If I took shots like that I’d have to call an ambulance.
Lawrence O'Donnell tears into the media, "The very same news media that ignored all the times Trump has called American citizens and American voters scum and garbage and actually tried to turn Joe Biden's use of the word garbage into a controversial new story today." pic.twitter.com/OOrkbub4fa
Musk-funded door knockers crammed into a Michigan van.
As I said, we have the press underfoot at Democratic headquarters in Asheville. We’re damned good at get-out-the-vote operations. (I wrote a guide for it.) The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank came to visit and saw for himself (on a day I wasn’t at HQ):
Forty thousand volunteers have signed up since Harris became the candidate, on top of those who were already volunteering for Biden. The Harris campaign has been running four shifts of daily canvassing here — at 9 a.m., noon, 3 p.m. and 6 p.m. — in which hundreds of volunteers knock on thousands of doors. Last week, campaign volunteers knocked on more than 100,000 doors and made more than 1.8 million phone calls in North Carolina alone. Comparable efforts are underway in every swing state.
Scamming the scammer
Speaking of comparisons.
And the Trump campaign?
Well, it seems to be accomplishing a whole lot of nothing on the ground. As the Republican nominee spent a lot of the campaign hawking sneakers and trading cards to enrich himself and turning the Republican National Committee into a cult of personality, he neglected to build a field operation. At the last minute, the campaign tried to outsource the function to billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, who has poured some $75 million into an astroturf effort, paying canvassers to knock on doors and (possibly illegally) bribing people to register to vote with $1 million giveaways.
But the operation has floundered. A quarter of the door-knocks done by Musk’s paid workers are reportedly suspected of being fake in some battleground states — who knew that $20-per-hour hired guns might not be as dedicated to the cause as passionate volunteers? — and the operation has failed to meet its (relatively low) targets.
These people are election door-knockers in the back of a seatless U-haul van who were flown to Michigan by a contractor for Elon Musk’s America PAC to door knock for Donald Trump.
“America PAC door knockers were flown to Michigan, driven in the back of a U-Haul, and told they’d have to pay hotel bills unless they met unrealistic quotas. One was surprised they were working to elect Donald Trump.”
Trump-the-scammer is being scammed. Musk too, perhaps. He can land a rocket booster, but can he land a presidential campaign? Doubtful.
Democrats’ turnout machine in North Carolina is humming. Our HQ is a hive of activity, as Milbank saw for himself.
In the Democratic stronghold of Asheville in western North Carolina, I spent a couple of hours last week following Democratic volunteer Bess McDavid as she went door to door. She downloaded her assigned “turf” from the coordinated campaign (a joint operation of the Harris campaign and the state Democratic Party) into her canvassing app, “MiniVAN,” which identified those on her route who had not yet voted. She gets a call before her scheduled canvassing time from a campaign staffer to make sure she hasn’t forgotten, she walks the route ranking each voter as “Strong Harris” or something less, and at the end of the day, she gets another call from a Harris staffer to debrief her.
McDavid stopped at about 35 homes (in a neighborhood largely unscathed by the recent hurricane) during my time with her, handing out information about early voting and urging neighbors to get to the nearest polling place. Of all those who answered the door, only one said she wouldn’t be voting, and another was a Republican who had recently moved in. But the rest required no pushing:
“I’m trying to get my husband to come with me.”
They encountered more like that too. But this is Buncombe County. Of course, they did.
There’s no way to compare this year’s early vote turnout with 2020. Too many variables are different. Republicans are outvoting Democrats for the first time we’ve seen in early voting. But women are outvoting men statewide by 11 points. And those 23 percent of Republicans who voted for Nikki Haley in the NC GOP primary? What will they do? Has Hurricane Helene impacted our operations in the west? Sure. But with no pandemic, absentee-by-mail is off dramatically, as you’d expect, so it’s apples and oranges.
Do I feel good? Yes. Frankly, I feel better than I did going into Election Day 2016. And we know what happened then.
“Women are voting early in huge numbers, far outpacing men,” Politico reports this week.
Among the reasons why? Pregnant women are dying.
ProPublica has the story of yet another tragic, preventable death. Josseli Barnica was 28:
Josseli Barnica grieved the news as she lay in a Houston hospital bed on Sept. 3, 2021: The sibling she’d dreamt of giving her daughter would not survive this pregnancy.
The fetus was on the verge of coming out, its head pressed against her dilated cervix; she was 17 weeks pregnant and a miscarriage was “in progress,” doctors noted in hospital records. At that point, they should have offered to speed up the delivery or empty her uterus to stave off a deadly infection, more than a dozen medical experts told ProPublica.
But when Barnica’s husband rushed to her side from his job on a construction site, she relayed what she said the medical team had told her: “They had to wait until there was no heartbeat,” he told ProPublica in Spanish. “It would be a crime to give her an abortion.”
For 40 hours, the anguished 28-year-old mother prayed for doctors to help her get home to her daughter; all the while, her uterus remained exposed to bacteria.
Three days after she delivered, Barnica died of an infection.
Barnica’s death was preventable, say a dozen medical experts. The death of her fetus was not.
Barnica is one of at least two Texas women who ProPublica found lost their lives after doctors delayed treating miscarriages, which fall into a gray area under the state’s strict abortion laws that prohibit doctors from ending the heartbeat of a fetus.
Neither had wanted an abortion, but that didn’t matter. Though proponents insist that the laws protect both the life of the fetus and the person carrying it, in practice, doctors have hesitated to provide care under threat of prosecution, prison time and professional ruin.
This is Texas, y’all. Under a Trump/Project 2025 regime, it’s coming to a state near you.
After reviewing the four-page summary, which included the timeline of care noted in hospital records, all agreed that requiring Barnica to wait to deliver until after there was no detectable fetal heartbeat violated professional medical standards because it could allow time for an aggressive infection to take hold. They said there was a good chance she would have survived if she was offered an intervention earlier.
“If this was Massachusetts or Ohio, she would have had that delivery within a couple hours,” said Dr. Susan Mann, a national patient safety expert in obstetric care who teaches at Harvard University.
I’ve long criticized the left’s condescension that conservatives are voting against their best interests. People vote their identities. This year, women across the political divide have reason to vote both. Donald Trump is promising not what he’ll do for your but what he’ll do to you whether you like it or not. What he’s with Dobbs and brags about is killing women. He’s just getting warmed up. Women know it.
Think they’re joking? When the MAGA right is trolling, they’re not joking. They’re telling you exactly who they are.
Across battlegrounds, there is a 10-point gender gap in early voting so far: Women account for roughly 55 percent of the early vote, while men are around 45 percent, according to a POLITICO analysis of early vote data in several key states. The implications for next week’s election results are unclear; among registered Republicans, women are voting early more than men, too. But the high female turnout is encouraging to Democratic strategists, who expected that a surge in Republican turnout would result in more gender parity among early voters.
[…]
“In some states women are actually exceeding their vote share from 2020, which is at this point shocking to me,” said Tom Bonier, a Democratic strategist and CEO of the data firm TargetSmart. “I never would have bet on that.”
A quick tabulation shows women outvoting men in NC by 11 points, FYI.
It may also help explain why he’s already starting to spread false claims of fraud, before we even get to Election Day. He’s worried he’s going to lose. pic.twitter.com/XtmsQS9Kek
Now that it’s clear that Elon is “Dark Gothic MAGA” he’s using multiple ways to help Trump return to power. Here’s one I spotted the other day, from Doge Designer (a suspected Musk sock puppet account).
He says Elon Musk’s PAC launched an X Community focused on “exposing voter fraud and election interference” and it asks people to post videos or information about “election interference” or “anything compromising election integrity” in the X Community.
What’s this really about? It’s a place to dump false and unverified stories that can be used to create the appearance of widespread voter fraud. It will be used right after the election to demand that the votes not be certified until the “fraud” is investigated. It’s also about “flooding the zone with sh*t” in social media so that the media, who are all still on Twitter/X, will have to address all the “fraud” that is posted. Especially since the Musk X algorithm will be amplifying them.
I went to X’s “Election Integrity Community” and found a handful of posts. Three were looking to dox someone who delivered ballots. MAGAts are going after a postal worker for doing his job. Just like they went after election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss for doing their jobs.
This line of attack, going after someone dropping off multiple ballots, presuming they are fraudulent, is the same one used by the widely debunked film 2,000 Mules.
For years I have been writing about the FAILURE of social media companies to enforce their own rules and guidelines about threats of violence on their platforms. Legislators in most states have FAILED to pass laws to address the harm from doxing and harassments of public health officials & workers during the height of the pandemic.
So what are people like this ballot delivery guy to do when they start getting death threats and harassed? Report them to the DOJ’s Election Threats Task Force. It was set up in 2021 for this purpose.
It’s good that the Election Threats Task Force exists, but it’s not enough to change the attitude that it’s okay to threaten, dox and harass people online. Because of that attitude I’ve been suggesting the use of civil cases.
How do we bust Musk & the MAGA attackers of election workers?
I’m the kind of Vulcan who wants to know the logical steps for how to do things, & then prepare for the illogical actions of humans who do NOT WANT TO DO those things. I say to people, “This is our 3rd rodeo.” We’ve seen these tricks before. We know how the bull will buck. We know how the orange-faced rodeo clown will try to distract us from our goal.
I’m betting that MAGA people will find the ballot delivery man, dox, harass and threaten him. The Election Threats Task Force will need to be alerted to investigate. They might not be able to successfully prosecute a criminal case, because the laws against harassment and doxing aren’t in every state, but it is their mission to take on these kinds of cases. They have the resources to track down all the connections to his threats, including those who amplified, organized and spread false & unverified information that was used to target him. But as I said, lots of humans in law enforcement do NOT want to investigate & prosecute anything that has to do with WORDS. Because of that history I’ve been teaching people. & groups how to file civil lawsuits against the people who defamed and threaten them.
I hope that concurrently to the Task Force investigation the doxxed, harrrassed & threatened ballot deliverer goes to the group that won the Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss civil defamation case. Or the group that sued Dinesh D’Souza, & The Salem Media group.
He will need resources to sue Elon Musk, his PAC and the people who carried out the threats. But, there are now multiple successful cases that the lawyers can point to as a reason to keep the lawsuits going for the years it will take. People need to know Musk has lost cases. He doesn’t prepare for the lawsuits that will come following his rash actions and that makes vulnerable. He has a grade school level of understanding of the law & thinks his definition of free speech is a get out of jail free card for when he breaks laws about speech that is not protected..
The other reason I want to see civil cases is so the lawyers for the plaintiffs can keep talking about the case in public. Civil lawsuits don’t go into the black hole of the DOJ and come out 19 month later with a press release about the win. The DOJ is TERRIBLE at promoting their successful prosecution of threats to election workers and officials.
For example, did you hear about Brian Ogstad, the guy who got 30 months in prison for threatening Arizona election workers? Of course you didn’t! The DOJ put out a press release, didn’t you read it? It didn’t have any photos of Ogstad though, so the media that DID pick it up showed images of a ballot box or a building. I searched for him and found the photo below from when he “confronted” the Cullman City Council on it’s COVID-19 response. )
Brian Ogstad, recording with his phone, confronts the Cullman City Council over the City’s COVID-19 response in August 2021. (Cullman Tribune file photo)
Brian Ogstad, a former business professor at Maricopa Community Colleges, sent 18 messages to Maricopa County Election workers between August 2 and August 4, 2022, a majority of which contained threats against the workers’ lives. (Photo taken from X, formerly Twitter)
I wanted to make a short video of the threats Ogstad & others made that was powerful enough to get on Fox News, but it’s hard when the DOJ doesn’t even bother to provide MUG shots of the people they put away for years for their true threats to election workers.
In the past people would ask private entities to enforce their own rules & guidelines about speech, especially on social media where people said things that that were “awful, but lawful.” But Musk ignores rules developed on his own platform to protect the community from harm. The “Election Integrity community” looks like it is violating X’s OWN Civil Integrity rules, which, sadly, no one expects Musk to follow. But based on what I’ve seen so far, the new X community violates multiple state and federal laws. I’m going to dig into it more, but just because Musk is protected under rule 230 of the Telecommunication Act, doesn’t mean he’s above all laws. Stay tuned.
October Surprise: Speaker Johnson lets slip him and Trump's "secret" is to repeal the Affordable Care Act and pre-existing conditions protections in first 100 days
I think we can count on the Obamacare wars to flare up again the minute Trump takes the White House. Mike Johnson is the guy to get ‘er done. He says “we want to take a blowtorch to the regulatory state” which sounds terrific.
By the way, I’m not sure that’s the October Surprise. In fact, I’m guessing we’re going to have a November or December Surprise, if anything. The Supreme Court just decided to let states purge their voter rolls just before the election, in contravention of established law, so it looks like they’re ready to give old Trumpie plenty of rope to hang the country when he brings his bogus election cases before them. And if he loses, he will.
Never Trumper Bill Kristol, like others of his ilk, has had an epiphany. In today’s Bulwark he discusses Trump’s hastily put together event at Mar-a-lago yesterday (it can’t be called a press conference) in which he said of his Madison Square Garden rally:
The love in that room, it was breathtaking. There’s never been an event that beautiful. It was a love fest. It was love for our country.
Gak. Kristol notes that this has a disturbing parallel with Orwell’s 1984 in which the repressive Interior Ministry of Oceania “the place where submission to Big Brother is ultimately enforced” is called The Ministry of Love. That sounds about right.
He’s not a Trump fan, that much is clear. Which means he’s not insane or a coward as so many Republicans are. But I did not expect this:
Yesterday, between Trump’s remarks at Mar-a-Lago and Harris’s speech at the Ellipse, I voted here in Virginia. Watching Harris’s speech later on, I wasn’t merely comfortable with my vote for her. I’ve got to say that I was proud to be a Harris voter. I’m sure she’ll disappoint me if she wins. They always do. But she’s risen to the occasion in this campaign in a way that speaks to much that is admirable about today’s America, the America that Trump and Miller and Bannon hate, but that many of us do love.
I never thought I’d see something like that from a conservative movement warrior like Kristol. Good for him. Let’s hope there are more like him out there.
