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Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Egregious Liars

Published by digby on October 29, 2024

The Trump campaign, of course

Daniel Dale at CNN fact checks this piece of garbage:


On Friday, we published an article about how former President Donald Trump’s campaign has made a habit of deceptively using quotations in television ads attacking Vice President Kamala Harris.

Then, just days later, the campaign released perhaps the most egregious example yet.

A new minute-long ad revives two of the quote distortions from previous Trump ads – and sprinkles in two more for good measure. Here is a fact check.

Cutting out key words about Harris and taxes

The new ad cuts out critical words from a news article about Harris’ tax proposals.

The ad, like a previous Trump ad, features the following on-screen text attributed to an August article in The New York Times: “Harris is seeking to significantly raise taxes.” But as the Times itself has noted, this is a misleading snip. What the Times article actually said was this: “Harris is seeking to significantly raise taxes on the wealthiest Americans and large corporations.”

That’s a big difference.

The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment for this article. For the Friday article on the campaign’s misleading use of quotations, the campaign declined to address any of the specific examples we raised; instead, spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said, “President Trump has the hardest-hitting, most well produced ads in the business.”

Cutting out a key word about Harris and the border

The new ad also deletes a crucial word from a news article about immigration policy.

The ad features the following on-screen text the ad attributes to a CBS News piece in September: “Harris vows to keep Biden’s border.” The text is accompanied by a narrator saying, falsely, that “Kamala was in charge of his open-border policies.”

But what the CBS News article’s headline actually said was this: “Harris vows to keep Biden’s border crackdown: ‘The United States is a sovereign nation.’” The article began: “During a visit to the U.S.-Mexico border on Friday, Vice President Kamala Harris vowed to keep President Biden’s asylum crackdown in place if elected, solidifying Democrats’ embrace of more stringent immigration rules.”

Taking an immigration quote out of context

The ad features on-screen text that says, “welfare for illegals,” attributing those words to an NBC News article from 2018.

But as we noted when a previous Trump ad featured similar on-screen text, that NBC News article did not even mention Biden or Harris, whose administration did not begin until 2021. And the article used the phrase “welfare for illegal immigrants” only in passing – in a totally different context than the Trump ad uses it.

The article criticized occupational licensing rules that were preventing immigrants enrolled in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program from working in certain jobs. It said: “It’s a complete travesty that otherwise qualified individuals can’t get the government’s permission to cut hair. Regardless of one’s position on welfare for illegal immigrants, a license is clearly different from food stamps and other government safety nets.”

Taking a quote about national security out of context

The new ad features giant on-screen text with the words “global war,” attributing them to a July article by the media outlet Axios, as the ad’s narrator says, “Their weakness invited wars.”

But the Axios article did not claim there is “global war” under the Biden administration. The article was headlined, “U.S. not ready for global war, commission warns”; it was about a bipartisan commission’s findings about the country’s preparedness for hypothetical future conflict, not about the present situation.

Luckily most people don’t actually watch TV ads anymore. But online, the comments to this ad are “wow, they’re using Kamala’s own words against her.”

There have always been misleading and hysterical ads in political campaigns and it isn’t confined to the Republicans (although they’ve made a fetish of it.) But with Trump it’s just “anything goes” and there’s very little blowback because everyone knows he’s a pathological liar and that’s just par for the course. I suspect all the other Republicans are watching and learning that the key is to lie so flagrantly that it shocks people and never admit you are wrong.

This isn’t going to go away when Trump finally shuffles off to Mar-a-lago for the last time (whenever that will be.) It’s the new ethosewhich, combined with organized disinformation, is going to make politics a lethal minefield for a long time to come.

The Boomer Whisperer

Published by digby on October 29, 2024

All the boomer armchair travelers watch Rick Steves. If there are any old school GOP voters who are on the fence, this guy may have some influence.

Indecipherable Ballot Initiatives

Published by digby on October 29, 2024

This is something that has driven me crazy for years. Here in California it’s an ongoing problem. Even this year we have a couple of these things on the ballot. Bolts.com took a look at one of them on the Ohio ballot and it’s an incredible story of political gamesmanshipt and special interest influence. It’s a gerrymandering initiative and it could affect all of us:

When Songgu Kwon went to the polls earlier this month, he was eager to help Ohio adopt an independent redistricting commission. The comic book writer and illustrator, who lives near Athens, dislikes the process with which politicians have carved up Ohio into congressional and legislative districts that favor them, enabling Republicans to lock in large majorities. So he was pleased that voting rights groups had placed Issue 1, a proposal meant to create fairer maps, on the Ohio ballot this fall. 

