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Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Who’s The Big Winner?

Published by digby on April 24, 2024

Joe Biden’s the big winner — on policy anyway

While most of the country was riveted by recaps of Donald Trump’s sordid hush money trial on Tuesday, something amazing was happening in Washington: the US Senate debated and then passed the national security package that’s been consuming the capitol for the last six months. With a lopsided vote of 79-18 the bills with aid for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan among some other things will finally be behind us. Notably, there is no increased funding for the border because Donald Trump ordered the Republicans to reject it so that he can keep demagoguing the issue during the campaign. It’s a big win for President Joe Biden and the Democrats.

The GOP infighting has escalated in the wake of the House’s months long tantrum led by the far right extremists who seemed to truly believe that they could hold their breath until they turned blue and they would eventually get everything they wanted. Leading MAGA rebel Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., left town without calling for Speaker Mike Johnson to vacate the chair, demanding instead that he resign, which isn’t going to happen. Podcaster Steve Bannon and a couple of fellow right wing sad sacks, Thomas Massie,R-Ky., and Paul Gosar, R-Az., joined the call but it’s clear that however frustrated some of them might be there is no appetite for any more internecine fights, at least for the moment. And the rest of the party is obviously sick of the kooks.

GOP Sen. Tom Tillis of North Carolina pulled no punches, talking about Greene’s malign influence, calling her “uninformed” and “a terrible leader” and complaining that she’s “dragging our brand down.”

Republican Rep. Tony Gonzales probably speaks for many in his party who are too cowardly to say it as plainly as he did when he called the wild extremists in the GOP “scumbags”

They all might want to take a look at the big orange guy who’s actually pulling the strings but then even he’s turning his back on Greene and continuing to support Johnson, telling a radio host:

Look, we have a majority of one, OK? It’s not like he can go and do whatever he wants to do. I think he’s a very good person. You know, he stood very strongly with me on NATO.

It was a bit low energy but it’s pretty clear that he’s not going to back any play to oust the speaker so Greene is sidelined, at least for now.

It’s been a bad run for Trump and for Greene these past few weeks. But you know who’s having a great run? President Joe Biden. His poll numbers are edging up but it’s still incomprehensibly tight considering how much policy success he’s had with a congress that is so dysfunctional. Somehow, he and the Democrats have made it work for them.

I think we’re all familiar with Biden’s big legislative wins in the first two years with the American Rescue Plan which set the table for a very positive economic recovery, the big infrastructure bill which is just coming online all over the country, the first major gun safety bill in decades, capping prescription drug costs for seniors and much more. And it was all done with razor thin majorities in both houses with most passed with bipartisan votes despite what is arguably the most toxic political environment since the 1850s. It was a remarkable feat but I think most observers assumed that was going to be the end of it when the Republicans managed to eke out a tiny victory in House in 2022. How could anything get done with Donald Trump pulling the strings and crazed right wing extremists dominating the caucus?

They had their fun with the Hunter Biden farce and the various “investigations” into the so-called Biden Crime family which have gone nowhere. And immigration has been a genuinely vexing problem that the GOP has exploited as they always do. But as it turns out, while the House Republicans ran around in circles causing chaos on a weekly basis, the important sausage kept getting made. And despite all the drama, the Biden White House ended up getting most of what it wanted without having to give up much of anything in return, at least in part because the Republicans wouldn’t take yes for an answer when concessions were offered.

The biggest achievement was avoiding a costly debt limit/government shutdown and I wouldn’t have bet that would happen. But former speaker Kevin McCarthy and the White House negotiated a spending deal that served as the excuse to take down McCarthy. (As it turns out it was really about McCarthy refusing to stop an ethics investigation into Florida gadfly Matt Gaetz, but that’s another story.) McCarthy’s successor Mike Johnson kept the spending agreement in place and fought off another attempt to shut down the government. Just this past month they passed the FISA extension backed by the White House and now the big national security package, the ugliest sausage making extravaganza ever.

It’s been such pandemonium that it was hard to see exactly what was happening but now that the smoke is clearing it’s obvious that the writing was on the wall when former Speaker Kevin McCarthy gave so many concessions to the crazies during that bizarre speakers’ race at he beginning of the term. Handing the keys to that faction was a major mistake because those people are maximalists for whom politics is all or nothing and they can’t accept that having a tiny majority in one house of congress makes that impossible.

In the end it took the House Democrats being unprecedentedly united, despite some very real tensions within their own coalition, and a willingness for some moderate Republicans to finally stand their ground despite dilly-dallying around for months. Majority leader Schumer, kept his majority together without the centrist divas causing any trouble for once. Not only that, Senate Republicans who haven’t completely gone insane refused to follow the House model and came through on the important issues as well.

But there’s no doubt that it took a very steady hand in the White House to stay the course and keep working the legislative levers to get the job done. It wasn’t pretty but under the circumstances the achievements are very big wins at little cost. Meanwhile the Republicans are reeling with internal strife while their leader sits in a courtroom every day facing a jury in his criminal trial for paying off a porn star. You can’t ask for much more than that in an election year.

Salon

How Do I Fact Check Thee?

Published by Tom Sullivan on April 24, 2024

Let me count the ways

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.”

“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.

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He Who Smelt It, Dealt It

Published by Tom Sullivan on April 24, 2024

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.

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!

Reporter Vaughn Hillyard captured what Tuesday actually looked like outside the New York courthouse.

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.

From The New York Times:

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.

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Losing It Bigly

Published by digby on April 23, 2024

He’s very desperate right now

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.

Never Forget

Published by digby on April 23, 2024

He wasn’t the only one, although he appears to have been the only one who was directly conspiring with Trump. Rick Perlstein wrote about the tabloid support for Trump at the time.

So did I, writing about the Drudge effect:

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.

In an article last month called “The Man Who Could Have Stopped Donald Trump,” Oliver Darcy of Business Insider noted Drudge’s still-dominant role:

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.

Mainstream publications have fed the notion with click-bait stories like this slide show from Politico, which sat at the top of its “most-read” list for months this year, despite its having been originally published back in 2013. As it turned out, Drudge had been up to his old tricks. He had linked to a British tabloid story in which Abedin was quoted as saying that she thought Clinton was beautiful, which sent millions of drooling Drudge readers searching for “Clinton Huma lesbian.”

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.

Drudge doesn’t even try to find political relevance to his lewd, juvenile innuendo. But the mainstream media’s reaction to this week’s Weiner-Abedin story was hardly any better. Attempts to make it into a campaign story were downright embarrassing.

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.

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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.

No, It Wasn’t To Spare Melania

Published by digby on April 23, 2024

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.

Is JD Vance MAGA 2.0?

Published by digby on April 23, 2024

I’m not so sure

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.)

It’s The Conspiracy, Stupid

Published by digby on April 23, 2024

According to MSNBC’s Lisa Rubin:

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.

Is Common Sense Prevailing?

Published by digby on April 23, 2024

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?

Happy Disinfectant Injection Day

Published by Tom Sullivan on April 23, 2024

For those who celebrate

Four years ago today. How could I forget? The Biden-Harris campaign makes sure no one will forget Dr. Trump’s Magic Elixir.

Matthew Yglesias: Happy Disinfectant Injection Day to those who celebrate.

Raw Story’s Sarah Burris: Happy Stick a Light Up Your Ass Day and Bleach Injection Day to all who celebrate.

Brian Beutler: Happy bleach injection day to all who celebrate.

Be sure to re-Tweet, re-Thread, etc., and generally pile on every chance you get today.

Also four years ago today:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/22/us/politics/rick-bright-trump-hydroxychloroquine-coronavirus.html

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?

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?

What have “they” done to you?

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