No Words . . .

 

My Unenthusiastic Vote - Part Two

I can't wait until Election Day is over . . . and then I can go back to watching something other than the news on television.  Unless, of course, Trump wins and i have to prepare to flee the country before he returns to power and turns the nation into a 3.8-million-square-mile East Berlin.

But, assuming Kamala Harris wins, which is beginning to look more likely,  I am expecting the next four years to be little different from the previous four years . . . though I do expect the Heritage Foundation to reprint a version of its right-wing agenda for the next Republican President with a new title . . . Project 2029.

I'm sorry.  I've been living in These States too long.  When anyone talks about change coming to America, I'm like . . .

Let me explain it in the best way I can understand . . ..  When Bill Clinton was elected President in 1992, I expected change for the better . . . and got Newt Gingrich and the Contract With America, followed by another Bush.  When Barack Obama was elected President, I expected change for the better . . . and got the Tea Party.  When Martin O'Malley ran for President, I expected change for the better . . . and got laughed at for supporting a loser of a candidate, followed by a choice between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump . . . and then "President Trump," two words I still can't put together with a straight face.  And when Joe Biden was elected President, I expected change for the better . . . and got the January 6 insurrection, before President Biden was even sworn in.  After that, I pretty much decided that America is what America is, and we shouldn't try to make America what it ain't.

So I think I'm going to stand back, but not stand by.  The 2024 election campaign is coming to an end.  Wake me when it's over.

Especially if Trump wins, because I know his administration will see to it that, thanks to what I've written about him here, I'll be sleeping permanently.  Likely, with the fishes. 

Loaded For Bear

If there is any doubt remaining that Trump, if he returns to power in January, will make opposition to him a capital offense, then Trump's latest outrage should sweep away all that.

In Arizona, he told Tucker Carlson in a public forum that Liz Cheney ought to be placed in front of a firing squad to see how she, who supported the wars in the Middle East in the 2000s and 2010s, would feel if she had nine rifles pointed at her face, ready to be fired.

That is, execution by firing squad.

Okay . . . Christian nationalism . . . one-party rule . . . monitoring pregnancies . . . and now firing squads as a form of capital punishment . . . I'm sorry, when did the entire country suddenly become like Utah??? 

Trump was particularly peeved at how Liz Cheney, like her father, could possibly support sending young men to war without ever having actually served in one.  If Trump wanted to highlight the fact that neither of the Cheneys never served in the military and  yet were "chicken hawks" who supported endless wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, he could have done it without threatening Liz with guns in her face.  Though, any criticism of the Cheneys as chicken hawks would have had much more resonance coming from a man who didn't claim to have bone spurs to avoid serving in Vietnam.

The Arizona Attorney General's office is investigating Trump's comments as a possible hate crime.    

Music Video Of the Week - November 1, 2024

"I've Gotta Get Get a Message To You" by the Bee Gees  (Go to the link in the upper-right-hand corner.)

Sex and the Single Clown

While I was out one morning last week, I drove by one of those scary-clown mannequins, like the one below, that have become popular Halloween decorations. 

As annoying and creepy as they may seem, clowns are still popular with a wide swath of the population.  They are beloved for many people as circus and birthday party entertainers, and some people's fondest memories are of seeing a clown perform, being silly and ridiculous and also somewhat endearing, be it under the big top, or at a street fair.

I, of course, am not one of these people.  I do have a memory of Ronald McDonald appearing at the grand opening at a McDonald's restaurant as a kid in Pennsylvania, but all I really remember was that he was there.  As was I.  Nevertheless, in addition to the sight of scary clowns on suburban lawns ever October being very depressing, the popularity of homicidal clowns, particularly in horror movies such as It and Circus of the Dead, is quite disturbing.  Such movies exploit the sensitivities of people who have a fear of clowns. Never mind how these movies are meant to make people scream  - just the fact that there are so many clown horror movies is enough to make me scream.

Hey,  I have an idea - how about a romantic clown movie, a movie in which a cute lady clown removes her face paint for a man, turns out to be a beautiful woman, and makes love to him afterwards? 

Oh wait, this is America, you can't show something like that - that's sick!  A female clown taking off her makeup and revealing her face for a man - possibly revealing herself to be of a different race than he is - and then engaging in sexual intercourse with him, possibly still in her clown costume?  Oh, that is so disgusting!

As opposed to a movie where a clown with a sadistic grin painted on his face chops people up with a machete or a chainsaw in hand. 😉

Happy Halloween. 😝

Dr. Steinister - Part Two

Near where I live, there is a house with a "Cease-Fire Now" lawn sign opposing Israeli military operations against Hamas in the Gaza Strip.  A couple of days ago, I passed by it and found another lawn sign next to it - a Jill Stein campaign sign.  

Although I am a former Stein voter who has since expressed regret for voting for her in 2016 - but not regretting voting for a third-party candidate,as I could never vote for Hillary Clinton - I continue to stress that while the once and present Green Party presidential candidate may have been a factor in costing Hillary the Presidency against Donald Trump in 2016 in the states in what used to be called the 'blue firewall,"  as the vote tallies in those states show above, she was not the only factor, and that Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson also cost Hillary Clinton votes in these states (as this CNN article from 2016 explains). Johnson was as much a possible spoiler as Dr. Stein was.  Moreover, many people who voted for Dr. Stein or Johnson might have stayed home if neither one had been on the ballot.

That out of the way, I am happy to present more evidence that Dr. Stein is a fraud.  I once complained how progressives did nothing to start a new party to replace the Democrats after Hillary Clinton's well-deserved loss and the Democratic party's descent into Whig-like irrelevance, but did you notice?  Dr. Stein was one of those progressives who sat on her hands.  In fact, she disappeared as quickly as I expected the Democratic Party to.  She sat out 2020 and let another Green Party member carry the standard in the presidential election that year, and now she's back, promising a more just society if she were to win against all odds.  Don't you believe it.

Her stand for the Palestinians seems contrived and incredulous, since she never spoke out about the Middle East before, but her emphasis on Michigan, with its large Arab and Islamic population, seems to be calculated into helping Trump at Kamala Harris' expense.   Because it is.  She has expressed no fear that her efforts to make inroads in Michigan could help Trump win, just as she doesn't regret that Trump may have won in 2016 because of her candidacy.

Justice for the Green Party should, as its name implies, include environmental justice, but Dr. Stein has benefited from mutual fund holdings that have investments in fossil fuels valued at up to $937,775, which Dr. Stein defended in 2016 by saying that her mutual funds invest in an array of companies and that oil and gas companies are only a small part of the mix.  Okay, so why, as MoveOn.org recently reported,  did she knowingly invest up to $500,000 in a stock index fund that invests in the Keystone XL pipeline that Dr. Stein says she opposes?  And why, after she denounced President Biden for his handling of the Norfolk Southern derailment in Ohio, did she knowingly invest in index funds that have holdings in that same railroad?  

It seems to me that if Dr. Stein really were concerned about fossil fuels, she would have made a sincere effort to invest in more environmentally friendly companies or in mutual funds that invest in such companies.  All you have to do is look at The Nation for ads for such mutual funds.  And if Dr. Stein were concerned about advancing progressive causes, she would be doing the work of advancing them every day, like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) does.  I don't agree with everything AOC says, and I have grown uncomfortable with her narrow test of what a progressive is (Martin O'Malley, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris would all fall short), but say what you will, she does just that -put in the work.  And it's easy to see why she ran for office as a Democrat even though the party was moribund when she entered politics.  Because even a declining, irrelevant, disconnected out-of-touch Democratic Party is preferable to a Green Party at the height of its powers.

And the Green Party of the United States, unlike its European counterparts, will never be a player in national politics unless it gets rid of hypocrites and opportunists like Dr. Stein.

The United States of Amazonia

The late, great comedian Robin Williams once explained why boycotts don't work.  He explained how he and some of his friends wanted to boycott products made in China to protest Chinese abuses of human rights, but they ran into, shall we say, a great wall.  "Damn!  They make everything!" 

Which is why, as much as I'd like to, I can't boycott Amazon, the consumer-product mail-order company founded and run by Jeff Bezos, who has owned the Washington Post since 2013.  When Bezos (above) refused to allow his paper's editorial staff publish an endorsement of Kamala Harris for President to avoid pissing off Donald Trump, who met with executives from Bezos's space-exploration company over possible federal contracts for the firm, all hell broke loose. Post Editor-at-large Robert Kagan resigned, and several editors and columnists for the Post protested vehemently.  (At the same time, Patrick Soon-Shiong, the wealthy owner of the Los Angeles Times - the largest newspaper in Kamala Harris' home state - refused to allow the editorial board publish an endorsement of Harris, causing Los Angeles Times editor Mariel Garza to resign.)  And not only have many of the Washington Post's customers - 200,000, at last count - cancelled their subscriptions, many people have cancelled their Amazon Prime memberships and stopped buying products from Amazon and are asking others to do the same.  

Sorry, that's a non-starter for me.  

I have had to buy most of the products I've bought in the past several months from Amazon.  Among them are a mantel clock, a saucepan, a few car-care products, and the very laptop I wrote this blog post on.  I have found that, in many cases, finding the exact item I want in the stores is next to impossible.  Oh, I might find the right car polish or tire dressing I want in the local auto-parts store, but more often than not, I have to go to Amazon for what I want or need.  

And then there are books and records.   I bought a book about the history of the Volkswagen Golf through Amazon, a book published in Britain that cannot be found at the nearest Barnes & Noble.  And records - specifically, compact discs?  Sure I'd be happy to by my CDs at a record store - if I can find one.  You almost have to go to the ends of the earth to find a record store these days . . . Amazon has made them a little hard to find! 

Jeff Bezos is a genius - an almost evil genius.  He created a shopping system in which you're more likely to find the product you want or need through his company than in a mom-and-pop store, a big-box store like Wal-Mart or Target, or even a chain store at the mall.  And by the way, next time you go to your local mall, you may notice that that record store you used to browse in back in the 1980s is gone.  You might be able to find the album you're looking for at a locally owned record store - one of the benefits of Amazon monopolizing CD sales is that such record stores that survived Sam Goody and Record World are able to stay in business - but the the time and money you spend just to get there might not be worth it.

When you dominate the consumer-retail business so thoroughly that your business is always someone's best bet to get the product they want or need, you're more than powerful.  You're omnipotent.  So it's ironic that Jeff Bezos can't stand up to Trump.   

Der Bund

Kamala Harris was in Philadelphia yesterday while Donald Trump was in New York holding a rally at Madison Square Garden.   They were a hundred miles apart and ten thousand light years apart as well.  While Harris was calling for a coalition of patriots that would strive to make a better country for everyone,  Trump's rally went full-tilt boogie on hatred. 

Trump's Madison Square Garden rally echoed a different time, a different ethos, and a different Madison Square Garden.  And no, I'm not talking about the election campaign rally President Herbert Hoover held in 1932.  I',m talking about the German-American Bund/America First rally that took place at the old Garden in February 1939, in which white nationalists cheered for Hitler and denounced the Jews.  This rally was full of people who cheered for Trump and denounced everyone against Trump.

As expected, Kamala Harris bore the brunt of that attacks, with many speakers calling her a prostitute, or the Antichrist.  But the most egregious comments came from a so-called comedian named Tony Hinchcliffe (below), who ridiculed Hispanics for breeding liberally and called Puerto Rico piece of floating garbage in the sea.  

Interesting. There's another former President who ran to get his old job back as the head of a party that trashed another island populated by destitute Catholics and ruled by a bunch of greedy Anglos . . . 

. . . and Millard Fillmore's Know-Nothing Party platform bashing Irish immigrants only got him Maryland's eight electoral votes! 

My Unenthusiastic Vote

I don't think it's necessary for me to say that I am not making any endorsements on this blog.  It's not because, like the owners of the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, I fear retribution if Donald Trump wins.  Heck, I know a Trump 47 administration is going to come for me if I win based on everything I've said about him here.  I'm not making any endorsements because it would be meaningless.  All I'd have to do is write that this blog endorses Democratic candidate _______ in the ______  election for ________ because of his/her support for reproductive rights, tax breaks for the middle class, etc., etc., etc., and filling in the blanks would be like just adding water to an instant product.

The other reason is that I don't expect anything in These States to get better than it is now even if Harris wins.  I cast my ballot yesterday in the first day of early voting for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, and I stood in line for over forty-five minutes to do so.  I also have my Harris lawn sign displayed outside in plain view from the street.  But I did so without much in the way of enthusiasm.  Because even though I've been behind her from the start, and any criticisms I had of her before she became the Democratic presidential nominee no longer apply, I look at the suburban-sprawl, SUV-loving, Wal-Mart-shopping America and I know that we will not become a more civilized and enlightened country going forward even with a Harris administration.  I voted for her knowing that a Harris Presidency - or any Democratic Presidency - will not - not - result in single-payer health care, bullet trains for Amtrak, more aid for education, paid parental leave, and all of those other nice things Europeans have had for decades, because Americans are just wired differently from anyone else.

The biggest reason - perhaps the only reason - I'm voting for Harris is that a Harris administration won't make opposition to the government or to the executive branch in particular a crime punishable by death.

Trump will likely do that.

Though, no matter who wins, we'll still have the death penalty in other cases.

We're not Europe.

Out and In

If Kamala Harris is elected President of the United States on November 5, the transition of power from President Biden will be the first transition of power from one elected Democratic President to another since Franklin Pierce transferred power to James Buchanan in 1857.  (By contrast, there have been five transitions of power from one elected Republican President to another since then, the most recent one being from Ronald Reagan to George H.W. Bush in 1989.)

