Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

You passed on an opportunity to be offended? What are you even doing here?

Jack Smith: “Why did you start campaigning in the middle of my investigation?!”

Today in our ongoing national embarrassment…

They want us to be overwhelmed and exhausted. Focus. Resist. Oppose.

President Musk and Trump are both poorly raised, coddled 8 year old boys.

Pessimism assures that nothing of any importance will change.

Too often we confuse noise with substance. too often we confuse setbacks with defeat.

When your entire life is steeped in white supremacy, equality feels like discrimination.

Dear elected officials: Trump is temporary, dishonor is forever.

Wow, I can’t imagine what it was like to comment in morse code.

Hi god, it’s us. Thanks a heap, you’re having a great week and it’s only Thursday!

In my day, never was longer.

When do we start airlifting the women and children out of Texas?

if you can’t see it, then you are useless in the fight to stop it.

Come on, man.

When you’re a Republican, they let you do it.

Republicans don’t want a speaker to lead them; they want a hostage.

Seems like a complicated subject, have you tried yelling at it?

Fight for a just cause, love your fellow man, live a good life.

Compromise? There is no middle ground between a firefighter and an arsonist.

Dumb motherfuckers cannot understand a consequence that most 4 year olds have fully sorted out.

If you tweet it in all caps, that makes it true!

The poor and middle-class pay taxes, the rich pay accountants, the wealthy pay politicians.

I really should read my own blog.

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Good Trouble

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Open Thread: Obama Museum and Selma Anniversary

I heard from our friends in Montana today.

Apparently, the folks near the Fort Peck reservation are not being particularly welcoming to Native voters at voting locations.

Native voter walks in to vote.  They tell him that a ballot was mailed to him.  He says he never received the ballot.  Someone from GOTV tells him that it’s his right to vote on a new ballot, even if a ballot was mailed to him.  Accusations of interfering with their office staff are made and threats of arrest ensue.  As you can see from the video, law enforcement was called in.

Here’s what happened after that.   Video.

Followed by an email:

In an effort to avoid what happened today I am going to lay out our expectations. You can be here as a pole watcher to observe the votes. You cannot interfere with the elections staff. If a voter verbally requests your help once they are at the window or when they are voting you can help them but let our staff first make sure they are getting their questions out. If you interfere with any voter or the elections staff I will have you removed from the Courthouse and possibly charged with obstruction of a public servant pursuant to Montana Code.

The claims of interference were made up out of whole cloth.  Even so, there is apparently no regulation or statute that says you can only speak when spoken to.  It appears to me that they are trying to intimidate the people who are doing GOTV for the Native vote.

The woman in the video isn’t just some control freak insisting that she must not be questioned.  She is Theresa Diekhans, the Roosevelt County Attorney.  At least one law enforcement was called in, with the implied threat of arrest.  The written threat of future arrest came later, by the email above.

Office phone:
406-653-6295

Direct line to the county attorney:
406-653-6298 (Direct line)

If you’re inclined to call and say:

– that you have read about the incident last week

– that you have seen the video

– that it appears to you that the environment in the office is unwelcoming to Native voters

– and that they appear to be hostile to those who are doing GOTV for Native voters

Then I suggest that you call both phone numbers, because anything left on the direct line could be deleted before anyone else is aware of them.

Open thread.

 

Reader Interactions

116Comments

  6. 6.

    KrackenJack

    KrackenJill and I got our ballot tracking email confirming our ballots were received and counted yesterday. Double yay! Last of our postcards mailed yesterday, too.

    Now to find some more good trouble to get into…

  8. 8.

    Jackie

    WaterGirl, the video says I don’t have permission to view and/or it’s no longer available to view.

  9. 9.

    lowtechcyclist

    Got to admit that I couldn’t understand what the GOTV person was saying while his back was to the camera, so it was hard for me to suss out what point he was trying to make.

  12. 12.

    WaterGirl

    @lowtechcyclist: At some point, the video gets louder and you can follow it.  I think I had the same volume issue you did, where I had to turn the volume up to hear and then suddenly it was plenty loud.

    I bet if you fast forward to the middle you’ll hear just fine.  It was quite repetitive.

  13. 13.

    New Deal democrat

    Via Josh Chafetz, the Harris campaign has cut three local ads, designed to be aired during relevant NFL games, among other times: “Detroit/Philly/Milwaukee vs. Trump.” He’s on video insulting all three cities, and now it’s coming back to bite him in the @$$.

    Really well done to generate turnout in these three crucial cities.

    And per Dan Guild, early voting in these three cities is running well ahead of turnout in other areas of the three States, which means that Harris’s GOTV efforts are working very well.

    A special caution about early voting numbers. Aside from special circumstances like COVID, I think the main reason for increased early turnout nationwide is that millions of people who already had their minds made up (including me) have discovered they really like it. Shorter wait times, gets the task over with. And that feeling is also shared by GOPers. Lots of my GOP neighbors have already voted, for example. So I think Dan Guild’s way of looking at it – comparing turnout in red vs. blue municipal jurisdictions in relative comparison with earlier years – is the best. And what he has found is that early voting has surged in the three cities above *much more* than in rural areas compared with 2020 and 2022.

  14. 14.

    Marleedog

    WG, do you know how many people are living at the Duck River Reservation? Looking at the map it is quite an austere countryside. Split halfway between  Nevada and Idaho

     

    Edit to add

     

    Duck Valley is in Nevada and Idaho.   Why is Montana code being cited

     

    Edit to add again

     

    The video is somewhere in Montana, not Duck valley.

     

    Regardless, voter intimidation and suppression remains immoral.

  15. 15.

    KatKapCC

    @Jackie: It works for me. It’s on iCloud, I wonder if perhaps it doesn’t work on non-Apple platforms? I could be totally wrong.

    I love that photo of Rep Lewis. What an incredible man he was.

  16. 16.

    Rusty

    I’m embarrassed to admit that it was only this year that I fully realized that the Selma march over the bridge took place after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, not before.  And it was the beginning of the march to Montgomery to demand the right to vote, not the end.  Just passing laws wasn’t remotely enough, and it still isn’t remotely enough if the laws are are not followed in good faith.  Time is a flat circle, so little changes.

  22. 22.

    Ruckus

    Life goes on, life changes as it does.

    For anyone in the older age brackets we’ve likely seen a lot of change in this country, in humanity over our lives. In the overall concept of humanity a lot has changed in the last 100 yrs. A lot.

    Communications is a lot different. I’ve made this comment here before. As an old myself I’ve seen some dramatic changes, like what we are doing right here, right now. Anyone with a computer or even a modern phone can follow this conversation, and this is an actual big deal. I believe that I’ve made this statement here at least once prior. We all have lives, we wake up, we go through our day, we sleep, rinse, repeat. But what we are doing right here, right now is hugely different than what we had, in the lifetimes of many of us, especially the older old farts. It’s no longer just your town and your local newspaper. We can see, almost in real time, from most any place on the planet, comments from other humans, most of whom we’ve never met. We can have neighbors from most anywhere, not just next door or down the block. We can fly to most anywhere at the drop of a hat. We can own a car that actually doesn’t break down on a regular basis. We can fix a lot of health issues that in the lifetime of many alive today we couldn’t or didn’t even have a damn clue. This world is a hell of a lot different than when I was born, and I’m not even close to the age of some of my neighbors or other commenters, who have seen even more. And, this is not the first time I’ve written this here, on this blog. Which didn’t exist 25 yrs ago.

  24. 24.

    Sister Golden Bear

    Video plays for me on Mac OS/Safari.

    Of note, at the start of the voter there’s a man who appears to be a LEO — with his hand poised over his gun holster. Maybe that’s SOP when viewing an argument but it does seem to be a bit threatening gesture.

  28. 28.

    KatKapCC

    @bk: We all know the greatest sins humankind has ever committed were minor typos that do absolutely nothing to distract from the importance of the message.

  35. 35.

    WaterGirl

    @bk:  I just did the copy & paste.  It’s not my fault that she wrote it wrong.  And it doesn’t seem right for me to correct it – just a smaller version of the media trying to make someone look better than they are.

  36. 36.

    WaterGirl

    @Sister Golden Bear:

    Of note, at the start of the voter there’s a man who appears to be a LEO — with his hand poised over his gun holster. Maybe that’s SOP when viewing an argument but it does seem to be a bit threatening gesture.

    Absolutely!   Exactly the intention.  To people who were there, it appeared that the officer was called there to make an arrest, based on the “interference” accusation from the hothead worker in the office who was blowing off the Native voter, not offering the information that they could vote with a new ballot.

    That’s the angry younger male you hear in the video.

  39. 39.

    Jackie

    @WaterGirl: I guess I’m special🤷🏼‍♀️ I’ve gone back a couple of times to see if it was a momentary glitch. Nope. Ah well.

    eta: I took a screenshot and emailed it to you.

  40. 40.

    Bupalos

    I know there’s little sense in even thinking about polls at this point, but I admit to having been freaked out that they pretty much all showed a couple point move toward Twump. And now I admit to being irrationally unfreaked that ABC Ipsos now dropped one that has Harris back to her +4.

  41. 41.

    syphonblue

    866-OUR-VOTE if you’re having any issues being allowed to vote (disclaimer I work for this organization)

  43. 43.

    Nelle

    @Ruckus: Were you in my brain a few hours ago?  I was thinking about how tech has altered our expectations of response time in relationships.  And even the demands for interaction.

    My mother went for three years with intermittent communication with my father (army from 1942 to 45), which was good prep I guess for having one daughter on the Angola-Zaire (then, DRC now) border and the other one on Barter Island, off the northeast coast of Alaska.  Neither of us had access to a phone.  I (the Alaska one) had mail delivery once a week, if the weather didn’t prevent the plane from landing.  My sister had mail access when someone came through and was willing to take letters back to the States and mail them there.  My mother was unperturbed.  She was master of not worrying about what she couldn’t control.

    Now, it is “Mom hasn’t answered and it’s been 30 minutes!”

  47. 47.

    TBone

    A xit among many legendary xits:

    Liz Cheney on JD Vance’s CNN meltdown: “What we just watched is what it looks like when someone has gotta go through unbelievable contortions to try to find a way to defend the person that JD Vance himself called America’s Hitler.”

    https://digbysblog.net/2024/10/27/jake-tapper-ftw/

    😆🔥

    Sunday politics show!

  50. 50.

    KatKapCC

    @TBone: That’s a great essay. This part really struck me:

    But these reversals, coming now and coming from the poisoned heart of American oligarchy, have instead confirmed the worst fears among an anxiety-wracked electorate that the core institutions that once saved U.S. democracy under the life-or-death pressures of Watergate — the Supreme Court, Congress, and an aggressive media — have morally imploded into empty shells.

    Exactly.

  58. 58.

    John S.

    @trollhattan:

    If Harris had done what I just watched JD Vance do in her interview with Bret Baier, we would be hearing about how it disqualified her until Election Day.

    The double standard continues to become more glaring by the minute.

  60. 60.

    Chris

    @KatKapCC:

    In the interests of fairness, I suppose I should point out that “aggressive media” is far too kind even in the Watergate context.

    IIRC, Woodward and Bernstein were never supposed to get the story. Felt initially tried going to the actual political desk, manned by far more high profile reporters. Those reporters… went straight to the White House, asked them politely if there was any truth to these malicious rumors, and when they were told “no,” decided that was good enough. At which point Felt started looking around for a Plan B. It’s a nice insight into just how much political reporting was riddled with authority-friendly garbage even then.

  65. 65.

    p.a.

    Cowardice compounded with stupidity: as if tucking tail now will guarantee them of anything later!  Just more demands and threats.

  67. 67.

    TBone

    @Emily68: I watch mine all the time to see if my bait is still doing its job and wiggling!

    (JK, I don’t torment poor, defenseless fish anymore.)

  70. 70.

    Peale

    @Emily68: they also hang out at Track meets to make sure nothing nefarious happens to a vaulter’s tool if he needs to take a bio break, and in firehouses to make sure some nitwit doesn’t set something down that will prevent them from sliding down when the alarm goes off.

  72. 72.

    FelonyGovt

    @New Deal democrat: I’m glad to hear about these ads. I’m sure people in those cities are insulted by his remarks, just as I’m insulted by his characterization of California as a hellhole and even more insulted by his characterization of the United States as a “garbage can” receiving refuse (i.e. human beings) from other countries.

  74. 74.

    Bupalos

    @trollhattan: decent effort but still a loss. The right angle for arguing with the “intellectual” magats is to wait for them to say “but Trump’s policies are good” and then say “what policy exactly?”

  75. 75.

    Jackie

    @trollhattan:

    My god, JD of the Eyeliner Vance Clan is slippery as a hovercraft full of eels. Lying while indignant is a learned skill.

    Vance is the new male version of Kellyanne Conway. Every time he talks over and runs through interviews I see her smiling over his shoulder with approval.

    I can’t wait for him to be shamed back to the senate in his junior Ohioan senator role.

  76. 76.

    Spanky

    @FelonyGovt:

    even more insulted by his characterization of the United States as a “garbage can” receiving refuse (i.e. human beings) from other countries.

    Give me your tired, your poor
    Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free
    The wretched refuse of your teeming shore
    Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
    I lift my lamp beside the golden door

    I am spawn of wretched refuse, and proud of it!

    (Edited to correct to “breathe”)

  82. 82.

    hitchhiker

    @Bupalos: That’s the modern-day version of an argument with a fan of the Confederacy:

    They were fighting for states rights!

    Which rights, exactly?

  83. 83.

    pabadger

    I just finished an hour of text banking for both the PA Dems and Harris Walz. Good news is that there are so many Texter’s I only did like 25 responses! Heck yes!

  84. 84.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    @Bupalos: Keep in mind those polls aren’t scientific, they are merely the opinion of the people running the polling organization.

  90. 90.

    lowtechcyclist

    @TBone:

    I watch mine all the time to see if my bait is still doing its job and wiggling!

    I’d think you’d be watching hubby’s to see if your bait is still doing its job. Wiggle harder! :-D

  93. 93.

    Scout211

    Sorry if this has already been posted.  Will Bunch’s column in the Philadelphia Inquirer  is worth a read (web archive version)

    Billionaire cowards at Washington Post, L.A. Times show what life under a dictator is really like

    A few snippets, but read the whole thing.

    . . .

    If this looks like the latest saga of open corruption in a nation that’s become a billionaire kleptocracy, it is — but this moment is also so much more than that. America is witnessing the raw power of dictatorship some nine days before voters even decide if that will truly be our future path. The cowardly Bezos can spend billions to erect a manmade projectile that sends him into space, but he’ll never have the cojones of a Katharine Graham. He is obeying fascism in advance, and he is not alone.

    . . .
    The message here is clear. The cowardice of the news organizations controlled by Bezos and Soon-Shiong has already taught Trump — in the words of Yale’s Snyder, a leading U.S. expert on fascism — what power can do, and if he prevails in next week’s election, he plans to bring that hammer down in full force. What happened at the Post and the L.A. Times was a stunning betrayal of journalism’s moral values, but in a strange way the papers did perform a public service: showing American voters what life under a dictator would feel like.

    The endorsement cancellations came with a heaping side order of nuance. One irony, as some observers pointed out, is that the expected endorsements of Harris from both editorial boards would have been a tiny blip on the political radar, compared to the earthquake of the owners’ interference. What’s more, there’s an intellectual argument — I once made it myself in a long-vanished blog post — that newspapers shouldn’t endorse candidates. If the Post or Times had announced such a decision a year ago — and not under the heat of the election’s final days, under pressure from self-interested billionaires — there’d be little controversy.

    . . .

    Even worse, readers’ sudden sense of betrayal seems to have greatly accelerated the already steep decline of public trust in American journalism, with reports that both the Post and the L.A. Times have been bombarded with thousands of canceled subscriptions. Some have switched to news organizations like The Inquirer, which published a long and compelling endorsement of Harris at almost the exact moment the Post’s capitulation went public. But many readers will be lost for good. This will create even more layoffs, which will lead to even less accountability journalism in a crumbling democracy, which will create even more cynicism — the tainted gasoline that fuels autocracy.

    . . .

    This early sneak preview of what dictatorship actually looks like is also providing the most important lesson we could have right now, which is how to not obey in advance but stand up against strongmen and bullies. How all of us respond over the coming days and weeks will decide the fate of the First Amendment to the Constitution, freedom of the press and maybe the future of the country.

  95. 95.

    RaflW

    @Harrison Wesley: “At a time when most politicians would be honing their closing arguments to voters, Trump often acts more like an entertainer on a farewell tour than someone who aims to lead the world’s most powerful nation.”

    Oh my g-d, yes please. Buh-bye mister Trump. “Weave” on into the sunset, ‘entertaining’ your people at Mar-a-Dodo. No curtain calls, please.

  98. 98.

    cmorenc

    @hitchhiker: I get these neo-Confederate arguments from my sister-in-law about the dismantling of statues of Confederate Army officers in North Carolina and the re-naming of modern military bases from Confederate generals like Bragg to “Fort Liberty”.  “iT’S JUST HERITAGE”.  She has no answer to my obvious follow-up question: “Heritage of what?  What rights exactly were they fighting to preserve?”  She gets flustered and tries her next response: “It’s just HISTORY!”

    My response is: “History is preserving Civil War battle sites and historical structures like the McLean house at Appomattox, not heroic monuments to Confederate generals erected 30 to 50 years after the war, or southern military bases created around Ww2 that were named because Southern arch-segregationist US Senators chaired the Armed Services and Appropriations Committees in the 1940s,”. Her response: “I don’t care-it’s just history and they should leave it alone!”

    And I break off trying to further discuss it at that point.  Might as well be arguing with a stone.

  99. 99.

    Central Planning

    My wife, 3 of our kids, and I voted today. Took about 30 minutes to get through the line. Previous years there was hardly anybody there.

    We are in western NY, and went all Blue and Yes on Prop 1, which republicans, morons, and MAGAts say it limits parents rights and that people need to save girls sports:

    Concurrent Resolution of the Senate and Assemblyproposing an amendment to section 11 of article 1 of the constitution, in relation to equal protection

    Section 1. Resolved (if the Assembly concur), That section 11 of article 1 of the constitution be amended to read as follows:

    § 11. a. No person shall be denied the equal protection of the laws of this state or any subdivision thereof. No person shall, because of race, color, ethnicity, national origin, age, disability, creed [or], religion, or sex, including sexual orientation, gender identity, genderexpression, pregnancy, pregnancy outcomes, and reproductive healthcare and autonomy, be subjected to any discrimination in [his or her] their civil rights by any other person or by any firm, corporation, or institution, or by the state or any agency or subdivision of the state, pursuant to law.

    b. Nothing in this section shall invalidate or prevent the adoption of any law, regulation, program, or practice that is designed to prevent or dismantle discrimination on the basis of a characteristic listed in this section, nor shall any characteristic listed in this section be interpreted to interfere with, limit, or deny the civil rights of any person based upon any other characteristic identified in this section.

    §  2. Resolved (if the Assembly concur), That the foregoing amendment be submitted to the people for approval at the general election to be held in the year 2024 in accordance with the provisions of the election law.

    Explanation – Matter in underscored is new; matter in brackets [ ] is old law to be omitted

  102. 102.

    Baud

    @Bostondreams:

    Man, if right wing white dudes think we don’t respect them now, they’re not going to be too happy with us if we’re forced to deal with four more years of Trump.

  108. 108.

    gene108

    @KatKapCC:

    American oligarchy, have instead confirmed the worst fears among an anxiety-wracked electorate that the core institutions that once saved U.S. democracy under the life-or-death pressures of Watergate — the Supreme Court, Congress, and an aggressive media — have morally imploded into empty shells.

    The SCOTUS and Republicans in Congress are not empty shells. They are active participants in undermining institutions to check the wealthy and powerful’s abuse of power.

  110. 110.

    topclimber

     
    Has our erstwhile pundocracy noted yet that JD could well be the least experienced vp in maybe a century or two? Two years in the Senate marked by no accomplishments, not even a lead role in losing GQP causes and sure as shit little or nothing else.

  114. 114.

    Irish

    @syphonblue:

     

    @cmorenc: Germany had its history too. They banned all nazi paraphernalia. Destroyed everything they could so that Hitler would not be memorialized. Modern day Nazi’s in Germany use the Confederate flag instead.

  115. 115.

    columbusqueen

    @BlueGuitarist: How I wish I could have met John Lewis. I wanted to tell him, “I was born on March 16, 1965, & I came into a better world because of you.”

  116. 116.

    Ruckus

    @Nelle:

    I don’t believe I was….

    It’s just that all us old farts get to see a hell of a lot more than we did when we were young. If we were/are paying any attention whatsoever we would notice that almost nothing is the same as it was. We had, when I was born, really only 2 ways to get the news, newspapers and radio. Now we have the internet, TV, radio and newspapers. Many decades ago I delivered the local town paper – I was a paperboy. Now I don’t even bother to read them because I get more news by other, faster, less wasteful methods. I’d bet that a lot of us go this route. There are TV and radio stations that only broadcast news. There is the internet, which I’ve been using for over 2 decades.

    @NotMax:

    I’d imagine that this is true…….

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