Month: March 2016

How many will vote for him anyway?

by digby

Huffington Post has a new poll out. Lordy:

Half of America believes Donald Trump’s campaign exhibits fascist undertones, with only 30 percent disagreeing, according to a new HuffPost/YouGov poll. The sentiment isn’t contained to Democrats, who unsurprisingly are willing to agree with a negative statement about their political rivals. Forty-five percent of independents also say Trump’s campaign has echoes of fascism, as do a full 28 percent of Republicans.

About half the country believes Trump encourages violence at his campaign events, with just 34 percent saying he doesn’t. The rest aren’t sure. Meanwhile, 27 percent of Republicans say it’s acceptable to “rough up” protesters at political events…

Two-thirds say there’s more violence at Trump’s events than at those for other candidates, with 62 percent saying the clashes are part of a broader pattern rather than isolated incidents.

That’s not to say that people like protesters:

The data indicates that people generally consider protesters and the media to be most responsible for the uptick in violence, even if they also agree that Trump fans the flames. Fifty-four percent say protesters shoulder “a lot” of the blame, 41 percent say Trump’s supporters do and 47 percent say Trump himself does.

Only 23 percent of Republicans, though, say Trump is largely responsible, with barely one-quarter believing that he encourages violence.

Republicans place even less blame on Trump’s supporters, as just 18 percent say they bear a lot of responsibility. In contrast, half place that level of blame on “the mainstream media,” and 78 percent put that degree of fault on protesters.

While some of the GOP response is likely due to rallying around the party’s front-runner, Republicans are also less amenable toward protesting in general. They’re 20 points less likely than Democrats to say it’s acceptable for protesters to turn up at candidates’ rallies, and nearly twice as likely to say it’s all right for those protesters to be thrown out.

I’m sure they had a different opinion a few years back though, aren’t you?

These are the same people, after all, who applauded this directive to disrupt town halls nationwide back in 2009:

— Artificially Inflate Your Numbers: “Spread out in the hall and try to be in the front half. The objective is to put the Rep on the defensive with your questions and follow-up. The Rep should be made to feel that a majority, and if not, a significant portion of at least the audience, opposes the socialist agenda of Washington.”

— Be Disruptive Early And Often: “You need to rock-the-boat early in the Rep’s presentation, Watch for an opportunity to yell out and challenge the Rep’s statements early.”

— Try To “Rattle Him,” Not Have An Intelligent Debate: “The goal is to rattle him, get him off his prepared script and agenda. If he says something outrageous, stand up and shout out and sit right back down. Look for these opportunities before he even takes questions.”

Imagine that. Thousands of conservatives converged on town hall meetings to shut down speech and deny their representatives the ability to “have an intelligent debate.” And if you’ve forgotten how all those people got their instructions and information, there were many industry groups coordinating them, one of which was called “Conservatives for Patients Rights”, run by Rick Scott, at the time a disgraced hospital executive and now the governor of Florida.

This is not to say that Republicans were not genuinely upset that people might get affordable health care. The mere idea of it turned them into ravening beasts. For instance this famous exchange outside of a town hall in Columbus, Ohio, in which “protesters” harass and humiliate a man with Parkinson’s disease, screaming “no more handouts!”

Inside the halls, they shouted down their senators and representatives, laughed at people whose children had died for lack of health care and otherwise behaved like animals.

And they engaged in tactics far more intimidating than anything the Black Lives Matter protesters have done: some of them showed up to the town halls armed, at least one carrying a placard saying “it is time to water the tree of liberty!” (a reference to the Thomas Jefferson quote “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants”).

That practice has become much more common in recent years, being used against gun regulation groups like Moms Demand Action and at various Muslim gatherings and well as the armed “protests” like the Bundy standoff and the recent events in Oregon.

And there is that small matter of decades of right-wing harassment and violence at abortion clinics. Just three months ago a right wing anti-abortion terrorist killed three people in Colorado Springs.

Let’s just say that Republicans have a lot of nerve complaining about protesters. Or fascism.

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“Get a job!” 

by digby

Am I the only one who finds it curious that Trump’s alleged populist appeal to the working class who’ve been screwed by the man includes this line to protesters?

“Go home and get a job. Go home. Get a job. Get a job!” Trump said

And outside the rallies, you’ll hear his supporters chanting the same thing:

And here I thought all these people were poor unemployed manufacturing workers struggling to get by.  Does it make sense that such people would be yelling “get a job” to Trump protesters if they were motivated by a bad job market? Hmmmm.

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Kevin McCarthy really is a moron

by digby

You already knew that, of course. But this confirms that he’s even more stupid than you thought:

On a quiet February morning, before most lawmakers had returned from recess, House majority leader Kevin McCarthy gathered a handful of reporters in his Capitol Hill office. He was in a good mood, bantering about the prior week’s spell of snow, his posture relaxed. A few minutes later, his shoulders stiffened. A reporter, breaking the chain of questions on House budget negotiations and the upcoming legislative calendar, had asked: “Is Donald Trump conservative?”

McCarthy repeated the question. “Is Donald Trump conservative?”

“Yes. Is he a conservative?”

The majority leader twisted his wedding band. “I think he is a conservative. He’s a Republican.”

The reporter pressed. “You only have to be a Republican to be a conservative?” “He identifies himself as a Republican,” McCarthy said. “He’s been in the business world, I’ve seen his actions that he’s taken. . . . Maybe on his television show he’s made conservative decisions, too. But I take him as a conservative.” He moved on to the next question.

At the time McCarthy spoke, tip-toeing around the elephant in the room may have seemed harmless or even prudent. But in the month since, as Trump has marched ever closer to the nomination despite his refusal to disavow the KKK and the violent atmosphere at his rallies, he’s sparked a full-blown backlash from grassroots activists in the #NeverTrump movement and from establishment heavyweights such as Mitt Romney.

Those anti-Trump forces are now expressing frustration that they’ve been met with a wall of silence — or worse, a rationalization of Trump’s candidacy — from Capitol Hill. They say lawmakers have willfully turned a blind eye to the long-term wreckage Trump could inflict on the GOP, concerning themselves only with the short-term costs of alienating his supporters in an election year. McCarthy and other top lawmakers suddenly find themselves at odds with prominent party elders such as Romney. So it is that McCarthy and other top lawmakers suddenly find themselves at odds with prominent party elders such as Romney.

The chasm widened on Thursday when McCarthy touted the benefits of Trump’s candidacy at a Public Policy Institute event in Sacramento. As the Sacramento Bee reported, the majority leader argued that Trump has inspired a slew of intensely motivated new Republican voters to turn out and that those voters would ultimately help GOP incumbents down-ballot.

Trump endorsed the sentiment via Twitter. “Thank you Kevin,” he wrote. “With unification of the party, Republican wins will be massive!”

McCarthy seems to have forgotten that his district in California has a whole lot of Hispanic voters who haven’t voted in the past. I suspect Trumpie might be just the motivator they’ve been waiting for.

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Crisis of confidence
by Tom Sullivan

The loss of confidence in this country for its institutions and distrust among citizens for each other has really reached toxic levels. Enter Donald Trump and supporters who seem bent on making the country great again by burning the place to the ground. But those levels of distrust are present now across party and ideological lines. In this primary season especially, everyone seems hypervigilant for the stab in the back from allies and quick to read the worst intentions into any statements or government actions. Not without some priming.

After Ronald Reagan declared that government is the problem, his fans worked assiduously at proving it. With success. For thirty years or more, Republicans have worked at undermining confidence in American elections by promoting the idea that widespread fraud is at work undetected. Since 1982, the RNC has been under a consent decree prohibiting it from implementing its own voter fraud prevention measures — or voter suppression, if you see them through jaundiced eyes. In 2012, the last time (of which I am aware) that the Republican Party tried to get the 1982 consent decree voided, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit essentially laughed them out of court. Again. So they have turned after years of such rejection to state legislatures to accomplish the same thing through voter ID. Through relentless propagandizing, they convinced a large swath of the country that the threat from the elusive zombie voter is real and justifies such restrictive measures.

On Tuesday, there were some lines at the polls here in North Carolina and other issues with the new voter ID law. It will be worse in November.

In a story on America’s longing for something lost, the Washington Post cites New Hampshire students’ reactions to the primary and debates. A 19 year-old Bernie Sanders volunteer commented on the perception of corruption and mistrust:

“If you look at Republicans or Democrats, you are looking at 10 years of things people don’t trust,” Brown said. “Before, we could trust our government, but then we had the NSA wiretapping, and while the world is getting bigger, our politics are getting so much smaller and more corrupt.”

That perception is nonpartisan. After brisk turnout caused an early voting site here to run out of Democratic sample ballots, locals took to radio and social media to speculate that it was because the fix was in somehow. Against somebody. By someone. On Primary Day, the slightest problem set off alarm bells. There were problems, but now people are seeing random errors as evidence of dark conspiracies.

I mentioned to an out-of-state volunteer that the conspiracy meme seemed to be spreading and was itself becoming itself an issue. The Board of Elections was excellent and doing its best under the state’s confusing new rules. By the way, I bragged, with John McCain up by 3,000 votes in North Carolina on Election Night 2008, our county had delivered the final 17,000 votes that put Obama over the top and turned the state blue. We were late reporting because a data transfer glitch had delayed uploading the votes to Raleigh.

The young woman sitting nearby looked up and made air quotes, “Right. ‘Glitch’.”

Head : desk.

Friday Night Soother

by digby

A couple of adorable Democrats!

Evelyn and Abigail Wool guest paging in the Alaska State Capitol.

Get ’em started early …

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Not a dime’s worth of difference?

by digby

There are many differences between the parties but this one may be the most important:

[B]illionaire Tom Steyer told me in an interview that he plans to spend more money pushing the issue in this year’s elections than he did in 2014, when he spent at least $70 million.

But Steyer also acknowledged that he faces a problem: A lot of voters don’t appear to be aware that one party favors action on climate, particularly transitioning to clean energy, and the other mostly doesn’t.

Steyer’s group, NextGen Climate Action, recently commissioned a poll of likely 2016 voters in Ohio — a crucial swing state in the industrial Midwest, where climate policy is often said to be a tough sell — to gauge attitudes towards climate change and clean energy in advance of the 2016 elections. Steyer has been calling on the presidential candidates to pledge to support his goal of generating half of the country’s electricity from clean-energy or non-carbon sources by 2030, and 100 percent of it by 2050.

The poll tested this proposal in the following way:

Which of the two political parties do you think would support this proposal to power America with 50 percent clean energy by 2030 and 100 percent clean energy by 2050?

Democrats 47

Republicans 10

Both 20

Neither 9

Don’t know 14

More than half of respondents either think Republicans would be inclined to support this general goal or don’t know either way. More than half don’t know — and only 47 percent do know — that Democrats are substantially more committed to this goal than Republicans are. (As for Steyer’s specific pledge, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders have signed it; no GOP candidates have).

“They don’t recognize that Republicans are opposed to a transition to clean energy,” Steyer tells me, speaking of voters. “That is an amazing fact.”

This hints at a broader problem that Steyer and others may face: A lot of voters may not know that there is a dramatic asymmetry between the two parties on climate and energy issues. Democratic lawmakers and candidates overwhelmingly acknowledge the science and favor specific action to do something about it. Republican lawmakers and candidates overwhelmingly either deny the science, act noncommittal about it (what I’ve called “Climate Non-Committalism“), or acknowledge the science but are evasive as to what specific actions they could support to address the problem.

Steyer’s new poll also found that in Ohio, very large majorities support transitioning to 50 percent clean energy by 2030. (The poll’s wording is generous to the proposal, but it mirrors other polls that have found national majorities support prioritizing the development of alternative energy sources.) However, Democrats and climate activists have struggled to make the issue into one that actually influences votes.

I realize the Democratic Party is second only to Satan in its commitment to the destruction of everything we hold dear. But it is still better than Satan, at least on this. Even the allegedly mainstream Republicans like Marco Rubio refuse to believe that humans contribute to climate change and even if they do there’s no point in doing anything because people in other countries won’t do anything. (The call this “leadership.”)

And here’s what the new leader of the Republican establishment, Ted Cruz, has to say about it:

“Climate change is not science. It’s religion.”

“If you’re a big-government politician, if you want more power, climate change is the perfect pseudo-scientific theory … because it can never, ever, ever be disproven.”

“the global warming alarmists are the equivalent of flat-Earthers.”

Here’s Trump:

“And actually, we’ve had times where the weather wasn’t working out, so they changed it to extreme weather, and they have all different names, you know, so that it fits the bill. But the problem we have, and if you look at our energy costs, and all of the things that we’re doing to solve a problem that I don’t think in any major fashion exists. I mean, Obama thinks it’s the number one problem of the world today. And I think it’s very low on the list. So I am not a believer, and I will, unless somebody can prove something to me, I believe there’s weather. I believe there’s change, and I believe it goes up and it goes down, and it goes up again. And it changes depending on years and centuries, but I am not a believer, and we have much bigger problems.”

He’s not alone.

For a while Americans had bizarrely stopped worrying about it, but are now reaching their earlier levels of concerns. It seems to shift for inexplicable reasons.

But Republicans are still cretins:

In March, 40 percent of Republicans said they worry a great deal or fair amount about global warming, up from 31 percent last year. Independents expressing concern increased nine points, from 55 percent to 64 percent. Democrats’ concern is up slightly less — four points — and is now at 84 percent.

The vast majority of Democrats consistently believe the science.  Others do not. This is a problem. And it’s worth taking into consideration when you condemn both parties equally. The Democrats aren’t that great but right now they are our only hope if we want to save the planet.

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The clumsiest grifter on the planet

by digby

That would be Dr. Ben Carson, who pretty much admitted that Trump bought his endorsement with the promise of a position in the administration:

Carson said in a Monday interview with Newsmax that after weighing his options, endorsing Trump made the most “practical” sense.

“I have to look at what is practical,” Carson told host Steve Malzberg. “I didn’t see a path for Kasich, who I liked, or for Rubio, who I liked. As far as Cruz is concerned, I don’t think that he’s going to be able to draw independents and Democrats unless he has some kind of miraculous change.”

He continued: “Is there another scenario that I would have preferred? Yes. But that scenario isn’t available.”

Malzberg asked if he was referring to a scenario that involved another candidate, to which Carson answered, “Yeah.”

Later in the interview, Carson implied Trump had promised him a role in his administration.

“[Trump] will surround himself with very good people,” the retired neurosurgeon said.

“And will one of them be Dr. Ben Carson?” Malzberg asked.

“I will be doing things as well, yeah,” Carson responded.

When pressed whether the role would be “in the administration,” Carson said it would be “certainly in an advisory capacity.”

“That’s been determined? When you sat down with him that was discussed?” Malzberg asked.

“Yes,” Carson said. When the host asked whether he was offered a Cabinet role, Carson said the details are still “very liquid” and declined to offer specifics.

Yep, that crack-up we’ve been hearing about for so long has arrived

by digby

Grab a cool drink and settle in for a rolicking read from Richard Viguerie’s Conservative HQ.  This is getting so, so good:

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The will of the people is communism. Or something.

by digby

So Erik Erickson has been collaborating with other conservatives to find a way to bring down Trump. It’s not going all that well. Today he shared some emails from his former fans in a piece called “The Will of the People is Crap”:

Let me show you a few emails from people I’ve gotten in the past few days.

