Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

The Supreme Court refused to block the execution of Marcellus Williams last night in a 6-3 decision with the liberals all dissenting. Of course,

From an X thread on the story:

Marcellus Williams was fifty-four when Missouri killed him tonight. Or was he murdered? For over two decades, he sat on death row, convicted of a crime he had always insisted he didn’t commit—the brutal 1998 stabbing of Felicia Gayle, a former St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter.

Despite DNA evidence that excluded him as the source of male DNA found on the murder weapon, the state of Missouri pushed ahead with his execution. Williams wasn’t just a faceless inmate confined to a cell. Over the years, he earned two college degrees while incarcerated, using his time to pursue self-improvement despite the looming death sentence. His story is one of resilience and transformation. He often mentored younger inmates, encouraging them to pursue education as a way to reclaim their humanity in a system designed to strip it away. H

His sister, Patricia Davis, once said, “Marcellus never gave up on hope. He believed the truth would set him free.” Even as his legal team fought to prove his innocence, Williams inspired those around him.

Yet, even the victim’s family—who lost a loved one in a horrific crime—expressed doubts about Williams’ guilt. As new DNA evidence emerged that excluded Williams as the source of the male DNA found on the murder weapon, the Gayle family called for leniency, believing that life without parole was a more just sentence given the uncertainty surrounding his conviction. Despite these pleas, Missouri moved forward with the execution, sparking outrage and disbelief among many who followed the case.

Felicia Gayle’s murder remains a tragic loss, and the urgency to bring justice to her case is understandable. However, the rush to execute Williams without fully addressing the new evidence creates a deeply unsettling question: could the real murderer still be free? By not allowing for a thorough re-evaluation of the case, the state may have failed both the Williams family and the Gayle family. Rather than achieving justice, the legal system may have prematurely closed a case that still had questions left unanswered. This rush to finality failed to provide the truth for either family, leaving them both with an unresolved sense of justice.

Missouri’s decision to execute William did not occur in a vacuum—it’s part of a much larger and troubling legacy of racial disparity in the state’s justice system. His conviction rested heavily on the testimony of two incentivized jailhouse informants, both of whom had much to gain by testifying against him. There was no physical evidence linking Williams to the crime. Despite DNA testing showing that Williams’ DNA did not match the male DNA on the murder weapon, Missouri courts never conducted a full evidentiary review of this critical fact. The courts proceeded forward, ignoring exculpatory evidence in favor of maintaining the status quo.

It’s sickening.

Paul Waldman has an excellent analysis of the tiresome elite media lament that the Kamala Harris isn’t giving them enough attention:

You can read many complaints about Harris’s lack of media accessibility (see here or here or here or here), though reporters seem unconcerned about the fact that Donald Trump does no interviews with them either. He talks to Fox News, other right-wing outlets, and dudebro podcasts, but he does not sit down with major newspapers or television networks, and somehow they don’t seem to mind. But as always, Democrats are held to a higher standard, scolded for failing to uphold the most elevated democratic norms while Republicans’ violation of those norms is taken for granted. 

[…]

Let’s take a look at one New York Times column that I think reflects the prevailing sentiment. Written by Todd Purdum, who was a longtime Times political reporter and then moved on to positions at The Atlantic and Vanity Fair, it’s presented as friendly advice, explaining to Harris why she should want to give reporters the face time they crave. Purdum starts by saying it took too long for Harris to get to the meaty policy details in an answer she gave about the economy in an interview with a Philadelphia TV station. She needs to offer more “direct, succinct answers and explanations,” he writes, because “Being known as a straight shooter would also help persuade restive political elites, pundits and journalists that Ms. Harris is grappling with such scrutiny, and I think she’s apt to be rewarded in the end for it.”

This is unintentionally revealing. Purdum has little to say about whether Harris’ ideas are good ones; what he’s advising is that she put on a better show. She doesn’t have to be a straight shooter, she just has to appear to be a straight shooter, and then she’ll be rewarded not just by the voters but by the elites who pretend to care about substance, but actually don’t.

That is correct. This is mostly theatre criticism. When they get the chance to ask substantive questions they rarely ask them. They ask about the horse race or the accusations by the other side or typical gotcha questions. It’s why they are so happy with Trump’s press availability which is completely devoid of reason and substance and is all show.

As Waldman notes:

But if she follows Purdum’s advice, reporters will only reward her for it if they judge her to be a compelling performer and if they feel she has been properly deferential to them, which I suspect she and her campaign understand. 

He also discusses the fact that all of this “advice” is delivered with an implicit threat — either do what we want you’ll pay. And we have a very recent example of what that looks like, don’t we?

Waldman references a piece by Judd Legum author of the popular newsletter Popular Information. Legum reports that he has received the hacked Trump emails, allegedly purloined by Iran, which were previously delivered to The Washington Post, Politico, The NY Times and Puck. (There are probably others.) They have all refused to publish these emails which are about the vetting processes for JD Vance, Marco Rubio, Doug Burgham and apparently some legal matters.

Legum won’t publish the emails because he was peripherally involved in the Russian DNC hack back in 2016 and he doesn’t see any reason to perpetuate this sort of thing. I’m not sure I agree with that in this case. It just seems like one more way to benefit Trump at a time when the stakes are monumental. Nobody’s principles in matters like this are going to matter much when he starts rounding up his enemies.

But Legum does at least give a scathing indictment of the media’s outrageous behavior last time, when it was the much hated Hillary Clinton they went after as part of their years long quest to take her down. (And they wondered why she didn’t much like talking to them…)

Waldman writes:

According to Legum, in the waning days of the 2016 campaign, the New York Times published an incredible 199 articles mining Democratic emails — stolen by the Russian government and passed to Wikileaks — for juicy tidbits. But that obsessive coverage, the Times said in an editorial published that October, was actually Hillary Clinton’s fault. “Imagine if months ago, Mrs. Clinton had done her own giant information release,” they wrote. “Journalists and the public could have waded through them, discussed them, written about them — and by now, everyone would have long since moved on.” 

Which of course they wouldn’t have; the press had long before decided that Clinton was corrupt, and they were going to paint her that way no matter what (you may have noticed that reporters’ passion for policing proper email practices was decidedly muted when it was Trump administration officials using private emails for government work). 

We see some variant of that excuse again and again, questionable or even appalling news judgments rationalized with “This would have gone better for you if you had given us what we wanted,” an assertion that is not only implausible but echoes the abuser’s victim-blaming. Look what you made us do. You brought this on yourself.

Of course. And one thing we know for sure: they will never take even the slightest responsibility for their role in any of it.

I guess the death penalty states are now racing to execute people at a record pace:

Death row inmates in five states are scheduled to be put to death in the span of one week, an unusually high number of executions that defies a yearslong trend of decline in both the use and support of the death penalty in the U.S.

If carried out as planned, the executions in Alabama, Missouri, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Texas will mark the first time in more than 20 years — since July 2003 — that five were held in seven days, according to the nonprofit Death Penalty Information Center, which takes no position on capital punishment but has criticized the way states carry out executions.

This country is in the grip of a death cult. Maybe it always has been.

I will never understand how a country can call itself civilized if it allows the state to kill people under a system that is nearly random and fraught with corruption and inequity. It’s pretty clear that it’s only done as a form of ritual punishment by the government to show that it can.

Update: Check out this piece by Bolts about the violent, criminal guards who carry out the secretive executions on Alabama. Yes, it’s barbaric.

It’s all about “policy” you see. As Philip Bump writes:

You will often hear that Trump has an advantage on policy; that, if the campaign set aside all of the fluff of personal emotion, Trump would prevail simply by virtue of the popularity of his positions. That his support is rooted in what he stands for, not who he is.

This is not true.

First of all, efforts to present Trump’s campaign as centered on policy are derailed more than a little by the paucity of policy proposals he’s offered. He had something he called “Agenda 47” that was the policy arm of his primary campaign, but it was mostly videotaped riffs about whatever furies were animating the right at any given moment.

This is why the effort to tie Trump to the Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025” has been so successful. Here was an actual outline of policy proposals, written by people close to Trump and/or who’d served with him. Trump’s ability to dismiss the outline as nonrepresentative is weakened by the lack of a campaign counterweight. (Polling released over the weekend by NBC News shows that most Americans have heard of “Project 2025” — and don’t like it.)

What Trump supporters mean when they say that he wins in a campaign focused on policy is that they think an election centered only on specific policy issues — the economy, inflation, immigration — is one that favors Trump. It’s not that Trump has a detailed paper explaining how he plans to steward the economy; his agenda can be summarized as “lots of tariffs” and “wasn’t 2019 cool?” The argument is instead that focusing on those things positions Trump more favorably than focusing on other stuff — like abortion or the stability of American democracy.

Another factor here is that many of Trump’s allies use “policy” as a way to minimize his toxic or bizarre rhetoric. We can see that in polling conducted by YouGov for CBS News that was released over the weekend.

About 9 in 10 Americans said that the candidate’s policies were important to their vote when asked, including 84 percent of Democrats, 86 percent of independents and 89 percent of Republicans. When asked whether personal qualities were important, a bit over half said they were — with a wide partisan gap. About 7 in 10 Democrats said personal qualities were important to the their vote; only 4 in 10 Republicans did. Because, you know, Trump supporters are simply focused on policy.

Also, he is a cult leader. That means he is right about everything. No need to sweat the details.

An explanation is warranted

Brian Beutler wisely suggest that Vice President Kamala Harris needs to remind voters why, if she’s ahead in the polls, she and Gov. Tim Walz are still underdogs.

“We’re not going back” suggests inevitability. So does “When we fight, we win.”

Beutler writes:

In this regard, as confident underdogs, the Harris campaign offers its supporters both hope and encouragement to put in work. It’s a simple strategy, and I think it’s a good one.

But I also think Harris herself might benefit from being a bit more explicit about why she and Tim Walz, despite leading steadily in national polls, consider themselves underdogs. They have a good case to make. It cuts right to the heart of critical weaknesses and corruption in our political system. And the messaging might work even better if more of her supporters understood why she’s running into the wind.

It’s the Electoral College. Political geeks know this. Greg Sargent knows this. It’s just a poor assumption that the general public busy with jobs and kids and shopping and church and soccer practice knows it. Team Harris-Walz wants supporters energized but not lulled into complacency by a popular vote polling lead. Tell them why they shoudn’t be.

The problem is: In the Trump era, that’s not good enough for Democrats. Trump lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by 2.1 percent, representing nearly three million ballots, and still won the election. Joe Biden won the popular vote by 4.5 percent, representing over seven million ballots. It was good enough for him to become president, but he only won the tipping point state of Wisconsin by 0.6 percent, representing just a bit over 20,000 votes. It suggests that if Biden had won the national popular vote by just under four points—say, by five or six million votes, instead of seven—he, like Clinton, would’ve lost.

So as Han Solo once said, don’t get cocky. A 2.3 percent polling lead does not a Harris presidency make.

As of this writing, the tipping-point state is likely to be Pennsylvania. That’s the upper-midwest “blue wall” state where Harris’s lead is smallest—a mere 1.2 percent. Her lead there, though slim, mercifully suggests the Electoral College’s pro-GOP bias has shrunk since 2020—that a three point national popular vote margin will be good enough. It also suggests that a tiny change in the dynamics of the election could throw the whole thing to Trump, against the will of a popular majority.

But wait, there’s more.

Harris doesn’t just have to pad her popular vote margin to overcome Electoral College bias. She also has to overcome the margin of Republican cheating and insurrection.

Our Electoral College is indefensible, but its current bias isn’t part of some conspiracy against her. Trump supporters just happened to be better distributed geographically to win 270 electoral votes while losing head-to-head nationwide.

The corruption scandal is that Trump and the GOP want to exploit these arbitrary, antidemocratic aspects of our system to make it even harder for Democrats to win.

Put Tim Walz onto it

Okay, Nebraska’s split vote. The Blue Wall states. The 12th Amendment that could “throw the whole election to the 50 state delegations in the U.S. House of Representatives.” There are a host of Republican lawsuits in swing states aimed suppressing the votes of people Trump will lock up if handed the presidency again. It all matters. But it’s complicated.

Harris is busy selling herself to some voters and still introducing herself to others. Explaining why all that means she and Walz are still underdogs is a job for the guy with the 1979 International Harvester Scout. He can break it down and make the complicated simple.

There’s a difference between the two major parties so fundamental that former Wyoming congresswoman Liz Cheney suggests the Republican Party is now too far gone to save.

But it’s not so weakened that it cannot cheat its way into the Oval Office, Beutler warns. That’s what the Harris campaign must better explain. That’s why it can be leading in the polls and still be the underdog.

This is just the most basic difference between the two parties juxtaposed before us. One that’s happy to ratfuck its way to power without popular support, another that would never dare. It’s why Harris can call herself an underdog. And if more people understood her meaning, Trump’s chicanery would be more likely backfire.

And don’t forget to vote on the first day.

Yes, everyone, voting on Day 1 allows our campaigns to move faster to lower propensity Dems. And when we do that we make more Dem voters and make it more likely we win.

So friends – vote on Day 1 or as early as you can. It’s another way to help us win. https://t.co/7gIKAt55mk

— Simon Rosenberg (@SimonWDC) September 24, 2024

“Revenge does take time”

Policy. We all know that’s what this presidential election is about. Fence-sitters like New York Times columnist Brett Stephens have inquiring minds. They want to know what policies Vice President Kamala Harris will pursue before voting for her. Even knowing the other entrée choice is, as humorist David Sedaris put it, “a platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it.”

Because everyone knows what Donald Trump’s policy agenda for his second term is: revenge. And lots of tariffs.

“I love getting even with people,” Trump told Charlie Rose in 1992, “if given the opportunity.”

Nothing has changed in the intervening years. Trump’s view of the world — of women especially, a pundit said this week — was frozen in amber in the late 1980s when his real estate empire was at its peak. On Trump’s revenge agenda should he win in November is an expanding list of enemies, many of whom he’s never met, against whom he holds grudges. People he wants rounded up by troops and deported. People he thinks should face military tribunals. Or IRS audits. Or federal investigations that upend lives. People he thinks should be put in jail for criticizing Supreme Court decisions or him.

Trump says Americans who criticize the Supreme Court for overturning Roe v. Wade should be imprisoned: “These people should be put in jail for the way they talk about our judges and justices” pic.twitter.com/IJtQVZPKXc

— Kamala HQ (@KamalaHQ) September 24, 2024

This is not theoretical, Michael Schmidt wrote on Saturday in the New York Times. He sought to deploy the Department of Justice as a weapon for personal revenge in his first term. He was frustrated, albeit not entirely, by advisers who sought to stall, dissuade, and divert him:

In an Oval Office meeting, Mr. Trump told startled aides that if Attorney General Jeff Sessions would not order the department to go after Hillary Clinton and James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, Mr. Trump would prosecute them himself.

Recognizing the extraordinary dangers of a president seeking not just to weaponize the criminal justice system for political ends but trying as well to assume personal control over who should be investigated and charged, the White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, sought to stall.

Those efforts were not entirely successful. Schmidt and Matthew Cullen detailed ten people on Trump’s enemies list eventually hit with punitive actions that disrupted their lives and cost hundreds of thousands in fines and legal fees.

MSNBC’s “Deadline White House” opened on Monday with a montage of Trump’s musings on revenge. Treason is punishable by death in the Constitution, a reporter noted in May 2019: “Who specifically are you accusing of treason?”

Trump didn’t blink. He cited a list of people he felt had wronged him who should be charged with treason (extremely loosely defined).

“Revenge does take time,” Trump told “Dr. Phil Primetime.”

Trump is biding his. If he wins a second term and anyone opposes him, he told a rally last September, he’ll order his attorney general to indict them.

He’ll go full Queen of Hearts given a second chance at the Oval Office.

In case you were wondering how The Great Businessman is doing:

If you invested $1,000 in March, it is worth $190 today. pic.twitter.com/1lRspXo3k2

— Alex Cole (@acnewsitics) September 23, 2024

It would appear that now that the lock out period is over, Trump or other big stock holders are dumping stock. Too bad about the suckers and losers.

Many people say they want Trump to be president again because he is a great businessman and they believe he will lower prices. That’s what he’s promising, after all.

He gave an interview to a friendly reporter, Sheryl Attkisson, who asked him how he planned to do that:

Attkisson: Kamala Harris has been very short on specifics when it comes to the economy other than saying she wants an opportunity economy. What are the specific mechanics of how prices come down. You know the steps that would be taken in a second term for you?

Trump: So first of all, she can’t do an interview. She could never do this interview because you ask questions like give me a specific answer. She talks about her lawn when she was growing up. This woman is not equipped to be president She is not equipped to deal with President Xi, — I took in hundreds of billions with him.

And Putin, we had no war with Putin. Remember, and I’m just going to go off just for this. With Bush, they took a lot. Russia. With Biden, they’re trying to take everything. With Obama, they took a lot. With Trump, Russia took nothing, Just remember that. It’s a little, a little chart.

But what happened, and when you look at what took place, it was so sad. When they took over, they cut the oil way down, and oil started going through the roof. It was going to $10 a gallon. It was going to go to numbers that nobody has ever seen. And so they went back to the Trump drilling, They said, let it go back.

That was the only good thing. But they stopped, because I wold be there, but four years later I would be triple what the number was. Right now, they’re just about even where I was. But they only did that because of the fact that they would have an election coming up.

And you remember at the beginning what happened? That’s one of the reasons that Putin went in, because it went to $100 a barrel instead of $40 a barrel. And he could fight all the wars he wants with those kinds of numbers because he’s a big seller of gas and oil. So what happens is they went back to what I was doing just to reopen. Just reopen.

It wasn’t hard. It’s so crazy what they want to do. They’re going to destroy lives. They’re going to destroy — what they have done to this country, and especially in the sense of allowing millions and millions of people come in, because that’s something. You know we can fix the gasoline situation and we can fix the — anything.

Did that answer the question about the specific mechanics of what he’ll do to bring prices down? No? Attkisson (who is a MAGA sympathizer) didn’t seem to think so either.

Attkisson: Do prices come down magically because it’s not them?

Trump: They come down with energy and they come down with interest rates. We’re going to get, as I told you, we’re going to get energy down by 50% in 12 months. We’re going to have it. It’s going to be a major smash on energy.

If you look at the energy for, and I’m not just talking about cars. I’m talking about air conditioning, heating your basic energy — operating a bakery operating any kind of business. It’s all having to do with energy.

That was where they all started wrong when they cut way back on what I did, and again, just so you understand, they let it go back to where it was which was a very smart thing, Otherwise, I think you would have had, I think you would have had a depression, if you want to know the truth.

But energy was rising at a level that nobody had ever seen, and then they said, go back,go back. They would tell people, go back to your wells, go back to drilling, fracking, whatever you have to do. But if they win, the day after they’re going all the way. They were only doing that because of an election coming up. They’re going all the way, What they are doing to our country is madness. And what they’ve done to our country is mad.

I guess that gobbldygook was meant to say that he will lower energy prices by going back to what he did before — except the Biden administration allegedly went back to what he did before already so his plan is to lower energy prices by 50%. (Don’t even ask if he knows anything about whether oil prices can go below their break even price because he’s an imbcile and doesn’t understand anything.)

In addition, aside from all the gibberish, he apparently believes that inflation occurred because Biden changed his energy policy? What?

I’m just taking a wild guess about what he was trying to say so it’s possible I’m sanewashing him. Most of that was him vamping with incomprehensible bullshit because he doesn’t have a clue ab out inflation and doesn’t care.

But sure, he’s a great businessman so let’s put him back in charge. What could go wrong?

Meanwhile:

Reporter asks Trump about economists saying prices will go up if he implements heavy tariffs.

Trump says Congress will approve his tariffs and if they don't, he'll impose them anyway.

He then rambles on for another 9 minutes about Elon Musk, China, coal plants, San Franciso,… pic.twitter.com/LaIFJVn7lp

— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona) September 23, 2024

Trump asked what the future of crypto looks like: “Well, I think it’s a good future. You know, who knows about anything today. I tell you what, you look at values, you look at what’s happening and where it’s come and where it came from, I think crypto’s got a great future.” pic.twitter.com/HN9SzKMhJ2

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) September 23, 2024

At least until Trump does

JV Last reminisces about America’s halcyon days when winning the popular vote meant that you’d also win the electoral college, something we all took for granted until 2000 when we learned otherwise. (Ye, it happened once before in the 1870s but nobody gave it much of a thought after that.)

He talks about all the variables, including the impact of late-breaking news about one side or the other,and how these variables have changed over the years and concludes:

Unless Harris expands her lead over Trump to greater than a +5 margin on Election Day, we’re in coin-flip territory for the next 42 days.

Yeah. This is one of the reasons I really wish the news media would be careful about how they frame the polling.

Here’s the bad news we can definitely count on:

Not being able to see over the electoral horizon is a problem because we know what Trump is going to do on Election Day: He’s going to claim victory.

His voters will believe him, and this in turn will cause Republican elites to support his claims, irrespective of evidence.

We saw how quickly and easily Republican voters believed Trump in 2020, when Biden’s margin of victory was overwhelming and had been anticipated by polls for months.

Within days a supermajority of Republican voters believed that Trump was the winner, even though there was no evidence to support this view and a great deal of evidence against it.

Ask yourself: What are these people going to say—and do—if Kamala Harris is not a heavy favorite going into Election Day? And if no one really knows what’s happening until the returns come in?

As Last says, even if she wins and none of Trump’s attempts to overturn it succeed, he will still say that he won and will convince many Republicans that it’s true. The results of that will be a Republican Party that continues to be required to adhere to the Big Lie even if Trump is out of the picture which means:

[W]e’re going to have another four years in which the price of admission to Republican politics is claiming that the sitting president is illegitimate.

I’m afraid so.

The Washington Post’s Ashley Parker with a long overdue proper description of Trump’s campaign theme:

In Donald Trump’s imaginary world, Americans can’t venture out to buy a loaf of bread without getting shot, mugged or raped. Immigrants in a small Ohio town eat their neighbors’ cats and dogs. World War III and economic collapse are just around the corner. And kids head off to school only to return at day’s end having undergone gender reassignment surgery.

The former president’s imaginary world is a dark, dystopian place, described by Trump in his rallies, interviews, social media posts and debate appearances to paint an alarming picture of America under the Biden-Harris administration.

It is a distorted, warped and, at times, absurdist portrait of a nation where the insurrectionists who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, to deadly effect were merely peaceful protesters, and where unlucky boaters are faced with the unappealing choice between electrocution or a shark attack. His extreme caricatures also serve as another way for Trump to traffic in lies and misinformation, using an alternate reality of his own making to create an often terrifying — and, he seems to hope — politically devastating landscape for his political opponents.

It goes on to describe many of the details, most of which you no doubt are aware of. But I wonder how many so-called “normies” who aren’t paying close attention know about this. Here’s just one example:

Immigration is another topic ripe for Trump’s land of make-believe. For example, the former president repeatedly references Hannibal Lecter, the fictional serial killer from “The Silence of the Lambs,” as a way of conflating migrants seeking asylum with people in mental institutions to suggest without evidence — but with dehumanizing language — that those crossing the U.S.-Mexico border are migrants from insane asylums.

“We have people that are being released into our country that we don’t want in our country,” Trump told a Wildwood, N.J., crowd in May, after mentioning “the late, great Hannibal Lecter.”

Trump also regularly claims that the government is putting up undocumented immigrants in “luxury hotels.” In Manhattan, for instance, the city has spent millions converting motels, office buildings and even some upscale hotels into housing for thousands of migrants, but the accommodations are shelter operations, not five-star opulence.

“You have soldiers right now laying on the streets of different cities, all Democrat-run. They’re laying on the streets in front of hotels, in some cases luxury hotels, and you have illegal immigrants coming in and living in those hotels and laughing at our soldiers, as they walk by into a luxury lobby,” Trump said during an economic speech in New York this month. “Is there something wrong with that thinking? Is there something wrong with our country?”

There is another way to describe all this, of course. Donald Trump is a pathological liar and a grotesque demagogue. But this will do.

The problem we have, as I’ve been annoyingly hammering, is that a very large plurality of the public either believes him or admires him for being the demagogic liar that he is because it triggers the libs. These are all people who seem to be in love with hate.

Either way, the fact that we have a man who is portraying America as a dystopian hellhole despite all evidence to the contrary virtually tied in the polls with the person living in the real world is profoundly disturbing.