Mother Jones; Courtesy of Grace Molteni; Courtesy of Jacob Rosenberg

The last time I got in a fight was about four years ago in San Francisco. The incident involved me, my bike, and a car. And when I say fight, I mean a stranger shoved me to the ground and I ran away—the bike under me as I hurried like a child riding a stick that’s supposed to be a make-believe horse. 

It was a moment of mutual road rage. I was headed home from work on a one-way street, plodding along in the bike lane on the right side. As I approached a side street, a car cut in front of me—ostensibly to make a right turn. Annoying, but acceptable. I tried to slow down. The car, however, did not turn; it parked. In the bike lane. I hit the Toyota and flipped over my handlebars. And, in sort of a beautiful bit of timing, as I was about to make my landing, the car moved forward just a bit. At this point, my shoulder, and general head area hit the pavement. Bam, bam. (I was fine.)

Propelled by a dose of adrenaline and an overwrought sense of justice, I hobbled over to the car’s window. Before I could even begin to berate anyone, someone yelled: “Keep it fucking moving.” Out of the passenger seat, a man emerged (let’s pretend he was big but I don’t remember). He walked over to me and pushed me to the cement. “Uh, what the fuck?” I asked from the less-than-dominant position of the ground. And then I got up and did what I was told: I kept it fucking moving.

For me, this was all fine if frustrating. Getting pushed? Okay, I’ve been to middle school, we can deal with it. Crashing on my bike? It happens. But the particular indignity of the next part was what has stuck with me.

After my time on the cement, I started riding home. And even then I still had to dodge many cars parked in the bike lane. It was like having to clean up the mess your bully made after giving you a swirlie. Navigating the often-obstructed bike lane, swerving into the street where car traffic sped along, I had to look behind me into oncoming traffic. (I’ve been told that making eye contact with drivers forces them to acknowledge you’re a real human being and therefore they will be less likely to hit you.)

The entire time I kept thinking: What if one of these cars smushes me? And what if after it happens, the driver doesn’t even think it’s their fault? Dying is part of life. But to die at another’s hands (as they grip the wheel) without the perpetrator feeling any twinge of guilt?  That is not a just world in which I want to live. Often when I am almost run down by a car while biking, the thing I realize is: That driver thinks I’m being annoying and I think they’re being evil. The yawning gap in emotion bugs me. 

That disconnect has been on my mind a lot this year after I moved back to New York City.

Many of my happiest memories here are attached to biking.  When I had little money, as a freelancer after college, my best friend and I had a cherished weekend tradition. I would steal a roommate’s bike, and we would head down from Bushwick to Sunset Park. There, we ate tacos, and then rode to a cafe in Red Hook, sitting near the water, reading books—pausing now and then to talk. It was a cheap and fun way to spend a day.

We used some bike lanes. But the thrill was in part listening to loud music in our headphones, dodging cars, and dipping in and out of traffic. It felt like a low-level rebellion. Biking did not feel normal. It was not carefree. At the time, I didn’t mind a car parked in a bike lane—all the better reason to get into the street, try to skim past a vehicle stuck in traffic, yell at someone over an Arthur Russell song that seemingly everyone was listening to.

That doesn’t seem as appealing now. (Even if I do sometimes indulge.) Now, in a landscape with bike lanes, I am flummoxed by how dangerous it feels to use what seems to be the easiest, best form of transportation to get around town. This year, as Gothamist reported, traffic deaths have gone down slightly but the problem is still massive: In 2022, guns were involved in 246 deaths in New York City; there were 247 traffic deaths. (Despite that, the crime narrative that fueled the governor’s race did not exactly hone in on the automobile.)

For a week, I kept track of how often I had to go into the street because a car was parked in a bike lane. It was astounding. On average I saw one car parked in a bike lane for every 2.5 minutes of biking.

For a week, I kept an extremely rough approximation of the number of cars parked in the bike lane per ride. 1 car for every 2.5~ minutes https://t.co/tjciY1jkUN pic.twitter.com/qKhKH1AGkQ

— Jacob Rosenberg (@jrrosenb) November 14, 2022

For Mother Jones, Abigail Weinberg has written “accidents” don’t exist; they are really safety design flaws. Last year, my colleague Tim Murphy chose cars generally as a monster of 2021, noting that there are few consequences for hitting someone with an automobile. What increasingly irks me about cars is their sheer presumption. To think about designing a city around biking, or walking first is considered to not be serious about the world. It is considered the pipe dream of activists. And that arrogant car chauvinism, for me, is most noticeable when I see a vehicle parked in a bike lane. It is as if a driver has said: I will take that too. 

I often wonder if I will be able to bike in New York City when I am sixty. When will be the last time my friend and I can have that day from Sunset Park to Red Hook? 

When I see a car in a bike lane, it is not only an annoyance but a reminder that creating a livable city—with the fullest meaning of that phrase—will take more than some paint on the ground. I can’t imagine doing something this casually dangerous for the rest of my life. I can’t imagine not doing it either. 

As usual, the staff of Mother Jones is rounding up the heroes and monsters of the past year. Find all of 2o22’s here.

Mother Jones; NASA

Think of Earth as a Kinder Egg, a ball of surprises (plastics) and danger (chemicals known to the state of California to cause cancer) that is reduced to shit by human consumption. Of the many universes, PBS tells me, life can only form in a few—and most of those tolerate but don’t encourage it, the way most people aren’t actively trying to kill you, but also don’t want to hang out. We shouldn’t ask too much.

Still, we one-up the egg time to time: elephants, underwater volcanoes, Indonesian food, Maxwell’s Urban Hang Suite, total eclipses, the movie Friday, the five-inning stretch of Dock Ellis’ 1970 Pittsburgh Pirates acid-trip no-hitter when he thought Richard Nixon was umpire, and, latterly, the James Webb Space Telescope.

The James Webb Space Telescope is the new heavyweight champion of the faraway, the best camera our species has built; Jim, to its friends. Jim makes spectacular the familiar and uncovers new mysteries: it’s already produced NASA’s “deepest and sharpest infrared image” of the universe,” its “most distant known star” (says Space.com), the “first direct image of a planet outside our solar system” (Axios), and, says its own website, “an ‘undiscovered country’ of early galaxies.” 

It’s even more impressive given that Jim turns one this Christmas, an age-to-accomplishment ratio to impress even the parents for whom nothing you did was good enough. And—unlike many young people—Jim has not only permanently left the house but is now four times more remote than the moon. I’ll run the numbers.

Weight: 6,170 kilograms, roughly three times the weight of a 1999 Toyota Camry LE.
Length: 69 feet, or three times the length of a 1999 Toyota Camry LE.
Cost: $8.8 billion, about 9,500,000 times the current market value of my 1999 Toyota Camry LE due to cosmetic damage to the passenger-side door.
Value: Revolutionizes astronomy, ushers in new era of space science.

The main event, obviously, is its infrared eyes. I’ll skip the details because I don’t understand them—I think it’s made of iPhone cameras—but you can see how Jim compares to the iconic Hubble Space Telescope, its predecessor. I bet you remember, if you’ve always needed glasses, the first time you saw-saw a tree. Jim is that, spatially:

These big leaps change science, but they also change people. Hubble lit up public interest in space science and the cosmos, with breathless news coverage of spacewalk repairs, as if our worth as a species hinged on our ability to photograph nebulae.

Well, it kind of does. In the age of space billionaires and their cringe-ass fans, Jim reminds us what the stars have always been to human: an orientation, not a destination. Long before anyone thought we could go to space, up was the direction of wonder. Sure, if we don’t destroy ourselves, our kids’ kids’ kids might tour its near reaches. But the point of Yosemite is not that you get to go. The point of a Picasso is not that you can own it. The point of the cosmos is not that you’re in it. If your vision of space exploration is you, on Mars, taking a selfie, you probably also think Wage Theft Jeff’s Fisher Price star-phallus will “increase access to space,” much as hiring more dishwashers at the Waldorf-Astoria technically increases access to luxury hotels.

You won’t be a space tourist because you live in an economy that’s better at directing resources to boutique star cruises than basic infrastructure. Space tourism, unicorn startups, “sustainable” private jets: these are the spots of mold that spell deeper trouble. If your gospel is that most social goods can be private and profitable—maybe with a bit of new tech that’s always five years away—you get disastrous allocative inefficiencies. They accumulate. They metastasize. Next thing you know, you’re fighting the climate crisis by hawking luxury cars. Or “opening space for everyone” by putting shareholders in free fall for the time it takes to pee. That’s systemic market failure. Nothing trickles down in zero G.

That’s not lost on the space-drunk rich. It’s not about humanity; it’s about a few humans. The people who build the vanity rockets would, in a heartbeat, buy the Northern Lights for in-home display. Who do they think will own Luna Colony? Themselves.

Jim is everything they’re not. The JWST feed, publicly funded and freely shared, is there to nourish curiosity. Its mission statement: “We wonder. It’s our nature. How did we get here? Are we alone in the universe? How does the universe work?” Its goal: to “push the boundaries of human knowledge.” It does that, like X-rays or electron microscopes, with new ways of seeing things to see. “When you see Webb go into space,” Jim’s boss, NASA astrophysics chief Eric Smith, said to Smithsonian, “it’s the whole force of human creativity and all kinds of disciplines that push it there.” That is space science. It can yield all the practical, material returns you want, but you know it’s discovery for its own sake because instead of staring at ourselves, or mean-mugging each other, it gets us looking together in the same direction.

Anyway, check this out.

As usual, the staff of Mother Jones is rounding up the heroes and monsters of the past year. Find all of 2022’s here.

Dominic Lipinski/AP

The problem with men like British tabloid personality Jeremy Clarkson is that they exist solely to piss you off. How else to explain Clarkson’s stunning record of repeated on-air racism, his calls for striking workers to be shot and executed, or his claims that television is obsessed with hiring “Black Muslim lesbians?” 

So to condemn Clarkson for his latest missive—a deranged Sunday column in which the 62-year-old broadcaster and game show host fantasized about the day that Meghan Markle would be made to “parade naked through the streets of every town in Britain while the crowds chant, ‘Shame!’ and throw lumps of excrement at her”—is to play right into Clarkson’s soiled hands. Sure, you could argue that Clarkson’s column, which lazily borrows from that “Game of Thrones” scene, is evidence of exactly the kind of abhorrent racism that Markle has previously said led her to feel suicidally abandoned, and therefore proves what he intends to undermine. But that assumes that men like Clarkson—who despite everything, enjoys a peculiar reverence with the British public—are capable of shame. (The former “Top Gear” presenter claimed on Monday that he’s “horrified” by the backlash, the same state of mind he apparently had when caught using the n-word in a nursery rhyme.) No instead, one imagines Clarkson sitting smugly in a disgusting pub this evening, surrounded by people who lavish him with phrases like “Good on ya mate” for his vile words.

But what about the woman absurdly referred to in the year 2022 as Queen Camilla? Just days before the column was published, Camilla hosted a private Christmas luncheon that reportedly included Clarkson and another notorious Markle bully, Piers Morgan, as one of her high-profile guests. This lunch took place after another of Camilla’s events during which an honorary member of Buckingham Palace targeted a Black charity worker with repeated racist questions. But while that prompted the swift dismissal of Lady Hussey from her honorary royal duties, so far, there’s been no comment from the royal family following Clarkson’s disturbing column. In fact, many have pointed to a line in Clarkson’s hateful comments that “everyone” in his demographic shares the same hatred for Markle, leading many to speculate that Clarkson may be giving confiding nods to Camilla and the other old British elite who showed up for her fancy lunch. Meanwhile, Morgan—the other British tabloid fixture of a similar age, countenance, and bile—he’s responded to the outrage over Clarkson’s column with classic whataboutism.

There isn’t any evidence, at least yet, that Camilla approved of Clarkson’s attack in advance. But it’s no small thing that the Queen Consort has appeared in two recent incidents of racism involving the royal family. Who could fault anyone for taking her silence—and the rest of the royal family’s refusal to denounce Clarkson—as tacit approval of something as vile as Clarkson’s op-ed? 

Kent Nishimura/Getty

Sen. Kyrsten Sinema is leaving the Democratic Party and registering as an independent. Politico has the scoop, which you can decide is either unsurprising or something of a bombshell. The news comes shortly after two key moments for Democrats. This week, Sen. Raphael Warnock won re-election in Georgia, securing the party with a theoretically more powerful advantage in the upper chamber, and Sen. Chuck Schumer was chosen again as majority leader.

Speaking to Politico, Sinema attempted to downplay the “timing” of her announcement, claiming it was rooted in some recent soul-searching of how she could best champion her core values. 

“Nothing will change about my values or my behavior,” she added.

While it’s easy to scoff at Sinema’s reassurances here, in some ways,  they’re less mealy-mouthed than they seem. Because regardless of how you feel about her absolute refusal to end the filibuster (and in doing so, torpedo Democrats’ efforts to protect voting rights); her donations from venture capitalists while killing tax hikes for the Wall Street set; or even that heinous thumbs down, Sinema’s claim that her behavior will not change once she leaves the party would have to mean that she was working in lockstep with Democrats to begin with. Not really her thing.

As my colleague Tim Murphy wrote in his excellent profile of the Arizona senator, Sinema’s political career has been one giant metamorphosis. She’s gone from the Green Party roots to unlikely Dem powerbroker. She once claimed donations were a form of “bribery;” now she enjoys friendships with the private equity crowd.

So, when she says that nothing will change about her behavior, Sinema’s likely telling it straight; she won’t stop constantly changing as she sees fit. 

As of now, it doesn’t appear as though Sinema’s decision to leave Democrats will result in a power-sharing agreement; she told Politico that she intends to keep her committee assignments and won’t caucus with Republicans.

But as Arizona’s dynamics shift in our post-midterms landscape, we’re almost certain to see the senator keep up with her own head-spinning changes. Just never expect an apology from her.

Picketers, Rupert Murdoch, bellbottoms.AP Photo

More than 1,100 New York Times employees are striking for 24 hours after more than a year and a half of contract negotiations. But the Times website is still up and running, populated by prewrites, articles written by non-unionized staff, and a couple high-profile scabs. 

This reminded us of a relic of a famous newspaper strike: Not the New York Times.

Let’s remember the energy. It’s 1978 in New York. People didn’t have household internet access and were free of the 24-hour news cycle. For updates on current events, they tuned in for the nightly television news, turned on the radio, or picked up a newspaper. That year, for 88 days between August and November, the New York newspaper industry stopped.

When the New York Times, New York Daily News, and the New York Post all shut down production amid a strike, Not the New York Times stepped in to fill the void.

An early precursor of The Onion, Not the New York Times looked convincingly like the real thing, with articles and ads created by striking newspaper writers and others in the media industry, including Carl Bernstein and Veronica Geng.

I was unaware of Not the New York Times until Mother Jones editor Marianne Szegedy-Maszak mentioned it (h/t to her), but I was delighted by the “Sprots” (not a sic) section. For whatever reason, the staff at my college—DIII except for fencing, no football team—newspaper called it the same thing.

You can find a PDF of Not the New York Times here.

Check it out.

Gwengoat/Getty

One of the last in-person events I had the fortune of attending before the pandemic was a “closed door” panel discussion on the excesses of cancel culture, orchestrated by a PR firm and featuring none other than Mark Halperin, a political pundit and Game Change coauthor who had lost his gig as an MSNBC senior political analyst at the crest of the MeToo movement.

Fourteen women alleged that Halperin had groped them or made unwanted sexual advances during and after his tenure as the political director of ABC News from 1997 to 2007. (Halperin has made vague apologies but disputed several of the allegations, such as slamming a woman into a wall, masturbating in front of another, and pressing an erection through his clothes onto three others.)

Onstage at the panel discussion, Halperin lamented society’s treatment of The Canceled, likening their experience to that of refugees. “Murderers in our society who get out of prison are afforded an opportunity to go on with some aspect of their life,” he said. “The challenge to a lot of people who are canceled is there’s no mechanism for that, regardless of what they’ve done, regardless of whether they’ve tried to make amends.”

