ReportWire

Tag: remove interruptions

  • Who Assassinated Charlie Kirk? Live Updates

    [ad_1]

    From Robby Soave’s obit for Kirk at Reason:

    Kirk was influential among young people. He launched Turning Point USA in 2012, with financial backing from Tea Party activist Bill Montgomery. The organization’s stated goal was to foster a conservative movement on college campuses, following in the footsteps of past groups such as Young Americans for Freedom. He was adept at creating catchy slogans and useful talking points for conservative students to deploy against leftwing thinkers; he popularized the phrase “Socialism Sucks” and added it to t-shirts, posters, and banners. He took advantage of dramatically increased interest in crazy campus happenings among the broader American public, and he encouraged dissenting kids to challenge their liberal professors, form right-leaning organizations, and invite Republican speakers to campus. Under Kirk’s leadership, the group became the undisputed king of conservative campus activism, helping turn thousands of non-liberal students into fans of the Republican Party and its rising stars: Candace Owen, Tucker Carlson, Ben Shapiro, Matt Walsh, and of course Trump.

    Kirk too became a prominent star, known for his debate-me-bro persona. He did not confine himself to the company of the already converted, and he seemed to enjoy venturing into the fray and arguing with liberals and leftists—the more of them at once, the better. Indeed, at the time of his death, Kirk was scheduled to debate the leftist commentator Hasan Piker.

    Kirk was also at the forefront of conservative movement’s conquest of independent, alternative media spaces. He hosted his own podcast, racking up millions of views, listeners, and downloads on YouTube, Spotify, and other platforms where conservative media personalities have thrived. While he is far from the only right-wing figure to take advantage of the changing media landscape, it would be hard to overstate his impact on the overall trajectory of the Republican Party, youth activism, and conservative communications. The current crop of MAGA influencers on TikTok, Instagram, and X—some of whom now regularly appear at White House press briefings, displacing more traditional media figures—are the inheritors of the ecosystem he built.

    Donald Trump Jr., who was close friends with Kirk, has published a tribute, as well:

    Charlie dedicated his life to something bigger than himself. He fought tirelessly for this country, for the values that make America great, and for the next generation. The impact he had on young people — reaching them in masses, giving them courage to stand up, to think for themselves, and to fight for freedom — is immeasurable. There is no question that Charlie’s work and his voice helped my father win the presidency. He changed the direction of this nation.

    Charlie was never a threat to anyone. He was civil, he was kind, he listened and responded with respect. The only “threat” he ever posed was that he was incredibly effective. He was a powerful messenger of truth, and people heard that truth.

    That’s what made him a target.

    This loss is absolutely devastating — not only for Erika and the kids, but for our country. We’ve lost a leader, a fighter, and a man whose character and conviction were rare. Too rare. To think that his life was cut short by a brutal, heinous, evil act is beyond comprehension. It is horrible and it is heartbreaking.

    Former GOP strategist T.W. Arrighi wrote on X that Kirk was “doing it the right way”:

    Charlie built a movement on campuses across America by engaging students in debate and dialogue. Challenging orthodoxy and winning hearts and minds in the process. Isn’t that what we want from political figures? To try and silence that work through violence is antithetical to everything we stand for as a country.

    Semafor’s David Weigel writes that Kirk “created a new paradigm for conservatives”:

    The current round of liberal hand-wringing about how conservatives have become far better at driving the political conversation stems in large part from Kirk. He pitched the conservative movement not just as a club for tax cuts and law-and-order politics, but as a lifestyle.

    That, Kirk believed, would help win over young people who felt they were being offered miserable choices by the left.

    “Younger audiences love this contrarian heterodox approach,” Kirk told me in an interview at the 2024 Republican National Convention. “The mantra is not that, if you’re a man, you’re an oppressor. It’s not that having children is a plague on the planet.

    “We’re here to say, actually, no, having children is a gift from God and it’s a wonderful thing,” he added. “We’re saying, getting married is awesome, and you can reject hookup culture.”

    Kirk is survived by his wife, two children, and by the sprawling political movement he created on the US right.

    His killing will doubtless exacerbate divisions in a country already shaken by political violence. But his influence will live on in the movement he helped shape — where his style of debate and argument, and his unapologetic Christian faith, have created a new paradigm for conservatives.

    [ad_2]

    Intelligencer Staff

    Source link

  • RFK Jr. Battles Senators at Tense Hearing: What Happened

    [ad_1]

    Bloomberg via Getty Images

    Health and Human Services Secretary Robert. F. Kennedy Jr. faced hours of intense questioning from the Senate Finance Committee on Thursday morning, firing back at the senators with his own rebuttals and accusations. His appearance comes nearly one week after he forced the ouster of Susan Monarez, the director of the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention, after the two clashed over vaccine policy. Several top officials at the CDC also resigned following her firing, leaving the nation’s most powerful public-health agency in crisis. Below are the latest developments from the Hill.

    [ad_2]

    Intelligencer Staff

    Source link

  • CDC Director Ousted, Top Officials Resign: Live Updates

    [ad_1]

    Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, the now former director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, didn’t mince words in his scathing resignation letter, which he released on social media:

    I am unable to serve in an environment that treats CDC as a tool to generate policies and materials that do not reflect scientific reality and are designed to hurt rather than to improve the public’s health.  The recent change in the adult and children’s immunization schedule threaten the lives of the youngest Americans and pregnant people.  The data analyses that supported this decision have never been shared with CDC despite my respectful requests to HHS and other leadership.  This lack of meaningful engagement was further compounded by a “frequently asked questions” document written to support the Secretary’s directive that was circulated by HHS without input from CDC subject matter experts and that cited studies that did not support the conclusions that were attributed to these authors.  Having worked in local and national public health for years, I have never experienced such radical non-transparency, nor have I seen such unskilled manipulation of data to achieve a political end rather than the good of the American people.

    It is untenable to serve in an organization that is not afforded the opportunity to discuss decisions of scientific and public health importance released under the moniker of CDC.  The lack of communication by HHS and other CDC political leadership that culminates in social media posts announcing major policy changes without prior notice demonstrate a disregard of normal communication channels and common sense.  Having to retrofit analyses and policy actions to match inadequately thought-out announcements in poorly scripted videos or page long X posts should not be how organizations responsible for the health of people should function.  Some examples include the announcement of the change in the COVID-19 recommendations for children and pregnant people, the firing of scientists from ACIP by X post and an op-ed rather than direct communication with these valuable experts, the announcement of new ACIP members by X before onboarding and vetting have completed, and the release of term of reference for an ACIP workgroup that ignored all feedback from career staff at CDC.

    The recent term of reference for the COVID vaccine work group created by this ACIP puts people of dubious intent and more dubious scientific rigor in charge of recommending vaccine policy to a director hamstrung and sidelined by an authoritarian leader.  Their desire to please a political base will result in death and disability of vulnerable children and adults.  Their base should be the people they serve not a political voting bloc.

    He also alleged that “We are seven months into the new administration, and no CDC subject matter expert from my Center has ever briefed the Secretary” and said that Kennedy’s rhetoric promoted eugenics:

    I am not sure who the Secretary is listening to, but it is quite certainly not to us.  Unvetted and conflicted outside organizations seem to be the sources HHS use over the gold standard science of CDC and other reputable sources.  At a hearing, Secretary Kennedy said that Americans should not take medical advice from him.  To the contrary, an appropriately briefed and inquisitive Secretary should be a source of health information for the people he serves. As it stands now, I must agree with him, that he should not be considered a source of accurate information.

    The intentional eroding of trust in low-risk vaccines favoring natural infection and unproven remedies will bring us to a pre-vaccine era where only the strong will survive and many if not all will suffer.  I believe in nutrition and exercise.  I believe in making our food supply healthier, and I also believe in using vaccines to prevent death and disability.  Eugenics plays prominently in the rhetoric being generated and is derivative of a legacy that good medicine and science should continue to shun.

    [ad_2]

    Intelligencer Staff

    Source link

  • What Happened at the Trump-Zelenskyy Summit?

    [ad_1]

    Fox News’ Jacqui Heinrich outlines what the plan apparently was as of this morning during the pre-meeting with Zelenskyy at the Ukrainian embassy:

    1) I’m told there’s no expectation that today wraps up with a date on the calendar for a trilateral summit – but today would be a success if Zelenskyy had a realistic discussion about territorial concessions

    2) Nobody expects Zelenskyy to take Putin’s first version of the map back to his country, but he needs to talk about what he can let go and what is critical to keep.

