The wind at the Democratic Party’s back might get a little stronger as the election approaches. Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell signaled he will cut interest rates in response to falling inflation stats and soft job-creation numbers. If elections are still about the economy – highly doubtful when society is menaced by the Coalition of Childless Cat Ladies – it should help quell the weirdo vote.

Special prosecutor Jack Smith appealed the dismissal of Trump’s stolen documents case by Trumpist Judge Aileen Cannon. This is by far the most sensitive and serious of the legal cases against Trump, and it shouldn’t be adjudicated by someone as inexperienced as this bozo in a robe.

The media can’t help itself. Trump is now saying any wild shit that comes into his head – we’ll make flag-burning punishable by law! – and they dutifully report it. No links, because those clicks are what keep the Trump train running, and it’s past time to put it out of service.

America might descend into fascism, but Texas is already there. A retired teacher who complained about local seniors not being sent mail-in ballots got a 6 a.m. visit from cops from the state Election Integrity Unit, who seized her phone and laptop. These people have weird ideas about what constitutes “freedom.”

The floor’s yours.

Big night at the Democratic National Convention, as both Michelle and Barack Obama showed off their skills. The contrast between the Obamas’ soaring oratory and Trump’s professional wrestling taunts and bluster could not be sharper. Look, clowns have their place – the circus. So if you let them run the country, they turn it into a circus, and you wind up with elephant shit.

Not literal elephant shit, of course. Elephant shit like this: Lawsuits by GOP attorneys general funded by the oil industry. Literal elephant shit would be a bargain by comparison.

Meanwhile, in Ukraine, there’s plenty of information about troop movements and drone attacks – has any war ever given the public so much raw information? – but nobody is really sure of the goal behind its invasion of Russian territory.

In Gaza, the slaughter of course continues, but what’s new is Trump’s probable violation of the Logan Act. It appears he told Bibi what Bibi already knew: a ceasefire would help Harris. I’m sure he asked Bibi to do him a favor, because that’s what he does. I’m also sure that if you asked him what the Logan Act is he wouldn’t know.

The floor’s yours.

The first day of the Democratic National Convention went off smoothly – the biggest glitch was James Taylor getting bumped from the schedule because cheering went on so long. The best news: the Gaza protest fell far short of organizers’ plans. “The turnout appeared to be well below the tens of thousands that organizers had hoped for and short of the 15,000 they claimed turned out,” according to the BBC. Most American outlets failed to include that context, instead simply reporting that “thousands” marched, which is true, but not the whole truth. For example, this USA Today story has a photo cutline about someone “picking up signs at Union Park” without mentioning that those signs are lying on the ground because attendance was well below expectations and nobody ever carried them.

The damage being wrought by the corporate-humping Supreme Court is incredibly far-ranging. This story explains that four recent decisions are already slowing progress on climate policy, which was of course their intent. “Freedom,” to Republicans, means “the freedom to exploit others.” And that’s all it’s ever meant.

Here’s another example of the effects of SCOTUS fuckery: Kroger, the supermarket chain trying to merge with Albertsons, has sued the FTC, claiming it doesn’t have the authority to stop it. Expect much, much more of this in months and years to come.

One of the traits of people with dementia is repetitive behavior, doing the same pointless thing over and over. I mention this because the subhumans of the House committee investigating Joe Biden recommended impeachment despite no evidence of any crime. Yeah, I called them subhumans, but I won’t call them animals. I’m kind to animals.

The floor’s yours.

The Harris/Walz ticket is riding high right now, and the chattering classes seem to think the Democratic National Convention, which starts today, is going to keep the positive vibes flowing. I’m too old to think a Democratic convention in Chicago is likely to go without a hitch. Indeed, the media should be counted on to dwell at great length on whatever protests occur. The city has beefed up security, which, given the history of Chicago policing, isn’t much guarantee that protests will remain peaceful.

The reason Kamala Harris should avoid saying anything detailed about anything should be obvious. After bashing her for vagueness on the economy, the media pounced all over every specific, rather than taking a big-picture view: She’s confronting corporate price-gouging. They prefer to ape the GOP line that it’s all the fault of Democrats, because they refuse to cast their source of funding in an unfavorable light. Always remember this – I’m going to shout, because it’s important: THE MEDIA IS IN IT FOR THE MONEY.

Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo often highlights reader emails, and this one makes an important point: The media is covering Trump’s public display of mental incapacity as if it were a failure of campaign tactics instead of what it is, prima facie evidence that’s he unfit for any office, let alone the presidency. If he can’t stay on topic for 10 minutes in a presser, it should be treated as a fatal flaw rather than a personality quirk. FWIW, I’ve yet to see an MSM outlet report the obvious – that Trump’s idea of campaigning is just insulting people and using buzzwords like “Marxist” that he couldn’t begin to understand. If reporters were worth anything, one would ask him to define a Marxist. For extra fun, ask him which brother was his favorite.

While polls continue to show a close presidential race, the signs from actual voting results continue to show a different story. This Daily Kos diarist in Wisconsin points out that two GOP ballot initiatives designed to strip power from the Democratic governor expected to pass easily instead went down in decisive defeat. They would have lost even eliminating the votes from Milwaukee and Madison, the state’s Democratic strongholds. Trumpists are demoralized. Democrats are not, and they’re now motivated by more than just the desire to defeat our fascistic foes.

The floor’s yours.

Reaction to Kamala Harris’ selection of Tim Walz as her running mate has been widely praised. Most pundits have cited his mien, best summed up by Harold Meyerson of the American Prospect as “Hubert Humphrey without Vietnam.” Walz’s happy warrior style reminded me of Humphrey, too, but I’d say “with a sharper tongue.” Ol’ Hubert wouldn’t have said he’d love to debate JD Vance “if he’s willing to get off the couch.”

I’ve been getting pro-Meyer mailers from an outfit called Change Can’t Wait, which I assumed was a PAC supporting him despite the generic name and obvious attempt to hide its partisanship. Karl Baker at Spotlight Delaware tracked down who’s behind it, while Meyer played coy about his connection to an outfit that’s skirting state campaign finance laws. Just a little reminder that while Bethany Hall Long is a talentless Delaware Way hack, Matt Meyer is no bargain himself.

AIPAC, the Israeli lobbying group, claimed its second scalp of the election season when Missouri Congresswoman and Squad member lost her primary 51-46 to the local prosecutor Wesley Bell, whom AIPAC gave $8 million. His campaign never mentioned Israel, because genocide does not enjoy majority support. Instead he ran a tough-on-crime campaign. Leaving policy issues aside, it’s a net loss for Congress to gain yet another former prosecutor while losing one of its very few working people. Bush was a nurse before her election.

Bernie Sanders is urging the Harris campaign to run on economic policies aimed at boosting the working class, and to help convince them he commissioned a poll to ask swing-state voters their opinion of various proposals. What I found most interesting, though, is the lack of support for certain ideas. Only 51% agreed with raising the minimum wage to $17 an hour, and only 50% were on board with free college tuition. I used to think hate was the most corrosive emotion, but I’m starting to give resentment another look.

Wowser, this should be a jerk-off contest for the ages: Donald Trump is going to interview Elon Musk, or maybe it’s the other way around. The winner should be crowned King of the Narcissists and awarded the trophy, a limp biscuit.

The floor’s yours.

Kamala Harris will name her choice for vice president today. Because American politics is essentially sports for the athletically disinclined, the bookies have Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz pulling slightly ahead of Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro as the betting favorite, and that’s considered a news story.

A couple of bad days for the stock markets was all it took for the business press to churn out its perennially favorite story: We might be heading for a recession. Here’s why I ignore most stories about what might happen: a 12% drop in Japan’s stock index last week triggered all this. On Monday, Japan’s stock index jumped 11%. Oh, well, be very afraid anyway, I guess.

In news of things that actually happened, Google lost an antitrust case over its search-engine dominance. As the judge wrote, “After having carefully considered and weighed the witness testimony and evidence, the court reaches the following conclusion: Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly.” Even Google’s advertising-at-the-top algorithm had to let that one through.

Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Inquirer worries that the story about the $10 million bribe the Egyptians gave Trump is being quickly forgotten. As Paul Campos noted over at LGM, the media barely reports on any Trump outrage anymore. People don’t click on those stories because nothing Trump does surprises them.

That Trump is openly bribing billionaires by promising to sell them the government and that he’s praising Putin for kidnapping Americans is at least getting a little bit of media attention, although hardly anything commensurate with the enormity of these acts. By contrast, at the end of his rally Saturday night Trump asked Georgia’s governor to intervene to drop the criminal case against him in that state, and this isn’t even being reported, because apparently that’s just Trump being Trump, plus there’s the dead bear cub that RFK was going to eat, and Simone Biles fell off the balance beam, and stocks are way down this morning so maybe you should rebalance your portfolio, and on and on and on (puts on Sinatra and starts to cry).

The press is doggedly pursuing a story they want to be true, though. Josh Marshall points out that they’re reporting that the Harris honeymoon is over despite there being no evidence to support this claim. They’re simply trying to wish – and propagandize – it into being.

The floor’s yours.

Everyone knows the story of the emperor’s new clothes, but I think they miss the point of it. As Hans Christian Andersen told it, two con-men told the king their cloth was invisible to stupid people, so everyone pretended they saw it to avoid appearing stupid. It took a child to blurt out that he was naked. But everyone forgets the end of the story: The emperor carries on as if nothing had happened.

I was reminded of this by the Republican reaction to Weirdgate. In case you’ve been bingeing the Olympics and missed it, Democrats, led by Kamala Harris and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, began calling Republicans “weird.” It turned the politiscape on its head. It went viral, in large part because they are weird. Why are they obsessed with other people’s genders and sex lives? Why are they obsessed with forced birth? Why do they want to ban contraception? And it back-footed conservatives, who have tried to carry on as if nobody was aware of their nakedness. Shouting back, “No, you’re weird” and running pictures of trans people just reminds everybody that you’re a bunch of sexually insecure bigots.

Speaking of sexually insecure bigots, Elon Musk’s husk of Twitter suspended the White Dudes for Harris account after it raised $4 million and refused to say why. Yet almost all so-called legitimate journalists continue to use what’s now a propaganda platform.

The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, its toxic plan for a fascist takeover of the United States, has turned out to be – who could have guessed? – wildly unpopular. Donald Trump keeps saying he hasn’t read it, which I totally believe, but it was assembled by dozens of people who were in his administration and hope to be again. It didn’t help, so now they shitcanned the guy who came up with the brilliant idea of gathering all the nuts of the forest, no matter how rancid.

The floor’s yours.

I was assured several days ago that Republicans would welcome a race against Kamala Harris because they had lots of ways to attack her. So far the attacks have been off-the-bottom-shelf specials noting that, hmm, let’s see…Apparently she’s a woman and she’s Black, so she slept her way to the top when she wasn’t being promoted for being Black. Yeah, that’s some really potent stuff, but if Republicans think that’s going to kill enthusiasm, they’re in for a shock. What worked against Hillary in ’16 is merely generating backlash now.

Most of that backlash is coming against Trump’s charisma-free VP choice, JD Vance, who frankly deserves every bit of shit the media can fling at him. He doesn’t even have to say anything – there are plenty of videos of his past utterances for reporters to dig through, like the one where he said the Democrats are run by “childless cat ladies.” Only Trump can get away with saying shit like that, as countless conservatives have learned the hard way. Vance is not only dead weight on the ticket, he makes it harder for Trump to pretend he doesn’t know about the Heritage Foundation’s plan for an American Hellscape, Project 2025; Vance wrote the introduction to a book by the plan’s architect. If these people are the master race, why don’t they ever do anything that shows it?

This article raises a point about that SCOTUS decision on presidential immunity I hadn’t considered: It opens the door for Trump to steal anything he wants without fear of prosecution. If he gets re-elected it will be the greatest crime spree anyone’s ever seen, and he’ll brag about it.

I’m sure you’ve noticed the change in the atmosphere since Biden dropped out, and I’m not talking about barometric pressure. The Democrats have, almost certainly by accident, tapped into the fervent desire for change that has marked elections all around the globe this year and, as the Rude Pundit notes, have seized the narrative.

See, we live in a time of vibes, where people want to part of where the vibes are. We want the feeling of belonging, of community, of actual joy without the burden of hate. We want to feel like we’re moving forward, not, you know, going back. And that’s a powerful attractor. When we get more of them post-Biden, polls are going to show a tight race, possibly with Harris a little ahead. Then comes the Democratic National Convention, and the vibes will continue.

I have one more thing that Harris offers and it relates to Trump and the MAGA bullshit and JD Vance and all of it. It’s a simple idea: Don’t you want all of that to be over already? God, don’t you want it to be done and gone? We can do that. We’ve already defied all the expectations about how this was supposed to go. We can defy them all the way through to turning the goddamn page at last on the old narrative and living in the new one.

The floor’s yours.