Where's My Rommel? 🌴 ✡️🌻✡️🌻✡️ 🌴

Whiplash: As we barrel to election day, sleep is starting to elude me.  I suspect I am not alone.  My moods shift from optimism to pessimism about the outcome, hardly helped by the barrage of conflicting polls released daily.  On Monday, a Washington Post poll showed Harris up 6 points in Georgia, yesterday the Atlanta-Journal Constitution her down by 4.  David Plouffe, the long-time Barack Obama aide who ran his 2008 campaign and is now serving as a senior advisor to Kamala Harris says that most public polls are horseshxt 💩 and should be treated accordingly.  He stresses that the presidential race is close and any swing state poll showing either candidate winning by a significant margin should be dismissed. He says it’s a margin of error race and, though based on what he’s seeing in private polls, he’d rather be Harris than Trump, it remains very close.  That said, there is one poll that is making this New Yorker who admittedly spends too much time scrolling the doom and gloom, hellscape purveyor NY Post website.  According to a Siena College Poll released yesterday, Harris’ lead in New York State has increased to 19 points and though the race is closer in the traditionally more conservative suburbs including Long Island, Harris is also leading there by a narrower 5-point margin.  Siena may be off by the size of Harris’ NYS lead but that she’s leading NYS by a substantial amount is not surprising, and also may bode well for the Democrats hope of picking up some of those Biden district House seats that went red during the 2020 election.  It also makes Trump’s upcoming Madison Square Garden rally, which is being compared to the “Pro American” Nazi rally of 1939, that much more perplexing.  Punchbowl news reports that the rally, which is scheduled to take place on October 27, is sold out and that it will be attended by the hoi polloi of Republican leadership. Punchbowl is right about the leadership attendance, everyone from Speaker Mike Johnson to NY Representative Elise Stefanik, a big Republican money raiser, is planning to attend but it’s possible that some of those “sold out” 19,500 seats will be empty since a number of pundits, including never Trumper George Conway have posted social media messages encouraging Harris supporters to sign-up and no-show just for kicks.  We’ll know soon enough.

Late But Maybe Better than Never:  Retired Marine Corp General John Kelly, who first served as Trump’s Homeland Security Secretary and then as his Chief of Staff is finally speaking out about Trump, this time on the record rather than in secret conversations with authors like Bob Woodward. In a series of interviews published in today’s NY Times, he says that Trump “fits into the general definition of fascist.” that he admires and wants to be an authoritarian, and that he “wanted the kind of generals that Hitler had.” That last part is particularly ironic because Trump whose grasp of history is pathetically ignorant didn’t realize that Hitler’s generals tried to kill him three times and that ultimately one of his most storied ones, Erwin Rommel also known as the Desert Fox, committed suicide after one of the failed assassination attempts. In a fitting, albeit truly frightening companion piece to the NY Times’ Kelly interviews, The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg details Trump’s general disdain for members of the military and his misunderstanding of what they should and should not be ordered to do, not a surprise to anyone who remembers how Trump repeatedly disparaged wounded and/or captured soldiers and war heroes like former Senator John McCain or his most recent assertion that if reelected he’ll call upon the military to arrest his domestic adversaries, something he plans to do right about the same time that he closes down the NY Times and strips CBS and MSNBC of the their broadcast licenses. Goldberg cites how Trump failed to make good on a promise to pay the funeral expenses for US Army soldier Vanessa Guillen who was sexually harassed and then horrifically murdered by a fellow soldier in 2020.  Upon receiving the $60,000 bill for her funeral, an amount that reflected the size of the memorial service that took place in part as a result of all the attention that Trump helped feed by publicizing his faux outrage about her experience and murder, he told then Chief of Staff Mark Meadows to refuse the bill, saying “It doesn’t cost 60,000 bucks to bury a fxcking Mexican!” Trump doubled down, later saying those “fxcking people are trying to rip me off.”  That Hitler admiring, military disdaining, immigrant hating former president is running neck and neck with VP Kamala Harris and though it’s great to see these articles, and to finally hear directly from General Kelly, it may be a little late particularly since a lot of Trump’s voters don’t read either the NY Times or The Atlantic and it’s not like Fox is going to run with these stories. And I guess, this is as good a place to mention that Bret Stephens, one of the NY Times’ conservative pundits who earlier said that he wouldn’t vote for Trump now says that he’ll be voting for Kamala Harris but just reluctantly.  I want to say fxck him for his anemic support, but a vote is a vote, so I won’t.

It’s the Economy Stupid:  It turns out that the US economy which Trump and his Fox echo chamber repeatedly diss is, as reported by the Murdoch owned Wall Street Journal, “increasingly pulling ahead of the world’s advanced economies with a surge of investment paying off in higher productivity and wages.” The WSJ cites the International Monetary Fund which has upgraded its outlook for the US because our trends are better than most of the world’s other advanced economies.  That’s good news but the bad news is that the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget believes that a second Trump presidency threatens the financial stability of Social Security because the combination of his planned tax cuts, deportation of immigrants, and tariffs on imported goods would see it running out of cash in fiscal 2031, years earlier than now previously forecasted. So maybe Republicans, particularly those signing on to Trump’s tariff meshuggash (insanity) and its companion piece, the Project 2025 playbook aren’t good for the economy?

Fog:  There’s nothing good to report out of the Middle East, no peace, no ceasefire, and no hostage release.  And for those who think that Trump, who may be egging Netanyahu on in private to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities probably because a disastrous October surprise could help his election chances, is the solution, try listening to his interview with Saudi State TV.  That’s the interview where he once again professes his undying admiration for Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, the bone saw prince. Echoing his assertion that Abraham Lincoln wasn’t such a good president because he should have avoided the Civil War by agreeing to keep some slavery, his promise to end the Ukraine war by letting Russia keep all the land it’s taken from Ukraine, and his invitation to the Taliban and his phantom friend Abdul to visit Camp David on September 11, he says that he could have prevented October 7 because he would have “negotiated” with Hamas, you know the guys whose mantra is “from the river to the sea.” To be fair, maybe he doesn’t really mean that part, or at least that’s what he’s been telling mega donor Miriam Adelson, but he’s hoping to lure in some pro-Palestinian voters in Michigan so there’s that.      

And:  The Georgia Supreme Court has rejected Republican Party’s efforts to reinstate their election suppression rules, at least for this election cycle.  Vote, Vote, Vote!

#BringThemAllHomeNow