Skip to content

Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

The Ayes Of Texas Are Upon You

Published by Tom Sullivan on November 2, 2024

Pregnant and bleeding? Don’t mess with Texas.

Still image from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974).

Texas’ severe abortion laws notched another preventable death from a pregnancy gone wrong. ProPublica reported the death of Josseli Barnica, 28, in 2021 on Wednesday. She died days after the state’s S.B. 8 “heartbeat bill” took effect. Bloomberg Opinion asked: “Texas’ Abortion Ban Killed Josseli Barnica. Who Will Be Next?”

Nevaeh Crain, it seems. On Friday, ProPublica told the story of her tragic death in MAGAstan after the Dobbs decision in June 2022 triggered an effective abortion ban in Texas. Crain was an early victim:

Candace Fails screamed for someone in the Texas hospital to help her pregnant daughter. “Do something,” she pleaded, on the morning of Oct. 29, 2023.

Nevaeh Crain was crying in pain, too weak to walk, blood staining her thighs. Feverish and vomiting the day of her baby shower, the 18-year-old had gone to two different emergency rooms within 12 hours, returning home each time worse than before.

The first hospital diagnosed her with strep throat without investigating her sharp abdominal cramps. At the second, she screened positive for sepsis, a life-threatening and fast-moving reaction to an infection, medical records show. But doctors said her six-month fetus had a heartbeat and that Crain was fine to leave.

Now on Crain’s third hospital visit, an obstetrician insisted on two ultrasounds to “confirm fetal demise,” a nurse wrote, before moving her to intensive care.

By then, more than two hours after her arrival, Crain’s blood pressure had plummeted and a nurse had noted that her lips were “blue and dusky.” Her organs began failing.

Hours later, she was dead.

Read the rest at ProPublica.

Those of you headed to the polls (especially in Texas) might ask yourselves and your friends Bloomberg’s question. Who’s next?

NBC News reported in September:

The number of women in Texas who died while pregnant, during labor or soon after childbirth skyrocketed following the state’s 2021 ban on abortion care — far outpacing a slower rise in maternal mortality across the nation, a new investigation of federal public health data finds.

From 2019 to 2022, the rate of maternal mortality cases in Texas rose by 56%, compared with just 11% nationwide during the same time period, according to an analysis by the Gender Equity Policy Institute. The nonprofit research group scoured publicly available reports from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and shared the analysis exclusively with NBC News.

Furthermore:

Among Hispanic women, the rate of women dying while pregnant, during childbirth or soon after increased from 14.5 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births in 2019 to 18.9 in 2022. Rates among white women nearly doubled — from 20 per 100,000 to 39.1. 

Also: Johns Hopkins this summer estimated “that infant deaths in Texas increased more than expected in the year following the state’s 2021 ban on abortion in early pregnancy, especially among infants with congenital anomalies.”

This, after maternal mortality (deaths during or after childbirth) in the U.S. declined sharply after the mid-1930s:

In 2017, at a time when maternal mortality was declining worldwide, the World Health Organization (WHO) reported that the U.S. was one of only two countries (along with the Dominican Republic) to report a significant increase in its maternal mortality ratio (the proportion of pregnancies that result in death of the mother) since 2000. While U.S. maternal deaths have leveled in recent years, the ratio is still higher than in comparable countries, and significant racial disparities remain.

Donald Trump and his MAGA movement want to roll back the last century. It was a time when death in childbirth was a leading cause of death for women, along with (if vaccine skeptic RFK Jr. gets a job in a second Trump administration) tuberculosis, pneumonia, gastrointestinal infections, smallpox, and more.

Beware, sister, beware

So take care getting pregnant in Texas. Depending on the outcome of this election, it could get worse elsewhere soon. Amarillo’s Proposition A, ““Sanctuary City for the Unborn Ordinance,” is part of a larger strategy to ban abortion nationwide (The New Yorker):

Proposition A is alarming enough on its own. But it’s part of a bigger strategic play. At a time when Donald Trump is insisting that abortion should be left up to the states, a fervent group of anti-abortion activists are working behind the scenes to achieve a different goal. “The Dobbs decision really was a pro-choice decision, by leaving it up to the states instead of saying that abortion is a great social, moral, and political evil,” Mark Lee Dickson, a minister from East Texas, who is the driving force behind the sanctuary-city movement, told me, referring to the decision that overturned Roe. Dickson’s goal is nothing less than a nationwide ban on abortion, enacted by the courts. The path there may well lead through the Texas Panhandle—which means that the fight against it is happening here, too.

Amarillo became the second panhandle city in Texas (along with Clarendon) “to reject both the original and amended versions” of the ordinance in June. But Lubbock, Abilene, and San Angelo all said aye.

The Amarillo Tribune in October reported:

On June 11, 2019, Waskom, Texas, became the first city to pass the Sanctuary City for the Unborn Ordinance. Since then, the Amarillo Tribune has verified that 69 cities have passed a Sanctuary City Ordinance in states beyond Texas, including Illinois, New Mexico, Nebraska, Iowa, Louisiana and Ohio. Lubbock is the largest city that has adopted the ordinance. 

None of the 69 Sanctuary City for the Unborn Ordinances prohibit or ban contraceptives such as birth control. Mail-in pills that would induce an abortion and abortions performed within city limits are banned under the ordinances as well as under state law after the overturn of Roe v. Wade. No abortion clinics were in any of the cities that have adopted the Sanctuary City ordinance. 

Beware, sister, beware.

They ain’t foolin’ and if you fool around with them
You gonna get yourself a schooling

Vote accordingly. Tell your friends.

We Know He Lies But This Is A Real Whopper

Published by digby on November 1, 2024

Kamala Harris speaks the truth:

Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris warned voters on Thursday that Republican Donald Trump and his allies would scale back healthcare programs if he wins the White House and said his comments at a Wednesday rally were offensive to women.

In a brief press conference, Vice President Harris reminded voters that former President Trump had tried unsuccessfully to repeal the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, during his 2017-2021 presidency.

Now he says this:

He said he wouldn’t cut Social security but presented a budget that cut it every single year he was president.

And they still plan to do it:

If they get the chance they’re going to repeal it, don’t ever think otherwise. It’s their holy grail.

Bernie Speaks

Published by digby on November 1, 2024

If you are thinking of not voting for Harris over the Gaza issue, I understand the impulse. But it’s a mistake. Bernie Sanders explains why:

AOC says:

And then there’s this:

Nuff said.

The Joe Rogan Experience

Published by digby on November 1, 2024

I know that some of you don’t listen to podcasts and I’d guess that most of you have never listened to Joe Rogan, the man who runs the most popular podcast in the world (making hundreds of millions of dollars at it.) Trump appeared on his show last week and it’s been dowloaded 35 million times.

Anyway, here’s a taste of the kind of thing this superstar is selling to his massive audience:

He is very stupid and he makes everyone who listens to him stupid. A case in point: his interview with JD Vance who is not as stupid as Rogan but knows the audience will believe anything:

During a prolonged discussion about the environment, Vance asserted that he “didn’t have a strong view about what the carbon footprint ultimately does,” appearing to waffle about whether human-caused climate change exists. 

“It’s interesting that the environmental movement in America, the only thing that it talks about is the carbon footprint, and it never talks about . . . why do we have the highest rates of obesity in the world right now,” Vance said.  

Rogan added that it was “disturbing” that “there’s also profit that’s being made off the green movement,” and name-checked Bill Gates who has invested billions of dollars in climate technology solutions. 

JD vance knows very well that climate change is real and he is a fully formed creature of the Silicon Valley tech-bro culture. But Rogan’s audience is full of conspiracy theorists who’ve been indoctinated by this sort of programming so they don’t know that.

Vance also said this, which I’m sure thrilled the bros to no end:

Vance told Rogan that he was mini golfing with his family in Ohio when he learned that Trump had been shot in the ear during his Butler, Pa. rally in June.  “I actually thought they had killed him because when you first see the video he grabs his ear and then he goes down,” Vance recalled after seeing the video of Trump’s July 13 rally. “I’m like, ‘Oh my God, they just killed him.’”

“At first I was so pissed, but then I go into like fight or flight mode,” he said. “I grab my kids up, throw them in the car, go home and load all my guns. And basically stand like a sentry in our front door, and that was my reaction to it.” 

And this:

“If you are a middle-class or upper-middle class white parent, and the only thing that you care about is whether your child goes into Harvard or Yale, obviously that pathway has become a lot harder for a lot of upper-middle class kids,” said Vance, who has talked about his family’s economic struggles growing up and has a degree from Yale Law School. “But the one way that those people can participate in the DEI bureaucracy in this country is to be trans, and is there a dynamic that’s going on where, if you become trans, that is the way to reject your white privilege?”

This is the caliber of dialog the Trump bros are hearing every single day.

VP Kamala Harris was going to go on his show but he she could only spare an hour and wanted him to come meet her on the campaign trail so she could continue with her schedule. He refused demanding that she come to him in Austin and spend three hours with him. His time is far more valuable than hers, you see. And he has the biggest podcast so he’s very important.

This is all well and good, of course. But will if get the bros out of bed on election day to go vote? Maybe. But they sure aren’t voting so far…

Here’s Vance’s mentor schooling the Rogan listeners on politics:

A Silver Surge In Pa?

Published by digby on November 1, 2024

I know we shouldn’t pay too much attention to the early vote and this might not mean anything. But if it holds up it’s big. Old people vote:

Donald Trump is lagging Kamala Harris in Pennsylvania early voting with a critical and once-reliably Republican constituency: seniors.

It’s a warning sign for the former president that reflects early vote data and polling across the battlegrounds, after Republicans won the senior vote in each of the last five presidential elections. In Pennsylvania, where voters over the age of 65 have cast nearly half of the early ballots, registered Democrats account for about 58 percent of votes cast by seniors, compared to 35 percent for Republicans. That’s despite both parties having roughly equal numbers of registered voters aged 65 and older.

The partisan gap is narrower than it was in 2020, when views of early voting were more partisan, and Republicans take that as a good sign. But the GOP still is counting on more of its older voters to show up on Election Day, while Democrats have more votes in the bank. The data is in line with polling in the state that has shown Trump shedding support among older voters. According to a Fox News poll of Pennsylvania, Trump is running 5 percentage points behind Harris among voters ages 65 and over, slipping back from the previous month, when he and Harris were tied with that demographic. It’s a major shift from 2020, when Trump carried 53 percent of the senior vote in Pennsylvania in a losing effort in the state.

Tom Bonier, a Democratic strategist and CEO of the data firm TargetSmart, said he has been surprised by what he is calling the “silver surge” in early voting from older Democrats.“Our expectation going into the early vote was that it would, in general, skew substantially more Republican than in 2020,” Bonier said. “There is no more pandemic, Democrats were more Covid conscious … and Republicans have been pushing early voting.”

The senior vote is particularly important in five of the seven battleground states — Pennsylvania, Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin, and North Carolina — that, according to U.S. Census data, have more residents over the age of 65 than the national average. According to modeling data shared by a Democratic campaign operative tracking early voting, across the Blue Wall states, Democratic voters over the age of 65 are running 10 to 20 percent ahead of their Republican counterparts with respect to registered turnout.

As I said, I don’t know if this is true or if it’s meaningful. A majority of seniors are traditionally Republican voters. Maybe that’s changing since the GOP went batshit crazy.

And it isn’t just the oldsters who have them worried about Pennsylvania. Here’s some juicy Mar-a-lago gossip from Tara Palmieri at Puck:

The Trump campaign has paused its premature celebration and fallen into sweat mode, as early-voting numbers indicate more women are turning up than men in must-win Pennsylvania, and operatives are bringing out the briefcases for lawfare. “They’re going so crazy here,” says a source.

We’re less than a week from Election Day, and the mood inside the Trump campaign has undergone yet another transformation. Last week, I reported on the preemptive but undeniably palpable sense of euphoria washing over Mar-a-Lago as data rolled in depicting early-voting surges in Nevada, Georgia, and North Carolina. But now, as the early results from Pennsylvania reveal an influx of first-time female voters who will likely break for Harris, a newfound anxiety is taking hold. While Trump continues to claim he has a massive lead, setting the stage to contest any unfavorable result, some in the Mar-a-Lago-sphere are starting to believe that his surge last week was two weeks premature.

Pennsylvania is obviously a must-win state for both campaigns… but it’s really crucial for Trump. While his inner circle feels confident about winning the Sunbelt, they recognize that they have a good chance of losing Michigan, where the gender gap is stark and students are coming out in record numbers. (A new CNN poll shows Harris up 5 points in the state.) So the situation in Pennsylvania—where women have outpaced men by 13 points in the early vote—has sent the campaign into a tailspin during the past two days.[…]

As I reported two weeks ago, Trump has already zeroed in on Republican National Committee chairman Michael Whatley as his scapegoat if things go south…

And while Trump may want to blame Whatley and his “election integrity unit” for a loss, the campaign is also preparing to blame outside groups who were supposed to handle Trump’s ground game. Sure, figureheads like Kirk at Turning Point and Elon Musk at America PAC are firmly planted in Trump’s inner circle and would probably walk away unscathed. But the same can’t be said for Phil Cox and Generra Peck, who have essentially commandeered Musk’s America PAC and are seen as too closely aligned with Trumpworld’s collective enemy Ron DeSantis.

Let the bloodletting begin.

Panic In Incel Land

Published by digby on November 1, 2024

The bros are getting hysterical:

Two of former president Donald Trump’s most prominent backers in the right wing influencer sphere fretted Wednesday after early voting numbers showed massive early turnout among women that could imperil their candidate’s path to victory.

“Male turnout in Pennsylvania for Trump has been a disaster,” tweeted Mike Cernovich on Wednesday. “Unless this changes, Kamala Harris takes PA and it’s over.”

Cernovich is a longtime far right gadfly and commentator with a massive online following

He’s been around long enough to have played a role in the anti-feminist Gamergate harassment campaign and to have helped spread the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, though has disavowed the alt-right and drifted closer to the mainstream conservative movement in recent years. (Trump’s eldest child, Donald Jr., once said he deserved a Pulitzer Prize).

When a follower questioned his assessment, Cernovich pointed out that conservative organizer Charlie Kirk, who he called “one of the most significant [get out the vote] activists in the country,” had also raised the alarm.

“Early vote has been disproportionately female,” tweeted Kirk earlier Wednesday. “If men stay at home, Kamala is president. It’s that simple.”

Kirk, whose conservative nonprofit Turning Point USA is a central force in organizing and coordinating right wing campus activism across America, is a close ally of Donald Jr., though has not yet been tipped for a Pulitzer by the former president’s eldest offspring.

Preliminary data supports their concerns.

A Politico analysis of early vote data in battleground states published on Tuesday showed a 10 point gender gap in early voting, with women comprising 55 percent of those who had cast ballots. Nation-wide early voting data compiled by NBC showed Thursday that, of roughly 58 million mail-in and early in-person votes cast across the country, 54 percent came from women.

National and swing state polls show Trump’s Democratic rival, Vice President Kamala Harris, with a commanding double digit lead among women voters.

“In some states women are actually exceeding their vote share from 2020, which is at this point shocking to me,” Democratic strategist Tom Bonier told Politico. “I never would have bet on that.”

Cernovich even made fun of the Joe Rogan podcast audience:

“Problem is thinking that Draft Kings coupon code link clicking alcoholics who space out when tuning into podcasts while high, vote. Women vote, and more needs to be done!”

Oh my…

Apparently, men do tend to vote on Election Day so maybe all those bros will roll out of bed, grab a latte and head out to their precinct (the location of which they will have researched earlier) to stand in line with a bunch of old ladies so they can fill out their ballot and proudly wear their “I Voted” sticker. It would be so like them.

Preparing For The Win

Published by digby on November 1, 2024

No matter who gets the most votes

A couple of weeks ago the gang down in Mar-a-lago was popping the champagne and gleefully drawing up plans to further destroy the White House gardens once the Trump’s are in residence again. They were looking at the early voting in the swing states and they figured they had it in the bag. According to Puck’s Tara Palmieri:

It hit Trump in the last couple of weeks that early voting is a good way to win,” a person with knowledge of his thinking said. The campaign has been papering Pennsylvania with signs like, “Swamp them with votes,” “Make it too big to rig,” and “Vote early today!” 

They’ve actually been strutting around for a while, but that’s to be expected. Republicans always go with the bandwagon effect, and no one is more natural at it than Trump who just last night told an audience in Arizona, “if Ronald Reagan came back from the dead at the height of Ronald Reagan, if he went to California to have a rally, he would 250–300 people in a ballroom. We have fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty, ninety, a hundred thousand people.” (At the same event he fanatisized about putting Liz Cheney in front of a firing squad in lurid detail, so he was really on a roll.)

However, Palmieri wrote an update to her piece yesterday and the mood down in Florida has dampened a bit in recent days. She writes that the campaign is starting to believe that surge they were al celebrating was premature. Apparently. the campaign still feels confident that they can win the sunbelt states (N. Carolina, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada) but since Michigan is looking less and less doable, Pennsylvania is the must-win state. And suddenly things have started to look very dicey there “where women have outpaced men by 13 points in the early vote which has sent the campaign into a tailspin during the past two days.”

This has led to the most predictable reaction in American politics today:

Not unlike 2020, Trump and his allies are preemptively making outlandish and extreme assertions to lay the groundwork for a claim, if they don’t prevail, that the election was stolen. They’re also engaging in the early stages of election lawfare.

“They’re going so crazy here,” said a campaign source. “Anyone who hears how rabid they are about this issue can’t walk away from this and think they feel comfortable about where they’re at in PA. They’re talking about criminal referrals. They want to find poll watchers who they feel are engaged in voter suppression so that they can refer criminal prosecutions.

Of course they are. They’ve already started with the lawsuits. They complained that in Bucks Country people standing in line to apply for a mail in ballot past the deadline should have been allowed to get them anyway. A judge agreed and actually extended the deadline there and in another county until Friday. If you are rolling your eyes at the irony of Republicans demanding that deadlines be extended in the voting process, you aren’t alone.

But of course, the point of the whole thing is to help spread the idea that the election system is rigged against him, even when he is being accommodated.

Here’s Trump reaction:

He’s claiming that they’ve “found votes” which is blubbering nonsense:

We’ve already been through two presidential elections with Donald Trump and in both cases he said that he would only accept the results of the election if he wins. And even when he won he insisted that he actually won the popular vote and established a commission to investigate it (which went nowhere.) Contesting the elections is now par for the course in presidential elections. We have no idea what will come after if he loses but nobody in this country thinks for a minute that he will concede gracefully. This is how we do it now.

A big part of the strategy (and at this point I don’t think we can see it as anything else) is the touting of phony polling numbers that will convince his followers that he was leading so much before the election that it makes no sense that he possibly could have lost. In fact, one of his staunchest supporters and top surrogates, Tucker Carlson, laid it out with his patented snotty delivery at the Madison Square Garden hate rally last weekend:

It’s gonna be pretty tough for them, ten days from now, to look in the eye to America with a straight face — it’s gonna be pretty hard to look at us and say, “You know what? Kamala Harris, she’s just, she got 85 million votes because she’s just so impressive. As the first Samoan, Malaysian, Low-IQ former California prosecutor ever to be elected president. It was just a groundswell of popular support. 

This week the campaign “leaked” an internal polling document to Axios that showed Trump leading everywhere based upon the Real Clear Politics averages (which includes all the right wing pollsters that have been flooding the zone without weighting them.) The author Mike Allen writes, “the memo reflects the exuberance that Trump staffers and allies exude in interviews and behind-the-scenes conversations.”

It’s not uncommon for campaigns to slip reporters positive internal memos during the campaign for any number of reasons. In this case it’s just the usual Trump spin that he’s winning more than anyone’s ever won and nobody’s ever seen anything like it. But it’s done to reinforce the new Republican doctrine that Donald Trump cannot lose unless the other side cheats because he is so obviously superior to his opposition whether it’s Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden or Kamala Harris. In fact, Trump said the same against fellow Republicans who ran against him and his followers believed him when he said that too.

There are many plans to contest the vote, file lawsuits, intimidate voters, whatever it takes to make sure that Donald Trump will never, ever be seen as a loser among his cult followers. Nothing is more important than the belief that any loss is the result of a corrupt conspiracy to deny them their rightful victory and the leader they truly believe is the preference of the vast majority of the American people. As their Dear Leader told them just today:

His campaign knows he’s lying. They’re still trying to win legitimately. But they go to sleep at night secure in the knowledge that even if they lose they can just claim they really won but the other side stole it. And it’s not just campaign operatives. Tens of millions of people in this country will believe for the rest of their lives that our election are all rigged unless their candidate wins. How long will it take before we have a majority of American who believe in democracy again?