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Month: November 2023

Poor Unhappy Billionaires

Published by digby on November 9, 2023

Another disappointed master of the universe has regrets. Boo hoo hoo.

Barton Gelman had a chat with Peter Thiel. He has a sad:

It wasn’t clear at first why Peter Thiel agreed to talk to me.

He is, famously, no friend of the media. But Thiel—co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, avatar of techno-libertarianism, bogeyman of the left—consented to a series of long interviews at his home and office in Los Angeles. He was more open than I expected him to be, and he had a lot to say.

But the impetus for these conversations? He wanted me to publish a promise he was going to make, so that he would not be tempted to go back on his word. And what was that thing he needed to say, loudly? That he wouldn’t be giving money to any politician, including Donald Trump, in the next presidential campaign.

Already, he has endured the wrath of Trump. Thiel tried to duck Trump’s calls for a while, but in late April the former president managed to get him on the phone. Trump reminded Thiel that he had backed two of Thiel’s protégés, Blake Masters and J. D. Vance, in their Senate races last year. Thiel had given each of them more than $10 million; now Trump wanted Thiel to give the same to him.

When Thiel declined, Trump “told me that he was very sad, very sad to hear that,” Thiel recounted. “He had expected way more of me. And that’s how the call ended.”

Months later, word got back to Thiel that Trump had called Masters to discourage him from running for Senate again, and had called Thiel a “fucking scumbag.”

Thiel’s hope was that this article would “lock me into not giving any money to Republican politicians in 2024,” he said. “There’s always a chance I might change my mind. But by talking to you, it makes it hard for me to change my mind. My husband doesn’t want me to give them any more money, and he’s right. I know they’re going to be pestering me like crazy. And by talking to you, it’s going to lock me out of the cycle for 2024.”

This matters because of Thiel’s unique role in the American political ecosystem. He is the techiest of tech evangelists, the purest distillation of Silicon Valley’s reigning ethos. As such, he has become the embodiment of a strain of thinking that is pronounced—and growing—among tech founders.

And why does he want to cut off politicians? It’s not that they are mediocre as individuals, and therefore incapable of bringing about the kinds of civilization-defining changes a man like him would expect to see. His disappointment runs deeper than that. Their failure to make the world conform to his vision has soured him on the entire enterprise—to the point where he no longer thinks it matters very much who wins the next election.

He didn’t get everything he wanted. Imagine that. How dare America disappoint him like this?

Read the whole article if you can. This spoiled, petulant princeling says that he picks the most negative, pessimistic politicians because they are the most realistic. This is the silicon valley brain trust. Oy vey.

The Shutdown Looms

Published by digby on November 9, 2023

The Republicans just can’t get it together

They can’t even get the votes together to pass the draconian spending cuts they all live for:

House Republicans on Thursday pulled their annual financial services and general government funding bill amid divisions on abortion-related provisions and FBI funding. 

It was the second time in a week GOP leaders opted to punt a vote on a funding bill over divisions within the party.

GOP leadership hoped to pass the conference’s partisan plan laying out fiscal 2024 funding for the White House, the Treasury Department and other offices this week. But a planned vote was pulled at the last minute on Thursday as the conference struggled to unify behind the measure. 

Some moderate Republicans came out in opposition against language seeking to prohibit Washington, D.C., from carrying out a law that aims to protect people from employer discrimination based on their reproductive health decisions. 

“I think that we need to be much more respectful of the difficult decision that women have to make,” Rep. Marc Molinaro (R-N.Y.) said of the thorny policy rider on Wednesday. “I think we need to respect the city’s determination, and I think it’s a provision that is unnecessary in the bill.” 

He told reporters shortly ahead of the planned vote on Thursday that he was prepared to vote against the measure and suggested “there’s probably about five to eight of us that have expressed a concern regarding the one provision being placed in the bill.” 

In the House Republicans’ narrow majority, just a handful of members can sink any partisan bill.

The bill has also faced opposition from the right flank amid scrutiny around the FBI as some conservatives have accused the agency of political weaponization.  

An amendment pushed by Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) earlier this week sought to bar funding from being used “for the acquisition of property” for a new FBI headquarters. 

“I don’t believe that the FBI deserves a massive new headquarters or Washington field office,” he said, while accusing the agency of working to “censor factual information harmful to their preferred political candidates.” 

Rep. Steve Womack (R-Ark.), who heads the subcommittee that crafted the bill, pushed back on Gaetz’s criticism at the time, saying “it is bad policy for the Congress to be taking steps to deny a federal agency that is in serious need, in my opinion, of an improvement to their headquarters.”  

“Notice I said improvement,” Womack said on the floor. “I didn’t say some massive big expansion, necessarily. But what I do know is that when I toured the FBI headquarters, I saw it in a state of disrepair that is going to need the attention of the owners of that property. And that’s us.”  

