Good heavens, this garbled mess from RNC co-chair Lara Trump.
“We now have the ability at the RNC not just to have poll watchers… but people who can physically handle the ballots… So there was a moratorium for about 40 years on the RNC actually training people to work in these polling locations and the tabulation centers where the mail-in ballots come in. And last year, the judge who implemented that passed away, so that was lifted.”
Lara Trump: We now have the ability at the RNC not just to have poll watchers… but people who can physically handle the ballots… pic.twitter.com/xd06medJal
“Poll observers are NEVER permitted to touch ballots,” tweets exasperated Democratic election protection attorney Marc Elias. “She is suggesting the RNC will infiltrate election offices.”
Observers physically handling ballots is BS, as Elias points out. But she’s just getting started on the wrongness.
First, some terminology. Poll watchers or observers are citizens pre-approved to be present inside a polling location as observers during voting. At most (at least in my state), they may bring to the attention of the chief judge any observed infractions or misapplication of voting rules, and that’s all. They are to sit quietly. No interactions with voters, verbal or physical. Poll workers are citizens approved and hired to administaer the actual election, issue ballots, check IDs, etc. Poll greeters or electioneers are political operatives who may interact with voters only outside the polling location’s marked electioneering boundaries.
The “moratorium” Lara Trump mentions was a standing court order enforcing a 1982 consent decree between the RNC and DNC. It limited the RNC, its agents’ and employees’ ability to engage in “ballot security” efforts without prior court approval. The RNC sued to get the decree rescinded after the election of Barack Obama. Third Circuit Appeals Court Judge Joseph Greenaway in his ruling noted, “the District Court has never prevented the RNC from implementing a voter fraud prevention program that the RNC has submitted for preclearance, at least in part, because the RNC has never submitted any voter fraud prevention program for preclearance.”
The RNC was never prohibited from appointing poll watchers, and did. Among other requirements, the RNC was probibited from engaging in a through g above. Observing vote counting has always been allowed, to my knowledge. I’ve watched mailed-in ballots be approved plenty of times.
I don’t have time to bird dog all of this, but per Wikpedia, Greenaway, 66, retired in 2023. He is still alive. District Court Judge Dickinson R. Debevoise issued the original 1982 ruling. He died in office in 2015, not last year. U.S. District Court Judge John Michael Vazquez (still alive) allowed the consent decree to expire in December 2017. Debevoise expiring had nothing to do with it.
Like her father-in-law, Lara Trump is way out of her depth.
The popularizer of “fake news” conspired to create it
Projection. Long has the left used that term to describe conservative accusations against the left. When Republicans allege the left commits some infraction against, what — Decency? Patriotism? Rule of law? Election integrity? — then likely they themselves are secretly or more subtly doing the same.
Inoculation is the underlying purpose. Loudly and often accuse your opponent of misbehavior in which you engage so that if ever caught in the act you can both-sides the affair. “Well, they do it too.”
Fake news is another Donald Trump effort at inverting reality. Trump, authoritarian-in-training, has long attempted bending reality to his will. His inauguration crowd was not more bigly than Barack Obama’s? Photographs prove it? Fake news! His team would present “alternative facts” they knew were untrue but were the Trump-approved version of history. Period!
Now on trial on criminal charges in Manhattan, Trump has summoned the MAGA cult, as he did on Jan. 6, 2021, to come by the thousands to protest unfairness like you’ve never seen. Only a handful of pro-Trump protesters answered the call on Monday.
I counted a total of 3 Trump supporters at courthouse today. The loudest person was the guy yelling at them “Bill Clinton balanced the budget!” pic.twitter.com/fbELdxn7Xw
Ah, but that is fake news! Time to invert reality again.
Trump on Tuesday repeated his summons when supporters failed to show up for the second day of his trial. They were out there, Trump insisted, but complained that “for blocks , you can’t get near this courthouse.” By the thousands MAGA cultists were kept away from the courthouse by a massive police cordon!
Trump, speaking before entering the courtroom, again calls for MAGA protests outside the NYC courthouse where he's being tried pic.twitter.com/DBUnAlNc7N
Inside the courthouse, what testimony by David Pecker, former publisher of The National Enquirer, revealed is that Trump and Pecker conspired in 2016 both to suppress stories harmful to Trump and to publish fabricated stories harmful to his primary opponents.
Prosecutors called it the “Trump Tower conspiracy,” arguing that Mr. Pecker, Mr. Trump and Michael D. Cohen, who was then Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer and fixer, hatched a plot at the meeting to conceal sex scandals looming over Mr. Trump’s campaign.
Their effort led Mr. Pecker’s tabloids to buy and bury two damaging stories about Mr. Trump. Mr. Cohen purchased the silence of a porn star, a deal at the heart of the case against the former president.
Trump asked Pecker and his tabloids “to help the campaign,” to “catch and kill” stories harmful to Trump’s political fortunes. That was the suppress-the-truth part of the conspiracy. Then came the damage-opponents part:
The tabloid, for example, ran stories about Mr. Trump’s primary opponents, including Ben Carson, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio. The prosecutors illustrated the point for jurors, posting several lurid headlines on screens: “Donald Trump Blasts Ted Cruz’s Dad for Photo with J.F.K. Assassin,” “Bungling Surgeon Ben Carson left Sponge in Patient’s Brain!” and, in a moment of ironic foreshadowing, “Ted Cruz Shamed by Porn Star.”
Stories Pecker fabricated on Trump’s behalf are, in Trump’s parlance, fake news. Trump’s fake news claims are, in Pee Wee Herman’s schoolyard vernacular, a case of he who smelt it, dealt it.
That is the supreme irony of what we have learned so far in the Trump trial. The man who popularized “fake news” for discrediting unfavorable stories, the man who insists on bending reality to his will, was himself complicit in creating and disseminating phony stories. Trump was accusing opponents of exactly what he and his confederates were engaged in.
That fact didn’t escape notice by comedian Trae Crowder, the “Liberal Redneck”:
I do think it’s kind of poetic that while [Trump] was out in public popularizing the concept of fake news, at that same time, behind the scenes he had a full fake news team making fake news arrangements with Big Fake News in an effort to fake as much news as possible. Just kind of sums him up, I think.
Trump issued that call for his cult to protest at the courthouse last night. It’s not surprising. They haven’t shown up to protest for him on the courthouse steps or anywhere else.
This was from day 1.
There weren’t any more today after he made that call. So he lied:
He’s only been able to get a ragtag handful of weirdos to show up at the courthouse and it’s freaking him out.
His rallies aren’t drawing like they used to but it’s early in the campaign. The people who come to them at the moment are hard core cultists who love the ritual the same way Grateful dead fans used to follow them all over the world. I know people who follow Bruce Springsteen the same way. But there are no crowds coming to his trial and I would guess it’s because the rallies are a very specific kind of fun get together for the true believers. This isn’t that.
Some years back, Washington Post reporters Mark Halperin (currently of Bloomberg News and MSNBC) and John Harris (now editor in chief of Politico) wrote a book about political journalism called “The Way to Win: Clinton, Bush, Rove and How to Take the White House in 2008.” In it, they made a famous admission about how Beltway journalism works in the digital age:
Matt Drudge rules our world … With the exception of the Associated Press, there is no outlet other than the Drudge Report whose dispatches instantly can command the attention and energies of the most established newspapers and television newscasts.
So many media elites check the Drudge Report consistently that a reporter is aware his bosses, his competitors, his sources, his friends on Wall Street, lobbyists, White House officials, congressional aides, cousins, and everyone who is anyone has seen it, too.
Mitt Romney’s former spokesman called Drudge the political media’s assignment editor. And in 2012 on the day after the election, Halperin gave credit in where credit is due in a tweet:
I had assumed that Matt Drudge’s star had faded a bit in the intervening years as fresher, sexier right-wing sites like Breitbart and The Blaze had emerged. But as Politico has reported, Drudge is doing better than ever:
For the first time, The Drudge Report moved into second place on Similar Web’s top U.S. Media Publisher rankings, placing just behind MSN.com with about 1.47 billion page view for the month of July. The Drudge Report’s traffic beat out the likes of news sites from Disney Media Networks (which includes ESPN.com and ABCNews.com), Yahoo, Google, Time Warner and Fox Entertainment Groups.
Drudge was the top traffic referrer to The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fox News, and other news outlets in 2015, according to a Vocativ report. The report said the site accounted for a staggering 52 percent of referral traffic to the Associated Press.
All those organizations are very well aware of the potential for clicks from a Drudge link, and they know what kind of stories he wants to flog. The incentives to please him are obvious.
As the last leg of the 2016 campaign approaches, it’s worth remembering Drudge’s original claim to fame:
Web Posted: 01/17/98 23:32:47 PST — NEWSWEEK KILLS STORY ON WHITE HOUSE INTERN
BLOCKBUSTER REPORT: 23-YEAR OLD, FORMER WHITE HOUSE INTERN, SEX RELATIONSHIP WITH PRESIDENT
The original post, which went on to name various publications that were allegedly holding the item, put journalists at the center of the story. Needless to say, they were excited. The rest, of course, is history. For years Drudge was fed news items by the media, which would often launder them through the foreign press. Then he would feature links with screaming headlines reporters that editors could use to show that a story was “out there.”
Today such stories are still generated in the British tabloid press, but also in right-wing conspiracy sites and bigger operations like Breitbart News. Recently Drudge managed to disseminate the discredited story of Hillary Clinton’s alleged ill health by posting a picture from a fringe website showing Clinton’s slipping on the stairs some months before with this screaming headline:
2016: HILLARY CONQUERS THE STAIRS 2012: FALLS AT HOME, BLOOD CLOT 2011: FALLS BOARDING PLANE 2009: FALLS GOING TO WHITE HOUSE, BROKEN ELBOW
That story is now part of the election campaign, with people demanding her full medical records and the press watching her every move like a hawk for signs of brain damage.
With the news this week that Clinton’s right-hand woman Huma Abedin had separated from her husband, former Congressman Anthony Weiner, after yet another public humiliation, Drudge used the opportunity to tee up one of the right’s favorite rumors — that Clinton and Abedin are secret lovers. Unsurprisingly, whispers among unenlightened right-wingers about the feminist harpy Clinton’s being a lesbian go back decades. But the Abedin insinuations, which started in 2007, have taken off in this campaign.
There’s no way of knowing if mainstream reporters were among those intrigued by Drudge’s dirt. But we do know that The New York Times found this item worthy of a breathless front-page lead:
Among the trove of emails released from Hillary Rodham Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state was this instruction to a trusted aide who needed to brief her on a matter that could not wait:
“Just knock on the door to the bedroom if it’s closed,” Mrs. Clinton wrote in November 2009 to Huma Abedin, then her deputy chief of staff.
Yesterday under the headline “Weiner free!” Drudge insinuated once again that Abedin and Clinton are lovers with a picture allegedly showing the two of them hugging with joy now that they have vanquished one of their husbands. As it turned out, the other woman in the picture wasn’t Abedin. It was Burmese opposition leader and 1991 Nobel Peace Prize recipient Aung San Suu Kyi, but whatever. He made his point.
We can be sure that Drudge’s nasty little sex rumors aren’t the end of it. The more scurrilous charges that Abedin is a secret Muslim agent are now breaking into the mainstream direct from the fever swamps, via none other than Donald Trump himself. And publications like The Hill and the New York Post, hungry for Drudge links and eager to give the monster what it wants in return, are already pushing it into the mainstream. As long as Matt Drudge is driving the news cycle, it will only get worse.
The mainstream media was heavily influenced by all this and you could see the line from Trump and the Enquirer to Drudge and Breitbart to CNN to the NY Times in real time. Look at what it wrought.
The defense will try to say that Trump was just trying to keep these allegedly false accusations about his womanizing from Melania. Please. She knew who she was married to. He’s on record saying he’d be dating Ivanka if she wasn’t his daughter. He once said when asked if he would stay with Melania if she was disfigured in a car crash: “How do the breasts look?”
He very famously once said:
“You know, it doesn’t really matter what [the media] writes as long as you’ve got a young and beautiful piece of ass.”
She herself went on Howard Stern and said that she and Donald “have incredible sex once a day, sometimes even more.”
She had no trouble defending his grotesque Access Hollywood comments:
So no, Trump wasn’t worried about Melania. She had a pre-nup.
Robert Kutner thinks JD Vance is the only guy who can keep the MAGA/corporate coalition going after Trump. He writes:
WITH THE PUBLICATION IN 2016 of his best-selling book Hillbilly Elegy, Vance marketed himself as a self-made man who had risen above his troubled origins. For Vance, poverty was all about self-defeating values. In my review of his book in the Prospect, I described Vance as Charles Murray with a shit-eating grin. As I wrote:
Hillbilly Elegy turns out to be a very sly piece of work that professes to express great nostalgia and compassion for the hillbilly way of life. (“Americans call them hillbillies, rednecks, or white trash. I call them neighbors, friends, and family.”) But Vance is on the trail of a bait and switch. Despite the down-home charm, he ends up sounding condescending to his neighbors and kin. Vance not only excelled at Yale Law; he is now at a Silicon Valley hedge fund. And, according to Vance, you could be, too—if you weren’t so gol-durned lazy. If you weren’t selling your food stamps, blowing off jobs, deserting your kids, and getting stoned on Oxycontin.
By then, hillbilly Vance had already become a protégé of Peter Thiel, the ultra-right tech billionaire. Thiel poured $15 million into Vance’s 2022 campaign for the Republican Senate primary in Ohio.
Vance reminded me of Harold Ickes’s withering description of the 1940 Republican nominee for president, Wendell Willkie. An Indianan who also served as a lawyer for wealthy corporations but tried in the campaign to stress his rural roots, Ickes called him the barefoot boy from Wall Street.
But when I subsequently appeared with Vance at a public event at Oberlin, I realized that I had underestimated him. In contrast to the bombast of Trump, Vance is a man of intellect and charm. He can be effective at a rally, but also impressive in a discussion.
I wonder. I don’t think MAGA is MAGA without Trump. Like any cult, once the leader is gone, so is the cult. That’s not to say that Vance couldn’t ascend to the top of the GOP but it won’t be because he keeps Trump’s coalition together. He will have to somehow put together his own and I’m not sure he has the juice to get a majority. He’s an odious person completely lacking in charm of any kind. Say what you will about Trump but he’s got some kind of charisma and always has, and it makes people pay attention to him. Vance is just another right wing jerk and there are a lot of them out there. I’m not sure Vance demonstrably better than any of them.
Kuttner thinks Vance will have a substantial leg up if Trump picks him as VP and thinks there’s a good chance he will. Maybe. But I don’t think that helps him much if Trump loses. If Trump wins, well… we have bigger problems.
It’s going to be something to watch them all try to be the new Trump though (and that assumes we aren’t stuck with the old one, god forbid.)
During a sidebar about the relevance of Steve Bannon’s requests of Pecker, Steinglass admitted that New York Election Law 17-152, which prohibits conspiracies to promote a candidate’s election through unlawful means, is their “primary” predicate.
It appears that this is the theory the Manhattan DA has settled on.
Of course it was a conspiracy. It was composed of three people and two of the members of the conspiracy have either pleaded guilty or have immunity and are testifying against the third: Donald Trump. The question all comes down to whether or not the jury believes them — and the mountain of paperwork that backs them up.
If Trump wasn’t acting like an asshole every single day, it might not be this way. Maintaining some dignity in this situation would go a long way. Instead, look at what he did today after the gag order hearing — right in the courthouse:
That was after this happened:
He’s making a fool out of his lawyer and degrading the justice system like a juvenile delinquent. And it’s a wonder that people who are watching all this think it might not be a good idea to put him back in the White House?
Today is the 4 year anniversary of the most DISASTROUS press bleaching, I mean briefing of all time, masterfully weaved into hilarious comedy gold by the amazing @SarahCpr.
Donald Trump, “extraordinarily resilient” Man of Action, is unable to celebrate today. He is stuck in a courtroom having his brain and his body drained. Of bleach?
Watters claims ‘they’ are draining Trump’s brain by having him sit all day: You’re going to take a man who’s usually golfing and you’re going to sit him in a chair in freezing temperatures pic.twitter.com/gcDkTlahqO
Who? This reincarnation of rough-riding Teddy Roosevelt? This manly man with the constitution of a rhinoceros? This Adonis, this Übermensch with a Rocky Balboa physique of who can’t stand the sight of blood or walk 18 holes?
Tennessee public education advocates chalk up a win
Efforts to defund Tennessee’s public schools crashed and burned on Monday after weekend negotiations failed to advance Gov. Bill Lee’s universal voucher bill. The bill will be dead (for now) once the legislature adjourns for the year. Lee plans to bring it back next session.
“I am extremely disappointed for the families who will have to wait yet another year for the freedom to choose the right education for their child, especially when there is broad agreement that now is the time to bring universal school choice to Tennessee,” Lee said in an early Monday statement. “While we made tremendous progress, unfortunately it has become clear that there is not a pathway for the bill during this legislative session.”
“Freedom to choose”? Remember when conservatives pitched vouchers as a way to help poor, minority kids escape “decaying” inner-city public schools, lives of poverty, drugs, etc. ? Nowadays they’ve dropped the facade. The “funding should follow the child” rubric hides the real goal of having the general public subsidized rich parent’s choice to send their kids to private schools. Vouchers and supposed “opportunity scholarship” programs are aimed at diverting public funds away from not-for-profit public education to selective private academies, many of them religious schools. Many charter schools operate the same way with public funds.
Charter schools, which were originally proposed to be district-run, innovative public schools, have since morphed into national charter school chains, Christian nationalist schools, and facades for for-profit corporations. More here: https://t.co/ManKFPEI1p#CharterSchoolFailhttps://t.co/xafa5jsOdT
A look behind the curtain reveals where the tax dollars get diverted, to nominally nonprofit private schools often operated by for-profit LLCs that take a markup on dollars spent for services, supplies, teachers, and facilities.
Resegregation of schooling is a bonus for supporters, as is ensuring fundamentalists’ kids are not exposed to ideas like CRT, DEI, multiculturalism, “woke,” evolution, or any other Fox News bogeymen-of-the-month. These programs are designed to subsidize rich families who already “choose” to sent their kinds to private schools. What they want is a tax break for doing so.
“Vouchers are welfare for the well-to-do,” Missouri activist Jess Piper tweeted in Feburary. Annual public schools spending is still “the big enchilada” for many investors.
The Tennessee For All Coalition celebrated its successful efforts to kill the voucher proposal.
“The governor’s voucher scam would have diverted money from our already underfunded public schools, doing immeasurable harm to every community in our state,” the coalition said in a statement. “Every child in Tennessee deserves to have a chance to succeed through strong public schools. We are one step closer to this vision with the defeat of this voucher scam. We will continue to fight to increase funding to every public school so communities can have more resources, restorative accountability measures, less reliance on high-stakes testing, and better paid educators and school support staff.”
We won!! This was only possible because of parents, students, educators and community members organizing together across the state.
Congratulations to everyone who gave their time to this effort, here’s some of what we did together:https://t.co/8MmWxkoXIj
Tennessee Education Association President Tanya T. Coats said in a statement:
“90% of Tennessee’s students are educated in public schools, and today is a great day for them and their parents,” part of the statement read. “On behalf of our students, I want to thank the legislators who stood strong for our state’s children. I also want to thank the thousands of Tennesseans, including their local elected officials, who were moved to speak out against the governor’s proposal, and who I’m sure would do it all again in a heartbeat. We’ve seen a lot of bad voucher policies passed around the country, and none of them have lived up to the promise of benefitting parents and students.”
Despite my Republican colleagues best effort, the power of the people cannot and will not be stopped.
Proud of the people of Tennessee for standing up for labor, racial justice, and public schools.
In the face of unrelenting pressure, the people are winning— resistance matters. pic.twitter.com/zEDJCCHjoZ
