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David Kurtz
@davidkurtz.bsky.social
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Happy Fourth? Morning Memo will be back Monday.
morningmemo.talkingpointsmemo.com
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David Kurtz@davidkurtz.bsky.social |
388 followers 14 following 499 posts
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David Kurtz
@davidkurtz.bsky.social
[ View ] |
Happy Fourth? Morning Memo will be back Monday.
morningmemo.talkingpointsmemo.com
0 replies 0 reposts 0 likes
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David Kurtz
@davidkurtz.bsky.social
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The post-debate freakout probably won’t resolve itself one way or the other until public opinion settles in and polling can assess the net effect of his poor debate performance.
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David Kurtz
@davidkurtz.bsky.social
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President Biden heads into the holiday weekend with Democrats still panicking, a few elected Dems abandoning him but many others keeping their options open, and no clear path forward if Biden is not the nominee.
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David Kurtz
@davidkurtz.bsky.social
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Don’t make us hurt you, remains a recurring theme of Trumpism’s cycle of abuse. Meanwhile, Trump's sentencing in the hush money case was postponed to September in the aftermath of the SCOTUS immunity decision.
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David Kurtz
@davidkurtz.bsky.social
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As if a reminder of the stakes were needed, Heritage Foundation's president hailed the presidential immunity decision using barely veiled authoritarian language: “[W]e are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”
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David Kurtz
@davidkurtz.bsky.social
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Of course they’re not entirely unrelated. Biden’s debate-fail resonates precisely because of the high stakes of the current moment. If your hair was already on fire at the prospect of Trump II, weakness in the standard bearer for the Trump opposition is cause for deep concern.
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David Kurtz
@davidkurtz.bsky.social
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The collision of SCOTUS' radical end-of-term rulings with Biden’s catastrophic debate performance is one of those quirks of timing that only history can provide. We'd find it implausible in fiction, and in reality it strains the imagination, too.
talkingpointsmemo.com/morning-memo...
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David Kurtz
@davidkurtz.bsky.social
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Sign up for Morning Memo, formerly in the business of chronicling the long, slow, unsteady process of holding Donald Trump to account.
morningmemo.talkingpointsmemo.com
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David Kurtz
@davidkurtz.bsky.social
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Many of you will be skeptical of this. Calm down, you'll say. Don't be so dramatic and overwrought. I will take no joy in being right about this. You can wait and see, but don’t wait too long. It may already be too late.
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David Kurtz
@davidkurtz.bsky.social
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We have entered an uncertain new era. The door is now wide open to the kinds of fascism and authoritarianism we spent much of the 20th century and hundreds of thousands of American lives combatting overseas.
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David Kurtz
@davidkurtz.bsky.social
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The American presidency now exists outside of the law and beyond the reach of the criminal law. In the Supreme Court’s view, the President is the law. This is new, it’s unprecedented, and the consequences are almost beyond our ability to imagine or foretell.
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David Kurtz
@davidkurtz.bsky.social
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Three days ahead of the 248th anniversary of the American colonists shucking off monarchial rule in Philadelphia, SCOTUS gilded the presidency with monarchial powers the likes of which we’ve never had, never sought, and thought we had rid ourselves of two and half centuries ago.
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David Kurtz
@davidkurtz.bsky.social
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With its immunity decision, SCOTUS took a sledgehammer to the constitutional foundation of American democracy and eviscerated the rule of law. It will go down in the annals of wretched decisions alongside Dred Scott, Plessy, and Korematsu.
talkingpointsmemo.com/morning-memo...
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David Kurtz
@davidkurtz.bsky.social
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Morning Memo wants ALL THE POWER, too. Join now, before it's too late:
morningmemo.talkingpointsmemo.com
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David Kurtz
@davidkurtz.bsky.social
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Rather than being driven by a guiding conservative judicial philosophy, however odious it might have been, the current Supreme Court is most consistent when it comes to consolidating power for itself.
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David Kurtz
@davidkurtz.bsky.social
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There’s nothing conservative about it, and you only have to look to conservatives’ exact same complaints about the Warren and especially the Burger courts to see the obvious. We’ve taken to calling the court “right wing” instead of conservative b/ it’s a more precise description.
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David Kurtz
@davidkurtz.bsky.social
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...where the judiciary is increasingly the final arbiter not just on the law but on the facts, the interpretation of those facts, the application of those facts in given situations, and the technical, scientific, and professional implications of those facts in the real world.
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David Kurtz
@davidkurtz.bsky.social
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Rather than taking a conservative view of the role of the courts – a modest, humble, restrained posture that is wary of its own power and applies it carefully – the Roberts supermajority has taken a radical course ...
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David Kurtz
@davidkurtz.bsky.social
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...the Supreme Court’s term and its four years with a 6-3 conservative supermajority is how the defining characteristic isn’t conservatism at all but the accrual of power to the judiciary at the expense of the executive and legislative branches.
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David Kurtz
@davidkurtz.bsky.social
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The Supreme Court’s decision Friday to overrule Chevron will have vast consequences, many of then unseen or hard to detect, but one of the things we were discussing internally Friday as we assessed ...
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David Kurtz
@davidkurtz.bsky.social
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The Supreme Court’s decision Friday to overrule Chevron will have vast consequences, many of then unseen or hard to detect, but one of the things we were discussing internally Friday as we assessed ...
talkingpointsmemo.com/morning-memo...
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David Kurtz
@davidkurtz.bsky.social
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For the full read and to sign up (it's free): morningmemo.talkingpointsmemo.com
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David Kurtz
@davidkurtz.bsky.social
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With that out of the way, let’s try to untangle some of the conflicting and contradictory analyses that bedevil not just the coverage of debates but how people absorb and react to them. The problem writ large overwhelmingly comes down to conflating which debate audience you’re taking about.
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David Kurtz
@davidkurtz.bsky.social
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He agreed to the rules. He set the agenda. And none of what happened was unforeseeable. Not only was it predictable, it was in fact predicted.
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David Kurtz
@davidkurtz.bsky.social
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You can carp about CNN’s debate moderators abdicating any fact-checking responsibilities. You can bemoan Trump’s fountain of lies or the difficulty of debating a narcissistic sociopath on live TV. But Biden asked for this.
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David Kurtz
@davidkurtz.bsky.social
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This is what it looks like to swing for the fences and miss. You can’t blame the man for being old, but you can blame him for failing to seize the opportunity that he went out of his way to create for himself.
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David Kurtz
@davidkurtz.bsky.social
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It was a strategic move to try to change the course of the campaign, put to rest the concerns about his age and vitality, and put Trump — fresh off his criminal conviction — back on his heels.
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David Kurtz
@davidkurtz.bsky.social
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What makes this probably the worst presidential debate performance ever wasn’t the presentation itself, it was that Biden sought this debate, forced it on Trump, agreed to its terms, and then fell on his face.
talkingpointsmemo.com/morning-memo...
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David Kurtz
@davidkurtz.bsky.social
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If it comes to it, Morning Memo will be documenting the degradations of a Trump II presidency with unrelenting consistency. Sign up now:
morningmemo.talkingpointsmemo.com
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David Kurtz
@davidkurtz.bsky.social
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If Trump were to win, we’re only a few months away from reaping the whirlwind, and the government workers once again will be among the first and hardest hit.
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David Kurtz
@davidkurtz.bsky.social
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... with careers, pensions and personal financial viability on the line. Others may be legitimately trying to shield their work in the short term so they can resume it in earnest later. Regardless, it’s hard to imagine it’s not having an effect subconsciously already.
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David Kurtz
@davidkurtz.bsky.social
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ou can only hope that they’re not already consciously clipping their wings to take the edge off their work or minimize their exposure. It would be a mistake to self-censor, but you can certainly sympathize with their plight. Some may be self-protective...
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David Kurtz
@davidkurtz.bsky.social
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...the phalanx of inspectors, auditors, and examiners who do the daily work of the gov't, they’re not oblivious to the three years of Trump threats of retribution and revenge. You think they don’t remember the vindictive Trump I move of BLM’s headquarters from DC to Colorado?
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David Kurtz
@davidkurtz.bsky.social
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Whether it’s the good folks at NOAA (the Sharpie photo above is a bitter reminder of what we may face again) doing the hard work of marrying science with public communications, the line prosecutors bringing Jan. 6 rioters to justice, or ...
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David Kurtz
@davidkurtz.bsky.social
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How Federal Workers Will Be The First Casualties Of Trump II->Right now, all across the federal government, people are acutely aware of what a Trump II would mean for them and their work.
talkingpointsmemo.com/morning-memo...
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David Kurtz
@davidkurtz.bsky.social
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Morning Memo can come right to your inbox each weekday, if you prefer it that way:
morningmemo.talkingpointsmemo.com
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David Kurtz
@davidkurtz.bsky.social
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Or, as I suspect is most likely, a combination of top-down and bottom-up election denialism that work in sync with each other to maximize disruption.
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David Kurtz
@davidkurtz.bsky.social
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If the 2020 autocoup attempt was from the top down, led by President Trump from the White House, the 2024 version may look more bottom up, a "grassroots" effort that Trump has seeded with a million lies for a dozen years ...
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David Kurtz
@davidkurtz.bsky.social
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Heroes in their own minds, they've been immersed in the Big Lie for long enough for it to have saturated their entire understanding of the election process. That's not let them off the hook, or to excuse their actions. It's just a different dynamic than what we saw in 2020.
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David Kurtz
@davidkurtz.bsky.social
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That was a sobering realization, a corollary to the old aphorism that if you repeat the lie long enough it becomes true. Which brings us to the Big Lie. The WaPo reports this morning on 5 examples where county-level officials have tried to block the certification of the vote.
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David Kurtz
@davidkurtz.bsky.social
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But I observed from our reporting on it over the years that the voter fraud bogosity was so prevalent that even reasonable, non-bad-actor Republicans adopted and advanced it unquestioningly. It was in the drinking water. They didn’t even know they’d been sipping it for years.
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David Kurtz
@davidkurtz.bsky.social
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We saw a similar dynamic in the decades-long voter fraud bamboozlement effort the GOP was running. Yes, those efforts were smoked out, the worst culprits identified, and some of the most egregious efforts either thwarted or rolled back.
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David Kurtz
@davidkurtz.bsky.social
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One under-appreciated aspect of Donald Trump’s relentless year’s long campaign to promulgate the Big Lie is how it becomes internalized as gospel all the way down the GOP line to the local dog catcher.
talkingpointsmemo.com/morning-memo...
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David Kurtz
@davidkurtz.bsky.social
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Morning Memo, where all the red warning lights are flashing about a potential Trump II presidency:
morningmemo.talkingpointsmemo.com
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David Kurtz
@davidkurtz.bsky.social
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As for the criteria used to determine who makes the list and how those criteria are applied, the AP provides this chilling methodology: “They’re relying in part on tips from his network of conservative contacts, including workers.”
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David Kurtz
@davidkurtz.bsky.social
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Notably, the plan is to publish the list online. A doxxing in the public square as it were, with all the obvious historical echoes, as the AP rightly notes: "The public list-making conjures for some the era of Joseph McCarthy."
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David Kurtz
@davidkurtz.bsky.social
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The work is being financed with the help of a $100K prize from the Heritage Foundation, long a bastion of Reagan conservatism but now fully in MAGA mode. In announced the prize, Heritage referred to”the presence of anti-American bad actors burrowed into the administrative state.”
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David Kurtz
@davidkurtz.bsky.social
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The work of compiling the list of names of some 100 gov't workers is being done by a Kentucky fellow named Tom Jones and his American Accountability Foundation. Jones is a former staffer to Sens. Jim DeMint (R-SC) and Ron Johnson (R-WI) and did oppo work for Ted Cruz’s '16 WH bid.
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David Kurtz
@davidkurtz.bsky.social
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The Heritage Foundation is funding the creation of a blacklist of federal government workers who MAGA loyalists claim might obstruct the Trump II agenda, the Associated Press reported Monday.
talkingpointsmemo.com/morning-memo...
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David Kurtz
@davidkurtz.bsky.social
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Sign up for your morning jolt of news and analysis. Cheaper than coffee:
morningmemo.talkingpointsmemo.com
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