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Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

From The “You Can Believe Me Or Your Lyin’ Eyes” Files

Published by digby on October 8, 2024

He always lies and when caught just doubles down:

After Donald Trump was asked in a Monday interview about the future prospects of Gaza, the former president made a curious claim: “You know, I’ve been there, and it’s rough.”

There is no public evidence of Trump ever having been to Gaza, which has been governed by militant group Hamas since 2007. He certainly didn’t go to Gaza as president, and CNN, The New York Times and The Washington Post have all found no proof he made a prior visit. Perhaps he merely meant he has been to Palestinian territory, since he did visit the West Bank in 2017? Or maybe he was just talking about having been to the broader region?

Nope.

Trump’s campaign said Monday night that he meant what he said about having been to Gaza in particular – and the campaign insisted the claim is true. “President Trump has been to Gaza previously and has always worked to ensure peace in the Middle East,” campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt told CNN. Leavitt, though, did not provide a single detail about Trump’s supposed trip to Gaza. And she did not respond when we repeatedly asked for even the most basic information, like the year of the supposed visit.

So we were highly skeptical – because Trump has a long history of making things up, because of the lack of public evidence, because the Times of Israel has reported that Trump had never even visited Israel before his presidency, and because the Trump campaign had offered a substantively different comment to The New York Times earlier Monday. That earlier comment, which a campaign official provided only on condition of anonymity, did not say Trump had actually been to Gaza. Instead, the anonymous campaign official tried some spin, correctly saying that Trump has been to Israel but wrongly saying, “Gaza is in Israel.”

We asked three former Trump officials who worked on Middle East policy whether they know of any proof for the former president’s claim, and the campaign’s claim to CNN, that Trump has been to Gaza itself. The only one who has responded, Trump-appointed former Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs David Schenker, said in an email: “As far as I know, he’s never traveled there. He did not go in 2017 when he visited Israel. I think this story is probably already over.” […]

They could not find any former staffers who could verify Trump’s claim. And guess what? He’s doubling down:

Trump aides told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on Tuesday that the former president privately said he did.

Of course he did.

Here are some more lies from that one interview with Hugh Hewitt:

Terrorist attacks: Trump repeated his false claim that “we didn’t have one terrorist attack” during his presidency. There were multiple terrorist attacks during his presidency, including some he has spoken about himself.

The defeat of ISIS: Trump repeated his false claim that although others said it would take years to “get rid of” the ISIS terror group, “I got rid of it in a month.” Leaving aside the fact that Trump certainly doesn’t deserve sole credit, the ISIS “caliphate” was declared fully liberated more than two years into Trump’s presidency.

Iran and funding for terror groups: Trump repeated his false claim that Iran did not fund terror groups during his presidency: “They weren’t giving any money, because they had no money.” Iran’s funding for entities designated by the US government as terror groups, like Hezbollah and Hamas, did decline in the second half of his presidency, in large part because his sanctions had a major negative impact on the Iranian economy, but the funding never stopped – as Trump’s own administration acknowledged in 2020.

China’s oil purchases from Iran: Trump repeated his false claim that he successfully pressured Chinese leader Xi Jinping into ending oil purchases from Iran; Trump claimed, “He said, ‘I’ll pass.’ He passed. Everybody passed. They did no business.” China’s oil purchases from Iran briefly plummeted in 2019, but they never stopped, and they quickly rebounded while Trump was still president – back up to hundreds of thousands of barrels per day.

Nuclear weapons: Repeating a false claim he made during his presidency, Trump said, “I rebuilt our entire nuclear force.” He simply did not do so, though he did undertake efforts to modernize the US arsenal. “Long story short: then, as now, Trump’s nuclear braggadocio is utter fantasy, wholly divorced from reality,” said Stephen Schwartz, an independent expert on US nuclear weapons policy. “And not only did he not rebuild ‘our entire nuclear force,’ on his watch the total operational nuclear stockpile of warheads and bombs actually decreased by about 100 weapons!”

