Mold Bugs  🌴 ✡️🌻✡️🌻✡️ 🌴

Storm Politics: Still rising, the Helene hurricane death count already exceeds one hundred.  Naturally, Trump who once attempted to redirect a hurricane with a sharpie, dealt with another one by tossing paper towels, and who last month exhorted his cronies in Congress to let government funding, including money for the federal emergency agency FEMA, run out, is now politicizing hurricane relief to make it appear as though President Biden and his current nemesis VP Harris are shirking their responsibilities to help people in affected areas, particular Republicans.  That’s fake news but Trump who continually tried to withhold money from Democratic areas affected by disasters, remember how he treated California when it was confronting a particularly awful wildfire emergency, has mastered the art of repetitive lying and sadly, many cling to his words. Yesterday, even though Biden had already spoken with Governors in storm affected areas to ask whether they wanted FEMA help which can only be provided to affected areas upon the request of their Governors, Trump asserted that Biden was dawdling and that Harris, who suspended her campaign activities yesterday, was too busy raising campaign cash to care.  When asked, Georgia’s Governor Kemp, hardly a left-wing snowflake but a straight shooter, confirmed that he’d spoken with Biden as did North Carolina’s Governor Cooper, but that didn’t stop Trump from continuing with his lies. Trump’s intent is to amplify the suffering in an attempt to portray Helene as another Katrina, the Louisiana hurricane relief disaster that plagued George W Bush. The clean-up for Helene will take a long time because there was a huge amount of damage and sadly, people will continue to suffer, but politicizing that suffering is despicable but then again so is Trump.

JD WTF? Last week, FBI Director Wray announced that three Iranian nationals, all members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corp, have been indicted for a wide-ranging hacking campaign intended to disrupt the US presidential election.  The hackers accessed the email account of Roger Stone, using it as an entrée into the RNC system and shared the contents of internal research that the Trump campaign had undertaken while vetting Trump’s potential vice president candidates including Trump’s ultimate choice, JD Vance. The Iranians sent the Vance file to the Harris campaign and several media outlets but unlike in 2016 when the Trump campaign and the press eagerly disseminated phished information about Hillary Clinton, the Harris campaign took the high road, and the press pretty much sat on what they received.  Despite efforts by faux free speech advocate/Trump super fan Elon Musk who last week squelched an X posting of the JD Vance files, the JD Vance information has finally surfaced.  It turns out that there’s little revelatory in the Vance file which in itself is revelatory, because it means that Trump’s vetting team either missed the too many to count times that Vance said what should have been disqualifying things or just didn’t think that what he’d said about childless cat ladies and women in general were all that bad. This leads us to some even worse things that Vance said in podcast interviews and during many of the speeches he gave to right wing audiences back when few, outside of the right-wing loon-is-sphere, were paying attention to his musings.  Last night MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, a Rhodes Scholar who has become an expert in the depressingly persistent American fascist movement, shared some more of Vance’s musings, which include his endorsement of the views of modern-day fascist Curtis Yarvin who founded the anti-democratic and anti-egalitarian movement known as the Dark Enlightenment a neo-reactionary movement which is as bad as its name implies.  Yarvin, also known as Mencius Moldbug, advocates for Americans to get over their dictator phobia and to engage in RAGE, his acronym for the Retirement of All Government Employees.  He wants to toss the US system of government aside, replacing it with a small cadre of anti-Democratic types, tech bros like the Peter Thiels of the world, while also embracing a dictator, someone like Vlad, Orban, Xi,  Kim Jong Un or better yet Trump?  Yarvin, who graduated from Brown and attended grad school at UC Berkeley like Vance who graduated from Ohio State and Yale Law School benefited from education at good schools but believes that the institutions of higher learning that launched their careers are problems, like the whole Department of Education, that need to be eradicated.  They want to see those institutions disbanded, with their “valuable” real estate handed over to developers.  Remind me again which of the presidential candidates is, or at was, a developer?  This may sound farfetched, but Vance is on record advocating for it, Trump’s vetting team had to have heard him do so, and Peter Thiel, JD Vance’s biggest financial backer is on board, so this is all out in the open to be seen.  Will any of this come up during tonight’s debate?  It should, but will it, who knows because there are so many other things to ask about, like did Tim Walz abandon his military career after “only” 24 years for nefarious reasons and did Kamala really cook French fries at a McDonalds.

Endorsements:  Yesterday the editors of the New York Times endorsed Kamala Harris as the “only patriotic choice for president.”  That was pretty much inevitable, but Trump got the endorsement of Shazam! actor Zachary Levi on Saturday, so does that make it even, the NY Post seems to think so.  For the record I am not familiar with Levi or even Shazam! but Levi previously endorsed RFK Jr which says a lot.  Worth noting, Australia expects to see HPV related cervical cancer eradicated by 2035, Norway expects the same by 2039.  Both countries’ expectations are due to their widespread Gardasil anti-HPV vaccine inoculation programs.  RFK Jr who admits to never having met a vaccine he likes and who Trump says will have an important health related position in his “next” administration has filed several lawsuits against Gardasil’s manufacturer Merck in an attempt to get the vaccine take off the market because that’s what he does and anyway cervical cancer is okay? In other health news, Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney ruled that Georgia’s six -week abortion ban violated the state’s constitution saying that liberty in Georgia includes in its meaning, in its protections, and in its bundle of rights the power of a woman to control her own body, to decide what happens to it and in it, and to reject state interference with her healthcare choices.” That’s great but the state’s Attorney General has already announced plans to appeal because apparently women dying while being refused emergency reproductive care is not a concern he shares. Another subject that should be addressed in tonight’s debate.

#BringThemAllHomeNow