And if you think it’s just men who think this sort of thing:
That’s MAGA for you.
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Digby's Hullabaloo Posts
18% of Republicans are angry or dissatisfied with him. And he’s basically telling them to get lost, he doesn’t need them.
Just to quickly point out why some of us would be very happy to see Biden back in the White House, apart from keeping the dictator out, let’s recount the record.
Biden’s recovery act quickly boosted the economy back to full employment. We know Trump has problems with numbers, but employment growth had slowed sharply by the end of his term.
Biden’s recovery package, which passed with zero R votes and over the yells and screams of many Democratic economists, quickly boosted the economy back to full employment.
The bout of inflation we saw was overwhelmingly due to disruptions created by Covid and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Our inflation was little different than Germany’s, France’s or even Japan’s.
The media tell us people don’t care about inflation in Germany, they care about inflation here. That’s fine, but if we don’t assume people are morons, they can understand a pandemic can cause inflation, just like it caused mass unemployment when Trump was in the WH.
Biden also pushed through a massive infrastructure bill that is going far towards modernizing the country’s infrastructure. This has been on the agenda forever. Trump gave us dozens of “infrastructure weeks,” Biden gave us infrastructure.
He also pushed through the Inflation Reduction Act, again with zero R votes. This is giving the I.R.S. the resources to crack down on RICH tax cheats (anyone see any jack-booted I.R.S. agents at their door?)
The IRA also put in place a 1.0 percent tax on corporate share buybacks, the most administratively efficient tax EVER.
Most importantly, the IRA jumpstarted a green energy conversion and the switch to electric cars. These industries are now soaring.
We are way behind the curve on climate change, but if we have a prayer of limiting the damage, it is because of this bill.
Biden also increased the subsidies in the Obamacare Care exchanges so that most people can get affordable insurance now. (Look it up )
Health Insurance Marketplace Calculator | KFFThe Health Insurance Marketplace Calculator, updated with 2024 premium data, provides estimates of health insurance premiums and subsidies for people purchasing insurance on their own in health insura…https://www.kff.org/interactive/subsidy-calculator/
He also made the income-driven student loan repayment plan far more generous. A single person making $33k year pays zero
FACT SHEET: The Biden-Harris Administration Launches the SAVE Plan, the Most Affordable Student Loan Repayment Plan Ever to Lower Monthly Payments for Millions of Borrowers | The White HouseSee President Biden’s Video Announcing the Plan HERE: “Today I’m proud to announce a new program called the SAVE Plan. It’s the most affordable student loan plan ever.” Borrowers can sign up by visiti…https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2023/08/22/fact-sheet-the-biden-harris-administration-launches-the-save-plan-the-most-affordable-student-loan-repayment-plan-ever-to-lower-monthly-payments-for-millions-of-borrowers/
And, he has an Federal Trade Commission that believes in enforcing anti-trust law and a NLRB that believes workers have a right to form unions.
I realize that folks like Nate Silver don’t like the way Joe Biden looks on TV, but I’m an old-fashioned type who cares more about getting things down than impressing Nate Silver. (Yes, Gaza is horrible.)
Also 401ks are going gangbusters.
If Democrats don’t turn out or vote for clowns like RFK Jr, West or Stein then we will finally have irrefutable proof that all these decades of political science showing that people vote their pocketbooks was bullshit.
In other Super Tuesday news….
“The lieutenant governor of North Carolina and the first Black person to hold the office, [Mark] Robinson is heavily favored to clinch the GOP nomination for governor in next Tuesday’s primary and, at a Saturday rally with Trump, got the former president’s formal endorsement,” The Washington Post reported Saturday. Should he win today’s primary, Robinson is expected in the fall to face Josh Stein, the state’s sitting Democratic attorney general.
Robinson is something to behold. “Mark Robinson is not running to be governor to be a bully over anybody,” Robinson told the MAGA rally crowd. Why did he feel the need?
