Enjoy a little pre-debate fun.
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Digby's Hullabaloo Posts
Rebecca Traister has written an inspiring feature about the Harris candidacy that you don’t want to miss. She talks about the fact that the burst of enthusiasm around her candidacy was fuelled almost entirely by the grassroots, much of it led by women, especially Black women’s groups that have been around awhile, quietly going about the business of electing Democrats.
She writes:
As we settle into the second phase of this candidacy and old hands regain control in preparation for the presidential debate on September 10, the question is whether the cautious, moderating forces that have long guided Democratic electoral politics will tamp down the people’s power that was unleashed this summer and jeopardize Harris’s chances of victory. And also whether those in charge in the Democratic Party and in the Washington press corps even understand where that power comes from: a true women-led movement, built over decades and given new life in the aftermath of Hillary Clinton’s defeat in 2016, working in service of a female presidential candidate running on a set of policies around housing, care work, abortion, health care, and labor that this candidate understands to be inherently, but not exclusively, “women’s issues.” It is a movement galvanized by a devastating setback for women’s rights — for civil rights — that seeks to rectify that wrong and usher in a new era of American politics.
“It feels like finally our political culture is catching up to the extent to which women are shaping politics and shaping our democracy,” said Ai-jen Poo, senior adviser for Care in Action, a domestic-workers organization. “Women are owning and organizing to protect democracy in a totally different way.”
She describes how, in the days leading up to Biden’s withdrawal, all the Democratic poohbahs were determined to hold some kind of “blitz primary” and create some rube goldberg mechanism for “choosing” the right person to replace him. Those of you who read this blog regularly will remember that Tom Sullivan and I were adamantly against all of that, from the very beginning believing that Harris was the only choice and that the people who were pushing this nonsense were completely out to lunch. Traister points out that some of those people include Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama. But then Biden endorsed Harris right away (I think she sort of ungenerously questions his motives there) and while it took a few days for the naysayers to come around, the instant grassroots enthusiasm left them no choice but to get onboard:
Whatever reservations these leaders might have had were swept aside by a fervor for a Harris presidency that few people in Washington could have predicted. In her first week, she raised $200 million, two-thirds from first-time donors; more than 170,000 people volunteered for the campaign. The first day alone, 28,000 people signed up, more than 100 times what the Biden campaign had been seeing on an ordinary day. Within 48 hours of Biden’s stepping aside, I was crossing the street carrying a newly minted HARRIS sign for my kids and was greeted by honking horns, thumbs-up, people yelling from cars, “Where did you get that?” As Eaddy put it to me, “If you’ve seen The Wiz on Broadway, it was like when they sing ‘A Brand New Day.’”
The Win With Black Women call “really set the tone for the energy and momentum we’ve seen,” said Harris’s campaign manager, Julie Chávez Rodríguez, who is the granddaughter of famed labor activist César Chávez and describes herself as “an organizer by birth and by blood.”
One person who worked for Clinton in 2016 and afterward for Biden called me that first week nearly in tears. “They were just there for her,” she said, marveling at that first Sunday call. “It’s like these women just knew what to do. They formed a protective cocoon or maybe a kind of platform that could raise her up with joy and confidence. It was just like, ‘We got this. We got you.’”
The party came together in an unprecedented show of unity. I’m still reeling to tell you the truth. But it’s because the “cringe” Resistance just kept going (as Hillary Clinton exhorted them to do) and when the time came they were ready:
“You can see people reaching in and wanting to be a part of this and fuel it,” said Whitmer, a co-chair of Biden’s campaign and now of Harris’s. “Normal people. People that were sitting on the sidelines are now activated, people that were at the Women’s March and see that this is the moment where we can use organizing to push Kamala Harris over the finish line. The reason we’re having so much success as a campaign is because that work has been done — not finished, but the ground game has been growing — at that grassroots level over the last eight years.”
It’s quite a story and a hopeful one. I highly recommend the whole thing. She concludes with:
The people have the power, Harris told the Women’s March. The strength of the nation has always relied on the organizers, she told the Win With Black Women call in 2023. When we fight, she tells us now, we win. Maybe this time, we finally will.
We have to.
Asked of a panel of likely voters in swing states what they thought Harris and Trump most wanted to achieve from a term in office:
Harris:
Trump:
Sounds about right. I would just ask you to contemplate what it means that nearly half the country says they plan to vote for the second one.
Mark Cuban tweeted this and I thought it was useful:
I think one major point the discussion of tariffs is missing is the time and cost to businesses, even the smallest single person company.
It’s a lot of work. It’s a lot of bureaucracy. It almost always required hiring a broker to deal with all of it.
And of course there is the ongoing record keeping that each business is responsible for.
Here is what @grok had to say (really growing attached to @grok @elonmusk)
When importing products that are subject to tariffs, here’s what you generally need to do:
1. **Determine the Tariff Rate**: Use the Harmonized Tariff Schedule of the United States (HTSUS) to classify your product and find out the applicable tariff rate. This classification involves determining the correct HTS code for your product, which can be complex and might require consulting with a customs broker or trade specialist.
2. **Calculate the Duty**: Once you know the tariff rate, calculate the duty you’ll owe. This duty is based on the customs value of the goods, which includes the cost, insurance, and freight (CIF) value. The formula typically looks like this: Duty = Customs Value * Tariff Rate.
3. **Customs Entry**: File a customs entry through the Automated Commercial Environment (ACE) system, usually with the help of a customs broker. This entry includes all necessary documentation like commercial invoices, packing lists, and possibly a bill of lading or airway bill.
4. **Pay the Duty**: You’ll need to pay the calculated duty, along with any other fees or taxes, to Customs and Border Protection (CBP) before or at the time of entry. If you’re using a customs broker, they might handle this for you, but you’re ultimately responsible.
5. **Compliance with Other Regulations**: Beyond tariffs, ensure compliance with regulations from other agencies like the FDA for food products, USDA for agricultural products, etc. This might involve additional certifications, inspections, or permits.
6. **Record Keeping**: Maintain detailed records of all transactions, including invoices, duty payments, and any other documentation. U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) might audit these records, and you need to prove compliance with trade laws.
7. **Consider Tariff Engineering**: If possible, look into ways to reduce tariffs. This might involve changing the product’s design, sourcing materials from countries with lower tariffs, or qualifying for free trade agreements like the USMCA (for products from Mexico or Canada).
8. **Price Adjustment**: Since tariffs increase the cost of your goods, you might need to adjust your pricing strategy. This could mean raising prices, absorbing some of the cost, or finding ways to reduce other costs.
9. **Understand the Impact**: Be aware that tariffs might affect your competitiveness. Consider how these costs impact your market strategy, including potential price increases for consumers or the need for alternative sourcing.
10. **Stay Informed**: Tariff rates can change due to trade agreements, policy changes, or disputes. Keep abreast of any updates through official channels or trade publications.
Remember, while customs brokers can handle much of the paperwork and payment processes, as the importer of record, you’re responsible for ensuring all information is correct and all duties are paid. If your business involves frequent imports, investing in knowledge or hiring experts in international trade compliance might be beneficial.
#8 is especially relevant, don’t you think? It’s inflationary. But you knew that.
Any small business person who imports anything and votes for Trump is a fool. He’s talking about imposing tariffs on everything.
The Philly Inquirer proposed a set of questions for Donald Trump tomorrow night that would be fantastic:
I wish I had confidence that this is the caliber of questions we can expect but I don’t. Get ready for more questions like “how do you answer Vice President Harris’ accusation that you are anti-democratic?”
“People need to know what they’re up against”
Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick spoke with Ari Berman of Mother Jones, author of “Minority Rule: The Right-Wing Attack on the Will of the People―and the Fight to Resist It.” He warns that anti-democracy forces inside this country are doing what the far right always does: doubling down.
Republicans love few things more than a twofer. They have one in spreading a new conspiracy theory that noncitizens are voting in numbers and tipping elections away from decent, All-American white people.
Berman says, “[I]t’s the newest version of the Big Lie, and it’s really a twofer for them because they are fusing voter fraud paranoia with anti-immigrant hysteria. And in doing so, they’re building support both for new restrictions on voting, but also for new restrictions on immigration. So it’s basically taking two of the most important planks of the MAGA agenda and putting them together.”
But that’s just filigree. The real meat of Stop The Steal 2.0 is far more sophisticated than Rudy Giuliani’s Four-Seasons-Total-Landscaping presser and dripping hair dye:
This is a much more organized effort, because they have changed the laws in a number of places to make it easier to effectuate these outcomes. They don’t need to bang on the doors outside the polling place in Michigan anymore, because they’re inside the polling places in a lot of these places now. They are the election officials who will be counting the ballots, or election observers who will be much closer to counting the ballots.
They’re inside the courts too.
Berman continues:
That’s why they changed the rules in Georgia well ahead of time. To get ahead of the thing so they don’t need to challenge it after the election. They’re already laying the groundwork not to certify the election in Georgia. We don’t know if they’ll be successful—it’s very likely their efforts to try to not certify elections will be blocked by the courts ahead of time or blocked by the courts after the fact; I think most people are confident of that.
What I worry about most is that they’re also trying to send a signal to other states and other Trump people to do this ahead of time. I worry that the votes were counted in 2020 and then lawsuits were filed to overturn the votes, but the votes had already been counted. What if the votes aren’t counted? What’s a court going to do then? That changes the whole process. Then you might have disputes that look much more like Bush v. Gore as opposed to what we saw in 2020 and just outright trying to steal an election.
Very clever, these criminal minds. And like Ford’s pardon of Nixon, the legal system going easy on the people behind the insurrection means they’ve just learned from their 2020 mistakes. They’re thinking ahead:
Not only did the “Stop the Steal” people seemingly face no accountability other than maybe being slapped on the wrist here or there, maybe disbarred or losing their license, but basically they have been resurrected to lead “Stop The Steal” 2.0, which is a lot more sophisticated than it was the last time. All of these Trump-aligned think tanks are laying the groundwork for these policy changes this time around. You have the Conservative Partnership Institute raising millions and millions of dollars to work with state officials and to put election deniers in positions of authority.
Berman believes Democrats are fighting asymmetric warfare where it comes to election protection and court battles. The real fight is happening now under their noses.
[Republicans are] not fighting on policy. They don’t care about policy. They’re laser-focused on changing the rules to make sure they can succeed where they failed in 2020. That is the overriding goal of the MAGA movement right now.
And they’ve got a large swath of MAGA voters convinced they are in an apocalyptic fight for “their” country. They’ve built a well-funded network of operatives planning to “win” elections no matter how the votes totals go. Democrats are bringing a butter knife to a gunfight, if I read Berman right.
I’m inquiring into what contingency plans are being made for direct, nonviolent actions if needed in the post-election period to protect the vote count and elector process from physical disruption. Taking nothing away from Marc Elias and his network of election protection lawyers, I worry that we’re going into democratic battle armed with little more than harsh language.
Update: Will Bunch just weighed in on this topic.
“Americans are being impacted by the authoritarian threat right now,” Amanda Carpenter, the disaffected former aide to Texas GOP Sen. Ted Cruz, posted on X/Twitter, referring to assaults on voting rights in Texas and Florida. “Believe it. This is what authoritarians want to put on steroids and enact on a federal level.”
Republicans would rather rule
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The mailing of over 100,000 North Carolina absentee ballots in-state and to armed service members and others residing overseas will be delayed for weeks. (Dare we again use unprecedented?) North Carolina’s state Supreme Court on Monday ruled for RFK Jr. on his demand that his name/party that he fought to include on state ballots now be removed. One hundred county Boards of Elections have already printed roughly 3 million in-person and absentee ballots with Kennedy’s name on them. His delay in withdrawing from the presidential contest to endorse Donald Trump means strapped county boards must pay reprinting costs.
As we noted on Saturday, “2,348 ballot styles will have to be reformatted, reproofed, reprinted, mailings re-prepared by staff, and voting machines recoded in 100 counties.” The cost of Kennedy’s vanity project to North Carolina taxpayers and delay to voters will be considerable.
State law requires absentee ballots to be mailed 60 days ahead of the general election. That was Friday, September 6. The court split 4-3 to circumvent that law , with one Republican justice joining two Democrats in dissent (WRAL):
Democratic Justice Allison Riggs, who is also on the ballot this year as she seeks to retain her seat against state Court of Appeals Judge Jefferson Griffin, wrote in dissent Monday that Kennedy’s request wasn’t worth missing what could end up being close to a month of the state’s mail-in voting period.
She referenced the fact that until recently, Kennedy had been fighting to get onto the ballot in North Carolina and said that it’s not clear if he has actually dropped out of the race.
“Elections — the cornerstone of our democracy — are not games or exercises in ego-stroking,” she wrote. “With a disturbing disregard for the impact on millions of North Carolina voters, [Kennedy] seeks to have his cake and eat it, too. Forcing the state to put his name on the ballot, creating for the state costs both practical and legal, he now wants to reprint millions of ballots because he has decided to suspend his campaign without actually ending it or foreclosing the possibility of his election.”
“It amounts to a suspension of state law not mandated by the representatives of the people and grants a favor to one candidate not extended to other candidates, namely, additional time to decide whether to stand for office,” Democratic Justice Anita Earls wrote in her dissent.
State officials have said that will cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and could delay the start of mail-in voting for weeks, blowing well past the deadline Friday set by state law. They made those points to the Supreme Court, asking for a reversal of the Court of Appeals order so that they can go ahead and send out the ballots they’ve already printed with Kennedy’s name. They also question Kennedy’s true motives, noting that even as he claims he will face “irreparable harm” if his name appears on the ballot in North Carolina, he’s also fighting separate legal battles to make sure his name does appear on the ballot in other states including New York and Mississippi.
“It’s hard to know what the answer is as far as what Kennedy’s thinking?” said Shawn Donahue, a political science professor at New York’s University of Buffalo of Kennedy’s efforts to get placed on the ballot in New York. In denying RFK Jr. access, a New York court found that the address Kennedy used in his petition was a sham, and that he exhibited (NPR) a pattern of “borrowing addresses from friends and relatives” while actually living in California.
Republican control of the courts both federal and state mean that thumbs are on the scale. The GOP is pulling out every stop and working every lever to gain advantage in this election. GOP operatives display remarkable creativity in devising new ways to monkey-wrench democracy to thwart the will of the people. If only they applied those talents to solving problems Americans face day to day, to improving people’s lives. That they do not, compounded with their rejection of democracy, their embrace of authoritarianism, and promotion of a convicted criminal for president, testifies to the fact that power is their political project, not governing. They’d rather rule.
Why?
You have probably heard about Tucker Carlson’s interview with a pro-Hitler, Holocaust revisionist whom he called “the most important popular historian working in the United States today.” a few days back. Yeah.
This article in Vox wonders if the GOP is going to go along with him on this. Guess what?
The Trump camp — which sets the tone for the entire party — has so far done nothing to distance itself from the increasingly toxic Carlson.
[JD] Vance, who has pre-taped a Carlson interview and is scheduled to speak with him at a live event in two weeks, refused to denounce Carlson after the Cooper fiasco — with a spokesperson saying in a statement that “Senator Vance doesn’t believe in guilt-by-association cancel culture.” A Trump campaign source told the Bulwark that while it’s “not ideal timing” for Vance to appear twice with Carlson before Election Day, “it is what it is.” (Donald Trump Jr. is also scheduled to attend.)
It is what it is.
What’s more interesting is the reaction among conservative-aligned commentators and intellectuals — many of whom are expressing shock at what Tucker had done.
“Didn’t expect Tucker Carlson to become an outlet for Nazi apologetics, but here we are,” radio host Erick Erickson wrote on X. The writer Sohrab Ahmari, who wrote a tribute to his “friend” Carlson after his April 2023 firing from Fox, tweeted on Wednesday that he “can’t get over … the fact that Tucker saw fit to lend [Cooper] an uncritical platform.” (Elon Musk tweeted the Carlson interview approvingly — only to delete the tweet later.)
Such expressions of shock feel absurd. For Carlson’s entire run on Fox News, liberals had been warning that his show had become a vector for racist and neo-Nazi ideas — while people on the right dismissed those concerns as the woke PC police trying to silence a prominent conservative voice.
The liberal position has now been proven correct — yet again. The only question is whether conservatives will learn a broader lesson about how far-right ideas infiltrate their movement — with their own tacit support.
I’m going to guess no. This was inevitable. Carlson is immensely popular with Neo-Nazis and has been for years.
“Tucker Carlson is literally our greatest ally,” Andrew Anglin, the publisher of the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer, wrote in 2016. “I don’t believe that he doesn’t hate the Jews.”
Carlson did quite a bit to merit this fan base. He worked assiduously to mainstream the idea of the “great replacement theory,” the white supremacist idea that mass immigration is a secret elite plot to replace the native-born whites with minorities. He took white nationalists’ false ideas about a “white genocide” in South Africa and brought it to then-President Donald Trump’s attention. He claimed that immigrants were making America “dirtier” and fearmongered about the alleged threat to America from “gypsies.”
The link between Carlson and the radical right was quite direct. In 2020, his head writer Blake Neff resigned after CNN reported that he had made racist and sexist comments on an anonymous web forum. In 2022, the New York Times reported that Carlson’s segments were at times directly inspired by stories published by racist and neo-Nazi websites.
Tucker has some cute rhetorical tricks that he uses when he’s disseminating fascist propaganda, like always insisting that he’s not a racist which is all it takes to satisfy any wobbly right wingers. It’s only a matter of time before these ideas are mainstream in the Republican party.
There’s more on this “historian” Darryl Cooper in this article on MSNBC. He’s extremely popular on the right. Yeah.
I wish the Atlantic offered gift links because this is one I’d really love to share with you. Here’s a gift link to this article in the Atlantic. It’s from Mark Liebovitch and it’s about the invertebrate cowards in the Republican Party. Donald Trump had them pegged:
In the summer of 2015, back when he was still talking to traitorous reporters like me, I spent extended stretches with Donald Trump. He was in the early phase of his first campaign for president, though he had quickly made himself the inescapable figure of that race—as he would in pretty much every Republican contest since. We would hop around his various clubs, buildings, holding rooms, limos, planes, golf carts, and mob scenes, Trump disgorging his usual bluster, slander, flattery, and obvious lies. The diatribes were exhausting and disjointed.
But I was struck by one theme that Trump kept pounding on over and over: that he was used to dealing with “brutal, vicious killers”—by which he meant his fellow ruthless operators in showbiz, real estate, casinos, and other big-boy industries. In contrast, he told me, politicians are saps and weaklings.
“I will roll over them,” he boasted, referring to the flaccid field of Republican challengers he was about to debate at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library that September. They were “puppets,” “not strong people.” He welcomed their contempt, he told me, because that would make his turning them into supplicants all the more humiliating.
“They might speak badly about me now, but they won’t later,” Trump said. They like to say they are “public servants,” he added, his voice dripping with derision at the word servant. But they would eventually submit to him and fear him. They would “evolve,” as they say in politics. “It will be very easy; I can make them evolve,” Trump told me. “They will evolve.”
Like most people who’d been around politics for a while, I was dubious. And wrong. They evolved.
You have to read the whole thing if you can. It’s such a stunning indictment of Republican Party. He takes us through the early days of Trump’s ascension and the short lived fierce resistance to him among the party’s luminaries through the presidency, January 6th the official takeover of the RNC, the pilgrimages to Mar-a-lago and the Manhattan courthouse and more. It’s astonishing to see it all in one place.
He writes that after Trump’s ignominious loss in 2020 and January 6th it seemed inevitable that the party would want to move on. (I didn’t think so FWIW …) But it wasn’t to be:
[T]he speed with which Trump has settled back into easy dominance of his party has been both remarkable and entirely foreseeable—foreseen, in fact, by Trump himself. Because if there’s been one recurring lesson of the Trump-era GOP, it’s this: Never underestimate the durability of a demagogue with a captive base, a desperate will to keep going, and—perhaps most of all—a feeble and terrified opposition of spineless ciphers (“weak like a baby”).
Ain’t that the truth. Trump has shown us something no one else has ever been able to do. What a perfect storm.
And, by the way, make note of the fact that the feeble and terrified opposition of spineless ciphers he refers to aren’t the Democrats. They have been stand-up guys and gals in this whole thing even going so far as to beat him at the ballot box and then pass a bunch of very liberal domestic policies while the Trump clown car continued to run around in circles. They set aside their differences to fight the opposition because the stakes are so high. They are the only real political party in America.
Good. There’s no need to rattle him during the debate because he’ll do that to himself. Rattle him before the debate.