"Would You Click This Link?" - Bob Rankin

Click here for a useful article at Bob Rankin entitled "Would You Click This Link?" It has some useful information about email scams.

True Trump Believers Are A Lost Cause

Click here for an article by John Pavlovitz, at johnpavlovitz.com, entitled "The Indictments of Trump are Indictments of His Supporters."

The article begins:

He’s been indicted again, this time for trying to override the voices and votes of the American people in order to steal an election and permanently install himself as a dictator.

These are offenses of the presidency more traitorous and sobering than anything we’ve witnessed in our young nation’s turbulent lifetime.

Sadly, that isn’t the story here.

There were days when far less than these charges would have elicited repulsion from patriotic Americans.

There were days such things would been dealbreakers.

They aren’t anymore.

That is the story.

Pavlovitz presents a list of Trump's offenses, and says of his followers:

They have served to ratify with laser precision the the complete tribal sickness that a terrifying portion of this nation has found itself afflicted with. There is no bridge too far. There is no uncrossable line. There is no unpardonable sin. He is incapable of losing their steadfast adoration.

The cognitive dissonance were living around simply escapes comprehension:
10 Commandments-wielding Christians embracing a profane and predatory pathological liar proven to have sexually abused at least one woman. “Don’t Tread on Me” patriots continually falling prostrate before the very one with his foot upon their collective necks. Self-identified morality police celebrating a prolific purveyor of every kind of wickedness.

The article concludes:

Many of us have wasted countless hours trying to figure out the whys of this recent mass exodus from decency: these denials of Science, celebrations of discrimination, defenses of fascism, embraces of cruelty. This is a natural but fruitless pursuit at this point.

It may be that a cocktail of indoctrination and manipulation have rendered people unable to diverge from Donald Trump.

It may be that political self-preservation keeps them tethered to the Republican Party no matter how low the bottom runs.

It may be that pride prevents them from simply admitting that they once made a terrible mistake, and to avoid such a confession they will continue to make it.

Either way, we are left with the same sobering, infuriating, terrifying truth: to a large swath of the people we share this place and time with, it doesn’t matter what he does or how many people are irreparably harmed by his growing legacy of documented crimes and moral offenses—they are riding him into the abyss.

The rest of us cannot be pulled in with them.

We who remember what this nation aspires to and who believe simple goodness is a still hill worth defending (regardless of their past political affiliations), need to make sure that power is not placed in hands of someone like Donald Trump or those whose hearts provide safe harbor to his hatred.

In the coming days we need to find our collective influence and use it to declare unequivocally that this nation will not allow its legacy to be decided by this man and his movement.

 

 

"This is extremely dangerous to our democracy."

Showed this classic video to my pops last night and he was blown away, which made me realize how effective this compilation is for waking folks up to just how fake the Fake News Media really is.

Please download it and text it to your friends & family who are still asleep 🙏🏼🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/CQ7xhPwUvW

— TheStormHasArrived (@TheStormRedux) December 22, 2023

A generous gift from Donald Trump

A generous gift? From Donald Trump?? Yeah, right.

Since it’s Christmas time, let’s revisit Trump’s generous gift to Charlie Sheen. pic.twitter.com/LiXavvsFBJ

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) December 24, 2023

Carol of the Bells

"Pray for peace in Ukraine and around the world."

🇺🇦 💕 Carol of the Bells (Schedryk) performed by Angelina Usanova. We keep Ukraine in our minds during this Christmas season for the 2nd year in a row, as the nation bravely continues to fight for her survival. pic.twitter.com/LjfTlXpHKB

— Igor Sushko (@igorsushko) December 23, 2023

Your mind plays tricks.

Incredible https://t.co/cSksArovW1

— Kathy Jones-Hospod (@JonesHospodTX) December 23, 2023

This is what the country is up against.

 <blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-media-max-width="560"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Are they all going to be orange now? 🧐🧐 <a href="https://t.co/RYgnHMSEiI">https://t.co/RYgnHMSEiI</a></p>&mdash; MsMariaBlack Covid Cave Dweller (@Msmariablack) <a href="https://twitter.com/Msmariablack/status/1738396094688612830?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">December 23, 2023</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

Long Live the Gävle Goat!

 

Click here for an article at Forking Paths by Brian Klaas entitled "Will the Gävle Goat survive this Christmas?" According to the article, the struggle over the Goat represents

the eternal battle between goat-erectors and goat-burners; between the forces of cozy commercialization, eager to smother the season in ribbons, presents, and sparkly lights, and the contrasting, primeval urge to set something huge on fire because the sun has disappeared and who knows when it’s coming back.

 

Cats -- what would we do without them?

...and that's how nuclear fission works. https://t.co/YYyrOvP3XH

— Driftglass, Guardian of Inconvenient History (@Mr_Electrico) December 22, 2023

Shamelessness is their superpower.

Joe Rogan has the most popular podcast, with tens of millions of listners.

You can hear the cognitive dissonance gears grinding in Rogan's big, dumb melon.

But it'll pass.

Because with these meatbags, it always passes. https://t.co/8cLAjL9Nwn

— Driftglass, Guardian of Inconvenient History (@Mr_Electrico) December 22, 2023

John Oliver v. Elon Musk

John Oliver uses his final show of 2023 to skewer Elon Musk for half an hour.

 

J

St. Ronald of Reagan

Click here for an article in Salon from February 16, 2016, by Brady Carlson, entitled "They're trying to deify Ronald Reagan: Inside the right-wing plot to turn the Gipper into a modern-day God." It describes Grover Norquist's Ronald Reagan Legacy Project.

Norquist, of course, famously said ""I'm not in favor of abolishing the government. I just want to shrink it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub." I used to consider Norquist to be the most influential non-elected Republican; he's faded from the limelight in recent years, even though he's a mere 67 years old. I guess his poisonous conservative views are considered to be too moderate for the MAGA crowd.

Carlson says: "If the public thought of Reagan, as Norquist did, as a top-tier historic figure, there would be a Reagan mantle for modern conservatives to claim as their own."

Not everyone is enamored of Norquist's project:

Even some staunch Reaganites joined in the criticism; commentator George Will wrote there was “something un-Reaganesque about trying to plaster his name all over the country the way Lenin was plastered over Eastern Europe, Mao over China and Saddam Hussein all over Iraq.”

