Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Reasons to be brave

Stuart Stevens, former Republican strategist, called back this week to a post he wrote in The Bulwark in October 2020 “imploring my new Dem friends to finish the campaign with confidence and swagger.” Were he a leading Democrat, his message would be:

We are going to crush Donald Trump and the sickness he represents. There are more of us than there are of them. We are right. They are wrong. This is our moment. This is our destiny. Walk with confidence. Do not falter. Victory will be ours.

I once again make the plea. Arrogance is walking on the field, bragging you will win without having done the work. The Harris-Walz campaign and thousands of volunteers are doing the hard work. You’ve earned it.

No team wins the Superbowl thinking, “We might have a shot.” This is yours. Walk out and take it. You will look back at this moment with quiet pride and satisfaction for the rest of your life, knowing that when America called, you answered.

James Fallows takes Stevens’s cue to offer more Reasons to be Brave.

James Carville is not my go-to for advice because you know what he’s going to say whether he agrees with Democrats’ strategy or critiques it. Nevertheless, Fallows excerpts his New York Times op-ed on why he thinks Kamala Harris will be our first woman president. Mostly, for this:

My final reason is 100 percent emotional. We are constantly told that America is too divided, too hopelessly stricken by tribalism, to grasp the stakes. That is plain wrong.

If the Cheneys and A.O.C. get that the Constitution and our democracy are on the ballot, every true conservative and every true progressive should get it too. A vast majority of Americans are rational, reasonable people of good will. I refuse to believe that the same country that has time and again overcome its mistakes to bend its future toward justice will make the same mistake twice. America overcame Mr. Trump in 2020. I know that we know we are better than this…

A movement that marches with hope is 1,000 times as thunderous as a movement that marches with dread.

Fallows is betting that in the privacy of the voting booth Americans, women especially, will not choose “a felon “a convicted felon, who admires Adolf Hitler, whose mind is obviously deteriorating, whose most senior national-security staffers have warned urgently against him, who scoffs at Constitutional limits, who has no plausible platform, who knows nothing of US history, who brags about the most divisive Court ruling in modern history (Dobbs), who is a pawn of hostile foreign interests,” etc.

Liz Cheney, Harris and Barack Obama are working the “blue wall” states this week. Republicans are clearly unnerved by the chorus of voices from Trump’s first term — Cheney’s especially — warning the country they’ve served not to allow TFG near the White House again:

In all of these locales the message was: Precisely because time is short and the stakes are high and the prospects can be discouraging, it’s time to work even harder, rather than to give up.

Obama made this a standard riff. Each time he mentioned some new outrage from Donald Trump, the crowd would start to boo—and he’d immediately cut them off with: “Don’t boo! VOTE!” It became call-and-response. In her Blue Wall conversations with Harris, Liz Cheney would lay out their policy differences, but then say: We are absolutely together, in the only fight that matters.

Trump’s fascist movement has seduced a large fraction of the country. He’s ignorant, vengeful, and his dictator friends are scary. Exhortations of “we’re better than this!” fly in the face of proof after proof that we are not. And yet.

I keep returning to Dave Neiwert’s German language professor explaining how in the overwhelmingly Christian home of Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation, villagers living adjacent the Nazi death camps each morning, in their tidy Teutonic way, swept away the ash that fell on their windowsills overnight. Like many today, they blinded themselves to what was happening right next door:

“When the camps were liberated and their contents were revealed, they all expressed surprise and horror at what had gone on inside,” he said. “But they all had ash in their feather dusters.”

Yeah, we fought them over there so we wouldn’t have to fight them over here. Well, that hasn’t worked out. But we beat them before. We will do it again.

Stevens yesterday concluded that’s a good bet:

Race is remarkably stable. 47% of country is MAGA or open to MAGA; 53% isn’t.

The goal of Harris-Walz is to coalesce as much of 53% as possible. Today, Liz Cheney and Bernie Sanders are on the same side. That’s not a bad coalition.

The differences in polls are about the percentage of the 53% that Harris is getting. Trump stays stuck at 47%.

If you were for Trump, you were for Trump months ago. You are looking for someone else to be acceptable. He’s functioning as the incumbent.

