Jon Stewart had a really good analysis of that on his podcast. Not only that, the show he did right before Biden stepped aside included a guy from CNN who made exactly that argument. "It's too late. There's nothing we can do because it's too complicated." He looked like an idiot during that show because the other guests obliterated every argument he tried to throw out, and sure enough the day Biden withdrew he was invited back to CNN to do the "this is a good opportunity to move forward" whiplash. I'll admit I was fully on the "It's Biden, stop complaining" train originally, but his debate performance took the floor right out from under my feet. Anyone still arguing to keep him in after that performance was participating in a different reality than the one the rest of us live in.
Such a stark contrast. For so long Biden's campaign just didn't seem to be fighting for anything, they kinda coasted and kept their heads down so as not to cause a stir or trigger any kind of controversy. Now Harris has cranked things up to eleven and is pounding Trump/Vance into the dirt with media blitzes amid seamless coordination with the entire Democratic Party. If she governs the way she's handled this campaign, then bring it the fuck on.
and is frankly insultingly little after everything that has transpired around those sorts of issues
Due to Republicans.
If you don’t like how angry I am about it, I’m sorry to tell you that telling me not to be angry isn’t going to make me less so.
Nobody told you not to be angry, so not sure why you're so defensive. Just be angry at the people actually keeping things from happening and the voters who keep sending them to DC, not the politicians drafting laws and trying to negotiate their passage.
I’m far more pissed off now that everyone has woken up to attack me for criticizing the party I was already going to vote for because I had the gall to call it like I saw it than the mild disgruntlement I was experiencing when I made the first comment.
Nobody "woke up" to attack you. This is a public discussion forum. Don't take everything so personally.
Fucking rise up like this to demand better from Dems, folks!
...and stop voting for Republicans.
I'm not claiming to know what kind of training would help, just that "train them better" isn't a particularly controversial statement. I'm also not arguing against police reform, which is desperately needed. I'm simply observing that Republicans are to blame for the GFJPA repeatedly not advancing in Congress. Were there a more significant Democratic majority in Congress, their intransigence would be irrelevant and reform would have already been implemented. Voters simply didn't send that sizeable majority to DC.
And them saying it last month, six months ago, 12 months ago, or 18 months ago would have been different how?
'Fund them with resources and training' is controversial to you?
Democrats tried to pass the GFJPA in 2020, then again in 2021, and then Republicans took the House. All three times it was blocked by Republicans.
No Democrats are "sitting on it". They passed a House bill in 2020 which Senate Republicans killed. They passed another in 2021 which died over disputes about qualified immunity and because Republicans objected to a national police misconduct database. Then Republicans took the House in 2022 and obviously weren't going to pass it again.
Stop blaming Democrats for Republican intransigence.
NC elections board approves a new party, allowing Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on the ballot
The NC elections board makes We the People a political party, allowing presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to appear on the ballot.
> The state Board of Elections voted to authorize the alternative We the People party, allowing presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to appear on North Carolina ballots in November.
> The Board rejected with a 3-2 vote along party lines the Justice for All party, Cornel West’s alternative party. Democrats rejected the Justice for All attempt to become a recognized party in part over questions about signatures on its petitions.
> Tuesday’s votes came after weeks of deliberations, a request from Democrats on the board for an investigation into the petition efforts, and pressure from state and congressional Republicans to have both parties approved.
There is no candidate until the convention. Biden wasn't actually the nominee yet, so there's nothing for them to contest. Johnson put out that threat to scare you.
Another top Biden adviser put it this way: “He’s going into this thinking, ‘I want to find a running mate I can turn things over to after four years but if that’s not possible or doesn’t happen then I’ll run for reelection.’ But he’s not going to publicly make a one term pledge.”
That source does not say what you're claiming it says.
Well that's interesting and encouraging (I think). I'm in NC and my experience is exactly the opposite, but your vote is more important than mine.
