Sunday, March 10, 2024

ANS -- Biden’s Electrifying State of the Union, Why it Matters, Plus: Fascism vs Modernity

Here is umair haque's reaction to Biden's State of the Union speech last Thursday.  It is full of hope.  the comments on the site are a civilized and detailed discussion.  



--Kim


MAR 9, 2024  8 MIN READ

Biden's Electrifying State of the Union, Why it Matters, Plus: Fascism vs Modernity

Biden's Electrifying State of the Union, Why it Matters, Plus: Fascism vs Modernity

I'm Umair Haque, and this is The Issue: an independent, nonpartisan, subscriber-supported publication. Our job is to give you the freshest, deepest, no-holds-barred insight about the issues that matter most.

New here? Get the Issue in your inbox daily.





  1. The Oceans We Knew Are Already Gone (The Atlantic)



  2. Silencing of the girls (Aeon)



  3. Barcelona's rude awakening after years-long drought (Le Monde)



  4. I'm a climate scientist. If you knew what I know, you'd be terrified too. (CNN)

Let's not mince words. There are speeches and there are Capital S Speeches. Biden's sensational State of the Union was one of the latter. It was visionary, historic, and startling. I didn't know quite what to expect, and I doubt many did. Biden rose to the challenge of the moment—more on that in a second, and hit the ball out of the park.

By the way, if you didn't watch it, do so, just even the first few minutes, because…

This speech was a special moment for America. I don't know if Americans grasp that, but world leaders, starting this weekend, are going to be spending much of the year studying Biden's words, ideas, and vision—because it set out sort of a new direction for America, as leader of a troubled world again.

Let me explain, on three levels, why this speech mattered so much: stylistically, substantively, and politically.


Being a Leader Versus Becoming One, or, Is Biden Fit for Office?

Lately, it's become kind of cool to hate on Biden. I get that, though I don't join in it. Young people will accuse him of everything from indifference to genocide, while the GOP's attack line that he's too old and frail to hold office again has registered, amplified by media.

The Biden we saw yesterday answered those concerns decisively. He was witty, sharp as a razor, intelligent, spry. He ran rings around the Republicans, weaving webs around them to entrap them in, leaving them bewildered and spluttering. So much so that by the end of the night, this whole business of image manipulation had been turned on its head: the new attack line was that Biden was too energetic, angry, and talkative. The irony was lost on no one, really.

This Joe Biden delivered, as many said, a masterclass. And that masterclass was in large part about what politics, unfortunately, begins with: style, "impression management," "messaging." Biden got his message across, in giant blinking neon letters. He roasted the Republicans, while outmaneuvering them, out-thinking them, easily outdoing them, as if they were amateurs and wannabes—and so this Joe Biden electrified people. In the media business, we track a thing called "sentiment," which is how people talk about you on social media, and sentiment was off the charts. People were astonished, some, like the Republicans, overwhelmed, and the reaction was strikingly positive.

Those are all good things. Part of Biden's challenge, if the goal is to avoid another Trump era, and the consequent end of democracy, more or less, was just to convince people that Biden was still in the game. After this, while, sure, you can still have doubts, if you're fair, you're going to have fewer and smaller ones, on the issues of Biden's fitness and competence.

This Biden glowed, swaggered, and revelled, like a rock star.

Stylistically, the State of the Union was a devastating blow to the Republicans—think, again, how the erstwhile attack line had to flip from "he's got one foot in the grave" to "Jesus! Why won't he stop getting us!!" Funny—and telling.

We recently discussed the difference between occupying a leadership position—and being accepted as a leader. This Biden's been hid away by the Democratic machine, it seems. Those roaring, electrified masses? Those surging positivity ratings? That's a figure going from merely occupying the position, to being accepted as a leader.

That matters in a bigger way than you think, because…


What is America, Anymore?

But that was just the beginning of why this speech was so important, though it's what the chatter has focused on. Punditry is missing the real reason this speech was made of fireworks—why world leaders are going to be studying it frantically and intensely, beginning this weekend, if not already, and continue doing so the whole year.

Beneath the swagger, Biden quietly proposed something very much like a new America. A new American social contract. The ideas came so fast and furious that they were almost easy to miss, sandwiched between philosophy and persuasion.

