Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

There are some intriguing polls about Florida the past few days. I’m not suggesting that it’s in play. But it’s certainly not as red as it has been.

Vice President Kamala Harris has erased half of former President Donald Trump’s lead in Florida, a statewide poll released Wednesday found.

The Florida Atlantic University poll shows Trump leading Harris 50% to 47% among likely voters in the state. Just 2% said they were undecided and 1% said they’d vote for another candidate.

The 3-point Trump advantage is half the lead he had in June, the last time FAU polled in the state. Trump had a 6-point advantage among likely voters, 49% to 43%, when President Joe Biden was the Democratic candidate two months ago. The execrable Ric Scott is only up by 4 points and Miami

Harris is actually up in Miami. The execrable Ric Scott is only ahead by 4 points.

The terrific Bolts.com has a fascinating story today about one of the prosecutors DeSantis suspended a couple of years ago because he was using prosecutorial discretion that DeSantis didn’t care for:

Andrew Warren is running to win back his old job as Tampa’s top prosecutor. Since the Democrat joined the race in April, he has released campaign videos, basked in endorsements, and raised hundreds of thousands of dollars—all the staples of a typical campaign.

But this campaign is anything but typical. Two years ago, Warren was abruptly suspended from his office by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who said he had neglected his duties because of statements such as a promise to not prosecute abortion cases. DeSantis summarily replaced him with Susan Lopez, a Republican who immediately reversed some of Warren’s signature policies, including his effort to stop the aggressive prosecutions of Black cyclists and pedestrians in Hillsborough County. 

Voters will now weigh in for the first time since DeSantis ousted the state attorney they elected. Lopez is running for a full term, but it’s Warren who won the office the last two times it was on the ballot, in 2016 and 2020. If he wins the Democratic nomination next week, he’ll face Lopez, who is running unopposed in the GOP primary, in November. 

The circumstances of Warren’s removal loom large over his third run. Hillsborough County has leaned Democratic in the past, but if Warren wins, DeSantis could try suspending him again. Warren filed lawsuits arguing that DeSantis exceeded his authority when he removed him the first time, and a federal appeals court earlier this year kept his case alive. Some experts say it’d be harder for the governor to suspend him again in the future, but these legal questions remain unsettled.

“Every Democratic candidate in Florida has to campaign under the threat of DeSantis removing them solely because they’re a Democrat, solely for political reasons,” Warren told Bolts.

Last year, DeSantis also suspended the elected Democratic prosecutor of Orlando, Monique Worrell, whose sentencing practices he disagreed with. He had already removed Broward County’s Democratic sheriff, replacing him with a new sheriff who backtracked on a local reform.  

Lopez, too, rolled back Warren’s reforms within just days of replacing him. On Aug. 8, 2022, just four days after her appointment, she sent a memo to her staff announcing changes to the office’s policies. Among them: She lifted Warren’s restrictions on prosecuting people when their charges stemmed from bike and pedestrian stops conducted by the Tampa police.

“Effective immediately, any policy my predecessor put in place that called for presumptive non-enforcement of the laws of Florida is immediately rescinded. This includes the bike stop and pedestrian stop policy,” Lopez said in her memo. DeSantis had named this reform among his reasons for removing Waren, saying that it demonstrates a “fundamentally flawed and lawless understanding of his duties as a state attorney.”

Warren had set up his policy in the wake of a 2015 Tampa Bay Times investigation that revealed that the majority of cyclists stopped by the Tampa police were Black. The story sparked an investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice that reached the same conclusion in 2016: Of 9,121 bicycle stops made by Tampa police over a 20-month period, 73 percent of those involved Black cyclists. Tampa’s population is 26 percent Black. 

 

Read on for more. It’s a good story. I hope he wins. DeSantis’ bully boy tactics need to be repudiated. Hard.

The gravedigger of democracy has concerns

The master manipulator who put his thumb on the scales to take advantage of the undemocratic electoral college (which results in a GOP advantage even when they are rejected by a majority of the voters) to install two hyper-partisan wingnut Supreme Court justices says that if the Democrats win they’re going to right his wrongs.

