Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Iran throws a flurry of missiles and drones at Israel

Iran retaliated for Israel’s April 1 “bombing of its consular building in Syria that killed two of Tehran’s top commanders.” Buckle up (CNN this morning):

In decades of antagonism between Israel and Iran, there has never been an attack by Iran inside Israel. This crosses a threshold. What happens next rests on whether Israel will listen to the United States and not escalate the cycle of retaliation.

Iran’s massive drone and missile wave was 99% intercepted, and Israel said damage was limited. Triggered by Israel’s April 1 strike on the Iranian consulate in Syria, the barrage brings the region to a boil. We still don’t know exactly why Israel carried out the strike in Syria, but analysts say Iran was forced to respond for its own internal consumption and to demonstrate strength in the region. For its part, it says the matter is now concluded.

President Joe Biden said the US will not join any Israeli offensive against Iran. The very real question is whether Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will listen to the warnings of his biggest backer.

Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak told CNN Israel had won this round and Netanyahu must think before any further action, warning that Israel is still stuck in Gaza, hostages remain captive, and the Lebanon-Israel border is highly volatile.In the meantime, despite the current escalation between Israel and US intelligence say there is no evidence Iran planned or acted in Hamas’s October 7 attacks.

Biden has a chance to tamp this down before things spiral out of control. If he doesn’t or can’t, God knows what comes next in the Middle East or for him in this fall’s elections.

CNN again (from last night):

Israel should consider tonight a win because the current US assessment is that Iran’s attacks had been largely unsuccessful and demonstrated Israel’s superior military capability, President Joe Biden told Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in their phone call, a senior administration official told CNN.

The US’s assessment tonight was that almost all of the drones and missiles – including more than 100 ballistic missiles — launched by Iran had been knocked out of the sky. No cruise missile made impact, the official said, and nothing of “value” was hit. 

Israel war cabinet is meeting now

2 hardline Israeli ministers urge firm response to Iran attack

Just what your nerves needed

Washington Post:

World leaders are expressing concerns that Iran’s wave of missile and drone attacks against Israel could further destabilize the Middle East. Allies including the United States, Germany, France and Britain reaffirmed their support for Israel in the wake of Tehran’s first full-scale military assault.

In a statement condemning the attacks, President Biden said that U.S. support for Israeli security was “ironclad” and that he would convene Group of Seven leaders Sunday to coordinate a response.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz called the attack “unjustifiable and highly irresponsible,” adding that Iran’s actions risked “further escalation in the region.” Scholz said Germany stands by Israel and would be holding talks with its allies.

British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said Iran’s attack was “reckless” and risked “inflaming tensions” in the region. “Iran has once again demonstrated that it is intent on sowing chaos in its own backyard,” Sunak said, adding that Britain would continue to “stand up for Israel’s security.”

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said that Canada “unequivocally condemns” Iran’s attack against Israel and that the strikes highlighted the Iranian regime’s “disregard for peace and stability in the region.” Trudeau said Canada supports Israel’s right to defend itself.

French President Emmanuel Macron condemned the “unprecedented attack,” saying it “threatens to destabilize the region.” Macron expressed solidarity with the Israeli people and reiterated France’s commitment to the security of Israel. “France is working on de-escalation with its partners and calls for restraint,” he said.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky admonished Iran on social media, writing that Ukrainians are all too familiar with the sound of Iranian drones because Russia uses the same type in its attacks against Ukraine. Zelensky also called on Congress to “make the necessary decisions to strengthen America’s allies at this critical time.”

Russia’s Foreign Ministry urged all parties to “exercise restraint” and criticized Western members of the U.N. Security Council for failing to “adequately respond” to Israel’s strike on the Iranian embassy in Damascus on April 1, which Russia condemned at the time. The statement also highlighted Iran’s claim that Saturday’s strike followed a framework of self-defense in response to the Damascus attack. Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Russian-Iranian relations have deepened, with Tehran providing Moscow with thousands of Shahed drones for its attacks on Ukraine.

