Last night’s VP debate wasn’t anything to write home about. (I admit that I didn’t watch every minute of it.) Tim Walz seemed nervous at first, but eventually got in some meaningful jabs. J.D. Vance was confident, glib and polished, but he had a some shameful moments that will probably be remembered far longer than his mostly smooth delivery of lies and obfuscation. The instant polls either called it a tie or gave Vance a slight edge.
Tim Walz and JD Vance spent much of Tuesday night defending their running mates’ records. They were less successful promoting their bosses’ plans for the future.
The two vice presidential candidates spent the 90-minute debate relitigating the last eight years just as much as they focused on their visions for the next four, sparring over the intricacies of Donald Trump’s first term, President Joe Biden’s policies — and their own political baggage, including Walz’s false claim he was in Hong Kong during the Tiananmen Square protests and Vance’s past harsh criticisms of Trump.
The result was a wide-ranging, policy-heavy back and forth that often pushed Walz and Vance to play defense for the presidential nominees, affording them little opportunity to make a fresh and forceful case to undecided voters just weeks before they head to the polls.
At the same time, they missed opportunities to use much-used attack lines against one another: Vance didn’t grill Walz on his military record while the Minnesota governor didn’t go after Vance over his “childless cat ladies” comment.
On immigration, Vance spent a large portion of his time defending Trump’s border policies, as Walz attacked the former president for only building less than 2 percent of the wall when he was in office. Vance used questions on the economy to argue that Trump delivered rising take-home pay and lower inflation, while slamming four years of Harris’ leadership on the economy. On health care, the men sparred over the Affordable Care Act and prescription drug costs under their running mates. And on foreign policy, they engaged in lengthy back and forth, both blaming each other’s parties for deteriorating global instability….
With no additional debates on the books, Tuesday night’s showdown may be the last significant national campaign event before November, increasing the weight of the vice presidential contenders’ closing arguments for their running mates. Polls show Harris and Trump in a neck-and-neck race, and Tuesday night was a chance for both men to pitch themselves and their party’s vision for the next four years.
Harris campaign co-chair Jen O’Malley Dillon said Walz “spoke passionately” about Harris’ “vision for a new way forward” and specifically highlighted Vance’s refusal to say Trump lost the 2020 election during what was perhaps the sharpest exchange of the night.
“That is a damning non-answer,” Walz said, after Vance was pressed multiple times on the issue.
IN TUESDAY NIGHT’S VICE-PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE, JD Vance and Tim Walz covered lots of issues: inflation, housing, guns, abortion, immigration, health care, and much more.
But there was only one question on which the vice presidency—the job for which these two men are competing—really matters. That question was whether they would certify the results of the next presidential election. And on that subject, Vance gave a non-answer that instantly disqualifies him: He refused to acknowledge that Donald Trump lost the 2020 election.
Certification of elections was a central factor in Vance’s audition to become Trump’s running mate. Other contenders for the job demonstrated, as Vance did, that they were sufficiently right-wing or loyal to MAGA. But, as Thomas Joscelyn has pointed out in The Bulwark, Vance stood out in one respect: He was the one who signaled most clearly that he was willing to push constitutional boundaries to do Trump’s bidding.
In February, Vance went on ABC’s This Week and made it clear that unlike Mike Pence, he would have collaborated in Trump’s scheme to block the certification of electoral votes on January 6, 2021.
Q: Would you have certified the election results had you been vice president?
Vance: If I had been vice president, I would have told the states, like Pennsylvania, Georgia, and so many others, that we needed to have multiple slates of electors. And I think the U.S. Congress should have fought over it from there.
Three months later, in an interview with Ross Douthat of the New York Times, Vance defended Trump’s scheme and explained how a vice president could have executed it. “You would try to marshal alternative slates of electors, like they did in the election of 1876,” said Vance. “The entire post-2020 thing would have gone a lot better if there had actually been an effort to provide alternative slates of electors and to force us to have that debate. I think it would’ve been a much better thing for the country.”
Vance dismissed the argument that courts had already rejected Trump’s allegations of election fraud. “You can’t litigate these things judicially; you have to litigate them politically,” Vance told Douthat. “And we never had a real political debate about the 2020 election.”
When Douthat suggested that pursuing Trump’s scheme “would have pushed America into a crisis,” Vance refused to concede that the scheme was illegal. Trump “was using the constitutional procedures,” Vance argued. “He was trying to take a constitutional process to its natural conclusion.”
In short, Vance made it clear that he believed 1) Congress could second-guess and override election results submitted by states; 2) politicians, not judges, should decide these matters; and 3) any scheme could be rendered presumptively constitutional by inventing a new interpretation of the Constitution. As a Yale Law grad, he surely knows better.
“Margaret,” he said to moderator Margaret Brennan of CBS News, “the rules were that you guys weren’t going to fact-check!”
It was a lie on top of another lie, supplemented by a pair of other lies, in support of an even bigger lie.
There was no “rule” against fact-checking. And Vance had just told a whopper. He had alleged that, in Springfield, Ohio, “you’ve got schools that are overwhelmed, you’ve got hospitals that are overwhelmed, you have got housing that is totally unaffordable because we brought in millions of illegal immigrants.”
There is no “open border,” Kamala Harris isn’t the president, and the thousands of Haitian migrants to which Vance was referring have legal status, which Brennan had accurately pointed out. But Vance claimed that “what’s actually going on” was that the Haitian migrants are there as part of “the facilitation of illegal immigration” — and he kept going until the moderators shut off the candidates’ microphones.
From the sidelines, Donald Trump cheered on his running mate. “Margaret Brennan just lied again about the ILLEGAL MIGRANTS let into our Country by Lyin’ Kamala Harris, and then she cut off JD’s mic to stop him from correcting her!” he posted on Truth Social.
The up-is-down moment was all the worse because it was in response to Vance’s original libels about the Haitian immigrants in Springfield: that they were bringing crime, disease and, yes, eating the cats and dogs of the town’s residents. Vance declined to walk back that calumny during the debate, instead saying: “The people that I’m most worried about in Springfield, Ohio, are the American citizens who have had their lives destroyed by Kamala Harris’s open border.”
It feels entirely appropriate that CBS chose to hold the vice-presidential debate in a studio once home to “Captain Kangaroo.”
Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance claimed Tuesday night — in contradiction of history — that his running mate, former President Donald Trump, “salvaged Obamacare,” the health insurance program that Trump tried to kill.
During the vice presidential debate on CBS against Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Vance, a senator from Ohio, echoed Trump’s own recent revisionism. But the assertion also served to remind voters that Democrats ultimately won the yearslong political fight over expanding access to health insurance: The Republican ticket no longer wants to repeal the 2010 law.
Trump “actually implemented some of these regulations when he was president of the United States,” Vance said Tuesday night. “And I think you can make a really good argument that it salvaged Obamacare, which was doing disastrously until Donald Trump came along. I think this is an important point about President Trump.
“When Obamacare was crushing under the weight of its own regulatory burden and health care costs, Donald Trump could have destroyed the program,” Vance added. “Instead, he worked in a bipartisan way to ensure that Americans had access to affordable care.”
But when Trump was president, repeal was a centerpiece of his agenda. In a dramatic Senate vote in 2017, Democrats and a handful of Republicans rejected his plan to repeal Obamacare. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., cast the deciding vote by turning his thumb down with a theatrical flourish. A critic of Obamacare, McCain nonetheless concluded that the “skinny repeal” measure would leave people worse off than if Obamacare remained in place.
Walz noted that episode Tuesday night.
Trump “would have repealed [Obamacare] had it not been for the courage of John McCain,” Walz said.
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz said during Tuesday night’s vice presidential debate that his son Gus was among the many Americans who have witnessed a shooting, causing an otherwise contentious sparring session to be briefly waylaid by a moment of human compassion.
“I’ve got a 17-year-old,” Walz said, as part of answer to a question about the issue of gun violence, “and he witnessed a shooting at a community center playing volleyball.”
When it was the Ohio senator’s turn to respond, Vance turned to Walz.
“Tim, first of all, I didn’t know that your 17-year-old witnessed a shooting, and I’m sorry about that and I hope he’s doing OK,” he said.
Then he proclaimed: “Christ have mercy. It is awful.”
“I appreciate you saying that,” Walz thanked him.
Walz has previously referred to the anecdote along the campaign trail while discussing the need for gun control.
“Too many of us have been there,” he said at a rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan, two weeks ago. “My own son was in a location where someone was shot in the head.”
Tim Walz‘s former roommate and fellow lawmaker claims there’s a secret cabal of Republicans that supports Kamala Harris but whose members are too chicken to cross Donald Trump.
Former Rep. Patrick Murphy (D-PA) who was elected to the House of Representatives in 2006 alongside Walz told the Daily Beast Tuesday that not only will he be rooting for his ex-roomie to defeat JD Vance in Tuesday night’s debate, but former colleagues on the other side of the aisle will be, too.
“There’s a silent majority out there that wants to send a message to Donald Trump that he was fired once for a reason,” Murphy told the Daily Beast Tuesday.
Former Rep. Patrick Murphy (D-PA)
The only problem with these GOP members is that they fear Trump, who—in spite of everything—still has an iron grip on the GOP congressional establishment.
Former Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona is the latest GOP ex-member of Congress to endorse Harris, joining the likes of former Republican Reps. Jim Greenwood, Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger. Cheney’s father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, has also endorsed Harris.
Walz’s friend Murphy, who served on House Armed Services when Walz served on the House Veterans Affairs Committee, said he regularly texts with Republicans who say they support Harris and don’t want another four years of Trump in the White House.
“But they’re afraid,” he said, adding that Trump’s most recent personal attacks on Harris may be the final blow for Republicans who are privately fed up with the former president and 2024 GOP nominee. Murphy declined to name names.
“More Republicans will definitely be coming out to endorse Harris,” he predicted. “After lying about cats and dogs being eaten, Obama not being born in America, he’s now turning on her with false claims about a mental disability,” said Murphy, a combat veteran who served as a paratrooper with the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division in Iraq.
Maybe he thought the pink tie could help. JD Vance, the Ohio senator and Donald Trump’s running mate, clearly set out to make himself seem less creepy at Tuesday night’s vice-presidential debate, and a major target of this project was aimed at convincing women voters to like him. Vance, after all, has what pollsters call “high unfavorables”, which is a polite way of saying that people hate his guts.
Much of this stems from Vance’s extreme and inflexible views on abortion, his hostility to childless women, and his creepy statements about families and childrearing. He had to convince women that he’s not out to hurt them or monitor their menstrual cycles; he had to try and seem kindly, empathetic, gentle. The resulting 90 minutes felt like watching a remarkably lifelike robot try to imitate normal human emotion. He smiled. He cooed. He spoke of an anonymous woman he knew whom he said was watching, and told her: “Love ya”. And occasionally, when he was fact-checked or received pushback on his falsehoods or distortions, the eyes of his stiff, fixed face flashed with an incandescent rage.
A generous characterization of Vance’s performance might be to call it “slick”. Vance delivered practiced answers to questions on healthcare, abortion rights and childcare that were dense with lies and euphemism. Asked about his call for a national abortion ban, Vance insisted that what he wanted was a national “standard” – a standard, that is, to ban it at 15 weeks.
He spoke in what was probably supposed to be empathetic terms about a woman he had grown up with who had told him that she felt she had had to have the abortion she got when they were younger, because it allowed her to leave her abusive relationship – without clarifying that the laws that Vance supports would have compelled that woman he purports to care about to carry her abuser’s child to term, and likely become trapped with him.