The project has indisputably been successful:

In 2000, when the Legacy Project was just a few years old, Gallup Poll respondents ranked Reagan as a better-than-average US president; today, he usually ranks near the top, with John F. Kennedy and Abraham Lincoln.

Sigh.

Rick Perlstein on presidential pardons, January 14, 2021

Click here  for an article in The New Yorker by Isaac Chotiner entitled "The Lessons of the Nixon Pardon," dated January 14, 2021 (after the insurrection and a week before Biden's inauguration) in which Chotiner interviews historian Rick Perlstein.

After Ford's pardon of Nixon, Carl Bernstein called Bob Woodward and said, “The son of a bitch pardoned the son of a bitch.” That really seemed to express a pretty widespread national sentiment, as Ford’s approval rating dropped from seventy-one per cent to forty-nine per cent.

Ford's opinion was that if Nixon went to trial, it would be so disruptive and divisive to the operation of the country that it wasn't worth it. In relation to a possible trial of Trump, Perlstein says "any kind of accountability for Trump will require a big chunk of the Senate calendar. In order to be President and govern the country, Joe Biden needs to nominate and have confirmed all sorts of key officials, and that’s going to be difficult work in any event. He’s talking about taking up half the Senate calendar with impeachment."

Asked about the damage to the country resulting from allowing Nixon to go unpunished, Perlstein said; 

I think the cost to the country was colossal. I think it caused a cascade of élite wrongdoing that was specifically enabled by this single act of determining that the Presidency was “too big to fail."

Perlstein goes on to say:

And of course, quite often, justice is destabilizing. Achieving African-American civil rights was destabilizing. Achieving the vote for women was destabilizing, and I’m sure investigating the bribery at Teapot Dome in the nineteen-twenties was divisive. But doing the work of reckoning does all kinds of other important things. It sends a signal that lawbreaking won’t be tolerated."

And of course, if you don't send that signal, wrongdoers are encouraged to act. Had Nixon been tried, convicted, and punished, would Poppy Bush have been more reluctant to get into the Iran-Contra affair, as a result of which several administration officials were indicted and convicted, including Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger? So the wrongdoers were indicted, convicted, and punished, and all is well in Voltaire's "best of all possible worlds"? Sorry, no: They were pardoned by Poppy Bush.

When Obama was elected in 2008, there was a strong push to indict W, Cheney, and Rumsfeld for war crimes (and possibly other administration figures as well), but Obama's famous response was “We need to look forward and not backward.” Yet again, wrongdoing is not punished.

Persltein finds it poetic that the Republican opposition to Trump is led by Liz Cheney, and says:

"If Trump becomes the Herbert Hoover of the twenty-first century, that kind of one-word summary of all that was failed and illegitimate, then what we’re left with as the operational ideology of the Republican Party is Cheneyism. Not only does that revive the family name but it moves the Overton window to the right. The amount of executive malfeasance that is acceptable to official Washington is what Cheney did because it sure is better than what Trump did. It’s a fascinating multigenerational thing going on here."

Witch Hunt

Click here for an article at Substack by Robert Reich entitled "Who's really behind the drive to impeach Joe Biden?" He answers his own question with the article's subtitle: "The same person who sought Zelensky's help in digging up dirt on Hunter and Joe."

It's a witch hunt, of course. Hunter has done some wrong and possibly criminal things -- but Hunter's not running for office. The Republicans have been unable to tie any of Hunter's wrongdoings  to his father, but that's irrelevant to Republicans if they can smear and tarnish the president with an investigation.

Yeah, Darth Vader is one scary dude

A post by Mark Hamill (aka Luke Skywalker):

This one never fails to amuse me. 😆#DogVader https://t.co/qEi9U3XSFG

— Mark Hamill (@MarkHamill) December 12, 2023

Robert Reich video on monopolism in agriculture

Why's meat so expensive? Could it be corporate price-fixing?

The price of Tyson chicken went up 20% in 2021, which helped the company double its profits.

But over the past three years, Tyson has had to pay ~$220 million over price-fixing allegations.

Hello? pic.twitter.com/d6GsCAdQTX

— Robert Reich (@RBReich) December 10, 2023

Surprise!

This a 6-part series of tweets; click to open, and follow for much more.

This is so striking. I bet 0.000001% of the population knows this, and that includes highly engaged politically minded people. https://t.co/OdqGpn9JgI

— David Roberts (@drvolts) December 8, 2023

Be afraid ... be very afraid ...

#Shenanigans 😂 pic.twitter.com/RbKVDmHVrO

— 🍸ⓁⒶⓃⒺ🍸 (@lanechanged) December 8, 2023

I want one of these!

This is just good therapy. pic.twitter.com/5ByIrQlrsJ

— Paul Ahticks (@PaulAhticks) December 7, 2023

Yes, there's something familiar about this.

Sound familiar??? pic.twitter.com/JjAacV3SYg

— Kaylan_TX (@Kaylan_TX) December 7, 2023

Republicans Block Ukraine Funding -- Russians Rejoice

Click here for an article at The Daily Beast by Julia Davis, entitled "Putin's Pals Think the GOP Just Won Them the War in Ukraine." Subtitle, "Kremlin propagandists celebrate the Republican move to block funding and predict President Trump will totally cut off Ukraine and Israel."

This is a roundup of programs and articles in Russian TV and print media celebrating Republicans' efforts to cut off funding for Ukraine: 

“This will be a great revelation to other countries. It is even more dangerous to be a friend of the United States than its enemy. In the end, they will abandon you, leaving nothing but the scorched earth on your territory.”

Commentators throughout the war have been saying that Russia's plan was to outlast Western support, which they predicted would crumble when the United States lost interest and decided the price was too high. Unfortunately, that may be happening.

And the Russians are big Trump supporters:

While the Russians are pleased with Republicans, they believe that Donald Trump could do even better. The Kremlin’s mouthpieces make no secret of their desire to see Trump return to the White House and now they have yet another incentive. Appearing on The Evening With Vladimir Solovyov Tuesday night, Dmitry Drobnitsky predicted that if Trump wins the presidency, he will ditch not only Ukraine but also Israel. He explained that he no longer has to demonstrate being a pro-Israel president to his evangelical base. Drobnitsky said, “Trump already gave them all that he could: the Golan Heights, Jerusalem, and everything else. He already paid them in full. Now, after the empire of Sheldon Adelson has turned away from him, he owes them nothing.”

