It’s ghosts, goblins and yahoos season Like Lewis Carroll’s oysters, election conspiracy theories are coming “thick and fast,” and “more, and more, and more.” A voter engagement group yet unnamed by Pennsylvania law enforcement submitted batches of voter registration applications suspected of being fraudulent both in York and Lancaster counties. Or about 60 percent of those examined in Lancaster. “It is not uncommon, especially in presidential election years, for paid workers of such groups to turn in fabricated applications,” explains Katie Bernard of The Philadelphia Inquirer. It won’t matter who is paying the group. Donald Trump will use the episode to declare the election invalid when he loses Pennsylvania next week. Bernard deconstructs Trump’s claims about what elections officials discovered: Lancaster County was not “caught with 2600 Fake Ballots and Forms, all written by the same person,” as former President Donald Trump claimed on Truth Social Monday night.
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When I announced my intention to join Microsoft Research in 2008, my friends set up a betting pool over how long I would “last” there. No one thought that I’d be at MSR more than 7 years. And here we are, almost 16 years later. I still love MSR. I love my colleagues. I am […]
Donald Trump filmed one in Madison Scary Garden Digby last night featured just a few of the racist quotes. (They even played “Dixie” before Byron Donalds walked on.) But know this. Trump long ago stopped trying to win this election on Nov. 5. He plans to take it by force afterwards. Rick Wilson knows it. So should you. The only way to keep us from that is by making Nov. 5 “a real knockout.” Last night’s New York rally and Trump’s others in states he has no chance of winning are not about winning on Nov. 5. They are about keeping the spotlight on himself, about turning the volume up to 12, about signalling what he wants his followers to do when he loses. He’s doubling down on what he and his co-conspirators failed at in 2021. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tells “Morning Joe” they are “mini January 6 rallies … mini Stop the Steal rallies” meant to prime his base for more post-election violence. Trump’s campaign deliberately chose Madison Square Garden for the callback to the pro-Nazi German American Bund rally from 1939. Trump adviser Stephen Miller, of course, did not disappoint on that score.
Donald Trump/Tom Homan/Stephen Miller/Project 2025 dream I’m reposting this “60 Minutes” clip of Tom Homan again to make sure no one misses it amidst the Trump rally coverage. CBS News: Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, has said it would be reasonable to deport a million people a year. And Trump’s top immigration adviser, Stephen Miller, told the audience at the Conservative Political Action Conference earlier this year that deportees would be removed from the country in a massive military air operation. “You grab illegal immigrants and then you move them to the staging ground and that’s where the planes are waiting for federal law enforcement to then move those illegals home,” Miller said at the conference. “You deputize the National Guard to carry out immigration enforcement.” Homan said he doesn’t use the term “raids,” but immigration enforcement operations at worksites would be needed. Deeper into the realm of ethnic cleansing From the clip: Cecilia Vega asks: “Is there a way to carry out mass deportation without separating families?” “Of course there is.
After the 2016 election once everyone recovered from the shock, the analyses of what happened started to gel into a conventional wisdom that said Donald Trump won because a bunch of non-college educated white people were feeling “economic anxiety.” Thousands of stories and features followed with reporters being sent out to rural Pennsylvania diners and Iowa church socials to figure out what those voters really want. But the fact was that it was an extremely close electoral college victory that could have gone either way with just a handful of votes in a couple of swing states. The main data guru at the time, Nate Silver, did a post-election analysis which showed that whenever there was an event such as Hillary Clinton collapsing briefly at a 9/11 event or the Washington Post reporting of Donald Trump’s gross commentary on the Access Hollywood tape, there would be a slight drop in the polls for the affected candidate but they would rebound to the usual stasis within a couple of weeks. Trump was still struggling to recover from the Access Hollywood scandal at the end of October of that year and Clinton was ahead in the aggregated polling by about 6 points.
That’s Elon Musk’s group America Pac. Apparently, it’s run by 12 year old boys. They have removed it from X, but it still exists on Facebook for now. Warning: This ad contains multiple instances of the ‘C Word.’ Viewer discretion is advised. Kamala Harris is a ‘C word.’ You heard that right. A big ole ‘C word.’ In fact, all of the other ‘C words’ think she’s the biggest ‘C word’ of them all. That’s right. She’s a tax-hiking, regulation-loving, gun-grabbing communist. And the worst part? She’s proud of it. Kamala Harris: the ‘C word America simply can’t afford. See you nationwide Tuesday, November 5th. This is where we are people. Update — Oh look, more C-word. Apparently the Trump campaign stopped that rancid comic from saying it during Trump’s rally last night: [F]our top campaign sources said it could have been even worse. “He had a joke calling [Vice President Kamala] Harris a ‘cunt,’” a campaign insider involved in the discussions about the event told The Bulwark.
He’s a real pip. And Trump loves him: He’s also a grifter, profiting from his reputation as a rank xenophobe. In a piece from the Texas Observer called, “Border 911: The Misinformation Network Profiting Off the ‘Invasion’ Narrative: Dark money and charity organizations led by former intelligence officers and ex-feds have been spreading propaganda and laying the groundwork for presidential election challenges” you can see that Homan has been in on the planning for a Trump restoration, win or lose on November 5th: For a retired federal employee, Tom Homan, an acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) under the Trump administration, is a very busy man.
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.
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.