Bearing that in mind, don't expect a Harris administration to resemble the Biden administration.  If Harris becomes President, she likely won't retain the Biden Cabinet.  She'll want her own Secretary of the Treasury, her own national security team, and her own roundtable of economic advisors.  Her plans to help more small businesses is a clear contrast from President Biden's economic policies.  As a President with a Jewish spouse, she'll likely take a more nuanced policy toward Israel and the Middle East, and as a woman, she's already been more to the forefront on reproductive rights than President Biden, a male Catholic, can be. 

Oh, she may retain a few Cabinet members, just as George H.W. Bush retained Education Secretary Lauro Cavazos from Ronald Reagan and just as Herbert Hoover in 1929 retained Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon from Calvin Coolidge (who inherited Mellon when President Warren Harding died).  She's likely to have an even more diverse Cabinet; after Vice President Tim Walz, the highest-ranking white male Christian in a Harris Cabinet might very well be the Secretary of Commerce.  She may decide to try to get Acting Labor Secretary Julie Su confirmed after Joe Manchin leaves the Senate, as it was he who slowed Su's confirmation to be the permanent Labor Secretary . . .  or she might do what I suggested and appoint Tim Ryan to that post.  But most of her Cabinet officers will likely be new faces one way or the other, some of whom we may not have heard of yet.

One thing is for certain if Harris is elected: She will not retain Attorney General Merrick Garland, given his foot-dragging in prosecuting the mastermind behind the January 6 insurrection (you know whom I'm talking about; I won't mention his name).  Recent reporting has revealed that making Garland the chief law enforcement officer of the nation is Biden's biggest regret.

Music Video Of the Week - October 25, 2024

"Bungle In the Jungle" by Jethro Tull  (Go to the link in the upper-right-hand corner.)

Heil Drumpf!

It's not news that John Kelly, Donald Trump's second White House chief of staff, said that Trump admired Adolf Hitler and said that Hitler did good things.  He said all that months ago.

What's news is that reporter Michael Schmidt got it on tape.

More so, Kelly described Trump's Hitler fascination in much greater detail, noting and lamenting is admonition for the loyalty Hitler demanded (but didn't get) from his generals in the Second World War.  Kelly - no one's idea of a liberal (he agreed with Trump that the Civil War could have been avoided by compromise and called Robert E. Lee "an honorable man") - made it clear to Trump that there was nothing Hitler ever did that was good and told Schmidt that he felt that Trump's desire for unlimited, extreme power clearly made him a fascist.

And, even as Kamala Harris has come right out and said that Trump was a fascist, more of her campaign surrogates have been stressing how Trump, as President, would not only arrest leading Democrats for speaking out against him but for arrest average Joes and Josephines for doing so - and even though no one has said that Trump would make dissent a capital offense - except me, of course - and Trump himself has said nothing of the sort, just remember, you should be afraid not just of what Trump says he'll do.  You should be afraid of what Trump doesn't say he'll do.  All you need to do is look at what Hitler himself did without ever mentioning any of it in the parliamentary campaign the Nazis ran in what would be the last free election held in Germany in Hitler's lifetime.

As for the good things Hitler is believed to have done . . . he stole the credit for both of them.  The autobahns were inspired by the first Italian autostradas built by engineer Piero Puricelli in the early 1920s.  Hey, how far back do you want to go?  The Long Island Motor Parkway, the world's first controlled-access road for automobiles anywhere, opened in 1908.  As for the Volkswagen, which Hitler built the autobahns for . . . even some VW enthusiasts mistakenly credit the VW Beetle to Hitler, calling it "the only good idea Hitler ever had."  The "people's car" was actually Ferdinand Porsche's idea, and he conceived of it before the Nazis came to power.  Hitler just gave him the means to develop it, and he used the people's car idea for propaganda purposes; the factory meant to produce Volkswagens (and did, but not until after the war) built military vehicles.

Assembly Halls

Donald Trump is clearly deteriorating.  He keeps talking about arresting and/or executing opponents, serves McDonald's French fries to pre-selected drive-through customers, visits a disaster area in North Carolina and disrupts ongoing recovery efforts, and jokes about women who died for not getting the proper reproductive care.  But once in awhile, I must admit - and I don't like to - Trump makes a valid point.

Trump explained his car tariff proposals last week in an interview before the Economic Club of Chicago explaining how more foreign automakers, particularly the Germans, need to build manufacturing plants in the United States to avoid the tariffs he advocates.  

"Mercedes-Benz will start building in the United States," Trump said.  "They have a little bit, but do you know what they really are? Assembly [lines] like in South Carolina, but they build everything in Germany and then they assemble it here. They get away with murder because they say, 'Oh yes we are building,' but they don’t build. They take them out of a box and assemble them."

That's actually right. It's important here to make the distinction between a car factory that turns raw material - steel, glass, and plastic - into cars and a car factory that takes pre-assembled parts like doors, hoods, and engines and puts them together.  Many of those parts are in fact made around the world, and that economic model doesn't help companies in America that could produce those same parts.  Volkswagen's history in the United States reflects this distinction.  

VW was the first non-American automaker to manufacture cars in the United States when it opened a manufacturing plant in Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania in 1978.  The plant managed to last ten years, and it produced thousands of Rabbits, Golfs and Jettas for the U.S. and Canada.  Until its 1988 closing, it made economic sense to build the cars where VW wanted to sell them.   Volkswagen's Mexican factory was a plant like that, but it was an assembly plant, taking parts from crates sent from Germany and assembling them into cars. 

Then, in 1992, VW decided that, to keep costs low for the American consumer, the third-generation Golf (above) and Jetta were to be built from the ground up at Volkswagen's factory in Puebla, Mexico.

A real manufacturing plant benefits the local economy in that it involves sourcing materials locally requiring expertise in making the parts as well as putting them together to create a car.  One could argue, in fact, that the result is a car of better quality.  But before 1992, the Mexican factory had had no experience in making cars from the ground up, and the plant managers didn't know what they were doing. The result was that the quality of the first few cars they made was so bad that the introduction of these cars was delayed for over a year. 

Trump realizes that a manufacturing plant involves more effort to make a product than one that just assembles the product from existing parts, and when the materials for the product are sourced locally, that means a more robust industrial base and a more integrated economy.  The move to turn Puebla from an assembly plant into a full manufacturing plant benefited the Mexican economy, and the lower costs of producing the cars south of the Rio Grande than producing them in Wolfsburg - it's certainly easier to import cars from across the border than from the other side of the ocean - benefited the American consumer and also the Canadian consumer.  But, when you manufacture a product from scratch rather than just assemble parts to make the product, it's important to have everything working in concert with each other.  And VW's Puebla factory was being told - on short notice, I might add - to make cars with no manufacturing ability.  If VW had sold the cars the Mexican factory tried to make at the start, word of their poor quality would have spread like wildfire and even VW die-hards like I would have stopping buying Volkswagens. That would have meant the end of Volkswagen in North America, which was already on death's door beforehand.  (The first third-generation Mark 3 Golfs and Jettas appeared as 1993 models in the San Diego area but were not available in the rest of the U.S. or Canada until the 1994 model year.)

So, I should take Trump seriously when he says that the Germans should build more cars in america as opposed to just assembling them, right?  Well, here's the thing.  Volkswagen's plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee currently operates as an assembly plant.  What made economic sense for VW with the Westmoreland plant in Pennsylvania in 1978 and for the Puebla plant in Mexico in 1992 no longer makes economic sense for either the Puebla or Chattanooga factories now, as both operate as assembly plants.  It would be great if VW or any other foreign automaker could manufacture and not just assemble their cars in the U.S.,  but that's not feasible now.  So, if Trump thinks that foreign automakers are and should always be obliged to manufacture rather than just assemble cars in the United States, he's clearly mistaken.

He's also mistaken when he says the long, back-breaking work of assembling a car from pre-existing parts is so easy, "you could have a child do it."

Please, when I was a child I couldn't even assemble plastic model cars!

And by the way, Trump, the company is not called Mercedes-Benz.  It's called Daimler AG.

Secession Obsession

Donald Trump recently chastised the memory of Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican President, for not having done enough to prevent the Civil War, and he said that he should have made a deal with the slave states that had threatened to secede if Lincoln was elected President in 1860.  What Trump had no idea of was that Lincoln did try to make a deal with the slave states.  He said he wouldn't interfere with slavery in their jurisdictions so long as the federal government was allowed to forbid slavery in the territories, but the South insisted on the extension of "the peculiar institution" to achieve economic and political parity with the industrialized free states in the North.

The South, in fact, didn't have to make a deal with Lincoln at all.  Indeed, the South had plenty of reasons not to secede.  Among them:

First, as noted in an earlier blog entry from this month, Lincoln was a minority President, having been elected with 39 percent of the vote.  The truth was that over six in ten voters considered Lincoln too dangerous and radical to be President, and Lincoln had to tread carefully to prove otherwise if he hoped to govern.

Second, the Republican platform of the 1860 presidential campaign that they had no intention of abolishing slavery where it already existed.  Although Lincoln personally hated slavery, he knew there was no way he could abolish it through executive order.

Third, the Dred Scott decision of 1857, which guaranteed the rights of slave owners to take their slaves into free states and back to their home states, was the law of the land, and not even the President of the United States can reverse a Supreme Court decision.   

Fourth - and this is an important point - even though the Democrats had been so divided that the nominated two presidential candidates in the 1860 campaign, they had succeeded in electing majorities in both the House and Senate, meaning that they could block any legislation or presidential legislative proposal that Southerners opposed.

Which pretty much settles it.  The main cause of the Civil War wasn't slavery.  It was Southern stupidity.  Stupidity has long been associated with the South, of course, but it's mainly been associated with rednecks.  But stupidity, it turns out, has extended to the ruling classes - all the way back to the antebellum years.   The leaders of the Southern states had all of these reasons for not seceding, yet they were so intent on keeping fellow human beings in bondage for the benefit of free labor - nay, expanding the institution at a time when other countries had already abandoned it - that they went ahead and tried to form a separate country, the Confederate States of America, and they got the whupping they richly deserved.

And what Donald Trump didn't get was the moral rectitude of Lincoln's effort to contain slavery in 1861, when he took office, and his move to emancipate the slaves and grant them full citizenship in 1864 and 1865 to bring about a new birth of freedom.  Freedom . . . yeah, that's something he doesn't get.

Swiss Time Has Run Out

Did you hear about how the Geneva International Motor Show went this past March?  No?  That's because it didn't go at all.

It was canceled again?  Oh, no, it was held, all right.  

See how well-attended it was?

The truth of the matter is that the 2024 Geneva auto show was a bigger lemon than any of the Renaults shown in the picture above.  In May, its fate was sealed when the show's organizers announced that they were disbanding and that there would be no more auto shows in Geneva.  No one cares anymore.  Only a handful of major auto brands even participated in the show, and none of them offer cars for sale in the United States.    

All auto shows were in a degree of trouble by the end of the 2010s.  Then COVID hit in early 2020.  When the Geneva show was canceled that February, that's when I knew that this virus from China was serious.  The show was canceled for the next two years due to la pandémie de le covíde and in 2023 due to lingering COVID fears and "uncertainties in the global economy and geopolitics," though the organizers were happy to display cars in Doha, Qatar to appeal to crazy rich Arabs.  This year the show was finally held again in Geneva, but a funny thing happened in the five-year interregnum - people in Switzerland and elsewhere in Europe decided to do something else with their time because they didn't really miss it.  

A lot of my own personal life was forever ruined by le covíde, and so were my plans for when I finally go to Europe - this show was on my bucket list.  But as I said before on an earlier post on this blog,  when would I ever find myself in Switzerland in March?  The organizers have since retrenched and regrouped to continue holding auto shows in Doha, but I have absolutely no plans to fly halfway around the world to a dry, sun-baked, oppressively hot city in the middle of the desert with horrible architecture when Las Vegas is so much closer.   

As for European car shows, there's always the biennial Internationale Automobil-Ausstellung in Munich (formerly held in Frankfurt), and the next one is in September 2025, but whether or not I make that depends whether we have a President who believes in freedom to travel wherever we want or a President who plans to turn America into a 3.8-million-square mile East Berlin. 

Kamala Moves Along

Kamala Harris celebrated her sixtieth birthday today.

Her presidential campaign looks better now than it did a few weeks ago, now that she's done more media - including a pivotal appearance on Fox News - while Donald Trump is talking about Arnold Palmer's private parts and trying to show what a good short-order cook he is.   

One advantage Harris should have going into the the final sixteen days is experience.  Not hers - Trump's.  Hillary Clinton could do no more than warn voters in 2016 what a Trump Presidency could be like, but Harris has the advantage of reminding us of what a Trump Presidency was like.  And it wasn't pretty.  Add to that the fact that Trump has not promised but threatened what to do in a second term and it makes perfect sense for the once-joyous Harris-Walz campaign is reminding us just how dangerous Trump really is.

We'll see what happens. 

Dr. Steinister

The more I learn about Jill Stein, the more I regret voting for her in 2016.

As everyone knows, Dr. Stein, once again the Green Party presidential nominee, is setting her sights on Michigan, where she says she plans to win enough votes to deprive Kamala Harris of a victory there, which would of course make it easier for Donald Trump to win the White House and turn the United States into Der Amerikanisches Reich.  She is appealing to the large number of Michiganders of Arab heritage and/or the Islamic faith due to the unpopular Biden-Harris administration's policy toward Israel and the Palestinians.   I couldn't understand why Dr. Stein, who supposedly leads the ticket of a progressive minor party, would focus squarely on the Biden-Harris administration's missteps on the Middle East while ignoring Trump's racist attitudes toward the Palestinians and his unreserved support for Israel.  The only explanation that makes sense is that she's a pawn of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who hopes to interfere in the American election to help Trump.