They're not big Biden fans:

America analyst Dmitry Drobnitsky noted, “The downfall of Ukraine means the downfall of Biden! Two birds with one stone!”

During his appearance on [the Russian program] 60 Minutes, Dmitry Abzalov, president of the Center for Strategic Communications, predicted that the fiasco with the funding for Ukraine will spell the political demise of Biden. Host Olga Skabeeva added, “We’ll have no pity for him! To the contrary, we’re ready to hammer those final nails right in!” With a happy grin, Skabeeva said, “Well done, Republicans! They’re standing firm! That’s good for us.”

Russia, Russia, Russia -- a hoax? Yeah, right.

 

Heather Cox Richardson interviews President Biden

Historian Heather Cox Richardson interviews President Biden on March 4, 2022. Try to imagine Trump in an interview situation like this one.

Click here for the half-hour interview.

Okay, This Is Scary As Hell.

Click here for an article in The New York Times by David French, entitled "It's Time to Fix America's Most Dangerous Law."

It concerns The Insurrection Act (1792), "a federal law that permits the president to deploy military troops in American communities to effectively act as a domestic police force under his direct command." French calls it a law "that Donald Trump, if re-elected president, could use to destroy our republic."

 French writes that one section of the Act "gives the president the ability to call out the National Guard or the regular army 'whenever the president considers that unlawful obstructions, combinations, or assemblages, or rebellion against the authority of the United States, make it impracticable to enforce the laws of the United States in any state by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings.' Note the key language: 'whenever the president considers.' That means deployment is up to him and to him alone."

Another section "grants the president the power to 'take such measures he considers necessary' to suppress 'any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination or conspiracy.' This broad grant of power makes the Insurrection Act far more immediately dangerous than many other threatened Trump actions, such as prosecuting political opponents and transforming the federal work force. Judicial review can blunt many of Trump’s worst initiatives, but there’s no such obvious check on the use of his power under the Act." 

What could happen? "An angry, vindictive president could send regular army troops straight into American cities at the first hint of protest. This would place both the American polity and the American military under immense strain. While the former consequence may be more obvious, the latter is also important. Many soldiers would be deeply unhappy to be deployed against their countrymen and would be rightly concerned that a reckless deployment would be accompanied by reckless orders. Dominating the streets of New York is not the mission they signed up for."

You might wonder why the Insurrection Act hasn’t presented much of a problem before now. It’s been used rarely, and when it has been used, it’s been used for legitimate purposes. For example, it was used repeatedly to suppress racist violence in the South during the Reconstruction era and the civil rights movement. Most recently, George H.W. Bush invoked it in 1992 — at the request of the governor of California — to assist in quelling the extreme violence of the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles.

That historical restraint has been dependent on a factor that is utterly absent from Trump: a basic commitment to the Constitution and democracy. Previous presidents, for all their many flaws, still largely upheld and respected the rule of law. Even in their most corrupt moments, there were lines they wouldn’t cross. Trump not only has no such lines but also has made his vengeful intentions abundantly clear.

The article concludes:

When you read misguided laws like the Insurrection Act, you realize that the long survival of the American republic is partly a result of good fortune. Congress, acting over decades, has gradually granted presidents far too much power, foolishly trusting them to act with at least a minimal level of integrity and decency.

Trump has demonstrated that trust is no longer a luxury we can afford. It’s time to take from presidents a power they never should have possessed. No man or woman should be able to unilaterally deploy the armed forces to control America’s streets.

 

 

Henry Kissinger: RIP?

Click here for an article by Robert Reich on Substack entitled "Henry Kissinger, 1923-2023. War criminal."

He discusses at some length Kissinger's malevolent involvement in Pinochet's violent overthrow of Salvador Allende's democratically elected government in Chile, a military coup with thousands tortured, murdered, and executed. Allende referred to his government policy as "the Chilean way to socialism," which of course was anathema to Nixon and his merry band, so they turned a blind eye to Pinochet's bloodsoaked regime from 1973 to 1990.

Reich focuses his article on Chile, but that was only one of a number of places where Kissinger could justifiably have been prosecuted for war crimes. Another was the bombing of Cambodia during the Vietnam War. Here's what Anthony Bourdain posted on Twitter about Kissinger and Cambodia in 2001:

"Once you've been to Cambodia, you'll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands. You will never again be able to open a newspaper and read about that treacherous, prevaricating, murderous scumbag sitting down for a nice chat with Charlie Rose or attending some black-tie affair for a new glossy magazine without choking. Witness what Henry did in Cambodia -- the fruits of his genius for statesmanship -- and you will never understand why he's not sitting in the dock at The Hague next to Milosevic."

Authoritarians foster chaos

I'm posting this for the second video clip in this tweet, a minute and 13 seconds of Rachel Maddow explaining how authoritarians work to muddy the waters so badly that no one trusts anything to be true. The tweet refers to Doug Ford making authoritarian moves in Ontario, but it really applies to authoritarians everywhere. They want us to believe that democracy doesn't work, and "only I can fix it," to quote a well-known U.S. authoritarian wannabe.

Doug Ford is an authoritarian 👇 https://t.co/0wHL7FLMVj

— Bev (@Garnet_2203) November 28, 2023

Careful with those commas!

Click here for an article at ABC News entitled "Pence told Jan. 6 special counsel harrowing details about 2020 aftermath, warnings to Trump: Sources," subtitled "The former VP is the top official known to have spoken with investigators."

It's an interesting article, but I like the piece about the disputed comma placement:

Sources said that investigators' questioning became so granular at times that they pressed Pence over the placement of a comma in his book: When recounting a phone call with Trump on Christmas Day 2020, Pence wrote in his book that he told Trump, "You know, I don't think I have the authority to change the outcome" of the election on Jan. 6.

But Pence allegedly told Smith's investigators that the comma should have never been placed there. According to sources, Pence told Smith's investigators that he actually meant to write in his book that he admonished Trump, "You know I don't think I have the authority to change the outcome," suggesting Trump was well aware of the limitations of Pence's authority days before Jan. 6 -- a line Smith includes in his indictment.

"You know, I don't think" and "You know I don't think" express different thoughts.

(I can't resist adding a favorite quotation of mine from Oscar Wilde: "I have spent half a day deciding to use a comma -- and the other half deciding to take it out again.") Careful with those commas!

