Sure. Give him the nuclear codes again. What could go wrong? .
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Digby's Hullabaloo Posts
Josh Marshall on the Arlington scandal is really good. He makes the important point that the whole thing was designed as a campaign stunt to make Harris look bad for supposedly failing to honor the dead. We all know how that worked out:
Three days ago, the Trump campaign held a campaign event at Arlington National Cemetery. The idea was to lay a wreath honoring the 13 members of the U.S. military who were killed during the evacuation of Kabul in 2021 and film a political ad. They would distribute the video and attack Vice President Harris and President Biden for not “showing up” for their campaign event, which they sought to portray was an established memorial. As soon as the video circulated, military policy experts I know said right off the bat they were shocked that the campaign had been allowed to hold a campaign event on the grounds of the cemetery and circulate video of it. It isn’t just unseemly. It’s against the law. How were they allowed to do that?
That turned out to be a good and prescient question.
The first hint that anything else had happened on the visit came in a brief NPR article, published a day later, which reported that cemetery staff had sought to prevent the campaign from violating the law by holding a political event on the cemetery grounds. The details were limited but it seemed a verbal altercation became violent and two Trump campaign staffers physically assaulted a cemetery employee. The impression I got from the article was that they likely shoved the woman to the ground. But the details were cryptic.
What wasn’t cryptic was the Trump campaign’s wildly over-the-top response. Campaign spokesman Stephen Cheung denied a physical altercation had taken place and claimed the campaign was prepared to prove its claim with the release of a video tape. “We are prepared to release footage if such defamatory claims are made.”
He then proceeded to make a series of bizarre claims suggesting the attacked employee was actually some random person undergoing some sort of psychotic break. “The fact is that a private photographer was permitted on the premises and for whatever reason an unnamed individual, clearly suffering from a mental health episode, decided to physically block members of President Trump’s team during a very solemn ceremony.”
Later the campaign’s hyper-aggressive co-chair Chris LaCivita gave an even wilder comment to the Times, calling the assaulted cemetery employee “a despicable individual” and “a disgrace” who “does not deserve to represent the hallowed grounds of Arlington National Cemetery.”
At a speech Wednesday, vice presidential candidate JD Vance doubled down on the campaign’s defense, seeming to imply that campaign staffers were right to assault the cemetery employee. He said VP Harris could “go to hell” because of the backlash Trump is facing.
That’s just crazy. And then there’s this:
What’s so perverse about this is that this isn’t one of Trump’s predatory moments. There’s just something broken about the man since it doesn’t occur to him that a grinning thumbs up isn’t appropriate at the grave of a fallen soldier.
It was worse than we imagined:
The cemetery employee, a woman, filed a report about the incident. But she later declined to press charges, fearing — according to military officials who spoke to The New York Times — that Trump supporters would try to retaliate against her. So the woman was assaulted for trying to enforce federal law. She filed an official report about the incident but later declined to press charges because she feared reprisals from violent Trump supporters. Late this evening, the Daily Caller reported that Speaker Mike Johnson actually got involved to force cemetery officials to allow Trump to hold his campaign event on the grounds. The Caller, unsurprisingly, portrays this as the Gold Star families requesting help from Congress after Arlington officials tried to prevent Trump from accompanying them to the cemetery.
Spin aside, what I take as the relevant point is that Arlington cemetery officials could see this was a trainwreck-in-the-making from the start. And the Speaker of the House was brought in to overrule cemetery officials simply trying to enforce the prohibition against holding partisan political events on the cemetery grounds, especially in the area of recent burials. This whole thing went on, involving an assault on a cemetery employee, and it was all under the media radar until this NPR report.
It was one thing if Trump wanted to privately pay homage to the dead at the request of one of the families. That’s not a problem. But Trump isn’t alive unless he’s on camera and he and his henchmen thought using dead soldiers as a campaign prop was a great way to troll Kamala Harris. That’s what this was all about.
