Author Archives: weeklysift

Doug Muder is a former mathematician who now writes about politics and religion. He is a frequent contributor to UU World.

Positive Influences

September 16, 2024 – 12:40 pm

Haitians are — culturally, my wife Fran and I have seen this when we’ve been down in Haiti — education is prized. So when you look at all of these things, people who want to work, people who value their kids, who value education, you know, these are positive influences on our community in Springfield, and any comment about that otherwise, I think, is hurtful and is not helpful to the city of Springfield and the people of Springfield.

– Mike DeWine, Republican Governor of Ohio

This week’s featured posts are “Where the race stands” and “Lessons from the Haitian Fright“.

This week everybody was talking about the debate

One featured post discusses where the race stands post-debate. This note is just about the debate itself. [video, transcript]

All week, MAGA has been throwing stuff at the wall to try to explain how their God-Hero got completely outclassed by a Black woman he has claimed is “dumb as a rock“. So far I’ve heard:

  • It didn’t happen. Trump actually won. But apparently that story wasn’t convincing even in MAGA-World, so they also had to come up with explanations for Trump’s defeat.
  • The moderators were against him. It wasn’t fair to fact-check him more just because he lied more frequently and more outrageously than Harris. Moderators should have sat there stone-faced when Trump claimed babies are being executed after birth, immigrants in Ohio are eating dogs and cats, or that Trump was being “sarcastic” when he admitted that he had lost the 2020 election.
  • Kamala must have gotten the questions ahead of time. Obviously there is no way Harris could have anticipated that she would be asked about inflation, abortion, immigration …
  • Kamala’s earring was really an earphone. I suspect this claim is motivated by jealousy. Trump’s handlers wish he had been wearing an earphone, so they could have kept yelling “Forget about crowd sizes! Get back to inflation!”
  • Kamala was using witchcraft. Seriously. Lance Wallnau, the so-called “father of American Dominionism” detected the “occult empowered deception, manipulation, and domination” on Harris’ side, and believes that “something supernatural needs to disrupt this counterfeit momentum”. Clearly we need to throw her in a lake and see if she floats. This theory has one advantage over all the others: It explains why Trump floundered. (How could Harris knowing the questions cause Trump to sound like a raving lunatic?) But if Kamala is secretly the reincarnation of Marie Laveau — I can sort of see a resemblance — it all makes sense. He rambled and told outrageous lies not because he’s old and his brain never did work very well, but because she cast a spell of confusion on him. [BTW: MAGA really should thank me for doing that bit of historical research. If it catches on, we’ll know they read the Sift.]

Trump managed to pull a bunch of that together into this totally sane and rational Truth Social post:

ABC FAKE NEWS has been completely discredited, and is now under investigation. Did they give Comrade Kamala the questions? It was 3 on 1, but they were mentally challenged people, against one person of extraordinary genius. It wasn’t even close, as is now reflected in the polls. I WON THE DEBATE!

About the polls … well, no, they don’t say Trump won the debate. But why would Trump start telling the truth at this late date?

My favorite post-debate meme went something like: “No wonder Trump thinks Harris is a Marxist. She just publicly owned him.”

Trump has taken a lot of well-deserved ridicule for claiming to have only “concepts of a plan” on healthcare. (He’s been using that phrase at least since 2019.) Paul Krugman explains what’s going on here: The “phenomenal” healthcare plan Trump has been vaguely discussing since 2015 provides affordable coverage to all Americans. But there are really only two ways to do this:

  1. The government insures people directly, as in Bernie’s Medicare for All proposal.
  2. The government subsidizes private insurance, as in ObamaCare.

Trump has repeatedly said these options are both “disasters“, so he’s stuck. He can fantasize about having an all-singing all-dancing program that solves everybody’s problems. But there’s no way to flesh out that fantasy, so it never develops beyond a “concept”.

BTW: Trump’s “concepts of a plan” flashed me back to a party scene in “Annie Hall”, where you overhear some random guest saying: “Right now it’s only a notion, but I think I can get money to make it into a concept, and later turn it into an idea.”

The eating-cats-and-dogs thing grew into its own featured post.

and shots fired on Trump’s golf course

We don’t know much yet. Sunday, Secret Service agents clearing the hole ahead of Trump spotted a gun barrel in the bushes. They engaged a man who ran away. Reportedly, shots were fired, but whether any were fired by the man in the bushes or just by the agents is unclear. Trump was unharmed. The man, a White American, is now in custody. He appears to be strongly pro-Ukraine, but it’s not clear whether that was his motive in stalking Trump.

Trump supporters online have been irresponsibly linking this apparent assassination attempt to the previous attempt, and blaming both on a mysterious “them”. Here’s Marjorie Taylor Greene:

They are trying to kill him!!! They will do anything to stop him from winning.

As a firmly anti-Trump liberal, let me say this: I don’t want him killed and I’m glad nothing came of this attempt. I want Trump discredited, not dead. I want to see him defeated in the election, and I want him to get fair trials on his indictments. If he does go to trial again, I will be rooting for him to be convicted and sentenced to jail. But I don’t want him killed. A Trump assassination would probably only unleash something worse on America.

and Laura Loomer

I’ve decided not to touch the rumors that Trump and Loomer are having an affair. Too often, when a woman rises to some form of prominence, hostile people claim she must be using sex somehow. It’s wrong when Trump says it about Harris, and it’s wrong here too.

But I don’t need to lose my PG-13 rating to criticize Loomer, or to criticize Trump for associating with her. Last week, Loomer responded to a Kamala Harris tweet celebrating her Indian grandparents with a blatantly racist post:

If @KamalaHarris wins, the White House will smell like curry & White House speeches will be facilitated via a call center and the American people will only be able to convey their feedback through a customer satisfaction survey at the end of the call that nobody will understand.

That was too racist even for Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lindsey Graham. Always quick to take the high road, Loomer responded to Graham by asking him when he was going to come out of the closet.

The Bulwark’s Sam Stein observed that if Republicans are worried about Trump being influenced by a conspiracy theorist, that ship sailed a long time ago. He provided a long list of Trump-promoted conspiracy theories going back to Vince Foster’s suicide and questioning whether Osama bin Laden had really been killed.

Marcy Wheeler points out that the Loomer problem is the same as the Putin problem: Trump can be manipulated by flattery.

The problem isn’t Laura Loomer. She’s little different than all the other extremists who remain in Trump’s good graces by performing near-perfect sycophancy. The problem is precisely what Tim Walz warned: Trump’s narcissism and his ego make him weak, vulnerable to any person willing to use flattery to win their objectives. Trump’s aides are making the same argument Tim Walz is: that Trump doesn’t have the self-control to protect against extremists making him their ready tool.

and you also might be interested in …

Just in case you had any doubt that Trump takes everything personally, he posted “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT” to Truth Social Sunday morning. I love the response from never-Trump Republican Rick Wilson:

Invading Moscow in the winter, fighting a land war in Asia, and going up against the Swifties. These are well regarded as key strategic mistakes in history.

And speaking of Taylor, I am struck speechless by Elon Musk’s offer to “give you a child and guard your cats with my life”. Usually when I see some outrageous statement, I can imagine some situation or some state of mind where I might be tempted to say something similar. But I’ve got nothing here. I have no idea what Elon could have been thinking.

In my post about the Haitian Fright, I forgot to mention a Chicago hotdog shop’s attempt to make commercial hay out of the controversy:

Don’t have time to read the Project 2025 manual? Listen to the song instead.

Various people have speculated that Republicans drummed up the Springfield pet-eating story to distract from something else. Here’s one possibility: The Republican candidate running against Sherrod Brown for the Senate has been lying about selling off his business interests, and also about having an MBA.

But I find myself agreeing with David Roberts:

It is getting very difficult to determine which MAGA fiasco is supposed to be a distraction from the other MAGA fiascos.

and let’s close with something visual

Some while ago I did a closing featuring a Dad who photoshopped his kids. It seems he’s still at it. Here we see a demonstration of a basic principle of physics: Actions produce equal and opposite reactions.

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Where the race stands

September 16, 2024 – 11:36 am

The conventions and probably the only Harris/Trump debate are behind us now.
Can we say who’s winning?

The story so far. Last September, President Joe Biden started falling behind former President Donald Trump in the polls , and then their debate in June made the situation worse. As of July 19, The Hill’s polling average had Trump ahead by 3.3% — not a certain loss for Biden, but hardly an encouraging situation. Then on July 21, Biden withdrew from the race in favor of his vice president, Kamala Harris.

Many observers, including me, had predicted that replacing Biden would produce chaos, possibly turning a difficult race into an impossible one. That prediction looks silly now. (My own failures are one reason why I discourage taking speculation seriously.) In fact, no other major Democrat showed an interest in contesting for the nomination, and the Democratic Party quickly united behind Harris.

Everything has gone well for Harris since then. Her ascension to the top of the ticket produced a huge wave of excitement and a corresponding outpouring of both volunteer commitments and financial contributions. Her choice of Tim Walz as VP has been popular. To Trump’s consternation, the Democratic Convention was watched by more people than his Republican Convention, and Harris’ well-constructed and well-delivered acceptance speech contrasted favorably with his record-long 92-minute ramble. Tuesday, Harris dominated Trump in a one-on-one debate. (More on the debate in the following post.)

