Democrats need to change their approach to Trump's second term, top Kamala Harris pollster says

A pollster to Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign told top Democratic Party officials on Friday that they must confront President-elect Donald Trump far differently than they did during his first term, urgently pressing them not to focus on every outrage but instead argue that he is hurting voters’ pocketbooks.

The speech by Molly Murphy, which was delivered during one of the Democratic National Committee’s first post-election meetings of its leadership, amounted to a quiet indictment of much of the party’s long-standing approach to Trump. It also marked one of the most candid conversations that top party officials have aired publicly since Trump won.

“The 2025 playbook cannot be the 2017 playbook,” she said.
Speaking at a Hyatt Regency hotel in Washington D.C. to the DNC’s executive committee, she said that most Americans support Trump’s transition and that voters “don’t care about who he’s putting in Cabinet positions.”


https://www.politico.com/news/2024/12/13/democrats-2024-election-retrospective-trump-00194273

I somehow missed this -- "Immigrants' Resentment Over New Arrivals Helped Boost Trump's Popularity With Latino Voters"

This is specifically about *undocumented* immigrants who resent more recent arrivals and believe Trump will focus on the newer undocumented immigrants but leave those already here alone.

Bleh.
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‘ Across the U.S., Latino immigrants who’ve been in the country a long time felt that asylum-seekers got preferential treatment. “Those of us who have been here for years get nothing,” said one woman from Mexico who has lived in Wisconsin for decades.’
-snip-

https://www.propublica.org/article/immigration-latino-trump-election-resentment-asylum

A worthwhile article about our relationship with vigilantism: " Some Other America, One I Do Not Know"

Some people are very upset about the public reaction to the assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. The killing has generated horror, but also mocking memes, a wave of hostility towards the healthcare industry, and rhetoric that stops barely short of calling the murder justified.

The Washington Post calls it a “sickness,” saying “those who excuse or celebrate Mr. Thompson’s killing reveal an ends-justify-the-means sentiment that is flatly inconsistent with stable democracy” and that “most Americans probably reject this kind of thinking.” The Yale School of Management calls it “very un-American.” My friend David French says that online “activism is attracting some of the most cruel and self-righteous people in America. There’s a remarkable lack of grace and compassion.”

With the greatest respect to these worthies — well, at least to David — I am not familiar with the America they’re talking about.

America is largely aspirational. We talk big and then, more or less, sometimes strive towards goals like justice, equality, decency. Many people are willing to put their shoulder to the wheel of those aspirations even in the face of the many ways America falls short. I’ve written about a formative experience I had as a young lawyer: attending a naturalization ceremony for Filipino World War II veterans who still exulted to become Americans even after America had betrayed them for decades. Those men still believed in the promise of America despite so many years of broken promises. Many of our greatest citizens have worked to better this country even as it has treated them as less than full Americans or even less than human.
—snip—

https://www.popehat.com/p/some-other-america-one-i-do-not-know

Populism, Media Revolutions, and Our Terrible Moment

Progress is always a pendulum throughout history.If you want to know some reasons why, this might be a good video:

Franklin Fire nearly triples in size in one hour as it threatens Malibu

Everyone, be safe out there.

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A fire near Southern California’s downtown Malibu is spreading quickly, prompting mandatory evacuations and threatening homes and businesses, including the city’s iconic Malibu Pier. Nearby Pepperdine University canceled classes Tuesday, as students sheltering in place on the school’s Malibu campus watch the flames in the distance.

The Franklin Fire has burned through an area larger than five football fields every minute since igniting late Monday night and burning toward Malibu. The inferno is so intense that it’s altering the weather around it and worsening already extreme conditions.

“The fire is burning so hot that it is modifying the local winds… (and) bending them towards and into the fire,” the National Weather Service in Los Angeles warned Tuesday morning.

https://www.cnn.com/2024/12/10/us/franklin-fire-evacuations-wind-gusts-50-mph/index.html

Franklin Fire nearly triples in size in one hour as it threatens Malibu

Source: CNN

A fire near Southern California’s downtown Malibu is spreading quickly, prompting mandatory evacuations and threatening homes and businesses, including the city’s iconic Malibu Pier. Nearby Pepperdine University canceled classes Tuesday, as students sheltering in place on the school’s Malibu campus watch the flames in the distance.

The Franklin Fire has burned through an area larger than five football fields every minute since igniting late Monday night and burning toward Malibu. The inferno is so intense that it’s altering the weather around it and worsening already extreme conditions.

“The fire is burning so hot that it is modifying the local winds… (and) bending them towards and into the fire,” the National Weather Service in Los Angeles warned Tuesday morning.

Read more: https://www.cnn.com/2024/12/10/us/franklin-fire-evacuations-wind-gusts-50-mph/index.html

"... what thwarts the growth of our civilization is not the uncanny, malicious contrivance of the plutocracy..."

“Yet we have to face the fact in America that what thwarts the growth of our civilization is not the uncanny, malicious contrivance of the plutocracy, but the faltering method, the distracted soul, and the murky vision of what we call grandiloquently the will of the people. If we flounder it is not because the old order is strong, but because the new one is weak. Democracy is more than the absence of czars, more than freedom, more than equal opportunity. It is a way of life, a use of freedom, an embrace of opportunity. For republics do not come in when kings go out, the defeat of a propertied class is not followed by a cooperative commonwealth, the emancipation of woman is more than a struggle for rights. A servile community will have a master, if not a monarch, then a landlord or a boss, and no legal device will save it. A nation of uncritical drifters can change only the form of tyranny, for like Christian's sword, democracy is a weapon in the hands of those who have the courage and the skill to wield it; in all others it is a rusty piece of junk.”
—Walter Lippman

We need to do a huge info campaign about using your library membership to access e-periodicals.

Journalism's fight for survival in a postliterate democracy

“The work of obtaining facts has a major economic disadvantage against the production of bullshit, and it’s only getting worse. I’m a pro-labor person, so I often think about the problems of our journalism through a lens of how we do our work, why it’s done, and who’s paying for it. After many years of watching my fellow journalists suffer at legacy newspapers, digital startups, big commercial newsrooms, small nonprofit outlets and public media all alike, here’s what I learned the hard way: America’s marketplace of ideas has a competition problem. The biggest story about media and the internet is that new technology — AI, social media, smartphones, etc. — keeps driving down the cost of producing bullshit while the cost of obtaining quality information only goes up. It’s getting more and more expensive to produce the good stuff, and the good stuff has to compete against more and more trash once it’s out on the market.”


https://mattdpearce.substack.com/p/journalisms-fight-for-survival-in

Yulia Navalnaya discusses Putin, Ukraine, and political ambitions in first major Russian-language interview since...

her husband’s death

“On Wednesday, the independent news outlet TV Rain published a nearly two-hour interview with Yulia Navalnaya — the first she’s given in Russian since her husband, Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny, died in an Arctic Russian prison in February 2024. During the conversation, Navalnaya spoke about the war in Ukraine, the controversies surrounding Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, and her vision for her political future. Meduza shares key quotes from the interview.”


https://meduza.io/en/feature/2024/11/13/yulia-navalnaya-discusses-putin-ukraine-and-political-ambitions-in-first-major-russian-language-interview-since-her-husband-s-death