I used to take your message as gospel. however, you have ignored the will of the people and have spoken against trump in your unbiased reporting. please understand that you are dividing the people. please look at the positives. we are tired of the same ole rhetoric. we need a business man to balance the budget and create jobs. please be more impartial.

Then this.

Hearing of Eric Ericsson’s “closed doors” meeting to decide how to defeat DonaldTrump and invalidate the voting public’s right to elect their leadership by trying to figure out how to accomplish THE MACHINE’s goals, of which you are all too clearly a member…….bitterly disappointed.

Do not underestimate the will and power of the people……we are not a figurehead Communist country where we “vote” just to make us feel powerful but the leaders are chosen without public input. You are signing a death warrant to your validity and integrity as a news reporting agency…….and that is just the tip of the iceberg.

Then there is this one.

As a staunch conservative I am deeply angered by your absolute arrogance. You seem to think that you get to override the will of the people and that you can decide the outcome of the republican convention. By the way, I’m not an advocate for Trump. Other candidates were definitely my preference. But for you to think that you know better then the people and to disregard the votes of the Americans to impose your will on us. You have some nerve. People like you are the problem.

And there is this one.

I was a tea party advocate and I support Trump. How dare you and others support disenfranchising my vote and others because you don’t like him or want him!!!!!!!!!!!. It is up to the people who vote, not your establishment lobbyists, leaders or anyone else who thinks it is okay to cheat and disenfranchise the voters. Mind your business, and let the American people have the say.

You are making a fool of yourself. If you guys go through with this, I will dump this Republican party and either become an Independent or never vote for a Republican again. Trump and Cruz stands corrected! People will revolt. Go move to North Korea, a communist country where the people can’t vote, since you align yourself with that way of thinking.

Last one:

Are you not listening to the people? Please spend your time and energy on something worthwhile. Why would you try to stop something the American people clearly want. Does our vote mean nothing? You have no right to try and stop any candidate who the people of this great country are voting for. If you continue with your little charade you are making a mockery of our right to vote and elect to office who we want, not who you and your friends think should be elected.

He goes on to explain that “the will of the people gave us Barack Obama — a President many of these people think is illegitimate” which he seems to believe is a real put-away shot.

And then he spells it all out:

The will of the people is just a polite way of saying the collective, which is the authoritarian, socialist destiny of this nation if Donald Trump is elected.

Erickson does represent the party that has concocted a massive vote suppression scheme and even went so far as to impeach a president for a trivial personal matter. They have protested than any Democratic president is, by definition, illegitimate since at least the 1980s. Let’s just say there’s no big surprise that he’s not a fan of democracy or America’s constitutional system. But I’ve never heard democracy called “the collective” before. That’s a new twist.

Trump is confusing the conservatives. They usually aren’t particularly troubled by their inconsistencies because they’re deploying them against the left in order to twist them into pretzels trying to argue with inane illogic. But this time they’re forced to make these arguments against each other. It will be very interesting to see how this plays out.

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Remember all those orchestrated Right Wing protests?

by digby

With all the talk among right wingers about “left wing fascism” I took a little trip down memory lane for Salon this morning:

The right-wing media is reluctantly coming to terms with Donald Trump. It’s been difficult for them, since he has no respect for their power and has treated them with the same contempt that conservatives usually treat the so-called liberal media. But they’re finally adapting to the inevitable. For instance, Bill O’Reilly had been something of a Trump skeptic but he’s made his peace with the candidate, explaining to his audience that one of Trump’s most important crowd-pleasing agenda items is not actually fascist:

(Note: It may not be a mark of fascism, but you will certainly recall the argument that other countries treating Germany unfairly was central to Adolph Hitler’s appeal. That didn’t end well.)

In fact, many conservatives are starting to make the transition to their usual “I know you are but what am I” brand of argument in defense of Trump. The following defense, leveled by Newt Gingrich earlier this week on “Hannity,” is a perfect example:

The actions Friday night clearly were left-wing fascism, I’m really saddened by Republicans who want to blame Trump. Donald Trump wasn’t the reason, as you point out — Condi Rice got cancelled, Ayan Hirsi Ali was canceled on campus. You have this entire movement of fascism which is saying, if you don’t agree with me I’m going to shut up your right to speak, I’m going to intimidate you, bully you. And they are terrified of Donald Trump because he seems to be strong enough and dynamic enough to take them head on.

But it is worse than that in the news media. You have on MSNBC for example, Rachel Maddow saying that for Donald Trump to go to Chicago, St. Louis, Cleveland, is provocative because of racial incidents that have occurred in those cities.

Imagine an American television person saying that a presidential candidate shouldn’t go to Chicago, Cleveland, or St. Louis. This is madness.

We have some obligation to say to the news media, you need to get off this Trump-bashing and report honestly. Not just in the presidential race, but on the campuses what is happening…

The sources of confusion and chaos are left-wing fascists who want to impose their way of life on us, they want to impose their values on us. Remember, the first really big test case was Scott Walker as Governor of Wisconsin, who had a key moment when he had thousands of people in the capitol… occupying the state capitol. They had lost the election fair and square, for governor, for state reps, for the senate, and their reaction was to take it to the streets and try to browbeat the governor.

I think if you see Trump win or Cruz win, if either one goes to Washington and brings real reform, you’re going to see these kinds of militants go out and do everything they can in the streets to try to stop what they’re losing at the ballot box.

Setting aside the obvious fact that the right  is working overtime all over the country to literally keep people from voting, conservative provocateurs like Gingrich jumping on a high horse is rich considering the mass primal scream that emanated from the Republicans upon the election of Barack Obama. As Salon’s Brendan Gautheir noted earlier this week, the stench of hypocrisy is overwhelming. These are the same people, after all, who applauded this directive to disrupt town halls nationwide back in 2009:

— Artificially Inflate Your Numbers: “Spread out in the hall and try to be in the front half. The objective is to put the Rep on the defensive with your questions and follow-up. The Rep should be made to feel that a majority, and if not, a significant portion of at least the audience, opposes the socialist agenda of Washington.”

— Be Disruptive Early And Often: “You need to rock-the-boat early in the Rep’s presentation, Watch for an opportunity to yell out and challenge the Rep’s statements early.”

— Try To “Rattle Him,” Not Have An Intelligent Debate: “The goal is to rattle him, get him off his prepared script and agenda. If he says something outrageous, stand up and shout out and sit right back down. Look for these opportunities before he even takes questions.”

Imagine that. Thousands of conservatives converged on town hall meetings to shut down speech and deny their representatives the ability to “have an intelligent debate.” And if you’ve forgotten how all those people got their instructions and information, there were many industry groups coordinating them, one of which was called “Conservatives for Patients Rights”, run by Rick Scott, at the time a disgraced hospital executive and now the governor of Florida.

This is not to say that Republicans were not genuinely upset that people might get affordable health care. The mere idea of it turned them into ravening beasts. For instance this famous exchange outside of a town hall in Columbus, Ohio, in which “protesters” harass and humiliate a man with Parkinson’s disease, screaming “no more handouts!”

Inside the halls, they shouted down their senators and representatives, laughed at people whose children had died for lack of health care and otherwise behaved like animals.

And they engaged in tactics far more intimidating than anything the Black Lives Matter protesters have done: some of them showed up to the town halls armed, at least one carrying a placard saying “it is time to water the tree of liberty!” (a reference to the Thomas Jefferson quote “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants”).

That practice has become much more common in recent years, being used against gun regulation groups like Moms Demand Action and at various Muslim gatherings and well as the armed “protests” like the Bundy standoff and the recent events in Oregon.

And there is that small matter of decades of right-wing harassment and violence at abortion clinics. Just three months ago a right wing anti-abortion terrorist killed three people in Colorado Springs.

Here’s how the perpetrator of that attack recently described his work:

“[They] were in a war zone.  They were there where the babies were being killed.  You go to a war zone.  That’s what happens,” said Dear. “In a war there’s gonna be casualties. Are you gonna name the hundred million babies that were killed, that nobody talks about, nobody represents them, they have no voice, but yet our Constitution says we have the right to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness?”

When asked about the children of Swasey, Markovsky, and Stewart – parents to two children, each – Dear said he would not say anything to them.

When asked if he had any guilt, Dear replied, “No! I don’t have any guilt! I am in a war!”

The right has a hell of nerve calling protesters at Donald Trump’s rallies “militants” when actual killers confidently spout conservative propaganda to justify their depraved acts.

Considering all that history, this right-wing meme that “left wing fascists” are shutting down free speech and causing violence is absurd. But unfortunately for those who have been peddling this ridiculous story, it was completely refuted by Donald Trump himself this week, when he said this to CNN:

“I think we will win before getting to the convention. But I can tell you, if we didn’t and if we’re 20 votes short or if we’re 100 short and we’re at 1,100 and somebody else is at 500 or 400 because we’re way ahead of everybody, I don’t think you can say that we don’t get it automatically, I think you would have riots. I think you would have riots.”

It’s highly doubtful that anyone but Republicans will be roaming the floor of the GOP convention, so if any riots break out even Newt Gingrich won’t be able to rationalize it as a liberal plot.

It should be obvious to anyone that “left wing fascists” really don’t care if the Republicans treat Donald Trump unfairly. If it happens will be led by the same right-wingers who are cheering wildly for Trump’s violent authoritarianism at his rallies. And they’ll have no one to blame but themselves.

I forgot to mention this one in the article:

The Brooks Brothers Riot:

Hundreds of paid GOP operatives descended upon South Florida to protest the state’s recounts, with at least half a dozen of the demonstrators at Miami-Dade paid by George W. Bush’s recount committee. Several of these protesters were identified as Republican staffers and a number later went on to jobs in the Bush administration.

The “Brooks Brothers” name reinforces the allegation that the protesters, in corporate attire, sporting “Hermès ties” were astroturfing, as opposed to local citizens concerned about counting practices.

The demonstration was organized by Republican operatives, sometimes referred to as the “Brooks Brothers Brigade”, to oppose the recount of 10,750 ballots during the Florida recount. The canvassers decided to move the counting process to a smaller room and restrict media access to 25 feet away while they continued. At this time, New York Rep. John Sweeney told an aide to “Shut it down.” The demonstration turned violent, and according to the NY Times, “several people were trampled, punched or kicked when protesters tried to rush the doors outside the office of the Miami-Dade supervisor of elections. Sheriff’s deputies restored order.” DNC aide Luis Rosero was kicked and punched. Within two hours after the riot died down, the canvassing board unanimously voted to shut down the count, in part due to perceptions that the process wasn’t open or fair, and in part because the court-mandated deadline was impossible to meet.

The controversial incident was set in motion by John E. Sweeney, a New York Republican who was nicknamed “Congressman Kick-Ass” by President Bush for his work in Florida. Sweeney defended his actions by arguing that his aim was not to stop the hand recount but to restore the process to public view. Some Bush supporters did acknowledge they hoped the recount would end. “We were trying to stop the recount; Bush had already won,” said Evilio Cepero, a reporter for WAQI, an influential Spanish talk radio station in Miami. “We were urging people to come downtown and support and protest this injustice.” A Republican lawyer commented, “People were pounding on the doors, but they had an absolute right to get in.” The protest prevented official observers and members of the press from getting in.

By the way, one of the orchestrators of that little operation was none other than Trump confidant Roger Stone.

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