Mostly Monday Reads: Party Time!

Posted: August 19, 2024 | Author: dakinikat | Filed under: 2024 DNC | Tags: @repeat1968, and unemployment benefits, DNC, Harris/Walz policy priorities 2024, John Buss, One Last Time, President Biden, RNC, tips, Trump Travails and Tribulations, Trump undoing Reagan Taxes on Social Security | 3 Comments

“Come on, Mr. President. Just do it!” John Buss, @repeat1968

Good Day, Sky Dancers!

The DNC begins today in Chicago. It’s a busy schedule of what’s ahead for the future, but tonight’s focus will be on President Joe Biden’s long record of public service. Here’s the line-up of events and speakers.

This is from Axios. “DNC lineup: Who’s speaking and what to expect.”

The Democratic National Convention will open in Chicago on Monday, with President Biden speaking in prime time as he passes the torch to Vice President Kamala Harris.

Driving the news: Convention organizers released night-by-night themes and speaker details on Sunday morning. One speaker who’s not on the official agenda but Axios has confirmed will take the stage on Tuesday: former First Lady Michelle Obama.

Monday, “For the People”: Biden and Dr. Jill Biden speak, along with former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and a welcome from Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson.

Tuesday, “A Bold Vision for America’s Future”: Former President Obama plus second gentleman Doug Emhoff, with a welcome from Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker.

Wednesday, “A Fight for Our Freedoms”: Vice presidential nominee Tim Walz delivers his acceptance speech, preceded by former President Clinton, Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg (per CNN).

Thursday, “For Our Future”: Harris accepts the convention’s nomination for president.

Other speakers include Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries.

Former President Carter’s grandson, Jason Carter, is expected to speak on behalf of his grandfather, who has said he hopes to stay alive long enough to vote for Harris.

Sneak peek: The stairs at the delegate entrance will say “History Is In Your Hands” — a quote from Biden’s Oval Office address on July 24.

As delegates arrive on Monday ahead of Biden’s speech, digital signage in the United Center will say: “History is in your hands” and “Spread the faith.”

Robert Reich sums up what I feel about Biden’s four years. I was beginning my career as an economist when Ronald Reagan took over. I was working in a highly regulated banking industry about to be turned loose. Eventually, my first home had a fixed rate of 16.7%, which my employment turned into 12%. That’s just one of the nightmare stories I have to tell students.

I attended schools that produced ‘freshwater’ economists, which is a term that basically describes us as not coming from either coast, likely public university educated, and by no means radical. During that time, I lived through two recessions that took out my nascent savings and investment portfolio. I realized that the radical policy was not coming from the Democratic Party.

By the time I found out about the Iran-Contra affair, I was ready to vote for Bill Clinton. I didn’t lose much in the “Great Recession” because I knew another Republican meant another economic roller-coaster ride. The last Reagan recession took out most of my parents’ retirement savings, but they didn’t want to discuss why. If you know how to use derivatives, and that’s where hedge fund managers come in, you can make money in any economy. Unfortunately, it hasn’t been very accessible to regular folks until recently.

My oldest Kansas City Cousin and her husband graduated from Ivy League Schools, Princeton and Vassar. One time, when I was in high school, they drove to buy a car from Dad’s Ford Dealership in Iowa. My dad gave them the usual family price. I was their flower girl at their wedding and spent much of my young life with my Kansas City family. I adored them.

Her lawyer husband told me that the only way to grow an economy was to give massive tax cuts to the wealthy to start businesses, which would create jobs. I can’t remember exactly what started that conversation. Although, I must have said something outside of the orthodox Republican Policy Bible at the time. It sounded logical but seemed too good to be true when I started thinking about it. I’ve never gotten the chance to tell him that it doesn’t work, will never work, and actually works worse than anyone ever thought now that I’ve got my doctorate in Financial Economics, worked at the Fed, and taught and researched economics and finance since 1980. I now have the chops and the proof of why all that does is create chaos in the overall economy and siphon public funds to people who don’t need any more wealth.

I’m not sure why people fondly remember the Reagan years, but they were not economic good times. Also, I found out the Republicans will run up huge deficits as long as the rich or defense contractors get the results of whatever happened to create them. Trickle-down economics is even more of a failure with all the incentives now of not taxing capital gains and giving tax breaks for basically stock market gambling. The rich do not put their gains into actual industry anymore. They keep rolling it into the stock market, and then they’re great consumers of things like gigantic German Yachts and all kinds of goodies that mess up our trade balance. I voted for Bill Clinton because his policy came from economists and worked. Reagan was the one who put taxes on tips, unemployment, and Social Security. He had to make huge tax increases to compensate for the huge deficit with the 1981 tax cuts. So, from 1982 to 1993, there were huge tax cuts, including some from “Read My Lips” by HW Bush. Weirdly, undoing the taxes on tips and Social Security that Trump is high on is basically removing Reagan’s economic legacy.

But enough of that rant … on to the Reich commentary.

Tonight’s opening of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago will be an opportunity for the Democratic Party and the nation to take stock of Joe Biden’s term of office and thank him for his service.

He still has five months to go as president, of course, but the baton has been passed.

Biden’s singular achievement has been to change the economic paradigm that reigned since Reagan and return to one that dominated public life between 1933 and 1980 — and is far superior to the one that has prevailed since.

Biden’s democratic capitalism is neither socialism nor “big government.” It is, rather, a return to an era when government organized the market for the greater good.

The Great Crash of 1929 followed by the Great Depression taught the nation a crucial lesson that we forgot after Reagan’s presidency: markets are human creations. The economy that collapsed in 1929 was the consequence of allowing nearly unlimited borrowing, encouraging people to gamble on Wall Street, and permitting the Street to take huge risks with other people’s money.

Franklin D. Roosevelt and his administration reversed this. They stopped the looting of America. They also gave Americans a modicum of economic security. During World War II, they put almost every American to work.

Subsequent Democratic and Republican administrations enlarged and extended democratic capitalism. Wall Street was regulated, as were television networks, airlines, railroads, and other common carriers. CEO pay was modest. Taxes on the highest earners financed public investments in infrastructure (such as the national highway system) and higher education.

America’s postwar industrial policy spurred innovation. The Department of Defense and its Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration developed satellite communications, container ships, and the internet. The National Institutes of Health did trailblazing basic research in biochemistry, DNA, and infectious diseases.

Public spending rose during economic downturns to encourage hiring. Antitrust enforcers broke up AT&T and other monopolies. Small businesses were protected from giant chain stores. Labor unions thrived. By the 1960s, a third of all private-sector workers were unionized. Large corporations sought to be responsive to all their stakeholders.

But then America took a giant U-turn. The OPEC oil embargo of the 1970s brought double-digit inflation followed by Fed Chair Paul Volcker’s effort to “break the back” of it by raising interest rates so high that the economy fell into deep recession.

All of which prepared the ground for Reagan’s war on democratic capitalism. From 1981 onward, a new bipartisan orthodoxy emerged that markets functioned well only if the government got out of the way.

The goal of economic policy thereby shifted from the common good to economic growth, even though Americans already well-off gained most from that growth. And the means shifted from public oversight of the market to deregulation, free trade, privatization, “trickle-down” tax cuts, and deficit reduction — all of which helped the monied interests make even more money.

If you notice the last two Republican administrations with the emphasis on the last one, there were very few real economists who advised the President. Trump only had one with the creds but was considered insane by his peers because he fitted his papers to a political take rather than data analysis and the usual scientific method.

No matter what party you’re in, and I know Bernanke, Mankiw, Greenspan, and Krugman feel this way, the facts are the facts. Concentrating fiscal policy on Main Street and the middle and working classes is the best use of tax dollars to keep the engine of economic growth steadily growing. Biden’s stewardship of the economy has proved this. He also provided input on the Obama administration’s cleanup of the huge mess called “The Great Recession,” which was completely on the back of bad policy and lack of oversight regarding the financial economy. I am a Financial Economist. We know enough to know that these things should not happen if it wasn’t the habit of Pols to go after Dark Money and then vote to install bad policy into law. It’s also disheartening to see it on the Supreme Court, where Dark Money has completely corrupted at least two Judges.