    2a. – Getting clarity on security guarantees and what that looks like will make it easier for Zelenskyy to sell that back home

    2b. – Asked about what that means for the timeline, I’m told the US feels there is political energy behind this, a light at the end of the tunnel, and wants to get it done now – but knows it won’t be instant. More like “weeks not months” – and Ukraine understands this

    3) US and Europeans have “gently” made suggestions on territory, but they are also aware that Zelenskyy has to take this back and massage it through his own system – “gotta come back with a counteroffer”

    3a. – I asked how Zelenskyy is approaching that given Ukraine’s constitutional requirement of a national referendum for territorial changes – I’m told the the general attitude is “that’s a you problem” – as in, up to Zelenskyy to figure out and handle

    3b. – On territory with minerals being under Russian control, basically if America has a stake in land, it is a security in an of itself – its in their interest to make that work

    4) Europeans believe the security guarantees are a very very big deal, and want to protect and preserve it – which is part of why they are all eager to be here today.

    4a. – They also want to help Zelenskyy manage this high-wire act because “the risk factor of Zelenskyy putting his foot in his mouth is significant”

    5) The discussion on security guarantees won’t produce full security plan today- but they want clear next steps to work on, “a commitment in principle from the coalition of the willing, the US, hammering out alongside Ukrainians”

    5a. – Some awareness that the US should legislate this, make sure it lasts into future administrations

    5b. – Also the WH sees Putin’s acceptance of security guarantees as important – their attitude is “Now we have to put more meat on the bone”

    6) Today it is important to demonstrate unity between Europeans, US, and Ukraine – that would define success

    7) Neither Ukrainians or Americans want today to fail

    Andrea Mitchell also reports that European leaders also coached Zelenskyy ahead of time on how to kiss Trump’s ass:

    [ad_2]

    Intelligencer Staff

    Source link

  • What the F**k Just Happened? And What Happens Now? Live Updates

    [ad_1]

    At Bloomberg Opinion, Patricia Lopez writes that “Latinos were motivated by the same concerns that drove other voters in the new Trump coalition: an economy that has eroded working-class buying power and a flood of immigrants who were feared as competitors for jobs”:

    Trump shrewdly played on those fears with his “Black jobs” riff, which he later expanded to include “Hispanic jobs.” His anti-immigrant rhetoric drew a bright line between Hispanics on the one hand and migrants on the other. “They’re going to be attacking — and they already are — Black population jobs, Hispanic population jobs, and they’re attacking union jobs too,” Trump said. “So, when you see the border, it’s not just the crime. Your jobs are being taken away, too.” Never mind data that shows the claim is untrue.

    The pitch drew Latinos into a universe where many longed to be, included in the mainstream, and allowed them to participate in otherizing the new enemy — recent immigrants. Trump’s attacks also exploited tensions within the Latino population itself. Mexicans by far represent the largest and most well-established group of Latino Americans and occupy all rungs of society, from entrepreneurial billionaires on down. Puerto Ricans are American citizens by birth and some — though by no means all — resent being associated with those here illegally.

    Trump gave permission for each group to look down on newer waves of immigrants that now arrive mostly from Central and South America and have proved as much a headache to Mexico as to the US.

    In a prescient X thread on Tuesday night, Jack Herrera made a number of other important points, summing up his (excellent) election year reporting. He noted that Republican organizers paid more attention to low-turnout Latino communities:

    Republicans [were] organized, funded, and ambitious in Latino neighborhoods this year, especially in South Texas, Pennsylvania, and Florida. Democrats, meanwhile, keep prioritizing the most likely voters, in whiter, college educated suburbs. In low-turnout communities, door knocking and in-person outreach makes a huge difference.

    And he explained that Latinos’ perceptions of Trump didn’t outweigh their basic economic concerns as a group that is 80 percent working class:

    I’ve spoken with pro-Trump Latinos who aren’t shy about calling out his racist comments. They don’t have rose-colored goggles for the man. Still, many tend to assume his xenophobia is directed at undocumented immigrants, not them personally. Polling still find that most Latinos consider Democrats the more welcoming party. Republicans get read as racist. But Latinos vote strategically — the economy ranks as their #1 issue; racism trails far behind. And some think Democrats are also racist.

    There’s another dynamic this year. In the past, the taboo for voting for Trump was intense. After Trump’s surprising success in 2020, however, the social consequences for openly supporting him are less severe. Do not underestimate how powerful this interpersonal element is.

    He says that Democrats are losing Latinos in part because they are choosing not to court them:

    Latino dealignment is a symptom of broader class dealignment. My argument, however, is that this transformation comes from electoral strategy as much as ideological shift. Democrats *could* win; but they’re not trying as hard as the GOP to win working class voters.

    Bloomberg Opinion’s Patricia Lopez also concluded that Democrats are going to have take long hard look at how to appeal to this enormous and diverse group of voters:

    Ronald Reagan used to joke that Latinos were Republicans, “they just don’t know it yet.” Democrats have long sought to make Latinos part of their coalition — fighting for Dreamers, a path to citizenship, and better wages and working conditions.

    But they may have lost a step in recognizing that Latinos are no more a monolith than Black voters or any other identity group. The Latino red shift could be a fluke or a permanent realignment. But expect the priorities of this multi-faceted community to come into a much higher profile as the two parties battle over them.

    Equis Research’s Stephanie Valencia and Carlos Odio, meanwhile, are pushing back on the idea that Latinos voters can be blamed for Trump’s victory, as his swing-state wins and the shift of the Latino vote are in fact two distinct stories:

    The magnitude of the gains Trump made in places like New York, New Jersey, and Texas — states that don’t decide the presidential race – were surprising and point to deeper discontent and broader trends.

    But the support Trump received among Latinos in the battleground states should not have been a surprise to anyone who was paying attention. Those shifts were present in polling throughout the cycle and since the early days of the Biden presidency. Harris ultimately had the support she needed with Latinos to win, if all else held according to plan. Yes, Trump did make big gains with Latinos, but those gains are not what decided his victory. What happened in this election is larger than Latinos – Trump’s win came from a broader erosion of support in key battleground states. Latinos in the battleground states are a critical part of winning but they do not alone determine the outcome.

    They also argue that Trump “Trump should not misread any gains in Latino votes as support for his full agenda — in fact quite the opposite”:

    The Latinos who did move to Trump were clear: they want him to bring down prices. They rejected Project 2025, and told us repeatedly in focus groups and polling that they didn’t believe he would do any of the things his opponents said he would, from banning abortion to repealing Obamacare to deporting long-term immigrants like Dreamers. They voted for Trump because they believed he would prioritize the economy over all else, just as they did in voting for him.

    UCLA political psychologist Efrén Pérez adds that based on his research, Latinos and other people of color are simply becoming more polarized, just like everybody else already is:

    What I think we’re seeing is polarization catching up to people of colr. We get two parties and two choices and all of the internal heterogeneity of various people of color must be channeled and expressed through these two (!) parties. Both parties currently “own” different identities. Eg, Democrats are the party of people of color while Republicans are the party of “real” Americans. Many people of color have clear identity priorities. Among Asian and Latino individuals, about 27 percent of them value their American identity over their racial identity.

    Part of what is happening with party identity among these groups is that they are sorting into the “correct” party that they see reflecting how they view themselves.

    [ad_2]

    Intelligencer Staff

    Source link

  • Harris Is Up 3 Points in Final Iowa Poll: Election Updates

    Harris Is Up 3 Points in Final Iowa Poll: Election Updates

    [ad_1]

    Below is some of the most interesting reaction and analysis of Saturday’s stunning Selzer poll. (We’ll keep updating this with more commentary as it comes out.)

    Several analysts have pointed to other similar signs in recent polling:

    Soltis Anderson adds:

    Two things are possible: 1) This Selzer poll is right and we are witnessing an absolutely wild inversion of the left-right generation gap; OR 2) Trump-favoring seniors are sitting out polls this year in extraordinary fashion and it is leading to some wild crosstabs.

    RCP’s Sean Trende is warning against interpreting the poll as far-reaching definitive evidence:

    Nate Silver notes that the Selzer poll doesn’t have much effect on his forecast, but that doesn’t mean its potential insight can be dismissed:

    Before you get your hopes up too much, another Iowa poll today from Emerson College had Trump ahead by 9 points instead. Still, Harris’s chances in Iowa roughly doubled from 9 percent to 17 percent.

    However, the poll had little effect on our topline Electoral College numbers because Iowa has only a 1 percent chance of being the tipping-point state. In the world where Harris wins Iowa, she is probably also cleaning up elsewhere in the Midwest, particularly in Michigan and Wisconsin, in which case she’s already almost certain to win the Electoral College. So most of the time, it would be redundant.

    Still, to have a prominent, high-quality pollster like this at a time when most other pollsters are herding toward the consensus suggests the possibility that other pollsters could be lowballing Harris.

