Category: Politics

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.

So of course after Labor Day, the political ads are out in force. The other day I saw one of the few non-attack ads, where they were promoting Kamala Harris for President. The ad announced, among other things, that Harris is going to be the first president to push for a program of national price controls. (Not quite true.)

And I thought to myself, “But I don’t WANT price controls. I don’t think they work.” Any more than Trump’s wonderful “plan” to shift from income taxes (on the rich) to national tariffs (affecting goods for the middle class and poor) is going to work either.

But how we should run the economy or how government should get revenue are policy matters on which people can agree to disagree. But since 2016, one of these parties, the Democrats, is run by the sort of career politicians that MAGA populists justifiably rail against, but they’re still trying in their own way to keep the system running.

Meanwhile since 2016, the only opposition presidential candidate is a racist, convicted felon, also found guilty in a defamation case involving sexual assault, only three years younger than Biden but still has half as many brain cells, and at this point everything he says is like a turn in Cards Against Humanity. “I have a Plan to save Isreal from Hamas and it involves DAVID BOWIE RIDING A TIGER MADE OF LIGHTNING! Meanwhile, cause of Komrade Kamala, immigrants in Springfiled Ohio are filming TWO MIDGETS SHITTING IN A BUCKET!!!!”

And in his (Republican) party, there may indeed still be some people I like. Such as Joe Lombardo, the current governor of Nevada, who was a fairly good Sheriff in the Las Vegas area. Or Sam Brown, who’s running against incumbent Democrat Jacky Rosen for US Senate. Brown literally went through fire in Afghanistan, was permanently scarred but rebuilt his life and became a success. (This would also mean he’s one of those veterans Trump wouldn’t want to be seen with, cause ‘they’re either in very bad shape because they’ve been hit so many times by bullets or they’re dead.’) But I didn’t vote for Lombardo as Governor and I’m not voting for Brown as Senator, cause they’re both in the Trump Party, and that means that they have to do any fool thing that Trump wants if they wanna stay in the He-Man Woman Haters Club.

And just as Trump’s tariff position means that no longer are Republicans the fiscal conservative party (to the extent that they ever were) there aren’t any good alternatives in “third” parties even if you could somehow wish that your vote was the only one that counted and wouldn’t be cancelled by everyone else in your state. For years, I was a vocal Libertarian, but in the past few years alleged purists took over because they saw how Trumpism had purged all the moderate conservatives and gay-tolerant people in the Republican Party and brought them into the Libertarian fold. These are the same people who in 2022 killed the Libertarian Party position that “we condemn bigotry as irrational and repugnant” because apparently they wanted to attract bigots, not to mention the irrational and repugnant. Some of these people were sincerely trying to purge the “normies” but others were more openly aligning the party towards Putin’s Russia. That’s why the “free thinkers” in party leadership invited Donald Trump to the 2024 LP convention, where he openly demanded that they nominate him. That’s why the Party leadership is not supporting their own nominee, Chase Oliver, because he isn’t on board with the new agenda. Even though Party Chairwoman Angela McArdle tried to rationalize the party’s rejection of her favored candidate by saying the goal is to stop the Democrat (at the time, Biden) and get Trump elected. The irony being that in getting rid of the right-wingers who rejected Trump in order to recruit the “freethinkers” who like Trump, the LP is either not going to get any votes at all (because the fans already have Trump) or they will attract voters who might prefer Trump to Harris and therefore make a Trump victory less likely. Which is why the “freethinkers” got Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to drop out.

And then you have Jill Stein’s Green Party, which always WAS a fellow traveler.

So pretty clearly the party politics structure is not working, even for those parties outside the duopoly. In the case of the Democrats, it’s easy to see why. Government is their business. One might say racket. And they’re trying to protect their institution. But in the case of parties more motivated by ideology, namely the Republicans and Libertarians, it becomes a question of what you have to do to be a party member. In the case of the Republicans, if you believed in certain things, like being “pro-life” and pro-capitalism, you were in the club. If you were a constitutionalist, you were in the club. That is of course the point of a political party: To make sure that everyone is on the same page and working toward the same goal. But if the party gets taken over by some outside force for the sake of one of its political goals, then said force can change the definition of who’s a “real” party loyalist. In this case, being “pro-life” meant that the Republican Party changed into the Trump Party, and went back on pretty much everything else that it meant to be Republican, like being pro-capitalist, pro-Constitution and anti-Russia. Likewise (L)ibertarian suspicion of government COVID mandates (almost all of which were instituted by state governments rather than Washington, ironically) meant there was an opportunity for takeover by people who go for all the alternative-to-being-right positions, like saying that the Federal Reserve “brainwashes our children to not know the difference between boys and girls” (from a Libertarian Party of Nevada post that I got the other day).

And as long as who you are and what you believe matters less than what party you belong to, we’re going to be stuck in this system where Republicans and “third” party candidates have to appeal to the biggest whackjobs to win primaries and Democrats can just mope along cause they have no incentive to compete intellectually. Since parties are now less a means of enforcing party function than a guarantee of party dysfunction, they need to be de-emphasized in the election system, which after all is supposed to supervise the campaigns rather than the other way around.

There have been various attempts to reform things on the state level, some of which got farther than others. This year, on the Nevada ballot, we have Question 3.

The ballot question was already passed in the 2022 election, but in Nevada, any ballot question has to have two successful Yes votes in two successive elections to become law. This is on one level a good security measure, but in practice what it means is that a popular proposal can pass in one election and then the special interests who don’t like it will have time to mobilize and get enough support to get people to vote it down the next time. This is how a previous Question 3, requiring an open energy market and removing the monopoly of NV Energy, could get supported in 2016 and then voted down in 2018, after NV Energy spent twice as much money against it as the supporters had to promote it.

So now we have a fairly similar situation coming up, with far more “No on Question 3” ads slamming the media than there are ads and articles explaining it or promoting it. And with early voting coming up, I need to go over 2024’s current Question 3.

This is the text of the ballot question:

Amendment to the Nevada Constitution:

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?

According to Ballotopedia, Question 3 greatly amends Article 15, Section 17 of the Nevada Constitution, stating first, “The primary election for partisan offices must be held on the date and time as provided by Nevada law.” Which right there challenges the current default where either of the two big parties can schedule a primary or even a caucus completely independent of what the State dictates. (Strange that no one complains about how confusing THAT is.) The main change is that the primary round would no longer be a party primary; “any registered voter may cast a primary ballot for any candidate for partisan office regardless of the political party affiliation of the voter”. Only the names of the five candidates receiving the greatest number of votes will advance to the general election.

It also creates a Section 18 detailing the process of ranked choice voting. It starts by saying that “The general election ballots for partisan office shall (be) designed so that the candidates are selected by ranked-choice voting.” Voters can mark (up to) five candidates in order of preference. It is not mandatory to mark more than one, but voters cannot assign the same ranking to more than one candidate for the same office. If no candidate is highest-ranked on a majority of ballots, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated and votes for that candidate will be counted towards each ballot’s next highest continuing candidate and a new elimination round is held until a clear majority is achieved.

Pretty much every organized Democratic interest in Nevada is against Question 3, but not Republicans. Interestingly, the state Libertarian Party is also against it, saying in a September 3 news email, “Question 3 needs to be defeated! The “Top-Five Ranked-Choice Voting Initiative” doesn’t guarantee that Libertarian candidates will be on the ballot. You can kiss checks and balances on the two-party system goodbye. Right now, a Libertarian candidate can run in every race, but if this abomination passes this won’t be the case.”

Which especially in comparison to the status quo is just as illogical as every other objection to Question 3.

One of the objections is that Question 3 would force people to learn about (oh no) up to five candidates in a race. I mean, heavens forfend that people actually make an informed decision while voting. And I say it’s up to five candidates because that assumes there will even be more than the two major party candidates or more than one per party. (One of the reasons I think the Libertarians protest too much about Question 3 is that half of the time when I have a general election ballot, they don’t even have any candidates in most of the down-ballot races.) And if, as is probably going to be the case, there are more than two candidates but they are only in two parties, then yeah, you’re actually going to have to do your research and not just trust someone cause the ballot says R or D.

Another objection is that the system would eliminate the choice you made. This is in fact what the proposal is intended to prevent. If (hypothetically, because Question 3 would not apply until after this election, and the wording specifically excludes presidential races) you’re Libertarian sympathizing and your choices for a hypothetical race are Chase Oliver, Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, along with the other “third” party candidates that you don’t care so much about, you can prioritize. If you think Harris is the lesser of two evils, you can set your top three priorities as Oliver, Harris and Trump. If you really think Harris’ agenda is more of a threat to liberty than Trump’s, you’d pick Oliver, Trump and Harris. Assuming of course that you ARE a capital L Libertarian and not just a willing tool of Trump and his boss. If you’re a Von Mises “libertarian” it’s probably going to be Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, and I-guess-I-have-to-pick-Oliver. In the current system any choices other than the big two are eliminated automatically, so if you had any sympathies outside the big two, you either eliminate your preferred choice before even voting or the system does it for you.

But the fact that this does involve a more extended decision process is something that is picked on by Democrats in particular, with their campaigns assuming that voters simply can’t sort through them all. Garbage. How do we know Democrats in Nevada can sort through a longer selection process with ranked voting? Because they already have.

In the 2020 Nevada Democratic Caucus, the party experimented with a ranked-choice system for selecting the Democratic nominee for President in the early voting period. I have already gone over how it worked. Interestingly, that contest ended up with independent Bernie Sanders winning over Joe Biden, 40.5 percent to 18.9. Now that was a closed Democratic caucus, but again it included Sanders who is technically not a Democrat and businessman Tom Steyer who had previously never run for office.

To sum up, if Question 3 passes, Nevada’s election system would change in two major respects: elections for partisan state office (including US Senator and Representative but not including President and Vice President of the United States) would be effectively open primaries in which all voters can participate, as opposed to being restricted to members of one party. This would produce up to five candidates in a general election, who would be ranked by voters so that if no one candidate has an absolute majority in the first round of votes, the ranking order creates elimination rounds until that majority vote is achieved.

This is important for at least two reasons. The first, again, is that the process would be under the control of the state government as a whole as opposed to being an internally controlled party affair. Whereas when Hillary Clinton’s people were in charge of the Democratic caucus in 2016, they basically threw out votes for Sanders and when Nevada law was changed after 2020 to eliminate party caucuses and set a date for the 2024 Republican primary, the Trump Party held a caucus anyway, basically so that they could guarantee the result.

Second, ranked choice voting in the general round addresses the point that while the practical default in this country is two-party voting, Americans are becoming increasingly dissatisfied with both Democratic and Republican institutions. It certainly does not guarantee that a “third” party politician would win state office, but it greatly increases their chances of advance (that is, above zero). The fact that up to five candidates can participate addresses one issue with our region’s other alternate model, California’s ‘top two’ runoff system, where you could have two Republicans against three or more Democrats splitting the notRepublican vote and end up with a general election where the two choices are Republicans.

So, Question 3 addresses the problems with independent voters being shut out of the primary process and the general election, and makes the process less dependent on the control of partisan organizations.

No wonder some people want to kill it.

Again, an issue with ballot initiatives in Nevada is that the need for them to pass twice in two elections means that people against the change can simply hoard their assets and create an opposition in the second election that wasn’t there when the question passed the first time.

