I’m struck by the velocity and activity around and from Kamala Harris’s campaign. This is not a pro- or con- analysis. I genuinely have no favorite in any of this. Part of this is just the frequency of media attention, reports from campaign trips. That of course can simply be circular, media attention. But if you notice, over recent days Harris has received the endorsements of Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA), Dolores Huerta and California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D). The new governor of the biggest state in the union speaks for itself. The other two endorsements are in their own way more significant. In fact, considerably more. Read More
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You have news here that the Prime Minister of Poland has canceled a visit to Israel over comments by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu about Poland and the Nazi Holocaust. The full story manages to be more comical, tragic and absurd.
Netanyahu has been trying to build ties to a group of rightist-nationalist governments in Eastern Europe, some of which have at last dabbled in anti-Semitism or what we might call soft Holocaust denialism. Netanyahu has sought to use these ties in the upcoming Israeli election as evidence of how his decade-in-power government is beating back Israel’s diplomatic isolation. Read More
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Once again we’re back to this nonsense about the 25th Amendment. Alan Dershowitz claims that invoking it would amount to a coup d’etat, which is nonsensical since it is literally and expressly authorized by the constitution. But the 25th amendment actually doesn’t do jack. And yes, that’s the technical term. People still seem to think that it gives a majority of the cabinet the ability to remove the President.
It definitely does not. Read More
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Today is a really bad day for the country. But it also reminds me – it should remind you – that authoritarianism is most often born of incompetence and mismanagement. It seems like a paradox or a disconnect. But it’s not. They generally go together, as they do here.
Early in his administration Democrats were willing to vote to okay tens of billions of dollars for Trump’s vanity project wall. The price of that was little more than confirming in law what was already the case in practice, DACA protections. Trump rejected that, negotiated his way down to about one billion dollars for the kinds of border barriers the US was building before Trump ever proposed his wall. Now he’s trying to seize about a 10th of those funds – the original $50 billion offer – to build his signature wall. Read More
State Senator Lynn Hutchings (R) of Wyoming explaining her decision to vote against abolishing the death penalty: “The greatest man who ever lived died via the death penalty for you and me. I’m grateful to him for our future hope because of this. Governments were instituted to execute justice. If it wasn’t for Jesus dying via the death penalty, we would all have no hope.”
Wyoming is currently debating a bill that would abolish the state’s death penalty. The state’s last execution was in 1992.
(Credit to Radley Balko.)
I’m very curious about this David Ignatius column. It’s written with great drama and portent. But on its face, it contains not too much more than another version of Chairman Adam Schiff’s announcement that he’s planning a vastly expanded Russia probe that will reach much further into the President’s business and personal finances. The thing is that Ignatius is one of the most wired people in Washington when it comes to the nexus of international spycraft and US politics. His columns are frequently based on more than he can or chooses to explicitly reveal. Read More