Month: November 2020

For those keeping score, the Republican Party on Tuesday declared in a series of actions it has abandoned democracy. The announcement was not unexpected. Erstwhile George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum predicted in The Atlantic in January 2018, “If conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy.”

And in the fullness of time, it came to pass.*

Frum neglected to mention what they would substitute. American brownshirt supporters of Donald J. Trump brawling in the streets of the nation’s capitol on Saturday provides a dark glimpse.

A Pennsylvania judge on Tuesday had to school former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, attorney for the lame duck president, in the basics of law. Giuliani struggled to explain why his election fraud case was not alleging election fraud and why the judge should invalidate more than 6.8 million votes.

In Michigan, meanwhile, the Wayne County Canvassing Board (two Democrats, two Republicans) deadlocked along partisan lines on certifying the results in the predominantly Black county. The outgoing president, RNC chair Ronna McDaniel, White House Press Secretary Kaleigh McEnany, and a Trump campaign attorney among others celebrated the action as a huge win (over democracy).

Not only is Jenna Ellis wrong about the particulars of this, it's worth noting the utter disregard of democracy and pure will to power here. There's not even a pretext of moral justification. https://t.co/u45pTyHW6O

— David Atkins (@DavidOAtkins) November 18, 2020

Appearing on CNN AC360 with Anderson Cooper, Election Law Blog’s Rick Hasen declared Giuliani’s performance “an embarrassment.” Hasen added, “That was probably the worst lawyering I’ve heard in an election law case in my life.” He predicted the Republican blocking of vote certification in Wayne County would not stand.

Indeed, about the time Hasen appeared on CNN, under tremendous public pressure (including a walk through one Republican board member’s Facebook posts) the board voted a second time to certify the results. This time unanimously. The Detroit News reported the board asked “the Secretary of State’s office conduct a “comprehensive audit” of precincts with unexplained out-of-balance tallies.” No fraud alleged.

BREAKING: The Wayne County Board of Canvassers has just unanimously voted to certify the results of the election & called on Michigan SOS Jocelyn Benson to conduct an audit of the unexplained precincts in Wayne County that did not match.

— Adam Brewster (@adam_brew) November 18, 2020

The pressure on the GOP needs to keep up, Hasen tweeted, “because Trump by not conceding and his enablers like Lindsay Graham are feeding into this very dangerous bullshit in an attempt to disenfranchise voters. The reason it doesn’t work is because enough people are vigilant (Not panicked).”

In a less-conspicuous story, the Arizona Republican Party asked a judge to delay certification of election results in Maricopa County until the judge rules on the GOP demand for a (second?) hand-count of ballots:

The GOP made the request Monday night after the county revealed officials planned to approve the returns on Thursday or Friday.

A judge is scheduled to hear arguments in the lawsuit Wednesday afternoon. The county faces a Nov. 23 deadline for certifying its results.

The lawsuit focuses on an audit of a sampling of ballots that is required to test the accuracy of tabulated results. The county has already completed the audit and said no discrepancies were found.

Not content to attempt sabotaging election results, the outgoing president fired cybersecurity chief Chris Krebs on Tuesday via Twitter:

…votes from Trump to Biden, late voting, and many more. Therefore, effective immediately, Chris Krebs has been terminated as Director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 18, 2020

Krebs had declared the 2020 election “the most secure election in American history.” He added there “is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.” Trump was not having any of it. (He lost.)

The New York Times reports:

The firing stirred an immediate backlash in the national security community and on Capitol Hill.

“Of all the things this president has done, this is the worst,” said Senator Angus King, independent of Maine, who led a commission on improving cyberdefenses. “To strike at the heart of the democratic system is beyond anything we have seen from any politician.”

He said Mr. Krebs was one of the most competent people he had met in the government. “In this administration, the surest way to get fired is to do your job,” Mr. King said.

Through its collective Tuesday actions, Republicans validated Frum’s concerns. In the same way Bush White House counsel Alberto Gonzales declared Geneva Convention limitations on prisoner treatment “quaint,” the Republican Party has forsaken its commitment to government deriving its “just powers from the consent of the governed.”

“To put it simply, we are headed for an era in which America may well have a Democratic Party and an Anti-democratic Party.” — Jeremy D. Rosner (12/23/18), former Special Adviser to Pres. Clinton and senior staff member National Security Council

“To put it simply, we are headed for an era in which America may well have a Democratic Party and an Anti-democratic Party,” wrote Jeremy D. Rosner, former Special Adviser to Pres. Clinton and senior staff member National Security Council.