After all that, you might imagine she would be far ahead, but not so. In The Hill’s polling average, she has almost exactly the same lead Trump had over Biden: 3.4%. 538 has the race even closer: 2.7%.

The Electoral College. If all Harris had to do was win the popular vote, things would be looking pretty good for her. But due to the Constitutional Convention, whose motives are still hotly debated, the United States elects its president through an electoral college in which every state gets at least three votes, with more depending on population. That has always produced a bias towards the small states, and in the current era it gives Republicans a consistent advantage. In 2000 and 2016 that advantage was decisive, as Republicans won the presidency with fewer votes than their Democratic opponents. These Republican victories have had consequences: the Iraq War, a long delay in our government recognizing climate change, and the 6-3 partisan majority on the Supreme Court, just to name the most obvious ones.

In 2016, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by 2.1% and lost; in 2020 Joe Biden got 4.5% more votes and won. But an across-the-board shift of .63% in Trump’s favor would have flipped Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin, producing a 269-269 tie in the Electoral College. (.63% was the margin in Wisconsin, the other two were closer.) The election would have gone to the House, where each state gets one vote and Republicans held a 26-23-1 advantage. In short, if Biden had only won the popular vote by 3.8%, Trump would be president.

In 2016, a .77% shift towards Hillary would have flipped Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, giving her the election. So a Clinton 2.9% victory would have been enough.

So it’s a reasonable guess that a 2.5% Harris victory wouldn’t be enough, but a 4% victory would.

State polls. Almost everyone believes that a Trump victory is secure in 23 states with 187 electoral votes, while a Harris win is reliable in 17 states (actually 16 plus DC) with 203 electoral votes. That leaves 11 with uncertain results, plus singleton electoral votes in Maine and Nebraska, which allocate a vote to each of their congressional districts.

Some of those “uncertain” states have a definite lean, and would only go the other way in a national rout. So an average of recent polls has Harris up 6.7% in New Hampshire and 8.0% in Virginia, while every recent poll of New Mexico has Harris up at least 5%. Trump is up 4.3% in Florida, which is hardly insurmountable, but still significant. If you allocate those votes, Harris is ahead 225-217.

That leaves the generally accepted list of “battleground” states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, plus the two singletons. Polling is unreliable for the singletons, but Harris is leading in both, so let’s go to 227-217, while making a note to be suspicious of a conclusion that has Harris winning by 2 EVs or less. Here are the 538 polling averages in the remaining states:

Wisconsin (10 EV): Harris +2.6
Michigan (15): Harris +1.5
Pennsylvania (19): Harris +0.6
Nevada (6): Harris +0.3
North Carolina (16): Trump +0.5
Arizona (11): Trump +0.7
Georgia (16): Trump +0.7

Winning Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania gives Harris 271, so she would need at least one of the singletons. A shift of 0.8% in her direction and she sweeps the battleground states. A shift of 0.7% against her and Trump becomes president again.

Now you have some idea how close things really are.

Campaign strategies. The two campaigns are not approaching the battleground states equally. The Trump campaign is focusing its spending on a narrow path to 270 (or perhaps only 269), believing it mainly needs to win Georgia and Pennsylvania. (So far, they do not seem to take seriously the possibility of losing North Carolina.)

Meanwhile the Harris campaign understands that its most direct path to victory consists of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. But they are also putting significant resources into Georgia, Arizona, and North Carolina.

Intangibles. Now we’re into speculation, which I’ve already discouraged you from doing. Going forward, I believe Democrats have an intangible advantage in this campaign based on a simple fact: We have better candidates. I mean this in terms of basic political skills. Day-in, day-out from here to Election Day, I think that Harris and Walz will give better speeches, do better interviews, connect better face-to-face, and make better commercials than Trump and Vance. We saw that in the debate, and I think it will continue.

Also, Harris is reality-based and Trump is not. Trump’s people are afraid to tell him unpleasant facts, and this will cause him to make bad decisions down the stretch. The Harris campaign will consistently get more out of its resources, because the Trump campaign has always been at least partially a grift, holding events at Trump properties and booking ads through Trump-favored firms.

Democrats have spent far more money on their ground game than Republicans, who have focused more on mythical election fraud than on getting out the vote.

In all recent cycles we’ve seen election-day surprises, as the vote totals failed to match the polls. In 2016 and 2020, those polling errors favored Republicans, but in 2022 they favored Democrats. This year, it may all come down to voters who make up their minds in the voting booth. And here, I think the diminishing enthusiasm for Trump will take its toll. In 2016 he was the exciting candidate. (Wouldn’t it be a hoot to see him as president?) But in 2024 he’s the boring candidate, the one who talks endlessly about his own grievances and grudges. His constant appeals to anger and hate are exhausting.

My hunch — based on nothing but my own intuition, which has failed before — is that large numbers of Americans will go into the voting booth and think “This could all be over.”

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Lessons from the Haitian Fright

September 16, 2024 – 9:52 am

Many Americans are ready to believe and pass on any horrifying rumor they hear about non-White immigrants, without checking their sources or looking too hard at the evidence. Trump, Vance, and other Republican politicians have been eager to exploit this gullibility.

The Simpsons is set in Springfield because there are 35 Springfields in various states, including five in Wisconsin alone. So wherever you live, the Simpson house might be just down the road. Given this near-universality, it shouldn’t be surprising that the Trump/Vance lies about the Springfield in Ohio have grabbed public attention on both sides of our political divide. If immigrants really are stealing and eating pets in Springfield, your pets may be in danger too. Conversely, if Trump can tell such a baseless and vicious lie about Springfield, he could just as easily lie about your town, your neighbors, or even you.

It’s important to be clear from the beginning: He is lying. Everybody from the local police to the city manager to the Republican governor of Ohio has denied this pernicious internet rumor, which is a lesson in how easy it is to create “evidence” for anything. (Here’s a photo that purports to show a Haitian in Springfield carrying off two geese, presumably to eat. Actually it’s a non-Haitian in Columbus, removing two road-kill geese from the pavement.)

Lots of articles trace the rumor through right-wing sources that invented it, so I’ll cover that history only briefly: The influx of legal Haitian immigrants in recent years had created discomfort among some White Springfield citizens. During Covid, city services got stretched — as services did nearly everywhere — and some locals blamed the Haitians. In any large group, somebody will eventually do something wrong; last year, an unlicensed Haitian driver killed an 11-year-old boy (whose parents have begged the public not to use their son’s death to fan hatred). That created an exploitable opportunity for neo-Nazi groups like Blood Pride, which began targeting Springfield with negative disinformation about the immigrants. From there, stories multiplied until the eating-dogs-and-cats rumor got started. It spread mainly online, and not so much by word-of-mouth in Springfield itself. Then J. D. Vance picked it up, from which it got to Trump.

If you want more detail, I can recommend a post on Justin Ling’s blog Bug-Eyed and Shameless, which relates the story to the Irish Fright of 1688, when tens of thousands of panicked Englishmen barricaded bridges and crossroads to stop the advance of marauding Irish troops, who in fact did not exist.

The Irish Fright didn’t make it into my high-school history texts, but maybe it should have. There’s a lot to learn from what what 19th-century historian Charles Mackay famously dubbed “extraordinary popular delusions“.

How racism manifests. To begin with, the Haitian Fright of 2024 provides a teaching opportunity about racism. I am constantly seeing accounts from White people online and on television, who believe they are not racist because they don’t internally experience what they imagine racism to be: a blind and senseless hatred of other races. “I don’t hate anyone,” they claim, and believe that they are telling the truth.

But the Haitian Fright points out a more subtle and widespread kind of racism: a propensity to believe (and even pass on) negative stories about other races without requiring evidence. A sudden influx of Scots or Danes could have put just as big a strain Springfield’s schools and hospitals, but I doubt we’d be hearing stories about them eating cats.

A similar lesson can be drawn from the Birther controversy of the Obama years (where Trump also was a major player). Many Whites were eager to believe that Barack Obama wasn’t a legitimate president, so they credited any justification for that belief, no matter how flimsy. The birther story served to mediate their racism: They could deny that they disapproved of Obama’s presidency because he was Black, and instead disapprove because he wasn’t really an American. But they believed that evidence-free claim because he was Black.

Myths about immigration. Similarly, many Americans claim that they don’t object to immigrants per se, but only to illegal immigrants. If people would only come to America “the right way, like my ancestors did”, they would be welcomed.

Personally, my ancestors arrived in the United States from Germany in the mid-1800s. And yes, they did come “the right way”, but at the time there was no wrong way. Other than occasional quarantines for health reasons, the US had few restrictions on immigration prior to the openly racist Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.

You know who else is here the right way? The Haitians in Springfield. They qualify for a program known as “temporary protected status“, which provides legal status to people from countries which (because of either natural disaster or political unrest) are not safe to return to. Others came “as part of a parole program that allows citizens and lawful residents to apply to have their family members from Haiti come to the United States”.

And Springfield is lucky to have them. Governor DeWine said yesterday:

Here’s what we do know, though. What we know is that the Haitians who are in Springfield are legal. They came to Springfield to work. Ohio is on the move, and Springfield has really made a great resurgence with a lot of companies coming in. The Haitians came in to work for these companies. What the companies tell us is that they are very good workers. They’re happy to have them there. And frankly, that has helped the economy.

This matches an observation Deborah and James Fallows made in their book Our Towns, about their travels across America, particularly in the section about Dodge City, Kansas: One key difference between small towns that are dying and those that are thriving is that the thriving towns are welcoming immigrants rather than discouraging them.

Governor DeWine had previously mentioned his own trips to Haiti and observed:

[I]n Haiti education is prized. So when you look at all of these things, people who want to work, people who value their kids, who value education, you know, these are positive influences on our community in Springfield, and any comment about that otherwise, I think, is hurtful and is not helpful to the city of Springfield and the people of Springfield.

In short, whatever you may think you want out of immigrants — legal status, work ethic, family values … anything other than white skin and speaking English since birth — the Haitians of Springfield have it.

Another complaint I’ve run into is that the Biden administration “sent” the Haitians to Springfield. Here’s J. D. Vance:

Kamala Harris dropped 20,000 Haitian migrants into a small Ohio town and chaos has ensued.

But like any person with legal status in the US, the Haitians can go where they like. They weren’t “sent” or “dropped”, they came to Springfield looking for work and a low cost of living.

Thousands of new jobs had been created [in Springfield], thanks to a successful effort by the city’s leadership and Chamber of Commerce to attract new business to Springfield, which sits between Columbus and Dayton. Once a manufacturing hub, Springfield saw its economy shrink after factories closed and jobs migrated overseas. By about 2015, its population had dwindled to under 60,000, from about 80,000 in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Companies that set up shop, however, confronted a dire labor shortage.

Haitians in Florida, Haiti and South America heard from friends and family about Springfield and its need for workers. They began arriving to take jobs in warehouses, manufacturing and the service sector, and employers urged the new workers to encourage other Haitians to join them.

We often hear how jarring it must be for a town of 60,000 to accommodate 15,000-or-so new residents. But few note that the immigrants are simply restoring Springfield to its historic size. They are making Springfield great again.

Consequences. History teaches that lies can lead to violence, particularly when they make a group of people seem monstrous or subhuman. The pet-eating lie has been likened to the blood libel against Jews, which often circulated prior to pogroms. According to the libel, Jews needed the blood of Christian children to ritually prepare matzah for Passover. So any child who went missing prior to Passover could spark a bloody attack on a town’s Jews.

Often associated with the Middle Ages, a blood libel pogrom happened as recently as 1946 in Poland. Forty-two newly returned Holocaust survivors were killed.

The pet-eating lie has not yet led to any murders in Springfield. But a series of bomb threats followed Trump’s outburst at Tuesday’s debate. City hall had to be shut down on Thursday. Friday, a middle school closed and two elementary schools had to be evacuated. Saturday, two hospitals went into lockdown. Two local colleges have temporarily shut down in-person classes. I can only imagine the bullying that Haitian children are experiencing in schools all over the country.

Thank you, Mr. Trump.

Trump has expressed no remorse and repeated the lie Friday in California, long after it had been widely debunked. On talk shows Sunday, J. D. Vance simultaneously acknowledged that the stories are false while justifying his own role in continuing to spread them.

On Sunday, Ohio’s junior senator was pressed by journalists as to why the Trump campaign was spreading a claim it could provide no evidence for beyond the anecdotal “I heard it on television” excuse Trump himself gave during the debate.

On CNN, he seemingly admitted that his claims were lies, then continued by saying that he would keep spreading such tales, even knowing them to be untrue, if they resulted in the media talking about issues he claimed were still just as real despite the deception.

“If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do,” said the senator.

It is worth pointing out that even though non-citizens can’t vote, anyone legally in the State of Ohio is Vance’s constituent. (That’s why congressional districts are distributed according to total population rather than the number of citizens, a provision Republicans are trying to overturn.) He has a responsibility to them whether he recognizes it or not.

Vance’s interviews point out something else: He and Trump are often accused of “falling for” the pet-eating lie, as if the problem were simply their gullibility in the face of an internet conspiracy theory. But they haven’t fallen for anything. They looked for a hateful lie they could tell about immigrants, and they found one.

What is a joke? The internet is now full of cat-and-dog-eating memes, most of which are intended to be humorous. Both sides are spreading them with very different motives. For Democrats, the lie is so unbelievable that people who are taken in by it deserve to be laughed at. That’s why many of my liberal friends have shared The Kiffness’ musical version of Trump’s debate lines. The song doesn’t explicitly criticize Trump, but does make him seem ridiculous.

Meanwhile, Republicans are indulging in bully-humor, as they so often do. By posting a cat-eating meme with three laugh-till-I-cry emojis, Ted Cruz can promote cruelty towards immigrants while hiding behind a veneer of comedy. When challenged, he is undoubtedly saying, “It’s a joke! Doesn’t anybody have a sense of humor any more?”

The problem, of course, is that not everyone agrees that it’s a joke. Many on the internet still take the Haitian Fright seriously, and virtually no Republicans are condemning Trump for promoting it. (Even Governor DeWine has stopped short of faulting Trump or specifically asking him to stop.) And even if they did agree, jokes can still be cruel.

As for the liberal memes, I have changed my mind several times. Yes, Trump deserves to be ridiculed for this. And yet I find myself agreeing with media studies scholar Whitney Phillips:

While Phillips said she doesn’t begrudge people “having fun online,” she warned that liberals who think they’re cutting Trump down to size risk giving oxygen to a trope that ultimately plays into his hands — and endangers the Haitians who were its original targets.

“When you’re making a joke using the frame” of immigrants as cultural invaders, she said, even if you’re pushing back on it, “the frame is still amplified.”

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The Monday Morning Teaser

September 16, 2024 – 8:41 am

One of these weeks, I’m going to make a plan for what I’m going to talk about and then carry it out. Ever since the conventions ended, I’ve been planning to write a state-of-the-race article. But something else always comes up: Trump desecrates Arlington National Cemetery, or Georgia election officials lay the groundwork for another January 6, or something.

This week, an apparent Trump assassination attempt broke too late for me to say anything substantive about it, but the eating-dogs-and-cats thing was just impossible to ignore. So I’ll just have to double up: the state-of-the-race post will come out later this morning, maybe around 11 EDT.

But I also found an interesting slant on the Springfield dogs-and-cats story: The Bug-Eyed and Shameless blog draws a parallel to the Irish Fright of 1688, when tens of thousands of Englishmen became convinced that rogue Irish troops from the British army were marauding through England, destroying everything in their path. Spontaneous militias barricaded bridges and crossroads, waiting for rampaging Irishmen who only existed in their imaginations.

It turns out that disinformation can spread and start a panic even without the internet.

Anyway, I think there’s a lot to be learned from Americans’ propensity to believe bizarre and scary things about non-White immigrants. I’ll collect some in “Lessons from the Haitian Fright”. I’ll try to get it out soon. The state-of-the-race article will follow, and then the weekly summary, which will review the Harris-Trump debate, what little we know about the shots fired in Trump’s vicinity, the Laura Loomer thing, and a few other notes. I’m aiming to have that out by noon, but it may run later.

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Inaction

September 9, 2024 – 12:17 pm

We did nothing.

– Donald J. Trump,
summing up his accomplishments on the issue of gun violence

This week’s featured post is “The Word of the Week: Sanewashing“.

This week everybody was talking about tomorrow night’s debate

I’m not going to say much about this because I’m trying not to think about it. It will happen, I can’t influence the outcome, and by Wednesday morning we’ll know how it went. Kamala Harris is smarter and sharper, but a shameless liar always has a puncher’s chance in these things, especially when moderators refuse to fact-check, as they did in the Trump-Biden debate.

Recent polls have Harris up nationally by 2.8%, according to the 538 polling average. Given the Electoral College’s thumb on the scale, that’s a toss-up. Hillary’s popular-vote margin of 2.1% wasn’t quite enough, but Biden’s 4.5% definitely was. Democrats hold a similar 2.6% edge in congressional generic ballot polls.

The Electoral College shames our country. Twice in this century, it has allowed the candidate who got the second-most votes to claim the presidency. People only support the Electoral College to rationalize the unfair advantage it gives their side. Can you imagine how Trump would scream if he got more votes than his opponent, but still lost the election?

I’ve decided not to do a state-of-the-race post until after the debate. But here’s Ruben Bolling’s account of the campaign so far.

and Russia, Russia, Russia

We all know that “the Big Lie” is Trump’s claim that he really won the 2020 election, and his victory was stolen from him by fraud. But a lie of similar size is his claim that “Russia, Russia, Russia” was a hoax cooked up by his enemies, and that investigations like the Mueller Report “cleared” him of wrongdoing. (This is covered in Chapter 1 of Steve Benen’s new book “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, reality, and the Republicans’ war on the recent past“.)

John Durham’s sham investigation of “the Russia hoax” went on longer than the Mueller investigation, and came up empty when juries quickly dismissed two prosecutions against minor characters in its conspiracy theory. The “crime of the century” Trump advertised was never revealed.

This week we got a reminder that Russia has never stopped trying to promote the American right wing. An indictment released Wednesday charges that the Russian state media company RT funneled $10 million through an American company (obviously Tenet Media, though the indictment does not name the company) to fund right-wing influencers online.

The people who ultimately got the money are all claiming they were duped, and had no idea Russia was funding their work. Author Renée DiResta observes:

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.

The Democratic Mormon X-account Dem Saints notes “The irony of calling Kamala a communist while cashing Russian checks.”

and the Georgia school shooting

Wednesday, a 14-year-old brought an AR-type weapon to Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia and began shooting, killing four and wounding nine. He has been charged with murder and will be tried as an adult. His father faces manslaughter and other charges for providing the gun “with knowledge [his son] was a threat to himself and others.”

I’m not sure how I feel about either of those prosecuting decisions. No matter what he’s done, a 14-year-old is not an adult. And the father deserves consequences of some sort, but manslaughter seems a bit much. More punishment is not the solution to every problem.

Gun violence (like climate change) is one issue where the difference between the two parties is stark. Kamala Harris responded: “It doesn’t have to be this way.” Meanwhile, J. D. Vance said: “This is a fact of life.” Donald Trump called the shooter “a sick and deranged monster“, as if the important issue for a leader to address is how to assess blame. In the past he has said “We have to get over it, we have to move forward.“, as if school shootings are acts of God with no policy implications.

Another Republican response came from Governor Kemp:

This is not the day to talk about safety or policy. We need thoughts and prayers for the victims, law enforcement, and educators.

For Kemp, it never is the day. Just two years ago, he signed a law that allows Georgians to carry handguns in public without a license or background check.

And here’s Trump, accepting the endorsement of the NRA in May:

In my second term, we will roll back every Biden attack on the Second Amendment.

At an NRA event in February he bragged:

During my four years, nothing happened. And there was great pressure on me, having to do with guns. We did nothing.

This TikTok video is a very raw response from a Mom who says she takes pictures of her kids every day so she will know what they were wearing in case something happens. She contrasts Trump’s attention to imaginary issues like schools changing kids’ genders with his disinterest in actual problems like kids getting shot at school.

Former Missouri high school teacher (and one of my favorite Substack bloggers) Jess Piper describes how disturbing active shooter drills are for teachers, not to mention students.

I also know that kids who are stuck in the hallway during an active shooter event are left in the hallway. Every single police officer who conducted drills told us the same thing: if you have a student begging to get into your classroom, refuse them. They could be the shooter.

During one drill, complete with explosions and smoke in the hallway, someone pounded on her locked classroom door and begged to be let in. She followed instructions and did not open the door. Even though she knew it was a drill, she felt traumatized afterwards. (Fortunately this was a teachers-only drill with no students present.)

Piper lists the common-sense changes the vast majority of voters would like to see: universal background checks, safe storage laws, and red flag laws.

Those proposals run into the same objections gun-violence apologists always raise: They won’t stop every shooter. No solution is perfect, so we should do nothing.

Qasim Rashid rebuts the nine most common NRA myths.

If you’re willing to accept school shootings as a “fact of life” and think government should “do nothing” about them, you know how to vote. If you believe that it doesn’t have to be this way, you also know how to vote.

and the corporate media covering for Trump’s mental decline

That’s the subject of the featured post, introducing the term sanewashing, which has been around for a while, but whose usage has recently exploded.

and Trump’s legal cases

Judge Juan Merchan delayed sentencing Trump for his 34 felony convictions until after the election. Frustrating as this is, Politico’s Ankush Khardori explains the judge’s thinking.

The federal January 6 case is back in Judge Chutkan’s court, which now has to deal with the Supreme Court’s invention of presidential immunity. There are so many issues to sort out that we are still months or maybe even years away from trial, even if Trump doesn’t win the election and order the Justice Department to drop the charges. But between now and election day Chutkan may hold evidentiary hearings or request briefs that could allow Jack Smith to introduce evidence the public hasn’t seen yet.

Trump must think the E. Jean Carroll defamation cases (where juries found him responsible for sexual abuse and defamation, totaling up to nearly $90 million in damages) works in his favor politically, because he purposefully called attention to it Friday.

He didn’t have to show up for the hearing in federal appeals court about his attempt to overturn the initial $5 million verdict, but he did. He also didn’t have to make a 49-minute statement to the press afterward, but he did that too.

The appeals court can’t just substitute its own judgment for the jury’s, because the jury heard witness testimony live rather than reading it in a transcript. So who the jury decided to believe is not reviewable. What the appeal is about is whether the jury should have been allowed to hear one of the witnesses at all, or listen to the infamous Access Hollywood tape, where Trump confessed to doing in general the kind of thing Carroll accused him of specifically.

The witness in question supported Carroll’s case by testifying that Trump had groped her on an airplane, something he continues to deny. In his press statement, Trump did what he so often does, saying that the witness wasn’t attractive enough to assault.

Frankly, I know you’re going to say it’s a terrible thing to say, but it couldn’t have happened, it didn’t happen, and she wouldn’t have been the chosen one. She would not have been the chosen one.

“The chosen one” — as if it’s an honor, and women are lining up hoping that Trump will grope them. All I can say is: “What an asshole.” You can watch the video here; it looks and sounds just as bad as it reads.

Oh, and Trump also lied about Anderson Cooper, as Cooper demonstrated Friday evening.

and you also might be interested in …

The world’s most “liveable” city? Vienna.

I was going to write a summary of the Democrats’ best chance to retain the Senate, but I was going to say exactly what Jay Kuo says: It all comes down to Jon Tester winning in Montana and Debbie Mucarsel-Powell beating Rick Scott in Florida. Doing both probably keeps the 51-49 margin.

The knock on most renewable energy is that it’s unreliable; the sun isn’t always shining and the wind doesn’t always blow. The answer to that problem is battery storage. The Economist reports on the state of grid-scale batteries.

Massachusetts is making a major investment in offshore wind power.

How fast climate change causes sea level to rise depends to a large extent on what is happening under the glaciers of Greenland — and nobody really knows.

It’s September and Republicans control the House, so it must be time to talk about a government shutdown. The issue House Republicans are pushing this time is to require proof of citizenship to register to vote.

That provision may sound reasonable if you don’t think about it too long — after all, we all want American elections to be decided by Americans. But basically it causes a problem without solving a problem.

It causes a problem because lots of legal American voters can’t easily produce proof of citizenship. In general, poor people have little incentive to get a passport, and Americans who have moved around a lot may have lost track of their birth certificates a few hops ago. (Again, there’s a socio-economic factor: If you’ve ever had to leave someplace in a hurry, taking all your important papers with you may not have been a priority.) You can probably go back to the county where you were born and pay a fee to get a new copy, but that’s a big enough hurdle to keep many people from voting — which may be the whole point.

As for the problem this idea is supposed to solve — noncitizens voting — it isn’t really a problem. Noncitizen voting is already illegal, and there is absolutely no evidence that significant numbers of noncitizens are voting (other than in local elections in cities that allow it). U.S. News summarizes:

Almost all available data says that noncitizen voting in federal elections, though not unprecedented, is incredibly rare.

In 2016, North Carolina audited its elections and found that 41 legal immigrants had cast ballots despite not yet being citizens out of 4.8 million votes cast. The state’s election board found that the votes made no difference in any state election.

Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger conducted an audit of the state’s voter rolls in 2022 and found that 1,634 had attempted to register but all were caught and none were actually registered.

God help me, but I agree strongly with Dick Cheney.

In our nation’s 248-year history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump. He tried to steal the last election using lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters had rejected him. He can never be trusted with power again

I still hold him responsible for the Bush administration’s torture policy and would like to see him tried at The Hague. But he’s right this time, and I appreciate him not including some poison pill in his endorsement. I couldn’t have made the point better.

In recent weeks there has been a steady drumbeat of Republicans (or former Republicans) endorsing Harris: Adam Kinzinger; Liz Cheney; 238 staffers of the Bushes, Mitt Romney, and John McCain; Jimmy McCain; Rupert Murdoch’s son James; and many others.

Other Republicans have not endorsed Harris, but have announced that they won’t vote for Trump: Mike Pence, Pat Toomey, Meghan McCain, Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan.

The way the announcements are dribbling out makes me wonder if someone in the Harris campaign is orchestrating the timing. But apparently it’s not all leading up to George W. Bush, whose office says he won’t endorse anyone this year.

In case you still respect Elon Musk: On September 1, he retweeted (with the comment “Interesting observation.“) a totally wacko theory that only “high-status” or “high-T” men should have input into political decision-making. The justification is that “people who aren’t able to defend themselves physically” process everything through a “safety filter” and aren’t free to ask “Is this true?” The ideal is “Democratic, but a democracy only for those who are free to think.”

Maybe I’m having a low-T day, but I can’t remember ever considering the idea that testosterone might enhance rationality. There’s a reason why we talk about guys who “think with their dicks”. When the ancient Athenian playwright Sophocles got old and felt his libido waning, he compared it to being freed from a harsh master.

The week’s best comeback. The Economist published an article “The hard right takes Germany into uncharted territory“. And Jathan Sadowski replied:

Oh I don’t know, I think that territory is actually very well charted.

The Economist edited, replacing “uncharted” with “dangerous”.

and let’s close with something tasty

Have a few thousand gallons of milk you need to do something with before they go bad? Maybe you too can take a run at the Guinness record for the largest ball of string cheese. The UPI story and the YouTube link disagree about the exact weight. (Was it 2200 pounds or just 1400 pounds? I think the YouTube link just did the kilogram/pound conversion wrong.) But it’s big. Sadly, the story doesn’t say whether anyone will get to eat it.

Posted in Weekly summaries | Comments (9)

The Word of the Week: Sanewashing

September 9, 2024 – 10:33 am

For the press that headlined every Biden flub, Trump’s wild delusions aren’t news. At least now we have a word to describe their failure.

