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Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Giving Away The Game

Published by Tom Sullivan on June 10, 2024

And the Declaration is not even the New Testament

Neil Young: “But what does that have to do with Jesus?”

Steve Benen offers this recollection. I’d already forgotten:

In 2017, on the 4th of July, NPR published a series of tweets with the text of the Declaration of Independence. It seemed like a simple, patriotic gesture to help celebrate our Independence Day. A surprising number of Republicans didn’t quite see it that way.

The more NPR published portions of the Declaration of Independence, the more rank-and-file conservatives — who apparently didn’t recognize the words of the document — assumed that the media outlet was publishing anti-Trump “propaganda.”

“A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people,” one tweet read, sparking particular outrage from the right, who assumed the missive was directed at the then-Republican president.

It was an early reminder, just six months into Donald Trump’s term, that many of his followers, when confronted with core American principles, would simply assume they were anti-Trump criticisms.

Republicans reacted similarly to Joe Biden’s remarks at the 80th D-Day anniversary:

Republican Sen. Rick Scott of Florida called the remarks “disgusting.” A Fox Business host also accused the Democrat of “taking veiled shots” at Trump. As New York magazine’s Jon Chait noted, some other prominent voices from conservative media had similar reactions.

That’s because no matter how much red, white and blue merch they own, Cult of Trump supplicants do not believe in core American principles. In spirit, they are royalists not colonists. If not outright idolaters.

Perhaps this clip from the chair of the Nevada Republican Party is poor phrasing. Perhaps it is a Freudian slip. But call a political rally worship?

Rep. Marge Greene of Georgia goes a step further. She likens her worship of Jesus to her fealty to Donald Trump.

I was raised Catholic. A criticism Protestant fundamentalists always raise is that with all of Catholics’ statues and saints, the line between “venerating” saints (as the catechism would have it) and worshipping them and their images is uncomfortingly fine (Mrs. O’Donnell joke).

Naturally, Trump cultists seem to have no such uneasiness about their own affections toward their orange-caked savior.

It is clear from what transpired on Jan. 6, 2021; and from the actions of GOP-controlled legislatures across the country to ignore the will of the people; and from MAGA Republican efforts to place Trump above the laws of men; and from the shameless declarations of Christian nationalists to transform the U.S. into a theocracy; and from anti-abortion activists’ intentions to reduce women to birthing vessels; that they have, in biblical terms, sold their American birthright for a mess of Trumpage.

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“It’s Not Your Body Anymore”

Published by Tom Sullivan on June 10, 2024

Time for the NCGOP to rewrite the rules again

Digby has a post prepped for later today on Republican sore-loserism in Georgia (based on a Rolling Stone piece). It’s the sort of tactic with which we are well familiar next door in North Carolina. It’s simply this: If Republicans lose under established election rules, change the rules.

Judd Legum spotlights the latest Republican effort in North Carolina to tip the governor’s race in favor of Lt. Gov. Mark “Choking on my own blood” Robinson, the freaky Christian nationalist and conspiracy theorist. He’s trailing in fundraising behind the state’s Attorney General Josh Stein (D).

“The most recent campaign finance reports show that Stein has raised over $19 million, with $12.7 million cash on hand,” Legum begins. “Robinson, however, has raised less than $11 million and has $4.5 million in cash.”

Time to change the rules:

Republicans in the North Carolina legislature have responded by introducing legislation that would dramatically alter the state’s campaign finance rules in the middle of an election. 

Under existing North Carolina campaign finance law, corporations and labor unions cannot contribute directly or indirectly to state campaigns or committees. This prevents the main national fundraising vehicles for gubernatorial campaigns — the Democratic Governors Association (DGA) and the Republican Governors Association (RGA) — from donating to North Carolina political committees. These committees, known as 527s, accept unlimited contributions from corporations and individuals. 

The changes proposed by North Carolina Republicans would allow the RGA and the DGA (or any other 527) to donate unlimited amounts to any “[s]tate, district, or county executive committee of any political party or an affiliated party committee.” Should these changes become law, the only requirement is that the 527s must create two “accounts”—one accepting corporate money and another accepting individual donations in any amount. The Republican proposal would allow the 527s to donate unlimited amounts to North Carolina committees from the account that accepts individual donations.

Bob Hall, a veteran North Carolina campaign finance expert, explained that the new rules would allow “wealthy individuals with new ways to give tens (or even hundreds) of thousands of dollars to support a North Carolina candidate without their name being identified with the donation.” 

Didn’t see that coming, didja?

Anonymity is important to deep-pocketed donors committed to maintaining Republican control but who don’t want their fingerprints on money supporting Mr. “It’s not your body anymore.”

In June 2021, for example, Robinson called LGBTQ people “filth” and said exposure to LGBTQ people and issues in schools was child abuse. In a sermon later that year, Robinson said “straight” couples were “superior” to same-sex couples and compared being gay to “what the cows leave behind.” Robinson has also called LGBTQ people “devil-worshiping child molesters”

On Facebook, Robinson repeatedly minimized the atrocities of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. “I am so sick of seeing and hearing people STILL talk about Nazis and Hitler and how evil and manipulative they were,” Robinson wrote on Facebook in 2017. He accused unknown forces of “pushing this Nazi boogeyman narrative all these years.” 

In 2019, Robinson said that abortion rights were “not about protecting the lives of mothers” but “about killing the child because you weren’t responsible enough to keep your skirt down.” Robinson said women choose to have an abortion so that they can keep living “on easy street” and “keep running to the club every Friday night.” He favors an abortion ban from the moment of conception.

The ad above is part of a seven-figure buy by Stein’s campaign, NBC News reports:

“Abortion in this country is not about protecting the lives of mothers,” Robinson says in the clip used in the ad. “It is about killing the child because you weren’t responsible enough to keep your skirt down.” 

(You might send Robinson a message about that via Stein at ActBlue. )

By any means necessary

Gerrymandering, of course, is an age-old tradition in which both major parties partake to gain advantage. Gotta credit Republicans for their 2010 REDMAP program to flip legislatures all over the place ahead of 2011 redicstricting. But since the election of the first Black president, they’ve really taken their game to the next level (or two) in states David Pepper calls “Laboratories of Autocracy.”

Democrats have been playing Whac-A-Mole ever since against some deviously clever efforts to squeeze every advantage out of existing rules and rule tweaks. From strategically starving blue cities of revenue to purging voter rolls to erecting barriers to voter registration to making voting itself harder to Thomas Hofeller’s computer-aided gerrymandering to trying to rig the 2020 census, the GOP has pulled out all the stops. Lest we forget, they instigated a violent insurrection after losing the 2020 presidential election. We have to implement these changes, Republicans insist, to restore public confidence in election integrity (their buzzword) that they’ve spent relentless decades undermining.

Dramatically altering North Carolina’s campaign finance rules is just another clever tweak. Watch for that mole to pop up its head in your Republican-controlled state.

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Immigration Policy In An Election Year

Published by digby on June 9, 2024

Biden’s new immigration order sucks. I’m sorry, it does. I know it’s a big election issue for a lot of people, including Democrats, and they’re trying to mitigate any erosion of their voting coalition. But the reality is that border crossings are way down over the last 6 months and it’s really overkill.

Having said that, they are apparently also on the verge of offering up something very positive on immigration:

Looking to shore up Latino votes in Nevada and Arizona for his reelection campaign, President Joe Biden is on the verge of soon following up last week’s executive action aimed at curbing border crossings with another move focused on providing legal status for long-term undocumented immigrants who are married to American citizens.

Though final details have not been decided, officials are reviewing an existing legal authority known as “parole in place” that would shield select undocumented immigrants from deportation and allow them to work legally in the country as they seek citizenship. The orders have not yet been presented to Biden himself for review.

Polling reviewed by top aides in the White House and the president’s reelection headquarters are helping seal the deal.

For Biden in Arizona, “Everything is on the margins, right?” said Democratic Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly. “My sense is it should help.”

Estimates put the number of people who could be directly affected at 750,000 to 800,000, with a reverberating effect among spouses, children, extended family and friends — and predominantly Latinos. That’s millions of potential votes in just Arizona, Nevada, and Georgia. Those are all battleground states, all home to many Latinos and all looking likely to be decided in November by slivers of the electorate.

“We have lost the narrative on the border, and so we need to start winning it back,” said one person involved in the discussions of why Biden started with the executive action tightening asylum rules last week.

But “Latino voters in particular are extremely enthusiastic about seeing something done to help people they know. It is either a direct relative or friend, someone they work with,” that person argued. “It is such a powerful signal to these communities that you care about them, and you understand what’s happening there.”

This could amount to the federal government’s biggest relief program since the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. That program, which allowed undocumented immigrants who came to the United States as children to live and work in the country, was announced mid-June of Obama’s own reelection year in 2012.

This sounds like a good policy and also smart electorally. I’m not sure if it will make up for the rather draconian new rules on asylum but it’s good on its own terms.

The fact is that with full employment the U.S. needs immigrant labor more than ever. People who are freaking out over it are being very short-sighted. But what else is new?

Put The Surrogates On The Road

Published by digby on June 9, 2024

This podcast with the New Yorker’s Susan Glasser, Jane Mayer and former GOP strategist Sarah Longwell was quite fascinating. Longwell is all over the media sharing the information about the focus groups she holds with swing voters. In this, though, she shares her advice for the Democrats about how to reach them and I thought it was excellent.

The one piece of advice that really sounds smart to me is the idea that if Biden’s big weakness is his age, they should roll out all the surrogates from around the country, like Governors Whitmer, Newsom, Shapiro etc to show there is a strong Democratic bench that’s young and vital. It reflects on the party rather than Biden but its useful in any case. And she says they should go to lengths to show that he has young an vital people all around him. She didn’t advise it, but I wondered if they should show some cabinet meetings. Obviously, they don’t have to do it like Trump did with all the sycophants making fools of themselves over Dear Leader. But it might be useful for the public to see the people in the administration who back Biden up day to day.

I’m sure that sticks in Biden’s craw but he should do it anyway. People just need to be reminded that the presidency is more than just one person and they can count on Biden’s excellent personnel choices in important roles almost all of whom are still in the jobs for which they were hired, unlike the massive turnover in Trump’s term.

I think this makes sense. Democratic surrogates should be fanning out everywhere, all the time, making the case. Nothing is more important.

How Soon We Forget

Published by digby on June 9, 2024

How is this not disqualifying?

The man who orchestrated what happened that day is under indictment for that crime but is running for president again. And he might win.

We are living in Bizarroworld.

The Ad Game

Published by digby on June 9, 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.

The Answer To Their Problem

Published by digby on June 9, 2024

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.

#FraudulentEuphemism

Published by Tom Sullivan on June 9, 2024

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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Biden Remembers The Past

Published by Tom Sullivan on June 9, 2024

Trump fails to learn from it or to learn anything

Aisne-Marne American Cemetery, France.. Photo by Anubis75 (CC BY-SA 4.0).

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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