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Adolescence USA

Published by Tom Sullivan on October 29, 2024

Will the country survive ours?

“Kamala.”

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.”

Milligan deconstructs Trump’s “masculine” appeal:

“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 theme has been deepening even since Trump walked onto the Republican National Convention stage to the James Brown song “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World.” He has been oddly consumed with non-cis people, calling openly gay CNN anchor Anderson Cooper “Allison Cooper,” falsely claiming kids come back home from school as a different gender, and complaining again on Rogan’s show (whose listenership is 81 percent male and 56 percent 18–34-year-olds) about “men playing in women’s sports.”

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.

As I Was Saying …

Published by digby on October 28, 2024

I thought so.…

It looks like Trump really stepped in it:

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.

Trouble At Campaign Headquarters

Published by digby on October 28, 2024

I’m not sure why this isn’t a bigger story since it purports to reveal that Trump’s campaign is riven by even more back biting than previously reported. If it’s true it suggests that the campaign is paranoid and dysfunctional:

A Trump campaign worker has been fired after trying to blow the whistle on what she called “grift and greed” by top campaign officials—and an alleged “bugging” plot, the Daily Beast has learned.

The worker, whose identity the Beast is withholding, wrote an explosive email after she was fired detailing her concerns about how the campaign’s most senior leaders, Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles, appear to be funneling millions of dollars to companies which, she alleges, are overcharging Donald Trump. One of them is run by a major donor to Kamala Harris.

“The grift and greed I’ve witnessed makes me sick and I think leadership has been bad stewards of generous donors money,” the campaign worker wrote in an email to a former colleague after she was abruptly fired on Oct. 18. “I‘m 100% on Team Trump—I want the very best for this campaign, but what I’ve witnessed is greedy and wrong.”

Even more sensationally, the woman also wrote in her email that campaign employees became convinced that leadership had installed “a listening device in a cut out hole” to a conference room at campaign headquarters in South Florida to eavesdrop on private conversations by their colleagues.

Sean Dollman, the campaign’s chief financial officer was so worried he was being snooped on that he and others searched the conference room in an attempt to find the surveillance device and block its ability to intercept his conversations, she wrote.

Dollman “has alluded to the fact that he can’t say things for fear of retaliation,” the woman added. “There are napkins stuffed in all the gaps in the conference room now. It seems like they’re willing to go to extremes.”

I would not put it past anyone in Trump’s orbit to do any of this. Grifting and paranoia are fundamental to the Trump ethos. But this comes on the heels of an earlier story that I wrote a few days ago about Trump’s transition team battling with the Project 2025 people. There’s a lot of dissension within those ranks and it’s about people jostling for power and money and it seems that it’s almost to the point that it’s become their main focus. (Maybe it always was.)

This “whistleblower” may just be a crank, we don’t know. But it all sounds very possible, even likely.

Will The Supremes Weigh In?

Published by digby on October 28, 2024

Ian Millhiser at Vox takes a look at the history of the Supreme Court and elections in recent years and speculates that the Court will intervene on Trump’s behalf if the case is confined to one state (or more with a similar complaint) but not if there is a variety of cases in various states.

He writes:

[W]hat would a Supreme Court decision overthrowing the 2024 election look like? Most likely, it would look like a 2020 court dispute out of Pennsylvania.

During the pandemic, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled that certain ballots mailed before Election Day would be counted even if they did not arrive at an election office until up to three days after Election Day. Though the US Supreme Court has the final word on questions of federal law, each state’s highest court has the last word on questions of state law. So the Pennsylvania court’s decision should have been final because it was rooted in that court’s interpretation of Pennsylvania state law.

Nevertheless, the Republican Party asked the Supreme Court to reverse the Pennsylvania court’s decision and order these ballots tossed out, and several Republican justices urged their Court to do so. Ultimately, the Court dismissed the case as moot — Biden won Pennsylvania by a large enough margin that it wouldn’t have mattered what happened to these ballots.

Since then, the Court handed down its decision in Moore v. Harper (2023), a case in which the justices claimed a new power to overrule a state supreme court’s interpretation of the state’s own election law. Though Moore was largely viewed as a victory for voting rights because it rejected a very aggressive attempt to eliminate voter protections enshrined in state constitutions, the Court’s opinion includes an ominous line stating that the US Supreme Court may overrule a state’s highest court’s decision impacting a federal election if the state decision “exceed[s] the bounds of ordinary judicial review.”

The Court did not define this phrase — it just left it dangling out there as a warning that the justices may exercise a new and unprecedented power to swing elections at some point in the future.

