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Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Trump Flailing

Published by Tom Sullivan on August 17, 2024

Harris does not compute

It’s like watching Rocky’s rematch with Clubber Lang. Clubber is suffering a flurry of jabs from the fitter, faster, more-skilled Rocky. He’s throwing punches and missing, breathing hard, wearing himself out. In his American flag trunks, Rocky taunts him, “My mother hits harder than that!”

Announcer: “I don’t think Lang knew what hit him yet in this whole first round.”

It’s a joy to watch, says Michael Tomasky in The New Republic, now that Donald Trump is the target and VP Kamala Harris is throwing punches. It’s still the first round, but Trump is tossing around “bananas” accusations and visibly flailing:

But wait. These are just the appetizers! Then he called Harris a “communist” and said the country under her leadership would devolve into a commie dystopia in which “everyone gets health care” (the horror!). And then, the piece de resistance: At the Jewish event, he praised Miriam Adelson, the huge Trump donor and widow of Sheldon Adelson, mentioning that he’d given her a Presidential Medal of Freedom, which he noted was the civilian equivalent of the Congressional Medal of Honor (given to military veterans) but was “actually much better” because people who receive the latter medal are “either in very bad shape because they’ve been hit so many times by bullets, or they’re dead.”

You know how they say in sports that an opponent has gotten inside the other team’s head? Well, Harris and Tim Walz have certainly gotten inside Trump’s head. Walz’s “weird” comment, which Trump has also responded to in a, well, sort of weird way, was just the start. Harris has also smartly refused to take the GOP campaign’s bait, like when Trump attacked her race and J.D. Vance tried to make her childlessness an issue. Meanwhile, the Harris-Walz campaign trolls Trump in its press releases with snarky language I don’t recall Joe Biden’s or Hillary Clinton’s campaigns using. It sends the message, which must drive him nuts, that they don’t fear him at all.

Meanwhile, what else is Harris doing? Starting to unveil an economic package that, so far anyway, looks pretty great. It’s aimed straight at middle-class voters and focused on housing and grocery prices. You can’t get more kitchen table than that. And the bit about going after corporate price gougers is great. It sends a nice populist signal that she’s willing to make some enemies.

Trump is “a hot mess.” He’s facing someone the right hasn’t been trained to hate for 25 years. To his chagrin (horror?), Americans like her. And Gov. Tim Walz from “Minnesota nice” country.

Tomasky concludes, “He can’t understand this, and he simply can’t stand it. Trump’s like a predatory animal in a literal sense. Since he has no conscience, he’s all instinct, and his instinct is to find his prey’s weakness and go after it over and over.” He hasn’t found hers.

More to the point, Trump and his MAGA followers were blindsided by the hand-off to Harris because they cannot fathom Joe Biden (or anyone) giving up power for the good of the country and his party. In the might-make-right MAGA universe, that does not compute.

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Friday Night Soother

Published by digby on August 16, 2024

Baby penguin!

There are few certainties in life, but alongside death, taxes, and the arrival of hot weather in July, at least one other thing is inarguable: baby penguins are almost impossibly cute. 

Guests visiting the Tennessee Aquarium during the Fourth of July holiday can join Aquarium staffers in excitedly welcoming the newest addition to the Penguins’ Rock gallery — a fluffy (and shockingly fast-growing) Macaroni Penguin chick.

The chick hatched on June 2 from an egg laid in late April by parents Bacon and Merlin. This baby bird is the first offspring ever produced by Bacon, who hatched in 2015 to two other Aquarium penguins, Hercules and Little Debbie. Though Little Debbie now lives at another facility, the newest chick’s grandsire, Hercules, still calls Penguins’ Rock home. With this latest arrival, the Aquarium is home for the first time ever to three generations of Macaroni Penguins. 

The new chick is the Aquarium’s first hatchling since the 2021 arrival of Carla, a Gentoo Penguin. This latest baby is the first Macaroni Penguin chick since Pedro hatched in 2019. The Aquarium’s colony now has 23 birds: 9 Macaronis and 14 Gentoos.

