"President Trump posted a blatantly racist video clip portraying former President Barack Obama and the former first lady Michelle Obama as apes...."

"The brief clip, set to 'The Lion Sleeps Tonight,' was spliced near the end of a 62-second video that promoted conspiracy theories about anomalies in the 2020 presidential election....In response to questions about the clip, which Mr. Trump posted Thursday during a late-night spree on social media, Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said criticism of the video was 'fake outrage.' 'This is from an internet meme video depicting President Trump as the King of the Jungle and Democrats as characters from the Lion King,' she said. 'Please stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public.'"

I'm reading "Trump Posts Video Portraying Obamas as Apes/The White House press secretary dismissed criticism of the clip’s racist content, shared by the president’s Truth Social account, as 'fake outrage'" (NYT).

I don't know why Leavitt responded like that. If I hadn't read what she said, I would have assumed Trump shared the video because of the material that took up the first 97% of the video. Look at it here. It's somber technical material about tampering with voting machines in the 2020 election. I would have assumed that he never even saw the discordant image of the Obamas as apes that is spliced in at the very end, in the last 2 seconds.

I would have speculated that some sneaky person spliced that image in to trick Trump supporters into passing the video along unwittingly and becoming targets for accusations of racism.

Who sticks around for the full 62 seconds? Well, maybe some people do, and then when the Obama image pops up, they probably think What is this bullshit? It doesn't belong. Who put this here?

"I never liked the MAGA Mar-a-Lago sexualization. I believe how women in leadership present themselves sends a message to younger women."

"I have two daughters, and I’ve always been uncomfortable with how those women puff up their lips and enlarge their breasts. I’ve never spoken about it publicly, but I’ve been planning to."

Said Marjorie Taylor Greene, quoted in "'I Was Just So Naïve’: Inside Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Break With Trump/How the Georgia congresswoman went from the president’s loudest cheerleader to his loudest Republican critic" (NYT).

This is a very long article, by Robert Draper. Let me just pull out 3 more things:

"I am happy to have a conversation with anybody in the administration as to the motivations and expectations that our community had when they overwhelmingly wanted me to bring this criminal action."

What "community"?

I'm quoting Dan Rubinstein, the Mesa County district attorney who won the conviction of Tina Peters. Peters was sentenced to 9 years in prison for "tampering with voting machines under her control in a failed attempt to prove that they had been used to rig the 2020 election against President Trump."

I'm reading "Justice Dept. to Review Election Tampering Conviction of Pro-Trump Clerk/The decision, revealed in a filing in a Colorado clerk’s bid to overturn her conviction, marks another example of President Trump’s Justice Department intervening to aid supporters or go after foes" (NYT).

At a sentencing hearing in October, Judge Matthew D. Barrett scolded Ms. Peters from the bench, telling her that he was imposing a stiff penalty on her because she had repeatedly advanced false claims about Mr. Trump’s defeat, and that, in so doing, she had become a celebrity among those who denied that he lost the race.

“You are no hero. You abused your position, and you are a charlatan,” Judge Barrett said, adding, “You cannot help but lie as easy as you breathe.”

I'm amused by the combination of the headline and "at least somewhat correctly."

I'm reading "Joe Rogan Irresponsibly Suggests Kari Lake Has a Point About Election Fraud/Joe Rogan quickly veered into conspiracy territory in his most recent podcast" (Daily Beast). It begins:

Joe Rogan on Thursday let loose another doozy of a false claim, suggesting that despite a number of failed lawsuits and months of fruitless efforts, Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake may actually be correct about the wide-scale voter fraud she’s so far been unable to prove.

“It looks like there’s real fraud,” Rogan suggested during an episode of his podcast. “At the very least, there were voting machines that weren’t working properly,” Rogan said, at least somewhat correctly, an apparent reference to an incident in which some printers in Maricopa County voting centers didn’t make dark enough marks on ballots—a technical problem that former President Donald Trump also seized on at the time.

Boldface added. 

Here's the clip that Kari Lake is sharing on Twitter:

"For an effective anti-Trump move to take place... the G.O.P. would have to display the sort of coördination that the moderate wing of the Democratic Party showed in 2020..."

"... after Bernie Sanders finished first in the New Hampshire primary. On that occasion, Congressman James Clyburn threw his support behind Joe Biden in South Carolina, and two of the moderate candidates—Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar—dropped out and endorsed Biden. Ayres didn’t go so far as to say that a Republican Party still dominated by Trump could engineer a similar feat...."

Writes John Cassidy in "Can Anybody Stop Donald Trump in the 2024 Republican Primary? Even as the former President has a commanding poll lead in a splintered field, one veteran G.O.P. consultant argues that it’s too early to coronate him" (The New Yorker).

