James Gillen

No way to delay the trouble comin’ every day.

• Frank Zappa & The Mothers (of Invention) “Trouble Every Day”

I’m reading last year’s papers

Although I don’t know why

Assassins, cons and rapers

Might as well die

– Steely Dan, “King Of The World”

While the Cabinet nominations of President-inept Donald Trump continue to draw flak, it might actually be more newsworthy what the Trump team’s default “Plan B” is. Specifically, Trump’s most offensive pick, former Congressman Matt “Morrissey Called, He Wants His Hairstyle Back” Gaetz, withdrew from consideration when he failed to sway Republican Senators who had voted twice to acquit Trump during impeachment. But after that, Trump announced his backup choice, Pam Bondi, the former state Attorney General in Florida. Among other things, she had received a donation from Trump in 2013 and subsequently decided not to have Florida join a joint lawsuit against Trump University. But that level of corruption is par for the course these days. Otherwise Bondi is perfectly qualified for the job as well as totally loyal to the new order, and not so provocative that she draws the wrong kind of attention.

Now it seems like another Trumpnik, Fox News employee Pete Hegseth, may lose his appointment to Secretary of Defense after he turned out to be a full-time alcoholic with a television anchor hobby. According to several sources including Politico, Trump has several choices waiting in the likely eventuality that Hegseth also hits a wall in confirmation. The leading choice is Ron DeSantis, the Florida Governor himself. Given that he’s term-limited he has reason to seek higher ground. He also has real military and legal qualifications, having been a Navy officer and serving with JAG. And he’s also the guy who set the standard for making his home state an unassailable stronghold for Republican dominance.

I have not actually read Machiavelli’s The Prince, but there is an often-quoted section of it where the author says a prince may often improve his reputation by first appointing a ruthless official who accomplishes goals expediently but alienates the population, and when this happens, he simply gets rid of said official and appoints someone else without an obnoxious reputation who will be in his own way ruthless but more subtle. In this way the prince creates relief among his subjects. (The historical example in the text is Cesare Borgia.)

I’m pretty sure Trump has never read Machiavelli – I doubt he can spell Machiavelli – but I’m sure that supporters like Steven Bannon have, and they would be in position to advise Trump. But that raises the question of whether he would take the advice. Or why he would foist appointees who are obnoxiously bad even by Republican standards. It could just be that Trump is exactly what he appears to be, a pudding brain with less maturity or self-control than a five-year old.

This leads to another point. I am normally loathe to make direct comparisons between Trump and Hitler, mainly because they always make Hitler look better. But there is at least one obvious parallel. In Weimar Germany, after World War I, the political establishment was composed of bourgeois conservative parties and the Social Democrat left, which was being pressured by even more left-wing parties. And then you had the reactionaries (namely the military and industrialists) who were running things under the German Empire and who blamed the Left for losing the war even though they weren’t in charge of the government at the time. These groups saw Adolf Hitler as a lowlife rabble-rouser, but they could see his popularity and saw him as a vehicle to maximize their ends while minimizing Hitler’s. Specifically they sought evil and reactionary but feasible goals like suppressing dissent and re-militarizing the country, as opposed to Hitler’s crackpot goals, like, starting a war with everybody at once.

Well, in this country you have an unpopular bourgeois Left Democratic Party that is being pressured by even less popular “progressives” and directly opposed by a reactionary, Christianist Right that is even less popular than them. (For example, Mike Pence and JD Vance.) Donald Trump, an angry, popular demagogue, just happened to side with them and their party, and made his popularity synonymous with their success. And everyone in the used-to-be republican Party goes along with him because they see Trump as a vehicle for their evil, reactionary but feasible agenda (namely turning America into a Hungarian-style one-party regime) and not so much for Trump’s crackpot ideas (like invading Mexico or assimilating Canada).

The German reactionaries failed to control Hitler because his cult of personality was far too large and they needed him a lot more than he needed them. And that’s pretty much why no one in the Republican Party speaks out against the cult that it has become. But the difference may be that people are able to recognize how decayed Trump has become over nine years. Come to think of it, the German generals were starting to realize by 1943 how physically and mentally ill Hitler was.

Where was I? Oh yeah, it looks like the Senate isn’t waiting for Trump to start a war with every other power on the globe before they push back, because it’s increasingly likely he won’t be able to throw out the election system and declare himself President for Life before he dies of natural causes. Which at the rate he eats may be January. More likely the second “Administration” will wait about two years to suddenly declare that Trump is mentally unfit under the 25^th Amendment so that JD Vance can take over. Why two years? Because according to the 22^nd Amendment, a person can serve as president for a theoretical maximum of ten years, two four-year terms and up to two years after succeeding a president: “no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once.” The question then is whether that cult is going to go along with it. If the gambit works I’m not sure it would be better or worse than Trump surviving. If the stringpullers depose their figurehead they would have a more stable regime, but that would also make it harder to overthrow. If Trump continues to rule as a demented king, he might destroy the whole basis of his party’s support, but that would require him to do truly horrendous levels of damage to the country. As in, more than he already has.

And lest it seem that the Trump Party has a real mandate for any of this, let me again point out that Trump didn’t increase his vote totals much, if any, from 2020. He got a majority popular vote and swept the swing states because at least ten million people who voted for Biden and Democrats in 2020 stayed home this year. This election was at least as much a vote of no-confidence in the establishment as it was an assertion of MAGA theology. Which leads to a much more ominous event.

On December 4, 6:45 am in New York, United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson was on a street in New York on his way to an 8 am UHC investors meeting when he was shot and killed. The 8 am meeting went on as scheduled.

And from what I see of the social media reactions, no one is shedding a tear.

There are now several camera shots of the suspect which are being circulated and they all show a tall white guy wearing a hooded jacket and backpack, except that some pictures show the backpack with dark straps and others show it with light straps. So the suspect is a tall, thin, white guy with angular features, in a hooded jacket and wearing a backpack whose description varies according to the camera shot, and which he is no longer wearing.

I’m pretty sure whoever did it got this idea from that Timothee Chalamet lookalike contest they held in New York City recently. Hell, the assassin might be one of the guys from that contest. Hell, he might BE Timothee Chalamet.

Nobody wants to help catch this guy. And if they DID, all he has to do is wait four years and run for President.

Seriously, unlike most people I am NOT saying this assassination is a good thing. Protesting our extortionist healthcare system by shooting one of its executives would be like a 19^th Century person killing a plantation owner and thinking that got rid of slavery. That took Constitutional amendments. And of course a Civil War to force the issue on the people who wanted slavery in the first place.

The overwhelming Schadenfreude at the billionaire’s death, and the very fact that it happened, just indicates how many people in America have given up thinking that this system is going to protect the innocent. It doesn’t even protect its own. After all, this country had a chance to vote for a government that could have made things more progressive and equitable, and instead people chose, if only by inaction, to make the system exponentially worse.

Because they think, for good reason, that the “progressive” party doesn’t care about them, so they don’t care about it. And as I just said, when the law doesn’t apply to the powerful, it doesn’t apply to anybody, and the only way you can have justice is to get it yourself.

I am seriously starting to think that the only way to fix things, or even try, is to flush it all out and start from scratch. Let’s call it the US Constitution 2.0. Because you can’t expect Republicans to fix this system when it’s exactly what they want and you can’t expect Democrats to fix it when they did so much to get things to this point.

“The Force can have a strong influence on the weak-minded.”

– Obi-Wan Kenobi, Star Wars

Apparently on Sunday when President Biden pardoned his ne’er-do-well son Hunter it was such shattering news that they put it in the middle of football coverage. My question is: Why?

Because this is in contrast to a President-inept Donald Trump whose current pick for Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth, has been revealed according to his history as president of Concerned Veterans for America as having been “repeatedly intoxicated while acting in his official capacity—to the point of needing to be carried out of the organization’s events.” Another potential appointee, Charles Kushner, is picked by Trump to be Ambassador to France. Kushner, the father of Jared Kushner, was convicted of filing false tax returns and retaliating against a cooperating witness. Trump pardoned him before leaving office in 2021. What is the point of being mad about a Democrat’s use of the pardon power when Trump’s whole approach to staffing his administration is to hire guys who NEED pardons?

Whether anyone acknowledges this or not, half the point of this election was that people didn’t want their favorite reality TV game show host to go to prison. If that’s not a pardon, I don’t know what is.

But there are still Good Christians ™ on the Right and pearl-clutching Democrats who act like Hunter Biden’s pardon actually matters. To those people, let me put this as diplomatically as I can…

Fuck you. Fuck your Mom. And fuck you while you’re having your eyelids pulled up to watch your Mom getting fucked.

What it is is that you do not acknowledge that standards are a thing, and we have them for a reason. You do not acknowledge this because Donald Trump is apparently the only person in the world who could take a jet to Great Britain, barge into Queen Elizabeth’s estate, have her corpse exhumed and fuck it live in front of TV cameras, and have his opinion polls go UP. HE can do that. YOU can’t.

Hell, the reason he had to pardon Roger Stone and Paul Manafort and the other crooks is because they don’t have a magic mind control shield that tells everybody “You Can’t Punish Me, I’m a TV Star!!”

The fact that you can acknowledge there’s something wrong with Biden pardoning his own son means that you still theoretically think that standards apply to SOME people but not to your perfect little boy. At least Joe Biden didn’t hire Hunter for anything. Does anyone know what Jared Kushner’s job at the White House even WAS?

Did you think Trump was the only one who got to break the law and get away with it? That he was the only one who could shield his kids? That he was the only one who could give jobs to his friends and his cronies and the people who bribe him? No? Then why are you upset?

When people like me say, or used to say, that we have a rule of law, this is what we meant. Because laws are supposed to apply to everybody. If they do not, there ARE NO LAWS. When your perfect little boy can commit crimes and do as he pleases while the rest of us are supposed to obey the laws, on what standard do you justify that other than “he’s Donald Trump”? The answer is, there IS no standard, and therefore if the laws don’t apply to him, they don’t apply to US either.

Did you think Trump is immortal? That the gods sent him down from Heaven to establish righteousness among the nations and he will reign over us forever? That therefore the laws of man don’t apply to him? No. He is a mortal who has to live in the same reality of science and causality as the rest of us peasants. That’s why he almost died from coronavirus. Because while a virus may be mindless, it’s not so stupid to believe Donald Trump when he says it doesn’t exist.

When this talking shit stain is finally wiped off the shoe of the Earth, you will find that you’ve traded away reason and ethics and laws for a temporary idol and you will have nothing to protect you when someone even worse comes along. I should know, because I made that same point to Democrats during Monicagate, and they didn’t listen to me any more than you do.

Your standard is fraud. Your standard is grift. Your standard is crime. Your standard is Trump. And Joe Biden, recognizing the will of the people, has finally acknowledged this.

