THE BROS THINK WE NEED THEIR HELP TO UNDERSTAND WHAT WE WANT

https://nomoremister.blogspot.com/2024/07/the-bros-think-we-need-their-help-to.html

I want to thank Ten Bears for the link, his link will be below because WordPress messed up blogging like I do to the max. But for those who do not follow Ten Bears he posts grand links that you can choose to follow or not, and he labels them well enough that some of them get my interest, like the one below. In this one it is about how the die hard center / lean right democrats are not giving up just because the entire public seems to want Kamal a more progressive candidate. No they insist the public really wants a center / leans right one like Old Joe used to be in the old days. Maybe a split ticket of Kamal and a Joe Manchin type is what they are hinting. What they say is right wingers don’t lose hope at the convention a centrist will rise up to challenge her and win over whelming support. These guys just don’t get the 1980 – 1990s are gone. The right had it last brief gasp of power, but the country is moving forward, not backward to the 1950s. Hugs. Scottie

Page Tue: Time is Short …

Many pundits are sad today because the Democratic Party won’t have a mini-primary to choose Joe Biden’s replacement on the presidential ticket. But how do Democrats feel? Morning Consult has done some polling:
A Morning Consult survey conducted after President Joe Biden ended his re-election campaign found that 65% of Democratic voters support Harris to lead the party’s ticket, more than double the level of support she had in a hypothetical look at the same question late last month following the first presidential debate.
As has Quinnipiac:
Democrats and Democratic leaning voters were given a list of 10 names of possible Democratic candidates for president instead of Joe Biden and asked who they would most like to see win the Democratic nomination for president.

Vice President Kamala Harris tops the list with 45 percent support, California Governor Gavin Newsom receives 12 percent support, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg receives 11 percent support, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer receives 7 percent support, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro and Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear each receive 4 percent support, Arizona Senator Mark Kelly receives 3 percent support, and Maryland Governor Wes Moore, Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker, and Colorado Governor Jared Polis each receive 1 percent support.
Those are blowout numbers, as is this:
Vice President Kamala Harris raised $81 million in the first 24 hours since announcing her bid for president, her campaign said, a record-breaking showing as Democrats welcomed her candidacy with one of the greatest gushers of cash of all time.
See also this:
Future Forward, the flagship super PAC blessed by President JOE BIDEN, received $150 million in new commitments from major Democratic donors in the 24 hours since the president announced he would step aside from the race, Elena Schneider reports.

The fundraising boon … gives VP KAMALA HARRIS, Biden’s endorsed successor, an enormous boost as the Democratic Party reorients to a new nominee.
Sounds as if Democrats are very satisfied with Harris as the candidate. And that should be no surprise. Go to FiveThirtyEight’s collection of 2024 Democratic primary polls. When you get to the bottom of the list, keep clicking “Show more polls.” Long before Biden dropped out, in every national poll that asked respondents about a field without Joe Biden, Kamala Harris won, usually by double digits. When Harris’s lead was only in single digits, it was because her closest rival was Michelle Obama, who has made it clear she’ll never run for office.

Here are three typical polls, all posted on one day late last month (click to enlarge):

Survey USA: Harris by 27 over a field including Newsom, Buttigieg, Whitmer, Shapiro, and Wes Moore. Morning Consult: Harris by 10 over a field including Newsom, Buttigieg, Whitmer, Moore, Beshear, Cooper, Pritzker, and Moore. Data for Progress: Harris by 21 over a field including Newsom, Buttigieg, Whitmer, Pritzker, Shapiro, Cory Booker, and Amy Klobuchar.

In a field without Biden, Kamala Harris is the Democrats’ consensus choice. Kamala Harris has always been the Democrats’ consensus choice.

But bros like Ezra Klein aren’t satisfied. They still think we Democrats don’t know what we want, and need to have a bro-devised process to help focus our tiny minds:
I think there’s a middle path here that Democrats should consider. None of the top-tier candidates are going to challenge Harris for the nomination. But what about some second- or third-tier candidates? Let a few up-and-comers make their case against Donald Trump. Let’s see some CNN town halls, some multicandidate forums. Nobody is going to go negative on each other here. Give the country a reason to watch a lineup of young Democrats, most of all Harris, make their cases against Trump day after day for the next few weeks.

Think of it not as a contest. Think of it as an exhibition. Maybe the people who’ve endorsed Harris can participate, too. She’s going to need a vice president. So maybe Gretchen Whitmer and Shapiro and Kelly and Beshear should be up there, too…. Maybe a little strategic ambiguity about what these candidate forums and voter town halls are would be good.
Harris vs. “some second- or third-tier candidates”? You mean the way Joe Biden ran against Dean Phillips and Marianne Williamson? We all derived a great deal of civic nourishment from that process, didn’t we?

And what does Klein mean when he writes, “Think of it not as a contest. Think of it as an exhibition,” and then “Maybe a little strategic ambiguity about what these candidate forums and voter town halls are would be good”? Beyond the obvious (We can’t allow you simple folk to know what your big-brained betters are doing), is Klein arguing that this will be described as an exhibition but will actually be a contest, because donors who want another candidate will urge writers like Klein to magnify any Harris slip-ups and promote a donor-friendly alternative?

Klein goes on to say nice things about Harris, and says she’d almost certainly emerge from his process as the nominee. (Though you never know — he writes, “If she really isn’t up to it, [Democrats] need to know that now.”) He describes this as good publicity for the party (though I’d remind him that a few excellent speeches by the presumptive nominee would also be good for the party, especially if other party stars show up in support of her).

But it’s clear that if you’re happy about the party’s consolidation around Harris, Ezra Klein thinks you’re uninformed and need educating. I worry that patronizing bros like this — and not just the ones in the media — will choose not to vote for Harris, ‘cuz she’s a girl and a bunch of girls and girlymen decided to make her the nominee by acclamation, without contests and brackets and March Madness and a Final Four. We need to outvote Republicans, but we may also need to outvote America’s Ezra Kleins.

Posted by Steve M. at 10:44 AM

Reblog from Michael

Tuesday’s Bumper Sticker

Let’s talk about primaries and democratic process….

Definitely a great meme!

Great Memes, Cont.

The Guardian: A Jewish couple was rejected as foster parents because of their religion. This is the future Project 2025 envisions

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jul/24/project-2025-adoption-fostering?CMP=share_btn_url

The conservative blueprint envisions ‘a biblically based’ definition of marriage and wants to protect adoption agencies that only work with Christians

Rebecca McCrayWed 24 Jul 2024 07.00 EDTShare

In 2021, Liz and Gabe Rutan-Ram decided to take the next step toward growing their family and applied to foster a child. After identifying a three-year-old in Florida who they hoped to ultimately adopt, the Rutan-Rams turned back to their home state of Tennessee to start training to become foster parents.

But their plans quickly fell apart when the Christian state-funded foster care placement agency informed them by email that they “only provide adoption services to prospective adoptive families that share our belief system”. The Rutan-Rams, who are Jewish, were out of luck.

“There’s already emotions playing into wanting to be a parent, and then to have us attacked personally just made it that much harder,” Liz Rutan-Ram told the Guardian.

The Rutan-Rams sued the Tennessee department of children’s services, arguing that a state law permitting private agencies to refuse to work with prospective parents on religious grounds violates the Tennessee constitution’s equal protection and religious freedom guarantees. The case will soon go to trial.

The predicament facing the Rutan-Rams could become more common under a second Trump administration. Project 2025, a 900-plus page blueprint for the next Republican administration and the policy brainchild of the conservative Heritage Foundation, contains an explicitly sympathetic view toward “faith-based adoption agencies” like the one that rejected the Rutan-Rams, who are “under threat from lawsuits” because of the agencies’ religious beliefs.

Project 2025’s Adoption Reform section calls for the passage of legislation to ensure providers “cannot be subjected to discrimination for providing adoption and foster care services based on their beliefs about marriage”. It also calls for the repeal of an Obama-era regulation that prohibits discrimination against prospective parents and subsequent amendments made by the Biden administration.

Though Donald Trump has tried to distance himself from the project, his campaign’s own 16-page policy agenda echoes many of its goals, and his ties to the plan’s architects are well-established. In Milwaukee last week, the Heritage Foundation’s role in the Republican national convention was on full display, both on welcome banners at the airport and in the millions of dollars invested in the event itself. Following Trump’s announcement of his vice-presidential pick, the organization’s president, Kevin Roberts, said he was “good friends” with JD Vance, and effusively declared him “a man who personifies hope for our nation’s future”. Vance has previously said there were “some good ideas” in Project 2025.

Project 2025 is divided into four broad pillars, the first of which is to “restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children”. A conservative vision of family pervades the document, and the authors call on policymakers “to elevate family authority, formation, and cohesion as their top priority and even use government power, including through the tax code, to restore the American family”.