Was I surprised, then, to read in Politico yesterday that Halperin was the highest paid-employee of the centrist political group No Labels in 2021, earning nearly $260,000 after being hired as a “senior communications adviser”? I shouldn’t have been. After all, it hadn’t taken long for the outcast to find his way. Even before his speaking gig on Cancel Culture, he’d published another book, and appeared on radio shows and podcasts. A few months after the panel, he scored his own weekend show on Newsmax, the right-wing cable network.

I’m sending best wishes to the staff at No Labels, who seem to be under some duress. Politico reports that co-executive directors Liz Morrison and Margaret White told multiple female employees to dress more modestly after a former member of Congress allegedly touched one of their colleagues inappropriately at a No Labels event. One of the group’s surrogates is former Rep. Tom Reed (R-N.Y.), who resigned a year after being accused of sexual misconduct by a lobbyist, Politico reports. And then there is Mark Halperin. According to the investigation: 

No Labels said it has never had a complaint about any employees or contractors engaging in sexual harassment at the group. But one employee POLITICO spoke with expressed discomfort at having to work alongside Halperin and two others criticized management’s handling of the situation.

A former employee said that staffers were told by their bosses they could ask Halperin about the accusations on an introductory Zoom call. The forum became “very weird,” according to a person who was on the call. “What am I going to say to this man?”

Halperin did not respond to a request for comment.

Paul Hennessy/SOPA Images/Zuma

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, chief warrior in the crusade against “wokeness,” has hurled the word at so many targets as to render it meaningless. Fortunately, some members of DeSantis’ office have opened up about what they consider the definition of the word “woke” to be—and said a lot about their politics, while they were at it.

The question of the meaning of the word came up during a Florida trial over the potential reinstatement of Democratic State Attorney Andrew Warren, whom DeSantis suspended after Warren signed a pledge not to prosecute abortion seekers or providers. DeSantis argued that Warren’s pledge signaled a failure to perform his duties. A judge is currently deliberating the case.

During the trial, attorneys for Warren asked DeSantis aides to define “woke.” Per Florida Politics:

Taryn Fenske, DeSantis’ Communications Director said “woke” was a “slang term for activism…progressive activism” and a general belief in systemic injustices in the country.

That’s the thing we’re supposed to believe is tearing the country apart. Belief in systemic injustices. There’s more:

Asked what “woke” means more generally, [Desantis’ General Counsel Ryan] Newman said “it would be the belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them.”

Newman added that DeSantis doesn’t believe there are systemic injustices in the U.S. He also emphasized he believed Warren’s “wokeism” led him to sign the pledge not to prosecute abortion crimes, the primary factor that led to his suspension.

It’s important to remember that Ron DeSantis can’t hide behind the excuse of ignorance or incompetence, as former President Trump often did. Surely, during his undergraduate coursework at Yale or his law studies at Harvard, DeSantis encountered some discussion of redlining, environmental racism, discriminatory policing, or any of the other injustices that might be described as “systemic.” DeSantis knows that these exist, but in denying them, he divorces his actions from historical context and gives himself cover to perform stunts like arresting (mostly Black) Floridians for registering to vote when they didn’t know they had been barred from doing so. If DeSantis says “woke” often and loud enough, he just might be able to distract voters from the retrograde nature of the policies he’s enacted.

Ian Vogler/Daily Mirror/AP

Once adored for their pristine blowouts and dutiful silence in our age of the Kardashians, Kate Middleton and her husband, William Arthur Philip Louis Mountbatten-Windsor, draw jeers these days. Loud, jumbotron-ed boos smack in the middle of their first stateside tour in nearly a decade, a three-day visit that barely registered with bored Americans.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph?” Celtics head coach Joe Mazzulla responded, looking dead serious when asked whether he had met the royal couple during their attendance at a Celtics game. “Oh no, I did not. I’m only familiar with one royal family. I don’t know too much about that one.” 

This is awesome. pic.twitter.com/ncvAlIaBtB

— John-Henry Westen (@JhWesten) December 2, 2022

The apparent yawns over Kate and William’s visit to Boston came amid more trouble for the royals, including the resignation of a woman called Lady Susan Hussey from Buckingham Palace after Hussey reportedly peppered a Black charity boss with repeated racist questions about where she was from. Then came the double-whammy. Two trailers for the upcoming Netflix doc, “Harry & Meghan,” dropped days apart from each other, prompting the ever-calm Daily Mail  to yell of a “DELIBERATE” effort to ding Kate and William’s tour.

Meanwhile, the latest season of “The Crown” was boring as hell, and left many wondering whether Charles himself was behind the bizarre choice of Dominic West, far too rugged and handsome for the Charles we know, to play the sympathetic role of a progressive young prince struggling under an old-fashioned monarchy.

Yeah, things are strange for the House of Windsor these days—and I’m happy to document the mounting mess. After all, the monarchy is an immoral institution that diverts untold millions from the British public while health workers are treated like shit; the notion of a King Charles in 2022 is nothing short of absurd; and as Meghan Markle detailed, is a racist hell hole.

Will my blogging finally kill off the monarchy? No. But it’ll keep me buzzing as I periodically mumble “down with the monarchy” to myself. There’ll be plenty to ridicule, especially in the lead-up to Charles’ big ass party in May, so watch this space for more.

