You know it. I know it. Mike Johnson and Jim Jordan know it. Donald Trump knows it all the way down to the toenails he can’t trim.
Elect Kamala Harris or else Jimmy Kimmel and Dave Bautista will be among the first up against the wall in a Trump dictatorship.
You saw it. I saw it. We all saw it. Vice President Kamala Harris did an interview Wednesday with Fox chief political anchor Bret Baier and, as The New York Times framed it, got a debate instead.
Ahead of a third presidential election with Donald Trump — now a convicted felon indicted for inciting an insurrection — as their candidate, MAGA Republicans routinely dodge answering, 1) Did Donald Trump lose in 2020? and 2) Will he/you accept the results? For voters not wanting a replay of Jan. 6, those are pertinent election issues.
No, no, no, those are “gotcha” questions, Republicans object, as Speaker Mike Johnson did. (Will no reporter demand they explain what they expect to “get” if they answer?)
Inside Fox’s Earth 2 bubble, Baier was all “gotcha” all the time. Baier asked Harris questions to which he really did not want her answers. He was not interested in revealing for his viewers her vision for America’s future. He was litigating the past. Baier interrupted. He talked over. He badgered. He baited. He oh-so-obviously tried to make Harris say Trump voters are stupid. Baier tried to reframe the election as a rematch between Trump and Joe Biden, asking when she first noticed Biden’s diminished mental faculties.
Watch it again for yourselves here:
But Harris the prosecutor was having none of it. The Democrat now endorsed by over 100 Republicans parried and turned questions on immigration policy into accusations on Donald Trump’s and Republicans’ records on preserving a broken immigration system as a campaign issue rather than a problem to fix.
“Brett, Joe Biden is not on the ballot,” Harris snapped. “Donald Trump is on the ballot,” she replied citing former Trump administration officials and national security experts who insist Trump is unfit to be president.
Harris made sure to end with a rapid summary of her goals to address affordable housing, strengthening the economy, and ensuring a strong military. If Fox viewers expected a woman easy to “get,” they were disappointed, and certainly not enlightened. Baier was both.
“A conservative is someone who stands athwart history, yelling Stop,” William F. Buckley famously wrote in the 1950s. Trump’s fascist-adjacent MAGA movement stands athwart it, yelling Fox.
John Harwood wrote at Zeteo on Wednesday that Trump’s MAGA movement is rooted in the Confederacy’s legacy of slavery, America’s original sin. A Red America stands against moving on from race-based politics and resentments while Blue America looks forward.
Charles Blow sees among some Black men the draw of patriarchy, an older and deeper tradition. That tradition is even older than the yearning of the world’s oligarchs for a return to feudalism, as I’ve argued.
As is, one American party stands for public service. The other led by Trump, for preserving the Ancien Régime through overturning democracy for autocracy, if not outright fascism.
Anand Giridharadas addressed that this morning on MSNBC. The Fox interview was interruption as a metaphor for a minority Old Guard objecting to and trying to silence a more pluralistic America and the future Harris represents as vanguard of a new generation. MAGA is future-shocked, Giridharadas tweeted. That itself is a fine metaphor, but not one that new generation will get any more than Bret Baier.
Update: Couldn’t locate this clip at post time. It was a key moment in the Harris interview.
Scott Perry is one of the worst MAGA congressmen in the country. And he’s in trouble:
Perry, a former chair of the far-right House Freedom Caucus who was first elected in 2012, had reportedly done plenty to aid former President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election. The FBI seized Perry’s cellphone in 2022, which led to the revelation of text messages showing his extensive attempts to install an attorney general who would help keep Trump in office. Perry’s preferred candidate was Jeffrey Clark, a now-indicted Department of Justice official whose main qualification was spreading claims of election fraud.
I started by noting that Perry was the one who’d introduced Trump and Clark. He cut me off.
