Reagan’s conservatism, in Boot’s telling, was little more than a farrago of erroneous statistics, spurious quotations and incendiary claims about an ever-present communist conspiracy — many of them derived from his reading of tracts from the lunatic-right John Birch Society. Boot suggests that Reagan didn’t care about factual accuracy because he “was convinced his larger moral point was correct and that was all that mattered.” Yet Boot notes with some irritation that throughout Reagan’s career, “reporters seldom held him to account for his falsehoods,” and that on the rare occasions when they did, “they found that most readers did not care.”
Mostly Monday Reads: This is the Craziest Party that Could Ever Be
Posted: September 23, 2024 Filed under: 2024 Elections, 2024 presidential Campaign, Economy | Tags: "some weird shit", #DonOld, @repeat1968. John Buss, Ayatollah Mike Johnson, Bidenomics, Government Shutdown Blues, Reaganomics, Trump and Racism, Trump lies and dark shit 9 Comments
Modern Day Moses Mike Johnson has achieved Rinocchio status as Trumplicans demand a motion to vacate the chair. John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
There’s been good news on the U.S. economy and other issues like a decreasing crime rate. Weirdly, the legacy media wouldn’t cover history-making- statistics like the ones we’ve experienced over the last 4 years. But 48% of the country seems to prefer dark, weird lies for some reason. “Murder and other violent crime dropped across the U.S. last year, FBI data shows. Murder dropped 11.6% from 2022 to 2023, the largest single-year decline in the last 20 years. Property crime was also down overall, while motor vehicle theft and shoplifting rose.” This crime report is from NBC News.
Crime, including serious violent incidents like murder and rape, dropped nationally from 2022 to 2023, according to new data released by the FBI on Monday.
Violent crime was down about 3% from 2022 to 2023 and property crime took a similar drop of 2.4%, the FBI reported in its annual “Summary of Crime in the Nation.” The most serious crimes went down significantly: Murder and non-negligent manslaughter were down an estimated 11.6% — the largest single year decline in two decades — while rape decreased by an estimated 9.4%.
Preliminary numbers showed that 2024 crime numbers were also dropping for the early part of this year, continuing a trend of crime easing as America has come out of the pandemic.
The Economic Data from the U.S. is impressive. This is from The Real Economic Blog. “American outperformance in the post-pandemic global economy.” This analysis is by Joseph Brusuelas. American Economists can no longer claim to be practitioners of the dismal science during the Biden administration. Everything is going much better than expected.
One of the more underdiscussed economic developments following the shocks of the pandemic has been the United States’ outperformance compared to its peers.
This success can be traced to bold monetary and fiscal policies put in place that have hardened supply chains, bolstered energy independence and started to rebuild the nation’s infrastructure.
Since 2020 real U.S. GDP has increased 9.4% compared with:
- Canada 4.9%
- Italy 4.7%
- EU 4%
- France 3.8%
- Japan 3.1%
- UK 2.3%
- Germany 0.3%
Perhaps more important, the U.S. is approaching what I think is a productivity boom.
If one asks how the U.S. can grow so fast even as hiring slows, the answer is productivity. With productivity increasing at 2.7% year over year, the American economy is experiencing its best gains in that area since the boom from 1995 to 2004.
That is why wages are rising above inflation, corporate earnings and profits are increasing and the U.S. continues to outperform its peers.
It’s all a result of smart decisions after the pandemic that increased supplies across the economy and encouraged long-term investments that integrate sophisticated technology into the production process.
Canada is our mini-me. They shadow and follow are economic results so it’s not surprising they’re number two on that list. But, the same reason we could not get a bi-partisan immigration bill is the same reason we may get a government shut-down right before the election. Just 3 days ago, the FED cut the FedFunds rate by 1/2%. As a Financial Economist, I can tell you this is a BFD. Did you know that Biden spoke at the New York Economic Club? Of course, it wasn’t covered the way the Trump debacle was. This is from ABC News. “Biden calls rate cut ‘an important day for the country.’ Biden told The Economic Club how far the U.S. has come since the COVID pandemic.”
President Joe Biden on Thursday called the Federal Reserve’s rate cut the day before an “important signal” from the Fed to Americans that inflation is cooling, but he cautioned that it “doesn’t mean the work is done” to improve the economy.
In remarks on Thursday at the Economic Club of Washington, D.C., Biden said, “Yesterday was an important day for the country.”
“Two and a half years after the Federal Reserve began raising interest rates, it announced that it began lowering interest rates,” Biden said. “I think it’s good news for consumers, and that means the cost of buying a home, a car, and so much more would be going down. And it’s good news in my view, for the overall economy.”
The president in his remarks discussed how far the U.S. has come since the COVID-19 pandemic, including supply chain issues, high costs of food and goods, and baby formula shortages. He also checked through all of his legislative achievements such as the American Rescue Plan, Inflation Reduction Act, Chips and Science Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.
“At its peak, as you all know, inflation was 9.1% in the United States. Today it’s much closer to 2%,” Biden said. “It doesn’t mean our work is done. Far from it. Far from it, no one should confused why I’m here. I’m not here to take a victory lap. I’m not here to say, ‘A job well done.’ I’m not here to say ‘We don’t have a hell of a lot more work to do.’ We do have more work to do.”
“Secret Service stepping up its game on the campaign trail.” John Buss, @repeat1968
If you search the legacy media, you can find a few stories about the normalcy and improvements the Biden/Harris administration has provided our country. Ronald Reagan’s economic stewardship has been mischaracterized for years and these stories are still hanging around. I think the treatment that the press gave Reagan prepared us for the total media meltdown on Trump Coverage. Max Boot has a new book that will hopefully demonstrate it’s mostly myth,. Boot, you may recall, was a Republican Operative at the time. This is the Washington Post‘s review of his Reagan biography “Reagan: His Life and Legend.” Geoffrey Kabaservice wrote the review, and the lede states, “How Important was Reagan? Max Boot’s biography deflates the Gipper’s legacy.”
This splendid new account of the 40th president’s life shows that Reagan’s influence doesn’t loom so large 35 years after he left the White House.
To some extent such criticisms bounced off Reagan simply because reporters and the public liked him. His mastery of symbolism, largely derived from his Hollywood experience, also meant he never suffered politically for the contradictions between, for example, the traditional values he preached and his dysfunctional family life. (Reagan’s two children with his previous wife, the actress Jane Wyman, and his two children with Nancy were alienated from their emotionally detached parents as well as each other and engaged in a range of self-destructive behaviors.) As Boot perceptively observes, “The trappings of family, displayed in photographs and videos, conveyed the right image even if they were disassociated from the underlying reality.”
Reagan’s presidency likewise was more symbol than substance. Boot goes so far as to say that Reagan was “an oddly passive chief executive,” “a disengaged president who had little interest in, or aptitude for, running the federal government.”
In Boot’s telling, few of Reagan’s apparent successes owed much to Reagan himself. Several significant bipartisan bills were passed during his presidency, including a comprehensive tax overhaul and Defense Department restructuring, but “he did not take an active role in crafting any of them.” The most important economic policymaker was not the president but Paul Volcker, the chairman of the quasi-independent Federal Reserve Board — though Boot does credit Reagan for showing “considerable courage and perspicacity” in backing Volcker despite the economic costs of his anti-inflationary policies. In any case, “there was nothing particularly impressive or unusual about the Reagan economic record,” given that, according to the statistics Boot cites, annual growth in the gross domestic product during his presidency was about the same as what it had been under Richard Nixon and below the rates during the presidencies of Bill Clinton, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson
The worst headlines still fill today’s papers and are always about you-know-who or the candidates running with MAGA status. North Carolina Gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson is the latest in the MAGA lineage of someone who shouldn’t hold public office. The CNN headline is “Nearly all of Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson’s campaign staff quits after CNN report.” But the big question is, why did they go to work for him before? It’s not like he just turned into a deplorable overnight! As usual, CNN goes with normalizing MAGA behavior even when each story about them is more abnormal than the last.
Days after a CNN report about racist and sexual comments posted on a pornography forum, all but a few of Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson’s campaign team quit their jobs on Sunday.
A campaign news release said that four top staffers have left the campaign: Conrad Pogorzelski, general consultant and senior advisor who’s worked for Robinson since his initial 2020 lieutenant governor campaign; Chris Rodriguez, campaign manager; Heather Whillier, finance director; and Jason Rizk, deputy campaign manager.
But WUNC has confirmed that other staffers have quit as well, leaving Robinson with just three people working on his campaign — two campaign spokesmen and a bodyguard. The list of departures also include longtime director of operations Patrick Riley and political directors John Kontoulas and Jackson Lohrer.
Sunday’s news release says that new staff hires will be announced “in the coming days.” But hiring a new campaign team less than two months from Election Day will be tough for a campaign rocked by scandal.
The lengthy CNN report, published Thursday afternoon, highlights comments posted to an online pornography forum called “Nude Africa” from an user calling themselves Mark Robinson with many of his personal biographical details and an email address associated with the man who’s now the Republican nominee for governor.
The report includes a long list of sexually explicit and racist comments posted to the site between 2008 and 2012, long before Robinson entered politics as a candidate for lieutenant governor in 2020. The commenter describes himself as a “Black Nazi,” calls for the reinstatement of slavery, says he enjoys watching transgender pornography and describes a time he spied on women taking showers in a locker room.
Robinson has denied that he wrote the posts, but other Republicans have been distancing themselves from the GOP nominee for governor in recent days. President Donald Trump made no mention of Robinson during a Saturday rally in Wilmington, even as the GOP nominee for attorney general, Congressman Dan Bishop, spoke to the crowd.
Controversies have been present in most of the MAGA set. I mean, what type of weirdo can vote for a guy who’s about to get his sentence for committing 34 felons, is an adjudicated felon, and still has plenty of my felonies lined up to get him if he doesn’t get into office. His wife won’t even be seen with him, and she was just paid to show up at a Log Cabin Republican meeting by some unknown person. “Melania Trump was paid for a rare appearance at a political event. It’s not clear who cut the unusual six-figure check.” She made another weird, rare appearance at the RNC. It was filled with the visual rebuffs of her husband. For a Political Party obsessed with a traditional family and flying so-called Christian Values, something is very wrong here.
Also, the Barron Trump allegations are beginning to come out since he’s no longer considered a kid. Oy, and what a kid he was! “The shocking Barron Trump allegations just keep getting worse.” This is from MSN.
Yesterday, we learned that Barron Trump—according to an insider—allegedly “slapped the sh*t” out of his nanny years ago. But apparently Barron’s behavior is far worse than that.
After one poster—who nannied for a kid who went to the same New York school as Barron after every DC school allegedly refused to take him—started dishing the dirt on the young psycho-in-training, even more stories started to come out about the youngest Trump.
“The more y’all annoy me, the more Imma keep telling the Trumps business,” original poster @WonderKing82, aka Mr. Weeks, promised Trump supporters in his replies. And boy, did he deliver. Soon after telling the story about the nanny, a few other damning details came to light, mostly about Barron’s treatment of small animals.
For Barron, the bad behavior allegedly didn’t stop with animals. He also directed his abuse at other classmates, according to Mr. Weeks.
The part about the inappropriate touching and investigation is especially disturbing. And for the people in the comments claiming that these are somehow signs of autism, that’s not only incredibly untrue, it’s irresponsible and harmful for individuals who are actually autistic. Folks on the autism spectrum don’t tend to harm animals or classmates, and it’s a little bit ridiculous that this has to be said out loud.
There are even people in the replies trying to find a way to blame Barron’s behavior on Hillary Clinton. Good luck with that!
Whatever the truth is about Barron Trump, you can be sure it will eventually come to light. For now, we’re going to keep a close eye on these disturbing, utterly believable claims.
We’re basically seeing a family tree full of sociopaths! And blame that on Hillary??? WTF? So, there appears to be a spending deal that my avoid the government shutdown Trump wants. This is from the AP. “Spending deal averts a possible federal shutdown and funds the government into December.” I’m not sure how dumb you must be to know that the party that doesn’t deliver the deal gets blamed. The Citizens get really pissed if they start missing all kinds of things owed them, like Vet Benefits and paychecks.
Congressional leaders announced an agreement Sunday on a short-term spending bill that will fund federal agencies for about three months, averting a possible partial government shutdown when the new budget year begins Oct. 1 and pushing final decisions until after the November election.
Temporary spending bills generally fund agencies at current levels, but an additional $231 million was included to bolster the Secret Service after the two assassination attempts against Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, and additional money was added to aid with the presidential transition, among other things.
Lawmakers have struggled to get to this point as the current budget year winds to a close at month’s end. At the urging of the most conservative members of his conference, House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., had linked temporary funding with a mandate that would have compelled states to require proof of citizenship when people register to vote.
But Johnson abandoned that approach to reach an agreement, even as Trump insisted there should not be a stop-gap measure without the voting requirement.
Bipartisan negotiations began in earnest shortly after that, with leadership agreeing to extend funding into mid-December. That gives the current Congress the ability to fashion a full-year spending bill after the Nov. 5 election, rather than push that responsibility to the next Congress and president.
In a letter to Republican colleagues, Johnson said the budget measure would be “very narrow, bare-bones” and include “only the extensions that are absolutely necessary.”
“While this is not the solution any of us prefer, it is the most prudent path forward under the present circumstances,” Johnson wrote. “As history has taught and current polling affirms, shutting the government down less than 40 days from a fateful election would be an act of political malpractice.”
I have just a few other recommendations. The first one comes from Emptywheel. Also, if you haven’t watched From Russia, with Lev, You should. “Why No One Went to Prison for Rudy Giuliani’s Hunter Biden Corruption.”
As I said, the film leaves the impression that Lev was arrested to protect Trump during impeachment by silencing the key witness.
But that’s not why Lev went to prison (as a news clip in the movie tacitly admits).
Lev and Igor Fruman (along with David Correia and Andrey Kukushkin) were first charged on October 9, 2019, via indictment that was (according to then US Attorney for SDNY Geoffrey Berman’s memoir) drafted quickly overnight in advance of Lev and Igor’s trip to meet Dmitry Firtash in Vienna. From Berman’s memoir, I’m not 100% sure whether he pushed it because he genuinely feared they were about to flee the country, felt he had to do so before Barr intervened … or for more nefarious reasons.
The charges were:
- Conspiring to make a bunch of political donations in the name of Global Energy Producers
- Lying to the Federal Election Commission
- Falsifying a document to the FEC
- Laundering donations from Russian Andrey Muraviev to pay pro-cannabis politicians
As Bondy described, the indictment implied that Lev and Igor’s political contributions to Pete Sessions were tied to an attempt to fire Marie Yovanovitch. But that was not charged as FARA.
On September 17, 2020, the indictment was superseded. Lev and Correia’s longterm Fraud Guarantee fraud was added and the charges tied to Muraviev (who was secretly indicted that same day) were bumped up. The paragraph describing a payment to Sessions took out the reference to an Ambassador, describing it instead as to “further their political goals.” There were still no FARA charges though.
Ultimately, Lev was convicted at trial in October 2021 of the GEP and Muraviev donations, and in March 2022, pled guilty to the fraud guarantee charges. He was never charged with FARA violations.
Bondy’s insinuation that SDNY took out the foreign agent aspect to protect Rudy is wholly inconsistent with the warrants (linked below) targeting Lev and Rudy unsealed last year.
They show that the investigation into Lev, which started based on a Campaign Legal Center complaint, initially focused on campaign finance crimes. In August 2019 — after the firing of Marie Yovanovitch but before the disclosure of the Perfect Phone Call — SDNY began to turn to Foreign Agent suspicions (though one of two warrants obtained in August 2019 was not executed). After the arrest, SDNY more aggressively turned to developing the Foreign Agent prong of the investigation. On November 4, 2019, SDNY obtained warrants targeting Rudy (which were not released last year). On December 10, 2019, the Foreign Agent prong continued.
That’s when Bill Barr intervened to kill that prong of the investigation, certainly as it pertained to Rudy, as I’ll lay out below.
After that point, SDNY focused on the Fraud Guarantee fraud.
It’s not that Lev went to prison for this but Rudy did not. On the contrary, Barr worked hard to ensure no one could go to prison on such charges.
While Barr was doing that, SDNY appears to have put that investigation on ice and attempted, without success, to resuscitate once Barr was out of office.
There are also a few more articles analyzing DonOLD. I’ll be brief with these. From the Washington Post and Phillip Bump: “The ‘policy’ mirage that undergirds Donald Trump’s support. The former president and his supporters insist he wins a race centered on policy. It’s not because of Trump’s detailed policy platform.”
A central reason for this is the deep polarization in American politics, particularly around Trump himself. In 2016 and 2020, he earned a bit under 50 percent of the vote, about where he is in most recent polls. The shift from Biden to Harris helped firm up the Democratic electorate, which may be crucially important in who actually turns out to vote — but the race generally went from a narrow national Trump lead to a narrow Harris one. The 2024 race continues to be largely a referendum on Trump, much as the 2020 race was.
There has been one notable difference this year, though. While Trump’s 2016 campaign was unabashedly indifferent to policy specifics and his 2020 campaign centered on his incumbency, his 2024 effort has often — largely through the energies of his boosters — been presented as a campaign centered on the policies he seeks to implement.
It’s an unexpected argument, but a common one. You will often hear that Trump has an advantage on policy; that, if the campaign set aside all of the fluff of personal emotion, Trump would prevail simply by virtue of the popularity of his positions. That his support is rooted in what he stands for, not who he is.
Juan Williams dives in further at The Hill. “Trump is at 48 percent. How could this be possible but for widespread racism?”
At this point, the racism is obvious. How else does it make sense that 48 percent of registered voters in last week’s Fox News poll say they have no problem putting Donald Trump back in the White House?
Who are these people who look the other way when their candidate tells a bold lie about Black immigrants eating a mostly white Ohio town’s cats and dogs?
How can it be that not a soul among the 48 percent cares that Trump’s vice-presidential pick, JD Vance, says it is okay to “create” racist lies about immigrants eating pets “so the American media actually pays attention”?
How can 48 percent of voters back a candidate who says immigrants coming from “infested” places are “poisoning the blood of our country?”
Is it just snowflakes who notice when one of Trump’s close allies says, “The White House will smell like curry” if Vice President Kamala Harris, the daughter of an Indian immigrant, wins the presidency?
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R- Ga.), no snowflake, condemned the comment as “appalling,” “racist” and “hateful.”
Do these voters also prefer to sail past Trump once calling a Black woman and former aide a “dog”? And he called Alvin Bragg, the Black Manhattan district attorney who successfully prosecuted him for business fraud, an “animal.”
Maybe Trump’s 48 percent don’t excuse his racism so much as get the message. They are inside a Republican Party that is 82 percent white. Most of those white Republicans are in small towns and rural areas.
Harris said Trump can’t be trusted to serve as president after “engaging in…hateful rhetoric that, as usual, is designed to divide us as a country…to have people pointing fingers at each other.”
In this year’s campaign, one of Trump’s regular dog-whistles at his rallies is his false claim that big cities, full of racial minorities and immigrants, are scary places full of crime and failure. Last week he flatly lied at a rally when he said a parent who leaves a child alone on the New York subway has “about a 75 percent chance that [they’ll] never see [their] child again. What the hell has happened here?”
Trump’s use of racism to stir up his white supporters was called out by writer Fran Lebowitz back in 2018. Trump, she wrote, has “allowed people to express their racism and bigotry in a way that they haven’t been able to in quite a while and they really love him for that…It’s a shocking thing to realize people love their hatred more than they care about their own actual lives.”
Ashley Parker writes this at The Washington Post. “Donald Trump’s imaginary and frightening world. His extreme caricatures serve as a way to paint an alarming picture of America under the Biden-Harris administration.”
In Donald Trump’s imaginary world, Americans can’t venture out to buy a loaf of bread without getting shot, mugged or raped. Immigrants in a small Ohio town eat their neighbors’ cats and dogs. World War III and economic collapse are just around the corner. And kids head off to school only to return at day’s end having undergone gender reassignment surgery.
The former president’s imaginary world is a dark, dystopian place, described by Trump in his rallies, interviews, social media posts and debate appearances to paint an alarming picture of America under the Biden-Harris administration.
It is a distorted, warped and, at times, absurdist portrait of a nation where the insurrectionists who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, to deadly effect were merely peaceful protesters, and where unlucky boaters are faced with the unappealing choice between electrocution or a shark attack. His extreme caricatures also serve as another way for Trump to traffic in lies and misinformation, using an alternate reality of his own making to create an often terrifying — and, he seems to hope — politically devastating landscape for his political opponents.
Trump, for instance, regularly claims that Democrats favor abortions up until the day of birth — and, in some cases, even after birth.
Speaking at the Sept. 10 presidential debate with Vice President Kamala Harris in Philadelphia, Trump falsely claimed that Harris’s running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, has said “abortion in the ninth month is absolutely fine.”
“He also says, ‘execution after birth’ — execution, no longer abortion because the baby is born — is okay,” Trump continued.
In fact, Walz has not said this, The Washington Post Fact Checker found, and “execution after birth” — or infanticide — is illegal in all states. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in 2021, nearly all abortions — 93.5 percent — occur at or before 13 weeks, and fewer than 1 percent were performed after 21 weeks. World War III, too, is another all-but-certainty should Trump not be elected in November, the former president frequently claims. In July, before a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at his private Mar-a-Lago Club, Trump told reporters that only his electoral victory could stave off another global conflagration.
“If we win, it’ll be very simple. It’s all going to work out and very quickly,” Trump said. “If we don’t, you’re going to end up with major wars in the Middle East and maybe a Third World War. You are closer to a Third World War right now than at any time since the Second World War. You’ve never been so close, because we have incompetent people running our country.”
Seeing this dark stuff, or as Dubya put it back at his inauguration, “some weird shit,” we can only ask ourselves what causes people to swallow this hook, line, and sinker. Is this what makes you feel better about yourself? I keep wondering if it’s their brand of religion, their lack of education, or just their Iron Age tribalistic hate of any “other than them.” I had to even call it weird because, to me, the word evil is far more descriptive. It’s certainly no way to run a country. And, it’s not the way to have fun.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Lazy Caturday Reads: The Powerful Political Influence of Opus Dei
Posted: September 21, 2024 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,
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.
Finally Friday Reads: Ms Harris, Please Unite Us!
Posted: September 20, 2024 Filed under: 2024 Elections, 2024 presidential Campaign, abortion rights | Tags: @repeat1968. John Buss, DonOld Weirdo and Perv, Harris/Walz policy priorities 2024, JD Vance Weirdo and perv, John Neely Kennedy Weirdo, Mark Robinson, Mark Robinson weirdo and perv, Oprah Winfrey, Rep. Matt Gaetz, Vice President Kamala Harris, Weirdo, weirdo and perv 11 Comments
“One Quadruple Bogey at a time.” John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
I saw some of Oprah’s Zoom interview with Vice President Harris Last night. Watching the back tier with 1000 individual screens showing the faces of celebrities and folks around the country was fascinating. Tonight, the Vice President will give a speech on the preventable deaths of two young women from complications in Atlanta. I’m sure that the Republicans and the Christian Right will go after mifepristone and misoprostol since incomplete medical abortions were involved. This is even though the procedure would be used for a miscarriage as well. This is from the New York Times. “Harris Will Give Abortion Speech in Georgia After Deaths of Two Women. The vice president has said the stories of pregnant women who have been denied or have been unable to gain access to medical care show the consequences of former President Donald J. Trump’s actions.” This is reported by Lisa Lerer.
Vice President Kamala Harris will give remarks in Atlanta on Friday focused on the stories of two Georgia mothers whose deaths she has argued show the consequences of the strict abortion bans passed by Republicans after Roe v. Wade was overturned.
The speech is part of an effort by the Harris campaign to push reproductive rights to the center of the presidential election, according to a person with knowledge of the event who insisted on anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the plans.
The deaths, reported this week by ProPublica, occurred in the months after Georgia passed a law banning abortion at six weeks. Amber Thurman died of sepsis resulting from an incomplete medication abortion after waiting 20 hours in a suburban Atlanta hospital for medical care. A second woman, Candi Miller, died after declining to seek medical care for complications from abortion medication.
Throughout her campaign, Ms. Harris has sought to tie former President Donald J. Trump, who has taken credit for appointing the Supreme Court justices who provided the key votes to overturn the federal right to abortion, to dire medical situations faced by women seeking the procedure in states where it is banned or heavily restricted.
Georgia is very much in play. This is why so much attention has been paid to it with positive and negative actions. This kind of shenanigans is likely why Trump is only playing to his base and not heading to the middle to appeal to swing voters and voters in the suburbs. Although, when I watch the snippets of his speeches I think he may be incapable of actually doing that. He seems to repeat some of the golden oldies, then goes off on some unintelligible tangent. The Guardian reported this yesterday. “Network of Georgia election officials strategizing to undermine 2024 result. Emails reveal Georgia Election Integrity Coalition, a group of officials and election deniers, coordinating in swing state.”
Emails obtained by the Guardian reveal a behind-the-scenes network of county election officials throughout Georgia coordinating on policy and messaging to both call the results of November’s election into question before a single vote is cast, and push rules and procedures favored by the election denial movement.
The emails were obtained by the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (Crew) as a result of a public records request sent to David Hancock, an election denier and member of the Gwinnett county board of elections. Crew shared the emails with the Guardian.
Spanning a period beginning in January, the communications expose the inner workings of a group that includes some of the most ardent supporters of the former president Donald Trump’s election lies as well as ongoing efforts to portray the coming election as beset with fraud. Included in the communications are agendas for meetings and efforts to coordinate on policies and messaging as the swing state has once again become a focal point of the presidential campaign.
The Georgia Election Board continues to make a mess of voting in Georgia. The idea appears to make it impossible to certify the vote count by the Constitutionally required Date. That way, the Trump campaign may start a lawsuit that lands in his Supreme Court. “Pro-Trump Georgia election board votes to require hand counts of ballots. Critics plan to sue, saying the new requirement would almost certainly lead to errors and could disrupt the process of certifying the vote in a crucial battleground state.” This headline is in today’s Washington Post. Amy Gardner reports the story.
The Georgia State Election Board approved a rule Friday requiring counties in the critical presidential battleground to hand-count all ballots this year, potentially upending the November election by delaying reporting of results by weeks if not months.
The change was spearheaded by a pro-Trump majority that has enacted a series of changes to the state’s election rules in recent weeks and approved the hand-count requirement despite a string of public commenters who begged them not to. Critics included democracy advocates who accused the board of intentionally injecting chaos and uncertainty into the presidential contest as well as election supervisors and poll workers who said hand counts would take too long, cost money and almost certainly produce counting errors.
The board voted 3-2 to approve the measure, which would require the hand count in addition to the customary machine count in each precinct. The rule requires the hand count to take place the night of the November election or the next day. But dozens of election officials said that would be physically impossible in all but the smallest counties. Many also said in public comments Friday that it is far too late in the year to adopt new procedures for which their staffs have not been trained and for which they have no funds.
“Military ballots have already been issued,” said Ethan Compton, elections supervisor in south Georgia’s Irwin County. “The election has begun. This is not the time to change the rules. That will only lower the integrity of our elections.”
The hand-count requirement was one of 11 rules expected to be voted on Friday, the latest batch the State Election Board has considered in recent weeks in an effort, proponents say, to make state elections more secure and transparent. The flurry is the work of a new right-wing majority that took control of the board in May with an avowed mission of preventing fraud and other irregularities from tainting the presidential result this year.
All three are supporters of former president Donald Trump, and the rules they are pushing have been promoted by the state’s leading proponents of the false claim that Joe Biden stole the Georgia election in 2020.
JD Vance is not experiencing the issues of advanced age like DonOLD. He’s just admitted to making up stories to make his point. His reprehensible talking points and speeches are just that, reprehensible. “JD Vance Makes Light of Actual Foreign Interference in His State.” This is from EmptyWheel
At a press conference on Ohio’s efforts to respond to the chaos created in Springfield by a slew of bomb threats, Governor Mike DeWine revealed that a number of the bomb threats came from “one particular country” overseas.
We have people, unfortunately, overseas, who are taking these actions. Some of them are coming from one particular country. We think that this is one more opportunity to mess with the United States. And they’re continuing to do that.
After that, in a truly deranged Xitter manifesto basically arguing that if the media doesn’t platform the false claims of Nazis attacking migrants, they’ll shoot someone, JD Vance falsely claimed that that’s proof a double standard from the media, then continued to lie that Kamala Harris was responsible for the assassination attempts against Trump.
[R]eports today suggest they came from a foreign country, not–as the media suggested–a deranged Trump fan.
The double standard is breathtaking. Donald Trump and I are, by their account, directly responsible for bomb threats from foreign countries. Why? Because we had the audacity to repeat what residents told us about the problems in their town. Meanwhile, Harris allies call for Trump to be eliminated as the media publishes arguments that he deserved to be shot.
Vance integrated this attack into his stump speech in Sparta Michigan, claiming that, “the American media has been laundering foreign disinformation” and deliberately lying — before DeWine revealed this — when they noted the bomb threats followed Trump and JD’s false attacks on Haitians.
Meanwhile, ABC News reports that “Ohio Haitian immigrants say they are afraid to leave home after recent backlash In Springfield, Ohio, Haitian immigrants claim they are terrified.” This is stochastic terrorism.
Haitian migrants residing in Springfield, Ohio, shared with ABC News their harrowing experiences of living in constant fear, expressing deep concerns about their safety that prevent them from venturing outside their homes.
In a town of more than 58,000 residents, threats of bombings and shootings led to the closure of city buildings and schools for several days. Wittenberg University canceled all activities on Sunday and classes on Monday as a precautionary measure.
James Fleurijean, a Haitian Community Help & Support Center member, stated that the continual spread of false and divisive statements from prominent politicians was fostering an environment of fear.
The entire small city will need therapy and Federal disaster help when this happens. And still, the despicable dotard and his sidekick Vance Viscious are still spinning lies to the deplorables. Even Ohio’s Republican governor, Mike DeWine, wrote this in the New York Times. ” I’m the Governor of Ohio. I Don’t Recognize the Springfield That Trump and Vance Describe.”
Sydney Blumenthal published this piece in The Guardian today. “Trump and Vance’s Springfield smear is a microcosm of their entire campaign. The Republicans desperately need to distract voters away from abortion. They’ve now found the perfect new scapegoat “
After Donald Trump’s disastrous debate with Kamala Harris on 10 September he decided to center his campaign on a single incendiary issue: “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs. The people that came in, they’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”
When Trump was corrected during the debate by the ABC moderator David Muir, who pointed out that his statement about the Haitian community in the Ohio town was erroneous, he insisted it was factual. “Well,” he said, “I’ve seen people on television, people on television say, ‘My dog was taken and used for food.’” But there were no such “people on television”. There were no dogs taken for food. Trump called Muir a “foolish fool”, and said, “He’s a guy with good hair, but not as good as it was five years ago.”
…
After the debate left him staggering into the spin room to proclaim, “It’s the best debate I ever had,” before confusedly retreating, Trump’s imperative has been to hold on to his base. He can afford no erosion. Losing even a point might be a falling rock that starts a landslide.
Trump desperately needed to distract the national discussion away from abortion. His pre-debate charade of gyrating positions failed to beguile women voters. His charm offensive was offensive without the charm. The gender gap widened to an even greater chasm.
The day before the debate, he held a commanding lead on the economy, 10 points over Harris, 55% to 45%, in a Pew poll. But afterwards, the FT-Michigan Ross polls showed Harris with an advantage on trust in her handling of the economy by 44% to 42%, and 48% to 42% among those who watched the debate.
Trump knows in his bones that his supporters will believe anything he says. If he ever feels they will abandon him, he cannot shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue. He does not require any evidence, not even spectral, to trigger their need to demonstrate unswerving faith. Once he speaks, declaring miracles, he is certain his supporters will fall to their knees. And, mirabile dictu, a majority, 52%, say it’s true that “Haitian immigrants are abducting and eating pet dogs and cats,” according to a post-debate YouGov poll. Only 5% are willing to confess the heresy that it is “definitely false”, while 25% are agnostically “unsure”.
Trump’s lie about “eating pet dogs and cats” is his best-polling lie. It polled nine points better among his supporters than his lie that “in some states it is legal to kill a baby after birth”. It polled 24 points better than his lie that “public schools are providing students with sex-change operations” and 44 points better than his lie that “noise from wind turbines has been shown to cause cancer.” The raw numbers dictated the emphasis of his fiction.
The illogic of his demagogy gives Trump no pause. He has railed that immigrants are stealing “Black jobs”. He says the Haitians of Springfield are illegal. But they are in fact legal and of course black. They are the black people usurping the “Black jobs”.
Trump knew before he uttered his lie in the debate about “eating pets” that it was untrue. The morning of the debate, according to the Wall Street Journal, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, Trump’s running mate, had a staffer call the office of the Springfield city manager. “He asked point-blank, ‘Are the rumors true of pets being taken and eaten?’” that official, Bryan Heck, told the Journal. “I told him no. There was no verifiable evidence or reports to show this was true. I told them these claims were baseless.”
Rather than debunk the rumor he had been informed was untrue, Vance spread the falsehood immediately. “Reports now show that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country. Where is our border czar?” he tweeted, pinning the blame for the presence of the Haitian community, which had settled in the town a decade earlier, on Harris, who was incidentally not the “border czar”. Within a half-hour of Vance’s post, the Springfield News-Sun reported that police stated that there were no incidents of pets being stolen or eaten and that the story was “not something that’s on our radar right now”.
Trump repeated the lie in the debate and kept repeating it. His incitement was followed by 33 bomb threats that shut down schools, hospitals and municipal buildings in Springfield. The town’s CultureFest was cancelled. Classes at Clark State College and Wittenberg University were suspended because of bomb threats. (Wittenberg was founded in 1845 at Springfield by devout German-American abolitionists. The last time classes were suspended there was for the send-off of a volunteer military company of students to fight for the Union in the civil war. When Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, the school held a day of prayer and fasting in celebration.)
“Do you denounce the bomb threats in Springfield?” a reporter asked Trump on 14 September.
“I don’t know what happened with the bomb threats,” Trump lied. “I know that it’s been taken over by illegal migrants, and that’s a terrible thing that happened.” He pledged: “We will do large deportations from Springfield, Ohio. Large deportations. We’re gonna get these people out.” He said they would be the first to be rounded up. He would use “local law enforcement” and the national guard, despite the Posse Comitatus Act that prohibits such deployments against civilians. “Well, these aren’t civilians,” he claimed. “These are people that aren’t legally in our country. This is an invasion of our country.” “And you know,” he had previously told a cheering crowd, “it’s going to be a bloody story.”
Trump’s sidekicks are just as despicable as he is. This story came across live while I was watching Nicole yesterday afternoon. I’ve gotten to the point that I think this guy represents the modern Republican party to a t. This is from The Bulwark, and the headline says it all. “Uh, Gross.” I’m with Andrew Egger on that one.
When the rumor mill started churning yesterday that some major, potentially campaign-shaking news was coming on North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, the GOP nominee for governor this year, people’s minds began going to truly dark places. After all, Robinson was already one of the most insanely controversial figures in today’s politics: a Holocaust denier; a modest enthusiast of political violence; a walking, talking Breitbart comments section who’d been posting unhinged stuff online for years. A story that he used to be a frequent patron of video porn stores was barely a blip in the race. What could possibly be worse?
Well, uh, we found out. CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski had tracked down a bunch of old online profiles of Robinson—most notably, an account he’d frequently used to comment on a porn site, Nude Africa, in the early 2010s. Those posts included some of the most insane ranting you’ll ever see:
- “I’m a black NAZI!”
- “I’d take Hitler over any of the shit that’s in Washington right now!”
- “Slavery is not bad. Some people need to be slaves. I wish they would bring it back. I would certainly buy a few.”
- Of Martin Luther King, Jr.: “Get that fucking commie bastard off the National Mall. . . . I’m not in the KKK. They don’t let blacks join. If I was in the KKK I would have called him Martin Lucifer Koon!”
- Of a story about a woman who said she was sexually assaulted by her taxi driver: “The moral of this story . . . . . Don’t fuck a white bitch!”
There was more beyond that. What’s really incredible is that all this was the sanitized version. CNN tiptoed politely around a heap of other Robinson comments that were simply some of the most obscene, degraded sexual stuff you could imagine.
I’d say North Carolina is really in play now. How could you vote for anyone that’s on the ballot with this deplorable? I suppose it’s all fine and reasonable by the MAGA crowd, but I can’t see a suburban mom or dad going for any of this. Independents will likely head to the Democratic Party’s offerings. Then there’s this information on the deplorable Matt Gaetz from NOTUS. Why are Republican men so obsessed with women’s bodies? “New Court Filings Place Matt Gaetz at a Party at the Center of the Sex Trafficking Scandal. This is the first public filing that cites sworn testimony alleging that Gaetz attended one of the long-rumored parties with a teenage girl.” This is just one of many Florida stories that put Florida into play.
Rep. Matt Gaetz attended a drug-fueled sex party in 2017 with the 17-year-old girl at the center of the alleged sex trafficking scandal, according to legal documents filed to a Florida federal court shortly before midnight Thursday, which cite sealed affidavits from three eyewitness testimonies.
The minor, who was a junior in high school at the time, arrived in her mother’s car for a July 15, 2017, party at the Florida home of Chris Dorworth, a lobbyist and friend of Gaetz’s, according to a court filing written by defense attorneys who interviewed witnesses as part of an ongoing civil lawsuit Dorworth brought in 2023.
The lobbyist claimed he had been unfairly dragged into the alleged sex trafficking scandal that has dogged Gaetz and his allies for years. Dorworth ultimately dropped the case, but lawyers filed these documents in an attempt to recoup attorneys fees for a lawsuit they say should never have been brought.
One eyewitness cited in the court filings, a young woman referred to as K.M., provided a sworn affidavit that claimed the teenage girl was naked, partygoers were there to “engage in sexual activities,” and “alcohol, cocaine, ecstasy … and marijuana” were present. The teenage girl was identified in the filings only as A.B.
“The discovery taken in this case to date reflects that on Saturday, July 15, 2017 … Dorworth, hosted a party at his residence … with the following guests present: (1) A.B.; (2) K.M.; (3) B.G.; (4) Matt Gaetz,” lawyers wrote in the filing, also listing several others. The defense lawyers filed testimonies from those three women — who the attorneys say placed Gaetz at Dorworth’s house that night — under seal pending a judge’s approval to make the records public.
Additionally, Gaetz’s own ex-girlfriend — who was present at the party — provided testimony that lawyers say rebuts Dorworth’s claims that he was not there.NOTUS independently verified that Gaetz and one of the women who testified were previously involved in a relationship; she is only identified in the court filing by her initials, B.G.
The congressman’s ex-girlfriend’s eleventh hour testimony on Sept. 3 came just two days before Dorworth dropped his lawsuit, defense attorneys said in the filing. The defense lawyers also relied on Dorworth’s geolocated cell phone records, which showed that he communicated constantly with the congressman that day.The defense’s court filings show a hired digital forensic examiner identified Gaetz’s number, which has a Florida panhandle 850 area code and texted back and forth 30 times that day and then called Dorworth twice in the hours before the evening revelry. “B.G., another attendee at that party, confirmed A.B.’s testimony under penalty of perjury,” defense lawyers wrote.
This marks the first time that sworn testimony has been referenced in public court filings alleging that the congressman attended one of the long-rumored parties tied to an alleged underage sex scandal.Previous reports have revealed details of ex-politician and Gaetz friend Joel Greenberg’s confession letter that was never made public, which described how Gaetz would allegedly pay him to arrange several sexual encounters with young women — including a 17-year-old girl. Greenberg is serving an 11-year prison sentence for a list of charges, including fraud and sex trafficking with a child.
Deplorable Louisiana Senator John Neely Kennedy set a new level of low. This is from MSNBC. “Sen. John Kennedy used a Senate hearing on hate crimes to spew hate. A senator’s racist attack on a witness in a hearing was appalling even by Trump-era standards.” This Op-Ed was written by Zeeshan Aleem, MSNBC Opinion Writer/Editor.
On Tuesday, the executive director of the Arab American Institute, Maya Berry, appeared as a witness before the Senate Judiciary Committee to testify on an issue that should garner concern across the political spectrum: hate crimes. In both her prepared statement and her testimony, Berry apprised lawmakers of the need for stronger enforcement of the law to tackle the country’s growing “hate crime crisis.”
She acknowledged both Jewish and Arab American victims of hate crimes, and shared statistics on those crimes’ effects on all kinds of demographic groups, including Black Americans, Asian Americans and members of the LBGTQ community.
It’s difficult to imagine how a reasonable person could take issue with Berry’s comments, other than to interrogate how effective the hate crime enforcement model is. But in a shocking display, Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., demonstrated that he is not a reasonable person.
Instead, Kennedy used the hearing as an opportunity to launch a series of racist attacks on Berry, centered around accusations that she supports terrorism. His repugnant broadsides were a stunning illustration both of why the panel was being held in the first place and how politicians use ad hominem attacks to try to silence criticism of Israel.
Shortly after beginning to question Berry, Kennedy abruptly asked her: “You support Hamas, do you not?”
“Senator, oddly enough, I’m going to say thank you for that question, because it demonstrates the purpose of our hearing today in a very effective way,” Berry replied.
Kennedy interjected: “Let’s start first with a yes or no.”
“Hamas is a foreign terrorist organization that I do not support,” Berry responded, “but you asking the executive director of the Arab American Institute that question very much puts the focus on the issue of hate in our country.”
“You support Hezbollah, too, don’t you?” Kennedy then asked — implying that he didn’t believe her answer on Hamas.
Berry replied, “I find this line of questioning extraordinarily disappointing.”
“Is that a no?” Kennedy demanded.
“I don’t support violence, whether it’s Hezbollah or Hamas or any other entity that invokes it, so no, sir,” she said.
“You just can’t bring yourself to say no, can you? Kennedy said, even though Berry’s answer could not have been clearer. He continued his absurd line of questioning, asking her if she supports or opposes Iran “and their hatred of Jews?”
You may watch this reprehensible behavior below. I would also like to reference Kennedy’s use of the word “Jews” can be a hate word itself. The Deplorable in Chief demonstrates this. This is from the Jewish Journal Forward. “Trump says Jews would deserve much of the blame if he loses. The speech was supposed to be about antisemitism but instead trafficked in it, Trump’s critics said.” This is written by Jacob Kornbluh.
In a speech Thursday billed as former President Donald Trump’s answer to rising antisemitism, he said Jews would bear much of the responsibility if he loses the presidential election.
And in a second speech later in the evening, to the Israeli American Council, Trump elaborated on his past assertions in recent weeks that Israel would not survive if he doesn’t win in November, by painting a doomsday scenario in which Iran launches nuclear weapons and invoking the Holocaust.
“The Jewish people would have a lot to do with a loss,” Trump said during the first speech of the evening, an hourlong address at an event called “Fighting Antisemitism in America,” organized with GOP megadonor Miriam Adelson, at the Hyatt Regency hotel on Capitol Hill.
“You can’t let this happen,” he told his largely Jewish audience.
Trump in recent weeks has offended many Jews by questioning their mental health for voting for Democrats — as most Jews do — and predicting Israel’s demise should Harris win. But Thursday night’s comments seem to represent an escalation in Trump’s rhetoric, in that he singled out Jewish Americans — who represent only about 2% of the electorate — as a significant reason he might lose the election, one whose results he has never pledged to accept.
Amy Spitalnick, CEO of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, said after the speech that Trump’s remarks endanger Jews.
“Treating Jews and Israel as political footballs makes Jews, Israel, and all of us less safe,” she said in a statement.
“Dividing Jews into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ camps and engaging in dual loyalty tropes further normalizes antisemitism.”
“Anyone who cares about Jewish safety should call it out,” she added. “This is not partisan politics — it’s about the fundamental safety of the Jewish community.”
This is running at nearly 5000 words now, and there are more of these examples of stupidity, hatred, fear-mongering, lying, and trying to divide the country in the news today. I’m unsure if fear of a significant loss, panic, or finally dropping the sheep’s clothing to expose the wolves is for these examples of keeping the audio relentlessly at 11. So, I will end with something the Vice President said last night in her interview with Oprah. These quotes come from Australia’s The Nightly.
Speaking with Winfrey in an exclusive sit-down interview, aired on Thursday, local time, Ms Harris described the sense of responsibility she felt when President Joe Biden announced she would not seek re-election.
She described the race to the White House as being about America — not herself.
“I felt a sense of responsibility,” Ms Harris said. “With that comes a sense of purpose.
“We are here because there really is so much at stake.”
“There’s so much about this campaign I love because it’s about the people. This movement is about reminding each other that there is so much more we have in common.
“I don’t ask people if they are a Democrat or a Republican, I ask if they are okay.
“I do know that I am in a position to do something about it. I felt a great sense of responsibility.”
I want the grown-ups, the ordinary people, the ones who want to unite us to serve us. I want the weirdos and the red meanies to leave the buildings permanently. I want people that will fight for us! Do everything within your power for the Harris/Walz campaign and the local Democratic candidates in your jurisdiction.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Wednesday Reads
Posted: September 18, 2024 Filed under: 2024 presidential Campaign, Donald Trump, Kamala Harris 2024 | Tags: abortion, Amber Thurman, Candi Miller, D&C, election interference, Georgia, J.D. Vance, Lawrence O'Donnell, Springfield Ohio 4 CommentsGood Day!!
Autumn Portrait of Lydia Cassatt, by Mary Cassatt, 1880
Last night, Lawrence O’Donnell opened his show with a scathing rant on the results of the Republican crusade against legal abortion titled, “Women are dying. They got what they wanted.” He talked about the ProPublica article about Amber Nicole Thurman, who died in a Georgia hospital because doctors were afraid to give her the basic procedure (dilation and curettage or D&C) that would have saved her life. They then continued to withhold treatment until she died of sepsis. As a result, Thurman’s 6-year-old son has been left without a mother. O’Donnell then talked about what happened to his own mother when he was 6 years old. His mother had a miscarriage and was immediately given a D&C. This was before abortion was legal. O’Donnell choked up as he told this story. You can watch the video at MSNBC.
Today, Kavita Surana posted the story of the second Georgia woman known to have died because of the state’s anti-abortion laws: Afraid to Seek Care Amid Georgia’s Abortion Ban, She Stayed at Home and Died.
Candi Miller’s health was so fragile, doctors warned having another baby could kill her.
“They said it was going to be more painful and her body may not be able to withstand it,” her sister, Turiya Tomlin-Randall, told ProPublica.
But when the mother of three realized she had unintentionally gotten pregnant in the fall of 2022, Georgia’s new abortion ban gave her no choice. Although it made exceptions for acute, life-threatening emergencies, it didn’t account for chronic conditions, even those known to present lethal risks later in pregnancy.
At 41, Miller had lupus, diabetes and hypertension and didn’t want to wait until the situation became dire. So she avoided doctors and navigated an abortion on her own — a path many health experts feared would increase risks when women in America lost the constitutional right to obtain legal, medically supervised abortions.
Miller ordered abortion pills online, but she did not expel all the fetal tissue and would need a dilation and curettage procedure to clear it from her uterus and stave off sepsis, a grave and painful infection. In many states, this care, known as a D&C, is routine for both abortions and miscarriages. In Georgia, performing it had recently been made a felony, with few exceptions.
Her teenage son watched her suffer for days after she took the pills, bedridden and moaning. In the early hours of Nov. 12, 2022, her husband found her unresponsive in bed, her 3-year-old daughter at her side.
An autopsy found unexpelled fetal tissue, confirming that the abortion had not fully completed. It also found a lethal combination of painkillers, including the dangerous opioid fentanyl. Miller had no history of drug use, the medical records state; her family has no idea how she obtained them or what was going through her mind — whether she was trying to quell the pain, complete the abortion or end her life. A medical examiner was unable to determine the manner of death.
Her family later told a coroner she hadn’t visited a doctor “due to the current legislation on pregnancies and abortions.”
The conclusion of experts:
When a state committee of experts in maternal health, including 10 doctors, reviewed her case this year at the end of August, they immediately decided it was “preventable” and blamed the state’s abortion ban, according to members who spoke to ProPublica on the condition of anonymity.
They came to that conclusion after weighing the entire chain of events, from Miller’s underlying health conditions, to her decision to manage her abortion alone, to her reticence to seek medical care. “The fact that she felt that she had to make these decisions, that she didn’t have adequate choices here in Georgia, we felt that definitely influenced her case,” one committee member told ProPublica. “She’s absolutely responding to this legislation.”
This is the second preventable death related to abortion bans that ProPublica is reporting this week. Amber Thurman, 28, languished in a suburban Atlanta hospital for 20 hours before doctors performed a D&C to treat sepsis that resulted from an incomplete abortion. It was too late. “This young mother should be alive, raising her son and pursuing her dream of attending nursing school,” Vice President Kamala Harris said of Thurman on Tuesday. “This is exactly what we feared when Roe was struck down.”
There are almost certainly other deaths related to abortion access. Georgia’s committee, tasked with examining pregnancy-related deaths to improve maternal health, has only reviewed cases through fall 2022. Such a lag is common in these committees, which are set up in each state; most others have not even gotten that far.
Path in the garden of the asylum, Vincent Van Gogh
The situation women are dealing with now is far worse than what happened in the years before Roe. Old right-wing men without even basic knowledge of the female anatomy and medical procedures are making decisions that can condemn women to death and their families to the loss of a mother or daughter who becomes pregnant in a red state. Of course none of this could have happened without six monsters on the Supreme Court. As Lawrence O’Donnell said, “Women are dying. They got what they wanted.”
Here’s another horror story out of Georgia; this one is about election interference. Justin Glawe at The Guardian: Network of Georgia election officials strategizing to undermine 2024 result.
Emails obtained by the Guardian reveal a behind-the-scenes network of county election officials throughout Georgia coordinating on policy and messaging to both call the results of November’s election into question before a single vote is cast, and push rules and procedures favored by the election denial movement.
The emails were obtained by the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (Crew) as a result of a public records request sent to David Hancock, an election denier and member of the Gwinnett county board of elections. Crew shared the emails with the Guardian.
Spanning a period beginning in January, the communications expose the inner workings of a group that includes some of the most ardent supporters of the former president Donald Trump’s election lies as well as ongoing efforts to portray the coming election as beset with fraud. Included in the communications are agendas for meetings and efforts to coordinate on policies and messaging as the swing state has once again become a focal point of the presidential campaign.
The communications include correspondence from a who’s who of Georgia election denialists, including officials with ties to prominent national groups such as the Tea Party Patriots and the Election Integrity Network, a group run by Cleta Mitchell, a former attorney who acted as an informal adviser to the Trump White House during its attempts to overturn the 2020 election.
The group – which includes elections officials from at least five counties – calls itself the Georgia Election Integrity Coalition.
These emails go way back:
Among the oldest emails released are those regarding a 30 January article published by the United Tea Party of Georgia. Headlined “Georgia Democratic Party Threatens Georgia Election Officials”, the article was posted by an unnamed “admin” of the website, and came in response to letters sent to county election officials throughout Georgia who had recently refused to certify election results.
“In what can only be seen as an attempt to intimidate elections officials,” the article began, “the Georgia Democratic party sent a letter to individual county board of elections members threatening legal action unless they vote to certify upcoming elections – even if the board member has legitimate concerns about the results.”
The letter had been sent by a lawyer representing the Democratic party of Georgia to county election board members in Spalding, Cobb and DeKalb counties. Election board members in each of those counties had refused to certify the results of local elections the previous November. In their letter, Democrats sought to warn those officials that their duty to certify results was not discretionary in an attempt to prevent further certification refusals, including in the coming presidential election. In response, the United Tea Party of Georgia took issue with the letter, calling it “troubling” and saying that it was “Orwellian to demand that election officials certify an election even if they have unanswered questions about the vote”.
While the author of the article was not named on the United Tea Party of Georgia’s website, the emails obtained by Crew show that it was Hancock, an outspoken election denier and member of the Gwinnett county board of elections, who has become a leading voice in the push for more power to refuse to certify results.
There’s more at the link.
Autumn in Honfleu Cote de Grace, cir. 1906, byEmile-Othon Friesz
More efforts at election interference were reported by ABC News: Suspicious mail containing white powder was sent to election offices in at least 16 states.
The FBI and Postal Service are investigating suspicious mail containing a white powder substance that was sent to election offices in at least 16 states this week, according to an ABC News canvass of the country.
None of the mail has been deemed hazardous so far – and in one case, the substance was determined to be flour – but the scare prompted evacuations in some locations.
Election offices in New York, Tennessee, Wyoming, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Iowa, Nebraska, Missouri, Kansas, Indiana, Massachusetts, and Colorado received the suspicious packages. Similar suspicious mail was addressed to offices in additional states – Arizona, Georgia, Connecticut and Maryland among them – but investigators intercepted them before they reached their destination.
The FBI and U.S. Postal Inspection Service said in a statement Tuesday that they were investigating letters containing white powdery substances. A law enforcement source said at this point none of the packages were believed to be hazardous.
“We are also working with our partners to determine how many letters were sent, the individual or individuals responsible for the letters, and the motive behind the letters,” the statement read.
At least some of the packages were signed by the “United States Traitor Elimination Army,” according to a copy of a letter sent to members of the Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center obtained by ABC News.
The Saga of Springfield goes on and on. The Wall Street Journal learned that before he began spreading rumors of dogs and cats being eaten, he was told by city officials that the stories were baseless. We know this from a story in The Wall Street Journal. It’s behind the paywall, so this is a summary from Raw Story:
A representative for J.D. Vance was told “point blank” that the Republican vice presidential nominee’s claims about Haitian immigrants in Ohio were not true, but he continued to smear them anyway as bomb threats were called in to local schools and government offices.
The Republican senator posted about the rumors on X, where he’s got 1.9 million followers, and he did not delete the post even after one of his staffers called Springfield city manager Bryan Heck on the morning of Sept. 9 to ask whether Haitian immigrants were stealing and eating cats and dogs, as other social media users had alleged, reported the Wall Street Journal.“
He asked point-blank: ‘Are the rumors true of pets being taken and eaten?’” Heck told the newspaper. “I told him no. There was no verifiable evidence or reports to show this was true. I told them these claims were baseless.” [….]
Vance has admitted the claims are false, but he continues to make dubious and debunked claims about Haitian immigrants in the state he represents in the U.S. Senate, such as his claim that communicable diseases have spiraled out of control in Springfield.“Information from the county health department, however, shows a decrease in infectious disease cases countywide, with 1,370 reported in 2023 — the lowest since 2015,” the Journal reported.
“The tuberculosis case numbers in the county are so low (four in 2023, three in 2022, one in 2021) that any little movement can bring a big percentage jump. HIV cases did increase to 31 in 2023, from 17 in 2022 and 12 in 2021. Overall, sexually transmitted infection cases decreased to 965 in 2023, the lowest since 2015.”
Another claim by Vance fell apart after a spokesperson provided the Journal reporter with a police report involving a woman who alleged that a Haitian immigrant may have taken her cat.“But when a reporter went to Anna Kilgore’s house Tuesday evening, she said her cat Miss Sassy, which went missing in late August, had actually returned a few days later — found safe in her own basement,” the newspaper reported. “Kilgore, wearing a Trump shirt and hat, said she apologized to her Haitian neighbors with the help of her daughter and a mobile-phone translation app.”
The Autumn, by Alphonse Mucha, 1896
Trump says he wants to visit Springfield, but the mayor would prefer that he didn’t. NBC News: After false pet claims, Springfield mayor says Trump visit would be ‘an extreme strain’ on resources.
The Republican mayor of Springfield, Ohio, the city that has been the target of unfounded claims from former President Donald Trump and his running mate about Haitian immigrants’ eating residents’ pets said Tuesday that a visit from Trump would tax the city’s resources.
“It would be an extreme strain on our resources. So it’d be fine with me if they decided not to make that visit,” Mayor Rob Rue said at a news conference at City Hall.
NBC News reported Sunday that Trump planned to visit the city “soon,” according to a source familiar with his planning, after he amplified during the presidential debate a baseless claim that had circulated in right-wing spheres online for weeks, saying Haitian immigrants were “eating the dogs” and cats of local residents.
Officials in Springfield have said the allegations are meritless, with city police issuing a statement that said there were “no credible reports” of Haitian immigrants’ harming pets.
Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican, had also “panned the claims as “garbage,” and he visited Springfield Tuesday as the city responds to dozens of bomb threats, deemed hoaxes that have led to temporary closings and evacuations of schools and city buildings.
DeWine said a campaign visit from a presidential candidate is “generally very, very welcomed,” but he acknowledged that it would pose challenges.
“I have to state the reality, though, that resources are really, really stretched here,” he said.
Trump and Vance should stay the hell out of Springfield, Ohio.
Trump is holding a rally on Long Island tonight–a strange use of campaign resources in a blue state this close to the election. Anyway, there’s been a “suspicious occurrence.” Newsweek: ‘Suspicious Occurrence’ Near Donald Trump New York Rally: What We Know. “
Nassau County police responded to a “suspicious occurrence” near the location of former President Donald Trump‘s Wednesday night rally in Long Island, noting that no explosives were located, the department confirmed to Newsweek.
“We did respond to a suspicious occurrence in the vicinity of the Nassau Coliseum, however there was no validity of an explosive device being found,” a public information officer told Newsweek after a report about an explosive device at the rally site circulated online.
“We’re unsure where this information originated, but we can confirm that no explosives were discovered.”
I suppose we’ll be dealing with these false alarms from now on.
More Republicans are backing Kamala Harris every day now. This is from The New York Times: 111 Former G.O.P. Officials Back Harris, Calling Trump ‘Unfit to Serve.’
More than 100 former national security officials from Republican administrations and former Republican members of Congress endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris on Wednesday after concluding that their party’s nominee, Donald J. Trump, is “unfit to serve again as president.”
In a letter to the public, the Republicans, including both vocal longtime Trump opponents and others who had not endorsed Joseph R. Biden Jr. in 2020, argued that while they might “disagree with Kamala Harris” on many issues, Mr. Trump had demonstrated “dangerous qualities.” Those include, they said, “unusual affinity” for dictators like President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and “contempt for the norms of decent, ethical and lawful behavior.”
John Everett Millais, Autumn Leaves, 1855–1856
“As president,” the letter said, “he promoted daily chaos in government, praised our enemies and undermined our allies, politicized the military and disparaged our veterans, prioritized his personal interest above American interests and betrayed our values, democracy and this country’s founding documents.”
The letter condemned Mr. Trump’s incitement of the mob attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, aimed at allowing him to hold onto power after losing an election, saying that “he has violated his oath of office and brought danger to our country.” It quoted Mr. Trump’s own former vice president, Mike Pence, who has said that “anyone who puts himself over the Constitution should never be president of the United States.”
The letter came not long after former Vice President Dick Cheney and his daughter, former Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, both said they would vote for Ms. Harris. Democrats featured a number of anti-Trump Republicans at their nominating convention last month, including former Representative Adam Kinzinger of Illinois. Mr. Pence has said he will not endorse Mr. Trump but has not endorsed Ms. Harris.
The 111 signatories included former officials who served under Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush or George W. Bush. Many of them had previously broken with Mr. Trump, including two former defense secretaries, Chuck Hagel and William S. Cohen; Robert B. Zoellick, a former president of the World Bank; the former C.I.A. directors Michael V. Hayden and William H. Webster; a former director of national intelligence, John D. Negroponte; and former Gov. William F. Weld of Massachusetts. Miles Taylor and Olivia Troye, two Trump administration officials who became vocal critics, also signed.
But a number of Republicans who did not sign a similar letter on behalf of Mr. Biden in 2020 signed the one for Ms. Harris this time, including several former House members, like Charles W. Boustany Jr. of Louisiana, Barbara Comstock of Virginia, Dan Miller of Florida and Bill Paxon of New York.
I’ll end with this piece by conservative Stuart Rothenberg in Roll Call: So, you’re sure the presidential race will be close?
If there is one thing on which liberals and conservatives, Republicans and Democrats, journalists and political partisans all agree, it’s that the 2024 presidential race is too close to call.
Vice President Kamala Harris may have a slight advantage nationally and in a couple of competitive states, but polling in at least half a dozen swing states – including Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona, North Carolina, Michigan and Wisconsin – shows that the presidential race between Harris and former president Donald Trump is separated by only a percentage point or two.
As the New York Times wrote on Sept. 8 and updated three days later, “The national results are in line with polls in the seven battleground states that will decide the presidential election, where Ms. Harris is tied with Mr. Trump or holds slim leads, according to New York Times polling averages. Taken together, they show a tight race that remains either candidate’s to win or lose.”
But if you are something of a gambler and everyone you know believes the 2024 presidential contest is and will remain extremely close, you probably should put a few dollars on the possibility that November will produce a clear and convincing win for Harris.
That assessment isn’t based on the most recent survey numbers but on the current dynamics of the race and the advantage of taking a contrarian position.
Harris has plenty of momentum going into the fall election. She has become a strong speaker at her rallies, and she should have a considerable financial advantage over the next couple of months.
Her coalition, which includes some high-profile Republicans and conservatives, stretches from former Vice President Dick Cheney and conservative intellectual Bill Kristol on the right to Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on the left.
Harris clobbered Trump in their first (and possibly only) debate, and another debate would be extremely risky for Trump, who can’t afford another bad performance.
Harris wasn’t merely good on one or two topics during the debate. She successfully deflected Trump’s attacks and baited him so that he spent more time defending himself than defining his opponent. Harris was particularly effective on abortion/reproductive rights and foreign policy/national security.
The Democratic ticket is drawing huge crowds in the key states where Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz, are campaigning, and it’s quite possible that pollsters are underestimating the turnout that the Democrats will generate in the fall.
Read the whole thing at the link.
Have a nice Wednesday, everyone!!
Mostly Monday Reads: A Broken Orange Clock
Posted: September 16, 2024 Filed under: 2024 presidential Campaign, Black Women Lead, black women's reproductive health | Tags: "concepts of a plan", #DonOld, @repeat1968. John Buss, A Clockwork Orange, Politics and Football, Republicans "create stories" 5 Comments
“I know someone who is in serious decline…” John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
I usually take a long break from TV in the Fall. I actually don’t have a TV at the moment, although I have a new one sitting on a box on my bed that I haven’t bothered to set up for over a year now. I stick to the news and weather, so I’m usually okay as long as I can stream those. I typically like following politics, but that’s not like it used to be, and I prefer to get that from the print media. I’m even avoiding as much of that as possible because there’s no discussion about policy anymore. The cult of personality is everywhere these days.
This political season reminds me of all the things I detest about football. I ignore football games as much as possible. I usually call it mutants crashing and men fighting over ceremonial big balls. It starts with a between the legs movement and some guy bending over. It’s about throwing and catching and running away. It also causes brain damage. It’s a perfect allegory for today’s Republican politics right up to the part where the adherents of the team wear silly costumes and scream a lot.
Maybe it’s because most people don’t harvest, do something productive, or return to school to meet new kids and teachers. Maybe social media is the new American circus and it doesn’t just happen one week of the year. I’m happy for the cooler weather. Halloween is still the best holiday on the calendar, but it’s short-lived and overrun by the overtly commercial Crassmess season. But really, America. This is one of the silliest silly seasons that I’ve experienced in a long time.
So, I’m hesitant to follow the herd into the latest guy with a gun near Trump. There are guys with guns in schools. In our reality, they’re in shopping centers, neighborhoods, and even hospitals every day. They’re all ready to shoot things up for one reason or another. Most of them are troubled, surrounded by gun culture, encouraged to take out whoever has run off with their balls, and they’re unfortunately successful. When we’re encouraged to see all others as a team, we don’t want to play ball with but against, it begins to make sense. Is this the way American governance and law work now?
Everyone knows there’s someone on the team willing to shit talk. The crowd evidently loves it. Truth be damned. I mean, ‘concepts of a plan’ wouldn’t win a football game. Why should it get votes in an election? Every team has a designated shit-talker. But donOLD has a team full of them. That’s all they can do. Here’s a great example from The Guardian, as Edward Helmore wrote. “JD Vance admits he is willing to ‘create stories’ to get media attention. Republican vice-presidential candidate defends spreading false, racist claims demonizing Haitian immigrants.” What happens if the people on the other end aren’t participating in the ball-chasing activities? Then, the other side looks much more like the droogies in A Clockwork Orange. H/t for this to Hillary Clinton.
In a stunning admission, the Republican vice-presidential candidate, JD Vance, said he was willing “to create stories” on the campaign trail while defending his spreading false, racist rumors of pets being abducted and eaten in a town in his home state of Ohio.
Vance’s remarks came during an appearance on Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union, where he said he felt the need “to create stories so that the … media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people”. Asked by the CNN host Dana Bash whether the false rumors centering on Springfield, Ohio, were “a story that you created”, Vance replied, “Yes!” He then said the claims were rooted in “accounts from … constituents” and that he as well as the Republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump, had spoken publicly about them to draw attention to Springfield’s relatively large Haitian population.
Vance’s remarks drew a quick rebuke from the US transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg, a Democrat who supports his party’s White House nominee in November’s election, Kamala Harris.
“Remarkable confession by JD Vance when he said he will ‘create stories’ (that is, lie) to redirect the media,” Buttigieg wrote on X. “All this to change the subject away from abortion rights, manufacturing jobs, taxation of the rich, and the other things clearly at stake in this election.”
Vance further insulted people in Springfield who are Haitian as “illegal”, though the vast majority of them are in the US legally through a temporary protected status (TPS) that has been allocated to them due to the violence and unrest in their home country in the Caribbean. The status must be renewed after 18 months.
The rumors proliferating out of Springfield have led to bomb threats aimed at local hospitals and government offices. Vance on Sunday told Bash it was “disgusting” for the media to suggest any of his remarks had led to those threats. He also used the same term to refer to the people issuing those threats, though – in a separate appearance on Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press – he made it a point to blame the media for accurately reporting on them, saying it was “amplifying the worst people in the world”.
Vance ultimately defended his endorsement of the lies about Springfield as calling attention to the immigration policies at the White House while Harris has served as vice-president to Joe Biden.
“I’m not mad at Haitian migrants for wanting to have a better life,” Vance said. “We’re angry at Kamala Harris for letting this happen.”
Haitians in Springfield have been thrust under the US’s divisive political spotlight after Trump alleged that some of them were responsible for the abduction and consumption of pets during the former president’s debate with Harris on Tuesday.
Town officials have vociferously rejected the lies, and a woman who helped start the rumors on a widely circulated Facebook post acknowledged they were unfounded hearsay.
Two Springfield Elementary schools were evacuated again today. Fire Department Investigators are trying to determine the cause of a fire that destroyed two apartment buildings Sunday morning. The buildings were located directly across the street from one elementary school there. This analysis is from Jonathan V. Last written for The Bulwark. “Trump Is the Main Character of 2024. Again. How to take over the news cycle with this one weird trick.”
Late last week, in between laughing at JD Vance and Donald Trump, I had a thought:
What if the Haitians-stealing-and-eating-your-pets is actually good for the Trump campaign?
Not good in the tactical sense. Polling on the story doesn’t look especially good for him. But good in the strategic sense. This insane lie—which, borders on blood libel—may be reorienting the campaign in ways that are ultimately useful for Trump.
Let me explain.
(1) Trump needs to be the main character. Trump’s grand unified theory is that politics, like entertainment, is an attention economy. His strategy—always—is to dominate the news and make himself into the main character of every story.
A neo-Nazi march in Charlottesville? It’s about Trump’s response.
A global pandemic? It’s about Trump’s daily antics.
Geostrategic considerations involving a 75-year conflict on the Korean peninsula? It’s about Trump’s relationship with the Korean dictator.
It doesn’t matter what the issue, or context, is. Trump wants it to be about Trump. He believes that if he owns the spotlight—even if it is a very unflattering spotlight—then he can maneuver and find angles.
This theory may be callow, dangerous, and/or immoral. But it is not crazy.
And while it doesn’t always work out for Trump, it works out enough that it’s a good percentage play for him. Like doubling down on an 11. You don’t always win that bet. But you win it often enough that you should do it automatically, without hesitation.
I remember those years in football when knocking the other guy senseless to the point they had to send EMS in with a stretcher was considered fun. Do you suppose all those old guys who loved those wipe-outs still love it even though the NFL finds it costly for them and tries to avoid it? Then, there are always the folks that boo at the Ref and think the Refs are there to call a play on the part of the other team. This is from Judd Legume writing at Popular information. “The attack on the legitimacy of the 2024 presidential election has begun.” It can’t be that they just suck at the game or that play. It has to be the fault of someone else! Right?
There are 49 days until Election Day in the United States. Although the presidential race remains extremely close, Donald Trump and his allies have escalated their efforts to undermine the results.
In a post to Truth Social on Sunday morning, Trump falsely claimed that the United States Postal Service (USPS) “has admitted that it is a poorly run mess that is experiencing mail loss and delays at a level never seen before.” Trump asked, “how can we possibly be expected to allow or trust the U.S. Postal Service to run the 2024 Presidential Election?”
Trump has attacked mail-in voting for years, baselessly asserting that mail-in ballots facilitated fraud that robbed him of victory in 2020. Early this year, Trump appeared to change his tune on the practice. “ABSENTEE VOTING, EARLY VOTING, AND ELECTION DAY VOTING ARE ALL GOOD OPTIONS,” Trump posted to Truth Social on April 19. “REPUBLICANS MUST MAKE A PLAN, REGISTER, AND VOTE!” That change of heart appears to be short-lived.
In addition to attacking mail-in voting, Trump has advanced broader claims that Democrats “want to cheat” in the 2024 election. In a September 7 Truth Social post, Trump pledged to prosecute and jail Democrats who repeat “the rampant Cheating and Skullduggery that has taken place by the Democrats in the 2020 Presidential Election.” (In nearly 4 years since the 2020 election, Trump has produced no evidence of cheating.) Trump claimed that prosecuting “Lawyers, Political Operatives, Donors, Illegal Voters, & Corrupt Election Officials” was the only way to ensure “this Depravity of Justice does not happen again.”
Trump will not commit to accepting the results in November, saying he would only do so “if everything’s honest.” Otherwise, Trump said, he plans to “fight.”
Screenshot
Remind me again: who appointed Louis DeJoy as Postmaster General and CEO of the USPS? How about this headline from Forbes in April? “The Trump donor whom Biden can’t fire is running the U.S. Postal Service directly into the ground—just what everyone warned about when he was confirmed during the pandemic.” Mission accomplished, Asshole!
Let’s see how much airplay this gets today, what with crazies with guns in the bushes and immigrant hellscape stories out there as bait for the media. This is from Newsweek. “Kamala Harris Gets Good News From Economists: New Survey.” This is reported by Rachel Dopkin.
Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, received good news from economists about her economic agenda, according to a survey published on Saturday.
The economy has been a major talking point in this year’s election following high inflation in recent years. Even though inflation has decreased, falling to its lowest level in three-and-a-half-years in August, many Americans are still feeling its effects.
The Federal Reserve is expected to cut its benchmark rate, known as the federal funds rate, during next week’s meeting by either a modest quarter-point or a larger half-point cut. The Fed raised the rate 11 times in 2022 and 2023 to curb high inflation, which hit both the United States and countries around the world after the COVID-19 pandemic. The expected rate cut would be the first in over four years. The cost of consumer borrowing, including for mortgages, auto loans and credit cards, should go down over time with a series of Fed cuts.
So, which presidential nominee has the better economic agenda to get Americans back on track? According to nearly 40 economists from America’s top schools surveyed by the Financial Times and the University of Chicago Booth School of Business’ Kent A. Clark Center for Global Markets, it’s Harris instead of former President Donald Trump, the GOP presidential nominee.
When asked which nominees’ economic policies would be more inflationary—in other words, which would be more likely to cause inflation—70 percent of the economists said Trump’s while only 3 percent said Harris’. Meanwhile, 27 percent said there is no material difference in each economic platform’s inflationary consequences.
A total of 70 percent also thought Trump’s economic platform would produce larger federal budget deficits, while only 11 percent said Harris’ platform would and 19 percent said there would be no material difference.
Budget deficits are when government expenses exceed revenue. They also add to the national debt, which is not good for the economy.
DonOLD is doing his usual grift thing after being very unaware of a shooter in the bushes of his Florida Golf Club. Oh, the Humanity! This is from The Daily Beast. “Trump Asks for Cash Hours After Second. “I will NEVER SURRENDER!” the former president wrote in an email solicitation Sunday. Assassination Bid. “
Donald Trump wasted no time hitting up potential donors for money Sunday in the immediate aftermath of the second apparent assassination attempt against him in two months.
Within a few hours, the former president sent out an “Alert from Trump” email blast to potential donors saying: “There were gunshots in my vicinity, but before rumors start spiraling out of control, I wanted you to hear this first: I AM SAFE AND WELL! Nothing will slow me down.”
After the first attempt on his life at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13, Trump, in spite of blood streaming down his face after his ear was grazed by a bullet, managed to tell his supporters to “fight, fight, fight.”
On Sunday, after Secret Service agents foiled what authorities are calling a possible second assassination attempt, Trump wrote: “I will NEVER SURRENDER! I will always love you for supporting me.”
Never forget that the only thing this guy was successful at for a period of time was being a reality star on TV. This guy really has no shame. Meanwhile, Laura Loomer is back in the spotlight again. “GOP Senate nominee Bernie Moreno raised funds on Laura Loomer’s show and met with her in D.C.” This is reported by Media Matters.
In late July, Ohio U.S. Senate nominee Bernie Moreno fundraised on the show of Laura Loomer, a far-right extremist who has celebrated the deaths of migrants and mocked Vice President Kamala Harris’ Indian American heritage. Loomer also said on her show that she met with Moreno that month when he was in Washington, D.C.
Moreno’s appearance with Loomer is yet another example showing Republicans’ deep entrenchment with the far-right conspiracy theorist, despite recent efforts to distance the party from her.
Loomer’s history of offensive remarks is long and awful. It includes a toast to “2,000 more” dead migrants; an admission that she’s “not going to care” when there’s anti-immigrant violence; racist insults following the death of “ghetto b—-” Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX); and the claim that the White House “will smell like curry & White House speeches will be facilitated via a call center” if Vice President Kamala Harris wins.
Loomer has also described herself as “pro-white nationalism” and a “proud islamophobe.” Last year she posted a video claiming that “9/11 was an inside job.” Loomer has also promoted the viral, racist lie that Haitian immigrants in Ohio are eating pets.
Trump and his campaign are heavily connected to Loomer, with the far-right bigot flying on his plane to Pennsylvania and New York last week. Their close connections have caused consternation among a few Republicans.
I can only imagine what Senator Sherrod Brown is going through. Meanwhile, women are dying from the Trump Abortion Laws throughout the country. This is from ProPublica, which does the most crucial investigative journalism in the country. Trump Lies and people die. Say her NAME. Amber Nichole Thurman, She is a victim of MAGA.
In her final hours, Amber Nicole Thurman suffered from a grave infection that her suburban Atlanta hospital was well-equipped to treat.
She’d taken abortion pills and encountered a rare complication; she had not expelled all of the fetal tissue from her body. She showed up at Piedmont Henry Hospital in need of a routine procedure to clear it from her uterus, called a dilation and curettage, or D&C.
But just that summer, her state had made performing the procedure a felony, with few exceptions. Any doctor who violated the new Georgia law could be prosecuted and face up to a decade in prison.
Thurman waited in pain in a hospital bed, worried about what would happen to her 6-year-old son, as doctors monitored her infection spreading, her blood pressure sinking and her organs beginning to fail.
It took 20 hours for doctors to finally operate. By then, it was too late.
The otherwise healthy 28-year-old medical assistant, who had her sights set on nursing school, should not have died, an official state committee recently concluded.
Tasked with examining pregnancy-related deaths to improve maternal health, the experts, including 10 doctors, deemed hers “preventable” and said the hospital’s delay in performing the critical procedure had a “large” impact on her fatal outcome.
Their reviews of individual patient cases are not made public. But ProPublica obtained reports that confirm that at least two women have already died after they couldn’t access legal abortions and timely medical care in their state.
There are almost certainly others.
Committees like the one in Georgia, set up in each state, often operate with a two-year lag behind the cases they examine, meaning that experts are only now beginning to delve into deaths that took place after the Supreme Court overturned the federal right to abortion.
Thurman’s case marks the first time an abortion-related death, officially deemed “preventable,” is coming to public light. ProPublica will share the story of the second in the coming days. We are also exploring other deaths that have not yet been reviewed but appear to be connected to abortion bans.
Doctors warned state legislators women would die if medical procedures sometimes needed to save lives became illegal.
I haven’t heard stories like this since I was in High School awaiting the Roe Decision. Leaders in my Presbyterian Church in Omaha held a panel of speakers with horrible stories like these. We learned firsthand what Roe would mean to us if the Supreme Court decided to keep it out of the realm of others’ politics and religion. This is not acceptable in a country like ours. The fight is on, and this isn’t a game. We’re better than this.
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