Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

One of the biggest revelations in Watergate was the existence of Nixon’s enemies list. The episode was particularly dramatic because it was announced by CBS correspondent Daniel Schorr on live TV and as he was reading it he found his own name on the list. It was a tremendous scandal at the time which sounds downright quaint today what with the former president and current GOP nominee routinely calling the press the “enemy of the people” and publicly declaring his intention to prosecute his political rivals.

New York Magazine helpfully drew up a partial list which they promise will be updated as the threats add up:

Joe Biden and family, obviously
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg
New York Judge Juan Merchan
New York Attorney General Leticia James
New York Judge Arthur Engoron
Special Counsel Jack Smith and anyone involved in the federal Trump investigations/indictments

Those are the obvious ones. But there are more. Here’s the rest of the list with the evidence:

Members of the House January 6 Select Committee

On June 6, Trump attacked the committee and accused its members of committing crimes in a Truth Social post, writing at the end of the post: “INDICT THE UNSELECT J6 COMMITTEE FOR ILLEGALLY DELETING AND DESTROYING ALL OF THEIR ‘FINDING!’”

Journalists and media organizations

Trump continues to attack members of the media, or at least those he views as unfriendly to him and his causes, as “the enemy of the people.” In a September 2023 Truth Social post, Trump attacked NBC News, MSNBC, and the organizations’ parent company, Comcast, before adding:

I say up front, openly, and proudly, that when I WIN the Presidency of the United States, they and others of the LameStream Media will be thoroughly scrutinized for their knowingly dishonest and corrupt coverage of people, things, and events. Why should NBC, or any other of the corrupt & dishonest media companies, be entitled to use the very valuable Airwaves of the USA, FREE? They are a true threat to Democracy and are, in fact, THE ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE! The Fake News Media should pay a big price for what they have done to our once great Country!

During an appearance on Steve Bannon’s podcast late last year, former Trump National Security Council member Kash Patel, who according to the New York Times will likely have a senior national security role in a second Trump administration, vowed that the administration would go after journalists. Though Patel said a second Trump administration would “follow the facts and the law,” he also said:

We will go out and find the conspirators, not just in government but in the media. Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections — we’re going to come after you. Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out. We’re actually going to use the Constitution to prosecute them for crimes they said we have always been guilty of but never have.

Nonprofits and charities that support migrants

In a November 2023 Truth Social post, Trump vowed that, “For any radical left charity, non-profit, or so called aid organizations supporting these caravans and illegal aliens, we will prosecute them for their participation in human trafficking, child smuggling, and every other crime we can find…”

Retired Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley

In September 2023, Trump posted a message on Truth Social attacking Milley over phone calls the former top general made to China in October 2020 and January 2021 (two days after the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol) offering reassurance that Trump was not planning to attack China. Milley later said that both calls, at the time, were cleared by senior Trump administration Defense officials. But in his Truth Social post, Trump suggested Milley had in fact committed treason, writing that:

This is an act so egregious that, in times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH! A war between China and the United States could have been the result of this treasonous act. To be continued!!!

Employees at the National Archives

Per a Rolling Stone report in October 2022, Trump has expressed an interest in purging the federal agency — which he has said is “woke and broken” —after it sought to recover classified documents Trump took from the White House at the end of his presidency:

Trump has told close associates that he wants to gut the nonpartisan historical agency, which the former president believes is full of anti-MAGA subversives, two sources with knowledge of the matter tell Rolling Stone. Trump has said he plans to make it a priority if he wins a second term, the sources say.

In some of these conversations, the former president has referenced specific officials — all installed during Democratic administrations — who he’d want to immediately “get rid of” and have replaced with pliable loyalists. One of these sources says that it was clear from the conversation that someone in Trump’s orbit had been slipping him names or lists of potential targets.

Mark Zuckerberg

In a February Truth Social post, Trump accused the Facebook/Meta CEO of interference in the 2020 election, citing an unproven allegation that the billionaire attempted to help Democrats via a nonpartisan nonprofit which donated millions of dollars to help bolster the operations of 2,500 local election offices ahead of the election.

“He cheated on the Election(s). The whole system is RIGGED. Why isn’t he being prosecuted?” Trump wrote.

Stay tuned. I’m sure there are more we don’t know about and more to come. You can be sure that he has a much longer list of journalists and like fascists before him he will also target people on his own team (as he did to Bob Good, a MAGA Republican who had the nerve to endorse Ron Desantis) just to keep the cult in line.

Anyone who doesn’t take this seriously is a fool

At first I was dubious of @MSNBC for inviting a Heritage Foundation person on to spout lies.

Then I saw this interview and recognized that the best way to highlight the insanity that’s afoot is to put examples of it on television for all to see.

pic.twitter.com/L5KaQ61Sft

— Christopher Wiggins (@CWNewser) June 22, 2024

That is the head of the Heritage Foundation which is pulling together Project 2025. He is very arrogant, very confident that they have the election in the bag and very proud of the work they are doing. First and foremost, he is obviously saying that they will not accept the results of the election if Trump doesn’t win. The rest is just as batshit crazy.

QUESTION: Is your organization going to accept the results of the 2024 presidential election, regardless of the election results.

ANSWER: Yes, if there isn’t massive fraud like there was in 2020.

QUESTION: There wasn’t massive fraud. Where was it?

ANSWER: no answer

QUESTION: What is the plan for the deportation of undocumented immigrants in the interior, not at the border.

ANSWER: We need to have the biggest mass deportation system in America.

QUESTION: What are these people (undocumented immigrants) doing?

ANSWER: A lot of them are committing crimes like murdering the 12-year-old girl in Houston.

FACT: That’s one out of 11 million. In Texas, undocumented immigrants were 37.1 % less likely to be convicted of a crime.

QUESTION: Should a woman be able to get an abortion if her doctor says she needs one?

ANSWER: Abortion is not healthcare . We will change the name of the Department of Health and Human Services to the Department of Life, because we are all in support of life.

Don’t turn away.

Project 2025, read it and weep.

More smackdowns, please

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) brought some heat to her stumping in Nevada for Joe Biden this week. This, this is what I’m talking about. Behold:

AOC: I have a message for this conservative court and Donald J. Trump. The women and people of this state do not consent. And the woman and people of this country certainly do not consent to Donald Trump nor this corrupt court that he has enabled. pic.twitter.com/I6MfefIrae

— Acyn (@Acyn) June 22, 2024

But what little coverage AOC’s appearance drew missed the fire. Las Vegas Sun:

“For women and gender diverse people, it is life and death,” said Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., during a discussion about reproductive rights Thursday in Las Vegas. Ocasio-Cortez later appeared in downtown Las Vegas for a rally to support Biden’s reelection campaign. “It’s not hyperbole. It’s reality.”

And Axios? Axios felt the need to both-sides Democrats, placing more emphasis on dissension in the ranks than on her message: AOC holds first 2024 rally for Biden as progressives rage over Gaza.

This is what Democrats fight in convincing progressive voices and younger voters that their vote is their voice, that their vote is their power, that their power matters, and that Democrats have their backs. If there is media bias, it is against progressives’ most powerful voices. Democrats themselves are uneasy about putting up a public fight. Several members of Nevada’s mostly Democrat Congressional delegation were absent fron the event.

“A Biden-Harris campaign spokeswoman acknowledged the absences and said ‘scheduling’ issues were to blame,” the New York Post reported.

This week, Rep. Jaime Raskin (D) of Maryland urged readers of The New Republic not to count out “self-deprecating” liberals. Don’t be fooled by their “essential modesty.” Except reticence in this environment is a liability.

“[B]attle-hardened post-Trump liberals have proved tough as nails and ready to fight all necessary battles for freedom and democracy in these days of resurgent authoritarianism,” Raskin wrote:

Ordinarily a live-and-let-live philosophy, liberalism fights hard when it’s up against the ropes. And here we are—in the fight of our lives ever since Florida Man came down the escalator to run a new nationwide grift. The good news is that the post–Donald Trump networks of liberals and progressives are ready for battle, strategically focused, and plentiful in the land.

“Tough as nails and ready to fight.” Is that Democrats’ secret weapon? The problem is few voters on the sidelines see a polite magazine essay as “fighting.” As Dr. Strangelove once said, “Of course, the whole point of a Doomsday Machine is lost, if you *keep* it a *secret*! Why didn’t you tell the world, EH?”

Dispirited and disengaged voters want to see Democrats fighting for them, as Anat Shenker-Osorio found in recent focus groups:

If my colleagues and I took a shot everytime someone in these groups decried the Democrats as doing nothing on the fascism front, we’d have cirrhosis.

As one disaffected Democratic white woman from Arizona said in April, “I don’t think any of them care really. Even if Democrats won the House, the Senate, the presidency, they’ve had it before — didn’t do anything then.” 

Again,

A laundry list of accomplishments doesn’t lodge in people’s brains the way a good story with heroes and villains does. Democrats aren’t telling one. It’s not voters’ fault that they don’t know what they don’t know. It’s a challenge Democrats are struggling to meet. And the kitchen table? The kitchen table is on fire.

AOC preaches as though the table is on fire. More of that, please.

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Perfection rarely is

A casual friend introduced me to his buddy at a public concert last night. The usual. Tom works with the Democratic Party, etc. The buddy replied with the familiar “fed up with both parties” bit.

Rebecca Solnit wrote about that stance in 2016:

Cynicism is first of all a style of presenting oneself, and it takes pride more than anything in not being fooled and not being foolish. But in the forms in which I encounter it, cynicism is frequently both these things. That the attitude that prides itself on world-weary experience is often so naïve says much about the triumph of style over substance, attitude over analysis.

[…]

If you set purity and perfection as your goals, you have an almost foolproof system according to which everything will necessarily fall short. But expecting perfection is naïve; failing to perceive value by using an impossible standard of measure is even more so. Cynics are often disappointed idealists and upholders of unrealistic standards. They are uncomfortable with victories, because victories are almost always temporary, incomplete, and compromised — but also because the openness of hope is dangerous, and in war, self-defense comes first. Naïve cynicism is absolutist; its practitioners assume that anything you don’t deplore you wholeheartedly endorse. But denouncing anything less than perfection as morally compromising means pursuing aggrandizement of the self, not engagement with a place or system or community, as the highest priority.

Persistence accomplishes more than perfection:

One thing you can say for the [party] old boys, they are patient and persistent. (Okay, that’s two things.) Patience and persistence are not the first qualities liberal activists look for in their change agents, and qualities that not enough activists cultivate in themselves. Whenever an Obama flings the wheel hard over (or not hard enough) and the ship of state doesn’t turn like a speedboat, impatient activists abandon their posts and jump ship. Do that, and nothing changes. And the old boys get their club back.

One thing to be said for old and unexciting Joe Biden is he has been persistent. James Lardner writes in The New Yorker that a recent Times and Sienna College poll found that nearly seventy per cent of Americans thinks the system needs “either a major shakeup or (the preference of fourteen per cent) to be ‘torn down entirely.’ ” Donald Trump was just the sort of guy to do it, not Joe Biden.

The Times’ Nate Cohn found that, ironically, people saw the same appeal in Barack Obama, “another candidate who famously represented change, change we could believe in.” Only to be disappointed when the ship didn’t turn like a speedboat and that hnis response to the financial crisis was overly timid. “And I think that it’s not a coincidence that there are so many Obama/Trump voters out there.”

“The upshot was a fresh wave of outrage against the government and politicians, a growing perception of Democrats as the party of a self-absorbed élite, and an opening for the likes of Donald Trump,” Lardner writes.

So few of us saw Joe Biden, change agent, coming. Lardner provides an impressive list of first-term accomplishments. But Biden’s record recalls the title of Frank Zappa’s live album, “The Best Band You Never Heard in Your Life.” Biden’s is another band no one’s heard:

In a forbidding political environment, the Biden Administration has racked up an impressive record of impactful achievement; and yet even a goodly number of Biden’s 2020 voters are “surprisingly unaware of anything he has done as President,” according to Rich Thau, a public-policy researcher who runs regular focus groups with swing voters. The perception of Biden as ineffective has been a source of much vexation in the President’s camp, and the subject of many an op-ed column and blog post. Some commentators reason that the Administration’s policies need more time to prove their worth: most of the infrastructure projects, for example, have yet to reach the ribbon-cutting stage. Others blame a politically fractured media that tends to reinforce people’s biases. Ageism has been at work here, too: Americans could count themselves lucky to have a President who, after a lifetime in government, has shown a capacity to reflect on past mistakes—his own and his party’s—and a resolve to make the most of the opportunity belatedly granted him. But the polls suggest that, even among Biden’s supporters, his age is viewed almost entirely as a source of concern.