I'll get to them, but first: most State of the Unions aren't like that. They're pretty boring, because Presidents tout their accomplishments. They're backwards looking things, in other words, sort of performance reviews, if you like. This one really was different—profoundly different.

Here are just a few of the Big Ideas in Biden's vision—and what their sort of link to the cutting edge of global thinking is.

—Taxing billionaires, which is part of a new movement, arising mostly in Europe, to reduce inequality, by having a global tax on the ultra-rich.
—Limiting executive compensation—this one in a soft way, not a hard one, salaries over $1 million no longer being tax deductible. This is linked, too, to recent moves by European nations to make economies more equal again.
—Giving home buyers tax credits. This is a first step towards fixing America's badly broken housing market. The world's is, in fact, and many European nations are trying to fix that through incentives like this.
—Lowering drug prices. One of Biden's most revolutionary policy ideas was to let the government negotiate for far more drugs—this is a big, big deal, because of course Americans are ripped off incredibly badly by their version of "healthcare." This is a way to modernize America and bring it in line with other Western nations.
—Freezing taxes on those earning than less $400K.

There were plenty more, in fact, than all this. The point isn't just the "policy ideas"—rather, it's the direction that Biden wants to go in, if you read between the lines a little bit. What is Biden really saying? He's recognizing how badly broken many aspects of the American social contract—healthcare, housing, inequality, salaries, taxes—and how all that adds up to an incredibly precarious life even at or above the median.

Biden seemed to be channeling the ghost of FDR—and the spirit of Truman. The FDR aspect: he appears to be reaching for something like a new deal, or at least as close to one as America's going to get in this tenuous situation. The spirit of Truman: he didn't say this nicely, he roasted the Republicans as he said it, driving home the point how little they actually care about people's lives, and simply rely on scapegoating, how empty of ideas their side really is.

This is a Big Deal. An American President doesn't not just say this stuff lightly—they never say it at all. Taxing billionaires? Not taxing everyone else? Making corporations pay their fair share? Expanding the role of government? Reducing the drivers of inequality, from overblown exec salaries to a crumbled housing ladder? That's…the stuff…much more aligned with…European social democracy…than American politics, which is usually anodyne variants of the same thing, aka, slightly different flavours of Coke versus Pepsi capitalism.

This isn't two slightly different variants of capitalism, and if you read between the lines, meaning that it's a first draft at setting out a vision, the end result will be even more radical. Taxing billionaires, limiting salaries, intervening in broken markets, giving people actual support—none of these are ideas we associate in the slightest with…American politics. They're the stuff of social democracy, and Biden's setting out a sort of lightweight-almost social democratic vision. It's not quite one fully, but what it does, at last, is begin to put America on the path to becoming one, like the rest of the Western world.


The Transformation of Politics From Anti-Modern to Modern

And all that draws a sharp distinction between the two parties, at long, long last. I've been sharply critical of the Democrats in recent times. Who are they? What do they stand for? What's the idea here? What's their sort of theory of the world, of a just society, of a good life?

Now we know. We know that it's something a lot more like lightweight European social democracy in nascent form—a good life comes from a just society, which is one that's socioeconomically equal, not just "equal opportunity," or what have you, yesterday's nostrums—than yesterday's tired neoliberalism. That said, of course, that a good life comes from being a survivor in a brutal game whose stakes are life or death.

But that's just what the other side said, too. So all this finally draws the difference between the two parties into sharp, stark relief. Sure, one's for democracy, and the other one's for fascism—but the truth is to win just that political contest, you can't just rely on that issue itself. You need to go deep into the issues people actually care about, which are always the economy, money, their property, stability, a sense of security, upwards mobility, etcetera.

Nobody ever really beat the fascists by saying: but we're offering you democracy!

This is a breakthrough, and it shouldn't be underestimated. For an American President to stand on the podium and say this stuff? The government should set prices, salaries for bigwigs are way too high, billionaires and corporations should be taxed—I scarcely thought I'd see that day happen, ever, period. America's been incredibly resistant to these ideas, on both sides of politics. The GOP, of course, built its political fortunes around defending capitalism and individualism, from Reaganomics on, and then Clintonomics was a sort of thinly disguised variant of much the same thing.