It is true that the “Yes” campaign is being funded by both millionaires of both parties in Nevada as well as both Democratic and Republican donors from out of state, but their efforts haven’t been nearly as visible as the “No” campaign. Pretty much every TV ad on the subject in Las Vegas has been a No ad, and that would be one thing, but most of them are written on the lines of a few specious and just plain wrong arguments. Such as, you have to vote for more than one candidate (you don’t, but if you do, you have to assign each a different rank), your vote will be thrown out (when again, if you’re a ‘third’ party voter, your vote will almost certainly not count at all in the current system) or it’s just too hard to go over five picks (when again, Democrats in Nevada have already done so at least once).

What it is is that certain people, including in the “third” parties, are interested in brand protection. The Democrats, at least in Nevada, like things the way they are. And the one grain of truth in the No arguments is that since “third” parties effectively do not even have a primary process, since there aren’t enough people involved, the open primary system where only five advance might eliminate a third-party candidacy. But I’ve already given my personal response to that: In most general election ballots I’ve seen, “third” parties are only running for President (which isn’t affected by Question 3), or maybe Senator. By and large they haven’t been fielding candidates under the status quo, and only when they do would such objection be relevant.

And to review, this whole process, explicit or otherwise, is going to make party affiliation less relevant. Because when the election system is run by the parties, it is gamed to their benefit, which is a large part of why we have sought out “third” parties as an alternative to the duopoly. And frankly, that hasn’t worked, both because our first-past-the-post standard has made a “third” party candidate irrelevant at best and a “spoiler” at worst, and because what happened to the Libertarians and Greens demonstrates that Republicans are not the only ones vulnerable to a hostile takeover that obliges party voters to choose between what they thought their party was and what it is now.

And that gets to the big point which is relevant to America in general and Nevada in particular:

In Nevada as of July 1, there are 685,459 non-partisans compared to 608,048 registered Democrats and 578,365 registered Republicans. Being “politically homeless” is more and more of a thing, because the Republican Party has made itself more and more repellent, and that has not in itself made the Democratic Party better at government nor made other parties more attractive. And none of this changes the fact that in any given election, one candidate is going to win. Anything that creates more participation in the process can only help, given that the dysfunction in the current duopoly is based on their closed participation systems, which are becoming more and more unrepresentative of a country where fewer people can identify fully with either big party.

The current system is a trap, it’s only going to lead to increasingly negative returns, and the best way out is to de-emphasize party loyalty and have people vote for whoever the best candidate is.

You know, like in a democracy.

The big news leading up to the next presidential debate was that not only did Liz Cheney (former Republican Congresswoman of Colorado) announce last week that yes, she was voting for Kamala Harris, she said on Friday that her Dad, Dick Cheney, was voting for Harris too. Which seems like a big deal, given that the Cheneys are so conservative that they kinda started the Iraq War and everything. But I am reminded of when Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill immediately urged Parliament to send military aid to Stalin, his political arch enemy. And when asked why, Churchill said, “If Hitler invaded Hell, I would at least put in a good word for the Devil in the House of Commons.”
That’s where we are now. Not that I am comparing Trump to Hitler. Hitler at least had an infrastructure program.

On one level, this is meaningless, just as Tulsi Gabbard and RFK Jr. endorsing Trump is meaningless, because just as those two represent the kind of Democrats whom the Democratic Party as a whole has rejected, the Cheneys are the kind of Republicans whom their party has rejected. But this is less a matter of “conservatism” (whatever that means) and more loyalty to the Mob Boss. And the Cheney endorsement just goes to show that leading up to this debate, whatever one thinks of the two parties, only one of them actually IS a political party. However dysfunctional and feckless the Democrats are, they at least think they’re supposed to be running a government. Whereas the Republicans are a combination Mafia family and religious cult that believes in leeching the taxpayer for all they can get while worshiping a criminal as God.

And if you want to play both sides-ism, both of these parties started off with a presidential candidate who is clearly too old to compete, but the Democrats actually acknowledged that in their case. And not only is Trump completely unqualified on a performance level, he has disqualified himself with his criminal activities to stop the 2020 election result, not to mention his hoarding of classified documents since leaving office, a point that neither Republicans nor the “liberal” media will emphasize.

And since the Trump Party IS a Mob, and have already announced that they’re going to try and interfere with election results, the best way for Kamala Harris and Democrats to win is to do what Joe Biden did in 2020: Win enough states by big enough margins that Republicans can’t steal enough elections to change the outcome.

And as with the DNC, which certainly pumped up the Democrats but doesn’t seem to have created much momentum in the polls, Democrats were looking at the debate as a means of shifting the momentum, whereas with all the advantages Trump has – namely a “news” media that wants a demented goon back in the White House cause he’s “great for ratings” – all Trump really needed to do was hang on and hope that his blind-faith cult can carry him the rest of the way.

Well, as Trump would say, “We’ll see what happens.”

Keep in mind, I only got to check so much of the debate in real time because I work at home, at night, and I was taking calls. But I noticed a couple things. Most of the people calling customer service had the debate on, which I could hear on their line while I was watching with the sound off. The other thing I noticed is that we weren’t getting quite as many calls as we usually do on a Tuesday evening. Of course as soon as the debate was over, every property in the United States suddenly started having emergencies again.

Just as well that I couldn’t hear most of it. I am not a fan of Harris’ voice, and even less a fan of Trump’s whiny-Mafioso-with-sleep-apnea voice. So as with Kennedy vs. Nixon, the visuals are everything. And the main visual I got watching this on TV was Trump on the left going off while on the right Harris was watching with an actively bemused, trying-not-to-laugh expression on her face, like you might have if your friend invited you to their house and you watched their four-year-old child try to recite Gilbert and Sullivan. Much more pleasant than watching Trump on the left as he Gish Galloped across the Pecos while Biden stood there wondering what the hell he was seeing, let alone Trump’s reactions to Harris, which were basically a sulky little boy hoping that if he frowned hard enough his stare could break a hole in a mountainside. That is, when he wasn’t rolling his eyes and pursing his lips in contempt, or grinning like a toad who’d just been given a lobotomy.

