Category: Uncategorized

A rapist, a fraudster and a mental patient walked into a bar. And the bartender said, “Hi, President Trump!”

Anyway…

I’ve been seeing a few people from other countries, with some cause, blaming the entire nation of the US for what we are seeing in the world today because even if some people voted for a candidate who had a resume other than killing half a million people in one year with Trump Virus ™, there weren’t enough of us, and Trump actually won without the Electoral College this time. And I’ve seen some Americans posting back that those people in other countries don’t understand how screwed up this country is, how voting is mostly state-by-state, and how most people can’t afford to organize or have a general strike to shut down the country precisely because this government prevents us from having health care that isn’t dependent on our employment and most of us can’t survive beyond a paycheck-to-paycheck level.

That’s one take. Here’s mine.

Did you ever see Chinatown?

Warning, there are spoilers.

Detective Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson) ends up investigating a murder when the chief engineer in the Los Angeles water and power department is found dead. In the course of this he finds out that the reservoir is releasing huge amounts of water despite the city’s drought. Meanwhile the victim allegedly had a mistress but it turns out the ‘mistress’ is the sister of the man’s wife. The wife, Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway), hires Jake to continue the case and Gittes figures that Evelyn’s father, Noah Cross (John Huston) is behind the water dump in order to facilitate a land grab in the county. Jake confronts Evelyn about her inconsistent story and she reveals that her sister is also her daughter by Cross (I TOLD YOU, spoilers). Gittes tries to confront Cross but he takes Gittes by gunpoint and forces him to reveal the location in LA’s Chinatown where the women are hiding. Evelyn gets her sister/daughter to a car as police arrive. Jake tells her to turn Cross over to the police, and she says “he OWNS the police.” She tries to drive off but the cops shoot her, she slams her car into a corner, and as the cops surround the car, Cross takes the confused teenage girl out to comfort her, and Jake realizes that the disgusting pig is going to get away with everything. He’s going to take over the county AND he’s going to rape his daughter the way he raped her mother. And as his friends on the force lead him away, one of them says “Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown.”

Living in America is like living in the last scene of Chinatown, except that instead of one state, it’s THE ENTIRE FUCKING COUNTRY.

And the joke is that all the Good Folk Real Americans who wail and whine about how an omnipotent “they” are responsible for all their problems and behind a terrible international pedophilia ring decided that the best way to solve their problems was to vote for the Big Pig at the heart of that ring and turn him into an unaccountable and invincible God.

And they wonder why the rest of us think they’re sub-retarded. Forrest Gump wasn’t that stupid.

But the brilliant thing about the Trump occupation regime is how you can’t focus on the last outrage they committed because in 48 hours they commit an even bigger outrage. I speak, of course, of the regime’s murder of civilian Renee Good in Minneapolis when she was trying to observe an ICE raid of a neighborhood. This particular incident is proving to be an excellent case in how the plain folks of this land allow their stupidity and evil to collaborate in defending their government’s actions.

Despite the fact that the shooting was fully captured on tape, I’ve seen all kinds of social media takes embracing the Church of Trump dogma that Good was “a professional agitator” and that she was shot in self-defense after she “viciously ran over the ICE officer” and “it is hard to believe he is alive”. Never mind that said officer was not even knocked on his feet and was seen walking down the street under his own power while neighbors were screaming at him.

Riddle me this, detectives, why is the burden of responsibility in a threat situation always with the lone unarmed civilian and not with the mall cop who has five weeks of training, riot gear, automatic weapons and two squads of reinforcements with the same characteristics?

Never mind that the video clearly shows the victim turning the SUV away from the officers. “But the vehicle is a deadly weapon!” Well, that much more so when you shoot the driver and let the car run down the road and hit someone’s else car, as happened in this case. “Uh well, I HAD to shoot that bear, it was self-defense.” “Okay, so why did you step IN his path when he was running?”

Then Thursday the shooter’s identity was revealed (which should warn ICE that they should quit assuming their masks are armor) and it was also found out that in his service he had recently gotten stitches after he “got his arm stuck in the window of a vehicle as the driver tried to flee an immigration arrest. He was dragged roughly 100 yards down the street before breaking free.” President of Vice JD Eyelashes did a whole press conference where he tried to justify the officer’s actions as being the result of combat stress. In which case that would indicate he’s exactly the sort of person not to be put in a situation with guns. The fact of this past incident where he tried to stop a moving vehicle from outside indicates to me that he has a history of escalating.

The Church of Trump defenses for this murder are a classic case of willful ignorance. Mere stupidity is insufficient to justify their position. Stupidity could be excused as an inability to process information or a simple lack of knowledge. Such active and willful rationalizations are bad faith arguments for a position that one knows to be wrong. Of course the same people who thought Renee Good shouldn’t have “fucked around and found out” are the same ones who think Ashli Babbitt is a sainted martyr.

And at the same time, we still have the previous outrage that the Renee Good murder trumped, where Trump basically looked at Venezuela, and said “this is mine” and apart from capturing the dictator Nicolas Maduro to face charges in the US, didn’t do anything to follow up. I believe this is because Trump (who was against Bush’s invasion of Iraq after he was for it) didn’t want to get involved in the sort of quagmire that undermined Bush even with his own party. So Trump has handed everything over to Maduro’s Chavista government by default, and they are doing that much more to crack down on dissent than they did. But while some parts of our government like Marco Rubio’s Department of State wanted to indicate a hands-off approach, Trump is all about seizing Venezuela’s oil, including seizing any remaining export ships for their profits to go to “secure” (personal) Treasury accounts. And that’s already causing problems with our “friendly” socialist government in Venezuela. Why do we even need Venezuelan oil, when its crude needs extra refinement, that will require extra investment (which was risky to oil companies before and that much more risky now) and America is already one of the leading oil producers on Earth? Because Secretary Rubio, as a Miami Cuban, has been jonesing to change the Communist governments of the Caribbean since childhood. And he also knows that Trump doesn’t care about arguments based on political strategy, so he said “oil” and his sovereign went “GIMMEGIMMEGIMME! MINEMINEMINE!!” So at some point they’re going to need boots on the ground to get that oil. Not like Trump cares about that, they won’t be his boots. Swollen ankles, y’know.

So Lord Trump is thinking of giving the administration of Venezuela over to effective Chief of Staff Stephen Miller. There’s a great idea. Turn a Hispanic country over to Stephen Miller, who loves Hispanics the way Hitler loved Jews.

Speaking of Stephen Miller acting like Hitler, in the wake of our Latin coup, he and other people have continued to wave our flag over Greenland, Miller’s own wife Katie did a media post showing the Arctic island with an American flag imposed on it, labeled “SOON.” He also did an interview with Jake Tapper at CNN (Cuck News Network), where he said “”The real question is, by what right does Denmark assert control over Greenland? What is the basis of their territorial claim?” (Raising the question, what is ours?) It’s like everything else. The Boy King tells himself “I got a right to this. I’m entitled to this.” And his inner circle of worshipers use whatever fraud and force they can to make his delusions reality. Never mind that Denmark, by extension Greenland, is a NATO member, and trying to force the issue would definitely break NATO for all practical purposes, and that directly benefits Vladimir Putin, the ruler of Russia, and wouldn’t that be an incredible coincidence?

We have no eternal allies. We don’t even have eternal interests. We just have a little boy who wants what he wants, and no one will stop him from getting it. We don’t have allies. We have those who are forced, and those who force us. Those who are forced include E. Jean Carroll, the contestants at Miss Teen USA, and everyone else in the United States, not to mention Venezuela, Greenland and Canada.

Who are those who force us?….

Draw your own conclusions.

The thing is, it’s not as though our Constitution and system of government failed in themselves, but they need individuals to enforce them, and our Constitution, which was specifically designed to keep the executive from becoming a mad Caesar, is not being enforced because Democrats are a combination of learned helplessness and programmed reverence for the Big Government they created, and the president’s own party is not a party so much as a death cult. And that is because no matter how stupid and insane Trump is, 77.3 million voters in 2024 were more stupid than him.

Now if you follow social media feeds, maybe some of those Trump worshipers have come to regret their decision, which might also be why the Trump Party lost so big in off-year elections even in states where they were favored. But it’s still too late. The damage is done and it’s been getting worse by the day. The best you can do is try to contain it.

At the moment, the best way to do that would be to force another government shutdown. Yes, another one. Why do we keep having them? Because Democrats want to fund government for people besides Elon Musk, Exxon, and Paul Blart, Gestapo Cop, and Republicans don’t. So they can’t create real budget plans, they just keep passing continuing resolutions that kick the can down the road, and even that is like pulling their own teeth. Now, because the Democrats kept embarrassing themselves trying to force concessions by shutdown in 2025 (and Republicans kept embarrassing themselves trying to do this with Democrat presidents), most Democrats didn’t even want to contemplate holding the budget hostage. Besides which, there’s that aforementioned reverence for Big Government, even when it’s subverted against them. But that was before Renee Good was murdered. The Fucking News: “Without new congressional allocations for 2026, both DHS and ICE would have to shut down after Jan. 31.” And in the wake of ICE’s latest atrocity, there is growing thought in the Senate to cut them off. Senator Chris Murphy (D.-Connecticut) said “Democrats cannot vote for a DHS budget that doesn’t restrain the growing lawlessness of this agency.” I mean that would have been an idea before they voted to do so last year, but hey.

And while the Senate is secure for the Trump Party for this year, they may not even keep the House through November. Georgia’s Marjorie Taylor (BR.-QAnon) has already quit. Another Republican Congressman is in the hospital. And this week California Republican Representative Doug LaMalfa suddenly died at the age of 66. There is a Texas special election in a redistricted area that will probably be won by a Democrat. That would make the margin for Speaker Mike Johnson (BR.-Louisiana) only four, meaning he can only afford to lose one defector on bills, as tied measures lose in the House. And neither chamber is totally united any more.

While the Bullshitter Bully seems more omnipotent than ever, his Party is weaker than ever, and let us never forget, they do what he wants because he does what they want. As I say: Trump is the symptom. THEY are the problem. And while they were already likely to lose at least the House big time, their losses are that much more likely as it becomes that much more clear that the regime is at war with the rest of the country, and voting is the last way we are able to mount an effective protest short of Madame Guillotine. And if Democrats win in 2026 (I do not say ‘when’, cause these are Democrats, and God hates us all) we, the people, need to seriously change the direction of the political class, and that requires changing the only non-Republican party that can get people elected. No more of these Chuck Schumer go-along-to-get-along leaders who still think of the Republican Party as compatriots and colleagues. THEY ARE A GODDAMN OCCUPATION GOVERNMENT RUN BY OUR NATION’S ENEMIES, and they need to be treated as such.

They Are The Problem

As campaign season commences, every citizen who can do so ought to press every candidate on the question of whether a Democratic House will impeach Trump. And that leads to the question of whether House members will support Hakeem Jeffries as Speaker or find somebody who recognizes where we are and is willing to fight the regime rather than pretend they can be dealt with in good faith.

That’s two things that need to be done right there. And if Democrats win in November, they need to do everything they can to press their position, and to correct the issues that let Trump happen in the first place. For instance, as long as Republicans want to jerk around with our election rules, Democrats ought to follow suit. Like have states pass laws saying you can’t vote unless you can write an essay answer to the question “What is the difference between ‘your’ and ‘you’re’?”

“I think fundamentally the problem with post liberal thinkers is that they seem to assume that vanquishing liberalism results in their enemies being converted or defeated and not becoming radicalized into enemies who no longer extend the mercies they once did.”

‘Starfish Who Can’t Think Something Witty’ on Bluesky

So I had said, in the wake of Viceroy Trump destroying the White House East Wing, that this only confirms that the American republic is as dead as the structure, because Trump can just do what he wants without involving the protected sites bureaucracy, or Congress, or anyone else, because Congress is perfectly okay with him treating everything as his personal property. There is no rule of law anymore. So that raised two questions, one, how we are to get rid of the criminals and two, what government we are going to replace them with.

It may indeed come to violence, but we can see from the protests in ICE-occupied cities that non-violence is winning more hearts and minds than attacking cops and destroying property. Also, it may not even come to violence.

Consider that Trump, after saying that the coronavirus was a “Democrat hoax” for most of 2020, got it himself, and only survived because he was the president and had the best medical care the government could provide. When he was ex-president, he still had the best medical care the government could provide. He has the best medical care the government can provide now. And you see what he looks like.

Unless he can sign an executive order to make himself immortal, or God hates us that much more than I thought, Trump IS going to die, likely before 2028, maybe even before the end of 2026. And that would mean JD Vance takes over. Now, in the abstract, I could say some good things about JD Vance. Like, he can probably count to 11 without pulling down his pants, which is more than I can say for Trump or half the men in his Cabinet. But Vance doesn’t have Trump’s magic mind control skill for selling unbelievable bullshit, and while he has a highly cultivated sense of snottiness, he hasn’t learned Trump’s trick for insulting an audience to their face and making them love him all the more for it.

Not to say that Vance can’t establish a Trumpnik dynasty – after all, the charismatic dictator of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, was succeeded by the highly uncharismatic Nicolas Maduro, and he’s still got a tight grip on power. But in this country, the fact that the last two Democratic presidents before Biden were Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, and the last two Republican presidents were both Trump, serves to confirm that this low-information country would rather vote for a celebrity than a statesman or a bureaucrat. And Vance isn’t much of either. So all of this not only raises the question of what happens when (not if) Trump dies, that implies the question of what happens if (not when) Democrats take over again. Because as with the Biden Administration they run the risk of alienating both Left and Right so much that people will turn back to the Republicans no matter what Mad Max warlord they get to run for president.

There are two justified fears outside the Church of Trump (i.e. In the reality-based community): One, that if this regime is overturned by lawful election, the Democratic hierarchy, whoever is president, will just say, ‘Oh, thank goodness that’s over! We won, so that means Americans just want us to get back to the status quo when people like Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer were running everything!’ In other words, the Biden Administration, which nobody liked, including leftists.

The other being, if the more radical ‘progressives’ take over – which could be through election or other means – then they’re going to enact leftist measures like ‘antiracism’ which would indeed be radical but not the sort of radical changes the country actually needs. I’d estimate that that is the reason that anybody who isn’t already a leftist and/or Democrat hasn’t switched to that party by now.

Speaking for myself, I’d already said that I’m changing my registration back to independent from Democrat – not because the Democrats are too leftist, but because as an institution, they’re useless. As I put it, I would rather send my money to a Kickstarter campaign than a Democrat candidate’s fundraising campaign, because with Kickstarter I have a better chance of getting what I paid for.

And I would estimate that’s the real issue for a lot of people, including leftists. We can’t trust that the Democratic Party will honor even promises for moderate action, let alone radical action. When Trump sent a mob – complete with zipties, blunt weapons and a hanging scaffold ready to go – to kill anybody who wouldn’t go along with his scheme to replace the Electoral vote in the Capitol, that should have been the end of it right then and there, impeachment or no impeachment.

And this relates to recent news in that this Tuesday they had “off year” elections in those states that have them, like Virginia, and in pretty much every one, Democrats beat Republican candidates and by much larger margins than predicted. In the New York mayoral race, Democrat (and admitted socialist) Zohran Mamdani won by more than 50 percent, meaning that in the unlikely event that Republican Curtis Sliwa dropped out of the race to endorse former Mayor Andrew Cuomo and the even more unlikely event that all of Sliwa’s supporters voted for him, Cuomo still wouldn’t have won. But in neighboring New Jersey, centrist Democrat for Governor Mikie Sherill was almost tied with Republican Jack Chittarelli in polls, and Sherill beat him by double digits. And while JD Vance snarked that the election was only an issue for “a couple of blue states”, the Georgia elections had a couple of Democrats win races for the public service commission. In Pennsylvania, special elections to challenge the three liberals on the state supreme court ended with all three judges keeping their positions. And in Missisippi, which wrote the book on disenfranchising Black voters, Democrats flipped two state Senate seats, ending Republicans’ supermajority in the chamber.

And of course as a result, Trump is reliving the same happy memories he got when Putin bent him over a desk in that closed-door meeting in Helsinki. But this election, along with the No Kings turnout, only confirms that the Democrats now have the momentum leading into the 2026 midterms. The question is what they do with it.

It’s going to be that much more likely that the Trump Party will try to skew state elections in 2026 (especially since California’s Prop 50 also won by ridiculous margins). They are this desperate for the same reason that House Speaker Mousy Mike Johnson is continuing the government shutdown, which should be called the Oh Please, Oh Please, Oh Lawdy PLLEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEZE Mike Johnson, Don’t Let Dem Epstein Files Get Out Shutdown. They have used Trump’s victory (a majority of the popular vote but still only a plurality of all voters) as a mandate for absolute power, which they see as license to commit crimes. They are scared to death that if Demonrats take even one part of Congress, they’re not only going to investigate Trump, but all the minions who were just obeying orders (but are not given Supreme Court immunity).

Why should we disappoint them?

Some people would give us that “when they go low, we go high” attitude and say that if/when Democrats take over, they shouldn’t be fixated on revenge. FUCK. THAT. SHIT. We already had a Democrat Administration that refused to take revenge on the Trump Party and Trump repaid them on January 6, 2021 before Joe Biden was even sworn in. At that point they weren’t just disagreeable, they had declared war on the whole system of law. And now thanks to Trump, that law no longer really exists. Obeying its terms is worse than self-defeating. We do not need revenge, we need justice.

If Democrats really want to follow through with their victory this November and sweep Congress, they need to get the message that was given by “progressives” in New York City, by centrists in Virginia and Pennsylvania, and by red-state voters in Georgia and Mississippi: FUCK. YOU. TRUMP. FUCK.YOU. UP. THE. ASS. Fuck you, you Russky traitor bitch. Fuck you, you walking septic tank of a humanoid. Actually, the septic tank would be a better president, because it would be smarter and less racist. The whole premise of Russell Vought and his ‘Project 2025’ people was to create not just a revenge policy but a policy for permanent Republican majority.

We need a Project 2029.

We need not just ‘oh when we come back, we’ll just put everything back the way it was.’ These fuckers let Trump destroy the East Wing. They are not politicians, they are accomplices. As I have said too many times to count, the Republican Party collective is the real problem. It was the Trump Party before 2015. He just finally showed up. And again, we need justice, not revenge. Mind you, revenge will be needed, in the short term. Not just for petty emotional reasons. The Biden Administration thought they could just put everything back the way it was because Republicans had learned their lesson. These brother-fuckers are too stubborn and stupid to learn anything that isn’t beaten into them. It needs to be made clear that if they continue to identify with racists and fascists and traitors, that the Republicans will go the way of the Whig Party, only with more archaic beliefs and a smaller Anti-Slavery wing. And that means criminal prosecution of the Trumpniks who have actually committed crimes.

But if all you do with power is enrich your cronies and punish people you hate, you’re just the Mirror Universe version of the Trump regime that voters rejected this week. What people want is to get the republic back. And they’re not gonna get it, because Trump destroyed all the checks and balances that made it work, including the implied premise that politics should be a private concern between two political parties that could trust each other. So what we need is to actively build the republic we thought we had. Not just go back to the way it was, but to look at the system and correct the flaws that destroyed it and brought us to this place.

I have already stated my ideas on how to do that (starting here). In the long term, we are going to need a full-scale constitutional project to put term limits, and age limits, on all our politicians, including justices. (Anybody who doesn’t think a Supreme Court Justice is a politician angling for votes has never seen a Senate confirmation hearing.) In the medium term, Congress needs to do what it can do, and it can add new seats to the Supreme Court, and yank the funding from ICE. But to do that, in the short term, you need to win elections, and unfortunately that requires voting for the Democrats as our legally-designated NotTrump Party. And that means that to be worth the effort, the Democrats need a Goddamn attitude adjustment. But I think some of them are already there. One of the less publicized stories from Tuesday’s Virginia elections was the victory of Jay Jones in the attorney general race against incumbent Republican Jason Miyares. Jones was leading the race before October, when old text messages from 2022 came up with Jones where he said he would “piss on graves” of Republicans and asked about a hypothetical where he had a gun with two bullets and was in a room with Hitler, Pol Pot and Virginia Republican Todd Gilbert. His choice: “Spoiler: put Gilbert in the crew with the two worst people you know and he receives both bullets every time.” This was controversial enough to cast doubt on not only Jones’ campaign but the campaign of Abigail Spanberger for Governor. Well, not only did Spanberger win by double digits, Jones won his race by almost 6 points.

Why, it’s almost as if after January 6, not to mention ‘King Trump’ dumping AI shit on No Kings protestors, the mainstream media should quit being shocked that a politician would advocate violence against his opponent, and act like the voters should consider that disqualifying. Cause it’s not like Republican voters care.

I said it before, I’ll say it again, and I’m gonna keep saying it: FUCK. THEM. ALL.

The day after the 2025 election, Mike Johnson said, “President Trump is on the ballot next fall,” Johnson said in his first comments of the off-year election results, delivered at a news conference outside the Capitol on Wednesday. That, he explained, is because Democrats will work to unwind Trump’s agenda and “move to impeach him.”

Find that clip and run it as an election ad every Goddamn day of the 2026 campaign. Democrats might take the Senate.

But if that happens, we may have all these Tea Party-style ambitions but we have to figure out where things proceed with what we have. The Tea Party and more successful Trump Cult could not proceed until established Party leadership either got out of the way or got with the program. So too with the Democrats. Chuck Schumer of course is completely useless. Hakeem Jeffries is slightly better than useless, if only because he’s not old enough to collect Social Security. But either one of them is ripe for challenge to their position. And once the current Congress ceases to be in session, Mike Johnson will no longer have standing to hold it up. And then anyone can run for speakership. And whether it’s next year or 2028, the Democratic leadership ought to be taken up by somebody who’s actually popular and in tune with where this country is going. Somebody like… Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

I mean, you know how Nancy Pelosi behaved when Trump was holding his State of the Union speeches. If AOC was up there, he’d need a Secret Service detail just for the podium.

Jeffrey Epstein. The man who never dies. At least as far as Donald Trump is concerned.

Just this Thursday, The Wall Street Journal, that commie rag, posted a story giving the details of a letter Donald Trump wrote to Jeffrey Epstein on Epstein’s birthday in 2003. The text was mostly in the outline of a naked woman drawn in marker, inside which was typewritten text of a dialogue between Trump and Epstein mentioning an “enigma” and asking “what is better than having everything” and the two men telling each other they know the answer to that question. The text concluded with “Happy Birthday, and may every day be another wonderful secret.” One article had the followup “Far-right activist Laura Loomer, who has called on the White House to appoint a special counsel to handle the release of the Epstein files, also called the letter “totally fake.” “I’m calling bullshit on this Trump “birthday letter” to Epstein. It’s totally fake. Everyone who actually KNOWS President Trump knows he doesn’t type letters,” she said on X.”

A good point, actually. I mean from what we’ve seen, there aren’t enough typos.

I mean nobody’s traced Trump directly to Epstein’s sex crimes, other than a dismissed lawsuit with witness testimony, or the fact that Trump was president when Epstein was arrested – after he’d already been sentenced in a sweetheart deal by prosecutor Alex Acosta, who was later made Labor Secretary in Trump’s first term. (At the time, Acosta was serving under Pam Bondi who was Florida’s Attorney General and is now the country’s Attorney General under Trump.) When Epstein kicked the oxygen habit, the Attorney General was Bill Barr, whose father was the headmaster of a school that hired a young Jeffrey Epstein as a teacher. The facts of Epstein’s death are still suspicious, especially after the re-released tape of prison security footage turned out to be doctored.

The one valid point Trump made in all of his rantings was, IF the Epstein information is so damaging to him, why didn’t the Democrats release it when they had the White House? But then that gets to the question, if the information is so damaging to the Clintons and liberal elites like Bill Gates, why hasn’t Trump released it yet?

This story has more legs than a centipede. Why? There are only two kinds of people in this country: Trumpniks, and people who live in the real world. And the only thing the two groups have in common is: “Epstein didn’t kill himself.”

What I keep getting back to is this: Why is Trump so panicky, and so defensive, and so guilty, when he knows that the law will never touch him, and never would touch him even before he got control of it? (Oh by the way, THANKS, Merrick Garland!)

Pondering the matter, I have several impressions:

Trump is the reason Freud is still relevant. In the back of his mind, he must know just how completely inadequate he is, how he has never been a self-made man, how everything he had was given to him by somebody else (like his daddy, or Mark Burnett) and he has wasted what was given to him and always needed someone more competent (like his daddy, Roy Cohn or Mitch McConnell) to bail him out. That’s why he can’t have competent people around him, because that would only remind him of his inadequacies. That’s why all his henchmen have to give him more praise than Kim Jong Un gets from his government. And it’s why he can’t stand to hear anybody telling the truth about him. So any time somebody says anything bad about him or that might seem bad about him, he lashes out. Now, if as he says, most of Epstein’s nasty stuff happened after Trump quit being involved with him, and there’s no direct evidence Trump was involved in sex crimes, he could confirm this. But Trump’s reactions get to the next point –

Trump is not a smart man. Which is an understatement on par with “Maybe Napoleon should have brought winter supplies to Russia.” Like, one of the other developments this week was when the DOJ fired Maurene Comey (who just happens to be a daughter of James Comey), who just happened to be one of the prosecutors in the federal Epstein case. The press speculated that this was an attempt to cut off new revelations, which is odd in that during the trial, Ms. Comey argued against releasing details of the crimes, for the sake of the victims. She was also a prosecutor in the case against record producer Sean Combs.

Basically this is a case of a guy who might have something to hide thinking he can conceal the fact by making it seem that much more likely that he’s got something to hide. But given the fact that a lot of the outrage among the MAGAts is because they genuinely didn’t know Trump was associated with Epstein, that gets to the last point –

Trump knows his base. I mean, calling them sheep would be an insult to sheep. These are the same people who thought Mexico would pay for the wall, that vaccines spread disease and that tariffs will fix inflation. They must be the same people who thought Liberace just hadn’t found the right gal.

He has good cause to think that they’ll believe him both when he says that the files don’t exist and that the Democrats made them up, even when Pam Bondi said she had the files and then handed copies to right-wing influencers, when they were made up by Democrats and don’t exist.

But when I say Trump knows his base, there’s a sinister side to that. That’s the reason Trump is still scared when he’s above the law. It’s not the law he’s scared of. I had mentioned during the election that the same people who think Trump 2.0 is a dystopia by and large wouldn’t actually vote for Kamala Harris, who was the one chance we had to avoid this. And these were the same people who cheered when Luigi Mangione (allegedly) killed healthcare executive Brian Thompson in outrage over insurance company policies. These people have given up thinking the constitutional system works, so they’re ready for old-fashioned policy solutions.

Well, now look at the people who actually idealize violence. Pundits use phrases like “stochastic terrorism” in regard to Trump. There are the people who (say) break into Nancy Pelosi’s house and beat her husband half to death. Broadly speaking they are what Richard Hanania refers to as “Gribbles.” But while conspiracy thinking has a broad following, these are the guys who go the extra mile. Trump can tell them “You gotta fight like hell, or you won’t have a country anymore.” He doesn’t have to openly order “hang Mike Pence”. They get the drift.

And he got these guys to assault Congress for him because he told them they were all crooked and all in on an evil conspiracy, and now that we’re seeing the aftermath of an evil conspiracy, it looks more and more like Trump is at the heart of it.

Come to think of it, the two times we know of that some guy tried to kill the God-Emperor, weren’t both those guys Republicans?

It leads to a point I’ve been making on social media recently: It’s not a good idea for a movement to encourage private citizens to buy high-powered firearms to resist a tyrannical government, and then once they win an election, use that same government to piss off the whole country.

Y’know, anybody who had seen The Suicide Squad or the Peacemaker series that came out of it probably wouldn’t think that James Gunn was the right guy to direct Superman.

Because while Martin Scorsese may famously disdain superhero movies, James Gunn in his DC Comics productions was about as close as you can get to Martin Scorsese directing superhero movies, at least in terms of the F words equaling the body count. And DC had already done dark and adult Superman and the whole point of ending the “DC Extended Universe” was to break from all that.

But James Gunn’s productions also have real heart and a sense of humor, and one of the reasons to bring James Gunn in – actually as head developer for the whole new DC movie universe – was that he would bring a similar spirit to their movies and do for their characters what he did for Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy. And the new Superman movie definitely achieves that goal. It is an old-fashioned superhero story like they haven’t been making any more.

This movie fully embraces what one superhero game designer called “the lovely and the pointless” aspects of the genre – like, how Superman has a fortress in the (Ant)arctic full of Kryptonian tech but still works for a daily newspaper, and how he has a scruffy little dog with the same powers that he does (and we know this because the dog has the same cape) and we all just accept this.

It is said that because this movie starts in the middle of the action, it doesn’t have a Superman origin story. That is not quite true. Early on, details of Superman’s origins are revealed and they diverge significantly from the traditional story. I will not spoil the detail because a large part of the plot hinges on it. But Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult) uses the scandal to manipulate Superman (David Corenswet) into turning himself into the government, and Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan) has to get to the bottom of all this, aided by sudden investigative journalist Jimmy Olsen (Skylar Gisondo) and the “Justice Gang” of Green Lantern (Nathan Fillon), Hawkgirl (Isabel Merced) and Mr. Terrific (Edi Gathegi) who is basically DC’s version of Doc Savage, or as one person put it, Lex Luthor’s Good Twin. The action is great, the production is great, and so are the performances, especially Fillion as asshole Guy Gardner, Hoult as an obsessive Luthor, and David Corenswet, whose Superman works precisely because he is a total square. I mean, this guy actually rescues a squirrel.

And now I should address the politics of all this. Which is weird, because other than one death and some obligatory PG swear words, this is a pretty wholesome movie. You would think it wouldn’t be offensive, and yet people read in controversies from current events, which is all the more odd given that most of the movie was produced before the last election. I guess certain people didn’t like the implication that if you send your personal enemies to a mass detention center in literal nowhere, you’re not the good guy.

And those same people act like Superman has suddenly become “woke.” Maybe they didn’t see the original Siegel-Schuster comics where Superman hammered a wife beater and stopped war profiteers. Neither this movie nor the Superman character in the movie are all that politically conscious, but it’s that very normalcy that seems to offend the anti-woke Right more than it does the self-conscious Left.

Indeed there’s a phrase that’s been going around since the premiere that is alluded to by Superman in one of his scenes with Lois: “Kindness is punk rock.” Of course I always thought punk rock was Johnny Rotten and Sid Vicious, so the opposite was the case. But look: Right now we have a whole country of professional Christians who are totally aghast at the prospect of Andrew Dice Clay as a stand-up comedian but absolutely adore Andrew Dice Clay as our president. If Dice were both corrupt and senile.

When everything in America is Opposite Day and thugs are our designated heroes, maybe the most punk rock thing you can do is to make a movie about a regular Middle American guy who loses his cool and makes mistakes sometimes, but puts one foot in front of the other every day and always tries to do the right thing.

Maybe James Gunn really was the right guy to direct Superman.

Well, I think so.

The phrase “autopsy” in regard to post-election analysis came about after the Republican Party commissioned a study shortly after Mitt Romney lost to President Obama in 2012, despite Obama not performing as well as he had in 2008. It was not actually called an autopsy, but that’s the phrase that developed in the political media. So ever since then an analysis of the losing party’s campaign in an election has been referred to as such, except of course, for the 2020 election, which according to the Church of Trump canon dogma that will soon be enshrined in official documents, Donald Trump DID NOT LOSE despite the fact that he’s officially elected the 47^th president and not still the 45^th. So here’s my personal analysis for what went wrong with the (Biden) Harris campaign and what Democrats could do better in the next presidential campaign, assuming they’re allowed to have one. I can only hope this is not the literal autopsy of the Democratic Party, but let’s see what happens in Trump’s first hundred days.

On Facebook, I’d posted a Reason Magazine article pointing out that after 2016, Democrats did, sorta, have an “autopsy” on the results of the election, saying “In fact, Democrats tasked then-Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney (D–N.Y.) with compiling an autopsy of the 2016 election, only to then effectively bury it: Maloney presented the report to lawmakers “during a members-only gathering at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee headquarters” in 2017, Politico reported, but “members were not allowed to have copies of the report and may view it only under the watchful eyes of DCCC staff.” Which is about par for the course with these people. And one friend, thinking that the premise of learning from the Republican victory was to be more like them, asked me, “If the result of the autopsy is, the only way to beat them is to be more like them than they are, what’s the point?” And I responded: “Winning. Without which being less like they are is irrelevant. Moral victories don’t count.”

The fact that the nominally democratic party is so elitist and controlling tells you a big part of the problem right there.

Of course learning from how the other side wins doesn’t mean you’re going to be as evil as they are. The Democratic Party is not run by a womanizing pathological liar and real-estate cheat. Bill Clinton retired. And it’s not like they didn’t learn from you. This election Republicans learned how to use early voting and mail-in balloting as opposed to acting like mail ballots were possessed by evil spirits.

I should have guessed that Nevada was a microcosm for the country. When early voting started I kept noting Jon Ralston’s blog on The Nevada Independent site, and he immediately noted that the rural counties north of Clark County/Las Vegas had a huge turnout for early voting and they were nearly all registered Republicans. Whereas Clark County normally has a Democratic “firewall” but it was very small compared to previous elections. Things picked up a little as it got closer to Election Day (and it looks like Senator Jacky Rosen and all Democratic House members got re-elected) but Nevada went for Trump because the early data was actually the trend.

Trump won with slightly less vote than he got in 2020, and he still won the popular vote because about 14 million people (at this week’s count) who voted Democrat in 2020 stayed home. Trump did not raise the “ceiling” on his support. Kamala Harris fell through it. And as Tom Powell Jr. on TikTok said, “when you don’t vote, this is the shit that happens.”

That should be the first lesson right there. Just as Trump picked up a lot of voters who you wouldn’t think would be the usual suspects for the Trump fan club, so too a lot of the people who didn’t vote this time and are not fans of Trump did vote for Biden the last time. The lesson is, you’re not representing those people. In the next four years, or however much time you still have left, you ought to go and search for those people in the neighborhoods you lost. Have your staffers “of color” talk to their own families, and their relatives, and friends and ask what issues they’re concerned about that they expect government to be able to fix. I don’t assume that gender-neutral addressing will be high on the list.

Secondly, as James Carville – a political strategist who won for you – is famous for saying, “It’s the economy, stupid.” Because clearly, even the horror stories about Project 2025 and the deaths of pregnant women in miscarriage because no one wanted to be accused of facilitating an abortion weren’t enough to deal with ridiculous inflation. Which HAS gotten under control now, but “under control” doesn’t mean prices have actually gone down. Knowing that you would be blamed, you should not have instituted inflationary policies in the first place. Or at least, not if you were going to let the guy who tried to seize control of the Capitol by force run free braying his stab-in-the-back mythology and using his fan club to bully the very Republicans he tried to kill to march in line behind him again. That’s another thing, you should have prosecuted Trump THE very day he quit being president and not fuck around for two years while he did all this. (Another Facebook friend pointed this out to me, and I agreed, and said, ‘that’s a great example of why we’re not like them, isn’t it?’)

The inflation issue brings up another relevant bit of advice: Act as if (even if it is statistically impossible) that all voters are dumber than a bag of rocks, only more opinionated. After all, the Republicans do, and look where they are. That does not mean being patronizing. That’s part of what got you where you are. It means, don’t just assume everyone knows the obvious, cause what’s obvious to you is not necessarily obvious to everyone else. Remember, a person can be smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it.

Part of this means finding out how people actually communicate these days. Milblogger Jake Broe pointed out that for-profit corporate media is dead. And apparently Republicans figured this out four years ago. It was good that Harris appeared on Fox News, 60 Minutes and “Call Her Daddy” but they should have gone more in the latter direction with those liberal-leaning podcasts that exist. Broe says one reason they didn’t is because if you go on some podcast for three hours, you run the risk of actual conversation, and that risks saying something stupid. But he says the American people are ready for this. Maybe so. Donald Trump says stupid shit all the time.

The recurring point in all this is: Meet people where they are. Learning from the enemy does not mean becoming more evil and stupid than they are, because that really would defeat the purpose of winning. It means, learning what they’re doing right and what you’re doing wrong. Specifically, finding out what voters want and presenting your agenda as being in line with their interests. Assuming, of course, that you know what your agenda is.

And this is all assuming that you’ll even get another fair shot at the White House. From what all the Trumpniks are saying, by 2028, I don’t think you will.

But hey, Democrats, there’s still all kinds of weirdo loner Republicans out there who want to assassinate Donald Trump, and nobody’s taking their guns away. So you’ve got that to look forward to.

RE: “He’s Winning This Thing“

Dear Andrew,

If there is anything more embarrassing than Howard Stern and Stephen Colbert fangirling over Kamala Harris in their interviews, it’s you fangirling over a candidate you say you’re voting against. Like when Trump describes his word salads as “the weave.” You really think that’s clever? When I think of “the weave” in relation to Trump, I think of something else coming off the top of his head. It’s like a thatched-roof cottage up there.

And when you say Harris’ answers to substantive questions are generalities like “I believe in building consensus. We are a diverse people. Geographically, regionally, in terms of where we are in our backgrounds. And what the American people do want is that we have leaders who can build consensus”, quite so, but at least air is a substance. As opposed to Trump, who in his Detroit speech said: “I said who the hell did that, I saw engines, about three four years ago, these things were coming, cylinders, no wings, no nothing, and they’re coming down very slowly, landing on a raft in the middle of the ocean someplace, with the, circle, boom, reminded me of, the Biden circles that he used to have, right, he’d have eight circles, and he couldn’t fill them up, but then I heard he BS with the popular vote, I don’t know, I don’t know, couldn’t fill up the eight circles, I always loved those circles, they were so beautiful, they were so beautiful to look at, in fact the person that did that, that was the best thing his, the level of that circle, was, great, but they couldn’t get people, so they used to have the Press, stand in for the circles, because they couldn’t get the people, then I heard we lost, oh, we lost, now we’re never going to let that happen again, but we’ve been, abused, by other countries, we’ve been abused by our own politicians really more than other countries.”

He’s winning this right now? What kind of country is this where he COULD be winning right now?

I agree with you on some points. Like, Pennsylvania being as central as it is, Harris’ running mate should have been Josh Shapiro and not Tim Walz. But exactly what “bold and risky” thing do you propose she do that wouldn’t piss off her voter group, which lest we forget, is basically everybody in this country who’s not already for Trump, and can’t agree with each other on everything, maybe not anything?

We can’t get Obama back. For various reasons, we couldn’t get Pete Buttigieg to run, and I think both of us would prefer that. But Harris would have both of them in her corner. And as I said: We could have Biden, and we all suspect how that would play out. When you said he should bow out, you knew what the options were. This is what we’ve got. And if you can’t back Harris, you know what you’re going to get.

I know Harris’ problems. But it’s a little odd that the Michiganders who hate how Biden-Harris have not stood up for Palestinians think that Trump and Jared Kushner would be any more sympathetic. I find it hard to be believe that all the people who voted against abortion bans and supported state abortion rights in the midterms would go along with a guy who is going to support a national abortion ban. (And don’t say he wouldn’t. I actually believe that the guy who was in the Jeffrey Epstein Frequent Flyer Club doesn’t really care about banning abortion, and I can believe that the guy who had Elton John perform at his wedding party doesn’t really care about persecuting gays, but he caters to the people who DO.)

I have been asking myself over the past week or so: How is it that Ruben Gallego can be leading Kari Lake for the US Senate race in Arizona by 10 points in one poll, incumbent Democratic Senator Jacky Rosen is leading Sam Brown in Nevada by anywhere from 2 to 13 points, and incumbent Democratic Senator Bob Casey is leading David McCormick by anywhere from 2 to 8 points, yet polls in all three states show Trump either tied or leading?

Is Trump really that popular and Harris really that unpopular? I wouldn’t doubt it. After all Trump was unpopular enough that he lost to Biden even though Republicans made some downballot gains in 2020. But Harris is certainly not as repellent as Hillary Clinton, and neither is Biden, though you seem to be actively repelled by both of them while you almost seem to admire Trump’s skill (or chutzpah) and obviously admire Vance.

But the “Lamestream Media” wants to make this a horse race to the very end, and Nervous Nellies like you are part of the project. If anything that might help Democrats get out the vote. After all, everyone thought Hillary had it in the bag, and we know how that played out.

Like I said, Andrew, you should really apply for a job with Trump’s campaign, or apparently, his Cabinet. Cause you’re giving him better advice than he’s getting. Or seems to follow.

Or, Donnie can just go along like he has been, like going to the Detroit Economic Forum and telling all the people in Detroit what a terrible city Detroit is. At this rate, he’s gonna win Michigan by 5 points. Not because Trump is so wonderful or because Harris is so terrible, but because no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.

Does anybody remember laughter?

– Robert Plant, The Song Remains The Same

It is a truism that a major party’s political convention immediately boosts its standing in the polls for the general election. That was not as much the case for the Democrats in 2020, because they were observing COVID quarantine, and even with Republicans conspicuously avoiding quarantine for their convention, the mood was down, and their clumsy deification of Viceroy Trump didn’t help. And believe it or not, they went even further in that direction this year, and given that Trump almost got shot to death just the weekend before, it almost worked. But then he nominated would-be populist Senator JD Vance (BR.-Ohio) as his running mate, and then everybody realized he had no appeal outside the Trump base, and maybe not even with them.

And then, in the wake of Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance and Trump’s successful Jesus Christ Pose, President Biden actually agreed to do what people were telling him to do: Give up the campaign and switch endorsement to his running mate, Vice President Kamala Harris. And that gave the Democrats a kick, despite her lack of popularity and prominence up to then, because it was no longer a choice between two tired old white guys, either of whom might kick the bucket before 2028. And then, Harris chose as her running mate Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, who presents as a regular Midwestern guy much more successfully than JD Vance does, because unlike Vance, he IS a regular Midwestern guy. Not only that, he’s the guy who went on cable TV and casually described the Republicans as “weird”, and that’s somehow shifted the perception of them more than anything the Democrats have tried in over eight years.

And because of all that, whatever very slight momentum Trump/Vance might have had in the wake of their convention has completely evaporated, with Harris/Walz now leading in national polls and competitive in swing states that Biden was losing. And going into the Democratic National Convention, all the delegates that were previously won for the Biden/Harris campaign pledged themselves to Harris. So the question here is did this month’s convention give the Democrats the kick they needed to propel them to national victory in November?

Because to review, there is only ONE question that matters in the general election: Do you want Big Chief Ook-Ook Gorilla (formally known as Donald Trump) to be your absolute monarch, or do you want Trump to go to prison?

Those are the only choices, because Trump himself will allow no others. Because his own pride will not allow him to just peacefully retire like Hillary Clinton or George W. Bush. And because he has committed too many crimes, especially national security crimes, to be allowed to run free. And because he will not stop committing crimes, because he is a pathological criminal. It is patently obvious that Trump is running for president just to stay out of jail, and that means he has to be president for the rest of his life, term limits be damned. And because when the Supreme Court gave us Trump vs. United States, they enabled the President to commit any crime as an “official act” because they knew that if Donald Trump is back in office, he will not stop committing crimes. And when they used language that the president can act in ways ‘incompatible with the expressed or implied will of the Congress’, they are making it clear that the modern Right’s concept of government, Trump or no Trump, is explicitly at odds with the Constitution.

