Festival of Grievances
The link to buy me a cup of coffee (or 10…) in Monday’s edition of Wide World of News was, for reasons one can only attribute to gremlins, broken.
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Here is the first wave of data from our new Wide World of News/SISYPHUS poll of 1,100 registered Democrats and 1,100 registered Republicans.
The survey was conducted by walkie-talkie and CB radio and has a margin of error +/- 7.8.
TOP FIVE BLUE GRIEVANCES
1. Donald Trump is not in prison and barred from public life.
2. The illegitimate Supreme Court’s abortion ruling (and overall slant).
3. The very fact that Mitch McConnell walks the Earth.
4. Fox News.
5. Republicans’ unwillingness to acknowledge they are evil hypocrites.
TOP FIVE RED GRIEVANCES
1. Joe Biden has ruined the economy (and the country).
2. The Dominant Media blatantly favors Democrats (as with coverage of Joe Biden’s capacities, Hunter Biden’s histories, everything else).
3. Vice President Harris’ laugh.
4. Anything Biden, such as:
5.
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ESSENTIAL READING
* The Washington Post curtain raises Tuesday’s 1pm ET 1/6 hearing:
The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection plans to hold its seventh public hearing on Tuesday, with an expected focus on the ways in which former president Donald Trump and his allies summoned far-right militant groups to Washington as he grew increasingly desperate to hold on to power.
The hearing is likely to drill down on the period after states cast their electoral college votes on Dec. 14, 2020, action that confirmed Joe Biden’s victory. Trump, the committee is expected to argue, then shifted his focus to using the date of the congressional counting of the votes, Jan. 6, 2021, to block a peaceful transfer of power.
A committee aide said on a conference call with reporters Monday that the hearing will lay out the way that far-right militant groups like the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers and others took cues from the former president and his allies. Particular attention will be paid to his Dec. 19, 2020, posting on Twitter: “Big protest in D.C. on January 6th,” Trump tweeted. “Be there, will be wild!”
The tweet that served as “a pivotal moment that spurred a chain of events, including preplanning by the Proud Boys,” noted the committee aide, who was not authorized to speak on the record. The tweet was issued “a little more than an hour after meeting with Rudy Giuliani, Gen. Mike Flynn [ret.], Sidney Powell and others where they consider taking actions like seizing voting machines, appointing a special counsel to investigate the election.”
The committee will also highlight the ties between violent extremist groups and Trump associates — connections lawmakers on the committee have already hinted at during previous hearings.
“We will show how some of these right-wing extremist groups who came to D.C. and led the attack on the Capitol had ties to Trump associates, including Roger Stone and Gen. Mike Flynn,” said the committee aide.
* The New York Times poll on Donald Trump re-illustrates my longstanding analysis: He has gone from a 1,200-pound gorilla to an 1,100-pound gorilla, and/but he is still the largest Republican gorilla in the jungle:
* Relatedly, the Wall Street Journal lead editorial keys off the same poll:
What does it say that Joe Biden, the least popular President in modern times, still beats Donald Trump?
* Politico:
As President Joe Biden faces calls for more drastic action on abortion, the legal team vetting his options has found itself preoccupied by a single pressing concern: That any action they could take would simply be struck down by the very court that put them in this place.
* The Washington Post’s Fred Ryan writes with moral clarity on the human rights stakes of the president’s Saudi trip.
* Politico, on what is either a meaningless development or the start of something big:
A left-wing group that worked in 2020 to persuade progressives to support President Joe Biden is now preparing to turn on him, organizers told POLITICO, with plans to launch a public pressure campaign to block his renomination in 2024.
The effort, by RootsAction.org, is the latest sign of unrest among Democrats about Biden, whose job approval rating has cratered during a punishing midterm election year. RootsAction, with an email list of about 1.2 million people in the United States, said it plans to spend six figures on a “#DontRunJoe” campaign, with digital ads starting in early nominating states on Nov. 9, one day after the midterm elections.
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POTUS DAYBOOK
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Thank you to the many of you who took our Monday quiz based on Jeff Nussbaum's new book Undelivered: The Never-Heard Speeches that Would Have Rewritten History
In a giving mood, we are opening up the upcoming special Zoom with me and Jeff to those of you who played to win and bought a book, regardless of how many questions you got right. Stay tuned for details.
And if you send proof of book purchase today to markhalperintalk@gmail.com, we will add you into the Zoom, even if you didn’t take the quiz!
Here are the correct answers:
1. One article in the Saturday Evening Post included the first known usage of the term “hawks and doves.” What was the article about?
A. The first game of the 1951 basketball season, in which the Milwaukee Hawks beat the derisively nicknamed Rochester Royals (“the Doves”)
B. The 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis
C. The Korean War, in which those who wanted to fight north of the 38th parallel were nicknamed “hawks.”
CORRECT ANSWER IS “B”
2. Which President once said: “I am a verb.”
A. George W. Bush, speaking to schoolchildren, intending to say “noun.”
B. Calvin Coolidge, justifying why he spoke so little.
C. Ulysses Grant, speaking to his physician.
CORRECT ANSWER IS “C”
3. The original draft of which famous civil rights speech was titled, “Normalcy, never again.”
A. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream Speech” (1963)
B. Fannie Lou Hamer's Testimony to the Democratic National Convention (1964)
C. Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael) on “Black Power” (1966)
CORRECT ANSWER IS “A”
4. Which President was assassinated before he could tell an audience that “We in this country, in this generation, are – by destiny rather than choice – the watchmen on the walls of world freedom.”
A. Abraham Lincoln
B. James A. Garfield
C. William McKinley
D. John F. Kennedy
CORRECT ANSWER IS “D”
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