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

 

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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