The last couple of years of news have been pretty bad,
and I know many of you tune into the damage report expecting to be
hit with stuff that is at the very least mildly depressing, but not today.
But later on today, but not right now.
We are going to be hitting you with some of the good news that has come in some of
the recent elections as well related matters recently, including throwbacks to
some stories that we talked about on this show and across this network.
So, do you recall the Florida judge who denied a teen girl an abortion
because her grades weren't good enough, he lost re-election.
Isn't that nice?
That's Jared Smith, an incumbent circuit judge for Hillsborough County,
gained notoriety because he said,
apparently you can only have freedom over your body if you get good enough grades.
She was a 17 year old seeking an abortion without parental consent back in January.
He said she lacked intelligence or credibility, and
was thus not mature enough to get an abortion,
although presumably mature enough to raise a human.
Anyway, he won't be a judge anymore.
So that's good news.
Also by the way in Florida, representative James Bush lost his re-election bid.
He was the only Democrat in the state legislature, who voted for
a 15 week abortion ban and supported the don't say gay bill.
So multiple good election results there.
What do you think Jordan?
>> Yeah, I think it's great on the Democrat who lost.
I think it shows how ineffective appealing to Conservatives is if you're
running as a Democrat.
Because if they have a choice between you somebody who's taking right wing stances
to try to appeal to people across the aisle or in the middle, they're just gonna
go with the real thing, they're just gonna go with the real Republican.
So it's not a viable long term strategy, so
I hope democrats realize that nationwide.
On the judge thing, I think that's great,
I'd be curious to see who replaces him, but also,
I'm still really worried in general about our rightward shift of the courts.
And this week the Lever had a really good story about an industrial magnet
in Chicago giving 1.6 billion to Leonard Leo who is the co-chair of
the Federalist Society, he already had a ton of wealth.
He had all ready worked to reshape the courts nationwide,
including the Supreme Court.
Now he's got a $1.6 billion dollar war chest to keep doing that, so it's good,
but it's also in the grand scheme of things like, what's really gonna change?
I hope people understand just how massive that's going to be in a boost for
the right and the moral imperative to get involved to fight back.
As much as I want to say, small dollar donations help and go a long way,
we're not gonna really be able to match that.
So we're gonna have to work above and go above and
beyond, in every other aspect of our organizing,
of our community engagement, of our political engagement to beat that.
>> Yeah, yeah, I know, I'm glad that you point out the $1.6
billion because that one donation is more than progressive
organizations like in the media will be given ever,
you can pass for 200 years, all told it will not add up to that.
But, $1.6 billion there, I don't know if some beanie wearing idiot wants
to make a music video, they'll throw millions of dollars at him to do that.
There's always money available on the other side, that is nice.
But again, we are focusing briefly on the good news.
We'll get to all sorts of bad news including apocalyptic news
coming up later on.
Another good result, Scott Esque was a candidate for
the Oklahoma House of Representatives,
who had said at multiple points across multiple years, including two journalists,
that it was totally just and moral to stone gay people to death.
He lost election.
That was apparently slightly over the line, thankfully.
So that's good news.
We've got that and this isn't technically an election.
It's just somebody being fired.
But I think a case could be made that it was warranted.
Pete Arredondo has been fired by the school board community in Uvalde, and
it was a unanimous vote and obviously an emotional situation.
I'm gonna undercut the good news by just a little bit by saying
getting rid of P Arredondo seems necessary obviously.
Does that solve the situation?
Does it solve the problem?
No, not at all.
I mean P Arredondo is a symptom of an absolutely broken corrupt sick machine,
but if you hadn't had Pete Arredondo, the shooting still would have happened.
The response might have been better.
It might have been approaching competence, but so that's good.
He got fired.
He should be done in public life if there was any justice.
So that's good news George.
What do you think about that?
Yeah, absolutely.
I don't know how different the situation would have been the without them
because like you say it's a symptom of a much larger disease and
it wasn't just one person who was hiding,
it wasn't just one person who was harassing assaulting arresting parents in
the parking lot who were just worried about their kids safety and evolved.
It's just they're all like that and it's just it shows how ineffective they are and
how they really don't even serve the purpose they purportedly serve, But
also just how overpowered assault weapons are.
Like if you have hundreds of cops afraid to take on one kid with an a.
r. 15.
The problem is the gun, there is a problem with the police, but like if they're all
scared of it, like maybe that shouldn't be able to be purchased by consumers.
Yeah, yeah, and and I look, I, I can only speak for
myself, I am never gonna be satisfied with,
no matter how fast a police response might be, it is always going to be a response.
I don't want them to have to respond to someone having even 15 seconds
of uninterrupted time using an assault weapon against innocent civilians.
And that's the thing, you can replace Peter O'Donnell,
you can replace every cop in your body.
You can still go and buy one of these guns and you'll have at least a car couple
of minutes to kill as many kids as you want and that is unacceptable,
which is why from the very beginning with this story, as much as I am glad
that people have focused on the incompetence of the cops, I always
felt a little bit uncomfortable doing that because that took the attention off of
the fundamental problem which is that you can buy these guns in the first place.
So I, we need to do both.
Okay,, other good news.
, there was a special election in the new york swing district
Democrat Pat Ryan actually won.
And so that is good news, but more importantly,
perhaps people are now starting to analyze the pattern of the special
elections that have happened since biden.
, or actually this is just since the Dobbs decision decision back in june
the destruction of roe v wade.
If we bring up this tweet by Ryan Matsumoto, you can see that there has been
a pretty, pretty large and in uniform direction shift in how trump
performed in these areas versus how the special elections have happened.
And look, it could be that there are reasons other than the Dobbs decision that
it could be moving this direction.
But look, honestly, I think one would expect that these sorts of special
elections, I would have expected that the normal historic pattern of midterms would
have applied, which is that you would expect that the party out of power would,,
have an outsized benefit to this time.
And so it's possible that something like that is happening in terms of enthusiasm
and yet it's moving in the direction of the democrats.
And so I think people are starting to, to wonder if this is, this is like
a marker of,, a really big shift in how the midterms might work Jordan.
I'm not sure if that's something that you've, you have been thinking about, but
things aren't looking quite as ominous as they were.
Something like three or four months ago.
It's, it's hard to ignore, john you're like you say historically, the party
in power in midterms does relatively poorly, they usually lose a little bit.
, they might lose control of a chamber or congress entirely.
It's surprising democrats could defy history here if
they continue what they're, what they've been doing over the past few weeks.
We've seen a few really good things from the democrats not saying perfect.
So just everyone can chill out.
But I think generally there are some things in the Ira that are good,
very deeply troubled about the climate or the climate provisions not being able to
be enacted in in part because of its boost to oil and gas.
But there are a few other things that are really good.
The student loan debt cancelation, the way they've been hammering republicans on
abortion and now today moving to make DACA federal rules so it can't be challenged.
That's a really good thing.
That's a really good thing that helps undocumented people in this country.
So they continue down this path of literally doing things which is,,
a little out of character for democrats.
But if they continue down this path, keep hammering republicans for
really just being the dog that caught the car on abortion.
, and also in the new york race, a really, really good ad that I saw from Ryan
grim today was,, 50 basically 50% of his ad expenditures,
which is hammering Big corporations and their price gouging on electricity.
Now, that's, that's something everybody can relate to hit people,
you target the material conditions that people experience across the board
regardless of party.
And you're going to see more support because what the Republicans have to offer
whining about culture, war issues,
complaining that you get $10,000 in relief and student loan debt and
insisting that you shouldn't be able to practice bodily autonomy.
That's not a winning message.
Yeah. Yeah.
And then spending a week like choosing a hill to die on of trying to stop vets from
getting like health insurance for the diseases that they have suffered.
Yeah, they've, they've had a couple of own goals over the past few months.
, and look,, if we bring up this this last graphic, you'll see how certain
issues have changed in terms of their importance for people's vote.
And you can, you can see a 13 point jump in how important abortion is.
, I absolutely despise that this scale only goes to 20 not 20.
I hate when people do that.
But anyway,, coronavirus outbreak is a little bit less important to people.
Foreign policy dropping.
I'm assuming that's maybe,, with the Ukraine being less daily news,
perhaps people are less focused on that.
But gun policy, violent crime are up and the economy,
which that could mean that means literally everything.
So saying the economy is a weird thing to say is still the most important issue by
a good chunk.
So,, look, I, I largely agree with you.
I think we've been asking for the democrats to literally do anything.
I think with those exact words for some time.
They started to do it.
It hasn't always been what we've wanted.
I was,, somewhat critical obviously of the student debt cancelation planned
yesterday.
I'm gonna be a little bit more positive with the new details.
But, yeah, it's people like it when you actually govern, when they send you to
office and you do not only anything, but literally the things that you campaigned
on that is how this process is supposed to work when you do the opposite of that,
when you campaign on something and then just don't even try to accomplish it.
People are understandably frustrated and
you can see both parts of that process in play.
People were okay with biden for the first few months or so.
He did,, a little bit of the stimulus, it seemed like he was taking build back
better seriously once they like late last fall they decided,
well I guess we're not gonna do this anymore.
His numbers started to slip month after month after month because it appeared he
had gone to sleep or at least given up.
He'd surrendered on his agenda and
now that they're starting to do stuff that's great.
Now a little bit of it in terms of like,,
people being fired up over the destruction of roe v wade.
This is a good side effect.
I still find it to be an unacceptable side effect.
And I still hate that the democrats haven't done more to contradict a little
bit of it being destroyed with the power that they have.
But, I guess we'll take it if it moves the needle?
I suppose.
Any other thoughts.
Yeah. I mean you you see that reaction in people
and I'm not saying the internet is reflective of the body politic at large,
but there are a lot of people who are deeply engaged to spend time
on the internet in political circles and political parts of the internet.
And you saw that was like, I know it's not,, just the, the signal but
the dark Brandon meme I saw being shared by people who would never
otherwise support biden or have been deeply critical of biden.
I think it shows that like people really want him to like yesterday
telling reporters that fair that corporations get tax
cuts on the backs of the working class.
That popped off so much.
Another anecdote was last night I guess a w wrestling had like an applause line for
student debt cancelation.
Like what is happening here.
And it's just that they're doing things that a lot of people really want and
like and people relate to it rather than just these abstract different,,
tinkering around the edges and different federal rules and the bureaucracy.
Like do big things that people like and you'll be a popular president.
It's very simple.
Exactly yeah.
Yeah. I saw someone saying,, and this,
this would be very in, in fitting with the dark brand and
me and like he should cancel another 10-K.
Today.
Can you imagine?
God can you imagine what the right would do if he just did?
He was like you want to say something I could do it tomorrow.
It's a business day I could do another 10-K.