#1984 Democratic Presidential nomination

[deadpresidents]

Is there anyone who could have given Reagan a bigger challenge than Walter Mondale did in 1984?

If John Glenn had just hired the right people and put together a better campaign strategy (and maybe had a bit more political charisma), he could have absolutely been able to give Ronald Reagan a run for his money in 1984.

Reagan's whole political identity was that he was the most All-Americany All-American that ever stepped foot on the political scene and that he was going to fight Communism and make America that shining city on a hill. Imagine if he had to run against John Fucking Glenn -- a fighter pilot in World War II and Korea who literally fought Communists in real combat. Oh, and then he was one of the Mercury Seven and just so happened to be the first American astronaut to ever orbit the Earth. John Glenn wasn't just an astronaut -- he was the image that people had in their heads when they thought about what an astronaut was. He's still the definition of astronaut to most Americans. He was also buddies with JFK and RFK and when he retired from NASA -- again, he was a fucking ASTRONAUT, in case I didn't make that clear -- instead of moving to Florida and going golfing, he became a U.S. Senator. Not only should John Glenn have been able to out-All-American Ronald Reagan, but he should have been able to make Reagan seem like Leonid Brezhnev. I mean, just picture Reagan trying to get cute in a debate and making some sort of joke and then Glenn saying, "I'm sorry, I don't think I heard you correctly. My ears are still adjusting from when I was a fighter pilot who shot down three actual MiG-15s and then became a FUCKING ASTRONAUT WHO ORBITED THE EARTH."

But when Glenn did seek the Democratic nomination in 1984, he ran a really crappy campaign and somehow lost to Walter Mondale (who went on to lose 49 out of 50 states to Reagan in the general election). Glenn's campaign is one of the all-time missed opportunities. He was running for President just a few months after The Right Stuff came out and reminded Americans that Glenn was not only an astronaut but THE astronaut! His campaign should have held screenings of that movie in every early primary state and just had Glenn serving apple pie and Coca-Cola outside every theater while wearing his space suit and sitting in a fighter jet and reminding folks that Reagan's "combat" duties during World War II was making training films in Burbank.

I don't know who ran John Glenn's disastrous 1984 Presidential campaign, but it was political malpractice. Just answering this question makes me mad because it's so obvious that he was the PERFECT candidate to run against Ronald Reagan. HE WAS JOHN GLENN. He was such a legendary astronaut that, years later, when NASA wanted to send an old guy to space to study the effects of space flight on aging people, they sent him! He was almost 80 years old and passed the same physicals as young astronauts! How the hell did Glenn lose the Democratic nomination to Mondale? John Glenn lost to a guy named "Fritz"! I can't believe that John Glenn couldn't even beat the guy who got beat in 49 out of 50 states in 1984.

I can't believe how frustrated I am from answering this question and slowly realizing the sheer political malpractice of John Glenn's failed 1984 Presidential campaign.

[mariacallous]

At its convention in Milwaukee, the Republican Party officially nominated Donald Trump as their presidential candidate. Democrats call Trump an existential threat to American democracy. If he returns to the White House, the former president would likely be able to have the criminal cases against himself dropped and significantly expand executive power. Developed by the Heritage Foundation and members of Trump's team, the Project 2025 program envisions mass deportation of illegal immigrants, a further assault on reproductive rights, a rollback of financial aid and health insurance programs for vulnerable populations, and the implementation of measures to place the Department of Justice under presidential control, which would allow Trump and his allies to bring cases against political opponents. The potential assault on human rights in the U.S. can be countered by Congress, local governments, and courts. However, matters are complicated by the Supreme Court — the ultimate arbiter in the American legal system — which may well end up siding with Trump on several contentious issues.

[justforbooks]

Ethel Kennedy

Widow of Bobby Kennedy who brought up 11 children after his 1968 assassination and later devoted herself to social causes

Ethel Kennedy, who has died aged 96, was one of the most active and best-known US political wives of the 20th century. As her husband, Robert F Kennedy, campaigned first for the Senate and then for the presidency, she supported him while also bringing up their children. The 11th and last of them, her daughter Rory, was born after Bobby was assassinated in 1968. From the 1970s onwards, Ethel devoted herself to social causes and was latterly co-chair of the Coalition of Gun Control.

Her life had been touched by tragedy earlier, when her parents died in a plane crash in 1955. Her brother-in-law, President John F Kennedy, was assassinated in 1963. Two of her children died prematurely – David of a drug overdose at the age of 28 in 1984 and Michael in a skiing accident in 1997, when he was 39. Her husband was shot at the Ambassador hotel in Los Angeles following his victory in the California primary for the US presidential race.

Sustained by a strong Catholic faith, she remained, in the view of writer Hays Gorey, “an incorrigibly cheerful widow”, never permitting gloom to descend on the frenetic lifestyle that had always been found at Hickory Hill, the family home in McLean, Virginia. The place was strewn with footballs and tennis rackets, and no one was allowed to sit around and mope.

Ethel used sport to promote her husband’s legacy and raise money for the wide variety of charities that fell under the umbrella of the Robert Kennedy Foundation, which also administered what is now Robert F Kennedy Human Rights. This led to the creation of a memorial tennis tournament at Forest Hills, New York, a pro-celebrity event that for several years in the 1970s was played on the eve of the US Open.

Born in Chicago, Ethel was the sixth of seven children of Ann (nee Brannack), a devout Catholic, and George Skakel, who went from an $8 a week job as a railway clerk to selling coal and founding a company called Great Lakes Coal & Coke. When Ethel was five the family moved east, eventually settling in Connecticut, where she attended Greenwich academy. She became friends with Jean Kennedy, Bobby’s sister, while they were both studying at Manhattanville College of the Sacred Heart in New York City. Meanwhile, Bobby – whom Ethel first met on a skiing trip in Quebec in 1945 – was dating Ethel’s sister, Patricia. When they broke up, Ethel began the partnership that would define her life.

Ethel campaigned for John F Kennedy when he ran for Congress in Massachusetts in 1946. She married his younger brother in 1950, and the following year their first child, Kathleen, was born.

“They had a wonderful relationship, full of banter and repartee,” recalled Donald Dell, a US Davis Cup captain in the 60s, who played tennis with the couple and became a family friend. “Ethel used to needle Bobby all the time and he gave as good as he got. But he was always very protective of her and she was fiercely loyal to him.”

When JFK ran for the Senate in 1952, Bobby managed the campaign. Throughout the rest of the 50s, Ethel supported Bobby as he climbed the political ladder, and when JFK went to the White House in 1960, Bobby was appointed attorney general.

The assassination of JFK in 1963 changed Bobby and Ethel’s lives abruptly. Bobby continued the Kennedy story by successfully running for the Senate in 1964 and then decided to join the 1968 presidential race himself.

Early in the campaign, that March, came the stunning news that President Lyndon B Johnson had decided not to run for a second term. It immediately made Bobby Kennedy a hot favourite to win the Democratic nomination and, in many people’s minds, the presidency. But that dream died after shots were fired in the kitchen of the Los Angeles hotel in June.

Dealing steadfastly with her bereavement, Ethel drew on a wide and diverse array of “pals”, as she used to call them, to boost her charitable work. Sidney Poitier, Sammy Davis Jnr and Charlton Heston were among the celebrities who were always available when she called. A friend remembers her phoning Heston, whom she always referred to as Chuckles, in an attempt to get him to persuade Roy Emerson, the Wimbledon champion, to play in her tournament. “In return I’ll take a part in one of your movies,” she joked. “But I don’t want a maid’s part – I want some love interest!”

There was some speculation about possible “love interest” between Ethel and the singer Andy Williams during the years following her husband’s death. This gossip continued until, citing her Catholic views, she announced a decision never to re-marry.

In a later age, a new generation was swept up in the Kennedy lifestyle. Taylor Swift, the country music star, was 23 when she spent some time with the then 84-year-old widow at the family compound at Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, in 2012. Swift declined to go swimming because a couple of her friends had not brought their swimsuits. “Being that thoughtful, you’ll run the risk of being boring,” said Ethel. “Go on, get in the water!”

“So I jumped in,” said Swift. “I took it as a metaphor for life. You have to jump in; you have to take your chances. Ethel taught me that.”

In May 2014, the Benning Road Bridge, which links Washington DC to Anacostia in Maryland, was renamed the Ethel Kennedy Bridge in recognition of the decades of work she had put in to improve the lives of young people living alongside the Anacostia River, reportedly one of the most polluted in America. To kick start the project in 1992, Ethel had waded in to pluck old tyres and debris from the water.

The family member most in the news recently has been her son Robert Jr, who abandoned presidential runs first as a Democrat, and then as an independent. Ethel is survived by him, four other sons, Joseph, Christopher, Max and Douglas, and four daughters, Kathleen, Courtney, Kerry and Rory.

🔔 Ethel Skakel Kennedy, socialite and campaigner, born 11 April 1928; died 10 October 2024

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at Just for Books…?

[blastnews]

Helping Harris on her way to the White House is a proven duo

'I'm betting on the American people and the voters,' Minyon Moore has said in the past. One of Kamala Harris's top advisers has one last week to get Americans to vote for the first female president in the country's history.

A woman is running for President of the United States after eight years. Kamala Harris was nominated by the Democratic Party after the resignation of Joe Biden, for whom she served as vice-president.

Her campaign, which in recent months has caused many a Republican to wrinkle his forehead, is being run by two women: Minyon Moore and Sheila Nix.

Who are the key advisers working to ensure that Harris defeats Republican nominee Donald Trump on 5th November?

Decades ago, the Democratic Party made it a point to make its leadership more reflective of its voter base, i.e., to bring women and minorities into the club of older white heterosexual men.

Minyon Moore, now a 66-year-old Chicago native, took up the program. She has worked for the Democrats for forty years. She never ran for office herself, gave speeches or basked in the limelight much, but she helped pave the way for other women and members of minorities to get it all.

Early in her career, she was more of an activist than a professional election manager. Her first experience was as an adviser to the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1984 and 1988.

Moore was successful in his service. An underrated civil rights activist with Native American and African American ancestry who was by no means a traditional politician, he finished third in his first primary, and second four years later.

Source: seznamzpravy.cz

Picture: illustrative

For more information, visit seznamzpravy.cz.

[lboogie1906]

Rev. Jesse Louis Jackson Sr. (October 8, 1941) is a civil rights activist, Baptist minister, and politician. He was a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1984 and 1988 and served as a shadow US Senator DC. He is the founder of the organizations that merged to form Rainbow/PUSH.

He was born in Greenville, South Carolina to Helen Burns and Noah Louis Robinson. His mother married Charles Henry Jackson, a post office maintenance worker who adopted him. After high school, he rejected a contract from a minor league professional baseball team so that he could attend the University of Illinois on a football scholarship where he pledged Omega Psi Phi Fraternity. He transferred to NCATSU, played quarterback, and was elected student body president. He became active in local civil rights protests against segregated libraries, theaters, and restaurants. He graduated with a BS in Sociology, then attended the Chicago Theological Seminary on a scholarship. He withdrew three classes short of earning his MA, to focus on the civil rights movement. He was ordained a minister and was awarded an M. Div based on his previous credits earned plus his life experience and work.

People United to Save Humanity began operations on December 25, 1971; he changed the name to People United to Serve Humanity. He planned to orient Operation PUSH toward politics and pressure politicians to work to improve economic opportunities for African Americans and poor people of all races. SCLC officials felt a new organization would help African American businesses more than it would help the poor.

He organized the Rainbow Coalition and resigned from his post as president to run for POTUS, he remained involved as chairman of the board. PUSH’s activities were described as conducting boycotts of businesses to induce them to provide more jobs and business to African Americans and as running programs for housing, social services, and voter registration. In 1996 the Operation PUSH and Rainbow Coalition organizations were merged.

He married Jacqueline Brown. He is the father of six children. #africanhistory365 #africanexcellence #omegapsiphi

[drunk-on-starlight]

"In addition, some of the Project 2025 theses deviate from the traditional Heritage position but coincide with Trump's own stance, once again corroborating the thesis of his team’s involvement in the drafting of the document. For example, the Heritage Foundation has always recommended cutting social programs like Social Security and Medicare, but Project 2025 does not mention such proposals. Trump, on the other hand, has publicly opposed such cuts"

[anthonybialy]

The Runner-Up Worst

Joe Biden can’t brag about anything dull like achievements.  But he can claim to somehow be only the second-worst option.  The only truthful thing he’s ever uttered fittingly involves the person for which he’s again competing for one job.  A declining octogenarian who was an imbecile in his prime couldn’t have chosen a better foe.  The only people who can beat each other face off again in a most formidable challenge to logic as we know it.

The last incumbent who deserves assistance can run on Donald Trump sucking.   Bipartisan assistance isn’t as appealing as it may seem in concept.  A wholly inspirational message of the other guy being demonstrably appalling has created the exact morale you’d figure.  It’s coincidentally the only case his similarly tiresome foe can make?  As far as which one, it doesn’t matter.

You were sick of this in 2016.  Sweet folks in 1984 tired of Trump’s grating shtick without realizing they’d be enduring it for decades and on a far grander scale than bringing tackiness to Atlantic City’s boardwalk.  A plague of phony alpha success will culminate in another wretched term whether it’s somehow winning or letting Biden complete the most undeserved tenure in human history.  Selectors should probably figure it out by one of these presidential years.

The leader of the once-free world is obviously going to make preposterous claims in his Bidenesque way.  Even his surrogates who can formulate sentences without notecards are unable to avoid calling a potential loss the Fourth Reich’s start.  A vague threat of imposing white supremacy by law comes before claiming Trump would divide the country.

Every single Republican option is branded racist before uttering a word.  The maniacal charge is similar to claiming the right to negotiate without subsidies equates to hating the poor.  We would presently be hearing about how the fantasy decent nominee dreams of wearing Klan robes to the inauguration.

AI-generated Democrats on alternate DC Comics Earths are issuing identically nonsensical slanders against a calm governor who’s only noticeable for creating jobs when it’s most unpopular.  The fact they’re right this one time by coincidence makes Trump’s infuriating nomination somehow even more appalling.

Using the challenger’s only successful business strategy would be cunning if it weren’t instinctual.  An utter failure of an executive is wagering on serving as only the second-worst possible nominee.  In the spirit of respecting the other side, that’s same way Trump won, namely by running against the worst possible candidate imaginable.  Today’s devilish decision is Hillary Clinton’s fault in her way.  

Politics appeals to black holes of humanity who just have to pretend to be less worse.  The election that makes Sophie’s Choice seem like it was between Jeni’s Splendid Ice Cream and Cold Stone Creamery is the precise opposite of a free market with an endless array of options.  By contrast, one just must be better than the other one.  How did Biden get 81 million votes? This same way he will this year, namely by being a human being who is not Trump.

Noting Trump is a tantrum in human form is not quite a cunning election strategy.  But you can’t expect much from the person who spent half a century in politics thinking he’d finally make everyone rich by sending out checks.  The choice of all-time dreadful idiots who have lucked into roles mistakenly linked with success shows why the private sector is always better.  Imagine only getting to pick between Trump Ice and Trump Vodka if you’re thirsty.

Two candidates who have nothing but calling the other one awful are grateful for codependency.  Railing against each other is the only time each is accurate.

Nobody is happy, so let’s try more of what sucks.  A breakthrough is inevitable unless patterns are consistent, and life should feature more surprises.  Right now, nothing’s shocking.  This is a rather painful way to learn predictability can be torture.  Dinner at Burger King is out of reach even for royalty.  The only people not harassed are criminals and those sneaking into the country.

A competent candidate’s greatest worry against Joe Biden would be excessive cockiness.  The electoral vote total would be even higher than he can usually count.  Instead, the person who makes us feel the least worst might be at a disadvantage.  The sole thing older than Biden is the case against his beliefs.  The ghastly ideology of an idiot who doesn’t understand reality can be downplayed because his repeating adversary is on record as not getting anything he promised done.

There are no other options.  I mean, there were.  But primary voters were either too medicated or not enough.  As with getting poorer by printing more money, the result is sadly predictable.  If voters don’t like negative campaigns, then they should stop selecting the surliest messengers around.

The increasingly unlikely prospect of a candidate ever running by making the case for improvement is what voters wanted, so congratulations.  Each side demanding compliance by noting the binary choice should share blame.  It’s the one time collectivism is useful.  Never worrying about how options became this distasteful in the first place works out in the same way ignoring which way the debt clock rolls leads to breaking even.

[beesandwasps]

What I love about this reply is that you did not actually prove anything I said wrong, you just danced around my claims and pretended they were less important than your rhetoric, because — exactly as I said — you have a fantasy that these people are on your side instead of being a bunch of right-of-center assholes who deliberately kneecapped the left.

“The Democrats lost big in 1980, 1984, and 1988”: in 1980, Jimmy Carter got only about 2% less of the popular vote than Bill Clinton did in 1992, with a highly successful third-party spoiler candidate from the left taking away 6% of the total. In 1984, Mondale got only about 4% less of the popular vote than Bill Clinton did in 1992, with all the advantages of incumbency against him. In 1988, Dukakis got about 2% more of the popular vote than Bill Clinton did in 1992. (And exit polls showed that the 1992 third party candidate, Ross Perot, overwhelmingly drew votes from the Republicans — by a ratio of 5 Republican voters to ever 1 Democratic one; if you do the math, you will see that had he not run, Clinton would have lost the popular vote decisively.) In all three of those Presidential elections where you claim they “lost big”, Democrats held the House, and from 1986 onward they held both the House and the Senate — but it took only 2 years of Clinton to convince Americans to put in a Republican majority in both houses of Congress.

(Hardly surprising, since Clinton actively campaigned on destroying Welfare, took all his economic advice from the big-L Libertarian Alan Greenspan — which, since he pushed for the repeal of the Glass-Steagall trading regulations, led directly to the 2008 meltdown which would not have been possible under them — and called in favors and twisted arms in Congress to get them to ratify the union-busting Reagan wet dream which was NAFTA. Clinton had already proved even before the election — go look up Gennifer Flowers — that he would use his government position to screw women, but it became clear immediately after the election that he would use it to screw everyone as well.)

Clarence Thomas didn’t pick his colleagues, but he was the proof of concept that Democrats would go along with the confirmation of right-wing judges. Specifically, he proved that right-of-center Democrats like Biden would sabotage opposition, which is how things have gone ever since. The Thomas confirmation was the blueprint for nearly all the later ones, and it was Biden who showed the Republicans how to make it work.

Biden voted to ban abortion regularly throughout his entire Congressional career, if you’ll actually look it up — the video I mentioned was from the early 1990s — and was publicly making statements about how he wanted to ban abortion as late as 2012, after he was already VP, so your claim that it was some kind of youthful indiscretion is just bullshit. He hasn’t publicly reversed his position, he has just learned to keep quiet about it, and trying to claim otherwise is just a lie. (You have to lie to excuse Biden’s career, because almost all of his career was spent championing positions which no sane, decent person could defend. For example, the only war I’ve been able to find, real or proposed, which he didn’t support in Congress was Operation Desert Storm under the first Bush — and his reason for doing so was not on humanitarian grounds or because it might destabilize the region; it was because he felt Europeans should pay for more of it. He has always been a vicious asshole wrapped up in a crinkly smug smile.)

As I said, the Democratic Leadership Council, which included the Clintons (Bill was the chairman when he got the Presidential nomination), Gore, and Biden, was a self-selected group dedicated to pushing the party rightward. They said, themselves, that the Democrats should stop talking about civil rights and the environment and start trying to court the white middle-class. (Until recently, there was a direct quote from their own statement of purpose on the Wikipedia page for the group; apparently somebody in the Biden administration found that embarrassing and it was edited out, despite being a properly-cited direct quotation.) The so-called “third way” was just a racist pro-corporate movement designed to destroy opposition to the Republicans. If the party is moving leftward, it is because the assholes who made up the Third Way are dying and retiring now, after having wrecked the party. (And none too soon — if only the Clintons had shut up and gone into full retirement in 2000, we would have been spared not just Hillary’s repeated losses but almost certainly the Trump Presidency, since he was only able to unite the Republicans by appealing to 20 years of orchestrated anti-Hillary sentiment. Think about how much better the world would be now if that had happened!)

But is the party actually moving left again? The rhetoric may be, but in policy, which is the only thing that makes a difference, they’re worse than ever. The Biden administration talked about the Green New Deal, but they haven’t actually pushed for it — what they have actually done is to lease a record amount of public land for fossil fuel extraction, including at least one project which is projected to be in the 2% worst ever for climate change. Biden has raised the wasteful military budget every year by billions of dollars, not even counting aid to Ukraine or Israel, just as we are no longer fighting any official wars. Obama enacted all of the authoritarian “Total Information Awareness” proposal from the Bush administration, except for the name. Both Obama and Biden increased drone bombings and deportations (at every point in his term, the Trump administration had deported fewer immigrants than either Obama at the equivalent point in his first term or Biden 4 years later). Obama gave us another war based on lies (in Libya) and — as Biden admitted in 2021 — backed Nazis in the attempted coup in Ukraine. Both Obama and Biden have offered to cut Social Security and Medicare to please Republicans, and have been fine with austerity for all government programs except the military and our spy programs.

It is extremely disturbing how many posts I see claiming that Roe v. Wade was overturned on Biden's watch and blaming him and the Democratic Party for it. It's disturbing on a number of levels.

First, it was Trump and Bush-appointed justices who handed down the Dobbs decision. This is a flagrant example of blaming Democrats for things Republicans did, and not coincidentally is one of the the most widely felt differences between the two parties. As a result, it's usually the first example Democrats and their allies point to; this misappropriation suggests a deliberate attempt to undercut that fact.

Secondly, and related to the first point, it obfuscates who the real enemy is, and I am comfortable using word "enemy" to describe the Republican Party because of the policies they advocate and enact. The truth is that states controlled by the Republican Party were where the effects of Dobbs are most severely felt, while states controlled by the Democratic Party are passing laws to protect abortion. It is important to know which party opposes abortion and which party supports it. If the Republicans gain control of the House, Senate, and White House, they will pass a national abortion ban, as they have done at the state level in several places.

Thirdly, blaming Biden for Dobbs demonstrates a very concerning lack of understanding of how the government functions. The judiciary is its own branch of government; judges are appointed by the president and confirmed by the senate. It doesn't matter who is president when a decision is handed down, it matters who was president when the justices were appointed. People sometimes react to this by moving the goalposts and claiming the real issue was a failure by Democrats to "codify" Roe v. Wade. I am not sure what "codify" means in this context, and I'm not sure they are either. One thing it does not mean is that congress can pass a law saying "abortion is legal forever." Republicans could easily repeal such a law and it the federal government cannot necessarily prevent states from restricting abortion at the state level. Roe v. Wade was a ruling stating that the constitution guaranteed a right to privacy, which included the right to have an abortion. This prevented abortion restrictions in a way federal law cannot. That doesn't mean passing federal law protecting abortion is a bad idea, but it isn't a foolproof protection. It's fair to argue that the Democratic Party and the left of center generally were complacent about abortion. The form of this complacency was not taking the courts seriously, while the right spent fifty years openly filling the courts with anti-abortion judges.

The last thing that worries me is that this is popping up phrased almost the exact same way all over the place. I am afraid that it is not merely incompetence, but intentional misinformation, that is then repeated by the incompetent who believe it.

I know some will probably dismiss this post as being from a "vote harder" liberal Biden supporter, but whatever your feelings about Biden, the Democratic Party, or the democratic process in the U.S., you should care about the truth. The truth is that Roe v. Wade was overturned by Republican-appointed judges and abortion bans are being enacted by Republican elected officials, and Joe Biden opposes these things. You can do with that information whatever you wish, but you denying it is dishonest.

[cattarattat]

Anyone who votes for Trump in the 2024 Presidential Election--after his Jan. 6th. preview dictatorship attempt--ought to be fully aware that they will be simultaneously voting for the transition of American Democracy into American Dictatorship.

When they are suddenly living in 'The Handmaid's Tale' or '1984' version of America where their and everyone else's CIVIL RIGHTS slowly or quickly dwindle away.

They don't get to act 'surprised' after the fact. They've been warned.

Neither is delusional extremist MAGA cultism an excuse.

Worth noting, the 100% corrupt monopolied corporate bought-and-paid-for Republican Party of politicians are already planning to plant a Democratic-Party-similar third-party into the 2024 presidential election to drought/split the available Democratic Party citizen votes away from the nominated Democratic Party presidential runner.

A dirty pool equivalent in order to put a Republican Party politician behind the presidency desk in 2024!

This same corrupt Republican Party of politicians will inevitably select Trump as their presidential nomination as he carries the majority of Republican Party citizen votes--their best shot at somewhat legitimately winning an election--even though the actual American Constitution states any insurrection attempts automatically disqualifies the same individual (i.e. Trump) from running for political office ever again in order to protect American democracy.

This is the political reality of the coming 2024 American presidential election, folks!

Not just a pipe dream of a few extremists.

(Think Germany's Adolf Hitler, if you need a real-life visually equivalent national outcome example of what Trump in power might be like.

Furthermore, America is currently the worldwide leader militarily. So not even a combination of exterior countries would be able to successfully aid us in the same way the American military aided European countries against a Nazi occupied Germany.)

Americans NATIONWIDE--whether identifying Republican, Democrat, or Independent--should be SERIOUSLY worried about this.

PLEASE take the initiative NOW to contact your state's congressmen/congresswomen with regularity to DEMAND treasonous Trump be REMOVED from the 2024 presidential ballot IN EVERY STATE based on Constitutional Law. Alert friends & family in other states to do the same.

The future of our American democracy as well as upholding the integrity of our American Constitution as a whole depends upon it!

"'This is what authoritarians do. This is what fascists do,' historian says, warning to take Trump threat seriously…

Former President Donald Trump said while campaigning in Iowa this year that he was kept from using the military to quell violence in primarily Democratic cities and states during his presidency. The 2024 Republican primary frontrunner called New York City and Chicago 'crime dens,' telling his audience, 'The next time, I’m not waiting. One of the things I did was let them run it and we’re going to show how bad a job they do,' he said. 'Well, we did that. We don’t have to wait any longer.'

The former president has not precisely explained how he plans to employ the military during a potential second term, though he and his advisors have suggested they would have a far reach to call its units. While regularly deploying the military within the nation's borders would depart from precedent, Trump has already foreshadowed his aggressive agenda if he wins, including mass deportations and travel bans imposed on certain Muslim-majority countries, the Associated Press reports.

A law crafted early in the nation's history would give the former president — as commander in chief — almost unbridled power to call upon the military, legal and military experts told the AP.

The Insurrection Act authorizes presidents to summon reserve or active-duty military units to respond to unrest in the states, a power that is not reviewable by the courts. One of its few limitations requires the president to request that participants in the unrest disperse.

'The principal constraint on the president’s use of the Insurrection Act is basically political, that presidents don’t want to be the guy who sent tanks rolling down Main Street,' Joseph Nunn, a national security expert with the Brennan Center for Justice, told the AP. 'There’s not much really in the law to stay the president’s hand.'

'Nightmare scenario': Legal scholars alarmed over Trump's 'plot to abuse his power' for revenge Nunn said the act, which passed in 1792, just four years after the Constitution was ratified, is now a fusion of different statutes enacted between then and the 1870s, a moment when local law enforcement had few restrictions.

'It is a law that in many ways was created for a country that doesn’t exist anymore,' he added.

It's also one of the most significant exceptions to the Posse Comitatus Act, which generally bars the use of the military for purposes of law enforcement.

Trump has openly voiced his plans around using the military at the southern border and in cities struggling with violent crime if he wins the presidency. His agenda has also included employing the military against foreign drug cartels, a measure echoed by fellow Republican candidates Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley, the former U.N. ambassador and South Carolina governor. Those threats have prompted questions about presidential power, the meaning of military oaths, and who Trump could appoint to further his plan.

He's already floated the idea of bringing back retired Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, who served briefly as the national security advisor in the Trump administration and twice pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI during its Russian interference probe before being pardoned by Trump. In the wake of the 2020 election, Flynn suggested that Trump could snatch up voting machines and order the military in some states to aid in rerunning the election.

Attempts to invoke the Insurrection Act would likely garner pushback from the Pentagon where the new Joint Chiefs of Staff is Gen. Charles Q. Brown. Brown was among eight members of the group who signed a memo to military personnel in the aftermath of the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack emphasizing the oaths they took and called the day's attempts to stop the certification President Joe Biden's electoral victory 'sedition and insurrection.'

Throughout history, presidents have issued 40 total proclamations invoking the law, some of which were done multiple times for the same discord, Nunn told the AP. Lyndon Johnson invoked it three times — in Baltimore, Chicago and Washington — in response to the civil unrest in cities following the 1968 assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Dwight Eisenhower sent the 101st Airborne to Little Rock, Arkansas, to protect Black students who were integrating Central High School after the state's governor called the National Guard to prevent them from doing so.

George H.W. Bush was the last president to invoke the act in response to the 1992 Los Angeles riots that followed the acquittal of white police officers who beat Black motorist Rodney King in a videotaped incident.

Repeated attempts from Trump to invoke the act could apply undue pressure on military leaders, who could face consequences for their actions even if carried out at the president's behest.

Michael O'Hanlon, the director of research in foreign policy at the Brookings Institution think tank, told the AP that the question is whether the military is being imaginative enough with the scenarios it presents to future officers. Ambiguity is not something military personnel are comfortable with, he said.

'There are a lot of institutional checks and balances in our country that are pretty well-developed legally, and it’ll make it hard for a president to just do something randomly out of the blue,' O’Hanlon, who specializes in U.S. defense strategy and the use of military force, told the outlet. 'But Trump is good at developing a semi-logical train of thought that might lead to a place where there’s enough mayhem, there’s enough violence and legal murkiness' to summon the military.

Rep. Pat Ryan, D-N.Y., the first graduate of the U.S. Military Academy to represent the congressional district that includes West Point, told the AP that he took the oath three times while attending the school and additional times during his time in the military. He added that classes extended much focus on an officer's responsibilities to the Constitution and the people under their command.

'They really hammer into us the seriousness of the oath and who it was to, and who it wasn’t to,' Ryan said, adding that he believed it was universally understood, but the Capitol attack 'was deeply disturbing and a wakeup call for me.'

While those connections were troubling — several veterans and active-duty personnel were charged with crimes in connection to the riot — Ryan said he thinks those who feel similarly to the rioters make up a small percentage of the military.

A military officer is also not forced to follow 'unlawful orders,' William Banks, a Syracuse University law professor and national security law expert, told the AP. Forcing an officer could drum up a difficult situation for leaders whose units are called on for domestic policing since they can be charged for carrying out unlawful actions.

'But there is a big thumb on the scale in favor of the president’s interpretation of whether the order is lawful,' Banks said. 'You’d have a really big row to hoe and you would have a big fuss inside the military if you chose not to follow a presidential order.'

'Members of the military are legally obliged to disobey an unlawful order. At the same time, that is a lot to ask of the military because they are also obliged to obey orders,' he told the AP. 'And the punishment for disobeying an order that turns out to be lawful is your career is over, and you may well be going to jail for a very long time. The stakes for them are extraordinarily high.'

During an MSNBC appearance, NBC News presidential historian and author Michael Beschloss urged Americans to take Trump's voiced plans to invoke the law should he win in 2024 'seriously' recalling how some Americans following Trump's 2016 victory said his campaign comments about violence and presidential powers were 'just bluster' and that the former president was really a 'moderate who loves to make deals.'

'Remember that? That was all totally wrong,' Beschloss warned per HuffPost. 'Take him at his word.'

He went on to note that Trump has said he'd use the military, unlike his predecessors, to 'suppress his domestic opponents' and referenced evidence from the House Jan. 6 Committee's probe that pointed to how frequently Trump 'was aching to use the Insurrection Act to send in the American military into a city or a state to crush the opposition.'

'This is what authoritarians do. This is what fascists do,' Beschloss insisted.

He later expressed surprise that the 2024 GOP primary frontrunner and his allies had been so open with their agenda, arguing the move was likely not in his best interest 'because if he wants to get elected next year, it probably makes more sense to him to pretend to be someone who’s more moderated.'

Beschloss then noted that, even with several of Trump's allies threatening to resign in the aftermath of the 2020 election if he invoked the law or abused his presidential power, the former president continued at rallies to hint at his authority to use the law.

'If you elect Donald Trump, we're going to incur the serious danger that all of us Americans are going to be living under a presidential dictatorship,' Beschloss concluded. 'That's not what our founders intended.'"

[pastdaily]

Mondale Clinches Nomination - Mass Murder At McDonalds - France Goes House-Cleaning - July 19, 1984

San Francisco – the air was filled with Mondale. (Photo – Ron Dirito) https://pastdaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/News-July-19-1984.mp3 – July 19, 1984 – CBS World News Roundup – Gordon Skene Sound Collection – A day mixed with celebration and horror, this July 19th in 1984. From San Francisco it was the once-every-four-year ritual of selecting a Presidential candidate, For the Democrats it…

[nbmsports]

Jesse Jackson to Step Down From Rainbow PUSH Coalition

The Rev. Jesse L. Jackson Sr., the longtime civil rights leader and former Democratic presidential candidate, plans to step down as president of the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, the organization he founded, the group said in a statement on Friday.Mr. Jackson, 81, who has had several health issues in recent years and announced in 2017 that he had Parkinson’s disease, spoke about the decision on the organization’s weekly radio broadcast on Saturday, Fox 32 Chicago reported.“I’m going to make a transition pretty soon,” Mr. Jackson said, according to the news station. “I’ve been doing this stuff for 64 years. I was 18 years old. I’m going to get a new president for Rainbow PUSH Coalition.”He said he would work with the new president and the board through the change. “I want to see us grow and prosper,” he said, adding: “We have the ability to build on what we’ve established over the years.”The Rainbow PUSH Coalition said in a statement that a successor to Mr. Jackson would be introduced at its annual convention, which is being held this weekend in Chicago and includes a celebration of the 35th anniversary of his 1988 presidential campaign.Vice President Kamala Harris is scheduled to address the convention on Sunday.In the statement announcing Mr. Jackson’s decision to step down, the organization said: “His commitment is unwavering, and he will elevate his life’s work by teaching ministers how to fight for social justice and continue the freedom movement.”Mr. Jackson has been a stalwart figure in the civil rights movement since he was a teenager in the 1960s. He worked with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1984 and 1988.He founded the Rainbow PUSH Coalition in 1996 as a result of a merger between two groups he had previously started.He began Operation PUSH, or People United to Save Humanity, in 1971, with the goal of improving the economic conditions of Black communities across the United States. The group later changed the word “Save” to “Serve.”The other group was the Rainbow Coalition, which Mr. Jackson started in 1984 after his first presidential campaign. That group opposed President Reagan’s domestic spending cuts and sought greater investments in American cities, particularly in minority communities.In 2017, Mr. Jackson announced that he had Parkinson’s disease. He said that he and his family had noticed three years earlier that he was having increasing difficulty performing routine tasks.In early 2021, he underwent gallbladder surgery after experiencing “abdominal discomfort,” a spokesman told The Associated Press. Later that year, Mr. Jackson and his wife, Jacqueline, were hospitalized after testing positive for the coronavirus.One of his sons, Representative Jonathan L. Jackson, Democrat of Illinois, told The Chicago Sun-Times that there was “a determination made that in his current health and condition that he has appointed a successor and will formally announce it Sunday.”He said that his father’s Parkinson’s was “progressive” and that he had been using a wheelchair.Mr. Jackson, his son said, “has forever been on the scene of justice and has never stopped fighting for civil rights,” and that would be “his mark upon history.” Source link Read the full article

[deadpresidents]

Is Trump the first person to run for president three different times?

No, there have been numerous people through the history of the United States who have run for President three or more times, but most of them didn't get their party's nomination.

Interestingly, a lot of people forget that the 2024 election is actually Joe Biden's fourth, full-fledged, formal Presidential campaign, in addition to Trump's third campaign. Biden unsuccessfully sought the Democratic nomination in 1988 and 2008 before finally winning the nomination and general election in 2020. Ronald Reagan first ran for President in 1968 when he jumped into the race for the Republican nomination as an alternative to Richard Nixon, but it was kind of a half-hearted, late bid and Reagan later admitted that he wasn't quite ready to run for President at that point, which was only about a year into his tenure as Governor of California. Reagan challenged incumbent President Ford for the Republican nomination in 1976 and very nearly pulled off a rare intraparty defeat of a sitting President from his own party. And of course, Reagan ran and won in 1980 and 1984.

It's not just a relatively recent phenomenon, either; candidates have been running for President three or more times for as long as the Presidency has existed. Thomas Jefferson sought the Presidency in 1796 , 1800, and 1804, and there are many more examples, including Ulysses S. Grant, who was the first former President to make a serious attempt at breaking George Washington's tradition of serving two terms and then retiring. Grant won Presidential elections in 1868 and 1872, and allowed his supporters to actively work for his nomination at the 1880 Republican National Convention after President Hayes retired without seeking a second term. Grant was the frontrunner for the nomination, but once the balloting for the nominee started, the convention became deadlocked between Grant and James G. Blaine -- another person who ran for President multiple times: 1876, 1880, and 1884 (when he was nominated, but lost the general election). On the thirty-sixth ballot, the Republicans finally nominated James Garfield, who had emerged as a compromise candidate.

It is less common for someone to be a major party nominee for President on three or more occasions, which Trump has a shot of being in 2024 if he's not in prison. However, it is still not unprecedented. Obviously, Franklin D. Roosevelt won four Presidential elections (1932, 1936, 1940, and 1944), which had never happened before and will never happen again unless the Constitution is amended. William Jennings Bryan was the Democratic nominee in 1896, 1900, and 1908, and lost all three times. Grover Cleveland won the Democratic nomination in three straight elections: 1884 (which he won), 1888 (which he lost), and 1892 (which he won). Trump is hoping to join Cleveland as the only Presidents to serve two non-consecutive terms. Henry Clay was his party's nominee on three different occasions, and lost all three times. In an odd quirk of the times, because the major political parties were still in the process of forming in the first half of the 19th Century, Clay was technically the Presidential nominee for three different political parties: Democratic-Republican in 1824, National Republican in 1832, and Whig in 1844. Martin Van Buren was elected President as the Democratic nominee in 1836 and renominated in 1840, but lost the general election, After breaking with his party over the spread of slavery to new American territories, former President Van Buren ran as the Free Soil nominee in 1848, but came in third in the general election behind Zachary Taylor and Lewis Cass. And, one more recent example would be Richard Nixon, who was the 1960 Republican Presidential nominee and narrowly lost the general election in John F. Kennedy. Despite the belief that his political career was finished -- particularly after a humiliating loss in the 1962 campaign for Governor of California -- Nixon won the Republican nomination again in 1968 and 1972 and went on to win the general election both times (as well as winning 49 out of 50 states in 1972).

(I'm sorry...I understand that was a long-winded, overly-detailed way of answering your question when I also could have just said, "No.")

[mariacallous]

I don't agree with all of the points or comments here, but I do think there's some interesting stuff to think about

Editor's note: In 2024, just as in 2016 and 2020, Trump won big among working-class white evangelicals but lost majorities of blue-collar blacks, Latinos, and non-evangelical whites. A less than 1% shift in the “blue wall” states would have tipped the Electoral College to Harris, and a less than 1% shift nationally would have given her the popular vote as well. Looking ahead to 2026 and 2028, Democrats remain well-positioned to advance pro-worker/pro-family policies, appeal to diverse working-class constituencies, and win elections at all levels of government.  

The dominant post-election 2024 narrative is that Donald Trump’s victory over Kamala Harris was delivered largely by a multiracial working-class coalition. Backed by certain numbers, this narrative has many Democrats quaking in their 2026 campaign boots. For example, the exit polls show that working-class voters, defined as voters without a college degree, split 56% for Trump to 42% for Harris. The same polls tell us that white working-class voters favored Trump over Harris by 66% to 32%, and that Trump won a larger share of working-class Black and Latino voters than he did in 2020. 

All true, but let’s put those numbers into historical context and then, starting with the white working class, dig into what the exit poll data reveal when you run cross-tabulations by education and sex.1

As I have documented elsewhere, after winning a 56% white working-class majority in 1984 with Ronald Reagan, the GOP lost the majority in the 1990s, then got back to even with George W. Bush in 2000 (50%) and again in 2004 (51%). Mitt Romney won 56% of the white working-class vote in 2012, followed by Trump with 62% in 2016, 59% in 2020, and 66% in 2024. That two-thirds share is impressive, but many other Republican candidates have done as well or better electorally with the white working class. 

For example, in 2022, working-class whites broke 66% for Republican congressional candidates—the same percentage of those voters that Trump won in 2024. And several Republican governors who were not aligned with Trump won more than two-thirds of white working-class votes. For example, in 2022, Florida’s Ron DeSantis, who would go on to challenge Trump for the GOP presidential nomination before becoming his staunch ally, won 70% of the white working-class vote; and Ohio’s Mike DeWine, who received a congratulatory call from President Joe Biden the morning after his reelection win, received 72% of it.

How they voted

The white working-class electorate consists of two distinct voting blocs: white evangelicals without college degrees and all other whites without college degrees. The latter bloc, which encompasses working-class white catholics and other non-evangelical whites without college degrees, is slightly larger than the former bloc.

As I have documented elsewhere, in 2016 and 2020, Trump won a majority of white evangelical working-class voters, but he lost a majority of white non-evangelical working-class voters. He lost them again in 2024.

Take a look at Tables 1 and 2. In 2024, Trump won 86% of white evangelical working-class voters, up from 84% in 2020, and increased his spread with those voters by 5 points (from plus-68 points versus Biden to plus 73-points versus Harris). But he still lost white non-evangelical working-class voters to Harris, 52% to 45%, even as he reduced his losing margin with this bloc by 8 points (from 15 points behind Biden to 7 points behind Harris).

Among white non-evangelical working-class women, Trump did worse in 2024 than he did in 2020, dropping from 40% to 38% of their vote and widening the spread against him by 3 points. 

Now, take a look at Table 3 below. In 2024, Trump lost Black working-class voters by 72 points, 13% to 85% for Harris. That was slightly better than the 77-point spread (11% to 88%) he suffered against Biden in 2020. He won 22% of Black working-class males, up from the 17% he won against Biden. Meanwhile, Black working-class women gave Harris the same 91% of their vote that they gave Biden, and they reduced their Trump vote from 9% in 2020 to 7% in 2024.

But if Democrats are determined to fret and sweat about where they stand with working-class voters, the exit poll data would justify them worrying—not about some pro-Trump or pro-GOP multiracial working-class coalition, but about Latino voters.

Take a look at Table 4 below. Although Trump lost working-class Latinos to Harris by 51% to 47%, that was 31 points fewer than he lost them to Biden in 2020. He won Latino working-class men 55% to 43%, almost exactly the same split in his favor that he had among non-evangelical white working-class males (52% to 44%). And while he again lost working-class Latino women, he lost them by 24 points fewer than he did against Biden in 2020.

Among Latinos, the only subgroup that did not bolt from the Democratic fold was college-educated Latino women, who favored Harris 63% to 33%, a 30-point margin identical to the one they gave Biden in 2020.

But Trump’s victory in 2024, his more than 76 million votes and his swing-states sweep, is owed the most to white evangelicals. White evangelicals voted for Trump more than four to one, constituting more than a third of his 49.9% share of the popular vote. As Table 1 indicates, Trump was a landslide winner among working-class white evangelicals, but his single biggest gain in 2024 over 2020 was among white evangelical women with college degrees. 

Having suffered a double-digit drop in college-educated white evangelical women’s vote between 2016 and 2020, in 2024 he turned a 6-point spread in Trump’s favor against Biden (53% to 47%) into a 50-point spread in his favor against Harris (74% to 24%).

So, in the 2024 election, a majority of white evangelicals without college degrees once again favored Trump, but majorities of blue-collar Black, Latino, and non-evangelical whites did not. 

But why? And why did Trump do better than ever with college-educated white evangelical women? What was behind the Grand Canyon-sized gender gap in voting? More generally, how much can who voted for president and who didn’t, or who voted how for president, or both, be explained by, say, “culture” or “religion” or “ideology,” whether in conjunction with or separate and apart from each other and other variables? 

Pro-worker/pro-family Democrats

At this stage—in fact, at any stage—it’s really hard to say. As one of the pioneering scholars of American national election studies, Donald E. Stokes, and I explained three decades ago in our analysis of the 1992 presidential election results, in deciding on which candidate or party to support, most voters consult their own ideas, ideals, and interests, and then take into account both where they think the respective contenders stand on specific issues (abortion, immigration, transgender rights, etc.) and how they perceive each contender’s possession of traits that are almost universally considered to be laudable (“intelligent,” “trustworthy,” “care about people like me”) or loathsome (“incompetent,” “corrupt,” “callous”). 

Still, I believe that there are at least three things one can credibly say about the 2024 presidential election results at this stage. First, as we have already established, contrary to so much of the commentary, Trump won a vast majority of white evangelical voters without college degrees, but Harris won majorities among blue-collar Blacks, Latinos, and non-evangelical whites; second, Harris did better with the electorate as a whole than has hitherto generally been acknowledged; and, third, it would seem that, other things equal, Democrats who emphasize pro-worker/pro-family policies and messages do better with voters than otherwise comparable Democrats who don’t.

Despite being the first Black woman to run for president as the nominee of a major party; despite running in place of a highly unpopular first-term sitting president whose record she could neither easily run on nor run from; and despite running what many observers judged to be a tactically mistake-ridden campaign yoked to easy-to-attack anti-majority opinion positions on hot-button issues such as transgender women being allowed to compete on women’s teams in sports; Harris won more than 74.3 million votes, constituting 48.3% of the national popular vote to Trump’s 49.9%; and lost Pennsylvania by 1.7%, Wisconsin by 0.8%, and Michigan by 1.4%. 

So, a less than 0.8% shift her way in the national popular vote would have tied Trump’s tally, and a less than 1% shift her way in the three “blue wall” states would have added 44 electoral votes to the 226 she received and made Harris the next president. 

In addition to winning working-class majorities among non-evangelical whites, Blacks, and Latinos, Harris beat Trump among union workers 57% to 41%. As I have explained elsewhere, most Americans now see the decline in private-sector unionization (from about a third of all workers in the mid-20th century to 17% in the mid-1980s to just 6% now) as bad for America; 70% of working-class Americans approve of unions; and an estimated 60 million nonunionized workers would like to have the opportunity to join a union. 

Indeed, Americans now trust organized labor more than large technology companies and big business. Moreover, growing evidence suggests that increasing the availability of union-quality jobs—meaning presumptively secure jobs with decent wages, working conditions, health insurance, and retirement benefits—would increase birth rates and foster stable family formation.

So, as close as Harris came to winning, might she have done even better had she picked Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, a popular (60% plus approval rating), pro-worker/pro-family, center-left Democrat, as her running mate? There are many reasons to think so. For one, Shapiro-allied Democrats retained control of Pennsylvania’s State House, including wins by pro-worker/pro-family, center-left candidates in counties that Trump carried.

Harris herself might have donned that pro-worker/pro-family mantle, as she was vice president in an administration that protected the U.S. steel and shipbuilding industries by tripling tariffs on Chinese imports; banned non-compete clauses that stop workers from taking a job in their same line of work if they quit; expanded eligibility for overtime pay; and pressured pension funds to invest in firms that have fair labor practices and divest from ones that treat workers poorly. 

Harris’ running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, though hapless as a national campaigner, championed pro-worker/pro-family laws. One such law provided workers partial pay for up to 12 weeks a year to care for a newborn baby, nurse a sick relative, or recover from a serious injury or medical malady. Another eliminated hyper-productivity requirements that certain companies inflict on warehouse workers and drivers. 

As the saying goes, the plural of anecdote is not data; but I have, in effect, 67 years’ worth of “time series data” on blue-collar voters in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware. These states are home to my predominantly working-class family members and lifelong friends, including baby boomers who became “Reagan Democrats” or changed their registration to Republican. They affectionately (for the most part) code me, “the professor,” as a “liberal,” though I consider myself to be a center-left/center-right (depending on the issue) pro-life/pro-poor Democrat in the tradition of the late, great Keystone State Governor Bob Casey. 

Most of them voted for Barack Obama in 2008, Mitt Romney in 2012, and Trump in 2016. They split between Biden and Trump in 2020, but went uniformly (save one), if in many cases reluctantly, for Trump in 2024. My informal “focus group” polling suggests that Harris could have won at least a quarter of them had she spotlighted pro-worker/pro-family policies.

As the journalist Batya Ungar-Sargon has rightly noted, working-class voters hold nuanced views on most issues. For example, most working-class people would not consider getting an abortion but strongly oppose banning abortion; most don’t want to expand the welfare state but do want government-guaranteed health insurance; most favor secure borders but oppose immigration bans; and so on. And, as economist Les Leopold has argued, the median working-class voter remains ideologically center-right. Still, over the last decade, working-class views have trended to the left on many social and cultural issues, including abortion, LGBTQ rights, and taxation. 

Democrats are well-used to losing white evangelical voters but are new to losing Latino voters. It’s not clear what, if anything, Democrats could do to court white evangelical voters. Ever more of the party’s faithful profess no religious faith, are affiliated with no religion, and identify as strictly secular. But Democrats can begin to build a bridge back to the Latino voters who they lost in 2024 by promoting expressly pro-worker/pro-family candidates and policies like those favored by organizations such as the Pennsylvania Latino Convention, Esperanza, and most of the more than one million Latinos who live, work, and vote in Pennsylvania.

If confirmed, Trump’s nominee for Labor Secretary, Lori Chavez-DeRemer, a Republican House member from Oregon, would be the most pro-union Republican to hold that position since John T. Dunlop held it under President Gerald Ford. Last July, Chavez-DeRemer, a Latina, co-sponsored a bill that called for the biggest expansion in workers’ rights since the New Deal.

Over the next two to four years, whatever else they do, will Democrats double-down on pro-worker/pro-family policies, and will Republicans launch new pro-worker/pro-family policies of their own? 

Let’s all hope so, because if the two parties compete for Latinos and other voters that way, then all Americans, most especially all working-class Americans, will stand to benefit lots.

[takeonmetakemeon]

US presidential elections after 1956 with Kennedys, Bushes and Clintons:

1960 JFK elected president 1968 RFK assassinated during campaign for Democratic nomination 1980 Ted Kennedy ran for the Democratic nomination; George H. W. Bush ran for the Republican nomination and was elected vice-president 1984 George H. W. Bush reelected vice-president 1988 George H. W. Bush elected president 1992 George H. W. Bush lost to Bill Clinton 1996 Bill Clinton reelected 2000 George W. Bush elected president 2004 George W. Bush reelected 2008 Hillary Clinton ran for the Democratic nomination 2016 Jeb Bush ran for the Republican nomination; Hillary Clinton won the Democratic nomination 2024 RFK Jr runs as an independent

That's 12 with Kennedys, Bushes or Clintons and only 5 without.

(This isn't counting other national offices like Senator, Attorney General, Secretary of State or Representative. There was at least one Kennedy in Washington from 1946-2010, and from 2000-2008 one member of each of the families served as US President or Senator.

Members of the three families, a spouse and a former spouse have been elected as governors of California, Texas, Florida, New York and Arkansas.)

US presidential elections after 1956 without a Kennedy, Bush or Clinton running for president or vice-president:

1964 1972 1976 2012 2020

[heywoodsays]

Overturning Roe Is McConnell’s Legacy as Much as It Is Trump’s

With yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling, overturning Roe v. Wade and 50 years of legal precedent has left a majority of Americans feeling troubled, upset, and angry. Many are rightfully channeling their anger toward SCOTUS, whose slate of decisions this session represents an alarmingly extremist, backward-looking, and divisive slant. Many are channeling their anger at the former President, who appointed three of the five judges in the majority decision in Dobbs v. Jackson.

But let’s not forget the man who perhaps bears the lion’s share of credit for this – to use Justice Alito’s own term – egregious turn in American judicial history.

Mitch McConnell’s ruthless leadership of Senate Republicans since 2007 is the key element of the series of events that allowed Friday’s decision to transpire. His time as senate leader has been characterized by overreaching abuse of the filibuster and a propensity for changing procedural rules to achieve his objectives.

McConnell is the longest serving Senate Republican leader by far, surpassing Bob Dole by almost 4 years. Although he started out as a pro-choice moderate in the 60s, McConnell shifted strategies after a close election call in 1984 and embraced a more far-right agenda. In this respect, he perhaps embodies the dramatic shift in the Republican party over the last several decades.

McConnell stated in a 2010 interview with the National Journal, “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.” In that moment, he admitted, publicly, what we all already knew. Republicans have no interest in working with Democrats to enact policies that help the American people. They make no attempt to find middle ground and work together. They seek only to obstruct, so voters become frustrated with the inaction and inefficacy of Dems, and vote them out.

Two-thirds of Americans did not want Roe v. Wade overturned. Yet the former Senate majority leader, overseeing a GOP that represented a minority of Americans, has been able to dictate policy and assert an extremist agenda on an unwilling nation. Let’s look at how he accomplished this.

Step 1: Obstruct Obama Appointees

Americans saw firsthand, in constant media coverage, McConnell’s often successful attempts to block President Barack Obama’s legislative agenda. The 44th President boldly proclaimed the importance of seeking middle ground on a host of issues, including abortion, in his 2008 nomination speech. This sentiment was widely supported by Americans at the time, but data also showed the issue becoming more and more polarizing. McConnell capitalized on this division, painting the centrist Obama as an extremist socialist.

It worked. The right always viewed Obama as a radical leftist. And then there were Dems who wanted him to be a champion of the left, a task at which he often failed. Repeated attempts to find middle ground were met with rejection. Obama could achieve little in partnership with the other side, especially after Republicans regained control of the Senate in January 2015.

But what Americans didn’t see on their front pages or the nightly news were McConnell’s successful efforts to block Obama’s appointments of federal judges. McConnell held votes on just two Obama appointees during the then-president’s last two years in office.

Trump was able to fill all 54 vacancies, with mostly white men.

Step 2: Merrick Garland

There was one judicial blockade that the public got to see unfold. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia died on February 13, 2016, 270 days before election day. Just 10 days later, McConnell announced that there would be no hearing, and no vote on any appointee Obama may have.

This was shocking and had never been done before, but McConnell held firm, invoking the so-called “Biden Rule.” This rule supposedly suggested that the senate should not confirm a presidential nominee to the Supreme Court in an election year, and should instead wait to “give [voters] a voice.”

To be clear, no such rule exists. McConnell was referencing a comment made by Joe Biden in June 1992, an election year in which there was no Supreme Court vacancy. His comments were made in light of the recent contentious Clarence Thomas hearings in 1991. It’s worth noting that Biden only advocated postponing any hearing until after Election Day and never proposed not considering a nominee at all.

It ended up being a non-issue. There was never an opening, or an appointee, and the Senate never voted on any such rule. Nonetheless, McConnell was able to use the decades-old words of Obama’s own vice president against him. Thomas’ nomination process, the longest for any confirmed justice in modern history, took 99 days from nomination to confirmation. Joe Biden made his senate remarks 132 days before Election Day 1992. Merrick Garland was nominated on March 16, 2016, 238 days before the 2016 election.

Step 3: Neil Gorsuch

McConnell’s gamble paid off. In a result that most could not predict, Donald J. Trump was elected the 45th president of the United States. Merrick Garland would never get his day before the Senate, and Trump would get to appoint a justice for the open Supreme Court position.

Democrats (rightfully) cried foul. McConnell abused his power to subvert the will of the American people who had elected Barack Obama and given him the right to appoint Supreme Court justices for the duration of his term. Garland wasn’t even the biggest threat to McConnell’s agenda. Garland was a moderate. A theoretical President Hillary Clinton could have selected a much more progressive option.

Just 11 days after taking office, President Trump nominated Neil Gorsuch, a staunch pro-life conservative, to the Supreme Court. Gorsuch’s nomination process was not without controversy. Though in the majority, McConnell lacked the 60 votes needed to approve a Supreme Court justice.

So, he changed the rules. Invoking the “nuclear” option, McConnell lowered the threshold for approving an appointee from 60 votes to 50. After 20 hours of public testimony, Gorsuch was approved to SCOTUS with 54 votes. Three Democratic senators joined the majority – Joe Donnelly of Indiana, Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, and Joe Manchin of West Virginia.

Step 4: Brett Kavanaugh

At the end of the SCOTUS session in June 2018, Justice Anthony Kennedy announced his retirement. Kennedy had been the swing vote on the court for years. He penned the majority opinion in the landmark Obergefell v. Hodges case that essentially made gay marriage the law of the land.

This was a gift to Trump and McConnell. Obama needed to pick a moderate like Garland to have any hope of a Republican-controlled Senate approving his nominee, should they even bother to consider him. Trump faced no such hurdle, and could appoint a stalwart conservative to fill the spot of the moderate Kennedy.

Trump nominated DC Appellate Court judge Brett Kavanaugh on July 9, 2018. Despite a history of advocating for pro-life causes, and passing Trump’s litmus test for only appointing pro-life judges, Kavanaugh insisted to senators like Maine’s Susan Collins that he was not going to overturn Roe. Kavanaugh proclaimed at his confirmation hearings, “Roe v. Wade is an important precedent of the Supreme Court. It has been reaffirmed many times.”

Kavanaugh’s abortion stance took backseat to the larger controversy – whether he had committed sexual assault against Christine Blasey Ford back in 1982. In the end, Kavanaugh was confirmed 50-48. Collins voted in favor.

Step 5: Amy Coney Barrett

Liberal icon Ruth Bader Ginsberg passed away on September 18, 2020, just 47 days before the 2020 election. More than a year earlier, McConnell had been very glib in his insistence that he would proceed with confirming any Trump appointee in 2020, even though it broke the rule he had invented in the previous election cycle. And he did.

With their hypocrisy on full display, Trump announced that he would nominate Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court on September 26, 2020. With a mere 39 days before the election, Trump and McConnell though it appropriate to proceed with confirmation hearings. The previous five confirmation hearings took an average of 77.6 days. Recall from earlier that Merrick Garland was denied a hearing with 238 days before the election. There was no possible justification for proceeding with the nomination, but Trump and McConnell did anyway.

Naturally, Democrats bemoaned the Republicans’ haste. Coney Barrett was confirmed within 30 days of the announcement, the quickest since Chief Justice Roberts’ confirmation in 2005. When Democratic senators questioned both the rush attempt and her lack of experience, Coney Barrett responded that she had turned over 1,800 pages of documents addressing her 30-year record. By contrast, her immediate predecessors presented much more – Kagan, 170,000 pages; Gorsuch, 180,000; Kavanaugh, more than a million.

Not a single senate Democrat voted for Coney Barrett’s confirmation. She’s the first Supreme Court justice since 1869 not to receive a single vote from the minority party.

A Lasting Legacy

The conservative supermajority on the current Supreme Court has been assembled through flagrant disregard for tradition, bipartisanship, and even the Constitution. Each of the three was put in place under dubious circumstances that required rejection of precedent and abandonment of reason. For as much credit as Trump gets for flooding the court with his judges, none of it would have been possible without McConnell’s shameless distortion of procedural norms. Like a petulant child who’s about to lose a game, he changed the rules to secure his desired outcome.

This is not to say that a Democrat in the same position wouldn’t do the same thing. But we haven’t seen that, so speculation is irrelevant. All we know is that McConnell did.

The January 6 hearings are showing us how close we came to having our democracy overthrown by a seditious megalomaniac. Millions of Americans believe an otherwise preposterous fabrication, that our election was stolen. It is a lie concocted by the old guard, terrified of losing the semblance of power they once held. Their backwards, racist, anti-feminist ideology seeks to return us to a time when people of color and women knew their place. Their big lie embodies their bigotry, seeking to subvert the will of a diverse electorate. In their minds, the will of people of color, women, LGBTQ+ people, immigrants, and non-Christians is illegitimate. Theirs is the only true morality and the only valid vision.

Overturning Roe v. Wade is not the endgame. It is one landmark on a path of destruction of the principles of liberty and freedom, and restoration of the systems that oppress “the other.” As Justice Thomas openly admits, Friday’s decision paves the way for turning back the clock on contraception and gay marriage. (Interestingly, Thomas has been silent on Loving v. Virginia, which also uses the right to privacy to secure a right to interracial marriage.)

But even those are small pickings compared to the big picture. Filling the courts with judges to do their bidding was only the first phase of McConnell’s devious agenda. We are seeing the second phase unfold before our eyes, as Republic legislators across the country work to upend election laws, further marginalizing voters unlikely to agree with their policies. When the majority don’t agree with you, your best course of action is to silence the majority – to take away their voice.

The proposed changes to voting laws will undoubtedly favor Republic outcomes. This not only seeks to ensure the continued influence of a party that represents an increasingly minority viewpoint, but also floats the possibility of a re-emergent Trump or any of his successors that will move America closer to fascism.

These restrictive voter laws will inevitably find themselves before the courts. The next Presidential election might end up before the courts as well. McConnell has done everything to ensure he has the edge when that happens.

Image: Senator Mitch McConnell at Conservative Political Action Conference in 2011. Photo by Gage Skidmore. Used under CC BY-SA 2.0 / Cropped from original.

[quotesfrommyreading]

In New York, the relationship between African Americans and Jews has added another layer of complexity to the problem. In the civil-rights era, prominent Jews fought alongside Martin Luther King Jr. in his struggle for equality. But after King’s assassination in 1968, Black Power advocates, frustrated with the results of peaceful marches, took the stage. Leaders such as Stokely Carmichael, Jesse Jackson, and Louis Farrakhan blamed Jews for oppressing blacks and aligning with Israel, condemned by these critics as an apartheid state.

Jackson’s brief run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1984 was derailed, in part, after he used the words Hymie, in reference to Jews during a private conversation, and Hymietown, in reference to New York City. After initially denying the comments, Jackson publicly apologized before a Jewish audience, saying that “however innocent and unintended, it was wrong.”

But things are changing. Public expressions of anti-Semitism have become more and more taboo in American society over the past three decades, as Jewish organizations have been more aggressive in calling out offenders—from professional athletes to government officials—as well as more proactive in seeking alliances with minority communities.

It took Sharpton 28 years, but in May he publicly acknowledged his “cheap” rhetoric at the time of the Crown Heights riots, telling a Reform Jewish convention that he could have “done more to heal rather than harm.” Sharpton, whose reputation has been rehabilitated in recent years and who now hosts a talk show on MSNBC, strongly condemned the recent anti-Semitic attacks on Jews, “particularly because they were perpetrated by members of the African American community.” Other African American religious and political leaders in New York have issued similar statements.

African Americans and religious Jews have lived in close proximity in Brooklyn neighborhoods for decades. In the late ’60s, at the height of the white flight from the area, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the revered leader of the Lubavitch Hasidim, called on his followers to stay put in Crown Heights, and they did. Media coverage of attacks by African American youngsters against Hasidic men, women, and children has been intense in recent months, but Jewish residents say that such problems have occurred sporadically over the years, away from the spotlight. And they are upset at the previous lack of outrage from the Jewish community and civic leaders

Some view the problem more through the lens of economics and gentrification than religion. With rising housing costs in the neighborhood, some African Americans have had to move, replaced by white people—and that anger and resentment has focused on the white neighbors who live in closest proximity. Today, many in New York’s Jewish community are calling for more of the kind of under-the-radar but effective black-Jewish community coalition efforts in schools and between youths and civic leaders that emerged after the 1991 riots.

  —  Is Anti-Semitism the New Normal in America?