Apples and Honey🌴 ✡️🌻✡️🌻✡️ 🌴

VEEP Night:  There was little surprising about the debate. As expected, Yale Law grad JD Vance was more polished than Minnesota nice Tim Walz but still, he was smarmy and lied like there was no tomorrow.  He lied about Obamacare insisting that Trump, who’d repeatedly tried to kill the program, rather than John McCain, was the hero who had saved it.  While asserting that he too is an Obamacare advocate (spoiler alert, he isn’t)  Vance advocated for toppling it by putting people with pre-existing conditions into a separate pool, an actuarily disastrous approach to insurance that would jack up costs for millions upon millions of Americans while lowering costs for those he described as healthy, but only for as long as they stay healthy which of course is the rub. Vance lied about energy production. Though he admitted that climate science was real, he stuck with Trump’s assertion we aren’t drilling enough oil, saying we needed to “drill baby drill” because apparently in Trump and Vance world, burning more fossil fuels will save the environment while also fixing the housing crisis caused, of course, by all those “illegal migrants,” especially this season’s scapegoat, the Haitians of Ohio.  Is it a coincidence that more drilling will also make Trump’s oil industry backers richer who as Tim Walz pointed out, Trump feted at Mar a Lago?  To recap the Trump/Vance energy philosophy:  “drill baby drill” will do for housing what Trump earlier said that tariffs will do for childcare.  Vance also lied about abortion, saying that he isn’t for a national ban despite the fact that he has repeatedly called for one.  He stuck to the NRA mantra that turning schools into forts is the solution to our national gun problem, the one caused by the mental illness that is only a problem here in the US because, you know, illegal migrants who when they aren’t stealing our housing are shooting up our schools even though mass shootings are largely committed by native born, young white men, people who look more like JD. To cement himself in the Orange guy’s good graces, Vance stuck with the biggest lie of all, refusing to acknowledge that Trump lost to President Biden in 2020, claiming that the January 6th coup wasn’t a problem because so what if the day was violent and Trump urged his MAGAs to overthrow the government, none of that matters because he did leave Washington on January 20. Vance went on to say that since Trump “left” it’s the Democrats who are threatening democracy because they need to get over that little coup thing.  Tim Walz is not as polished.  He can exhort football players to victory, but debates are not in his wheelhouse.  He frequently spoke too fast and stumbled while explaining an earlier misstatement about where he was during the Tiananmen Square demonstrations, not that anyone really cares, but he got in some really good zingers and even showed off a few Kamala worthy facial expressions. He used his stunned face 🤦‍♂️ to good effect when Vance called Trump Obamacare’s savior, going on to demonstrate a keen understanding of how health insurance really works, and it was hard not to laugh when he noted that the reason Mike Pence wasn’t the one with him on the debate stage was because Trump tried to have him hanged while going on to add that it wasn’t just Pence who was no longer in the Trump camp but virtually all of the other senior officials from his first administration. Walz frequently cited Minnesota’s successes, as a state that treats its residents well while also being a good place to be in business. Some of the pundits are saying that Vance “won” the night, a position that Trump and the Republican spinners will keep pushing, but that’s largely because Vance exceeded the low bar set by Trump who faceplanted during his debate with Kamala. The bottom line, Vance is an odious and deceptive sycophant who despite having previously called Trump Hitler-like is now his partner in deception and hate crimes.  He may want us to forget that, but we shouldn’t, and we shouldn’t let the spinners. and the press tell us to, especially when Kamala and Minnesota Tim are such superior alternatives.  Will last night matter, the pollsters say probably not but it should concern everyone, or at least everyone not already down the MAGA rabbit hole that Vance and Trump are so bad on so many fronts.          

October! The curse of the election year October Surprise is upon us, and we are not talking pumpkins 🎃 🎃 and witches 🧙  🧙. Hurricane season isn’t over, the hurricane Helene death count is still rising, and lot of people in the south will be struggling for some time as they dig out.  Dockworkers on the east and gulf coast went on strike yesterday morning, halting half the country’s ocean shipping. Think twice before eating shrimp because it won’t be as fresh as it should be. The dockworkers aren’t just striking for more wages, they want to slow the advance of job killing automation.  Solving the wage part is the lesser challenge, the automation part, not so easy.  Despite Trump’s exhortations to the contrary, the US economy has been humming along nicely however, the strike is expected to cost billions daily so to quote Martha Stewart, it’s not a good thing.  The strike probably would have gotten more attention yesterday except for that other big thing that happened.  Iran launched a barrage of somewhere between 180 and 200 ballistic missiles at Israel, the superfast ones not the slower moving drones used last time.  The Iranians targeted population centers such as the Tel Aviv-Jaffa metropolis with a population of close to 4.5 million in an attempt to do severe damage to Israel and its military capabilities.  Israel’s air defenses, bolstered by help from the US and Jordan, intercepted most of the incoming missiles, though some landed in central and southern parts of the country. Remarkably only two Israelis were lightly wounded by shrapnel but in the West Bank Palestinian officials reported that a Palestinian man was killed by a missile that fell near the town of Jericho. Unfortunately, 7 were killed and 11 more wounded by Palestinian terrorists in an attack that took place in Jaffa while the missiles were flying. Ironically, the missile attack hurt more people in Iran than in Israel since 5 Iranians were killed and 12 were wounded when one of the Iranian missiles exploded before launching.  So, in summary Iran spent more than $300 million to kill a few of its own and one Palestinian. The question now is how does Israel respond to what was not just an attack from an Iranian surrogate but one with deadly intentions from Iran itself?  Did I mention that the month has just begun?

Shanah Tovah.  Wishing all a year full of peace, joy, and good health with emphasis on peace. 🍯 🍎

#BringThemAllHomeAliveNow