In one way, though, Biden has contributed to his own predicament. In his determination to sound the alarm against another Trump Presidency, he has had a lot to say about what Americans stand to lose: access to abortion, honest elections, civility, the rule of law. If Biden is seen as a system defender, it’s partly because he has spent so much of his campaign time on defense. He should say more—far more—about what his Administration and his party have done, and mean to do in the future, to make the economy and democracy more just.

His attacks on Trump could be more expansive, too. Trump is in some ways a sui-generis figure: the only convicted felon to be a major-party nominee for President, and the only candidate who has ever promised to be a “dictator” on Day One or spoken of using his office to exact “retribution” against his enemies. In the realm of economic policy, however, Trump has proved to be a conventional Republican of the modern era. His Administration, like those of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, was a fount of special favors for powerful industries and a trasher of regulations that cost corporations money; and its first and biggest achievement was an enormous tax-cut bill tilted in favor of the rich. What set Trump and his governing crowd apart, beyond their many crimes and indictments, was only the brazenness of their quid-pro-quo understandings with donors and their readiness to direct a stream of the benefits of their official actions to themselves. When it comes to the privileges of the wealthy and powerful, Trump has been the defender and Biden the threat. Biden and his team would do well to remind voters of that, again and again, from now to Election Day. 

Democrats, Biden included, also need to demonstrate a commitment to change by showing they mean to fight for it. Visibly. Loudly. What doesn’t get attention might as well not exist.

Misdiagnosing why Dem base voters report moving away from Biden will absolutely lead to wrong cure. Despite pundit-land evergreen answer – "be less woke" – in reality these voters are getting turned off by lack of resolve & fight.https://t.co/qqpd8q9pJq

— Anat Shenker-Osorio 🟧 (@anatosaurus) June 17, 2024

I’m pretty sure the guy last night has no idea what Biden and his Democratic colleagues have accomplished because good-government types tend to do a poor job of advertising their accomplishments. They’re just doing what they’ve been hired to do, and shrug. Not being visible and loud about it in this “forbidding political environment” looks like lethargy. Biden shook things up with his Independence Hall speech in 2022. His debate performance next week is another chance to change the narrative.

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Two beluga whales are rescued from war-ravaged Kharkiv, Ukraine and taken to an aquarium in Spain. Salma Abdelaziz has more on their remarkable journey. pic.twitter.com/Tnll5fryp9

— Anderson Cooper 360° (@AC360) June 21, 2024

 

From the New York Times ( good news gift link for you!)

It was a whale of an evacuation. Actually, two.

In what experts said was among the most complex marine mammal rescue ever undertaken, the pair of beluga whales were extricated from an aquarium in the battered city of Kharkiv in eastern Ukraine and transported to Europe’s largest aquarium in Valencia, Spain, on Wednesday morning.

As Russian aerial bombardments of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, have intensified, the evacuation of Plombir, a 15-year-old male, and Miranda, a 14-year-old female, came just in time, marine mammal experts said.

“If they had continued in Kharkiv, their chances of survival would have been very slim,” said Daniel Garcia-Párraga, director of zoological operations at Oceanogràfic de Valencia, who helped lead the rescue.

Belugas, whose natural habitat is the Arctic, need cold water to survive. The devastation of the power grid in Kharkiv meant that the aquarium there had to rely on generator power, making it challenging to keep the waters cooled.

At the same time, the whales’ diets were halved recently amid shortages of the 132 pounds of squid, herring, mackerel and other fresh fish the pair needed daily, Dr. Garcia-Párraga said. Ukrainian caregivers were even considering using discarded fish from restaurants and markets.

And in recent weeks, bombs exploded close enough to ripple the waters of their home at the NEMO Dolphinarium. As the conditions grew more precarious, the Ukrainians decided the whales required evacuation.

Moving marine mammals can be risky in the best of circumstances. Transporting sick or stressed animals ratchets up the difficulty.

“You’d like to make sure that anybody that gets transported is as healthy as possible,” said Michael Walsh, a veterinarian who leads the marine animal rescue program at the University of Florida but was not involved in the operation.