Now, I've had a hard time accepting the notion that Dr. Stein is a Putin stooge, given her leftist views and his fascistic rule of post-Soviet Russia.  Oh, sure, I knew that she - and Michael Flynn, the Hermann Göring of Trumpworld - attended a dinner in Moscow in December 2015 to celebrate Russia Today (RT), the propaganda "news" channel tat had been founded in 2005, and sat at Putin's table, which I decided wasn't that much different from that scene in Bananas where Fielding Mellish has dinner with the President of San Marcos ("I could kill him now!  He brings cake for a group of people, and he doesn't even bring an assortment!"). 

And Dr. Stein had a plausible explanation for her presence there. She that while RT's American channel covered her presidential campaign extensively, the major networks ignored her. "And my own connection to RT, you know ironically, it takes a Russian television station to actually be open to independent candidates in this country and that is a shame. A shameful commentary on our own media."

The realization that Dr. Stein is full of snail snot came not when I saw that Michael Flynn and Vladimir Putin were seated at the same dinner table with her.  It came when I found out who her other seatmates were.

As the superimposed name tags show, all but four of the people seated with Flynn, Putin and Dr. Stein are all associates of . . . Putin.  The other three are Cyril Svoboda, a pro-Putin former deputy prime minister of the Czech Republic, Willy Wimmer, a pro-Putin German politician who has served in the German Bundestag, Bosnian pro-Putin film director Emir Kusturica, and his wife.

A person is judged by the company she keeps.

*SIGH* . . .  Once again, I have to explain my vote for Dr. Stein in 2016 because some of you may not have read my earlier blog posts on the subject . . ..  I live in New Jersey, which hasn't been a swing state since 2004, and I voted for the Green ticket in 2016 because I not only loathed Donald Trump but because I thought the Democratic National Committee had hijacked the party nomination for Hillary Clinton, whom I believed thought was entitled to it and because of how the Democratic National Committee had undermined Martin O'Malley, whose 2016 candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination I supported. I would have voted Green if Homey the Clown had been the nominee, because I wanted to help the Greens get enough of the vote to qualify for matching funds in 2020. They didn't.  And when the Democrats were in danger of going full Whig in 2017, I hoped progressives could call a convention and start a new party to fill in the void left by the Democrats once they died what I thought would be a richly deserved death. But progressives didn't call for anything, and the Democratic Party hobbled on.  Now I find out that Dr. Stein's seatmates at this dinner in Moscow were not just Putin and Flynn but Putin's Kremlin stooges and  pro-Putin Europeans?

I wish I hadn't voted for Dr. Stein.  I was wrong to do so.  There, I said it.  I don't regret voting for a minor-party presidential candidate, even though I did so more out of anger at the Democratic National Committee over how they treated Martin O'Malley than anything else, and besides, I knew Hillary would win a popular majority in New Jersey and its fourteen electoral votes, which she did.  However, I voted for the wrong candidate. I should have voted for Workers World Party presidential nominee Monica Moorehead. New Jersey was one of three states in which Moorehead was on the ballot.

As for Jill Stein, this doctor is out.

Music Video Of the Week - October 18, 2024

"It's Only Rock 'N' Roll (But I Like It)" by the Rolling Stones  (Go to the link in the upper-right-hand corner.)

Donald Trump's Favorite Tunes

While Kamala Harris was in Erie, Pennsylvania pushing Donald Trump's incendiary, dictatorial banter about the enemy within, Trump was in the opposite corner of the state in suburban Philadelphia hosting a town hall in which his usual lunkheaded non-answers to questions got interrupted by people fainting in the overheated building.  At a loss for words - and his mind - Trump called for songs from his list of personal favorites to be played for, as it turned out, forty minutes - about the length of a long-play album - which revealed something far worse about Trump than his authoritarian tendencies - his taste in music.

Among his selections were Luciano Pavarotti's cover of "Ave Maria," "Memory" from Cats, "YMCA" by the Village People (which Trump must take literally as a song promoting wholesome activities such as basketball and swimming but not seriously as a song about gay culture), "November Rain" by Guns 'N' Roses, and Sinead O’Connor’s cover of Prince's "Nothing Compares 2 U."  In short, his tastes in music are like his policies - inconsistent, messy, diffuse, and somewhat kitschy.   

And Trump swayed and shimmied all the way through the music without saying very much.

Not much in the way of sixties and seventies classic rock and pop in the mix, which was too bad, because, given his promises of what to do to Harris supporters, a few songs of that description would have been perfect for his playlist.

You already know about these two.

Or how about this?

Or this?

I don't think I need to say any more. 

Going to College

It could happen again. It happened to Hillary Clinton in 2016, and it could happen to Kamala Harris in 2024, once again benefitting Donald Trump.

It's possible for Harris to win the popular vote and lose the presidential election thanks to the Electoral College, and every time the winner of the popular vote comes up short in the electoral vote, it always seems to be a Democrat holding onto the short end of the stick, thanks nowadays in part to Republicans dominating Texas, Florida, and a multitude of less populated states in the nation's midsection.

The reason for the Electoral College in the Constitution is usually given as slavery, mainly due to the slave states wanting an increased role in selecting the President and Vice President.  The constitutional clause basing the number of electors for each state on how many House and Senate members a state sends to Congress - at a time when slave states could count every five slaves as the equivalent of three citizens for the number of representatives they would send to the House -  certainly lends a great deal of truth to that, but it is hardly the only reason.  Another reason, according to Alexander Hamilton, was to ensure that the President and Vice President were chosen by private citizens who would vote on behalf or the people and who also could make sound judgments based on their better education and their deeper knowledge of the candidates.  In other words, Hamilton - and many of the other framers - didn't trust the judgment of the masses and and wanted people who knew the presidential candidates more intimately than the hoi polloi.  Each elector would vote for a first choice and a second choice, the runner-up in the election would be elected Vice President, and a bare majority of electoral votes - 35 in the first presidential election of 1789 - were needed to win the Presidency, else the House of Representatives would elect the President.

The plan worked perfectly - and then it didn't.  The states were left to decide how electors would be chosen, and most of them decided to have their legislatures choose them.  At the start, everyone agreed that George Washington should be President.  All of the electors voted for him in the first two elections, and John Adams, as the runner-up in each case, was twice elected Vice President.  Then, as parties formed, inconsistencies and difficulties started screwing things up.  Electors became more partisan, and the election of 1796 resulted in Adams, a Federalist Party member, being elected President and Thomas Jefferson, the leader of the Democratic-Republican Party, ending up as Vice President. When 138 electors were chosen in the election of 1800, 73 of them were Democratic-Republican electors, and they voted for Jefferson and Aaron Burr, resulting in a tie - the electors had intended for Burr to be Vice President, but there was no way to indicate that on the ballot.   The tie was broken in the House in favor of Jefferson, and the Constitution was amended in advance of the 1804 election to have electors specify and indicate their choice for President and their choice for Vice President (and it gave the Senate the power to choose a Vice President if no vice presidential candidate got a majority).

With the two-party system firmly established by the Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans and the evolution of popularly chosen electors, the participating parties changing until settling into the Democratic Party and the Republican Party as of 1856, the Electoral College turned into a mere formality where the electors - once meant to be independent thinkers with educated choices based on sound judgment - became mere echoes of the popular choice.   While some states allow electors to vote their conscience, in many if not most states electors are expected to choose the nominee of their party.  For all intents and purposes, the Electoral College have mostly ratified the choice of the masses since 1828, when Andrew Jackson became the first popularly elected President.  In some states, as in New Jersey, the people vote for a whole slate of electors without even knowing their names.  That's how irrelevant the Electoral College has largely become.  This was fine, as long as it reflected the will of the people.

And after the disputed election of 1876, in which Republican Rutherford B. Hayes defeated Democrat Samuel J. Tilden by the barest electoral margin despite losing the popular vote, and the election of 1888, when President Grover Cleveland won the popular vote but lost the Presidency to former GOP Senator Benjamin Harrison in the electoral vote, the Electoral College did, for quite a long time, reflect the will of the people. Franklin D. Roosevelt won four presidential elections in huge landslides - especially in 1936, when he won 46 out of 48 states - and John F. Kennedy won a close race in 1960 that could have been closer if he'd lost Illinois. (Kennedy won by an electoral vote of 303 to Richard M. Nixon's 219. Without Illinois, Kennedy still would have won, 276 to 246.) With the more recent examples of Democratic popular-vote winners losing the White House in the Electoral College, there are calls to abolish the Electoral College and let the President and Vice President be chosen directly by the people.

Be careful what you wish for.  The Electoral College has been beneficial in many cases where the parties broke down and split apart in attempting to choose a presidential ticket.  The Electoral College may have saved the Union. In 1860, Abraham Lincoln came in first in the popular vote in a four-man race with two Democratic candidates, Stephen Douglas and John C. Breckinridge - the Democratic Party splitting over slavery - and a centrist candidate from what was left of the old Whig Party.  However, Lincoln only won 39 percent of the popular vote because an overwhelming aversion to him from over six out of ten voters. In New York State, which ultimately decided the election, the Democrats ran a fusion ticket to block Lincoln and to split the electoral votes between different candidates. If 25,000 votes had gone the other way, Douglas or Breckinridge might have become President of the United States because Lincoln would have won only 145 electoral votes - seven short of a majority - and the election would have been submitted to the House, where Lincoln would have lost because the Democrats controlled that chamber. (Lincoln won New York and the election with 180 electoral votes.)  Similarly, in 1912, the split between President William H. Taft and former President Theodore Roosevelt caused a great fissure in the Republican Party that led to Roosevelt forming a rival party and standing for the Presidency.  The Democratic candidate, New Jersey governor Woodrow Wilson, whose liberal policy proposals were similar to Roosevelt's came in first in the popular vote with Roosevelt finishing second.  But Wilson was a minority President, winning only 41 percent of the vote, and his solid win in the electoral vote - 435 votes with 266 needed to win - sanctified his victory.

So how would we reform the presidential selection process, especially when the Electoral College increasingly relies on a handful of swing states as many states become less bipartisan?  Have the President and Vice President popular elected and have a runoff between the top two presidential tickets if no one gets a majority?  Sure, let's make the already interminable electoral process even longer!  If we're going to have a system like that, perhaps the best thing to do would be to reform the nomination process.  Since the mid-1970s, the presidential nomination process has mirrored the presidential election process, with party members voting for delegates pledged to vote for their choice for the presidential nomination and the convention delegates voting in a predetermined roll call just like the electors voting in December.  Before the modern primary and caucus system, though, the parties vetted the potential candidates for their presidential nominations with little input from the rank-and-file.  Women and people of color may complain about how this system was dominated by white men, but this system gave us Franklin D. Roosevelt (nominated on the fourth ballot in 1932),  Harry S. Truman (nominated for Vice President on the second ballot in 1944, when most party insiders knew that FDR could not survive a fourth presidential term), Dwight D. Eisenhower, and John F. Kennedy. The parties must once again vet the presidential candidates if the electors will not or cannot do so.     

In fact, the Democratic Party just did use this system to nominate Kamala D. Harris.  And the Republicans, counting on the will of the rank-and-file party members, renominated Donald J. Trump.

(Below is the current allotment of electors based on the 2020 census.)

The Enemy From Within?

People thought I was being hysterical and hyperbolic when I kept saying that, if Trump got re-elected President, he would make dissent a capital crime.  He demonstrated that quite clearly in an interview he gave to the insufferable Maria Bartiromo on Fox News.

"I always say, we have two enemies," Trump said to Bartiromo.  "We have the outside enemy, and then we have the enemy from within, and the enemy from within, in my opinion, is more dangerous than China, Russia and all these countries."

Trump added that he didn''t think the aftermath of the election would produce any violence , as President Biden recently warned, at least not from the side that votes for him.  Rather, the violence would come from his . . . opponents.

 "I think the bigger problem is the enemy from within . . ..  We have some very bad people we have some sick people, radical left lunatics." he said, adding that any unrest caused by anti-Trump demonstrators "should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary by the military, because they can’t let that happen."

In other words, Trump will arrest and subdue anyone who expresses opposition to him.

And he will likely, as I keep saying, make dissent a capital crime.

With three weeks to go in this presidential election campaign, the pro-democracy coalition fighting Trump must hang together in 2024 . . .

. . . or they will most assuredly hang separately in 2025! 😱

All News, All the Time

It's the only television I watch.

I can't be bothered with any of the new sitcoms and dramas that have premiered in the 2024-25 season, and I can't even name one.  As for other shows that have returned from the previous season, well, I haven't watched any of them either.  For the past several months, with the exception of the odd PBS documentary, I have only watched the news programs on MSNBC - mainly Nicolle Wallace, Lawrence O'Donnell, Jen Psaki (whom I must put on my beautiful-women picture blog), Katie Phang (ditto), and the Reverend Al Sharpton, as well as "The Weekend."  I keep watching for any good news, no matter how thin a sliver it may be, about the Harris campaign at a time when pundits are second-guessing her and critiquing her outreach efforts toward the voters she needs to win in November.  

I can't stop watching the news and analyzing the polls for as long as I remain unsure of how the election will turn out.  It's all about the campaign.  I don't even have time to watch the BBC News America report weeknights on PBS.  If I learn of any famous celebrity deaths, it's usually on the Internet, and I probably learned about more celebrity passings than I would have if I were still watching the PBS NewsHour.  

