Four More Days

Low Road Meet Oprah:  Four days to go until the midterm elections and Trump is quadrupling down.  Yesterday, he announced that those 15,000 troops he is ordering to the US border to confront the migrant hordes, those moms, babies, children and yes, some men, will be authorized to treat the migrants as enemy combatants and start shooting if any of them throw a rock, or even think about throwing a rock.  As to those men, he says that his base, especially the women among them, expect him to order the shooting of migrants to quell their fears that the men among them are entering the country solely to engage in rape and pillage.  To that end, he’s sticking with the story told in his George HW Bush era “Willy Horton” political ad, the one that alleges Democrats want no borders and blames them for the murders committed by Luis Bracamontes, who was actually deported during Clinton’s administration before illegally reentering the country during the George W Bush years.   As part of his announcement he also said that he would be issuing an executive order barring asylum claims from immigrants who cross into the U.S. illegally, urging them to “turn back now because they’re wasting their time.”  That order would violate a number of US and International laws, but that hasn’t stopped Trump before so why would it bother him now, when so much is at stake.  All of this feeds into his election strategy, one that hopes to spew enough fear to get his base to show up and vote.  Although, some Republican politicians such as outgoing Senators Jeff Flake and Bob Corker and soon to be former Ohio Governor John Kasich are offended by his approach, many if not most are still on board so Georgia’s Republican Gubernatorial candidate Brian Kemp has cancelled a planned debate with his opponent Democratic candidate Stacey Abrams, stating a scheduling conflict but really to accommodate Trump’s travel itinerary because he wouldn’t want to miss the opportunity to stand arm and arm with his great leader.  As to  Stacey Abrams, Trump called her out as unqualified for the job. Abrams served as the Minority Leader of the Georgia house of Representatives and is a graduate of Spelman College who received a law degree from Yale but then again she is an African American woman and Trump has a history of questioning Black women’s capabilities and intelligence.  One Black woman who isn’t interested in hearing any more of Trump’s hateful rhetoric is Oprah Winfrey.  Yesterday she joined Stacey Abrams on the campaign trail, delivering an upbeat and uplifting speech about the importance of taking full advantage of your voting rights.  Her words focused on the positive and were intended to energize voters, not by freaking them out with fear, but by reminding them that voting was a privilege, one that many of their ancestors fought hard to get.  Notably Oprah reached out to Abrams on her own, calling around until she could get her contact number and then offering support and services out of a personal commitment to help her win. Oprah also made it clear that she is still not planning to run for president.  Right now, despite Georgia being a red state, Abrams and Kemp are running neck and neck with a third party candidate still in the mix.  To the extent that neither candidate obtains 50% of the vote, Georgia law requires a runoff so this whole exercise might get repeated again later in the month.  And lastly, Trump bemoaned the life threatening pipe bombs and the murders at the Tree of Life Synagogue yesterday, not because they were both disturbing and, in the case of Pittsburgh, lethal, but because they halted Republican electoral momentum.  Glad to see he has his priorities in order, NOT!  

Throwing Stone:  Long time Trump buddy Roger Stone’s problems appear to be deepening. During the 2016 presidential campaign he pitched the value of his contacts with WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange to the Trump team.  They either took him very seriously and had him moved outside of the official campaign apparatus to obscure his connection to the campaign while he engaged in some dark and devious activities  or they thought that he was a fringe crackpot exaggerating his connections to Assange and moved him away because he was a distraction.  In any case after Julian Assange appeared on a video promising that he would soon release Hillary implicating “purloined documents,” Steve Bannon reached out to Assange to find out what was up. Not long after that, immediately after the Access Hollywood tape was released, the dump of DNC emails hit the internet and, sadly, the rest is history.  We now know about Bannon and Stone’s communication because Stone released copies of some of their campaign time emails, part of his effort to get ahead of the story by claiming that the emails didn’t really mean much even though they probably do.  In any case, Bannon has now been interviewed by Mueller three times, Mueller has spent a lot of time with Paul Manafort who probably also had a few Stone implicating things to share but Mueller has not met with Stone, making it more and more likely that Stone is one of his key targets.  None of this is all that good for the very peculiar Stone who is now saying that he really didn’t have contact with Assange but liked pretending that he did to make himself seem more important.  We may, or may not, learn more details next week once the election is behind us.   

International Politics:  While most eyes have been focused on the upcoming midterm elections, Brazil elected a new president, a far right wing nationalist named Jair Bolsonaro.  Trump immediately called his congratulations in to Bolsonaro, who is described as a man with “fascist inclinations and authoritarian tendencies.”  For example, when speaking about Brazil’s population of  900,000 indigenous people  he has said that “it’s a shame that the Brazilian cavalry wasn’t as efficient as the Americans, who exterminated their Indians.”  It’s feared that if he enacts his campaign promises, the “first peoples of Brazil face catastrophe, in some cases genocide.”  It’s also been reported that after Saudi Arabian journalist Jamal Khashoggi was killed and diced into pieces, another administration favorite, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) called his friend Jared Kushner and national security advisor John Bolton to more or less defend Khashoggi’s killing by labeling him as a dangerous Islamist and member of the Muslim Brotherhood.  During that call MBS urged Kushner and Bolton to do their best to preserve the US-Saudi alliance and at least so far, it appears that he may get his wish.  As to that murder, this week the Turks disclosed that Khashoggi was strangled the moment he entered the Saudi embassy. Unrelated, but still very disturbing the bodies of two young women who were found duct taped together along the shore of NYC’s Hudson river in late October have been identified as two Saudi sisters who had been living with their mother in Virginia.  They disappeared shortly after their mother received a call from the Saudi Arabian embassy telling her to take her daughters back to Saudi Arabia because they had applied for political asylum in the US. Makes you wonder if MBS’ reach now extends to the US soil.        

Wishing all of Sunday's NY Marathon runners a fun, safe day!