Paul Hennessy/ZUMA

SNL kicked off its cold open this weekend with a panicked GOP sitting down for an emergency meeting with Herschel Walker, the scandal-plagued Senate candidate in Georgia, as voters head to the polls to determine the last seat in the Senate on Tuesday.

The sketch, which included a furrow-browed Mitch McConnell, Marsha Blackburn, and John Cornyn, saw a clueless Walker confusing simple words—election for an erection, voting by mail for voting by male, and so forth. Meanwhile, Republican leaders went back and forth over what to do with their man before finally deciding it was simply best to keep Walker quiet in the final stretch.

Those concerns, of course, are very real; Walker did actually confuse “election” for erection during a Fox News interview. Many, including Georgia’s Republican lieutenant governor, have blasted Walker as one of the worst candidates in the GOP’s history.

The solution on SNL to silence Walker also appears to borrow from reality. In the final days before Tuesday’s election, the former NFL star has been conspicuously quiet in interviews, mostly relying on others to do the talking for him. But it’s hard to see voters falling for that last-ditch strategy after months of absurd, incoherent statements that have come out of Walker’s mouth. (Read my colleague David Corn’s excellent dispatch on why Walker should release his medical records.) Looking at it one way, Kenan Thompson’s portrayal of Walker felt slightly more like a real Senate candidate. At least you were watching a man who knew he was in on the joke.

Ron Sachs/ ZUMA Press

On Friday, President Joe Biden dropped a tweet that in one fell swoop urged political leaders to condemn antisemitism, white supremacy, and Holocaust denialism. 

The simple statements, which neatly fit into Twitter’s 280-character limit, came one day after Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, appeared on Alex Jones’ Infowars to openly praise Adolf Hitler and Nazism. (“I like Hitler” is a direct quote from West.) The appearance was the latest instance of ugly anti-semitism by West since tweeting in October that he was going to go “death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE.” 

As it so happens, Biden’s message also follows Donald Trump’s dinner with West and the virulent anti-semite, Nick Fuentes. 

I just want to make a few things clear:

The Holocaust happened.

Hitler was a demonic figure.

And instead of giving it a platform, our political leaders should be calling out and rejecting antisemitism wherever it hides.

Silence is complicity.

— President Biden (@POTUS) December 2, 2022

Some Republicans, including Mitch McConnell and Susan Collins, have spoken out against these high-profile acts of antisemitism. But others have either been far too mild in their criticism—or altogether silent. Fox News host Tucker Carlson hasn’t said a peep, despite hosting West on his show three days after West’s “death con” tweet.  The Twitter account for Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee didn’t delete a controversial tweet praising West until yesterday’s Infowars appearance, when apparently the antisemitism became too overt for even the GOP to pretend it wasn’t happening. Others, like Mike Pence, have expressed regret at Trump’s dinner with Fuentes but claimed that the former president was not an anti-semite himself.

So Biden’s tweet today raises a curious question: If the president can unequivocally denounce antisemitism in a single tweet, why is it so hard for some on the right to do the same? 

ZUMA press

On Wednesday, outgoing North Carolina Rep. Madison Cawthorn made a bizarre final speech on the House floor, jamming at least eight alpha male podcasts worth of toxic masculinity into a minute and 22 seconds. 

“It used to be a rite of passage in this country for young men to be punched in the face when they did something stupid,” Cawthorn said at the top of his remarks. “Our nation used to believe that there was strength and purpose in taking the hits, learning from your mistakes, and growing through the adversity.” 

According to Cawthorn, Americans are facing the consequences of a “participation trophy society.” The “nanny state” now controls the once mighty United States. People who identify as “soft metrosexual” are more valuable. The speech was something of a trademark swan song for the North Carolina congressman, who after months of embarrassing self-inflicted scandals, including tossing around claims about sex parties and lawmakers doing cocaine, lost a primary challenge in May.

So the question arises: Does Cawthorn identify as one of the young men in this country who should be physically assaulted for doing something stupid? Based on this list, it sure might seem so.

Yuri Gripas/Abaca/Zuma

President Joe Biden celebrated his 80th birthday today, becoming the first ever octogenarian to serve as commander-in-chief.

Biden is ringing in his eighth decade with a birthday brunch hosted by First Lady Jill Biden, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said. Yesterday, Biden’s granddaughter Naomi was married on the White House lawn, and family who were in town for the wedding will likely be in attendance.

Biden, who still has not announced whether he plans to run for reelection, has faced concerns over his fitness to serve another term as president. If Biden were reelected, he would be 86 by the end of his second term. (Former President Trump, who recently announced that he will run again in 2024, is no young gun, either—if the 76-year-old were to win, he’d be poised to become the second president to turn 80 in office.)

Biden said in an MSNBC interview last month that his age was “a legitimate thing to be concerned about.” Still, he said that his energy level is as high as ever: “I think people should look and say, ‘Does he still have the same passion for what he is doing?’ If they think I do and I can do it, then that’s fine,” he told reporter Jonathan Capehart. “If they don’t, they should vote against me—not against me, they should encourage me not to go. But that’s not how I feel.”

Earlier this week, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who is 82, announced that she would not seek reelection to House leadership. “The hour has come for a new generation to lead the Democratic caucus that I so deeply respect,” Pelosi said in a speech on the House floor on Thursday. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-N.Y.), 83, will also join the rank and file of Congress, while Majority Whip Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.), 82, will seek a lower-down leadership position.

President Biden also shares a birthday with Judy Woodruff, who, at 76, is stepping down from her position as a PBS NewsHour anchor.

Biden may be the oldest president, but he is far from the oldest politician serving the United States. As my colleague Jacob Rosenberg has noted, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), 88, was reelected earlier this month—he’ll be 95 by the end of his term. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who has been plagued by reports of her alleged cognitive decline, is 89.

Are you ready to see this face on your TV screen for (at least) two more years?C-Span/Zuma

About an hour into a presidential campaign announcement speech so boring that even Fox News cut away, former President Trump made an interesting point.

For the most part, Trump hit all his usual tired talking points, some said with low energy. He ranted about immigration, “radical left Democrats,” critical race theory, MS-13 (he called them “savages”), fentanyl, the threat of nuclear war, inflation, gas prices, and “the blood-soaked streets of our once-great cities” that have become “cesspools of violent crimes.”

But when Trump laid out his plans for how to “dismantle the Deep State and restore the government by the people,” he went beyond the usual calls to “drain the swamp.”

Instead, he promised a series of anti-corruption measures.

Trump said he would push for a constitutional amendment imposing term limits on members of Congress; a permanent ban on taxpayer funding of political campaigns; and a ban on “members of Congress getting rich by trading stocks with insider information.” If you read the comments out of context, you might have thought you were hearing from Elizabeth Warren.

Trump used these reform suggestions as a segue to complain about the United States’ lengthy elections and to advocate for “paper ballots, same-day voting, voter ID—so simple.”

The discussion was far tamer than his January 6, 2021, declaration that the previous election constituted an “egregious assault on our democracy.” The audience at Mar-a-Lago did not seem as enraptured with Trump as the typical MAGA rally crowd, and the speech was so disjointed that it was hard to tell how the former president expected to frame his 2024 run. Still, one could see a path forward in which Trump attempts to twist his 2020 election lies into an anti-corruption message—even if that seems a little rich coming from a man embroiled in constant scandal.

If the final minutes of Trump’s speech were a reliable predictor of the points he’ll be hammering home on the campaign trail, we just might see a more toned-down Trump, with a commonsense reform message that will appeal to more than just his sycophantic right-wing fans.

I’m not sure which is scarier.

This is Chuck Grassley running.Chris Maddaloni/Getty

Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa was born during the Great Depression.

He was born before Hitler rose to power; he attended college in 1955 (when tuition cost $159); his predecessor upon his first election to US Congress was born in 1899. Grassley won his first election in 1959 and served in the Iowa House of Representatives until 1975. He was succeeded, after leaving for national office, by Raymond A. Lageschulte. That man’s picture on the official website of Iowa is in black and white.

Senator Chuck Grassley is now 88-years-old. He was once again reelected this week. By the end of this term, he will be 95.

That is too old.

Chuck Grassley, 89, who was born before the invention of the chocolate chip cookie, will serve another six (6) years in the Senate.

— Charlotte Alter (@CharlotteAlter) November 9, 2022

Grassley has done a push this cycle to combat chatter about his maturity by cosplaying as a fitness influencer. In addition to his usual barrage of odd tweets about volleyball scores, he has posted videos of his early morning runs. He has, like Ruth Bader Ginsburg, shown his brittle bones moving up and down in push-up form.

Grassley’s apparent commitment to posting his workouts, as Politico noted in a recent look at Congress’ gerontocracy problems, exposes issues beyond fitness. (Despite the scary reporting about Senator Dianne Feinstein.) The heart of the complaint is “an increasingly impenetrable elite with entrenched habits [holding] jobs that get treated like entitlements and coteries of courtiers who disconnect them from the zeitgeist.”

But, for a moment, let me return to the subject of the body.

ppl ask me why i run 6 days a wk at 4AM pic.twitter.com/30NaTuMzpO

— Chuck Grassley (@ChuckGrassley) August 14, 2022

On one level, for sure: To be that old and still running is a feat. But you know how old Chuck Grassley is? He’s been noting his exercise routine since at least 2010.

This is an ad from twelve years ago!

Here’s another from six years ago:

I think it’s important to make this clear: Bragging about being able to physically move is not good. It means you are so old people are afraid you cannot.

Going for a short run is not a thing anyone needs to gloat about unless you are so aged that the founding of the company that introduced the treadmill to the United States happened almost a decade after your first electoral win—which, yes, is the case for Chuck Grassley.

U.S. Rep. Andy Biggs, R-Ariz., speaks as republican U.S. Senate candidate Blake Masters holds his son, Rex, 2, listens, Monday, Nov. 7, 2022, in Gilbert, Ariz.Matt York / AP

An idea: Let’s not have politicians do Borscht Belt cadenced jokes about an attempt to kidnap House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, an incident that nearly left her husband dead last week after an intruder broke into the couple’s home and brutally assaulted Paul Pelosi with a hammer fracturing his skull.

Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ): “[Speaker Nancy Pelosi] is losing the gavel but finding the hammer. Too soon? Is that too soon?” pic.twitter.com/29em6jJWJ8

— The Recount (@therecount) November 9, 2022

It is dangerous. It is obscene.

But also, Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Az.), your pacing is off. You have no flow. You’re not even good at riffing about the potential violence against one of your colleagues.

Go do some open mics.

Julio Cortez/ Associated Press

It’s still early and the anxiety over a likely red wave crashing down over national, state, and local races remains intact. But a handful of notable firsts regarding race, gender, and sexual orientation have already emerged. Here are a few worth highlighting:

Wes Moore 

Wes Moore, the author and non-profit executive, made history by becoming Maryland’s first Black governor, defeating state legislator Dan Cox, the far-right candidate backed by Donald Trump. Despite being a newbie in politics, Moore received endorsements from several high-profile names, including Barack Obama and Oprah Winfrey. Moore, who will become only the third Black governor in the US, ran on a platform focusing on ending childhood poverty

Maxwell Alejandro Frost

At only 25, the minimum age to run for Congress, social justice activist Maxwell Alejandro Frost won Florida’s 10th Congressional District, making him the first Gen-Z candidate to win a seat in Congress. An organizer and advocate for gun reform, Frost ran on a platform for stricter gun laws, abortion rights, and affordable housing. According to a 2022 report from the Congressional Research Service, the average age of members of the House is 58.4 years old. 

WE WON!!!! History was made tonight. We made history for Floridians, for Gen Z, and for everyone who believes we deserve a better future. I am beyond thankful for the opportunity to represent my home in the United States Congress. #FL10

— Maxwell Alejandro Frost (@MaxwellFrostFL) November 9, 2022

Sarah Huckabee Sanders

Following in dad’s footsteps, Sarah Huckabee Sanders will become the first woman to become governor of Arkansas. Donald Trump endorsed the former White House press secretary last year, calling her a candidate “strong on borders, tough on crime, and fully [supportive of] the Second Amendment and our great law enforcement officers.”

Maura Healey 

Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey will become the first woman governor in Massachusetts, as well as the country’s first openly lesbian governor. Healey ran on a platform that promised to expand affordable housing, better public transportation, and protect people’s reproductive freedoms. 

Becca Balint

Richard Graulich/Palm Beach Post/ZUMA

As control of the United States government hangs by a thread, our attention turns to the de facto leader of the nation’s ascendant minority party for political insights. But that man, Donald J. Trump, is proving once again that he is—physically, emotionally, intellectually—incapable of such an ordinary task of election night punditry.

Instead, when asked a softball question about what tonight’s results could say about his position in the Republican Party, the former president offered his trademark mix of narcissism, incoherence, and—as my colleague Marianne Szegedy-Maszak described it—an absurd conviction normally possessed by a 6-year-old boy.

Take a look:

A real quote from Donald Trump about tonight’s results:

"Well, I think if they win, I should get all the credit. If they lose, I should not be blamed at all."

pic.twitter.com/u0O8yWfCoE

— Matt Wilstein (@mattwilstein) November 8, 2022

It’s a perfect distillation of the petulance that has governed everything in Donald Trump, basically forever. So good luck to everyone. We’re about to see the imminent return of a lot more dumb clogging up every corner of the news cycle.

The former secretary of state didn't want me to miss out on a 13X match!Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP

I got an email yesterday from Mike Pompeo. He was writing on behalf of the NRCC—the House Republican campaign arm—with some troubling news. “I’ll level with you,” the former secretary of state told me. “This isn’t going well, we didn’t get any donations last night.”

But all was not lost! Pompeo said that after some begging, anonymous GOP donors agreed to offer—for one day only!—a “13X MATCH” on any contributions I sent their way. Time was of the essence. “Tomorrow, I predict we will go back to 12x match, so act now,” he urged. “This is our last chance to save our country.”

I didn’t write back right away, which was a good thing, because 90 minutes later I got another email from the NRCC, with an even better offer. “RARE 14x MATCH,” the message read.

So, what happened? “We were SUPPOSED to go back to 1200% or 1300% matching today,” the GOP fundraiser explained, “but we’ve convinced our generous donors to extend their match because…YOU STILL HAVEN’T JOINED! We need you.”

Ah.

It went on like this.

4:31 pm: “Emergency 14X Match.”

7:34 pm: “FINAL 15X MATCH.” (“I’m giving my bosses 1 more grassroots fundraising update in the morning and I want to make sure your name was included on my report,” wrote “Taylor from House Republicans HQ.”)

1:01 am: “FINAL 14X MATCH…ONE. LAST. CHANCE.”

By 8:30 this morning, the news was increasingly dire. House Republicans HQ sent an “Urgent Update” to inform me that “House Republicans are BEHIND in many battleground races” and that “conservative voter turnout is LOWER than normal in key regions.”

Fortunately, the solution to this crisis was clear: “A group of top patriots has decided to 1400% EMERGENCY MATCH all donations for the next 14 minutes.” And no pressure or anything, but “victory or defeat and the future of our country rest on your shoulders.”

But wait! you are no doubt wondering. Didn’t Mike Pompeo predict that by today, we would “go back to 12x match”?

Hmmm. This is all a bit disconcerting. If I can’t rely on the GOP to tell me the truth about 13X contribution matching programs, can I even believe that House Republicans are really losing all those races?

Brian Branch Price/Zuma

Yesterday, Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) sent out a campaign with a solemn, all-caps heading: PARTICIPATING IN OUR CONSTITUTIONAL REPUBLIC.

The email hails voting as a part of our “national identity” which has enabled “the American experiment in representative government to continue for almost 250 years.”

As I read the email, I noticed that Boebert’s campaign uses a lot of words here to describe our form of government. It’s a “constitutional process.” It’s “representative.” But one word is glaringly absent: “democracy.”

Indeed, Republicans across the country are removing the word “democracy” from their lexicon. My colleague Pema Levy reported today that in Arizona, Senate candidate Blake Masters argued that the United States is not a democracy but a republic. “It sounds like a nerdy takedown,” she writes, “but it’s being bandied with frequency by Republicans who also support minority rule and supported overturning President Biden’s 2020 victory.”

