Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
Trump and now Vance are repeatedly shooting themselves in the foot by making stupid statements. Any idiot would know that saying that Kamala Harris turned black from Asian would not please most voters, including Republicans. I’m not sure whether Harris once emphasized her Asian ancestry and then her black ancestry at a later time, but even calling attention to that is invidious. Like many voters, including black ones, I do not want this election to be about race; I want it to be about issues.
Vance, who was chosen for his hardscrabble background designed to appeal to middle America, has proved to be somewhat of a drag on the ticket. His comment on childless cat ladies was just as bad as Trump’s gaffe, and he topped that by criticizing Simone Biles for pulling out of the last Olympics because of mental health issues. That’s just churlish. None of these statements have anything to do with issues; they are ad hominems.
Harris, on the other hand, accepted her coronation with glee, and I’m appalled that people with much better cred, including Obama and Pelosi, jumped aboard the Harris juggernaut so quickly. I am not enthused about her stand on Israel, on her wokeness (she’s increasingly “progressive”, and will do damage to Titles VI and IX) and her weakness on the border, though she’s keeping a low profile right now. What irks me the most is her claim that she wasn’t going to simply inherit the Democratic nomination, but EARN it. Well, she’s done absolutely nothing to earn it except serve up a few more word salads (I swear, she is incapable of thinking on her feet, and becomes acceptable only when reading from a teleprompter).
This is one election when I’m not enthused about either candidate. I remain a Democrat and a huge critic of Trump, whom I consider mentally ill, but I can’t say that I wouldn’t be holding my nose when voting for Harris. I am appalled at what’s happened to the Democratic Party. Yes, they are dancing with glee around a mediocre candidate, for they want to win, but what happened to the search for quality? Perhaps it was too late to have debates or resolve this in the Democratic Convention, for it’s already been solved. Still . . . .
But the laws of physics have already determined who will win the Presidency, so I suppose I should just relax and let the molecules work it all out.
A hypothetical question: You are one of the moderators of the next Presidential debate. (We’re not sure if there will be one, though there surely must.) What question(s) would you most like to ask both candidates together, as well as either one separately. Since Harris hasn’t yet chosen a running mate, we’ll leave out VP questions, though if you want to say what you’d ask Vance, fire away. Be hard on them!
But here’s one question I’d ask both candidates. A version of this was asked in 2007 among the Republican Presidential candidates, with three out of the ten candidates said they didn’t “believe in evolution.” Here’s the video of that:
So here’s what I’d ask both Trump and Harris:
Do you accept that evolution is true? Why or why not?
That’s a touchstone about whether they’d accept established scientific “truth.” If you don’t buy that, then you’re oblivious to evidence. I’m sure Harris would say “yes”, but don’t know what Trump would say. But I’d also like to know if they know the evidence.
Here’s what I’d ask Trump (two questions):
You still maintain that the last Presidential election was rigged, with illegal votes counted in a way that made you lose. If you lost this time, would you still say the same thing?
(This is to determine whether he’d still foment insurrection if he lost.)
“You got to get out and vote. In four years, you don’t have to vote again. We’ll have it fixed so good, you’re not going to have to vote.”
And you’re sticking by that statement. Could you explain exactly what you meant by it?
And here are two questions I’d ask Harris:
What do you think you accomplished on your own as Vice-President, as opposed to simply assenting to what Biden accomplished? I am referring to what you actually did to make America progress, as opposed to what you were supposed to do).
I thought of one more:
You are hoping that you will win the Presidency by reinstalling Roe v. Wade as the law of the land. How, exactly, would you accomplish this if at least one house of Congress was majority Republican?
Both of those questions for Harris are designed to make her think on her feet as opposed to her custom of simply repeating a question as if it were an answer.
Put your questions below. Remember, you aren’t supposed to show partisan bias here, but to draw out the candidates, for that’s what debate moderators are supposed to do.
From the NYT (click to read), but first I’m gonna say that yes, I was right again:
Excerpt:
President Biden, 81, abandoned his bid for re-election and threw the 2024 presidential contest into chaos on Sunday, caving to relentless pressure from his closest allies to drop out of the race amid deep concerns that he is too old and frail to defeat former President Donald J. Trump.
After three weeks of often angry refusals to step aside, Mr. Biden finally yielded to a torrent of devastating polls, urgent pleas from Democratic lawmakers and clear signs that donors were no longer willing to pay for him to continue.
There’s more, but the race has suddenly become interesting. Will Kamala Harris replace him as the default candidate? (I hope not; I’m a Gretchen Whitmer fan.) Will Gavin Newsom throw his hat into the ring? Or will some dark horse emerge from the convention and go on to trounce Trump?
At this late date it’s probably too late to defeat Trump, but suddenly I feel hopeful again.
Here’s the latest Bill Maher comedy shtick from his “Real Time Show.” It’s a good one, too. This time he argues “there’s nothing, not even an assassination attempt, that can’t be made at least at little worse by adding religion. Since the bullet that was meant for Donald Trump missed him last Saturday, Republicans have been indulging in an orgy of magical thinking.”
And there’s a lot of this sacralization of Trump, which is sickening. According to Maher, people have said that Trump “wears the armor of God” (Steve Bannon) and is even one of “God’s angels” (Jake Paul). Oy! God’s angels apparently love KFC.
Maher notes that all this amounts to treating Trump like a “demigod,” and “that never turns out well”. Maher shows some scenes from his movie “Religulous,” just to show that he’s still antireligious. And he adds, re the assassination attempt, “It’s the twenty-first century. Enough is enough—interpreting every random event as a DM from Heaven.”
The rest of the piece is a hilarious tirade against religion and about people’s tendency to read religious significance into everything, including dog butts that resemble Jesus. Finally, Maher gets in a few more licks at Trump (and one about Biden).
Here’s Bill Maher’s 10-minutes Real Time segment that constitutes his video “op-ed”. This is one of the best such segments I’ve seen.
As the title indicates, Maher thinks that Biden should make a hasty exit. The bad news is that he’s quite enthusiastic about Kamala Harris as his replacement, a choice that I don’t agree with. But the good news is that he also think she’s too unpopular to win. He also likes Gavin Newsom, despite his “slickness” (Maher even suggests a slogan: “I’m havin’ Gavin”). Further, he’s a fan of Gretchen Whitmer (my favorite candidate) and Mayor Pete (my former favorite candidate). He also suggests five governors who are younger and liberal but not “crazy woke”.
Here’s the full 22-minute uncut interview of Joe Biden by ABC’s George Stephanopoulos. It took place yesterday evening, and concentrated, of course, on Biden’s performance in his debate for Trump. Please weigh in below.
My short take: Stephanopoulos asked good, hard questions—no softballs. And Biden’s unscripted performance here was better than in the debate, but I’m still worried.
When asked whether he watched the debate on tape, Biden says he couldn’t remember. He says he was ill and “just had a bad night.” He also claims that Trump’s shouting, even with his mike shut off, threw Biden off. But then remember that Biden gave a barnburner teleprompted speech the very next day, and how could that be if he was ill? As for reports that he has a “bad day” often in private life as well, he replies by touting his accomplishments in a boilerplate recitation, and denies that his efforts in the past 3.5 years has cost him anything vis-à-vis his health.
Biden claims that his doctors say he’s fine, and that “he has a full neurological test every day”, which sounds dubious. Stephanopoulos asks, however, if Biden had taken a full cognitive test. Biden evades that question, saying that he “has a full cognitive test every day,” referring to his behavior in public. But that’s not an answer, and it’s curious if he really hasn’t HAD such a test, which could put many minds at ease Nevertheless, the President says he doesn’t want to have a full medical evaluation because “he’s already done it.” That’s clearly not the case: he’s referring to his “normal” behavior in public. But many of his answers are basically a campaign speech: assertions that he “put NATO together,” “shut Putin down,” “checkmated China” (???), “put together a South Pacific initiative,” and so on.
Biden vehemently asserts that he will defeat Trump in November. despite the polls that show otherwise. He adds that he got this same poll-based pushback in 2020, when he won. Ergo, he implies that the polls aren’t really a good prediction of what will happen, and it’s merely a “toss-up”. That may be the case, and no candidate ever admits that they’re really behind. He claims that a “pathological liar” like Trump simply can’t win, and that he knows of nobody “more qualified to be President and win this race than me.”
When Stephanopoulos notes that a group of Congresspeople are getting together to convince Biden to drop out of the race, Biden poo-poos that, claiming that all the people in Congress he knows have told him to stay in. (Biden looks disturbed at this point.) He reasserts that his dropping out “is not gonna happen,” and denies that his approval rating really is 36%.
In the end, yes, I think Biden did a good job in his first term. He was good on Ukraine vs. Russia, okay on Israel, not so good on immigration, decent on most other things, but lame on gender/sex issues (Title IX). I don’t hold him responsible for the downturn in our economy; but I think he certainly did better than Trump would have. Trump will be mired in trials and legal issues for the next few years, and I also think he’s mentally ill. So, as a “never Trumper” liberal, I’ll vote for whatever candidates the Democrats choose. But I’m still dubious about Biden, even after watching this interview. He was simply not sharp enough, and what’s the story with his voice? I do think he has a neurological problem that might impede his effectiveness as President. He needs to take a cognitive test and make the results public.
Despite that, and despite his defensiveness and clear reluctance to even consider dropping out of the election, I guess he’ll be the Democrat whose name is by the party box.
After the end of the debate, 23 minutes in, four ABC correspondents give their take during the last 8 minutes. None of them think that Biden did a good enough job to rehabilitate his reputation, and several say that he hasn’t taken the doubt among House Democrats seriously enough. None of the four are enthusiastic.
Biden’s self-confidence may hurt not just the party, but, come November, the country.
Mr. Biden’s performance in the 22-minute session with George Stephanopoulos was not viewed as disastrously as his debate against Mr. Trump eight days earlier. But while his most loyal supporters presumably found enough reassurance to stick with him, those who have turned against him or were on the verge of doing so did not seem comforted, and time is running out if the party is to change nominees, as some would like.
While Mr. Biden had a ruddier color to his face this time and looked calm and composed with his hands in his lap and legs crossed, he once again sounded hoarse and at times tentative, sometimes struggling to finish a sentence. He was dismissive about concerns about his health, denied that he was more frail and ducked questions about medical tests.
He took responsibility for his debate performance repeatedly — “nobody’s fault but mine” — but then blamed it on exhaustion and sickness and Mr. Trump “shouting” and distracting him. Even so, he indicated that he did not know whether he had actually watched a recording of the debate afterward. He said that he has a cognitive test every day because he is “running the world” and that he would only step aside as a candidate “if the Lord Almighty came down and said, ‘Joe, get out of the race.’”
Probably the one line that generated the most irritation among fellow Democrats was his response when Mr. Stephanopoulos asked Mr. Biden how he would feel in January if he loses to Mr. Trump and has to turn the White House back over to the former president. “I’ll feel as long as I gave it my all and I did the goodest job as I know I can do, that’s what this is about,” Mr. Biden replied.
Multiple Democrats expressed exasperation at that afterward, declaring that the election was not about earning a participation trophy but about stopping a convicted felon who tried to overturn an election he had lost, urged “termination” of the Constitution to return himself to power and vowed to devote his next term to exacting “retribution” on his adversaries. One House Democrat, who asked not to be identified for fear of repercussion, said that he hoped the Lord Almighty would be coming to talk with Mr. Biden soon.
President Joe Biden, in his interview Friday night with ABC News, said many things. The polls had him in a dead heat with Donald Trump. Democratic Party leaders have urged him to stay in the race. America, under his leadership, has “checkmated” China.
He delivered these assessments with a gravel-voiced clarity missing from his disastrous debate performance on June 27. He was engaged and followed his train of thought to a conclusion. The problem was the substance of his answers were lacking. In fact, many of the things he said strained credulity.
Call it Biden’s alternative facts.
Let’s start with the polling. Biden told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, “All the pollsters I talk to tell me it’s a toss-up” between him and Donald Trump. It’s possible Biden has indeed spoken to pollsters who tell him the presidential race, after the debate, is 50-50. But the highest quality polls after the debate show Trump in a firm lead.
The New York Times/Siena College poll, for example, has Biden down six points among likely voters. A Wall Street Journal post-debate poll found 60 percent of likely voters either strongly or somewhat disapprove of Biden’s performance as president. CNN’s latest poll among American adults has Biden at 43 percent versus Trump at 49 percent.
Former senior adviser to President Barack Obama David Axelrod posted on X a more realistic assessment of Biden’s chances in the race on Friday evening: “The president is rightfully proud of his record. But he is dangerously out-of-touch with the concerns people have about his capacities moving forward and his standing in this race. Four years ago at this time, he was 10 points ahead of Trump. Today, he is six points behind.”
The other extraordinary answer Biden gave to Stephanopoulos was that Democratic Party leaders were urging him to stay in the race. In response to a question about whether he would consider abandoning his run for a second term if Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi urged him to withdraw, Biden said, “Every one of ’em. . . they all said I should stay in the race.” He said this was also true of James Clyburn, the former House majority whip from South Carolina who saved Biden’s campaign in 2020 in his home state.
In public remarks, however, two of these Democratic leaders have signaled a very different message for Biden. This week Clyburn said he would support a “mini-primary” before the Democratic convention at the end of August if Biden stepped aside. And Pelosi this week encouraged Biden to give an interview to serious journalists to prove he is capable of running for a second term. Then she added this knife-twist in an interview with MSNBC: “I think it’s a legitimate question to say, ‘Is this an episode or is this a condition?’ ”
Scanning the liberal press, I really couldn’t find a single op-ed saying that Biden did a good job and should forget about dropping out. Surely that tells you something about the mindset of liberals. Joe needs to go.
This I didn’t expect, and it’s a decision by a 6-3 vote, with Jackson, Kagan, and Sotomayor dissenting. Trump is now apparently shielded from prosecution for official acts, but not private ones. That’s going to cause great confusion, but it’s also going to delay his trials, making it easier for him to win November’s election.
From the NYT; click the headlines to read (archived here, but the feed changes):
An excerpt as things unroll in real time:
The Supreme Court ruled on Monday that former President Donald J. Trump is entitled to some level of immunity from prosecution, a decision that will almost surely delay the trial of the case against him on charges of plotting to subvert the 2020 election past the coming election in November. The vote was 6 to 3, dividing along partisan lines.
Mr. Trump contended that he was entitled to absolute immunity from the charges, relying on a broad understanding of the separation of powers and a 1982 Supreme Court precedent that recognized such immunity in civil cases for actions taken by presidents within the “outer perimeter” of their official responsibilities. Lower courts rejected Mr. Trump’s claim, but the Supreme Court’s ruling may delay the case enough that Mr. Trump would be able to make it go away entirely if he prevails in November.
Here’s what to know:
The ruling: The justices said that Mr. Trump is immune from prosecution for official acts taken during his presidency but that there was a crucial distinction between official and private conduct. The case returns to the lower court, which will decide whether the actions Mr. Trump took were in an official or private capacity.
The charges: The former president faces three charges of conspiracy and one count of obstructing an official proceeding, all related to his efforts to cling to the presidency after his 2020 loss. He was indicted last August by the special counsel, Jack Smith, in one of two federal criminal cases against him; the other relates to the F.B.I. raid on his private club, Mar-a-Lago, in August 2022 that recovered missing government documents.
The trial timing: The prospects for a trial in the 2020 election interference case before the election seem increasingly remote. If Mr. Trump prevails at the polls, he could order the Justice Department to drop the charges. The bottom-line effect of the court’s ruling appears to be that the trial judge in Washington, Tanya S. Chutkan, is going to have to hold an evidentiary hearing on many, if not most, of the allegations in the special counsel’s indictment of Mr. Trump. The fact-finding process the court has ordered could take a while not only to conduct, but also to prepare for.
Lower courts ruled against Trump: Judge Chutkan of the Federal District Court in Washington denied Mr. Trump’s immunity request in December. “Whatever immunities a sitting president may enjoy, the United States has only one chief executive at a time, and that position does not confer a lifelong ‘get-out-of-jail-free’ pass,” she wrote. A unanimous three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit agreed in February.
Apparently the January 6 case will go back to an appellate court for further consideration, and that means that a lot of time will pass (way past the election) before this case is decided.
Click to read the ruling as a pdf that you can download:
We are well and truly screwed: the President can commit as many crimes as he wants so long as they are “official acts”, and he has nothing to lose by doing that. And if he gets elected in November, a prospect that seems increasingly likely, he could simply order the Justice Department to drop the whole case against him.
If you’re a lawyer or legal eagle, weigh in below.
