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GOP PACs Are Supporting Jill Stein’s Candidacy–to Hurt Kamala

By dianeravitch
November 3, 2024 //
20

Jill Stein was a spoiler in 2016. She won enough votes in battleground states to enable Trump to win the electoral college, as he was losing the popular vote. She claims to represent the Green Party but her candidacy elected the most anti-environment President in recent memory. Other presidents may have been indifferent to climate change, but Trump aggressively insists it’s a hoax. He even made the bizarre claim that rising tides would create more waterfront property even though the opposite is true.

Now Jill Stein is up to her old tricks.

Politico reports that her third party candidacy is sponsored by GOP donors.

I’m not sure what her goal is but she risks returning Trump to the White House. That must be what she wants.

Adam Wren of Politico wrote:

A Republican-aligned super PAC is sending texts in Georgia telling voters to “Join The Movement For Equality” and vote for Jill Stein — a sign some Republicans believe her candidacy could harm Kamala Harris’ chances in the battleground.

American Environmental Justice PAC, which filed with the Federal Election Committee on Oct. 1, is urging voters to back the Green Party candidate.

The text calls the two parties “a uni-party,” and says “you can count on Jill Stein.” An X user shared a screenshot of one text with a disclosure that it was paid for by American Environmental Justice PAC.

In the group’s sole filing, it reported receiving the entirety of its $35,000 in funding from Lin Rogers of Atlanta. Rogers has donated tens of thousands to Trump, including $12,500 to The Trump 47 Committee, Inc. A call to the phone number listed for the treasurer on the federal filing led to an inoperable number.

The PAC is at least the second pro-Stein, GOP-backed entity of its kind operating in an electoral battleground that has emerged in recent days: CNN reported that Badger Values is backing Stein with robocalls in Wisconsin.

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Environment, Hypocrisy, Republicans, Trump

Dan Rather: Ignore the Polls; Turn Off Social Media; Read a Book; Take a Walk

By dianeravitch
November 3, 2024 //
13

Dan Rather is as nervous about this election as everyone else is. he’s been election-watching for many years. He offers sage advice. But whatever you do, keep reading this blog! Usually an island of reason, intelligence, and sanity.

He writes:

……Here’s my first tip to surviving the final two weeks before the election: Save your sanity and stay off social media. Get away from the TV, the computer, the phone. It is not good for anyone’s mental health to doomscroll. Leave the house and enjoy the lovely fall weather. Take a walk or a drive. 

Sure, use your phone to check sports scores, make dinner reservations, or call someone — the device’s original purpose.

Yes, we’re all on the edge of our seats, awaiting our chance to vote. Friends, I am not one to sugarcoat anything, much less the state of the most important election in our lifetimes. The race appears to be incredibly close. Based on my 70-plus years of covering American politics, please allow me to offer some suggestions for getting through the next two weeks without losing our collective minds. 

Do not obsess over the polls. The national horse race polls are meaningless at this point. We know it will come down to the seven battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. And the public polls that you see from those swing states are worthless, according to David Plouffe, a Harris senior adviser. He doesn’t even look at them, instead using the campaign’s internal polling, which he believes is more reliable.

Do not react to every flutter you read or hear — good or bad. Social media and the mainstream media amplify chatter for clicks and views. It is designed to get your attention, but that doesn’t mean there is any value or validity to the “news.”

Do consume other things. Read some fiction, go to a movie, listen to music.

Remember that a race this close — and it has been close for months — will not change significantly over the next two weeks. If you see a poll or anything else that suggests a huge swing in either direction, it is likely bunk.

I can’t write a piece this close to the election without (again) talking about Donald Trump’s unhinged and increasingly angry and erratic behavior. But I will keep it short.

In the last three days, he has talked incoherently about topics that have absolutely nothing to do with anything meaningful to voters. He made vulgar comments about golfer Arnold Palmer. He characterized January 6 as “a day of love.” He had a staged photo-op “working” at a McDonald’s in a misguided appeal to working-class voters — interesting coming from a candidate whose FEC filings show he has spent $31,000 at the fast-food chain since January 2023. 

It is doubtful that any of this will motivate fence-sitters to the polls for Trump, and what matters most now is getting people into the voting booth. That doesn’t start and end on November 5. Early voting has already begun in 46 states and Washington, D.C., so the turnout ground game is already underway.

“[Turnout] is a combination of best operation, best data, best resources, best volunteers. But what really gives all of that energy is the candidate closing well,” Plouffe explained on a recent podcast. “That gets more volunteers out. That might get some of those tough-to-get voters to say, ‘She’s taking the fight to them; I like that.’ Sometimes it’s not policy-based; it can be based on performance and energy. And she’s out there campaigning hard, having fun, going into tough [venues] like Fox News,” he continued.