But other conservatives are still critical of FBI funding. Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.) signaled he was a part of that camp in remarks to reporters on Thursday, while saying he also planned to vote against the bill.  

“FBI was a big deal. I raised that on the floor with Womack. It’s in disrepair. Well, the FBI is in disrepair as well,” he said, adding the bill didn’t go far enough to cut spending.  

“I mean, we’re just nibbling around the edges,” he said, telling The Hill the public is “tired of just going around in circles, and [if] we’re not going to cut, let’s just tell the American people we’re going bankrupt.” 

The bill is among the 12 annual government funding bills House Republicans sought to pass this month as they look to strengthen their hand in spending talks with Senate Democrats later this year.    

Like a chunk of the proposals, the bill considered on Thursday seeks to cut spending partly by rolling back funding for Democratic priorities approved in the previous Congress, with previous legislative summary detailing a pitch for clawing back billions of dollars in IRS funding. 

Republicans have defended the cuts, pointing to the rising national debt and inflation, and hardline conservatives are pressing for further reductions to spending.  

[…]

Earlier this week, House Republicans also punted plans to vote on a housing and transportation government funding bill over concerns from some in the party about a proposed drop in dollars for Amtrak. 

What a clusterfuck. And they have a religious nutcase running things now. This is going to be some holiday season…

The Media Has Got To Sober Up

Published by digby on November 9, 2023

They’re doing it again as if nothing has changed. Do they think they are immune to consequences of fascism?

Margaret Sullivan reads the media the riot act:

Whatever doubts you may have about public-opinion polls, one recent example should not be dismissed.

Yes, that poll – the one from Siena College and the New York Times that sent chills down many a spine. It showed Donald Trump winning the presidential election by significant margins over Joe Biden in several swing states, the places most likely to decide the presidential election next year.

The poll, of course, is only one snapshot and it has been criticized, but it still tells a cautionary tale – especially when paired with the certainty that Trump, if elected, will quickly move toward making the United States an authoritarian regime.

Add in Biden’s low approval ratings, despite his accomplishments, and you come to an unavoidable conclusion: the news media needs to do its job better.

The press must get across to American citizens the crucial importance of this election and the dangers of a Trump win. They don’t need to surrender their journalistic independence to do so or be “in the tank” for Biden or anyone else.

It’s now clearer than ever that Trump, if elected, will use the federal government to go after his political rivals and critics, even deploying the military toward that end. His allies are hatching plans to invoke the Insurrection Act on day one.

The US then “would resemble a banana republic”, a University of Virginia law professor told the Washington Post when it revealed these schemes. Almost as troubling, two New York Times stories outlined Trump’s autocratic plans to put loyal lawyers in key posts and limit the independence of federal agencies.

The press generally is not doing an adequate job of communicating those realities.

Instead, journalists have emphasized Joe Biden’s age and Trump’s “freewheeling” style. They blame the public’s attitudes on “polarization”, as if they themselves have no role. And, of course, they make the election about the horse race – rather than what would happen a few lengths after the finish line.

Here’s what must be hammered home: Trump cannot be re-elected if you want the United States to be a place where elections decide outcomes, where voting rights matter, and where politicians don’t baselessly prosecute their adversaries.

When Americans do understand how politics affects their lives, they vote accordingly. We have seen that play out with respect to abortion rights in Ohio, Virginia, Wisconsin and beyond. On that issue, voters clearly get that well-established rights have been ripped away, and they have reacted with force.

“Women don’t want to die for Mike Johnson’s religious beliefs,” as Vanity Fair’s Molly Jong-Fast said on MSNBC, referring to the theocratic House speaker.

Abortion rights is a visceral issue. It’s personal and immediate.

Trump’s threats to democracy? That’s a harder story to tell. Harder than “Joe Biden is old”. Harder than: “Gosh, America is so polarized.”

Journalists need to figure out a way to communicate it – clearly and memorably.

It was great to see the digging that went into that Washington Post story about Trump and his allies plotting a post-election power grab. But it was all too telling to see this wording in its subhead: “Critics have called the ideas under consideration dangerous and unconstitutional.”

So others think it’s fine, right? That suggests that both sides have a valid point of view on whether democracy matters.

Deploying the military to crush protests is radical. So is putting your cronies and yes men in charge of justice. These moves would sound a death knell for American democracy. They are not just another illustration of Trump’s “brash” personality.

We need a lot more stories like the ones the Post and the Times did – not just in these elite, paywalled outlets but on the nightly news, on cable TV, in local newspapers and on radio broadcasts. We need a lot less pussyfooting in the wording.

Every news organization should be reporting on this with far more vigor – and repetition – than they do about Biden being 80 years old.

It’s the media’s responsibility to grab American voters by the lapels, not just to nod to the topic politely from time to time.

Polls can be wrong, and it’s foolish to overstate their importance, especially a year away from the election, but if more citizens truly understood the stakes, there would be no real contest between these candidates.

