Notes on a Phony Campaign: Strange Days
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Women seem wickedWhen you’re unwantedStreets are unevenWhen you’re down
– The Doors, People Are Strange
+ I have no feel for how this strange election will turn out. I sense that most people want both leading candidates to lose and lose badly, but they think and fear Trump will win. Of course, that may be their fatalism taking over, and who could blame them? The polls seem unnaturally close–to the extent you can poll cellphones. People keep telling me you can’t, but they sure as hell seem to have no trouble bombarding me with their non-stop texting. And I’m hit with a dozen more every time I text “STOP” back. So I’ve stopped looking at texts, and if you send one, don’t expect a reply until after the election is settled sometime in January.
CNN has Harris up in Michigan and Wisconsin, but tied in Pennsylvania, which is slightly surprising and may represent some vengeful machinations by Josh Shapiro for passing him over as Veep, even though the Governor of Pennsylvania is somewhere to the right of the ADL on Palestine. Not that Harris is any less hostile toward the starving, orphaned and maimed of Gaza. Harris’s campaign has offered voters little more than a droning insistence that she’s not Trump, which is much less obvious than it may appear, at least in terms of policy. In fact, she’s had to recruit the likes of Liz Cheney and Mark Cuban to testify to the distinction, narrow as it may be, which is unlikely to prove helpful in the long run, even among the white suburban women voters of Philadelphia, who she seems to have sacrificed what remains of the Democratic base to attract. She sent Obama to repair the damage, though he seems to have squandered whatever mojo he once possessed.
Apparently, she’s up comfortably in that lone Nebraska district around Lincoln. If Harris holds Pennsylvania, she could still win, even if she loses Arizona, Georgia, and Nevada. But if that’s how it plays out apparently Mike Johnson now has some scheme to muck things up in the House. Then there’s Virginia, where Harris should be leading by 5 or 6 points given that Trump’s people want to slash the federal workforce by 2/3s, but she’s only ahead 1 or 2 points and that was before the Supreme Court’s whacko ruling this week (Bush v. Gore, redux) allowing the state to purge its voter rolls even of legally registered voters, which should be an ominous sign for Harris.
I tend to think Harris wins a plurality, but not a majority, of the popular vote 49-47 and loses again in the electoral college, even though I hope it turns out the reverse, if only because it might ignite MAGA into laying waste to the EC, despite the fact that anti-democratic relic of the slave-owning era works entirely to their advantage. I flipped my way through the 200 dreary pages of the Oregon Voters pamphlet and only found two races that captured my attention: both for Soil and Water Conservation District Commissioners and one of those was running unopposed.
Cockburn used to say, vote for whoever makes you happy, knowing that the vote-counting machines will probably record it for someone you despise. So I filled out my ballot, though not very joyfully, and drove to the drop-off site in our little mill town, where the ballot box was being “monitored” by four MAGA people, adorned in their red hats, who, undeterred by the drenching rain, recorded my arrival on their cellphones and asked to see my ID, a request I replied to with a customary Mexican gesture, as I told them I’d left my papers back in Juarez. Hasta la vista, muchachos.
+ They must be apprehensive about how I was casting my vote for Soil and Water Conservation District #2 Commissioner.
+ In the spirit of “bi-partisanship,” Biden kept Louis DeJoy as Postmaster General, with entirely predictable results: Coos County, Oregon Clerk Julie Brecke said Tuesday that the coastal county has experienced “unexplained delays” in ballot mailing due to an error from the U.S. Postal Service.
+ Two ballot collection sites in the Portland area were set ablaze this week. The police said the suspect was an experienced metallurgist and drove a Volvo. MAGA drives Volvos?
+ Mugshots from the numerous arrest of the guy who burned the ballot boxes in Phoenix. Probably get the first Trump pardon and be named the next Postmaster General. Move over, Louis DeJoy this is how you do it!
+ A Florida man was arrested after he threatened two women Kamala Harris supporters–one 71, the other 52– with a machete outside a polling place at the Jacksonville Public Library.
+ Can Harris have a closing argument for her campaign, if she never had an opening one?
+ Just when Harris’s poll numbers in Michigan began to improve, she sent Bill Clinton to scold Arab-American voters in the state: I understand why young Palestinian and Arab Americans in Michigan think too many people have died — I get that, but…Hamas makes sure that they’re shielded by civilians, they’ll force you to kill civilians, if you want to defend yourselfI got news for [Hamas]—[Israelis] were there first before their faith existed.” Bill used to know better, but now he’s just lazy, woozy and vain.