In emergencies, he said, “you may not have as much of a choice.”

Dan Ashe, head of the Association of Zoos and Aquariums and the former head of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, said it took “the world’s most elite team of marine mammal experts” to achieve what he said was “likely the most complex marine mammal rescue ever undertaken.”

Specialists from Oceanogràfic de Valencia, Georgia Aquarium in Atlanta and SeaWorld all assisted the Ukrainians in the operation, a 36-hour journey over more than 1,900 miles that started on Monday evening and was completed just before dawn on Wednesday.

Read on. It’s a whale of a story.

This time it’s for “debauchery”

This morning I wrote about the use of the Comstock Act and other zombie laws to help the right take America back to the 1890s. Get a load of this one:

A government watchdog group filed suit in Delaware federal court this week, seeking to compel the Justice Department to produce records that may determine whether Hunter Biden should be further investigated under a 1910 law relating to “prostitution or debauchery.”

The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project petitioned the same Wilmington bench where Biden was found guilty on gun charges this month, contending that there is a significant amount of evidence the first son was being probed on Mann Act grounds.

The law, stemming from a time when prostitution was more prevalent in urban areas, states it is a felony to “knowingly transport… in interstate or foreign commerce… any woman or girl for the purpose of prostitution or debauchery.”

The legal brief, obtained by Fox News Digital, includes part of a 2023 interview transcript from IRS whistleblower Joseph Ziegler before the House Ways & Means Committee.

Ziegler recounted efforts by the Justice Department to assess potential Mann Act violations, speaking of a “West Coast assistant” of Biden’s, whom “we knew … to also be in the prostitution world or believed to be in the prostitution world – and he deducted expenses related to her.”

An unnamed lawmaker then asks about Biden “paying for the travel of an individual to fly out to California or wherever,” to which Ziegler responds, “Or Boston or wherever he was at. [Washington, D.C.] I think one of them – he flew someone for the night.”

Ziegler said he understood the Justice Department to be “compiling” potential violation allegations that had been referred to them but that he did not know the ultimate outcome.

Oversight Project attorney Kyle Brosnan told Fox News Digital in a Thursday interview he believes the Justice Department, therefore, has the information and that it should be made publicly available.

Brosnan said the Oversight Project seeks records relating to Ziegler’s testimony, any communications with the probation office regarding the Mann Act, as well as “victim”-related inquiries.

“If you sort of peel back the layers of the onion, it’s absurd, because there is an overwhelming amount of information that already shows these records exist. [They’re] found on the Hunter Biden laptop, which was entered into evidence in his criminal case in Delaware,” Brosnan said.

These Trump bootlickers want to go after Hunter Biden for “debauchery.” You cannot make this stuff up.

This is where shamelessness really is a superpower. Anyone with a sense of shame would be too embarrassed to push this with all the rape and underage sex charges among Republicans politicians and evangelical pastors (just this week!) not to mention the presidential nominee’s own track record. But they won’t. Instead, they will no doubt hold hearings allowing Marjorie Taylor Greene to leer at big blow up pictures of Hunter Biden’s privates while screeching like a demented harpy about morality.

Trump keeps telling his fans that he doesn’t need any votes. He says he has more than enough. He says everything depends on stopping Democrats from “cheating” (by which he means voting.) So it makes sense that they wouldn’t be putting much effort into get out the vote. They figure they don’t really need it.

Bill Sher at the Washington Monthly discusses the Trump “ground game” here and it turns out that they’re outsourcing it to a grifter. Yep:

CNN reported that “Donald Trump’s campaign is taking a vastly different approach to 2024 compared with 2020, with plans for fewer staff and expenses [and instead] relying on wealthy conservative groups for data, infrastructure, and significant bank accounts.” It further noted that one of the most important of these groups is Turning Point Action, part of the Turning Point network that began with Turning Point USA. 

Turning Point USA is a right-wing student group founded in 2012 by Charlie Kirk, an 18-year-old soon-to-be college dropout, and Bill Montgomery, an elderly Tea Party activist. 

You know about Kirk by now. He’s a full fledged, far right wingnut welfare celebrity with a huge following who says things like, “if I see a Black pilot, I’m going to be like, ‘Boy, I hope he’s qualified.” and there is no separation of church and state.” He’s also a Trump insider going back to 2018 when he interned with Don Jr.