Boo fucking hoo:

The day after Minnesota Governor Tim Walz was announced as Kamala Harris’s choice for vice president, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told a crowd of lawmakers in Louisville, Kentucky, that a Harris administration would spell certain doom for the Republican Party.

“Let’s assume our worst nightmare—the Democrats went to the White House, the House, the Senate,” McConnell said during his keynote speech at the National Conference of State Legislators Legislative Summit last week, according to Spectrum News. “The first thing they’ll do is get rid of the [Senate] filibuster. Second, you’ll have two new states: D.C., Puerto Rico. That’s four new Democratic senators in perpetuity.”

Puerto Rico will vote on a nonbinding ballot measure in November to determine the territory’s future political status, with voters being given three options, all of which would change its official status: statehood, independence, or independence with free association. It will be the seventh time that the island’s 3.2 million people vote to define their political relationship with the United States. Harris has not yet taken an official stance on the vote.

McConnell insisted that next on the historically moderate Democrat’s agenda would be to place as many liberal justices on the Supreme Court as possible, noting that doing so would be “unconstitutional”—while apparently ignoring the fact that that’s exactly what Donald Trump did to achieve SCOTUS’s current conservative supermajority.

“If they get those two new states and pack the Supreme Court, they’ll get what they want,” McConnell said.

There’s nothing unconstitutional about any of that. Consider how the right got “North and South” Dakotas and Carolinas to pad their electoral college advantage. And, I’m sorry, there is ample precedent for expanding the Supreme Court, especially in a time when the current court routinely says, “what are these precedents you speak of?” To hell with that.

I’ll be shocked if the Democrats actually do any of this. But I'[d be thrilled if they do.

Yet another moment from the X horror:

Donald Trump has apparently considered the possibility that he might lose the 2024 election—and, if he does, his plans for the future involve a one-way ticket to Venezuela.

Speaking to Elon Musk on Monday, the former president told the X owner, “If something happens with this election, which would be a horror show, we’ll meet the next time in Venezuela, because it’ll be a far safer place to meet than our country. So you and I will go and we’ll have a meeting and dinner in Venezuela.”

“Their crime rate is coming down and our crime rate is going through the roof,” Trump continued. “And it’s so simple. And you haven’t seen anything yet, because these people have come into our country and they’re just getting acclimated.” He added that Venezuela has cleared out “about 70% of their really bad people,” suggesting that said “really bad people” are now in the US. “Their jails are about 50%, put into the United States,” he said. “Same with other countries, over 30%. Some are at 50%. They’re all different. But the bottom line is they’re all going to be 100%. Why wouldn’t you put 100% of it?”

Who’s going to tell him?

He’s right that there has been a massive exodus of Venezuelans escaping the authoritarian rule of Maduro. But he’s obviously clueless about the reasons or what’s happening there today as the nation rises up in anger at the recent stolen election (of which he no doubt approves…)

But sure, I think he should emigrate to Venezuela. And he can take Musk with him.

I know you know that, but this is one of the stupidest things he’s ever said

“The biggest threat is not global warming, where the ocean’s going to rise one, one-eighth of an inch over the next 400 years. The big — and you’ll have more oceanfront property, right?”

Donald Trump

Trump said that speaking to Elon Musk in his X “interview” the other day. Philip Bump breaks it down:

Trump often dismisses the threat posed by rising sea levels by suggesting that they are minor or insignificant. Speaking to Musk, it was an eighth of an inch over 400 years; how could anyone be worried about that?

But that is nonsense.

“Global mean sea level increased by 0.20 (0.15 to 0.25) m between 1901 and 2018,” the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change wrote last year. “The average rate of sea level rise was 1.3 (0.6 to 2.1) mm yr between 1901 and 1971, increasing to 1.9 (0.8 to 2.9) mm yr between 1971 and 2006, and further increasing to 3.7 (3.2 to 4.2) mm yr between 2006 and 2018 (high confidence).”

