James Murdoch and his wife Kathryn, Prudence Murdoch, and Keith Tyson and Elisabeth Murdoch.  Credit…Danny Moloshok/Reuters; PA Images/Alamy; Tim P. Whitby/Getty Images

Dear Commons Community,

A major legal battle is brewing between Rupert Murdoch and his children over future control of Fox News and the rest of his media empire.  Rupert Murdoch has moved to change the family’s irrevocable trust to preserve his media businesses as a conservative force. Several of his children are fighting back. As reported by The New York Times.

Mr. Murdoch, 93, set the drama in motion late last year, when he made a surprise move to change the terms of the Murdochs’ irrevocable family trust to ensure that his eldest son and chosen successor, Lachlan, would remain in charge of his vast collection of television networks and newspapers.

The trust currently hands control of the family business to the four oldest children when Mr. Murdoch dies. But he is arguing in court that only by empowering Lachlan to run the company without interference from his more politically moderate siblings can he preserve its conservative editorial bent, and thus protect its commercial value for all his heirs.

Those three siblings — James, Elisabeth and Prudence — were caught completely off-guard by their father’s effort to rewrite what was supposed to be an inviolable trust and have united to stop him. Lachlan has joined on Mr. Murdoch’s side. Remarkably, the ensuing battle has been playing out entirely out of public view.

Last month, the Nevada probate commissioner found that Mr. Murdoch could amend the trust if he is able to show he is acting in good faith and for the sole benefit of his heirs, according to a copy of his 48-page decision.

A trial to determine whether Mr. Murdoch is in fact acting in good faith is expected to start in September. Hanging in the balance will be the future of one of the most politically influential media companies in the English-speaking world.

Representatives for the two sides declined to comment. Both have hired high-powered litigators. The three Murdoch siblings are represented by Gary A. Bornstein, the co-head of litigation at Cravath, Swaine & Moore. Mr. Murdoch is represented by Adam Streisand, a trial lawyer at Sheppard Mullin who has been involved in estate disputes concerning Michael Jackson and Britney Spears.

Few media stories have been watched as closely as the succession battle over the Murdoch empire, both because of the irresistibly Shakespearean nature of the drama, and because of the empire’s outsize political influence. Mr. Murdoch’s decision in 2018 to formally designate Lachlan as his heir put to rest years of speculation over his wishes for the company.

What it did not do, though, was ensure that Mr. Murdoch’s wishes would survive him: The existing trust gives all four of his oldest children an equal voice in the company’s future.

The Murdoch family has been divided before. James and Elisabeth at one point competed with each other and Lachlan to eventually take over the company, and at various times they have clashed with one another and their father. James, who once helped run the company with Lachlan, left it in 2019 and now oversees an investment fund. Elisabeth runs a successful movie studio, Sister, and has for years sought to position herself as the “Switzerland” of the family, maintaining good relations with all.

But given Mr. Murdoch’s advanced age, this battle has all of the makings of a final fight for control of his sprawling media conglomerates, which own Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post and major newspapers and television outlets in Australia and Britain. It has already driven a new wedge into the famously fractured family.

Politics, and power, are at the root of the struggle. Since Mr. Murdoch designed the trust nearly 25 years ago, the family’s political views have diverged sharply. During Donald J. Trump’s rise, Mr. Murdoch and Lachlan became more closely aligned, pushing the company’s most influential outlet, Fox News, further to the right, making the other three children increasingly uncomfortable.

Mr. Murdoch has called his effort to change the trust Project Harmony because he hoped that it might head off a looming family struggle when he dies, according to a person with knowledge of the family. But it has had the opposite effect.

After filing his petition to amend the trust, Mr. Murdoch met separately with Elisabeth and Prudence in London, hoping to win their support, this person said. Instead, they were furious. Elisabeth responded to the possibility with a string of expletives.

Days later, on Dec. 6, Mr. Murdoch’s representatives went ahead with the motion to make the changes at a hastily called special meeting of the trust in Reno, Nev. The representatives for the three children sought to adjourn the meeting and block the proposed changes but failed, according to the court decision.

The fight has left Mr. Murdoch estranged from three of his children in his twilight years. None of them attended his wedding to Elena Zhukova, his fifth wife, in California last month. (Lachlan did.)

