Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Targeted or not?

This morning’s news about Israel’s pager attack against Hezbollah in Lebanon is at once fascinating and appalling. Let’s get the basic outlines out of the way (CNN):

Hezbollah has vowed to respond to an Israeli attack that killed multiple people and injured thousands across Lebanon on Tuesday when pagers belonging to members of the Iran-backed militant group exploded almost simultaneously, exposing a massive security breach and demonstrating the scale of Israeli intelligence.

A child was among at least nine killed in the blasts, which wounded about 2,800 people, Lebanese Health Minister Firass Abiad said. At least 170 people are in a critical condition, he said, though the nature of the other injuries is unclear.

Two children died, say updated reports: an 8-year-old girl and an 11-year-old boy. The death toll is now reported at 12, with several wounded in Syria and over 200 listed in critical condition, per Al Jazeera.

On the technical side, it is a coup for Israeli intelligence. Somehow, the service uncovered news that Hezbollah meant to purchase, thousands of pagers for its members. Israel secretly intercepted the devices at some point in the manufacturing process, slipped small amounts of powerful explosive charges into the devices, and remote-triggered them about 3:30 p.m. Tuesday, producing the chaos and injury mentioned above. The sophistication of the attack is mind-boggling.

“Tuesday was like something out of a bizarre James Bond movie,” writes The Washington Post’s David Ignatius. At once ingenious and diabolical.

How is this not terrorism?

The point of the attack itself is elusive (The New York Times):

“This is an amazing tactical event,” said Miri Eisin, a fellow at the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism, an Israel-based research organization.

“But not a single Hezbollah fighter is going to move because of this,” said Ms. Eisin, a former senior intelligence officer. “Having amazing capabilities does not make a strategy.”

Israelis are divided about whether the attack was born from short-term opportunism or long-term forethought. Some believe that Israeli commanders feared that their Hezbollah counterparts had recently discovered Israel’s ability to sabotage the pagers, prompting Israeli commanders to immediately blow them up or risk losing the capability forever.

Others say that Israel had a specific strategic intent. Israel may have hoped that the attack’s brazenness and sophistication would ultimately make Hezbollah more amenable to a cease-fire in the coming weeks, if not immediately.

But that sounds like rank rationalization. The attack likely throws sand in the gears of any ceasefire efforts with Hamas in Gaza (already at an impasse) and the release of Israeli hostages. From embattled Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s perspective, perhaps that is the point. Freeing the hostages frees Israelis to rid themselves of Netanyahu.

Except such an operation and its timing may have little connection to Netanyahu. In fact, one hand in may not know what the other is doing:

More generally, the attack also highlighted the dissonance between the discipline of Israel’s intelligence agencies, which have the ability to plan operations months or even years ahead, and the messy short-term thinking of Israel’s political leadership.

The attack followed days of reports in the Israeli press about an intention by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to fire his defense minister, even as [defense minister Yoav ] Gallant was overseeing the planned operation in Lebanon.

Hezbollah will surely retaliate, but must wonder what else Israel has up its sleeve.

European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell (via Al Jazeera):

“Even if the attacks seem to have been targeted, they had heavy, indiscriminate collateral damages among civilians, including children among the victims,” Josep Borrell said.

“I consider this situation extremely worrying. I can only condemn these attacks that endanger the security and stability of Lebanon, and increase the risk of escalation in the region,” he added.

He said that the European Union wants to avert an all-out war because it would have “heavy consequences for the entire region and beyond”.

I’m left shaking my head. How is this not terrorism from one of the United States’ strongest allies?

Update: If a violent Islamist faction did this, there would be no question what we’d call it.

BREAKING: More device explosions are reported across Lebanon. pic.twitter.com/BP5uufEYoN

— MSNBC (@MSNBC) September 18, 2024

Will the media finally concede that she isn’t avoiding their gotcha nonsense because she’s incapable of answering questions?

Check this out. It’s masterful:

the idea that Kamala Harris has any trouble speaking extemporaneously is ridiculous, as the back-and-forth in this clip from her NABJ interview demonstrates pic.twitter.com/h0p76fHksP

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 17, 2024

You want issues?

Kamala Harris begins her NABJ event by explaining why the economy is in better shape now than it was four years ago pic.twitter.com/i6LkTfAdCj

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 17, 2024

Vice President Harris: No working family should pay more than 7% of their income on child care. It’s about a return on investment. Allowing people to work and pursue their dreams benefits us all. We also need to expand the Child Tax Credit to $6,000 in the first year of a child's… pic.twitter.com/xysP4ioPvl

— Kamala HQ (@KamalaHQ) September 17, 2024

Harris on her message to Black men who are considering voting for Trump: "I'm working to earn their vote. Not assuming I'm going to have it because I'm Black, but because the policies and perspectives I have understand what we must do to recognize the needs of all communities" pic.twitter.com/xqhuqHflXZ

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 17, 2024

She is very good. But I’m sure the media will continue to dog her for constant press conferences, tarmac comments etc because that’s what Donald Trump does. She can do this her own way and it will be fine.

Voters should really take a moment and watch this. This isn’t a long-time Trump critics. It’s his own chosen Secretary of Defense. For God’s sake, people! pic.twitter.com/XAbGtBxv1U

— Patrick Chovanec (@prchovanec) September 16, 2024

… to the worst health insurance system in the industrialized world

JD Vance’s dance across the Sunday shows is one for the ages. We’ve already discussed his admission that they “create stories” (such as immigrants eating pets) in order to “draw attention” to the issues they think benefit them. But he said other things that are almost as interesting — and damning.

What asked about Trump’s “concept of a plan” about replacing Obamacare (which just demonstrated in living color the fact that Trump had no plan despite promising for 9 long years) Vance replied:

You want to make sure that preexisting coverage – conditions are covered, you want to make sure that people have access to the doctors that they need, and you also want to implement some deregulatory agenda so that people can choose a health care plan that fits them. Think about it: a young American doesn’t have the same health care needs as a 65-year-old American. A 65-year-old American in good health has much different health care needs than a 65-year-old American with a chronic condition. And we want to make sure everybody is covered. But the best way to do that is to actually promote some more choice in our health care system and not have a one-size-fits-all approach that puts a lot of people into the same insurance pools, into the same risk pools, that actually makes it harder for people to make the right choices for their families.

Maybe Vance was busy changing identities during the heath care debates of 2009, but anyone who was listening during that period knows that this is fatuous nonsense. You can’t guarantee that pre-existing conditions are covered without regulating the insurance market and that requires:

• Guaranteed issue: Carriers must sell to everyone in the market.
• Community rating: Everyone’s in the same risk pool, and plans come with the same premiums (or very similar premiums) no matter who’s buying them.
• Critical mass: The market needs to be big and diverse enough (particularly in age and health-status) to pool risk widely and bargain with providers.
• Subsidy: If monthly out-of-pocket expenses are too high, people will leave the marketplaces and they’ll become unviable.

That handy list comes from Brian Beutler who discusses this in his newsletter today pointing out that essentially what Vance was saying is a lie and a big one. He writes:

The Trump-Vance policy is to rip out the second and third tentpoles and go back to the old way. They intend, per Vance, to segregate young from old, and healthy from sick, so that people who don’t yet have costly medical needs can free ride, and those who already do will lose the benefits of risk pooling, sending their premiums soaring.

Vance wants people to believe that “pre-existing conditions are covered” under such a plan, and his fig leaf is that the law will still nominally require plans to cover treatment for pre-existing conditions. But that law will be meaningless to the millions of people who suddenly won’t be able to afford their coverage.

It would take us back to the time when I was denied health insurance because I had periodontal disease. (I’m not kidding.) When I finally found a health insurer who would cover me ( I was otherwise completely healthy) it cost well over a thousand dollars a month and it had a gigantic deductible. That’s the market we were living in if we didn’t have employer or government insurance. Vance wants to take us back to that and people really should know that.

I also like what Beutler said about Vance revealing this when Trump has been vague about specifics (mostly because he doesn’t understand them.)

Most of the MAGA politicians who want to take up Trump’s mantle have pickled their brains with racism. Unlike Trump, though, many of them have at least a touch of intellectual vanity.

Before entering politics, Trump never labored for the admiration of national political elites or legal elites or media elites. His neuroses attached to other forms of status—he wanted to be admired and accepted by the Manhattan upper crust, but his try-hard affect marked him as an interloper.

Below Trump on the political totem pole, aspiring MAGA leaders like Vance suffer from an analogous form of striving. They were groomed by elites. They want to oppress, but they also want smarty-pants cred. Trump will lie for passing advantage, and bluster when he doesn’t know what he’s talking about, but in a contest of intellect, he’ll simply claim superiority (“the best people” “Wharton school of finance”).

The people coming up behind him want to demonstrate it. They’ll lie with Trumpish insouciance, but then, like Vance, they’ll explain their true intent, as if to flaunt the intellectual scaffolding beneath the lies.

On Meet the Press that meant claiming to support pre-existing conditions protections, then describing a plan that would unravel them. On CNN it meant lying about immigrants, and then explaining, “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.”

This is not a disciplined con artist trying to conceal motive with distraction. It’s the conduct of someone too arrogant to be so calculating.

Beutler rejects the idea that Trump and Vance are consciously trying to distract (“deadcatting” ) and are instead just following their own insecurities. I kind of agree with him (despite writing about the distraction tactic earlier.) I know that Trump is rarely so calculating, at least to the extent that he sits down with his team and maps out a strategy. He has a feral survival instinct that he trusts implicitly and it often works for him. And Beutler makes an excellent point about Vance.

Maybe both of them really are just winging it.

Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern, two of he best legal analysts and Supreme Court observers, take a cold hard look at Chief Justice John Roberts’ newly revealed behavior in the big Trump cases last term and ruefully cop to being wrong about him. They discuss his seemingly centrist position in a number of important cases in which he found himself in the minority and his endless paeans to court legitimacy and conclude that he never really cared about the latter and just got tired of losing:

Two years ago, in his solo Dobbs concurrence, Roberts faulted both the majority and the dissent for their “relentless freedom from doubt.” We can only guess that some time thereafter, he decided doubt was, in fact, for suckers, and embraced the aggressive activism of his colleagues to the right. We get it: Losing is no fun, and in the early days of the 6–3 court, when Roberts tried to find a middle ground, he sometimes faced the sting of defeat, and rebukes from his own party. His solution, we surmise, was not to take a principled stand of dissent when the far-right bloc went too far, too fast, but to join them and lead them to new heights of extremism. If you can’t beat them, it surely can be more enjoyable to join them, especially when any fears of breaking the republic can be washed away with your colleagues’ sweet, soothing sycophancy.

The sycophancy they refer to are the private comments revealed from Gorsuch and Kavanaugh sounding like they’re speaking to Kim Jong Un — or Donald Trump.

Constitutional expert Steve Vladek also weighs in on this, having been suspicious for some time that Roberts’ alleged fealty to institutional legitimacy was BS:

Mine wasn’t the only piece over the summer that was sharply critical of Chief Justice Roberts—or that called into question how much he actually does worry about public perception of the Court in contexts in which he has some control over events. What the Kantor/Liptak piece drives home is that he does worry, but only to a very superficial degree. Thus, it was important to Roberts for the immunity case to be heard this term—even if he knew which way it was going to come out. It was important to Roberts for the Colorado case to be unanimous—until he couldn’t get the justices to his left to go as far as he wanted. It was important to Roberts to take Alito’s name off of Fischer—even though it wasn’t important enough to leverage him to recuse, or to so much as acknowledge, at any point in his majority opinion, the deeply fraught, conspiracy-laden narrative into which the Court was necessarily wading. Ultimately, it’s not high constitutional politics driving the bus; it’s optics. And as these episodes underscore, those just aren’t the same thing.

This court has now completely lost whatever legitimacy it once had, not that they care. And why should they? If there is a truly imperial institution in our system it’s the Supreme Court. We’ve already seen that impeachment is a paper tiger, only possible if one party has a super majority in the Senate so that’s off the table. The chances of court reform are next to nil as long as the GOP is batshit crazy and I see little chance of that changing any time soon.

Roberts clearly realized that there would be no price to pay for going for it. So he did. And there is no reason to believe he won’t continue to.

I just found those with a cursory Google search. I’m sure there have been many more and even more than that for President Biden.

Trump’s SS team seems to be at his mercy (recall how he insisted on standing up at the Butler event and screaming “fight, fight! against their wishes) and according to these reports he has consistently refused to let them provide proper security at his golf courses. The Washington Post reports:

Soon after Donald Trump became president, authorities tried to warn him about the risks posed by golfing at his own courses because of their proximity to public roads. Secret Service agents came armed with unusual evidence: not suspect profiles or spent bullet casings, but simple photographs taken by news crews of him golfing at his private club in Sterling, Va.

They reasoned that if photographers with long-range lenses could get the president in their sights while he golfed, so too could potential gunmen, according to former U.S. officials involved in the discussions who, like most others interviewed for this story, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the matter’s sensitivity.

But Trump insisted that his clubs were safe and that he wanted to keep golfing, the former officials said. These preferences posed problems for his protection that former Trump aides, Secret Service officials and security experts said have only intensified in the years since he left the White House, as his security detail shrank and agents no longer maintained as extensive a perimeter guarding his movements. A Trump spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.

Trump never liked all the security at this properties and since he’s left the White House it’s gotten lax:

People who have played at Trump’s club in West Palm Beach said they were surprised they weren’t screened more extensively or kept away from the former president. One person who played last year said he wasn’t asked any questions or subjected to a bag search. After he finished his round, this person said, he walked into the clubhouse and took a corner table near where Trump later came to dine.

Trump’s security was bolstered following the July 13 shooting in Butler. The size of the Secret Service team protecting him on the links on Sunday was similar to the resources provided when he was president. A drone was in use Sunday to give agents an overview of the course, countersurveillance agents were deployed to survey the area, and protective intelligence agents were on hand to assess possible risks, according to a Secret Service official briefed on the security plan.

The former president has expressed appreciation for the stepped-up security, which includes armed men among his golfing patrons, but he has sometimes shown flashes of annoyance about the spectacle, said people who have been with him.

“People are coming to play golf,” he recently told an associate. “They don’t want to see that.”

Maybe there’s a reason the nuts are able to get so close to him but it isn’t Kamala Harris saying that a man who refused to accept his loss and incited and insurrection is a threat to democracy.

All those people who say they love Trump because of his policies should really look at what he did when was president instead of listening to his lies. Take, for example, his bold proposal to eliminate taxes on tips. Guess what he did when he was president? From 2018:

House Republicans passed a spending bill Thursday that includes an important amendment to the Fair Labor Standards Act. It bars employers from keeping tips earned by workers.

The text, written by Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA), was added to the bill to block a proposed Trump administration rule that would have allowed employers to pocket the tips of millions of workers — a move that could cost service workers $5.8 billion a year in lost tips.

The amendment would soften the blow of the new tipping rule the Department of Labor (DOL) is developing. The rule, which the agency proposed in December, would repeal an Obama-era regulation that made official what had been the common view for decades: that tips are the sole property of the workers who earn them. It would essentially allow employers to share their workers’ tips with other staff, or keep tips for themselves, provided they pay workers the full minimum wage.

Luckily, the Democrats stopped them. This time they may not be able to.

No one should ever take any promises he makes in this election seriously. He is a liar, as we know, and at this point will say anything to win.

This is not a drill

Some smarmy former Trump aide over the weekend asked if anyone had evidence of pregnant women actually bleeding out in a parking lot, as alleged since abortion bans took hold across red states. He got inundated with replies, including the TikTok by Carmen Broesder (above) from Idaho. Michelle Goldberg cites a report from ProPublica on a Georgia women who died (Gift article):

It was inevitable, once Roe v. Wade was overturned and states started banning abortion, that women were going to die. Over the last two years, we’ve learned of countless close calls. In Oklahoma, 25-year-old Jaci Statton, sick and bleeding with a nonviable partial molar pregnancy, said medical staff told her to wait in a parking lot until she was “crashing” or on the verge of a heart attack. In Florida, Anya Cook was sent home from the hospital after her membranes ruptured at 16 weeks; she then nearly bled to death in the bathroom of a hair salon. Women in Texas and Louisiana have been denied treatment for life-threatening ectopic pregnancies.

And now ProPublica has identified at least two women who died “after they couldn’t access legal abortions and timely medical care.” According to ProPublica’s Kavitha Surana, “There are almost certainly others.”

On Monday, thanks to Surana, we learned the story of one of those women, Amber Nicole Thurman, an otherwise healthy 28-year-old medical assistant from Georgia with a 6-year-old son. In 2022, Thurman and her child had just moved out of her family’s place and into their own apartment, and she was planning to start nursing school. When she found out she was pregnant with twins, her best friend told ProPublica, she felt she needed an abortion to preserve her newfound stability, but Georgia had enacted a 6-week abortion ban, and she’d just passed the deadline.

Thurman died in what medical authorities in Georgia deemed a “preventable” death. ProPublica promises to tell another woman’s story in coming days.

[Thurman] waited, hoping the law would be put on hold, but eventually she arranged babysitting, took time off from work and borrowed a car in order to get a surgical abortion in North Carolina. Though she and her best friend woke up at 4 a.m. for the drive, they hit terrible traffic on their way there. “The clinic couldn’t hold Thurman’s spot longer than 15 minutes — it was inundated with women from other states where bans had taken effect,” wrote Surana. It offered her a medication abortion instead.

Medication abortion is usually safe and effective, but in about 3 percent to 5 percent of cases, women end up needing either another dose of misoprostol, one of the two drugs in the regimen, or surgery. That’s what happened to Thurman. Days after taking her second pill, she was in pain and bleeding heavily. The clinic in North Carolina would have offered her free follow-up care, but it was too far away.

Eventually, suffering a severe infection, she passed out and ended up in a hospital in suburban Atlanta. She needed a D.&C., a procedure to empty the uterus, but doctors waited 20 hours to operate as her blood pressure sank, and her organs began to fail. According to Surana, Thurman’s last words to her mother were, “Promise me you’ll take care of my son.” A state medical review committee ruled her death “preventable.”

“I suspect that the anti-abortion movement will claim that she was killed by abortion pills and use her case to further its quest to outlaw them,” Goldberg writes, citing Project 2025’s intention of outlawing them.

The bans written by politicians and enacted in multiple states include vague language that leaves physicians and hospitals scratching their heads over when they are legally protected in saving a woman’s life (ProPublica):

Take the language in Georgia’s supposed lifesaving exceptions.

It prohibits doctors from using any instrument “with the purpose of terminating a pregnancy.” While removing fetal tissue is not terminating a pregnancy, medically speaking, the law only specifies it’s not considered an abortion to remove “a dead unborn child” that resulted from a “spontaneous abortion” defined as “naturally occurring” from a miscarriage or a stillbirth.

Thurman had told doctors her miscarriage was not spontaneous — it was the result of taking pills to terminate her pregnancy.

There is also an exception, included in most bans, to allow abortions “necessary in order to prevent the death of the pregnant woman or the substantial and irreversible physical impairment of a major bodily function.” There is no standard protocol for how providers should interpret such language, doctors said. How can they be sure a jury with no medical experience would agree that intervening was “necessary”?

For that matter, how could politicians with no medical experience craft a bill that would make “necessary” clear? They might as well write legislation defining when a nuclear launch is necessary.

Goldberg concludes:

The complications Thurman faced didn’t have to be deadly; a timely medical intervention could have saved her life. And as long as abortion bans persist, more women are likely to die the same way. Some probably already have. As Surana notes, state committees tasked with reviewing maternal mortality typically operate with a two-year lag, so experts are only just beginning to delve into the details of pregnancy-related deaths that have happened since Roe was overturned.

But we’ll have to wait to find out longer than the delay that killed Amber Nicole Thurman.

It’s National Voter Registration Day. Make the most of it. Make more of Nov. 5. Women’s lives depend on it.

Today is National Voter Registration Day! Take a few minutes to visit https://t.co/V3uLF7XRqt and make sure you’re registered and have a plan to vote. Then check in with your friends and family and make sure they’re registered, too. Let’s get it done. pic.twitter.com/e1SDMfGL27

— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) September 17, 2024

Can you say “sto-chas-tic”?

Sure. I knew you could.

Some may “find it harsh using the terms ‘infestation’ and ‘cockroaches’” to describe members of Tren De Aragua, a Venezuelan gang operating in Texas, Department of Public Safety Commander Steve McCraw said on Monday. McCraw made his remarks in Houston after Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) designated the group a foreign terrorist organization:

“Tren de Aragua gangsters are like cockroaches,” said DPS Director McCraw. “They multiply quickly; small intrusions into communities become infestations if not aggressively pursued. These Venezuelan thugs are highly combative, violent, and certainly adaptable. They’re always involved in situations that first start with human smuggling. Then they are involved in the extortion, kidnappings, rape, assaults, and sex trafficking of migrants. Governor Abbott has made it very clear: We will not allow any of these gangsters to gain a foothold in Texas.”

Texas Department of Public Safety Director Steve McCraw doubles down on referring to undocumented immigrants as "cockroaches" that are part of an "infestation":

"Texas is not going to allow any part of this state to be infested with that type of disease." pic.twitter.com/IsF2ByFMxV

— Heartland Signal (@HeartlandSignal) September 16, 2024

Over the last week, Donald Trump and vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance promoted a debunked internet rumor alleging something-something about Haitian immigrants legally residing and working (and welcomed) in Springfield, Ohio. Bomb threats against the town followed their remarks.

The timing of Abbott’s statement about another group of immigrants, albeit criminals, might at best be described as unfortunate. But not McCraw’s remarks describing any Venezuelans as a “disease.”

“This is genocidal language. He should be immediately suspended. At a minimum, this dept should not receive one dime of federal money while he’s in charge,” said Howard University’s Sherrilyn Ifill, former president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. McGraw announced his retirement last month.

When they’ve got nothing to offer Americans to solve their problems, MAGA Republicans have an endless supply of Others to blame for them.

Stochastic terrorism

The Ink reflects on how dehumanizing language feeds stochastic terrorism. That is, “random” terrorism that isn’t entirely random, but an outgrowth of characterizing an entire ethnic group as an internal enemy. One doesn’t have to invoke Germany of the 1930s for how that operates:

Instead, let’s go back a few dozen years, to the 1990s, to Rwanda. And to the (now former) Yugoslavia. According to Human Rights Watch:

From 1990 through the 1994 genocide, propagandists used newspapers and later the radio to disseminate these ideas hostile to the Tutsi. It was particularly the last idea—that Hutu were threatened and had to defend themselves—that proved most successful in mobilizing attacks on Tutsi from 1990 through the 1994 genocide.  This idea may have been influenced by a study of propaganda methods. Among documents found by Human Rights Watch researchers in a government office soon after the genocide was a set of mimeographed notes summarizing methods of propaganda as analyzed by a French professor, Roger Mucchielli, in a book entitled Psychologie de la publicité et de la propagande. One of the methods described is persuading people that the opponent intends to use terror against them; if this is done successfully, “honest people” will take whatever measures they think necessary for legitimate self-defense. 

In Rwanda, some 660,000 people were murdered; following a similar playbook in the collapsing Yugoslavia, more than 100,000 were killed. Rwanda’s media agitators were prosecuted and convicted of genocide. NATO bombed RTS/Serbian Radio and Television’s headquarters.

Given First Amendment guarantees, prosecutions of the influencers(?) behind such a genocide could not be carried out in the U.S., argued the counsel for a Rwandan journalist convicted as a war criminal.

That it is not prosecutable here does not make what Vance and Trump engage less “domestic terrorism by proxy,” writes Daniel Drezner in a Monday Substack post:

The difference between Trump and the innocent residents of Springfield, Ohio, is that Trump has the protection of the United States Secret Service. Trump’s targets of political violence possess far fewer defenses. And make no mistake: Trump and Vance’s willingness to lie, deceive, and stigmatize minorities is behind the threats of violence affecting Springfield, Ohio this week.

They are attempting domestic terrorism by proxy. And if they keep it up, they will eventually have blood on their hands.

After the alleged assassination attempt against Trump over the weekend, Vance said at the Georgia Faith & Freedom Coalition dinner in Atlanta that “the big difference between conservatives and liberals is that we have — no one has tried to kill Kamala Harris in the last couple of months.” He blamed liberal rhetoric for attempts on Trump’s life.

David Cay Johnson suggested that Vance’s comments “painted a target on Kamala Harris, sending a signal that some rightwing nutcase may a take as a directive,” just as Drezner described.

Below is by far THE most irresponsible statement by any American politician in my lifetime.@JDVance tonight
painted a target on Kamala Harris, sending a signal that some rightwing nutcase may a take as a directive.

Vance behaves like a 13-year-old wisenheimer.
From @CNN: pic.twitter.com/gub7oht0vP

— David Cay Johnston (@DavidCayJ) September 17, 2024

The genesis of genocide

In April 2019, Kennedy Ndahiro reflected in The Atlantic on how Rwanda became the site of genocide:

Twenty-five years ago this month, all hell broke loose in my country, which is tucked away in the Great Lakes region of Africa. Hordes of members of the Hutu ethnic majority, armed with machetes, spears, nail-studded clubs, and other rudimentary weapons, moved house to house in villages, hunting for Tutsis, the second largest of Rwanda’s three ethnic groups. The radio station RTLM, allied with leaders of the government, had been inciting Hutus against the Tutsi minority, repeatedly describing the latter as inyenzi, or “cockroaches,” and as inzoka, or “snakes.” The station, unfortunately, had many listeners.

And many dehumanizing euphemisms for the Tutsi minority.

By the mid-1990s, the Hutu leadership was in jeopardy. Multiple political factions had emerged, and the insurgent Rwanda Patriotic Front, an organization composed mostly of young Tutsi exiles, had entered the country. For Hutu leaders, it was time to play the Tutsi card. Extremist publications had sprung up, especially a newspaper called Kangura. (Its public face, the editor Hassan Ngeze, was later convicted by the post-genocide International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, along with other high-level figures associated with the publication.)

But it was the private radio station RTLM—which stands for Radio Télévision Libre de Mille Collines—that illustrates the power of hate media. Rwanda had an official radio station, but Hutu hard-liners came up with the idea of creating a private radio station to carry incendiary anti-Tutsi propaganda.

It was Joseph Goebbels who said, “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.” RTLM was very successful. It managed to plant a seed of discord among the moderate Hutus who were slowly drawn into the extremist fold.

Out of context

Foreign Policy in 2016 reported on one Rwandan receiving a life sentence for genocide, not for what he did but for what he said:

In 1992, Leon Mugesera, a senior politician in Rwanda’s then-ruling Hutu party, told a crowd of supporters at a rally in the town of Kabaya that members of the country’s minority Tutsi population were “cockroaches” who should go back to Ethiopia, the birthplace of the East African ethnic group.

Spectators claim that at one point in the rally, which was not recorded in its entirety, Mugesera said, “Anyone whose neck you do not cut is the one who will cut your neck.” Two years later, some 800,000 Rwandans — mainly Tutsis — were brutally slaughtered and hacked to death in a genocide that lasted 100 days.

Mugesera, who told rallygoers to dump their victims’ bodies in the river, “later maintained his innocence, saying the speech had been taken out of context,” the BBC reported.

Expect to hear the “taken out of context” excuse if we see mass casualty attacks against immigrants in this country.

Bolts.com has done some deep research into the elections official positions in states where they themselves are on the ballot this year. Yikes:

One needs only to skim recent headlines to be reminded of the power of state elections officials to shape access to voting. Nebraska’s secretary of state just unilaterally shut down voter registration for tens of thousands of people with past felony convictions just weeks before the election. The secretary of state in Ohio, who has spent years courting the Big Lie, this month proposed to make it harder to vote by mail by limiting drop boxes. In Arizona, the secretary of state is laying the groundwork to combat election deniers who might seek to reject election results in November.

All these officials were elected by voters in the 2022 midterms, a busy cycle that saw a coordinated (and largely unsuccessful) effort by followers of Donald Trump to take over election administration. Two years later, a new round of states are selecting their chief election officials.

Twelve states are deciding in November who will run their elections going forward. 

That role is directly on the ballot in seven states; in five others, voters will elect a governor or lawmakers who’ll then get to appoint their elections chief. 

In most of these states, this elections chief is the secretary of state; but in a few, there is another office that has that authority—for instance, in Utah, it’s the lieutenant governor.

Today Bolts is publishing a new guide that walks you through these elections in all 12 states.

In some of these states, including Missouri, Oregon, and Vermont, a candidate is once again running who has clearly embraced false conspiracy theories that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. They’ve proposed taking drastic actions such as ending mail-in voting.

In other states, such as New Hampshire or Utah, the office is unlikely to fall into the hands of an election denier. But even these races can be critical to the shape of democracy. Secretaries of state or the equivalent official often design voter outreach programs, or set policies that can make voter registration easy or difficult. They can also champion new election legislation or maneuver to stall ballot initiatives. 

In the bad old days, many of these (when America was Great) these jobs were often partisan. But it’s having a big resurgence with the new Republicans election stealing strategy. Keep your eyes on this. Some of those states may not be swing states now but …

Read on for the details.