Yes She Can

...and she WILL!

women's rights

I found the graphic above on Facebook recently. It is truly amazing to see the progress that women have made over the last 100 years. It was a long, long time coming, but I am sure that many present-day, old-fashioned males still cannot handle it, thinking that change has come too fast. Women used to be under their control, it says so in the Bible!!, and now we have all these "independent" women working, driving cars, running companies, and heaven forbid VOTING! 

"Childress cat ladies," Shady Vance calls them. (Oh, and just this afternoon, Vance called Kamala Harris "trash" that needed to be hauled out of the White House.) Classy.

I guess no one told Vance that being openly sexist wasn't going to attract many women's votes. Maybe he thinks there are enough Neanderthal men still around that he'll get elected. Not gonna happen, Shady. The only way you will be vice-president is if we allow Trump to steal this election, and that is NOT going to happen.

The Marsh Family

The Marsh family is a British musical group. This is a very well-done parody of Bohemian Rhapsody.

Well, with the polls so tight a week out, we decided to revisit US Election politics one last time, and ambitiously to have a stab at building a parody around one of the greatest songs ever written, Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” which was the inimitable mock opera lead single from their album “A Night at the Opera” released in 1975. It was a monstrous production, created across eight generations of 24-track tape and with hundreds of overdubs, complex layered harmonies, subsections, innovations. And at its core, the spectacular vocals of Freddie Mercury – one of the finest singers ever, on top form. It has been parodied so many times already, including an iconic version by the Muppets (which the kids loved and grew up with), and it’s been twisted to fit subjects from the menopause to coronavirus. But our chosen subject is the willingness of so many decent people to hold their nose and - likely - vote for Donald Trump in the forthcoming US Presidential Election. We know we’ve sung about it already twice, and we don’t live or vote in the USA. But the whole world has a stake in this election – and it’s a free world. At least, for now. We chose not to riff off the many daft claims, stories, or issues (the cat ladies and cats and dogs have been cut up plenty), but just to try to cut to the fundamentals, and think about behaviours, facts, values, and history. Some of the footage is from the US Congress hearings.

deceptive ads

In the relatively short life of political ads airing on television (back to the '60's?) we have seen some pretty deceptive ads. But often it was a shading of the truth. There would be a situation presented and the opponents position would be incomplete or misrepresented. But there would be a grain of truth in there. 

Nowadays, the Trump campaign has dropped all pretense and is just going for broke. A recent Trump ad I saw said that average incomes are down across the board (not true) but the thing that struck me was that immediately after saying that, the ad cuts to Kamala laughing, cackling, as if she is laughing about people having a hard time. The same ad presents about three different scenarios, all negative, all suggesting that people are REALLY struggling economically, and each is followed by Kamala laughing again. They try to make it look like she doesn't give a shit about people struggling, which is not only far from the truth, but really deceptive when they splice two different clips together. 

This is the character of the Trump campaign. Do anything, say anything, create totally bullshit ads, all to gain advantage. They are not interested in truth, just fomenting resentment and hatred. And this is what a 2nd Trump presidency would be like. 

Here is a story on CNN from a few days ago, examining the different ways the Trump team lies. It's just fucking disgraceful, but we know Trump and his minions have no shame. It's like a nest of vipers, doing anything and everything no matter how despicable. I'm sure most Americans would not want to be associated with such tactics.

Fact Check: How Trump's TV ads deceive viewers with misleadingly edited quotes.

by Daniel Dale - CNN

Oct 25, 2024

Washington (CNN) 

Former President Donald Trump’s late-campaign television ads are littered with deceptively edited and misleadingly described quotations.

Multiple Trump ads omit critical words from quotes by and about Vice President Kamala Harris on the subject of tax policy. One Trump ad misleadingly depicts comments about fracking from Trump’s campaign and administration as if they were comments from independent news organizations.

Another Trump ad takes an immigration-related quote from a 6-year-old news article way out of context, wrongly depicting it as a comment about the Biden-Harris administration. Another ad changes a word from the headline of an economic news story. And another ad wrongly describes a quote from the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Asked for comment on CNN’s findings, Trump campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt chose not to defend any of the specifics. Instead, she said Friday: “President Trump has the hardest-hitting, most well produced ads in the business.” She credited them for damaging Harris’ campaign.

All of the ads discussed in this article are among the 20 most-aired ads from Trump and his outside allies in the last two weeks, according to data provided by AdImpact. Here is a fact check.

Tactic: Cutting out key words

One Trump ad deletes critical words from two separate quotes on Harris’ tax policies.

The ad twice shows a video clip of Harris saying this: “Taxes are gonna have to go up.” But the ad removes key words from the beginning and end of her sentence.


What Harris actually said — at an event in 2019, during her previous presidential campaign — was that “estate taxes are gonna have to go up for the richest Americans.”

The same ad also features the following on-screen text the ad attributed to an article in The New York Times: “Harris is seeking to significantly raise taxes.” But as the Times itself has noted, this, too, is a misleading snip. What the Times article actually said was this: “Harris is seeking to significantly raise taxes on the wealthiest Americans and large corporations.”

At least two other Trump ads employ similar deception on the same topic.
Those ads feature on-screen text saying “Harris would raise taxes,” attributing those words to a CBS News article. But that CBS News article actually said this: “To pay for her plan, Harris would raise taxes on high-income earners.”

Tactic: Depicting claims from the Trump camp as statements from news entities

One Trump ad, attacking Harris over her past support for a ban on fracking (which she now says she no longer supports), shows the logo of the Reuters news agency beside the words “KAMALA’S SCHEME: ‘KILL JOBS,’” making it seem like that was something Reuters had declared. But the Reuters article the ad cites in small print actually used the phrase “kill jobs” only in reporting a claim from Trump’s own 2020 campaign.

The article – which was about comments made by Joe Biden, not Harris – said: “The Trump campaign had already pounced on his remarks, saying they were evidence that Biden’s energy stance would kill jobs in states like Pennsylvania.”

The same ad features the words “KAMALA’S SCHEME: ‘RAISE GAS PRICES,’” attributing them to a 2021 article in the environmental and energy publication E&E News. But that 2021 article used the phrase “raise gas prices” only in describing a claim from the Trump administration. The article said that, in a report released days before Trump left office, “outgoing Energy Secretary Dan Brouillette said a fracking ban would cost millions of jobs, raise gas prices at the pump and cause electricity bills to spike.”

Tactic: Citing a ‘source’ that is unrelated to the ad’s claims

A Trump ad criticizing the record of the Biden-Harris administration says, “Their weakness invited wars. Welfare for illegals.” The ad flashes on-screen text that says “welfare for illegal immigrants” and attributes those words to an NBC News article from 2018.

But that NBC News article did not even mention Biden or Harris, whose administration did not begin until 2021. And the article used the phrase “welfare for illegal immigrants” only in passing – in a totally different context than the Trump ad uses it.

The article criticized occupational licensing rules that were preventing immigrants enrolled in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program from working in certain jobs. It said: “It’s a complete travesty that otherwise qualified individuals can’t get the government’s permission to cut hair. Regardless of one’s position on welfare for illegal immigrants, a license is clearly different from food stamps and other government safety nets.”

Tactic: Making a quote more dramatic

One Trump ad has on-screen text saying, “Massive Layoffs Hit Michigan.” The ad, criticizing Harris for her support for electric vehicles, attributes those words to a March 28 article in Newsweek.

But that Newsweek article actually referred not to “massive” layoffs but to “mass” layoffs, at least a slightly less dramatic word; it was talking about layoffs totaling under 1,400 people at two auto plants. And the ad didn’t mention the number of people employed in auto manufacturing in Michigan has increased by about 15% under the Biden-Harris administration; it is now at its highest level since 2007, though the number of people employed in auto parts manufacturing in the state has fallen about 6%.

Tactic: Wrongly describing a quote

One Trump ad features a narrator saying the “Biden-Harris administration just admitted that they released thousands of illegal immigrants convicted of violent crimes.” A quote shown on the screen, from the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), appears to support the claim; the text says, “Released Illegal Immigrants: ‘435,719 ARE CONVICTED CRIMINALS.’”

But as CNN and others have noted, this ICE letter did not say that all of these immigrants with criminal convictions were released under the Biden-Harris administration. The data is about people who entered the country over the course of decades, including during Trump’s own administration, and the letter did not offer any administration-by-administration breakdown.

The ICE letter also did not say all of these people were “released” – many are still in prisons and jails serving their criminal sentences – or that they are all “illegal immigrants.” The list includes both people who entered the country illegally and people who entered legally and then committed crimes.

Original.

Here's another story by Politifact.

And another one from MSNBC.

And another one on FactCheck.org.

There is just no end to the lies, and no bottom too low to go for the Trump campaign. 

next con

The clock is ticking. The election is next week. Much of America is on edge and will be until Donald Trump is soundly defeated. Yes, he will probably claim he won as soon as he can on Election Night, and there will be no evidence. At this point, he is like the boy who cried wolf. He has lied so often about everything that no one takes him seriously anymore. I wonder if his own worshippers even take him seriously. I don't think they care. They are entertained by him, and his racism, anger and bile matches their own. 

Sad to think there are so many bullies in America, but bullying has been with us as long as I have been conscious, and I'm sure it predated my time on Earth. I have faith that America is going to do the right thing and put Kamala in the White House. Will that include a Dem Senate and House? It would sure make things a bit easier, eh?

Trump's Biggest Con: Pretending he's on the Side of Working Men and Women

by Paul Krugman, New York Times

Oct 28, 2024

Donald Trump has always been a con man. As a businessman, he left behind a trail of investors who lost money in failed ventures even as he profited, students who paid thousands for worthless courses, unpaid contractors and more. Even amid his current presidential campaign he has been hawking overpriced gold sneakers and Trump Bibles printed in China.

But Trump’s biggest, potentially most consequential con has been political: portraying himself as a different kind of Republican, an ally of working Americans. This self-portrait has been successful so far, notably in gaining Trump significant support among working-class people of color — although the carnival of racism at his Sunday rally at Madison Square Garden in New York, in which a comedian opened the event by describing Puerto Rico as an “island of garbage” and made a watermelon joke in reference to a Black man, may dent that support in the campaign’s closing days.

The truth is that to the extent that Trump’s policy plans — or, in some cases, concepts of plans — differ from G.O.P. orthodoxy, it’s because they are even more antilabor and pro-plutocrat than his party’s previous norm.

Background: Since the 1970s our two main political parties have diverged sharply on economic ideology. In general, Democrats favor higher taxes on the rich and a stronger social safety net; Republicans favor lower taxes on corporations and the wealthy paid for in part by cutting social programs.

Kamala Harris is, in this sense, a normal Democrat, calling for tax hikes that would primarily affect high-income Americans while expanding tax credits for families with children; she has also proposed expanding Medicare to cover home health care for seniors, which would be a big deal for millions of families.

An aside: I really don’t understand people who claim that Harris hasn’t supplied enough policy detail. All I can think is that they’re looking for something to complain about so they can sound evenhanded.

Has Trump deviated from Republican norms? While he was president, not really. His 2017 tax cut strongly favored high-income Americans. Now he wants to make that tax cut, many of whose provisions will expire in 2025, permanent. He has also floated the idea of a further large cut in corporate taxes (much of which could, by the way, ultimately benefit foreign investors).

As president, Trump tried to push through deep cuts in Medicaid, although he didn’t succeed. And while he says that he won’t cut Social Security and Medicare, his policy proposals would undermine these programs’ financial foundations.

Trump has also made some tax proposals that may sound pro-worker but aren’t, such as ending taxes on tips; many tipped workers don’t make enough to pay income taxes, and those who do are mostly in a low tax bracket.

If Trump has broken with standard G.O.P. economic policy, he has done so by intensifying efforts to redistribute income upward. For he is proposing higher taxes on the working class in the form of a large national sales tax — which is essentially what his tariffswould be. And this tax would be highly regressive — a large burden on middle- and lower-income families, a trivial hit to the 1 percent.

If you put reasonable estimates of the effects of the Harris and Trump tax plans on the same chart, they’re more or less mirror images. Trump would raise taxes on most Americans, with only the top few percent coming out ahead; Harris would do the reverse.

So, no, Trump isn’t a friend to working-class Americans; quite the opposite. Why, then, do millions of people believe otherwise?

Some of it probably reflects racial tension: White men without college degrees have lost ground relative to other groups since 1980, and some of them, alas, surely feel an affinity for the racism and misogyny we saw at Madison Square Garden. But as I said, some Latino and Black Americans also appear to have bought into Trump’s spiel. Why?

Well, Americans correctly remember Trump’s prepandemic economy as an era of strong job growth and rising wages — largely, I’d argue, because Republicans in Congress opened the fiscal spigots after austerity during the Obama years slowed recovery from the 2008 financial crisis. Many also implicitly discount or memory-hole the high unemployment of Trump’s final year in office. And they’re still frustrated about higher prices, the consequence of the inflation surge of 2021-22 — even though this surge was a global pandemic phenomenon, and wages adjusted for inflation are now higher than they were right before the Covid-19 pandemic.

What relatively few people realize, I believe, is that if he wins next week, Trump’s anti-worker agenda will be much broader than anything he managed to do in 2017-21. Back then, he raised average tariffs on Chinese goods by about 20 percentage points, but China accounts for only about 15 percent of U.S. imports; now he’s talking about imposing similar tariffs across the board, and 60 percent on imports from China. Overall, we’re talking about a sales tax roughly 10 times as large as his last venture.

Trump, then, is anything but pro-working-class Americans. If many believe otherwise, well, they aren’t the first victims of his lifelong career as a con man.

Original.