One Year 🌴 ✡️🌻✡️🌻✡️ 🌴 🕯️ 🕯️

Twenty-Eight Days:  Election day is getting closer.  The candidates are on the road and all over the airwaves.  Though their messages are startlingly different and many of the policies that Trump and his partner JD Vance are promoting are not popular and would hurt his base, the electorate is so locked into their lanes that the election remains frighteningly close.  Abetted by Elon Musk, the world’s richest man who mostly just wants to be an oligarch unencumbered by any inconvenient regulations, one of the two candidates, the one who promises to be a dictator on day one, is spreading so many lies about hurricane relief, that some Republican Governors and even a few local Republican politicians including Georgia’s Republican Governor Brian Kemp and North Carolina’s Republican Senator Thom Tillis have alerted their constituents that those assertions are false. For his part wannabee oligarch Musk is using his social media site X to amplify the relief lies, spreading false assertions that the Biden/Harris administration has closed air space in hurricane ravaged areas to prevent aid from getting to those who need it most while also claiming that affected citizens are being given no more than $750 in recovery aid while illegal migrants are being showered with cash.  Lies are powerful and lying to the downtrodden is even more potent, Trump knows that and so does Musk, thus the lies won’t stop and with Hurricane Milton on the way to Florida, they’ll only get worse.  The aid lies are particularly ironic since Trump wanted his stooges in Congress to let the government coffers run dry and, following his lead, a significant number of Republicans in hurricane ravaged areas voted against keeping FEMA up and running.  On the subject of deception, Trump also posted on his Truth Social account that JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon had endorsed him.  Dimon, who earlier in the campaign season was a Niki Haley fan, responded by making it clear that he HAS NOT endorsed Trump. Trump’s response was to then assert that the Dimon endorsement that he posted on his personal account was fake because having lied about the endorsement, why not lie about who posted it?  Anyway, as Winston Churchill once said:  “A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on,” so while discourse and articles, including one this weekend in the NY Times, about Trump’s mental decline are pervasive, his lying skills have gotten more brazen. For her part, Kamala Harris has been all over the place too, appearing in swing states and also participating in loads of interviews, some targeted to specific niche audiences, some like her interview on CBS’ 60 Minutes scheduled to air tonight, national.  Notably 60 Minutes also reached out to Trump, but he cancelled once he realized that he would be fact-checked because, of course he did.  And while November 5^th is less than a month away, Election Day will only the first act in this cycle’s saga, because should he lose, Trump has already made it clear that he and his Republican allies will stall the verification of election results, drag the election into the courts, including al the way to his SCOTUS friends, and if that doesn’t work there’s always violence.  To paraphrase the Bette Davis line from All About Even: fasten your seat belts, it’s going to be a bumpy few months.

October 7 🕯️ 🕯️ 🕯️:  It’s been one very long year since Hamas invaded Israel, killing 1200, some at a concert, others asleep in their homes, while also abducting 250 more men, women, and babies, with many of those hostages since murdered.  Around the world, in Israel, Paris, London, German, Australia and Switzerland, ceremonies for the first anniversary of the Hamas attack are taking place.  Events are scheduled to take place in the US today as are a number of protests against the wars in Gaza and Lebanon, protests that here and abroad have in many cases morphed into anti-Semitic/anti-Israel rallies.  Since last October 7 things have gone downhill from what should have been the depths of hell.  More attacks, more missiles, more death, and no end in sight.  It’s just about a given that Israel will retaliate for Iran’s most recent missile barrage which in itself was a retaliation for Israel’s attacks on Hezbollah which were in retaliation for Hezbollah’s unending attacks on Northern Israel, and so on.  The official US party line, delivered by President Biden, is that Israel is entitled to retaliate for the most recent barrage, but that they shouldn’t go after Iran’s nuclear facilities.  Trump who claims that he’s the ultimate peacemaker who with the power of his Sharpie can stop all wars, is egging Israel’s Netanyahu, another seriously compromised politician, to go for the nukes. Israel has gone after nuclear facilities in the past, but Iran’s won’t be so easy to destroy which is probably why they haven’t been destroyed already so encouraging such an attack is not so presidential nor all that diplomatic but then again Trump cares little about that.  No one should be fooled, he is only saying what he thinks some of his donors and some voters want to hear while also further stirring the Middle East cauldron because increasing regional uncertainty raises gas prices and, upset about the economy’s continued upswing, he’d love an inflationary oil shock and maybe even a nuclear cloud before the election, even if it that brings more suffering in its wake.

Bibles, Watches, Crypto: Trump’s surrogates have been badmouthing the dockworkers’ quick return to work, they had been counting on a long strike and disruptions in supply chains tanking the economy.  On the subject of eye for an eye, and all that other Biblical stuff, over the summer Oklahoma’s top education official issued a mandate that the Bible be incorporated into all lesson plans.  Would it surprise you to learn that the only Bible that meets the very specific criteria he’s set for “teaching” those lessons is the $60 one being hawked by Trump?  Separation of church and state is out, but Trump Bibles and grift, bigly in.  Maybe mandating Trump watches in the classroom is next because don’t kids have to learn how to tell time?  Lastly, Rudy Guiliani’s daughter Caroline has endorsed Kamala.  That’s not surprising as she has been fairly vocal about her feelings about Trump and her father’s downward trajectory for some time.  

 

#BringThemAllHomeNow