#Dave Whammond

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Dave Whammond

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Don’t be Glenn Youngkin. History will remember.

October 15, 2024

Robert B. Hubbell

In a speech on Monday, Kamala Harris significantly ratcheted up her attacks on Donald Trump's ugly threats to persecute his political enemies. She described Trump as increasingly “unstable and unhinged.” Harris’s comments came four days after Trump called for the military to be deployed against the “enemy within”—enemies identified by Trump as the “radical left.” See MSNBC, Trump suggests using the military to address ‘the enemy from within’. Trump later identified Rep. Adam Schiff as one of the “enemy within.”

Trump made the following statements to Fox personality Maria Bartiromo in an interview last Friday:

I think the bigger problem is the enemy from within. We have some very bad people. We have some sick people, radical left lunatics. . . . It should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard — or if really necessary, by the military, because they can’t let that happen.

Trump's threats of using the military are not idle. During his term, he repeatedly ordered his subordinates to use the US military against civilians—including “just shoot[ing] protesters in the legs”—but those subordinates refused or ignored his orders. See, e.g., Council on Foreign Relations (6/5/2020), Trump’s Threat to Use the Military Against Protesters: What to Know.

In her speech in Eerie, Pennsylvania, Kamala Harris strongly condemned Trump's threats to use the military against political opponents. See CNN, Harris uses Trump’s ‘enemy from within’ comment to portray GOP rival as dangerous and unstable.

Kamala Harris’s new aggressiveness against Trump's promised despotism is something that many (frustrated) Democratic faithful have been hoping for. Harris’s full speech in Eerie is here: YouTube | Kamala Harris in Eerie, PA. It is worth watching the entire thirty-minute speech.

If you don’t have time to watch the entire speech, I urge you to watch the final ten minutes. Kamala Harris is on fire as she describes Trump as the threat to democracy he is. And she uses a video montage of Trump's repeated threats to persecute his political enemies. It is a “must-watch” moment of history. See YouTube | Kamala Harris addresses Trump's comments re "the enemy within".

Go ahead and watch the final ten minutes of Kamala’s speech, here. I’ll wait!

Using the military against civilians is the common tactic of fascist governments everywhere. It is a singular moment in American history when a major party candidate is using threats of military force against US citizens as a campaign promise.

How did we get here? Answer: Glenn Youngkin.

Why Glenn Youngkin? Because Youngkin spent Sunday excusing and defending Trump's threat to use the military against Americans. Trump makes such threats because spineless cowards like Glenn Youngkin not only refuse to condemn him but rise to defend him. In the absence of the Glenn Youngkins of the world (and his ilk), there would be no cover for Trump's obscene threats against Americans and the rule of law.

On Sunday, Jake Tapper read Trump's comments to Glenn Youngkin and asked the governor of Virginia to condemn Trump's remarks. In a tortured five minutes, Youngkin refused, repeatedly claiming that Tapper was “misinterpreting” Trump's remarks. When Tapper repeatedly said, “I am reading his comments verbatim, let me show you the video,” Youngkin refused to condemn the comments and suggested that Trump didn’t mean what he said.

See CNN, Tapper presses Youngkin on Trump’s authoritarian rhetoric. If you can, watch five minutes of this interview. Warning: You may nauseous.

Youngkin clearly (and wrongly) believes he has a political future that is dependent on not angering Trump's cultish base. Youngkin has made the political calculation that advancing his future political prospects is more important than protecting Americans against a threat of military force to achieve the partisan pollical goals of the president.

Can you imagine what the Framers would say about such a proposition?

Glenn Youngkin is, of course, a surrogate for every Republican politician who pretends to be a reasonable and moral leader with the nation's best interests at heart. In reality, they are faithless cowards whose only loyalty is to themselves. They represent the worst of America. They are depraved, soulless, and spineless. The are cloyingly self-righteous as they look straight at the camera and lie for someone JD Vance called “America’s Hitler.”

There will be a time (soon) when Americans will face a moral and political reckoning for the depravity of the Trump presidency and MAGA movement. There is no ambiguity in where the moral and political judgments will fall or how future historians will view Trump's supporters, enablers, and co-conspirators.

They are hoping only that they can delay that day of reckoning on which their white nationalism, racism, misogyny, xenophobia, and depravity will be universally condemned. The historical precedents for such a reckoning abound.

On Monday, Kamala Harris began the process of moral and political reckoning. Good. She should keep it up until the major media begins every news cycle with this headline, “Candidate for US presidency threatens to use US military against Americans.” There is no story bigger than that—and it deserves to be at the top of the news 24/7 until Election Day.

Trump holds bizarre campaign rally that turns into a 39-minute Trump dance party

As Kamala Harris was calling Trump “unstable and unhinged” during her campaign rally in Eerie, PA, Trump was proving Harris’s point at his rally in Oaks, PA. Trump was supposed to host a townhall, but answered only two questions in his incoherent, non-linear, incomprehensible fashion. After two people in the crowd fainted, Trump said,

Let’s not do any more questions. Let’s just listen to music. Let’s make it into a music. Who the hell wants to hear questions, right?

 See WaPo, Trump sways and bops to music for 39 minutes in bizarre town-hall episode. (Accessible to all.)

The bizarre scene is described by WaPo as follows:

For 39 minutes, Trump swayed, bopped — sometimes stopping to speak — as he turned the event into almost a living-room listening session of his favorite songs from his self-curated rally playlist. He played nine tracks. He danced. He shook hands with people onstage. He pointed to the crowd. Noem stood beside him, nodding with her hands clasped. Trump stayed in place onstage, slowly moving back and forth. He was done answering questions for the night. [¶] . . . . Trump’s decision to cut the question-and-answer portion of the town hall short and instead have the crowd stay to listen to his favorite songs was a somewhat bizarre move, given that the election was only 22 days away. It also comes as Vice President Kamala Harris has called Trump, 78, unstable and called into question his mental acuity.

Trump is descending into madness. The major media should lead every news cycle with scorching questions about Trump's mental fitness—right after stories about his promise to use the military against the American people. Trump is unraveling in front of our eyes. Make sure everyone knows about this story. It is important—especially given that Biden was forced out of the race over a single debate performance.

[Robert B. Hubbell Newsletter]

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Dave Whammond

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Person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV. Double Standard.

July 8, 2024

ROBERT B. HUBBELL

JUL 08, 2024

The mainstream media continues its whisper campaign against President Biden, as they report that anonymous “senior leaders” talk “in private” about approaching Joe Biden to urge him to drop out. At least Adam Schiff had the guts to express his qualms in public respectfully, even though I strongly disagree with his views (on this subject).

One evolving narrative among the press is that the Biden administration “concealed” the truth of Biden’s cognitive state—which supposedly justifies their righteous anger. Bull****. This is another example of a double standard applied by a media that is intent on driving Joe Biden out of the race—damn the facts!

Joe Biden has been transparent with the American people about his health—which cannot be said about Trump.

Remember Trump's unexplained visit to Walter Reed for a treatment that remains secret to this day? Or showing up to a debate in 2020 knowing he had tested positive for Covid but concealed that fact from Joe Biden, the debate moderators, and the American public?

Or having a doctor release a statement about Trump's health that was dictated by Trump? Or when the White House physician provided false information about Trump's vital statistics—like his weight—and said that Trump might be the first president to live to be 200?

Amid all the calls for “cognitive tests” for Biden—but not Trump—journalists are committing malpractice by failing to note that President Biden released a detailed summary of his annual physical in February of this year.

The full report is here: Health-Summary-2.28.pdf (whitehouse.gov). The examination included consultations with neurological experts at Walter Reed hospital. I urge you to read the entire report and consider how you would measure up to such a battery of tests!

[...]

So, Biden did have a “detailed neurological exam” four-and-half months ago. The widespread media demands that Biden “take a neurological exam” should be directed to Trump instead.

Predictably, this “proof” won’t be enough for the media. Just as the media refused to accept a certified copy of President Obama’s birth certificate, the goalposts will keep shifting.

The issue is not Joe Biden. It is Donald Trump—and the media’s arrogant refusal to apply the same scrutiny to Trump that it is applying to Biden. If they did, they would be demanding neurological exams of Trump and his withdrawal from the race. So far as we have been informed by Trump, his cognitive test consisted of recalling five objects: “Person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV.” Can you say, “double standard”?

Why isn’t the media making demands that Trump submit to “extremely detailed neurologic testing” by experts from a nationally recognized hospital?

The answer is simple. Trump has quashed dissent within his party. Anyone who dares raise a voice in dissent is the immediate recipient of anonymous death threats and public ridicule on Trump's vanity media platform. And Trump's para-military press surrogates leap into action, declaring that the dissidents are dead to MAGA.

So, the press's application of the same standards to Trump has no upside because it won’t incite the mass panic among Republicans that Democrats are willing to supply by the bucketful.

I accept at face value the good faith of readers who say they have lost confidence in Biden because of the debate or any other reason. That is a personal judgment only you can make. But I again remind everyone that “Biden should withdraw” is not a plan. If you believe a different path to victory is appropriate, then you must devote yourself to that path with all the vigor and financial resources you can muster.

[...]

Timothy Snyder (author of On Tyranny and Substack blog Thinking About), addressed the role that the press has been playing in whipping up “fascist froth” that helps Trump. See Timothy Snyder, Fascism and Fear (substack.com)

There are three tests of good faith for those who are proposing that President Biden step down. The first is recognition that Biden’s first term has been one of extraordinary achievement. The second is a plan for what the Democrats would do, should Biden withdraw, to select a nominee and win the election. The third is recognition that the threat of regime change is what might justify changing the nominee.

If I am right that much of the energy behind the Biden pile-on is displaced fear of a regime change, much of the media will continue to generate fascist froth for Trump, whether or not Biden is the Democratic nominee — unless, of course, journalists confront their fears, and keep the issue of regime change inside the story, and provide a constructive alternative alongside personal criticism.

[I inverted the order of Snyder’s two paragraphs above so they made more sense in a short quotation.]

And, finally, Rebecca Solnit wrote what I wish I had written. See her essay in The Guardian: Why is the pundit class so desperate to push Biden out of the race?

Solnit begins:

I am not usually one to offer diagnoses of people I’ve never met, but it does seem like the pundit class of the American media is suffering from severe memory loss. Because they’re doing exactly what they did in the 2016 presidential race – providing wildly asymmetrical and inflammatory coverage of the one candidate running against Donald J Trump. They have become a stampeding herd producing an avalanche of stories suggesting Biden is unfit, will lose and should go away, at a point in the campaign in which replacing him would likely be somewhere between extremely difficult and utterly catastrophic. They do this while ignoring something every scholar and critic of journalism knows well and every journalist should. As Nikole Hannah-Jones put it: “As media we consistently proclaim that we are just reporting the news when in fact we are driving it. What we cover, how we cover it, determines often what Americans think is important and how they perceive these issues yet we keep pretending it’s not so.” They are not reporting that he is a loser; they are making him one. And so it goes with what appears to be a journalistic competition to outdo each other in the aggressiveness of the attacks and the unreality of the proposals. It’s a dogpile and a panic, and there is no one more unable to understand their own emotional life, biases and motives than people who are utterly convinced of their own ironclad rationality and objectivity, [also known as] pundits.

Here's my advice to everyone—regardless of what side of the issue you take regarding Joe Biden’s continued candidacy. The issue is Trump, not Biden. Whether Biden drops out is not something you or I have control over. (Readers frequently write to me and say, “Please tell Joe Biden . . . .” The only thing Joe Biden knows about me is my credit card number.)

Joe Biden has control over his choices; his close advisors and family have influence; some senior leaders in the Democratic Party have some influence. They are talking amongst themselves. Let them have a rational, private conversation not played out on the front pages of the NYTimes and WaPo minutes after the latest exchange of views.