Putting that in American, sea levels rose nearly eight inches from 1901 to 2018. From 1901 to 1971, the rise occurred at a rate of about 0.05 inches a year. That increased to 0.07 inches until 2006 and since has jumped to 0.15 inches. In other words, sea levels are rising at more than an eighth of an inch annually, not over the next four centuries.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration explains that “about 2 feet (0.6 meters) of sea level rise along the U.S. coastline is increasingly likely between 2020 and 2100 because of emissions to date. Failing to curb future emissions could cause an additional 1.5 – 5 feet (0.5 – 1.5 meters) of rise for a total of 3.5 – 7 feet (1.1 – 2.1 meters) by the end of this century.”

The “emissions” being referenced, of course, are greenhouse gas emissions, releases of carbon dioxide, methane and other gases that help trap heat in the atmosphere. The rise in the rate of increase in sea levels reflects that trapped heat in two ways. First, warmer temperatures accelerate the melting of glaciers and other ice that then flows into oceans. Second, warmer temperatures increase ocean temperatures, and warmer water occupies more volume than colder water.

As shown in this NOAA graph:

But what about Trump’s claim that we will just have more oceanfront property which will be fabulous? Obviously not

Believe it or not, Trump is wrong again. If you have a defined area of land that’s surrounded by water, an increase in the height of the water means that it covers more land. The result is less land touching the ocean, not more.

There are 95,471 miles of shoreline in the United States, including outlining American territories. Imagine, for the sake of simplicity, that’s a big circle, as above. The 95,471 miles would be its circumference, the distance around its outside edge. Its diameter — its width across the middle — would be about 504,086,880 feet. Now slice off two feet at each end, marking the anticipated sea-level rise by 2100. (A rise of two feet in sea level doesn’t necessarily mean that it eats into the shore two feet, but this is just an example.) Now the circumference (the diameter times pi) is 504,086,867 feet. About 13 fewer feet of shoreline!

It’s so obvious, you really don’t need any kind of expertise or math to know this. And yet, the alleged stable genius said it and the alleged techno genius didn’t say a word.

Remember the 10 year old girl who had to travel to Indiana for an abortion? And they tried to prosecute the doctor who helped her? Well:

 Indiana’s attorney general has dropped a lawsuit that accused the state’s largest hospital system of violating patient privacy laws when a doctor told a newspaper that a 10-year-old Ohio girl had traveled to Indiana for an abortion.

A federal judge last week approved Attorney General Todd Rokita’s request to dismiss his lawsuit, which the Republican had filed last year against Indiana University Health and IU Healthcare Associates, The Indianapolis Star reported.

The suit accused the hospital system of violating HIPAA, the federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, and a state law, for not protecting patient information in the case of a 10-year-old rape victim who traveled to Indiana to receive abortion drugs.

Dr. Caitlin Bernard ‘s attorneys later that she shared no personally identifiable information about the girl, and no such details were reported in the Star’s story on July 1, 2022, but it became a flashpoint in the abortion debate days after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade that June.

A federal judge in Indianapolis initially granted IU Health’s motion to dismiss the case in June, prompting Rokita to file an amended complaint in July. His office then sought the case’s dismissal last week, writing that the state’s initial complaints have been satisfied by actions IU Health has taken since The Star first reported on the girl’s case.

These actions include continuing to train employees not to talk about patients in public spaces and informing employees that if they are contacted by a reporter, they must inform the public relations or communications departments before responding, Rokita’s dismissal motion said.

“We are pleased the information this office sought over two years ago has finally been provided and the necessary steps have been taken to accurately and consistently train their workforce to protect patients and their health care workers,” Rokita said Monday in a statement.

However, IU Health said it has always had such practices in place, and it’s disheartened by the claim that these were corrective actions made in response to Rokita’s suit.

[…]

Indiana’s medical licensing board reprimanded Bernard in May 2023, saying she didn’t abide by privacy laws by talking publicly about the girl’s treatment.

It was far short of the medical license suspension Rokita’s office sought, and IU Health’s own internal investigation found that Bernard did not violate privacy laws.

The Indiana Supreme Court, meanwhile, reprimanded Rokita and fined him $250 for making statements about Bernard that violated rules of professional conduct for attorneys.

Rokita is a terrible person. But at least he seems to be smart enough to have figured out hat he wasn’t going to win this one. Nonetheless, they did manage to sully the reputation of this compassionate doctor who helped this poor child which is grotesque and disgusting. But that’s just how they roll.

BY the way, Indiana may still be a throwback state but there are others that are fighting this at the ballot box. Here are two more:
Missouri and Arizona join six states that are voting on abortion rights in the upcoming presidential election.

On Tuesday, Missouri state officials greenlit a ballot initiative, allowing residents to determine the fate of the state’s total abortion ban. On Monday, Arizona officials said they received enough petition signatures to put an abortion ballot measure before voters this November.

The ballot measures in question allow voters to decide if the right to an abortion should be enshrined in the states’ constitutions.

More than two years after Roe v. Wade was overturned, 14 states have passed total abortion bans while others have moved to protect reproductive rights at the state level. Missouri is one of several states that passed a total ban on abortion. Arizona passed a law in 2022 that bans abortion after 15 weeks.

In states that allow voter-driven ballot measures, abortion rights groups have used the tool to push back against restrictions.

Dawn Penich, a spokesperson for the organizers of Arizona’s abortion ballot measure recently told USA TODAY, “A very broad majority supports this issue, and that’s whether we were in rural communities or cities, whether we were in largely red, conservative districts or more progressive areas of the state.”

Trump says the issue is no longer salient. I don’t think so.

Shifts from Cook’s Biden vs. Trump polls in May to their Harris vs. Trump polls in late July/early August (full field):

AZ: D+8 shift
GA: D+4 shift
MI: D+5 shift
NV: D+3 shift
NC: D+10 (!) shift
PA: D+8 shift
WI: D+5 shift https://t.co/j7LTiAFz2b

— Adam Carlson (@admcrlsn) August 14, 2024

And following up yesterday’s producer inflation report, here’s the consumer report:

Corporate capitalism too

Sociologist Jessica Calarco (“Holding it Together: How Women Became America’s Safety Net“) believes that one reason we cannot have nice things, The Ink explains, is “because Americans have been sold a manufactured ideology of personal responsibility, bolstered by the work of neoliberal economists, and for the most part accept it as tradition — even though it’s largely an invention of 20th-century business interests and crafted as part of the backlash to the New Deal.”

That system is not just propped up by cheap labor, but by women’s labors specifically:

The situation persists largely because women have been forced to make up for the lack of real social policy. Whether that’s to do with a conservative vision of women’s roles being as homemakers, helpmeets, and mothers or our reliance on poor women, women of color, and immigrant (and undocumented immigrant women) to fill the low-paid jobs in child and elder care that make American society possible, it’s women who do the devalued and relentlessly taxing work that can’t be made profitable in the market.

The country is still imprisoned in an ideology, says Calarco, “explicitly manufactured to persuade us that we didn’t need a social safety net.” That system of thought was disrupted by the need for women to work manufacturing jobs during WWII. We provided low-cost childcare so they could. But that support did not hold. Free-market fundamentalism had better PR (market fundamentalism propaganda).

But rather than think, “Okay. So how do we restructure our economy to make it so that everyone who wants to have a paid job can do so,” we instead shuttered those childcare centers. We pushed women out of the workforce. We told them to go back home, told them it was their patriotic duty to give those jobs back to men because we didn’t want to expand the economy, and we didn’t want to continue paying for these kinds of social safety net programs. Meanwhile, many European countries used what they learned from those kinds of models during the war to build these national childcare programs that they still have today or to build national healthcare, to put in place universal paid family leave.

[…]

One of the core reasons that we haven’t pushed back is that we’ve relied on women to fill in these gaps instead. The unpaid and underpaid labor that women do to fill in the gaps in our social safety net and in our economy makes us complacent, makes us feel as though we don’t maybe actually need a social safety net because we’re doing well enough with the minimal social safety net that we do have. And yet at the same time, this is crushing women. They’re the default caregivers for children, for the sick, and for the elderly. They’re the ones who fill the lowest-paid jobs in our economy. 70 percent of our lowest-wage jobs are held by women. 

And to your point that we need government to do this, there are jobs that are often too labor-intensive to be highly profitable. They just don’t work in a market model. Things like childcare, things like customer service, things like home healthcare, K-12 teaching, which we do fund with some government support, but not at a sufficient level to make that job as valued and as sustainable as it should be.

But any product or service the government might provide on a not-for-profit basis that the private sector might provide at a profit (even if only in theory) is an abomination, a crime against capitalism. That’s a big No from free market fundamentalists.

Plus, we socialize children to see themselves in roles defined by gendered hierarchy and sexist myths. It’s a way of thinking so baked into the culture, like structural racism, as to be all but invisible.

I know it well. Longtime readers may recall my decades-old take on capitalism:

We think we invented capitalism. Yet there have been “capitalist acts between consenting adults”* since before Hammurabi. We don’t call one capitalist enterprise the world’s oldest profession for nothing. There’s a restaurant in China that has been in operation for nearly 1000 years. And pubs in England that have been in business for 900. All without being incorporated in Delaware or the Cayman Islands.

Corporate capitalism is a different animal, an invasive species, actually, and merely one model for organizing a capitalist enterprise. There are others. But corporate capitalism’s success and ubiquity convince us that there is no alternative. It is the water we swim in but cannot see.

Look around where you sit right now. There is likely nothing from the chair on which you sit to the screen on which you read this to the materials of the building around you that were not manufactured by a modern corporation. This artificial lifeform, a soulless creation possessing only appetite and instinct, has created a system in which the people no longer govern. They are ruled by those who would make serfs of us again, telling us only by their being kings can the rest of us flourish. Instead of holding corporate capitalism’s leash, humans wear the collar.

“We are not fated to live this way,” historian Steve Fraser once told Bill Moyers.

Neither men nor women.

There is much more at The Ink.

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WTFness at the NYT

The spouse’s sharp eyes picked out a detail in a New York Times account of Ukraine’s surprise counterattack last week that sent its forces over the border into Russia:

Ukrainian troops sliced easily through a thinly defended border, pushing tens of miles into Russia and shifting the narrative of the war after a glum year in which Ukraine had struggled, often in vain, to hold back Russian advances across its eastern front.

By Monday, Ukraine’s commanding general had told President Volodymyr Zelensky that his troops held 390 square miles of territory in Russia’s southeastern Kursk region. Two dozen settlements were overrun.

You take some of our land, Vlad? Fine, we’ll take some of yours.

But that account from Monday is not what raised the wife’s ire. It was the story in Tuesday’s The Morning briefing by German Lopez on what Ukraine hoped to gain from the incursion: to “divert Russian troops from strategic locations,” to improve Ukrainian morale, to impress Washington, and “to shore up support abroad“:

Kyiv has relied on aid from Western nations to defend itself. But voters in those countries are no longer as enthusiastic about supplying Ukraine with weapons. Some leaders, including Donald Trump, have suggested they want to cut off the aid. A battlefield victory against Russia, even if it’s not strategically important, could get skittish supporters back on board.

“Some leaders, including Donald Trump”? And Trump is the leader of what?

Which leaders want to cut off aid?

Whose voters are “no longer as enthusiastic”?

An Eurobarometer poll released in early January showed 74 percent support for EU aid to Ukraine. An IPSOS/Euronews poll of almost 26,000 from 18 European countries released in early February found “36% of Europeans want aid to Ukraine to be a priority of the next European parliament. Another 36% see it as important but not a priority while it is a secondary issue for the remaining 27% of respondents.” Yes, Germany planned to cut its aid budget for Ukraine in mid-July when it appeared Trump was headed to victory, just days before Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race.

Yet despite far-right opposition to continuing aid to Ukraine, European Union governments voted overwhelmingly in July to continue support. Last week, the EU approved “the first regular payment to Ukraine of 4.2 billion euros ($4.58 billion) of the 50 billion euros the EU has set aside as financial support for Kyiv.”

WTF is going on at The Times?

“It’s an attempt to give Russia somewhat of a shock,” Times national security reporter, Eric Schmitt, told Lopez of the counterattack. Ukraine might want to use the territory to bargain for concessions:

To do that, Ukraine would have to actually keep what it takes. Given how overburdened its military is already, that may not be possible. And if Ukraine suffered heavy losses trying to hold foreign terrain, the incursion would amount to a disaster. “It’s a huge gamble on the part of the Ukrainians,” Eric said.

But Ukraine also has to plan for eventual negotiations with Russia. Trump has suggested that if he wins this year’s election, he will force Ukraine to work out a peace deal with Russia. That would likely require Ukraine to give up most or all of the territory that Russia currently holds.

That’s two references to Donald Trump and to what he might do as president regarding dropping aid to Ukraine in a 700-word Times story. No mention of Joe Biden, the actual president of the United States, or to VP Kamala Harris who for now looks on trajectory to rout Trump in November.

Again, WTF is going on at The Times?

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Doing real American stuff

Just watch it:

This is insane. These aren't just line cops. This is the police chief of a town that straddles a major highway in and out of Nashville completely lost to Q-Anon obsession and insanity. These guys have been using federal databases to investigate political campaigns and private… https://t.co/wOV3E6uHSq

— Fred Wellman (@FPWellman) August 13, 2024

As Tom Nichols said on twitter:

This is what I meant when I said democracy will collapse in small pockets here and there in the country instead of all at once. Imagine this police dept but without the state’s TBI, or DOJ, or a federal government willing to step in. That’s a view of the future.

It’s well documented that Donald Trump Jr loves JD Vance and was instrumental in getting him on the ticket. They are two peas in a pod in so many ways, even beyond the beards. Junior is less intellectually able but that’s not saying much. But JD apparently respects him anyway. A new fact check on JDs lies about Kamala Harris indicate that some of them come directly from Junior. For instance:

“She has said things like, ‘it’s reasonable not to have children over climate change.’ I think that’s the exact opposite message we should be sending to our young families.”

— Vance, interview with CNN’s Dana Bash, Aug. 11

✅

Follow Fact-checking politiciansFollow

This is false. Vance made this comment as he tried to explain 2021 remarks that Harris was one of those “childless cat ladies who are miserable in their own lives and they want to make the rest of country miserable, too.” (Harris has two stepchildren.) To Bash, he said: “I criticized Kamala Harris for being part of a set of ideas that exists in American leadership that is anti-family. I never, Dana, criticized people for not having kids. I criticized people for being anti-child.”

That’s when he offered the claim that Harris once said “it’s reasonable not to have children over climate change.”

There is zero evidence thatHarris said that. Instead, Vance appears to be channeling a misleading Facebook post by Donald Trump Jr.

“WATCH: Resurfaced video shows Kamala Harris suggesting that young people should not have children due to climate change,” TrumpJr. wrote on July 27. “She calls climate anxiety ‘the fear of the future and the unknown of whether it makes sense for you to even think about having children.’”

Trump Jr. clipped a small section and then mischaracterized it. Here’s the full statement, made at an event at a community college in Reading, Pa., on Sept. 19.

Because young people — and, in particular, young voters — said, “We are going to direct and decide what is the direction of our country.” … Because young people said, “We’re not leaving it to other people to decide how we’re dealing with the climate crisis” —

You know, I’ve heard young leaders talk with me about a term they’ve coined called “climate anxiety.” Right? Which is fear of — of the future and the unknown of whether it makes sense for you to even think about having children, whether it makes sense for you to think about aspiring to buy a home because what will this climate be?

But because people voted, we have been able to put in place over a trillion dollars in investment in our country around things like climate resilience and adaptation, around focusing on issues like environmental justice.

In sum, she was characterizing “climate anxiety” and noted the Biden administration was taking steps to mitigate it.

That he said this in response to his fatuous “childless cat ladies” comment that has gotten him into so much trouble makes it all the more absurd.

Vance’s latest persona, the one that was so impressive to Trump when he spotted him on Tucker Carlson’s show bootlicking like a champ, was largely formed by following the likes of Trump Jr online and then cultivating them as he launched his political career. They are not very bright so it’s not hard to do.

The question is how bright Vance really is that he made the bet that being closely associated with Trump and MAGA are great career moves? I’d say it was a bad one that Vance will struggle to shake off when he makes his next shape shift.