Isaiah's THE WORLD TODAY JUST NUTS "Trump's Prison Yard Rap"
Now for Paul Rudnick.
Verified photo of Kristi Noem ordering the Cocker Spaniel Platter with Onions at PetSmart, with a Teacup Poodle to go pic.twitter.com/mlQXcZlciH
— Paul Rudnick (@PaulRudnickNY) September 12, 2024
Sadly, Isaiah and Paul are our last chuckles for this post.
We've got to talk about something else.
The Justice Department’s public servants “do not bend to politics” and “will fiercely protect the independence of this Department from political interference in our criminal investigations,” Garland said.
His remarks follow attacks from the Republican presidential candidate and his allies who have accused Garland and President Joe Biden of “weaponizing” the Justice Department to criminally prosecute him in two cases under special counsel Jack Smith.
Trump was criminally charged for his efforts to reverse his election loss in 2020, and for allegedly withholding reams of classified documents after leaving office, then obstructing efforts to get them back.
But another special counsel, Robert Hur, has separately investigated Biden for his own withholding of classified documents from his time as vice president, though Hur ultimately decided against charging the president
His son Hunter Biden, however, pleaded guilty last week to tax fraud charges brought by a third special counsel, David Weiss.
The Justice Department’s investigation into Democratic Senator Bob Menendez also yielded guilty verdicts for corruption and bribery.
Yet, Trump continues to baselessly insist that the department is singling him out, and that the multiple criminal investigations and lawsuits against him are the product of a Biden-directed scheme to derail his election chances.
In a lengthy post on his Truth Social and X accounts on Saturday, Trump threatened “long term prison sentences” for “Lawyers, Political Operatives, Donors, Illegal Voters, & Corrupt Election Officials” he accused of “cheating” in the 2020 and 2024 elections.
To get some reciprocity
See, no one loves you more than me
And no one ever will
You always seem to let me know
It ain't working (it ain't working, no), it ain't working
And when I try to walk away
You'd hurt yourself to make me stay
This is crazy, this is crazy (oh, this is crazy, uh-huh)
"Iraq snapshot" (THE COMMON ILLS):
With Tuesday’s debate between Trump and Kamala Harris, Trump no longer had the protective cover of a hapless and flailing rival. Quite the reverse: Harris dominated the debate, relying in particular on a masterful strategy of hitting topics that Trump is especially touchy about. This deliberate baiting of Trump threw him off message. Instead of pounding away on what he sees as his best topic (opposition to undocumented immigrants), Trump was goaded into defensive and aggrieved answers about crowd size, the January 6 attempted coup, and his response to the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville in 2017. At one point, Trump became so unhinged that he started shouting about immigrants eating cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio—a racist canard that has much popularity on the online right but, as debate moderator David Muir of ABC News pointed out, has no basis in fact. All of this made Trump sound unhinged.
As David Weigel of Semafor acutely noted, Harris had a strategy that she deftly executed: “She invoked a fact from the Trump years that Democrats felt had been forgotten by voters since 2020, she said something that would set her opponent off, and then she used his familiar eruptions in response to urge voters to take the offramp on the Trump era.”
This strategy of baiting Trump was based on a sound understanding of the psychology of the former president. Trump is a touchy narcissist who holds grudges and likes to repeat favorite talking points. Harris keyed her comments to hit Trump’s hot buttons. She teased Trump into getting angrier and more incoherent.
In a sense, Harris was replicating Muhammed Ali’s famous rope-a-dope technique that was used to such great affect in his 1974 match with George Foreman. Ali made himself into a punching bag, which tired Foreman out and allowed Ali to deliver the winning punches. In Harris’s case, rope-a-dope meant allowing Trump to meander on into incoherence, a strategy of selective silence. It’s noticeable that Trump spoke for considerably longer than Harris: 43.03 minutes for Trump, 37.41 minutes for Harris, a difference of 15 percent. But Harris wasn’t letting Trump walk over her. Rather, she was giving the dope enough rope to hang himself.
Remarkably negative reactions to Donald Trump’s performance during his first formal matchup against Vice President Kamala Harris have left conservatives reeling—and Trump panicking.
On Wednesday, the former president attempted to wiggle out of any further debates against Harris, claiming that he had actually beaten Harris and deserved to be acknowledged for the “K.O.”
“In the World of Boxing or UFC, when a Fighter gets beaten or knocked out, they get up and scream, ‘I DEMAND A REMATCH, I DEMAND A REMATCH!’” Trump posted on Truth Social. “Well, it’s no different with a Debate. She was beaten badly last night. Every Poll has us WINNING, in one case, 92-8, so why would I do a Rematch?”
Later, in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, Trump insisted that he didn’t believe he “had to do it a second time,” only to suggest that he could be open to following through on the two other debates slated to be hosted on NBC and Fox in the coming weeks.
(No polls have indicated that Trump would win by such a large margin. A CNN flash poll after the debate indicated that 63 percent of Americans felt that Harris outperformed Trump.)
New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger has issued a lengthy warning in the Washington Post (9/5/24) on the dangers another Donald Trump presidency would pose to a “free and independent press.”
Sulzberger details Trump’s many efforts to suppress and undermine critical media outlets during his previous presidential tenure, as well as the more recent open declarations by Trump and his allies of their plans to continue to “come after” the press, “whether it’s criminally or civilly.” He documents the ways independent media have been eroded in illiberal democracies around the world, and draws direct links to Trump’s playbook.
You might expect this to be a prelude to an announcement that the New York Times would work tirelessly to defend democracy. Instead, Sulzberger heartily defends his own miserably inadequate strategy of “neutrality”—which, in practice, is both-sidesing—making plain his greater concern for the survival of his own newspaper than the survival of US democracy.
“As someone who strongly believes in the foundational importance of journalistic independence,” Sulzberger writes, “I have no interest in wading into politics.”
It’s a bizarre statement. Newspapers, including the Times, regularly endorse candidates. Presumably, then, he’s referring to the “news” side of the paper, rather than the opinion side.
But, even so, you can’t report on politics without wading directly into them. Which political figures and issues do you cover, and how much? (See, for example: media’s outsize coverage of Trump since 2015; media’s heavy coverage of inflation but not wage growth.) Which popular political ideas do you take seriously, and which do you dismiss as marginal? (See, for example, the Times‘ persistent dismissal of Bernie Sanders’ highly popular critiques.) These decisions shape political possibilities and set political agendas, as much as the Times would like to pretend they don’t (FAIR.org, 5/15/24).
Sulzberger goes on (emphasis added):
I disagree with those who have suggested that the risk Trump poses to the free press is so high that news organizations such as mine should cast aside neutrality and directly oppose his reelection.
Sulzberger is always raging against critics who, he claims, want him to skew and censor his paper’s reporting (FAIR.org, 5/19/23). The Times must instead be steadfastly “neutral,” he claims. But those very political coverage decisions that media outlets make on a daily basis make it impossible for the outlets to be neutral in the way Sulzberger imagines.
Neutrality could mean, as he suggests, independent or free from the influence of the powerful in our society. This is possible—if difficult—for media outlets to achieve. Yet the Times, like all corporate media, doesn’t even try to do this.
Instead, the Times seems to take neutrality as not appearing to take sides, which in practice means finding similar faults among both parties, or not appearing overly critical of one party or the other (FAIR.org, 1/26/24). This strategy didn’t work particularly well when Republicans and Democrats played by the same set of rules, as both parties took the same anti-equality, pro-oligarchy positions on many issues.
But it’s particularly ill-suited to the current moment, when Republicans have discarded any notion that facts, truth or democracy have any meaning. If one team ceases to play by any rules, should the ref continue to try to call roughly similar numbers of violations on each side in order to appear unbiased? It would obviously be absurd and unfair. But that’s Sulzberger’s notion of “neutrality.”
Still.
During Tuesday night’s debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump, critics almost immediately became obsessed with Harris’ face-management choices: “If she wants to win, Harris needs to train her face not to respond,” tweeted GOP pollster and aspiring face-trainer Frank Luntz. “It feeds into a female stereotype and, more importantly, risks offending undecided voters.”
Other “female stereotype” haters were quick to agree. Christian conservative Carmine Sabia opined, “Kamala Harris has been way over coached on doing facial expressions because of the muted mics.” New York Post columnist Miranda Devine posted: “Kamala Harris is doing obviously rehearsed routines instead of answering questions. Then she does rehearsed and exaggerated facial expressions when Trump talks. She comes across as fake and weak.”
Harris fans of course begged to differ. The slow blink, the chin stroke, the quirked brow, the squinting, laughing eyes? This was the stuff of legend. It was a brilliant tactical attack on Trump’s ego. It was a self-meming performance of the face of every woman who has ever been forced to listen to a bunch of unreconstructed insanity spewing from someone who has unidirectionally failed upward.
Key agencies within the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) took significant strides this summer to improve family planning services, remove unnecessary barriers to care, and offer more accessible forms of birth control.
Here are three recent moves by HHS agencies:
1. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Approves First Dissolvable Birth Control Pill
On July 22, 2024, the FDA approved Femlyv, a new type of birth control. Combining two active ingredients that have been used in oral birth control pills since the 1960s, Femlyv is unique because of its delivery mechanism: it is the first orally disintegrating contraceptive.
This new treatment option will help make the birth control pill more accessible, especially for individuals who have trouble swallowing pills.
2. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Releases Guidance on Medicaid Family Planning Requirements and Best Practices
On August 8, 2024, CMS released new guidance on family planning services. The guidance:
- Reiterates the standards that state Medicaid agencies must adhere to, including ensuring enrollees have access to free, comprehensive family planning services from their choice of providers.
- Highlights strategies to enhance access, such as an extended supply of contraceptives given at one time, access to over the counter (OTC) contraceptives like Opill, and payment reforms that improve intrauterine device (IUD) access immediately postpartum.
- Clarifies confidentiality requirements, both specific to Medicaid and generally under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), and provides recommendations to integrate contraceptive quality measures.
3. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Updates Practice Recommendations for Contraception
Read more.
What does SCOTUS’s “Chevron Deference” ruling mean for the future of federal reproductive rights?
Find out about the implications of this ruling overturning a decades-long doctrine that gave deference to administrative actions.
On August 8, 2024, the CDC released new contraception recommendations for providers designed to “remove unnecessary medical barriers to accessing and using contraception and to support the provision of person-centered contraceptive counseling and services in a noncoercive manner.”
Notably, the recommendations include new guidance on person-centered pain management for IUD insertion. The guidance:
- Expands pain management options for the first time since 2016, adding topical Lidocaine cream, spray, and gel to the list of recommended pain management options.
- Outlines the importance of personalized pain counseling and best practices for follow-up care.
The Center for Reproductive Rights applauds the Administration’s efforts to expand access to a range of effective and affordable contraceptive options. The ability to decide when and how to start a family is crucial to each individual’s ability to control their life and future.