The Guardian’s David Smith laid out the contrast: “Since Biden took office the US economy has added a record 14m jobs while his list of legislative accomplishments has earned comparisons with those of Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson … Trump, meanwhile, is facing 91 criminal indictments in Atlanta, Miami, New York and Washington DC, some of which relate to an attempt to overthrow the US government.”

So what can the press do differently? Here are a few suggestions.

Report more – much more – about what Trump would do, post-election. Ask voters directly whether they are comfortable with those plans, and report on that. Display these stories prominently, and then do it again soon.

Use direct language, not couched in scaredy-cat false equivalence, about the dangers of a second Trump presidency.

Pin down Republicans about whether they support Trump’s lies and autocratic plans, as ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos did in grilling the House majority leader Steve Scalise about whether the 2020 election was stolen. He pushed relentlessly, finally saying: “I just want an answer to the question, yes or no?” When Scalise kept sidestepping, Stephanopoulos soon cut off the interview.

Those ideas are just a start. Newsroom leaders should be getting their staffs together to brainstorm how to do it. Right now.

With the election less than a year away, there’s no time to waste in getting the truth across.

From her lips to CNN’s ears. The coverage of these polls is a very worrying harbinger of what’s to come. It appears they’ve learned nothing and it’s “butheremails” all over again.

GOPers On Parade

Published by digby on November 9, 2023

It’s not a pretty sight

The GOP debate last night was torture. I watched it because it’s my job but I’ll be very happy when this primary is over. I usually sort of enjoy watching them tear each other apart and say stupid things but this one is truly unpleasant.

I thought this one might be more interesting because it was on NBC so maybe it would have more interesting questions than the softballs they’ve been given on the earlier Fox debates. But no. It was just more dull — well except for Nikki Haley calling Ramaswamy “scum” and Ramaswamy calling Zelensky a Nazi. They didn’t ask about abortion until the last 15 minutes, they didn’t ask about guns, they didn’t ask about Trump’s legal problems. (Chris Christie did mention them in one early answer but that was that.)

Aaaaand there was a rousing discussion about how much to cut Social Security and Medicare! Here’s the leading so-called “moderate” on the stage who the media anointed the winner:

Points for making that clear.

It is a total waste of time for everyone. I don’t know why they are bothering.

Meanwhile, 15 miles away at the same time, here’s the man everyone says is so much sharper than Joe Biden:

Biden is old but he isn’t stupid and he isn’t crazy. Kids, please don’t make the mistake of voting third party because you don’t like something Biden did or didn’t do. You must realize that enabling this lunatic to have another term will end us.

Dems Couldn’t Have Done Better

Published by digby on November 9, 2023

The polls are driving them crazy but the performance on Tuesday should make them keep their heads down, do the work and recognize they have a good argument and all the other side has is hate.

Ron Brownstein on the election this week and what it means for Democrats:

Democrats yesterday continued to perform better at the polls than in the polls.

Even as many Democrats have been driven to a near panic by a succession of recent polls showing President Joe Biden’s extreme vulnerability, the party in yesterday’s elections swept almost all the most closely watched contests. Democrats won the Kentucky governorship by a comfortable margin, romped to a lopsided victory in an Ohio ballot initiative ensuring abortion rights,and easily captured an open Pennsylvania Supreme Court seat. Most impressive, Democratsheld the Virginia state Senate and were projected to regain control of the Virginia state House, despite an all-out campaign from Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin to win both chambers.Among the major contests, Democrats fell short only in the governor’s race in Mississippi.

The results extended the most striking pattern from the 2022 midterm election, when Republicans failed to match the usual gains for the party out of the White House at a time of widespread public dissatisfaction with the president. Democrats, just as they did last November, generated yesterday’s unexpectedly strong results primarily by amassing decisive margins in urban centers and the large inner suburbs around them.

The outcomes suggested that, as in 2022, an unusually broad group of voters who believe that Democrats have not delivered for their interests voted for the party’s candidates anyway because they apparently considered the Republican alternatives a threat to their rights and values on abortion and other cultural issues.

“The driving force of our politics since 2018 has been fear and opposition to MAGA,” the Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg told me. “It was the driving force in 2022 and 2023, and it will be in 2024. The truth is, what we’re facing in our domestic politics is unprecedented. Voters understand it, they are voting against it, and they are fighting very hard to prevent our democracy from slipping away.”

The surprising results yesterday could not have come at a better time for Democratic leaders. Many in the party have been driven to a near frenzy of anxiety by a succession of recent polls showing Biden trailing former President Donald Trump.

Yesterday’s victories have hardly erased all of Biden’s challenges. For months, polls have consistently found that his approval rating remains stuck at about 40 percent, that about two-thirds of voters believe he’s too old to effectively serve as president for another term, and that far more voters express confidence in Trump’s ability to manage the economy than in Biden’s.

But, like the 2022 results in many of the key swing states, the Democrats’ solid showing yesterday demonstrated that the party can often overcome those negative assessments by focusing voters’ attention on their doubts about the Trump-era Republican Party. “Once again, we saw that what voters say in polls can be very different than what they do when faced with the stark choice between Democrats who are fighting for a better life for families and dangerous candidates who are dead set on taking away their rights and freedoms,” Jenifer Fernandez Ancona, the chief strategy officer of Way to Win, a liberal group that focuses on electing candidates of color, told me in an email last night.

Even more than a midterm election, these off-year elections can turn on idiosyncratic local factors. But the common thread through most of the major contests was the Democrats’ continuing strength in racially diverse, well-educated major metropolitan areas, which tend to support liberal positions on cultural issues such as abortion and LGBTQ rights. Those large population centers have trended Democratic for much of the 21st century. But that process accelerated after Trump emerged as the GOP’s leader in 2016, and has further intensified since the conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion.

Across yesterday’s key contests, Democrats maintained a grip on major population centers. In Kentucky, Democratic Governor Andy Beshear carried the counties centered on Louisville and Lexington by about 40 percentage points each over Republican Attorney General Daniel Cameron.

In Ohio, abortion-rights supporters dominated most of the state’s largest communities. That continued the pattern from the first round of the state’s battle over abortion. In that election, as I wrote, the abortion-rights side, which opposed the change, won 14 of the state’s 17 largest counties, including several that voted for Trump in 2020.

The results were equally emphatic in yesterday’s vote on a ballot initiative to repeal the six-week-abortion ban that the GOP-controlled state legislature passed, and Republican Governor Mike DeWine signed, in 2019. The abortion ban was buried under a mountain of votes for repeal in the state’s biggest places: An overwhelming two-thirds or more of voters backed repeal in the state’s three largest counties (which are centered on Cleveland, Columbus, and Cincinnati), and the repeal side won 17 of the 20 counties that cast the most ballots, according to the tabulations posted in The New York Times.

Democrats held the Virginia state Senate through strong performances in suburban areas as well. Especially key were victories in which Democrats ousted a Republican incumbent in a suburban Richmond district, and took an open seat in Loudoun County, an outer suburb of Washington, D.C.

The race for an open Pennsylvania Supreme Court seat followed similar tracks. Democrat Daniel McCaffery cruised to victory in a race that hinged on debates about abortion and voting rights. Like Democrats in other states, McCaffery amassed insuperable margins in Pennsylvania’s largest population centers: He not only posted big leads in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, but he also built enormous advantages in each of the four large suburban counties outside Philadelphia, according to the latest vote tally.

From a national perspective, the battle for control of the Virginia state legislature probably offered the most important signal. The Virginia race presented the same competing dynamics that are present nationally. Though Biden won the state by 10 percentage points in 2020, recent polls indicate that more voters there now disapprove than approve of his performance. And just as voters in national polls routinely say they trust Trump more than Biden on the economy and several other major issues, polls found that Virginia voters gave Republicans a double-digit advantage on economy and crime. Beyond all that, Youngkin raised enormous sums to support GOP legislative candidates and campaigned tirelessly for them.

Yet even with all those tailwinds, Youngkin still failed to overturn the Democratic majority in the state Senate, and lost the GOP majority in the state House. The principal reason for Youngkin’s failure, analysts in both parties agree, was public resistance to his agenda on abortion. Youngkin had elevated the salience of abortion in the contest by explicitly declaring that if voters gave him unified control of both legislative chambers, the GOP would pass a 15-week ban on the procedure, with exceptions for rape, incest, and threats to the life of the mother.

Youngkin and his advisers described that proposal as a “reasonable” compromise, and hoped it would become a model for Republicans beyond the red states that have already almost all imposed more severe restrictions. But the results made clear that most Virginia voters did not want to roll back access to abortion in the commonwealth, where it is now legal through 26 weeks of pregnancy. “What Virginia showed us is that the Glenn Youngkin playbook failed,” Mini Timmaraju, the CEO of Reproductive Freedom for All, an abortion-rights group, told me last night. “We showed that even Republican voters in Virginia weren’t buying it, didn’t go for it, saw right through it.”

Youngkin’s inability to capture the Virginia state legislature, even with all the advantages he enjoyed, will probably make the 2024 GOP presidential contenders even more skittish about openly embracing a national ban on abortion. But Timmaraju argued that yesterday’s results showed that voters remain focused on threats to abortion rights. “Our job is to make sure that the American people don’t forget who overturned Roe v. Wade,” she told me.

None of yesterday’s results guarantees success for Biden or Democrats in congressional races next year. It is still easier for other Democrats to overcome doubts about Biden than it will be for the president himself to do so. In particular, the widespread concern in polls that Biden is too old to serve another term is a problem uniquely personal to him. And few Democrats really want to test whether they can hold the White House in 2024 without improving Biden’s ratings for managing the economy. Trump’s base of white voters without a college degree may be more likely to turn out in a presidential than off-year election as well.

But a clear message from the party’s performance yesterday is that, however disenchanted voters are with the country’s direction under Biden, Democrats can still win elections by running campaigns that prompt voters to consider what Republicans would do with power. “We have an opening here with the effective framing around protecting people’s freedoms,” Fernandez Ancona told me. “Now we can push forward on the economy.”

Yesterday’s results did not sweep away all the obstacles facing Biden. But the outcome, much like most of the key contests in last fall’s midterm, show that the president still has a viable pathway to a second term through the same large metro areas that keyed this unexpectedly strong showing for Democrats.

It’s the freedom. It all comes down to that. Taking away abortion rights, banning books, banning speech, telling parents how they’re allowed to raise their kids, demonizing health care workers, election workers and teachers are all assaults on freedom. And they are just getting started.

Tooth and nail

Published by Tom Sullivan on November 9, 2023

By hook and by crook

It’s not clear sometines whether the beleaguered 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA) is as dead as a Norwegian Blue or just resting. The Act, explains Democracy Docket, was not just intended to address open discrimination, but the subtle kind as well, as Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote in 1969. Chief Justice John Roberts will go down in history for eviscerating and/or weakening VRA provisions.

Even then, The VRA is not quite dead yet:

Over the past few months, pro-voting forces have brought a series of lawsuits under lesser known and rarely litigated provisions of the VRA that seek to combat some of the more “subtle” — but nevertheless pernicious — voting laws that disenfranchise citizens across the country. From Washington to North Carolina and other states in between, these lawsuits are tapping into more obscure portions of the VRA in order to protect voting rights. 

You go to war with the VRA provisions you have.

Case coordinator Rachel Selzer names a few:

In Wisconsin, a new lawsuit challenges the state’s absentee ballot witness requirement under Section 201 of the VRA. 

A recent federal lawsuit brought on behalf of four individual Wisconsin voters alleges that the state’s absentee ballot witness requirement contravenes Section 201 of the VRA, which prohibits denying the right to vote on the basis of a citizen’s failure to comply with a “test or device.” Section 201 defines an unlawful “test or device” as any requirement that a voter must satisfy as a prerequisite for voting. 

Including “the voucher of registered voters or members of any other class.” Like a “supporting witness.”

Relying on Section 202(c) of the VRA, lawsuits in North Carolina and Washington challenge residency requirements for voting. 

That 1970 provision “abolished so-called ‘durational residency requirements’ as a precondition for voting in presidential elections.” Residency is distinct from a registration cutoff.

Despite the VRA’s clear mandate, states including North Carolina and Washington require their citizens to reside in the state for at least 30 days prior to the election in which they seek to vote. Two new federal lawsuits filed on behalf of the North Carolina Alliance for Retired Americans and the Washington State Alliance for Retired Americans allege that their states’ respective durational residency requirements flout Section 202(c) as well as the U.S. Constitution.

[…]

The Section 202(c) lawsuits also bring claims under the First and 14th Amendments, alleging that the durational residency requirements unconstitutionally burden the fundamental right to vote without a compelling justification. Both cases cite the Supreme Court’s 1971 opinion in Dunn v. Blumstein, which held that Tennessee’s durational residency requirements “deny some citizens the right to vote” and “impinge[] on the exercise of a second fundamental personal right, the right to travel.” 

Using Section 202(d) of the VRA, a Georgia lawsuit seeks to extend the time period in which voters can request an absentee ballot.

In particular, Section 202(d) stipulates that states are required to allow all qualified voters who will be outside of their election district on Election Day to cast an absentee ballot in a presidential election so long as they applied at least seven days before the election. 

Georgia previously comported with this federally mandated deadline up until 2021 when it enacted an omnibus voter suppression law, Senate Bill 202, in response to record high turnout in the 2020 general election. Under S.B. 202, the latest a voter may apply for an absentee ballot (via mail, email fax or online) is 11 days before an election — four days before the VRA’s prescribed deadline. 

Look closely at any voting-related statutory adjustments made by GOP-led legislatures for the subtle and not so subtle impacts. They’re trying anything and everything they can think of to suppress the vote and to make voting itself more of a challenge. Just as Paul Weyrich said so unsubtly in 1980.

Two can play at that game.

While RNC losers debated

Published by Tom Sullivan on November 9, 2023

“When in the history of the world have the people banning books been the good guys?”

Erin Reed (Erin in the Morning) posts on Threads:

This story got drowned out by the elections yesterday, but I want to make it clear to everyone. A decent sized city in Tennessee has banned public homosexuality. This is the kind of law we have not seen since the 70s. It’s straight out of Orbán and Putin’s government.

Now Murfreesboro has moved on to local libraries “where at least four books, all containing LGBTQ+ themes, have been pulled from the shelves,” Reed writes, describing the ordinance. “Following that, the [city] council moved to enact a tiered library card system, where most nonfiction content will be gated behind the adult-only library card. This system will go into effect in 2024.”

Where have we seen that before?

Reed continues:

On Monday, however, the county steering committee met to discuss a new resolution: the removal of all books in the library that could possibly violate the Murfreesboro ordinance. The fiery meeting featured multiple board members stating that they had the right to “enforce community standards” and ban books.

Local activist Keri Lambert pointed out that city was already being sued over the ordinance. Now you want to double down and invite another? she asked, exasperated?

“Do you know now that if you’re under 18 you can’t access history books?” How does a 16-year-old study for the SAT?

“When in the history of the world have the people banning books been the good guys?”

East of Tennessee

“Democrats yesterday continued to perform better at the polls than in the polls,” wrote Ron Brownstein on Wednesday. It was also true in North Carolina.

We had no statewide contests in North Carolina on Tuesday. Still, Democrats fared better here as well in the mostly nonpartisan local races (WRAL):

Democrats swept the mayor’s race and council seats in Huntersville, in Republican-leaning northern Mecklenburg County — the first time that’s ever happened, according to Catawba College political scientist Michael Bitzer.

[…]

Democrats also won all the open seats in New Hanover County, which is politically nearly evenly divided. They won the mayor’s race in High Point, a seat that’s been held by a Republican for many years. They even swept the town councils in Cooleemee, a tiny town in Davie County, and in Mars Hill and Marshall in Madison County, all typically Republican areas.

Democrats have not engaged much in local races in recent cycles, but longtime Democratic strategist Gary Pearce says that’s changing under new party Chairwoman Anderson Clayton. He credits her for the wins.

“She had made a big thing when she came in about wanting to compete in municipal races,” Pearce said. “Some Democrats were afraid that would take the focus off the 2024 election, but she proved them wrong.”

Watch that space.

Oh, that guy in the White House? Still getting shit done:

The White House announced this week a historic investment in American passenger rail services, advancing the plan put forth in Biden’s signature Bipartisan Infrastructure Law that will provide billions of dollars for modernizations in Amtrak’s northeast corridor. The new projects are expected to create over 100,000 new construction jobs.

The law will provide $16.4 billion in new funding for 25 passenger rail projects from Boston to Washington, D.C. The investments will rebuild tunnels and bridges that are over 100 years old; upgrade tracks, power systems, signals, stations, and other infrastructure; and, advance future projects to significantly improve travel times by increasing operating speeds and reducing delays.

Joe knows something about Amtrak, I hear.

(h/t KM for the graphic)

He Owns It

Published by digby on November 8, 2023

Trump on his great achievement in taking away a woman’s right to choose:

During the 202) campaign he tried to hedge:

The Democrats cannot let him do that again. His bragging about being personally responsible for taking away women’s constitutional rights must be pounded into every voter’s brain before the 2024 election. It must be conventional wisdom made clear by those quotes of him taking credit for what he did (and there are more) and he cannot be allowed to hedge about it and pretend he didn’t say it. Not this time.

Poor, Poor Marjorie

Published by digby on November 8, 2023

Nobody can stand her

Marjorie Taylor Greene finds that she’s standing alone:

With her claims about Jewish laser beams, attacks of school-shooting survivors, promotion of QAnon, and overall “I’ll tell YOU when I’ve had enough wine coolers” vibes, Marjorie Taylor Greene has never been a universally beloved figure in Washington. Still, for a time, she had a number of friends on the far-right side of Congress who were willing to put up with her. Now? Not so much!

The Daily Beast reports that while the GOP’s three-week train wreck electing a House Speaker was an embarrassing stain on the entire party, one individual in particular “emerged from the drama with few friends and plenty of enemies”: the congresswoman from Georgia. She’s now persona non grata among a significant amount of Republicans thanks to the fact that:

1-She was kicked out of the House Freedom Caucus this summer.
2-Kevin McCarthy, whom she aligned herself with earlier this year, is out of power.
3-“GOP rank and file…already disliked her.” 

Really, it’s just math.

And that math was on display last week when Greene tried and failed—very badly!—to censure Democratic Representative Rashida Tlaib for the lawmaker’s pro-Palestinian comments. Per the Daily Beast:

Twenty-three Republicans broke with Greene on her resolution to censure Tlaib…. And those 23 Republicans breaking with Greene—a firebrand conservative who is perhaps the id of the MAGA movement in Congress and has Donald Trump on speed dial—is just the latest evidence that GOP members are neither fearing nor loving Marjorie Taylor Greene.

That point was further illustrated after the vote, when Greene took to Twitter to shame the Republicans who voted against her censure resolution. “You voted to kick me out of the freedom caucus, but keep CNN wannabe Ken Buck and vaping groping Lauren Boebert and you voted with the Democrats to protect Terrorist Tlaib,” Greene wrote, taking aim at Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX). “You hate Trump, certified Biden’s election, and could care less about J6 defendants being persecuted.”

In response, Roy told The Hill: “Tell her to go chase so-called Jewish space lasers if she wants to spend time on that sort of thing.” And whereas some of her colleagues might have previously come to her defense, many have since suggested—some by saying outright—that she’s only hurting herself and her standing in Congress.

“Childish in many ways,” Representative Troy Nehls, who has previously defended Greene, told the Daily Beast of her attacks on Roy. “What do you feel you’re accomplishing there, you know?” Another Republican and former Greene ally told the outlet: “She’s creating her own enemies through unprovoked, unwarned, and unsubstantiated attacks. Embarrassing herself through launching attacks she later has to retract due to their inaccuracies.” A third who was “once close” with the Georgia rep added: “There is no one I have heard from, dozens of members, who are happy with her, that trust her [or] confide in her. She’s continually seeking attention,” this GOP member said, “building herself up while tearing others down. I have cut ties completely.”

Asked for comment re: her lack of popularity in DC, Greene told the Daily Beast she wasn’t going to speak to a “stupid gossip blog.”

Unfortunately, while Greene may be on the outs with many of her congressional colleagues, she reportedly remains beloved in MAGA HQ, where she is apparently on a “short list” of VP candidates.

They managed to censure Tlaib last night with a different resolution which probably fries her even more.

Trump is not going to pick her for VP. She’s not his type (as he likes to say…) and this unpopularity will not go unnoticed at Mar-a-Lago. He may like her personally (he likes anyone who licks his boots) but there’s a limit.

Tick Tock Ivanka

Published by digby on November 8, 2023

Daddy’s little girl on the stand

MSNBC’s Lisa Rubin covered the testimony on twitter this morning:

Good morning, I’m back at New York Supreme Court, and I’ll be posting both here and through MSNBC’s live blog of Ivanka Trump’s testimony. I’ll give you the good color and analysis there & will pop in here with quicker bits of the play-by-play:

Let’s set the stage with 7 minutes left before the trial day starts. The courtroom is almost full, but not nearly as crowded as it has been on days past and is a relative ghost town compared with Monday’s packed-within-inches scenario. 

The Attorney General is here in her usual front-row seat, surrounded by staff, and her team has been at their table for at least a half hour. Team Trump, on the other hand, just walked in and is getting settled. 

Remember: Ivanka is technically a third party witness, and as my @NBCNews colleague @adamreisstv observed this morning, will not sit as the defense table nor is she permitted in the courtroom separate and apart from being called to the stand. 

Previewing lines of testimony to come, Ivanka explained that she spent “an enormous amount” of time on two projects in particular: Doral and the Old Post Office loan. 

Right off the bat, Ivanka is a more cooperative, comfortable witness than her brothers. 

And now, with little fanfare, Solomon has started discussing the relationship between the Trump Org and Deutsche Bank. He asks whether she understands Trump once had a relationship with DB through its commercial division, including with respect to a loan on the Chicago property. 

Ivanka has referenced her August 2022 investigative interview multiple times now, including referring to documents shown to her at that interview. That she has been well, if transparently, prepped is clear. 

In connection with discussing the financing Trump sought for Doral, Ivanka says her goal with Doral was to “reposition” it as a luxury property. And here comes the first document in today’s examination. 

In a 2011 email to someone named Andy Beal, Ivanka promises her father will send him his most recent financial statement via “hard mail.” She does not recall whether Beal requested that document; the conversations with Beal Bank were brief & never reached the term sheet stage. 

Kise is objecting to these questions on relevant grounds. The implication, of course, of reviewing these kinds of emails with other prospective lenders is that the Trumps could not obtain a loan for Doral on standard terms for a commercial real estate project. 

That is, in fact, where we are headed. We are now looking at a November 2011 email from Ivanka to Richard Byrne of Deutsche Bank about obtaining financing for Doral, conversations Ivanka described as “high level” and that “didn’t go anywhere.” 

And now we’ve moved to the point, one month later, where Ivanka — the captain of the Doral redevelopment — has arranged a meeting with Rosemary Vrablic and Dominic Scalzi of the private wealth management group and days later, received a term sheet and a request for more information for due diligence purposes from Vrablic 

And in particular, Solomon is now highlighting how much more advantageous the interest rates are (LIBOR + 2.25 or the Prime Rate, during one phase of the project) in exchange for … 

two things: a full and complete personal guaranty from Donald Trump that he could cover the principal and interest of the loan and operating expenses of the resort AND a minimum net worth of $3 billion, exclusive of brand value. 

That these terms were unusual, even for Trump, is underscored by the initial reaction of Trump Org lawyer Jason Greenblatt, who worried in a Dec 2011 email that Trump might not be willing to sign such a guaranty and that the minimum net worth requirement could be “a problem.” 

Ivanka responded, “We’ve known that” — meaning that the net worth requirement would be an issue — “since day one.” Nonetheless, however, Trump told DB his total net worth was in excess of $4 billion. 