China expressed concern over the “current escalation,” calling on “relevant parties” to exercise calm and restraint. “The conflict must end now,” a Foreign Ministry spokesperson said, according to the Global Times, a state-backed newspaper.

Saudi Arabia expressed “deep concern,” with its Foreign Ministry saying the military escalation “would have grave consequences if it expands.” The kingdom said it was urging “all parties to exercise maximum restraint and to protect the region and its people from the dangers of war.”

Qatar’s Foreign Ministry urged all parties to “exercise maximum restraint,” calling on “the international community to take urgent action to defuse tension and reduce escalation in the region.”

This is all developing in real time with little room for analysis (esp. by me), but there’s this (NBC News):

Iran’s unprecedented attack on Israel marks a significant moment in history, even if it was intended to be largely symbolic, according to an analyst with geopolitical risk advisory firm Eurasia Group.

“Make no mistake: even if #Iran intended this to be a telegraphed and (it would seem) largely symbolic show of force to restore deterrence, it has attacked Israel with missiles and drones for the first time,” tweeted Gregory Brew, an Iran analyst.

“Alea iacta est, folks,” he added, using a Latin term for “the die is cast.”

Brew wrote that he “did not anticipate Iran would use its own missiles, from within its own territory, against Israel directly.”

“A major milestone,” Brew tweeted.

Needed that like a hole in the head.

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History like you’ve never seen

Clips of his Saturday rally in Pennsylvania feature some epic, word-jazz weirdness wherein Donald Trump praised the state’s place in American history. It’s fantastical, but there’s a point to quoting it.

The punctuation is unclear here:

It’s where the army weathered it’s brutal winter at Valley Forge where General George Washington led his men on a daring mission across the Delaware and where our union was saved by the immortal heroes at Gettysburg Gettysburg what an unbelievable battle that was the battle of Gettysburg what an unbelievable I mean it was so much and so interesting and so vicious and horrible and so beautiful and so many different ways it represented such a big portion of the success of this country Gettysburg wow.

Trump: Gettysburg. What an unbelievable battle. That was the battle of Gettysburg. What an unbelievable I mean, it was so much and so interesting and so vicious and horrible and so beautiful and so many different ways… Gettysburg wow pic.twitter.com/jyI1o9L0yE

— Acyn (@Acyn) April 14, 2024

Did he mean “Valley Forge where General George Washington led his men” across the Delaware,” or was there a comma in there? Washington crossed the Delaware a year before Valley Forge, but like Bluto and the Germans bombing Pearl Harbor, forget it, he’s rolling.

Mrs. Betty Bowers (America’s Best Christian™) observed, “Donald Trump always talks about history (or, well, anything) like a fourth-grader doing a book report on a book he didn’t read.”

Trump rambled on, again, punctuation unclear:

I go to Gettysburg Pennsylvania to look and to watch and the statement of Robert E. Lee who’s no longer in favor did you ever notice that no longer in favor never fight uphill me boys never fight uphill they were fighting uphill he said wow that was a big mistake he lost his great general and they were fighting never fight uphill me boys but it was too late

This is another example of why he paid people to take tests for him in school. https://t.co/Xsoap0ekBL

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) April 14, 2024

Where he came up with this spurious Lee quote is anyone’s guess.

“You know who died at Gettysburg? A bunch of suckers and losers,”probably, tweeted Jennifer Mercieca of Trump’s Gettysburg comments.

Noting the weirdness of Trump’s reference, Newsweek asked the Trump campaign for comment this morning. But Trump’s recitation is not further evidence of his accelerating mental decline (unless confirmation of it), or even a script from “Peabody’s Improbable History.” In fact, this bit is four years old, at least.

Here’s a portion of a transcript from a Minnesota rally on September 18, 2020 in which Trump rants about never fighting uphill and people removing Civil War statues:

But Robert E. Lee won many, many battles in a row and it was supposed to be over in one day. You know, it was supposed to end immediately because the North was too powerful for the South. But it just shows when you have leaders, when you have a great general. And Robert E. Lee, he would have won except for Gettysburg. And that was because his general was killed who’s going to lead Gettysburg. “Never fight uphill, me boys. Never fight uphill.” He heard they were going uphill. “Stop them, stop them.” But we had no cell phones in that day, right, congressmen? No cell phones.

So they sent the horses to stop them, stop them, but it was too late. They fought uphill and they got slaughtered. That’s what happened. But Robert E. Lee, these were incredible things. But I hope you, I hope you appreciate that we had a period of time when they were ripping down all of the statues and monuments. And I said to my people four months ago, I said, “This is crazy. These people.”

They sent horses, huh? And who knew people were tearing down statues of Lincoln and Jefferson and Ghandi? And marching on Washington to topple a Lincoln statue?

And they don’t even know. You know, they started ripping down Abraham Lincoln. When they hit Lincoln I said, “Wait a minute. This is the man. And you can’t do—” Then they hit George Washington, Thomas Jefferson. They hit everybody. They even hit Gandhi. All Gandhi wanted was one thing. Peace. “May we have peace.” Ripped down the statue, “We don’t like it.” I don’t think they have any idea what they’re doing. I think they’re just a bunch of thugs. Okay? You wanna know the truth? I think they are a bunch of thugs. [cheers and applause]

But they were gonna march on Washington and they were gonna rip down a statue of Abraham Lincoln. You know the exact statue. Its up very nicely. Up now. And by the way, they can take them down legally. They go through Congress as a way of doing it. But, you know, they didn’t want to do it that way. And they were marching on Washington. And I said, “Do we have any laws about this?” They said, “No, sir.”

“If you took the 10 worst presidents in the history of the United States and added them up, they would not have done near the destruction to our country as Joe Biden and the Biden administration have done. The worst president in history,” said the worst president in history on Saturday.

“We will fight like hell,” Trump exhorted the crowd as he did on Jan. 6. “2024 is our final battle,” etc., etc. against the globalists and communists, “the tyrants and villains who hate our country,” etc., etc.

I sat at my parents’ dinner table in early 2016 and said then Trump was mentally unstable. He’s at least as bad as that and probably worse now. And he’s hoping he’s still got an Animal House full of supporters ready to go out in a blaze of destructive glory for him.

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Trump is under a gag order which says that he’s not allowed to publicly attack witnesses in his upcoming trial. Mark Pomerantz and Michael Cohen are both witnesses. Will anything come of it? Probably not. He seems to have achieved immunity from judge’s orders. He’s still letting fly.

This article by Politico’s legal editorJames Romoser discusses just how unusual that is:

A firebrand politician named Donald is about to stand trial. Just a few days before jury selection, he goes on TV to slam the charges as baseless and biased.

“The FBI and the Justice Department,” he insists, have “targeted” their political opponents in a burst of partisan persecution.

The rhetoric sounds familiar, but this is not a story about Donald Trump. It’s about a man named Don Hill, a former Dallas City Council member who was facing bribery charges 15 years ago.

The telltale clue that this isn’t about Trump is what happened next: The judge, upset by the attempt to taint the jury pool, slapped the politician-turned-defendant with criminal contempt and ultimately sentenced him to 30 days in jail for violating a gag order.

Today, Trump routinely spouts invective far more inflammatory than anything Hill said. He denigrates prosecutors. He lies about his cases. He vilifies the judges overseeing them — and then vilifies their wives and daughters, too. Yet Trump has never faced the swift repercussions that were imposed on Hill — and are routinely imposed on other defendants in America.

Instead, Trump gets special treatment.

“I can’t imagine any other defendant posting on social media about a judge’s family and not being very quickly incarcerated,” said Russell Gold, a law professor at the University of Alabama.

As Trump prepares to begin his first criminal trial on Monday in New York, the tolerance of his tirades is perhaps the most glaring sign of the judicial system’s Trump exceptionalism. But it’s far from the only example. Over the past year, in ways large and small, in criminal cases and civil ones, Trump has consistently been given more freedom and more privileges than virtually any other defendant in his shoes.

