Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Normally, I don’t pay too much attention to the Vice Presidential debate in a presidential election campaign because they tend not to matter all that much. Certainly, everyone was excited to see Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin debate Sen. Joe Biden in 2008 because she was such a wild card and everyone tuned in to see if she would fall on her face. (She actually held up pretty well.) There have been famous VP debates in which one of the candidates got skewered by the other, as when Democratic Sen. Lloyd Benson of Texas deftly took down the callow Senator from Indiana Dan Quayle with his withering, “I knew John Kennedy, John Kennedy was a friend of mine. And you sir are no John Kennedy.” But mostly they’re forgettable. In fact, Vice Presidential candidates, even the ones who are part of the winning ticket, are often pretty much forgotten.

But this year I think it might be different. Mostly it’s because it really does appear there will only be one debate between Harris and Trump because Trump is intellectually lazy and knows that he’s incapable of actually preparing for a debate at Harris’s level. He can’t risk another catastrophic failure. So, regrettably, this Vice Presidential debate tomorrow night may be the last big event of the campaign before the election is over.

According to a recent Pew Survey, a quarter of the American people haven’t heard of either Democratic Gov. Tim Walz or GOP Sen. JD Vance so the debate will be very enlightening for them. (I somehow doubt they are the type of people who will tune in but you never know.) Of those who have heard of them, 34% of Americans view Vance favorably, while 42% view him unfavorably and 39% of Americans see Walz favorably, while 33% view him unfavorably. (Vance has the worst favorable ratings of any VP candidate in the last 20 years.) In that respect Walz goes into the debate with a pretty fair advantage.

I would guess that Vance has made a very bad impression because of his nasty, cold personality and very extreme ideology but that’s just a guess. The creepy stuff about unmarried cat ladies destroying the world was not a winning introduction to the national stage and his latest crusade against immigrants from “Haitia” has been, well, deplorable. Walz, on the other hand, comes off as a very warm, regular guy which just isn’t something that offends normal people.

Whether those perceptions will hold up in a debate remains to be seen. The two presidential debates in this election campaign so far have been among the most consequential we’ve ever seen so who knows what might happen with this one?

Apparently, Vance and Walz have both been preparing like candidates usually do, unlike Donald Trump who says he already knows everything he needs to know. Vance has been working with various members of his team including Trump confidante Jason Miller, going over Walz’s record as a congressman and Governor. Walz himself is being played by Rep. Tom Emmer, who has known Walz for years and reportedly can do a fair impression of his voice and mannerisms.

Emmer appeared on “This Week” and refused to talk about Vance simply refusing to move off his talking points about Tim Walz being “Gavin Newsom in a flannel shirt” and portraying Trump as the guy who “fixed the country then Biden and Harris broke it and he’s going to fix it again.” Maybe that’s just one big feint but I’m guessing that’s the Vance game plan — attack Walz as a San Francisco hippie, hit Biden and Harris and pump up Trump.

Walz has Pete Buttigieg playing Vance in his debate prep and his team includes some of the veterans who worked with Harris on hers (which is a good sign.) Buttigieg appeared on Tim Miller’s Bulwark podcast and didn’t give away the game plan but when Miller joked that he hoped playing Vance wouldn’t adversely affect him he said, “I’m going into that head space but hopefully I’ll be able to find my way back out of it. It’s an interesting place to be.” I think it must be a frightening place to be, personally.

Both Vance and Walz have fairly recent experience debating. The LA Times’s Paul Thornton went back and watched some of them and came away with some interesting impressions. He believes that Vance has the edge because “he comes off as fluent on policy, and he can nimbly respond to attack” and in the 2022 Senatorial debates with Congressman Tim Ryan, “he used just about every question from moderators as an opportunity to paint Ryan as petty and hypocritical.” Boy that sure sounds like Vance, doesn’t it?

But as Thornton points out, that was before Vance was known and thoroughly disliked by so many people “a drawback that only more brightly highlights Walz’s best attribute: People just like the guy.”

