Whew. That was brutal. But fair.
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.
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?
“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
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.
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?
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.
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.
The number of migrants crossing into the U.S. illegally at the southern border reached the lowest point of President Biden’s administration in September, three months into his crackdown on asylum claims, according to internal Department of Homeland Security statistics obtained by CBS News.
In September, U.S. Border Patrol agents recorded nearly 54,000 apprehensions of migrants who crossed into the country between legal entry points along the border with Mexico, the government figures show. It’s a smaller figure than the previous Biden-era low in July, when Border Patrol processed roughly 56,000 migrants who crossed the border without authorization.
Border Patrol’s tally of migrant apprehensions in September is the lowest number recorded by the agency since August 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic and the travel restrictions countries enacted in response to it led to a sharp decrease in migration to the U.S. southern border.
It would be nice if there were screaming headlines about this but there are a lot of screaming headlines about everything right now. But considering that Trump’s main line of attack is that hordes of migrants are coming to slit your throats in your kitchen (he actually says that) it seems pretty salient.
I happened to spend some time with a highly intelligent 17 year old over the weekend who’s taking AP Government and is keenly interested in the election. She’s following all the polling and the punditry and knows the ins and out of the battleground map better than most adults I talk to. And she said something that struck me because I hadn’t really considered it before.
We were talking about the VP debate and she found it odd that it was so civil. She kept waiting for something to happen. And I realized that there are millions of people for whom Trump’s brand of demagogic politics is normal. They are either young like this person and have literally grown up in this era of bad feelings or they are those for whom politics wasn’t of interest until Trump came along. That’s a lot of people who don’t know that it isn’t supposed to be this way.
Granted we have had more spirited arguments in televised political debates than the one we witnessed last week between JD Vance and Tim Walz. But we never had the kind of debates like those that Donald Trump has participated in since 2016. It’ also true that we never had election campaigns like Donald Trump’s presidential campaigns and we certainly never had a presidency like his. You have to wonder, is this going to be the way it is going forward even after he’s gone?
It’s hard to imagine that it will be exactly the same. Trump is sui generis. But what has the next generation of GOP leaders learned from him that can be put to use for their own ambition? I imagine there are many things but I think there is one very clear lesson.: they can lie with impunity. And some of the new leaders like Vance and House Speaker Mike Johnson, have obviously discovered that if they lie with a congenial look on their face, there is no limit to how much they can get away with.
Politicians have always lied to some degree, of course. In the past we used to call it spin because they would not dare to just lie outright and essentially tell the voters that they shouldn’t believe their own eyes or depend on their own memories. But what we are seeing today is a major shift in what is acceptable in politics. And it goes way beyond Trump.
Vance does not have a naturally pleasant personality but he discovered in that debate that if he didn’t crudely disparage “childless cat ladies” or accuse Haitian immigrants of eating pets, he could lie flagrantly about the past and his plans for the future as long as he kept a smile on his face. Consider that he congenially but blatantly lied about having said that he favored a national abortion ban, that Donald Trump had saved Obamacare, that carbon emissions aren’t the main cause of climate change (suggesting that climate change is “weird science”),that Chinese imports raised the cost of consumer goods etc.
That’s not spin. It’s an assault on reality. Those lies and more went unchecked and I would guess that millions of people watching believed him because he said them with such a pleasant tone.
Out on the stump Vance plays to the MAGA crowd, but he’s just as dishonest. One of his favorite lines is “They couldn’t beat him politically, so they tried to bankrupt him. They failed at that, so they tried to impeach him. They failed at that, so they tried to put him in prison. They even tried to kill him.” Whichever persona he assumes, attack dog or affable colleague, the lies are the one consistent feature of his speeches.
Another up-and-comer, Mike Johnson, ever the reasonable sounding fellow, has become adept at MAGA lying. Just this weekend he went on Fox News and said that the federal response to Hurricane Helene is a failure.
That’s a lie and he knows it. You can ask any of the Republican Governors and local officials in the affected area and they will say that the feds have been on the ground since before the hurricane hit and have been excellently coordinating the massive response. In the past one would have expected this sort of thing from the likes of Florida gadfly Rep. Matt Gaetz but not the Speaker of the House. This kind of blatant falsehood is now completely normal among Republicans. They are spreading these lies on social media and television and are backed up by Trump’s eager endorser Elon Musk and a massive disinformation campaign.
How about Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fl., was once a respectable conservative and considered a strong candidate for president. Today he sounds like a Russian trollbot on X:
The last two reports have been revised up but that beside the point. The BLS is a non-partisan agency. He knows this. He is lying.
Republicans do this reflexively now, without any fear of repurcussions from their voters some of whom actually respect them for doing it while those poor souls who actually believe what they’re saying give them money and take their lives into their hands. There is no price to be paid for dishonesty and evidently they believe they have something to gain.
This didn’t start with Donald Trump although he’s the first one to turn a profit at it. This really started back in the 1990s with Newt Gingrich and the primer written by Republican strategist Frank Luntz called “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control” for Gingrich’s political action committee GOPAC. A few years later we were lied into the Iraq war by the Bush administration.
New York Times Magazine published an article in 2004 by reporter Ron Suskind who interviewed a senior administration aide, presumed to be Bush’s Brain Karl Rove:
The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’ […] ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do’.
I’m not sure Rove thought it would devolve into the orgy of lying about everything, distorting even their own concept of reality, but that’s where we are now. (Thanks a lot Karl.)Perhaps it was inevitable that a celebrity demagogue and pathological liar would take the mantle of “history’s actor” and turn it into political world wide wrestling but the consequences of this little experiment are dire.
We owe it to my young 17 year old friend to do everything we can to turn this country back into the reality based community. No society can function swimming in deceit and corruption for very long. And right now we are drowning in it.
Salon