The Aquarium’s keen-eyed penguin care team first noticed the egg pipping — that’s the cracking that occurs when a baby bird begins to chip away at its shell from the inside — on a Friday afternoon when they spotted a dime-sized hole with a tiny beak moving around inside. The new chick seemed to get cold feet on Saturday with little progress. However, by Sunday morning, the chick had fully emerged with an unusual level of precision that surprised even its veteran caregivers.

“It seems like it has a little type A personality,” says Assistant Curator of Forests Loribeth Lee. “It cracked the egg perfectly, straight down the middle. We’ve never really seen that.” 

When Lee discovered the emerged hatchling, it was sitting in the center of its stacked shell, which was broken neatly around the side in an almost perfect circle.

The chick’s precocious attitude didn’t end there. So far, it has displayed confidence and fearlessness both in its nest and around caregivers when briefly removed for tri-weekly weigh-ins to monitor its health and rate of growth.

“We’ve seen it pick up rocks multiple times in the nest, which is very impressive that it can do that at its size,” Lee says. “It’s been throwing them around, so it’s a strong, tough little bird.”

Speaking of size, the chick has been growing at an astronomical rate, thanks largely to its parents’ diligence. A day after hatching, it weighed just 145 grams (5.1 ounces, or a little less than an iPhone 15). Three weeks later, it had ballooned to a whopping 1,592 grams (3.5 pounds). To put that in perspective, that’s the same as a 7-pound human infant weighing 77 pounds before it was a month old.  

Lee credits those gains to the skillful parentage of Bacon and Merlin, who has fathered several previous chicks and kept the chick well fed. A penguin growing quickly isn’t all that unusual, though. Macaroni Penguin chicks must mature quickly to be ready for the harsh winters in their native Antarctic climates, where they reach adult size in just two and a half months.

Via Zooborns

The Stupid, It Burns

Published by digby on August 16, 2024

The innocent exchange led to a total Republican meltdown.

“Why is Kamala the expert on tacos?” asked Fox & Friends co-host Will Cain. “Did she say white guy tacos are tuna in mayonnaise?”

Conservative provocateur Mike Cernovich took it further, accusing Walz of lying about skipping seasoning. “Tim Walz is such a compulsive liar, and deployment dodger, that I decided to see if he lied about not seasoning his food.”

Cernovich pointed to a 2016 award-winning recipe by the Minnesota governor for “Turkey Taco Tot Hotdish,” which included the spices paprika, chili powder, onion powder, and garlic powder.  “Tim Walz is such a compulsive liar, and deployment dodger, that I decided to see if he lied about not seasoning his food.”

Apparently, Cernovich, who is s moron in most ways, thinks that a “tot hot dish” is spicy. Here is an example of a taco tot hot dish:

  • 1(2 ounce) package taco seasoning
  • 1⁄4cup water
  • 1⁄2medium onion, diced
  • 1(10 ounce) can whole kernel corn
  • 1(12 ounce) jar mild salsa
  • 8 oz mild cheddar shredded
  • 1⁄2lb tater tots
  • Brown ground beef and onion together in skillet.
  • drain.
  • Add taco seasoning and water and simmer according to package directions.
  • In a 13×9 casserole dish spread taco meat on bottom of pan.
  • Layer the corn on top of it.
  • Then place tater tots in a single layer on top of corn.
  • Spread the salsa and cheese on top of everything.
  • Cook in preheated oven for about one hour.

That’s “white guy” mexican food. So, by the way, is most of what they serve at Taco Bell if you don’t add the hot salsa.

Even Senator Ted Cruz got in on the drama, writing, “hispanics are not tacos.” Unclear what he meant there. 

It seems like Republicans will find anything to get mad about if it comes from Harris and Walz—maybe they’ll eventually launch an investigation on what actually goes into “white guy tacos.”