In more prosaic terms, this is the sort of stuff that Bernie and Liz have long pleaded for, argued vehemently for, demanded. Where does it come from? Again, from European social democracy, but now let's make that concrete. In France, the government negotiates everything from drug prices to waiter's salaries. Executive pay is sharply restrained by both norms and laws. One of the ways in which, for example, smarter parties, like Spain's socialists, stayed in power, was to give people more support precisely for basic necessities like housing.

So this is incredibly smart stuff—in the sense that we know it works. France is probably the world's most successful society, by a very long way, right about now, and Spain's not far behind. America, by contrast, is way behind. It needs to catch up to the rest of the Western world in basic political terms, and that's by having it's "sides' not just be predatory capitalism versus slightly less predatory capitalism, but modern oppositions, like conservative versus liberalism versus green in social democratic terms, which are completely different from America's. Nobody in Europe, for example, not even conservatives, would say that people deserve nothing, and government shouldn't exist—but of course America's do.

So this transforms America politically. It does something long, long overdue, and it does it in a clever way, which is that the people listening to it won't even know about it. They're not going to know that "oh, this idea comes from France, and this one from Spain, and this one from the EU itself." It doesn't matter, and of course, to make Americans, that'd make it a non-starter. It just puts these ideas front and center, and more importantly, the philosophies behind them.

Those theories of the world, of the good life, of the just society, and how they're linked. Now, at last, there's a variant of politics on offer that's not just "life should just be winners and losers, and winners should take it all, and losers should basically be left to perish." It's incredibly important that this happen, for any society, not just America, this evolution of politics to what we call a modern level, not just a sort of still-trapped-in-the 19th century one. In America, the State of the Union is the last place I expected it to, if it ever did.

There's plenty, plenty more to say, and we'll discuss it soon. I just wanted to share some quick thoughts with you. Color me impressed. Mightily so. Is it going to be enough to beat Trump—remember, just before this, the risk of a Trump landslide was rising swiftly? That's exactly what we'll delve into shortly. Thanks for reading—and let me know your thoughts in the comments!!


Monday, February 26, 2024

ANS -- Sliding from Doug Muder

This is Doug Muder's column, which he puts out on Mondays.  He is brilliant.  It's a series of comments on a bunch of things that are going on.  
At the end, there was a video of Pachelbel's Canon played on train whistles, trains included.  If it didn't come through, go to the site, or my facebook page to see it.  
--Kim


iconThe Weekly Sift

making sense of the news one week at a time

Sliding

If you don't think this country is sliding toward theocracy, you're not paying attention.

– Charles Blow

This week's featured post is "Sweet Home, Gilead".

This week everybody was talking about IVF in Alabama

The Alabama Supreme Court's ruling that frozen embryos are children for the purposes of wrongful death lawsuits is covered in the featured post.

Just after I pushed the Post button, I saw that Jay Kuo had written about his personal IVF story. His IVF child is currently in a surrogate mother's womb. (Since I subscribed to Kuo's substack blog, I've been linking to it almost every week.) He includes a photo of a frozen embryo, so we know what we're talking about.

The bottom line is that the GOP can't support IVF and support the idea that an embryo is a "person" entitled to full protection under our laws. Supporting IVF means understanding how it actually works and being comfortable with the idea that intended parents must create more embryos than we ultimately need. And clinics cannot be on the hook for murder should anything happen to them. No clinic coul survive with that threat hanging over it.

Neither of those two principles can be truly supported by Republicans so long as their party adheres dogmatically to the "life begins at conception" notion. Politicians who claim to support IVF must repudiate these kinds of fetal personhood laws, or their public backing of IVF means exactly nothing.


In my post, I tried not to treat the Alabama court's position with all the contempt it deserves, so I resisted the temptation to include the "Every Sperm is Sacred" scene from Monty Python's The Meaning of Life.


In other religious-right news: The campaign to overturn the Obergefell same-sex marriage decision begins in Tennessee, with a law allowing state officials to refuse to solemnize same-sex marriages.

This law wouldn't block same-sex marriages, because same-sex couples could still get a marriage license and find somebody other than a judge or other government official to play the celebrant role. But it does relegate them to a second-class status, which this Supreme Court will probably think is fine. This is exactly the kind of chipping-away that states did on Roe v Wade until it was reversed.

Personally, I judge these things by applying a racial analogy: What if a judge refused to marry an interracial couple to express his personal disapproval? Of course, Justice Alito is unmoved by this analogy. Recently he wrote that his dissent in Obergefell was prescient in foreseeing

that Americans who do not hide their adherence to traditional religious beliefs about homosexual conduct will be 'labeled as bigots and treated as such' by the government.

Of course, if you want to deny the full rights of citizenship to people your religion disapproves of, and you believe that government officials should be able to treat them with official disrespect, you are a bigot. Conservative political correctness may not let people say so, but it's not even a close call.

and Russia, Russia, Russia

Last week we learned that the Biden impeachment case — which had always been flimsy — had fallen completely apart: The star witness for the bribery story Republicans wanted to tell, Alexander Smirnov, had been indicted for making the whole thing up and lying to the FBI. Another prospective witness, Gal Luft, had been indicted last summer for arms trafficking and being an unregistered Chinese agent.

This week we found out it's worse than that: Smirnov now says he got his anti-Biden stories from Russian intelligence.

Jay Kuo (him again) lays out the pipeline by which Russian disinformation found its way to the Trump Justice Department and from there to Republicans in Congress (Jim Jordan, James Comer, Chuck Grassley) who pushed it out to the country.

These GOP leaders are at best hapless dupes. They should have known and understood the games Russia was playing with them. But we shouldn't discount the possibility that they were well aware that the Smirnov claims were false and may have originated from Russian intelligence… and then went along with them anyway.

Indeed, we should now actively investigate this possibility.

In a members-only newsletter on TPM, Josh Marshall wonders if the mainstream press is up to covering this story.

Donald Trump and his MAGA legions have spent years shock-training reporters not to bring up anything else about Russian disinformation programs aimed at helping Donald Trump. But they're real. They're continuing. They're actually working. And that remains the case no matter how many times Donald Trump says "RUSSIA RUSSIA RUSSIA" on Truth Social. Reporters have been conditioned to ignore the clear implications of what we're learning.

So what does he think the real story is?

[W]e now see that almost all of 2023 was dominated by a legal/political story that was not only bogus but — according to prosecutors' filings and the discredited source's own admission to federal authorities — was a plant by the Russian intelligence services. That's real. That requires an explanation as to how that was ever allowed to happen.

… The story here isn't that the "Biden Crime Family" nonsense didn't pan out. That was always transparently bogus. The story here is how the U.S. again got bamboozled by transparent foreign manipulation and how the U.S. political press bought into it pretty much whole hog. That doesn't mean they accepted all the claims. But they treated it as reasonable, worthy of a presumption of seriousness, a serious story to be covered as such. Even with the veritable forest of red flags.

and the Trump trials

Judge Engoron officially filed his judgment against Trump Friday, with the disgorgement-plus-interest standing at $454 million. This sets the clock running: Trump has 30 days to appeal. But appealing doesn't mean he gets to delay coming up with a substantial amount of money.

Trump has two options to meet the state's demand: to pay the amount in full, or secure a $35m bond against his assets, which might include the Fifth Avenue Trump Tower, 40 Wall Street, his Mar-a-Lago estate, or a number of golf courses in the US.

The WaPo examines the difficulties Trump faces raising cash.

"If the guy can give phony financial statements, he can give phony information to the bonding company," [attorney Mark C.] Zauderer said, referring to Engoron's finding in the case that the Trump Organization submitted false information to banks to obtain loans. "A bonding company who is going to put up several hundred million dollars here is not, in my opinion, going to do it easily."

Those Carroll and NY state totals face very different prospects on appeal. The Carroll money is mostly punitive damages, which was a judgment call made by the jury; an appeals court might make its own judgment and find that excessive. But the NY State money is based on disgorgement of specific ill-gotten gains. To reduce them, an appeals court would need to rejudge Engoron's conclusions: It would have to find either that Trump did not commit fraud, or that the fraud was not connected to these particular gains.


I'm not going to put a lot of effort into making fun of Trump's branded sneakers, because it's shooting fish in a barrel. But I will pass on one nickname they have picked up: Aryan Jordans. And one suggested slogan I heard: "Fast. Faster. Fascist."

and media malpractice

I already mentioned Josh Marshall's doubts that the mainstream media is up to covering the Smirnov story. But that's just part of a much larger failing.

This week, a new Quinnipiac poll had Biden ahead of Trump 49%-45%. So of course Politico's headline was "Poll: Nearly 70 percent of voters say Biden is too old to serve again". There's no such thing as good news for Biden.


Jeff Tiedrich recalls "the Clinton rules"

basically, Bill or Hillary would do something that every other politician in the entire history of the world does — something as simple as holding a fundraiser, or giving a speech — and the press would report it in hushed tones and describe it as if it were some new kind of dastardly scandal.

Well, the same thing is happening with Biden: Whatever he does — even if every other politician in the world does it — is evidence that he's too old. Tiedrich links to The Daily Mail, which has discovered the latest evidence of Biden's senility: He uses note cards!


Mark Jacobs raises a significant question about the NYT: "Is the New York Times neutral on the future of democracy?" He calls out all the doubts I have about whether the Times deserves my subscription: They regularly give a platform to known liars. They cover politics as "an amusing game", analyzing everything as strategy without discussing the consequences. They write headlines that hide horrible things Republicans say (like when Trump's "vermin" comment was simply "a very different direction" for a Veterans Day speech). And they find "balance" for every terrible thing Republicans do. (Trump is facing criminal charges? He encourages Putin to invade our allies? Yeah, but Biden is old. Biden's age is filling the same "balancing" role that Hillary's emails played in 2016.)

The Times' best work is very, very good. But I continue to wonder whether it's a net positive or negative for American journalism. One change you may have noticed on this blog: I used to subtly encourage my readers to subscribe, but I no longer do. So I'm only linking to NYT articles if there is something unique about them. If I can get the same information from The Guardian or CNN, I will.


The New York Times Pitchbot suggests an angle for the Times to take in the future:

Given the fact that Trump and Biden have 91 felony counts between them, it's no wonder that so many Americans are considering voting third party.


Last week I linked to Ezra Klein's call for Biden not to run, and for the Democrats to hold an open convention. This week many people pushed back on that idea. Lindsay Beyerstein called attention to Biden's success at unifying the divergent wings of the Democratic Party, and predicted that party unity would dissolve in an open convention.

In 2024, a contested convention would become an arena to settle every score from Gaza to Medicare for All. A free-for-all would shatter the fragile Democratic coalition that Joe Biden so carefully knit together.

Several pundits made the same observation: No alternative candidate is doing better than Biden in the polls against Trump. (Current polls show the race more-or-less even.) You can claim that's a name-recognition problem and they'll do better after they're nominated, but that's a leap of faith.

Josh Marshall writes:

The right answer to anyone making these kinds of open-ended statements of concern is to say, tell me specifically what course of action you're advocating and, if it's switching to a new candidate, how you get there in the next few weeks? … Klein's argument really amounts to a highly pessimistic but not unreasonable analysis of the present situation which he resolves with what amounts to a deus ex machina plot twist. That's not a plan. It's a recipe for paralysis.

and the wars

As Israel prepares its ground operation against Rafah (the southern-Gaza town where refugees have gathered), it still has no goal beyond the vague and unachievable "destroy Hamas". For an analysis of how everything arrived at this state, I recommend Zack Beauchamp's Vox article "How Israel's War Went Wrong".


In The New Yorker, a Palestinian who escaped to Egypt describes how the relatives he left behind are scrambling for food.


Biden continues to back away from Netanyahu very, very slowly. Friday, the administration restored a legal finding the Trump administration had reversed, saying that the West Bank settlements are against international law.

Tomorrow's Michigan primary will be a test of how much Biden's Israel policy is costing him, as Palestinian activists are campaigning for Democrats to vote "uncommitted" rather than for Biden.


We just passed the two-year anniversary of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. PBS Newshour gathered some experts to summarize.


