Month: June 2024

I think they’re pretty good I don’t know if anyone’s seeing them though.

There are a bunch of these. They’re being targeted at specific social media and, I assume, on television in some markets. I think they’re effective but then I’m already on the team.

There is now a new Super PAC announced to try to get to young voters:

The group, Won’t PAC Down, will raise and spend $20 million to $25 million, according to details shared exclusively with POLITICO. It’s also turning to Hollywood for help. Won’t PAC Down has hired millennial and Gen Z writers, directors and producers to help craft pro-Biden content that’s specifically engineered to sell an octogenarian candidate to typically disillusioned and hard-to-reach voters under 30.

Those movie industry creatives, with credits from “Saturday Night Live” to “Parks and Recreation” to “Big Mouth,” have been meeting monthly for the last half year in a rented, loft-style conference room in a downtown Los Angeles office building. There, they have pitched everything from 30- and 90-second influencer-style ads that could run on Instagram Reels to highly produced, scripted ads. The group’s first actual ads — which will only appear on social media and streaming platforms — are expected to drop in early July.

The hope, officials involved with the super PAC say, is that ads that are crafted for and by a younger, online audience can more effectively reach nonpolitical voters under 30. And for that reason, the group plans to avoid the crutch that other politics-meets-Hollywood ventures have deployed: splashy celebrity videos meant to go viral online.

“There’s a big difference between putting a celebrity on camera and having them say, ‘if you liked me in “Madame Web,” then you’re going to love voting,’ versus what we’re doing,” said Travis Helwig, a former head writer for Crooked Media who is now leading the super PAC’s writers’ room. “We’re taking the best young writers and directors, who are the age and demographics of the people we’re targeting, using poll-tested messaging, and shaping it in a way that will resonate with young people and get them excited.”

I have no idea if this will help but I’m glad to see all hands on deck.

Don’t nominate a criminal

Here is where that framing has inevitably led. From Jonathan Chait:

John Yoo, the former Bush administration lawyer (who himself escaped prosecution for his role in constructing legal justifications to torture detainees, many of whom turned out to be held wrongfully in the first place), has an essay in National Review arguing for revenge prosecutions. The imprimatur of Yoo, a Berkeley law professor and fellow at two of the conservative movement’s least-insane think tanks (the American Enterprise Institute and the Hoover Institution), underscores the progression of “lock her up” from wild seriously-not-literally Trump-campaign demagoguery in 2016 to party doctrine in 2024.

“Repairing this breach of constitutional norms will require Republicans to follow the age-old maxim: Do unto others as they have done unto you,” urges Yoo. “In order to prevent the case against Trump from assuming a permanent place in the American political system, Republicans will have to bring charges against Democratic officers, even presidents.”

[…]

There are several problems with Yoo’s argument, beginning with the “age-old maxim” he cites. The saying, derived from the Bible, is “Do unto others as you would have done to you,” not “Do unto others as they have done unto you.” I am not a biblical scholar, but the basic thrust of the teachings the line summarizes is to treat people the way you would wish to be treated, rather than instructing people to take revenge for slights.

Second, Yoo attributes Trump’s prosecutions to “the Democrats”:

Make no mistake, Democrats have crossed a constitutional Rubicon. For the first time in American history, they have brought criminal charges against a former president. For the first time in American history, they have brought criminal charges against the major (and leading) opposition candidate for president during the campaign …

Republicans keep asserting that the Democratic Party, or Joe Biden, collectively decided to throw the book at Donald Trump, but there is literally zero evidence for this. Biden has avoided interfering with decisions by the Justice Department, and the two biggest cases against Trump were brought by Jack Smith, who is a nonpartisan figure respected by both parties.

Third, Yoo’s examples of revenge prosecutions underscore his deep confusion about how the Justice Department has been operating. Here are some things he wants investigated: A Republican DA will have to charge Hunter Biden for fraud or corruption for taking money from foreign governments. Another Republican DA will have to investigate Joe Biden for influence-peddling at the behest of a son who received payoffs from abroad.

In fact, Donald Trump went to great lengths to do this very thing. William Barr, a Republican, did investigate allegations of foreign payoffs by Joe Biden. He never brought charges because he was unable to find any legitimate evidence whatsoever to support the claim.

Biden’s only living son is on trial right now and may very well go to jail long before Trump ever does. And, as Chait notes:

Note that these are the kinds of criminal charges a regular person would almost certainly never face. Hunter Biden is being charged because he is the president’s son, and has engaged in sleazy-but-legal dealings that made him a prosecutorial target.

