Dear Leader has some inspiring words to share with you
Thank you Daddy:
Daddy’s awfully busy running for president…
"what digby sez..."
Digby's Hullabaloo Posts
If they’re complaining, you’ve hit a soft spot
As Digby noted yesterday, “the media has now found some integrity just in time to help [Trump], even as their previous irresponsibility also helped him.” That is, by burying Trump documents Iranian hackers recently hacked.
“Working the refs” is the phrase long used to describe how conservatives cowed journalists into treating the right’s lunacy as normal politics when its sabotage of democracy was still in previews. Both-sidesism is one approach press stenographers use to prove they have no liberal bias (for fear of being called bad names by the right and to preserve access to Republicans inside the Beltway).
Oh, but criticism is starting to bite. Access reporters cowed by the right object to being criticized by the left.
Sensitive, aren’t we?
Access journalism, press stenography, and bothsidesism has undermined faith in what you do, not criticism from the left. Press consolidation under private equity and hedge funds has not helped one bit:
Brooke Gladstone: In recent years, billionaire owners have snapped up outlets like The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Atlantic, and others, with three of the top newspaper chains in the country are currently owned not by individuals or families but by private investment firms. According to Margot Susca, Assistant Professor of Journalism, Accountability, and Democracy at American University, we’re currently in the private investment era of media.
Private equity firms and hedge funds may function differently in the marketplace but Susca says they have a similarly ravenous approach to buying up news outlets and selling them off for parts. Susca, author of Hedged: How Private Investment Funds Helped Destroy American Newspapers and Undermine Democracy, debunks the notion that it was solely the dawn of the internet that failed local news.
James Fallows follows up on Froomkin’s comment on FKA twitter:
Obviously I disagree w main points here: that press has overall done very good job covering Trump, and that there is a left-wing “industry” that is “dedicated toward attacking the media,” especially NYT.
But (seriously, no snark) credit to at least one prominent NYT figure for acknowledging that there is a critique.
Next step would be engagement on some specifics people have actually been asking about:
– Why framing / headline / social-promo of stories takes a certain shape so predictably as to have given rise to the Pitchbot
– Why no retrospective public discussion, at all, about coverage in 2016 (Her emails!!!!) and lessons thereof. After Iraq WMD coverage, NYT under Bill Keller did a public retrospective (“what we got wrong”) etc
– Why no public explanation of diff between coverage of HRC/Podesta Russian-hacked emails and silence on Trump Iranian-hacked emails
– Why diff between extent / persistence of Biden “fitness to govern” cognitive overage vs Trump-cognitive issues.
– Thoughts about proportion of “guy in a diner” stories, vs “women in the suburbs” stories. And proportion of “econ is good but feels bad” stories.
– Whether there’s a diff in general outlook of coverage of US politics (need for “balance”) vs coverage of the rest of the range of news. And so onWorth considering this as a start.
It’s all so tiresome.
GOP primary voters wanted that guy
For those just tuning in, yes, N.C. Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson (R) is a freak show. Between his tax troubles, investigations into his daycare business billings and bankruptcies, his misogyny and demand for an ouright ban on all abortions, it’s his porn habits that are finally attracting big headlines. Go figure. Okay, on the heels of his “some folks need killing” comments. Little of this is news to North Carolinians.
I was always partial to his declaration that “The Christian patriots of this nation will own this nation and rule this nation” as the clearest indicator not of his dishonesty or fetishes, but of where his type wants to take the country. Oh, and “Tell our enemies on the other side of the aisle that will drag this nation down into a socialist hellhole that you will only do it as you run past me laying on the ground, choking on my own blood.”
Even Donald Trump is not that colorful. P.T. Barnum might have put this guy on display and made a fortune.
Some New York Magazine writers are playing catch up.
“Mein Kampf” is enough of an informative read that Robinson extolled its virtues on a porn site (Nia Prater and Chas Danner):
Robinson, who has publicly questioned some of the events of the Holocaust, allegedly used antisemitic slurs and displayed an affinity for Hitler. In one 2012 comment, he expressed a preference for the dictator over then-president Barack Obama. “I’d take Hitler over any of the sh*t that’s in Washington right now!” Robinson said. Per the Post, Robinson also wrote that Mein Kampf was “very informative and not at all what I thought it would be. It’s a real eye opener.”
No wonder Trump was such a quick endorser, being a reported fan of Der Führer’s speeches.
