You no doubt heard that the bodies of six Israeli hostages were discovered a couple of days ago in Gaza. They had been dead only a few hours. Juan Cole says that “Three of them had been designated as part of a hostage exchange with Hamas that the Hamas leadership had agreed to on August 3,” but Netanyahu had made other demands that soured the deal. “Many Israelis believe that if Netanyahu had accepted the hostage deal in early August, the six who were killed on Saturday would still be alive,” Juan Cole says. So yesterday there were massive demonstrations all over Israel, along with strikes and labor stoppages that continue into today. In brief, Israelis are massively pissed at Netanyahu.

Today Axios reports that “President Biden told reporters on Monday that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu isn’t doing enough to get a Gaza hostage and ceasefire deal.” From what I’ve been reading over the past several weeks Netanyahu really is a bigger holdup to a deal than Hamas. As I understand it, Netanyahu thinks his political fortunes depend on stoking conflicts with Hamas, not on making deals with them.

Axios continues,

The other side: A senior Israeli source said “it is puzzling that president Biden is pressing Prime Minister Netanyahu, who agreed to the U.S. proposal as early as May 31 and to the U.S. bridging proposal on August 16, and not Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, who continues to vehemently refuse any deal.”

I regret I’m not following this closely enough to know who is doing what. So back to Juan Cole:

One of the protesters, a woman, mocked Netanyahu’s attempt to blame Hamas. He had said, “Whoever wants a deal doesn’t kill hostages.” But the demonstrator said he was speaking of himself, not Hammas, and was speaking of his cabinet members who voted, she alleged, to sacrifice the hostages. She underscored that “it was possible to get them back home alive.” She added, “The Israeli government and its leader deliberately sacrificed the hostages, leading to their deaths.” She pointed out that the six hostages had been left there eleven months, and killed only a week ago. The hostage families said they want a deal “now!”

I don’t trust Hamas, either, but as I said what I have been reading over the past few days puts more blame for the failure on Netanyahu than Hamas. Lindsey Graham disagrees and has suggested that the U.S. start bombing oil refineries in Iran if the hostages are not released. Um, maybe not.

This  morning Biden and Vice President Harris met with the national security team about Israel. WaPo, yesterday:

As I’ve said before, I think Netanyahu is trying to drag out negotiations in hopes Trump wins another term. Now that that possibility is looking iffier, maybe he’ll cave. Or not.

Once upon a time there was a very powerful Republican politician who climbed to that power by claiming the government was infested with communists. He issued more smears than anyone could fact check, and people believed him. It got so that even those in his own party dare not criticize him, because those who did became victims of his inquisition. His claims started with the State Department but then spread to other branches. But then one day he made the mistake of taking on the United States Army. And within a few months the Army destroyed him. That was the end of his political career.

I was thinking of Joe McCarthy yesterday when I read that Trump’s campaign manager Chris LaCivita doubled down on dissing the Army. After the Army issued an official rebuke of the Trump campaign and its continued smears of the Arlington staffer they assaulted, LaCivita re-posted the campaign video made at Arlington with the words, “Reposting this hoping to trigger the hacks at @SecArmy.”

Of course, the normal thing for a campaign manager to have done was to issue some bland statement about regretting the misunderstanding or the miscommunication or whatever. I don’t expect the Army to respond to LaCivita. But there are already congressional inquiries.  LaCivita had better be hoping his client wins the bleeping election, because if he doesn’t I expect there to be public hearings on Arlingtongate in the next Congress. And then the Army will destroy him, and his client too. This is not something that can be allowed to stand.

I’m just now learning that shortly after the incident, J.D. Vance actually scolded the media and said, “You’re acting like Donald Trump filmed a TV commercial at a gravesite.” And then Trump posted the campaign video/TV commercial he had made at a gravesite.

He literally posted a video using the footage. pic.twitter.com/H94qjkdRaV

— Dr. Temper Tantrum, PVT (@DrTemperTantrum) August 28, 2024

The other relic of the 1950s that came to mind this week was the song “Oh Sinner Man,” which was first recorded in 1956. You might remember that the song describes some poor damned soul who could find no refuge on Judgment Day. This week Donald Trump may have begun to learn there is no safe place to stand on the abortion issue. He keeps trying to find some sweet spot, some middle ground, that will get the issue off his back. But ain’t no such place.  There is no position that will keep the anti-abortion zealots happy that won’t also cost him support among nearly everybody else. Again, anyone familiar with the issue could have told him that.

I doubt Trump cares one way or another about the abortion issue. I doubt he has paid close attention to all the ways other politicians have tried to finesse the issue over the years. He seems to have believed that being the guy who finally killed Roe v. Wade would earn him everlasting campaign victory.

And then when the inevitable and long-predicted backlash began, he fell back on saying that abortion should be left to the states. That was the forced-birth movement’s disingenuous favorite talking point for years; let the states decide. It shouldn’t be a federal matter. Anyone who had watched them closely over the years knew that “back to the states” was just a first step, and that they would not rest until abortion was criminalized nationwide. But they wouldn’t admit that until the Dobbs decision really did “let the states decide.” Now, of course, all the anti-abortion organizations are calling for a nationwide ban. This was utterly and obviously predictable.

But it wasn’t predicted by Trump.

He’s using all his magic powers to make abortion go away. By early August he was declaring that abortions are “not a big factor” in elections any more, so we don’t have to talk about it. Nice try.

Over the past few days he’s been like the guy in the “Sinner Man” song, running to one place after another to escape the Judgment. Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan wrote in the New York Times how Trump Contorts Himself on Abortion in Search of Political Gain. I think it’s more like he’s trying to find the position that will do the least damage.

For example, several of his surrogates lately have declared that Trump would never sign a federal abortion ban. Now the wrath of the anti-abortion zealots is upon him to reverse that. A couple of days ago he vagely signaled he might vote yes on Florida’s abortion access referendum, because a ban after six weeks was too short. After hellfire rained down on him for a couple of days he appeared to have changed his mind. And he brilliantly promised free IVF for everybody! I’m not sure he understands why the anti-aborts are down on IVF.

See also Trump’s Latest Move to Avoid Abortion Is His Strangest One Yet by Michael Schaffer at Politico. This one features a conflict between abortion access in the District of Columbia and Trump’s promise to take over running the District himself. “We will take over the horribly run capital of our nation,” Trump himself said at a Florida rally this summer. “We’re going to take it away from the mayor. And again, that doesn’t make me popular there, but I have to say it.” You might remember that Trump’s beef with D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser goes back to the Black Lives Matter protests, if not before.

The District also has very liberal abortion laws. It’s one of the few places with no gestational limits. And the Fetus People want Trump to change that. But recently Trump has decided that abortion is the one thing that the District can decide for itself. Politico:

“Democrats want to gaslight Americans and sow fear, but President Trump has long been consistent in supporting the rights of states, and the District of Columbia, to make decisions on abortion,” Trump campaign national press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement.

The “and the District of Columbia” part of that sentence marks a jaw-dropping departure from decades of GOP orthodoxy.

In Congress, GOP majorities have intervened to stop the locals from voting to legalize marijuana, administer a needle-exchange program, allow noncitizens to vote in city elections, update the municipal criminal code, and use hometown tax dollars to pay for low-income abortion care. The Project 2025 blueprint calls for prohibiting D.C.’s public schools from teaching critical race theory. There are ongoing Congressional efforts to do away with physician-assisted suicide and permit concealed carry in the city.

And, finally, see Cleanup on Aisle MAGA: Trump Bends to Conservative Abortion Critics by Marc A. Caputo and Andrew Egger at The Bulwark.

In other news:  See Trump Wants to Hide His Attempt to Assassinate Mike Pence from Voters by Marcy Wheeler.

Wow, the Arlington story has actual legs. It’s blowing up in Trump’s fat orange face. And the more details come out, the worse it gets. It’s so bad for Trump that Elon Musk’s X has tagged news about the incident as “unsafe” to discourage people from reading about it.

First off, there’s no question that Trump was there for a campaign event and to make a campaign video, which was posted on Trump’s vanity social media site. You really must watch Chris Hayes on this point.

WaPo has the backstory about how all this happened.

Earlier this month, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s campaign contacted military officials about visiting Arlington National Cemetery to mark the third anniversary of the Islamic State bombing that killed 13 U.S. service members during the evacuation from Afghanistan.

Federal law prohibits election-related activities at military cemeteries, and Arlington is the most prestigious and sacred of all. Pentagon officials were deeply concerned about the former president turning the visit into a campaign stop, but they also didn’t want to block him from coming, according to Defense Department officials and internal messages reviewed by The Washington Post.

I just saw this —

A federal grand jury in Washington, D.C., has reindicted Donald Trump on four felony charges related to his effort to subvert the 2020 presidential election.

The 36-page indictment, secured Tuesday by special counsel Jack Smith, is an attempt by prosecutors to recalibrate the case against Trump in light of the Supreme Court’s ruling last month that concluded presidents enjoy sweeping immunity from prosecution for their official conduct.

The new indictment removes some specific allegations against Trump but contains the same four criminal charges, including conspiracy to defraud the United States. It’s a signal that Smith believes the high court’s immunity decision doesn’t pose a major impediment to convicting the former president.

Jack Smith has been busy. Yesterday he filed an appeal to overturn Loose Cannon’s decision to dismiss the documents case. Here is Joyce Vance’s commentary. It’s expected the 11th Circuit will agree with Smith, but what happens after that isn’t clear. It might go to the Supreme Court. Smith didn’t ask that Cannon be removed from the case, but I understand the 11th Circuit could reassign the case. Note also that Smith didn’t ask for the case to be expedited. So nothing significant is likely to happen until after the election, and possibly not until next year. If Trump loses, perhaps SOTUS won’t try to protect him.

In other news: I’m seeing news stories that Trump is back to agreeing to the September 10 debate, on the same terms as the last debate. I haven’t heard that the Harris campaign has agreed.

Stuff to read: Greg Palast has a post headlined I was on the phone with RFK Jr.
When he lost his mind. Palast has known RFK the Lesser for many years. Years ago they wrote articles together. What Palast describes sounds like the brain worm really did scramble Lesser’s cognitive abiblities.

At the Atlantic, see Trump’s Evangelical Supporters Just Lost Their Best Excuse by Peter Wehner. Wehner explains that Trump has twisted himself into a pretzel trying to back away from abortion restrictions. And that was the primary issue keeping him tied to the evangelicals.

One more. Josh Marshall asks, Donald’s Fallen Down. So Why Can’t He Get Up?

First, some humor:

This is the headlline to an actual op ed by Rich Lowry, the editor in chief of National Review. I don’t know what’s going on at National Review, but I skimmed enough of this thing to be able to assure you it’s not a joke. But I’m not going to waste one of my few remaining “gift article” links for the month on it.

There’s another piece at the New York Times that’s actually useful to read: Republican Donors: Do You Know Where Your Money Goes? This one’s a gift article. The author, Juleanna Glover, is some sort of big deal corporate consultant who has worked for past Republican administrations, although not Trump’s.

Anyone who has spent time reviewing Donald Trump’s campaign spending reports would quickly conclude they’re a governance nightmare. There is so little disclosure about what happened to the billions raised in 2020 and 2024 that donors (and maybe even the former president himself) can’t possibly know how it was spent.

Federal Election Commission campaign disclosure reports from 2020 show that much of the money donated to the Trump campaign went into a legal and financial black hole reportedly controlled by Trump family members and close associates. This year’s campaign disclosures are shaping up to be the same. Donors big and small give their hard-earned dollars to candidates with the expectation they will be spent on direct efforts to win votes. They deserve better.

During the 2020 election, almost $516 million of the over $780 million spent by the Trump campaign was directed to American Made Media Consultants, a Delaware-based private company created in 2018 that masked the identities of who ultimately received donor dollars, according to a complaint filed with the F.E.C. by the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center. How A.M.M.C. spent the money was a mystery even to Mr. Trump’s campaign team, according to news reports shortly after the election.

Apparently nobody can tell if any laws were broken, because there aren’t enough details. Lara Trump was AMMC’s first president. Jared Kushner was also involved with it somehow.

This election, the Trump campaign and four of its PACs have paid Red Curve Solutions, another private company, at least $18 million. The Campaign Legal Center says Red Curve appears to pay Mr. Trump’s legal bills and then gets reimbursed by the PACs. (The law is murky on what types of legal bills can be paid by campaigns, but some are allowed.) The head of Red Curve also serves as the treasurer for the Trump campaign as well as the affiliated PACs.

What percentage of donor contributions go to lawyers defending Mr. Trump? It’s impossible to know.

Interesting articles I’ve seen over the past few hours —

I recommend this piece by Greg Sargent at The New Republic. He makes an important point. Here’s just a bit:

In her rousing convention speech on Thursday, Harris offered many olive branches to right-leaning independents and Republican voters. She vowed toughness on immigration and crime. She promised to transcend the nation’s divisions. She vowed to govern for all Americans and transcend faction or party. She made numerous appeals to voters with decidedly right-leaning values.

But, in mulling what Harris means by all this, it’s crucial to appreciate what she did not do. Harris offered all this outreach to voters outside the core Democratic coalition without making serious concessions to the ideological preoccupations we associate with MAGA-style right-wing populism. There was no real accommodation with what might be called The World According to MAGA.

Instead, Harris treated Trumpism and the MAGA movement as forces that must be decisively repudiated—and unequivocally left behind.

The crew at the right-wing National Review were never in the tank for Trump, and now that they smell defeat they are to point to it. The original article is behind a paywall, but Raw Story provides some quotes:

This next article makes an interesting comparison between the two party conventions. The DNC’s stagecraft, signs, posters, chants, etc. were mostly all about America. The RNC’s were just about Trump. Audience signs and chants at the DNC were all about America. At the RNC, it was the Trump show.

And here’s one that says Trump’s “event” at the southern border this weekend featured a setion of wall that was built durng the Obama administration.

MONTEZUMA PASS, Ariz. — A brown ribbon carved a straight gash across a vast, flat desert basin, the only mark of human civilization visible on this wilderness. The partition charged up a steep hill in Montezuma Canyon, then suddenly stopped. Extra pieces lay in piles nearby, rusting monuments to an unfinished campaign promise.

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump came here on Thursday to heap praise on the structure standing to his right — “the Rolls-Royce of walls,” he called it — and lament the unused segments lying to his left. Joining him there, Border Patrol union leader Paul A. Perez called the standing fence “Trump wall” and the idle parts “Kamala wall,” after his Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris.

Those labels were inaccurate. This section of 20-foot steel slats was actually built during the administration of President Barack Obama. Trump added the unfinished extension up the hillside, an engineering challenge that cost at least $35 million a mile. The unused panels of 30-foot beams were procured during the Trump administration and never erected

I understand chunks of Trump’s wall are not holding up well, so it’s understandable he chose a section that still looks nice.

We now know that each of the four nights of the Democratic convention had significantly higher ratings that the four nights of the Republican convention. As I keep saying, the days in which putting Trump on television is a guaranteed ratings boost are long over.

(Update: Right after I posted this, NBC reported thet RFK the Lesser is dropping out and endorsing Trump. This is not a surprise, and I doubt it will make much difference, but we’ll see.)

(Update: “Special Counsel Jack Smith has decided against seeking a major hearing to present evidence in the election-interference case against Donald Trump before voters go to the polls Nov. 5, according to people familiar with the matter,” it says here.)

Wowzers. I don’t think the DNC convention could have gone any better than it did. If Harris-Walz don’t get a bounce from that, the laws of physics must be suspended. As of this morning it’s still a toss-up race, though. Let’s give it three or four days.

I’m also waiting to see the television ratings for last night compared to the last night of the RNC. For the first three nights the DNC’s television rating blew the RNC’s out of the water. And for those who did tune in to see Trump’s acceptance speech, I believe the most charitable review I read of it was that it was an “unhinged mess.”

The convention has been criticized for not inviting a pro-Palestinian speaker on the stage. I heard somewhere that there were concerns a pro-Palestinian speaker might say something that would muck up the cease-fire talks. Although the cease-fire talks aren’t going anywhere, that I can tell, at the moment.

I suppose you’ve heard the unconfirmed story that Trump called Netanyahu to ask him to not make any deals before the election. Both Trump and Netanyahu deny it happened, which of course has no bearing on whether it did or not. I’d be more surprised if it didn’t happen than if it did. It sounds like something Trump would do. But if it gets closer to November and Trump is losing, Bibi might want to think about making a deal while Joe Biden is still president.

There is also some grumbling in right-wing commentary that Harris didn’t provide enough details about her plans. (Like Trump ever provided details?) Obviously Harris was avoiding a wonky policy speech. And one right-wing blogger complained that Harris actually spent part of her acceptance speech talking about her personal background. From the transcript, it appears Trump spent at least a third of his nearly endless acceptance speech talking about being (maybe) grazed in the ear.

So, roughly, we’ve got two months and a couple of weeks until the election. Besides the great convention, one of the most hopeful signs, to me, is that Trump seems to be utterly melting down. He doesn’t know how to just take a deep breath and rethink his strategy. Now he’s on defense, and he’s being reactive instead of proactive. During Harris’s speech he was furiously posting in ALL CAPS on Truth Social in howling rage. He called in to Fox News, so agitated that he was punching numbers on the phone while talking. And Fox News had to cut him off. So then he called Newsmax, which apparently let him continue as long as he wanted.

Trump is calling into Fox, lying, saying Harris is “going to give a tax increase of 4 to 5 times what people and companies are paying right now,” and he seems to be accidentally pressing buttons on his phone while he speaks pic.twitter.com/5Wb4qSZ3C5

— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) August 23, 2024

At WaPo, Ban Balz writes that Kamala Harris has put Trump in a box, and he’s struggling to break out.

In other Trump news, see Trump’s businesses are raking in millions of dollars from Republican political campaigns – including his own at CNN.

Consider this an open thread to comment on whatever. I am hoping to not fall asleep before the acceptance speech.

I’m reading that the DNC convention is getter much higher ratings than the RNC did. That’s a good sign. Meanwhile, Trump is bounding around the country trying to get attention. After his extremely weird “law and order” even in Howell, Michigan (see last post), he was supposed to sit for an interview with the Detroit News. But he bailed when reporters started asking tough questions. This is from The New Republic:

As Donald Trump returned to Michigan to speak about crime, he deliberately ignored the truth: Crime is down. 

Standing under a banner that read “Make America Safe Again” on Tuesday, Trump spoke about law and order and a so-called “Kamala crime wave” occurring at levels “nobody has ever seen before.” But when journalists tried to ask him about that claim, he got scared.

According to The Detroit News, the Trump team had originally agreed to sit down for an interview with their newspaper Tuesday. However, after reporters pushed the former president about spreading lies about Michigan’s crime data, “a campaign aide said the presidential candidate no longer had time for an interview after the speech.”

Data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation doesn’t show any crime wave phenomenon. In the two years since the former president left office, violent crime has continued to drop and return to pre-pandemic levels.

Poor baby. Today he was at the southern border doing something. I’m sure Fox News covered it.

More later.

I didn’t watch any of the RNC Convention, so I can’t personally do a compare and contrast. But I snagged a couple of Associated Press photos, one of the RNC and one of the DNC. I won’t have to tell you which is which.

So which group looks like they’re winning?

I’ve been struck by how genuinely multiracial the Democratic Party has become. The  nonwhites at the RNC clearly were there for display purposes only.

My only problem with the DNC convention is that I’m old and in the eastern time zone. I just can’t stay awake for anything that happens after 10 pm EST or so. Last night I saw Michelle Obama being introduced, and the next thing I remember somebody — I think it was Jen Psaki — was giving a roundup of the night’s events. I slept through the Obama speeches, in other words. I’m making a point of finding the videos and watching them later today.

The roll call was a hoot, although a tad overstimulating for me. And that business with holding a simultaneous big rally in Milwaukee was inspired. The DNC has come a long way from the 2004 DNC Convention when the balloons didn’t drop. 

MSNBC is mostly just showing the convention with very little commentary, I notice. Their lineup is on hand but might as well have stayed home. Someone on social media was saying PBS was cutting a lot of stuff out.

Meanwhile, here’s just a little snip of Trump’s inspired “counterprogramming” event from Howell, Michigan, last night.

“You’ve seen it. I’ve seen it” Trump says about seeing people “walk across the street to get a loaf of bread and get shot, you get mugged, you get raped.” pic.twitter.com/j8L1IWWMci

— Sarah Burris ? (@SarahBurris) August 20, 2024

So has anyone run across the street for bread and milk lately? I hope you made it back okay. (And whose bright idea was this, I wonder?)

The much-dreaded protests have fizzled. The organizers were promsing 50,000 or more. Police estimated 3,500 protesters on Monday. Dana Milbank’s column on the protesters is worth reading. From his descriptiton those who did show up were what I’ve called the “vocational protesters” who show up at any leftie demonstration with giant puppets and megaphones to make spectacles of themselves. And, as usual, what few people were there quickly splintered into factions marhing off in different directions. Jill Stein was among them. She seems to be turning into the new Lyndon LaRouche.

So far, so good.