The latest updates:

There are indications that Kamala Harris is getting some decent post-debate bounce. It’s still closer than it would be in a sane world.

J.D. Vance explained Trump’s concept of a plan for health care. Per Jonathan Chait:

Vance explained the Trump plan during an interview with NBC’s Kristen Welker: “He, of course, does have a plan for how to fix American health care, but a lot of it goes down, Kristen, to deregulating insurance markets, so that people can actually choose a plan that makes sense for them.”

Vance is advocating a partial or complete return to the system that existed before Obamacare. In that world, prior to 2014, it was very difficult to find affordable coverage unless you were on Medicare, Medicaid, or got insurance through your employer. There was a market for individual insurance, and it was possible to buy plans if you didn’t get coverage through a government plan or through work. But that market was dominated by “adverse selection” — the only way insurers could make money was to weed out any customers likely to need medical care.

Was Vance asleep from 2008 to 2010 when the details of the Affordable Care Act were being fought over? And back when millions of people couldn’t get health insurance at any price? Unreal.

There have been 33 separate bomb threats made against schools in Springfield, said Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine. Several of them came from “overseas,” from one country in particular, but DeWine would not say which country. No actual bombs were found, but of course they have to be taken seriously nonetheless.

Nativist hysteria is hardly new to the U.S., of course. There was another incident when false rumors about immigrants set off several days of rioting, resulting in about 20 deaths and two churches and a seminary burned. The year was 1844, the city was Philadelphia, and the immigrants were Irish.

It turns out that Trump’s Arlington Cemetery incident is being investigated, but not by the Army.

Law enforcement officials at a Virginia military base are still actively investigating an August incident at Arlington National Cemetery involving what has been described as a confrontation between former President Donald Trump’s campaign and a cemetery worker, even as the Army says it considers the matter closed, according to multiple sources familiar with the matter.

As part of the probe led by the Joint Base Myer-Henderson Hall Police Department, an investigator with the base’s police department has sought in recent days to contact Trump campaign officials about the incident, the sources said.

Investigators are seeking to interview the officials involved in the incident, according to the sources.

Pro Publica reports that Judge Aileen Cannon Failed to Disclose a Right-Wing Junket. And that wasn’t the first time.

Today Republicans in the Senate again blocked a bill that would have protected IVF.

They’re more afraid of the Fetus people than they are of being consistent.

Late last week several hard-right websites were promising that a WHISTLEBLOWER was about to come forward and explain how ABC rigged the debate for Harris, allegedly by giving her the questions in advance. But then yesterday Marjorie Taylor Greene x’ed that this whistleblower was killed in a car crash. So disappointing. Never fear, though; Jim Hoft at Gateway Pundit is calling the car crash report a HOAX. This whistleblower will appear! Any minute now! Just you wait! And you can read more about it at the Gateway Pundit site, to which I do not link, if you want to.

And if he doesn’t appear, I’m willing to bet the car crash will be blamed on a Haitian migrant.

In other news — you probably heard about the guy who appears to have planned to shoot Trump while the former president was playing golf at his West Palm Beach golf club. By all reports so far this guy was a “lone wolf” gunman, not part of any organization. He just doesn’t like Trump. Trump, of course, is blaming Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

Elon Musk also showed the world who he is:

Following a second assassination attempt on Donald Trump Sunday, Musk issued an alarming tweet questioning why the MAGA conservative had been targeted several times while there had been no such attempt to attack Vice President Kamala Harris.

“And no one is even trying to assassinate Biden/Kamala,” Musk wrote.

Musk deleted the tweet after it received widespread backlash, with X users torching him for “inciting violence.”

By Monday, Musk had issued a couple of new tweets to explain away the atrocious comment. Apparently, he considered the violent invitation just a bad retelling of a “hilarious” joke.

I would think he has lawyers on retainer who would have told him to take the tweet down. The word “moron” does come to mind.

An hour after trying to brush off his own poor remarks, Musk shared a video that claimed to depict Democrats “calling for” political violence, including snippets of Nancy Pelosi referring to the 2020 fake electors as “enemies of the state” for undermining the last presidential election, as well as a clip of actor Robert de Niro sharing that he’d like to punch Trump “in the face.”

On a serious note, ProPublica is reporting that at least two women in Georgia have died because they were unable to get abortions that could have saved them.

I’m learning from TPM that two hospitals in Springfield, Ohio, were locked down after receiving bomb threats. We’ll be very if lucky nobody is killed because of this nativist nonsense. Trump, of course, is refusing to denounce the bomb threats.

Here’s a recent story from the New York Times that should have gotten more attention. See How Roberts Shaped Trump’s Supreme Court Winning Streak by Jodi Kantor and Adam Liptak (no paywall). The Times obtained a leaked memo by Roberts in which he insisted the Court rule on the presidential immunity case and suggested strongly that the lower courts were all wrong in their understanding of separation of powers. Robert also was much much behind the Court’s opinions related to J6 insurrectionists and whether states can unilaterally drop a federal candidate from the ballot.

Here are a couple of photos of Trump and Laura Loomer that I understand were taken this week.

I pulled these from a Times of India article. Executive summary: Wink, nudge.

Marcy Wheeler writes that the Laura Loomer problem is the same as the Vladimir Putin problem.  Which is, basically, that Trump is so addled and so emotionally needy that he’s easier to manipulate than silly putty. It’s said people within Trump World are worried that Loomer has way too much influence over Trump at the moment. And that’s as much as I want to know.

The hysteria over Springfield, Ohio, continues. Schools and city administrative offices have had to be evacuated because of bomb threats. The mayor of springfield and governor of Ohio have both said there is no pet-eating going on. By all local accounts the Haitian community of Springfield has contributed a great deal. John Legend, a native of Springfield, issued this video:

Meanwhile, Donald Jr. said this:

Donald Trump Jr. suggested on Thursday that Haitian immigrants were less intelligent than people from other countries, and claimed that there was demographic evidence to back this up. He provided none.

“You look at Haiti, you look at the demographic makeup, you look at the average I.Q. — if you import the third world into your country, you’re going to become the third world,” Mr. Trump said in an interview with Charlie Kirk on Real America’s Voice, a conservative broadcasting network. “That’s just basic. It’s not racist. It’s just fact.”

I wonder how people in Ohio, not just Springfield, are dealing with this. We’re going to be lucky if no one is killed.

Reports at TPM and the Guardian say that the Haitians of Springfield were initially target by a Neo-Nazi group called Blood Tribe. J.D. Vance picked up the pet consumption rumors from the Nazis, and from there it spread to the Trump campaign. Let’s hope there’s a backlash.

Russell Moore, editor in chief of Christianity Today, tries to remind people that spreading false witness against anybody is sorta kinda not what Jesus would do. Moore, bless his heart, is a man who takes Christianity seriously. He must be very lonely.

We’ve got more than 50 more days of this? Help …

Let’s be careful out there …

The political world is still processing Tuesday night’s debate. I understand the Harris campaign is putting out television ads featuring debate highlights. And not everyone on the Right is closing ranks around Trump. Some long-time GOP operatives — Frank Luntz and Karl Rove, for example — gave frankly accurate assessments that Trump got owned. Not that many people listen to Karl Rove any more.

My sense of things is that the effects of Tuesday night are still in play. Although Trump’s obviously impaired mental state still is not being as openly discussed as it ought to be, it is being discussed even in mainstream media outlets. I predict from here on Trump’s verbal disconnects from reality will not be so utterly “sanewashed” except in right-wing media. His mental state will finally become part of the narrative. No more ignoring the obvious out of some misguided sense of “fairness.” Let’s hope, anyway.

See also Philip Bump at WaPo, Donald Trump no longer knows how to talk to anyone outside his base. He’s so insulated and isolated inside his own MAGA-world he can’t function outside of it.

Programming note: The debate between Walz and Vance will be Tuesday, October 1. Given that it’s unlikely Trump would be able to fake his way through another presidential term, people who are still undecided really need to take a closer look at Vance.