He claimed that Americans didn’t “trust” Republicans on the abortion issue, but did not mention that they don’t trust Republicans because those are the ones taking their rights away.
When asked about childcare, Vance spoke in eerily imprecise terms about encouraging people to choose their preferred “family model”, without specifying exactly which “model” he had in mind. He spoke of the “multiple people who could be providing family care options” but did not specify if these “people” had anything in common with each other. In media appearances throughout his career, Vance has been more explicit: he means that women will perform childcare for free – dropping out of paid work in the public sphere to do so, if necessary.
Vance was confident and smiling as he delivered these lines; he had the greasy self-assurance of someone who is used to lying to people he thinks are stupider than him. He sounded every bit like the Yale Law lawyer that he is. Even when he was not degrading women’s dignity or condescending to the two female moderators, his answers were often delivered with a polish that seemed intended to conceal the fact that they made no sense.
Asked about the housing crisis, for instance, he said that mass deportations – a horrific ethnic-cleansing operation proposed by the Trump campaign that would ruin communities, families and lives – would lower prices by decreasing demand. It was a kind of repeat of Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal, but this time it wasn’t satire. He also suggested that the government could build housing on federal lands – but neglected to mention that most of those lands are in the vast, rural, empty Mountain West, in regions with lots of tumbleweeds and absolutely no jobs.
Read more at The Guardian.
If the VP debate was somewhat unmemorable, Trump’s behavior yesterday decidedly was not. Some highlights:
Not only was Donald Trump the sole living president—current or former—to not deliver a video message for Jimmy Carter in honor of the 39th president’s milestone 100th birthday on Tuesday, but he made no mention of the historic occasion despite talking about Carter’s presidency in an attempt to criticize Joe Biden.
On Tuesday, the Carter Center shared excerpts of messages of support from Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Joe Biden that were shown at Carter’s birthday concert last month at Atlanta’s Fox Theater. The concert, a benefit that has raised $1.2 million thus far for the Carter Center’s mission to “wage peace, fight disease, and build hope,” airs Tuesday on Georgia Public Broadcasting….
Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Biden also posted about Carter on their official social media accounts. As of publication, Trump hadn’t even done that.
Instead, while campaigning in Waunakee, Wisconsin, Trump used Biden’s administration as a way to mention Carter—and not in a positive way.
“Jimmy Carter is the happiest man because Jimmy Carter is considered a brilliant president in comparison,” Trump said, after having called Biden “the worst.”
Carter, who left office in 1981, has had the longest post-presidency of any former commander-in-chief and is the only former president to have turned 100. He entered hospice care in February 2023….
Seen Tuesday surrounded by family and friends in his backyard while being saluted with a military flyover, Carter has downplayed his birthday. What’s more important to him, he has made clear through his family, is being able to vote for Vice President Kamala Harris.
Former President Donald Trump dismissed the injuries of U.S. soldiers who were caught in a 2020 missile attack by Iran on an American military installation, while he fielded questions from reporters at his latest campaign event in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Earlier in the day, the former president reacted to the news of strikes on Israel by Iran, by claiming that nothing of the sort could have happened if he were still in office.
When confronted with this fact by a reporter, Trump downplayed the idea that U.S. troop casualties in the incident were a big deal.
“Do you believe that you should have been tougher on Iran after they had launched ballistic missiles in 2020 on U.S. forces in Iraq, leaving more than 100 soldiers injured?” asked a reporter.
“So first of all, injured. What does injured mean?” said Trump. “You mean because they had a headache. Because the bombs never hit the fort. So, just so you understand, there was nobody ever tougher on Iraq. They had no money with me, they would have made any deal with me. I would have had a deal made within — literally, I would have had a deal made within one week after the election.”
The troops who were wounded in the missile strike suffered considerably more than a headache, officials have said.
According to a Pentagon report at the time, 109 troops were injured, many of whom suffered traumatic brain injuries. Despite the report, Trump has insisted, “We suffered no casualties.”
MILWAUKEE — Republican nominee Donald Trump spoke for 33 minutes before his first mention of the ostensible focus of his remarks.
Signs reading “SCHOOL CHOICE,” “EDUCATION FREEDOM NOW” and “LET PARENTS DECIDE” decorated a small auditorium, and a panel of speakers preceding the former president focused on using public funds to let families choose between public and private, especially religious, schools. Trump read from a binder containing a prepared speech on the subject, and he switched abruptly between the text and a jumble of other topics.
“We can be nice and we can be politically incorrect, but the only thing they’re going to do there is cheat on elections, and we just can’t let this happen,” he said at one point. Without warning, he continued: “The city of Milwaukee is the home of first and oldest choice program.”
He spoke of “a million Rambos.” “Turnarounds” and “gotaways” and “dead-head spending.” He mixed up Iran with North Korea and strained to pronounce United Arab Emirates. He marveled at Hurricane Helene coming so late in the storm season, which typically runs through November. He falsely claimed government agencies can’t name the U.S. population, and he compared the conflict between Israel and Iran to “two kids fighting in the schoolyard.”
Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump speaks at a campaign event at Discovery World, Friday, Oct. 1, 2024, in Milwaukee. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
Trump, 78, often speaks in a digressive, extemporaneous style that thrills his fans at large-scale rallies. But Tuesday’s event, in front of almost entirely reporters, was especially scattered and hard to follow. Polls show voters’ concerns about Trump’s age and fitness have increased since President Joe Biden, 81, withdrew and was replaced as the Democratic nominee by Vice President Kamala Harris.
Trump spoke slowly and appeared tired. It was his second stop of the day, and he has picked up the pace of campaigning in recent weeks….
Trump was more energetic during a speech to supporters in Waunakee, Wis., earlier Tuesday. He went on an extended riff about the 1987 film “Full Metal Jacket” and made up a false claim that Harris raised taxes as the San Francisco district attorney, which is not a power of that office.
Trump avoided direct questions about how he would address the escalating violence between Iran and Israel, by repeatedly insisting it never would have happened if he were president. He claimed he could settle that war, as well as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, with a single phone call apiece, but he declined to specify how.
“I don’t want to say what I’d use because I don’t want to give up negotiating abilities,” he said. He even boasted that with a second term he could have struck a peace deal between Iran and Israel.
There’s more Trump nonsense at the link. The guy is really coming apart.
…pale in comparison to Donald Trump’s most troubling showing yet on the campaign trail. Across two campaign events in Wisconsin on Tuesday, the former and would-be president reiterated a truth that is much more important than who won the debate: namely, that he’s morally and intellectually unfit for office.
Both Trump events were packed with outrageous defamations and lies. His targets included troops wounded abroad while he was president, which would be unthinkable in anything resembling a normal era of politics.
Vicious as Trump’s attacks were, they also managed to be muddled in ways suggesting he isn’t up to the task of being president until he’s 82 years old. Vance’s slick lying and election denialism is even more ominous given the possibility that he may end up as the country’s leader in a second, nightmarish, Trump term….
Trump’s public addresses are disjointed and disconnected from reality at the best of times. Yesterday, however, was a particularly wide-ranging journey through conspiracy theories, hatred, and nonsense.
His first speech of the day in the the Madison suburb of Waunakee featured racially coded attacks on Brittney Griner, a Black American basketball player who was held hostage in Russia. Trump also lied about opposing the Iraq War and said all sorts of strange stuff, such as accusing Democrats of supporting “water-free bathrooms.”
The lowlight, however, came when Trump flat out defamed Kamala Harris for murder, saying of a murder victim, “She murdered him. In my opinion Kamala murdered him. Just like she had a gun in her hand.” (So much for Trump toning down the rhetoric and offering a message of unity — watch the clip below.)
Even lower depths were explored during Trump’s appearance later in the day in Milwaukee. Taking questions from the press, he told a reporter who asked him if he trusts the election process this time around that “I’ll let you know in 33 days” — the implication being that he would accept the results only if he wins. Riffing about immigration, he wandered off into a bizarre, woozy, blatantly racist rant about people in the Congo, a country that he boasted he did not know anything about. (“They come from the Congo in the Africa. Many people from the Congo. I don’t know what that is, but they come out of jails in the Congo.”) [….]
Then, in a moment that would’ve driven news cycles for days had Biden done it, Trump confused the dictator of North Korea, Kim Jong Un, with the president of Iran, Masoud Pezeshkian, and claimed his buddy Kim “is trying to kill me.”
Then came the episode when Trump mocked injured troops.
That debacle came when a reporter asked Trump if he should’ve been tougher in retaliation against Iran after they launched a 2020 missile attack on a US base in Iraq, which injured more than 100 US soldiers. The Iranian launch was in retaliation for a US drone strike which killed Iranian Major General Qasem Soleimani. More than 100 US soldiers suffered traumatic brain injuries.
Trump at the time lied about the incident, insisting that no soldiers were harmed and that he’d “heard that they had headaches.” The episode was mostly forgotten over the ensuing four years, but Trump reminded everyone about it during his news conference, peevishly responding to the reporter: “So first of all — injured. What does injured mean? Injured means — you mean because they had a headache? Because the bombs never hit the fort.”
After Trump finished downplaying serious, life-changing injuries suffered by the troops, he then attacked the reporter for not being “truthful” while mixing up Iraq and Iran.
Read on at Public Notice for more horrifying Trump quotes along with videos.
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“The empathy just oozes from this one. Hurricane Helene was apparently wet.” John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Morning, Sky Dancers!
The signs of the results of lousy decision-making based on greed and mythology are everywhere. Hurricanes are no longer coastal phenomena but can make their way 300 miles inland and hold a Cat 2 status. You would think enough people in this country have critical thinking skills and conscience to vote the pols out who are doing this to us. It would help, of course, if the press were still on the side of democracy instead of creating clickbait to earn a buck for stockholders and top management. But, here we are deeper down the rat hole of “The Medium is the Message published in 1964.” McLuhan understood clickbait before just about anyone.
The title “The Medium Is the Massage” is a teaser—a way of getting attention. There’s a wonderful sign hanging in a Toronto junkyard which reads, ‘Help Beautify Junkyards. Throw Something Lovely Away Today.’ This is a very effective way of getting people to notice a lot of things. And so the title is intended to draw attention to the fact that a medium is not something neutral—it does something to people. It takes hold of them. It rubs them off, it massages them and bumps them around, chiropractically, as it were, and the general roughing up that any new society gets from a medium, especially a new medium, is what is intended in that title”
This is more true than ever. We have more than a few TV channels, newspapers, and radio to influence us these days. Most people treat their news and information more like boutique shopping, where they can find the look that suits them every time. Substack is one medium where I have seen public intellectuals. I feel comfortable reading a lot of people there, and I must admit that it’s because they are a lot like me. They write about things that bug them about the institutions and country that house them and likely educated them. However, they do bring reasoned thought and data with them. But anyway, enough of that rabbit hole. Let’s just say I’m not beyond shopping my own boutique. Also, the positive thing about the web is that you have access to authentic information and don’t have to spend days in dark, moldy library stacks to find it. The negative thing is that not all people want to be challenged. They want to feel good about what they already think is real.
Margaret Sullivan’s Substack–aptly called American Crisis–has this headline today. “The three phases of normalizing Trump’s attack on Harris in Wisconsin. The media did what it always does, and it’s not good enough.” Trump is so far off the sanity scale these days that it is indeed frightening.
The use of neutral language. If you merely read about Donald Trump’s deeply offensive rally this weekend in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, you probably thought it was about immigration. And about Trump up to his usual tricks of disparaging his rivals.
Here the lead of the report from Axios, for example:
“Former President Trump, in a self-described ‘dark speech,’ told a rally in Wisconsin yesterday that his opponent, Vice President Harris, is “mentally impaired’ and “mentally disabled.’”
Axios, which favors bullet points and boldface help for the tuned-out, let us know “Why It Matters”: “Even for Trump, it was weird, nasty and nonsensical — when he needed to be swaying ‘national security moms’ and other undecideds.”
Or here’s the top paragraph of the Washington Post report: “Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump criticized Vice President Harris’s mental capacity Saturday, falsely claiming she was born ‘mentally impaired’ and comparing her actions to that of a ‘mentally disabled person.’ The remarks prompted criticism from advocates for people with disabilities.”
Here’s the Associated Press’s headline: “Trump lists his grievances in a Wisconsin speech intended to link Harris to illegal immigration.”
But if you watched the speech, or even snippets of it, you saw something quite different — an absolutely ugly and brutal attack on Kamala Harris, full of lies and racist misogyny. In case you missed it, watch a bit of it here.
Sullivan has written two more of them and a lot of examples to follow. Please go read it.
The lack of substantial followup. Once the outrageous rally was over, and the stories with their neutral language written, the political media was ready — more than ready — to move on. The media does know how to follow up, as you may recall from, for instance, President Biden’s bad debate this summer. But in the case of Trump’s unhinged and ugly attack on Harris’s intelligence, the spot-news coverage was about it. I did not see countless outraged opinion pieces; I did not see days of stories examining every aspect of this. It was just, cover the speech and let’s get out of here.
The pivot to safety. Like waves rushing to the shore, the media relentlessly returns to the familiar. The thinking seems to go something like this: Whew, that was a pretty crazy rally, but let’s leave that behind and get back to what we’re good at. When in doubt, cover the horserace. One thing I did see after Saturday’s rally were many, many, many stories about polls. A New York Times headline Sunday rendered it this way: “Harris and Trump are Neck and Neck in Michigan and Wisconsin, Polls Find.” And that’s about as horserace-oriented as it gets.
Vance is now a historically unpopular Vice-Presidential nominee. Mainstream Republican contenders, such as Senator Marco Rubio or Governor Doug Burgum, might have appealed to the sort of Nikki Haley voters that can’t stand Trump. Rubio, who is Cuban American, might have been a good pick to attract Latino voters, who, polls showed, were less interested in voting Democratic this year. Instead, Trump’s selection of Vance and all that he brings with him emphasized a doubling-down on MAGA culture. It could end up being politically ill-advised, but it’s not without its logic. Trump’s team knows that America is a hyperpartisan country. Polls show that just four per cent of voters are undecided in this election, the smallest share of the electorate in any U.S. contest this century. For the Trump campaign, the theory goes: Why expend all your energy trying to convince people to vote for one of the most unpopular Presidents in American history? Work to amp up your base and find Trump fans who don’t usually vote and make sure they turn out on November 5th.
The Trump campaign calls these voters “low-propensity,” and they’re working to turn them out in swing states like Arizona, where a canvassing effort is being run by the conservative group Turning Point USA. An Elon Musk-backed PAC is doing the same in Nevada and Michigan. Some Republicans have expressed reservations about the strategy, but it’s not a new idea in Trumpworld. In 2016, when I was a reporter at FiveThirtyEight, I obtained a Trump campaign memo written during that year’s primaries that explained the unusual practice of targeting low-propensity voters. “Our candidate commands unheard amounts of earned media,” the memo read, calling the strategy “more akin to evangelization than persuasion.” The job, then, was to teach Trump fans how to become Trump voters. “These are people who may not know where to vote, whether or not they are eligible to participate, and what the hours are,” the memo read. “They may have to work on the actual election day and are unaware of early voting opportunities on Saturdays. Many of them may have simply never been asked for their vote.” Turning Point’s focus this year—one of its employees told Semafor—is on small groups of thirty thousand to forty thousand potential voters in swing states, a testament to the slim margins of 2024.
Trump’s appeal has always been his sui-generis persona and politics—take him as he is—but, this year, the campaign seems more devoted to fan service than anything else. Steven Cheung, Trump’s top spokesman, recently retweeted a three-minute tongue-in-cheek hard-rock music video titled “MAGA ENERGY,” which nicely captured the movement’s aesthetics. It features lyrics like “Our world is frightening / Globals want to burn it down,” images of American flags and Trump’s face overlaid on that of a lion, and a montage of the jiggling, mostly bare bottoms of women shooting automatic weapons. Trump, a marketer to his core, has also built a promotional flywheel that he hopes his voters will get stuck in: If you like Trump’s crazy persona, you might go to your first Trump rally. If you go to enough rallies, you might like Trump’s digital trading cards—collect enough and you’ll get a physical piece of the suit that he wore to his debate with Biden (really!). If you like the trading cards, maybe you’ll buy Melania’s new book (she stands by her nude photos). Somewhere in there, Trump and company are hoping their low-propensity supporters register to vote and do so early.
The purpose of Trump’s campaign is to bolster his ego and keep him out of jail. Then, he’ll likely be replaced either by death or the 25th Amendment, and Vance will put the entire 2025 plan into play. Because all the players will be set up in the Federal Government. Additionally, all the work of Pat Robertson and others from the Reagan administration to enslave us to White Christian Nationalism will come to fruition.
Yesterday, I read this article from Mother Jones where one of the so-called Christians in that movement finally realizes that what he was doing wasn’t very ‘Christ-like,’ has repented, and is now trying to reverse the hell they bring to the political system.The title is “Confessions of a (Former) Christian Nationalist. When religion is placed at the service of a political party, it corrupts both.” and it’s written by The Reverend Rob Schenck. Anyone who read the history of the Roman Empire and its use of Christianity to conquer Northern Europe should know this by now. The story on how they captured SCOTUS is even more interesting than the narrative on capturing members of Congress.
Federal judges and especially Supreme Court justices, unlike politicians, never need to shake hands across a rope line. Accessing their world required creativity. I found it through the little-known Supreme Court Historical Society. Founded by the late Chief Justice Warren Burger, the independent nonprofit holds an annual dinner hosted by the chief justice and attended by most associate justices. Tickets are strictly controlled. By establishing a close relationship with the society’s staff, I managed to secure seats each year for several of my donors, whom I would coach on how to connect with the justices attending the event. As a result, two of my most active participants, Don and Gayle Wright of Dayton, Ohio, ingratiated themselves with the Alitos, Scalias, and Thomases.
When I trained my donors to interact with conservative justices on the court, I told them to reinforce for their powerful new friends how important their decisions were to the country’s future, and how critical Judeo-Christian values are to America’s success. I encouraged them to underscore how millions of citizens thanked God for their presence on the top court.
In a notable instance, the Wrights were tipped off about a pending decision before it was announced to the public. As I later told the House Judiciary Committee, “Gayle relayed that she had learned the outcome of the Burwell v. Hobby Lobby case while at the meal with the Alitos, that it was in Hobby Lobby’s favor, and that ‘Sam is writing it.’” The ruling would affirm that companies with religious objections were not required to provide contraceptive coverage in their health insurance packages. I also told the House committee that Gayle had shared the news with me and that I told the president of Hobby Lobby, Steve Green—his parents were donors to my organization—that they had won the case. The Green family found themselves in the enviable position of using the advance notice to prep their spokespeople so they could be ready at the microphone outside the court following Alito’s reading of the majority opinion. They could shape the public narrative, a distinct advantage over their opponents.
When word of our campaign eventually broke in the New York Times, Justice Alito responded, “I never detected any effort on the part of the Wrights to obtain confidential information or to influence anything that I did in either an official or private capacity, and I would have strongly objected if they had done so.” He added, “I have no knowledge of any project that they allegedly undertook for ‘Faith and Action.’” Gayle Wright denied obtaining or passing along any such information. Steve Green declined to comment to the Times, and his mother told the paper he hadn’t been notified in advance. Let’s just say this is not how I remember what had happened.
It took years for the scales to fall from my eyes. A major turning point occurred when I took a leave of absence from Faith and Action to pursue a late-in-life doctorate. Part of my research involved the German Christian movement of the 1930s, which supported the Nazi Party. One of the most respected Bible scholars of that period, Paul Althaus, declared Hitler’s ascent to the chancellorship to be a “gift and miracle from God.” I began to suspect that we evangelicals were similarly allowing our faith to be co-opted for political purposes. Devastating consequences seemed inevitable for evangelicalism and for our country.
These fears were reinforced when I attended a tribute banquet for Pat Robertson around 2010. Virtually every evangelical luminary was there. When Robertson introduced his guest of honor, Donald J. Trump, I was shocked. In Bible college, my preaching instructor had suggested that the New York playboy was a perfect illustration for what it meant to not live as a Christian. I asked a friend of Pat’s why Trump was there. They both were “members of the billionaires’ club,” he explained. “Besides, he may make a good president someday.” Trump worked the room, filled with the biggest names on the religious right, garnering hearty applause.
The article is long and can make you angry, but it gives you more insight into that influential movement. Know Thy Enemy.
The New York Timesfinally read the writing on the wall today and endorsed Kamala Harris for President. I’m using the Politico analysis rather than trying to get into the NYT again, so you can notice the subheading, which says a lot about Politoco as a source. “NYT endorses Harris as ‘the only choice’ for president. The editorial board has not backed a Republican for president since Dwight Eisenhower in 1956.” The analysis also says something about the New York Times.
The New York Times editorial board on Monday endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris, calling her “the only patriotic choice for president” while painting a grim picture of a second term for former President Donald Trump.
Rather than praise for its preferred candidate, the board led its endorsement of Harris by listing off disqualifying arguments against Trump. “It is hard to imagine a candidate more unworthy to serve as president of the United States,” the Times editorial board wrote.
“This unequivocal, dispiriting truth — Donald Trump is not fit to be president — should be enough for any voter who cares about the health of our country and the stability of our democracy to deny him re-election,” the board, made up of 14 opinion journalists, wrote. “For this reason, regardless of any political disagreements voters might have with her, Kamala Harris is the only patriotic choice for president.”
The endorsement of Harris is unsurprising — the editorial board has not backed a Republican for president since Dwight Eisenhower in 1956 — though still important given the paper’s influence. In July, 10 days before President Joe Biden left the race (and after the board called on him to do so), the board published a five-part, scathing editorial against Trump that struck many of the same chords as Monday’s story.
Okay, enough of that. Trump has become utterly void of self-censoring, even when it’s something that would behoove him to hide. This is from MSNBC and Steven Benen. “On overtime pay, Trump slips up by accidentally telling the truth. Donald Trump admitted that he concocted a private-sector scheme to avoid paying his employees overtime compensation. So much for his “pro-worker” pitch.”
Five of the most interesting words in Donald Trump’s rhetorical repertoire are, “I shouldn’t say this, but…” While it’s obviously impossible to read the former president’s mind, whenever the Republican uses the phrase, it’s an apparent acknowledgement that he knows the rest of the sentence will be politically problematic, but he’s simply unable to help himself.
As his first year in the White House came to an end, for example, Trump declared, “I shouldn’t say this, but we essentially repealed Obamacare.” He was, of course, lying, but the comments served as a reminder of his anti-health care vision. About a year later, campaigning in Montana, the then-president publicly praised Republican Gov. Greg Gianforte for physically assaulting a journalist who asked a question the governor didn’t like.
“I shouldn’t say this [but] there’s nothing to be embarrassed about,” Trump said in reference to the violence.
Six years later, the Republican is still stumbling into inadvertent moments of candor. HuffPost reported:
Former president and current GOP nominee Donald Trump on Sunday admitted he ‘hated’ to pay his staff overtime and would instead replace them with other workers to avoid doing so. Trump’s confession came during a campaign rally in Erie, Pennsylvania, after promising to deliver ‘gigantic tax cuts’ via his pledge to end tax on tips, on overtime and on social security benefits for seniors.”
“I know a lot about overtime,” the Republican candidate boasted. “I hated to give overtime. I hated it. I’d get other people, I shouldn’t say this, but I’d get other people in. I wouldn’t pay.”
The public comments stood out for a few reasons.
Right off the bat, there are still some political observers who like to pretend that the former president is some kind of ally to working-class Americans. It’s against that backdrop that Trump thought it’d be a good idea to admit that he, as a boss, deliberately took steps to deny his own employees overtime compensation to which they were entitled.
Meanwhile, the DonOld Cult is up to more domestic terrorism. This is from Raw Story. “Trump-supporting Ohio businessman gets MAGA death threats for defending Haitian workers.” This analysis is by Brad Reed.
A Trump-supporting Ohio businessman is getting major blowback from fellow Trump supporters after he publicly defended the honor of the Haitian immigrants he has hired to work for him.
The New York Times reports that Jamie McGregor, a lifelong Republican who twice voted for former President Donald Trump and owner of the McGregor Metal manufacturing shop, has been hit with “death threats, a lockdown at his company and posters around town branding him a traitor” because he praised the Haitian immigrants who work at his company.
In fact, McGregor says the situation as gotten so scary that he’s arming both himself and his family members to defend against would-be MAGA assailants.
“I have struggled with the fact that now we’re going to have firearms in our house — like, what the hell?” he told the Times. “And now we’re taking classes, we’re going to shooting ranges, we’re being fitted for handguns.”
McGregor decided to hire newly arrived Haitian immigrants in recent years because he had trouble finding dependable workers, and he has praised them for having a strong work ethic that has benefitted his business.
McGregor’s home city of Springfield, Ohio has become the focus of MAGA anger in recent weeks after former President Donald Trump made false claims about Haitian immigrants there eating locals’ dogs and cats.
When confronted with evidence debunking this claim, Trump and his running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), have doubled down on attacking the Haitian immigrant community.
It’s beginning to feel like Lord of the Fliesin Trumplandia. I wonder if said businessman will vote for Trump again? Has that book been banned yet in Florida?
Oh, and now we get to speak of The Purge. They filmed the TV series at the Abandoned Navy Base down the block from me, which was weird enough. I didn’t see the movie or the series, but I know enough of the franchise to recognize it in Donald’s speech. This is from Politico. “Trump says ‘violent day’ of policing will end crime. The remarks at a campaign rally Sunday did not amount to a policy proposal allowing police retaliation, the former president’s campaign said.” Adam Wren reports the story.
Former President Donald Trump on Sunday called for “one real rough, nasty” and “violent day” of police retaliation in order to eradicate crime “immediately.”
The remarks — delivered by Trump at a rally in Erie, Pennsylvania, just 36 days before the election — did not amount to a new policy proposal, according to a Trump campaign official.
Asked whether the former president’s idea amounted to a new proposal and how such an operation would work, a campaign official said Trump was “clearly just floating it in jest.”
“President Trump has always been the law and order President and he continues to reiterate the importance of enforcing existing laws,” Steven Cheung, the campaign’s communications director, wrote in a statement to POLITICO. “Otherwise it’s all-out anarchy, which is what Kamala Harris has created in some of these communities across America, especially during her time as [California] Attorney General when she emboldened criminals.
The best analysis of what’s ahead and what’s happened is by Marcy at EmptyWheel. “As Kamala Harris Passes the Two-Thirds Mark, Trump Adopts Apocalyptic Language.”
There were no mass protests at the DNC. Neither, however, was there someone speaking for Palestinian people from the Convention podium.
With the assassination last week of Hassan Nasrallah and Israel’s expanding operations against Iranian proxies in Lebanon and Yemen, we have seen unforeseen escalation in the Middle East. Joe Biden seems incapable of understanding that Bibi Netanyahu was never a good faith negotiator. On top of the instability this will bring (and the ongoing threat of Iranian violence targeted at Trump), I worry that Harris’ choice to prioritize Republican endorsements over Palestinian speakers could harm her in Michigan (as Elissa Slotkin issues warnings about Michigan).
We did get a superseding indictment in Trump’s January 6 case (though without any new charges), but Trump succeded in delaying sentencing in his NY case. We may find out this week whether we’re going to get to see a redacted version of Jack Smith’s argument that Trump is not immune; indeed, given how Judge Tanya Chutkan issued a deadline for noon tomorrow, we may even see the argument itself this week. If we do, Trump’s attacks on Mike Pence will be at the center of the argument. Remember: Trump’s increasing fascistic language over the weekend has come afterhe got a first look at Smith’s argument, and his lawyers seem terrified of some of the claims made by witnesses that could get unsealed.
Whatever the cause, Trump is increasingly unhinged in public appearances, though much of the press continues to sanewash his coverage. More and more, his rants adopt fascist language, such as yesterday when he either endorsed The Purge or Kristallnacht. Donald Trump looks weak and Donald Trump looks violent, but that is not yet a persistent news coverage theme (indeed, in his polling update, Nate Silver claims there’s nothing “like Joe Biden’s deteriorating public performances” that might be affecting the race in ways polling is not accounting for). If the press does begin to capture Trump’s weakness and violence, it may impact the race — but I’m not holding my breath.
Trump’s right wing running mate has drummed up terrorist threats against his own constituents in Springfield, OH, and more recently drummed up threats against a beloved Pittsburgh restaurant (while trying to tamp them down). We have not yet gotten right wing violence, neither localized nor mass. But understand that the far right Christian nationalists that Trump has been cultivating, most notably with JD Vance’s appearance with Lance Wallnau, have been an absolutely central factor in past political violence, including January 6. When Donald Trump mobilizes Christian imagery, he does so not because he believes in any of it, but because he believes in power, and he knows he can get people who mistake him for the Messiah to go to war for him. (An Evangelicals for Harris group just rolled out an ad interspersing Billy Graham warnings of the anti-Christ with clips of Trump.) We have not yet seen political violence against marginalized groups, but Trump is doing everything that has fostered it in the past. Nevertheless, most horserace journalists are ignoring that, just like they and their colleagues dismissed the risk of political violence in advance of January 6.
In my earlier post, I said we should be unsurprised by a Black Swan event (I suggested all-out war was one possibility, and given the escalation in the Middle East, it remains one).
The floods caused by Helene could be another. Right wingers are already trying to ensure this works like Katrina did for George W Bush. And whatever else, the flooding disproportionately affected the rural areas that Trump needs to win North Carolina (though North Carolina voters can forego voter ID requirements under an emergency exception). That said, the Helene response may also highlight two things — FEMA and NOAA — that Project 2025 aims to defund. Tennessee Governor Bill Lee’s attempt to forgo federal help may provide a contrast that shows how Federal help can make a difference in a catastrophe. And a whole bunch of conservative people just got bowled over by the impact of climate change, hundreds of miles from the nearest coast. If the Feds can respond to the damage on I-40 like they did to the I-95 or the Francis Scott Key Bridge disaster, it may convince people in North Carolina that the government can too do something good.
As for the flood, Biden promises the Federal Government will stay until the work is done. This is from USA. Today.”Biden on Helene disaster: ‘We’re not leaving until the job is done.'” Swapna Venugopal Ramaswamy reports the story.
“We’ll continue to serve resources including food, water, communications, and lifesaving equipment will be there,” Biden said. “I mean it − as long as it takes to finish this job.”
He also said he’s committed to travel later this week to affected communities.
“I’ve been told that it would be disruptive if I did it right now,” he said.
Authorities are dealing with the storm’s aftermath, which saw caused widespread devastation and power outages across the Southeast and killed at least 100. Biden, who said he’s been in touch with governors, mayors and local leaders, said 600 people were still unaccounted for.
I remember Hurricane Katrina all too well and while I loved spending time with Anderson Cooper et al, I’d rather no one have to live through that again. So, why don’t we keep going with renewable energy, develop a workable immigration plan, and continue to fund a government that works for the people? I’m tired of seeing billionaires and grifting politicians get the goodies.
Cheer up folks! Coach Tim debates J Dank Vance tomorrow night!!
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Cats of the Louvre, a graphic novel by Taiyo Matsumoto
Happy Caturday!!
There are just 37 days remaining until election day, November 5. While Trump continues to display his growing cognitive issues as well as his ignorance of public policy, Kamala Harris has been making substantive appearances in which she intelligently spells out what she will do as president. Earlier in the week she spoke about her economic plans. Yesterday she visited the border in Arizona and gave a speech outlining her proposed immigration policies and attacking Trump’s failures.
Immigration has featured prominently in the 2024 presidential election, with polls showing voters placing more trust in Trump to handle the issue than Harris.
Democrats, grappling with years of border crises, have tried to gain ground by pointing to the bipartisan border measure that congressional Republicans blocked earlier this year after Trump came out against it. Harris on Friday lambasted Trump for his role in stymying that bill.
“It was the strongest border security bill we have seen in decades. It was endorsed by the Border Patrol union. And it should be in effect today, producing results in real time, right now, for our country,” she said at a rally in Douglas, a town on the US-Mexico border.
“But Donald Trump tanked it. He picked up the phone and called some friends in Congress and said, ‘Stop the bill,’” she said. “He prefers to run on a problem instead of fixing a problem. And the American people deserve a president who cares more about border security than playing political games and their personal political future.”
She said she would ask Congress to pass the measure if she is elected, and would sign it into law. She also laid out a series of proposals that she said were “not just about some rhetoric at a rally,” but would help stem the flow of migrants into the United States.
A bit more:
“Solutions are at hand if we focus on fixing a problem and not running on a problem,” Harris said.
She said she’d work with Congress to create a pathway to citizenship for “hardworking immigrants who have been here for years, for years, and deserve to have a system that works,” as well as “Dreamers” – undocumented immigrants brought into the United States as children, who are allowed to live and work in the US under an Obama-era program but generally cannot become citizens under current law.
“They are American in every way. But still, they do not have an earned pathway to citizenship. And this problem has gone unsolved at this point now for decades,” Harris said. “The same goes for farmworkers who ensure that we have food on our tables and sustain our agricultural industry – and they too have been in legal limbo for years because politicians have refused to come together and fix our broken immigration system.”
Earlier this year, Biden announced an executive action severely limiting the ability of migrants to seek asylum at the US southern border if they crossed unlawfully – a departure from decadeslong protocol. Immigrant advocates have likened the executive action to Trump-era policies.
The measure can be turned on and off and lifted when there’s a daily average of fewer than 1,500 encounters between ports of entry, among other criteria. It remains in place.
Homeland Security officials have credited the action for driving down border crossings to the lowest point since 2020.
DOUGLAS, Ariz. — Vice President Kamala Harris and her campaign on Friday proposed new border restrictions that would go further than the emergency rules the Biden administration deployed in June, making the announcement during a visit to the U.S.-Mexico border Friday in an effort to confront one of her biggest political vulnerabilities.
By Taiyo Matsumoto
Harris’s proposed executive action would build on President Joe Biden’s current policy of essentially closing the U.S. asylum system unless illegal border crossings stay below 1,500 daily crossings for a week. Harris would lower that threshold and extend the period it must be met, advisers said,although exact figures were not immediately available.
The action might have a limited practical impact, at least in the short term, but the proposal appeared designed to send a message that Harris is taking a more assertive immigration posture than the administration in which she serves and that she is not ceding the issue to Donald Trump, who consistently scores higher marks among voters on border security and immigration.
In what her campaign had billed as a major speech in this community, which sits on the border, Harris also emphasized her support for an enforcement-heavy border security bill crafted by a bipartisan group of senators earlier this year. She decried Trump’s central role in derailing it, noting that he had urged Republicans in Congress to oppose the legislation.
“Donald Trump tanked it,” she said, standing amid six different signs that said in capital letters, “Border Security and Stability.”
“Because, you see, he prefers to run on a problem instead of fixing a problem,” she added. “And the American people deserve a president who cares more about border security than playing political games and their personal political future.”
Vice President Harris walked along the U.S. border with Mexico on Friday alongside a stretch of border wall built during the Obama administration, talking with border officials about their work.
It was a photo op meant to illustrate that she supports border security — one of the biggest concerns voters have about Harris — and to try to defang criticism from her Republican opponent, former President Donald Trump.
Later, she embraced a mother whose son died of a fentanyl overdose, and made her most extensive remarks to date on how she would address border security and immigration reform.
“I will reach across the aisle and I will embrace common sense approaches and new technologies to get the job done,” she said….
She said her experience as a prosecutor and attorney general gave her experience to tackle the fentanyl problem.
“I’ve seen tunnels with walls as smooth as the walls of your living room, complete with lighting and air conditioning, making very clear that it is about an enterprise that is making a whole lot of money in the trafficking of guns, drugs and human beings,” she said.
“Stopping transnational criminal organizations and strengthening our border is not new to me, and it is a long standing priority of mine. I have done that work, and I will continue to treat it as a priority when I am elected president of the United States,” Harris said.
Read more at NPR.
Trump very much has not been focusing on policy, and if you’ve paid attention to his rallies and other public appearances, you know that he’s simply not capable of doing so. Even though he was “president” for four years, he has learned nothing about how the government works or about serious issues. He is incapable of learning, and why the media keeps propping him up is a mystery. Here are a couple of “issues” raised by the Trump camp over the past couple of days.
Former President Donald J. Trump threatened Friday to prosecute Google if he was elected to the presidency a second time, claiming that the tech company had been “illegally” showing only “bad stories” about him and only “good” ones about Vice President Kamala Harris.
Mr. Trump said at a news conference on Thursday that the former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi should be prosecuted in connection with the security lapses by which a mob of his own supporters attacked the Capitol during the transfer of presidential power on Jan. 6, 2021.
And on Friday, in Michigan, he called for an attorney general “somewhere, like in a Republican territory” to investigate Ms. Pelosi and her husband over reports that Mr. Pelosi had sold Visa stock ahead of the Justice Department’s filing an antitrust lawsuit against the company.
It was not immediately clear what prompted Mr. Trump to make the statement about Google on his social media website, Truth Social.
“It has been determined that Google has illegally used a system of only revealing and displaying bad stories about Donald J. Trump, some made up for this purpose while, at the same time, only revealing good stories about Comrade Kamala Harris,” Mr. Trump wrote.
“This is an ILLEGAL ACTIVITY, and hopefully the Justice Department will criminally prosecute them for this blatant Interference of Elections,” he added. “If not, and subject to the Laws of our Country, I will request their prosecution, at the maximum levels, when I win the Election, and become President of the United States!”
Google said it did not manipulate search results to favor any candidate.
“Both campaign websites consistently appear at the top of search for relevant and common search queries,” a Google spokesman said.
The source of Trump’s claim appears to be the right-wing Media Research Center, which published a report on Wednesday covered this week by Fox News and The New York Post.
MRC’s report “analyzed the Sept. 6 Google search results” for the terms “donald trump presidential race 2024” and “kamala harris presidential race 2024.” The group alleges that the results favored outlets with “a history of leftist bias,” and that, while Trump’s campaign website appeared sixth in his search results, Harris’s campaign website appeared third in hers.
Dismissing MRC’s report, a Google spokesperson told Fox, “Both campaign websites consistently appear at the top of Search for relevant and common search queries. This report looked at a single rare search term on a single day several weeks ago, and even for that search, both candidates’ websites ranked in the top results on Google.”
Trump’s Truth Social post recalls his previous claims that Google search results are biased against him, which Google has denied.
It is also yet another example of Trump promising to prosecute his perceived political foes if he retakes the White House. Earlier this month, for example, Trump posted to Truth Social that, if he wins, “those people that CHEATED”—such as “Lawyers, Political Operatives, Donors, Illegal Voters, & Corrupt Election Officials”—“will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the Law, which will include long term prison sentences.”
This is what Trump is preoccupied with a month before the November election.
Oh, and JD Vance continues to say the quiet part aloud when it comes to women’s control over their own bodies and lives. Recently, close Trump adviser did it too.
One of the most toxic and politically explosive parts of the current abortion rights debate is tied the complexities and perhaps inanities of leaving national abortion policy up to individual states. And a comment yesterday from Trump spokesman Jason Miller put the question right back into the center of the campaign.
By Taiyo Matsumoto
It’s not enough for many anti-abortion stalwarts to ban the procedure in their state. They want to ban legal drugs designed to induce abortion. They want to surveil and block women traveling to other states to obtain an abortion. One of the most threatening dimensions of these programs is that they threaten to make doctors and other medical professionals — who might give counsel on or simply know about a woman’s plans to obtain an abortion — responsible for reporting her actions. If you visit your OB-GYN and discuss traveling to another state to get an abortion, does your OB have to report you to the local sheriff? It applies to third parties who might assist a woman either in traveling to get an abortion or getting FDA-approved medications to induce an abortion at home. The cases we’ve already seen range the gamut from sheriff’s departments wanting to pull medical and travel records for evidence of pregnancies that ended for unexplained reasons, gaps in menstruation, trips out of state that coincided with a pregnancy not brought to term….
…[Y]esterday in an interview on Newsmax of all places, a host asked Trump spokesman Jason Miller whether Donald Trump supported or wouldn’t aim to prevent states from enforcing their own menstrual surveillance regimes. It was one of those Fox-like interviews in which the host seems to go out of his way to signal what the right answer is. You wouldn’t do this, right?
“But he wouldn’t support monitoring pregnancies, even if a state decided to do that?” the host asked.
Miller responded that “he’s [i.e., Trump’s] made it very clear that he’s not going to go and weigh in and push various states on how they want to go and set up their particular rules and restrictions. That’s going to be up to the states.”
So he went there. It’s totally up to the states. Trump’s “leave it up to the states” approach applies to all these menstrual surveillance and travel restriction regimes as well. It’s a new opening for the Harris campaign to focus attention on an issue that hasn’t yet gotten enough attention — not just abortion rights as a general issue but states and county sheriffs’ effort to restrict women’s travel, access their medical records and current state of menstruation or gestation, and bar access to legal medications.
What else is on Trump’s befuddled mind these days? He’s “obsessed” with Olivia Nuzzi/RFK Jr. story.
The former president even called up the 70-year-old Kennedy—who’s married to Curb Your Enthusiasm star Cheryl Hines—to ask if the bombshell reports about him and the 31-year-old journalist were true, and if the relationship ever went beyond the sending of “demure” nudes, according to Puck News.
“[Kennedy] denied the whole thing to Trump,” a source with direct knowledge told the outlet. “He said he hardly knows her. He said he met her one time.”
Trump was also apparently close to making a public statement about the alleged digital dalliance, having “almost posted to Truth Social, his social media platform, ‘My condolences to Ryan Lizza…’” according to the Puck report. Lizza, a Politico journalist, ended his engagement to Nuzzi last month after learning of her relationship with Kennedy, according to Vanity Fair.
Trump apparently exercised more restraint than his adviser, Corey Lewandowski, who tweeted and then later deleted his own post sharing the Kennedy gossip.
Nuzzi had interviewed Trump for a piece published earlier this month which, in part, featured a detailed description of the GOP nominee’s ear bandaged up following the attempt on his life at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania in July.
The forbidden love between New York magazine reporter Olivia Nuzzi and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been chronicled in a new report that reveals even more details of their dalliances.
The Page Six report, which cites only anonymous sources, claimed Friday the 31-year-old Nuzzi fell “madly in love” with the Kennedy scion, 70, after he “love bombed” her and sparked a virtual relationship during his campaign.
The two reportedly exchanged “I love yous” and had an affair that lasted nearly a year, complete with the duo having “incredible” FaceTime sex and speaking on “long calls.” The report also alleged that Nuzzi and Kennedy shared “endless texts” with each other.
Page Six reported that Nuzzi and Kennedy’s supposed relationship kicked off as Nuzzi worked on a profile of the failed presidential candidate for New York.
Nuzzi, who was engaged to Politico’s Ryan Lizza at the time, traveled to Los Angeles to interview Kennedy during a hike together in October 2023. It was on that hike that Kennedy, who has been married to the actress Cheryl Hines for 10 years, reportedly made his first pass at Nuzzi and grabbed her arm “as a romantic overture.”
Page Six reported that Nuzzi and Kennedy’s relationship heated up after the journalist contacted Kennedy with follow-up questions as she wrote her profile. The relationship reportedly remained under wraps for months, but word of it had reached Lizza by August.
Vanity Fairreportedthat Lizza had a “heated” call with Kennedy over the alleged affair upon learning of it. It remains unclear how Lizza caught wind of the reported fling, but the Daily Beast exclusively revealed this week that Kennedy had been bragging about receiving nude photos of Nuzzi.
I hope this will be the end of Nuzzi’s career in journalism, but it probably won’t be. She could always go to Fox News.
I’ve tried to keep this post light, because the news overall has been so depressing lately. In that spirit, I’m going to end with another hilarious, gossipy story about a Republican candidate.
Republicans have taken umbrage with the notion that they’re weird — specifically when it comes to accusations that they’re weird about people (usually women) who don’t have children.
The sentiment in Republican politics that childless Americans are — as JD Vance put it — disorienting and disturbing has become so prevalent that one GOP candidate has taken to borrowing his friends’ wife and children for photo ops.
According to a Friday report from The New York Times, Derrick Anderson — a former Green Beret running for the House of Representatives in Virginia — has repeatedly featured a woman and her three daughters in campaign materials.
One photo features the group posing close together in an image that you could probably find framed on a grandmother’s mantle, the type of photo that your parents made your uncle with a DSLR camera take because “we never get nice pictures together.” https://twitter.com/JacobRubashkin/status/1839759803729752271
In one campaign video, Anderson is seen walking side-by-side with the same woman. In another video, which was featured on the National Republican Campaign Committee’s website and on his YouTube channel, shows Anderson speaking to the woman and the three girls while seated in a home dining room.
According to the Times, the woman and girls are “the wife and children of a longtime friend.” Anderson’s campaign website does not mention a wife or children, but notes that he “lives in Spotsylvania County with his dog, Ranger, a Dalmatian.” The Republican candidate recently revealed on social media that he is engaged to his girlfriend, Maggie, and has posted pictures of her — she is decidedly not the woman featured in the photos and videos.
A Friday article at The New York Times, headlined “G.O.P. Candidates, Looking to Soften Their Image, Turn to Their Wives,” reported how “male Republicans struggling to appeal to female voters concerned about their records on reproductive rights are unleashing their spouses to make the pitch on their behalf.”
Male GOP candidates who are worried about getting dragged down by the abortion issue in November are putting their wives front and center in their campaign ads. That’s hardly a new phenomenon — candidates have showcased the stereotypical [husband + wife + at least two children + probably a dog or two] family photo for ages — but the Republican angst about Dobbs is so acute, at least one candidate resorted to faking an entire family for his ads.
These GOP ads included anodyne images of “women in softly lit living rooms and pristine kitchens vouching for their husbands’ characters,” “a wholesome family gathering around the dining room table,” and moms “driving S.U.V.s with young children in the back seat as they stop for gas and groceries, talking about how their husbands are champions for their families, and can be champions for yours, too.” [….]
So what do you do if you’re running for Congress with an R after your name but don’t have your own wife and kids?
If you’re Derrick Anderson, a candidate running in an open race for Virginia’s seventh congressional district, you borrow a wife and daughters from a friend.
From the Times report:
The campaign of Derrick Anderson, a former Army Green Beret who is running in a competitive race for an open seat in Virginia’s Seventh District, has posted footage of him posing with a woman and her three daughters in what looks like a photo that might be used for an annual holiday card. In another scene filmed for potential use in a campaign ad, Mr. Anderson is seated around the dining room table with the same woman and three girls, chatting and smiling.
But the people are not relatives. They are the wife and children of a longtime friend. Mr. Anderson, who announced this month that he was engaged, does not have any children of his own. His campaign website says he lives with his dog and does not display any of the photos.
Isn’t it strange that Trump is never accompanied by his wife and family, but the media never mentions it?
That’s it for me today. Please take care, especially if you are/were in the path of Helene.
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“Yes, it’s quite insane. I think it hurts my brain.” John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
I stayed up too late last night watching Hurricane Helene come on shore. It’s difficult to explain that dual feeling of relief that it went east of you while realizing the number of people whose lives have been turned upside down. I get a flashback full of feelings about my hurricane and tornado experience. I’ve been fortunate to date even though Hurricane Katrina upended my life; it was nothing compared to many, many others’ lives.
I remember sitting on the dorm hall floor at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln during the massive 1975 Omaha Hurricane. I was one of the few with a TV and a phone in my room. Those of us who had such luxuries were surrounded by others who took turns trying to call home and watching to see if there was news available on the limited number of channels then on my tiny black and white portable. The only way we really got to know was to pack up and go back home. Almost everyone I knew living along the 72nd Street corridor had severe damage. Fortunately, living in Hurricane Alley meant you had basements. Friends of mine in apartments did less well. I’ve also driven alongside, almost into, and surrounded by tornadoes. I became interested in severe weather early in my teens when I watched an oversized double garage door spin over my house in Omaha from the basement window while strumming and singing, “The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind.” This was 1968. Irony and sarcasm have always been my friend and best defense when in the middle of these terrifying events.
I am still waiting to hear from family and friends. Even though Helene was still a Cat 2 Hurricane in Georgia, JJ and her family are okay. We’ll be hearing more from many folks north of Florida who also took a hit of intense rain and wind. Thank goodness the guy with the Sharpie isn’t in charge of the Federal response to all of this in all those states. And yes, De Santis has those white boots on again.
The severe damage and the death toll in Florida today should humble us all. We can build all kinds of places, but the sciences of climatology and meteorology show that we can only do so much with these massive storms. “Hurricane Helene ravages the Southeast, killing at least 22 and leaving millions without power. The storm made landfall overnight as a Category 4 hurricane, bringing devastating flooding and high-speed winds.” This is from NBC News.
Hurricane Helene killed at least 22 people and left millions without power across the Southeast before weakening on its way north Friday morning, officials said.
Widespread damage was expected in Florida’s Big Bend region, where Helene made landfall as a Category 4 shortly after 11 p.m. ET on Thursday. It was the strongest storm to ever strike the area, which connects Florida’s panhandle and peninsula.
Water levels in some parts of the region reached more than 15 ft. above ground level, the National Hurricane Center said, citing preliminary storm surge models.
In Perry, Florida, where officials urged residents who refused to evacuate to write their information on their bodies for identification, police chief Jamie Cruse braced himself for the storm’s aftermath as first responders began rescue operations.
“We’re starting to get the first glimpse of what we actually have laying on the ground and what we’re going to be dealing with,” he told NBC News. “The only regret I have at this moment is we weren’t aggressive enough in the notification to tell people to evacuate the areas that were prone to flooding.”
“I just hope that when we finally discover what we’re dealing with that we don’t have a big loss of life,” he added.
Officials in Clearwater, further south along Florida’s Gulf Coast, also feared the worst after seeing overnight footage of first responders rescuing elderly locals in knee-deep flood water.
“We had some homes burn to the ground out on the island. There were some folks that we just couldn’t get to because of high waters to rescue,” Clearwater mayor Bruce Rector told NBC’s “TODAY” show.
By Friday morning, Floridians woke up to extensive damage from the devastating flooding, high-speed winds, and heavy rain.
Helene, now a tropical depression, is located 125 miles southeast of Louisville, Kentucky, with maximum sustained winds of 35 mph, moving northwest at 28 mph, according to the National Hurricane Center’s 2 p.m. ET advisory.
All tropical storm warnings have been discontinued and there are now no coastal watches or warnings in effect.
It’s forecast to slowdown and will stall over the Tennessee Valley through the weekend.
Helene will still produce more rainfall for the Central and Southern Appalachians, resulting in “catastrophic and potentially life-threatening flash and urban flooding.” Tornadoes are possible today across eastern South Carolina, central and eastern North Carolina and southern Virginia.
Many blessings to you, my American Family, on your recovery journey.
It reportedly comes from an alleged Iranian government hack of the Trump campaign, and since June, the news media has been sitting on it (and other documents), declining to publish in fear of finding itself at odds with the government’s campaign against “foreign malign influence.”
I disagree. The dossier has been offered to me and I’ve decided to publish it because it’s of keen public interest in an election season. It’s a 271-page research paper the Trump campaign prepared to vet now vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance. As far as I can tell, it hasn’t been altered, but even if it was, its contents are publicly verifiable. I’ll let it speak for itself.
“The terror regime in Iran loves the weakness and stupidity of Kamala Harris, and is terrified of the strength and resolve of President Donald J. Trump,” Steven Cheung, communications director for the Trump campaign, responded when I asked him about the hack.
If the document had been hacked by some “anonymous” like hacker group, the news media would be all over it. I’m just not a believer of the news media as an arm of the government, doing its work combatting foreign influence. Nor should it be a gatekeeper of what the public should know.
On August 19, the U.S. intelligence community issued a statement on Iranian election interference, including cyber operations attempting to gain sensitive information. “This includes the recently reported activities to compromise former President Trump’s campaign, which the IC [intelligence community] attributes to Iran.”
On September 18, the intelligence community issued another statement going into further detail about Iran’s efforts. “Iranian malicious cyber actors” were still undertaking efforts since June, the press release says, “to send stolen, non-public material associated with former President Donald Trump’s campaign to U.S. media organizations.”
The intelligence community would not confirm to me whether the stolen campaign materials included the Vance Dossier. “We don’t have anything beyond what’s noted in the September 18 joint statement,” Lauren Frost, a spokesperson for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, told me this week.
You may download and read the document at Klippenstein’s Substack at the above link.
The alleged vetting documents of Ohio Senator JD Vance before he was chosen as the Republican vice presidential candidate have been made public after they were allegedly obtained via an Iranian hack on Donald Trump‘s campaign.
Journalist Ken Klippenstein published the 271-page report into Vance which was carried out by the Trump team on his Substack on Thursday.
The Vance dossier is said to have been part of a trove of sensitive materials which Iranian hackers stole from Trump’s campaign team. At least three news organizations—Politico, The New York Times and The Washington Post—were said to have received the documents, but refused to report on them.
Klippenstein said he disagreed with the suggestion that publishing the materials allegedly obtained by Iranian hackers amounted to helping a foreign country influence the outcome of the 2024 election. The FBI previously confirmed that Iran had attempted to disrupt both the Republican and Democratic presidential campaigns.
…
The report is a detailed examination of Vance’s background based on hundreds of his public statements, media interviews and available official records.
The document highlights the potential vulnerabilities Vance could face if selected as Trump’s running mate, including his previous stances and political views.
The dossier delves deep into times Vance has publicly criticized Trump over the years. Included in the document, for instance, is the transcript of an October 2016 appearance on Charlie Rose, where Vance said he was a “Never Trump guy.”
The document also cites social media posts apparently to highlight issues surrounding Vance being added to the 2024 GOP presidential ticket.
The dossier includes a reference to a tweet Vance reportedly sent in 2016 asking “what percentage of the American population has @RealDonaldTrump sexually assaulted?” The post said to be from Vance has since been deleted. Trump has been accused by multiple women of sexual assault. He has denied all the allegations against him.
The document also notes Vance’s positions on numerous issues including potentially contentious views, or what the dossier cites as “controversial” such as supporting higher taxes for people without children.
Vance’s phone number, home address, photos of his properties and email address are in the document, but have been redacted.
In a statement, X said: “Ken Klippenstein was temporarily suspended for violating our rules on posting unredacted private personal information, specifically Sen. Vance’s physical addresses and the majority of his Social Security number.”
Newsweek has contacted X for further comment via email.
Users on X are prevented from sharing a link to Klippenstein’s Substack page where he posted the dossier.
A prominent House Democrat is introducing legislation Friday that would prevent former President Donald Trump from dismissing his ongoing criminal prosecutions if he were to win the presidency again.
The new bill, shared exclusively with TIME ahead of its release, is being led by Rep. Adam Schiff, the Democratic nominee for California’s Senate seat who has been a leading Trump antagonist. He says his bill, which would prevent a sitting President from quashing a criminal prosecution against him or herself, aims to ensure that no President can use their position to evade accountability.
“This is about protecting our democracy and ensuring a President can’t place themselves above the law,” Schiff tells TIME in a statement. “There is every indication that Donald Trump will use the Justice Department to do away with any effort to hold him accountable.”
There’s a reason Schiff feels urgency to introduce the bill now. Trump is currently facing multiple criminal prosecutions, including charges related to his alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 election results. “The need for swift passage of this bill could become even more pressing,” Schiff says, “depending on the outcome of the election.”
Some more shocking news on Vance with the vice-presidential debate on the horizon. This is from The Daily Beast. “Vance’s Pre-Debate Prep Includes Christian Nationalist Who Called Harris a Witch. The veep hopeful will hold a town hall with a notorious televangelist who said last year that opponents of Donald Trump would soon suffer “sudden deaths” at the hands of God.” You never know if you should laugh, cry, or throw a rotten tomato at these guys. This is written by Josh Fiallo.
JD Vance’s embrace of far-right Christian nationalists will reach a whole new level this weekend.
Donald Trump’s running mate is set to spend one of his final afternoons before Tuesday’s vice presidential debate by hosting a town hall with Lance Wallnau, a notorious conspiracist who recently praised the 2021 Capitol riot as “an election fraud intervention.”
Vance is set to appear alongside Wallnau at 1 p.m. Saturday, platforming the self-described “prophet” who said in earnest this month that Kamala Harris is a “Jezebel spirit” who uses “witchcraft” to emasculate Trump.
“She can look presidential and that’s—and we’ll get to this later—that’s the seduction of what I would say is witchcraft,” Wallnau said of Harris after her Sept. 10 debate. “That spirit, that occult spirit, is operating on her and through her.”
Shortly after President Joe Biden announced in July that he would not be running for reelection and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris, self-proclaimed Christian nationalist and unabashed Trump cultist Lance Wallnau immediately began posting videos in which he warned that Harris represents “the spirit of Jezebel” and declared that she is “the devil’s choice.”
When Harris bested former President Donald Trump in a debate earlier this week, Wallnau was quick to blame it on “witchcraft,” and then doubled down on that attack Wednesday when he appeared on the “FirePower” show, hosted by fellow Trump cultists Mario Murillo and Todd Coconato.
“What you’re seeing now is a real Jezebel,” Wallnau declared. “When you’ve got somebody operating in manipulation, intimidation and domination—especially when it’s in a female role trying to emasculate a man who is standing up for truth—you’re dealing with the Jezebel spirit. … So, with Kamala, you have a Jezebel spirit, a characteristic in the Bible that is the personification of intimidation, seduction, domination and manipulation.”
“She can look presidential,” he continued. “That’s the seduction of what I would say is witchcraft. That’s the manipulation of imagery that creates an impression contrary to the truth, but it seduces you into seeing it. So that spirit, that occult spirit, I believe is operating on her and through her.”
While Harris is supposedly operating under an occult Jezebel spirit, Wallnau claimed that Trump has “an Elijah mantle on him, probably from the intercession of a million Christians.”
“So, we have to double down in intercessory prayer in the warfare mode of Pentecostals,” Wallnau proclaimed. “We need to close ranks and actually begin to get in a superlative agreement over what we believe we’re hearing God say he wants to manifest, because this election is coming five days after Halloween—another high holy day for all the Satanist crazy people.”
“We’ve got to lean into this thing because the Elijah mantle can break the spell of witchcraft off America,” he concluded. “God can tear the veil and unless that veil is torn, we have a lot working against us.”
Yes, this guy is real. I put the CBS interview up to demonstrate he’s not a movie character. I’m not sure what’s wrong with these people, but I want them nowhere around any human being. They are insane. They run wicked cults that target the vulnerable, and it’s sickening.
This is the sheet music, and yes, I own one. It’s from 1969.
The formidable dowager Violet Crawley, Maggie Smith’s scene-stealing character in Downton Abbey, made Smith a bona fide celebrity.
“It’s ridiculous. I led a perfectly normal life until Downton Abbey,” said Smith, who has died at 89. “I’m not kidding. I’d go to theaters. I’d go to galleries. Things like that, on my own, and now I can’t. And that’s—you know—awful. It’s all… It’s truly television. I mean, I’ve been working around for a very long time before Downton Abbey. And life was fine. Nobody knew who the hell I was. Now, it’s all—it has changed.”
…
Dame Margaret Natalie Smith CH DBE was born Dec. 28, 1934 in Ilford, Essex. Her own version of her life thereafter was terse but to the point: “One went to school, one wanted to act, one started to act, and one’s still acting,” she said. “I love it. I’m privileged to do it, and I don’t know where I’d be without it.”
She was first nominated for an Oscar for her portrayal of Desdemona in the 1965 film version of Othello (in an Academy first, all four principal actors in the movie were Oscar nominees). She had originated the role in the National Theatre Company’s production in London in 1964.
Four years later she won the best actress Oscar for the title role in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and ten years later won a best supporting actress Oscar for California Suite, for which she also won a Golden Globe.
So, the closer we come to November 5th, the more insane it will get with the Party of Weirdos doing what they do. My birthday is the day before, and the only thing I want as a gift is for everyone and their cousins to go and vote for the Democratic Party up and down the ballot. It’s as essential as bombing NAZIs, taking the beaches, and writing The Constitution at this point. We lose all of that if they don’t win. And you don’t have to take it from me.
I’ve spent quite a bit of time over the last 9 years worrying myself sick about what Trump has done, is doing, and might do in the future to our country and our lives. I’ve spent many sleepless nights lying awake because of anxiety. But now Trump has decided to reassure us women. He says he’s doing what’s best for us, even though we don’t realize it. I know you’ve probably seen the message he sent to women on Truth Social, but I’m going to post it again here:
Donald J. Trump
@realDonaldTrump
WOMEN ARE POORER THAN THEY WERE FOUR YEARS AGO, ARE LESS HEALTHY THAN THEY WERE FOUR YEARS AGO, ARE LESS SAFE ON THE STREETS THAN THEY WERE FOUR YEARS AGO, ARE MORE DEPRESSED AND UNHAPPY THAN THEY WERE FOUR YEARS AGO, AND ARE LESS OPTIMISTIC AND CONFIDENT IN THE FUTURE THAN THEY WERE FOUR YEARS AGO! I WILL FIX ALL OF THAT, AND FAST, AND AT LONG LAST THIS NATIONAL NIGHTMARE WILL BE OVER. WOMEN WILL BE HAPPY, HEALTHY, CONFIDENT AND FREE! YOU WILL NO LONGER BE THINKING ABOUT ABORTION, BECAUSE IT IS NOW WHERE IT ALWAYS HAD TO BE, WITH THE STATES, AND A VOTE OF THE PEOPLE – AND WITH POWERFUL EXCEPTIONS, LIKE THOSE THAT RONALD REAGAN INSISTED ON, FOR RAPE, INCEST, AND THE LIFE OF THE MOTHER – BUT NOT ALLOWING FOR DEMOCRAT DEMANDED LATE TERM ABORTION IN THE 7TH, 8TH, OR 9TH MONTH, OR EVEN EXECUTION OF A BABY AFTER BIRTH. I WILL PROTECT WOMEN AT A LEVEL NEVER SEEN BEFORE. THEY WILL FINALLY BE HEALTHY, HOPEFUL, SAFE, AND SECURE. THEIR LIVES WILL BE HAPPY, BEAUTIFUL, AND GREAT AGAIN!
When Trump takes charge, everything will be wonderful and we will no longer think about abortion. Because Donald knows what’s best for us and that is that we should accept that we aren’t really people like men are. We can relax and just be vessels for men’s offspring if we are young enough or child care workers if we are too old to have our own babies. Finally this man is giving us the truth. We don’t own our bodies or our minds. We should just relax and follow the dictates of men like Trump.
It is so much nicer being a woman, now that Donald Trump is in charge!
You barely remember the Biden times at all, except in nightmares. In the dreams, regular eggs cost as much as Fabergé eggs. All the food at the grocery store is too expensive — if you made it to the store at all without being killed, sometimes twice. Also you were always thinking about abortion.
But then you wake up all the way and Donald Trump is protecting you and you are not thinking about abortion.
Mostly you feel wonderful all the time, happy and confident and not depressed because all that has been fixed. Every single problem the country had! Poof! And all you had to do was stop thinking about abortion.
Now, Donald Trump is back and you are not thinking about anything. All your anxieties are gone, now that men are handling all the country’s problems. It would have been a mistake to put a woman in charge! Fortunately, that did not happen. Fortunately, Donald Trump is guarding you. You are guarded! You are not worrying your pretty little head. Donald Trump is protecting you, just like the Bible said should happen. It did not mention him by name, but that was implied.
It was so tough in the before times, when you had to act as though you were a person. It was exhausting, like a dog standing on its hind legs all day. Of course, you weren’t a person, not really, and it is so much nicer to get to stop pretending. Much more restful this way. You are not thinking about abortion. Abortion is back in the hands of those who know best. The choice was the exhausting part; now, you get to be a blessed vessel and raise up as many children as they have decided is best. It is much nicer now….
Thank God the national nightmare of forcing you to make choices — as though your thoughts and desires mattered — is at an end. You wake up and smile at the picture of your patron saint, Donald Trump. You go to the market (JD Vance is in charge of eggs now; he has been lecturing the hens about the need to fertilize more of them) and buy one dozen. They cost exactly the right amount. You are not thinking about abortion.
It’s so much easier, now that I understand I’m not actually a person.
Former President Donald Trump is trying a new approach to winning over women voters by telling them that they are depressed, poor, anxious, unsafe and thinking about abortion ― but as their “protector,” he will change all that.
Alice Duer Miller
“I always thought women liked me,” Trump said at a rally in Pennsylvania on Monday. “I never thought I had a problem, but the fake news keeps saying women don’t like me. I don’t believe it.” [….]
Trump read an extended version of an all-caps rant he posted last week on his Truth Social website as he insisted that women are in dire need of his protection.
“Because I am your protector,” Trump said. “I want to be your protector. As president, I have to be your protector, I hope you don’t make too much of it. I hope the fake news doesn’t go, ‘Oh, he wants to be their protector.’ Well I am. As president, I have to be your protector.”
“You will no longer be abandoned, lonely or scared. You will no longer be in danger, you’re not gonna be in danger any longer. You will no longer have anxiety from all of the problems our country has today. You will be protected and I will be your protector,” he added. “Women will be happy, healthy, confident and free. You will no longer be thinking about abortion.”
Read a number of Twitter reactions to this message at the HuffPost link.
Donald Trump has always been wildly sexist. Generally, his sexism takes the form of reducing women to their looks, either praising their sex appeal or denigrating them as ugly. In private, of course, Trump behaves like a sex pest.
But his new campaign riff to women voters is something altogether more disturbing. He sounds like a domestic abuser….
Trump casts himself as a kind of husband to America’s women. “I am your protector,” he declares repeatedly. He presents himself as the solution to all the problems he imagines they are having in their personal lives:
You will no longer be abandoned, lonely, or scared. You will no longer be in danger. You’re not gonna be in danger any longer. You will no longer have anxiety from all of the problems our country has today. You will be protected, and I will be your protector. Women will be happy, healthy, confident, and free. You will no longer be thinking about abortion.
“You will no longer be abandoned, lonely, or scared. You will no longer be in danger. You’re not gonna be in danger any longer. You will no longer have anxiety from all of the problems our country has today. You will be protected, and I will be your protector. Women will be happy, healthy, confident, and free. You will no longer be thinking about abortion.”
Trump’s message to women is notably infantilizing.
What makes it so creepy is that he implicitly acknowledges that women are reluctant to support him and that their disagreement over abortion is the reason. But rather than claim that his abortion stance is more reasonable than they assume or that they should vote on the basis of other issues — that is, the way you would try to win over a voter who has rational concerns — he presumes women are crazy.
Trump addresses what he believes is the underlying distress that is causing women to think they don’t want Trump to serve another term as president. Women “are more stressed, and depressed, and unhappy than they were four years ago,” he says. This is because they are “lonely and abandoned.”
Their “anxiety” is being misdirected into the belief that they want abortion to be legal. But their actual problem, he insists, is loneliness and abandonment, which will be resolved by giving themselves over to Trump….
That is not an argument you’d make to free citizens. It is quasi-authoritarian appeal, Trump as national father figure, with an unmistakable undertone of menace. Women of America, you may think you don’t want to be with Trump. But you are wrong, and you are crazy, and if you return to Trump, you’ll realize he was right, and you will leave the worrying to him.
Honestly, this is worse than anything I heard about women’s place in the world back in the 1950s and 1960s. It’s difficult to believe it is really happening.
One night in March of 2023, Amari Marsh went to the bathroom and suffered a miscarriage. “I screamed because I was scared, because I didn’t know what was going on,” she recently recalled. An at-home pregnancy test in late 2022 had come back positive. But the South Carolina college studentsaid she continued to have her period—at least that’s how she interpreted the bleeding—so didn’t seek out prenatal care, figuring the test result must have been wrong.
Dorothy L. Sayers
Then, a few months later, Marsh told a reporter from KFF Health News, she began to experience severe cramping, “way worse” than regular menstrual pain. Two emergency room visits later, the 22-year-old biology major learnedshe was pregnant after all. Back at home that night, the contractions returned. Marsh woke up, rushed to the toilet, “and when I did, the child came.”
Miscarriages are extremely common in the US; among confirmed pregnancies, 10 to 20 percent will end in a loss. What happened to Marsh next is also becoming horrifically frequent in the post-Roe v. Wade era, according to a new report by the legal advocacy group Pregnancy Justice. Instead of treating her miscarriage as the health crisis and personal tragedy it was, prosecutors eventually charged her with murder/homicide by child abuse—punishable by 20 years to life in prison. Marsh spent three weeks behind bars, followed by another 13 months on house arrest, tracked by an ankle bracelet. She was finally cleared by a grand jury this past August, KFF said.
The Supreme Court’s landmark 2022 ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization “open[ed] the door to government intrusion into pregnancy in unprecedented ways,” Pregnancy Justice says, “throwing suspicion on pregnancy loss, particularly outside medical settings.” In the first year after Dobbs, at least 22 women around the US faced criminal prosecution after suffering miscarriages, stillbirths, or the death of babies born prematurely, the organization reports.
The Dobbs decision didn’t just unleash a raft of laws restricting and banning abortion—it also seems to have made authorities more skeptical of women whose pregnancies end prematurely for reasons that have nothing to do with abortion. “Most of the time, we don’t know why a pregnancy or infant demise happened,” says Wendy Bach, a law professor at the University of Tennessee Knoxville, who co-authored the report. “But in this post-Dobbs era, pregnancy loss is extremely suspicious. It can lead to criminal investigation, criminal charges, incarceration, and family separation.”
Pregnancy-loss cases represented just a fraction of the prosecutions tallied by Pregnancy Justice over 12 months. In total, Bach and her team found at least 210 cases in which authorities initiated charges against pregnant people for crimes related to pregnancy or birth. That’s a record number of pregnancy-related prosecutions in a single year—and, the researchers say, it’s almost certainly an undercount.
George Conway, the ex-husband of former Donald Trump aide Kellyanne Conway, is helping bring attention to the sexual assault claims against the former president as he seeks a second term in the White House.
On Wednesday, Sept. 25, the attorney’s political action committee launched ads featuring two of the Republican presidential nominee’s sexual assault accusers.
“At one point, Melania went upstairs to change her clothes for the next photo shoot, and Trump said to me, ‘I want to show you this beautiful painting, this beautiful room.’ He leads me to this room, pushes me against the wall, and starts kissing me forcefully,” she says. “I tried to push him. He kept coming back at me.”
“I was in shock and smothered, and he had his hands here against my shoulders. I felt sick inside. I felt horrified, and thank goodness the butler charges into the room,” she continues. “Like many women, I blamed myself. So Trump turned to me and said, ‘You know we’re going have an affair, don’t you?’ and Melania was approaching. I was horrified.”
Leeds said she encountered the former president at a charity event just two years after their alleged plane interaction, where he insulted her with a “crude remark.”
While Trump denied the claims in the Times article, Leeds vividly recalled the alleged encounter in the new ad, saying, “The airplane took off, and all of a sudden Donald Trump started groping me. He was trying to kiss me and I’m trying to push him away, he was basically overpowering me.”
“When he started putting his hand up my skirt I got out of the seat, grabbed my purse, and went back to my original seat and I certainly was shook up by the whole thing,” she adds.
Abuse of women isn’t the only negative result to come out of the radical right wing Supreme Court. Last night the Court allowed the state of Missouri to murder an innocent man.
Marcellus Williams was executed on Tuesday night in the US state of Missouri after spending more than two decades on death row.
Williams, who had two previous executions stayed, maintained he was innocent in the 1998 fatal stabbing of Felicia Gayle in a St Louis suburb, and a wide swath of people had opposed his death sentence.
An attorney representing Williams argued there was racial discrimination in selecting jurors and that DNA evidence in the case was mishandled.
Williams was denied a last-minute reprieve from the US Supreme Court, after Missouri’s top court and governor rejected his clemency requests early this week.
In a rare move, the three liberal justices on the US Supreme Court – Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson – said on Tuesday they disagreed with the conservative majority and would have granted a stay. They did not give a reason.
There were problems with the case against Williams:
Lawyers for Williams had said there were concerns over the handling of his case, arguing black jurors were wrongly excluded from his trial.
They also said there was no forensic evidence linking Williams to the crime scene and that the murder weapon had been mishandled, raising questions over DNA evidence.
Marcellus Williams
The trial prosecutor has said he followed procedure at the time by touching the murder weapon without gloves after it was tested in a crime lab….
The victim’s family had supported a life sentence instead of the death penalty, while local prosecutors had pressed to have the conviction overturned.
His execution had been stayed twice – once in 2017 and once in 2015 – due to the discovery of male DNA on the murder weapon that did not match Williams.
The state’s then-governor, Eric Greitens, a Republican, formed a panel to examine the case after granting the second stay, but he then left office amid a scandal and the panel never formed a conclusion.
Also concerned about the DNA, the local prosecuting attorney, Wesley Bell, requested a hearing.
But at that point it was discovered that the DNA evidence was spoiled from someone in the prosecutor’s office touching the knife without gloves, and the hearing was cancelled.
“This outcome did not serve the interests of justice,” Mr Bell said in a statement on Tuesday.
Donald Trump was meeting privately in mid-September with one of his oldest friends, Steve Wynn, when the casino mogul and Republican mega-donor delivered the former president a blunt warning: You’re off message, and it isn’t helping.
Trump had been distracted, in Wynn’s view. The former president at the time was promoting a conspiracy theory that Haitian immigrants were eating people’s cats and dogs in Ohio, among other things. To drive home his point, Wynn showed Trump polling and suggested the former president would be better off focusing on policy issues where Republicans see his opponent, Kamala Harris, as vulnerable, according to two people briefed on the meeting and granted anonymity to describe it.
The meeting underscored a key point of tension inside the Trump campaign. While polls show the race is incredibly close, some of Trump’s allies are concerned that his impulses and coarse approach to campaigning are undermining him against Harris, a rival who has proved far stronger than his previous opponent, Joe Biden.
In interviews, more than a dozen Trump allies described the former president as reaching a crossroads — faced with the choice of continuing with the missteps that have overtaken the past several weeks of his campaign or embracing a more calculated approach aimed at appealing to a small subset of undecided voters who are likely to sway the outcome of the election. In recent weeks, he has brought into his fold destabilizing forces like social media provocateur Laura Loomer and his controversial former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, plugged commemorative Trump coins, and asserted that if he loses, Jews would be partly to blame.
“It’s not that he’s going backwards,” said one Trump ally granted anonymity to speak freely. “But he should be doing better.”
Kamala Harris is planning a network interview, but I doubt if it will shut the media critics up.
Vice President Kamala Harris will be interviewed by Stephanie Ruhle in Pittsburgh Wednesday night, in what will be her first one-on-one network interview since becoming the Democratic nominee.
The interview will air on MSNBC at 7 p.m. ET and coincides with Harris’ fourth visit to the area since launching her campaign, according to a news release from the Harris campaign. Pennsylvania is a key battleground state; no Democrat has won the White House without the Keystone State since 1948.
MSNBC’s announcement follows criticism over the lack of media interviews the vice president has done. Reporting from Axios and The Telegraph earlier in September revealed that the Harris-Walz campaign were giving fewer interviews.
Oh, boo hoo.
That’s all I have for you today. Take care everyone, and if you’re a women, assert your personhood!
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The Sky Dancing banner headline uses a snippet from a work by artist Tashi Mannox called 'Rainbow Study'. The work is described as a" study of typical Tibetan rainbow clouds, that feature in Thanka painting, temple decoration and silk brocades". dakinikat was immediately drawn to the image when trying to find stylized Tibetan Clouds to represent Sky Dancing. It is probably because Tashi's practice is similar to her own. His updated take on the clouds that fill the collection of traditional thankas is quite special.
You can find his work at his website by clicking on his logo below. He is also a calligraphy artist that uses important vajrayana syllables. We encourage you to visit his on line studio.
The result was a wide-ranging, policy-heavy back and forth that often pushed Walz and Vance to play defense for the presidential nominees, affording them little opportunity to make a fresh and forceful case to undecided voters just weeks before they head to the polls.
Vance dismissed the argument that courts had already rejected Trump’s allegations of election fraud. “You can’t litigate these things judicially; you have to litigate them politically,” Vance told Douthat. “And we never had a real political debate about the 2020 election.”
On Tuesday, the Carter Center shared excerpts of messages of support from 
This is more true than ever. We have more than a few TV channels, newspapers, and radio to influence us these days. Most people treat their news and information more like boutique shopping, where they can find the look that suits them every time. Substack is one medium where I have seen public intellectuals. I feel comfortable reading a lot of people there, and I must admit that it’s because they are a lot like me. They write about things that bug them about the institutions and country that house them and likely educated them. However, they do bring reasoned thought and data with them. But anyway, enough of that rabbit hole. Let’s just say I’m not beyond shopping my own boutique. Also, the positive thing about the web is that you have access to authentic information and don’t have to spend days in dark, moldy library stacks to find it. The negative thing is that not all people want to be challenged. They want to feel good about what they already think is real.
This New Yorker’s The Lede, published three days ago, has similar warnings. It’s written by Clare Malone. “
The purpose of Trump’s campaign is to bolster his ego and keep him out of jail. Then, he’ll likely be replaced either by death or the 25th Amendment, and Vance will put the entire 2025 plan into play. Because all the players will be set up in the Federal Government. Additionally, all the work of Pat Robertson and others from the Reagan administration to enslave us to White Christian Nationalism will come to fruition.
The article is long and can make you angry, but it gives you more insight into that influential movement. Know Thy Enemy.
Okay, enough of that. Trump has become utterly void of self-censoring, even when it’s something that would behoove him to hide. This is from 
Meanwhile, the DonOld Cult is up to more domestic terrorism. This is from 
Oh, and now we get to speak of 
The best analysis of what’s ahead and what’s happened is by
As for the flood, Biden promises the Federal Government will stay until the work is done. This is from 
I am still waiting to hear from family and friends. Even though Helene was still a Cat 2 Hurricane in Georgia, JJ and her family are okay. We’ll be hearing more from many folks north of Florida who also took a hit of intense rain and wind. Thank goodness the guy with the Sharpie isn’t in charge of the Federal response to all of this in all those states. And yes, De Santis has those white boots on again.
Helene’s name will be retired and she will be one for the records.
Many blessings to you, my American Family, on your recovery journey.
Today, Newsweek stood up.
Time magazine has this interesting breaking news of proposed legislation by Rep. Adam Schiff.”
Some more shocking news on Vance with the vice-presidential debate on the horizon. This is from 
I’ve spent quite a bit of time over the last 9 years worrying myself sick about what Trump has done, is doing, and might do in the future to our country and our lives. I’ve spent many sleepless nights lying awake because of anxiety. But now Trump has decided to reassure us women. He says he’s doing what’s best for us, even though we don’t realize it. I know you’ve probably seen the message he sent to women on Truth Social, but I’m going to 
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