In any election, there will be some disputes about which ballots are counted, whether certain polling places should be kept open late, and other routine legal disagreements that are typically resolved by state courts without too much drama. Now, however, a Republican-controlled Supreme Court claims the power to overrule any of these decisions, and potentially to rewrite a state’s own election law.

If the justices decide to overturn the 2024 presidential election, in other words, they have given themselves a powerful new tool that they can use to find reasons to do so.

That sounds just terrific, doesn’t it?

Last nightTrump alluded to a “secret” he and House speaker Mike Johnson share about the election. (“But I won’t tell you until after the election!”) Seeing as how Johnson wrote an amicus brief for one of those cases in 2020, it’s not a stretch that a possible Supreme Coirt intervention might have something to do with their “secret.”

If Millhiser is right we just have to hope that Harris can pull off a decent win in a number of the swing states. Which is outrageous. Not only do Democrats win the popular vote and lose but now we’re facing winning the electoral college as well but having it snatched away by the Supreme Court (again) because it’s not a big enough win. What democracy are we fighting for exactly?

The Post-It Strategy

Published by digby on October 28, 2024

It’s a thing:

In the weeks before Election Day, a loose-knit group of women are organizing online to blanket their communities with pro-Kamala Harris messages — not on yard signs or fliers, but on sticky notes.

The idea is simple: Take a pad of sticky notes, write messages and post them wherever women may see them — bathroom stalls, the backs of tampon boxes, bathroom mirrors, the gym.

The messages vary slightly, but a typical one reads something like: “Woman to woman: No one sees your vote at the polls. Vote Harris/Walz.”

There’s a whole ad stragtegy around this:

I don’t know if it’s effective but I won’t be surprised if it is. Not to say that the MAGA cult isn’t teeming with wingnut women. We see them all the time and they are true believers. But there are certainly women who are married to MAGA creeps and are merely putting up with it to keep the peace. Whole communities are full of people who just don’t want to rock the boat. Reminding them that this little act of rebellion in service of the greater good is a smart thing to do.

Get Ready For MAGA Chaos

Published by digby on October 28, 2024

Wow:

 Authorities were investigating Monday after early morning fires were set in ballot drop boxes in Portland, Oregon, and in nearby Vancouver, Washington, where hundreds of ballots were destroyed.

The Portland Police Bureau reported that officers and firefighters responded to a fire in one ballot drop box at about 3:30 a.m. and determined an incendiary device had been placed inside. Multnomah County Elections Director Tim Scott said a fire suppressant inside the drop box protected nearly all the ballots; only three were damaged, and his office planned to contact those voters to help them obtain replacement ballots.

A few hours later, across the Columbia River in Vancouver, television crews captured footage of smoke pouring out of a ballot box at a transit center. Vancouver is the biggest city in Washington’s 3rd Congressional District, the site of what is expected to be one of the closest U.S. House races in the country, between first-term Democratic Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez and Republican challenger Joe Kent.

I think we can be pretty sure who might be responsible for this and it isn’t someone who is rooting for Gluesenkamp Perez since the drop box in Washington was in an area she won.

Most jurisdictions will let you check to make sure you ballot was received. I hope they are able to get in touch with every person registered in those dkstricts to let them know that they need to do that.

Let’s hope these acts of vandalism don’t catch on. But I’m afraid that this kind of election interference is probably going to be fairly common in one way or another. Election day could be a real circus in some places. They’re actually training their “poll watchers” to cause chaos.

And there have already been some incidents, encouraged by the Trump campaign:

This happened too:

A man in Texas who wore a MAGA hat to a 2024 presidential election early voting location was arrested after he punched an election worker who asked him to remove the hat. Jesse Lutzenberger, 63, was arrested Thursday and has been charged with injury to an elderly person, according to an incident report from the Bexar County Sheriff’s Office.

Twenty-one states prohibit the wearing of political or campaign apparel in or immediately around voting locations, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures…

MAGA wants to wear their ugly cult regalia wherever they go. They don’t take kindly to being told there are rules against it, even for a minute.

Trump’s Border Czar

Published by digby on October 28, 2024

He’s a real pip. And Trump loves him:

He’s also a grifter, profiting from his reputation as a rank xenophobe. In a piece from the Texas Observer called, “Border 911: The Misinformation Network Profiting Off the ‘Invasion’ Narrative: Dark money and charity organizations led by former intelligence officers and ex-feds have been spreading propaganda and laying the groundwork for presidential election challenges” you can see that Homan has been in on the planning for a Trump restoration, win or lose on November 5th:

For a retired federal employee, Tom Homan, an acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) under the Trump administration, is a very busy man. For the last year, he’s crisscrossed the country with a team of former state and federal law enforcement officers, who call themselves Border911, speaking in theaters and event halls from Phoenix, Arizona, to Mission, Texas, to Ronkonkoma, New York, to promote the propaganda that the U.S.-Mexico border is under invasion and that President Joe Biden and his allies are admitting “illegal aliens” so that Democrats will “be in power for years to come.”

Homan, the president and CEO of the 501(c)(3) nonprofit Border911 Foundation, Inc., and his group’s members have largely flown under the radar, receiving little coverage outside of right-wing media. But if Trump were to win this November, Homan, the architect of Trump’s family separation initiative, and his allies could receive prominent posts. Trump already promised at a rally this summer that he is “bringing back” Homan in 2025.

“Trump comes back in January, I’ll be on his heels … and I will run the biggest deportation force this country has ever seen,” Homan vowed during a July immigration panel in Washington, D.C. “They ain’t seen shit yet. Wait until 2025.”

Read the whole thing. This group is very busy building up the lie that undocumented immigrants are voting for Democrats. If Trump loses you can be sure he and his boys will be very active in contesting the election.

Homan wrote the Immigration Agenda for Project 2025. Despite the reporting about trouble in paradise in the Trump campaign over Project 2025, Homan is still in very good graces with Trump. They are two peas in a pod.

The “C” Word

Published by digby on October 28, 2024

That’s Elon Musk’s group America Pac. Apparently, it’s run by 12 year old boys.

They have removed it from X, but it still exists on Facebook for now.

Warning: This ad contains multiple instances of the ‘C Word.’ Viewer discretion is advised. Kamala Harris is a ‘C word.’ You heard that right. A big ole ‘C word.’ In fact, all of the other ‘C words’ think she’s the biggest ‘C word’ of them all. That’s right. She’s a tax-hiking, regulation-loving, gun-grabbing communist. And the worst part? She’s proud of it. Kamala Harris: the ‘C word America simply can’t afford. See you nationwide Tuesday, November 5th.

This is where we are people.

Update —
Oh look, more C-word. Apparently the Trump campaign stopped that rancid comic from saying it during Trump’s rally last night:

[F]our top campaign sources said it could have been even worse.

“He had a joke calling [Vice President Kamala] Harris a ‘cunt,’” a campaign insider involved in the discussions about the event told The Bulwark. “Let’s say it was a red flag.”

Hinchcliffe’s remarks—and the ensuing backlash—has sparked questions about how such an offensive speech was allowed at such a high-profile rally; whether it was deliberate; and why a presidential campaign would elevate a roast-master comic edgelord in the closing days of a tight race for the White House.

Campaign staffers had asked all speakers to submit drafts of their speeches ahead of time—before they were loaded into the teleprompter—according to the aforementioned sources. Once the objectionable “cunt” joke was spotted, the sources said, a staffer asked Hinchcliffe to strike it. He complied.

They said the racism was ad libbed.I doubt that very much. The whole rally was full of despicable rhetoric.

Did Trump Just Blow His Chance?

Published by digby on October 28, 2024

After the 2016 election once everyone recovered from the shock, the analyses of what happened started to gel into a conventional wisdom that said Donald Trump won because a bunch of non-college educated white people were feeling “economic anxiety.” Thousands of stories and features followed with reporters being sent out to rural Pennsylvania diners and Iowa church socials to figure out what those voters really want.

But the fact was that it was an extremely close electoral college victory that could have gone either way with just a handful of votes in a couple of swing states. The main data guru at the time, Nate Silver, did a post-election analysis which showed that whenever there was an event such as Hillary Clinton collapsing briefly at a 9/11 event or the Washington Post reporting of Donald Trump’s gross commentary on the Access Hollywood tape, there would be a slight drop in the polls for the affected candidate but they would rebound to the usual stasis within a couple of weeks.

Trump was still struggling to recover from the Access Hollywood scandal at the end of October of that year and Clinton was ahead in the aggregated polling by about 6 points. And then FBI Director James Comey sent a letter to congress announcing that the agency was following up on the Clinton email investigation and the media once again went wild with the story that had captivated them for months. Clinton’s polls immediately dropped and never had a chance to recover because election day was just too soon. The rest is history.

Silver gathered plenty of evidence to back up his theory that the Comey letter and the subsequent media frenzy so close to the election was decisive in Clinton’s loss. Why do I bring that up now? Well, that event happened exactly 8 years ago today. You may remember the famous NY Times front page the next morning:

The polls are a lot tighter today than they were in 2016. But as that year proved, any small misstep can matter greatly because there is no time to recover. And it’s just possible that Donald Trump made one yesterday with his horrifying rally at Madison Square Garden in New York.

The event was packed and it went on for many hours as his rallies are wont to do. The speakers were pretty much uniformly crude, extreme and insulting in one way or another. It got off to a roaring start with radio host Sid Rosenberg calling Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff a “crappy jew” and keeping it classy by saying, “she is some sick bastard, that Hillary Clinton. What a sick son of a bitch. The whole fucking party. A bunch of degenerates. Lowlives, Jew-haters, and lowlives. Every one of ’em. Every one of ’em.” So that was nice.

Another speaker, David Rem, supposedly a childhood friend of Trump’s (apparently not true) said, “Kamala Harris is the devil! She is the Antichrist!” A real estate expert (?) named Grant Cardone took to the podium to declare that former California AG, US Senator and current Vice President Harris is “the least qualified person to ever run for any office in America” and claims that she has “pimp handlers,” which I think has a pretty clear implication.

After Trump the day before had made a big pitch to American Muslims to vote for him , Rudy Giuliani showed up and slammed Palestinians:

The Palestinians are taught to kill us at two years old. They won’t let a Palestinian in Jordan.. in Egypt. And Harris wants to bring them to you.

Trump’s transition chief, Howard Lutnick, yelled “we must crush Jihad!” and waxed on about the 1890s when America was great while Trump’s top adviser Steven Miller really brought home the 1939 vibes with his declaration that “America is for Americans!” (It sounded better in the original German: Nur für Deutsche a genuine Nazi slogan.)

RFK Jr was there too, ranting about the “corruption at the CDC, the FDA, the NIH and the CIA.” Trump later promised him, “I’m gonna let him go wild on health. I’m gonna let him go wild on the foods. I’m gonna let him go wild on the medicines.” And Tucker Carlson took the stage to huge applause, laughing maniacally and delivering a crude racist insult toward Kamala Harris:

Those are just the highlights of some of the introductory speeches before Trump came on and did his usual schtick which had people leaving the venue in droves.

But there was one very special speech given by a “comedian” at the start of the event. His name is Tony Hinchcliffe and he apparently has a very popular podcast. He got the whole event rolling with this line:

He also had a gag about hanging out with a Black friend and instead of carving pumpkins, they carved a watermelon. But this Puerto Rico “joke” caused a sensation and not for nothing. In this very tight race, Trump is depending on making inroads among Latino voters to make up for his losses among white college educated suburbanites. The line immediately went viral.

As luck would have it, Kamala Harris happened to be in Pennsylvania at that very moment making a pitch to Puerto Rican voters (there are almost half a million of them in the state) when word of the insult hit the internet. Within a matter of minutes we saw Puerto Rican megastar Bad Bunny, soon followed by Rickey Martin and J Lo, (with a combined 315 million followers on Instagram alone) all endorsing Harris and criticizing Trump. Florida politicians immediately began to denounce the comment and the Trump campaign itself finally came forward and said it didn’t reflect their position. All of this happened as the rally was still going on!

Is it just another tempest in a teapot? Could be. Trump is a master at eluding all accountability. He didn’t say anything about it in his own speech but perhaps he’ll address it today and that will be the end of it. But if there’s a lesson from 2016 it’s that a scandal that would normally blow over given enough time can be lethal in the final days of a campaign. In a tied race it’s the last thing any campaign would want.

Of course, everything that was said in that rally should, by all rights, disqualify Trump in the minds of decent people everywhere. I’ll never understand how any of that is considered normal political discourse now. But specifically insulting a group that’s necessary for victory is just plain dumb even for them. All it takes is just a point or two in the right place and it could be the death blow. 

Salon

Ethnic Cleansing, ICYMI

Published by Tom Sullivan on October 28, 2024

Donald Trump/Tom Homan/Stephen Miller/Project 2025 dream

“Families can be deported together.”

I’m reposting this “60 Minutes” clip of Tom Homan again to make sure no one misses it amidst the Trump rally coverage.

CBS News:

Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, has said it would be reasonable to deport a million people a year. And Trump’s top immigration adviser, Stephen Miller, told the audience at the Conservative Political Action Conference earlier this year that deportees would be removed from the country in a massive military air operation.

“You grab illegal immigrants and then you move them to the staging ground and that’s where the planes are waiting for federal law enforcement to then move those illegals home,” Miller said at the conference. “You deputize the National Guard to carry out immigration enforcement.”

Homan said he doesn’t use the term “raids,” but immigration enforcement operations at worksites would be needed. 

Deeper into the realm of ethnic cleansing

From the clip:

Cecilia Vega asks: “Is there a way to carry out mass deportation without separating families?”

“Of course there is. Families can be deported together,” says Tom Homan, head of ICE during Trump’s family separation policy.

“Deport families together. Note what that means:

Believe them the first time.