This is something that has driven me crazy for years. Here in California it’s an ongoing problem. Even this year we have a couple of these things on the ballot. Bolts.com took a look at one of them on the Ohio ballot and it’s an incredible story of political gamesmanshipt and special interest influence. It’s a gerrymandering initiative and it could affect all of us:
When Songgu Kwon went to the polls earlier this month, he was eager to help Ohio adopt an independent redistricting commission. The comic book writer and illustrator, who lives near Athens, dislikes the process with which politicians have carved up Ohio into congressional and legislative districts that favor them, enabling Republicans to lock in large majorities. So he was pleased that voting rights groups had placed Issue 1, a proposal meant to create fairer maps, on the Ohio ballot this fall.
“I’m in support of any measures that make the process more fair to reflect the will of the people, instead of letting the politicians decide how to gerrymander,” says Kwon.
In the voting booth, he reviewed the text in front of him. His ballot read that voting ‘yes’ would set up a panel “required to gerrymander the boundaries of state legislative and congressional districts,” and that it would “repeal constitutional protections against gerrymandering.”
So Kwon voted ‘no’ on the measure—given what he’d just read, he thought, that had to be the way to signal support for independent redistricting. He’d gone in planning to vote ‘yes,’ but he was thrown off by this language he saw; he guessed that he must have been wrong or missed some recent development. “The language seemed really specific that if you vote ‘yes’, you’re for gerrymandering,” he now recalls in frustration.
But when he left the polling station and compared notes with his wife, he quickly figured out that he’d made a mistake: He had just voted to preserve the status quo. To bring about the new independent process and remove redistricting from elected officials, as was his intention, he would have had to vote ‘yes.’
Kwon says he got confused by the language that was crafted and placed on the ballot by Republican Ohio officials. The official most directly responsible for this language, Secretary of State Frank LaRose, had a direct hand in drawing the gerrymandered maps that Kwon opposes and that the reform would unwind.
“I didn’t think that they would go so far as to just straight up lie and use a word that means one thing to describe something else,” Kwon told me. “They are using the term gerrymandering to describe an attempt to actually fix the gerrymandering.”
As I said, I’ve been there. And when you add in the misleading ads and social media disinformation you end up feeling like throwing up your hands and not bothering. That’s one reason why a site like Bolts is so helpful. Hardly anyone follows these local and state stories in depth.
Here is the link to their Election Cheat Sheet which is really thorough. Whether you’re looking for some help with your own ballot or just want to know what’s going on around the country, it’s invaluable.
I'm insanely jealous of @KamalaHQ for renting the Vegas dome. I've pitched multiple clients on it. Came close once—so, so cool. pic.twitter.com/iXDfVcv3Ba
When the cops came for her Patience Frazier had no idea why:
Earlier that month, Frazier had shared a Facebook post about the son she lost. She had apologized to Abel, saying she was “so scarred n afraid” and “didn’t know what to do,” court records show.
“Why would you be sorry?” asked Jacqueline “Jac” Mitcham, the 31-year-old deputy on Frazier’s doorstep, according to body-camera footage obtained by The Washington Post. “Why would you be sorry, Patience?”
Frazier looked over at the other armed officers standing 10 feet away.
“I’m not allowed to have personal things in my life?” said Frazier, a mother of three. “I had a miscarriage, okay? A miscarriage. Why are you guys here over a f—ing miscarriage?”
Even before Roe v. Wade fell, a broad consensus had emerged across much of the antiabortion movement that women who seek abortions should not be prosecuted. The abortion bans that have taken effect since Roe was overturned, as well as abortion restrictions that existed before the 2022 Supreme Court ruling, do not allow women who terminate their pregnancies to be punished, instead targeting doctors and others who help facilitate abortions.
But those measures don’t tell the full story. In rare and often little-noticed cases, authorities have drawn on other laws to charge women accused of trying to end their pregnancies.Some prosecutors in both red and blue states have used sweeping statutes entirely unrelated to abortion — like child abuse, improper disposal of remains or murder — while others have relied on criminal laws written to protect a fetus.In Nevada, Frazier would eventually be charged with manslaughter under a unique 1911 law that supplements the state’s abortion restrictions, titled “taking drugs to terminate pregnancy.”
As in Frazier’s case, women who are prosecuted are typically accused of trying to end pregnancies without the help of a medical professional — a method frequently chosen because they live far from an abortion clinicand can’t afford to get to one. These prosecutions also often occur when women are thought to be relatively far along in pregnancy, near or past the point when a fetus could potentially survive outside of the womb.
Based on a review of hundreds of documents, hours of body-cam footage and interviews with those involved, a Post investigation of Frazier’s case offers new insight into the messy complexities and intensely personal emotions embedded within such a prosecution. From the start, deep moral questions loomed over a local justice system as it struggled to distinguish a miscarriage from an abortion, a fetus from a baby — culminating in a conviction one judge would ultimately characterize as “a total miscarriage of justice.”
[…]
Out on bail in the months before that day’s sentencing hearing, Frazier had felt like an outcast in her small town of 8,000. Her best friend had stopped talking to her. False details about her case swirled around Facebook. The first time she tried to go to the grocery store, she said, a group of teenage boys chased her down the aisle yelling, “baby killer.”
“Winds of prejudice have arisen,” Frazier’s public defender, Matt Stermitz, wrote in a court filing. “A lynching-like atmosphere hangs heavy over the City of Winnemucca.”
She was sentenced to 30 months to 8 years largely on the basis of the anti-abortion fanatic cop who arrested her. The whole story is aboslutely appalling. I’ve included a gift link (yes, it’s the Washington Post, but the reporters who wrote this story aren’t Jeff Bezos) and I urge you to read the whole thing to see just how screwed up our abortion policies have been for a very long time.
A high profile lawyer came on to the case after she’d been in prison for a year and she was eventually released on the basis of ineffective counsel.
“Patience has been portrayed as an antichrist, but this Judge thinks she is, instead, just a mother caught hopelessly in the web of poverty with a lack of any support system,” Judge Charles McGee wrote in an emotional 40-page decision, describing Frazier’s case as a “total miscarriage of justice.”
The emotional intensity of the abortion issue subtly propelled Frazier’s case from the start, the judge said later in an interview with The Post.
By taking up Frazier’s case, he said, the prosecutor in Winnemucca was able to send a clear message to the antiabortion constituents who elected him: “We don’t tolerate that kind of stuff here in cowboy country.”
Women have been cannon fodder in the culture wars over this issue for a very long time. The frightening thing is that it’s getting even worse in the Trump ban states. We know what these forced birth fanatics have always wanted and they’ve now been exposed.
Let’s just hope that the voters understand the stakes in this election and send a strong, unambiguous message that right wing zealots are not going to be allowed to control the most intimate decisions of people’s personal lives any longer.
I don’t actually think that’s hopium. The vibe I’m getting from everything I see and read is that the Harris campaign is feeling cautiously optimistic. That doesn’t mean that it’s in the bag but I think it certainly means they aren’t seeing anything that would lead us to believe that Trump has it in the bag, contrary to what the MAGA crowd is saying.
Again, this feels like 2012 to me. Romney and his people were measuring the drapes at this point. The polls were very close and Karl Rove was strutting around telling everyone that it was over.
On election night, we had this silly scene (which happened to make Megyn Kelly’s career.)
They simply could not believe that Obama had won because the polls were close and they’d convinced themselves that they couldn’t lose. After Trump came along in 2016, many of them convinced themselves that they can never lose.
Obviously, we have no idea if this will go our way. We got schooled in 2016 too, after all. I was certainly convinced that Clinton would win because I couldn’t imagine how anyone could vote for that miscreant. We all know what happened.
But I don’t think we have to assume that every close election is going to go their way either. It didn’t in 2012, 2018, 2020 and 2022. Maybe they’re due. But maybe the real truth is that 2016 was just a fluke because we had a close election with the first woman nominee whom a lot of people didn’t like and a TV celebrity who captured the imagination of a large enough segment of the population to eke out a win. I’m not saying that’s the case but it’s as easily proven as the idea that Trump is a juggernaut who can’t lose — when we know that he can.
So Rogan’s demand was that the sitting vice president detour from her campaign in swing states to come to him in Austin and also that she give him—what?—three hours?
And if she was only willing to give him an hour, and he had to travel to her? Well, then he thought his audience would be better off not hearing from her at all.¹
I am sorry but that is not on the level.
This is just one more area in which Kamala Harris has done—or tried to do—everything that was asked of her in the name of outreach to the great and good American people who get their news from a guy who talks about sucking his own dick.
Really. I know all the bros love him and Kamala wants to try to reach a few of them but it’s ridiculous that she has to give up 3 hours in the final week to fly to Texas to kiss this guy’s feet. Fuck that guy.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Friday shared a personal sexual-assault story during an abortion-rights rally, saying she felt grateful she had the freedom to obtain an abortion if she needed one in that moment.
“I myself, when I was about 22 or 23 years old, was raped while I was living here in New York City,” she told a crowd in New York’s City Union Square Park. “I was completely alone. I felt completely alone. In fact, I felt so alone that I had to take a pregnancy test in a public bathroom in midtown Manhattan.”
“When I sat there waiting for what the result would be, all I could think was thank God I have, at least, a choice,” she continued. “Thank God I could, at least, have the freedom to choose my destiny.”
She added: “I didn’t know then, as I was waiting, that it would come up negative.”
“I hope your beeper doesn’t go off,” right-wing personality Ryan Girdusky told Mehdi Hasan after Hasan said he supports Palestinian people.
Last month, hundred of pagers held by suspected Hezbollah operatives across Lebanon exploded in an attack widely believed to have been carried out by Israel. At least 37 people were killed, including two children, and thousands were injured.
“Did you just say I should die?” Hasan asked in disbelief. “Did you just say I should be killed on live TV?”
“No, I did not say that,” Girdusky said.
“You said you hope my beeper doesn’t go off,” Hasan pointed out.
Girdusky asked Hasan if he supports Hamas.
“I said ‘Palestinians,’” Hasan said.
“Then I apologize, I apologize,” Girdusky said. “I thought he said Hamas, I apologize.”
“This is America in 2024,” Hasan said. “Forget the racism. It’s I should die.”
When Girdusky claimed he didn’t say that, Hasan pressed him to explain what he meant with the “beeper” comment.
After a commercial break, Girdusky was gone ― and host Abby Phillip issued an apology to Hasan as well as to CNN viewers.
“We want discussion. We want people who disagree with each other to talk to each other,” she said. “But when you cross the line of a complete lack of civility, that is not going to happen here on this show.”
Sharing @CNN’s statement and a quick message from me about what happened on tonight’s show.
Newsmax host: “You worked very closely with JD Vance. Your friend and former boss is now the Vice Presidential nominee.”
Ryan Girdusky: “In 2020, he reached out to me over Twitter, and we built a friendship. I called him and said, if you’re running, I want to be on the team.” pic.twitter.com/gTavm2WJ2d
Ryan Girdusky made several appearances on The Gavin McInnes Show. McInnes is the founder of The Proud Boys. This is from the sam year McInnes founded the group in 2016. In this clip Girdusky appears to say people of color hate white folks and think we're Hitler. pic.twitter.com/fF4slHOnad
Buncombe County, NC early voting turnout trends by year.
At Helene Ground Zero (Asheville, N.C.) with a week to go until Election Day, we’ve got news crews from around the globe underfoot. Crews from Japan (multiple), from South Korea, France, The Netherlands, Canada and others I can’t recall.
A seasoned election protection attorney from Boston told me in 2014 he’d never seen an operation like ours. None of that interests these reporters. They want to report on how Helene is depressing turnout in this swing state. Got to keep that horse race racy.
To cut them some slack, they’re here because around the world their viewers are worried what happens to all of us if Donald Trump wins or attempts another coup. North Carolina is not the only state that matters on that, but results here do matter.
Game on!
Please. Do not buy into the hype about how close the presidential election is. Simon Rosenberg warns about how many “red wave” Republican polls are flooding the zone to skew polling averages and to fool observers into thinking the race is closer than it is.
Enjoy Trump on Joe Rogan suggesting that he knows the polls showing him are fake, and the data is made up. Don't take it from me. Take it from the guy who knows a little about fraud and ripping people off….https://t.co/h2vCDEju25
Trump is not the only one who thinks the polls are bullshit. Tom Bonier does too.
Our modeled partisanship for those who have voted already in the battleground is about D+4. And among the subset who have registered to vote since 2020, it is D+8. Where's that GOP registration/low propensity advantage we've been hearing so much about? pic.twitter.com/sxYKQWRokZ
Candidates and campaign managers ask what it all means. Little about this election is normal. Republicans typically hold off and vote in an Election Day flood. Not this year. Their orange savior ordered them to vote early and vote early they have. Their turnout exceeds Democratic turnout in N.C. to date. But does it mean anything? Unaffiliated registrants outnumber Ds and Rs (Ds by 7 points). They’ll determine the outcome, but their statewide turnout average to date is a point lower than normal. Twenty-three percent of GOP primary voters in North Carolina voted for Nikki Haley. What will they do now? Grit their teeth and vote Trump? Vote Harris? Stay home? Leave the presidential race blank and vote R down-ballot? I don’t know.
Canvassers ready for launch.
The graph atop this post shows turnout trends in typical years in my county since 2018. Ordinarily, Day 1 of early voting and the last two days are huge. There may or may not be weekend voting, thus the dips. But during the first full week, turnout trends downward. Not this year (yellow line). It’s trended up. And we’re voting every day in our county, 9a-5p until this Saturday (9a-3p).
In the pandemic year of 2020, the volume of absentee-by-mail ballots was enormous. Not so this year. Helene evacuees are not finished. Some will returning to the region late to vote by Election Day. Others will vote absentee from where they’ve relocated. So facile press comparisons of early vote turnout to turnout from 2020 are apples to oranges. Useless, if not misinformation. We may hit 2020 numbers (at least here) when all’s said and done.
As Coach Walz says, keep running all the way through the tape.
Nobody should have to go through middle and high school. It’s a fiery crucible of mean-spirited competitiveness, of who’s “in” and who’s “out,” where only the prettiest, strongest and most ruthless get ahead. Teens struggle to navigate an anxious world of jocks and mean girls driven by changing bodies and proverbial “raging hormones.” For most, it’s not a period to thrive but to survive. Some don’t.
It’s little solace that many of our teenage peers peaked in high school. The pity is that others never matured beyond it. They grew older and no wiser as the same people they were as adolescents. They walk among us seen as leaders for the same qualities that made them popular jerks in high school.
In the prehistory of Hullabaloo, Digby wrote about one such man, our then-president:
He makes decisions based upon the most primitive, unrefined aspects of human nature, most often deciding instinctively in favor of the most combative, aggressive course of action until reality and necessity intrudes and he reverses course and follows the advice of his more sophisticated and rational advisors. It is not just that he takes a simple instinctive gut check after listening to competing views, it’s that his gut seems to always favor a show down over a negotiation even when it is obviously counter productive and dangerous. Unsurprisingly, his instincts are that of an insecure rich boy surrounded by “friends” who manipulate him with sycophantic ego strokes to his manliness — a troubled child whose father is constantly having to bail him out of trouble.
George W. Bush, if you needed prompting. Or Donald John Trump, if prefiguring is your thing.
And in the wake of the financial collapse, Digby opined on the men of Wall Street whose greed and recklessness brought the world to its knees:
I think the frat house, riverboat gambling atmosphere has attracted a certain kind of person — an emotionally stunted, irresponsible, immature sort of fellow who simply refuses to accept that there are any limits to his behavior and who insists on blaming everyone else for his failures. A spoiled, reckless, bully. And all the people supposedly in charge are worried that if we don’t allow these adolescent monsters to have free rein they will destroy us all.
Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally on Sunday paraded hours of such people, before 20,000 other such people, in service of elevating their ideal of adolescence to running the most powerful office on the planet.
“Being president,” Michelle Obama once said, “doesn’t change who you are, it reveals who you are.” Who Donald Trump is (and who his hangers-on are) was on display before the world on Sunday (as I’ve written before):
Who Trump is was nakedly visible for those with eyes to see well before his election. Trump is emotionally stunted, mentally unstable, amoral, deeply insecure, needy, venal, vain and vengeful, a pathological liar and con man who has lived his life on the edge of the law (and outside it) using his father’s fortune to shield himself, and now his former office. The law may or may not finally catch up to him before the fall election.
The question after Sunday is whether Trump being Trump finally caught up to him. The New York Times described the MSG event as “a carnival of grievances, misogyny and racism.” More succinctly, adolescence. Adolescents who want to turn the United States into a continent-sized high school.
Over half of Americans registered to vote in this country are women, per the League of Women Voters. Many issues impacting women are at stake this election, including reproductive freedom. At issue between today and a week from today (Election Day) are whether the “outs” of this country, women especially, are willing to be dragged back not only back to the 18th century but to high school by the kind of jerks who never matured beyond it.
Tucker Carlson, for one, described Trumpian adolescence on Sunday as liberation: “It’s the freedom to say what’s obviously true as a free man and not a slave.” Read: to be an adolescent jerk.
Fast-changing gender roles have young men struggling to find what it means to be masculine, experts told The New Republic‘s Susan Milligan. Trump the marketer sees an audience for what he’s selling, and put on an hours-long display of “figurative crotch-grabbing.” It was Trump’s prime-time promise “to “to put women back in their place and restore men to total supremacy in America.”
“This is either a brilliant move, or this is a ridiculous move that was always doomed to fail,” [pollster Daniel Cassino] said. “With young men, we see a real disillusionment with gender and masculinity. Trump is giving them a solution. It’s not a solution that’s going to work, but he’s giving them someone to blame.”
This touches a nerve in young men who are wondering what it means to be a man. Harvard’s Institute of Politics, in its youth poll released October 25, found Harris with a 47-point lead among women age 18–29 but just a 17-point lead among men that age.
“He brings the ‘locker room’ talk into the public sphere,” said psychologist Randy Flood, co-founder and director of the Men’s Resource Center of West Michigan and co-author of Mascupathy: Understanding and Healing the Malaise of American Manhood. “This appeals to young men, [who think] he’s really strong, he’s really courageous to say things off the cuff and not worrying about people getting their feelings hurt over it.”
Ironically, Flood says, Trump embodies the very “feminine” qualities he disparages: He’s highly emotional, throws tantrums, and gets his feelings hurt easily.
He’s an adolescent and all we’ve described above. As are the men who love him. How many no-tradwife women will stand for it? In a week or so we’ll know.
Donald Trump has a serious Puerto Rico problem — in Pennsylvania.
Many Puerto Rican voters in the state are furious about racist and demeaning comments delivered at a Trump rally. Some say their dismay is giving Kamala Harris a new opening to win over the state’s Latino voters, particularly nearly half a million Pennsylvanians of Puerto Rican descent.
Evidence of the backlash was immediate on Monday: A nonpartisan Puerto Rican group drafted a letter urging its members to oppose Trump on election day. Other Puerto Rican voters were lighting up WhatsApp chats with reactions to the vulgar display and raising it in morning conversations at their bodegas. Some are planning to protest Trump’s rally Tuesday in Allentown, a majority-Latino city with one of the largest Puerto Rican populations in the state.
And the arena Trump is speaking at is located in the middle of the city’s Puerto Rican neighborhood.
“It’s spreading like wildfire through the community,” said Norberto Dominguez, a precinct captain with the local Democratic party in Allentown, who noted his own family is half Republican and half Democratic voters.
“It’s not the smartest thing to do, to insult people — a large group of voters here in a swing state — and then go to their home asking for votes,” Dominguez said.
The timing couldn’t be worse for Trump. Almost a week before Election Day, he’s pushing to cut into Harris’ margins among Latinos, especially young men who are worried about the economy. But the comments from pro-Trump comedian Tony Hinchcliffe Sunday night, referring to Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage,” has reverberated throughout Pennsylvania and elsewhere, prompting even the former president’s Republican allies to defend the island and denounce the comments. And with the race essentially a toss up, every vote counts — especially in Pennsylvania.
“This was just like a gift from the gods,” said Victor Martinez, an Allentown resident who owns the Spanish language radio station La Mega, noting some Puerto Rican voters in the area have been on the fence about voting at all.
It’s really stupid to diss people you really need to win an election. Really stupid.