    FiveThirtyEight’s Nathaniel Rakich adds:

    Selzer & Co. has earned a reputation for outliers that are later proven to be correct. Obama+7 in the 2008 Iowa caucuses. Trump+7 in the 2020 general. But it’s also had misses, like Hubbell+2 in #IAgov in 2018.

    In general, you should trust polling averages over outliers, but be cognizant of the *possibility* that the outlier may be picking up on a late trend. I recommend doing the same in this case.

    Split Ticket’s Max McCall and Lakshya Jain warn against Harris landslide dreams:

    While no other poll has shown quite this monumental of a shift, if you squint, there are perhaps hints of something similar happening in polls of similar states. Harris has polled exceptionally well in Nebraska’s second congressional district, and some polls of Nebraska statewide show a shift toward her as well. There was also a recent poll of Kansas that only had Trump up 48-43, a seeming outlier, but one perhaps worth taking a second look at in the wake of this poll.

    Does this poll imply a Harris landslide? That’s one interpretation we’re skeptical of — even setting aside the outlier nature of this poll, it is worth noting that even a perfectly accurate Iowa poll cannot say much about states like Georgia or Arizona, where the whites vote differently from the Midwest.

    Also, a note about methodology:

    The state’s draconian abortion ban could be having an impact, too:

    And at Semafor, Benjy Sarlin points out that the campaigns should have been paying more attention to Iowa:

    For the first cycle in recent memory, Iowa has definitively not been treated as a swing state by either presidential campaign. Meanwhile, the seven top battleground states have seen billions of dollars in ad spending, constant visits from candidates, and extensive canvassing operations. For that reason, it was my strong personal prior before the Selzer poll dropped to not assume it would be as predictive of other states this time.

    That said, the Selzer result is so stunning that it raises an entirely different scenario that does have recent precedent: A presidential campaign failing to notice a state that once seemed safe falling into competition until it’s too late.

    Members of the Trump team, meanwhile, are not impressed.

    [ad_2]

    Intelligencer Staff

    Source link

  • The Gender Gap, the Garbage War, and a Taylor Swift Rumor: Live Election Updates

    The Gender Gap, the Garbage War, and a Taylor Swift Rumor: Live Election Updates

    [ad_1]

    Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

    There are only five (!) days left before the 2024 election (presumably) comes to an end, and the only guarantee we can make about the outcome at this point is that nobody actually knows what that outcome will be. In the meantime, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are spending their final days on the campaign trail, the early votes are piling up, and a new Taylor Swift rumor is afoot. If you’re having trouble keeping track of all the election news, we’re here to help. Below are live updates, commentary, and analysis.

    [ad_2]

    Intelligencer Staff

    Source link

  • Non-Endorsement Chaos, Beyoncé, and Trump vs. Rogan: Live Election Updates

    Non-Endorsement Chaos, Beyoncé, and Trump vs. Rogan: Live Election Updates

    [ad_1]

    The Washington Post, where “democracy dies in darkness,” is sitting out the 2024 presidential endorsement race. For the first time since the 1988 election, the paper’s editorial board won’t be making an endorsement for president. Publisher-CEO Will Lewis announced the move to readers on Friday as “returning to our roots of not endorsing presidential candidates.”

    Not surprisingly, there’s apparently (a lot) more to this story, which comes a few days after the Los Angeles Times announced a similar move at the behest of its billionaire owner Patrick Soon-Shiong, prompting the publication’s editorials editor and two members of its editorial board to resign.

    A billionaire owner was behind the Post’s non-endorsement, too. Here’s the Post’s reporting on itself:

    An endorsement of Harris had been drafted by Post editorial page staffers but had yet to be published, according to two sources briefed on the sequence of events who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. The decision not to publish was made by The Post’s owner — Amazon founder Jeff Bezos — according to the same sources.

    “This is cowardice, a moment of darkness that will leave democracy as a casualty. Donald Trump will celebrate this as an invitation to further intimidate The Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos (and other media owners),” former Post executive editor Martin Baron, who led the paper while Trump was president, said in a text message to The Post. “History will mark a disturbing chapter of spinelessness at an institution famed for courage.”

    NPR reports that editorial-page editor David Shipley broke the news internally at a “tense meeting” shortly before Lewis made his announcement:

    Shipley had approved an editorial endorsement for Harris that was being drafted earlier this month, according to three people with direct knowledge. He told colleagues the decision was to endorse was being reviewed by the paper’s billionaire owner, Jeff Bezos. That’s the owner’s prerogative and is a common practice. On Friday, Shipley said that he told other editorial board leaders on Thursday that management had decided there would be no endorsement, though Shipley had known about the decision for awhile. He added that he “owns” this outcome. The reason he cited was to create “independent space” where the newspaper does not tell people for whom to vote.

    Here is Bezos’s last tweet, sent after Trump was nearly assassinated in July:

    Lewis’s stated rationale has been met with skepticism by others in the business:

    Current staffers at the Post are also expressing alarm and/or outrage over the move:

    Editor-at-large Robert Kagan has resigned:

    The Post’s union says its “deeply concerned,” too:

    The Columbia Journalism Review reports that the Post’s Harris endorsement had been in the works for weeks:

    Over a period of several weeks, a Post staffer told me, two Post board members, Charles Lane and Stephen W. Stromberg, had worked on drafts of a Harris endorsement. (Neither was contacted for this article.) “Normally we’d have had a meeting, review a draft, make suggestions, do editing,” the staffer told me. Editorial writers started to feel angsty a few weeks ago, per the staffer; the process stalled. Around a week ago, editorial page editor David Shipley told the editorial board that the endorsement was on track, adding that “this is obviously something our owner has an interest in.”

    “We thought we were dickering over language—not over whether there would be an endorsement,” the Post staffer said. So the Post, both news and opinion departments, were stunned Friday after Shipley told the editorial board at a meeting that it would not take a position after all. 

    [ad_2]

    Intelligencer Staff

    Source link

  • Trump Says ‘I’m F**king Crazy’: Live Updates

    Trump Says ‘I’m F**king Crazy’: Live Updates

    [ad_1]

    Trump spent his Friday morning on Fox & Friends, joining his favorite Fox News program in-studio rather than calling in as he typically does. The former president was in town after speaking at the annual Al Smith charity dinner in Manhattan Thursday evening.

    Trump’s appearance was typically all over the place, with the former president talking about defunding the Department of Education, expressing an openness to campaigning with Nikki Haley, and even knocking Fox News for airing negative ads against him.

    When one host complimented Trump’s jokes at the Al Smith dinner and asked who wrote them, the former president said he had a surprising answer. “I had a lot of people helping, a lot of people. A couple of people from Fox. Actually, I shouldn’t say that, but they wrote some jokes. And, for the most part, I didn’t like any of them,” he said.

    A spokesman for Fox News denied Trump’s claim in a statement to CNN. “FOX News confirmed that no employee or freelancer wrote the jokes,” it read.

    There was also a moment when Trump claimed that cows would cease to exist under a Harris presidency.

    Trump ended the interview by saying he was planning to pay a visit to Rupert Murdoch. “I’m gonna tell him very simple because I can’t talk to anyone else about it. Don’t put on negative commercials for 21 days,” he said, referring to the span of time before Election Day. “And don’t put on their horrible people that come and lie. I’m gonna say, ‘Rupert, please, do it this way,’ and then we’re gonna have a victory.”

    [ad_2]

    Intelligencer Staff

    Source link

  • Trump and Harris Battle With 25 Days to Go: Live Updates

    Trump and Harris Battle With 25 Days to Go: Live Updates

    [ad_1]

    According to NBC News, Trump has been told that his safety can’t be guaranteed, so he’s temporarily choosing life over one of his favorite pastimes:

    Trump has not played golf since an apparent assassination attempt near one of his courses on Sept. 15, and he will not do so until after the election, according to a person close to the campaign and another person familiar with the situation. A third person familiar with the conversations said Trump was told that federal agents could not ensure his safety to a degree that they were comfortable with if he were to play. The concerns were conveyed in two conversations with Trump since the September incident: one with Ronald Rowe, the acting director of the Secret Service, and the other with officials from the national intelligence director’s office. 

    He and his campaign aren’t just worried about golf courses. Per the Washington Post, the Trump campaign has asked for a number of additional protective measures while he’s on the trail — apparently including the Air Force:

    Trump’s campaign requested military aircraft for Trump to fly in during the final weeks of the campaign, expanded flight restrictions over his residences and rallies, ballistic glass pre-positioned in seven battleground states for the campaign’s use and an array of military vehicles to transport Trump, according to emails reviewed by The Washington Post and people familiar with the matter.

    The requests are extraordinary and unprecedented — no nominee in recent history has been ferried around in military planes ahead of an election. But the requests came after Trump’s campaign advisers received briefings in which the government said Iran is still actively plotting to kill him, according to the emails reviewed by The Post and the people familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive discussions. Trump advisers have grown concerned about drones and missiles, according to the people.

    [ad_2]

    Intelligencer Staff

    Source link

  • Trump Delivers Historically Illiterate Lecture on Tariffs

    Trump Delivers Historically Illiterate Lecture on Tariffs

    [ad_1]

    Donald Trump has grown increasingly fixated on tariffs, which he seems to think, contrary to the consensus among economists, are borne by foreigners. Trump understands at some level that economists and most business owners disagree with him, but rather than paper over their dispute, he insists — his insistence being an indicator of the depths of his conviction — upon trying to win them over to his side.

    In a speech to the Detroit Economic Club, Trump made a remarkable, error-strewn diatribe in favor of tariffs:

    In under a minute, Trump claimed, first, that when it relied on tariffs for revenue, the United States (by which he means the government) had more wealth (by which he means revenue) than at any other time in its history. “We had so much money,” he said, “all from tariffs; there was no income tax.”

    The truth is the opposite. Before the creation of the income tax, the United States did rely on tariffs as a major funding source. But the government collected far less revenue:

    Illustration: Tax Foundation/A graph of Federal Government Receipts and Expenditures

    Trump proceeded to tell his audience that, contrary to popular belief that the U.S. imposed a tariff that worsened the Depression, in fact tariffs only came into use in 1932.

    That is also false. The Smoot-Hawley tariff was implemented in 1930. One of its major effects was to set off retaliatory tariffs by trading partners, thus hurting American manufacturers as well as consumers. The economic contraction was underway when the tariff was implemented, but economic conditions grew much worse after it was put in place.

    Illustration: Press-Telegram

    Furthermore, Franklin D. Roosevelt liberalized trade after taking office in 1933. Tariff rates plunged as the economy recovered from the Depression. To be sure, tariffs are not even close to the main reason the economy recovered, but Trump’s belief that they were hiked only beginning in 1932 is the reverse of what occurred.

    Trump, in some ways, is obsessed with an economic agenda of which his understanding is so rudimentary he gets the most important historical facts about it backward.

    Many Republican elites believe that Trump either doesn’t mean it when he presents tariffs as an economic cure-all or that they can talk him out of it after the election. But Trump would have unilateral power to impose tariffs through executive action; he does not need Congress. And the idea that a lifelong megalomaniac who lacks a basic understanding of government will somehow become amenable to reason is, at best, optimistic.

    Conservatives don’t worry about Trump’s undisguised authoritarian ambitions because they think he’s going to use his powers for policies they believe in. In part, that is true. But Trump is also determined to implement a tariff agenda most conservative elites understand would have disastrous ramifications. Maybe the authoritarianism, criminality, and racism aren’t worth it?

    [ad_2]

    Jonathan Chait

    Source link

  • Hurricane Milton Expected to Slam Florida as Category 4 Storm: Live Updates

    Hurricane Milton Expected to Slam Florida as Category 4 Storm: Live Updates

    [ad_1]

    At Eye on the Storm, meteorologist Jeff Masters notes that Tampa–St. Petersburg has been rated the most vulnerable metropolitan area in the country to storm-surge damage, to the extent that a Category 4 storm that makes landfall just north of the area could do an estimated $230 billion in damage. Adds Masters:

    Most of the population in the four-county Tampa Bay region lives along the coast in low-lying areas, about 50 percent of it at an elevation of less than 10 feet. More than 800,000 people live in evacuation zones for a Category 1 hurricane, and 2 million people live in evacuation zones for a Category 5 hurricane, according to the 2010 Statewide Regional Evacuation Study for the Tampa Bay Region. Given that only 46% of the people in the evacuation zones for a Category 1 hurricane evacuated when an evacuation order was given as 2004’s Category 4 Hurricane Charley threatened the region, the potential exists for high loss of life when the next major hurricane hits.

    Two weeks ago, Helene didn’t even get all that close, but still walloped the metro area:

    Despite its center passing 130 miles (205 km) to the west of Tampa Bay on Sep. 26, Hurricane Helene brought the bay its highest storm surge since record-keeping began in 1947, with water levels 5-8 feet above dry ground. According to local station fox13news.com, damage was heavy in the four-county Tampa Bay region: Pinellas County (home of St. Petersburg) had 28,000 damaged buildings, Pasco County had 9,900, and there were 8,600 in Manatee and Sarasota counties combined. Twelve storm-related deaths occurred in Pinellas County, two in Manatee County, and two in Hillsborough County.

    Masters outlined the most troubling possible scenarios for Tampa:

    Our five top hurricane-specific forecast models – the HWRF, HMON, HAFS-A, HAFS-B, and COAMPS-TC – have been painting some extremely ugly possible futures for Tampa Bay from Hurricane Milton. At least one run in recent days from all of these models have predicted Milton would achieve Cat 4 or Cat 5 strength on Tuesday or Wednesday. Many of the runs have shown a landfall just north of Tampa Bay, which would maximize the surge in the bay. However, many recent runs of these models have predicted that high wind shear and dry air would combine to disrupt Milton’s core before landfall, causing rapid weakening, with a potential Cat 1 or Cat 2 landfall resulting. Unfortunately, such a rapid weakening would allow the hurricane’s strongest winds to spread out over a larger area, resulting in a damaging surge characteristic of a Cat 3 hurricane affecting a larger portion of the coast. The most devastating scenario for Tampa Bay painted by any of the model runs from 6Z (2 a.m. EDT) Monday was from the new HAFS-B model, which showed Milton hitting as a large Cat 3 with 115 mph (185 km/h) winds just north of Tampa Bay (Fig. 3). Such a storm would likely generate a storm surge in the bay in excess of 10 feet, causing over $10 billion in damage. The HAFS-B model outperformed all the other models for 3-, 4-, and 5-day forecasts last year. …

    With the new 6Z Monday runs of the HWRF, HMON, HAFS-A, HAFS-B, COAMPS-TC, GFS, and European models, all painted variations of a dire scenario for Milton for Tampa Bay, showing a landfall just to the north of or over Tampa Bay. The only model showing a best-case scenario for them was the 0Z Monday run of the UKMET model, which depicted a landfall near Fort Myers, about 80 miles south of Tampa Bay.

    [ad_2]

    Intelligencer Staff

    Source link

  • Mayor Eric Adams Indicted: Live Updates

    Mayor Eric Adams Indicted: Live Updates

    [ad_1]

    The first signs of trouble for Adams came on November 2, 2023, with an ominous round of raids targeting people close to City Hall. While he was traveling to Washington, D.C., for a White House meeting with mayors about the migrant crisis, FBI agents were executing search warrants at the homes of three Adams associates, including his chief fundraiser, Brianna Suggs, for dealings involving the Turkish government.

    In New Jersey, agents took cell phones and other materials from the homes of Rana Abbasova, director of protocol in the Mayor’s Office for International Affairs, and Cenk Öcal, a former Turkish Airlines executive who served on the mayor-elect’s transition committee. Agents left Suggs’s home in Crown Heights with three iPhones, two laptops, and a manila folder labeled “Eric Adams,” the New York Times reported.

    Alerted to the Suggs raid by a staff member, Adams turned around after landing in D.C. and boarded a flight back to New York. He told reporters the following week that he had skipped the migrant summit out of concern for 25-year-old Suggs. On the following Monday, FBI agents approached Adams as he left an event at New York University and confiscated two cell phones and an iPad that were in his possession.

    “As a former member of law enforcement, I expect all members of my staff to follow the law … I have nothing to hide,” the mayor said afterward, a refrain he used repeatedly, with variations, as the Turkey probe advanced and other investigations materialized.

    Another sweep came on September 4. Federal agents conducted early-morning raids at the homes of senior city officials including NYPD commissioner Edward Caban; Deputy Mayor for public safety Philip Banks III; his brother, schools chancellor David Banks; first deputy mayor Sheena Wright, David Banks’s fiancée; and a top mayoral adviser, Timothy Pearson. Caban’s identical twin brother, James, and a younger Banks sibling, Terence, also had phones confiscated.

    The coordinated raids came in support of two investigations unrelated to Turkey but run primarily out of the Manhattan U.S. Attorney’s office.
    One probe is looking into a consulting firm run by Terence Banks, whose fortunes rose when his older brothers joined the Adams administration, and the other is focused on whether James Caban had used his family ties to the police commissioner to gain work for his security business, according to news reports.

    Edward Caban resigned ten days after the raid. His brother and the Banks siblings have all denied wrongdoing. David Banks later resigned as schools chancellor.

    [ad_2]

    Intelligencer Staff

    Source link

  • The Case For 2024 Indecision Is Feeble

    The Case For 2024 Indecision Is Feeble

    [ad_1]

    This post originally appeared in Jonathan Chait’s &c. newsletter, which you can sign up for here.

    This week, more than 100 Republican elected officials or national security advisers endorsed Kamala Harris. The argument that united these figures, many of whom worked directly for Donald Trump, is simple: Trump is a maniac. More specifically, Trump worships dictators, a fact with disturbing implications for his foreign policy, and even more disturbing implications for his use of domestic power (Trump has attempted a coup, promises to free the criminals who joined his coup attempt, and threatens regularly to imprison the media and opposition if he wins). In the face of the extraordinary threat to the system posed by a second Trump term, normal political disagreements over budgets, social policy, and the like simply don’t register.

    Oddly, this logic has not won over two of the most prominent conservative columnists at the New York Times, whom you might expect would have an easier time supporting a Democrat than would, say, Dick Cheney.

    Both Ross Douthat and Bret Stephens have written columns explaining why the choice between nakedly authoritarian, paranoid racist criminal Donald Trump and regular Democrat Kamala Harris leaves them flummoxed and, for now, undecided. I am not a conservative, so for me the choice is extremely obvious. Even granting that conservatives have different priorities and preferences, however, the case for indecision strikes me as feeble.

    Stephens’s column begins with a series of specific policy questions he wishes Harris would answer. These are all perfectly valid questions, of course, but there’s something comical about demanding this level of specificity from one candidate — “Are there any regulations she’d like to get rid of in her initiative to build 3 million new homes in the next four years? What role, if any, does she see for nuclear power in her energy and climate plans? If there were another pandemic similar to COVID-19, what might her administration do differently?” etc. — when the other candidate’s platform ranges from incoherent blather to promises or threats so outlandish his own party is reduced to hoping he is simply lying. Stephens sounds like a parent who is unsure about whether he should hire a serial killer to babysit his children because the only other candidate hasn’t supplied enough references.

    After listing his questions that Harris must answer (and that Trump, of course, not only hasn’t answered but is mentally incapable of answering), Stephens addresses the obvious objection about the alternative:

    “Yet Trump victory or no, the Republican Party isn’t likely to revert to its former ideological leanings. And the argument that Trump is our Mussolini, scheming with ever-greater malevolence and cunning to end the Republic, is getting a little long in the tooth.

    Trump may be much the worse sinner, but Democrats aren’t blameless when it comes to weaponizing the instruments of state power to interfere with the will of the voters. Otherwise, what does it mean to try to kick a candidate off a state ballot, or use a nakedly politicized prosecution to turn an opponent into a convicted felon, or have powerful insiders anoint a presidential candidate without the benefit of a single primary vote?”

    Begin with the second paragraph. Stephens is trying to equate Trump’s naked authoritarianism with various actions by “Democrats.” Two of those, the Manhattan prosecution (which I think is shaky) and a lawsuit to disqualify him in California, have nothing to do with either Harris or the national party. The third, the party’s quick coalescing around Harris rather than jury-rig a speed primary, is both an understandable response to an emergency and one that is perfectly normal party behavior. There are no rules in place for how a party responds to a medical emergency by its nominee. Speed elections aren’t realistic. In any case, parties used to anoint their candidates without voting at all. To even compare quibbles about the nominating process with Trump’s belief he is entitled to prevail whatever the voters say, and that all opposition to him is inherently criminal, is an insult to democracy.

    I think the weakness of this argument is explained by the paragraph preceding it, in which Stephens laments that the old Republican Party is not returning, and that complaints about Trump’s unfitness are getting old. Obviously, the passage of time does not make concerns about an authoritarian president less compelling, especially when his authoritarianism is growing more blatant, while his party’s willingness to check it is faltering. But what does weaken with time is political willpower. Stephens’s thought process is laid bare by his fretting that the old party is not returning. His period of brief exile, which he first imagined would last months until Trump was defeated, and then four years until the party returned to sanity, is now stretching out indefinitely. And that is why his implied threshold of acceptability for Trump is now getting lower and lower.

    Douthat’s argument for indecision is somewhat more frustrating. He argues that the Democratic Party lurched leftward during the Trump era. Douthat concedes that it has been chastened, both on substantive grounds (inflation rose surprisingly fast) and political grounds (the public turned out to be much less progressive than the Twitter-influenced bubble of 2019–2020 implied). Yet his complaint is that Democrats have failed to acknowledge and apologize for their leftward lurch:

    “The ‘ask’ is to ratify a record of substantial policy failure and conspicuous ideological fanaticism, dressed up for the moment in a thin promise that we won’t make those mistakes again …

    Then the bill comes due, the elites backpedal and obfuscate and conveniently forget (What do you mean, Kamala Harris endorsed publicly funded gender reassignment surgery for illegal aliens? Sounds like Fox News nonsense!), and the unhappy swing voter is informed that no real price can be exacted for any of this folly, because the populist alternative isn’t fit for power.”

    It isn’t enough for Douthat that Harris has renounced nearly all her progressive stances from 2019 and is running a campaign far more centrist than the one Joe Biden ran in 2020. He demands a price be paid for the progressivism. An apology? A truth and reconciliation commission for the unjustly canceled? One can understand his impulse to desire these things without being able to fathom how they could amount to a rationale for electing Trump, the very lunatic who helped set off the excesses that he’s still so angry about.

    Yes, the public-health experts overshot their certainty — but that was both more tempting for them to do, and easier for them to get away with, when the president was spinning absurd lies that the virus would go away on its own in a few days or could be cured with Ivermectin. Yes, the Robin DiAngelo / Ibram Kendi fad was embarrassing and even harmful, but racism sure seems like a more serious problem when the president of the United States says racist things constantly.

    Douthat, like Stephens, manages to identify his own emotional processes without diagnosing them fully. For Douthat, it’s the lack of an option — he cannot take out his frustration on the Democrats “because the populist alternative isn’t fit for power.”

    It’s frustrating. I get it. If the Republicans were still in the hands of Bush-Romney types, and the Democratic Party fell into the thrall of, say, a Hugo Chavez, I would have to vote Republican. The give-and-take of normal policy disagreement can only proceed under a relatively healthy democracy. If the only party that could be trusted with democracy was only taking, and not giving, my policy priorities, I would feel growing frustration. The system is unfair. The elites must pay a price.

    But it is not the system that has brought us to this unfortunate point. It is the Republican Party. I would very much like to have a world in which we had two parties to choose from that could be trusted not to destroy democracy. But until we do, small-d Democrats have only one choice. That their alternative is unsuitable for power is not the Democrats’ fault.


    See All



    [ad_2]

    Jonathan Chait

    Source link

  • The 30 Best Movies on Paramount+ Right Now

    The 30 Best Movies on Paramount+ Right Now

    [ad_1]

    Amores Perros.
    Photo: Lionsgate

    This post will be updated frequently as movies enter and leave the service. *New titles are indicated with an asterisk.

    In 2021, CBS All Access rebranded with the name Paramount+, reflecting the history of the legendary film and TV company with that nifty little mathematical sign that all the streaming companies seem to love these days. The name Paramount brings a deep catalogue of feature films, and the streaming service also includes titles from the Miramax and MGM libraries. They have also added a more robust original selection than at launch to complement the service’s classics like Gladiator, the Mission: Impossible series and Grease.

    For now, Paramount+ can’t compare to the depth of a catalogue like Max’s or the award-winning original works at other streamers, but it has a solid library with at least 30 films you should see.

    Year: 2001
    Runtime: 2h 34m
    Director: Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu

    Alejandro González Iñárritu would go on to win two directing Oscars but he first earned worldwide acclaim with this time-jumping thriller starring Gael Garcia Bernal. At the end of a wave of violent triptychs inspired by Pulp Fiction, Amores Perros somehow still felt fresh and new thanks to its director’s daring storytelling style and skill with actors.

    Year: 2016
    Runtime: 1h 56m
    Director: Denis Villeneuve

    The beloved French director’s best film remains his adaptation of “Story of Your Life” by Ted Chiang, a tale of alien invasion that’s really more about the people on Earth than the interplanetary visitors. Amy Adams gives one of the best performances of her career as a linguist tasked with communicating with the aliens.

    Year: 2004
    Runtime: 2h 50m
    Director: Martin Scorsese

    Leonardo DiCaprio stars as Howard Hughes in Martin Scorsese’s incredibly detailed and lavish period piece about one of the most infamous eccentric millionaires of all time. It feels like every other month produces a bit of social outrage about Scorsese’s place in movie history or his comments on Marvel movies. Ignore that noise and just watch one of his works that doesn’t get nearly enough praise, anchored by one of DiCaprio’s best performances and some of the most impressive aerial cinematography of all time.

    Year: 2007
    Runtime: 1h 56m
    Director: Sidney Lumet

    The masterful director of 12 Angry Men, Dog Day Afternoon, and so many more American classics ended his career with a banger in this intense thriller featuring performances from Ethan Hawke, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Marisa Tomei, and Albert Finney that stand among their best. A chronological puzzle of a film that would impress Chris Nolan with its structure, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead is one of the best films of the 2000s.

    Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead

    Year: 1984
    Runtime: 1h 45m
    Director: Martin Brest

    It’s hard to explain to people too young to experience it how big a star Eddie Murphy was in 1984 when his Axel Foley ruled the world. Murphy’s wit and charm were put to perfect use in Beverly Hills Cop that produced two inferior sequels, and both happen to also be on Paramount Plus.

    Year: 1997
    Runtime: 2h 35m
    Director: P.T. Anderson

    Paul Thomas Anderson is widely recognized as one of the best living American filmmakers now, but that wasn’t the case before the release of this masterpiece about life in the Los Angeles porn scene. Mark Wahlberg has never (and likely never will be) better than he is here, anchoring an ensemble that includes equally great work from Julianne Moore and Burt Reynolds.

    Year: 1974
    Runtime: 2h 10m
    Director: Roman Polanski

    Forget it Jake, it’s Chinatown. One of the best movies of the ‘70s, this Best Picture nominee (and Best Screenplay winner) tells the story of Jake Gittes, played unforgettably by Jack Nicholson, as he investigates an adulterer and finds something much more insidious under the surface of Los Angeles. It’s a must-see, as important as almost any film from its era.

    Year: 1995
    Runtime: 1h 37m
    Director: Amy Heckerling

    You can keep all those stuffy Jane Austen adaptations—one of the best remains Amy Heckerling’s updating of the 1815 classic Emma to mid-‘90s L.A. Is this the most ‘90s movie ever? From its fashion to its references to its beloved characters, Clueless is certainly one of the most iconic, a movie that made a small impact when it was released but feels like it grows even more popular with each generation that discovers it.

    Year: 2004
    Runtime: 1h 59m
    Director: Michael Mann

    Tom Cruise gives one of his most fascinating performances as Vincent, the passenger to Jamie Foxx’s L.A. cab driver on a very fateful night. It turns out that Vincent is hitman and he needs Foxx’s character to drive him on a killing spree in this tense, gorgeously-shot thriller from the masterful craftsman Michael Mann.

    Year: 2022
    Runtime: 2h 19m
    Director: J.D. Dillard

    The proximity to another little movie about pilots called Top Gun: Maverick likely hurt the bottom line of this excellent, old-fashioned drama based on a true story. The excellent Jonathan Majors plays Jesse Brown, the first Black aviator in Navy history, and Maverick star Glen Powell plays his co-pilot and friend Tom Hudner. Both young future stars are excellent in a film that viewers can now find at home.

    Year: 2019
    Runtime: 2h 32m
    Director: Mike Flanagan

    Almost four decades after Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, Mike Flanagan (The Haunting of Hill House) adapted the sequel by Stephen King with what felt like mixed results. However, in just the few years since this movie came out, it feels like the cult following has grown. It’s a stylish drama that kind of falls apart in the final act, but has enough good stuff before that to recommend a look.

    Year: 1997
    Runtime: 2h 18m
    Director: John Woo

    There are rumors that a remake of this John Woo classic is on the horizon, so you owe it to yourself to go back and see the very high standard that project will have to meet. Face/Off is one of the best action movies of the ‘90s, a wonderfully staged blockbuster by one of the genre’s best filmmakers. And John Travolta and Nicolas Cage were near the peaks of their screen charismas as an FBI agent and terrorist who end up, well, switching faces. It’s a blast.

    Year: 2020
    Runtime: 1h 38m
    Director: Jiayan “Jenny” Shi

    Jiayan Shi directed and produced this heartbreaking documentary about the disappearance and death of Yingying Zhang in 2017. Shi has unique access to the story in that she knew Yingying, and so her film has an incredible you-are-there quality as Shi captures the investigation and grief that would emerge from this horrific crime. Paramount+ deserves credit for bringing smaller projects like this to their subscribers, ones that other major streamers might ignore.

    Year: 2000
    Runtime: 2h 34m
    Director: Ridley Scott

    One of the most popular films of its era, this action epic stars Russell Crowe as the legendary Maximus, a warrior whose family is murdered by the vicious Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix). Forced into slavery, Maximus has to rise the gladiator arenas to get his vengeance. The film made a fortune on its way to winning the Oscar for Best Picture.

    Year: 1972
    Runtime: 2h 55m
    Director: Francis Ford Coppola

    Maybe you’ve heard of it? In all seriousness, there’s a very cool opportunity right now to watch the entire Godfather trilogy on Paramount+, including the superior recent cut of the third film. You could then slide from some of the best filmmaking of all time into the streaming service’s original series The Offer, about the making of Coppola’s masterpiece.

    Year: 2014
    Runtime: 2h 49m
    Director: Christopher Nolan

    No one else makes movies like Christopher Nolan, a man who took his superhero success and used it to get gigantic budgets to bring his wildest dreams to the big screen. Who else could make this sprawling, emotional, complicated film about an astronaut (Matthew McConaughey) searching for a new home for humanity? It’s divisive among some Nolan fans for its deep emotions, but those who love it really love it.

    Year: 2015
    Runtime: 1h 40m
    Director: David Robert Mitchell

    Maika Monroe stars in this indie horror breakthrough hit as a young woman who discovers that her recent sexual activity has cursed her with a supernatural force that will chase her until she passes it along to someone else. Stylish and striking, this felt like nothing else on the American horror market in 2014, really ushering in the era of what is now called “elevated horror.” Whatever you call it, It Follows is still an unforgettable genre flick.

    Year: 2002
    Runtime: 1h 25m
    Director: Jeff Tremaine

    Jackass Forever helped 2022 start with a bang. Now you can go back and watch the whole series exclusively on Paramount+ right now! (Even the “alternate” ones like Jackass 3.5). Go back to the heyday of Johnny Knoxville, Steve-O, and the rest of the dangerous idiots. These movies are often derided as being dumb but they’re a glorious, infectious kind of dumb that wants nothing more than to make you laugh.

    Year: 1996
    Runtime: 2h 18m
    Director: Cameron Crowe

    One of Cameron Crowe’s best films became something of a punchline with its heavily quoted lines (“Show me the money,” “You had me at hello,” everything that cute kid says) but it’s actually a character-driven romantic comedy that has held up incredibly well in the quarter-century since its release. Tom Cruise plays the title character, a sports agent who is pushed into starting his own agency while he falls in love with a single mother, played by Renee Zellweger. It’s sweet, smart, and funny.

    Year: 2022
    Runtime: 1h 52m
    Director: Aaron Nee, Adam Nee

    With echoes of beloved rom-coms like African Queen and Romancing the Stone, this film truly felt like an anomaly in 2022, and yet it turned into a pretty big hit at the theater. It’s already on streaming services, and it’s a great choice if you’re looking for some escapism tonight. Travel to the middle of nowhere with a romance novel writer (Sandra Bullock) and the cover model (Channing Tatum) who tries to save the day.

    Year: 2002
    Runtime: 2h 25m
    Director: Steven Spielberg

    One of Steven Spielberg’s best modern movies is this adaptation of a Philip K. Dick story about a future in which crime can be predicted before it happens. Tom Cruise stars as a man who is convicted of a crime he has no intent of committing in a fantastic vision of a future in which the systems designed to stop crime have been corrupted. It’s timely and probably always will be.

    Year: 1996-present
    Runtime: Varies
    Director: Various

    The whole series is finally here! For some reason, parts 1 to 3 and parts 4 to 6 have alternated residence on a lot of streaming services, but Paramount+ currently hosts the entire thing from De Palma’s first movie to Fallout. While we wait for Mission: Impossible 7, revisit the whole arc of the saga of Ethan Hunt to date.

    Year: 2023
    Runtime: 1h 45m
    Director: Celine Song

    A current Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay nominee, this phenomenal film isn’t on any of the other streamers. It stars the excellent Greta Lee and Teo Yoo as a couple who were close as children but reunite years later after she immigrated to the United States. It’s as much a story of what people leave behind when they change their entire lives as it is a traditional story of unrequited love. It’s beautiful and unforgettable.

    Year: 2008
    Runtime: 1h 52m
    Director: David Gordon Green

    Seth Rogen gives one of his best performances as Dale Denton, an average guy who just wants to get high. He visits his dealer (played perfectly by James Franco) on the wrong night as the pair cross paths with hitmen and a police officer on the wrong side of the law. This is an incredibly funny movie, and you don’t need to be high to love it.

    Year: 2018
    Runtime: 1h 30m
    Director: John Krasinski

    Who could have possibly guessed that Jim from The Office would be behind one of the most successful horror films of the ‘10s? You’ve probably already seen this story of a world in which silence is the only way to survive, but it’s worth another look to marvel at its tight, taut filmmaking and a stellar performance from Emily Blunt. Plus, Paramount+ recently added the sequel, so: double feature time!

    Year: 2019
    Runtime: 1h 24m
    Director: Rose Glass

    Rose Glass’s terrifying horror film is one of the best movies of 2021 and it’s already on Paramount+. Reminiscent of psychological nightmares of the ‘70s like Repulsion and Rosemary’s Baby, this is the tale of a hospice nurse named Maud (a fearless performance from Morfydd Clark) who becomes obsessed with saving the soul of one of her patients (Jennifer Ehle). It’s unforgettable.

    Year: 1996
    Runtime: 1h 51m
    Director: Wes Craven

    The Ghostface killer came back in January 2022 with the release of Scream, the fifth film in this franchise and the first since the death of Wes Craven, and the fun continued with another sequel in 2023 (although the troubles around the production of the seventh film have been, well, notable). Paramount+ is the best place for a marathon with the original trilogy and the fifth and sixth films (but, bizarrely, not Scream 4.) The first movie is still a flat-out genre masterpiece.

    Year: 2010
    Runtime: 2h
    Director: David Fincher

    One of the best movies of the 2010s has returned to Paramount after a brief hiatus to remind people how wildly far ahead of its time this movie was when it was released. With a razor-sharp screenplay by Aaron Sorkin and some of the best direction of David Fincher’s career, this is a flawless movie, one that resonates even more now in the era of constant internet than it did thirteen years ago.

    Year: 1986
    Runtime: 1h 53m
    Director: Jonathan Demme

    Jonathan Demme was a master of tonal balancing, finding a way to perfectly blend the comedy and the dread in this story of an average man caught up in a criminal’s web. Charlie (Jeff Daniels) is a milquetoast banker who goes on a wild ride with a girl named Lulu (Melanie Griffith), but everything changes when Lulu’s ex (an unforgettable Ray Liotta) enters the picture.

    Year: 2007
    Runtime: 2h 38m
    Director: Paul Thomas Anderson

    One of the best films of the ‘00s, Paul Thomas Anderson’s adaptation of Upton Sinclair’s Oil! won Daniel Day-Lewis his second Oscar as the unforgettable Daniel Plainview. As detailed and epic as great fiction, Anderson’s movie is one of the most acclaimed of its era, a film in which it’s hard to find a single flaw. Even if you think you’ve seen it enough, watch it again. You’ll find a new reason to admire it.

    Year: 1997
    Runtime: 3h 14m
    Director: James Cameron

    More than just a blockbuster, this Best Picture winner was a legitimate cultural phenomenon, staying at the top of the box office charts for months. There was a point when it felt like not only had everyone seen the story of Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Rose (Kate Winslet), but most people had seen it twice. History has kind of reduced this epic to its quotable scenes and earworm theme song, but it’s a better movie than you remember, a great example of James Cameron’s truly robust filmmaking style.

    Year: 2022
    Runtime: 2h 10m
    Director: Joseph Kosinski

    It’s the movie that saved movies last year! The truth is that Paramount wanted to drop this long-awaited sequel on a streamer during the pandemic, but Tom Cruise knew it was the kind of thing that should be appreciated in a theater. He bet on himself and the result is arguably the biggest hit of his career, a movie that made a fortune and seems primed to win Oscars in a couple months.

    Year: 2000
    Runtime: 1h 36m
    Director: Sofia Coppola

    Sofia Coppola made her directorial debut with this adaptation of Jeffrey Eugenides’s beloved novel about a group of sisters who captivated the entire neighborhood in which they lived. Kirsten Dunst anchors a dreamy, captivating movie about the myth of perfection that exists in the world of picket fences in middle America. It’s got a great Air soundtrack too.

    Year: 2013
    Runtime: 3h
    Director: Martin Scorsese

    Leonardo DiCaprio should have won the Oscar for his amazing performance as Jordan Belfort, the financial criminal that rocked Wall Street and shocked audiences in one of Scorsese’s best late films. Arguments over whether or not this film glorifies a “bad guy” have become prominent—and could only really be made by people who haven’t actually watched it. Most of all, it’s a shockingly robust film, filmed with more energy in a few minutes than most flicks have in their entire runtime.

    Year: 2007
    Runtime: 2h 37m
    Director: David Fincher

    David Fincher’s masterpiece is more about the impact of crime than crime itself. The fact that he made a sprawling epic about an unsolved murder is daring enough, but what’s most remarkable is how much this movie becomes less and less about figuring out the identity of the Zodiac Killer and more about the impact of obsession. It’s one of the best films of the ‘00s.

    If you subscribe to a service through our links, Vulture may earn an affiliate commission.

    [ad_2]

    Brian Tallerico

    Source link

  • Trump’s Post-Debate Presser Was All Attacks and Grievance: How It Happened

    Trump’s Post-Debate Presser Was All Attacks and Grievance: How It Happened

    [ad_1]

    Photo: Robyn Beck/AFP via Getty Images

    Donald Trump held his first post-debate press conference on Friday at his Los Angeles–area golf club, but he didn’t have much of anything to announce. Instead, he mostly read a prepared speech repeating dozens of criticisms of Kamala Harris, complained about the moderators of the debate, and reiterated racist attacks on migrants residing in Springfield, Ohio, and elsewhere — though he notably abstained from further promoting baseless cat-and-dog-eating conspiracy theories about the community. He also took questions from reporters — about his extremist campaign companion Laura Loomer, the downturn in Trump Media stock, and several other topics. Below, our running account of what happened as it happened.

    [ad_2]

    Intelligencer Staff

    Source link

  • Kamala Harris Understood the Assignment

    Kamala Harris Understood the Assignment

    [ad_1]

    After Donald Trump’s surprising win in 2016, the Democratic Party was panicked into abandoning the Obama model as a failure. Earlier this month, I examined Kamala Harris’s political challenge through the lens of Obamaism. Could Harris rediscover a winning formula her party had discarded? The convention gives us a clear answer:

    Yes. She. Can.

    The Obama recipe has several key components, all of which were vividly present in Chicago. The most obvious may be novelty. Obama promised to turn the page, leaving behind frustrating and tiresome debates of the past, rather than overpowering the Democrats’ adversaries.

    The convention, accordingly, presented Harris to the country as if she was an outsider. Speaker after speaker hammered this theme. Michelle Obama told Democrats she saw a “feeling that’s been buried for far too long. It’s the contagious power of hope … Hope made a comeback.” Colin Allred, the Texas Senate nominee, promised that “we will turn the page and write a new chapter for this country.” Tim Walz urged Americans to “turn the page on Donald Trump.” Yusef Salaam, New York City Council candidate and exonerated former target of one of Trump’s earliest racist fearmongering campaigns, told Democrats, “When they see us, we will finally say good-bye to that hateful man.”

    Harris herself has employed the slogan “A New Way Forward” and the chant “We’re not going back!” because, presumably, “No Country for Old Men” was rejected as too subtle.

    This assumption that Donald Trump is the sitting president of the United States managed to simultaneously infuriate both Trump and the actual incumbent president. Biden’s loyalists have grumbled at the disrespect implied by her messaging, and they are not wrong to detect an insult.

    In a literal sense, it is a feat of propaganda to turn public discontent with the status quo into an argument for a member of the administration and against his challenger. But as much as it may invert the current power arrangement in Washington, it feels true. Biden has never managed to grasp public attention, and this year his presence has shrunk to the point of near invisibility. Trump’s presence on the national stage has grown. His sycophants even address him as “Mr. President.” Trump’s plan was to use that appearance of strength versus weakness to overpower his presumed opponent. Harris has used it against him like jujitsu. Trump has been the loudest voice in the room for eight years. Making him go away, she promises, will give a greater sensation of change than switching party control of the executive branch.

    One gauge of success is the apoplectic reaction this has produced among Republicans. “The strategy is to pretend that Kamala Harris has never existed until this very moment,” wails Ben Shapiro, “That the Biden-HARRIS administration was never a thing. That she somehow was handed the nomination without a single vote WITHOUT owning Biden’s record. The audacity of LIES.” The Wall Street Journal editorial page laments, “Mr. Trump has let Ms. Harris claim the mantle of change, though she has been Mr. Biden’s sidekick all along. This is political malpractice.”

    If you recall, the Trump message involved reminding people how well the economy was performing in 2019, pretending he wasn’t president in 2020, then blaming the global post-pandemic inflation surge on his successor. Biden was too hapless to disrupt this narrative. Harris isn’t.

    A second element of Obamism relies on carefully navigating the explosive cultural forces unleashed by Harris’s novel identity. Winning elections means gaining the approval of voters who hold moderate or conservative beliefs and cultural assumptions. Not all those fears can be assuaged by rolling out a white-haired former football coach who enjoys hunting more than spicy food. It entails carefully curating the nominee’s biography and platform.

    Harris depicted her life story as “working class” — she does not come from the affluent part of the Bay Area, nor was her family dependent on income support. (Yes, there are still winnable voters out there who hold bigoted assumptions in their minds about the work habits of the urban poor.) The story she gave the country was of a striving, tight-knit upwardly mobile immigrant family, which Americans regard with pride.

    Harris cast her lot firmly on the conservative side of social questions like criminal justice, border enforcement, the military, and patriotism. Democrats waved American flags and chanted “U-S-A!” with gusto and frequency. Harris presented her own plans as responsible, common sense, and potentially bipartisan. She cast her opponent, not herself, as the driver of radical change — somehow without undercutting her depicting of him as old news. Trump’s angry rejoinder that Harris is serving in the White House right now, along with his desperation to disavow himself from Project 2025, which he has previously touted as his master plan for a second term, is another sign of how well this is working.

    This was a complete abandonment of the progressive assumption that Trump won because the working class had grown alienated by neoliberalism and desperate to overthrow the system. The transformation could also be traced in the party’s platform, as political scientist Matt Grossmann noticed. The word border, which appeared just eight times four years ago, received 49 mentions this year, while invocations of the term “systemic racism” fell from nine in 2020 to zero.

    Harris’s choice was to focus relentlessly on targeting the voters she needs to win 270 electoral votes, at the expense of fan service for progressives. This has naturally created some dismay among the fans. Left-wing activists, who were initially thrilled with Harris’s nomination and her choice of Tim Walz as running met, met her speech with icy sarcasm, especially its embrace of the defense establishment and promises to bring together labor and entrepreneurs. (“The reference to ‘founders’ there is ominous,” observed David Dayen of the left-wing American Prospect.)

    Alienating the left is not the point of these moves. It is simply the inevitable by-product. If you are targeting your message to the beliefs of the median voter, you are necessarily going to leave voters at the 99th percentile of the right-to-left spectrum feeling cold. The bitter complaints from the right that she is a fraud, and from the left that she is a sellout, are indications that Harris has calibrated her campaign perfectly.

    Unlike Obama, Harris is almost certainly not going to have a Democratic Congress and an opportunity to expand the welfare state and new regulation. There is little point in selling the public on new liberal programs that a Republican-led Senate would ignore. If Harris does enjoy a historically consequential presidency, it will not run through the traditional channel of passing giant liberal laws through big Democratic majorities.

    The question is will Harris become president at all? The evidence from Chicago all points to the conclusion that she knows exactly what to do.

    [ad_2]

    Jonathan Chait

    Source link

  • Trump Proposes Making It a Crime to Criticize Pro-Trump Judges

    Trump Proposes Making It a Crime to Criticize Pro-Trump Judges

    [ad_1]

    Over the weekend, Donald Trump expressed in a speech his belief that public criticism of judges and Supreme Court justices who rule in Trump’s favor should be illegal.

    Trump took this position expressly, twice, in his speech, albeit in a stream-of-consciousness riff. His basic point was that public critics of Trump-appointed judges who make rulings Trump approves of are “working the refs.”

    Trump first claimed this is illegal. (“I really think it’s illegal what they do, with judges and justices. They’re playing the ref.”) Later in the speech, he said it ought to be illegal. (“Remember the term. Playing the ref with our judges and justices should be punishable by very serious fines and beyond that.”)

    In the middle of these two statements, he managed, in typical Trumpian fashion, to strip away any pretense of intellectual consistency by (1) saying that “working the refs” is wonderful and brilliant, because it was done by his friend, Bobby Knight, the former Indiana basketball coach who endorsed him, leading to Trump winning Indiana by a landslide, and (2) immediately making his own criticism of judges who rule against him. “The New York court system is totally corrupt,” Trump said.

    A law against criticizing judges would be highly problematic, of course, but that is obviously not what Trump wants, since he sandwiched his calls for such a law around criticism of judges who ruled against him. Trump wants to ban criticizing judges who rule the way Trump wants them to rule.

    Trump would almost certainly not be able to pass such a law through Congress, and even if he did, it would stand little chance of surviving a clear First Amendment challenge. The Republican-controlled Supreme Court has shown a willingness to bend the law in favor of Trump and the conservative agenda to a sometimes-shocking degree, but an outright ban on criticism of judges would disregard the plain text of the Constitution to a degree that would be hard to imagine.

    What matters here is that Trump has revealed once again his utter lack of respect for democratic values. He admires dictators. He believes any election he loses is illegitimate. He believes his political opponents and critics are per se criminal. And he has made this plain so many times that every fresh new piece of evidence of his dictatorial ambitions, each of which ought to be totally disqualifying on its own, barely attracts attention of the political media any more.

    [ad_2]

    Jonathan Chait

    Source link

  • Trump Assassination Attempt Suspect Identified: Live Updates

    Trump Assassination Attempt Suspect Identified: Live Updates

    [ad_1]

    Trump spoke for about six minutes before shots rang out, delivering his standard rally speech. You can see the full video on C-SPAN.

    He started by commenting on the “big crowd” and lamenting that the “fake news” refused to turn the cameras around and show it because “nobody would believe it.” (Trump has been saying this for years, though the media regularly shows the size of his rally crowds.) Then Trump mocked Joe Biden, claiming only “93 people” showed up to one of his recent events.

    Trump promised to deport millions of undocumented immigrants, who he falsely claims are largely from mental institutions and prisons. “We’ve got to bring our country back to health, because our country is going to hell, if you haven’t noticed,” he said. “Millions and millions of people are pouring in from prisons and from mental institutions. We’re going to stop it. We’re going to bring them back. We’re going to deport.”

    Trump vowed to “defeat Crooked Joe Biden and Laffin’ Kamala Harris,” using his new nickname for the vice-president. And he claimed that he didn’t actually lose the last election.

    “We did fantastically in 2016,” he said. “We did much better in 2020 and it was rigged, it was a rigged deal.”

    Next Trump shouted out Republican Senate nominee David McCormick, who was in the crowd. He said his Democratic opponent, Senator Bob Casey, is “a real stiff” who “votes for Biden or whoever happens to be furthest left.”

    Trump accused Biden of not understanding the meaning of “Make America Great Again,” joking that he’d be “at some beautiful place with a gorgeous ocean” if Biden “was doing the job.”

    Finally, Trump pivoted back to claiming that “dangerous people,” “criminals,” and “drug dealers” are flooding into the country and had his team bring up a chart on illegal border crossings during his administration (which was not visible on the C-SPAN feed). Trump was discussing the chart when the first shots rang out. “And you know, that’s a little bit old, that chart,” he said. “That chart’s a couple of months old. If want to really see something that’s sad, take a look at what happened …”

    Then Trump grabbed his ear and crouched down as he was hit.

    [ad_2]

    Intelligencer Staff

    Source link

  • Biden Survives His High-Stakes Press Conference: How It Happened

    Biden Survives His High-Stakes Press Conference: How It Happened

    [ad_1]

    The Capitol Hill building where Democratic senators heard from top Biden aides Mike Donilon, Steve Richetti, and Jen O’Malley Dillon had two exits, one on a side street with a nice view of the Supreme Court and the other emptying out onto four lanes of traffic on Constitution Avenue with no shade from the July sun. Most senators invariably used the second, because it was the one where they wouldn’t be interrogated by reporters.

    The few who trickled out of the first exit were reluctant to answer any questions at all about the meeting where they sought reassurance from the president’s team that there was a way he could win reelection. They didn’t even answer questions about what was for lunch.

    Connecticut’s Richard Blumenthal offered the cryptic answer that “some of my concerns are allayed, some others have been deepened” after the meeting — which Politico reported didn’t seem to have changed anyone’s minds. Still, Blumenthal insisted ahead of Biden’s press conference that he has to “go to American people, not just in one meeting, in one press conference, or in one speech but consistently and constantly.”

    “Tonight will be important,” he said. “The press conference will be potentially a turning point, but there has to be more than one.”

    Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire offered a panglossian spin, rare among Democrats who have been increasingly stone-faced in recent days. “The best way to defeat Donald Trump is to reelect President Biden,” she said. “I thought the presentation we had was a really excellent one.”

    The windows of the building, which was headquarters of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, were plastered with stickers encouraging passersby to look up www.goponabortion.com — a campaign website where they criticized Republicans for their opposition to Roe v. Wade. No one outside was pulling up the website though. They were too busy reading the statement from the latest House member to demand that Biden drop out.

    [ad_2]

    Intelligencer Staff

    Source link