1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.d4 exd4 4.Nxd4 Nf6 5.Nxc6 bxc6 6.Bd3 d5 7.e5 Ng4 8.O-O Bc5 9.Bf4 O-O 10.Nd2 f6 11.exf6 Qxf6 12.Bg3 Nxf2 13.Bxf2 Bxf2+ 14.Kh1 Bd7 15.c3 Qh6 16.Nf3 Bg3 17.Qc2 Bd6 18.Rae1 Rae8 19.Qf2 Rxe1 20.Rxe1 Qxh2+ 21.Nxh2 Rxf2 22.b4 Rxa2 23.Nf3 Bg3 24.Rc1 a5 25.bxa5 Rxa5 26.Rb1 g6 27.Nd4 c5 28.Nb3 Ra3 29.Be2 Bf5 30.Rb2 c4 31.Nd2 Rxc3 32.Nf1 Rc1 33.Rd2 c6 34.Rd1 Rxd1 35.Bxd1 Bf4 36.g3 Bd3 37.Kg2 Bxf1+ 38.Kxf1 Bxg3 39.Ba4 Kf7 0-1>

Will ya lookie heah: less than 7000 posts till reaching that horrific number of 60k that <ursus banalus> loathes. Once that milepost has been passed, there will doubtless be another object for his considerable store of ire.

<Donald Trump has executed three perfect U-turns within the last two weeks, three times acting in complete contradiction to his earlier public statements on three separate issues, his conscience cheerily untroubled.

Having said he “absolutely” wanted to testify at his New York hush money trial, he ultimately opted out.

Having once denounced TikTok as a tool of the villainous Chinese government, he joined it anyway and swiftly picked up more than 5 million followers.

And having repeatedly called for Hillary Clinton to be jailed during the 2016 election, he denied ever having said it, ignoring the mountain of video evidence to the contrary.

In so doing, the 45th president, current Republican presidential contender and now convicted felon inadvertently revealed a pattern of behavior that should give American voters pause for thought, exposing him, yet again, as anything but a man of his word. Here’s a closer look at those three walk-backs, only the latest examples of Trump failing to live up to his bluster.

Testifying

The defendant baulked at the chance to testify at his Manhattan criminal trial last month despite complaining endlessly that he had no right of reply to the allegations made against him because of the gag order imposed by Judge Juan Merchan.

He had also insisted on the Friday before proceedings began: “Yeah, I would testify, absolutely. That’s not a trial. That’s a scam.”

40 percent in new poll say Trump should be sentenced to prison in hush money case Doing so would always have been a major risk for him, and he soon began to rein in the macho posturing and prepare the ground for anti-climax.

Two weeks in, he was suddenly telling Newsmax he would only testify “if it’s necessary”.

After the defense had closed its case without calling him, Trump explained to conservative radio that he feared his “great” past might have been used against him.

“Anything I did, anything I did in the past, they can bring everything up, and you know what, I’ve had a great past – but anything,” he said, not altogether coherently.

TikTok

As president, Trump launched a bitter trade war with China, accusing the rival superpower of seeking to undermine America’s interests, steal its intellectual property and compromise national security, offering ByteDance, the company behind TikTok, as a prime example.

“As far as TikTok is concerned, we’re banning them from the United States,” he declared in July 2020.

He issued an executive order a month later that explained: “TikTok automatically captures vast swathes of information from its users, including internet and other network activity information such as location data and browsing and search histories.

“This data collection threatens to allow the Chinese Communist Party access to Americans’ personal and proprietary information – potentially allowing China to track the locations of federal employees and contractors, build dossiers of personal information for blackmail and conduct corporate espionage.”

But Trump’s executive order aimed at banning TikTok in the US was blocked in the courts.

Three years on, he joined the app himself, seemingly part of a strategy to target new voter demographics – in this case, potential Gen-Z conservatives – to back his latest tilt at the White House.

Now, he’s claiming that banning TikTok would just help Facebook: the “true Enemy of the People.”

‘Lock her up!’

As the dust settled on the verdict in his criminal trial, Trump gave a friendly interview to three hosts from Fox and Friends Sunday, during which he protested his innocence and reeled off his customary complaints about the outcome being “rigged,” Judge Merchan being “highly conflicted” and so on.

