As it became clear on Sunday that Vice President Kamala Harris is the front-runner to replace President Joe Biden as the 2024 Democratic presidential nominee, pro-Donald Trump conservatives went on TV to fiercely condemn her position on sipping devices.
“I mean, heck, she wants to get rid of plastic straws, for goodness sake,” Jason Miller, a senior adviser to former President Donald Trump’s campaign, told NBC. “Whereas Joe Biden was renting some of the territory on the more extreme left, Kamala Harris owns it.”
In a lengthy monologue on Sunday, Fox News host Sean Hannity said Harris would “be the single most radical major party candidate to run for election.” He went on to condemn her environmental record, including her previous support for ending the oil and gas drilling practice known as fracking and, of course, reining in the use of plastic straws.
“She wants to ban plastic straws,” Hannity grumbled. “I love my plastic straw. I hate those paper straws. Anyway.”
Finally Friday Reads: We Understand the Assignment
Posted: August 2, 2024 Filed under: 2024 Elections, 2024 presidential Campaign, Germany, Russia, Slovenia | Tags: @repeat1968, Harris for President 2024, Hostage Swap, John Buss, Racism 5 Comments
“Ketchup is flying.” John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
While the Wall Street Journal and the other “big” newspapers were busy writing about how President Biden looked so old and tired and ignoring the insane things Dotard DonOld was saying at his rallies, President Biden was busy negotiating a complex deal with multiple countries to get a WSJ writer and other hostages released from Russian Prison. There are so many amazing things about this series of negotiations that it’s hard to list. Still, one of the many amazing things was that there were no leaks of any ongoing processes, that included other countries, the CIA, the State Department, the Vice President, and other U.S. officials.
The Wall Street Journal is even being gracious today with its news and headlines about their freed reporter Evan Gershkovich, who is now in San Antonio for medical exams and has been reunited with his mother. They have even acknowledged the role Vice President Harris played in the Swap.
Vice President Kamala Harris played a role in negotiations with allies to secure the prisoner-swap deal. Harris met with both German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Slovenian Prime Minister Robert Golob separately in intimate settings during the Munich Security Conference in February to urge both leaders to push the deal through, according to a White House official.
Harris’s meeting with Scholz was particularly critical to securing the exchange because releasing Krasikov was a key Russian demand. The two first had a normal bilateral meeting before Harris asked Scholz to stay back for a “restricted bilateral,” the official said. Harris asked everyone to leave except Scholz and one aide on each side.
“They had a back and forth about how to best move forward about that, but ultimately, she was pressing Scholz to take action on this,” the official said.
Harris has met Scholz previously on several occasions and had a “good working relationship with him,” the official said. That is “part of the reason why she was able to have a really good, frank conversation with him.”
Harris had never met Golob before the conference. Their meeting was the highest-level U.S. engagement at the time with the Slovenian government, which was holding two Russian nationals Moscow wanted released. That meeting was also restricted to just Harris, Golob and two aides.
Separately, Harris spoke to Yulia Navalnaya, widow of Alexey Navalny, on Thursday, according to a White House official. Russian political prisoners who had worked with Navalny were released as part of the swap.
The German Chancellor and the Slovenian Prime Minister were key to the deal. The AP reports the swap as a “landmark.”
The United States and Russia completed their biggest prisoner swap in post-Soviet history on Thursday, with Moscow releasing journalist Evan Gershkovich and fellow American Paul Whelan, along with dissidents including Vladimir Kara-Murza, in a multinational deal that set two dozen people free.
Gershkovich, Whelan and Alsu Kurmasheva, a journalist with dual U.S.-Russia citizenship, arrived on American soil shortly before midnight for a joyful reunion with their families. President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris also were at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland to greet them and dispense hugs all around.
The trade unfolded despite relations between Washington and Moscow being at their lowest point since the Cold War after Russian President Vladimir Putin’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
Negotiators in backchannel talks at one point explored an exchange involving Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, but after his death in February ultimately stitched together a 24-person deal that required significant concessions from European allies, including the release of a Russian assassin, and secured freedom for a cluster of journalists, suspected spies, political prisoners and others.
I don’t care that some bad guys got sent back to Russia. That’s a type of punishment, even though Putin played them up as heroes. I can’t imagine they will be completely safe there. However, we brought the good folks home to thrive.
I keep reporting that my phone banking response is just about the most uplifting since I did my first phone back as a junior in high school. The election updates are getting more positive as the Harris Campaign raked in more than twice Team Weird. This is from NBC News. Election 2024 live updates: Harris team says it raised $310M in July, more than double what Trump’s team announced. Vice President Kamala Harris’ team said it raised $200 million during the first week of her campaign.”
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Vice President Kamala Harris’ team announced today that it raised $310 million in July. That would trounce the $138.7 million former President Donald Trump’s team said it raised last month. NBC News cannot verify those reports until Federal Election Commission reports for July are released.
Tara Sutter, reporting for The Hill, has this headline. “Pritzker says Trump ‘bewildered’ by Harris, new Dem excitement.” I’m getting trolled on social media whenever I produce my mini-report on what people say to me. On my Wednesday calls this week, I got to talk to seniors in places like Tennessee, Missouri, and Illinois this week. They are fired up and ready to go! They’re talking to their family and friend circles to pass a better world to our children and their children! I feel very positive. Some of these folks live in deeply red corners of their states. Yet, they’ve decided to talk about how excited they are about Harris to friends, family, and neighbors. One woman said she saw a woman wearing a Kamala t-shirt in a restaurant, which surprised her. She talked to the woman, and they said they would stand up for the future! The couple from Tennessee asked how they could volunteer! They said they knew they had to fight for the future. I guess I’m not the only granny for sanity.
Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker (D) said Thursday he believes former President Trump is “bewildered” by Vice President Harris and the excitement she has generated among Democrats.
“Kamala Harris is the perfect person at this moment,” Pritzker said on MSNBC’s “The Beat” to anchor Ari Melber. “We’ve got the kind of palpable excitement, the energy, that we really need in the party to carry us to victory in November, and of course Donald Trump is, I think, bewildered by it all. I don’t know that he has any idea how to handle the excitement that’s happening on the Democratic side, or Kamala Harris herself.”
Pritzker is among the many names floated as a possible running mate for Harris, the likely Democratic presidential nominee. His home state will also host this year’s Democratic National Convention later this month in Chicago.
“We’re planning a phenomenal convention here in Chicago. … the excitement is palpable,” Pritzker said. “The United Center, which is where the convention will happen, is being spruced up, lookin’ terrific.”
Besides Pritzker, other names on the vice presidential shortlist include Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.
Democratic Governors are all speaking out with enthusiasm. They’re also nailing Donald and the guy who changed his name three times to the wall. DonOld is ratcheting up the racism and misogyny. This is from Susan B. Glasser reporting for The New Yorker. “Trump’s Racist Attack on Kamala Harris Was No Accident. Is it, perhaps, a sign that the Vice-President’s swift rise in the polls has him panicked?”
Spoiler alert: he meant it. When Donald Trump claimed, on Wednesday afternoon, in a combative onstage interview at the National Association of Black Journalists convention in Chicago, that Kamala Harris had adopted her identity as a Black woman in an effort to gain political advantage, he drew appalled gasps from the audience. “She was Indian all the way, and then all of a sudden she made a turn and she became a Black person,” he said. This was an inaccurate slur as well as a bizarre one. Harris has always been proudly biracial: she is the daughter of an Indian mother and a Black, Jamaican father, both of whom immigrated to the U.S. She attended Howard, a historically Black college, where she joined one of Black America’s most storied sororities. Nonetheless, Trump doubled down on this particularly Trumpian form of hate speech. In a post on his Truth Social platform, he wrote, “Crazy Kamala is saying she’s Indian, not Black. This is a big deal. Stone cold phony. She uses everybody, including her racial identity!” That evening, in a rally in Pennsylvania, his campaign even projected an old news headline proclaiming Harris the first Indian American U.S. senator. Trump’s embattled Vice-Presidential nominee, J. D. Vance, joined in, too, calling Harris a “total phony who caters to whatever audience is in front of her.”
By Thursday morning, as the liberal commentariat feasted on its horror over his remarks and right-leaning pundits struggled to explain and excuse it, Trump mocked them all, posting an old photo of Harris alongside relatives on the Indian side of her family. He wrote, “Thank you Kamala for the nice picture you sent from many years ago! Your warmth, friendship, and love of your Indian Heritage are very much appreciated.” In another post, he circulated the conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer’s idea that, because Harris’s birth certificate says her father’s “color or race” is “Jamaican,” not Black, she is a “liar” who is “NOT black and never has been.”
How much clearer does it have to get? America, you are being trolled.
Laura Loomer probably holds the Guinness World Record for being the largest piece of shit ever. Meanwhile, I thoroughly enjoyed watching the Atlanta rally Tuesday night. I got to stick around for some campaign insider stuff and a Zoom visit from the Vice President. It’s been a long time since I’ve been this hyped up to volunteer my ass off. This is from the Washington Post. “Harris events: Not your father’s campaign rallies (or Biden’s). If there was ever any indication of the head-snapping transition that Democrats have gone through, it was the one that occurred on Tuesday night in Atlanta when 10,000 people danced and cheered to Megan Thee Stallion before Harris took the stage for a campaign rally.”
If there was ever any indication of the head-snapping transition that Democrats have gone through, it was the one that occurred on Tuesday night in Atlanta when 10,000 people danced and cheered to Megan Thee Stallion before Vice President Harris took the stage for a campaign rally to the strains of Beyoncé’s “Freedom.” Biden forecast this kind of a change four years ago when he talked about a bridge to a new generation, but that transformation didn’t take place until the past two weeks when he officially relinquished his grip on the party.
