The Olympics have begun, and the election season in the United States has started anew, as our team noted earlier, as it is an election too close to call. Our team curated thoughts courtesy the team at Crystal Ball, The Institute for Economics and Peace, The Coop Scoop, Politoc and Heather Cox Richardson:
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Coop Scoop: Kamala Enters Boldly --MAGA In DisarrayA record deluge of money and volunteers bolsters the Democrats
July 22-23, 2024 By Marc Cooper Oh, man, remember all that chaos we were going to experience if Biden dropped out? How the Reptileplicans were going to use the courts to block any change in the nomination? How we were gonna have an apeshit open convention with all kinds of goofs swinging from the rafters? How there was going to be a mass exodus of Blacks from the party because Harris was a prosecutor? And where would the Biden-Harris money go? Um. No. None of this is happening. Just the opposite. The lifting of the burden of having to defend a half-comatose Joe Biden has lit a roaring fire under the butts of recently depressed and dejected Democrats who now believe that Trump is beatable and that Harris can do it. They can at least a see a sliver of hope after a very dark stretch of Spring. Maybe they are right. Maybe not. But consider these facts: Over the past months an average of 250-300 people a day have been calling up the Biden-Harris Campaign to volunteer. In the first day after Biden was replaced by Kamala, and he has been, an astounding TWENTY-EIGHT THOUSAND called in to volunteer. And a zoom call Harris organized Sunday night with black women crashed several servers when 40,000 followers tried to link in. In the first 24 hours after the switch, an historic record $81 million poured directly into the new Harris campaign, besting Trump’s best day ever by $30m. And something like another $80m has come into related Democratic PAC’s and campaigns over the weekend. We also learn today that the DNC has vowed there will be a nominated candidate in place by August 7, before the party convention opens. So much for the media ghouls and the Democratic bedwetters who were either hoping for or fearing factional bedlam. Ain’t gonna happen. Understanding they have lost three valuable weeks while Biden dithered about dropping out, the Democrats are showing uncommon signs of iron unity behind Harris. The endorsements from all different factions of the party, and from satellite labor and women’s groups are coming in by the minute, including the one from Nancy Pelosi (that some media on Sunday tried to fashion into a story about some imaginary split). Of all major Democrats, only Barack Obama has yet to endorse and the conventional wisdom is that he is holding off until it really counts in the heated campaigning after Labor Day.
In her initial campaign outings, Harris is taking a hard and clear combative stance against Donald Trump — which is easy to do even if Biden failed to do so in the debate debacle on June 27. “I took on perpetrators of all kinds,” she said as she was greeted with loud support from a campaign crowd on Monday. “Predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own game. So hear me when I say I know Donald Trump’s type.” She said she will “proudly” put her record against Trump’s. “As a young prosecutor when I was in the Alameda County District Attorney’s office in California, I specialized in cases involving sexual abuse. Donald Trump was found liable by a jury for committing sexual abuse. As attorney general of California, I took on one of our country’s largest for-profit colleges and put it out of business. Donald Trump ran a for-profit college, Trump University, that was forced to pay $25 million to the students it scammed,” she said. It’s a good start but only that. Harris has taken on a thorny task of just having 105 days left to mount a campaign and defeat the aging autocrat named Donald Trump. I assume we will know soon enough if this auspicious start gains and maintains traction and momentum. MAGA, meanwhile, seems to have been thrown into some degree of disarray. Don’t ever underestimate the Trump team’s own ineptitude and rank stupidity. You would think they had been developing a Plan B but that would actually require a coherent Plan A. The GOP is no longer a Republican Party that tolerates internal differences and constructive dissent nor even any internal debate. No. It’s an autocratic movement whose agency is dictated and regulated by The Boss. And The Boss ain’t that smart even if only he makes the big decisions. The MAGGATS have been described by some as “clowns with flamethrowers” and it is often the clown aspect of their personality that dominates. The mediasphere is now filled with some pretty negative reporting not only about the unvetted person of J.D. Vance but also with manifold reports of “buyers remorse” and “second thoughts” about the choice Trump made (not that one single Republican would dare tell Il Capo di Tutti Capi anything like that to his face). A whole gaggle of Republicans are quoted off the record saying that Vance was chosen to grow the hard-line Trump base as the rookie Ohio Senator has staked out the most extreme of positions among those who had been vying for the vice-presidency. Thinking the election was in the bag, Trump saw no need to reach toward the middle. Biden’s exit, and Harris’ entrance reshapes the race however, granting more weight to moderate suburbanites and possible Nikki Haley voters as well as anti-Trump independents — among all of whom J.D. Vance is about as popular as Hitler’s Bar Mitzvah present. From the Daily Beast: “Presumably, Trump chose Vance as his VP candidate largely to fire up the MAGA base and boost the Republican ticket in Rust Belt states. But that was a choice made when Biden was still heading the Democratic ticket. Now that he’s not, Vance may well become a liability.” “Vance’s strict anti-abortion positions of the past, and a string of highly contentious statements he’s made about divorce, implying that women trapped in abusive marriages should remain married for the sake of the kids, aren’t likely to be forgotten. In 2021, he suggested ending marriages that were “maybe even violent” as selfish. “This is one of the great tricks that the sexual revolution pulled on the American populace,” he said. “Making it easier for people to shift spouses like they change their underwear.” “He’s also a strict pro-natalist, characterizing those who don’t have kids as “childless cat ladies,” and suggesting that people with children should be given additional votes. He has taken aim at childcare subsidies as “class war against normal people,” despite — or maybe because — such subsidies provide women with young kids more opportunities to work or go to school and be independent.” A final thought for the moment that I am addressing directly to the overwhelming majority of Coop Scoop readers who are liberals, progressives, socialists, leftists and trouble makers. We have exactly 105 days left to maintain the republic, to maintain rule of law, to maintain a modicum of constitutional democracy and that means we have zero time to play around, daydream, wishcast, or fuck around in any other way. The debate over the Democratic candidate is now over. The candidate is in place, effectively. I will vote for her as I would vote for any Democrat to block Donald Trump. Those who delude themselves into thinking that this election is some sort of extension of the Great Reckoning of 2020 are, yes, deluding themselves. That moment came and has now gone and has been replaced by nationalist fascist-adjacent narratives coming from MAGA and resonating too well among a population who, I for one believe, is still living in sublimated aftershocks of the pandemic. That’s a complicated way of saying that Harris as prosecutor was a negative in 2020 but just might be a positive today. And if you do not fully recognize that liberals, progressives and leftists are now appropriately on the defensive then you need a reality check. This election is not about setting the table for progressive reform. It’s about getting the Republic to survive until January 2025 so we can at least talk about reform and social change because if Trump comes back to power…..well, you know. There are some out there on the left fringe (to my rather classic Marxist-trained mind they are way more fringe than left) who today are still proclaiming they will not vote for Harris because she too is guilty of genocide against Palestinians. In this case, I am referring to former Sanders spox Briana Joy Gray who has joined the vanguard of super-leftists like Krystal Ball and other Youtube and Twitter revolutionaries in arguing that, hey, Trump isn’t really a fascist and the Democrats are authoritarian tools of the banks and campaigning against Palestinian genocide (which has not happened) is more pressing than stopping an authoritarian take over of the US. I heard Rep. Pramila Jaypapal, leader of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, endorsing Harris and saying she was convinced that the candidate represents a new opportunity to reset or modify the relationship with Israel. Harris does not carry all the pro-Israeli baggage Joe hauled over from his decades in the Senate. I am hoping that Jayapal’s common sense will filter down to some of the younger voters so exercised over Palestine. I will use this historical example to make my current point. I lived in Italy from 1976-79 when the Left peaked but did not form a government. An armed, I would say terrorist, organization emerged known as the Red Brigades who were outraged that the Italian Communists were so moderate (they were). So their strategy was to assassinate Communist union leaders along with some Christian Democrats here and there. The rest of the militant Italian left engaged in a debate as to whether or not the Red Brigades were “mistaken comrades or common criminals”). In fact, they were terrorist criminals. I cite this example not because folks like Briana Joy Gray, or Chris Hedges, or Matt Taibbi, or Katie Halper are also “terrorists” in the current fable I am spinning. No way. They would probably pee their pants if they held a gun. No. They are not terrorists. BUT… they are also NOT our “mistaken comrades” or friends or allies. They have become our political enemies and they should be branded as such, ostracized, and denounced as being objectively allies of Donald Trump. They don’t think they are. That’s because they are diseased with ideology and cannot see reality. And yet, the only possible effect they can have on this election is to pull a few thousand votes in a swing state and swing it to Trump. There is no other impact these third parties will have. Even the old argument that they are in the race to just “raise issues” that are otherwise ignored won’t hold water. This is 2024 not 1964 and the lefty and progressive issues DO get raised now because there is a vibrant progressive faction, even a small social democratic faction, inside the Democratic Party. Remember, Bernie Sanders won about a third of the Democratic primary vote, So, to Briana Joy Gray, to Jill Stein, to Marianne Williamson, to all those who swaddle themselves in some sort of political purity as an “alternative”=== go to hell and do not pass Go and you certainly do not collect $200.. You are not our allies. You are not our friend or comrades. You are obstacles to freedom. We need to defeat you along with Trump because you are acting as accelerants to authoritarian rule. And if he could pull anything together that even remotely resembled a campaign, the same goes for Cornel West who was once a respectable dissident voice but has now declined into a bitter ego-driven vote syphon for Brother Trump, and only because he still resents Obama not appointing him to some position. Ugh. We have restarted our motors. Pedal to the metal. We have some fascists to beat like our parents and grandparents did in Europe and the Pacific. Let’s get on with it. +++
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