A compendium of excellent reporting and commentary surrounding the pivotal 2024 elections in the United States. You won't find horse race coverage here, or the standard "both sides" BS that passes so often for political journalism. What you will find are links – with brief quotes from the coverage and short commentary from me – to work that I believe advances the conversation we should be having about America's, and the world's, future. Remember: Everything is at stake this year. (Unfortunately, some of the work I point to is behind paywalls.)
Two women — one in Florida and one in Texas — were left to miscarry in public restrooms. In Arkansas, a woman went into septic shock and her fetus died after an emergency room sent her home. At least four other women with ectopic pregnancies had trouble getting treatment, including one in California who needed a blood transfusion after she sat for nine hours in an emergency waiting room.
As the AP reports, the number of women facing this Orwellian dilemma is not huge, but even one is too many. The Red States' draconian abortion laws are causing real harm, and the anti-abortion people think that's a fine tradeoff. All of this is a reminder that we're in what may be the early days of harshly punative laws that treat women as vessels to carry fetuses, not as people with rights of their own. Trump ordered the Republican Party to remove abortion from the platform, but the extremists who've taken control of the party won't be satisfied until they have banned all abortions. A Democratic president and Congress would reinstitute Roe as law of the land.
“This is what we call a wild-ass campaign promise,” Ted Pappageorge, the secretary-treasurer of Culinary Workers Union Local 226, told The Nevada Independent in July. United Here, the hospitality workers union, endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris for president this month, with union president Gwen Mills dismissing Trump’s proposal as unserious and a ploy to earn voters.
It was only a wild-ass promise when it came from Trump, apparently, because Pappageorge's union has endorsed Harris and her own proposal along these lines. This promise reminds me of the fiscally irresponsible ethanol policy that – when Iowa was more prominent in national politics – used to be central to presidential campaigns. It's pandering, and as the New Republic article explains, it's bad for the country. The Harris proposal seems to be slightly less bad. What we need is tax policy that works to reduce the staggeringly unequal wealth in this country, and uses our money to invest in people and their future. That's not on the Trump agenda – which is all about further tax cuts for the wealthy – in any form.
A team of NPR reporters and editors reviewed the transcript of his news conference and found at least 162 misstatements, exaggerations and outright lies in 64 minutes. That’s more than two a minute. It’s a stunning number for anyone – and even more problematic for a person running to lead the free world.
NPR has done a service with this piece. But to call Trump's pathological lying "problematic" is to understate things more than a little. Journalism overall continues to fail, badly, in its coverage of this election. TV news channels, in particulary, still feel they're somehow doing their jobs when they run live TV broadcasts of someone who lies twice a minute – with zero real-time fact checking by the news organizations. It's just malpractice. More than six years ago I begged journalists to "stop being loudspeakers for liars." That piece sank pretty much without a trace. I believe I was right then, and still think it's a good idea.
In recent weeks, Musk, who officially endorsed former President Donald Trump on July 13, has weaponized his account to flood millions of X users with pro-Trump and anti-Vice President Kamala Harris messages. Over the last month, Musk has published at least 173 posts supporting Trump and his running mate, Senator J.D. Vance (R-OH), or attacking their Democratic opponents.
Musk has a right to use his increasingly vile site to promote Trump and his extremist cult. (Trump returned to the site today, throwing the hilariously named "Truth" Social under the bus.) Musk has a right to use it to denigrate Harris. He has a right to use it to attack democracy. He is doing all of those things. What saddens me is that Judd Legum, on whose site this article appears, remains an active participant on the site that used to be called Twitter. So do countless journalists, all of whom know what they are doing. They are actively supporting Musk's business, and they should reconsider. (Popular Information operates its website on Substack, a site whose major investors are loudly backing Trump and which hosts extremism.)
Suddenly, she seems matched to the moment: a former prosecutor running against a convicted felon, a defender of abortion rights running against the man who helped overturnRoe v. Wade, a next-generation Democrat running against a 78-year-old Republican. Perhaps above all, she has given Americans the one thing they overwhelmingly told pollsters they wanted: a credible alternative to the two unpopular old men who have held the job for the past eight long years.
We'll be seeing a lot of articles like this one in coming days, but this Time piece offers a solid context about Harris' life and career. The Democratic convention next week will give the public a lot more understanding of who she is and what she (says she) believes, and what she plans to do if elected. (Disclosure: I was not a fan of Harris in 2020, based in part on some of the things she did as California's attorney general, as well as her inability – to me, anyway – to make clear why she wanted to be president. I supported Elizabeth Warren.)
Voting is just part of democracy, but it's the essential place to start. Make sure you're registered. Doublecheck in the fall, well before Election Day, because in some states Republican officials are removing people, mostly those who tend to vote for Democrats, from voting rolls.
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I spend a lot of time looking for essential coverage, and hope you'll help me by letting me know about the good stuff you find. Let me know.
AMANDA SEITZ
Grace Segers
Judd Legum