Click here for an article on Substack by Robert Reich, entitled "Four ways the mainstream media is quietly helping Trump and his Republican allies."

First, it’s drawing a false equivalence between Trump and Biden — claiming that Biden’s political handicap is his age, while Trump’s corresponding handicap is his criminal indictments.

Secondly, every time the mainstream media reports on another move by Trump and his Republican allies toward neofascism, it tries to balance its coverage by pointing out some fault in the Democratic Party (such as the ongoing federal corruption and bribery case against Senator Bob Menendez).

It makes it seem as if the dysfunction in Washington is coming from both parties.  

Finally, blaming both sides for this chaos plays into Trump’s and his allies’ goal of wanting Americans to believe the nation has become ungovernable, so it needs a strongman.

Bothsiderism: the fiction that the two parties are equally bad; or that to be fair and evenhanded, criticism of one side must be tempered by criticism of the other.

That point of view may have some validity when discussing two parties behaving in the way we've become accustomed to over the last 75 years. But when one party -- but not the other -- has gone off the rails, the principle no longer applies.

Robert Reich on AI

 Be afraid. Be very afraid.

And click here for an article by Robert Reich discussing AI and concluding:

Which all goes to show that the real Frankenstein monster of AI is human greed.  

He believes that Sam Altman, CEO of Open AI (which has a capped profit structure and nonprofit board and in which Microsoft has a huge stake) was forced out by board members of the nonprofit group because he was leaning too far toward Microsoft's desire to generate profits and away from the objectives of the nonprofit that Open AI was set up to be.

Altman went to Microsoft. A huge majority of Open AI's approximately 700 employees signed a letter saying they would all quit and go to Microsoft too if Altman was not reinstated (because Altman was moving in the directon of profit, when "they own stock in the company and will make a boatload of money if Open AI prioritizes growth over safety. It’s estimated that OpenAI could be worth between $80 billion to $90 billion in a tender offer — making it one of the world’s most valuable tech start-ups of all time," and "Everyone involved — including Altman, OpenAI’s employees, and even Microsoft — will make much more money if OpenAI survives and they can sell their shares in the tender offer."

So Open AI will  follow the Microsoft path, "making gobs of money." Reich concludes:

This past week’s frantic battle over OpenAI shows that not even a nonprofit board with a capped profit structure for investors can match the power of Big Tech and Wall Street. 

Money triumphs in the end.

The question for the future is whether the government — also susceptible to the corruption of big money — can do a better job weighing the potential benefits of AI against its potential horrors, and regulate the monster.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Robert Reich: Gouging By Airlines (and others)

4.7 million Americans will be flying this week, the highest number of Thanksgiving air travelers in nearly two decades.

If you're traveling, be kind to those around you.

And remember that flying sucks so much these days because of the greed of the airlines. pic.twitter.com/IpmN47IbVo

— Robert Reich (@RBReich) November 22, 2023

The Republican Case In Trump's Favor

This is a video clip at Article 3 Project (A3P) claiming that the charges against Trump are politically motivated. Almost entirely fact-free, with lots of ominous innuendo.

NEW: Article III Project's latest ad lays out the fight against the lawfare used on President Trump.https://t.co/BYacisbKQP pic.twitter.com/TP2DRDonVl

— The Article III Project (A3P) (@Article3Project) November 17, 2023

Mike Davis, the guy behind A3P, is being touted by Steve Bannon and Don Jr., among others, to be Trump's Attorney General, a position he is apparently trying out for. He’s said he’d toss opponents in “the gulag,” said they're going to deport 10 million people, and “We're going to put kids in cages; it's going to be glorious,” and told his followers to “arm up” against “the violent black underclass.” “This is almost comically pathetic chest-beating of a creepy dork," says Chris Hayes, about a Twitter clip where Davis promises to put Mehdi Hasan "in the gulag" when he is AG. Here's another one, a two-minute clip posted by icebergz99, which says: "Here it is!! Keep this moving, spread it Fast!! They keep taking it down, but we keep putting it back up."

NEW: Article III Project's latest ad lays out the fight against the lawfare used on President Trump.https://t.co/BYacisbKQP pic.twitter.com/TP2DRDonVl

— The Article III Project (A3P) (@Article3Project) November 17, 2023

In another post, iceberg says: "During the cease and desist order this was taken down from my page 3 times. This was the fourth time I put it up, but the order was removed (court dismissed) and I have been able to keep it up. Still waiting for Twit to find it offensive and drop it on me…." As if it's some kind of dynamite that the Democrats don't want you to see. It's entirely fact-free, with a bunch of mini-clips intended to put Democrats in a bad light and make Trump look powerful and presidential (shades of The Apprentice). But it gets praise from people who say it's the best video they ever saw, and posts like this one: "Gave me chills, so powerful, moving - that’s our real leader! Made promises, kept promises all while fighting the Deep State and RINOS! PDJT 2024 MAGA!!" Funny, but similar clips and posts on Twitter never defend Trump or offer any support for their claims he's being unfairly prosecuted; they're just empty propaganda.

Republican Lies About Immigration

Click here for an article at MSNBC by Julio Ricardo Varela entitled "This new report reveals the depths of the GOP's lies about immigration."

A report from the Pew Research Center says that the estimated total of unauthorized peaked in 2007, under W., at 12.2 million and has been declining ever since, until 2021, the last year for which figures are available, to 10.5 million. The decline has continued, says Pew, "since apprehensions and expulsions of migrants along the U.S.-Mexico border started increasing in March 2021.”

If those numbers shock you, then there’s a reason for it. Not a week goes by without somebody in the Republican Party promising mass deportations of unauthorized migrants. They can’t talk about the U.S. border with Mexico without falsely describing it as “open.”

Once proudly described as a nation of immigrants, the United States has become a nation of immigration enforcers thanks to Republicans making immigration a wedge issue that too many Democrats are afraid to challenge.

Republicans say that they don’t mind immigrants entering the country legally; they want to decrease the number coming in illegally. Well, that’s exactly what’s been happening.

Another interesting statistic is that while unauthorized immigration has decreased by 14%, legal immigration has increased by 29%. The number of naturalized citizens has grown by 49%. 

And the majority of unauthorized immigrants arrive not over the southern border, despite Republican fearmongering, but by people who arrive legally as tourists and overstay their visa.

The differences in perception between the two parties are stark: " 73% of Republicans believe that “American culture and way of life” has “mostly changed for the worse” since the 1950s. Only 34% of Democrats feel the same way. This is the same survey that found a third of Republicans “believe that true American patriots may have to resort to violence to save the country.” Such views align with a 2021 Pew poll showing clear partisan lines between conservative Republicans (38%) who see the decrease in a white majority to be bad for the country and liberal Democrats (32%) who see it as a good thing.

But Republican fearmongering has not convinced the majority of Americans that immigration is a bad thing:

When asked about levels of immigration, 57% either want it to remain at or above its present levels, while 41% favor a decrease in our immigration levels. Constant news of a so-called “invasion” coming almost exclusively from Republican politicians and their right-wing allies may contribute to the views of that 41%.

The article closes:

The roughly 10.5 million undocumented people in the United States are not faceless, and there is enough political support out there to make sure they are seen as the human beings they are. Republicans might be excoriating them, which is dangerous and terrifying, especially for immigrant communities, but those same immigrants help form the fabric of American society. Distorting statistical reality for GOP political expediency is now the standard. But Thursday’s Pew report gives Democrats the opportunity to radically change the conversation.

Perhaps Trump's recent grandiose announcements of creating huge concentration camps and deportations of millions a year will be more difficult than Stephen Miller expects.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We can learn a lot from dogs!

Sharing is good pic.twitter.com/t909PfOKm7

— Enez Özen | Enezator (@Enezator) November 12, 2023

Robert Reich: Pro-Union Video Clip (4 minutes)

71% of Americans approve of unions. So why do nearly all Republican lawmakers in Congress oppose proposals that would make it easier to unionize?

It’s simple: they’re terrified.

Nothing scares the GOP more than working people recognizing their collective power. pic.twitter.com/BD4kqM0oCC

— Robert Reich (@RBReich) November 12, 2023

Election Turnout by Age

It’s an unsolvable mystery as to why politicians pander to 60+ year olds. pic.twitter.com/ptKjyt1IkB

— A. Human (@OddThinks) November 10, 2023

Lawsuits Pending Over 2020 Election Lies

An article in Vanity Fair by Brian Stelter, entitled "Dominion's Fox News Case Was Just the Beginning," referring to the successful Dominion lawsuit against Fox News,which resulted in the media giant paying $787.5 million in April to settle that case. Dominion has “lawsuits pending against Newsmax, One America News, Mike Lindell and MyPillow, Sidney Powell and her law firm, Rudy Giuliani, and Patrick Byrne. 

The suits are moving more slowly than the Fox case “because most of them are in DC, and the DC courts are very busy, still to this day, with a lot of the January 6 cases,”

 Another election technology company, Smartmatic, is also suing Fox, Newsmax, and other defendants. “Smartmatic is a global company that was injured on a global scale,” attorney J. Erik Connolly told Stelter for the book. “The damages are much bigger.”

(I'm trying out an app called Textmaker which allows you to hightlight text in an article you're reading. Unfortunately, it has a few quirks that I may or may not be able to fix. One is that you can't selectively de-highlight marks you've made; if you've made a number of highlights in an article, you do have the option of deleting them all, but not individually. The second is that if you cut and paste, the highlighting remains, as above. I'll be trying to get around this in the future.)

Click here for an article at The New York Times by Charlie Savage, Maggie Haberman, and Jonathan Swan, entitled "Sweeping Raids, Giant Camps and Mass Deportations: Inside Trump's 2025 Immigration Plans," subtitled "If he regains power, Donald Trump wants not only to revive some of the immigration policies criticized as draconian during his presidency, but expand and toughen them."

Something to remember is that this is not Trump's plan, because Trump doesn't plan: he reacts. This strategy is being drawn up by Stephen Miller.

Mr. Trump and his advisers see the opening, and now know better how to seize it. The aides Mr. Trump relied upon in the chaotic early days of his first term were sometimes at odds and lacked experience in how to manipulate the levers of federal power. By the end of his first term, cabinet officials and lawyers who sought to restrain some of his actions — like his Homeland Security secretary and chief of staff, John F. Kelly — had been fired, and those who stuck with him had learned much.

In a second term, Mr. Trump plans to install a team that will not restrain him.

Since much of Mr. Trump’s first-term immigration crackdown was tied up in the courts, the legal environment has tilted in his favor: His four years of judicial appointments left behind federal appellate courts and a Supreme Court that are far more conservative than the courts that heard challenges to his first-term policies.

 It's going to be a scary world for the millions of undocumented immigrants; he is "preparing to round up undocumented people already in the United States on a vast scale and detain them in sprawling camps while they wait to be expelled."

He plans to scour the country for unauthorized immigrants and deport people by the millions per year.

To help speed mass deportations, Mr. Trump is preparing an enormous expansion of a form of removal that does not require due process hearings. To help Immigration and Customs Enforcement carry out sweeping raids, he plans to reassign other federal agents and deputize local police officers and National Guard soldiers voluntarily contributed by Republican-run states.

To ease the strain on ICE detention facilities, Mr. Trump wants to build huge camps to detain people while their cases are processed and they await deportation flights. And to get around any refusal by Congress to appropriate the necessary funds, Mr. Trump would redirect money in the military budget, as he did in his first term to spend more on a border wall than Congress had authorized.

 The article says:

The constellation of Mr. Trump’s 2025 plans amounts to an assault on immigration on a scale unseen in modern American history. Millions of undocumented immigrants would be barred from the country or uprooted from it years or even decades after settling here.

There's a lot more, and it promises an ugly police-state society. A second term for Trump would be a complete disaster.

Trump's Henchmen Plans For Takeover

Click here for an article by Robert Reich at Substack entitled "What is Trump planning if he gets a second chance? Chaos and consolidation," subtitled "Be worried. Be really worried."

What does Trump have planned? Nothing. Trump doesn't plan: He reacts. But he has a group of minions, many of whom are led by the unholy triumvirate of Bannon, Flynn, and Stone, who have plans -- a lot of them -- and they're not going to be good.

If Trump learned one thing during his four years as president, it’s that he doesn’t want anyone to tell him what he cannot do. All he wants are people to help him do what he wants to do.

They plan to prosecute opponents like Biden, and former Trump people who have turned against him -- Barr, Milley, Kelly --  and to reward people he perceives as having fought for him -- like those imprisoned for their conduct on January 6.

How do Americans feel about politics?” The New York Times asked a few weeks ago, answering in the same headline: “Disgust isn’t a strong enough word.”

Trump and his allies want us to be disgusted. They want us to believe that America is ungovernable – and is becoming more so, as long as power remains diffused. They want us to think we need an authoritarian strongman — Trump — to concentrate power and take over everything.

The article has a lot more in this vein.

SCOTUS Corruption

Click here for an article by Shawn Boburg in The Washington Post entitled "A guide to the friends and patrons of Clarence and Ginni Thomas," subtitled "These are the associates of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife, Ginni, who have given gifts, made payments or otherwise supported the couple based on recent reporting from various news outlets."

It's limited to various gifts, et cetera, from Harlan Crow, Leonard Leo, and H. Wayne Huizenga. Nice to live a billionaire lifestyle on a federal paycheck of roughly a quarter-million a year.

You might think that obvious Supreme Court corruption would be a bipartisan issue; sorry, no. The Democrats, led by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-Rhode Island), are investigating; the Republicans are resisting the investigation tooth and nail. I can't think of one issue where the Republicans are in favor of the little guy, the common man, the underdog. Every issue you can think of, they side with the rich and powerful.

Israel/Palestine

Click here for a long thread unrolled on Twitter. I long ago despaired of trying to figure out the Israel/Palestine situation; this looked like a good article to help me make sense of that horrible problem. (I think if world war breaks out, the Middle East is a flashpoint that may be the origin.)

Robert Reich: Wealth Inequality

Pause the video at 5:30; it's a very interesting graph. It bottoms out around 1970, when I was 22. The world looked bright: I had no qualms about quitting university. Lots of my tradesmen friends had a car, a boat, and a cabin at the lake. CEOs were paid about 30 times as much as their employees. But it was all downhill from there, as the graph climbed steadily higher. In 2020, CEOs were paid 350 times as much as their employees. Real estate prices have skyrocketed. The outlook for a young person just starting out looks bleak to me.

728 billionaires hold more wealth than half of American households. If that doesn’t tell you we’re in a second Gilded Age, I don’t know what will.

It can be easy to feel discouraged, but the first Gilded Age teaches us lessons on how we can fight back. Let me explain. pic.twitter.com/2gXK8IQ4ad

— Robert Reich (@RBReich) November 10, 2023

Teddy Roosevelt - The New Nationalism Speech

Click here for an article at Teaching American History which includes Roosevelt's "New Nationalism" speech. Warning: It's pretty wonky! But Roosevelt lived in a time not unlike our own, the first Gilded Age (it seems we're living in the second). And he has some pretty interesting things to say. Here's the article's introduction to the speech:

Vice President Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) ascended to the presidency after the assassination of William McKinley in 1901. Aligned with the more reformist, progressive wing of the Republican Party, Roosevelt advocated far-reaching policies aimed at, among other things, the regulation and prosecution of monopolies under the Sherman Anti-Trust Act (1890), industrial safety and labor regulations, conservationism, and a muscular foreign policy. Employing a robust understanding of executive authority (he saw the president as the “steward of the people,” authorized to take any action for the people’s good unless that action was expressly prohibited by the Constitution and the laws) and championing the increasing role of administrative agencies to address the challenges of industrial America, Roosevelt was a key figure in the progressives’ transformation of American politics in the early twentieth century. Increasingly, the language of American politics became one of problem solving through the moral, rhetorical leadership of the president and the scientific expertise of administrative experts in the federal bureaucracy.

A year out of office, Roosevelt delivered the following speech in Osawatomie, Kansas, at the dedication of a park built in honor of abolitionist John Brown. Addressing an audience that included many Civil War veterans, his aim was to mend the rift that had emerged between the progressive and conservative wings of the Republican Party since William Howard Taft had assumed the presidency. In the speech, Roosevelt laid out a political platform, much of which was built upon the Square Deal of his own presidency. Roosevelt embraced many of the progressive talking points of the day, especially in his proposals for increased administrative regulation of private business, his remarks on the redistribution of wealth, and his support for the direct primary. He argued that under modern conditions, these and other reforms would help secure the common good and foster greater equality of opportunity for American citizens. He dubbed his program “The New Nationalism,” a term borrowed from Herbert Croly’s seminal 1909 book, The Promise of American Life. Roosevelt used the theme two years later when he broke from the Republicans and ran for the presidency under the banner of the “Bull Moose” Progressive Party.

Bill Gates on AI

Click here for an article by Bill Gates entitled "AI is about to completely change how you use computers"; subtitle, "And upend the software industry."

To do any task on a computer, you have to tell your device which app to use. You can use Microsoft Word and Google Docs to draft a business proposal, but they can’t help you send an email, share a selfie, analyze data, schedule a party, or buy movie tickets. And even the best sites have an incomplete understanding of your work, personal life, interests, and relationships and a limited ability to use this information to do things for you. That’s the kind of thing that is only possible today with another human being, like a close friend or personal assistant.

In the next five years, this will change completely. You won’t have to use different apps for different tasks. You’ll simply tell your device, in everyday language, what you want to do. And depending on how much information you choose to share with it, the software will be able to respond personally because it will have a rich understanding of your life. In the near future, anyone who’s online will be able to have a personal assistant powered by artificial intelligence that’s far beyond today’s technology.

Gates says:

The most exciting impact of AI agents is the way they will democratize services that today are too expensive for most people. They’ll have an especially big influence in four areas: health care, education, productivity, and entertainment and shopping.

He goes on to elaborate how AI will change these four areas.

Eiger wingsuit jump

Click here for an Eiger wingsuit jump. Those guys get way too close to the rock, horizontally, for me. At one point it looks like his fingers must have been brushing the rock on his right. Ten feet to the left and he'd be perfectly safe, and it would still be a lot of fun. I guess they want the danger element for the camera? And he seems to be moving very slowly -- vertically, at least. How slow can those things fall, I wonder?

Jack Smith rebuts Trump's lies

Click here for an article at WaPo by Rachel Weiner, Spencer S. Hsu, and Tom Jackman, entitled "Trump belief that 2020 election was stolen is not a defense, DOJ says," subtitled "Trump claimed he can't be charged with intending to deceive; Special Counsel said his crimes were steeped in lies."

Barb McQuade, former U.S. Attorney and law professor, summarized the legal points in the article in a Twitter thread; you can click here to read it.

 

Bad poll? Dont panic.

Click here for an article at Substack by Robert Reich entitled "Trump v. Biden: How worried should we be?" and subtitled "No reason to panic. Biden will win the 2024 election."

There's a lot of sturm und drang among Democrats, particularly after -- as Reich points out -- a New York Times poll that came out on the weekend showing "that Biden is now trailing Trump by 4 to 10 points among registered voters in the key battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, and Pennsylvania."

Yes, it's alarming; but  Reich goes on to urge calm. It would be a huge mistake if Democrats were to toss Biden because of sudden fear and panic. He closes:

The reality is that Biden is the only person who has beaten Trump. Biden is the incumbent president with all the advantages of incumbency. Biden has shown himself to be a strong campaigner. There is no one to take his place.

If Biden simply continues to be the adult in the room — governing maturely and responsibly — more of the American public will eventually come around to him, including in the swing states. And the more they see that Trump is increasingly unhinged, they will decide that they’d rather have a competent adult in charge.

So my advice is not to panic, not to unduly worry. Biden will need to work hard for it, and the rest of us will have to work very hard in support of him, but Biden will win in 2024.

 

The Bee Lady!

The Bee lady is so amazing pic.twitter.com/wenmwFpTGm

— slaterjonathan (@paulsla1539372) November 6, 2023

By A Nose!

The Winner is the Horse! 💓😂pic.twitter.com/z8ABB1VS2W

— Figen (@TheFigen_) November 6, 2023

Maui fire -- frightening

I subscribe to NYT, so I don't know if this is behind their paywall or not. Sorry.

The New York Times used video evidence, data and interviews to reconstruct the wildfire that raged through Lahaina, once Hawaii’s royal capital. See the deadly Maui inferno, hour by hour. https://t.co/Z7KupqmkhC pic.twitter.com/zZFPmBGOVl

— The New York Times (@nytimes) November 6, 2023

Wonders of Modern Technology - 1930

pic.twitter.com/9VpqRlHFdK

— Fascinating (@fasc1nate) November 6, 2023

Just in case.

I saved this thread, just in case at some time in the future I want to use Twitter's search features (I don't right now).

Before we get started, you might be wondering why you need advanced search?

Your main feed just shows what's being posted NOW.

But there's absolute gold in the old tweets from experts you love + big accounts you follow.

Lots of learning just waiting there for us.

Here's how:

— Tessa Davis (@TessaRDavis) April 8, 2022

Media Cowardice - Democracy Is At Stake

Click here for a courageous article in the Philidelphia Inquirer by Will Bunch, entitled "With the world on fire, a cowardly, timid news media is a threat to U.S. democracy," subtitled "News organizations are using cowardly words to describe killing abroad, fascism at home — downplaying the danger to democracy."

"West Wing" religious philosophy

Whomever made this, bravo!
pic.twitter.com/75H43v32RT

— Majestic (@MajesticResists) November 5, 2023

Workout Partners

Yoga time.. 😊 pic.twitter.com/MiXZKc17jN

— Buitengebieden (@buitengebieden) November 4, 2023

That's some driver's test.

pic.twitter.com/QLk7aOcM8o

— NO CONTEXT HUMANS 👤 (@HumansNoContext) November 4, 2023

Republicans Oppose Investigation of SCOTUS Corruption

You might think that investigation of corruption of Supreme Court justices would be a bipartisan thing -- but you'd be wrong. More proof that Republicans are wrong on everything.

Click here for an article at Talking Points Memo by Kate Riga entitled "Republicans Threaten to Filibuster Subpoena Enforcement And Quash SCOTUS Oversight.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Dick Durbin (D-IL) confirmed Thursday that the committee will vote next week to authorize subpoenas for a few powerful right-wing players known to have intimate, monetary relationships with Supreme Court justices. 

The committee plans to authorize subpoenas next Thursday for Federalist Society founder Leonard Leo and mega-donors Harlan Crow and Robin Arkley II. The vote will almost certainly come down along party lines, as Senate Judiciary Republicans railed against the plan during a Thursday business meeting.

After the recent revelations of obvious corruption by Justices Thomas and Scalito accepting bribes gifts (undeclared for tax purposes), Republicans are going to the wall to defend them, claiming the investigations are political attacks because the justices implicated are conservative.

 

Can you read this? Of course you can.

You may need to have an Instagram account to see this; I don't know.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Gaurav Bharadwaj (@amazingsciencez)

Stars in Motion

You may need to have an Instagram account to read this; I don't know.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Gaurav Bharadwaj (@amazingsciencez)

You can't be too careful!

pic.twitter.com/65IL1VJJob

— NO CONTEXT HUMANS 👤 (@HumansNoContext) November 4, 2023

Yeah, it's pretty cool.

Will humanity ever produce something like this again? pic.twitter.com/1Kh38lyY4t

— Culture Critic (@Culture_Crit) November 3, 2023

Ricky Gervais and David Bowie collaborate on a song

 

I still can’t believe I co-wrote a song with David Bowie. pic.twitter.com/VgYEfZyDVb

— Ricky Gervais (@rickygervais) November 3, 2023

MAGA violence and intimidation

Click here for a Substack article by Robert Reich entitled "Trump the mob boss," subtitled "His threats to mobilize his mob are escalating."

Shortly after the 2016 election, I spoke with a Republican friend who had retired from the Senate years before. I asked him why so many Republican lawmakers remained silent in the face of Trump’s vile lies and bigotry.

After a pause, he said, “Some of his supporters are nuts, and they have guns.”

I laughed, thinking he was joking. He was dead serious. “They’re a dangerous mob, and Trump’s the mob boss,” he added.

He follows with a list of examples of Republican lawmakers being intimidated by MAGA threats to them or their families, and concludes:

Threats and intimidation are hallmarks of mob bosses.

Mob rule is incompatible with democracy.

Rep. Liz Cheney warned a few weeks ago that if Trump is reelected, “all of the things he attempted to do but was stopped from doing by responsible people around him … he will do. There will be no guardrails … . He will unravel the institutions of our democracy.”

People disapprove of comparisons with Hitler, but sometimes they're apt: In the early 1930s, Nazi violence and intimidation frightened off many of his political opponents. 90 years later, an American parallel?

 

Hugely bloated military budget? Perhaps not.

Click here for a Paul Krugman "Opinion" article in The New York Times entitled "Military spending isn't as expensive as you think." 

It starts with an interesting look at the concept of "left" and "right," commonly thought of as too simplistic:  

Well, while people may be complicated, politicians aren’t. Careful statistical analysis of congressional voting shows that politicians are very clearly arrayed along a left-right spectrum (yes, Joe Manchin is the rightmost Democrat, and Susan Collins is the leftmost Republican).

Krugman makes the point that "voters aren’t as easily characterized as politicians, but they, too, seem to be growing more one-dimensional."

Then he gets to the common belief that military spending is excessive:

It’s true that Dwight Eisenhower gave a speech warning about the dangers of the “military-industrial complex.” But he gave that speech in 1961 — that is, his warning was as far in our past as, say, the Spanish-American War was in his. Military spending today is much smaller as a share of the economy than it was then.

He follows with an eye-opening chart that shows that while defense spending as a share of GDP was high in the '50s -- as high as 16 percent at one point and 12 percent in 1961, when Eisenhower gave his famous speech. But since 2000, that figure has been somewhere around 3 to 4 percent -- as high as 6 percent around 2010, but close to 3 percent in the last few years

He concludes: 

So, do we have a hugely bloated military budget? No doubt the Pentagon, like any large organization, wastes a lot of money. But recent events have made the case for spending at least as much as we currently do, and perhaps more.

First, one of the revelations from the war in Ukraine has been that those expensive NATO weapons systems, from Javelin anti-tank missiles to HIMARS, actually do work.

More important, it turns out that the era of large-scale conventional warfare isn’t over after all, and there are real concerns about whether our weapons production capacity is large enough to deal with the potential threats.

By all means, let’s have good-faith arguments about how much America should spend on its military. But repeating 60-year-old clichés about the military-industrial complex doesn’t help the discussion.

 

 

What happens when you cross the MAGA base

Kinzinger: I had family that sent a certified letter disowning me. They said, I've lost the trust of great men like Sean Hannity. It's funny, but they believe that.pic.twitter.com/yiRCXhtFpp

— Acyn (@Acyn) October 31, 2023

Sorry, Adam.

Peek-a-boo!

Did I tell you elephants are bad at hide and seek? pic.twitter.com/bM65l5jwOT

— jamie (@gnuman1979) October 29, 2023

28 milk crates is all it takes.

pic.twitter.com/0R0jMqBgmb

— JessicaUSAF (@JessicaUSAF) October 29, 2023

Trump: "I'm a great athlete."

A picture of his baseball prowess. pic.twitter.com/7jmV6jQ7rf

— DHoss97022 (@EagleCreekHoss) October 29, 2023

Mike Johnson's self-proclaimed worldview -- frightening!

 

If I didn't hear this, I wouldn't believe it. https://t.co/HTjLyiF1UA

— Jill Wine-Banks (now on Threads as jillwinebanks) (@JillWineBanks) October 27, 2023

Here's What Mike Johnson Is About - And It's Scary

Click here for an excellent article by Matt Lavietas at NBC News describing the new Republican Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson. It's entitled "'Raging homophobe': New House speaker's views on LGBTQ issues under fresh scrutiny.

And click here for another article along the same lines, by David Rothkopf at the Daily Beast, entitled "Here's Why Mike Johnson Is More Dangerous Than Donald Trump," subtitled "The former president only cares about himself. The new Speaker of the House actually wants to make America a Christian theocracy."

The most dangerous movement in American politics today is not Trumpism. It is Christofascism. With the election of Rep. Mike Johnson (R-LA) as Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, the organized effort to impose the extreme religious views of a minority of Americans on the entire country, at the expense of many of our most basic freedoms, took a disturbing step forward.

Despite Speaker Johnson’s claims of being a constitutional “originalist,” via his elevation by a unanimous vote of his Republican colleagues he has moved America closer to having precisely the kind of government America’s founders most feared.

 

"Killers of the Flower Moon" -- the evil doesn't stop when the movie credits roll

Click here for an article by Greg Palast for The Guardian entitled "America's Osage Natives want you to know their story doesn't end with Killers of the Flower Moon."

Learn how a small oil-and-gas operator out of Wichita, Kansas -- Koch Industries -- became rich and influential by continuing to cheat the Osage Tribe; it was estimated in 1996 that they had cheated the Osage out of $2.4 billion.

Wisdom From Arnie

Arnie tells of his visit to Auschwitz; addresses bigotry and hate.

Tears. This is incredible. Must watch. https://t.co/o5bQnxwW8V

— Neal Katyal (@neal_katyal) October 21, 2023

Seldom Is Heard A Discouraging Word?

Click here for an article in The New York Times by Michael Goldman, entitled "Mitt Romney's Sickest Burns: Book Reveals Harsh Views of Fellow Republicans."

Ronald Reagan called it the “Eleventh Commandment":  “Thou shalt not speak ill of another Republican.” I guess Mitt Romney didn't read that one. This article presents Romney's opinions of Chris Christie, Ted Cruz, Ron DeSantis, Newt Gingrich, Mitch McConnell, Mike Pence, Rick Perry, Rick Santorum -- and of course Donald Trump -- and they're not favorable.

I've changed my mind ...

 

His reaction 😂pic.twitter.com/fvoukJOj2j

— Figen (@TheFigen_) October 19, 2023

Joe Biden - Quiet Competence

Click here for an article by Robert Reich titled "The last adult in the room," with the subtitle "Joe Biden is shrewd, careful, and calibrated. Almost everyone else on the stage is a wild child."

As I look at the people on the center stage of America now — the Republican clowns in the House, the childishly narcissistic Donald Trump, the juveniles on Fox News, the forever infantile Elon Musk, the fraudulent RFK Jr., the greedy CEOs who are raking in record compensation while refusing to raise the wages of their frontline workers, the spoiled financiers who want to make even bigger bets with other people’s money — I’m appalled at how few adults are in the room.

He finishes:

As the adult in the room, Biden doesn’t lash out in ways that make entertaining news clips. He doesn’t ridicule his opponents or call them names. He doesn’t intentionally lie. He doesn’t exaggerate his successes or minimize challenges ahead.

In contrast to his explosive and deranged predecessor (and likely rival for the presidency in the next election), Biden is emotionally mature, even-tempered, sensible.

America and the world need an adult in the room — especially now, when the kids are on a rampage. I thank our lucky stars that Joe Biden is in charge.