And the crazy thing is we’re back to being called Communists again which, like capitalism, is a Marxist theoretical abstract that cannot work, has never worked, and has never actually been implemented anywhere. We live in mixed market economies, and their characteristics determine what kind of oversight they require. You cannot compare a market where there are only two providers, like airplane manufacturing and Boeing and Airbus, with the market for apples. There have never been any economies where the government owns all the production factors. The Soviet Style system was called a command economy. Even the Chinese have given up on the planned command economy and the Cubans have many markets based on private ownership. It’s not just the major ones. I can’t believe we’re back to red-baiting.

The most interesting trivia I have for you today is that Donald J. Harris, Kamala’s father, is a bona fide Emeritus Economics Professor at Stanford. His research is primarily in developing economies. He published a book in 1978, “Capital Accumulation and Income Distribution,” which relies heavily on the new statistical methods that were developing at the time and takes the field from political philosophy to using scientific methods and data to see what works! That’s my kind of pragmatism. You wonder what kind of talk the Harris family had at the dinner table.

So, while this shindig in Chicago gets going, watch the week for Trump’s further insane adventures for attention. Unfortunately, he usually succeeds at getting press attention even when it’s not newsworthy or basically a rant of a senile old man stuck in the 1980s. People need to know how bad it was 4 years ago with COVID-19 unassailed by policy and treated with denial. We are the strongest economy in the world with the strongest growth. Economists were prepared to see China become the number one economy shortly, but it’s not because of this administration’s policy. Inflation is back within normal parameters. That’s not to say there are not people who still aren’t seeing the benefits. But Kamala’s policy announcement last Friday was full of suggestions to get everyone back on track. The answer to folks left behind is not in the Project 2025 Playbook. (See BB’s post on Saturday for coverage of the Harris/Walz economic priorities in her Caturday Post.)

David R Lurie, who is writing for Public Notice, writes, “Trump’s carny act isn’t working anymore. His Folgers Coffee™ Conference showed a candidate in decline. I’m sure the DNC productions will have much better production chops, pithy content, and actual policy presentation.

Last Thursday, Donald Trump held a “press conference” outside a building in his Bedminster country club in New Jersey, done up with many American flags so as to vaguely resemble the White House.

Trump rambled on astride a tableau of groceries, ranging from brightly toned condiments and a Wheaties™ box (bearing the image of Billie Jean King) to tubs of Folgers Coffee™ (caff and decaf) and packages of sausage and bacon that lay roasting in the midsummer heat.

Trump’s team also assembled a chorus, apparently composed of club visitors, that cheered and jeered during the “news conference” when needed.

Simply put, it was quite a weird scene.

The event was all the more bizarre because Trump hardly referred to (or even acknowledged) the cornucopia of processed food arrayed around him during his typically lengthy and meandering rant before the assembled press corps.

Presumably, the food had been intended to serve as a prop for a “policy” discussion of inflation. Trump, however, spent most of his time in front of the cameras deriding Kamala Harris’s intelligence and appearance, and insisting that he’s “entitled” to “personally attack” her, because, as Trump explained, she unfairly labeled him “weird.”

To borrow an old ad meme, where’s the beef? Well, it was sitting on the table at that presser, rotting in the sun. That’s quite a metaphor for what’s happening with the DonOld/JD show. JD’s rallies look like the Time Out Room for bad behavior. And no one can take 90 minutes of Trump’s senile ramblings on sharks, batteries, and how much better he looks than Harris.

The topic that I’m looking forward to hearing about at the DNC is the presentation on how Trump proposes an existential threat to democracy. Will we see a lot of Project 2025? How do they make it not look like a school assembly event? This is from CNN. “Democrats to highlight threat to democracy they say Trump poses, giving speaking roles to January 6 committee lawmakers.”

Democrats gathered in Chicago this week for their national convention will highlight the threat to democracy that they say former President Donald Trump poses, giving prominent speaking roles to lawmakers, as well as to a Capitol Police officer injured during the January 6, 2021, riots.

An official with Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign told CNN that among those speakers are Reps. Jamie Raskin of Maryland and Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, who both served on the House select committee to investigate the January 6 insurrection. That committee ultimately recommended in its 2022 report that Trump be barred from holding office again.

Retired St. Aquilino Gonell, one of the Capitol Police officers injured during the January 6 attack, will also address the convention. Since responding to the attack on the US Capitol over three years ago, Gonell has become a public face of the insurrection’s toll and a vocal critic of Trump and the Republicans who continue to defend him.

“Donald Trump’s failure to denounce the violence on January 6, 2021 is a betrayal to every officer who put their life on the line that day — and to every veteran who risked everything to defend our country,” Gonell, who is supporting Harris, said in a statement provided to CNN. “You cannot say you back the police or the Constitution if you’re offering pardons to criminals who tried to destroy our democracy, hurt our leaders and attack law enforcement.”

Former Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, who also served on the January 6 committee, is scheduled to address the convention Thursday, CNN previously reported. Kinzinger, who is now a CNN political commentator, was one of 10 House Republicans to vote for Trump’s impeachment for “incitement of an insurrection” in relation to his role during the attack on the Capitol.

The so-called Tennessee Three — state Reps. Justin Jones, Justin Pearson and Gloria Johnson — are also expected to speak at the convention. Jones and Pearson were expelled from the Tennessee House last year after the three lawmakers led a gun control protest on the chamber floor. They have since won reelection.

Also scheduled to speak during the week, according to the campaign official, are Rep. Jasmine Crockett of Texas, who served in the state Legislature in 2021 when Democrats sought to block restrictive voting legislation in the state, and Georgia Sen. Raphael Warnock, who serves as pastor of Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. served.

Before dropping out of the 2024 race, President Joe Biden made the argument that Trump posed a threat to democracy a driving feature of his candidacy.

“Anita Dunn says Joe Biden’s speech is about looking forward, not back. “This is not a time for legacy,” the longtime Biden aide said on CNN.” This analysis can be found at Politico. It’s written by Irrie Sentner.

Anita Dunn is looking to the future — and says President Joe Biden is, too.

The former senior Biden adviser, who left the White House last month to work with the Future Forward super PAC supporting Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign, said on CNN today that Biden in his speech will make a “resounding argument for why Kamala Harris should be elected president in 2024.” She joked that he is now Harris’ “volunteer in chief.”

Tonight’s speech will cap off a half-century political career for the president. But, Dunn said, it won’t be about looking back.

“This is not a time for legacy,” Dunn said. “This is a time for arguing why Kamala Harris is the best candidate.”

Biden will be speaking to a party that pushed him to drop his reelection bid — and endorsing a candidate the party has since rallied around. Those intraparty tensions are still playing out at the DNC.

Well, it’s bound to be much better than whatever the Republicans put on. I remember turning off Pat Buchanan’s racist rant in his Culture Wars speech at the 1992 Republican National Convention and was glad I didn’t attend in person. The state convention was weird enough and overrun with what we now call White Christian Nationalists. Because even though I was running as a Republican at the time, it was another one of those things that made me vote for Clinton. I could tell then that there was no saving the Republican Party. I was an Independent for a long time.

So, I’m certain there will be a lot going on that won’t include all that anger and bigotry of the other! Stay tuned! You may exit the Rabbit Hole now!

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?

One of my other cousins performed at the White House as Martha Jefferson in 1776 when Nixon was President in 1970 as part of the Broadway Cast. She fell asleep on a settee to the chagrin of some tourists who probably thought they’d seen a ghost. Her mother was a descendant of Hamilton. Ever so often, a glimpse at the founding fathers singing is fun. So, it seems appropriate that we watch Obama and Biden watching “One Last Time.” I’m waiting to see if this show song is played at the DNC for the President.

Lazy Caturday Reads: Campaign News and Cats Stealing Food

Posted: August 17, 2024 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: 2024 presidential Campaign, cat art, caturday, Donald Trump, Kamala Harris 2024 | Tags: Chicago, debates, Democratic National Convention 1968, Democratic National Convention 2024, Economic policy, medal of honor, political snark, polls, Veterans of Foreign Wars | 6 Comments

Alexandre-Francois Desportes, Still Life with Cat, 1705

Happy Caturday!!

