#We have a presidential candidate who supports a two-state solution

[traumatizedbymay2016]

If I could Thanos snap a single time, I think I might use it to teach all the "But she supports Israel! :(" crowd what the Overton Window is and how we shift it left.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

By The Editorial Board

The editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values. It is separate from the newsroom.

Sept. 30, 2024

It is hard to imagine a candidate more unworthy to serve as president of the United States than Donald Trump. He has proved himself morally unfit for an office that asks its occupant to put the good of the nation above self-interest. He has proved himself temperamentally unfit for a role that requires the very qualities — wisdom, honesty, empathy, courage, restraint, humility, discipline — that he most lacks.

Those disqualifying characteristics are compounded by everything else that limits his ability to fulfill the duties of the president: his many criminal charges, his advancing age, his fundamental lack of interest in policy and his increasingly bizarre cast of associates.

This unequivocal, dispiriting truth — Donald Trump is not fit to be president — should be enough for any voter who cares about the health of our country and the stability of our democracy to deny him re-election.

For this reason, regardless of any political disagreements voters might have with her, Kamala Harris is the only patriotic choice for president.

Most presidential elections are, at their core, about two different visions of America that emerge from competing policies and principles. This one is about something more foundational. It is about whether we invite into the highest office in the land a man who has revealed, unmistakably, that he will degrade the values, defy the norms and dismantle the institutions that have made our country strong.

As a dedicated public servant who has demonstrated care, competence and an unwavering commitment to the Constitution, Ms. Harris stands alone in this race. She may not be the perfect candidate for every voter, especially those who are frustrated and angry about our government’s failures to fix what’s broken — from our immigration system to public schools to housing costs to gun violence. Yet we urge Americans to contrast Ms. Harris’s record with her opponent’s.

Ms. Harris is more than a necessary alternative. There is also an optimistic case for elevating her, one that is rooted in her policies and borne out by her experience as vice president, a senator and a state attorney general.

Over the past 10 weeks, Ms. Harris has offered a shared future for all citizens, beyond hate and division. She has begun to describe a set of thoughtful plans to help American families.

While character is enormously important — in this election, pre-eminently so — policies matter. Many Americans remain deeply concerned about their prospects and their children’s in an unstable and unforgiving world. For them, Ms. Harris is clearly the better choice. She has committed to using the power of her office to help Americans better afford the things they need, to make it easier to own a home, to support small businesses and to help workers. Mr. Trump’s economic priorities are more tax cuts, which would benefit mostly the wealthy, and more tariffs, which will make prices even more unmanageable for the poor and middle class.

Beyond the economy, Ms. Harris promises to continue working to expand access to health care and reduce its cost. She has a long record of fighting to protect women’s health and reproductive freedom. Mr. Trump spent years trying to dismantle the Affordable Care Act and boasts of picking the Supreme Court justices who ended the constitutional right to an abortion.

Globally, Ms. Harris would work to maintain and strengthen the alliances with like-minded nations that have long advanced American interests abroad and maintained the nation’s security. Mr. Trump — who has long praised autocrats like Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orban and Kim Jong-un — has threatened to blow those democratic alliances apart. Ms. Harris recognizes the need for global solutions to the global problem of climate change and would continue President Biden’s major investments in the industries and technologies necessary to achieve that goal. Mr. Trump rejects the accepted science, and his contempt for low-carbon energy solutions is matched only by his trollish fealty to fossil fuels.

As for immigration, a huge and largely unsolved issue, the former president continues to demonize and dehumanize immigrants, while Ms. Harris at least offers hope for a compromise, long denied by Congress, to secure the borders and return the nation to a sane immigration system.

Many voters have said they want more details about the vice president’s plans, as well as more unscripted encounters in which she explains her vision and policies. They are right to ask. Given the stakes of this election, Ms. Harris may think that she is running a campaign designed to minimize the risks of an unforced error — answering journalists’ questions and offering greater policy detail could court controversy, after all — under the belief that being the only viable alternative to Mr. Trump may be enough to bring her to victory. That strategy may ultimately prove winning, but it’s a disservice to the American people and to her own record. And leaving the public with a sense that she is being shielded from tough questions, as Mr. Biden has been, could backfire by undermining her core argument that a capable new generation stands ready to take the reins of power.

Ms. Harris is not wrong, however, on the clear dangers of returning Mr. Trump to office. He has promised to be a different kind of president this time, one who is unrestrained by checks on power built into the American political system. His pledge to be “a dictator” on “Day 1” might have indeed been a joke — but his undisguised fondness for dictatorships and the strongmen who run them is anything but.

Most notably, he systematically undermined public confidence in the result of the 2020 election and then attempted to overturn it — an effort that culminated in an insurrection at the Capitol to obstruct the peaceful transfer of power and resulted in him and some of his most prominent supporters being charged with crimes. He has not committed to honoring the result of this election and continues to insist, as he did at the debate with Ms. Harris on Sept. 10, that he won in 2020. He has apparently made a willingness to support his lies a litmus test for those in his orbit, starting with JD Vance, who would be his vice president.

His disdain for the rule of law goes beyond his efforts to obtain power; it is also central to how he plans to use it. Mr. Trump and his supporters have described a 2025 agenda that would give him the power to carry out the most extreme of his promises and threats. He vows, for instance, to turn the federal bureaucracy and even the Justice Department into weapons of his will to hurt his political enemies. In at least 10 instances during his presidency, he did exactly that, pressuring federal agencies and prosecutors to punish people he felt had wronged him, with little or no legal basis for prosecution.

Some of the people Mr. Trump appointed in his last term saved America from his most dangerous impulses. They refused to break laws on his behalf and spoke up when he put his own interests above his country’s. As a result, the former president intends, if re-elected, to surround himself with people who are unwilling to defy his demands. Today’s version of Mr. Trump — the twice-impeached version that faces a barrage of criminal charges — may prove to be the restrained version.

Unless American voters stand up to him, Mr. Trump will have the power to do profound and lasting harm to our democracy.

That is not simply an opinion of Mr. Trump’s character by his critics; it is a judgment of his presidency from those who know it best — the very people he appointed to serve in the most important positions of his White House. It is telling that among those who fear a second Trump presidency are people who worked for him and saw him at close range.

Mike Pence, Mr. Trump’s vice president, has repudiated him. No other vice president in modern history has done this. “I believe that anyone who puts themselves over the Constitution should never be president of the United States,” Mr. Pence has said. “And anyone who asks someone else to put them over the Constitution should never be president of the United States again.”

Mr. Trump’s attorney general has raised similar concerns about his fundamental unfitness. And his chief of staff. And his defense secretary. And his national security advisers. And his education secretary. And on and on — a record of denunciation without precedent in the nation’s long history.

That’s not to say Mr. Trump did not add to the public conversation. In particular, he broke decades of Washington consensus and led both parties to wrestle with the downsides of globalization, unrestrained trade and China’s rise. His criminal-justice reform efforts were well placed, his focus on Covid vaccine development paid off, and his decision to use an emergency public health measure to turn away migrants at the border was the right call at the start of the pandemic. Yet even when the former president’s overall aim may have had merit, his operational incompetence, his mercurial temperament and his outright recklessness often led to bad outcomes. Mr. Trump’s tariffs cost Americans billions of dollars. His attacks on China have ratcheted up military tensions with America’s strongest rival and a nuclear superpower. His handling of the Covid crisis contributed to historic declines in confidence in public health, and to the loss of many lives. His overreach on immigration policies, such as his executive order on family separation, was widely denounced as inhumane and often ineffective.

And those were his wins. His tax plan added $2 trillion to the national debt; his promised extension of them would add $5.8 trillion over the next decade. His withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal destabilized the Middle East. His support for antidemocratic strongmen like Mr. Putin emboldened human rights abusers all over the world. He instigated the longest government shutdown ever. His sympathetic comments toward the Proud Boys expanded the influence of domestic right-wing extremist groups.

In the years since he left office, Mr. Trump was convicted on felony charges of falsifying business records, was found liable in civil court for sexual abuse and faces two, possibly three, other criminal cases. He has continued to stoke chaos and encourage violence and lawlessness whenever it suits his political aims, most recently promoting vicious lies against Haitian immigrants. He recognizes that ordinary people — voters, jurors, journalists, election officials, law enforcement officers and many others who are willing to do their duty as citizens and public servants — have the power to hold him to account, so he has spent the past three and a half years trying to undermine them and sow distrust in anyone or any institution that might stand in his way.

Most dangerous for American democracy, Mr. Trump has transformed the Republican Party — an institution that once prided itself on principle and honored its obligations to the law and the Constitution — into little more than an instrument of his quest to regain power. The Republicans who support Ms. Harris recognize that this election is about something more fundamental than narrow partisan interest. It is about principles that go beyond party.

In 2020 this board made the strongest case it could against the re-election of Mr. Trump. Four years later, many Americans have put his excesses out of their minds. We urge them and those who may look back at that period with nostalgia or feel that their lives are not much better now than they were three years ago to recognize that his first term was a warning and that a second Trump term would be much more damaging and divisive than the first.

Kamala Harris is the only choice.

https://www.nytimes.com/.../kamala-harris-2024.html...

[vote-democrat-president-congress]

NYTimes, The Editorial Board: 9/30/2024

The Only Patriotic Choice for President

"It is hard to imagine a candidate more unworthy to serve as president of the United States than Donald Trump. He has proved himself morally unfit for an office that asks its occupant to put the good of the nation above self-interest. He has proved himself temperamentally unfit for a role that requires the very qualities — wisdom, honesty, empathy, courage, restraint, humility, discipline — that he most lacks.

Those disqualifying characteristics are compounded by everything else that limits his ability to fulfill the duties of the president: his many criminal charges, his advancing age, his fundamental lack of interest in policy and his increasingly bizarre cast of associates.

This unequivocal, dispiriting truth — Donald Trump is not fit to be president — should be enough for any voter who cares about the health of our country and the stability of our democracy to deny him re-election.

For this reason, regardless of any political disagreements voters might have with her, Kamala Harris is the only patriotic choice for president.

Most presidential elections are, at their core, about two different visions of America that emerge from competing policies and principles. This one is about something more foundational. It is about whether we invite into the highest office in the land a man who has revealed, unmistakably, that he will degrade the values, defy the norms and dismantle the institutions that have made our country strong.

As a dedicated public servant who has demonstrated care, competence and an unwavering commitment to the Constitution, Ms. Harris stands alone in this race. She may not be the perfect candidate for every voter, especially those who are frustrated and angry about our government’s failures to fix what’s broken — from our immigration system to public schools to housing costs to gun violence. Yet we urge Americans to contrast Ms. Harris’s record with her opponent’s.

Ms. Harris is more than a necessary alternative. There is also an optimistic case for elevating her, one that is rooted in her policies and borne out by her experience as vice president, a senator and a state attorney general.

Over the past 10 weeks, Ms. Harris has offered a shared future for all citizens, beyond hate and division. She has begun to describe a set of thoughtful plans to help American families.

While character is enormously important — in this election, pre-eminently so — policies matter. Many Americans remain deeply concerned about their prospects and their children’s in an unstable and unforgiving world. For them, Ms. Harris is clearly the better choice. She has committed to using the power of her office to help Americans better afford the things they need, to make it easier to own a home, to support small businesses and to help workers. Mr. Trump’s economic priorities are more tax cuts, which would benefit mostly the wealthy, and more tariffs, which will make prices even more unmanageable for the poor and middle class.

Beyond the economy, Ms. Harris promises to continue working to expand access to health care and reduce its cost. She has a long record of fighting to protect women’s health and reproductive freedom. Mr. Trump spent years trying to dismantle the Affordable Care Act and boasts of picking the Supreme Court justices who ended the constitutional right to an abortion.

Globally, Ms. Harris would work to maintain and strengthen the alliances with like-minded nations that have long advanced American interests abroad and maintained the nation’s security. Mr. Trump — who has long praised autocrats like Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orban and Kim Jong-un — has threatened to blow those democratic alliances apart. Ms. Harris recognizes the need for global solutions to the global problem of climate change and would continue President Biden’s major investments in the industries and technologies necessary to achieve that goal. Mr. Trump rejects the accepted science, and his contempt for low-carbon energy solutions is matched only by his trollish fealty to fossil fuels.

As for immigration, a huge and largely unsolved issue, the former president continues to demonize and dehumanize immigrants, while Ms. Harris at least offers hope for a compromise, long denied by Congress, to secure the borders and return the nation to a sane immigration system.

Many voters have said they want more details about the vice president’s plans, as well as more unscripted encounters in which she explains her vision and policies. They are right to ask. Given the stakes of this election, Ms. Harris may think that she is running a campaign designed to minimize the risks of an unforced error — answering journalists’ questions and offering greater policy detail could court controversy, after all — under the belief that being the only viable alternative to Mr. Trump may be enough to bring her to victory. That strategy may ultimately prove winning, but it’s a disservice to the American people and to her own record. And leaving the public with a sense that she is being shielded from tough questions, as Mr. Biden has been, could backfire by undermining her core argument that a capable new generation stands ready to take the reins of power.

Ms. Harris is not wrong, however, on the clear dangers of returning Mr. Trump to office. He has promised to be a different kind of president this time, one who is unrestrained by checks on power built into the American political system. His pledge to be “a dictator” on “Day 1” might have indeed been a joke — but his undisguised fondness for dictatorships and the strongmen who run them is anything but.

Most notably, he systematically undermined public confidence in the result of the 2020 election and then attempted to overturn it — an effort that culminated in an insurrection at the Capitol to obstruct the peaceful transfer of power and resulted in him and some of his most prominent supporters being charged with crimes. He has not committed to honoring the result of this election and continues to insist, as he did at the debate with Ms. Harris on Sept. 10, that he won in 2020. He has apparently made a willingness to support his lies a litmus test for those in his orbit, starting with JD Vance, who would be his vice president.

His disdain for the rule of law goes beyond his efforts to obtain power; it is also central to how he plans to use it. Mr. Trump and his supporters have described a 2025 agenda that would give him the power to carry out the most extreme of his promises and threats. He vows, for instance, to turn the federal bureaucracy and even the Justice Department into weapons of his will to hurt his political enemies. In at least 10 instances during his presidency, he did exactly that, pressuring federal agencies and prosecutors to punish people he felt had wronged him, with little or no legal basis for prosecution.

Some of the people Mr. Trump appointed in his last term saved America from his most dangerous impulses. They refused to break laws on his behalf and spoke up when he put his own interests above his country’s. As a result, the former president intends, if re-elected, to surround himself with people who are unwilling to defy his demands. Today’s version of Mr. Trump — the twice-impeached version that faces a barrage of criminal charges — may prove to be the restrained version.

Unless American voters stand up to him, Mr. Trump will have the power to do profound and lasting harm to our democracy.

That is not simply an opinion of Mr. Trump’s character by his critics; it is a judgment of his presidency from those who know it best — the very people he appointed to serve in the most important positions of his White House. It is telling that among those who fear a second Trump presidency are people who worked for him and saw him at close range.

Mike Pence, Mr. Trump’s vice president, has repudiated him. No other vice president in modern history has done this. “I believe that anyone who puts themselves over the Constitution should never be president of the United States,” Mr. Pence has said. “And anyone who asks someone else to put them over the Constitution should never be president of the United States again.”

Mr. Trump’s attorney general has raised similar concerns about his fundamental unfitness. And his chief of staff. And his defense secretary. And his national security advisers. And his education secretary. And on and on — a record of denunciation without precedent in the nation’s long history.

That’s not to say Mr. Trump did not add to the public conversation. In particular, he broke decades of Washington consensus and led both parties to wrestle with the downsides of globalization, unrestrained trade and China’s rise. His criminal-justice reform efforts were well placed, his focus on Covid vaccine development paid off, and his decision to use an emergency public health measure to turn away migrants at the border was the right call at the start of the pandemic. Yet even when the former president’s overall aim may have had merit, his operational incompetence, his mercurial temperament and his outright recklessness often led to bad outcomes. Mr. Trump’s tariffs cost Americans billions of dollars. His attacks on China have ratcheted up military tensions with America’s strongest rival and a nuclear superpower. His handling of the Covid crisis contributed to historic declines in confidence in public health, and to the loss of many lives. His overreach on immigration policies, such as his executive order on family separation, was widely denounced as inhumane and often ineffective.

And those were his wins. His tax plan added $2 trillion to the national debt; his promised extension of them would add $5.8 trillion over the next decade. His withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal destabilized the Middle East. His support for antidemocratic strongmen like Mr. Putin emboldened human rights abusers all over the world. He instigated the longest government shutdown ever. His sympathetic comments toward the Proud Boys expanded the influence of domestic right-wing extremist groups.

In the years since he left office, Mr. Trump was convicted on felony charges of falsifying business records, was found liable in civil court for sexual abuse and faces two, possibly three, other criminal cases. He has continued to stoke chaos and encourage violence and lawlessness whenever it suits his political aims, most recently promoting vicious lies against Haitian immigrants. He recognizes that ordinary people — voters, jurors, journalists, election officials, law enforcement officers and many others who are willing to do their duty as citizens and public servants — have the power to hold him to account, so he has spent the past three and a half years trying to undermine them and sow distrust in anyone or any institution that might stand in his way.

Most dangerous for American democracy, Mr. Trump has transformed the Republican Party — an institution that once prided itself on principle and honored its obligations to the law and the Constitution — into little more than an instrument of his quest to regain power. The Republicans who support Ms. Harris recognize that this election is about something more fundamental than narrow partisan interest. It is about principles that go beyond party.

In 2020 this board made the strongest case it could against the re-election of Mr. Trump. Four years later, many Americans have put his excesses out of their minds. We urge them and those who may look back at that period with nostalgia or feel that their lives are not much better now than they were three years ago to recognize that his first term was a warning and that a second Trump term would be much more damaging and divisive than the first.

Kamala Harris is the only choice."

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/30/opinion/editorials/kamala-harris-2024.html

[ivankahasbeentreatedsounfairly]

By The New York Times Editorial Board

The editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values. It is separate from the newsroom.

Sept. 30, 2024

It is hard to imagine a candidate more unworthy to serve as president of the United States than Donald Trump. He has proved himself morally unfit for an office that asks its occupant to put the good of the nation above self-interest. He has proved himself temperamentally unfit for a role that requires the very qualities — wisdom, honesty, empathy, courage, restraint, humility, discipline — that he most lacks.

Those disqualifying characteristics are compounded by everything else that limits his ability to fulfill the duties of the president: his many criminal charges, his advancing age, his fundamental lack of interest in policy and his increasingly bizarre cast of associates.

This unequivocal, dispiriting truth — Donald Trump is not fit to be president — should be enough for any voter who cares about the health of our country and the stability of our democracy to deny him re-election.

For this reason, regardless of any political disagreements voters might have with her, Kamala Harris is the only patriotic choice for president.

Most presidential elections are, at their core, about two different visions of America that emerge from competing policies and principles. This one is about something more foundational. It is about whether we invite into the highest office in the land a man who has revealed, unmistakably, that he will degrade the values, defy the norms and dismantle the institutions that have made our country strong.

As a dedicated public servant who has demonstrated care, competence and an unwavering commitment to the Constitution, Ms. Harris stands alone in this race. She may not be the perfect candidate for every voter, especially those who are frustrated and angry about our government’s failures to fix what’s broken — from our immigration system to public schools to housing costs to gun violence. Yet we urge Americans to contrast Ms. Harris’s record with her opponent’s.

Ms. Harris is more than a necessary alternative. There is also an optimistic case for elevating her, one that is rooted in her policies and borne out by her experience as vice president, a senator and a state attorney general.

Over the past 10 weeks, Ms. Harris has offered a shared future for all citizens, beyond hate and division. She has begun to describe a set of thoughtful plans to help American families.

While character is enormously important — in this election, pre-eminently so — policies matter. Many Americans remain deeply concerned about their prospects and their children’s in an unstable and unforgiving world. For them, Ms. Harris is clearly the better choice. She has committed to using the power of her office to help Americans better afford the things they need, to make it easier to own a home, to support small businesses and to help workers. Mr. Trump’s economic priorities are more tax cuts, which would benefit mostly the wealthy, and more tariffs, which will make prices even more unmanageable for the poor and middle class.

Beyond the economy, Ms. Harris promises to continue working to expand access to health care and reduce its cost. She has a long record of fighting to protect women’s health and reproductive freedom. Mr. Trump spent years trying to dismantle the Affordable Care Act and boasts of picking the Supreme Court justices who ended the constitutional right to an abortion.

Globally, Ms. Harris would work to maintain and strengthen the alliances with like-minded nations that have long advanced American interests abroad and maintained the nation’s security. Mr. Trump — who has long praised autocrats like Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orban and Kim Jong-un — has threatened to blow those democratic alliances apart. Ms. Harris recognizes the need for global solutions to the global problem of climate change and would continue President Biden’s major investments in the industries and technologies necessary to achieve that goal. Mr. Trump rejects the accepted science, and his contempt for low-carbon energy solutions is matched only by his trollish fealty to fossil fuels.

As for immigration, a huge and largely unsolved issue, the former president continues to demonize and dehumanize immigrants, while Ms. Harris at least offers hope for a compromise, long denied by Congress, to secure the borders and return the nation to a sane immigration system.

Many voters have said they want more details about the vice president’s plans, as well as more unscripted encounters in which she explains her vision and policies. They are right to ask. Given the stakes of this election, Ms. Harris may think that she is running a campaign designed to minimize the risks of an unforced error — answering journalists’ questions and offering greater policy detail could court controversy, after all — under the belief that being the only viable alternative to Mr. Trump may be enough to bring her to victory. That strategy may ultimately prove winning, but it’s a disservice to the American people and to her own record. And leaving the public with a sense that she is being shielded from tough questions, as Mr. Biden has been, could backfire by undermining her core argument that a capable new generation stands ready to take the reins of power.

Ms. Harris is not wrong, however, on the clear dangers of returning Mr. Trump to office. He has promised to be a different kind of president this time, one who is unrestrained by checks on power built into the American political system. His pledge to be “a dictator” on “Day 1” might have indeed been a joke — but his undisguised fondness for dictatorships and the strongmen who run them is anything but.

Most notably, he systematically undermined public confidence in the result of the 2020 election and then attempted to overturn it — an effort that culminated in an insurrection at the Capitol to obstruct the peaceful transfer of power and resulted in him and some of his most prominent supporters being charged with crimes. He has not committed to honoring the result of this election and continues to insist, as he did at the debate with Ms. Harris on Sept. 10, that he won in 2020. He has apparently made a willingness to support his lies a litmus test for those in his orbit, starting with JD Vance, who would be his vice president.

His disdain for the rule of law goes beyond his efforts to obtain power; it is also central to how he plans to use it. Mr. Trump and his supporters have described a 2025 agenda that would give him the power to carry out the most extreme of his promises and threats. He vows, for instance, to turn the federal bureaucracy and even the Justice Department into weapons of his will to hurt his political enemies. In at least 10 instances during his presidency, he did exactly that, pressuring federal agencies and prosecutors to punish people he felt had wronged him, with little or no legal basis for prosecution.

Some of the people Mr. Trump appointed in his last term saved America from his most dangerous impulses. They refused to break laws on his behalf and spoke up when he put his own interests above his country’s. As a result, the former president intends, if re-elected, to surround himself with people who are unwilling to defy his demands. Today’s version of Mr. Trump — the twice-impeachedversion that faces a barrage of criminal charges — may prove to be the restrained version.

Unless American voters stand up to him, Mr. Trump will have the power to do profound and lasting harm to our democracy.

That is not simply an opinion of Mr. Trump’s character by his critics; it is a judgment of his presidency from those who know it best — the very people he appointed to serve in the most important positions of his White House. It is telling that among those who fear a second Trump presidency are people who worked for him and saw him at close range.

Mike Pence, Mr. Trump’s vice president, has repudiated him. No other vice president in modern history has done this. “I believe that anyone who puts themselves over the Constitution should never be president of the United States,” Mr. Pence has said. “And anyone who asks someone else to put them over the Constitution should never be president of the United States again.”

Mr. Trump’s attorney general has raised similar concerns about his fundamental unfitness. And his chief of staff. And his defense secretary. And his national security advisers. And his education secretary. And on and on — a record of denunciation without precedent in the nation’s long history.

That’s not to say Mr. Trump did not add to the public conversation. In particular, he broke decades of Washington consensus and led both parties to wrestle with the downsides of globalization, unrestrained trade and China’s rise. His criminal-justice reform efforts were well placed, his focus on Covid vaccine development paid off, and his decision to use an emergency public health measure to turn away migrants at the border was the right call at the start of the pandemic. Yet even when the former president’s overall aim may have had merit, his operational incompetence, his mercurial temperament and his outright recklessness often led to bad outcomes. Mr. Trump’s tariffs cost Americans billions of dollars. His attacks on China have ratcheted up military tensions with America’s strongest rival and a nuclear superpower. His handling of the Covid crisis contributed to historic declines in confidence in public health, and to the loss of many lives. His overreach on immigration policies, such as his executive order on family separation, was widely denounced as inhumane and often ineffective.

And those were his wins. His tax plan added $2 trillion to the national debt; his promised extension of them would add $5.8 trillion over the next decade. His withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal destabilized the Middle East. His support for antidemocratic strongmen like Mr. Putin emboldened human rights abusers all over the world. He instigated the longest government shutdown ever. His sympathetic comments toward the Proud Boys expanded the influence of domestic right-wing extremist groups.

In the years since he left office, Mr. Trump was convicted on felony charges of falsifying business records, was found liable in civil court for sexual abuse and faces two, possibly three, other criminal cases. He has continued to stoke chaos and encourage violence and lawlessness whenever it suits his political aims, most recently promoting vicious lies against Haitian immigrants. He recognizes that ordinary people — voters, jurors, journalists, election officials, law enforcement officers and many others who are willing to do their duty as citizens and public servants — have the power to hold him to account, so he has spent the past three and a half years trying to undermine them and sow distrust in anyone or any institution that might stand in his way.

Most dangerous for American democracy, Mr. Trump has transformed the Republican Party — an institution that once prided itself on principle and honored its obligations to the law and the Constitution — into little more than an instrument of his quest to regain power. The Republicans who support Ms. Harris recognize that this election is about something more fundamental than narrow partisan interest. It is about principles that go beyond party.

In 2020 this board made the strongest case it could against the re-election of Mr. Trump. Four years later, many Americans have put his excesses out of their minds. We urge them and those who may look back at that period with nostalgia or feel that their lives are not much better now than they were three years ago to recognize that his first term was a warning and that a second Trump term would be much more damaging and divisive than the first.

Kamala Harris is the only choice.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/30/opinion/editorials/kamala-harris-2024.html

[head-post]

Japan to work with US for Taiwan peace, imposes sanctions on four Israeli settlers

Japan will continue to work with the United States for peace in the Taiwan Strait regardless of who wins the November presidential election, according to Asian media.

The comments came after Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump stated that Taiwan should pay the US for its defence. That raised concerns about US support for the island nation if the former president is re-elected, according to Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshimasa Hayashi.

Peace and stability [in the Taiwan Strait] are hugely important not just for our own security but for the entire international community.

Given that the US and Japan believe in the importance of a peaceful solution to the problems between the two sides of the strait, “we will continue these diplomatic efforts. It is important to reinforce the common ground we have as allies,” Hayashi added.

I understand that there are preparations being made for a Japan-China foreign minister meeting. It’s important to communicate clearly with one another on various levels.

The US has no formal defence agreement with Taiwan, but is legally obliged to provide the island with the means to defend itself. The current arrangement appears to be a source of frustration for Trump, who has stated that “Taiwan doesn’t give us anything.”

His running mate J.D. Vance also hinted last week at what a potential Republican president’s Indo-Pacific policy might look like. Vance called China the “biggest threat” the United States faced. Earlier this year, Trump sparked concerns that a new trade war could break out between China and the US after he threatened to impose a 60% tariff on Chinese imports.

Read more HERE

[mariacallous]

Using the U.S. military in Mexico to deal with the fentanyl crisis in the United States is the hot new policy solution for lots of U.S. politicians. The top three Republican presidential candidates have endorsed using the U.S. military to fight Mexican cartels. Similarly, Republican Rep. Dan Crenshaw, the newly appointed chair of a congressional task force for countering Mexican cartels, announced recently that “Colombia is the model” for what Washington needs to do in Mexico.

Crenshaw is the author of a bill in Congress authorizing the use of military force against Mexican cartels or any actor “carrying out other related activities that cause regional destabilization in the Western Hemisphere.” He argues that the “American partnership” with Colombia helped make the country safer today than it was 25 years ago and that this provides a model for dealing with Mexican cartels:

“We need to somehow figure out diplomatically how to make this Mexico’s idea. That they’re asking for our military support, such as close air support, such as an AC-130 gunship overhead while they’re prosecuting a target and surrounded by sicarios. … If I was in that situation as a Navy SEAL, we would just call in close air support, all those guys would be gone, and we’d move along our merry way.”

This is bad analysis on a number of levels: bad history, bad economics, and bad political science. Since Crenshaw has volunteered himself as an expert on Colombia—he went to high school there—and its lessons for fighting the war on drugs with the U.S. military, we can start with his proposals.

In an Instagram post, Crenshaw stated, “Anyone who has watched Narcos knows that the Colombia of 30 years ago looked a lot like Mexico does today.”

The problem with that theory—beyond its reliance on a Netflix series to formulate U.S. foreign policy—is twofold. To begin with, if you consider annual homicide rates, today’s Mexico looks an awful lot like today’s Colombia. In 2021, Mexico had 28 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants, whereas Colombia’s rate was 27. This convergence—Mexico’s homicide rate surpassed Colombia’s for the first time in 2017—is certainly bad news for the former country, whose homicide rate was 8 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2007, one year after then-President Felipe Calderón deployed Mexican Army troops to fight the drug cartels. Nonetheless, despite seeing its homicide rate more than triple in less than two decades, Mexico is still nowhere near Colombia’s levels of violence during the Narcos era of the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the country reached the alarming rate of 85 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants. Comparing Mexico’s violence in 2023 to that of Colombia in 1993 borders on the preposterous.

Crenshaw’s argument also overlooks that Colombia today is slipping back to the 1990s, when the country, under siege from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), a narco-guerrilla group, was on the verge of becoming a failed state. Although the homicide rate remains comparatively low, large swaths of the national territory are still under the control of the FARC and other illegal armed groups, which are expanding their spheres of influence. In May, the U.S. State Department issued a travel advisory to warn that three of the country’s 32 departments (the equivalent of U.S. states)—Cauca in the country’s southwest, Arauca and Norte de Santander in eastern Colombia—were high-risk areas due to widespread organized criminal activities including homicide, assault, armed robbery, extortion, and kidnapping.

According to the International Committee of the Red Cross, seven different armed conflicts are now taking place in Colombia (an increase from six in 2022). While the Colombian state battles the FARC, the National Liberation Army (ELN), and the Clan del Golfo, the latter armed group is waging its own war against the ELN. The FARC, meanwhile, is fighting two of its own splinter groups, Segunda Marquetalia and Comandos de la Frontera, the latter of which operates along extensive parts of the Venezuelan border. Finally, the FARC and the ELN, both communist narco-guerrilla groups, are facing off against each other for control over Arauca, a department that also controls key access routes into Venezuela.

Although each of the unofficial armed actors takes part in illegal mining, extortion, and other criminal activities, their main source of financing—and the main source of the conflicts among them—is the cocaine trade. The major difference between the situation now and that of the 1990s is that no single group enjoys a monopoly over the drug trade while waging an all-out war against the state, as the FARC then did. Instead, a multitude of armed actors fight both the state and one another over strategic coca-growing areas and export routes.

It is true that, overall, the conflict now has a lower intensity than in the 1990s, but Crenshaw’s thesis that Colombia is a safer, more peaceful place today than it was when he lived there at the turn of the century is valid only up to a point. For the population in entire departments like Arauca, Norte de Santander, and Cauca, the security situation is no less lethal now than two or three decades ago. It is unquestionable that the change in strategy in Bogotá and the assistance from Washington helped the Colombian military in its struggle against insurgent groups. But this misses the point.  From a U.S. perspective, the reason for getting involved in the first place was to stanch the flow of cocaine into the United States. As seen above, that objective was not attained. From Colombia’s perspective, the tactical victory provided a some Colombians refuge from the conflict, but the country is still afflicted by the endemic violence that plagues countries stuck in the middle of the drug war.

The last four years have also seen a resurgence of the type of violence that struck the country when the Medellín Cartel and the FARC were at the apex of their powers. In 2019, the ELN carried out a deadly terrorist attack against the National Police Academy in Bogotá, killing 21 with the detonation of a car bomb. In March, the ELN attacked a military base in Norte de Santander with explosives, leaving nine soldiers dead. The FARC, meanwhile, recently reestablished its 53rd Front in Sumapaz, a rural locality of Bogotá, thus reviving dark memories of 1999, when the terrorist group threatened the Colombian capital itself.

Given the persistence of armed groups financed with cocaine proceeds and the continuation of drug-fueled violence in Colombia, it is telling that Crenshaw, while heralding Colombia as a model for U.S. policy in Mexico, does not mention cocaine once. That was the reason the United States got involved in Colombia in the first place. In the 1980s and into the 1990s, there was an enormous increase in the flow of powder and then crack cocaine into U.S. cities. U.S. politicians concluded that the solution was to use U.S. military aid to help solve problems inside Colombia, drying up the supply of the drug at the source. As a result, under Plan Colombia and its successor counter-narcotics programs, nearly $12 billion was dedicated to helping the Colombian military eradicate coca leaf and undermine actors participating in the cocaine trade between 2000 and 2021.

Unfortunately, as an Office of National Drug Control Policy study showed in October 2008, cocaine prices in the United States consistently declined in the 1980s, and then remained relatively flat throughout the 1990s. The idea of attacking the drug supply at the source relies on the idea that interdiction will reduce availability and drive prices up, limiting consumption and negative consequences at home. If price is not even increasing, that is proof positive that a supply-side model is not working.

The large expenditure of American taxpayer money in Colombia did nothing to halt the spread of coca crops, illicit drug production, or the continuous export of cocaine to the United States. On the contrary, coca cultivation in Colombia increased between 2000 and 2020, from roughly 136,000 planted hectares to a record 245,000. In this sense, Plan Colombia’s counter-narcotics element can be seen as an utter failure, even if its military component did help the Colombian military launch an effective offensive against the FARC in the 2000s.

That is why Crenshaw’s soliloquy on how Colombia should be a model for our policy in Mexico is so strange. The U.S. government failed to solve the cocaine problem, but Crenshaw now heralds the “Colombia model” as an unqualified success. The reason we went into Colombia in the first place, cocaine, just fell out of the story altogether. The “do something!” impulse in U.S. foreign policy is strong, but surely a proposed solution to a problem should be able to pass scrutiny better than this.

Colombia’s drug war has proved to be a Sisyphean struggle, with each victory against the dominant drug cartel leaving a power vacuum that is quickly filled by new drug cartels. The Medellín Cartel’s fall led to the rise of the Cali Cartel, whose own demise allowed the FARC and a series of paramilitary groups to take over the cocaine business.

Between 2002 and 2010, then-President Álvaro Uribe’s government successfully fought the FARC, but this was undercut by the fact that it was impossible to do away fully with the FARC’s main source of financing (cocaine). Hence, the FARC, despite heavy blows to its leadership structure, didn’t surrender fully and was able to outlast Uribe’s government. Uribe’s successor, Juan Manuel Santos, negotiated with the FARC and amnestied its leadership, yet only a part of the FARC demobilized in 2016. The rest, known locally as FARC dissidents, remained up in arms and, as mentioned, remain fully immersed in the drug trade.

As shown above, this hardly made a dent on the supply of cocaine to the United States. If anything, the fentanyl problem is even more daunting. Cocaine is much more expensive and difficult to produce than fentanyl. During Plan Colombia, U.S. and Colombian pilots sprayed more than a million acres of Colombian territory with glyphosate in an attempt to eradicate coca crops. Fentanyl is produced on a much smaller scale with comparatively tiny amounts of precursor chemicals that are easy to obtain. Fentanyl could be produced in meaningful quantities almost anywhere. Even if Mexico stopped producing any fentanyl, there is little reason to believe U.S. supply would evaporate.

And the profit margins are astounding: According to an indictment of the Sinaloa Cartel in the Southern District of New York in April, $800 of fentanyl precursor chemicals can produce up to $640,000 worth of retail value in U.S. cities. Even if greater interdiction cuts into those margins, they are large enough to absorb a lot of pressure.

As an unintended result of the drug war, Mexico has already become a heavily militarized country. As one of us has previously noted, the tendency has increased dramatically under President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who has put the army in charge of infrastructure projects, customs duties at ports and airports, gasoline and fertilizer distribution, school textbook deliveries, and the provision of hospital materials, among other mundane or strictly logistical tasks that, even in many Latin American countries, fall well outside the military sphere.

In 2019, López Obrador created the National Guard, a new branch of the armed forces with over 100,000 regulars (compared to less than 150,000 in the army proper). In recent years, influential members of the armed forces have waded into politics, thus breaking the decadeslong tradition of an apolitical military. If anything, the United States should refrain from abetting any further militarization of Mexico. Plans to further involve the U.S. military against Mexico’s drug cartels, however, would likely add fuel to the fire.

A final word might bear mentioning, since Crenshaw referenced the Netflix series Narcos. The series continues after the denouement of the Medellín and Cali cartels in Colombia. There is a second series, set in Mexico. The first episode sets the scene quite clearly, with DEA agent Walt Breslin growling over a spliced cut of grim drug war clips:

“I’m going to tell you a story, but I’ll be honest: It doesn’t have a happy ending. In fact, it doesn’t have an ending at all. … It’s about … a war. … A drug war. The kind that’s easy to forget is happening, until you realize that in the last 30 years in Mexico, it’s killed half a million people—and counting. … I can’t tell you how the drug war ends. Man, I can’t even tell you if it ends.”

Crenshaw, and the leading Republican candidates for president, want you to believe that they have a plan for how the drug war in Mexico ends.

Ask yourself: Should you believe them?

[fostertheory]

Alternate parties have to build from the ground up. In particular, you need allies in the legislative branch to get your agenda passed. Simply putting a third party candidate into the executive branch won't get anything accomplished (leaving aside the facts of the matter, as pointed out by previous posters, that third party candidates do not gain enough traction to win the electoral college).

What voting third party, more left, does is the equivalent of choice #3 above, allowing the voter to feel they have kept their own hands clean. It's human nature for harm resulting from one's action to feel like the greater sin than harm resulting from one's inaction (this fuels vaccination hesitancy). So it feels like the more moral choice to sit out the election or vote symbolically. But actually, this choice results in greater harm.

I 100% agree with the messages of the previous poster. I have just a few quibbles on a few points.

beatrice-otter asserts that we have put limits on financial support for Israel that has never been put on any US foreign aid before. I'm not certain if they're referring to US foreign aid worldwide or aid to Israel specifically. Either way, it's not the case that there have never been strings attached to US foreign aid to Israel. The Leahy Law prohibits providing military assistance to a military unit for which there is evidence of gross human rights violations. It is fairly unusual for the State Department (the US' foreign office), who does the vetting, to actually deny a request for support. Critics have argued that the Leahy Law is too weak. But it has been applies. In addition, presidents Eisenhower, Reagan, and H.W. Bush all threatened to withhold aid from Israel until or unless Israel complied with various requirements. Some of the current appropriations are for defensive weapons (vs offensive), which is also a limitation on aid.

Regarding the election of 1860, the Republican party was arguably already one of the two major parties. The Whigs had imploded prior to the 1856 election, and the Republicans had fielded a candidate in that presidential election. In the 1860 contest, the vote was split four ways. It was an incredibly unusual election.

beatrice-otter said, "Biden has also mentioned the possibility of a two state solution where Palestine becomes its own completely separate country. That's huge, because up until this point the US position has always been that Israel is the only possible legitimate nation in that territory." That's actually not true. The two-state solution has been official US policy for decades, interrupted only by Trump. Clinton, in fact, brought the Palestinian Liberation Organization and Israel to the negotiating table to work out a process for deciding the particulars of a two-state solution, for which Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin won the Nobel Peace Prize. Rabin then paid for that great political risk with his life, assassinated by a right-wing Jewish Israeli. Rabin's widow felt the heated rhetoric coming from one Benjamin Netanyahu created the environment that led to her husband's assassination (in other words, Netanyahu committed stochastic terrorism). The Israeli public has turned more and more away from a two-state solution since then.

But the larger point is absolutely true. A vote is a chess move to get you as close as possible to your goal.

I’ll be honest, when one party’s aiding and abetting the genocide and the other’s outright gonna kill all my friends, I don’t really care if the fascists “win”. They’ve won already.

You know who would be delighted to hear that? Trump and Putin. The US far right and the Russian government have poured lots of time, effort, and money over the last decade+ into convincing US leftists and liberals that things are hopeless, there's no point in even trying to make things better, and the Democrats and Republicans are functionally interchangeable. They do this because one of the easiest ways for them to win is if the left gives up and stops trying. Every person on the left they can convince to give up in despair brings them closer to complete control. Defeatism on the left actively supports victory on the right.

I think your statement is wrong on a number of levels, both factual and emotional. It comes from not understanding what the actual options are for the US government and the President specifically, either at home or abroad. And it will allow actual fascism to flourish and make the world far worse than it is now.

On an emotional level, the way to address this is to stop doomscrolling. Stop focusing on the worst things happening in the world. Don't ignore them! but don't let them consume you. Start looking for the things that are going well. Find places in your community that you can get involved in making things better. Even if it's only on a small scale like volunteering in a soup kitchen or homeless shelter, it will help you realize that you aren't helpless, that there are things that can be done to make the world a better place. Stay informed about things on a local, national, and international level, but limit how much time and attention you give to things that depress you that you can't affect. Instead of sitting there thinking about all the ways the world sucks and how awful things are, look for things you can do that are productive, and then do them. You'll feel better and you will have made your corner of the world a little better. And you will be a lot less likely to unintentionally fall into the despair, nihilism, and passivity that the fascists want you to be consumed by.

Always remember that the worlds problems are not resting solely on your shoulders, or solely on America's shoulders, and neither is the hope of fixing them. Everyone has things that we can do to make the world a better place, but there are also things that are beyond our control. We can control what we do; we cannot control what others do. We can and should try to make the world a better place, but focusing on the things we can't change has no positive benefits. Focusing on things we can't change accomplishes two things: it makes you feel bad, and it stops you from doing the things you actually can do to make things better. Neither of these things is good for you or anyone else. Look for things you can do and do them. Keep informed on the things you can't change, but don't focus on them.

On a factual level, let's look at "aiding and abetting genocide," shall we?

First, it's important to remember that the US President is not the God-Emperor Of The World. The US government has limits to what it can and can't do in other countries, and both legally and practically. If the US wants to intervene in a problem in another country, there are a variety of things we can do that boil down to basically four categories. It's a lot more complex than this in practice, of course, but in general here are the categories of things we can do:

Send in the troops. Invade, either by ourselves or as part of a NATO or UN operation. (Or maybe just send in a CIA wetworks team to assassinate the head of state.) I hope you can see the moral problems with this option, and also, we've done this a shitton of times over the course of the 20th Century and pretty much every time we've done it, we've made an already awful situation worse. On a moral level, it's pretty bad, and on a practical level, it's worse. Sure, we could stop the immediate problem, but what then? Consider Afghanistan and Iraq. We got rid of Saddam Hussein and the Taliban, and everything went to shit, we spent twenty years occupying Afghanistan with pretty much nothing to show for it. (The Taliban is back in control of Afghanistan.) Things were worse when we left than when we arrived. So this option is pretty much off the table (or should be).

Diplomatic pressure. Now, the thing is, they're a sovereign nation, they don't have to listen to us if they don't want to. We have a lot of things we can leverage--including financial aid--but the only way to force them to do what we want is to invade and conquer, and that only works temporarily. Since we can't force, we have to persuade. This requires us to maintain our existing relationship with the country in question, and possibly strengthen it, because that relationship is what we're leveraging to try and influence them to do what we want them to do. If we do not maintain our relationship, they have no reason to listen to us.

Cut ties and go home. Break off any existing relationship and support, loudly proclaim that they're awful and doing awful things and we wash our hands of the whole situation. This keeps our own hands lily-white and pure, but it also means we have zero leverage to work on any kind of a diplomatic solution. They have no reason to listen to us or care about what we think. We can pat ourselves on the back for doing the right thing, but we destroy our own ability to influence anything. Not just now, but also in the future. Let's say the current crisis ends, and then ten years later there's another crisis. If we want to have any effect then, we would have to start from square one to start building a relationship. Cutting ties would be great for making Americans feel better about ourselves, and there are times when it's the only option, but it should be a last resort. If there is any hope of being able to influence things for the better this will destroy it at least temporarily.

Cut ties and impose sanctions. Break off any existing relationship and support, loudly proclaim that they're awful and doing awful things, but also use the might of the American economy to isolate and punish them. We've done this a lot over the 20th Century, too, and it has never actually resulted in the country in question buckling down and toeing the line we want them to. What happens is the sanctioned country has an economic shock (how long it lasts and how bad it gets depends on a lot of factors) and then pulls themselves back together economically, except this time they're more self-sufficient and less reliant on international trade and financial networks. They tell themselves that America is evil and the cause of all their problems, and so not only do they not listen to us, they actively hate us. And they have fewer international relationships, so fewer reasons to care about what the international community thinks about them. So they're most likely to double down on whatever it is they're doing that we don't like. This one is completely counterproductive and utterly stupid. It's great for making Americans feel better about ourselves, but if we actually care about being able to use our influence for good (or, at least, to mitigate evil) this option shoots us in the foot. It encourages other nations to do the very thing we're trying to stop them from doing.

So, with those four options in mind, both option one (invasion/assassination) and option four (sanctions) are off the table for being immoral and counterproductive. That leaves "breaking our relationship and going home" and "using diplomatic pressure" as our only two viable options.

Biden has chosen option two, diplomatic pressure. Yes, he and our government have continued financial support for Israel ... but with strings attached. They have put limits on it that have never been put on any US foreign aid before. They have taken legal steps to lay the groundwork to target Israeli settlers (i.e. Israeli citizens who confiscate Palestinian homes and businesses). We've been hearing reports for months that Benjamin Netanyahu (Israeli Prime Minister, and a far-right-wing demagogue) hates Biden's guts, because Biden is pressuring him to stop the genocide and work towards peace. Biden is maintaining the relationship, and he's using that relationship to try and influence things to curb the violence and pave the way for a just peace settlement of some sort. Biden has also mentioned the possibility of a two state solution where Palestine becomes its own completely separate country. That's huge, because up until this point the US position has always been that Israel is the only possible legitimate nation in that territory. If Biden stopped US support for Israel, it wouldn't force Israel to stop what it's doing ... but it would let them ignore us. It would remove any leverage or influence we might have.

Biden's hands aren't clean. But the only way for them to be clean would be to also give up any chance of influencing the situation or working to protect Palestinians now or in the future. Only time will tell if it works, but I personally would rather have someone who tried and failed than someone who didn't even try. You might disagree about whether this is the right course of action, and there's a lot of room for honest disagreement about the issue (there's a lot of nuances that I'm glossing over or ignoring). But please do acknowledge that Biden isn't supporting Israel because he supports genocide; he's doing it so that he can continue to maintain diplomatic pressure on Israel to stop the violence.

Which brings us back to "aiding and abetting genocide." Trump is not like Biden. Trump is good friends with Netanyahu and backs Israel to the hilt. Trump thinks that all Arabs are terrorists (and all Muslims are terrorists) and genuinely believes the world would be a better place with them dead. Biden is continuing to support Israel, but using that support as influence to get them to stop or slow down. Trump would be using that influence to encourage them.

And those are the two choices. Someone who is trying to curb the genocide, and someone who actively supports it.

I really hope you can see the significant and substantial difference between those two positions.

But let's say that you're right and Biden's policy towards Israel and Palestine is every bit as bad as Trump's would be. If there was nothing to choose between them on foreign policy grounds, there would still be a shitton to choose between them on domestic policy grounds. You admit that the right wants to kill your friends, and yet you don't seem to think that stopping them from killing your friends might be a good thing to do.

"We can't save Palestinians, so we might as well let Republicans destroy the rights, lives, and futures of LGBTQ+ people, women, people of color, people with disabilities, poor people, non-Christians, and anyone else they don't like." "We can't save Palestinians, so why bother to try to save the people we might actually be able to save." "We can't save Palestinians right now, so there's no point in trying to build up a longer-term political bloc that might drag US politics to the left over the long run."

Do you get why there's a problem with that line of thought?

[locustheologicus]

The choice in the election is not between two competing blueprints for border management. Harris is proposing practical reforms to fortify the border and overhaul the immigration process in line with the nation’s labor needs and humanitarian aspirations. Trump proposes an exclusionist project that would not only bring turmoil and hardship to communities across the country but would also do long-term damage to the U.S. economy and undermine the United States’ global reputation as a place of opportunity and freedom.

This is a good and thorough article on the actual policy choice that we can expect from candidates Trump and Harris on immigration. The author’s ultimate assessment is this.

Trump’s purge does not offer functional solutions to a broken system that would make the border more secure. Instead, his nativist agenda would spread divisive conflict and mainly serve to fortify his presidential powers and enhance his image as the leader of an incipient authoritarian project. Harris offers something entirely different, a pragmatic program based on respect for immigrants, in which she rejects “the false choice” between securing the border and creating an immigration system that is “safe, orderly, and humane.”

If you can read the article (you may need a subscription) I suggest you do so because it is very thorough. If not here is what the bottom line is regarding the policy we can expect.

Harris said she would impose new penalties to ban unlawful crossers from any access to asylum, speed up deportations, and bar deportees from returning for five years. Repeat offenders would face severe criminal charges, Harris also said she would work to open legal pathways for undocumented immigrants, especially the farm workers who make up nearly half of the nation’s agricultural labor force and those who came as children, known as Dreamers. But the core of her program is one frequently repeated commitment: if elected president, she will resurrect and sign the border security bill. In its current form, the bill is heavy on Republican enforcement priorities and does not address Democrats’ most long-standing reform demands, particularly for pathways to citizenship for Dreamers, farm workers, and spouses of American citizens. The bill stops short of building out an asylum system that would provide timely but also fair decisions, ensure due process, and support lasting resettlement for migrants who are legitimately fleeing persecution. If Harris wins the White House and takes up the bill, it will be only the starting point for intense negotiations in what will inevitably still be a closely divided, bitterly polarized Congress.

In comparison this is what the author suggest about Trump’s policy.

Trump promises a massive operation. He says he will invoke an obscure statute, the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, to mobilize multiple law enforcement agencies, the National Guard, and U.S. military troops to repel the “predatory incursion.” Miller speaks of setting up “vast holding facilities” along the border, reminiscent of the internment camps where Japanese American citizens were confined during World War II. Trump has made it clear the roundup could be violent. Many of the immigrants Trump has vowed to deport are in the United States legally. To achieve the scale of deportations he envisions, Trump’s plan calls for a far-reaching countrywide dragnet. Agents would go house to house and raid workplaces in an offensive that would sweep up many people who are not criminals, disrupt businesses and schools, and forcefully separate families. They would go hunting among the 11 million undocumented people in the country. Nearly three-quarters of those immigrants have been settled in the United States for more than a decade, long since gaining steady work, paying taxes, buying homes, and melding productively into the society.

Immigrants are unfortunately easy to vilify these days. Candidate Trump has created a very negative image that is terribly inaccurate but with the failed policies and tremendous swell of immigration into this country the image has endured. It is woefully inaccurate and illogical portrayal of this community but logic and accuracy are not so much a priority these days.

So these are the policies we can expect from our two candidates. Immigrants will need to brace for a stricter procedure after November 5th, that is inevitable. Yet the difference between these two positions are very stark.

[bllsbailey]

Walz Embraces and Defends Pro-Palestinian Protesters on Michigan Radio

Pro-Palestinian Protesters Desecrating American Monuments.

Democrat vice presidential candidate Gov. Tim Walz defended pro-Palestinian protesters on Friday during a local Michigan radio interview and said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu needs to embrace a "two-state solution."

Speaking with MCMU Public Radio out of central Michigan, Walz touched on a variety of topics but perhaps none more vital to a potential victory in the state than the current war between Israel and Hamas.

Host Rick Brewer asked Walz how a potential Harris-Walz administration would handle the conflict and if they would break with President Joe Biden in any way.

"We need to continue, I think, to put the leverage on to make sure we move towards a two-state solution," Walz said. "I think we're at a critical point right now. We need the Netanyahu government to start moving in that direction. But I think those folks who are speaking out loudly in Michigan are speaking out for all the right reasons."

Walz did not get into specifics as to what those reasons were, nor did he mention any responsibility on behalf of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar in reaching a cease-fire deal. The Minnesota governor emphasized the Biden administration's goal of an Israeli and a Palestinian state.

"It's a humanitarian crisis. It can't stand the way it is. And we need to find a way that people can live together in this, and we've said it and continue to say it: Getting a cease-fire with the return of the hostages and then moving towards a sustainable two-state solution is the only way forward," he added.

With Michigan being a critical battleground state, many have accused the Biden administration of wavering in its defense of Israel in hopes of appeasing the large Muslim population in Michigan.

There are over 200,000 registered Muslim voters in Michigan. In February, over 100,000 Michigan Democrats voted "undecided" in the primary in protest of the administration's support for Israel.

James Morley III ✉

James Morley III is a writer with more than two decades of experience in entertainment, travel, technology, and science and nature. 

© 2024 Newsmax. All rights reserved.

[littlestarwithoutsky16]

Central Wisconsin Farmers Struggle Amid Trade War and Immigration Concerns

The Impact of U.S. Foreign Policy on Local Agriculture

A group of farmers in Central Wisconsin gathered at Miltrim Farms in Marathon County for a discussion on the challenges they face in the current economic climate. The meeting, organized by the Council on Foreign Relations, focused on the impact of U.S. foreign policy and immigration policies on local producers and small businesses. With the ongoing trade war with China and potential immigration crackdowns, farmers in the region are finding it increasingly difficult to stay afloat.

Immigration Policies Threaten Dairy Farms

One of the major concerns raised by farmers is the potential mass deportations promised by Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. Dairy farmers, in particular, heavily rely on immigrant labor from Mexico and South America to operate their farms. While many workers have legal status through temporary work visas, there are also undocumented workers in the industry.

The prospect of mass deportations would have a devastating impact on Wisconsin's dairy farms, which depend on this labor force.

"It seems foolish to just pretend that foreign-born workers aren't here and that we don't need them," said Hans Breitenmoser, a dairy farmer from Merrill. "We need a means by which their presence here can be legal and sustainable, and also provide them with the dignity that they deserve."

Public opinion on immigration has shown a shift in favor of stricter policies in recent years. A survey conducted by Axios and The Harris Poll found that a majority of Americans would support mass deportations. In Wisconsin, the sentiment is reflected in the Marquette Law School Poll, which found that 30 percent of Wisconsinites believe undocumented immigrants should be deported, a figure that has almost doubled in the past two years.

Trade War Impacts Wisconsin Agriculture

Another significant challenge faced by Wisconsin farmers is the impact of trade policies, particularly the ongoing trade war with China. In 2023, Wisconsin exported $3.87 billion worth of agricultural and food products, making trade a vital component of the state's economy. However, when the U.S. imposes tariffs on imported goods, other countries retaliate by placing new fees on U.S.-produced products, resulting in a decline in exports.

The ginseng industry in Wisconsin has been hit particularly hard by the trade war. More than 90 percent of U.S. ginseng production comes from Marathon County, with the majority of the product exported to China. The industry, which is worth millions of dollars, has suffered greatly due to the escalated tariffs initiated under the Trump administration and continued under President Joe Biden.

"We have a 120-year tradition in Marathon County for raising ginseng, which is mostly export-driven. So now we are really between a rock and a hard place," said Ming Tao Jiang, president of Marathon Ginseng International.

Furthermore, farmers are also affected by the price of steel and other building materials, which may be subject to new tariffs. President Biden's proposed tariffs on Chinese steel and aluminum could potentially drive up costs for farmers, who heavily rely on equipment for their operations.

The challenges faced by Central Wisconsin farmers highlight the complex interplay between U.S. foreign policy, immigration, and the agricultural industry. The threat of mass deportations and the trade war with China have created a difficult environment for farmers, impacting their ability to sustain their businesses. It is crucial for policymakers to consider the long-term consequences of their decisions on local economies and work towards finding sustainable solutions that support both the agricultural industry and the communities it serves.

[aliteralgrizzlybear]

Seeing the usual U.S. Election Discourse revving up again, so I'll remind you that here in the United States,

The Presidential election is our collective vote on the opponent we deal with for the next four years whose genuine goal is to impede us in building a better world and living our lives in peace.

There is no morally correct choice in voting for President that will end with a morally correct candidate being elected President. There are two choices that have a chance of winning, and a handful of choices that don't. Ultimately, that means you are wasting a small tactical resource of yours in voting for one of those candidates who does not have a chance of winning, and continuing to vote for any of that handful of candidates does not improve any of their chances over time.

Strictly speaking, you aren't endorsing the crimes of this nation by voting for the face of the nation that would already commit those crimes regardless of your vote. We're voting to choose our opponent while we seek to reduce how much blood gets shed in our names that we didn't fucking ask for, for the next few years. Your vote (or refusal to vote) is not a morally defining action in this situation, but a tactical one. You can attach morality to it if you want, but I hope you can recognize that the functional reality of the situation doesn't really have a solution that changes the situation into a morally good one.

Ultimately, our upcoming vote for the U.S. President is actually this question: Do you want your opponent to be the evil old man autocrat who nominally cares about his PR and has minimal overt influence in our local communities, or do you want your opponent to be the evil old man autocrat who has already built himself a cult of personality *and* already has the social backing of Christofascist politics behind him, which already has abundant influence in many of our local communities as well? Which opponent do you want to fight?

You know I'm not spouting some wild conspiracy bullshit here, the rightmost wing of our government is organized and poised to escalate every situation we care about into even more violence, and all of the social groups that support them are waiting for that violence as well. The situation itself is bullshit, and I can't fault you for your anger, despair, and refusal to participate in this system if you're choosing to vote for a morally correct candidate (who you and I know will not win the election, even though they are in every way a better choice) or not vote at all. From a results-oriented perspective, those two choices are the same choice, however, which is why I'm asking you to make a different one.

I'm going to keep fighting either way, and if you're in the U.S. and reading this, you probably will, too. I'm going to ask you to inspect and set aside any self-righteousness you may have invested in this decision, however, and yes, also request that you vote for The Genocidal Murderer Who Nominally Cares About His PR, if you're going to vote at all. This is because in fighting against him for the past few years, I have dealt with Slightly Less Bullshit than I did when I was fighting against the other evil old man, and The Genocidal Murderer Who Nominally Cares About His PR is less likely to be able to tap into our local Christofascism movements as a power play to disrupt our community's movements against him, due to the aforementioned nominal concern about his PR and the fact that they've been conditioned to reject him entirely.

The reason I am asking you, A Person In The U.S. Who Can Vote And Intends To, in addition to the people who don't normally vote and aren't currently planning to, is because you are already motivated to vote, and more importantly you are motivated to engage in action in other places. You already clearly give a shit, and I know that there is a non-zero chance that we have stood side by side in the struggles of this last decade and change. I'm not here to pretend you're a bad person for not following my request -- I'm arguing for this course of action because I believe it is the tactically superior option for our collective goals: both in ceasing genocides abroad that our nation is enacting directly and aiding indirectly, and in reducing the odds of further escalation of political violence throughout our local communities.

[stellarhangout]

Biden is not a lesser evil. Every campaign promise he made was a lie. He is only concered with lining his pockets with money from the gas in Gaza and the Ben Gurion Canal project.

Please look into Claudia De la Cruz! She's a 2024 presidential candidate who actually wants to improve conditions for working class people and she's actively trying to help Palestine. The majority of American voters are dissatisfied with Biden and Trump. A 3rd party candidate can win.

(sjdksjdss why did i only get the notification now this ask is 3 days old)

ANYWAY, Biden is the lesser of two evils. He just pardoned the marijuana offenses he was able to pardon. He's directed the relevant agencies to enforce anti-discrimination policies. He's been adamant about supporting Ukraine.

His only real flaw comes from his support of Israel—which is wavering! He's publicly supported a 2 state solution, unlike Trump who wants to deport Palestinians—and all leftists—from the US.

Donald Trump is a fascist who has literally stated he'll be a dictator. So yes, Biden is by far the lesser of 2 evils.

How many times has a third party won since the Republican Party was founded in 1854? Zero. Our electoral system doesn't account for it. The last time a third party even broke 10% was in 1992 with Ross Perot, who was taking a weird centrist-populist road, and he didn't even win a state! The last time any third party candidate even won a single state was in 1968, with George Wallace winning the South because neither major candidate was racist enough.

While I support policies like De la Cruz's, there is no chance of her getting elected. What will happen if leftists support her over Biden is a spoiler effect, like what happened in 2000 with Ralph Nader, the Green Party nominee, in Florida. Nader won 97,488 votes, and Bush won by 537—because of our stupid electoral system. This is the danger of voting for a third party or not voting instead of voting for Biden.

If we had a different system, such as RCV, I would 100% be advocating for choosing someone else before Biden—but unfortunately, that's not how most states have their elections set up (only Alaska and Maine have RCV, but neither are really swing states currently). Until we can get electoral reform, we have to just choose from the 2 candidates we have.

[thegirlinmask]

What the op said is absolutely on the money. Harris ran an incredibly short campaign - 107 days. This meant that in 107 days, she had to not only introduce herself to the American public but also introduce proposed policies. That is an incredibly tall and difficult task, which means her campaign strategy was going to look diffrent from normal campaigns. (I'm straying a but from the Op's point)

Under normal campaign circumstances, where the incumbent president can't or won't run for reelection, candidates don't head straight into the general election. Instead, they have to go through primary elections.

Just as a reminder, when someone votes in a primary election, they are voting for a candidate to win their party's nomination to run in the general election. Essentially, in primary elections, if you win enough votes, you become a presidential candidate. If you win in the general election, you become the president elect.

Make sense? Good, moving on.

Campaigning during primaries is vastly different from the general election because voters that candidates are trying to persuade to vote for them are members of their party (depending on state laws). This means you're going to see candidates appeal more to the right or left of their party than you would during the general election. After all, they're not courting the entirety of the American population just, yet they're courting people who, more or less, are on board with the party's platform. So you're going to see a lot more Progressive and conservative policies being proposed, such as defending the police (Democrats were never going fully defend the police in a meaningful way) and, I shit you not this was a proposal during the 2024 republican primary, deploying troops to Mexico to destroy the cartel (Republicans maybe idiots, but they wouldn't want to go to war with a nation in our backyard). Doing this boosts their base, and they have a good foundation of voters for the general election. Additionally, it serves as an introduction the wider voter base.

Harris didn't have any of that.

Her campaign started during the general election where she'd have to court the entirety of the American population, not just the Democratic Party and the left.

So Harris's campaign had a choice, do they try to campaign with policies that the left would love but moderates or centrist Republicans might be hesitant or opposed to, or do they try to appeal more towards moderates and centrist Republicans and hope those on the left would continue to support her.

Obviously we know what route the Harris campaign took. They appealed to moderates and Centrist Republicans.

This makes sense. Just appealing to your base doesn't get you elected. Not everyone is a leftist or progressive, and not everyone supports progressive policies, even though it would help them and their community.

So, the Harris campaign took a Gamble. They'd support more moderate polices to win over moderates and centrist Republicans and hope that the left would continue to support them. Harsher stances on the border, remaining silent about climate change, not really advocating for LGBT protections, maintaining the staus quo on Gaza l (condemnation, pursuing a peace treaty, supporting a two state solution) This isn't to say that the campaign completely ignored the left. After all, she was staunch in her support of abortion rights. But this wasn't enough.

In an election where every vote mattered, she didn't have strong support from the left. Meaning that moderate and centrist Republican votes had to cover that loss, which they couldn't do.

If Biden never ran for re-election, Harris would have been able to court the left more effectively and differentiate herself from the Biden Administration as she went through the primaries. Hell, we might have gotten an entirely different candidate.

This isn't an excuse for why she lost because there were mistakes made in her campaign, but this is a reason and factor as to why Harris lost.

Sorry for the rambling and spelling and grammar mistakes. I have a cold and I'm currently trying to fight it

I have a theory for why Harris lost that I haven’t seen much, and it’s not glamorous or exciting.

Basically: EVERYONE knows who Trump is, nobody knew who Harris was. That’s it.

Harris had 107 days or three months and 15 days to get her word out there, and Trump literally never stopped campaigning since riding down that escalator 3431 days, or nine YEARS, four months, and 21 days before Election Day 2024.

There’s a lot of talk about which policies Harris should and shouldn’t have championed, but lest we forget, the anti-Harris messaging for a sufficient portion of her campaign was that she had no policies, because nobody could name them.

Even when she was given a public platform, any coherent argument she could give was drowned out by the opposition, even when given coverage was opposed to that opposition. Remember the debate? Remember how the news cycle was dominated afterwards, not by her 90 page economic plan, but by whether or not Haitians ate cats? That’s important.

With so little time to campaign and so much airtime dedicated to Trump, she had to rely on social media and word of mouth to get her message out there, but this is also a very flawed strategy.

I think, if you’re here on Tumblr, you’re probably very internet-oriented, so it’s easy to think that everyone is on the internet, but the internet is a much smaller, much more fractured place than we realize.

I wrote several paragraphs showing social media statistics, but it made this post much longer than it should’ve been. I’ll make a separate post later. The big takeaway is that social media platforms have vested interests to appear as big and far-reaching as possible, but actual engagement statistics are vanishingly small. On Facebook, the largest platform by a country mile, less than a quarter of a percent of people who view a given post will engage with it, and that includes looking at it for longer than ten seconds. On Twitter, 97% of the site’s content is created by less than 25% of its users. The number of people in the US who post once a day is smaller than the population of Michigan. The number of people in the US who post more than once a day could fit in Michigan Stadium.

Due to the short timeframe, Harris’s campaign had to rely disproportionately on the internet, and the internet has a hard cap on word travel. Even if every single American on social media had access to perfect knowledge of Harris and her policies, you’re still only reaching half of all voting Americans, at best.

This also explains, I think, the seeming disparity between all the “unprecedented” early voting/registration reporting versus final vote tallies: the people who vote early AND report on early voting are going to be more active on social media in general, and, again, there’s a hard limit on how many people that can be.

Also, she still got 74 million votes, which is the second largest number of votes for any Democrat presidential candidate ever, behind Biden in 2020. And Biden was, himself, a very public, well-known figure even during his own Vice-presidency, in ways Kamala wasn’t.

At the end of the day, I really don’t think Harris‘s policies or interviews or debates affected her campaign at all. I think it was simply not enough time.

And she still managed more popular votes than literally every other presidential candidate in history, save two. There are definitely discussions to be had about her policies and why she lost and where the Democratic Party is going from here, but I also think it’s important to keep those discussions within that context. Did she misstep, veering more right as the election drew near? Should she have given clearer answers when asked about Palestine or Trans rights? Absolutely! Would that have helped her get more votes than Biden, who was a publicly known figure running against *the* least popular president in modern history during a period of historic turmoil? Probably not.

This is why I push back against people saying Harris ran a bad campaign. By any measurable metric, (The big, obvious one notwithstanding) she ran one of the best campaigns ever run by a democrat. Factoring in her limitations, it was, at least on paper, nothing short of miraculous.

This is also why I push back against doomerist claims that the country is more racist or misogynist than it used to be. Trump’s voter tallies did not significantly change between 2020 and 2024. In no genuinely bigoted country could Harris get more votes than Obama. There’s roughly the same number of bigots in America that there have always been.

The country did not move further to the right. It simply moved *away* from the Democrats. And even then, not by a whole lot. Just enough. Because people tend to gravitate towards what is familiar, and Harris, in three months, could not overcome the familiarity that Trump built over nine years.

I really do think it’s as simple as that.

And more: I think anyone trying to tell you otherwise is selling you something.

[warningsine]

The United Auto Workers announced that it won at least 95 percent support for a possible strike at General Motors, Ford and Stellantis if negotiations fail to produce a contract by the September 14 deadline, with an average of 97 percent across the three companies.

The vote, which was expected, does not mean there will be a stoppage, but it gives newly-installed UAW President Shawn Fain an additional point of leverage in talks. Fain has criticized the companies for dragging their feet during the negotiations thus far.

"Our union's membership is clearly fed up with living paycheck-to-paycheck while the corporate elite and billionaire class continue to make out like bandits," said UAW President Shawn Fain. "The Big Three have been breaking the bank while we have been breaking our backs."

The UAW's push comes in a period dubbed #HotLaborSummer as unions flex muscles in a still-tight employment market. Hollywood has been virtually shut down by writer and actor strikes, while UPS avoided a stoppage following difficult negotiations.

A strike at all three companies would involve about 150,000 workers, with a potentially wide-ranging economic impact on suppliers and industry-adjacent services.

The talks are on the radar of President Joe Biden, who recently called for a "fair" contract that ensures workers' rights are strengthened during the transition to electric vehicles (EVs).

Fain has signaled a willingness to strike at all three companies, although labor experts think if there is a strike, a stoppage at just one company is more likely.

Fain has argued workers should get the same 40 percent salary boost given to auto executives. Other demands include a restoration of cost of living adjustments (COLA), guaranteed pensions for all workers and elimination of a multitiered compensation system.

The pandemic helped "create a sense among the American workforce that they don't have to tolerate bad working conditions anymore," said Michelle Kaminski, a professor at Michigan State University who specializes in labor relations.

"These are the most favorable conditions for unions in decades," she said.

Reform candidate

Fain, 54, who worked as an electrician at a Stellantis factory in Indiana, narrowly won the first UAW presidential election with direct voting by rank-and-file members. The voting was overseen by a court-appointed monitor after a corruption scandal led to prison terms for two former UAW presidents.

In the campaign, Fain ran as a reformer, criticizing other UAW leaders for an overly cozy approach with management and a legacy of plant closures and lower pay for junior employees.

He has maintained an aggressive posture since taking office, shunning a ceremonial handshake with auto CEOs when the talks kicked off.

In a streamed bargaining update earlier this month Fain plunked Stellantis' proposal in the trash, a gesture the company criticized as "theatrics and personal insults."

Stellantis said it was committed to reaching an agreement "based on economic realism" that reflects the pressures of competing with nonunionized automakers.

"Agreeing to Mr. Fain's demands could endanger our ability to make decisions in the future that provide job security for our employees," Stellantis said in a letter to employees.

GM said it has "been working hard with the UAW every day to ensure we get this agreement right for all our stakeholders," while Ford said it looks "forward to working with the UAW on creative solutions ... when our dramatically changing industry needs a skilled and competitive workforce more than ever."

Compromise?

Fain's strategy with the Detroit Three has taken a page from that of Teamsters President Sean O'Brien, who also presented regular livestream updates and organized "practice pickets" at UPS.

UPS workers overwhelmingly approved a contract that included hefty wage increases and an elimination of a two-tier wage system.

Labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein, who noted the UAW's long history of striking, said Fain could "claim victory" with hefty wage hikes and elimination of the tiered system.

Harry Katz, a professor at Cornell's School of Industrial & Labor Relations, said a compromise could include a cost-of-living adjustment and a narrowing of pay gaps in tiers.

Fain "will definitely deliver a favorable contract," Katz said. "It's all a question of how favorable."

But Katz said there is also a decent chance of a strike if either side misreads the situation. While the UAW has some leverage over the carmakers, it has less compared with the Teamsters in the UPS case, given the heavy number of US vehicles built by nonunion automakers.

[scribeme]

Obama played hardball in 1996 in first Chicago campaign - CNN.com

By Drew Griffin and Kathleen Johnston

CNN's AC 360°

(CNN) -- When the Democratic National Committee meets Saturday on the thorny issue of seating the Florida and Michigan delegations at its August convention, party officials will have to fashion a solution that satisfies supporters of Sen. Hillary Clinton and presidential nominee front-runner Sen. Barack Obama.

Sen. Barack Obama showed he was willing to use bare-knuckle tactics during his first race in Chicago.

It may take a Solomon-like decision to appease both candidates.

Clinton has argued that the primary results of two of the nation's largest states should count because, otherwise, millions of voters are being disenfranchised. Obama has said he is willing to work out some compromise.

But he is insistent that the primary results are invalid because the two states failed to follow party rules and that the rules are the rules.

The DNC has not seated the Florida and Michigan delegates because the two states violated party edicts in holding their primaries early.

Although neither candidate campaigned in the two states, Clinton won about 50 percent of the Florida vote, compared with 33 percent for Obama. She won 55 percent of the vote in Michigan, where Obama's name was not on the ballot.

In his first race for office, seeking a state Senate seat on Chicago's gritty South Side in 1996, Obama effectively used election rules to eliminate his Democratic competition.

As a community organizer, he had helped register thousands of voters. But when it came time to run for office, he employed Chicago rules to invalidate the voting petition signatures of three of his challengers.

See how Barack Obama has used election rules to his advantage during his political career on AC 360.

The move denied each of them, including incumbent Alice Palmer, a longtime Chicago activist, a place on the ballot. It cleared the way for Obama to run unopposed on the Democratic ticket in a heavily Democrat district.

"That was Chicago politics," said John Kass, a veteran Chicago Tribune columnist. "Knock out your opposition, challenge their petitions, destroy your enemy, right? It is how Barack Obama destroyed his enemies back in 1996 that conflicts with his message today. He may have gotten his start registering thousands of voters. But in that first race, he made sure voters had just one choice." Watch how Obama shut out challengers in his first race

Obama's challenge was perfectly legal, said Jay Stewart of the Chicago's Better Government Association. Although records of the challenges are no longer on file for review with the election board, Stewart said Obama is not the only politician to resort to petition challenges to eliminate the competition.

"He came from Chicago politics," Stewart said. "Politics ain't beanbag, as they say in Chicago. You play with your elbows up, and you're pretty tough and ruthless when you have to be. Sen. Obama felt that's what was necessary at the time, that's what he did. Does it fit in with the rhetoric now? Perhaps not."

The Obama campaign called this report "a hit job." It insisted that CNN talk to a state representative who supports Obama, because, according to an Obama spokesman, she would be objective. But when we called her, she said she can't recall details of petition challenges, who engineered them for the Obama campaign or why all the candidates were challenged.

But Will Burns does. Now running himself for a seat in the Illinois legislature, Burns was a young Obama volunteer during the presidential candidate's first race.

Burns was one of the contingents of volunteers and lawyers who had the tedious task of going over each and every petition submitted by the other candidates, including those of Alice Palmer.

"The rules are there for a reason," Burns said.

He said that challenging petitions is a smart way to avoid having to run a full-blown expensive race.

"One of the first things you do whenever you're in the middle of a primary race, especially in primaries in Chicago, because if you don't have signatures to get on the ballot, you save yourself a lot of time and effort from having to raise money and have a full-blown campaign effort against an incumbent," Burns said.

(Priest apologizes for mocking Clinton)

Burns said he believed that Obama did not enjoy using the tactic to knock off Palmer.

"It was not something he particularly relished," Burns said. "It was not something that I thought he was happy about doing." Watch Burns describe how Obama used the rules to his advantage »

But Obama did it anyway, clearing the field of any real competition.

Obama's staff would not comment on what the senator thinks about that petition challenge now. Instead, they referred CNN to this 2007 comment made by Obama to the Chicago Tribune.

"To my mind, we were just abiding by the rules that had been set up," the senator is quoted as saying in the Tribune. "My conclusion was that if you couldn't run a successful petition drive, then that raised questions in terms of how effective a representative you were going to be."

But in that same newspaper story, Obama praised Palmer.

"I thought she was a good public servant," he said.

Palmer, who has campaigned for Clinton, told CNN that she did not want to be part of this story.

Obama supporters claim that Palmer has only herself to blame because she indicated she would not run for the 1996 state Senate and instead aimed for Congress. After losing in that bid, she returned to running for the state Senate seat, a move Obama supporters claim amounted to reneging on a promise not to run.

But Palmer supporters, who did not want to be identified, said that she never anointed Obama as her successor and that the retelling of the story by Obama supporters is designed to distract from the fact he muscled his way into office.

One other opponent who Obama eliminated by challenging his petitions, Gha-is Askia, said he has no hard feelings today about the challenge and supports Obama's presidential aspirations.

But back at the time he was running for state Senate, Askia said, he was dismayed Obama would use such tactics.

"It wasn't honorable," he said. "I wouldn't have done it."

He said the Obama team challenged every single one of his petitions on "technicalities."

If names were printed instead of signed in cursive writing, they were declared invalid. If signatures were good but the person gathering the signatures wasn't properly registered, those petitions also were thrown out.

Askia came up 69 signatures short of the required number to be on the ballot.

Kass, the Chicago Tribune columnist, said the national media are naive when it comes to Chicago politics, which is a serious business.

He said they have bought into a narrative that Obama is strictly a reformer. The truth, Kass says, is that he is a bare-knuckled politician. And using the rules to win his first office is part of who Obama is.

"It's not the tactics of 'let's all people come together and put your best ideas forward and the best ideas win,' " Kass said. "That's the spin; that's in the Kool-Aid. You can have some. Any flavor. But the real deal was, get rid of Alice Palmer.

"There are those who think that registering people to vote and getting them involved in politics and then using this tactic in terms of denying Alice Palmer the right to compete, that these things are inconsistent. And guess what? They are. They are inconsistent. But that's the politics he plays."

And this weekend, DNC delegates will have to decide what kind of rules it will invoke in helping choose its next candidate.E-mail to a friend " https://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/05/29/obamas.first.campaign/#:~:text=VIDEO,to%20a%20friend

[asecondparty]

The Plan

I live in Jersey City, New Jersey. I am a lifelong scientific progressive. I always disliked the "Party of No" - the Republicans that I saw, growing up and as a young adult, who seemed to reject change out-of-hand while proposing no alternatives.

That's a recipe for failure. A party must have a vision and a party must present solutions to issues that Americans consider pressing, whether or not one personally considers those issues sensible. To say "I see no issue & I have no plan" may be honest but it is not productive.

Such Republicans were bad enough without mentioning their belabored & abused American vein of Christianity. That added a self-superior note which was altogether odious. So I didn't like them. Republicans were (are) bastards.

And then they got worse. They weren't really Christian anymore, but they still had that superior air. They voted for...well, you know who. I didn't laugh. It's not a joke to have one of America's two parties nominating an idiot for spite.

But it is a joke that he won, if a cruel one. In retrospect, Republicans were too incompetent to get very much done. What we all got was an embarrassing lesson in why you don't nominate a fucking joke - he might win. Anything can happen.

The red party no longer has an ideology. They aren't Christian. They aren't conservative. They merely exist moment-to-moment, taking whichever stance Democrats don't. This is not a party which can be trusted to nominate reasonable, serious candidates for office.

And that's serious, because they will continue to provide one of the two real presidential candidates for the foreseeable future. It is disgustingly irresponsible to allow these candidates to be jokes.

What is, then, the responsibility of a progressive? If one trusts the Democratic party to nominate sane & generally sensible individuals - which I do - then one's vote in the Democratic primary matters little. It is far more important to affect the outcome of the Republican primary in any way one can.

And I do think the existence of the Republican party is "valid." There should be a sane alternative - a "loyal opposition" - to ensure that ideas & policies are subject to rigorous debate and analysis. At the moment, we lack that. Points raised by Republicans can simply be discounted, because "Republicans are crazy." At the moment, that's completely sensible. No party that nominated & accepted Donald John Trump as their candidate for President of the United States of America can be taken seriously.

It's especially ironic that a party called "Republican" did such a thing - the notion of "republicanism," as opposed to "democracy," indicating a belief that government decisions should be made at least in part by the competent, the educated, and the elite, rather than entirely by the commons. Yet they did nothing but timidly throw up their hands and say, "What can we do? They voted for him. He won the primaries."

Such a disgusting and cowardly renunciation of responsibility puts an indelible black mark on the record of everyone who had the power to intervene and yet chose inaction. Such people should be laughed out of every room.

I thusly consider it necessary, for the continuation & renewal of this union, to become a new kind of Republican - one who is not a god damned fucking moron.

How, then, does one "be a Republican," if one merely believes in the necessity of a thoughtful & honest second party in a healthy political system?

Presently, I consider that this suggests, in situations where a decision must be made between popular power and elite or institutional power, and available information does not strongly indicate that one option or the other will lead to a better outcome, that a "theoretical Republican" support the authority of elites & institutions. Likewise, for an economic issue, if neither a market solution nor a governmental solution is strongly indicated to be superior, a "theoretical Republican" would support the market solution. In either case, if the data points strongly toward the superiority of a position contrary to the "party line", my "theoretical Republican" would support the position supported by the data.

That, then, will be my starting point. My dream is to see a "Party of Lincoln" which is not a stain on America. It will be a long road.

I don't agree with the Democratic party on every issue either. While the "Party of No" isn't good for much, I worry that Democrats have become the "Party of Yes" - too quick to support notions which gain rapid traction among progressive thought leaders & progressive influencers, without time for rational analysis, and too eager to take whatever positions conservatives find frightful, regardless of the facts.

My particular small grievances with Democrats I may in the future elucidate, but they are insignificant compared to my disagreements with the current mainstream of the Republican party, which I consider entirely off the rails, and in desperate need of new management.

The purpose of this blog is to document my ongoing attempts to engage local Republicans in discussions about their beliefs and about the purpose and mission of their party - that is, if I can find them.

The Republican Party of Jersey City seems to have little more than a barebones website and a facebook page that makes occasional holiday announcements, getting one or two comments. The Hudson County Republican Party doesn't even have a website. Neither appears to have regular meetings, or any space for constituent feedback beyond a webform for sending messages into the abyss.

So I'll be sending emails, making phone calls, and knocking on doors if need be. I want to have some debates! Democrats aren't any fun to argue with, they're all serious. I want to fight some clowns.