Let’s start here: At a Moms for “Liberty” event on August 31, Donald Trump said this:

The transgender thing is incredible. Think about it, your kid goes to school and comes home a few days later with an operation. The school decides what’s going to happen with your child, and many of these children, 15 years later, say “What the hell happened? Who did this to me?”

Incredible? Absolutely, and rightfully so: What Trump is telling us is literally beyond credibility, because it bears no resemblance to reality. Schools aren’t performing unauthorized gender-changing operations, or operations of any kind (beyond possibly the school nurse pulling a splinter out of a child’s finger). Not even the wildest radical is proposing that they should. And nobody is looking back on some surgery-at-school that happened 15 years ago.

This goes way beyond any political lying we’ve seen in the past. Trump isn’t exaggerating a statistic, cherry-picking a quote, or spinning some actual incident to his advantage. He’s not implying something nasty about an opponent that can’t be proved either way, or making some bizarre prediction that may not come to pass. Instead, he’s inviting us to come live in a completely delusional world of his construction.

And in case you think he just got carried away, he repeated the claim Saturday in Wisconsin.

You might imagine that a presidential candidate going so far off the deep end would be news. But for most of the mainstream press, it wasn’t. The New York Times covered the MfL event, but didn’t mention that particular part: “Conservative Moms, Charmed by Trump, Would Rather Avoid His Misogyny.” Many newspapers, including The Washington Post, used AP’s article, which also said nothing about schools doing surgeries: “Moms for Liberty fully embraces Trump and widens role in national politics as election nears“.

Just another normal event on a normal candidate’s normal schedule.

The day before, the NYT published an analysis of the two candidates’ ideas for making housing more affordable. They gave it a very both-sides headline: “Harris and Trump Have Housing Ideas. Economists Have Doubts.“

Harris’ housing ideas are relatively straightforward policies amenable to ordinary political and economic analysis: tax cuts to stimulate construction of affordable housing and a $25K benefit targeted at first-time home buyers. Trump’s “housing” idea is a side-effect of his insane proposal for “mass deportation”: If millions of undocumented people are forced to leave the country or herded into detention camps, the couches they’ve been sleeping on will become available to American citizens.

Nothing monstrous here. Just a normal presidential candidate’s policy idea, whose effectiveness economists might “doubt”. Former NYT public editor Margaret Sullivan quotes former NYT reporter (and Pulitzer-prize winner) James Risen: “At first, I thought this was a parody.”

Speaking of economists, Thursday Trump appeared before the Economic Club of New York. A woman asked him what specific legislation he would propose to make childcare more affordable. Here was his answer:

Well, I would do that, and we’re sitting down. You know, I was somebody — we had, Senator Marco Rubio, and my daughter Ivanka, was so impactful on that issue. It’s a very important issue. But I think when you talk about the kind of numbers that I’m talking about — that, because look, child care is child care, couldn’t — you know, there’s something — you have to have it in this country. You have to have it. But when you talk about those numbers, compared to the kind of numbers that I’m talking about by taxing foreign nations at levels that they’re not used to. But they’ll get used to it very quickly. And it’s not going to stop them from doing business with us. But they’ll have a very substantial tax when they send product into our country. Those numbers are so much bigger than any numbers that we’re talking about, including child care, that it’s going to take care. We’re going to have — I look forward to having no deficits within a fairly short period of time, coupled with the reductions that I told you about on waste and fraud and all of the other things that are going on in our country. Because I have to stay with child care. I want to stay with child care. But those numbers are small relative to the kind of economic numbers that I’m talking about, including growth, but growth also headed up by what the plan is that I just — that I just told you about. We’re going to be taking in trillions of dollars. And as much as child care is talked about as being expensive, it’s, relatively speaking, not very expensive compared to the kind of numbers will be taking in. We’re going to make this into an incredible country that can afford to take care of its people. And then we’ll worry about the rest of the world. Let’s help other people. But we’re going to take care of our country first. This is about America first. It’s about make America great again. We have to do it because right now, we’re a failing nation. So we’ll take care of it. Thank you. Very good question. Thank you.

Got that? The NYT looked at that answer and divined a policy proposal: tariffs. It disapproved of Trump’s proposal, saying that it was a 19th century proposal for a 21st century country. “Trump Praises Tariffs, and William McKinley, to Power Brokers“. [1] But the fact that he was asked a serious question and responded with an incoherent ramble about something else — that wasn’t news.

The Washington Post thought the most significant thing Trump did Thursday was deepen his alliance with Elon Musk. Deep, deep in that article it summarized the childcare back-and-forth like this:

Trump made several other promises during his speech at the Economic Club of New York. … When asked about how he’d make child care more affordable, Trump suggested that he would help pay for it by placing taxes on foreign governments. “We’re going to be taking in trillions of dollars, and as much as child care is talked about as being expensive, it’s relatively speaking not very expensive compared to the kinds of numbers we’re going to be taking in,” he said. He did not provide details or specifics about how this would work; experts have warned imposing tariffs on such a scale would risk triggering an international trade war.

Just a normal candidate explaining a normal policy amenable to normal critique. The word “suggested” does a lot of work here: It means that Trump’s words inspired WaPo’s three byline reporters to imagine a coherent proposal in which tariff revenue pays for childcare.

Oh, and Trump has an explanation for his rambles: It’s an art. He calls it “the weave”.

You know what the weave is? I’ll talk about like nine different things, and they all come back brilliantly together, and it’s like, friends of mine that are, like, English professors, they say, “It’s the most brilliant thing I’ve ever seen.”

It might be fair to see that explanation itself as evidence of insanity. But the NYT wrote an article taking it seriously. “Meandering? Off-Script? Trump Insists His ‘Weave’ Is Oratorical Genius.” It compared Trump’s verbal stylings to Shakespeare, William Faulkner, and James Joyce. Seriously. [2]

Just two months ago, the press took a very different attitude towards the mental processes of an aging candidate. On July 11, President Biden held a news conference to talk about the recently concluded NATO summit. He was asked questions on a variety of foreign-policy topics and answered them all in considerable detail, demonstrating an impressive mastery of a number of complex situations. Reuters’ headline captured none of that, because Biden had also occasionally misnamed people, like saying “Putin” when he meant “Zelensky”. “Biden makes a series of verbal gaffes at NATO summit“. The Hill also found Biden’s flub newsworthy: “Zelensky dismissed Biden accidentally calling him Putin as a ‘mistake’“.

If Biden made a verbal error, that became the headline. It eclipsed whatever else he had been trying to say.

Why isn’t Trump being covered the same way? When Trump says something insane or incoherent that should be the news. It’s not just smoke that a reporter needs to blow away to reveal some underlying policy point that may or may not actually exist. The nominee of a major party regularly says things that are insane or incoherent. That’s what’s significant. That — and not whatever policy a reporter can interpret from his ravings — is the news in these Trump events.

Blogs like this one have been making this point for months. But that understanding is beginning to creep closer to the mainstream. It is being aided by the existence of a term that perfectly describes what the NYT and its ilk have been doing: sanewashing.

Apparently the term goes back at least to 2020 and has been popularized more recently by Aaron Rupar, whose X/Twitter feed I often quote. But I hadn’t noticed sanewashing until this week, when suddenly it exploded into public consciousness and usage. TNR’s Parker Malloy defines it like this: “reframing Trump’s incoherent and often dangerous rhetoric as conventional political discourse”. Her article gives many examples I have not mentioned here.

Her TNR colleague Michael Tomasky was a little more blunt:

With dizzying regularity, Trump lies. He says toxic, antidemocratic things over and over again. And he still gets treated like a normal candidate. It’s often the case that the media, presented with another one of his addled rants, will dive in, scoop, and separate enough words to make it seem like he’s got enough actual gray matter gooping around in his skull to form a complete sentence, and present their director’s cut of his wandering mind for public consumption. 

His link is to a Jason Linkin tweet, which calls this phenomenon “coherency bias”. But sanewash is the term that seems to be winning out. Thursday, James Fallows asked his followers on X/Twitter whether they can

think of an example of main media “sane-washing” Biden the way they are even today doing w Trump?

Friday, the term appeared in the Outside the Beltway blog. Friday, Joy Reid used it on MSNBC. This morning, it appeared in Columbia Journalism Review.

A phenomenon with a widely-used name is harder to ignore, and harder to make excuses for, than some vague intuition that a lot of us share. Perhaps now we can hope that Trump’s delusions and incoherent rambles will themselves become news, just as Biden’s word-substitutions did.

Greg Sargent, who wrote The Plum Line blog for the WaPo until 2023 and now writes for TNR, described what that would mean:

Trump’s mental fitness for the presidency deserves sustained journalistic scrutiny as a stand-alone topic with its own intrinsic importance and newsworthiness. Real journalistic resources should be put into meaningfully covering it from multiple angles, as often happens with other big national stories of great consequence.

He illustrated the point by rewriting actual headlines about Biden as they might apply Trump.

And he asks:

Are these headlines really stretches, based on all we’ve seen? I submit that they are not. Note that all of these treat signs of the subject’s questionable mental fitness for the presidency—and the politics surrounding them—as themselves being the real news. How often do you see headlines like this? Why don’t we see more of them?

Why indeed?

[1] It’s worth pointing out that even if you give Trump the benefit of the doubt and interpret his nonsense as having something to do with tariffs, he still isn’t making sense. A tariff does not “tax foreign nations”. A tariff is a tax paid by an American importer, not a foreign exporter. If that importer isn’t going to go broke, it needs to raise the prices its American customers pay. So a tariff is ultimately a tax on American consumers, not on foreigners.

This has been well understood for a long time. Back in 1828, a tariff very nearly started the Civil War decades early, because it taxed British goods Southerners needed in order to benefit Northern industries that otherwise couldn’t compete with British imports. Southerners like John Calhoun labeled the proposal “the Tariff of Abominations“, because they grasped that the British weren’t paying the tax, they were.

So calling a tariff a “tax on foreign nations”, like talking about schools performing surgeries on unsuspecting students, is delusional.

[2] I am reminded of a possibly apocryphal story (recounted without reference in the Illuminatus! trilogy) of a conversation between James Joyce and Carl Jung. Joyce excuses his schizophrenic daughter’s ravings by comparing them to similar to passages in his own writing. “You are diving,” Jung supposedly replies, “but she is sinking.”

When Trump “weaves”, I don’t think he’s diving.

Posted in Articles | Tagged | Comments (24)

The Monday Morning Teaser

September 9, 2024 – 9:10 am

I’m not writing about tomorrow’s debate, other than to explain briefly why I’m not writing about it: It’s going to happen, I have no control over it, and by Wednesday morning we’ll all know how it came out. Speculating about who has the advantage or what strategy each candidate should adopt serves no purpose. Plenty is being written about this elsewhere, if you want to spend your time that way.

This week’s featured post is about “sanewashing” — a word I didn’t know last week that seems to be everywhere this week. Sanewashing is when a reporter takes in some insane or incoherent Trump statement and refines it into a solid policy point to highlight for readers. The mainstream press has been sanewashing Trump for years now, as when it turned Thursday’s word-salad answer to a question about child care into advocating tariffs. I believe that Trump-speaks-in-word-salads is the news to be gleaned from that event, and not his support for tariffs.

But now that there’s a word to describe the phenomenon, it should be harder to get away with. We can hope.

Anyway, “The Word of the Week: Sanewashing”, should be out around 10 EDT. The weekly summary should appear noonish.

Posted in Morning tease | Comments (6)

Cornerstones

September 2, 2024 – 12:04 pm

It was the labor movement that helped secure so much of what we take for granted today: the 40-hour work week, the minimum wage, family leave, health insurance, Social Security, Medicare, retirement plans. The cornerstones of middle-class security all bear the union label.

– Barack Obama

This week’s featured posts are “Can Trump Steal Georgia?” and “A Week in Trump’s Declining Spiral“.

This week everybody was talking about Trump’s downward spiral

As I explained in the Teaser, I didn’t really set out to write two Trump articles this week. I planned the Georgia article, but then as the week went on, there was some new Trump outrage every single day. This summary was getting swamped with them, so I moved them all to their own article.

and the Harris interview

Wednesday night, CNN aired a much-ballyhooed interview (transcript, video parts 1, 2, 3) where Dana Bash asked questions and Kamala Harris and Tim Walz answered them. The Democratic ticket survived the interview without blundering, but overall the interview just underlined the point I was making two weeks ago: Mainstream political journalism is broken. Answering their stupid questions does nothing to serve the cause of democracy.

Bash spent the interview asking Harris and Walz to respond to baseless accusations Trump and Vance keep making. Basically, she was playing the role of the trouble-making gossips I knew in junior high. (“Do you know what Marcy is saying about you?”) I find myself agreeing with Jeff Tiedrich (who elaborated in more colorful language than I’m going to use here):

“Tim Walz lied about IVF” is a right-wing talking point. “Kamala Harris isn’t really Black” is a right-wing talking point.

pestering Democratic candidates about right-wing talking points is not journalism. it’s being a Republican tool.

The exchange that sums up the interview is this one:

BASH: Speaking of Republicans, I want to ask you about your opponent, Donald Trump. … He suggested that you happened to turn Black recently for political purposes, questioning a core part of your identity.
HARRIS: Yeah.
BASH: Any—
HARRIS: Same old, tired playbook. Next question, please. (LAUGH)
BASH: That’s it?
HARRIS: That’s it.

Bash may have been surprised by Harris’ dismissal of her question, but did it deserve any lengthier answer? Like a junior-high gossip, wasn’t Bash angling for Harris to insult Trump in some way she could then carry back to him? (“Kamala Harris says you’re a racist. How do you respond to that?”)

Even the questions that sounded substantive really weren’t. For example, Bash started the interview with: “What would you do on Day 1?”

Day 1 is only interesting when there is a change in parties, because — unless the new president wants to be a dictator, as Trump has said he does — the only possible actions are executive orders that reverse the previous administration’s orders. So Biden’s Day 1 was significant because he

  • rejoined the Paris Climate Accords
  • reversed Trump’s Muslim ban
  • stopped construction on Trump’s border wall
  • reversed Trump’s moves to disengage from the World Health Organization.

Harris doesn’t have any similar night-and-day disagreements with Biden’s orders. Everything she has been talking about — restore the protections of Roe v Wade, safeguard voting rights, restore the child tax credit, build more affordable housing, subsidize first-time home buyers, shift some of the tax burden from the middle class to the very rich, pass the border bill Trump had his minions in Congress block, etc. — requires the cooperation of Congress, which isn’t going to get any of it done in one day.

Bash knows this, so why is she asking? To set up critical headlines, like Politico’s “Harris Dodged Questions About Her Day One Plans“. (Politico’s article went on to describe the dramatic actions five presidents took on Day 1. All five, of course, replaced presidents from the opposite party.)

How do maneuvers like this serve the voters, or democracy in general?

Asha Rangappa posts an interesting analysis of why Harris dismissed Bash’s turned-Black question, and how this tactic is driving Trump nuts.

Rangappa points to the Karpman Drama Triangle, which simplifies interpersonal conflicts down to three roles: persecutor, rescuer, and victim. From time to time Trump takes any of the roles, but his goal is always to wind up as the Victim, as in “I did everything right, and they indicted me.“

By saying “Next question, please”, Harris is refusing to strike back at Trump and give him something to play the Victim over.

In contrast to their criticism of Harris for avoiding interviews, the media often gives Trump credit for responding to questions. But they never ask him anything hard, like: “What were you planning to do with the classified documents you were keeping at Mar-a-Lago? And why did you tell the government you had given them all back when you hadn’t?”

They don’t ask such questions because they know what the response (which doesn’t qualify as an “answer”) would be: “That’s a nasty question. You’re the fake media.”

Let’s be honest: When Trump faces real questions, he never answers them. To this day, he hasn’t given a coherent response to the charges in any of his four indictments. (Instead, he attacks the prosecutors, the judges, the FBI, the witnesses, the jurors, and the Biden administration. He makes sweeping denials like “I did nothing wrong.” But he never addresses the evidence against him.) He complains that the media doesn’t tell his side of the story, but that’s because he has never settled on a single story to tell.

In view of all the stuff Trump has gotten away with (so far), I have to laugh at the attempt to drum up some Lilliputian Harris scandal. This week’s attempt: She claims she worked at McDonalds, but never listed it on a resume. Does anybody applying for a job after law school list their fast-food summer jobs on their resumes?

The media often digs into the nuts-and-bolts inside-baseball of campaigning — fund-raising, polls, ads, strategies — but presents a very naive view of governing. They want a detailed picture of a candidate’s policy proposals, as if presidents were kings who could simply decree those proposals into law.

That’s how you get questions like Bash’s “The steps that you’re talking about now, why haven’t you done them already?” A bunch of those “steps” — codifying Roe v Wade protections, passing the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, passing the border bill, restoring the child tax credit — have gone to Congress and been blocked by the House Republican majority. Others, like shifting the tax burden from the middle class to the billionaires, stand no chance of getting Republican support.

Every administration’s policies are a compromise between the president’s vision and what can get through Congress. Implicit in all of Harris’ proposals is the assumption that Democrats will hold the Senate and regain the majority in the House.

During its first two years, when it had slim Democratic majorities, the Biden/Harris administration managed to get done an amazing number of things — far more than Trump — like funding infrastructure (which Trump kept promising but never accomplished), and beginning to transition away from a fossil-fuel economy that is leading to a climate-change apocalypse (a transition Trump wants to reverse with a drill-baby-drill policy, which somehow will make bacon cheaper). But no, they weren’t able to implement the full Democratic change agenda. During the last two years, they have artfully kept MAGA nihilists in the House and Republican partisans on the Supreme Court from undoing all that progress, but they haven’t managed to push further.

In this environment, ten-step plans are beside the point. Voters need to understand the sharp contrast in the underlying values of the two parties.

  • Women have rights vs. wombs belong to the state.
  • Save the planet for future generations vs. drill-baby-drill.
  • Stand up for democracy vs. give in to Putin.
  • Focus policy on the middle class vs. cut billionaires’ taxes and wait for prosperity to trickle down.
  • Support the rule of law vs. let presidents commit crimes and become autocrats.

How many details do you need to pick a side?

and the hostages

Six more Israeli hostages were found dead in Gaza over the weekend. According to AP:

Three of the six hostages found dead — including an Israeli-American — were reportedly scheduled to be released in the first phase of a cease-fire proposal discussed in July.

