Be Prepared For A Very Dirty Trump Campaign

 

Robert Reich is warning that Trump and his MAGA cohorts will wage a very dirty campaign:

We can’t allow our good feelings to drift into complacency. 

Trump and his enablers will throw whatever they can at her. Even though nothing has seemed to stick so far, we must be ready for the possibility that something will.

 

Four reasons to expect trouble ahead: 

First, the mainstream media can’t abide a love fest for long. They have to sell advertising and eyeballs, so they’ll soon turn contrarian — reporting Republican-generated opposition research about Harris. (I’m reminded of the old journalism saw that there are only two media stories — “oh, the wonder of it” and “oh, the shame of it” — and one always follows the other.)

We must be ready to respond to those charges with facts — in letters to editors, interviews with local media, public statements from groups we’re associated with, and grassroots organizing. 

Second, Trump is getting desperate — and he is capable of almost anything. He knows the upcoming election is likely to mean the difference between going to jail and going scot-free — so he will pull out all the stops, including racism and misogyny. 

Expect even more bigotry and lies to from him and his enablers. The cesspool will likely turn even more fetid. Sadly, enough Americans are openly or tacitly racist and misogynistic to make this a powerful ploy.

 

What should we do? Call out racism and misogyny, however and wherever it appears. Shame those who perpetuate bigotry. Mobilize others to call it out, too.

 

Third, the billionaires are starting to mobilize against her.

 

To take one example, Elon Musk — the richest man in the world, who has 192 million followers on X (largely because he owns the platform and can maximize his reach on it) — has started a PAC that collects highly detailed personal information. Musk’s goal is to target voters in key battleground states with tailored digital ads favoring Trump and harming Harris.

 

In addition, X’s AI chatbot has told millions of users — falsely — that Kamala Harris is not eligible to appear on their state’s 2024 presidential ballot.

What can you do? At the least, make it expensive for Musk to use his wealth and ownership of X this way. Boycott Tesla, urge your friends to do the same, and tell advertisers to get off the X platform. 

Fourth, most House Republicans are election deniers. Speaker Mike Johnson was one the ringleaders in 2020. If Kamala wins, House Republicans could have enough votes to try to force the presidential election into the House, via the 12th Amendment, where Republicans are likely to have a majority. 

We must demand that the media ask any and all Republican members of Congress being interviewed if they will accept the results of the election and will certify the results from the Electoral College — and if not, explain why not. 

I don’t want to diminish the positive energy we’re enjoying now. I just want us to be realistic about what could, and almost certainly will, come next — and be prepared.

 

Practice nauseous optimism — hoping for the best but knowing in the pit of your stomach that the road ahead will be difficult.

 

And resolve that — despite the sickening techniques Trump will use against her — we will do everything in our lawful power to make Kamala Harris the next president of the United States.

Special Counsel Cleared Biden - Then Attacked Him Anyway

 

Leading up to the 2016 election, the head of the FBI cleared Hillary Clinton of any criminal conduct -- then issued a report that was little more than an obvious attack on her candidacy. It was a right-wing "dirty trick" and harmed her candidacy.

A right-wing special counsel has repeated that kind of nasty "dirty trick". He issued a report that cleared President Biden of any criminal wrongdoing in having government documents he was not supposed to have. Then unnecessarily, he attacked the president - calling him an elderly man with a poor memory (adding fuel to the fire of doubt about the president's age).

It was uncalled for, but lies and dirty tricks seem to be all the Republicans have these days.

Here's what former Labor Secretary Robert Reich had to say about this:

Special counsel, Robert K. Hur — appointed in January 2023 by Attorney General Merrick Garland to lead an inquiry into President Biden’s possible criminality after classified files were found in the garage and living areas of Biden’s home in Delaware — cleared Biden of any wrongdoing.

 

But Hur also suggested that one reason Biden could not be prosecuted was because of his memory lapses — thereby underscoring one of the biggest issues that the public is concerned about in re-electing Biden: His aging brain. 

In recounting his interviews with Biden, Hur portrayed him as unable to remember key dates of his time in President Barack Obama’s White House. Hur wrote:

“Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview with him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” and that it would be difficult to convince a jury that “a former president well into his 80s” was guilty of a felony that “requires a mental state of willfulness.”

I don’t know how much this statement by special counsel Hur will hurt Biden, but it surely will not help. 

Yet let me point out five things: 

1. Special counsel Hur has no professional background or experience diagnosing age-related memory loss. In fact, he has no medical background at all. His conclusion that Biden has a “poor memory” is entirely subjective, based on Hur’s own guess about how a jury would respond to Biden. 

2. Some memory loss naturally comes with aging, and both Biden (age 81) and his likely Republican opponent, Donald Trump (age 77) have demonstrated memory loss as well as confusion. (Trump recently confused Nikki Haley with Nancy Pelosi, for example.)

3. For the purposes of electing the next president, the relevant question isn’t a candidate’s memory. It’s his knowledge, temperament, and judgment. We have no reason to doubt these attributes in Biden. He has been the adult in the room. But the likely Republican nominee notably lacks all these qualities. To the contrary, Trump has consistently and repeatedly demonstrated willful ignorance, a sociopathic temperament, and the judgment of a five-year-old. Trump has been indicted on 91 criminal counts. 

4. Hur is a former Trump Justice Department official. I don’t know about you, but I can’t help wonder why Hur thought it useful to predict that a jury would likely find Biden to be an “elderly man with a poor memory” — unless, perhaps, Hur thought it politically useful. Could it possibly be that Hur — whom Trump appointed to the Justice Department, who was a top adviser to Trump’s then-Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, and whom Trump then nominated to be U.S. attorney for Maryland — might have known he would set off a political bombshell? How could he not have known?

5. The two cases — Trump retaining classified documents and Biden retaining them — are utterly different. Trump refused to turn over documents that had been subpoenaed and undertook other efforts to thwart investigators. Biden, on the other hand, did not willfully retain papers; he cooperated with investigators the moment the documents were found.

Senate Dems Refuse To Be Tricked By Fake GOP Vote

(This photo of the U.S. Senate is from C-SPAN.)

The Republicans are in trouble when it comes to doing something about health care. For the last seven years they had whined and moaned about Obamacare -- and they promised to repeal it and replace it with something better if the voters put them in power. Well, they now have that power (controlling both houses of Congress and the White House), but they haven't got a clue about what to do.

They've painted themselves into a corner with their several years of political theater. If they don't repeal Obamacare, they will face the ire of their own party base in the next election -- and if they do repeal it without replacing it with something better, they will face the ire of most other voters in 2018. And that have not been able to come up with something that would be an improvement over Obamacare. Every plan they've suggested will take health insurance away from millions of Americans while raising insurance premiums for those who still have insurance.

In short, they now own the health care issue, whether they repeal Obamacare or not. And that issue is going to hurt them in the next election, because the public has seen that they have nothing but overblown rhetoric to offer on the issue.

One Republican senator came up with what he thought was a brilliant idea. He introduced an amendment that would substitute a single-payer system for the current Trumpcare bill being considered. He assured his fellow Republicans that he would not vote for his own amendment, and the GOP had enough votes to make sure it didn't pass. The amendment was just to trick Democrats into voting for "socialized medicine", and that could then be used against them (especially in red states) to mitigate the Republican failure on health care.

His devious plan failed miserably. Not a single Democrat voted for the silly amendment. The amendment failed on a 0 to 57 vote. All 52 Republicans voted against it, and were joined by four red state Democrats -- Manchin (W. Virginia), Tester (Montana), Heitkamp (N. Dakota), and Donnelly (Indiana). Independent Senator King (Maine) also voted no. The other 43 senators (42 Democrats and 1 Independent) voted "present". In other words, they refused to fall for the GOP's trick.

This means the Republicans still "own" the health care issue (regardless of what they do or fail to do about it) -- and that's not going to be good for them in 2018.

More GOP Dirty Tricks - This Time On Benghazi Committee

(This photo of Rep. Trey Gowdy was found at Salon.com.)

Republicans got all bent out of shape when Rep. Kevin McCarthy said that the House of Representatives Benghazi Committee had been successful in lowering Hillary Clinton's poll numbers -- inferring that was the purpose of the committee. A couple of days later another Republican, Rep. Richard Hanna (New York) admitted that was the sole purpose of that committee -- to smear Hillary Clinton.

Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy (R-South Carolina) got upset over that, and told Republicans to keep their mouths shut about his committee. He wanted to try and keep up the appearance that they were really investigating possible wrongdoing with the Benghazi tragedy -- even though several other committees in the House had said there was no wrongdoing by any government official.

Now we learn that Gowdy is not just the committee chair -- he is also the ringleader in the effort to besmirch and smear Hillary Clinton. Gowdy has been passing around some heavily redacted documents from the CIA which seemed to infer possible wrongdoing by Clinton. The Democrats on the committee smelled a rat, and that asked the CIA if they could know what was in the redacted sections of the documents.

It turns out that when the CIA turned the documents over to the committee, nothing was redacted -- and they did not ask that anything be redacted from those documents (since they didn't consider anything in them to be secret or classified). And once the full context of the documents was known, it became clear that Clinton had done nothing wrong. It was only the clever (and disingenuous) redactions that had given that impression.

Once this came to light, Gowdy admitted that he had been the one who redacted the documents. The question is why (since there was no classified information in them). The answer is obvious. Rowdy's committee has not been able to come up with any damaging information about Hillary Clinton, even when investigating her supposed e-mail "scandal". He was failing in the designated purpose of his committee -- to find damaging information about Clinton. So he doctored the CIA documents. In other words, he LIED.

I wish I could say this was out of character for the Republicans, but it isn't. They have a fairly long history of lying and performing "dirty tricks" to get elected. This seemed to reach a high point in the Nixon administration, when dirty tricks were just considered to be a part of campaigning. But these new Republicans make Nixon look like an amateur. They are so invested in the lying and dirty tricks that they are willing to use the organs of government to do their dirty work (in this case, a committee of the House of Representatives). They have taken dirty tricks to a new and rather frightening level.

Democrats should be happy about a couple of things though. First, these scurrilous and untrue attacks on Clinton have been exposed. And second, it shows just how terrified the Republicans are about a probable Hillary Clinton nomination.

A Fair And Free Election ?

We are just a couple of weeks away from an important election that will determine whether this country moves forward, or returns to the failed policies of the past. And frankly, I have my doubts as to just how honest that election will be. For months now, the Republicans have been trying to suppress the votes of groups they think will vote against them. One of the most public ways they've done this is by passing new and restrictive Voter ID laws. Most of these laws have been overturned by the courts (at least for this election), but that hasn't ended the voter suppression efforts.

A newspaper in Pennsylvania (owned by a right-winger) recently printed an article telling voters they could not vote without a picture ID. That is false (since that law was invalidated by the courts), but that didn't prevent this attempt to discourage people from voting. In other states, similar efforts are happening. In Wisconsin, billboards were put up in the minority community only, warning people that it is a felony to commit voter fraud. In Arizona, Hispanic voters were told that the election is on November 8th (instead of the actual day -- November 6th).

Now we learn that a company controlled by Willard Mitt Romney's son has purchased controlling interest in a voting machine company. These machines are in many states, including the critical swing state of Ohio. How suspicious does that look, especially considering how easy it is for these machines to be tampered with?

And then we have a teabagger group near Houston who says they are training 1,000,000 "poll watchers" all over the country, who will be preventing "voter fraud". What they are really doing is trying to question the voting credentials of minorities and others that they think will vote Democratic. They probably can't keep these people from voting, but they can force them to have to vote on a provisional ballot -- and regardless of what you may have heard, provisional ballots are not counted on election day, and most are not counted at all.

This has me wondering just how many efforts are there across this nation to keep Democrats from voting, or to keep their votes from being counted. That's why I was happy to see a post that appeared a couple of days ago on Red State Progressive. The blogger, vjack, tells us:

 It seems that the Organisation of Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), the largest international election-monitoring group, will be monitoring our upcoming presidential election after receiving complaints from civil rights groups about widespread Republican efforts to disenfranchise minority voters. Yes, the OSCE is deploying observers throughout the U.S. in an effort to promote fair elections. If you thought international organizations monitoring elections was something that only happened in so-called third world countries, I guess that gives you a sense of the trouble our democracy is in.

I don't know about you, but this makes me feel a little better about the impending election. I think we have reached the point in this country where we need some impartial outside observers to try and insure a fair and free election. Personally, I no longer trust the Republicans (especially the teabagger version) any further than I could throw Rush Limbaugh (and I doubt I could even lift that buffoon, let alone throw him).

Even More Republican Dirty Tricks

Even though Texas is normally a pretty Republican-dominated state (there are no statewide elected offices held by anyone other than Republicans), it looks like some Republicans in the state are running scared.   It came out last week that Republican teabaggers in Houston were trying to intimidate minority voters.   That charge is already being investigated by the U.S. Department of Justice.

Now the above flyer has been showing up on the windshield of many cars near the Sunnyside early voting location in Houston (where many minority voters cast their ballot).   It purports to be from a minority organization -- the Black Democratic Trust of Texas.   But there is no such organization.

It is an attempt to keep minority voters from voting the straight Democratic ticket by telling them that such a vote would be counted for the Republicans.   It asks them instead to just mark there ballot for Bill White, the Democratic candidate for governor, and that would be the same as a straight-ticket vote and would count for all Democratic candidates.

Obviously,this is an attempt to suppress votes for down-ballot Democrats (many of whom are favored to win in Houston and Harris County).   It is an attempt by local Republicans to win some local races by cheating that they could not win honestly.   Voter suppression seems to be a common Republican tactic in Houston.

Personally, I think it is also racist.   Because it assumes that African-American voters are not smart enough to see through this crude attempt to subvert their votes.   They aren't stupid (which is proven by their lack of support for Republican teabagger candidates), and I doubt that the flyers changed any votes.   But that is beside the point.  

The point is the racists tried to suppress the minority vote, and that cannot be allowed to happen in a representative democracy.   Those who printed and distributed the flyers should be prosecuted for trying to tamper with an election.

Dirty tricks has become a tradition for many Republicans.   Perhaps the inimitable Juanita Jean, owner of the World's Most Dangerous Beauty Salon, Inc., put it best when she said,   "Getting Republicans not to try to cheat black folks out of their vote is like trying to eat red beans with a pitchfork.   Republicans have messed with black folks for so long that now they can mess with black folks by pretending to warn against Republicans messing with black folks."

More Political "Dirty Tricks" In Fort Worth

Fort Worth has not traditionally been a hotbed for political "dirty tricks", but it looks like that may be changing. A few days before the election, someone tried to suppress the Hispanic vote by passing out fliers with the wrong election date on them. The flier urged people to vote on Saturday the 10th, when the election was actually Tuesday the 6th.

Now there has been a second incident. On the morning of the election, an automated phone call went out to many voters. The call accused Republican and former state rep. Bob Leonard of voting in the past to raise taxes. The inference was that this was an anti-Republican vote, when in fact the bill he voted for was negotiated by Republican leadership. Here is the text of that call:

"This is a voter alert. Please pay close attention. Bob Leonard does not want you to hear this message. Craig Goldman's supporters recently revealed that as a state representative in the mid-1980s, Bob Leonard voted to raise your taxes. One of his last votes was to increase taxes on most household goods, cars, guns -- almost anything you can think of, Bob wanted to tax. Maybe that is why he quit to become a lobbyist after making that vote. Today cast your vote for Texas and against Bob Leonard."

Some believe this call could have changed the outcome of the election. In early voting totals, Leonard finished second to Democrat Dan Barrett. But after election day votes were totaled, Mark Shelton finished in second place.

The call, which many received about 8:00am, was illegal in several ways. Automated calls can't be made before 9:00am, must state the nature of the call, give the identity of the caller, and give either the phone number or address of the caller. This call did none of those things.

So far, all of the candidates have denied being resposible for the calls. But regardless of who is responsible, both the calls and the fliers are illegal. I hope those responsible parties can be found and prosecuted.

This kind of behavior cannot be tolerated in a democracy.

Political Dirty Tricks Hit Fort Worth

Voters will be heading to the polls today all over Texas. In Ft. Worth, there are a couple of elections in addition to the constitutional amendments being voted on statewide. Ft. Worth will also be electing a new member of the city council to replace Wendy Davis, who resigned to run for the state senate. It will also elect a new state representative.

It now looks like someone thinks their candidate needs a little illegal help to get elected. Someone has recently been distributing fake flyers that urge voters to go vote on Saturday, November 10th. The bogus flyers have been distributed in areas of Ft. Worth where there are large numbers of Hispanics, and are printed in both English and Spanish.

No one knows yet who has been distributing the pamphlet. The Tarrant County District Attorney has assigned two investigators to find out. But it looks like someone wants to suppress the Hispanic turnout.

That makes me think it is most likely a Republican doing the dirty work. After all of the anti-immigrant and anti-Hispanic rhetoric from Republicans in the last few months, it is very likely that the Hispanic vote would be largely Democratic.

Maybe it's just a racist who thinks this would be a big joke to trick Hispanics into missing the election, but I tend to think someone is trying to help a city council or state representative candidate that is unlikely to get many Hispanic votes. Either way, it is an illegal and very un-American action -- not the action of a person who believes in our democratic system of government.

I hope they find the culprit soon, and prosecute them to the fullest extent of the law. A fine would not be enough. The criminal needs to get some jail time -- preferably a lot of jail time.