Stopping Trump is the ONLY thing that matters. Every other consideration, like, the fact that the cost of living is skyrocketing under Bidenomics and Kamala’s price controls are not going to help, is secondary. This is about whether we’re even going to HAVE an economy. This is about whether you’re even going to be alive. Or did you forget how many people died in 2020 from Trump Virus? ™

Night 1

It’s hard to say if there was an organizing theme to each night, the way the RNC was organized around one night being “Make America Safe Again” and another night being “Make America Monochromatic Christian Again” or whatever. In this case the DNC seemed to be organized simply around its keynote speakers for each night. It would have been Joe Biden concluding the convention with his acceptance speech, but of course that decision was made. So they gave him the keynote speech of the night, basically to confirm that he IS still the president of the United States and official leader of the Party – but things are moving on.

I wanted to listen to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’ speech, but I couldn’t get through it. Actually, from what I’ve read of AOC and seen of her interviews, she’s one of the sharpest people in politics right now, but her voice creates a certain amount of dissonance. Basically she sounds like one of those squeaky Gnomes from World of Warcraft. Really, imagine her saying “You have a great day now!”

During the evening, Michigan State Senator Mallory McMorrow brought out a gigantic prop, which was an oversized copy of the 900-page Project 2025 “Mandate for Leadership” document drawn up by conservatives. In fact, the DNC brought this up a lot. In fact, they even had Kenan Thompson from Saturday Night Live come on with the book Wednesday and interviewing people on video call to ask if they knew about some of its provisions, like eliminating civil protections for LGBTQ people. In fact, the DNC did a lot more to highlight the prominence of the Project 2025 mandate in their event than the RNC did the month before. Why is that, anyway?

They had several union guys come on to testify that Trump is a “scab” (which he is) and would be bad for labor, as anybody who heard his conference with Elon Musk could confirm. Most of the union guys who spoke were all wearing T-Shirts to the convention. This is a trend I can get behind.

However they also had a brief surprise moment where Kamala Harris made an appearance on the convention floor to give a brief speech. Given how this resembles Trump’s need to monopolize his own conventions, this is a trend I cannot get behind.

The other big event other than Biden himself was the speech from multi-accomplished former Trump opponent Hillary Clinton. Which, given the circumstances, was very much an “I told you so” thing, even if she was fairly gracious in saying that this was Harris’ moment to break the glass ceiling. Clinton still comes off as Pantsuit Palpatine to me, but it is testimony to Trump’s cosmic scale of evil and incompetence that she seems that much better a choice in retrospect.

At the end of all this, they had Joe Biden’s family members (not Hunter) come on to give remarks, and then President Biden come on for his bowing out speech. And the massive crowd held it up with cheers like “Thank You Joe!” Eventually, he proceeded, and you could see why it’s been decided that Joe is too old for politics, like the fact that he couldn’t look at the right camera most of the time. But his speech was at least as good as the last State of the Union, and when he recited the poem ending, “America, I gave my best to you!” that was a truly great moment.

Night 2

The main event in what passes for actual business in a major party convention is the roll call of the various states and territories, announcing their delegates and formally nominating the president and vice president. That was Tuesday. It is of course a total formality (like the entire national convention) when everything is decided in advance, but parties still keep this tradition because it allows people to come up and promote their state with speeches like, “Mr. Secretary, from the great State of Nevada, home of Reno, the biggest small town in the world, home of the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste suppository, and home of Las Vegas, the only city in the world where the hookers give out discount coupons.”

But this time, in addition to the secretary announcing the roll call, the DNC had an innovation: A DJ, who was dressed in a shiny blue suit and giant sunglasses like a gay Paul Shaffer. If that isn’t redundant. And this meant that each state got its own theme music, like Florida getting Tom Petty’s “Won’t Back Down”, Idaho getting the B-52s’ “Your Own Private Idaho” and of course, Nevada getting the Killers’ “Mr. Brightside.” The DJ party also set the stage for the surprise appearance of Lil’ Jon introducing the delegation for Georgia. The Democratic National Convention: Turn Down For WHUT?

The headline speakers of the night were both Michelle and Barack Obama, very appropriately, because while they are now old enough to be among the party elders with Biden and the Clintons, they remain as effective as ever on the podium. So after an emotive, call-and-response speech by Michelle, she introduced Barack, and by that point, the crowd were in his words “fired up” and “ready to go.” And not only did Barack Obama, like Biden, give an effective testimonial on the values and accomplishments of the Democratic Party, he peppered the speech with remarks (and at least one visual gag) belittling Trump. To me, Obama’s money quote was “We do not need four more years of bumbling, and bluster, and chaos, we have seen that movie before, and we know the sequel is usually worse.”

Which kinda brings up the question of what we would call Trump’s second term in office.

Trump 2: Electric Boogaloo

Trump II: The Wrath of the Con

Trump: The Secret of the Ooze

Abbott & Costello Meet Trump/Vance

Night 3

This night was the set up for Tim Walz to accept the Vice Presidential nomination. And the main attraction other than Walz himself was former President Bill Clinton, who is like Obama considered one of the great orators of the Democrats. Well, he was. Sorry, but good ol’ Bill’s voice is almost as shot as Robert Kennedy Jr’s, even if he’s clearly more on the ball than either Biden or Trump. Although I did like the part where he mentioned that Harris’ career in customer service made her the only presidential candidate who’s been in McDonald’s more than he has.

At least most of the speeches Wednesday were fairly brief, compared to Night 1. These included the aforementioned Thompson, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Andy Kim, New Jersey Congressman and Senate candidate most famous for volunteering to clean up the broken glass in the Capitol after the January 6 insurrection, and former Mike Pence staffer Olivia Troye. Along with the numerous other celebrities like Stevie Wonder who appeared, you had a central speech by Chicago’s own Oprah Winfrey, and while she pointed out that she was an independent, she made it very clear who she was voting for. In big, booming PRO-NOUN-Ci-A-TIOOONNS. Basically, Oprah was there to BE Oprah, and she did a very good job of that.

Before they had Tim Walz on, they brought on the players from the Mankato West High School football team where he’d served as an assistant coach, helping win the state championship in 1999.

Walz continues to come across as more approachable than most people in politics, including both Biden and Harris, let alone any of the Republicans. And in his speech, he continued to lean into his background, invoking his players as he gave a literal pep talk, saying that the Democrats are in the last play of the fourth quarter, down by a field goal, but they’ve got the ball. Like most of this convention, his speech did what it had to do.

To me, the two things that sold Tim Walz to me at least as much as his speech were: one, his son openly going crazy to see his Dad accept the nomination, and two, after the event, the Minnesota delegation stayed around for several minutes to wave giant cardboard Tim Walz heads, which I believe is a They Might Be Giants reference.

Night 4

And then of course we had the night for Kamala Harris. And there weren’t quite as many big names and they didn’t speak for quite as long. You had Senators Bob Casey and then Elizabeth Warren. The kind of person who would raise a cheer for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Al Sharpton came on with another one of the great visuals of the week, introducing four of “the Exonerated Five”, who had been arrested on suspicion of a violent rape in New York in 1989, at which point the media-seeking Donald Trump took out full page newspaper ads demanding the death penalty. The men were at one point convicted but then released years later when DNA evidence traced the act to a completely different man. But Trump has never apologized for his action, because reasons.

As cap off to the continuing parade of Republicans coming to the DNC to commit heresy against Our Lord and Savior, we had former Republican Congressman – from Illinois – Adam Kinziger come on. He said, “You never thought you’d see me here, did you?” And he told his fellow Republicans, “The Democrats are as patriotic as us.” (At which point the crowd chanted ‘U-S-A!’) And he made the direct point: The Republican Party is no longer conservative. It is a party in service to “a small man pretending to be big … a perpetrator pretending to be a victim.” There is a distinction between conservative and Republican because “Donald Trump has suffocated the soul of the Republican Party.” And he mentioned Ukraine and foreign policy, which a lot of observers have noted were not big subjects in the previous three days. And he said, “Democracy knows no party.” Well, the Constitution doesn’t, anyway.

We had another visual with Marine and Arizona Senate candidate Ruben Gallego appearing with a bunch of other veterans – including disabled Senator Tammy Duckworth – to present a contrast with Trump, who has praised our enemies and called veterans “suckers.” And after a bunch of other brief speeches, and testimonials on gun violence, and celebrity appearances, including Pink, they had Harris come on around 9:40 Central Time. And while I am not a big fan of her slow, almost preachy delivery, she hit all the right points.

She pointed out that not only is she now in a blended family (with Doug Emhoff and his children) but was raised by a single mom after her dad left and was raised partially with the help of a lot of other people who were not blood relatives. And that’s a situation a lot of Americans can relate to.

Harris made her case that in her California career, prior to becoming a US Senator, she was a prosecutor, and “for my entire career, I have had only one client, The People.” And this eventually placed her in contrast to Trump, whose only client has been himself.

She pointed out that Trump in the first half of his term did try to get rid of the Affordable Care Act, an Obama policy that was actually popular. She promised a middle-class tax cut (we’ll see) and she pointed out that Trump’s plan for a broad based tariff on goods is a “Trump Tax” that would pass down to all consumers. (Would that Democrats would admit that ALL taxes on production get passed down to the consumer. But it’s not like the Trump Republican Party is in position to argue that.)

She pointed out that in this country, pregnant women have developed sepsis and conditions that will prevent them from ever being able to give birth again, specifically because their states no longer allow abortion, which is a direct result of Dobbs vs. Mississippi, the Supreme Court decision that Trump frequently brags would not have been possible without his Court appointments. She also says that Trump is planning on a national abortion ban and other agendas like ending the Department of Education – which Trump has not explicitly endorsed, but many of his political backers have.

Harris said: “And let me be clear: After decades in law enforcement, I know the importance of safety and security, especially at our border. Last year, Joe and I brought together Democrats and conservative Republicans to write the strongest border bill in decades. The Border Patrol endorsed it. But Donald Trump believes a border deal would hurt his campaign. So he ordered his allies in Congress to kill the deal. Well, I refuse to play politics with our security, and here is my pledge to you: As President, I will bring back the bipartisan border security bill that he killed, and I will sign it into law.”

She pointed out that while she, and Biden, have sought to preserve America’s strength and alliances abroad, “Trump, on the other hand, threatened to abandon NATO. He encouraged Putin to invade our allies. Said Russia could ‘do whatever the hell they want.” She acknowledged the rights of both Israel and the Palestinians in Gaza.

She said, “Our opponents in this race are out there every day denigrating America, talking about how terrible everything is. Well, my mother had another lesson she used to teach: Never let anyone tell you who you are; you show them who you are.” She wound up saying “It is now our turn to do what generations before us have done, guided by optimism and faith: to fight for this country we love, to fight for the ideals we cherish, and to uphold the awesome responsibility that comes with the greatest privilege on Earth—the privilege and pride of being an American. So, let’s get out there. Let’s fight for it. Let’s get out there. Let’s vote for it. And together, let us write the next great chapter in the most extraordinary story ever told.”

It worked.

Conclusions

You may have noticed that I generally don’t have a high impression of Democrats. I am not a liberal. I vote Democrat only to stop Republicans. But that’s okay, I don’t need to have a high impression of Democrats. The problem is my impression of the American voter is even lower. After all, Trump DID win once, and 2020 was a lot closer than it ought to have been, with Republicans winning a lot of downballot races and then taking back the House in 2022. If things are as close as they were in 2000, we will get another Bush vs. Gore, and this Supreme Court is that much more nakedly biased towards Republicans than that Court was. If it doesn’t go there, Republicans can still try to move a contested Electoral College result to the House of Representatives, where according to Constitutional rules the votes are by state delegation, meaning Republicans will have a majority.

The only way to prevent that is actually to do what Biden did: win enough states by wide enough margins that the Trumpniks can’t whine and bitch and steal the election result in all of them. And even then, Trump tried to take the government by force, though I assume that will be harder now that Biden-Harris are running Washington and not Trump.

So if it seems like my analysis of these speeches is on the optics and how all of this is perceived, it’s because that’s the whole point. It all comes down to perceptions. For better or worse, a Harris Administration is not really going to have different policies than the Biden Administration. So what changed, and why the change? Because everyone thought that Biden was lost and confused at the Trump debate, and he probably was, but that could be because he was actually trying to make sense of Trump’s continual Gish Gallop instead of staying on message. This whole change is about perception. The idea that the implementation of policy is going to be different under a young, female Kamala Harris as opposed to a visibly aged representative of last century’s career politicians.

And in the sense of optics, I return to one of those quotes from Harris’ speech: “Never let anyone tell you who you are; you show them who you are.” Because that’s how a senile career criminal like Trump could smear Biden as crooked and senile, and do it so well that people are actually blaming him for everything bad that happened in his term, including Roe vs. Wade getting overturned. The fact that Harris was under the radar for most of Biden’s term actually turns out to be an advantage here, because Trump was so invested in branding Biden and forcing him to play his game that he never considered Harris and now she has the opportunity to set the agenda, and she has.

In that regard, it’s that much more remarkable that the DNC went as smoothly as it did given that they basically had to redo the whole thing from scratch after primary season while making sure that the delegates already pledged to Biden moved over to Harris. The professional, dramatic presentation with lots and lots of celebrities indicates that the kind of people who know how to put on a show were very helpful in regard to arranging things. You could say this is just another example of liberal Hollywood and liberal musicians showing their bias for the Democrats. Or, you could say this is the media doing penance for foisting Donald Trump on us in the first place by taking a multiple-bankrupt investor and presenting him as an actual billionaire through the premise of “reality TV”, two words that do not belong in the same galaxy, let alone the same concept.

As of the weekend, most of the polls state by state are still within the margin of error, and RFK Jr. has decided to endorse Trump. Not like the Fauci-engineered-mind-control-nanobots-in-the-vaccine-for-George-Soros crowd were going to be voting for Harris anyway. But every vote matters. If Harris is going to have a chance to stop Trump, she needs to keep the initiative and keep Trump on the defensive. Fortunately this Democratic National Convention shows that she and her team know how to organize an agenda, and that is good news for the coming stretch, and hopefully for a future Harris Administration.

Well. Let’s see who ELSE is up this late.

Technically, this election is not over, because a lot of the urban areas in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Georgia do not have all their votes in, but the problem is, Joe Biden is going to NEED those votes. At the very least, he’s going to need Pennsylvania.

So while there is not – yet – cause for despair, there is great cause for anger and depression.

This is NOT 2016. The Democrats had a candidate people liked, or at the very least didn’t have Hillary Clinton’s negatives. They had a huge amount of early voting, which is at this point the only thing that can save the election. Most importantly, it is that much more damn obvious what an evil incompetent Donald Trump is, and it ought to be obvious that we will not have an economic or coronavirus recovery as long as he’s president, because if he’s that half-assed about dealing with it now, how’s he gonna be when he no longer has to worry about the voters?

And YET, the Democrats didn’t get Texas, they didn’t get Florida. Nor was I expecting them to. But they didn’t get Ohio or Iowa, and they may not get North Carolina.

Worse, the overall weakness of the national results indicates that Democrats probably will NOT get enough Senate races to take that chamber.

And of course while Biden did the responsible thing and declared optimism at the eventual result, Trump – waiting until almost midnight Pacific time – decided to have a little news conference in which he declared that he was going to contest the election in the Supreme Court to keep votes from being counted, since apparently all the votes not yet tabulated are after Election Day even though they were in fact submitted by Tuesday. The childishness of this argument is demonstrated by the fact that the Trump campaign IS still contesting Arizona, where Biden is leading. But then, with Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court, who knows?

The only good thing about this is that, as pundits are saying, Trump has been telegraphing this approach for some time, and likewise the Biden campaign has been taking all this into account, which is why they focused on taking the Great Lakes and Pennsylvania from Trump rather than going for big but tough prizes like Florida. Likewise the talking heads on TV have been warning us for some time that it is not uncommon for election results (statewide and elsewhere) to not be resolved overnight, Your Favorite President’s decrees to the contrary.

It’s just that it shouldn’t have come to this point.

I can sort of understand Latinos in Florida coming in so big for Trump, since Cubans and Venezuelans actually ARE familiar with one-party socialism, and unlike either duopoly faction in this country, actually understand why it’s a bad thing. It’s just that right now the party closer to that endgame is the one that wants to control the economy and the borders, with a Maximum Leader who swims in corruption and praises dictators, including Communist ones. What I don’t understand is all the white and black (but really, mostly white) people who by now should really know better.

What the result shows even now is that a critical percentage of Americans – perhaps more than last time – are either too stupid or too fanatical to acknowledge the evidence of their own eyes, even with Trump Virus on track to kill over a quarter-million people in this country before the end of the year.

Even if you don’t like the Democrats, or even if Biden ends up winning, that is a very, very bad thing for this country.

Well… I’m gonna do a few things around the house, and then get to bed.

Wake me up when November ends.

So, as Halloween rapidly transitions to Dr. Tongue’s 3D Election (Ooh, scary, kids) we have some things to keep in mind.

At FiveThirtyEight, Nate Silver has all but wrapped up his own analysis of pre-election polls with his site giving Trump only a 10 percent chance of winning the election. It used to be at least 15%. “And if nothing changes at all in the polls, Biden’s chances of winning will nonetheless increase slightly by Tuesday morning in our forecast. That’s for two reasons: Trump is still receiving a tiny boost in our forecast based on economic conditions and incumbency, currently amounting to an 0.2-percentage-point shift. But this will fall to 0 percent by Election Day. Uncertainty in the forecast will also be slightly reduced when we actually make it to Election Day. ” Furthermore: “At the same time, though, a 2016-style polling error wouldn’t be enough for Trump to win. …I’ve taken our final polling averages in 2016 and shown how they compared to the actual results. And then I’ve shown what the results would be based on this year’s polling average if the polls were exactly as wrong as in 2016 in exactly the same states.

“Takeaway? Joe Biden would win. In fact, he’d win 335 electoral votes, including those in Florida, Georgia and Arizona. A lot of these wins would be close — he’d win by around 2 points in Arizona and Wisconsin, by and less than 1 point in Florida, Georgia and Pennsylvania, so he’d have to sweat a bit, but he’d win.”
Silver’s caveat: “And note that, with his 10 percent chance, our model is specifically referring to a legitimate win; we do not account for what we call “extraconstitutional shenanigans,” by Trump or anyone else, such as trying to prevent mail ballots from being counted.”

If you watch MSDNC, Steve Kornacki has been showing a national Electoral College map showing some states in the bag for Biden (the West Coast besides Alaska, Nevada, most of the Northeast besides Pennsylvania) and some in the bag for Trump (most of the Rocky Mountains besides Colorado and New Mexico, most of the Deep South) and other states (Arizona, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Texas, Ohio, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Georgia and Florida) as toss-ups. Without the toss-ups, Biden starts with a base of 232 electors. Trump starts with 125.

In a way this is telling, because it helps explain why Democrats, with 16 years between Bush v. Gore and the Trump election, didn’t do a damn thing to reform the Electoral College, because in large respect it still favors them. When it doesn’t, it’s because the Republican can win certain key states with lots of electors (other than California and New York, of course). This is also why Republicans think that dirt does vote, and why they’re so easily impressed by a 2016 election map that showed a sea of red states despite losing the popular vote by 3 million or so. Republican votes are spread out, except in Texas and Florida, and Trump won because some of those states Hillary Clinton was counting on, and normally would be able to count on, broke Trump’s way.

Of course this means the two campaigns have to focus on those states. Everyone’s been looking at the huge early vote in Texas, and thinking, ‘Oh, THIS is the year Texas turns blue.’ Well, they say that every election, they said it when Beto O’Rourke was running against Senator Ted Cruz, and every time it never actually happens, partly because of voter suppression schemes like Governor Abbott restricting ballot access to one station per county. However, the fact that Texas has already exceeded 2016’s total vote indicates the scheme isn’t working. Still, I feel safe in predicting that Trump is going to keep Texas.

Winning Texas is not the point, and I suspect Team Biden knows it.

The point is to be just competitive enough that Republicans will lose Texas unless they spend time and money shoring up a territory that would have been considered totally safe not long ago. And given that the Trump campaign has pissed away its campaign budget like a cokehead pisses away Atlantic City casino money, that means they have to perform triage and decide where they have to fight, because now they have to fight everywhere, but can’t.

The Republicans can keep Texas, and Florida, and maybe even Pennsylvania, but they would have to lose Minnesota and Wisconsin. If they do that, they may lose Iowa. They focus on those places, they may have Pennsylvania, Ohio and the Great Lakes, but they could lose Arizona and maybe even Florida.

They lose Florida, it’s probably over. They lose Texas, it’s REALLY over. As in, 1932 over.

Remember this: Officers study tactics. Generals study strategy. Real generals study logistics.

But again, none of this could matter, because Trump has one advantage that he didn’t before, which is that he IS the president and could use the office to cheat his way out of a lawful election in the same way that he’s bullshitted his way out of everything else.

MSN reproduced a guest column at CNN’s website (Fuck You, CNN) from Russian genius and Putin refugee Garry Kasparov in which he finds his former situation very much like this one:

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/win-or-lose-with-trump-prepare-for-the-unimaginable-after-the-election-opinion/ar-BB1azpu8?ocid=ientp

“Normal people don’t like to imagine terrible events, which is why autocrats consistently surprise them. (As when I wrote here back in April that it would seem logical to someone like Trump to try to sabotage the US Postal Service if he thought it could help his electoral chances. Unimaginable, until it happened.)

“You could make a very long list of things pundits insisted autocrats would never do that they eventually did. I made such a list myself, about Vladimir Putin. In my 2015 book, “Winter Is Coming,” I called it the “Putin would never” list. It included things like taking over private media companies, arresting Russia’s richest man for dabbling in politics and invading Georgia and Ukraine.

“Doesn’t Putin realize how bad this looks?” became the experts’ refrain after he crossed line after uncrossable line. As if he cared how things looked. Why should he? Dictators don’t ask “Why?” They only ask, “Why not?” They don’t stop unless someone stops them. No one stopped Putin.

“For years, my colleagues and I in the Russian democracy movement warned that Putin was building a dictatorship. Even when it was crystal-clear that Russian democracy and civil society had been gutted, the free world fiercely resisted acknowledging that truth.

“Putin laid bare the huge disconnect between autocrats and normal people — the autocrats’ ability to do things that simply don’t occur to people with a sense of decency and a respect for norms and traditions. Autocrats are aware of the consequences they might face for the damage they do, but they believe they can avoid those consequences by staying in power, forever if necessary. Trump might have been indicted several times over were he not protected by his office, and a sense of impunity tends to make one sloppy.

“Trump no doubt believes that he has more to lose by leaving office than by fighting — lawlessly or not — to stay. The oligarchs and thugs he so admires surely agree. They won’t easily let go of such a lucrative investment — one of their own kind in the Oval Office.

“Putin and Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, to name two, have surely reaped many benefits from Trump, beyond political ones. It will take years to untangle the web of his financial dealings and how the treasure and might of the United States was exploited to serve the President’s personal interests and those of his cronies.”

Which is why Trump really has no reason NOT to get his goons to intimidate voters, get his judges to throw out massive amounts of legal votes just cause they can, and get his handpicked Supreme Court to flat-out ignore all precedent and declare that the original intent of the Constitution is that Donald Trump can do anything he wants, not cause he’s the President, but because he’s Donald Trump. And then he’ll spend the next four years flashing that retarded toad grin and campaigning for TRUMP 2024: “Sure you’ll be dead of coronavirus by then, but before that, YOU’LL STILL GET TO MAKE LIBERALS CRY!!”

And that’s why pretty much everybody thinks the only way to shut down that possibility is to prevent it from happening in the first place, and that’s means you need a Democratic blowout. Problem is that the demographics in that sea-of-red Midwest will keep even the most wild Biden victory from being a 1984-level blow-out where Reagan was re-elected and Walter Mondale only won his home state of Minnesota. And now the polls in Iowa and Pennsylvania are tightening up: https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/politics/iowa-poll/2020/10/31/election-2020-iowa-poll-president-donald-trump-leads-joe-biden/6061937002/ “J. Ann Selzer, president of Selzer & Co., said while men are more likely to support Trump and women to support Biden, the gender gap has narrowed, and independents have returned to supporting the president, a group he won in 2016.

“The president is holding demographic groups that he won in Iowa four years ago, and that would give someone a certain level of comfort with their standing,” she said. “There’s a consistent story in 2020 to what happened in 2016.” But, she said, “Neither candidate hits 50%, so there’s still some play here.”

So given that Election Day itself still hasn’t happened, we have to hope that the early vote for both candidates is at least as much a factor as the Tuesday vote, and that said early vote favors Democrats.

Probably the only hope there is that Trump’s lookit-me-Mommee need for attention and his subsequent compulsion to keep holding rallies even after getting infected with Trump Virus himself have created supersoaker events that have, according to a Stanford study, led to 30,000 coronavirus cases traceable to the rallies with over 700 deaths. This includes people who were subsequently infected by contact with attendees, but it’s hard to say how many of them were Biden voters.

Oh sure, I shouldn’t wish death on anybody, but it’s not like anyone put a gun to these people’s heads and told them to go out and catch coronavirus just to show the rest of us how butch they are. Indeed, if anybody’s using weapons to threaten voters, it’s these guys.

And yet, with Trumpniks being so afraid of losing their object of ego identification, and Trump so afraid of indictment, you have to expect these people to fight like the cornered rats they lick, both at the ballot box and in the courtrooms. So a lot of these states – especially the ones both candidates need, like Pennsylvania – could be subject to legal hassles for weeks or months. Like Florida in 2000.

Christ Jesus on a pogo stick, is this gonna come down to fucking Florida AGAIN?

Well, that would make 2020 that much more 2020, wouldn’t it?

Yeah, I’m just gonna keep reposting this until everyone gets it.

Yeah, What ABOUT Ukraine?

I predict that tonight’s Big Speech will go one of two ways.

Either:

blahblahblah Mexico will pay for it whinewhinewhine Witch Hunt blahblahblah Liddle Chuckie Schumer blahblahblah

Or:

“I’m the King, nobody can stop me, I just declared martial law, Pelosi’s in jail, Hillary’s in jail, and we’re nuking Mexico in five minutes.”

So just in case I don’t get to talk to you again: so long, and thanks for all the fish.