There Is No Bottom to the Horrors of the Modern Republican Party (w/ Update)

I haven't blogged much about the recent craziness in North Carolina, but now this is unavoidable. The wingnut Republican candidate for the governor's office there is going off the rails in the biggest train wreck since JD Vance said more demeaning stuff about immigrants yesterday. CNN has all the gory details about Mark Robinson (via Andrew Kaczynski and Em Steck):

Editor’s Note: This story contains offensive language.

(CNN) — Mark Robinson, the controversial and socially conservative Republican nominee for governor of North Carolina, made a series of inflammatory comments on a pornography website’s message board more than a decade ago, in which he referred to himself as a “black NAZI!” and expressed support for reinstating slavery, a CNN KFile investigation found.

Okay, just on this lede alone, this is a disaster for the state national GOP. Their preferred candidate in North Carolina - voted in by a primary process, and who had been elected currently as Lt. Governor - was posting stuff on a porn website. The next part is about Robinson openly claiming to be a Black Nazi (!), which used to be a career ender in 98 percent of the American states. And the topper - at this point in the story, which is still the first fcking paragraph - is having a black man supporting slavery in a former Confederate state.

But wait, it gets worse.

Despite a recent history of anti-transgender rhetoric, Robinson said he enjoyed watching transgender pornography, a review of archived messages found in which he also referred to himself as a “perv.”

The comments, which Robinson denies making, predate his entry into politics and current stint as North Carolina’s lieutenant governor. They were made under a username that CNN was able to identify as Robinson by matching a litany of biographical details and a shared email address between the two.

Many of Robinson’s comments were gratuitously sexual and lewd in nature. They were made between 2008 and 2012 on “Nude Africa,” a pornographic website that includes a message board. The comments were made under the username minisoldr, a moniker Robinson used frequently online...

That Robinson is publicly hateful towards trans people and yet fetishizes them as porn subjects is part and parcel of the Far Right hypocrisy when it comes to sex and power. This should be shameful except the modern conservative elites no longer have shame.

And the fact that Robinson kept using a common online moniker for going into the kinky stuff underscores not so much his idiocy in leaving behind easily-tracked clues to his identity years later, it's that he likely believed he would never get caught or held accountable for it.

That said: There are a handful of Witty Librarians out there on social media, so do be aware I'm only responsible for like 37 percent of the crazy stuff coming from a Witty account, I swear... I have to admit, I've been insanely active on the Internet since 1994 - when I got into the Usenet chats for the X-Files television show - so I know if I ever get into politics or become a public figure there's going to be a lot of... ahem, interesting things I've posted. 

In my defense, I've made it a personal policy to speak my mind to what I believe and know. My belief: You better be able to say in public what you say in private, and you better say in private what you've said in public. And I try to avoid saying mean or derogatory things towards people who don't deserve it. The mean and derogatory things I say about goddamn conservative wingnuts is that they DO deserve it. So there.

Enough about my bad habits. Back to the report:

Many of Robinson’s comments on Nude Africa stand in contrast to his public stances on issues such as abortion and transgender rights.

Publicly, Robinson has fiercely argued that people should use bathrooms only that correspond to the gender they were assigned at birth. He’s also said transgender women should be arrested for using women’s restrooms...

Yet privately under the username minisoldr on Nude Africa, Robinson graphically described his own sexual arousal as an adult from the memory of secretly “peeping” on women in public gym showers as a 14-year-old. Robinson recounted the story as a memory he said he still fantasized about.

“I came to a spot that was a dead end but had two big vent covers over it! It just so happened it overlooked the showers! I sat there for about an hour and watched as several girls came in and showered,” Robinson wrote on Nude Africa...

In other comments on Nude Africa, Robinson discussed his affinity for transgender pornography.

“I like watching tranny on girl porn! That’s f*cking hot! It takes the man out while leaving the man in!” Robinson wrote. “And yeah I’m a ‘perv’ too!...”

He's against "trans" going into ladies' restrooms but for himself - like other deviant narcissists - he wants to retain his privilege to invade safe places and demean women. It's all about his lusts getting satisfied, after all.

Robinson, who would become North Carolina’s first Black governor if elected, also repeatedly maligned civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., attacking him in such intense terms that a user accused him of being a white supremacist.

“Get that f*cking commie bastard off the National Mall!,” Robinson wrote about the dedication of the memorial to King in Washington, DC, by then-President Barack Obama.

“I’m not in the KKK. They don’t let blacks join. If I was in the KKK I would have called him Martin Lucifer Koon!” Robinson responded...

In the pornographic forums, Robinson revealed his unvarnished thoughts on issues such as race, gender and abortion.

Writing in a forum discussing Black Republicans in October 2010, Robinson stated unprovoked: “I’m a black NAZI!”

That same month, Robinson wrote in another post that he supported the return of slavery.

“Slavery is not bad. Some people need to be slaves. I wish they would bring it (slavery) back. I would certainly buy a few,” he wrote.

In March 2012, Robinson wrote that he preferred the former leader of Nazi Germany Adolf Hitler over the leadership in Washington during the administration of Barack Obama.

“I’d take Hitler over any of the sh*t that’s in Washington right now!” he wrote.

Robinson’s comments on Nude Africa often frequently contained derogatory and racial slurs directed at Black, Jewish and Muslim people...

Robinson's sell-out over the fight for civil rights for African-Americans is already a public matter. He's made it clear he's a hater - and a sadistic control freak - in the worst way. That he displayed this much vitriol for a respected historic figure like Reverend King under his online handle shouldn't be a surprise. Painful, but not a surprise.

CNN’s reporting on Robinson’s comments comes a few weeks after The Assembly, a North Carolina digital publication, reported that Robinson frequented local video pornography shops in the 1990s and 2000s. The story cited six people who interacted and saw him frequent the stores in Greensboro, North Carolina. A spokesperson for Robinson called the story false and a “complete fiction...”

There's too much consistent bad behavior here to think these reports are in error. CNN is risking a lot posting this report if they didn't have receipts, and so they're backing up these allegations with what they've researched:

On the Nude Africa website in both comments and his profile, minisoldr offered numerous details that align precisely with Robinson’s personal history.

In his profile, minisoldr listed his full name as “mark robinson” and disclosed a private email address Robinson used elsewhere online. In 2012, a user responded to a comment by calling minisoldr “Mark.”

Minisoldr mentioned in 2008 being married for 18 years, which corresponds with Robinson’s marriage to Yolanda Hill in 1990. In 2011, minisoldr wrote he had been married 21 years. Minisoldr wrote in a 2011 post that he lived in Greensboro, North Carolina, the same town where Robinson lived at the time and currently lives.

In a post in 2012, minisoldr said he served in the Army in the 1980s, during the same time period as Robinson. In his sexually graphic comments detailing watching women in the showers in 2011, minisoldr wrote that his mother worked at an Historically Black College and University (HBCU). Robinson’s mother worked as a custodian at North Carolina A&T State University, an HBCU located in Greensboro.

Both minisoldr and Robinson often posted about the same topics online, including reviews for remote-controlled helicopters, their attraction to specific celebrities and their favorite “Twilight Zone” episode.

The email address associated with minisoldr on Nude Africa was also used by Robinson elsewhere online and social media. On the commenting platform Disqus, a user who joined in April 2011 features Mark Robinson’s photo under the username minisoldr.

Usernames and email addresses from Disqus were publicly leaked online in 2017, according to the company. CNN confirmed that Robinson’s username minisoldr on Disqus shared the same email address as the one used on Nude Africa...

If Robinson isn't minisoldr, there's a hell of a lot of coincidences involved.

Robinson has frequently used the username “minisoldr” elsewhere on the internet. On X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, Robinson once used the minisoldr username, according to a screenshot he shared on Facebook in 2018 and data in Robinson’s old tweets.

