Trump or Treat

It's Halloween, and Trump his up to his tricks to treat his base.  He's already announced plans to send ICE to polling places in districts and states that matter in the midterms, he's promised five thousand dollars to to adult citizens if the Republicans hold their congressional majorities he might get the FBI to seize voting machines, and he's even challenging the results in Alaska before anyone's even voted.

The situation is this: There are two men on the Alaska ranked-choice ballot named Dan Sullivan, the incumbent Republican U.S. Senator and an independent candidate.  Senator Sullivan is clearly identified on the ballot, but Trump is convinced that Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Mary Peltola got the other Dan Sullivan to stand for the office so that Senator Sullivan supporters would mistakenly vote for him, helping Peltola.

Now why would Trump make such an accusation against a nice lady like this? 

Because it's true.  Apparently, anyway.

The New York Times reported this past week that the Peltola campaign recruited Dan Sullivan the non-senator to mount a Senate campaign as part of a dirty truck against the senator and that the Peltola campaign had been working on this scam for months.  Republican Alaska Governor Mike Dunleavy has ordered an investigation into the ruse, and the Justice Department has filed suit to stop the certification of a Peltola victory should she in fact win on Tuesday.

There's just one thing - assuming that the Peltola campaign did do such a thing, what the Peltola campaign did is perfectly legal.  Trump is pursuing a Nixonian effort to convince Alaskans and folks in the lower forty-eight otherwise.  

Also, the Alaska Supreme Court already litigated the matter, saying that the non-senator Dan Sullivan could appear on the ballot provided that non-senator Dan Sullivan and Senator Dan Sullivan be identified as such.  The ballot clearly indicates which man is which, and only an idiot would be unable to tell who is who.  But, given that MAGA Republicans are voting, being unable to tell who's who would be something of a possibility.

And yet the New York Times is treating the Peltola non-scandal as serious as Watergate, even as news of Trump having raped a former Miss Switzerland and deeper ties between Trump and Jeffrey Epstein than previously known - both from a report issued by House Democrats - get little more than a shrug.  Again, all that the news about Trump provides is entertainment value.

For that reason, I should seriously consider canceling my online subscription to the New York Times.  I got it for four dollars a month, and I have never been able to get my money's worth.  For one thing, my subscription rate is now going up. Another thing, I rarely have time to read it.  The stories I'd intended to read but never did outnumber the ones I did read by a wide margin.  And when I do go to the Times site, I go to the Times Machine archival site.  To read first-hand accounts of historic events like Pearl Harbor or Lyndon Johnson's landslide election?  To research material for my blog posts?  No - to look for department store ads from the late seventies featuring veteran models I befriended through Facebook.

That's about all the New York Times seems to be good for - indulging in its past.

By the way, here's a picture of my model friend Catherine Roberts from a Saks Fifth Avenue ad that appeared in the Sunday Times in 1979.