Nov. 5 Draws Nigh

 I suppose it's most a matter of turnout in the  crucial pivotal states.

 

In a race they cast as good vs. evil, Christian hard-liners are fired up for Trump

Christian nationalist tours showcase the power and ambition of a movement aimed at erasing the separation between church and state.

-Hillary Allam in the WaPost

Greg Sargent in The New Republic

 

Trump’s Ugly Racist Rally Finally Unmasks His Real Closing Argument

The Madison Square Garden rally didn’t devolve into a hate fest. The hate fest was the point all along.

Shadi Amid in the WaPost

 

By Shadi Hamid

October 28, 2024 at 8:10 a.m. EDT

The affluent D.C. suburb of Fairfax County, Virginia, once leaned Republican. In 2000, George W. Bush won the county by 1.4 percent, or 5,860 votes. But by 2020, Democrat Joe Biden claimed it by a staggering 42-point margin.

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Such a dramatic swing in one of the nation’s wealthiest counties points to a deeper reconfiguration of American political identity — one in which education, not income brackets, increasingly determines party loyalty. As the proportion of college-educated residents in Fairfax County surged — reaching more than 60 percent by 2020 — so did Democratic vote share.

The declining salience of class represents perhaps the most consequential political shift of the past century in the United States, altering the very nature of the partisan divide in the process. From the end of World War II until 2012, Whites among the top 5 percent of income earners were the most likely to vote Republican. Not only is this no longer the case, the pattern has reversed almost entirely. Now, the top 5 percent are the least likely to vote Republican. Meanwhile, Democrats are losing working-class White voters by a 2-1 margin.

Trump Has His Hate Week

 NEW YORK — Former President Donald Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden may have been the zenith of his roles as entertainer-in-chief for the MAGA faithful but those in attendance were sure it wouldn’t be his last act.

Attending Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden proved to be a feat of endurance. Arriving around four hours ahead of the event’s official start at 2:30 pm, rallygoers were whisked from the exit of Penn Station into a packed crowd with little to no direction from staffers or volunteers. Many looking for the general admission line ended up waiting in the VIP line and many others wandered back and forth looking for someone to ask.

At the entrance on West 32nd Street and 6th Ave., peddlers hocked knock-off Trump merchandise, some of it apparently on an end-of-election season fire sale, with classic MAGA hats going for as low as $10 with newer Dark MAGA merch climbing from there.

-Salon.com

He Is

 

HEIL NO

The Best Reason for Calling Donald Trump a Fascist? Easy: He Is. 

Michael Tomasky in The New Republic

 Come on now.  There are no undecided would-be voters out there.  If you haven't decided by now you are not voting at all.

NY Times Fails to Call Trump Out

 If Donald Trump wins the Nov. 5 election, the New York Times will be partly responsible.

As the dominant voice in American journalism, the Times could have fundamentally changed the way Trump has been covered not just by its own journalists but by the political media as a whole. It could have stopped using soft, empty language and false equivalence, and made it crystal clear to the public that if elected Trump would turn America into a racist, authoritarian regime where facts don’t matter.

But rather than call out the dangerous lunacy in plain view, the Times has chosen to engage in tortured euphemisms, passive construction, and poor news judgment.

Here are a few examples of the troubling coverage — or lack thereof: 

• When Trump seized up at a rally this week and bizarrely swayed to music for 39 excruciating minutes, the Times called it an “improvisational departure.”
• Trump’s racist threats to deport millions of undocumented people are actually just full of “hyperbolic rhetoric” and “fury.” 
• When it was reported that Trump’s top general, Mark Milley, called him “fascist to the core” the Times buried what should have been front-page news deep in an article about something else entirely.
• Times journalists refuse to call Trump’s “false claims” what they are: malicious lies.
• Hurling racist invective at a vulnerable community to fire up a hateful and bigoted base is just “rabble rousing” to the Times. It’s “combative conservatism.”
• And even in an otherwise admirable article on Trump’s cognitive decline, the Times couldn’t bring itself to use the term “cognitive decline.” 
• -Dan Froomkin

Dodgers vs. Yankees

 I have the vaguest memory of 1955 when Johnny Podres won 3 games in the Series and Dem

Bums won their first one over the Bronx Shysters. When Dodger manager Walter Alston asked the plate umpire in one of the games if he were watching the same game as him.

If I could see Jackie Robinson steal home again and Yogi Berra could explode again I think I would die happy.

The World in the Balance

 Returning Trump to the Oval Office — where this time he would be unlikely to be constrained by “adults” like Milley, Esper and Kelly — would be a recipe for American decline and rising global instability. Trump is a foe of democracy at home and a friend of dictators abroad. He could usher in a world — last seen in the 1930s — where democratic nations are fatally divided and dictators think they can commit aggression with impunity. So vote as if the fate of the world depends on your choice. Because it very well might.

-Max Boot in the WaPost

 Some of the best sports stories are the ones that cannot be verified objectively. May be true. My not be true. The truth resides just in the telling. Did George Gip really tell his Coach to one day tell the team to win one for the Gipper? Or did Coach R make up the whole story? The truth is somewhere between real truth and legend.

 Dr. Collins talks a lot about honesty in science and whether or not science  can be trusted, but he says nothing about the criminal justice system which makes many mistakes, many based on junk science.

 

As dozens of wrongful convictions have demonstrated, the American criminal justice system is flawed. That a state can approve death while refusing to consider critical evidence should give all Americans pause. Are we more willing to accept a potentially innocent man’s execution than to revisit a case?

In the coming days, Roberson should be spared from death and granted a new, fair trial.

-John Grisham in the WaPost

 

The book is careful and thorough—chock-full of historical evidence—but Gienapp’s argument is ultimately straightforward. Founding-era Americans didn’t think of the Constitution as the kind of thing that had a fixed meaning. Therefore, it wouldn’t have made sense to look for unchanging original meanings that were fixed for all time in the Constitution’s text. So if one would like to be an originalist, that original history says not to be an originalist. “When we recover Founding-era constitutionalism,” Gienapp writes, “we discover how deeply at odds originalism is with the history it claims to recover.” His book reveals “how un-originalist originalism turns out to be.”

-Andrew Lanham in The New Republic

 Some Democrats worry, for instance, that the party still isn’t doing enough to engage low-propensity Black and Latino voters, particularly young men. There is time to repair this. Democrats also wonder if they failed to define Trump early in the cycle, letting him slowly rehabilitate his favorability numbers. Still others fear they didn’t remind voters early on of the horrors of Trump’s first term, leaving them with rosy memories of his presidency—including blue-collar voters’ fond impressions of the Trump economy. Those latter two problems may not be repairable in time.

-Greg Sargent in The New Republic

 

"Fascist to the core": Former Trump official Milley warns against "dangerous" second term

Trump appointee Mark Milley called the ex-prez the "most dangerous person ever"

By GRIFFIN ECKSTEIN

News Fellow

This morning at Starbucks with my two new friends, evacuees from impending Milton landfall in Florida.

They live on an island in the Tampa area. Two bridges but only one is now open. If that one is closed it will be a while before they can get back. Milton is very real here this morning

Mary & Randy, the Florida evacuees I've met in Starbucks this week, are back for their last morning before starting to work their way back to Anna Maria Island in the Tampa area. Luckily for them, Milton came ashore 20-25 miles south of them so they think they had no storm surge. Randy explained that hurricanes wobble as head toward land and you never know until the last where the storm will find land. If Milton had come across their little island, it could have wiped out the whole island and their house and boat. Good for them. Florida will recover but it will take time and effort. Many were not so lucky.

As Randy and Mary depart Starbucks, Randy says that the roof at the Rays baseball stadium in Tampa was designed to withstand winds of 150 MPH and the highest recorded wind from Milton was 101. Add the damage inside the stadium by the wind and rain and the lawsuits will be fast furious. As I always say, technology always eventually fails usually at the worse moments.

 The MAGA Maniacs Are Going All In on Deranged Hurricane Conspiracies The MAGA Maniacs Are Going All In on Deranged Hurricane Conspiracies

It’s the Jews! It’s the deep state! It’s anything but a natural weather occurrence made much worse by climate change!

-The Nation

 It was in my college yrs being introduced to the scholarly study of history that I began to learn the critical thinking skills that have helped me make my way thru adulthood without succumbing to the follies of today. I continue to read scholarly historiography today. May I always be intellectually curious.

 A tragedy like Milton and I always remember Ernest Hemingway from "A Farewell to Arms."

I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it. There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. Certain numbers were the same way and certain dates and these with the names of the places were all you could say and have them mean anything. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.

(The details of what has happened, the damage, and the effects on the affected people and what do we do now is what matters now, coming together, not politics, not fancy words, not accusations)

 

Shared with Your friends

I once caught my wife with a broom in her hands. I asked her if she were still cleaning or flying off somewhere. For some reason she did not appreciate my witticism. I barely got out the door from the swinging broom.

 

Shane Ostrander looks through the remains of his home Thursday in Fort Pierce, Fla. (Kathleen Flynn for The Post)

At least 13 dead in Fla.,  millions without power in wake of Hurricane Milton

Updated 6 minutes ago

 Of all the lies Donald Trump tells, perhaps the most preposterous is that he cares about his own voters. That was evident in 2020, when Trump repeatedly downplayed the threat of COVID-19, even calling the pandemic a "hoax." His followers got the message, risking their own lives first by refusing to socially distance and then, going further even than Trump himself, refusing to vaccinate. The result was that excess deaths were 43% higher for Republicans than Democrats in the months after the vaccines were released. Trump's lie killed his own voters by the thousands.

At the heart of Trump's pandemic lies was a sociopathic calculation: His lies and conspiracy theories would offset the loss of MAGA voters to COVID deaths. That bet did pay off, as most of the excess Republican deaths occurred after the election. Trump is making the same bet again in 2024 with his lies about Hurricanes Helene and Milton. He's spraying lies about the federal response that have rapidly spread throughout social media, convincing his followers to take risks with their own safety. His lies will kill people. He doesn't care, though, because he's betting that he can offset the losses by using these lies to turn out more voters. 

-Amanda Marcotte in Salon.com

 The way political journalism worked before Donald Trump seems quaint in retrospect. If it was a presidential election year, a reporter was assigned a candidate to cover. The first thing task was to contact the campaign and notify them of the assignment. If the campaign was serious, press credentials were issued to allow access to the campaign headquarters and into his — it was always a “he” — rallies. In the old days, if the paper or network you worked for was important enough, your pass would get you onto the “press plane” and the bus populated by the “Boys on the Bus,” in the words of the title of Timothy Crouse’s best-selling book on the way the press covered the 1972 presidential campaign. The “boys” were the other political journalists following the campaign, because with perhaps one or two exceptions, there were no female political reporters. 

You didn’t have to cover American politics very long to realize that politicians lied, prevaricated and said things that were demonstrably untrue all the time. It didn’t take much longer to learn that you weren’t there to report their lies. You were there to report what politicians said. You were, in effect, a stenographer. Lies, if they were remarked upon at all, were the domain of pundits.

Lucian K. Truscott IV in Salon.com

 I happened accidentally to find myself talking to a bona fide fascist yesterday at Applebees. I let him ventilate, not before I counted eight lies, but I did notice the air getting warmer and even sizzling though I did not see any devilish horns growing out of his head and neither did he make any threats. I thought about walking out, but then I thought, why give him the pleasure? He left, but not before calling me demonic. Yes, they're out there. Beware. They seem normal until you get them talking, and I know how to provoke & make them show themselves. I took a shower later.

 "Even though myself I'm not so sure that McCarthy and Cohn were fascistic, it's clear that what Trump learned from them eventually led to what I think is his 'wannabe fascism,'" Dr. Federico Finchelstein, chair of the history department at the New School for Social Research and author of "A Brief History of Fascist Lies," told Salon. "The idea that Trump is a fascist relates to his own kind of very basic, intuitive understanding of politics," which certainly puts him in contrast with ideologically well-read students of fascism like Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. "At the end of the day, it went back to a very kind of intuitive and really violent and narcissistic understanding of their own leadership." This intuition involves serving the interests of the powerful while pandering to the various hatreds of those among the powerless who can be easily manipulated. Inevitably, this type of thinking is hostile to widespread public education and effective democracies.

"Anti-democratic views were eventually part of the ferment for Trump's development as a kind of fascist situation, which of course ends in January 6," Finchelstein said, adding that he doubts Trump has any deeper "theoretical" underpinnings to his fascist beliefs beyond superficial support for the ideas already popular among his far right base. Like Cohn, Trump saw far right-wing politics first and foremost as an avenue to personal advancement. In this sense, Trump's refusal to accept the democratic system's verdict after losing the 2020 election was the most Cohn-like thing he could have done.

Chauncey Devega in Salon.com

On Wrecking Higher Education

 Donald Trump has never made a secret of his antipathy to higher education, but scapegoating the academy has become a central preoccupation of his second presidential run. His running mate, JD Vance, has openly declared that universities are the enemy and championed an aggressive attack on them. Agenda 47, Trump’s collection of policy proposals, includes a pledge to protect students from the “radical left and Marxist maniacs infecting educational institutions.”This contempt for higher education is a powerful rallying cry in their larger rightwing populist campaign.

If Trump takes the White House in November his administration could abolish the Department of Higher Education, as called for by Project 2025; levy fines on universities and use them to fund an online university called American Academy; replace college accreditors as part of their crusade against the “radical left;” roll back diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts; and implement a host of other disastrous measures.

While many academics have sounded the alarm about Trump’s plans to gut academia, Trump is not without supporters in higher education. I have studied 198 leading conservative professors and found that 109 support Trump: “academic Trumpists.” These are professors who advocated and voted for Trump in 2016, supported his administration despite all its turmoil, and challenged the legitimacy of Biden's win in 2020. A few even supported the January 6, 2021 assault on the Capitol. They are overwhelmingly white, male and tenured. Some, like Marshall DeRosa, Professor of Political Science at Florida Atlantic University, express their support in blunt terms. In 2016 he said, “I’m looking forward to voting for Trump, because I see him as a wrecking ball and I want to see those sons of bitches squeal in Washington, to be quite frank.” Trump now gives every indication that he will take his wrecking ball to higher education and, if he does, he’ll find some professors there to welcome him. 

-David L. Schwartz in Salon.com

 

"Very good news": Strong September report shows U.S. added 254k jobs

From Salon.com

 We saw this shell game in action during Tuesday night's vice presidential debate, when Donald Trump's running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, talked about a friend who had an abortion. "She felt like if she hadn't had that abortion, that it would have destroyed her life because she was in an abusive relationship," he said, falsely implying that he is fine with keeping these kinds of abortions legal. In reality, as the fact-checkers lamely noted, both current and proposed abortion bans, which Vance has backed wholeheartedly, do not make exceptions based on the reason a patient seeks an abortion. 

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It was an outrageous lie by insinuation, but why he lied is not mysterious. Vance understands that his voters want to hear a pretty story where people like themselves will get to have abortions, but those other people — imagined to be "sluts" and "welfare queens" — will not. The problem for him and Trump, as this polling shows, is that the cold, hard reality of abortion bans is hard to ignore, now that they're law and not just an abstraction. Post-Dobbs, "abortion" isn't just a way for MAGA voters to gloat about their self-defined moral superiority. Instead, they realize that the bans apply to MAGA and non-MAGA alike. It's shifted from cheap identity politics to real-world impacts. As these polling changes demonstrate, their actual policy preference has started to eclipse what used to move them, which was culture war nonsense.

Republican politicians win by keeping their base voters focused on phantasms and symbolic, ego-driven identity politics, rather than real world issues. It's why Trump and Vance are laser-focused on immigration. It's not just that it has no material impact on their base voters, but because it doesn't. For the average MAGA voter, stories about Haitian immigrants eating cats feel like a low-stakes way to wallow in a sense of racial superiority. Many of them don't even pause to consider how these ego-fluffing lies harm real people. To them, "Haitians" are a largely imaginary group — like the "sluts" of anti-abortion mythology — that they can feel safe hating, without considering the consequences. But suppose Trump is successful in deporting millions of people from the workforce, which economists believe would trigger an economic depression. It's safe to say these voters would not enjoy that outcome.

Amanda Marcotte in Salon.com

 

save

If you watched Tuesday’s vice presidential debate hoping for something like a WWE SmackDown event, then you were probably left disappointed. However, if you wondered what fascism on Novocain looks like, or what a political “prevent” defense versus a blitz looks like, you might have enjoyed yourself.

Republican Vice Presidential candidate JD “Smokey Eyes” Vance and Democratic Vice Presidential candidate Tim “Coach” Walz squared off in a CBS event deemed the undercard event of the century. Expectations were low and interests relatively high. Still, all you could do was sigh.

With a serious tone and knitted brows, CBS News' Norah O'Donnell and Margaret Brennan moderated the debate that ran for 90 minutes at the CBS Broadcast Center in New York. While the ghost of Walter Cronkite was probably wretched in anticipation of the event, which studio heads boasted would feature no fact-checking from the moderators, early in the debate the journalists abandoned that vow after Vance refused to drop the obvious and dangerous lie about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio he’s propagated for weeks.

Brian Carem in Salon.com

Pete Rose

 

For years, Rose denied the gambling allegations under oath and in interviews. “I’m not going to admit to something that didn’t happen,” he told NBC Sports reporter Jim Gray in 1999. “I know you’re getting tired of hearing me say that.” He did admit in a tell-all book published in 2004 that he had lied and acknowledged that he was a gambling addict who bet on games he managed for the Reds.

Over the years, Rose was chronically in debt and in 1990 he pleaded guilty to federal tax charges after failing to report $354,968 in income from autograph fees and memorabilia sales. He served five months in federal prison and never fulfilled the requirements for having his name removed from the “permanently ineligible” list.

Cindy Boren in the WaPost

Great baseball player but a scumbag as a person died 9-30-24 in Las Vegas