A YouTube playlist for a user named “minisoldr” features exclusively videos of Robinson. On Pinterest, a user “minisoldr” lists his name as “Mark Robinson.”

People online rarely mix up their Internet handles - in order to avoid confusing themselves - and "minisoldr" is unique enough that I doubt there's others fighting for that persona. The odds of this being the same Mark Robinson are pretty fcking solid.

Tonight there's been a wave of denials, dismissals, and evasions by Robinson's campaign and by the Republican Party at the state and national level. How they respond to this - either by pushing Robinson off the ballot before he drags the whole ticket down in a key battleground state, or doubling down on the racism and sexism and fascism to keep the wingnut base appeased - depends on how they gauge the loss of moderate independent voters who will recoil from these revelations.

But even if the state GOP succeeds in dismissing Robinson if they could, the next question ought to be "who the hell can they get next to replace him?" This unapologetic, hypocritical racist/sexist was the top choice of the party voters in the primary: They're not going to find a rational or less openly racist/sexist candidate to replace him.

We've been seeing it ever since the start of the modern Republican era of "attack politics" forged by Newt Gingrich, where the conservatives took over the party mechanics and the party choices to where there are no true moderates - the more congenial, the less racist/sexist - surviving among the ranks. It accelerated during the Tea Party movement against Obama - less because he was Center-Left and more because he was a Black Man who dared to win high office - to where open rudeness and public hostility by the GOP elected officials are now the norm.

With trump's takeover of the party voting base in 2016 with his anti-immigrant, Mexico-bashing and China-bashing, anti-women antics, this is where the Republicans are today: A roster filled with religious hypocrites, grifters, and sexual predators. This is no longer a party of Ronald Reagan or the Bush dynasty or John McCain, with whatever fidelity to the nation and to public decency they would display. This is now the party of Roy Moore, of Jim Jordan, of Matt Gaetz. It's a Republican party of idiot hypocrites like Tommy Tuberville or Lauren Boebert or Marjorie Taylor Greene, exposing their fears and hatred on the rest of the nation.

It's a Party of Trumps - grotesqueries - all the way down.

For the love of GOD, stop voting for them. 

Update 9/28/24: Just spotted this Peter Wehner article in The Atlantic, and he uses the same word - grotesque - that I used here (read the whole article to get an idea how deep and widespread the rot is):

The GOP is a moral freak show, and freak shows attract freaks. Which is why Mark Robinson fits in so well in today’s Republican Party...

The Republican Party today isn’t incidentally grotesque; like the man who leads it, Donald Trump, it is grotesque at its core. It is the Island of Misfit Toys, though in this case there’s a maliciousness to the misfits, starting with Trump, that makes them uniquely dangerous to the republic. Since 2016, they have been at war with reality, delighting in their dime-store nihilism, creating “alternative facts” and tortured explanations to justify the lawlessness and moral depravity and derangement of their leader.

None of this is hidden; it is on display in neon lights, almost every hour of every day. No one who supports the Republican Party, who casts a vote for Trump and for his MAGA acolytes, can say they don’t know.

They know.

We as voters need to hold them accountable. The whole Republican Party has got to go.

The Prelude to Dangerous Days

Update: Thank you again, Batocchio, for including my blog at Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up. To everyone out there, get the vote out for Harris/Walz to make sure trump and his ilk are driven out of office everywhere! 

I blogged earlier about how trump's - and along with him the Republican Party's - constant lying about what's happening in the United States - highlighted by the continual fearmongering over immigrants - led to JD Vance and his buddies falsely accusing Haitian immigrants of "stealing and eating our pet cats." I posted that just before the big debate between donald trump and Kamala Harris - which I didn't watch because I don't wanna get more riled up than I am - and during that debate trump doubled down on the accusations towards Haitians being "pet-eating monsters".

These falsehoods - attacking an ethnic group in our own backyard of criminal acts, a blood libel for all intents - are meant to do one thing: Stir up trump's angry immigrant-hating voter base of MAGA faithful to believe the absolute worst to the point they will take action "to defend" whatever nationalist ideal is in their heads... by attacking those "inhuman Others" through threats and violence.

We're seeing that in the days after trump's agitating outbursts (pushed along by his follow-up media appearances repeating his big lies), as the city of Springfield Ohio - where the rumors began - began reporting a series of bomb threats aimed at the local government offices, and then at the local schools, and today at the local hospitals (via Edward Helmore at the Guardian US).

Two hospitals in Springfield, Ohio, were sent into lockdown after bomb threats, police said Saturday, marking the fourth such case in as many days that appears linked to false claims circulating among the far right that Haitian immigrants there are eating domestic pets and wildlife...

Kettering Health Springfield was one of the medical facilities targeted, with officials later saying they found nothing suspicious during a search. Another hospital, Mercy Health’s Springfield regional medical center, received a similar threat.

A spokesperson with Mercy Health said the hospital has continued to operate and thanked Springfield police as well as hospital staff “for their swift, efficient and caring response”.

The bomb threats Saturday came after others had been called in to government buildings Thursday, forcing their closure and causing local schools to be evacuated.

“We recognize that the past few days have been particularly challenging for everyone in our community,” Springfield police said in a statement. Police added “we remain fully committed to ensuring the safety and well-being of each and every person”...

You will notice the threats are aimed at public places, where the most vulnerable of the citizenry would be especially the schools and hospitals. These hate-filled cowards want those innocent civilians to cower in fear and avoid any incoming conflict (especially as Election Day nears).

Today is Saturday. Tomorrow is Sunday. For most Christians, that's Church Day. Supposed to be the day to pray to an Almighty, and seek salvation and forgiveness and peace of mind. I guarantee you these MAGA terrorists are going to threaten at least one church (arguably whichever church has the most Haitian immigrants in the congregation) just to satisfy their dark, rage-driven demons.

All of this is happening to a small town, no different than the hundreds that dot the American landscape. Springfield is on the outskirts of Dayton, and a serious drive away from the major metros of Cincinnati and Columbus. It's one of those places where the downtown has at best one five-story building, and the rest small businesses selling antiques or housing local eateries. It's small enough that everybody kind of knows everybody else, their kids all go to the same schools, where the harvest festivals have the best pies, and they'll have their chairs lined up along Main Street a day in advance for the annual Christmas parade because nobody will vandalize or steal them. The idealized small town Eagleland of American mythos that the Beltway Media keeps looking for.

It's a place that was also dying through the steady drain of the younger generations moving on to college and then moving away to bigger jobs closer to the big cities like Cincy. The influx of Haitian refugees since 2017 to work the local factories had been an actual boon... and proof that trump and his fellow anti-immigrant haters in the Republican ranks are wrong about demonizing immigrants and denying their value as new incoming citizens. In that, you can see why trump jumped on this lie and ran with it: trump cannot abide the reality that his anti-immigrant world-view doesn't fit the facts.

There's another, darker reason trump is pushing his false narrative: he's hoping for violence to erupt in Springfield, triggering and tempting his MAGA base to cross the line with his blessing. This is part of trump's repertoire since he took over the national stage in 2015: Either insinuating - or outright stating - that those who oppose him and his MAGA base should be arrested, shot, and/or killed. There's evidence he talked to his aides about okaying law enforcement to shoot the George Floyd protestors in 2020. He cheered on the violence towards protesters in Portland Oregon and other cities. 

The observation gained by trump's constant calls for his followers to "show up, be wild" is that he wants confrontation between the Far Right and the rest of the nation. He wants more Charlottesvilles, trump wants more moments where his extremists have free reign to attack the Left-leaning counter-protests, and induce terror in average Americans so that they dare not question him or his grabs for power and money. trump believes he can profit from the chaos spurred by street fights sparked by the Nazis and extremists that back him, and that when the blood starts flowing the rest of White America - who are not as to-the-bone racist as he is, but still driven by certain prejudices - will panic and side with him and the Republicans in the coming battle.

