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Election Interference Hits Keep Coming

Published by Tom Sullivan on December 22, 2023

Trump caught in another recording

“Tomorrow’s news tonight,” Detroit News posted Thursday evening.

Motown’s Berry Gordy might have set the recording to music but Detroit News got there first:

Then-President Donald Trump personally pressured two Republican members of the Wayne County Board of Canvassers not to sign the certification of the 2020 presidential election, according to recordings reviewed by The Detroit News and revealed publicly for the first time.

On a Nov. 17, 2020, phone call, which also involved Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel, Trump told Monica Palmer and William Hartmann, the two GOP Wayne County canvassers, they’d look “terrible” if they signed the documents after they first voted in opposition and then later in the same meeting voted to approve certification of the county’s election results, according to the recordings.

“We’ve got to fight for our country,” said Trump on the recordings, made by a person who was present for the call with Palmer and Hartmann. “We can’t let these people take our country away from us.”

Trump didn’t insist they “find 11,780 votes,” but you get the idea. Special prosecutor Jack Smith and Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel will too. Nessel had best increase her personal security before expressing her interest publicly.

McDaniel, a Michigan native and the leader of the Republican Party nationally, said at another point in the call, “If you can go home tonight, do not sign it. … We will get you attorneys.”

To which Trump added: “We’ll take care of that.”

Help me Ronna | Help, help me Ronna

Is it time for McDaniel to lawyer up?

Palmer and Hartmann left the meeting without signing the Wayne County certification. The next day, they tried and failed to rescind their votes for certification, Detroit News adds.

McDaniel, a Wayne County resident, said she stood by her past push for an audit of the election in Michigan, a request she and then-Michigan Republican Party Chairwoman Laura Cox made in a Nov. 21, 2020, letter to the Board of State Canvassers.

“What I said publicly and repeatedly at the time, as referenced in my letter on Nov. 21, 2020, is that there was ample evidence that warranted an audit,” McDaniel said in a statement.

But Jonathan Kinloch, who was a Democratic member of the Wayne County Board of Canvassers in November 2020, said what happened on the call with Trump was “insane.”

“It’s just shocking that the president of the United States was at the most minute level trying to stop the election process from happening,” said Kinloch, a Wayne County commissioner.

At another point in the conversation, McDaniel told the pair that if they certified without demanding an audit, people would “never know what happened in Detroit.”

Trump leveled similar fraud accusations against heavily Black communities in Atlanta, Milwaukee and Philadelphia. Trump insisted on social media that in Detroit there were more votes than people. “I win Michigan!” he insisted.

Detroit News reminds readers that Trump’s statement was incorrect.

“If ballots had been illegally counted, there would be substantially more, not slightly fewer, ballots tabulated than names in the poll books,” Jonathan Brater, the director of the state Bureau of Elections, wrote in a 2020 affidavit submitted in response to a lawsuit filed by Sidney Powell of “Kraken” fame.

A spokesman for the RNC declined Politico’s request for comment on the Detroit News story:

“All of President Trump’s actions were taken in furtherance of his duty as President of the United States to faithfully take care of the laws and ensure election integrity, including investigating the rigged and stolen 2020 Presidential Election. President Trump and the American people have the Constitutional right to free and fair elections,” Steven Cheung, a spokesperson for the former president, said in a statement to POLITICO.

Comparisons with Trump’s recorded call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger are obvious. Mark Meadows has insisted his participation on the Georgia call was simply part of his role as the president’s chief of staff. Election integrity and all that.

So much criming

Conservative attorney George Conway told CNN on Thursday that the report could lead to additional charges against Trump (Raw Story):

“I mean, there is no factual basis given for the claim there was fraud, and there was intimidation involved,” Conway continued. “And according to the Detroit News article, it’s suggested by a former elections official there that in essence what was happening here, he suggests, is that they were being induced by the — by the promise of legal protection, by the promise of getting attorneys for them to violate their official duties, which potentially could be an additional crime under Michigan law.”

And possibly charges for McDaniel:

“It’s one big fix”

If someone has set “Everthing Trump Touches Dies” to music, I haven’t seen it. In the meantime….

Update: Fallout

Happy Hollandaise!

What Are They Going To Do About All The Unwanted Babies?

Published by digby on December 21, 2023

Anti-abortion zealots aren’t going to adopt them, that’s for sure

We know they don’t care about babies once they’re out of the womb. Why would they want to adopt them?

Reminder:

Sixty percent of kids who have lost Medicaid coverage this year came from just nine states, all of which are Republican-led, according to new data from the Biden administration.

And the 10 states refusing the Affordable Care Act’s expansion of Medicaid to low-income adults have disenrolled more kids than all of the expansion states combined, the administration also reported… Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Montana, New Hampshire, Ohio, South Dakota and Texas

Some of those states (I’m looking at you Texas and Florida) among those states with the most draconian abortion bans in the nation.

This should be embarrassingly hypocritical to these people but they are shameless. After all, these are the same clinic harassers who whine that the man “harassing” them about adoption is being rude.

I highly recommend reading this piece in In These Times about what happens to people who are forced to have more children than they can afford. This is happening in Mississippi:

I first wrote about Lationna after visiting her in March, when she was still on unpaid maternity leave. She told me then that she had always planned to have a second baby someday, once her life was more stable. She’d wanted to be married, better paid, and for the family to live in a house instead of their cramped apartment in West Jackson, Miss. She’d been planning to go to cosmetology school so she could leave her job — which paid barely above minimum wage at $8.50 an hour — and follow her dreams to start her own beauty business.

But instead, in July 2022, she’d learned she was pregnant — just weeks after the Supreme Court struck down the constitutional right to abortion with its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a case that originated in Lationna’s home state. Mississippi’s abortion ban trigger law went into effect less than two weeks later. She contacted the only abortion clinic that remained in the state but never heard back because it had already closed. She didn’t have the money to travel out of state.

Kingsley was born at the end of January. In the early days, Lationna was struggling to adjust to being a new mom when she hadn’t chosen to be, wrestling with sleepless nights, isolation and postpartum depression. After Lationna went back to work, she and Kendall entered a new phase, enjoying a bit more sleep but trying desperately to figure out how to afford raising a child they hadn’t planned for with scant government help. The typical exhaustion and chaos of parenting two young children has been exacerbated by a lack of control over the timing and their economic precarity. Mississippi does virtually nothing to ease that precarity, and despite some pledges from lawmakers to do more to assist children and families after it banned abortion, little has changed in the year and a half since Lationna was deprived of autonomy over her own body.

Now that 21 states have banned or severely restricted abortion, an untold number of people are following in Lationna’s footsteps: trying to piece together enough money to care for a new child they weren’t ready for and navigating government bureaucracies in states that offer families little to no financial relief. Lationna and Kendall have caught a few lucky breaks, but for each advance they make the tide pulls them further backward, barely treading water as their dreams and ambitions drift further and further away. 

These extremists are the destroyers of dreams. It’s heartbreaking.

Happy Hollandaise!

They’re Just Letting Their Freak Flags Fly

Published by digby on December 21, 2023

Trump showed the GOP they can be as racist as they want to be

They don’t care about no woke criticism. They’re just going for it:

Donald Trump is getting headlines for saying immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.” But for months the GOP race for president has been shadowed by xenophobia, as some candidates or those backing them have embraced racist and white nationalist themes.

It’s partly a reflection of how Trump has moved Republican politics toward the harder-edged, “us vs. them” view that now dominates the GOP’s base and is reshaping its membership in Congress.

This is from Axios. It’s nice that they’ve noticed it’s not just Trump. It’s very important to report this because there may be a handful of people who have always voted Republican who are not exactly on board with the crudeness of this. (The dog whistles always provided deniability.)

Even as the GOP has recruited more minority prospects for public office — this year’s initial field for the presidential race was historically diverse — more Republicans are latching onto Trump’s racially divisive rhetoric.

Vivek Ramaswamy, the son of Indian immigrants, has won fans among white nationalists for promoting the “Great Replacement Theory,” a racist conspiracy theory that nonwhite people are being allowed into the U.S. and other Western countries to replace white voters. Ramaswamy, who among the GOP candidates has been particularly reluctant to criticize Trump, also has campaigned with former Rep. Steve King, an Iowa Republican who has said that U.S. culture can’t be restored “with somebody else’s babies” and called for an America “so homogeneous that we look a lot the same.”

Last summer, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ team fired a speechwriter who created campaign material with neo-Nazi imagery, then shared it on a pro-DeSantis Twitter account.

More recently, some far-righters, conservative groups and others have begun calling former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley — whose parents were Indian immigrants — “Nimarata,” her first name, rather than Nikki, the middle name she has gone by for most of her life. The emphasis on Haley’s Indian heritage has escalated as she has risen in GOP polls and cast herself as a less chaotic, more sensitive conservative than Trump. Ramaswamy has called Haley “lying Nimarata Randhawa,” referencing her family name before marriage.

[…]

At the Turning Point’s convention last weekend, some attendees were asked to mark their preference for Trump’s vice presidential pick on a screen, on which Haley was identified as “Nimarata Nikki Randhawa Haley.” On the board, Haley’s face was scribbled over and someone had written “Boo!” next to it. Two others on the informal survey, conservative commentator Tucker Carlson and Arizona Senate candidate Kari Lake, were identified only by their first names.

The Turning Point scene was partly a reflection of attendees’ loyalty to Trump, but the emphasis on Haley’s nonwhite heritage was hard to miss. It echoed Trump’s frequent, derisive mentions of former President Barack Obama’s middle name — Hussein — even though Trump never ran against Obama. Critics have called Trump’s tactic a racist dog-whistle.

There’s no containing it now. As Axios reports, they had the chance after their 2012 “autopsy” report which made clear that their racism was hurting the party nationally and depriving it of a future They went with Trump instead. And here we are.

This is going to be very clarifying. You’ll recall the old Lee Atwater admonition to the GOP that the country was changing and their habit of screaming the N-word as they did back in the 50s and then moderating to to talk about “busing” or “welfare” wasn’t going to work forever. Well, this is about to be tested, big time. Trump is openly channeling Adolph Hitler. Republicans are going after one of their biggest non-white stars. It’s only a matter of time before he says the n-word in public. Mark my words.

Happy Hollandaise everyone. Buckle up …

Polls, polls, polls

Published by digby on December 21, 2023

What’s this I hear about Trump running away with the general election?

Nobody on your TV is going to tell you this, so I will:

Polls mean nothing right now, as you know. But these are no more meaningless than any of the others.

The sad reality is that this race is inexplicably close and Democrats are going to have to work their asses off. Too many people have forgotten what a nightmare Trump was and unfortunately tens of millions of people loved him then and love him now. (That’s what should keep us up at night…)

Still, considering the relentless doom and gloom about Biden over the past few months, I think we should take heart in the fact that despite the sour mood in the country at least half the people haven’t lost their minds.

Happy Hollandaise!

A Little Happy News For The Holidays

Published by digby on December 21, 2023

It couldn’t happen to a nice bunch of zealots

Rep. Thomas Massie and family

I’m sure you’ll recall that the NRA recently had a little “controversy” when it turned out that their revered leader Wayne LaPierre was livin’ the life of a Clarence Thomas on the members’ dues. Well, things have gotten even worse:

While the events contributing to the NRA’s freefall have been well-documented, a review of the gun rights group’s tax filings and political spending over the last 15 years provides some of the clearest evidence of its downfall—showing just how badly the legal setbacks and mismanagement have ravaged the once-formidable gun lobbying giant.

The NRA’s most recent tax return, filed in November of this year for 2022, reveals dramatic declines along almost every conceivable metric: revenue, assets, member dues, lobbying, and political spending—with conversely sharp increases in legal costs and deficits.

And as the NRA’s power and influence has waned, gun violence has perversely soared, particularly suicides, especially in the wake of the pandemic.

In one view, the NRA’s decline might be seen as a consequence of its own “success,” as its gargantuan lobbying efforts in the early to mid-2010s effectively froze the national gun control debate, diminishing the advocacy group’s utility. Still, that might be changing.

In 2022, 15 GOP senators repudiated the NRA, passing the first meaningful gun control package in decades. That could be a signal of the NRA’s demise, but it also could be interpreted as a reaction to the surging gun violence that continues to this day in part because of the lax gun laws that the NRA advocated for and won over that time.

What is clear is that the NRA today is in a dismal state. On the income side, 2022 was the fourth year in a row that revenue fell, marking its weakest fundraising year since at least 2008. Membership dues are at all-time lows, according to available public data, and staffing is at the lowest point since those costs began their downward plunge in 2016, while the group’s legal costs—largely driven by civil actions alleging rampant mismanagement of funds and self-dealing—are proportionately higher than ever.

I think the gun proliferation zealotry is now so thoroughly inculcated on the right that they are no longer needed. It’s possible that there will be some tweaking around the edges but when the Supremes finally validated the individual right to bear arms in 2008, the deal was pretty well sealed short of a constitutional amendment. Who needs the NRA when you have the high court?

It’s going to take a major sea change to change this status quo. I wish I could see an end to it. Still, it’s a nice Christmas present to see this article. The world is a better place without the NRA running the Republican Party.

Update —
On the other hand, who needs the Republican Party if you have nihilistic fanatics on the court?

A federal judge on Wednesday blocked a California law that would have banned carrying firearms in most public places, ruling that it violates the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and deprives people of their ability to defend themselves and their loved ones.

The law signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom in September was set to take effect Jan. 1. It would have prohibited people from carrying concealed guns in 26 places including public parks and playgrounds, churches, banks and zoos. The ban would apply whether the person has a permit to carry a concealed weapon or not. One exception would be for privately owned businesses that put up signs saying people are allowed to bring guns on their premises.

U.S. District Judge Cormac Carney granted a preliminary injunction blocking the law, which he wrote was “sweeping, repugnant to the Second Amendment, and openly defiant of the Supreme Court.”

The court case against the law will proceed while the law is blocked. The judge wrote that gun rights groups are likely to succeed in proving it unconstitutional, meaning it would be permanently overturned.

Happy Hollandaise!

Trump’s Going With The Hitler Thing

Published by digby on December 21, 2023

He thinks it’s working for him

Of course it’s Miller who’s put the Nazi talk back into the discourse. Trump doesn’t know from “vermin.” He would just say “rat.” Trump is an instinctive fascist not an ideological one. And that may even be worse:

IN THE DAYS following Donald Trump’s remarks that migrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” the 2024 GOP frontrunner was met with a wave of Democratic and media criticism, likening his speech to Nazi rhetoric. In response to the Adolf Hitler comparisons, Trump has privately vowed to further amp up the volume on his extreme, anti-immigrant messaging, according to two sources who’ve spoken to him since his rally in New Hampshire last weekend. 

“He wants the media to choke on his words,” one of these sources says. “The [former] president said he’s going to keep doing it, he’s going to keep saying they’re poisoning the blood of the nation and destroying and killing the country … He says it’s a ‘great line.’” (Trump has been publicly using this specific phrase since at least September.)

According to the second source, Trump said in recent days that he was being “too nice” about the “animals” and alleged gang members who cross the southern border, whom Trump routinely accuses of flooding the United States with drugs, diseases, and violent crime. This person relays to Rolling Stone that Trump also said he and his campaign will be rolling out newer, even “tougher” policy proposals on immigration in 2024, and that his supporters should look out for them because they’ll be “very happy.” His current slate of 2024 immigration policy prescriptions include militarizing the southern border to a shocking degree, reimposing and expanding his travel “Muslim ban,” and building a vast network of new detention camps to house undocumented immigrants awaiting deportation.

It is no mystery why Trump’s hard-right, increasingly authoritarian rhetoric and policy promises have become a prime feature of his reelection bid. It’s not just music to the ears of various MAGAdonians, or the logical conclusion of his presidential campaign launch in 2015. It’s because there are more mainstream Republicans now — advising Trump, at influential think tanks and advocacy groups, or in positions of power in the House and Senate and elsewhere —  openly embracing and encouraging his rhetoric.

It does appear that the GOP base and establishment are thrilled with all the fascist talk and are clamoring for more.

If that doesn’t alarm you, it should.

The Price Of Muffins

Published by Tom Sullivan on December 21, 2023

And $6 boxes of cereal

Between degrees I worked as a waiter. I preferred tips on a credit card. Yes, that made them more reportable. But it also made them bigger. Customers seemed more generous when the cash didn’t come directly out of their wallets. They felt the bite more when they plopped down cash.

Americans’ sense that their personal economy remains unwell may stem from something like that. Great economic data is abstract. Six-dollar boxes of breakfast cereal are not. Nor five dollars for a dozen eggs.

That’s what Americans feel most, The Atlantic‘s Gilad Edelman explains:

Working with Leger, a North American polling firm, we asked 1,005 Americans how they felt about the economy. As with other recent polls, this one painted a gloomy picture. Only 20 percent of people said that the economy has gotten better over the past year, compared with the 44 percent who said it has gotten worse. (There was a big partisan split, but even among self-identified Democrats, only 33 percent said the economy has improved.) Then we asked them to choose, from a long list, what factors they consider when deciding how the national economy is doing. The runaway winner was “The price of groceries for your home”: Twenty-nine percent of people picked it as their top choice, and 60 percent of people selected grocery prices among their top three. Other than “inflation” itself, nothing else came close—not gas, not housing, not interest rates, not the cost of major purchases. And when we asked what people had in mind when they reported that their personal finances were getting worse, 81 percent chose groceries.

Home prices may have skyrocketed during the pandemic, but those negatively impact primarily non-homeowners. Homeowners are richer. On paper.

Polling debunks a couple of theories on why people don’t feel the improved economy: the expiration of the government’s pandemic stimulus and expanded child tax credits. And answers depend on how you ask the questions. If people “were coldly rational” and studied their increased incomes, “they would recognize that their income more than offsets higher grocery prices—they’re spending more, but they still have more left over,” Edelman writes.

But as grocery-buyers, we feel the pinch. So does Edelman:

I should confess that I’m among the many Americans who experience prices as an atmospheric economic condition and income as something I earn. Early in the pandemic, I got in the habit of making an egg-and-cheese sandwich for breakfast pretty much every day. I recall a six-pack of Thomas English muffins costing about $3.50 at the time. Today, one costs $5.59 at my nearest Wegman’s and $5.29 at the nearest Safeway and Harris Teeter. An economist would probably say I shouldn’t worry about it. After all, since the start of the pandemic, I have changed jobs twice, and my income has risen more than enough to easily cover the extra $2 a week on English muffins. Still, I can’t bring myself to buy them. My higher income feels like something I accomplished through hard work and patience, but the higher price of English muffins just feels wrong. I settle for cheaper, inferior brands while waiting in vain for Thomas to go back under $5. (Or I grab them when I’m at Target, where for some reason they’re still only $3.49.) Unlike most poll respondents, I don’t conclude from this that the economy is bad. On the very specific dimension of egg sandwiches, however, I suppose I do feel worse off.

I feel your pain. Blueberries I bought through much of the pandemic recently shot up by half at Harris Teeter. The brand-name cereal I once bought at about $3.59/box is now over $6. Some of Harris Teeter’s store-brand clones are surprisingly good at half the cost. Don’t ask about the price of cookies and lettuce. Eggs are cheaper at Trader Joe’s.

If Joe Biden finally catches a break and wins credit for the improving economy by next fall, you and I, Dear Reader, will feel better off. He just might too. Food inflation if flattening. Consumer sentiment “has made up about half the ground it lost from the eve of the pandemic to its nadir in June 2022.” But those 2019 prices are not coming back. The problem is that grocery prices go up more readily than they come down.

“Personally, I still can’t wrap my head around paying $5.29 for six English muffins,” Edelman says. “Ask me again in six months.”

Happy Hollandaise!

Screwed: Them Or Us?

Published by Tom Sullivan on December 21, 2023

This was your court, John Roberts

SCOTUS-watcher Dahlia Lithwick comments on the dilemma in which the Roberts court finds itself. Choose your clichéd metaphor: painted itself into a corner, hoisted on its own petard, shot itself in the foot, chickens coming home, etc.

Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife are just one court soap opera. The fact that conservative funders expend lavish sums to sustain the pair in the style to which they’ve become accustomed makes it clear that both the Federalist Society and SCOTUS conservatives believe justice goes to the highest bidder.

The Colorado Supreme Court’s decision to ban Donald Trump from the state’s primary ballot for engaging in insurrection is on its way to D.C. Thomas will surely not recuse himself from that and other Jan. 6 cases involving players with which his spouse Ginny is closely aligned. This is an imperial court, Lithwick writes, and conservative justices don’t care that we know:

Also in the coming months, with public mistrust for the integrity and character of some of the justices at record lows, the justices will have to help the public understand why they should be trusted to engage in sober, principled deliberations of thorny questions when reporting shows that at least some of them take 10 minutes to read 98 pages, that decisions in major cases are ends-driven and political, and that a couple of them are more than willing to distort the record to cover up for that fact. In the coming months, the public will have to sit with the fact that Justice Samuel Alito told Wall Street Journal opinion writers that the court is untouchable by Congress and with the fact that when the Senate sought testimony from the chief justice last year he just refused to show up. And the public will have to just get really comfortable with the fact that this imperial court thinks that kind of thing is fine.

Chief Justice John Roberts has taken care to oversee his legacy on the court, just not very well, as the previous paragraph suggests. What the “amicus brief industrial complex” has sown, etc.

For years, some of the most vocal critics of the court’s ethical lapses, its lack of transparency, and its refusals to take seriously its own brokenness and errors, have warned that the day would come when an election would be decided by a body that has refused to clean house and has blamed the press and the academy for the stench of its own illegitimacy. The worry wasn’t that the court would decide the election; that seems almost inevitable. The worry was that the public, grown weary of the stench, would not abide by their decision.

… When the hyperpolitical supercharged Trump cases catch up with the court—and that is beginning to happen, right now, this week—all that stench will run headlong into the questions about why the husband of the woman who went to the pep rally for the insurrection and the folks who lied to us all about Dobbs are objective enough to decide the outcome of an election. The same people entrusted with the protecting the reputation of the court have blundered into being wholly responsible for protecting democracy. Not one thing suggests they will take the latter any more seriously than they took the former.

“Late-stage capitalism” is another cliché, one native to the left internet. We are where we are as an unhappy society because laissez faire policies promoted since the time of Reagan (or before) have enabled capitalism’s worst instincts to flourish. The driver, what once was called movement conservatism has reached its logical conclusion and, like a cancer, now threatens to kill the host republic that sustains it.

Underlying that movement are imperial impulses far older: feudalism, monarchy, or worse. Some people still yearn for a king. They’ll settle for a dictator.

Happy Hollandaise!

Appeasement R Us

Published by digby on December 20, 2023

JV Last has a great piece up today about the Colorado decision that you should read in its entirety. I’ll just excerpt this one part:

Have you ever noticed how, whenever Trump does something terrible, there is always an argument that holding him accountable can only help him?

You can’t impeach him in 2020, because it’ll just make him stronger.

You can’t impeach him in 2021, because you’ll turn him into a martyr.

You can’t raid Mar-a-Lago to take back classified documents, because you’ll rile up his base.

You can’t prosecute him for crimes X, Y, and Z, because it’ll make Republican voters love him more.

There is a strange, self-limiting, helplessness to that thinking: A wicked man does immoral and illegal things—and society’s reaction is to say that we must indulge his depredations, because if we tried to hold him accountable then he would become even worse.

Is there any other aspect of life in which Americans take that view?

That’s not how parents deal with children.

It’s not how regulatory agencies deal with corporations.

And it’s not how the justice system deals with criminals.

The only analogue I can come up with is foreign policy: There have been times when American foreign policy has sought to give foreign dictators what they want in order to prevent them from making more trouble.

I am not an expert, but my impression is that this mode of operation has not often led to good outcomes.

This is one of the most frustrating repetitive dynamics in American politics and it makes me want to scream. It’s as Last writes, “Heads Trump Wins, Tails America Loses.” The reactions last night to the Colorado demonstrated that perfectly. Over and over people said things like this:

Sigh.

Last also points out how the opposite dynamic applies to Biden: Heads Biden Loses, Tails Trump wins. No matter what the guy accomplishes it’s always, always framed as a problem. This is what we’re up against folks.

Happy Hollandaise!