Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

It’s getting hard to tell anymore

Daniel Dale at CNN breaks down a few of Trump’s bizarre ramblings:

Former President Donald Trump is littering his public remarks with fictional stories.

This isn’t run-of-the-mill political spin, the kind of statistic-twisting and accomplishment-exaggerating that political candidates of all stripes engage in. Rather, the Republican presidential nominee is telling colorful lies that are completely untethered to reality.

He talks about the “eating the dogs” thing of course. But there are more:

Harris and the military draft

At a rally in Las Vegas last week, Trump claimed his Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, is talking about forcing Americans to serve in the military: “She’s already talking about bringing back the draft. She wants to bring back the draft, and draft your child, and put them in a war that should never have happened.”

That’s absolute bunk. Harris is not talking at all about bringing back the draft.

Harris’ CNN interview

Trump claimed during a Fox News event in Pennsylvania in early September that Harris “had notes” to assist her during the television interview she did with CNN in late August. He even performed an impression in which he portrayed Harris supposedly looking down at these notes.

She didn’t actually have any notes.

Transgender children and schools

At an event held by a conservative group in late August, Trump claimed that schools are sending children for gender-affirming surgeries without their parents’ knowledge. He said, “The transgender thing is incredible. Think of it. Your kid goes to school and comes home a few days later with an operation. The school decides what’s going to happen with your child.”

Trump’s campaign subsequently made clear to CNN that it could not find a single example of such a thing having happened anywhere in the United States. Parental consent is required for gender-affirming operations; schools have not performed or approved these surgeries for minors behind their parents’ backs.

Even after Trump’s campaign demonstrated that it couldn’t substantiate the story, he repeated it days later at a Wisconsin rally in early September.

Harris and the Russian invasion of Ukraine

Trump told a vivid story on Fox News in late August about how President Joe Biden supposedly sent Harris to negotiate with Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2022 in an effort to prevent an invasion of Ukraine. Trump claimed Harris was sent “to see Putin in Russia three days before the attack. She went. She said – she gave her case. He attacked three days later. He attacked three days later. He laughed at her. He thought she was a joke.” Trump also told a version of the story at the September debate.

But this story, too, is wholly false.

Biden never sent Harris to negotiate with Putin – in fact, the Kremlin said in July that Harris and Putin have never spoken – and Harris did not travel to Russia just prior to the invasion. Rather, Harris traveled to a conference in Germany to meet with US allies, including Ukrainian President Volodymr Zelensky.

Harris’ 2020 primary performance

Trump has repeatedly claimed during the last month that Harris was so unpopular when she previously ran for the presidency, in 2019, that she was the very first candidate to drop out of the crowded Democratic primary. “She was one of 22 people that ran. She was the first one to quit,” he said at a Pennsylvania rally in late August.

Not even close.

In fact, 13 other Democratic candidates dropped out of the race before Harris did – including the sitting or former governors of Washington, Montana and Colorado; the sitting mayor of New York City; and sitting or former members of the House of Representatives and Senate.

Opinions of Roe v. Wade

Facing heavy criticism from Harris and others for appointing three of the Supreme Court justices who overturned the Roe v. Wade abortion rights decision in 2022, Trump concocted a tale that this unpopular decision fulfilled the wishes of “everybody” – including “every Democrat.”

“Every Democrat, every Republican, everybody wanted Roe v. Wade terminated and brought back to the states,” Trump said on Fox News in late August.

This is not even remotely accurate.

Roe was consistently supported by a majority of the American public, and it was overwhelmingly popular among Democrats – with 80% support or better among Democrats in many polls.

Elections in California

At a September press conference in California, Trump claimed that “if I ran with an honest vote counter in California I would win California, but the votes are not counted honestly.” He had delivered an even more colorful version of the claim in an interview in late August, saying, “If Jesus came down and was the vote counter, I would win California, okay?”

More rubbish.

The votes are counted honestly in California, as they are in every other state; Trump loses California because it is an overwhelmingly Democratic state that has not chosen a Republican presidential candidate since 1988. He lost the state in 2020, fair and square, by more five million votes and more than 29 percentage points.

Migrants, prisons and ‘the Congo’

For months, Trump has told a story about how “the Congo” has deliberately emptied prisons to somehow get its criminals to come to the United States as migrants. “Many prisoners let go from the Congo in Africa, rough prisoners,” he said at an August event in Arizona. At an August rally in Pennsylvania the week after, he said, “In the Congo, in Africa: 22 people deposited into our country. ‘Where do you come from?’ ‘The Congo.’ ‘Where in the Congo?’ ‘Jail.’”

But Trump has presented zero evidence that “the Congo” has actually emptied any prisons for migration purposes. Representatives for the governments of both the Democratic Republic of Congo and the neighboring Republic of Congo have told CNN on the record that the claim is fiction, experts on the two countries say they have seen no evidence it is true, and Trump’s campaign has ignored requests to offer any substantiation.

The jobs revision

After the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics announced in August that its annual revision of jobs data found that the economy added about 818,000 fewer jobs than initially reported for the 12 months ending in March, Trump told a story about how the government had been planning to announce this downward revision “after November 5th,” Election Day, but was forced to do so before the election because of “a whistleblower” – “a patriot leaker.”

Another fabrication. The Bureau of Labor Statistics regularly releases the preliminary revised data in August, and it had disclosed the precise date of this particular data release – August 21 – weeks in advance.

William Beach, a conservative economist who was appointed by Trump to lead the Bureau of Labor Statistics, wrote on social media: “For those who think the big revision to the BLS jobs numbers ‘leaked’ and was meant to come out after the election, remember that BLS always announces its draft revisions in August and announced this year’s date, August 21, many months ago. It is important to check your facts.”

There are a few more. He’s just making shit up on the fly.

ICYMI Wednesday

I took a little license in the title. Here’s what you may have missed (NYT):

More than 100 former national security officials from Republican administrations and former Republican members of Congress endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris on Wednesday after concluding that their party’s nominee, Donald J. Trump, is “unfit to serve again as president.”

[…]

The 111 signatories included former officials who served under Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush or George W. Bush. Many of them had previously broken with Mr. Trump, including two former defense secretaries, Chuck Hagel and William S. Cohen; Robert B. Zoellick, a former president of the World Bank; the former C.I.A. directors Michael V. Hayden and William H. Webster; a former director of national intelligence, John D. Negroponte; and former Gov. William F. Weld of Massachusetts. Miles Taylor and Olivia Troye, two Trump administration officials who became vocal critics, also signed.

Here’s the link.

We believe that the President of the United States must be a principled, serious, and steady leader who can advance and defend American security and values, strengthen our alliances, and protect our democracy. We expect to disagree with Kamala Harris on many domestic and foreign policy issues, but we believe that she possesses the essential qualities to serve as President and Donald Trump does not. We therefore support her election to be President.

Then they address the sick elephant in the room:

We firmly oppose the election of Donald Trump. As President, he promoted daily chaos in government, praised our enemies and undermined our allies, politicized the military and disparaged our veterans, prioritized his personal interest above American interests, and betrayed our values, democracy, and this country’s founding documents. In our view, by inciting the violent attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021 and defending those who committed it, he has violated his oath of office and brought danger to our country. As former Vice President Pence has said “anyone who puts himself over the Constitution should never be President of the United States.”

Bottom line: “He is unfit to serve again as President, or indeed in any office of public trust.”

Harris, on the other hand, displays characteristics these former officials deem worthy of their support. They write that she has, “Consistently championed the rule of law, democracy, and our constitutional principles” as well as aligning with a list of their foreign policy imperatives.

“[A]ny any potential concerns” the group has about Harris “pale in comparison to Donald Trump’s demonstrated chaotic and unethical behavior and disregard for our Republic’s time-tested principles of constitutional governance.”

“Traitorous fucking moron” appears nowhere in the letter. I looked.

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: