Articles related to the Presidential Election

lousubcap

The below teasers don't fit in any of the current OT offerings so here's a new one.

"The Pentagon yesterday strongly pushed back against social media misinformation falsely suggesting U.S. troops have been authorized to use force against American citizens during the election. Tara Copp reports for AP News.

Elon Musk’s super PAC did not announce a winner Wednesday or Thursday in its daily $1mn lottery for registered swing-state voters following a warning from the Justice Department. Avery Lotz reports for Axios.

A top Georgia official pushed back yesterday on false claims of voting machine fraud, calling out “certain congresspeople” for spreading the allegation. The remarks appeared to reference recent comments by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA). Olivia Rubin reports for ABC News.

Colorado officials yesterday said they identified at least a dozen fraudulent ballots, of which three have been validated before they could be pulled from the process. Maura Barrett reports for NBC News.

An individual was arrested yesterday in Phoenix after setting a collection mailbox on fire and damaging a number of ballots, local police said. Meredith Deliso and Laura Romero report for ABC News.

A federal judge yesterday signaled she will likely order Virginia to restore about 1,600 people to its voter rolls following their removal in a voter purge. Josh Gerstein reports for POLITICO."

lousubcap

"Where we are:

Insights, analysis and must reads from CNN's Fareed Zakaria and the Global Public Square team, compiled by Global Briefing editor Chris Good   Seeing this newsletter as a forward? Sign up here.   October 25, 2024

Fareed: Politics Have Changed. Harris Is Bearing the Brunt. By many measures, the US economy is performing very well, Fareed notes in his latest Washington Post column. Last week, The Economist’s cover story called it “the envy of the world.”   And yet, Fareed writes, “the strongest economy in the world has not paid off for President Joe Biden, who had the second-worst third-year average approval rating of any modern president. Nor is it giving Kamala Harris a commanding lead in the polls. It is yet one more powerful signal that our politics are in the midst of a great upheaval, as economic issues give way to cultural ones.”   Social identity has come to dominate politics, Fareed writes. As Fareed argued in his recent book “Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present,” our current political era is defined, in part, by a reversal. Economics have faded in importance, while social status and cultural issues like gender are now driving voter behavior. The left has been slow to adapt to this new reality.   “The right has its own problems,” Fareed writes. “It is in thrall to the personality cult of Trump, whose extreme positions and rhetoric turn off many voters. With the most economically vibrant parts of America trending left, Harris has far outraised [Donald] Trump in recent months, including by a more than 3 to 1 margin in September. For Democrats, the problem is that non-college-educated voters still make up the majority of the electorate, about 65 percent of registered voters in 2020, and they might feel alienated by some of the Ivy League liberalism. Whether Harris or Trump wins, this new cultural landscape will define American politics for decades to come.”"

Botch

Good thread idea, Cap'n.  I've been seeing a lot of relevant articles from Robert Reich, Heather Cox Richardson, etc that I've posted in two or three other threads, or a standalone post.  This will work better, for the next couple weeks.  

lousubcap

This from Nate Silver-now independent pollster, formerly at Five ThirtyEight:

Seriously. National polls have shown Donald Trump gaining ground lately — Kamala Harris’s lead in our national polling average is down to just 1.2 points. But the popular vote is merely a beauty contest. If you know the winners in the seven major battleground states — Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona and Nevada — you can correctly identify the Electoral College winner about 99 percent of the time. So those national polls are only interesting to the extent they help us anticipate trends in state polls — and at this late point in the race, it’s better just to look at state polls directly.

State and national polling averages and how they've changed over time

An average of 2024 presidential general election polls nationally and in each state, and how those averages have changed over the past week and past month

Hang on!  The trend is definitely tilting the wrong direction.

lousubcap

Anyone here know of any "undecided" who intend to vote??  For the record-none here. It's all baked in now. 
BTW- I am so sick of the MSM touting the National polling data.  It will come down to the swing states and likely under a 100-150K votes total.  Which means that in the Electoral College numbers it could be a rout. 
Fasten your seat belt.  It's gonna be quite a ride.  

lousubcap

Worth a read regarding last night's Madison Square Garden Clown Show-

"This Is Trump’s Message

At his Madison Square Garden rally, Trump’s argument was hate and fear.

By David A. Graham

We might as well start with the lowlight of last night’s Trump campaign rally at Madison Square Garden. That would be Tony Hinchcliffe, a podcaster who’s part of Joe Rogan’s circle, and who was the evening’s first speaker.

“These Latinos, they love making babies too. Just know that. They do. They do. There’s no pulling out. They don’t do that. They come inside,” he joked. “Just like they did to our country.” A minute later: “I don’t know if you guys know this, but there’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. Yeah, I think it’s called Puerto Rico.” It took a few more minutes before he got to the joke about Black people loving watermelons. Novel, edgy stuff—for a minstrel show in 1874.

Other speakers were only somewhat better. A childhood pal of Donald Trump’s called Vice President Kamala Harris “the anti-Christ” and “the devil.” The radio host Sid Rosenberg called her husband, Doug Emhoff, “a crappy Jew.” Tucker Carlson had a riff about Harris vying to be “the first Samoan-Malaysian, low-IQ former California prosecutor ever to be elected president.” Stephen Miller went full blood-and-soil, declaring, “America is for Americans and Americans only.” (In 1939, a Nazi rally at the old Madison Square Garden promised “to restore America to the true Americans.”) Melania Trump delivered a rare public speech that served mostly as a reminder of why her speeches are rare.

Only after this did Trump take the stage and call Harris a “very low-IQ individual.” He vowed, “On day one, I will launch the largest deportation program in American history.” He proposed a tax break for family caregivers, but the idea was quickly lost in the sea of offensive remarks.

Republicans who are not MAGA diehards reacted with dismay and horror—presumably at the political ramifications, because they can’t possibly be surprised by the content at this point. Politico Playbook, a useful manual of conventional wisdom, this morning cites Republicans fretting over alienating Puerto Ricans and Latinos generally. (Yesterday, Harris visited a Puerto Rican restaurant in Philadelphia and received the endorsement of the Puerto Rican pop superstar Bad Bunny.)

“Stay on message,” pleaded Representative Anthony D’Esposito, a New York Republican in a tight reelection race. That’s ridiculous. This—all of this—is the message of Trump’s campaign. Other Republicans may cringe at the coarseness of these comments, or worry that they will cost votes, but they made their choice long ago, and have stuck with them despite years of bigotry and other ugliness.

Trump is running on nativism, crude stereotypes, and lies about immigrants. He has demeaned Harris in offensive and personal terms. He’s attacked American Jews for not supporting him. His disdain for Puerto Rico is long-standing, and his callousness after Hurricane Maria in 2017 was one of the most appalling moments of an appalling presidency. He feuded with the island’s elected officials, his administration tried to block aid, and he tried to swap the American territory for Greenland. (The Trump campaign said that Hinchcliffe’s routine “does not reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign,” which is also absurd. He was invited by Trump to appear at a rally for Trump’s campaign, and made the joke standing at a lectern emblazoned with Trump’s name.)

