Inslee drops out: only slowly building a national fundraising base and gaining no traction in polls, Washington Governor @JayInslee is ending his Presidential candidacy. I had expected this but am very sorry to see it. Thread vox.com/energy-and-env…
A former Congressman and two-term Governor of a mid-sized State has a better claim than most candidates this year to be able to run the federal government. And @JayInslee had devoted the most thought of any candidate to the most critical issue facing the nation: climate change.
I think it’s probably true that Inslee’s presence in the race put pressure on other candidates (and on the Democratic Party) to increase the attention they gave to climate change. That’s a good thing. And frankly, Inslee’s inability to attract as much attention as, say,...
....two very elderly retread candidates, a small town mayor, a former junior Cabinet member & several former backbench Congressmen probably says more about Democratic activists than it says about Inslee.
The experience @JayInslee brought to the campaign was earned in the Pacific Northwest, a national media desert. He started out with low name ID; had no obvious way to connect with minority voters in early primary states; at 68 was older than is really desirable...
...for a “fresh face” candidate; & sometimes had so much to say his central message got muddled. It may be his campaign was doomed from the start. Recognizing he was getting nowhere with his target audience, he left the race decisively, without recriminations & in a timely way.
At least a dozen Democrats now in the race should follow @JayInslee’s example. The ones who remain should borrow liberally from his policy proposals to fight climate change, by far the most thorough and practical of any candidate, meat on the bones of the Green New Deal.
I understand @JayInslee is now considering running for re-election as Washington’s Governor. I hope he does. Everything he said about the mortal threat posed by climate change was true; he needs to stay in the arena, a check on Democrats who may prefer easier tasks.
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"In this third iteration of Senator Graham’s arguments, just as in the prior two, there is no role for this Court
other than to serve as a rubber stamp for his own conclusions." Fani Willis, an Atlanta District Attorney, thinks Sen. Graham should testify. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.usco…
But Trump thinks Graham shouldn't, and what's most important to Graham is showing loyalty -- loyalty! -- to Trump. He'll try to stonewall a court, and even threaten riots, to show his loyalty to Trump.
Here's the thing: Graham and other Republicans in Congress have already voted to hold Trump above the law. Almost all of them voted to hold Trump above the law three times. Ron Johnson, the Wisconsin Senator, and other Republicans up for reelection are campaigning on it.
To begin with, I have no predictions as to what @elonmusk will do with Twitter if he completes his acquisition. I don't think he knows himself, so anything I could say would be just a guess. Frankly, I think Musk is making this play for Twitter because he's bored.
It makes sense. Developing electric vehicles and getting government support to do this is one task; building a durable nationwide market is another. Developing private space transport systems is one task; establishing them as profitable over many years is another.
Flagging a couple of essays by the observant and vastly experienced @JamesFallows about American governance. One is a lament about venerable American institutions (like the Constitution) not meeting the needs of modern American society. fallows.substack.com/p/fools-drunks…
The second is a set of prescriptions, to address the mismatch Fallows perceives between inflexible institutions, laws, and rules on the one hand and modern society on the other. fallows.substack.com/p/were-stuck-w…
Do I agree with all this? With many of Fallows' prescriptions, sure. With his diagnosis, well, less. It's not so much the details -- like complaining about the Founders not having foreseen California and how big it would be. I mean, it's fair enough to note that having...
Timely essay by @joshtpm on the handful of Democrats threatening to wreck @POTUS Biden’s agenda. They’ve created a sticky situation, no doubt. How to get past the obstacles they’re throwing up? [short thread]
My theory on the reconciliation bill from the beginning has been that its taxes (more precisely, revenue-raising provisions), not its spending, would be its weakness among self-styled Democratic moderates. I see little reason to doubt that theory now.
This isn’t to say Sinema, Schraeder and the rest don’t care at all about the Sunday shows or the Delta/Afghanistan-driven decline in Biden’s poll numbers since June. But they all have big donors, and big donors all have access. We can guess what donors are telling them.
A think piece from last year by @AbrahmL for @propublica. Lustgarten focused on how climate change affects the risk of living in certain places, all in the United States. He speculated about a coming great migration. It’s actually worse than that. [Short but depressing thread]
Climate change, of course, is a global phenomenon. People in much of the world live on narrower margins than most Americans do. And, the other factors that prompt people to leave their homes in search of new places to live are still active.
Natural disasters (Haiti); bad, oppressive governments (Cuba, Venezuela); instability borne of Americans enduring, insatiable demand for drugs (Mexico, Central & northern South America); war (Afghanistan, Somalia). Climate change — &, now, #COVID19 — compounds every one of these
@JessicaHuseman You should re-up this thread, but this time specify who "y'all" and "a lot of people" are supposed to be. Let's have some names. In my state, the people who want to spend money on rural broadband, public education and road maintenance are all Democrats from Madison & Milwaukee.
@JessicaHuseman The Republicans from the rural north like to bang on instead about mask mandates and Critical Race Theory. And, of course, they're very upset about the last election. There's no practical difference between rural and suburban Republicans here, incidentally.
@JessicaHuseman I can't speak to conditions in Texas, or Oklahoma, or other Southern states where Republicans run basically everything and have for years. Maybe those are the folks to whom you refer. Or maybe it's a few political writers in Washington and New York with platforms but no power.