He’s grifted almost a quarter of a billion since 2016 and while he’s good at putting on drooling Trump fest events, other than that…

In 2022, the Turning Point network entered the ground game business, mainly in Arizona, where it is headquartered. As the Arizona Republic reported, “Turning Point PAC, the political action committee started by Turning Point USA, spent $494,105 during the 2022 election cycle, including the primary elections. The bulk of that, $377,201, went towards the general election races for U.S. Senate, governor, and Secretary of State in Arizona.” Turning Point’s candidates lost all of those races. 

What did Turning Point do to help on the ground? Per the Arizona Republic: 

Outside of money, Turning Point Action, the advocacy arm of the parent non-profit, Turning Point USA, held a string of rallies in key legislative districts. Volunteers who showed up were handed materials provided by Turning Point PAC and sent out to knock on doors and engage voters.  

And, though it did not advocate certain candidates, Turning Point USA, the parent non-profit, started its Turning Point Faith initiative in August 2021 that aimed at persuading Christians to become more civic-minded.  

At monthly events held at a Phoenix megachurch, Kirk would speak about current events and cast political involvement as a spiritual duty to protect the nation from falling under the control of Satan. Excerpts of those events played as part of a half-hour radio show that began airing on dozens of Christian radio stations. 

None of this had any discernible impact. In the Arizona gubernatorial race, Turning Point’s preferred candidate, Kari Lake, led the Democratic nominee, Katie Hobbs, by 2.4 percentage points in the final FiveThirtyEight poll average. Yet Hobbs won by a 0.7 percentage point margin. Underperforming the polls by 3 points indicates that Lake and her Turning Point comrades got beat on the ground. 

Undeterred, Turning Point last year began shopping around a $108 million get-out-the-vote plan, now called “Chase the Vote,” focusing on Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin. Then-Chair of the Republican National Committee, Ronna McDaniel, gave this plan the cold shoulder. Kirk launched blistering attacks on McDaniel, claiming she was a Democratic plant and urging Trump to dump her. According to Real Clear Politics, McDaniel told Trump that Kirk’s penchant for insulting African Americans, such as saying Martin Luther King, Jr. did not deserve a holiday, would hurt efforts with Black voters. 

Kirk won the fight. McDaniel quit under pressure. Then Trump took Kirk’s suggestion to install his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, as RNC co-chair.  

This explains Kirk’s recent turn toward hyper Christian talk on his radio show and podcast. He’s targeting the evangelical base. Let’s just say that his professions of pious Christianity aren’t especially believable.

In today’s excellent newsletter, Brian Beutler is absolutely right about this. We know that most of the kvetching about the economy at this point is coming from Republicans and even then they are reporting that their own finances are fine it’s everyone else who is suffering terribly under the horrors of Joe Biden’s economy. There are some independents and Democrats who are complaining as well which is where the real problem lies.

Beutler points out that this phenomenon is asymmetric:

[S]urvey data reliably shows that Republican economic sentiment is much, much more sensitive to partisan control of the White House than Democratic sentiment. Republican voters are trained by their media, or acculturated by their communities, to dissemble about their economic sentiments depending on who’s president—or, more generously, to feel so invested in who holds power in America that they lose touch with reality.

Every poll like this one from Monmouth will sweep in voters whose responses are tethered to facts, and others, mostly Republicans, whose responses are shaped by partisanship and tribalism. What we have here is evidence that Biden is fighting the issue to a draw despite that handicap. If people really just voted their pocketbooks, Biden would be winning handily. If Trump were to become president tomorrow, Republicans would experience catharsis, and economic sentiment would shoot above the waterline.

Political professionals should be able to see that coming miles away: Those same tribal poll responders will become big fans of the economy if Trump wins the election. They will outnumber their tribal opposites in the Democratic Party, and sentiment will invert before policy has changed at all.

Which means we know Biden doesn’t have a major economy problem—he has a Republican shit-talking problem.

Knowing that to be true, you would think that Democrats would not succumb to it but there is a raging debate among them about whether Biden should tell the truth about the economy or capitulate to these “vibes” that are telling people it sucks.

I’m with Beutler:

Conceding to the shit talkers can’t be right as a matter of strategy or basic self-respect. Biden’s domestic policy agenda should be a source of pride, not embarrassment. It’s also troubling in a larger sense: If we ever mean to become a society where politics is bound by empirical reality, it’s not good enough to recruit good-faith actors with solid epistemic habits who abhor fanning lies. We need the bad guys to pay a price for their deceptions. That can not happen if Democrats concede to living in a MAGA-inflected, topsy-turvy world, where prosperity is deprivation, “help wanted” signs are evidence of unemployment, and the most expensive gas station in America reflects the real price per gallon. 

Democrats might still win the election from a defensive crouch. But they’ll have a much harder time winning the battle for consensus about the economy or Biden’s record if they accept conventional-wisdom pessimism. We’ll be told they won despite poor economic sentiment, not that Republicans lost because their campaign was based fundamentally on mass- and self-deception. And if this is the mindset Democrats have about Biden’s policy triumphs, they are not going to do much better when they have the power to impose real accountability, and all the contention it will stir.

This is why it was so jarring to hear Democratic strategists (and seemingly only Democratic strategists) respond to Trump’s felony convictions by cautioning that calling Trump a felon might backfire, because it would feed Trump’s false claims of “politicization.”

We obviously don’t know what will work. None of us are soothsayers or oracles. But as Beutler points out, if Biden wins a close election, which seems the likeliest positive scenario, “winning narrowly without popular appeal, and without the will or the mandate to fix what Trump and his loyalists have broken” would be a very bad outcome. The status quo is not sustainable.

It’s going to be a blockbuster

All over cable news today are breathless reports about how “momentum” has shifted toward Trump because he collected $141 million last month compared to Biden’s apparently paltry $84 million. But they fail to mention that most of Trump’s money came from 3 billionaires, one of whom was this guy:

Timothy Mellon, a reclusive heir to a Gilded Age fortune, donated $50 million to a super PAC supporting Donald J. Trump the day after the former president was convicted of 34 felonies, according to new federal filings, an enormous gift that is among the largest single disclosed contributions ever.

The donation’s impact on the 2024 race is expected to be felt almost immediately. Within days of the contribution, the pro-Trump super PAC, Make America Great Again Inc., said in a memo that it would begin reserving $100 million in advertising through Labor Day.

The group had only $34.5 million on hand at the end of April, and Mr. Mellon’s contribution accounted for much of the nearly $70 million that the super PAC raised in May. On Wednesday and Thursday, the super PAC began reserving $30 million in ads to air in Georgia and Pennsylvania around the Fourth of July holiday.

Mr. Mellon is now the first donor to give $100 million in disclosed federal contributions in this year’s election. He was already the single largest contributor to super PACs supporting both Mr. Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is running as an independent. Mr. Mellon has previously given $25 million to both.

CNN actually said that Mellon had changed teams when it’s been obvious from the beginning that he was backing RFK on behalf of Trump.

Trump is out there selling himself to the highest bidder explicitly promising rich people that if they give him huge sums of money he will take care of them, if you know what I mean. He told the oil company execs that if they give him a billion dollars he’ll make sure their taxes are slashed and their regulations are reversed. It used to be that such explicit quid pro quos were considered to be liabilities. Today, not so much.

Biden collected big bucks from billionaires too, including Michael Bloomberg who gave 20 million. But the idea that these huge numbers reflect anything about the electorate is ridiculous at this point. It certainly says something about our campaign system and capitalism but that’s a different story.

Anyone with a passing knowledge of the history of reproductive rights in America had heard of the antediluvian Comstock Act but I doubt most of them ever thought it would actually be back in use in the 21st century. The notorious “anti-vice” laws from 1873 banned the shipment of “lewd” written materials, contraceptives and any “instrument, substance, drug, medicine, or thing” for the purpose of abortion, had not been in force for many decades since the passage of various laws and the recognition of a constitutional right to abortion in 1973’s Roe v. Wade. Nonetheless, it remained on the books and leave it to the radicals putting together Project 2025 to exhume it the minute Samuel Alito and company gave them the green light.

