The party of tRump
Category: Vote / Voting
Media report on tRump’s age and infirmities as much as you did Biden’s, please
The UAW
Ten Bears posted this yesterday, and it’s great. Earlier yesterday, I saw the video linked below, also great. Morning cheer!
This Looks Like News
(Saturday’s post on Sunday. Saturday was National Lazy Day. I actually got my Inbox clean and organized, along with other areas in my actual house. But slowly and peacefully! Some might say lazily? Anyway, maybe that’s why news was slow. Or, could it be, Satan? I mean, the US news media?)
“This clip is the Harris/Walz crowd in Arizona yesterday. It’s big, and these people are turned up to eleven.
“Now, I understand the news media like to cover Donald Trump–if it bleeds, it leads, and there’s probably money riding on his having a big old red-faced aneurism on stage one day or of course, he just spews his usual ‘American carnage’-flavored rant–it’s a lurid carnival where both the observers and the observed are the freak show.
“But what if there was a thirst for something different and better? Maybe instead of hearing for the hundredth time about low water pressure and whales being driven mad by windmills, insults against journalists, other politicians, immigrants, wide swaths of the American people, and of course, lying about every little thing under the sun and a few beyond it, we could have a conversation about something more constructive than that.
“I think this is the podium to train the cameras on–not the empty one that stays empty even when a late, sweaty, angry old man finally lumbers behind it. Take a look at this crowd, and what had happened to those poll numbers over the last two-three weeks, and ask yourself ‘What are these people seeing now that they weren’t before?’
“This looks like news to me. What if we just want some good news for a change? What if people are tired of being mad and just want nice things for a change? What if they want some truth? For a change?
“You know, I could go with that. I think a lot of people could.”
https://vixenstrangelymakesuncommonsense.blogspot.com/2024/08/this-looks-like-news.html
OSDE attempts to deprive schools of rollover funds for safety, security enhancements despite previously promising them
by: Spencer Humphrey/KFOR Posted: Aug 8, 2024 / 10:00 PM CDT, Updated: Aug 9, 2024 / 06:06 PM CDT
(I sent this to me to post a couple of days ago; I lost it in the Inbox. But it’s been updated, anyway, so here it is. I suppose this is another thing, like the taxpayer-funded trips, that Walters, et al. were doing while everyone was looking at the Bibles in the classroom thing. In addition, most of the links included here go to yet more stories about Walters and his crew.)
OKLAHOMA CITY (KFOR) — The Oklahoma State Department of Education is attempting to take away certain funds the state legislature allotted school districts to make security enhancements after the Uvalde shooting, even though OSDE’s website said districts would be able to keep the money—until lawmakers began asking questions.
Now, numerous Republican lawmakers are calling for State Superintendent Ryan Walters to be held accountable, with at least one of them calling for Walters to be impeached for the first time.
OSDE no longer has lawyers on staff according to department’s website
In 2023, Oklahoma legislators overwhelmingly passed House Bill 2904. The bill provided Oklahoma schools with $150 million to make security enhancements to campuses and hire school resource officers in the wake of the 2022 shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, which left 21 people dead.
HB2904 created a three year revolving fund, in which every school district in the state would receive approximately $96,000 per year for three years to make the improvements.
Several superintendents from mostly rural districts across Oklahoma told News 4 it was their understanding that they would be allowed to roll over any unused funds from one year to the next.
They told News 4 they planned to let their ‘Year One’ funds roll over to the following years until they saved enough to pay for improvements that would cost more than $96,000.
OSDE paying Texas-based company $50k+ to make social media videos
But now, those superintendents—who spoke to News 4 anonymously—say the Oklahoma State Department of Education (OSDE) denied them access to leftover ‘Year One’ funds they had not yet spent.
The superintendents say, without the leftover Year One funds available, they will have to cut the security improvements they planned to make, including additional school resource officers, secure entry vestibules, bulletproof windows, and more.
OSDE’s lawyers are now telling lawmakers they believe HB2904 did not allow for funds to rollover each year.
This bill’s authors say that is not, and never was the case.
Several republican lawmakers spoke out to News 4 about the issue, and how they feel about Walters’ role in it all.
“It gets me upset,” State Rep. Eddy Dempsey (R-Valliant) said.
“It just seems like it’s getting untenable at this point,” State Sen. Adam Pugh (R-Edmond) said.
“[Walters] answers to the legislature,” State Representative Mark McBride (R-Moore) said. “And it’s time to stop.”
Let’s talk about Trump’s press conference….
House Republicans’ congressional offices spent millions more on taxpayer-funded travel than Democrats since 2023
House Republicans outspent their Democratic counterparts in taxpayer-funded travel expenditures by nearly $8 million since the start of 2023, a new OpenSecrets analysis found.
Eight out of the top ten biggest spenders between the start of 2023 to March 2024 were Republican members of Congress. They accounted for 7% of total taxpayer-funded travel spending by GOP members of Congress and with each of the top spenders spending two to five times more than the average House office. (snip-there’s a graph; the embed link doesn’t seem to be working.)
(Graph on the page)
The total travel spending reported by House Republicans’ offices exceeded $23 million from January 2023 to March 2024 — nearly $8 million more than House Democrats spent on travel during the same period. Despite having only a seven-member majority, House Republicans have significantly outspent Democrats. Congressional offices of House Republicans spent around $102,000 on average for travel during that period, while the average spent by House Democrats sat around $70,000, according to the House Statement of Disbursements.
According to the Congressional Management Foundation, the average total annual budget of a House office is around $1.5 million, which is distributed across a variety of categories such as personnel compensation, franked mail, supplies and materials and travel.
The most commonly cited travel expenses are lodging, meals, wifi on travel and parking as well as the transportation expenses themselves such as car rental, airfare and taxis. Entertainment or recreational activities are not considered to be a part of the travel category and are not covered by taxpayer money, according to Public Citizen.
House Statements of Disbursements are public reports featuring all receipts and expenditures of offices of the U.S. House of Representatives, as required under federal regulations. These reports are released quarterly by the Chief Administrative Officer of the House.
Since 2009, House Statements of Disbursements have been accessible to the public. However, they do not reflect information about the purpose of the travel, travel destinations or specific transportation details.
Of all 435 House Member offices, the top spender on travel was the office of Rep. Lance Gooden (R-Texas) which spent about $379,000 on travel expenditures since the start of last year, nearly 5 times more than the average House member office. Gooden’s travel spending constitutes more than 16% of his office’s budget, also higher than the average of around 4% spent by other House offices, according to OpenSecrets’ analysis.
Gooden is known to be an active traveler with high spending on both office and campaign-related travel, according to Roll Call. After winning reelection to his second term in 2022, Gooden spent leftover campaign money abroad and at popular destinations, including New Orleans, La., and Las Vegas, Nev.
Gooden himself has been spotted in a meat boutique in Israel, a bar in New York and Trump’s Mar-A-Lago resort in Florida. The office declined our request for comments about the purpose of the travel, its details, or sources of funding.
The second biggest spender was a Democratic member from the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, Rep. Gregorio Sablan. Yet, Sablan’s office represents a territory almost 8000 miles from Washington, D.C. managed to incur around $90,000 less than Gooden from Texas.
Bob Schwalbach, Sablan’s chief of staff, told OpenSecrets that the high travel expenditures simply reflect the costs of getting to the district.
Harris Campaign: Donald Trump’s Very Good, Very Normal Press Conference
August 8, 2024, 3:56 pm | in
This is quite good:
| Donald Trump’s Very Good, Very Normal Press Conference Split Screen: Joy and Freedom vs. Whatever the Hell That Was (No photo on the page.) |
| Donald Trump took a break from taking a break to put on some pants and host a p̶r̶e̶s̶s̶ ̶c̶o̶n̶f̶e̶r̶e̶n̶c̶e̶ public meltdown. We have a lot to say about it. Here are some initial thoughts – with more to come. He hasn’t campaigned all week. He isn’t going to a single swing state this week. But he sure is mad Kamala Harris and Tim Walz are getting big crowds across the battlegrounds.The facts were hard to track and harder to find in Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago meltdown this afternoon. He lied. He attacked the media. He made excuses for why he’s off the campaign trail. We’re here to help because his staff clearly isn’t. But first, an important reminder on the question Donald didn’t answer: how he will vote on the Florida abortion referendum. (He has been ducking this question since April.) We worked to pin down reality so Donald Trump, bless his heart, doesn’t have to. Here are the facts: We had 12,000 and 15,000 people in Wisconsin and Michigan yesterday, respectively (Not 2,000.) The ABC debate is September 10th. Not the 25th. People have spoken to bigger crowds than Donald Trump. (Obama, Clinton, literally anyone at Lollapalooza, Coachella, the World Cup…) January 6th was decidedly nothing like MLK’s “I Have a Dream” speech. And Trump did not get a bigger crowd than Martin Luther King Jr. on that historic day. There was famously not a “peaceful transfer” of power after the 2020 election, which Donald Trump fought to overturn. (Famously.) Five police officers died because of January 6th. Donald Trump said he was off the trail this week because of the Democratic convention. (That convention is not happening this week.) Trump said they have commercials at a level no one else does. (He is being drastically outspent on the airwaves.) Governor Josh Shapiro is actually a great guy. Project 2025 author Tom Homan, the “father” of Trump’s cruel child separation policy, is not a person to praise. Jewish people should not “have their head examined” for not supporting him. (That’s actually antisemitic.) Trump said he was not complaining. He in fact very much was. Trump does not know the difference between asylum seekers and an insane asylum. Donald Trump does not “cherish” the Constitution. Abortion is not “less of an issue” for voters. It is not “subdued.” It is not a “small issue” for voters, despite how much Donald Trump wants it to be. Donald Trump did not answer the abortion question “very well in the debate.” Everybody did not want Roe v. Wade overturned. The American people do not support states banning abortion. After-birth abortion does not exist. Minnesota and Virginia are not the same. Donald Trump doesn’t know what progressive means. Kamala Harris does not want to take away everyone’s guns. Tim Walz is a gun owner. Vice President Harris does not support an arms embargo on Israel. Donald Trump could not remember Tim Walz’s name. Donald Trump’s tax cuts are not the biggest in history. We don’t know what “the transgender became such a big thing” is supposed to mean. Donald Trump will cut Social Security – just like he proposed every year he was in office. Government was not weaponized against Trump and Steve Bannon. Mail ballots are secure. We agree – Elon IS a different kind of guy. There are no polls that say Donald Trump is going to win in a landslide. The MAGA base is not 75% of the country. |
Jack Smith Wants More Time To Figure Out SCOTUS Immunity Ruling by TPM
(Long post, but jam-packed even if you don’t click through on anything.)
INSIDE: Donald Trump … Kamala Harris … Nancy Pelosi Read on Substack
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo.
Hurry Up And Wait
Today was the deadline set by U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan for Special Counsel Jack Smith and Donald Trump to propose a schedule for pretrial matters as she resumes the Jan. 6 case following the Supreme Court’s horrendous ruling on presidential immunity.
But Smith, in a bit of a surprise move, asked Chutkan in a filing late yesterday to provide more time for him and other DOJ components to sort out the implications of the Supreme Court decision. Trump, the king of delay, did not oppose Smith’s request for more time.
Smith wants another three weeks – until Aug. 30 – to confer with Trump and submit the proposed scheduling order. Smith also asked Chutkan to delay the status conference originally scheduled for next Friday, Aug. 16, until after Aug. 30.
Typically, you would expect the judge to be amenable to this kind of request, but Chutkan was clearly ready to move when the case was finally returned to her, so it’ll be interesting to see how she reacts. I still doubt she’ll force the issue, but nothing about this case is routine.
What does it all mean?
This case was already not going to trial before the election, so it doesn’t change those odds. It reduces the window available for holding any kind of evidentiary hearing on the immunity issue, making it less likely that that will happen before the election (for what it’s worth, I was having trouble getting excited about that as any kind of real pre-election accountability moment for Trump anyway). Whether the case goes to trial after November depends almost entirely on whether Trump loses the election, so Smith’s desired delay wouldn’t really change that either.
Beyond that, we’re left to speculate about what Smith is grappling with internally. It’s all speculation at this point. But before I get into the more tenuous speculation, the simplest and most obvious answer is that the implications of the Supreme Court immunity decision are in fact difficult to parse and to apply to the facts of this case. The high court didn’t give a clear road map on all of the legal issues involved, as Politico explains extensively this morning. And there are a lot of legal issues involved, as this Just Security project published this week outlines in great detail.
Beyond that, the speculation about the delay ranges from internal disputes at DOJ about how to move forward to more mundane bureaucratic slowness in dotting i’s and crossing t’s to one possibility that I’ve tried to keep in mind all along … but again this is purely speculative: If you’re not going to get to try Trump before the election, does it make sense to change the strategy of a stripped-down indictment of only Trump and broaden the federal case to charge the full conspiracy, including all possible crimes committed by Trump, plus adding co-defendants and co-conspirators?
I mention this possibility because the whole point of the current approach was to keep things narrow and targeted, largely for judicial economy and speed. It didn’t work. Trump succeeded in dragging it out past the election. Given that the goal of the original strategy is no longer achievable, there’s a logic to changing the strategy. And remember: if Trump loses the election, Smith has all the time in the world.
What Can Be Done About The Georgia Election Board?
NBC News’ Lisa Rubin takes a closer look at the recent shenanigans of the MAGA-infused Georgia Election Board on behalf of Donald Trump.
That Crazy Trump Presser
Casual readers of other news outlets probably got the sense that Trump held a press conference at Mar-a-Lago yesterday where he proposed more presidential debates, dodged some abortion questions, and made preposterous claims about the size of his crowds. But it truly was the kind of performance that had it been anyone else, or even him eight years ago, would have produced a cacophony of stories asking what is wrong with this guy. If you missed it, perusing the TPM liveblog of the presser might be the best way to get a proper sense of how much we’ve collectively normalized the man.
Harris Campaign Unleashes Its Young And Very Online Staff
I’ve read a million campaign press releases over the years and at this point ignore most of them, so I’m not holding up this Harris campaign press release responding to Trump’s press conference yesterday as some kind of Rosetta stone of the current moment. And yet … if you want to see the difference in tone and tenor between the Biden and Harris campaigns, this is as good of an illustration as any:
Nancy Pelosi Is Having A Moment
The former speaker is on a roll since President Biden ended his re-election bid.
Here she is, telling the AP about her crusade against Trump: “‘How can I say this in the nicest possible way: My goal in life was that man would never step in the White House again,’ Pelosi said, slapping the table with every word.”
Here she is giving The New Yorker’s David Remnick her assessment of Biden’s campaign: “I’ve never been that impressed with his political operation. They won the White House. Bravo. But my concern was: this ain’t happening, and we have to make a decision for this to happen. The President has to make the decision for that to happen.”
Historical Context
Just gonna leave this right here:
Good Read
TPM’s Josh Kovensky: A Journey Through the Authoritarian New Right–A non-exhaustive look at the influencers behind Republicans’ recent turn toward the bizarre.
Reader Mailbag
TPM Reader AN checking in this week from the Paris Olympics:
Thanks for including that item about Armand Duplantis in the Morning Memo. My husband and I were there last night at the Stade de France, and it was absolute magic.
We are the biggest nerds in the world, totally un-sporty, never watch any sports, barely know what pole-vaulting is. Some friends gave us their extra tickets to Saturday night’s, and then last night’s, track and field event, so we thought, what the hell, it’s the Olympics, let’s go.
Well. We had a spectacularly good time watching all the events on both evenings: discus, shotput, long jump, high jump, sprints, relays and the men’s 10,000 meter final. But the pole-vault! It was just spectacularly entertaining, in large part thanks to the showmanship of the athletes, especially Sam Kendricks and Mondo himself. They had the crowd clapping in unison, they mugged for the camera, raced around, emoted, hugged each other between attempts.
It was crazy how much higher Mondo vaulted than the other guys–at the beginning, he was clearing the bar by probably half a meter. He seemed to be floating. When he had beat everyone else and won the gold at 6.10 meters, there was a pause. Then came the announcement that Mondo would go for the world record. The crowd went crazy and stayed that way until the very end. What a joy.
I’m not sure this experience has turned us into sports fans, but after this, we certainly get what all the fuss is about.
Have a great weekend, everyone!
Short one again. Sorry having to deal with stuff. But there is always next week. People feel free to use anything here as you wish. Love you.
Scottie's Playtime 