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JD Vance Really Hates The Cat Ladies

Published by digby on September 27, 2024

I mean, he really hates them,…

Media Matters found a number of examples of JDs irrational hostility toward childless people, particularly women who haven’t given birth. It’s creepy and bizarre:

Vance on conservative podcast: Childless American leaders are “more sociopathic” than those with children, and they make the country “less mentally stable.” In a November 2020 interview, Vance said that “so many people, especially in America’s leadership class,” don’t have the “cadences of life” that come with having children, adding, “I worry that it makes people more sociopathic and ultimately our whole country a little bit less, less mentally stable.” He went on to say that the “most deranged” and “most psychotic” posters on Twitter “are people who don’t have kids at home.” [CNN.com, 7/30/24] 

Vance tweet: “Our country’s low birth rates have made many elites sociopaths.” [CNN.com, 7/30/24; Twitter/X, 3/21/21]

Vance to Sebastian Gorka: Kamala Harris is part of a “childless cabal of people who don’t really care about the future.” On the July 12, 2021, edition of America First with Sebastian Gorka, Vance said: “Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC, all of these people. It’s like a party where the next generation of leaders, none of them have kids. … The entire Democrat Party is like this childless cabal of people who don’t really care about the future.” [America First with Sebastian Gorka, 7/12/21]

Vance tweet: “Paul Krugman is one of many weird cat ladies who have too much power in our country.” [Twitter/X, 7/25/21]

Vance tweet: “We should give miserable, childless lefties less control over our country and its kids.” [Twitter/X, 7/27/21]

Vance on Fox: “If you want to experiment on somebody’s kids, Kamala Harris, AOC, and so forth, have your own kids.” On the July 30, 2021, edition of Fox News Primetime, Vance said he was “sick of these bureaucrats experimenting on my children” by requiring kids to be vaccinated against COVID-19 and recommending masking in schools in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Vance added: “That’s experimenting on our kids. If you want to experiment on somebody’s kids, Kamala Harris, AOC, and so forth, have your own kids — lay off of mine.” [Fox News, Fox News Primetime, 7/30/21]

Vance on Fox: Democrats are the party that “doesn’t have kids,” so they are “dominated by a bunch of sociopaths who don’t care about America’s children.” On the August 4, 2021, edition of Fox News Primetime, Vance said that Democrats “feel comfortable experimenting on children” because they are “increasingly the party in the movement that doesn’t have kids.” He went on to say, “I think basically what we’ve done is that we’ve allowed the Democrats to become dominated by a bunch of sociopaths who don’t care about America’s children. And we just need to call it out.” [Fox News, Fox News Primetime, 8/4/21]

Vance on Fox: The left “has effectively been taken over by a lot of childless people, by the AOCs of the world, the Kamala Harrises of the world.” On the August 8, 2021, edition of Fox’s The Next Revolution, Vance said that he supported giving parents extra votes to represent their children. He explained that this would counterbalance “the left,” which he said “has effectively been taken over by a lot of childless people, by the AOCs of the world, the Kamala Harrises of the world. Those people now run the agenda of the Democratic Party, and we’ve got to push back against that.” [Fox News, The Next Revolution, 8/8/24]

Vance campaign email: “We’ve allowed ourselves to be dominated by childless sociopaths” who “don’t have a direct stake in this country.” An August 2021 campaign email, written in Vance’s voice and obtained by CNN.com, highlighted “the serious issue of radical childless leaders in this country,” adding, “We can’t have people who don’t have a direct stake in this country making our most important decisions.” The email continued, “We’ve allowed ourselves to be dominated by childless sociopaths – they’re invested in NOTHING because they’re not invested in this country’s children.” [CNN.com, 7/30/24]

Vance campaign email: “Our country is basically run by childless Democrats” who “don’t have a direct stake in it.” A second Vance campaign email read, “Our country is basically run by childless Democrats who are miserable in their own lives and want to make the rest of the country miserable too… What I want to know is: why have we turned our country over to people who don’t have a direct stake in it?” [CNN.com, 7/30/24]

