Month: July 2024

Howdy! Do we have any Patti Smith fans in the frog pond?

This is such a fun cover of an old song from the late 1960s. I also enjoyed Tom Petty’s cover of this same song.

As always the bar is fully stocked and the jukebox is limited only by your imagination.

Cheers!

From my perspective, other than the president and vice-president, the most important member of the Biden administration isn’t the Secretary of State or Secretary of Defense but Lina Khan, the head of the Federal Trade Commission. You can tell how influential she is by her enemies. Ryan Grim notes that she’s in the crosshairs of LinkedIn billionaire Reid Hoffman who is a major donor to the Harris campaign. She was recently called “a dope” by the chairman of IAC, Barry Diller during an appearance on CNN. Then there’s CNBC anchor and stock pimp Jim Cramer who, “has been fixated on insulting and disparaging her enforcement record on live TV” since the moment she took office.

What’s their problem with Khan? She’s the first FTC commissioner to take antitrust seriously in decades. She goes after monopolies and monopoly power, and this is making certain business executives and their paid for on-air help howl like scalded cats. On the other hand, as Grim notes, others are quite pleased.

Khan and Rohit Chopra, director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, have been the bane of large companies who profit by exploiting market share to jack up prices on consumers and implement obscure fees, while they have also produced some of the policy wins most trumpeted by both the Biden administration and the Harris campaign. Harris has recently celebrated moves made by Chopra on medical debt and Khan on non-compete agreements.

While monopolists have dubbed Khan “anti-business,” her skeptical approach to corporate consolidation has coincided with a booming stock market and finds a broad base of support among companies looking to compete against Goliaths, or firms tired of being ripped off by them due to a lack of competition.

The Wall Street Journal editorial board has criticized J.D. Vance for praising Khan who they dub “Biden’s most lawless regulator.”

At a Bloomberg technology forum in February, Mr. Vance called Ms. Khan “one of the few people in the Biden administration that I think is doing a pretty good job.” At what? Breaking the law and losing in court?

The FTC Chair has been the most ambitious Biden regulator, stretching the law at every opportunity to impose her policy views on antitrust and other matters.

The WSJ board goes on to knock Vance for endorsing Khan’s “policy of jettisoning the consumer-welfare antitrust standard that has prevailed for 40 years. But this is the key to her importance. Will Norris of the Washington Monthly explains:

Trump’s regulators, like all administrations of the past 40 years before Biden, argued cases mainly on the narrow basis of harms to consumers. But Khan and other reformers argue for reestablishing an interpretation of antitrust law that’s more expansive than this “consumer welfare standard.” Under Biden, regulators have rewritten the government’s lax merger guidelines and have often focused their legal strategy on the harms done to producers as well as consumers.

The thing to note is that monopolies are not just a problem for consumers who pay higher prices, have less choice, and often have no recourse if they don’t like their products or services. The reason we have hollowed out downtowns and shuttered malls is because massive corporate consolidation has made it impossible for small businesses and even medium-sized corporations to compete. That’s what’s driving so much right-wing populist resentment, and one thing you can say in favor of J.D. Vance is that he understands and cares about this more than Reid Hoffman, Barry Diller and the editorial board at the Wall Street Journal. 

The number one thing the federal government can do to help the hillbillies Vance pretends to represent is to make it possible for people to have small bore entrepreneurial success again in this country. And the best way to do that is to reverse the trend of market share consolidation. So, yes, it’s important to protect consumers from junk fees and predatory loans, which the Biden administration and Khan have done with real determination, but it’s also important to return to the original way of doing antitrust enforcement that prevailed from FDR’s time until the Carter administration blew it up and went over to a strictly consumer-driven focus.

Some of the worst monopolists in the country hail from Silicon Valley, and while that crowd is split in its support of Trump and Harris, they appear united in wanting Khan’s head on a pike. And they hope that if Harris is elected in November, as a fellow Bay Area Californian, she will fulfill their wish. That’s certainly Jim Cramer’s expectation:

Vice President Kamala Harris would get rid of Federal Trade Commission head Lina Khan if she were to defeat former President Donald Trump in the November election and succeed President Joe Biden, according to CNBC commentator Jim Cramer.

“I don’t have to go into Lina Khan anymore [because] everyone knows my views and there’s no need to reiterate,” Cramer, who once referred to her an “empty suit” and “one-woman wrecking crew for your stock portfolio,” said during Monday morning’s broadcast.

Cramer also predicted that if Harris ascends to the presidency following Biden’s decision to drop out of the 2024 race, she would also dismiss Jonathan Kanter, the assistant attorney general with the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division.

To get an idea of what’s at stake, I am going to quote Will Norris at length:

Biden was not at the vanguard of this [antitrust] movement in his party, but his campaign’s policy papers included promises to confront monopolies. Then, after he won the election, Biden committed to the cause like no other president had in modern times. He appointed one of the movement’s brightest and most aggressive reformers, Lina Khan, to run the FTC, as well as other fierce critics of corporate concentration in key posts, including Jonathan Kanter, who took over the antitrust division of the DOJ, and Tim Wu, who became a key economic adviser inside the White House. Six months after taking office, Biden issued a whole-of-government executive order that called on 17 different government agencies to take 72 actions to foster competition and protect consumers against monopolies. As a result, agencies like the FTC, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and the Food and Drug Administration have cracked down on public scourges like price gouging, noncompete contracts, and banking-related junk fees, and created new rules to make consolidated industries like the hearing aid market more competitive.

Under Kanter and Khan, the DOJ and FTC have also filed far more ambitious antitrust investigations than any administration in decades. Last summer, an investigation into several food production conglomerates over wage suppression and collusion resulted in an $85 million settlement, one of several successful DOJ investigations into no-poach and wage-fixing schemes across the economy. In December, the FTC successfully blocked the medical data firm IQVIA’s attempt to monopolize the business of advertising to doctors through the purchase of an ad tech company called DeepIntent. And in January, a judge sided with the DOJ in its suit against a JetBlue-Spirit merger, the first successful prosecution of an airline merger in 40 years.

The effect of a more aggressive posture from regulators goes beyond favorable court rulings: Under the threat of litigation, Amazon, Lockheed Martin, Berkshire Hathaway, and the chipmaker Nvidia were some of the companies to back off multibillion-dollar acquisitions of smaller firms. Biden’s regulators filed a record 50 antitrust enforcement actions last year, and mergers dropped to a 10-year low.

The truth is, as outstanding as this record is, it is only a beginning. In order to really be felt and to transform the economy and Make America Great Again for small businesses and small towns, this shift needs to be sustained. It took 40 years to destroy the American Dream, and it could take just as long to restore it.

As for Harris, she’s been touting some of Khan’s accomplishments like her work to ban non-compete agreements, but it’s uncertain whether she would retain Khan in the face of such vociferous opposition from major donors like LinkedIn’s Hoffman. I’m pretty sure if Vance had his way, he might support Khan’s shift on consumer welfare even if he chose someone else to run the FTC, but I know for certain that Trump will listen to the monopolists and can not only Khan and Kanter but the whole antitrust project.

Which is ironic, because this is the single best policy for helping the people who predominate at his MAGA rallies.

What we need is a President Harris who honors what Biden started rather than whatever her monopolist donors ask for in return for the massive donations..

President Joe Biden has announced three major judicial proposals. The first is to impose a binding code of ethics on the Supreme Court. The second is to limit future Supreme Court appointments to 18-year terms. And the third is to pass a new constitutional amendment:

Biden’s proposed amendment, which Biden is calling the “No One Is Above the Law Amendment,” states the “Constitution does not confer any immunity from federal criminal indictment, trial, conviction, or sentencing by virtue of previously serving as president.”

Each proposal addresses a recent concern with the Supreme Court. The Code of Ethics is necessary because members of the Court have not abided by the rules that apply to all lower federal courts. They haven’t reported gifts, or in some instances have been extremely tardy in reporting them. They also haven’t reliably recused themselves from cases where they had a clear conflict of interest. The result is a massive loss of confidence in the integrity of their decisions.

The 18-year limit addresses several issues from different angles. One is basically partisan, but seeks to redress the fact that Republicans essentially stole two lifetime seats from the Democrats. The first came when Antonin Scalia died in 2008 during President Obama’s last year in office and the Senate Republicans refused to consider Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland as a replacement. When Donald Trump became president, he filled the seat with Neil Gorsuch.

The second came when Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg died just before the 2020 election and the Republicans raced to replace her with Amy Coney Barrett during the lame duck portion of Trump’s one term in office. This truncated process for confirming Justice Barrett ignored all the reasons the GOP provided for why they couldn’t consider Garland to replace in Scalia.

The result was a 6-3 ultraconservative majority on the Court that has now overturned Roe v. Wade and gutted voting rights, affirmative action and the federal agencies’ ability to regulate the environment and the economy. It has also effectively declared the office of the presidency above the law. For these reasons, many progressives and Democrats have called on Biden to expand the Court to include 11 or 13 members, allowing a rebalancing of the ideological bent. Biden’s 18-year term limit comes at the problem from a less nakedly partisan angle. For starters, by doing away with lifetime appointments, it mitigates the problem of having an ethically compromised judge. If the reform had been in place when Clarence Thomas was confirmed, he would have left the Court in 2009. Justice Samuel Alito would have left the Court this year. It would also avoid the problem at least in some circumstances of a Justice serving longer than they really want to or should in the hope of being replaced by a president of their own party. To game the system in that way, they’d have to retire early, before the end of their term.

The last proposal is a constitution amendment made necessary by the aforementioned decision by the ultraconservative Supreme Court to transform the presidency into a lawless dictatorship where nothing the president does that can be considered even tangentially related to an “official act” is prosecutable as a crime.

In the short term, none of these proposals has a snowball’s chance in hell of becoming law. The Republicans will act defensively, seeing the proposals as direct rebukes of Donald Trump and their favorites on the Court. Of the three, the constitutional amendment might have the best chance of eventually gathering bipartisan support. Once the reform isn’t seen as a direct shot at Trump, the merits will become clearer to everyone regardless of party. A president should not be above the law.

The other reforms can pass through Congress alone, but would require Democratic majorities in both the House and the Senate, as a well as a Democratic president. Even then, the Democrats would need to get around the filibuster either by having a 60-seat majority, which seems like a long way off at the moment, or by changing the filibuster rule.

Maybe in time, the right will see the value in an enforceable Code of Ethics and term limits for the Supreme Court, but not until those reforms are no longer associated with criticisms of Thomas, Alito and the Republicans’ ill-gained 6-3 majority.

I do think all three proposals will be more popular than not with the American voter, so it’s good politics as well as sensible policy.

The New York Times has a profile of Timothy Mellon, who is both Robert F. Kennedy and Donald Trump’s biggest individual donor in the 2024 presidential election cycle. It appears that he’s a complete nut whose brain has been consumed by right wing lunacy. You can see what I mean by reading the whole profile, but I want to focus on just one part of it.

Timothy Mellon, a wealthy banking heir and railroad magnate, has reached the stratosphere of American political influence as the top supporter of Donald J. Trump, doling out millions to try to elect the former president and his allies.

But to his neighbors in a Rhode Island beachfront enclave, he is better known as the prime suspect in the Narragansett Runestone Affair.

A hulking boulder once positioned just offshore in Narragansett Bay, the runestone bears inscriptions that some believe were left by Viking explorers. It was the stuff of local lore and attracted visitors at low tide — to the consternation of Mr. Mellon, the pedigreed businessman whose home looked out on the rock.

And then one day it was gone.

A criminal investigation yielded a witness who had heard sounds of heavy machinery at night. Mr. Mellon refused to talk and hired a former state attorney general as his lawyer. Nearly a year later, the matter was resolved quietly: Mr. Mellon agreed to return the stone, and prosecutors agreed not to bring charges.

Now, naturally when I read this, my curiosity was piqued. Where did Mr. Mellon put the rock? One day it was there, the next day it was gone. There was an investigation and Mellon clammed up and hired a former state attorney general to represent him. And then suddenly Mr. Mellon produced the rock, apparently fully intact.

Since the New York Times didn’t address this question, I searched on WikiPedia and found this:

Town historian and independent columnist G. Timothy Cranston said that a Pojac Point resident had removed the stone, as he was tired of having tourists scouring the neighborhood and shoreline looking for the stone. He said that the resident, who was not named, was ordered by state officials to retrieve the stone after having sunk it in deeper waters off the coast.

We now know that the Pojac Point resident was an heir to the massive Andrew Mellon fortune, the aforementioned Timothy Mellon. Apparently he did not store the rock in a warehouse but hired people to pick up and dump the Narragansett Runestone in deeper offshore waters. When he realized that he might actually face criminal prosecution for this, he must have hired the same crew to go and retrieve it.

Of course I have no idea if the original crew was actually capable of retrieving it. It’s easier to dump something in deep water than to pull something heavy off the ocean floor. It could be that the original crew was only useful for pinpointing the location of the runestone and another much more expensive crew was hired to bring it to the surface.

I imagine this was all very expensive: the crews and the former attorney general. But he avoided prosecution and the rhinestone no longer sits in the water at the edge of his property. In 2015, it found a new home.

NORTH KINGSTOWN, R.I. — About 120 people gathered in what is hoped will become Wickford’s upstaging of Plymouth Rock as Town Historian Tim Cranston and a person in a pirate costume unveiled the Narragansett Runestone.

Propped against a smaller boulder to achieve the best angle for showing off its mysterious inscription, the stone that some believe was carved by Nordic explorers predating Columbus sits in a nest of small cobblestones inside a rail fence surrounded by a lush grass carpet and a brick sidewalk.

Whether it was Vikings who carved it in the late 1300s or a teenager fascinated with runic characters in the 1960s, Cranston said it was “a bold fist in the air that says ‘I was here!'”

For the record, I don’t believe vikings are actually responsible for the inscriptions on the stone, but that’s not really the point. This is an example of how rich people, like Donald Trump and his biggest donor don’t have to live by the same rules and obey the same laws as the rest of us.

There are two things that Donald Trump said on Friday night in an appearance before the religious conservatives in Turning Point Action that should cause quite a bit of controversy. Speaking in West Palm Beach near his Mar-a-Lago residence, Trump made huge waves by saying that if he’s elected, his supporters will never need to vote again.

“Christians, get out and vote. Just this time. You won’t have to do it anymore, you know what? Four more years, it’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine, you won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians.”

That’s a very odd thing to say, and it’s being interpreted as a promise that he’ll establish a dictatorship. That impression is bolstered by what he said next, but there’s a huge problem with the New York Times’ quote. They have him saying “I love you, Christians. I’m a Christian. I love you, you got to get out and vote. In four years, you don’t have to vote again. We’ll have it fixed so good, you’re not going to have to vote.”

But I have watched the video dozens of times, and it is as clear as day to me that he actually says “I’m NOT Christian.”

Maybe he misspoke, but no matter how many times I play the clip I do not hear him say “I am a Christian.” And do you know who agrees with me? Whoever did the subtitles for the Wall Street Journal‘s clip:

So, why does the New York Times’ quote say the exact opposite? I mean it’s newsworthy that Trump just declared that he’s not a Christian, is it not? That might be relevant to a lot of voters.

I agree that the rest of his remarks are a bigger story, but this shouldn’t get lost among the weeds.

 

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be continuing with the painting of FDR’s home in New York’s Hudson Valley. I’m painting from my photo from a recent visit, 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 now started the building and foreground. More for 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.
–

I am 99.9 percent sure that Donald Trump was not shot on July 13, 2024 in Butler, Pennsylvania. I am 100 percent sure he was shot at that day. It sounds like the Federal Bureau of Investigation agrees with my assessment. Testifying before the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday, FBI director Christopher Wray told Chairman Jim Jordan of Ohio that “There’s some question about whether or not it’s a bullet or shrapnel that hit his ear.” I don’t think he’d offer that answer if had any concern whatsoever that he’d later be proven wrong to express doubt.

Let’s start at the beginning. Like all of you, I watched the video of the shooting, and Trump reacted to being injured like you’d react to being stung by a wasp or hit with something hard and sharp. He swatted at his ear and then went down for cover. He wasn’t knocked off his feet. He didn’t seem like he’d been shot.

Then there’s the injury itself. While it’s possible to be just barely grazed by a bullet, in general a round from an AR-15 has terrifying destructive power. In 2023, the Washington Post published an extensive visual report on “how bullets from an AR-15 blow the body apart.” I wrote about it here.

The AR-15 fires bullets at such a high velocity — often in a barrage of 30 or even 100 in rapid succession — that it can eviscerate multiple people in seconds. A single bullet lands with a shock wave intense enough to blow apart a skull and demolish vital organs. The impact is even more acute on the compact body of a small child.

“It literally can pulverize bones, it can shatter your liver and it can provide this blast effect,” said Joseph Sakran, a gunshot survivor who advocates for gun violence prevention and a trauma surgeon at Johns Hopkins Hospital.

During surgery on people shot with high-velocity rounds, he said, body tissue “literally just crumbled into your hands.”

More typical than a scrape on the ear is what happened to Corey Comperatore, which was described by fellow rally-goer Dr. James Sweetland who tried to help him.

“When I got to him, and I stumbled over people that were hunkered down, there was a large pool of blood. Unfortunately, there was a brain matter there. I did a brief examination of him. He had a bullet wound just above his right ear. And it looked to be fatal,” he said.

After moving Comperatore onto the bleacher bench, Dr. Sweetland performed CPR but said the man had no pulse and was not breathing.

The only medical report we’ve received on Trump’s injury came from Rep. Ronny Jackson, the disgraced ex-director of the White House Medical Unit (WHMU) who does not have an active medical license to practice outside of a military facility.

According to Jackson, Trump sustained a gunshot wound to the right ear that came “less than a quarter of an inch from entering his head, and struck the top of his right ear.”

The bullet track, he said, “produced a 2 cm wide wound that extended down to the cartilaginous surface of the ear. There was initially significant bleeding, followed by marked swelling of the entire upper ear.”

…“Given the broad and blunt nature of the wound itself, no sutures were required,” Jackson wrote.

Jackson simply isn’t credible in any way, so nothing he says can be accepted without some corroboration. By his account, however, an AR-15 bullet hit Trump in the ear and caused nothing more serious than “a 2 cm wide wound” that required no stitches. Photos of Trump’s ear since the incident indicate no scabbing or missing flesh.

But, as Josh Marshall notes, the initial report from Pennsylvania State Troopers was that Trump had been “hit by flying debris kicked up by the gunfire.” That’s consistent with this:

Four local police officers who were just feet away from Trump when the shots were fired also received minor injuries from flying debris from the bullets. (It seems probable that Secret Service agents may have been hit too but we simply haven’t gotten those details. The only reports about the local police officers came from the police department itself and appeared solely in the local press.) It was only after Trump went on Truth Social and announced that he’d been struck in the ear with a bullet that the story changed.

Add this all up, and it’s clear why the FBI doesn’t think it has been established that Trump was struck by a bullet, so he has not, as he claims, “taken a bullet for democracy.”

Yes, he was shot at and almost killed, and he could tell the story that way if he were an honest man. But he’s not an honest man, and that is a big part of the story of his assassination attempt. Even at his most sympathetic moment, he’s acted dishonorably, and that’s the kind of failure of character that typifies him.

Hey hey everyone. Seems like a good time for some tranquility.

The jukebox is filled with limitless possibilities. The bar is stocked. It can be open mic night if you want.

Cheers!

One of my favorite podcasts is The Professional Left with Driftglass and Blue Gal and they have a recurring feature called “No fair remembering stuff” where they set the record straight on things Republicans have said and done in the past. I probably like it so much in part because my memory is like a sieve and I’m envious of how they have so much history at their fingertips.

But I have something from this genre to share today. You see, I was reading an article from the Associated Press about how “Republican leaders are warning party members against using overtly racist and sexist attacks against Vice President Kamala Harris.” I thought that was a nice thing to hear and I wanted to know more.

At a closed-door meeting of House Republicans on Tuesday, National Republican Congressional Committee chairman Richard Hudson, R-N.C., urged lawmakers to stick to criticizing Harris for her role in Biden-Harris administration policies…

…Hudson told members at the Tuesday meeting that the NRCC is focusing on how Harris is even more progressive than Biden and essentially “owns” all the administration’s policies, according to a person familiar with the conversation and granted anonymity to discuss it.

I guess they got concerned with members like Wyoming Rep. Harriet Hageman popping off that Vice-President Harris is  “Intellectually, just really kind of the bottom of the barrel. I think she was a DEI hire.”

DEI is an acronym for diversity, equity and inclusion, and is not to be confused with REI which is a retail and outdoor recreation services corporation that sells tents, kayaks and hiking boots. For the right, a “DEI hire” is a minority who has been given a job over a more qualified non-minority. So, saying that Harris is a DEI hire is a shriek of white grievance as well as a dismissive insult of Harris’s capabilities. Presumably, she was only picked as President Biden’s running mate because she’s a woman or because she’s non-white or both.

But since this is rightly seen as sexist and racist, the NRCC doesn’t think it’s great political messaging for its more vulnerable members. And I guess that’s a good thing, because we all benefit when there’s less sexism and racism in our politics.

The problem is the NRCC chairman who delivered this message has a bit of history with racism. Back in April 2012, Richard Hudson was running in the primaries for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives and he had made an appearance in front of a Tea Party group.

“There’s no question President Obama is hiding something on his citizenship,” Hudson said at the event, according to a video provided to Roll Call. “And if you elect me to Congress to represent you, I’ll introduce legislation that requires any candidate for president or vice president to be certified by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court as being a citizen.”

“And whether that’s the birth certificate or whatever it means, that’ll make it really simple from now on, if you want to run for president you need to know that you’re going to have to prove you are a citizen. I think that’s good and simple,” he continued.

Roll Call reached out to Hudson after the received a video of his appearance at the Tea Party event, but Hudson was unrepentant:

Reached today at his campaign office, Hudson stood by his comments.

“I think there’s a lot of people that think that he’s not a citizen. I don’t know,” Hudson said.

When reminded that Obama’s long-form birth certificate has been released and his citizenship is known, Hudson said he hadn’t personally seen the president’s birth certificate.

“In the future,” Hudson said, “let’s just set a standard that if you’re going to run, you have to have your citizenship certified in advance and then you won’t have all this lingering, you know, questions and conspiracy theories and so forth.”

“Personally, it’s not a pressing issue for me,” said Hudson, the former chief of staff to Rep. Mike Conaway (R-Texas).

Hudson went on to win the primary and the general election, and he’s been serving in Congress ever since. So, his dabbling in Birtherism paid off. He might even owe his seat to his willingness to embrace the most nakedly racist attack Republicans launched against the nation’s first black president.

But now that he’s in charge of the NRCC, he’s responsible for winning not just one red-leaning seat in North Carolina but a majority of seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. And he realizes that the toss-up seats that will determine the majority aren’t as receptive to naked sexism and racism. He’s not enlightened on these issues. He’s despicably cynical on these issues, which I know because I can remember at least some stuff.

I love Joe Biden and I’m sad that he’s no longer able to carry the torch. But I have to say that I’ve never been happier with the Democratic Party. The leadership made the incredibly difficult decision to stand up to a very successful and admirable president and insist that despite winning the nomination of the party in a walk, that he could not be allowed to accept it. I wish they had been able to convince Biden without having to push so hard and so publicly, but they did not back down from their responsibility. There was no way we could responsibly argue that Biden would be fit to serve another four and a half years in office, and the American people simply were not going to believe it.

I do think in an ideal world, the alternative to Biden would be someone who is not a part of his (unjustly) unpopular incumbent administration, but we don’t live in an ideal world. The simplest solution was to go with Kamala Harris and, if there were ever going to be someone else, Biden put the kibosh on it when he wholeheartedly endorsed her. At that point, it was ensured that she would have the delegates needed and the right thing to do was to rally around her.

I know pushing Biden aside was not something Obama, Pelosi, Schumer and Jeffries wanted to do. It seems so unfair and unkind. But we all age, and to be candid about it Biden wasn’t necessarily supposed to run for a second term. He kind of suggested he wouldn’t. But that’s all water under the bridge now. Biden finally saw the light, or more precisely the devastating battleground poll numbers, and now he’ll go down as a kind of Cincinnatus who gave up power for the good of the country and went back to his plow.

Now his negatives transfer to Harris’s opponent. People want a new president, not one we’ve already tried. They want someone fresh and young, not an old retread. They want someone lucid and vibrant, not a rambling narcoleptic like Trump.  It’s easy to feel the instant infusion of energy and optimism that arrived the moment Biden bowed out, and that’s a pretty strong indication that it was a popular decision. Harris’s astonishing fundraising numbers are another indication.

The Democratic Party really came through here. And the Republican Party, which has never acknowledged the problems with Trump and never stood up to him, is still the same shambolic mess that couldn’t elect a Speaker of the House. Their presentation of unity at the Republican National Convention was a mirage and it won’t stand up.

It’s possible the Democrats still lose this election but I am so grateful that they did something bold rather than just waddling into the threshing blades.

This wasn’t about big donors or some undemocratic process. This was about a political organization operating on the highest level under the most intense pressure.