The (no longer) much too early 2024 election thread

[N.E. Brigand]

Another reminder that Donald Trump's awfulness is just taken for granted and not treated as news:



He's right. If 51% of Democratic Congressional staff said that they doubted Joe Biden had the mental and physical capacity to serve as president, no other story would get any attention today. But I'll bet nobody here heard this news about Trump.

[N.E. Brigand]

While I had a general sense that this was true, I'd never seen this particular comparison of Donald Trump speaking in 2015 and speaking in 2020:



Maybe the selections were cherry-picked, but hat certainly appears to show a mental decline.

[N.E. Brigand]

So the Republicans who control Louisiana's state legislature, faced with the likelihood that a court would force the creation of a second Black congressional district (in order to comply with the Voting Rights Act), created that district on their own, but they deliberately made it gerrymandered in order that a court would strike it down.

I'm curious to know why you believe that is what happened. My understanding is that Louisiana properly followed the Supreme Court's dictates in Allen v. Milligan in response to litigation brought under the Voting Rights Act and that these two Trump-appointed judges (David C. Joseph and Robert R. Summerhays) are basically thumbing their noses at the court and daring them to reverse that decision and completely invalidate what is left of the Voting Rights Act. Can you explain why you believe that Louisiana improperly created this district?

Here, by the way, is the decision by Judges Joseph and Summerhays and the dissent by Judge Carl Stewart.

Well, I had a faint recollection of thinking when the map was drawn three months ago that it looked pretty squirrelly,* and Tuesday I saw a couple comments somewhere indicating that there was a much better map that satisfied the Supreme Court's requirements and was more compact, but I can't find them after a half-hour of looking now, and I'm too tired to keep at it. I see that the case is being appealed to SCOTUS. Mark Joseph Stern expects they'll restore the legislature's map for this year's election in accordance with the "Purcell principle" (which says maps shouldn't be changed too close to an election) but there's a good chance that next year the Court will use this case to scrap what remains of the Voting Rights Act.

*Here's the map the legislature approved. The 6th district is the one causing the trouble:

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Thanks for the response. I agree that the district is a bit funky, but it is not really extreme, and as the dissent points out there are lawful reasons for it. I hope and assume that Stern is right about the Purcell rule.

[N.E. Brigand]

This probably won't make sense to casual readers without some explanation:

[Tweet from Marcy Wheeler: "Has anyone called Corey Lewandowski and asked if he was ever concerned Noem would shoot him?"]

That would be South Dakota governor Kristi Noem, viewed by some as a possible running mate for Donald Trump, and rumored at one point to have been dating sometime Trump advisor Corey Lewandowski. Today the Guardian published an excerpt from an upcoming memoir by Noem in which the governor [update: it turns out Noem has been sharing this story for some time], apparently trying to show that she can make the tough decisions, talks about her decision to shoot a 14-month old dog she owned that she says was dangerous and untrainable.

Sen. Mitt Romney, Republican of Utah, says: "I didn't eat my dog. I didn't shoot my dog. I loved my dog and my dog loved me."

The Washington Post reports that "Americans overwhelmingly say that Noem killing her dog was unacceptable. Among those who plan to support Trump in November, though, views are more evenly divided." And for more evidence that Noem is very much Trump's kind of candidate:

"South Dakota Gov. Noem erroneously describes meeting with North Korea's Kim Jong Un in new book" (Associated Press).

This is the passage in question: "I had the chance to travel to many countries to meet with world leaders – some who wanted our help, and some who didn't. I remember when I met with the North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. I’m sure he underestimated me, having no clue about my experience staring down little tyrants (I'd been a children's pastor after all)."

It was not previously known that Noem had met Kim, and the reason for that, reporters quickly found, was that:



Noem's office is blaming her ghostwriter.

[Frelga]

The ghostwriter just made up the meeting with the North Korean dictator? That's more like a poltergeist writer.

Eta: "erroneously described" huh? So many ways for the journalists to avoid saying "lied about."

[RoseMorninStar]

But what...? She was a children's pastor??

[N.E. Brigand]

Of course...

