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Ask Me Anything Thursday

Ask Me Anything Thursday

I'll answer as best I can

Brian Beutler's avatar
Brian Beutler
Dec 14, 2023
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(Photo by Wong Yu Liang)

I can feel the mystical force of the holiday drawing people away from news and politics toward cozier things. But that doesn’t mean there hasn’t been a bunch of news.

  • Republicans made their buzzword-based impeachment inquiry “official” with a vote in the House on Wednesday. They are clowns, but people who are confident this won’t pay off for them are forming an assessment based on an n of 1.

  • Israel’s ambassador to the U.K. wants everyone to know that, in the eyes of the Netanyahu government, the two-state solution is dead. In some sense she’s just stating the obvious, but in another, more important sense, saying it out loud wipes away any strategic ambiguity Netanyahu may have wanted to maintain, and offers President Biden an opportunity to begin disentangling himself from him. No reason to think he will, just food for thought!

  • We gotta wait for details, obviously, but the reporting we have on the ransom Biden’s preparing to offer in exchange for aid to Ukraine is troubling.

  • The polls—less said the better.

  • Impressed as I am with Jack Smith, I’m a bit worried about this other Supreme Court cert grant.

  • Economy, still strong; vibes, still poor, but perhaps improving!

    Leave a comment

  • The way Texas Republicans tortured and displaced Kate Cox is infuriating, and I hope it broke through out of the news-junky realm. But I remain so very frustrated with how quiet and uncreative Democratic leaders are at capitalizing on these kinds of developments.

  • Matthew Yglesias
    is right about this, which means we should perhaps widen the vibes debate by noting Biden’s only a bit more popular than we’d expect if all of Donald Trump’s bad faith “predictions” had come true.

What’d I miss? (A lot, no doubt.) Anything on your mind? I’ll take questions in the thread this afternoon, and have a live chat with interested/available subscribers around 2 p.m. ET. Hope you’ll join!

UPDATE: Let’s go!

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