This week’s revelation that Robinson once compared Dr. King to a maggot in more private forums showed a less filtered variation on a familiar motif. As did his apparent nostalgia for slavery — in his 2022 memoir, We Are the Majority, Robinson surveyed the two factions involved in the ’79 massacre and deemed only one of them the most “amoral people in the American political arena.” (Hint: It was not the Klansmen.) His admiration for Hitler and self-identification as a Nazi could be gleaned from his long-standing habits of diminishing the Holocaust and casting Jews as money-grubbing connivers. In multiple Facebook posts, he claimed that the dangers of Nazism had been overstated to launder the legacy of communism, and once described the Marvel movie Black Panther as a Jewish plot to extract Black dollars.
One aspect of Robinson’s Nude Africa posts that is largely absent from his Facebook output is their lascivious tone, which tracks — it was a porn site, after all. But even that element of his personality was poorly camouflaged: In his memoir, Robinson writes in unmistakably horny tones about his borderline-Freudian obsession with trains, which began when he was a kid rolling underneath oncoming locomotives and experiencing a rush as they screamed overhead. He confessed to giving them borderline-sexual nicknames like “big dirty” and stalking them across Guilford County trying to talk to them. “There’s a big dirty,” he would say aloud when he spotted one, “and he’s trying to hide from me, but I see him.”
Weird. Weirder. Weirdest. Robinson’s been hiding in plain sight, Cheney-Rice writes, and a type all too familiar among conservatives.
Just the type GOP primary voters who chose Robinson love in a way that’s just as creepy. Creepier, considering they may live next door.
I’m reminded of Siskel and Ebert doing a special show decades ago on the “women in trouble” film genre. The independent woman is always the slasher’s prime target. It was Ebert, I think, who was more creeped out by a guy sitting next to him in the theater. When the woman enters the dark attic/basement and we see her through the maniac’s eyes/mask, he whispered to himself, “She’s gonna get it now.”
Republicans nominated that guy for governor in North Carolina.
There is a new viral superstar! Meet Moo Deng the adorable baby pygmy.
Her toothless chewing is already an internet hit, and now, Moo Deng, the pygmy hippopotamus, is starring in cosmetic ads and quickly becoming a brand ambassador for Thailand. But the 2-month-old’s meteoric rise to online stardom has also prompted caretakers to urge visitors to show restraint and to limit her visit hours at Khao Kheow Open Zoo.
Moo Deng, also known as the “bouncing pig,” was named after a vote from more than 20,000 children and tourists on the Facebook page of the zoo in Chonburi, a city in eastern Thailand, where she was born in July.
The hippo has become an internet sensation since her caretakers began uploading videos of her going about her day, which mostly includes napping, walking around her enclosure and chewing her caretakers’ knees while being hosed down for a shower.
And just like any human celebrity, Moo Deng has dozens of fan pages on social media with pictures and videos capturing her every moment in public.
Check out the memes!
Adorbs.
You may have heard a passing rumor that Iranian hackers got into Trump’s VP vetting communications and gave them to major newspapers which are refusing to publish them. Yesterday, it was reported that Iranians offered the same stuff to the Harris campaign but they didn’t even open the emails. (That hasn’t stopped the moronic Don Jr and his father from saying this proves that they are working with Iran to take out Trump.)
Anyway, last night Puck’s Tara Palmieri wrote this:
Like several other journalists covering the 2024 presidential campaign, I was contacted earlier this month, and again on Tuesday, by an individual peddling what appeared to be sensitive documents pertaining to Donald Trump. I alerted federal authorities, and I’m not reporting the contents, but the materials themselves confirm that the hackers, whom the Justice Department apparently suspects to be agents of Iran, have absconded with more than just the oppo files on J.D. Vance, Marco Rubio, and Doug Burgum that have been disseminated to multiple news outlets. It appears that they may also have breached Trump’s legal team.
Is this a Reverse Podesta situation? Who knows. The reality is that the media has become more responsible with hacked information, and frankly, it’s hard to imagine anything about Trump that would move the needle post January 6, post-bankruptcies, post-Access Hollywood, post-E. Jean Carroll, post-indictments, post-Arlington, and even after the dog-eating and baby-executing bit.
Setting aside the blithe “nothing matters, Trump gets away with everything” at the end from a journalist, isn’t it nice (for Trump) that the media has now found some integrity just in time to help him, even as their previous irresponsibility also helped him. Win-win!