Yeah I've also started trying to figure out, in the grand scheme of things, if there's a scenario where replacing an incumbent would be more beneficial. Like, how bad would the polls have to get before the party stepped in and made an unfortunate but necessary decision? Losing all swing states? Losing Dem lean states? Losing solid blue states? Losing by double digits? Or maybe the candidate would have to get worse? What if he has a stroke in October? What if he dies in October? Is that how bad it would have to get?
The only silver lining I'm seeing right now is the 538 model calling for a Biden win (sorta), and it's predicated on economic fundamentals which I just don't think hold the line like they used to. I think the game has fundamentally changed, as has political typology, and that's the reason he's drowning in swing states.
Since the debate I haven't spoken to a single left-leaning person who wants Biden to stay in or thinks he can win. Not one.
Not only that, they don't even have to target 3/4 of the country. They just need to hammer Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.
NC commission delays advancing limits on forever-chemical water pollution — again
> Republican-appointed leaders of the Environmental Management Commission have twice declined to advance proposed rules that would restrict industry’s release of some “forever” chemical pollution into drinking water supplies across North Carolina.
> To further complicate things, the groundwater committee also asked DEQ to remove five of the eight chemicals from the list of what it wants to regulate.
> An increasingly frustrated DEQ Secretary Elizabeth Biser, appointed by Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper, said the commission is stalling full committee evaluation of the new rules, a departure from previous practices. “I hate to say that it wasn’t a huge surprise that they once again found reasons to move the goalposts and to not take action. It’s very frustrating,” Biser said.
Who cares who burned the Reichstag down? It's just a building and those things burn down all the time!
cAnCeL CuLtUrE11!!!! fReEzE pEaCh!!!!!!@
Let it be known that you've had removed-then-reposted comments re-removed multiple times in the past 2 days by three different moderators. If you do so again, a ban will follow.
Doing Nothing About Biden Is the Riskiest Plan of All
Looking at polls beyond the straight horse-race numbers between Biden and Trump offers a glimpse of hope for Democrats.
> After last week’s debate disaster, some Democrats are trying to circle the wagons to protect President Biden, noting that Barack Obama lost his first debate as an incumbent president, too.
> But this one doesn’t pass the smell test. Mr. Obama wasn’t 81 years old at the time of his debate debacle. And he came into the debate as a strong favorite in the election, whereas Mr. Biden was behind (with just a 35 percent chance of winning).
> A 35 percent chance is not nothing. But Mr. Biden needed to shake up the race, not just preserve the status quo. Instead, he’s dug himself a deeper hole.
> Looking at polls beyond the straight horse-race numbers between Mr. Biden and Donald Trump — ones that include Democratic Senate candidate races in close swing-state races — suggests something even more troubling about Mr. Biden’s chances, but also offers a glimpse of hope for Democrats.
Okay, Biden isn’t popular. But his policies sure are.
Who is to blame for that? Voters, the media or Biden himself?
> President Biden’s policy agenda is incredibly popular, much more popular than his opponent’s. But Biden the man? Not so much.
> The question now is whom to blame for the approval gap between the president and his agenda: voters, the media or Biden himself.
> Democrats have long argued that their policies are more popular than those of Republicans. In a recent blind test conducted by YouGov, that was unmistakably true. The polling organization asked Americans what they thought about major policies proposed by Biden and Donald Trump without specifying who proposed them. The idea was to see how the public perceived ideas when stripped of tribal associations.
> Biden’s agenda was the winner, hands down.
> Of the 28 Biden proposals YouGov asked about, 27 were supported by more people than opposed them. Impressively, 24 received support from more than 50 percent of respondents.
Request to mod [email protected]
Mod has been inactive for a year, and I’d like to take it over and help it generate more traffic.
The six most extreme fire years have occurred since 2017, the study found.
> The frequency and magnitude of extreme wildfires around the globe has doubled in the last two decades due to climate change, according to a study released Monday.
> The analysis, published in the journal “Nature Ecology & Evolution,” focused on massive blazes that release vast amounts of energy from the volume of organic matter burned. Researchers pointed to the historic Australia fires of 2019 and 2020 as an example of blazes that were “unprecedented in their scale and intensity.” The six most extreme fire years have occurred since 2017, the study found.
Agricultural insecticides were a key factor, according to a study focused on the Midwest, though researchers emphasized the importance of climate change and habitat loss.
> The latest insight comes from a study on butterflies in the Midwest, published on Thursday in the journal PLOS ONE. Its results don’t discount the serious effects of climate change and habitat loss on butterflies and other insects, but they indicate that agricultural insecticides exerted the biggest impact on the size and diversity of butterfly populations in the Midwest during the study period, 1998 to 2014.
Request to un-delete c/climate
I deleted it when it didn't gain enough traction, and I'd like to revive it.
Iran signals a major boost in nuclear enrichment at key site
> A major expansion underway inside Iran’s most heavily protected nuclear facility could soon triple the site’s production of enriched uranium and give Tehran new options for quickly assembling a nuclear arsenal if it chooses to, according to confidential documents and analysis by weapons experts.
> Inspectors with the International Atomic Energy Agency confirmed new construction activity inside the Fordow enrichment plant, just days after Tehran formally notified the nuclear watchdog of plans for a substantial upgrade at the underground facility built inside a mountain in north-central Iran.
> Iran also disclosed plans for expanding production at its main enrichment plant near the city of Natanz. Both moves are certain to escalate tensions with Western governments and spur fears that Tehran is moving briskly toward becoming a threshold nuclear power, capable of making nuclear bombs rapidly if its leaders decide to do so.
American Leaders Should Stop Debasing Themselves on Israel
You have to wonder if American “friends” of Israel have any clue about the nature of Israel’s government.
> Israel is up against a regional superpower, Iran, that has managed to put Israel into a vise grip, using its allies and proxies: Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and Shiite militias in Iraq. Right now, Israel has no military or diplomatic answer. Worse, it faces the prospect of a war on three fronts — Gaza, Lebanon and the West Bank — but with a dangerous new twist: Hezbollah in Lebanon, unlike Hamas, is armed with precision missiles that could destroy vast swaths of Israel’s infrastructure, from its airports to its seaports to its university campuses to its military bases to its power plants.
> But Israel is led by a prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who has to stay in power to avoid potentially being sent to prison on corruption charges. To do so, he sold his soul to form a government with far-right Jewish extremists who insist that Israel must fight in Gaza until it has killed every last Hamasnik — “total victory” — and who reject any partnership with the Palestinian Authority (which has accepted the Oslo peace accords) in governing a post-Hamas Gaza, because they want Israeli control over all the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, including Gaza.
> And now, Netanyahu’s emergency war cabinet has fallen apart over his lack of a plan for ending the war and safely withdrawing from Gaza, and the extremists in his government coalition are eyeing their next moves for power.
> They have done so much damage already, and yet not President Biden, the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC, nor many in Congress have come to terms with just how radical this government is.
> Indeed, House Speaker Mike Johnson and his fellow G.O.P. mischief makers decided to reward Netanyahu with the high honor of speaking to a joint meeting of Congress on July 24. Pushed into a corner, the top Democrats in the Senate and the House signed on to the invitation, but the unstated goal of this Republican exercise is to divide Democrats and provoke shouted insults from their most progressive representatives that would alienate American Jewish voters and donors and turn them toward Donald Trump.
GOP pick for N.C. governor downplayed Weinstein allegations, assault by Ray Rice
> Mark Robinson, the firebrand Republican nominee for governor in North Carolina, has for years made comments downplaying and making light of sexual assault and domestic violence.
> A review of Robinson’s social media posts over the past decade shows that he frequently questioned the credibility of women who aired allegations of sexual assault against prominent men, including Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, actor Bill Cosby and now-U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh. In one post, Robinson, North Carolina’s lieutenant governor, characterized Weinstein and others as “sacrificial lambs” being “slaughtered.”
> Robinson has drawn scrutiny for his incendiary remarks on other issues, including about LGBTQ+ people, religion and other political figures. But his comments on domestic violence and sexual assault stand out for their tone and frequency, as well as Robinson’s repeated questioning of accusers.
> While Robinson is, in some ways, emblematic of the Republican Party’s turn under Donald Trump toward rewarding inflammatory, sexist language, his dismissals of women threaten to test Robinson’s appeal with voters troubled by that history, in particular female voters.
The decisions came despite the Judicial Standards Commission’s recommendations to publicly reprimand the judges, and these are likely the only times in more than a decade in which the court didn’t follow the commission’s guidance.
> Last fall, out of public view, the North Carolina Supreme Court squashed disciplinary action against two Republican judges who had admitted that they had violated the state’s judicial code of conduct, according to three sources with direct knowledge of the decisions.
> One of the judges had ordered, without legal justification, that a witness be jailed. The other had escalated a courtroom argument with a defendant, which led to a police officer shooting the defendant to death. The Judicial Standards Commission, the arm of the state Supreme Court that investigates judicial misconduct by judges, had recommended that the court publicly reprimand both women. The majority-Republican court gave no public explanation for rejecting the recommendations — indeed, state law mandates that such decisions remain confidential.
> Asher Hildebrand, a professor of public policy at Duke University, explained that in the 2010s, North Carolina had policies designed to keep the judiciary above the political fray, such as nonpartisan judicial elections. However, the gradual dismantling of these policies by the Republican-controlled legislature has driven the court’s polarization, according to Hildebrand.
Year after year, NC legislators use state budget to weaken environmental protections
> Preventing local governments from reducing plastic waste is just one recent example of the many ways Republican lawmakers have used the state budget, theoretically a fiscal document, to weaken existing environmental regulations or prevent more.
> Since taking power in 2011, GOP leaders have introduced dozens of environmental provisions in state budgets, rather than standalone bills. That includes 2023 provisions preventing North Carolina from joining a cap-and-trade program that could have limited greenhouse gasses released by the state’s power plants and stymieing Gov. Roy Cooper’s efforts to shift trucks across the state from diesel fuel to electric power.
> Since 2017, state environmental officials have been grinding their way toward regulating these per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS. While scientists know of thousands, DEQ identified eight present here that it intended to regulate in ground- and surface water.
> But in April, the N.C. Chamber, the state’s powerful business interest group, urged the N.C. Environmental Management Commission to slow down and conduct more research before approving rules for the substances. Much of Chamber President Gary Salamido’s argument to delay setting new limits focused on new drinking water rules the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency finalized this year for six of the eight PFAS the state is considering limiting.
> He also pointed to the renewed Hardison Amendment, writing that regulators need to consider whether they are going further than the EPA’s rules.
Judge calls DeSantis ban on transgender care unconstitutional
> A federal judge blocked most of a law championed by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) that strictly limited transgender health care for adults and banned it completely for children.
> In his decision, U.S. District Judge Robert L. Hinkle rejected a common mantra of the DeSantis administration, saying that “gender identity is real,” and that the state cannot deny transgender individuals treatment.
> “Florida has adopted a statute and rules that ban gender-affirming care for minors even when medically appropriate,” Hinkle wrote. “The ban is unconstitutional.”
More efficient manufacturing, falling battery costs and intense competition are lowering sticker prices for battery-powered models to within striking distance of gasoline cars.
> More efficient manufacturing, falling battery costs and intense competition are lowering sticker prices for battery-powered models to within striking distance of gasoline cars.
Automakers and dealers are starting to offer discounts, low-interest loans and other incentives to lure buyers as the supply of cars grows.
> For much of the last four years, automakers and their dealers had so few cars to sell — and demand was so strong — that they could command high prices. Those days are over, and hefty discounts are starting a comeback.
> During the coronavirus pandemic, auto production was slowed first by factory closings and then by a global shortage of computer chips and other parts that lasted for years.
> With few vehicles in showrooms, automakers and dealers were able to scrap most sales incentives, leaving consumers to pay full price. Some dealers added thousands of dollars to the manufacturer’s suggested retail price, and people started buying and flipping in-demand cars for a profit.
> But with chip supplies back to healthy levels, auto production has rebounded and dealer inventories are growing. At the same time, higher interest rates have dampened demand for vehicles. As a result, many automakers are scrambling to keep sales rolling.
Another N.C. beach house just fell into the ocean. Others may follow.
> Another home has crumbled into the sea in Rodanthe, N.C., the scenic Outer Banks community where rising seas and relentless erosion have claimed a growing number of houses and forced some property owners to take drastic measures to retreat from the oceanfront.
> “Another one bit the dust,” David Hallac, superintendent of the Cape Hatteras National Seashore, said in an interview. And it probably won’t be the last, as many homes in the area are perilously close to the surf. “This situation will continue.”
Netanyahu and Putin are both waiting for Trump
> Netanyahu reportedly met this month with three foreign policy envoys working with former president and current presidential candidate Donald Trump — who could yet win the election despite being convicted Thursday on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in his New York state hush money case.
> Netanyahu, who benefited immensely from Trump’s first term, is arguably hoping for a similar dividend in the event of a second. In the interim, he has openly rejected the Biden administration’s hopes for the Palestinian Authority to take the lead in the postwar administration of Gaza, and he and his allies have shown no interest in even engaging in the White House on reviving pathways for a Palestinian state. And contrary to the Biden administration’s wishes, Netanyahu may soon act on a Republican invitation to address a joint session of Congress.
___
> It’s not just Netanyahu who is waiting for Trump. The evidence is more clear that Russian President Vladimir Putin is holding out for a Trump victory, which would probably help the Kremlin consolidate its illegal conquests of Ukrainian territory. My colleagues reported last month that Trump and his inner circle have outlined the terms of a potential settlement between Moscow and Kyiv that they would attempt to usher in if in power. “Trump’s proposal consists of pushing Ukraine to cede Crimea and the Donbas border region to Russia, according to people who discussed it with Trump or his advisers and spoke on the condition of anonymity because those conversations were confidential,” they reported.
> Such a move would fracture the transatlantic coalition built up in support of Ukraine’s resistance to Russian invasion. It would cement the Republican turn away from Europe’s security at a time when Western resolve around Ukraine is flagging. And it would be yet another sign of Trump’s conspicuous affection the strongman in the Kremlin.
Environmental Management Commission stalls PFAS standards, members own stock in companies lobbying against regulation
> The Environmental Management Commission is a 15-member body appointed by the governor, General Assembly leaders, and the agricultural commissioner. It is charged with reviewing and enacting rules for the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality.
> DEQ requested the EMC begin the rulemaking process to adopt PFAS surface water and groundwater standards at its May 10 meeting. Commissioners declined the request, citing the need for more time to study the financial implications of the proposal, namely costs associated with requiring companies to install filtration technology.
> A Port City Daily review of EMC financial disclosures found at least three commissioners own stock in companies that have either directly lobbied against PFAS and 1,4-dioxane regulation or pay lobbying dues to organizations that lobby on their behalf, such as the Chamber of Commerce and the American Chemistry Council. Both organizations sent letters to the EPA opposing recent regulatory actions on PFAS and 1,4-dioxane.
Progressive Democrats aren’t turning activism into election wins
> Essentially, today’s 213-member Democratic caucus breaks down into a few categories, the largest of which are traditionally liberal lawmakers who come from cities or inner suburbs and are comfortable with incremental victories in helping the working class. There are dozens of moderates who are more friendly toward business but believe in socially liberal values.
> And there are dozens of far-left liberals, hailing from the progressive caucus or the small-knit “Squad,” who have clashed with leaders for not pushing for a more purely liberal agenda. This group has been on the rise over the past half decade, both at the ballot box and inside the caucus.
> But now, at this stage of the primary calendar, this wing is facing tough political headwinds.