A world where everyone is walking around with tracking devices

Mark Sumner of Daily Kos takes another look at the claim that the more the nasty guy gets bad legal news the stronger he becomes. And Sumner calls BS.

The idea that [CEO of the Harris Poll, Mark] Penn and [Los Angeles Times writer Scott] Jennings are selling is that narrative that Republicans, and Trump, want everyone to believe: It’s the “every time he gets knocked down again, he gets up stronger” thesis. And it is, what’s that word again? Bulls---. Every time Trump is held accountable, every MAGA account on X seems to spew “Democrats just elected Trump!” Because, somehow, they seem to be convinced that everyone else is just as angry about a slight to Trump as the folks in their Let’s Go Brandon support group. We’re not.

Fans of the nasty guy said the same thing before the 2020 election. And, after impeachment, he lost. Sumner also had a look at what the nasty guy wants in a VP candidate. + Surrogacy: How quick are they to defend the nasty guy, praise him, and attribute every bit of good news to him? + Subservience: How well can they be a blank, extremely white screen onto which any nasty guy thought can be projected – without a thought for legality or morality. + Sacrifice: Someone who will take the bullet and slow down the chase. Sumner then rates who appear to be the top four candidates according to those criteria. These candidates are: Doug Burgum, Marco Rubio, Tim Scott, and JD Vance. Beyond that I really don’t care how well each fits the criteria. Kos of Kos wrote about the conservative movement being one long grift. He shows a list of products one can buy to avoid buying a similar product that is too “woke.” One can get anti-woke water, razor blades, beer, sneakers (the gold ones that give the nasty guy a cut), pets, coffee, and even a bank. That they cost more than the corresponding “woke” product is an easy guess – a case of Ultra Right Beer goes for $57.84 ($18.65 of that for shipping) while a case of Bud Light is $21. But it keeps you from getting woke cooties. I’ve collected a bunch of pundit roundups. I’ll just go through them (with a diversion or two) even with the jumble of topics. A pundit roundup for Kos from two weeks ago by Chitown Kev quoted Thor Benson of Wired on how the nasty guy’s return to the Oval Office could create a surveillance state and do it quickly.

If he so desired, Trump could create his own version of this [Nixon era] program, but he’d be working with much more advanced technology—and it’d be in a time when there are countless data points available on every American. Hoover could have only dreamed of a world where everyone was walking around with tracking devices. ... The administration may not even need to come up with a justification for surveilling Americans without a warrant, because it could simply purchase scores of people's personal data. The federal government has been known to purchase data from private brokers in the past, and doing so doesn’t require a warrant. “We are just awash in data, and data brokers can just collect and sell these data,” Vagle says. “Law enforcement or quasi-law enforcement can collect that information.”

A momentary break from roundups to visit a Book Post by Admiral Naismith on Kos that includes a look at the book Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, by Jaron Lanier. The book, of course, goes into these in a whole lot more detail to explain what is happening to your brain, politics, and more. Reader reviews of the book are here. Naismith just lists the reasons and I’ll mentioned some of them:

1. You are losing your free will. 2. Quitting social media is the most finely targeted way to resist the inanity of our times. 3. Social media is making you into an asshole. 4. Social media is undermining truth. ... 9. Social media is making politics impossible.

Naismith boils the ten down to two:

(1) social media is run by fascists like Zuckerberg, who use insidious propaganda techniques to make Republicans into dangerously unhinged terrorist fanatics and Democrats discouraged from voting out of sheer despair. (2) the "influencers"--not the kids on reddit with a million followers, but the REAL behind-the-scenes godzillionaires--pay billions to mine your data and f--- you over with targeted propaganda. And yet---I have a friend network via social media. I have in fact PRACTICED, not lost, empathy by interacting with them. I get to have friends in Colorado and Ohio and Florida and England, who I would never interact with at all, but for social media.

A roundup from ten days ago, Kev quoted Greg Sargent of The New Republic talking about the nasty guy saying he’ll get revenge.

In the media, this story tends to be framed as follows: Will Trump seek “revenge” for his legal travails, or won’t he? But that framing unwittingly lets Trump set the terms of this debate. It implies that he is vowing to do to Democrats what was done to him. But that’s not what Trump is actually threatening. Whereas Trump is being prosecuted on the basis of evidence that law enforcement gathered before asking grand juries to indict him, he is expressly declaring that he will prosecute President Biden and Democrats solely because this is what he endured, meaning explicitly that evidence will not be the initiating impulse.

Joan Walsh of The Nation looked at the health care plans in Project 2025. First, align care with the demands of conservative Christianity – no abortion, no transgender care, and more. Then...

Severino would also leave Americans far more vulnerable to crass capitalism when they are seeking healthcare. He wants HHS to promote private-sector Medicare Advantage plans, which—take it from me, I did my homework—may give healthy “young” seniors decent benefits at lower costs, but which get more expensive, and more restrictive, as seniors age and need more care. He recommends making Medicare Advantage the “default option” once a person qualifies for the senior-citizen health program at age 65, which would be a boon to private insurance companies, since it essentially privatizes the wildly popular public program. Severino would also repeal recent legislation allowing Medicare to negotiate better prices for commonly used drugs. And he doesn’t like Medicaid any better: He would weaken the ACA provisions that rely on Medicaid expansion and would impose work requirements on recipients.

In a roundup from eleven days ago, Greg Dworkin quoted a tweet by Steve Benen (which includes a link):

Trump to Mike Johnson: Put unqualified, scandal-plagued loyalists on the Intelligence Committee, giving them access to many of the nation's most sensitive secrets. Johnson to Trump: Sure thing. Everyone else: You've got to be kidding me.

Dworkin quoted an article in The Guardian:

The chair of Colorado’s Republican party is facing calls to resign from members of his own group after the state organization sent out an email criticizing Pride month – and later calling for rainbow-colored Pride flags to be burned. Dave Williams, who is also a representative in Colorado’s legislature, has faced swift backlash from his fellow Republicans in the wake of the controversial email sent. Much of the criticism aimed at Williams by other Republicans focused on the potential for his remarks to hurt the chances for members of their party to be elected.

I notice the criticism is not about the harm to LGBTQ people. It is good to see Republicans admit that oppressing LGBTQ people can turn voters against them. In the comments are a few good cartoons. Rob Rogers posted one of the nasty guy in a landing craft with other troops approaching the coast on D-Day (now 80 years ago). He says, “But Hitler did some good things... Right suckers?” exlrrp posted a meme of the Statue of Liberty taking a golf swing at the head of the nasty guy. And a panel posted by National Now shows Lucy and Charlie Brown and she says, “I think a lot of my anger can be traced to Patriarchy!” In a roundup from nine days ago, Dworkin quoted Dean Baker on X and Threadreader:

I was listening to a focus group sponsored by NPR of people who don't like Biden or Trump. They asked one person who was leaning towards Trump about what she saw happening in a second Trump term. She answered, he would create jobs. Given that we have created jobs at an incredible pace under Biden, this would be like saying that they want to see Trump in because he would nail Osama Bin Laden. What an incredible indictment of the media that people literally have no idea of the basic facts on the economy. And don't tell me this is based on their lived experience. They don't know lots of people who are unemployed. They get this from what they hear, not from what they see.

And in the comments... A cartoon by David Wilson shows the nasty guy speaking at a rally. A guy in a red hat says, “I wonder what his sentence is going to be.” A woman in a blue jacket says, “Me too! I haven’t heard a complete one yet.” A cartoon by Joel Pett shows a car driving past the “Church of our Malignant Christian Nationalism.” The man in the car asks, “Are we obliged to forgive them for knowing not what they do?” In a roundup from a couple days ago by Dworkin he quoted Peter Wehner of The Atlantic talking about political supporters:

But something has changed for me in the Trump era. I struggle more than I once did to wall off a person’s character from their politics when their politics is binding them to an unusually—and I would say undeniably—destructive person. The lies that MAGA world parrots are so manifestly untrue, and the Trump ethic is so manifestly cruel, that they are difficult to set aside. If a person insists, despite the overwhelming evidence, that Trump was the target of an assassination plot hatched by Biden and carried out by the FBI, this is more than an intellectual failure; it is a moral failure, and a serious one at that. It’s only reasonable to conclude that such Trump supporters have not made a good-faith effort to understand what is really and truly happening. They are choosing to live within the lie, to invoke the words of the former Czech dissident and playwright Vaclav Havel. One of the criteria that need to be taken into account in assessing the moral culpability of people is how absurd the lies are that they are espousing; a second is how intentionally they are avoiding evidence that exposes the lies because they are deeply invested in the lie; and a third is is how consequential the lie is.

Lea Page of the New York Times spent six months knocking on the doors of over 8,000 voters from across the political spectrum:

There’s an immediate intimacy in having a conversation on someone’s doorstep. It is, after all, a threshold between public and private, but who would have thought that political canvassing would be so conducive to such unvarnished honesty? Perhaps because of the fracturing of our communities, we encountered an almost universal need to be witnessed and validated, to trust. … It never felt like a loss. We had stood together on porches and broken steps, among pots of petunias and cans of sodden cigarette butts, and we listened. People told stories full of pride and full of pain. Do you see me? they seemed to ask in a hundred different ways. Do you see my beauty? Do you see my struggle? They were asking so little of us. It was easy to say yes.

Last weekend the nasty guy went to a black church in Detroit to convince people he wold be better for black people than Biden. In the comments Rambler797 included a tweet by John Rock:

“Photo shared by Detroit reporter Russ McNamara of the crowd during Trump’s visit to a Black church in the city yesterday. McNamara reported, ‘Of the 8 Black Trump voters I talked to, just one was from Detroit and zero were congregants.’” In no way surprised by this.

That photo is of the people sitting the pews. All the faces that can be seen are white. A cartoon by Barry Deutsch posted on Kos shows a man and a woman saying, “Why can’t trans people just accept their bodies as they are? ‘Gender Affirmation’ is woke crap! Normal people don’t do that!” Around them are words to show what body modifications each has had done. Some for her: shaved legs, liposuction, boob job, makeup, nose job, botox, hair dye, and pierced ears. Some for him: tattoos, chin job, hair transplant, shaved face, and tummy tuck.