Election muddling
Mounting frenzy ... Democrats produce a Black Swan moment ... Trump's own goals ... Australia's most toxic export ... Murdoch - the man who gave us Trump ... Plans for a new "steal" campaign ... Republican judges meddling in the election ... Roger Fitch files from Washington
"Trump should step aside as his criminal convictions and continued legal troubles have clearly taken a toll on the 78 year old conman" - Congresswoman Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota)
"Kamala Harris has a resumé. Donald Trump has a rap sheet" - Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas)
Americans seem to be awakening from the learned helplessness induced by the Trump Stolen Election Delusion. For nearly four years, a political subversive and supporter of violent insurrection has been running around the country, claiming he won an election he actually lost by seven million votes. Many believed him.
The spell of this absurdist drama may finally be breaking. There's been a remarkable change since the Democrats chose an articulate career prosecutor to stand for president against the incoherent felon representing the Republicans.
Only weeks ago, Democrats were dreading their upcoming August convention, with President Biden's campaign seemingly doomed, even when facing such a dreadful candidate as Trump.
What no one expected was a Black Swan event. Jonathan Alter explains.
That came when Mr Biden, though a "transformative" president, stumbled, withdrew, and was replaced as candidate by his Vice-President, Kamala Harris who has recently led by 3+ points. Trump is now the weaker candidate, and the election is soon - November 5th.
On the eve of the Democrats' convention, House Republicans released the report of a sham "impeachment investigation" of President Biden. As there was no evidence of wrongdoing, and Mr Biden was no longer the candidate, it sank like a stone.
Kamala Harris' Black Swan summer
The convention was a triumph for Democrats and especially Harris. The party is on the offensive, ready to give Republicans hell.
Additional wins in the congress are also possible, and are badly needed to break the legislative logjam.
Due to Republican obstruction in the house, just 78 laws passed the 118th congress. When the Democrats controlled the house in the previous two congresses, 344 and 360 public laws were passed, respectively.
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Even before the convention, Mr Trump, goaded on by instinctive misogyny and racism, began a series of spectacular own-goals.
The most amazing was his appearance before a convention of black journalists, where he suggested there was political calculation in Harris describing herself as "black" (her father is a well-known Jamaican economist, Dr Donald J Harris), rather than South Asian (her late mother, the noted biomedical scientist Dr Shyamala Gopalan, was from India).
Trump strongly implied Harris had only recently, for cynical purposes, chosen to identify as black: it was all a disingenuous melatonin metamorphosis.
The resulting chorus of boos provided one of Trump's first Ceauşescu moments, and the incident itself received a searing Michelle Obama riposte at the Democratic National Convention.
Nicolae Ceauşescu: chorus of boos
Trump has form in questioning the racial or ethnic bona fides of rivals, e.g, American Indians, and his disrespect is nothing new.
In his casino days in New Jersey, before the business failures and bankruptcies, he questioned the authenticity of native-American tribes opening casinos - not only their ethnic identity, but their colour - and expressed the view that they didn't look like Indians to him.
For good measure, Trump added unfounded allegations of gangster influence. This from a man who was denied consideration for Darling Harbour's casino due to Mafia connections in his tawdry Atlantic City gaming facilities.
It was all rather rich coming from a shady real estate man who has admitted passing himself off as Swedish when showing property to Jewish prospects.
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How, really, did a shallow blowhard like Donald Trump ever establish a following in the United States?
He had help, and from unexpected places. Australians are just beginning to acknowledge the lethal damage that their most toxic export - Rupert Murdoch - has done to democracy, decency, and even the general level of intelligence, in the US.
Without Murdoch's assistance, Donald Trump might never have stumbled into the White House and his preposterous stolen election fable might never have gained traction - yet it could all happen again.
Murdoch: Trump's Svenghali
Trump is now plotting to steal the 2024 election with Republic Party dirty tricks in swing states like Georgia and Arizona.
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Hot after last term's appalling interference in the 2024 presidential election (Trump v Anderson and Trump v US), the supreme court is using its summer recess interim orders to meddle for Republicans in November's elections - this time in Arizona.
The court's Republican majority has also indulged in culture-war mischief during the summer recess, blocking enforcement of an entire Biden education regulation because one small part offended "anti-trans" states; global injunctions of analogous health regulations may follow.
The court is provisionally upholding other examples of gratuitous Republican cruelty, e.g, the 8th circuit order enjoining, on behalf of Republican states, student loan forgiveness.
Meanwhile, the awful presidential immunity case continues its baleful effects. It may impact, for instance, a state court matter, Trump's New York criminal fraud conviction, a case in which Trump could actually go to jail if he loses the election.
Republicans also want to save their candidate from financial ruin. Incredibly, the attorneys general in 15 Republican-controlled states are squandering public money to support the non-resident Donald Trump's New York State civil appeal against a $455 million fraud judgment.
In the courts of appeal, the fully-Trumped Fifth Circuit (Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi) has continued to run wild, and even the conservative supreme court had to pull them up for bad lawyering in eight of the circuit's eleven cases heard in the last term.
Even so, shocking decisions continue, including two more en banc party-line anti-voting decrees issued by the 12 Republicans (six of them Trumpistes) who now plague the 17-member court. Chris Geidner has more.
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If, notwithstanding supreme court interference, Kamala Harris takes office, she will be the 28th lawyer president. The first was George Washington's successor, the eminent advocate John Adams.
Some of them, e.g, John Adams, Grover Cleveland, Benjamin Harrison and Martin van Buren were outstanding lawyers who argued before the supreme court, and one lawyer president, William Howard Taft, was afterwards appointed Chief Justice.
Taft wasn't the first president to be offered a place on the supreme court: in 1810, future president John Quincy Adams was offered an already-confirmed supreme court seat. Adams (then minister to Russia) declined, saying he was "too much of a partisan to be a judge".
Supreme Court justice Chase: impeached for peddling a political agenda
Perhaps JQ Adams was thinking of the notorious 1804 impeachment trial of supreme court Justice Samuel Chase.
Chase, the only supreme court justice ever impeached, was accused of "continually promoting his political agenda on the bench, thereby 'tending to prostitute the high judicial character with which he was invested, to the low purpose of an electioneering partizan'."
Acquitted by the senate, Chase remained on the court till his death.