A more surprising line to emerge was his denial that he had ever called for Hillary Clinton to be imprisoned, something he had said repeatedly at rallies in 2016 but was now blaming on “the people.”

Among the many commentators incensed by the lie was the late-night host Stephen Colbert, who gasped: “That was your whole campaign! Stop it, we remember. We were there!”

In themselves, these three pivots might not appear to be of monumental importance.

You could simply interpret them as the actions of a pragmatic candidate adapting to the ever-changing shape of the political landscape before him.

But taken together, his opponents say, they offer a fresh reminder that Trump is, and always has been, someone prepared to say whatever is most politically expedient in the moment, with no qualms whatsoever about reneging on his promises when the earth subsequently shifts beneath him, no matter how hard his supporters have bought into the rhetoric.

<If you pay, will they build it?

That’s one question the Biden administration should have asked itself regarding the electric vehicle (EV) charging infrastructure needed to accommodate the goal of an all-EV future.

One well-publicized infrastructure failure is public EV charging stations along U.S. highways, for which the Inflation Reduction Act allocated $7.5 billion. That federal largesse has resulted in just eight charging stations being built since the IRA was signed almost two years ago.

Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg has claimed the U.S. will need 500,000 such stations by 2030. To build the remaining 499,992 stations, we will need to build almost 90,000 of them annually — that’s almost 250 daily or more than 10 per hour — for the next five-and-a-half years.

Perhaps sensing the absurdity of this pace of construction, Buttigieg claimed that most people will charge their EVs at home. Maybe, but numerous states, including California and New York, as well as the Environmental Protection Agency, have decreed that all heavy trucks, which transport the bulk of our products, including the food we eat, must go electric, too. Thus, under the envisioned EV future, a lack of public charging stations will not be a mere inconvenience for holiday travelers. Indeed, it could be a matter of life and death.

The lack of public charging stations is just one aspect of the dearth of EV charging infrastructure that will be required. The secretary has also said that building charging stations is “more than just plunking a small device into the ground.” He’s right. There is a lot more involved, much of which is rarely discussed.

For example, even assuming we can build enough new generating capacity to produce the electricity those EVs will need, we will also need hundreds of thousands of miles of new transmission lines to deliver it. They will stretch not only to public charging stations along highways, but also to the local distribution utilities that provide electricity to homes and businesses. For context, only 500 miles of new transmission lines were completed in the U.S. in all of 2022.

To handle the increased loads from millions of EV chargers, the nation’s approximately 3,000 local electric utilities — which operate the poles and wires running down streets that deliver electricity to individual homes, apartments and businesses — will require major upgrades. That means millions of miles of local power lines will need rebuilding with higher-capacity wires. It will require replacing most of the estimated 60 to 80 million electrical transformers with larger and heavier ones. It will mean installing larger utility poles to handle the extra weight.

Thousands of new transformer lines will need to be built along U.S. highways to accommodate the electricity demand of the individual EV charging stations — each requires as much as a modern steel mill.

Transformers are perhaps the least understood infrastructure component of the electrical grid, but they are the most critical and the component most likely to hamper EV charging infrastructure development. Transformers adjust electricity voltage. At the plants that generate electricity, transformers increase the voltage so that electricity can be moved along transmission lines with minimal losses. At the customer end, transformers reduce voltage to levels needed for homes and businesses to operate lights, appliances and EV chargers.

Transformers, however, are in short supply — especially the large ones that public EV charging stations will require. Some utilities report waiting up to five years for these large transformers to be delivered, most of which are manufactured in Asia, raising a national security issue. The transformer shortage will be heightened by the Department of Energy’s requirement that new transformers use a new (and more costly) form of specialized electrical steel.

Transformers also require copper. (So do EVs — almost four times more copper than conventional vehicles.) The U.S. already imports about 80 percent of its copper. The need for new transformers will require either vastly increasing domestic copper mining, which has been declining for years and is opposed by many environmentalists, or increased reliance on foreign suppliers. Either way, copper prices will increase.

Finally, electricians will be needed to install upgrades to homes and businesses, and linemen will be needed to build the new transmission lines and upgrade local distribution systems. These workers are already in short supply.

<Some Senate Republicans are expressing concerns over former President Trump’s calls for political vengeance after the 2024 election, warning that retaliatory prosecutions will lead the country down a bad road.

The Senate GOP’s top leaders — Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) and Whip John Thune (S.D.) — have shown no desire to embrace Trump’s calls to prosecute senior Biden administration officials or his long-time nemesis Hillary Clinton.

And some GOP senators are pushing back against conservative colleagues who want to freeze Justice Department funding or defund special counsel Jack Smith’s criminal prosecutions of Trump.

They don’t want to stumble into a government shutdown by waging war over the Justice Department’s budget or taking other retaliatory steps favored by Trump’s allies.

Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) says he thought Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s (D) case against Trump was “an unjust prosecution.”

But he’s concerned about Trump’s vow to retaliate with politically motivated prosecutions from his own Justice Department if he’s elected in November.

“This is not the direction we want this country to go,” he said. “I think it’s time for adults to take over with regard to the Senate, and it’s time for adults to take over in regards [to] how we treat the judicial climate in this country.

“I don’t want to see a tit for tat on prosecution. I think that’s the wrong direction. I think that’s the wrong path for us to go down,” Rounds said. “I think we’ve got to get back to what the Founding Fathers wanted in the first place, which is a judiciary which is not full of political appointees that are hard far left or hard far right.”

Trump made waves when he told Phil McGraw, the host of the television show “Dr. Phil,” in an interview Thursday that revenge “can be justified.”

“Well revenge does take time, I will say that. And sometimes revenge can be justified, Phil, I have to be honest. Sometimes it can,” Trump said.

Trump last month said he would consider appointing Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton to serve as U.S. attorney general in his administration, an idea that didn’t get a warm response from some Senate Republicans.

Asked about the prospect of Paxton, who was acquitted on impeachment charges in the state Senate last year, heading the Justice Department, Texas Sen. John Cornyn (R) offered a measured response.

“I’m sure he’ll have a lot of people to choose from,” Cornyn said.

Paxton challenged the 2020 election results in four battlegrounds states and spoke to a pro-Trump rally in Washington, D.C., before the crowd stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) said he won’t support an effort to freeze Justice Department funding or to defund the special counsel in response to a Manhattan jury last week finding Trump guilty on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records.

“The New York action was not guided by or directed by the Justice Department. So it’s a misdirection. There’s a different target to aim at. So I’m not going be joining an effort to defund the Justice Department; we need to have the FBI and our Justice Department doing their jobs,” he said.

Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), the vice chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, said attempting to freeze Justice Department funding or to defund two criminal prosecutions of Trump won’t get anywhere with Democrats in control of the White House and Senate.

“I don’t think that’s a feasible or constructive approach, but we’ll see what the CJS subcommittee comes up with,” she said, referring to the Appropriations Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, Science and Related Agencies, which is headed by Sens. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) and Jerry Moran (R-Kan.).,,,>

<....There was no discussion about how to respond to Trump’s conviction at the Tuesday Senate Republican lunch meeting, which is hosted by GOP leadership, according to a senator who attended.

“Those guys all have a not so much love-hate relationship with Trump, but a hate-hate [relationship]. They just want to get past it,” the senator said.

“The leadership doesn’t want to get drawn into any of that,” the lawmaker said of Trump’s legal travails.

Senior Senate Republicans in the past have poured cold water on calls by Trump and his House allies to defund the Department of Justice and FBI in response to what Trump says is their political persecution of him.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) last year criticized as “irresponsible” the inflamed rhetoric of Trump allies, in particular Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.), who wrote on social media a year ago that “we have reached a new war phase” and vowed “an eye for an eye” in response to the indictments against Trump.

Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) has led a group of Senate conservatives in pledging to oppose any funding increases for the Justice Department in the wake of the guilty verdict against Trump in Manhattan.

The pledge, so far signed by 14 senators, declares “we are unwilling to aid and abet this White House in its project to tear this country apart.”

“To that end, we will not allow any increase to non-security funding for this administration, or any appropriations bill which funds partisan lawfare,” it states.

The top three members of elected Senate Republican leadership — McConnell, Thune and Senate GOP conference Chair John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) — had not yet signed it as of Friday afternoon.

Senate GOP Policy Committee Chair Joni Ernst (Iowa) and National Republican Senatorial Committee Chair Steve Daines (R-Mont.) are the two members of the elected GOP leadership who have signed it.

One GOP senator, who requested anonymity, criticized the pledge as “so vague.”

“I don’t agree with that,” the senator said, pointing out that the pledge says signatories won’t allow expedited consideration or passage of “Democrat legislation or authorities that are not directly relevant to the safety of the American people.”

“I’ve got bills out there with Democrats on it. Is that a Democrat priority?” the lawmaker grumbled.

Some Republicans, including Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), are trying to turn down the temperature of the Senate rhetoric in the wake of Trump’s conviction.

Murkowski emphasized that Trump has an opportunity to appeal the verdict.

“From what I observed with the trial, the process for a jury trial was handled as jury trials go,” she said, when asked about Trump’s claims that he was convicted by a “kangaroo court.”

Murkowski said Manhattan Judge Juan Merchan was “trying to manage a very public proceeding” and “attempted to ensure there was not only a fair process to it but a level of decorum within the courtroom, which I think is important.”

“From what we were able to see of it, the process that was taken was one that people would look at and say, ‘That’s how you handle a jury trial,’” she said.

But she acknowledged there is a legitimate debate about whether the charges of falsifying business records should have been advanced at all, given that the public has known about Trump’s hush money payments to porn actor Stormy Daniels for years and prosecutors didn’t act on it until last year.>

I take the liberty of addressing you on your forum. In the latest issue of New in Chess, no. 3, there is an eight page long article about poker and chess, the title being The Chess Queens of Poker. The "queens" in question are Jennifer Shahade, Almira Skipchenko and Qiyu Zhou, and this label: "all three national champions play chess and professional poker".

In case you don't subscribe to this (very brilliant) chess magazine, I thought you might be interested in the article anyway. Perhaps you could find a way to get it somehow. Unfortunately, I cannot help you since I only have the magazine on paper.

I know slightly more than nothing about poker, so I haven't read the article, but it looks interesting, in particular, of course, if you have an interest in both disciplines.

Well, that was it. I hope you'll succeed in finding it.

You are always most welcome here.

I consider NIC very good and may well subscribe for the first time.

Many thanks for your warm welcome.

Sorry for not having responded earlier. My PC stopped working while writing my response to you some days ago, so I thought it was a virus attack on CG. But it was something else, as it appears.

As for the ladies in question, I think young Qiyu Zhou is a rookie in poker compared to the other two, who allegedly have cashed hundreds of thousands of dollars in the game. An image of QZ in NiC gets a whole page and she looks like a movie star, I say! Perhaps that fools the men she plays against :-)

Glad your computer is back on course.

Have never been to Vienna, but it sounds like a fine place to visit.

Yesterday, one masseuse passed by my table who bore a staggering resemblance to Jen Shahade, with the red hair and fair skin.

Outside of visits to this part of the country, neither have I experienced such heat; in my area, the record is 38, and that is extremely rare. Average highs back home in July are 28 or so.

Weatherwise you seem to live in a climate similar to mine, as far as heat is concerned. Denmark, with its coastal climate, lies in a crossroad of summer hot winds from the Russian mainland to the east, the polar winds from the north, the moisty winds from the west, so much depends on the wind direction. Which, btw, is constantly shifting.

First leg of the journey home takes me to Dallas in a few hours, by mid-afternoon, another city which gets hot this time of year.

I live in northwestern Vermont, with the nearest major city being Montreal (roughly 150 km north).

<The Supreme Court on Friday ruled that the obstruction statute used to prosecute the January 6, 2021, defendants was employed too broadly by the Department of Justice.

The obstruction charge doesn't apply to anyone who breached the Capital, SCOTUS said.

Rather, to meet obstruction, "the Government must establish that the defendant impaired the availability or integrity for use in an official proceeding of records, documents, objects…or other things used in the proceeding," Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the court's decision.

Legal experts told Business Insider the decision was great news for Trump and could result in resentencing for certain January 6 defendants.

But it's far from a sweeping victory. That's because Trump and the majority of the January 6, 2021, attackers were charged with more than just obstruction.

The Department of Justice noted in response to the SCOTUS ruling that it would "most significantly impact a narrow band of cases."

Of the 1,427 people charged in the Capitol attack, the DOJ said 52 were convicted on just the obstruction charge in question — 27 of whom are currently incarcerated, the DOJ said.

The SCOTUS decision "may be a huge windfall for Donald Trump," Loyola Law School professor Laurie Levenson told Business Insider. But the case against him "has not disappeared," given his other charges.

As for other January 6 defendants, "we are in store for resentencings" — though not necessarily retrials, she said. Given that most defendants were charged with multiple offenses, "the government might just take what they already have."

Former federal prosecutor Neama Rahmani concurred the SCOTUS ruling "is great news for Trump."

"Smith will likely dismiss the obstruction of an official proceeding charges against Trump to avoid the possibility of dismissal and guaranteed delays in the case," Rahmani told BI in an email. "Litigating the obstruction of a proceeding issue unnecessarily is high risk with little reward."

Gene Rossi, a former federal prosecutor who said he represented the first Oath Keeper to breach the Capital, told BI that the ruling is "not a total victory or defeat for either side — but I'd rather be on the defendant's side than the government's."

Another legal expert told BI the SCOTUS ruling actually benefits the prosecution against Trump, and argued the indictment will hold up.

That's because Trump's fake elector scheme involved submitting fraudulent documents to Congress to stop the certification of the election, New York attorney Richard Hermer-Fried said.

"Trump's actions to stop the certification of the election goes beyond provoking a mob of his supporters to force their way into the Capitol threatening political violence, and, in fact, is a complex scheme involving the manipulation of documents," Hermer-Fried told BI in an email.

On Monday, the Supreme Court will rule on its most consequential January 6 decision: whether Trump, as president, is immune from prosecution.

Given today's fortuitous decision, legal experts surmised the court could rule in his favor.

"The court says it's not playing politics, but the politics are that these decisions are helping Donald Trump," Levenson said. "So I don't think that the court will hesitate to reach a ruling on Monday that helps Donald Trump."

While conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett dissented from today's decision, Syracuse law professor William Banks told Business Insider that the decision shows "the conservative majority is lining up."

Chevron and other SCOTUS decisions coming down this week "suggests there's a lot of fuel behind that conservative fire right now," Banks said.>

<Remember, folks. It’s always darkest before things go completely black.

Hard after Thursday night’s television debacle, the Supreme Court leaped in to destroy the separation of powers and, as Elie Mystal pointed out on Xwitter, to engage in the biggest power grab since Marbury v. Madison. Through the now-customary 6–3 vote delivered by the carefully manufactured conservative majority, the precedent of Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, aka the Chevron deference, is now as dead as Julius Caesar. And thus forty years of administrative law comes to a rude and abrupt end. The decision is further illustration that the dedication of the carefully manufactured conservative majority to corporate oligarchy is utterly unshakable, expertise—scientific and otherwise—be damned. Don’t believe me? Ask Chief Justice John Roberts, who wrote the majority opinion.

“Perhaps most fundamentally, Chevron’s presumption is misguided because agencies have no special competence in resolving statutory ambiguities. Courts do.”

So instead of career scientists deciding that the E. coli convention in your pork loin makes it inadvisable to eat, some twenty-two-year old law clerk fresh out of Regent University School of Law will. Bon appétit!

Getting rid of Chevron has been one of the golden dreams of the country’s oligarchs and the judges and lawyers in their pay. Along with Roe v. Wade, it has been number one on the conservative hit parade. But Justice Neil Gorsuch, whose concurrence is chock-full of the kind of tinhorn erudition so beloved by the carefully manufactured conservative majority, has perhaps a special reason to dance on Chevron’s grave. His mother, Anne Gorsuch, was hired by the Reagan Administration to run the EPA— into the ground, apparently. From The Washington Post:

Anne Gorsuch—like Reagan then and President Trump today—was a firm believer that the federal government was too big, too powerful and too eager to issue regulations that restricted businesses. As a result, she slashed the EPA’s budget by nearly a quarter and, according to a Washington Post story at the time, boasted that she had reduced the thickness of the book of clean water regulations from six inches to a half inch. She filled various departments at EPA with subordinates recruited from the very industries the agency was supposed to be regulating. By the end of her stint at EPA, Anne Gorsuch was under siege. A half dozen congressional committees were looking into allegations of mismanagement of the Superfund program, which was designed to clean up abandoned toxic waste sites around the country. The House voted to cite Gorsuch for contempt of Congress for failing to turn over subpoenaed records.

In addition to its dollar-store history, Gorsuch’s concurrence pretty much turns the concept of stare decisis into Silly Putty. Return with us now to those thrilling days of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Justice Neil Gorsuch, your host.

Other consequences followed for the role precedent played in future judicial proceedings. Because past decisions represented something “less than a Law,” they did not bind future judges....At the same time, as Matthew Hale put it, a future judge could give a past decision “Weight” as “evidence” of the law....Expressing the same idea, William Blackstone conceived of judicial precedents as “evidence” of “the common law.” And much like other forms of evidence, precedents at common law were thought to vary in the weight due them.

Matthew Hale died in 1676. He was a notorious witch hunter and once argued that the existence of laws against witchcraft proved that witches existed. What the hell he has to do with PFAS pollution or workplace safety in a chicken plant is beyond me. But we live in his universe now, and Neil Gorsuch got his own back for his mom.>

Payback's a biyatch, and Sonny Boy is the biyatch.

< Refuting the usual standard operating lie... again.

Another, another, another case where FTB's stalker is allowed to freely harass FTB as usual with an absolute lie/deliberate mischaracterization out of the blue. Yet, its FTB's freedom of speech that is rescinded (the famous Chessgames double standard thrives), while the stalker's harassing statements -- deliberate fabrications -- are allowed to stand unremoved, unpunished again, again, again. How many times must FTB self-defend, showing sunny p for the hard-core lying jerk that he is??? As many as necessary.

Only a whack cyberbully would try to twist and misrepresent FTB's in-game comments in the April 2023 WC (18 games, many of which FTB never commented on) such as "take the rook" instead falling deeper in time trouble, and then deliberately, wildly mischaracterize FTB as a Ding Liren hater in June of 2024 -- more than ONE YEAR later. This is what a perpetually lying dolt does to generate attention/argument??

sunny p is one sick individual, completely infatuated with FTB. How many contrived statements did sunny p make about those members who did not comment on these Norway Chess 2024 tournament pages??

Found it quite enjoyable to read sunny p's pal keypusher immediately correct our undying cyberbully with "Ding is playing very badly." FTB did not say that, the cyberbully's pal did: 12th Norway Chess (2024) (kibitz #216)

Ding Liren has more integrity and class under one fingernail than the unhinged sunny p can muster. Unfortunately, DL did finish in last place, garnering criticism and concern (but FTB did not say so). Our cyberbully insists that no one but the narcistic [sic] self-appointed basher himself be allowed to freely criticize others on these pages, even when it's a deliberate lie, lie, lie to accrue another standard useless +1 post from Vermont.>

<With the worst debate performance in the history of presidential elections, Joe Biden has ignited a fast moving discussion: Can he be replaced? Is there still time to pick someone, get them introduced to the public and on the ballot? Who should step in?

Some Democrats seem to think they are stuck with Biden. If they replace him now, it will look like the Republicans were right all along, and the Democrats were lying to the American people about Biden’s competence.

Those concerns are real, and valid. There will be a cost to pushing Biden aside. It will take a lot of advertising to introduce a new candidate. And there’s a risk, as there always is, that a new person will implode because of a previously undetected scandal, or a meltdown at their first news conference or debate.

But replacing Biden is worth the risk, and some of us thought that before he got beaten like a middle school wrestler taking on Conor McGregor.

Elections aren’t really about ideas and issues. They are usually about gut feelings and emotions. Issues matter because they move blocs of voters emotionally, and because the right candidate can take an idea and use it to portray herself heroically or sympathetically.

To beat Trump, Biden must drop out: How can Biden save America from Trump's return to the White House? Drop out of the race.

And a new candidate will give Democrats something they’ve been missing since 2016, or maybe 2012: excitement.

Biden in 2020 had almost no one personally excited about him beyond his immediate family and talented staff.

Biden won because enough Americans were disgusted, scared or otherwise done with Donald Trump. These were anti-Trump votes that pushed Biden into the White House in a close election.

Who won the debate? Biden has no business running for president. The debate proved it.

There’s still a lot of anti-Trump votes, because Trump is a uniquely awful figure in American presidential history. He’s got the attention span of a fruit fly, the emotional stability of a cranky toddler, the ethics of a mobster, the narcissism of a supermodel, the honesty of North Korea’s press agency and the foreign policy knowledge of a fry cook.

He’s a convicted felon who has also been found guilty of fraud in civil cases and of sexual assault. Worst of all, he risked destroying the republic to try to stay in office after he lost the 2020 election.

There are many reasons to vote for anyone if it could keep Trump out of power.

But with Michigan's Gretchen Whitmer or Pennsylvania's Josh Shapiro, two swing-state Democratic governors, or any of a dozen or so other younger Democrats as the presidential nominee, Democrats would have a candidate to be FOR.

And that matters.

Having a positive reason will make the ground game of the Democrats more powerful. Millions of Republicans are thrilled about Trump’s candidacy, and only a new face will allow Democrats to match or surpass that intensity.

Instead of telling their non-political friends, neighbors and colleagues all the reasons why Trump is so awful that they have to vote for a doddering old man with the charisma of cottage cheese and the mental quickness of a turnip, Democrats could be out there telling them how great their candidate is.

And that excitement will be contagious, particularly to the small group of undecided voters in the seven swing states that will decide this contest.

Whitmer and Shapiro also would be firsts: our first woman president or our first Jewish president. That’s going to matter in a close election, because firsts always involve increased excitement.

Indeed, the speed with which a new candidate will go from national unknown to a name that everyone knows will contribute to the excitement.

It’s not too late to pick someone new − just the opposite − new is a feature, not a bug. Our modern media culture makes new faces familiar faster than any civilization in history. No one knew the Hawk Tuah girl two weeks ago (Google it, boomer). Now everyone under 40 does.

So Democrats have a choice − lose with Biden or give the voters someone to vote for, someone to admire, someone to be excited about.>

<[Event "48th New Hampshire Open"] [Site "Manchester NH"]
[Date "1998.07.18"]
[Round "2"]
[White "Riordan, Charles"]
[Black "Bryan, Jarod J"]
[Result "0-1"]
[ECO "B06"]
[WhiteElo "1914"]
[BlackElo "2266"]

1.e4 c5 2.Nf3 d6 3.d4 cxd4 4.Nxd4 Nf6 5.Nc3 a6 6.Bg5 e6 7.f4 Be7 8.Qf3 Qc7 9.O-O-O Nbd7 10.Bd3 h6 11.Bh4 g5 12.fxg5 Ne5 13.Qe2 Nfg4 14.Nf3 hxg5 15.Bg3 Bd7 16.Rhf1 b5 17.h3 Nxf3 18.Qxf3 Nh6 19.e5 Bc6 20.exd6 Bxf3 21.dxc7 Bxd1 22.Be4 Rc8 23.Rxd1 f5 24.Bc6+ Kf7 25.Be5 Bf6 26.Rd7+ Kg6 27.Bd6 Nf7 28.Ne4 Ne5 29.Bxe5 Bxe5 30.Nd6 Bf4+ 31.Kb1 Bxd6 32.Rxd6 Rxc7 33.Rxe6+ Kg7 34.a4 Rhc8 35.axb5 axb5 36.Bxb5 Rxc2 37.Bd3 Rf2 38.Rb6 Rc5 39.g4 f4 40.Rg6+ Kf8 41.Ka2 f3 42.Kb3 Kf7 43.Ra6 Rd2 44.Kb4 Rc7 45.Bc4+ Kg7 46.Ra5 Rd4 47.Rxg5+ Kh6 48.Rh5+ Kg6 49.b3 Rf4 50.Ra5 f2 51.Ra1 f1=Q 0-1>