As Chait argues, the biggest conceptual flaw in his argument is that Trump is an innocent victim. In rality, he is a life long criminal conman who inherited vast sums of money and has treated the rule of law like toilet paper and gotten away with it because he had money and operated in a nether world of mobsters and grifters. He is anything but innocent.

Yoo argues that what broke the system was the decisions to charge Trump with crimes, and what can repair it will be charging Democrats. I would suggest the solution instead would be for Republicans to nominate as their next presidential candidate an experienced, vetted politician rather than a professional swindler.

That should be easy peasy. Surely they can find some Republicans who aren’t crooks to run for president.

The watchdog press needs to watch itself

We looked at “radical constitutionalism” on Saturday. But a tweet caught my attention this morning that reinforces why so much ire gets directed at mainstream outlet headlines and bothsidesism:

The Times has been taking a lot of well-deserved flak, especially for clickbait headlines that often mischaracterize the stories below.

New York Times editor Joe Kahn says defending democracy is a partisan act and he won’t do it

A Deputy Standards Editor for Trust Initiatives might begin by finding new headline writers.

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Trump fails to learn from it or to learn anything

President Joe Biden will return to Washington, D.C. after a visit to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery in France. About 2,000 Americans who died in WWI lie buried there. Donald Trump refused to pay his respects during his presidency because a) rain might mess up his hair, and b) he viewed the dead soldiers as “suckers” and “losers” (Associated Press):

It’s a fitting end to five days in which Trump was an unspoken yet unavoidable presence. On the surface, the trip marked the 80th anniversary of D-Day and celebrated the alliance between the United States and France. But during an election year when Trump has called into question fundamental understandings about America’s global role, Biden has embraced his Republican predecessor — and would-be successor — as a latent foil.

Every ode to the transatlantic partnership was a reminder that Trump could upend those relationships. Each reference to democracy stood a counterpoint to his rival’s efforts to overturn a presidential election. The myriad exhortations to help Ukraine defend itself against Russia created a contrast with Trump’s skepticism about providing U.S. assistance.

Biden’s paeans to the struggle between democracy and autocracy drew plaudits in Europe, where the prospect of a return to Trump’s turbulent reign has sparked no shortage of anxiety. But it remains to be seen how the message will resonate with American voters, as Biden’s campaign struggles to connect the dire warnings the Democratic president so often delivers about his rival with people’s daily concerns.

Americans are so busy with quotidian concerns that many have tuned out the news. As recent reports tell it, many are unaware of Trump’s recent convictions on 34 felony counts. How they managed to avoid that news is beyond news junkies such as ourselves, but there it is.

“The autocrats of the world are watching closely,” Biden said in his 80th D-Day commemoration speech, even if Americans are to busy to. Susan Glasser observes (The New Yorker):

While listening to Biden’s speech, I thought about a resignation letter that Mark Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff appointed by Trump, wrote but did not send to him in 2020. “It is my deeply held belief that you’re ruining the international order, and causing significant damage to our country overseas, that was fought for so hard by the Greatest Generation that they instituted in 1945,” Milley said in the letter, a draft of which I obtained in the course of writing a book on the Trump Presidency. “It’s now obvious to me that you don’t understand that world order. You don’t understand what the war was all about. In fact, you subscribe to many of the principles that we fought against.”

Biden did not have to mention any of this to make it the inescapable context of his remarks on Thursday. “To surrender to bullies, to bow down to dictators is simply unthinkable,” Biden told the audience pointedly, adding, “Were we to do that, it means we’d be forgetting what happened here on these hallowed beaches.” And yet so much forgetting has happened, and I am not thinking here about the lessons of the past century as much as I am about the lessons of just one four-year Presidential term ago. Does anyone still remember Trump in Helsinki in 2018, tripping over himself as he took Putin’s word over that of America’s intelligence agencies? Or Trump in France, for another set of world-war commemorations later that year, fresh off midterm-election losses and skipping a cemetery visit because he reportedly did not want to get his hair wet? Or Trump, in 2019, blackmailing Ukraine’s young new President, Volodymyr Zelensky, by holding up hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. military assistance needed to fight off Russia as he demanded Zelensky dig up dirt on Biden?

It is thinkable, then, all too thinkable. At the time of Biden’s speech, the polling averages showed Trump slightly ahead of him. What will happen to Ukraine if he should win?

Trump is more concerned with exacting retribution on “the enemy within” and has no time for warnings in the historical record. His focus is himself. He nevertheless cloaks his plans in the same rhetoric of the fascism-curious America First movement of the 1930s. The enemy within was not an idle comment from his Time interview, Glasser writes, “but a theme of his campaign—the theme of his campaign.”