Global warming and sea levels: Trump delivered another version of his usual false claim about global warming, minimizing the threat by saying it will cause the ocean to rise merely “1/8th of an inch in the next 500 years.” Sea levels are currently rising more than an eighth of an inch per year.

Harris, immigrants and crime: Trump repeated his false claim that Vice President Kamala Harris, his opponent in the presidential election, let in 13,000 murderers and 425,000 criminals over the border. The statistics he was referring to are not specifically about people who entered the country during the Biden-Harris administration; rather, they cover numerous presidential administrations, including his own, over the span of decades – “over the past 40 years or more,” the Department of Homeland Security said in a September statement to CNN. You can read more here.

Pelosi and a stock sale: Trump falsely claimed that the former speaker of the House, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, sold stock in Visa “the day before the lawsuit” that was filed against the company by the Justice Department in September. An official disclosure shows the stock was actually sold by Pelosi’s husband more than two and a half months before the Justice Department filed the lawsuit.

Biden and foreign income: Trump repeated his false claim that President Joe Biden “gets a lot of money from China, or he got a lot of money from China, tremendous amount of money.” After years of investigation by House Republicans, there is still no evidence Biden has received any payments from China.

Chris Wallace in 2020: Trump repeated his false claim that journalist Chris Wallace, now of CNN and formerly of Fox News, tried to stop him, during a presidential debate Wallace moderated in 2020, from asking Biden about a supposed payment from the mayor of Moscow’s wife (which actually went to a company connected to Biden’s son Hunter Biden, not to the president); Trump claimed, “And Chris Wallace wouldn’t let me ask. (Biden) couldn’t answer the question. Chris Wallace stepped in and said, ‘Well, we’re not going to be talking about that.’”

Wallace never said anything like that. As the transcript shows, Wallace interjected during this debate exchange to try to get Trump to allow Biden to answer Trump’s question about the money, not to stop Trump from talking about the subject.

Military equipment surrendered to the Taliban: Trump repeated his false claim that $85 billion in US military equipment was left to the Taliban upon the US withdrawal from Afghanistan under Biden and Harris. Trump’s figure is a massive exaggeration; the Pentagon has estimated that this equipment was worth about $7.1 billion – a chunk of the roughly $18.6 billion worth of equipment provided to Afghan forces between 2005 and 2021.

He Pulled Himself Up By His Imported Italian Leather Bootstraps

Published by digby on October 8, 2024

This spoiled narcissist who had everything handed to him on silver platter by his rich father (after which he lost most of it because of his terrible business judgment) has always told people that he made it on his own. Nothing could be further from the truth.

I’ve mentioned it before but once again, if you want to read one more book about this miscreant make it “Lucky Loser” by the NY Times reporters Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig. It shows the scope of Trump’s failures and how he was really rescued by reality TV which created the persona that brought him to the White House. He’s no more authentic than a Real Housewife of New York.

Here’s the publisher’s note:

Soon after announcing his first campaign for the US presidency, Donald J. Trump told a national television audience that life “has not been easy for me. It has not been easy for me.” Building on a narrative he had been telling for decades, he spun a hardscrabble fable of how he parlayed a small loan from his father into a multi-billion-dollar business and real estate empire. This feat, he argued, made him singularly qualified to lead the country. Except: None of it was true. Born to a rich father who made him the beneficiary of his own highly lucrative investments, Trump received the equivalent of more than $500 million today via means that required no business expertise whatsoever.

Drawing on over twenty years’ worth of Trump’s confidential tax information, including the tax returns he tried to conceal, alongside business records and interviews with Trump insiders, New York Times investigative reporters Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig track Trump’s financial rise and fall, and rise and fall again. For decades, he squanders his fortunes on money losing businesses, only to be saved yet again by financial serendipity. He tacks his name above the door of every building, while taking out huge loans he’ll never repay. He obsesses over appearances, while ignoring threats to the bottom line and mounting costly lawsuits against city officials. He tarnishes the value of his name by allowing anyone with a big enough check to use it, and cheats the television producer who not only rescues him from bankruptcy but casts him as a business savant – the public image that will carry him to the White House. 

It’s unthinkable that with all we know about him, this dishonest, vengeful loser could be back in the White House in less that 6 months.

Why? I hate to say it but …

Tens of millions of our fellow Americans are in a cult.

Cowardly Liar Part XXIV

Published by digby on October 8, 2024

Whew. That was brutal. But fair.

The Censorship Scam

Published by digby on October 8, 2024

Hey, remember when JD Vance weirdly went on about the Biden administration’s alleged censorship during the debate with Tim Walz in order to evade saying whether the 2020 election was stolen? Yeah. They’re all very, very shrill on the subject complaining about Democrats allegedly destroying the 1st Amendment. It’s one of their major memes. And yet …

Get a load of this from Josh Marshall:

Florida has become the state where elements of a future second Trump presidency America already comes into view. We’re seeing some of these things happening right now in Florida. The example I’m about to share with you legitimately shocked me. (That’s a high bar.) It’s about the pro-choice ballot amendment which would restore Roe protections in Florida if it reaches a 60% threshold. As in most other states, getting to 50% isn’t that difficult. 60% is much harder.

To head off even the chance that the ballot initiative might hit that challenging high bar the state of Florida is already spending a substantial amount of tax payer dollars campaigning against the initiative. Now we learn that the state is quite literally threatening jail time for the employees of stations that agree to run one of the ads for the pro-choice amendment. You heard that right – not sue under some claim of defamation but actual criminal charges.

DeSantis will do anything to stop the pro-choice amendment from winning, And that apparently includes jailing journalists who run ads advocating for it. First Amendment for dummies.

Here’s the ad, by the way:

DeSantis’ reasoning as to why the ad is untruthful and should be taken off the air is that the law states that an abortion an only be done to save the woman’s life and in this case, because she has brain cancer, it would only extend it.

MY GOD.

Josh is right that this is a precursor to what we’ll see in a Trump administration. He’s already repeatedly threatened to take away the licenses of CBS, NBC, ABC and CNN for reporting news he doesn’t like. His mantra is “fake news” and “enemey of the people.” In his first administration he tried to tank the merger deal between At&T and Time Warner because he hates CNN. (CNN was owned by Time Warner.) I’m guessing there won’t be any “guardrails” on that in a second one.

Just look at what Elon Musk is doing on Twitter. He screeches about censorship and free speech even saying that the 2nd Amendment protects the first at that embarrassing Trump rally on Sunday. This is the excuse he uses to allow Nazis and foreign bots run wild on the platform dispensing massive amounts of disinformation. But he also freely bans people for posting things he doesn’t like, such as the fellow who posted a link to the emails Iran hacked from the Trump campaign. And it’s clear that he’s using the algorithm to boost his own posts which are filled with disinformation as well.

Watch Jon Stewart take Musk apart in this clip from the Daily Show last night:

Trump, Vance, DeSantis, Musk — they aren’t trying to hide what they plan to do in the future if they gain political power. They want to jail people for exercising their first amendment rights in the name of fighting censorship. Seriously.

Trump Sent Covid Equipment To Putin

Published by Tom Sullivan on October 8, 2024

Secretly. So says Bob Woodward’s new book

From FEMA’s Hurricane Helene: Rumor Response page.

Bob Woodward’s new book alleges that Donald Trump “secretly sent Putin a bunch of Abbott Point of Care Covid test machines for his personal use” during 2020 testing shortages. That’s even as FEMA fends off false MAGA allegations that FEMA diverted Hurricane Helene disaster monies aid migrants.

The Washington Post reports:

As the coronavirus tore through the world in 2020, and the United States and other countries confronted a shortage of tests designed to detect the illness, then-President Donald Trump secretly sent coveted teststo Russian President Vladimir Putin for his personal use.

Putin, petrified of the virus, accepted the supplies but took pains to prevent political fallout — not for him, but for his American counterpart. He cautioned Trump not to reveal that he had dispatched the scarce medical equipment to Moscow, according to a new book by Washington Post associate editor Bob Woodward.

Putin, according to the book, told Trump, “I don’t want you to tell anybody because people will get mad at you, not me.”

Four years later, the personal relationship between the two men appears to have persisted, Woodward reports, as Trump campaigns to return to the White House and Putin orchestrates his bloody assault on Ukraine. In early 2024, the former president ordered an aide away from his office at Mar-a-Lago, his private club and residence in Florida, so he could conduct a private phone call with the Russian leader, according to Woodward’s account.

How many Abbott Point of Care Covid test machines are there in a bunch?

Plan B From Raleigh

Published by Tom Sullivan on October 8, 2024

How will Helene impact the presidential election in North Carolina?

“To be determined” is the simple answer.

Hurricane Helene has upset many residents’ fall plans in western North Carolina, among which are plans for early voting set to begin on October 17. Gov. Roy Cooper (D) is urging the annual inmigration of fall “leaf peepers” to stay home and away from the disaster area. Local businesses who count on that trade may not have beds or power or water for them anyway. Hotels are filled with relief workers or people whose homes are unlivable or gone. Local election boards will have to alter election plans that under normal circumstances are unalterable once submitted and approved by the state’s Board of Elections in August.

Permisssion for altering the unalterable came on Monday (Democracy Docket):

The North Carolina State Board of Elections (NCSBE) unanimously passed a resolution Monday allowing special accommodations for voters in the 13 counties most impacted by Hurricane Helene.

Karen Brinson Bell, NCSBE’s executive director, began the Monday morning meeting with a status update.

“What a difference a week makes,” Brinson Bell said. “When we were last together to consider the emergency authority regarding absentee board meeting schedules for these affected counties, we were looking at 14 offices that could still not open for work or to the public, and today, all county offices are open in North Carolina, and this is just quite the feat.”

However, she said many voters and election workers still face numerous struggles in the storm’s aftermath. One of the board members, Stacy Eggers IV, said that he has visited five of the counties impacted and has seen the damage firsthand.

“These areas received over 20 inches of rain in less than about 36 hours,” Eggers said. “As of today, we still have over 100,000 North Carolinians without power. Communication is significantly limited, and our roads remain in a crippled state.”

The five-member board determined that in multiple western North Carolina counties — Ashe, Avery, Buncombe, Haywood, Henderson, Madison, McDowell, Mitchell, Polk, Rutherford, Transylvania, Watauga and Yancey — the “infrastructure for elections administration and voters’ accessibility to polling places and mail service” was “severely disrupted as a result of the disaster.”

Therefore, the board members passed a resolution to allow election boards in these counties to make changes with a “bipartisan majority vote.” 

They can amend their early voting plans — like adding or removing voting sites and changing hours or days that sites are open — and modify their Election Day polling places. 

On Nov. 5, these counties can establish voting sites for a precinct outside of the actual precinct. If a county doesn’t have the infrastructure to operate an Election Day site in a certain precinct, they can create a site in a different area or county for their voters to go to.

Also, the election boards in these counties can bring in election officials and poll workers who are registered voters and residents of other North Carolina counties.

Additionally, county boards can make accommodations for absentee voters. They can process absentee ballot requests until the day before Election Day. Without this change, the request deadline would’ve been Oct. 29.

Under the proposal, voters in these counties can now hand-deliver their absentee ballots to any Election Day voting site by 7:30 p.m. that day. Otherwise, they would only be allowed to submit them to their county’s election office. 

Voters can also return their ballots to a different North Carolina county’s election board by 7:30 p.m. on Nov. 5 if they were displaced to another county after the storm.

Only two of those 13 are “blue counties” (Buncombe and Watauga). The rest are pretty solidly red, and their combined populations are over 100,000 more than the blues. Republicans in Raleigh could balk at plans that would allow Buncombe (Asheville) and Watauga (Boone, Appalachian State) flexibility for citizens to access voting sites post-Helene, but they could be shooting themselves in the foot to try.

Of course, voters here in Asheville will crawl over broken glass to vote beginning next week (as many as possible on Day1, please). Fourteen early voting sites were planned in Buncombe County. How many remain in operational condition and accessible after the flooding is under review. Some of the 80 Election Day precincts may have to be moved or combined. Giving advance notice to voters (given that informational literature is already printed) will prove a challenge, but there are still weeks to tackle that problem. Buncombe’s local Board will meet today to draft Plan B.

What’s not clear is what happens in other counties. Watauga (which saw extensive flooding) planned for five EV sites. The rest of the 13 have two EV sites at best.

Democrats’ plans for seeing North Carolina go blue could turn on voting access here in the west and on which voters can and cannot access voting by Nov. 5

Yes. He Is A Eugenicist

Published by digby on October 7, 2024

We’ve known that for years

He’s still on this except now instead of touting his own allegedly superior genes he’s condemning immigrants’ allegedly inferior genes:

In an interview on “The Hugh Hewitt Show” that aired Monday morning, former President Donald Trump criticized Vice President Kamala Harris for her policies on the southern border and suggested that migrants have “bad genes.”

“When you look at the things that she proposes, they’re so far off she has no clue. How about allowing people to come to an open border, 13,000 of which were murderers,” he said, referring to the vice president’s immigration proposals.

“Many of them murdered far more than one person, and they’re now happily living in the United States,” he added. “You know, now a murderer, I believe this, it’s in their genes. And we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now. They left, they had 425,000 people come into our country that shouldn’t be here, that are criminals.”

This isn’t the first time that Trump has invoked race science. In 2020 he praised a nearly all-white crowd at a rally in Minnesota for having “good genes,” pointing to a belief that has been touted by white supremacists called “racehorse theory.”

“You have good genes. You know that, right? You have good genes. A lot of it is about the genes, isn’t it, don’t you believe? The racehorse theory. You think we’re so different? You have good genes in Minnesota,” Trump said at the 2020 rally.

Sidney Blumenthal has a fascinating piece in the Guardian today about Trump’s belief in eugenics and his affinity for Naziism. He traces Trump family lineage back to Germany and even reveals some literal Nazi ties. He also explores Trump’s long held beliefs in his “good German blood” and his evocation of Hitleriam rhetoric. It’s all very interesting. I thought this was especially sharp on Trump’s beliefs in the Great Replacement Theory:

Trump’s footsie with Nazis mingles narcissism with Nazism. But it is his belief in the far-right “replacement theory”, which is the central idea of his campaign, that provides the greatest illumination on what are more than overlapping coincidences. The historical lineage of poisonous ideas, rather than “poison in the blood”, explains Trump’s doctrine of a master race, whether Trump is aware or not of the origins of his venom.

[…]

Trump’s replacement theory is derivative of the nativism of eugenicists and “race scientists”, especially Madison Grant, whose 1916 book, The Passing of the Great Race, warned against “the old stock being crowded out” by “swarms of Polish Jews” and other aliens, who were pushing aside “the Nordic man”, and fostering “suicidal ethics which are exterminating his own race”.

Grant served as an adviser to the congressional members who wrote the Immigration Act of 1924, which severely restricted immigration of those ethnic groups from eastern and southern Europe that he deemed inferior, closing out Italians and Jews. He also helped write laws in the south banning interracial marriage.

Hitler regarded Grant’s book in his speeches as scientific proof and wrote him an admiring letter telling him it was his “Bible”. “It was America, in spite of its enormous territory, that was the first country to teach us by its immigration law that a nation should not open its doors equally to all races,” Hitler told the New York Times in an interview on 20 December 1931, before he seized power. “Let China be for the Chinese, America for the Americans and Germany for the Germans.” In 1936 the Nazis promoted The Passing of the Great Race as essential reading for Germans.

“The irony is that by putting Madison Grant’s theories into practice, the Nazis discredited those theories forever,” wrote the historian Jonathan Spiro in his biography of Madison Grant, Defending the Master Race.

That is, until Trump.

When Trump says immigration, he means race. When he says crime, he means race. When he says communism, socialism, or Democrat, he means race. When he says America is declining, he means race. When he says “American First”, he means race. When he says blood, he means race. When he says poison, he means race.

When he says race, he means Black people. When he says race, he means Hispanics. When he says race, he means Muslims. And when he says race, he means other white people, too, some less white, less pure, less clean, less acceptable depending on their ancestral origin, than others. When he says race, he means the replacement theory.

His “good German blood” will save us all.

If you found this as interesting as I did, I urge you to read the whole thing. It’s quite long but worth the time if you can spare it.

Democracy Dies Slowly At First Then All At Once

Published by digby on October 7, 2024

The West Virginia House has introduced a resolution that lays the foundation for the state to officially reject the national presidential election results in the case they suspect fraud in a Democratic victory.

I don’t know if this means they will refuse to submit their electoral votes but if that’s what they’re saying they’ll only hurt Donald Trump who will certainly win them. So I guess they’re just preparing for secession then by saying they won’t “recognize” a Democratic president? What else could it be?

The real point of this is ginning up their rubes to commit violence by pushing the idea that the Democrats are trying to kill Trump. If he loses, who knows what they’ll do?

First They Came For Abortion And They Said Nothing

Published by digby on October 7, 2024

Then they came for the porn

One of the most heavily contested voting demographics this cycle is the so-called “Bro” vote. Don Jr’s got Trump all over the Bro podcasts trying to grow the gender gap in his favor. But there’s a tensy problem, I’m afraid:

Seventeen pornographic film actors on Monday announced that they had launched a $100,000 ad campaign on porn sites warning that Project 2025 — the Heritage Foundation blueprint for a Republican administration that has been a centerpiece of some Democratic campaigns — wants to ban pornography and imprison people who produce it. The online ads will run in the states that will decide the presidency: Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada.

The architects of the “hands off my porn” campaign are nothing if not aware of the polling. Vice President Kamala Harris is losing to former President Donald J. Trump among men, but younger men might be winnable — and pornographic websites are among the most heavily trafficked on the internet.

Quoting the Survey Center on American Life, the group said younger men are the biggest consumers of the industry’s products: Among men aged 18-29, 44 percent had watched porn within the past month. Among men aged 30-49, it was 57 percent.

“I have been in this industry for over 25 years and have witnessed many attacks on our industry, but Project 2025’s ban on pornography is the most extreme proposal I have ever seen, and voters have to take that threat seriously,” Holly Randall, a pornographic film actor, said in the group’s announcement. “We cannot simply rely on precedent that consuming pornography is legal and has been legal for a long time.”

The bros may like Trump’s anarchic spirit and care little for actual policy. But this hits them where they live. I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if this has an impact.

Out Of The Mouths Of Apostates

Published by digby on October 7, 2024

Joe Scarborough, former hardcore right winger, dealing with what the GOP has become:

“The level of un-American activity that you just saw is stunning. That is un-American. They know they’re lying. Donald Trump knows that’s a lie. He will tell you that the Secret Service, he thought, did the best job they could do. The fact that JD Vance and Trump’s family would out and out say what they said takes the threat of violence, takes the threat beyond where it was even leading up to January the 6th. This is an increasingly desperate person, an increasingly desperate family, who is preparing for civil war. They just are.”

He’s not wrong. The desperation is just dripping from the Trump clan.