Finally Friday Reads: Your Cassandra Daily

Posted: November 29, 2024 | Author: dakinikat | Filed under: American Fascists, corruption, Donald Trump, Regime of Chaos | Tags: @johnbuss.bsky.social, @repeat1968. John Buss, Donny Dotard and the Chaos Cult, Trump Cabinet = Rape Gang | 7 Comments

Nothing says Thanksgiving to me more than the WKRP Turkey Drop! Thank you, John Buss, @repeat1968

Good Day, Sky Dancers!

My first short story remains in my scrapbook in its purply blue mimeograph ink. It has my drawing of Cassandra and my interpretation of my favorite Greek Character, who was dedicated to the Greek God Apollo but was fated to make true prophecies no one ever believed. I was drawn to her in my 5th-grade mythology class. I remember my mother listening to me once and starting to question me before she interrupted herself by telling me this. “I don’t know why I question you; you’re almost always right.” I usually don’t believe everything I read, but I remember it. Prognostication is less godly and more mathematical these days, but when you know what’s likely to happen when you do that S-VAR model based on solid theory and a new hypothesis, you don’t always want to welcome the results.

I’ve been running around with my hair on fire since the Orange Demon started obsessing about tariffs again. He tried them during his last Reign of Terror and nearly drove our farmers out of business. Congress had to rescue them with huge subsidies that paid them for not selling their crops or livestock. Trump started a Trade War with China. He needed a visit from Herbert Hoover’s Ghost and to listen to the huge chorus of economists who warned him, but he persisted. Luckily, it didn’t take out the U.S. economy, but it ran up the deficit and jeopardized the Agriculture sector.

This warning is from the AP. “Trump’s tariffs in his first term did little to alter the economy, but this time could be different.” Trump’s misunderstanding of tariffs could wreck the economies of North America. This analsyis comes from Josh Boak.

Donald Trump loved to use tariffs on foreign goods during his first presidency. But their impact was barely noticeable in the overall economy, even if their aftershocks were clear in specific industries.

The data show they never fully delivered on his promised factory jobs. Nor did they provoke the avalanche of inflation that critics feared.

This time, though, his tariff threats might be different.

The president-elect is talking about going much bigger — on a potential scale that creates more uncertainty about whether he’ll do what he says and what the consequences could be.

“There’s going to be a lot more tariffs, I mean, he’s pretty clear,” said Michael Stumo, the CEO of Coalition for a Prosperous America, a group that has supported import taxes to help domestic manufacturing.

The president-elect posted on social media Monday that on his first day in office he would impose 25% tariffs on all goods imported from Mexico and Canada until those countries satisfactorily stop illegal immigration and the flow of illegal drugs such as fentanyl into the United States.

Those tariffs could essentially blow up the North American trade pact that Trump’s team negotiated during his initial term. But on Wednesday, Trump posted on social media that he had spoken with Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum and she had agreed to stop unauthorized migration across the border into the United States.

Trump also posted on Monday that Chinese imports would face additional tariffs of 10% until Beijing cracks down on the production of materials used in making fentanyl.

President Sheinbaum immediately denied Trump’s characterization of their conversation. This headline from HuffPo says it all. “Trump Mocked After Mexico’s President Blows Up His Brag About Their Call.” Josephine Harvey reports on the response.

Donald Trump seemed to offer alternative facts on Wednesday about his recent call with Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum and was swiftly rebutted by the leader herself, prompting mockery on social media.

In a post on his Truth Social platform, the U.S. president-elect declared that Sheinbaum had “agreed to stop Migration through Mexico, and into the United States, effectively closing our Southern Border.”

Shortly afterward, Sheinbaum shared a Spanish-language message about the conversation, writing, “We reiterate that Mexico’s position is not to close borders, but to build bridges between governments and communities.”

Both leaders characterized the call as positive. The two spoke after Trump on Monday threatened to impose a 25% tax on all products entering the country from Canada and Mexico as soon as he takes office. Trump said, “This Tariff will remain in effect until such time as Drugs, in particular Fentanyl, and all Illegal Aliens stop this Invasion of our Country!” He also threatened to put an “additional 10%” tariff on goods from China.

This week’s news was somewhat reminiscent of Trump’s claim ahead of the 2016 election that he would make Mexico pay for “100%” of a proposed wall at the U.S. border. Enrique Peña Nieto, Mexico’s president at the time, disagreed. Mexico did not pay.

Social media users sarcastically celebrated Trump’s fictional victory this week.

“All it took was one call. Donny deals,” journalist Sam Stein posted online.

Mike Nellis, a former aide to Vice President Kamala Harris, said, “Trump thinks he convinced the President of Mexico to stop all migration across the border LOL.”

Olivia Troye, who was a White House official in Trump’s first term, offered a “Translation” of the president-elect’s comments about Mexico.

Just had a conversation with the President of Mexico who didn’t allow me to bully her, which left me confused about my charm…she pointed out that this is very bad…very bad for me if I do these tariffs…” Troye wrote.

China and Canada were also blunt about DonOld’s mischaracterizations of his conversations with their leaders. USA Today‘s Kim Hjelmgaard reported it this way. “‘Counter to facts and reality’: China, Mexico, Canada respond to Trump tariff threats.”

Officials in China, Mexico and Canada criticized Tuesday a pledge made by President-elect Donald Trump on social media to impose new tariffs on all three of the United States’ largest trading partners on the first day of his presidency.

Trump said the move, which appears to violate the terms of a free-trade deal Trump signed into law in 2020, is aimed at clamping down on drugs − fentanyl especially − and migrants crossing into the U.S. illegally.

The president-elect said he would sign an executive order immediately after his inauguration introducing a 25% tariff on all goods coming from Mexico and Canada and a 10% tariff on goods from China.

Trump takes office on Jan. 20.

“Both Mexico and Canada have the absolute right and power to easily solve this long simmering problem,” Trump said in a post on Truth Social, a platform he owns. “It is time for them to pay a very big price!” He accused China in a separate post of failing to block smuggling of U.S.-bound fentanyl, a synthetic opioid.

There was quick pushback to Trump’s comments from all three countries.

Liu Pengyu, a spokesperson for the Chinese embassy in Washington, said: “No one will win a trade war or a tariff war” and “the idea of China knowingly allowing fentanyl precursors to flow into the United States runs completely counter to facts and reality.”

Mexico’s finance ministry said in a statement the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, a trade pact Trump sponsored during his first term, provided “certainty” for investors. “The response to one tariff will be another, until we put at risk companies that we share,” Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum said, naming General Motors and Ford, among others. Sheinbaum said her comments, read aloud in a press conference, were sent in a letter to Trump.

Doug Ford, the premier of Ontario, Canada’s most populous province, said the tariffs would be “devastating to workers and jobs” in both the U.S. and Canada.

A tariff is effectively a tax imposed by one country on the goods and services imported from another country. Oil is the top U.S. import from Canada, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The largest category of goods imported to the U.S. from Mexico is cars and components for cars. The U.S. imports a significant amount of electronics from China. Some goods are exempt from tariffs because of the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement.

Businesses are already responding to the tariff threats. This will not be good for American Consumers. NBC News reports: “Here’s where consumers could feel the price pain if Trump’s tariffs go into effect. Trump has made threats about tariffs in the past. Businesses are nevertheless taking the latest threats seriously.” This guy hasn’t even taken the oath of office, and he’s already acting like he’s sitting in the Oval Office.

An estimate from The Budget Lab at Yale shared Wednesdaywith NBC News found that the cost to consumers from Trump’s proposed tariffs could reach as much as $1,200 in lost purchasing power on average based on 2023 incomes, assuming retaliatory duties on U.S. exports are put into place.

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has already warned that any new tariffs imposed by the U.S. would be met with retaliatory ones by her country. Canada is similarly considering its own options, including possible tariffs on U.S. goods, according to The Associated Press.

America’s biggest import from Canada is oil — and any increase in energy prices would likely be felt throughout the economy.

“Another way to think about this is it’s 4 to 5 months of a normal year’s inflation in one fell swoop,” Ernie Tedeschi, The Budget Lab’s director and the former chief economist under the Biden administration, said in an email.

The three countries Trump has selected for a new round of targeted tariff proposals — China, Mexico and Canada — represent nearly half of all U.S. import volumes.

While Trump has insisted other countries end up paying the cost of tariffs, most economists agree those costs wind up getting passed on to shoppers. And at a time when rising prices remain a top concern, the types of goods that could see higher costs are the ones consumers interact with every day.

Some companies are warning that particularly import-heavy parts of the economy could be hit hard. Best Buy CEO Corie Barry warned Tuesday that any added costs on U.S. imports “will be shared by our customers.” Electronic goods account for the largest share of U.S. imports from China as of 2023.

“There’s very little in [the] consumer electronics space that is not imported. … These are goods that people need, and higher prices are not helpful,” Barry said.

This is what happens when morons vote for a moron. David R. Lurie of Public Notice has this analysis on other Trump plans. These endanger our National Security. “Tulsi Gabbard and Trump’s scheme to gut the intel agencies. It’s hard to envision a less suited intelligence chief. That’s a feature, not a bug.”

Donald Trump has selected Tulsi Gabbard, former congresswoman and notorious Putin stooge, as his nominee for director of the office of national intelligence.

It’s difficult to imagine a candidate less suited to carry out the DNI’s mission, and that’s very likely just the reason that Trump chose her. Gabbard has virtually none of the experience or expertise required to competently assume DNI’s weighty responsibility of marshaling the information and analyses gathered by the nation’s intelligence agencies and coordinating their work.

Gabbard’s longstanding association with a shadowy rightwing cult, her history of suspicious uses of campaign funds, her habitual conspiracism and advocacy for the interests of bloodthirsty dictators (including Syria’s Bashar al-Assad as well as Putin) all raise a multiplicity of red flags.

But, as Donald Trump made clear during his first term in office, national security is hardly at the top of his list of priorities. In fact, hobbling the nation’s intelligence agencies is one of his principal goals.

Donald Trump has selected Tulsi Gabbard, former congresswoman and notorious Putin stooge, as his nominee for director of the office of national intelligence.

It’s difficult to imagine a candidate less suited to carry out the DNI’s mission, and that’s very likely just the reason that Trump chose her. Gabbard has virtually none of the experience or expertise required to competently assume DNI’s weighty responsibility of marshaling the information and analyses gathered by the nation’s intelligence agencies and coordinating their work.

Gabbard’s longstanding association with a shadowy rightwing cult, her history of suspicious uses of campaign funds, her habitual conspiracism and advocacy for the interests of bloodthirsty dictators (including Syria’s Bashar al-Assad as well as Putin) all raise a multiplicity of red flags.

But, as Donald Trump made clear during his first term in office, national security is hardly at the top of his list of priorities. In fact, hobbling the nation’s intelligence agencies is one of his principal goals.

Marc Zuckerberg perfects his role as Surrender Monkey by dining with the Dotard at Mara Lardo. This is from the BBC. “Mark Zuckerberg dines with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago.” It was definitely a Baboon butt moment.

Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg has visited Donald Trump at his resort in Mar-a-Lago, further evidence of the apparent thawing in their once frosty relations.

The president-elect already has a close, high-profile relationship with another of the leading figures in tech, X owner Elon Musk.

Historically, though, there has been no such closeness between Trump and Mr Zuckerberg – with Trump barred from Facebook and Instagram after the Capitol riots, and Trump threatening the Meta boss with jail if he interfered in the 2024 presidential election.

However, there has recently been evidence those strained relations are improving, culminating in Mr Zuckerberg dining with the president-elect at his Florida mansion.

“Mark was grateful for the invitation to join President Trump for dinner and the opportunity to meet with members of his team about the incoming administration,” a Meta spokesperson told the BBC.

“It’s an important time for the future of American Innovation,” the statement added.

The Detroit Free Press featured an Op-Ed by the AG of Michigan, Dana Nessel. It is difficult not to notice the incredibly large number of Sexual Predators Trump has been appointing to his Cabinet and other leadership positions. It seems like a feature and not a bug, “Michigan AG Nessel: Trump cabinet picks show disdain for victims of sex assault.” We continue to see a parade of the stupid and the lawless.

Every 68 seconds, an American is sexually assaulted.

Only a third of the estimated 440,000 victims over the age of 12 each year will ever report, often due to negative emotions such as guilt, shame, and self-blame.

Survivors feel they won’t be believed, so why bother reporting, opening themselves up to ridicule, judgment and shame?

So what is it we are telling victims of these brutal, life-altering crimes, when our President-elect seeks to elevate alleged fellow perpetrators to cabinet positions and other high levels of power in our government?

To lead the Department of Defense, Trump has nominated Fox News personality Pete Hegseth, who settled an accusation that he raped a woman and entered into a non-disclosure agreement with the victim. To lead the Department of Health and Human Services, he nominated Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who has been accused of groping a young woman who worked for him as a babysitter on several occasions. For Secretary of Education – responsible for ensuring the schooling of our nation’s children – he nominated Linda McMahon, who has been sued for criminal negligence for enabling the grooming and sexual abuse of children by employees of her organization. And as the nation’s top law enforcement officer, he nominated former Representative Matt Gaetz — who withdrew from consideration last week — the subject of a House Ethics Committee investigation, following accusations he paid minors for sex. And Trump still has more nominations to make.

With these nominations, we are telling survivors of sexual assault that they don’t matter, that their trauma is meaningless and that they should stay silent.

And they will.

The American Prospect calls them “The Rape Gang.”

The presumptive Secretary of Education is married to a man whose former employee alleges he forced her to perform sex acts with his friend for an hour and a half after he defecated on her head. The presumptive Commerce Secretary preemptively sued his former assistant in 2018, after her lawyer threatened to publicize “not pretty” 2 a.m. text messages she’d received from him and his wife. The presumptive Health and Human Services director’s explanation for forcibly groping a former nanny’s breasts while holding her hostage in a kitchen pantry was that he “had a very, very rambunctious youth”; he was 46 at the time. The White House efficiency czar, currently a defendant in a putative class-action lawsuit filed by eight former employees who accuse him of perpetrating an “Animal House” work environment of “rampant sexual harassment,” and paid a quarter of a million dollars to a flight attendant who says he got naked and asked her to touch his erect penis in exchange for the gift of a horse.

And of course the presumptive Defense Secretary was accused of raping a woman who was tasked with monitoring what she described to police as his “creeper vibes” after a Republican women’s conference at which he was a keynote speaker, just a month and change after the birth of his fourth child with a woman who was not his wife at the time. (Reader, she married him.)

The aggressive rapeyness of the second Donald Trump administration is so tyrannical it’s almost enough to make a girl wistful for Matt Gaetz, the Florida congressman who withdrew his name from attorney general contention yesterday (to make way for the despicable Pam Bondi) amid an orgy of leaks from two investigations into his sexploits with a 17-year-old procured by a convicted sex trafficker friend. Multiple witnesses testified that Gaetz did not actually know the 17-year-old was underage, you see, and that he ceased having sex with her when he found out.

We definitely have a kakistocracy coming our way. We can see the incompetence, the total lack of knowledge of policy, and the complete inappropriateness of every candidate for Cabinet. It comes from the ultimate dotard. The only thing we have going for us now is our resolve and the fact that the Republican Majority in both Houses is narrow. Both houses have also had lots of experience in gumming up the works for Trump. Trump’s so-called mandate is a bald-faced lie. The LA Times asks, “As Trump’s lead in popular vote shrinks, does he really have a ‘mandate’?” Of course, Trump will be oblivious to all that, so he’s relying heavily on executive mandates that may or may not be legal.” Jenny Jarvis has the details.

Though Trump overwhelmingly won the electoral college vote, his tally in the popular vote is hardly a landslide.
In the last 75 years, only three other presidents had popular-vote margins that were smaller than Trump’s.
When Trump exaggerates his presidential mandate, he is not an outlier but drawing from bipartisan history.

In his victory speech on Nov. 6, President-elect Donald Trump claimed Americans had given him an “unprecedented and powerful mandate.”

It’s a message his transition team has echoed in the last three weeks, referring to his “MAGA Mandate” and a “historic mandate for his agenda.”

But given that Trump’s lead in the popular vote has dwindled as more votes have been counted in California and other states that lean blue, there is fierce disagreement over whether most Americans really endorse his plans to overhaul government and implement sweeping change.

The latest tally from the Cook Political Report shows Trump winning 49.83% of the popular vote, with a margin of 1.55% over Vice President Kamala Harris.

The president-elect’s share of the popular vote now falls in the bottom half for American presidents — far below that of Democrat Lyndon B. Johnson, who won 61.1% of the popular vote in 1964, defeating Republican Sen. Barry Goldwater by nearly 23 percentage points.

In the last 75 years, only three presidents — John F. Kennedy in 1960, Richard Nixon in 1968 and George W. Bush in 2000 — had popular-vote margins smaller than Trump’s current lead.

“If there ever was a mandate, this isn’t it,” said Hans Noel, associate professor of government at Georgetown University.

There is a slim majority margin in the US House of Representatives. There is no mandate radical change there. This is from Politico, “Where the slim House margin might matter most.” The analysis is by Anthony Adragna.

Republicans are vowing an all-out war in the opening days of the next Congress against Biden administration regulations in areas as varied as energy, financial, housing and education policy.

They’re hoping for a redux of 2017 and 2018, when Republicans used their unified control of government and the powers of the Congressional Review Act to ax 16 regulations. With a coming 53-47 majority, GOP senators say they’re again primed to use the CRA, one of their most potent tools to undo Democratic policies — and one that tends to unite the often fractious Republican conference.

But — and it’s a major but — an extremely narrow House margin could make things hard to pull off, at least for the first couple of months of the Trump administration. While the GOP could lose as many as three votes in the Senate with Vice President-elect JD Vance (R-Ohio) casting tie-breakers, the House very well be at a one-vote margin until early April (more on that math below).

Still, that hasn’t dampened Republicans’ enthusiasm around the CRA.

“We’re going to want to go and evaluate everything that fits into the jurisdiction” of the 1996 review law, incoming Senate Whip John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) told Inside Congress. Invoking it involves passing simple-majority votes in both chambers plus a presidential signature, no filibusters allowed.

President Joe Biden’s administration recognized this looming threat and prioritized early completion of rulemakings to shield them from congressional challenge. Still, dozens of regulations were finalized after Aug. 1, 2024, leaving them vulnerable to the CRA, according to Public Citizen, which closely tracks the potential use of the law. (That corresponds to the date identified by the Congressional Research Service after which rules might be vulnerable to revocation.)

Barrasso’s hardly alone with vows of aggressive use of the tool, which had only been successfully used once before Trump’s first term.

“We’ll do every possible regulation we can get to,” Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said. “It’s a wonderful tool for undoing the bureaucratic excess of the Biden administration.”

“On some of these crazy policies we ought to just get rid of them as fast as we can,” said Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.), who said he’d instructed his staff to find regulations that may be good targets for challenges.

“This is the only time the Congressional Review Act actually has teeth, otherwise it’s a messaging vehicle,” Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) said, referring to the first months of a new trifecta, since using the CRA effectively requires one party to control the presidency and both chambers of Congress, a relatively infrequent occurrence in modern politics.

Hopefully, this turns into a Can’t Do Anything Congress.

Have a good weekend! Hope you had a great day for feasting! I’m off to eat a turkey sandwich!

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?

Mostly Monday Reads: He’s a Maniac

Posted: November 18, 2024 | Author: dakinikat | Filed under: A thread for Ranting, American Fascists | Tags: #DonOld, @repeat1968. John Buss, Elonia Musk, Orange Caligula, Trump Cabinet Weirdos | 2 Comments

“Whenever I hear or read the word kakistocracy, this immediately comes to mind.” John (repeat1968) Buss

Good Day, Sky Dancers!

I hope the ACLU and other NGOs will be up for the next version of #DonOld’s Reign of Terror. Get ready for mass deportations by the military. If only they would deport me and my animals to the south of France or even the old family home in Hastings, England, if it’s still standing! For a guy who insists he didn’t know what Project 2025 was about, he is certainly right on top of it! This is from AXIOS. “Trump confirms plans to use military for mass deportations.”

President-elect Trump confirmed Monday that he is planning to declare a national emergency and use the U.S. military to carry out mass deportations.

Why it matters: Trump made his promise to deport millions of undocumented immigrants one of the cornerstones of his 2024 campaign, and his team has already begun strategizing how to carry its plan out.

A Truth Social post early Monday is the first time the president-elect has confirmed how his administration will execute the controversial plan.

Driving the news: Tom Fitton, the president of the conservative group Judicial Watch, posted on Truth Social earlier this month that Trump was “prepared to declare a national emergency and will use military assets to reverse the Biden invasion through a mass deportation program.”

Trump reposted Fitton’s comment Monday with the caption, “TRUE!!”

The big picture: There are an estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the U.S. Trump’s mass deportations are expected to impact roughly 20 million families across the country.

Immigration advocates and lawyers are preparing to counter the plan in court.

The president-elect’s team is aiming to craft executive orders that can withstand legal challenges to avoid a similar defeat that befell Trump’s Muslim ban in his first term, Politico reported.

Their plans also include ending the parole program for undocumented immigrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela, per Politico.

Zoom out: Trump has also already begun filling out his Cabinet positions with immigration hardliners.

This includes tapping Tom Homan, the former acting head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), to serve as his “border czar.”

In addition, Trump nominated South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem as his secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

Go deeper: How Trump’s plan for mass deportations fits into U.S. history

I will expand the garden in my side yard and extend it back to the area which has fruit trees and ginger. If the courts don’t block this, I’m betting on higher food prices by the next harvest. Also, I don’t know how anyone in a state like mine, affected by hurricanes and damage, will be getting their homes fixed and cleaned. We’d have never recovered without the workers from South of our border. However, that will be only one of the problems this regime change will bring.

David Nir, writing for Public Notice, has this information on the possibility of recess appointments for the basket of unqualified deplorable he’s chosen for his cabinet. “How Johnson could make Trump’s recess appointments a reality. Talk of cutting out Dems — and GOP dissenters — is more than just idle rhetoric.” Surely, no one believes that what comes out of his anus-looking mouth is just idle rhetoric at this point!

Donald Trump’s plan to stock his cabinet with the most appalling MAGA nihilists hinges on the obeisance of one man in particular: House Speaker Mike Johnson. And given Johnson’s track record of cowardice, Trump may indeed get what he wants — and demolish a pillar of democracy along the way.

The crescendo of increasingly nightmarish picks like Tulsi Gabbard, Matt Gaetz, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. almost makes Liz Dye’s take here at Public Notice — that Trump is trying to install the crowd at the Star Wars cantina — seem too kind.

So beyond the pale are Trump’s worst choices that even some Republicans in the Senate are balking. And it’s worth remembering that many Trump nominees during his first term in office withdrew from consideration in the face of GOP inaction or hostility.

But whether or not Republican senators are inclined to revert to subservience and greenlight these nominations, Trump is already armed with a plan to bypass the confirmation process entirely. He wants to fill vacancies without a confirmation vote by making so-called recess appointments when the Senate is not in session — a power granted to him by the Constitution. And he has a path to do it.

A will and a way

For many years, Congress has not actually taken a formal recess, precisely to deny presidents the ability to side-step lawmakers. Trump, though, has demanded that the Senate resume the practice of adjourning itself so that he can ram his picks through without any oversight.

The GOP’s new majority leader, John Thune, replied submissively to Trump’s demand, saying on Fox News last week that “all options are on the table.” And Johnson echoed that sentiment on Fox News Sunday yesterday, saying of recess appointments that “there may be a function for that.” (Watch below.)

It turns out that, even for a legislative body that often convenes for just three days a week, it’s surprisingly difficult for the Senate to take a proper, on-the-books break. Such an adjournment requires a majority vote, which even Thune acknowledged might be “a problem” for some Republican senators.

But even if Senate Republicans could muster a majority, a motion to recess can be amended, as Semafor’s Burgess Everett notes. That means Democrats could hold up such a motion indefinitely, unless Republicans were to unilaterally change Senate rules regarding recesses — a move Everett calls “a smaller-scale version of the ‘nuclear option'” that might also have a hard time garnering 50 votes.

The alt-media has been doing an excellent job tackling this garbage in and out of motivation and action. Politico has stated that the Ethics Committee in the House will discuss the report on Gaetz and his sex adventures with underage girls, also known as statutory rape. I firmly believe that if they don’t release it, someone will leak it. “House Ethics panel to meet Wednesday as Gaetz question looms. Members rescheduled the Wednesday meeting from one last week where lawmakers were widely expected to vote on whether to release the report.”

The House Ethics panel will meet Wednesday and potentially vote to release a report probing sexual misconduct allegations against former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), who Donald Trump tapped to be his attorney general, according to two people familiar with the discussion.

The meeting comes as Gaetz’s confirmation is in question, with some Republican senators wary of the controversial Florida Republican serving as the nation’s top law enforcement officer.

Speaker Mike Johnson is putting pressure on members of the Ethics Committee to keep the report under wraps, saying on Friday that he is “going to strongly request” the report isn’t released because “that is not the way we do things in the House, and I think that would be a terrible precedent to set.”

Johnson furthered that stance in interviews on the Sunday shows and threw his support behind Gaetz to be attorney general.

Members rescheduled the Wednesday meeting from one last week where lawmakers were widely expected to vote on whether to release the report.

Whether or not to release the report, which some senators have said would be essential in deciding whether or not to confirm Gaetz, is placing intense pressure on the historically bipartisan Ethics Committee. Republican Sen. Markwayne Mullin on Sunday told “Meet The Press” that the Senate should “absolutely” be able to see the report, but he said that doesn’t necessarily mean it should become public.

Gaetz, a fierce and loyal supporter of Trump’s, has a tough road to confirmation in the Senate. GOP Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) said she doesn’t “think it’s a serious nomination.” And fellow swing-vote Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine said she was “shocked” by the choice.

Republicans will hold 53 Senate seats in the next Congress, meaning they can only afford three defectors in the confirmation process.

As I mentioned, Trump’s lies about not knowing about Project 2025 are becoming more disprovable. This is also from Politico. “Playbook: Heritage comes out of the bunker.” Natalie Allison has the lede.

But now, with Trump as president-elect, Heritage is peeking back out from its metaphorical bunker.

Two of Heritage’s visiting fellows — TOM HOMAN and JOHN RATCLIFFE, who were contributors to Project 2025 — have already been named to top Trump administration posts. That book from Roberts that was supposed to come out in September? It was released last week. The think tank even marked its reemergence with an event this past week welcoming back the Washington cocktail circuit to the group’s Massachusetts Avenue headquarters on Capitol Hill. It was a D.C. coming back out party, of sorts, for an organization that is easing its way back into influence in what’s soon to be Trump’s Washington once again.

“We’re so back,” the Heritage official told Playbook, with a nervous laugh, while a crowd in the packed but modest-sized room milled around during a book party Thursday night for Roberts.

As GOP members of Congress — Playbook spotted Reps. RALPH NORMAN (R-S.C.), BRIAN BABIN (R-Texas), ERIC BURLISON (R-Mo.) and JOSH BRECHEEN (R-Okla.) there — sipped wine and grabbed hors d’oeuvres with a smattering of ambassadors, conservative staffers and reporters on Thursday, Roberts noted that he has lost a number of his “liberal friends” this year over “that larger book we’re famous for.”

But Heritage’s stint as a social pariah due to Project 2025 is effectively over.
“The entire political spectrum in the West is represented here,” Roberts said of the crowd he had assembled Thursday. “I won’t call anyone out, but those of you who are not exactly excited about everything that Heritage does — I’m very, very grateful that you’re here, and you’re here out of friendship.”

Roberts spoke about the need for conservatives to “have a certain humility” in order to continue growing the historic coalition that’s returning Trump to the White House — while still trying to fully convert new faces in the movement to a robust conservative ideology more closely resembling his own.

“What the conservative movement did for a generation — I was guilty of this, sometimes I’m still tempted to be guilty of this — is to say, ‘Oh, I’m not going to talk to you,’” Roberts said. He recalled scoffing the first time someone suggested that influential “populist conservatives” like himself should form a “political alliance with the tech bros.”

“I said, ‘What are you talking about? That’s crazy.’ Guess who was wrong? I was.”

Roberts, flanked on each side by panels quoting book endorsements from VP-elect JD VANCE and TUCKER CARLSON, noted that there are stark differences between his worldview and of some of the GOP’s newcomers, name-checking ELON MUSK and ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR., who had been announced as Trump’s nominee for secretary of Health and Human Services just hours earlier.

“I can be very grateful to Elon Musk for revitalizing free speech for the world, while also saying — very respectfully, civilly, maybe even with a smile on my face — it’s crazy to want to put microchips in the brain,” Roberts said.

And he intends to have what he said will also be a “civil” conversation with Kennedy on their differences on abortion rights. “We might agree to disagree,” Roberts said, “but we’re going to work on whatever we can that we agree on, and I will hold out hope that maybe I can change his mind.”

Roberts is sounding pretty optimistic again about the role of Heritage in Washington, about his own improving standing in Trump world, and, yes — about the likelihood of Project 2025’s much-maligned proposals getting closer to implementation. His organization, meanwhile, has prepared for the Trump administration a database of nearly 20,000 names of people who could fill jobs in the president-elect’s new federal government, a Heritage official told Playbook.

Elon Musk’s idea of free speech is anything that doesn’t personally attack him or his ideals, so let’s get rid of that notion. The Tech Bros funded this crazy train. This is from Oliver Darcy, who writes for Status. “The Verge Editor-In-Chief Nilay Patel breathes fire on Elon Musk and Donald Trump’s Big Tech enablers. “All of these men are now hopelessly trapped in a problem their own platforms and algorithms created.”” This is from Oliver’s interview with Patel.

What do you make of Elon Musk’s alliance with Donald Trump and what worries you the most about him playing such an outsized role in the Trump administration?

America now has an unelected defense contractor sitting in the White House doing ketamine and twiddling the algorithmic knobs of an influential right-wing echo chamber while fulminating against traditional standards-based journalism, threatening to revoke network broadcast licenses, and suing advertisers who don’t want to spend their money on his dwindling user base. What could go wrong?

On top of that, Trump’s most likely FCC Chairman is Brendan Carr, who was tasked in the first Trump government to crack down on platform moderation by taking control of Section 230, literally wrote the Project 2025 chapter laying out a plan to do so, and is now begging to punish NBC for having Kamala Harris on “SNL.”

To be as clear as I can be, the second Trump administration with Elon Musk embedded within it represents the most direct and sustained threat to the First Amendment and the freedom of the press any of us will ever experience. If you’re a media executive or editorial leader and you haven’t met with your legal team to understand the current landscape of First Amendment threats, let alone the ones to come, you’re already behind. Get on it.

In the wake of Trump’s victory, other Big Tech leaders (Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai, etcetera) posted congratulatory messages on X. It struck me as much different to how Silicon Valley responded to Trump’s first election. Why do you think that is?

All of these men are now hopelessly trapped in a problem their own platforms and algorithms created: they have to manipulate Trump’s narcissism to secure tariff exceptions and regulatory largesse, while knowing that the vast majority of their employees and half of their customers will see any engagement as moral bankruptcy. There’s a reason Apple and Google would not confirm the calls Donald Trump claimed Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai made to him before the election — they didn’t want to be associated with him.

Now they have no choice. Tim Cook had been quietly setting the stage to retire — but he’s stuck kissing the ring and hosting fake factory openings for another four years to avoid disastrous tariffs on Apple products. Zuck is spending billions on Nvidia H100s manufactured in Taiwan in order to dominate A.I., but all that money comes from advertising for products made overseas — a double whammy of tariff issues. (And the entire influencer economy is built on Shein sponcon — that’s about to fall off a cliff.) Elon, Marc Andreessen, and J.D. Vance all think that Google should be crushed to bits with antitrust law — Vance has specifically said that he think Lina Khan is doing a good job.

Jeff Bezos? All that money for yachts and rockets comes from Amazon’s huge ecosystem of alphabet soup dropshipping companies. I hope Lauren likes having dinner at Mar-a-Lago.

Here’s more on the FCC cabinet pick who edited Project 2025. This is from the AP. “Trump names Brendan Carr, senior GOP leader at FCC, to lead the agency.” Demons all the way down.

President-elect Donald Trump on Sunday named Brendan Carr, the senior Republican on the Federal Communications Commission, as the new chairman of the agency tasked with regulating broadcasting, telecommunications and broadband.

Carr is a longtime member of the commission and served previously as the FCC’s general counsel. He has been unanimously confirmed by the Senate three times and was nominated by both Trump and President Joe Biden to the commission.

The FCC is an independent agency that is overseen by Congress, but Trump has suggested he wanted to bring it under tighter White House control, in part to use the agency to punish TV networks that cover him in a way he doesn’t like.

Carr has of late embraced Trump’s ideas about social media and tech. Carr wrote a section devoted to the FCC in “ Project 2025,” a sweeping blueprint for gutting the federal workforce and dismantling federal agencies in a second Trump administration produced by the conservative Heritage Foundation.

Every federal worker is going to need a lawyer at this point. Get ready for that Class Action lawsuit. This in-depth look at the weirdo that will head defense is not pleasant. But, he’s the guy who would work with whatever Generals remain in all parts of the country, sniffing out undocumented workers. Judd Legume and his team sniffed him out for Popular Information. “13 things everyone should know about Pete Hegseth. Just looking at him gives me the willies.

Hegseth is a military veteran who served in Iraq and Afghanistan and received a Bronze Star and other commendations. He also served in the National Guard. But the largest organization that Hegseth has previously run is Concerned Veterans for America, a Koch-funded right-wing advocacy organization, where he served as Executive Director from 2012 to 2016. Concerned Veterans for America had a few dozen employees and a budget of around $15 million during his tenure. In that role, Hegseth hired his younger brother, who had just graduated college, to a well-compensated media relations position at the CVA. Hegseth founded a small PAC in his native Minnesota to support conservative candidates. It managed to raise about $15,000 over several years. One-third of the raised funds were “spent on two Christmas parties and reimbursements to Hegseth.”

Even Trump’s most loyal supporters acknowledge Hegseth’s lack of relevant experience. Steve Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist during his first term, said that Hegseth has “never run a big organization” and is “kind of a madman.”

But while Hegseth has limited management experience, he has spent many years in the public eye and has a long record of punditry. Here are 13 things everyone should know about the man Trump wants to put in charge of the nation’s military.

His top priority is getting women out of the military.

“I’m straight up just saying we should not have women in combat roles,” Hegseth said in a media interview on November 10, 2024. According to Hegseth, “[e]verything about men and women serving together makes the situation more complicated, and complication in combat, means casualties are worse.”

“Dads push us to take risks. Moms put the training wheels on our bikes,” Hegseth wrote in his 2024 book The War on Warriors. “We need moms. But not in the military, and especially not in combat units.”

“There aren’t enough lesbians in San Francisco to staff the 82nd Airborne like you need, you need the boys in Kentucky and Texas and North Carolina and Wisconsin,” Hegseth said in a podcast earlier this year.

Women have formally been allowed to serve in combat roles since 2013 and have been involved in combat operations for decades. Even the conservative Wall Street Journal editorial page suggested Hegseth’s position is misguided because “women have shown they can perform well in many roles” in the military.

It gets worse from there if you want to read it. And I think that it’s horrifying for all of us for now. Be aware of all the places where havoc will reign. The stock market has already been rebooted. It’s nose-dived since the cabinet officers were announced. Big Pharma and anyone in the processed food business were particularly hard hit. This is the headline today from Stock Market Watch. “Stock Market Today: Dow flat, S&P 500 attempts bounce after worst week in over 2 months. It’s not like I didn’t warn y’all. Just get ready to hunker down like an Okie during the Dust Bowl. I have mad skills, having survived post-Katrina with the lessons my Nana and Dad taught me. This is not going to be an easy time for any of us.

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?

Songs for dwelling on Trump and his appointments

Finally Friday Reads: Pobre Diabla

Posted: November 1, 2024 | Author: dakinikat | Filed under: 2024 presidential Campaign, abortion rights, Abusive Relationships, American Fascists, just because, Right Wing Angst | Tags: #DonOld, 2024 Elections, @repeat1968. John Buss, Halloween Horror Movies, Liz Cheney, Texas abortion laws | 4 Comments

“Voting can stop it.” John Buss @repeat1968

Good Day, Sky Dancers!

It was a dark and drizzly night, not one to make the rounds to all the Halloween parties in the hood. So, I settled into watching a friend from around Flagstaff, Arizona, stream a set of Horror Movies on Discord to a bunch of us who play a Zombie survival game together. It was like a pajama party with the girls, except my girls are all furry, and everyone else was scattered all over the country. I retwisted my ankle last night which was still hurting from a Tuesday mishap and feeling really old. The live Oaks of New Orleans’ Avenues drop acorns that rapidly become a coffee ground-like mess everywhere. That was the trick. I was glad that I stocked up on treats and wine earlier because I just missed the fog and the mist rolling in over the city. A very apt setting for Interview with a Vampire. I was hurting, traumatized by the DonOld Garbage Truck Cosplay spewing from the News Channels, and thought settling down to some movies would be a good break.

I saw a new version of Children of the Corn and was treated to several movies, including two of the “The Hills Have Eyes” franchises. It was hard to believe that the original version by Wes Crave had come out when I was at university. The fact the newest version of Children was centered in Nebraska was not lost on me. The original of that one came out when I was finishing my Masters. Back then, I’d take out the Beta tapes of the old Vincent Price horror movies that I recorded off the few cable channels back then.

The more I watched the Hill films, the more I could see Trump supporters in all the cannibal zombies in the Hills. Seriously, right down to their caps, their messy English, and the way they treated the two women in that National Guard Unit, I could swear I was watching a MAGA ambush. The creepy preacher in Children of the Corn and his implied “sin” against the little girl Eden was like the perfect metaphor for all those white Christian nationalist men whose arrest mug shots for crimes against children keep popping up on my X feed.

I had watched the news earlier and the meltdown that MAGA husbands are having at the idea their wives might get in the voting booth and vote their conscience instead of the will of their Patriarchal captor. One dude on Fox likened it to committing adultery, at which point the women on the panel laughed, and then he looked straight at the camera and told his chattel Emma that it would be finished if he found she’d done that. I thought she should get a lawyer to get her share, then Run Emma, RUN!! That and go have some fun with some young men that know what they’re doing! Just don’t bring them home or marry them.

This is from Vanity Fair. The analysis is provided by Bess Levin. “Fox News Host Says He’d Divorce His Wife for Voting for Kamala Harris. “If I found out Emma was going into the voting booth and pulling the lever for Harris, that’s the same thing as having an affair.” If you’d like, I can reference the part from the Hill movie where the mutant grabs a woman National Guard soldier, starts grabbing and raping her, and says, “You make nice babies!” Who among us can’t see DonOld in his prime doing that same thing?

How much respect do Donald Trump’s male supporters have for women? So much that at least one of them has said he’d end his marriage if his wife exercised her constitutional right to vote for Kamala Harris.

On an episode of The Five this week, Fox News host Jesse Watters told fellow panelists that if he learned his wife, Emma, cast her ballot for the vice president, after letting him think she was voting for Trump, he would consider it a betrayal on par with having an extramarital affair and it would be “over.”

“If I found out Emma was going into the voting booth and pulling the lever for Harris, that’s the same thing as having an affair,” Watters said. “That, to me, violates the sanctity of our marriage. What else is she keeping from me? What else has she been lying about?” Asked by cohost Jeanine Pirro, “Why would she lie to you? Have you threatened her?” Watters responded, “Why would she do that and then vote Harris? Why would she say she was voting…. And I caught her and then she said, ‘I lied to you for the last four years—’”

“So you admit you intimidate people,” Pirro interjected. “It’s over, Emma!” Watters said. “That would be D-Day!”

Watters and co. were discussing an ad put out in support of the Harris campaign that reminds women, “You can vote any way you want, and no one will ever know.” Which is apparently a necessary point to make to women who are married to extremely fragile Trump-supporting men.

I know that once they think they’ve got you, they show their true colors, but seriously, who could stand to live like that? Salon has this great article up with an even more wonderful headline. “”It is so disastrous”: MAGA men are freaking out that wives may be secretly voting for Kamala Harris, “That’s the same thing as having an affair,” Fox News host argues as women fuel early vote in key states.” The entire concept of Control Freak is not hyped enough for these guys. Charles R Davis takes them on.

When you’re a star, Donald Trump has said more than once, women will let you do whatever you want to them. As president, that meant putting three right-wing justices on the Supreme Court and stripping half the country of a constitutional right, enabling people like him — their self-proclaimed “protector” — to have the final word on what any woman does with her body.

“I’m going to do it whether the women like it or not,” the former president asserted at a campaign stop on Wednesday. “I am going to protect them.”

Women, it turns out, do not care for this — a large majority of them, at least. While millions will still vote for the Republican candidate, perhaps hating immigrants more than they love reproductive rights, the only certainty at this point is that many millions more will vote for Vice President Kamala Harris. In the latest ABC News/Ipsos national poll, the Democrat enjoyed a 14% advantage with women over Trump; among women with a college degree, that number rose to 23%; among women voters under 40, it rocketed to 34%.

According to the Brookings Institution, Harris’ strength among women angered by the 2022 Dobbs decision could explain why Democrats, for the first time in forever, are polling better with older voters than Republicans. The think tank’s Michael Hais and Morley Winograd noted that, per the ABC News/Ipsos survey, there has been a 10-point swing to Harris among voters over the age of 65 compared to 2020.

“Some observers think this shift is driven by the ‘revenge of Boomer feminists’ among the women of that famous generation, all of whom are now over 65 but who cut their political teeth in the battle for equality when they were much younger,” Hais and Winograd wrote. Younger voters may be angry over losing a right they had never lived without, but older people have seen hard-fought progress rolled back. They are also the most reliable group of voters — and they tend to vote early.

In battleground states, that appears to be exactly what’s happening. According to an analysis of early-voting tallies by Politico, women account for 55% of all ballots cast thus far in states such as Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.

That, in turn, is causing some MAGA commentators to break from their usual posture of feigned confidence to outright panic.

“Early vote has been disproportionately female,” Charlie Kirk, head of Turning Point USA and helping to lead the Trump campaign’s get-out-the-vote effort, posted on social media. “If men stay at home, Kamala is president. It’s that simple.” (Kirk, seeking to motivate these voters, offered Orwellian misogyny: “If you want a vision of the future if you don’t vote, imagine Kamala’s voice cackling, forever.”)

I feel seen for once, hopefully, not by the Children of the Garbage Bags and AR-15s. DonOld really has gone over the edge. During his rally in New Mexico, he made a loosely veiled threat at former Congresswoman Liz Cheney. This is from the Bulwark, as written by Bill Kristol. Don’t Horror shows make allies out of the strangest folks? That’s what happens when your very life is on the line.

Donald Trump’s two strongest personality traits each had a moment on the campaign trail yesterday.

At a rally in Albuquerque, New Mexico, the buffoon: “I’m here for one very simple reason. I like you very much, and it’s good for my credentials with the Hispanic and Latino community.”

And later, on stage with Tucker Carlson in Glendale, Arizona, the menace. Here he was on former GOP Rep. Liz Cheney: “She’s a radical war hawk. Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, okay? Let’s see how she feels about it, you know, when the guns are trained on her face.”

U.S. News has this headline. “Trump Says Liz Cheney Might Not Be Such a ‘War Hawk’ if She Had Rifles Shooting at Her. Donald Trump is calling former Rep. Liz Cheney, who’s one of his most prominent Republican critics, a “war hawk” and he’s suggesting she might not be as willing to send troops to fight if she had guns shooting at her.”

Donald Trump is suggesting that former Rep. Liz Cheney, one of his most prominent Republican critics, should have rifles “shooting at her” to see how she feels about sending troops to fight. It was his latest suggestion that his rivals should be targeted with violence.

Cheney responded by branding the GOP presidential nominee a “cruel, unstable man who wants to be a tyrant.”

The Republican presidential candidate has been using increasingly threatening rhetoric against his adversaries and talked of “enemies from within” undermining the country. Some of his former senior aides and Vice President Kamala Harris have labeled him a fascist in response.

At an event late Thursday in Arizona with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, Trump was asked whether it was strange to see Cheney campaign against him. The former Wyoming congresswoman has vocally opposed Trump since the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol and endorsed Democrat Kamala Harris, joining the vice president at recent stops as they try to win over Republicans disaffected with Trump.

Trump called Cheney “a deranged person” and added, “But the reason she couldn’t stand me is that she always wanted to go to war with people. If it were up to her we’d be in 50 different countries.”

The former president continued: “She’s a radical war hawk. Let’s put her with the rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her. OK, let’s see how she feels about it. You know, when the guns are trained on her face.

The results of Donald Trump’s first reign of Terror are killing women. The Republican appointees to the Supreme Court have the blood of innocents on their hands. ProPublica has once again followed the trail of deaths left in Texas by the hypocrites who scream they are “pro-life.” “A Pregnant Teenager Died After Trying to Get Care in Three Visits to Texas Emergency Rooms. It took three ER visits and 20 hours before a hospital admitted Nevaeh Crain, 18, as her condition worsened. Doctors insisted on two ultrasounds to confirm “fetal demise.” She’s one of at least two Texas women who died under the state’s abortion ban.”

Candace Fails screamed for someone in the Texas hospital to help her pregnant daughter. “Do something,” she pleaded, on the morning of Oct. 29, 2023.

Nevaeh Crain was crying in pain, too weak to walk, blood staining her thighs. Feverish and vomiting the day of her baby shower, the 18-year-old had gone to two different emergency rooms within 12 hours, returning home each time worse than before.

The first hospital diagnosed her with strep throat without investigating her sharp abdominal cramps. At the second, she screened positive for sepsis, a life-threatening and fast-moving reaction to an infection, medical records show. But doctors said her six-month fetus had a heartbeat and that Crain was fine to leave.

Now on Crain’s third hospital visit, an obstetrician insisted on two ultrasounds to “confirm fetal demise,” a nurse wrote, before moving her to intensive care.

By then, more than two hours after her arrival, Crain’s blood pressure had plummeted and a nurse had noted that her lips were “blue and dusky.” Her organs began failing.

Hours later, she was dead.

Fails, who would have seen her daughter turn 20 this Friday, still cannot understand why Crain’s emergency was not treated like an emergency.

But that is what many pregnant women are now facing in states with strict abortion bans, doctors and lawyers have told ProPublica.

“Pregnant women have become essentially untouchables,” said Sara Rosenbaum, a health law and policy professor emerita at George Washington University.

Texas’s abortion ban threatens prison time for interventions that end a fetal heartbeat, whether the pregnancy is wanted or not. It includes exceptions for life-threatening conditions, but still, doctors told ProPublica that confusion and fear about the potential legal repercussions are changing the way their colleagues treat pregnant patients with complications.

In states with abortion bans, such patients are sometimes bounced between hospitals like “hot potatoes,” with health care providers reluctant to participate in treatment that could attract a prosecutor, doctors told ProPublica. In some cases, medical teams are wasting precious time debating legalities and creating documentation, preparing for the possibility that they’ll need to explain their actions to a jury and judge.

Dr. Jodi Abbott, an associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Boston University School of Medicine, said patients are left wondering: “Am I being sent home because I really am OK? Or am I being sent home because they’re afraid that the solution to what’s going on with my pregnancy would be ending the pregnancy, and they’re not allowed to do that?”

There is a federal law to prevent emergency room doctors from withholding lifesaving care.

Passed nearly four decades ago, it requires emergency rooms to stabilize patients in medical crises. The Biden administration argues this mandate applies even in cases where an abortion might be necessary.

No state has done more to fight this interpretation than Texas, which has warned doctors that its abortion ban supersedes the administration’s guidance on federal law, and that they can face up to 99 years in prison for violating it.

ProPublica condensed more than 800 pages of Crain’s medical records into a four-page timeline in consultation with two maternal-fetal medicine specialists; reporters reviewed it with nine doctors, including researchers at prestigious universities, OB-GYNs who regularly handle miscarriages, and experts in emergency medicine and maternal health.

Puerto Rican Americans continue to speak out about the horrible racist slurs spoken by #DonOld about their Island home and their presence on the mainland. Does he understand that Puerto Ricans are Americans and that they live everywhere in this country? This is from The Daily Beast. “J.Lo Claps Back at Trump Rally Puerto Rico Jab: ‘We Are Americans’, “Our pain matters,” the singer said at a Las Vegas event for Kamala Harris.” This is reported by Claire Lampen.

As promised, Jennifer Lopez took the stage at Kamala Harris’s rally in Las Vegas on Thursday night, responding to racist statements about Puerto Rico made at one of Donald Trump’s recent events.

“I am an American woman. I am the daughter of Guadalupe Lupe Rodríguez and David Lopez, a proud daughter and son of Puerto Rico. I am Puerto Rican,” Lopez said, restating the final point in Spanish. “And yes, I was born here. And we are Americans.”

In his much-maligned comedy routine at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally on Sunday, right-wing comedian Tony Hinchcliffe referred to Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage.” His comments, Lopez said, should offend “anyone of decent character.”

“It’s about us, all of us, no matter what we look like, who we love, who we worship, or where we’re from,” Lopez said. “[Harris’s] opponent, on the other hand, doesn’t see it that way. He has consistently worked to divide us. At Madison Square Garden, he reminded us who he really is and how he really feels.”

Trump‘s rally featured a parade of extremist speakers, though it was Hinchcliffe’s act that really dominated headlines. In it, he claimed Latinos “love making babies,” a riff whose anti-immigrant punchline fell flat, and threw in some racist stereotypes about Black people as well.

Although the Trump campaign has since attempted to distance itself from Hinchcliffe’s set—Trump trotting out a classic “I don’t know her” defense—it garnered criticism from all sides, even from his own party.

Trump’s enablers cannot stop him from his hate-filled speeches and comments.

“It wasn’t just Puerto Ricans who were offended that day,” Lopez added. “It was every Latino in this country, it was humanity.”

J.Lo went on to say that, “with an understanding of our past, and a faith in our future,” she‘s proud to vote for Harris. “You can’t even spell American without Rican,” she said. “This is our country, too, and we must exercise our right to vote.”

Towards the end of her speech, Lopez appeared to fight back tears. “I promised myself I wouldn’t get emotional,” she told the audience. “But you know what? We should be emotional. We should be upset. We should be scared and outraged, we should. Our pain matters. We matter. You matter. Your voice and your vote matters.”

“This election is about your life,” J.Lo continued. “It‘s about you, and me, and my kids, and your kids. Don‘t make it easy; make them pay attention to you. That’s your power. Your vote is your power.”

“Your vote is your power” is the line I want everyone to remember today. Another one is a quote from the late Senator Paul Wellstone from Minnesota. Five Days until we get the opportunity to never hear that man or his zombie cultists again.

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?

Finally Friday Reads: Full-on Full Moon Crazy

Posted: October 18, 2024 | Author: dakinikat | Filed under: "presidential immunity", 2024 Elections, democracy is threatened, Foreign Affairs, Fox News, Harris Walz 2024, Iran, Israel, Kamala Harris 2024, North Korea, Right Wing Angst, Russia, Ukraine | Tags: @repeat1968. John Buss, Full Moon Madness, Special Counsel Jack Smith, Trump's dementia | 4 Comments

“Every single time he opens his mouth…” John Buss, @repeat1968

Good Day, Sky Dancers!

If you got to look into the sky last night, you got to see the Hunter’s supermoon. There certainly was a lot of Lunacy yesterday. That causation or even correlation doesn’t stand up to scientific scrutiny, but it has a literary tradition covering nearly all periods of history. DonOld’s Yesterday fits the adage neatly.

“It is the very error of the moon.She comes more near the earth than she was wont. And makes men mad.”
—William Shakespeare, Othello

Speaking of madness, “North Korea sends troops to support Russia in Ukraine war: NIS.” This was announced in The Korea Herald.

North Korea has dispatched special forces to support Russia in its war against Ukraine, with the first batch already having arrived in Russia and a second group of North Korean troops expected to follow soon, South Korea’s intelligence agency claimed on Friday.

The National Intelligence Service said it “confirmed that North Korea began its participation in the war by transporting special forces to Russia via Russian Navy transport ships from Oct. 8 to 13.”

However, the NIS provided no substantial evidence to support this claim, other than satellite imagery showing Russian vessels docked at the port of Chongjin in North Hamgyong Province.

Four amphibious ships and three escort ships from the Russian Pacific Fleet transported around 1,500 North Korean special forces to Vladivostok during this period, departing from areas near Chongjin and Musudan-ri in North Hamgyong Province, as well as Hamhung in South Hamgyong Province, according to the NIS.

The NIS further stated that a second operation to transport North Korean troops to Russia is “expected to take place soon.”

The North Korean soldiers deployed to Russia have been stationed at military bases in the Far East, spread across cities such as Vladivostok, Ussuriysk, Khabarovsk and Blagoveshchensk.

“They are expected to be sent to the battlefield once they complete their adaptation training,” the intelligence agency added.

According to the NIS, the North Korean soldiers were provided with Russian military uniforms and Russian-made weapons. They were also issued fake identification documents resembling residents of Siberian regions such as Yakutia and Buryatia, whose appearance is similar to North Koreans.

“This appears to be an attempt to disguise them as Russian soldiers and conceal their involvement in the war,” the NIS stated.

The NIS also reported that Kim Jong-sik, the first vice director of North Korea’s Munitions Industry Department and a key figure in the country’s missile development, was observed visiting a North Korean KN-23 missile launch site near the Russia-Ukraine front. He was accompanied by dozens of North Korean military officers to provide on-site guidance.

“It’s incomprehensible,” John Buss. @repeat1968. “More Full moon Madness!!!” me

American Madman DonOld is showing his age; finally, the legacy media have noticed and are reporting it. It only took 39 minutes of swaying to his playlist at a rally for them to start asking the real questions. He’s evidently tuckered out. “Trump cancels a streak of events with only days until election.” This is reported in AXIOS by Ivana Saric

Former President Trump’s planned appearance at a National Rifle Association event next week was cancelled Thursday, the latest in a slew of scuttled public appearances and interviews by the former president in recent weeks.

Why it matters: With only 17 days to go until Election Day, the spate of cancellations gives voters fewer chances to hear from Trump before heading to the polls in a coin toss race.

Vice President Kamala Harris, on the other hand, has been on a media blitz after enduring criticism from Republicans about a perceived lack of interviews.

And while Harris has ventured into the unfriendly territory of a Fox News interview, Trump has stuck to the safe spaces of conservative outlets.

In the appearances he has made, Trump’s rhetoric has grown more violent and nativist. In recent weeks, he has decried his critics as the “enemy from within” and fanned the flames of false conspiracy theories about migrants.

Driving the news: The NRA said Thursday it had cancelled its “Defend the 2nd” event with Trump in Savannah, Georgia, next week due to “campaign scheduling changes.”

Trump also pulled out of two mainstream media interviews this week, with NBC News and CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”

Earlier this month he backed out of a scheduled appearance on CBS’ “60 Minutes,” while Harris appeared on the program.

The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to Axios’ request for comment.

Between the lines: Several of the events and interviews Trump has appeared at in recent weeks have raised eyebrows.

Trump cut short a Pennsylvania town hall this week to listen and sway to music for more than half an hour. “Let’s make it into a music fest,” Trump said. “Who the hell wants to hear questions, right?”

In an interview with Bloomberg News at the Chicago Economic Club Tuesday, Trump downplayed the Capitol riot and struggled to respond when confronted about the costs of his economic plans

Trump later claimed he was “hoodwinked” into the interview.

During an all-women Fox News town hall that aired Wednesday, Trump declared himself the “father of IVF,” a decades-old fertility treatment that has come under threat since overturning Roe v. Wade — which Trump has repeatedly bragged about ending.

DonOld is asking for a sitdown with Rupert Murdoch. This is from MEDIAITE’s Isaac Schorr. “Donald Trump Outlines His Demands For Rupert Murdoch Live On Fox News Ahead of Private Meeting: ‘I Don’t Know If He’s Thrilled.’”

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump outlined his demands for conservative media mogul Rupert Murdoch live on Fox News Friday morning, musing that Murdoch should stop airing negative ads and allowing Democratic guests on the network in the run up to Election Day.

After Fox & Friends’ Lawrence Jones thanked Trump for appearing on the show Friday, the former president jumped back in to ask Jones and his co-hosts, “You know what the event I have now?”

“No,” said Brian Kilmeade.

“A very big event,” continued the former president. “I’m going to see Rupert Murdoch.”

A pensive Kilmeade replied, “Alright,” and Steve Doocy exclaimed, “Okay!” before Trump pressed on.

“That’s a big event. I don’t know if he’s thrilled that I say it. And I’m going to tell him, I’m gonna tell him something very simple because I can’t talk to anybody else about it: Don’t put on negative commercials for 21 days, don’t put them. And don’t put on the air their horrible people. They come and lie. I’m going to say, ‘Rupert, please do it this way.’”

“Right,” interjected Kilmeade.

“And then we’re going to have a victory, because I think everyone wants that,” concluded Trump.

Salon Fellow Griffin Eckstein reports that Faux News Reader Brett Baier is very sorry about his behavior during his interview with Vice President Harris. “”I did make a mistake”: Baier apologizes for playing edited Trump clip in Harris interview. The Fox News anchor’s deceptive video clip left out Trump’s remarks about “enemies from within.”

Fox News anchor Bret Baier is apologizing for playing a misleadingly edited clip in an interview with Vice President Kamala Harris.

Harris sat down with Baier on Wednesday for a tense interview, in which the “Special Report” host repeatedly cut off and chastised the Democratic candidate. One exchange in particular gave the game away.

When Harris admonished former President Trump over suggestions that he’d sic the military on his political opponents, Baier aired a portion of a Trump interview that omitted his comments against “the enemy from within.”

“I’m not threatening anybody,” Trump said in the clip Baier played. “They’re the ones doing the threatening.”

In a Thursday night episode of “Report,” Baier owned up his misdirection.

“I wanna say that I did make a mistake,” Baier admitted. “When I called for a soundbite, I was expecting a piece of the ‘enemy from within’ from Maria Bartiromo’s interview, to be tied to the piece from [Harris Faulkner’s ]town hall.”

Baier went on to play the intended clip for his audience, though Harris was still able to get her point across the previous night despite the misleading edit.

“You and I both know that he has talked about turning the American military on the American people,” the vice president said on Wednesday. “In a democracy, the president of the United States, in the United States of America, should be willing to be able to handle criticism without saying he would lock people up for doing it.”

Even the New York Times is noticing DonOld’s crazy demeanor and speech these days. “Trump’s Meandering Speeches Motivate His Critics and Worry His Allies. Some advisers and allies of former President Donald J. Trump are concerned about his scattershot style on the campaign trail as he continues to veer off script.” This is reported by Michael C. Bender.

Now, some Trump advisers and allies say privately they are concerned that the dynamic may be repeating itself four years later. They worry that Mr. Trump’s impetuousness and scattershot style on the campaign trail needlessly risk victory in battleground states where the margin for error is increasingly narrow.

At a time when his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, has stepped up her attacks on him as “unstable,” Mr. Trump has struggled to publicly hone his message by veering off script and ramping up personal attacks on Ms. Harris that allies have urged him to rein in.

“When he’s good, he’s great, and when he’s off message, he’s not so great,” said David Urban, a Trump adviser. “I don’t think anyone is really changing their mind at this point, but when he distracts from his biggest, broadest messaging, it’s counterproductive because the Harris campaign uses it to turn out their voters.”

During a speech on Saturday in California, he described mail-in ballots as “so corrupt,” reviving one of his false attacks on the 2020 election results, and did a play-by-play of his internal thoughts when he watched SpaceX, Elon Musk’s spaceflight company, fly a rocket back onto its launch site.

On Sunday, in response to a question on Fox News about the possibility of foreign adversaries’ meddling in the election, he reverted to autocratic language by saying “the bigger problem is the enemy from within.” On Monday, he halted a town-hall event in suburban Philadelphia after five questions when two people in the crowd needed medical attention. He spent roughly the next half-hour playing D.J., swaying and grooving in front of his crowd to a playlist he curated from the stage. “Let’s just listen to music,” he said.

Last week, he canceled a CBS interview on “60 Minutes,” in which he and Ms. Harris were both scheduled to appear — and has not stopped talking about it. He complained about it during events in Detroit and Reno, Nev., and again on Monday in a social media post at 1:12 a.m.

All of this makes me wonder if he doesn’t care about winning or if he’s just relying on a country-wide repeat J6 event and his cronies planted in positions to disrupt the voting process in many states. It might be he has other things on his rapidly disintegrating mind. Just a few hours ago, Judge Tanya Chutkin, keeper of the American Way and the U.S. Constitution, allowed the Special Counsel to open up the floodgates of evidence. This is from CNN. “Special counsel releases trove of redacted documents in 2020 election subversion case against Trump.” October Surprise, perhaps? Care to Dance in the Moonlight with me?

Special counsel Jack Smith on Friday released a massive trove of heavily redacted documents in his 2020 election subversion criminal case against former President Donald Trump.

There are nearly 2,000 pages in a massive trove of documents released Friday, but nearly all of the pages appear to be completely redacted.

The redacted appendices filed on the public docket in the case are related to Smith’s expansive filing from earlier this month that laid out his fullest picture yet of the case against Trump and Smith’s belief that his actions around the 2020 election should not be shielded by presidential immunity.

One volume is filled with sealed pages as well as tweets and other social media posts from Trump, his campaign and allies, including some posted during the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot.

One of the tweets include Trump’s post that day that Vice President Mike Pence “didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done” that day in supporting his effort to change the election results.

Others include a myriad of claims of voter fraud during the 2020 election.

Prosecutors have argued that these tweets from Trump should be allowed to be used in the trial because they were personal in nature or part of his campaigning efforts and not his official duties as president.

The documents were released a day after Judge Tanya Chutkan rejected a bid by Trump to pause the release. Trump argued that posting the documents now could be seen as election inference and had asked them to remain under seal until after Election Day.

“If the court withheld information that the public otherwise had a right to access solely because of the potential political consequences of releasing it, that withholding could itself constitute – or appear to be – election interference,” Chutkan wrote in a decision late Thursday.

Another volume contains memos from lawyer John Eastman with a plan for Pence to reject the congressional certification of the 2020 election. The volume also includes a public statement Trump released the night before January 6 claiming he and Pence were on the same page about the congressional certification, Trump’s prepared remarks for his speech on January 6, and fundraising emails sent out by his 2020 campaign in the days before January 6.