Considering that LaCivita is one of the swift boa strategists , we shouldn’t be too surprised. Using the military for crass political purposes is in the GOP DNA. But they should be smarter than to have Donald Trump pull a stunt like this. The guy who is known for saying that dead soldiers are suckers and losers probably ought to stay away from military cemeteries. Nothing good can come of it.
Has AG Sulzberger turned it into the Orange Lady?
“WTF Is Happening To The NY Times?” Digby wrote just days ago. A chorus of critics believe the Gray Lady has lost its way, and they’ve brought receipts. The Times giving space this week to National Review‘s editor Rich Lowry, for example, to suggest that on character Donald Trump has a better case to make for his election led one FKA Twitter user to suggest, “The Onion writers are now running the @nytimes.” The New York Time Pitchbot account added, “I think we may be nearing the end of civilization.”
Dan Froomkin caustically distilled a March speech publisher A.G. Sulzberger gave at Oxford University explaining Sulzberger’s editorial stance thusly:
One: You will earn my displeasure if you warn people too forcefully about the possible end to democracy at the hands of a deranged insurrectionist.
And two: You prove your value to me by trolling our liberal readers.
The Times headline writers have been an issue for years, as journalist Jennifer Schulze again noted on Tuesday:
In a follow-up comment, Schulze adds, “It’s actually a very interesting piece about the state of the race -especially the remarkable campaign Harris has run. But the times has to do do it’s ‘yes, but’ headlines when it’s about a Democrat. Good grief.”
But it’s not just the headlines at issue. It’s the paper’s decisions about what constitutes a newsworthy story and what does not. James Fallows illustrated Wednesday with two Times front pages eight years apart. The Times that ran “but her emails” stories about Hillary Clinton for months in 2016 placed news of Trump’s superseding indictment by a fifth grand jury on Tuesday not just below the fold, but on Page A11.
“And, if you were wondering,” Fallows continued, “the inside-page article about Trump’s visit to Arlington Cemetery is framed as a “dueling attacks” story and does not mention the photo-op controversy.”
If trolling liberal readers is the way to Sulzberger’s heart, Deputy Opinion Editor Patrick Healy is bucking for Employee of the Month with pieces noted by both NYU’s Ruth Ben Ghiat and Fallows.
Bruce Bartlett posted a thread to FKA Twitter on Wednesday on how the Times’ choice of what constitutes news is its own kind of bias, shown, as Fallows observed, in its coverage of Hillary Clinton in 2016:
The real power of the Times on other media is establishing priorities–what is news and what isn’t. The Times clearly has the power to make nothingburgers, such as Hillary’s emails, into those that all media must cover. It can also bury stories, as it has often done for Trump.
Its comprehensiveness is its defense. If one asks why a certain story wasn’t covered, it can always find an article or op-ed where is was covered–once and only once, and henceforth buried. Implicitly, the Times acts as if every article it’s ever published was read by everyone.
The Times’ constant repetition of certain stories or lack of such coverage on others constitutes bias. But it’s hard to find bias in any individual story. It’s the sheer repetition of stories that should have been dropped that constitutes the bias.
There is a certain Times’ methodology that also constitutes de facto bias. That is the widely criticized policy of implying that both sides are equally guilty of some action or intellectual wrongdoing.
Quite often, one side’s minor misdemeanor is equated with the other side’s first-degree murder, as if all lawbreaking is equally wrong. The law itself doesn’t say so and the Times shouldn’t either. Unfortunately, the bothsidesism disease has spread throughout the media.
Finally, read John Harwood’s assessment on how the media is failing to meet the moment and a candidate like Trump with an agenda like Project 2025. The Times’ fetish for prioritizing neutrality over preservation of the culture that sustains it makes preferencing balance a suicide pact:
Experts warn his brazen dishonesty exceeds that of any of his predecessors. And the threat he and his allies pose to the norms, freedoms, and institutions of the world’s most powerful nation lends extraordinary gravity to the collective decisions of the news business.
