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.
"what digby sez..."
Digby's Hullabaloo Posts
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.”
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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.
Tar Heel Follies
By now you’ve heard there is another hole in Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson’s campaign for N.C. governor. “Martin Luther King on steroids” is sinking even faster as of yesterday. Since he is, of course, unwilling to exit the race, and since it is too late to strip his name from the ballot anyway, the big question is how much of a drag Robinson’s porn habits and Naziphilia will be on Donald Trump’s chances of collecting the state’s 16 electoral votes.
BTW, MLK III is backing the Democrat for governor. Who’da thunk it?
As Digby noted on Thursday, “Trump is terrified he’s going to lose N Carolina.” (Fingers crossed.) He’s up to his neck in Robinson.
Robinson is down double digits in multiple polls against A.G. Josh Stein and already dragging down the rest of the state GOP’s MAGArrific statewide slate. Other Democrats used the blanket coverage of Robinson’s porn-Nazi-slavery habits to tie their opponents to him. They didn’t have to work hard at it.
State Sen. Rachel Hunt is running against Republican businessman Hal Weatherman for lieutenant governor.
Rep. Jeff Jackson is running for attorney general against Rep. Dan “Bathroom bill” Bishop.
Mo Green, former superintendent of Guilford County Schools, is running for State Superintendent of Public Instruction against homeschooler Michele “the ‘+’ in LGBTQ+ includes pedophilia” Morrow. She’s called for making money from Barack Obama’s execution. (Pairs neatly with Robinson’s “some folks need killing,” right?)
Sarah Taber eats, sleeps and breaths farming. She’s running for Commissioner of Agriculture against incumbent Republican Steve Troxler. “Troxler’s been our Commissioner of Agriculture for 20 years. Our farm sector’s shrunk by about 25% on his watch,” Taber tweets. “And we’re losing farmland faster than any other ag state. Great work, Steve!”
You get the idea. It would be as funny as this The Daily Show bit if not for these Republicans trying to out-Trump Trump.
Western Carolina University professor of political science, Chris Cooper, offers a set of possible impacts on the state, including the GOP losing their supermajority. (And Dems holding a key state Supreme Court seat, I’d add.)
I can almost taste it.
That’s Trump at an antisemitism event tonight.
He’s supposed to be an excellent salesman.
Obviously, it would be very bad to get your hopes up. We’ve all learned our lesson over the past 8 years. But still, there is a bit of a case to be made that things could go very well on election day for Harris and the Democrats. I think it’s ok to fantasize a little bit about that, just for kicks.
Here’s an article in Fortune about the possibility of a big win:
In late 2020 and early 2021, this reporter wrote several stories focusing on the election predictions advanced by Thomas Miller, a data scientist at Northwestern University. I was intrigued by the highly original methodology Miller deployed in calling the trends, and outcomes, first in the presidential race, then for the two Georgia senatorial contests, where the surprise twin victories gave Democrats control of the upper chamber.
[…]
In all three 2020 contests, Miller beat virtually every pollster, and modeler parsing multiple voter surveys. He missed the size of Biden’s win in the electoral college by just 12 votes, tagging every state for the correct column save Georgia. For the two senate runoffs, Miller refined his approach to sorting data on the Peach State, and scored again. A week before Election Day on December 6, 2020, the polls gave Republican David Perdue a wide lead over Democrat Jon Ossoff, and showed the GOP’s Kelly Loeffler in a dead heat versus opponent Raphael Warnock. By contrast, Miller’s numbers had Loeffler heading for a big loss, and Ossoff en route to a modest victory. Once again, the contrarian academic nailed it: Miller was just 0.2% short on Warnock’s 2.0% margin, and precisely on target in forecasting Ossoff’s 1.0% final bulge at the ballot box.
Ok, so now you know who this is and why we are listening to him. Miller doesn’t rely solely on polls but also uses the betting markets. He says the right question isn’t “who are you voting for” but “who do you expect to win.” Ok.
Here’s how it worked in 2020:
For the 2020 Biden-Trump face-off, Miller deployed the pricing posted on the largest U.S. political betting site, Predictit. He took the Predictit odds in the 56 individual voting jurisdictions, tracked the hourly changes, and used his proprietary model to roll the data into daily odds that were extremely current given that folks were posting bets for one candidate or the other 24-7 on the site. For the Senate races, Miller took a different tack. He assembled a group of about 1,200 Georgians whom he lured by agreeing to pay them a few dollars to participate, and extra dollars if they named the contender most likely to win—not the necessarily one they planned to vote for, as well as predict the margin for victory. The method he developed, called a “prediction survey” taking the best parts of the polling and the betting market guided Miller to a near-perfect reading of the voting shares.
He’s using Predictit again this time. He tracked the Biden-Trump race over the course of many months and it had Trump winning “bigly.” The Democrats odds went up after Harris took over and ended up at about 400 electoral votes by the end of the DNC.
But…
Then, Trump staged a comeback. In the days before the September 10 Trump-Harris debate, Harris was still ahead, but Trump had nearly caught up. “At that point, the race was essentially a tossup,” observes Miller. “The forecast for the Democrats was 288.” It was the onstage battle in Philadelphia that wrecked the 78-year old former POTUS, according to the Miller numbers. Within a day after the candidates left the podium, Harris had jumped to exactly over 400 electoral votes. The Harris endorsement from Taylor Swift, secured the day of the debate, probably helped sink Trump’s chances, according to Miller. Since then, Harris has maintained for 400-plus vote total.
As of September 16, Predictit is showing a price of 55 cents for Harris, and 45 cents for Trump, the reverse of the scenario before Biden’s departure. Once again, those odds translate in 55% of the popular vote for the Democrat according to Miller’s model. If the situation persists, Trump faces an absolute rout. “It would be somewhere between the defeats of Barry Goldwater by Lyndon Johnson in 1964, and Bob Dole by Bill Clinton in 1996,” says Miller. “We’re talking about a blowout where Harris gets over 400 electoral votes and wins Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and every other swing state.”
Miller notes that at least in recent history, America’s never witnessed a reversal of fortune remotely as dramatic as this one. “It’s gone from a drastic landslide in Trump’s direction to a drastic landslide for Harris,” he marvels. The distance is now so great that only another epic swing would bring Trump back into contention, and Miller predicts that right now, it looks like Harris will win big on November 5. As a coda, he recalls a slogan the Johnson campaign used to bash Goldwater: “In your gut you know he’s nuts.” Miller’s markets-based analysis posits that the people betting their own money are right in predicting that by the time the candidates left the stage on September 10, millions of voters likely to back Donald Trump abandoned the ex-President, starting the shock waves that could cause an avalanche for Harris that as of now, few see building
Is that all bullshit soothsaying? Could be. And even if it’s all true, the wild swings are concerning, especially since we know the late swing against Clinton in 2016 from the Comey letter probably precipitated the loss. Who knows what might happen in the next month and a half?
Still, it’s kind of fun to contemplate. If she pulled out every swing state, including North Carolina and Georgia it would be so, so sweet. Trump will say it was stolen, of course. There is no scenario in which he won’t. And there will no doubt be post election shenanigans with the electoral vote and the courts and maybe even violence. But if she could win them all it would make it all look even more ridiculous than it already does.
Personally, I’m not putting any money on any of this because I’m paranoid and assuming it’s going to be close. But wouldn’t it be great if it wasn’t?
The NY Times poll is out! Oh my god! Now we know the truth!
Take a look at the list below from 538 which shows all the national polling results since September 11th. You may notice that there’s only one that shows Trump ahead. That’s the NY Times/Sienna poll.
Maybe it’s right and all these other polls are wrong. It could happen. But I would think that the media would show a tiny bit of skepticism about that since every single poll other than this one shows Harris leading.
And yes, these are all within the margin of error. And maybe it’s better psychologically for Democratic voters to believe they are losing but there’s a fine line between feeling motivated feeling despondent. I just hope the Democrats are able to keep up the energy that we’ve been seeing since Harris took over the ticket.
I should point out that the good news is the NY Times poll (with the Philly Inquirer) found Harris ahead in Pennsylvania by 4 points. (They didn’t poll Wisconsin and Michigan or didn’t reveal it, if they did.) That’s actually better than some of the other polls from the same period and who knows what it really means. But because this poll is taken so much more seriously by the media, these numbers are getting exposure and I suspect that makes all the people working hard in Pennsylvania feel a little bit better.
Now the Trump campaign is urging him to drop out because of this story on CNN:
Mark Robinson, the controversial and socially conservative Republican nominee for governor of North Carolina, made a series of inflammatory comments on a pornography website’s message board more than a decade ago, in which he referred to himself as a “black NAZI!” and expressed support for reinstating slavery, a CNN KFile investigation found.
Despite a recent history of anti-transgender rhetoric, Robinson said he enjoyed watching transgender pornography, a review of archived messages found in which he also referred to himself as a “perv.”
The comments, which Robinson denies making, predate his entry into politics and current stint as North Carolina’s lieutenant governor. They were made under a username that CNN was able to identify as Robinson by matching a litany of biographical details and a shared email address between the two.
Many of Robinson’s comments were gratuitously sexual and lewd in nature. They were made between 2008 and 2012 on “Nude Africa,” a pornographic website that includes a message board. The comments were made under the username minisoldr, a moniker Robinson used frequently online.
Robinson listed his full name on his profile for Nude Africa, as well as an email address he used on numerous websites across the internet for decades.
CNN is reporting only a small portion of Robinson’s comments on the website given their graphic nature.
They’re gross but they’re entirely in keeping with other things he’s said and done. He was reportedly a very regular visitor to a porn store where he visited the little private room to watch them. He was there many days a week. He’s said, “some people need killing” (in a church!) and condemned women for getting pregnant saying they need to get “control down there.” There’s a lot more that they all knew about before this latest revelation. He’s a pig but being a pig is a MAGA selling point.
Trump is terrified a he’s going to lose N Carolina so they’ve seized on this to try to get him off the ballot because they believe he’s dragging them down. But they already got RFK taken off the ballot to help Trump and the delayed ballots are already printed and slated to go out on the 21st. Will the courts issue another stay to delay the ballots so they can try to get this weirdo off the ballot? Seems like a stretch but in this race anything can happen.
It’s unclear how this is going to go but so far, Robinson isn’t quitting:
I suspect that he’d think about it for the right amount of money. He’d better get it upfront because Trump doesn’t pay.
(If only the media would report it…)
Media Matters with yet another of Trump’s insane comments:
Major newspapers and newswires failed to report that at a September 17 campaign event in Michigan, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump proposed reducing food imports in response to a question about how he’d reduce food costs, claiming that “our farmers are being decimated.” Several economists explained the obvious point that reducing the supply of food by restricting imports would actively increase food prices.
During the town hall, an audience member asked Trump how he would “bring down the cost of food and groceries.” After Trump rambled about unrelated energy prices and Federal Reserve interest rates, he responded:
“We gotta work with our farmers. Our farmers are being decimated right now. They’re being absolutely, absolutely decimated. And you know, one of the reasons is we allow a lot of farm product into our country. We’re gonna have to be a little bit like other countries. We’re not gonna allow so much come — we’re gonna let our farmers go to work.”
Several economists were quick to point out that this would not reduce food prices. In fact, it would raise them.
University of Michigan economist Justin Wolfers wrote, “I’m exhausted even saying it, but blocking supply won’t reduce prices, and it’s not even close.”
Cato Institute vice president Scott Lincicome posted: “Well, technically, you can’t get a price lower than zero (bc the food won’t be available at all bc it can’t be grown in the US for most of the year).”
Center for Economic and Policy Research senior economist Dean Baker commented: “That’s what you get when you ask someone who both knows nothing about economics and has never had to buy his own groceries in his life.”
Former Labor Secretary and University of California, Berkeley public policy professor Robert Reich added: “Trump’s plan to lower food prices is to reduce the supply of food. Think grocery prices are high now? Just wait.”
Yet, according to a search of the Factiva database from September 17 through noon on September 18, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Associated Press, and Reuters all failed to cover this statement from Trump. (These newspapers have a history of almost entirely failing to cover Trump’s inflationary policies in their print news coverage of inflation.)
Why? It seems like all we’ve heard for the past three years is massive bellyaching about inflation and Trump is out there saying that he’s not only going to raise the price of groceries but he’s going to make a whole lot of stuff just disappear from the shelves for most of the year. (Those of you on the older side, like me, will recall what it was like when you could only get produce in season and often couldn’t get it at all.) Why isn’t his daft “economic plan” a huge story on the front page with headlines that say, “Trump promises to hike inflation with huge taxes on groceries.” That would be the truth.