Champion of Truth
“Former President Donald Trump pulled out of the scheduled ABC debate and tried to push for a showdown on Fox News instead, drawing open derision from the Harris campaign and throwing into doubt whether any debates would take place in the general election.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/08/03/trump-calls-off-abc-debate-suggests-fox-news-face-off-instead-00172554
19 Facts About Tim Walz, Harris’ Pick for Vice President
https://www.yahoo.com/news/19-facts-tim-walz-harris-175334343.html
Tim Walz Is Kamala Harris’ V.P. Pick. Watch Our Interview With Him.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3fuS9PmV9hg
Harris Picks Walz! | MR FUN | 8/6/24
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQcvvmgC9g0
“In Texas — a state that often sees some of the hottest temperatures in the country — extreme heat killed more than 330 people in 2023, setting a new record. More recently, millions of people in cities like Houston have had to deal with a massive heat wave while navigating power outages caused by Hurricane Beryl.
Despite the growing toll, there’s shockingly little regulation around protecting people from the effects of heat. It’s a stark contrast to how policies tend to treat the extreme cold. And while extreme cold continues to be deadlier than extreme heat, as heat waves become more dangerous, the gap between the two is likely to shrink.”
https://www.vox.com/climate/360019/climate-extreme-heat-ac-cooling-policy
“The first theory centers the role of elected officials — specifically Republicans, and more specifically Trump. As Republicans left power and shifted into opposition mode, they’ve refocused attention on immigration as a threat to American identity.
Other experts argue the economy — particularly inflation and the public’s “scarcity mindset” — has made more Americans critical of immigration. When the public feels as though the economy is booming and there’s plenty to go around, they feel more open to sharing that wealth. But when people perceive the economy to be tenuous, like after the pandemic when inflation took off, Americans feel more hesitant to share with outsiders.
A third group argues that the anti-immigrant turn is being driven by concerns about the rule of law and social disorder. This theory posits that the post-pandemic surge in crime, combined with heightened media coverage of disorder in public, prompted greater concerns from Americans about security and quality of life — concerns that were then also applied to the border and people trying to cross it without documentation.”
…
“According to Gallup, 2024 is the first time since 2005 that most of the public have wanted less immigration, and this year marks the largest share of Americans feeling resistant to immigration since 58 percent said so in 2001.
And those shifts are happening across party lines: Gallup notes in its most recent public opinion report that the desire to decrease immigration has jumped 15 percentage points among Republicans, 11 points among independents, and 10 points among Democrats — the group most supportive of immigration.
An Axios poll from April suggested 42 percent of Democrats would support mass deportations of undocumented immigrants. Other polls have also found an anti-immigrant shift in the public’s mood. Gallup’s long-term tracking poll, which has been running since the 1960s, shows a more general decline in the share of Americans who want to increase rates of immigration or keep them the same.
Conversely, the portion of Americans who want to decrease immigration has spiked: 55 percent of Americans feel this way, up from a low point of 28 percent in 2020.”
https://www.vox.com/politics/351535/3-theories-for-americas-anti-immigrant-shift
“Fears have ticked up since Friday because the unemployment rate has risen enough in the past year to trigger a statistical threshold, known as the Sahm rule, that has historically been a sign that we’re in the early stages of recession.
But the U.S. economy actually still looks fine: Joblessness is at 4.3 percent, which is only bad by comparison to 3.4 percent, where it stood in early 2023. A higher percentage of people in their prime working years are employed than at any point since 2001, and the unemployment rate — which measures the number of people looking to be employed against the total number of people participating in the labor force — has risen largely because more people are seeking work, including immigrants.
U.S. GDP grew at a 2.8 percent pace in the second quarter of the year, which is faster than would be expected, especially given how high interest rates are. (Recessions are associated with an economy that is contracting, not expanding.)
Claudia Sahm, the creator of the Sahm rule, said that she doesn’t think we’re in a recession and that this time her rule might not hold.
But one thing seems clear: The economy is now slowing. The question is how much and how fast.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/08/05/how-to-make-sense-of-market-turbulence-00172647
“Bangladesh’s prime minister resigned and fled the country Monday, after weeks of protests against a quota system for government jobs descended into violence and grew into a broader challenge to her 15-year rule. Thousands of demonstrators stormed her official residence, a day after nearly 100 died in the unrest.
Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s departure threatens to create even more instability in the nation on India’s border already dealing with a series of crises, from high unemployment and corruption to climate change.”
…
“The protests began peacefully as frustrated students demanded an end to a quota system for government jobs that they said favored those with connections to the prime minister’s Awami League party, but the demonstrations have since morphed into an unprecedented challenge to Hasina and the party.
The 76-year-old — who was the longest-serving female head of government — was elected for a fourth consecutive term in a January vote that was boycotted by her main opponents. Thousands of opposition members were jailed in the lead-up to the polls, and the U.S. and the U.K. denounced the result as not credible, though the government defended it.
Hasina had cultivated ties with powerful countries, including both India and China. But under her, relations with United States and other Western nations have come under strain, as they have expressed concerns over human rights violations and press freedoms in the predominantly Muslim nation of 170 million people.
Her political opponents have previously accused her of growing increasingly autocratic and called her a threat to the country’s democracy, and many now say the unrest is a result of that authoritarian streak.
Hasina arrived Monday in a city in India on the border with Bangladesh in an army helicopter, according to a military official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to release the information to the media. It was not clear where she would go next.
As she fled, people stormed her residence, taking furniture and pulling food from the refrigerators.
Protests have continued even after the Supreme Court last month ruled that the quota system — which set aside up to 30% of government jobs for family members of veterans who fought in Bangladesh’s war of independence against Pakistan — must be drastically cut. The government attempted to quell the demonstrations with force, leaving nearly 300 people dead since mid-July.”
…
” Hasina repeated her pledges to investigate the deaths and punish those responsible for the violence. She said she was ready to sit down whenever the protesters want. Earlier, she had said protesters who engaged in “sabotage” and destruction were no longer students but criminals, and that the people should deal with them with an iron hand.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/08/05/bangladesh-prime-minister-resigns-flees-country-00172623
“The answers are a bit complicated because Project 2025 encompasses a lot of different things (and there are some claims about what’s in it that are simply false). I think of its agenda as falling into three buckets:
1) Concentrating power in the presidency: The idea here is to give Trump and his appointees more power over the executive branch relative to permanent nonpartisan civil service professionals (who he disparages as the so-called “deep state”). Critics fear this will lead to the abuse of power and political hackery. Trump supports these ideas and we have every reason to believe he’d implement them.
2) Achieving longtime conservative priorities: This is stuff like slashing regulations, reducing federal spending on the poor, ditching efforts to fight climate change, ramping up military spending, and so on. Many progressives think these ideas are terrible, but they aren’t exactly new. Trump supports basically all of these. (Project 2025 mostly avoids taking firm positions on issues where Trump breaks from the conservative consensus, such as trade.)
3) Taking a hardline religious-right agenda: The project lays out quite aggressive proposals to use federal power to prevent abortions and restrict certain contraceptive coverage. It even says that pornography should be “outlawed” and its creators and distributors should be “imprisoned.””
https://www.vox.com/politics/360318/project-2025-trump-policies-abortion-divorce
Being not allowed to use your country’s real name in the Olympics…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vs27tjM1-hk