However, the one institution that has demonstrated it cannot be trusted to deal with this question is the media. They have a perverse financial incentive: Chaos = profit. They are agents of chaos at this moment in pursuit of the mighty dollar.

I believe that Joe Biden is the best candidate to defeat Trump, that replacing him at this point poses unacknowledged and unknowable risks, and that those who advocate a different path have the burden of identifying and funding an alternative candidate.

Our task has not changed. It is our moral and patriotic duty to alert all Americans about the threat posed by Trump and his fascist plan to undermine democracy. We have plenty of work and precious little time left to accomplish our task.

Let us channel all our energy away from debating Joe Biden’s age and health into defeating Trump. In that task, we must speak with one voice.

[MORE]

[Robert B. Hubbell Newsletter]

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Dave Whammond

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LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

April 23, 2024

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

APR 24, 2024

In the past two days, the Biden-Harris administration has announced a wide range of new rules to protect ordinary Americans. 

Yesterday, Vice President Kamala Harris announced that the administration has finalized two new rules affecting patients in nursing homes and receiving home care, as well as the workers who care for them. The first sets minimum staffing requirements for facilities funded by Medicare and Medicaid, and the second concerns how home healthcare companies account for Medicaid funding. 

In a speech at the Hmong Cultural and Community Agency in La Crosse, Wisconsin, Harris noted the extraordinary value of healthcare workers. She also explained that about 1.2 million Americans live in federally funded nursing homes, which make up about four fifths of the nursing homes in the country. But the majority of those homes—about 75% of them—are understaffed. This is dangerous and isolating for patients and demoralizing for workers, who have high rates of burnout and turnover.  

Now, nursing homes that receive federal funding will have to provide at least 3.48 hours of nursing care per resident every day, less than the 4.1 hours the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services advocate but enough to require the hiring of about 12,000 registered nurses and 77,000 aides, at an annual cost of almost $7 billion. 

Consumer organizations and labor unions pushed for the new rule, but nursing home operators strongly oppose the new mandate, saying it will force facilities to close because of a shortage of nurses. In response, Health and Human Services secretary Xavier Becerra told Tami Luhby of CNN that no one should live in facilities that are unsafe or should receive inferior care. Luhby noted that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services in September launched a $75 million campaign to increase the number of nurses in nursing homes.

The second rule the vice president announced had to do with home health aides. Medicaid currently pays about $125 billion a year to home healthcare companies, which employ hundreds of thousands of workers providing services for elderly and disabled Americans. These companies have never been required to report how that money was being spent. Now they will be required to spend 80% of the federal dollars they receive on workers’ salaries rather than administrative overhead.

Also yesterday, the Office for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced a final rule that strengthens the HIPAA medical privacy rule for people from states that ban abortions who seek reproductive health care in states that permit them. In response to threats by Republican state officials to charge women who cross state lines to obtain abortion, contraception, or fertility treatments, the new rule prohibits health care providers, health plans, and other entities from disclosing patients’ reproductive health care records to state officials when they are being sought to investigate or charge patients, doctors, or others.  

Today, the Labor Department announced a new rule that would guarantee that salaried workers who make less than $59,000 a year are compensated fairly for overtime work. The Trump administration set the salary threshold for those who did not have overtime protections at $35,568. As of July 1, 2024, the threshold will be $43,888, and on January 1, 2025, it will rise to $58,656. Senator Patty Murray (D-WA), former chair of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, said the change could affect 4 million workers.

“Too often, lower-paid salaried workers are doing the same job as their hourly counterparts but are spending more time away from their families for no additional pay,” acting secretary of the Department of Labor Julie Su said. “That is unacceptable. The Biden-Harris administration is following through on our promise to raise the bar for workers who help lay the foundation for our economic prosperity.”

