Whining 😱 ✡️🌻 😱 🚀🚢

Rorschach Test:   Ohio’s Republican candidate for Governor Vivek Ramaswamy’s slimy ad attacking his Democratic opponent Dr. Amy Acton is the Rorschach test that none of wanted to see but that we are nevertheless all seeing.  Sadly, the response by the usual players, while not surprising, confirms expectations.  That Acton was sexually accosted by her stepfather as a tween and brutally mistreated by her mother is a given.  Her stepfather was indicted, only avoiding a trial and punishment because he fled the state while her mother lost custody of Acton and her younger brother.  Though a number of Republican politicians have been “deeply disturbed” by the Ramaswamy ad, including Ohio’s outgoing Republican Governor Mike DeWine and at-risk Republican Senator Jon Husted who said he wouldn’t have run it, Vice President Vance praised Ramaswamy for his audacity and said he was disgusted, not by Acton being raped but by those Republicans who criticized the ad, telling them they needed to stop whining.  Trump attacked Governor DeWine for his criticism and then posting on Truth Social that Vivek should keep the ad up and running to “let everyone listen to the mother of a defective, dishonest, and incapable Candidate, explain how the daughter is a DISASTER who, uncontrollably, lies, cheats, and steals!”  Who’s surprised that Trump, an adjudicated rapist who has bragged about grabbing women’s crotches and has also been accused of more than a dozen other sex crimes, is team Vivek?  Polls show Acton leading Ramaswamy and Democratic challenger/Former Senator Sherrod Brown leading current Senator Jon Husted, the guy whose butt Trump can’t stop admiring.  However, Ohio is very red, and as shown by a recently exposed scandal concerning Wedgewood Polling, polls can be inaccurate or worse, as in the case of Wedgewood, intentionally misleading.  Wedgewood, a “progressive” polling company whose polls were including in a number of supposedly reputable polling averages, now admits that their polls were completely fabricated social experiments.  Those polls showed democratic socialist Francesca Hong leading in the Wisconsin gubernatorial primary that she ultimately lost to the more centrist David Crowley.  The company’s polls also showed Michigan’s Mallory McMorrow losing badly to Abdul El-Sayed and Representative Haley Stevens in the Democratic Senator primary that El-Sayed ultimately won but by far less than the Wedgewood polls said he would.  The Wedgewood polls scared away McMorrow’s donors and contributed to her decision to pull the plug on her campaign.  As to the other polls, legitimate or not, they show many key races, including the unexpected tight race for Senator in Minnesota, within the margin of era.  If you aren’t nervous about the midterm’s outcomes you should be, not just because so many races are so close, but because Trump is already casting shade on their legitimacy.  Making matters more challenging, yesterday the Supreme Court said that it was fine for New Hampshire and presumably other states, to ban student IDs as acceptable proofs of identity. Could that be because younger people tend to favor Democratic candidates?   

War:  Yesterday, Trump said that he’d spoken to Elon Musk, requesting that he lift the restrictions on Ukraine’s military grade Starlink that Musk imposed on his own or with a wink and a nod from Trump last week (by the way it was Henry II not VIII who wanted his meddlesome priest killed).  US and Ukrainian officials say that the Starlink system is now back to working more normally as the result of Trump’s request although some Ukrainian officials said the system while working at higher speeds hasn’t been restored to full functionality. In other Russian related news, Putin, who delusional, inept real estate guy Steve Witkoff called a humanitarian has finally released long- held American 74-year-old hostage Steven Hubbard.  Note to everyone, humanitarians don’t take and hold hostages while intentional targeting civilian sites. Also, yesterday, the NY Times reported that the US and Israel are making plans for more attacks on Iran after both country’s elections.  Whether those plans are just plans or are for real, only time will tell.  Iran, however, is taking them seriously, doing more saber rattling, Strait of Hormuz ship targeting, and threatening worse. As reported by MSNOW earlier this week, Iran’s threats and capabilities shouldn’t be underestimated. Their earlier attacks on the US’s Fifth Fleet Naval base in Bahrain resulted in more crippling, possibly even irreparable, damage than revealed by Trump and Hegseth’s Pentagon. That damage hasn’t just affected infrastructure but has also seriously disrupted the lives of the families of those who had been stationed in what had been the relatively safe Bahrain.

Other 💩:  Yesterday Calley Means, RFK Jr’s top MAHA advisor, quit.  Means, whose sister Calley had been Trump’s Surgeon General nominee before her nomination was pulled over her cockamamie anti-vaccine position, reportedly resigned because he couldn’t get the Trump administration to implement his plans to get all the additive crap out of the food supply and because the administration refused to regulate the cancer-causing weed killer glyphosate. Means had been instrumental in arranging the shidduck (marriage) between RFK and Trump that helped Trump win in 2024.  For some reason, Means thought that Trump whose preferred diet includes hamburgers, fries, extra servings of ice cream, and Diet Coke would actually go after the food industrial complex. Also, yesterday it was reported that the Department of Justice is investigating former DHS de facto Chief of Staff and maybe still Kristi Noem’s paramour for “contract misconduct.”  Trump said that he’s heard something about that but that he doesn’t “know exactly what it is,” and that he wants “his people to be honest. And if they’re not going to be honest, they have to be prosecuted.”  Then again Trump also went off on a tangent about not having received a Pulitzer Prize during one of his recent rallies so it’s fair to assume that a pardon awaits Lewandowski, who like Kimberly Guilfoyle, knows where lots of bodies are buried.  Trump is still threatening and restricting the press.  In addition to calling a slew of reporters stupid for asking real questions, he banned the Independent’s Andrew Feinberg from the White House press pool.  Feinberg’s crime, having a contentious exchange with Trump about his offering of financial rewards to whistleblowers who expose government fraud.  Trump called his question "fundamentally dishonest" adding "I don't know who the hell you are, but you better be careful." And then called him a “sick person” after he attempted to ask another question about Trump's golf course plans. By threatening them Trump has gotten Politico to retract the section of their recent article that said that Susie Wiles had set up Press Secretary for a nanosecond Katie Zacharia by scheduling her career killing interview with Fox’s Sean Hannity but is making less progress in his attempt to extort $10 billion from the BBC.  Trump’s been trying to avoid sitting for a deposition in his lawsuit against the British broadcaster, pushing off his last agreed to October date because he had important business to deal with.  The judge overseeing the case isn’t buying that attending a political rally to admire butts counted as important business and says that Trump better show up on December 11 or face having the case dropped.  It’s not a stretch to assume that Trump will be busy trying to overturn the Midterm results and/or waging war against Iran and won’t show up then or ever.