Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

With joy and unity

A couple of Democratic events here in WNC over the last week drew far bigger crowds than I’ve seen in nearly two decades. A fundraiser for a county commission candidate at a nearby farm on Thursday drew hundreds. A district-wide gathering featuring a slate of statewide candidates at a rural farm west of here drew 400-500. An ice cream social at a city park shelter on Sunday exploded to 300 and became a local happening.

That energy is popping up in unlikelier places:

On Saturday afternoon, around 500 golf carts reportedly paraded through the Villages, a retirement community in Central Florida, in support of Kamala Harris for president — roughly 200 more than the number that reportedly showed up for President Biden ahead of the 2020 election.

Saturday’s rally was part of the newly minted Harris campaign’s efforts to engage Florida voters and recruit volunteers to boost Democratic support.

With roughly 30% of Florida voters affiliated with neither the Republican or Democratic parties, per the Tallahassee Democrat, some attendees saw the turnout as a sign of a notable shift for the largely conservative community.

Jennifer Rubin suggests this morning that the way to fight autocracy is with optimism, joy, and humor. Less-engaged voters want to support the winning team. Democrats need to start acting like winners.

But while the Trump-Vance ticket has shown itself to be a joke, what it represents is not. This is still a serious fight. Rubin attended the Anti-Autocracy Conference last week featuring totalitarianism expert, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, who told the assembly:

This is an anti-autocracy conference because autocracy is what we are looking at if Donald Trump is reelected.

I know many Americans feel this is hyperbole, even after MAGA attemped [sic] to overthrow the government to keep Trump in office illegally. In my line of work, we call this a coup attempt. Even now, Trump is continuing to use his rallies to market strongman rule to Americans. Just a few days ago he praised Xi Jinping, a Communist dictator, as “brilliant” because he rules with an “iron fist.”

What’s important in pushing back against this dark movement is finding the common ground most Americans share:

Norm Eisen, co-founder of State Democracy Defenders Action✓ — which hosted the conference together with conservative group Principles First and advocacy group Democracy Forward — told me, “There is much more that unites us as Americans than divides us.” He laid out 10 principles at the conference that “define what a long-term right, left and center coalition would look like to unify the vast majority of Americans against Trump’s authoritarianism and ensure that the American democratic tradition continues — and that Trump led autocracy is permanently banished from the American political scene.” These principles boil down to:

1. Democracies rest on rule of law; someone who denies the sanctity of the Constitution and serially violates our laws cannot be president.
2. Democracy cannot survive without truth, facts, science and evidence.
3. Free and fair elections are the essence of democracy, where power resides in the people.
4. Civil discourse must be the means to resolve differences; compromise is essential to governance.
5. A democratic government cannot operate without an independent, nonpartisan civil service, and subject matter expertise is essential to good government.
6. An ethical government free from corruption and self-interest is essential to our democracy.
7. The United States is the indispensable nation for international stability, economic prosperity and democracy. Our military takes an oath to the Constitution, not to a single leader.
8. Democracies require and ensure widespread prosperity. Democracies that deliver economically for citizens require a domestic calm, commitment to the rule of law and opposition to cronyism.
9. A vibrant, independent press is vital to democracy.
10. Equality and civil rights (“All men [and women] are created …”) are foundational to our American creed.

What surprised Rubin was (despite the serious topic) the atmosphere of “camaraderie and humor.”

Adam Gallagher and Anthony Navone wrote that humor “disrupts dominant discourses and challenges power ‘by disrupting the language and symbols used by those in power to represent reality in a particular way and providing alternative interpretations of that reality.’” Moreover, “Authoritarian leaders and regimes rely on projections of unshakable power; using fear to maintain control,” the authors wrote. “No wonder they hate jokes.” (Not coincidentally, Trump has said he hates being laughed at.)

Americans are anxious for connection, for in-person relationships and for fun. Especially when enlisting previously apolitical people, optimism, joy and, yes, humor can help hold movements together. No wonder Vice President Harris’s laugh is already is unnerving MAGA scolds; perhaps they grasp the power of happy warriors.

It helps that Donald Trump’s vice presidential pick, Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio, is, as Harris campaign co-chair Mitch Landrieu told CNN, “one of the most unprepared people that we have ever put up to hold the vice presidency of the United States.” Vance barely meets the minimum requirement to be 35 years old and native-born, Landrieu said:

“He didn’t even run a business. He’s never run anything. And he’s about to be one heartbeat away from the largest entity in the world, and the one that’s the most important,” Landrieu said. “So it’s a fair question to ask: How would we know whether you have the capability to run domestic and national security policy for the most powerful country in the world, which you may be called to do on a moment’s notice?”

Expect the contrast with Harris’s upcoming VP pick to be stark, starker even than the choice Sen. John McCain’s made in 2008 to choose Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska . She saw her role as spokesmodel. What helped sink McCain’s candidacy then will help sink Trump’s now.

Plus, as America has seen recently, Trump the Unhinged is becoming more unhinged. His act is old and stale, and he is now the old man in the race facing an energized Democratic Party and a happy warrior in Kamala Harris.

Anecdotally here, independents are getting off their couches and getting involved in the fight.

The lighthearted memes cropping up around the Harris campaign feed the excitement. So what if they are silly or unintelligible to older voters? They’re working. As Barack Obama once cautioned, don’t be buzzkills.

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Here’s a shocker:

The US could have avoided almost 250,000 Covid-19 deaths if every state had adopted stricter mask and vaccine requirements seen in the Northeast during the height of the pandemic, according to a new study.

Researchers say that the country, which saw more than 1.1 million Covid deaths, could have been spared an estimated 118,000 to 248,000 more lives.

The research from University of Virginia public policy and economics professor Christopher J Ruhm, published Friday in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) Health Forum, analyzed mortality data between 2020 and 2022, comparing it to a baseline of 2017 through 2019.

“These study findings do not support the views of those opposing COVID-19 restrictions who erroneously believe the restrictions did not work,” Ruhm writes. “To the contrary, the package of policies implemented by some states probably saved many lives.”

“If all states had imposed restrictions similar to those used in the 10 most restrictive states, excess deaths would have been an estimated 10% to 21% lower than the 1.18 million that actually occurred during the 2-year analysis period,” according to the study.

“Conversely, the estimates suggest counterfactual increases of 13% to 17% if all states had restrictions similar to those in the 10 least-restrictive states.”

All the elderly and immunocomprised as well as the workers in necessary workplaces who didn’t have a choice in this were among those who died in those red states. It’s shameful. Wearing a mask was hardly the end of the world but they had to act like fools and hundreds of thousands died.

Unfortunately, they have not learned their lesson. They never will.

Authors Peter Dreier, who teaches politics at Occidental College and Maurice Isserman who teaches history at Hamilton College warn people who care about the Palestinian people not to protest at the DNC next month if they don’t want to set back their cause:

In a democracy, protest movements can play a vital role in reshaping the national debate on important issues. But they have to hone their message and choose when and how to make their case. There were major protests at all three Democratic conventions in the 1960s. Two of them eventually got the results they hoped for. One backfired.

In 1960, when John F. Kennedy was nominated in Los Angeles, civil rights protesters, including the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., carefully orchestrated a 5,000-person march and daily pickets at the convention demanding a strong pro-civil rights plank in the Democratic platform. It was a first at a convention, and Kennedy was cautiously supportive, though it took several more years of protests before he embraced the Civil Rights Act, which became law in 1964, the year after his assassination.

When Lyndon B. Johnson was nominated that same year in Atlantic City, civil rights activists, now driving for voting rights, supported the integrated Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party delegates in place of the all-white regular Mississippi delegation. They didn’t unseat the regulars, but their impact on delegates and public opinion was undeniable. A year later, with Johnson’s support, Congress passed the watershed Voting Rights Act.

The convention protests of 1960 and 1964 followed a sophisticated and pragmatic strategy of working within and without the party apparatus. The leaders crafted demands that appealed to the best in the American democratic tradition — equal rights for all. They delivered historic gains for African Americans.

In 1968, when Hubert Humphrey was nominated for president in Chicago, it was a different story. Protesters again showed up in the streets outside the convention, this time to demonstrate their opposition to the Vietnam War. That opposition was justified. Targeting that convention that year, and their wild rumpus approach, was not.

Due mostly to the brutal tactics employed by the Chicago police, the result was bloody chaos in the streets. Some protest organizers believed dramatic televised images of confrontations would strengthen their cause, winning the sympathy of the viewing public.

They were wrong. Polling revealed that most television viewers — 56%, according to a Gallup poll — blamed the protesters, not the “police riot,” for the disturbances. Republican Richard Nixon, campaigning to restore “law and order,” defeated Humphrey that November. He prolonged the Vietnam War well into the next decade.

Antiwar protests ultimately helped shift public opinion away from the U.S. military intervention in Vietnam. They produced a new wave of liberal and progressive politicians. But the protests at the 1968 Democratic convention set back the cause.

Today, those who want to protest the war in Gaza need to think about how to further that goal. Will the cause of peace and Palestinian rights be helped or hindered by demonstrations at this year’s Democratic convention in Chicago?

[…]

If this year’s Chicago protests produce scenes of chaos in the streets and Democratic-leaning voters decide to abstain or choose a doomed third-party candidate — who will benefit? In a remarkable bit of political jujitsu, the Republicans, instigators of the Jan. 6 insurrection, are campaigning as the party of law and order.

Protests may achieve changes we want to see. But this time, it’s too risky. Instead of demonstrating against Democrats, we’re going to campaign and vote for them. You should too.

I hope this doesn’t turn out to be another Chicago shit-show. I doubt it will. The energy is way, way different. But they make good points. We are dealing with a whole other level of threat with Trump, the country is closely divided. If you actually care about the Palestinian, which I’m not sure all of these folks do, I’m going to guess these protests aren’t going to help, especially if they do what they did in DC this week and celebrate Hamas, which is just felony stupid.

I watched the video of this yesterday and it made me sick.

Sonya Massey’s last words before a Sangamon County Sheriff’s Office deputy shot and killed her in her Springfield, Illinois, home earlier this month were, “I’m sorry.” 

The 36-minute body camera footage released Monday depicting her July 6 killing showed her interaction with the officers she called for help began calmly enough. At times, it even appeared to veer into light-hearted conversation as they responded to her 1 a.m. local time report of a possible home invasion. But the tone changed suddenly just under 15 minutes into the exchange after the 36-year-old Black woman went to remove a pot of boiling water from her stove at the direction of Deputy Sean Grayson, who informed her with a laugh as she did so that he was distancing himself to get away “from your steaming hot water.”

“Away from the hot steaming water? Oh, I’ll rebuke you in the name of Jesus,” she replied with a seemingly playful tone before repeating the phrase more neutrally in response to the officer’s confusion. 

“You better f**king not or I swear to God I’ll f**king shoot you in the f**king face,” Grayson said suddenly, drawing his firearm.

Massey crouched behind the counter with her hands raised. She apologized, though nothing she had done up to this point appeared to warrant one. Still, it didn’t matter. Within seconds, Grayson fired three shots, striking her just under the eye. He’d go on to make clear to his colleagues he believed he’d opened fire on an imminent threat, call her a crazy “f***ing b***ch” and reject the other deputy’s attempt to render aid to Massey because “she’s done.”

“From looking at the bodycam footage, it’s clear that the space is not a space of distress in the sense that it’s somebody’s home. The pace and everything about the video that I saw did not seem that the police officer was under distress, either,” said Christen Smith, a professor of anthropology and African American studies at Yale whose research focuses on gendered anti-Black state violence. “It just seems to me that the threat that was perceived was simply the threat of a Black woman and not anything else, and that’s something that we need to really think about.”  

In a press conference Monday, civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who is representing Massey’s family, said that she had previously experienced mental health challenges but did not show any aggression. Massey’s family also confirmed she had previously been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, according to The Guardian. “She needed a helping hand,” Crump said. “She didn’t need a bullet to the face.”

Just as her family and community mourn their loss and Americans decry the brutality she faced with cries of “Say Her Name,” Massey’s killing underscores the disproportionate amount of police violence that Black people and disabled people face in the United States — and the reality that Black disabled Americans, like Massey, bear the brunt of it. 

She had called them to look for a prowler. They didn’t find one but came into her house and demanded that she produce ID for some reason. She couldn’t immediately locate it and went to the stove to remove the pot of water. And that’s when it happened. The fcop was all the way across the room. This frail woman couldn’t have hit him with the water if she wanted to and it really didn’t seem she did.

It’s horrible. Horrible.

The officer had a history of bullying behavior. No surprise there. And Trump wants to give police officers like this one, who clearly overreacted and killed this poor woman, rather than simply back out of the room if he felt threatened, immunity. No.

I know most of you would rather stick chopsticks in your ears than watch an entire Trump rally. But you should know that he’s actually getting worse. And he’s admitting it.

Rather than post all the highlights, you might want to watch this video which also features some clever commentary:

He also appeared at a Bitcoin convention. Oh dear:

Nobody does it better:

Fox viewers don’t get to hear this normally. It takes someone skilled to do it and Buttigieg is very skilled.

If you follow the Never Trumper Sarah Longwell and her focus groups (which are fascinating) you have heard for months now that the Democrats needed to get the surrogates out on the road. I think some of her rationale was that Biden wasn’t doing a good job of making he case and so needed to be shored up. But it’s important even with Harris at the top of the ticket. As you can see, Buttigieg is just excellent.

Here’s a guy speaking to the non-Fox audience and he’s excellent too:

Another one:

Those last three are auditioning for VP right now and they’re all good. And there are a lot more where that came from who aren’t on that list: Whitmer, Newsom, AOC, Wes Moore, Pritzker and on and on. The Democrats have a very impressive bench. The Republicans have imploded leaving them with people like Vance and Elon Musk — nutcases just like Trump.

The battle for the soul of the country as Biden has always said is now a battle for the brain of the country. I’m not entirely certain who will win (which is disturbing in itself) but we know who has the most ammunition.

Trump should have listened to him

Politico playbook:

The WSJ editorial board is joining the pile-on over Sen. JD VANCE’s (R-Ohio) comments about “childless cat ladies.”

In a tough piece posted last night, Paul Gigot and colleagues call the comment “the sort of smart-aleck crack that gets laughs in certain right-wing male precincts” but that “doesn’t play well with the millions of female voters, many of them Republican, who will decide the presidential race.”

They see the speed and breadth of the coverage of Vance’s remark as evidence “that this is Mr. Vance’s first big cultural impression, and not a good one.”

They are unimpressed with Vance’s efforts to clean things up on Megyn Kelly’s podcast yesterday (“he wasn’t at all apologetic”), and they come away with this surprising conclusion about the episode: “One possibility is that at some level Mr. Vance really doesn’t respect people who make different life choices.”

And then they move on to attack some of Vance’s other past ideas. His proposal that families without children should pay higher taxes is “bad policy” and “bad politics” and would amount to using the tax code “as a political and cultural weapon against people who don’t share his values.”

The editorial gives voice to what’s been a quiet murmur we’ve been hearing from some corners of the right all week: Does DONALD TRUMP regret picking Vance?

They suggest that the campaign put Vance’s wife out there to reassure suburban voters that he doesn’t really hate women. Somehow that doesn’t strike me as adequate to stanch the bleeding.

Trump is losing it. He was cocky and assumed he was going to win and he listened to Tucker Carlson and Uday and Qusay instead of the people who understood the election was close even with Biden in the race. They thought they could start the MAGA revolution victory party already. It was always delusional and apparently they were so high on their own supply during the decision making process that they didn’t realize Biden was very likely to drop out and be replaced by Kamala Harris. Either that or they truly believe it wouldn’t make a difference because they’re are so racist and sexist that they believed it would make no difference.

Whatever the case, naming Vance with obviously very little vetting was a monumental mistake. Even the Wall St. Journal is appalled. Making Rupert mad is never a good idea for Republicans, even Trump.

It’s raining coconuts

“There are years when nothing happens, and there are weeks when decades happen. This was one of those decades-long weeks,” Wisconsin Democrats chair Ben Wikler tweeted on Friday.

Politico at the start of a new week:

Kamala Harris pulled in $200 million in her first week as a presidential candidate, a staggering figure the campaign points to as evidence of the intensity surrounding her nascent bid with 100 days to go before Election Day.

What a difference a week makes, Politico not-so-trenchantly observes.

With Harris ascending to the top of the ticket, the party saw mammoth fundraising, including topping the $100 million mark in her first full day as the Democrats’ likely nominee. The campaign soon announced she had secured enough verbal commitments from delegates to secure the party’s nomination ahead of the Democratic National Convention next month.

Of the seven-day haul, two-thirds of the donations came from first-time donors, something the campaign pointed to as evidence of overwhelming grassroots support for her historic White House bid.

The energy behind Harris, who is of Black and South Asian descent, is also showing up in the polls, with Harris closing the deficit that had widened in the final weeks Biden was the presumptive nominee.

According to a CNN/SSRS poll published last week, Harris trailed 46 percent to Trump’s 49 percent, a statistical tie since those figures were within the poll’s margin for error.

So now the horse-race press has a new horse race to blather about 24/7. And a new veepstakes.

Speculation about the Harris pick for running mate is a beauty pageant for national pundits, by their pick of favorites more about cosmetics than calculation. It’s about who looks good, has rhetorical chops, etc. But unless this race shifts dramatically in Harris’s favor, 2024 will be another close one.

States don’t send popular votes to Congress. They send electoral votes. So teasing potential VP picks from states that might not add to the Harris electoral totals misses the point. Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz is an excellent politician. Perhaps he can help shore up the ‘blue wall’. But can he bring electoral votes with him that Democrats don’t already expect to win? Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg is the sharpest-witted politician I’ve ever seen. But seriously, is the former mayor of South Bend ready to step into the presidency? Will his being on the ticket give Harris a shot at Indiana’s 11 electoral votes?

I can’t wait until the VP beauty pageant ends and we get on to the real business of electing the Harris ticket and seeing the MAGA movement consigned to the ash heap of history.

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We won’t move on!

“Get out and vote just this time. You won’t have to do it anymore,” Donald Trump told The Believers’ Summit, hosted by Turning Point Action on Friday in West Palm Beach, Fla. “Four more years it will be fixed. It’ll be fine. You won’t have to vote anymore…In four years you don’t have to vote again. We’ll have it fixed so good your not gonna have to vote.”

Democrats piled on Donald Trump’s comments to the Christian nationalists (no, not conservative Christians) on Friday:

Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), who is running for Senate, shared the clip of Trump’s speech on X, writing, “This year democracy is on the ballot, and if we are to save it, we must vote against authoritarianism. Here Trump helpfully reminds us that the alternative is never having the chance to vote again.” Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) called Trump’s comments “terrifying.” And Rep. Dan Goldman (D-N.Y.) said, “The only way ‘you won’t have to vote anymore’ is if Donald Trump becomes a dictator.”

Naturally, the Trump campaign tried to explain away what he meant. No, no, no, the 2020 election denier didn’t mean what you thought you heard, a spokesman corrected. Trump “was talking about uniting this country and bringing prosperity to every American, as opposed to the divisive political environment that has sowed so much division and even resulted in an assassination attempt.”

If shamelessness is conservatives’ superpower, Trump supplements it with plausible deniability which, Jason Statler argues, comes “from Trump’s constant blather, digressions, and weirdness…. Even his fiercest critics feed that power by assuming there must be some harmless explanation for his laser focus on dividing and conquering America. There’s not.”

On the left, our thirst for freshness and novelty, while an asset, is also a weakness. There will be a reflex to let these statements from Trump disappear down the memory hole, buried quickly by his next nonsensical boast or tirade or outrageous lie. Don’t move on. Don’t let this one go. Or Project 2025 either.

The Harris campaign should latch onto these statements like Jack Russell terrier with a knotted rope and not let go. Her campaign has for now called Trump’s statements “a vow to end democracy.” The Washington Post reports:

“When Vice President Harris says this election is about freedom she means it,” Harris campaign spokesperson James Singer said in a news release on Saturday. “Our democracy is under assault by criminal Donald Trump: After the last election Trump lost, he sent a mob to overturn the results. This campaign, he has promised violence if he loses, the end of our elections if he wins, and the termination of the Constitution to empower him to be a dictator to enact his dangerous Project 2025 agenda on America.”

Trump, his Christian nationalist and think tank allies have taken out a contract on America. They mean to terminate the freedoms of non- MAGA Americans — yours — with extreme prejudice in a second Trump term. Roe is just the beginning.

“[T]he press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally,” Salena Zito wrote in The Atlantic in 2016. Believe him. He’s January 6th serious. Christian nationalists are Gilead serious. Heritage is 900 pages worth of serious. They have rejected democracy, as David Frum belatedly predicted.

Your job is not to move on, not to be distracted by the next gibberish Trump spouts at the next rally. The press will move on. The left must not from the latest proof that he means to be a dictator. Not this time.

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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.