SunSeeker
SunSeeker's JournalWhat's Preventing Harris From Crushing Trump Is Shockingly Simple
If Trump wins, blame the billionaires. Without them, this presidential race wouldn’t be close at all. As Elon Musk’s rabid pro-Trump mania makes clear, billionaires are wielding their financial might in this year’s presidential election far more than in any previous campaign—and far more openly, too. More than 60 billionaires have opened their wallets to help elect Donald Trump, with some giving $10 million, $20 million, or more, indicating that many plutocrats are far more worried about the prospect of Democrats increasing their taxes than about the threat that Trump poses to our democracy.
There’s no denying that billionaires are trying to bend society to their will. America’s 800-plus billionaires hold over $6 trillion in wealth, more wealth than the bottom half of U.S. households. The super wealthy own a greater share of the nation’s wealth today than they did during the Gilded Age of the Rockefellers and Carnegies. And they will do whatever they have to do to keep things that way. Without the enormous aid from these and other billionaires, Trump’s race against Kamala Harris wouldn’t even be close—he’d be well behind. These plutocrats’ efforts underline the wisdom of something that Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once said: “We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.”
Crystallizing Brandeis’ fears, the billionaires backing Trump don’t seem terribly concerned about preserving our democracy. They support Trump despite his talk of being a dictator on Day One, terminating the Constitution and siccing federal prosecutors on his political opponents and critics. They’re far more concerned about slashing taxes and regulations than about the risks of electing a demagogue who hails Hungary’s authoritarian leader, Viktor Orban, as a model.
Many Americans fail to realize just how much the super rich use their financial muscle to twist and tilt policymaking to their liking. After the painful 2008 recession, the super rich got Washington’s policymakers to focus on cutting the budget deficit instead of cutting the painfully high unemployment rate and assuring a speedy recovery. The ultrawealthy successfully lobbied to stop Presidents Obama and Biden from repealing the “carried interest” loophole that saves private equity executives billions by taxing their profits at lower capital gains rates, around 20 percent, instead of higher personal income tax rates, around 37 percent. Billionaires’ successes in helping elect right-wing lawmakers and in lobbying help explain why Congress keeps blocking progressive ideas that have overwhelming public support, like a higher minimum wage and paid family and medical leave. (In one of the most insidious and destructive moves by billionaires, the Koch brothers used their wealth to essentially create the climate denial movement, as Jane Mayer explains in her book Dark Money, funding pseudoscientists to produce “studies” that supposedly debunked human-caused global warming and donating heavily to right-wing think tanks and politicians to get them to deny global warming and fight efforts to curb fossil fuels.)
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/10/trump-kamala-harris-election-elon-musk-gates-polls-2024.html?pay=1729752833358&support_journalism=please
New NBC News poll shows 51% of registered voters saying they plan to vote early, favoring Harris.
Half of registered voters plan to vote early this fall, new figures from the September NBC News poll show, with Democrats continuing to run up the score among early voters and Republicans getting stronger backing from those who plan to vote in person on Election Day.
Fifty-one percent of voters say they'll vote early, either by mail or in person, with Vice President Kamala Harris leading former President Donald Trump 61%-35% (a 26-point margin) among those voters.
By comparison, Trump leads by 20 points, 57%-37%, with the group of voters who plan to vote on Election Day, which accounts for 45% of the electorate in the poll. It's a smaller lead among a slightly smaller share of the electorate than Harris has over those early voters.
"Either the margin has to close among [those] voting early, or Republican margins on Election Day have to be bigger than this to win," said Bill McInturff, the Republican pollster who conducted the NBC News poll with Jeff Horwitt of Hart Research Associates.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/half-voters-plan-cast-ballots-early-huge-partisan-split-rcna172253
Allan Lichtman, Prophet of Presidential Elections, Calls the Race for Harris.
Donald Trump and Kamala Harris are scheduled to debate on Sept. 10, but the 2024 presidential election is already in the bag — at least according to Allan Lichtman, the American University historian who’s been dubbed the Nostradamus of presidential election predictions for his near-perfect 40-year track record.
Mr. Lichtman was among the few to accurately predict Mr. Trump’s victory in 2016 (earning him a Sharpie-scribbled note from the candidate lauding the “GOOD CALL!”). Immediately after the first 2024 presidential debate, between Mr. Trump and President Biden, Mr. Lichtman was also quick to warn that Mr. Biden dropping out of the race could be a “tragic mistake for Democrats,” leading him directly into an online battle with the forecaster Nate Silver. The confidence is rooted in Mr. Lichtman’s simple, history-driven model, which tunes out polls and pollsters and instead focuses on 13 true-or-false questions that he says hold the “keys” to the White House.
So can a model that looks all the way back to the horse and buggy days survive in an unprecedented election year marked by criminal proceedings, an assassination attempt and that Democratic switcheroo? Mr. Lichtman is confident that it can.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/05/opinion/allan-lichtman-trump-harris-prediction.html
Biden, Harris push scrutiny of police. Trump would halt such efforts.
Source: Washington Post
Among the changes Trump has promoted: allowing the use of stop-and-frisk to interrogate suspects, rescinding a Biden administration ban on the transfer of military equipment to local police departments, deputizing local officers to enforce immigration laws, and deploying the National Guard to fight crime.
On the campaign trail and in meetings with supporters, Trump has signaled his intent to curb federal monitoring of local police and to withhold funds from departments unwilling to employ more confrontational tactics, according to people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations.
“I think we will see a full-on gutting of the [Justice Department’s] efforts to hold law enforcement accountable for misconduct,” said Chiraag Bains, who served on Biden’s White House Domestic Policy Council.
Trump allies say he would act in a second term to correct what they see as ideological overreach by the Biden and Obama administrations. The Justice Department should be “surgical” in addressing specific police misconduct rather than pursuing legally binding consent decrees that mandate wide changes, said Jason C. Johnson, a former deputy police commissioner in Baltimore who is president of the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund.
Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/08/27/trump-policing-biden-harris-police-accountability/
Trump is basically saying he will defund the police if they don't commit misconduct.
Trump Claims His Pre-Pandemic Economy Was 'The Best.' The Numbers Say Otherwise.
A tame inflation report this week gave hope to Democrats that their biggest electoral weakness may finally be in the rearview mirror after being stubbornly persistent since 2022. Even as inflation has been slowing since then, it’s still a big worry for voters, and in his bid to get reelected, former President Donald Trump has been hammering Democrats on the issue constantly. His press conference Thursday was called to highlight price increases on a variety of consumer staples.
While inflation did hit a four-decade high in 2022, by a wide variety of measures — job growth, wages even adjusting for inflation, the pace at which entrepreneurs start small businesses — the post-pandemic economy beats the pre-COVID economy handily.
...
The number of workers on private sector and government payrolls, as compiled by the Labor Department in its monthly jobs report, grew by 225,522 on average from October 2022 through July 2023, according to HuffPost calculations. In the pre-pandemic era, from February 2017 through February 2020, average monthly job growth was 180,351.
While the COVID recession officially lasted only two months, according to the group that formally dates business cycles, there is no official date by which the economy returned to so-called normal. But the number of employed Americans returned to its pre-pandemic level in September 2022.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-economy-before-pandemic-not-the-best_n_66bf8ffce4b031661caa93b4
Gaza war protesters shut down busy L.A. freeway
A group of demonstrators blocked part of the 405 Freeway in Los Angeles during Tuesday morning’s commute.
According to CHP Officer Mike Naser, the freeway was shut down at National Boulevard as of 9:10 a.m. but was completely reopened just over an hour after the protest started.
Sky5 footage shows CHP officers detaining several demonstrators, who are part of a coalition of American Jews and allies, according to a press release from IfNotNowLA, which dubs itself “a movement of anti-Apartheid American Jews working to end our community’s support for the Israeli occupation of Palestine.”
A total of eight arrests were made, CHP confirmed to KTLA, adding that there were around 40 protesters, most of whom left on foot when police arrived.
https://ktla.com/news/local-news/l-a-jews-allies-shut-down-405-freeway-during-morning-commute/
The internet slays again: "Sofa Loren"
The replies are hilarious:
https://x.com/ProjectLincoln/status/1822705444462170526
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