“I’m in support of any measures that make the process more fair to reflect the will of the people, instead of letting the politicians decide how to gerrymander,” says Kwon.

In the voting booth, he reviewed the text in front of him. His ballot read that voting ‘yes’ would set up a panel “required to gerrymander the boundaries of state legislative and congressional districts,” and that it would “repeal constitutional protections against gerrymandering.” 

So Kwon voted ‘no’ on the measure—given what he’d just read, he thought, that had to be the way to signal support for independent redistricting. He’d gone in planning to vote ‘yes,’ but he was thrown off by this language he saw; he guessed that he must have been wrong or missed some recent development. “The language seemed really specific that if you vote ‘yes’, you’re for gerrymandering,” he now recalls in frustration. 

But when he left the polling station and compared notes with his wife, he quickly figured out that he’d made a mistake: He had just voted to preserve the status quo. To bring about the new independent process and remove redistricting from elected officials, as was his intention, he would have had to vote ‘yes.’

Kwon says he got confused by the language that was crafted and placed on the ballot by Republican Ohio officials. The official most directly responsible for this language, Secretary of State Frank LaRose, had a direct hand in drawing the gerrymandered maps that Kwon opposes and that the reform would unwind.

“I didn’t think that they would go so far as to just straight up lie and use a word that means one thing to describe something else,” Kwon told me. “They are using the term gerrymandering to describe an attempt to actually fix the gerrymandering.”

As I said, I’ve been there. And when you add in the misleading ads and social media disinformation you end up feeling like throwing up your hands and not bothering. That’s one reason why a site like Bolts is so helpful. Hardly anyone follows these local and state stories in depth.

Here is the link to their Election Cheat Sheet which is really thorough. Whether you’re looking for some help with your own ballot or just want to know what’s going on around the country, it’s invaluable.

The Horror

Published by digby on October 29, 2024

When the cops came for her Patience Frazier had no idea why:

Earlier that month, Frazier had shared a Facebook post about the son she lost. She had apologized to Abel, saying she was “so scarred n afraid” and “didn’t know what to do,” court records show.

“Why would you be sorry?” asked Jacqueline “Jac” Mitcham, the 31-year-old deputy on Frazier’s doorstep, according to body-camera footage obtained by The Washington Post. “Why would you be sorry, Patience?”

Frazier looked over at the other armed officers standing 10 feet away.

“I’m not allowed to have personal things in my life?” said Frazier, a mother of three. “I had a miscarriage, okay? A miscarriage. Why are you guys here over a f—ing miscarriage?”

Even before Roe v. Wade fell, a broad consensus had emerged across much of the antiabortion movement that women who seek abortions should not be prosecuted. The abortion bans that have taken effect since Roe was overturned, as well as abortion restrictions that existed before the 2022 Supreme Court ruling, do not allow women who terminate their pregnancies to be punished, instead targeting doctors and others who help facilitate abortions.

But those measures don’t tell the full story. In rare and often little-noticed cases, authorities have drawn on other laws to charge women accused of trying to end their pregnancies.Some prosecutors in both red and blue states have used sweeping statutes entirely unrelated to abortion — like child abuse, improper disposal of remains or murder — while others have relied on criminal laws written to protect a fetus.In Nevada, Frazier would eventually be charged with manslaughter under a unique 1911 law that supplements the state’s abortion restrictions, titled “taking drugs to terminate pregnancy.”

As in Frazier’s case, women who are prosecuted are typically accused of trying to end pregnancies without the help of a medical professional — a method frequently chosen because they live far from an abortion clinicand can’t afford to get to one. These prosecutions also often occur when women are thought to be relatively far along in pregnancy, near or past the point when a fetus could potentially survive outside of the womb.

Based on a review of hundreds of documents, hours of body-cam footage and interviews with those involved, a Post investigation of Frazier’s case offers new insight into the messy complexities and intensely personal emotions embedded within such a prosecution. From the start, deep moral questions loomed over a local justice system as it struggled to distinguish a miscarriage from an abortion, a fetus from a baby — culminating in a conviction one judge would ultimately characterize as “a total miscarriage of justice.”

[…]

Out on bail in the months before that day’s sentencing hearing, Frazier had felt like an outcast in her small town of 8,000. Her best friend had stopped talking to her. False details about her case swirled around Facebook. The first time she tried to go to the grocery store, she said, a group of teenage boys chased her down the aisle yelling, “baby killer.”

“Winds of prejudice have arisen,” Frazier’s public defender, Matt Stermitz, wrote in a court filing. “A lynching-like atmosphere hangs heavy over the City of Winnemucca.”

She was sentenced to 30 months to 8 years largely on the basis of the anti-abortion fanatic cop who arrested her. The whole story is aboslutely appalling. I’ve included a gift link (yes, it’s the Washington Post, but the reporters who wrote this story aren’t Jeff Bezos) and I urge you to read the whole thing to see just how screwed up our abortion policies have been for a very long time.

A high profile lawyer came on to the case after she’d been in prison for a year and she was eventually released on the basis of ineffective counsel.

“Patience has been portrayed as an antichrist, but this Judge thinks she is, instead, just a mother caught hopelessly in the web of poverty with a lack of any support system,” Judge Charles McGee wrote in an emotional 40-page decision, describing Frazier’s case as a “total miscarriage of justice.”

The emotional intensity of the abortion issue subtly propelled Frazier’s case from the start, the judge said later in an interview with The Post.

By taking up Frazier’s case, he said, the prosecutor in Winnemucca was able to send a clear message to the antiabortion constituents who elected him: “We don’t tolerate that kind of stuff here in cowboy country.”

Women have been cannon fodder in the culture wars over this issue for a very long time. The frightening thing is that it’s getting even worse in the Trump ban states. We know what these forced birth fanatics have always wanted and they’ve now been exposed.

Let’s just hope that the voters understand the stakes in this election and send a strong, unambiguous message that right wing zealots are not going to be allowed to control the most intimate decisions of people’s personal lives any longer.

Today’s Hopium

Published by digby on October 29, 2024

I don’t actually think that’s hopium. The vibe I’m getting from everything I see and read is that the Harris campaign is feeling cautiously optimistic. That doesn’t mean that it’s in the bag but I think it certainly means they aren’t seeing anything that would lead us to believe that Trump has it in the bag, contrary to what the MAGA crowd is saying.

Again, this feels like 2012 to me. Romney and his people were measuring the drapes at this point. The polls were very close and Karl Rove was strutting around telling everyone that it was over.

On election night, we had this silly scene (which happened to make Megyn Kelly’s career.)

They simply could not believe that Obama had won because the polls were close and they’d convinced themselves that they couldn’t lose. After Trump came along in 2016, many of them convinced themselves that they can never lose.

Obviously, we have no idea if this will go our way. We got schooled in 2016 too, after all. I was certainly convinced that Clinton would win because I couldn’t imagine how anyone could vote for that miscreant. We all know what happened.

But I don’t think we have to assume that every close election is going to go their way either. It didn’t in 2012, 2018, 2020 and 2022. Maybe they’re due. But maybe the real truth is that 2016 was just a fluke because we had a close election with the first woman nominee whom a lot of people didn’t like and a TV celebrity who captured the imagination of a large enough segment of the population to eke out a win. I’m not saying that’s the case but it’s as easily proven as the idea that Trump is a juggernaut who can’t lose — when we know that he can.

Keep the faith.

He Summoned The VP

Published by digby on October 29, 2024

I think JV Last says it all:

So Rogan’s demand was that the sitting vice president detour from her campaign in swing states to come to him in Austin and also that she give him—what?—three hours?

And if she was only willing to give him an hour, and he had to travel to her? Well, then he thought his audience would be better off not hearing from her at all.¹

I am sorry but that is not on the level.

This is just one more area in which Kamala Harris has done—or tried to do—everything that was asked of her in the name of outreach to the great and good American people who get their news from a guy who talks about sucking his own dick.

Really. I know all the bros love him and Kamala wants to try to reach a few of them but it’s ridiculous that she has to give up 3 hours in the final week to fly to Texas to kiss this guy’s feet. Fuck that guy.

Horrible Human Being

Published by digby on October 29, 2024

This is what that toxic monster Marjorie Taylor Greene is referring to:

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Friday shared a personal sexual-assault story during an abortion-rights rally, saying she felt grateful she had the freedom to obtain an abortion if she needed one in that moment.

“I myself, when I was about 22 or 23 years old, was raped while I was living here in New York City,” she told a crowd in New York’s City Union Square Park. “I was completely alone. I felt completely alone. In fact, I felt so alone that I had to take a pregnancy test in a public bathroom in midtown Manhattan.”

“When I sat there waiting for what the result would be, all I could think was thank God I have, at least, a choice,” she continued. “Thank God I could, at least, have the freedom to choose my destiny.”

She added: “I didn’t know then, as I was waiting, that it would come up negative.”

Has thereever been a more loathesome creature?

JDs Bro Bud

Published by digby on October 29, 2024

The latest MAGA scandal happened last night on CNN

These right wingers are just letting their racist freak flags fly now:

“I hope your beeper doesn’t go off,” right-wing personality Ryan Girdusky told Mehdi Hasan after Hasan said he supports Palestinian people.

Last month, hundred of pagers held by suspected Hezbollah operatives across Lebanon exploded in an attack widely believed to have been carried out by Israel. At least 37 people were killed, including two children, and thousands were injured.

“Did you just say I should die?” Hasan asked in disbelief. “Did you just say I should be killed on live TV?”

“No, I did not say that,” Girdusky said.

“You said you hope my beeper doesn’t go off,” Hasan pointed out.

Girdusky asked Hasan if he supports Hamas.

“I said ‘Palestinians,’” Hasan said.

“Then I apologize, I apologize,” Girdusky said. “I thought he said Hamas, I apologize.”

“This is America in 2024,” Hasan said. “Forget the racism. It’s I should die.”

When Girdusky claimed he didn’t say that, Hasan pressed him to explain what he meant with the “beeper” comment.

After a commercial break, Girdusky was gone ― and host Abby Phillip issued an apology to Hasan as well as to CNN viewers.

“We want discussion. We want people who disagree with each other to talk to each other,” she said. “But when you cross the line of a complete lack of civility, that is not going to happen here on this show.”

I’d never heard of that guy. This is him:

He’s also involved in Project 2025. Nice guy…

Rock Steady

Published by Tom Sullivan on October 29, 2024

Don’t buy the disinfo

Buncombe County, NC early voting turnout trends by year.

At Helene Ground Zero (Asheville, N.C.) with a week to go until Election Day, we’ve got news crews from around the globe underfoot. Crews from Japan (multiple), from South Korea, France, The Netherlands, Canada and others I can’t recall.

A seasoned election protection attorney from Boston told me in 2014 he’d never seen an operation like ours. None of that interests these reporters. They want to report on how Helene is depressing turnout in this swing state. Got to keep that horse race racy.

To cut them some slack, they’re here because around the world their viewers are worried what happens to all of us if Donald Trump wins or attempts another coup. North Carolina is not the only state that matters on that, but results here do matter.

Game on!

Please. Do not buy into the hype about how close the presidential election is. Simon Rosenberg warns about how many “red wave” Republican polls are flooding the zone to skew polling averages and to fool observers into thinking the race is closer than it is.

Trump is not the only one who thinks the polls are bullshit. Tom Bonier does too.

And Elon Musk’s simplistic analysis is not worth the platform he’s promoting it on.

Candidates and campaign managers ask what it all means. Little about this election is normal. Republicans typically hold off and vote in an Election Day flood. Not this year. Their orange savior ordered them to vote early and vote early they have. Their turnout exceeds Democratic turnout in N.C. to date. But does it mean anything? Unaffiliated registrants outnumber Ds and Rs (Ds by 7 points). They’ll determine the outcome, but their statewide turnout average to date is a point lower than normal. Twenty-three percent of GOP primary voters in North Carolina voted for Nikki Haley. What will they do now? Grit their teeth and vote Trump? Vote Harris? Stay home? Leave the presidential race blank and vote R down-ballot? I don’t know.

Canvassers ready for launch.

The graph atop this post shows turnout trends in typical years in my county since 2018. Ordinarily, Day 1 of early voting and the last two days are huge. There may or may not be weekend voting, thus the dips. But during the first full week, turnout trends downward. Not this year (yellow line). It’s trended up. And we’re voting every day in our county, 9a-5p until this Saturday (9a-3p).

In the pandemic year of 2020, the volume of absentee-by-mail ballots was enormous. Not so this year. Helene evacuees are not finished. Some will returning to the region late to vote by Election Day. Others will vote absentee from where they’ve relocated. So facile press comparisons of early vote turnout to turnout from 2020 are apples to oranges. Useless, if not misinformation. We may hit 2020 numbers (at least here) when all’s said and done.

As Coach Walz says, keep running all the way through the tape.