NEW >> Vice President Harris releases her closing 2-minute ad – “Brighter Future”
— Ian Sams (@IanSams) November 2, 2024
Centers the American people, not herself
WATCH: pic.twitter.com/gqN2yzv7xm
Pretty darned good, in my opinon.
"what digby sez..."
Digby's Hullabaloo Posts
Hey, he’s just talking to the bros…
Apparently, this isn’t a joke:
Alex Jones confirmed that Tucker Carlson told him about being mauled by demons in his sleep last year at his house, and they figured out it was connected to someone “laying hands” on him. Alex says he was also attacked by a poltergeist who threw him around and separated his shoulder.
Alex Jones says Tucker Carlson told him about being mauled by demons in his sleep last year at his house, and they figured out it was connected to someone “laying hands” on him. Alex says he was also attacked by a poltergeist who threw him around and separated his shoulder. pic.twitter.com/xkjJPrghwj
— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) November 1, 2024
Okay….
Carlson is supposed to be the thnking man’s MAGA extremist. I guess this is what they mean by that.
The New Yorker followed Carlson on his tour. Just don’t call him weird:
Sometimes, when Tucker Carlson is in the shower, he takes a quiet moment to reflect on whether his haters may be right about him. I know this not firsthand but because he recently mentioned it to a few thousand fans in Rosenberg, Texas. He said, “I have been through this process for so many years, where they call you something”—in his case, a very incomplete list would include “venomous demagogue,” “crypto-Nazi blowhard,” “anti-science ignoramus,” and “a dick”—“and I actually do try to take stock. Like, am I that person?”
These reveries always lead him to the same conclusion: he’s clean. It is the haters who are wrong. That night, in Rosenberg, the epithet he lingered on was “extremist.” He drew out the syllables in a derisive growl, followed by his foppish hyena bark of a laugh—a familiar sequence to anyone who has watched Tucker Carlson heap scorn on his enemies, which is to say, anyone who has watched Tucker Carlson. “Whatever else I am, I’m the opposite of an extremist,” he continued. “My parents got divorced. I’m totally opposed to change.” He claims that his vision for the country’s future is actually a vision of the country’s past, one that strikes him as modest, even obvious: “I liked America in 1985.”
This was the ninth stop on the Tucker Carlson Live Tour—sixteen arenas, this fall, from Anaheim, California, to Sunrise, Florida, but mostly in the heartland. At each stop, before bringing out his special guest (Kid Rock in Grand Rapids; Donald Trump, Jr., in Jacksonville), Carlson delivered a semi-improvised monologue, usually starting with some geo-targeted pandering. In Michigan, he praised the local muskie fishing before slamming the state’s “brain-dead robot” of a governor. In Pennsylvania, he extolled the beauty of the Conestoga River before describing that state’s governor as “evil, actually.” In Texas, he said, “There’s something about being in a room full of people you agree with that is so great. It’s like a spa treatment.”
Trump was his guest on Thursday:
It’s very hard to believe that anyone would describe Trump or Carlson as “venomous demagogues” “crypto-Nazi blowhards” “anti-science ignoramuses” of “dicks.” So weird.
Pregnant and bleeding? Don’t mess with Texas.
Texas’ severe abortion laws notched another preventable death from a pregnancy gone wrong. ProPublica reported the death of Josseli Barnica, 28, in 2021 on Wednesday. She died days after the state’s S.B. 8 “heartbeat bill” took effect. Bloomberg Opinion asked: “Texas’ Abortion Ban Killed Josseli Barnica. Who Will Be Next?”
Nevaeh Crain, it seems. On Friday, ProPublica told the story of her tragic death in MAGAstan after the Dobbs decision in June 2022 triggered an effective abortion ban in Texas. Crain was an early victim:
Candace Fails screamed for someone in the Texas hospital to help her pregnant daughter. “Do something,” she pleaded, on the morning of Oct. 29, 2023.
Nevaeh Crain was crying in pain, too weak to walk, blood staining her thighs. Feverish and vomiting the day of her baby shower, the 18-year-old had gone to two different emergency rooms within 12 hours, returning home each time worse than before.
The first hospital diagnosed her with strep throat without investigating her sharp abdominal cramps. At the second, she screened positive for sepsis, a life-threatening and fast-moving reaction to an infection, medical records show. But doctors said her six-month fetus had a heartbeat and that Crain was fine to leave.
Now on Crain’s third hospital visit, an obstetrician insisted on two ultrasounds to “confirm fetal demise,” a nurse wrote, before moving her to intensive care.
By then, more than two hours after her arrival, Crain’s blood pressure had plummeted and a nurse had noted that her lips were “blue and dusky.” Her organs began failing.
Hours later, she was dead.
Read the rest at ProPublica.
Those of you headed to the polls (especially in Texas) might ask yourselves and your friends Bloomberg’s question. Who’s next?
NBC News reported in September:
The number of women in Texas who died while pregnant, during labor or soon after childbirth skyrocketed following the state’s 2021 ban on abortion care — far outpacing a slower rise in maternal mortality across the nation, a new investigation of federal public health data finds.
From 2019 to 2022, the rate of maternal mortality cases in Texas rose by 56%, compared with just 11% nationwide during the same time period, according to an analysis by the Gender Equity Policy Institute. The nonprofit research group scoured publicly available reports from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and shared the analysis exclusively with NBC News.
Furthermore:
Among Hispanic women, the rate of women dying while pregnant, during childbirth or soon after increased from 14.5 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births in 2019 to 18.9 in 2022. Rates among white women nearly doubled — from 20 per 100,000 to 39.1.
Also: Johns Hopkins this summer estimated “that infant deaths in Texas increased more than expected in the year following the state’s 2021 ban on abortion in early pregnancy, especially among infants with congenital anomalies.”
This, after maternal mortality (deaths during or after childbirth) in the U.S. declined sharply after the mid-1930s:
In 2017, at a time when maternal mortality was declining worldwide, the World Health Organization (WHO) reported that the U.S. was one of only two countries (along with the Dominican Republic) to report a significant increase in its maternal mortality ratio (the proportion of pregnancies that result in death of the mother) since 2000. While U.S. maternal deaths have leveled in recent years, the ratio is still higher than in comparable countries, and significant racial disparities remain.
Donald Trump and his MAGA movement want to roll back the last century. It was a time when death in childbirth was a leading cause of death for women, along with (if vaccine skeptic RFK Jr. gets a job in a second Trump administration) tuberculosis, pneumonia, gastrointestinal infections, smallpox, and more.
Beware, sister, beware
So take care getting pregnant in Texas. Depending on the outcome of this election, it could get worse elsewhere soon. Amarillo’s Proposition A, ““Sanctuary City for the Unborn Ordinance,” is part of a larger strategy to ban abortion nationwide (The New Yorker):
Proposition A is alarming enough on its own. But it’s part of a bigger strategic play. At a time when Donald Trump is insisting that abortion should be left up to the states, a fervent group of anti-abortion activists are working behind the scenes to achieve a different goal. “The Dobbs decision really was a pro-choice decision, by leaving it up to the states instead of saying that abortion is a great social, moral, and political evil,” Mark Lee Dickson, a minister from East Texas, who is the driving force behind the sanctuary-city movement, told me, referring to the decision that overturned Roe. Dickson’s goal is nothing less than a nationwide ban on abortion, enacted by the courts. The path there may well lead through the Texas Panhandle—which means that the fight against it is happening here, too.
Amarillo became the second panhandle city in Texas (along with Clarendon) “to reject both the original and amended versions” of the ordinance in June. But Lubbock, Abilene, and San Angelo all said aye.
The Amarillo Tribune in October reported:
On June 11, 2019, Waskom, Texas, became the first city to pass the Sanctuary City for the Unborn Ordinance. Since then, the Amarillo Tribune has verified that 69 cities have passed a Sanctuary City Ordinance in states beyond Texas, including Illinois, New Mexico, Nebraska, Iowa, Louisiana and Ohio. Lubbock is the largest city that has adopted the ordinance.
None of the 69 Sanctuary City for the Unborn Ordinances prohibit or ban contraceptives such as birth control. Mail-in pills that would induce an abortion and abortions performed within city limits are banned under the ordinances as well as under state law after the overturn of Roe v. Wade. No abortion clinics were in any of the cities that have adopted the Sanctuary City ordinance.
They ain’t foolin’ and if you fool around with them
You gonna get yourself a schooling
Vote accordingly. Tell your friends.
I know it’s the day after Halloween but it’s still pumpkin season:
They did the mash! The elephant family stomped and snacked on over 1,200 lbs of pumpkins this morning during our Squishing of the Squash!
Kamala Harris speaks the truth:
Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris warned voters on Thursday that Republican Donald Trump and his allies would scale back healthcare programs if he wins the White House and said his comments at a Wednesday rally were offensive to women.
In a brief press conference, Vice President Harris reminded voters that former President Trump had tried unsuccessfully to repeal the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, during his 2017-2021 presidency.
Now he says this:
He said he wouldn’t cut Social security but presented a budget that cut it every single year he was president.
And they still plan to do it:
If they get the chance they’re going to repeal it, don’t ever think otherwise. It’s their holy grail.
If you are thinking of not voting for Harris over the Gaza issue, I understand the impulse. But it’s a mistake. Bernie Sanders explains why:
AOC says:
And then there’s this:
Nuff said.
I know that some of you don’t listen to podcasts and I’d guess that most of you have never listened to Joe Rogan, the man who runs the most popular podcast in the world (making hundreds of millions of dollars at it.) Trump appeared on his show last week and it’s been dowloaded 35 million times.
Anyway, here’s a taste of the kind of thing this superstar is selling to his massive audience:
He is very stupid and he makes everyone who listens to him stupid. A case in point: his interview with JD Vance who is not as stupid as Rogan but knows the audience will believe anything:
During a prolonged discussion about the environment, Vance asserted that he “didn’t have a strong view about what the carbon footprint ultimately does,” appearing to waffle about whether human-caused climate change exists.
“It’s interesting that the environmental movement in America, the only thing that it talks about is the carbon footprint, and it never talks about . . . why do we have the highest rates of obesity in the world right now,” Vance said.
Rogan added that it was “disturbing” that “there’s also profit that’s being made off the green movement,” and name-checked Bill Gates who has invested billions of dollars in climate technology solutions.
JD vance knows very well that climate change is real and he is a fully formed creature of the Silicon Valley tech-bro culture. But Rogan’s audience is full of conspiracy theorists who’ve been indoctinated by this sort of programming so they don’t know that.
Vance also said this, which I’m sure thrilled the bros to no end:
Vance told Rogan that he was mini golfing with his family in Ohio when he learned that Trump had been shot in the ear during his Butler, Pa. rally in June. “I actually thought they had killed him because when you first see the video he grabs his ear and then he goes down,” Vance recalled after seeing the video of Trump’s July 13 rally. “I’m like, ‘Oh my God, they just killed him.’”
“At first I was so pissed, but then I go into like fight or flight mode,” he said. “I grab my kids up, throw them in the car, go home and load all my guns. And basically stand like a sentry in our front door, and that was my reaction to it.”
And this:
“If you are a middle-class or upper-middle class white parent, and the only thing that you care about is whether your child goes into Harvard or Yale, obviously that pathway has become a lot harder for a lot of upper-middle class kids,” said Vance, who has talked about his family’s economic struggles growing up and has a degree from Yale Law School. “But the one way that those people can participate in the DEI bureaucracy in this country is to be trans, and is there a dynamic that’s going on where, if you become trans, that is the way to reject your white privilege?”
This is the caliber of dialog the Trump bros are hearing every single day.
VP Kamala Harris was going to go on his show but he she could only spare an hour and wanted him to come meet her on the campaign trail so she could continue with her schedule. He refused demanding that she come to him in Austin and spend three hours with him. His time is far more valuable than hers, you see. And he has the biggest podcast so he’s very important.
This is all well and good, of course. But will if get the bros out of bed on election day to go vote? Maybe. But they sure aren’t voting so far…
Here’s Vance’s mentor schooling the Rogan listeners on politics:
I know we shouldn’t pay too much attention to the early vote and this might not mean anything. But if it holds up it’s big. Old people vote:
Donald Trump is lagging Kamala Harris in Pennsylvania early voting with a critical and once-reliably Republican constituency: seniors.
It’s a warning sign for the former president that reflects early vote data and polling across the battlegrounds, after Republicans won the senior vote in each of the last five presidential elections. In Pennsylvania, where voters over the age of 65 have cast nearly half of the early ballots, registered Democrats account for about 58 percent of votes cast by seniors, compared to 35 percent for Republicans. That’s despite both parties having roughly equal numbers of registered voters aged 65 and older.
The partisan gap is narrower than it was in 2020, when views of early voting were more partisan, and Republicans take that as a good sign. But the GOP still is counting on more of its older voters to show up on Election Day, while Democrats have more votes in the bank. The data is in line with polling in the state that has shown Trump shedding support among older voters. According to a Fox News poll of Pennsylvania, Trump is running 5 percentage points behind Harris among voters ages 65 and over, slipping back from the previous month, when he and Harris were tied with that demographic. It’s a major shift from 2020, when Trump carried 53 percent of the senior vote in Pennsylvania in a losing effort in the state.
Tom Bonier, a Democratic strategist and CEO of the data firm TargetSmart, said he has been surprised by what he is calling the “silver surge” in early voting from older Democrats.“Our expectation going into the early vote was that it would, in general, skew substantially more Republican than in 2020,” Bonier said. “There is no more pandemic, Democrats were more Covid conscious … and Republicans have been pushing early voting.”
The senior vote is particularly important in five of the seven battleground states — Pennsylvania, Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin, and North Carolina — that, according to U.S. Census data, have more residents over the age of 65 than the national average. According to modeling data shared by a Democratic campaign operative tracking early voting, across the Blue Wall states, Democratic voters over the age of 65 are running 10 to 20 percent ahead of their Republican counterparts with respect to registered turnout.
As I said, I don’t know if this is true or if it’s meaningful. A majority of seniors are traditionally Republican voters. Maybe that’s changing since the GOP went batshit crazy.
And it isn’t just the oldsters who have them worried about Pennsylvania. Here’s some juicy Mar-a-lago gossip from Tara Palmieri at Puck:
The Trump campaign has paused its premature celebration and fallen into sweat mode, as early-voting numbers indicate more women are turning up than men in must-win Pennsylvania, and operatives are bringing out the briefcases for lawfare. “They’re going so crazy here,” says a source.
We’re less than a week from Election Day, and the mood inside the Trump campaign has undergone yet another transformation. Last week, I reported on the preemptive but undeniably palpable sense of euphoria washing over Mar-a-Lago as data rolled in depicting early-voting surges in Nevada, Georgia, and North Carolina. But now, as the early results from Pennsylvania reveal an influx of first-time female voters who will likely break for Harris, a newfound anxiety is taking hold. While Trump continues to claim he has a massive lead, setting the stage to contest any unfavorable result, some in the Mar-a-Lago-sphere are starting to believe that his surge last week was two weeks premature.
Pennsylvania is obviously a must-win state for both campaigns… but it’s really crucial for Trump. While his inner circle feels confident about winning the Sunbelt, they recognize that they have a good chance of losing Michigan, where the gender gap is stark and students are coming out in record numbers. (A new CNN poll shows Harris up 5 points in the state.) So the situation in Pennsylvania—where women have outpaced men by 13 points in the early vote—has sent the campaign into a tailspin during the past two days.[…]
As I reported two weeks ago, Trump has already zeroed in on Republican National Committee chairman Michael Whatley as his scapegoat if things go south…
And while Trump may want to blame Whatley and his “election integrity unit” for a loss, the campaign is also preparing to blame outside groups who were supposed to handle Trump’s ground game. Sure, figureheads like Kirk at Turning Point and Elon Musk at America PAC are firmly planted in Trump’s inner circle and would probably walk away unscathed. But the same can’t be said for Phil Cox and Generra Peck, who have essentially commandeered Musk’s America PAC and are seen as too closely aligned with Trumpworld’s collective enemy Ron DeSantis.
Let the bloodletting begin.