So any of you Fox News macho men, if you still want to get your panties in a bunch because Biden is finally acting on the standard that you rewarded, just consider: This is what you wanted. This is what you wanted the world to be like. Sit down, shut up, smile and be happy.

You got what you wanted. I hope you enjoy it just as much as I do.

As we continue to ruminate over how and why this country sodomized itself with a jackhammer this last election, I think it all comes down to an old saying: “Everything happens for a reason. And sometimes, the reason is that you’re stupid and make bad decisions.”

When I say here, ‘stupid’ I define stupidity versus intelligence and I define intelligence as being able to gather data, acknowledge it and act on it, including changing one’s actions if that is warranted by new information. Stupidity therefore is refusing to do what the facts are telling you is right. I don’t necessarily mean voters are stupid in that they’re uneducated. There are a lot of educated Trump voters. And I don’t mean you’re stupid just because you disagree with me. Look: It doesn’t matter what you think, it doesn’t matter what I think about abortion, or Ukraine or some other hot political issue, you have a right to your opinion, you have a right to your vote, and if you elect a guy that I think is reprehensible, that’s just the way the cookie crumbles.

Except:

When Trump sent a mob to the Capitol to “fight like hell”, stop the Electoral College certification and kill his own Vice President and Republican congressmen with a hanging scaffold that just happened to be there at a “peaceful protest”, that should have automatically disqualified him from any federal office. It did not because you wanted him there, and because the writers of the Constitution did not specify “No person shall be eligible for the office of President if he is both a raging hammerhead and an overgrown child with an emotional age somewhere between a sugared-up toddler and a 12-year old girl on her first period” because they thought it went without saying.

And then you said that the Biden-Harris economy sucks, and the Trump economy was so much better, so you voted for Trump despite everyone and his Mom – including conservative economists – repeatedly telling you that Trump has gone whole hog on broad-based tariffs, which major retailers have predicted will require them to raise prices.

That is not just disagreeable, that is playing Russian roulette with a machinegun.

One example of where I speak: New York Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, to her credit, had a video conference event where talked to her own voters and supporters after the election to ask what happened and why. And at one point she asked, how many of the people who voted for her also voted for Trump, and why. And one of the responses she got was to the effect of “I think that both of you are outsiders compared to the rest of DC, and less ‘establishment’.”

So you’re saying that ‘establishment’ is necessarily bad and ‘outsider’ is necessarily good? Because that’s what you’re telling me when you vote for both Ocasio-Cortez and Trump, two people who are certainly outsiders to their respective party establishments but who come from radically different perspectives and have nothing else in common. How would you expect two such people in the same government to negotiate and which would you want to prevail? Those are questions you need to answer instead of choosing labels over policies.

You cannot have it both ways, any more than you can vote for Trump on one hand and then vote for state initatives protecting abortion rights on the other. Because I think we all know in his artery-clogged heart that Trump really doesn’t care one way or another about stopping abortion, but if there is anyone he is still beholden to (outside of Russia) it’s the Evangelical community that now treats him like God on Earth. After all, with all the setbacks he’s had, he still won. (Thanks to you voters.) The Evangelicals are now just as drunk with power as Trump is, and they’re going to expect him to enact that national abortion ban. You could have stopped that. But no, you thought you could keep watching The Trump Show while still keeping abortion rights in your state, never mind all the red states you damned to Hell cause people voted in Trump the last time.

Here’s your sign.

Then here’s another example I’ve previously referred to, Bill Barr. Bill Barr actually has a brain. And earlier this year he was doing the tour of TV shows and interviews to hawk his new memoir, and he went into extensive detail about how as Trump’s Attorney General he saw how unqualified and erratic he is. And reporters would always ask Barr, who are you voting for? And he would always confirm that he was voting Republican, even if the nominee was Trump. Why? Because Biden would be worse.

Again: That is not morality. That is not even ideology. That is programming. That’s “I cannot vote for any non-Republican, no matter how much my intellect tells me that the current Republican candidate is wrong.”

Apparently to some people the prospect of another Biden term or a Harris presidency is so horrible that it’s worth having Dr. Oz running our health services. At this rate why not hire Dr. Phil as Surgeon General? His first name is “Dr.”!

People in this country don’t think, they react. They react to labels. They react to their programming.

They don’t actually go over the reasons why they believe what they believe, they just let other people define their terms for them, and then they act on those other people’s definitions.

Meanwhile, how is the “left” (which the woke Right describes as ‘anybody who disagrees with me and my Lord and Savior Trump’) going to respond to this? If you’re a Democratic Party official or member of the mainstream media (same thing), you probably have no idea. So I’ve seen a lot of people giving their hot takes as to how this happened and interviewing various people after the fact to find out why they voted the way they did, and what their motivations are. I say to those liberals:

No. Stop. Stop that.

You’re Trump whispering again.

Remember the last time this happened, you kept getting reporters to come out to Trump-voting neighborhoods and ask why they voted the way they did? Remember you did all those studies and articles, thinking, oh, if we only could get insight into the minds of Trump voters then we could appeal to them and correct course? No. Not happening. Joe Biden was the most pro-organized labor president we’ve had in decades, and organized labor pissed in his face.

What it is is that you good little liberals assume that because you have reasons for doing what you do, however flawed they may be, that you assume that other people are acting on reasons for what they do, which seem valid to them even if you disagree with them. No. The problem is that THESE PEOPLE ARE NOT ACTING ON REASONS. They are operating on feelings. Or what Stephen Colbert in his previous career presciently called truthiness – that is, believing in a thing not because it is actually true, but because it feels true – which is to say, I believe it because I want it to be true. Which feels better to me than fishing through the minutiae of context and facts.

Or as John Fugelsang put it recently, “the media doesn’t get that Donald Trump is the closest some red states will ever get to being able to vote for Boss Hogg.”

You cannot reason with such people any more than you can reason with the Joker. Some men just want to watch the world burn.

If you want to do some real soul searching and re-assessment, liberals, consider again that Trump did not actually increase his vote count from 2020, Kamala Harris only lost because she got at least 11 million votes less than Joe Biden did. Don’t try to Trump whisper the people who were never going to vote for you anyway. Consider why so many people who could have voted for you didn’t.

That is important insofar as you actually plan to be running things once you get elected, whereas Republicans are really good at selling themselves to get elected but always fall down on the ‘running things’ part.

But at the same time, while you actually want to have substantial policies if you win office, you need to sell yourselves to win, and you should admit by now that you can’t sell yourselves with substantial policies. Why? Because again: Americans, as a collective, are stupid.

The good news, sorta, is that Americans’ critical superficiality can work in your favor, and in fact has. Remember when Bill Clinton played sax on the Arsenio Hall show? Remember when Barack Obama won two terms? Nobody cared that the purchasing power of American workers was declining under Democrats, just as voters didn’t care that we’ve had a better post-COVID recovery than any other Western nation. Voters just care what looks good and feels good to them. And it’s pretty clear, again given the anemic vote for Trump and the fact that he won because Democratic voting was even more anemic, that Republicans are just running on the basis of a celebrity figurehead to get their way back in power, because no one cares about their substantial policies any more than people care about those of the Democrats. Which is why Republicans don’t have them.

All you need is another striking figure whom everybody loves and who is capable of competing with Trump on that celebrity level.

Taylor Swift IS 35 now, isn’t she?

It was surprising and sometimes consternating to find that notwithstanding the opportunities I had to learn the facts and despite one’s inherent distrust of what one learned from Nazi sources, a steady diet over the years of falsifications and distortions made a certain impression on one’s mind and often misled it. No one who has not lived for years in a totalitarian land can possibly conceive how difficult it is to escape the dread consequences of a regime’s calculated and incessant propaganda. Often in a German home or office or sometimes in a casual conversation with a stranger in a restaurant, a beer hall, a café, I would meet with the most outlandish assertions from seemingly educated and intelligent persons. It was obvious that they were parroting some piece of nonsense they had heard on the radio or read in the newspapers. Sometimes one was tempted to say as much, but on such occasions one was met with such a stare of incredulity, such a shock of silence, as if one had blasphemed the Almighty, that one realized how useless it was even to try to make contact with a mind which had become warped and for whom the facts of life had become what Hitler and Goebbels, with their cynical disregard for truth, said they were.

William Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

Well.

As I keep saying: God is real and he hates us all.

Either that or as I also said last time, either somebody ginned the election returns like Maduro did in Venezuela or the average American voter is too stupid to find their face in a mirror.

Judging from the US Senate results, I’d say the latter.

And I could say that a country that was too sexist to elect Hillary Clinton is too sexist and racist to elect a woman “of color”, but then why did so many women and Hispanics vote Trump? Even AFTER the Puerto Rico shit? You can bitch all you want about the Electoral College, but again, Republicans won the Senate, fairly clearly. The Electoral College has nothing to do with that. Hell, at the end of all this Trump might have the popular vote.

I think what it comes down to is, once again, the media making this a horse race between an entertainer and a bureaucrat, where the entertainer has a natural advantage. Not only that, the impression was given that the Democrats had a get-out-the-vote operation and the Republicans didn’t.

It’s one thing for Trump to win, since everybody was saying this was a coin flip, but in the next few months before the Ministry of Truth is established, we need to analyze exactly how he won THIS big.

I saw a Vlad Vexler commentary on YouTube in the aftermath of this election, and he was pondering what exactly we need to consider as to how we (the center-liberal people) could have let things come to this. And my response was, what is there to understand? After all we have learned about Trump, after we have seen him visibly deteriorate, after we have seen what is waiting in the wings if he dies in office, we (well, not me) elected him again? Why?? Was it all just “Fuck the Democrats”? I mean, I can kind of understand that. But it’s not enough. Just as the evil and incompetence of the Republicans is independent of the fact that Democrats are inadequate even by leftist standards, the fact that Democrats are inadequate is independent of the fact that Republicans are not only evil but objectively unfit to govern, because as in socialist countries, the evil of their ideology is going to dictate policy that is totally in conflict with reality. And whatever my misgivings with the Democrats, that was the reason I voted for them.

I cannot even say that I am sorry. What is there to be sorry for? I did what I could.

I am mad. Because anybody who claims to care about the world we’re in and voted for the Trump Party anyway made the world worse. We let the Middle East down. We let Ukraine down. We let Taiwan down.

This is a world of consequences. You cannot, say, tell everybody that abortion rights matter, and vote for abortion rights initiatives and then elect a government that is going to make the Dobbs decision nationwide. Contrary to what Trumpniks believe, reality exists and causality exists. And the reality and consequences of their actions WILL come back on them just as they did in 2020. The problem is they will also come back on the rest of us. It will mean that more people, in this country and throughout the world, will die who didn’t have to die. We know those are the stakes because that is what happened.

Seriously, fuck this place. The Republican Party quit being a republican party. The Libertarian Party quit being a libertarian party. And America just quit being America.

The only thing I can say as encouragement for the next four years – or however long this lasts – is that America is, or is supposed to be, a country of individuals. It doesn’t matter if the collective has decided to be stupid and illogical. If you are still an individual – if YOU are still America – then America still exists.

Up til this weekend, every election poll has had the race still tied between Vice President Kamala Harris and once-and-future Viceroy for Russian North America Donald Trump. But apparently because Trump has so much built in support, from his Party, the “liberal” media and his cult of apes in pants, he figured he could afford a few unforced errors.
Like, when he went back to New York, a state he will never win, and held a Sunday rally in Madison Square Garden in New York City, for some reason, and the first speaker was a “famous” podcast comedian that I’ve never heard of until now telling jokes about the fecundity of Puerto Ricans and saying their homeland was a floating island of garbage. And at least he could make the excuse that he was using roast humor. The other guest speakers, who used various slurs for Harris and called her campaign staff “pimp handlers” weren’t even as funny. But apparently it’s the garbage comment that everybody fixated on. So in his when-you’re-in-a-hole-dig-to-China way, Trump decided to embrace the image by wearing a garbageman’s orange reflective vest to a campaign event. Cause apparently he didn’t look orange enough. You know he’s a professional garbageman cause he still had his tie on. He also decided to make the metaphor even more perfect by bringing out a white garbage truck with the Trump/Vance logo on it. And then he flubbed it by trying and failing to get in the cabin, displaying further evidence of his deteriorating motor skills.

And in this one speech Friday in Arizona, he got so frustrated at a bad microphone that he started doing the hawk-tuah like he was simulating oral sex on it. So Trump must think he’s going to win. He’s already rehearsing for his next meeting with Putin.

But otherwise, with everything we now know at this point, if Trump wins it is either because they ginned the results the way Maduro ginned the results in Venezuela, or because the American public as a whole is too damn stupid to find their faces in a mirror.

There’s a reason that the media is only focusing on a few swing states: Cause all but seven states are pretty much spoken for. If you look at, say, 270towin.com, it’s got Harris listed at 226 electoral votes cause those are the states that are pretty much sure to vote Democratic. Like, you know most of the Northeast and the West Coast are going to go blue. Trump is listed at having 219 votes. Because Alaska and most of “flyover country” are guaranteed to go Trump. Democratic Senate candidates in Texas and Florida are making a serious challenge, but ultimately, both states are going to go Trump. After all, if one of them did go Democratic, that would be the end of the election. If both went Democratic, that would be the end of the Republican Party.

Allan Lichtman’s final analysis for the Electoral College map shows Harris winning with the following spread on the remaining swing states: Trump gets Arizona and Nevada. That’s 17 Electors. Pennsylvania is still up in the air, which it probably would be given the amount of time it takes to get the votes. But Harris gets Wisconsin, Michigan, North Carolina and Georgia. Now, if Harris got Wisconsin and Michigan that’s 25 Electors. If she got Pennsylvania that’s 19 more and that would be 270 by itself. Of course that still won’t be enough because the Trumpniks will try to contest the results everywhere and if she has only that many, flipping one state would be enough to deny the election. Which is why North Carolina and Georgia going blue is important. I personally think Pennsylvania is more likely to go Democrat than North Carolina, but North Carolina is almost even money at this point. Georgia is always the wild card. It’s been red for some time and has a Republican government that has done a lot to restrict voting, even if it isn’t quite as Trumpnik as the governments in other red states. Yet voter turnout (and the repellent nature of local Senate candidates) has caused federal elections in Georgia to go to the Democrat the last few times.

And speaking as a Nevada native, frankly if I were a Harris campaign staffer looking at the Electoral College map, I’d say North Carolina for Nevada is a great trade.

And then there was the news that everyone on the Internet was going on about, where a major poll Saturday by Anne Selzer showed Harris leading by 3 in conservative Iowa. At the same time, more sober prognosticators don’t think Harris is actually going to win Iowa, but the telling thing is that a reputable pollster is showing her gaining and potentially winning a state Republicans can usually take for granted.

Maybe, contrary to what the media is telling us, Americans don’t want a country where Elon Musk is running economic policy, Robert Kennedy Jr. is running the health system and a rapist is deciding whether we have a national abortion ban.

My bet would be similar but not quite the same as Lichtman’s: Arizona and Nevada go Trump, although there’s a possibility that the popularity of the Democratic Senate choices in those states might carry Harris. Pennsylvania goes Harris, though that may take days to determine after Tuesday. North Carolina goes Trump, though that may take days. Georgia goes Harris. Again, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania would be just enough for Harris to clinch and if she gets either NC or GA, that would cement the victory, and if she gets both, or gets one of those plus either or both of AZ or NV, that would really cinch it. Remember, we all knew in 2020 that Trump wasn’t going to admit if he lost, and Biden won mainly because he won enough states by wide enough margins that Trump couldn’t steal anything by recount or state government interference, and as it turned out, none of the states he contested after Election Day went back to his column. That looks like what we’re going to see here.

All that being the case, I’m more interested in seeing how everything plays out, how quickly it plays out, and, just as important in the long term, who wins the Senate. Part of the reason I’m more optimistic about Harris is that Democrats in Senate races – especially Colin Allred in Texas – are polling a lot better in their races than Harris polls against Trump. And while there is always cross-voting it’s a little hard to believe that people who are voting for Democrats in downballot races are that disinclined to vote for Harris. (Just as, Democratic optimists not withstanding, it’s a bit hard to believe that all those rural Republicans in Nevada are flooding the early voting lists so that they can vote in Harris.) I’m also interested in seeing how the state election Questions, especially Nevada Question 3, turn out.

But still, we can never assume that Trump is done for or that he’s not going to win this election. Always remember: God is real, and he hates us all.

The Nevada mail-in ballots finally came in the mail this weekend. I got to look them over on my day off and now I’m taking my ballot in to the drop-off site.

Hey kids, guess what day it is? It’s FUCK TRUMP DAY!

But as I do during elections, I want to go over the various ballot questions each cycle in Nevada, just in case anybody is reading this. And I want to do that before going over the partisan races, because there is less and less suspense each election cycle as to which party to vote for.

Question 1: Shall the Nevada Constitution be amended to remove certain provisions governing the Board of Regents of the Nevada System of Higher Education and its administration of the State University and certain federal land grant funds to provide additional legislative oversight of public institutions of higher education through regular independent audits, without repealing the current statutory election process or other existing statutory provisions relating to the Board of Regents?

So right here, you’re going to see that you will need to consult the election sites – I recommend Ballotpedia – to go over these ballot initiatives, cause the first two at least are wordy, vague and confusing as all hell. Almost as if they were phrased to inspire a negative result.

The Nevada Board of Regents, under the state constitution, is an independent entity that governs the state’s university system, whose members are elected by the public. According to Ballotpedia, a “Yes” vote would remove the Board as a protected entity under the state constitution and render it subject to oversight from the state legislature. The actual amendment would affect Section 4 and Section 8 of Article 11 of the Nevada Constitution, removing Section 7 entirely.

There are points to be made on either side of this, but I voted YES on Question 1, because anybody who pays attention to state politics knows that this particular body is one of the more clear examples of bureaucratic misuse of power. And it’s not like we’re getting much for it.

Question 2: Shall Section 1 of Article 13 of the Nevada Constitution be amended to: (1) revise the description of the persons who benefit from institutions that the State is required to foster and support; (2) replace the term “institutions” with “entities”; and (3) add entities for the benefit of persons with intellectual or developmental disabilities to the types of entities that the State is required to foster and support?

This is another case of vague phrasing where the question is fairly straightforward if you already know the context. The amendment refers to phrasing in state law regarding the care of disabled persons, changing the term “institutions” to “entities” because the former word has a punitive or carceral association. Likewise the wording of the actual amendment removes “the Insane, Blind, Deaf and Dumb” from Article 13 of the Nevada Constitution.

Basically, this is changing the phrasing to more politically correct language. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing. For one example, “idiot” was once a clinical term for patients of subnormal intelligence, but is nowadays just considered an insult. So since this will be of some benefit and do no harm, I voted YES on Question 2. It’s the sort of thing even Republicans can get behind, given that they have been increasingly described with words like “insane”, “dumb” and “idiot”, so continuing to use these terms in a clinical context may make them feel like they’re singled out.

Question 3: Shall the Nevada Constitution be amended to allow all Nevada voters the right to participate in open primary elections to choose candidates for the general election in which all voters may then rank the remaining candidates by preference for the offices of U.S. Senators, U.S. Representatives, Governor, Lieutenant Governor, Secretary of State, State Treasurer, State Controller, Attorney General, and State Legislators?

I voted YES on Question 3. I have already gone into great detail as to why I advocate it. But let me make one more point here: We are going to need an alternative to closed primary rounds in partisan elections, not just in Nevada, but in America, because one way or another, after this election, we really won’t have a two-party system anymore. Either Trump will become God-Emperor, and Democrats will be house slaves for the plantation at best, or Trump will lose, and what used to be the Republican Party will lose that much more of its credibility, perhaps permanently. So you’re going to need a process in which an increasingly independent, non-partisan voter base can review candidates without thinking that their party affiliation will matter, because after this year, it won’t.

Question 4: Shall the Ordinance of the Nevada Constitution and the Nevada Constitution be amended to remove language authorizing the use of slavery and involuntary servitude as a criminal punishment?

Much like Question 6 (below) this is a case of state advocates heading off a changing federal standard. In fact the current wording deliberately parallels the US Constitution’s 13^th Amendment Section 1: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” That middle “except as a punishment for crime” part has historically been used as a loophole to enforce compulsory labor by another name, and in that regard it’s no surprise that the land of the free has 20 percent of the world’s prisoners, and why both Blacks and Whites each make up 40 percent of the prison population even though at the time of study Whites were 64 percent of the American population and Blacks were 13 percent.

Therefore, several states, not just Nevada, have been petitioning to remove the “punishment for crime” clause of their constitutions that forbid slavery. In the context of history, I voted YES on Question 4. Anything that makes this country less of a police state is a good idea.

Question 5: Shall the Sales and Use Tax Act of 1955 be amended to provide an exemption from the taxes imposed by this Act on the gross receipts from the sale and the storage, use or other consumption of diapers?

This is one of those things where you have to get into policy and revenue. It’s fairly relevant. During the presidential campaign Trump declared that he was going to get rid of federal taxes on tips, which is an obvious pander to labor in general and Nevada workers in particular. Harris, who is just as shameless in her own way, quickly followed suit. All of which raises the question of the consequences, such as, wouldn’t businesses just change all jobs to tipped labor, or how you’re supposed to cover the lost revenue.

This gets into the broader question of how taxes are applied. “Progressive” leftist policy has generally been to soak the rich and impose ever-increasing nets of taxes on the grounds that those who have more income can pay more. Trump, meanwhile, is now besotted with the idea of broad-based tariffs on all foreign goods, which are essentially taxes on import businesses that inevitably pass down to the consumer. He and some other right-wingers have stated that US tariff policy in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries were able to produce prosperity and government revenue without a personal income tax. However the costs to the consumer were such that they helped justify the federal income tax amendment, while later tariffs, such as the Smoot-Hawley Tariffs, led to trade wars that were a direct factor in the Great Depression.

So it’s one thing to say taxes should be this or so high, but it matters where they are derived and whom they affect. I voted YES on Question 5. It is of course a question on how the State will make up the revenue from diapers, but they ought to be able to get it without grabbing at young mothers or senior citizens.

Question 6: Should the Nevada Constitution be amended to create an individual’s fundamental right to an abortion, without interference by state or local governments, whenever the abortion is performed by a qualified health care professional until fetal viability or when necessary to protect the health or life of the pregnant individual at any point during the pregnancy?

Pros: Why not?
Cons: Why THE HELL NOT?

Question 7: Should the Nevada Constitution be amended to require voters to either present photo identification to verify their identity when voting in-person or to provide certain personal information when voting by mail ballot?

In other words, this is the “Voter ID requirement” question. I voted NO. It’s not that big a deal, since most of us have ID, but by the same token, it raises the question of why we need this. Especially since the state already mandates sending mail ballots and that in turn indicates that the state has already verified you as a voter. Really, what this is is another attempt by the Trump Party to corner the market. Since they can’t win by majority vote, they have to change the definition of “majority” and pick the voters instead of the other way around. This is especially obvious since, again, we have mail ballot voting and that is designed to address many of the legitimate voter ID issues. The second matter of “provide certain personal information when voting by mail ballot” just makes it that more obvious that they’re looking for a pretext to throw out politically incorrect votes. Now that I think about it, I shouldn’t have voted No, I should have wrote in FUCK NO.

Speaking of the Trump Party, this is where I have to get to the partisan federal races. And obviously, I recommend that people vote for Kamala Harris and the Democrats all the way down ballot. Not cause they’re any GOOD, but because they’re not robots of a Sundown Clown and Russian tool, and those are the only two parties that have a chance of winning. That being the case I shouldn’t need to go over the bleeding obvious, but given the polls in this country, and Nevada in particular, apparently I have to.

And that means I have to address the Republicans first. The only reason that things are this fucked up. Not just in this election, but, in analysis, on almost any other public issue you could raise.

It used to be there were a lot of issues I could agree with you on, but in retrospect it seems to me that there used to be issues that you agreed with me on. Like just for one, having a frothing mob of collectivists trying to break into the Capitol to stop an Electoral College certification just cause they didn’t like the result is a bad thing. And you know this cause I’m sure that in 2017 if all the leftists in pink pussy hats had broken into the Capitol waving Soviet flags and screaming to kill Joe Biden for certifying the vote, you’d be screaming bloody murder and demanding that the people who put them up to it be tried for treason. And I’d be there with you. But when the thugs are waving the Stars and Bars, and it’s your hero they’re doing it for, merely trying to impeach him over the affair isn’t just taken as a personal insult to you, but as blasphemy to your god. And apparently the rest of us are supposed to be okay with that, cause Trump is still getting to run.

So please don’t tell me that the system is rigged against you, please don’t tell me you don’t have a choice, and PLEASE don’t tell me that this is a republic and not a democracy. Because a, you don’t want this to be a republic, and b, it clearly is a democracy. Donald Trump tried to destroy the Electoral College process itself, and he’s still getting to run for president. This is not a country where candidates run on qualifications, but on popularity. The only reason a demented career criminal gets to run as a major party candidate for president is because you wanted him there. Despite all the evidence against him on performance and all the expert opinion telling you that he shouldn’t be sent back to the White House and would be better sent to prison.

Because liberals, if you want to know why we have an Electoral College, it’s because the Founders didn’t want stupid, emotional people deciding who is the next president. And conservatives, if you want to know why we need to get rid of the Electoral College, it’s because that institution is the only reason that that result ever occurred.

Now given the weight of factors, especially the early turnout in places like Georgia, I have reason to believe that Harris will eventually win the right number of Electors, but I can’t be certain that she will win state majorities big enough to avoid serious challenge by various Trump Party organizations, most notably the House of Representatives (which would vote for Trump if the Electoral College is hung) or the Supreme Court, which has intervened for Republicans before.

And that just gets to the point that the problem isn’t just Trump, but an entire party that follows him as a political role model. Because as I’ve said, if he didn’t have a cult that wanted him in politics, he’d be just another ratty old bum at the gas station screaming conspiracy theories at you while begging you for change. At least he’d have an excuse for that haircut.

So, Republicans, believe me when I say this. From the bottom of my heart:
Fuck you.

Fuck y’all.

All y’all.

Up the ass.
Fuck your entire party with John Holmes’ dead, AIDS-ridden dick.

So now liberals, Democrats, all of that means that if you don’t want even more violence, if you don’t want Dobbs vs. Mississippi all over the country, on steroids, if you don’t want JD Vance waiting in the wings for when Trump swallows a chicken bone sideways, quit ANY AND ALL OF YOUR FUCKING EXCUSES for why you don’t feel like voting for Harris or voting at all. I don’t care. You think the Palestinians are getting screwed with Biden, you’re gonna love when Trump brings Jared Kushner back to handle Mideast policy. If you’re Hispanic, and you think the Trump economy was better, you’re not going to enjoy it, cause he’s gonna deport you. What? You’re a citizen? You were born here? It won’t matter. I don’t care if you think the economy sucks. I don’t care if I think the economy sucks. Just vote. And get everybody you know who’s not already a Trumpnik to vote Democrat with you, because that’s what it’s going to take to keep the gangster party from stealing this. Make it clear that they will not be able to gin enough states to change the outcome. There are more of us than there are of them, and if we do not wish to live under occupation, we need to prove it once and for all. Just vote. If you’re in Chicago, vote twice.

Vote, Goddammit. Vote these Trump slugs out. ALL of them.

Vote like it’s the last time you’ll ever get the chance.

Just in case.

The last presidential debate (with Kamala Harris) reamed Donald Trump about as hard as his behind-the-scenes meeting with Vladimir Putin at Helsinki in 2018, and I don’t think he enjoyed it as much. In fact, the only reason that that debate didn’t kill Trump’s campaign the way the Biden-Trump debate killed Biden’s campaign is that Biden was running mainly to keep Trump from being president again, so once he became a liability to that, he deferred to his running mate, whereas Trump is running mainly to stay out of prison. So given that Trump is just as timid in regard to a rematch as he was with Putin at Helsinki, the main suspense in the 2024 race came from anticipating the vice-presidential debate of October 1, between Vice-President Harris’ running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, and Trump’s running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio.

I did not really get to see it, because I work from home, and as is often the case on Tuesday evening, and especially on the first day of the month, the entire population of North America was maniacally cramming the call queue like it was a 24-hour McDonald’s drive-thru and emergency calls were Big Macs.

The most controversial aspect of the whole thing was that after ABC anchors made some mild fact references against Trump in his last debate, the Trump Party worked the ref in complaining about “bias”, and the mainstream media, as it does, caved. CBS announced prior to the event that their journalists, Norah O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan, would not engage in live fact-checking. Which as at least one comedian put it, is like running an NFL game without referees. But this was probably because CBS assumed that if the journalists had to ask questions AND fact check Vance, they’d be there till Election Day. This was not a very good idea. Especially towards the end of the debate when Vance said it was rich that Walz was calling Trump a unique threat to democracy when he peacefully left office like every other president in history. AFTER January 6. Saying Trump peacefully left office after that is like asking Mrs. Lincoln, “Other than that, how did you like the play?” In fact earlier, when Vance continued to blame illegal immigrants for the problems in Springfield Ohio – after he and Trump were brought up on charges for harassment and menacing by a Haitian community group – CBS moderator Margaret Brennan said, “And just to clarify for our viewers, Springfield, Ohio does have a large number of Haitian migrants who have legal status, temporary protected status”, Vance immediately complained, “Margaret, the rules were that you were not going to fact check and since you’re fact-checking me, I think it’s important to say what’s actually going on” – and this led to so much cross-talk that CBS cut the candidates’ mics. Which only confirms that Vance and the used-to-be Republican Party saw the no-fact-checking pledge as intended to be in their favor, which in itself is an indication that they see an advantage in lying.

You would think, given that Walz was the guy who popularized calling Trumpniks “weird” and was on board with that whole JD Vance/Couch thing, that he would be at least as forceful as Kamala Harris was in her debate, but the impression I got from commentators was that he was too “Minnesota nice.” Whereas Vance made a positive impression not so much by real virtues but the simple fact that he is not Donald Trump, does not mug for the camera when the other person is talking and does not act like a brain-damaged orangutan, only without the maturity and sense of grooming. As one pundit put it, maybe Walz was assuming that if he really ragged Vance, when Vance does a better job of presenting as a Homo sapiens than Trump does, it might backfire. Indeed, most commentators were pleasantly surprised that this debate marked a return to mutual civility. Which is good in and of itself, but not so good when both sides agree that the enemy is going to destroy the republic and one has a lot more evidence for that theory.

Walz did at least get the line of the night, in reference to that last election that JD seems to think went swimmingly, when he said, “When Mike Pence made that decision to certify that election – that’s why Mike Pence isn’t on this stage.”

One thing I saw on MSDNC after the fact was where they had a group of college voters and exactly one of them said he got a better impression of JD Vance from the debate, and even then he phrased in terms of Vance coming across a lot better when he has time for preparation.

But given that CBS by and large did not fact check Vance’s smarmy bullshit, and Walz was mostly not inclined to do so, this just confirms my suspicion that the media is setting this up to be a horse race to the very end, despite the fact that the Democratic ticket is composed of normal people with political credentials and the opposition is composed of JD Eyelashes and King Bingbongbingbangbing.

On presentation it was a draw. On substance, it was leaning Walz. Walz started slow but frequently made eloquent cases in his favor and against the Republican position, even if a lot of us thought he could have gone for the jugular. Meanwhile JD Vance came off as just presentable enough to be an acceptable substitute for Donald Trump as President should Trump keel over and die, which I imagine Republicans are praying very hard to happen right now. But then again they have probably given up assuming that God will answer their prayers, since Trump is still alive.