Responding Tuesday to the Wayne County events, Marcy Wheeler (emptywheel) recalled how she canvassed in Jackson, Michigan for Barack Obama in 2008. She visited the stone marking the founding there of the Republican Party as an anti-slavery party.

The Republican Party of the state that claims to have founded an anti-slavery party today applauded the effort to not count the votes of an entire city of black people, just because. The entire party is cheering this!!

— emptywheel (@emptywheel) November 18, 2020

*A Twitter user suggests Frum was wrong in part: “they’ve abandoned democracy AND conservatism. All the principles are gone. It’s all just power and grift now.”

This piece by Sean Trende gave me hope about the Georgia races. It really is doable:

Control of the Senate is going to come down to two Jan. 5 runoffs in Georgia. Sen. David Perdue came a hair’s breadth from winning his race against Jon Ossoff outright, but ultimately fell just short of 50% plus one. Sen. Kelly Loeffler will face off against the Rev. Raphael Warnock to complete the term of former Sen. Johnny Isakson (the reward for the winner is running again in two years for the full term). 

Somewhat surprisingly, articles discussing these races have framed the races to claim that Republicans are favored in both. Politico declares that Democrats begin behind the eight ball, while other pieces casually cast Republicans as “likely” or “probable” victors in the Peach State.

I’m not sure that is correct, and would view these races as pure tossups from the start. Here are six reasons why.

1. Biden just barely won the state, and it may not revert to “factory settings.” Any analysis of the Georgia runoffs needs to start with this observation: Joe Biden just won the state. There are obviously enough votes today for a Democrat to win a Senate seat (something that hasn’t been true for two decades). One would think that fact would dominate analysis of these races: All Democrats have to do is turn out their own voters one last time.

Why would analysts overlook this? There is likely a sense that Donald Trump is an aberration, and that the parties will revert to their pre-Trump orientation once he exits the stage. Even if we make the seemingly gratuitous assumption that Trump will have quietly left the stage by January, this overlooks the fact that the changes we’ve seen under his administration are the culmination of trends within the parties dating back over a decade. As I wrote in 2012:

“While I find it highly unlikely that [Rick Santorum will] be the nominee this time out, there’s a good chance that the Republican coalition will fundamentally change in the next 20 years and move toward Santorum’s style of politics. Twice in a row now, the party has toyed with nominating a candidate who combined social conservatism with economic populism; Santorum’s speech last night was essentially a northern version of a speech Mike Huckabee could have delivered in 2008.

“We’ve already seen white working-class voters move toward the Republican Party over the past several decades — a shift perhaps epitomized by the GOP’s special election victory in New York’s 9th Congressional District. If a more credible Santorum/Huckabee candidate could emerge, the party would reciprocate by moving toward these voters. This would have major implications for our political dynamic, and could deal the Democrats a serious blow in states like Pennsylvania and Ohio.

“On the other hand, the Democrats have been moving toward a top-bottom coalition of ‘New Economy’ professionals and minority voters. A Santorum/Huckabee-esque Republican Party would probably hasten the exit of upscale suburbanites from the Republican coalition, and potentially reinvigorate the New Democrat approach to governing that dominated the party’s politics in the ’90s.”

There may be some mean reversion for Democrats among whites with a college degree in the post-Trump GOP, but it is unlikely that it will be a complete backslide. Of course, American politics can’t be explained entirely by white educational attainment. Race, religion, and religiosity all play roles in explaining vote patterns. But given Atlanta’s emergence as a major “knowledge economy” hub, it is difficult to dismiss these changes.

In short, these voters might be Democrats now, in the same way that voters in Northern Virginia are now Democratic. This also will complicate efforts by Republicans to warn against giving Joe Biden a blank check with a Democratic Senate; these voters might be okay with him having one for now.

2. The Democrats’ coalition is different than those in previous runoffs. Part of what fuels media skepticism about Democrats’ chances in these races is the outcome of previous runoff elections, where Democrats have made the postseason in good condition, only to lose in the end.  The most prominent example of this is the Georgia race between Democrat Wyche Fowler and Republican Paul Coverdell in 1992, where Fowler (like Perdue) almost cleared 50% on Election Day, but fell short in the final count. In 2008, Jim Martin forced a runoff with Saxby Chambliss after keeping the race within three percentage points in November; Chambliss won the runoff by 15.

But this might tell us more about the nature of the parties’ old coalitions than anything else. Runoff elections are typically low-turnout events, and when the Democratic coalition in Georgia consisted largely of whites without college degrees and blacks, they were placed at a disadvantage in an election where high-propensity voters dominated.