Why am I torturing myself like this?  Because I want to know if I get tortured by the Trump 47 administration if such an administration actually comes to pass.  See, I've been on my own since January.  I had a lot of plans for my life after I ended up on my own, but apart from adopting two kittens, I haven't realized them.  I'm in a holding pattern as I watch the latest news on the 2024 presidential election because, if Trump wins, it's game over as far as I'm concerned.

Yes, I still think it.  Trump will not only make himself a dictator if re-elected, he'll set up a system to opporess, incarcerate, and, yes, execute anyone who opposes him.  First he'll come for the press and the pundits, then he'll come for Democrats, then he'll come for state and local governments to root out anti-MAGA public officeholders, and eventually - perhaps somewhere in between - he'll come for bloggers who have spoken out against him.

That would include me.  

I can't make any long-term plans if living in a free and democratic America is a short-term deal.  I can't plan a trip to Europe for 2025, because either Trump will make emigration illegal or because I might have to plan on doing more than just visiting Europe.  I have to get ready to leave the country if necessary, and what research I've done in how to do that does not reassure me.  It can be so difficult that I might have to stay in America.  And if Trump is back in office, it will be an America where MSNBC is off the air. 

It shouldn't be hard for the Trump 47 authorities to find me.   In my area, there are numerous Trump lawn signs, and I put a Harris sign outside my door as a sign of defiance.

And I'm sure there will be many an informer to aid the Trump secret police to root out the rot.

I am probably a dead man already.  😱

Setting the Record Straight

Now that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (my condolences to him for the death of his mother) is no longer a presidential candidate and the remaining third-party candidates are little more than annoyances, it looks more likely than not that the results of the 2024 presidential election will not be affected by a minor presidential candidate as a spoiler.

But was any presidential election ever affected by a third-party presidential candidate?   Maybe once in awhile, like all of the young people in 1968 who may have made Richard Nixon President by voting for Peace and Freedom Party nominee (and Black Panthers leader) Eldridge Cleaver instead of Hubert Humphrey, but not so much in other presidential elections.  It's likely that the 1844 election was decided in favor of Democrat James K. Polk over Whig Henry Clay based on Polk's support for annexing Texas and that third-party candidate James Birney of the Liberty Party, which advocated abolishing slavery, brought out voters who would have supported neither Polk nor Clay, both slaveowners, or not voted at all. The 1860 election was such a hot mess that it produced four major candidates - Republican Abraham Lincoln, northern Democrat Stephen Douglas, southern Democrat John C. Breckinridge, and Constitutional Union Party nominee John Bell - and the vote was so sectionalized between the candidates that an electoral deadlock was more likely than a spoiler effect.  Had Douglas won New York, Lincoln would have been denied an electoral majority and most likely would have lost the Presidency in the House of Representatives.  The only times third-party candidates played spoiler was when a faction of an existing party supported one of its leaders on another ticket - such as in 1848, when former President Martin Van Buren was nominated by a reformist faction of the New York State Democratic Party was and subsequently endorsed by the anti-slavery Free-Soil Party for his views against extending slavery into the territories.  Van Buren cost Democratic nominee Lewis Cass New York State and the Presidency, electing Whig Zachary Taylor.  And, in 1912, when Theodore Roosevelt led progressive Republicans out of the party and ran on the Bull Moose ticket against his one-time friend, President William Howard Taft (they later reconciled), he split the Republican vote and helped elect Democratic presidential candidate Woodrow Wilson. 

I bring all of this up as background to correct two blatant misconceptions about the two most recent presidential elections in which the winners of the popular vote lost the Electoral College - that third-party candidates cost  Democrats Al Gore and Hillary Clinton the Presidency.  That theory may or may not be true in the latter case, but it is definitely false in the former.  And both theories, not coincidentally, involve the Green Party.

In 2000, as Vice President Al Gore (above) was running for the Presidency against Republican George Walker Bush, pundits expressed alarm at the support Green Party presidential nominee Ralph Nader was gaining from liberal-leaning voters dissatisfied with President Bill Clinton and said that Nader could win enough Democratic votes to deprive Gore of a victory that November.  When the presidential election results from Florida, the deciding state, ended up being disputed for five weeks and was ultimately decided in favor of Bush by 537 votes, pundits pointed to the thousands of votes Nader got and concluded that Gore did lose Florida and the Presidency because of Nader . . . and have consistently said so ever since.

In reality, as American University professor Allan Lichtman later proved, Gore actually won Florida, but the election was stolen for George Bush because thousands of Gore votes cast by black Florida residents were thrown out by the state, whose governor was . . . Jeb Bush! And the butterfly-style ballots were so antiquated and difficult to fill out that when noted anti-Semitic third-party candidate Pat Buchanan got a large number of votes in heavily Jewish precincts in Palm Beach County, even Buchanan himself said those votes for him had to have been cast by mistake.     

Also, 2016 Green Party presidential nominee Jill Stein is seen as the culprit who peeled off enough votes from Hillary Clinton (above) in that year's presidential election to cost her three states in the Rust Belt that then went to Donald Trump.  Well, I have to concede that, if you look at the numbers, Dr. Stein did win more votes than the margins between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump in those three states - Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.  (I once said that if everyone in Pennsylvania who voted for Dr. Stein had voted for Hillary, it wouldn't have made a difference and Trump still would have won the state, but the numbers were revised and I turned out to be wrong.)  But did it ever occur to the pundits and politicos who blamed Dr. Stein for Hillary's loss that maybe Hillary Clinton blew it by not campaigning in those states enough or at all?  Michigan congresswoman Debbie Dingell begged - nay, implored - Hillary to campaign in her state, but she blew her off, thinking she had Michigan in the bag.  And Florida was a state Hillary was supposed to win, but people in Florida who had never voted before and had never put much faith in politics came out to vote for Trump.  And that phenomenon was repeated in other states.

Here's another thing.  Dr. Stein was on the ballot in 44 states.  Libertarian Party presidential nominee Gary Johnson was on the ballot in all fifty of them.  As I noted on this blog once before, MSNBC host Chris Matthews, after the 2016 election, explained that moderate Republicans turned off by Trump who could have voted for Hillary voted for Johnson instead, and that the vote Johnson won in key states was greater than Trump's margin of victory.   At least that was Matthews' reasoning.  So, if third-party candidates are spoilers, how is it that Gary Johnson - who came in third and got double the number of votes Dr. Stein got nationally - had no effect on the 2016 election but Dr. Stein did?

And why isn't then-FBI director James Comey more to blame for reopening an investigation into Hillary Clinton's laptop just before the election than Dr. Stein is?

Come to think of it, why is Hillary Clinton, who was a lousy candidate, totally blameless? 

So again, the only way a third-party candidate can be a spoiler is if the candidate in question is from one of the two major parties and leaves to run on a separate presidential ticket and brings enough fellow members of said party with him or her - as liberal Democrat Henry Wallace did with his Progressive movement and as conservative Democrat Strom Thurmond did with the "Dixiecrats" in 1948 when they both ran for President against incumbent Democratic President Harry S. Truman, when the polls favored Republican presidential nominee Thomas E. Dewey.

Oh yeah, Truman won.  

Spoilers?                

Music Video Of the Week - October 11, 2024

"Dream Police" by Cheap Trick  (Go to the link in the upper-right-hand corner.)

Back to the Park

When I was forced to remove the bust of Abraham Lincoln that I contributed to Waverly Park, the local community park in my neighborhood, I was convinced that I would never contribute anything to the park again, bar only a couple of flowers here and there.  But a couple of folks in the neighborhood implored me to keep up the good work.  How could I say no?

I later found a small garden pillar that someone had thrown out, with a blue metal bowl on top of it.  I immediately got out of my car to put the pillar in the back, only to find out that the bowl had been glued to the pillar.  But I managed to separate the two after I got home.  I put the pillar in a garden bed. This is the result.

For now, at least, this will satisfy my desire to have something resembling public art in the park.  But I'm already working on another idea.   I remembered that part of the vacant lot on which the park was created by the neighbors - a strip of land that runs along my back yard, approximately three feet wide - may actually be on my side of the property line.  So I can put another bust on land that's on my side of the property line in a corner of the park - and put it right up against the line - and then landscape the square footage around the bust on either side of the property line so it looks like the bust is part of the park.  Which, for all intents and purposes, it will be.

The bust will be where the strip meets the sidewalk so it will be accessible.  It won't be a Lincoln bust, though.  I donated that bust to a library in another town nearby, so having another copy of the exact same bust of Lincoln doesn't make sense when the original bust is just a few miles away in another town in the same county.   So it will be a bust of another famous American.  I've narrowed it down to John F. Kennedy or Martin Luther King, Jr.  And yes, I like that Dion song.   

Gaza

It's been a year to the day since Hamas terrorists from the Gaza Strip crossed into Israel and murdered young people at a music festival that started out as being like Woodstock but ended up being twelve times worse than Altamont.  You would think that after a year of relentless bombardment of the strip, Hamas would be completely obliterated and the Israelis would be in complete control and the war would be over, as the Israelis clearly identified the enemy as Hamas, not "terror," as the U.S. did after 9/11 and chose to fight a war against a tactic more than against an organization.   

One year on, not only is the war against Hamas is still going on , but a series of  military operations between Israel and the Iranian-backed Hezbollah organization in Lebanon has begun and subsequently intensified.  What could happen if these military operations increase?  World War III, that's what.  Or worse.  How could it be worse? Add hostility from Arab-American and American Muslim populations in key swing states toward Kamala Harris and the evangelicals flocking to Donald Trump who believe that Armageddon is at hand, and, well, you can draw your own conclusions. 😱 

Paradise Lost

Hurricane Helene has done extensive damage to the Southeast in general and western North Carolina in particular, and Donald Trump is doing even more damage by suggesting that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is doing nothing for the victims of the hurricane and diverting funds meant for disaster relief to help migrants.  Georgia governor Brian Kemp, South Carolina governor Henry McMaster, Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin, Knox County, Tennessee maytor Glenn Jacobs, and North Carolina senator Thom TIllis have all said that FEMA is doing a great job, President Biden has been extraordinarily helpful, and  added that Trump is doing no one any favors with his lies. All of these officials are Republicans. 

Well, starting next week, Trump can stop lying about the federal government's response to Hurricane Helene in North Carolina . . . and start lying about the federal government's response to Hurricane Milton in Florida.   

Tropical Storm Milton just became a hurricane earlier today and is expected to make landfall just outside St. Petersburg and is expected to zoom up the Interstate 4 corridor and possibly lay waste to everything from Tampa to Daytona Beach before going back out to sea.  Because the area is heavily populated - thanks to Interstate 4's mere existence - you can expect a lot of damage as early as this coming Wednesday.  Florida could see Disney World laid to waste.  Fortunately, that wouldn't be very serious.  But the loss of life could be devastating, and my advice to the residents in central Florida is to pack up their vehicles and head north.  Central Florida, with its numerous resorts, will no longer be heaven on earth after Milton blows through.

On the plus side, this could be an October surprise that helps Kamala Harris upset Trump in Florida - a scenario that former Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele has predicted - and also gives Democratic Senate candidate Debbie Mucarsel-Powell an advantage of the horrible incumbent Republican Rick Scott, who has voted against FEMA funding in the past. 

Good thing he turned down funding for a high-speed rail line in central Florida when he was governor, because at least we won't have to worry about high-speed trainsets being wrecked.

Interstate 4, on the other hand . . . 😧

Music Video Of the Week - October 4, 2024

"Louisiana 1927" by Randy Newman  (Go to the link in the upper-right-hand corner.)

October Surprise

Many Democrats feared that an October surprise would be coming this month (well, what other month would it be) to disrupt the Kamala Harris campaign.  Maybe it would be Jill Stein surging among Arab-American voters in Michigan and costing Harris the state and the White House.  Maybe it would be the longshoreman's strike that would threaten the economy. Maybe it would be the fact that she hasn't visited western North Carolina in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, even though President Biden did visit the area.  These are all important topics, and I hope to return to them later - maybe even in one blog entry to play catch-up.   But the new October surprise this week concerns not Harris but Donald Trump.  

Special prosecutor Jack Smith unsealed documents in his new indictment of Trump regarding the January 6 insurrection, superseding the old one.  The documents show that, by the standards of the Supreme Court's ruling granting Presidents immunity from being prosecuted for "official acts," Smith has been able to indict Trump for acts that our clearly non-official - acts that Trump and his supporters committed as part of the Trump presidential campaign, not the executive branch.  The charges show Trump threatening Vice President Mike Pence with mob-rule retribution if he didn't send the electoral votes for Joe Biden back to the states (and sure enough, he sent out messages to the January 6 demonstrators to ensure that), and he expressed fear that Pence was "too honest" to to send them back.  (Upon hearing that the Vice President had to be escorted to a safe location to precent him from being attacked, Trump said, "So what? 😲).  Also, Trump campaign operatives spent much of November 2020 attempting to disrupt vote tabulations in swing states and one unnamed co-conspirator exhorted another to incite a riot at one tabulation center in Detroit.  (As serious as this sounds, it is sort of humorous to imagine white people working for a "law and order" candidate inciting a riot in, of all places, Detroit.) 

Trump, of course, will inevitably appeal on the grounds that he was officiating as President, even though it's obvious to anyone who can breathe - with or without a ventilator - that he was acting as a candidate and not as the President of the United States.  But the mere appearance of efforts to overturn a free and fair election should give pause to enough voters in swing states - particularly extremely close states like North Carolina and Arizona - who were ready or on the verge of being ready to vote for Trump because they were unsure of Harris . . . before they end up voting for Harris.