Calling James Comer.(I’ll bet he’s had a few tot hot dishes in his day…)

Update:

Some Polling Notes

Published by digby on August 16, 2024

Harris is now leading in most of the national polls and it appears the swing states are going her way as well. Aaron Blake isolated a few pertinent points worth noting:

Democrats’ big enthusiasm bump — and edge

It’s been evident for a while that Democrats have been injected with huge amounts of enthusiasm since Harris replaced President Joe Biden on the ticket. Call it “vibes” or something else; it’s real. Polls this week reflect that.

While a Monmouth University poll from June showed just 46 percent of Democrats said they were enthusiastic about a Trump-Biden rematch, that number has nearly doubled to 85 percent for the Trump-Harris race. Democrats’ enthusiasm leapfrogged Republicans, whose excitement stayed steady at 71 percent.

In other words, Democrats went from a 25-point enthusiasm deficit to a 14-point advantage, at least on this specific question. (Other polls have tested enthusiasm to vote, which is a somewhat different question, and the two parties have been closer.)

Also notable from the Monmouth poll: Nearly 9 in 10 Democrats say they’re optimistic about the election, compared with about three-quarters of Republicans.And an AP-NORC poll this week showed that 63 percent of Democrats are excited about a potential Harris administration, compared with 57 percent of Republicans for another Trump administration.

Democrats could be getting a Senate bump, too

A big question has been how much Harris’s momentum might filter down to other Democrats this election year — particularly with both the House and Senate very much in play. It wasn’t guaranteed it would help, especially given that Senate Democrats were already overperforming Biden.

Well, we got a big new set of Senate polls from the Cook Political Report on Thursday, and they suggest the Democrats got a significant bump there, too. Democrats improved their margins by an average of four points across five key Senate races: Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. They now lead in each race by at least seven points.

Democrats also flipped the generic ballot — where people are asked to choose between a generic Republican and a generic Democrat — in two other states that don’t feature a 2024 Senate race: Georgia and North Carolina. In total, Democrats actually gained more down ballot than they did in the presidential race in every state except Wisconsin.

We don’t have a ton of other new polls, but the ones we have do suggest some of these races have moved slightly in Democrats’ direction in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. […]

The ‘double-haters’ break for Harris

My colleague Philip Bump on Wednesday broke down the evolving picture with “double-haters,” or those who dislike both major-party candidates.

The top finding from the Monmouth poll is that they are a shrinking group, declining by about half since Harris’s entry into the race. While about 1 in 5 voters were double-haters before — a historically high number — it’s now about 1 in 10.

Perhaps more important is the big reason for that decline: A lot of them like Harris. And they’re now ready to vote for her.Among voters who still dislike both Trump and Biden, 53 percent say they’re voting for Harris, while just 11 percent say they’re voting for Trump.Previously, those double-haters had been more evenly split between Trump and Biden. Harris winning them over is a big boost for her.

He also observes that JD Vance is very unpopular (maybe because he’s so damned weird) and that other states may be coming into play, notably North Carolina and Florida. Who knows?

I highly recommend this piece by John Marshall on the state of polling in 2024. It’s hard to know what to think about them but Marshall’s analysis is excellent and rings true to me.

Who You Calling Weird?

Published by digby on August 16, 2024

Highlights of the “press conference”

Trump is apparently afraid of campaigning so now he’s just calling “press conferences” and rambling for an hour or so and then taking a handful of questions which he doesn’t really answer.

Speaking of intelligence…

He just can’t stop trashing the military. Here he is saying that giving the Presidential Medal of Freedom to his top donor Miriam Adelman is better than the medal of honor because only broken down or dead soldiers get that one.

“They’re either in very bad shape because they’ve been hit so many times by bullets or they’re dead. She gets it and she’s a healthy beautiful woman.”

Project 2025 Undercover

Published by digby on August 16, 2024

Check this out:

NEW We went undercover in Project 2025. Our investigation uncovered details of the secretive second phase of Project 2025 being led by a Trump insider, with plans to feed hundreds of highly-confidential battle plans directly into the Trump transition team. Watch here.

I wrote about Russell Vought a while back. He’s quite the piece of work. I can’t imagine that Trump is happy about this one bit — assuming he is aware of anything at this point but his grievance that Joe Biden unfairly dropped out and made it harder for him to win.

The 900 page Project 2025 is a shocking manifesto. But it’s always been this secret transition and first hundred days plan by Vought that we needed to see. That and the data base of hacks and henchmen they’ve been building to stack the administration are the two aspects of the project that are the most threatening because Trump himself is so addled he won’t have a clue that it’s happened until it’s already done. (Not that he would be against it if he did …)

Kamala Gets Aggressive

Published by Tom Sullivan on August 16, 2024

Harris unveils populist economic plans

Ahead of her planned speech today in Raleigh, North Carolina, Vice President Kamala Harris announced a dozen proposed policies for “lowering costs for American families” (Washington Post):

The most striking proposals were for the elimination of medical debt for millions of Americans; the “first-ever” ban on price gouging for groceries and food; a cap on prescription drug costs; a $25,000 subsidy for first-time home buyers; and a child tax credit that would provide $6,000 per child to families for the first year of a baby’s life.

The last item followed a suggestion earlier this month from JD Vance, the GOP vice-presidential nominee, that the credit be raised from $2,000 per child to $5,000. Harris is also calling for restoring the Biden administration’s child tax credit that expired at the end of 2021, which raised the benefit for most families from $2,000 per child to $3,000.

The flurry of policy positions — just days before the Democratic National Convention in Chicago — represented the clearest articulation yet of how Harris, who has only had a relatively brief time on the national stage, would handle economic policy if elected this fall. Harris has thus far surrounded herself with many former aides to Biden, and her team had made some overtures to business leaders that they hoped reflected a more centrist approach. But the policy positions she embraced Friday suggest she will continue, if not deepen, the party’s transformation under Biden, who pushed for more aggressive government intervention in the economy on industrial, labor and antitrust policies.

Donald Trump, Republicans, and their industrialist backers will come after Harris with torches and pitchforks. Financing details for the policies were not immediately available, but Harris and her party have made a commitment to a “pro working-family agenda,” The Post adds. Their calculation is that victory in November lies down that path.

“Vice President Harris faces a dilemma: On the one hand, America is on a fiscally unsustainable path, and if we’re going to embark on some of the more ambitious programs she’d like to pursue we need more revenue,” said Daniel Hemel, a tax policy expert at the New York University School of Law. “On the other hand, democracy is in peril, and that crisis feels — and is — more imminent than the fiscal crisis, and I think she’s made the correct calculus that sacrificing on fiscal policy for a few hundred thousand middle-class voters in the battleground states is worth it.”

A butter knife to a gunfight?

Policy proposals signal to serious people that Harris is a serious presidential candidate. But Donald Trump operates in a different universe altogether, one of lies and insults. Dana Milbank catalogues a host of Trump’s insults in his Washington Post column this morning in addition to Trump anecdotes that are simply “bananas.” Less-MAGA Republicans are begging Trump to stop. But insults are all he has.

Trump’s disastrous pick for vice president, J.D. Vance, dismissed concerns about a campaign built on insults and “a whole bunch of nonsense.” Vance thinks giving offense is just fine (via Talking Points Memo_:

“The reason people love him is because he is his own man, he is unfiltered and he lets the American people see who he is,” Vance said during a campaign rally in Byron Center, Michigan. “We’d much rather have an American president who is who he is, who’s willing to offend us, who’s willing to tell us the truth, who isn’t a fake who hides behind a teleprompter but lets the American people see exactly who he is.”

So let’s hope Harris is not bringing a policy butter knife to a gunfight. A substantial number of Americans are happy to live in an authoritarian Trumpistan. They are willing to risk themselves and the western alliance to bring it about.

They have abandoned democratic principles to establish a white, Christian nationalist homeland where the land of the free once stood. “Truth, justice, and the American way” is not the 1950s to which they hope to return. They condemn liberal aspirations for equality of opportunity as a demand for equality of outcomes while backing a convict whose foot soldiers are at work rigging election outcomes.

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For The Win, 5th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV planning guide at ForTheWin.us.

With Apologies For 2016

Published by Tom Sullivan on August 16, 2024

H.L. Mencken was right

Translation: Medal of Honor Winners are suckers.

I still remember reassuring volunteers in October 2016 that despite Trump signs dotting the highways and byways outside the city that there was no way Americans were crazy enough to elect the orange-hued reality star over Hillary Clinton, the former senator and secretary of state. But they did.

He’s not just unfit. He’s not just amoral. He’s a walking repudiation of every aspiration the Founders had for this country.

Behold:

“This is shocking but not surprising because of the pattern,” said MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” co-host Willie Geist. “This is not a one-off, this is the way he thinks about people who serve the country in uniform.” Trump infamously mocked Sen. John McCain for being a POW.

Via Raw Story:

“Yeah, there’s something really warped inside of him, there really is,” Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson added. “Just something — I guess the word weird is overused, but all that we just played is weird.”

“And it is just appalling that he would speak of America’s heroes that way,” he continued. “I mean, the heroes, many who made the ultimate sacrifice for the country, and he simply does not get it. He doesn’t understand. There’s a connection there that’s not being made, and, you know, you saw it where for years he was president and, boy, if he ever became president again, I would really worry about this country because of that emptiness, that lack inside of him, that lack of empathy, that lack of patriotism. It’s just not there. It’s not there.”

Jim LaPorta of CBS News:

Equivalent means equal in value. The two medals are not comparable other than being the highest award in their fields. A medal being “much better” than the other is a matter of opinion. The Medal of Honor is for extraordinary heroism in the face of great danger on battlefields. The Presidential Medal of Freedom is given for significant achievements in the arts, public service, science and other fields. Recipients chosen often reflect a president’s political and personal interests per CRS.

David Simon of “The Wire” fame:

He is speaking of Miriam Adelson, who charged two German machine gun nests, was wounded sixteen times but managed to pull five other wounded members of a platoon to safety before collapsing herself.

Wait, I just checked the award citation and Ms. Adelson received the Medal of Freedom for donating several million dollars to Mr. Trump’s political campaigns.

Americans elected this soulless grifter to lead them. We actually did that. And incredibly, a plurality of us want to do it again. If we do, we deserve the world’s astonished contempt.

There are people living among us who, once burned by a hot stove, cheerfully stick their hands on it again. Oh, and people like Talks to the Sky.

Do everything you can to make sure they are the ones disappointed on November 5.

Compare and contrast:

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Latinos Come Home

Published by digby on August 15, 2024

Good news from Pennsylvania:

Recent polling shows Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris is beating Republican nominee Donald Trump among Pennsylvania voters — a brand new poll by Quinnipiac University, for example, puts her four points ahead. That represents a significant change from when President Joe Biden was still at the top of the ticket.

However, a poll by TelevisaUnivision’s Strategy & Insights provided to WHYY News prior to its publication reveals that shift may have been particularly significant among Hispanic voters in the state. Whereas 39% of Hispanic voters in the Commonwealth said they definitely planned to vote for Biden just before his announcement, 49% now say the same about Harris.

That checks out, according to Sarina Torres, 23, of Allentown.

“I think a lot of that shift comes from Latina voters,” Torres, a college student and movement politics organizer, told WHYY News. “It’s more exciting to vote for a woman of color.”

The TelevisaUnivision poll provides a rare look into voter reactions to Biden being replaced by Harris atop the Democratic ticket. The poll was already being conducted when Biden made his announcement, and researchers were able to record the immediate change in public opinion. Trump saw a marginal gain in votes in his head-to-head contest against the Democratic nominee.

Kathy Whitlock, VP of Strategy & Insights at TelevisaUnivision, warned that it’s still too early to make concrete predictions, but said the poll also gives key insights into a growing voting bloc that may impact the results in what is expected to be a close race in Pennsylvania.

“In the past, it was a virtual tie and this breathed new blood into this cycle,” she said.

Fingers crossed.