“An introduction?” he said, incredulously. “Is that illegal now?” Perry accused me of repeating “a narrative that has been promoted by the left” that the mainstream media have refused to verify. “Somebody said, Can you introduce me? I said sure,” he explained, saying it was no different than if he had introduced me to one of his aides standing nearby. “So no, I’m not embarrassed.”
Whether Perry agrees with it or not, the “narrative” about his role ahead of the January 6 assault on the Capitol is part of why he’s the most vulnerable Trump loyalist in the House. “For a lot of normie, older Republicans, all that January 6 stuff was really a line of demarcation,” Christopher Nicholas, a GOP strategist who lives in Perry’s district, told me. In their hunt for a House majority, Democrats are targeting Perry like never before, and they’re running a candidate, the former local-news anchor Janelle Stelson, who can match both his regional fame and his fundraising.
The race could help determine the House majority, and in the state that could decide the presidency, Perry is once again sharing a ballot with the ally he tried to keep in office four years ago. The issues that have defined Trump’s comeback attempt—immigration, abortion, trying to overturn the 2020 election—have also figured prominently in Perry’s race. Until this year, Perry had demonstrated even more political resilience than Trump; he outran him in 2020, winning his district while Trump narrowly lost Pennsylvania. That might not be the case in November.
If Perry loses his seat in Pennsylvania, I would guess Trump will lose too. If that fellow quote above is right, that it’s January 6th that has freaked out the “normie, older Republicans” then the man who instigated the whole thing is going to lose their vote too. Fingers crossed…
I have often mused about the belief that the American Constitution is the best of all possible worlds, as least as it was taught when I was in school many moons ago.The Bill of Rights (with one notable exception) is great, laying out the ideals the country was founded on even if we’ve rarely fully lived up to them.
The structure of our system, however, isn’t all that great. I’m not sure federalism was such a fabulous idea although I certainly understand why it happened. But there’s a reason no democracy in the world has adopted our system and that most of them have instead a parliamentary system which, frankly, just works better.
The Senate was a mistake and the electoral college has turned out to be the train wreck quite a few of the founders predicted it would be. Other countries that once used such a system have gotten rid of it. We should too:
The United States is the only democracy in the world where a presidential candidate can get the most popular votes and still lose the election. Thanks to the Electoral College, that has happened five times in the country’s history. The most recent examples are from 2000, when Al Gore won the popular vote but George W. Bush won the Electoral College after a U.S. Supreme Court ruling, and 2016, when Hillary Clinton got more votes nationwide than Donald Trump but lost in the Electoral College.
The Founding Fathers did not invent the idea of an electoral college. Rather, they borrowed the concept from Europe, where it had been used to pick emperors for hundreds of years.
As a scholar of presidential democracies around the world, I have studied how countries have used electoral colleges. None have been satisfied with the results. And except for the U.S., all have found other ways to choose their leaders.
There is an alternative but it’s really been hard for it to pick up steam. And it’s imperfect too:
The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, currently agreed to by 17 U.S. states, including small states such as Delaware and big ones such as California, as well as the District of Columbia, is an agreement to award all of their electoral votes to whichever presidential candidate gets the most votes nationwide. It would take effect once enough states sign on that they would represent the 270-vote majority of electoral votes. The current list reaches 209 electoral votes.
A key problem with the interstate compact is that in races with more than two candidates, it could lead to situations where the winner of the election did not get a majority of the popular vote, but rather more than half of all voters chose someone else.
When Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Finland and France got rid of their electoral colleges, they did not replace them with a direct popular vote in which the person with the most votes wins. Instead, they all adopted a version of runoff voting. In those systems, winners are declared only when they receive support from more than half of those who cast ballots.
Notably, neither the U.S. Electoral College nor the interstate compact that seeks to replace it are systems that ensure that presidents are supported by a majority of voters.
Why not just elect presidents by popular vote? We’re supposed to be one nation so we should elect national leaders …nationally.
Sadly, until the Republicans start losing elections via the electoral college, I doubt we’ll ever be able to change the Constitution to get rid of it. And that’s not likely to happen any time soon, if ever.
Donald Trump held a Fox News town hall with undecided women voters in Georgia and they all ended up loving him. Of course, they were all Trump voters:
As soon as Trump arrived in the rustic barn with its wood panels, he received rapturous applause. Throughout the town hall hosted by Harris Faulkner, questioners seemed enraptured by him.
“I feel like when he when he came out, everybody was so excited to see him and his enthusiasm,” Emily Harris told TheIndependent. “It was just great to be in the room with him.”
And there was good reason, given that many of the attendees in an intimate setting were from Republican groups around the area whom Fox News invited.
At least, that’s what some of the women told The Independent. Harris, for example, is the vice president of the Republican Women of Forsyth.
“We got a personal invitation from Fox News,” she said. “We were ecstatic. We were we were all very, very excited.”
It was the same case with Cynthia Brown from Cumming, who was the treasurer for Republican Women of Forsyth County.
“We love Donald Trump and President Trump, and what he has done in America, and what he is doing for women,” she told The Independent.
…Trump famously said at a rally in Iowa “Suburban women, please like me.”
“I don’t know where that comes from,” Brown said. “Because everyone I talk to just loves and appreciate what he is doing, because he’s protecting our children, protecting women from sex trafficking, human trafficking and all the all the things that bringing, having open borders allows.”
Lol.
A couple of highlights:
He’s like a child. That’s not how this works. It’s not how any of this works…
Howie Klein has a very fun contest going about a very useful political project. If you’ve maxed out on campaign donations or you’re looking to donate to something ongoing (which we will need desperately) this would be a good place to start:
Born On A Pirate Ship
Blue America has teamed up with Jamie Raskin’s office to give away a rare, collectible, mint-condition, RIAA-certified Barenaked Ladies gold record award for Born On A Pirate Ship. We’ll tell you how to win it in a moment. Or, if you’re in a rush… just go here.
First we want to tell you a little something about Jamie Raskin’s celebrated Democracy Summer project, which this year trained and deployed more than 1,000 high school and college students to participate as Democracy Summer Fellows in critical Democratic campaigns in 44 states across America.
Every summer, Democracy Summer fellows not only canvass neighborhoods, knock on doors, register voters, and engage in digital organizing, but participate in seminars on the historical struggles for democracy and freedom in America and on the contemporary threats we face to strong democracy and civic freedom. They learn from leading policy experts, academics, union organizers and Democratic officials, who explain GOP voter suppression tactics, right-wing gerrymandering of state and federal legislative districts, right-wing judicial activism and the serious ethics and legitimacy crisis on the Supreme Court, the reactionary dynamics of the filibuster, the struggle for a national popular vote for president along with Ranked Choice Voting and campaign finance reform, and the statehood drives among large disenfranchised communities in our country, including Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico.
Founded by Raskin in 2006, when he ran for the state Senate, as a way to involve his own three children and dozen nieces and nephews in his campaign, Democracy Summer has educated, energized and inspired thousands of young Americans who are ready to become the next generation of Democratic organizers and leaders. We propose to use the Born On A Pirate Ship gold record as a means to raise funds for Democracy Summer. Contribute any amount to Democracy Summer on this ActBlue page and you get a chance to win the framed BNL gold award.
Reminder for non-BNL fans: They recorded Born On A Pirate Ship in 1995, before the band had broken through in the U.S. “The Old Apartment,” was the first of their singles to get significant American radio play, with a video directed by Jason Priestly. Another song from the album, “Shoe Box,” was part of the Friends soundtrack. After the big BNL breakthrough album Stunt went multiplatinum, new fans found Born On A Pirate Ship and it started selling and went gold in 2000. The gold record award is extremely rare because only a small handful were ever made. This one was awarded to Blue America co-founder and then-Reprise Records president Howie Klein who donated it to this Democracy Summer 2024 promotion.
