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.
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!
Joy Reid opened her MSNBC program tonight with a clip from one of my favorite episodes from the original Twilight Zone series, “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street”, which she posited to be analogous not only with the recent demonizing of Springfield, Ohio’s Haitian immigrant community by the Trump-Vance campaign, but American politics in general.
She’s not wrong.
I used that same Twilight Zone episode as the impetus for this piece from 2020. I was commentating on the sociopolitical climate of the early days of the pandemic, but I think many of the points I was making remain salient to this rather tempestuous election season; hence, a rerun.
Picture if you will:
(Originally posted on Hullabaloo on March 20, 2020)
The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices…to be found only in the minds of men. For the record, prejudices can kill…and suspicion can destroy…and a thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all of its own – for the children and the children yet unborn. And the pity of it is that these things cannot be confined to the Twilight Zone.
– Narrator’s epilogue from “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street” (1959 episode of The Twilight Zone) original teleplay by Rod Serling
A few days ago, this Tweet by NBC news journalist Richard Engel caught my attention:
Now here was an angle on the Coronavirus crisis that I hadn’t given much thought to. Engel makes a very salient point about “social” side effects of pandemic panic. Many people are prone to allergies or suffer from non-viral chronic respiratory conditions who will be (or already are) getting dirty looks when they’re out and about. I’ve been worried about this myself for several days; the apple and cherry trees have begun to blossom, and (right on schedule) so has my usual reaction: sneezing fits, runny nose and dry coughing.
I currently live in fear of mob retribution should I fail to suppress a sneeze in an elevator.
On the flip side, I must come clean and plead guilty to feeding the monster myself. Earlier this week I was waiting in line at the drug store. Standing in front of me was a man and his young daughter (I’d guess she was around 7 or 8 years old). She was doing the fidget dance. Just as she twirled around to face in my direction, she emitted a fusillade of open-mouthed coughs. I jumped back like James Brown, nearly colliding with the person standing behind me (we’re all a tad “jumpy” in Seattle just now). For a few seconds, I was seeing red and nearly said something to her dad, who was too busy futzing around with his cell phone to notice his Little Typhoid Mary’s St. Vitus Dance of Death.
Thankfully, my logical brain quickly wrested the wheel from my lizard brain, and I thought better of making a scene. After all she was just a little girl, bored waiting in line.
A lot of sociopolitical fallout from pandemic panic has been on display in recent weeks: fear of the “other” (ranging from unconscious racial profiling to outright xenophobia), disinformation, fear mongering, and the good old reliable standbys anxiety and paranoia.
This got me thinking about one my favorite episodes of the original Twilight Zone, “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street”. Scripted by series creator Rod Serling, the episode premiered in 1960. I re-watched it today and was struck by how tight Serling’s teleplay is; any aspiring dramatist would do well to study it as a masterclass in depth and brevity.
**** SPOILERS AHEAD ****
The story opens under blue suburban skies of Maple Street, U.S.A. in a neighborhood straight outta Leave it to Beaver where the residents are momentarily distracted from their lawn mowing and such by the overhead rumble and flash of what appears to be a meteor streaking though the sky. However, this brief anomaly is only the prelude to a more concerning turn of events: a sudden power outage coupled with an inexplicable shutdown of anything gas-powered, from lawn mowers to automobiles. Concern builds.
This precipitates an impromptu community meeting in the middle of the block, as residents start to speculate as to what (or who) could be to blame for these odd events. A young boy takes center stage. An avid sci-fi comic book fan, he regales the adults with a tale he read recently about an alien invasion. In the story, the invaders infiltrate towns by embedding a family in each neighborhood, until the time is right to “take over” en masse.
The seed has been planted; fear, distrust and paranoia spreads through the block like wildfire, becoming increasingly more palpable with the diminishing daylight. By nightfall, anarchy reigns, and once-friendly neighbors have turned into a murderous mob.
The camera pulls away further and further from the shocking mayhem occurring on Maple Street to a “God’s-eye” view, where we become aware of two shadowy observers (who are obviously the alien invaders). After absorbing the ongoing scenario, one asks the other “And this pattern is always the same?” “With a few variations,” his companion intones with a clinical detachment, adding “They pick the most dangerous enemy they can find, and it’s themselves.” Cue Mr. Serling’s equally omniscient epilogue (top of post).
Obviously, when Serling wrote the piece he was referring at the time to the Red Scare; America and Russia were at the height of the Cold War and nuclear paranoia was rampant among the general populace (in the episode, a character sarcastically refers to himself as a “Fifth Columnist” when accused of being an alien invader by his neighbors).
That said, Serling’s script (like much of his work) is “evergreen”. With its underlying themes about mob psychology, scapegoating, and humanity’s curious predilection to eschew logic and pragmatism for fear and loathing, the “message” is just as relevant now.
Keep your head, be a good neighbor, and don’t forget to wash your hands for 20 seconds.
Previous posts with related themes:
More reviews at Den of Cinema
—Dennis Hartley
Go ahead. As Mitch McConnell said yesterday:
Trump is making sure they will get the blame. He seems to think immigration is the magic bullet and that people will rush to his side if the Democrats refuse to pass this sill SAVE act which is an unnecessary, redundant bill. I really doubt that people will see it that way. Much more likely they’ll just see more Trumpian chaos and be reminded that the GOP majority is a clown show there will be even more of it if he’s elected president again.
Speaker Johnson was kissing the ring at Mar-a-lago last weekend so we know where he’s going to wind up. He certainly isn’t going to defy Dear Leader. Stay tuned. This is going to get interesting.
You’ve no doubt heard about the tragic death of Amber Thurman who was denied a D&C in Georgia because of the new abortion laws, ended up getting sepsis and died on the operating table. She’s not the only one. ProPublica got hold of another report from the maternal death board and it’s equally awful.
Candi Miller was a Georgia mother of three in poor health and her doctor said she should not risk having another child. Unfortunately, she accidentally got pregnant and knew that she would not be able to get an abortion unless she was in danger of losing her life, which was very possible. So she decided that she had to deal with the situation alone:
Miller ordered abortion pills online, but she did not expel all the fetal tissue and would need a dilation and curettage procedure to clear it from her uterus and stave off sepsis, a grave and painful infection. In many states, this care, known as a D&C, is routine for both abortions and miscarriages. In Georgia, performing it had recently been made a felony, with few exceptions.
Her teenage son watched her suffer for days after she took the pills, bedridden and moaning. In the early hours of Nov. 12, 2022, her husband found her unresponsive in bed, her 3-year-old daughter at her side.
An autopsy found unexpelled fetal tissue, confirming that the abortion had not fully completed. It also found a lethal combination of painkillers, including the dangerous opioid fentanyl. Miller had no history of drug use, the medical records state; her family has no idea how she obtained them or what was going through her mind — whether she was trying to quell the pain, complete the abortion or end her life. A medical examiner was unable to determine the manner of death.
Her family later told a coroner she hadn’t visited a doctor “due to the current legislation on pregnancies and abortions.” situation herself:
The committee on maternal health determined that her death was preventable. If she hadn’t been burdened by Georgia’s draconian anti-abortion law she would have sought medical help.
I cannot help but be reminded of the very famous story of Gerri Santoro who was found dead on the floor of a dingy motel room rom an attempted self- induced abortion in 1964. Ms Magazine ran the police photo of the scene and it shocked the nation. Her story was a common one in those days. It looks like it’s common once again.
Ms. posted this in 2022 when Roe was overturned:
On the heels of the Supreme Court’s initial ruling in Roe v. Wade, we remembered Gerri and the women like her who had died from unsafe, illegal abortions. We declared: “Never again.”
We ran the photo again in 2016, after the election of Donald Trump—predicting that in the weeks, months and years to come, abortion access would become a battleground more hard-fought than ever. Unfortunately, we were right.
For too many women of my generation, a time before Roe feels like ancient history—but now, that history looms dangerously in the future. Almost five decades after Roe, we’re once again in the fight of our lives.
We must demand that women have bodily autonomy and control over their destinies. We must remind lawmakers that a majority of Americans support safe and legal abortion. We must remind the country what a nation without any safe, legal abortion access looks like. We must remind our lawmakers what women’s lives without abortion access look like—and the devastating ways in which an end to abortion access is an end to our freedom.
We must bring back to life the stories of women like Gerri, who died because they had no choice, and the thousands of women like her whose lives were forever altered because they didn’t, either.
“She was just one of countless women who died in this lonely and desperate way,” Gerri’s daughter said to the crowd in 2004. “They were all someone’s sister, daughter, mother or friend.”
I’ve posted Gerri Santoro’s picture on this blog many times over the years but I’m not going to do it again. It feels so much worse to look at it now. If you have never seen it, you can click here.
This is what Trump means when he says he wants to make America Great Again.
NPR reports on a very exciting improvement in the fentanyl epidemic:
For the first time in decades, public health data shows a sudden and hopeful drop in drug overdose deaths across the U.S. “This is exciting,” said Dr. Nora Volkow, head of the National Institute On Drug Abuse [NIDA], the federal laboratory charged with studying addiction. “This looks real. This looks very, very real.”
National surveys compiled by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention already show an unprecedented decline in drug deaths of roughly 10.6 percent. That’s a huge reversal from recent years when fatal overdoses regularly increased by double-digit percentages. Some researchers believe the data will show an even larger decline in drug deaths when federal surveys are updated to reflect improvements being seen at the state level, especially in the eastern U.S.
“In the states that have the most rapid data collection systems, we’re seeing declines of twenty percent, thirty percent,” said Dr. Nabarun Dasgupta, an expert on street drugs at the University of North Carolina. According to Dasgupta’s analysis, which has sparked discussion among addiction and drug policy experts, the drop in state-level mortality numbers corresponds with similar steep declines in emergency room visits linked to overdoses.
Dr. Nabarun Dasgupta, a researcher at the University of North Carolina, is an expert on the U.S. street drug supply. He believes data shows a sudden drop in drug overdose deaths nationwide that could already by saving “roughly 20,000 lives” per year.
Dasgupta was one of the first researchers to detect the trend. He believes the national decline in street drug deaths is now at least 15 percent and could mean as many as 20,000 fewer fatalities per year.
There are still too many, obviously. But this sharp decline is unprecedented and it’s very good news.
They don’t know what’s causing it. There is speculation that the availability of naloxone is a key while others think that one of the newer ingredients in the racipe seems to elay withdrawal which means people may be using less fentanyl. The timing of the sharp rise and the subsequent drop may also indicate that the COVID epidemic was a factor. (I think the trauma of that event, with everything that went with it, caused much more disruption than we will be able to measure for some time to come.)
Anyway, this is unalloyed good news and we should be able to feel a little sense of relief that this terrible problem has not only stopped getting worse but that it’s actually improved. We need more of that.
You’ll notice that’s from the Wall St. Journal. It comes on the heels of a scathing editorial board editorial condemning Trump.
Here’s an excerpt and a gift link to the whole article. Oh my:
City Manager Bryan Heck fielded an unusual question at City Hall on the morning of Sept. 9, from a staff member of Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance. The staffer called to ask if there was any truth to bizarre rumors about Haitian immigrants and pets in Springfield.
“He asked point-blank, ‘Are the rumors true of pets being taken and eaten?’” recalled Heck. “I told him no. There was no verifiable evidence or reports to show this was true. I told them these claims were baseless.”
By then, Vance had already posted about the rumors to his 1.9 million followers on X. Yet he kept the post up, and repeated an even more insistent version of the claim the next morning.
That night, former President Donald Trump stood on a Philadelphia debate stage and shot the rumor into the stratosphere. “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs,” he said to 67 million viewers. “The people that came in, they’re eating the cats. They’re eating, they’re eating, the pets of the people that live there. And this is what’s happening in this country.”
There’s more, a lot more. The tensions in the town had been mounting for a while, with the white residents obviously agitated by the arrival of Black foreigners who made them mad with their black and foreign ways. An old story. But then the white supremacists came to town to really stir up trouble. Read the whole thing.
You have to see this one anecdote to really understand the grotesque dishonesty of JD Vance. It’s been clear from the beginning that there was no pet-eating going on and that the local racists had just worked themselves up into a frenzy.
Vance, meanwhile, has continued to defend his claims.
A Vance spokesperson on Tuesday provided The Wall Street Journal with a police report in which a resident had claimed her pet might have been taken by Haitian neighbors. But when a reporter went to Anna Kilgore’s house Tuesday evening, she said her cat Miss Sassy, which went missing in late August, had actually returned a few days later—found safe in her own basement.
Kilgore, wearing a Trump shirt and hat, said she apologized to her Haitian neighbors with the help of her daughter and a mobile-phone translation app.
This actually made me feel a little bit better. Yes, it’s probable that this woman freaked out in a racist fury that had been ginned up in her neighborhood. But in the end she was able to admit she was wrong and actually apologized to the neighbors she had unfairly targeted. She is a much better person than Donald Trump and JD Vance who have never in their lives apologized for anything.
It’s a small thing but it suggests that some of them aren’t so far down the rabbit hole they’ll never be able to climb back out.
Update:
Vance is really pushing the Nazi propaganda with this one:
Check this out:
María Teresa Kumar told The Hill that Harris is tapping into a cultural phenomenon with the under-40 crowd.
“For older voters and for donors coming in, it’s like, ‘We could actually beat Trump.’ I think for young people, it’s a genuine, authentic enthusiasm. And I say this because … the moment she announced, we saw young voters tick up,” Kumar said.
“It was nuts. So we were registering roughly 60 to 100 voters a day on Friday. On Monday, it jumped to 3,000. By [the next] Friday, it was 8,000. It was super exciting. Night and day. It’s a very cool chart.”
According to numbers from Voto Latino, which targets young Latinos for registration, the group facilitated 36,000 registrations in the six months leading up to July 21. In the weeks since, Voto Latino has registered 120,000 additional voters.
Of those voters, 59 percent are under 30, and 29 percent are in their 30s.
Those age groups, Kumar said, are connecting to Harris’s message not only on new platforms, but through language that’s lost on older demographics.
“I do think that we’re not giving the phenomena that is happening on TikTok enough credit. The moment that that young woman said, ‘Kamala is brat,’ it distinguished the right and the misogyny of how they were trying to place her. They were trying to place her as ‘she laughs too much, she’s not organized, she’s not focused,’ you know? And basically, Gen Z is like, ‘she’s messy, we’re messy. But we’re also smart, so don’t get confused,’” said Kumar, referring to pop star Charli XCX’s labeling of Harris as “brat.”
But traditional Democratic strategists haven’t fully caught up, according to Kumar.“I’ve been in these kitchen cabinet meetings with all these consultants trying to figure out how they were going to go against the misogyny of that ‘They don’t like her voice.’ … You know, people earning hundreds of thousands of dollars, and it literally took one tweet from one Gen Zer to encapsulate and emasculate the other side. I mean, brilliant, right?”
The Harris campaign has an excellent social media tram and they are killing it, especially on the platforms where the youngs hang out. They are also launching a major Latino outyreach campaign:
The Harris campaign is launching its largest effort yet to reach Latino voters, with new spending on Spanish-language radio and an organizing push around boxing matches and baseball games as National Hispanic Heritage Month kicks off this weekend.
The investments come as early voting is set to begin soon in some of the critical battlegrounds that are home to sizable Latino populations, like Arizona, Nevada and Pennsylvania.
Vice President Kamala Harris will address the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute’s annual conference on Wednesday, according to a senior campaign official, and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz is expected to pitch Latino voters in swing states in the coming weeks. Surrogates will be a part of the travel plan as well, the official said in plans first shared with NBC News.
If you read the whole thing you’ll see that it’s a major initiative with top surrogates, ad campaigns and lots of on-the-ground contact. That is very good news.
