We begin today with Aaron Blake of The Washington Post and some potentially troubling exit poll numbers for the shoe salesman beneath his 20-point Republican primary win in the home state of his only challenger.
One is that 31 percent of voters said Trump wouldn’t be fit to serve as president if he’s convicted of a crime. South Carolina becomes the third early state to show that at least 3 in 10 voters said a convicted Trump wouldn’t be fit. (We don’t have data for Nevada.)
Just because these voters say he wouldn’t be fit doesn’t mean they wouldn’t vote for him, but it would surely be a hurdle for at least some voters to get over. And 5 percent of voters voted for Trump but said he would be unfit if convicted. [...]
The NORC analysis showed that 35 percent of voters said they would be dissatisfied with Trump as the nominee, and 21 percent said they wouldn’t vote for him in the general election.
At least 20 percent of voters in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina have now said they will not vote for Trump in November.
That “20 percent of Republican primary/caucus voters will not vote for Trump in the general election” came up again. Interesting.
Here are the results from the Sunday Republican primary in South Carolina with 99% of the vote in.
Piper French of Bolts looks into an attempt in San Francisco to unseat two judges this coming Election Day in California, March 5.
A new courtwatching effort has sprung up in San Francisco in recent years. Like the other groups, Stop Crime SF volunteers attend hearings and take notes. They emphasize the importance of transparency and public accountability. “San Francisco courts are notoriously opaque,” the group’s founder, Frank Noto, told me.
But Stop Crime SF is approaching courtwatching from essentially the opposite direction. Noto and his fellow members want harsher sentences for people with repeated violations, and they’re highly critical of judges who let people out on their own recognizance, meaning without money bail, to await trial. “At a time when drug overdose deaths are at an all-time high, many chronic drug dealers and other repeat violent felons are free on our streets because of overly lenient court rulings,” the group said in an August statement.
Now, as California’s March 5 elections approach, Stop Crime SF’s sister c(4) organization, Stop Crime Action, is jumping into the city’s judicial races and working to oust two sitting judges whom it says are fueling this crisis, Michael Isaku Begert and Patrick Thompson. The group, which is also led by Noto, is championing Chip Zecher and Jean Myungjin Roland, Begert and Thompson’s challengers, who are also running with heavy tech and venture capital money and support from the local police union.
Jeremy Barr of The Washington Post writes about conservative media’s misappropriation of the word “psyop.”
Technically, “psyop” is a U.S. military term, referring to various kinds of campaigns to get inside the heads of adversaries. In a classic psychological operation during the Vietnam War, the U.S. government blasted messages over loudspeakers that were meant to urge Viet Cong soldiers to defect. Ahead of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, it was millions of leaflets dropped on cities to undermine support for then-President Saddam Hussein. “Who needs you more? Your family or the regime?” one flier asked.
But conservative media personalities have begun using the term in vaguer and wilder ways, seemingly to allege government conspiracies targeted at American citizens — something that would be illegal, even if any of these theories were remotely plausible.
Actual experts in real-life psyops are unconvinced by this latest wave of claims.
“Most people realize it’s just baloney,” said Herbert A. Friedman, a retired sergeant major who worked in psychological operations for the Army.
Sarah Rainsford of BBC News talks about the price of political opposition in Russia with a focus on the American-based part-Briton Vladimir Kara-Murza.
Alexei Navalny, who was 47, and Vladimir Kara-Murza, 42, are very different men.
Navalny was a social-media phenomenon, a charismatic speaker with some of the egotism of a natural-born leader.
Mr Kara-Murza is a softly spoken intellectual - more back-room lobbyist than crowd-gatherer.
He's not a household name in Russia even now.
But both men shared the same drive and a conviction that Putin's Russia was not eternal and political freedom was possible.
Whilst Navalny produced video exposés of corruption at the highest level of power, Mr Kara-Murza lobbied Western governments for sanctions to target officials' assets and cash stashed abroad.
Both have paid dearly.
James Surowiecki of The Atlantic looks into why sanctions against Russia as punishment for the invasion of Ukraine don’t appear to have crippled the Russian economy.
The sanctions that the United States, Europe, and other industrialized democracies have imposed on Russia in the two years since its invasion of Ukraine have not devastated the Russian economy. Although the initial announcement of sanctions led to a crash in the value of the ruble and bank runs, the economy soon stabilized. After falling a less-than-expected 2.1 percent in 2022, Russia’s GDP actually grew last year, and appears to be on pace to do so again in 2024. [...]
If the sanctions on Russia have had limited impact, that’s in part because they were limited in scope. They did involve serious measures: They included the freezing of $300 billion in Russian central-bank assets, a ban on transporting Russian crude oil using any Western services (including shipping and insurance) unless the oil is sold for $60 a barrel or less, restrictions on technological exports to Russia, and targeted sanctions against thousands of Russian individuals, companies, and ships.
Even though the price of Russian oil was capped, however, Europe did not stop buying it, or natural gas (though imports of Russian gas have fallen sharply)—because it couldn’t afford to. Some Russian banks were cut off from access to the SWIFT banking network, but unlike the conditions imposed on Iran in 2012, the ban was not total: Some of Russia’s biggest banks were exempted. And the West is still doing business with Russia: A little less than half of European exports to Russia, for instance, are under sanction.
Sebastian Ben Daniel (John Brown) of +972 Magazine examines the performance of Israel’s military journalists.
The media’s abdication of responsibility didn’t begin on October 7. For years, Israelis have known little about what their army is really doing: stationing more and more soldiers in the West Bank to keep up with the ever growing settler population and sustain an apartheid regime. And while the biggest price for this is clearly paid by the Palestinians who live under the boot of the Israeli army, Israelis pay a price too.
Indeed, just two days before Hamas launched its assault on southern Israel, two commando units were moved from the Gaza fence to the West Bank in anticipation of their need to protect — or even aid — what many expected would be a settler rampage on the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah. The remaining forces near Gaza were left totally unprepared for the attacks that followed.
Military correspondents at Israel’s mainstream news outlets not only fail to report on such issues; their constant exaltation of the army and willingness to take the IDF Spokesperson’s pronouncements at face value erroneously convince the public that all is swell. One barely needs to scratch the surface to understand how the media’s failure to scrutinize the army played a key role in leading Israel to the disaster of October 7.
Finally today, The Grammarian of The Philadelphia Inquirer has a couple of announcements.
Is it possible to write a grammar musical that isn’t as didactic as Schoolhouse Rock!, as old-timey as 1776, or as corny as elementary school shows performed regularly around the country?
We’re about to find out together. The Angry Grammarian: A New Musical, presented by Pier Players Theatre Co., runs March 7 through 16 at Theatre Exile in South Philadelphia.
No shade to Schoolhouse Rock! or 1776 — they’re great shows — but along with my writing partner, award-winning local playwright David Lee White, we were interested in a romantic comedy that played with grammar and language first, taught grammar and language second.
[...]
Which brings me to one final bit of news: As the musical chapter of The Angry Grammarian opens, I’m closing another chapter: This week will be this column’s last in The Inquirer. After more than five years of chronicling how Philadelphia and America speak and write, I’ve decided to change things up a bit.
I plan to keep writing in a wider format — you can keep up with my grammatical rantings at theangrygrammarian.substack.com. Fans and haters alike will find plenty to respond to there.
Everyone have the best possible day.
