They’re doubling down: Just two days after the Georgia indictment, one of Trump’s most enthusiastic backers took the stage at a conference in Missouri to again spread election misinformation. Mike Lindell, the owner of MyPillow who is a vocal promoter of the myth that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, kicked off an event on purported election crimes with a video about fraud. It included footage from November 2020 that purported to show a Fulton County, Georgia, election worker pulling a briefcase of ballots from under a desk to surreptitiously add them to the tally. As evidence has since shown, the worker, Ruby Freeman, was simply doing her job — pulling out a standard government container full of real ballots that had to be counted. Three different counts of the Georgia vote, including one by hand, showed the ballots were tallied properly and the results were accurate. But Freeman and her daughter, who also worked in the elections office that night, were targeted by Trump and his allies and accused of helping throw the election to Biden, compared to drug dealers and deluged with threats. The women testified before the congressional Jan.
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Aka “I know you are but what am I” The following discussion is hardly anything new to those of you who’ve been following the netroots, blogs, online left, what-have-you for the past couple of decades. There was once an obsessive focus in those groups on “messaging” and how to combat what seemed to be the right’s mastery of the form. Nobody talks about it much anymore but it’s still an issue and this article is a decent reminder of that: By almost any measure, the struggle for political dominance in the US seems deadlocked between Republicans and Democrats. At times, the two parties resemble a pair of punch-drunk boxers, slugging away at one another in a contest that neither can end. But there is one political battleground where Republicans triumph virtually every time — and control of this arena could determine who wins the White House in 2024. Republicans are masters of verbal jiu-jitsu. It’s a form of linguistic combat in which the practitioner takes a political phrase or concept popularized by their opponent and gradually turns into an unusable slur.
“a friendlier Nazi Germany” Amanda Moore went undercover in late 2020 as a far-right extremist. She attended the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) and Turning Point USA’s Student Action Summit. By August 2021, she was attending a Proud Boys riot in Portland with a neo-Nazi. The far-right threat, Moore felt, was “misunderstood by much of the press and far more dangerous than what was being reported.” What began as an idea for a podcast and a couple of blog posts became an 11-month journey into the heart of American darkness. The press underestimates the white-nationalist threat because these groups are careful to conceal their real agenda. They work as congressional campaign staffers and work to form congressional caucuses, all while “meeting with leaders of far-right political parties in Italy and Hungary” and heading up local Young Republican clubs. “Some have worked hard to scrub themselves from the Internet or to curate their online personas; others operate in the shadows, so that people do not even know to look for them,” Moore explains in The Nation.
He’s full of it: Vivek Ramaswamy is once again Just Asking Questions about what happened on 9/11. In an interview with the Atlantic, the GOP presidential candidate spontaneously turned to the subject during an exchange about whether Americans know the “truth about what really happened” during the January 6 assault on the Capitol. “I don’t know, but we can handle it,” said Ramaswamy. “Whatever it is, we can handle it. Government agents. How many government agents were in the field? Right?” He then pivoted to September 11, 2001, when terrorists hijacked four jetliners and crashed them into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania — killing close to 3,000 people. “I think it is legitimate to say how many police, how many federal agents, were on the planes that hit the Twin Towers,” he said. “Maybe the answer is zero. It probably is zero for all I know, right?” “I have no reason to think it was anything other than zero.
“Virtually all rainfall daily records have been broken” For future reference, on the east coast when it’s overcast and the air feels like warm bathwater, a hurricane is on its way. Hoping our friends kept dry on Sunday during Hilary’s visit to Palm Springs where the 911 system went down. It’s not as if tropical weather is a regular event there. (One mentioned doing some advance sandbagging.) Weather experts reported “virtually all rainfall daily records have been broken thus far” and warned of “catastrophic and life-threatening flooding.” Plenty of people seem to have insisted on driving flooded streets anyway. As an aside, a women in Greenville, S.C. once stepped out of her car after she stalled out in a foot of water in a low spot. She got sucked down a storm drain at the curb. They found her body in a river days later. It’s not something you forget. Don’t do that. Washington Post: The Los Angeles Unified School District schools are closed.