Vance tweet: “The cat ladies, man. They must be stopped.” Vance was responding to a poll which found a “significant percentage fear having children because of climate crisis.” [Twitter/X, 9/14/21] 

Vance on conservative podcast: Journalists are “miserable and unhappy” because their biological clocks have run out. On the September 20, 2021, edition of the Moment of Truth podcast, Vance attacked people “who can’t have kids” because they “passed the biological period when it was possible” as “miserable” people who pursue “racial or gender equity” to give “their life meaning.” He also claimed that “a core part of what’s wrong with journalism in America is that you have a group of people who are dealing with their own, like, psychotic breaks” because “one of the weird lies the elites have been told is “hat it’s very easy to start a family when you’re 45,” but “God says otherwise.” [American Moment, Moment of Truth, 9/20/21]

Vance on Breitbart: “The Kamala Harrises, they don’t have kids” but “want to take our kids and brainwash them so that their ideas continue to exist in the next generation.” On the October 4, 2021, edition of Breitbart News Daily, Vance claimed that the left’s “next generation leaders,” including “the Kamala Harrises, they don’t have kids. And so there’s this weird way where they want to take our kids and brainwash them so that their ideas continue to exist in the next generation.” Vance added: “If you want to brainwash children, have your own kids to brainwash.” [Breitbart News, Breitbart News Daily, 10/4/21]

It appears that the Trump campaign vetters (whoever they were) didn’t think any of this was relevant. The Bulwark reports:

The opposition-research dossier put together by the Trump campaign on JD Vance—and allegedly stolen from them by foreign hackers—was published on Thursday by journalist Ken Klippenstein on his Substack.

And what stands out is not what’s in the 271-page file, but what was left out.

Vance’s infamous “childless cat ladies” comment was not listed among the liabilities that the Trump campaign assessed about the then-prospective running mate.

That comment from Vance—which was made, among other places, during a 2021 Fox interview with Tucker Carlson—ended up dogging both him and the Trump campaign in the weeks after he was selected, helping Kamala Harris’s campaign drag down his favorability ratings and define him negatively. Taylor Swift, among others, referenced the “childless cat lady” dig when announcing her support for Harris.

[…]

The exclusion suggests that Trump campaign researchers either missed Vance’s incendiary remarks or thought they were no big deal. The former, however, seems implausible as the document posted by Klippenstein included dozens of other citations of Vance’s appearances on Carlson’s show.

Indeed, much of the oppo file, Klippenstein notes, consists of a copious scrubbing of the public record that is “factual and intelligently written.” It’s typical opposition research assembled with open-source information available online and in the news media concerning Vance’s prior criticisms of Trump, his “obstructionist” stance on Ukraine funding, his support of abortion restrictions, opposition to marijuana legalization, support of “pseudo Christian values,” and comments on race.

Vance comes across as a right-leaning classical liberal who became a Trump era conservative populist. There was nothing obviously disqualifying in it, which explains, in part, how he got selected for the post.

Maybe they just didn’t see what a problem such misogynist commentary might cause. But it sounds as though someone wants to present Vance as a regular Trump guy instead of the tech-bro authoritarian ideologue he really is. This guy isn’t Marge Greene or even Tim Scott.

The Greatest Embarrassment In American History

Published by digby on September 27, 2024

It’s all about him:

“It takes two to tango” “I have a very good relationship with Putin.”

Trump wants something that’s “good for both sides.”

I feel sick. He’s standing next to a man whose country was invaded, trying to defend his people and this asshole says “I’m sure President Putin wants it to stop.”

He will give this country and the rest of Europe to his pal Putin if he gets in again. He is an immoral imbecile.

Before They Were Afraid

Published by digby on September 27, 2024

If you haven’t seen this Barbara Walters interview of Donald Trump form 1990, take the time to watch it. Walters was known in this period for her interviews of powerful people and boy did she have Trump’s number.