Harris is winning a larger percentage of R’s than Trump is of D’s. She’s winning independents.

Could Trump win? Sure. But is there any element of the campaign that Trump campaign is performing at a higher level than Harris campaign? Think of it as a sports team match-up. She has better organization, more money, a better message and is performing at a much higher level than Trump. Most candidates are trying not to make mistakes at this stage of the presidential race. Exhaustion is a key factor. But Harris is improving. Maybe because she hasn’t been a candidate for a year and a half.

In campaigns, the question you ask every night is would you rather be your campaign or the other guy? I’d rather be Harris.

The only poll that matters is on Election Night. Remember that. Then gird yourselves for the backlash and sedition that will continue through certification aall the way to January 20. For now, I’m prepared to shed tears on Election Night. Tears of joy.

A woman, 58, called our county Democratic Party headquarters Friday with the other kind. Registered unaffiliated, she was angry that her mailbox is filled with attack flyers from Republicans and no mailers from Democrats. They’d stolen Harris signs from her early voting location. I tried to explain that Trump’s field team is incompetent, that Democrats are dedicating their resources to more effective turnout tactics. But the quavering in her voice revealed the real reason she was angry. She’s terrified.

The military widow was on the edge of sobbing for almost 15 minutes. Her late husband had spent a career serving this country. She, in turn, had spent her marriage supporting his work upholding the values for which the United States claims it stands. Staring down a fascist movement that’s overtaken many, both in the country and in the conservative area of the county where she lives, is more than she can bear. It broke my heart.

By the end, I had her relieved somewhat and chuckling through tears.

Our story is not over. Don’t count out America. It’s never a good bet, Joe Biden reminds us. We have reason to swagger.

Fallows too offered up a message from the 2011 Super Bowl about never being counted out. Because that’s who we are. That’s our story.

Enjoy.

Update: Forgot to convert the Eminem photo from html and it displayed something else. Fixed it.

Bi-coastal sea otters!

Those eyes will charm you! Two adorable female southern sea otters, rescued off the coast of California, have made their New York City debut and will likely steal your heart.

Pumpkin and Clover were rescued at young ages, deemed non-releasable, and cared for as pups by caregivers at other accredited aquariums prior to arriving at the New York Aquarium.

They’re now settling in at the Sea Cliffs exhibit, where visitors can also enjoy exhibits featuring sea lions, harbor seals and penguins.

“We are happy to provide a home for these rescued southern sea otters,” said Dr. Leigh Ann Clayton, director of the New York Aquarium, located in Coney Island, Brooklyn. “These two otters have incredible stories, and we are pleased to see how well they are settling into their new home.”

The New York Aquarium has provided a home for 11 rescued sea otters since 1991.

Southern sea otters (Enhydra lutris nereis), also known as California sea otters, live on the coast of California.

Like all wildlife, they have an important role in the ecological health of the environment, according to the New York Aquarium. As a keystone species in Pacific Ocean near-shore waters, sea otters play an important role in their ocean ecosystem by eating sea urchins, which helps keep the populations in check.

Southern sea otters are listed as a threatened species under the United States Endangered Species Act (ESA) and are protected by the United States Marine Mammal Protection Act (MMPA) and international treaties.

Kamala Harris has raised over a billion dollars, mostly from small donors since July.

The Harris campaign raised $97.2 million in the first half of October alone, while the Trump campaign raised only $16.2 million, after Harris shook up what was previously a more evenly matched cash race (Biden and Trump had raised $284.1 million and $217.2 million in total as of the end of June, respectively).

The Harris Victory Fund—which raises money for both Harris’ campaign and Democratic groups—raised $1.2 billion this election cycle, according to a FEC filing released Thursday.

While Harris had already garnered a fundraising lead over Trump, her donations shot up in September: NBC News first reported that Harris and affiliated committees had passed the $1 billion mark since she entered the race based on her September fundraising, which included $47 million the campaign reported raising in the 24 hours after Harris’ debate against Trump on Sept. 10—her largest one-day haul since entering the race—and lucrative fundraisers in New York City and San Francisco last month that reportedly took in between $27 million and $28 million apiece.

The Harris campaign didn’t publicly report how much it took in in September before federal filings were released over the weekend, with the New York Times reporting it didn’t want to “brag” about its big donations and make voters complacent.

That kind of fundraising does suggest a lot of enthusiasm from regular voters. Trump on the other hand seems to prefer to have his voters send him cash directly by buying the hideous junk he’s selling. But then his campaign, through his super pacs, is doing just fine. He has a lot of enthusiasm too — from his pet billionaires:

Elon Musk has donated $119 million to Trump’s cause
Timothy Mellon has donated $125 million
Miriam Adelson has donated $100 million

Together those three billionaires  have given $344 million.

Just don’t say that they’re buying the election.

That;s all well and good. But here’s a CNN piece from last month:

“She’s a Marxist, communist, fascist, socialist,” Trump said at an Arizona rally on Thursday.

“This is a radical-left, Marxist, communist, fascist,” Trump said while attacking Harris at a news conference on Friday.

This wasn’t new rhetoric. “We have a fascist person running who’s incompetent,” Trump told Virginia residents during a campaign stop in August; at an Arizona rally in August, Trump said the true divide in American politics is between patriots with traditional values and “these far-left fascists led by Harris and her group.”

And Trump has gone beyond saying that electing Harris would mean an end to American democracy. He has said this summer that electing Harris would mean “you’re not going to have a country anymore” and that “we’re not going to have a country left.”

Not to mention him calling his political enemies vermin and saying they’re poisoning the blood of the country as well as a thousand other demeaning insults. He’s made over a thousand threats to punish or prosecute his political enemies.

Johnson and McConnell know very well that they are being unctuous hypocrites. You can just see the smug smirks they must have had while they were drafting that. It’s absurd. But that’s the point.

I would really like to see some follow-through on this if Harris wins. (Needless to say, Trump will make sure it never happens if he does.)

Senate Finance Committee Chair Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and House Committee on Oversight and Accountability Ranking Member Jamie Raskin (D-M.D.) called today on Attorney General Merrick Garland to appoint a special counsel to investigate possible violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) by Jared Kushner, son-in-law and former senior White House advisor to ex-President Donald Trump.

As part of investigations launched last Congress by House and Senate Democrats, Senate investigators have uncovered that since the end of the Trump administration through mid-2024, Kushner’s firm Affinity Partners has received as much as $157 million in fees from foreign clients—including $87 million from the Saudi government—while generating no return on investment, paying zero earnings to investors, and investing only a small fraction of funds it has received from the sovereign wealth funds of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates.

Public reports indicate that Kushner remained politically active throughout that time period, particularly on matters of U.S. foreign policy related to the Middle East. 

“While on the Saudi government’s payroll, Mr. Kushner is simultaneously serving as a political consultant to former President Trump and acting as a shadow diplomat and political advisor to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman and other foreign principals. Despite being engaged in plainly political activities, Mr. Kushner has not made FARA disclosures to DOJ related to the millions of dollars he receives annually by entities owned and controlled by the governments of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar,” Wyden and Raskin wrote. “The scale of these undisclosed foreign payments to Mr. Kushner coupled with the national security implications of his apparent ongoing efforts to sell political influence to the highest foreign bidder are unprecedented and demand action from DOJ.”

FARA is designed to ensure that the American public and lawmakers are made aware of foreign efforts to influence U.S. public opinion and political activities, and requires individuals acting as an “agent of a foreign principal” to register with DOJ. In their letter, Wyden and Raskin cite multiple examples of political activity Kushner engaged in while being paid by the Saudi government and other Gulf states without registering under FARA, in possible violation of federal law:  

Advising the Saudi Crown Prince on U.S. foreign policy; 

Advising former President Trump and his presidential campaign;

Selling geopolitical advisory and political advocacy services to foreign government clients through his private equity fund;

Arranging meetings on foreign policy with the Qatari prime minister on U.S. soil;

Engaging in political fundraising in support of Trump’s campaign; and

Influencing members of Congress on domestic and foreign policy.

He is 100% corrupt and has been messing in foreign policy just as much as Trump with his chats with Bibi every night.

I worry that the Democrats are going to do one of their patented “lets not look in the rerview mirror” thing again and it is completely unacceptable. It’s because they did that going back decades that we are where we are today. If they want the rule of law to be respected and useful, they have to hold these criminals accountable.

We don’t have to think about this right now. But after the election it’s going to be a very live topic and there will be massive pressure to let bygones be bygones to “bind up the nation’s wounds, blah,blah, balh.” No. Just no. Not this time.

Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee sent out a statement this week drawing attention to the fact that the Trump campaign is dragging its feet with respect to the presidential transition process in which both candidates are expected to participate in anticipation of a possible win in November. Generally they start months ahead of time to get a head start on vetting people for staffing the large number of political appointee jobs throughout the administration and coordinating with the current staff to ensure a smooth transition to the new presidency. So far, the Trump team has missed two important deadlines to sign agreements to get it started.

Trump, you may recall, doesn’t respect this process very much, having fired his first transition team right after the election in 2016. And he prevented the Biden team from accessing the process in 2020 while he contested the election dangerously delaying them from getting started. However, one might think it’s a bit odd for them to do that this time since once you sign the papers you have access to money and services that make the whole thing easier.

But it doesn’t take a very stable genius to figure out why they are refusing. According to the NY Times, until all the documents are signed they can avoid the rules limiting private contributions to their transition and certain ethics rules that bar conflicts of interest. The Trump team doesn’t care for such restraints.

Trump has refused to take the usual security briefings, giving the excuse that he doesn’t trust the Biden administration (or the “deep state”) not to leak and blame it on him so at least we don’t have to worry about that. But we can see by this early decision to delay this standard bureaucratic process that our impression that they don’t plan to play by any of the usual rules is correct. The corruption that characterized the first term is already evident.

The Trump transition team is headed by Howard Lutnick, a longtime personal friend of Trump’s of the Wall Street firm Cantor Fitzgerald and Linda McMahon, Trump’s director of the Small Business Administration and former wife and business partner of Vince McMahon who ran World Wrestling Entertainment.

According to the NY Daily News, McMahon has just been accused of “knowingly allowing the grooming, exploitation and sexual abuse of young boys throughout the 1980s and ’90s,” from when she was helping to run the WWE, according to a new lawsuit filed on behalf of five alleged victims. This would probably be cause for her to resign from any other presidential transition but considering his own history of sexual abuse it’s unlikely that Trump would care about such mundane accusations. It’s par for the course in any Trump administration,

Politico reported that Lutnick is causing quite a bit of consternation among Trump loyalists who believe that he’s edging out members for the first administration so that he can place his own people in the White House for his personal benefit. Republicans on Capitol Hill are likewise sounding the alarm due to the fact that he seems to be leveraging his position to lobby on behalf of Canter Fitzgerald among other investments including some very controversial crypto projects.

But Lutnick has a very important ally in Donald Trump Jr who is taking an important role in transition planning. He has said that he expects to have veto power to “block the guys that would be a disaster. He told Axios’ Mike Allen:

I want a veto power to cut out each and every one of those people,” he said, adding that an “advantage” of a second Trump term is that “now we know” who possible administration officials are.

He claims to trust Lutnick implicitly to pick the right people, telling Politico, “there’s nobody more loyal and capable than Howard, which is why my father picked him to help put together the greatest collection of talent to ever serve in the United States government.”

Lutnick claims that any complaints are all sour grapes coming from people associated with Project 2025 who have apparently been excommunicated from Trump’s inner circle for making the former president look bad. But the NY Times reports that there’s a different, much more secretive group that’s been putting together a very similar project, called “The America First Agenda” produced by the America First Policy Institute, a group formed four years ago in the wake of the 2020 election. Unlike Project 2025 this group is working directly with the Trump campaign, preparing for the second term. As it happens one of its directors is Linda McMahon, the co-chair of the Trump transition.

According to the Times, this agenda isn’t as voluminous as the 900 page Project 2025 and doesn’t feature some of the more sensational policies like outlawing pornography and prohibiting the mailing of abortion pills but it’s MAGA all the way. It calls for policies like mandatory ultrasounds for medication abortion and establishing only two legal genders along with a bunch of standard issue conservative movement policies going back decades. They claim to have already drafted nearly 300 executive orders ready for Trump’s signature.

There is one issue they take even further than Project 2025, however. It calls for “the elimination of nearly all civil service protections for federal workers by making them at-will employees .” That aspect of the plan is being implemented by none other than Howard Lutnick who has apparently frozen out all those Project 2025 Trump lackeys who signed on with the wrong team.

So you can see why the campaign doesn’t feel the need to bother with a traditional transition process. They are already vetting hundreds of MAGA faithful and planning to start dramatically expanding executive power the minute Trump takes power. But as with everything else associated with Trump, the whole project appears to be one part grift and one part vengeance with loyalists already backstabbing each other and currying favor with the Dear Leader. Some things never change. 

Salon

Tyler Perry’s analogy

We are a quilt in this country, Tyler Perry told a Kamala Harris rally in Atlanta on Thursday. A nation of immigrants. “We are all shapes, sizes and colors, but we are one.”

Look, unless you are a Native American, you and your people came from somewhere else. And even indigenous people on this continent came from somewhere else. Just over 20,000 years before Donald Trump and his America Firsters arrived. I mean, if we’re claiming privilege based on who was here first? But no. MAGA wants it all.

Perry launched a pointed barb against Donald Trump and his MAGA movement, saying he voted for a candidate who understands that America is a quilt.

“And I could never stand with a candidate who wants America to be a sheet.”

Perry paused to let the dual meaning sink in. The crowd didn’t miss it in Atlanta, Georgia.

Tyler Perry’s quilt vs sheet analogy is probably the line of the night. pic.twitter.com/KAPObHsXsW

— Renee 🪷 (@PettyLupone) October 24, 2024

Biennial Republican celebration

October is normally leaf-looker season here in the Cesspool of Sin. But after Hurricane Helene’s tragic visit last month, not this year. (We can’t drink the water yet and victims are still missing.) But neither rain, nor snow, neither darkness of heart nor climate change-spawned natural disaster will stop MAGAland’s celebration of migrant caravan season.

Republicans celebrate biennially, like clockwork, observes The New Republic’s Greg Sargent. Caravan season may not be an October surprise these days, but it is an October miracle.

Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York is chair of the House Republican Conference. And by Jiminy, she will “stop the madness” by electing a madman.

A Customs and Border Patrol spokesperson tells Newsweek: “We are aware of recent reports of a migrant caravan that has materialized in Southern Mexico, as we hear about several times per year.”

This is pretty shocking:

In the past five weeks, Trump’s operation has spent more than $29 million on TV ads criticizing Vice President Kamala Harris for supporting transgender surgeries for inmates and illegal immigrants in detention, according to data from the media tracking firm AdImpact. That makes the topic, by far, the biggest focal point when it comes to Trump’s ad spending—one of the best barometers of messaging priority there is. By contrast, the campaign has spent $5 million over that same time period on TV ads on the economy, making that topic their fifth-most emphasized.

The campaign’s elevation of transgender issues above the economy constitutes one of the biggest bets in presidential politics. The former rates as among the least important to voters according to public opinion polls; the latter their top concern. The trans-heavy focus also seems to conflict with months of insistence—from the Trump campaign to the pundit class—that the ex-president will win because of inflation and jobs.

Executing such a gambit at this late stage of the campaign represents a major roll of the dice: one that could either reset culture war politics for years to come in presidential races or, if Trump loses, go down as a major, even historic, tactical blunder.

I’m going to guess the latter. I really doubt that most people are going to be persuaded to vote for Trump because of this. The ads are so cruel and stupid it makes me want to throw my coffee cup at the screen:

Trump strategist and pollster John McLaughlin says that this is “asymmetrical political warfare” in that modern campaigns aren’t about policies, they’re about character.

He’s not wrong. But this kind of crude bullying and scapegoating of a very small and vulnerable minority says everything about the character of the people who are doing it. I suspect that even many of those people who are uncomfortable with transgender girls competing in sports aren’t moved by this cruel message. Sure, the racists and the xenophobes and homophobes like it, but they’re already voting for Trump. I can’t imagine this is persuading anyone who isn’t already a hateful MAGA voter.

By the way, out of tens of thousands of prisoners, there is a record of only 2 inmates ever having this surgery (as required under the law.)