The Trump campaign itself may be perfectly happy with how it all went down. Madison Square Garden, the most famous venue in Manhattan, a place that still enthralls him, was packed to the rafters for him. Counterprotests were muted, even as speakers at the rally boasted about entering the beating heart of liberalism. (As The New York Times’ Nate Cohn writes, New York City has moved somewhat toward him, though any hopes of his winning the city or the state remain far-fetched.)

The whole point of the rally was provocation. Trump has long demonstrated a view that it’s better when people are talking about him—even if they’re outraged—than talking about anyone else. The record is murky: Trump won in 2016 but lost the popular vote, lost in 2020, and led his party to poor performances in 2018 and 2022. But he appears to believe that this year could be different. Trump calculates that if people are thinking about immigration and race, they will move toward him, even if they disapprove of the policy solutions he’s offering (or just don’t believe he’ll implement them).

Some Democrats agree, and fret that the Harris campaign’s recent turn toward attacking Trump is a missed opportunity for the Democrat to make a positive case for herself or refocus on economic issues. The pro-Harris super PAC Future Forward warns in an email that “attacking Trump’s fascism is not that persuasive,” while Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, a Harris surrogate, warned that the rally was “bait.”

As a matter of electoral calculation, focusing on the offensive remarks last night may be unhelpful for Harris. But as an encapsulation of what Trump stands for as a candidate, and what he would bring to office, the rally was an effective medium for his closing message."

Botch

lousubcap said:

Anyone here know of any "undecided" who intend to vote??  For the record-none here. It's all baked in now. 
BTW- I am so sick of the MSM touting the National polling data.  It will come down to the swing states and likely under a 100-150K votes total.  Which means that in the Electoral College numbers it could be a rout. 
Fasten your seat belt.  It's gonna be quite a ride.  

The blatant racist comments during the MSG nazi re-enactment against blacks, latinos, LGBTQ, and especially Puerto Ricans may have tipped the scales back, in the swing states; saw a list of how many Puerto-Ricans were in each of those states, and most of them had voted in 2020.  And a hell of a lot of republicans are backpedaling furiously since (although that never seems to last too long (wish I could leach collagen out of backbones that quickly when making stock), and we still have over a week to go).
 
EDIT:  Holy ****.  I hadn't watched any clips of the MSG re-enactment today, just read a few things, but CBS News just broadcast a a bunch of them on the top of their Evening News.  Holy ****.  And they didn't break it out by state, but they did state that over one million Puerto Ricans are living just in the swing states right now, possibly a magnitude more than the 100-150K Cap'n just mentioned.  
Seat belt, fastened.  
 
EDIT 2:  Also reported, a couple ballot boxes in Washington State were firebombed, and the internal fire suppression system failed in one of them (I didn't know the boxes had such systems).  Also, think it was in TX, a voter was asked to remove his political hat (color was not reported) to vote, then punched the elderly lady multiple times in the head after voting.  **ck.   

lousubcap

Here is The Atlantic’s endorsement of Kamala Harris, first published on October 10, 2024.   For the third time in eight years, Americans have to decide whether they want Donald Trump to be their president. No voter could be ignorant by now of who he is. Opinions about Trump aren’t just hardened—they’re dried out and exhausted. The man’s character has been in our faces for so long, blatant and unchanging, that it kills the possibility of new thoughts, which explains the strange mix of boredom and dread in our politics. Whenever Trump senses any waning of public attention, he’ll call his opponent a disgusting name, or dishonor the memory of fallen soldiers, or threaten to overturn the election if he loses, or vow to rule like a dictator if he wins. He knows that nothing he says is likely to change anyone’s views.   Almost half the electorate supported Trump in 2016, and supported him again in 2020. This same split seems likely on November 5. Trump’s support is fixed and impervious to argument. This election, like the last two, will be decided by an absurdly small percentage of voters in a handful of states.   Because one of the most personally malignant and politically dangerous candidates in American history was on the ballot, The Atlantic endorsed Trump’s previous Democratic opponents—only the third and fourth endorsements since the magazine’s founding, in 1857. We endorsed Abraham Lincoln for president in 1860 (though not, for reasons lost to history, in 1864). One hundred and four years later, we endorsed Lyndon B. Johnson for president. In 2016, we endorsed Hillary Clinton for more or less the same reason Johnson won this magazine’s endorsement in 1964. Clinton was a credible candidate who would have made a competent president, but we endorsed her because she was running against a manifestly unstable and incompetent Republican nominee. The editors of this magazine in 1964 feared Barry Goldwater less for his positions than for his zealotry and seeming lack of self-restraint.   Of all Trump’s insults, cruelties, abuses of power, corrupt dealings, and crimes, the event that proved the essential rightness of the endorsements of Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden took place on January 6, 2021, when Trump became the first American president to try to overturn an election and prevent the peaceful transfer of power.   This year, Trump is even more vicious and erratic than in the past, and the ideas of his closest advisers are more extreme. Trump has made clear that he would use a second term to consolidate unprecedented power in his own hands, punishing adversaries and pursuing a far-right agenda that most Americans don’t want. “We believe that this election is a turning-point in our history,” the magazine prophesied correctly when it endorsed Abraham Lincoln in 1860. This year’s election is another.

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About the candidate we are endorsing: The Atlantic is a heterodox place, staffed by freethinkers, and for some of us, Kamala Harris’s policy views are too centrist, while for others they’re too liberal. The process that led to her nomination was flawed, and she’s been cagey in keeping the public and press from getting to know her as well as they should. But we know a few things for sure. Having devoted her life to public service, Harris respects the law and the Constitution. She believes in the freedom, equality, and dignity of all Americans. She’s untainted by corruption, let alone a felony record or a history of sexual assault. She doesn’t embarrass her compatriots with her language and behavior, or pit them against one another. She doesn’t curry favor with dictators. She won’t abuse the power of the highest office in order to keep it. She believes in democracy. These, and not any specific policy positions, are the reasons The Atlantic is endorsing her.   This endorsement will not be controversial to Trump’s antagonists. Nor will it matter to his supporters. But to the voters who don’t much care for either candidate, and who will decide the country’s fate, it is not enough to list Harris’s strengths or write a bill of obvious particulars against Trump. The main reason for those ambivalent Americans to vote for Harris has little to do with policy or partisanship. It’s this: Electing her and defeating him is the only way to release us from the political nightmare in which we’re trapped and bring us to the next phase of the American experiment.   Trump isn’t solely responsible for this age of poisonous rhetoric, hateful name-calling, conspiracies and lies, divided families and communities, cowardly leaders and deluded followers—but as long as Trump still sits atop the Republican Party, it will not end. His power depends on lowering the country into a feverish state of fear and rage where Americans turn on one another. For the millions of alienated and politically homeless voters who despise what the country has become and believe it can do better, sending Trump into retirement is the necessary first step.   If you’re a conservative who can’t abide Harris’s tax and immigration policies, but who is also offended by the rottenness of the Republican Party, only Trump’s final defeat will allow your party to return to health—then you’ll be free to oppose President Harris wholeheartedly. Like you, we wish for the return of the Republican Party of Ronald Reagan, Bob Dole, John McCain, and Mitt Romney, a party animated by actual ideas. We believe that American politics are healthiest when vibrant conservative and liberal parties fight it out on matters of policy.   If you’re a progressive who thinks the Democratic Party is a tool of corporate America, talk to someone who still can’t forgive themselves for voting for Ralph Nader in 2000—then ask yourself which candidate, Harris or Trump, would give you any leverage to push for policies you care about.   And if you’re one of the many Americans who can’t stand politics and just want to opt out, remember that under democracy, inaction is also an action; that no one ever has clean hands; and that, as our 1860 editorial said, “nothing can absolve us from doing our best to look at all public questions as citizens, and therefore in some sort as administrators and rulers.” In other words, voting is a right that makes you responsible.   Trump is the sphinx who stands in the way of America entering a more hopeful future. In Greek mythology, the sphinx killed every traveler who failed to answer her riddle, until Oedipus finally solved it, causing the monster’s demise. The answer to Trump lies in every American’s hands. Then he needs only to go away.

