Encapsulations
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The current state of Team Biden’s messaging, economic, political, and management apparatuses encapsulated in one sentence, via the Associated Press:
Asked if his administration had responded as quickly as it should have [to the baby formula shortage], Biden said, ”If we’d been better mind readers, I guess we could’ve. But we moved as quickly as the problem became apparent.”
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The current state of American politics and the nation’s two major parties encapsulated in the final six paragraphs of a Washington Post story:
Biden’s decision to dub Republicans as “ultra MAGA” — like another new [sic] Biden quip, “This is not your father’s Republican Party — represents a turnabout from his campaign persona. He ran as a unifier, promising that under a Biden administration Republicans would have an “epiphany” and bipartisanship would return to Washington.
Instead, partisan vitriol has continued to consume the nation’s capital, a reality Biden seems to acknowledge with his “ultra MAGA” descriptor — a wing of the Republican Party that he described as “petty,” “mean-spirited,” “extreme” and “beyond the pale” at a fundraiser in Chicago Wednesday night.
Asked how Biden’s recent rhetoric aligns with his desire to be a bipartisan healer, Psaki said “the president’s view is you can do both” — work with Republicans on shared priorities while spotlighting what he views as destructive policies or behavior.
“He’s also not going to stand by and not call out what he sees as ultra MAGA behavior, ultra MAGA policies that are out of the mainstream of the country and are not in the interest of the American people,” Psaki said.
Not everyone is convinced Biden has stumbled upon a political winner, however. Sims, the former Trump adviser, warned that Democrats may have more trouble than they realize taking a Trump slogan and turning it into an insult.
“It’s stunning how out-of-touch Biden and his folks are about how to brand this stuff when they’re taking the most iconic, successful political slogan of all time and trying to turn it into something derogatory,” Sims said. “I mean, who doesn’t want to make America great again?”
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A description of Donald Trump’s shrinkage from the 1,200 pound gorilla of the Republican Party into an 1,100 pound gorilla encapsulated in the 33rd paragraph (a classic “to be sure” paragraph, to be sure) of a 35-paragraph Washington Post story, which is otherwise a very shrewd summary of the 1,000-pound shrinkage:
To be sure, Trump retains wide support across the party, and relatively few of the candidates in GOP primaries are distancing themselves from him. In a Washington Post-ABC News poll released earlier this month, 60 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents said that GOP leaders should follow Trump’s leadership, while 34 percent say they should lead the party in a different direction.
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Some sections of a surprisingly and delightfully unwoke New York Times story about Joe Biden and the great civil rights issue of our time, encapsulating the president’s status as a wholly owned subsidiary of the anti-student education cartel that guides his administration’s every move on the matter:
New rules proposed by the Education Department to govern a federal grant program for charter schools are drawing bipartisan backlash and angering parents, who say the Biden administration is seeking to stymie schools that have fallen out of favor with many Democrats but maintain strong support among Black and Latino families….
On Wednesday, an estimated 1,000 parents and advocates from across the country rallied at the Education Department and the White House in opposition of the rules.
Malachi Armstrong, the father of a kindergartner who attends a charter school in Philadelphia, was among the participants, who held signs, wore T-shirts with protest messages and repeated chants of “back off our schools.” Mr. Armstrong, who said his child attended a charter school in Philadelphia after his underfunded public school shut down, called the proposed rules “senseless.”
“Charter schools aim to be different,” he said. “They know about the hardships — and I’m sure the Department of Education knows — and how bad public schools can be.”
The rally came on the heels of several high-profile denouncements of the proposed rules, including opinion pieces by Michael R. Bloomberg, the philanthropist billionaire and former New York mayor, and Gov. Jared Polis of Colorado, a Democrat. In a letter sent last week, Senators Dianne Feinstein of California, Cory Booker of New Jersey and Michael Bennet of Colorado joined Republicans in asking the department to revise them….
As a candidate, Mr. Biden declared that he was not “a charter school fan,” which shocked many given that the schools had proliferated under the charter-friendly Obama administration….
In a Twitter post this week with the hashtag #CharterSchoolsFalling, Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, promoted a letter-writing campaign to Congress in support of the new regulations….
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ESSENTIAL READING AND FYSA:
Wall Street Journal (free link!):
More than 380 marches and events to rally for abortion rights are planned across the country Saturday, in the first big effort since a draft of a Supreme Court opinion indicated the high court may overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that established a constitutional right for the procedure.
The main events are planned for New York, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Los Angeles and Austin, Texas, with many events kicking off in the late morning and early afternoon.
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Wall Street Journal (free link!!):
Netflix Inc. has a new message for its employees: Be prepared to work on content you may not agree with. And if you don’t like that, you can quit.
In an update to its culture guidelines, the streaming giant added a section called “artistic expression” which details how the company offers an array of programming for many audiences.
“We let viewers decide what’s appropriate for them, versus having Netflix censor specific artists or voices,” Netflix says in the updated part of its culture memo. The company added that it supports offering diversity in stories, “even if we find some titles counter to our own personal values.”
“Depending on your role, you may need to work on titles you perceive to be harmful,” Netflix says. “If you’d find it hard to support our content breadth, Netflix may not be the best place for you.”