Mostly Monday Reads: Election Daze Edition

Good afternoon, Sky Dancers!

The Iowa Caucuses are on January 15th.  The New Hampshire primaries are scheduled for January 23rd. Get ready for the cray-cray. Abortion Rights and Trump’s campaign are in the headlines today. As the Boys from South Park say, “I call shenanigans!”

 The election in Kentucky has brought a young woman to the front of the abortion debate. This is a Washington Postarticle about her and how she will join the national conversation on a civil right that is very personal and essential for her. “‘Everybody’s daughter’: The rape victim behind Kentucky’s viral abortion ad. Hadley Duvall helped Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear win reelection — and she’s ready to campaign again in 2024.” The feature article was written by Caroline Kitchener.

One month before the governor thanked her for his victory, Hadley Duvall had already won.

Standing in the middle of a football field in mid-October, she looked out at the students of her small Christian university, stunned to be the one wearing the rhinestone tiara. Her classmates could have chosen to honor the student body president ora leading member of the local Bible study. Instead, they’d picked Hadley, the face of a viral ad about abortion and sexual abuse that had begun airing a month earlier, and would soon help Democrats hold the governor’s mansion in one of the most conservative states in the country.

“They don’t hate me,” Duvall,21, recalled thinking as she accepted a bouquet of red roses from her college president. “They made me homecoming queen.”

Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear’s reelection campaign learned aboutDuvall because of a Facebook post about her experience she had written on June 25, 2022, the day after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. The ruling triggered a near-total abortion ban in Kentucky, one of 12 states with a recently enactedban that makes no exceptions for rape or incest. Days after she heard from Beshear’s team, Duvall was sitting in the dining room of a wealthy Beshear supporter she didn’t know, staring into a video camera. She aimed her words directly atthe Republican candidate for governor, who for months had thrown his full support behind the current version of Kentucky’s law before conceding late in the campaign that he was open toadditional exceptions.

“This is to you, Daniel Cameron,” Duvall said in the ad, her blue eyes narrowed in anger.

“To tell a 12-year-old girl she must have the baby of her stepfather who raped her is unthinkable. I’m speaking out because women and girls need to have options. Daniel Cameron would give us none.”

She tells the story of the abuse in detail.  So, I have to issue another Content Warning today.  It’s about the details of a 12-year-old girl being repeatedly raped by her stepfather.

Republican Campaign Strategist Liz Mair wrote this Op-Ed in today’s New York Times. Mair has a list of clients that are basically in the deplorable basket.  “Republicans Are Finding Out That ‘Pro-Life’ Means a Lot of Things to a Lot of People.”

Well, D’oh.  Again, we see the Republican obsession with late-term “abortions,” which are usually the result of something gone horribly wrong, incredibly rare, and the OB/GYN profession considered to be deliveries with bad outcomes.  Again, they’re not even considered abortions after the point of fetal viability, where babies will be saved if possible.  The overwhelming majority are wanted pregnancies and devasting to the women and families involved.

Many conservatives may call themselves pro-life, but in practice, that may be a more aspirational statement than an accurate reflection of hard policy views. Perhaps by figuring out what it now means to be pro-life — and recognizing that pro-life policy is easiest to sell only when it amounts to a ban on abortions later in pregnancy — Republicans can come up with a new approach to the politics of the issue.

Before Roe was overturned, the term “pro-life” covered a lot of ground — which was useful over decades in galvanizing a broad coalition willing to use abortion as a political cudgel. As Republicans are finding out today, “pro-life” means many things to many people.

Reading how these people think about something so complex and personal is not anything I like to do, but it’s necessary.  There are a lot of states trying to get abortion rights on their ballots, and Republicans are pulling shenanigans to try to keep the initiatives away from voters.  We have to hear what the deplorable are doing so we can fight them at the ballot box. I put a Rolling Stone article up about South Dakota yesterday.  Today, I feature this PBS News Hour report from last August.  Given what I read about South Dakota, I can’t help but believe that deplorables in states like Ohio haven’t shared their tactics.

Across the country, Republican officials and activists who oppose abortion access have worked to make it harder to pass citizen-led ballot measures and added roadblocks to the process of getting abortion directly on the ballot  These attempts to stop voters from weighing in directly on abortion aren’t new, but advocates say the current anti-ballot-measure efforts are taking on a renewed pace and ferocity. As voters even in conservative states have chosen to back abortion rights, GOP legislators and officials have been willing to fundamentally change the rules of democracy.

“We’ve been seeing an acceleration of these attacks on ballot measure processes more every year for the past several years,” said Kelly Hall, executive director of the Fairness Project, which works to pass progressive ballot measures. “And the success that abortion rights advocates have had at the ballot box in 2022 is putting fuel on that already burning fire of red state legislatures wanting to exclude their voters from direct democracy.”

Comer engaging with his constituents. John Buss, @repeat1968

These types of initiatives are definitely part of a democratic republic that Republicans would prefer to disappear in a Trump autocracy.  So, how is the Republican plan to overthrow a constitutional democracy going? Well, look at the Trump Campaign.   This is from Politico. “Trump’s revenge? GOP braces for daily blasts from ‘orange Jesus.’ His reascension, as nominee or the eventual winner, threatens to spark the same clashes with the Hill GOP that took a heavy toll on the party.”

Congressional Republicans are steeling themselves for a return to daily life with Donald Trump — which means constant, uncomfortable questions about his erratic policy whims and political attacks.

With Trump far ahead of the GOP primary pack and leading President Joe Biden in some polls, Republicans are getting a preview of future shellshock akin to their experiences in 2016 and his presidency. It’s likely to continue for the next 11 months. And perhaps four more years after that.

Trump’s recent call to replace the Affordable Care Act is triggering a particularly unwelcome sense of deja vu within the GOP. Even as many Senate Republicans steered away from Trump over the past couple years, now they’re increasingly resigned to another general election that could inundate them with the former president’s often fact-averse and hyperbolic statements.

But Hill Republicans are girding to treat Trump the third-time nominee the same way they did Trump the neophyte candidate and then president. They’re distancing themselves and downplaying his remarks, which touch on policy stresses like his urge to end Obamacare and political grievances like his vow to come down “hard” on MSNBC for its unfavorable coverage.

“He is almost a stream of consciousness,” said Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), one of only three Senate Republicans who will remain in office after voting to convict Trump in his second impeachment trial — the other four have either already left or plan to next year. It’s “analogous to when every day he would tweet,” Cassidy added, “and 99 percent of the time it never came to anything.”

The article continues to highlight how many Trump critics are leaving their office voluntarily this year rather than face Trump and his army of congressional deplorables.  This New York Times article outlines his radical ideas for this election cycle.  The byline includes Maggie Haberman, FYI.  “Why a Second Trump Presidency May Be More Radical Than His First. Donald Trump has long exhibited authoritarian impulses, but his policy operation is now more sophisticated, and the buffers to check him are weaker.”

Mr. Trump’s violent and authoritarian rhetoric on the 2024 campaign trail has attracted growing alarm and comparisons to historical fascist dictators and contemporary populist strongmen. In recent weeks, he has dehumanized his adversaries as “vermin” who must be “rooted out,” declared that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” encouraged the shooting of shoplifters and suggested that the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, deserved to be executed for treason.

As he runs for president again facing four criminal prosecutions, Mr. Trump may seem more angry, desperate and dangerous to American-style democracy than in his first term. But the throughline that emerges is far more long-running: He has glorified political violence and spoken admiringly of autocrats for decades.

As a presidential candidate in July 2016, he praised the former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein as having been “so good” at killing terrorists. Months after being inaugurated, he told the strongman leader of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, that his brutal campaign of thousands of extrajudicial killings in the name of fighting drugs was “an unbelievable job.” And throughout his four years in the Oval Office, Mr. Trump blew through boundaries and violated democratic norms.

What would be different in a second Trump administration is not so much his character as his surroundings. Forces that somewhat contained his autocratic tendencies in his first term — staff members who saw their job as sometimes restraining him, a few congressional Republicans episodically willing to criticize or oppose him, a partisan balance on the Supreme Court that occasionally ruled against him — would all be weaker.

As a result, Mr. Trump’s and his advisers’ more extreme policy plans and ideas for a second term would have a greater prospect of becoming reality.

This article written by Philip Bump in the Washington Post also addresses Trump’s campaign style. “How Donald Trump uses dishonesty.”  He might as well say the quiet part out loud.

Trump spent years trying to get people to buy gold-plated condominiums, apartments gilded with veneers of luxury and class. He spent years trying to get lots of people to buy lots of things, really, with allegations of fraud lingering around him and his company for much of that time. But he was never more successful in parlaying dishonesty into investment than since he embraced a career in national politics in 2015.

His approach that year was groundbreaking for a deceptively simple reason. Republican voters, frustrated by Barack Obama’s election and reelection, had increasingly embraced misinformation about national political issues. The Republican establishment, including elected officials, didn’t know how to deal with this. At first, they tried to co-opt the energy, reframing their desired policy preferences in the vernacular common with the tea party or fringe-right media outlets. But there was still a gap between what those outlets and right-wing commentators were endorsing and what established politicians would say.

Trump closed the gap. He said the things about immigrants that were common on the fringe-right, despite being exaggerated or false. He said the things about the left that those commentators, uncoupled from the party, were claiming on Fox News and in blogs. There was a backlash, including from the GOP establishment, that helped increase the audience for his claims. Republicans — especially the hard-right Republicans who were more likely to vote in primaries — heard him and viewed him not as a dishonest, opportunistic demagogue but as a solitary truth-telling pariah. That everyone in a position to know pointed out that Trump was wrong or lying reinforced his political branding: He was the guy challenging the elite hegemony. “Birds aren’t real,” but for an older generation.