As close as this race is, I still maintain that Harris has more going for her than Trump does. She has raised more money. The Democrats’ ground game is bigger and better organized. Most importantly, Harris is a more energized and likable candidate. 

But none of that will matter unless she gets her vote out.

The best advice I or anyone else can give is, vote! And get as many others as you can to do so too.

Open the link to read the post in full.

Categories Democracy, Elections

Public Education Has Been Ignored in the Campaign, But It Is on the Ballot

By dianeravitch
November 2, 2024 //
7

It’s hard to notice something that is invisible, but it is indeed obvious that there has been no discussion of education in the Presidential campaign.

It’s not as if education is unimportant: education is a path to a better life and to a better society. It is the road to progress.

The differences between the two candidates are like night and day. Trump supports dismantling public education and giving out vouchers. Harris is committed to funding schools and universities.

Project 2025 displays Trump’s goals: to eliminate the Department of Education, to turn the programs it funds (Title 1, IDEA for students with disabilities) and turn them into unrestricted block grants to states, which allows states to siphon off their funding for other purposes. At the same time that the Trump apparat wants to kill the Ed Department, it wants (contradictorily) to impose mandates on schools to stop the teaching of so-called critical race theory, to censor books, and to impose rightwing ideology on the nation’s schools.

It’s too bad that the future of education never came up in either of the high-profile debates. The American people should know that Kamala Harris wants to strengthen America’s schools, colleges, and universities, and that Donald Trump wants to destroy them.

Randi Weingarten wrote an excellent article in Newsweek about the plans of each candidate.

If you can’t open it, try this link.

Categories Bigotry, Budget Cuts, Censorship, Charter Schools, Curriculum, Democracy, Education Industry, Education Reform, Elections, Extremism, Harris, Kamala, Trump, U.S. Department of Education, Vouchers

Florida: Voting on the Amendments on the Ballot

By dianeravitch
November 2, 2024 //
4

Scott Maxwell, a regular columnist for the Orlando Sentinel, has some suggestions about how to vote in the referenda in Florida. From reading him for the past few years, I trust his judgment.

I don’t live in Florida, but the amendment I will watch closely is #4. That’s the amendment to roll back Florida’s harsh six-week ban on abortion. Very few, if any, women know that they are pregnant at the six-week mark. A six-week ban is, in reality, a total ban. Under this ban, women will die; young girls will be forced to become mothers. People like Ron DeSantis are not pro-life.

VOTE YES TO REPEAL THE SIX-WEEK BAN.

VOTE YES TO REPEAL THE BAN.

This is how Scott Maxwell is voting on state referenda:

Florida’s Constitutional amendments can be confusing, often by design.

So I’m going to try to break down the six amendments on this year’s ballot as simply as possible. I’ll give you the arguments for and against each one, tell you some of the supporters and opponents and share how I’m voting. Do whatever you want. It’s your constitution.

Amendment 1: Make school board races partisan

This would take school board races, which are now nonpartisan affairs, and turn them into partisan contests with closed primaries. The idea was backed by Republican state legislators — and one Democrat, Sen. Linda Stewart of Orlando — who believe partisanship should play a bigger and more transparent role in school issues. Opponents, including the League of Women Voters, say injecting more partisanship into school board races is a rotten idea and note that the closed primary system will prevent many of you from casting votes.

Vote yes: If you want more partisanship and party involvement in local school races, as well as closed primaries.

Vote no: If you think candidates should appeal to voters based on their platforms and credentials rather than their party affiliation.

How I’m voting: No. I think this is the worst amendment on this year’s ballot. The last thing our schools need is more politics and partisanship.

Amendment 2: Put hunting and fishing in the Constitution

This would add language to the Florida Constitution that says hunting and fishing is a constitutionally protected right. Hunting and fishing is already legal in Florida. Existing statutes even declare them as “preserved” activities. And no state has banned hunting and fishing. But advocates say they just want to be super-duper sure. Opponents say this is like asking voters to pass a constitutional amendment protecting the right to golf or play tennis. The Florida Bar Journal also published a lengthy piece that said this proposal could have unintended consequences, such as prohibiting local beach communities from closing stretches of beach to protect turtle eggs, for instance, if someone claimed that turtle protection got in the way of their “constitutional right to fish.”

Vote yes: If you want to enshrine hunting and fishing protections in the Florida Constitution.

Vote no: If you don’t.

How I’m voting: No. This one seems unnecessary and potentially fraught with unintended legal consequences.

