Month: October 2023

but….

Alexandra Petri’s latest:

 The word “But” has been stunned to find itself appearing in an increasing number of sentences that begin “The killing of children is never acceptable … ”

After finding itself in yet another Instagram comment, preceded by the phrases “I am devastated to read about the loss of life” and “I deplore the killing of civilians, especially children,” the word “But” described itself as “horrified” to be included. Although it did not specify what sentiment came after it — possibilities included the phrases “should have had different parents,” and a reference to making omelets and breaking eggs — “But” took to social media to beseech other posters to avoid making this mistake.

The coordinating conjunction begged that those phrases be added to the list of sentences in which it would notappear under any circumstances, a list that already includes: “You never have to compliment Stalin for any reason”; “I don’t want to suggest that slavery wasn’t an unmitigated evil”; and “Genocide is always bad.” The words “Nevertheless,” “Still” and “However” jointly concurred in “But’s”statement, though “Nevertheless” looked visibly tired and strained.

“‘I am against the killing of children, regardless of who their parents are or where they live,’ is a set of words that never should be accompanied by any of us,” their statement read. “If you notice that you are putting us in, please, we beg you, reconsider.”

“But” also asked to be left out of sentences that start with “Of course, I condemn the deaths of innocent civilians,” and, especially, “I object to war crimes.”

“‘I believe in the inherent dignity of human life’ is a sentence that is getting along just fine without me,” “But” observed, a sentiment with which “Nevertheless” said it concurred “a thousand times.”

In a separate statement, the noun “Collateral Damage” and the adjective “Inevitable” asked to stop being forced to appear together.

“But” concluded its statement by saying it would return to anxiously watching someone compose a post that began “There is no excuse for antisemitism” and praying not to be called into service.

She’s absolutely right …. but …

No really, some things are just unequivocal. Baby killings are bad, no if, ands or buts.

It had so much promise …

We thought that social media was going to be a great boon to civilization, opening up communication across the planet for the benefit of humans everywhere. Instead it’a become a dystopian nightmare. Look what’s happening in Israel and Gaza:

A WhatsApp voice memo purporting to have insider information ricocheted across hundreds of group chats in Israel early on Monday. The Israeli army was planning for another “battle like we’ve never experienced before,” the anonymous woman said in Hebrew, warning that people should prepare to lose access to food, water and internet service for a week.

Across the country, Israelis raced to the banks and to the grocery stores, anticipating another attack. But the message, the army clarified hours later on X, turned out to be a falsehood.

One week into the war between Israel and Gaza, social media is inducing a fog of war surpassing previous clashes in the region — one that’s shaping how panicked citizens and a global public view the conflict.

Social media has long played a critical role in battles in the area. During the 11-day war between Israel and Hamas in 2021, posts of carnage in Gaza rallied the public to the Palestinian cause. Researchers say increased internet access and the spread of smartphones enabled a watershed moment, revealing how tech platforms could show the horror and human toll of such events.

But now, a volatile, months-long fight over Israel’s democratic future has primed conspiracies and false information to spread within its borders. Tech platforms, diminished from waves of layoffs, have receded from policing falsehoods, disinformation and hate speech online. Electricity outages and strikes on telecommunications infrastructure in Gaza threaten Palestinians’ connectivity, according to human rights organizations.

While social media has been a critical tool for disseminating wartime information in recent days, a barrage of images, memes and testimonials is making it difficult to assess what is real. Activists in the region warn that viral horror stories that turn out not to be true may lead people to further distrust authority figures — and could spark hate, violence and retaliation against innocent people.

“I’m terrified,” Marwa Fatafta, a policy analyst at Al Shabaka, a Palestinian think tank and regional policy manager for the nonprofit digital human rights group Access Now. “There’s a lot of information being shared that is not verified, a lot of calls to violence and dehumanization. And all this is fanning the flames for further massacres [of Palestinians].”

Foreign disinformation — a key element ofRussia’s global strategy — has been a major feature of the protracted war in Ukraine.

But in the current Middle East war, researchers have so far found only minimal evidence of disinformation originating abroad, said John Hultquist, chief analyst with the Google-owned cybersecurity firm Mandiant.

Instead, much misinformation about the war is directed inward.

Posts, videos and memes falsely claim that the attack stemmed from collusion between Hamas and Israel. In the 24 hours after the Hamas attack, the hashtag “TraitorsFromWithin” became the top trend on X, formerly Twitter, in Hebrew. Some threads posited that Palestinian citizen of Israel workers were stationed at the border fence, while others claimed the attack was orchestrated to push a peace deal with Israel and Saudi Arabia.

Months of protests over the country’s future, deep domestic polarization and broad distrust of authorities have caused these theories to spread, said Achiya Schatz, director of FakeReporter, an Israeli watchdog organization dedicated to fighting disinformation and hate speech online.

One viral TikTok video featured a woman who identified herself as a former soldier on the Gaza Strip. She claimed that the border was so tightly controlled that even “a cockroach” would have been detected in advance — a description many commenters took to mean that Israel would have had to have aided Hamas in penetrating it.

Supporters of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have taken to calling critics of his far-right government traitors in recent months, said Schatz. Now the narrative is bleeding into the current conflict.

“People don’t want to believe that their leader has failed them,” he said. “So it must have been an inside job.”

Hamas and its supporters have taken advantage of Israel’s disunity: On Monday a pro-Hamas account called Gaza Now shared an image suggesting that former left-wing Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak was fleeing the country. The image was undated and showed him in the baggage claim at an airport. The Gaza Now account had picked it up from a Jewish Israeli influencer who supports the far-right government of Netanyahu, and had shared the content to criticize Israel’s left. The influencer ultimately issued an apology on X.

Two years ago, when a war broke out between Israel and Hamas, locals used their cellphones to broadcast a play-by-play of the demonstrations and subsequent bombardment to the world.

But the stakes are far higher in today’s conflict, said Fatafta. While the 2021 conflict resulted in 250 deaths in Gaza and 13 in Israel, at least 1,300 people in Israel and more than 1,799 people in Gaza have been killed in the current war.

And unlike in 2021, Palestinians in Gaza are already losing access to the internet, she said, compromising their ability to tell their story to the world.

“People don’t have enough electricity to charge up their devices,” she said. “There are people who can’t send SMS messages, some telecommunications infrastructure has been damaged … It’s becoming an information blackout.”

Hamas’ swift and violent attack is more difficult to parse than the events in 2021. “No one knows what really happened on the border,” Schatz said. “It was too big, too fast and too brutal.”

This void is being filled by misinformation that appeals to people’s rage — which researchers warn could lead to more antisemitic attacks or violence against Palestinian citizens of Israel — and to justify a more brutal retaliation in Gaza.

Another WhatsApp voice memo featured the voice of a man claiming to be a soldier with intelligence that the country’s Arab citizens — roughly 20 percent of Israel’s population — were planning a coordinated attack. The audio message, which was played for The Washington Post, said Palestinian citizens were going to show up invehicles with Israeli plates and “start shooting people.”

We should have seen this coming. And I’m sure some people did. But it’s making everything worse.

Even here in the safety of the US, social media is a sewer owned by feckless billionaires who are helping to brainwash millions of people. This is the last thing we need right now.

In a deranged rant, Trump says Barr, Romney and Paul Ryan are conspiring with big donors and two GOP candidates running against him. He says they are disloyal losers with no talent and they “eat their young” by opposing him. He says “Republican Nation” must not listen to them. pic.twitter.com/zuDzMAbtDg

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) October 14, 2023

He always says that he feels like he’s 35…

To the rude, inappropriate and manipulative

Kat Abughazaleh of Media Matters is sick of being asked.

Stop asking every Palestinian if they support Hamas: pic.twitter.com/3oFalcc1as

— Kat Abu (@abughazalehkat) October 14, 2023

One of the most outrageous features of the public response to any mass terror attack is the assumption that everyone from the ethnic group of the terrorists is expected to publicly and immediately condemn the villains or be condemned themselves as a terrorist sympathizer. (Unless the perpetrator is a white American, naturally.) The premise behind the demand is assignation of mass guilt by association.

Plus, the demand itself is annoyingly manipulative, and not just limited to (in this case) Palestinians. It kind of works like, “If you are outraged by this act of terror, if you are horrified and sickened, we, your neighbors (and political adversaries), demand you shout your outrage from the rooftops. We demand you feel the way we feel and express your feelings about the attack the way we do, now, performatively, publicly and loudly. That is, unless you want to draw suspicion and condemnation yourself.”

Sincere question for the hive mind: Can anyone point me to statements or interviews from Republicans that struck this same balance? https://t.co/mZhV0oq7qf

— Greg Sargent (@ThePlumLineGS) October 15, 2023

Despite the wailing mothers seen on TV, not all people express their feelings the same way. Not all people experience grief the same way, nor express them as openly and immediately. It is rudely and inappropriately manipulative to insist you either join us in our performance of outrage or you are with the terrorists. But some people are just that rude, inappropriate and manipulative. They’re too busy trying to score points to care.

I’ve not met Abughazaleh and have no other connection to Palestinians except for my humanity, but I too respond poorly to being manipulated.

omg pete davidson just made me cry https://t.co/j8wgInkNoc

— Lauren Windsor (@lawindsor) October 15, 2023

By any means necessary

Shamelessness is their superpower. You’ve likely heard that somewhere.

Voters in Louisiana on Saturday by 73 percent passed Amendment 1. It bans state and local governments from using funds, goods, and services donated by foreign governments or nongovernmental (private) sources for the purpose of conducting elections.

Bolts reported back in August that this makes Louisiana the 26th state to adopt such a restriction. As the National Council of State Legislatures (NCSL) described them back in July:

All legislation on this topic has been enacted since the 2020 election when the COVID-19 pandemic led to unexpected expenses related to mailing and processing an increased number of absentee/mail ballots, providing larger in-person voting facilities to accommodate social distancing and sudden demands for more cleaning and hygiene supplies. 

Generally, elections are funded by state and local budgets—with occasional federal infusions. To meet the additional needs during the pandemic, philanthropic funding for local election offices was made available by the Center for Tech and Civic Life, with donations from Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan. Grants ranged from $5,000 to $19 million. 

Those who support banning or limiting such grants argue that private funds could result in the donor or grant-making organization having undue influence over elections and perhaps favoring some jurisdictions over others. Opponents, however, say that elections are chronically underfunded and that such bans may prohibit election offices from using donated resources they have long relied on, such as cybersecurity tools and the use of polling places. 

Currently, over one-third of the states [now with 26 it is over half] have passed laws prohibiting or limiting the use of private funds in elections. Eleven states did so in 2021 (similar bills were vetoed in Louisiana, Michigan, North Carolina,  Pennsylvania and  Wisconsin that year), and 13 states followed suit in 2022. The specifics vary, with some states passing outright bans on election officials accepting or using philanthropic funds and others setting new regulations on how and when such funding can be accepted. 

Bolts put the conservative hostility to benefactor funding a tad more bluntly in August:

[The bills are] directly inspired by what conservatives have demonized as “Zuckerbucks” spent on elections during the onset of the pandemic. The billionaire’s donations have drawn particular ire from conservatives convinced that CTCL boosted Democratic get-out-the-vote efforts, and the partisan outrage is clearly reflected in state policies: 23 of the 25 states that already adopted such restrictions voted for former President Donald Trump in 2020 or have Republican legislative trifectas, or both. 

NCSL’s article needs updating. The Republican-controlled state House and Senate in North Carolina overrode Gov. Roy Cooper’s veto of SB 747 last week. One of its provisions prohibits “the State Board and county boards of elections … from accepting private monetary donations or in-kind contributions for the purpose of administering elections or employing individuals on a temporary basis.” *

North Carolina’s legislature is underfunding election services here while adding new requirements elections officials must fulfill. Conservatives decades ago railed against unfunded mandates. Not now. But what they really, really dislike is benefactors stepping in to help fund elections operations Republicans mean to monkey-wrench.