Biden must have read Trump’s interview, too, as preparation for his own. It clearly informed his passionate case for why Trump is a danger to the international order, his focus on the threat posed by Russia—Trump, in his own interview, had bragged about how well he got along with Putin—and his best off-the-cuff line: “All the bad guys are rooting for Trump, man. Not a joke.”

Neither stirring battlefield rhetoric nor snarky one-liners, though, can explain how Biden can extract himself from his current predicament, running dead even at best against a felonious ex-President who diminishes the threats from America’s adversaries abroad because he is consumed by purging disloyal citizens at home. Tell that to the boys of Pointe du Hoc. I don’t think they’d believe it.

They’d be turning over in their graves at the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery Trump refused to visit.

I still believe (and I hope it’s not naive) that Trump is bleeding support and it’s just not showing up yet in the polls.

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I couldn’t help but think that Kimberly may have just realized that she bet on the wrong horse.

The story in the NY Times takes apart their ridiculous claim, which I’m sure you’ve all heard about by now. Millions of people no doubt believe that the FBI tried to assassinate Donald Trump now. The lies just pile on top of each other. It’s good to see the Times calling it like it is.

There’s a certain hysteria about the GOP’s talking points right now that indicted a lack of confidence in their candidate. That’s understandable since their candidate is a convicted felon who is also a narcissistic pathological liar. But still, lately they’ve been completely out of their minds.

The reaction to he verdict is the best example. They went completely over the top — all of them — complaining that it was a partisan prosecution and a political verdict. It was clearly coordinated to try to intimidate the Democrats into being afraid to use it in the campaign. (That’s not going to work — I hope.)

Just yesterday they all went nuts over a random post by a self-professed “shit-poster” on facebook who had written a post before the verdict saying tat his cousin was on the jury and told him they were going to convict. This was brought to the attention of the judbge who said they will hold a hearing on it. But it was obviously a hoax which the shitposter himself admitted. That didn’t stop Fox News and the entire right wing media from having a complete meltdown over it and demanding a mistrial. Trump himself got in on the action.

They are working their voters up into a paranoid frenzy and I think we all know where that’s going to lead if he loses in November. It’s incredibly irresponsible but that’s the definition of the Republican party in the 2020s.

It’s not the Democrats

MSNBC reports:

Cornel West’s independent presidential campaign is broke. His former campaign manager says he knows nothing about ballot access. And he spent more on graphic design than petition-gathering in his most recent campaign finance report.

But tens of thousands of signatures have been gathered on behalf of the famed left-wing academic in key states thanks to self-organized grassroots volunteers — and some help from outside operatives tied to a Republican consulting firm.

[…]

Emails from elections officials, obtained through a request under North Carolina’s Public Records Law, show the pro-West Justice for All Party authorized three people to pick up and drop off signatures for them statewide — and all three are current or past employees of a Colorado-based Republican political firm called Blitz Canvassing.

Blitz Canvassing has worked for numerous Republican House and Senate candidates and took in more than $14.6 million in payments working for Never Back Down, the main super PAC that supported former GOP presidential candidate and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, according to campaign finance reports.

“In the same way that Republicans have quietly pushed ballot access for the Green Party across the country for years, there’s concrete evidence — not rumors, but evidence — in North Carolina and in other states of an organized Republican effort to get Cornel West on ballots, using Republican consultants and vendors that the West campaign is not paying for,” said Pete Kavanaugh, who founded Clear Choice Action, a new Democratic super PAC working to combat third-party candidates.

West could do something about this, of course. He could withdraw from the race. But they’d just work for one of the other freedom saboteurs so I’m not sure it makes a difference.

This is not a grassroots operation. Someone is paying for it. And those someones are Republicans. I’d really like to see the press in general take a page out of MSNBC’s book here and do some in depth reporting on GOP shenanigans for once. Trump’s relentless accusations that Democrats are rigging the elections is projection as usual.

Update:

You want rigging? I’ll give you rigging. This one concerns a US Senator– Wisconsin’s Ron Johnson. He was up to his neck in the fake electoral scheme and lied about it.

As I’ve been watching the D-Day commemorations the last few days it’s obviously brought up thoughts about the history of our alliances in Europe and why they have been so important. The idea that the United States can withdraw behind its borders and pretend the rest of the world doesn’t exist has been proven wrong over and over again. We may not want to participate with the rest of the world but it certainly wants to participate with us, one way or the other.

The first half of the last century was cataclysmic and the relative peace of the second half was largely achieved by recognizing the fact that closing your eyes to everything but your own domestic concerns never works. Being the world’s only superpower certainly makes that impossible.

Allowing ignoramuses like Trump and Marjorie Taylor Greene to be in charge of such an awesome responsibility is one of the most reckless acts in human history.

All the greatest hits