lousubcap

And this from Defense One today: 

View from Capitol Hill: If re-elected, Donald Trump will behave “like a fascist” and “destroy the Department of Defense,” warned the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, Chairman Jack Reed of Rhode Island, in a conversation with reporters Monday. Reed called the meeting to bring attention to what he described as “Trump’s dystopian threats to misuse the military and trample on the Constitution.”

“What Trump wants is power—power to first dismiss the legal cases against him,then power to accumulate more and more,” Reed said. “He wants to create chaos and a dysfunctional non-government, actually, because there in that context, he has more power.” If he returns to office, Trump “will destroy the Department of Defense,” the senator cautioned. “He already demonstrated at the end of his last term his willingness to essentially fire the civilian senior defense employees to his Schedule F episode. That's been replicated in the Project 2025 report, and it's going to be something he does. He will create chaos, and he will force many, many of our best officers, frankly, to decide whether they continue to serve or they must leave the service.”

“Why is it that men Trump once called ‘my generals’—men like Gen. [John] Kelly, General [Mark] Milley, General [Jim] Mattis, General [H.R.] McMaster, Secretary of Defense Mark Esper and more, everyone who worked closely with him, even his own former Vice President Mike Pence—why is it they all believe Trump is unfit to be president?” Reed asked. 

Citing the recent work of historian Heather Cox Richardson, Reed said that a March 1945 U.S. Army publication, Army Talks, “tried to explain to most of the troops what fascism was. And one of the lines from the document said it is ‘government by the few and for the few. The objective is seizure and control of the economic, political, social, and cultural life of the state.’ And that sounds a lot like Donald Trump and Elon Musk and the gang all plotting to take over and get special powers and to go after enemies and do things like that.” 

Citing that Army publication, Reed reminded reporters, fascists “make their own rules and change them when they choose…they maintain themselves in power by the use of force combined with propaganda based on primitive ideas of ‘blood’ and ‘race,’ by skillful manipulation of fear and hate and by false promises of security.’ [That] Sounds like a Trump speech,” Reed said. “So I'm very concerned that he would, regardless of the definition of a fascist, act like a fascist.”

But Reed wasn’t entirely lacking in optimism. “I have faith in the leadership of the military that if they detect people who are acting contrary to the law and Constitution and the Uniform Code of Military Justice, that they'll take steps and correct that; that's their job,” he said. However, “The question that becomes much more difficult is, if he assumes office, then I think he has powers that can basically purge the military of people with conscience and replace them with his cronies. That would be a disaster” since “people would be there not because they're the best strategist, tactician, etc. They're there because they'll do whatever [Trump] says. And frankly, I don't think he has a very good grasp on many issues affecting the world.”

And @Botch was ahead of them all with his separate thread regarding the above pamphlet.

CHEETO makes Nixon look like a saint.  

lousubcap

Fiona Hill explains how "the American political system already drifting into autocracy... A key sign is that members of the country’s billionaire class are acting more and more like oligarchs." Fiona Hill Explains Trump, Musk and Why They Both Talk to Putin. "They are part of a very small group of men who control vast fortunes and vast political power that have global reach, and who prefer to deal with each other. They aren’t driven by the people they represent or the companies that they represent, but by the peer group that they are in, which is an extraordinarily small group of people ... Their interactions are all about them figuring out how to exercise power together. When it comes to Musk, he’s promoting Trump’s candidacy and transacting with Putin because it serves his own interests in amassing political and financial power, Hill said: 'His loyalty is not necessarily to the United States.'" (In other words, he's found the perfect candidate to back.)

Botch

lousubcap said:
And @Botch was ahead of them all with his separate thread regarding the above pamphlet.

Errr, not quite; I learned about the Army pamphlet from Heather Cox Richardson's post the day before.  

Botch

lousubcap said:

...They aren’t driven by the people they represent or the companies that they represent, but by the peer group that they are in, which is an extraordinarily small group of people ... Their interactions are all about them figuring out how to exercise power together. When it comes to Musk, he’s promoting Trump’s candidacy and transacting with Putin because it serves his own interests in amassing political and financial power, Hill said: 'His loyalty is not necessarily to the United States.'" (In other words, he's found the perfect candidate to back.)

Here, I will claim an early warning.  It was maybe a year ago that I expressed concern about musk's control of more and more critical infrastructure:

- As we turn more and more to electric vehicles, who controls the majority of charging stations across the US?  And has the ability to throttle/sever such charging, ergo interstate commerce?
 
- More and more of our telecommunications are being funneled thru musk's satellite system.  He's already been asked by putin to sever comm in Ukraine, and now Xi (apparently also on musk's speed-dial) has asked him to do the same over Taiwan, "if necessary".  And what about the US's arsenal of GPS-guided munitions?  Yeah, the GPS comm system is currently controlled/regulated by the Feds, but if cheeto wins and hires on musk as a "government waste czar", guess what happens to the Feds' control of the entire frequency spectrum?  
 
- We've already seen what an oligarch's control to the World's understanding can do when he/she controls a propaganda machine disguising as a News source (Exhibit A: r murdoch and Faux "news", fined for $787,500,000.00 for lying to the public, which hurt but did not deter said murdoch).  Exhibit B: musk buying and transforming twitter into "X", knowing that more and more folks only get their world view via the internet; and just this morning I read that X is now heavily filtering any democratic-leaning content, and just giving voice to MAGA supporters.  Factor in another oligarch's meddling with his news source, and squelching WaPo's endorsing Harris.  
 
 
Throughout History different nation/states have been gradually taken over by oligarchs/wealth control, and often they topple or are otherwise overcome.  But, to my limited understanding, this is the first time it's spanned most of the globe (WWII came close, but it was half-sies, Allies vs Axis).  If it boils down to drumpamerica, china, russia, and similar states vs northern Europe and a few others, how's that going to end?     

lousubcap

From The Atlantic today- Lora Kelley ASSOCIATE EDITOR

Election deniers have co-opted the term election integrity to undermine public trust in the voting process. The phrase election integrity sounds noble on its face. But in recent years, election deniers have used it to lay the groundwork for challenging the results of the 2024 election. A few months after Donald Trump took office in 2017, he signed an executive order establishing the “Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity.” The Brennan Center for Justice wrote at the time that “there is strong reason to suspect this Commission is not a legitimate attempt to study elections, but is rather a tool for justifying discredited claims of widespread voter fraud and promoting vote suppression legislation.” That proved prescient. Although there is no evidence of widespread fraud in the 2016 or 2020 elections—or in any other recent elections, for that matter—Trump and his allies have fomented the narrative that such interference is a real problem in America, employing it in the illegal attempt to overturn the 2020 election and their reported plans to claim that the 2024 race is rigged. As part of this strategy, right-wing activists and lawyers have organized initiatives under the auspices of election integrity, warping the meaning of those words to sow distrust. Through her Election Integrity Network, theright-wing activist Cleta Mitchell has been recruiting people—including election deniers who will likely continue to promote disinformation and conspiracy theories—to become poll workers and monitors, in an effort that was reportedly coordinated with members of the Republican National Committee. Poll watching in itself is a timeworn American practice, although it has been misused in the past; now, however, election-denial groups are sending participants to polling places under the presumption that fraud is taking place. More recently, Elon Musk—in addition to his own brazen efforts to get Trump reelected—has invited X users to report activity they see as suspicious through an “Election Integrity Community” feed, an effort almost certain to trigger a flood of misinformation on the platform. In Texas, Attorney General Ken Paxton’s Election Integrity Unit has gone to great lengths to seek evidence of fraud; in one case, nine armed officers reportedly appeared with a search warrant at the door of a woman who had been working with a Latino civil-rights organization to help veterans and seniors register to vote. The RNC, especially under the influence of its co-chair Lara Trump, has taken up “election integrity” as an explicit priority: As she said at a GOP event over the summer, “we are pulling out all the stops, and we are so laser-focused on election integrity.” Her team created an election-integrity program earlier this year and hired Christina Bobb, who was later indicted for efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election in Arizona (she has denied wrongdoing), as its lead election-integrity lawyer. As The New Yorker reported earlier this month, the RNC plans to staff a “war room” with attorneys operating an “election-integrity hotline” on Election Day. Such initiatives have helped inject doubt into a legitimate process. Despite the clear lack of evidence to suggest fraud is likely in this election, nearly 60 percent of Americans already say they’re concerned or very concerned about it, according to a recent NPR/PBS News/Marist poll; 88 percent of Trump supporters said they were concerned about fraud (compared with about 30 percent of Kamala Harris supporters). The “consistent, disciplined, repetitive use” of the term election integrity in this new context is “designed to confuse the public,” Alice Clapman, a senior counsel in the Brennan Center’s Voting Rights Program, told me. A sad irony, she added, is that those who use this framing have done so to push for restrictions that actually suppress voting, including strict voter-ID laws and limitations on early ballots, or to threaten the existence of initiatives to ensure fair voting. Many of the same activists promoting “election integrity,” including Cleta Mitchell, organized a misinformation campaign to undermine a bipartisan state-led initiative called the Electronic Registration Information Center, which was created in 2012 to ensure that voter rolls were accurate. Multiple states eventually left the compact. The term election integrity isn’t entirely new—Google Trends data suggest that its usage has bubbled up around election years in recent decades. But its prominence has exploded since 2020, and the strong associations with election denial in recent years means that other groups have backed away from it. “Like so much charged language in American politics, when one side really seizes on a term and uses it in a loaded way,” it becomes “a partisan term,” Clapman told me. Now groups unaffiliated with the right are turning to more neutral language such as voter protection and voter security to refer to their efforts to ensure free elections. Election deniers are chipping away at Americans’ shared understanding of reality. And as my colleague Ali Breland wrote yesterday, violent rhetoric and even political violence in connection with the election have already begun. This month so far, a man has punched a poll worker after being asked to remove his MAGA hat, and hundreds of ballots have been destroyed in fires on the West Coast. Election officials are bracing for targeted attacks in the coming days—and some have already receivedthreats. If Trump loses, the right will be poised—under the guise of “election integrity”—to interfere further with the norms of American democracy.

Botch

Some more interesting "rhyming History" from Heather Cox Richardson, 29 Oct:
 

On Monday, October 28, 1929, New York’s Metropolitan Opera Company opened its forty-fifth season.

Four thousand attendees in their finest clothes strolled to the elegant building on foot or traveled in one of a thousand limousines to see Puccini’s Manon Lescaut, the melodramatic story of an innocent French girl seduced by wealth, whose reluctance to leave her riches for true love leads to her arrest and tragic death. Photographers captured images of the era’s social celebrities as they arrived at opening night, their flash bulbs blinding the crowd that had gathered to see the famous faces and expensive gowns.

No one toasting the beginning of the opera season that night knew they were marking the end of an era.

At ten o’clock the next morning, when the opening gong sounded in the great hall of the New York Stock Exchange, men began to unload their stocks. So fast did trading go that by the end of the day, the ticker recording transactions ran two and a half hours late. When the final tally could be read, it showed that an extraordinary 16,410,030 shares had traded hands, and the market had lost $14 billion. The market had been uneasy for weeks before the twenty-ninth, but Black Tuesday began a slide that seemingly would not end. By mid-November the industrial average was half of what it had been in September. The economic boom that had fueled the Roaring Twenties was over.

Once the bottom fell out of the stock market, the economy ground down. Manufacturing output dropped to levels lower than those of 1913. The production of pig iron fell to what it had been in the 1890s. Foreign trade dropped by $7 billion, down to just $3 billion. The price of wheat fell from $1.05 a bushel to 39 cents; corn dropped from 81 to 33 cents; cotton fell from 17 to 6 cents a pound. Prices dropped so low that selling crops meant taking a loss, so struggling farmers simply let them rot in the fields. 

By 1932, over one million people in New York City were unemployed. By 1933 the number of unemployed across the nation rose to 13 million people—one out of every four American workers. Unable to afford rent or pay mortgages, people lived in shelters made of packing boxes.

No one knew how to combat the Great Depression, but certain wealthy Americans were sure they knew what had caused it. The problem, they said, was that poor Americans refused to work hard enough and were draining the economy. They must be forced to take less. “Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate,” Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon told President Herbert Hoover. “It will purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living will come down. People will work harder, live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people.” 

Slash government spending, agreed the Chicago Tribune: lay off teachers and government workers, and demand that those who remain accept lower wages. Richard Whitney, a former president of the Stock Exchange, told the Senate that the only way to restart the economy was to cut government salaries and veterans’ benefits (although he told them that his own salary—which at sixty thousand dollars was six times higher than theirs—was “very little” and couldn’t be reduced).

President Hoover knew little about finances, let alone how to fix an economic crisis of global proportions. He tried to reverse the economic slide by cutting taxes and reassuring Americans that “the fundamental business of the country, that is, production and distribution of commodities, is on a sound and prosperous basis.” 

But taxes were already so low that most folks would see only a few extra dollars a year from the cuts, and the fundamental business of the country was not, in fact, sound. When suffering Americans begged for public works programs to provide jobs, Hoover insisted that such programs were a “soak the rich” program that would “enslave” taxpayers, and called instead for private charity.

By the time Hoover’s term ended, Americans were ready to try a new approach to economic recovery. They refused to reelect Hoover and turned instead to New York Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who promised to use the federal government to provide jobs and a safety net to enable Americans to weather hard times. He promised the American people a “New Deal”: a government that would work for everyone, not just for the wealthy and well connected.

As soon as Roosevelt was in office, Democrats began to pass laws protecting workers’ rights, providing government jobs, regulating business and banking, and beginning to chip away at the racial segregation of the American South. New Deal policies employed more than 8.5 million people, built more than 650,000 miles of highways, built or repaired more than 120,000 bridges, and put up more than 125,000 buildings. 

They regulated banking and the stock market and gave workers the right to bargain collectively. They established minimum wages and maximum hours for work. They provided a basic social safety net and regulated food and drug safety. And when World War II broke out, the new system enabled the United States to defend democracy successfully against fascists both at home—where they had grown strong enough to turn out almost 20,000 people to a rally at Madison Square Garden in 1939—and abroad. 

The New Deal worked so well that common men and women across the country hailed FDR as their leader, electing him an unprecedented four times. Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower built on the New Deal when voters elected him in 1952. He bolstered the nation’s infrastructure with the Federal-Aid Highway Act, which provided $25 billion to build 41,000 miles of highway across the country; added the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare to the government and called for a national healthcare system.

Eisenhower nominated former Republican governor of California Earl Warren as chief justice of the Supreme Court to protect civil rights, which he would begin to do with the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision months after joining the court. Eisenhower also insisted on the vital importance of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to stop the Soviet Union from spreading communism throughout Europe.

Eisenhower called his vision “a middle way between untrammeled freedom of the individual and the demands of the welfare of the whole Nation.” 

The system worked: between 1945 and 1960 the nation’s gross national product (GNP) jumped by 250%, from $200 billion to $500 billion. The vast majority of Americans of both parties liked the new system that had helped the nation to recover from the Depression and to equip the Allies to win World War II. 

Politicians and commentators agreed that most Democrats and Republicans shared a “liberal consensus” that the government should regulate business, provide for basic social welfare, promote infrastructure, and protect civil rights. It seemed the country had finally created a government that best reflected democratic values. 

Indeed, that liberal consensus seemed so universal that the only place to find opposition was in entertainment. Popular radio comedian Fred Allen’s show included a caricature, Senator Beauregard Claghorn, a southern blowhard who pontificated, harrumphed, and took his reflexive hatred of the North to ridiculous extremes. A buffoon who represented the past, the Claghorn character was such a success that he starred in his own Hollywood film and later became the basis for the Looney Tunes cartoon rooster Foghorn Leghorn.

—

Notes:

“Gala Throng Hails Opening of Opera,” New York Times, October 29, 1929, p. 28.

John Kenneth Galbraith, The Great Crash: 1929 (1954; rpt. New York: Time Incorporated, 1961), pp. 171, 135–153, 158–160, 161–167, 214–218.

Herbert Hoover, The Memoirs of Herbert Hoover: The Cabinet and the Presidency, 1920–1933 (New York: Macmillan, 1952), pp. 30–31.

Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1931), pp. 332, 340–341.

“22,000 Nazis Hold Rally in Garden,” The New York Times, February 21, 1939; Ryan Bort, “When Nazis Took Over Madison Square Garden,” Rolling Stone, February 19, 2019.

Dwight D. Eisenhower, February 2, 1953, Message to Congress.

lousubcap

Hope the link works and nothing new here but a review of CHEETO and his bu!!$hit:
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/10/trump-violent-rhetoric-timeline/680403/?utm_=. 

Canugghead

If I may digress, one of our kids and friend are visiting NYC Nov 7 for a mini vacation, is it safe to do so 48 hours after the election?

lousubcap

NYC absorbs anything after 9/11 even CHEETO.  As I have not been since fall '22 I will defer to the experts but the size and energy of the city is pretty much immune to any near term ebbs and flows in any area.  
I would jump on the chance.  
If their first exposure, they will be drinking from a fire hose of experiences, all of value.  

fishlessman

I don't see a problem

Canugghead

Thanks for the reassurance, they've been there before.

Ike

Sounds like a question for @WildmanWilson he oughta be in the know on that kind of stuff

lousubcap

Trump Suggests Training Guns on Liz Cheney’s Face

“Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, okay?”

By David A. Graham. (from The Atlantic)

Less than a week before Election Day, Donald Trump last night called for one of his prominent political adversaries to go before a firing squad. In an onstage interview with Tucker Carlson in Arizona, Trump called Liz Cheney, the Republican former representative from Wyoming, “a very dumb individual” and “a radical war hawk.”

“You know they’re all war hawks when they’re sitting in Washington in a nice building saying, Ooh gee, well, let’s send 10,000 troops right into the mouth of the enemy,” Trump said. “Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, okay? Let’s see how she feels about it, you know, when the guns are trained on her face.”

Like Trump’s hate-filled rally at Madison Square Garden last weekend, these comments are a good summation of what he would bring to the White House if reelected. His campaign is premised on violence, disregard for the rule of law, and retribution for anyone who might disagree with him.

David A. Graham: This is Trump’s message

“This is how dictators destroy free nations,” Cheney responded on X. “They threaten those who speak against them with death. We cannot entrust our country and our freedom to a petty, vindictive, cruel, unstable man who wants to be a tyrant.”

Trump’s campaign said that Trump “was talking about how Liz Cheney wants to send America’s sons and daughters to fight in wars despite never being in a war herself.” Trump isn’t wrong that Cheney has often advocated foreign military interventions. She can and should be criticized for many of her views. But Trump isn’t calling for a debate. He vividly imagined Cheney with “guns trained on her face.” Normalizing discussion of political opponents getting shot is a step in a dangerous direction.

These remarks cannot be written off as joking around, the excuse that Trump has typically used when he’s crossed lines. (He seems less concerned about disapprobation these days.) Trump didn’t laugh when he said it. Neither did Carlson or the audience. Besides, Trump has repeatedly called for the armed forces to be used against his political critics. He’s proposed deploying the military against the “enemies from within,” a group that includes “radical left lunatics” generally, but also former Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Representative Adam Schiff, both California Democrats. He’s amplified calls on Truth Social for former President Barack Obama to face a military tribunal (for what crimes, one can only guess). He has said that retired General Mark Milley, whom he appointed chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, should be executed.

Anne Applebaum: Trump wants you to accept all of this as normal

Yet some voters may go to the polls without a firm grasp of his rhetorical record. Trump makes so many outrageous remarks that keeping track of them all is difficult, and some parts of the press persist in toning down even his most dangerous comments. The headline in The New York Times on Trump’s Cheney remarks as of this writing was “Trump Attacks Liz Cheney Using Violent War Imagery,” which is not strictly false but misses the point.

In these comments, Trump flagrantly displayed his hypocrisy. Although the former president has remade himself as a putative dove, he once backed some of the same conflicts that Cheney did, including the war in Iraq. And although he claims he wants to avoid foreign adventurism, he spent his first term in office being talked out of attacking Venezuela, North Korea, and Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, among others. He and his allies are now proposing that the U.S. military launch attacks on cartels inside Mexico.

David A. Graham: Trump isn’t bluffing

Trump is also proposing new uses of the military domestically, not only against his enemies but to conduct a mass deportation. He has encouraged brutal policing and vigilante attacks by citizens. Trump may hate war, but he loves violence.

Perhaps voters shouldn’t give this man command of so many people armed with rifles.

lousubcap

 And a bit more from Fareed Zakaria:

Fareed: After the Last Presidential Election, US Democracy Faced a Close Call

The Jan. 6 riot at the US Capitol resulted in death and property destruction. But for US democracy, Fareed writes in his latest Washington Post column, something else was very troubling, too.   “To me, the most frightening aspect of what happened on Jan. 6 was not the event outside the Capitol but the one inside it—after the violence had ended and order had been restored,” Fareed writes. “The House reconvened that night to certify the election results that had been sent forward from the states. Remember, this was after dozens of objections in many of the states had been considered and rejected and dozens of court cases had been filed and dismissed. After all those legal procedures had been followed, after a violent assault on the Capitol, Donald Trump and his allies still urged his supporters to reject the results, reject electors, and in effect nullify the election. And a majority of House Republicans—139 of them—readily assented and voted against certifying the election. Had they had enough votes, well, we don’t know what would have happened; it’s possible Trump could have managed to stay on as president.”   As Constitution framer James Madison warned, America’s system of government relies on virtuous people to abide by checks on power and follow explicit rules and traditional norms. Fareed concludes: “We might be about to embark upon an experiment to see whether our institutions, checks and balances can hold, even when leaders try their best to bend them.”

lousubcap

This for Susan Glasser of The New Yorker:

Garbage Time at the 2024 Finish Line

Susan Glasser, The New Yorker November 1, 2024

https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-bidens-washington/garbage-time-at-the-2024-finish-line

Botch

From Heather Cox Richardson's article yesterday; I'm really starting to appreciate her observations/perspective.  Here she ties in today's situation with crime rates, the gender split, the interesting (for me) alliance between independent women and senior women, Reagan's "Little House on the Prairie" cowboy myth and the resulting alliance with fundamentalist christians, Ruby Ridge/Waco, and the murmurs of eliminating women's right to vote.  Dayam.       
 
 

Yesterday, in Time magazine, Eric Cortellessa explained that the electoral strategy of the Trump campaign was to get men who don’t usually vote, particularly young ones, to turn out for Trump. If they could do that, and at the same time hold steady the support of white women, Trump could win the election. So Trump has focused on podcasts followed by young men and on imitating the patterns of professional wrestling performances.

At the same time, he has promised to “protect women…whether the women like it or not,” and lied consistently about crime statistics to keep white suburban women on his side by suggesting that he alone can protect them. Today in Gastonia, North Carolina, for example, Trump told the audience: "They say the suburban women. Well, the suburbs are under attack right now. When you're home in your house alone and you have this monster that got out of prison and he's got, you know, six charges of murdering six different people, I think you'd rather have Trump."

The crime rate has dropped dramatically in the past year.

Rather than keeping women in his camp, Trump’s strategy of reaching out to his base to turn out low-propensity voters, especially young men, has alienated them. That alienation has come on top of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision that overturned Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that recognized the constitutional right to abortion. 

Early voting in Pennsylvania showed that women sent in 56% of the early ballots, compared to 43% for men. Seniors—people who remember a time before Roe v. Wade—also showed a significant split. Although the parties had similar numbers of registrants, nearly 59% of those over 65 voting early were Democrats. That pattern holds across all the battleground states: women’s early voting outpaces men’s by about 10 points. While those numbers are certainly not definitive—no one knows how these people voted, and much could change over the next few days—the enthusiasm of those two groups was notable. 

This evening, a Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa poll conducted by the highly respected Selzer & Co. polling firm from October 28 to 31 showed Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris leading Trump in Iowa 47% to 44% among likely voters. That outlying polling result is undoubtedly at least in part a reflection of the fact that Harris’s running mate is the governor of a neighboring state, but that’s not the whole story. While Trump wins the votes of men in Iowa by 52% to 38%, and of evangelicals by 73% to 20%, women, particularly older women, are driving the shift to favor Harris in a previously Republican-dominated state. 

Independent women back Harris by a 28-point margin, while senior women support her by a margin of more than 2 to 1, 63% to 28%. Overall, women back Harris by a margin of about 20 points: 56% to 36%. Seniors as a group including men as well as women are also strongly in Harris’s camp, by 55% to 36%.

A 79-year-old poll respondent said: “I like her policies on reproductive health and having women choosing their own health care, and the fact that I think that she will save our democracy and follow the rule of law…. [I]f the Republicans can decide what you do with your body, what else are they going to do to limit your choice, for women?”

The obvious driver for women and seniors to oppose Trump is the Dobbsdecision. The loss of abortion care has put women’s lives at risk. Within days after the Supreme Court handed the decision down, we started hearing stories of raped children forced to give birth or cross state lines for abortions, as well as of women who have suffered or died from a lack of health care after doctors feared intervening in miscarriages would put them in legal jeopardy. 

As X user E. Rosalie noted, Iowa’s abortion ban also has long-term implications for the state. It has forced OBGYNs to leave and has made recruiting more impossible. As people are unable to get medical care to have babies, they will choose to live elsewhere, draining talent out of the state. That, in turn, will weaken Iowa’s economy.

That same process is playing out in all the states that have banned abortion. 

It seems possible that the Dobbs decision ushered in the end of the toxic American individualism on which the Reagan revolution was built. When he ran for president in 1980, Ronald Reagan set out to dismantle the active government that regulated business, provided a basic social safety net, promoted infrastructure, and protected civil rights. Such a government was akin to socialism, he claimed, and he insisted it stifled American individualism. 

In contrast to such a government, Reagan celebrated the mythological American cowboy. In his telling, that cowboy wanted nothing from the government but to be left alone to provide for and to protect his family. Good women in the cowboy myth were wives and mothers, in contrast to the women who wanted equal rights and jobs outside the home in modern America. That traditional image of American women had gotten legs in 1974, when the television show Little House on the Prairie debuted; it would run until 1983. Prairie dresses became the rage.

Reagan’s embrace of women’s role as wives and mothers brought traditionalist white Southern Baptists to his support. Those traditionalists objected to the government’s recognition of women’s equal rights because they believed equality undermined a godly patriarchal family structure. They made ending access to abortion their main issue. 

At the same time that the right wing insisted that women belonged in their homes, it socialized young men to believe in a mythological world based on guns and the domination of women. In 1980 the previously nonpartisan National Rifle Association endorsed Reagan, their first-ever endorsement of a presidential candidate, and the rise of evangelical culture reinforced that dominant men must protect submissive women. 

When federal marshals tried to arrest Randy Weaver at his home in Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in August 1992 for failure to show up in court for trial on a firearms charge, right-wing activists and neo-Nazis from a nearby Aryan Nations compound rushed to Ruby Ridge to protest what right-wing media insisted was simply a man protecting his family. 

The next February, when officers stormed the compound of a religious cult in Waco, Texas, whose former members reported that their leader was sexually assaulting children and stockpiling weapons, right-wing talk show hosts—notably Rush Limbaugh and Alex Jones—blamed new president Bill Clinton’s attorney general, Janet Reno, for the ensuing gun battle and fire that killed 76 people. Reno was the first female attorney general, and right-wing media made much of the idea that a group of Christians had been killed by a female government official who was unmarried and—as opponents made much of—unfeminine. 

When he ran for office in 2015, Trump appealed to those men socialized into violence and dominance. He embraced the performance of dominance as it is done in professional wrestling, and urged his supporters to beat up protesters at his rallies. The Access Hollywood tape in which he boasted of sexual assault did not hurt his popularity with his base. He promised to end abortion rights and suggested he would impose criminal punishments on women seeking abortions. 

And then, in June 2022, thanks to the votes of the three religious extremists Trump put on it, the Supreme Court handed down the Dobbs decision, stripping women of a constitutional right that the U.S. government had recognized for almost 50 years. 

Justice Samuel Alito suggested that women could change state laws if they saw fit, writing in the decision that “women are not without electoral or political power.” Indeed, since the Dobbs decision, every time abortion rights have been on the ballot, voters have approved them, although right-wing state legislators have worked to prevent the voters’ wishes from taking effect. 

In this moment, though, it is clear that women have electoral and political power over more than abortion rights. 

The 1980 election was the first one in which the proportion of eligible female voters who turned out to vote was higher than the proportion of eligible men. It was also the first one in which there was a partisan gender gap, with a higher proportion of women than men favoring the Democrats. That partisan gap now is the highest it has ever been.

The fear that women can, if they choose, overthrow the patriarchal mythology of cowboy individualism that shaped the modern MAGA Republican Party is likely behind the calls of certain right-wing influencers and evangelical leaders to stop women from voting. For sure, it is behind the right-wing freak-out over the video voiced by actor Julia Roberts that reassures women that they do not have to tell their husbands how they voted. 

The right-wing version of the American cowboy was always a myth. Nothing mattered more for success in the American West than the kinship networks and community support that provided money, labor, and access to trade outlets. When the economic patterns of the American West replicated those of the industrializing East after the Civil War, success during the heyday of the cowboy depended on access to lots of capital, giving rise to western barons and then to popular political movements to regulate businesses and give more power to the people. Far from being the homebound wives of myth, women were central to western life, just as they have always been to American society. 

In Flagstaff, Arizona, today, Democratic presidential candidate and Minnesota governor Tim Walz told a crowd: “I kind of have a feeling that women all across this country, from every walk of life, from either party, are going to send a loud and clear message to Donald Trump next Tuesday, November 5, whether he likes it or not.”

—

Notes:

https://time.com/7171535/donald-trump-harris-young-men/

https://www.cnn.com/2024/11/02/politics/older-women-voters-kamala-harris-abortion-rights/index.html

https://www.inquirer.com/news/early-voting-women-seniors-pennsylvania-20241101.html

https://www.politico.com/news/2024/10/29/gender-gap-early-voting-00186155

https://www.politico.com/news/2024/10/31/trump-lagging-early-votes-seniors-pennsylvania-00186612

https://www.statesman.com/story/news/2018/04/16/a-quarter-century-later-dark-theories-still-hover-over-waco-siege/9982805007/

https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/politics/iowa-poll/2024/11/02/iowa-poll-kamala-harris-leads-donald-trump-2024-presidential-race/75354033007/

https://www.cnn.com/2024/11/01/politics/trump-women-voters-gender-gap-harris/index.html

https://cawp.rutgers.edu/facts/voters/gender-differences-voter-turnout

https://cawp.rutgers.edu/gender-gap-voting-choices-presidential-elections

Associated Press, “18 Months in Jail for White Supremacist,” The New York Times, October 19, 1993.

https://www.politico.com/news/2022/05/02/supreme-court-abortion-draft-opinion-00029473

X:

atrupar/status/1852770754208665661

Acyn/status/1852817296441635094

Info_Rosalie/status/1852921217482621379

shannonrwatts/status/1850891818256445592

lousubcap

"The Proud Boys are mobilizing in support of former President Trump, amplifying election-cheating claims and making threats about the presidential election. The group previously played a central role in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. Tawnell D. Hobbs and Jennifer Levitz report for the Wall Street Journal. 

The Pentagon is preparing to counter foreign attempts to threaten or destabilize the United States during the presidential transition period, senior defense officials say. Missy Ryan, Ellen Nakashima, and Dan Lamothe report for the Washington Post.

Security fencing was erected yesterday around White House, U.S. Capitol, and the Vice Presidential residence, as federal and District authorities brace for potential unrest following tomorrow’s presidential election. Spencer S. Hsu reports for the Washington Post.

Washington state is activating some members of the National Guard to be on stand-by following “general and specific information” regarding the potential for election-related violence, Governor Jay Inslee said Friday. Costas Pitas reports for Reuters.

The Justice Department announced on Friday it will send election monitors to 86 jurisdictions in 27 states. David Nakamura reports for the Washington Post."

Legume

It's pretty incredible how when you yell loud enough and long enough that this is a third world country / banana republic, you can actually get people to behave as if it is.

Botch

Today's blurb from Robert Reich had some hopefulness in it, something I need after reading a couple points in the Cap/n's post above.  I'd also read that Gov. abbott of TX will not be allowing any of the Justice Dept election monitors in (they're unarmed, texas law enforcement is).   
 
 

Friends, 

These are the most stressful and nerve-wracking days I can recall. I vacillate between optimism and fear, hope and dread. 

You? 

I don’t recall an election in which the two candidates represent such opposite poles of the American character. 

Harris is the rule of law; Trump, lawlessness. Harris, inclusion; Trump, exclusion. Harris, decency; Trump, loathsomeness. Harris, the American Dream; Trump, the American nightmare. 

Harris wants the best for the country; Trump wants the best only for himself. 

I don’t need to go on. You know all this. The question is why doesn’t everyone else? That almost half of America appears willing to vote for Trump is itself shocking. 

I write this short missive to you every day (sometimes more than once a day) because I want to fortify you. Not just with facts, analysis, and logic, but also with reminders of our shared morality. 

I want to reassure you about the common good. 

A large part of that common good consists of our concern for something larger than personal wealth, power, or advantage over others — in other words, the opposite of Trump. 

The common good is what we owe one another as members of the same society. These duties create a set of relationships that give us a civilized way of living together. 

But the common good has been under assault in two ways.

First, it’s been under assault by people with great wealth who have been using their wealth to corrupt our democracy and spew cynicism about the whole project of self-government. 

These people include Elon Musk, Rupert Murdoch, Peter Thiel, and Tim Mellon. 

Let me also add two powerful people whose cowardice has been reprehensible: Jeff Bezos, who won’t allow his Washington Post to endorse Kamala Harris because he’s afraid of angering Donald Trump. And Jamie Dimon, chair and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, America’s largest bank, who never misses an opportunity to comment on public issues but has gone silent when it comes to the dangers posed by Trump. 

Worse yet, hugely wealthy people like them have rigged the American political and economic system to their own benefit. They have siphoned off a significant part of the gains of the economy. 

The median wage for the bottom 90 percent of Americans has risen just 15 percent in real terms over the last forty years. Over the same years, the stock market has risen 5000 percent. In the 1960s, CEO pay was 20 times the typical worker’s pay. Today, it’s 320 times. 

Second, the common good has been under assault by people who have been exploiting Americans’ fears of others to build their political power. The “others” include immigrants, people of color, gay people, trans people, secularists, even women.

The perpetrators include Donald Trump, JD Vance, and much of the current Republican Party, which has become a cesspool of bigotry and lies. 

There’s an important relationship between these two threats to the common good. 

A major reason so many Americans are willing to follow Trump and blow up the system is they feel they have nothing to lose. 

For years they’ve worked hard and followed the rules but have gotten nowhere. They’ve become frustrated, anxious, and angry. Trump, Vance, and the Republican Party have tapped into these feelings and channeled them into hate of “them” — as if immigrants, people of color, gay and trans people, secularists, and women are responsible for what has happened to white working class men. 

Both threats to the common good are inviting brutality. They are undermining decency. They are corroding our shared morality.

In these ways, Trump and his sycophants and funders have elevated the dark side of the American psyche. They have normalized viciousness in America.

Since Trump came on the scene in 2015, hate crimes have soared. America has become even more polarized. Average Americans say and do things to people they disagree with that in a different time would have been unthinkable.

Defeating Trump and Vance tomorrow (or however long it takes for the election to be decided) is only the first step. 

The next step is to hold Trump accountable for his criminality. 

Third, we must contain the billionaires who are undermining American democracy. We must demand a tax on great wealth, more vigorous antitrust enforcement to break up monopolies, and true campaign finance reform.

Fourth, and hardest of all: We must ensure that Americans who have voted for Trump — whether out of anger, despair, bigotry, or delusion — are brought back into the realm of rationality and included in the nation’s future prosperity.

We must create means to achieve the American Dream that do not require a four-year college degree. We have to get big money out of our politics. Social media must filter out hateful disinformation.

The preamble to the Constitution of the United States opens with the phrase “We the people,” conveying a sense of shared interest and a desire “to promote the general welfare,” as the preamble goes on to say. 

Which brings me back to tomorrow’s election. 

I know you’re scared and stressed. So am I. Some of you may feel quite alone right now. You are not. 

All I can say to reassure you is that time and again, Americans have opted for the common good. 

We supported one another during the Great Depression. We were victorious over Hitler’s fascism and Soviet communism. We survived Joe McCarthy’s communist witch hunts, Richard Nixon’s crimes, Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam War, the horrors of 9/11, and George W. Bush’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. So far, we have survived Donald Trump’s malignant narcissism. 

The common good in America is still alive. 

If we are true to our history and ideals, Kamala Harris will win, and we’ll get through the destruction Trump will again try to wreak on our democracy in the wake of his defeat, as we did before. And we will get on with the work of achieving broadly-shared prosperity and strengthening our democracy. 

We the people will succeed.

dbCooper

George Will opines on "Voters face the worst presidential choice in U.S. history"

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/11/01/donald-trump-kamala-harris-worst-choice/?itid=ap_georgef.will

By George F. Will
November 1, 2024 at 7:00 a.m. EDT

Of this mercifully truncated presidential campaign we may say what Samuel Johnson said of Milton’s “Paradise Lost”: No one ever wished it longer. Why prolong this incineration of the nation’s dignity?

Donald Trump, a volcano of stray thoughts and tantrums, is painfully well known. There is nothing to know about Kamala Harris, other than this: Her versatility of conviction means that she might shed her new catechism as blithely as she acquired its progressive predecessor.

The Democratic Party’s reckless disingenuousness regarding the president’s frailty persisted until, in 90 June minutes, the truth became public. Then, with the nimbleness of those without the ballast of seriousness about anything other than hoarding power, his party foisted on the electorate a Play-Doh candidate. Her manipulators made her malleability into her platform. Prudence is a virtue, so do not fault her handlers for mostly shielding her from public interactions more challenging than interviews with grammar school newspapers.

Her sole notable decision as a candidate has been the choice of a running mate whose self-description (“knucklehead”) is more astute than his flippancies about serious matters (the electoral college is icky, socialism is “neighborliness,” etc.) and his self-celebratory fictions about his past. Tim Walz’s achievement during his pirouette in the spotlight has been to make his counterpart, JD Vance, resemble Aristotle.

Or perhaps one of the Brothers Grimm: Vance’s scary fairy tales (he calls them “stories”) about kitten-cooking Haitians, etc., are, he says, intended to be didactic. They might be if he, a bristling porcupine of certitudes, candidly demarcated his fictions from reality. The 2024 campaign has revealed the recklessness of Joe Biden’s 2020 choice of a running mate. Trump, who is 78 and who is not a martyr to the strictures of healthy living, was as reckless in choosing Vance.

Many of the nation’s 59 prior presidential elections have been choices between mediocrities, with some scoundrels thrown in (and into office). This year’s choice is, however, the worst ever.

This measured judgment is validated by pondering, one by one, previous elections. To understand how far the nation has defined mediocrity down, consider the campaign’s pitiless exposure of the candidates’ peculiar promises and reprehensible silences.

On foreign policy, Trump and Harris have different styles of being incomprehensible. He is pithy, promising to settle Russia’s war against Ukraine “in 24 hours,” details someday. She is loquacious, as when explaining the Middle East to CBS’s “60 Minutes”: “The work that we have done has resulted in a number of movements in that region by Israel that were very much prompted by, or a result of, many things, including our advocacy for what needs to happen in the region … We’re not going to stop pursuing what is necessary for the United States to be clear about where we stand on the need for this war to end …”

He will not say Vladimir Putin is an enemy. She will not say Israel has a right to fight as fiercely against genocidal enemies next door as the United States fought in World War II against enemies oceans away.

Trump and Harris are, however, crystal clear and completely agreed about the national debt, which increased $1.8 trillion in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30: They promise to do nothing about the main problem, entitlement (Social Security, Medicare) spending.

When Trump said “no tax on tips,” Harris, perhaps admiring the artful pander, said: Me, too! They also agree on repealing one of his good presidential deeds — the cap on deductions of state and local taxes from federal income tax liabilities. This would be a tax cut disproportionately for high-earners in high-tax blue states.

Trump and Harris also agree that American democracy is a papier-mâché shambles. He says elections are “rigged.” She says democracy’s protectors (the Constitution, Congress, the courts, the people) are so flimsy that only she can prevent Trump from demolishing what George Washington founded and Abraham Lincoln preserved.

Amazingly, although both candidates have constantly caused normal people to wince, neither’s voice has been the most embarrassing this year. That award goes to the Idaho Republican who, in a public forum, told a Native American to “go back where you came from.” Let’s do go back to where we come from: the nation’s founding of a limited government.

Whoever wins, both parties should be penitential about what they have put the country through. And both should begin planning 2028 nomination processes that will spare the nation a choice that will be greeted, as this year’s has been, by grimaces from sea to shining sea.

lousubcap

@dbCooper - George Will can really pull it together.  I caught a piece of an interview with him where he said that this is the worst Presidential election choice in history.  Gonna be quite a ride.