Imagine what that Orange Liberace wannabe would do if someone interviewed him like that today? Imagine any reporter throwing all that at him today?

Swiftboating Harris

Published by digby on September 27, 2024

Ever since the 2004 election one of the Republican Party’s favorite tactics against Democratic opponents is the swift boat attack. You’ll recall that Sen. John Kerry was the Democratic presidential nominee and since the country was at war in Iraq and Afghanistan the campaign was emphasizing his heroic Vietnam war record. Some veterans, angry at Kerry’s later anti-war activities, contended that Kerry, a swift boat officer, was lying about his wartime actions and the GOP coordinated a full-fledged smear campaign which has become known as swift boating.

The operation was run by none other than Chris LaCivita, Donald Trump’s 2024 co-campaign manager so I suppose it’s not too surprising that the campaign believes it’s found a way to swift boat Kamala Harris. Since that inane accusation that she was lying bout being Black didn’t really work out, they seem to think that calling into question the veracity of Harris’s claim to have worked at McDonald’s when she was a teenager is some kind of stolen valor. (As the Daily Show quipped, “How dare she disrespect our men and women in uniform like that!)

Trump has been pounding this theme for the last couple of weeks at every event, screaming that she is a liar, as if lying about working at a burger joint 41 years ago disrespects a sacred American institution which disqualifies her for the presidency. He’s so upset about this that he’s promising to go to a McDonald’s himself and “work the fries” for half an hour to prove … what? That she couldn’t possibly have scooped the fries as well as he does? I don’t get it.

He brought it up at this rally in Indiana, Pennsylvania on Monday

I think I’m gonna go to a McDonald’s next week, some place. “I’m gonna go to a McDonald’s, and I’m going to work the french fry job for about a half an hour. I want to see how it is.”

“But she said she worked, and grew up in terrible conditions, she worked at McDonald’s, it was such—SHE NEVER WORKED THERE! And these FAKE news reporters will never report it. They don’t want to report it because they’re FAKE! They’re FAKE! They don’t want to report it,”

“She never worked at McDonald’s, but it was a big part of her résumé.

Here he was in New York on Thursday

LaCivita needs to drill him a little better on this one. He got the talking points all confused. The problem was supposed to be that she’d never listed it on her résumé, not that it was big part of it.

The LA Times reported on how this whole story took off in the right wing media sphere:

On Aug. 29, the Washington Free Beacon, a conservative news website, published a report that questioned whether Harris had worked at McDonald’s, saying that the job was not listed on a resume she submitted a year after college and noting that biographers had not mentioned the work either. Trump’s campaign seized on the story, demanding that Harris prove she worked for the chain.

The Free Beacon story found it very odd that she didn’t have it on the professional résumé, that listed her work as a law clerk, assistant at the Federal Trade Commission and an internship with former California senator Alan Cranston. Her summer job at the fry station wasn’t exactly relevant. ( Full discIosure: I worked at Uncles Pizza Parlor when I was a teenager and I never once listed it on a résumé or even a job application. I do, however, have a burn scar on my right forearm to prove it.)

But here we have Trump getting the story backwards and saying it was a “big part of her resume” because he is addled and doesn’t make sense half the time anyway.

For some reason he really likes this smear and often gets very animated and loud when he talks about it, I would guess because he thinks his working class followers will be very offended that she would lie about doing the job that they do, as if they identify strongly as fast food professionals. Trump knows nothing about what it’s like to work in a job like that since he was born wealthy and never worked anywhere that didn’t have his name on it but he does love to eat McDonald’s so maybe this particularly aggrieves him?

MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle interviewed Harris this week and asked about the McDonald’s job and Harris explained why she has brought it up in this campaign. She replied:

Part of the reason I even talk about having worked at McDonald’s is because there are people who work at McDonald’s in our country who are trying to raise a family — I worked there as a student, I was a kid — who work there trying to raise families and pay rent on that. And I think part of the difference between me and my opponent includes our perspective on the needs of the American people and what our responsibility then is to meet those needs.

She’s right about that and Trump and his team seem to think he needs to show more of a common touch because he’s been doing something very different in this campaign. He’s been trying to mingle with “real people” something he never did much of before. This week he went to a grocery store and you would have thought he’d made a quick trip to Mars:

These “real people” events are always strange and very inauthentic for Trump. He used to avoid such corny moments, perhaps understanding his appeal better back when he was still seen as a reality TV celebrity. He was quoted saying back in 2016:

Don’t forget that when I ran in the primaries, when I was in the primaries, everyone said you can’t do that in New Hampshire, you can’t do that. You have to go and meet little groups, you have to see — cause I did big rallies, 3-4-5K people would come . . . and they said, “Wait a minute, Trump can never make it, because that’s not the way you deal with New Hampshire, you have to go to people’s living rooms, have dinner, have tea, have a good time.” I think if they ever saw me sitting in their living room they’d lose total respect for me. They’d say, I’ve got Trump in my living room, this is weird.

But this year he’s going to go to McDonald’s and make french fries to prove that Kamala Harris is a liar. Now that’s what I call weird.

Salon

The Sell-Out At Mar-A-Lago

Published by digby on September 27, 2024

My whole life I’ve been hearing about Neville Chamberlain and appeasement from the right wing, not to mention the “sell-out at Yalta.”

Take a look at this:

He relented and agreed to a meeting with Zelensky tomorrow. I wonder if he’ll tell him that he should just surrender when he wins the election because he’ll sure as hell make sure there’s no more military support once he takes office?

These rambling answers seem to really please much of the media (not Haake who does try to persist) because he’s talking to them. It doesn’t matter that he can’t answer any questions because he is completely clueless. He’s talking and that seems to be all that matters.

Let’s Hear From The Conservative Christians

Published by digby on September 26, 2024

There’s a new poll out by the Barna group which surveys evangelical Christians and is considered to be very reliable. There’s lot’s of interesting information but this struck me as important:

Historical data indicates that turnout among the voting age population was 53.6%
in 2012 (Obama-Romney); 54.6% in 2016 (Trump-Clinton); and 61.3% in 2020
(Trump-Biden). If the election were held now (about 7 weeks before November
5th), the expected turnout would be 50% of voting age adults. Typically, that
turnout figure will rise several percentage points, likely concluding in the 53% to 55% range. That would put the 2024 election squarely in line with the turnout levels of 2012 and 2016, but below that of 2020.

It’s big problem for Trump if any of his evangelical followers don’t vote. But one biggie there at the bottom is especially problematic this time. The voters who say the election is rigged are almost certainly his. He can’t afford to lose them.

I must say, this surprised me (actually not…)

Moral decline was identified by less than one-quarter of the churched Christians
(23%) as a defining issue in this election.

A pussy-grabbing, con-artist, pathological lying felon is running for president and most of them will vote for him so clearly, morals are not of much interest to these people anymore.

Interesting, no? So what do they care about?

It’s nice to see poverty and homelessness make the list but why do I think that empathy isn’t necessarily what’s driving the concern for many of them? (Maybe it’s because the rest of their agenda closely mirrors Donald Trump’s?)

Among the churched Christians interviewed, Donald Trump generated, by far, the
highest favorable rating of the seven leaders tested. Overall, seven out of 10
(69%) had a very or somewhat favorable score for Trump. No other leader topped
50%. The closest were Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (48%) and VP running mate, Sen.
J.D. Vance (46%). Former President Obama received a favorable score from 37%.
Lower ratings were awarded to Kamala Harris (28%), Timothy Walz (22%) and Joe
Biden (20%).

The highest “unfavorable” rating was generated by Joe Biden (70%), closely
followed by his Vice President and current Democrat candidate Kamala Harris
(64%). No other leaders evaluated received a negative rating by a majority of
churched Christians. Donald Trump had a negative score from one-quarter of the
respondents (25%).

Obsessed With The French Fries

Published by digby on September 26, 2024

McDonald’s is actually not on her resume which he used to use as proof that she never worked there. But nobody puts their summer job while they’re in school on their professional resume. (Trump wouldn’t know that because he never had a job other than working for daddy before he inherited his $400 million.) Now he’s saying is all over her resume I guess to push that she’s a liar?

I don’t know why Trump thinks this is such a put away shot but he’s leaning very heavily on it. Usually I can see why he thinks something is going to resonate with the MAGA cult but I honestly can’t see it this time. Sure, he wants to portray her as lying about her normal middle class upbringing (I guess to say she’s a Marxist???) but the fact that she worked at McDonald’s doesn’t prove or disprove that.

She’s not lying but I doubt there’s a record of her short term part time job from 40 years ago. So is he trying to make this into a new “birther ” scandal? (“Burger” scandal?) I just don’t get it.

He’s also ranting and raving about Springfield and Aurora, calling the Governor a coward and claiming that communities all over Americans are being “decimated” of course. Just droning on and on about all the usual BS.

By the way, that’s from Trump’s “press conference” which is basically just another of his rallies which he holds regularly for the media. It’s also what that same elite media hold up as an example of Trump’s transparency and accessibility in contrast to Kamala Harris. They love to be suckers for Trump.

And guess what he had to say about Eric Adams? Yep:

The Pennsylvania Challenge

Published by digby on September 26, 2024

I don’t know how much time you have to listen to podcasts but if you’re interested in the minutia of the electoral college vote and are worried about Pennsylvania, this one with Greg Sargent interviewing Gov. Josh Shapiro may be up your alley. An excerpt:

If Kamala Harris can defeat Donald Trump in Pennsylvania, she almost certainly will win the presidency. It’s must-win for him. Yet the state remains a coin-flip—which is why both candidates campaigned in the state this week. So what is Harris’s path to victory? We talked to Governor Josh Shapiro, who explained why the race is so close—and why he thinks she’s “on her way” to winning there, in part due to concerted communications with non-college voters. Shapiro also responded at length to Trump’s lies about Haitian immigrants living in Pennsylvania, pronouncing them “utter bullshit.”

Here is the whole thing:

I know the polls show a very close race. But as I wrote in an earlier post,

This Is How You Do It

Published by digby on September 26, 2024

Naturally, the MAGAs had him removed.

Their sense of humor is confined to making fun of disabled people and chanting “lock her up” and “send them back.”

The Grift Never Ends

Published by digby on September 26, 2024

Donald Trump is running for president. And he may just win. It’s that close. And this is what he’s doing 6 weeks before the election.

The watches sell for $499, which I’m sure is a bargain for the people who are suffering in this economy which Trump says is the worst in American history.

But get a load of this:

He is basically soliciting bribes at this point. He can raise a quick million and a half from rich buddies and it will go directly into his pocket before the election. As we’ve seen with his promises to everyone from the oil and gas industry to the vape industry in exchange for policy promises in the last few months, Trump is in a frenzy of corruption right now.

I wonder why this hasn’t really penetrated the media? We’re hearing lots of details about Eric Adams’ alleged crimes, some of which are worth big money and others which are penny ante graft. Meanwhile there’s virtually nothing about the recent reporting about Trump’s huge $10 million bribe from Egypt in 2016 or him selling Bibles, NFTs, Crypto, Picture Book, Shoes, and hundreds of other trinkets and now $100,000 watches to 147 lucky interested parties, in the middle of his presidential campaign!

We know the DOJ will not charge him for anything in the weeks before the election but considering what they did to Clinton when Comey re-opened the “butheremails” investigation 2 weeks ahead of the election, you’d think someone would find this to be a worthy story.