Not that the moderators didn’t ask questions that could challenge the Biden-Harris Administration. But you know what? She answered them. In regard to the Biden Afghanistan pullout, she pointed out that it was Trump himself who made the plans with the Taliban in 2020, bypassing the Afghan government. And as much as Trump hammered on immigration, and “border czar” and all that, she pointed out that there was a border bill written by a Republican that he told his Party to kill. And in regard to immigration, Trump repeated the racist-as-fuck story that Haitian immigrants in some communities were eating people’s dogs, which running mate JD Vance has also spread. In response, ABC news anchor David Muir said ABC did reach out to the city manager in Springfield and confirmed they had no such reports.

Co-moderator Linsey Davis also fact-checked Trump, noting that “there is no state in this country where it is legal to kill a baby after it is born.”

BREAKING NEWS: JOURNALISTS ACTUALLY DID THEIR JOBS

And when the debate turned to climate change, Trump blamed Harris and Biden for taking money from Ukraine.

Which only goes to show that Trump has his invincible bond with his voter base because he IS his voter: A belligerent dumbass who parrots any conspiracy theory you feed him cause he can be exploited by con men that much more evil than he is.

It went further. On the subject of Ukraine, Harris said “Putin would be sitting in Kyiv with his eyes on the rest of Europe. Starting with Poland. And why don’t you tell the 800,000 Polish Americans right here in Pennsylvania how quickly you would give up for the sake of favor and what you think is a friendship with what is known to be a dictator who would eat you for lunch.” She also said earlier, “And it is absolutely well known that these dictators and autocrats are rooting for you to be president again because they’re so clear, they can manipulate you with flattery and favors.” Trump later said, “Viktor Orban, one of the most respected men — they call him a strong man. He’s a tough person. Smart. Prime Minister of Hungary. They said why is the whole world blowing up? Three years ago it wasn’t. Why is it blowing up? He said because you need Trump back as president. They were afraid of him. China was afraid. And I don’t like to use the word afraid but I’m just quoting him. China was afraid of him. North Korea was afraid of him.”

Kinda proves her point, don’t it?

And Harris also said in regard to world leaders, “And that is why so many military leaders who you have worked with have told me you are a disgrace.”

Well, he IS a disgrace. Just this week, he continued to insist that he’d never met E. Jean Carroll, refusing to say her name, while also going into extensive detail about the number of times they’d met. He also denied guilt in her sexual assault case, saying “she would not have been The Chosen One.” At the press conference, he also had two of his lawyers flanking them while he said, “I’m disappointed in my legal talent, I’ll be honest with you.”

It’s like he was designed in a lab to be the most disgusting humanoid imaginable. I mean, Lenin and Hitler would look at him and go, “DUDE.”

And just after the debate, Taylor Swift posted on Instagram, announcing that she was endorsing Harris, because we need “calm instead of chaos.” She signed it “Taylor Swift Childless Cat Lady.”

Now here’s the real fight: Trump vs. Swift.

One is an Aryan tycoon with millions of fanatic worshipers who will kill you for disrespecting their idol. The other is Trump.

So, that’s it, then. It’s over.

I mean, it shouldn’t be that simple, but it probably is.

But then again: It should have been over in 20 fucking 16 after the Access Hollywood tape. It should have been over when Trump tried to kill his own Republican Congress on January 6, 2021 cause not enough of them would go along with his election steal. They all fluttered, and huffed, and then they all took Trump’s side in impeachment, and came crawling back to their Master anyway.

What else are they going to do?

Voters, Republican voters in particular, are like football fans. Everyone’s got their team. And as I’ve said before, it’s like if you’re a Dallas Cowboys fan from back in the glory days, and then Jerry Jones bought the team, and the very first thing he did was to fire Tom Landry, and every rotten thing that’s happened to that team since stems directly from that decision, but what’re ya gonna do, quit being a Cowboys fan?

And a lot of it is also “moderates” who want an alternative to the “socialist” party that’s raised inflation everywhere, but then who’s going to be the alternative to the alternative when the Republican cure for social democracy is a lot worse than the disease?

We are never going to be rid of these two parties because, for one thing, they need each other for their suckers to have someone to vote against. Also, no matter how dysfunctional one party becomes, its formal collapse would mean that there’s only one national party in this country, and that’s really not feasible. But what that means for the moment and the foreseeable future is that the Republican Party will just continue to deteriorate without dying because there will always be a need for an alternative to the Democrats, no matter how broken and evil it is.

The only way to get out of this trap is to break people of their football-team loyalty to party and de-emphasize parties in the election system, just as they have largely ceased to exist as governing bodies against their own politicians. You need things like open primaries and ranked choice voting. This ought to be damn obvious by now, and yet certain people don’t want their little system to change. And there’s a particular example of this that I will deal with in my next column.

Leading a race does not mean you will win it.

– African proverb

Hey, so what did you think of the Democratic National Convention this year? When they had a DJ? When they had Stevie Wonder? When people were singing, and happy, and it almost felt like a concert every night? Did you see how Tim Walz’ son was crying because he was so proud to see his Dad become the Vice Presidential nominee, and his Dad gave that love right back? Did you see how Kamala Harris surprised everyone by actually giving a great speech? Did you see how fired up everyone was? Did you see all those Lamestream Media people using words like “happiness” and “joy”? JOY?

Nauseating as fuck, wasn’t it?

What you need is to get grounded back in the reality of the last eight years of the Trump Era, in which you grind out day after day in a paycheck-to-paycheck job expecting the government to engineer some giant catastrophe (or stumble into one by sheer accident) while the Boss and his cronies continue to grift off the taxpayer and dodge prosecution, and you go to bed at night waiting for a sadistic God to grant you the sweet mercy of Death.

So let’s see what’s been happening in Trumpworld since Harris and Walz teamed up.

First, the big earth-shattering, game changing news: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. endorsed Trump. AND so did Tulsi Gabbard. Yeah, he should start picking out the drapes right now. These are the two people whose whole cultural role is being the people in traditional Democrat demographics who were never going to vote for Democrats anyway, and those people were never going to vote for Kennedy as an “independent” if it meant that Biden (now Harris) wins their state.

There was this one opinion column, I think it was from USA Today, but I can’t find it, where the guy talked about how the Kennedy family has gotten involved in all kinds of drug abuse and adultery scandals, but they act like Robert is a disgrace to the family, just cause he endorsed Trump?

Well, YEAH, guy. That’s just it. Do you know what it takes to embarrass the Kennedys?

I’m sure they wouldn’t appreciate a Kennedy endorsing any Republican, but there’s a qualitative difference between endorsing (say) someone in the Bush family and Trump. There are some Trumpniks who want to declare that the endorsement of RFK (and Gabbard) indicates that the Greedy Old Puritans are still a “big tent” party because they have the support of these very nominal Democrats, but in this case big tent just means tolerance to any crackpot theory or mental dysfunction, not just the ones Trump likes.

Kerry Kennedy, RFK’s sister, had said months before the open alignment to Trump, “I strongly condemn my brother’s deplorable and untruthful remarks last week about Covid being engineered for ethnic targeting,” Kerry Kennedy said at the time. “His statements do not represent what I believe or what Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights stand for, with our 50+-year track record of protecting rights and standing against racism and all forms of discrimination.” And then there’s the fact that RFK Jr. is just totally what-the-fuck even by modern Republican standards. In addition to his own drug abuse, diagnosed mental and physical problems and multiple admitted abuses of dead wild animals, the news recently requoted RFK’s own daughter going over another story of how her Dad used a chainsaw to sever the head of a beached whale when they were at Hyannis Port, then strapped the head to the family vehicle for the five-hour drive home, saying “every time we accelerated on the highway, whale juice would pour into the windows of the car” and that they “had plastic bags over our heads with mouth holes cut out, and people on the highway were giving us the finger, but that was just normal day-to-day stuff for us.”
But as Bill Maher said Friday, maybe RFK just has this weird attachment to decaying and bloated corpses. Which would also explain the endorsement of Trump.

And then there’s the big issue with the veteran community.

Trump, who is such a Macho Man that “Macho Man” is actually part of his campaign theme music (along with ‘YMCA’) apparently didn’t realize that saying the Congressional Medal of Honor isn’t as good as the Presidential Medal of Freedom “because everyone gets the Congressional Medal of Honor, [but] soldiers ‒ they’re either in very bad shape, because they’ve been hit so many times by bullets, or they’re dead” was not a good move for his reputation as a Real American Hero.

So Monday August 26, with the invitation (or pretext) by a family of the deceased, Trump and said family posed at the graves of servicemembers who died guarding the Kabul airport during America’s final evacuation of forces in 2021. Smiling with his shit-eating grin and his thumb up, the way he says “Happy Good Friday!” to commemorate the myth of Jesus dying in agony and harrowing Hades.

The reason this was a big deal is because apparently it’s against the law. The Army said in a statement, “Federal law prohibits political campaign or election-related activities within Army National Military Cemeteries, to include photographers, content creators or any other persons attending for purposes or in direct support of a partisan political candidate’s campaign.” The other issue being that when a cemetery official pointed this out, Trump’s “staff” decided to have an altercation. But Arlington National Cemetery also stated: “An ANC employee who attempted to ensure adherence to these rules was abruptly pushed aside […] the employee subsequently decided not to press charges. Therefore, the Army considers this matter closed.” So Trump got away with it.

Because of course he did. The Boss always wins. The Boss always gets his way. Laws don’t apply to the Boss. And if you got a problem with dat, we’re gonna make it real ugly for ya. Ya don’t want it to get ugly, DO ya, America?

Then there was the third issue this week, where Special Counsel Jack Smith had the Department of Justice reintroduce charges against Donald Trump regarding the January 6 insurrection with a superseding indictment.

Because as we know, the last decision of the Supreme Court’s last term was Trump vs. United States, in which the United States lost. In said decision, Chief Justice John Roberts unilaterally declared that the president can commit any crime he wants as long as he calls it an “official act.” It still raises the question of whether this applies to parts of Trump’s New York fraud coverup that he committed after getting elected, or whether it applies to Trump’s pressure campaign on a different official (Vice President Mike Pence) to throw the election result to him. And that’s because Trump, like Dobbs vs. Mississippi, was made up with no regard to precedent, let alone consequences, and like Dobbs is a piece of shit ruling that’s not worth the toilet paper it was wiped on, and ought to be overridden just like the Dred Scott ruling.

But this being the standard for now, Jack Smith rephrased his case to an untainted grand jury, this time changing various terms so as to refer to Donald Trump as an individual, rather than as the president, and referring to his January 6 speech to the mob as a campaign event – which you can seriously argue that it was, given that the whole point was that Trump was not conceding the election.

It is of course certain that if this case gets anywhere in the next few months and goes against Trump, his lawyers are once again going to climb the ladder to get Trump’s pet judges to save their boss from himself. They probably could, cause they’ve gone this far, but then again they’ve pushed their luck so far that President Biden actually started pushing Supreme Court reforms, including term limits, and Roberts probably doesn’t need to give Democrats any more ammunition, especially if Democrats win. And maybe Roberts ought to consider that he shouldn’t have decided that Presidents can do anything they want if right now Biden is President and Harris is in charge of certifying the Electoral result, and they are in charge of Washington DC security and can do all of that stuff that Trump wanted to do to stop a loss. Unless Roberts wants to step in and say “Wait, I meant only OUR guy can do that”, but that would give the game away, wouldn’t it?

I saw some self-described “libertarians” bitching on Facebook that Smith’s move is another case of the mean ol’ Democrats trying to eliminate any competition – although in other cases, this is a very real problem.

My reaction is: Grow up. Thanks to Trump’s various enablers, up to and including the Supreme Court, Smith’s case is never going to be decided in court before this election. If I were you, I’d be more worried about the sentencing in the already decided New York fraud case, which itself has been unnecessarily delayed. And even if your hero does get a prison term there, he can always appeal, and even if he went to prison, there is nothing stopping him from continuing to run for office. And if Trump wins his election, he can make Smith’s case go away permanently, and probably make Smith go away permanently too.

Because we should not forget the real reason Our Lord and Savior is making us all suffer for his sins:

TRUMP 2024: I’M TOO PRETTY FOR PRISON

Since I really don’t have time for everything I want to do in a week, I couldn’t both state my opinion on new Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris and respond to the Andrew Sullivan opinion on Harris, “The Kamala Chimera.” So I’m doing both here.

Dear Andrew,

In your July 26 piece, you said that the news media and social media swing of support toward Vice President Kamala Harris in the wake of President Biden’s endorsement was a pivot that reflected “amnesia.” Certainly amnesia towards Harris’ pre-2020 career is not the only example of media amnesia. For instance, the fact that the media successfully leveraged Biden into quitting the race because he is visibly aging and seems therefore unqualified for the job begs the question of why no one in the media or the Republican OR the Democratic Party is questioning the qualifications of a Donald Trump, who is not only visibly aging and increasingly incoherent – like Biden – but tried to strongarm both Georgia’s Secretary of State and his own Vice President to “find” him the votes he needed to skew the result in 2020 and then incited an armed mob to kill said Vice President when he wouldn’t do what he wanted. You would think that Biden’s level of disqualification on top of that one would be a bigger issue for Trump, but everyone just seems like they forgot about it. That level of amnesia makes the contrast with Harris’ past and present kind of trivial.

Indeed, the contrast between Harris and Trump points out the real problem for Republicans. Democrats could switch horses because they had other options. Republicans in the Party of Trump cannot switch because they have no other options, because no one else in the party would be seen as credible, with the possible exception of Nikki Haley, whom not enough people voted for.

Harris could still lose. The Electoral College is still not looking good, and Democrats need Biden’s birth state of Pennsylvania, otherwise the math gets too hard. Which is why I think Harris’ best bet for running mate is Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro. In 2020, he was popular with the sort of ticket-splitting moderates and conservatives that Democrats will need now. Plus, he’s Jewish, which will really make the MAGAts go nuts.

Kamala Harris was not my first choice for Democratic nominee in 2020. That would have been Pete Buttigieg. Or maybe Sanders. In fact, Harris wouldn’t have even been my last choice. And I suspect, as do you, that most of the reason Biden held out this long is because he knew Harris’ weaknesses and suspected she would be even weaker against Trump than he is. But then Trump himself demonstrates the problem with picking a VP based on loyalty and demographic appeal rather than confidence that they would be a good replacement. But you knew that was the alternative you had, if you wanted to keep picking apart Biden, because just handing over to the VP who is already on the ticket is preferable to a substitute that could be challenged in the Republicans’ pet courts, or an open and potentially fractious Democratic Convention. Which just happens to be in Chicago. I mean, assuming you don’t want Trump to win.

As they say, Andrew, be careful what you wish for. You got what you wished for. Be happy.

Even if we, unlike much of the media, have a mental age above four and are capable of looking at how “cringe” Harris was, and remains, the reason things are different now – and so far seem to be different than they were for the last female presidential candidate – is because, to use that phrase of hers that’s been making the rounds, “You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.”

I mean, obviously we didn’t see this on Friday, but on Saturday Trump made a speech to a Christian group in Florida and told them, quote: “Christians, get out and vote, just this time. You won’t have to do it anymore … You got to get out and vote. In four years, you don’t have to vote again. We’ll have it fixed so good you’re not going to have to vote.”

Raising the question, what kind of “fix” are we talking about that changes the process of government to make voting irrelevant?

I have joked that the premise of Republican voting is “Vote So You’ll Never Have To Vote Again.” Now they’re just coming out and saying it. And don’t rationalize by saying that Democrats take Trump literally but not seriously and Republicans take him seriously but not literally. When Trump slumped up to the podium on January 6, 2021 and told his audience, “You’ve got to fight like hell, or you won’t have a country anymore”, and then they fought like hell for him, were they taking him seriously or literally?

These are not Ronald Reagan’s conservatives. They do not want a republic, they want a monarchy. Not even a monarchy. Even King George III was limited by Parliament. What these “post liberals” want is an absolute monarchy, like the Czars of Russia had. Or should I say, like the Czars of Russia have.

What are our objections toward Kamala Harris compared to that?

“She’s not a serious person.” What, compared to Donnie “Bingbongbingbangbing” Trump and JD “I Can See Russia From My Bank Account” Vance?

“All-Drama Kamala.” See, that’s a good one. That’s an insult with wit. I mention this because as you know, Trump always invests much of his very little brainpower on coming up with the right demeaning nickname for his current political target, like how he calls Nancy Pelosi “Crazy Nancy”, he calls Nikki Haley “Nancy Pelosi” and he calls Vladimir Putin “My Precious Lord and Master In Whose Name I Live and Serve.” What’s he calling Harris? “Laffin’ Kamala.” Always making sure to spell out the “Laffin'”, with the apostrophe, to emphasize that he can’t spell correctly.

Lame. “Laffin’ Kamala.” Not as good as “Meatball Ron.” That one just rolled off the tongue, so to speak. Trump’s clearly losing his touch. He needs help. Really, Andrew, you should apply for a job with Team Trump. You’re giving him better advice than he seems to be getting from them.