He notes that judges are bending over backwards to avoid the appearance of interfering in the election — something Trump knew very well would help protect him when he announced for president.

Some judges in Trump’s cases may have afforded him unique leeway in hopes of avoiding any appearance that they are meddling in the 2024 campaign. Indeed, Trump’s role as a presidential candidate — one who is always eager to play the martyr — complicates the task of prosecutors and judges eager to lower the temperature of the proceedings. Penalizing Trump before he’s ever convicted of anything could stir a backlash and trigger more heat, not less.

Trump supporters surely bristle at the notion that he’s getting any preferential treatment. After all, he is facing dozens of felony counts across four criminal cases, and a series of massive civil judgments has damaged his reputation and his wealth.

But the fact is that no other person in America — if charged with the diverse panoply of malfeasance that Trump has been accused of — would enjoy the same procedural and structural advantages that Trump has harnessed, to great effect, as his legal troubles reached a fever pitch over the past 12 months.

There may be good reasons for some of those advantages. A former president and current candidate is no ordinary criminal defendant. But special treatment carries a hefty price: It shatters the American lore that everyone is treated equally before the law.

The result, ironically, is a partial confirmation of one of Trump’s favorite grievances. He’s enmeshed in a “two-tiered system of justice,” he often says — and he’s right. There are two tiers. But Trump frequently has been the beneficiary, not the victim.

Of course he has. I urge you to click over and read all the ways in which he’s done it. It’s mind-boggling.

I believe the main reason underlying all of it is the fact that he has many thousands of armed lunatic cult members and he’s already demonstrated that he’ll deploy them. They are terrified that if they treat him the way they would treat anyone else in the country that his followers will blow up the country. I’m not sure they’re wrong. But it’s making a mockery of the legal system.

A real man of the people

If you enjoyed the 2008 financial system crash you’re going to love a second Trump term:

A second Trump White House would seek to sharply reduce the power of U.S. financial regulators, according to a review of public documents and interviews with people allied with the former president.

In the wake of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, Congress dramatically expanded the U.S. government’s oversight of the financial industry to prevent a repeat of the 2008 global banking meltdown.

Donald Trump would likely renew his efforts to scale back those reforms, if elected, as well as pare protections for small-scale investors and borrowers, and allow companies to raise money with less scrutiny, according to the interviews and proposals from groups positioned to influence a new conservative administration. Reuters spoke with, among others, about a dozen people who have provided advice or been consulted by Trump or his allies.

The Republican Party’s presumptive nominee has not announced a formal policy staff or released detailed positions on how he would regulate Wall Street, aside from short videos and snippets in campaign appearances.

But, the sources told Reuters, a constellation of experts and Trump allies are pitching regulatory rewrites, identifying potential staff and floating ideas on TV, in op-eds and directly to Trump at his Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Florida.

This would probably be happening no matter what Republican was running. It’s been just long enough since the last time that the Wall St. players are restless to get back to regular order. Sure they’re making massive profits right now but there’s never enough for greedheads.

However, Trump is in need of money very badly so they have the means to extract some extravagant promises from him. His own publicly traded company is tanking every day and he no doubt wants some allies in the markets just in case not to mention there are signs that his venture is riddled with criminality so loosening the laws only makes sense.

This is ridiculous. Even Napoleon didn’t go this far.

But then, consider this by Jonathan Martin, one of the foremost purveyors of Village 2.0 conventional wisdom in which he reveals that up until now, just everybody has assumed that Trump has a lock on the White House. It has long appeared to me that the beltway press has felt that way and it’s nice to know that my perceptions weren’t wrong. But I honestly did know about the rest of this:

It has been close to an open secret in the diplomatic corps that America’s allies and adversaries are anticipating a Trump restoration. Discussing who will fill his second-term Cabinet and White House isn’t just the stuff of parlor games in embassies and overseas capitals — it has taken on a what-will-we-do urgency since Trump sealed the GOP nomination last month.

It is one thing for Hungarian President Viktor Orban, the contrarian and would-be authoritarian troll of the continent, to descend on Mar-a-Lago for an ersatz state visit. But the degree to which other countries are preparing for a Trump victory was illustrated by a far more unlikely visitor this week to the former president’s exile in Xanadu: British Foreign Minister David Cameron.

The British government hastened to say how common it was for top officials to meet with American opposition figures. But when he was prime minister in 2012, Cameron didn’t dispatch his foreign minister to Boston, let alone Lake Winnipesaukee, to visit Mitt Romney. The British received Romney at 10 Downing Street, their turf, when he happened to be in town for the beginning of the Summer Olympics.

In fact, as I was reminded this week, it was about this time in 2012 that Cameron came to the White House for a pomp-filled visit and state dinner. The then-prime minister compared the then-incumbent up for reelection, Barack Obama, to Theodore Roosevelt and all but endorsed his reelection, praising Obama for having “pressed the reset button on the moral authority of the entire free world.” (Yes, students of diplomatic sport history, that was the same trip where Obama brought Cameron to the NCAA basketball tournament play-in game in Dayton, which was surely difficult to translate into the Queen’s English.)

In fairness to Cameron, who may be gone with the rest of the Tories by the time Trump would be sworn in again, he did have a more urgent task in Palm Beach: softening the former president’s Ukraine opposition ahead of a House vote on aid to Kyiv this month.

Yet Cameron, more than any country’s foreign minister, knows the message he sent by showing up at Trump’s gilded door.

And, of course, Trump knows the message being sent. An official from another Western country, not Britain, told me Trump’s circle is advising a number of embassies to dispatch ambassadors and ministers to Mar-a-Lago to, well, rekindle relationships.

A high-ranking Biden official said it was not surprising but rather “unsettling” that Cameron would go to Mar-a-Lago. “They’re scared of how destructive he is and they’re seeing if he can temper him,” this official told me, with a measure of sympathy, because the British know Trump is bent on vengeance.

Yet right as major countries have embarked on mollifying Trump over six months before the election, there were reminders that his polling advantage in key states may not last. The fashionable assumption among Trump’s elite critics — perhaps the way of demonstrating this time one is not out of touch — that he’s a lock looks increasingly misguided or at least premature.

Foreign allies are assured that if Biden wins anyway, he and the Democrats won’t jeopardize the world or or American interests out of pique and vengeance as Trump would so they know they have little to lose by currying favor with Trump at this point. And the fact that Cameron was trying to get Trump to change his mind on Ukraine aide is also true (but he wasn’t successful. ) Still, it’s a very bad look.

They shouldn’t bother. Trump is very susceptible to flattery but he hates Europe and his alliance with Putin is written in stone at this point. If he wins, Ukraine is dead in the water and so, very possibly, is Europe. If they are looking at contingencies in case Biden loses in November there’s no point in looking to Trump for support.

We finally got the latest all-important NY Times poll which shows that Biden has gained 4 points in the last 6 weeks or so and is now virtually tied with Trump. This follows most of the other polling over the past few weeks showing that Biden’s numbers have moved up. The article accompanying is predictably dour, suggesting that everyone hates him anyway and that underneath it all Trump is really much more popular (which is untrue) but that’s how the NY Times polling rolls these days. The fact is that Biden is steadily turning the ship around and Democrats are coming back on board. If the race were held today it would be a a nail biter and it very likely will be the same in November because half the country is in a cult-like trance and believes that Donald Trump is either Jesus Christ or a business genius who will make them all rich and the rest of us are terrified that this fascist cult leader will edge out another win. I don’t know if there’s any way to change that.

Mr Hopium Simon Rosenberg puts it in perspective for you in a way that will make you breathe just a little bit easier:

More data now showing a changing election, one getting much better for Joe Biden and the Democrats. A new NYT poll has Biden going from down 5 to down 1, 46-45 – a 4 point gain! This encouraging movement is consistent with many other polls we’ve seen in recent weeks. The election today is close and competitive. Trump no longer leads, and things are moving in our direction.

The analysis of the poll is also consistent with the argument I’ve been making about what was likely to happen this spring – once the general began, and the Biden campaign turned on, some of our wandering coalition would begin to come home and Biden’s numbers would go up. Here’s a few excerpts from the NYT analysis of its poll:

the Democratic base has begun to coalesce behind the president…..Mr. Biden’s tick upward appears to stem largely from his improved standing among traditional Democratic voters — he is winning a greater share of voters who supported him in 2020 than he did a month ago…..

In the last month, Mr. Biden’s support among white voters remained flat, but it has inched upward among Black and Latino voters…….Mr. Biden was faring better than he had been a month ago in suburbs and among women……

The last few weeks have brought us lots of encouraging polling. Trump’s leads outside the margin of error have disappeared. Almost every poll national poll taken in recent weeks has the race within margin of error – meaning it’s close and competitive. 21 polls taken since late February have Biden ahead. Many polls have found meaningful movement towards Biden (he’s gained 4 points here, 6 points in Harris X for example). We’ve started seeing better numbers in the battleground states too, as there are now polls with Biden ahead in MI, PA, WI. We had 2 very encouraging polls in NC this week showing Biden within margin of error (tied). One Quinnipiac had Josh Stein up 52-44.

I particularly enjoyed this, however:

I went on CNN last night to discuss Biden’s improving poll numbers and what has become a very bad April for Donald Trump. Do watch if you have a minute, and yes I finally got a haircut:

As I discuss in the clip I think this has been a disastrous stretch for Trump and the Republicans. The new AZ and FL Supreme Court decisions stripping the rights and freedoms from millions of women in America has sent a powerful reminder to all Americans of the ongoing threat MAGA poses to all of us.

The damage to MAGA was compounded by Trump’s idiotic attempts to minimize the fallout. In a big reveal on Monday he announced he was for leaving reproductive health decisions not to women and their doctors but to politicians in the states. And whatever he thought he was doing, by taking this position, he endorsed and green-lighted the most extreme abortion laws in the country, in places like Florida, Idaho and Texas. He made it clear that total abortion bans with no exceptions and penalties for “trafficking women” were good with him. And if those are okay with him in any state, it means it would be okay with him nationally. Whatever the moronic Trump thought he was doing on Monday, he actually confirmed that he is the most powerful and dangerous abortion extremist in modern American history. He and his party will now have to defend these extremist bans which poll at about 20% across the US, a devastating political place to be on an issue which really matters to voters.

I think Trump’s confirmation of his extremism, and his Monty Python-esque handling of it, is going to cost him and his party in the polls in the coming weeks. It’s already fired up Democrats and will result in us raising more money and getting more volunteer time from our supporters. And on Monday his horrific April continues as his criminal trial stemming from his having sex with a porn star while married to Melania begins. I for one am looking forward to Christian Republicans like Mike Johnson defending the right of Trump to have sex with porn stars while married and illegally covering it all up – hey, no biggie. We all do it!

Trump’s very bad April is about to get a whole lot worse.

V.P. Kamala Harris goes on the attack

“Overturning Roe was just the opening act of a larger strategy to take womens’ rights and freddoms,” Vice President Kamala Harris told supporters in Arizona on Friday.

Arizona is challenging other swing states for the designation of “Ground Zero” in the 2024 presidential race. The Arizona Supreme Court’s reanimating the territory’s 1864 abortion ban this week drew Vice President Kamala Harris to the state on Friday. She brought the heat and she named names. Well, just one (CNN):

Vice President Kamala Harris on Friday placed the blame squarely on Donald Trump as she went on the offensive over abortion rights in Arizona and across the country.

In the wake of an Arizona Supreme Court ruling this week banning abortions in almost all cases, Harris headed to Arizona to mobilize voters who see November’s election as a referendum on women’s rights, one of the Biden campaign’s key issues in the upcoming election. The vice president has become a go-to voice for the campaign on abortion rights and quickly announced a trip to Tucson after Tuesday’s ruling.

The decision, which revived a 160-year-old law barring all abortions except in cases when “it is necessary to save” a pregnant woman’s life, “demonstrated once and for all that overturning Roe was just the opening act of a larger strategy” to restrict abortion access in the United States, Harris said. The ruling, she said, marked an “inflection point” in the fight over abortion rights.

“And we all must understand who all is to blame,” she said. “Former President Donald Trump did this.”

Vice President Harris: Overturning Roe was just the opening act of a larger strategy to take women's rights and freedoms. It’s part of a full-on attack state by state on reproductive freedom. We all must understand who is to blame. Donald Trump did this pic.twitter.com/gQiqJdKD9L

— Biden-Harris HQ (@BidenHQ) April 12, 2024

Vice President Harris: Trump wants us to believe he will not sign a national ban. Enough with the gaslighting. We all know if Trump gets the chance he will sign a national abortion ban. How do we know? Just look at the facts. Trump endorsed a national abortion ban as president pic.twitter.com/3NcXTnMlBp

— Biden-Harris HQ (@BidenHQ) April 12, 2024

Vice President Harris: Don’t forget, Donald Trump said women should be punished for seeking an abortion. He hand-picked three members of the Supreme Court because he intended for them to overturn Roe, and they did. And now one in three women of reproductive age in our country… pic.twitter.com/Gb0wURZcfU

— Biden-Harris HQ (@BidenHQ) April 12, 2024

Vice President Harris: This is 2024, not the 1800s. We’re not going back. Joe Biden and I trust women to know what is in their best interest. And women trust us to fight to protect their freedoms pic.twitter.com/IICAYv2DyQ

— Biden-Harris HQ (@BidenHQ) April 12, 2024

An MSNBC guest on Friday argued that Harris is undervalued as a campaigner and asset to the Biden campaign (if not dismissed). That’s been my assessment. Your guess as to why is as good as mine. And mine is pretty good.

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Suppressing the vote by any means necessary

Another GOP non-solution to a non-problem from frightened men who can’t govern except by making it harder for U.S. citizens to choose their leaders. TFG Donald Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson announced an “election integrity” bill at their Mar-a-Lago meeting on Friday. Their bill would make voting by non-citizens illegaler than it is already.

It doesn’t matter if it’s a bluff that has no chance to get past the U.S. Senate if Republicans even introduce it. Trump and Johnson got the publicity. They stoked the MAGA base’s xenophobia. They fed the voter fraud conspiracy theory. These guardians of the republic further undermined confidence in government of the people in which they themselves no longer believe. It’s a win-win-win-win.

How will they make the illegal illegaler? We don’t know, not having seen the bill (if it exists). People already must swear on penalty of a fine of “not more than $10,000″ or imprisonment of “not more than five years, or both” that they are U.S. citizens when they register to vote (to be verified by boards of elections). If they slip through somehow, it’s still a felony if they vote in a federal election.

Now, having required photo IDs to vote in state after state, will Republicans require citizens to produce at their polling stations their long-form birth certificates, Social Security cards, or passports at the polls? And which Americans might have the most trouble obtaining those and getting over this new barrier to casting a ballot?

That was a rhetorical question.

FYI, Associated Press:

CLAIM: Social Security Administration data shows the number of voters registering without a photo ID is skyrocketing in three key swing states, evidence that migrants who entered the country illegally are registering to vote in Arizona, Texas and Pennsylvania.

AP’S ASSESSMENT: False. Election officials in all three states said the information being shared is incorrect. In fact, recent voter registrations in those states are well below the numbers being cited online. The posts are misrepresenting data from the SSA’s Help America Vote Verification system, which tracks requests by states to verify the identity of individuals who registered to vote using the last four digits of their social security number. Only U.S. citizens can vote in federal elections and noncitizen voting is exceedingly rare, as states have processes to prevent it.

THE FACTS: With three months remaining in the presidential primary season, social media users are misrepresenting government data to suggest that the country is seeing a surge in voter registrations by migrants who came to the U.S. illegally.

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