+ Take it from the man who bombed an aspirin factory in Sudan to divert attention from his own sex scandal…
+ Every time Clinton points that figure, you know he’s lying…
+ The Democrats’ unyielding support for the Israeli rampages in Gaza and Lebanon have opened the door for Trump and he wasted little time in taking advantage…
+ Trump: “During my Administration, we had peace in the Middle East, and we will have peace again very soon! I will fix the problems caused by Kamala Harris and Joe Biden and stop the suffering and destruction in Lebanon. I want to see the Middle East return to real peace, a lasting peace, and we will get it done properly so it doesn’t repeat itself every 5 or 10 years!”
+ If by “peace in the Middle East” he meant dropping more bombs in a year than Obama, who held the previous record, allowing Israel to confiscate the Golan Heights, launching missiles at Iran, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Somalia and assassinating a top Iranian general, he might have a point.
+ Biden isn’t helping Harris, either through spite or senescence is unclear. Likely both. But after the president called Trump supporters “garbage,” his press office altered the official transcript, after consulting with Biden, to change “supporters” to “supporter’s.” Then the official White House stenographer objected, calling the alteration of the transcript “a breach of protocol and spoilation of transcript integrity between Stenography and Press Offices.”
+ Trump in Green Bay: “I told women I will be their protector. They said, ‘Sir, please don’t say that.’ Well I’m going to do it whether the women like it or not.”
+ “I’m going to do it, whether the women like it or not” has been Trump’s motto for 60 years…
+ Mark Cuban: “Donald Trump, you never see him around strong, intelligent women. Ever. It’s just that simple.”
+ Out of the 20 largest individual donors this election cycle, nine gave to Trump and the GOP, while only one to Harris and the Democrats. This is a significant change from 2020 when two of the top three donors backed Democrats. In 2016, four of the top six donors backed Hillary Clinton.
+ Trump claimed this week that he won New Mexico twice. In 2016, HRC received 385,234 votes (48.25%) to Trump’s 319,667 votes (40.04%). In 2020, Biden received 501,614 votes (54.29%) to Trump’s 401,894 (43.50%).
+ The great Mel Brooks could not have written this script…
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+ At a paid speech before the American Bankers Association, retired General Mark Milley Gen. Mark Milley told a bunch of bankers: “I know people in the crowd are controlling basically 24, 25 trillion…I want to thank you for your service.”
+ From a piece in The Economist by Bharat Ramamurti on the consequences of GOP tax cuts since 2000: “America’s tax code no longer keeps up with the needs of its people. In 2000, the federal government raised roughly 20% of GDP in revenue annually. If the country still had its 2000-era tax code today, its national debt would be declining. But large tax cuts under Republican presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump slashed revenue to below 17% of GDP, a difference of nearly a trillion dollars a year. That has been a windfall for the wealthy, whose effective tax rates have fallen sharply in the last 25 years even as tax rates for the middle class have stayed roughly the same. But it has been a drag on the economy, as the erosion in revenue has cramped the government’s ability to make needed investments and forced it into more borrowing.”
+ More than 80% of the ad buys by the Trump campaign and pro-Trump PACs were spent on attack ads against Harris and Tim Walz, while less than one percent went to ads promoting the former president’s accomplishments or policy proposals.
+ Because of his animosity toward Jay Inslee, the Democratic governor of Washington, Trump refused to approve Inslee’s request for $37 million in federal disaster aid after wildfires burned across eastern Washington in September 2020, displacing thousands and killing a one-year-old boy.
+ By contrast, even though no Republicans voted for Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, Congressional districts that went for Trump in the 2020 election received three times as much clean energy and manufacturing investments as those that favored Biden.
+ A giddy Elon Musk, who Trump says he’ll make his Czar of budget cuts, says he plans to slash federal spending by more than $2 trillion, or roughly one-third of the current budget.
GOP REP. BUDDY CARTER: It can be done. We can cut $2 trillion out of the budget
STUART VARNEY, FOX BUSINESS: But how? I’m sorry. $2 trillion is an enormous amount of money.
CARTER: I can assure you there is plenty of waste, fraud, and abuse.
The current federal budget is about $6.5 trillion, with most of that going to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, defense spending (which Trump vows to increase), and interest on the debt.
FY 2024 Spending
Social Security: $1 trillion
Health care: $912 billion
Net Interest: $882 billion
Medicare: $874 billion
Defense: $874 billion
Income Security: $671 billion
Veterans benefits: $352 billion
Education, Training, Employment: &305 billion
Transportation: $137 billion
Community & Regional Development: $88 billion
Other $223 billion
+ In order to achieve the Musk-Trump goal, they’d have to cut 30 percent of federal spending, including entitlements and defense spending.
+ House Speaker Mike Johnson vowed that Republicans will repeal the Affordable Care Act if Trump wins. So that’s may be the first thing they put on the chopping board lock.
+ Elon Musk’s get-out-the-vote operation for Trump is turning into a nightmare for the door-knockers hired by his America PAC, who say they were flown to Michigan, driven in the back of a U-Haul, and told they’d have to pay hotel bills unless they met unrealistic quotas. Many didn’t even know they were working to elect Donald Trump. Canvassing for Musk sounds like signing up for the kind of “rough ride” Baltimore cops gave Freddie Gray…
+ There’s a big story in Wired by Zach Dorfman this week documenting Trump’s unsuccessful efforts to overthrow the Venezuelan government of Nicolas Maduro, which included a CIA hack of the Venezuelan military’s payroll.
+++
+ Mistah Kurtz, he ain’t dead…
+ Trump NYC rally speaker “comedian” Tony Hinchcliff: “There’s a lot going on. I don’t know if you guys know this, but there’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. I think it’s called Puerto Rico,..And these Latinos, they love making babies too. Just know that. They do. They do. There’s no pulling out. They don’t do that. They come inside. Just like they did to our country… That’s cool, a Black guy with a thing on his head. What the hell is that? A lampshade? …I’m just kidding. That’s one of my buddies. He had a Halloween party last night. We had fun. We carved watermelons together.”
+ They don’t even try to sublimate the racism anymore. It’s the driving force of the Trump campaign…
+ Of course, this is the kind of bigoted minstrelsy routine” Bill Maher and Sacha Baron Cohen do about Muslims all the time, usually without any condemnation from liberals. If someone does call them on it, they whine self-righteously about being victims of “cancel culture.”
+ FoxNews’ Jesse Watters: “If I found out my wife secretly voted for Harris, that’s the same thing as having an affair… that violates the sanctity of our marriage… that would be D Day.”
+ Yes, this is the same Jesse Watters who, while married to his previous wife, launched into an affair with his then-27-year-old producer, who he later married and now suspects might be a secret Harris voter.
+ Christian nationalist pastor Joel Webbon delivered a sermon on divorce where he preached that divorce would not even be necessary if we had a “just society” that put adulterers to death: “Divorce would not be necessary because there would not be a spouse left living to divorce.” During the same sermon, Webbon said that physical abuse is not “a justifiable case for divorce because it’s not in the Bible.” No wonder they believe Trump is “the Vessel.”
+ JD Vance decried the diversity of London and New York City ahead of Trump’s Madison Square Garden immigrant-bashing rally last night at MSG: “London doesn’t feel fully English to me anymore. Right? New York, of course, is the classic American city. Over time, I think New York will start to feel less American.”
+ Stephen Miller’s uncle, Dr. David S. Glosser: “I have watched with increasing horror as my nephew, an educated man who is well aware of his heritage, has become the architect of immigration policies that repudiate the very foundation of our family’s life in this country.”
+ These are the kinds of people holding office these days: North Carolina Republican gubernatorial nominee (and current Lt. Gov.) Mark Robinson filmed himself in December 2018, saying that children who are raped will grow up to become “monsters” and go on to do “unspeakable things.”
+ Then there’s Ted Cruz, whose political ads use images of children who are not transgender to attack transgender children… without the permission of their parents…
+ Rapper 50 Cent admitted that he was offered $3 million to perform at Donald Trump’s Madison Square Garden hatefest but turned Trump down, saying, “I’m afraid of politics.” Aren’t we all…
+++
+ The Green Party’s VP candidate, Butch Ware, came out for national limits on abortion this week…
Q. Do you believe there should be limits on abortion?
Ware: Of course, there should be limits on everything. There’s almost nothing that should be left, you know, completely unregulated. But I think that a lot of the common sense, you know, regulations that most Americans agree on is an essentially 60/40 issue. You know, something like 16 weeks. I won’t go into the fine points of it, but of course, there have to be limitations. There have to be regulations of abortion without any question.”
+ Shouldn’t Butch be leaving these issues up to his running mate, Jill Stein, a medical doctor?
+ Patience Frazier, a poor Nevada mother, suffered a miscarriage. Then, the police arrived at her home and arrested her for manslaughter under a Nevada law from abortion law from 1911. “I had a miscarriage, okay? A miscarriage. Why are you guys here over a fucking miscarriage?” Frazier asked the cops. She was sentenced to 2.5-8 years in prison. Then, a pro bono lawyer filed an appeal, convincing a judge to reverse the conviction and set her free to return to her children…
+ Joe Rogan: Roe was the law of the land, and all of a sudden, that had been taken away, and you have these men trying to dictate what women can and cannot do with their bodies.
JD Vance: Yeah, yeah… but you have women who go too far and try to celebrate it.
Rogan: Very few do that. The concern is men are making decisions on what women can do. Some states have extreme laws that put women in vulnerable positions and if they go to another state, they could then be prosecuted. It’s concerning
Vance: I haven’t heard of this as something that actually exists.
+ It exists, actually. See: Texas, Louisiana, Alabama and Idaho.
+ The evangelical pastor from Texas, John Hagee, who has blessed Trump and Vance, released a video sermon pleading for pregnant “young women who are between the ages of 12 and 22” to carry their babies to term if they are pregnant.
+ Four facts about the US criminal justice system, courtesy of Prison Policy Initiative:
* The US has the highest incarceration rate of any independent democracy on earth. Worse, every single state incarcerates more people per capita than most nations.
* 5.7 million people in the US are under correctional control. More than half have already served time and are on parole.
* 70% of all people in jails have not been convicted of a crime and are legally innocent.
* Each year in prison takes two years off a person’s life expectancy.
+ ICE has been whitewashing its immigration data and covering up the fact that black migrants are more likely to be placed in solitary confinement and serve lengthier detentions.”
+ According to data from the Gun Violence Archive, the number of people injured or killed in road rage incidents involving a gun has doubled since 2018.
+ New York City plans to shutter all ten upstate migrant shelters by the end of 2024, forcing 1,100 adult and children residents to leave and find new shelter in mid-winter.
+ Treasury Secretary Janet Yellin said on Wednesday that “fraud in the banking system is becoming a big problem.” Becoming?
+ Valencia, Spain experienced 491.2 mm of rain in 8 hours. The average annual precipitation is less than 454 mm. The floods have killed more than 70 people with hundreds more still unaccounted for.
2024 is on track to be the warmest year on record, with temperatures above the 1.5C warming threshold.
+ Carbon dioxide concentration has increased by more than 10% in just two decades, reports the World Meteorological Organization…
According to Oxfam, around $41 billion in World Bank climate finance —nearly 40 percent of all climate funds disbursed by the Bank over the past seven years— is unaccounted for.
+ In a span of only two decades, India lost one-fifth of its native wildlife species.
+ Amazon is funding the construction of four nuclear reactors along the Columbia River to power its AI data processing plants. They never asked us if we wanted AI, never mind the nuclear reactors needed to power it…
+ The UN General Assembly adopted a resolution on the necessity of ending the economic, commercial and financial embargo imposed by the United States against Cuba. Result of the vote:
In favor: 187
Against: 2 (Israel, US)
Abstain: 1 (Moldova)
+ The AP’s indefatigable Matt Lee questioning State Dept. hack Matthew Miller on the UN vote condemning the US blockade and embargo on Cuba.
Matt Lee: The vote was 187 to 2
Miller: I’m aware of the history of votes
Lee: At what point are you gonna realize the entire world, with the exception of you and Israel, thinks the embargo is a bad idea
Miller: We take their opinion seriously, but we make our own policy
Lee: You do? It’s 32 years in a row…
Miller: We take their views quite seriously.
Lee: That’s not borne out by the facts.
+ Trump on the new class of destroyers he says he redesigned for the Navy: ”They’re really like yachts, they’re like beautiful yachts with a lot of guns and weapons on them. You know I’m a guy, I love beauty, and I took that ship, oh I love beauty, I took that ship and I designed the bow a little bit differently. I said no, it’s got to have more of a point. And they were great. And they’re building it, and it’s so successful. It’s the most beautiful thing.”
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+ In the 40 years between 1880 and 1920, British colonialism killed more than 100 million Indians. Under British rule and exploitation, extreme poverty in India rose from 23% in 1810 to more than 50% by the time of India’s independence in the mid-20th century.
+ According to the Wall Street Journal, WSJ the National Archives museum has removed references to the treatment of Native Americans, birth control, crackdowns on union organizing, the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II and government spying on Martin Luther King, Jr. because these episodes in American history might make Republicans uncomfortable: “Vistors shouldn’t feel confronted, a senior official told employees, they should feel welcomed. [US Archivist Colleen] Shogan and her senior advisors also have concerns that planned exhibits and education displays expected to open next year might anger Republican lawmakers–who share control of the agency’s budget–or a potential Trump administration.”
+ After legalization, pot no longer seems to have the same appeal to young people in the US. According to a study by Florida Atlantic University, “in 2011, 23.1% of adolescents indicated they were current users, but by 2021, this figure had dropped to 15.8%. The percentage of adolescents trying marijuana for the first time before age 13 also saw a notable decline, from 8.1% in 2011 to 4.9% in 2021.”
+ A Russian court has fined Google $20,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 for blocking their content.
+ The Haunting of Tucker Carlson…
Q. Do you think the presence of evil is kickstarting people into wondering about the good?
Tucker: That’s what happened to me.
Q. That’s what happened to you?
Tucker: Oh, yeah. I had a direct experience with it.
Q. In the milieu of journalism?
Tucker: No. In my bed at night. And I got attacked while I was asleep with my wife and four dogs, and mauled, physically mauled.
Q. In a spiritual attack by a demon?
Tucker: Yeah. By a demon. Or by something unseen that left claw marks on my sides.
Q. So it left physical marks?
Tucker: Oh, they’re still there, a year and a half later…I woke up and I had these terrible pains on my ribcage and shoulders. I was just in my boxer shorts and I went and flipped on the light in the bathroom and had four claw marks on either side underneath my arms and on my left shoulder. And they were bleeding.
Q. Wait? They were bleeding?
Tucker: They were bleeding, yeah. No, actual claw marks. And I sleep on my side, so I wasn’t clawing myself. I don’t have long nails. And they didn’t fit my hands, anyway. But, yeah, that happened.
+ The pressure is really on Russell Brand to top this…
+ Perhaps it was the nefarious work of the same demon who clawed Tucker?
+ Journalist Michael Wolff, who says he has about 100 hours of recordings of Jeffrey Epstein talking about the inner workings of the Trump White House, released the tape of an interview he conducted with Epstein at a NYC restaurant in 2017 on how Trump fuels conflicts among his staff: “His people fight each other and then have outsiders–he sort of poisons the well outside. He will tell ten people Bannon’s a scumbag and Priebus is not doing a good job and Kelly has a big mouth. What do you think? Jamie Dimon thinks that you’re a problem and I shouldn’t keep you. And I spoke to Carl Ichan and Carl thinks I need a new spokesperson. So, Kellyanne, even though I hired Kellyanne’s husband, Kellyanne is just too much of a wildcard. And then he tells Bannon, I really want to keep you, but Kellyanne hates you.”
+ For years, I’ve tried to encourage Ralph Nader to transfer his loyalties to the small-market Orioles, formerly owned by the great trial lawyer Peter Angelos, who sent the Orioles to play in Cuba and invited the Cubans to play in Baltimore. But he can’t seem to give up on the team of his youth, even though they are the capitalist death star of Major League Baseball…
Nader: The Yankees’ collapse in last night’s 5th game of the World Series was a long time coming. The Yankees have been mismanaged or poorly managed since their last World Series in 2009. Loaded with money, they make the wrong choices in buying athletes from other teams. They’ve weakened seriously their farm system and the owner, Steinbrenner, is not that ambitious for a winning team because he’s still making a lot of profit. Yankee General Manager Brian Cashman and Yankee team manager Aaron Boone are relentless losers. Yankee fans should demand their replacement. The only thing going up at Yankee Stadium are the prices, not the World Series wins.
Teri Garr in Young Frankenstein.
+ RIP Teri Garr…”They only write parts for women where they let everything be steamrolled over them, where they let people wipe their feet all over them. Those are the kind of parts I play, and the kind of parts that there are for me in this world. In this life.”
AV Club: Any thoughts on Tootsie…?
Teri Garr: I saw that again recently. I hadn’t seen it in twenty-something years. And it’s the same thing! Pretty, nice girls being taken advantage of by slimy men. They put a man in a dress and he’s supposed to know what it feels like to be a woman. But, of course, he doesn’t. I think what Dustin [Hoffman] says is, “I realize now how important it is for a woman to be pretty. And I wasn’t pretty.” God! That’s all you realized? Jesus Christ. Oh well. Don’t quote me. Actually, quote me, it just doesn’t work. At least it didn’t in that movie, because it was made by sexist men. I can say that now, because Sydney [Pollack] isn’t with us anymore. [Laughs.] But he was a fine director.
AVC: But you thought he was sexist?
Teri Garr: Oh, yeah! I think so. He just wanted the beautiful, blond, cute, shiksa girls to be nice and shut the fuck up! [Laughs.] God, I’m bad. But that’s what he wanted. And that’s what the world wants, I think. God, I’m bitter. Bitter!
People are strange, When you’re a stranger
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