And when Ivanka sent back to DB their marked up term sheet, they lowered the net worth covenant to $2 billion, not $3 billion. 

Ivanka has now confirmed Trump Org ultimately entered into commitment and fee letters with Deutsche Bank for the Doral loan, as signed by her dad. 

Kise is now objecting that Ivanka has not been questioned about the three corporate entities that afforded the AG jurisdiction; Engoron says “it’s an interesting question.” Solomon is getting exercised; she was involved, from top to bottom in the negotiation and execution of this deal. 

Engoron says the subpoena set a floor, not a ceiling on the scope of her testimony, and we move on. 

Ivanka is reviewing the ultimately agreed-upon net worth covenant, which required a minimum net worth of $2.5 billion, exclusive of brand, as reflected in his statements of financial condition. She has no independent memory of this term, however. 

Ivanka also has testified, despite Solomon’s attempt to refresh her recollection with various emails, that she does not recall communications about an unsecured, additional loan for Doral in 2016, nor does she remember why that loan did not come to fruition. 

Ivanka is now being shown an April 2016 email from Vrablic indicating there “bank couldn’t make the exception in this case,” meaning they decided against moving forward. Again, Ivanka says this does not refresh her recollection. 

Solomon moves on to the another of the topics I predicted would come up: Ivanka’s option to purchase two different penthouse apartments, both of which were owned by the Trump Org. 

Ivanka maintains she was not involved in the statements of financial condition so she has no idea how they were valued in those documents. 

With a half hour remaining before lunch, we’re focused on Ivanka’s involvement in the Old Post Office — aka Trump International Hotel DC — deal, which began with presentations to the federal government’s General Services Administration, which owns the property. 

The AG’s lawyer is using documents to establish that in December 2011, the GSA noticed “multiple GAAP departures” in Donald Trump’s statements of financial condition, and brought those to the attention of Trump Org. representatives, including Ivanka. 

A Trump employee, David Orowitz, internally circulated a proposed response to GSA’s concerns; Ivanka does not recall that they received a “deficiency letter” to which Orowitz was trying to respond. She does remember GSA had “questions” to which they worked to get them “answers.” 

But she doesn’t have any independent recollection of any specific questions raised by GSA in response to Trump’s statements of financial condition. 

****

We’re now on our lunch break, but before it began, Ivanka was shown a 2013 email between her and her husband, as produced by the Trump Org. 

While how much of that email will ultimately be admissible is up for discussion because of spousal privilege,if you wondered whether these two talked shop, they absolutely did. Ivanka seems to have sought and got Jared’s advice about potential sources of financing for the Old Post Office deal. 

And the implication that the AG appears to be drawing here is twofold: Only Deutsche Bank was willing to provide financing on terms even close to what the Trumps wanted—but only if they got two things they wanted: 

a guaranty that Trump could cover the principal, interest, and operating income of each asset and proof that he maintained a minimum net worth of $2-3 billion, exclusive of brand value, as demonstrated by … his annual statements of financial condition. ]

Ivanka’s direct testimony is over and has been relatively placid. But that doesn’t mean there were no surprises. 

The AG’s lawyer just showed Ivanka proof that despite making a personal guaranty to Deutsche Bank in connection with the Old Post Office loan, Trump then entered into an agreement with his adult kids, through which each agreed to pay him money through their revocable trusts to ensure he could meet that obligation. 

On cross examination, Jesus Suarez is hammering at a theme: Deutsche Bank wanted to make money, and the favorable loan terms they extended to Trump were part and parcel of an overall strategy to make money from their relationship with the Trumps. Not only did DB offer them other investment opportunities or banking services, but seemed to have believed publicity from the Trump relationship would benefit the bank. 

Given how little she recalled about the terms of the related loans, Ivanka’s recollection of the beginning of her involvement in the multi-year, multi-million-dollar Doral acquisition and renovation strikes me as oddly extensive. 

Rubin points out that Trump lying and saying he could personally guarantee the repayment of the loan even though he actually had to enter a deal with his kids that he could loot their trusts if he failed is quite a revelation.

I’m just putting this here to mark what took place today. Rubin’s analysis on television was that despite her calm demeanor, Ivanka actually revealed a great deal about how they did business and didn’t contradict any of the documents presented in the case, merely saying that she didn’t remember them. Those documents are pretty damning. In some ways it appears that she subtly threw Trump and her brothers under the bus by just sitting there and allowing the case to speak for itself without staging any tantrums and distractions as the others have done on the stand to deflect from the substance of the case.

Everyone has been saying that her testimony isn’t important but as I wrote last week, she was intimately involved in Trump’s schemes and has different incentives than the boys to join the circus. Her husband has handsomely cashed in on the presidency. Her concerns are more for her own reputation and Jared’s and getting into this mess doesn’t benefit her. She’s a Trump and they always look out for number one.