This has been Trump’s sales approach ever since. You can see it in the rhetoric he deployed over the weekend at campaign events in Iowa, reiterating false, debunked claims about election fraud and attempting to reframe President Biden as a threat to democracy. But those are the endpoints of his approach, not the mechanism itself.

Consider this bit of rhetoric Trump offered in support of the idea that it is Biden, not him, who undermines America’s systems and history.

“You know that they’ve labeled parents at school board meetings as domestic terrorists. I mean, can you believe it?” he said in Cedar Rapids. “But they have. You know, when I first heard that — they have actually gone after parents viciously and violently, and when I first heard it, I thought people were just making it up. They haven’t made it up. You’ve seen that.”

They did make it up. This idea that the Biden administration had called parents “domestic terrorists” has been debunked repeatedly. But — because it’s so compelling a reason to despise Biden and because the debunkings don’t permeate right-wing media — the idea has become embedded in anti-Biden lore. He’s right about one thing, though: His supporters have seen that claim, on Fox News and in right-wing commentary for years. It’s false, but they’ve seen it, and here’s Trump glomming onto the idea so that he can put it to higher use: disparaging Biden and his administration as the threat to democracy.

That’s how it works, over and over. He gets buy-in on a familiar claim and then pivots it to his advantage, either by depicting himself in opposition to shared enemies or by leveraging the credibility he earns to make other false statements. Right after this riff, for example, he started talking about how his opponents purportedly cheat in elections. Graham Kates of CBS News reports that “Trump seeks “urgent review” of gag order ruling in New York civil fraud case.”  Not even a court can shut this idiot up while he destroys others’ lives.

Former President Donald Trump intends to appeal a ruling that upheld a gag order in his civil fraud trial in New York, with his attorneys saying Monday that they plan to ask the state’s highest court to review the decision.

New York Judge Arthur Engoron issued the order barring Trump from commenting publicly about his staff after the former president published a social media post disparaging Engoron’s clerk on Oct. 3, the second day of the trial. The order was later expanded to apply to attorneys in the case.

The judge found that Trump and his campaign violated the gag order twice, and Trump paid $15,000 in fines, before the appeals court temporarily stayed the order on Nov. 16. That hiatus lasted two weeks, while a panel of judges in the Appellate Division of the New York Supreme Court considered, and then rejected, Trump’s request to have the gag order lifted.

Trump is now seeking an “urgent review” by New York’s highest court, called the Court of Appeals, his attorneys said in a filing. Trump has accused Engoron and the clerk, Allison Greenfield, of bias in his filings.

“Without expedited review, [the defendants] will continue to suffer irreparable injury daily, as they are silenced on matters implicating the appearance of bias and impropriety on the bench during a trial of immense stakes,” Trump attorney Clifford Robert wrote. “Petitioners’ counsel have no means of preserving evidence of or arguments regarding such bias and impropriety at this time, since the Gag Orders also prohibit in-court statements.”

I’m unsure how to endure all this since we must deal with it head-on. I suppose ranting here, going to my local to drink a glass of wine and rant, plus just plain ranting to the dog and cats, will suffice for now. I’m not quite too old to also rant at my elected officials, even though there’s not much they do about anything.

We will also get this mess that Republicans have cooked up to get us to ignore Orange Caligula’s rants. Here’s more of those Crazy Train Republicans as reported by Newsweek. “Joe Biden Impeachment Looks More Likely After Walmart Confrontations: Comer.  Who had Walmart Confrontations on their Election Bingo cards?  Anyone?

Representative James Comer, chairman of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, said on Sunday that an impeachment of President Joe Biden looks more likely after House Republicans heard from their constituents at Walmart over the Thanksgiving holiday.

The GOP has been investigating Biden over allegations that he intervened and benefited from his son Hunter Biden‘s business dealings with China and Ukraine while he was vice president under former President Barack Obama, including accusations of taking bribes. The allegations have been denied by the White House and Hunter Biden’s lawyers, with Democrats criticizing the GOP’s impeachment inquiries for failing to find any meaningful evidence against the president.

Once the impeachment inquiry is complete, the Judiciary Committee will decide on whether to draw up any draft impeachment articles against Biden to be voted on by the House. Comer has said that a vote could take place by early 2024.

Better let MGT do it, or she will come after you with a machete and whack of little Jim. You remember what she did to Boerbert.

We have a few more weeks before we can actually see voter sentiment instead of reading misleading polls.  Hang in here with us!

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?

You’ve got covert action
Prejudice to extremes
You’ve got primitive cunning
And high tech means
You’ve got eyes everywhere
But people see through you

 
You’ve got good manipulators
Got your store of dupes
You’ve got the idiot clamour
Of your lobby groups
You like to play on fears
But people see through you

 
You’ve got instant communication
Instant data tabulation
You got the forces of occupation
But you don’t get capitulation

 
‘Cause people see through you
People see through you
People see through you
People see through you

By Bruce Cockburn