Even if everything you’re saying about Kamala is true, and I agree with most of it, she is a Goddamn ray of sunshine compared to Trump, this whiny, dumpy little brat who will never go away, will never stop demanding attention and who expects to be treated like God, despite his manifest lack of qualifications for the job. Unless you count his desire to annihilate anyone who’s outside his chosen tribe. Anything that’s wrong with Harris is a fair price to pay for making that brat shut his puckered little mouth once and for all. And of course, making his death cult that used to be a real political party cry. And I suspect there’s a whole bunch of people, who used to be conservative before Trump bought out the definition of the term, who feel the same way as I do, and we now have the best chance to make that happen. And if that’s how we feel, you can imagine how energized Democrats are.

The real problem, if you’re in that rare species called “libertarian” and the now hunted-to-the-point-of-extinction species of moderate conservative, is BOTH these major political parties suck Jalapeno pickles. Both of them will not leave you alone. Both of them demand to micromanage your life, it’s just a question which aspects they prefer to micromanage. And frankly, both of them are socialist. It’s just that since Trump is a self-described nationalist, his socialism is more of the national type. And what really sucks is, no matter how much you want to get away from the fact, ONE of these political parties IS going to win the election. So make up your mind which socialism you prefer: The one that promises national health care or the one that wants to send your gardener to a concentration camp?

Ever since 2016, the situation has been that the Republicans are Nazi Germany, the Democrats are Soviet Russia, and America is Poland. And we know that Poland eventually managed to get out from under 50 years of mindless left-wing collectivism, but it would not have survived 50 years of mindless, exterminationist, right-wing collectivism, and that is where we are now. No, I am not saying that the Democrats ARE Communists or the Republicans are Nazis. Yet. But you have to admit, even you have to admit, Andrew, that the Republicans are a lot closer to being Nazis than the Democrats are to being Communists. At worst, the situation with Kamala is going to be the same as if Hillary Clinton had won in 2016. And as the late great P.J. O’Rourke said of Hillary, “She would be a terrible president, but she would be terrible along conventional parameters.”

Sincerely,

James

Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. was born November 20, 1942, almost 82 years ago. And while his body is in fair shape for a man his age, his political career was assassinated on July 21, 2024, not by Republicans, but by his ostensible allies in the “liberal” media and the Democratic Party itself. His presidency has not yet lasted four years.

On Sunday, President Biden officially announced that while he is serving the rest of his term, he will not continue to campaign and is asking his primary delegates to support Vice President Kamala Harris for the Democratic Party nomination for president. On Wednesday 8 PM he gave a short speech from the Oval Office stating: “I believe my record as president, my leadership in the world, my vision for America’s future all merited a second term, but nothing, nothing can come in the way of saving our democracy, and that includes personal ambition.”

As I have said more than once, I think the reason Biden ran for re-election in the first place (and held off this long despite his unpopularity) is the suspicion that Harris would be even more unpopular.

The reason that we have been in this horrible situation with the 2024 election, with a rematch of two candidates that no one wanted to see run the first time, is because of the truly horrible truth of the Republican Party: Donald Trump really is the best candidate they have for president. Because he is a sinner and a joker, he is the best candidate to push a theocratic agenda compared to the sincere fanatics who would otherwise be running in his absence. We all know Trump isn’t sincere about anything, so (it’s assumed) he isn’t going to be serious about Project 2025, either.

Conversely, Joe Biden, the other old, politically incorrect white guy, was thought to be the best choice to sell a Democratic Party that is still associated with DEI, Palestine protestors and Defund the Police, even though most mainstream Democrats don’t believe in such initiatives. The problem is that that June debate really killed him. Everyone knew that Joe was old, but some people saw that and thought, “Wow, I knew he was old, but this is ‘should we put Dad in a home?’ old.” I think overall he has shown himself to be lucid, but not consistently enough, and not without even more flubs, such as mixing up his running mate with Trump and Ukrainian President Zelenskyy with Russian President Putin. And then of course there’s this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vpIF65ISZU

I had thought that as with a whole bunch of candidates, including Barack Obama in 2012 and the now Senator John Fetterman in 2022, that one bad debate was not and should not have been enough to pronounce final judgment on the Biden campaign. And it didn’t. Most polls after the debate showed Biden at least holding his own, even if he was a couple points down in some instances, but certainly not by so much of a margin that it ended the race. What took Biden down was the campaign from within, as Democratic Party insiders and the Washington media – same thing, really – spread rumors about Biden’s lack of support even as big money donors openly declared they were withholding contributions. Meanwhile bigwigs like Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer and even Barack Obama were non-commital in public even as they were pressuring Biden to drop out behind the scenes, and letting their contacts in the press know all of this even as they refused to say so on camera. The threat being that if Biden didn’t drop out, those people and others like Democratic House leader Hakeem Jeffries would speak out openly this week. And that sort of no-confidence gesturing did a lot more to kill Biden’s polls and position than the Trump debate itself. So while at one point after the debate Congressional insiders said the push against Biden was dead, and he was continuing to gain public support at rallies, the impression among the Inner Party was that his continued presence at the top of the ticket was only going to endanger their own priorities.

Like, didja notice how the Democratic insiders only started renewing their push for Biden to quit once he announced his idea of reforming the Supreme Court?

But then, a good definition of irony is Adam Schiff publicly saying that Biden needed to step down, then sending me a fundraiser email saying that Trump doesn’t want to unite the country.

If nothing else, this disloyalty is at least a contrast to an alleged political party that could watch Trump get convicted of sexual assault and fraud and become that much more loyal the more unsavory he got. The Democrats do seem to be individuals and not a hive mind. They are in fact so individualist that they are willing to throw away such political planning as they have.

The other angle being that Trump and his pet party have invested their campaign money and their dwindling reserves of intellect and creativity in bashing Joe Biden as Trump’s inevitable opponent: “Sleepy Joe, Crooked Joe, Hunter Biden, Hunter Biden, Hunter Biden… if I say Hunter Biden enough times, Michael Keaton will show up and save the day with his magical ghost powers.”

Now at least they can’t do that. The spanner has been thrown into the works. And it’s obviously made Trump and his servants mad, with House Speaker Mike Johnson telling the press that it would be “unlawful” to replace Biden. Says the guy who supported January 6.

This change also means that in the two-party race, Donald Trump is now the only candidate who can be credibly accused of being too old and senile to do the job. Presumably the press will be just as obsessed with that issue as they were when Biden was running.

Which leads to the separate but very much related issue that the “liberal” media are nobody’s friends. This is something that I would like to detail at another time, but right now it’s not as important. Suffice to say here that they did everything they could to shift the course of Biden’s decision, and now that they’ve successfully couped a president their own self-importance will swell even further and make them even more insufferable than they already are.

And it goes without saying that this only confirms the Democratic Party is simultaneously feckless and untrustworthy and for all its preening demonstrations of altruism, it was, is and always will be primarily concerned with preserving its privileges in the system, and if doing the right thing gets in the way of that, they get the right thing out of the way.

But they’re NOT Project 2025. Which Trump is now committed to even if he actually knows better.

And likewise, I am even less a fan of Kamala Harris than I am of Joe Biden, but compared to Trump, Harris looks like fucking Eisenhower.

In any case, in the short span of time since Joe’s announcement, polls of Kamala Harris against Trump are no worse than Trump’s polls against Biden, with one notable poll showing Harris ahead of Trump, 42 to 38 percent with Robert Kennedy Jr. getting 8 percent. Without Kennedy included the poll showed Harris up by only 2, 44 to 42 percent. (So at least in this poll, Kennedy is taking votes away from Trump. Something to think about if you were only supporting RFK to spoil the Democrats.) The race is still close, especially in Electoral College terms. But until now, all other things were equal and a lot of people thought it was going to be the same two old white guys running again, and now you have the potential of a female president, with Black and Indian roots at that. The Democratic base is energized now, probably more than they would be if Biden had won that debate.

In Wednesday’s speech, President Biden reviewed what he is continuing to do and what he has done: “I’ll continue to lower costs for hard-working families, grow our economy. I’ll keep defending our personal freedoms and our civil rights, from the right to vote to the right to choose. … I’m the first president in this century to report to the American people that the United States is not at war anywhere in the world. We’ll keep rallying a coalition of proud nations to stop Putin from taking over Ukraine and doing more damage. We’ll keep NATO stronger, and I’ll make it more powerful and more united than at any time in all of our history. I’ll keep doing the same for allies in the Pacific.

“You know, when I came to office, the conventional wisdom was that China would inevitably surpass the United States. That’s not the case anymore. And I’m going to keep working to end the war in Gaza, bring home all the hostages and bring peace and security to the Middle East and end this war… You know, we’ve come so far since my inauguration. On that day, I told you as I stood in that winter — we stood in a winter of peril and a winter of possibilities, peril and possibilities. We were in the grip of the worst pandemic in the century, the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, the worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War, but we came together as Americans, and we got through it. We emerged stronger, more prosperous and more secure. Today, we have the strongest economy in the world, creating nearly 16 million new jobs — a record. Wages are up, inflation continues to come down, the racial wealth gap is the lowest it’s been in 20 years.”

Coming from his career politician background, serving as US Senator from Delaware from 1973 to 2009, then serving eight years as Vice President under President Barack Obama, using his Senate connections to negotiate crucial budget bills and presenting a foreign policy perspective that was otherwise lacking, Joe Biden had every reason to be proud of his life in public service even before becoming President. He had famously decided not to run in 2015 in the wake of his son Beau’s death, and was considered only one of several contenders to run against Trump in 2020, with the press focusing on his personal behavior and the scandals of his son Hunter. But Biden’s Party connections paid off again, with the support of Congressman Jim Clyburn helping him win the South Carolina primary and gaining him the momentum he needed for the Super Tuesday primaries to cinch the nomination.

Biden had promised to correct many of the mistakes from Trump’s time in office, and did so. But he made mistakes – notably collapsing our position in Afghanistan before a troop withdrawal – and is blamed for inflation, although many other factors are involved. He believed in 2020 that he was the only candidate who had the position and reputation to beat Trump, and he was right then. He still believed he was the only candidate who could beat him this year, but just as President Obama was often too passive in dealing with both foreign and Republican threats, Biden did not properly acknowledge that his challenger, the former incumbent, was a criminal who was a threat to national security, starting even before Biden’s inauguration, when on January 6, 2021 he incited a mob to break into the Capitol and kill his own Vice President when Mike Pence wouldn’t change the results of the Electoral College vote for him. Because Biden and his even more timid Attorney General, Merrick Garland, did not act to investigate and prosecute Trump until about the midpoint of his presidency, this gave Trump’s various allies in government and the courts the ability to delay judgments until after the election, when depending on the result, they will not matter. Because of this, Biden and the Democrats did what everyone has always done: They normalized Trump. They made him seem like a legitimate candidate, and having been made equal to the current president, the fact that the current president is also old, slow and forgetful seems to matter more because he’s the old, slow and forgetful guy who’s in office now.

Several times on Wednesday, Biden used words like “America is at an inflection point” and that the election is about choosing “the course of America’s future.” He used the old Benjamin Franklin quote about the Constitutional Convention where Ben was asked if the new government was a republic or monarchy, and Franklin replied, “A Republic, if you can keep it.” He held on to his campaign because he thought that it was the only thing stopping Trump from taking over, and when his own Party made it clear they would not support him anymore, he realized that the main thing that would allow Trump to take over is to keep going the way we have been. His decision was called “selfless”, “heroic” and all those things by Washington insiders because such sacrifice is completely alien to themselves, so they know how hard the decision must have been for him. But he quit the race for the same reason he ran in the first place: Because Trump must be stopped.

You cannot say that Joe Biden didn’t do everything he could to make that happen.