"what digby sez..."
Month: May 2022
“The greatest disillusioning experience of my life”
I don’t know if you’ve been following the latest Steve Schmidt saga in which he spills his guts about John McCain, but it’s kind of riveting. I don’t know what his story is — some emotional issues maybe — but I can’t say any of it surprises me. Some of us knew that McCain was not fit to be president from the word go.
This week on “Playbook Deep Dive,” we sat down over Zoom with STEVE SCHMIDT, the architect of the late Sen. JOHN MCCAIN’s 2008 presidential run, to hear what amounts to an untold chapter of that exhaustively chronicled campaign.
It’s a story about regret and disillusionment that we are confident you will want to hear.
Previously, Schmidt has had a lot to say about his regrets playing a role in elevating SARAH PALIN, McCain’s running mate. Schmidt has long maintained that the roots of Trumpism, which he has spent the last seven years fighting, can be found in the movement that first gathered around Palin in 2008.
But Schmidt has always been more circumspect about McCain, his onetime hero and the man who actually picked Palin. Recently, though, he took to Substack to unfurl a surprising new chapter about the legendary senator and his failed 2008 campaign, which we discuss in depth on the show.
He also told us something he’s never revealed before: his disillusionment with McCain was so deep by the end of the 2008 campaign that he didn’t think McCain should be in the White House.
“The only conceivable conclusion that you could get to after watching his conduct in this campaign was that he’s completely unfit to be president,” Schmidt told us. “Truth is, I didn’t vote for him, either.”
It’s not just book banning
They sure have a funny way of showing their support for the First Amendment:
Texas residents can now sue Facebook, Twitter and YouTube for allegedly censoring their content after a federal appeals court sided Wednesday with the state’s law restricting how social media sites can moderate their platforms.
The 15-word ruling allowing the law, which had been blocked last year, to take effect has significant potential consequences. Most immediately, it creates new legal risks for the tech giants, and opens them up to a possible wave of litigation that legal experts say would be costly and difficult to defend.
Texas’s law makes it illegal for any social media platform with 50 million or more US monthly users to “block, ban, remove, deplatform, demonetize, de-boost, restrict, deny equal access or visibility to, or otherwise discriminate against expression.”
The law creates enormous uncertainty about how social media will actually function in Texas, according to legal experts, and raises questions about what users’ online spaces may look like and what content they may find there, if the companies are even able to run their services at all.
The ruling also sets the stage for what could be a Supreme Court showdown over First Amendment rights and, possibly, a dramatic reinterpretation of those rights that affects not just the tech industry but all Americans — and decades of established precedent.
In short, the decision has allowed Texas to declare open season on tech platforms, with huge ramifications for everyone in the country. It could reshape the rights and obligations of all websites; our relationship to technology and the internet; and even our basic, fundamental understanding of the First Amendment.
The origins of Texas’s law, HB 20, lie in the longstanding Republican criticism that tech platforms discriminate politically against conservative users, a charge the companies have denied and which platform moderation researchers say there is little systemic evidence to support.
The law, which seeks to address the perceived imbalance, was blocked in December by a district court judge who ruled it was unconstitutional under the First Amendment. That decision came months after a similar law, in Florida, was also blocked for the same reason.
But that all changed this week, when in oral arguments at the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, a three-judge panel confused social media platforms with internet service providers; disputed that Facebook and Twitter are websites; and expressed surprise that a service such as Twitter could “just decide” what content appears on its platform as a matter of course.
The result was Wednesday’s decision overturning the lower-court injunction that had kept Texas’s law from going into effect. The ruling promptly led Texas’s attorney general Ken Paxton — who is also empowered to sue tech companies under HB 20 — to declare victory.”
My office just secured another BIG WIN against BIG TECH,” Paxton’s office tweeted.
The appeals court has not provided a written opinion explaining the decision, and it did not offer the tech advocacy groups who challenged the law time to seek an appeal.”
Apparently, they do not think this is disruptive or something,” said Harold Feld, a senior vice president and communications lawyer at the consumer group Public Knowledge.Whatever happens next, legal experts appear convinced that the outcome will be chaos.
These people are nothing more than chaos agents. They have no clue what they are doing — Paxton is a full blown nutcase — and I fear the Supreme Court radicals don’t either. Fasten your seat belts.
The scope of the law is truly vast, according to legal scholars. It is broad both in terms of its text — explicitly naming at least nine types of prohibited content moderation — as well as its subtext. What does it really mean to “de-boost” or “deny equal visibility”? The ambiguity of those terms provides carte blanche to creative plaintiffs willing to stretch the definitions of the English language, according to Jeff Kosseff, a law professor at the US Naval Academy.”
Just think of all the actions that could be seen as ‘denying equal visibility’ to user content,” Kosseff tweeted.
The state law also forces tech companies to fight the same battles over and over again, prohibiting them from citing a successful defense in one court as a way of nipping similar cases in the bud in other courts.”Those are all things you’d do if you wanted to make litigation as attractive, expensive, and difficult to defend as possible,” said Ken White, a First Amendment lawyer better known as @Popehat on Twitter.
These wingnut courts are about to turn this country upside down and it will take years to right it.
He’s not deluded. He’s a lying political operative.
The New York Times reports on an on-the-record talk with Clarence Thomas this week. It’s all very interesting. But I’ll just excerpt this part. Drink it in:
Justice Thomas took part in an after-dinner conversation with one of his former law clerks, John Yoo, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and answered questions from the audience. Professor Yoo was one of the architects of the Bush administration’s response to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, and Justice Thomas joked that his former clerk would face a confirmation battle were he nominated to the federal bench.
Yes, it’s that John Yoo. The architect of America’s torture regime during the Afghanistan and Iraq wars.
Justice Thomas said the left had adopted tactics that conservatives would not employ.
“You would never visit Supreme Court justices’ houses when things didn’t go our way,” he said. “We didn’t throw temper tantrums. It is incumbent on us to always act appropriately, and not to repay tit for tat.”
His wife was texting the Supreme Court during a violent insurrection at the US Capitol. Anti-abortion zealots have been shooting doctors, harassing women and bombing clinics for the past 40 years.
He added that conservatives had “never trashed a Supreme Court nominee.” He acknowledged that Merrick B. Garland, President Barack Obama’s third Supreme Court nominee, “did not get a hearing, but he was not trashed.”
“You will not see the utter destruction of a single nominee,” Justice Thomas said. “You will also not see people going to other people’s houses, attacking them at dinner at a restaurant, throwing things on them.”
He said Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh had been subjected to particular abuse, but he referred only glancingly to his own brutal confirmation hearings, during which he angrily denied accusations of sexual harassment.
He added that conservatives had “never trashed a Supreme Court nominee.” He acknowledged that Merrick B. Garland, President Barack Obama’s third Supreme Court nominee, “did not get a hearing, but he was not trashed.”
“You will not see the utter destruction of a single nominee,” Justice Thomas said. “You will also not see people going to other people’s houses, attacking them at dinner at a restaurant, throwing things on them.”
He said Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh had been subjected to particular abuse, but he referred only glancingly to his own brutal confirmation hearings, during which he angrily denied accusations of sexual harassment.
They just attacked Ketanji Brown Jackson as a pedophile enabler. Before her, they made it clear that they believed Sonia Sotomayor was too stupid to be on court. But the very, very sad fact is that despite winning 7 of the last 8 popular presidential votes, Democrats have only been able to name 3 Justices to the Court while the Republicans have named 5, with the right wing extremist Thomas being the 6th.
He also has the gall to make this erroneous and snotty remark:
Taking sides on a contested point, Justice Thomas said the Senate Republicans who blockaded Mr. Garland’s nomination were following a rule that President Biden, then a senator, had proposed, “which is you get no hearing in the last year of an administration.”
