Koch network to back alternative to Trump after sitting out recent primaries

[Daily Kos Morning Roundup]( A morning roundup of worthy pundit and news reads, brought to you by Daily Kos. [Click here to read the full web version.]( - [Koch network to back alternative to Trump after sitting out recent primaries]( Koch network to back alternative to Trump after sitting out recent primaries, Isaac Arnsdorf, The Washington Post The return of one of the biggest spenders in American politics to the presidential primary field poses a direct challenge to the former president’s comeback bid. “The best thing for the country would be to have a president in 2025 who represents a new chapter,” Emily Seidel, chief executive of the network’s flagship group, Americans for Prosperity (AFP), wrote in a memo released publicly on Sunday. The three-page missive repeatedly suggests that AFP is taking on the responsibility of stopping Trump, with Seidel writing: “Lots of people are frustrated. But very few people are in a position to do something about it. AFP is. Now is the time to rise to the occasion.” - [Tyre Nichols should still be alive. Donate $3 to help Memphis, TN grapple with this senseless death and organize to end police terror.]( - [Britain Is Much Worse Off Than It Understands]( Britain Is Much Worse Off Than It Understands, Simon Tilford, Foreign Policy Things weren’t nearly this bad in the 1970s—but the country’s leaders haven't grasped that yet. By any criteria, the United Kingdom faces a serious economic and social crisis, one that will deepen without big shifts in policy. Yet there is little sense of this crisis among the country’s elite, not least its politicians. The power of narratives helps explain this disconnect. The gap between the U.K.’s reality as portrayed by the dominant narrative of its economy’s performance and real life as experienced by its average citizen has widened to the breaking point. The resulting political distortions are now making the underlying problems even worse. Narratives and the emotional impulses that drive them play an underappreciated role in our understanding of the way economies work and whether they are perceived to be performing well or not. Sometimes, there is real grounding to those narratives; other times, they are largely fictional constructs. This does not necessarily mean that those who believe them and propagate them are dishonest, only that their personal experience may not be representative of the economy as a whole. - [Biden’s State of the Union case for his quiet revolution]( Biden’s State of the Union case for his quiet revolution, E.J. Dionne Jr., The Washington Post A GOP celebration of a mass-killing machine on the House floor is on-brand for a nihilistic party that prides deadly individualism over problem-solving. But that’s the point, isn’t it? The lapel pins — like those Christmas cards of their adorable blond kids armed to the teeth with high-powered weaponry or the right’s new love affair with the toxic fumes of gas stoves — are meant to “trigger the libs” and sustain a career arc that generates prime-time hits on Fox News and fund-raising emails without ever having to get anything done. Yes, you could argue this column, then, is a perfect example of what these cons want. But what a choice: playing along, or remaining silent while America sheds the skin of humanity. - [The gaping hole in the New York Times' NCAA story: Race]( The gaping hole in the New York Times' NCAA story: Race, Jonathan Weiler, Jonathan’s Quality Kvetching Newsletter A Glaring Omission The New York Times Sunday Magazine featured a long article this weekend about the transformation of college sports now that college athletes are allowed to earn money off their name, image and likeness (NIL). In particular, the Times warns of potentially troubling unintended consequences as a result of this change, which I’ll get to in a moment or two. To back up, following years of litigation against and dogged resistance by the NCAA, the latter rather suddenly relented in July 2021, after a Supreme Court ruling a few weeks earlier on a separate NCAA matter convinced the Association that it could no longer deny athletes their NIL rights. In the subsequent eighteen months, many nervous insiders and observers have been rueing the emergence of a money besotted Wild West. While the NCAA scrambles to create guidelines to help college athletics departments navigate this new terrain, an unruly and unsettling bidding war has ensued for high profile athletes, especially in football and men’s basketball. … The article notes that, historically, the high revenue generating sports at UNC and elsewhere - football and men’s college basketball - have helped subsidize the scholarships and other expenses on which programs like tennis, field hockey, golf, gymnastics and lacrosse typically rely. But, as I referred to above, it omits any mention of race in this account. In fact, those sports like tennis and golf are overwhelmingly populated by White athletes. And typically, the athletes good enough to play those varsity sports at places like UNC come from affluent families. Therefore, there has long been a stark fact about the nature of wealth transfer in college athletics. As a National Bureau of Economics Research Paper put it a couple of years ago, before the NIL era began - and as countless other analyses have found - “[t}he National Collegiate Athletic Association’s long-standing policy prohibiting profit-sharing with college athletes effectively allows wealthy White students to profit off the labor of poor Black ones.” - [Bad news: Daily Kos revenue is down, and we might not be able to do all we do. Good news: You are a big part of the solution, and small donors have never let us down. Donate $5 TODAY.]( - [The Institutional Arsonist Turns on His Own Party]( The Institutional Arsonist Turns on His Own Party, Peter Wehner, The Atlantic When we talk about optimism, it’s often easy to oversimplify it as having a relentlessly upbeat outlook. Optimists, we imagine, spend their time gazing at the bright side of life through rose-colored glasses, sipping glasses half-full of good cheer. But the science suggests that optimism is best understood not as an unchanging attitude but as a pattern of responses — which taken together dictate how we view our prospects. Being optimistic is more complicated than blithely thinking, “Everything will turn out fine.” Optimism and pessimism, it turns out, are all about the stories we tell ourselves after both our successes and our failures. ICYMI: Popular stories from the past week you won't want to miss: - [Donald Trump goes full unhinged TERF in four-minute video posted to Truth Social]( - [Satanic Temple opens telehealth abortion clinic and names it after Samuel Alito's mom]( - [Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene's committee debut was exactly as disgraceful as expected]( Want even more Daily Kos? Check out our podcasts: - [The Brief: A one-hour weekly political conversation hosted by Markos Moulitsas and Kerry Eleveld]( - [The Downballot: Daily Kos' podcast devoted to downballot elections. 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