Beep, Beep 🌴 ✡️🌻✡️🌻✡️ 🌴

The Blame Game: Forget about ratcheting down the rhetoric.  Trump, JD Vance. and their red echo chamber are all in on blaming Democrats for last weekend’s assassination attempt by Ryan Wesley Routh.  Vance, like Trump fan Elon Musk, isn’t hiding his disappointment that Kamala Harris and President Biden haven’t been similarly targeted, ignoring of course that they are routinely threatened.  Vance blames “the Democrats” for “whipping supporters into a violent frenzy,” while Musk actually questioned on X why “no one is even trying to assassinate Biden/Kamala,” emphasizing his post with a thinking face emoji/nudge.  Despite receiving significant backlash for that tweet, he left it in place for nine hours before finally taking it down, perhaps only because it was publicly noted by the FBI.  As to Routh, though he’s reported to have made $140 in ActBlue donations since 2019, he is far from a left-wing radical.  In fact, having grown disillusioned with Trump over his pro-Russian stance, the pro-Ukraine Routh’s 2024 dream ticket included Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy rather than Biden or Harris though he also liked Tulsi Gabbard, odd because like Trump, Tulsi and Vivek are Team Vlad rather than Team Zelenskyy. Worth noting, despite his support, Ukrainian officials early on realized that Routh was a delusional and dangerous kook and wanted him to stay as far away as possible. As to Trump’s vulnerability, apparently, for years he’s been told that providing adequate protection while he’s puttering around on his golf courses, most of which are too close to public roads and all of which are open to other players, is near impossible. Congress is now considering increasing Secret Service funding in order to provide Trump with more security, and while it’s fair to believe that former presidents and current candidates should be well protected, particularly while campaigning, it shouldn’t be a stretch to say that they should act responsibly.  Trump should cut back on the golfing because maybe our tax-payer dollars could be better spent elsewhere?  As to those tax dollars, concerned about “Komrade” Kamala’s rise in the polls, Trump who’s already promised Nevada’s casino workers that he’ll end taxing tips, now claims that he’ll also end taxing overtime pay and that he’ll restore the State and Local Tax deduction that he capped when he was president.  Forget about the burgeoning deficit, that only matters when Democrats are in office or when they are trying to provide child tax credits.

Reproductive Politics: Apparently, Senate Republicans missed it when Trump said that he would not only protect access to IVF but would also have either the government or insurance companies cover the cost of IVF and other fertility treatments. Yesterday, with the exception of Senators Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski, they all voted against advancing an IVF protection bill.  JD Vance was not present for the vote, he was too busy campaigning and doubling down on Haitian hate because apparently 30 bomb threats aren’t enough.  When asked about the IVF vote, he said that there was no need to protect IVF because why bother. Meantime, back in the real-world women are dying as a result of the Supreme Court’s Roe overturning Dobbs decision.  And we’re not just talking about nameless statistics but real people, like 28-year-old, mother of one, Amber Nicole Thurman who died of sepsis related complications after being deprived of an emergency D & C by a suburban Atlanta hospital where doctors were so afraid that providing her with what was previously routine care would be a violation of Georgia’s new six week abortion ban, a violation that could land them in jail for up to ten years. There will be many more Ambers and there will be many more maternity care deserts as trained Ob-Gyn’s flee states where laws restrict their ability to provide medically necessary care.  When the Dobbs decision was announced, there was some suggestion that Chief Justice Roberts was really just a right leaning moderate being pushed to the dark side by forces out of his control.  Forget about that, the NY Times reports that he’s actually quite happy with the Court’s recent right-wing decisions, particularly the one that protects Trump from suffering consequences for most, if not all, of his actions. That could be a bigly problem for the country if November’s election ends up in the courts.

Endorsements:  Add, Martha Stewart, Billie Eilish, her brother Finneas O’Connell and a slew of military and former Bush, Reagan, and Romney related officials to the list of people who’ve endorsed Kamala over Trump.  It’s not clear that those endorsements will really matter but maybe they will on the edges.  The Teamsters union which met with Kamala Harris earlier this week but whose leader also spoke at the Republican convention may or may not be issuing an endorsement of one of the candidates today.  And then there’s the Pope who did a both sides thing last week, saying it’s up to his flock to determine who is the lesser of two evils, the woman who supports reproductive freedom and IVF or the one who treats living migrants like dirt.

Fog:  In case you missed it, a whole bunch of beepers exploded in Lebanon yesterday. It turns out that beepers are the communication device of choice for members of Hezbollah who eschew cell phones over concerns that using them makes them easy targets for Israel’s military.  Well, it looks like beepers aren’t safe either. Maybe relentlessly launching missiles into Israel and making northern parts of the country unlivable has consequences. In any case, one thing is clear: peace is not around the corner and also beepers aren’t safe. 

#BringThemAllHomeNow

Squeaky, Sarah, and Ryan  🌴 ✡️🌻✡️🌻✡️ 🌴

Yet Again:    Another crazy who despite his lengthy criminal record possessed an AK 47 style rifle attempted to assassinate Trump yesterday as he played still another round of golf in Florida.  Assasination attempts are always bad, but still it’s worth putting this second attempt to take out Trump in historical perspective since it turns out that he’s not the first president, or in this case former president, to be targeted twice in one summer.  A Charlie Manson cult member named Lynette Alice ”Squeaky” Fromme and another woman named Sarah Jane Moore each tried to kill Gerald Ford within 17 days of each other in September 1975.  With AK 47s not yet in vogue, their attempts both involved somewhat less lethal pistols.  Ryan Wesley Routh, the 58-year-old man who tried to shoot Trump this weekend, was captured not long after he was spotted hiding in some golf course bushes with his rifle point at Trump. Routh voted for Trump in 2016 but appears to have grown disillusioned with him over his pro-Russia/anti-Ukraine position thus his twisted rationale for attempting an assassination. By the way, after the attempts on his life, President Ford was persuaded to wear a special bullet proof trench coat.  Somehow, I doubt that Trump will follow suit. He also probably won’t give up playing golf despite the challenges and costs of protecting him in such wide-open spaces.  

Memes: We shouldn’t let the assassination attempt divert from all the other crazy things that Trump and his team said last week and continued to say over the weekend because those utterances are bad too, and they have the potential to be responsible for the loss of life among people who don’t have Secret Service protection teams or bullet proof trench coats.  In particular, there’s that whole “Haitians are eating pets” bull sh-t, sure the memes are funny but the hate part not so much.  VP candidate/Ohio Senator JD Vance admitted to CNN’s Dana Bash that he happily spreads and amplifies the lies despite knowing they’re fabricated because he just has to get Americans focused on the ills of illegal immigration. That is evil because those lies have already led to bomb threats, school closings and hospital lockdowns in Springfield and in some neighboring communities in Ohio including Dayton.  It’s also a misrepresentation of the status of the Haitians living in Springfield, they’re in the US legally having been granted temporary immigration status and permission to work due to the upheavals in their home country.  We shouldn’t be fooled by any of this, Taking a page from Goebbels and company, Trump and Vance are targeting Haitians to foment racial hatred, to freak out marginalized white voters to get them to show up and vote for him on election day.  Keeping with the theme of hate and division Trump’s Republican Party abettors are also running ads in Michigan’s Arab communities that highlight that Kamala Harris’ husband Doug Emhoff is Jewish because while Trump has been telling Jewish Americans that they’d be idiots to vote for “anti-Israel” Kamala, his team wants Arab Americans to believe that voting for “pro-Israel” Kamala would be equally idiotic.  To put the icing on the hate cake, before the assassination attempt sucked the oxygen out of the news cycle, Trump posted “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT” on Truth Social yesterday. Though it would be easy to slough off his post as more kindergarten level sour grapes, there are Trump idolizers out there who will interpret it as a permission slip to hurt Swift who cancelled three Vienna performances in August in response to very real threats. After all, Trump’s all in on Laura Loomer, the right wing conspiracist who routinely spreads hatred across social media and asserts that Kamala who is either too pro-Israel or very anti-Israel is going to set up a caliphate.  Trump says he keeps Loomer around because despite her evil lies, she’s a “free spirit” who really likes him.  Isn’t that the only thing that matters?     

Polling:  For whatever it’s worth the national polls mostly show Kamala up a few more points. Nice but it’s winning the Electoral College vote that matters, and the important swing state polls remain too close for comfort, mostly within the margin of error. Curiously or, dare I optimistically say, an indication of things to come, some polls in states that don’t really matter are also moving in Kamala’s direction. According to the respected Des Moines Register/Mediacom poll Kamala is now down by only 4 points in Iowa where Biden was down 18 points in the Spring.  Similarly, Kamala is now down by only 5 points in Alaska, a state where Trump beat Biden by 10 points in 2020.  These trends which need to spill into the swing states to influence the outcome of the election, likely explain why the Republican machine is hyper focused on voter suppression because preventing blue votes from counting is just as effective as getting red voters to vote.    

#BringThemAllHomeNow     

 

Another Broken Toy 🌴 ✡️🌻✡️🌻✡️ 🌴

Cats and Dogs:  Ohio’s Haitians aren’t dining on household pets but the racist conspiracy theory that they are being eaten has legs in part because the state’s junior Senator who also happens to be the Republican’s candidate for Vice President is still pushing it, telling CNN’s Kaitlan Collins that just because no one’s been able to document the story’s validity doesn’t mean that it’s not true. Naturally, given the country’s temperature, Vance’s comments, like those of his mango buddy have consequences so in an abundance of caution some of Springfield, Ohio’s Haitian parents kept their children home from school yesterday over fears that delusional MAGA maniacs would do something criminally stupid. It’s hard to question their concern given that Springfield’s town hall and multiple other of the town’s government related buildings were evacuated yesterday, the result of emailed bomb threats.  While Trump and Vance are still pushing the hate filled pet trope, yesterday one former Springfield, Ohio resident used his social media presence to try to defuse the anti-Haitian, anti-immigrant frenzy they’ve triggered. John Legend who was raised in Springfield posted a thoughtful message noting that Springfield’s Haitian population had been encouraged to move to the town to fill open manufacturing jobs and that they’ve reinvigorated what had been a shrinking metropolis. He encouraged people to see each other’s humanity and to remember the Golden Rule to “love thy neighbor as thyself.”  We need more John Legends.

Loomer Looms:  Citing X (Twitter) polls even his surrogate RFK Jr acknowledges are highly suspect, Trump insists that he resoundingly won Tuesday night’s debate even though everyone with half a brain or a worm hole in their brain knows he lost bigly.  That said, he has no interest in being trounced again by Kamala so yesterday he posted that he won’t be participating in any more debates.  He probably won’t but then again, it’s not like Trump sticks to his plans so don’t be surprised if he changes his mind but at least for now we only have the October 1 debate between Tim Walz and JD Vance to endure.  Future debates or not Trump is keeping his newest comfort blanket, racist conspiracist Laura Loomer, by his side. Loomer seems to be filling the travel companion spot previously occupied by Hope Hicks. Even though she is a known 9.11 skeptic who asserts that the day’s heinous attacks were an “inside job,” Trump brought her along to Wednesday’s memorial service.  Loomer who with Trump’s endorsement once ran for Congress in his Palm Beach area district, routinely expresses her hate for all things Muslim, she’s called for Kellyanne Conway’s daughter Claudia to hang herself, and now, in response to comments from Senator Lindsey Graham and Margie Q that Trump should find himself a new less broken comfort toy, she’s publicly questioning Graham’s sexuality and calling Margie Q a hooker. Those attacks are totally in character for Loomer, she’s previously asserted that Kamala Harris is childless because of her “many abortions” and more recently warned that should Harris win, the White House will smell of curry and that calls to the government will be answered by an incomprehensible call center.  It’s not surprising that Trump has no problem with anything that Loomer says but he’s not alone in tolerating her bigotry and conspiracy mongering, the National Republican Senate Committee (NRSC) uses videos that she produces for their campaigns.  

Red Endorsements:  Alberto Gonzales who served as Attorney General during George W Bush’s administration has joined Bush’s VP Dick Cheney in endorsing Kamala Harris.  Yesterday he said that he “can’t sit quietly as Donald Trump – perhaps the most serious threat to the rule of law in a generation – eyes a return to the White House.”  Their one-time boss, George W,  who doesn’t seem to care about the future of the country, remains silent, hanging out in Texas with his easel and paint brushes.  Also yesterday, current Attorney General Merrick Garland publicly denounced “dangerous and outrageous attacks on Department of Justice prosecutors and personnel.” He didn’t specifically name Trump as one of those attackers, but he clearly had him in mind.  For what it is worth, though Trump still has far too much support to fathom, Harris’ poll numbers, including in North Carolina which hasn’t gone blue since Obama’s first election,  appear to be improving and we still haven’t seen post-debate polls yet. Unfortunately, Montana Democrat Jon Tester remains seriously underwater, a problem because if he falls, it’s likely that the Senate will go red, which isn’t good for future Supreme Court confirmations.

#BringThemAllHomeNow       

      

Running Fast as She Can🌴 ✡️🌻✡️🌻✡️ 🌴

Fearless Leader, Alpha Type:  Maybe doing debate prep with the dubious duo of Matt Gaetz and Tulsi Gabbard wasn’t such a good idea? Maybe traveling to Philadelphia with far-right activist Laura Loomer, who Margie Q of all people calls a mentally unstable, documented liar, wasn’t a brilliant decision? Maybe, my favorite online comment, men are just too emotional to be president?  Or maybe it’s just that Trump got tripped up by a really prepared Kamala Harris who stayed on script, pivoted whenever she could to her clearly practiced lines while using all of her prosecutorial skills to push his buttons and goad him into spouting all the inane things his handlers begged him to avoid.  Sure, I expected Trump to shout about the millions upon millions of violent migrants crossing the border straight from Latin American asylums, to celebrate his good friends Viktor Orban, Vladimir Putin, and Kim Jung un, and to claim that Kamala was all in on post term abortions, but the assertion that Haitian immigrants are eating petnapped kittens and puppies, I thought that one was too loony even for him.  But was I ever wrong about that, With his nose dripping, Trump was so rattled that he went with it and then pushed back at ABC moderator David Muir after he said he’d actually checked and that no cats 🐱 🐱 or dogs 🐶 🐶 were showing up on dinner plates in Springfield, Ohio despite VP candidate JD Vance’s assertion and Trump’s concurrence that they were.  Dogs and cats aside, Trump was incapable of voicing any support for Ukraine, perhaps his handler in Moscow warned him not to, but Kamala was quick to warn that if Putin’s Ukraine land grab succeeds, historical precedent indicates that he’ll target Poland next, shrewdly slipping in that swingy Pennsylvania has 800,000 residents of Polish descent. Trump also got tripped up on the politics of abortion even though he had to know that Kamala who spent the two years since the overturning of Roe v Wade honing her abortion speech all over the country would be very prepared on the subject and that the ABC moderators, this time Linsey Davis, would push him on whether or not he’d sign a national abortion ban if it got to his desk.  He twisted himself into knots not answering that question, knowing that one response would offend most women, while the other would enrage his evangelical base. Though he had a really bad night and still doesn’t have a health plan, Trump insisted that he won the evening, and naturally his surrogates blamed ABC and its “biased” moderators for having the temerity to call out some, though not all of his outright lies. To cap the evening, one particularly prominent debate watcher issued a surprise endorsement at the end of the debate.  Calling Vice President Harris a “steady-handed” and “gifted leader,” who will lead with “calm, not chaos” and signing her message Childless Cat Lady while including a picture of her with her cat Benjamin Button, the insanely popular Taylor Swift said that she was all in on the Harris-Walz ticket.  Surprised or not, Harris’ campaign was ready.  To the joy of many Swifties new and old, the campaign team immediately started playing “The Man.”  And how could they resist?  Will Harris’ great night and that Swift endorsement swing voters? Who knows, but last night certainly won’t hurt.  54 Days.