As the previous point emphasized, that might not be the case anymore. Republicans may find their turnout efforts hamstrung if whites with college degrees in metro Atlanta turn out in force – as they have in past runoffs – but instead vote Democratic this time.

3. Trump voters may be dispirited.  On top of this, there is likely still something of a difference between a “Trump voter” and a “Republican voter.” In many ways this is similar to a struggle that Democrats faced in the late aughts and early ’10s – there was a small difference between an Obama voter and a Democrat, and that caused them headaches throughout his administration. It probably contributed to the drop in Democratic performance in the 2008 runoff.

This time, voters who backed the president because of who he is seem unlikely to turn out in droves for Loeffler and Perdue. In fact, these voters might be disenchanted by the Republican Party’s failure to go all-in on the president’s claims of voter fraud and a stolen election. State election officials, all of whom are Republican, are compelled to admit that there is little evidence of fraud in the state, which runs contrary to the president’s claims. The senators don’t have a lot of room for slippage, so any tension between the state’s message and the president’s message risks being interpreted as establishment Republicans once again being insufficiently dedicated to the president’s success.  Relatedly …

4. Trump might go nuclear on Republicans. I find this less likely than I did on Election Day, but there is still a chance that the president may decide to take out some of his anger on Republicans for not supporting him enough in his legal battles. Since I suspect, at least at this point, that Trump will want to run again in 2024, he probably doesn’t want to antagonize rank-and-file Republicans any more than he has too, and at the very least would want to return to office with as many Republicans as possible in the Congress. Still, Trump is nothing if not unpredictable, so the chance remains.

5. Warnock and Ossoff complement each other. Had only Warnock or Ossoff advanced to the runoff, I would probably view the election differently. As it stands, with both of them advancing and able to motivate different portions of the Democratic coalition, they likely enhance the others’ chances. Ossoff’s appeal is rooted in the new, upscale Democratic coalition; he may serve to keep these voters in the Democratic fold.

On the other hand, Democrats’ runoff problems have often been a function of a lack of black enthusiasm. That seems unlikely to be the case this time. Warnock is now close to becoming the first African American senator from Georgia, and his stewardship of Martin Luther King’s A.M.E. church will doubtless be played up in the runoff. Combined, the two of them work hand-in-glove against the traditional decline in Democratic turnout in runoffs in a way that very few other candidates would.

6. Loeffler and Perdue aren’t great candidates. On top of all this, Perdue is a senator who had never before held office and who struggled to win election in what was then still a red state amid a Republican mini-wave. Loeffler is an appointee. Neither has the natural political chops that are developed after years of winning lower profile state representative and congressional races.  They’ve struggled with message discipline and poor choices, and again, they don’t have much room for error.

This isn’t to say that Democrats are the favorites, either. They also have no room for slippage; whites with college degrees may return to the Republican fold; and Democrats may have experienced the defeat of Trump as a cathartic event. Warnock in particular has baggage as a candidate. But the actual evidence that Republicans start out as favorites seems lacking, and we shouldn’t be at all surprised if Democrats win one or both of these races.

I am especially reassured by the idea that Warnock and Ossoff make a particularly good team in terms of turnout. I hadn’t thought about that but it makes sense.

I don’t know what will happen. But I’m hopeful.

Oh, and by the way, the Republicans down there are in a civil war — with each other.

There is no worse time for Georgia Republicans to be engulfed in a civil war. Their presidential candidate just narrowly lost the state, which has long been a conservative safe space, while two competitive runoff races are looming in January that could determine control of the U.S. Senate — and the direction of the country for the first part of this decade.

And yet the war has come, full of double-crossing, internecine accusations of lying and incompetence, and a bitter cleavage into factions over the question of how much fealty should be shown to President Trump — and the extent to which Republicans should amplify his false argument that the election in this fast-changing Southern state was stolen from him.

Republicans in Georgia and elsewhere are now faced with a stark choice. They can stick by Mr. Trump and his rash claims of fraud, and risk alienating moderate voters who may have had their fill of Trumpism — including the thousands who helped turn Georgia blue this month. Or they can break with Mr. Trump, invite his wrath and risk throwing the political equivalent of a wet blanket on conservative turnout for the Senate runoffs in January.

The longer Trump continues this nonsense the less time they have to regroup. In that sense he’s doing the Democrats a favor. Too bad about the damage to democracy but he’s been doing that on a daily basis since the day he came down that escalator anyway so maybe we can hold on for a few more weeks and at least take the gavel away from Mitch McConnell. Nobody has done more than him to destroy our nation.

The Uniquely American Solution for Americans Who Won’t Wear Masks!

Are you tired of arguing with people who won’t wear a mask?

The people at Sufficiently Advanced know you can’t fix stupid, so they created the Mask Launcher!

Simply point and shoot!

Makes a great gift for people who live in states where people don’t take personal responsibility for their role in spreading COVID-19. 

Act now to use it at DOOR BUSTER SALES!

 

This product is not available in any stores. You can’t buy it, but if you want to make your own here’s the build video from Allen Pan – Sufficiently Advanced  @AnyTechnology

#MASKUP

Look, I’ve written the serious reasons to wear masks, why enforcement needs to come from public health because of the issues with police who don’t apply the law equality.

I talked about how to get corporations on board Want To Reopen Retail? Everyone Must Wear Masks and how to make Trump pay for his superspreader rallies. But they are ignored by the target audience, so why not go over the top? 

This humorous solution got 3 million views when it first came out. Maybe we don’t need a working mask launcher just a prop one to point at non-mask wearers, especially the aggressive anti-maskers. Will they freak out? Sure, they love to freak out and play the victim, even when they are the ones who could infecting others.  

When they squawk we use the same logic as the guns everywhere people.  
“It’s for defensive use! I’m just trying to protect myself! You didn’t have on a mask and were coming right at me! I feared for my life! Walmart says I’m legally allowed to carry in their store, so I will!”

I don’t like confrontation. I also don’t like death by COVID. 

Yesterday, Ted Cruz scolded Sherrod Brown for asking that Alaska Senator Dan Sullivan wear a mask while he’s presiding over the Senate. He called it “virtue signaling” which is a common slam against people who wear masks and otherwise try to follow the guidelines:

Here’s some “vice signaling”:

Four New York sheriffs say they will not enforce Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s (D) restrictions on Thanksgiving gatherings, with one saying he “couldn’t in good faith attempt to defend it.”

Sheriffs from Erie, Fulton, Saratoga and Washington counties have come forward saying they will not enforce rules released last week by Cuomo that limit indoor gatherings to 10 people, including for the holidays.

“With regard to the Thanksgiving Executive Order, the Fulton County Sheriff’s Office will NOT be enforcing it against our County residents. Frankly, I am not sure it could sustain a Constitutional challenge in Court for several reasons including your house is your castle. And as a Sheriff with a law degree I couldn’t in good faith attempt to defend it [in] Court, so I won’t,” wrote Richard Giardino on the Fulton County Sheriff’s Office Facebook page.

Erie County Sheriff Timothy B. Howard, meanwhile, wrote, “I have no plans to utilize my office’s resources or Deputies to break up the great tradition of Thanksgiving dinner.”

In his statement, Howard said his office is respecting the “sanctity of your home” and encouraged people to “follow your heart and act responsibly.”

Sheriffs Michael Zurlo of Saratoga County and Jeff Murphy of Washington County both made similar statements, saying what happens inside people’s homes is beyond their jurisdiction

The restrictions fall in line with recommendations that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has made in regard to the holiday season. In a new report, the CDC said that gatherings would be best if they were limited to only those within a person’s immediate household, even excluding college students returning home from school.

These sheriffs are not the only public officials to publicly go against Cuomo’s orders. In a tweet, Joe Borelli, a Republican Staten Island council member, said he planned on having more than 10 people at his Thanksgiving celebration.

They did not have to come forward and make a statement about this. They could have just told their forces to concentrate on public gatherings and not to cite anyone without coming out and making a big deal of it. They did this as a truly policial act as government actors defying the guidelines to perform for their right wing followers.

People are dying. They don’t care.

Carol Moseley-Braun, the first African American woman to be elected to the Senate, used to tell the story of getting into the elevator with Jesse Helms and he started singing “I wish I was in the land of cotton…” turned to Senator Orris Hatch who was standing next to him and said, “I’m going to make her cry. I’m going to sing ‘Dixie’ until she cries.” He was a lovely fellow.

That picture above, and all it represents, has always reminded me of that story and what it says about the Republican party.

Jennifer Rubin at the Washington Post writes about the latest Lindsey Graham scandal:

The Post reports on an interview with Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who said he spoke on Friday to Senate Judiciary Chairman Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.):In their conversation, Graham questioned Raffensperger about the state’s signature-matching law and whether political bias could have prompted poll workers to accept ballots with nonmatching signatures, according to Raffensperger. Graham also asked whether Raffensperger had the power to toss all mail ballots in counties found to have higher rates of nonmatching signatures, Raffensperger said.Raffensperger said he was stunned that Graham appeared to suggest that he find a way to toss legally cast ballots. Absent court intervention, Raffensperger doesn’t have the power to do what Graham suggested, as counties administer elections in Georgia.“It sure looked like he was wanting to go down that road,” Raffensperger said.

Graham denied to The Post that he encouraged Raffensperger to discard ballots, saying he was only investigating signature-matching rules. That raises the question why he would need to know this information and decide directly to contact Raffensperger, who is under death threats and has been subject to baseless accusations of misconduct by fellow Republicans.

But there’s more:

Raffensperger told The Wall Street Journal that there were witnesses on the call who could contradict Graham. And:

Mr. Raffensperger said that when he was contacted by Mr. Graham Friday, he thought the senator was calling about the state’s two senate races. After an initial conversation, Mr. Graham called back again and brought up the idea of invalidating absentee ballots from counties with higher rates of signature errors, Mr. Raffensperger said, adding that he had staffers with him on that call.

Mr. Raffensperger and his staffers agreed not to act on any of Mr. Graham’s suggestions, he said. “We have laws in place,” he said.

Graham told CNN that he is involved in this because “the future of the country depends upon it.” He also said that he called the Secretary of State of Nevada and Arizona which would be odd if he were just inquiring about the rules for the Georgia run-off. It is clear that he is seriously trying find ways to overturn the presidential election results.

Rubin suggests that there must be an investigation, possibly criminal, about what Graham is up to here. I will be very surprised if that happens. But it should.

Graham has been radicalized by Trumpism on a level that’s almost insane. He can’t possibly truly believe that they can pull this off. Or at least the formerly canny politician Lindsey Graham couldn’t possibly believe that. And a formerly canny politician trying curry favor with a defeated Trump after having just won six more years makes no sense.

I think he has decided that he will now be “that guy” in the Senate, a Jesse Helms or Strom Thurmond, for the modern era. He has learned from Trump that being the biggest asshole on TV will keep you in the spotlight.

This survey from Pew takes a look at QAnon. It’s somewhat reassuring:

To understand how much exposure Americans have to QAnon and the conspiracy theories associated with it, we surveyed 9,220 U.S. adults between Aug. 31 and Sept. 7, 2020, to first determine how much respondents had heard of QAnon and then asked them to write in their own words how they would describe the group. Everyone who took part is a member of Pew Research Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP), an online survey panel that is recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses. This way nearly all U.S. adults have a chance of selection. The survey is weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population by gender, race, ethnicity, partisan affiliation, education and other categories. Read more about the ATP’s methodology.

Responses to the open-ended question were analyzed using a combination of machine keyword analysis and human coding.

For details on the YouTube analysis, see the methodology. All videos published in September 2020 by the 11 channels that mentioned QAnon in at least 10% of their videos in December 2019 were coded for mentions of QAnon.

Americans’ awareness of the conspiracy theories called QAnon increased dramatically from early to late 2020. In a Feb. 18-March 2 survey, about a quarter (23%) of U.S. adults said they had heard “a lot” or “a little” about QAnon. By September, that number had increased to 47%. At the same time, though, very few Americans have heard a lot about it: 9% as of September, up from 3% in February.

Knowledge of QAnon grew on both sides of the political aisle, though Democrats’ awareness continues to outpace that of Republicans. As of September, more than half (55%) of Democrats and those who lean Democratic say they have heard at least a little about the conspiracy theories, compared with 39% of Republicans.

The same U.S. adults were sampled for the March survey and September survey. This raises the possibility that some of the increase in QAnon awareness is attributable to re-asking the same people.

Americans with high political knowledge are more likely than others to have heard of the conspiracy theories. Within both parties, political knowledge correlates closely with awareness of these theories.

Among Democrats, those with high political knowledge are more than three times as likely to say they have heard about QAnon (85%) as those with low political knowledge (25%). And though fewer Republicans overall have heard of QAnon, those with high political knowledge are more than twice as likely (59%) as those with low political knowledge (24%) to have heard at least a little about QAnon. (You can find more details of the political knowledge index here.)

High or low political knowledge is a stronger factor in awareness of the conspiracy theories than differences in ideology within each party. The differences seen between Democrats with high and low knowledge are much larger than the differences seen between liberal Democrats and conservative or moderate Democrats, and the same is true among Republicans.

The majority of Americans who have heard of QAnon think it’s a bad thing for the country. Among those who have heard of the conspiracy theories, 57% say QAnon is a “very bad” thing for the country. Another 17% say it is “somewhat bad.” That compares with 20% who say it is a somewhat or very good thing, while 6% did not answer.

Democrats who have heard of QAnon are more likely than their Republican counterparts to say it’s bad for the country. Almost eight-in-ten Democrats who have heard of QAnon (77%) say it is a “very bad” thing for the country, and another 13% say it is a somewhat bad thing. On the other hand, only about a quarter of Republicans who have heard of QAnon (26%) feel it is very bad for the country, while 24% say it is somewhat bad. Indeed, roughly four-in-ten Republicans who have heard of QAnon (41%) say it is a good thing for the country (32% somewhat good and 9% very good).

When asked to describe QAnon, people most often mentioned that it was a group of some kind (41%) or a conspiracy group or theory (44%). When Americans who said they had heard at least a little about QAnon were asked to write in their own words what they thought it was, they were most likely to describe it as a group of some kind or include a more specific description of it as a conspiracy group or theory.

Far fewer wrote in other kinds of descriptions. Two-in-ten mentioned that it is a right-wing group or theory (20%) or that it is a theory about child abuse or trafficking (20%). Another 16% connected it directly to President Donald Trump, either by saying that Trump supports the group or that the group views him as a hero, savior or victim. (Responses could fit into more than one of these categories.)

The bad news is that 40% of Republicans think Q is a good thing for rhe country. That’s an awful lot of conspiracy theorists.

Dolly Parton is wonderful for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is this:

It’s truly the greatest gift of all: a $1m donation by Dolly Parton to coronavirus vaccine research supported the development of the Moderna vaccine, which shows 95% protection from the virus.

In April, Parton donated £800,000 to research after her friend Dr Naji Abumrad of the Vanderbilt Institute for Infection, Immunology and Inflammation at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee told her that they were making “some exciting advancements” in the search for a cure for the virus. Abumrad and Parton became friends in 2014 after the singer was involved in a car accident and treated at Vanderbilt.

Parton is yet to respond to the news. The Guardian has contacted representatives for the singer.

The 74-year-old country music icon’s donation has also supported convalescent plasma study at Vanderbilt – treating infected people with the plasma of others carrying antibodies against the virus – as well as the development of several research papers pertaining to the virus.

Dolly Parton is a national treasure.

Eric Boehlert’s Press Run is a must read today. (If you aren’t subscribing already, you really should. You are going to need his independent voice to get you through this time. The media is in chaos.)

Anyway, he writes today about the ongoing obsession with the “Trump voter” and he is 100% correct:

Shining an unprecedented spotlight on supporters of the losing presidential candidate, the press continues its four-year love affair with Trump voters. Forever centering them as the unequivocal focal point of American politics, news outlets are making sure to check in on them as they defiantly reject Trump’s lopsided electoral loss to Joe Biden.

Journalists are swooping into GOP-friendly outposts such as Youngstown, Ohio (ABC News), Colorado Springs (Washington Post), and Mason, Texas (New York Times), for what seem like group-hug sessions, as the press continues to give close-minded Trump supporters a platform to spread untrue claims about the election and about Biden.

“Did I miss all the stories about the 78 million Biden supporters who triumphed — and their wants and needs — and how rural-centric Trump supporters need to reach out and understand the massive urban/suburban majority in America?” asked SiriusXM host, Michael Signorile, watching the flood of media attention given to Trump loyalists in recent days.

The media’s firm fixation on Trump voters isn’t normal — the idea that our politics needs to concern itself with the bruised feelings of voters who supported the presidential loser has no basis in how the press traditionally views the election season. And yet, here we are as the press rushes in to hear and amplify Trump voters’ anger, angst and concern about the president’s loss, and push fabricated claims about voter fraud.

After Trump’s surprise win in 2016, news executives beat themselves up for “missing” the story and, led by the Times, launched four years of Trump voter stories — often from Midwestern diners — and presented their worshipful views on Trump as borderline sacrosanct.

“As time went on and Trump consistently proved to be unpopular — his aggregate approval rating never got above 50% — the press continued to plug away at profiling Trump supporters,” Oliver Willis notes this week. “Every misstep and disastrous decision he made in the presidency was greeted with another journalistic adventure into a diner that was inevitably packed with Trump voters who still backed Trump.”

• “I don’t see how Michigan could vote blue after everything that’s happened to us. It doesn’t make sense to me.”

• “Biden is in bed with China.”

• “For me to believe that Joe Biden got 78 million votes, I find that very hard to believe.”

• “I will never accept a Biden win.”

• “These mystery votes all came in for Biden and zero for Trump. Something is definitely fishy there.”

• “I will not believe that [Biden] is a legitimate winner.”

