Opponents of women’s reproductive rights are just getting warmed up. As if you needed reminding.
Abortion bans are a loser for Republicans, but they are slow learners. They need reminding.
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When I told my partner-in-blog I’d been elected a North Carolina delegate to the 2024 DNC convention in Chicago, her advice was to bring a flak jacket. The thought had occurred to me. Those of a certain age remember too well what happened in Chicago at the 1968 convention. It is another reason a 2016 Bernie Sanders delegate insisted I run after Ezra Klein’s reverie about an open convention. Plus, anything might happen between April and August. He wanted me there in case things go off the rails. As things have in Chicago.
David Frum writes in The Atlantic why, security-wise, the kind of disruptions Chicago saw in 1968 are unlikely to happen again. Even as American campus protests over the Israeli prosecution of a war in the Gaza Strip draw headlines, 2024 is not 1968. Protesters presuming to replicate 1968 (as some will) are deluding themselves, Frum explains:
From 1968 to today, responsibility for protecting political conventions has shifted from cities and states to the federal government. This new federal responsibility was formalized in a directive signed by President Bill Clinton in 1998. The order created a category of “National Special Security Events,” for which planning would be led by the Secret Service.
National Security Special Events draw on all the resources of the federal government, including, if need be, those of the Defense Department. In 2016, the federal government spent $50 million on security for each of the two major-party conventions.
Those funds enabled Cleveland, the host of the 2016 Republican convention, to deploy thousands of law-enforcement personnel. Officers were seconded from across Ohio, and from as far away as Texas and California. Federal funds paid for police to be trained in understanding the difference between lawful and unlawful protest, and to equip them with body cameras to record interactions with the public. The city also used federal funds to buy 300 bicycles to field a force that could move quickly into places where cars might not be able to go, and that could patrol public spaces in a way that was more approachable and friendly.
Campuses are lightly controlled and lightly policed, Frum adds. “Pro-Palestinian protesters have proved considerably more circumspect when they march in places where laws of public order are upheld.”
Disruptions like blocking bridges and protests inside the Cannon Office Building on Capitol Hill involve “old-fashioned civil disobedience—lawbreaking that did not threaten injury to anyone, followed by peaceful acceptance of arrest.”
National Special Security Events are different animals. Security at the 2012 convention in Charlotte was tight. (I attended on a press pass.) No one gets past the security perimeter without credentials approved by the party host committee. Protests outside the 2016 Philadelphia convention by a few N.C. Bernie delegates from my district amounted to (in my friend’s reporting) mostly face-painting and fierce crying.
With Jan. 6 informing planning, and with subsequent prosecutions as a point of reference, it is less likely any hopes of disrupting the DNC convention will remain hopes. Frum concludes:
Maybe protesters will discover an unsuspected weak point, overwhelm police, wreak viral-video havoc, embarrass President Biden, and thereby help Donald Trump. The better guess is that they will not only fail in that but also be unable to mobilize any large number to attack police lines and risk serious prison time.
Guess I’ll leave the flak jacket at home.
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Speaking of polls, Philip Bump has a good bit of fun with Trump’s hilariously misleading charts like the one above ostensibly showing his crushing Biden in the latest Bloomberg poll in his newsletter this weekend. It doesn’t matter what the numbers are, Trump is always “crushing” it. He added this bit which I thought was interesting.
If the bottom of the red shaded area is not higher than the top of the shaded blue area, it’s best to describe the race as a dead heat or statistically tied. After all, consider those Pennsylvania results, with the margin of error of 3 points. That means support for Biden probably lands between 43 and 49 percent and support for Trump between 44 and 50 percent. So maybe the “real” support for Biden is 47 percent while Trump’s is 46. The crusher has become the crushee!
I put “real” in quotes because there’s squishiness all over the place here. Margins of error don’t capture all of the uncertainty, nor do April polls predict November results.
Indeed. Remember this as you look at polling over the next few months. And recall that in 2016 the race was always within the margin of error and yet we assumed that Clinton had to win because … well, it’s the only thing that made sense. We know how that turned out.
The Trumpers insist they were never in any danger of being stolen or observed in that storage room at Mar-a-Lago. Well:
A coat hanger or “very tiny screwdriver” could be used to unlock the Mar-a-Lago storage room where former President Donald Trump stored highly classified documents for more than a year, according to a witness in Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigation.
The account was relayed to FBI agents by an unidentified aide to Trump in January 2023, according to newly released exhibits, and further undercuts claims by Trump that the highly-classified materials he’s accused of taking with him after leaving office were secured at all times.
Not to worry. I’m sure none of the thousands of people who attend paying events there every night of the week, (including all the foreign nationals with sketchy credentials) could figure that out. Certainly they couldn’t have known how to unlock that bathroom door where all the boxes were stored in the shower. They were all very, very secure.
Besides, Trump says the Presidential Records Act allows him to keep anything he wants, including nuclear secrets, and if he wants to display them for the whole world right there in the ballroom, that’s his privilege. He’s immune, dontcha know. Otherwise some bitter Democratic president will wreak his revenge by criminally prosecuting him for stealing them. .
Or something.
If you watch CNN you’ll no doubt be hearing a lot about their new poll from the most annoying data analyst on television, David Chalian. It shows Trump beating Biden 49-42 and this will almost surely end up being the narrative going into the next week.
Don’t listen. It’s an outlier:
There is also a new CNN poll today showing Trump with a 49-43 national lead. Given that dozens of other national polls have shown the race within the margin of error and many have shown Biden gaining or with leads THIS CNN POLL IS AN OUTLIER and should be treated that way by CNN and other commentators.
Any attempt to use the CNN to guide one’s understanding of the election given that dozens of other polls are showing a completely different race (tied) would be journalistic and/or analytical malpractice. A few months ago the Washington Post published a poll that they considered an outlier, and acknowledged it in their article about the poll, pointing out that their data was different from many other recent polls. CNN and other commentators should do the same with this poll.
This race is inexplicably tight to be sure and Trump may well be marginally ahead. But this is ridiculous.
As Larry Sabato says here:
I did want to flag some truly astonishing results from that CBS poll which has me contemplating tequila before noon. It’s generally a hopeful poll which shows MI, PA and WI essentially tied. But take a look at a few of the crosstabs.
Right, sure.
That’s just not true.
Delusional.
Is there some kind of collective brain damage causing this amnesia?
Trump has been saying he had the greatest economy the world has ever known on a loop for the past three years. Apparently a large majority of Americans believe him. The truth is that he inherited a strong economy that was able to withstand some of his daft ideas like the Chinese tariffs while Biden inherited a massive economic and public health crisis that happened on Trump’s watch and brought the country back in record time, doing much better than any other advanced economy in the world. But sure, Trump was better. He sat on his ass and tweeted and let Obama’s economic momentum carry him.
If he had won in 2020 you can bet we would be mired in recession right now because he and his cult were determined not to extend the stimulus and would have instead offered some more tax cuts for their rich buddies and put Jared in charge of the supply chain chaos. I’m pretty sure the vaccine program would have been a nightmare as well so we could probably count on another half a million deaths or so as well. It doesn’t bear thinking about.
But sure, everything was great under Trump and has been hard under Biden. That’s because he had to fix the horrific mess that Trump left him. I guess that’s too long ago for people to remember. It was three long years ago.
Adam Serwer on the immunity argument:
Trump’s legal argument is a path to dictatorship. That is not an exaggeration: His legal theory is that presidents are entitled to absolute immunity for official acts. Under this theory, a sitting president could violate the law with impunity, whether that is serving unlimited terms or assassinating any potential political opponents, unless the Senate impeaches and convicts the president. Yet a legislature would be strongly disinclined to impeach, much less convict, a president who could murder all of them with total immunity because he did so as an official act. The same scenario applies to the Supreme Court, which would probably not rule against a chief executive who could assassinate them and get away with it.
The conservative justices have, over the years, seen harbingers of tyranny in union organizing, environmental regulations, civil-rights laws, and universal-health-care plans. When confronted with a legal theory that establishes actual tyranny, they were simply intrigued. As long as Donald Trump is the standard-bearer for the Republicans, every institution they control will contort itself in his image in an effort to protect him. […]
[…]
No previous president has sought to overthrow the Constitution by staying in power after losing an election. Trump is the only one, which is why these questions are being raised now. Pretending that these matters concern the powers of the presidency more broadly is merely the path the justices sympathetic to Trump have chosen to take in order to rationalize protecting the man they would prefer to be the next president. What the justices—and other Republican loyalists—are loath to acknowledge is that Trump is not being uniquely persecuted; he is uniquely criminal.
This case—even more than the Colorado ballot-eligibility case—unites the right-wing justices’ political and ideological interests with Trump’s own. One way or another, they will have to choose between Trumpism and democracy. They’ve given the public little reason to believe that they will choose any differently than the majority of their colleagues in the Republican Party.
They are partisan above all else. There’s no other way to interpret their actions. They also have immunity from any accountability since we now know that the impeachment clause is completely impotent and they have lifetime terms. They don’t care.
“Our job is to condemn Hamas, a terrorist organization that started this war, condemn in every form antisemitism, islamophobia, and other forms of bigotry. But we do have to pay attention to the unprecedented humanitarian disaster taking place in Gaza right now.
Bernie Sanders: "Our job is to condemn Hamas, a terrorist organization that started this war, condemn in every form antisemitism, islamophobia, and other forms of bigotry. But we do have to pay attention to the unprecedented humanitarian disaster taking place in Gaza right now." pic.twitter.com/Rs27n5M2Tt
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 28, 2024
It shouldn’t be necessary to say this but it’s probably a good idea. Certain universal liberal values need to be emphasized when emotions get high.
Lol. He knows Jr is talking about his people here:
Trump got a bunch of blowback from the faithful for putting down RFK Jr.’s anti vax routine yesterday. He’s worried.
He didn’t like this either:
Right:
Did I mention that he’s worried?
After the jokes at D.C.’s “nerd prom” last night, SNL’s Colin Jost got serious.
I remember decency. Sort of.
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Joe Biden’s sharpest barb at the White House Correspondents’ dinner was about him running against a six year old.
The Guardian this morning uses a few more words for characterizing the “former factory worker” who rose from obscurity to serve as North Carolina’s Republican lieutenant governor. Mark Robinson is his party’s candidate for governor this November. It might be news that Republicans selected a Black candidate to run against state Attorney General Josh Stein. But if Donald Trump is a six year-old, it’s less clear how one might describe Robinson:
Born into poverty and working in a furniture factory while attending college, Robinson quit his job and dropped out of school to begin speaking at conservative events. (Robinson, if he wins, would be the first North Carolina governor without a college degree elected since 1937.)
Robinson beat a host of competitors for the Republican nomination for lieutenant governor in 2020, winning about a third of the primary vote. He faced the state representative Yvonne Holley, an African American Democrat from Raleigh. Holley’s campaign focused on North Carolina’s urban territory while largely ignoring rural areas of the state, while Robinson barnstormed through each of the state’s 100 counties. He won narrowly but outperformed Trump’s margin over Biden by about 100,000 votes.
That’s not headline news. Democrat Roy Cooper outperformed both Trump and Biden to win the governorship. That’s how state elections here roll. State voters have a moderate streak and a history of ticket-splitting when it comes to local vs. national races. Republicans find in Robinson a candidate “who could not be easily accused of bigotry.” On his face (literally), Robinson appeared to provide Republicans with some cover against such accusations, “until people began to pay attention to what he said,” the Guardian reports.
Such as?
Robinson has shared conspiracist comments about the moon landing and 9/11. He has attacked the idea of women in positions of leadership. His swipes at Black culture and public figures are talk-radio fodder, describing Barack Obama as a “worthless anti-American atheist” and suggesting Michelle Obama is a man.
“Half of black Democrats don’t realize they are slaves and don’t know who their masters are. The other half don’t care,” he wrote in one Facebook post. He described the movie Black Panther in another as the product of “an agnostic Jew and put to film by satanic marxist”, and wrote: “How can this trash, that was only created to pull the shekels out of your schvartze pockets, invoke any pride?”, using a derogatory Yiddish word to refer to Black people.
While the literati celebrating themselves last night in Washington, D.C. aimed (mostly) good-natured jokes at each other last night, Robinson isn’t joking.
The antisemitism of that comment is not singular. He has repeated common antisemitic tropes about Jewish banking, posted Hitler quotes on Facebook and suggested the Holocaust was a hoax. “There is a REASON the liberal media fills the airwaves with programs about the NAZI and the ‘6 million Jews’ they murdered,” wrote Robinson, with scare quotes around the figure.
Robinson’s Democratic opponent, Stein, could be the rapidly growing state’s first Jewish governor.
The two present a sharp contrast in policy, temperament and experience. After graduating from both Harvard Law and the Harvard Kennedy school of government, Stein managed John Edwards’ successful Senate campaign. Stein then served in the statehouse before winning the attorney general’s race in 2016, becoming the first Jewish person elected to statewide office in North Carolina.
Stein, 57, is running as a conventional center-left Democrat. At a stump speech in pastoral Scotland county near the South Carolina line, Stein focused on fighting the opioid-addiction epidemic, the state’s backlog of untested rape kits, clean drinking water and early childhood education. But he had some words about Robinson’s rhetoric.
“The voters of North Carolina have an unbelievably stark choice before them this November, between two competing visions,” Stein said in an interview. “Mine is forward and it’s inclusive. It’s about tapping the potential of every person so that they have a chance to succeed where we have a thriving economy, safe neighborhoods, strong schools.
What’s more, if the controversy over North Carolina’s infamous “bathroom bill” (HB 2) is any indicator, electing Robinson could be an economic hit for the Tar Heel State. The Associated Press estimated the law could cost the state “upward of $3.7 billion in sports/entertainment and business revenue over the next 12 years,” the Washington Post reported in 2017. Forbes in November 2016 estimated the state had “flushed away” perhaps “$630 million in lost business in the bill’s first eight months in effect. It helped cost Gov. Pat McCrory (R) reelection.
It’s not an economy voters might want to turn over to Robinson. The firmly anti-abortion Robinson’s finances have been in the headlines lately while Stein’s have not.
In one of Robinson’s three bankruptcy filings, reporters discovered that he had failed to file income taxes between 1998 and 2002. Questions have been raised about personal expenses charged to campaign funds from the 2020 race.
His wife shuttered a nutrition non-profit after a conservative blogger began to raise questions about the Robinson family’s financial dependence on government contracts. Reporters later learned that the North Carolina department of health and human services is investigating the firm for questionable accounting.
[…]
Robinson acknowledged in 2022 paying for an abortion for his wife 33 years earlier.
The question is whether Robinson’s full-throated anti-abortion stance hinders not just his own candidacy but that of Trump. Planned Parenthood plans to double its spending in North Carolina, to $10m, with an eye on defending the governorship and ending a veto-proof Republican legislative majority. Trump, meanwhile, has backed away from publicly endorsing the most extreme abortion bans.
No guarantees, but Trump and his 88 criminal charges and Robinson with his past statements and business history could bring out the moderate in North Carolina’s electorate this November.
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