IVF's Daddy? 🌴 ✡️🌻✡️🌻✡️ 🌴

The Dancing Clown:  With less than three weeks left until election day, the candidates are bouncing from so many interviews to town halls and back again that it’s hard to keep track of all of them.  On Tuesday, fresh off his Pennsylvania sway-a-thon, Trump was interviewed by Bloomberg’s Editor in Chief John Micklethwait at the Chicago Economic Forum.  As Esquire put it, Trump didn’t answer Micklethwait’s questions but instead answered the imaginary ones in his head.  An unamused Micklethwait kept pushing Trump to respond to his questions but instead Trump dissed all economists, especially the ones cited in the Wall Street Journal’s recent comparison of his and Kamala’s economic plans.  Those economists largely agreed that Trump’s plan especially his tariffs would raise inflation and grow the deficit substantially more than anything proposed by Harris.  Trump’s response to that was that he’s a whiz at math, those economists are all stupid, the WSJ is always wrong, and just to prove that he’s right, he’ll impose even higher tariffs so that no foreign goods make it into the US ever, US consumers be damned. Trump once again asserted that January 6^th was a nothing burger because at the end of the month, he and his trove of secret documents did decamp to Mar a Lago. Taking no prisoners, Micklethwait said that the transfer was only peaceful in comparison to Venezuela. Would it surprise you to learn Trump who had previously agreed to an interview with CNBC has now cancelled that appearance?  On Wednesday Trump participated in a Univision Town Hall, part of his outreach to the Hispanic community. In response to a question from a Spanish speaking attendee, Trump doubled down on his assertion that the Springfield, Ohio Haitians were eating pets “because that’s what he’s heard,” adding that those Haitians only speak foreign languages, probably not the best answer to someone who posed his question in Spanish but what do I know, because the pundits say that while Trump is behind Harris with the Latin American community he’s gained ground with them. To round things out Fox broadcasted a “women’s” townhall that he’d taped earlier.  During that session, hosted by Fox’s Harris Faulkner, he tried to soften his abortion position, again asserting that “everyone” wanted Roe overturned so he was a hero for that. He acknowledged that he didn’t really know what IVF was until Alabama Senator/Handmaiden Katie Britt told him about Alabama’s court banning the procedure but then said that he was the father of IVF. By IVF, maybe he thought they were talking about second son Eric? Doesn’t make sense, but that didn’t seem to be a problem for the handpicked MAGA women in the audience.  They didn’t seem all that concerned about his promise to order the military to go after his opponents either.  

Kamala Too:  Harris who was previously criticized for not participating in enough interviews has been just about everywhere.  On Tuesday, as part of her outreach to Black men she participated in a well-received interview with The Breakfast Club radio host Charlamagne Tha God where the two agreed that Mark Milley was spot on in calling Trump a fascist. Pulling no punches, she also called Trump weak and dangerous. On Wednesday she appeared in Bucks County, Pennsylvania with a bunch of now never Trumper Republican politicians by her side, that’s part of her effort to let wavering Republicans know that voting for her won’t get them kicked out of their country clubs especially if they’re discrete about their intentions.  Then yesterday, her Fox interview with Bret Baier was aired.  That interview was a wee bit contentious.  Baier who isn’t as wacky as Maria Bartiromo or as much of a Trump toady as Sean Hannity is hardly the middle of the road guy he pretends to be; last cycle after Fox’s respected election desk, all of whom have since been fired, called Arizona for Biden, he tried to get them to retract their call.  Harris wasn’t having any of Baier’s nonsense, she pushed back hard when he tried to portray Trump’s promise to call out the military as something other than what it was. Her intention was to tell Fox viewers those things that Fox generally fails to mention.  It’s not clear if anyone watching cared because after the interview Fox went with lots of Black women dog whistles 🐶 😗 but she gets credit for showing up in enemy territory and anyone who thinks that she’ll be intimidated by foreign leaders like Vlad Putin, is deceiving themselves. MSNBC’s hosts have all extended invitations to Trump but none of us should expect to see him on with Rachel Maddow anytime soon. As to Maddow, she usually doesn’t appear on Wednesday nights, but she showed up last night with a bigly scoop.  Specifically, she had written documentation and a tape, of Trump’s legal team, trying to get adult film star Stormy Daniels to agree to stop saying bad things about Trump in exchange for a reduction in the amount of legal fees she owes him for a defamation case she’d lost. To repeat, Trump who is due to be sentenced after the election for falsifying business documents to hide payments he made to keep their dalliance quiet before the 2016 election is still all in on election interference. If sentencing judge Juan Merchan didn’t know about this, it’s fair to assume that he does now.  By the way, Trump’s defense is that the documentary proof that Maddow presented is from the Iran hack, so it doesn’t count.  It wasn’t from the Iran hack; it was from information provided by his lawyers. It counts, not that any of his fans will care.

Lots and Lots of Trouble Ahead:  An increasing number of political pundits and legal experts are convinced that Trump and his congressional supporters, which these days include just about every Republican in the House and most of those in the Senate, plan to contest the results of the election if he loses, kind of January 6 only worse.  However, a few judges are trying to impede some of those efforts.  This week Georgia’s new election rules including the one that mandated the manually counting of all votes and another that allowed local officials to refuse to certify votes, just because they wanted to, were thrown out by the courts.  Also, an Alabama judge blocked the state’s efforts to systematically purge voter records, and a Nebraska court ruled that a state election official could not strip those with felony convictions of their voting rights.  The Nebraska ruling matters because the effort to ban felons from voting was intended to influence the outcome in the Omaha area district where Harris is expected to win what could be a pivotal Electoral College vote.

Just Weird:  JD Vance has finally come out and said that as far as he’s concerned, Trump did not lose in 2020. Apparently. Trump wasn’t satisfied with his hemming and hawing and needed him to be more definitive.  We’ve known for a long time that Trump has a bizarre toupee like weave, what we didn’t know is that his excuse for his meandering speeches, the ones where he talks about Hanibal Lecter and sharks while calling tariffs the solution for childcare and doubling down on retribution for his enemies is also a weave, only this weave which sounds a lot like early dementia is a “strategy.”  And lastly former KKK leader David Duke has endorsed third party candidate Jill Stein.  That matters because Stein is a spoiler, in fact that’s the whole point of her candidacy which is why its widely believed that one of her other key supporters is Putin.

#BringThemAllHomeNow