Lazy Caturday Reads

Posted: September 28, 2024 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: 2024 presidential Campaign, cat art, caturday, Donald Trump, just because, Kamala Harris 2024 | Tags: abortion rights, Cats of the Louvre, Derrick Anderson, fake family, Google, immigration policy, Japanese Manga, Olivia Nuzzi, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Taiyo Matsumoto | 6 Comments

Cats of the Louvre, a graphic novel by Taiyo Matsumoto

Happy Caturday!!

There are just 37 days remaining until election day, November 5. While Trump continues to display his growing cognitive issues as well as his ignorance of public policy, Kamala Harris has been making substantive appearances in which she intelligently spells out what she will do as president. Earlier in the week she spoke about her economic plans. Yesterday she visited the border in Arizona and gave a speech outlining her proposed immigration policies and attacking Trump’s failures.

CNN: Harris goes to the border to take Trump to task for blocking bill to fix migration issues: ‘He prefers to run on a problem.’

Vice President Kamala Harris went on the offensive against former President Donald Trump on immigration Friday during her visit to the southern border in Arizona as she tries to turn a political vulnerability on its head.

Immigration has featured prominently in the 2024 presidential election, with polls showing voters placing more trust in Trump to handle the issue than Harris.

Democrats, grappling with years of border crises, have tried to gain ground by pointing to the bipartisan border measure that congressional Republicans blocked earlier this year after Trump came out against it. Harris on Friday lambasted Trump for his role in stymying that bill.

“It was the strongest border security bill we have seen in decades. It was endorsed by the Border Patrol union. And it should be in effect today, producing results in real time, right now, for our country,” she said at a rally in Douglas, a town on the US-Mexico border.

“But Donald Trump tanked it. He picked up the phone and called some friends in Congress and said, ‘Stop the bill,’” she said. “He prefers to run on a problem instead of fixing a problem. And the American people deserve a president who cares more about border security than playing political games and their personal political future.”

She said she would ask Congress to pass the measure if she is elected, and would sign it into law. She also laid out a series of proposals that she said were “not just about some rhetoric at a rally,” but would help stem the flow of migrants into the United States.

A bit more:

“Solutions are at hand if we focus on fixing a problem and not running on a problem,” Harris said.

She said she’d work with Congress to create a pathway to citizenship for “hardworking immigrants who have been here for years, for years, and deserve to have a system that works,” as well as “Dreamers” – undocumented immigrants brought into the United States as children, who are allowed to live and work in the US under an Obama-era program but generally cannot become citizens under current law.

“They are American in every way. But still, they do not have an earned pathway to citizenship. And this problem has gone unsolved at this point now for decades,” Harris said. “The same goes for farmworkers who ensure that we have food on our tables and sustain our agricultural industry – and they too have been in legal limbo for years because politicians have refused to come together and fix our broken immigration system.”

Earlier this year, Biden announced an executive action severely limiting the ability of migrants to seek asylum at the US southern border if they crossed unlawfully – a departure from decadeslong protocol. Immigrant advocates have likened the executive action to Trump-era policies.

The measure can be turned on and off and lifted when there’s a daily average of fewer than 1,500 encounters between ports of entry, among other criteria. It remains in place.

Homeland Security officials have credited the action for driving down border crossings to the lowest point since 2020.

The Washington Post: Harris, in visit to border, proposes new restrictions on immigration.

DOUGLAS, Ariz. — Vice President Kamala Harris and her campaign on Friday proposed new border restrictions that would go further than the emergency rules the Biden administration deployed in June, making the announcement during a visit to the U.S.-Mexico border Friday in an effort to confront one of her biggest political vulnerabilities.

By Taiyo Matsumoto

Harris’s proposed executive action would build on President Joe Biden’s current policy of essentially closing the U.S. asylum system unless illegal border crossings stay below 1,500 daily crossings for a week. Harris would lower that threshold and extend the period it must be met, advisers said, although exact figures were not immediately available.

The action might have a limited practical impact, at least in the short term, but the proposal appeared designed to send a message that Harris is taking a more assertive immigration posture than the administration in which she serves and that she is not ceding the issue to Donald Trump, who consistently scores higher marks among voters on border security and immigration.

In what her campaign had billed as a major speech in this community, which sits on the border, Harris also emphasized her support for an enforcement-heavy border security bill crafted by a bipartisan group of senators earlier this year. She decried Trump’s central role in derailing it, noting that he had urged Republicans in Congress to oppose the legislation.

“Donald Trump tanked it,” she said, standing amid six different signs that said in capital letters, “Border Security and Stability.”

“Because, you see, he prefers to run on a problem instead of fixing a problem,” she added. “And the American people deserve a president who cares more about border security than playing political games and their personal political future.”

Lazy Caturday Reads: The Powerful Political Influence of Opus Dei

Posted: September 21, 2024 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: cat art, caturday, just because | Tags: Catholic Church, Gareth Gore, JD Vance, Kevin Roberts, Leonard Leo, Opus Dei, Project 2025 | 7 Comments

By Tetsuhiro Wakabayashi

Happy Caturday!!

I wanted to post an article that appeared in New York Magazine a couple of days ago, but I can no longer get past the paywall. It was about the ultra right wing Catholic sect Opus Dei, which has become a very powerful influence in Washington DC. The article was based on a new book that will be released on October 1, Opus: The Cult of Dark Money, Human Trafficking, and Right-Wing Conspiracy inside the Catholic Church, by Gareth Gore.

Here is a description of the book from Publisher’s Weekly:

Abuse, enslavement, and financial schemes are the stock in trade of the shadowy Catholic sect Opus Dei, according to this chilling debut exposé. Journalist Gore stumbled onto the institution’s web of influence during the 2017 collapse of Banco Popular, when he discovered that the Spanish bank’s biggest shareholder, mysteriously named the Syndicate, could be traced to Opus Dei. Combing through the Syndicate’s sprawling network of foundations and nonprofits led Gore to uncover Opus Dei’s connections to offshore money-laundering schemes and a global web of vocational schools implicated in human trafficking of children. Delving into archives and conducting interviews with former members, Gore alleges that a mission to “serve God by striving for perfection even in the most everyday tasks” has masked abuse since Opus Dei’s 1928 founding by Josemaría Escrivá, whose recruitment methods rapidly turned cultlike, incorporating “listening devices” and “prescription drugs.” While Gore reports that today abuse permeates the entire hierarchy of the organization, he most harrowingly recounts the plight of its lowest rung: underage girls assigned to household work in Opus Dei residencies, where many later reported being held captive; others minors connected to Opus Dei have reported instances of sexual abuse. Gore’s most alarming line of inquiry is into Opus Dei’s political influence in Washington, D.C., via the Catholic Information Center and the Federalist Society. Readers will be disturbed.

Some of the powerful people who are known to be members of Opus Dei: Samuel Alito, Amy Coney Barrett, Clarence and Gini Thomas, J.D. Vance, Leonard Leo, who hand-picked Trump’s SCOTUS picks, and Project 2025 author Kevin Roberts. There are many more.

Rachel Leingang and Stephanie Kirchgaessner at The Guardian (from July, 2024): Kevin Roberts, architect of Project 2025, has close ties to radical Catholic group Opus Dei.

Kevin Roberts, the Heritage Foundation president and the architect of Project 2025, the conservative thinktank’s road map for a second Trump presidency, has close ties and receives regular spiritual guidance from an Opus Dei-led center in Washington DC, a hub of activity for the radical and secretive Catholic group.

Roberts acknowledged in a speech last September that – for years – he has visited the Catholic Information Center, a K Street institution headed by an Opus Dei priest and incorporated by the archdiocese of Washington, on a weekly basis for mass and “formation”, or religious guidance. Opus Dei also organizes monthly retreats at the CIC.

In the speech – which he delivered at the CIC and was recorded and is available online – Roberts spoke candidly about his strategy for achieving extreme policy goals that he supports but are out of step with the views of a majority of Americans.

Outlawing birth control is the “hardest” political battle facing conservatives in the future, the 50-year-old political strategist said, but he urged conservatives to pursue even small legislative victories – what he called “radical incrementalism” – to advance their most rightwing policy objectives.

Roberts gained notoriety this year as the leading force behind Project 2025, a foundation plan backed by more than 100 conservative groups that seeks to radically upend a broad range of policies if Trump gets elected again, from limiting abortion access and LGBTQ+ rights and dismantling the Department of Education, to ending diversity programs and increasing government support for “fertility awareness” programs, like ovulation tracking and practicing periodic abstinence, instead of more reliable contraception.

But Roberts’ personal ties to Opus Dei and the significance of his affiliation, have received far less attention.

King Cat, by Tetsuhiro Wakabayashi

Gareth Gore, the author of a forthcoming book on Opus Dei, said members of the Catholic organization are engaged in “a political project shrouded in a veil of spirituality”. The group’s founder, Saint Josemaría Escrivá, saw his followers as part of a “rising militia”, Gore said, who were seeking to “enter battle against the enemies of Christ”.

