Month: April 2023

After waking up with great anticipation about seeing opening statements in the case between Dominion Voting Systems and Fox News, I’m a little disappointed that Delaware Superior Court Judge Eric M. Davis delayed the trial until Tuesday. Judge Davis provided no explanation other than to say that delays are routine in his experience. So it goes.

The twice-impeached, disgraced ex-president Donald Trump seems to have had the trial on his mind late last night, as he was posting about it into the wee hours. At 2:39 in the morning he wrote on his Truth Social network:

IF FOX WOULD FINALLY ADMIT THAT THERE WAS LARGE SCALE CHEATING & IRREGULARITIES IN THE 2020 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION, WHICH WOULD BE A GOOD THING FOR THEM, & FOR AMERICA, THE CASE AGAINST THEM, WHICH SHOULD NOT HAVE EXISTED AT ALL, WOULD BE GREATLY WEAKENED. BACK UP THOSE PATRIOTS AT FOX INSTEAD OF THROWING THEM UNDER THE BUS – & THEY ARE RIGHT! THERE IS SOOO MUCH PROOF, LIKE MASS BALLOT STUFFING CAUGHT ON GOVERNMENT CAMERAS, FBI COLLUDING WITH TWITTER & FACEBOOK, STATE LEGISLATURES NOT USED, etc.

He followed that up mid-morning with another ALL-CAPS blast addressed to Rupert Murdoch:

“FOX NEWS IS IN BIG TROUBLE IF THEY DO NOT EXPOSE THE TRUTH ON CHEATING IN THE 2020 ELECTION. THEY SHOULD DO WHAT’S RIGHT FOR AMERICA. WHEN RUPERT MURDOCH SAYS THAT THERE WAS NO CHEATING IN LIGHT OF THE MASSIVE PROOF THAT WAS THERE, IT IS RIDICULOUS AND VERY HARMFUL TO THE FOX CASE,” argued Trump, before addressing Murdoch directly. “RUPERT, JUST TELL THE TRUTH AND GOOD THINGS WILL HAPPEN. THE ELECTION OF 2020 WAS RIGGED AND STOLLEN…YOU KNOW IT, & SO DOES EVERYONE ELSE!”

Trump probably doesn’t realize that his 2020 election lies are so risible that the Judge earlier ruled Fox News cannot even defend airing them by claiming they were newsworthy.  In other words, while you might think it’s legitimate to report what the president of the United States is saying, you can’t treat defamatory bullshit as if it might be true if  you’re completely clear that it is not. The idea that Trump’s claims might be proven true isn’t even contemplated because it’s beyond the scope of reality. The people at Fox knew Trump was lying and they repeated his lies anyway. That’s why they’re in trouble.

This is obviously a threat to Trump on pretty much every level. It hurts him in court. It’s hurts him politically. It hurts his legacy. It hurts his feelings. And, if his base begins to internalize the actual truth of the matter, it will hurt Trump with his supporters. That will hurt him financially.

That’s why we’re seeing these panicked and delusional social media posts. Obviously, this case is specific to matters pertaining to Dominion Voting Systems, so most of Trump’s list of conspiracies aren’t even relevant in theory. But no one sane thinks the best way to defend against defamation charges is to continue defaming the plaintiff in court. Rupert Murdoch has already admitted that his network erred in repeating Trump’s lies, and that’s no even a matter of dispute at trial. The question is only whether they should be held to account for it.

When they are, it will put a big dent in The Big Lie.

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be continuing with the painting of Bent Pyramid. The photo that I’m using is seen directly below.

I’ll be using my usual acrylic paints on a 5×7 inch canvas panel.

When last seen the painting appeared as it does in the photo seen directly below.

Since that time I have continued to work on the painting.

Not too much for this week but I did finish the sand to the left side. More next week.

The current state of the painting is seen in the photo directly below.

I’ll have more progress to show you next week. See you then.

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be continuing with the painting of Bent Pyramid. The photo that I’m using is seen directly below.

I’ll be using my usual acrylic paints on a 5×7 inch canvas panel.

When last seen the painting appeared as it does in the photo seen directly below.

Since that time I have continued to work on the painting.

I have refined the foreground figures a bit as well as painting in more of the sand upon which they stand.

The current state of the painting is seen in the photo directly below.

I’ll have more progress to show you next week. See you then.

I am not a physician but my understanding is that that doctors count the age of a pregnancy from the first day of a woman’s last period. Strictly speaking, this is very likely to be inaccurate. Women don’t get pregnant while they are menstruating. The British National Health Service says the typical menstrual cycle is 28 days long, and women are generally fertile 10 to 16 days before their next period. Another way of saying this is that a pregnancy is most likely to commence between day 12 and 18 of the cycle. That means that by the time a woman misses her period, she has already been pregnant, on average, about 12 to 18 days. But how quickly can we reasonably expect them to realize that they’re pregnant.

It’s possible for a test to detect a pregnancy 1-2 weeks after intercourse, but sperm can survive in the Fallopian tubes for up to a week, so fertilization can be delayed. The tests are typically looking for a hormone called human chorionic gonadotropin that is associated with pregnancy, and it takes time for HCG to reach a detectable level in the body, which is why testing too early can lead to a false negative. The truth is, a six-week abortion ban gives a woman, on average, 1-2 weeks to make a decision and then have the procedure. And that assumes she realizes she’s pregnant at near the earliest possible moment. That’s a rare occurrence even among vigilant women with very regular cycles. In many cases, the six-week window will already have passed.

But that didn’t deter Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis from signing a 6-week ban into law this week. This is a follow-up to a 15-week ban he signed last year. It turns out that 15 weeks is about as good as Southern woman is going to find, and Florida became a destination spot for those seeking abortions. That’s not a record DeSantis wants to run on as a presidential candidate in the Republican primaries.

“The numbers show that Florida is a destination” for abortion, said Chad Davis, a candidate for the state House who worked for ex-state senator Kelli Stargel, the sponsor of the 15-week ban. “That’s an embarrassment to him.” …

“Abortion is not an issue that motivates him, I can tell you that,” said the person in DeSantis’s orbit with knowledge of the situation. “But it’s one of those … what choice do you have here?”

So, even though DeSantis has demonstrated a “longtime reluctance to make abortion a signature part of his public profile” and friends say “He doesn’t want to talk a lot about it” and avoids “the a-word,” he felt he no choice but to implement a 6-week ban. Floridian women will suffer the consequences for what amounts to a cynical political calculation, and one for which DeSantis has no passion. In truth, he knows it’s bad general election politics which is why he made no fanfare of signing the bill and didn’t even mention it the next day during a speech at conservative Christian Liberty University in Virginia.

He want’s defuse the issue in the primaries without letting it define him in a contest against President Joe Biden.

I, for one, am not going to let him do this so easily. I hope women share articles like this far and wide, because everyone should see through this cynicism and note the cruel indifference of DeSantis for what it is.

Here’s who he’s trying to mollify by stripping women of their reproductive choice:

Tom Ascol — a Florida pastor chosen to deliver prayers at a DeSantis reelection rally and, earlier this year, DeSantis’s inauguration — said the six-week ban “may get us three or four yards further down field, but it’s not anywhere near the goal line.”

A runner-up to lead the Southern Baptist Convention, he has said he believes women who get abortions at any stage of pregnancy should face homicide charges — an idea vehemently rejected by most antiabortion advocates.

As you can see, he didn’t even succeed in satisfying these lunatics. But the harm is done.

The Washington Post and New York Times have extensive coverage of a very substantial and concerning security breach committed by a 21-year-old member of the intelligence wing of the Massachusetts Air National Guard named Jack Teixeira. His mother says he has been working “overnight shifts at a base on Cape Cod.” Mr. Teixeira posted highly sensitive documents in a small, private Discord channel consisting of mostly younger gaming and gun enthusiasts. This group bonded during the worst of the pandemic.

The man behind a massive leak of U.S. government secrets that has exposed spying on allies, revealed the grim prospects for Ukraine’s war with Russia and ignited diplomatic fires for the White House is a young, charismatic gun enthusiast who shared highly classified documents with a group of far-flung acquaintances searching for companionship amid the isolation of the pandemic.

United by their mutual love of guns, military gear and God, the group of roughly two dozen mostly men and boys — formed an invitation-only clubhouse in 2020 on Discord, an online platform popular with gamers.

The details are depressing. The group had a real taste for racist and anti-Semitic memes. They were also international in character, which will provide for at least one easy conviction of Teixeira since much of the intelligence he shared was marked as Not Releasable to Foreign Nationals (NOFORN).

Despite being only 21, Teixeira was the clear leader of the group. His nickname was O.G., and he had administrative duties. His motive, according to other members, was a combination of wanting to educate his friends and a desire to impress them with his access. His position on the Ukraine-Russia war was neutral, and he never intended the information to leak and become public.

Unfortunately, one member took some of the documents and put them on a public forum where the Russians discovered them.

Now, I don’t want to disparage young men in their early twenties, but they’re not known for their maturity and sound judgment. It’s really not surprising that things like this will crop up when you consider the broad depth of our intelligence apparatus and the age of some of our intelligence officers. It’s natural to want to share what you know, and also to have influence and prestige within your peer group. This incident exposed a security weakness and steps will have to be made to limit the risk in the future.

Now, let’s move on to our disgraced ex-president. The New York Times reported on Wednesday that Department of Justice special counsel Jack Smith is asking questions about Trump’s propensity to share highly sensitive documents with journalists, aides, political donors and complete randos. The latest focus is a particular map he was apparently waving around on his plane.

Federal investigators are asking witnesses whether former President Donald J. Trump showed off to aides and visitors a map he took with him when he left office that contains sensitive intelligence information, four people with knowledge of the matter said.

The map has been just one focus of the broad Justice Department investigation into Mr. Trump’s handling of classified documents after he departed the White House.

I cannot see any substantial difference between Trump and Teixeira. The crimes are the same, and so are the motives. But Trump isn’t a 21-year old young man trying to impress teenagers in a private forum. With four years of experience in the White House, he should know exactly why his behavior is criminal and dangerous.

But Trump has not matured as he has aged. Whatever sentence Teixeira receives should also apply to Trump, with perhaps less leniency.

My buddy Brendan doesn’t own a television, but he’s always sending me notes about the latest editorial decision on National Public Radio that he finds outrageous. Since he approaches things from a left-wing point of view, you can imagine that he doesn’t see NPR as some partisan liberal news outlet, but rather one that bends over backwards to give “both sides” of issues. Perhaps they succeed in angering both sides better than they do at fairly representing them. I don’t know, because I almost never tune in. I am aware, however, the right-wing is suspicious of all publicly-funded media. It’s the same in the United Kingdom where the BBC is a regular punching bag of the Tories.

One thing I didn’t know until Elon Musk decided to “label” NPR twitter accounts as “state-affiliated media” was just how little government funding NPR receives.

The news organization says [it] is a private, nonprofit company with editorial independence. It receives less than 1 percent of its $300 million annual budget from the federally funded Corporation for Public Broadcasting…

…Most of NPR’s funding comes from corporate and individual supporters and grants. It also receives significant programming fees from member stations. Those stations, in turn, receive about 13 percent of their funds from the CPB and other state and federal government sources.

After Musk was criticized for treating NPR like a Russian or Chinese propaganda outfit, he tried to compromise by replacing the “state-affiliated media” designation with a “government-funded media” one. That was at least technically accurate, although pretty misleading if intended to warn readers about their independence. Any organization that is afraid of losing one percent of their funding is about to go out of business anyway. NPR might be more concerned about their affiliate stations losing funding, but they have no real control over that.

In any case, NPR’s board is independently appointed, and they’ve decided to take the organization completely off Twitter to avoid participating in their own reputation’s damage.

NPR will no longer post fresh content to its 52 official Twitter feeds, becoming the first major news organization to go silent on the social media platform…

…NPR is instituting a “two-week grace period” so the staff who run the Twitter accounts can revise their social-media strategies. Lansing says individual NPR journalists and staffers can decide for themselves whether to continue using Twitter.

In an email to staff explaining the decision, [NPR CEO John] Lansing wrote, “It would be a disservice to the serious work you all do here to continue to share it on a platform that is associating the federal charter for public media with an abandoning of editorial independence or standards.”

This whole saga shows how deeply unserious Musk is as a public thinker. This is only reinforced by reading his recent interview with the BBC.

Former Twitter executive Bruce Daisley – who ran the business in Europe, the Middle East and Africa for eight years – said the interview “gave us some insight into the strange life of this billionaire”.

“He confessed today that the only reason he went through with buying Twitter was because he believed a judge would force him to go through with the transaction. He’s never admitted that till now, so it was a very whimsical interview.”

Fame and fortune makes a lot of people insane. I’m thinking about Elon Musk, but also entertainers like Kanye West, Tom Cruise and Mel Gibson. In any case, NPR has seen enough and they’re taking their ball to other social media outlets.

Some classic Brian Eno for you:

I’m going to begin here with the caveat that we should never put too much stock in the cross tabs of a survey with 1,346 respondents. The margin of error can be pretty large even if the methodology and sample are solid. But this study from Tufts University gets at something that interests me, and it may have found something of value.

The goal is to measure Donald Trump’s influence as a political endorser. Here’s how the went about it.

To collect our data, we conducted an experiment on a nationally representative online survey of 1,346 American adults fielded just before the 2022 midterm elections. All respondents saw a preface about a Republican nominee for a Congressional seat in their state named Terry Mitchell. Respondents either viewed “conventional” Republican viewpoints (lowering taxes, limiting government’s role in healthcare, and opposing citizenship for undocumented immigrants) or “unconventional” Republican viewpoints (increasing taxes, expanding government’s role in healthcare, and supporting citizenship for undocumented immigrants). Respondents then received one of three Trump endorsement conditions: Trump’s support for Mitchell, Trump’s disapproval of Mitchell, or no mention of Trump.

Now, the headline for the study is that Trump’s endorsement had an overall negative effect in 2022. But, intuitively, I already knew that. What was his effect among just Republican voters? Here is where there’s a result I didn’t anticipate.

For Republican respondents who were told that Trump had endorsed Mitchell, the average favorability rating did not change by a statistically significant amount, shown in the second graph. When Trump told voters not to vote for Mitchell, Republican respondents’ ratings decreased by 7 points. From these results, it is evident that Trump’s “cult of personality” was unable to galvanize support among Republican respondents. However, Trump’s disapproval depressed Mitchell’s favorability ratings, showing that losing the support of Trump can still have a notable impact among Republican voters.

I don’t have a statistical study in hand, but I think we’ve all noticed that Trump has endorsed a lot of candidates who went on to lose. He has padded his success rate by endorsing Republicans in races everyone knew the GOP would win irrespective of his input, but his record isn’t so impressive in strongly contested races. In 2022, this was particularly obvious in the Senate contests.

The Tufts study backs this up. When Trump tells people to vote for a candidate, it doesn’t move the needle with the Republican electorate. But when he tells Republican voters not to support someone, then he has some serious influence.

Now, this result isn’t that robust for a simple reason. Take the example of the 2022 Pennsylvania Senate race where Trump endorsed Mehmet Oz in the primaries over David McCormick. Perhaps Trump’s endorsement of Oz had little influence. But the Tufts study suggests that when he visited Pennsylvania and called McCormick a “liberal, wall street Republican…totally controlled by Mitch McConnell,” it probably hurt McCormick’s chances. The problem is that the study doesn’t examine what happens when Trump attacks “Terry Mitchell’s” opponent.

But the study still provides a potential psychological insight. Perhaps Republicans respond to Trump primarily through his disapproval. Maybe he’s quite effective at putting a target on someone or some thing’s back, but he’s ineffective in rallying people in a positive direction. One possible example of this from his presidency is that he never could produce an infrastructure bill, even though it was the one area where the Democrats were willing to work with him. Republican members of Congress seemed to live in mortal fear of inviting Trump’s wrath but they had no apparent fear of opposing his promise to double Hillary Clinton’s proposed infrastructure spending. If Trump made any serious effort to convince his supporters to pressure Congress, it quite obviously did not work. Yet, he easily convinced a mob of his supporters to attack Congress on January 6, so it’s clear he can move them with a negative message.

I’m less interested in what this says about Trump than what it says about the Republican electorate. They clearly responded to Trump from the moment he arrived on the scene hurling epithets at Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, Lindsey Graham and Ted Cruz. Nothing riled them up more than his calls to have Hillary Clinton arrested. He fulfilled a latent desire for this kind of ruthless combat. It didn’t even have to be plausible, as with his promise to make Mexico pay for a border wall, as long as it was a full-throated attack on some person or group. In many ways, Trump’s cult-like status was built on gratitude that someone was finally willing to fulfill this need for scapegoating and disrespect. That gratitude quickly turned into loyalty, and a willingness to forgive any shortcoming or misstep.

Some of this sentiment isn’t foreign to Democrats. The left can also grow impatient and call for candidates with more fight and fewer scruples. It’s a natural if not necessarily rational response to the consequences of losing. But it’s hard to imagine the left embracing a candidate, no matter how combative, who is as ideologically out of step with them as Trump was with the Republican Party on several issues, including entitlements, infrastructure spending and free trade. Democrats may sometimes thirst for a champion who will take the gloves off, but not for causes they don’t support.

Perhaps this reflects a weakness in the conservative coalition in general, namely that policies that suit billionaires aren’t actually that popular with the Republican rank-and-file voter. Many people vote Republican despite the party’s economic policies rather than because of them. But if Trump peeled off some traditional Democrats with his more populist economic message, he didn’t rally them to produce the promised results. He held them mostly in place in spite of this, because their primary attraction wasn’t what he could do for them but what he might do to their perceived enemies.

The result is that Trump tore down the old Republican coalition, which was at least good enough for a couple narrow presidential wins and a good amount of congressional control. That old coalition is gone, along with any sense of coherence to Republican ideology. Trumpism and McConnellism are so antagonistic that they can’t form a natural alliance, which is something Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy is contending with as he finds himself unable to pass even messaging bills through his chamber. The idea that he could cobble together a majority to tackle the debt is ludicrous because his party is too split.

Even with the party largely united around Trump in 2020, it lost badly in the elections, so trying to go forward without Trump’s coalition fully on board is not going to work. Seemingly, the only way to hold the MAGA crowd’s interest without Trump is to replicate his relentless attacks. The party doesn’t agree on an agenda and doesn’t respond to positive messaging anyway, so the only thing that can bind a coalition to together is hostility to common enemies.

In this way, something that started as particular to Trump became something systemic for the GOP as whole. They need his style to survive, even if it has no real substance.

I’ve written on many occasions about Frank Luntz and his consulting business.  My favorite piece, from 2014, was called Frank Luntz Has Earned his Hell. In 2011, I had described him as “an evil genius who conducts tests on ordinary citizens to see how they can be best deceived into supporting policies that truly screw them over,” but by 2014 my take was that he “appears to be having some kind of midlife crisis brought on by the reelection of Barack Obama.”  I’ve never stopped seeing him as a uniquely malevolent force, and I hold him deeply responsible for what has become of the Republican Party. Still, he has kind of faded away over the past decade. So, when I saw that he’d written an editorial in the New York Times on “how to make Donald Trump go away,” I was hoping that I might gain some useful insight.

As I anticipated, Luntz has been doing a lot of his famous focus groups, this time involving supporters of Trump. He wants to learn what makes them tick so he can devise the best way to pry them away from the disgraced ex-president and lead the GOP back to its former glory. I don’t doubt that his intentions are sincere. And based on past successes, I don’t discount his ability to find effective messaging.

Why does Donald Trump still generate such loyalty and devotion? And unlike 2016, can a different Republican win the nomination in 2024 who largely shares Mr. Trump’s agenda but not his personality?

To answer these questions, I have hosted more than two dozen focus groups with Trump voters across the country, the most recent for Straight Arrow News on Wednesday night to understand their mind-sets in the aftermath of his historic indictment in Manhattan. Many felt ignored and forgotten by the professional political class before Mr. Trump, and victimized and ridiculed for liking him now. Like Republican primary voters nationwide, the focus group participants still respect him, most still believe in him, a majority think the 2020 election was stolen, and half still want him to run again in 2024.

Luntz starts out by telling people what not to do: “pummeling [Trump] and attempting to decimate his base will not work…If they think a candidate’s mission is to defeat their hero, the candidate will fail.”

How can a Republican presidential contender credibly argue that their goal is not to defeat Trump? It’s a ridiculous ambition, seemingly absurd on its face. Luntz recommends, first of all, sticking with Trump’s policies: “It’s not about beating Mr. Trump with a competing ideology” because “Republicans want just about everything Mr. Trump did.” “Compliment Mr. Trump’s presidency while you criticize the person.”

Next, you need endorsers, but if these recommendations come from people who didn’t support Trump in 2016 and 2020, they’re worthless.

They just need to be authentic — and be able to say that they have voted for Mr. Trump in 2016 and 2020 — so the Never Trump label won’t stick.

So far, the winning formula is to push Trump policies and presidency, and say you supported him from the beginning to the end. As you might expect, this leaves little other than the “more in sadness than in anger” angle for criticizing Trump.

Luntz does have avenues of attack, however. First, focus on Trump’s preoccupation with the past. He seems more interested in re-litigating and settling scores than he does on what he can do for his supporters with another four years in the White House: “In 2016, the campaign was about what he could do for you. Today, it’s about what is being done to him.”

Second, attack him for hypocrisy, focusing heavily on how he criticized President Barack Obama for golfing but then spent half his presidency on the links. Third, promise to deliver the same basic results without all the drama. Say you’ll you’ll set a better example for people’s kids.

If this seems like weak tea, that’s because it is. But Luntz has another idea.

Millions of Trump voters are old — really old. They love their grandchildren, so speak specifically about the grandkids and their grandparents will listen as well.

Here’s where Luntz’s aversion to ideological challenge gives way. The way to appeal to Republicans’ grandchildren is to talk about debt and deficits.

The looming debt ceiling vote is the perfect hook. The increase in the annual deficit under Trump ranks as the third-largest increase, relative to the size of the economy, of any U.S. presidential administration. Long before Covid, Republicans in Congress were told by the Trump White House to spend more — and that spending contributed to the current debt crisis. Mr. Trump will say he was fiscally responsible, but the actual numbers don’t lie. “We can’t afford these deficits. We can’t afford this debt. We can’t afford Donald Trump.”

This is really where Luntz crashes on the shoals. Trump’s position that the Republicans should not touch Social Security or Medicare in their effort to shore up the country’s fiscal situation is his main ideological difference from traditional conservatives like former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan. This ideological heresy not only gave him get crossover appeal in 2016, it transformed the makeup of the GOP and created a Trump-specific constituency. If you want to keep Trump’s voters inside the tent, you can’t start preaching about “we can’t afford Trump” and have any coherency. I mean, you can say it, but you can’t translate it into anything that might actually pertain to the debt ceiling crisis. There’s simply no way to make meaningful changes in the country’s fiscal condition that don’t involve Social Security and Medicare, so if you want to run on traditional austerity without challenging Trump’s ideology, you’re going to be in a real bind. You’re going to be making wholly unrealistic levels of cuts to (mostly popular) discretionary spending. And if you decide to challenge Trump on entitlements, then you’re making an ideological change that Trump’s voters will intensely dislike.

Luntz’s final piece of advice is probably his best. It focuses on electability.

If Mr. Trump is the nominee in 2024, are Republicans fully confident he will win independents this time? The ex-president surely loses if Republicans come to believe that a vote for Mr. Trump in the primaries means the election of Mr. Biden in the general.

Simply put, if Republican primary voters lose faith that Trump can beat President Biden, he has a good chance of losing the nomination.

It seems to me, that reinforcing anything that calls into question Trump’s electability is to most obvious way peel away his support. Nothing will dent his perception of electability more than losing in court. Trump seeks to rally people to his defense by questioning the legitimacy of his legal problems, and it’s certainly working at the moment. But he’s getting an assist from his competitors who are so far taking his side. They need to start focusing on the pattern of Trump’s life. His charity was banned. His university was shut down. His company was convicted. He got caught in a lie about Stormy Daniels. All his associates are getting arrested. His January 6 supporters went to prison. The man is a fraud, and following or serving him is dangerous. He’s in legal peril because he deserves to be in legal peril, and if you don’t see it, enough other people see it that there’s no chance he can beat Biden.

Luntz doesn’t make this recommendation because his focus groups demonstrate too much loyalty to Trump, but he should be anticipating a year full of escalating legal problems. Instead of resigning himself to the fact that Trump is too popular to criticize for anything much more than style, spending and golf, Luntz should be coming up with a way to ride the coming wave in a way that can change how Trump is perceived by his supporters. He knows electability is a possibly fruitful avenue attack, but he doesn’t see how his competitors might actively enhance this weakness.

At the beginning of Luntz’s piece he says:

It begins by reflecting more closely on Mr. Trump’s rule-breaking, paradigm-shattering campaign in 2016 and all of his unforced errors since then. It accurately reflects the significant attitudinal and economic changes in America over the past eight years.

This is his way of saying the Republican candidates must respect the appeal of Trump’s combative style and more populist economic message. The problem with that is that no one will break more rules or paradigms or better embody the attitudinal thirst among conservatives for combat. If the battle is waged along those lines, Trump will win. To defeat Trump, the focus needs to change. It isn’t about being Trump without the unforced errors (a la Ron DeSantis), but about beating Biden.

It’s really a two-step strategy. Work to undermine Trump’s electability and then attack him for being unelectable.

The challenge, obviously, is that if you’re perceived as harming Trump’s electability you aren’t going to be the beneficiary. This is where surrogates can help. But it’s also about being politically adroit. First, don’t run interference for Trump. Never do anything to lessen his problems. Don’t attack his tormenters and don’t make excuses for him. Pile dirt on him whenever you can, damn with faint praise, and always amplify the difficulty he’ll have winning the general election.

Have faith that the legal woes will build and change perceptions, but also be an active participant in the process.

But, above all, don’t follow the Luntz roadmap. It’s garbage.

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be continuing with the painting of Bent Pyramid. The photo that I’m using is seen directly below.

I’ll be using my usual acrylic paints on a 5×7 inch canvas panel.

When last seen the painting appeared as it does in the photo seen directly below.

Since that time I have continued to work on the painting.

For this week’s cycle I have repainted the pyramid in a more appropriate color. I have also continued with the figures seen in the foreground.

The current state of the painting is seen in the photo directly below.

I’ll have more progress to show you next week. See you then.