If any reader has seen a current set of measures by which GOP legislators have tried to limit who can vote, make voting more difficult and take longer, skew equal representation away from unfriendly populations, and manipulate election outcomes to ensure Republican victories, please send along a link. Their efforts to overturn the 2020 election are now legend and being litigated in multiple courts.

As Josh Marshall observed last week, Republicans’ MAGA wing now reject democratic processes even within the GOP caucus. He wrote regarding the failure of U.S. House Republicans to elect a new speaker after the majority of their caucus voted to approve Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana. Nope. Not if the MAGA faction doesn’t get its way:

Couldn’t happen to a nicer caucus, of course. But we should note that there’s a clear thread connecting this to 2020 rigged electionism and, perhaps more tightly, the dramas of debt ceiling hostage-taking and government shutdowns. The premise of all those dramas is that they’re what you do when you don’t have the votes to do what you want. If you’ve got the votes in the Congress and a President who will sign your bills, you just do it. Threatening to shut down the government is what you do when you don’t. Do what I say even though I don’t have the votes or I start breaking things. That’s the bottom line behind every one of these gambits.

It’s all cut from the same cloth.

Grover Norquist, the anti-tax zealot, meant to “starve the beast,” to “cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.” That was nearly 25 years ago. What has become of the Republican Party in the intervening years is working furiously by all means it can think of to drown democracy itself.

* As we featured on Wednesday, Voto Latino, the Watauga County Voting Rights Task Force, and Down Home North Carolina (with help from Marc Elias) immediately sued to prevent implementation of SB 747’s “Undeliverable Mail Provision.” Plaintiffs contend the section “will arbitrarily disenfranchise North Carolina’s same-day voters, those who register to vote on the same day they cast their ballots during the state’s early voting period.”

Jim Jordan was one of the coup plotters. Now they want to make him Speaker of the House?

I guess that’s a stupid rhetorical question. Of course they do. They’re all prepared to vote for the chief coup plotter so what’s the difference?

Just watch Jordan on that Youtubte try to wriggle out of it. Greg Sargent tweeted out these excerpts from the January 6th Committee Report in case you forgot the details:

Republican voters act like children

This is ridiculous:

David Alexander, an engineer who attended the Iowa Faith and Freedom dinner last month, called the absent Donald Trump “arrogant” and “egotistical” while praising a raft of other Republican presidential candidates who attended.

But he doesn’t blame Trump for skipping the event — and figures the former president is busy defending himself from indictments on 91 criminal charges. The “beating” Trump has taken is a key part of his appeal, Alexander said.

“The people that don’t like him. … When they dislike him, it helps me like him more,” said Alexander, 61, who called Trump his top choice in the 2024 nominating contest. “If they ignored him, I probably wouldn’t like him as much. Does that make sense?”

Only if you are a toddler. Mature adults don’t think like that. The whole damned party is a bunch of whiny little babies.

Interviews with scores of voters in multiple states show thatTrump’s constant message of victimhood has seeped in not just among the Trump faithful — but also among center-right voters who were previously skeptical of him. Many of the voters echoed his long-running attacks on the law enforcement system that he has sharply ratcheted up in recent months. In many cases, Republicans who said they were initially interested in another candidate more than Trump were dismissive of the seriousness of the charges. Some said they believed Trump had made mistakes, but they contend there was an unfair double standard against him.

Those supposedly “center-right” voters are lying. They voted for him before (even if they say they didn’t) and were always going to vote for Trump if he stayed the front-runner. There are no Biden voters who have decided that poor Donald Trump is being persecuted so they’re going to make him president again. It’s absurd.

Republicans who voted for Trump in 2020 and believe that he actually won that election were always going to vote for him again if he was on the ballot. Why wouldn’t they? And anyone who believes he actually lost the last election and has staged this epic tantrum based on a lie but are going to vote for him anyway because the law is holding him accountable for that and his other misdeeds (stealing hundreds of classified documents!!!!) have the logic of a five year old. I honestly don’t think there are more than a handful of those.

He may be the front runner but that hasn’t stopped him from making back room deals to secure it

The NY Times lays out Trump’s strategy to ensure that he can’t lose the nomination. Does anyone think he won’t do the same with the general election if he can?

Not long after the new chairman of the Republican Party in Hawaii was elected in May, he received a voicemail from none other than Donald J. Trump.

“It’s your all-time favorite president,” Mr. Trump told the chairman, Tim Dalhouse. “I just called to congratulate you.”

The head of the Kansas G.O.P. received a similar message after he became chairman. The Nebraska chairman had a couple of minutes and a photo arranged with the former president during an Iowa stop. And the chairman of the Nevada Republican Party, Michael McDonald, who had served as a fake elector for Mr. Trump after the 2020 election, was among a group of state party officials who were treated to an hourslong Mar-a-Lago meal in March that ended in ice cream sundaes.

Months later, Mr. McDonald’s party in Nevada dramatically transformed the state’s influential early contest. The party enacted new rules that distinctively disadvantage Mr. Trump’s chief rival, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, by effectively blocking the super PAC he relies upon from participating in the state’s new caucus.

Mr. McDonald has tilted the rules so significantly that some of Mr. Trump’s opponents have accused the party of manipulating the election for him — and have mostly pulled up stakes in the state entirely.

As Mr. Trump dodges debates and is regularly seen on his golf courses in branded white polo shirts and red MAGA hats, it can seem that he is bypassing the 2024 primary fight entirely. He has done relatively few public campaign events until recent weeks. But Mr. Trump and his political team have spent months working behind the scenes to build alliances and contingency plans with key party officials, seeking to twist the primary and delegate rules in their favor.

It amounts to a fail-safe in case Mr. DeSantis — or anyone else — scores a surprise victory in an early state. And it comes as Mr. Trump faces an extraordinary set of legal challenges, including four criminal indictments, that inject an unusual degree of uncertainty into a race Mr. Trump leads widely in national polling.

“They’ve rigged it anywhere they thought they could pull it off,” said Ken Cuccinelli, a former Trump administration official who founded Never Back Down, the pro-DeSantis super PAC that was essentially ousted from the Nevada caucus.

The maneuvering is the type of old-school party politics that Mr. Trump, who cut his teeth in the machine politics of 1970s and 1980s New York, relishes and knows best: personal calls and chits, glad-handing, relationships and reprisals. Advisers say that in contrast to some tasks, getting him to make those calls is a breeze. Plus, the seemingly arcane issue of delegate accumulation — tallying up formal support in the states to secure the nomination at the party convention next summer — is deeply personal to Mr. Trump after he was outflanked in exactly this fight in 2016.

Then, a better-organized Senator Ted Cruz of Texas worked Trump-skeptical state parties to win more delegates even in some places where he had lost at the ballot box. Mr. Cuccinelli was one of Mr. Cruz’s top delegate hunters at the time. Now, surrounded by a more experienced team and the authority of a former president with loyalists entrenched nationwide, Mr. Trump is doing to Mr. DeSantis exactly what he once accused Hillary Clinton of doing to Bernie Sanders: bending the system in his favor.

Mr. Trump’s backroom campaign reveals the extent to which he has become the establishment of the Republican Party.

“This is the kind of stuff that’s not talked about in the news,” said Scott Golden, the chairman of the Tennessee Republican Party, who was invited to speak briefly in private with Mr. Trump when the former president visited his state this spring. “This is important stuff. It is ultimately about making sure your person is the nominee.”

In presidential primaries or caucuses, voters’ casting of ballots is only the first step. Those elections determine the individuals — called delegates — who go to the national party convention to formally choose their party’s nominee. The rules each state uses to allocate delegates and bind them to particular candidates can shift from year to year, and the people in charge of those rules are otherwise obscure state party officials.

Wooing those insiders can be crucial. Among those who attended the Mar-a-Lago dinner in March was Alida Benson, then the executive director of the Nevada Republican Party. Now she is Mr. Trump’s Nevada state director.

At one point, Mr. Trump’s campaign warned state parties nationwide about the legal risks of working with super PACs. In the past, super PACs have generally been allowed to organize and advertise in both primaries and caucuses. But in Nevada, a new rule was enacted that barred super PACs from sending speakers, or even literature, to caucus sites, or getting data from the state party.

The unstated goal: to box out Never Back Down.

Alex Latcham, who oversees Mr. Trump’s early-state operations, called the Nevada party’s moves especially sweet. He noted that Nevada is the state where the super PAC’s largest donor, Robert Bigelow, lives and where its chairman, Adam Laxalt, just ran for Senate.

“Not only is it a strategic victory, but it’s also a moral defeat for Always Back Down,” Mr. Latcham said, purposefully inverting the group’s name.

Advisers to Mr. DeSantis, known for his bare-knuckle tactics in Florida, have complained about an imbalance in the playing field.

“I don’t think they play fair,” said James Uthmeier, Mr. DeSantis’s campaign manager.

Mr. Cuccinelli accused Mr. Trump of hypocrisy. “No one has tried to rig the rules like Donald Trump has been doing here at least in a very long time,” he said. “And no one has ever done it who, in other circumstances, complains about the rules being rigged.”

Ya thinki,Cooch? Really? How unlike him.

2024 is a decade away in political years

Dave Wasserman commented last night on the present chaos in D.C.: “What’s so wild about the current political environment is that if the 2024 election were held this November, I believe a) Biden’s numbers are so bad he’d lose to an indicted Trump and b) House Rs are so dysfunctional/out of sorts they would lose the majority.”

November 2024 is a decade away in political years. Donald Trump could be appealing convictions by then, be banned from the ballot in a state or two, or be drooling onto his fast food while raging about beating Barack Obama at the polls in November as a regional war burns in the Middle East.

Still, Wasserman’s warnings about Biden’s weakness point to some Democratic weaknesses I monitor.

How is it Dems are cleaning up in special elections/referendums if their national poll numbers are so bad? Because in the Trump era, Dems are excelling w/ the most civic-minded, highly-engaged voters.

Their biggest weakness? Peripheral voters who only show up in presidentials.

— Dave Wasserman (@Redistrict) October 14, 2023

They skew young, unaffiliated, nonwhite and non-college. They’re also more likely to base their choice on a simplistic evaluation of whether the economy was better under Trump or Biden.

On this question – and on immigration/age concerns – Biden is routinely getting clobbered.

— Dave Wasserman (@Redistrict) October 14, 2023

If these infrequent voters will base their votes on “whether the economy was better under Trump or Biden,” that’s not how Republicans will campaign, especially with Trump atop the ticket. He’ll lead with “Sleepy Joe” and culture war/immigration, especially with the Hamas attacks fresh in people’s minds.

Now fast forward to 2024 with tied national polls, 40% Biden approval, equally dismal Biden/Trump favorability, more economic pessimism, growing migrant/intl crises and the potential for RFK/West to double Jill Stein’s pull on campuses, etc.

Biden is in absolutely dire shape.

— Dave Wasserman (@Redistrict) October 14, 2023

Where I agree is that with infrequent and unaffiliated voters, Democrats are policy liberals and campaign conservatives. When every damned election is “the most important election of our lifetime,” they take no chances, try nothing new. Throw the bomb? Hell, no. Too risky. Fall on the ball and hope to run out the clock instead. That is, do what they’ve always done, just more of it.

There are tens of thousands of Democratic votes in North Carolina alone among unaffiliated voters who sit at home in blue precincts where their unaffiliated neighbors overwhelmingly vote Democrat. But campaigns ignore them because these registrants have three strikes against them.

Strike 1: They are not registered Democrats.
Strike 2: They have poor voting records (low-propensity voters).
Strike 3: They reside in voting precincts so blue and that campaigns waste no time there.

Unaffiliated turnout is ~12% less than Democratic turnout in these precincts. In the rest of my state it is only 5-6% less.

Q1: Are R-leaning UNAs more motivated to vote in redder counties? If so, why?
Q2: Are D-leaning UNAs less motivated to vote in bluer counties? If so, why?

What are Democrats prepared to do about it … 2024 being “the most important election of our lifetime” and all?