Could have been worse:

[picture of a Vogon from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy]

Edited to add: "infrastruckersureparauhee."

The link was to Donald Trump struggling Wednesday to pronounce the word "vegan" during a campaign rally in Wisconsin. He kept pronouncing the first syllable as "vay" rather than "vee." The reason he kept saying it is that he was endorsed by Shana Gray, the owner of a vegan restaurant in Milwaukee, who had previously said in a Fox News interview* that she wasn't sure whom she'd vote for in November. Gray spoke at the rally before Trump did, she inveighed against immigrants -- noting particularly that someone said was a recent immigrant purchased a meal using a pre-paid food card provided by the government, which she said was a "slap in the face" to hardworking Americans -- and she complained about inflation. When Trump spoke, he said she told him that Gray told him "her business is being brutalized by the soaring cost of food," the likes of which "she's never seeen," and that she "was doing great three and a half years ago." Trump said he'd visit her restaurant when he returns to Milwaukee for the Republican National Convention this summer.

Are you surprised to learn that:

1. Gray "has filed for bankruptcy three times in the past decade and reported receiving Food Share benefits in the most recent filing"; and

2. Gray's restaurant opened in August 2023, more than two years into Biden's presidency?

*After that interview, Gray said on social media that her "finest attribute" was "being genuine and honest."

[Voronwë the Faithful]

It's not really a vegan restaurant, either. It has a few vegan or vegetarian items but it is mostly meat items on the menu.

https://www.google.com/search?gs_ssp=eJ ... lviDWG0WYT

[RoseMorninStar]

Yeah, that's definitely not a vegan restaurant. Vegan isn't big here so the options are few. Not surprising it is a campus restaurant. It really doesn't have any special 'vegan' items that I that I haven't seen on the menu of any other breakfast/lunch restaurant except maybe the chia pudding. I would have expected perhaps a Jackfruit pulled 'pork' (not really pork).

I find her story about the migrant in her restaurant with a food card questionable on several levels.

One of the comments in the Urban Milwaukee article NE. posted states, 'Does anyone involved in any way with Trump not lie??'
Yeah, good question. Another good question: Why are people so eager to believe the lies? I think we know the answer to that.

[N.E. Brigand]

The ghostwriter just made up the meeting with the North Korean dictator? That's more like a poltergeist writer.

Eta: "erroneously described" huh? So many ways for the journalists to avoid saying "lied about."

Noem's people have implausibly claimed that this is a fabrication by a ghost writer that they only just discovered, but:

There's an audio version of the book, which was narrated by Noem herself!

[N.E. Brigand]

Somehow I missed an episode that was reported about The Room Where It Happened, the 2020 book by Donald Trump's departed national security advisor, John Bolton. (I wonder if Bolton had even seen Hamilton, which obviously inspired his book's title, and if so, what he thinks about it.) Bolton writes about something Trump said to China's leader Xi Jinping regarding the millions of Uighurs that China has in concentration camps:

At the opening dinner of the Osaka G-20 meeting in June 2019, with only interpreters present, Xi had explained to Trump why he was basically building concentration camps in Xinjiang.

According to our interpreter, Trump said that Xi should go ahead with building the camps, which Trump thought was exactly the right thing to do. The National Security Council’s top Asia staffer, Matthew Pottinger, told me that Trump said something very similar during his November 2017 trip to China.

[N.E. Brigand]

Lots of politicians' "photo ops" are of course staged. But I do appreciate this analysis which points out that the pizzas that Donald Trump "delivered" to a New York firehouse this week had to be getting cold:

[N.E. Brigand]

I guess Marco Rubio was right back in 2016?



Another aspect of that particular lightsaber is that the color was mostly used by the villains in Star Wars.

But that would in keeping with Donald Trump's past comparisons of himself to Bane, the Emperor, and Thanos.

Meanwhile, President Biden yesterday was endorsed by Luke Skywalker:

[N.E. Brigand]

In a newly-leaked recording obtained by the New York Times, Donald Trump complains at a closed-door high-end fundraiser that Democrats "start off essentially at 40 percent" of the vote -- shades of Mitt Romney's 2012 campaign there -- because they "have civil service ... the unions and ... welfare. And don’t underestimate welfare. They get welfare to vote." He also likens President Biden's administration to the Gestapo. He says that the reason that he commuted the sentence of former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich (a Democrat who was convicted in 2010 for trying to sell the Senate seat that had been vacated when Barack Obama won the 2008 presidential election), who was in the crowd, because James Comey was involved. (It turns out Trump said this when he commuted the 14-year sentence in 2018, but it isn't true. Comey was in private practice at the time.) He gets someone in the crowd to donate $1 million on the spot, and he says that his campaign raised $76 million in April. Mind you, as with the leaks about Benjamin Netanyahu earlier today that were later revealed to be released by Netanyahu himself, I think it's possible that Trump is the source of today's recording.

[N.E. Brigand]

In that fundraiser, Trump also bemoaned the federal bribery charges recently brought against Democratic Congressman Henry Cuellar of Texas. Trump suggested that the charges were brought because Cuellar takes a hard line on border issues. Obviously no sane person thinks that such political concerns would motivate Merrick Garland -- and in the alternate universe where Garland was wielding the DOJ to punish gadfly Democrats, he wouldn't have done it in such a way as to put in doubt the possibility of Democrats holding the seat and retaking Congress.

I think Trump's larger purpose here is simply defending corruption -- thus also his praise for Rod Blagojevich -- and perhaps specifically defending illicit dealings with shady Azerbaijani agents, something the Trump Organization has done in the past.

[N.E. Brigand]

The ghostwriter just made up the meeting with the North Korean dictator? That's more like a poltergeist writer. Eta: "erroneously described" huh? So many ways for the journalists to avoid saying "lied about."

In a CBS interview this morning, Gov. Noem was explicitly asked if she ever met Kim Jong-un. She filibustered twice and then said she wasn't going to discuss which specific world leaders she's met. Despite the fact that she put it in her book!

(Edited to add: in case there were doubts about whether Noem actually recorded the audio book, I would note that her publisher says says that at her request, they are "removing a passage regarding Kim Jong Un" from both the print, e-book, and audio versions of the book.)

(Edited again to add that six weeks ago, she tweeted video of herself recording the audio book, although the video doesn't show that specific passage.)

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Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida is reportedly willing to resign his seat and move to another state in order to become Donald Trump's running mate. (The Constitution says that electors may not pick a president and vice president who both reside in the same state.)

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A poll testing various messages on swing voters finds that President Biden does best against Donald Trump when emphasizing economic fairness.

Edited to add: another poll also finds economics on the top of voters' minds. Immigration is sixth, behind crime, health care, and defending democracy.

[N.E. Brigand]

Lara Trump, the chair of the Republican National Committee, explained on Fox News today that they're suing Nevada to prevent the counting of votes after Election Day because "you cannot have ballots counted after elections are over." And of course, Republicans have previously passed laws in a number of states (I'm not sure if Nevada is one of them) to prevent ballots from being counted until polls close. So apparently all ballots must be counted in five hours?

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Fortunately, filing a lawsuit (or claiming to do so) does not make it happen.

[N.E. Brigand]

Two polls over the weekend found President Biden leading Donald Trump among likely voters. ABC News had Biden over Trump 49%-45%, and NPR/Marist had Biden over Trump 52%-47%. Biden's four-point lead with ABC's sample shrinks to two points if the group is expanded from likely to registered voters, and it shrinks even more if its expanded to all adults, where Trump leads Biden by two points. Similarly Biden's lead in the NPR poll shrinks from five points to two points among registered voters. So there may be a pro-Democrat enthusiasm gap at play. But this is just two polls, we're still six months from the election, and a 4-5% lead nationally might not be enough for Biden to prevail in the Electoral College.

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Geoff Duncan was Georgia's lieutenant governor from 2019 to 2023. He is a Republican. Today he announced that he's voting for President Biden in November because the "GOP will never rebuild until we move on from the Trump era".