Some folks in the media are trying to convince us that the excitement generated by the Harris-Walz campaign is fizzling out. I don’t think so. Harris gave a speech on her economic policies yesterday, tomorrow they will take a bus tour of Pennsylvania beginning in Pittsburgh, and on Monday the Democratic National Convention will begin in Chicago. So there is lots happening. Harris is also moving up in the polls. Here’s the latest on the campaign.

Mediaite: Polls Find Kamala Harris Taking Lead From Trump in States He Was Running Away with Just Weeks Ago.

New surveys from The New York Times/Siena College show Vice President Kamala Harris has put four Sun Belt states in contention, taking the lead in two.

Harris has edged ahead of Donald Trump in Arizona and North Carolina and tightened the margin in Nevada and Georgia compared to when President Joe Biden was still running for reelection. The polls, conducted August 8-15, show Harris and Trump averaging a tie of 48% across the four states.

According to Times/Siena data taken when Biden was still running, Trump was leading the president 50% to 41% in Arizona, Georgia, and Nevada. North Carolina was not included in those surveys, but Trump won the state in both 2016 and 2020. Harris has closed some of these gaps with the vice president pulling 50% to Trump’s 45% in Arizona and 49% compared to Trump’s 47% in North Carolina.

In Georgia, Trump still holds the lead with 50% compared to Harris’s 46% and in Nevada he leads by one point, pulling 48% compared to Harris’s 47%. The margin of error for the Times poll is 4.4% for Arizona, Georgia, and Nevada and 4.2% for North Carolina results….

Harris has also grown in favorability, according to the new data with 48% saying they have a very or somewhat favorable opinion of the vice president. In a February survey, Harris’s unfavorable score was ahead by 19% while now she’s running even. Trump has remained unchanged in this department, pulling a 48% favorable rating compared to 50% unfavorable.

Voters who were polled were also asked who could “unify” the country as president and 46% backed Harris compared to 42% who backed Trump.

Sahil Kapur of NBC News on Harris’s economic speech in Raleigh, North Carolina yesterday afternoon: Harris pitches plans to tackle food, housing, medicine and child care costs in N.C. speech.

At a campaign speech Friday in North Carolina, Vice President Kamala Harris promised to “make it a top priority to bring down costs” if elected president and touted her new plans to tackle food and housing costs, slash prescription drug prices and expand the child tax credit.

Harris said the Biden administration has made progress, given the Covid economy it inherited from former President Donald Trump, but that it isn’t enough as “many Americans don’t yet feel that progress in their daily lives.”

Still Life with Cat and a Mackerel, by Giovanni Rivalta, 1760

“Costs are still too high. And on a deeper level, for too many people, no matter how much they work, it feels so hard to just be able to get ahead,” she told the crowd. “As president, I will take on the high costs that matter most to most Americans, like the cost of food. We all know that prices went up during the pandemic, when the supply chains shut down and failed, but our supply chains have now improved and prices are still too high.”

The Harris campaign outlined her proposals prior to the speech. She said she’d work with Congress to impose a “federal ban on price gouging on food and groceries,” setting rules “to make clear that big corporations can’t unfairly exploit consumers” to boost their profits. She would also seek new powers for the Federal Trade Commission and state prosecutors to slap “strict new penalties on companies that break the rules,” her campaign said….

Harris noted in her Raleigh remarks: “Look, I know most businesses are creating jobs, contributing to our economy and playing by the rules, but some are not, and that’s just not right, and we need to take action when that is the case.”

She touted her plans to create a tax break for homebuilders who construct starter homes for first-time buyers and said she will provide a $25,000 subsidy for first-time homeowners buying a house. She vowed to cut “needless bureaucracy and unnecessary regulatory red tape” as part of that and said she’ll promote “innovative technologies while protecting consumers.” She vowed to set “a stable business environment with consistent and transparent rules of the road.”

The vice president pitched her plan to expand the child tax credit and offer “$6,000 in tax relief to families during the first year of a child’s life.” She said she’ll seek to extend Medicare’s $35-per-month insulin out-of-pocket cap to everyone and expand the administration’s Medicare drug price negotiation program.

Finally Friday Reads: The Decline and Fall of the DonOld Empire

Posted: August 16, 2024 | Author: dakinikat | Filed under: Kamala Harris 2024 | Tags: 2024 presidential Campaign, @repeat1968, Dotard DonOld, Harris/Walz policy priorities 2024, John Buss, WTF is Trump Talking about? | 3 Comments

“For those wondering, since the press isn’t reporting what happened after the fly left Donold’s face.” John Buss @repeat1968

Good Afternoon Sky Dancers!

Sorry for being a bit late. I had to be retrained on the same things again this year and then ensure the paperwork got into the right places. I’ve been at this for two days. I must get caught up with the world outside compliance with Higher Ed. Regulations.

Whenever the Former Guy emerges from his hidey hole in Mara Lardo, his lies, bizarro stories, and slurring worsen his travails. I still refuse to watch this stuff on the Boob Tube, but I’m sure up to reading about it. There’s just something about his demeanor and voice that I cannot take. So far, he’s attacking veterans, decided that illegal immigrants have taken more than 100% of the jobs that have been created, and then there is this. “Trump Warns That if Kamala Harris Wins, ‘Everybody Gets Health Care. Donald Trump repeatedly lies about single-payer health care — an idea he and Harris both previously supported but no longer do’” That headline is in Rolling Stone. CNN also has an explanation but without the ironic headline. “Kamala Harris’ complicated history with Medicare for All becomes a Trump campaign attack line.” Harris actually dropped her support for Medicare for All when Biden pulled ahead because of his stance for just improving ObamaCare instead.

But Harris has not addressed the question herself, touting the Biden administration’s record while trying avoid any relitigation of the years-old fight, and putting out word now only through campaign aides. Now, Trump is reviving the debate as he seeks to paint Harris as both a radical liberal and a flip flopper.

“Kamala Harris’ spokespeople are once again alleging she has flip flopped on her positions – this time saying she no longer supports socialist Medicare for All,” Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said on Wednesday, calling on Harris “to explain why she is running from every liberal policy she has ever supported.”

The Trump camp’s focus on Medicare for All is emerging as the centerpiece of a wider strategy to use Harris’ 2020 primary positions against her now, less than 90 days before the general election. Harris dropped out of the Democratic primary before the first votes werecast, but her campaign that year frequently jousted with Sanders and reporters trying to pin down her position on the plan, which would eliminate private insurance plans and replace them with a government-funded and operated single-payer system.

That debate quieted when Biden consolidated the party on his way to winning the nomination and, eventually, the presidency with Harris as his running mate. Trump – who repeatedly attempted to repeal ACA, also known as Obamacare, without success and to significant electoral backlash – has never spelled out a clear plan of his own.

“She wants to outlaw private health insurance,” Trump said in late July at the conservative Turning Point Action’s Believers’ Summit in West Palm Beach. “A lot of people have private health insurance. They want to keep it that way. It’s phenomenal.”

Harris responded the next day at a fundraiser in Massachusetts, raising Trump’s 2017 campaign to end Obamacare.

“He intends to end the Affordable Care Act and take us back to a time when insurance companies had the power to deny people with preexisting conditions,” Harris said. “You guys remember what that was? It was real. Children with asthma. Breast cancer survivors. Grandparents with diabetes.”

The Harris campaign, in response to CNN, pointed to the record high number of Americans now enrolled in Obamacare and other initiatives, including moves to lower prescription drug prices.

“Vice President Harris believes real leadership means bringing all sides together to build consensus. It is that approach that made it possible for the Biden-Harris administration to achieve bipartisan breakthroughs on everything from infrastructure to gun violence prevention,” campaign spokesperson Sarafina Chitika said. “As President, she will take that same pragmatic approach, focusing on common-sense solutions for the sake of progress.”

The Affordable Healthcare Act still continues to be popular. It may need some upgrading, but there’s no reason to invent an entirely new public option. You would think he’d move on after John McCain sunk the last attempt to get rid of it. But since he still hasn’t found a way to do his usual dirty tricks on Vice President Harris, I suppose he is just throwing anything at the wall, including ketchup. But the Harris/Walz tickets aren’t the only ones that are getting his bile and vile treatment. He’s after Vets again, which brings McCain back to mind.

This is from Politico. Cadet Bonespurs strikes again. “Trump veteran comments spark controversy — again. The former president has a history of making controversial comments about veterans, receiving backlash during both his 2016 and 2020 campaigns.” Here’s the quote first.

“But [the] civilian version, it’s actually much better because everyone [who] gets the Congressional Medal of Honor, they’re soldiers. They’re either in very bad shape because they’ve been hit so many times by bullets or they’re dead,” former President Donald Trump said Thursday.

Irie Sentner writes this analysis.

Former President Donald Trump is facing backlash over his comments about veterans. Again.

Trump said Thursday that the country’s top civilian honor was “much better” than its top military honor, because the service members who receive the latter are “in very bad shape” or “dead” — the latest in a yearslong pattern of inflammatory comments the former president has made about veterans as barbs over military service are being traded by both campaigns during a heated election.

Speaking at an event on antisemitism at his Bedminster, New Jersey, estate, Trump was discussing Miriam Adelson and her late husband Sheldon Adelson, the billionaire pro-Israel GOP megadonors who set a donation record in 2020 by spending over $170 million. Trump bestowed the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Miriam Adelson in 2018 for her history of contributions to U.S. national interests and “world peace.”

“That’s the highest award you can get as a civilian. It’s the equivalent of the Congressional Medal of Honor,” Trump said Thursday. “But [the] civilian version, it’s actually much better because everyone [who] gets the Congressional Medal of Honor, they’re soldiers. They’re either in very bad shape because they’ve been hit so many times by bullets or they’re dead.”

Trump has a history of making controversial comments about veterans, receiving backlash for them during both his 2016 and 2020 campaigns. But now, both parties’ vice presidential candidates are veterans — and as the GOP attacks the service record of the Democratic vice presidential hopeful, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Trump’s comments Thursday gave Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign ammunition for a counterattack.

“Donald Trump knows nothing about service to anyone or anything but himself,” Harris campaign senior spokesperson Sarafina Chitika said Friday in a statement. “For him to insult Medal of Honor recipients, just as he has previously attacked Gold Star families, mocked prisoners of war, and referred to those who lost their lives in service to our country as ‘suckers’ and ‘losers,’ should remind all Americans that we owe it to our service members, our country, and our future to make sure Donald Trump is never our nation’s commander in chief again.”

“Blinded by light”, John Buss, @repeat1968

As I said, I totally missed this “press conference,” so I’m relying on sources like the AP. “FACT FOCUS: Trump blends falsehoods and exaggerations at rambling NJ press conference.”

Inflation did not take the toll Trump claimed. Growth surged under Biden

TRUMP: “As a result of Kamala’s inflation, price hikes have cost the typical household a total of $28,000. … When I left office, I left Kamala and crooked Joe Biden a surging economy and no inflation. The mortgage rate was around 2%. Gasoline had reached $1.87 a gallon. … Harris and Biden blew it all up.”

THE FACTS: Trump made numerous economic claims that were either exaggerated or misleading. Prices did surge during the Biden-Harris administration, though $28,000 is far higher than independent estimates. Moody’s Analytics calculated last year that price increases over the previous two years were costing the typical U.S. household $709 a month. That would equal $8,500 a year.

Here’s the more facts on that from CBS News.

Inflation continued to retreat in July, aided by easing price pressures for consumer staples like food and energy and physical goods like new and used cars.

The consumer price index, a key inflation gauge, rose 2.9% in July from a year ago, the U.S. Department of Labor reported Wednesday. That figure is down from 3% in June and the lowest reading since March 2021.

The CPI gauges how fast prices are changing across the U.S. economy. It measures everything from fruits and vegetables to haircuts, concert tickets and household appliances.

Bruce Plante Cartoon: Trump and the Cashier

Trump set up a little grocery store at this “presser” where he told whopper after whopper. I love this headline from Vanity Fair. “Does Anyone Know What Donald Trump Is Talking About Anymore? Hannibal Lecter? Cheerios? “Bird cemeteries?” The former president is tying himself in a knot of discursive tangents and in-jokes that only makes sense to an increasingly small sect of the American public.”

Donald Trump has never been what you’d call eloquent. An orator, he is not. And yet, the former president seems to be getting even more incoherent by the day, as his latest “press conference” underscored Thursday.

Speaking to reporters at his Bedminster country club in New Jersey, Trump stood before a display of groceries—coffee, cereal, milk—for what was billed as a presser on the economy, one of those “issues” his allies and advisers wish he’d spend more time talking about. What everyone got instead was a series of rants on subjects ranging from his anger at Kamala Harris calling him and JD Vance “weird” to the “bird cemeteries” under windmills to his math-defying contention that “beyond…100 percent” of job creation under Joe Biden in the past year has “gone to migrants.”

“It’s a much higher number than that,” Trump said, “but the government has not caught up with that yet.”

“I haven’t seen Cheerios in a long time,” he remarked at another point, saying he wanted to “take some of them back to [his] cottage and have a lot of fun.”

What, exactly, does that mean, you might ask? Well, what does any of this mean? Trump isn’t just inarticulate, trying in vain to express his thoughts and emotions with a vocabulary that seems limited to “beautiful,” “perfect,” and maybe thirty other words. He’s now riffing on riffs, becoming so self-referential and so discursive that you need to leave a trail of breadcrumbs to find your way back to the original thought. Take Trump’s latest addition to his repertoire about Hannibal Lecter, the fictional cannibal of page and screen portrayed by Anthony Hopkins: “He’d love to have you for dinner,” the former president said during a rant on immigration during his Republican National Convention speech last month. “That’s insane asylums. They’re emptying out their insane asylums.”

The media is absolutely laughing at him. “Trump’s Magical History Tour. Under siege and self-sabotaging at his New Jersey golf club, Donald Trump is reaching for old familiar faces and enablers to imbue his flailing 2024 campaign with some 2016 magic: Corey Lewandowski, Tim Murtaugh, maybe Kellyanne. Who’s next, Roger Stone? Oh wait…” This is from Puck and Tara Palmer.

I woke up Thursday morning to a storm of text messages saying that it was really happening, and then, within an hour, Trump’s team had leaked the news to Politico. The two had been talking for a while, and Lewandowski traveled with the team on the night of the debate. But from what I hear, Trump was alone in making the call to hire Lewandowski, who has been consulting for the R.N.C. since April. “People in Trumpworld try to stop things and they can’t,” said a former aide. “Sometimes when the ship has left the port, it’s left the port.”

Sheepishly, perhaps, the news of Lewandowski’s reinstatement was bundled with a handful of other, lesser-known new hires: Taylor Budowich, Alex Pfeiffer, Alex Bruesewitz, and Tim Murtaugh—all “veterans of prior Trump campaigns” with “unmatched experience,” per a campaign statement. Spokesperson Steven Cheung told me Lewandowski’s title will be “senior advisor,” and that Wiles and LaCivita will remain as co-campaign managers. (Trump himself referred to Lewandowski during a press conference on Thursday afternoon as a “personal envoy or something.”)

All around Bedminster, where Trump has relocated to escape the South Florida heat, there is a pervasive anxiety that the candidate is trying to recreate the chaos that surrounded his winning 2016 campaign. No one thinks Lewandowski and LaCivita can cohabitate for long, leading some people close to Trump to speculate that he’s trying to push LaCivita out, just as he installed Anthony Scaramucci to fire Steve Bannon and Reince Priebus. “Susie is a survivor; she’s not going anywhere. But then you have LaCivita and Corey Lewandowski, two alpha men,” said a source close to Lewandowski. “It’s like Trump just wants them to kill each other and for one to win so he doesn’t have to actually fire anyone.”

One obvious vulnerability facing LaCivita is his astronomical fee. As Trump stews over his fading poll numbers and whether a once easily winnable election is slipping away, there has been growing chatter in some corners of Mar-a-Lago about the $50,000 that LaCivita’s firm, Advanced Strategies, collects from the campaign and R.N.C. each month, which is included in the nearly $1.7 million he’s invoiced the campaign so far this year for various services like placed media, political strategy consulting, and video production, up from the $1.65 million he billed last year. (Sure, it’s not Jeff Roe money, but it has some tongues wagging.) “I have never told anyone I will be conducting a forensic audit of the campaign, nor have I alluded to, or have any understanding of, how much money Chris LaCivita may or may not have billed this campaign,” Lewandowski told me.

I’m still enjoying the interviews with people who once worked for him. Have you noticed he’s suddenly coming apart whenever someone mentions he’s coming up on his sentencing deadline in New York? “Scaramucci: Trump Is ‘Coming to Grips’ With Losing the Election, Trump’s former White House communications director says it’s going to be “rough” until Election Day.” This is from The Daily Beast. This article is by Dan Ladden-Hall.

Anthony Scaramucci, Donald Trump’s one-time White House communications director, thinks his former boss is “coming to grips” with the possibility that he’ll lose the election and is consequently “growing darker.”

“Will be a rough 81 days,” Scaramucci added in an X post Thursday, referring to the time left until Election Day in November. His comment came as Trump spoke at an hour-long press conference at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, in which the Republican nominee explicitly rejected pleas from others in his party to stop personally attacking Vice President Kamala Harris.

“I’m very angry at her that she weaponized the justice system against me and other people,” Trump said at the press conference. “Very angry at her. I think I’m entitled to personal attacks. I don’t have a lot of respect for her, I don’t have a lot of respect for her intelligence, and I think she’ll be a terrible president.”

Trump has become increasingly irate in private as Harris has surpassed him in various polls, according to an Axios report over the weekend. The former president has also reportedly referred to Harris as a “b—h” behind closed doors while growing frustrated by sustained news coverage of her.

Scaramucci was briefly Trump’s White House comms chief in 2017, losing the job after just 10 days over a foul-mouthed tirade against then-White House chief of staff Reince Priebus and strategist Steve Bannon. Scaramucci has since become an outspoken critic of his former boss, describing Trump in a Daily Beast op-ed in May as a “true narcissist” whose “ego-driven and childlike behavior” he’d witnessed up close.

No matter how befuddled or far into advanced dotage he’s become, it’s important to remember the people behind him. “Watch Undercover Video: Project 2025 Co-Author Lays Out “Radical Agenda” for Next Trump Term.” This is from Democracy Now. You may also read the Transcript at that link.

As Donald Trump tries to distance his campaign from Project 2025, those behind the right-wing policy blueprint to remake the U.S. government continue to brag in private about their close ties to the Republican presidential nominee and how they intend to push a radical right-wing agenda in a second Trump administration. In July, Project 2025 co-author Russell Vought met with two people he believed to be relatives of a wealthy conservative donor interested in funding the effort. In fact, he was meeting with two reporters with the U.K.-based Centre for Climate Reporting as part of an undercover sting captured on video. Over the course of two hours, Vought described Trump’s disavowal of Project 2025 as mere theater and laid out plans for mass deportations, restricting abortion, gutting independent government bureaucracies, using the military against racial justice protesters and more. The secret plans are “designed to ensure that this kind of radical agenda that the conservative movement has in the U.S. can be implemented from day one,” says Lawrence Carter, founder and director of the Centre for Climate Reporting and one of the reporters who spoke with Vought. “They want to make sure that the mistakes from the first Trump administration, as they see them, where not much got done, are avoided this time around.”

AMY GOODMAN: We begin today’s show with a new undercover video that shows the co-author of Project 2025 bragging about his ties to Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump — even as Trump is trying to distance himself from the right-wing blueprint for his potential second term.

The video features Russell Vought, who was director of the Trump White House Office of Management and Budget. It shows Vought meeting in a five-star Washington, D.C., hotel with two men he thought were relatives of a wealthy conservative donor. But Vought was actually talking to two undercover reporters with the Centre for Climate Reporting, an independent British news outlet. They were secretly recording him.

Here’s some happier reading. “Vice President Harris Lays Out Agenda to Lower Costs for American Families.” You may read actual policy goals and solutions there. It’s good to be back when you can see what’s on the table.

Today, Vice President Kamala Harris is announcing several proposals for her first 100 days in office to bring down costs for American families. The steps announced today will cut taxes for the middle class, reduce grocery costs, take on price gouging, lower the costs of owning and renting a home, continue to bring down the costs of prescription drugs, and relieve medical debt for millions of Americans. These bold actions will address some of the sharpest pain points American families are confronting and bolster their financial security.

These proposals are just one part of the Vice President’s economic plan, which also includes protecting and strengthening Social Security and Medicare; bringing together labor, small businesses, and major corporations to invest in America, create jobs, and deliver for Americans; lowering costs of education, child care, and long-term care; empowering workers and their right to come together to bargain for higher wages; creating a stable business environment with consistent and transparent rules; encouraging innovative technologies while protecting consumers; and so much more. Vice President Harris has made clear that building up the middle class will be a defining goal of her presidency. She will deliver for Americans who are demanding a new way forward towards a future that lifts up all Americans so that they can not just get by, but get ahead.

I’m sitting here in my little Kathouse, wondering how anyone could deny climate change as we are deep into the third intense heat wave of the summer and know that August has been the worst month for the last few years. It’s really important that we don’t go back. I was talking to one of my gay neighbors today, saying that he wasn’t going back, and watching the news felt good for a change. I said I’d already be back if I still had working ovaries and a uterus. I don’t want my girls and the granddaughters to stay where Trump and that dreadful group of throwbacks on SCOTUS put them. Our governor just signed a law that basically ensures that you will be arrested and your phone will be taken from you if you try to film police officers. We have to get the correct laws into place to ensure all the book banning, the religious interference with education, and the voter suppression stop. Join in where you can to stop this.

So, I had to skip calling this week, but I will be at it again next week. Do what you can to turn out the vote for Kamala.

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?

For some reason, I’m singing this song a lot these days. Have a peaceful and wonderful weekend!

Wednesday Reads: Presidential Campaign News

Posted: August 14, 2024 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: 2024 presidential Campaign, Donald Trump, Kamala Harris 2024 | Tags: Democratic National Convention, economic policies, Milwaukee, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Tim Walz | 11 Comments

Good Afternoon!!

Strawberry Moon, by Christi Belcourt

The presidential campaign is really heating up now. The Democratic National Convention is next week in Chicago, but Vice President Kamala Harris and Governor Tim Waltz aren’t sitting on their hands in the meantime. Harris will give a speech on her economic policies in North Carolina on Friday.

CBS News: Kamala Harris to release her first major economic plan as a presidential candidate.

Vice President Kamala Harris is set to deliver a speech Friday to roll out her economic portfolio in Raleigh, North Carolina, marking the first time Harris has released a major policy initiative since President Biden dropped out of the race last month.

Harris is expected to announce that she will make tackling inflation a “Day One” priority, as well as outline a plan to lower costs for middle class families, take on corporate-price gouging and an overall focus on lowering costs for Americans, according to details shared by Harris-Walz campaign officials.

According to the most recent CBS News poll, only 9% of registered voters rated the condition of the national economy as ‘very good’ with the economy and inflation ranking as the top issue of concern consistently across 2024 polls. Inflation has cooled since its peak in June 2022, but many voters are still feeling the financial strains. Prices are still 20% higher overall than prior to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Friday’s economic policy remarks come after Harris pledged to eliminate taxes on tips and raise the minimum wage during her rally in Las Vegas on Saturday, her only two economic policy proposals so far.

“When I am president, we will continue our fight for working families including to raise the minimum wage and eliminate taxes on tips for service and hospitality workers,” Harris said while speaking to rally attendees that included Nevada Culinary union members.

A Harris-Walz campaign official added that her pledge would require legislation.

More on the speech from Reuters: Harris to target price gouging in first policy speech in North Carolina.

U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris will make her first policy-centered speech as Democratic presidential candidate on Friday, taking aim at price gouging, in a sign her whirlwind campaign could rattle big companies and corporate executives.

Harris will travel to Raleigh, in North Carolina, a state Democrats hope to flip this election, to outline her plan “to lower costs for middle-class families and take on corporate price-gouging,” her campaign said on Tuesday.

Harris canceled an event in North Carolina last week because of Tropical Storm Debby. Focusing her first major policy speech on the economy, and locating it in North Carolina shows how her campaign has revived Democrats’ hopes of flipping a state they have only won twice in the last half-century.

With less than three months before the Nov. 5 electionwhen she takes on Republican Donald Trump, Harris has drawn new enthusiasm and dollars to the ticket after President Joe Biden stepped aside, and seen polls swing in her favor in some states.

Her campaign sees states like Pennsylvania as a must-win, but North Carolina is more of a reach. Biden lost the state to Trump by a 1.3% margin – just 74,000 votes, but his prospects there were dim before he stepped down on July 21.

Harris’ speech will be closely watched to see how her style or substance differs from Biden, whose economic policies received low marks from voters angry about the cost of housing, medicine, groceries and gasoline.

On Saturday, Harris announced her support for eliminating taxes on tips, a position similar to Trump’s. Harris will hold a White House event with Biden on Thursday that is expected to focus on healthcare costs.

The Park, by Gustav Klimt

Biden has blamed corporate greed for still-elevated prices, accusing companies of boosting profits by shrinking portion sizes and by failing to pass on falling costs to consumers.

Big consumer goods companies have hiked prices in recent quarters, and food prices have risen 25% between 2019 and 2023.

Harris policed “corporate greed and price gouging” when she was California’s attorney general from 2011 through 2016, challenging pharmaceutical, oil, electronics and cosmetics companies, a campaign official said.

Harris “knows costs are too high and will make tackling inflation a ‘Day One’ priority,” added the official who declined to be identified speaking about the event beforehand.

Over the weekend Harris and Walz will hold a bus tour in Pennsylvania.

90.5 Pittsburgh: Harris, Walz to launch campaign bus tour in Pittsburgh this weekend.

As Democrats prepare for their national convention next week in Chicago, presidential nominee Kamala Harris and running mate Tim Walz will kick off a bus tour Sunday in Pittsburgh.

The Harris campaign has released few details about the event or the tour itself, but it says it will make multiple stops in Pennsylvania throughout the day. Those will include visits to canvassing kick-offs and other retail events that will set the stage for Harris and Walz formally accepting their party’s nomination in Chicago later next week.

Harris announced that Walz was her pick in a boisterous Philadelphia rally just over a week ago. The candidates will be accompanied by their spouses on the bus tour, marking the first time the two couples have made a joint campaign appearance.

The news is further proof, if any were necessary, of Pennsylvania’s crucial role in the 2024 election….

Harris has been a frequent visit to the state since before she became the party’s nominee: Including official visits made in her capacity as vice president, the bus tour will mark her eighth visit to Pennsylvania this year. And Harris clearly hopes to continue building the momentum that has energized Democrats since she replaced President Joe Biden as the party’s nominee earlier this summer.

The DNC begins on Monday and on Tuesday, Harris and Walz will hold a rally in Milwaukee.

Radiant Pines, by Mary Bea

WTMJ Milwaukee: VP Kamala Harris, Gov. Tim Walz plan Tuesday rally in Milwaukee, report says.

MILWAUKEE — Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz are planning a rally in Milwaukee for next Tuesday during the Democratic National Convention, according to a report in the New York Times.

The Harris campaign is planning to speak at Fiserv Forum, though an agreement has not yet been formalized with the venue, the Times reports.

Tuesday will be Day 2 of the Democratic National Convention, which is taking place in Chicago from Monday, August 19 through Thursday, August 22.

Barack Obama is scheduled as the featured speaker in Chicago on Tuesday, the Times says, which means the Harris-Walz rally would likely take place before that.

The Times based its report on four anonymous sources who were “briefed on the discussions” regarding the Milwaukee stop.

Fiserv Forum, of course, is where former President Donald Trump accepted the GOP’s nomination for president just last month.

Uh oh. Trump will be watching in order to compare crowd sizes.

Some new on the DNC schedule from The Independent, via Yahoo News: DNC schedule: When Kamala Harris, Tim Walz and more will speak.

The Democratic National Convention (DNC) gets underway on Monday August 19 in Chicago, Illinois, with some political heavyweights slated to headline the four-day gathering.

While the DNC is first and foremost a presidential nominating convention, Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate Tim Walz are already officially on the Democratic party’s ticket after a five-day round of online voting from delegates wrapped on August 5.

The historic virtual roll call results saw Harris become the first Black woman and first Asian-American person to become the presidential nominee for a major political party, securing 99 per cent support from more than 4,500 delegates.

As many as 50,000 visitors are now expected to descend on the Steven Spielberg-coordinated convention at the Windy City’s United Center between Monday and Thursday next week, including 5,000 delegates from all 50 states and territories, plus 15,000 members of the media and tens of thousands of guests.

A broad schedule for the event has now been released.

Featured speakers will include Joe Biden, Barak Obama, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, and more. Read all the details at the link above.

One more article on Kamala Harris’s campaign by David R. Lurie at Public Notice: Kamala Harris’s joyful realism. It’s a refreshing change from American Carnage.

The prevailing “take” on the Kamala Harris campaign is that it is “joyous about the joy,” a description that is at once obviously correct and incomplete.

It is only really possible to appreciate being joyful after one has suffered and acknowledged pain and loss. While Vice President Harris’s campaign certainly exudes joy, it is a happiness that arises from a forthright recognition of grave losses the nation suffered during and as a result of Donald Trump’s presidency, together with an abiding optimism that we are on a path toward recovery.

Only a few weeks into the rebooted presidential race, the contrast between the Harris and Trump campaigns is stark. Trump’s campaign is increasingly portrayed as dark, even dystopian, in contrast to the sunniness of Harris and Walz.

Crows, by Amano Kinihiro, 1929

Yet the description of Trump as dour is as incomplete as the account of Harris as a ray of sunshine. It misses the abiding attraction many Americans have to Trump’s reactionary vision, a vision grounded on resolute denial of essential facts regarding traumatic events the nation has suffered largely as a result of actions by Trump and his allies.

The surprising outpouring of joy that permeates the nascent Harris campaign reflects a belated recognition of the progress America has made over the past several years in overcoming the grave losses and damage to the nation’s social fabric we suffered during Trump’s presidency. It also reflects a sober but nonetheless optimistic recognition that, with sufficient effort, we can avoid going backwards….

At the outset of this presidency, Trump portrayed a fictional America consumed by chaos, disorder and “carnage,” and in dire need of a savior — him.

What followed, however, was actual chaos and carnage. Trump’s chaotic and disordered governance culminated in his administration’s nihilistic mismanagement of an historic health crisis that resulted in several million wholly avoidable deaths, while Trump’s assiduous efforts to inflame political and cultural divisions culminated in a literal attack on democracy itself after he lost the 2020 election.

Trump would have had little chance of convincing even his most fanatical fans, let alone other Americans, to return him to the White House had he acknowledged the disastrous nature of his prior term as president. Accordingly, Trump and his GOP followers have devoted the better part of the last four years to creating an elaborate and nearly entirely fictional account of his four years in office.

Trump has demanded his followers forget that he turned a public health emergency that should have brought the nation together into a vehicle for politicizing medical science and increasing social divisions, resulting in more avoidable deaths among Trump’s own Republican followers than in other communities. In recent months, Trump’s campaign even begun inviting voters to remember how much “better” things were under his watch four years ago at the chillingly chaotic height of the pandemic.

According to Trump’s alternative history, the president who culpably mismanaged the pandemic was not him, but Biden, who purportedly used the excuse of a nonexistent health emergency to transform the nation into a virtual police state.

Read the rest at Public Notice. It’s good.

Old man Trump has been forced to get off the golf course and make a speech on the economy (supposedly) in North Carolina today. The story includes some Harris news. ABC News: Trump to deliver remarks on economy as he returns to campaign trail in North Carolina.

Former President Donald Trump is set to deliver remarks on the economy in North Carolina on Wednesday as the campaign works to reset his campaign against Vice President Kamala Harris.

“The election’s coming up, and the people want to hear about the economy,” Trump said during an interview with Elon Musk on X Monday, directly blaming the Biden-Harris administration for what polls show is Americans’ pessimism about the economy.

The economy has been one of the Trump campaign’s central election issues this cycle — the former president often spending a considerable amount of time discussing inflation, gas prices and the job market.

Forest Spectrum, by June Hess

“I just ask this: Are you better off now, or were you better off when I was president?” Trump said Monday night as he was wrapping up his conversation with Musk.

Last week, Trump blamed the Biden-Harris administration for the recent stock market sell-off and called it a “Kamala crash” — making unfounded claims that the downswing happened because people have “no confidence” in Harris, while experts pointed to concerns about the health of the U.S. economy and that the Federal Reserve’s long wait to cut interest rates as among key reasons for the downturn.

Though the stock market has since bounced back, Trump has seized on economic worries, claiming without evidence or elaboration that if Harris wins in November, there could be a “Great Depression” on par with that of 1929 — an unfunded attack he previously used against President Joe Biden.

On the campaign trail, Trump, even as he rails against the economy under the Biden administration, has announced sparse details on specific economic policy proposals for his possible second administration, often offering his signature “Trump tax cuts,” “Trump tariffs” and “drill, baby, drill” — a boost for the oil and gas industry — as solutions to most economic problems.

I highly doubt that Trump is capable of making a serious economic speech. Let’s see if he can avoid bringing up Hannibal Lector.

This is interesting from Newsweek: Trump Campaign Forced To Pay North Carolina City $82K in Advance for Rally.

Former President Donald Trump‘s campaign was forced to pay more than $82,000 in advance for this week’s rally in Asheville, North Carolina.

Trump is set to take the stage at Asheville’s Thomas Wolfe Auditorium on Wednesday after paying $82,247.60 to the city for a “last-minute” rally, according to Blue Ridge Public Radio (BPR). The campaign, struggling to effectively blunt the momentum of Vice President Kamala Harris, reportedly first contacted the city about the rally on August 8.

City of Asheville spokesperson Kim Miller told BPR that $22,500 of the amount paid is a two-day rental fee for the auditorium, while “the remainder of the funds go to cover additional costs such as house support, production staff, production equipment rental, and exterior items like queue stanchions and port-a-loos.”

While the campaign paid in advance due to Asheville’s policy for short-notice bookings, Trump has a long history of failing to pay cities for billed rally fees, leaving the White House in January 2021 with at least $850,000 in unpaid rally debt. Most of the bills are still unpaid, including more than $500,000 owed to the city of El Paso, Texas….

The Trump campaign booked the smaller of two venues at the same complex in downtown Asheville for Wednesday’s rally. The Thomas Wolfe Auditorium has a capacity of just 2,431 people, while a larger arena next door that is not hosting Trump has a capacity of 7,200.

Of course Trump will claim there was a massive crowd, but it sounds like they didn’t think he could attract 7,000 people.

Bird Floral, by Jo Scott

AP: Donald Trump is going to North Carolina for an economic speech. Can he stick to a clear message?

ASHEVILLE, N.C. (AP) — Donald Trump will have another opportunity Wednesday to recalibrate his presidential comeback bid, this time with a rally and speech in North Carolina that his campaign is billing as a significant economic address.

Set in a Democratic city surrounded by staunchly Republican mountain counties, the event carries both national and local implications for the former president.

Republicans are looking for Trump to focus from the scattershot arguments and attacks he has made on Vice President Kamala Harris since Democrats elevated her as their presidential nominee. Twice in the past week, Trump has fumbled such opportunities, first in an hourlong news conference at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, then in a 2 1/2-hour conversation on the social media platform X with CEO Elon Musk.

The latest attempt comes in the state that delivered Trump his closest statewide margin of victory four years ago and that is once again expected to be a battleground in 2024. Trump won North Carolina over Democrat Joe Biden in 2020 by less than 1.4 percentage points — about 74,500 votes — and he can’t afford to have the state’s 16 electoral votes shift to Democrats for the first time since Barack Obama prevailed here in 2008….

The question for the campaign is whether Trump can stick to a tight frame on the economy, especially to saddle Harris with the fallout of inflation, rather than default to his usual stemwinding and grievances. The speech comes the same day that the Labor Department reported that year-over-year inflation reached its lowest level in more than three years in July, a potential boon for Harris.

Anybody want to bet on Trump sticking to the prepared remarks?

That’s the campaign news. There’s lots happening, and the convention should be a lot of fun. Following politics is finally fun again!

Mostly Monday Reads: Size Matters

Posted: August 12, 2024 | Author: dakinikat | Filed under: 2024 Elections, 2024 presidential Campaign, Biden Harris 2024, Civil Liberties, Civil Rights | Tags: ground game, On the Ground Politics, Presidential Election 2024, What, What's Vance's Drag Queen name? | 7 Comments

“The desperation is real. The next fake elector coup is coming.” John Buss, @repeat1968

Good Day, Sky Dancers!

It was inevitable that the incredible crowds that the Harris/Walz appearances have been attracting would eventually impact Donald’s psyche. One of the first signs was the amount of disinformation being packaged by right-wing sites and news. The KKKult is falling for it. I even had to fact-check someone myself. I’ve never seen a group of more gullible people in my life. They’re even rehashing some of the crap they tried to pass in 2020. We’ve also seen poorly photoshopped pictures of crowds in Trump’s appearance, where the same obvious guys appear in four different stadium sections. We’ve now advanced to AI conspiracies.

Marcy at emptywheel has a delightful account of this current bout of fake crowds. It’s filled with pictures and videos of the size issue. “In Which Ian Miles Cheong Understands Trump’s Campaign Better than NYT. The second I saw video of Vice President Harris rolling up to a hangar at Detroit’s airport on Air Force Two, then alighting with Tim Walz in front of cheering crowds, I knew it would break Donald Trump’s brain.” Indeed.

This is the kind of spectacle Donald Trump excels at creating.

This is the kind of spectacle on which Trump has built slavering loyalty from millions of MAGAts who see power in such spectacle.

And a Black woman created it.

Or rather, a Black woman and her campaign team, a campaign team which has already demonstrated they know exactly how to trigger Donald Trump, created it.

And sure enough, it did melt his brain.

Yesterday, he adopted the hysterical claims of some of his followers, posting that Vice President Harris was cheating because (he falsely claimed) she had used AI to sub in a crowd of people who weren’t there.

After these many years of dealing with this emotionally disturbed man with his plethora of Personality Disorders, we know his defense is projection. I know you are, but what am I! Donald has crowd-size envy, so it has to be resolved by calling it fake photos, fake videos, and fake reporting! Marcy brings the tape and photos to show how deluded he is. So deluded that even social media right-wing troll Malaysian Ian Miles Cheong. This guy jumps for red meat but can’t even with the entire AI crowd thing. Marcie continues with this. Wait for it. She mercilessly goes straight from the well-known troll to WAPO and NYT.

And Cheong is not the only right wing troll complaining that Trump is hurting the movement, their movement, with his unhinged response to Vice President Harris’ rally. At a time when some prominent right wing trolls are showing RFK-curiosity, they’re also questioning the campaign, in significant part because of Trump’s public meltdown over this arrival.

And that’s where things start to get weird.

Both WaPo and NYT reported overnight on Trump’s unhinged claim.

But they’re both missing a bit of what’s going on, and they’re missing it, in my opinion, because they’re still seeing this race from Trump’s perspective.

In a piece on Saturday, WaPo claimed that Democrats were obsessing over crowd size in their own right, citing Tim Walz’ boast about crowd size in a Friday rally in Phoenix, even while (in the penultimate paragraph) quoting a Harris spox mocking Trump for the meltdowns he has in response.

Read more for details. It’s true. We’ve all had fun with Trump waving his hands to a nonexistent crowd at airports and in front of Trump Tower. Watching Trump meltdown over his dwindling crowd size has been epic fun. This is from Brett Bachman from The Daily Beast. “Dem Rep: Trump’s Latest Conspiracy Is Evidence He’s in ‘Dementia Land.’

Rep. Ted Lieu had some harsh words for Donald Trump Sunday after the former president falsely suggested that Vice President Kamala Harris had somehow digitally altered photos of her rally at a Detroit-area airport over the weekend. “Has anyone noticed that Kamala CHEATED at the airport?” Trump posted on Truth Social Sunday. “There was nobody at the plane, and she ‘A.I.’d’ it, and showed a massive ‘crowd’ of so-called followers, BUT THEY DIDN’T EXIST!” Lieu attacked the conspiracy theory during an appearance on MSNBC, saying that Trump was “really going bonkers off the edge into dementia land.” Lieu added: “He’s now fantasizing that all these rallies are not real and that somehow, Air Force Two is not real and that the rally she had in Michigan was not real. I think the American people realize that Donald Trump is not suited for office in any way whatsoever.”

So, yeah, they’re going for the paid actor thing yet again. Why not? In fact, it seems they’ve just doctored some of the stuff they used in 2020, as I said. But, here’s world-class troll Ian Miles Cheong at least copping to them not being AI. Michael Tomasky writes this for The New Republic. “Grab the Popcorn. Donald Trump Is Freaked Out in Ways He Never Imagined Were Possible. Kamala Harris and Tim Walz are getting under his skin, and it’s a beautiful sight to behold.”

The Harris-Walz campaign proved two important things last week. First, it proved that sometimes all you really have to do is answer attacks—the mere fact of answering them deflates their momentum. Second, it proved that Democrats have finally learned something from brazen Republican presidential campaigns over the years: Convert your perceived weakness into strength and their perceived strength into weakness.

The campaign did both of these things effectively last week. And it drove Donald Trump, and Republicans generally, nuts. Democrats aren’t supposed to do that! It’s like Cinderella saying she’s not doing the dishes. But Democrats are saying it, and it’s effing awesome.

…

Republicans have understood this for years. Seeing a Democratic presidential campaign finally get this is exhilarating to me personally but, more important, potentially game-changing.

And Donald Trump is freaked out in ways he never imagined were possible. He has faced a lot of opponents—from 1980s New York Mayor Ed Koch to all his many creditors to the 16 dwarves he ran against in 2016 to a Clinton campaign that thought the race was over to prosecutors he has known for years how to slow down, especially with corrupt hack judges having his back. But Trump has never had an opponent that made him go: “Oh fuck, these people mean business.”

Now he does. And that it’s a Black woman who means this business makes it so great, so much better. The New York Times reported over the weekend that he is so shell-shocked by the turnabout in this race that he’s doubling down on racism and “stop the steal” delusions. He is in full-blown meltdown mode, in other words.

All the pressure is on Trump now. Can he come back? Can he respond? Can he prove, contra George Conway’s brilliant ads, that he is not a pathetic psychopath? Can he make up these polling gaps, like his sudden four-point deficit in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan?

In 2016, we had a Trump who expected and even wanted to lose, who had no investment in winning. In 2020, we had a Trump with a deep investment in winning, and who expected to win. In 2024, we had a Trump—while he was running against Joe Biden—who fully expected to win.

But now we have a new Trump. He really isn’t sure. We’ve never seen this animal on the loose. Hide the wives and children. The Democrats are hitting him where it hurts. And it’s about damn time.

Historian Heather Cox Richardson believes that “Vice President Kamala Harris’s choice of Minnesota governor Tim Walz to be her running mate seems to cement the emergence of a new Democratic Party.” Her analysis was posted yesterday in her SubStack Letters from an American.

While Biden worked hard to make his administration reflect the demographics of the nation, tapping more women than men as advisors and nominating more Black women and racial minorities to federal judicial positions than any previous president, it was Vice President Kamala Harris who emphasized the right of all Americans to be treated equally before the law.

She was the first member of the administration to travel to Tennessee in support of the Tennessee Three after the Republican-dominated state legislature expelled two Black Democratic lawmakers for protesting in favor of gun safety legislation and failed by a single vote to expel their white colleague. She has highlighted the vital work historically Black colleges and universities have done for their students and for the United States. And she has criss-crossed the country to support women’s rights, especially the right to reproductive healthcare, in the two years since the Supreme Court, packed with religious extremists by Trump, overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision.

To the forming Democratic coalition, Harris brought an emphasis on equal rights before the law that drew from the civil rights movements that stretched throughout our history and flowered after 1950. Harris has told the story of how her parents, Dr. Shyamala Gopalan, who hailed from India, and Donald J. Harris, from Jamaica, met as graduate students at the University of California, Berkeley and bonded over a shared interest in civil rights. “My parents marched and shouted in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s,” Harris wrote in 2020. “It’s because of them and the folks who also took to the streets to fight for justice that I am where I am.”

To these traditionally Democratic mindsets, Governor Walz brings something quite different: midwestern Progressivism. Walz is a leader in the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, which formed after World War II, but the reform impulse in the Midwest reaches all the way back to the years immediately after the Civil War and in its origins is associated with the Republican, rather than the Democratic, Party. While Biden’s approach to government focuses on economic justice and Harris’s focuses on individual rights, Walz’s focuses on the government’s responsibility to protect communities from extremists. That stance sweeps in economic fairness and individual rights but extends beyond them to recall an older vision of the nature of government itself.

Philip Bump of the Washington Post believes Donald’s most recent behavior is ominous. “‘AI’ crowds and unskewed polls: Trump prepares to reject another loss. The former president’s recent rejection of obvious realities indicates that he is not planning to treat a negative 2024 outcome as legitimate.” As I mentioned on Friday, shenanigans are afoot.

The first person who I noticed spreading the idea that images of Vice President Kamala Harris’s rally in Michigan had been manipulated was conservative moviemaker Dinesh D’Souza.

On Saturday evening, D’Souza posted a photo on social media of Harris exiting her airplane with a crowd of supporters looking on. Two reflections from the airplane were circled in red, illustrating that, despite the crowd, no one was visible in the reflection.

“Does this look like a real picture to you?” D’Souza asked. Within hours, similar questions were everywhere on social media — and by Sunday had popped up in former president Donald Trump’s feed at Truth Social.

“Has anyone noticed that Kamala CHEATED at the airport? There was nobody at the plane, and she ‘A.I.’d’ it, and showed a massive ‘crowd’ of so-called followers, BUT THEY DIDN’T EXIST!” Trump wrote. “She was turned in by a maintenance worker at the airport when he noticed the fake crowd picture, but there was nobody there, later confirmed by the reflection of the mirror like finish on the Vice Presidential Plane.”

That D’Souza was at the leading edge of this argument is not surprising. It was D’Souza, you may recall, who produced a feature-length movie arguing without evidence that the 2020 election had been stolen by “mules” who collected and submitted ballots on behalf of Joe Biden. Then, as now, D’Souza’s claims were rooted in a trivial misrepresentation of digital information.

There was a crowd in Michigan to meet Harris, as shown below in a photograph taken by a Washington Post photographer. You can also see why the reflection from the plane didn’t show the crowd; it was angled away from the speaking platform.

No AI. No whistleblowing maintenance worker, ginned up from the ether to make the claim of dishonesty seem more credible. And no “cheating” by Harris.

Why would Trump and his allies spread a false claim about attendance at a rally that was covered on C-SPAN? In part because many elements of Trump’s base have embraced rejections of basic reality (like the existence of “mules”) for years. In part, it’s confirmation bias, with partisans being more likely to accept false information as true when it supports their preexisting beliefs. But in part, it’s because Trump and his allies are already eagerly raising questions about the reliability of measures of Harris’s support — and by extension, the reliability of the results in November.

Bump makes a strong case that the Trump campaign will reject the election results and chaos will follow. The response will be in Biden’s court. Recent Polls show that “Democratic attacks on JD Vance are working.” This is from Semafor and reported by Kadia Goba.

New polling shared exclusively with Semafor shows Democrats’ attacks on JD Vance’s views on abortion, divorce and “childless cat ladies” are sticking with voters.

A pair of surveys by Blueprint, the centrist Democratic pollster backed by Reid Hoffman, one taken July 21 – July 22, two days after Vance was announced as Donald Trump’s running mate, and then again two weeks later on August 4, showed Vance’s net favorability falling from -7 to -11 with fewer voters unsure either way. That’s similar to other public polling, which has also shown Vance making a poor first impression since joining the Republican ticket.

The main shift in how respondents viewed Vance: He’s become more and more identified with his particular brand of conservatism and less with his famed biography as an author, veteran, and politician. Presented with a list of options to describe Vance in August, the most common answers were “conservative,” “anti-woman,” and “weird,” while more positive options like “young,” “smart,” and “businessman” declined from July. The percentage calling him “extreme” shot up 13 points.

So, it appears to be the crazy season, even if it isn’t even Labor Day yet. However, constant craziness just naturally comes with anything DonOld does.

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?

Come to my FaceBook page and play the game of Name this Drag Queen, or do it here! We gotcha Couchy Tomato!

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