Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Some of you who aren’t on social media may not have heard about this since it’s getting zero coverage in the mainstream media. I suspect this is what the rumor everyone was talking about week or so ago was all about. In another time, it would be an earthquake but in this election I think they’ve decided that it’s just too much.

The Daily Beast reports:

Jeffrey Epstein described himself as Donald Trump’s “closest friend” and claimed intimate knowledge of his proclivity for sex, including cuckolding his best friends, according to recordings obtained exclusively by the Daily Beast.

The convicted pedophile even boasted of his closeness to Trump and his now-wife Melania by claiming, “the first time he slept with her was on my plane,” which was dubbed the Lolita Express.

Epstein spoke at length about Trump with the author Michael Wolff in August 2017, two years before being found dead in his jail cell. Wolff was researching his bombshell bestseller Fire and Fury at the time.

The recordings cast more light on Trump’s long relationship with Epstein and will add to debate over the character of the Republican candidate, especially his attitudes and conduct towards women, just days before the election.

The tapes tell Epstein’s version of the relationship of two former friends and their very different paths–one towards infamy, prison and suicide–the other toward power, the Oval Office and his own criminal conviction for paying hush money to a porn star.

Trump’s camp referred to the tapes’ release as “false smears” and “election interference.”

The tapes also offer unusual insight into a friendship of two men frequently out on the town together and pursuing women, prowling New York and Atlantic City, using their wealth and power.

Epstein painted a complicated portrait of Trump. He called him “charming,” and “always fun,” capable of extraordinary salesmanship and suggested he was personally in favor of Trump’s policies on“the transgender stuff.” But he alleged Trump was a serial cheat in his marriages and loved to “f— the wives of his best friends.”

He also claimed that while Trump has friends, he was at heart a friendless man incapable of kindness. And he alleged that Trump had had scalp reduction surgery for baldness and called himself “The Trumpster.”

Asked by Wolff, “How do you know all this?” Epstein replied: “I was Donald’s closest friend for 10 years.”

Wolff shared the tape with the Daily Beast ahead of discussing it on his Fire and Fury podcast on Monday. Last Thursday he caused shockwaves by revealing a few seconds of a separate recording in which Epstein spoke in detail about the inner workings of the Trump administration. Wolff also said Thursday that the pedophile showed off photos of Trump with topless young women sitting in his lap.

They think those pictures may have been confiscated by the FBI when they arrested Epstein. But they may still be out there…

You may wonder why Ghislaine Maxwell hasn’t blown the whistle on this since she’s in prison probably for the rest of her life. I have no idea. But I do know that if I had observed the way Jeffrey Epstein went out while he was held in prison (and holding out the possibility that he didn’t die by his own hand) I might not feel very safe in incarcertation if I said the wrong thing.

Wolff is not the best source on stories like thes except that he has all these tapes. If they are authenticated they should be pretty damning. But despite the fact that the right has been obsessed with Epstein for years on the assumption that his story would take down Democrats, there just don’t seem to be much interest in this story. Go figure.

Update — yikes:

He’s going to “protect” women…

Considering what Obama, Biden, Walz and others have meant when they say that America might not survive another four years of Trump.

“I think you have to look at what the definition of ‘survive’ is. You can put me on a breathing tube tonight, but it wouldn’t be surviving like I’m surviving now. 

That’s the best way of putting the threat that I’ve heard from anyone. We might survive but we’ll never be the same.

Clinton gave a wide ranging interview to CNN and it’s quite good:

Over nearly three weeks straight of 10-hour days – which means he’s had a much more active schedule than Harris, Trump, Tim Walz, JD Vance, Joe Biden or Barack Obama – Clinton is adamant in his speeches about his unique perspective as the only person on the planet who’s done the job and personally knows both candidates on the ballot Tuesday.

“You did pretty well when I was president, and I think I’m entitled to my opinion about who would be better,” he often says, his soft Southern accent now with a permanent rasp.

Standing in a church gym in Muskegon Heights, Michigan, he recounted a bit that he had read a few years ago about Dwight Eisenhower saying he worried how much longer the oldest continuous democracy could survive with all the effort it takes.

[…]

He insisted that this tour focus on towns and counties where a president has never been before, like South Haven, Michigan, where he spoke from a front porch in the middle of a block – a scene that would have been too conventional for Norman Rockwell to paint.