Is the paramount responsibility of U.S. journalists to help protect their country’s 2½-century-old democratic experiment, which not coincidentally also protects the existence of their craft? That requires braving the ire and denunciations of Republicans long conditioned to scream bias.
The Times is not up to it. Harwood cites political scientists Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein who believe “a balanced treatment of an unbalanced phenomenon distorts reality.”
The nation’s leading newspaper rejected the democracy-above-all-else approach out of hand. In an interview with the digital outlet Semafor, New York Times executive editor Joseph Kahn suggested that such a framework would compromise the very norms its advocates aim to preserve.
“To say that the threats [to] democracy are so great that the media is going to abandon its central role as a source of impartial information to help people vote — that’s essentially saying that the news media should become a propaganda arm for a single candidate, because we prefer that candidate’s agenda,” Kahn said.
“It’s our job to cover the full range of issues that people have,” he added. “At the moment, democracy is one of them. But it’s not the top one — immigration happens to be the top [in opinion polls], and the economy and inflation is the second.”
Kahn later clarified his comments, promising more coverage of issues around democracy and the expected thrust of a new Trump presidency. But the controversy generated by his remarks laid bare the dilemma American news executives face.
But Kahn’s response simply raises more questions. Harwood asks why news executives should “organize their coverage based on opinion surveys.” Another question “is whether some of their coverage has misshapen public opinion itself,” reinforcing Bartlett’s point above. The snake eats its own tail.
Jay Rosen suggested months ago that the news’ framing should emphasize “not the odds, but the stakes” of the 2024 election. The Times has yet to take up his challenge and revels in criticism that it hasn’t.
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The more Trump and Vance run from weird, the more they own it
No, the Republicans’ vice-presidential nominee is not weird. Not weird at all:
JD Vance, the Republican vice-presidential candidate and US senator from Ohio, attacked teachers who do not have children in newly resurfaced remarks from 2021.
In the resurfaced clip, Vance, who was speaking at a forum held by the Center for Christian Virtue, attacks “leaders on the left” and Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, for not having children.
“So many of the leaders of the left, and I hate to be so personal about this, but they’re people without kids trying to brainwash the minds of our children, that really disorients me and disturbs me,” Vance can be heard saying in the clip.
“Randi Weingarten, who’s the head of the most powerful teachers’ union in the country, she doesn’t have a single child. If she wants to brainwash and destroy the minds of children, she should have some of her own and leave ours the hell alone.”
Weingarten is gay, married, and a stepmother to two daughters.
Oh, and Vance? Catholic nuns have been “brainwashing” and destroying the minds of American children for 300 years. You converted to Catholicism, yes?
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The Gallup poll shows that voter enthusiasm is higher than it’s been since 2008. (That was a very good year for Democrats, by the way.)
Guess why?
It’s the Democrats.
Democrats’ current level of enthusiasm is one percentage point shy of the group’s high in Gallup’s trend since 2000. That was the 79% measured in February 2008, when Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were engaged in a spirited battle for the party’s presidential nomination. Enthusiasm subsided later that year, but by the end of the campaign, consistently more than seven in 10 said they were more enthusiastic than usual about voting. Democratic enthusiasm was also elevated during the 2004 and 2020 presidential campaigns.
I’d rather be the Democrats than the Republicans….
I was on the The Nicole Sandler Show show as RFK Jr.’s brain worm. I was going to add photos of the people and articles that I was referring too, because as bizarre at all these stories sound, I WAS NOT MAKING THEM UP!
I decided to just list the articles below in case anyone wants to know more details.
These are Real Headlines Written by Actual Humans about RFK Jr. in a new segment I’m calling RFK Jr.’s Brain Worm News.
(The graphic is from an actual article on brain worms from ABC News, Australia that said, “headlines about brain worms can be alarming.” but adds, “..here are ways you can minimize your risks of being infected with one.” )
- R.F.K. Jr. Says Doctors Found a Dead Worm in His Brain The New York Times
- RFK Jr says he was behind mystery of dead bear dumped in Central Park with bicycle The Guardian
- RFK Jr. Once Decapitated A Dead Whale With A Chainsaw BBC
- Mary Richardson Kennedy’s grave was exhumed & moved 700 feet away by her ex-husband RFK Jr., because he wanted her to be buried on a hilltop People Magazine
- RFK Jr., Tulsi Gabbard named to Trump transition team CBS News
When I talked about how Dave, RFK Jr’s brain worm, would be advising Trump on loyalty and cabinet positions I was talking about John McEntee, Trump’s body man during the 2016 campaign is currently working on HR for the Trump campaign.
Who would help Trump carry out his promised “purge” of the “deep state”? Citizens For Ethics in Washington July 9, 2024
“As the Director of PPO, McEntee took it upon himself to ensure that all presidential appointees were sufficiently loyal to Trump, conducting loyalty interviews with employees throughout the federal government and monitoring their social media presence.”
Nicole had hoped to have Digby on the show but she was ill. Luckily not with BRAIN WORMS!
I modeled the segment on A Closer Look on Late Night with Seth Meyers. Those are written by my favorite writer, Sal Gentile, who does an amazing job of getting in jokes along with the facts.
Trump actually posted this on Truth Social:
He’s said and done a LOT of disgusting things in his short political career. But this may be the worst. He and his republive minions are out there every day on social media pushing the lie that Harris slept her way to the top.
I know I don’t really have to say this but it’s important. She had a relationship with Willie Brown, the Speaker of the state assembly for about a year in the mid 90s when she was a prosecutor in Alameda County. He recommended her for a job on the unemployment appeals board.( I don’t think that’s quite the stepping stone to power people what you to believe.)
Then she went to work for the San Francisco DA’s office and the San Francisco City Attorney, ran for San Francisco DA and she won. Twice. After that she ran for Attorney General of California and she also won twice. After that she ran for the Senate and won and then ran for VP and won. She has been an elected official for over 2 decades. Unless she gave blow jobs to millions of voters, she did not sleep her way to the top. It’s absurd.
There’s more here. Ugh.
And she had a right to be
NBC News on Tuesday reviewed more than 30 minutes of video from the roughly 48 hours surrounding the Capitol attack on Jan. 6, 2021, including video that showed Pelosi being led away from the building by her security detail as she pressed her staff members to get the National Guard to respond to the Capitol.
The newly surfaced remarks go further than the public ones she made on Jan. 7, when she said Trump had “incited an armed insurrection against America” and “instigated” an attack that would “forever stain our nation’s history.”
The same day, the HBO video shows, Pelosi spoke to her staff while she was sitting under an ornate mirror that had been smashed when the pro-Trump mob ransacked her office hours earlier.
“We take an oath to protect our country from all enemies, foreign and domestic,” she said. “There is a domestic enemy in the White House. And let’s not mince words about this.”
The previously unaired video also shows Pelosi taking responsibility for not pressing law enforcement officials harder about their preparations ahead of the attack.
“Why weren’t the National Guard there to begin with?” Pelosi asked. “They clearly didn’t know, and I take responsibility for not having them just prepared for more,” she said as she was being escorted away by security on Jan. 6. “It’s stupid that we should be in a situation like this.”
Pelosi would not have had independent authority to summon the National Guard, and the Capitol Police Board is in charge of security for the U.S. Capitol. The head of the Capitol Police resigned shortly after the riot, as did the House sergeant-at-arms, and the video shows Pelosi in discussions with her staff about getting resignations from both officials.
“They thought these people would act civilized? They thought these people gave a damn? What is it that is missing here in terms of anticipation?” she added.
[…]
The comments also indicate that Pelosi was skeptical about the motivations of the law enforcement community, which is generally conservative-leaning. (A high-ranking FBI official, for example, was warned in the hours after the attack that many within the bureau were “sympathetic” to the Capitol rioters.)
“Shame on us,” Pelosi said as her security unit whisked her off to nearby Fort McNair, where several congressional leaders ended up on the night of Jan. 6 when the facility turned into a command center for those in the order of presidential succession. “Shame on us. I’m suspicious of them and their motivations, tell you the truth.”
The House Jan. 6 committee ultimately shied away from focusing on the law enforcement failures in the lead-up to the attack. Instead — as Pelosi did in the immediate aftermath of the Capitol riot — it zeroed in on Trump’s role.
The new video also reveals that Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., made a quip about Trump’s pardoning rioters, a position that Trump, again the Republican presidential nominee, now endorses by referring to Jan. 6 defendants as “hostages” and “unbelievable patriots.”
When Pelosi’s daughter asks her early Jan. 7 how she feels about being “done” with Trump after Congress certified his election loss, a tired Pelosi says in the new video that there must be consequences for his actions.
“I just feel sick about what he did to the Capitol and the country today,” Pelosi says. “He’s got to pay a price for that.”
You would think so. We all thought so. But now the Supreme’s have held that he’s immune from being prosecuted for “official acts” and we won’t know what they meant by that probably for years. He could be dead before he is ever held legally accountable.
We have to make sure that the voters hold him accountable and send him packing in a couple of months.
The months long Trump Media stock slide continued Wednesday, as shares of the company majority-owned by former President Donald Trump fell below $20 for the first time since the Truth Social maker went public in March of this year.
As of 12:45 p.m. ET, the stock price of DJT has dropped more than 75% from its intraday high on March 26, the day the company debuted on the Nasdaq stock exchange.
Trump Media stock price
Trump Media has also lost more than half its value since its recent surge on July 15, the first trading day after the Republican presidential nominee narrowly survived an assassination attempt at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania.
Trump’s stake is still worth $2.2 billion but he has an agreement that prevents him from cashing out. That agreement is going to expire on September 20th. Golly, what do you think he’ll do???
What a nice little scam…
If he does sell — or if he even appears likely to — investors could lose confidence in Trump Media, a situation the company’s own regulatory filings have acknowledged.
Similar to other meme stocks, investing in Trump Media has come to be seen as a way for Trump’s supporters to back him and bet on his chances of beating Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris in the presidential election.
But the company has noted that its fledgling social media platform Truth Social depends at least partly on Trump’s enduring popularity and reputation. Trump, who holds the most popular Truth Social account, has recently started posting more on X, his former messaging app of choice, and TikTok.
He’s going to make a bundle and his small time investors are going to get fleeced. I guess they don’t care. Anything for Dear Leader.
It wasn’t a joke. This is something he obviously seriously believes. He is repulsed by any woman who has not given birth and has been crusading against them for years:
GOP vice presidential candidate JD Vance in 2021 made yet more disparaging comments about people without children, this time turning his ire to teachers.
Part of Vance’s remarks were resurfaced on Tuesday by Heartland Signal, a digital outlet based in Chicago. NBC News later reviewed and shared video of the entire event.
During a forum for Republican Senate candidates in Ohio hosted by the Center for Christian Virtue in October 2021, Vance weighed in on the question of how to make schools more responsive to parents.
Vance claimed the left wants “to control what our children learn.”
“I think our conservative idea is that parents and family should determine what children learn, what values they are brought up with,” he said.
Vance went on to call out Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, accusing her of trying to “brainwash” children while not having “a single child.”
“So many of the leaders of the left, and I hate to be so personal about this, but they’re people without kids trying to brainwash the minds of our children. That really disorients me,” Vance said.
“Weingarten, who’s the head of the most powerful teaching union in the country, she doesn’t have a single child,” he added. “If she wants to brainwash and destroy the minds of children, she should have some of her own and leave ours the hell alone.”
[…]
Vance’s spokesperson told NBC News the Ohio senator will continue speaking out in defense of children.
“There is no bigger threat to American children than the left wing indoctrination being peddled in our schools by radicals like Randi Weingarten, with the support of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz,” Taylor Van Kirk said.
I’m disturbed and disoriented that this weirdo freak is on a presidential ticket and could easily become president someday.