In short: trump wants his goddamned race war because he believes it will help him win cheat his way back into the White House.

Even though he had those conditions in 2020 and still lost to Joe Biden by 7 million votes and a strong Electoral College result even in states - like Oregon, Pennsylvania, Minnesota - that were rocked by such violence anyway.

trump's not going to get the results he likes, because it's already out there that the ones instigating the violence towards Springfield - not just the Haitians but everyone there - are trump and Vance and their fellow hate-filled Republicans. If anybody suffers or dies as the escalation worsens, the blame is going right towards him no matter how much blame-shifting and gaslighting he attempts.

The sad thing is the way things are going, violence is now a certainty. Someone's going to get hurt, and I feel bad for Springfield... and for all the other towns that trump's violent rhetoric will attack next as his desperation increases.

For the LOVE OF GOD and America and Mom and Apple Pie, stop voting for Republicans. Their cruelty and violence towards fellow Americans - towards our own families and neighbors - should not be ignored and should not be rewarded.

Flooding the Zone With Lies

The wave of outright lying by the Far Right Noise Machine - and their Republican Party allies hacks - is overwhelming us now as the 2024 election day nears.

It's been well-documented that trump lies nearly every line he says in public; but he's been spewing offensive allegations the past few months that hospitals in Blue states are "performing post-abortions" (which is legally infanticide), and the past few weeks that there are schools forcibly performing transgender surgeries on children (the second part of that covered by Matt Lavietes at NBC News):

Former President Donald Trump repeated his false claim that children are undergoing transition-related surgery during their school day, worsening fears among some conservatives that educators are pushing children to become transgender and aiding transitions without parental awareness.

“Can you imagine you’re a parent and your son leaves the house and you say, ‘Jimmy, I love you so much, go have a good day in school,’ and your son comes back with a brutal operation? Can you even imagine this? What the hell is wrong with our country?” Trump said Saturday at a campaign rally in Wisconsin, a vital swing state.

Trump made similar remarks — saying children were returning home from school after having had surgical procedures — the previous weekend at an event hosted by Moms for Liberty, a parent activist group that has gained outsized influence in conservative politics in recent years...

There is no evidence that a student has ever undergone gender-affirming surgery at a school in the U.S., nor is there evidence that a U.S. school has sent a student to receive such a procedure elsewhere...

According to trump and his Far Right acolytes, our public schools have the medical facilities and the means to perform surgeries at a whim: Considering how most of our schools are struggling to keep up with office supplies makes this deluded narrative a clear fantasy.

You'll notice trump doesn't mention where these things are happening: No mention of which school, which state. If any school has been transitioning kids without parental consent we'd have heard of it by now, even by the traditional media outlets expressing some level of outrage. If any hospital has been killing newborns as trump is claiming, the pro-fetus crowd in those states - even in deep Blue states like California or New York - would be massed outside that building protesting every minute of every day. Vague allegations without any eyewitnesses or documentation, not a thing that could stand up as factual evidence in an actual court of law.

So we know he's lying, we know he's fearmongering to his MAGA base... and yet the mainstream media isn't holding trump accountable - they are not challenging him to his face - for these blatant lies.

And now just over the past few days, JD Vance and several of his GOP buddies are sharing the outrageous and debunked claim that Haitian immigrants are out there eating our pet cats. Even Ian Millhiser over at Vox's Explainer can't fully explain it:

For the record, there is no evidence that any Haitian immigrant ate a cat in Springfield, Ohio, or anywhere else in the United States, for that matter. But the lack of factual evidence hasn’t stopped the GOP from pushing the nativist narrative, which seems designed to play off bigotry and suspicion against the mostly Black population of Haitian immigrants.

More than 300,000 previously unauthorized migrants from Haiti received temporary protected status in June, which means these Haitian immigrants are now — despite Vance’s suggestion otherwise — legally present in the United States. Still, Vance and other Republicans’ attacks on these immigrants come at a moment when more Americans have grown skeptical of immigration...

Springfield’s Police Division said on Monday that there have been no reports of any pets being stolen or eaten in that city. However, there apparently was an incident in Canton, Ohio — a nearly three-hour drive from Springfield — where a woman was charged with cruelty to animals for allegedly killing and eating a cat. But there’s no evidence that this woman is an immigrant or of Haitian descent.

Despite that lack of evidence, the woman appears to have been identified as of Haitian descent in far-right tweets...

The wingnuts are twisting the facts to make it fit their narrative that Haitian refugees - that immigrants in general - are inhuman. That's the only explanation here. And these wingnuts are desperate to turn the manufactured fear of immigrants into easily-promoted hate.

So it’s not surprising that many prominent members of the Republican Party, a party that frequently flags isolated crimes committed by immigrants to fuel nativist sentiment, latched onto an unfounded internet rumor about Haitians and cats as “proof” that immigrants present a problem (that Republicans can fix).

Still, none of this context changes the fact that Republicans at the pinnacle of the party, including sitting US senators and even one of the party’s two nationwide candidates, see no downside to spreading racist, completely unfounded rumors based on random social media posts spread by far-right trolls...

Millhiser spells it out at his conclusion even though he doesn't want to discuss the implications further: Vance and everyone else at the top of the GOP chain of command are happily spreading the fearmongering lies because there's no one willing to hold them accountable for being liars. The ones who could sue for defamation - right now, the entire Haitian community in the United States have every right to sue the GOP for their slander - are too poor or too constrained by their legal status to fight any courtroom battles. The media outlets that are supposed to maintain professional standards of journalism are too cowed by their rich owners - and too blinded by the need for "access" - to push back.

There's been a long and troubling history of the Far Right - especially as trump rose to power among their ranks - to exaggerate at best and outright lie at worst about so-called "criminal" acts committed by liberals and Democrats in order to excite their base into violent action. Think of every attack on Planned Parenthood facilities whenever the wingnuts claim that "baby killers" are farming for body parts. Remember how accusations about a child sex smuggling ring involving Hillary drove a man to attack a pizza parlor in Washington DC.

This is where we are at now in America, as the November general election draws nearer and trump - fearing he is going to lose the Popular vote again and likely the Electoral College - is desperate to stir up the passions of his MAGA base... but not to show up and vote, instead to show up with guns and commit acts of terror and chaos to do whatever it takes to disrupt any voting at all.

Gods help us. The lying is going to get worse until November and beyond, not until every wingnut liar is out of power... and in trump's case sitting in a jail cell.

FOR THE LOVE OF GOD AND TRUTH, AMERICA, STOP VOTING REPUBLICAN. Hold them accountable. That IS in your power to stop their lies.

Update: A historian from Northwestern University is raising the warning flag that violence aimed at immigrants is sure to follow:

So let's not get confused: the debunked claims that refugees are eating cats aren't just nonsense. They are the beginning of a wave of violence. The people spreading this rhetoric either know exactly what they're doing, or they should know. But violence follows. Every time. (3)

— Kathleen Belew (@kathleen_belew) September 10, 2024

trump wants the blood to flow: It's how he knows he has his mob doing his dirty work for him.

My One Sentence Thoughts About Judge Merchan Delaying trump's New York Felony Sentencing Until After the 2024 General Election

FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFUCK. 

Russia's Weapons In the Form of Words

Update 9/9/24: Thanks again to the Crooks & Liars crew especially Steve in Manhattan for promoting this article at Mike's Blog Round-Up! Please remember to GET THE VOTE OUT America and stop Republican/Russia sabotage of our elections! Also, please consider my book Notice a Trend as a stocking stuffer this coming Halloween uh Turkey Sacrifice Day hold on, Saturnalia!

 I am an arms dealer fitting you with
Weapons in the form of words
And don't really care which side wins
As long as the room keeps singing
That's just the business I'm in
-- "This Ain't a Scene," Fall Out Boy

The Department of Justice this week dropped a bombshell in the form of indictments and sanctions towards Russian operatives who were paying off Far Right media outlets and "influencers" to undermine our nation's elections and policies (via Shannon Bond, Jude Joffe-Block, and Caitlin Thompson at NPR):

On Wednesday, the Justice Department charged two employees of RT, the Russian state media broadcaster, in a scheme to secretly fund and direct the production of social media videos that racked up millions of views.

The RT staffers, named in the indictment as Kostiantyn Kalashnikov and Elena Afanasyeva, have been charged with conspiracy to commit money laundering and conspiracy to violate the Foreign Agents Registration Act. They’re accused of funneling nearly $10 million to an unnamed Tennessee company that contracted with online influencers with big audiences...

“The company never disclosed to the influencers or to their millions of followers its ties to RT and the Russian government,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said on Wednesday.

Still, didn't anybody on the RT payroll suspect they were all working from the same script, all so favorable to Putin and to Russia? Or are these Far Right "influencers" so twisted by their own world-view - that Ukraine is the enemy, that liberals are Commies, that there's a global conspiracy to destroy Alpha Males - that they didn't care how much like puppets they are?

The charges against Kalashnikov and Afanasyeva come as U.S. intelligence officials say foreign efforts aimed at swaying the outcome of the election are escalating. On Wednesday, the government seized 32 internet domains connected to a separate Russian influence operation, while Iran has recently been accused of trying to hack both the Republican and Democratic presidential campaigns.

What sets the RT operation apart from many other interference efforts is that it appeared to reach a real audience, thanks to the recognizable names attached.

“Buying authentic influencers is a far better use of funds than creating fake personas, because they bring their own trusting audiences and are actually, you know, real,” wrote Renée DiResta, the author of Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies Into Reality, about how online influencers spread propaganda and rumors, in a post on Threads...

The thing every American - especially the ones getting hammered repeatedly by these propagandists - knew that what was coming from these influencers wasn't home-grown but a coordinated effort by a deep pocket source: They tended to repeat the same messages and stick to the same talking points. Now there's proof in a courtroom that the Far Right Noise Machine was getting paid to attack the rest of us. That the money was coming from Russia is what stings.

The money itself is obscene. One person getting $400,000 A MONTH to spew the pre-scripted content? About 90 percent of most Americans don't see that much income in a YEAR. The greed of these pro-Russian influencers barely equals the severity of their anti-American output.

A good number of social media commentators - most of them doing it for free by the by - pointed out how these Far Right influencers have been screaming for decades about "leftist bloggers and pundits getting paid by George Soros" so the irony is not lost. It may not be irony actually: It's certainly deflection and confession on their parts. 

What the mainstream media - affected by the revelation that there is this kind of corruption in their own circles - need to realize, what a majority of Americans need to understand is how all of this is Putin's psychological (psyops) war on the United States.

This may not be a real-world warzone like Ukraine with tanks guns and bloodshed, but our airwaves and information sources are battlegrounds now. Putin can't afford a direct war on America - Gods help us, it would end in nuclear fire if that happens - but he's bitter and enraged at how our government has imposed economic sanctions not only on Russia but on himself ever since the Magnitsky Incident in 2009 led to congressional legislation that targeted Putin and his corrupt regime.

You can see the uptick in Far Right rhetoric around that time as the Tea Party stirred anti-Obama resentment into anti-government outrage. It helped Putin that many of the Far Right are synced to his own political and social world-views - nationalist, extremist, evangelical/orthodox Christianist, expressing open contempt and horror towards women, ethnics, gay/lesbian/trans people - to where these so-called "patriotic Americans" would happily - for a high fee - turn against their fellow Americans to side with a foreign despot.

There used to be anger and outrage from the Far Right Republicans back at the height of the Cold War if ANYone was caught working on the Soviet Russia payroll. Today, you have to think that everyone from Fox-Not News to Newsmax on down to InfoWars (what's left of it) have their hands out for the Russian oligarchs to tickle their palms for another $400k each (I would like to think National Review have higher personal standards than to sell out like that, but even now I have doubts).

If we were at actual war, what these Far Right media elites are doing would be considered treason.

Thing is, we are at war: Engaged by an enemy nation in Russia that is overwhelming our media with disinfo, conspiracy tripe, brazen lies - what we'd call "flooding the zone with shit" - to where almost half our fellow citizens can't tell what's real or fake news anymore. All thanks to Russia's front-line Fifth Columnists spewing all that shit at us from Facebook to Twitter to podcasts to facetime on the prime time talk shows.

Half the reason the United States is on the brink of civil war is because Putin is paying those wingnut bullshitters to confuse and defame Americans, to make us fear and hate each other at the expense of our own common cause to support and defend this nation.

Goddamn them. Every single one of these greedheads betrayed America for Putin's cash. Send them to prison first, and let Hell take them when they die.

The Conservative Contempt for Women

As low as the Far Right Republican political agenda for 2024 can sink, it still keeps going in a downward spiral. Over the weekend, the media got wind of yet another interview VP candidate JD Vance gave where he exposed more misogyny towards women who did not fit his world-view (via Jason Wilson at the Guardian (US)): 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Guardian contacted the Vance campaign for comment but received no response...

As a man, JD Vance is trying hard to present himself as a patriarchal Alpha Male: dismissive of women's rights, projecting his own misery onto them, and refusing to express any basic decency at all. 

We've seen these Alpha Male wannabes - and their Incel cousins - running around on social media, showing off their "conquests", expressing their toxic mindsets, and acting out their dominance towards everyone they view as their lessers. 

Remember Andrew Tate, the preening jackass who advertises himself as a male role model and tried taunting a young woman about his prized gas guzzling sports cars... and ended up exposing himself to arrest by Romanian authorities pursuing him for abuse, fraud, and human sex trafficking? He resumed his public behavior as a misogynistic asshole even after that arrest, which all led to fresh arrests by Romanian officials now including sex trafficking of minors.

This is who these women-hating men are: They can't stop themselves from their attitudes that women - and the younger the better - are property, no different than the 16 cars Tate has to own to make himself feel superior to the rest of us. To these men, women are basically slaves to their whims and needs. They don't see women as half the human population, or as humans at all. Ask them if women have brains, these guys will laugh. Ask them if women have souls, these guys will shrug it off.

As human beings, Vance and his Alpha Male colleagues just keep proving themselves - and everything their world-view represents - vile and wrong.

It's not just Vance that's the problem. The guy who hired him as his vice presidential candidate - trump - is demonstrably worse. Above all, donald trump is officially a sex offender, found liable for sexual assault on E. Jean Carroll that the judge declared was by definition rape. There's the long history of trump abusing his "privileges" owning the Miss Teen USA pageants. There's the report he raped his first wife Ivana. There's trump himself proudly boasting he can grab women by the p-ssy in the most vulgar way possible.

And with all that, the so-called "family values" religious-type leadership of the Republican Party accepts trump - and Vance, and hundreds of other vulgar Alpha Male assholes - as their own. Because those "Christian" values aren't about family, or humility, or love.

This contempt, this rage, this violence towards women explains how deep into the rot the conservative ideology has fallen. 

This is who conservatives are, in service to their ideology that only the true elites - rich, white, and male - must rule. Remember what Frank Wilhoit said: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

Everyone else outside of their circle - the ethnic minorities like Blacks and Latinos (and even Asians), the youth, the poor, and now above all the women - must be shunned, defamed, disposed of.