My two-years-in observation is about the politics of the Ukraine War in the US: It resembles the politics of January 6. At the beginning, Americans responded the way human beings would. They sympathized with a country trying to get out of the orbit of Putin's fascist Russia when Putin's forces invaded to pull them back in. (I've since read all kinds of explanations about how either Ukraine or the West provoked Russia, and I just don't see it. There was never a threat to invade Russia through Ukraine. Anything less is a problem for diplomacy, not justification for an invasion. The typical answer to that point is to bring up the US invasion of Iraq, which was also unprovoked. But I have no trouble admitting that the Iraq invasion was wrong too.)

That initial gut response wasn't controversial in America. In the early days of the war, everybody, regardless of political party, was rooting for the underdog Ukrainians and wondering what we could do to help. That's how the situation was similar to January 6: In the beginning, everybody who wasn't actively involved in the coup reacted with horror to Trump's brownshirts attacking the Capitol to try to keep him in power by force. Kevin McCarthy, Mitch McConnell, and just about the whole GOP establishment united with Democrats in their initial rejection of what Trump had done.

But then the MAGA media machine and the MAGA social-media conspiracy theorists got to work on reversing the natural human instincts of the people under their sway, and today both Ukraine and January 6 are partisan issues.

and the dysfunctional House of Representatives

Ukraine aid isn't the only thing House Republicans are stalling. Speaker Johnson has recessed the House until Wednesday, with a partial government shutdown looming Friday and the rest of the government running out of money a week later. The WaPo reports that "talks have slowed" on a compromise to prevent a shutdown.

The four appropriations bills set to expire Friday — agriculture; military construction-VA; energy and water and transportation; housing and urban development — are the easier ones. On March 8, funding runs out for more controversial bills for which the far right is demanding even more explosive policy riders around abortion, LGBTQ rights and border security.

and you also might be interested in …

South Carolina's Republican primary was Saturday, and Trump won over Haley, 59%-39%. How you read that result depends on the question you're asking. If you're focused on whether Trump will be nominated, this is a very solid positive result. If Haley is 20 points down in her home state, she really has no chance.

But if your question is whether Trump will be able to unite the Republican voters in the fall, this is a weak showing. Voters went in knowing Trump was the almost certain nominee, but 39% refused to get in line behind him.


Democracy is returning to Wisconsin. For many years, the Wisconsin legislature has been gerrymandered to guarantee Republican control, independent of the will of the voters. AP reports that Democrats have won 14 of the last 17 statewide elections, but somehow those same elections have yielded a Republican supermajority (22-10) in the state senate and a near supermajority (64-35) in the state assembly.

Nonetheless, the voters of Wisconsin still had access to a few levers of power. Last April, Janet Protasiewicz won a 55%-44% victory to gain a seat on the state supreme court, flipping the court to liberal control. In December, the court ruled 4-3 to throw out the Republican-drawn legislative maps. Forced to negotiate with Democratic Governor Tony Evers (another winner of a statewide election), the Republican legislature produced a relatively fair map, which Evers signed into law last Monday.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports:

Under the new state Assembly map, the districts are more evenly split. The new map has 46 districts that lean Republican and 45 districts that lean Democratic. The eight districts left are likely to be a toss-up between Democratic and Republican candidates. …

Under the new state Senate map, 14 out of 33 districts are Democratic-leaning, while 15 are Republican-leaning. Four districts are competitive, where either party has a fair chance of winning them.

However, the Wisconsin congressional maps are still gerrymandered, and Republicans hold six of the eight seats. Democratic voters are packed into the other two districts (containing Madison and Milwaukee), which they won by 19 and 25 points.


The NYT reports on "The Crisis in Teaching Constitutional Law". What's the crisis? The clearly partisan nature of the current conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court. The older generation of professors once shared a faith that interpreting the Constitution is a meaningful activity transcending politics. Justices might have philosophical differences that lead to diverse conclusions, but fundamentally they are all making a good-faith attempt to understand what the law means. Recent Supreme Court decisions — like the Bruen gun control decision — have shaken that faith, to the point that law professors don't know what to teach their students.

Whatever rationale or methodology the justices apply in a given case, the result virtually always aligns with the policy priorities of the modern Republican Party. …

Stanford's Professor McConnell recalled a recent exchange in one of his classes. "I said something to the effect of, 'It's important to assume that the people you disagree with are speaking in good faith.' And a student raises his hand and he asks, 'Why? Why should we assume that people on the other side are acting in good faith?' This was not a crazy person; this was a perfectly sober-minded, rational student. And I think the question was sincere. And I think that's kind of shocking. I do think that some of the underlying assumptions of how a civil society operates can no longer be assumed."


I don't know how many times I've heard that "the stock market always goes up in the long run". Well, sometimes the long run is a very long time indeed. If you bought Japanese stocks at their peak in 1989, you finally turned a profit this week.

and let's close with some musical training

I've heard lots of versions of Pachebel's Canon, but never before one based on train whistles.

By weeklysift, on February 26, 2024 at 12:35 pm, under Uncategorized. 6 Comments
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Comments

  • Anonymous On February 26, 2024 at 2:18 pm

    The idea of replacing Biden is so typical of Democrats.  Trump constantly does endless illegal, unethical, immoral and outright disgusting things and his supporters are all in.

    Biden flubs a few words or forgets something, and we are in a panic.  

    I think this could be a self-fulfilling prophesy – either way.  Let's get behind Biden and find ways to show how capable he is and has been!   In spite of some media looking for controversy.

    Bert

  • Anonymous On February 26, 2024 at 5:12 pm

    My favorite example of the media's treatment of Biden happened just a few days ago. I believe it was during the analysis of the South Carolina primary results. After talk of Trump's hold on the Republican party, they turned to Biden, underlining how much of a problem it is that he's so old. The line was something like "…all he has to run on is his record," delivered in a dismissive tone. Here's a question, what does it matter how old Biden is if he's able to rack up a very impressive list of accomplishments?

  • ldbenj On February 26, 2024 at 9:02 pm

    Did anyone else catch Thomas the Tank Engine at 1:00?

  • Martha Legare On February 27, 2024 at 12:06 am

    OMG, I never saw The Meaning of Life! Clearly I could use this as an opportunity for reframing MEANING as a lesbian, slowing down my consulting/ coaching business in the next 5 years before I really retire! LOL.

    But what I intended to write to you about is the Open Democratic Convention concept. While I am old enough to remember (barely), I forgot about that process. Although I voted for Shirley Chisholm, actually thinking she had a chance of winning – haha, (all my best friends were voting that way at 18!), I ended up with McCarthy. But it wasn't a huge difference in numbers for Humphrey.to beat him. We can do better this time.

    We need to do something NOW! If Biden is our candidate, we will surely lose, (as your observations of the press clearly indicate).

    For every political ad I get asking for money, I respond: "I will not donate another dollar to the Democratic Party until you all get Joe Biden to step aside by May and plan to have an Open Democratic Convention! imagine what would happen if Democrats actually had HOPE and excitement! (Cue Obama.) If this doesn't happen, we will lose for sure." Or a longer rant…

    If you have any bright ideas to move this forward with less risk, I'd love you to write more!

    Also, despite reading this newsletter for years now and being Unitarian, I can't recall your name. Do you have to be that secreative? Just want to say "Thanks!"

    Cheers, Martha

    Martha Legare m. +1 404.815.7766 martha.legare@gmail.com

    >

  • kimc0240 On February 27, 2024 at 2:51 am

    As Lawrence O'Donnell said this week:" If someone were going to run against Biden, he/she would have had to have started three years ago." It's too late to change horses.

    I think Biden has done a great job. Much better than I expected. He is a consummate negotiator. Unfortunately, real negotiating is not done in public, so most people have no idea how well he does. It has been obvious to me that Biden has been trying to talk Netanyahu down from what he's doing, but he can't continue to do that if he walks away in a huff, as people seem to want him to do. They (the public) don't seem to understand that we have people who really understand this stuff, and they (the public) want to tell them how to do their job, even when they themselves haven't a clue how to do it.

    As I see it, when Biden gets out there on the campaign trail, he needs to do two things: give people hope, and give them a vision of what he intends to do with his second term.

    –Kim

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