All Good if You’re Bad? Elon Musk, the increasingly dangerous oligarch who gets Trumpier, emboldened, and more unacceptable every day, offered to impregnate Taylor Swift after her Harris endorsement last night in a bizarre and offensive X (Twitter) post   I kid you not. He should probably stay far away from Travis Kelce and the whole Kansas City Chief squad not to mention the world’s countless Swifties.  That was after he spent part of the week promoting Tucker Carlson’s interview of Holocaust denier Darryl Cooper who in addition to asserting that Winston Churchill, not Hitler, was the chief villain of WW II, claims that the murder of six million Jews and millions of others by the Nazis was just the inadvertent consequence of bad planning rather than evil intent.  JD Vance refused to condemn Tucker’s platforming of Cooper and still plans to be interviewed by Carlson on an upcoming broadcast. Because hate sells and Holocaust deniers vote?  Shifting to Congress, believe it or not another funding deadline looms. Speaker for now Mike Johnson is pushing for a stopgap funding measure that includes a requirement that all voters in federal elections show proof of citizenship before being allowed to cast their ballots, a controversial fix for a problem that doesn’t exist.  That requirement which sounds innocent, is not, rather it is a voter suppression measure intended to place impediments in front of qualified voters who don’t have copies of their birth certificates, driver’s licenses or passports, a group mostly made up of less advantaged people, frequently people of color, who tend to vote blue rather than red.  Again, countless election audits have shown that non-citizens don’t illegally vote.

#BringThemAllHomeNow 

  

Sane Washing 🌴 ✡️🌻✡️🌻✡️ 🌴

56 Days:  Happy Monday to all those who didn’t buy their disturbed children or any of their children an AK 47 like weapon for Christmas.  It’s mind blowing that the father of the Georgia school shooter thought, even after he was told that his son was posting threatening messages on social media, that such a “gift” was appropriate for his then 13-year- old, but then again it’s nuts that there are at least two members of Congress, Lauren Boebert and Thomas Massie, whose annual Christmas cards include pictures of their kids adorned with weaponry and that there are dozens more who routinely don NRA rifle pins as a sign of gun ownership solidarity.  Misinformed childcare strategies are the rage with Republican politicians which could explain why Trump’s answer to a question about childcare, an issue foreign to him, at the Economic Club of New York was that “childcare is childcare” and that his solution is tariffs, with some insane word salad about his billionaire daughter Ivanka and Marco Rubio. Putting aside that Trump has no idea how tariffs work, it should be obvious that he cares nothing about helping working parents meet their childcare needs, after all his Project 2025 manifesto defunds education and proven programs like Head Start. His partner in stupidity, JD Vance is all in on childcare but thinks that working mothers, a concept he doesn’t endorse, should forget about government assistance of any kind, and instead demand that their mothers babysit, and if those grandmothers are not available maybe get help from some of those cat lady aunts who he routinely disses.  Forget about compensation, the grandmothers and aunts should be more than willing to clear their schedules for free.  Circling back to the Economic Club, the attendees mostly greeted Trump’s misinformed and absurd remarks about tariffs being a cure-all with applause either because they’re equally ignorant about basic economics or more likely because they just want their income taxes lowered, no matter what the consequences, and likely also because the specter of a Black woman who is also a Democrat as president, the woman who Trump is now calling Komrad Kamala, is too much for them to take.  Sadly, the Economic Club attendees are not alone.  Despite Trump’s call for “bloody” mass deportations, an economic plan that will increase the deficit by way more than any of “Komrad” Harris’ plans,  his weekend threats to jail people “involved in unscrupulous behavior” related to voting in the upcoming election, his promise to pardon all the January 6 rioters, and all his other insane rants, polls indicate that the outcome of the November election remains too close to predict. All eyes and ears are now on Tuesday night’s debate.  Kamala’s team says she’s been preparing, Trump’s says he hasn’t been because he’s a superior being. They lie, he’s been practicing too with the help of his bombastic acolytes Matt Gaetz and Tulsi Gabbard.  Get ready for the press to dissect and critique every word that comes out of Harris’ mouth while “sane washing” everything that Trump utters because that’s what they do.                 

