Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

The Dems are playing

Axios reports:

The Democratic National Committee is launching billboards in 10 locations across Milwaukee on Friday featuring former President Trump’s reported diss of the city that’s the site of the Republican National Convention next month.

Why it matters: Trump reportedly used “horrible” to describe the city in the key swing state during his closed-door meeting on Capitol Hill on Thursday with House Republicans, though his campaign and Republican lawmakers dispute this account…

But the Biden campaign and Democrats seized on the comments.

• Biden posted a photo on the social media platform X and wrote, “I happen to love Milwaukee.”
• Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers wrote on X, “add it to the list of things Donald Trump is wrong about.”
• Biden won Wisconsin by fewer than 21,000 votes in 2020 and his re-elect campaign is investing heavily in the the key battleground.

The billboards will run in 10 different locations across Milwaukee, the most populous county in the state and a Democratic stronghold, Axios has learned.

[…]

Donald Trump has made his contempt for Wisconsinites and their home clear,” DNC Deputy communications director Abhi Rahman said in a statement.

“The dislike is mutual – in 2020, Wisconsin handed Trump a one way ticket back to exile in Mar-a-Lago and sent President Biden to the Oval Office,” Rahman said.

“Trump hates Milwaukee because Milwaukeeans know exactly who he is – a sore loser who they’re going to make a two-time loser this November,” Rahman said.

The desperate scramble by Republicans to rationalize what he said tells the whole story. They know that Wisconsin is key. And they are freaking out about Trump insulting the state like this, especially since theb local news was all over it across the state:

“He was talking about how terrible crime and voter fraud are,” said campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung.

In another statement, the campaign wrote that it was a “total lie” that Trump called Milwaukee a “horrible city.” However, they went on to add, “President Trump was explicitly referring to the problems in Milwaukee, specifically violent crime and voter fraud,” suggesting he did make comments about the city, just not in the way some were interpreting it.

The campaign then includes a series of tweets from Republican members from Wisconsin inside the room who agree with the campaign’s description that Trump was not making a blanket disparaging statement about the city.

Republicans — including those from Wisconsin — quickly jumped to Trump’s defense, insisting the former president was talking about crime and election security.

“@realdonaldtrump was specifically referring to the CRIME RATE in Milwaukee,” Rep. Derrick Van Orden posted on X after the meeting.

Rep. Glenn Grothman told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that Trump “was concerned about the election” and “felt we need to do better in urban centers around the country.”

Rep. Bryan Steil claimed on X that Trump “did not say this” in the conference meeting.

“There is no better place than Wisconsin in July,” Steil said.

He said it and he meant it. Just like he means the insults he makes toward any place or any person that doesn’t worship him. He hates most of America.

Remember when the Republic ans spent an entire year wailing that refrain over Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky?

I like that this video loops the felony conviction in with Epstein, Access Hollywood, etc etc etc — it’s a great entry point into a wider conversation. pic.twitter.com/gJSc0zl6TP

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) June 15, 2024

By the way, just the other day…

“Come on, just a little smoochie for Trump.” pic.twitter.com/w0GVI36yOV

— 𝕊𝕦𝕟𝕕𝕒𝕖_𝔾𝕦𝕣𝕝 (@SundaeDivine) June 13, 2024

I saw this and assumed it must be a joke. It isn’t:

The Pope told me I was his favorite comedian. Such an incredible experience. This followed the Pope addressing a room of 200 comedians from throughout the world. It felt like a meeting of everyone who couldn’t behave in church. Thanks to @ragandbone for the fancy suit, shirt… pic.twitter.com/VDTBuTAthS

— Jim Gaffigan (@JimGaffigan) June 14, 2024

Who knew?

On Friday morning, Pope Francis was in fact full of praise for 105 entertainers from 15 countries who were invited to meet with him at a gathering that the Vatican described as an effort to “establish a link” between the humorists and the Roman Catholic Church.

“In the midst of so much gloomy news,” Francis told them, “you denounce abuses of power, you give voice to forgotten situations, you highlight abuses, you point out inappropriate behavior.” He also lauded them for getting people to “think critically by making them laugh and smile.”

Francis is a bit of a wisecracker himself. One of his standard punchlines, when people say they are praying for him, is to reply: “For or against?” — a line he riffed on during Friday’s gathering. He has also quipped that the best remedy for an ailing knee is tequila, and the comedian Ellen DeGeneres once made up a whole set built on one of Francis’ mother-in-law jokes.

Oh, please, oh please

Should Donald Trump actually show up for the scheduled June 27 presidential debate, he may find the rules irritatingly confining. There will be no opening statements. Both Trump and Joe Biden wil have two minutes to answer questions before moderators cut their mics. Red lights will flash when they have five seconds left.

Trump will have little time to ramble on about windmills, electric boats and baby sharks doo doo doo doo doo doo. Commercial breaks will give both men a breather, the New York Times reports, but they will be prohibited from huddling with advisers.

Not that Trump would, although he proved (when under threat of a contempt charge in a New York court) that his attorneys could contain him, barely. But Judge Juan Merchan will not be moderating for CNN:

The two men are readying themselves for the debate in ways almost as different as their approaches to the presidency itself. The Biden operation is blocking off much of the final week before the debate, after he returns from Europe and a California fund-raising swing, for structured preparations. Mr. Trump has long preferred looser conversations, batting around themes, ideas and one-liners more informally among advisers. He held one session at the Republican National Committee headquarters this past week.

Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden plainly do not like each other. The former president calls the current president the worst in American history. The current president calls his predecessor a wannabe dictator who threatens democracy itself. Four years ago, in their first encounter, Mr. Trump trampled over his rival’s talking time — the former president has since admitted privately that he was too aggressive — with Mr. Biden scolding him, “Will you shut up, man?”

The rules circulated by CNN warn that this time, “moderators will use all tools at their disposal to enforce timing and ensure a civilized discussion.”

It remains to be seen whether Jake Tapper and Dana Bash will.

One former adviser to Trump said the new restrictions may put the former president at a disadvantage.

With the Times report noting, “For his part, Mr. Trump has never consented to anything resembling traditional, rigorous debate preparation, and this election appears no exception. He has often said that he is at his best when improvising,” former 2020 Trump campaign adviser Marc Lotter admitted, “He views his rallies as debate prep. If they’re literally going to cut your mic, you’ve got to hit your marks.”

Practice is for losers

As the self-declared smartest person in any room, Trump hates being “handled.” Plus, he’s lazy and resists “traditional, rigorous debate preparation.” Which reminds me of a Scrutiny Hooligans post from 2010 regarding the 1978 “Great Pool Shootout” hosted by ABC’s Wide World of Sports. The contest was a

live tournament between fifteen-time world straight pool champion, Willie Mosconi, and well-known pool hustler, Minnesota Fats. A relentless self-promoter, Limbaugh-like with a touch of W.C. Fields, Fats was asked beforehand if he practiced much. The hustler replied with characteristic bombast, “Practice is for suckers.” Mosconi won the contest in three straight sets.

You’ll notice the resemblance, and I don’t mean somatotype.

I waited eight years for George W. Bush to lose his cool and melt down on camera. Never happened. But a boy can dream.

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For The Win, 5th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV planning guide at ForTheWin.us.

Interesting if less practical than advertised

The headline did not take me where I thought it would.

Linda Kinstler’s New York Times guest essay, “Jan. 6, America’s Rupture and the Strange, Forgotten Power of Oblivion,” (gift link) examines “an ‘act of oblivion,’ an ancient, imperfect legal and moral mechanism for bringing an end to episodes of political violence.” It is a pragmatic effort at “forgetting — a forgetting that instead of erasing unforgivable transgressions, paradoxically memorialized them in the minds of all who had survived their assault.”

Oblivion, a form of amnesty new to me and now fallen out of favor, served to put behind a society the rifts of past transgressions rather than see to it that every last transgressor receives punishment, especially where entire armies or classses are targets. That serves only to keep wounds open instead of heal them.

I’m not there yet.

Kinstler cites its roots in Greek history and writes, “As a legal mechanism, oblivion promised the return to a past that still had a future, in which the battles of old would not predetermine those still to come. It did not always achieve its lofty aspirations, nor was it appropriate for all conflicts. But the ideals it grasped for had an enduring appeal.” The practice has contemporary echoes in Clean Slate laws on the books in 12 states.

The unique power of oblivion is that it does not forgive the crimes committed on one side or the other, but rather consecrates and memorializes the profound gravity of the wrongs. It demands accountability and refuses absolution, yet it rejects the project of perpetual punishment. Where forgiveness is impossible, the only viable option is to look past the wrong, to bury it in oblivion, but to always remember where it lies and the harm that it caused. Historically, appeals to oblivion offered political communities the prospect of rethinking the present, presenting a rare opportunity to re-evaluate and confront societal divisions.

That paragraph may impress in a doctoral dissertation, but I’ll admit I cannot bring it into focus for its gauziness. Kinstler means to offer some way for the country to put behind it the divisions of Trumpism and Jan. 6 and move on. That presumes Donald Trump, a man whose very identity is getting even, wants to put the past behind him rather than under his boot heel.

When I read “the strange forgotten power of oblivion,” I thought Kinstler meant to explore the tango the MAGA movement and its Christian nationalist wing is performing with seductive nihilism, and its impulse to murder the republic if it can’t have its way with her.

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For The Win, 5th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV planning guide at ForTheWin.us.

Baby elephants walk…

Hilvarenbeek, NL, May 14, 2024 – Recently, three African elephants were born within four months: Mosi, Ajabu, and Tendai. The calves are doing very well, each weighing over 150 kilos.

A few weeks ago, they also met their father Yambo for the first time. The calves and the rest of the herd immediately got along well. Vogels says, “The calves play together constantly and are very curious. They are also enthusiastically exploring this new habitat together.”

The new Elephant Valley is one of the various enclosures housing the entire elephant herd of Beekse Bergen. In total, there are eleven African elephants in the Safari Park. Recently, Nile antelopes and Defassa waterbucks have also started using the valley.

The three young elephants at Beekse Bergen have explored the Elephant Valley for the first time. This large habitat is entirely new to the calves; previously, they resided in an adjacent enclosure.

In their new environment, there was a lot to discover, says head zookeeper Yvonne Vogels. “The herd behaved naturally, with the young ones staying nicely in the middle of the group and constantly staying together. Later, the calves became a bit more adventurous and wandered a bit further from their mothers. It was truly wonderful to see how they behaved!”

Since the announcement of the three elephants’ pregnancies at the beginning of 2023, much effort has gone into expanding the elephant enclosure. The habitat has been extended by 2 hectares to provide ample space for the entire herd, including the calves.

There are also many new elements in the enclosure that are novel for the elephants. For example, there are multiple barriers in the paddock, allowing them to hide from each other. There’s a shallow clay pool where they can roll in the mud and a large water pool. The valley is also much hillier, giving the elephants the opportunity to explore different heights.”

Trump says that if he loses the debate it will be because he did it on purpose

Just as he always telegraphs ahead of time that elections are rigged just in case he loses, here he is planting the seeds that he actually threw the debate in case he loses that too:

Donald Trump is already doing damage control for his upcoming debate with President Joe Biden.

The former president laid out a few different excuses, attempting to explain away why Biden might perform well on the stage in two weeks, during an interview Thursday night on the far-right news network Real America’s Voice.

“I don’t know, I don’t know what’s going to happen. I can say this. If he does make it through, which I think he will, they’re gonna feed him a lot of stuff,” said Trump. “And we should do a drug test, I’d love to do a drug test before.”

Trump, who rarely casts an accusation that is not also a projection, previously suggested that Biden was “higher than a kite,” during his State of the Union address.

The presumptive Republican nominee also joked Thursday that he might decide to throw the event, but his reasoning made little to no sense. Trump explained that his polling suggests that Biden is more popular than any of the Democrats that the party might tap to replace him, should they somehow choose to pull the plug on his campaign after the debate.

“This guy does better than the Democrats that you’re talking about, including [Gretchen] Whitmer,” Trump said, referring to the governor of Michigan. “He does better than them, I don’t quite understand that. I’m a little surprised. But, he actually polls better than all the people you’re talking about, and so, they don’t want to take him off, it depends.”

“Maybe I’m better off losing the debate, I’ll make sure he stays. I’ll lose the debate on purpose, maybe I’ll do something like that,” Trump added.

What a pathetic moron.

Biden should just stand there and say, “you’re a loser Donald and you just can’t stand to admit it. You’ve lost every election for your party since 2016 and no matter what pathetic excuse you make every time it doesn’t change the facts. You like to call yourself the greatest and you’re right. You’re the greatest sore loser in the history of the world.”

Here’s another total waste of time that will do nothing to help them win re-election in November or illustrate anything about the Democrats. It’s just performative nonsense:

The House narrowly cleared defense policy legislation on Friday after Republicans tacked on divisive provisions restricting abortion access, medical treatment for transgender troops and efforts to combat climate change.

Speaker Mike Johnson’s move to permit culture war amendments to the annual National Defense Authorization Act turned a widely bipartisan bill into a measure supported almost entirely by Republicans. The tactic represented a gamble for Johnson, who could have pushed to pass a more bipartisan version with the help of Democrats, but instead catered to a sliver of his right flank.

That gamble ultimately paid off for Johnson as enough Republicans united to win the final vote. But the most conservative parts of the House defense bill stand no chance in the Senate, and the dispute likely won’t be sorted out until after the November elections.

It’s one thing to put up messaging bills to make a point. Both parties do that. But this is blowing up a bipartisan bill on an important issue in order to pander to a bunch of nutcases on the fringe. I guess the quasi-normal Gopers in the House just threw in the towel figuring there’s nothing they can do when these extremists decide to pitch a fit.

Fergawdsakes. I’m sure you’ve heard about the fears of the H5N1 avian flu virus being found in dairy cattle. Well, guess what?

Ever vigilant about stoking fears among their constituents regarding the threat of governmental overreach, Republican leaders, as a form of political strategy, frequently crow about all the things liberals allegedly want to take away from working Americans. The White House is coming for their guns, they say, or perhaps their gas stoves — or even pints of raw milk that have potentially been contaminated with bird flu. 

[…]

“There is concern that consumption of unpasteurized milk and products made from unpasteurized milk contaminated with HPAI A(H5N1) virus could transmit HPAI A(H5N1) virus to people; however, the risk of human infection is unknown at this time,” the agency writes. 

However, in recent weeks, as the number of bird flu cases have climbed, so have sales of raw milk. This is because numerous Republican public figures have decried what they perceive to be attempts from the government and “Big Milk” to infringe on their right to consume the beverage, regardless of whether it contributes to the human-to-human spread of bird flu. It’s an attitude that closely mimics the party’s approach to the COVID-19 pandemic and the ways in which their members refused to participate in even basic public health and safety measures. 

Essentially, for Republicans, it seems like avoiding raw milk is the new masking — and they’re just not going to do it in order to prove a point. 

For instance, in April, Infowars host Owen Shroyer called the Food and Drug Administration a “gangster mafia” who wanted to “make raw milk illegal.” 

“So, now that more people are going to local farms and farmers markets and consuming raw milk, this angers the FDA,” Shroyer said. “This angers Big Milk. Say, ‘No, you need to pasteurize milk, it’s a lot less healthy for you.’ See, eventually, they’ll just make it illegal. They’ll just make raw milk illegal. That’s what this is all about.” 

That same month, as Media Matters reported, right-wing media outlet TheBlaze published an article titled “Blaze News Investigates: The truth about raw milk the government doesn’t want you to know: ‘Close to a perfect food,’” which told readers that “the so-called ‘experts’ are not telling you the full story” and that “unfortunately, the potential benefits of raw dairy are a secret to most Americans.” 

Now, the conservative youth organization Turning Point USA is selling a plain white t-shirt emblazoned with a line illustration of a dairy cow. The caption reads: “got raw milk?” 

“See, eventually, they’ll just make it illegal. They’ll just make raw milk illegal. That’s what this is all about.”

There’s more at Salon. The throwback states are already putting laws on the books to ensure that people can kill themselves with raw milk. I won’t be surprised to see them mandating it for babies and schools.

Trump’s been making a lot of wild promises lately. All restraints are gone. He’s even bribed the oil companies with vows to remove all regulations if they’ll give him a billion dollars. Dave Weigel took a look at how its landing:

Ending all taxes on tips. Declassifying all files on 9/11 and the JFK assassination. Freeing a darknet market mogul from prison. Protecting Bitcoin and TikTok from government meddlers.

In his four-year presidency, Donald Trump did none of that. In the last few weeks, he’s promised to do all of it — sometimes in front of crowds ready to cheer his new policies, sometimes with interviewers who don’t ask why he flipped. Democrats, already battling voter “Trumpnesia” and warmer feelings about the MAGA years, are now wrestling with out-of-nowhere promises that don’t match up with Trump’s record.

The latest promise, to make tipped wages tax-free, debuted at Trump’s Sunday rally in Las Vegas. “We’re going to do that right away, first thing in office,” said the Republican nominee. “It’s been a point of contention for years and years and years.”

Trump had never endorsed this before, or mentioned it during 2017’s yearlong tax cut debate. The Biden campaign said that Trump’s “wild campaign promise” couldn’t be trusted, and that Democrats wanted to end the tipped minimum wage, a policy with more direct worker benefits, which Republicans opposed.

But on Monday night, Fox News praised Trump’s “tip tax cut” and explained how it could swing the election. On Wednesday, Trump-endorsed Nevada US Senate Sam Brown told NBC News that the “visionary” ex-president had “scooped” him on a proposal he was about to run on himself. By Thursday, Trump was rallying House Republicans for the tax cut, and Senate Republicans were praising a “brilliant idea” that no one had a plan to implement yet.

“I think we should put it on the table,” Sen. John Cornyn told Semafor. “We’re gonna consider everything else, so it might as well be part of it.”

I wonder if they’re putting the 100% tariff replacement for income tax on the table too?

Weigel sees this as a problem for Democrats:

Trump’s breezy willingness to reverse himself was a problem for Democrats in 2016. Polls found that voters saw him as more moderate than Hillary Clinton; he could hit her from the right on abortion and immigration, from the left on trade and criminal justice reform, and from the center on gay rights.

That wasn’t the case in 2020, when Democrats ran against specific, unpopular Trump agenda items — an unsuccessful push to repeal the Affordable Care Act, the passage of polarizing tax cuts.

This cycle has been more of a muddle, shaped by nostalgia for pre-COVID prices and interest rates, and blurred memories of what happened when. A poll conducted for Politico last month found 37% of voters crediting Trump with new infrastructure investments, compared to 40% who credited President Joe Biden, even though the investments famously didn’t happen under Trump.

According to Weigel, some libertarians are giving him the benefit of the doubt over his promise to commute the sentence of the convicted drug dealer mogul and go all in on crypto currency (“I want all bitcoin made in the USA!”)even though he ignored them back when he was president. They blame it on his former staff (“swamp creatures”) and believe he’ll surround himself with people who will do what they want this time.

As one critic points out, “all of his dealings with this are just totally transactional. If it’s in his interest to release them, he’ll release them; if he doesn’t think it’s in his interest, he won’t.”

In other words, his promises don’t mean jack.

Weigel has this to say:

There’s an old Clintonworld assessment of the 2016 election that’s stuck with me for eight years. I’ll paraphrase it: “We built an Italian sports car, and Trump made us take it off road.” There is a tried-and-true populist way that Democrats win national elections, epitomized by the 2012 campaign that portrayed Mitt Romney as a vulture capitalist who’d cut taxes on the rich. Trump’s unpredictability prevented Hillary Clinton from doing that.

Democrats are trying to do that again, with three binders of material — Trump’s record, his promises to rich donors that he’ll cut their taxes, and the Project 2025 portfolio of conservative policies being prepped for a second administration. But there’s a powerful monomyth about Trump, which the Libertarian Party’s chair summed up well. In the first term, he had the wrong advisors; the next President Trump would be unencumbered, and could do anything.

“Don’t worry” they say, “he’ll be free of all those swamp creatures who stopped him from doing what he always wanted to do last time. He’ll get rid of them and good MAGA true believers will carry out his agenda.” Basically, they are saying that he used to be an inept fool whose first term was really just a practice run. Now he knows what he’s doing and he won’t fuck up so much.

That’s quite a pitch don’t you think?