Also today, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) voted 3–2 along party lines to ban the noncompete agreements that prevent workers from minimum-wage earners to top executives from changing jobs within the industry in which they work; senior executives can still be bound by such agreements. Initially used to protect trade secrets, noncompete clauses have expanded to cover what the FTC estimates to be 30 million people—one in five U.S. workers. They take away workers’ ability to improve their wages and conditions by quitting their jobs and moving to another company or starting their own. The FTC estimates that the end of such clauses could add almost $300 billion a year to workers’ wages. 

“Robbing people of their economic liberty also robs them of all sorts of other freedoms,” FTC Chair Lina Khan said. Neil Bradley, head of strategic advocacy for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, countered: “If they can issue regulations with respect to unfair methods of competition, then there’s really no aspect of the U.S. economy they couldn’t regulate.” The U.S. Chamber of Commerce plans to sue over the rule. 

A CBS News/YouGov poll released Monday found that, although Biden and Harris have made addressing climate change a centerpiece of their administration, only 10% of the people who say they think climate change is a very important issue had heard or read a lot about what the administration has accomplished, and 49% said they had read not much or nothing about it. When told some of the things the administration has done, a strong majority of those who care about addressing climate change support those policies. 

“Even people who feel the administration has done too little on climate change support these policies,” reporters for CBS News note. They conclude that the disconnect “may be more about Mr. Biden needing to get his message out there than having to convince this ‘climate constituency’—those who call the climate issue very important—of the substance of his policies.” 

Meanwhile, today is the fourth anniversary of the press conference in which former president Donald Trump suggested injecting disinfectant to get rid of Covid, prompting the maker of Lysol to warn people not to use their disinfectant cleaning products internally. Four years later, Trump spent the day in a Manhattan courtroom, where his former friend David Pecker, who ran the company that published the National Enquirer tabloid magazine, testified for the prosecution. 

Legal analyst Lisa Rubin summarized Pecker’s testimony, noting that the big takeaways were that Trump and Pecker were transactional friends for decades and that “the agreement they struck in 2015 went way beyond the ‘catch and kill’ aspect of the scheme that has been known for years.” Together, they not only killed stories damaging to Trump, but also pushed fake stories about Ben Carson, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio, who were running against him for the 2016 Republican nomination, as well as Democratic rival Hillary Clinton.

As the trial grabs headlines, Trump’s power seems to be diminishing. He is demonstrably not in power in the courtroom, where he must do as the judge tells him and reporters say he has often fallen asleep, and none of his family members have shown up to support him.

Trump seems aware that his power is waning. Early yesterday, he called for supporters to “RALLY BEHIND MAGA,” but only a handful of people gathered outside the courthouse. Today he claimed that the turnout was low because police had “completely CLOSED DOWN” the streets around the courthouse. That was a lie: the streets, the sidewalk, even the courthouse have remained open to the public. 

Pennsylvania’s primary election today revealed Trump’s real electoral weakness. He won about 83.5% of the Republican votes, but Nikki Haley, who dropped out of the race in early March and has not campaigned since, won 16.5%. In the suburbs of Philadelphia, the so-called “collar counties,” Haley won closer to 25% of the Republican vote. 

Biden, meanwhile, took the fight against MAGA Republicans to Trump’s home state of Florida. There, an extreme abortion ban signed into law by Republican Governor Ron DeSantis will take effect on May 1, but in November, Florida voters will have the option to add protections for abortion before fetal viability to the state constitution, returning the state to the standards it had before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. That measure is expected to energize Democrats in the state.

And then, tonight, by a vote of 79–18, the Senate passed the $95 billion national security supplemental bill that provides funding, mostly for military supplies, to Ukraine, Israel, and the Indo-Pacific and humanitarian aid for war-torn countries; requires the sale of TikTok; and permits confiscating Russian assets. MAGA Republicans are still adamantly opposed to aid for Ukraine, but a strong bipartisan majority has finally gotten the chance to weigh in.

As soon as the measure passed, Biden issued a statement, saying: “Tonight, a bipartisan majority in the Senate joined the House to answer history’s call at this critical inflection point. Congress has passed my legislation to strengthen our national security and send a message to the world about the power of American leadership: we stand resolutely for democracy and freedom, and against tyranny and oppression.”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON