Our political campaigns are too long

From the New Hampshire Bulletin:

Four hundred and forty-four days prior to the 2024 presidential election, millions of Americans tuned into the first Republican primary debate. If this seems like a long time to contemplate the candidates, it is.

By comparison, Canadian election campaigns average just 50 days. In France, candidates have just two weeks to campaign, while Japanese law restricts campaigns to a meager 12 days.

Those countries all give more power than the United States does to the legislative branch, which might explain the limited attention to the selection of the chief executive. But Mexico – which, like the U.S., has a presidential system – allows only 90 days for its presidential campaigns, with a 60-day “pre-season,” the equivalent of the U.S. nomination campaign....

Rob's comment:

The talking heads on TV keep repeating the dubious political challenge facing Kamala Harris, that she has only 100 days to convince Americans that she's a better choice than Donald Trump. 

Instead, Americans will be politically exhausted long before November. After Harris is elected, she should propose legislation to limit US presidential campaigns to 60 days. If that is still too tiresome, 30 days could be tried.

Already a toss-up

Harris gains ground in latest poll.

The campaign is just beginning, and Harris is doing well. Even though she's been Vice President for more than three years, people don't know her well, since the Vice Presidency is a lot like a Witness Protection Program. They will quickly learn that she's smart and personable. They already know Donald Trump.

Can Kamala Harris beat Donald Trump?

Driftglass

Meet Vivian Maier

Vivian Maier

The choice: Prosecutor or Perpetrator?

Daily Kos

The prosecuter and the perpetrator

Nancy Pelosi: Still working for us---and the country

Today's New York Times:

Can we all admit there was something supremely gratifying about watching Nancy Pelosi work over the last few weeks?

As concerns mounted among Democrats about President Biden’s mental fitness and his disastrous debate performance and as Mr. Biden responded by digging in his heels, it was the 84-year-old Ms. Pelosi — a fellow octogenarian, no longer in charge yet as shrewd and formidable an operator as ever — who took those concerns and helped organize them into a sustained pressure campaign.

When Mr. Biden said he absolutely wouldn’t drop out, Ms. Pelosi went on his favorite TV show to say he needed to make a decision “because time is running short.” When the president told her during a phone call that polling data suggested he could still win, she challenged him: “Put Donilon on the phone,” Ms. Pelosi is said to have demanded of the president, asking for one of Biden’s advisers. “Show me what polls.”

Even as Mr. Biden was becoming “increasingly resentful” of what he viewed as the “orchestrated campaign” against him, as The Times reported, she kept working methodically behind the scenes, talking to lawmakers, members of her old leadership team and her large network of donors, who slowly and steadily kept piling on. 

Before Mr. Biden ultimately threw in the towel last weekend, his team was bracing for what she might do next, Politico reported, with a quote that made this grandmother of 10 sound a bit like Don Corleone.

“Nancy made clear that they could do this the easy way or the hard way,” a Democrat familiar with the conversations told the publication. “She gave them three weeks of the easy way. It was about to be the hard way.” 

As one Democratic strategist told The Hill, referencing the president’s statement that it would take “the Lord Almighty” to make him withdraw his re-election bid. 

“Once she weighs in, it’s done. He wanted the Lord Almighty? Well, this is the Lord Almighty”: Nancy Pelosi with the iron fist!....

See also this:

Frankly, Tim 

Let us now praise Nancy Pelosi 

Proud to be respresented by Nancy Pelosi 

"How can I say this more clearly? Show us the report."

White boys lost In the blues

Sorry to learn of the death of John Mayall. Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee sing about Mayall and a lot of white boys of our generation.

The Handmaid's Tale

 The Book:

Project 2025

The Prosecutor and the Perpetrator

In today's edition of The New York Times:

In a preview of what’s to come, Ms. Harris made the prosecutor’s attack line explicit during an appearance on Monday, describing her past as the district attorney of San Francisco and the attorney general of California.

“In those roles I took on perpetrators of all kinds: Predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So hear me when I say, I know Donald Trump’s type,” she said.

I'm with her

Clay Bennet

Kamala Harris: Growing up in Berkeley

Photo: Mobilus In Mobili/Flickr

How Kamala Harris’ childhood in Berkeley shaped her

Biden drops out, endorses Kamala!

July 14 photo

Biden withdraws from presidential race

New JFK document dump, but US still hiding some

Case not closed

Still hiding 4,000 documents

Snap Out of It!

Biden manages to board Air Force One

First he has to get out of the car. Then he has to get up the stairs to the plane...

If he's still on the ticket in November, I'll vote for him, because any Democrat is much better than any Republican.

But, come on, Joe! If you struggle to get out of the car and up those stairs, it's time to get out of the race and pass the torch to Kamala.

Bill Maher nails it

JD Vance scrubs his Twitter archives

Daily Kos

The giant tortoise

From the Good News network:

2023 was a banner year for the Galapagos Islands: that wondrous archipelago so famous for its giant tortoises and other endemic species.

The long-serving conservation organization the Galapagos Conservancy, also endemic to the islands, recently published its annual report featuring standout figures like over 500 giant tortoises of 5 different species reintroduced to their natural habitat.

Additionally, a critically endangered species of albatross was identified to use giant tortoise feeding sites as take-off and landing areas. This key insight into co-dependency has given the Conservancy confidence that they can restore the populations of both animals to stable, flourishing numbers.

It underscores how far a donation to these endemic wildlife organizations really does go, and these two highlights of a successful year were only possible by the over $6 million in charitable contributions from supporters.

30 Chelonoidis chatamensis tortoises endemic to the smaller island of San Cristobal were repatriated to their natural habitat from the stock of a captive breeding program, while 97 native tortoises were returned to the second-largest island of Santa Cruz.

On the largest island of Isabella, 350 tortoises (214 C. guntheri and 136 C. vicina) were successfully reintroduced to their natural habitat after a survey found their numbers were not rising substantially on their own.

In March, the repatriation of 86 juvenile Chelonoidis hoodensis tortoises significantly contributed to enhancing the species’ distribution across their native habitat. They currently number 3,000 today on Española or Hood Island, a miraculous recovery from the 14 found there in the 1960s.

Also on Española, the endemic waved albatross was found to be taking off and landing on 50 additional parts of the island. These large birds, boasting an 8-foot wingspan, need ample space to get a running start before taking off, and this same principle applies when applying the brakes coming down from the sky.

In the survey, the biologists observed that concentrations of giant tortoises were linked with the usage of areas as runways for the albatross. Because the tortoises are the largest herbivores in the ecosystem, they perform the same acts as bison do in North America and Europe, and elephants in Africa—clear space.

With their herbivorous diet and large bulk, the tortoise’s feeding habits produce cleared areas ideal for albatross use.

“This discovery underscores the interconnectedness of the Galápagos ecosystem,” the authors of the report write. “This newly acquired knowledge allows us to strengthen the synergies between our conservation strategies.”

Tucker Carlson is back, unfortunately

Photo: Kenny Holston: New York Times

In today's New York Times:

....Mr. Carlson said that he has recently felt more ideologically simpatico with Mr. Trump, in particular the former president’s position on curbing immigration and the brand of economic populism that is espoused by Mr. Vance. 

“Joe Biden is evil,” he added. “Not wrong. Evil.”

Rob's comment:

Not the kind of rhetoric that the country, or even the Republican Party, needs right now.

See also A talk with little Tucker.

The Tucker Carlson Network

Trump monologue

How it happens

Rob Rogers

Retribution nation

Today's New York Times:

Why MAGA Nation Embraces Trump

To the Editor:

David Brooks takes a good stab at understanding the tensions between Enlightenment values and religiously grounded social mores, but the one thing he doesn’t explain is how those who think we need a return to a more “religious” moral center are completely enthralled by the likes of Donald Trump, who, whatever else you can say about him, never expresses anything in word or deed that would suggest he has any moral grounding at all. 

I know of no religious tradition that features revenge as a central moral tenet.

Ken Blickenstaff

Danville, Kentucky

Updating "The Dog That Didn't Bark"

Case Not Closed

In my recent post on the JFK issue, The Dog That Didn't Bark, I didn't pay attention to the blow-up of the 1995 Washington Post story behind Jefferson Morley as he spoke. Click on the title for the complete text:

The Oswald File: Tales of the Routing Slips

by Jefferson Morley

THE U.S. government's fifth effort in 31 years to satisfy the public's curiosity and doubts over the murder of President John F. Kennedy is quietly getting under way in a federal office building on E Street in downtown Washington.

The JFK Assassination Records Review Board, a five-member panel appointed last year by President Clinton, is collecting and starting to make public government documents related to Nov. 22, 1963.

The law creating the board requires the CIA, FBI and other government agencies to release virtually all of their files on the assassination. Even before the board was appointed, the CIA began releasing long-classified files to comply with the law. Since August 1993, the CIA has released 217,000 pages of documents, according to an agency spokesman.

Among those files, a historian and author has found materials that disclose for the first time who at CIA headquarters received detailed FBI reports about accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald in the months prior to Kennedy's murder. 

The routing slips on the newly released files show that some senior CIA officials who knew about the FBI reports failed to share the information with agency colleagues in Mexico City who were trying to learn more about Oswald six weeks before the assassination.

"We're finding that there are an awful lot of records that are at the CIA or at the FBI or at other federal institutions and agencies that people have never seen," says John R. Tunheim, the chief deputy attorney general of the state of Minnesota, who is chairman of the review board. "And whether the information in those records is relevant to ultimate conclusions about the Kennedy assassination or not, at least everyone should have a chance to look at them."

Opinion polls consistently have shown that a majority of Americans are skeptical of the Warren Commission's conclusion in 1964 that Oswald acted alone. The subject has been revisited by the Rockefeller Commission in 1975 and the Senate Intelligence Committee in 1976 and reinvestigated by the House Committee on Assassinations in 1979.

Congress passed the JFK Assassination Records Act two and a half years ago to quell a new wave of speculation generated by Oliver Stone's conspiratorial movie epic "JFK." The film suggested that Kennedy was murdered because he was resisting escalation of the Vietnam War. 

The routing slips that shed new light on the CIA's handling of information about Oswald before the assassination were found by John Newman, a 20-year veteran of U.S. Army intelligence who now is an assistant professor of history at the University of Maryland. The routing slips identify which counterintelligence and covert operations officers in CIA headquarters received the FBI's reporting on Oswald in 1962 and 1963.

The question of what the CIA knew about Oswald first arose in early October 1963 after the 24-year-old ex-Marine visited Soviet and Cuban diplomatic offices in Mexico City seeking a visa. 

On Oct. 10, 1963, officials at CIA headquarters in Langley sent a cable to their subordinates in Mexico, telling them that they had not learned anything about Oswald in the previous year and a half. But the routing slips show that at least one of the CIA officials who drafted the cable had, in fact, signed for two FBI reports on Oswald.

The Oct. 10 cable itself has been in the public domain for many years. It is also well-known that the FBI was monitoring Oswald's activities at the time. He was an obvious subject of interest to both the FBI and CIA during that period in the Cold War, because he had defected to the Soviet Union in 1959. Moreover, after returning to the United States in June 1962, Oswald had become active in a U.S. group that supported Cuba's communist leader Fidel Castro.

What is new is that the latest information on Oswald was not passed along to CIA officials in the field. On Oct. 8, 1963 the agency's Mexico City station sent a query to CIA headquarters, marked "routine," saying it had observed a visit to the Soviet Embassy by an "American male who spoke broken Russian {and} said his name {was} Lee Oswald."

Two days later, Langley responded. The cable was drafted by four operations officers and approved by the agency's deputy director of covert operations. It provided details about Oswald's past attempts to renounce his citizenship and become a Soviet. It also stated that the "latest hdqs info" on Oswald "was State {Department} report dated May 1962 saying State had determined Oswald is still U.S. citizen."

Just days earlier though, two CIA counterintelligence offices had received an FBI report on Oswald's recent pro-Castro activities, according to the routing slips. The CIA had also received FBI reports on Oswald in September 1963 and in August 1962. The information included an interview with Oswald and detailed information about his personal life and his political activities related to Cuba. These reports, according to the routing slips, had been widely distributed at Langley.

After the assassination, the CIA gave the Oct. 10 cable to the Warren Commission but did not disclose that the FBI reports on Oswald had been read by officials in the clandestine operations division in 1962 and 1963. The cable was described as a "summary of the background information held in the Headquarters' file on Oswald."....

See also David Talbot: A tribute. Talbot's book on the issue: The Devil's Chessboard.

Oliver Stone still has questions about the JFK assassination

Guess which party supported the US invasion of Iraq?

Remember the Iraq war?

On the other hand, Trump wants to abandon Ukraine.

So does JD Vance

Biden struggles to read from a teleprompter

The dog that didn't bark

See also the Washington Post story in the background.

Republicans rewrite history ...

"The right wing knows who to blame"

The Daily Beast

Kevin Drum:

A gunman apparently tried to assassinate Donald Trump at a rally in Pennsylvania today. Responses from the right came quickly. Noted without comment...

More here

See also Reichstag Fire?

Losers peddle Lost Cause memorabilia

Before The Gettysburg Address

In today's New York Times:

To the Editor:

Re Gettysburg’s Lost Cause Problem by Simon Barnicle (Opinion guest essay, July 5), claiming a lack of “historical context and moral valence” at the military park:

This essay happened to appear online just a few hours before we took the stage with the novelist Jeff Shaara at the Gettysburg National Military Park Museum and Visitor Center to perform a program on Civil War memory and the 1863 battle here. Our reaction: We couldn’t possibly be talking about the same place.

Even a cursory look at the exhibits at this museum reveals an unrelentingly frank, historically accurate emphasis on slavery as the cause of the Civil War; insurrection and treason as the root of the rebellion; and the displacement of free Black families as a horrific consequence of the Confederate invasion.

Yes, some private vendors around town still sell Confederate memorabilia to unreconstructed Lost Cause apologists, but to confuse their presence with any official sanitization of secession and rebellion is like saying the Gettysburg Address was politically incorrect because Lincoln failed to mention slavery by name.

As to an overemphasis on things military here, surely it is “altogether fitting and proper,” to quote Lincoln, for visitors to consider the extraordinary landscape here and speculate whether a slightly different alignment of troops on one or another spot, or a spared life at any crucial moment, might have changed the outcome of the battle, the war or the future of our country.

Gettysburg is hallowed ground precisely because freedom and democracy prevailed here — not because its combatants have been, or should be, erased.

Stephen Lang

Harold Holzer

Gettysburg, Pa.

Mr. Lang is a stage and film actor, and Mr. Holzer is a Lincoln historian.

The left is winning

Keir Starmer

Kevin Drum:

Marine Le Pen's right-wing populists appear to have won barely more than 20% of the vote in France's election today. This was a dismal showing for a party that was finally expected to win after years of rebranding and makeovers. 

But voters weren't fooled: a strong turnout unexpectedly powered an alliance of the left to the biggest share of the vote. Going forward, parliament will almost certainly be controlled by some kind of coalition of the left and center.

Meanwhile, Britain's right wing got crushed in Thursday's election; the right-wing candidate for president lost in Iran; and last month the far-right party in Belgium failed to make its predicted gains, with the usual messy coalition of center-left and center-right remaining in control.

Can we please get a few stories now about how the left is ascendant around the world while the forces of right-wing nationalism are in disarray because they're still consistently unable to appeal to more than a small fraction of the electorate?

Biden's decline 2

Kevin Drum:

Has the press been covering for Joe Biden over the past few months? Until now I've considered this to be little more than typical Fox News nonsense, but I'm beginning to wonder. Here is Olivia Nuzzi:

....They were scared and horrified. But they were also burdened. They needed to talk about it (though not on the record)....Their disclosures often followed innocent questions: Have you seen the president lately? How does he seem?

Often, they would answer with only silence, their eyes widening cartoonishly, their heads shaking back and forth. Or with disapproving sounds. Or with a simple, “Not good! Not good!”....Longtime friends of the Biden family, who spoke to me on the condition of anonymity, were shocked to find that the president did not remember their names....

Rob's comment:

If Biden is still the Democratic Party's nominee in November, I'll vote for him. Even a disabled Biden is a better choice than Donald Trump and the vile Republican Party.

As an Amesrican voter, I agree with this idea: Ultimately, political parties — not personalities — are the defining rubric for British voters.

Biden's decline

Biden’s cognitive decline may be fairly recent

David Talbot: A Tribute

President Kamala Harris?

Will she run as vice president or as president?

Eternal struggle: Art and the philistines

4,000-year-old rock art in Venezuela may be from a 'previously unknown' culture

...It's unclear why people created this art. "It is almost impossible to get into the minds of people living so many [thousands of] years ago" Pérez-Gómez said, but "definitely these signs had a ritual meaning." 

For instance, the different depictions may be related to birth, diseases, the renewal of nature or good hunting. The places where the rock art was created "most probably had a meaning and an importance within the landscape, just as the churches have a meaning for people today," Pérez-Gómez added....

Rob's comment:

Bullshit! That's a philistine interpretation of both art and human behavior. Creating art is just something people do---have always done! Art has never required any "meaning" beyond itself. 

The above rock art was beautiful when it was created by an artist---or artists---thousands of years ago, and it's still beautiful today. That "culture" isn't "unknown," since it's human culture.

Looking back

Richmond Review/Sunset Beacon

Crime report

Daily Kos

Trump's lies

Kevin Drum: Some of Trump's lies:

1. Tariffs:

"Not going to drive [prices] higher. It’s just going to cause countries that have been ripping us off for years, like China and many others, in all fairness to China — it’s going to just force them to pay us a lot of money, reduce our deficit tremendously, and give us a lot of power for other things."

Flat out lie. Tariffs are paid by the importer, who then has to pass along the cost increase to its customers.

2. Social Security:

"This man[Biden] is going to single-handedly destroy Social Security. These millions and millions of people coming in, they’re trying to put them on Social Security. He will wipe out Social Security. He will wipe out Medicare."