Amendment 3: Legalize recreational marijuana

This would basically treat marijuana like cigarettes and booze, making the substance legal but subject to strict government regulation. Advocates note that marijuana is a natural substance, already widely used and argue that legalization would make it safer. Some law enforcement chiefs say it would also stop wasting their time. Opponents, including Gov. Ron DeSantis and the Florida Chamber of Commerce, dispute the drug’s safety, say this amendment would primarily benefit a few large companies and generally argue that communities that allow marijuana are unpleasant.

Vote yes: If you want to legalize marijuana.

Vote no: If you don’t.

How I’m voting: I’ve been torn on this one. I don’t think marijuana is as harmless as some advocates claim and know companies like Trulieve hope to make billions off legalization. But I also believe adults should have the ability to make their own decisions and can’t make a good case for why alcohol and carcinogenic cigarettes should be legal and why this naturally grown plant shouldn’t be. So I ultimately decided yes, agreeing with the Sentinel editorial board’s summary: “We’re not going to pretend that legalizing recreational marijuana would be a 100% beneficial experience for Florida. But it does make sense — far more sense than the current situation, where some people use medical pot with no fear of prosecution while others still face arrest, jail steep fines or a lifelong criminal record for possessing it.”

Amendment 4: Prohibit Tallahassee-imposed restrictions on abortion

This is the abortion amendment. And it’s pretty simple. It would prohibit state lawmakers from imposing any laws that place restrictions on abortion “before viability” beyond what federal law says while preserving requirements for parental notification. Citizens placed this initiative on the ballot to combat Florida’s new restrictions, which are some of the strictest in the nation, banning abortion after 15 weeks without exceptions for rape or incest and effectively banning most abortions after six weeks. Supporters, including some doctors, say Florida’s law puts women’s lives in danger, is heartlessly cruel to victims of sexual crimes and that abortion decisions should be made by women and their doctors, not politicians. Opponents, including the governor and GOP lawmakers, generally oppose abortion and say they should have the right to decide what medical procedures pregnant women can undergo.

Vote yes: If you think Florida’s existing ban on abortions without many exceptions is too extreme.

Vote no: If you are opposed to abortion under most any circumstances and trust state politicians to make the rules.

How I’m voting: Yes. I believe thoughtful people can have different opinions on abortion. But Florida’s current laws are extreme and dangerous.

Amendment 5: Adjust homestead exemptions for inflation

State lawmakers want to offer homeowners a tiny tax break — maybe $10 a year — but force local governments to pay for it. This one’s a bit complicated. It would take half of the $50,000 homestead exemption homeowners get and tie it to inflation. So if inflation rose by 2.5% one year, your homestead exemption would be worth $50,625 the next, representing an increase of 2.5% on $25,000. Clear as mud, right? Opponents say this is political trickery, since state lawmakers aren’t offering to cut state taxes. They want to force local governments to take the hit. And the Florida League of Cities argues that tiny savings for homeowners would have a huge collective impact on local governments. The Tampa Bay Times editorial board supports this plan. The Orlando Sentinel and Sun Sentinel oppose, noting this tax break would elude many Floridians, namely renters.

Vote yes: If you want to slightly increase the tax exemption homeowners get every year and decrease what local governments collect for services like fire and police.

Vote no: If you think the exemption is fine the way it is.

How I’m voting: No. I don’t really care much about this one either way. Sure, I’d like a few extra bucks. But this seems like political theater; a way for state lawmakers to say they provided a tiny tax break without cutting any of their own spending. If state lawmakers want to cut taxes, they should cut the taxes they collect.

Amendment 6: Repeal taxpayer financed campaigns

This would end the law that allows candidates for statewide office to use public money to finance their campaigns. Forty years ago, Floridians voted to create this program, hoping it would help grassroots candidates compete with politicians who suck up gobs of special-interest money. But now, thanks to political committees that can take unlimited donations, the candidates who take the most special interest money also collect the most tax dollars. Ron DeSantis set the record in 2022, collecting the most money ever from deep-pocketed donors and the most from taxpayers (more than $7 million). Supporters of this repeal include Florida legislators. Opponents include the League of Women Voters and the Sentinel editorial board.

Vote yes: If you don’t believe taxpayers should finance political campaigns.

Vote no: If you like the idea of tax dollars paying for campaigns and believe lesser-funded candidates deserve help, even if their better-funded opponents get more of it.

How I’m voting: Yes. Unlike my newspaper’s editorial board, I believe this subsidies-for-politicians program was a noble idea that has been warped beyond sense or salvation. It could’ve been fixed by requiring subsidy recipients to limit all their other contributions. But lawmakers have consistently refused such reforms.

Want more info?

Check out the League of Women Voters’ great voter-info site at Vote411.org

smaxwell@orlandosentinel.com

Categories Charter Schools, Democracy, Education Industry, Elections, Florida

Jonathan V. Last: Oligarchy is on the Rise

By dianeravitch
October 31, 2024 //
7

Jonathan V. Last writes at The Bulwark, the always interesting gathering spot for Never Trumpers. He wrote that he has been stewing about the intervention of Jeff Bezos, billionaire owner of The Washington Post, to stop the editorial board from endorsing Kamala. after Bezos locked the editorial, three of the 10-member editorial board stepped down.

He wrote:

ON FRIDAY, after the Washington Post’s publisher announced that the paper was suddenly abandoning the practice of the editorial page endorsing presidential candidates, news leaked that—on the very same day—Donald Trump met with executives from Blue Origin.

Blue Origin, of course, is the rocket company owned by Jeff Bezos, who also owns the Washington Post.

What we witnessed on Friday was not a case of censorship or a failure of the media. It had nothing to do with journalism or the Washington Post. It was something much, much more consequential. It was about oligarchy, the rule of law, and the failure of the democratic order.

This was neither a coincidence nor a case of Bezos and Trump being caught doing something they wished to keep hidden. The entire point of the exercise, at least for Trump, was that it be public.

When Bezos decreed that the newspaper he owned could not endorse Trump’s opponent, it was a transparent act of submission borne of an intuitive understanding of the differences between the candidates.

Bezos understood that if he antagonized Kamala Harris and Harris became president, he would face no consequences. A Harris administration would not target his businesses because the Harris administration would—like all presidential administrations not headed by Trump—adhere to the rule of law.

Bezos likewise understood that the inverse was not true. If he continued to antagonize Trump and Trump became president, his businesses very much would be targeted.

So bending the knee to Trump was the smart play. All upside, no downside.

What Trump understood was that Bezos’s submission would be of limited use if it was kept quiet. Because the point of dominating Bezos wasn’t just to dominate Bezos. It was to send a message to every other businessman, entrepreneur, and corporation in America: that these are the rules of the game. If you are nice to Trump, the government will be nice to you. If you criticize Trump, the government will be used against you.

Which is why Trump met with Blue Origin on the same day that Bezos yielded. It was a demonstration—a very public demonstration.

But as bad as that sounds, it isn’t the worst part.

The worst part is the underlying failures that made this arrangement possible.

My friend Kristofer Harrison is a Russia expert who runs the Dekleptocracy Project. This morning he emailed,

America’s oligarch moment makes us more like 1990s Russia than we want to believe. Political scientists can and will debate what comes first: oligarchs or flaccid politicians. 1990s Russia had that in spades. So do we. That combination corroded the rule of law there, and it’s doing so here.

Russian democracy died because their institutions and politicians were not strong enough to enforce the law. Sound familiar? I could identify half a dozen laws that Elon Musk has already broken without enforcement. Bezos censored the Post because he knows that nobody will enforce the law and keep Trump from seeking political retribution. And on and on. The corrosive effect on the rule of law is cumulative.

The Bezos surrender is our warning bell about entering early-stage 1990s Russia. No legal system is able to survive when it there’s a class not subject to it because politicians are too cowardly to enforce the law.

And that’s the foundational point. The Bezos surrender isn’t just a demonstration. It’s a consequence. It’s a signal that the rule of law has already eroded to such a point that even a person as powerful as Jeff Bezos no longer believes it can protect him.

So he has sought shelter in the embrace of the strongman.

Bezos made his decision because he calculated that Trump has already won—not the election, but his struggle to break the rule of law.

Yesterday, Timothy Snyder issued a call to Americans to not obey in advance. He is correct, of course. We should continue to resist fascism as best we can. The stakes have not changed.

If Trump wins? Well, I suppose we’ll burn that bridge when we come to it.

What should change is our understanding of where our democracy currently sits on the continuum. We are not teetering at the precipice of a slide into autocracy. We are already partway down the slope. And that’s even if Harris wins.

But Bezos and Trump have just taught America’s remaining small-d democratic leaders: The time for normal politics, where you try to win bipartisan majorities by focusing on “kitchen-table” issues is past. The task in front of us will require aggressive, systemic changes if we are to escape terminal decline.

The hour is later than we think.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Corruption, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Failure, Fascism, Freedom of the Press, Trump

Washington Post: Trump’s Vulgarity Drags the Nation’s Politics into the Gutter

By dianeravitch
October 30, 2024 //
22

I did not cancel my subscription to the Washington Post despite the fact that I was outraged by billionaire Jeff Bezos’s censorship of the editorial board, which intended to endorse Kamala Harris.

I expected that the response of the editorial board and the opinion writ were a would double down on their contempt for the insurrectionist, lying former president.

As this editorial today shows, the editorial board will not be silenced. In this editorial, it draws a straight line between democracy and civility, a character trait that Trump knows not.

Unless Bezos replaces the editorial board with MAGA types, the WaPo editorials will dole out contempt for Trump every day that remains of the campaign. The last paragraph, in particular, is a gem.

Think of it as slow-walking its endorsement of Kamala.

Democracy depends on many things: institutions, traditions, public legitimacy and, yes, a culture of civility. The peaceful transfer of power requires people to have at least a minimum degree of trust in their fellow citizens — that the stakes are not existential. In this regard, former president Donald Trump showed, in his closing argument at a raucous rally at Madison Square Garden, that whether he wins or loses on Nov. 5, he has already done severe damage to American politics by coarsening and corroding public discourse.

Seeking to limit the fallout after a rally speaker referred to Puerto Rico as “a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean,” campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt lamented on Monday on Fox News: “It’s sad that the media will pick up on one joke that was made by a comedian rather than the truths that were shared by the phenomenal list of speakers that we had.”

Here are some of the “truths” from the other “phenomenal” speakers, none of which the Trump campaign disavowed: Businessman Grant Cardone likened Vice President Kamala Harris to a prostitute. “Her and her pimp handlers will destroy our country,” he said. David Rem, billed as a childhood friend of Mr. Trump’s, called Ms. Harris the “Antichrist” and “devil” while waving a cross onstage.

Radio host Sid Rosenberg called Hillary Clinton a son of a b—- and dropped an f-bomb as he said that all Democrats are “degenerates … lowlifes.” Rudy Giuliani, disbarred over his misconduct as a lawyer for Mr. Trump’s effort to block the 2020 election results, said Ms. Harris is “on the side of the terrorists” in the Israel-Gaza conflict. Donald Trump Jr. claimed Democrats want to “replace” Americans with immigrants.

The stand-up comedian who made that nasty crack about Puerto Rico, Tony Hinchcliffe, made other tasteless ethnic jokes about African Americans, Latinos and Jews. The Bulwark reported that Trump campaign staffers reviewed a script of Mr. Hinchcliffe’s routine in advance and asked him to excise only a line that referred to Ms. Harris as a “c—.”

Even so, a pro-Trump group funded by Elon Musk, who also spoke at Sunday’s rally, posted on X, the platform he owns, and later deleted a video that referred to Ms. Harris as the c-word. After some innuendo, the video’s narrator clarifies that they mean she’s a communist.

To be sure, Mr. Trump has been destabilizing civil discourse since even before he started his 2016 campaign: It was in 2011 that he started voicing support for the false notion that President Barack Obama was not born in the United States. Yet in the final weeks of this election, he seems to be making the normalization of incivility one of his campaign’s de facto objectives.

He opened a rally this month in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, by commenting on the size of golfer Arnold Palmer’s genitalia. Mr. Trump told the crowd that night that his wife, Melania, has urged him to use less foul language and that evangelical leader Franklin Graham wrote him a letter pleading the same case. His punchline is that he cannot help himself because Ms. Harris has been a “s—” vice president and everything she touches turns to “s—.” The crowd started chanting “s—” in Latrobe. A top-selling shirt outside his rallies describes Ms. Harris as a “hoe.”

True, Mr. Trump’s campaign is not only a cause of this society’s spreading incivility but a consequence of it. Moreover, norms regarding profanity follow a cultural dynamic separate from politics, and the culture is more permissive about such things than it once was. This may explain why Ms. Harris has also occasionally been using four-letter words on the stump. She swore up a storm in a Rolling Stone interview and said being vice president has made her more profane. Her running mate, Tim Walz, called Mr. Musk “a dips—” during a rally last week. Not a great example. But Mr. Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally and events like it are in a class by themselves, not least in their threatening tone.

When he finally took the stage on Sunday, the former president declared without irony: “The Republican Party has really become the party of inclusion.” Then, over 80 minutes, he promised to invoke the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to deport undocumented immigrants, called Democrats “the enemy within” and the mainstream media “the enemy of the people,” described the United States as “an occupied country,” and predicted Nov. 5 will bring “Liberation Day.” Even without a vulgarity, it was the most offensive language of all.

Categories Bigotry, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Freedom of the Press, Media, Trump

Trump Calls Madison Square Garden Rally “an Absolute Love Fest”

By dianeravitch
October 30, 2024 //
11

The day after Trump’s Madison Square Garden, the media reacted with shock to the raw racism and misogyny on display. The New York Times reported:

Former President Donald J. Trump sought to head off the major speech Vice President Kamala Harris was planning to deliver Tuesday night by casting her as responsible for all of the nation’s ills while also attempting to draw attention away from bigoted and racist remarks at his rally in New York.

Two days after he hosted a rally at Madison Square Garden where several speakers made racist and vulgar statements, Mr. Trump accused Ms. Harris of running “a campaign of absolute hate.”

Mr. Trump then headed to Pennsylvania, a crucial battleground state, for two campaign stops. Ms. Harris is expected to speak at the Ellipse, the same park near the White House where Mr. Trump marshaled his supporters to descend on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. The setting for Ms. Harris’s remarks will provide her campaign with a symbolic moment to go along with its increasingly blunt warnings about the dangers posed by Mr. Trump, who Democrats say is unstable and will run roughshod over democratic norms if he returns to the White House.

Mr. Trump’s allies have shown anxiety that the backlash to the Madison Square Garden event, and descriptions of him as a racist and a fascist, may be breaking through to segments of voters in battleground states. On Tuesday, however, the former president sought to attack Ms. Harris with the very accusations he himself has been facing, telling a group of supporters and reporters at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida that her message “has been a message of hate and division.”

In his remarks, Mr. Trump continued to push back against criticisms of his rally — which he called, unprompted, “an absolute love fest” — mocking Democrats who have pointed out that a pro-Nazi rally was held at Madison Square Garden in 1939.

Election Day is one week from today. Here’s what else to know:

  • Madison Square Garden rally fallout: Republicans moved swiftly to distance themselves from remarks disparaging Puerto Rico made by the comedian Tony Hinchcliffe, who was one of the opening speakers at Mr. Trump’s New York rally. The island’s Republican Party chairman is demanding an apology, and the Puerto Rican rapper Bad Bunny stepped up his condemnation of the remarks on Tuesday.
  • Hinting at a vulgar taunt: An ad from Elon Musk’s PAC refers to Ms. Harris as a “C Word” — eventually calling her a “communist” — in an allusion to an insult against women that is one of the most obscene words in American English.
Categories Bigotry, Democracy, Elections, Extremism, Gender, Racism, Trump

Eugene Robinson: Harris, Trump, and the Media’s Double Standard

By dianeravitch
October 29, 2024 //
9

Yesterday, Trump was interviewed by podcaster Joe Rogan, and as usual, he said crazy things. He said, for example, that there were people in this country who are more dangerous than the dictator of North Korea; they are “the enemy within,” whom he previously identified as Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff. He said days ago that “the enemy within” should be arrested and tried for treason. He also told Rogan that if George Washington came back from the dead and ran for president with Abraham Lincoln as his vice president, they wouldn’t beat Trump.

If Harris said crazy stuff like that, the press would go wild criticizing her.

Eugene Robinson, a regular columnist for The Washington Post, is baffled by the disparate treatment of Harris and Trump. He spouts nonsense so often that it is not news. She tries to make the case for reasonable and responsible policies, and the media nitpick every word she says.

What’s going on? It’s not that the media is biased; the mainstream media understand what Trump is. As one commenter on this blog wrote yesterday, “It’s okay for him to be lawless, but she must be flawless.”

Robinson wrote:

Something is wrong with this split-screen picture. On one side, former president Donald Trump rants about mass deportations and claims to have stopped “wars with France,” after being described by his longest-serving White House chief of staff as a literal fascist. On the other side, commentators debate whether Vice President Kamala Harris performed well enough at a CNN town hall to “close the deal.”

Seriously? Much of a double standard here?
Somehow, it is apparently baked into this campaign that Trump is allowed to talk and act like a complete lunatic while Harris has to be perfect in every way. I don’t know the answer to the chicken-or-egg question — whether media coverage is leading public perception or vice versa — but the disparate treatment is glaring.
This week, it became simply ridiculous.

Retired Marine Corps Gen. John F. Kelly — who served as Trump’s homeland security secretary for six months, then as his White House chief of staff for a year and a half — said in an extended interview with the New York Times that Trump “certainly falls into the general definition of fascist, for sure.”

This followed a similar shocking assessment by retired Army Gen. Mark A. Milley, who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for the final 16 months of Trump’s presidency. Milley is quoted in Bob Woodward’s latest book, “War,” as saying that Trump is “fascist to the core” and “the most dangerous person to this country.”

It is hard to overstate how extraordinary this is. Two of the nation’s most honored and respected warriors, both of whom worked closely with Trump for extended periods, warned the nation about the grave danger of returning him to the White House. Respecting the tradition of keeping the armed forces out of partisan politics, neither Kelly nor Milley went so far as to explicitly endorse Harris. But they clearly intended their remarks to be understood by those who might vote for Trump as flashing red lights and blaring sirens.

The Times published audio of the Kelly interview, in which he describes how Trump “commented more than once that, ‘You know, Hitler did some good things, too.’” In a separate interview with the Atlantic, Kelly recalled Trump telling him that he wanted obedient generals like “Hitler’s generals.” Trump “certainly prefers the dictator approach to government,” Kelly told the Times.

During Wednesday’s town hall, CNN’s Anderson Cooper asked Harris whether she believes Trump is a fascist. “Yes, I do,” she replied — and that was the headline from the event. But news stories and commentary also questioned her decision to pivot from questions about specific policy positions — almost all of which she has already spelled out in considerable detail — to attacks on Trump and warnings about the danger he poses to our democracy.

Let’s review: First, Harris was criticized for not doing enough interviews — so she did multiple interviews, including with nontraditional media. She was criticized for not doing hostile interviews — so she went toe to toe with Bret Baier of Fox News. She was criticized as being comfortable only at scripted rallies — so she did unscripted events, such as the town hall on Wednesday. Along the way, she wiped the floor with Trump during their one televised debate.
Trump, meanwhile, stands before his MAGA crowds and spews nonstop lies, ominous threats, impossible promises and utter gibberish. His rhetoric is dismissed, or looked past, without first being interrogated.

Imagine if Harris were promising to end the war in Gaza on her first day in office but wouldn’t say how. Imagine if she were proposing a tariffs-based economic plan that economists say would destabilize the world economy and cost the average family $4,000 a year in higher prices. Imagine if she were promising a “bloody” campaign to uproot and deport millions of undocumented migrants who are gainfully employed and paying taxes. And imagine if Harris were vowing to use the military to go after her political opponents, as Trump repeatedly pledges.

Kelly and Milley are hardly the only career servicemen to sound the alarm about a potential second Trump term. Two of Trump’s defense secretaries, Marine Corps Gen. Jim Mattis and Army Lt. Col. Mark T. Esper, and one of his national security advisers, Army Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, have also warned about Trump’s erratic performance as commander in chief.

They join a long list of civilians who worked in the Trump administration and say there should never be another one. Never has there been such a chorus of officials who served a president telling the nation that under no circumstances should he be elected again.

Oops, there I go again, dwelling on the existential peril we face. Instead, let’s parse every detail of every position Harris takes today against every detail of every position she took five years ago. And then let’s wonder why she hasn’t already put this election away.

Categories Democracy, Elections, Harris, Kamala, Hypocrisy, Insane, Trump

Alexandra Petri: WaPo Humorist Endorses Kamala, as Her Publisher Refuses to

By dianeravitch
October 28, 2024 //
7

Alexandra Petri is the humorist for The Washington Post. In her column, she endorsed Kamala Harris. She called her column “It Has Fallen to Me, the Humor Columnist, to Endorse Kamala Harris for President.” This is why I didn’t cancel my subscription to The Washington Post. I want to see many ways the opinion writers devise to torture Jeff Bezos.

She wrote:

The Washington Post is not bothering to endorse a candidate in the 2024 presidential election. (Jeff Bezos, the founder of Blue Origin and the founder and executive chairman of Amazon and Amazon Web Services, also owns The Post.)

We as a newspaper suddenly remembered, less than two weeks before the election, that we had a robust tradition 50 years ago of not telling anyone what to do with their vote for president.

It is time we got back to those “roots,” I’m told!
Roots are important, of course. As recently as the 1970s, The Post did not endorse a candidate for president. As recently as centuries ago, there was no Post and the country had a king! Go even further back, and the entire continent of North America was totally uninhabitable, and we were all spineless creatures who lived in the ocean, and certainly there were no Post subscribers.

But if I were the paper, I would be a little embarrassed that it has fallen to me, the humor columnist, to make our presidential endorsement. I will spare you the suspense: I am endorsing Kamala Harris for president, because I like elections and want to keep having them.

Let me tell you something. I am having a baby (It’s a boy!), and he is expected on Jan. 6, 2025 (It’s a … Proud Boy?). This is either slightly funny or not at all funny. This whole election, I have been lurching around, increasingly heavily pregnant, nauseated, unwieldy, full of the commingled hopes and terrors that come every time you are on the verge of introducing a new person to the world.

Well, that world will look very different, depending on the outcome of November’s election, and I care which world my kid gets born into. I also live here myself. And I happen to care about the people who are already here, in this world. Come to think of it, I have a lot of reasons for caring how the election goes. I think it should be obvious that this is not an election for sitting out.

The case for Donald Trump is “I erroneously think the economy used to be better? I know that he has made many ominous-sounding threats about mass deportations, going after his political enemies, shutting down the speech of those who disagree with him (especially media outlets), and that he wants to make things worse for almost every category of person — people with wombs, immigrants, transgender people, journalists, protesters, people of color — but … maybe he’ll forget.”

“But maybe he’ll forget” is not enough to hang a country on!

Embarrassingly enough, I like this country. But everything good about it has been the product of centuries of people who had no reason to hope for better but chose to believe that better things were possible, clawing their way uphill — protesting, marching, voting, and, yes, doing the work of journalism — to build this fragile thing called democracy. But to be fragile is not the same as to be perishable, as G.K. Chesterton wrote. Simply do not break a glass, and it will last a thousand years. Smash it, and it will not last an instant. Democracy is like that: fragile, but only if you shatter it.

Trust is like that, too, as newspapers know.
I’m just a humor columnist. I only know what’s happening because our actual journalists are out there reporting, knowing that their editors have their backs, that there’s no one too powerful to report on, that we would never pull a punch out of fear. That’s what our readers deserve and expect: that we are saying what we really think, reporting what we really see; that if we think Trump should not return to the White House and Harris would make a fine president, we’re going to be able to say so.

That’s why I, the humor columnist, am endorsing Kamala Harris by myself!

Categories Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Harris, Kamala, Humor, Media, Trump

How Is It Possible that Trump and Harris Are Statistically Tied?

By dianeravitch
October 28, 2024 //
71

I have been puzzling over this question since the Democratic National Convention.

Like most people, I didn’t know much about Kamala Harris when she became Vice President. Now that I have seen her speak, now that I saw her debate Trump, I feel very energized to support her campaign for the Presidency.

She is smart, well informed, experienced, committed to the U.S. Constitution and the rule of law. She is thoughtful and composed. She laughs, she smiles, she seems like a kind and thoughtful person. She is well prepared for the presidency, having won election as the District Attorney of San Francisco, as Attorney General of the State of California, as U.S. Senator from California, and as Vice-President of the United States since Joe Biden and she were elected in 2020.

Her opponent is a bundle of equal parts narcissism and hatred. He likes men. He likes white men. He likes to play tough guy. He looks on women as sex objects and feather heads. He doesn’t respect women.

He is crude, vulgar, without a shred of the dignity we expect from a president. The language he uses to ridicule and insult others is vile.

He is a racist, a misogynist, a xenophobe, and a Christian nationalist (without being a practicing Christian).

He is a sexual predator. He is known for not paying people to whom he owes money for services rendered. He has gone through six bankruptcies.

He is ignorant. His former aides say he has never read the Constitution. He is driven by his massive ego. He wants everyone to say he’s the best, the greatest, and there’s never been anyone as great as him.

He is a convicted felon, convicted on 34 counts of business fraud in New York. He was found guilty by a jury in New York of defaming E. Jean Carroll, who accused him of sexually assaulting her many years ago. He was ordered to pay her more than $90 million for continuing to defame her. That judgment is on appeal.

Other trials are pending.

When he lost the 2020 election, he refused to accept his defeat. He schemed to overturn the election by various ploys. He summoned a mob of his fans to Washington on January 6, 2021, the day that Congress gathered for the ceremonial certification of the election. Trump encouraged them to march on the U.S. Capitol, “peaceably….(but) fight like hell.” They did fight like hell. They battered their way into the Capitol, smashing windows and doors, beating law officers, vandalizing the building and its offices, while hunting for Vice President Mike Pence and Speaker Nancy Pelosi. The outnumbered law officers held them off to protect the members of Congress. Many of them were brutally beaten. Some later died. What if the mob had reached the members of Congress? What if they had captured Pence and Pelosi?

It was the most shameful day of our national history. A President encouraging a mob to sack the Capitol and overturn the Constitution.

Ever since that disgraceful day, Trump has reiterated that the election was stolen from him, even though it wasn’t close. He has undermined faith in the electoral process, faith in the judiciary, faith in the law.

These are the two candidates: Kamala Harris and Donald Trump.

Why is this election close?

Categories Accountability, Colorado, Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Failure, Fascism, Fraud, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, Freedom to Read, Kentucky, Nebraska, Racism, Trump
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