“Like Project 2025, Opus Dei at its core is a reactionary stand against the progressive drift of society,” Gore said. “For decades now, the organization has thrown its resources at penetrating Washington’s political and legal elite – and finally seems to have succeeded through its close association with men like Kevin Roberts and Leonard Leo.”

Leo is a conservative activist who has led the Republican mission to install the rightwing majority in the supreme court and finances many of the groups signed on to Project 2025.

Like Roberts, Leo also has links to the Opus Dei-linked CIC. In a 2022 speech accepting the CIC’s highest honor, the John Paul II New Evangelization award, Leo praised the center while also referring to his political opponents as “vile and amoral current day barbarians, secularists and bigots” who were under the influence of the devil….

One of the core tenets of Opus Dei is that it does not believe in the traditional separation of church and state. Instead, said Massimo Faggioli, a professor of theology and religious studies at Villanova University, it believes the two ought to have a symbiotic relationship.

I hope you’ll read the rest of the article. It’s not as extensive as thJe one behind the paywall at New York Magazine, but it’s good.

Matthew Fox at Daily Meditations (May, 2024): A Deeper Look at Opus Dei, Christofascism, Misogyny & SCOTUS.

Since the far-right wing cult in the Roman Catholic church known as “Opus Dei” has played such a prominent role in Leonard Leo’s life and in the current Supreme Court that he has fashioned, it seems fitting to take a closer look at the organization.

Christofascism is always steeped in misogyny.  So was the fascist founder of Opus Dei, Josemaría Escrivá, who was rushed into canonization shortly after he died.  Maria del Carmen Tapia wrote a tell-all book about Escrivá which became a best-seller in Spain, Italy, Portugal and Germany.  The Boston Globe called it a picture of an obsessively secretive, manipulative, and sexist organization with a virtual cultlike veneration of its founder.

Tapia played significant roles in her 18 years with Opus Dei including working as Escrivá’s secretary for seven years.  She wrote about what she saw.  “There’s a constant sexual obsession within Opus Dei” she writes.

Tetsuhiro Wakabayashi Ghost and Cat

Beating of one’s body was encouraged as a spiritual practice and Tapia confessed that “I treated my body with brutality.”  At one meeting where Tapia was present, Escrivá raged and shouted to fellow priests, Take the one [woman], lift up her skirt, take down her panties, and whack her on the behind until she talks.  MAKE HER TALK!

He shouted at Tapia, You’re a wicked woman, sleazy, scum!  That’s what you are!  She endured many interrogations and “advisers” were stationed inside and outside her room who followed her even to the bathroom. She wrote, I began to shake almost constantly as a result of my terror.  I was afraid they would take me to a mental institution as I knew they had done to other members.

In her final meeting with Escrivá, he shouted at her, You are a seductress with all your immorality and indecency!. …You’re wicked!  Indecent!….Hear me well!  WHORE!  SOW!

Escrivá hated Vatican II and liberation theology and actually was heard to praise Hitler.  But two papacies, those of JPII and Benedict XVI, appointed numerous members of his sect as bishops and cardinals in South and North America.

Pope Francis has tried to marginalize Opus Dei, apparently without much success.

It should be very concerning that J.D. Vance is a member of this cult.

Molly Olmstead at Slate: J.D. Vance Used to Be an Atheist. What He Believes Now Is Telling. Subhead: He’s not an evangelical Christian. He’s a Catholic—of a very specific type.

In 2021, when J.D. Vance was asked at a conference why he had converted to Catholicism just two years earlier, he had a fairly simple answer.

“I really liked that the Catholic Church was just really old,” he said.

This anti-modern worldview is key to understanding Vance. In a party long dominated by anti-intellectual evangelical Christians with a hearty distrust of institutions, Vance stands out among its leaders for having embraced a church with a complex social doctrine built off the work of ancient philosophers. His enthusiasm for a particular and relatively obscure kind of contemporary Catholic political thought shows up in his politics—his longing for Americans to build robust nuclear families, his comments about banning porn, his scorn for childless cat ladies. It’s tempting to see these stances as old ones from the Christian right, familiar to anyone who has followed the evolution of the GOP in the past couple of decades, but Vance’s past comments indicate that they’re motivated by something newer, and more radical, than that.

Vance wasn’t always so unusual among his fellow Republicans: He grew up loosely evangelical Christian; he writes in Hillbilly Elegy that his commitment to his father’s church was strong but short-lived. As a young man, he identified for a while as an atheist. Then, as he recounted in a 2020 essay about his conversion for the Catholic magazine the Lamp, he reconnected with Christianity when he was searching for greater meaning in his life during law school. He began to feel drawn to Catholicism in particular after reading up on Catholic moral philosophers and discussing theology with conservative Dominican friars he knew.

The Cat Which Relaxes, by Tetsuhiro Wakabayashi

After he officially converted in 2019, Vance explained in an interview with his friend Rod Dreher—a conservative writer and Catholic convert who later went on to convert, again, to Orthodox Christianity—that he had to Catholicism in part because of the writings of Saint Augustine. “Augustine gave me a way to understand Christian faith in a strongly intellectual way,” Vance said. “As someone who spent a lot of his life buying into the lie that you had to be stupid to be a Christian, Augustine really demonstrated in a moving way that that’s not true.” [….]

But as Vance would explain at that 2021 conference (held by the Napa Institute, a conservative Catholic organization), he was also drawn to Catholicism for its rules and relative stability over centuries. “I felt like the modern world was constantly in flux,” Vance said. “The things you believed 10 years ago were no longer acceptable to believe 10 years later.”

“We have, I believe, a civilizational crisis in this country,” Vance said at the 2021 Napa Institute event. “Even among healthy, intact families, they’re not having enough kids such that we’re going to have a long-term future in this country.” For his Senate campaign, also in 2021, Vance praised Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán for policies that incentivized marriage and children. Orbán’s government had offered loans to married couples that were forgiven if the couple stayed together and had three children. (Orbán is not himself Catholic but has privileged Christianity in a country dominated by Catholicism.) “Why can’t we do that here?” Vance asked. “Why can’t we actually promote family formation?”

These anti-modern comments fit with a certain kind of worldview that prizes a traditional and family-oriented society above individual liberties—and even democracy. It’s a guiding philosophy of a new faction of the conservative movement that pulls from elements of both the left and far right, that champions populist economics and radically conservative social policies, and that promises a revolution in the entire political order: the postliberal right.

Olmstead doesn’t mention Opus Dei, but she spells out Vance’s ultra right wing Catholic religious beliefs. There’s more at the link.

I’m not sure where I’m going with all this. I guess I’m going down a rabbit hole, as Dakinikat often says. But I wanted to call attention to the fact that it’s not just evangelical Protestants that are influencing our government–far right wing Catholics may be even more powerful, and now those powerful people are trying to place one of their own (Vance) in the White House.

One more article on Opus Dei’s influence, focusing on Leonard Leo. Thomas B. Edsall at The New York Times: The Man Behind the End of Roe v. Wade Has Big Plans for America.

In the world of political fund-raising, there is hard money, soft money, dark money — and Leonard Leo money.

Political advocacy and charitable groups controlled by Leo now have far more assets than the combined total cash on hand of the Republican and Democratic National, Congressional and Senatorial committees: $440.9 million.

Leo is a 58-year-old graduate of Cornell Law School, a Catholic with ties to Opus Dei — the most conservative “personal prelature” in the church hierarchy — chief strategist of the Federalist Society for more than a quarter century and a crucial force behind the confirmations of John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. He has emerged over the past five years as the dominant fund-raiser on the right.

As Leo has risen to this pinnacle of influence, he has become rich, profiting from the organizations he has created and from the consulting fees paid by the conservative advocacy and lobbying groups he funds.

Leo has an overarching agenda. In a 2022 speech he made upon receiving the John Paul II New Evangelization Award at the Catholic Information Center, he warned fellow Catholics: “Catholic evangelization faces extraordinary threats and hurdles. Our culture is more hateful and intolerant of Catholicism than at any other point in our lives. It despises who we are, what we profess and how we act.”

Inca, by Tetsuhiro Wakabayashi

Leo describes the adversaries of Catholicism as “these barbarians, secularists and bigots” who “have been growing more numerous over the past few years. They control and use many levers of power.” He is determined to wrest the levers of power from “the grasp of liberals” and place them, permanently if possible, with those he sees as their rightful owner: social and economic conservatives.

Leo has most famously used his network and personal influence not only to establish a 6-3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court but also to secure appointment of deeply conservative justices throughout the federal and state court systems.

At the same time, Leo has provided essential support to the full gamut of right-wing advocacy and lobbying organizations, including the Federalist Society, Susan B. Anthony Pro-life America and the Faith and Freedom Coalition.

The millions of dollars Leo has raised through his tax-exempt nonprofits have, in turn, flowed to profit-making consulting companies owned, in part or wholly, by him. In 2016, he created the BH Group, a for-profit consulting firm that is now defunct, which received at least $6.9 million from tax- exempt donor nonprofits run by him.

Four years later, Leo formed CRC Advisors, also a profit-making consulting firm. Since then, two of his tax-exempt donor organizations, the 85 Fund and the Concord Fund, have paid CRC Advisors more than $77 million, according to reports filed with the I.R.S.

Leo is a prodigious fund-raiser whose organizations take in and hand out hundreds of millions annually. For example, the 85 Fund, according to the I.R.S., raised $317.9 million from 2020 to 2022 and gave out grants totaling $147.4 million. During that same period, the 85 Fund paid CRC Advisors — of which Leo is chairman — fees totaling $55.2 million, according to I.R.S. filings and research by Accountable.us and ProPublica.

Leonard Leo is definitely a member of Opus Dei, and there’s much more information about him at the link. Here is a gift article in case you’d like to read the whole thing.

I have to end here, because I’m having WordPress problems. I’ll add a few more links in the comments.

Take care of yourselves and have a nice weekend.

Lazy Caturday Reads

Posted: September 7, 2024 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: 2024 presidential Campaign, cat art, caturday, Donald Trump, Kamala Harris 2024 | Tags: Dick Cheney, E. Jean Carroll, Economic Club of New York, fascism, Jeff Jarvis, Liz Cheney, media criticism, sexual abuse, tariffs | 4 Comments

Happy Caturday!!

By Tetsuhiro Wakabashi

Yesterday we got some earth-shaking news: Dick Cheney endorsed Kamala Harris for president. His daughter Liz had announced her endorsement a couple of days ago. Of course neither Cheney is announcing agreement with Harris’s policies, but they both see the danger that another Trump term would pose for our country and for democracy here and around the world. With just two months to go before the 2024 election, we the people are building a coalition of people with differing political views who will act together to save us from the forces of fascism.

AP: Former Vice President Dick Cheney says he will vote for Kamala Harris.

CHEYENNE, Wyo. (AP) — Former Vice President Dick Cheney, a lifelong Republican, will vote for Kamala Harris for president, he announced Friday.

Liz Cheney, who herself endorsed Harris on Wednesday, first announced her father’s endorsement when asked by Mark Leibovich of The Atlantic magazine during an onstage interview at The Texas Tribune Festival in Austin.

“Wow,” Leibovich replied as the audience cheered.

Like his daughter, Dick Cheney has been an outspoken critic of former President Donald Trump, notably during Liz Cheney’s ill-fated reelection campaign in 2022.

Dick Cheney put out a statement Friday confirming his endorsement, which read almost entirely as opposition to Trump rather than support of Harris.

“He can never be trusted with power again,” the statement said. “As citizens, we each have a duty to put country above partisanship to defend our Constitution. That is why I will be casting my vote for Vice President Kamala Harris.” [….]

Jen O’Malley Dillon, Harris’ campaign chair, released a statement saying, “The Vice President is proud to have the support of Vice President Cheney, and deeply respects his courage to put country over party.”

Former Vice President and influential Republican Dick Cheney released a statement announcing his endorsement of Democratic nominee Vice President Kamala Harris for President. Speaking out against the Republican nominee, former President Donald Trump, Cheney said that he can “never be trusted with power again.”

“In our nation’s 248 year history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump,” Cheney, 83, said in the statement shared on Sept. 6. “He tried to steal the last election using lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters had rejected him,” he continued, referencing the events of Jan. 6, 2021.

Cheney, who served as Vice President under President George W. Bush between 2001 and 2009 went on to say that American citizens have a “duty” to prioritize the nation over partisan politics.

Cheney’s endorsement marks the most high profile Republican politician to announce that they will vote for Harris over Republican nominee Trump, further spotlighting other former establishment Republicans who have yet to come out to endorse Trump during this run for the presidency—many of whom have been critical of Trump in the past—including his own former Vice President Mike Pence, former President George W. Bush, and former Republican nominee for President Mitt Romney.

Miroco Machiko, 1981-present

Liz Cheney also announced that she will vote for Democrat Colin Allred, who is challenging Ted Cruz for the Senate.

The Hill: Liz Cheney will back Allred in Texas Senate race.

Former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) said she would be backing Rep. Colin Allred (D-Texas) in the Texas Senate race, endorsing the House member over the Republican incumbent, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas).

“I want to say specifically, though, here in Texas, you guys do have a tremendous, serious candidate running for the United States Senate,” Cheney said during her Friday appearance at the Texas Tribune Festival in Austin, stopping as she was cut off by a raucous applause.

“Oh, well, it’s not Ted Cruz, but Colin Allred is somebody I served with in the House, and somebody who really, when you think about the kind of leaders our country needs, and going to this point about, you know, you might not agree on every policy position, but we need people who are going to serve in good faith,” she said.

“We need people who are honorable public servants and in this race that is Colin Allred so I’ll be working on his behalf.”

Allred, who is waging an uphill run to unseat the third-term Cruz, thanked Cheney shortly after on social media, saying the former No. 3 leader of the House Republican Conference is a “patriot who continuously puts country over party because she believes in the importance of protecting our democracy.

“I am so honored to have her support. In the Senate, I will work across party lines to get things done for Texas,” Allred said.

Naturally, the mainstream media is not treating this news with the seriousness it deserves. So far the NYT is AWOL.

Journalist, professor and media critic Jeff Jarvis at his blog Buzz Machine: The unprecedented grand coalition.

As Nicolle Wallace exclaimed on her show Friday, Liz Cheney and Dick Cheney, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders have all gathered together around a cause. That cause is democracy and its standard bearer is Kamala Harris.

This is a momentous time in the United States, unprecedented at least in this century and likely since long before the Civil War. It is the biggest story in my journalism career. The question is whether our national media will understand this moment — or whether they will continue to insist on their trope of a divided America.

By Tetsuhiro Wakabayashi

It is not a divided America. Patriots are gathering together and putting past differences aside to forestall a next civil war, to support and defend the Constitution. The movement that matters is not Trump’s and the Republicans’ fascist insurrection, which is the one that gets attention in news media. The movement that matters now is this one: the movement for democracy.

In recent days, in The Times, Nick Kristof scolded liberals, telling us why we should not demean Trump voters. A few days later in The Washington Post, Matt Bai rebutted, saying he understands Trump voters but asking why he should give them empathy. I say both framings are wrong, for each centers Trump and his fascists.

A much more profound phenomenon is growing — not on the “other side” of the fascists, but instead at the new and true core of American politics and governance. The question is not whether we should demean or understand or empathize with fascists. What we should be concentrating on instead is welcoming those who will stand for democracy in a larger movement.

Jarvis pleads with the both-sides-ing political press:

For God’s sake, political reporters, stop framing these two movements — one to tear down democracy, one to build it up — as equivalent sides across your imaginary continental divide. Stop your false balance. Stop washing the insanity of the fascist party’s leader — and the insanity of his followers for following him. Stop normalizing his and their patently abnormal and abhorrent behavior. Stop trying to predict (in this unprecedented moment, all your “models” and experience and presumptions are worthless). Stop hoping for bad news. Stop making the story about yourself — yes, I am looking at you, A.G. Sulzberger — and please try to understand the threats to democracy, liberty, and life from the perspectives of those who do not share the power and privilege of your platforms. Stop ignoring the rising chorus of critics who are trying to make you and your journalism better — to save journalism from your lapses of judgment. Stop your amnesia about what Trump and company have already shown us to be. Stop making up new white-gloved euphemisms for racism, misogyny, lies, insurgency, corruption, hatred, and grift — call these things what they are, otherwise you are not doing journalism, not informing and explaining reality to your publics.

Yesterday, Trump made a fool of himself again–what else is new? He attended a court hearing on his effort to appeal the jury verdict in the E. Jean Carroll defamation case. Afterward he gave a “press conference” in which he for some strange reason described in detail some of the accusations against him by various women. Trump took no questions as this purported “press conference.”

The Hill: Appeals court weighs Trump’s bid to toss E. Jean Carroll sexual abuse verdict.

Former President Trump appeared before a federal appeals court Friday where his attorney argued that he should get a new trial in writer E. Jean Carroll’s lawsuit accusing him of sexual abuse and defamation that ended in a multimillion-dollar jury verdict.

Cat and butterfly Woodblock print by Ohara Koson

The argument delved into whether Trump’s trial judge erred by allowing the jury to hear from two other women who accused the former president of sexual assault and the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape, in which Trump can be heard bragging about groping women without their permission.

“It’s very hard to overturn a jury verdict based on evidentiary rulings,” noted Circuit Judge Denny Chin.

The three-judge panel on the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, all appointed by Democratic presidents, heard arguments for less than a half-hour, hewing closely to the allotted argument time….

Trump himself attended Friday’s proceeding after not attending any of the trial and later blaming his lawyers for the loss….

Much of the argument revolved around the former president’s claim that his trial judge erred in allowing the jury to hear from two women who accused Trump of sexual assault on a 1979 airplane flight and during a magazine interview in 2005.

Read more about the hearing at the link.

The Washington Post: Trump rants, resurfaces sexual assault allegations for 49 unfocused minutes.

Donald Trump railed against women who have accused him of sexual assault. He baselessly blamed the Biden-Harris administration for his legal difficulties. He appeared to criticize the physical appearances of some of his accusers. “She would not have been the chosen one,” he said of one, later adding that he would “not want to be” involved with another accuser, even as he acknowledged his advisers urged him not to make such a comment.

And those were only some of the ways he veered away from topics voters have said they care most about in what his campaign billed as a “press conference” Friday, with the first ballots to be cast soon in the presidential election. Trump took no questions from the news media.

It was yet another striking strategic choice by the former president, who is in a toss-up race with Vice President Kamala Harris in the polls and facing what could be a historic gender gap in November as he struggles to appeal to women voters. After attending oral arguments Friday morning in his appeal of the verdict that found him liable for sexually abusing advice writer E. Jean Carroll decades ago, he went before the cameras and repeatedly impugned his accusers. He dismissed a string of allegations as entirely meritless as he leaned into his core message that he is a victim of political persecution.

In a roughly 49-minute appearance that sometimes verged into a stream-of-consciousness rant that was hard to follow, Trump also reminisced about his early career as a real estate mogul and reality television star. (“I was,” he said, “a celebrity for a long time.”) He lamented his two impeachments, calling them “impeachment hoax number one, impeachment hoax number two.” And he mentioned Monica Lewinsky, the former White House intern who had an affair with President Bill Clinton, at least three times.

“This is the weaponization of justice at a level that nobody’s ever seen in this country before,” Trump said, blaming the Biden-Harris administration’s Justice Department for his state and federal legal entanglements, even though there is no evidence that the White House has sought to influence any of Trump’s criminal cases. “You see it in Third World countries. You see it in banana republics, but you don’t see it in the United States of America. And it’s a very sad thing. And I think I’m doing a great service by having gone through it.”

“She would not have been the chosen one.” In other words, she was not attractive enough for him to force his sexual attentions on.

Analysis by Aaron Blake at The Washington Post: Trump’s sudden move to re-litigate sexual abuse claims goes off the rails.

Former president Donald Trump is near a crucial juncture of the 2024 campaign. Mail ballots are due to go out soon, his only scheduled debate with Vice President Kamala Harris is happening in four days and Trump is trying to reverse the momentum Harris has generated in her six-plus weeks as a presidential candidate.

By Kanoko Takeuchi

With that as the backdrop, Trump decided to spend nearly an hour Friday rehashing old grievances, offering a laundry list of false and debunked claims, criticizing his lawyers and going into great and seemingly ill-advised detail about the sexual assault allegations and verdicts against him.

Trump even acknowledged he was advised not to say some of what he said, either because it raised the possibility of yet more legal jeopardy or because it was obviously counterproductive politically.

Trump’s ability to go off-message and rant in ways that make his advisers — and, potentially, voters — squirm is unmatched. But even against that backdrop, this was on another level.

The impetus for the media event at Trump Tower was Trump’s appeal of the E. Jean Carroll sexual assault and defamation civil verdict, which was argued Friday morning. (This is the $5 million verdict against Trump — compared to the later $83.3 million case in another Carroll defamation suit.)

Some examples from Trump’s insane rant:

Trump began by repeating many claims he has made before, including that he doesn’t know Carroll and never met her, despite a photo showing the two of them meeting at one point. He said she made up the story of his assaulting her. The claims closely resembled the ones that were found to be defamatory in both of his cases. Carroll could seemingly sue again, an option her lawyer has reserved in the past when Trump kept saying such things. Her lawyer raised the prospect again Friday.

But Trump actually took things a step further.

At one point, he suggested that the 1987 photo of him and Carroll showing them, in fact, meeting “could have been AI-generated.” (This is the photo in which Trump in a deposition mistook Carroll for his ex-wife Marla Maples.) This is as nonsensical as Trump’s claim that recent images of Harris’s crowd size were faked. The photo first circulated in 2019, when Carroll brought her allegations forward.

At another point, Trump echoed his previous claims about another woman who accused him of sexual misconduct, suggesting that she wouldn’t have been desirable enough — a theme he returned to repeatedly throughout the appearance.

“I know you’re going to say it’s a terrible thing to say, but it couldn’t have happened,” Trump said of the other woman, Jessica Leeds, before adding that “she would not have been the chosen one. She would not have been the chosen one.”

The “chosen one” being the one he would choose to assault? Even the most generous interpretation of his bizarre comment makes it hard to conclude otherwise.

Trump has previously suggested he wasn’t attracted to the women who have accused him. But here he was casting assaulting women as something of a selection process.

Trump dwelled on that point, too, despite indicating that a lawyer had told him, “Please don’t say that I would not want to be involved with her.” He said at another point that his “people” told him not to say that, before saying it: “I would not want to be involved with her.”

There’s much more at the WaPo link.

By Tetsuhiro Wakabayashi

Yesterday, Dakinikat wrote about Trump’s embarrassing appearance at the Economic Club of New York and his bizarre response to a question about child care costs. Becky Quick of CNBC was present at the meeting. Josh Fiallo at The Daily Beast: CNBC Anchor: I Can’t Understand Trump’s ‘Crazy’ New Economic Plans.

Trump used a speech to the New York Economic Forum on Thursday to set out his fiscal plans, which included claiming that he would pay for child care by raising tariffs on imports—but left many who saw it confused and unable to explain it.

Among them were the co-anchor of CNBC’s Squawk Box Becky Quick, who was on stage watching while Trump spoke for half an hour.

On Friday morning, she said she couldn’t make any sense of his plans for tariffs.

“The idea you are going to raise a lot of money through tariffs and not have it be inflationary does not make a lot of sense to me,” Quick said on Friday morning’s Squawk Box.

Quick added, “You are either changing behavior or raising money. If you are raising money from it, it is inherently inflationary. Your consumers are not getting low prices.”

Quick’s co-host, Joe Kernen—named in court papers as one of the people on Trump’s contact list when he was in the White House—was equally perplexed at how Trump planned to hike tariffs on foreign goods without sending inflation into overdrive. He called Trump’s plan a “bad, populist idea.”

Trump’s incoherent rant Thursday on tariffs came after—of all things—he was asked what sort of legislation he’d support to make child care affordable.

“If you win in November,” a nonprofit founder asked, “can you commit to prioritizing legislation to make child care affordable, and, if so, what specific piece of legislation will you advance?”

Trump suggested that he’d bring down prices for parents by subsidizing it with money made from higher tariffs on countries like China, but offered no explanation on how that would actually work. His answer went on for two minutes and totaled 360 words, but was mocked by critics as an “absolute word salad.” [….]

I wish someone in the media would follow Lawrence O’Donnell’s suggestion to ask Trump to explain what a tariff is. He describes it as a “tax” on foreign countries, and either doesn’t understand or is lying about the fact that tariffs are simply added to price Americans pay for foreign goods and are obviously inflationary.

One more story before I wrap this up. We haven’t heard much about Ron DeSantis since failed miserably in the Republican primaries. But he is still down in Florida pushing his fascist agenda.

Tampa Bay Times: DeSantis’ election police questioned people who signed abortion petitions.

Isaac Menasche remembers being at the Cape Coral farmer’s market last year when someone asked him if he’d sign a petition to get Florida’s abortion amendment on the ballot.

He said yes — and he told a law enforcement officer as much when one showed up at the door of his Lee County home earlier this week.

Cat in Bamboo, Hiroshima, by Jimmy Tsutomu Mirikitani

Menasche said he was surprised when the plainclothes officer twice asked if it was really Menasche who had signed the petition. The officer said he was looking into potential petition fraud.

Though the officer was professional and courteous, Menasche, who has had little interaction with police in his life, said the encounter left him shaken.

“I’m not a person who is going out there protesting for abortion,” Menasche said. “I just felt strongly and I took the opportunity when the person asked me, to say yeah, I’ll sign that petition.”

The officer’s visit appears to be part of a broad — and unusual — effort by Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration to inspect thousands of already verified and validated petitions for Amendment 4 in the final two months before Election Day. The amendment would overturnFlorida’s six-week abortion ban by proposing to protectabortion access in Florida until viability.

Since last week, DeSantis’ secretary of state has ordered elections supervisors in at leastfour counties to send to Tallahassee at least36,000 petition forms already deemed to have been signed by real people. Since the Times first reported on this effort, Alachua and Broward counties have confirmed they also received requests from the state.

One 16-year supervisor said the request was unprecedented. The state did not ask for rejected petitions, which have been the basis for past fraud cases….

Menasche later posted on Facebook that it was “obvious to me that a significant effort was exerted to determine if indeed I had signed the petition.” He told the Times that the officer who showed up at his door had a copy of Menasche’s driver’s license and other documents related to him.Menasche said he does not recall which agency the officer was with.

I’m so glad I live in a blue state.

That’s all I have for you today. Have a nice weekend!

Lazy Caturday Reads

Posted: August 31, 2024 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: 2024 presidential Campaign, cat art, caturday, Donald Trump | Tags: Arlington National Cemetery, authoritarianism, fascism, JD Vance, Kamala Harris, misogyny, Section 60, Tim Walz | 4 Comments

Happy Caturday!!

By Eileen Mayo, New Zealand artist, 1906-1994

Trump’s Arlington National Cemetery scandal is still alive and kicking. This is unusual for Trump. The media generally works to normalize even his grossest violations of laws and norms. In fact, the major media have mostly ignored this episode too, but independent outlets and social media have kept it going. So I’m still reading, thinking, and writing about it.

Yesterday, I read a very good piece about it by Noah Berlatsky at his Substack Everything Is Horrible: Trump’s Arlington Photoshoot Shows That Fascism is Here.

Berlatsky’s argument is that we may not yet be at the point of being ruled by a dictator, but people are acting as if fascism is already here, because they are afraid of standing up to Trump. hey know he and his thugs will make their lives a living hell. Berlatsky writes that “Fascist vigilante harassment chills resistance.”

This week, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump oozed orangely into Arlington National Cemetary to take a picture of himself standing over veteran’s graves with an oleaginous smile and a big thumb’s up.

You may think this is tasteless. And you’d be correct. It’s also illegal. It’s against federal law to campaign in Army National Military Cemeteries.

An Arlington official attempted to enforce the rules, and told Trump he couldn’t take his grotesque pictures there. Trump campaign thugs then verbally abused the official and pushed them. When the official filed an incident report, the Trump campaign issued a statement insulting them and claiming they were mentally ill.

The official decided not to press charges, because they were afraid that if they did, they would be targeted, harassed, and worse by Trump supporters, according to the New York Times.

Again, an Arlington official, doing their job, tried to enforce rules that are supposed to apply to all. They were roughed up and insulted. And they are afraid to stand up to Trump and his campaign because they know that if their opposition to Trump becomes public, their life will be destroyed.

This isn’t an idle fear. Trump has sicced his fascist dittohead minions on election workers whose only crime was refusing to throw the election for Donald Trump. They were doxed and harassed at their home, and one had to go into hiding. Trump also organized a violent coup, in which his supporters attacked the capital building, terrorizing representatives and workers, and five people died. News organization have found a list of incidents in which Trump supporters committed violence explicitly in his name.

Standing up to Trump is frightening. If he singles you out, his supporters will try to hurt you and your loved ones.

Trump and his campaign flaks are quite aware of this dynamic, and they use it to their advantage. The campaign said it could release video backing up its version of events. It hasn’t done so, probably because the video shows that the Arlington worker was in the right. But if the video shows the Arlington worker’s face, that worker will be tracked down by Trump supporters. “We have video” isn’t evidence; it’s a threat.

And Trump’s threats, implied and otherwise, worked. The official was scared to challenge the leader of a fascist movement for fear of fascist abuse.

Berlatsky argues that “the press is intimidated too.” Is that why the fact checkers have been bending over backwards to explain away Trump’s false claims? I hope you’ll read the rest at the Substack link above.

Of course, the violation of a military cemetery is shocking to most Americans. Michael Powell at The Atlantic: Why Trump’s Arlington Debacle Is So Serious.

The section of Arlington National Cemetery that Donald Trump visited on Monday is both the liveliest and the most achingly sad part of the grand military graveyard, set aside for veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In Section 60, young widows can be seen using clippers and scissors to groom the grass around their husbands’ tombstones as lots of children run about.

I like your hair, by Natalia Shaloshvili

Karen Meredith knows the saddest acre in America only too well. The California resident’s son, First Lieutenant Kenneth Ballard, was the fourth generation of her family to serve as an Army officer. He was killed in Najaf, Iraq, in 2004, and laid to rest in Section 60. She puts flowers on his gravesite every Memorial Day. “It’s not a number, not a headstone,” she told me. “He was my only child.”

The sections of Arlington holding Civil War and World War I dead have a lonely and austere beauty. Not Section 60, where the atmosphere is sanctified but not somber—too many kids, Meredith recalled from her visits to her son’s burial site. “We laugh, we pop champagne. I have met men who served under him, and they speak of him with such respect. And to think that this man”—she was referring to Trump—“came here and put his thumb up—”

She fell silent for a moment on the telephone, taking a gulp of air. “I’m trying not to cry.”

For Trump, defiling what is sacred in our civic culture borders on a pastime. Peacefully transferring power to the next president, treating political adversaries with at least rudimentary grace, honoring those soldiers wounded and disfigured in service of our country—Trump long ago walked roughshod over all these norms. Before he tried to overturn a national election, he mocked his opponents in the crudest terms and demeaned dead soldiers as “suckers.”

But the former president outdid himself this week, when he attended a wreath-laying ceremony honoring 13 American soldiers killed in a suicide bombing in Kabul during the final havoc-marked hours of the American withdrawal. Trump laid three wreaths and put hand over heart; that is a time-honored privilege of presidents. Trump, as is his wont, went further. He walked to a burial site in Section 60 and posed with the family of a fallen soldier, grinning broadly and giving a thumbs-up for his campaign photographer and videographer….

A cemetery employee politely attempted to stop the campaign staff from filming in Section 60. Taking campaign photos and videos at gravesites is expressly forbidden under federal law. The Trump entourage, according to a subsequent statement by the U.S. Army, which oversees the cemetery, “abruptly pushed” her aside.

Trump’s campaign soon posted a video on TikTok, overlaid with Trump’s narration: “We didn’t lose one person in 18 months. And then they”—the Biden administration—“took over, that disaster of leaving Afghanistan.”

Trump was unsurprisingly not telling the truth; 11 soldiers were killed in Afghanistan in his last year in office, and his administration had itself negotiated the withdrawal. But such fabrications are incidental sins compared with what came next. A top Trump adviser, Chris LaCivita, and campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung talked to reporters and savaged the employee who had tried to stop the entourage. Cheung referred to her as “an unnamed individual, clearly suffering a mental-health episode.” LaCivita declared her a “despicable individual” who ought to be fired.

Once again, I have to ask why anyone would vote for this repulsive creature for any office, much less president?

Of course, Trump has taken no responsibility whatever for his disgusting behavior. In fact, yesterday he even claimed that he had no idea who posted the video ad on his TicTac account. He suggested that the gold star families who invited him may have done it–or maybe it was Vice President Harris’ campaign!

By Rakhmet Redzhepov

Rep. Jamie Raskin is now demanding answers about the events in Arlington Cemetery.

Raw Story: Top Oversight Committee Dem seeks ‘full account’ from Army secretary on Arlington incident.

Rep. Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, demanded Friday a “full account” of a reported incident between Donald Trump and his campaign and their collective appearance this week at Arlington National Cemetery.

Trump and his campaign faced intense backlash following a reported physical altercation with a cemetery official and faced questions over whether they may have violated federal law banning campaign materials from being photographed or filmed in certain sections of the cemetery.

A TikTok video showed Trump in Section 60, where the altercation purportedly occurred, smiling and giving a thumbs-up. Trump has said the family of a soldier laid to rest in the section invited him, and his campaign has said they were allowed to ring a photographer.

“The fact is that a private photographer was permitted on the premises and for whatever reason an unnamed individual, clearly suffering from a mental health episode, decided to physically block members of President Trump’s team during a very solemn ceremony,” spokesman Steven Cheung said in the statement.

laws were violated.

In a letter to Christine Wormuth, secretary of the Army, Raskin referenced reports of a “verbal and physical altercation” between members of the Trump campaign and cemetery staff.

“It appears that the Trump campaign refused to abide by Arlington National Cemetery’s absolute prohibition on ‘filming for partisan, political, or fundraising purposes’ and ‘abruptly pushed aside’ Cemetery staff trying to ‘ensure adherence’ to these rules,” he said in the letter obtained by Punchbowl News.

In doing so, he asked the Army secretary to hand the committee an incident report and deliver a briefing on what happened, “including whether Trump campaign staff violated federal law or Cemetery rules and whether the Trump campaign informed the families of servicemembers buried at the Cemetery that their gravestones would be used in Mr. Trump’s political campaign ads.”

Here’s an example of how Trump intimidates the media. At a rally in Pennsylvania yesterday a Trump supporter actually broke down the barriers to the press area.

AP: Police use Taser to subdue man who stormed media area of Trump rally in Pennsylvania.

JOHNSTOWN, Pa. (AP) — A man at Donald Trump’s rally in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, stormed into the press area as the former president spoke and was surrounded by police and sheriff’s deputies before eventually being subdued with a Taser.

The incident Friday came moments after Trump had criticized major media outlets for what he said was unfavorable coverage and dismissed CNN as fawning for its interview Thursday with his Democratic rival Kamala Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz….

The man made it over a bicycle rack ringing the media area and began climbing the back side of a riser where television reporters and cameras were stationed, according to a video of the incident posted to social media by a reporter for CBS News. People near him tried to pull him off the riser and were quickly joined by police officers.

The crowd cheered as a pack of police led the man away, prompting Trump to declare, “Is there anywhere that’s more fun to be than a Trump rally?”

Moments later police handcuffed another man in the crowd and led him out of the arena. It was not immediately clear whether that detention was related to the initial altercation.

By Eileen Mayo Here’s a bit more on the incident from The Daily Beast:

At the time of the incident, Trump was criticizing the media for its coverage of his campaign and the election more broadly—and, in particular, attacking CNN’s recent interview with his opponent, Kamala Harris.

As the man was detained and removed from the rally, the former president quipped, “Is there anywhere that’s more fun to be than a Trump rally?” per the Associated Press.

Trump is right to be worried about the Harris-Walz interview on CNN. It got great ratings.

The Daily Beast: Harris-Walz Interview Ratings Nearly Double Trump’s Last Big CNN Sit-Down.

The first joint interview with Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate Tim Walz was watched live by nearly 6 million viewers on CNN Thursday night, according to the Nielsen data—far outpacing the viewership that tuned the last time Donald Trump appeared on that network.

It was a strong night for CNN, which has struggled recently to reach the ratings of Fox News or MSNBC. Although it’s a much lower audience rating than Harris and Walz’s big DNC speeches, it’s still a promising stat for the Harris campaign, continuing a trend of her events receiving higher viewership than those of her opponent.

When Trump gave a town hall on CNN in May 2023, one of his first proper campaign events of the 2024 election cycle, only 3.3 million viewers tuned in. And more recently, when Trump did his first joint sit-down with running mate JD Vance in July, they drew an estimated 4 million viewers. All of those cable ratings, however, still trail the average audience for the network’s nightly news broadcasts, which tend to bring in around 7-8 million viewers.

The Harris-Walz campaign can also boast a more popular national convention this year; 20.1 million people tuned into the third day of the DNC where Walz gave his speech, for instance, while only 17.9 million viewers turned in for JD Vance’s big moment….

The ratings gap seemed particularly disappointing for Trump, considering how much pride he openly took in his RNC ratings. After his speech this year, he posted on Truth Social that his ratings were the “best and most successful in history,” even though viewership was trailing behind both his 2020 and 2016 performance.

Meanwhile, Harris’ convention ratings actually outdid Joe Biden’s in 2020. It’s a performance that gives credence to the idea that the Harris-Walz campaign has more energy and enthusiasm behind it, whereas that long-speculated Trump fatigue might have finally started to set in.

Trump fatigue set in for me long ago. If only he would just disappear.

There are a couple of interesting articles on J.D. Vance today. I got into the NYT even though I cancelled my subscription, apparently because I clicked the link at Memeorandum.

Michael C. Bender at The New York Times: JD Vance’s Combative Style Confounds Voters but Pleases Trump.

Donald J. Trump knew that JD Vance could take a punch. But during their first week together on the campaign trail, the former president wondered just how many hits his new running mate could absorb.

The volume and velocity of attacks from Democrats stunned even Mr. Trump. He was unaware of the most incendiary remarks that opponents were rapidly unearthing from Mr. Vance’s past, and the former president told allies that he was troubled by the idea that more comments would come to light as Democrats savaged his heir apparent as weird and anti-women.

A month later, polls show that the number of Americans who dislike Mr. Vance continues to grow — but Mr. Trump could not be happier.

The reason: Mr. Vance’s relentless pace of full-throttle performances as Mr. Trump’s well-trained attack dog has pleased the former president and instilled a sense of stability inside a campaign still shaken by President Biden’s sudden exit from the race.

Mr. Trump had instructed his young sidekick to fight forcefully through those initial attacks, and later said Mr. Vance’s execution exceeded his expectations, according to three allies who insisted on anonymity to discuss private conversations.

In a quintessentially Trumpian display of bravado, the former president has privately praised Mr. Vance by comparing himself to Vince Lombardi, telling people that his eye for political talent was now on par with the Hall of Fame football coach’s ability to find Super Bowl-caliber players.

But beyond Mar-a-Lago, early returns on Mr. Vance are less enthusiastic. Polls show that he effectively amplifies Mr. Trump’s political strengths but that he also magnifies his weaknesses. Mr. Vance’s approval rating improved by nearly double digits among the nation’s least educated and poorest voters since joining the Republican ticket — but plunged by even wider margins among college graduates and independent women, according to an NPR/PBS News/Marist poll.

How those conflicting opinions either resolve themselves or become further inflamed will help determine whether Mr. Trump ends the race in less than 10 weeks with a second presidential term or a second electoral defeat.

There’s more at the link, if you can get past the paywall.

Jason Wilson at The Guardian: ‘Dangerous and un-American’: new recording of JD Vance’s dark vision of women and immigration.

Donald Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, said that professional women “choose a path to misery” when they prioritize careers over having children in a September 2021 podcast interview in which he also claimed men in America were “suppressed” in their masculinity.

The Ohio senator and vice-presidential candidate said of women like his classmates at Yale Law School that “pursuing racial or gender equity is like the value system that gives their life meaning … [but] they all find that that value system leads to misery”.

Vance also sideswiped the Minnesota congresswoman Ilhan Omar, a one-time Somali refugee, claiming she had shown “ingratitude” to America, and that she “would be living in a craphole” had she not moved to the US.

In an emailed response to the Guardian, Omar slammed what she called the “ignorant and xenophobic rhetoric spewed by Mr Vance” as “dangerous and un-American”.

Ever since he was picked by Trump, Vance has been hit by scandals over his past comments, especially those concerning women and his perception of their role in society.

Ever since he was picked by Trump, Vance has been hit by scandals over his past comments, especially those concerning women and his perception of their role in society.

Last week his campaign was rocked by previous comments blasting a teachers union president for not having “some of her own” children. His previous characterizations of Democratic leaders as “childless cat ladies” have also troubled the Trump campaign’s efforts to appeal to suburban women.

On the newly found interview:

In the 2021 interview Vance also claimed men and boys in the US were “suppressed” in their masculinity and made racially charged remarks about American cities and his political opponents.

By Sharyn Bursiic

Of Afghans who assisted US troops during the occupation of that country who were now seeking to come to America, Vance asked whether “certain groups of people can successfully become American citizens”, and said those hostile to Minneapolis’s Somali American community “don’t like people getting hatcheted in the street in [their] own community”.

At the same time, Vance claimed that “the left uses racism as a cudgel”, and that he had been a “little too worried” in the past about such accusations because they can be “career-ending” and “destroy a person’s life”.

Sophie Bjork-James, an assistant professor at Vanderbilt University who has written extensively on topics including US evangelicals and populist politics, said: “Vance represents a new articulation of rightwing politics that is bridging the Christian right and a tech-influenced hypermasculine conservatism.

“He appeals to evangelicals with the message that we find happiness by fulfilling traditional gender roles, which is a cornerstone of white evangelical Christianity. He also speaks to a misogynist trend emerging out of the tech world among people who would prefer not to talk about any kind of diversity at all.”

“What they share is the view that women shouldn’t be in paid work: they should be in the home and rearing children. But the public line isn’t ‘we hate women’, it’s ‘women will be happier if they stay at home’,” she added.

I can see why Trump likes Vance. They both hate women. There’s more at the link, and The Guardian doesn’t have a paywall.

Those are my recommended reads for today. What’s on your mind?

Lazy Caturday Reads

Posted: August 24, 2024 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: 2024 presidential Campaign, cat art, caturday, Donald Trump, Kamala Harris 2024 | Tags: Democratic National Convention 2024, Greg Palast, Kurt Andersen, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Tim Walz | 6 Comments

Happy Caturday!!

pierre-auguste-renoir-sleeping-girl-with-a-cat-1880_u-l-f801wv0

Piere Auguste Renoir, Sleeping girl with a cat, 1880

There’s not a lot happening in the news today, so I’m just going to give you some odds and ends, some some serious some humorous, some creepy or crazy.

First up, a few follow-ups to the exciting and successful Democratic National Convention.

Al Weaver at The Hill: Democratic convention energy, Harris hot streak making Republicans nervous.

The energy emerging from the Democratic National Convention and Vice President Harris’s hot streak is making Republicans increasingly nervous.

Thursday marked the culmination of what was unthinkable just a month ago: A coronation for a new party leader who Democrats are ardently behind.

Former President Trump and Republicans, meanwhile, are grappling with the whiplash of going from the predictions of a landslide just a few short weeks ago to surveys showing Harris has shaken up races up and down the ballot and closed the gap with Trump.

“In some of the swing states … people are becoming increasingly concerned that the momentum is moving in the wrong direction,” said one Senate Republican, adding that the nervousness among Republicans is “real” at this stage.

Just a month ago, Republicans were riding higher than at any point of the campaign after President Biden’s disastrous performance in a debate sent Democrats into a tailspin. Trump accepted the GOP nomination in Milwaukee, where lawmakers and delegates were bullish that the former president would not only return to the White House, but do so in a convincing manner — and polling backed them up.

Now that thinking is firmly out the door.

Democrats’ four-day gathering in Chicago prompted comparisons to the energy around former President Obama’s landmark 2008 presidential bid. It could also hand Harris another slight polling bump as the calendar turns to September after she closed out the convention with a fiery speech heavy on biography and history that also took the fight to Trump.

“They are beginning to realize this is a wrestling match. There’s not going to be any knockout punch and they’ve got to get the best grip they can find, and it’s all state specific,” the Senate Republican continued.

Greg Sargent at The New Republic: Kamala’s Harsh Takedown of Trump Points the Way to a Post-MAGA America.

Kamala Harris just showed us the promise of a post-MAGA future. Now it’s up to the voters to decide to take us there.

In her rousing convention speech on Thursday, Harris offered many olive branches to right-leaning independents and Republican voters. She vowed toughness on immigration and crime. She promised to transcend the nation’s divisions. She vowed to govern for all Americans and transcend faction or party. She made numerous appeals to voters with decidedly right-leaning values.

But, in mulling what Harris means by all this, it’s crucial to appreciate what she did not do. Harris offered all this outreach to voters outside the core Democratic coalition without making serious concessions to the ideological preoccupations we associate with MAGA-style right-wing populism. There was no real accommodation with what might be called The World According to MAGA.

Instead, Harris treated Trumpism and the MAGA movement as forces that must be decisively repudiated—and unequivocally left behind.

How could Harris appeal extensively to voters on the other side—which by definition includes tens of millions of people who voted for Donald Trump—while insisting on a firm national renunciation of many MAGA voters’ apparent aspirations and beliefs? This tension, I think, helps explain why her appeals came across as so richly complex.

Harris extensively reassured swing voters on many fronts. For those struggling economically, she offered populist, broadly appealing policies to curb health care and housing costs. To those preoccupied with crime and the border, Harris recounted her history as a tough prosecutor and vowed stringent border security. Harris delivered extensive paeans to middle-class struggles and values like family, community, homeownership, and faith. As William Kristol notes, she even strongly endorsed American exceptionalism.

Yet Harris was also absolutely unsparing in her takedown of Trump. And it’s important to appreciate this criticism for what it really was. In numerous ways, Harris portrayed the broad MAGA worldview as something in need of comprehensive repudiation.

It’s a long piece. You’ll need to head over to TNR to read the rest of Sargent’s argument.

Black and White Cat II, by Muriel Mougeolle

Could the tide be turning on Republicans’ efforts to control what children read and think?

Juan Perez Jr. and Andrew Atterbury at Politico: Are Republicans losing the culture wars?

Republicans are confronting a decisive moment in the battle over public education: proving they can still win a culture war.

School board candidates backed by Moms for Liberty, a conservative vanguard whose members popularized restrictions on classroom library books, are losing elections in Florida and some swing states. Republican leaders who rallied against critical race theory and LGBTQ+ issues recently faced recalls in red pockets of California.

And in the presidential race, Democrats are playing offense. This week’s party convention in Chicago featured liberals attacking conservative candidates as “weird” and denouncing so-called book bans.

Former President Donald Trump is expected to lean into school politics next week at a Moms for Liberty summit, making the case that culture war issues still resonate with core supporters. Republicans show no signs of changing their strategy. But the party faces new challenges from a Democratic agenda — embodied by vice presidential nominee Tim Walz — that is redirecting the divisive education issues promoted by conservatives during the pandemic into a vehicle for highlighting free school lunches and affordable child care.

“We’re in the middle of a cultural revolution in America, and one of the biggest battlegrounds is the schools,” Moms For Liberty co-founder Tiffany Justice said in an interview. “We didn’t start this fire, but we’re going to put it out.”

Karoline Leavitt, a Trump campaign spokesperson, said there is “a lot of mutual consensus” between the Republican nominee’s beliefs on education “and what Moms for Liberty stands for.”

But several Democratic National Committee speakers found ways to leverage social issues, including Walz, a former teacher who used them to pivot to a law he signed as Minnesota governor providing free school meals to all students.

“We made sure that every kid in our state gets breakfast and lunch every day,” Walz said Wednesday at the DNC. “So while other states were banning books from their schools, we were banishing hunger from ours.”

Read the rest at Politico.

Here’s the latest on Trump’s reaction to the changed political landscape.

The Guardian: Is Trump OK? Unhinged reaction to rise of Harris worries supporters.

Even some of Donald Trump’s supporters are now asking the question that was the undoing of Joe Biden: is the former president fit for office?

But while Biden’s run for re-election was largely sunk by a single disastrous televised debate before a national audience, Trump is ramping up doubts with each chaotic, disjointed speech as he campaigns around the country.

While rambling discourse and outrageously disprovable claims, interspersed with spite and vitriol, may seem nothing new to many of Trump’s supporters and critics alike, the former president appears to have been driven to new depths by suddenly finding himself running against Kamala Harris a month ago.

Trump has only grown more infuriated as his poll lead over Biden evaporated, with Harris opening up a clear, if narrow, lead. The vice-president’s tactic of mocking Trump more than arguing with him appears to have incensed him further.

Since Harris assumed the mantle of the presumptive Democratic candidate, Trump has claimed to be better-looking than the vice-president, questioned whether she is really Black and attacked her laugh as that of “a lunatic”.

The former president has also characterised Harris as both a communist and a fascist, and described Harris as “dumb” but then told CBS he didn’t mean it as an insult because it was “just a fact”.

“I don’t think she’s a very bright person. I do feel that. I mean, I think that’s right. I think I am a very bright person, and a lot of people say that,” he said.

This is a long article, so here’s a bit more:

Trump seems particularly obsessed with the size of the crowds at Harris’s rallies, drawing derision for falsely claiming she used artificial intelligence to fake the turnout.

When he’s not worried about size, Trump is vexed by Harris’s looks. After the vice-president appeared on the cover of Time magazine, Trump compared her appearance to Sophia Loren and his wife, Melania, before drawing a comparison with his own features.

By Pierre Bonnard

“I’m a better-looking person than Kamala,” he declared to an audience of thousands who were more amused than convinced….

At a rally in Pennsylvania a week ago, Trump went as far as rambling on about rambling.

“I don’t ramble. I’m a really smart guy, you know, really smart. I don’t ramble. But the other day, anytime I hit too hard, they say he was rambling, rambling,” he told the crowd.

Even some of Trump’s most loyal fans were disturbed by that performance. Joan Long travelled from New York with her husband, Billy, to see the former president speak.

“I honestly can’t say I know why he starts talking about how to pronounce names. What does that have to do with the election?” she said. “And I wish he would stop talking about Kamala’s looks.”

There’s quite a bit more in this vein at the Guardian link. This is the kind of insanity from Trump that the NYT and WaPo ignore or try to normalize.

The supposedly big news yesterday was that Bobby Kennedy Jr. suspended his campaign and endorsed Trump at a rally in Arizona.

John Hendrickson at The Atlantic: Why RFK Jr. Endorsed Trump.

In the spring of 2023, not long after Robert F. Kennedy Jr. launched his chaotic presidential campaign, I asked him a straightforward question. What do you see as more harmful to America: another term of Joe Biden, or Donald Trump returning to power? “I can’t answer that,” Kennedy replied.

This morning, Kennedy finally stopped being cagey. He announced that he was suspending his campaign and throwing his support to Trump. During a rambling, nearly hour-long speech at the Renaissance Hotel in downtown Phoenix, Kennedy shared that the two had been talking for more than a month, and that he had visited the former president at Mar-a-Lago. “In a series of long, intense discussions, I was surprised to discover that we are aligned on many key issues,” Kennedy said. He correctly noted that his announcement would cause “difficulty” for his family members. “Our brother Bobby’s decision to endorse Trump today is a betrayal of the values that our father and family hold most dear,” five Kennedys said in a statement this afternoon. “It is a sad ending to a sad story.”

Kennedy’s evolution from member of a Democratic dynasty to a soldier in the anti-democratic MAGA movement will no doubt confuse casual observers. Trump once called Kennedy the “dumbest member” of his famous family, and Kennedy once suggested that Trump was a sociopath. The main reason for Kennedy’s conversion may be pure desperation. This summer, Kennedy made overtures to both major-party candidates; only Trump reciprocated. But the Trump-Kennedy pairing makes a certain kind of sense. To be sure, Kennedy doesn’t share Trump’s anti-immigrant sentiment, nor does he lean on white-identity politics or nationalism. Instead, it’s Kennedy’s conspiratorial, anti-establishment, burn-it-down ethos that makes him fit into the MAGA universe….

As Kennedy lashed out against the Democratic Party this afternoon, he sounded like a jilted lover searching for answers. He noted that he had attended his first Democratic National Convention at the age of 6, in 1960. And he attempted to draw a contrast between the party of his father and uncle, and today’s “shadowy DNC operatives” who staged “a palace coup” against Joe Biden. The Democratic establishment, he claimed, had weaponized government agencies against him and his campaign. He accused Biden of colluding with media companies to “censor” him and bemoaned his relative lack of cable-news interviews. He also sounded daft. “In an honest system, I believe that I would have won the election,” Kennedy said.

Three key factors forced Kennedy’s withdrawal. The first and most obvious was money. Despite tapping Nicole Shanahan, the wealthy Silicon Valley businesswoman, to be his running mate, Kennedy’s fundraising had recently dried up. Recent FEC filings showed that his campaign had just $3.9 million on hand at the end of July. The second factor was ballot access. Nick Brana, the campaign’s ballot-access director, told me that, as of today, the Kennedy-Shanahan ticket was certified in only 22 states. Kennedy was disqualified from the New York ballot after a recent court case, making the goal of all 50 states a virtual impossibility. The third factor was perhaps the most obvious: His core proposition had become moot once Biden dropped out.

All along, Kennedy’s pitch had relied on the fact that a sizable chunk of voters didn’t want a Biden-Trump rematch. But after Harris took Biden’s place as the nominee, she began to win back some of the disaffected Democrats, independents, and undecideds who had “parked” their support in the Kennedy column. Kennedy’s polling average had fallen to about 5 percent, from a 2024 high of about 10 percent.

Intellectual cat, Olena Kamenetska-Ostapchuk

There’s been some suggestion that Trump may have promised Kennedy a job in Trump’s prospective administration in return for Kenedy’s support. That would be a quid pro quo, and would be illegal. Of course Trump couldn’t care less. Kennedy also tried to strike a bargain with the Harris campaign, but they refused to meet with him. Harris, unlike Trump, obviously knows that would be illegal.

Aaron Pellish and Jim Acosta, CNN: RFK Jr. reached out to Harris campaign about administration role in exchange for endorsement.

Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s campaign reached out to Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign to arrange a meeting about a possible role in her administration if he drops out of the race and endorses her, a Kennedy campaign official and a Democratic official told CNN.

The approach from Kennedy’s team occurred last week, and no meeting between the two candidates materialized, the Kennedy campaign official told CNN.

The effort to meet comes weeks after Kennedy and former President Donald Trump met in person during the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, where the two discussed a possible role for Kennedy in a potential Trump administration in exchange for an endorsement.

Kennedy campaign staff also attempted to reach out to intermediaries for Ron Klain, former White House chief of staff for President Joe Biden, but those efforts were fruitless, the Kennedy campaign official said.

A couple more RFK Jr. stories:

Kurt Andersen: RFK Jr. Was My Drug Dealer.

Donald Trump and Bobby Kennedy—as I’ve referred to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. since we met freshman year at Harvard—have always had many features in common as well. Both are entitled playboy sons of northeastern wealth; both (in Michelle Obama’s words) were “afforded the grace of failing forward” as misbehaving, underachieving adolescents admitted to Ivy League colleges thanks to “the affirmative action of generational wealth”; both were reckless lifelong adolescents, both attention-craving philanderers and liars, both jerks. And Kennedy’s hour-long speech today was nearly as meandering and filled with lies as any average hour of Trump.

On the subject of reckless-adolescent entitlement, I’ve got one Bobby Kennedy anecdote to tell. But it’s actually relevant to his endorsement of Donald Trump for president and his apparent expectation of joining a second Trump administration….

By Olga Sevorova

My Bobby Kennedy story involves pharmaceuticals—not the legal, lifesaving kind, such as the vaccines he’s made a career of lying about, but the recreational kind….

As a teenager in Nebraska, I’d smoked cannabis and dropped acid before I got to Harvard in 1972. Sometime during my freshman year, I tried cocaine, enjoyed it, and later decided to procure a gram for myself. A friend told me about a kid in our class who was selling coke.

The dealer was Bobby Kennedy. I’d never met him. I got in touch; he said sure, come over to his room in Hurlbut, his dorm, where I’d never been, a five-minute walk. His roommate, whom I knew, was the future journalist Peter Kaplan—with whom I, like Kennedy, remained friends for the rest of his life. He left as I arrived. I wondered whether he always did that when Bobby had customers.

“Hi. Bobby,” Kennedy introduced himself. Another kid, tall, lanky, and handsome, was in the room. “This is my brother Joe.” That is, Joseph P. Kennedy II, two years older, the future six-term Massachusetts congressman….

He poured out a line for me to sample, and handed me an inch-and-a-half length of plastic drinking straw. I snorted. We chatted for a minute. I paid him, I believe, $40 in cash. It was a lot of money, the equivalent of $300 today. But cocaine bought from a Kennedy accompanied by a Kennedy brother—the moment of glamour seemed worth it.

As soon as he got back to his dorm room, Anderson got a call from RFK:

“Hello?”
“It’s Bobby.”
“Hi.”
“You took my straw!”
I realized that I had indeed, and had thought nothing of it. Because … it was a crummy piece of plastic straw. But Bobby was pissed.
“There are crystals inside it, man, growing. You took it.”
Growing? The residue of powdered cocaine mixed with mucus formed crystals over time? What did I know. It reminded me of some science-fair project.
“So … you want the straw back?”
“Yeah, man.”
I walked it back to his room. He didn’t smile or say thanks. It was the last time I ever bought coke from anyone.

A famous rich boy selling a hard drug that could’ve gotten him—or, more precisely, someone who wasn’t him—a years-long prison sentence. His almost fetishistic obsession with a bit of plastic trash. His greedy little burst of anger cloaked in righteousness. His faith that he was cultivating precious cocaine crystals. In retrospect, it has seemed to me a tiny illustration of the child as the father of the man he became: fantastical pseudoscientific crusader, middle-aged preppy dick who takes selfies with barbecued dogs and plays pranks with roadkill bear cubs he didn’t have time to eat.

Thomas is Sleeping, by Grazyna Smalej

One more crazy RFK, Jr. story:

Greg Palast at his website Greg Palast Investigative Journalism: I was on the phone with RFK Jr.
When he lost his mind.

This is painful. This is horrible and feels a bit like a betrayal. But I have no choice. Bobby Kennedy Jr. was my friend and co-author. We wrote stories together for Rolling Stone.  Bobby introduced my New York Times bestseller and wrote a chapter for Billionaires and Ballot Bandits.  And, with Jesse Jackson, we co-authored the Number 1 selling adult single issue comic book of all time, Steal Back Your Vote.

But then, Bobby lost his mind.

It was truly scary. In 2012, Bobby had arranged a press conference about the Deepwater Horizon explosion. Eleven oil rig workers were incinerated in the blow-out of a British Petroleum drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico.

The Palast investigations team discovered that, 17 months before that oil rig blew out in the Gulf, British Petroleum suffered an identical blow-out in the Caspian Sea. The oil company—with the connivance of then-Sec. of State Condoleeza Rice—covered it up.

It was a hell of a story, which I broadcast on prime time in Britain and Europe. I wrote a book about it, Vultures’ Picnic.

Here’s where Bobby comes in—and it gets weird. On the second anniversary of the blow-out, Bobby, a professor of environmental law, arranged for a major press conference to expose this story of BP’s blood-encrusted perfidy.

But then, Bobby cancelled the press conference, saying he heard the story had been told previously. Well, yes it had. You told it.  Bobby, I was on the radio with you for an hour discussing the blow-out and its cover-up.  Bobby had a national radio/TV show, Ring of Fire. He reviewed my book about the story. And strangest of all, Bobby was on my Democracy Now! Report about the blow-out.    That Bobby had forgotten all these things was frightening—as if Leonardo DiCaprio had forgotten he was in a film about the Titanic.

Our investigator Leni Badpenny was listening in and she began making frantic cut-off gestures, to end a call with him. End it now!  “Something’s wrong with him, or he’s just a jerk. I don’t know. But something’s really wrong and you don’t want your reputation destroyed by standing next to him when it goes wrong in public. Promise me we will never work with him, never see him again. I think he’s dangerous. I really do.” [….]

This was not the first incident.   Bobby was a strong guy in his late fifties talking like a 92-year-old in a nursing home trying to remember his first date.

Since then, we’ve found out that Bobby had a worm in his brain—a real, live physical critter that somehow got inside his skull. I’m not sure about the connection because I’m not a brain surgeon and I don’t speak worm.

You can read the rest at the link. It’s not paywalled.

That’s it for me today. What’s on your mind?

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