The Flying Nun 🌴 ✡️🌻✡️🌻✡️ 🌴

Storm Clouds:  Hurricane Milton hasn’t made landfall in the US yet but already the official Trump/Vance line, bolstered by Republican Congressman Steve Scalise and amplified by Elon Musk, is that the Helene recovery efforts and the Milton preparations being undertaken by the Biden administration and by extension VP/presidential candidate Kamala Harris are the real disaster.  A number of Governors, Republican and Democrat, insist that the administration is doing a good job and has been quick out of the box, doing whatever it can wherever necessary, but the Trump’s team is going with disaster response is a disaster theme because disinformation is so much more on brand and has so much election tilting potential, The Wall Street Journal in on the action, sort of.  Yesterday they ran a JD Vance authored op-ed in which the prince of smarm slams the administration for its horrible response to Milton predecessor Helene, asserting that the administration cares little about JD’s Appalachian brethren and that  Biden was lolling at his beach house in Delaware, while Harris was hobnobbing with celebrities, and Homeland Security head Mayorkas was busy giving handouts to illegal migrants, those people who Trump insists have bad blood and even worse genes when they should have been tossing paper towel rolls at storm victims. Today’s WSJ has an article entitled “FEMA battles two storms – and Misinformation,” about how lies like those spread in the JD Vance piece they published yesterday is making the hurricane recovery process more difficult, even convincing some gullible victims that they shouldn’t bother seeking the lifesaving government help they need.  No wonder we as a nation are so divided, how can we not be, when media outlets like the increasingly schizophrenic WSJ know the truth but consciously remain part of the problem that they themselves point out as the problem?   

Media Blitz:  As to Kamala Harris, JD is wrong about her ignoring hurricane relief but he’s right about one thing, she has been spending some of her time “hobnobbing”  with the media and that seems to be eating his and his Trump’s kishkes out.  She’s been everywhere, on 60 Minutes, on The View, with Howard Stern, on the popular Call her Daddy podcast and last night she shared a Miller Lite with Stephen Colbert. Sure, she doesn’t have Elon Musk doing bizarre cheerleading jumps at her rallies, but at least so far, her media romp has gone off without a hitch and really, did we need to see Musk’s flabby midsection?   Trump who initially committed to participating in 60 Minutes’s presidential candidates interview episode, a tradition that spans fifty years, pulled out of his scheduled interview because 60 Minutes fact checks, something he abhors for fairly obvious reasons.  His team added that he’s also still mad at CBS’s Lesley Stahl over something she never said.  Trump’s team is now furious that CBS went ahead with the episode without him and that they opened the segment with a statement to viewers about how he pulled out largely because of that not so little check thing. By the way Elon Musk says it’s okay that his X promotes hurricane lies as well as anti-Semitic tropes because though X doesn’t fact check it includes “community notes” where others can fact check if they want to and anyway it’s okay to tell people that Democrats, particularly Jewish Democrats are responsible for hurricanes if they’re dumb enough to believe it.

Russia, Russia, Russia:  Bob Woodward is back, this time teasing his soon to be released book “War.” In the book which will be available to the masses next week, Woodward cites an unnamed Trump aide’s revelation that Trump and Putin have spoken at least seven times since Trump left office in 2021.  Those assertions are not all that surprising considering that Trump, hardly a student of history, seems very up on the Kremlin’s talking points on Russia’s “stellar” military history and is also so very simpatico with Putin’s views on Ukraine.  Also, there’s Trump’s ongoing efforts to get his House and Senate “colleagues” to block the aid Ukraine needs to continue fighting against Russia’s invasion as well as his assertion that he’ll resolve the Ukraine-Russia “dispute” immediately after he “wins” the election, by making Ukraine agree to Putin’s demands, or as Kamala Harris so aptly puts it, by making Ukraine surrender.  The Woodward book also reveals that Trump secretly sent sophisticated COVID-19 testing equipment to Putin for his personal use early in the pandemic.  That was back when testing was unavailable to the rest of us but then again each of us only has one vote while Putin has the resources and ability to influence the outcome of elections.  Woodward’s book also addresses President’s Biden difficult relationship with Israel’s Netanyahu, noting that Biden, known for using “spicy” language has applied some “eff” words to Bibi.  That’s not so shocking, more than half of Israelis share that sentiment.  Bibi is and always will be Bibi and  “eff” words aren’t all that shocking, hardly as incriminating as Trump’s ongoing canoodling with Vladimir Putin which should really, really concern us but doesn’t because we are so desensitized to his violation of norms and laws.  Naturally, Trump’s team is now slamming Woodward, calling his assertions made-up and claiming they just prove that he’s suffering from advanced Trump Derangement Syndrome.  JD Vance even suggested that not only does no one care what Woodward has to say but that he didn’t even know that Woodward was still alive.

Just Get Over It: Reproductive rights are still a bigly issue though the Republican party line seems to be that women need to just get over losing their body autonomy.  That appears to be the SCOTUS view too, on Monday they let it be known that they are totally okay with Texas refusing to provide emergency abortions to women who show up at hospital emergency rooms if providing that care violates Texas law because who really cares about women anyway. Apparently, The Flying Nun’s Sister Bertrille, better known as Sally Fields, is not okay with that.  Fields was 19 when she started playing Sister Bertrille in that long ago sitcom.  She revealed this week that just two years before she starred in the Flying Nun sitcom, she had an illegal, painful abortion.  That was in the before Roe times which are now the current times for women in the thirteen states with total abortion bans and the eight more with early, including six-week bans.   

More Politics:   The race to replace New Jersey’s senior Democratic Senator Bob Menendez who having been tried and convicted of bribery, extortion, and acting as a foreign agent, finally stepped down from the Senate is on between Democratic Congressman Andy Kim and Republican businessman Curtis Bashaw.  Kim best known until now for picking-up waste left in the Capitol by the January “tourists,” played hometown hero again during his recent debate with Bashaw. While answering a question, the 63-year-old Bashaw, glitched, freezing in place, experiencing some kind of medical emergency, perhaps a seizure or maybe as he later said he was just hungry?  While everyone watched in stunned silence, Kim sprang into action, rushing to Bashaw’s podium to try to help. Finally, taking a cue from Kim, the debate moderator called for a commercial after which Bashaw returned to finish the debate.  Kim who leads in the polls by a around four points is expected to win the NJ seat, but nothing is a given.  Also, despite his assertion that he unlike Kamala has been to Gaza, Trump has not been to Gaza though he still wants to build a beach resort there someday soon.  At least a few Muslim groups are waking up to the fact that even though they’re not happy with Harris’ support for Israel that seeing Trump retake the White House won’t be a good thing for them, maybe it’s the specter of a Trump Gaza resort, or maybe it’s his Muslim ban. In an open letter, twenty-five Islamic religious leaders have endorsed the Harris/Walz ticket, telling their followers that they have a duty to think logically about their voting.              

#BringThemAllHomeNow