One related story I haven’t been watching as much as I should have involves House Republicans. Nicole Lafond, Talking Points Memo:

Donald Trump and Speaker of the House Mike Johnson are very proud of their plan to link a must-pass piece of government funding legislation to a bill that lays the groundwork for Trump to blame undocumented immigrants for his potential defeat in November. The only problem, we’re now learning, is that no one of any influence is on board with this plan besides the two of them.

Johnson hatched the plan at the beginning of the month, caving to pressure from members of the House Freedom Caucus (the Trumpy tail wagging House-Republican-conference dog) to attach the SAVE Act to any funding bills the House passes to keep the government open. The Act would outlaw non-citizen voting in federal elections, which is already illegal and statistically rarely happens, and require proof of citizenship in order to register to vote; experts say it is both unnecessary and would suppress the vote. For this reason, the bill could not pass the Democratic-controlled Senate, and so would risk a government shutdown.

The bill isn’t completely dead in the House, but Johnson apparently doesn’t have the votes. I take it one big impediment is that there are House Republicans with enough sense to realize they don’t want a government shutdown right before the election, which would be blamed on them, which is what would happen if a spending bill isn’t passed. They aren’t all taking orders from Trump, apparently.

And then after Trump absurdly called himself “the leader on fertilization,” in reference to IVF, Chuck Schumer is cornering Senate Republicans by introducing an IVF protection bill very similar to one they’ve already rejected. Repubicans can’t support IVF without angering the Fetus People, you know.

See also:

And we’ve had a request for the dancing banana …

I had a lot of fun this morning cruising around the Web and reading the reviews. Even right-wing sites admitted it was not a good night for Trump, although most blamed the moderators for being biased. (At least one also blamed Laura Loomer.) I’m sure most folks who didn’t watch are hearing that Trump bombed.

And then there’s this. I didn’t know Drudge was still online, but I guess he is.

CNN supports ABC:

CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale appeared on TV screens soon after the Trump-Harris debate ended Tuesday night to give his preliminary verdict—and declared that Donald Trump had lied at least 33 times during the 90-minute face-off.

“This was a staggeringly dishonest debate performance from former President Trump,” Dale told host Jake Tapper. “Just lie after lie on subject after subject. By my preliminary count, Jake, Trump made at least 33 false claims. Thirty-three!

“By contrast, by—again—a preliminary count, Vice President Harris made at least one false claim, though she added at least a few misleading claims and a few more that lacked key context.”

Dale, who has been fact-checking Trump for years, explained that the former president’s firehose of untruths was totally unprecedented in American political history.

“I think a lot of Americans say, ‘Well, all politicians lie,’” he said. “No major presidential candidate before Donald Trump has ever lied with this kind of frequency. A remarkably large chunk of what he said tonight was just not true.”

There’s a big difference between putting a spin on data by leaving out some context, which all politicians do, and quite another to say things happened that didn’t happen, like aliens eating people’s pets in Springfield, Ohio. The claim about some states allowing an infanticide option for mothers who don’t want their babies was never true, either, even though Fetus People have been claiming that for years. (I understand it originated from the common medical practice of giving only palliative care to newborns with such severe birth defects they have absolutely no hope of survival for more than a few hours, a concept the Fetus People can’t seem to grasp.)

Trump’s other mistake is that he’s been telling his followers for weeks now that Kamala Harris isn’t very bright and wasn’t giving interviews because she can’t speak well in public. It must have been disorienting to watch this allegedly dimwitted woman mopping the floor with God Emperor Trump. But Kamala Harris probably is used to being underestimated.

Along those lines, see Jonathan Last at The Bulwark, What More Do You People Want from Kamala Harris?

Harris delivered the goods. You never know if a politician can play on the national stage until they do it. Sometimes a promising candidate pops. Sometimes they’re Ron DeSantis.

At every turn over the last seven weeks, Harris popped. From her first speech at the campaign HQ in Delaware, to the first big rally, to her convention speech, to the debate—she answered the bell every time.

She is not coasting. She is not simply existing as a non-octogenarian alternative to Trump. She is waging a smart, vigorous campaign and executing at a high level.

Even this morning I’m still seeing interviews with undecided voters who complain they don’t know where Harris stands on issues. This is something that’s been driving me bats for decades now. Ultimately it doesn’t matter how much information about  candidates’ stands on issues is readily available (see Harris’s issues page on her campaign website, for example). There will be some who will persistently refuse to understand how a candidate they don’t want to vote for stands on issues. Just ignore these people, I say.

Jonathan Last also said this:

Some conservatives seem to think that news networks exist to serve the interests of their preferred candidates. That is a misunderstanding.

A journalistic institution exists to serve its audience by giving them the clearest possible understanding of reality.1 The first duty of a journalistic institution is not to be “fair” to the politicians it covers. It is to make certain that its audience is presented an accurate view of reality.

The footnote says, “An institution which places consideration for politicians above the interests of its audience practices something other than journalism.”

Even so, Trump was allowed to talk a lot more than Harris.

KAMALA HARRIS
Spoke for: 37.1 minutes
Amount of times she spoke: 23
DONALD TRUMP
Spoke for: 41.9 minutes
Amount of times he spoke: 39

— Stephanie Ruhle (@SRuhle) September 11, 2024

So who’s unfair? Anyway, there are so many good analyses of How Trump Screwed the Pooch Last Night to even begin to link to them all. Do see Steve M and David Kurtz for starts, though.

(I plan to watch and post comments through the debate, although I planned to do that last time and flaked out. Wish everybody luck. I am making no predictions. Consider this an open thread to talk about whatever.)

I’m here. Fingers crossed. Here we go.

Did she just bait him to bring up tariffs?

It’s painful to me to hear him talk. But I think she’s pretty good so far.

I had to mute Trump. I’m just watching Harris’s face now.

I’m still muting Donald Trump. He looks like he’s getting worked up, though.

OMG, she’s saying people leave his rallies early. He can’t stand that.

They’re eating the dogs!

She’s laughing at him.

He’s going to have sparks flying out of his head in a minute.

She’s definitely got him rattled. Whether low-information voters can tell when he’s lying I cannot say.

She’s on offense; he’s on defense.

Well,  she seems to be doing well to me.

Um, isn’t this thing about over? It was suppossed to be 90 minutes.

Josh Marshall:

 In any war, in any sport, you maintain the initiative and you’re on the road to victory. Harris has controlled the entire debate. She’s effectively baited him in a way no other candidate has ever been able to do. It’s not like she’s going to rocket into some big lead. People aren’t going to abandon Trump. But she needed to show she can dominate him, be the one in control. She has. It’s as simple as that. She’s also gotten him to spend most of the debate showing his most feral and angry self. This debate was a rout. I don’t think there’s any other way to put it.

Just on a presentation note, it struck me that Trump, with his inch-deep greasepaint on his face, looked “blacker” than Harris.

Okay, I feel better now. I think Harris did what she set out to do. She completely controlled the debate. He looked weak and angry and afraid. I wonder how many people watched?

In Axios, Generals come to Harris’ defense on Afghanistan. A bit:

“Without involving the Afghan government, [Trump] and his Administration negotiated a deal with the Taliban that freed 5,000 Taliban fighters,” the retired military officials wrote in a National Security Leaders for America letter first obtained by Axios.

The group accused Trump of leaving Biden and Harris with no plans to execute a withdrawal and little time to do so.

“This chaotic approach severely hindered the Biden-Harris Administration’s ability to execute the most orderly withdrawal possible and put our service members and our allies at risk,” they wrote.

Trump “continually disrespects those who serve in uniform, including wounded warriors, prisoners of war, and those who have made the ultimate sacrifice,” they added.

Will Bunch, Trump’s real Project 2025 was written for him in Moscow by Vladimir Putin’s men. The recently revealed payments from Moscow to right-wing influencers was just the tip of the iceberg.

Heather Cox Richardson’s latest on Trump’s continued deterioration is a must read.

See also today’s Morning Memo at TPM. Trump has been laying the ground work for “stop the steal” 2.0, already claiming cheating and “skullduggery” will cost him a victory. And he’s promising to punish the “cheaters.” He’s putting more effort into preparing for another coup attempt than he is in get out the vote preparation.

If I run into anything else juicy I’ll add it here.

Update — here’s another one, Is the Press “Sanewashing” Trump by Jon Allsop in the Columbia Journalism Review.

Update: James Earl Jones, 1931-2024

Barring some unforeseen disaster the next big event will be the Tuesday night debate. And, just in time, we have a new term for how media have been covering Trump — sanewashing. See How the Media Sanitizes Trump’s Insanity by Parker Molloy at The New Republic. But John Stoehr writes at The Editorial Board that we’ve gone beyond sanewashing. The press corps is Trump’s assisted living program, he says. 

Trump is 100 percent responsible for doing the work of saying what he’s trying to say. But like some of my 18-year-old students long ago, he’s unwilling or unable to do it. He even expects the grown-ups in the room to do it for him. And so far, in his very long life in the public eye, political reporters have been happy to oblige him.

This is worth reading, btw. See also some wonderful snark by Alexandra Petri at The Washington Post. Surely the Washington Press Corps is aware of the criticism.

For something a little more meaty, see The far right actually hates America: Its dark ideology has foreign roots by Mike Lofgren at Salon. Lofgren pulls together what might be called the philosophical roots of MAGA and the “unitary executive” theory and the rest of the authoritarian ideology being pushed by the Right. You won’t be surprised to learn that a lot of the intellectuals who are revered by educated righties — Ludwig von Mises and Leo Strauss, for example —  have ties to fascism.

But there are old domestic roots to our domestic wingnuttery. I looked up Richard Hofstader’s classic essay from the mid 1950s, The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt. The country is in a very different place now than it was then, but in a lot of ways today’s MAGAs are the old pseudo-conservatives, alienated from the current social order and bristling with fear and grievance. One of my favorite quotes:

The pseudo-conservative, writes, shows “conventionality and authoritarian submissiveness” in his conscious thinking and “violence, anarchic impulses, and chaotic destructiveness in the unconscious sphere. . . . The pseudo conservative is a man who, in the name of upholding traditional American values and institutions and defending them against more or less fictitious dangers, consciously or unconsciously aims at their abolition.”

Regarding the new Russian influence-peddling scandal, see A MAGA meltdown by Jay Kuo. This tells the whole story of the company that was funneling Russian money to right-wing influencers to spread Russian propaganda. Very informative. And here’s more about it from Heather Cox Richardson.

Useless as ever, former President George W. Bush has announced he won’t be endorsing anybody in the election.

Judge Juan Merchan has decided to postpone sentencing in the Trump “hush money” case until after the election. This was done to allow time for a potential appeal of an expected immunity ruling. The news story at the link explains this as well as I can. The new sentencing date is November 26.

The last post inspired some comments on bias in media, and I wrote a long comment about that, but I might as well elaborate here. But first see Heather Digby Parton at Salon, Donald Trump’s incoherence makes the media’s double standard hard to hide.

See also Lawrence O’Donnell on Trump’s speech to the New York Economic Club.

I have read news stories about this speech — see this one from The Hill — that somehow creatively interpreted Trump’s gibberish to make it sound something like economic proposals. The Hill article is not uncritical of what Trump was made out to have said. But it didn’t accurately express how demented Trump sounded. Reporting from Fox News was even worse, of course.

The child care plan has been all over social media today, at least. Alternet has a transcription of Trump’s response to the (actually intelligent) question about affordable child care. And Trump’s answer is pure, straight-up dementia. This is not some clever bit of gaslighting or saying something without saying anything specific. It’s just gibberish. If you use your imagination you might cobble together that he thinks his tariff plan will raise enough revenue to subsidize child care and a lot of other things, but that’s crazy in and of itself. Trump has no idea how tariffs work. He seems to think that if he puts a tariff on goods from China, then the government of China has to pay it. It’s, like, free money in his mind. But of course, the tariff is paid by the importing company, and the cost of the tariff is added to the price the U.S. consumer has to pay. And this cranks up inflation and is a drag on the economy generally. I am sure that at some point someone tried to explain this to him, but it went over his head.

Regarding child care, J.D. Vance isn’t much better. He was asked about reducing the cost of day care, and his answer was an insult to working mothers everywhere.

“One of the things that we can do, is make it easier for families to choose whatever model they want,” the Ohio senator said. “One of the ways that you might be able to relieve a little bit of the pressure on people is… maybe grandma or grandpa wants to help out a little bit more. Or maybe there’s an aunt or uncle that wants to help out a little bit more.”

“If that happens, you relieve some of the pressure on all the resources that we’re spending on day care,” he said.

Families are perfectly free now to choose whatever “model” they want from the “models” available to them. Turning to grandparents or other retired relatives who live nearby and are willing to become full-time babysitters is probably always the first choice. And there are no impediments whatsoever to making that choice if it’s an option. Vance seems to think this is some blazingly original idea that hadn’t occurred to anybody. The truth is most families just don’t have that option.

Anyway, back to Trump’s dementia — I’m sure a lot of us are hoping the full extent of Trump’s mental decline becomes apparent in Tuesday’s debate. Of course, I was hoping the same thing before the last debate. But if he ever does become visibly addled on live television, media can’t cover for him any more. And then maybe a “Trump’s dementia” narrative finally will take hold in media.

Oh, and this happened today.

In other news. In 2006 there was a shooting in an Amish school in Pennsylvania that took the lives of five children. And now it’s taken a sixth. Rosanna King was six years old when she was shot and was an invalid for the rest of her life. She could recognize family members and smile, but she could not talk, walk, or feed herself. She died recently of complications caused by her old injuries.

I wasn’t terribly surprised to hear that the father of the recent Georgia school shooting was arrested. He and the son appeared in court today and remain in custody. Prosecutors say he allowed the boy to have the firearm. This was after he promised authorities last year that he would keep the family guns out of the boy’s reach.

In more other news. Liz Cheney says her father, Dick the Dick, is voting for Harris. This might cause a rift in the time-space continuum, but okay.

Yesterday was some news day. It hasn’t made headlines, but Trump did admit on camera that he lost the 2020 election.

Somehow he will persuade his culties that he didn’t really say what he said. However, white nationalist Nick Fuentes is furious.

While Fuentes wasoncea zealoussupporter of former President Donald Trump and even dined with Trump at Mar-a-Lago in 2022, the adoration has since faded, partially because Trump tapped Sen. J.D. Vance, who has a non-white, non-Christian wife, as his running mate. Recently, Fuentes openly declared war on the Trump campaign, vowing to deploy activists in swing states for the purpose of depriving Trump of votes.

Fuentes’ disgust with Trump only increased after the former president seemingly finally admitted that he lost the 2020 election, which contradicted everything Trump has said for the last four years and essentially destroyed the justification for the entire “Stop The Steal” effort. (Later in the same interview, however, Trump nevertheless called the election “a fraud.”)

There will be more on Trump’s inability to keep his stories straight later in this post.

Liz Cheney’s endorsement of Kamala Harris was welcome news,  This could make some not-MAGA Republicans more comfortable with voting for Harris, I would think.

There’s still a lot we don’t know about yesterday’s school shooting in Winder, Georgia. For example, we don’t yet know how the 14-year-old shooter got his hands on the assault weapon he used to kill four people and wound nine more. Then we learned that the FBI had flagged this kid’s online activity a year ago, because he was posting about school shootings. The local police interviewed him but couln’t find a reason to “hold” him. Perhaps not, but maybe there’s an intermediate stage between “holding” and “ignoring.” Like “keeping an eye on him” and “making sure the boy is getting help and has no access to firearms.”

The presidential candidates’ responses were entirely different, as one would expect. Kamala Harris spoke at length about the ongoing tragedy of school shootings, ending with “This is a senseless tragedy — and it does not have to be this way. We must end the epidemic of gun violence in our country once and for all.” Her proposals for addressing gun violence include what might be called “enhanced” red-flag laws that might make a real difference in the case of people identified as possible shooters.

Trump issued a statement that called the shooter a “sick and deranged monster,” but he said nothing about addressing gun violence.

Whoa, here’s an update I just saw — the Washington Post is reporting that one of the shooter’s aunts is saying the boy was begging for help for months before the shooting.