The Books of Bokonon

When I first moved to my little corner of Arkansas in 2010, we had a Democratic Governor (and really any state-wide office you could imagine) and solid majorities (if not super-majorities) in both chambers of the State Assembly. What I learned very quickly from reading the news sites at the time was that the state's GOP was not ready for prime time (as a pundit put it at the time). There was no apparent positive platform, and much of the energy seemed to be directed at airing grievances about Obama being our nation's President. A barely-existent Democratic infrastructure combined with a Tea Party wave we saw in 2010 and again in 2012 were what propelled the state's GOP to tentative power and later absolute power after the 2014 election cycle. A decade later, one would think that the GOP's party apparatus would be in solid shape, its politicians more polished and with some tangible policies that appear based on current economic realities, etc. This is the part where we l...

  It's a damn shame. But yes, MAGA is having a media meltdown . It's getting hard to keep up with all the scandals ensnaring MAGA media influencers. They're conflicted over whether or not to be pro-Israel (or at least pro-Netanyahu) or whether to really lean in to that good old-fashioned antisemitism that characterized the original America First movement of the 1930s and 1940s. Tucker Carlson uses his Twitter platform to advance Nazi apologists, as has Elon Musk. It's not a good look. The icing on the cake were the influencers who were duped into spreading pro-Putin propaganda as part of a disinformation campaign , but then again these were willing and useful idiots for Putin's cause as well as the MAGA cause. They are acting punch-drunk about now.  In the meantime, JD Vance is like the standup comic who is being heckled off the stage and Trump's act is so stale that if he were in a TV series, he'd be looking at it being cancelled mid-season. Aside from in...

For Donald Trump, whose Supreme Court nominees overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, the Dobbs decision is becoming the Ghost of Christmas Past. That may be a bit of an understatement. The Ghost of Christmas Present has entered the chat this election season as well. Marcy Wheeler of emptywheel fame has a top-rate analysis of the consequences of Trump's decision to pursue a hard-line anti-abortion policy during his term in office , which now dog Trump and his running mate on the campaign trail as we enter the last couple months of the campaign. She is justifiably critical of media outlets' coverage of Trump's logical contortions in the aftermath of Dobbs, noting that Trump's problem is ultimately not one of "messaging" (there's no way to dress up grossly unpopular anti-abortion policies with different slogans). Trump's problem is that the policy choices his administration made are coming back to haunt him. This is a deeper story about Trump's actions, and...

 Maybe:   The contrast is stark. As we saw during the Democratic Convention last week, quite a few of the speakers were Republican Party members who endorsed Harris. It's clearly not because they see eye with Harris on the issues. Quite the opposite. But they do share a love of our nation in common with their Democratic counterparts and are willing to be part of what in different contexts would be called a popular front. We've seen since then other former staffers (not only Trump's) from previous GOP presidential campaigns and Presidencies endorse Harris. They've turned their backs on Trump, and with good reason. He was unfit for office in 2016 and he is even more unfit today. For many, the events of January 6th that resulted in a coup attempt turned out to be the last straw. Others might be looking carefully at the policies promoted in Project 2025, which is very much tied to Trump, and realized that those policies were simply weird: un-American and more befitting more...

 Liz Dye: It's fine to laugh at JD Vance and his couch . At this juncture, the GOP is weird memes practically write themselves. You look at the policies that Vance, Trump, the right-wing think tanks (including the one that hatched Project 2025), and it becomes obvious that these folks are pushing policies and ideas that are really out of touch and just plain odd - definitely radically out of touch with what most of us as Americans want or value. That's worth mocking. Hell, we could all use a few good laughs after the events of these last few weeks, and definitely the last decade. As long as we remember to go to the polls and vote this November, let's continue to laugh. Note, image comes from link, which is credited to Getty. Also, most importantly, no couches were harmed in the composition of this post.

We've ended the third full day of the new Congressional Session and the House has yet to elect a Speaker . Kevin McCarthy has lost 11 votes in a row. To put into context, that means that this is the first time since before the Civil War that it has taken more than nine votes for the House of Representatives to elect a Speaker. Then again, the majority party is the GOP, the guy wanting the Speaker's gavel is Kevin McCarthy, and so it's no great loss at least for now. My impression from catching coverage after my wife and I came home from our favorite diner was that McCarthy and his team will continue to hold votes for as long as it takes. Like Thanos, he claims to be "inevitable." And he may well be. He's made a ton of concessions to the 20 or so hold-outs, and so far that has not led to a breakthrough. So we go through another potential Groundhog Day scenario tomorrow, and perhaps the next day (and the next day, etc.). Any of us who have ever sought a leaders...

Like many of you, I've been checking the live blogs and C-SPAN to see how the GOP, with its very slim House Majority, would handle the vote for the Speaker's gavel. Our major parties are very broad coalitions, and so one expects negotiations ahead of a new session of Congress to be heated, but probably mostly settled by the time January 3rd hits.  Not this time. Kevin McCarthy has been jockeying for the Speaker's gavel for a good couple years, and is the GOP House Caucus Leader. However, he has never quite been able to close the deal. He's tried to become Speaker before in 2015. That effort failed when he did the equivalent of shooting himself in the foot. His sin that time? After the GOP leaders had taken great pains to present the Benghazi hearings as non-partisan, McCarthy let loose with how much the hearings had hurt Hillary Clinton's chances to become President. In other words, he could not be trusted to refrain from crossing the party line. His support evapora...