Fog, Vaccines, Crazy:  The March of Dimes’ original mission was fighting polio, the sometimes-paralytic disease that disproportionately impacts children and young adults. They redefined their mission to preventing birth defects after polio vaccines dramatically lowered, almost eliminated the worldwide incidence of polio. Unfortunately, there’s been an uptick in polio mostly attributed to the World Health Organization’s well-intentioned but, as it turns out, bad decision to remove one of the three polio strains previously included in the vaccine used mostly in third world countries.  This brings me to Gaza and to the US.  Hamas is evil but they get the value of vaccines so even under their rule, Gazans have been good at getting their children vaccinated.  Before October 7 polio vaccination rates there were around 99%.  However, given the war, that polio vaccines are given in four doses starting at two months, and that the WHO’s new vaccine is inadequate, there have been cases of polio in Gaza.  The good news is that Israel has provided WHO with polio vaccines and those vaccines are being administered. The war is still raging, the process is fraught, but Gazans are lining up for vaccines.  Contrast their eagerness to get their children vaccinated despite the dangers of war with the current situation in the US where polio and also MMR vaccine rates are dropping, now down to the low 90s which is below the ideal threshold for disease prevention, not because of war but because of our lunatic anti-vaccine movement.  Then consider that Trump, the presidential candidate of one of the two major parties has aligned himself with RFK Jr, a charismatic anti-vaxxer who is on record saying that he’s never met a vaccine he likes, not just COVID vaccines, but all the childhood vaccines. Worse yet, Trump has announced that RFK Jr will be on his transition team where he will focus on health issues, not just on vaccines but also on women’s health. Make America Sick Again?   

Legalities:  Juan Merchan, Trump’s New York hush money case judge, has pushed off sentencing him until after the election.  That’s disappointing but not all that surprising because while Trump shouldn’t be treated differently than any other defendant, it’s hard to not treat him differently and sentencing him now could energize his voters even more than they already are.  There is some activity however in the January 6 case being overseen by Judge Tanya Chutkan who has chosen to ignore as irrelevant Florida Judge Eileen “loose” Cannon’s ruling that Special Counsel Jack Smith was illegally appointed largely because he wasn’t. There will be no trial in DC until long after the election, if ever, but there could be some releases of incriminating evidentiary documents in the coming weeks.  In other legal news, Hunter Biden has plead guilty to the tax charges that he’s been fighting.  Nothing about Hunter’s case makes a lot of sense since usually people who, like Hunter, pay what they should have paid in the first place are treated less harshly prosecutors so it’s hard not to see his case as politically motivated. Hunter said he changed his plea so that his family wouldn’t have to go through the pain and expense of a trial.  Joe Biden previously said he wouldn’t pardon Hunter but then again that was before he pulled out of the race.  

#BringThemAllHomeNow

  

 

Borscht 🌴 ✡️🌻✡️🌻✡️ 🌴

Guns, Guns, Schools:  School is back in session and since guns remain easily accessible even to a fourteen-year-old with a known history of making online threats, yesterday two teachers and two students were shot to death by that student with an AR-platform style weapon at Winder, Georgia’s Apalachee High School. Nine additional victims were hospitalized. The state of Georgia is in the upper third for firearm mortality in the US.  Adults there don’t need a permit to buy rifles, shotguns, or handguns, don’t need to register their guns, don’t need a permit to carry rifles and shotguns and don’t need to do anything special to keep their guns away from their children, even those with a history of making gun related threats.  In 2022, Georgia repealed provisions requiring people to obtain a license and be subject to background checks before carrying concealed weapons in public spaces.  After the shooting, Georgia’s Governor Kemp who oversaw the elimination of his state’s concealed carry law refused to answer any questions about how to make Georgia’s schools safer from gun violence saying instead that “this is not the day to talk about safety or policy.  We need thoughts and prayers.”  So, although the shooting was tragic, nothing about it is all that surprising.  Just another day in America when a politician like Kemp who is popular enough to deal with pushback from the gun lobby is unwilling to talk about or do anything constructive about guns beyond those thoughts and prayers. 

Russia, Russia, Election:  We’re in the midst of another hotly contested election year where everything that matters is up for grabs so it’s also not all that surprising that Russia is once again engaging in election interference.  Yesterday the Department of Justice indicted, in absentia because they are in Russia, two employees of Russian government owned media company Russia Today (RT) for covertly providing $10 million in funding to Tenet Media, a Tennessee based US company that platforms right wing MAGA commentators including Tim Pool and Benny Johnson both of whom have many millions of followers on YouTube.  According to the DOJ indictment, the “commentators” were fed RT curated content through Tenet and were paid $400,000 per month to produce anti-woke, anti-Ukraine, pro-Trump videos.  Pool, Johnson, and the other so-called influencers who received the Russian payments claim that they didn’t know that they were Russians tools, but they had to know that something was full of borscht because the payments they received were above market. The RT folks were also involved with the bizarre video of former Fox star Tucker Carlson’s much mocked Russian supermarket shopping spree. In addition to the indictments, the DOJ seized more than 30 web domains that it said were part of a broad and ongoing effort by the Russian government to influence the 2024 election.  Trump who has appeared with Pool and who hosted him at Mar a Lago reacted to the DOJ’s action by saying it was just more evidence that he is being targeted because those Russian guys, like his good friend Hungary’s Viktor Orban are nice.

Campaign Trail:  Trump also suggested that the upcoming September 10 debate with Kamala Harris will be unfair, alleging that ABC news is providing Harris with an advance look at the questions they plan to ask.  He made that accusation yesterday at a Pennsylvania “townhall” where he was thrown softball questions by his Fox friend, sometime campaign advisor, Sean Hannity while answering a very limited number of pre-approved questions from the audience.  For her part Harris, who was endorsed yesterday by former Congresswoman Liz Cheney, once a member of House Republican leadership, was in New Hampshire where instead of embracing Hanibal Lecter or alleging that all recent migrants seeking asylum had recently been released from insane asylums, she talked economic policy. Harris’ plans include providing more tax incentives to small businesses and a significantly lower capital gains tax increase for high earners than the one previously proposed by President Biden. So maybe Elon Musk, the billionaire immigrant who hates immigrants, who has been reposting AI generated pictures of Harris dressed as a Communist apparatchik all over his X platform is wrong about her being a leftist stooge?  Or maybe he’s too busy auditioning for that promised position in Trump’s administration?     

Only the Best?  In other candidate news, Mark Robinson, the Holocaust denying evangelical Republican candidate for Governor in North Carolina reportedly has a serious and rather time-consuming porn addiction, he’s also on record saying that the US should go back to the days when women weren’t allowed to vote. Presumably, Robinson who is Black is okay with allowing Blacks to vote but then again, maybe not because consistency and logic aren’t his thing.   So, to clarify women making porn is okay, voting not so much, and definitely no single women with cats teaching kids. There’s a reasonable chance that the Trump endorsed Robinson, this election cycle’s equivalent to last cycle’s Republican Pennsylvania governor wannabee/wacko Doug Mastriano who lost resoundingly to Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro could help push North Carolina into Harris’s column.  Robinson isn’t the only Republican candidate who might help out the Democrats, Montana’s Trump endorsed Republican Senate candidate Tim Sheehy, who given Trump’s popularity in Montana stands a reasonable chance of toppling incumbent Democrat Jon Tester, was caught on tape making derogatory comments about the state’s Native Americans, about 6.5% of the state’s population. Something about the Tribe members all being drunk and tossing beer cans at 8 AM in the morning.  Sheehy who doesn’t really live in Montana might not realize just how much of a slur that was or more likely he’s just racist.      

#BringThemAllHomeNOW    

 
62 Days🌴 ✡️🌻✡️🌻✡️ 🌴

Crunch Time:  There are only 62 days left to what feels like the longest, most unpredictable election ever.  Kamala Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz, spent their Labor Day weekend campaigning.  They focused on labor and on the swing states, including, with an assist from President Biden, the most important one, Pennsylvania.  Trump and his partner, JD Vance, spent part of their weekend campaigning, and the rest throwing mud, justifying what should be disqualifying indefensible actions, flip flopping, and questioning the integrity of the upcoming election.  And because Vance had a habit of appearing on what seems like countless podcasts before seeking public office, we also learned some more about his disdain for women, or at the very least for “professional” women who by refusing to adhere to his Handmaid vision have chosen a “path to misery.” He also claimed that men in America are “suppressed in their masculinity,” and to be fair, he does seem to be lacking on that front.  As to the flipflopping, Trump finally revealed how he plans to vote on Florida’s abortion referendum. He’ll be voting against the amendment to incorporate abortion rights into the state’s constitution, not because he really cares a hoot about who does and does not get an abortion but because he cares about maintaining the support of evangelicals and other right to lifers, who’ve grown frustrated with his attempts to straddle the abortion fence.  His abortion waffling, like his recent assertion that he’ll see to it that health insurance companies or the government cover the costs of IVF, is just campaign fodder intended to lure back those low information female voters who can be convinced by targeted clips of his utterances.  There’s no way that Trump who tried and insists he will still try to eliminate Obamacare will require insurance companies to cover IVF, neither is there any way that Republicans in the House and Senate will as every Republican Senator recently voted against Democratic Senator Tammy Duckworth’s proposed legislation that would have established a nationwide right for patients to access IVF and other assisted reproductive services as well as a right for doctors to provide IVF treatment in accordance with medical standards and a right for insurance to cover those services.  As to the indefensible, having gotten caught and criticized for staging a campaign event at Arlington Cemetery, Trump and his team have come out swinging, gong so far as to slam Harris, Walz and Biden for not showing up at Arlington to “participate” in what they’re now mislabeling an official commemorative ceremony.

Polls? Sadly, doubling down and waffling works with too many voters.  How else to explain the tight polls?  Harris is up a bit but still mostly within the margin of error and given that only the Electoral College matters she needs to be up a lot to win.  Naturally, Trump is really mad about all those polls, especially angry with a daily tracking poll from reliably Republican friendly pollster Rasmussen which showed Harris up a smidge. Over the weekend, a Trump staffer was fired for revealing that Trump’s campaign is no longer focusing on New Hampshire, a state that with the support of popular Governor Chris Sununu, a future presidential wannabee who like Nikki Haley dissed Trump before then endorsing him, they no longer believe they can turn red. Also over the weekend, Trump said that he had “every right to interfere in the 2020 presidential election,” both an admission that he did and a warning that he plans to instruct his minions in the states that matter to do the same this time around.  

Horrific Fog:  Last week the good news was that one Hamas held hostage had been rescued from a Gaza terror tunnel, sadly this weekend’s news was devastating.  Six other hostages, including Ori Danino 25; Eden Yerushalmi, 24; Almog Sarusi, 27; Alexander Lobnov, 33; Carmel Gat, 40; and Israeli American Hersh Goldberg Polin, 23 whose parents spoke at the Democratic convention were brutally murdered by their Hamas captors. The press reported that they were “found” by Israeli forces, but to be clear, they didn’t die mysteriously or accidentally, they were shot dead, likely in front of each other, by their Hamas captors whose revised marching orders are to kill hostages whenever Israeli Defense Forces close in. As evidenced by the huge number of Israelis demonstrating over the weekend, as well as the national labor strike that closed down most of the country, Israelis are mourning and are furious with Prime Minister Netanyahu.  They’re not simply angry about his failure to negotiate a hostage release deal, a majority believe that he’s prioritizing his political career and personal freedom over the hostages. According to the Times of Israel daily podcast, the issue for many isn’t that Bibi’s demand that Israel be allowed to maintain control of the strategic Philadelphi corridor between Egypt and Gaza isn’t strategically rational, it’s that they don’t trust him, neither does Biden though both he and Harris have forcefully condemned Hamas while expressing their horror over the murder of the six hostages. Trump issued a “sympathy” statement too, but his quickly descended into a rant about how unfairly he’s being treated by the “weaponized” Department of Justice.  The similarities between him and Bibi are hard to miss.

#BringThemAllHomeNOW