A compendium of solid reporting, commentary, and direct-from-the-source information surrounding the pivotal 2024 elections in the United States. You won't find horse race coverage here, or the standard "both sides" (even when one is lying) 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.)
A few rough spots, and I acknowledge a bias – I want her to win in November – but this struck me as pretty much exactly what she needed to do. She made the case against Trump (and Vance), but more important, she made the case for herself and Walz. Again, just listen to it if you haven't already.
Kinzinger's party "no longer conservative"
Adam Kinzinger
Former GOP Rep. Adam Kinzinger (IL) says that the "Republican Party is no longer conservative" and "Donald Trump is a weak man pretending to be strong." He slams the GOP ticket's weirdness and support of Putin. He praises Harris' belief in democracy.
Another crucial video from the final night. Kinzinger paid an honorable price for his stance against Trump – losing his House seat to an extremist Republican challenger. In a key part of his speech on Thursday night, Kinzinger made a point that the Republicans are not conservatives in any traditional sense of the word. Our feckless media have, nonetheless, adopted that fraudulent framing as reality. A story I saw on a political site Thursday called Ann Coulter, as vile a right-wing extremist as you can find, a conservative. Strong advice: When you see the word "conservative" in the media, it is ESSENTIAL to understand that it now means "right-wing extremist" 90 percent of the time. Yet I doubt that the public at large does understand this.
[R]egular people seem to understand a few things that economists don’t. During an emergency, such as a natural disaster, short-term demand cannot be met by short-term supply, setting the stage for sellers to exploit their position by raising prices on goods already in their inventory. The idealized law of supply and demand predicts that new investors would rush in, but the real world doesn’t work like that. A short-term price spike won’t always trigger the long-term investments needed to increase supply, because everyone knows that the situation is, by definition, abnormal; they can’t count on a continued revenue boom.
I have a few doubts about the Harris "price-gouging ban" – as it's been called with only partial accuracy – but this piece from Zephyr Teachout (disclosure: a friend) is very persuasive. Liberal populism, as opposed to the white nationalist fear and loathing we've been saturated for more than a decade, has values I tend to support. I hope Harris has the resolve and stamina to take on the people and institutions that have turned capitalism into a foul version of what it should be: a market economy with rules to encourage competition and protect the public from its excesses, with a strong safety net. I still believe this is a stance that could win lots of voters from the parts of the country that have seen Trump as their only possible ally, even though he's consistently betrayed them.
But through these discussions of Harris’ “honeymoon” and when it has to end or when she has to come out of the “honeymoon” bubble, we can see an assumption or claim that is a bit different. It’s that somehow what’s happened during the first month of Harris’ campaign isn’t quite real, that it’s a sugar high, if you will, a burst of excitement that can’t last. I simply do not think that’s true.
No one has a better feel for the politics of the moment than Marshall, as he shows here. He amply makes the case that while we'll see ups and downs for the Harris campaign in coming weeks, what has happened since Biden stepped down as a candidate is far from empty euphoria. It's genuine optimism, based on smart moves by Harris in every respect.
I watched the Democratic convention exclusively on C-Span. No commercials, no idiotic commentary, just what the people were saying and doing inside the hall. It was some of the best TV (well, on my computer and tablet) I've seen in ages.
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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Zephyr Teachout
