Iced Team and Lemonade🌴 ✡️🌻✡️🌻✡️ 🌴

Weekend Snapshot:  The Yankees and Dodgers are going to the World Series, the Mets are not, and the NY Liberty are the WNBA champions, The Economist says that the US economy, the one that Trump continues to insist is in the gutter, is so good that it is the envy of the world. Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar is dead, but peace does not appear to be at hand. Trump who is dangerous and increasingly unhinged is running neck and neck with Harris who is neither nuts nor evil.  And one more thing, Elon Musk is trying is trying to buy his buddy Trump the election.  How was your weekend?  

Closing Messages:  With only 15 days to go the presidential candidates, aided by their surrogates, are delivering their closing messages. To that end, Trump who thinks that Abraham Lincoln would have been a better president if he had just agreed to “some” slavery in order to prevent the Civil War is all in on penises because nothing says “vote for me” to swing state soccer moms better than riffing on male anatomy. To that end, early in the weekend he told conservative podcast host Dan Bongino that he couldn’t believe that Harvey Weinstein, yes that Harvey Weinstein, had gotten schlonged.  Then, keeping with that theme in Latrobe, Pennsylvania where golf legend Arnold Palmer was born, he delivered a soliloquy about how all the other male golfers on the PGA tour were awed by the impressive size of the legend’s male anatomy.  Foolish me, all this time, I thought they were awed by Palmer’s golf game. Trump’s fascination with anatomy and biology were also on full display at the Al Smith Catholic charities dinner where, with Cardinal Dolan by his side, he made a crack about periods because who doesn’t discuss menstruation with celibate clergy? That’s the dinner where candidates are generally civilized and self-deprecating, a tradition that Trump ignored, instead opting to slam his opponents but dispensing with the self-deprecating part apparently because he’s both perfect and “unconventional.”  In another speech he called “stupid” Harris a lying sh-t 💩 VP and then to hammer home this election cycle’s fake Obama birth certificate conspiracy that she’d lied about working at a MacDonald during her student days, Trump finished his weekend by pretending to sling pretend hamburgers and fries at a closed MacDonalds to pre-selected pretend MAGA clients. Trump’s campaign team has cancelled several of his planned appearance telling Politico that the cancellations were because he’s too tired and maybe the 78-year-old is tired, but those interviews were just as likely cancelled because they fear what he might say next, perhaps because people suffering from dementia are unpredictable?  Apparently, they’re weak at math too which could explain why Trump insists that 78 is nowhere near 80.  Trump isn’t the only one with a closing argument.  Though Harris’ is mostly about change, reproductive rights, competence and equality, her campaign has also been using videos of Trump’s appearances to hammer home just how crazy and increasingly dangerous he is because nothing depicts Trump’s danger better than videos of Trump. That approach should be effective but, unfortunately, it’s not clear that any of Trump’s already locked-in voters care.  And why should they when Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell tells us to ignore the fact that he’s called Trump out as a despicable human being because others like JD Vance and Lindsey Graham have said far worse and they’re still aboard the Trump train.   

The X Man: We all need to focus more on what Elon Musk is doing and I don’t mean on the technical wonders of his Space X company or his overly ambitious promise to deliver a robo-taxi fleet by 2027.  We need to pay attention to his efforts to buy Trump the election. As if amplifying Trump friendly conspiracy theories and squelching Harris friendly messages on X isn’t bad enough, his newest scheme involves offering voters in Pennsylvania, the swing state with the most Electoral College votes, $100 to sign a petition supporting the First and Second Amendments to the Constitution, that document that Trump talks about suspending on day one.  By signing what looks like a benign petition, those voters are turning over personal details to Musk’s PAC to help him push Trump’s candidacy.  The $100 is only part of it, Elon is also raffling off a $1 million check daily in a drawing for those who sign his petition.  Given that the whole election could hinge on the narrowest of margins in Pennsylvania, Musk’s actions are particularly dangerous and because they look a lot like vote buying also might violate campaign finance laws and possibly even state gambling laws.  Unfortunately, as we’ve all learned by now, the legal system is so slow that the election will be in the rearview window way before any of the consequences, to the extent there are any, catch up with Musk, the oligarch who clearly expects something from Trump for all his support. A quid pro quo on steroids?  It’s not just Musk in Trump’s camp.  During a recent appearance on Fox, Trump made said that he’s got a call into his Murdoch buddies to let them know that he expects them to stop allowing anyone who has anything nice to say about Kamala Harris or has the chutzpah to criticize him on their network. As to Fox, Brett Baier admitted that despite his insistence otherwise Fox did misleadingly display the wrong video of Trump during his Kamala interview.  The video that should have been but wasn’t shown was the one where Trump said he’d call upon the military to squash his opponents.  Funny how Fox “accidently” left that one on the cutting room floor and Baier failed to notice?

Fog:  Sinwar, the architect of the October 7 massacre, is really dead, killed not in a targeted hit but instead by relatively junior Israeli soldiers out on a routine patrol.  Unfortunately, it’s not clear that Sinwar’s removal from the scene will lead to a ceasefire and the release of the remaining hostages because it’s not clear that either Netanyahu or whoever it is who is now calling the shots for Hamas is ready to end the hostilities despite increasing pressure from the US.  It’s also not clear if the Hermes Birkin bag that Sinwar’s wife was seen carrying as she scurried from one of her husband’s hiding places to another is authentic but it is clear that Sinwar had lots of cash, food supplies and other UNRWA labeled items in his secret lair.  How he managed that while so many Gazans are hungry should be further investigated but probably won’t be.

#BringThemAllHomeNow