Left unmentioned: the deluge of offensive comments that made such a declaration necessary. There was the time he called school shooting survivors “media prosti-tots” for advocating for gun-control policies. The meme mocking a Harvey Weinstein accuser, and the other meme mocking actresses for wearing “whore dresses to protest sexual harassment.” The prediction that rising acceptance of homosexuality would lead to pedophilia and “the END of civilization as we know it”; the talk of arresting transgender people for their bathroom choice; the use of antisemitic tropes; the Facebook posts calling Hillary Clinton a “heifer” and Michelle Obama a man.
Even in a Republican Party that, under former president Donald Trump’s leadership, has often rewarded crude insults, baseless claims and incendiary language, Robinson stands out among candidates this year for the volume of his bigoted attacks and vicious diatribes. The lieutenant governor of North Carolina and the first Black person to hold the office, Robinson is heavily favored to clinch the GOP nomination for governor in next Tuesday’s primary and, at a Saturday rally with Trump, got the former president’s formal endorsement.
But, of course, he did.
MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Monday evening took note of Robinson’s flair for the conspiratorial.
Maddow ran with mild stuff from Robinson suitable (barely) for prime time. Here is Robinson from 2021 heralding the coming Christian caliphate that will rule America. That’s all y’all.
NC Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson Declares That ‘Christian Patriots’ Will ‘Own This Nation and Rule This Nation’ from Right Wing Watch on Vimeo.
“Tell our enemies on the other side of the aisle that will drag this nation down into a socialist hellhole that you will only do it as you run past me laying on the ground, choking on my own blood because I will not give up this nation to you!” Robinson bellowed. “It is not yours. You did not build it, you did not defend it, and you will not own it. We will. The Christian patriots of this nation will own this nation and rule this nation and help freedom survive for future generations.”
It’s an amazingly warped definition of freedom.
Time for the left to champion the real deal, Anand Giridharadas wrote almost a year ago:
The right’s desertion of freedom creates a historic opportunity for the left to reclaim what should never have been conceded. In reporting my book “The Persuaders,” I saw research showing that freedom is the most highly ranked value by people on the far right, far left, center right, and center left. There aren’t a lot of values like that left.
[…]
As Anat Shenker-Osorio, the progressive messaging guru whom I write about in “The Persuaders” says, the thing about freedom is that you can feel it. It’s corporeal. It’s not abstract. People know what it feels like to be free. And not to be free. This is a theme, a concept, a frame, a word that the left can no longer afford to hand to the right, and the good news is it seems like it no longer is.
Thanks, Mark Robinson, for making the contrast stark by campaigning on the opposite of freedom.
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Freedom for vs. freedom from
It’s Super Tuesday. Do you know where your polling place is?
MSNBC last night pointed to a New York Times story I’d missed, perhaps because it’s old news to me. The voter fraud fraudsters are — say it with me — doubling down:
A network of right-wing activists and allies of Donald J. Trump is quietly challenging thousands of voter registrations in critical presidential battleground states, an all-but-unnoticed effort that could have an impact in a close or contentious election.
Calling themselves election investigators, the activists have pressed local officials in Michigan, Nevada and Georgia to drop voters from the rolls en masse. They have at times targeted Democratic areas, relying on new data programs and novel legal theories to justify their push.
What began with True the Vote in Texas has spread into a nationwide network of voter fraud sleuths in places such as Michigan.
The Michigan activists are part of an expansive web of grass-roots groups that formed after Mr. Trump’s attempt to overturn his defeat in 2020. The groups have made mass voter challenges a top priority this election year, spurred on by a former Trump lawyer, Cleta Mitchell, and True the Vote, a vote-monitoring group with a long history of spreading misinformation.
Their mission, they say, is to maintain accurate voting records and remove voters who have moved to another jurisdiction. Democrats, they claim, use these “excess registrations” to stuff ballot boxes and steal elections.
