JUNE 2024: “A DYING HUMIDIFIER”

6.28 Jerusalem Demsas in The Atlantic: “Joe Biden says he ran for president in 2020 because of Charlottesville. He says he ran because he saw the threat Donald Trump posed to the country and the threat he posed to democracy. If Biden truly believes that, he needs to end his reelection campaign. Indeed, dropping out could be the most patriotic gesture of his long career in public service, and every senior Democratic official and leader in the country should be pressuring him to act immediately.”

6.28 Mark Leibovich in The Atlantic: “Biden’s voice kept trailing off, and he kept getting lost in his train of thought. Donald Trump was sneering and lying. He said a bunch of stuff that made no sense—about club championships, cognitive tests, the whole farce of it. It didn’t matter. The only thing that mattered in this debate was Biden: his hushed and halting voice. His befuddled resting face. He looked like he wanted to be in bed. Or maybe every Democrat in America was just projecting. People kept sending me vomit emojis, among other things. Aides soon leaked that the president had a cold. Whatever. He hasn’t looked this bad in public for years. It was painful to watch, and it’s not getting better. The whispers were polite, deferential for a while. Eighty-one? Really? Is he up to this? Clearly not. Biden needs to step aside, for the sake of his own dignity, for the good of his party, for the future of the country. This debacle of a debate was a low point. It needs to be a turning point.”

6.27 Kinky Friedman dies at 79.

6.27 Jon Stewart on The Daily Show :  “This cannot be real life. It just can’t. We’re America!”
6.27 A woeful presidential debate. Trump literally cannot formulate a response that does not involve a lie. But it is Biden, frail and raspy, who seems overwhelmed. Thomas L. Friedman in the Times: I cannot remember a more heartbreaking moment in American presidential campaign politics in my lifetime, precisely because of what it revealed: Joe Biden, a good man and a good president, has no business running for re-election. And Donald Trump, a malicious man and a petty president, has learned nothing and forgotten nothing. He is the same fire hose of lies he always was, obsessed with his grievances — nowhere close to what it will take for America to lead in the 21st century. Ezra Klein in the Times:  “Trump, who is a very erratic performer himself, was much stronger than I’ve seen him in previous debates. He was crisp. He said a lot of things that were straight [expletive], that were brazen, that were bizarre, but he was much more in control. He was able to stop himself from talking in a way he couldn’t in 2020. He was quite clear in most of his answers.” David French: “Trump won, but not because of Trump. The best that can be said about his comprehensively dishonest performance is that he didn’t seem unhinged. The lower-information voters who are propping up his campaign won’t know how much he lied. Biden lost this debate for a simple reason: He acted his age in a way that can’t be spun and can’t be explained away.” Matt Labash: “Biden sounded like a dying humidifier.” Paul Krugman: “Joe Biden has done an excellent job as president. In fact, I consider him the best president of my adult life. Based on his policy record, he should be an overwhelming favorite for re-election. But he isn’t, and on Thursday night he failed to rise to the occasion when it really mattered. . . . Given where we are, I must very reluctantly join the chorus asking Biden to voluntarily step aside”

6.25 Bill Cobbs dies at 89.

6.24 Avoiding an all-time choke, the Florida Panthers defeat the Edmonton Oilers 2-1, and win the Stanley Cup 4 games to 3

6.20 Reggie Jackson, during the broadcast prior to the MLB game honoring the Negro Leagues at Rickwood Field, where he had played as a minor leaguer on the first integrated team to play there: “Coming back here is not easy. I said I would never want to do it again. I walked into restaurants and they would point at me and say, ‘The nigger can’t eat here.’ I would go to a hotel and they’d say, ‘the nigger can’t stay here.’ We went to Charlie Finley’s country club for a welcome home dinner and they pointed me out with the N-word, ‘he can’t come in here.’ Finley marched the whole team out. … Finally, they let me in there and he said, ‘We’re going to go eat hamburgers. We’ll go where we’re wanted.”. . . .Fortunately, I had a manager in Johnny McNamara that if I couldn’t eat in a place, nobody would eat. We’d get food to travel. If I couldn’t stay in a hotel, they’d drive to a hotel to find a place where I could stay. If it had not been for Rollie Fingers, John McNamara, Dave Duncan, Joe and Sharon Rudi — I slept on their couch three, four nights a week for a month-and-a-half. Finally, they were threatened that they’d burn our apartment complex down unless I got out. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. . . .I would have never made it, I was too physically violent, I was ready to physically fight,” Jackson said. “I’d have gotten killed here because I would’ve beat someone’s ass and you’d see me in a oak tree somewhere.”

6.20 Donald Sutherland dies at 88.

6.18 Willie Mays dies at 93. Daniel Brown in The Athletic: “With his incandescent style, Mays forever made the game look fun, whether it was dazzling in a Giants uniform or playing stickball with the kids on St. Nicholas Avenue and 155th Street in Harlem — sometimes on the same day. As Dodgers executive Branch Rickey once said, Mays’ greatest attribute “was the frivolity in his bloodstream (that) doubled his strength with laughter.” Tom Verducci in si.com: “No player is better defined by how he did it than what he did than Willie Mays. You would no more define Mays by his 3,293 hits than you would Miles Davis by albums sold. ”

6.17 The Boston Celtics defeat the Dallas Mavericks, 4 games to 1, and win the NBA championship.

6.17 A National Constitution Center presentation, The Intellectual Foundations of the Founding and Civil War Constitution, with Alison La Croix and William Allen.

