Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Something’s happening with the youngs:

Voter registration is breaking records as Election Day approaches, particularly among young people, many of whom are first-time voters.

On Tuesday’s National Voter Registration Day more than 150,000 people registered through Vote.org, the most the organization has ever seen on that day. The organization registered 279,400 voters in all of last year.

Last week, 337,826 people visited a link posted on Instagram by pop star Taylor Swift that directed them to their state’s voter registration site.

Although Swift noted that she would be voting for the Democratic candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris, people don’t have to declare a party affiliation when they register and neither vote.org nor Swift tracked registrations by party. Vote.org has previously told USA TODAY that about 80% of people they register turn out in the next election.

A huge percentage of the newly registered voters are young people, many voting for the first time.

According to Vote.org, voters under 35 made up 81% of Tuesday’s registrations, with the biggest spike among 18-year-olds. On this year’s National Voter Registration Day, 11% of those registered were 18, which is 53% higher than on the same day four years ago.

I may be going out on a limb here but I’d guess most of those young people are going to vote Democratic. Sure, there will be a few incel Trump fans and some who’ll vote 3rd party. But I think these young voters can see where the future is and it isn’t with the weirdos.

It’s going to be a very busy day. Usually the new president goes to the inaugural brunch, takes a nap and then goes to the inaugural ball on day one. Trump says he’s going to take 200 actions and counting.

“A lot but not all of what Trump says he wants to do on day one is going to be illegal or impractical,” said Steve Vladeck, a constitutional law expert at Georgetown University Law Center and a critic of how Trump has wielded executive power. “But even the illegal stuff might go into effect for some time, and he might actually succeed in pushing the law in his direction.”

Here’s a little taste of what he’s promising on immigration on day one:

Ity sounds like it’s going to be quite a day.

Obviously, he can’t do all or really, any of that, on the first day. But recall that in 2017 it didn’t take him very long to enact his Muslim ban and even though the courts eventually pared it back, it created chaos and ended up being fairly draconian in the end anyway. I think we can expect the Mass Deportation promise to be the same. This time, especially if he has a majority in the congress, he’s going to get away with a lot more since the Supreme Court is practically in bed with him.

I have no doubt that he’s much more intent upon carrying out his promises and he will have nothing by henchmen and sycophants willing to help him do it throughout the government. He’s not a paper tiger.

You’re goddamn right he did

Trump has taken to saying that he never asked to prosecute his enemies because it wouldn’t have been right. he even says about Hillary Clinton that he didn’t think it would be right to put the wife of a president in jail (as if that’s all she was….) He is, as usual, lying through his big, white, fake teeth.

The fact is that Trump repeatedly ordered his DOJ to prosecute his enemies. His minions managed to keep- him from doing his worst. Here’s how this story by Mike Schmidt in the NY Times starts out (gift link below.)

It was the spring of 2018 and President Donald J. Trump, faced with an accelerating inquiry into his campaign’s ties to Russia, was furious that the Justice Department was reluctant to strike back at those he saw as his enemies.

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.

“How about I do this?” Mr. McGahn told Mr. Trump, according to an account verified by witnesses. “I’m going to write you a memo explaining to you what the law is and how it works, and I’ll give that memo to you and you can decide what you want to do.”’

The episode marked the start of a more aggressive effort by Mr. Trump to deploy his power against his perceived enemies despite warnings not to do so by top aides. And a look back at the cases of 10 individuals brings a pattern into clearer focus: After Mr. Trump made repeated public or private demands for them to be targeted by the government, they faced federal pressure of one kind or another.

it highlights how closely his expressed desires to go after people who had drawn his ire were sometimes followed by the Justice Department, F.B.I. or other agencies. Even without his direct order, his indirect influence could serve his ends and leave those in his sights facing expensive, time-consuming legal proceedings or other high-stress inquiries.

The story of that period has a powerful resonance today as Mr. Trump, angered in part by the two federal and two state-level indictments of him since leaving office, threatens to carry out a campaign of retribution if he returns to the White House. He has signaled that a second Trump administration would be stocked not with people who served as guardrails during his first term, but with carefully vetted loyalists who would eagerly carry out his wishes.

And there’s this:

If elected again, he would also return to the White House bolstered by the Supreme Court’s ruling in July that former presidents have broad immunity from prosecution for official acts taken while in office.

Schmidt apparently had access to memos memorializing Trump’s orders and discussions among the staff as to their legality which members of the Trump administration snuck out of the White House. (Trump directed that people in the WH not take notes.) Both privately and publicly Trump was intent upon having the DOJ punish his enemies despite the constant admonishment by WH lawyers that it would cause havoc. And apparently, some of the lawyers who were very much against what he was trying to do, nonetheless reluctantly concluded that he could legally do it even though it would violate long established normas and result in mass resignations at the DOJ.

Schmidt doesn’t really go into what Bill Barr did personally, but we all know that he was almost as anxious to stick it to Trump’s enemies and the man himself.

Joe Biden has not ordered the DOJ to go after Trump. In fact, he’s stood silent as they prosecuted his beloved only surviving son on charges that would not have been brought against anyone else. So, even though Trump has been charged with federal crimes since he left office, the charges were fully justified — he tried to overturn the election and stole classified documents. — he cannot use Biden as an excuse to throw his enemies in jail if he becomes president again.

This article is thorough and includes a lot of detail about some of the episodes we had heard about earlier as well as some startling news facts. I’ve included a gift link here for you to read the whole thing.

Now that he knows he has immunity and will not have to seek another term (whether he leaves voluntarily or just decides he’s going to stay as long as he wants) all bets are off. He’s going to do it.

JD Vance is full of it

No the Haitians in Springfield are not murdering people in their beds. CNN’s Daniel Dale with a fact check:

“I’m talking to my constituents and I’m hearing terrible things about what’s going on in Springfield, and Kamala Harris’ open-border policies have caused these problems,” Vance said. Moments later, he said, “Murders are up by 81% because of what Kamala Harris has allowed to happen to this small community.”

We looked into this claim and found it’s a good example of how statistics can be cherry-picked and misleadingly framed to serve unfounded narratives.

“During the time that I’ve been with the prosecutor’s office, which is 21 years now, we have not had any murders involving the Haitian community – as either the victims or as the perpetrators of those murders,” Daniel Driscoll, the Republican top prosecutor in Clark County, in which Springfield is the largest city, said in a Friday interview.

Vance was citing real data, but he didn’t mention what the underlying numbers are.
Spokesperson William Martin said Vance was talking about official Ohio figures showing that Springfield had five murders in 2021 and nine murders in 2023.

That four-murder increase is indeed an increase of 80%. An increase from five murders one year to nine murders two years later, though, does not prove Vance’s claim that Harris and immigrants have caused a murder spike — or even that there is a current murder spike.

In small communities, Driscoll said, “if you were to have one murder one year and two murders the next year, you’ve suddenly got a 100% increase in the rate, but that’s not an appreciable difference in the number of murders you have.” He said what he looks at is “trends” — and “we’ve not seen any trend showing that the amount of murders is going up in Clark County.”

Springfield had more total murders under President Donald Trump than under Biden-Harris.

Vance said murders in Springfield have soared “because of” Harris’ policies. But a quick glance at Springfield’s murder numbers for the last three presidential terms – which are easily available online from the FBI and the state of Ohio – immediately calls his assertion into question.

President Barack Obama’s second term: 30 murders. Six in 2013; seven in 2014; 12 in 2015; five in 2016.

Trump’s term: 33 murders. Nine in 2017 (he took over from Obama on January 20 that year); 13 in 2018; three in 2019; eight in 2020.

President Joe Biden’s term through 3.5 years: 22 murders. Five in 2021 (he took over from Trump on January 20 that year); six in 2022; nine in 2023; two in the first half of 2024.

Even if you exclude the half-year 2024 data and only compare the three completed years of the Biden-Harris administration to either the first three years or last three years under the Trump administration, there have still been fewer murders under Biden-Harris.

So, if the president’s policies are causing murders, then Trump’s policies were obviously much worse. Of course, the president’s policies aren’t really responsible for murders (except to the extent that he’s been pushing unfettered gun rights) so it’s a ridiculous statement on its face. But if you’re going to make it, it’s very dishonest to cherry pick the figures to exonerate the man whose record is actually the worst one of the last three presidents.

But then this is JD Vance we’re talking about.

And by the way, there’s no reason to think that even the spike in murders that happened under Trump were caused by Haitian immigrants:

As we’ve repeatedly noted in fact checks about crime, identifying specific reasons for particular cities’ increases or decreases in any given year is notoriously difficult. And nobody has demonstrated that Haitian immigrants in particular or immigrants in general were responsible for the four additional murders in 2023 compared to 2021. (One prominent local case from 2023, in which a Haitian immigrant committed aggravated vehicular homicide and involuntary manslaughter when he accidentally crashed his minivan into a school bus and killed a child, is not classified as a murder, and the child’s father has said explicitly that it was not a murder.)

Local and state officials have certainly not attributed the uptick in murder to immigrants. Driscoll described it as “luck, or a lack thereof.” And Andy Wilson, now Ohio’s public safety director under Republican Gov. Mike DeWine and formerly the Clark County prosecutor before Driscoll, told reporters this week that the main public safety issue with regard to Haitian immigrants in the state is safe driving, “not crime” and “not violence.”

There are a number of other data points on this at the link.

The influx of immigrants has caused some problems, as it would when any place has a rise in population in a fairly short period of time. Government resources are stretched, traffic, things like that. There’s a bigger upside, though. Businesses flourish, revenue rises for the town etc. This happens all the time.

We all know what the problem is. Black foreigners have come into this small insular town for work and the locals are uncomfortable with that. Some are downright racist. And Donald Trump and JD Vance and their MAGA followers are exploiting that to argue for mass round-ups, detention camps and deportation of tens of millions of people. It’s disgusting.

Dear Leader has some inspiring words to share with you

Thank you Daddy:

Daddy’s awfully busy running for president…

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 on

Worth 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.

Zak Cheney-Rice:

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.

NBC reports:

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.