Garbage Force One is Ready For Takeoff

     This has to be the greatest self own in political history. Don't forget, Dukakis lost because he climbed into a tank. Seriously, they put Trump's name and motto on a garbage truck, from which Trump then nearly falls down as he tries to climb in it then has someone aimlessly drive around in circles so he can show... what? That right wingers should be associated with garbage? That Trump is a man of the people and a blue collar Joe? So that the actual Joe will regret a remark that he didn't make? Well, as darkly entertaining as this election cycle has been for the last 37 years, I cannot wait until this sick, silly shit is over with in five days.

The Tide is Turning

 

     And it'll be a tsunami.

     Look, I should be working on my next novel. It's entitled The Final Bullet and, to those of you familiar with my Scott Carson series, it will be a Kelley McCarthy standalone thriller. It's coming along very well and I'm excited about it. But I have a higher priority until November 5th.

    But the election is in a little over five days and, before you know it, election day will be here. After literally two years of this election cycle, it will suddenly be upon us, like John Cleese's Sir Lancelot. After all, this is the Super Bowl or World Series for political bloggers. And I and millions (if not tens of millions) of us will be up all night watching the election results.

     The last time I didn't do so was on Election Night 2004, just a couple of months before I jumped into the blogosphere. I went to bed that night, safe and secure in the delusion that the forces of good would finally get the upper hand and we'd be able to call John Kerry the president-elect.

     Instead, I got the news that morning that Bush had stolen yet another election, courtesy of J. Kenneth Blackwell, the staggeringly corrupt Ohio Secretary of State and, incredibly, Bush's campaign co-chair. So, remembering that horrible start to the day, I swore that I would never sleep through another election night. And since then, I've been there for them all, the good, bad and the ugly.

     I generally do a constantly updated post, or what's known as live blogging, as the election results start rolling in. And I'll be doing that again for whatever few people will care to tune in. And most of you who still continue to audit this forum will be the choir and maybe even a few apostates. I'm not going to pretend, nor ever will, that my opinions one way or the other will move any needle by so much as a micron.

     But I will implore you to watch this video from the Meidas Touch Network, to whose channel I proudly subscribe. Their video titles always seem to be hyperbolic and silly in nature but the title for this lead video does not exaggerate. It shows an interesting cross-section of people who have early voted, especially after Trump's Two Minutes Hate in Madison Square Garden where 20,000 idiots laughed when a so-called comedian called Puerto Rico a "floating island of garbage".

     The passion, emotions and disgust from the people who had posted videos to their social media explaining why they voted for Kamala Harris are at times hilarious, emotional and poignant. Young women voted to cancel out their Republican fathers' votes only to find out they'd voted for Harris, too. A mother of two sons who'd voted Harris on behalf of her two future daughters in law. And Latinos and Latinas who were outraged by the Madison Square Garden hate rally and its overt and shameless racism.

     I will also remind you that Kamala Harris had held a rally at the Ellipse just last evening in which she drew about 75,000 people. It was stealing Trump's old thunder because she stood in the exact same spot in which Trump launched his attack on the government on January 6, 2021. She went to right wing hallowed ground and pissed all over it.

     Harris was also leading in all seven battleground states in a series of polls taken early last August. And, yes, that's an eternity in political terms. But I defy anyone to tell me how the Harris-Walz campaign could lose ground in any of them considering what a shambling nightmare the Trump campaign has been.

     There's a shift, a sea change, a groundswell of support that even the press can't successfully hide, downplay or ignore. Several people, including myself, have stated they haven't felt this level of enthusiasm since Obama's first run in 2008. And both sides are screaming for 100,000,000 votes for their guy or girl. Of course, neither will come close to that. But look also at the early voting numbers.

     Maricopa County here in Phoenix is the largest in Arizona with 2.1 million voters. But the county has already counted a cool million early ballots or half the county. In Georgia, 2.6 million people had already voted early by last Saturday, which is over half the record turnout in 2020. In Wisconsin, 100,000 early votes were counted on just the first day of early voting with the number in the Badger State eventually swelling to 511,000. In Michigan, the first day of early voting brought in 145,000 ballots. I could go on and on but I think you get my point.

     Now, in no state is it legal to count early or absentee ballots until the polls close on Election Night, so we don't know who voted for whom. However, history tells us that absentee and especially early ballots tend to skew Democratic. Why else do you think Republicans have been slavering to shorten or end early voting? Because it favors Democrats.

     Another thing to consider before drinking yourself into oblivion- Does one seriously entertain the thought that Trump, who struggles to fill even the most modest of venues, is getting millions, tens of millions of souls to the polls and mailing in early ballots? We saw much the same thing in 2020 and the Biden-Harris ticket wound up collecting over 81,000,000 votes. 2020 shattered a 120 year-old record by boasting a 66% voter turnout.

     So before you chew your fingernails down to your elbows, relax and simply stop listening to the Grand Poobahs of the Polling and Political Punditocracy. Don't listen to the corrupt mainstream media. Hell, don't even listen to me. Listen to your heart and mind, listen to your central nervous system.

     Harris is winning this election and it will be by a landslide. She won't get 100,000,000 votes and that's OK because we don't go by popular votes. But she will get 310 electoral votes and maybe even more.

     In just under seven days, you'll see I'm right.

If You Can't Stand the Heat, Don't Get Near the Gas Ovens.

“It’s the people that surround her, they’re scum and they want to take down our country. They are absolute garbage.”

- Donald Trump, 9/7/24 pic.twitter.com/JslFPbCmC1

— The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) October 30, 2024

What never ceases to amaze me is the hypocrisy and thin-skinned nature of right wingers who can dish out hatred, vitriol, xenophobia and outright racism but start whining, blubbering and blowing snot bubbles the minute they get punched in the nose. Take the debacle over Trump's "comedian" calling Puerto Rico "a floating island of garbage" at Trump's Nazi rally three days ago. 

 Basically, the right wing’s default position was, “You leftists are snowflakes and need to get a grip.” And then President Joe Biden briefly entered the fray.
      They said Biden called Trump supporters “garbage” and the stuck pig squeals could be heard all across the country. O. the humanity! But what the president did, in fact say was,
      "The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporter’s — his — his demonization of Latinos is unconscionable, and it’s un-American."
Now, as I and many others have observed in the past, Joe Biden’s not the most articulate guy in the world. But Biden didn’t call Trump supporters garbage, even though he could have and maybe should have.
But, oh my God, the assholes telling us to stay calm and keep Newsmax on are acting as if they got their ear grazed by a sliver of teleprompter glass. Their reaction to what Biden supposedly said was the same as Obama saying Republicans clutch their Bibles and guns or Hillary calling them “a basket of deplorables.”
They’re also screaming bloody murder over Vice President Harris calling their guy a Nazi, even though she didn’t. She just agreed that Trump fit the profile of an authoritarian. But the fact is, two other Republicans had planned to kill Trump since July and, knowing how polarizing and hate-filled Trump is, they’re eager to pin the blame on Harris and other Democrats for that.
I recall reading once that many years ago, someone once observed that no major religion was ever founded by anyone with a sense of humor. The same goes for authoritarians.

October Surprise! Trump Is a Racist!

 

     Former GOP congressman Denver Riggleman said earlier today that Trump's nakedly fascist rally at Madison Square Garden yesterday was the biggest October Surprise self own in history. But, really, do any of us have the right to be surprised?

     For decades, Trump, like other right wingers, especially my fellow New Yorkers, have hated Puerto Ricans for decades. It doesn't matter to them that Puerto Rico is a US territory and has been for decades and they're even given three electoral votes in the quadrennial presidential election.

     Apparently, no one on Trump's team took him aside and informed him that there a lot more Puerto Rican voters in the US than he may think. For instance, there are approximately 500,000 in the battleground state of Pennsylvania. If one wants to get elected president, they'll certainly want to carry the Keystone State and its relatively rich 19 electoral votes. If you turn off a sizable voting bloc like Puerto Rican Pennsylvania voters, it could easily sway how the states goes.

     Yet, despite making serious inroads in the Latino voter bloc (against all rhyme or reason), Trump saw fit to invite some aspiring comedian whose name shall not be uttered here who would call Puerto Rico "a floating island of garbage" and make jokes about Black people and watermelons.

     Within hours of the six hour-long hate rally, the Trump campaign released a statement bleating the usual about how the "comedian's" remarks didn't accurately reflect the Trump campaign's values.

     Bullshit it doesn't.

     We all saw the contempt with which Trump looks at Puerto Ricans after Hurricane Maria struck the island and ravaged it. Trump sat on federal aid until the waning days of his term in office and insulted Puerto Rico's leaders, calling them (O the projection) "corrupt." He didn't do himself any favors when he flew to the island to toss paper towels at the residents and laughing like a lunatic as he did so.

     Maria directly and indirectly caused 3059 deaths in Puerto Rico alone and none of them got a word of lip service from Trump. That's because Puerto Ricans, to a racist sociopath like Trump, aren't American and not even human. And that goes for all Hispanics. where he's concerned.

     However, the racist "jokes" and the backlash they caused were such that Trump had personally get involved and hold a hasty press conference at Mar a Lago today. Did he apologize to Puerto Ricans? Please. Remember, this is Donald Trump we're talking about. Instead, he dipped back into his old playbook and, rather than apologizing to any rightly offended communities, he did his Earth Two schtick which comes down to, "Who are you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes?"

     It was a "love fest", he insisted (like the January 6th riot that put 140 police officers in the hospital) and, oh yeah, I'm not a Nazi.

     Obviously, the minute you have to say that, guess what? You're a fucking Nazi.

Get In, I'm Going For My Driving Test

     Don't have time to post much this morning because I'll be spending all day at the Glendale registry to take a driving test. But I just wanted to point out that Vice President Harris' rally in DC today is going to be at the Ellipse, the very same venue where Trump launched his assault on American democracy on January 6th, 2021. Which I think is the smartest thing her campaign's ever done. More later when I get back.

The Devil Roams

 

     This is just to let you all know that the day may come in which you surf in expecting fresh political content and may run up against a 404 page. I know because it happened to me yesterday. I was about to put up a post and I got that 404 page informing me that I got locked out of my own blog. Their generic-catch-all excuse was that I'd "violated community standards". It's the usual Kafkaesque, dystopian bullshit. Colder than Pluto's ass end and just as personal. So they asked me if I wanted to request a review and I said fuck yeah. A half hour later, Welcome Back to Pottersville came back up as if nothing happened. No explanation, no apologies, no nothing.

     This is the first time this has ever happened to me in the 16 and a half years I've run this blog. Obviously, this is yet another classic case of a giant corporation (Google owns this domain and has for well over a decade) that liberally makes use of brainless algorithms making arbitrary decisions so that humans, God forbid, don't have to actually think.

     Still, the scare that was put into me yesterday afternoon made me go to the template section. I copied and pasted it into a Word document and emailed it to myself so I'd always have a ready-made template to use in case I had to set up a new blog (which I have). But that's not what I want to talk about.

     The point I want to make is that this sort of bullshit happens for real and that's no truer than in this strange election cycle. We know that Zuckerberg, a typical autistic right wing billionaire social maladroit out of Silicon Valley, hired some right wing clown to clamp down on left wing content on Facebook.

     But that's just one symptom of a problem that's endemic throughout the internet.

     The other run of the mill, autistic right wing billionaire social maladroit out of Silicon Valley, Elon Musk, has been engaging in more overt right wing rat fuckery in his own sandbox. 

     The fact that Twitter for the last two years has been clamping down on left wing content is patently obvious and isn't even up for honest, serious debate. He brought back Kanye, he brought back Trump, he brought back Alex Jones, in other words, the other social maladroits who are radioactive elsewhere on the internet. Musk is the same guy who briefly shut down a Kamala Harris support group, Meemaw and permanently shut down Ken Klippenstein for putting out information that was already freely available on the internet.

     Recently, one of my followers complained that he loses followers in droves every time he posts something critical of Musk. In fact, since last night, he reports that he's lost over 500 followers. That's happened to me, too. In fact, when a big progressive account gives me a shoutout and I get a large influx of new followers, it's notable that Elon starts clawing them back. And don't even get me started on the shadowbanning that's been happening to me literally from Day One.

     Axing accounts when they briefly tweak your bloated ego is petty, immature and puerile enough. But having that kind of power points to something much more serious and sinister.

     Shadowbanning is a scummy way of silencing critics without actually banning their accounts. They simply artificially suppress the reach and visibility of certain accounts so that your content gets fewer eyeballs. It enables the domain owner (in this case, Musk) to severely limit the visibility of content with which they differ without having to admit to censorship (Musk bought Twitter two years ago this month with the promise of making it a free speech oasis).

     But these social media giants also tweak their algorithms so that they bombard accounts with "recommendations" from other accounts they find repugnant. Of course, on Twitter, this means overwhelming progressive feeds with right wing content. You can block the accounts generating that content, sure, but it's the ultimate game of Wack-a-Mole. You block one account, it seems there are 100 more to take its place.

     There are manifold reasons for this, I'm sure- It's targeted harassment so that more and more progressives get fed up and disgusted with Twitter to the point where they leave in disgust and go wander the desert wasteland of Bluesky.

     It's also good old fashioned propaganda carpet bombing.  As a certain authoritarian said, "If you tell a big lie enough times, it eventually becomes the truth." Musk, like all right wingers, hold the truth in absolute contempt, especially if those self-evident truths put the lie to their talking points and betrays them for the Nazis they truly are.

     And things aren't much better on Facebook. When Zuckerberg decided years ago to not fiddle around with news content, I guess he forgot about the part where he's not supposed to throttle progressive content for simply telling the truth. Because, as with school districts these days, all it takes is for one asshole to make some complaint for someone to get their account suspended or even deleted. And, of course, there are algorithms that will do that for them.

     What happened yesterday was a wakeup call for me. I haven't been completely blindfolded about what's going on out there. But for a half hour somebody or something thought I'd done something egregious enough to take down my blog, albeit for just a half hour, with no real appeals process and no explanation as to what I'd supposedly done. And this would've happened just nine days before what is possibly the most important election in US history.

     And social media tells us time and again that when you give billionaires a disproportionate amount of power over the visibility of other peoples' words and thoughts, the innocent will always suffer.

Good Times at Pottersville

 

Good Times at Pottersville

History is Rhyming Again

 

     The words "fascist" and "nazi" are overused. I think most if not all of us can agree on that. Donald Trump proves that every time he uses them to smear his so-called enemies, interchangeably using them with Marxist, socialist or Communist.

     Liberals are guilty of it, too. We all are. The old Nazi Party of Germany from 1933-1945 is not coming back, not in its original iteration, because it's literally a different world. Geopolitical conditions have changed and certain facets of National Socialism are too intolerable to repeat.

     But the aforementioned Trump makes comparisons to Nazism all too irresistible. So I think historians and political pundits can be forgiven for sounding the alarm bells when it was announced that Trump's presumably last campaign rally will be held in Madison Square Garden on October 27.

     And Trump makes it irresistible because, going back decades, we began learning he'd always had fascistic sympathies and tendencies. In fact, they've been accelerating in the last few months of the election season. As when he first came down that escalator in 2015, he's been Otherizing immigrants and channeling the same Nativist hatred that propelled so much of our politics in the 19th century.

     He's been stepping it up, too. The guy who sleeps with Hitler's speeches next to his bed has apparently been reading Mein Kampf, too, saying immigrants are committing crimes they're not and that they're poisoning the blood of our nation (obviously, his own five kids, four of whom came from immigrant wives, are exempted).

     Months ago, he began talking about huge detention centers, mass forced deportations, etc. "I am your retribution." "If I'm not elected, there will be a bloodbath." He's talked about letting the police have one violent day (Like, I don't know, Kristallnacht?). That he'd be a dictator on day one. Siccing the US military against American citizens. So, let's face it, he makes comparisons to Hitler too irresistible.

     But the rally at Madison Square Garden is a bridge too far. As with his Tulsa rally, this venue was chosen strategically. With politicians, especially Republicans, there is no such thing as coincidence. Even in his deepening dementia, Trump is all too aware, or was made aware, of the Nazi rally that was held at that same Madison Square Garden on February 20, 1939.

 

     The rally featured a huge full length portrait of George Washington and it perhaps occurred to few if any of how incongruent was the juxtaposition of Washington, American flags and Nazi flags. The reason for Washington's posthumous and unwilling appearance was that the American Bund organizers were utterly convinced that the father of our country would've been fully supportive of National Socialism. In plain point of fact, the first president would've been horrified at Hitler and his ideology. Washington, after all, went to war against a dictatorial tyrant.

     The keynote speaker was one Fritz Kuhn, the corrupt leader of the German-American Bund. The Bund was extremely unpopular in New York City, as is Trump today, and it brought out the largest police presence in NYPD history. The inside of Madison Square Garden attracted 20,000 Nazis but the protesters outside numbered five times that much.

     No doubt Kuhn and his fellow goose steppers thought the large and prestigious venue in the largest city on earth would be just the beginning, that the rally would be start of many as National Socialism took hold in the United States. Thankfully, the opposite happened.

     The Bund began collapsing right after the rally. By the end of the year, Fritz Kuhn would be arrested, charged and convicted of larceny and forgery. His life after that was spent in prison, then internment then being deported back to Germany where he died in another prison in 1951.

     Adding to the collapse of the Bund was Hitler's false flag invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, which of course was the catalyst for WWII.

     Here's what makes Trump infinitely more dangerous than Kuhn ever was:

     While the German American Bund and other fascist organizations were cropping up all over the country, they never got a toehold in American politics. Americans as a whole despised them, especially in New York City. Fritz Kuhn never had 74,000,000 followers.

     But that's how many Trump had voted for him in 2020. 74,000,000 neo Nazis, cryptofascists, fascist sympathizers and those who chose to look the other way voted for Trump four years ago. That's 6,000,000 more than who voted for him in 2016.

     As stated, Kuhn fell from grace with admirable speed. Father Coughlin fell from grace the same year when the Roosevelt administration forced the cancellation of his radio program. Charles Lindbergh soon followed.

     Yet here we are, a decade later, and Trump is still around. And, to listen to the MSM and the pollsters, his grubby, stubby fingertips are brushing against the front door of the White House.

     That should give anyone pause.

     We don't know what Trump will say at Madison Square Garden on the 27th but we can offer some educated guesses. We can expect the same rancid Nativist rhetoric that we've been getting on tap for years. There will be the same tired insults of Kamala Harris "Comrade Kam-ALA, who's a Communist, Marxist Fascist", etc.

     The NYPD will be there in full force to protect him, as they were 85 years ago in case, God forbid, anyone threaten Trump's First Amendment rights to free speech. It being a city of 8,000,000, you know New York City's Madison Square Garden will attract more than its fair share of protesters, as in 1939.

     The venue, the city and the state makes utterly no sense. Instead of going to a battleground state like Michigan or Wisconsin, he chose a deep blue city and state he has no chance of winning in two and a half weeks.

     It's not what Trump will say or not say in Madison Square Garden that will be so dangerous. It's what it represents. No matter how deeply Trump slips into his obvious dementia, he's very aware of history, especially Nazi history, just as Reagan was when he chose Philadelphia, Mississippi to kick off his 1980 presidential campaign.

Good Times at Pottersville

The Enemy From Within, Indeed

 

     So there a hunched over Donald Trump sat across from Maria Bartiromo, looking like a melting bowl of orange sherbert, and saying in the slow, raspy, low energy cadence of an aging mafia don, that the National Guard or even the military needs to be deployed against (ho hum) "radical left lunatics" (which is essentially anyone who disagrees with him about anything).

     At best, as any critic of media can expect, this produced little more than a low hum, like the kind a very small percentage of people hear in Taos, New Mexico.

    Naturally, the right wing broke their thick necks to circle the Nazi motorcycles complete with the sidecars to explain Donald Trump didn't say what he was recorded on videotape as saying: That he fully intends to violate the Posse Comitatus Act of 1874 or invoking the Insurrection Act against American citizens that he perceives as enemies. Oh no, that's not what he meant, they assured us. It was, uh, the Russians and Chinese who are, uh, the enemies from within. That would be the Russians and Chinese that Trump never once meaningfully opposed when he was allowed to pose as the president.

     Whose leaders Trump has praised time and again.

     Since then, he's only doubled and tripled down on his worst tendencies, such as at today's "town hall" he had with Harris Faulkner (VP Harris had her own time on Fox today with Bret Baier, who tried to fool Harris and the American people that Trump has indeed walked back his threat to sic the military on us by airing a very selectively-edited clip.).

     It doesn't really profit you or I to say just how horrible and fascistic this is, at Trump threatening to brutalize or kill Americans just for criticizing or disagreeing with him because these things should be self-evident.

     What's even scarier and what we should be talking about is what the Republican Party's real plan is for Trump. I'd already gone into this over a month ago. It's not Project 2025 with which we should be immediately concerned but their Project 25.

     In case you missed that post, it's where I proposed that the GOP's ultimate plan, their long game, is to drag Trump's bloated body across the finish line, then immediately invoke the 25th amendment, then shoehorn Vance into the padded chair behind the Resolute Desk. This makes an abundant amount of sense. Vance is about to turn 40, meaning he still has decades to go. Trump is obviously past his expected life span and is getting more senile by the day.

      Now, two decades of political punditry has shown me too much for anyone to dissuade me from my belief that Republicans are the world's stupidest meatbags on two legs. But one would have to be an utter moron to not see and admit at least privately that Donald Trump is crazier than a shithouse rat on meth. And it's probably on more than one Republican's 2024 Bingo card that Trump will walk out any day wearing a Pennywise costume and painting the Last Supper on a nearby wall with his own fecal matter. Consider what had happened just yesterday in Oak, Pennsylvania.

     There Trump stood at a so-called Town Hall. It was sweltering in the box where they held this event. One person fainted from the heat. Then another.

 

     The rallygoers yelled at, begged Trump to have someone turn on the air conditioning. He sat there, looking at one or the other, completely as one could expect unconcerned about the safety and well-being of his supporters. Suddenly, Trump decides he's not going to take any more questions and to just play music.

     So, for the next 39 consecutive minutes, Trump stood on stage waving his hands and doing his jerking off two invisible gigantic penises dance while his every gesture was aped by South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem. Maybe Noem didn't get the memo that JD Vance was named his running mate but during those excruciating 39 minutes, Noem gave the impression that if Trump wanted to throw pieces of a dog at the audience, Noem would've run out to the parking lot, grabbed her gun and killed someone's dog for Trump.

     It was classic sundowning.

     Sundowning is actually a medical term for sufferers of dementia who begin to fade at the end of the day. There weren't just two medical emergencies in that glorified storage container but three. Seriously, Trump decided on the spot to play nearly 40 minutes of music while people were fighting to stay conscious, playing DJ like he was at a wedding.

     Again, this was ostensibly a town hall, a venue in which politicians answer questions from the audience. 

     Now, speaking as someone who's cared for someone with dementia, I can state with absolute authority that, at a certain point in the disease's progression, the derangement progresses exponentially. In other words, skills are lost one after another with lightning speed. And the closer we get to the election, the more Trump is losing it. And at the rate he's slipping, he'll need to be spoon fed by November.

     Republicans, as stupid as they generally are, cannot avoid seeing this. Dementia affects all too many families regardless of political allegiance. They know Trump's not going to be around much longer. Mounting another campaign for the 2028 election is simply not happening. By then, if he's still alive, Trump will be spitting tapioca all over his bib.

     Therefore, if you're a Republican, it makes much more sense to play the long game and Vance is certainly in on it. All they have to do is play Weekend at Bernie's with Trump's bloated body for the next three weeks then invoke the 25th Amendment the minute Trump starts dribbling diarrhea out his pants leg. Vance becomes the 48th president, Project 2025 becomes a thing. Fade to black. Forever.

     Trump is officially a Trojan Horse at this point and the sooner we fully admit this, the better prepared we'll be on Election Day.

I'm in Facebook Arkham Asylum

 

     There's something truly sinister going on with social media and it's not just one or the other. It's both Twitter and Facebook. And the trend is unmistakable. People critical of Trump and the right wing are getting suspended left and right (actually, just left) or, as in the case of Ken Klipperstein, getting their accounts axed by Elmo just for reporting the truth.

     Four days ago, I got suspended from posting on Facebook for putting up the first lead image. It was allegedly for just 24 hours but, true to Fuckbook form, they've been capriciously adding another day on every day. Every time I log on, I'm told my "posting privileges" won't be reinstated until 2:46 tomorrow morning. It's like Groundhog Day, minus the laughs.

     Of course, it's all done with brainless algorithms but the way they're programmed is unmistakable - If you're against Trump, expect to get swatted down. Elmo Musk has made his bias unmistakable so there's no doubt in anyone's mind why he bought Twitter two years ago.

     But Zuckerberg has hardly been more subtle and he hides his own passive version of fascism with hardly more nuance. Think this is another liberal conspiracy theory? Try this on for size:

     

     Let me introduce you to Dustin Carmack. Carmack, as the picture tells us, is a contributor to the universally-reviled Project 2025, the radical right wing's version of Hitler's Enabling Act. Everything in that picture is true. "Public Policy Director", his official job title, sounds like something that would've been dreamed up by Goebbels. But being the author of a chapter in Project 2025 is just the tip of the iceberg.

    Carmack also recently worked for Ron DeSantis' slow motion Hindenburg of a presidential campaign. He was hired by Meta last August by Zuckerberg for obvious reasons, to suppress left wing content on the big blue meanie but it actually goes a lot deeper than that.

     This revelation of Carmack's hiring was broken by Alejandra Caraballa on Twitter and whose Twitter account was, surprise surprise, taken down by Elmo.

     This neatly dovetails into Facebook's and Zuckerberg's pious decision to avoid political content during this election cycle, which I guess included lifting Trump's ban from the site as well as allowing right wing content to spread throughout Facebook like a sewer gas leak.

      While progressive content and pro LGBTQ posts to get taken down under the vague and obligatory "goes against community standards", right wingers and neo Nazis are allowed to call gay people "pedophiles" and "groomers".

      All this is supposed to calm the jitters of Fuckbook's investors who don't want a repeat of the same clusterfuck that hit the domain after the 2016 election. And if you have any illusions that the restrictions will be lifted after this election, guess again.

     Former GOP Congressman Bob Barr once famously said, "If you give government power, it will use it "

     Does anyone out there think the same doesn't apply to right wing, self-dealing corporations like Facebook?

America First

      As I've stated recently, Trump's three campaigns for president are loaded with inflection points. They are thickly studded with deal breakers that would spell doom for any other candidate for president. Joe Biden's own bid for president in 1988 was immediately derailed with allegations of plagiarism. Gary Hart's candidacy was ended with news of an affair. Same thing with John Edwards. In fact his own affair ended his entire political career.

     That same year, 1988, Michael Dukakis' bid for the presidency was torpedoed because he got into a tank. George HW Bush's scummy Willie Horton ad didn't help any. That failed bid essentially ended Dukakis' political career, as well.

     Back then, that's all it took. It was the heyday for political scumbag tricksters like Lee Atwater. A little rumor, well-placed news article alleging some middling moral or ethical turpitude and you could call it a day.

     With Donald Trump, there have been so many missed opportunities to end his campaigns that it's laughable to even expect there will be an inflection point that will get him out of our lives forever. At this point, Trump could literally shoot someone on 5th Avenue and this race would still be neck and neck.

     Because when you lead a cult consisting of 70,000,000 people, all is forgiven and you can literally do no wrong. And there are almost too many of these deal-breaking inflection points to count over the last nine years.The first one arguably was in July 2015, just weeks after he rode down that escalator, to savage Sen. John McCain's war service. "I like guys that weren't captured," said the five time draft dodger. It should've ended right there.

     Then he mocked a disabled reporter. Asked Russia to hack Hillary Clinton's emails. I haven't even gotten into 2020. It's literally insane that the GOP's nominee in 2020 was a guy who was already impeached once but there we were.

     There have been plenty of inflection points galore in this election cycle, God knows, especially as Trump's dementia progresses. And then Bob Woodward provided us with another bombshell. In his upcoming book, War, Woodward tells us that Trump had given Vladimir Putin COVID testing kits at a time when we had had precious few. 

     Naturally, Trump snarled at Woodward and called the allegations fake news. But the problem is the Kremlin itself had supported Woodward's account and admitted that Trump did indeed send them to Russia. But, as usual, the press got it wrong. These weren't mere testing kits like the swabs you still have in your medicine chest at home.

     These were molecular point-of-care test machines that hospitals desperately needed at the time to rapidly detect infections at the onset of the pandemic. And not only that, they were sent for Putin's personal use. Specifically, the ones he'd sent to Russia were the Abbott Labs test machines that quickly acquired a reputation for giving false positives and negatives, which is the only funny part of this story.

     Of course, this was done with the usual hugger mugger secrecy because that's the way Putin wanted it. The Russian dictator tried to couch it in terms designed to show concern for Trump but the reality was, Putin didn't want to be exposed as being the dictator of a country that was so primitive it didn't even have testing technology for the deadliest pandemic in a century.

     Of course, if we were still living on Rachel Maddow's Earth One, this alone would place indelible mockery on Trump's dog-eared motto of America First (that was first used by the KKK, don't forget). But we no longer live on Earth One. We live on Earth Two.

Good Times at Pottersville

 

Rest in Peace, Kit

  I rarely check my Facebook notifications. I just found out today how much I truly suck at it.
Years ago, when I first got back on Facebook, I made friends with Kit Frazier (real name Cyndee Katherine DuHadaway). She was a fellow mystery novelist who'd created Cauley MacKinnon (ironically, an obituary writer) and we took to each other immediately. We'd quickly begun DMing each other. She was out of Austin. Texas at the time then by 2018, our conversations started taking a darker turn.
According to Kit, she was getting sent by the US government to all these hotspots all over the world. Russia. Ukraine. Places like that. She wasn't just a fellow mystery novelist but a photojournalist, which was got her sent to these dangerous places. I still don't understand why the US government was sending her to these places. But, while she was close-mouthed about what and why she was actually overseas, she'd begun speaking of handlers and babysitters, people whose job it was to look out for her life. In other words, real Jason Bourne spy shit.
Kit was one of those people we meet occasionally in our lives that had an element of strangeness to it either because they solicit that strangeness, like Andrew Vachss (Probably Barbara's favorite novelist ever), or because the strangeness enveloped their lives without invitation. I still don't wholeheartedly believe that Kit was on these various missions all over the world but the fact was, she never gave me the impression she lived in a fantasy world or lied to people as a matter of course. She wasn't a cat fisher.
During our chats, which ended in 2018, we'd made loose plans we both knew we'd never realize, like my going to Austin, Texas so she could take me to a great indie bookstore in that city. I even bought one of her books, which I never had the chance to read. Then, one day in October 2018, she just blipped out and I never heard from her again.
Her birthday was two days ago and that's how I found out she'd died nearly four and a half years ago. I finally checked my Facebook notifications and noticed that Kit's birthday was two days ago. The funny thing was, I was thinking about Kit within the last week and wondered what had become of her, at what she was up to now.
So I sent a pre-written birthday wish she'd never read then went to her wall and that's when I got the news.
It started out ominously. People wrote comments on her wall over the years saying how she would've loved this and that. Another mutual friend had died. Someone wanted Kit to show her around in heaven. Oh no.
I kept scrolling down her wall and finally arrived at the announcement that she had passed away the day before, June 5, 2020, surrounded by family. I still don't know what had killed her. But whatever the circumstances, she'd left this earth way too young.
She was an unnaturally beautiful woman both inside and out, her blonde hair almost always up in a girlish, high ponytail. She loved her dogs, her kids, her friends. And, for the rest of my life, I'm going to wonder if the shit the government made her do six years ago contributed to her death. If you read our private conversations, you'd immediately see it was weird hugger-mugger shit.
This one really hurts because Kit and I liked each other so much. We saw in each other a kindred spirit, in some ineffable, indefinable way. And the world is so much poorer in the wake of her very untimely passing.

Trump and Vance: Two Sides of a Counterfeit Coin

     Trump is droning on in Butler, PA right now and I couldn't take more than 4 or 5 minutes of the live feed. It started with some opera singer serenading Corey Comperatore's helmet and empty firefighting jacket and I had to shut it off when he started ranting about the current administration. But while he was eulogizing a guy whose name he wouldn't be able to remember without a teleprompter and talking up his widow about whom he was making jokes with donors just the other day, RSBN had the colossal bad taste to put up an inset ad for Trump's latest grift, a "silver" fight coin commemorating the day Comperatore was shot and killed. Earlier, JD Vance quoted scripture and claimed that Trump had God on his side on July 13th and that it was a "miracle" he was still alive. Sure it was a miracle. That's why you're both yammering on from behind bulletproof plexiglass.

Cumming to a Swing State Near You

     Albeit with a somewhat generous perspective.

Must See TV? Hardly.

 

(By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari)

"He’s slick. Walz is folksy and relatable. In the final analysis, VP debates are interesting but irrelevant. I can’t think of one that moved the needle in a presidential race.” -Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-VA)

Last night's vice presidential debate could be used as an object lesson as to why VP debates ought to be eliminated and unceremoniously dumped on the ash heap of history. After all, most if not all political pundits would agree that presidential debates don't move needles or change hearts and minds. At this stage of the game, most voters have already made up their minds as to how they're going to vote. So, how efficacious can VP debates be? It's like hurling spitballs at a fast-moving train. It's the B side of a hit record that we listen to half-heartedly and out of perhaps mere misplaced loyalty to a brand.

     It's notable that the only people who think Vance won last night are right wing, hyper-partisan hacks. Trump and Vance basically told the same lies at their respective debates and the only difference was that Vance, firmly ensconced in his charming Mr. Goodbar persona, was slicker at it than Trump. And a liar cannot and should not be considered the winner of any debate.

     And that's what Vance is to those of us who can easily cut through that Yale-educated, preppy, oleaginous charm, that borderline creepy, smiling guy at the end of the bar, all too eager to exploit your lifetime of moral failings so he can indulge in his.

     The video above, to me, is the signature and singular moment of the night. Some will say, and have, that it was really when Gov. Walz put Vance's feet to the fire and asked him if he thought Trump lost the 2020 election. Vance pulled his feet back and said he wanted to focus on the future, conveniently forgetting that past is prologue and that Trump hasn't changed a bit since he was seven years-old much less in the last four years.

     But that clip above exposed Vance's peevishness and real attitude toward the two female moderators. Vance had advanced another lie, that Springfield's Haitian migrants were living there illegally. Margaret Brennan, one of the moderators, reminded Vance that the Haitians were living and working under a temporary protected status. Vance whined that the rules stipulated that CBS wasn't supposed to do any fact-checking.

     In other words, Vance counted on CBS' unofficial injunction not to fact check as part of his debate strategy. He thought CBS would let him lie unchallenged. In fact, Vance got so strident they had to cut off his microphone.

    

     This was the exact moment Vance tried to fact-check CBS' fact check. Like Mitt Romney in 2012, Vance isn't the type of alpha male who likes being interrupted by a woman. In fact, Vance looks like he's chewing his tongue off trying to resist the urge to ask Nora O'Donnell and Margaret Brennan if they have kids and own cats.

 

 So, WTF?

So, how can CBS justify taking away 88 minutes that their viewers can't get back? Not a whole helluva lot, apparently.

   This election cycle gave birth to a new word in the lexicon. It even has its own hashtag: #sanewashing. It's when the mainstream media bend over backwards trying to make a clearly insane presidential candidate sound normal by tailoring clips of a word salad so said candidate doesn't sound as if he was about to drop his drawers and pleasure himself in front of a crowd.

    What the American viewer is left with are sound bytes lasting for all of two seconds at a time and stitched together as the MSM tries mightily to extract some sense like an industrious cryptocurrency crook trying to mine bitcoins. And we know why they do this: To keep the ad buys coming in, which is good for the bottom line, which is good for the top executives, which is good for the shareholders.

     It's not, however, good for the news consumer that's falsely fed the perception that Donald Trump is a perfectly sane stable genius. The MSM want to keep the illusion of the horse race that's neck and neck. No one wants to watch much less bet on a horse race between a thoroughbred and a broken down, sway-backed nag that ought to be on its way to the glue factory.

     If you want to know how desperate Trump is for attention and was last night, take a gander of what he put out on Truth Social during last night's debate:

    

     Which shows not only a shocking lack of focus during a make-or-break presidential campaign but it also shows Trump once again advocating for a known crook who'd bet on games in which his teams were playing. But to get back to Vance...

    JD Vance is literally the first VP pick in history who called his own running mate "America's Hitler" and "cultural heroin". Therefore, his place on Trump's ticket makes him, I'd opine, the biggest, most opportunistic whore and all-around fucking scumbag in US political history, which is saying something. Early this morning on Twitter, Ana Navarro wrote,

   "JD Vance’s an able shape-shifter. He’s been a Hillbilly. A Hollywood elite. A Never-Trumper. A Trump psychophant. Demeaning of women. A bigoted liar. He’s been consistent at being slick. Yesterday, he took the shape of a cordial guy discussing policy.

     Believe him at your peril."

     Which is probably the most astute and spot-on assessment that anyone's ever ventured of Vance.

 

 So Who Won?

That's not my call but yours, assuming you watched the debate as I had. All I can do is give you my subjective opinion. As is often if not always the case, there were cringe-worthy moments and all that's left is to decide if they were forced or unforced errors.

     One of the most cringe-worthy moments of the night was when Walz tried to play up his 2nd amendment credentials and blurted out that he was friends with school shooters. Of course, that's not what Walz meant to say. He either meant that he was friends with school shooting victims or had been friends with other students who were also gun owners. Walz, admittedly, is not the most articulate guy. So chalk up that gaffe to an unforced error.

    Of course, the rabid right in its desperation immediately took to social media to lambaste him for saying he was friends with school shooters, exactly the kind of people the rabid right wing wants to do absolutely nothing about, including infringing the rights of 15 year-olds to bear arms. Another cringe-worthy unforced error was when Walz began reminiscing about his childhood in Nebraska. One almost dreaded an anecdote about him having to walk to school in blizzards, uphill, both ways.

    And then there were JD Vance's forced errors, such as refusing to admit that Trump lost in 2020, that Springfield's Haitian workers were living there legally. In fact, perhaps the biggest whopper of the night was when Vance insisted that Trump peacefully transferred power on January 20th. And, just like that, Vance blithely pretended to forget about what Trump had done two weeks earlier, which was to sic a violent mob on his own government and his last vice president. It was an insurrection that cost nine human beings their lives, four by suicide.

     Vance also forgot to mention that Trump's "peaceful transfer of power" involved childishly avoiding the inauguration ceremony, firing the White House's chief usher so there would be no one to open the doors for President Joe Biden and the First Lady. Oh, and using Air Force One one last time to ferry stolen top secret documents back to Mar a Lago.

     JD Vance gave us exactly what we expected, at least among those of us like Ana Navarro and I: Teflon-coated lies, lies that, naturally, escaped serious scrutiny. This was exemplified by the usually useless Jake Tapper of CNN, who actually said on live national television that Vance had a clear advantage over Walz in terms of public speaking experience. I don't know where Tapper got his information from but Tim Walz has been the governor of Minnesota for nearly seven years. And, for years before that, he was a congressman. Vance has been in the Senate for barely over a year and a half. So, where does Vance get this vaster debate experience? (Bonus fact: Walz is 20 years older than Vance.)

     What we didn't expect was a buttoned-down Tim Walz. For most of the night, Walz looked like a chin puppet who woke up to find himself suddenly transported to a bordello on two-for-one night. He was clearly out of his element, like a mackerel on the bottom of a fishing boat. Gone was the "folksy, relatable" Midwesterner that Gerry Connolly spoke of. This was what happened to Ned Lamont in 2006 when he beat Joe Lieberman in the Democratic primary and he started listening to his focus groups.

     Vance may have won the debate on style points but that's just because he's a slicker and more accomplished liar than Tim Walz. Walz had the facts on his side but facts, as with the truth, often play the handmaiden to lies and falsehoods during an election year.