6.15 Biden at a fundraiser in Los Angeles: “[T]he next president is likely to have two new Supreme Court nominees. . . . He’s already appointed two that are — have been very negative in terms of the rights of individuals. The idea that, if he’s reelected, he’s going to appoint two more flying flags upside down is really — I’m — I really mean it.  There’s —Look, the Supreme Court has never been as out of kilter as it is today.  I mean never. ”

6.15 Dinner with Jo and her sister Marti and Ginny at the Albany War Room.

6.15 From Memory Lane, a Facebook page: “After she escaped Ike Turner, Tina Turner was written off by the whole music business. She was a Black woman in her 40s. It was time for the oldies circuit. “The night that changed her life was in NYC, January 1983. David Bowie was getting wined and dined by his new record label, right before Let’s Dance came out, but he informed them he had plans for the night: He was going to see Tina Turner live. He wouldn’t dream of missing her. He dragged everyone along. Her manager Roger Davies got a last-minute call, asking for 63 spots on the guest list. ‘My Cinderella moment,’ Tina called it. ‘That night at the Ritz was the equivalent of going to the ball (minus the part about Prince Charming) because it changed my life dramatically.’ After the show, she raised hell all night with Bowie, Keith Richards and Ron Wood, sitting around the hotel piano, singing Motown classics, guzzling Dom Perignon. They posed for one of the coolest rock photos of all time: Tina, Keith and Bowie all drinking from a bottle. She was a rock star now, forever. Her story was just beginning.”

6.12 Howard Fineman dies at 75.

6.12 Jerry West dies at 86.

6.8 Julia Louis-Dreyfus, interviewed in The New York Times: “If you look back on comedy and drama both, let’s say 30 years ago, through the lens of today, you might find bits and pieces that don’t age well. And I think to have an antenna about sensitivities is not a bad thing. It doesn’t mean that all comedy goes out the window as a result. When I hear people starting to complain about political correctness — and I understand why people might push back on it — but to me that’s a red flag, because it sometimes means something else. I believe being aware of certain sensitivities is not a bad thing. I don’t know how else to say it.”

6.8 Ronald Brownstein in The Atlantic: “During the seven decades of legal Jim Crow segregation from the 1890s through the 1960s, the principal goal of the southern states at the core of red America was defensive: They worked tirelessly to prevent federal interference with state-sponsored segregation but did not seek to impose it on states outside the region. By contrast, in the last years before the Civil War, the South’s political orientation was offensive: Through the courts and in Congress, its principal aim was to authorize the expansion of slavery into more territories and states. Rather than just protecting slavery within their borders, the Southern states sought to control federal policy to impose their vision across more of the nation, including, potentially. . . the free states. It seems unlikely that the Trump-era Republicans installing the policy priorities of their preponderantly white and Christian coalition across the red states will be satisfied just setting the rules in the places now under their control. . . .[T]he MAGA movement’s long-term goal is to tilt the electoral rules in enough states to make winning Congress or the White House almost impossible for Democrats. Then, with support from the GOP-appointed majority on the Supreme Court, Republicans could impose red-state values and programs nationwide, even if most Americans oppose them. . . .The Trump model, in other words, is more the South in 1850 than the South in 1950. . . .That doesn’t mean that Americans are condemned to fight one another again as they did after the 1850s. But it does mean that the 2020s may bring the greatest threats to the country’s basic stability since those dark and tumultuous years.”

6.8 Ronald Brownstein in The Atlantic: [B]lue states are benefiting more as the nation transitions into a high-productivity, 21st-century information economy, and red states (apart from their major metropolitan centers participating in that economy) are suffering as the powerhouse industries of the 20th century—agriculture, manufacturing, and fossil-fuel extraction—decline. The gross domestic product per person and the median household income are now both more than 25 percent greater in the blue section than in the red. . . .The share of kids in poverty is more than 20 percent lower in the blue section than red, and the share of working households with incomes below the poverty line is nearly 40 percent lower. Health outcomes are diverging too. Gun deaths are almost twice as high per capita in the red places as in the blue, as is the maternal mortality rate. The COVID vaccination rate is about 20 percent higher in the blue section, and the per capita COVID death rate is about 20 percent higher in the red. Life expectancy is nearly three years greater in the blue (80.1 years) than the red (77.4) states. (On most of these measures, the purple states, fittingly, fall somewhere in between.) Per capita spending on elementary and secondary education is almost 50 percent higher in the blue states compared with red. All of the blue states have expanded access to Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, while about 60 percent of the total red-nation population lives in states that have refused to do so. All of the blue states have set a minimum wage higher than the federal level of $7.25, while only about one-third of the red-state residents live in places that have done so. Right-to-work laws are common in the red states and nonexistent in the blue, with the result that the latter have a much higher share of unionized workers than the former. No state in the blue section has a law on the books banning abortion before fetal viability, while almost all of the red states are poised to restrict abortion rights if the Republican-appointed Supreme Court majority, as expected, overturns Roe v. Wade. Almost all of the red states have also passed “stand your ground” laws backed by the National Rifle Association, which provide a legal defense for those who use weapons against a perceived threat, while none of the blue states have done so. The flurry of socially conservative laws that red states have passed since 2021, on issues such as abortion; classroom discussions of race, gender, and sexual orientation; and LGBTQ rights, is widening this split. No Democratic-controlled state has passed any of those measures. Lilliana Mason, a Johns Hopkins University political scientist, told me that the experience of Jim Crow segregation offers an important reference point for understanding how far red states might take this movement to roll back civil rights and liberties—not that they literally would seek to restore segregation, but that they are comfortable with “a time when states” had laws so “entirely different” that they created a form of domestic apartheid. As the distance widens between the two sections, she said, “there are all kinds of potential for really deep disruptions, social disruptions, that aren’t just about our feelings and our opinions.”

6.7 After 41 seasons, Pat Sajak hosts his final episode of Wheel of Fortune.

6.7 At Caffe Lena (yes, ff) in bustling, Belmont Stakes-besotted Saratoga Springs, Ginny and I and our friend Tim Hart see the marvelous Larry Campbell and Teresa Williams. A lot of fun. Very entertaining. We are always delighted when they play in our vicinity.

6.5 Pittsburgh Pirates rookie phenom Paul Skenes struck out Dodger Shohei Ohtani on three consecutive pitches of 101.3 mph, 100.1 mph and 100.8 mph. Ohtani swung at all three pitches, fouling off one. This marked the first time in the pitch-tracking era (2008-present) that a starting pitcher has logged a strikeout with three pitches, all swinging strikes, all 100 mph or faster. In his following at bat,  Ohtani smacked a 100.1-mph 3-2 fastball from Skenes 415 feet into the Dodgers’ bullpen in center field.

6.4 Marjorie Taylor Greene, questioning Dr. Anthony Fauci at a congressional hearing:  “You should be prosecuted for crimes against humanity. You belong in prison, Dr. Fauci.”

6.4 Fauci, after the hearing: “It’s a pattern, Kaitlan, that whenever somebody gets up — whether it’s news media, Fox News does it a lot — or it’s somebody in the Congress who gets up and makes a public statement that I’m responsible for the deaths of x number of people because of policies or some crazy idea that I created the virus, immediately, it’s like clockwork, the death threats go way up. So that’s the reason why I’m still getting death threats, when you have performances like that unusual performance by Marjorie Taylor Greene in today’s hearing, those are the kinds of things that drive up the death threats because there are a segment of the population out there that believe that kind of nonsense.” 

6.4 With Tim Hart, we see Bonnie Raitt at Albany’s Palace Theater.

6.2 Colin Cowerd on The Volume: “Donald Trump is now a felon. His campaign chairman was a felon. So is his deputy campaign manager, his personal lawyer, his chief strategist, his National Security Adviser, his Trade Advisor, his Foreign Policy Adviser, his campaign fixer, and his company CFO. They’re all felons. Judged by the company you keep. It’s a cabal of convicts. If everybody in your social circle is a felon, I don’t think it’s ‘rigged’. I don’t think the world is against you. . . .To get people to agree on anything, 34 counts, 0 for 34, I mean that’s a batting slump even the New York Mets could be impressed with.”

6.2 The Demon of Unrest by Erik Larson.

6.1 With a 2-1 victory, the Panthers eliminate the Rangers, 4 games to 2.

6.1 Furiosa

6.1 CNN Business: America’s middle class is feeling the heat from sky-high interest rates and persistent inflation. Middle-class income growth has lagged behind that of the upper-class since 1970, according to a Pew Research Center report.  Now, the cost-of-living crisis is exacerbating that squeeze. “The economy is booming, and yet many Americans are still gasping for air financially. They simply don’t have the breathing room to plan beyond their present needs,” said Jennifer Jones Austin, co-chair of the National True Cost of Living Coalition.  There are signs that middle-class Americans are dialing back their spending. Fast food joints, a mainstay dining destination for middle-income consumers, are leaning into discounts to placate frustrated diners. Target, which has a core middle-class customer base, reported in May that sales at stores open for at least a year dropped 3.7% during its latest quarter from the prior year. Kohl’s that same month reported weak first-quarter results, underlining how middle-income consumers are pulling back spending on non-essential clothing and discretionary merchandise at department stores. Economic data and corporate earnings reports have shown that lower-income consumers are struggling to pay their bills on time, reducing their spending and searching for deals. Wealthy Americans, who have helped support the economy’s strength through high interest rates, are also starting to reel in their purchases. . . .There are other signals. US home prices are at record highs. Americans are racking up debt and running low on savings accumulated during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. Thousands of corporate layoffs have some Americans struggling to make ends meet saying they feel as though they are living in a recession.