They rented the sphere:
I'm insanely jealous of @KamalaHQ for renting the Vegas dome. I've pitched multiple clients on it. Came close once—so, so cool. pic.twitter.com/iXDfVcv3Ba
— Mike Nellis (@MikeNellis) October 29, 2024
Lol. I love it.
Of course Trump has his bedbug-riddled, shithole, hotel there too. But that ain’t much.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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…
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.
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.
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.
Nobody should have to go through middle and high school. It’s a fiery crucible of mean-spirited competitiveness, of who’s “in” and who’s “out,” where only the prettiest, strongest and most ruthless get ahead. Teens struggle to navigate an anxious world of jocks and mean girls driven by changing bodies and proverbial “raging hormones.” For most, it’s not a period to thrive but to survive. Some don’t.
It’s little solace that many of our teenage peers peaked in high school. The pity is that others never matured beyond it. They grew older and no wiser as the same people they were as adolescents. They walk among us seen as leaders for the same qualities that made them popular jerks in high school.
In the prehistory of Hullabaloo, Digby wrote about one such man, our then-president:
He makes decisions based upon the most primitive, unrefined aspects of human nature, most often deciding instinctively in favor of the most combative, aggressive course of action until reality and necessity intrudes and he reverses course and follows the advice of his more sophisticated and rational advisors. It is not just that he takes a simple instinctive gut check after listening to competing views, it’s that his gut seems to always favor a show down over a negotiation even when it is obviously counter productive and dangerous. Unsurprisingly, his instincts are that of an insecure rich boy surrounded by “friends” who manipulate him with sycophantic ego strokes to his manliness — a troubled child whose father is constantly having to bail him out of trouble.
George W. Bush, if you needed prompting. Or Donald John Trump, if prefiguring is your thing.
And in the wake of the financial collapse, Digby opined on the men of Wall Street whose greed and recklessness brought the world to its knees:
I think the frat house, riverboat gambling atmosphere has attracted a certain kind of person — an emotionally stunted, irresponsible, immature sort of fellow who simply refuses to accept that there are any limits to his behavior and who insists on blaming everyone else for his failures. A spoiled, reckless, bully. And all the people supposedly in charge are worried that if we don’t allow these adolescent monsters to have free rein they will destroy us all.
Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally on Sunday paraded hours of such people, before 20,000 other such people, in service of elevating their ideal of adolescence to running the most powerful office on the planet.
“Being president,” Michelle Obama once said, “doesn’t change who you are, it reveals who you are.” Who Donald Trump is (and who his hangers-on are) was on display before the world on Sunday (as I’ve written before):
Who Trump is was nakedly visible for those with eyes to see well before his election. Trump is emotionally stunted, mentally unstable, amoral, deeply insecure, needy, venal, vain and vengeful, a pathological liar and con man who has lived his life on the edge of the law (and outside it) using his father’s fortune to shield himself, and now his former office. The law may or may not finally catch up to him before the fall election.
The question after Sunday is whether Trump being Trump finally caught up to him. The New York Times described the MSG event as “a carnival of grievances, misogyny and racism.” More succinctly, adolescence. Adolescents who want to turn the United States into a continent-sized high school.
Over half of Americans registered to vote in this country are women, per the League of Women Voters. Many issues impacting women are at stake this election, including reproductive freedom. At issue between today and a week from today (Election Day) are whether the “outs” of this country, women especially, are willing to be dragged back not only back to the 18th century but to high school by the kind of jerks who never matured beyond it.
Tucker Carlson, for one, described Trumpian adolescence on Sunday as liberation: “It’s the freedom to say what’s obviously true as a free man and not a slave.” Read: to be an adolescent jerk.
Fast-changing gender roles have young men struggling to find what it means to be masculine, experts told The New Republic‘s Susan Milligan. Trump the marketer sees an audience for what he’s selling, and put on an hours-long display of “figurative crotch-grabbing.” It was Trump’s prime-time promise “to “to put women back in their place and restore men to total supremacy in America.”
Milligan deconstructs Trump’s “masculine” appeal:
“This is either a brilliant move, or this is a ridiculous move that was always doomed to fail,” [pollster Daniel Cassino] said. “With young men, we see a real disillusionment with gender and masculinity. Trump is giving them a solution. It’s not a solution that’s going to work, but he’s giving them someone to blame.”
This theme has been deepening even since Trump walked onto the Republican National Convention stage to the James Brown song “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World.” He has been oddly consumed with non-cis people, calling openly gay CNN anchor Anderson Cooper “Allison Cooper,” falsely claiming kids come back home from school as a different gender, and complaining again on Rogan’s show (whose listenership is 81 percent male and 56 percent 18–34-year-olds) about “men playing in women’s sports.”
This touches a nerve in young men who are wondering what it means to be a man. Harvard’s Institute of Politics, in its youth poll released October 25, found Harris with a 47-point lead among women age 18–29 but just a 17-point lead among men that age.
“He brings the ‘locker room’ talk into the public sphere,” said psychologist Randy Flood, co-founder and director of the Men’s Resource Center of West Michigan and co-author of Mascupathy: Understanding and Healing the Malaise of American Manhood. “This appeals to young men, [who think] he’s really strong, he’s really courageous to say things off the cuff and not worrying about people getting their feelings hurt over it.”
Ironically, Flood says, Trump embodies the very “feminine” qualities he disparages: He’s highly emotional, throws tantrums, and gets his feelings hurt easily.
He’s an adolescent and all we’ve described above. As are the men who love him. How many no-tradwife women will stand for it? In a week or so we’ll know.
It looks like Trump really stepped in it:
Donald Trump has a serious Puerto Rico problem — in Pennsylvania.
Many Puerto Rican voters in the state are furious about racist and demeaning comments delivered at a Trump rally. Some say their dismay is giving Kamala Harris a new opening to win over the state’s Latino voters, particularly nearly half a million Pennsylvanians of Puerto Rican descent.
Evidence of the backlash was immediate on Monday: A nonpartisan Puerto Rican group drafted a letter urging its members to oppose Trump on election day. Other Puerto Rican voters were lighting up WhatsApp chats with reactions to the vulgar display and raising it in morning conversations at their bodegas. Some are planning to protest Trump’s rally Tuesday in Allentown, a majority-Latino city with one of the largest Puerto Rican populations in the state.
And the arena Trump is speaking at is located in the middle of the city’s Puerto Rican neighborhood.
“It’s spreading like wildfire through the community,” said Norberto Dominguez, a precinct captain with the local Democratic party in Allentown, who noted his own family is half Republican and half Democratic voters.
“It’s not the smartest thing to do, to insult people — a large group of voters here in a swing state — and then go to their home asking for votes,” Dominguez said.
The timing couldn’t be worse for Trump. Almost a week before Election Day, he’s pushing to cut into Harris’ margins among Latinos, especially young men who are worried about the economy. But the comments from pro-Trump comedian Tony Hinchcliffe Sunday night, referring to Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage,” has reverberated throughout Pennsylvania and elsewhere, prompting even the former president’s Republican allies to defend the island and denounce the comments. And with the race essentially a toss up, every vote counts — especially in Pennsylvania.
“This was just like a gift from the gods,” said Victor Martinez, an Allentown resident who owns the Spanish language radio station La Mega, noting some Puerto Rican voters in the area have been on the fence about voting at all.
It’s really stupid to diss people you really need to win an election. Really stupid.
I’m not sure why this isn’t a bigger story since it purports to reveal that Trump’s campaign is riven by even more back biting than previously reported. If it’s true it suggests that the campaign is paranoid and dysfunctional:
A Trump campaign worker has been fired after trying to blow the whistle on what she called “grift and greed” by top campaign officials—and an alleged “bugging” plot, the Daily Beast has learned.
The worker, whose identity the Beast is withholding, wrote an explosive email after she was fired detailing her concerns about how the campaign’s most senior leaders, Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles, appear to be funneling millions of dollars to companies which, she alleges, are overcharging Donald Trump. One of them is run by a major donor to Kamala Harris.
“The grift and greed I’ve witnessed makes me sick and I think leadership has been bad stewards of generous donors money,” the campaign worker wrote in an email to a former colleague after she was abruptly fired on Oct. 18. “I‘m 100% on Team Trump—I want the very best for this campaign, but what I’ve witnessed is greedy and wrong.”
Even more sensationally, the woman also wrote in her email that campaign employees became convinced that leadership had installed “a listening device in a cut out hole” to a conference room at campaign headquarters in South Florida to eavesdrop on private conversations by their colleagues.
Sean Dollman, the campaign’s chief financial officer was so worried he was being snooped on that he and others searched the conference room in an attempt to find the surveillance device and block its ability to intercept his conversations, she wrote.
Dollman “has alluded to the fact that he can’t say things for fear of retaliation,” the woman added. “There are napkins stuffed in all the gaps in the conference room now. It seems like they’re willing to go to extremes.”
I would not put it past anyone in Trump’s orbit to do any of this. Grifting and paranoia are fundamental to the Trump ethos. But this comes on the heels of an earlier story that I wrote a few days ago about Trump’s transition team battling with the Project 2025 people. There’s a lot of dissension within those ranks and it’s about people jostling for power and money and it seems that it’s almost to the point that it’s become their main focus. (Maybe it always was.)
This “whistleblower” may just be a crank, we don’t know. But it all sounds very possible, even likely.