The plan envisions upholding “a biblically based, social science-reinforced definition of marriage and family”. It would remove nondiscrimination roadblocks governing faith-based grant recipients, such as the agency that denied the Rutan-Rams. The authors argue that “heterosexual, intact marriages” provide more stability for children than “all other family forms”. In addition to calling for the passage of the Child Welfare Provider Inclusion Act, which would allow adoption and foster care agencies to make placement decisions based on their “religious beliefs or moral convictions”, it also calls on Congress to ensure “religious employers” are exempt from nondiscrimination laws and free to make business decisions based on their religious beliefs.

To the Rev Naomi Washington-Leapheart, a professor of theology and religious studies at Villanova University and a queer parent, the image of family portrayed by the policy agenda is blatantly exclusionary. The Christian nationalist plan rejects unmarried parents, single parents and LGBTQ+ families.

white billboard with red and blue words: ‘You gotta keep ‘em separated’ — A billboard in Milwaukee, part of a campaign by Americans United for Separation of Church and State, to raise awareness of Project 2025, that ran during the Republican convention. Photograph: Americans United for Separation of Church and State

“The definition of family according to Project 2025 leaves a lot of folk out,” Washington-Leapheart told the Guardian. “This blueprint really delegitimizes the kinds of families that are day in and day out raising children, paying taxes, contributing meaningfully to society.”

The Rutan-Rams have become the face of a campaign led by Americans United for Separation of Church and State, who are representing them in their lawsuit, that seeks to shed light on what they call the Christian nationalist goals of Project 2025. As part of the campaign, visitors to the Republican convention last week may have seen billboards reading “You gotta keep ’em separated,” in reference to church and state.

Project 2025’s vision is already law in a number of states. The Rutan-Rams are battling a Tennessee law, modeled after similar laws in at least 10 other states, that permits faith-based foster care and adoption agencies to exclusively work with prospective parents who share their beliefs.

Amanda Tyler, executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty and author of a book titled How to End Christian Nationalism, contends that the scale and reach of Project 2025 pose a far greater danger to democracy than a patchwork of state laws.

“What’s different about Project 2025 is the sweeping nature of its plan,” said Tyler. “It would really rewrite the federal government and change policies in so many different areas at once in a way that would hasten our journey down that road to authoritarian theocracy.”

The Holston Home for Children in Tennessee, Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation did not respond to requests for comment.

Tyler worries that Project 2025’s deliberate erosion of the separation between church and state, a founding principle embedded in the first amendment to the US constitution, will get a helping hand from the US supreme court, which has handed a series of victories in recent years to Christian activists. She specifically mentioned the 2021 decision in Carson v Makin, which struck down a Maine law that banned the use of public funds for religious schools. It was “an earthquake of a decision that a lot of people didn’t really pay attention to that has really opened the door to government funding of religion”, said Tyler.

The threat of a theocracy doesn’t seem far-fetched to Washington-Leapheart.

“Project 2025 says that religion is a permanent institution that should influence American life,” said Washington-Leapheart. “That alone communicates the kind of arrogant way Christianity is situated as an inevitability. And it’s not. I say that as a Christian person who is firmly grounded in my faith. It is not an inevitable part of my identity, it is a choice I make every day.

Reading comics over lunch, again,

and first I was gonna post Calvin and Hobbes, then I was going to post Fur Babies, then Heathcliff, each time talking myself out of posting in favor of continuing to read. I did that, right up until this toon, which I have been enjoying for around a year. It’s got a storyline, and many fun/funny side storylines, and it’s just enjoyable to me. Today’s also is politically oriented, so I decided to break from reading and post it. Then we can discuss, or you can ask me to not post anymore comics, and I will stop. (I won’t stop reading and enjoying it, though!)

Jane’s World by Paige Braddock for July 24, 2024

Jane's World Comic Strip for July 24, 2024

https://www.gocomics.com/janesworld/2024/07/24

Stuff I saw on AP today

A few headlines of interest here, with snippets and links.

I got a great giggle when I saw this story last night. Imagine Republicans telling other Republicans they’re being too racist…

https://apnews.com/article/trump-harris-attacks-johnson-hudson-76f8e90d24004e49449087787ac031a5

WASHINGTON (AP) — Republican leaders are warning party members against using overtly racist and sexist attacks against Vice President Kamala Harris, as they and former President Donald Trump’s campaign scramble to adjust to the reality of a new Democratic rival less than four months before Election Day.

At a closed-door meeting of House Republicans on Tuesday, National Republican Congressional Committee chairman Richard Hudson, R-N.C., urged lawmakers to stick to criticizing Harris for her role in Biden-Harris administration policies. (snip-more)

=====

Monthly headlines are turning into daily headlines:

https://apnews.com/article/hottest-day-ever-climate-change-weather-heat-extreme-global-warming-8e2b0b7fa0360ecb931ca333a832c694

Monday was recorded as the hottest day ever globally, beating a record set the day before, as countries around the world from Japan to Bolivia to the United States continue to feel the heat, according to the European climate change service.

Provisional satellite data published by Copernicus on Wednesday showed that Monday broke the previous day’s record by 0.06 degrees Celsius (0.1 degree Fahrenheit).

Climate scientists say it’s plausible that this is the warmest it has been in 120,000 years because of human-caused climate change. While scientists cannot be certain that Monday was the very hottest day throughout that period, average temperatures have not been this high since long before humans developed agriculture. (snip-more)

=====

Cuteness overload!

https://apnews.com/video/kangaroos-animals-new-york-bronx-wildlife-conservation-society-11cbd816bd71411fb4ecb980b986361e

VIDEO

A 7-month-old tree kangaroo peeked out of its mom’s pouch at the Bronx Zoo and here is the video

The second baby of a tree-dwelling kangaroo made its public debut this week in New York, poking its pink head head out of its mom’s furry white pouch. (snip-click the Video hyperlink just above the title)

Letters from an American

Heather Cox Richardson’s history Substack is just a treasure of information and connections between history and current times. Here’s a copy today, because there are fine talking points in favor of the Dem candidate for US President.

July 23, 2024

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

JUL 24, 2024

Vice President Kamala Harris continues her momentum toward the 2024 presidential election since President Joe Biden’s surprise announcement on Sunday that he would not accept the 2024 Democratic presidential nomination.

Today more than 350 national security leaders endorsed Harris for president, noting that if elected president, “she would enter that office with more significant national security experience than the four Presidents prior to President Biden.” As vice president, she “has met with more than 150 world leaders and traveled to 21 countries,” the authors wrote, and they called out her work across the globe from her work strengthening partnerships in the Indo-Pacific region to her historic trip to Africa and her efforts to expand U.S. relationships with nations in the Caribbean and North Central America. In contrast to Harris, the letter said, “Trump is a threat to America’s national security.”

Those signing the letter included former Central Intelligence Agency director Michael Hayden, former director of national intelligence James Clapper, national security advisors Susan Rice and Thomas Donilon, former secretaries of defense Chuck Hagel and Leon Panetta, and former secretaries of state Hillary Clinton and John Kerry.

In a New York Times op-ed today, former secretary of state Clinton praised Biden for his “decision to end his campaign,” which she called “as pure an act of patriotism as I have seen in my lifetime.” She went on to say that Vice President Harris “represents a fresh start for American politics,” offering a vision of an America with its best days ahead of it and, rather than “old grievances,” “new solutions.”

Clinton noted that her own political campaigns had seen her burned in effigy, but said, “It is a trap to believe that progress is impossible” and that Americans cannot overcome sexism and racism. After all, she pointed out, voters elected Black American Barack Obama in 2008, and she herself won the popular vote in 2016. “[A]bortion bans and attacks on democracy are galvanizing women voters like never before,” Clinton wrote, and “[w]ith Ms. Harris at the top of the ticket leading the way, this movement may become an unstoppable wave.”

Today, Harris held her first campaign rally, speaking to supporters in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where the Republicans held their national convention just last week. The energy from the 3000 people packed into the gym where she walked out to Beyoncé’s song “Freedom” was palpable.

She began by thanking Biden and touting his record, then turned to noting that in her past as a prosecutor, California attorney general, U.S. senator from California, and vice president, she “took on perpetrators of all kinds—predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So,” she said, “hear me when I say: I know Donald Trump’s type.” She went on to remind the audience that Trump ran a for-profit college that scammed students, was found liable for committing sexual abuse, and “was just found guilty of fraud on 34 counts.”

While Trump is relying on “billionaires and big corporations,” she said, “we are running a people-powered campaign” and “will be a people-first presidency.” The Democrats, she said, “believe in a future where every person has the opportunity not just to get by but to get ahead; a future where no child has to grow up in poverty; where every worker has the freedom to join a union; where every person has affordable health care, affordable childcare, and paid family leave. We believe in a future where every senior can retire with dignity.”

“[A]ll of this is to say,” she continued, “Building up the middle class will be a defining goal of my presidency. Because…when our middle class is strong, America is strong.”

In contrast, she said, Trump wants to take the country backward. She warned that he and his Project 2025 will “weaken the middle class,” cutting Social Security and Medicare and giving “tax breaks to billionaires and big corporations,” while “working families foot the bill.” “They intend to end the Affordable Care Act,” she said, “and take us back…to a time when insurance companies had the power to deny people with preexisting conditions…. Remember what that was like? Children with asthma, women who survived breast cancer, grandparents with diabetes. America has tried these failed economic policies before, but we are not going back. We’re not going back.”

“[O]urs is a fight for the future,” she said “And it is a fight for freedom…. Generations of Americans before us led the fight for freedom. And now…the baton is in our hands.”

Meanwhile, MAGA Republicans are still scrambling for a plan of attack against Harris. One of their first angles has been the sexism and racism Clinton predicted, calling her “a DEI hire.” House Republican leaders have told fellow lawmakers to dial back the sexist and racist attacks.

MAGA Republican representative Andy Ogles (R-TN) has taken a different angle: he introduced an impeachment resolution against Harris, while others are demanding that the House should investigate Harris and demand the Cabinet remove President Biden under the 25th Amendment. The Republican National Committee has decided to make fun of Harris’s laugh.

But concern in the Trump camp showed today when Trump pollster Tony Fabrizio shared with reporters a “confidential memorandum” trying to get ahead of polls he says will show Harris leading Trump. He said he expects to see a “Harris Honeymoon” that will end quickly.

Trump has continued to post angrily on his social media feed but is otherwise sticking close to home. His lack of visibility highlights that the Republicans are now on the receiving end of the same age and coherence concerns they had used against Biden, and there might be more attention paid to Trump’s lapses now that Biden has stepped aside. CNN’s Kate Sullivan noted today, for example, that “Trump said he’d consider Jamie Dimon for Treasury secretary, but now says he doesn’t know who said that.”

As Tim Alberta noted Sunday in The Atlantic, the Trump campaign tapped J.D. Vance in an attempt to harden the Republican base, only to find now that he cannot bring to the ticket any of the new supporters they suddenly need.

According to Harry Enten of CNN, Vance is the first vice presidential pick since 1980 who has entered the race with a negative favorability rating: in his case, –6 points. Since 2000, the usual average is +19 points. Vance won his Senate seat in 2022 by +6 points in an election Republican governor Mike DeWine won by +25 points. Vance “was the worst performing Republican candidate in 2022 up and down the ballot in the state of Ohio,” Enten said. “The J.D. Vance pick makes no sense from a statistical polling perspective.”

Sarah Longwell of The Bulwark, who specializes in focus groups, noted that swing voters groups “simply do not like” Vance. “Both his flip flopping on Trump and his extreme abortion position are what breaks through,” she wrote.

The 2024 election is not consuming all of the political oxygen, even in this astonishing week. Today, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced that eight large companies must turn over information about the data they collect about consumers, product sales, and how the surveillance the companies used affected consumer prices.

“Firms that harvest Americans’ personal data can put people’s privacy at risk. Now firms could be exploiting this vast trove of personal information to charge people higher prices,” FTC chair Lina M. Khan said. “Americans deserve to know whether businesses are using detailed consumer data to deploy surveillance pricing, and the FTC’s inquiry will shed light on this shadowy ecosystem of pricing middlemen.”

The eight companies are: Mastercard, Revionics, Bloomreach, JPMorgan Chase, Task Software, PROS, Accenture, and McKinsey & Co.

In the House, Republicans have been unable to pass the appropriations bills necessary to fund the 2025 U.S. budget, laced as they are with culture-wars poison pills the extremists demand. Today House members debated the appropriations bill for the Interior Department and the Environment which, among other things, bans the use of funds “to promote or advance critical race theory” or to require Covid-19 masks or vaccine mandates.

According to the European climate service Copernicus, last Sunday was the hottest day in recorded history. The MAGA Republicans’ appropriations bill for Interior and the Environment calls for more oil drilling, fewer regulations on pollutants, no new regulations on vehicles, rejecting Biden’s climate change executive orders, and reducing the funding for the Environmental Protection Agency by 20%.

Notes:

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2024/07/23/remarks-by-vice-president-harris-at-a-political-event-10/

https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/23/politics/kfile-jd-vance-believed-donald-trump-sexual-assault-allegations-2016/index.html

https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/23/politics/video/jd-vance-data-ebof-digvid-enten

https://www.politico.com/news/2024/07/23/gop-race-comments-harris-00170735

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/07/23/kamala-harris-foreign-policy-endorsement/

Tennessee Republican files articles of impeachment against Harris

https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/republican-leaders-urge-colleagues-steer-clear-racist-sexist-112216267

Click to access 7-23-24-harris-honeymoon.pdf

Trump pollster predicts ‘Harris honeymoon’ in upcoming polls

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/07/ftc-issues-orders-eight-companies-seeking-information-surveillance-pricing

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/07/23/ftc-launches-probe-into-surveillance-pricing.html

https://apnews.com/article/hottest-day-climate-change-heat-wave-warming-71e3e9d1fbfdc8503ef36eabec9390bd

https://appropriations.house.gov/news/press-releases/committee-approves-fy25-interior-environment-and-related-agencies

https://www.cnn.com/politics/live-news/kamala-harris-biden-trump-election-07-23-24

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/07/trump-campaign-biden-dropping-out/679183/

SarahLongwell25/status/1815724143939084597

MacFarlaneNews/status/1815841590964892159

RNCResearch/status/1815818534200697037

https://open.substack.com/pub/heathercoxrichardson/p/july-23-2024?r=1pk2l&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

Here’s a really good vent piece

about what was happening with the Dem presidential ticket prior to Sunday’s culmination. It hasn’t been easy for any of us to just pivot to our new candidate, though her wondrousness makes it easier. There are still feelings about it. I like how this writer termed it.

Joe Did What? Trafalgar Edition by Yastreblyansky

“No captain can do very wrong if he places his ship alongside that of the enemy.”Read on Substack

Well, I guess this certainly does change everything, and that’s refreshing.

I’m going to stay angry for a long time at The Times and Politico and other big media and the “liberal” tech billionaires for the dishonest backdoor trick they pulled, when they couldn’t succeed in turning the public against Biden and shifted instead to convincing us that we had turned against Biden by ourselves, or rather that our neighbors had, through the bogus “age issue”, warning us not that Biden was a bad president, but that he’d lose because other people thought he was too old, and our punishment for supporting Biden would be another Trump term (on the basis of a polling model that has consistently failed by underestimating the Democratic vote for six years now). They recognized our deep fear of the consequences of another Trump term and exploited it, in a way that actually made Trump’s reelection more likely, using the debate disaster as evidence of a permanent degeneration (which it obviously wasn’t—Biden had never showed up in that condition before and never has since). It was irresponsible and disgusting.

I’m not too angry with the congressional party leaders, or the “centrist” representatives in their precarious suburban seats, or even the bedwetter commentariat. The fear is real, and it’s justified. What could be lost in another four years of Trumpery is almost incalculable; I’m thinking especially of the backsliding in the elimination of fossil fuels, but the “deconstruction of the administrative state” as prefigured in the Project 2025 document turns the entire civil service into an easily corrupted tool for tearing down regulations, and reduces the Justice Department into the president’s personal police agency. It really is the end of the republic, alongside plans for a federal ban on abortion, vigilante takeovers of school libraries, the insane powers for evil conceded to the presidency by the Supreme Court even as it strips the office of its power to do good. The thing is, fear is a lousy counselor, and their Fantasy Politics League plan to get rid of Biden by obliterating the primary results with some kind of pantomime competition, before or during the Democratic convention, as somebody leaked the plan to the abominable Mark Halperin (now working for Newsmax), was a terrible, senseless plan that would have flung us into even worse uncertainty than we already had. Don’t panic.

I’m certainly not angry at Biden for making the decision. Far from it! Remember that (as @nycsouthpaw just pointed out) there are two parts to what he did: stepping down from the campaign, and giving his endorsement to Vice President Harris. The first was the thing he was being pressured to do by the congressional party leadership, the timorous representatives from Nassau County and North Jersey and the Hudson Valley, the readers of Friedman and Brooks and Ezra Klein, and so on; the second was the thing those people absolutely didn’t intend for him to do, spoiling the open convention plan. He was not supposed to endorse Harris.

So it was one of those audacious, perfectly timed Biden moves that looks like a gaffe (the most famous example would be the one during his vice presidency that made marriage equality a federal reality) and changes the whole situation. Harris quickly announced her candidacy (to “earn and win” the nomination, she said, carefully), all the other conceivable candidates endorsed her too, and the campaign had raised $50 million from small donors ($100 million after 24 hours, suck on that, billionaires). Like one-eyed, one-armed Nelson at Trafalgar—I’m not kidding, folks!—the 81-year-old Biden had sacrificed his own (political) life, but had won the battle, for his legacy of a better, more free and equal America.

At least I hope so. A battle, of course, not the war. Anyway, it seems clear that Democrats are in a much better position than they were a couple of days ago, with a unity in the party we’ve seen nothing like in years, pro-Biden and anti-Biden voices embracing in the social media. Of 263 Democratic congressmembers and 23 governors, the Washington Post tally 24 hours after the announcements has 243 who have endorsed Harris and 43 who haven’t (non-endorsers include convicted felon Robert Menendez and the federally indicted Henry Cuellar, but the New York and New Jersey centrists I’ve been watching the most have endorsed, except for that freak Tom Suozzi, and so, I’m glad to report, has Speaker Emerita Pelosi). There are no alternative candidates except Marianne Williamson (old Joe Manchin sent out feelers, but was roundly rebuffed). As of this afternoon convention delegations from ten states—Tennessee, South Carolina, North Carolina, New Hampshire, Florida, Louisiana, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Alaska, and Wisconsin, plus Guam, had pledged support to Harris, for a total of 770 delegates out of the needed 1,986.

Meanwhile the Trump campaign, now led (with Biden’s withdrawal) by the oldest and unquestioned most cognitively disabled presidential candidate in history, is having to completely reconfigure its tactics. They are running ads complaining that Vice President Harris laughs too much and that she’s opposed to plastic drinking straws. Their vice presidential candidate “JD” Vance looks like a feeble impostor and baffles his audiences with his complaints.

Republicans have been trying to characterize the surge of support for Harris as some kind of coup attempt against Biden, as if Biden hadn’t sparked himself it with his bold move, and as undemocratic, which is somewhat ironic—

One of the most gratifying aspects of the excitement is the way the discussion of Biden’s age has given way to the discussion of his accomplishments from all quarters:

I’ll be getting to that, no doubt, but in the meantime check out this magisterial survey, “Why Biden Outclasses Every American President Since FDR,” by Nathan Newman.

Oh, and maybe one of his most surprising accomplishments will be the election of the nation’s first Black woman president.

(For me, that cleans the Anita Hill slate. It may not for her, and I wouldn’t blame her, but I’m over it now that this has happened. People learn, grow, and remediate wrongs over time. Well, good people do.)

Moms for Liberty have had a rough year. They’re still RNC darlings.

https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2024/07/moms-for-liberty-have-had-a-rough-year-theyre-still-rnc-darlings/

Thanks to their friends in (very) high places.

By Keira Butler Sunday, July 21, 2024

Moms for Liberty co-founders Tina Descovich and Tiffany JusticePhoto: YouTube clip

This article first appeared on Mother Jones. It has been republished with the publication’s permission.

On the second day of the Republican National Convention, I made my way back to Milwaukee’s symphony hall to attend a town hall hosted by the conservative parents’ rights group Moms for Liberty. This wasn’t my first Moms for Liberty event—I’ve attended the annual summits for the past two years. Back in 2022, Betsy DeVos, who served as former President Donald Trump’s Secretary of Education, delivered the line that got the loudest applause. “While I know that everything we did was with the interest of kids in mind and policies that would really give as much power back to the states and local communities as we possibly could,” she said, “I personally think the Department of Education should not exist.”

At the time, that statement felt a little bit edgy—like DeVos was saying the quiet part out loud. But two years later at yesterday’s event, many of the panelists expressed that same sentiment as a a foregone conclusion. “The fundamental problem that we have in the United States was the creation of the federal Department of Education,” Rep. Harriet Hageman (R-WY) told the crowd of maybe 400 or so mostly white women. In his remarks, erstwhile GOP presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy said, “We’re not just going to reform the Department of Education, it means we’re going to get there and actually shut it down.”

Does that mean that a ragtag group of moms single handedly turned the abolition of a behemoth government agency into a run-of-the-mill conservative talking point? Not exactly. On that issue and many others, Moms for Liberty has had a major assist from powerful conservative groups that share their goals—and are shaping the Republican agenda for 2024.

Founded in 2021 by three former school board members in Florida, Moms for Liberty rode the rising tide of anti-mask sentiment in the tumultuous year after schools were closed during the pandemic. The group’s leaders capitalized on the backlash to the Black Lives Matter movement after the murder of George Floyd. In fact, Moms for Liberty was one of the most prominent early groups to criticize the teaching of ant-racist curriculum in schools, which they incorrectly referred to as “critical race theory.” The group also vociferously opposed LGBTQ-inclusive lessons, and its members led campaigns to rid classrooms and school libraries of books deemed inappropriate.

Over time, Moms for Liberty grew in both membership and influence. Today, the group counts 130,000 members across chapters in 48 states. The organization groomed some members to run for local school boards, gradually expanding their influence throughout communities. Last year, all of the Republican presidential candidates, including former president Donald Trump, spoke at their annual conference in Pennsylvania.

In its marketing, Moms for Liberty comes off as a group of like-minded people, mostly women, who all happened to come together because of a shared concern for children. Founders Tiffany Justice and Tina Deskovich, the website says, are just a couple of “moms on a mission to stoke the fires of liberty.” But as I’ve previously reported, the organization’s connections to the Republican party run deep. Its conferences have been sponsored by the GOP training group the Leadership Institute and the conservative powerhouse think tank the Heritage Foundation. Earlier this week, after the RNC Heritage Foundation event, Moms for Liberty national director Catalina Stubbe told me that her group is “very close friends” with Heritage, which was one of the sponsors of today’s event, and whose president Kevin Roberts spoke on one of the panels.

Considering the group’s cozy relationship with Heritage, the RNC town hall panelists’ focus on abolishing the US Department of Education shouldn’t be surprising. Project 2025, the 920-page conservative policy roadmap that Heritage spearheaded, calls for the complete elimination of the Department of Education, along with the codification of parents’ rights laws similar to those in Florida, which strictly limit teachers’ use of LGBTQ-inclusive curriculum and books.

After the event, I spoke to Lydia Dominguez, a Moms for Liberty member running for school board in Clark County, Nevada. Dominguez, the mother of two teenage boys, told me that she believed schools “are being oversaturated by national agendas.” What kinds of national agendas? I asked. “They’re having CNN in the classroom,” she said. “They’re pushing national topics such as the transgender topics, sexualized content.”

—————
She believed schools “are being oversaturated by national agendas…They’re having CNN in the classroom,” she said. “They’re pushing national topics such as the transgender topics, sexualized content.”
—————

Monica Kepes serves as the secretary of a Moms for Liberty chapter in Washington County, Wisconsin. “I think the big bureaucratic institutions are instituting a lot of stuff that comes down through the education system,” she said. “I think the bigger you get, the more power there is, the more chance corruption and all that kind of stuff.”

At Moms for Liberty’s upcoming 2024 summit, which will take place next month in Washington, DC, it seems unlikely that the group will be able to muster a repeat performance of the star-studded speaker roster from last year. So far, this year’s list appears to be a grab bag of not especially famous ultra-conservative pundits, C-list comedians, and culture warriors. One reason for this lackluster lineup could be the fallout from a series of scandals in 2023. A group from a chapter in Kentucky posedfor a photo with the white nationalist group the Proud Boys. (Those members were later removed from the group.) Last year, a chapter leader in Indiana quoted Hitler in a newsletter. On the last evening of the annual summit a few months later, Justice, the co-founder, said in a speech, “One of our moms in a newsletter quotes Hitler…I stand with that mom!”

But the most damaging setbackcame in late 2023, when Christian Ziegler, chair of the Florida GOP, was accused of raping and illegally filming a woman who had been involved in a sexual relationship with him and his wife, Bridget Ziegler, a founding member of Moms for Liberty. As I wrote at the time, the situation was especially awkward because Ziegler helped craft Florida’s so-called “Don’t Say Gay” parents’ rights law, which forbids teachers in the state from talking about same-sex relationships. “The irony is crazy because you have this woman and her husband who are so concerned with preventing children from hearing anything that doesn’t totally align with their values,” one Florida mom told me at the time. “And then it’s like, I’m having to explain a three-way to a 12-year-old this week.” (Christian Ziegler has been cleared of rape charges; in March, the Florida state attorney’s office declined to criminally charge him for illegally filming the sexual encounter because of insufficient evidence.)

Unsurprisingly, no one mentioned the sex scandal (or any of the other ones) at the town hall event. But on one panel, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis took a victory lap about a bill Ziegler helped to create. “It used to be…you didn’t have to worry about your kid going to kindergarten and being told that they should change their gender,” he said. “We put the kibosh on that in Florida—we said, ‘We are not going to be indulging in things like gender ideology in our schools.’” The crowd whooped with approval.

The Republican Party seems to agree. Its official platform, released last week, calls for funding cuts for schools that embrace “woke” policies like LGBTQ-inclusive curriculum. This serves as a reminder that even though Moms for Liberty’s star appears to have dimmed over the past year, the reverberations from its movement will be felt for years to come. Moms for Liberty, cofounder Tina Descovich told the crowd, “is here to fight, fight, fight, and win, win, win.” She paused. “And winning we are.”

Don’t forget to share: