772 search results for ""voter fraud""

When Trump tried to fraudulently vote they wouldn’t let him

by digby

And yes, he was with that Billy Bush. They have quite the relationship:

Trump says it’s very easy to commit voter fraud, but he had a remarkably difficult time voting in 2004 with Billy Bush. pic.twitter.com/HNDrMuJLS9

— Yashar (@yashar) October 20, 2016

A cheese shop uncontaminated by cheese
by Tom Sullivan

More from the man who’d push the red button to prove how big his “hands” are.

ABC News:

With just 21 days to go before Election Day, Donald Trump has claimed repeatedly on the campaign trail that the election is being “rigged,” tweeting on Monday specifically about “large scale voter fraud” being a problem.

Of course there is large scale voter fraud happening on and before election day. Why do Republican leaders deny what is going on? So naive!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 17, 2016

ABC News reached out to the top election official in all 50 states to find out if they agree. Of the 26 state officials who immediately responded, all maintained that the presidential election has not and will not be rigged in their state.

And since Republicans control so many state legislatures, Think Progress observes, “If the election is really rigged, 33 states are rigged by Republicans.” (Image at top.)

The Guardian:

It will comes as little surprise to those who have paid even the slightest attention to the post-truth campaign of Donald Trump that these claims of voter fraud and ballot rigging are almost entirely fact-free and lacking in evidence. One legal scholar dedicated years to studying the issue and could find only 31 cases of voter fraud out of more than a billion votes cast. As the ThinkProgress thinktank has noted: “Iowa’s Republican secretary of state uncovered zero cases of voter impersonation at the polls during a two-year investigation.” Even the hard right Breitbart website – so close to Trump that its boss, Steve Bannon, is the chief executive of the Trump campaign – had to admit that, “given the sheer variety of jurisdictions that run a typical presidential election, the nationwide effect of voter fraud may be much harder to measure, and probably small”.

Post-truth campaign is right. The party that in the “do your own thing” 1960s started accusing the left of moral relativism now practices factual relativism. Conservatives insist on believing their own thing. Whoo-EEE! Facts are for losers. Winners make up their own. Evidence not required.

Getting especially tired of this BS (as defined by Wikipedia):

Proof by assertion, sometimes informally referred to as proof by repeated assertion, is an informal fallacy in which a proposition is repeatedly restated regardless of contradiction. Sometimes, this may be repeated until challenges dry up, at which point it is asserted as fact due to its not being contradicted (argumentum ad nauseam). In other cases, its repetition may be cited as evidence of its truth, in a variant of the appeal to authority or appeal to belief fallacies.

A form of brainwashing, in extreme cases.

RationalWiki provides an example:

It is a very simple formal logical fallacy that has the following structure:

X is true.

In practice, arguments by assertion tend to take the “rinse and repeat” approach to logic:

X is true.
No really, X is true.
Actually, X is true.
But X is true.

What’s frightening is how much post-truthiness has infected the entire culture. A fairly lengthy article by a 3rd Degree Berner that flashed across Facebook the other day (can’t find it now) had a virtually identical structure. “The primary was rigged. No really, it was rigged. You can tell it was rigged because of how rigged it was,” etc. No evidence offered. None required.

It’s the logic of a cheese shop uncontaminated by cheese.

Republicans are the riggers


by digby

I wrote about it for Salon this morning:

This presidential election has featured the Republican nominee talking about the size of his manly member on national TV and talking about grabbing women by the crotch on video. He has also endorsed torture, mass deportations, a 2,000-mile border wall, war crimes, nuclear proliferation, a ban on Muslims and jailing his opponent, all cheered on wildly by his rapturous supporters. All of that is a terrible comment on the state of American democracy. But as hard as it is to believe, something even more disturbing is happening. Yesterday morning Politico reported that 41 percent of registered voters believe that the election could be “stolen” from Donald Trump because of voter fraud. That number rises to 71 percent among Republicans.

Donald Trump himself has been pushing this theme ever since his poll numbers started slipping. His TV surrogates and campaign advisers started out spinning his charges as more or less metaphorical, saying that he meant the media was on Clinton’s side and therefore “rigging” the election. Former house speaker Newt Gingrich said, “The complaint isn’t at the polling level, it’s at the news media level.” Trump’s running mate Mike Pence explained, “The American people are tired of the biased media, that’s where the sense of a rigged election goes.” Former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani claimed Trump had “never talked about cheating at the polling place.”

That didn’t last long. Trump himself has recently made it clear that he thinks the election is literally going to be stolen from him at the ballot box. On Monday night in Green Bay, Wisconsin, he said:

They even want to try to rig the election at the polling booths. Believe me, there’s a lot going on. Do you ever hear these people, they say there’s nothing going on? People that have died 10 years ago are still voting. Illegal immigrants are voting. Where are the street smarts of some of these politicians?

“Street smarts” or delusion? Studies show this is utter nonsense. There have only been 31 credible instances of voter impersonation out of more than 1 billion ballots cast between 2000 and 2014.

A couple of weeks ago in Michigan, he gave some explicit instructions to his followers.

For obvious reasons, Trump has a particular habit of saying these things to his white audiences in proximity to urban areas with large numbers of people of color.

Republican election lawyer Ben Ginsburg was on MSNBC Monday, explaining that since there are 8,000 to 9,000 different jurisdictions across the United States that count ballots in different ways it’s important that people take advantage of state law “to be able to see exactly what’s going on in a polling place.” He cited Giuliani’s method of sending in lawyers to every precinct to challenge the votes and advised Donald Trump to do that also. On the same show, former Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele agreed that Democrats “largely control polling places in major metropolitan areas” naming the predominantly African-American Prince George’s County, Maryland, as the prime example and exhorting Republicans to “get off their behinds to get out there to do election judging, etc., etc.”

The Boston Globe recently quoted a Trump voter declaring how he planned to help out:

Trump said to watch your precincts. I’m going to go, for sure. I’ll look for … well, it’s called racial profiling. Mexicans. Syrians. People who can’t speak American. I’m going to go right up behind them. I’ll do everything legally. I want to see if they are accountable. I’m not going to do anything illegal. I’m going to make them a little bit nervous.

Actually, making people “a little bit nervous” at polling places is illegal. It’s called voter intimidation.

Some Republican leaders have tried to reassure voters that the election will not be stolen, but it’s too little, too late. After all, Republicans have been trying to manipulate elections for decades going all the way back to Operation Eagle Eye during the 1964 Barry Goldwater campaign when future Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist was a young lawyer intimidating black and Latino voters in Arizona. Then, as now, this was done in the name of preventing unauthorized people from voting.

In the 1980s, there were consent decrees in place all over the country as various local arms of the GOP got caught violating federal election laws by trying to suppress minority votes. In the wake of Jesse Jackson’s highly successful voter registration drives, Republicans instigated a campaign to purge voter rolls in African-American communities throughout the South and urban areas. They professionalized and nationalized their operation by recruiting lawyers and training them in the election laws of different jurisdictions so they could more efficiently challenge Democratic votes.

By the 2000 election they had hundreds of trained election lawyers at the ready and they all swooped in on Florida when Al Gore asked for a recount. (The state party under Jeb Bush had already taken care of the purge of African-Americans from the voter rolls, which helped make it so close.) Ironically, the chief justice of the Supreme Court was William Rehnquist and naturally he cast the deciding vote to stop the recount and hand the election to George W. Bush.

Immediately upon taking office, Republicans began to work on their next big vote suppression project. As Ari Berman reported in the Nation:

The incoming Bush administration prioritized prosecutions of voter fraud over investigations into voter disenfranchisement — longtime civil-rights lawyers were forced out of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, U.S. Attorneys were fired for refusing to pursue bogus fraud cases, and the first strict voter-ID laws were passed by Republican legislatures. The Bush Justice Department launched a five-year investigation into alleged voter-fraud abuses.

This will be the first presidential election in 50 years without the protections of the Voting Rights Act, which theconservative majority of the Supreme Court (including three members who voted to give the election to George W. Bush in 2000, and two more who worked on the recount on the behalf of the GOP) told America that there was no more need for such protections since we were past those ugly days of voter suppression. Seventeen states have new voting restrictions in place.

This is what’s known as “rigging elections.” Donald Trump just got a little bit confused about who’s doing the rigging. The Republicans have been at it for a very long time.

You don’t get points for that
by Tom Sullivan

Google “mass hysteria wiki” and you’ll get a long list of mass hysterias, some of which are surprisingly contemporary. The list does not include other popular delusions such as the tulip mania of 1637 or moral panics such as the ritual satanic abuse panic of the 1980s. Belief in widespread, undetected voter fraud should be among them. Unlike the others, this one did not develop organically. It had help.

This month that help is coming from the GOP’s candidate for president and his campaign. Spreading wild rumors of stolen elections via dog whistles at county party Republican dinners or at T-party rallies and websites (or even Washington salons) is one thing. The Republican standard bearer broadcasting conspiracy theories from a national platform is making even conservative pundits nervous:

Such incendiary talk is an affront to elementary democratic decency and a breach of the boundaries of American political discourse. In democracies, the electoral process is a subtle and elaborate substitute for combat, the age-old way of settling struggles for power. But that sublimation works only if there is mutual agreement to accept both the legitimacy of the result (which Trump keeps undermining with charges that the very process is “rigged”) and the boundaries of the contest.

For Donald Trump, this conspiracy theory is not new. But the size of his audience is.

Glad people are circulating this. I hadn't seen it. It's Trump's reaction to election night 2012. Note how unhinged it is! He's totally nuts pic.twitter.com/yb1TZkLEhs— Elliott Lusztig (@ezlusztig) October 16, 2016

The New York Times Editorial Board weighs in:

It may be too late for the Republican Party to save itself from the rolling disaster of Donald Trump, but the party’s top leaders still have the duty to speak out and help save the country from his reckless rhetoric. The most frightening example is Mr. Trump’s frenzied claim that the presidential election is being “rigged” against him — a claim he has ramped up as his chances of winning the presidency have gone down.

Instead of disavowing this absurdity outright, Republican leaders sit by in spineless silence. Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, and Paul Ryan, the speaker of the House, are the two most powerful Republicans in the country and should be willing to put the national interest above their own. Both know full well that there is no “rigging,” and yet between them they have managed one tepid response to Mr. Trump’s outrageous accusations: “Our democracy relies on confidence in election results,” Mr. Ryan’s spokeswoman said, “and the speaker is fully confident the states will carry out this election with integrity.”

This is like standing back while an arsonist pours gasoline all over your house, then expressing confidence that the fire department will get there in time.

The Times also calls out Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama and former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani for feeding the fires.

Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern details the recent sordid history of the fraud myth that dates back decades. Stern spoke with The Nation’s Ari Berman:

“Trump just poured gasoline on a fire that was already burning,” Berman told me. “For nearly two decades, Republicans have been insisting—without any evidence—that Democrats are stealing elections. The idea has always been to gain an electoral advantage by preventing the fastest growing Democratic demographics from voting.”

Would Berman give any credit for the conflagration to Republicans like Husted, who are now arguing against Trump’s stolen election conspiracy theories?

“These Republicans are criticizing Trump for the ‘rigged election’ talk, sure,” he said, “but they aren’t backing off their own party’s efforts to make it harder to vote. Denouncing Trump’s rhetoric without taking responsibility for your own party’s voter suppression is total BS.”

Republicans have been stoking voter fraud hysteria among their base for decades — studiously keeping the coals hot — to build support for the kinds of “election integrity” laws federal courts across the country are lately overthrowing as discriminatory and unconstitutional. Now that the Republican standard bearer and his acolytes are fanning the coals into a roaring fire, loudly and publicly broadcasting the conspiracy, a few Republicans are shocked, shocked.

Yet another Frankenstein monster of their own creation (to mix metaphors) has broken loose of its chains and a few Republicans are belatedly pushing back. But as President Obama said of Republicans who revoked their support for Trump in the wake of the “Access Hollywood” tapes, “You don’t get points for that.”

Where did the GOP think this would lead?


by digby

More from that Boston Globe article about Trump flogging the “rigged election” theme referenced in the post below:

Mainstream Republicans are watching these developments at the top of the ticket with a growing sense of alarm, calling Trump’s latest conspiracy theories of a rigged election irresponsible and dangerous. They also say the impact of voter fraud or errors on the outcome of elections is vastly overblown.

“How do you proclaim fraud before the incident takes place? It’s like my calling you a robber before you rob the bank,” said Al Cardenas, who was chairman of the Republican Party of Florida during the 2000 electoral recount. “In America, you call out a crime or malfeasance after it happens.”

Cardenas, having been immersed in the Florida recount for 37 days, said an average of 1.5 percent of votes cast in the nation are not recorded, due mostly to technical issues and procedural errors.

“That’s a significant number in a close election, but they are not wrongdoings,” Cardenas said. “Americans should feel that the ultimate outcome of the election is fair. That’s how we defend our democracy.”

Cardenas said he would not vote for Trump or Clinton — even if that means Clinton wins.

“Hey, the radicals had their day,’’ he said. “This is the result of it.”

Fergus Cullen, former chairman of the New Hampshire GOP, said it was an incredibly important moment in 2000 when Democrat Al Gore gave a speech saying he accepted the results of the Supreme Court decision to award the majority of electoral votes and presidential victory to George W. Bush.

“Had he not done that, or done so halfheartedly, or even suggested that he’d been robbed, or otherwise tried to delegitimize the results, it would have been a huge blow to our democratic process,” Cullen said.

Cullen expects Trump’s warnings about a rigged election to get even uglier in coming weeks, and he fears they will incite violence if Trump loses.

“That’s really scary,” Cullen said, recounting the violence at Trump rallies around the country leading up to the Republican National Convention. “In this country, we’ve always had recriminations after one side loses. But we haven’t had riots. We haven’t had mobs that act out with violence against supporters of the other side. There’s no telling what his supporters would be willing to do at the slightest encouragement from their candidate.”

While voters have certainly questioned election outcomes, it is unprecedented for the nominee of a major party to do so, historians say.

“What’s really distinct is the candidate himself putting this out front and center as a consistent theme throughout the last part of the campaign, and doing it when there’s no evidence of anything,” said Julian Zelizer, a Princeton University presidential scholar.

Some of Richard Nixon supporters in 1960 claimed that John F. Kennedy’s father bought the election for his son in Chicago. Many Democrats in 2000 felt the Supreme Court intervened on behalf of Bush. Fringe conservatives in 2008 launched the birther movement, which Trump joined with gusto in 2011, in an attempt to delegitimize Barack Obama’s presidency.

“If Clinton is elected, as it looks like she will be, they will be convinced she should not be president because the Republican nominee has confirmed their own fears, anxieties, and conspiratorial outlook,” Zelizer said. “It will make governing more difficult.”

Yeah, that’s a problem. Also violence.

It’s all true what they say. But Trump didn’t invent this theme and the GOP leaders who are now expressing alarm that their voters believe the election is being stolen have only themselves to blame. All over he country they’ve been pimping the thinly veiled racist voter fraud meme for years, passing laws to suppress the vote and otherwise try to rig elections! They’ve admitted it dozens of times. Here’s just one example from a GOP official:

“The Republican Party, the strategists, the consultants, they firmly believe that early voting is bad for Republican Party candidates. It’s done for one reason and one reason only … ‘We’ve got to cut down on early voting because early voting is not good for us,.”

They are trying to “rig” the vote and they admit it. And the way they do it by accusing the Democrats of rigging the vote.

Now the GOP leaders are upset that this sociopathic demagogue is fomenting violence by running with this theme they’ve been subtly pushing for decades. Look in the mirrors boys. You built the road he’s careening down at a a hundred miles an hour.

.

Good Villains and Bad ones
by Tom Sullivan

The way truthiness has replaced truth in our culture has led us to this situation in which a denizen of Bizarro World has a shot at becoming president of the United States. Reality has become inverted, a negative image of the world that is hard on the eyes to read. It is not simply the nature of this political season, but the product of a concerted effort to break down what Al Gore called “inconvenient truths” into constituent bits and to reassemble them into more sellable ideological products. Or as Joni Mitchell sang,
to pave paradise and put up a parking lot.

Thus, people believe voter fraud is rampant, though rampant is nowhere to be found. On lists of potential threats to health and safety, people rank the quantifiably least likely as the most concerning. Hillary Clinton is believed an “inveterate liar,” while analysts’ data say the opposite.

“When the public sees Trump as more honest than Clinton,” writes Nicholas Kristof, “something has gone wrong.” He cites Politifact’s files on both Clinton and Trump and ponders how we have come to such straits. The media falling for simplistic narratives is one trap. :

President Gerald Ford had been a star football player, yet somehow we in the media developed a narrative of him as a klutz — so that every time he stumbled, a clip was on the evening news. Likewise, we in the media wrongly portrayed President Jimmy Carter as a bumbling lightweight, even as he tackled the toughest challenges, from recognizing China to returning the Panama Canal.

Then in 2000, we painted Al Gore as inauthentic and having a penchant for self-aggrandizing exaggerations, and the most memorable element of the presidential debates that year became not George W. Bush’s misstatements but Gore’s dramatic sighs.

Paul Krugman warned recently that Hillary Clinton this election is getting “Gored.” Screenwriter Craig Mazin responded in a tweetstorm it is because “the media sells you a narrative dressed as truth.”
Narratively, Clinton makes a Good Villain. Good Villains are smart. They have plans, friends in high places. They are competent. Trump is none of those things. He makes for a Bad Villain. He’s harder to write about.

16) Journalists at the NYT find it easy to make Hillary out to be a villain, because it's easier to write that story. It's a STORY.— Craig Mazin (@clmazin) September 5, 2016

17) The NYT struggles to write stories about Donald Trump, because narratively, he's a terrible character. Hard to write a STORY about him.— Craig Mazin (@clmazin) September 5, 2016

18) But facts? Hillary has substance, and Trump has none. Alas, facts don't sell clicks. Narrative does.— Craig Mazin (@clmazin) September 5, 2016

Hollywood admits it is in the narrative business, Mazin writes. The press pretends it is not. Kristof insists that journalists have a duty to call out Bad Villains like Trump, even if people find it easier to roll with a good story than with the truth.

There are crackpots who believe that the earth is flat, and they don’t deserve to be quoted without explaining that this is an, er, outlying view, and the same goes for a crackpot who has argued that climate change is a Chinese-made hoax, who has called for barring Muslims and who has said that he will build a border wall and that Mexico will pay for it.

We owe it to our readers to signal when we’re writing about a crackpot. Even if he’s a presidential candidate. No, especially when he’s a presidential candidate.

But you shouldn’t hold your breath. BTW, Bad Villains seem to run in the family:

Ever notice that if u get a herd of mothers together they arent physically capable of talking about anything but birth pregnancy & diapers?— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) July 31, 2011

And the home of the paranoid
by Tom Sullivan

Donald Trump, the man whose “university” is accused of bilking thousands of students (in New York alone) out of tens of thousands of dollars, who faces federal racketeering charges over the scam, who stands accused in lawsuits of stiffing hundreds of everyday tradesmen out of pay they are owed, and who, fact-checkers attest, lies more than he tells the truth, that man is warning he might be cheated on November 8.

Thomas B. Edsall writes in the New York Times about Trump’s and his coterie’s preemptive strike against losing face in losing the presidential election in November. For months they have coached supporters to believe that if Trump loses the election, it is only because he and they have been cheated. If the election is close, they are likely to harden in this view.

“This is a potentially dangerous outcome for the country,” Seth Masket, a political scientist at the University of Denver, told Edsall:

Part of the reason that our nation has been relatively free of political violence is that losers of contests have nearly always accepted their loss and opposed the victor through legitimate means, such as challenging them in future elections or working against their agenda in Congress. The 2000 election was very close and obviously very controversial, but Al Gore nonetheless conceded after the Supreme Court’s ruling. Were Trump and his supporters to continue to argue that the election had been stolen from them, it would mean that they reject nonviolent solutions to political differences. It could jeopardize future elections, undermine the legitimacy of the federal government, and create an environment in which political violence becomes more likely.

From the alt-right fringe to prominent Republican figures, former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, Newt Gingrich, and Ann Coulter have suggested a Republican loss means the Democratic president is illegitimate. But then, the right has acted as though that is the case at least since Bill Clinton first took office. Any Democrat is illegitimate. The only real American presidents are Republican ones. Thirty years of hyping unseen “voter fraud” laid the foundation the current crop of right-wing conspiracy theorists have built upon.

Citing Richard Hofstadter’s 1964 classic, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” Edsall observes how trenchant Hofstadter’s description is of the afflictions of the congenitally “disenfranchised.” Hofstadter:

In American experience ethnic and religious conflict have plainly been a major focus for militant and suspicious minds of this sort, but class conflicts also can mobilize such energies. Perhaps the central situation conducive to the diffusion of the paranoid tendency is a confrontation of opposed interests which are (or are felt to be) totally irreconcilable, and thus by nature not susceptible to the normal political processes of bargain and compromise. The situation becomes worse when the representatives of a particular social interest—perhaps because of the very unrealistic and unrealizable nature of its demands—are shut out of the political process. Having no access to political bargaining or the making of decisions, they find their original conception that the world of power is sinister and malicious fully confirmed. They see only the consequences of power—and this through distorting lenses—and have no chance to observe its actual machinery. A distinguished historian has said that one of the most valuable things about history is that it teaches us how things do not happen. It is precisely this kind of awareness that the paranoid fails to develop. He has a special resistance of his own, of course, to developing such awareness, but circumstances often deprive him of exposure to events that might enlighten him—and in any case he resists enlightenment.

It is an old saw that the most important thing to know is what you don’t know. It is important to know “how things do not happen,” as in how elections do and do not operate. In the same way Naomi Klein described, that in times of crisis people put into use whatever ideas are lying around, the paranoid right, rather than admit not knowing, fills in the gaps of what they don’t know with whatever fantasies are lying around. Fox News and talk radio have made trafficking in fantasies their business model. In this way, the paranoid make themselves susceptible to being conned and to conning themselves.

Their champion this year is a man Charles Blow describes as lying “with a ferocious abandon.” The New Yorker‘s David Remnick said of Trump:

Donald Trump, the Republican nominee for President, does not so much struggle with the truth as strangle it altogether. He lies to avoid. He lies to inflame. He lies to promote and to preen. Sometimes he seems to lie just for the hell of it. He traffics in conspiracy theories that he cannot possibly believe and in grotesque promises that he cannot possibly fulfill. When found out, he changes the subject — or lies larger.

And in the home of the paranoid, that’s just how they like it.

2 Thessalonians 2:

And for this cause God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie: That they all might be damned who believed not the truth, but had pleasure in unrighteousness.

Stealing Trump’s thunder
by Tom Sullivan

An Allen Clifton post from a couple of weeks ago set in relief how nuts the anti-Clinton fever of the last quarter century has been. Problem is, the propaganda campaign has largely worked. Relentless repetition has a way of creating its own reality. It may not have worked for Bush II’s minions, but it has worked against the Clintons. After soaking in decades of propaganda, I don’t even trust what I think I think about them. Except to be convinced so much of it is bullshit.

Clifton writes at Forward Progressives:

To believe anti-Clinton critics, you would think Bill and Hillary Clinton were more powerful, evil and diabolical than even the most over-the-top villain in your stereotypical spy movie. The Clintons have been accused of:

• Being serial killers. (No, seriously, there are individuals out there who think they’ve killed well over 90 people.)
• Money laundering and racketeering.
• Covering up multiple rapes.
• Raising Chelsea Clinton as their daughter — when she’s not really their daughter.
• Running a drug-smuggling ring while Bill was governor of Arkansas.
• Ordering Chelsea to get pregnant before Hillary ran for president to make her seem more likable.
• Fixing a primary election via voter fraud, and also forcing minority voters to overwhelmingly support Hillary Clinton.
• Rigging an FBI investigation with a director of the FBI who’s not only a Republican, but worked for the Bush administration.

There are many more, of course, as Clifton notes. But as to the controversy du jour over their charity, the Clinton Foundation, Clifton marvels:

Then, even though the Clintons obviously knew that anyone who wanted to see the donation records of the foundation could do so, they went ahead and decided to use the foundation with their name on it to supposedly launder money from foreign countries and other shady characters who donated money expecting to “get something” from them in return.

Now, maybe I’m just a little “nuts,” but if I were someone capable of covering up multiple murders; rigging FBI investigations; fixing primary elections; and the whole host of other horrific things the Clintons have been accused of, I think I would find something a little more “subtle” to set up a “pay-for-play” scheme centered around international crime that could potentially be linked all the way to the White House. You know, at least slightly more subtle than a foundation with my last name on it!

But that’s just me.

Yet coverage of the Democratic candidate for president hovers — when it hovers at all — around these serial conspiracy theories and the distrust the public has been carefully taught. Meanwhile, the payaso running on the Republican ticket puts on such a colorful daily show for the press that he consumes all the press attention not devoted to whatever faux scandal GOP smear merchants are peddling about Clinton.

I know, it’s a helluva way to select a national leader, and not a situation Hillary Clinton should simply try to ride out because polls look so favorable.

David Horsey of the Los Angeles Times wonders the same thing:

Clinton needs something close to a landslide if she hopes to have any kind of mandate and if she hopes to bring a more friendly Congress into office with her. To get such a large margin of victory, she must do more than let Trump beat himself. She needs to steal the attention from him and get more people enthused about the idea of having her as president.

Right now, in his erratic way, Trump is doing a good job of reinforcing the pervasive right-wing caricature of Hillary as dishonest, corrupt and even criminal. As preposterous as his rhetoric may be, it is being heard day after day while Clinton’s voice is largely absent. The upcoming presidential debates offer a vitally important opportunity to project an appealing image of competence and command of issues, but, given that Clinton will face a very unpredictable opponent on the debate stage, she cannot be certain those three battles of wits will work in her favor.

If Clinton wants to grab the spotlight, she must confront very directly and very effectively the bad image that so many people have lodged in their brains — a tough task that carries with it plenty of risk. The temptation will be to play it safe and coast on current momentum to a slim victory. But barely beating the most absurd candidate Republicans have ever nominated will not give Clinton the clout she will need in the toxic political battles certain to come once the votes are counted and the hard work of governing begins.

A frightening article on coastal flooding in this morning’s New York Times makes clear just how much political capital will be needed for any progress to take place during the next administration. Robert Frank makes a plea at the New York Times for Clinton to work harder and to spend more money to take back the U.S. House from the T-party climate denialists now in charge and more vulnerable than ever:

But because a campaign’s budget is not a fixed sum, the trade-off may be more apparent than real. As economists have long stressed, the amount that people are willing to pay for something depends on what they expect to get in return. Democratic donors understand that their biggest concerns can’t be addressed until Republicans lose their congressional majorities. They also understand that if the House doesn’t flip this year, there will be virtually no chance of it flipping in the 2018 midterm elections. And until Democrats win enough seats in state legislatures to undo Republican gerrymandering — which could take decades — a wave election is the only near-term hope.

The candidacy of Donald Trump offers a unique opportunity. If Mrs. Clinton made the case clearly in these terms, many donors would step up. Democrats could compete for every vulnerable Republican seat without diverting a single dollar from the Electoral College battle.

But first she has to get their attention. That will be a tall order and take Hillary Clinton well out of her comfort zone. For all our sakes, let’s hope she is up to it.

QOTD: an honest Republican

by digby

I just …

Longtime Republican consultant Carter Wrenn, a fixture in North Carolina politics, said the GOP’s voter fraud argument is nothing more than an excuse.

“Of course it’s political. Why else would you do it?” he said, explaining that Republicans, like any political party, want to protect their majority. While GOP lawmakers might have passed the law to suppress some voters, Wrenn said, that does not mean it was racist.

“Look, if African Americans voted overwhelmingly Republican, they would have kept early voting right where it was,” Wrenn said. “It wasn’t about discriminating against African Americans. They just ended up in the middle of it because they vote Democrat.”

Hey, we’d allow ’em to vote if they did what we tell ’em to do!

.