Illegal immigrants aren't eligible for Social Security. In fact, they help Social Security because they pay taxes but never get any of the benefits.

3. Abortion:

"If you look at this whole question that you’re asking, a complex, but not really complex — 51 years ago, you had Roe v. Wade, and everybody wanted to get it back to the states, everybody, without exception. Democrats, Republicans, liberals, conservatives, everybody wanted it back. Religious leaders."

Flat out lie. It's simply untrue that "everybody" wanted to overturn Roe. v. Wade.

4. Abortion again:

"If you look at the former governor of Virginia, he was willing to do this. He said, we’ll put the baby aside and we’ll determine what we do with the baby. Meaning, we’ll kill the baby."

Former Gov. Ralph Northram never said this, no matter how many times Trump claims it.

5. Illegal immigration:

"He[Biden] decided to open up our border, open up our country to people that are from prisons, people that are from mental institutions, insane asylum, terrorists. We have the largest number of terrorists coming into our country right now. All terrorists, all over the world — not just in South America, all over the world. They come from the Middle East, everywhere. All over the world, they’re pouring in."

There is no evidence that terrorists have crossed into the US via the southwestern border.

6. Foreign affairs:

"As far as Russia and Ukraine, if we had a real president, a president that knew — that was respected by Putin, he would have never — he would have never invaded Ukraine....Just like Israel would have never been invaded in a million years by Hamas. You know why? Because Iran was broke with me. I wouldn’t let anybody do business with them. They ran out of money. They were broke. They had no money for Hamas. They had no money for anything. No money for terror."

This is ridiculous. Trump did nothing to deter Putin and nothing to deter Iran.

7. January 6:

"Nancy Pelosi, if you just watch the news from two days ago, on tape to her daughter, who’s a documentary filmmaker, as they say, what she’s saying, oh, no, it’s my responsibility, I was responsible for this. Because I offered her 10,000 soldiers or National Guard, and she turned them down. And the mayor of — in writing, by the way, the mayor. In writing turned it down, the mayor of D.C. They turned it down."

Flat out lie. Trump didn't offer 10,000 National Guard troops to anyone on January 6.

8. January 6 again:

"The unselect committee, which is basically two horrible Republicans that are all gone now, out of office, and Democrats, all Democrats, they destroyed and deleted all of the information they found, because they found out we were right. We were right. And they deleted and destroyed all of the information."

Flat out lie. The January 6 committee didn't destroy anything.

9. Ukraine:

"Joe could be a convicted felon with all of the things that he’s done. He’s done horrible things. All of the death caused at the border, telling the Ukrainian people that we’re going to want a billion dollars or you change the prosecutor, otherwise, you’re not getting a billion dollars."

"If I ever said that, that’s quid pro quo. That — we’re not going to do anything, we’re not going to give you a billion dollars unless you change your prosecutor having to do with his son."

Flat out lie. The US wanted Ukraine's top prosecutor fired because he was corrupt. It had nothing to do with Hunter Biden, and in any case, Joe Biden was just the messenger for US policy.

10. Inflation:

"He caused the inflation. He’s blaming inflation. And he’s right, it’s been very bad. He caused the inflation and it’s killing black families and Hispanic families and just about everybody. It’s killing people. They can’t buy groceries anymore. They can’t. You look at the cost of food where it’s doubled and tripled and quadrupled. They can’t live. They’re not living anymore. He caused this inflation."

Our recent surge in inflation was caused primarily by COVID shortages. Beyond that, it was most likely caused by rescue packages passed under Trump, which were much bigger than Biden's. And food prices haven't doubled or quadrupled; they've gone up about 20%.

11. Criminal justice:

"What he has done to the black population is horrible, including the fact that for 10 years he called them superpredators. We can’t, in the 1990s, we can’t forget that. Super predators was his name. And he called it to them for 10, and they’ve taken great offense at it, and now they see it happening."

Flat out lie. Biden never uttered the word superpredator.

12. The environment:

"During my four years, I had the best environmental numbers ever. And my top environmental people gave me that statistic just before I walked on the stage, actually."

Trump was a disaster for the environment. Carbon emissions stopped going down under Trump until 2020, when they dropped solely due to COVID.

13. Fentanyl:

"Jake, we’re doing very well at addiction until the COVID came along. We had the two-and-a-half, almost three years of like nobody’s ever had before, any country in every way. And then we had to get tough. And it was — the drugs pouring across the border, we’re — it started to increase."

Fentanyl deaths increased from 70,000 to 107,000 over Trump's term. Cocaine overdose deaths also skyrocketed.

Jon Stewart's debate analysis

See also President Harris? and Is There a Good Reason Not to Panic? Well, No, Not Really.