Why do I get the sense that the Democrats are having a lot more fun in this campaign than the Republicans, even as serious as the whole thing is?
Here we have Democratic governors dressing up as Tim Walz for Halloween:
You have to love Gretchen Whitmer’s “pig”. Lol.
I’m probably not being fair to the Republicans. I’m sure they’re having tons of fun pulling the wings off flies or stealing kids’ Halloween candy.
And Donald Trump is doing a garbage man minstrel show. Lots of fun:
Last night I posted that the Dodgers winning the World Series wasa good omen because they won last in 2020 and Joe Biden was victorious as well. It’s silly. But just for fun here’s some more:
While the stock market is not necessarily representative of the broader economy, the S&P 500’s performance in the run-up to Election Day has historically been a strong indicator of whether the incumbent party’s candidate will retain control of the White House — correctly forecasting all but four presidential races over the last 96 years.
If the index is falling, the theory goes, investors are bracing for more uncertainty from a new administration. But a climb in the S&P 500 signals that the market is expecting the current president’s party to win. And the index’s recent rise is suggesting that Vice President Kamala Harris, who took over the Democratic ticket from President Joe Biden this summer, could be bound for victory.
While the weirdo billionaires are betting on Orange Julius Caesar, the actual day-to-day money people are betting with their wallets on Harris. Good to know.
By the way:
Aaaand this:
More registered voters say they have been contacted by Kamala Harris’ campaign (42%) than by Donald Trump’s campaign (35%). The question asks about contact by email, phone, in person, mail or some other way. When Gallup asked the same question in the 2008 and 2012 election years, roughly one in three voters reported being contacted by the major-party campaigns, although Barack Obama’s 2008 figure was somewhat higher than that.
The majority of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents, 58%, say the Harris campaign has contacted them. That compares with 40% of Republicans and Republican leaners who say the Trump campaign has contacted them, which is on the low end of what Gallup has measured in the past for supporters of the nominee’s party. However, the 25% of Republicans saying they have been contacted by Harris’ campaign and 31% of Democrats who have been contacted by Trump’s are fairly typical for contact from an opposing party’s campaign.
This sounds promising, yes?
Look at that nonsense. David Kurtz at TPM writes:
In the final week of the presidential campaign, the country’s two most prominent newspapers extended into a second day their credulous coverage of Republicans’ fake outrage over President Biden’s “garbage” comment.
The NYT and WaPo each made it a front-page story in Thursday’s editions, with above-the-fold, prime-real-estate treatment.
Considering that Trump routinely calls Harris voters scum, garbage vermin and worse this is journalistic malpractice. Have they ever put his comments above the fold like that in this campaign even once, much less in the final week? I don’t think so.
Josh Marshall put it like this:
It’s actually a long time GOP tactic, one of their most infuriating, not because they do it but because the mainstream media falls for it every time. And sometimes the Democrats do too.
I wrote about this years ago:
The Art Of The Hissy Fit
By digbyTuesday, October 23, 2007
I first noticed the right’s successful use of ostentatious handwringing, sanctimony and faux outrage back in the 90’s when well-known conservative players like Gingrich and Livingston pretended to be offended at the president’s extramarital affair and were repeatedly and tiresomely “upset” about fund-raising practices they all practiced themselves. The idea of these powerful and corrupt adulterers being personally upset by White House coffees and naughty sexual behavior was laughable.
But they did it, oh how they did it, and it often succeeded in changing the dialogue and titillating the media into a frenzy of breathless tabloid coverage.
In fact, they became so good at the tactic that they now rely on it as their first choice to control the political dialogue when it becomes uncomfortable and put the Democrats on the defensive whenever they are winning the day. Perhaps the best example during the Bush years would be the completely cynical and over-the-top reaction to Senator Paul Wellstone’s memorial rally in 2002 in the last couple of weeks leading up to the election.
With the exception of the bizarre Jesse Ventura, those in attendance, including the Republicans, were non-plussed by the nature of the event at the time. It was not, as the chatterers insisted, a funeral, but rather more like an Irish wake for Wellstone supporters — a celebration of Wellstone’s life, which included, naturally, politics. (He died campaigning, after all.) But Vin Weber, one of the Republican party’s most sophisticated operatives, immediately saw the opportunity for a faux outrage fest that was more successful than even he could have ever dreamed.
By the time they were through, the Democrats were prostrating themselves at the feet of anyone who would listen, begging for forgiveness for something they didn’t do, just to stop the shrieking. The Republicans could barely keep the smirks off their faces as they sternly lectured the Democrats on how to properly honor the dead — the same Republicans who had relentlessly tortured poor Vince Foster’s family for years.
It’s an excellent technique and one they continue to employ with great success, most recently with the entirely fake Move-On and Pete Stark “controversies.” (The Democrats try their own versions but rarely achieve the kind of full blown hissy fit the Republicans can conjure with a mere blast fax to Drudge and their talk radio minions.)
But it’s about more than simple political distraction or savvy public relations. It’s actually a very well developed form of social control called Ritual Defamation (or Ritual Humiliation) as this well trafficked internet article defines it:
Defamation is the destruction or attempted destruction of the reputation, status, character or standing in the community of a person or group of persons by unfair, wrongful, or malicious speech or publication. For the purposes of this essay, the central element is defamation in retaliation for the real or imagined attitudes, opinions or beliefs of the victim, with the intention of silencing or neutralizing his or her influence, and/or making an example of them so as to discourage similar independence and “insensitivity” or non-observance of taboos. It is different in nature and degree from simple criticism or disagreement in that it is aggressive, organized and skillfully applied, often by an organization or representative of a special interest group, and in that it consists of several characteristic elements.
The article goes on to lay out several defining characteristics of ritual defamation such as “the method of attack in a ritual defamation is to assail the character of the victim, and never to offer more than a perfunctory challenge to the particular attitudes, opinions or beliefs expressed or implied. Character assassination is its primary tool.” Perhaps its most intriguing insight is this:
The power of ritual defamation lies entirely in its capacity to intimidate and terrorize. It embraces some elements of primitive superstitious belief, as in a “curse” or “hex.” It plays into the subconscious fear most people have of being abandoned or rejected by the tribe or by society and being cut off from social and psychological support systems.
In a political context this translates to a fear by liberal politicians that they will be rejected by the American people — and a subconscious dulling of passion and inspiration in the mistaken belief that they can spare themselves further humiliation if only they control their rhetoric. The social order these fearsome conservative rituals pretend to “protect,” however, are not those of the nation at large, but rather the conservative political establishment which is perhaps best exemplified by this famous article about how Washington perceived the Lewinsky scandal. The “scandal” is moved into the national conversation through the political media which has its own uses for such entertaining spectacles and expends a great deal of energy promoting these shaming exercises for commercial purposes.
The political cost to progressives and liberals for their inability to properly deal with this tactic is greater than they realize. Just as Newt Gingrich was not truly offended by Bill Clinton’s behavior (which mirrored his own) neither were conservative congressmen and Rush Limbaugh truly upset by the Move On ad — and everyone knew it, which was the point. It is a potent demonstration of pure power to force others toinsincerely condemn or apologize for something, particularly when the person who is forcing it is also insincerely outraged. For a political party that suffers from a reputation for weakness, it is extremely damaging to be so publicly cowed over and over again. It separates them from their most ardent supporters and makes them appear guilty and unprincipled to the public at large.
Ritual defamation and humiliation are designed to make the group feel contempt for the victim and over time it’s extremely hard to resist feeling it when the victims fail to stand up for themselves.
There is the possibility that the Republicans will overplay this particular gambit. Their exposure over the past few years for incompetence, immorality and corruption, both personal and institutional, makes them extremely imperfect messengers for sanctimony, faux or otherwise. But they are still effectively wielding the flag, (or at least the Democratic congress is allowing them to) and until liberals and progressives find a way to thwart this successful tactic, it will continue. At this point the conservatives have little else.
What do you suppose today’s enforcers of proper decorum would say to this?
Americans too often teach their children to despise those who hold unpopular opinions. We teach them to regard as traitors, and hold in aversion and contempt, such as do not shout with the crowd, and so here in our democracy we are cheering a thing which of all things is most foreign to it and out of place – the delivery of our political conscience into somebody else’s keeping. This is patriotism on the Russian plan. — Mark Twain
That was written years before Trump became a political figure. Maybe someday the media will stop falling for it.
Trump has bee basically calling Kamala Harris a dumb whore ever since she became the nominee. Here he is today:
Meanwhile:
Women are insulted by that threat, and a threat it is. Especially from him:
There’s a new kind of gender gap in the 2024 election: Women are voting early in huge numbers, far outpacing men.
It’s giving anxious Democrats — who see female voters as key to a Kamala Harris victory — newfound hope heading into the final week of the campaign.
Across battlegrounds, there is a 10-point gender gap in early voting so far: Women account for roughly 55 percent of the early vote, while men are around 45 percent, according to a POLITICO analysis of early vote data in several key states. The implications for next week’s election results are unclear; among registered Republicans, women are voting early more than men, too. But the high female turnout is encouraging to Democratic strategists, who expected that a surge in Republican turnout would result in more gender parity among early voters.
