Wow: Authorities were investigating Monday after early morning fires were set in ballot drop boxes in Portland, Oregon, and in nearby Vancouver, Washington, where hundreds of ballots were destroyed. The Portland Police Bureau reported that officers and firefighters responded to a fire in one ballot drop box at about 3:30 a.m. and determined an incendiary device had been placed inside. Multnomah County Elections Director Tim Scott said a fire suppressant inside the drop box protected nearly all the ballots; only three were damaged, and his office planned to contact those voters to help them obtain replacement ballots. A few hours later, across the Columbia River in Vancouver, television crews captured footage of smoke pouring out of a ballot box at a transit center. Vancouver is the biggest city in Washington’s 3rd Congressional District, the site of what is expected to be one of the closest U.S. House races in the country, between first-term Democratic Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez and Republican challenger Joe Kent.
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It’s a thing: In the weeks before Election Day, a loose-knit group of women are organizing online to blanket their communities with pro-Kamala Harris messages — not on yard signs or fliers, but on sticky notes. The idea is simple: Take a pad of sticky notes, write messages and post them wherever women may see them — bathroom stalls, the backs of tampon boxes, bathroom mirrors, the gym. The messages vary slightly, but a typical one reads something like: “Woman to woman: No one sees your vote at the polls. Vote Harris/Walz.” There’s a whole ad stragtegy around this: I don’t know if it’s effective but I won’t be surprised if it is. Not to say that the MAGA cult isn’t teeming with wingnut women. We see them all the time and they are true believers. But there are certainly women who are married to MAGA creeps and are merely putting up with it to keep the peace. Whole communities are full of people who just don’t want to rock the boat. Reminding them that this little act of rebellion in service of the greater good is a smart thing to do.
Ian Millhiser at Vox takes a look at the history of the Supreme Court and elections in recent years and speculates that the Court will intervene on Trump’s behalf if the case is confined to one state (or more with a similar complaint) but not if there is a variety of cases in various states. He writes: [W]hat would a Supreme Court decision overthrowing the 2024 election look like? Most likely, it would look like a 2020 court dispute out of Pennsylvania. During the pandemic, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled that certain ballots mailed before Election Day would be counted even if they did not arrive at an election office until up to three days after Election Day. Though the US Supreme Court has the final word on questions of federal law, each state’s highest court has the last word on questions of state law. So the Pennsylvania court’s decision should have been final because it was rooted in that court’s interpretation of Pennsylvania state law.
I’m not sure why this isn’t a bigger story since it purports to reveal that Trump’s campaign is riven by even more back biting than previously reported. If it’s true it suggests that the campaign is paranoid and dysfunctional: A Trump campaign worker has been fired after trying to blow the whistle on what she called “grift and greed” by top campaign officials—and an alleged “bugging” plot, the Daily Beast has learned. The worker, whose identity the Beast is withholding, wrote an explosive email after she was fired detailing her concerns about how the campaign’s most senior leaders, Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles, appear to be funneling millions of dollars to companies which, she alleges, are overcharging Donald Trump. One of them is run by a major donor to Kamala Harris. “The grift and greed I’ve witnessed makes me sick and I think leadership has been bad stewards of generous donors money,” the campaign worker wrote in an email to a former colleague after she was abruptly fired on Oct. 18.
I thought so.… It looks like Trump really stepped in it: Donald Trump has a serious Puerto Rico problem — in Pennsylvania. Many Puerto Rican voters in the state are furious about racist and demeaning comments delivered at a Trump rally. Some say their dismay is giving Kamala Harris a new opening to win over the state’s Latino voters, particularly nearly half a million Pennsylvanians of Puerto Rican descent. Evidence of the backlash was immediate on Monday: A nonpartisan Puerto Rican group drafted a letter urging its members to oppose Trump on election day. Other Puerto Rican voters were lighting up WhatsApp chats with reactions to the vulgar display and raising it in morning conversations at their bodegas. Some are planning to protest Trump’s rally Tuesday in Allentown, a majority-Latino city with one of the largest Puerto Rican populations in the state. And the arena Trump is speaking at is located in the middle of the city’s Puerto Rican neighborhood.
Golly, I don’t know why people think Republicans are anti-democratic: Representative Andy Harris, Republican of Maryland, appeared to voice support for a plan for North Carolina’s Republican-controlled Legislature to award former President Donald J. Trump the swing state’s electoral votes, according to video of a conservative gathering on Thursday that was posted on social media. Mr. Harris, the chairman of the House Freedom Caucus, later walked back his comments in a statement on Friday, saying that the “theoretical conversation has been taken out of context” and that “every legal vote should be counted.” His comments, reported earlier on Friday by Politico, came in an exchange with Ivan Raiklin, a lawyer and a supporter of former President Donald J. Trump who promoted a plan in 2020 to pressure former Vice President Mike Pence not to certify electors from several disputed swing states. Mr.
I’ve posted this before but since Trump will be holding another “America First” rally at Madison Square Garden tomorrow night, I thought you might want to see this again. It is chilling: An interview with the filmmaker:
Including his masculinity MSNBC’s Katie Phang asked Liz Plank (“For the Love of Men: A Vision for Mindful Masculinity”) to explain where Donald Trump and his angry male base gets masculinity wrong. They don’t know their own place in a changing culture and an eroding patriarchy, she finds. “Can we talk about masculinity, right? Trump is putting on a performance of masculinity. Because he’s not actually masculine. This is a guy who spends more time with his make-up artists than with his own advisors,” Plank explains. “But even setting aside that he probably wears more make-up than Kamala Harris, masculine men aren’t afraid of women. They’re not afraid to debate women. Masculine men don’t have meltdowns on stage because a woman that they didn’t like asked them a question that they didn’t like. Masculine men aren’t manipulated by people who give them compliments.” Like Trump’s bogus reputation as a business genius, his hyper-masculinity is another scam, a false front. He’s failing the men he claims to be leading. It’s a performance.
For all the shit we’ve given the NYTimes in this election season, they have really pulled out all the stops to make up for it the last couple of days. This was yesterday’s front page. Here are a couple of the inside pages in the same issue. There are more. A huge section was devoted to this subject. I have included a gift link to this online multimedia indictment of Trump. It’s amazing. And here is their endorsement of Kamala Harris which, unlike the Washington Post and the LA Times, they seem to think is something a major national paper has a responsibility to do: It is hard to imagine a candidate more unworthy to serve as president of the United States than Donald Trump. He has proved himself morally unfit for an office that asks its occupant to put the good of the nation above self-interest. He has proved himself temperamentally unfit for a role that requires the very qualities — wisdom, honesty, empathy, courage, restraint, humility, discipline — that he most lacks.
30,000 people showed up in Houston last night in person too: Betting that abortion access can be a winning message in Texas and across the country, Vice President Kamala Harris rallied more than 30,000 people in downtown Houston Friday night to “Vote for reproductive freedom.” Those words were emblazoned behind Harris, U.S. Rep. Colin Allred, Texas country legend Willie Nelson and global pop superstar Beyoncé Knowles-Carter as they declared the next 11 days leading up to Election Day as the final push in an existential fight for freedom. In her 30-minute speech, Harris keyed in on her campaign’s closing message for the election’s final days, framing the issues of democracy and reproductive rights as two sides of the same coin. Harris argued Trump and other Republican officials will erode citizens’ rights, pointing to the U.S.