Democratic voters want someone as pissed off as they are

My Sunday movie was The Best Years of Out Lives, released in 1946. The story begins with three men on their way home from WWII, heading for the same city. Al had been in the Army, Fred an airplane bombardier, and Homer in the Navy. Homer had lost his hands in the war and has adapted pretty well to hooks as replacements. Al fits pretty well back into being a banker, though his seniors are concerned he’s giving too many loans to veterans through the GI Bill. He glad to return to his wife, daughter, and son. Before the war Fred was a soda jerk and his war experiences don’t translate to any other civilian jobs. He married his wife just before the war and she has come quite independent. They start to clash and he meets Al’s daughter. Homer had a steady girlfriend before the war. Now that he’s disabled he doesn’t want to burden her. The three have a lot to work out as they return to civilian life. According to IMDb trivia of the film:

The film deals with a hot-button issue of the aftermath of World War II: how to reincorporate traumatized war veterans into civilian life. The returning veterans of the film are struggling with PTSD-induced flashbacks to the war, alcoholism, life as amputees, and financial difficulties. They also struggle with finding jobs. A USAAF bombardier captain is reduced to working as a soda jerk, because he has no formal education or marketable skills. The film was reputedly inspired by a 1944 article of Time magazine about emotionally and financially struggling war veterans, who were facing constant hardships after being discharged.

Harold Russell, the guy who played Homer, actually did lose his hands in the war. He was spotted by the producer in an Army training video and given the part. The movie was made under the old Hollywood studio system and the bosses wanted Russel to have acting lessons. The director refused, preferring Russell’s natural talent. When the Academy Awards came around Russell was nominated for Best Supporting Actor. The Academy Board of Governors thought his chances of winning were low, so gave him an honorary award “for bringing hope and courage to his fellow veterans through his appearance,” as recorded by IMDb. And then he won for Best Supporting Actor, the only actor to win two Oscars for the same role. The studio system had an unusual effect on the movie, according to IMDb. The character who played Al’s son concluded his studio contract after a couple early scenes were filmed. That contract was not renewed. So the lad doesn’t appear in the rest of the movie – the son disappears. I learned of this movie through the filmscore by Hugo Friedhofer. It probably showed up in a radio program devoted to filmscores. I have a CD of it and play it every so often. It’s good music – it won Best Music Score of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture. This is the first time I saw the movie. Oliver Willis of Daily Kos discussed what mainstream media got for bowing to the nasty guy. Short answer: Very little. Media has been propping up the nasty guy since 2015 with uncritical coverage. But since his second term started many are compromising their independence and try to appeal to his most ardent supporters. Yes, some of this is driven by the nasty guy suing news outlets if they say something he doesn’t like, but such cases would be dismissed if actually taken to court. The result is the outlets that compromised a lot, such as CBS, have lost their previous customers. They haven’t attracted nasty guy supporters because they already have conservative outlets such as Fox and Newsmax and have no need to switch to CBS. Even when a network promotes the nasty guy he still lashes out at their “fake news” and encourages his supporters to do the same. So for bowing to the nasty guy and his threats all they get is lower ratings. Willis reported that Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin got on Fox News to suggest immigrant women should be given a pregnancy screening. This is in response to the Supreme Court reaffirming birthright citizenship while conservatives still feel threatened by “birth tourism.” Mullin claimed travel in the last few months of pregnancy could be a health issue.

Neither Mullin nor the Fox panel explained how pregnancy would be determined. Would women have to be subjected to a pregnancy test before boarding a plane? Or would other, more invasive techniques be used?

Jenae Barnes started an article for The 19th posted on Kos with:

Anti-abortion advocates, including Republican lawmakers and state officials, want the EPA to review mifepristone as a water contaminant. Scientists say there’s no evidence it harms the environment or people. While there is no scientific evidence that abortion medication is contaminating Americans’ water supply, it has nonetheless become a central claim by the anti-abortion movement. Activists, Instagram influencers and Republican Party officials — including state and federal lawmakers — are doubling down on what experts describe as a disinformation campaign that mixes environmental policy and reproductive rights, and risks exploiting legitimate concerns about clean water.

The claim has been around for decades. It says mifepristone pollutes the water and puts the health of pregnant people at risk.

Environmental health experts dismiss these claims. These experts consistently point out that there is no scientific basis for treating mifepristone or other abortion medication as a water contaminant.

Experts point out that a small number of women take one dose compared to many other drugs taken far more frequently by a much larger number of people. The Environmental Protection Agency (at least under responsible presidents) has screened 700 medications for potential water contamination concerns. Mifepristone was not one of them. What this is really about is attempting to restrict abortion access. The claim distracts from actual pollution threats, such as PFAS chemicals. As for that birthright citizenship case, Kos of Kos wrote about conservatives who have spoken against the ruling. He ended with:

It’s especially rich to call faithfully reading the Constitution “lawless.” If the authors of the Fourteenth Amendment intended something different, they could have written something different. It’s crazy. Conservatives have spent decades attacking the idea of a “living Constitution,” arguing that judges shouldn’t reinterpret the Constitution to fit changing times but should instead follow the text as originally understood. Now they’re asking judges to disregard the plain language of the 14th Amendment because the modern world has produced outcomes they don’t like. That’s not originalism. It’s outcome-based jurisprudence.

Willis wrote about why Republicans hate the Constitution as part of his series on Explaining the Right. He begins with:

The right has spent decades associating itself with traditional imagery of the Constitution. That means years and years of Revolutionary War cosplay, references to the “original intent” of the Constitution, and right-wing figures claiming to be the last remaining defenders of constitutional order. But it’s all a lie.

Willis then gives many examples of the cosplay and the hatred that started well before the nasty guy. And the main point:

When it comes to the right and constitutional law, what matters is not the document they purport to revere, but rather the pursuit of power. ... The right’s actions show that securing, increasing, and attaining their own political power is more important than sticking to principles and tradition.

In Saturday’s pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin quoted Sarah Longwell of The Bulwark discussing why Democratic Socialist candidates are winning. And the reason is simple.

DSA candidates are seizing on voters’ primal scream for Democrats to Do Something. In this climate, one of the worst things a candidate can do is act like these are normal times. Democratic voters want someone who seems as pissed off as they are and who is focused on fixing the problems that impact their material well-being.

Matt Royer tweeted a response to a tweet from Homeland Security that uses the words of Theodore Roosevelt to condemn immigration. Royer says they left out the following sentence from a speech in 1915. What Homeland Security tweeted:

There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism... Americanism is a matter of the spirit and of the soul. Our allegiance must be purely to the United States. We must unsparingly condemn any man who holds any other allegiance.

The rest of the quote:

But if he is heartily and singly loyal to this Republic, then no matter where he was born, he is just as good an American as any one else. ... any discrimination against aliens is a wrong.

The American anniversary festivities were set up by Congress into the organization America 250. The nasty guy seems to have sidelines the official group, at least in DC, with his Freedom 250 organization. MSNOW reported:

Most notably, the authors of the report — Democrats on the Natural Resources Committee — raise questions about whether Freedom 250’s fundraising practices could amount to “potential wire fraud and charitable solicitation fraud.”

I’m not at all surprised. Ronald Brownstein quoted some nasty guy officials claiming Gen Z people don’t have real jobs, which is why they complain that everything is so expensive. Brownstein replied:

Yes the reason young people are not getting ahead, or reaching life milestones nearly as fast as their parents, is because there is a massive epidemic of sloth. No structural headwinds-just personal failure. Great messaging strategy as Gen Z reaches 1/6 of eligible voters in 2028.

Laziness has been a messaging strategy of Republicans ever since Reagan and the welfare queens. Down in the comments exlrrp posted a tweet from Robert Reich:

Just one day before he announced a 90-day pause on his sweeping tariffs, Trump’s investment accounts made stock purchase worth as much as $12.8 million. Then when Trump announced the pause, the S&P soared nearly 10% -- one of the biggest single-day gains in the index’s history. Trump pulled in at least $2.2 billion last year through schemes like this plus his crypto business. How are you doing?

A meme posted by exlrrp has the caption under a chart, “Here’s how many stock trades each president made during their term. Notice anything?” The chart shows Clinton: 0, GW Bush: 0, Obama: 0, Trump 1: 50, Biden: 0, Trump 2 (so far): 3642. By may quick calculations that’s 9-10 trades a day (excluding weekends). That sounds more like a day trader than an occupant of the Oval Office. In Sunday’s roundup Chitown Kev quoted Neil Steinberg of the Chicago Sun-Times.

As much as nationalists today imagine a whites-only world in 1776, that was the leadership, not the people. A fifth of Americans in the revolutionary era were Black — most held in slavery in the South, but still there. What would bind our nation together, sort of, eventually, was not race or faith, but the words on this document. “Certain nations are grounded in ethnicity or common religion, or a common language,” said Slauter. “But that has never been true of the United States. From the beginning it is a nation bound together by documents. Ink on paper is the medium of the United States.” That is really what we are celebrating on the 4th. A written promise. A check to be cashed. Not an end result — Americans had five years of bloody battle ahead of them before victory at Yorktown.

In the comments exlrrp included a tweet from The Politburo discussing the DC fireworks delayed by weather:

A bombastic display so ill conceived and delayed to placate his fragile ego until 1 in the morning on the 5th, the 850k fireworks vastly outnumbered the spectators and created so much smoke and haze to obscure itself. The obvious end to this poorly executed celebration.

In today’s roundup Dworkin included a tweet by Barry Malone that includes a photo taken by Cheney Orr. It shows the inside of a Washington Metro car packed with members of the Patriot Front (a white nationalist group) with shirts and caps with patches and faces wrapped in white – and one lone black person. Dworkin then quoted a thread by Adam Cochrane posted on Threadreader. I went to the whole thread that discusses far right groups grooming young converts.

They give them scholarships, internships, references and all kinds of support to help up their pedigree while exposing them to their specific school of thought. Then through donor networks, they call in favors to get these individuals placed as staffers on the hill. Young Republican staffers have a higher concentration of extremist views tied to lobbying groups and thinktanks than ever before. You can see it in office decorations and comms accounts, countless subtle callouts to white nationalist movements. And many times, this is all entirely unknown to the Congressional representative. These staffers don't really report in to the Congress person. They answer to a now indoctrinated ideology from their lobbying group - often with their own handler. The reason the Patriot Front wears masks isn't because they fear losing their jobs. It's because lobbying groups know if you knew what percentage of them were staffers, you'd realize just how deeply compromised the government is.

This is how they can quickly get 400 Patriot Front members to a protest. Dworkin quoted a tweet by Jonathan Martin:

There’s a growing recognition that the country’s soaring concentration of wealth and declining social mobility can’t be separated from America’s civic ills. Democrats as different as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, potential presidential candidates from opposing factions and generations, both say as much. “Economic instability and the collapse of democracy are intertwined,” Ocasio-Cortez recently told MSNOW’s Jen Psaki. “The moment the American dream became unaffordable, American democracy became unstable,” Emanuel has said for months as he scampers around the country, proposing a roster of targeted reforms on healthcare, education, housing and retirement.