Vance’s nasty accusations may not play as well against “the coach” who is apparently a pretty solid debater himself, although he has downplayed his skills, seriously lowering expectations. Thornton writes about his 2018 and 2022 Gubernatorial debates:

[T]he opponents attacked in ways that Vance did in his debate with Ryan — but with Walz, nothing rattled him. And Walz did indeed get attacked, perhaps because he was the favorite in both races… He answered policy questions on climate change, mineral extraction, working with the federal government and pandemic response straightforwardly but not in much detail, something for which both Jensen and Johnson attacked Walz.

And Walz never really took the bait. Nice guys whom people like can do that, and perhaps that is Walz’s biggest advantage over the unpopular yet fully policy-briefed Vance. 

I have a sneaking suspicion that Walz is being underestimated. He was a teacher for years but he’s been a politician for the past two decades and is in his second term as Governor of Minnesota. He’s a pro. His folksy demeanor may just fool the Yale educated but still very green JD Vance into thinking his rival doesn’t understand politics. I think that may be a mistake.

Will tomorrow’s debate tip the scales in this inexplicably close election? Maybe. But in the end it all comes down to the same question: do people want to go back to the negative, chaotic Trump years and spend four more of them dealing with his rage, revenge and retribution? Or are they ready to move past the drama and the stress of that poisonous era and reach for something fresh and new? We won’t find out until the votes are counted.

Salon

In PA today, Donald Trump gave one of the most dangerous speeches of the 21st century by describing his strategy for reducing crime as Kristallnacht, “one extraordinarily rough, one really rough nasty day. One rough hour. You know it’ll end immediately.”https://t.co/tR06J07hQ5… pic.twitter.com/Y0lYApPVDC

— Jim Stewartson, Counterinsurgent 🇺🇸🇺🇦💙🎈 (@jimstewartson) September 29, 2024

The crowd loved it. They can’t wait for the cops to have unfettered power. Well, until they use it on them. And it will happen. Sure, the Black and Brown people will take the brunt of it. But that kind of power tends to expand to all types.

We know their proclivity for whining. You don’t even want to think about the caterwauling when the state comes after them.

And yet most voters say they think that corrupt, orange, imbecile, con artist is the better choice to run it

If that freak wins I don’t want to hear another word about economic determinism, “deliverism” or “fundamentals.” It will have been proven to be utter nonsense.

Unreal. Trump proves once again that he's no friend of working Americans saying that he "hated to give overtime" and that instead of paying it he'd bring new staff in. pic.twitter.com/EwhOzzgRKu

— American Bridge 21st Century (@American_Bridge) September 29, 2024

It’s true:

In 1980, under pressure to begin construction on what would become his signature project, Donald J. Trump employed a crew of 200 undocumented Polish workers who worked in 12-hour shifts, without gloves, hard hats or masks, to demolish the Bonwit Teller building on Fifth Avenue, where the 58-story, golden-hued Trump Tower now stands.

The workers were paid as little as $4 an hour for their dangerous labor, less than half the union wage, if they got paid at all.

Their treatment led to years of litigation over Mr. Trump’s labor practices, and in 1998, despite frequent claims that he never settles lawsuits, Mr. Trump quietly reached an agreement to end a class-action suit over the Bonwit Teller demolition in which he was a defendant.

For almost 20 years, the terms of that settlement have remained a secret. But last week, the settlement documents were unsealed by Loretta A. Preska, a United States District Court judge for the Southern District, in response to a 2016 motion filed by Time Inc. and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. Judge Preska found that the public’s right to know of court proceedings in a class-action case was strengthened by the involvement of the “now-president of the United States.” […]

The documents show that Mr. Trump paid a total of $1.375 million to settle the case, known as Hardy v. Kaszycki, with $500,000 of it going to a union benefits fund and the rest to pay lawyers’ fees and expenses.

That’s the friend to the working man so many blue collar workers worship. How can people be so self-destructive?

I don’t know if this guy is on the level but if so, this is pretty damning:

Kyle Rittenhouse’s former bodyguard and spokesperson feels the 17-year-old might never have been acquitted of killing two people and seriously injuring another if the jury knew then what he knows now.

“When the world finds out everything that happened in this case and with Kyle, it’ll be shocking. It’s breathtaking,” Dave Hancock said in an interview for a documentary that sheds new light on what happened that fateful night in August 2020, on the streets of Kenosha, Wisconsin.

Hancock said that he learned during the trial that Rittenhouse had allegedly used racial slurs in messages sent to his friends and appeared to be looking for an opportunity to use a weapon.

“There was a history of things he was doing prior to Kenosha, specifically patrolling the street for months with guns and borrowing people’s security uniforms, doing whatever he could to try to get into some kind of a gunfight,” Hancock claimed. “I believed things he told me that I now understand to be one of his many lies. And that hurts.

I guess we knew that he was desperate to get into the action but it’s a shame that all the evidence wasn’t available at the trial. His sophomoric but deadly vigilante action being rewarded as it was sent a very dangerous message to others in America who may feel free to do the same thing.

If you’ve lost track of Kyle he’s making money on the wingnut welfare circuit. Kill somebody and get a career. It’s the GOP way.

The man who runs our judicial system has devised yet another depraved plot to destroy the planet:

A rightwing organization is attacking efforts to educate judges about the climate crisis. The group appears to be connected to Leonard Leo, the architect of the rightwing takeover of the American judiciary who helped select Trump’s supreme court nominees, the Guardian has learned.

The Washington DC-based non-profit Environmental Law Institute (Eli)’s Climate Judiciary Project holds seminars for lawyers and judges about the climate crisis. It aims to “provide neutral, objective information to the judiciary about the science of climate change as it is understood by the expert scientific community and relevant to current and future litigation”, according to Eli’s website.

The American Energy Institute (AEI), a rightwing, pro-fossil fuel thinktank, has been attacking Eli and their climate trainings in recent months. In August, the organization published a report saying Eli was “corruptly influencing the courts and destroying the rule of law to promote questionable climate science”.

Eli’s Climate Judiciary Project is “falsely portraying itself as a neutral entity teaching judges about questionable climate science”, the report says. In reality, AEI claims, the project is a partner to the more than two dozen US cities and states who are suing big oil for allegedly sowing doubt about the climate crisis despite longstanding knowledge of the climate dangers of coal, oil and gas usage.

In a PowerPoint presentation about the report found on AEI’s website, the group says the Climate Judiciary Project (CJP) is a “wholly aligned with the climate change plaintiffs and helps them corruptly influence judges behind closed doors”.

“Their true purpose is to preview the plaintiffs’ arguments in the climate cases in an ex parte setting,” the presentation says.

Both the report and the PowerPoint presentation link AEI to CRC Advisors, a public relations firm chaired by rightwing dark money impresario Leo. Given his outsize role in shaping the US judiciary – Leo helped select multiple judicial nominees for former president Donald Trump, including personally lobbying for Brett Kavanaugh’s appointment – his firm’s role in opposing climate litigation is notable.

Yes, it’s notable. The man is a one man wrecking crew.

Reading this after watching constant footage of a large portion of the southeast US under water for the past few days is infuriating. Climate change denial has become religion to these people and nothing, not even out of control fires, massive tornadoes and hurricanes, thousand year floods, now of it will change their minds.

All for oil company profits? Can yuo get any more shallow?

I heard from Tom Sullivan and it is a real mess in Asheville, NC. No power, lines for water, grocery stores all closed.

I thought I’d put up some links to places to donate if you are of a mind to help out:

The full picture of devastation is emerging from Hurricane Helene’s disastrous path through Western North Carolina.

Homes, businesses, roads, infrastructure, cell towers, and anything else in Helene’s path were washed away or severely damaged by raging flood waters and strong winds. For so many of the nearly 1 million residents in Western North Carolina’s beautiful mountains, the recovery process has barely begun.

Neighbors are trying to help one another and relief programs, both national and local, are mobilizing.

To assist the public in looking for ways to contribute, volunteer, or donate, BPR has compiled the list of resources below. We’ll keep this updated.

For local listeners and readers, the BPR News team has worked nearly around the clock since the start of the storm to provide critical information and updates. More information specific to local resources (such as shelters and supplies) is available on our website.

Donate To Western North Carolina Flood Victims: Ways To Help

If your organization would like to be added to the list please email all relevant information to adouglas@bpr.org with the subject line “WNC Relief Program.”

Manna FoodBank in Asheville

• The organization’s warehouse was prepped prior to the storm.
• Updates will be made available via the FoodBank’s website.
• There are many ways to get involved, volunteer, and donate – including online. Go here to give money to the Manna FoodBank online.

BeLoved Asheville

• On-the-ground volunteers are collecting and distributing a wide array of supplies.
• Cash donations can be sent via:
  Venmo: BeLoved-Asheville
  CashApp: $BeLovedAsheville
  Zelle: 828-412-2054
• Specific items are needed, including: food, bottled water, contractor-size trash bags, blankets, first aid supplies, feminine hygiene products, diapers and baby clothes, hand sanitizer, toilet paper, paper towels, bleach, shovels, brooms, gloves, coolers, propane, cook stoves, flashlights, batteries, fans, dehumidifiers, and generators.
• Volunteers are needed to help deliver supplies. Truck owners and truck drivers are needed.
• Drop-off and staging updates are available on the organization’s social media pages. BeLoved Asheville is located at 32 Old Charlotte Hwy, Asheville, NC 28803.
• For volunteer info and more, visit the organization’s website.

Asheville Buncombe Community Christian Ministry

• The ministry helped run and provide shelter in Asheville and is partnered with the Red Cross. Donations help pay for motel and food vouchers for local residents and long-term support for those displaced.
• To help: Donate food, clothing, or funds at abccm.org/donations/ministry-fund/.

Homeward Bound in Asheville

• The organization provides supportive housing to the homeless community in Asheville and it distributed essentials and clothing as the storm approached.
• For more information on year-round work and to donate, visit Homeward Bound’s website.

Mountain Projects

• Historically the group has helped with emergency housing, including storm victims.
• Plans and information on response to Hurricane Helene were not available as the group is based in Waynesville, which was hit with flooding.
• For more, visit the organization’s website.

WNC Regional Livestock Center

• Based in Canton, the livestock center is working to help farmers and animals who were affected by flooding. You can donate toward helping local farmers who need to buy feed for animals. The center also helps supply fencing and other essentials.
• Contact: Yvonne Coburn with Civilian Disaster Response at 828-216-4496.
• More information is available here.

American Red Cross of North Carolina

• At the storm’s peak, the organization opened more than 15 shelter locations in Western North Carolina and upstate South Carolina.
• You can volunteer to serve with the American Red Cross or you can donate blood, which assists medical facilities in responding to disasters. 
• You can make an online donation or give by texting Helene to 90999.
• More information is available here.

Salvation Army of the Carolinas

• The organization has historically worked to provide meals and support to residents and rescue personnel in WNC communities hard-hit by disasters.
• For information on donating and more, visit the Salvation Army of the Carolinas’ page with Hurricane Helene updates.

Baptists on Mission

• North Carolina Disaster Response volunteers will serve in communities as conditions allow. If you are interested in serving in flood recovery, chainsaw and temporary roof repair, you can volunteer on the organization’s website.
• Donations are accepted online and by check. Click here for more.

United Way of Asheville and Buncombe County

• The non-profit helps residents connect to a wide array of resources via it’s 2-1-1 hotline. The local United Way plans to help with immediate natural disaster response and long-term support for flood victims.
• Donations can be made online here.

Samaritan’s Purse

• The organization is responding to the High Country (northwestern North Carolina) and eastern Tennessee. The community of Boone, where Samaritan’s Purse, is based has been deeply impacted.
• Volunteers are needed for deployment starting Sept. 30. 
• Donations are accepted online. Click here for more info. 