Trump is a very lucky guy, but he has had a whole lot of help from the media for eight long years. And as far as I know, they have never copped their part in his victory in 2016 so it’s news to me that they learned any lessons. Interesting that we only find out about it when there are reports that they are holding back information that might harm Trump’s campaign.
Oprah Winfrey hosted a Kamala Harris online event last night that was surprisingly effective, I thought. I’m not usually much for town halls and tend to avoid them unless there’s a special reason to watch. But this one was quite good. maybe it’s the Oprah effect. She is a professional,after all, and very adept at evoking emotion. Here’s the lede in the Washington Post:
A star-studded online rally designed to showcase the enthusiasm and energy behind Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign turned somber as host Oprah Winfrey introduced the mother of a woman who died after waiting for health care in a state that has banned most abortions.
“You’re looking at a mother that is broken,” said Shanette Williams, whose daughter, Amber Thurman, died in what was deemed a “preventable” death stemming from Georgia’s abortion restrictions. “The worst pain ever that a mother, that a parent, could ever feel, for her father and myself and the family — you’re looking at it.”
Several people in the live audience were wiping their eyes by the time Thurman’s family members, including two sisters, finished speaking. The emotional moment prompted Harris to deliver some of her most forceful lines of the event — which over nearly 100 minutes turned the vice president’s campaign into a modern-day version of Winfrey’s popular daytime talk show.
“Amber’s story highlights the fact that, among everything that is wrong with these bans and what has happened in terms of the overturning of Roe v. Wade, it’s a health-care crisis,” Harris said after lambasting Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump for making such bans possible. “It’s a health-care crisis that affects the patient and the profession.”
Hundreds of thousands of people watched the event, which was an outgrowth of various Zoom meetings that came together in the days after President Joe Biden ended his reelection bid — with groups including Win With Black Women, White Dudes for Harris and Swifties for Kamala gathering by the thousands to show their support for Harris. The campaign cast the event — which featured a live audience of a few hundred people — as an opportunity to showcase the breadth of support for Harris and as a call to action for those watching online.
Here are a few clips from the event which I thought was also rather creatively produced:
I especially appreciated this on behalf of us childless cat ladies:
By the way, this is what we’re up against:
I think this is pretty brilliant:
You just have to love the guy.
Meanwhile, here’s James Comer:
This is what the GOP has become.
Trump had a little sad last night
Buried in his efforts to convince a sympathetic audience that he deserved to return to the White House, Donald Trump made an important admission about a long-standing frustration.
“With all I have done for Israel,” he said at a campaign event ostensibly centered on antisemitism, “I received only 24 percent of the Jewish vote. Now think of this. I really haven’t been treated very well, but that’s the story of my life.”
Subscribe to How to Read This Chart, a weekly dive into the data behind the news. Each Saturday, national columnist Philip Bump makes and breaks down charts explaining the latest in economics, pop culture, politics and more.Z
In Trump’s estimation, he deserves both credit and unwavering support from Jewish Americans because of the things he did on Israel’s behalf as president. He said as much at the event.
“I said, I’m the best friend they ever had. And still in 2020 — so remember, I got 24, 25 percent [of the Jewish vote in 2016]. Now, I did all of these things and I got 29 percent,” Trump complained. “Think of it. So I wasn’t treated right. But it’s not me that’s been treated badly. It’s Israel.”
This is a recurring theme of Trump’s politics. Making his pitch to skeptical constituencies, he cobbles together accomplishments that he then promotes as exceptional, as the pinnacle of what those groups might have wanted. Black Americans want opportunity zones. Jewish people want the American Embassy to be in Jerusalem. He delivered on these things — but they still don’t love him? How can that be?
Bump points out that this is just what Trump thinks these constituencies want, I’d imagine based upon various donors (like Miriam Adelson, who sponsored the event last night) and some oddball supporters. He makes up a fantasy of his own greatness and gets very disappointed when the rubes don’t appreciate it.
He said that the Democratic Party had a “hold, or curse,” on Jewish Americans and repeated his claim that Jews would be “out of their minds” to vote for them because “because it will face an unceasing, bloody war to obliterate the Jewish state and drive Jews out of the Holy Land.” He called Chuck Schumer a member of Hamas. Some people cheered.
He also said last night that it would be the Jews fault if he doesn’t win which sets up some very dangerous incentives for his Nazi constituency which seems to be growing every day. Nice. “You Jews might want to rethink your support or things might get a little bit dicey, if you know what I mean.”
As Ed Kilgore noted, “if the hallmark of antisemitism is irrational fury at Jews combined with stereotypes of how they should think and behave, Trump is more of a suspect than a defender and vindicator.”
God I hope not
All of the American media was atwitter on Thursday afternoon from rumors that CNN was going to release a bombshell report about North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, the Republican nominee for Governor. It turned out to be a gross and salacious story about his porn habits and comments calling himself a “Black Nazi.” It was reported during the day that the Trump campaign wanted him to drop out, presumably because they suspect he’s already dragging down the ticket, but he refused and because there was a midnight deadline to (possibly) remove him from the ballot, so that seems to be that.
N. Carolina is very close according to the polls as are all the swing states. And while this possible help for Trump landed in the Trump campaign’s lap at the last moment, in other states they are working overtime to subvert the vote and contest the election results if they don’t go Trump’s way. Ground zero for those plans is Georgia, one of the states, along with N. Carolina and Pennsylvania, that are considered must win for Donald Trump assuming he manages to hold on to all the other states he won in 2020. Georgia election deniers have been working behind the scenes for the past year laying their plans.
The Trumpy Georgia’s State Election Board voted to give local boards the authority to challenge election officials before certifying county election results. Trump was so happy about it he even praised by name those on the board who made it possible at one of his rallies. At the very least those local boards can create chaos by refusing to certify the election canvas due to what they will say is suspected fraud and foment more right wing conspiracy theories. They could also end up in court and win the day.
They don’t have unlimited power to delay but if they do this it will require intervention by the state courts, by the state official charged with certifying the electors or the federal court. If a presidential candidate wants to bring an action, the new Electoral Count Reform Act (ECRA) provides for such cases to be heard on an expedited basis in federal court by a three-judge judicial panel consisting of two circuit court of appeals judges and one district court judge. Any appeal would go to the Supreme Court which is required to rule by the day before the electors are to meet. Does any of that sound like a recipe for an outcome that is accepted as legitimate by the whole country?
The ECRA resolved some of the other issues stemming from the 2020 Big Lie and subsequent insurrection. It makes clear that the role of the VP is ministerial only and requires that 1/5th of the House and Senate must vote to object to the certification in a particular state. That’s not impossible but it is a much heavier lift than before. The certifications are now required to be done by December 11th when before it was governed by the vague “safe harbor” provision.
The election deniers had hoped to have some Secretaries of State and other top election officials in their pocket for this election but they have failed to win at the ballot box so being reduced to the county level is something of a failure. Still, there is little doubt that this could cause delays and dissension, which is part of the plan. We know what Trump is capable of after a loss when it comes to riling up his voters. He’s already planting seeds everywhere about the election being rigged against him. He did the same in 2016 and 2020.
There are other plans afoot besides post election challenges in various states. For instance, S. Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, who was deeply involved in trying to get Georgia to overturn their election results in 2020, is up to his old tricks. He’s leading a delegation for Donald Trump to Nebraska to try to convince the Republican legislature to change their electoral college system to winner take all. (Currently, two go to the winner of the popular vote in the state and the other three are split among the three congressional districts and are awarded to whoever wins the popular vote in each one.) With the swing states so close, the one district in the state that reliably votes Democratic could be the winning margin for Kamala Harris.
This first came up a few months back but it didn’t go anywhere because Maine, which has a similar system, said they would do the same which would make it a wash. Unfortunately, the deadline for Maine to do that appears to have passed which explains why the Republicans are moving on it now.
Graham thinks it’s perfectly legitimate to have them change the law 6 weeks before the election for the clear purpose of benefiting Donald Trump but they screamed bloody murder over some rules changes in 2020 to deal with the deadly pandemic. They like to call this “election integrity.”
There are also concerns about the role of the House Speaker should the Republicans maintain their majority. The current Speaker Mike Johnson, wrote an amicus brief back in 2020 on behalf of Trump asking the Supreme Court to essentially overturn swing-state results. There are concerns that if he is the Speaker next January 6th that he will use the power of his office for Trump’s benefit once again. Politico reports there are a number of possibilities ranging from changing the rules, which merely exist by tradition, for the counting of the votes on January 6th to asking the courts to rule on the constitutionality of the ECRA. That would inevitably end up in the Supreme Court as well.
In fact, it appears that if they really push this, all roads lead to the high court which is terrifying. The last time that happened, with Bush v. Gore, we had a strict partisan decision with fatuous reasoning that even they realized should not ever be used in any other case. And that court was a model of unbiased integrity compared to what we have now. After the stunning revelations in the epic NY Times report over the weekend, based on some unprecedented leakage from inside the normally secretive institution, it’s clear that Chief Justice John Roberts is leading the charge to protect Donald Trump from accountability and we already knew that he has been the driving force behind the court’s overturning of voting rights cases for the past few years. This is not a court I would trust to be judicious when it comes to this presidential election.
It’s not exactly going to be easy for the Republicans this time. People know what they’re up to and the Democrats are prepared with legal responses very step of the way Luckily the voters have managed to keep the most powerful would-be usurpers out of office and the congress set up some serious roadblocks. And Trump isn’t president so he won’t have the government available to do his bidding. But if the election is very close and it ends up in the Supreme Court as Bush v Gore did, there is a very good chance they will hand the presidency to him. They clearly have no care for whatever legitimacy they once had.
The only way to make sure this doesn’t happen is for the voters to give Harris and Walz a big enough win that they can’t steal it.
The echoes are pretty strong
Here’s a radical notion. People’s worth isn’t based on their citizenship status or economic output. One would think we wouldn’t need an essay on the topic to remind us. But since Team MAGA is floating rhetoric reminiscent of Radio Rwanda, sadly, we do.
All this time, Republicans scare-mongered about “illegals” and “migrant caravans” and “bad hombres.” After the fact-free smears of legal immigrants from “Haitia” eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, Sen. J.D. Vance made plain he considers even legally admitted immigrants worthy of deportation en masse. MAGA isn’t interested in documented vs. undocumented immigrant status. What’s at issue for them is nothing new and, dare we suggest, a matter of white, northern Europeans vs. everyone else. SNL spoofed that in 1988 when Gov. Mike Dukakis ran for president against George H.W. Bush: Bush Political Ad: He’s Whiter.
President Joe Biden called the smears against Haitians legally in Ohio “simply wrong.” They have “no place in America.” Biden added, “We don’t demonize immigrants. We don’t single them out for attacks. We don’t believe they’re poisoning the blood of the country. We’re a nation of immigrants and that’s why we’re so damn strong.”
Prem Thakker explains at Zeteo:
Missing in the broader defense of migrants and immigrants is a dispositive case, a reclaiming of the conversation instead of conceding to the right-wing presupposition that newcomers’ must inherently be justified, rather than welcomed. The assumption of scarcity that the powerful imbue into society, feeding impulses of self-preservation, and more threateningly, racism.
Moreover, judging newcomers’ abilities to assimilate, to be “one of us,” solely by the merits of their labor production and legal status only reifies the notion that we too are only as good as the work we do and the papers we have. By holding immigrants to such an unfeeling standard, we too bring ourselves to mean less than the potential that we hold, the capacities we have to love and feel and share life with others.
I’ve gotten halfway through William Hogeland’s “The Hamilton Scheme: An Epic Tale of Money and Power in the American Founding.” It’s stunning how much “the money connection” influenced the structure of our constitution, and how financial speculation by the investor class drove the adoption of the Constitution as a way of guaranteeing their interest on government bonds. If anything poisons the country, it is the mindset that reduces every human interaction to a transaction and persons to their net worth or economic output. That is, seeing the world primarily through the lens of money.
It is not enough to defend newcomers to this country as producers, as legal additions: that formula not only (ironically) dehumanizes them, it also degrades our ability to see ourselves as more than what is imposed upon us.
Ultimately, we are called to take to our hearts that we all are non-consensual players in the lottery of existence, subject to permutations of factors beyond our control, landing where we do, and doing the best we can to be, to exist, to live wholly within those outcomes. And feeling that, knowing that someone completely unlike you is only so by sheer raffle, and injecting that into our politics, would do much in defending immigrants not because they’re “like us,” but because they are not.
But that requires embracing diversity more than tribe and fear of the other. Fear is the mind killer, goes Frank Herbert’s Litany Against Fear from “Dune.” It’s also the community killer.
There is a Maple Street in Springfield, Ohio. Surprise.