It seems natural that Democrats would prefer the word “democracy” and Republicans “republic,” if only for sound-alike reasons. But the United States is, in fact, both those things. Refusing to accept that we live in a democratic republic is tantamount to suggesting that voters should not be entitled to choose their political party at all.

Republicans have long proclaimed that “we are not a democracy.” In the 1960s, the distinction became particularly linked with the John Birch Society, an anti-Communist group associated with a rising populist right. The idea offered a historical righteousness for the group’s opposition to desegregation and multi-racial democracy. “For us baby-boomers,” Ed Kilgore noted in New York Magazine in 2019, “the Birchers’ use of the term republic to justify all sorts of artificial restraints on popular majorities rings familiar.”

As Jamelle Bouie has written for the New York Times, the phrase invokes the idea that the Founders designed our system of government to combat the tyranny of the majority—but it misreads the substance of their arguments and becomes instead an argument for minority rule. “The point of the slogan isn’t to describe who we are but to claim and co-opt the founding for right-wing politics,” Bouie writes, “to naturalize political inequality and make it the proper order of things.” 

The fussiness over the word “democracy” reminds me of George Orwell’s 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language,” in which the writer notes that “political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible.”

Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.

Democrats are guilty of many of the pitfalls Orwell outlines, namely vagueness and cliché. The refrain that “democracy is on the ballot” does not invoke mental imagery of Trump supporters busting through barricades at the Capitol and beating and tasing a police officer on January 6—nor does it paint a picture of what life in the United States might look like if our democratic institutions continue to erode.

But when Republicans say that the United States is not a democracy, they are, to reference Orwell, obscuring the gap between their real and their declared aims. By eliding the word “democracy,” Republicans don’t honor our Founding Fathers; instead, they veil their desire to steal elections.

Implicit in the “we are not a democracy” cant is the notion that it doesn’t matter that a majority of Americans disagree with the overturning of Roe v. Wade, or that five of the Supreme Court justices who made that decision were appointed by presidents who lost the popular vote. Instead of “the United States is not a democracy,” Republicans should just say what they mean: “The United States should be governed by minority rule.”

When a politician sends a campaign email asking her constituents for their vote, she is asking them to participate in democratic process. When she refuses to call that process what it is, she’s telling them that she doesn’t care what they have to say, anyway.

AP Photo/Alberto Mariani

On Wednesday, both President Joe Biden and former president Barack Obama warned that if the current far-right extremist candidates win their elections next week, the country’s democratic foundations would be at risk. The dueling speeches came as Democrats scramble to urge voters in the final stretch before next week’s elections to reject election deniers on the ballot around the country.

“If you’ve got election deniers serving as your governor, as your senator, as your secretary of state, as your attorney general, then democracy, as we know it, may not survive in Arizona,” Obama told attendees at a rally in Phoenix, Arizona. “That’s not an exaggeration. That is a fact.” 

Obama specifically called out GOP gubernatorial candidate and former news anchor, Kari Lake, mentioning that she’d once interviewed him while he was president in 2016. In his story, Obama characterized Lake as a grifter, urging Arizonans not to elect someone based on their celebrity.

Obama in Arizona on Kari Lake: "Listen, if we hadn't just elected somebody whose main qualification was being on TV, you could see maybe giving it a shot." pic.twitter.com/PVx0W2mcrQ

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) November 3, 2022

Lake is one of the most vocal election deniers in the GOP, even going as far as to call for the imprisonment of Arizona’s secretary of state—and Lake’s current opponent, Katie Hobbs—for certifying the 2020 election results. As my colleague, Isabela Dias, previously reported: 

On various occasions during the campaign, Lake has hinted at supposed attempts to steal the primary election, but she has refused to provide any evidence to support her claims. “I’m not going to clarify it,” she recently said on a radio show. “We are on to some things that are very suspicious and possibly illegal. We’re working on it. I don’t want to ruin the investigation.” The chairman of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, which oversees elections in the state’s largest county, called her allegations “beyond irresponsible.” As part of her election integrity platform, Lake has proposed a ban on ballot-counting machines. 

President Biden made similar sentiments during a televised speech Wednesday evening, condemning the Republican candidates pushing Donald Trump’s election lies, as well as voter intimidation efforts and political violence that have surged in recent years.

“As I stand here today, there are candidates running for every level of office in America — for governor, Congress, attorney general, secretary of state—who won’t commit, they will not commit to accepting the results of the elections that they’re running in,” Biden said.

“This is the path to chaos in America. It’s unprecedented. It’s unlawful. And it’s un-American.”

Since the January 6 attack on the US Capitol, reports of armed protesters showing up at polling locations have mounted. As my colleague Tim Murphy reports in his recent dispatch from Maricopa County: 

“They’re at the polls right now, 24/7, making sure that they’re intimidating the people that are going to vote,” an organizer tells the volunteers in attendance, referring to the right-wing dropbox-watchers. “They’re trying to stop us from voting, they’re trying to stop us from turning it in, so it’s our job as well to empower these individuals that we’re gonna be talking to that they have a right to be at the freaking polling location.”

While Biden never mentioned Trump by name on Wednesday, he directly called out the former president’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election results.

“He refuses to accept the will of the people. He refuses to accept the fact that he lost,” said Biden. “He has abused his power and put the loyalty to himself before loyalty to the Constitution and he’s made a Big Lie an article of faith for the MAGA Republicans, a minority of that party.”