North Carolina Community Foundation

• The foundation’s disaster fund can be activated after natural disasters in the state.
• Plans and information are pending. For more information, visit the website.

Operation Airdrop

• The group is focusing operations on North Carolina after it aided Helene victims in Florida. Pilots and volunteers will deliver essential supplies and food to disaster-stricken areas in the mountains. 
• For more information, visit the website.

JD Vance is on quite the weirdo extremist tour right now. I honestly won’t be surprised to see him appear before a legit Nazi rally replete with swastikas at this point

JD Vance will speak at an event on Saturday hosted by the self-styled prophet and political extremist Lance Wallnau, who has claimed Kamala Harris practices witchcraft and has written that the US is headed toward bloody internal conflict.

The campaign announced earlier this week that the Republican vice-presidential candidate will participate in a “town hall” as part of the Courage tour, a traveling pro-Trump tent revival, during a stop in Monroeville, Pennsylvania.

Wallnau, who hosts the tour and broadcasts its speakers on his online show – drawing hundreds in-person and sometimes tens of thousands virtually – is a proponent of the “seven mountains” mandate, which commands Christians to seek leadership in seven key areas of society – the church, the education system, the family, the media, the arts, business and government.

He is also a leader in the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR), a movement that features modern-day apostles and has taken hold in particular in non-denominational charismatic churches that embrace faith healing and believe that the Holy Spirit can speak directly through believers in the form of speaking in tongues and prophesy. These religious spaces often also practice “deliverance ministry” and “spiritual warfare” to cleanse people of demonic entities.

Karrie Gaspard-Hogewood, a scholar whose research focuses on such groups, noted that NAR-aligned practitioners engage in a unique form of “spiritual warfare” – fighting malign forces in not only individuals who are believed to be inhabited by a malign entity, but also entire geographic areas.

“Spiritual warfare is the belief that a demon has taken up residence and is controlling anything from a large geographic space to a culture, to the White House or the supreme court,” said Gaspard-Hogewood.

JD’s already done the Tucker Carlson Tour with Roseanne Barr screaming that the Democrats are eating babies. This may actually be tame by comparison.

Wallnau thinks Kamala Harris is a “Jezebel”

“What you’re seeing now is a real Jezebel. When you’ve got somebody operating in manipulation, intimidation and domination — especially when it’s in a female role trying to emasculate a man who is standing up for truth — you’re dealing with the Jezebel spirit.” 

“So, with Kamala, you have a Jezebel spirit, a characteristic in the Bible that is the personification of intimidation, seduction, domination and manipulation.

I don’t know why women think JD Vance is a throwback patriarchal monster. He’s so nice and he only associates with the best of people.

Sadly, there are a lot of women who love this garbage:

This person doesn’t care whether or not she has the right to vote. pic.twitter.com/Un6zeVdOyr

— The Good Liars (@TheGoodLiars) September 28, 2024

The New Yorker endorsement of Harris is really great. Read it if you can. They lay out the full indictment of Trump and the full case for Harris. This is the conclusion:

Four years ago, in our endorsement of Joe Biden, we said that, while he was leading in the polls, we hoped he would displace Trump “by a margin that prevents prolonged dispute or the kind of civil unrest that Trump appears to relish.” We know what happened: the margins, in four decisive states, were extremely narrow, and Trump refused to concede. Instead, he levelled wild accusations and filed dozens of lawsuits. When those failed, he called on his MAGA believers to march on the Capitol. This time around, the Trump campaign and various right-wing groups have already deployed deny-the-vote efforts around the country, particularly in swing states like Georgia, Pennsylvania, Nevada, and Arizona. There is every likelihood that, if Trump loses, the drama could go on for weeks or months after Election Day. He has made no secret of the fact that he is willing to use every lever, deploy every dirty trick, political and rhetorical, to bring the country to the brink once more.

And so the choice is stark. The United States simply cannot endure another four years of Donald Trump. He is an agent of chaos, an enemy of liberal democracy, and a threat to America’s moral standing in the world. Kamala Harris—who has shown herself to be sensible, humane, and liberal-minded—is our choice for the Presidency. At the National Constitution Center, in Philadelphia, a few weeks ago, the American people were able to see both the stakes of this election and the vast differences between the candidates. The right choice—the necessary choice—is beyond debate. 

Beyond debate.

I just heard a bunch of people on TV complaining that they don’t know enough about her to decide whether to vote for her or Trump. It’s incomprehensible. Nothing could be worse than this:

Trump: Joe Biden became mentally impaired. Kamala was born that way. She was born that way. And if you think about it, only a mentally disabled person could have allowed this to happen to our country. pic.twitter.com/v6Yo6uINp5

— Acyn (@Acyn) September 28, 2024

You’re going to be hearing a lot about this from Trump and his minions. They’ll be lying through their teeth, of course:

Former President Donald Trump is wildly distorting new statistics on immigration and crime to attack Vice President Kamala Harris.

Trump falsely claimed Friday and Saturday that the statistics are specifically about criminal offenders who entered the US during the Biden-Harris administration; in reality, the figures are about offenders who entered the US over multiple decades, including during the Trump administration. And Trump falsely claimed that the statistics are specifically about people who are now living freely in the US; the figures actually include people who are currently in jails and prisons serving criminal sentences.

“Kamala should immediately cancel her News Conference because it was just revealed that 13,000 convicted murderers entered our Country during her three and a half year period as Border Czar,” Trump wrote in one post on Friday, the day Harris visited the southern border in Arizona. Harris “allowed almost 14,000 MURDERERS to freely and openly roam our Country,” Trump wrote in another Friday post. They “roam free to KILL AGAIN,” he wrote, escalating his rhetoric, on Saturday.

Facts First: Trump’s claims are false in two big ways. First, the statistics he was referring to are not specifically about people who entered the country during the Biden-Harris administration. Rather, those statistics are about noncitizens who entered the country under any administration, including Trump’s; were convicted of a crime at some point, usually in the US after their arrival; and are now living in the US while being listed on Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s “non-detained docket” — where some have been listed for years, including while Trump was president, because their country of citizenship won’t let the US deport them back there. Second, that ICE “non-detained” list includes people who are still serving jail and prison sentences for their crimes; they are on the list because they are not being held in immigration detention in particular.

The new statistics, released by ICE in a letter to a Republican congressman this week, said there were 425,431 total convicted criminals on the non-detained docket as of July 21, 2024, including 13,099 people with homicide convictions.

The statistics have been deployed by Trump and various Republican lawmakers and right-wing commentators as alarming evidence of Harris’ supposed mismanagement of immigration policy. But in addition to exaggerating her role on the file — she was never actually “border czar” — much of the chatter has inaccurately described what the statistics show.

A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, said in a Saturday email: “The data in this letter is being misinterpreted. The data goes back decades; it includes individuals who entered the country over the past 40 years or more, the vast majority of whose custody determination was made long before this Administration. It also includes many who are under the jurisdiction or currently incarcerated by federal, state or local law enforcement partners.”

It’s not clear how many of the 13,099 people with homicide convictions on ICE’s non-detained docket as of July 21 are currently incarcerated in jails and prisons. Regardless, John Sandweg, an attorney who served as acting director of ICE during the Obama administration, said in a Saturday interview that it is “100% false” to say all the homicide offenders on the non-detained docket entered the US during Harris’ vice presidency. Sandweg added: “These are individuals who undoubtedly entered the United States over a long period of time. … A lot of them have probably been on the list for 20 years, where the US has just been unable to deport.”

CNN could not immediately find public statistics on how many people with criminal convictions were on the non-detained docket during Trump’s presidency. But there are public statistics from just before and just after his presidency — and those statistics, which we’ll discuss later in this article, make clear that Trump, too, presided over a non-detained docket that included hundreds of thousands of people with criminal convictions.

Some of this can be attributed to the news media, especially Fox, which reported this hysterically without any of these details or context. Trump ran with it.

There’s more at the link.