THERE ARE 33 DAYS UNTIL THE MIDTERM ELECTIONS
We begin today with
Charles Blow of
The New York Times opening up the book on Herschel Walker’s son, Christian, so I don’t have to.
Of course, Christian is a complicated character, and that’s being charitable. More accurately, he’s come across as a nasty piece of work.
He is an election denier who opposes Black Lives Matter (he has called it a “terrorist organization” and “the K.K.K. in blackface”), as well as gay pride (even though, as The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
reported, “Walker has said he is not gay but is attracted to ‘big, strong, muscular men.’”). He is also anti-body positivity (He said on Instagram, “I’m tired of all these models who look like they’ve never seen a treadmill in their life”), anti-feminist (he said on Instagram, “Maybe men aren’t trash, and maybe you feminists should shave your armpit hair”), and he rages against Covid protocols (as he said when complaining about Covid restrictions, “I don’t care about your grandma, at all. I don’t.”).
As someone who is Black and queer, allow me to borrow from that vernacular, and say in a tone dripping with disdain: “Child, please.”
Christian says he could have stopped Herschel’s campaign from the beginning. But he didn’t. And neither was he passively disengaged. He was an active participant in the fraud. He knew when his father launched his campaign whatever Herschel had put him and his mom through, and he still actively supported him on social media and even sold campaign merchandise.
Chile. “...not gay but is attracted to ‘big, strong, muscular men’”...???… ???...
Look ??? (help me, Lord!)...chiiiiile...all I have to say about
that is what the ballroom queens of Lower Manhattan told me over 35 years ago, “Reading is fundamental and it’s the fundamental that get read.”
Christian Walker is as complicit as his father in the crispy hot mess that both of them created and maintained.
TRIGGER WARNING for this ad posted by election forecaster Logan Phillips.
What's causing Walker's drop in the polls? I don't think it's abortion. I think it's this multi-million dollar ad buy from Chuck Schumer. Heads up - this video is dark, and highlights Walker's threats to kill his wife. ?
pic.twitter.com/a1jlfWUHJC — Logan Phillips (@LoganR2WH)
October 5, 2022
The reason why I feel the very
very little bit of empathy for Christian Walker that I do is (for the most part) because of the content of that ad.
The woman in that ad is Christian’s mother.
Aaron Blake of
The Washington Post writes that white evangelical Christians who, once upon a time, were so-called “values voters,” are the bloc of voters behind the Republican Party shift that now accepts people like Number 45 and Herschel Walker as their political leaders.
The
Daily Beast’s report that Walker had paid for an abortion in 2009 (which Walker denies) combined with
harsh comments about Walker from his conservative son have rekindled long-running questions about just how much personal conduct and hypocrisy matter to voters. It’s a conversation we occasionally have, such as when a GOP congressman
urges a mistress to have an abortion or when a GOP Senate candidate is reported to have
pursued teenage girls while he was in his 30s. These questions often focus on the GOP, because the party around the turn-of-the-century built its brand on morality. Think: the
“values voters” of 2004.
What’s clear is that the party has evolved considerably since then, toward a version of itself that can accept the likes of Trump and Walker — and overwhelmingly. [...]
The shift was driven by the evangelical Christians who had once pushed the party to embrace morality. While in 2011, just 30 percent of White evangelicals said such a candidate could fulfill their duties, that number in 2020 was 72 percent. Among the major religious groups, this one went
from the least tolerant of such a candidate to the most tolerant.
White evangelical Christians have utterly destroyed any of their claims of advocacy for so-called “moral” leadership.
Former Ohio state Republican legislator
Joan W. Lawrence writes for
The Columbus Dispatch that the Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate J.D. Vance is an a**-kissin flip-flopper.
Even Trump knows it. “J.D. is kissing my a**. He wants my support so bad!”
the former president said at a rally in Ohio recently.
His opposition to Trump isn’t the only thing he has backtracked on.
Vance has flip-flopped on issue after issue. During the 2016 campaign,
Vance wrote in USA Today, “Trump’s actual policy proposals, such as they are, range from immoral to absurd.” That year,
he said that building a wall was “a simple solution” to a “complex problem.” But in April, he said at a rally, “Can we please, for the love of God, finish Donald Trump’s border wall on the southern border?”
One of Vance’s favorite issues is
the opioid crisis. He discussed it in
his memoir, and he’s talked about it for several years. But here too, Vance’s record isn’t as good as it seems. Vance founded a group called Our Ohio Renewal to fight opioid addiction.
Not only did it
not achieve much success, but Vance hired someone
who questioned the role of prescription painkillers in the opioid crisis. Most of the money the nonprofit raised
was spent on staff salaries. None was spent on charitable activities. So much for Vance’s concern about opioid addicts.
The
Editorial Board of the
Arizona Republic outlines the reasons that Arizona’s gubernatorial race has national significance.
In the way that television and, now more directly, the internet have connected every small hamlet, medium suburb and major city in America, they have also nationalized state politics to a point that today’s race for Arizona governor very much reflects the turns in U.S. politics.
And like our national politics, we can sense the tectonic shifts of historic change.
A wave of populism has broken over the traditional Republican Party, carrying away party mandarins and bringing in new Republicans such as Kari Lake, fully committed to shaking the table.
A cultural revolution also is changing the Democratic Party with its consuming themes of social justice and identity politics, bewildering old-school Democrats such as Katie Hobbs, who were too slow to understand the change and are only now catching up.
These new politics dominate this race because Lake went to extremes to win Trump’s blessing. To win that endorsement meant embracing Trump’s fantasy that the 2020 presidential election was stolen.
The entire editorial is quite detailed on both candidates and worth the read.
Susan J. Demas of Michigan Advance writes that Michigan Republicans do not want Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer talking about abortion rights.
Perhaps more than any politician in the country, Whitmer has read this moment right — and relished this fight in a key swing state.
It’s a big reason why she’s dominated the gubernatorial race that was, at one time,
billed as one of the most competitive in the country.
Naturally, this has absolutely incensed Republicans who have been
trying to talk about anything except reproductive rights. They’re desperately counting Whitmer’s tweets on abortion and begging her to stop bringing up the subject — especially her GOP opponent, Tudor Dixon, who backs a ban with no exceptions for rape, incest or the mother’s health. (It’s gotten so sad that anonymous sources have taken to
complaining to the media about how frustrated the campaign is over Whitmer’s “incessant” focus on abortion).
Anyone who’s been in politics for more than a few minutes knows that when an issue hits, you just keep hammering. But Dixon, a political novice, seems extremely flustered that she can’t just change the subject like she could as a low-wattage right-wing commentator.
No, I am not posting any of the hilarious memes of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and his white boots but I will post this.
Ron DeSantis does not look like a happy camper.
pic.twitter.com/mwnoJlxvHX — Jon Cooper (@joncoopertweets)
October 5, 2022
Yes, I did say something about this photo.
Ron DeSantis does
not look like a happy camper. And with good reason.
Stephen Caruso and Katie Meyer write for
The Philadelphia Inquirer that the inability to resolve issues pertaining to a 2019 law about mail-in voting may result in election night chaos in Pennsylvania.
Elections in Pennsylvania have become highly political, and the state election law has some gray areas. The patchwork of mail voting rules largely stems from 2019, when the legislature and governor passed a bipartisan overhaul of the commonwealth’s election law and allowed no-excuse mail voting for the first time.
That law, Act 77, doesn’t say, for instance, whether counties should be able to contact voters who have submitted mail ballots with errors and allow them to fix them — a process known as ballot curing. The law also doesn’t mention ballot drop boxes or how they should be regulated. They’re a common tool states use to make it quicker to submit ballots.
Courts have ruled on some of these questions, and the Department of State has also tried to clear up some of the confusion by issuing guidance on still-unsettled areas.
Last month, for instance, the department
handed down legal guidance to the counties on how to count mail ballots, policies for drop boxes, and what to do about emails from outside groups asking for unlawful voter roll purges.
Ted Van Green of Pew Research Center writes that most Americans think that their favored side of political spectrum is losing with regard to the issues that matter to them the most.
