Saturday Report 6/29/24 - Should Joe Biden Be Replaced?

The Best of the Rest of the News

Image by Tibor Janosi Mozes from Pixabay

— “Freakout at the highest levels”: Monday of this past week the Daily Mail, a British rightwing rag with a history of both breaking stories and pushing less-than-credible articles to get clickbait style headlines, ran a piece saying that Democratic insiders (specifically, the Clintons, Obamas, and Nancy Pelosi) were looking at a replacement for President Biden in advance of the debate if he did poorly. And, sure enough, he did. Now the frenzy is on full-bore, although most Democrats have rallied to Biden’s support. There are massive upsides and downsides to replacing Biden at this late moment. The upside is that a fresh face would give the media what so far they’ve only gotten from Trump and they continually crave: a new drama. It would swamp media coverage of Trump, raising the profile of whoever is chosen in ways that could give the Democratic campaign a boost. And it does need a boost: Biden is consistently polling below most Senate and House candidates, which is a bad sign up and down the Dem tickets nationwide. The downside is if the candidate picked turns out to have skeletons in his or her closet, doesn’t do well themselves, or a major Democratic demographic is offended. I wouldn’t want to be a decision-maker in the DNC right now.

— 50 Lies Trump Told On The Debate Stage: Team Biden Hits Back. Trump treated America to a firehose of lies Thursday night, lying about his crimes, his record on women’s rights, abortion, how he trash-talked our soldiers, January 6th, foreign policy, terrorism, Iran, the economy, and even lying about not having had sex with a porn star. He even lied about his own lies and about America’s position in the world! True to form, though, that wasn’t the big story the mainstream media focused on: they consider lies normal for Trump (and they are, but should never be normalized) which is apparently why CNN’s moderators chose not to even bother to correct Trump’s lies in real time. That is morally criminal journalistic malfeasance. Mediaite has a summary of Trump’s lies published by the Biden/Harris campaign if you’d like to review them.

-- The Supreme Court just blew up the “Chevron deference.” America will never be the same. Federal regulatory agencies make rules based on facts determined by the experts they hire, ranging from pollution controls to workplace safety to banks ripping us off pure food and drugs (among others). Until yesterday, courts deferred to the judgment of these experts and their agencies; the Supreme Court, however, just blew that up yesterday, taking that power onto themselves and opening the door to endless expensive and time-consuming lawsuits by corporations that don’t like regulations imposed on them. It’s going to create massive chaos, make it infinitely harder to enforce environmental and safety laws, and is a huge gift to polluters and corporate America. I wrote about this at length last October when the Court picked up the case, if you want to get a better understanding of the stakes and the mechanisms involved. The article is titled How the Billionaire Corruption of SCOTUS Could End Social Security — and America.

— Republicans on the Supreme Court hand a victory to January 6th rioters and Trump. Another ruling from the Court on Friday makes it much harder for prosecutors to charge both January 6th seditionists and Donald Trump with “obstructing an official act,” which constitutes two out of the four charges Trump is facing in Tanya Chutkan’s DC courtroom. Between this decision and their unending delay of Trump’s immunity claim, the Republicans on the Court have handed him a major victory, guaranteeing that he won’t face justice before the election and will be able to corruptly dismiss the charges against him if he’s elected this fall.

— The Christian Nationalist movement to force religion on our children got a big boost this past week when the governor of Oklahoma mandated that the Christian Bible be taught in that state’s public schools. This goes way beyond merely posting the Ten Commandments and is the next logical step in these people’s goal of turning America into something like 17th century Salem, Massachusetts or Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale. The mandate is sure to be appealed to the Supreme Court, but the six Republicans on this Court have already legalized coercive Christian public prayer being inflicted on high school football players. This isn’t looking good for the Founder’s original vision of America as a secular nation.

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