I thought the Lincoln Project kinda lost its mojo after the 2020 election, and the major staff changes.  But this under-2-minute montage of all the highlights from the weekend is vintage stuff. Now if only they’d post their latest videos on their website instead of ex-Twitter. The post Lincoln Project Had a Good Weekend appeared first on Discourse.net ..read more

Although in past years handicapping the Veepstakes has been one of my favorite pastimes, I find that this year I don’t much care who Trump’s running mate might turn out to be. I suppose it’s because they vary from quite bad to horrible, or because I think that, barring one of the candidates having a medical crisis, the election will be decided either in court or via Trump’s self-destruction as he says increasingly bizarre things and people start to focus on them. But that doesn’t stop other people, and Trump added fuel to the flames today by naming six people he thought might be potential runn ..read more

Inspired by the silly kerfuffle about President Biden’s supposed memory issues in his five-hour interview with a partisan special prosecutor, conducted while Biden also was involved in issues about the Middle East, and perhaps also inspired by the death of Toby Keith, I asked GPT-4 to take on the persona of an experienced writer of hit songs and write me a country music song on the theme “I’m voting for Grandpa (because the alternative is so much worse)”. The results were not half bad: “I’m Voting for Grandpa” (Verse 1) Out here where the wheat fields meet the sky, I’ve been watching the days ..read more

The Amar brothers have filed a very fine amicus brief in the Supreme Court’s review of the Trump disqualification case, styled Trump v. Anderson. The argument is aimed squarely at ‘originalists’ by recovering critical history that shaped Art. 3 of the XIVth Amendment. Here’s a portion of the summary: Underlying Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment, there resides […] an episode known to virtually all Americans in the 1860s and, alas, forgotten by most Americans today, even the learned. The episode has gone almost unmentioned in all previous scholarship on Section Three and in all previous ..read more

NEW AD: Trump told them to fight. He’s responsible for January 6. And he can never be president again. Running nationally on Fox News during the Haley, DeSantis, and Trump town halls on Jan. 8-10. pic.twitter.com/qoyCKB04BT — Republican Accountability (@AccountableGOP) January 8, 2024 New ad from the Republican Accountability PAC. The post Counterstrike appeared first on Discourse.net ..read more

President Franklin D. Roosevelt described December 7, 1941 as “a date which will live in infamy” in his speech the day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. 12/7 was a date seared into the memory of those who lived through it, although I think not nearly as meaningful to those who like me were born considerably later. Even infamy may have a half-life, and I suspect that today most people look at ‘Pearl Harbor Day’ on the calendar and don’t think that much of it. We of the current generations have two dates of our own that live in infamy at least for now: 9/11 and 1/6. What these dates hav ..read more

My brother, the journalist and now journalism watchdog, had a great idea: Donald Trump took the stand on Monday in his civil fraud trial in a Manhattan courtroom. But because television cameras were not allowed inside, the public was only given a filtered look at the proceedings, through the eyes of journalists whose takes varied considerably. Without the ability to record audio, reporters were unable to capture longer passages and exchanges. Precisely what went on in that courthouse should not be shrouded in mystery. So I tracked down the court reporter working that day, and purchased from h ..read more

Steve Scalise Source: Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons It seems a narrow majority of the House GOP conference has plumped for ultra-rightist but somewhat establishment Rep. Steve Scalise over ultra-rightist bomb-thrower Rep. Jim Jordan as its choice for Speaker of the House–an office the Washington Post recently called ‘the worst job in Washington’. But it also seems as though there currently are enough House GOP rebels to prevent Scalise from having the necessary 217 votes to get elected over Democratic opposition. So we remain in a state of paralysis while G ..read more

Click for larger version Hot on the heels of his official Twitter-disaster campaign announcement, the Ron DeSantis campaign has launch an attack on Donald Trump–for being too chummy with that demon Anthony Fauci.  And what better evidence than pictures of Trump hugging and kissing Fauci?  Pity they didn’t exist. But no problem!  Deepfakes: A Ron DeSantis presidential campaign video shows three pictures of Donald Trump hugging and kissing Anthony Fauci, all of which seem to be fake images generated by artificial intelligence. One professor told Ars today that there is “no doub ..read more

FDR Memorial Copyright © 2002. Some rights reserved CC BY-SA 3.0. President Biden has trailed the idea of a Freedom Agenda as the central theme of his re-election campaign. (“The freedom for women to make their own health-care decisions, the freedom for our children to be safe from gun violence, the freedom to vote and have your vote counted. For seniors to live with dignity, and to give every American the freedom that comes with a fair shot at building a good life.”) It of course harkens back to FDR’s Four Freedoms (“the freedom of speech, the freedom of worship, the freedom from want, and ..read more