About seven-in-ten U.S. adults (72%) say that, on the issues that matter to them, their side in politics has been losing more often than winning. Just 24% say their side has been winning more often than losing.
The share saying they feel like their side is losing politically has increased 7 percentage points since last year and 16 points since early 2020.
The change in the last year has come among members of both parties. Today, about eight-in-ten Republicans and Republican-leaning independents (81%) say they feel that their side is losing more often than winning politically, up from 74% who said this in 2021. In February 2020, with President Donald Trump in the White House, just 29% of Republicans said their side was losing more often than winning, while 69% said it was mostly winning.
Democrats, who currently control the White House and both houses of Congress, are more positive than Republicans about their political standing. Still, two-thirds of Democrats and Democratic leaners (66%) say their side is losing more than winning, up from 60% in 2021.
David A. Graham of
The Atlantic writes that polling shows a fondness for Confederate symbols is not limited to the South.
But though the Civil War was a battle between two regions of the country, sympathy for the Confederacy is no longer confined to states that seceded and border states. Support for Confederate symbols and monuments now exists across the country, following lines of race, religion, and education rather than geography. This is one of many ways in which the South is no longer simply a region: A certain version of it has become an identity shared among white, rural, conservative Americans from coast to coast. That’s one takeaway from
a new survey about Confederate symbols from the Public Religion Research Institute and E Pluribus Unum.
“We’ve had hints of this in the ways that campaigns get run: It used to be that all politics are local, and it’s seeming more like all politics are national,” Robert P. Jones, the president and founder of PRRI, told me. “When you look at the predictors on Confederate monuments, they are much more about race and partisan affiliation and education levels than they are about region.” [...]
Where things get interesting is when the survey measures support for reforms, whether destruction of these markers or removal to a museum: Across race, party, and education levels, numbers diverge, but views about reform are nearly identical in the South and in the rest of the country. Nearly identical portions of southerners and Americans elsewhere (22 percent versus 25 percent) back reform, and nearly identical portions oppose it (17 percent versus 20 percent). The remainder are split between leaning one way or another, again closely mirrored. In other words, non-southerners feel the same way about Confederate monuments that southerners do.
Benjamin J. Hulac and James Downing of
Roll Call gives an overview of Biden Administration and Congressional ideas about the decision by OPEC to cut oil production.
Within the administration, national security adviser Jake Sullivan and National Economic Council Director Brian Deese criticized the decision, calling it “shortsighted” and a response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. As oil prices ticked up in the hours following the announcement, the pair said the administration would consult with Congress on strategies to blunt OPEC’s control over global oil prices.
The cartel’s decision drew diverging strategies and approaches from Democrats and Republicans in Congress over how to rein in oil prices and how the U.S., the top generator of oil and gas of any country in the world, should use its supplies.[...]
The American Petroleum Institute and American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers told the administration on Tuesday that it should not ban or limit the export of refined petroleum products in order to build domestic inventories of gasoline and diesel.
Elsa Maishman and Nathan Williams report for BBC News that Russian President Vladimir Putin has signed the final paperwork “accepting” four Ukrainian regions into the Russian Federation even as Ukraine makes military advances in some of those very areas.
The Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions are "accepted into the Russian Federation" the documents say.
But in two of those areas - Luhansk and Kherson - Ukraine said it has been retaking more villages.
Mr Putin also signed a decree to formalise Russia's seizure of the nuclear power plant in Zaporizhzhia.
Last Friday, the Russian leader held a grand ceremony in the Kremlin, where he signed agreements with the Moscow-installed leaders of the four regions.
The move followed self-proclaimed referendums in the areas, denounced as a "sham" by the West.
But on the ground there appears to be a different reality, with Ukrainian forces making gains in both the south and the east.
Julian Borger of the
Guardian reports that Polish president Andrzej Duda has suggested that nuclear warheads could be based in Poland.
The request from the Polish president, Andrzej Duda, is widely seen as symbolic, as moving nuclear warheads closer to
Russia would make them more vulnerable and less militarily useful, according to experts. Furthermore, the White House has said it had not received such a request.