Biden may have said that, but they never did it. And Thomas himself was confirmed just one year and two weeks before the end of the Bush Sr administration.
He’s quite the arrogant wingnut:
“I always say that when someone uses stare decisis that means they’re out of arguments,” he said. “Now they’re just waving the white flag. And I just keep going.”
So all that talk about precedent is just bullshit. But then, we knew that didn’t we? He’s just letting it all hang out. It’s clarifying.
He’s only 73. I thought he was older. Unfortunately, this radical right winger is likely to be around for at least another decade.
“There is a satanic portal above the White House, you can see it …”
“It exists. It is real,” said Roger Stone Friday night at the ReAwaken America Tour in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.
Apparently, no one else has noticed in over two weeks. Not even the National Capitol Region-Integrated Air Defense System (NCR-IADS).
Where have I been? Stone has been pitching this line using virtually the same words since late April at least:
“It’s like a swirling cauldron,” Stone said. “I’ve tried to find some natural explanation: a reflection or an aerostat balloon for weather. No. I sent a personal friend down there — he thought I was crazy — I said, ‘Do me a favor, go down there, use a regular digital camera and see what you see.’”
Okay.
“There you can see it,” Stone said as the photo flashed across the screen. “It’s very, very clear. It doesn’t move, day or night. It’s harder to see during the day, but you see it at night. And I’m absolutely convinced about the inherent evil of what’s going on in the White House, what’s going on in the country, and I think it’s imperative that people know about this, that people of good faith and Christians know about this, and we begin a national, essentially a prayer assault to close the portal.”
Not a political dirty trick of the light, no way.
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For The Win, 4th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free, countywide get-out-the-vote planning guide for county committees at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.
Ukrainian Healthcare Center documents 165 cases of health care facilities damaged
The BBC reports Russian invasion forces in Ukraine may be retreating from Kharkiv in the north. The mayor reports no shelling of the town for five days:
The mayor of Kharkiv, Ihor Terekhov, has told the BBC that the Russians have withdrawn from the Kharkiv city area in the direction of the Russian border.
He says that Russian troops had only ever managed to enter a small part of the key north-eastern city once, and were not there for a long time.
“The Russians were constantly shelling Kharkiv because they were staying very close to the city. And due to the efforts of Kharkiv territorial defence and Ukrainian Armed Forces, the Russians have withdrawn out far from the city area in the direction of the Russian border,” he says.
Another report from CNN offers additional detail:
Ukrainian officials said this week that they continue to push towards the Russian border, liberating tiny villages on the outskirts of Kharkiv, the country’s second largest city before the invasion began. The Ukrainian advances threaten the symbolic embarrassment of expelling the Kremlin’s forces back to their own border and while posing the strategic threat of cutting Russia’s supply lines into Ukraine and its forces further south in the Donbas region. The advances have been swift over the past weeks.
Russian forces continue to target civilians. Two auto convoys attempting to flee the region have come under Russian fire near Staryi Saltiv, locals tell CNN. Multiple civilians including a 13-year-old girl were killed.
In the eastern Luhansk region, Ukraine claims to have destroyed a Russian battalion attempting to cross a temporary bridge over the Siverskyi Donets River (Daily Beast):
New satellite images from BlackSky intelligence firm show the parts that remain of a pontoon bridge built by Russian troops to access the Ukrainian territory. Images showed smoke rising from the bridge after it was hit by Ukrainian artillery on May 10, leaving Russian tanks and trucks protruding from the water. It is unclear how many Russian troops died in the strike, but Forbes put its estimate at around 1,000 troops and 50 tanks. Britain’s defense intelligence said almost all of the Russian force’s armored vehicles were lost in the battle.
The BBC reports Russian forces have been relentless in their three fruitless attempts to establish bridges to cross the river. Oleh Zhdanov, a Ukrainian defense analyst, told the news service that the fighting is so fierce because the orders to take the territory came “from the very top.”