It’s impossible to know who these women are voting for, including whether Democrats are winning over unaffiliated or moderate Republican women disillusioned with former President Donald Trump. But the gender gap has been one of the defining features of the 2024 campaign, and Harris allies see the lack of a surge of male voters as an encouraging sign.
“In some states women are actually exceeding their vote share from 2020, which is at this point shocking to me,” said Tom Bonier, a Democratic strategist and CEO of the data firm TargetSmart. “I never would have bet on that.”
But sure Trump, keep telling women we’ll have to take your “protection” whether we like it or not. Good strategy. I’m sure it will work.
Oh and tell your minions to keep saying this too:
Charlie Kirk is upset that Republican women may “undermine their husbands” and secretly vote for Harris while telling their husbands they voted for Trump, even though the husband “works his tail off to make sure that she can have a nice life.” pic.twitter.com/3ttLOqROBy
— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) October 31, 2024
Charlie Kirk is upset that Republican women may “undermine their husbands” and secretly vote for Harris while telling their husbands they voted for Trump, even though the husband “works his tail off to make sure that she can have a nice life.”
Keep it up boys. It’s going to go really well for you.
If I took shots like that I’d have to call an ambulance.
As I said, we have the press underfoot at Democratic headquarters in Asheville. We’re damned good at get-out-the-vote operations. (I wrote a guide for it.) The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank came to visit and saw for himself (on a day I wasn’t at HQ):
Forty thousand volunteers have signed up since Harris became the candidate, on top of those who were already volunteering for Biden. The Harris campaign has been running four shifts of daily canvassing here — at 9 a.m., noon, 3 p.m. and 6 p.m. — in which hundreds of volunteers knock on thousands of doors. Last week, campaign volunteers knocked on more than 100,000 doors and made more than 1.8 million phone calls in North Carolina alone. Comparable efforts are underway in every swing state.
Speaking of comparisons.
And the Trump campaign?
Well, it seems to be accomplishing a whole lot of nothing on the ground. As the Republican nominee spent a lot of the campaign hawking sneakers and trading cards to enrich himself and turning the Republican National Committee into a cult of personality, he neglected to build a field operation. At the last minute, the campaign tried to outsource the function to billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, who has poured some $75 million into an astroturf effort, paying canvassers to knock on doors and (possibly illegally) bribing people to register to vote with $1 million giveaways.
But the operation has floundered. A quarter of the door-knocks done by Musk’s paid workers are reportedly suspected of being fake in some battleground states — who knew that $20-per-hour hired guns might not be as dedicated to the cause as passionate volunteers? — and the operation has failed to meet its (relatively low) targets.
Trump-the-scammer is being scammed. Musk too, perhaps. He can land a rocket booster, but can he land a presidential campaign? Doubtful.
Democrats’ turnout machine in North Carolina is humming. Our HQ is a hive of activity, as Milbank saw for himself.
In the Democratic stronghold of Asheville in western North Carolina, I spent a couple of hours last week following Democratic volunteer Bess McDavid as she went door to door. She downloaded her assigned “turf” from the coordinated campaign (a joint operation of the Harris campaign and the state Democratic Party) into her canvassing app, “MiniVAN,” which identified those on her route who had not yet voted. She gets a call before her scheduled canvassing time from a campaign staffer to make sure she hasn’t forgotten, she walks the route ranking each voter as “Strong Harris” or something less, and at the end of the day, she gets another call from a Harris staffer to debrief her.
McDavid stopped at about 35 homes (in a neighborhood largely unscathed by the recent hurricane) during my time with her, handing out information about early voting and urging neighbors to get to the nearest polling place. Of all those who answered the door, only one said she wouldn’t be voting, and another was a Republican who had recently moved in. But the rest required no pushing:
“I’m trying to get my husband to come with me.”
They encountered more like that too. But this is Buncombe County. Of course, they did.
There’s no way to compare this year’s early vote turnout with 2020. Too many variables are different. Republicans are outvoting Democrats for the first time we’ve seen in early voting. But women are outvoting men statewide by 11 points. And those 23 percent of Republicans who voted for Nikki Haley in the NC GOP primary? What will they do? Has Hurricane Helene impacted our operations in the west? Sure. But with no pandemic, absentee-by-mail is off dramatically, as you’d expect, so it’s apples and oranges.
Do I feel good? Yes. Frankly, I feel better than I did going into Election Day 2016. And we know what happened then.
Oh, and Gov. Tim Walz was here again last night. I had a shift.
“Women are voting early in huge numbers, far outpacing men,” Politico reports this week.
Among the reasons why? Pregnant women are dying.
ProPublica has the story of yet another tragic, preventable death. Josseli Barnica was 28:
Josseli Barnica grieved the news as she lay in a Houston hospital bed on Sept. 3, 2021: The sibling she’d dreamt of giving her daughter would not survive this pregnancy.
The fetus was on the verge of coming out, its head pressed against her dilated cervix; she was 17 weeks pregnant and a miscarriage was “in progress,” doctors noted in hospital records. At that point, they should have offered to speed up the delivery or empty her uterus to stave off a deadly infection, more than a dozen medical experts told ProPublica.
But when Barnica’s husband rushed to her side from his job on a construction site, she relayed what she said the medical team had told her: “They had to wait until there was no heartbeat,” he told ProPublica in Spanish. “It would be a crime to give her an abortion.”
For 40 hours, the anguished 28-year-old mother prayed for doctors to help her get home to her daughter; all the while, her uterus remained exposed to bacteria.
Three days after she delivered, Barnica died of an infection.
Barnica’s death was preventable, say a dozen medical experts. The death of her fetus was not.
Barnica is one of at least two Texas women who ProPublica found lost their lives after doctors delayed treating miscarriages, which fall into a gray area under the state’s strict abortion laws that prohibit doctors from ending the heartbeat of a fetus.
Neither had wanted an abortion, but that didn’t matter. Though proponents insist that the laws protect both the life of the fetus and the person carrying it, in practice, doctors have hesitated to provide care under threat of prosecution, prison time and professional ruin.
This is Texas, y’all. Under a Trump/Project 2025 regime, it’s coming to a state near you.
After reviewing the four-page summary, which included the timeline of care noted in hospital records, all agreed that requiring Barnica to wait to deliver until after there was no detectable fetal heartbeat violated professional medical standards because it could allow time for an aggressive infection to take hold. They said there was a good chance she would have survived if she was offered an intervention earlier.
“If this was Massachusetts or Ohio, she would have had that delivery within a couple hours,” said Dr. Susan Mann, a national patient safety expert in obstetric care who teaches at Harvard University.
I’ve long criticized the left’s condescension that conservatives are voting against their best interests. People vote their identities. This year, women across the political divide have reason to vote both. Donald Trump is promising not what he’ll do for your but what he’ll do to you whether you like it or not. What he’s with Dobbs and brags about is killing women. He’s just getting warmed up. Women know it.
Think they’re joking? When the MAGA right is trolling, they’re not joking. They’re telling you exactly who they are.
Across battlegrounds, there is a 10-point gender gap in early voting so far: Women account for roughly 55 percent of the early vote, while men are around 45 percent, according to a POLITICO analysis of early vote data in several key states. The implications for next week’s election results are unclear; among registered Republicans, women are voting early more than men, too. But the high female turnout is encouraging to Democratic strategists, who expected that a surge in Republican turnout would result in more gender parity among early voters.
[…]
“In some states women are actually exceeding their vote share from 2020, which is at this point shocking to me,” said Tom Bonier, a Democratic strategist and CEO of the data firm TargetSmart. “I never would have bet on that.”
A quick tabulation shows women outvoting men in NC by 11 points, FYI.
Yup
I love this alternate version if the “no one has to know who you voted for” campaign:
Now that it’s clear that Elon is “Dark Gothic MAGA” he’s using multiple ways to help Trump return to power. Here’s one I spotted the other day, from Doge Designer (a suspected Musk sock puppet account).
He says Elon Musk’s PAC launched an X Community focused on “exposing voter fraud and election interference” and it asks people to post videos or information about “election interference” or “anything compromising election integrity” in the X Community.
What’s this really about? It’s a place to dump false and unverified stories that can be used to create the appearance of widespread voter fraud. It will be used right after the election to demand that the votes not be certified until the “fraud” is investigated. It’s also about “flooding the zone with sh*t” in social media so that the media, who are all still on Twitter/X, will have to address all the “fraud” that is posted. Especially since the Musk X algorithm will be amplifying them.
I went to X’s “Election Integrity Community” and found a handful of posts. Three were looking to dox someone who delivered ballots. MAGAts are going after a postal worker for doing his job. Just like they went after election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss for doing their jobs.
This line of attack, going after someone dropping off multiple ballots, presuming they are fraudulent, is the same one used by the widely debunked film 2,000 Mules.
For years I have been writing about the FAILURE of social media companies to enforce their own rules and guidelines about threats of violence on their platforms. Legislators in most states have FAILED to pass laws to address the harm from doxing and harassments of public health officials & workers during the height of the pandemic.
So what are people like this ballot delivery guy to do when they start getting death threats and harassed? Report them to the DOJ’s Election Threats Task Force. It was set up in 2021 for this purpose.
It’s good that the Election Threats Task Force exists, but it’s not enough to change the attitude that it’s okay to threaten, dox and harass people online. Because of that attitude I’ve been suggesting the use of civil cases.
The Georgia courts never criminally prosecuted the people who attacked them. but Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss did sue the people who defamed them. They sued them for millions. And they WON all those cases. “News network” OAN, Gateway Pundit, and as of Oct 31 2024 “A moving company representative and lawyers were expected to be given access to Rudy Giuliani’s Manhattan apartment after the former New York City mayor failed to turn over belongings to two former Georgia election workers who won a $148 million defamation judgment against him.”. Freeman and Moss are the winners.
There is also the case of Mark Andrews, who was featured putting five ballots in a drop box in Lawrenceville, an Atlanta suburb, in the debunked voter-fraud film 2,000 Mules. He sued Dinesh D’Souza, Salem Media, Regnery Publishing, True The Vote, and True the Vote’s Catherine Engelbrecht and Gregg Phillips for peddling manufactured lies that the 2020 presidential election was stolen by “ballot mules” engaged in election fraud.
The publisher apologized to Andrews and the Salem Media Group stopped distributing 2,000 Mules. The lawsuit for damages to Andrews is still proceeding. (PDF link)
I’m the kind of Vulcan who wants to know the logical steps for how to do things, & then prepare for the illogical actions of humans who do NOT WANT TO DO those things. I say to people, “This is our 3rd rodeo.” We’ve seen these tricks before. We know how the bull will buck. We know how the orange-faced rodeo clown will try to distract us from our goal.
I’m betting that MAGA people will find the ballot delivery man, dox, harass and threaten him. The Election Threats Task Force will need to be alerted to investigate. They might not be able to successfully prosecute a criminal case, because the laws against harassment and doxing aren’t in every state, but it is their mission to take on these kinds of cases. They have the resources to track down all the connections to his threats, including those who amplified, organized and spread false & unverified information that was used to target him. But as I said, lots of humans in law enforcement do NOT want to investigate & prosecute anything that has to do with WORDS. Because of that history I’ve been teaching people. & groups how to file civil lawsuits against the people who defamed and threaten them.
I hope that concurrently to the Task Force investigation the doxxed, harrrassed & threatened ballot deliverer goes to the group that won the Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss civil defamation case. Or the group that sued Dinesh D’Souza, & The Salem Media group.
He will need resources to sue Elon Musk, his PAC and the people who carried out the threats. But, there are now multiple successful cases that the lawyers can point to as a reason to keep the lawsuits going for the years it will take. People need to know Musk has lost cases. He doesn’t prepare for the lawsuits that will come following his rash actions and that makes vulnerable. He has a grade school level of understanding of the law & thinks his definition of free speech is a get out of jail free card for when he breaks laws about speech that is not protected..
The other reason I want to see civil cases is so the lawyers for the plaintiffs can keep talking about the case in public. Civil lawsuits don’t go into the black hole of the DOJ and come out 19 month later with a press release about the win. The DOJ is TERRIBLE at promoting their successful prosecution of threats to election workers and officials.
For example, did you hear about Brian Ogstad, the guy who got 30 months in prison for threatening Arizona election workers? Of course you didn’t! The DOJ put out a press release, didn’t you read it? It didn’t have any photos of Ogstad though, so the media that DID pick it up showed images of a ballot box or a building. I searched for him and found the photo below from when he “confronted” the Cullman City Council on it’s COVID-19 response. )
Brian Ogstad, a former business professor at Maricopa Community Colleges, sent 18 messages to Maricopa County Election workers between August 2 and August 4, 2022, a majority of which contained threats against the workers’ lives. (Photo taken from X, formerly Twitter)
I wanted to make a short video of the threats Ogstad & others made that was powerful enough to get on Fox News, but it’s hard when the DOJ doesn’t even bother to provide MUG shots of the people they put away for years for their true threats to election workers.
In the past people would ask private entities to enforce their own rules & guidelines about speech, especially on social media where people said things that that were “awful, but lawful.” But Musk ignores rules developed on his own platform to protect the community from harm. The “Election Integrity community” looks like it is violating X’s OWN Civil Integrity rules, which, sadly, no one expects Musk to follow. But based on what I’ve seen so far, the new X community violates multiple state and federal laws. I’m going to dig into it more, but just because Musk is protected under rule 230 of the Telecommunication Act, doesn’t mean he’s above all laws. Stay tuned.
The last time the Dodgers won the World Series, Biden won the White House. It’s an omen.