“A tricky approach” to avoiding conviction New information in the Trump stolen documents case surfaced over the weekend. ABC News had a scoop on former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows’ testimony to special counsel Jack Smith’s investigators. Marcy Wheeler (emptywheel) this morning summarizes key points: Meadows asked that the part about a classified Iran war plan sitting out in plain view be edited out of an early draft of Meadows’ book, “The Chief’s Chief,” ABC reports: Sources told ABC News that Meadows was questioned by Smith’s investigators about the changes made to the language in the draft, and Meadows claimed, according to the sources, that he personally edited it out because he didn’t believe at the time that Trump would have possessed a document like that at Bedminster. Meadows also said that if it were true Trump did indeed have such a document, it would be “problematic” and “concerning,” sources familiar with the exchange said.
Over the weekend Florida Governor Ron DeSantis may have sealed his political fate with one recklessly dumb comment. Failing to learn the lesson that a Trump opponent can say a lot of things but he cannot ever insult Trump supporters he told The Florida Standard: “The movement has got to be about what are you trying to achieve on behalf of the American people and that’s got to be based in principle, because if you’re not rooted in principle, if all we are is listless vessels that’s just supposed to follow … whatever happens to come down the pike on Truth Social every morning, that’s not going to be a durable movement.” The so-called “listless vessels” were not amused. DeSantis and his people scrambled to defend themselves, saying that he was referring to Trump’s congressional supporters not his Real American supporters but referring to members of congress as a “movement” was very sloppy even if he was actually whining about elected officials. He also said: “I think that we have a stream in our party that views supporting Trump as whether you are a Rino or not.
He can’t help himself Mediaite reported: According to a recent WalletHub report, Atlanta is ranked 11th in the nation for violent crime and has seen an increase in murder rates over the past few years. No doubt Atlanta is not the safest city in the nation, but its problems do not seem materially different than other urban areas in red and blue states. I wonder if at some point the GOP residents of Georgia will get tired of their state and its leaders being slagged by Donald Trump day in and day out. I suppose most of them are fine with it. He’s their god and can do no wrong. But there must be a few who still have a little pride in their own state. Aren’t there?
Here we have one of the supposedly great centrist unifiers promising to hand the election to Donald Trump: Former Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) said Sunday that No Labels will “very likely” launch a third-party “alternative” if former President Trump and President Biden win the nominations for their parties. “But if Trump and Biden are the nominees, it’s very likely that No Labels will get access to the ballot and offer an alternative,” Hogan said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “And if most of the voters don’t want A or B, we have an obligation to give them C, I mean, for the good of the country.” Hogan, who serves as the national co-chairman of No Labels — a political group that has been pushing for a third-party ticket — said two-thirds of the American people are “not interested” in voting for the Republican or Democratic nominee. “It’s an overwhelming majority of people who are completely fed up with politics,” Hogan said. “They think Washington is broken.
It’s not Donald Trump Ronan Farrow has a deep dive on Elon Musk: Initially, Musk showed unreserved support for the Ukrainian cause, responding encouragingly as Mykhailo Fedorov, the Ukrainian minister for digital transformation, tweeted pictures of equipment in the field. But, as the war ground on, SpaceX began to balk at the cost. “We are not in a position to further donate terminals to Ukraine, or fund the existing terminals for an indefinite period of time,” SpaceX’s director of government sales told the Pentagon in a letter, last September. (CNBC recently valued SpaceX at nearly a hundred and fifty billion dollars. Forbes estimated Musk’s personal net worth at two hundred and twenty billion dollars, making him the world’s richest man.) Musk was also growing increasingly uneasy with the fact that his technology was being used for warfare. That month, at a conference in Aspen attended by business and political figures, Musk even appeared to express support for Vladimir Putin. “He was onstage, and he said, ‘We should be negotiating.