We’re not trying to embarrass Rep. Raskin, but he’s probably the most brilliant member of Congress. He’s also one of the most inspiring. Last month he helped define the Democratic Party for his social media followers: “We Democrats,” he wrote, “are the party of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt. They saw fascists marching down the boulevards of Europe and did not see very fine people on both sides of the street— they knew America must stand strong on the side of democracy and freedom.”
It didn’t end there. “We are the party of the women’s movement and the Equal Rights Amendment and comprehensive health care and freedom to make your own choices regardless of what the right-wing theocrats tell you to do. We are the party of Medicare, Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act because we believe healthcare is a right of all the people and not a luxury good for the wealthy. We are the party of the labor movement and the National Labor Relations Act and the Fair Labor Standards Act. We are the party of the environmental movement and we are the party of science, facts and data— not fake news, conspiracy theory and disinformation.”
Enough? Nope “We’re the party that passed the most sweeping climate change legislation in American history. We’re the party that ended Big Pharma’s power to set sky-high drug prices for our people on Medicare without negotiating with the government. And we’re the party that says billionaire corporations must pay their taxes too. So while Lincoln’s party of ‘liberty and Union’ becomes Trump’s cult of chaos and disunion, Democrats will continue fighting hard to make democracy deliver for the American people, just as we always have.”
The contest ends on Sunday night, October 20 at 9 PM (Pacific Time). If you want to win but don’t want to contribute online, rush a check made out to Blue America PAC to PO Box 207201, Los Angeles, CA 90027. And, if you want to try to win but times are too tough to contribute, just send a post card to that same PO Box and let us know you want to enter too.
The official, FEC-mandated version of the rules are long and boring but if you’re a masochist with no life you can read them here. Again, this is where you can enter for the random drawing: Barenaked Ladies Democracy Summer.
On VP Kamala Harris:
“Every president has to cut their own path. That’s what I did. I was loyal to Barack Obama but I cut my own path as president. That’s what Kamala’s going to do. She’s been loyal so far but she’ll cut her own path… Kamala’s perspective on our problems will be fresh and new. Donald Trump’s perspective is old and failed and quite frankly totally dishonest.”
I think that’s a very generous comment by the Prez, particularly considering that it calls attention to his own age. He isn’t failed and he isn’t dishonest but he is old and he knows very well that it knocked him out of the race.
This is so stupid I hardly know what to say. Kamala Harris put out her medical report and this was Trump’s hysterical response:
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more pathetic grown man in my life.
This gave me a chuckle, maybe it will make you laugh too.
Is Donald Trump losing it for real this time? That’s a question being asked and answered all over social media and cable news this week in the wake of his bizarre performance in Pennsylvania on Monday night. I know his weird behavior is something we’re all very aware of and also unfortunately aware that it has been normalized over the past few years to the point that it hardly even gets mentioned by the mainstream media much less analyzed with the same focus and fervor given to Joe Biden’s verbal stumbles or Hillary Clinton’s emails. But Monday night’s very eccentric performance even got the Washington Post’s attention which described it with this headline:
Trump sways and bops to music for 39 minutes in bizarre town hall episode
After the Trump campaign left thousands of people stranded in the desert in the middle of the night after his Coachella, California rally over the weekend, they once again dropped the ball by holding his crowded Oak, Pennsylvania Town hall in a venue without air conditioning and a couple of people fainted shortly ater it began. (Trump later posted on his social media site that they fainted from the excitement. He really does think he’s Elvis.)
They halted the program briefly as they often do when these things happen but this time once they played a little musical interlude from Trump’s playlist, he abruptly decided he didn’t want to take any more questions and instead had his minions continue to play his very eccentric song selection for almost 40 minutes as he danced his little jerk dance on the stage with the sycophantic moderator, North Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, awkwardly trying to join in.
I have a sneaking suspicion that Trump has seen that the Harris campaign has a DJ entertaining poeple at her rallies and thought he could replicate it with his special Mar-a-lago DJ playlist featuring Pavarotti and Sinead O’Connor. But watching him try to get down with Slash’s ripping guitar solo on Guns and Roses’ November Rain was so embarrassing one had to look away. It was a trainwreck and the campaign knew it.
That’s why they assembled every surrogate, henchman and TV pundit supporter to fan out on Tuesday the minute Trump finished his event at the Chicago Economic Club to pretend that it was a triumph in a vain attempt to swallow up the growing public realization that Trump is far more addled and mentally chaotic than what we’ve seen previously.
That’s ridiculous. Trump was unable to answer any questions directly, instead meandering from one topic to another, clearly out of his depth when pressed for details and often just outright lying. At one point he was asked about whether Google should be broken up and he answered that he couldn’t get it out of his mind that the Justice Department had intervened in a voting rights issue in Virginia. That’s not a rational response to that question.
At another point he got angry at the interviewer, John Micklethwait, editor-in-chief of Bloomberg News, when he tried to bring him back on topic, telling Micklethwait that he was doing “the weave”, his recent excuse for the mental incontinence he displays on the stump, now being used to ratinalize his inability to keep a single train of thought or give a straight answer in an interview:
He finally regressed to his usual juvenile belligerance and insulted Micklethwait and the Wall St. Journal saying they don’t know what they’re talking about.
You’ll note the cheering and laughing at Trump’s ignorant insult from the audience. Now, it’s possible that the Trump campaign managed to fill the room with his fans but it seems unlikely that Chicago, home of the highly influential University of Chicago school of economics, wouldn’t have mostly serious members of its Economic Club in attendance. But in both the New York and Detroit events as well, the audience seems to have given Trump a very enthusiastic reception and it makes you wonder how savvy these so-called pillars of the financial community really are.
A few days back former president Barack Obama held a rally for Harris in Pennsylvania in which he made a case that’s especially relevant in the context of Trump’s ongoing chest thumping about his supposedly historically successful economy. Obama pointed out that Trump inherited a thriving economy only made possible by Obama’s hard won rebuilding from the financial crisis (which he inherited from the previous GOP president George W. Bush.) Obama is right about that. The data is clear.
Even more galling, Trump is trying to do the same thing again. The country’s economy was in shambles from his mishandling of the once in a century pandemic and he left the mess for Joe Biden to clean up, which he has done impressively. Trump is making the rounds to these economic clubs all over the country and is babbling incoherently about tariffs and “drill baby drill” saying that all of his ideas will be paid for by “growth” which Biden and Harris have failed to achieve which is a lie, of course. On virtually every measure, the economy is doing very well and even if you remove the year of Covid, growth under Biden exceeded Trump. The cover story of this week’s Economist magazine is “The American economy, the envy of the world.”
The Wall St Journal polled economists on their expectations should Trump or Harris win the election:
The NY Times actually interviewed some of the audience at the Detroit Economic Club event and all seemed to be business and financial types you might expect to be concerned with their bottom lines above everything else. They rationalized their support for him by saying they didn’t believe Trump would actually carry out all those unseemly threats he makes about deporting millions of people or going after his political enemies. They told the reporter they believe the media blows it all out of proportion or it’s all just an act. And despite their protestations it’s an act they apparently enjoy quite a bit.
According to the Times, Trump was just an avuncular fella, entertaining the folks with some funny stories about his body, his hair, muscle cars and Elon Musk with just a few “rough edges” about stolen elections and the like. I watched that speech. It was the usual rambling, incoherent, ignorant nightmare:
I’m not sure if it’s more alarming that he said it or that the Times and the allegedly sophisticated financial whizzes in the audience all thought it was charming and reassuring.
It’s been very difficult for many of us to understand how this race can be so close considering all we know about Trump’s unfitness. It’s clear there is a hardcore base of Trump followers who cannot be budged from their support. You see them interviewed at his rallies and they are so far down the conspiracy rabbit hole that they are no longer in touch with reality.
But I think we imagined that the type of people who belong to the Economic Club of a major city might be able to rationalize their support for him in service of their portfolios but it is a bit surprising to realize that they actually like all the things they purport not to believe are true about him. Just listen to that laughter when he insults the Wall St. Journal and the editor of Bloomberg News. That’s not about their wallets. Their wallets are fine. That’s about their ids.