The deaths sparked massive protests in Israel yesterday, with protesters charging that the Netanyahu government is not doing enough to get the remaining hostages returned. The nation’s largest union has announced a nationwide general strike to begin this morning.

The Biden administration perpetually claims to be on the verge of getting a hostages-for-ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas, but something always falls through at the last minute. Naturally, each side blames the other for not negotiating in good faith and not really wanting peace. It is difficult to criticize one side without seeming to endorse the other.

According to local authorities, more than 40,000 Palestinians have died as a result of the fighting in Gaza. It is never clear how many of them were Hamas warriors and how many were civilians in the wrong place at the wrong time.

and you also might be interested in …

I’ve been wondering for some while about the persistent charges that Democrats support “abortion after birth”. Since I’ve never seen a Democrat endorse the idea, or heard any examples of an after-birth abortions happening somewhere, I’ve assumed these are just lies.

But lies are usually based on something, even if reality has been grossly distorted by the time the claims get made. I think I’ve finally found the something in this case.

Back in 2022, California passed a law AB 2223, which protected women from prosecution after miscarriages.

The law came in response to the prosecution of two Kings County women who were criminally charged after having miscarriages. Though charges in both cases were dismissed, one woman spent 16 months in jail and the other spent nearly four years. The Kings County District Attorney has vowed to bring new charges in one case, according to CalMatters. According to Wicks’ office, at least 1,300 people have been criminally prosecuted for having miscarriages, stillbirths or self-managed abortions in the last 20 years.

AB 2223 and its author drew heavy criticism from the conservative anti-abortion movement, with some organizations, such as the California Family Council, alleging that the bill would effectively decriminalize infanticide. That is not true. The law does prevent pregnant people from being criminally charged in the event that an infant dies due to pregnancy-related causes. It does not decriminalize the killing of infants.

So if a miscarriage or self-managed abortion results in a baby who is alive but fatally damaged, the woman can’t be charged if the baby dies from that damage.

Other states have since passed similar laws, resulting in the after-birth abortion rhetoric.

I still haven’t got a handle on the feud between Elon Musk and Brazil’s supreme court. But this week it led to the court ordering Brazilian ISPs to block the Twitter/X platform.

The dispute stems from X’s usefulness as a tool for spreading dangerous disinformation, like bad health advice or incitement to political violence. Brazil demanded that X block certain disinformation-spreading accounts, which Musk called “censorship” and refused to do.

I’m sure many other countries are also worried about X and disinformation, so they are watching to see how this plays out.

Back in the 2000 campaign, Republicans would sum up Bush’s charm advantage over Gore by asking which candidate you’d rather have a beer with (ignoring the fact that Bush was a recovering alcoholic who couldn’t drink any more). In 2024, I propose a different test: Who would you rather go to the state fair with?

and let’s close with something that takes training

Throwing out the first pitch is a longtime baseball ceremony that is typically used to call attention to some local celebrity or community leader. Some honorees wilt under the pressure of being watched by thousands, and bounce the ball to the plate or toss it so wide of the mark that it can’t be caught.

But Wednesday, Shohei Ohtani’s dog Decoy delivered a memorable first pitch for a game between Ohtani’s Dodgers and the Baltimore Orioles. With Shohei behind the plate, Decoy squatted on the pitching rubber waiting for the sign, then picked up the baseball with his mouth and delivered it directly to his master, dropping it onto home.

Shohei also had a good game, hitting a home run and stealing two bases.

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Can Trump Steal Georgia?

September 2, 2024 – 10:17 am

Once the election board picks a side, does it matter what the voters want?

The usual methods of stealing elections go back to Athens and Rome: Bring in unqualified voters of your own, or use force or trickery to prevent your opposition’s voters from showing up in the right place. If voters vote by dropping tokens in a box, miscount the tokens, or maybe lose boxes from precincts where you don’t expect to do well. There’s a long history of such tried-and-true methods being used in the United States, and voting systems are designed to avoid such shenanigans.

For the most part they’ve been designed pretty well, and by now actual election-day cheating is fairly rare (despite Donald Trump’s baseless claims about every election he’s ever lost, going back to the Iowa caucuses in 2016 and even the Emmys “The Apprentice” lost). That’s why most current cheating goes on before election day, by “purging” the voting roles of legitimate voters, or requiring IDs that your voters are more likely to have than your opposition’s voters.

2020. But in 2020, Trump came up with a novel scheme to cheat after all the votes had been cast and counted: At every level from county election boards to the counting of electoral votes in Congress on January 6, Trump did his best to delay certification of Biden’s victory. The goal of this delay was not just to declare himself the winner (as he hoped Mike Pence would do by counting the votes of his fake electors), but to delegitimize his loss by pushing certification past certain legal deadlines.

If January 6 had come and gone with no recognized winner, he might have been able to push the decision into the House, where each state has only one vote and Republican delegations outnumbered Democratic delegations. Or possibly the succession might have been decided in the Supreme Court, where the 6-3 Republican majority has shown its willingness to decide cases on a partisan basis. If January 20 had arrived and no new president could be inaugurated, then he might simply have stayed in power temporarily until … well, until never. If voters had taken to the streets to protest their disenfranchisement, right-wing militias could make sure that demonstrations turned into riots that required federal troops and temporary martial law.

At each stage, Trump would hold out the promise of a peaceful transfer of power … but not yet. Here’s what Ted Cruz was proposing on January 6:

And what I would urge of this body is that we do the same [as in the contested Hayes/Tilden election of 1876]. That we [appoint an] electoral commission to conduct a 10-day emergency audit, consider the evidence, and resolve the claims [of fraud]. For those on the Democratic aisle who says, say there is no evidence, they’ve been rejected, then you should rest [in] comfort if that’s the case.

From today’s perspective, when Trump is still making claims of fraud despite uncovering no evidence in nearly four years, it seems naive to imagine that any ten-day audit could have resolved the doubts Trump had falsely instilled in his followers. If the electoral commission didn’t decide in Trump’s favor, then it too would have been “rigged” and “fake”. So then it’s January 16, with four days to inauguration, and there’s still no president-elect. What then?

2024. Four years later, Trump has had time to refine this plan. In many ways, he’s in worse shape to pull it off: He isn’t president. So if Harris wins, but her victory can’t be certified by January 20, it’s Biden who might stay in power. (Biden might then resign and let Harris become president until her victory could be certified.) And as President of the Senate, it’s Kamala Harris who will preside over the joint session of Congress on January 6.

Also, one state where the election is likely to be close (Arizona) now has a Democratic governor, but another (Nevada) has flipped in the other direction.

But he has one advantage now that he didn’t have in 2020: Despite the lack of evidence, the myth of the 2020 stolen election has become dogma among Republicans, who have worked to make local election posts more partisan. Republican officials like Aaron van Langevelde, who voted to certify Biden’s victory in Michigan because that was his legal duty, have been replaced by people more loyal to Trump than to the law.

Across the country, county-level boards of canvassers have what is legally known as ministerial duties. They aren’t supposed to be investigators and they aren’t supposed to make judgment calls. The law assigns them the mundane job of receiving vote totals from the precincts, adding them up, and passing the information up to state officials by some set deadline. Recounts and challenges to the votes-as-first-counted are somebody else’s job.

But Republicans see county election boards as places to stand while they throw monkey wrenches into the system. If counties don’t certify totals and pass them up the line, then states also can’t certify elections. This has been tried out in various state and local elections since 2020, usually unsuccessfully. (Often the refusal to certify comes from rural Republican counties who are protesting election fraud that they imagine happens in urban Democratic counties.)

A few weeks ago, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) published a report Election Certification Under Threat. The report identifies 35 officials in eight states who have already refused to certify an election. Nearly all of them are either still in office or likely to be reappointed at any moment. The report lists, state by state, the actions that can be taken to overcome the threat.

Those steps usually begin with a mandamus lawsuit. Mandamus is Latin for “we command”, and is related to the English word mandate. In a mandamus case, a court has the power to force an official to do his or her job. If the official refuses, the court has options that vary by state. The court may appoint a new official, or fine or even jail the resisting official.

What gives a court this kind of power is the ministerial nature of the job. Typical state law says that election supervisors shall (not should or even may) certify an election within a certain time period. If they don’t, they’re violating the law. Even if the officials are correct in thinking that vote totals are tainted, dealing with that is somebody else’s job. They’re just supposed to collect numbers from the precincts, total them up, and pass the results on.

Mandamus suits should work just about everywhere. Local officials can call attention to their cause by initially refusing the certify an election, but ultimately they’ll have to.

Georgia. But “just about anywhere” may not include Georgia, which Biden carried by less than 12,000 votes in 2020, and where Harris/Trump polls are very close.

In a series of meetings in July and August, the Georgia State Election Board voted 3-2 to change the rules governing local election boards. (The three members voting to change the rules all deny that Joe Biden won Georgia in 2020, despite the complete lack of evidence for that view. Trump has given them a shout-out at a political rally. When was the last time a national candidate paid any attention to a state election board?) Lawrence Tribe and Dennis Aftergut summarize the new rules and their apparent purpose:

The first rule requires local election officials to conduct “reasonable inquiry” into election results before certifying them. The term “reasonable inquiry” is dangerously elastic, creating an opening for authoritarians to do whatever they want. No sensible court would ever approve such a system, by which unelected appointees could issue open-ended election rules making certification discretionary, especially without any such directive from the legislature of Georgia to end democracy.

The second rule permits individual county board members “to examine all election related documentation created during the conduct of elections prior to certification of results”. The opportunities are unlimited to delay certification by demanding that documents great and small be produced before certification.

One apparent goal is to bypass federal and state law requiring states’ votes certified in time for Congress, on 6 January 2025, to bless the election results. If enough states’ certifications are stalled so that too few electors are actually appointed as of 6 January, under the 12th amendment, the presidential election goes to the House. There, per the constitution, the election is determined by one vote per state delegation. Given gerrymandering and how the House is structured, Republicans have held a majority of the state delegations for years. In November, by their votes, Trump would become president, regardless of whether he has won the electoral college vote or a popular vote majority.

Who are those guys? One unintended benefit of Trump’s relentless assault on democratic processes is that we all get a rolling civics lesson. Here’s some stuff I never knew before about the Georgia State Elections Board:

The board has five members: one appointed by the state House, one chosen by the state Senate, one each from the Republican and Democratic parties, and a nonpartisan chair selected by the General Assembly or by the governor if the General Assembly is not in session when there is a vacancy.

The three Trumpists trying to monkey-wrench Georgia elections are the House, Senate, and Republican Party appointees. The Democratic appointee and the chair appointed by Republican Governor Kemp voted against the new rules.

You may notice from that description that none are elected by the People of Georgia, and so they really shouldn’t (and almost certainly don’t) have the power to circumvent laws passed by the legislature. If state law says that the local election officials have until 5 p.m. the next Monday to certify Tuesday’s election (as it does say), the GSEB can’t authorize further delay.

Remedies. With that in mind, some Georgia voters and the Georgia Democratic Party are suing the GSEB in state court

To remedy these harms and prevent chaos in November, this Court should follow decades of binding precedent and declare both that the statutes mean exactly what they say and that SEB’s rules must be construed consistent with those statutes in order to be a valid exercise of SEB’s authority. …

Such relief is needed now, before the November 5 election and the start of the six-day clock the election code sets for certification. Election officials are already setting procedures and staffing for canvassing. Similarly, candidates and political organizations are already allocating resources and making efforts to ensure that every vote is counted. Withholding relief until a county board or other superintendent relies on the rules to delay certification or not certify at all risks disorder, including extremely rushed emergency judicial proceedings across multiple courts; imposes additional burdens on Georgia’s courts, election officials, and political organizations; and could lead to the discarding of valid votes cast by qualified electors

Democrats may have some allies in this effort: Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and Governor Brian Kemp. Both have denounced the new rules, and Kemp reportedly has asked the state attorney general to determine whether he can remove the GSEB’s three Trumpist members.

At a rally in Atlanta on August 5, Trump denounced Governor Kemp, who has consistently denied Trump’s claim that the 2020 Georgia election was rigged against him. But they have since patched up their differences and Kemp is supporting Trump. If Kemp removes board members Trump picked out for praise, though, the feud may start up again.

Harris’ best strategy: Win big, win everywhere. Of course, this disruption will only occur if Trump loses Georgia, and is only one of the tricks he can be expected to play in any state where the election is close. The best way to avoid another tense November, December, and early January is if Harris wins by margins large enough to dwarf Trump’s complaints, and to win in enough states that no single one is necessary for an Electoral College majority.

The most direct path for Harris to get 270 electoral votes (exactly) is to win Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, along with the 2nd congressional district in Nebraska. (Nebraska and Maine give separate electoral votes to each of their districts. Nebraska’s lone Democratic electoral vote should cancel the lone Republican vote from Maine.) Also in play are Georgia, Arizona, Nevada, and North Carolina. Winning two or three of those would protect the election from a lot of shenanigans.

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A Week in Trump’s Declining Spiral

September 2, 2024 – 9:36 am

Trump has always done offensive things, and said ignorant, incoherent, or insane things. But I don’t think he used to say or do them every day.

One thing I’ve heard about aging, which I can verify from my own life, is that it doesn’t change your character so much as magnify it. Whatever you’ve always been, you’ll be moreso as you get old.

This week revealed that pattern in 78-year-old Donald Trump, who did something stereotypically Trumpy every day from Monday to Saturday.

Monday. He started the week with a bang, by desecrating the hallowed grounds of Arlington National Cemetery to film a campaign TikTok video. You can dive into the long explanation of what ANC’s rules are, why those rules exist, and how Trump violated them. Or you can take another long dive into the flim-flam he, Vance, and his campaign spread to excuse his inexcusable behavior. But all you really need to do is look at this photo:

You know this is wrong.

Trump giving an inappropriate thumbs-up is becoming a meme, like this image of Thumbs-Up Trump at Jesus’ crucifixion. I’m hoping Thumbs-Up Trump becomes as ubiquitous as Bernie in his mittens.

Tuesday. Trump announced a new line of NFT trading cards showing him in fantastically heroic settings — in superhero armor, wielding a lightning bolt — and looking slimmer and more muscular than he has in many years, if ever. For a mere $99 you get one digital file of a card-image. If you buy 250 of them ($24,750), you get one physical card, two tickets to a Trump-attended dinner at his golf club (I assume the one in New Jersey), and a piece of the true cross suit he wore when he debated Biden.

But MAGA isn’t a cult and Trump isn’t a grifter. It’s totally unfair to say that the man who made these cards or the people who spend money on them are weird.

Wednesday. Trump unleashed a series of Truth Social posts that were extreme even by his standards. He reposted memes that

  • called for “public military tribunals” to try Barack Obama,
  • suggested indicting the House January 6 Committee for sedition,
  • commented on a photo of Harris and Hillary Clinton together that “blowjobs impacted both their careers differently”,
  • pictured Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Hillary Clinton, Anthony Fauci, Nancy Pelosi, and Bill Gates in orange prison jumpsuits with the caption “How to Actually Fix the System”.

When he’s called on stuff like this, the usual excuse is that he didn’t create the memes, he just reposted them. But reposting without criticism is endorsement. It says, “I think more people should see this.”

Thursday. At a rally in La Crosse, Wisconsin, he blamed wind energy for people eating less bacon.

Look at bacon and some of these products and some people don’t eat bacon any more. And we are going to get the energy prices down. You know, this was caused by their horrible energy. Wind. They want wind all over the place. But when it doesn’t blow we have a little problem.

Also Thursday, he began a two-day flip-flop on abortion, an issue that he insists voters don’t really care about. Currently, Florida bans almost all abortions of fetuses more than six weeks old. (Embryos, actually. They’re not considered fetuses until eight weeks.) NBC News asked Trump how he (a Florida resident) planned to vote on an upcoming Florida referendum to guarantee abortion rights “before viability or when necessary to protect the patient’s health, as determined by the patient’s healthcare provider”.

He replied: “I am going to be voting that we need more than six weeks.” That sounded like a Yes vote on the referendum, which would repeal the six-week ban. A No vote would leave it in place.

In that same interview, he said that in his next administration, the government would pay for all IVF treatments (which are very expensive) but didn’t say what program would cover them or where the money would come from.

Friday. A busy day. After a freakout from Evangelical “Christians”, he walked back the previous day’s statement on the Florida referendum, announcing that he would vote No. The anti-abortion faction hates his IVF proposal too, but so far he hasn’t walked it back.

(Naturally, though, it’s Harris who gets bad press for changing the position she held on fracking five years ago, and for not providing details of her proposals. It would be completely unacceptable for Harris to change her position on some major issue from one day to the next, or to announce an expensive new program with no supporting details.)

Also Friday, he shared this insane dark fantasy with a Moms For “Liberty” gathering:

The transgender thing is incredible. Your kid goes to school and comes home a few days later with an operation. The school decides what’s going to happen with your child. And then many of these childs [sic] 15 years later look back and say “What the hell. Who did this to me?”

This kind of stuff deserves to be judged by the Greyhound standard: If you were sitting next to a stranger on a cross-country bus, and he said something this detached from reality, you’d get up and move, wouldn’t you?

Friday night in Jonestown, Pennsylvania, Trump was introduced by Florida Congressman Byron Donalds, who (like Kamala) is Black. When Trump got on stage, he said:

That one is smart! You have smart ones and you have some that aren’t quite so good.

When I was growing up in the 1960s, I heard lots of people say things like this. But usually those statements explicitly included the N-word rather than just implying it. So I guess there has been progress.

Saturday and Sunday. His interview with Mark Levin aired on Fox News.

He confessed to “interfering” in the certification of the 2020 election, but claimed

Whoever heard, you get indicted for interfering in a presidential election when you had every right to do it?

As MSNBC’s Joyce Vance noted, “There’s no right to interfere in a presidential election.” And former prosecutor Elizabeth de Vega added: “Keep talking, moron.”

On the trade deficit with China, he claimed “I had them down much smaller”, which is a fantasy. Here are the actual year-by-year US trade deficits with China. Note the peak in 2018, a Trump year, and the low in 2023, a Biden year.

He also claimed “China paid me hundreds of billions of dollars.” That might be a reference to tariffs, which Trump imagines are paid by foreign exporters rather than American importers. Ultimately, of course, tariffs are passed on to US consumers the same way that sales taxes are.

In the same interview, Trump called Kamala Harris “nasty” for the way she treated Mike Pence, presumably during their vice presidential debate in 2020. However, Harris supporters have never called for Pence to be hanged, as Trump supporters did on January 6.

But today begins a new week. Who knows what marvels it will reveal?

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