Tim Miller, himself a former Republican political consultant who worked for Jeb Bush and is now a member of the Never Trump movement, asked some of his consultant colleagues for Republican candidates in races around the country why, given Trump’s plummeting poll numbers, their candidates don’t try to distance themselves from him, at least a little.
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The new book by Donald Trump’s niece Mary Trump, a clinical psychologist, exposes him to the world. The unsuccessful attempts to block publication resulted in the Streisand effect kicking in big time and greatly increasing interest in the book. As a result, the publisher shifted up the release date to Tuesday, July 14 but they also sent copies to the media and you can read excerpts from it in many places, such as this one.
Mary Trump’s book, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man, paints her uncle the president in a horrifying light and reveals explosive details about his character and disparaging comments made by his sister, retired federal judge Maryanne Trump Barry.
“If he is afforded a second term, it would be the end of American democracy,” Mary bluntly declares in the book. “Donald, following the lead of my grandfather and with complicity, silence, and inaction from his siblings, destroyed my father. I can’t let him destroy my country.”
While the excerpts quoted in the article suggest that the book will make for entertaining reading, it also induces the sobering feeling of “How the hell could such a person end up president? What does it say about a country that would vote him in?”
In another article, Mary Trump’s lawyer Ted Boutrous is quoted as saying, “The more people see what he was like before, and really understand the kind of person he is and was, the more people will be horrified that he’s the president.”
I am not so sanguine that this statement applies to Trump’s supporters because they are a cult and cult members either refuse to believe anything negative about their Dear Leader or view what others see as his faults as actual virtues.
The one-time lover, confidante, business associate, and alleged procurer of teenage girls for abuse by Jeffrey Epstein and his friends has been transferred from the New Hampshire jail where she was over the weekend to the Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC) in New York City. She is expected to appear in court on Friday at which the issue of bail will be discussed. Prosecutors will warn that she is a flight risk because of her money and her UK and French citizenship and connections, and thus should be denied bail, while her lawyers will likely argue that the fact that she had not already left the country (something that has puzzled me) means that she does not want to flee and so could be let out on bail
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Yesterday, the US Supreme Court issued a unanimous ruling of some significance. To understand why, you need to look at the truly weird system that the US uses to elect its presidents. So buckle up for a trip through that maze.
The first thing to appreciate is that the president is not elected by the majority (or plurality) vote of all the people in the country. While voters in an election do cast their votes for a specific presidential candidate, what they are really doing is electing members to an abstract entity called the electoral college and it is these electoral college members who vote for the president sometime after the presidential election is held, in a process that no one pays any attention to because it is assumed that they will vote according to the results of the presidential election so there should be no surprise.
Each state is entitled to a certain number of electoral college votes based on the following formula: one vote for each member of the House of Representatives from that state (which is roughly proportional to the number of voters in that state, with a minimum of one) plus two votes (for the two senators that each state gets). Since there are a total of 435 members of the House of Representatives and 100 senators, that adds up to 535 in total. Washington DC is not a state and thus has no congressional members but for the purposes of presidential elections it is treated as one and is allocated three electoral college votes. Thus there are 538 votes in all and to become president, you need 270 of those.
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I recently watched the above documentary that dealt with how the warming of the oceans is killing off the coral reefs all over the world. The filmmakers developed time-lapse cameras that they could place on the ocean floor to show how when temperatures rise even slightly, first the reefs get bleached white and then develop brown fibrous attachments all over them, giving them the look of ghostly apparitions. They focus a lot on the Great Barrier Reef in Australia.
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The pandemic has made everyone aware of the need to monitor their body temperature to see if they might be carrying the virus. I wrote earlier about how my ‘normal’ body temperature when I have no symptoms of anything is much lower than the canonical value of 98.6F, which makes it hard to determine how to use my body temperature to determine if I am sick or if I have returned to normal after being sick. This article explains that there is a huge amount of variation because a multiplicity of factors affect the temperature.
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Even after moving to California, I still get a daily newsletter from Chris Quinn, the editor of Cleveland.com, the online news site affiliated with the Cleveland Plain Dealer. A recent one once again showed why you should never, ever, believe the version of events that are put by the police following some fast-moving events because they will simply lie to deflect blame away from themselves and onto the victims of their violence. In this case, there was violence and property destruction in downtown Cleveland during protests last month following the death of George Floyd and the police were quick to issue a statement that said that it was initiated by the protestors and that was what caused the police to move in with force, using their arsenal of tear gas and so-called non-lethal weaponry which we know can inflict tremendous harm.
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This article describes how California went from being lauded for the way it controlled the outbreak to now being one of the states where there is a resurgence.
The Newsom administration’s four-phase plan to reopen slowly, while encouraging Californians to remain vigilant about wearing face coverings and maintaining distance to stop the spread of disease seemed “perfectly good and smart”, [Dr Bob Wachter, who chairs the department of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco] said.
“But what I think we didn’t get right was the national political scene,” he said. California, despite its reputation as a progressive state, wasn’t immune to a growing conservative movement that rejects face masks as muzzles on independence and vilifies public health officials as enemies of the people.
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We are used to seeing heavily armed white militia marching around in public spaces to show their support for white supremacist causes. Those shows of strength were clearly intended to intimidate lawmakers, government officials, and the public. But on Saturday, the tables were turned and there appeared over 1,000 heavily armed members of a black militia who marched through a park in Georgia where there are statues of confederate leaders.
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America was born in racism, starting with the way that the early settlers massacred the indigenous peoples, before moving on to the institution of slavery, and then to the conquest of regions of Mexico that resulted in yet another group to be subordinated. To understand better why it is the way it is now, it helps to understand that history.
Eric Foner is one of the foremost scholars on one aspect of it, that of the aftermath of slavery, especially the post-civil war period in the US known as Reconstruction that is usually given as 1865-1877, and I have already mentioned before (here and here) his excellent book on the subject.
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