In fact, Joe Biden never came up.
From the music to the outfits — and, most tellingly, the crowd size — it was clearer than ever that the shift to a new Democratic generation was complete.
By and large, it is the same campaign aides who were putting on Biden events that are now in charge of Harris ones. But the types of crowds interested in attending Harris events — and the musicians willing to perform at them — are very different. The new playlist, even if controlled by the same staffers who curated Biden’s soundtrack (a mix including Whitney Houston’s “Higher Love,” Tom Petty’s “I Won’t Back Down,” and Elton John’s “Philadelphia Freedom”), has a certain Harris flair, and is put together based on her personal input.
Campaign aides say they are still thinking about how Harris events will be different, and they are determined to not only do large-scale rallies but want to put her in smaller settings as well. The coming days will provide more of a test case as Harris picks a running mate and launches a seven-state tour that will probably include a range of venues.
In Atlanta, the baton was fully passed to Kamala Harris. This was now her party. Her campaign. Her playlist.
Even though this headline comes with my usual admonition about trusting polls, it’s a good sign. “Kamala Harris Now Leads Donald Trump in Eight National Polls.” That’s eight data points, so that’s good. This reporting comes in Newsweek by Martha McHardy AND Andrew Stanton.
The new polls show the presumptive Democratic nominee is leading the former president by between 1 and 4 points.
RMG Research is the latest pollster to find Harris leading Trump in the national popular vote. The firm released a survey on Friday showing her with a 5-point lead (47 percent to 47 percent) over the former president. The poll was conducted among 3,000 registered voters from July 29 to July 31.
A poll conducted by Civiqs between July 27 and July 30 also showed Harris with a 5-point lead over Trump. Among 1,123 registered voters, Harris leads Trump 49 percent to 45 percent. Her lead is outside the poll’s margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.
Harris is ahead of the Republican presidential nominee by 3 points in a poll by Leger conducted between July 26 and July 28. The poll, which surveyed 1,002 U.S. residents and had a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points, showed she was leading Trump with 49 percent of the vote to his 46 percent. That represents a 4-point increase for the Democrat since Leger’s June poll.
When third-party candidates were included in the Leger poll, Harris’ lead over Trump grew to 7 points, to 48 percent, compared to the former president’s 41 percent.
Harris had a smaller lead of 2 points over Trump in four other national polls. These include a poll conducted by The Economist and YouGov, where the vice president polled at 46 percent among 1,434 registered voters—a lead within the poll’s 3 percent margin of error.
The other polls, conducted between July 23 and July 30 by Redfield and Wilton Strategies, Angus Reid, and Florida Atlantic University, showed Harris leading by 2 points—within each poll’s margin of error.
We just have to keep up the Momala Momentum. This is an interview from Elle on her role as stepmom to two young adults. To hell with J.D. Vance and his parade of stereotypes.
Cole and Ella could not have been more welcoming. They are brilliant, talented, funny kids who have grown to be remarkable adults. I was already hooked on Doug, but I believe it was Cole and Ella who reeled me in.
To know Cole and Ella is to know that their mother Kerstin is an incredible mother. Kerstin and I hit it off ourselves and are dear friends. She and I became a duo of cheerleaders in the bleachers at Ella’s swim meets and basketball games, often to Ella’s embarrassment. We sometimes joke that our modern family is almost a little too functional.
A few years later when Doug and I got married, Cole, Ella, and I agreed that we didn’t like the term “stepmom.” Instead they came up with the name “Momala.”
Our time as a family is Sunday dinner. We come together, all of us around the table, and over time we’ve fallen into our roles. Cole sets the table and picks the music, Ella makes beautiful desserts, Doug acts as my sous-chef, and I cook.
So, that’s it for me today. We’re on our 4th heatwave and have perpetual Severe Heat warnings. I’m at the point where I just fill my soaking tub up with cold water and literally chill out. I’m watching the Tropical Storm headed to Southern Florida. The Gulf Waters are hot. This could become a big wet one; southernmost Florida is on the Dirty Side. CNN is calling it this way. “Tropical Storm Debby forecast to hit Florida this weekend with torrential rain and wind.” It’s going straight up the East Coast and could become a Cyclone Level Four. So, be safe if you’re on its path.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Mostly Monday Reads: Tableaux and Free to be You and Me
Posted: July 29, 2024 Filed under: 2024 Elections | Tags: Dionysian Bacchanalia, DonOld Wierdo, Free to be You and me, JD Vance Weirdo, Tableaux, The 2024 Paris Olympics Opening 6 Comments
“Vance is a weirdo. Trump is weird. They make a lovely pair.” John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
I was raised in a city where I never felt I belonged and was a Nerdy Tom Girl bored to tears. Fortunately, my mother loved to travel and always took me to the library. She also taught me piano starting at age 3. All I can remember from a lot of that period was what I was told I couldn’t do. I couldn’t wear pants to school–even in a near-blizzard–because whatever. I couldn’t play little league baseball even though I could bat a ball and put it wherever I wanted because whatever. The world of the 1950s and the early 1960s was a world of barriers with the excuses of “just because.” Books, music, taking my sketchbook on trips to places where no one judged what you did or gave you a speech about what’s not, I found refuges from piety scolds.
J.D. Vance and the deplorable throwbacks that worship Donald want to shove the majority back into a world of barriers. I looked at the boys with a glare that screamed Broadway Annie Oakley’s song “Anything You Can Do. I can do better; I can do anything better than you.” Then, I worked to prove it at horse camp, on the ski slope, sliding down huge hills in the Missouri River hillsides, or dissecting a pregnant nurse shark after getting my scuba diving license for one of the high school football players because he couldn’t do it.
I was drug into the school psychologist’s office in high school for testing off the walls on ambition, which was considered a male trait on the Bem Sex Role Inventory, BSRI. They were always testing us for something. I always found some supportive men. They generally tended to be creative like me, musicians like me, or dreamers of a life beyond boundaries. Most of these guy friends died in the 1980s. I was an activist feminist by that time. I was duly working to change the sexual abuse and domestic violence laws in that same boring place. I also volunteered to go to other states to get the ERA passed. But, also, at that time, I had to bring meals to these friends, take them to doctor’s appointments, and be prepared to watch them die even as their family turned their backs on them.
I know real misogyny. The faces of misogyny are right there at the top and all over all the Republican tickets. I know the faces of religious oppression. You can find them in the same place. I also know the people who can not just let people live and let live but be their authentic selves if that means either wearing a dress or sporting a crew cut when the piety scolds tell you that just isn’t done when you’re you. We all evidently failed the Bem Sex Role test. To hell with defining masculine and feminine traits.
My religion is kindness. I let the local homeless folks use my hose to get water. They may sit on my porch in the shade of my Magnolia and rest. I leave fruits from my trees and anything spare I can to feed them. I was taught that for those who have much, much is required by my mother and Nana. I was also taught to not judge others unless ye be judged yourself. I still believe in many things I was taught in Sunday School. It’s easier, however, to apply them as a Buddhist. I now have the meditation chops to negate piety scolds. Piety scolding is not a Buddhist thing.
J.D. Vance better not come to New Orleans. We’re already planning the protests. The man who searches for dolphin-on-woman porn, who can’t even defend his wife properly, and who starts the bad performance with “even though she’s not white” better stay out of New Orleans because we will protest and probably too much by his standards. Nothing comes from his mouth, only insults to my neighbors. This is from The Hill.
Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), the GOP vice presidential nominee, said this weekend his feelings are not hurt by Democrats labeling him “weird” as past comments he made before being tapped as former President Trump’s running mate are resurfaced.
“No, not at all,” Vance told a Fox News reporter in an interview that aired Sunday. “It doesn’t hurt my feelings.”
“Look, the price of admission — meaning, the price of getting to serve the people of this country — is the Democrats are going to attack us with everything that they have. I think it’s an honor,” Vance continued.
“As Harry Truman once said, ‘if you can’t take the heat, stay out of the kitchen,’” he said.
The brief interview, conducted during a campaign stop, comes nearly two weeks after Trump announced Vance would be his running mate on the GOP presidential ticket.
I personally wonder if Vance has ever seen functional parts of kitchens. Donald, however, builds it up. This is from Marcie of EmptyWheel. None of us have the power to persecute these people. First off, the U.S. Constitution lets everyone do their own thing when it comes to Religion. Second, professors like me, cat ladies like me, and women like me have little to no power. Just check who the rapists are, the perpetrators of climate change, and the lawmakers who limit our freedom, and you’ll see the demographic that proffers persecution.
The other day, during an address to a Turning Point conference, Trump implored,
Christians, get out to vote. You won’t have to do it anymore. Four more years, it’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine. You won’t have to vote anymore my beautiful Christians. I love you. I’m [not/a] Christian.You have to get out and vote. In four years, you won’t have to vote again, we’ll have it fixed so good you’re not going to have to vote.
Horse race journalists didn’t care. They found it more important to repeat and therefore magnify Trump’s latest slur on Vice President Harris.
When I first looked at how NYT covered it at 3:37AM ET, this was their headline.
At 8:311AM, this story from Michael Gold was published. It still focused on magnifying the slurs Trump used against Harris.
That story included Trump’s comment about voting, along with Gold’s spin of it as a claim that Trump would address the concerns of Christian voters sufficiently that they would no longer have to vote, buried in ¶14.
At the end of his speech, Mr. Trump urged the religious crowd to vote in November, suggesting that if elected he would address their concerns sufficiently enough that they would no longer need to be politically active. Earlier, he had lamented that conservative Christians do not vote proportionately to their size, a complaint he has made repeatedly in recent weeks.
“Christians, get out and vote. Just this time,” Mr. Trump said on Friday. “You won’t have to do it anymore, you know what? Four more, years, it’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine, you won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians.”
Let it be noted that one of NYT’s allegedly professional horserace journalists believes that the white Evangelical Christians who have been among Trump’s most important supporters vote in disproportionately low numbers or that any Republican would forego that most important part of their coalition. (That said, for demographic reasons Trump can’t change with a speech, white Evangelicals make up an increasingly smaller proportion of the voting public, which poses an entirely different kind of threat than apathy.)
Only much later, around noon ET, did Gold figure out that the “not have to vote” stuff was far more newsworthy than Trump calling the Vice President a “bum.”
This mural is at a restaurant in Mayfair, London, called Bacchanalia. It’s artist Gary Myatt’s interpretation of French artist Thomas Couture’s 1847 painting Romans in their Decadence..
Obviously, the media have power. They can ignore the important stuff and misalign our priorities.
So, it’s no surprise that the Piety Scolds are out on the Tableaux performance art at the opening of the Paris Olympics. Since I spent most of the 40 years of my life reading and getting away from Dodge Street as much as possible, I am fully aware of the role the art form and parlor activity played in suppressed Victorian England and America. It’s not only historical but also in the fiction of the time. It’s also referred to as melodramatic realism. Children’s books were essential forms of artwork in that style. Cinema uses it, too. It’s a form of escape from our rigid piety scolds in many ways. Many paintings of the time were tableau. It’s a really old artform and newly modern Paris was full of tableau performances and caberets with all kinds of acts and audiences.
I still have shits and giggles that some folks don’t know about the 19th-century Bacchanalia art and celebrations during the original Olympics. They even don’t know about Marie Antoinette or the goddess of the Seine River, Sequana.
We had a mythology semester for English in 5th grade and world religions studies in social studies. It was the first time I determined Buddhism was the only sensible religion. Also, my neighbor and friend and I used to play goddesses. She was a year ahead of me, so I got advanced lessons from the book. We’d drag white sheets out of the dirty laundry, make them cloudlike, and play Athena and Aphrodite.
I later named my consulting firm The Minerva Group in the mid-80s! Imagine spending your life thinking people persecute you because your education is sorely lacking! But one can always make up for that.
Bourdon Sebastien mid 17th Century, Bacchanalia
It’s not surprising that a French choreographer would study these art forms and use them first to represent the Original Olympics with its Dionysian Bachannals combined with the artistry at the time. We’ve also since discovered that the much older DaVinci Last Supper was also used for one of the scenes. A Bacchus/ Dionysus performer crashed the scene. Now, Piety Scolds are taking everything to task and even Mislabelling the Goddess of the Seine Sequana as one of the riders of the apocalypse. Okay, it’s the Washington Post. I get it. “Paris Olympics organizers sorry for Last Supper at Opening Ceremonies. The tableau included a woman in the role of Jesus, drag queens, and gay icons as disciples. It was crashed by a man in blue as Dionysus, the Greek god of revelry.”
Organizers of the Paris Olympics apologized on Sunday for a performance during Friday’s Opening Ceremonies that featured an apparent reenactment of Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Last Supper” amid mixed messages about the piece’s intent.
The tableau included a woman with a halo-like crown in the role of Jesus as well as drag queens and gay icons as disciples; it was crashed by a scantily clad blue man wearing a headdress of fruit — Dionysus, the Greek god of fertility, wine and revelry.
Church leaders and some conservative politicians condemned the performance as a perversion of the scene, recounted in the Bible, on the eve of Jesus’ trial and crucifixion.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) on Saturday called the performance a “mockery [that] was shocking and insulting to Christian people around the world.” A U.S. telecommunications firm, C Spire, said it was pulling its advertising from the Summer Games. The French Conference of Catholic Bishops also objected.
My life as the musical director of a drag show, DJ, chorus, and band (piano). We were prime time on Bourbon Street for a few years. The worst patrons were Brides and Bridesmaids who would make everything all about them. Respect a queen because it’s the one time she can display a vital part of herself.
I wonder what upset them more: the woman as Jesus or the dragqueens? I understand a movement within the Catholic religion is trying to reposition Marie Antoinette as a Christian hero. So look who is upset about all of these. The White Men in power deny the rest of us our humanity and identity. What’s worse is the Olympic Committee is sanitizing the videos of the various legs of the tableaux. So, let’s look at this. Some of my women friends like wearing men’s clothing and having crew cuts. They wear tuxedos, and I have never seen them in any dress.
I have friends who are now dead because of Ronald Reagan’s response to AIDS who loved to play dress up and dolls with me when we were kids. They do so because they were never allowed to express themselves as they truly felt they were. They were not allowed their feminine sides, and men like J.D. Vance were the ones who oppressed everything feminine.
This is Miss Jessica DeLorean, who has a killer voice. She’s got big hair because she comes from Texas. My favorite part of our performance was when she sang songs like “You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Woman” or “I Say a Little Prayer For You,” which I introduced to her and arranged especially for her. She frequently flirted with men. I would watch many of them with crawling skin and think yeah, now you know what it’s like. Many of them I bet are still confused about why women take the bear. Most of my gay friends have a drag queen outfit in their closet somewhere because it’s the time they are allowed to play dress up with the little girls in their neighborhood. Something that they were not allowed as kids. It’s why performance artists like Cher and Dolly Parton are flattered to be featured in shows where the purpose is to highlight their talent and their status as gay icons. Neither is a Piety Scold, and they don’t misunderstand the art form.
My WiFi carries the name Queens of Poland Avenue because Women and Gays were primary on my block. We prefer that because you know it’s been a rough life, and you need someone who just loves you for who you are. This time of year, my outfit is usually men’s jockey shorts and the kind of t-shirts made famous by Marlon Brando, who, like many men in the creative arts, had to pretend to be something he wasn’t. One day, I will go to the FQ and join the show to shout Stella! It won’t be because I like the character, but I want to do the drag performance to show my favorite Dead of Summer couture. Women do drag.
That’s what freedom should mean. Free to be you and Me. That is the name of the album my oldest daughter listened to constantly as a kid. It was a gift from one of my friends in NOW. They had a baby shower for me. Free to love any other consenting adult. Free to be ambitious and not particularly care about marriage. But free to marry if that’s what you want. This country is about Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Justice. That can’t happen without respect being granted to those just living their lives and doing no harm to others.
This blog is a safe space. Given Donald and J.D. Vance and the thralls, we have enough to deal with daily in the news cycle. We understand different views but do not think it creates a positive environment to attack others and their lifestyle choices. Please respect this.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Mostly Monday Reads: We Stand with Her
Posted: July 22, 2024 Filed under: 2024 Elections, 2024 presidential Campaign, American Fascists, Economy | Tags: 2024 Presidential Election, Kamala Harris 26 Comments
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
It’s Deja Vú, All Over Again! President Biden withdrew his name as the Democratic candidate for President in 2024 after a series of bad days and calls by many in the media, donors, and pols to quit the race. Enthusiasm for the candidacy of Vice President Kamala Harris is on the rise. Once again, we can hope for leadership that reflects this country and its needs. I’ve been waiting for her first speech as the candidate since these events over the weekend. She is set to speak at the White House on NCAA Sports Day to 1000s of student-athletes shortly.
NCAA Sports Day brings championship teams from the National Collegiate Athletic Association to the White House. Harris also spoke at the event in 2023, which saw more than 1,000 student athletes from nearly 50 teams, according to Harris’ remarks.
Shortly after Biden announced he will not seek reelection Sunday, he threw his support behind Harris as his successor for the Democratic Party’s nominee. Harris said in a statement on X, “I am honored to have the President’s endorsement and my intention is to earn and win this nomination.”
President Joe Biden has been one of the most consequential American Presidents in History. I am not a Noble Laureate, nor did I attend anything but Public Universities in two States, and I have only taught in public higher institutions and secondary schools. His economic policy record is beyond anything we’ve seen since the policies to end the Great Depression. The good thing is that we’ve learned a lot since then, and we have the computers, statistical chops, and data to determine what works and what doesn’t. He’s heeded these lessons. This analysis is from Jonathan V. Last writing at The Bulwark. “Joe Biden Is Our Greatest Living President. On the most unlikely great president in modern history.”
A president gets, at most, two lines above the fold on his Wikipedia page. That’s it. That’s how history judges them.
Here is Joe Biden’s legacy: He beat back America’s first authoritarian attempt. And when he realized that he could not do it a second time, he stepped away so someone else could.
This is enough to make him—already, today, on July 21, 2024—our greatest living president.
Biden’s presidency was unexpected. Prior to 2020, there had been nothing in his 47-year career to suggest that he was more than a pleasant, ambitious, Irish pol from central casting. He had been a senator, and a man running for president, over the course of four decades. His selection as Barack Obama’s running mate in 2008 seemed like a nice capstone for a rather average career in national politics.
For the first two years of Trump’s presidency, no one expected Biden to challenge him.
But the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville became a hinge-point in which this ordinary politician found his moment.
…
Biden’s administration was not perfect, but was largely successful.
He passed several significant pieces of bipartisan legislation. He fixed the COVID vaccine rollout (which Trump botched) and drove a stake through the heart of the pandemic. He achieved the kind of soft landing on inflation that economists dream about. His handling of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was the single most effective management of a foreign crisis since the end of the Cold War.
But Wikipedia doesn’t care about your CHIPS Act, or your Bipartisan Infrastructure Plan, or your Inflation Reduction Act. It doesn’t care about NATO expansion.
Again, you can feel the mounting support for Vice President Kamala Harris. The money is pouring in, and Donald is likely throwing ketchup everywhere. This is from Newsweek. “Nikki Haley Voters PAC Announces Support for Kamala Harris.”
A coalition of former Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley voters pledged their support for Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris‘ presidential bid on Sunday, hours after President Joe Biden announced that he was dropping out of the race.
Biden announced on Sunday afternoon in a letter that he will not be seeking a second term in this year’s presidential election and threw his support behind Harris. The president’s decision follows weeks of mounting pressure from people within his own party and from key Democratic donors urging him to step aside for the sake of the party’s future after a disastrous debate performance last month against former President Donald Trump.
The political action committee (PAC), previously known as Haley Voters for Biden, which now features Harris’ name, seeks to amplify the voices of former Haley voters in support of Harris’ White House bid.
Craig Snyder, the group’s director, told Newsweek in an email on Sunday afternoon that the organization believes Harris “is best suited to defeat Donald Trump in November.”
“A tough former prosecutor, the Vice President comes from the centrist wing of the Democratic Party, not it’s left most fringe…For Haley voters, all of this puts the Vice President in a sweet spot for them to register their ongoing opposition to [former] President Trump,” he said.
“Voto Latino pledges $44M to support Harris.” This is published by The Hill and reported by Rafael Bernal.
Voto Latino is endorsing Vice President Harris on Monday in her bid for the White House, pledging its entire 2024 campaign budget to her cause.
The civic engagement group, a key player in Latino campaign politics, supported President Biden’s reelection efforts and is a fierce opponent of former President Trump.
“As far right extremists seek to demonize immigrants, shatter our democracy, and curtail our rights at every turn, Vice President Kamala Harris has led the defense of our multicultural democracy. Her long-standing support for working Americans, voting rights, DACA, and for women’s rights have done so much good for our country and the Latino community — and it has never been more important,” said María Teresa Kumar, president of Voto Latino.
Voto Latino’s campaign in 2024 is hitting the road, after a mostly-digital 2020, amid the coronavirus pandemic.
“In 2020, Voto Latino endorsed Joe Biden in the face of an unprecedented threat to our community and our country. His exceptional term has earned our admiration and respect,” Kumar said in a statement Sunday, following Biden’s announcement that he would no longer seek reelection.
“Now more than ever we must unite our efforts to make sure Trump is not elected in November. The stakes have never been higher. If Trump returns to the White House, he’ll execute his anti-democracy and extreme platform. He will continue dehumanizing immigrants and will deploy our military to round-up people who they deem look undocumented. Trump also will expand the cottage industry of detention centers across the nation where no one is safe — U.S. citizens or not,” Kumar said Sunday.
Kumar told The Hill last month that Voto Latino is on track to raise and spend $44 million, up from $36 million four years ago.
The group plans to focus on young Hispanic voters with anti-disinformation, registration and mobilization campaigns in Nevada, Arizona, Texas, Pennsylvania and North Carolina.
Politico has this headline this morning. “Kamala Harris clears the path to the nomination as potential challengers fall in line. The rapid demonstration of support was a show of force — and unity — after weeks of unrest and anxiety.” I admit that I feel better already.
It took less than 24 hours for Kamala Harris to all but clear the Democratic presidential field.
Endorsements from a series of governors Monday morning — JB Pritzker of Illinois, Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, Wes Moore of Maryland and Andy Beshear of Kentucky — effectively ended talk of a serious contest for the party’s nomination after President Joe Biden’s sudden decision Sunday to drop out of the race. Sen. Joe Manchin (I-W.Va.), who also briefly flirted with challenging Harris, also said Monday morning that he wouldn’t seek the nomination.
“I am proud to endorse Vice President Kamala Harris for president of the United States,” Pritzker said in a statement.
“Today, I am fired up to endorse Kamala Harris for President of the United States,” Whitmer wrote in her own statement.
“She is the fighter we need at this moment to realize the full promise of our nation,” Moore said.
The rapid demonstration of support was a show of force — and unity — after weeks of unrest and anxiety over whether the president would agree to step aside after his disastrous debate performance in late June.
Again, Donald and his campaign of hate are now in more chaos than usual. Sean Hannity was thrown off his game and had this shocking (not really) headline covered by HuffPo. “MAGA Rages That Kamala Harris Is A Threat To Plastic Straws. Sean Hannity grasped at the argument while alleging Harris will “be the single most radical major party candidate to run for election.” Mediocre white men are fall to pieces when threatened. Maybe he needs a sippy cup like my 3 year old granddaughters use.
Signe cartoon
TOON13
Kamala Harris
That has to be one of the most ridiculous displays of white male privilege I’ve ever seen. This is from The Atlantic. “This Is Exactly What the Trump Team Feared. A campaign that had been optimized to beat Joe Biden must now be reinvented.” It’s reported by Tim Alberta. How will they have enough time to teach the Reality Star and Crisis Actor his lines? Perhaps all we will hear about is his fear of sharks and obsession with Hannibal Lecter.
In many ways, the convention scene was one of a party peaking too early. Campaigns are marathons measured by changes in momentum and narrative, and Republicans in Milwaukee reveled in what felt like a three-week winning streak, dating back to the debate, in which the daily churn of insider gossip focused ever more on Democratic fatalism and Trump’s seeming inevitability. No Republican I spoke with could remember a longer stretch of uninterrupted forward propulsion. And with Biden appearing to dig in, they left Milwaukee believing that this run of luck might never end.
The president’s abrupt exit dashed any such fantasy. Suddenly, Republicans who had boasted last week about expanding the electoral map—pushing into Minnesota and Virginia and other decidedly blue areas—were fretting about the possibility of Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro or Arizona Senator Mark Kelly joining the Democratic ticket, partnering with Harris to put back into play key battlegrounds that just 24 hours earlier seemed to be out of reach.
Given the historic volatility of this campaign—Trump survived an assassination attempt just last weekend—there’s no guarantee that Harris will ultimately succeed Biden atop the ticket. The Trump campaign certainly believes she will—understandably so, given the rapid consolidation of Democratic officials around her following Biden’s announcement—and blasted out a statement Sunday afternoon that tied Harris to her unpopular boss. “Kamala Harris is just as much of [a] joke as Biden is,” Wiles and LaCivita said in a statement. “Harris will be even WORSE for the people of our Nation than Joe Biden. Harris has been the Enabler in Chief for Crooked Joe this entire time. They own each other’s records, and there is no distance between the two.”
This is the essence of what Trump’s campaign believes—that any Democrat who picks up the party’s banner will inherit the baggage that made Biden unelectable. Republicans will point to historic inflation, millions of illegal border crossings, and geopolitical chaos from Eastern Europe to the Middle East as evidence that the entire Democratic Party has failed the American people. “We’ve talked about strength versus weakness, success versus failure,” LaCivita told me before the convention, summarizing the campaign’s strategic vision for the race. “The great thing about that messaging is that it’s not just unique to Joe Biden.”
In other words, they’ll continue to lie about issues at the border, dismiss that Trump told Republicans not to vote for a Republican-written Immigration reformer bill. They’ll cover up his murderous Covid-19 performance and the rest of the stuff. Also, they support dictators so Biden’s success with NATO will never be mentioned. They know that many people question what happened on that day at Butler Farms where one man died and two others were critical wounded. Trump continues to wear his Ear Kotex while not delivering evidence there’s anything in it. Photographs, as we have shared here, suggest it was likely a bit of glass. The campaign is mostly using it as a amarketing tool to extract money from the Cult. And, it is a cult.
I especially like this article and lede in The Guardian. “The post-Biden era may be uncertain for the Democrats, but for Trump it will be utterly dismaying. Whoever is nominated, a fresh choice will be on offer – a far better one than a grudge match between two grumpy old men.” It’s penned by Simon Tisdall.
The unforgiving deadline is 19 August, when the Democratic party national convention opens in Chicago. Thursday 22 August is the day the successful nominee must make her or his acceptance speech. After that, there’s no going back, no time for second thoughts. From then until election day on 5 November, it will be all-out war, a fight to the political death with an extremist Republican ticket in arguably the most consequential election since John F Kennedy narrowly defeated Richard Nixon in 1960.
Will Harris get her party’s nod, or face a damaging internal competition? She has big advantages. The vice-president since 2021, she can count on nationwide name recognition – unlike Trump’s far-right white nationalist running mate, the deservedly obscure JD Vance. She has black and Asian-American roots, a potential plus with minority voters. She is the first ever woman to hold the vice-presidency. And at 59, she is definitely not Joe Biden.
Before joining the White House, Harris was a well regarded prosecutor and senator from California. In office, she has earned a reputation, among those who care to look, for championing women’s rights, education and climate action – and for fighting Republican voter-suppression schemes. She is underestimated and mocked by opponents, as vice-presidents typically are. But she has taken hard knocks and kept going. And she could inherit the $100m Biden-Harris campaign war chest.
For the US’s independent and undecided voters, Harris, crucially, is also not Donald Trump. Instead of a grudge match between two grumpy old men, battering each other bloody like cranky Monty Python knights, a fresh choice may soon be on offer – in terms of personality, energy, policy, tone, trustworthiness and moral integrity. It’s a choice that could bring a generational leap. Come January next year, it’s possible a new, younger morning in the US may dawn.
Indeed, I hope we can finely rid ourselves of Donald and his cult.
I have to say that I am so happy to see so many of our Hillary friends are here again. JJ explained that we’ve been fighting the WordPress AI goblin, which is somehow mistreating comments. I even have trouble commenting on my posts, so don’t despair. If you download the Jetpack app, you can sometimes comment more easily there. Also, we know that some of your comments are going to SPAM, so we’re all on the watch for it! Nothing like getting the old gang back together again!! I am so glad you’re here.
We know what’s at stake. They’ve already taken so many rights away that it’s time we elect people at all levels to stop this.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Finally Friday Reads: We Shall Overcome
Posted: July 19, 2024 Filed under: "presidential immunity", 2024 Elections, Biden Harris 2024, Feminists, fundamentalist Christians, House of Representatives, The Insurrectionists Club, The Media SUCKS, tRump crimes against humanity, Violence against women, Women's Rights | Tags: @repeat1968, John Buss 9 Comments
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
I never wanted a week to end so much in my life as this one. I’m not one for TV viewing because reality shows are not my thing. There are very few movies and series that grab my attention, too. This time of year, it’s good to have the weather channel. You already know I’m a news junkie, but the news is more like a staged reality show than about actual events that matter. It also is getting too far into the Beltway gossip zone to be of any real use. The media is on a few stories like flies on rice. I searched for something beyond the Beltway jive talk today.
Today, Majority Leader Hakeem Jeffries put to rest a story at the Washington Post yesterday. I would like to think this will stop all the headlines out there speculating when and if President Biden will give up his bid for his second term.
The other big story was the Republican National Convention, which looked more like a North Shore Klan rally than a convention. The self-proclaimed ‘David Duke without the Baggage,’ Congressman Steven Scalise, even got a speaking spot. I questioned my affiliation with the Republican Party after the 1992 speech by Pat Buchannan. After that, I registered as an Independent for quite a while.
[17] Mr. Clinton, however, has a different agenda.
[18] At its top is unrestricted abortion on demand. When the Irish-Catholic governor of Pennsylvania, Robert Casey, asked to say a few words on behalf of the 25 million unborn children destroyed since Roe v. Wade, Bob Casey was told there was no place for him at the podium at Bill Clinton’s convention, no room at the inn.
[19] Yet a militant leader of the homosexual rights movement could rise at that same convention and say: “Bill Clinton and Al Gore represent the most pro-lesbian and pro-gay ticket in history.” And so they do.
[20] Bill Clinton says he supports school choice – but only for state-run schools. Parents who send their children to Christian schools, or private schools, or Jewish schools, or Catholic schools need not apply.
[21] Elect me, and you get two for the price of one, Mr. Clinton says of his lawyer-spouse. And what does Hillary believe? Well, Hillary believes that 12-year-olds should have the right to sue their parents, and Hillary has compared marriage and the family as institutions to slavery and life on an Indian reservation.
[22] Well, speak for yourself, Hillary.
[23] This, my friends, is radical feminism. The agenda that Clinton & Clinton would impose on America – abortion on demand, a litmus test for the Supreme Court, homosexual rights, discrimination against religious schools, women in combat units – that’s change, all right. But it is not the kind of change America needs. It is not the kind of change America wants. And it is not the kind of change we can abide in a nation that we still call God’s country.
[24] The President of the United States is also America’s commander-in-chief. He’s the man we authorize to send fathers and sons and brothers and friends into battle.
[25] George Bush was 17-years-old when they bombed Pearl Harbor. He left his high school graduation, he walked down to the recruiting office, and he signed up to become the youngest fighter pilot in the Pacific war. And Mr. Clinton? And Bill Clinton? When Bill Clinton’s time came in Vietnam, he sat up in a dormitory room in Oxford, England, and figured out how to dodge the draft.
That time I got to see both President HW Bush and President Bill Clinton together presenting aid to the city’s Universities on the Campus at UNO. I was sitting nearly up front and even had a nice chat with a secret service woman. Where did those days go? (December 7,2005)
Needless to say, I voted for Bill Clinton even though I had previously supported Bush against Reagan when he pulled that stunt about Welfare Queens. If you haven’t read Josh Levin’s book ‘The Queen’, you should. Here’s an interview with him from PBS by Hari Sreenivasan from June 2019. Reagan used a criminal who was an outlier to slur an entire group of women, as detailed in “The True Story Behind the ‘Welfare Queen’ Stereotype.”
Hari Sreenivasan:
Josh there’s this “welfare queen” moniker that’s been used really to demonize entire groups of people. You go through this entire book and take a dive not just into that phrase but really that it’s based on a real person. She was an outlier while at the same time becoming an icon for a whole category.
Josh Levin:
Yeah that’s exactly right. Her name was Linda Taylor and she was identified by the Chicago Tribune in 1974 as a person who had committed welfare fraud while driving fancy cars, including a Cadillac. And very quickly after that she was given the nickname the welfare queen. And it was a nickname and a stereotype that really very quickly blew up.
Hari Sreenivasan:
You know it was a Chicago paper that gave her that nickname but it’s really Ronald Reagan on the campaign trail that makes that phrase such a household idea. How did it get from the Chicago paper into his speeches?
Josh Levin:
One of his advisers had found a wire story about it and Reagan was looking for kind of outrageous stories about welfare because welfare reform had been one of his big accomplishments as governor of California. And it was also something that voters were outraged about in the mid 1970s increased welfare spending at a time when the economy was really poor. And this idea that there were welfare cheats out there was something that created outrage.
Ronald Reagan Campaign Speech, 1976: In Chicago, they found a woman who holds the record. She used 80 names, 30 addresses, 15 telephone numbers to collect food stamps, Social Security, veterans’ benefits for four nonexistent deceased veterans husbands. Her tax-free cash income, alone, has been running $150,000 a year.
Josh Levin:
He didn’t say the phrase “welfare queen” in his speeches he would talk about how there was this woman in Chicago who’d stolen as much as one hundred fifty thousand dollars in welfare money in a single year, which was an exaggerated sum. But there was such baggage attached to welfare at that point that I think the electorate really understood what he was saying and really knew what he was talking about. Welfare has been an effective talking point for a whole generation of politicians.
Me and the nuns at Congo Square protesting the caging of children and Donald’s family separation policy. (July 2,2017)
Now we have promises to deport and look up and one that is painted with the brush of ‘illegal immigrant with brown skin.’ They’re also developing a scheme of citizenship that would deprive citizenship for all kinds of folks that would actually include Melania if the law passed. This is from the page of America’s Voice.
Selected immigration components of Project 2025 are below:
Mass Detention and Family Separation: Project 2025 paves the way for mass family separation by eliminating important benefits for unaccompanied children and transfers the care of unaccompanied minors from Health and Human Services to DHS to allow for large scale detention of young children. The proposal recommends weakening standards for migrant detention, calling for mass detention in temporary structures such as tents.
Attacks on Dreamers and Parents of US Citizens: Project 2025 calls for the elimination of family-based immigration and DACA.
Raid Schools Hospitals and Religious Zones: Project 2025 removes prohibitions on ICE acting in ‘sensitive zones’ thus allowing raids on schools, hospitals, and religious institutions.
Suspending Due Process: Project 2025 removes legal processes allowing immigrants a day in court by expanding the use of expedited deportations to the ‘fullest extent’ throughout the country. It also gives DHS the authority to declare a ‘mass migration event’ and enact anything to avert it (e.g. scrapping all Title 8 requirements and automatically expelling migrants). The proposal further undermines due legal processes by allowing immediate expulsion of migrants in the case of ‘loss of operational control’ or USCIS backlogs which is caused by consistent underfunding from Republican officials. Project 2025 would create a show-me-your-papers style mandate and require ICE to remove, arrest, and detain immigration violators anywhere in the country and without warrant, if possible. The plan authorizes local law enforcement to participate in border security actions and penalizes jurisdictions that do not comply. The project also plans to remove oversight authorities from ICE and classify all USCIS operations.
Use of the Military: Project 2025 encourages the use of the US military to crack down on peaceful migrants arriving at the border. The proposal also considers engaging in war with drug cartels in Mexico.
Attacks Legal Immigration: Project 2025 seeks to restrict legal immigration by barring certain groups or nationalities from accessing work and student visas, eliminates DACA, family-based immigration, TPS, and visas for victims of crime, reduces asylum and discounts gang and domestic violence as grounds.
Yup, I am photobombing my friends at the Women’s March (Jan.23, 2013). All the Donald Cult probably thinks I doth protest too much.
These kinds of things happen when White Christian Nationalists take over a party and embrace a criminal, narcissistic, lying, and authoritarian leader. We’ve gone from a B-movie Actor to a Reality Show Actor who sure does a good job at Crisis Acting, too. I’ll rely on JJ to outline the absolute misogyny demanded by Project 2025. My point is that the RNC this year was basically the showboat for Project 2025. It was a festival of the Donald Cult wreaking racism, misogyny, and white Christian nationalism. Plus, the Vice Presidential nominee is a self-loathing hillbilly. His book is all about blaming poor people in Appalachia for the systemic problems they face. This is from Aja Romano, who is writing for VOX. “Revisiting Hillbilly Elegy, the book that made J.D. Vance. The bestseller proves Trump’s VP pick has abiding disdain for absolutely everyone.”
At one time, liberal and conservative centrists alike hailed Vance’s bestselling 2016 memoir of making it out of rural, poverty-stricken Appalachia, transforming himself from a tempestuous teen into a successful Yale law school grad.
Yet years on, Vance has undergone a transformation of a different sort, remolding himself from a fairly moderate professed conservative who once compared Trump to Hitler and wrote with disdain about the outer edges of the party into a would-be authoritarian.
That’s not to say Vance doesn’t have some nuanced and even appealing positions. His populist economic instincts are a running theme of Elegy, and today he makes deals across the aisle with Democrats like Sen. Elizabeth Warren. But to understand his larger worldview, you have to look past his economic ideas to his social ideas — and to what Vance actually displays about himself throughout the book.
Perhaps readers in 2016 were eager to look past the book’s highly loaded subtext and overt classism, as the promise of a sympathetic conservative who could unlock Trumplandia for liberals was just too appealing. It also seems likely that readers loved the book because it confirmed all of the negative stereotypes they already held about country hicks. As a read on Vance himself, though, in the context of his subsequent embrace of Trump and far-right ideology, Hillbilly Elegy paints a portrait of a man obsessed with status — and brimming with contempt for just about everyone he meets.
Another one about J.D. This is from the Independent. “I’m from the same place as JD Vance, and there’s nothing to celebrate now that he’s Trump’s VP. We are both Appalachians, with eerily similar working-class backgrounds which JD Vance wrote about in his bestselling book Hillbilly Elegy. Yet, says Skylar Baker-Jordan, our views — and our reactions to this attempted assassination — couldn’t be more different.”
Like so many millions of my fellow citizens, I watched in horror on Saturday as a would-be assassin came perilously close to murdering former president Donald Trump. This was not just an attack on him and those innocent people simply exercising their First Amendment right to attend a political rally. It was not just an attack on the Republican Party.
It was an attack on the very fabric of American democracy.
Political violence has become a norm in our divided and beleaguered nation. From the 2011 attack on Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords to the 2017 shooting of Republican Steve Scalise to the attack last year on Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul, to this weekend’s horrific attack which left one of our fellow citizens dead, we are increasingly solving our differences not with ballots and votes, but bullets and violence.
Neither side in this cold civil war, now cataclysmically close to boiling point, can claim the moral high ground. Would that someone told my fellow Appalachian, JD Vance.
“The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs,” the junior senator from Ohio tweeted last night following the shooting in Butler, Pennsylvania. “That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.
So the man they’re hailing as being just a good old boy is really just another elite enthralled by bigger elites. That’s what reality television has done with political reality. It’s made an entire group of people believe that a staged, scripted, false narrative wrapped up in a box with reality printed on it must be true. Let me show you some data rather than speculation. This is from Newsweek. This was published two days ago. The data comes before that awful RNC ho-down. “Donald Trump’s Chances of Winning Election Are Declining.” This comes from who once was a candidate and has worked campaign since High School. Don’t trust polls too far away from Election Day!
According to the tracker, Biden is favored to win in 534 out of 1,000 of FiveThirtyEight’s simulations of how the election could go, while Trump wins in 462. The poll also shows that the simulations indicate that Biden is on track for a three-point win.
The polling website said its forecast is based on a combination of polls and campaign “fundamentals,” such as economic conditions, state partisanship and incumbency.
It comes after a Presidential Voting Intention poll of 3,601 swing state voters by Redfield & Wilton Strategies, found that Trump’s margins over President Joe Biden have narrowed since June in two key states: Florida and North Carolina.
Trump previously defeated Biden in both states in 2020, while he held a six-point lead over Biden in Florida in a Redfield & Wilton Strategies poll from that June.
This craziness at The Daily Beast has me seething. It’s written by Jake Lahut. “Trump’s Plan to Slam Dems for Their ‘Coup’ Against Biden: Campaign. No matter who may replace Biden, the Trump camp plans to attack Democrats for an unruly ouster of their nominee.”
However, he now only leads the current president by four points in Florida. The poll shows that 45 percent of participants plan to vote for Trump, compared to Biden’s 41 percent.
It is not the only recent poll to give Trump only a four-point lead in Florida. A June Fox News survey gave Trump 50 percent of the vote, compared to 46 percent for Biden.
You would think a few folks would be reading them just to notice the trend. But, nope. Not with a big dose of Potomac Fever going on. So this one from The Daily Beast has me seething. It’s written by Jake Lahut. “Trump’s Plan to Slam Dems for Their ‘Coup’ Against Biden: Campaign, No matter who may replace Biden, the Trump camp plans to attack Democrats for an unruly ouster of their nominee.” Notice how we get two for one here.
Donald Trump‘s campaign will attack the Democrats for conducting a “coup” if Joe Biden quits the presidential race, the GOP campaign co-chair told The Daily Beast on Thursday.
The former president’s campaign for president will try to throw the charge leveled at him over the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection back in Democrats’ faces, Chris LaCivita told The Daily Beast in an exclusive interview at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.
“Here’s what’s fascinating about it,” LaCivita said as he mingled on the convention floor in Milwaukee. “You are watching a coup. Literally. In front of your eyes.”
LaCivita, the architect with Susie Wiles of Trump’s 2024 campaign, offered the first insight into how Republicans will deal with a new Democratic candidate as Biden appeared increasingly likely to accede to calls to step aside.
The attack as a “coup plotter” will be matched with a playbook that continues to attack Biden’s record especially if Biden is succeeded by his vice president, Kamala Harris.
The campaign will run the same strategy if Harris takes over, he said. Biden has already given Republicans too much fodder, he acknowledged. They will also demand that Biden step down as president if he won’t run. That would give them extra ammunition to attack Harris as a sitting president who benefited from a “coup.”
“It’s Joe Biden,” he added, even if the nominee will not, in fact, be Joe Biden, should he step aside.
And AOC says the quiet part out loud. We knew this. “AOC goes live on Instagram saying many who want Joe Biden to drop out of race also want to remove Kamala. ‘A lot of them are not just interested in removing the president. They are interested in removing the whole ticket,’ congresswoman says.” This is from the Independent.
New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez went on Instagram Live early on Friday morning to share her thoughts on Joe Biden’s floundering re-election campaign – and warning that many of those who want the President to drop out of the race, also want Vice President Kamala Harris off the ticket too.
“If you think that there is consensus among the people who want Joe Biden to leave … that they will support, Vice President Harris, you would be mistaken,” she told viewers.
She slammed her colleagues for giving anonymous quotes to the press, calling it “bull****” and urged those resigned to a loss to Donald Trump to give up their seats.
“My community does not have the option to lose,” she said.
“If they’re going to come out and say all their little things on background, off the record, but they’re not going to be fully honest, I’m going to be honest for them. I’m in these rooms. I see what they say in conversations,” the congresswoman said.
One last story that really shows what the ramping up of Wipipo privilege has done to our society. This is from CNN. “‘Treated like a convict’: NFL legend Terrell Davis describes getting handcuffed on a plane near his kids after asking for ice.” This story is reported by Holly Yan.
Terrell Davis and his family were looking forward to vacationing in California when pro football Hall of Famer was handcuffed and removed from a United Airlines plane – for no apparent reason.
“I was stripped of my dignity. I was powerless. I couldn’t do anything,” the two-time Super Bowl champion told CNN’s Erin Burnett on Wednesday.
The incident happened Saturday at the end of a flight from Denver to Orange County, California. Davis, 51, was flying with his wife, two sons and daughter when one of the sons asked for a cup of ice during beverage service, Davis wrote on Instagram. A flight attendant “either didn’t hear or ignored his request and continued past our row,” the post read.
Terrell Davis and his family were looking forward to vacationing in California when pro football Hall of Famer was handcuffed and removed from a United Airlines plane – for no apparent reason.
“I was stripped of my dignity. I was powerless. I couldn’t do anything,” the two-time Super Bowl champion told CNN’s Erin Burnett on Wednesday.
The incident happened Saturday at the end of a flight from Denver to Orange County, California. Davis, 51, was flying with his wife, two sons and daughter when one of the sons asked for a cup of ice during beverage service, Davis wrote on Instagram. A flight attendant “either didn’t hear or ignored his request and continued past our row,” the post read.
We should really be careful. It is getting ugly out there. But, if there is a protest of anything here in Orleans Parish, I will be there. I will also vote. I will also drag my neighbors to the voting booth if I have to.
We shall overcome.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Nothing reminds me of the worst stuff to come out of the 80s than Disco. Nothing says cultural appropriation like three white guys from the Isle of Man morphing funk and black slang into a song that’s all about themselves!!!!!! But it’s a good message to the pols and media that won’t settle down and do their damned jobs!
Monday Reads: I have Questions
Posted: July 15, 2024 Filed under: "presidential immunity", 2024 Elections, 2024 presidential Campaign, Republicans against democracy, right wing hate grouups, Treason and Sedition Republican Style | Tags: Alex Jones, Cannon drops Stolen Docs Case, Corrupting Judges, Ivan Laiklin on the benefits of assassinating Trump, Judge Loose Cannon, Putin staged assassination, republican politics, Trump Staged Assassination? 19 Comments
This drone photo of the vent area in Butler, Pennsylvania, shows the building in the upper left-hand corner where the shooter’s body was found.
Dear Sky Dancers, this is not a good day for our Republic.
Judge Cannon used this moment to distract the press from what I believe might be a staged coup attempt by Donald on Donald. He golfed right after the shooting and had no bandages or marks to be seen. I have reached this theory of the case after spending a day and a half asking questions and reviewing materials with JJ, BB, and a friend of my friend PB from the late Fire Dog Lake site. The press is characterizing people like us as BlueAnon conspiracy theorists. Frankly, I just have questions about things. I’m up to being proved wrong. I’m just someone who has watched decades of Law and Order and Criminal Minds, and I’m also smarter than your average bear.
The Cannon decision was based on the bone she was thrown by corrupt Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas in the shocking presidential immunity case. Human Rights Lawyer Qasim Rashid had this to say today on @Threads.
Understand what Judge Cannon did. She saw the non-stop media coverage of the shooting, used that distraction to overturn decades of legal precedent without citing a single case in her ruling’s favor, & dismissed Trump’s classified documents case. This is how republics collapse.
To be sure, Cannon’s absurd ruling is so extreme that only one of the MAGA justices supported it in his immunity decision (Thomas). Her decision will likely be reversed because it has absolutely zero basis in precedent whatsoever.But Cannon’s indefensible opinion still serves its purpose of delaying Trump’s trial long enough to prevent any form of accountability before the November election. That was the move all along. And the DOJ delayed & delayed & that helped Trump get away with this. Smh.
Judge Aileen Cannon and Leonard Leo of the Federalist Society (Photo illustration by Salon/Getty Images/USDC for the Southern District of Florida)
This is from Eric Tucker at the AP. “Federal judge dismisses Trump classified documents case over concerns with prosecutor’s appointment.”
The federal judge presiding over the classified documents case against former President Donald Trump in Florida dismissed the prosecution on Monday, siding with defense lawyers who said the special counsel who filed the charges was illegally appointed by the Justice Department.
The decision by U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, which can be appealed and may later be overturned by a higher court, brings at least, for now, a stunning and abrupt conclusion to a criminal case that at the time it was filed was widely regarded as the most perilous of all the legal threats the Republican former president confronted.
…
It’s the latest stroke of good fortune in the four criminal cases Trump has faced. Though he was convicted in May in his New York hush money trial, the sentencing there has been postponed following a Supreme Court opinion that conferred broad immunity on former presidents. That opinion will result in significant delays in a separate case brought by Smith charging Trump with plotting to overturn his 2020 presidential election loss to Democrat Joe Biden. Another election subversion case filed by prosecutors in Atlanta has been delayed by revelations of a romantic relationship between the district attorney and a special prosecutor.
I’ve been doing a bit of digging and found this article from Salon on May 7. “Judge Cannon’s secret right-wing getaway: Why didn’t we know about this? Federal judge in Trump’s documents trial didn’t tell us about those right-wing conferences at a Montana resort.” It’s reported by columnist Lucian Truscott IV.
Let me ask you a question: How many all-expenses-paid vacations at luxury hunting and fishing lodges have you enjoyed over the last few years? I’m not talking about a motel in the boonies of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan or a drafty log cabin on a lake in Maine or Minnesota. We’re talking about a luxury resort on 1,200 acres alongside the Yellowstone River just outside Yellowstone National Park. We’re talking about a lodge featuring rooms with stone fireplaces that go for upwards of $1,000 a night in high season, meals that include “house-cured meats from local ranches, garden-fresh produce from nearby farms, and, of course plenty of Northwest craft beers and spirits,” as the resort’s website describes the offerings.
It’s called the Sage Lodge in Pray, Montana, and it’s where George Mason University sends gaggles of federal judges for a week-long “colloquium” every year or so. Paid for by the Law and Economics Center at the Antonin Scalia Law School, the “colloquium” held at the Sage Lodge in 2021, for example, featured lectures on such subjects as “Woke Law!” – and yes, the exclamation point is part of the lecture topic — by one Todd J. Zywicki, who is George Mason University Foundation Professor of Law at the Antonin Scalia Law School and a senior fellow at the Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives of the Cato Institute. Another juicy topic covered at the Sage Lodge in 2021 was “Unprofitable Education: Student Loans, Higher Education Costs, and the Regulatory State,” also featuring a lecture by Zywicki, a topic that rings what we might call a rather different bell after the Supreme Court struck down President Biden’s student loan forgiveness program last year.
The Antonin Scalia Law School, by the way, was established and largely funded by the efforts of Leonard Leo of the Federalist Society, who helped put together $30 million from conservative donors, including Leo himself, to rename the law school after the late legendary right-wing justice, who it will be remembered died of a heart attack in 2016 at another luxury hunting lodge, that one in Texas, while on a trip paid for by wealthy conservative “friends of the court,” I guess we could call them. The other major donor to the Scalia Law School was the Charles Koch Foundation, which threw in a handy $10 million.
Why are we talking about luxury hunting lodges and right-wing “colloquiums” for judges? Because one of our favorite federal judges, Aileen Cannon of Florida, currently presiding over the case against Donald Trump over the secret documents he kept at Mar-a-Lago, was a guest at that same 2021 “colloquium” at the Sage Lodge, and the one held in 2022 as well. The thing is, Cannon failed to file the form known as a Privately Funded Seminar Disclosure Report, which lists whoever paid for the judge to attend the seminar, who the speakers were and what topics were discussed. The form is supposed to be posted on the website of every federal court within 30 days of the time a judge attending such an all-expenses-paid seminar. Cannon, however, somehow forgot to do so, so anyone who might be interested in learning who was paying for Cannon’s vacations and the nature of her judicial education would have been out of luck.
So why do we suppose Judge Cannon was so shy about who’s paying for her luxury trips and what she might have learned there? Oh, I don’t know … might it be because she didn’t want anyone to know about her links to the Leonard Leo wing of legal theory? Could it have been that she didn’t want it known that she had taken money from an organization that was in large part funded by billionaires friendly to the man whose case she was presiding over?
All these corrupt Republican Judges seem to lead right back to Leonard Leo, don’t they? Something is very rotten here. Marcie of Empty Wheel reads the 93 pages, so we don’t need to.
Procedurally, this may actually not help Trump in the way he’d like (because DOJ has the option of appealing it or having a US Attorney charge Trump).
But it’s also hilarious, since Aileen Cannon has been treating herself like an Appellate Judge that she hasn’t been confirmed to be.
Update: One thing Cannon appears upset about is Merrick Garland’s invocation of Section 533, which appoints FBI-like figures.
Special Counsel Smith argues that Section 533(1) confers on the Attorney General the authority to appoint special counsels, specifically, constitutional officers wielding the “full power and independent authority . . . of any United States Attorney.” 28 C.F.R. § 600.6. After careful review, the Court is convinced that it does not. Congress “does not . . . hide elephants in mouseholes.” Whitman v. Am. Trucking Associations, 531 U.S. 457, 468 (2001). Special Counsel Smith’s interpretation would shoehorn appointment authority for United States Attorney-equivalents into a statute that permits the hiring of FBI law enforcement personnel. Such a reading is unsupported by Section 533’s plain language and statutory context; inconsistent with Congress’s usual legislative practice; and threatens to undermine the “basic separation-of-powers principles” that “give life and content” to the Appointments Clause. Morrison, 487 U.S. at 715 (Scalia, J., dissenting). The Court explains below.
33 Order No. 5730-2023 (appointing David C. Weiss); Order No. 5588-2023 (appointing Robert K. Hur).
That is her only mention of Robert Hur, whose appointment would be unconstitutional under her theory as well. (I’m still trying to figure out whether Cannon will help Hunter Biden go free, too.)
Update: Okay, I’ve read the thing.
It’s hilarious.
It’s hilarious, because it doesn’t create any delay that Cannon was not pursuing anyway. Indeed, Jack Smith could immediately appeal this and try to get her tossed, so it may hasten things (unless Trump wins!).
It’s hilarious because it is unbelievably hubristic. The only credible future for Judge Cannon now is Trump’s first SCOTUS appointment in a second term.
It’s hilarious because the way she did this, if it were upheld (not an impossibility given how nutty SCOTUS has gotten), it would be even more useful for Hunter Biden than Donald Trump (especially if Trump didn’t win reelection), because the statutes of limitation on Hunter’s alleged crimes have started to expire.
So, back to Donald and his surprising recovery from a shooting that killed one and critically injured two. So my Nancy Drew senses started tingling when I saw how composed Donald was after the shooting; he was more worried about getting his shoes than leaving the scene. Posing for pictures all along the way. PB first contacted me with this bit.
Talked to a friend who’s a Psych and body language expert. 100% staged. Look at their unified messaging.
All I could remember where all the times Trump on the last two campaign trails and seemed afraid of everything. This is from Chris Cizzilla and CNN from April 28, 2022. “Donald Trump lived in fear of being hit by, um, ‘dangerous’ fruit.”
Donald Trump feared being killed by thrown fruit.
Yes, you read that right.
In a recently released transcript of a deposition as part of a lawsuit filed by a group of protesters who alleged they were assaulted by Trump’s security guards at a 2015 campaign rally, the subject of fruit – and fruit being flung, in particular – came up.
Here’s the full – and fully epic – back-and-forth between Trump and Benjamin Dictor, an attorney representing the protestors.
Dictor: Okay. And you said that, ‘If you see someone getting ready to throw a tomato, just knock the crap out of them would you.’ That was your statement?
Trump: Oh, yeah. It was very dangerous.
Dictor: What was very dangerous?
Trump: We were threatened.
Dictor: With what?
Trump: They were going to throw fruit. We were threatened. We had a threat.
Dictor: How did you become aware that there was a threat that people were going to throw fruit?
Trump: We were told. I thought Secret Service was involved in that, actually. And you get hit with fruit, it’s – no – it’s very violent stuff. We were on alert for that.
Trump attorney Jeffrey Goldman: A tomato is a fruit after all, I guess. … It has seeds.
Just enough time for a NAZI salute also, which is being used by the Press right now. They’re using the fist bumps. The campaign is now using for fundraising and political materials.
And where did Donald get the idea to lead an assassination attempt on himself? This is from Newsweek, May 3, 2023. “Russia Staged Putin ‘Assassination’ to Justify Mass Mobilization: ISW” I know now about self-coups and staged assassination attempts as political tools of fascists. What a world! Funny how Donald has disappeared from the campaign trail for a few weeks but suddenly was paling around with Viktor Orban last week, too.
The alleged attempt to “assassinate” Russian President Vladimir Putin was likely staged by the Kremlin to justify a future effort to mobilize troops for the war in Ukraine, according to the Institute for the Study of War (ISW).
The Russian government on Wednesday issued a statement alleging that two Ukrainian drones had been destroyed near Putin’s official residence in Moscow. The Kremlin said that the drones were attempting to carry out “a planned terrorist attack” by assassinating Putin just before “Victory Day” celebrations on May 9. Ukraine has denied any involvement.
While video of the drones dramatically exploding over Kremlin grounds appeared online soon after the purported attack occurred, the incident immediately raised eyebrows, with a number of experts and commentators suggesting that it may have been a staged “propaganda” event intended to drum up Russian support for the war.
ISW, the U.S.-based think tank, said in a report published on Wednesday night that the Russian government “likely staged” the purported assassination attempt “to bring the war home to a Russian domestic audience and set conditions for a wider societal mobilization.”
And then there’s good old Alex Jones, the father of seeing everything as staged with crisis actors. Listen to this. It’s from Patriot Takes. This is a conversation with Ivan Raiklin, who calls himself Trump’s Secretary of Retribution. Check him out on TNR: “Trump Ally Exposed for Horrific Hit List of Political Enemies. Donald Trump’s self-proclaimed “secretary of retribution” is even more bloodthirsty than the former president.” He’s an absolute skinhead. Both BB and I have posted on him before. Please follow the link to Patriot Takes and watch him talk. It’s bone-chilling. BB found this one.
5 months ago, Alex Jones and InfoWars guest Ivan Raiklin discussed how assassinating Trump would be beneficial, according to them, because it would lead to retaliatory “in kind” assassinations of a “deep state” list which includes President Joe Biden.
Ivan Raiklin: “If they [assassinate Trump], option 2, behind Trump, is going to be so much better for us and so much worse them.”
Alex Jones: “I was about as to say, If they kill him, that’s best case scenario from a sick level. From a sick level medium, ‘Oh, please kill him.’ I mean, it’s so good after that.”
Raiklin: “Oh, it’s going to be the best cleansing and the fastest cleansing that we’ve ever seen in my lifetime. I guaran—, I access, with almost certainty, with the highest level of confidence, that if they assassinate Trump, it is so game over for them.”
There’s no way to blame Biden for the shooter, given his personal history as a gun-toting right-wing Republican, either. “FBI probing motives, the background of Thomas Matthew Crooks, the Western Pa. gunman behind Donald Trump assassination attempt. Former classmates described Crooks as politically conservative and a “loner.” Authorities believe the AR-15-style rifle he used belonged to his father.” This is from the Philadelphia Inquirer,
Authorities released few updates Sunday on the progress of their investigation into Trump’s would-be assassin, but a portrait of Crooks — a 2022 graduate of Bethel Park High School who worked as a dietary aide at a local nursing and rehabilitation center — began to emerge.
He had no criminal history, almost no presence on social media, and lived in a middle-class suburb about an hour away from the site of the shooting.
His political leanings were not immediately apparent. Though he was registered as a Republican, according to state voter rolls — and this year’s election would have been the first in which he was eligible to cast a ballot for president — campaign finance reports show a man with the same name gave $15 to a progressive political action committee in January 2021, on the day Biden was sworn into office.***
Crooks’ father, Matthew, reached by CNN late Saturday, said he was trying to figure out “what the hell [was] going on” and declined to comment further until he had spoken with authorities. Attempts to reach other family members were unsuccessful Sunday.
Kevin Rojek, head of the FBI’s field office in Pittsburgh, told reporters Sunday that agents recovered bomb-making material from inside Crooks’ car and his residence. The rifle he used in the attack, which was believed to have been purchased at least six months earlier by his father, as well as Crooks’ cell phone and other evidence had been sent to the FBI lab in Quantico, Va., “for processing and exploitation,” Rojek said.
Meanwhile, several former classmates offered conflicting characterizations of Crooks. Some described him as a loner who had been bullied during his high school years. Jason Kohler, who graduated alongside Crooks, told reporters that students had harassed him “almost every day” and that he often wore “hunting” outfits to class.
“He was just an outcast,” Kohler said.
*** Author note: There’s some evidence this was not the shooter but a 69-year-old man with the same name from Pittsburg.
Here are some additional things I have questions about. Most of these are based on photography at the scene. For example, Kim Wexler’s Ponytail shows this TikTok of a New Angle of Trump at Rally shooting. It basically shows either Donald’s bodyguards or the Secret Service moving photographers close to the stairs. Perhaps for a better shot of the exit act? The TikTok comes from
Why was there such lackluster Security at the Rally?
I had a lot of weird things from early on that I thought were just not right. One was the interview by an MSNBC reporter of a man who was supposed to be standing next to Donald at the podium from the onset. He told the reporter something to the effect that he got up there, introduced himself, and was then told by Donald to go ahead and come up to the podium, only to be quickly told, wait, let’s do that later, and shuffled him off to sit somewhere else. I cannot find that clip by my neighbor across the street, who I had been with earlier for cocktails, who told me that she had seen it, too.
I also heard Frank Figluzzi discuss the fact that it was odd that the roof wasn’t in the area where the check-for-weapons zone was. He also said that on the other side was where the protestors were allowed to gather and even march. My thought was, wow! Sounds like a setup to blame a protestor and let the guy onto the roof. The fact that he was a right-wing Republican gun nut just really puts that on display as planning.
One of the most questionable things is that photos of Trump show him looking in the direction of the building where the shooter was. This is precisely when he turned his head to point to his whiteboard. At that point, local police went to the roof, saw him, and went back down the stairs. There was also a hesitation by the Secret Service Sniper to shoot him. Acyn, the Senior Digital Editor for MeidasTouch.com, captured this on CSPN. He’s looking directly at the shooter and then angling towards the White Board. The shooter was only about 165ish feet away from Donald. That’s definitely a distance that a good sniper could handle.
So, several things I noticed from this bit. First, when you speak to a large audience, you look straight ahead. You do not fixate on a spot to your right. Nowadays, politicians use teleprompters, but the ones that are guarded by the Secret Service have bulletproof shields. Do you see one?
I had another conversation with a neighbor this morning who has friends who have been military snipers, and their hypothesis on this I would put under the conspiracy theory. They’re saying they think the Republican Party mainstream was working with the Secret Service to take him out. That’s pure speculation. It’s obvious, though, that there’s something wrong with the security there.
This is from NPR. “The Secret Service is investigating how the man who shot Trump got as close as he did.” House leaders have already ordered a full investigation and demanded the head of the Secret Service testify before them while they have already had a briefing. It is already a bit of the usual zoo since Jim Comer is likely to lead the investigation.
The U.S. Secret Service is investigating how a gunman armed with an AR-style rifle was able to get close enough to shoot and injure former President Donald Trump at a rally Saturday in Pennsylvania, a monumental failure of one the agency’s core duties.
The gunman, who was killed by Secret Service personnel, fired multiple shots at the stage from an “elevated position outside of the rally venue,” the agency said.
An Associated Press analysis of more than a dozen videos and photos taken at the Trump rally, as well as satellite imagery of the site, shows the shooter was able to get astonishingly close to the stage where the former president was speaking. A video posted to social media and geolocated by the AP shows the body of a man wearing gray camouflage lying motionless on the roof of a manufacturing plant just north of the Butler Farm Show grounds, where Trump’s rally was held.
The roof was less than 150 meters (yards) from where Trump was speaking, a distance from which a decent marksman could reasonably hit a human-sized target. For reference, 150 meters is a distance at which U.S. Army recruits must hit a scaled human-sized silhouette to qualify with the M16 assault rifle in basic training. The AR-15, like the shooter at the Trump rally had, is the semi-automatic civilian version of the military M16.
Some of the weirdest Republican attacks have been on Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle, who is a 27-year-old veteran of the force. She is being called a DEI hire by really nasty Republican pols. She is the second woman to have the office. Of course, these black faces and the woman who heads the agency are suspected of being in a “deep state.” I won’t go deeper into any of these cringeworthy moments.
On Monday, Cheatle said in a statement: “Since the shooting, I have been in constant contact with Secret Service personnel in Pennsylvania who worked to maintain the integrity of the crime scene until the FBI assumed its role as the lead investigating agency into the assassination attempt.”
She added that the Secret Service is working with other law enforcement agencies to “understand what happened, how it happened, and how we can prevent an incident like this from ever taking place again. … We will also work with the appropriate Congressional committees on any oversight action.”
Neither Cheatle or the Secret Service’s communications office have weighed in on criticism of women in the agency more broadly.
I have a few more weird angles from various drones and photogs that make me even more suspicious, but according to White Christian Nationalists, it’s all just a miracle. I’m sticking with a staged attempt ala Putin because that seems more in line with Trump’s lack of anything decent.
So, I’m open to comments and criticism, but this is my case so far. I’m likely not going to leave this rabbit hole for a while. Keep an eye on the things Republicans don’t want you to know. And please, don’t take in any of the stupidity of the Republican Convention. This one is going to be insane.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Preview of the Republican Convention
More Questions from Friends
I have an update from the FBI.
Update on the FBI Investigation of the Attempted Assassination of Former President Donald Trump
Update: July 15, 2024, 3:05 p.m. EDT:
The FBI continues to investigate the shooting incident at the July 13 rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, as an assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump and as potential domestic terrorism. The investigation is still in the early stages, and the FBI is providing the following updates:
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FBI technical specialists successfully gained access to Thomas Matthew Crooks’ phone, and they continue to analyze his electronic devices.
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The search of the subject’s residence and vehicle are complete.
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The FBI has conducted nearly 100 interviews of law enforcement personnel, event attendees, and other witnesses. That work continues.
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The FBI has received hundreds of digital media tips which include photos and videos taken at the scene, and we continue to review incoming tips. We encourage anyone with information that may assist with the ongoing investigation to continue to submit it online at tips.fbi.gov or call 1-800-CALL-FBI.
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While the investigative work continues, FBI victim services personnel have offered assistance to the victims of Saturday’s incident.
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