The people show up, and not just for the 40-minute, no-notes speeches that are more like chats – just with only one person talking. Clinton’s visit “cements something for me going forward,” 25-year-old Berrien County Commissioner Chokwe Pitchford told a few hundred people in the patio of a microbrew pub in Benton Harbor on a Wednesday afternoon, referring both to boosting local pride and Democrats winning elections there.

He expressed regrets about NAFTA and acknowledged the fact that it ended up fuelling some of the populist backlash that Trump rode to victory. He believes the economy is about to take off and whoever wins will be able to take advantage of it. He’s right about that. Just imagine Trump with this economy…

He said this about George W. Bush:

There’s only one living former president missing in this race: George W. Bush. Many people think they know where he stands on Trump, even though he has refused to say.

Clinton, who has his own long history with the Bush family, defended the 43rd president’s choice to stick to his rule of avoiding campaign politics in his post-presidency.

“First of all, he’s spoken up, I think, more than he’s gotten credit for, and he takes every opportunity that I’ve seen to talk about how important immigration is and how we can’t survive without it,” Clinton said, leaving hanging in the air the implication of that contrast to Trump’s nativism.

Bush really did want to get out of politics, Clinton said, before dropping in passing that “he likes Colin Allred,” who happens to be Bush’s local congressman in Texas and is trying for a potentially Democratic majority-preserving upset Tuesday against Republican Sen. Ted Cruz. Clinton said Bush told him that directly: “Oh, yeah. He’ll tell anybody that, that he’s a good guy.”

Bush left a congratulatory voicemail for Allred, when he first won election as the congressman from his home district in 2018, and they met in person once, but the former president has not gotten involved in the Senate race.

“He also knows, beginning with our relationship, it’s very different when you’re out of political life, when there is no competition, no consequence,” Clinton said. “And I think he believes that since he was a proud Republican all those years, it’s enough for him to make clear what he believes with all this, without giving up the party he’s been with all his life.”

When read Clinton’s comments, a person close to Bush told CNN, “President Bush has indeed moved on from presidential politics, but he has been working quietly and diligently to keep the Senate in GOP control.”

The person declined to comment on whether that work included efforts on behalf of Cruz.

To hell with the Bushes. If they can’t speak up now, when even Dick fucking Cheney is doing it, they are just as bad as we always thought they were. He loses nothing by doing it and neither does his brother or his wife. His daughter Barbara is canvassing for Harris but that’s not enough.

I think Clinton’s right about this though:

Clinton’s case for Harris is looped through with his own experience: The reason he’s so sure Americans will soon start feeling better about the economy is because that’s what happened in between Democrats’ devastating 1994 midterms after he made huge cuts to the shrink the national debt, and how they felt about the surging economy years later. He said he feels for Biden, complaining at the White House about not getting credit for infrastructure projects like replacing lead pipes and other spending that he says helped save the economy, “but that happens to all of us.”

The list goes on – but nothing is so aching for Clinton as what has always been the regret he couldn’t reconcile: His failure, up until almost the day he left the White House in 2001, to land a permanent peace deal between the Israelis and Palestinians.

Especially since October 7, 2023, people who have spoken with Clinton told CNN he has talked with anger and remorse in private about what could have been and what didn’t have to be. Standing in Michigan, reflecting on Arab American politics in the state sent him off on an extended riff through history and emotional understanding, building up to the missed crowning achievement that might have gotten him the Nobel Peace Prize and almost certainly would have saved many of the lives that have been lost without it.

“The only time Yasser Arafat didn’t tell me the truth is when he promised me he was going to accept the peace deal that we had worked out,” he said, starting to tick through the details of the would-be agreement and the history of its approval by the Israeli Cabinet.

“I can hardly talk about this,” Clinton said, audibly choking up for a moment.

“How about we stop funding it?” a woman called out.

He kept going. There’s one president at a time, he said, but he thinks America needs to restart the bigger peace process.

“I’m going to do everything I can to convince people that they cannot murder their way out of this. Neither side. They can’t kill their way out. They have to make a new beginning,” he said.

The answer, he pleaded, isn’t being so mad at Biden that they turn toward Trump or other candidates that might help the Republican win. Show up for Harris, he told anyone listening, and it’ll be up to the next president to restart the peace process and pick up where he’d been forced to leave off.

“We have to find a way to share the future,” he said.

He muses about aging and it’s genuinely fascinating. He was the youthful first baby boomer president all those years ago. Now he’s in the twilight of his life.

If Trump wins he says that he’ll go back to work on his foundation if Trump will let him, which reflects his feelings about the possibility of revenge against him and his family (which is very real.)

He said he would be standing by to help if Harris wins, whenever she wants him:

“My belief is that you should always help if the president asks you to. I said, ‘I can help you on natural disasters, I can help you on some problems, but I will never call you,’” he said, proudly noting his 24-year, four-president run of never being the one to initiate a call, despite the many that have come in.

“She’ll call and say thanks to Hillary, me, and I’ll say, ‘We’re as close as your phone, but you’ve got a hard job, and the last thing you need is anybody like us working you.’”

I know his legacy is forever tarnished by his personal behavior but he remains a very interesting and, in some ways, powerful figure, as is Hillary. In the great scheme of things, they define the last three decades in American politics just as much as Trump does.

“Fluoridation is the most monstrously conceived and dangerous communist plot we have ever had to face”

The anti-fluoridation conspiracy theory is so old and crazy that Stanley Kubrick warned us about it in Dr. Strangelove (1964). For a half century it was THE political litmus test for nutjobs. RFK Jr is now trying to normalizing it.🙄 pic.twitter.com/ylpk4Kzm7r https://t.co/iPVCiS4ZEm

— Sanho Tree (@SanhoTree) November 3, 2024

Anti-flouridation conspiracy theories were a staple of Bircher propaganda back in the day. It was so ubiquitous that Dr. Strangelove, 1964, mocked it in the greatest satire of the right ever made.

Unfortunately, we are not living in a movie satire. Check this out:

That would be just another crazy RFK rant except for this:

He’s not backing down:

The Republican Party continues to show itself to be completely spineless toadies. If Trump pulls out a win he will be seen as the unbeatable Colossus, a literal god, and they will do anything to please him. After all, they already are. It will only get worse.

Update: Dennis Hartley and I were on the same wavelength today which is not surprising since are both huge Strangelove fans. So enjoy two Strangelove posts!

[*sigh*] To paraphrase the Giant in Twin Peaks…”It is happening again.”

What I’m referring to, of course, is life imitating the art of a certain 1964 film:

The General elaborates further:

General Jack D. Ripper : Mandrake, do you realize that in addition to fluoridating water, why, there are studies underway to fluoridate salt, flour, fruit juices, soup, sugar, milk… ice cream. Ice cream, Mandrake, children’s ice cream.

Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake : [very nervous] Lord, Jack.

General Jack D. Ripper : You know when fluoridation first began?

Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake : I… no, no. I don’t, Jack.

General Jack D. Ripper : Nineteen hundred and forty-six. 1946, Mandrake. How does that coincide with your post-war Commie conspiracy, huh? It’s incredibly obvious, isn’t it? A foreign substance is introduced into our precious bodily fluids without the knowledge of the individual. Certainly without any choice. That’s the way your hard-core Commie works.

Context? JICYMI:

From my 2016 piece on Dr. Strangelove:

“Mein fuehrer! I can walk!” Although we have yet (knock on wood) to experience the global thermonuclear annihilation that ensues following the wheelchair-bound Dr. Strangelove’s joyous (if short-lived) epiphany, so many other depictions in Stanley Kubrick’s seriocomic 1964 masterpiece about the tendency for people in power to eventually rise to their own level of incompetence have since come to pass, that you wonder why Kubrick and company bothered to make it all up. […]

There are so many great lines, that you might as well bracket the entire screenplay (by Kubrick, Terry Southern and Peter George) with quotation marks.

Try as you might, you really can’t make this shit up.

On the homepage and across two pages in the paper:

Their headlines and story placement have been terrible this year. But they’ve come around here at the end with some great features on the stakes and the editorial board is not pulling any punches.

A great surrogate speech:

Some people just surprise you. She’s really good at this.

Millionaire garbage and billionaire fools

American politics look different with a little geographic perspective. 7News Melbourne has plenty of distance for it. I had to check to be sure this wasn’t an Australian version of SNL’s Weekend Update.

Stuart Stevens says what we’ve all known about Donald Trump’s subcontracting the RNC’s GOTV operation to Elon Musk and PACs like America Pac, Turnout for America, Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point Action and America First Works. The con man is being conned:

One of the more amusing aspects of this campaign has been watching @elonmusk
make a fool of himself babbling on about a subject he is completely ignorant.

The consultants he is paying to set up an “organization” are taking advantage of him like an 18 year old frat boy with $1,000 in a strip club. They tell him what he wants to hear, and he puts in more money.

There is a view that Musk is not some genius, that he stumbled into making a fortune in PayPal (which was a stumble; read Peter Thiel’s biography, “The Contrarian”) and had a lot of ambition and passions and a high risk tolerance. I find those traits admirable, but they should not be confused with any genius. That he has some need to pretend he is a rocket scientist, car inventor (he bought Telsa, didn’t start it), etc.

I have no idea. But I do know when it comes to politics, he is one of the most gullible suckers to walk into the political bazaar in a long time. He knows nothing but feels obligated to prove it constantly. He’s building a lot of beach houses for the consultants who are fleecing him.

I would expect he will try to sue them after the race. And fail. Because they just nodded and agreed and took his money. It’s not illegal to be a fool throwing money around.

Your vote, your citizenship, still means something

Don’t it always seem to go
That you don’t know what you got ’til it’s gone?

@whistlingvivaldi knows what he’s got and what it means.

Don’t let that Big Orange Garbage Truck take away any more of what you’ve got.

@whistlingvivaldi https://www.vote.org/ #election #politics #dnc #rnc #election2024 ♬ original sound – Whistling Vivaldi 🇭🇹 🇺🇸

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This gold standard poll, which called the last two presidential election when everyone else had it wrong, in September had Trump 47 and Harris 43. This is all about women including independent women and women over 65 breaking hard for her in the last month. I wonder why?

The analysis from most of the strategists say that this portends victory, at the very least, in the Blue Wall states and could indicated a massive shift from women, particularly white women (Iowa is almost all white), elsewhere. Let’s just say that Democrats are pretty stoked right now.

Kamala Harris now leads Donald Trump in Iowa — a startling reversal for Democrats and Republicans who have all but written off the state’s presidential contest as a certain Trump victory.  

A new Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll shows Vice President Harris leading former President Trump 47% to 44% among likely voters just days before a high-stakes election that appears deadlocked in key battleground states.  

The results follow a September Iowa Poll that showed Trump with a 4-point lead over Harris and a June Iowa Poll showing him with an 18-point lead over Democratic President Joe Biden, who was the presumed Democratic nominee at the time.  

“It’s hard for anybody to say they saw this coming,” said pollster J. Ann Selzer, president of Selzer & Co. “She has clearly leaped into a leading position.” https://e.infogram.com/_/5R6h9p5uFC073bQf1Rzy?src=embed#async_embed

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has abandoned his independent presidential campaign to support Trump but remains on the Iowa ballot, gets 3% of the vote. That’s down from 6% in September and 9% in June.  

Fewer than 1% say they would vote for Libertarian presidential candidate Chase Oliver, 1% would vote for someone else, 3% aren’t sure and 2% don’t want to say for whom they already cast a ballot.  

The poll of 808 likely Iowa voters, which include those who have already voted as well as those who say they definitely plan to vote, was conducted by Selzer & Co. from Oct. 28-31. It has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.4 percentage points. 

The results come as Trump and Harris have focused their attention almost exclusively on seven battleground states that are expected to shape the outcome of the election. Neither has campaigned in Iowa since the presidential primaries ended, and neither campaign has established a ground presence in the state.  

A victory for Harris would be a surprising development after Iowa has swung aggressively to the right in recent elections, delivering Trump solid victories in 2016 and 2020.  

The poll shows that women — particularly those who are older or who are politically independent — are driving the late shift toward Harris. 

“Age and gender are the two most dynamic factors that are explaining these numbers,” Selzer said.   

Independent voters, who had consistently supported Trump in the leadup to this election, now break for Harris. That’s driven by the strength of independent women, who back Harris by a 28-point margin, while independent men support Trump, but by a smaller margin. 

Similarly, senior voters who are 65 and older favor Harris. But senior women support her by a more than 2-to-1 margin, 63% to 28%, while senior men favor her by just 2 percentage points, 47% to 45%.  

Update: He’s not taking it well: