Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

In a sane world

Board of elections officials and supervisors take oaths before starting their public service jobs, both in my state and in Georgia.

Here’s Georgia Code § 21-2-70:

(B) In the case of a board of elections, each member of the board shall take an oath in the following form upon becoming a member of the board which shall apply to all primaries and elections conducted by the board throughout such person’s tenure on the board:

I, __________________, do swear (or affirm) that I will as a member of the board of elections duly attend all ensuing primaries and elections during the continuance thereof, that I will to the best of my ability prevent any fraud, deceit, or abuse in carrying on the same, that I will make a true and perfect return of such primaries and elections, and that I will at all times truly, impartially, and faithfully perform my duties in accordance with Georgia laws to the best of my judgment and ability.

Now, like the presidential oath (Article II, Section 1, Clause 8) and the Foreign Emoluments Clause (Article I, Section 9, Clause 8), try enforcing it.

Because it seems like this kind of activity between election officials would be … wrong, if not illegal or a fireable offense in the private sector (The Guardian):

Emails obtained by the Guardian reveal a behind-the-scenes network of county election officials throughout Georgia coordinating on policy and messaging to both call the results of November’s election into question before a single vote is cast, and push rules and procedures favored by the election denial movement.

The emails were obtained by the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (Crew) as a result of a public records request sent to David Hancock, an election denier and member of the Gwinnett county board of elections. Crew shared the emails with the Guardian.

Spanning a period beginning in January, the communications expose the inner workings of a group that includes some of the most ardent supporters of the former president Donald Trump’s election lies as well as ongoing efforts to portray the coming election as beset with fraud. Included in the communications are agendas for meetings and efforts to coordinate on policies and messaging as the swing state has once again become a focal point of the presidential campaign.

The communications include correspondence from a who’s who of Georgia election denialists, including officials with ties to prominent national groups such as the Tea Party Patriots and the Election Integrity Network, a group run by Cleta Mitchell, a former attorney who acted as an informal adviser to the Trump White House during its attempts to overturn the 2020 election.

The group – which includes elections officials from at least five counties – calls itself the Georgia Election Integrity Coalition.

If it were me, I’d be calling for the dismissal of these election officials. But given GOP conservatives run Georgia according to Frank Wilhoit’s formulation for bad faith politics, it’s not likely.

Receiving the email were a handful of county election officials who have expressed belief in Donald Trump’s false claims of a stolen election in 2020, and have continued to implement policies and push for rules based on the belief that widespread election fraud threatens to result in a Trump loss in Georgia in November. They include Michael Heekin, a Republican member of the Fulton county board of elections who refused to certify results this year; his colleague Julie Adams, who has twice refused to certify results this year and works for the prominent national election denier groups Tea Party Patriots and the Election Integrity Network; and Debbie Fisher of Cobb county, Nancy Jester of DeKalb county and Roy McClain of Spalding county – all of whom refused to certify results last November and who received the letter Hancock took issue with.

And aside from little Spalding County (pop. 67k) about 35 miles south of Atlanta, Fulton, Cobb, and DeKalb counties conveniently represent, along with (Hancock’s Gwinnett) the four largest counties in Georgia and a third of its population.

In this environment, and in this state, and with its recent history, this story should be attracting more attention than it has.

Joyce Vance, former U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Alabama, writes at Civil Discourse that these election officials must be “gifted fortune tellers” if they’re already discovered that Georgia’s 2024 election will involve massive fraud before a single vote has been cast:

“The goal of their plan is to hamper certification of the election results if Trump loses,” Vance writes:

This news is not a surprise. As we’ve discussed previously, there are some efforts underway to pretend the purely ministerial obligation election officials have to certify completed counts is something else, a process whose outcome these officials have the discretion to challenge. If this sounds familiar, it’s roughly akin to the idea of delaying certification of the Electoral College vote on January 6, 2020, to throw the election into chaos amidst claims of (nonexistent) fraud. It’s a recipe for a coup.

… You don’t have to be an expert in election law to see what’s happening: Trump is trying to create a legal path to do what he failed to accomplish in 2020, overturning the will of the voters if he loses.

This election will be a fight for every vote, Vance reminds readers. On the positive side, she’s seeing signs for Harris-Walz in Alabama neighborhoods she normally thinks of as Republican:

Occasionally down here in Alabama you see a smattering of signs supporting Democratic candidates. But I don’t remember seeing this many, in such a wide variety of places and with so much variety and creativity, ever before. Is it joy? I’m not sure what it is, but these signs make me smile and feel hopeful every time I see one, and I hope they do for you too!

Go ahead. As Mitch McConnell said yesterday:

Trump is making sure they will get the blame. He seems to think immigration is the magic bullet and that people will rush to his side if the Democrats refuse to pass this sill SAVE act which is an unnecessary, redundant bill. I really doubt that people will see it that way. Much more likely they’ll just see more Trumpian chaos and be reminded that the GOP majority is a clown show there will be even more of it if he’s elected president again.

Speaker Johnson was kissing the ring at Mar-a-lago last weekend so we know where he’s going to wind up. He certainly isn’t going to defy Dear Leader. Stay tuned. This is going to get interesting.

You’ve no doubt heard about the tragic death of Amber Thurman who was denied a D&C in Georgia because of the new abortion laws, ended up getting sepsis and died on the operating table. She’s not the only one. ProPublica got hold of another report from the maternal death board and it’s equally awful.

Candi Miller was a Georgia mother of three in poor health and her doctor said she should not risk having another child. Unfortunately, she accidentally got pregnant and knew that she would not be able to get an abortion unless she was in danger of losing her life, which was very possible. So she decided that she had to deal with the situation alone:

Miller ordered abortion pills online, but she did not expel all the fetal tissue and would need a dilation and curettage procedure to clear it from her uterus and stave off sepsis, a grave and painful infection. In many states, this care, known as a D&C, is routine for both abortions and miscarriages. In Georgia, performing it had recently been made a felony, with few exceptions.

Her teenage son watched her suffer for days after she took the pills, bedridden and moaning. In the early hours of Nov. 12, 2022, her husband found her unresponsive in bed, her 3-year-old daughter at her side.

An autopsy found unexpelled fetal tissue, confirming that the abortion had not fully completed. It also found a lethal combination of painkillers, including the dangerous opioid fentanyl. Miller had no history of drug use, the medical records state; her family has no idea how she obtained them or what was going through her mind — whether she was trying to quell the pain, complete the abortion or end her life. A medical examiner was unable to determine the manner of death.

Her family later told a coroner she hadn’t visited a doctor “due to the current legislation on pregnancies and abortions.” situation herself:

The committee on maternal health determined that her death was preventable. If she hadn’t been burdened by Georgia’s draconian anti-abortion law she would have sought medical help.

I cannot help but be reminded of the very famous story of Gerri Santoro who was found dead on the floor of a dingy motel room rom an attempted self- induced abortion in 1964. Ms Magazine ran the police photo of the scene and it shocked the nation. Her story was a common one in those days. It looks like it’s common once again.

Ms. posted this in 2022 when Roe was overturned:

On the heels of the Supreme Court’s initial ruling in Roe v. Wade, we remembered Gerri and the women like her who had died from unsafe, illegal abortions. We declared: “Never again.”

We ran the photo again in 2016, after the election of Donald Trump—predicting that in the weeks, months and years to come, abortion access would become a battleground more hard-fought than ever. Unfortunately, we were right.

For too many women of my generation, a time before Roe feels like ancient history—but now, that history looms dangerously in the future. Almost five decades after Roe, we’re once again in the fight of our lives.

We must demand that women have bodily autonomy and control over their destinies. We must remind lawmakers that a majority of Americans support safe and legal abortion. We must remind the country what a nation without any safe, legal abortion access looks like. We must remind our lawmakers what women’s lives without abortion access look like—and the devastating ways in which an end to abortion access is an end to our freedom.

We must bring back to life the stories of women like Gerri, who died because they had no choice, and the thousands of women like her whose lives were forever altered because they didn’t, either.

“She was just one of countless women who died in this lonely and desperate way,” Gerri’s daughter said to the crowd in 2004. “They were all someone’s sister, daughter, mother or friend.”

I’ve posted Gerri Santoro’s picture on this blog many times over the years but I’m not going to do it again. It feels so much worse to look at it now. If you have never seen it, you can click here.

This is what Trump means when he says he wants to make America Great Again.

NPR reports on a very exciting improvement in the fentanyl epidemic:

For the first time in decades, public health data shows a sudden and hopeful drop in drug overdose deaths across the U.S. “This is exciting,” said Dr. Nora Volkow, head of the National Institute On Drug Abuse [NIDA], the federal laboratory charged with studying addiction. “This looks real. This looks very, very real.”

National surveys compiled by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention already show an unprecedented decline in drug deaths of roughly 10.6 percent. That’s a huge reversal from recent years when fatal overdoses regularly increased by double-digit percentages. Some researchers believe the data will show an even larger decline in drug deaths when federal surveys are updated to reflect improvements being seen at the state level, especially in the eastern U.S.

“In the states that have the most rapid data collection systems, we’re seeing declines of twenty percent, thirty percent,” said Dr. Nabarun Dasgupta, an expert on street drugs at the University of North Carolina. According to Dasgupta’s analysis, which has sparked discussion among addiction and drug policy experts, the drop in state-level mortality numbers corresponds with similar steep declines in emergency room visits linked to overdoses.

Dr. Nabarun Dasgupta, a researcher at the University of North Carolina, is an expert on the U.S. street drug supply. He believes data shows a sudden drop in drug overdose deaths nationwide that could already by saving “roughly 20,000 lives” per year.

Dasgupta was one of the first researchers to detect the trend. He believes the national decline in street drug deaths is now at least 15 percent and could mean as many as 20,000 fewer fatalities per year.

There are still too many, obviously. But this sharp decline is unprecedented and it’s very good news.

They don’t know what’s causing it. There is speculation that the availability of naloxone is a key while others think that one of the newer ingredients in the racipe seems to elay withdrawal which means people may be using less fentanyl. The timing of the sharp rise and the subsequent drop may also indicate that the COVID epidemic was a factor. (I think the trauma of that event, with everything that went with it, caused much more disruption than we will be able to measure for some time to come.)

Anyway, this is unalloyed good news and we should be able to feel a little sense of relief that this terrible problem has not only stopped getting worse but that it’s actually improved. We need more of that.

You’ll notice that’s from the Wall St. Journal. It comes on the heels of a scathing editorial board editorial condemning Trump.

Here’s an excerpt and a gift link to the whole article. Oh my:

City Manager Bryan Heck fielded an unusual question at City Hall on the morning of Sept. 9, from a staff member of Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance. The staffer called to ask if there was any truth to bizarre rumors about Haitian immigrants and pets in Springfield.

“He asked point-blank, ‘Are the rumors true of pets being taken and eaten?’” recalled Heck. “I told him no. There was no verifiable evidence or reports to show this was true. I told them these claims were baseless.” 

By then, Vance had already posted about the rumors to his 1.9 million followers on X. Yet he kept the post up, and repeated an even more insistent version of the claim the next morning.

That night, former President Donald Trump stood on a Philadelphia debate stage and shot the rumor into the stratosphere. “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs,” he said to 67 million viewers. “The people that came in, they’re eating the cats. They’re eating, they’re eating, the pets of the people that live there. And this is what’s happening in this country.”

There’s more, a lot more. The tensions in the town had been mounting for a while, with the white residents obviously agitated by the arrival of Black foreigners who made them mad with their black and foreign ways. An old story. But then the white supremacists came to town to really stir up trouble. Read the whole thing.

You have to see this one anecdote to really understand the grotesque dishonesty of JD Vance. It’s been clear from the beginning that there was no pet-eating going on and that the local racists had just worked themselves up into a frenzy.

Vance, meanwhile, has continued to defend his claims.

A Vance spokesperson on Tuesday provided The Wall Street Journal with a police report in which a resident had claimed her pet might have been taken by Haitian neighbors. But when a reporter went to Anna Kilgore’s house Tuesday evening, she said her cat Miss Sassy, which went missing in late August, had actually returned a few days later—found safe in her own basement. 

Kilgore, wearing a Trump shirt and hat, said she apologized to her Haitian neighbors with the help of her daughter and a mobile-phone translation app.

This actually made me feel a little bit better. Yes, it’s probable that this woman freaked out in a racist fury that had been ginned up in her neighborhood. But in the end she was able to admit she was wrong and actually apologized to the neighbors she had unfairly targeted. She is a much better person than Donald Trump and JD Vance who have never in their lives apologized for anything.

It’s a small thing but it suggests that some of them aren’t so far down the rabbit hole they’ll never be able to climb back out.

Update:

Vance is really pushing the Nazi propaganda with this one:

Check this out:

María Teresa Kumar told The Hill that Harris is tapping into a cultural phenomenon with the under-40 crowd.

“For older voters and for donors coming in, it’s like, ‘We could actually beat Trump.’ I think for young people, it’s a genuine, authentic enthusiasm. And I say this because … the moment she announced, we saw young voters tick up,” Kumar said.

“It was nuts. So we were registering roughly 60 to 100 voters a day on Friday. On Monday, it jumped to 3,000. By [the next] Friday, it was 8,000. It was super exciting. Night and day. It’s a very cool chart.”

According to numbers from Voto Latino, which targets young Latinos for registration, the group facilitated 36,000 registrations in the six months leading up to July 21. In the weeks since, Voto Latino has registered 120,000 additional voters.

Of those voters, 59 percent are under 30, and 29 percent are in their 30s.

Those age groups, Kumar said, are connecting to Harris’s message not only on new platforms, but through language that’s lost on older demographics.

“I do think that we’re not giving the phenomena that is happening on TikTok enough credit. The moment that that young woman said, ‘Kamala is brat,’ it distinguished the right and the misogyny of how they were trying to place her. They were trying to place her as ‘she laughs too much, she’s not organized, she’s not focused,’ you know? And basically, Gen Z is like, ‘she’s messy, we’re messy. But we’re also smart, so don’t get confused,’” said Kumar, referring to pop star Charli XCX’s labeling of Harris as “brat.”

But traditional Democratic strategists haven’t fully caught up, according to Kumar.“I’ve been in these kitchen cabinet meetings with all these consultants trying to figure out how they were going to go against the misogyny of that ‘They don’t like her voice.’ … You know, people earning hundreds of thousands of dollars, and it literally took one tweet from one Gen Zer to encapsulate and emasculate the other side. I mean, brilliant, right?”

The Harris campaign has an excellent social media tram and they are killing it, especially on the platforms where the youngs hang out. They are also launching a major Latino outyreach campaign:

The Harris campaign is launching its largest effort yet to reach Latino voters, with new spending on Spanish-language radio and an organizing push around boxing matches and baseball games as National Hispanic Heritage Month kicks off this weekend.

The investments come as early voting is set to begin soon in some of the critical battlegrounds that are home to sizable Latino populations, like Arizona, Nevada and Pennsylvania.

Vice President Kamala Harris will address the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute’s annual conference on Wednesday, according to a senior campaign official, and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz is expected to pitch Latino voters in swing states in the coming weeks. Surrogates will be a part of the travel plan as well, the official said in plans first shared with NBC News.

If you read the whole thing you’ll see that it’s a major initiative with top surrogates, ad campaigns and lots of on-the-ground contact. That is very good news.

There’s been a lot going on this week so you may have missed Donald Trump introducing his latest business venture on X on Monday. You read that right. He may be in the final stretch of his presidential campaign but he found the time to formally introduce his latest money making scheme to the public. And what a scheme it is. The Trump family is getting into the cryptocurrency game.

It’s obvious that Trump was completely clueless about how his new business, called World Liberty Financial, works. When asked why it is so important for America to lead in cryptocurrency, Trump started talking about how AI requires a lot of electricity. (Luckily he didn’t digress into shark attacks.)

Later he extolled the expertise and brilliance of his 18 year old son Barron, who he said has “four wallets” and is named as the new company’s “DeFi visionary” (that stands for decentralized finance.) Trump himself is the “Chief Crypto Advocate” and Trump’s oldest sons, the alleged movers and shakers of this deal, are both called “Web3 Ambassadors.”

The Trumps have a couple of very interesting partners in this new venture, exactly the kind of people you’d expect a president to be involved with. The first is a self-described “dirtbag of the internet” named Chase Herro who once famously said of the crypto market, “You can literally sell s–t in a can, wrapped in p–s, covered in human skin, for a billion dollars if the story’s right, because people will buy it. I’m not going to question the right and wrong of all that.” The other partner is Zachary Folkman who, according to the NY Times, used to teach classes on how to seduce women. You can see why the Trumps jumped at the chance to get in business with them.

It is unprecedented for a presidential candidate to launch a new business less than two months before the election. As those of you who were around before Trump poisoned all ethics and morals in politics will recall, candidates actually divested themselves of their businesses, often putting them in a blind trust in order to avoid even the perception of conflict of interest. It all seems so quaint now.

Trump is also hawking bibles, tennis shoes, NFTs and even pieces of the suit he was wearing during the assassination attempt in August, as if it was a holy relic. And in a matter of days he could conceivably come into a huge windfall when the “lock-out period” on his Truth Social stock ends and he can sell his shares. Wall Street has inexplicably valued the failed company at $3 billion and he owns 57% of the shares so if he decided to sell he’d finally be a real billionaire. The stock price would plummet even more than it already has and other investors, many of them his fans who’ve invested their nest eggs, would be ruined but I think we know that would be of no concern to Donald Trump.

He claimed last Friday that he has no intention of selling and as you know he cannot tell a lie so that’s that. Also, now that he’s said he won’t do it, he could be subject to SEC investigations and shareholder lawsuits if he did but I have a sneaking suspicion he isn’t too worried about that. After all, they’ll have to get in line.

Both his crypto scheme and the Truth Social stock present an obvious conflict of interest if he wins the presidency as he would have control of the regulatory agencies that oversee them. But Trump’s criminality and corruption as president is already well established so what would be a major scandal for any other candidate is irrelevant when it comes to him. (One can’t help but think about the Republicans dragging every member of the Biden family through the mud for four years over a legal business deal that took place when Joe Biden was out of office but that’s just how it works in Trump’s America.)

Trump’s been getting away with scams, cons and crimes his entire life and always wriggles out of them. A new book by NY Times reporters Ross Beutner and Suzanne Craig called “Lucky Loser: How Donald Trump Squandered his Father’s Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success” says it all about Trump’s long history of fraudulent business failures and his unique ability to convince people to keep giving him money anyway.

The point out that Trump’s had two big financial windfalls in his life, neither of them based on even the slightest talent for business. The first was his daddy, who bankrolled him for decades with hundreds of millions of dollars and bailing him out repeatedly. He did manage some early success with Trump Tower and a couple of other buildings on which he’d been partnered with some people who knew what they were doing. But apparently, that was when the narcissism really kicked in and he bought into his own hype. He never listened to anyone ever again and virtually everything he touched failed — casinos, an airline, a football league, buildings in Chicago, a development for the world’s tallest building in Manhattan, money losing golf resorts, all of it.

The second windfall came from The Apprentice which came at a moment when Trump badly needed money. They basically created the illusion of wealth that the show sold to America and Trump cashed in with a product placement deal that brought in a ton of money. (He even cheated his collaborator Mark Burnett, the producer who created the show, but they were all making money so they just let him do it.) His personal licensing deals — the steaks, the vodka, the ties etc. — apparently never made much money, however. He is simply terrible at business.

According to the authors he makes the same mistakes over and over again. He pays way too much, he doesn’t believe in research, and always thinks that his name on a project is the magic that will make it work — and it never does. And he’s done the same thing in politics. He has one talent and that’s convincing people that he’s successful even though he’s not. And he’s been doing it his entire life.

The big question is whether at the age of 78 he can pull it off one more time. Will he be able to cash in for more than a billion dollars with his failed social media company? Will he be able to parlay his political losses since 2016 into another term as president? We’d better hope that this loser’s luck has finally run out.

Salon

They know it’s wrong and they don’t care

Early in my tenure here, I wrote about the right wing trafficking in lies as standard procedure. Back in the day, there were the pass-it-on emails I received filled with lies, distortions, and smears. It was the kind of propaganda fathers warned kids against in the early 1960s when it was the “commies” threatening to undermine the U.S. from within. Decades later, it was (TPM) “hundreds of thousands of mailers with false information about voter registration sent by Americans for Prosperity” in 2014.

There was a pattern of misinformation. Larry Haake, the general registrar in Chesterfield County, Virginia, told an area paper, “Most of their information is wrong. They know it’s wrong and they don’t care.”

“It Was All a Lie,” Stuart Stevens wrote about his former political party. Republicans had become the people of the lie. And it wasn’t recently.

Marcy Wheeler drives home that point in a column for The New Republic:

There was some surprise on Sunday when vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance argued that the “American media totally ignored” the plight of Springfield and Vance’s own claims about immigration “until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes.” He seemed to suggest that it was OK to use a false story if it made people pay attention. “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people,” he thundered to Dana Bash, “then that’s what I’m gonna do.”

Even before Donald Trump screeched about cats and dogs on the debate stage last week, Vance took to X to encourage his followers to keep spreading debunked claims about Haitians eating cats: “Don’t let the crybabies in the media dissuade you, fellow patriots. Keep the cat memes flowing.” Such racist claims were worthwhile, Vance asserted, because it was “confirmed” that “a child was murdered by a Haitian migrant who had no right to be here,” a reference to the accidental death of an 11-year-old boy in a car accident with a legally admitted but unlicensed Haitian immigrant driver last year.

In other words: It was worthwhile to spread cat memes, Vance argued, because it brought attention to other claims that are also false (claims that the boy’s father has begged people to stop making).

Vance’s proud adoption of spreading false memes may have shocked people. But if you’ve been watching these people as closely as I have over the years, you know it’s not new. The ploy of using false memes to direct mainstream media attention has a storied tradition. For years, right-wing internet influencers—self-described trolls—have deliberately aimed to use “shitposting” to get the mainstream media to cover their favorite topics.

Marcy goes on to describe (as only she could) the trolling culture of far-right chat rooms on 4Chan and Reddit where trolls work up false memes, some humorous, to seed right-wing propaganda into the mainstream in a way that news organizations find they have to cover.

Vance, Trump’s blogger turned senator running mate, may not have grown out of the far-right chat rooms to which Trump’s son got added, but his ethic is the same: to use seemingly harmless memes normalizing false claims to force the mainstream media to adopt a far-right frame for an event, as has happened in Springfield. Imagine what we’re in store for over the next 50 days.

“They know it’s wrong and they don’t care” still applies. Truth is irrelevant. Who gets hurt is irrelevant. Achieving the goal is the only thing that matters, as the Third Reich’s chief propagandist knew: “That propaganda is good which leads to success, and that is bad which fails to achieve the desired result. It is not propaganda’s task to be intelligent; its task is to lead to success.” Success in this context is returning Donald Trump to the White House where he and his Project 2025 allies can reduce the republic to a Potemkin democracy and carry out a nationwide campaign of intimidation and deportation against nonwhite immigrants.

I’m reminded of one of the opening scenes in Lawrence of Arabia. It’s meant to foreshadow that Lawrence has a taste for pain. He playfully puts out a match with his fingers. Another soldier who tries it shouts, “It damn hurts.” Certainly, Lawrence responds.

“Well, what’s the trick, then?” the singed corporal asks.

“The trick,” says Lawrence, “is not minding that it hurts.”

Trump and our extremist neighbors don’t mind if the country gets hurt either. No trick.