Though the trust is irrevocable, it contains a narrow provision allowing for changes done in good faith and with the sole purpose of benefiting all of its members. Mr. Murdoch’s lawyers have argued that he is trying to protect James, Elisabeth and Prudence by ensuring that they won’t be able to moderate Fox’s politics or disrupt its operations with constant fights over leadership.

According to the court’s decision, Mr. Murdoch was concerned that the “lack of consensus” among his children “would impact the strategic direction at both companies including a potential reorientation of editorial policy and content.” It states that his intention was to “consolidate decision-making power in Lachlan’s hands and give him permanent, exclusive control” over the company.

The document makes it clear that Mr. Murdoch’s actions have pushed Elisabeth, Prudence and James into a joint posture against him. The siblings share legal counsel and are fighting to retain their voice in the company’s future, arguing that their father is trying to disenfranchise them. They say Mr. Murdoch’s move violates the spirit of the initial trust, enshrined in its “equal governance provision,” and that it was not done in good faith.

Good luck to Elizabeth, Prudence, and James.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

McKinsey & Company had an informative article entitled “Why agents are the next frontier of generative AI?” yesterday that examines the next stage of AI as moving from knowledge tool to action agent.  Here is an excerpt.

Over the past couple of years, the world has marveled at the capabilities and possibilities unleashed by generative AI (gen AI). Foundation models such as large language models (LLMs) can perform impressive feats, extracting insights and generating content across numerous mediums, such as text, audio, images, and video. But the next stage of gen AI is likely to be more transformative.

We are beginning an evolution from knowledge-based, gen-AI-powered tools—say, chatbots that answer questions and generate content—to gen AI–enabled “agents” that use foundation models to execute complex, multi-step workflows across a digital world. In short, the technology is moving from thought to action.

Broadly speaking, “agentic” systems refer to digital systems that can independently interact in a dynamic world. While versions of these software systems have existed for years, the natural-language capabilities of gen AI unveil new possibilities, enabling systems that can plan their actions, use online tools to complete those tasks, collaborate with other agents and people, and learn to improve their performance. Gen AI agents eventually could act as skilled virtual coworkers, working with humans in a seamless and natural manner. A virtual assistant, for example, could plan and book a complex personalized travel itinerary, handling logistics across multiple travel platforms. Using everyday language, an engineer could describe a new software feature to a programmer agent, which would then code, test, iterate, and deploy the tool it helped create.

Agentic systems traditionally have been difficult to implement, requiring laborious, rule-based programming or highly specific training of machine-learning models. Gen AI changes that. When agentic systems are built using foundation models (which have been trained on extremely large and varied unstructured data sets) rather than predefined rules, they have the potential to adapt to different scenarios in the same way that LLMs can respond intelligibly to prompts on which they have not been explicitly trained. Furthermore, using natural language rather than programming code, a human user could direct a gen AI–enabled agent system to accomplish a complex workflow. A multi-agent system could then interpret and organize this workflow into actionable tasks, assign work to specialized agents, execute these refined tasks using a digital ecosystem of tools, and collaborate with other agents and humans to iteratively improve the quality of its actions.”

The world of AI will surely move into an agentic stage.  Exactly when is hard to say.

The entire article is worth a read!

Tony

John Giles. AP Photo/Susan Walsh; AP Photo/Tony Gutierrez, File

Dear Commons Community,

Vice President Kamala Harris highlighted endorsements from mayors of border towns in swing-state Arizona yesterday in response to Republican criticism of her handling of illegal border crossings.

Harris’ campaign said she was backed by the mayors of Bisbee, Nogales, Somerton, and San Luis, as well as by Yuma County Supervisors Martin Porchas and Tony Reyes.

A week into the top of the Democratic presidential ticket, Harris is getting her campaign off the ground and refining her pitch to voters with less than 100 days before Election Day. Republicans are trying to make the border a political liability for Harris just as it was for President Joe Biden before he ended his reelection campaign.

Republicans say Harris did not do enough to clamp down on illegal immigration in a role they characterize as Biden’s “border czar.” House Republicans and a handful of vulnerable Democrats voted last week to rebuke Harris over the administration’s border policies.

The border endorsements offer a potential retort to that criticism, particularly in the only swing state that shares a border with Mexico.

“I trust her to meet the needs of border cities and towns without taking advantage of us for her own political gain, like her opponent,” Somerton Mayor Gerardo Anaya said in a statement. Somerton is a city of about 14,000 people in the state’s southwestern corner.

As vice president, Harris was tasked with overseeing diplomatic efforts to deal with issues spurring migration in the Northern Triangle countries of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, as well as pressing them to strengthen enforcement on their own borders. The Biden administration wanted to develop and put in place a long-term strategy that gets at the root causes of migration from those countries.

Immigration has been at the center of Trump’s political identity since he announced his first campaign in 2015. He paints a picture of a border that is out of control, threatening national security and the economy. If elected to a second term, he’s pledged to deport millions of people living in the country illegally.

Biden has both sought to crack down on new arrivals at the border and to offer new immigration pathways.

The restrictions he announced at the beginning of June cut off asylum access when arrivals at the border reached a certain number, infuriating immigration advocates who say the policy differs little from what Trump attempted. Then a few weeks later Biden announced a new program aimed at undocumented spouses of American citizens who had been in the country for a decade or more that could ultimately provide them a pathway to citizenship.

Border arrests have fallen from record highs last December.

John Giles, the Republican mayor of Mesa, said in an op-ed to azcentral,  the time has come for my fellow Arizona Republicans to return to the core foundations of the Grand Old Party.

“Our party used to stand for the belief that every Arizonan, no matter their background or circumstances, should have the freedom, opportunity and security to live out their American Dream.

But since Donald Trump refused to accept the outcome of the 2020 election, Republicans have yet to course correct. The Republican Party with Trump at its helm continues down the path of political extremism, away from focusing on our fundamental freedoms.

Now more than ever, we need leaders who will put country over party.

I believe my party has a moral and ethical responsibility to restore faith in our democratic institutions. In the spirit of the late Sen. John McCain’s motto, ‘Country First,’ I call on other Arizona Republicans to join me in choosing country over party this election and to vote against Donald Trump.

He went on to state that Trump did not support Arizona cities

In Arizona, we have faced the brunt of misinformation, election denialism and an erosion of trust in our justice system.

The Grand Canyon State is ground zero in the fight against repeated false claims to disrupt our electoral process — from fake presidential electors attempting to undermine Arizona’s election, to a sham “audit” by Arizona Senate Republicans that was spurred by conspiracy theories.

Significant reforms to immigration and border policies that would have addressed the crisis at our southern border were blocked by Trump because he didn’t want the problem solved. He wanted to exploit it for personal political gain.

Since 2014, I have had the honor of being mayor of Mesa, the nation’s 36th-largest city and one of the most conservative. Under Trump, American cities didn’t get the support they deserved. Infrastructure week was made into a joke.

But under the Biden-Harris administration, Mesa has seen historic federal funding for the Phoenix-Mesa Gateway Airport, along with investments to make sure our streets and public transit systems benefit from modern technology.

With the CHIPS Act, Vice President Kamala Harris and President Joe Biden are delivering thousands of new jobs to Arizonans and helping us grow critical industries.

Harris is the competent leader we need.

Trump poses a serious threat to our nation. We can’t have a felon representing us on the national stage, let alone one who would threaten to abandon NATO and ruin our standing abroad.

We are in a moment that only happens once every few generations, when we have to defend democracy, and stand up for the right to vote and our civil rights. It is essential that we proceed in a manner that strengthens, rather than diminishes, public confidence in our democratic institutions.

What kind of country do we want to live in?

Vice President Harris is fighting to make sure Americans can get ahead and be safe from gun violence and to restore and protect the rights of women. Donald Trump, on the other hand, could enact the extreme and dangerous Project 2025 agenda if elected, which would roll back our rights and freedoms.

We can choose a future for our children and grandchildren based on decency, respect and morality — or succumb to the crudeness and vulgarity of Trump and J.D. Vance and the far-right agenda they would champion.

Arizona leaders like McCain and Sen. Mark Kelly have embodied the commitment to country over party. And it’s that same high caliber of character and leadership I see in Vice President Harris.

That’s why I’m standing with her. Kamala Harris is the competent, just and fair leader our country deserves. This year too much is at stake to vote Republican at the top of the ticket.

It will take Arizona Republicans, independents and Democrats standing together against a far-right agenda. Let us put country over party by voting to stop Trump and protect our democracy.

Well-stated, Mayor Giles!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

I have just finished reading The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order:  America and the World in the Free Market Era by Gary Gerstle.  Gerstle is the Paul Mellon Professor of American History Emeritus at the University of Cambridge.  Anyone interested in the influence of neoliberal philosophy on American policy will find this book a most valuable read.  The first half focuses on the history and rise of neoliberalism going back to the 1950s with the likes of Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago. It was embraced by Republicans and Democrats alike including Presidents Reagan, Clinton and Obama.  The real value of this book is in the second half where Gerstle traces and analyzes the fall of neoliberalism.  He provides good details on the Great Recession of 2008, the Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street, and Black Lives Matter.  He comments that no single one of these spelled the demise of neoliberalism but taken together they effectively reduced its presence in American political life.  He concludes the second half focusing on Senator Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, both of whom have tapped into the new popularism that has replaced neoliberal thinking in our governmental institutions and processes including elections.

Below is a review that appeared in The New York Times Review of Books.

Tony

———————————————————————–

The New York Times

Review of Books

Ronald Reagan’s New Economic Order, and What It Meant for America

By Kevin Boyle

April 5, 2022

THE RISE AND FALL OF THE NEOLIBERAL ORDER
America and the World in the Free Market Era
By Gary Gerstle

Ronald Reagan devoted his Labor Day in 1980 to two marvelous photo ops. The first captured him delivering a major speech on freedom and opportunity in Jersey City, N.J., the Statue of Liberty standing in the haze behind him. Then he flew to Allen Park, Mich., one of Detroit’s ubiquitous blue-collar suburbs, for an afternoon cookout at the modest home of a laid-off steelworker. There he got his second shot: the soon-to-be president of the United States standing over a grill packed with kielbasa, barbecue tongs in one hand, a beer in the other. The free market revolutionary as an average Joe, chatting up the workingman.

It was a marker of one of the two political transformations that drive Gary Gerstle’s enlightening new book, “The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order.” For almost half a century families like those that lived in Allen Park had backed what Gerstle, the Paul Mellon professor emeritus of American history at Cambridge, calls “the New Deal order.” At its core lay Franklin Roosevelt’s commitment to using government power to counter capitalism’s instability and inequality. From that principle emerged an array of public policies, some meant to regulate troublesome sectors of the economy, others to assure the aged and the poor a minimal standard of living, still others to give working people the income they needed to buy the goods their factories produced and the homes they dreamed of owning. As the programs flowed out, the support flooded in: By 1936 Roosevelt had added a huge bloc of blue-collar voters in the urban North to the Democrats’ traditional base in the white South, a combination so powerful it gave the party almost unassailable control of national politics for two generations.

The coalition started to splinter in the mid-1960s, when Lyndon Johnson’s support of the surging civil rights movement drove the white South to the Republicans. Gerstle sees the fatal blow coming with the following decade’s economic crisis. The trouble started with the Vietnam War, which triggered an inflationary spiral that the oil shocks of the 1970s accelerated. Rising prices opened the economy to a rush of lower-cost imports that American industries didn’t see coming until it was too late. Suddenly auto plants were cutting shifts. Steel mills were shuttering. And Ronald Reagan was standing over a couple of dozen sizzling sausages, telling a yard full of struggling steelworkers that it was time to give up on the New Deal order.

Gerstle carefully recreates the new order Reagan wanted to put in its place. It had its origins, he says, in classical liberalism’s faith in the free market as the guarantor of both individual liberty and the common good. In the mid-20th century a handful of European intellectuals and their American acolytes gave that faith a new name — neoliberalism — and an institutional home in a scattering of generously funded research institutions and iconoclastic university economics departments. From there it seeped into the right wing of the Republican Party, where Reagan embraced it as the revelation he believed it to be. But Reagan was no intellectual. He was a popularizer, skilled at turning neoliberalism’s abstractions into sound bites that in the dire circumstances of the late 1970s managed to seem simultaneously common-sensical and inspirational. Government wasn’t the solution, he said again and again. It was the problem. Cut its regulation, slash its taxes, lower its trade barriers and capitalism’s genius would be released, the American dream restored.

Reagan also insisted that the government had overreached in its promotion of racial change, a position that was meant, Gerstle says, to anchor the white South’s vote. There’s a great deal of truth to that argument, but it doesn’t go far enough. When Reagan denounced affirmative action or busing or welfare queens, he was playing to the racial animus that coursed through places like Allen Park, where whites made up 97 percent of the population, as much as he was playing to Mississippi’s prejudices. In November he lost majority-Black Detroit. But he swept its segregated suburbs.

Over the next eight years Reagan laid the neoliberal order’s foundations. Gerstle emphasizes its market side — the administration’s busting of the air-traffic controllers’ union, its deregulation of key industries, its dramatic reduction of the wealthiest Americans’ tax rate and its attempt to construct a Supreme Court hostile to the New Deal order — which, as it turned out, released the force of greed more than it did the genius of the marketplace. The administration’s racial policies, Gerstle says, centered on the drug war it waged on young Black men, though he could have chosen any number of other positions as well — from the ravaging of public housing to the quiet resegregation of public schools — so thoroughly was race embedded in the Reagan Revolution.

What Reagan created, Bill Clinton consolidated. The economic story is straightforward. Having stumbled through his first two years in office, Clinton claimed neoliberalism as his own, proudly promoting the globalization of manufacturing, the deregulation of banking and telecommunication, and a fiscal policy designed to convince investors that they could make as much money under a Democratic government as they could under a Republican one. By the turn of the 21st century the American economy had been remade, its old industrial base replaced by the wondrous world of high tech, high finance and high-end real estate. The racial story was more complicated. Clinton celebrated multiculturalism as a marker of the nation’s vitality, Gerstle says. But he also doubled down on Reagan’s racialized law-and-order campaigns and completed the assault on the welfare state, even as the new economy was hitting poor communities with particular force. By the end of the Clinton years, Allen Park’s median household income was 15 percent lower than it had been when Reagan stopped by for a beer. Detroit’s had tumbled by 39 percent.

There the neoliberal order remained, all but untouchable in its orthodoxy, until the crash of 2008. In that seismic event Gerstle sees a dynamic much like the one that had shattered the New Deal order. At its center stood Barack Obama, the erstwhile champion of hope captured, in Gerstle’s telling, by a coterie of Clinton-era advisers convinced that neoliberalism could right itself. To Obama’s left a new generation of social Democrats demanded a state-directed reconstruction of the economy, while a new generation of Black activists turned the horror of racial violence and a brilliantly phrased hashtag into a mass movement. But it was the right that brought down the neoliberal order with a candidate who understood how to exploit the frustrations and furies of those whites the new economy had left behind. Donald Trump’s mix of anti-elitism, hyper-nationalism and raw racism didn’t win him the popular vote in 2016. But it won him Allen Park.

He lost it four years later, by three-tenths of a percent. Maybe the blue-collar voters who still lived there had seen the hollowness of his populism. Maybe they simply grew tired of the chaos Trump had caused. But there is a darker reading than the one Gerstle’s fine book suggests. Maybe the fact that the election had been so close, despite the year’s upheavals, shows that what matters most in American politics isn’t the shape of the nation’s economy but the enduring appeal of its racism.

Kevin Boyle teaches American history at Northwestern University. His most recent book is “The Shattering: America in the 1960s.”

Dear Commons Community

Maureen Dowd had a column yesterday entitled, JD Vance, Purr-fectly Dreadful, in which she takes no prisoners in bringing down the “dreadful” Vance.  She dishes on both Trump and Vance in their treatment and comments about women.  She saves her best for Vance.  Here is an excerpt.

“JD Vance, he of many names, is off to a thudding start. He went on Megyn Kelly’s podcast Friday for cleanup on Aisle Feline. She sympathetically asked him about his 2021 rant to Tucker Carlson that top Democrats — Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg and A.O.C. — were “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.”

Vance explained to Kelly: “Obviously, it was a sarcastic comment. I’ve got nothing against cats.”

Ha. Ha. Ha. He’s the Republican Party’s biggest wit since that laugh riot Sarah Palin.

He doubled down on the substance of his earlier argument, that only women who are in a traditional marriage, using their uteruses in a way JD Vance deems proper, can have “a direct stake” in America.

I grew up in a family brimming with military uniforms, police uniforms, altar boy outfits, Girl Scout uniforms, Catholic school uniforms and presidential medals for bravery. We were religious and patriotic and unbelievably proud to be Americans.

And now comes this ridiculous faux-billy, tailoring his beliefs to match his ambition, telling me I have no stake in America?

Unless women are fulfilling their duties as breeders and helpmates, they’re not fully Americans? It’s an un-American stance that’s beneath contempt.”

The entire column is below. 

I didn’t think it was possible that the Republicans could put up a vice presidential candidate worse than Sarah Palin but congratulations to them for putting up Vance.

Tony

——————————————————–

The New York Times

JD Vance, Purr-fectly Dreadful

July 27, 2024

By Maureen Dowd

Opinion Columnist, reporting from Washington

Suddenly, Donald Trump looks enlightened about women.

Sure, he’s in a 1959 time warp, like some spray-tanned, comb-over swinger in a Vegas lounge, talking about skirts and broads.

Sure, he filled the Supreme Court with religious zealots ending women’s rights.

Sure, he has been held liable for sexual abuse, accused of groping and caught talking about his right to grab women by their lady parts. He cheated on his first wife with the woman who became his second wife and then had flings when he was married to his third wife. He betrayed Melania with a porn star while she was home nursing their son and humiliated her again when the Stormy Daniels case went to trial. (See: Why Melania did not give a convention speech.)

Sure, his convention beatification was a dated homage to machismo, with Hulk Hogan tearing his shirt off and the U.F.C.’s Dana White introducing Trump as a fighter.

And yet, somehow, Trump managed to choose a vice-presidential pick whose views on women are even more draconian and meanspirited than his own.

JD Vance, he of many names, is off to a thudding start. He went on Megyn Kelly’s podcast Friday for cleanup on Aisle Feline. She sympathetically asked him about his 2021 rant to Tucker Carlson that top Democrats — Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg and A.O.C. — were “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.”

Vance explained to Kelly: “Obviously, it was a sarcastic comment. I’ve got nothing against cats.”

Ha. Ha. Ha. He’s the Republican Party’s biggest wit since that laugh riot Sarah Palin.

He doubled down on the substance of his earlier argument, that only women who are in a traditional marriage, using their uteruses in a way JD Vance deems proper, can have “a direct stake” in America.

I grew up in a family brimming with military uniforms, police uniforms, altar boy outfits, Girl Scout uniforms, Catholic school uniforms and presidential medals for bravery. We were religious and patriotic and unbelievably proud to be Americans.

And now comes this ridiculous faux-billy, tailoring his beliefs to match his ambition, telling me I have no stake in America?

Unless women are fulfilling their duties as breeders and helpmates, they’re not fully Americans? It’s an un-American stance that’s beneath contempt.

Phony. Vance has a lovely wife, Usha, the daughter of Indian immigrants, a star of Yale Law School and a litigator at a top law firm. She clerked for Chief Justice John Roberts at the Supreme Court and Brett Kavanaugh on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.

Their marriage is clearly a modern one. He donned an Indian robe for one of their wedding ceremonies, which irked white supremacists supportive of Trump.

Nick Fuentes, a white supremacist who dined with Trump at Mar-a-Lago in 2022, said, “Do you really expect that the guy who has an Indian wife and named their kid Vivek is going to support white identity?”

(The Vivek news surprised some MAGA delegates in Milwaukee.)

Vance replied Friday simply that he loves his wife. But on the campaign trail, he projects an archaic image nurtured by Heritage Foundation-Project 2025 fanatics and Vance’s fellow superconservative Catholics. You get the impression that they would love nothing more than to dispatch women back to the kitchen and bedroom, turning them into what Hilary Mantel called “breeding stock, collections of organs.”

Vance also said in a speech three years ago that parents should “absolutely” get a bigger say in how a democracy functions and more voting power; in different remarks, he said that childless Americans should pay higher taxes. Turns out, JD is as undemocratic as his running mate.

In 2022, Vance said he wanted abortion to be illegal nationally, though now he has amended his position to be more in line with Trump’s, giving states the power to decide. (Until they’re in the Oval Office, cave to the Christian right and get a national ban.)

Vance was so adamant on the issue when he was running for Senate that he said there should be a federal “response” to block women from traveling to other states to get abortions. He was worried that George Soros would send a jumbo jet to pick up “disproportionately Black women” and take them to California to “go have abortions.”

Vance wrote the foreword for the upcoming book by Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation. Project 2025 wants to put on a full-court press to ban abortion and products like mifepristone and wants to restrict access to Plan B. This is the same wing of the party, cultural reactionaries, that targeted I.V.F. treatments.

And last month, Vance voted against a Democratic bill to protect I.V.F.

Trump chose Vance to stir up cultural resentment in rural areas and small towns against elites and cosmopolitan types. Down with Carrie Bradshaw!

As a cat-loving, cosmopolitan type myself, I do not want Trump and Vance making intimate decisions for American women or judging us or disparaging us for our lives — all nine of them.

        Courtesy of The Daily Show.

Dear Commons Community,

As Trump wrapped up his nearly 75-minute speech on Friday night, he delivered a final pitch (see video below) to the Christian conservative crowd, saying if they vote for him on Election Day, they would never be obligated to vote again.

“I don’t care how, but you have to get out and vote,” Trump said at Turning Point Action’s Believers Summit in West Palm Beach. “Christians, get out and vote just this time.”

“You won’t have to do it anymore. Four more years. You know what? It’ll be fixed,” Trump said.

He added: “I love you, Christians. I’m a Christian. I love you, get out, you gotta 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.”

The Harris campaign is characterizing Trump’s comment that if Christians vote this one time they won’t have to do it anymore as a “vow to end democracy.”

“When Vice President Harris says this election is about freedom she means it. Our democracy is under assault by criminal Donald Trump,” Harris for President Spokesperson James Singer said. “Donald Trump wants to take America backward, to a politics of hate, chaos, and fear – this November America will unite around Vice President Kamala Harris to stop him.”

Dictator Trump for president!

Tony

Trump: You have to get out and vote. You won’t have to do it anymore. Four years, it will be fixed, it will be fine. You won’t have to vote anymore.. In four years, you won’t have to vote again. pic.twitter.com/DBGcBr3Wht

— Acyn (@Acyn) July 27, 2024

Dear Commons Community,

I got the the piece above from by colleague, Patsy Moskal. 

Parton had made the decision early in her life to never have children.

Vance has vilified women who don’t have children.

She represents all that is good in our country. He all that is ugly.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Politico had an article earlier this week questioning the selection of JD Vance as Trump’s vice presidential running mate. It pulls no punches in establishing that Vance might  turn out to be the entirely wrong pick for vice president.  Here is an excerpt.

U.S. President Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw from the White House race may well turn 2024 into the Year of the Woman — namely, that of Vice President Kamala Harris who is now the front-runner to replace him atop the Democratic ticket.

Truth is, if Harris is successful in getting the nod from the Democratic Party, much of the subsequent election campaign is likely to domestically focus on abortion and women’s rights. Trump already has a problem with women voters — polls have consistently shown that the proportion of women planning to vote for him this November is smaller than those who did in 2020. And Vance has nothing to offer Trump on this score — quite the reverse, he risks compounding his boss’s problem.

Presumably, Trump chose Vance as his VP candidate largely to fire up the MAGA base and boost the Republican ticket in Rust Belt states. But that was a choice made when Biden was still heading the Democratic ticket. Now that he’s not, Vance may well become a liability.

Vance’s strict anti-abortion positions of the past, and a string of highly contentious statements he’s made about divorce, implying that women trapped in abusive marriages should remain married for the sake of the kids, aren’t likely to be forgotten. In 2021, he suggested ending marriages that were “maybe even violent” as selfish. “This is one of the great tricks that the sexual revolution pulled on the American populace,” he said. “Making it easier for people to shift spouses like they change their underwear.”

He’s also a strict pro-natalist, characterizing those who don’t have kids as “childless cat ladies,” and suggesting that people with children should be given additional votes. He has taken aim at childcare subsidies as “class war against normal people,” despite — or maybe because — such subsidies provide women with young kids more opportunities to work or go to school and be independent. 

Furthermore, Vance has only recently moderated his position on abortion to fall into line with Trump, who argues that abortion should be left up to states to decide individually. But in 2022, when he was an Ohio Senate candidate, Vance said on a podcast that he would like to see a national abortion ban with no exceptions — even for rape or incest. That was before Trump’s Supreme Court appointees overturned Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 decision that protected the right to have an abortion. And Vance has even argued that federal action is needed to stop women seeking terminations traveling from states where abortion is illegal to states where it’s allowed.

Women currently comprise 51 percent of the voting-age population in the U.S. , and they’ve been making their vote felt since Roe v. Wade was overturned in June 2022.

Excellent analysis but how does Trump gracefully (not his strong suit) dump Vance?

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Last week, the Democratic Party was on a high as Joe Biden gave up his quest to run for President and passed the torch to Kamala Harris. The media were elated, fund raising soared, and polls indicated that Harris had narrowed the gap with Trump.  James Carville, a staunch supporter of the Democrats, cautioned that amid all the hoopla, that Harris and the Democratic Party had better buckle down and be prepared for a close and highly contentious campaign.  Below is an interview he gave on Thursday on MSNBC.

He provides a lot of good advice!

Tony