Ayres = Whit Ayres, a consultant and pollster who isn't advising anyone at the moment but who has, in the past, has advised Marco Rubio, Lindsey Graham, and Ron DeSantis.

Exactly how did "the moderate wing of the Democratic Party" "engineer" that "feat"? They just had to stop Bernie.

The effort to cancel the one black person on the Court.

On the front page of The Washington Post right now:



Can you even guess what that's about? I tried and I guessed wrong. I thought maybe there was a prediction that Justice Thomas might be conscious of a likelihood that he'd be leaving the Court within the next 4 years and he might be swayed by a desire to control who appoints his replacement. But, no, that would also be a ground to demand that Justice Breyer recuse himself.

Here's the column. The reason is that he might be carrying a decades-long grudge against Joe Biden for the way he ran the Senate Judiciary Committee in the hearings on his confirmation.

"There is no question some ballots will be mailed to people who have died, or moved or are no longer eligible to vote."

"But that almost never translates into those ballots being returned by someone else as a voted ballot, an act which would be a felony. And even when isolated instances like this happen, they don’t swing presidential elections.... There is also no question that some election administrators... will make errors in handling ballots. There are weak links in our election process.... There are a few steps that election administrators and the media should take given that we are going to have an imperfect election and given that these imperfections may be cynically manipulated by political operatives who want to throw the election results into doubt.... The media need to report claims of misfeasance in elections with caution.... The days leading up to November’s election may be rocky. But competence, patience, transparency and perspective are the best antidote to attempts to manipulate small-scale election problems into a full blown crisis."

From "Don’t fall for claims of voter fraud. Political operatives want to turn errors into a way to throw the election" by Richard L. Hasen (L.A. Times).

I couldn't take my eyes off Bill. What's he thinking?!

What do you think the bubble above Bill Clinton's head says right now? https://t.co/p3efFzKAFK

— Sharyl Attkisson🕵️‍♂️ (@SharylAttkisson) September 5, 2020

Democrats fear that on election night, it will look as though Trump has won in a landslide.

Axios reports.

Way more Democrats will vote by mail than Republicans, due to fears of the coronavirus, and it will take days if not weeks to tally these. This means Trump, thanks to Republicans doing almost all of their voting in person, could hold big electoral college and popular vote leads on election night.

Imagine America, with its polarization and misinformation, if the vote tally swings wildly toward Joe Biden and Trump loses days later as the mail ballots are counted. That is what this group, Hawkfish, which is funded by Michael Bloomberg and also does work for the Democratic National Committee and pro-Biden Super PACs, is warning is a very real, if not foreordained, outcome.

"We are sounding an alarm and saying that this is a very real possibility, that the data is going to show on election night an incredible victory for Donald Trump," [Hawkfish CEO Josh Mendelsohn said]. "When every legitimate vote is tallied and we get to that final day, which will be some day after Election Day, it will in fact show that what happened on election night was exactly that, a mirage."...

We like to sit down in front of the TV on election night and see the result come into focus within a few hours. Now, we can expect to be told to forget about that exciting, dramatic event. Look away! Don't see that! Or we'll sit there and watch, see this massive landslide for Trump and be warned every minute that this is not real, that there are other votes out there, and, indeed, that way more of those other votes are for Biden.

I'm afraid whoever loses this time will find it impossible to accept the results. Americans are already in an emotionally chaotic state, and the media and the politicians are doing their best to keep us anxious and belligerent. The only hope is that in the end the winners' landslide will be so big that the losers accept their loss. It's hard to imagine how big that landslide will need to be to produce that acceptance. We saw how Democrats reacted to Trump's very clear victory in 2016, and America's grasp on reality has declined since then, I believe.

ADDED: "Under one of the group's modeling scenarios, Trump could hold a projected lead of 408-130 electoral votes on election night, if only 15% of the vote by mail (VBM) ballots had been counted. Once 75% of mail ballots were counted, perhaps four days later, the lead could flip to Biden's favor. This particular modeling scenario portrays Biden as ultimately winning a massive victory, 334-204." That's not as worrisome as a landslide for Trump declining into a narrow victory for Biden.

"TikTok users and fans of Korean pop music groups claimed to have registered potentially hundreds of thousands of tickets for Trump’s campaign rally as a prank."

"After @TeamTrump tweeted asking supporters to register for free tickets using their phones on June 11, K-pop fan accounts began sharing the information with followers, encouraging them to register for the rally — and then not show. The trend quickly spread on TikTok, where videos with millions of views instructed viewers to do the same.... 'It spread mostly through Alt TikTok — we kept it on the quiet side where people do pranks and a lot of activism,' said the YouTuber Elijah Daniel, 26, who participated in the campaign. 'K-pop Twitter and Alt TikTok have a good alliance where they spread information amongst each other very quickly. They all know the algorithms and how they can boost videos to get where they want.'...  Many users deleted their posts after 24 to 48 hours in order to conceal their plan and keep it from spreading into the mainstream internet..... Twitter users on Saturday night were quick to declare the social media campaign’s victory. 'Actually you just got ROCKED by teens on TikTok,' Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York tweeted in response to [Trump campaign chairman Brad] Parscale, who had tweeted that 'radical protestors' had 'interfered' with attendance...."

From "TikTok Teens and K-Pop Stans Say They Sank Trump Rally/Did a successful prank inflate attendance expectations for President Trump’s rally in Tulsa, Okla.?" (NYT).

So... are we going to be celebrating the tricky use of the internet to interfere with campaign events?

The article proceeds to discuss "K-pop stans." Quite aside from whether the cutesy slang "stans" belongs in a serious new report — and it is serious news even if it's news of a prank — are we talking about Americans? Or is this foreign interference in our elections?

K-pop stans have been getting increasingly involved in American politics in recent months. 

The word "American" suggests that we are talking about foreign citizens acting in very large numbers  — colluding — to harm an American political candidate — to waste the campaign's assets and to create confusion and embarrassment. Because the candidate is Trump, readers are going to be complacent. Ha ha, the kids got that guy. You have to imagine a candidate you like getting humiliated and wasting scarce assets and turning away sincerely interested event-goers.

Obviously, the campaigns themselves need to come up with ways to counteract these kinds of pranks, but I wish the mainstream journalists would do something more serious and independent than just laughing along with the kids.

"A high school student created a fake 2020 candidate. Twitter verified it."

CNN reports.

After Twitter announced in December that it would give a blue checkmark to verify all 2020 congressional and gubernatorial candidates, the high school senior decided to test how the company was verifying that candidates really were who they said they were -- and if they existed in the first place.

"During Christmas break I was kind of bored and I learned a lot from history class [about Russia's interference in the 2016 US presidential election]..." the high school student told CNN....

For the photograph of the fake candidate, he said he downloaded a picture from a website called This Person Does Not Exist....

"U.S. officials have told Sen. Bernie Sanders that Russia is attempting to help his presidential campaign as part of an effort to interfere with the Democratic contest..."

"... according to people familiar with the matter. President Trump and lawmakers on Capitol Hill have also been informed about the Russian assistance to the Vermont senator, according to people familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive intelligence. It is not clear what form that Russian assistance has taken.... Sanders’s opponents have blamed some of his most vocal online supporters for injecting toxic rhetoric into the primaries. At a Democratic candidates debate in Las Vegas on Wednesday, Sanders indirectly blamed Russia, saying it was possible malign actors were trying to manipulate social media to inflame divisions among Democrats.... Also this week, a senior U.S. intelligence official said that Russia had 'developed a preference' for Trump in the 2020 campaign — an assessment that infuriated the president....."

WaPo reports.

What do you think is really going on? Would Russia help both Bernie and Trump? Why? Is it a preference for chaos? I can see the theory that getting Bernie the nomination works in the long run to help Trump, but that requires you to think that Russia prefers Trump to Bernie. Why wouldn't Russia just help Bernie?

RELATED: "Will Bernie Sanders' long-ago praise of Socialist regimes hurt Democrats in November?/If Sanders is the nominee, some Democrats worry Trump will hammer him on his long-buried words in defense of governments in Nicaragua, Cuba and the USSR" (NBC News).

"@sundarpichai of Google was in the Oval Office working very hard to explain how much he liked me, what a great job the Administration is doing..."

"... that Google was not involved with China’s military, that they didn’t help Crooked Hillary over me in the 2016 Election, and that they are NOT planning to illegally subvert the 2020 Election despite all that has been said to the contrary. It all sounded good until I watched Kevin Cernekee, a Google engineer, say terrible things about what they did in 2016 and that they want to 'Make sure that Trump losses in 2020.' Lou Dobbs stated that this is a fraud on the American public. @peterschweizer stated with certainty that they suppressed negative stories on Hillary Clinton, and boosted negative stories on Donald Ttump. All very illegal. We are watching Google very closely!"

Tweeted Donald Trump (AKA "Ttump") this morning.

ADDED: "Donald Ttump" is trending on Twitter. Some are laughing at Trump for being so stupid he can't spell his own name, but of course, the mistake tends to absolve him of stupidity for all the other misspellings. This one is clearly a typo. He's a guy who doesn't fuss over the proofreading. It may even be intentional. It's such a silly distraction — "Ttump." Ttump ttump ttump ttuh ttuh tuh ttump. I hear this tune.

By the way, I often typo my own last name. The familiarity itself seems to cause the glitch.