“We’re not aware of this issue being raised and would refer you to the government of
Poland,” a US official said.
Duda’s announcement appears to be the latest example of nuclear signalling as the US and its allies seek to deter Putin from the first nuclear use in battle since 1945, while preparing potential responses if deterrence fails that would have maximum punitive impact while containing the risk of escalation to all-out nuclear war.[...]
Duda’s remarks on basing nuclear weapons followed changes in the constitution of neighbouring Belarus that would allow Russian nuclear weapons to be based on its territory.
Frank Hornig and Maximilian Popp of
Der Spiegel interview former Italian Prime Minister Romano Pradi about the future of Italy under the probable leadership of Giorgia Meloni.
DER SPIEGEL: Is Meloni a danger to Italian democracy?
Prodi: That is certainly possible, yes. At least on the medium term. She remained intentionally vague when it comes to replacing the parliamentary democracy with a presidential system. I could imagine her attempting to amend the constitution, but to do so, she either needs a two-thirds majority in parliament, which she doesn’t have, or she must hold a referendum, which she would likely lose at the moment.
DER SPIEGEL: Meloni says that governing Italy is like raising a child. What will change for minorities in the country, for LGBTQ people and for migrants?
Prodi: Meloni is a woman with many different faces. During the campaign, she continually insisted that minorities had nothing to fear and that women’s rights would not be restricted. But her slogan, "God, Family, Fatherland”? That is one-to-one Mussolini. Meloni won’t be able to do whatever she wants. Italy is still a stable democracy. We are much closer to France and Germany than we are to Hungary.
We hope.
Rosy Auguste Ducena writes for Just Security that massive international support is needed to stabilize Haiti.
Last week, Ariel Henry, the acting prime minister of Haiti,
told the United Nations General Assembly that he had made progress in governing the country, and just needed more international support for such programs as equipping the police and assisting customs officers in order to set the stage for elections.
In fact, his governance has been an unmitigated disaster, as I told the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee last week in
testimony about the desperate situation in Haiti.
In more than a year of Henry’s rule, armed gangs benefitting from the protection of the state have become
more brazen and more brutal, most recently
blocking the main fuel terminal in the capital of Port-au-Prince, which resulted in a cutoff of gas supplies to hospitals and to generators that power cell phone towers. Water trucks lack the fuel to deliver potable water even to neighborhoods where people can afford to buy it. Henry’s leadership has brought
a collapsed economy, daily terrors and privations, and in recent weeks, a new level of crisis and
demonstrations in the streets.
This is a moment when Haiti must decide critical questions: What kind of international support is needed to restore basic security? How can Haiti effectively mount elections that will inspire trust and participation? How should the country regulate gas prices?
Finally today and on a much lighter note, I was surfing around some of the college and university papers in Georgia for Herschel Walker commentary and came across this interesting piece by
Clara Templin, writing for the Georgia Tech student newspaper, the
Technique, about the value of crafting.
When I think of crafting, I think of hunch-backed old ladies, knitting needles in hand. They’re sitting in front of a fire in a warmly lit room and making a homely sweater for an unsuspecting grandchild. The act of crafting is primarily reserved for elderly women who have nothing better to do in their free time or young children either at summer camp or school. Crafting is not a widely practiced activity, preventing many from discovering an additional way to channel their stress and untapped creativity.[...]
Coming to Tech, I have had a very sudden adjustment with practically no designated creative writing or art classes. Even though I’ve enjoyed the various chemistry, math, etc. classes I’ve taken so far, they do not satisfy my need to express myself. At Tech, I don’t feel like I have that many creative outlets. I can’t take a credited class about glass blowing or impressionist painting like my friends at traditional liberal arts schools.
The arts events that Tech does have are intermittently scheduled and not well advertised. While it would be ideal for Tech to make more of an effort to give students structured ways to express themselves creatively and emotionally rather than push that responsibility onto overworked students, that does not seem like a top priority to Tech at the moment. That being said, crafting is a generally inexpensive and accessible way to fill this need.
Have a good day, everyone!