The theory has no grounding in fact. Investigations into voter fraud have found that it is exceedingly rare and that when it occurs, it is typically isolated or even accidental. Election officials say that there is no reason to think that the systems in place for keeping voter lists up-to-date are failing.
Same as it ever was. Michigan pays data experts from the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC) to keep its voter rolls as up to date as the law allows. (“Federal law requires clerks to keep voters who may have moved on the rolls for two election cycles, unless they receive notice from the voter,” the Times reminds.) But ERIC, you may recall, is part of a vast, left-wing voter fraud conspiracy. It’s given side-eye by the right’s “election intergrity” shock troops since being “exposed” by Gateway Pundit in January 2022 as a “left-wing plot to add more racial minorities to the voter rolls.”
Never fear. The voter fraud Scoobies are here.
The Scoobies’ goal in 2024 is not just flagging “questionable” registrations, but intimidating local election clerks, bogging down elections staff chasing their “leads,” and laying the groundwork for a replay of 2020 election challenges when Donald “91 Counts” Trump loses in November.
In Nevada, the Pigpen Project has set out to clean the voter rolls. Two longtime conservative activists, Chuck Muth and Dan Burdish, have organized door-to-door canvassing and enlisted landlords to compare voter rolls with their leasing records. More than once, they have escorted landlords to the Clark County registrar’s office so that they can flag registrations of former tenants.
Stephanie Wheatley, a spokeswoman for Clark County, said that the evidence was not enough to remove a voter but that it was “enough for the election department to do research and investigate.”
Nevada is also an ERIC state. And like Michigan, a blue state in 2020.
For readers new to my work, I attended a 2013 “election integrity” boot camp hosted by the Voter Integrity Project of NC (VIP-NC) a True the Vote spinoff led by one Jay DeLancy. The workshop taught aspiring voter fraud Scoobies how to sniff out bad registrations, including by “driving by abandoned homes and vacant lots, taking photos to prove to the local Board of Elections that people registered there no longer live there” (Crooks & Liars, 2013):
Arguing by anecdote, DeLancy related a story about people showing up to vote with clean, never-folded power bills for ID. He flashed on the screen a copy of former Gov. Bev Perdue’s power bill and asked, how do you think I got that? He made it on his computer. Those people with the power bills? It might be voter fraud. See, because it’s possible to mass-produce fake utility bills, someone, somewhere might be forging them to commit widespread voter fraud, undetected.
“How is fraud widespread if it’s undetected?” Colin Powell asked caustically while visiting Raleigh in August.
(This Super Tuesday, North Carolina voters must for the first time produce acceptable photo IDs to vote.)
What’s both sad and pathetic about our democracy-averse neighbors is not how they’re wasting their time, but what the Scoobies are not doing with it (added emphasis):
America is headed for greater plurality that will shift the political power balance. The sad part is, such legislation and citizen “boot camps” feel like white-knuckled exercises in protecting a demographic patch of electoral turf that’s shrinking beneath supporters’ feet. State after state erects barricades to voting and retreats behind them as for a siege. Not once did any speaker this weekend suggest opening up the franchise to greater participation, registering new voters and encouraging them to go the polls to exercise their right to vote.
This is what these Real American™ paranoiacs believe about their neighbors:
Nice, decent white people wake up on Election Day, shower, dress, eat breakfast, then go the polls to do their patriotic duty by casting their votes. OTHERS — Poors numbering in the invisible millions — are not like US. They go instead to commit felonies punishable by five years in prison and a $10,000 fine for each offense just to add a single extra vote to their team’s total.
The voter fraud Scoobies’ concept of freedom is negative, freedom from not freedom for. They are maximizing their freedom by keeping feared others from enjoying any.
From 2019:
A priest friend jokes, in America you are expected to have faith. Not faith in anything in particular, just faith. In a similar vein, politicians peddle abstractions like freedom. Not freedom for anything in particular. Just freedom.
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For all you political junkies out there, here’s Bolts Magazine’s fantastic Super Tuesday breakdown of important races:
2024 is starting off fast: Tuesday, March 5 is one of the busiest election days on the calendar this entire year. It’s just the first with non-presidential primaries on the ballot, but it’ll take care of roughly 25 percent of all House districts, in one fell swoop!
That’s because California and Texas, the two most populous states, are holding all their primaries, as are Alabama, Arkansas and North Carolina. Across these five states, millions of voters will decide critical state and local offices, referendums and bond measures. Plus, Vermont municipalities are holding their town hall days. (And that’s not all: Ten other states hold their presidential primaries, but voters will have to head back to the polls later this year for down ballot offices.)
So buckle up for a crowded election day.
To help you, Bolts has identified more than 50 items to watch on Super Tuesday, and why they matter, including key races for supreme courts, governors, DAs, mayors, and lawmakers, plus referendums.
On the menu? Hotly contested judicial openings; prosecutor races in two of the nation’s three largest counties, Los Angeles County and Harris County; school boards that are deciding the rights of LGBTQ+ students; and partisan control of the nation’s fifth most populous county, San Diego County.
Voters will also take the first step in choosing the successor of California Senator Diane Feinstein. They’ll decide on the comeback bid of Alex Villanueva, LA’s scandal-plagued former sheriff. They’ll settle the latest conflict between a reform DA and police unions in Austin. They’ll arbitrate the Texas governor and attorney general’s revenge tours against GOP officials who defied them. And in Vermont, noncitizen residents of Burlington will get to weigh in on local elections for the first time after a 2023 reform.
Be sure to return to this page on election night, and on subsequent days, to check the results. Note that this guide is not exhaustive; it is Bolts’ selection of important races to monitor.
I know the presidential race is pre-ordained but there are other races that are not and we should pay attention. Bolts is the best resource for the state and local races we need to be aware of.
In case you were wondering who that is…
Their corporate benefactors made out like bandits. Everyone else? Not so much.
Gird yourself. Shocking News. The GOP tax cuts didn’t pay for themselves:
The corporate tax cuts that President Donald J. Trump signed into law in 2017 have boosted investment in the U.S. economy and delivered a modest pay bump for workers, according to the most rigorous and detailed study yet of the law’s effects.
Those benefits are less than Republicans promised, though, and they have come at a high cost to the federal budget. The corporate tax cuts came nowhere close to paying for themselves, as conservatives insisted they would. Instead, they are adding more than $100 billion a year to America’s $34 trillion-and-growing national debt, according to the quartet of researchers from Princeton University, the University of Chicago, Harvard University and the Treasury Department.
The researchers found the cuts delivered wage gains that were “an order of magnitude below” what Trump officials predicted: about $750 per worker per year on average over the long run, compared to promises of $4,000 to $9,000 per worker.
If the Democrats could win the trifecta in November, they should be able to let these ridiculous tax cuts expire. (Maybe … there’s always the filibuster.) With the economy roaring and plentiful jobs with people already getting large wage increases it should be a slam dunk but probably won’t be. The stock market is exploding Those people are awash in a tsunami of money. The idea that they aren’t paying their fair share is outrageous.
And the idea that a majority of Americans are so brainwashed that they want to give them even more is profoundly disturbing.
After the Supremes released their decision overturning the Colorado Ballot Case ruling, Trump gave a speech and the cable nets were beside themselves in anticipation. If you have a spare 15 minutes to watch it all, I urge you to do it. I wish everyone would see it because they need to be reminded of what he is.
This wasn’t a rally where you can possibly chalk up his lunacy to the fever of the crowd. This was him speaking extemporaneously before a camera, just riffing on what he cares about.
If you don’t have time (or can’t bring yourself to watch him) here are just a few of the highlights.
He says this will bring out country together. Because the country will only come together if Trump wins everything, That’s how this works.
Aaaaand….
I think that gives you the gist. And I would hope it will be on the evening news and in prime time so that people who are working can see it too. Maybe some will think he’s making a good point and that presidents should be given blanket immunity and its perfectly fine for a presidential candidate to trash judges and prosecutors and call them names in a formal setting like this (or at least not a political rally.) Maybe it’s a mistake to remind people that Donald Trump whines like a 5 year old even when he’s being given a gift by the Supreme Court. It’s possible that most voters really love that in a leader, I don’t know. But they should see it and make up their own minds if they want to sign on for four more years of that insufferable pity-party.
By the way, here’s a quick fact check:
DANA BASH: We have been hearing him first and foremost, talk about the fact that he is obviously very pleased about the Supreme Court decision to keep him on the ballot, or prevent Colorado from taking him off the ballot, and therefore other states as well, because of the actions that he was involved with in and around January 6th.
Then he veered into lots of other areas where we definitely have to fact check.
Daniel, I want to first just say the last thing he was talking about immigration, which of course has nothing to do with the Supreme Court decision today. He said a number of things that I hope that you get into. One of which was 20 million people he believes are in this country.
We don’t have any evidence to back that up.
And going on about the need for the president to use his executive, authorities to, quote unquote, “close the border.”.
There is an antiquated immigration system. Congress, in a bipartisan way in the U.S. Senate, tried to update it at least a little bit, and it was killed because, the president did not want to give Joe Biden that political win.
But let’s start by talking, if you will, Daniel, about, the allegations, with absolutely no evidence that he was making against President Biden, that he is behind all of the prosecutions that we are seeing both on a federal and state level.
There is absolutely no evidence to back that up. In fact, there are, there is a special counsel to to provide not one but two layers of distance between the president and these investigations. And that’s just on a federal level.
DANIEL DALE: That’s correct. So the claim is false even in terms of those federal cases. There’s no evidence that President Biden, you know, ordered or was behind these prosecutions.
But the claim is is is especially nonsensical when it comes to, you know, state and local cases. A civil lawsuit from the New York attorney general, a case is brought in Georgia and New York by local district attorneys.
There is zero evidence whatsoever that President Biden has somehow orchestrated these. So it’s just conjured out of thin air.
I think this, as many Trump speeches are, was kind of a where do you start kind of speech from a fact check perspective. You talked about immigration. He said, you know, I didn’t need to go to Congress. I just, he suggested that he just shut the border with his own executive authority.
In fact, he tried in 2019 to impose essentially an asylum ban on people crossing between ports of entry, from Mexico. And it was blocked by the courts. It was blocked by the Ninth Circuit. The Supreme Court declined to lift that block.
So the idea that he just did it so Biden can do it is not true.
He talked about a new, supposedly new category of crime called migrant crime. That, this is basically propaganda. There has always been some crime by immigrants. All of the data suggests that immigrants tend to commit crimes at lower rates than native born Americans. And I think, Dana, it’s worth noting that in 2023, preliminary data published by the FBI shows that the US is either at or around the lowest violent crime rate nationally since 1970. So this idea of a crime wave is nonsense.
And then I’ll just add quickly, he went through a bunch of his his old favorites. So I defeated ISIS in four months. In fact, the caliphate, so-called caliphate was liberated about two years into his tenure. He said he passed the largest tax cut in history. In fact, on a percentage basis, it’s nowhere close to the Ronald Reagan tax cut. He said there are people from insane asylums, all over the world coming across the border. He’s provided zero evidence for this, even when I’ve directly asked his campaign.
So false claim after false claim, as per usual.
DANA BASH: Daniel, thank you so much for being here. To to provide that kind of fact checking that only you can appreciate it.
And that is not hyperbole
He lost the DC primary. There were just a couple thousand votes but he just couldn’t stand it. So he had another tantrum.