Even those lessers who ARE in their circle - the conservative women (and Blacks and Latinos and Gays) in this case - who pander to this message of misogyny are just there to convince these men - if not those in the media looking for narrative cover - that they are ideologically in the right. The conservative women playing to the "tradwife" or anti-feminist stances are doing so because they personally profit - above all, the wealth and social influence - from living in the status quo that the conservative movement seeks to enforce. But the second these women are no longer valued for their contributions, they will find themselves in the same mess - poor, physically broken, emotionally drained - every other American woman suffers now.

Wonder why teacher's pay is so low across so many Republican-controlled states? It's because it's viewed as "women's work." Wonder why women's health care is declining across the nation? Because the bans on abortion - and the coming threat to birth control - are sending many OB/Gyns into retirement - and scaring potential new doctors out of the profession - before they can get criminally charged by ignorant wingnut politicians over basic women's health care.

If trump is trying to walk back the damage he'd done already over abortion - and health care in general - don't listen to him. Look at what he's doing. Look at who he's working with to promote even worse ills on the nation if he - and his cohort Vance - lie and steal their way back into the White House.

The Republican platform on women boils down to one word: SUFFER.

The cruelty remains the point.

For the Love of God and for the women in your lives, Stop Voting Republican.

The Portents of September 2024

So heading into September of this year of election, everything turns into a horse race and every poll gets parsed for omens and portents like the days of Rome (mmm, Rome).

I've gotten out of favor with the constant, obsessive polling that's been going on since at least 2012. While the polling then worked out and proved itself, afterwards the Republicans and the Far Right have figured out how to skew the numbers to where the last couple of election cycles weren't as easily predicted. We're at the point where the polling services are intentionally skewing their populations more rural - and conservative - to where you can't trust them.

Thing is, as the election itself draws nearer, the pollsters do shift their habits to better reflect the two demographics they pursue: Likely Voters and Registered Voters. So at this point, the polling gets to be a little more accurate, although we need to take all of it with a grain of salt (just like the Romans used salt for everyt... ow stop hitting me).

So while we can't take polls for granted this September, looking at results like this from Bloomberg/Morning Consult at least will give us Harris/Walz supporters a good reason to wake up every morning and campaign for voter turnout.

Or as Taniel tweets (STOP CALLING IT X, ELON) keeping track of the Electoral College: 

New Bloomberg/Morning Consult polls (RVs here):

Wisconsin: Harris 52/44
Pennsylvania: Harris 51/47
Nevada: Harris 49/45
Michigan: Harris 49/46
[that's 270+]
Georgia: Harris 49/47
North Carolina: Harris 49/47
Arizona: 48/48

— Taniel (@Taniel) August 29, 2024

Considering what we consider a "battleground state" is something within 1-2 points, to have Wisconsin going for Harris well above "margin of error" should make that state a solid Blue.

Here's where it's good news: Wisconsin is one of the states trump was planning on sowing chaos to prevent an Electoral College count from even happening. If it's too big of a blowout, even trump's cries of "stollen votes" won't be believable.

The growing margins for Harris in places like Michigan and Nevada help solidify the likelihood trump and his lackeys can't deny the Electoral College results. Granted, trump will do everything to prevent Georgia or Arizona getting called - especially with the Georgia Elections Board setting up new rules that would allow for massive tampering by Republicans - but if all the other battleground states go Democratic, the mixed party leadership in those states make it harder to rig the results. As soon as Harris/Walz cross that 270 finish line, trump's whole stunt to throw the results to the House of Representatives becomes moot.

What the map looks like based on the Bloomberg poll.
We can try and flip more states Blue, by the way...

This is the map trump wants, unless Georgia, North Carolina, and Nevada
flip Red to him, in which case we're fucked.

It'll then be an issue of both houses of Congress certifying the Electoral results, and unless Republicans control both next January there's every likelihood enough rational members of the GOP will certify Harris' win.

So that's one of the other things we need to consider this September: It's NOT JUST THE PRESIDENTIAL OFFICE ON THE LINE.

Democrats and Left-leaning Independent voters need to understand that voting for every Democratic candidate for the Senate and the House matter as well. To truly ensure trump can't steal his way back into the White House, there needs to be an Honest-to-God Blue Wave for 2024 covering all 50 states and covering every elected office on the ballot.

GET THE DAMN VOTE OUT, EVERYBODY.

And for the Love of God and Country and Mom and Apple Pie and college football - I blame UF's loss on Ben Sasse's scandals by the by - vote Blue, America.

trump's Violations of Norms and the Beltway's Inability to Cope

Ben Kesling at the Columbia Journalism Review has it right: 

On Tuesday, NPR’s Quil Lawrence and Tom Bowman broke the news that Trump and members of his campaign appeared to violate federal law during an appearance at Arlington to mark the third anniversary of the deadly attack on US troops that punctuated the deeply flawed withdrawal from Afghanistan. Members of Trump’s staff had sought to film the event for a campaign video, and got into an altercation with an Arlington National Cemetery staff member who tried to stop them. Steven Cheung, a Trump campaign official, strongly denied that any altercation had taken place and said the campaign was ready to release a video to prove his point. (They have yet to release it.) It wasn’t surprising that these two NPR pros with deep knowledge of the military, and sources among veterans, were the first with the news. The Washington Post followed with a story the same day, as did the New York Times. The public took note.

As more publications followed suit, the Arlington stories suffered a dreadful fate: they all started to sound the same. News outlets ended up with articles bogged down in parsing federal law, carefully defining what exactly counts as an altercation, and quoting milquetoast official statements like “There was an incident and a report was filed.” 

Lumped together, the reporting this week left readers and listeners, especially those with no knowledge of the military, at a loss to understand what actually happened—and, crucially, why it mattered so much. The Trump campaign team had successfully muddied the waters by alleging that the photographer had been invited to the event by family members of soldiers buried there. 

But as any veteran knows in their bones, the solemnity of the ceremony is exactly why the unauthorized photographer had no business being there—regardless of who invited them...

This is a very big reason why the veterans' organizations and a lot of veterans on social media are livid towards trump right now. And yet, the Beltway media doesn't seem to understand the fury:

Readers needed to know that, when you visit Arlington, you might not know exactly what you’re supposed to do when confronted by those rows of headstones, but you damn sure know what you’re not supposed to do. But the coverage this week left many readers with the impression that the whole thing might have been a bureaucratic mix-up, or some tedious violation of protocol. It focused on bland horse-race coverage so common during election season, rather than clearly stating what really took place: an egregious and willful violation of long-standing norms...

This has been one of the most obvious problems that our mainstream media suffers when it comes to covering trump, especially those moments when trump violates not only the established norms of political comity but also the long-established norms of common courtesy.

Put aside the well-told tales by now of trump's personal inability to understand military service, and his blunt disdain for those who suffered and died in that service. trump simply has no respect or diligence for anything he can't use or abuse.

Look at how trump himself behaved during this staged fiasco. Not only ignoring the cemetery's requirements to not bring his own campaign staff - he did - and not to bring his own photographer - he did, and promptly blamed it on the families he talked into hosting his appearance - and not to turn the memorial service into a partisan event - it became clear he was going to claim the moment was an official ceremony and accuse Biden and Harris of failing to show, in order to paint THEM as disrespectful to the military - trump proceeded to preen and pose at the gravesite of the fallen soldier with a grin and a thumbs up.

I refuse to show that photo on my blog. It is offensive and obscene. It's not that he's desecrating the burial grounds by urinating on the grave marker, it's that he's violating the common custom of treating cemeteries as a solemn and sacred location.

This is on him. This is how trump behaves for ANY photo op: standing with someone or a group who must act "grateful" to be in his presence, flashing that smile like he's happy instead of the dour bad boss he often is, and giving a thumbs up like "I'm perfect, I'm winning!"

And that's trump having no sense of place, no sense of humility, no sense of the gravity or gravitas of the situation, no sense at all really.

You damn sure know what you’re not supposed to do. And trump clearly doesn't know that.

The pity is the goddamned Beltway media doesn't know what to do with trump.

The media is unable to call trump out for his inhumane, clueless, selfish behaviors. They just can't, terrified of seeming biased and getting attacked by the Far Right for speaking the obvious that the GOP standard bearer - hell, the entire Republican Party leadership - is incapable of being a goddamned normal human being. 

This isn't just on the media owners, who are clearly in the tank for a Republican Party that's going to cut taxes for the uber-rich if they regain full control of government this 2024. This is on the editors and the writers and the reporters in the field just genuinely incapable of making the moral decision to point out how immoral trump truly is.

Gods help us.

I should mention how this is a personal matter for me. In the time that this scandal's percolated to this level of trump struggling to blame everyone else for his screwup, I've remembered that my father took me to Arlington a long time ago - probably on that week my older brother got married in Maryland when I was in my 20s - to visit the gravesites of his father and mother. I never met Grandpa Wartenberg - he died in 1968 before I was born - and dad rarely talked about him. Best I recall, my grandfather served as an officer on a Navy submarine during World War II in the Pacific (Grandma died when I was 8, and was buried in another spot in that region because of how the cemetery works). If the Naval records I've read is correct, Grandpa joined the Navy in 1917 and it looked like he served until 1946. If he was on the front lines of the Pacific War, he earned that spot in Arlington. (I need to find more about his duty during the big war).

When we visited, Arlington was a peaceful, calm, quiet place. There were others nearby visiting the graves of their family members, and everyone was solemn. Dad and I paid our respects at the markers, it might have been when dad talked about grandpa's service, but that was it. Nothing fancy. Nothing outlandish. That's all you're expected to do when you're honoring the dead.

trump just can't do that, can he.

/rage

Refreshing the Charges Against trump

Oh, and in case you missed it - and you likely did because the New York Times didn't even put it on the front page like they did with Hillary's emails in 2016 /rage - Special Prosecutor Jack Smith re-indicted donald trump for his role in the January 6th insurrection.

David A Graham at the Atlantic has some of the details (paywalled):

When the Supreme Court ruled last month that presidents are immune from prosecution for anything done as an official act, many observers reacted with immediate horror. They warned that the ruling would allow future presidents to act as despots, doing whatever they like without fear of accountability. And in the immediate term, they predicted doom for the federal case against former President Donald Trump for attempting to subvert the 2020 election.

The effect of the ruling on future presidents will not be clear for some time. But Special Counsel Jack Smith, who is prosecuting Trump for the Justice Department, isn’t acting too rattled by the Supreme Court’s decision.

Smith obtained a superseding indictment today in the case against Trump, whom he had previously charged with four felonies. The new document is a little more concise and changes some language, but it keeps the same four felony charges and most of the same evidence. After taking a few weeks to review the Supreme Court ruling, Smith has apparently concluded that it doesn’t change much about his case at all.

Roberts and his conservative buddies on SCOTUS can try to warp reality all they want, but what trump did was criminal and by GOD he needs to answer for it.

In addition to some slight rephrasing here and there, Smith makes two notable changes. First, he takes out all references to Trump’s attempt to involve the Justice Department in his subversion. Trump, who has spent much of his current presidential campaign warning about the “weaponization” of the federal government, attempted just that as he sought to stay in office. The then-president asked the department to issue a letter saying the election was corrupt and then “leave the rest to me and the R[epublican] Congressmen,” according to meeting notes taken by a DOJ official. One of Trump’s confederates was Jeffrey Clark, a Justice Department official whom Trump tried to install as acting attorney general to further the scheme, before fierce resistance from DOJ and White House lawyers stayed his hand.

But the Supreme Court ruled that “because the President cannot be prosecuted for conduct within his exclusive constitutional authority, Trump is absolutely immune from prosecution for the alleged conduct involving his discussions with Justice Department officials.” The superseding indictment thus takes out references to Trump’s conversations with these officials. It removes Clark from a list of co-conspirators. And it deletes a section of the initial indictment that explained how Trump tried to enlist the department to help solicit slates of false electors from states.

The fact that Smith and his team were able to re-indict trump to basically the same four charges underscores just how much dirt they still have on trump that the Supreme Court can't wash away (for now).

If I can refer to Marcy Wheeler at Emptywheel to get her take on this:

Altogether, the changes incorporate not just SCOTUS’ immunity decision, but also the DC Circuit’s Blassingame decision deeming actions taken as a candidate for office are private acts, and SCOTUS’ Fischer decision limiting the use of 18 USC 1512(c)(2) to evidentiary issues.

The logic of Blassingame is why Jack Smith included these paragraphs describing that Trump and Pence were acting as candidates.

1. The Defendant, DONALD J. TRUMP, was a candidate for President of the United States in 2020. He lost the 2020 presidential election.

[snip]

5. In furtherance of these conspiracies, the Defendant tried–but failed–to enlist the Vice President, who was also the Defendant’s running mate and, by virtue of the Constitution, the President of the Senate, who plays a ceremonial role in the January 6 certification proceeding.

As I’ve said repeatedly, it’s not clear that adopting the Blassingame rubric will work for SCOTUS, even though they did nothing to contest this rubric...

The decision to supersede this indictment may have turned what could have been an immediate dispute about the viability of the indictment at all into an evidentiary dispute to be managed later...

At the very least, Jack Smith suggests he has something viable on which to arraign Trump (and Trump’s Xitter wails treating this as a real indictment suggest he may believe that)...

This should serve - again - as a reminder to the general American voting public that trump is dangerous, that he's not pursuing the presidency for some lofty purpose: trump is running for President to keep his orange ass out of jail. It's not only the criminal charges trump is still facing - not only in DC but also in South Florida as Smith appeals to the appellate level to reinstate the classified documents case Cannon dismissed, and in Georgia with the state fake electors case - but also the criminal matter in Manhattan where he sits with 34 jury-confirmed felonies (with the presiding judge ruling mid-September on what happens next).

And those are the criminal charges and convictions. trump's civil trials found him liable for business fraud, defamation, and sexual assault (that the judge rose to the level of rape).

We've never had a major national party stoop so low as to have a convicted felon and confirmed sex offender like trump running for the highest office in the land (remember, Debs was a minor party candidate who never had a chance).

Every registered voter in America needs to understand how horrifying and criminal that is, and make certain that trump never gets within 100 miles of the White House again.

For the LOVE OF GOD AND JUSTICE, America, STOP VOTING trump.

Violating Sacred Ground for a Photo Op: August 2024 edition

For the LOVE of God, trump's doing it again. Desperate to show himself as a virtuous leader, trump's violating holy ground for a staged photo op: This time our nation's most honored cemetery for our military fallen (via Quil Lawrence and Tom Bowman at NPR):

Two members of Donald Trump's campaign staff had a verbal and physical altercation Monday with an official at Arlington National Cemetery, where the former president participated in a wreath-laying ceremony, NPR has learned.

A source with knowledge of the incident said the cemetery official tried to prevent Trump staffers from filming and photographing in a section where recent U.S. casualties are buried. The source said Arlington officials had made clear that only cemetery staff members would be authorized to take photographs or film in the area, known as Section 60...

Trump participated in an event to mark the third anniversary of a deadly attack on U.S. troops in Afghanistan as U.S. forces withdrew from the country; 13 U.S. service members were killed in the attack. The Trump campaign has blamed President Biden and Vice President Harris, now the Democratic presidential nominee, for the chaotic withdrawal...

trump is also trying to deflect from the reality that it was HIS administration in December 2020 - when it became clear he was losing the election to Biden - that brokered the deal with the Taliban that led to the U.S. withdrawal and collapse of our backed government there. I wish the national media would remember that and not let trump avoid his accountability. Thing is, he's accountable now for possibly violating federal law by staging his photo op where he shouldn't:

In a statement to NPR, Arlington National Cemetery said it "can confirm there was an incident, and a report was filed."

"Federal law prohibits political campaign or election-related activities within Army National Military Cemeteries, to include photographers, content creators or any other persons attending for purposes, or in direct support of a partisan political candidate's campaign," according to the statement. "Arlington National Cemetery reinforced and widely shared this law and its prohibitions with all participants."

Look, if there IS a federal law in the US Code for this, give us the chapter and verse, people! If trump committed a felony trespass, and if he committed a felony campaign violation, if he even committed some dinky misdemeanor in the rule books, charge the son of a bitch.

Stop letting trump get away with his godforsaken campaign stunts that mock everyone and causes real harm to the people he thinks are standing in his way.

And make him answer - one way or another - for the shame he keeps committing against our men and women in the military.

Update 8/28/24: Follow up on social media pointed me to the Code of Federal Regulations - the administrative side of how agencies interpret and enforce the US Code - specifically to 32 CFR 553: Army Cemeteries. The specific rule is 32 CFR 553.32(c):

Memorial services and ceremonies at Army National Military Cemeteries will not include partisan political activities.

The CFR relies on the 38 USC Section 2413 as one of its legal foundations: It issues the prohibition any form of protest or disruption at a memorial service. While trump wasn't protesting per se, his photo op staging could well have led to such disruptions, hence the ban.

Some of the legal experts I know at TNC's Horde are pointing out there may be no criminal remedy - except for the physical assault of a park ranger - but civil ones. Still, trump needs to understand he can't get away with this outrageous bullshit of turning our national memorial sites into his playgrounds.

The Joy

Update: Thank you Steve in Manhattan at Crooks & Liars for sharing this article at Mike's Blog Round-Up! Hope everyone enjoyed the DNC this week, hope you've ordered your BALLZ TO THE WALZ t-shirts like I have, and get the damn vote out for every Democratic candidate across all 50 states! Let's EFFING GOOOOO....

There is a thrill to the Democratic Party campaign I haven't seen in ages.

The current national convention in Chicago is humming with delight, musicians showing up to perform during otherwise staid roll calls, genuine laughs and cheers from audiences not just sitting there applauding politely on cue. For all of the discontent from the media elites, and for the legitimate criticisms from protestors outside that the party is ignoring the suffering in Gaza, and for all the dread about another trump attempt to hijack the elections; the Democratic voting base is enjoying the moment with the kind of hope for the future not seen since Obama's victorious celebration in Grant Park when he won in 2008.

Amanda Marcotte at Salon is documenting the atrocities sorry bad habit, documenting the pleasantries:

Organizers kicked off the Democratic National Convention by immediately demonstrating that they know how to throw a party better than Republicans. Democrats scheduled their elderly leader who rambles on too long for the first night, not the last. President Joe Biden's Monday night speech started slow and only got more boring, but the crowd cheered him gamely, chanting, "Thank you, Joe!" Part of that was real gratitude for the surprisingly effective job he's done in his four years in office. But the cheers reflected the attendees' joy at knowing this whole thing is done with. It's time to move forward with a candidate who embodies their hopes for the future...

That word matters.

In contrast, Donald Trump's capstone speech at the Republican National Convention was disastrous. Biden may have been long-winded and boring, but Trump was all those things while also sounding objectively weird. His speech ping-ponged between self-pity and incoherence, delivered in that odd sing-song quiet voice he uses when his aides tell him to act "serious." The crowd, always eager to flatter the cult leader's ego, cheered, but it felt forced and exhausted...

It's odd how the RNC was barely a month ago, and yet is utterly forgettable now. The only detail I can recall from it was how a number of attendees band-aided their ear in honor of trump's surviving that assassination attempt the week before... an event that has already dropped off of most people's awareness and something that failed to generate any level of sympathy or concern outside of the MAGA base.

As Andrew O'Hehir wrote about the RNC last month, the convention was "a startlingly quiet, polite, low-energy event." We did witness the audience get hyped up for Hulk Hogan, but even that has caveats: It was the last night, so more people bothered to show up. Hogan is a professional wrestler, an expert at riling up crowds over nonsense. (Though the actual message of his speech was terrifying and fascistic.) And frankly, after four days of listlessly wandering around hoping something interesting might happen, the attendees seemed eager to feel something. But Trump destroyed Hogan's hard work with his whining, droning, weird speech. 

On Tuesday night, Harris made the contrast crystal clear by holding a rally at the Fiserv Forum, where the RNC was held. (Personal insert: Milwaukee is literally up the road from Chicago, so Harris traveling to Fiserv wasn't a burden) It speaks volumes about the enthusiasm gap that it's not even surprising that the turnout and volume at this Harris rally outdid what Trump got at his own convention last month.

The difference was dramatic enough that Harris and her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, appeared at the DNC by remote video from Milwaukee. It created the visual effect of more than doubling what Trump was able to turn, despite covering his ear with a comically oversized bandage and everything...

One of the things about long political campaigns is the belief in Momentum (the Big Mo as Bush the Elder called it), and if the differences between the party conventions are any evidence, all of the Big Mo is with Kamala:

With Harris as the nominee, however, you can feel Democratic voters unclenching. This is not a crowd that feels "triggered." The mood is giddy. There's a scent of hope in the air. There's plenty of criticism of Trump, but it's no longer coming from a place of cornered animals trying to survive. The tone towards that babbling old fascist is one of contempt. Instead of flinching, Democrats are laughing in Trump's face. No wonder he's even more obsessed with crowd sizes and ratings than usual. He used to be the one offering entertainment value, even if it was only to his base that just wanted to inflict pain on their perceived enemies. Now it's Harris who is captivating, this time to a nation that wants to feel something other than despair...

I can speak to the enthusiasm among the political circles I keep: both the TNC Horde and the Balloon Juice commentariat are bouncing off the walls like it's a romper room. Hell, even the Rude Pundit is giddy:

It was simple. I thought, "Man, we need this." And by "this," I mean all the joy and energy and possibility being embodied on that stage. But it's not only about this moment. We need this because the one thing that's been missing as we emerged from the worst part of the Covid pandemic (and recognizing that Covid is still very much a problem) is a catharsis, some release where we all recognize that we survived. And it's not just a catharsis for getting through the lockdowns and mass deaths and required health safety measures. It's a catharsis for surviving the presidency of Donald Trump, which took this country down some incredibly dark alleys, leaving it battered and weary, with a good deal of PTSD.

We couldn't actually celebrate, or even fully exhale, because hanging over all of us was the tension of what would bring the Trump saga to its end. We waited for something to validate the anger we had and to demonstrate that things would be different. We hoped that Trump would be convicted and sent to prison, but that didn't happen and may not. 

The election of Joe Biden was an absolutely necessary step to get to this point. We needed someone who knew how the federal government worked inside and out, an old hand to get to the bridge and right the ship, weld the holes, scrub off the rust, get rid of the piles of garbage, and get us back on course, all while restocking the bar. We were all scared out of our weary minds in 2020, awaiting the even deadlier next surge of Covid deaths that was coming in January 2021. Then January 6th happened, and our sense of security in the very things that are supposed to function in this country were undermined, all while watching a large percentage of the population go down a red-capped abyss of crazy and conspiracies they will likely never return from. Biden's skill was in allowing the rest of us to chill out, to see that the government hadn't lost the ability to actually work.

In the last few months, though, everything kept hitting us, even as Trump was found guilty or liable, owing hundreds of millions of dollars. All of it still didn't lead us to anything like a feeling of completion, a feeling we could, indeed, move on. We were hit again and again with insane Supreme Court decisions, with the polls that showed Biden losing, with Biden's obvious signs of aging, with this feeling that it was all going to go south again. We would stick by Biden if we had to (and more than a few were doing so gladly), but, my god, we needed celebration. We needed joy. Real joy, not the kind of joy that says, "We made it," but the joy that says, "We crushed it." We need to face our American demons, who are easily identifiable, and we need to unify to exorcise them and send them back to whatever crevices in the earth they crawled out of, not just defeat them at the polls...

A previous Democratic leader once clarified that "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself," but FDR spoke to the rational demands of the moment and to the urgency of recovering from the Great Depression. The demands and urgency we face today have more to do with recovering from the emotional traumas of things like 9/11, the failed War on Terror, the economic chaos threatened by Silicon Valley "disruptors" looking to profit from fanciful shell games, the overwhelming Culture War madness of misogynists looking to take rights away from women and of racists looking to take rights away from ethnics they deemed "Other".

The opposite emotion to Fear in many ways is Joy, a means to build well-being for the self, the delight of the new and the willingness to celebrate. In the face of Republican Fearmongering, it has been a long time since Democrats fought back using Joy not as a shield but as a weapon, cutting through the dour unhappiness of the likes of trump and JD Vance who scowl at their rallies and lie about how America is "doomed" unless they take over as our overlords.

The Democrats are campaigning this year on Joy, not as a slogan but as an emotional buttress, a foundation on which all other policy positions will rest, allowing the nation to build not only on the successes of Biden's administration but on the future of Harris' potential tenure.

This is a campaign movement of Joy that can thrive, that can inspire millions to turn out to vote, with every sign this post-convention that the Democratic ground game will run with this emotion all the way to victory in 2024.

...

Just remember to keep the lawyers on payroll to stop trump and his Republican lackeys from the electoral chaos they're planning to unleash, please and thank you.

It's Campaign Time 2024 and the Beltway Is Still Broken

As the Democratic National Convention continues this week, apparently the national punditry are raging into the void about how they got bamboozled by the Biden retirement/Harris promotion (via Meredith Shiner at New Republic): 

...Trump (in 2016) was unique among that field of suits in that he did not slide from Polite Washington’s slick political candidate widget factory. He didn’t care to perform the same canned lines on tax rates, entitlements, or the national debt. And he showed the world that audiences didn’t care about that long-running political vaudeville act, either. The Trump era, however you define it, yielded few gifts and cured little about the broken political discourse coming out of Washington. But if it didn’t wreck the political press’s performative vacuity, it at least exposed it for all to see.

Now, with nearly four years of Trump out of the White House, Trump back on the trail, and a Democrat at the top of the ticket who can actually campaign, the gap between the Beltway Truman Show and what people outside of D.C. actually are experiencing is widening. And this rift in reality imperils the media at a time when journalism is fighting a multifront war against anti-truth Republicans, declining revenue, and predatory venture capital mismanagement...

The problems of campaign coverage from 2016 wasn't entirely all about trump: The National Media had been suffering with embarrassments and acts of self-immolation ever since they went all in on Bill Clinton's sex scandals and wondered how the hell the rest of the nation stopped trusting them. It didn't help in 2016 that Hillary was there to incite the media mob into a dangerous binary world-view that made Hillary a threat to everyone and not trump. But I digress.

When Trump burst onto the scene, I was still a reporter in Washington covering national politics and Congress. I watched as the journalism-industrial complex of D.C. reporters and operatives around me tried to cast Trump as an atypical candidate who blew up the Republican Party. Casting Trump as an outlier—trying to make him an aberration instead of an outgrowth of a decades-long Republican effort to break our country—obscured the collective national gaze from something much more troubling for the people who make their living on politics: Trump didn’t break the Republican Party at all. He just broke the made-up Washington rules that empowered every lobbyist, reporter, and staffer to attend parties together without fear or reservation.

The Republican Party had been dying for some time, when as a party they decided to shift to a Culture War narrative light on policy and heavy on demonizing fellow Americans. trump merely saw the weak spots in the GOP relationship between leaders and voters and overtook control of the wingnut base. The national media elites had no idea how to explain that - not only to the citizenry but also to themselves - and so have been flailing about trying to find anything that would fit their "both sides!" or "let's have bipartisanship!" world-views. America's punditry are stuck in a bubble of their own. Back to Shiner:

Because if this summer has revealed anything, it’s that, just like the Scott Walkers of yore, we are watching the national media short-circuit before our very eyes. They are insular. They are unprepared. And after years of watching Morning Joe and searching for their birthdays in the Politico Playbook, they do not see their role as speaking to us, but rather speaking to themselves. While this may seem ancillary to the main plotline of our national politics, the mainstream media own-goaling themselves out of civic relevance is a net negative for anyone who believes in the outcome of better, more representative, good government.

For years, largely because Republicans are better at working the refs and crying foul about any effort by the media to hold them accountable for their actions, the idea that the media are dyed-in-the-wool liberals has become the orthodoxy. Of course, the Beltway media are conservative. This is not a novel argument by any means: It’s an industry run by (increasingly reactionary) plutocrats, who reliably summon their charges to lead a highly effective, “But how will you pay for it?” pincer movement against anything resembling liberal policy. Meanwhile, there is seemingly no sin grievous enough to earn a Republican the same sort of nullifying skepticism—the Trumpists who aided and abetted the former president’s attempt to overturn a lawful election remain in the good graces of America’s cable news bookers.

Still, we need to acknowledge that the media are conservative in the most traditional, unideological sense of the word: They are clinging to a status quo, their status quo, that has not matched our reality since Barack Obama was elected president in 2008 and the Tea Party emerged as the energized manifestation of Ronald Reagan’s 1980s fever dreams. Their rules, their conventional wisdom, their savvy takes become more stale, more detached from normal life, and more cartoonish with every passing day...

I argued about this earlier about how the modern Beltway media elites are still obsessing over the Reagan Era like it's still 1985, with Green Eagle making a solid case that the ultra-rich owners of the media outlets have their own (anti-tax and deregulation) agendas to pursue. Either way, we are talking about an entire profession - journalism - unable to fulfill even the most basic functions of that job - to provide Objective (fact-driven) reporting - because they've sunk entirely into Subjective self-absorbed pandering to each other in the news business.

The problem is that we as a nation - we Americans as a people - need objective factual reporting to keep us informed properly about our choices when it comes time to use our power to elect our representatives and our leaders. We're not getting any of that when the headline writers and the front-page opinion pundits and the talk show guests can't even be correct about what they're selling us in their columns and podcasts.

Just again a reminder: For the national media elites, there is no accountability for being wrong (or self-centered). Maureen Dowd could spend the first half of 2024 screaming that Biden needed to step down from the presidential campaign, and less than a month after he did so accuse the Democratic Party of "pulling a coup" that she refuses to admit her own role in it. THIS is how that punditry acts - and reacts - and when things don't go their way they'll throw a conniption far bigger than anything crybaby trump puts out.

Until the national press comes to terms with the current reality that they are biased (and towards trump and other Far Right wingnuts); until the punditry realizes they are not the heroes of their own narratives, they are accomplices in the Far Right's schemes; until the likes of Dowd and David Brooks and the majority of swelled heads at the New York Times and Washington Post settle the fuck down: We are not going to get an honest story out of any of them.

And it's still up to us to tune out their ego-driven narratives and focus on what matters most: keeping criminal trump out of the White House and banishing the Republican Party from the national stage this November general election.

Get the damn votes out, everyone.

Let's Effing Go: Ballz to the Walz Shirt Is HERE

It took forever, but the Ballz to the Walz shirt finally got in the mailbox!

And it fits (so far, things may shrink in the wash, alas)!

The arched eyebrow is noticeable, but I think I need to smile a little more.

Oh, and the Democratic National Convention starts tonight.

LET'S EFFING GO! LET'S WIN ALL 50 STATES (well okay maybe not Idaho)!!!

BALLZ

TO

THE

WALZ