My Salon colleague Amanda Marcotte wrote about the Comstock Act in depth a few months ago in the wake of the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals Mifepristone ruling (access to which was thankfully affirmed (for now) by the Supreme Court this month.) The original decision relied heavily on the Comstock Act to justify the decision to ban the drug, an issue which was left unresolved by the Supreme Court when they threw out the lawsuit on the basis of standing rather than the merits. So the Comstock Act remains on the books and is now theoretically constitutional since the reversal of Roe v Wade, at least when it comes to contraception and abortion. Other aspects of the law regarding obscenity are still unenforceable as they are protected under other precedents.

The Comstock Act is what’s known as a “zombie law” which is a law that has been neutered by subsequent High Court decisions that have found a constitutional prohibition against enforcing them but they remain on the books sometimes for centuries lurking around like the undead (hence the name) waiting for a chance to be reanimated by the Supreme Court overturning one of its own decisions. There are a lot of them which we just saw in a number of states that had draconian 19th century laws go into effect when the Court handed down the Dobbs decision.

In Arizona after Roe was overturned, the conservative state Supreme Court revived a near-total ban on abortion, invoking an 1864 law that only allowed abortion to save the mother’s life and gave prison time to doctors who perform them. The state legislature went through tremendous gyrations to finally repeal that 1864 law but the status of the state’s abortion laws remain in limbo and doctors and patients remain confused and anxious about the law’s requirements. A similar story has played out in all the states that had these zombie laws on the books.

The Comstock Act is a federal law, however, and it is still in effect and is ripe for the picking by anti-abortion zealots and others who want to further restrict reproductive freedoms, including contraception. From the moment the Dobbs decision came down legal experts and activists recognized the danger it posed with this radical right wing judiciary and they immediately started to work on repealing it. At the time a number of abortion rights groups asked them to stand down because of cases already in the pipeline that would have been affected. As Notus reported:

“There’s a lot of litigation playing out that’s specific to this that many of the reproductive rights groups are in the middle of. They’re actually wanting to, they’re not wanting to see [the Comstock Act] change in the middle of that litigation. So that was at the request of Planned Parenthood and other reproductive freedom groups that have been fighting this for a long time,” Democratic Representative Pat Ryan said.

That came as something of a surprise but the Democrats in congress complied with the request. However with the Mifepristone case decided they have decided to make the move.

According to the Washington Post, Democrats are now introducing legislation to repeal the abortion provisions of the Act with the backing of those major abortion rights groups. (They will apparently leave in some of the obscenity laws on which bans on child pornography are based.) The Senate bill has 20 co-sponsors, including Sens.Tina Smith, D-Minn., Elizabeth Warren, D-Ma., and Catherine Cortez Masto, D-Nev. and Reps. Becca Balint, D-Vt. and Cori Bush, D-Mo. introduced the legislation in the House. Although they haven’t spoken out, the assumption is that the Democratic leadership is supportive.

The Post article suggests that there may be some reluctance by the White House but the reasons are unclear although other unnamed Democrats fear that it will somehow distract from other issues, which is typical but foolish. I hope that’s not the case. The Comstock Act is a 19th century monstrosity that should be repealed because is grotesque and we are watching it be used to roll back Americans’ basic human rights. I

Obviously, the very pious Christian Nationalist Speaker of the House Mike Johnson will not let this pass. The Comstock Act might have been written by him personally. (This is a man who participated in one of those bizarre purity balls with his daughter, after all. ) So there’s no hope of passage this year. But this should be part of the debate going into the election and the Democrats must repeal it the minute they get the chance because we know the Republicans are planning to use it the minute they get theirs.

There are a lot of zombie laws on the books that are likely to be used by the conservative judicial activists in the next few years now that they’ve secured the right wing Supreme Court of their dreams. For instance, there are existing, unenforced laws against adultery, atheism and sodomy which could easily be reanimated under some of the right’s current crusades. Discriminatory housing covenants and outdated draconian drug laws could rise from the dead as well.

They are setting up test cases all over the country with an eye toward overturning precedents to make that happen. Just this week Louisiana passed a new law requiring that all schools display the Ten Commandments in every classroom (using a large font!) They hope to get it to the Supreme Court which has shown every inclination to destroy the separation of church and state. Any zombies from the 1950s will immediately go back into effect if they uphold this law as constitutional.

Democrats in state legislatures and at the national level would be wise to survey all the laws and repeal these dead ones wherever they can as soon as possible. If they don’t, there’s every chance the right’s various culture crusades will end up bringing them back to life.