• “Everything I worked for, Biden wants to give to the immigrants to help them live, when they don’t do nothing but sit on their butts.”

There’s nothing wrong with the daily casting a wide net to get the temperature of voters. But that’s not what happened. For years, the media’s voter coverage has been completely obsessed with white, and usually rural Trump voters who adore the president.

Why the endless media desire to still normalize white Trump voters who live outside reality and reject Covid science along with election math? Especially when Americans, by five million votes, just rejected their standard bearer.

Without an ounce of self-awareness, the Post over the weekend noted that sore losers used to be ridiculed in American society. “But Trump’s refusal to concede to President-elect Joe Biden and his insistence, without evidence, that the election was rigged against him has focused a spotlight on a rapidly shifting culture’s growing acceptance of losers who push back against the truth.” [Emphasis added.]

There’s been a “rapidly shifting” cultural movement to accept sore losers, the Post reports, without noting the shift is being fueled by the media, which have completely embraced the sore loser mentality of Trump voters.

Last week, the Los Angeles Times cleared out space just so Trump voters could be heard. “As one small attempt to bridge the divide, we are providing today a page full of letters from Trump supporters,” announced Letters editor Paul Thornton.

The brazen move wasn’t even unique. In 2018, the New York Times did the same thing: “In the spirit of open debate, and in hopes of helping readers who agree with us better understand the views of those who don’t, we wanted to let Mr. Trump’s supporters make their best case for him as the first year of his presidency approaches its close.” It’s funny how “in the spirit of open debate,” neither newspaper has devoted its letters pages exclusively to Democratic supporters.

On Sunday’s ABC News’ “This Week,” Martha Raddatz sat down with a handful of Trump voters who spouted baseless claims about election fraud, while the host offered almost no pushback. One week after Biden flipped five states, including long-time Republican bastions, Georgia and Arizona, none of the Sunday network talk shows featured a panel discussion with Biden voters.

Instead, we get kid-glove coverage of Trump supporters, who are allowed to launch election lies and nasty attacks on Biden, under the guise of news. Here’s a collection of Trump Voter quotes, taken from the recent Post, Times and ABC News reports:

• “It was a recipe for disaster when they decided to have these mail-in votes.”

• “When we deal with globalists and liberalism, I would put absolutely nothing past them.”

What’s the point of this endless media exercise? What’s the news value in providing a platform for Trump voters so they can regurgitate these hollow, and often hateful, claims on behalf of a candidate who just became only the fourth U.S. incumbent president in 150 years to lose his re-election bid?

Trump voters’ feelings aren’t news.

I don’t think the media will ever get past their obsession with these folks. After all, they were pretty much obsessed with them even before Trump came along to claim them. You know, “Real Americans.”

Boehlert offers my readers a nice discount so be sure to subscribe via this link. It’s worth it.

The news has been full of Trump wanting to order a few thousand troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan before he leaves office because he’s just an anti-war peacenik at heart who lefties should have supported if they had any integrity at all.

He is not a peacenik and we’ve gotten away without a war by the skin of our teeth. He’s a bit of a coward, which helps. But don’t count your chickens. It could still happen:

President Trump asked senior advisers in an Oval Office meeting on Thursday whether he had options to take action against Iran’s main nuclear site in the coming weeks. The meeting occurred a day after international inspectors reported a significant increase in the country’s stockpile of nuclear material, four current and former U.S. officials said on Monday.

A range of senior advisers dissuaded the president from moving ahead with a military strike. The advisers — including Vice President Mike Pence; Secretary of State Mike Pompeo; Christopher C. Miller, the acting defense secretary; and Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — warned that a strike against Iran’s facilities could easily escalate into a broader conflict in the last weeks of Mr. Trump’s presidency.

Any strike — whether by missile or cyber — would almost certainly be focused on Natanz, where the International Atomic Energy Agency reported on Wednesday that Iran’s uranium stockpile was now 12 times larger than permitted under the nuclear accord that Mr. Trump abandoned in 2018. The agency also noted that Iran had not allowed it access to another suspected site where there was evidence of past nuclear activity.

Mr. Trump asked his top national security aides what options were available and how to respond, officials said.

After Mr. Pompeo and General Milley described the potential risks of military escalation, officials left the meeting believing a missile attack inside Iran was off the table, according to administration officials with knowledge of the meeting.

Mr. Trump might still be looking at ways to strike Iranian assets and allies, including militias in Iraq, officials said. A smaller group of national security aides had met late Wednesday to discuss Iran, the day before the meeting with the president.

Trump came into office determined to reverse everything Obama did and so he bought the far right’s view on the Iran deal and tore it up. This is the result.

This is powerful:

NEW VIDEO: #AmericaNeedsGeorgia TURN VOLUME UP!!

With @Jeff_Daniels and the amazing @THORNETTAD

REAL CHANGE begins with @ossoff & @ReverendWarnock.

We need your help. We need 17,500 RETWEETS TODAY! pic.twitter.com/cPwot35JWv

— Don Winslow (@donwinslow) November 17, 2020

Howie Klein at Down With Tyranny has a fabulous new website. (Change your bookmarks!) He wrote about these races the other day, focusing on the fact that David Perdue is a lilly-livered coward.

Neither David Perdue nor Kelly Loeffler has much to say other than pre-digested, one-size-fits-all Republican Party propaganda. Even in a red state like Georgia, people are growing weary of their crap. Which is why neither was reelected on November 3 and why each faces a runoff against Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock on January 5.

Today, Perdue, who was beaten up pretty badly by Ossoff the last time they debated, declined to accept an invitation from the Atlanta Press Club to debate before the runoff. Loeffler hasn’t responded but observers say she is likely to follow Perdue’s lead on this, especially because Warnock is incredibly charismatic and she’s kind of a babbling wet blanket.

Ossoff was quick to respond, telling CNN that he had accepted the debate proposal and then tweeting:

Last time they debated Ossoff called him a “crook” to his face– and accurate assessment– and he was unable to defend himself. After that he cancelled a debate he had already scheduled. Ossoff has told crowds that debating is the “the bare minimum” voters should expect from candidates. ..

You can contribute to Warnock and or Ossoff by clicking on this Blue America page at ACTBlue.

You have no doubt heard by now about Lindsey Graham following in Trump’s footsteps and trying to exhort the Georgia Secretary of State to throw out legal votes to overturn the election results for Donald Trump.

The Republican party is a shitshow and there is a pretty good chance they are not going to get their act together before January 5th. This Washington Post reports says they’re worried about it. As they should be:

Republican leaders are increasingly alarmed about the party’s ability to stave off Democratic challengers in Georgia’s two Senate runoff elections — and they privately described President Trump on a recent conference call as a political burden who despite his false claims of victory was the likely loser of the 2020 election.

Those blunt assessments, which capture a Republican Party in turmoil as Trump refuses to concede to President-elect Joe Biden, were made on a Nov. 10 call with donors hosted by the National Republican Senatorial Committee. It featured Georgia’s embattled GOP incumbents, Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, and Karl Rove, a veteran strategist who is coordinating fundraising for the Jan. 5 runoffs.

The comments by the senators and Rove were shared with The Washington Post by a person who provided a detailed and precise account of what was said by each speaker on the call. The person spoke on the condition of anonymity since they were not authorized to divulge the contents of the private discussion.

Most striking was the way the senators nodded toward the likelihood of Biden’s presidency. While Trump keeps insisting that he won the election, making baseless claims of voter fraud and mounting legal challenges, Republicans on the call privately cast those efforts as an understandable but potentially futile protest.

“What we’re going to have to do is make sure we get all the votes out from the general and get them back out,” Perdue said of core Republican voters. “That’s always a hard thing to do in a presidential year, particularly this year, given that President Trump, it looks like now, may not be able to hold out.”

Perdue added that “we don’t know that” yet — and said he fully supports Trump and his dispute of the results in several states. But, he said, “we’re assuming that we’re going to be standing out here alone. And that means that we have to get the vote out, no matter what the outcome of that adjudication is on the recount in two states and some lawsuits, and others. Kelly and I can’t wait for that.”

Perdue noted later that he had confronted an “anti-Trump vote in Georgia” in the first round of voting and said the runoff is about getting “enough conservative Republicans out to vote” in the Atlanta suburbs and elsewhere who might have opposed the president’s reelection.

“I’m talking about people that may have voted for Biden but now may come back and vote for us because there was an anti-Trump vote in Georgia,” Perdue said. “And we think some of those people, particularly in the suburbs, may come back to us. And I’m hopeful of that.”

Perdue’s delicate approach — standing with Trump, but also privately acknowledging that the president’s time in power could be waning and that he carries possible political liabilities — extended to others on the call who tried to balance their loyalty to Trump with their apprehension about what is needed in Georgia to save the GOP Senate majority. It is revealing of the Republican dilemma in the winter of Trump’s presidency, with fear of offending him and his fervent supporters hovering over a cold political reality.

It sounds to me as if the Georgia Dems need to think about ways to make sure those Trump voters know their Senators didn’t stand firms with Dear Leader.