Henry Olsen/WaPo:
Liz Truss’s resignation is a warning for Republicans
Trump also shares Truss’s lack of serious engagement with ideas. Both have pulled 180-degree turns in their careers, switching political parties and reversing themselves on policy commitments when it suited their ambitions. It’s revealing that Trump did not sanction a party platform in his 2020 renomination bid, the first time the party ever failed to issue an updated set of principles and proposals. You can’t change the nation’s course if you don’t have an idea for where it should be going.
Truss’s ideological fecklessness has brought the Conservative Party to its knees. Republicans, take note.
Be firm. Be strong. Be uncompromising. And most especially, be wrong. Reaganomics never fails, it can only be failed.
Politico:
Yes, the Liz Truss debacle matters for Americans
The U.K. political drama will have ripple effects in the U.S.
So is there any reason for Americans to care about chaos in Britain?
Aside from gaining satisfaction from knowing there are other countries with messed-up democracy, here are four ways the departure of Liz Truss matters for Americans:
[Here is number 3:]
Parties can move away from their extreme wings
It took a monumental crisis, but the British Conservatives junked their traditional system for electing their leader to deal with the Truss crisis.
Brian Klaas/Atlantic:
What Happened to Liz Truss Can’t Happen Here
The prime minister’s downfall shows that British democracy is still working. American dysfunction is far worse.
The past six weeks have been disastrous for Britain. Liz Truss will likely be remembered as the worst prime minister in history. But the speed with which she was chucked out is a positive sign for British democracy. Because in order to function properly, democracy requires an electorate of voters who are willing to change their minds.
The takeaway is that this is high turnout, which is a neutral concept, and the polls say it’s a close race. Georgia doesn’t track party even though it does track other demographics like race, age and gender. Ryan Anderson is keeping some nice early vote Georgia stats here and here.
So far, it’s 2020 presidential year turnout with 2018 demographics (more older people, e.g.). In 2018 there was a near even race between Brian Kemp and Stacy Abrams. So, we just have to wait.
Jonathan Bernstein/Bloomberg:
McCarthy Loves Himself Some Trump. Watch Out.
Spending bills and debt limit increases will be hard to pass if the current House minority leader becomes speaker next year.
McCarthy appears to be going down the same path as former Speaker Paul Ryan, who was unwilling to play the crucial role of serving as a pin cushion for critics. This is something that former Speaker John Boehner was very good at — as are current Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.
Boehner, Pelosi and McConnell all know that being part of the congressional leadership sometimes involves absorbing attacks so that electorally vulnerable members of their caucus don’t have to. They were willing to take the blame for burying legislation popular with some voters but ill-advised for the party such as, in the Democrats’ case, Green New Deal legislation backed by very liberal members of the House. Or for pushing ahead with unpopular but necessary measures, as McConnell did when he bought into a convoluted mechanism for raising the debt limit in 2021. Congressional leaders almost always wind up unpopular — but the skilled ones realize that their job is to protect their majority and its goals, not to build their personal popularity.
Greg Sargent/WaPo:
The mystery of the missing anti-MAGA majority
The powerful currents that propelled these outsiders into elected office were inextricably mixed up with the coalition that elected them. While analysts differ on particulars, the basic story of 2018 is that an anti-Trump backlash helped Democrats overperform among White voters, especially female independents and educated suburbanites, but also among rural and exurban voters.
This, plus elevated participation among Democratic base groups such as young voters, Latinos and African Americans, helped produce a big midterm turnout. The result, data firm Catalist found, was that these Democratic-aligned voter groups formed an uncommonly large share of the electorate.
That anti-Trump coalition produced a class of House members that was unprecedentedly diverse and female, and elevated the first Muslim and Native American female members. Yet it also reached deep into places far from diverse, cosmopolitan urban centers.
Now, this coalition is in doubt. Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg coined a term for it: “the anti-MAGA majority.” What happened to this majority, and what does its decline say about our politics?
Gina Siddiqui/NY Times:
Lessons From a ‘Difficult Patient’
Sal was the kind of patient that doctors strive to avoid. But for one medical student, he provided an education in compassion.
Sal’s pulmonologist of 30 years had retired, and the clinic had been struggling for months to figure out who would take on Sal’s case. Since not many cystic fibrosis patients had made it to Sal’s age, Sal suspected that many adult pulmonologists, especially the older ones, saw his ailment as a pediatric problem that they wouldn’t have to deal with, and ignored its nuances. In the case of several doctors I met, he was right.
Benji Jones/Vox:
“Dirty” cows are destroying the Amazon rainforest
The beef industry is flattening the Amazon, even when companies tell you it’s not.
On paper, the Brazilian Amazon is one of the most protected ecosystems on the planet. There are thousands of protected areas, in addition to rules that safeguard forests on private lands.
More importantly, big meatpacking companies that buy cattle — the largest driver of deforestation, by far, in the Amazon — committed more than a decade ago to only buy cattle from land without forest loss. This commitment was supposed to prevent any additional losses.
Yet year after year, satellites that monitor changes in forest cover find the same thing: The Amazon is shrinking. Between August 1, 2018, and July 31, 2021, more than 34,000 square km (8.4 million acres) disappeared from the Brazilian Amazon. That’s an area larger than the entire nation of Belgium, and a 52 percent increase compared to the previous three years.
It doesn’t add up. Assuming satellites don’t lie, someone is hiding deforestation.
Peter Kafka/Vox:
Alex Jones lost a $1 billion trial. Why is Infowars still streaming?
Jones says his enemies want him off the air. US bankruptcy law is on his side, for now.
“If Infowars chooses to continue to operate, it is within its power to do so, at least in the near term,” says Chris Mattei, an attorney for the victims. (A rep for Jones’s attorney Norm Pattis declined to field an interview request: “He doesn’t want to talk to anybody right now. He’s very, very, very busy and he feels like he has nothing else to say.”)
Jones hasn’t filed for personal bankruptcy, which experts tell me wouldn’t allow him to escape the judgments filed against him anyway. But it gets fuzzier when it comes to Free Speech Systems: Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection is designed to let the company that files it stay alive while it negotiates deals with its creditors, and then to keep operating after it emerges from Chapter 11.
Which means the Sandy Hook families, who are now creditors for both Jones and Free Speech Systems, could find themselves in a very odd position: Trying to get their hands on all of Jones’s personal assets while also working within a legal system that is designed to keep Free Speech Systems and Infowars — which only really works if Jones works there — up and running.