Pence’s letter to Congress on January 6 explaining why he could not reject certifying the election and a transcript of Trump’s 2023 CNN town hall are also included in the documents.

The redacted files were expected to include an array of materials, including grand jury transcripts and notes from FBI interviews conducted during the yearslong investigation.

This was a big news dump week. Hopefully, the death of Yahya Sinwar will lead to a peaceful conclusion to this latest Mid-Eastern War. I’m not sure that’s what Bibi wants, but I’m sure the return of the hostages and a ceasefire would be a good start to ending hostilities. This is from Reuters. “Yahya Sinwar threw stick at drone just before death, according to Israel video. “

Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar was tracked by an Israeli mini drone as he lay dying in the ruins of a building in southern Gaza and filmed him slumped in a chair covered in dust, according to video released by Israeli authorities on Thursday.

As the drone hovered nearby, the video showed him throwing a stick at it, in an apparent act of desperation or defiance. Not long afterwards, the military said, a tank shell was fired into the building.

After an intensive manhunt that had lasted for more than a year, the Israeli troops that killed Sinwar were initially unaware that they had caught their country’s number one enemy after a gun battle on Wednesday, Israeli officials said.

Dental records, fingerprints and DNA testing provided final confirmation of Sinwar’s death for Israel and on Friday, Hamas confirmed their leader had been killed.

Intelligence services had been gradually restricting the area where Sinwar could operate, the military said. But unlike other militant leaders tracked down by Israel, including Hamas military commander Mohammed Deif, who was killed in an Israeli airstrike on July 13, the encounter which finally killed Sinwar was not a planned and targeted strike, or an operation carried out by elite commandos.

The seven days of Sukkot started last night. The Jewish Harvest Holiday lasts 7 days, and I’m sure there will be much celebration that there will be one less terrorist plotting another atrocity like October 7th. May all who observe find it in their hearts to search for peace and reconciliation with Israel’s innocent Palestinian neighbors. You would think eventually, we would all be way over all those who try to turn neighbors against each other. I know I’m hopeful we can get a better outcome here if we all just get out and vote for Kamala and Tim.

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?

Finally Friday Reads: The Gender Chasm

Posted: October 11, 2024 | Author: dakinikat | Filed under: 2024 DNC, 2024 Elections, 2024 presidential Campaign | Tags: #DonOld, @repeat1968. John Buss, Barack Obama, DonOld and Dude Bros, Doug Emhoff, Father Figures, J Dank, Modern Masculinity, Stephan Miller, The Gender Chasm, The Gender Gap 2024, Tim Walz, Toxic Masculinity | 10 Comments

“Kamala is correct. Trump rallies are really a sight to behold. Everyone should watch at least one. Pro-tip, they’re getting more and more entertaining.” John Buss, @repeat1968

Good Day, Sky Dancers!

When you watch and read as much news as I do, you can’t help but notice that every political act committed by DonOld these days is focused on young men. I believe that watching and listening to even a minimal amount of this has given me my first bout with acid reflux. I watched this segment on Alex Wagner last night. I had to endure a quick clip of Stephen Miller, who is an unpleasant, unattractive misogynist, racist, and xenophobe, which is this year’s Trump campaign outreach. “‘Infantile, petulant masculinity’: Trump aims low in appeal for American male ‘bro’ voters.” Are there really that many of them out there?

With a yawning gender gap in his base of support as a consequence of driving women away with his own words and behavior, Donald Trump appears to have made a strategy of wringing as much support as he can from American men, which has meant plumbing the depths of bro culture and encouraging a less-than-flattering version of masculinity. Michelle Goldberg, columnist for the New York Times discusses with Alex Wagner.

The funniest thing is watching Miller telling every male the best way to demonstrate you’re an Alpha is to wear your Trump goodies. Then, he goes on to mispronounce Beta. I can’t help but remember my first reading of Brave New World, as assigned in my 9th grade English class taught by a woman who also taught me swimming when I was a kid. Alphas are the intellectuals, while Betas are designed for physically demanding but not mentally challenging labor. I suppose Miller is referring to the hierarchy of the Apes, but wow, he sure comes off as a Gamma to me.

I enjoyed watching former President Barack Obama roast Donald Trump and contrast his inept and selfish behavior with that of the brilliant and caring Kamala. So, there are a lot of strange reads today about the strong comeback of the Gender Gap, which appears to be more like a Chasm. Let’s chuckle through them. Frankly, I prefer men with a less brutish approach to manhood, and I know you’re out there. We see you. Obama’s funniest line of the night is when he discusses the cost of diapers and doing the duty, then asks the audience if they thought Donald had ever changed a diaper. My Dad bombed NAZIs from a B-25 Bomber, and he changed diapers in the 1950s. Just consider Elon Musk going all on the Trump Campaign and that his businesses are generally as bankrupt-prone and in trouble with labor laws and anti-discrimination laws as the DonOld’s. DonOld can have Tech and Dude Bros because most women don’t want them. The ones with money attract gold diggers. The ones without are known as incels. It’s going to be a brutal 24 days.

This article and link to Longwell’s podcast is from Politico. Although, I think they’re turning to voting scams for victory. They’re just warming up the next group of J6ers .”‘They’ve given up on the idea that they can get women.’ How Trump is turning to the other gender gap for victory. A profound gender gap is shaping the 2024 election. And after listening to voters in hundreds of focus groups, Sarah Longwell thinks she knows why.”

The 2024 election — it’s a contest between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. But increasingly, it also looks like it’s girls versus boys.

Poll after poll is telling the same story: a Times/Siena survey this month showing Harris up 16 with women and Trump up 11 with men; a set of Quinnipiac polls in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin showing Harris winning women by about 20 points in each. Meanwhile, according to a running average by the election quants at Split Ticket, Trump is on pace to win men by an even bigger margin than he did in 2020 — by about 9 points nationally.

But those numbers only tell part of the story.

The other half is from the mouths of the voters themselves. Which is where this episode of the Playbook Deep Dive podcast begins.

Sarah Longwell is the publisher of The Bulwark and is well known for her work as a Never Trumper.

But what she does with the rest of her time is talk to voters. Lots of them. Longwell has conducted hundreds of focus groups — you may have heard some of them on her podcast, The Focus Group.

While many of Washington’s top operatives have been digesting the election through polling datasets, she’s been taking a different approach: just asking people straight up what they think about Trump and Harris and what could change their minds.

Playbook’s Rachael Bade caught up with Sarah in her downtown Washington offices on Thursday and asked her to connect the dots from all of these hundreds of focus groups. In so doing, she laid out the stakes for what is arguably the biggest question of the 2024 election:

Why are men and women veering so far apart politically?

The answers to that may surprise you.

The Independent‘s Kelly Rissman has this analysis. “Inside the Trump campaign’s ‘edgy’ and crass approach to appeal to young men and ride them to victory.’ The Trump campaign’s crass language, wavering abortion stance, and sexist remarks about Harris have been a focus for Democrats.”

Donald Trump has proclaimed himself the “protector” of women but the tone of his messaging has become geared toward young men with crass language and put-downs in hopes the bloc will back him in November – despite the former president potentially isolating women voters.

“Alphas for Trump,” Steven Cheung, a campaign spokesperson recently tweeted, “vs Simps for Kamala.”

This seven-word tweet perhaps encompasses Trump’s years-long immersion into a stereotypical “tough” alpha male figure — a brand that some have described as “toxic masculinity.” In 2019, the then-president even tweeted a photoshopped image of himself as Rocky Balboa. Since then, he seemingly has tried to ingratiate himself into the real version of the fictional sports legend.

He has steeped himself in cryptocurrency, surrounding himself with tech bros and UFC fighters, using sexist terms to describe his Democratic rival, enters the rally stage to the Village People song “Macho Man,” all while his running mate disparages “childless cat ladies.” It could be costing him half of the electorate.

“It’s obvious Republicans have a woman problem, but it’s not just about policy differences like abortion. The GOP gender gap is just as much about how you talk about those differences,” Nachama Soloveichik, a GOP strategist and former adviser to Haley’s presidential campaign, told the Washington Post.

Soloveichik continued: “Regardless of gender, any political staffer with a pea-sized brain should know chasing away half the electorate is a bad idea. Talk to women with respect and understanding even when you disagree.”

Not only has the Republican nominee has appeared alongside “bro-y” celebrities, such as retired wrestler Hulk Hogan, wrestler-turned-YouTuber Logan Paul, Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) chief executive Dana White, and podcaster Theo Von, but his campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung was also formerly a spokesperson for the UFC.

There’s never anyone on the Trump list of celebrities that I label anything other than grrrRoss. I can even remember how I used to say it with my 6th-grade voice while wrinkling my nose. This is also from Politico. “Inside Trump’s push to win over the ‘bro’ vote. But can he get young men to vote?”

Donald Trump is betting that support from young men will help propel him to the White House. And he’s getting an assist from a crew of pro-Trump millennial pranksters who are capitalizing on college football tailgates, Tinder and even the “Hawk Tuah Girl” podcast.

The Nelk Boys, digital content creators and hosts of the popular “Full Send” podcast, are mounting a multi-million-dollar voter registration push aimed at turning out young men. They plan to sign up voters at a “Send the Vote” music festival later this month that will feature a performance by pro-Trump rapper Waka Flocka Flame, and at a pair of Penn State football games.

They will also promote the registration drive on dating apps and advertise on highly-listened to, male-friendly podcasts like “Kill Tony,” “MrBallen,” and “BS w/ Jake Paul.”

It’s the latest effort in an all-out campaign by the former president to turn out young men, a demographic his campaign views as critical to his election given the overwhelming support Kamala Harris is expected to receive from young women. The question the Trump operation faces, however, is whether it can turn out a subset of voters his allies concede are uncertain to cast ballots.

“The question is, will that podcast fan, that College GameDay fan, that USC fan, will they actually get up on November 5th and go and vote?” said John Shahidi, the president of Full Send and the co-founder of Send the Vote. “That’s the big question right now that we want to start emphasizing on and putting pressure on.”

One voter registration promo is expected to run on a podcast hosted by Haliey Welch, who rose to viral internet stardom with a sexually explicit riff. And, in the heart of football season, the Nelk Boys are exploring the possibility of advertising on sports gambling sites.

By reaching out to young men, some of whom came of age during the former president’s administration, Trump, who long before running for office had cultivated an alpha-male like image with his involvement in sports and entertainment, is capitalizing on goodwill from a demographic he hopes will support him. And there are indications Trump is making inroads with the group, which like other youth subsets traditionally tilts liberal. According to a recent Harvard Youth Poll, 35 percent of men between 18 and 24 years old said they supported Trump — an improvement of 5 percent from Trump’s performance in the same survey in the 2020 election.

I have no idea what any of this is, but I am obviously not in that demographic. My youngest son-in-law has a birthday tomorrow, but I have a good idea that he doesn’t know about either. He’s a biological engineer and has a life. I’m sure the older one, who is a Radiologist and does ultrasounds a lot, wouldn’t know or care. However, former President Obama spoke out to black men in his speech last night in Pittsburgh. This is from the Washington Post. “Obama admonishes Black men for hesitancy in supporting Harris. Former president suggests some in the Black community are uncomfortable voting for a woman and are coming up with excuses.” I think the headline is harsh compared to what I heard, but legacy media always looks for clicks.

Former president Barack Obama on Thursday made a direct, impassioned plea to Black men to support Vice President Kamala Harris — a key demographic she is struggling to mobilize — admonishing them for thinking about sitting out the presidential contest as well as suggesting sexism might be at play.

During an unannounced stop at a Harris campaign field office in Pittsburgh, just hours before he was set to appear at his first campaign rally for the Democratic nominee, Obama said he wanted to “speak some truths” and address Black men specifically, making his most direct remarks about their hesitancy in supporting Harris to date.

“My understanding, based on reports I’m getting from campaigns and communities, is that we have not yet seen the same kinds of energy and turnout in all quarters of our neighborhoods and communities as we saw when I was running,” Obama said, adding that it “seems to be more pronounced with the brothers.”

Obama questioned how voters, and Black voters specifically, could be on the fence about whether to support Harris or former president Donald Trump, the Republican nominee.

“On the one hand, you have somebody who grew up like you, knows you, went to college with you, understands the struggles and pain and joy that comes from those experiences,” Obama said, ticking off a list of Harris’s policy proposals. In Trump, he added, “you have someone who has consistently shown disregard, not just for the communities, but for you as a person … And you are thinking about sitting out?”

The former president then spoke about what he thought might be contributing to Black men’s soft support of Harris: the discomfort of some with the idea of electing the first female president.

“And you’re coming up with all kinds of reasons and excuses, I’ve got a problem with that,” he said. “Because part of it makes me think — and I’m speaking to men directly — part of it makes me think that, well, you just aren’t feeling the idea of having a woman as president, and you’re coming up with other alternatives and other reasons for that.”

Meanwhile, we see Harris’ husband and her running mate, Tim Walz, emulate a more compassionate version of manliness. Perhaps this kind of role-modeling from powerful men will take hold. This is from Time Magazine, as analyzed by Belinda Luscombe. “The Doug Emhoff Model of Masculinity.”

Society has names for men they feel are overshadowed by their wives or partners, and they’re not terms of endearment; cuck, p-whipped, and simp are among the nicer ones. As women’s economic and social power has risen, some men have felt that theirs has receded, and have responded by doubling down on machismo. Masculinity has become contested ground. So when Doug Emhoff took to the stage to talk about his wife Kamala Harris at the Democratic National Convention, he had to walk a fine line: gushy without being slavish, supportive but not submissive, a true partner but completely self-sufficient.

Fewer than half the countries in the world have ever had female heads of state, and many of those women were unmarried, so there are not a lot of models for how to be the husband of the lady who might become the leader of the free world. Emhoff’s speech was a benchmark. How does a man handle this? How does a man talk about a strong ambitious woman gunning for arguably the most powerful job in the world, without making her look a nightmare or a nonentity? And without himself appearing to be a buffoon or puppet master?

Emhoff—and his speechwriters and his son Cole—pretty much nailed it. When he stepped down from the stage, he had given a little master class in how to be a guy’s guy as wellas a wife guy. First, he telegraphed that he was dependent on no one. He’d done name-tag jobs at McDonald’s and the valet stand when he needed to. He had partly put himself through college but wasn’t too proud to admit he had help. He had a successful career with skills that involved de-escalating rather than dominating situations.

He demonstrated a winning self-confidence by making fun of the goofy nervous first-date voicemail he left on Harris’ phone, and joking about his mother being the only person in the world who thinks Harris married up. Unlike many a divorced dad, he showed no bitterness to his ex-wife, even thanking her from the stage. While Harris’s opponents have tried to make her laugh seem bizarre or sinister, he named it as one of the things he loves most—because normal men aren’t freaked out by women who laugh.

Emhoff’s presentation also subtly played up his more traditional masculine traits. A photo from Cole’s video introduction showed how protective he was when someone threatened Harris. Emhoff let it be known that he belongs to a fantasy football league with buddies from back in the day, and that in his youth he was a fan of both The Clash and Nirvana, both classic angry-young-man bands. He slid in mentions of his ability to pivot and to sacrifice, by leaving a law practice when Harris became vice president and taking a job at Georgetown University.

In fact, many of the masculine attributes that Emhoff leaned into during his speech are similar to those also valued by conservatives: strength, pride, courage, industriousness, protecting families. In some ways, President Trump’s running mate J.D. Vance has many of the same qualities. He too came from humble beginnings, put himself through school, thrived, and married a woman who was more his equal than his helpmeet. But Emhoff—and Tim Walz, Harris’ partner in this campaign—are projecting those qualities while playing second fiddle to a woman. They’re not allowed to outshine the nominee, but they also can’t make her look like a harridan.

Emhoff’s exuberant support of his wife’s strengths (“Empathy is her superpower,” he noted) has definitely touched a nerve with some women. “THIS is a supportive husband! He gets it. Doug do you have a brother? Cousin? BFF?” asked one woman on Instagram. “If anyone would like to set me up on a blind date with the 33-45 year old NYC-based equivalent of Doug Emhoff, my DMs are open,” tweeted another. It wasn’t just among women either; there was a spate of “Teach me how to Dougie” tweets from guys as well.

I will not venture into the J Dank Vance model of weird masculinity, but I will mention Tim Walz’s impact by showing a fuller version of what it means to be a man, husband, and father. I really like this coverage by the Chicago Sun-Times, which was published around the convention. “Tim Walz is a man’s man, unlike MAGA’s man-children. A good male role model from the Democrats is an excellent foil for the cartoon version of masculinity on offer from the Republican Party.” This Op-Ed is written by Mona Charen. (Yes, THAT Mona Charen.) I’ve put in the complete piece because she handles J Dank better than I ever could.

If Kamala Harris becomes the first woman president, her first accomplishment could well have already happened — elevating and honoring the positive side of masculinity.

Tim Walz, whose politics are to the left of most Americans and certainly most swing voters, has been welcomed not as a box-checking, progressive pick, but as a Midwestern dad who poses with his hunting dog, served for 24 years in the military and coached the high school football team to a state championship. He’s a man’s man without being a strutting jackass. A good male role model is an excellent foil for the swaggering, snarling, cartoonish version of masculinity on offer from the Republican Party right now.

Men are struggling. Boys are falling behind girls in grades and graduation rates. Men are falling behind women in college attendance, participation in the labor force, and connection to family and friends. Men are more likely than women to be lonely and to succumb to deaths of despair. It’s not a man’s world anymore, even if some have been slow to notice.

Boys and men are picking up the signals that there is something inherently wrong with them. The word “masculinity” is hardly uttered in some precincts without the modifier “toxic.” Our culture has stressed girl power and female “firsts” long past the time when boys are the ones who are struggling. As Richard Reeves has noted, in 1972, the year Congress enacted Title IX to promote gender equity in higher education, the gender gap in college enrollment was 13 points in men’s favor. In 2019, the gender gap in bachelor’s degrees was 15 points the other way.

Men are feeling it. A Brookings Institution survey found that fewer Generation Z men call themselves feminists (43%) than do millennials (52%), and the gap between men and women on this self-ID is much larger for Gen Z than for older cohorts. Another sign of discontent is that nearly half of men aged 18 to 29 report that they face discrimination as men.

The right has a response that is reactionary, misogynistic and smutty. The party that once prided itself on traditional values now features at its convention, as David French put it, “an OnlyFans star, a man who publicly slapped his wife, a man who pleaded no contest to an assault charge, and another man who had sex with his friend’s wife while the friend watched — and that’s not even including any reference to Trump himself.”

Not content with being an adjudicated sexual abuser, Donald Trump continues to fill out his dance card with the vilest male “influencers” online, most recently sitting down for an interview with Adin Ross, most known for associating with accused rapist/human trafficker Andrew Tate and neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes. Trump knows there’s a longing for male affirmation out there and is choosing the very worst ways to satisfy it. His masculinity bears none of the hallmarks of manly virtue — restraint, honor, service to others, responsibility or self-sacrifice. Instead, he offers braggadocio, put-downs, disrespect for women and vulgarity.

Trump’s running mate has been fishing in these waters for several years and now trails a train of cringe-worthy quotations he must own. JD Vance chose to unburden himself to Tucker Carlson. “We’re effectively run in this country, via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made. And so they wanna make the rest of the country miserable, too.” He then name-checked Harris, Pete Buttigieg and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

What’s offensive is not just that Vance is wrong about Harris or Buttigieg but that he would use such a personal matter as an opportunity for abuse. As Jennifer Aniston, who underwent years of fruitless fertility treatments, put it: “Mr. Vance, I pray that your daughter is fortunate enough to bear children of her own one day.”

I’m about as pro-natalist as you can get. I believe the government should be generous to parents through the tax code because children are an investment in the country’s future.

But leave it to MAGA to mar a completely benign idea like pro-natalism with contempt for others. Vance recycled his insights in a fundraising appeal: “We’ve allowed ourselves to be dominated by childless sociopaths — they’re invested in NOTHING because they’re not invested in this country’s children.” Really? George Washington and James Madison might like a word.

In the face of this brutalist version of masculinity, the Democratic Party is now honoring a different kind of man in Walz. The hunter/fisherman/veteran/football coach is no pajama boy.

Walz is a regular guy at a time when the country needs reminding that being a regular guy is actually pretty great. As The Atlantic put it, “Dad is on the Ballot.”

Harris’s selection of Walz gave rise to a whole genre of warm dad memes: “Tim Walz just slipped me a 20 on my way out the door because ‘you never know if some place doesn’t take credit cards.” Another posted that Walz would “(take) care of the wasps’ nest for you.”

What unites these posts is the sense of security and comfort they exude — the very things a good dad conveys.

Tim Walz may be the father figure the Democratic Party — and the country — needs.

This is a long set of reads but I think you’ll enjoy the contrast. I really hope we can leave the minds of J Dank and Donald in the footnotes of history. Let’s give our kids the future they deserve!

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?

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