These are the respectable members of the cult and it explains why we might only be able to count on a small percentage of Republican voters to cross over and vote for Harris. MAGA isn’t just the people waving around the huge Trump flags. It’s the people in the pin striped suits laughing at his puerile insult “comedy” and loving watching him sticking it to the libs. The Trump cult contains multitudes.
Salon
North Carolina in-person voting starts Thursday. It started Tuesday in Georgia.
Record number of early votes cast in Georgia as election gets underway in battleground state (CNN):
A record number of early votes have been cast in Georgia on Tuesday as residents headed to the polls in a critical battleground state that is grappling with the fallout from Hurricane Helene and controversial election administration changes that have spurred a flurry of lawsuits.
More than 328,000 ballots were cast Tuesday, Gabe Sterling of the Georgia secretary of state’s office said on X. “So with the record breaking 1st day of early voting and accepted absentees we have had over 328,000 total votes cast so far,” he said.
The previous first day record was 136,000 in 2020, Sterling said.
Please, be a cool kid. Whether you live in a swing state or not, vote on Day 1 of early voting. It’s about enthusiasm. It’s about showing Democratic strength. It’s about providing “social proof” that tells neighbors voting is what all the cool kids are doing.
It’s also about helping Democratic campaigns focus their resources on a smaller pool of harder-to-turn-out voters than you. (It will also quickly stop your campaign calls and door knocks.)
But don’t get overconfident about those big numbers in Georgia.
My early vote caution to excited freshman candidates here in NC when they see Democrats outvoting Republicans by 2 to 1 is this: Republicans bat last.
Nevertheless, here in N.C., we’ve got game. The GOP has Donald Trump and Mark Robinson.
It’s no secret that Josh Stein is in the driver’s seat in the race for governor against Robinson, but despite polls showing other statewide races being close, internal polls show Democrats in positive territory. The election is, as they say, within the margin of effort.
About having “game,” this from The New York Times (shared article):
In the final weeks of the 2024 election, Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald J. Trump are staking their chances on two radically different theories of how to win: one tried-and-true, the other untested in modern presidential campaigns.
Ms. Harris’s team is running an expansive version of the type of field operation that has dominated politics for decades, deploying flotillas of paid staff members to organize and turn out every vote they can find. Mr. Trump’s campaign is going after a smaller universe of less frequent voters while relying on well-funded but inexperienced outside groups to reach a broader swath.
Interviews with more than four dozen voters, activists, campaign aides and officials in four pivotal counties — Erie County, Pa., Kenosha County, Wis., Maricopa County, Ariz., and Cobb County, Ga. — reveal a diffuse, at times unwieldy Republican effort that has raised questions from party operatives about effectiveness in the face of the more tightly structured Harris campaign operation. Democrats, in many places, are outpacing Republicans in terms of paid staff and doors knocked, and are counting on that local presence to break through a fractured media environment and to reach voters who want to tune out politics altogether.
Rep. Jeff Jackson, candidate for N.C. attorney general, told a group here over the weekend that the numbers of field contacts this year rivals the Obama campaign of 2008. The number of Harris field offices and staff here is perhaps unprecedented. Another potential game-changer is what’s happening in Mecklenburg County (Charlotte). Maricopa in Arizona and Meck in N.C. are two counties of keen interest in this election.
Mecklenburg has traditionally been a drag on Democrats’ statewide performance, but that may be changing. Drew Cromer, Meck’s new under-30 chair, has brought new energy and big fundraising to his county, as well as an organizing effort not seen before.
Simon Rosenberg and his Hopium community have raised over $700k for the state party led by Anderson Clayton. Out-of-state groups like Swing Blue Alliance are directing funding and volunteers to Meck. If they can boost Meck’s turnout a point or two that will be huge.
So go vote tomorrow, all y’all in North Carolina!
