Peasants 🌻🌻🌻

Skittles? We made it through Halloween without all that feared fentanyl showing up in any treat bags. Could it be that the fentanyl in Halloween candy scare was just an alarmist dystopian fantasy spread to freak out shaky soccer moms, akin to the NY Post’s relentless fear mongering about crime in New York.  Many of the Murdoch rag crime stories are actually about crime in other parts of the country, an approach that NYS Republican gubernatorial hopeful Lee Zeldin likes so much that he ran at least one ad with a clip from California which is not a NYS suburb.  Crime explosion is this election cycle’s marauding migrant hordes.  One more week, well maybe as it’s remains possible that the results won’t all be in by next Wednesday, between too close to call races, runoffs and counting of absentee ballots, and many of those crime stories will fall off the front page to be replaced by ones about ballot flipping machines perhaps?  Buckle up we’re in for another tumultuous ride. By the way, taking a page from his BFF, the Former Guy, and heeding the advice of Steve Bannon, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro has not conceded the election that he just lost to president-elect Lula but he did agree to abide by the country’s constitution and has begun the process of transferring power.  That’s good but it’s still not clear if his revved-up supporters, including the truck driver blocking highways around the country are ready to step aside. By the way, the FG has finally weighed in on the attack of Speaker Pelosi’s husband Paul. For a brief second, he expressed concern but then quickly pivoted into joining the “gay hook-up” conspiracy crowd saying “Its weird things going on in that household in the last couple of weeks….The glass, it seems, was broken from the inside to the out and, you know, so, it wasn’t a break in, it was a break out.” To be clear, the 82-year-old Paul Pelosi did not know his attacker, he was the victim of a planned attack by a politically motivated evildoer who was out to knee-cap “Nancy,” who the Republican party has demonized for years.  It turns out that the break-in was caught on camera by the Capitol police but that given the volume of the video they’re responsible for watching they didn’t catch it happening in real time.  With all the attention on the Pelosi attack, the most recent “faux sheriff” Herschel Walker story has gotten short shrift.  Yesterday, the second woman who accused him of pressuring her into an abortion came forward and showed her face on camera during an ABC morning show interview.   

Legalities:  Justice moves like a pre global warming glacier but sometimes it does move in the right direction.  Yesterday, the Supreme Court refused to block a Georgia grand jury subpoena seeking testimony from Senator Lindsey Graham about his activities in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election. Fulton County, Georgia District Attorney Fani Willis is specifically interested in questioning Graham about the calls he made to Georgia election officials concerning the outcome of the 2020 presidential election, inquiries that the officials interpreted as Lindsey trying to exert influence on behalf of his golf buddy, the FG. We should know soon enough whether Graham cooperates, challenges each question individually, or pleads the Fifth, an especially awkward thing to do for a sitting Senator but then it’s Graham’s so awkward probably doesn’t matter.  While the news on the Graham front is promising, the news regarding the FG’s much sought-after tax returns is less so.  Yesterday, Chief Justice Roberts gave the FG what may be just a minor victory by putting a temporary hold on the release by the IRS of his tax returns to the House Ways and Means committee. The issue will be taken up after next week’s elections and it may be that the “administrative” hold was as much because of timing as anything else but time is ticking for the committee because no one believes that a Republican led House will continue to pursue the FG’s tax returns or any other related investigation, they’ll be far too busy impeaching Joe, going after Hunter and prosecuting Fauci.       

Twits:  The Chief Twit who is a whiz with electric cars and rockets, is finding out that managing and monetizing his newest acquisition isn’t just about technology or efficiency.  Yesterday, a few more key senior staff people who’d probably stuck around through the weekend to make it to November 1, a key vesting date, resigned.  Things have also gotten challenging on the advertising front where IPG, one of the world’s largest advertising companies, issued a recommendation for its clients to pause their spending on Twitter because of content moderation concerns. It turns out that companies don’t want their advertisements to appear alongside the N-Word, anti-Semitic rants, virus misinformation, and election lies.  Additionally General Motors, a Tesla competitor has also suspended its advertising, at least for now.  The Chief Twit Musk is now proposing an $8 monthly charge to “blue check” tweeters, down from the $20 or so he originally thought he could get away with but that he retreated from after frequent tweeter/famous author Stephen King laughed loudly. To date, blue checks have been awarded at no cost to prominent users to indicate to the rest of the Twitter-verse that they are who they say they are with a lot of those “influencers” complaining about how long it sometimes takes to get their ”check.” Yesterday Musk dubbed that a “Lord and Peasants” system saying that anyone willing to pay, and presumably willing to share their payment information and personal data for Twitter to monetize should be able to get a blue check.  Great in principal but few who matter and most who don’t are all that interested in paying for what they’re already getting for free. Musk is no dummy, he may figure this Twitter thing out and may get the last laugh, but this Twitter business is not so easy to manage and enormously time consuming for a guy who should be focused on launching rockets and worried about losing his electric car dominance.    

Polls are all over the place.  The election is either too close to call or a red runaway.  So Vote, Vote, Vote up and down the ballot like your rights depend on it because they do.