Since the invasion began, Russian forces have deliberately targeted “hospitals, clinics, maternity wards,” and other health infrastructure, Ukrainiain health officials allege and a guest video essay provided to the New York Times documents:
As of May 9, the Ukrainian Healthcare Center, a consultancy in Kyiv, had documented 165 cases of health care facilities damaged in the war, and the World Health Organization has identified some 200 such attacks.
Pavlo Kovtoniuk, the consultancy’s co-founder and a former deputy health minister of Ukraine, believes the attacks are meant to sow psychological terror. Aid organizations saw the same sorts of attacks in Syria, says Kovtoniuk. It is a pattern, not just a series of mistakes.
“The evidence for potential war crimes will take years to gather,” he says. “But I don’t need to wait that long to know that what I’m seeing every day is a murderous pattern.”
Few will be held to account. Vladimir Putin least likely of all.
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For The Win, 4th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free, countywide get-out-the-vote planning guide for county committees at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.
In case you missed it. Patron the hero
They think certain babies are “illegal” and therefore should die.
The right wingers are having a fit over what she said, as usual. I don’t know why. Look what Fox News put up on their site:
“Illegal babies.” And here I thought they believe all life is sacred. Apparently, it depends on what strip of land the babies are born on. “Legal babies” get first dibs.
A little fairly recent history offers a guide
From Gina Glanz, women’s rights activist and Democratic operative. She remembers something other Democrats may not:
It has been some 30 years since a Supreme Court abortion case generated such a fierce outcry. The recently leaked Supreme Court draft opinion has sparked pundits on both sides to make predictions about the long-term future of reproductive rights and the short-term effect on the mid-term elections.
At the same time, women across the country — and increasingly, people under 45 — are reacting to the shock of an overturn of Roe v. Wade. Undoubtedly, they are questioning whether they can trust candidates to protect that right.
A majority of Democratic women — and a smaller percentage of Republican women — likely feel that candidates who support the overturning of Roe do not trust women to make decisions about their reproductive health and do not care about the potential deleterious economic impact of a woman’s right to an abortion. Candidates who create trust barriers are candidates who begin the campaign season at a disadvantage — one that might just blunt the potential blow to Democrats in the midterm elections.
Today’s environment, though different in many ways, is reminiscent of the period from 1989 to 1992. In 1989, the Supreme Court decided Webster v. Reproductive Health Services, which affirmed restrictions on the use of state funds, facilities and employees in performing, assisting with or counseling on abortions and ultimately refused to invalidate the Missouri law’s preamble that stated that life begins at conception. In the 1992 Planned Parenthood v. Casey decision, “undue burden” was established as a new permissive standard on restrictions, and the constitutional right to abortion was affirmed.
As these cases worked their way through the courts, the country was facing a recession fueled by a spike in oil prices during the First Gulf War. Unsurprisingly, Bill Clinton’s campaign mantra became, “It’s the economy, stupid.”
And while the economy certainly played a key role, abortion also inspired voters. In 1989, in off-year gubernatorial elections in Virginia and New Jersey, outspoken proponents of Roe won. A year later, three pro-choice challengers were elected in California, Florida and, notably, Texas, where Ann Richards won.From 1989 to 1993, the number of women in the US House of Representatives grew from 29 to 48. In 1990, Barbara Mikulski and Nancy Kassebaum were the only women in the US Senate. In 1992, there were a record-setting four new female senators — Barbara Boxer, Carole Moseley Braun, Dianne Feinstein and Patty Murray. All six women were pro-reproductive choice.Post-election academic studies help tell the tale. Research conducted by professors at American University, Illinois Benedictine University and Georgetown University using data from 1989 and 1990 exit polls in multiple states found views on “(a)bortion was a significant predictor of vote choice.” They write, “In the aftermath of Webster, voters considered the positions of gubernatorial candidates on abortion and were willing to cross party lines to support the candidates who supported their positions.”
In his introduction to a study based on the 1992 American National Election Study, Emory University Professor Alan Abramowitz states, “Despite the general belief that the presidential election was decided almost exclusively on economic issues, attitudes toward abortion had a significant influence on candidate choice in the overall electorate. Although the issue divided supporters of both parties, far more ‘pro-choice’ Republicans than ‘pro-life’ Democrats defected from their party’s presidential candidate.”
Back in 1989, once anti-choice New Jersey gubernatorial candidate Jim Florio approached me at an event to say that his fiancé, a teacher, had told him if he did not publicly support a minor’s access to abortion, there would be no wedding. I heard many such stories, most involving wives or children of elected officials who changed their positions. Polling can’t capture the effect of these heightened personal conversations about abortion.Polling does do a good job of ranking issues and motivation. Early 2022 CNN polling shows abortion is not the top issue on voters’ minds, nor is it cited as a strong motivating force. However, it is one thing to rank issues and motivation. It’s another to be the “thing” that determines a vote.Simply put, what impact does the feeling that a candidate “doesn’t understand me” have? It’s the kind of question that is often asked about politicians and the media — and could be very revealing in this circumstance.
Most voters in 1992 could remember life before Roe, when conversations about abortion were largely limited to whispers behind closed doors. Today, voters of reproductive age were born into a world of Roe, and, according to a CNN poll, 60% of all Americans say they know someone who has had an abortion. They know a friend, a sister, a mother. As a result, their connection to the issue goes beyond the legal arguments into the realm of the personal.
By the same token, it is not a surprise that 67% of voters under 45 say they would be angry if Roe were overturned. The fact that Republican and Republican-leaning independents younger than 45 are split 50-50 on whether they’d like to see Roe overturned creates real potential for crossover voting. In close races, these voters, who cannot imagine a Roe-free world, may find their distrust of candidates influence voting decisions.
Returning to 1992, without the aid of the internet or social media, half a million people marched on Washington in support of abortion rights. This year, since the draft leak, there have been demonstrations across the nation, including in red, purple and blue states.
The good news is the spontaneity of these demonstrations. The challenge for Democrats is to capture the current emotion and turn it into organizing against candidates who favor overturning Roe.This is not as difficult a challenge as it might seem. The simple task of asking every candidate for public office if they support the overturning of Roe would be a good place to start. Answers in print, on audio and/or video can be shared locally and used by ad makers to plant seeds of distrust and discomfort among women and younger voters who will hold the key to the 2022 midterms and beyond.
I remember that election and I always thought that the “it’s the economy, stupid” was overhyped. There was a slight recession in 1991 but it was nothing compared to recent recessions and I never got the sense that the country felt desperate about the economy. It was much more a populist revolt (Ross Perot) and a culture war election.
We’ll see what happens this time. We’re in largely uncharted territory with the batshit insane right wing so history may not be a good guide in any number of ways. But I do think this issue scrambles the deck in ways that are being underestimated. Yes, inflation is a huge problem but the radicalism of the right wing is unprecedented in recent history and the center left and left has big numbers on its side and they can see that this extreme faction is moving fast. It can be mobilized. It has been in the past.
So much for being a straight shooter
There is growing panic among Republicans that Kathy Barnette is going to win the GOP nomination for Senate and she is even more batshit crazy than Marjorie Taylor Green. They are doing everything in their power to tank the more-MAGA-than-Trump wingnut.
Trump himself finally weighed in. He has endorsed her rival Dr. Oz. And he sounds like a tremulous old lady, scared to death of his own voters who are favoring her:
“Kathy Barnette will never be able to win the General Election against the Radical Left Democrats,” former President Donald Trump said on social media on Thursday. “She has many things in her past which have not been properly explained or vetted, but if she is able to do so, she will have a wonderful future in the Republican Party—and I will be behind her all the way.”
“She can’t win, but if she gets the nomination I’ll be with her all the way so you insane MAGAs don’t have to worry. I’ll support your choice. Please don’t hurt me.”