Desperate to Buy Off the Voters (and Cheap, Too)

Update: thanks as always to Steve in Manhattan over at Crooks & Liars including this article for Mike's Blog Round-Up! Good luck everyone, stay safe, and for the LOVE OF GOD throw every Republican crook out of office this midterms!

I didn't watch trump at his midterm egofest last night, but I saw the responses. Gods, he's never been subtle but even this reeks of desperation (via George Chidi at the Guardian(US)):

Donald Trump’s promise of a $5,000 “Trump dividend” for every US citizen if Republicans retain control of the US Congress in November’s midterm elections has sparked incredulity and accusations of bribery.

“If the Republicans win, you win with us and you get $5,000,” Trump said during the unprecedented Republican midterm convention in Dallas. “It will be called the Trump dividend.”

It comes amid extreme concern over the US national debt, which exceeded $40tn for the first time in August.

Even other Republicans questioned it (although they'll likely promote it with grins painted on their faces when trump insists).

Speaking to Politico, Chip Roy, the Republican US representative from Texas, sounded skeptical. “Well – I would like to know how they would plan to pay for … back of envelope … well over $1tn,” he said.

In the moments after Trump made the announcement, Marc Goldwein of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget wrote on X that “this would cost about $1.2 TRILLION in just one year. That’s more than ALL THREE ROUNDS of COVID relief checks, despite no recessions. The result would be a huge spike in the deficit, and almost certainly in the inflation rate.”

The US has roughly 240 million adult citizens, suggesting the cost of $1.2tn. The federal government spent about $7tn in fiscal year 2025, with about $2tn taken on as debt.

And the funny thing is? The average American household - which depends on what expenses they're carrying from mortgages to bills to medical expenses and outstanding college loans - has around $105,000 in personal debts (note: under normal circumstances I'd be dealing with around $52,000 in debt right now. My dad - with his financial acumen - helped pay off my mortgage last year before he died. Millions of others don't get that kind of help). A meager $5,000 dividend bribe to vote for the party putting us most into debt in the first place is too cheap a payoff to be of any good to anybody.

And it is a bribe trump offers: We'll only get the money "IF" the Republicans win the 2026 midterms that was already looking like a certain Democratic Blue Wave. Everybody - including the MAGA punditry - saw it for what it is (via Malcolm Ferguson at New Republic):

“We should note though, it is not the first time he has promised a cash payment like this,” the (Fox News) network clarified shortly after Trump’s speech. “He promised Americans $2,000 rebates during his tariff policy when that was enacted, but after court challenges to the tariffs themselves, those $2,000 checks so far have not materialized.” 

Fox hosts laid these concerns at the feet of Vice President JD Vance. 

“You do the quick math, that’s about $1.3 trillion,” Brett Baier told Vance. “I can hear the critics’ heads exploding. They’re saying out loud, I guarantee you: ‘The president is bribing voters to vote for Republicans to take over the House. And then he’s bankrupting the country because the deficit debt is huge, and inflation would come back if this comes into play.’ So how do you answer those criticisms?”

Vance tried to defend it by claiming we'd get the money from other countries through trump's trade wars:

“What the president’s talking about is fundamentally a dividend for American workers. We’re taking in an extraordinary amount of revenue because the president of the United States is actually standing up to both foreign companies, but also foreign countries who’ve been taking advantage of America’s workers for pretty much my entire life,” Vance said, referring to tariffs.

In reality, the revenue brought in by Trump’s tariffs, under $500 billion, would not cover a $5,000 check for every American, which would cost $1.2 trillion. 

It’s obvious at this point that Trump’s first inclination when his back is against the wall is to dangle money in front of the masses. He’s promised cash payments multiple times, including $2,000 stimulus checks for the “tariff dividend,” a $5,000 stimulus check for the bygone “DOGE dividend,” and $1,000 checks for the Affordable Care Act. None of those ever materialized. 

Republicans, by the way, already control Congress. If Trump wanted to make this a reality, he could have by now.

If trump really wants to flip the majority of American voters - angry as hell towards a Republican-controlled government that's wrecking everything from Washington landmarks to our public schools - he would reverse course on his ruinous tariffs policies, end the fighting in Iran and the bombing of fishermen across South and Central America, stop a violent and unnecessary deportation program disrupting our communities, and apologize to voters on bended knee. Of course, trump can never admit he is wrong any anything so that will never happen.

Instead - as the corrupt con artist bastard he is - trump can only offer bribes in clear violation of the law. Social media is rampant with posts of critics pointing to the laws in the US Code trump is openly breaking:

There are at least two provisions in the U.S. Code that make it illegal to offer or accept a $5,000 "GOP Dividend" for voting. Both the offerer (Donald Trump) and the accepter (good luck with that!) are liable for fines and jail time.

[image or embed]

— Mrs. Betty Bowers (@mrsbettybowers.bsky.social) September 10, 2026 at 11:19 AM

Just in case Mrs Betty Bowers' skeet disappears,
here is the screenshot

If you want the link to the Code for 18USC s597  and 52USC s10307c here you go. Even the offer of the payment to change votes is illegal even if the payment never goes through.

It is enraging that the corrupt Republican-controlled Supreme Court ruled that a sitting president can't be charged with crimes. trump is so crooked and reckless he believes - no, worse, he knows - the law won't touch him. However; if enough voters show up this November midterms to flip both the House AND the Senate to supermajority Democratic control (it's possible for the Senate, but EVERY seat has to flip to pull it off) these are impeachable offenses, and we can kick trump's corrupt ass out of the White House he does not deserve.

You want motivation to vote, America? VOTE THE REPUBLICAN CROOKS OUT and IMPEACH trump. That is far more valuable than that cheap-ass $5,000 bribe.

The Crimes of the DeSantis Power Circle, Symbolic of Statewide Republican Corruption

If you want to know how corrupt Republicans are, not only look to their crimes but also look to how they cover up said crimes when they're in control of the investigation. Right here in Florida is a perfect example as a grand jury probe dug into political fundraising misdeeds by those in power (via Jim Vertuno with AP News, linked through PBS Newshour):

A Florida grand jury found that Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis' administration "misappropriated" $10 million in taxpayer money it diverted to a charity connected to his wife, but it declined to file criminal charges due to a lack of evidence indicating who specifically was responsible.

DeSantis on Thursday did not dispute the legitimacy of the secret grand jury report obtained and published online by CBS News Miami, but he insisted no laws were broken and said whoever leaked the sealed documents would face "consequences."

What consequences? The report already indicated nobody in a position to do anything about this is pressing criminal charges!

The Leon County grand jury completed its report in January on investigations into Hope Florida, the charity started in 2021 by Florida first lady Casey DeSantis. Despite the lack of charges, the report ignited a new round of criticism aimed at DeSantis and other top state Republicans over the charity receiving $10 million from a state Medicaid settlement intended to help poor children get health insurance.

Basically, DeSantis' own wife stole from sick kids. SHE STOLE. FROM SICK KIDS. The sociopathy is bottomless with these crooks.

Also note, the grand jury completed their work in January but it's only NOW - after the August primaries were voted on - that the report leaked.

The Hope Florida charity is supposed to help financially struggling families connect with churches and aid groups to help keep them off publicly-financed assistance programs. The $10 million was instead moved to political action committees that used the money to oppose a 2024 statewide ballot measure that would have legalized marijuana for adults in the state...

The grand jury said no one would take responsibility for sending the money to the charity or had any memory of who did.

"We recognize that this would be an impediment to criminal prosecution," the report noted. "While we can't prove who is responsible, we can plainly see that taxpayer money was misused for political purposes and we would like to see changes made to prevent this from happening again."

The grand jury report concluded that James Uthmeier, who was DeSantis' chief of staff at the time, "was in a position of authority over those involved in settling," and that his Keep Florida Clean PAC was the prime recipient of the $10 million. The grand jury said then-state Attorney General Ashley Moody's office knew of the plans to divert the money. She was later appointed by DeSantis to the U.S. Senate...

Take note of all the players involved in both the crime and the cover-up, how they're all interconnected and relying on each other to stay in political power. Uthmeier and Moody both owe DeSantis their offices, and they have personal incentives to make sure they're never held accountable for any role they had in this.

The articles covering this story don't delve too much into how a grand jury investigation into this even started back in October 2025. That it was a fellow state Republican in the state House questioning the fundraising diversions seems a bit surprising unless you recognize it as an intraparty power play: Back then, Casey DeSantis was campaigning to run for governor to follow in her husband's footsteps, a blatant act of nepotism that arguably angered other Republicans ambitious for that office. The polls favored her well into February 2026, but the grand jury created enough scandal to keep her from running.

When she didn't show up on the ballot, you'll notice the other state-level Republicans didn't care to hold anybody accountable for it, even though clearly crimes took place. Their inaction reeks just as much as the DeSantis' power grabs and theft.

And this is what you get when one party runs everything at the state level for 28-plus years. The Republicans - driven more and more by their wingnut extremists - have been in control of Florida since 1998, packing the state courts with conservative judges happy to bend the laws to their favor, shredding every voter-backed referendums that supported funding schools and keeping ecosystems safe, denying local communities any sovereignty, and mocking any accountability to the voters who keep putting the same crooks back into office.

All I want - all I've been praying for the last two decades - is for my fellow Floridians to wake up to the reality that the state-level Republicans - as much as the national party - are a bunch of honest-to-God crooks. The Republican Party from trump on down to DeSantis and to every state legislator and county official are part of an ongoing criminal conspiracy to take taxpayer money for their own pockets and make most of us - even their own voters - suffer to their cruelty.

Please. I am begging every Florida voter. You want an end to criminal corruption in politics? You're going to have to recognize it's all coming from the Republicans in charge at Tallahassee, and you are going to have to vote every goddamn Republican crook out of office. Please.

trump and Republicans, Selling Us Out To the Crooks Every Day

Put a corrupt businessman in power, expect the only ones to benefit from that to be the other corrupt bastards ripping us off (via David Frum at the Atlantic): 

So it is with the news that the Department of the Treasury has ended ownership-reporting requirements for U.S. businesses and purged the existing database of ownership information. This seemingly technical-sounding change is a huge gift to financial crooks, who can now store and launder dark money in U.S. financial institutions with less risk of detection. But the gift comes at the direct expense of banks, mutual funds, insurance companies, and other financial institutions, which now have to shoulder the burden of verifying customer data themselves.

The Treasury advertises the measure as deregulatory, lifting burdensome red tape from business owners. But the relief to honest business owners is tiny. The added burden on the financial sector is huge. The real winners here are shady business owners. In 2021, Capital One, the Trump Organization’s then-bank, closed more than 300 of the Trump Organization’s accounts on suspicion that they violated anti-money-laundering rules. The action just taken by the Treasury may best be understood as payback for those who tried to enforce the law against Donald Trump.

After the 9/11 terror attacks, Congress took action to prevent terrorists and other criminals from using the U.S. financial system to move money around undetected. Congress enacted laws requiring U.S. financial institutions to “know your customer.” If someone tried to open an account for a shell company, perhaps owned by another shell company, the financial institution had to pierce the layers of concealment to know the human beneficial owners of the account...

Financial institutions have clamored for years for some relief from the tangled mess of reporting imposed on them. In 2020, Congress attached a new Corporate Transparency Act to the 2021 Pentagon budget, which imposed an obligation on most businesses operating inside the United States to report their ownership directly to the government. The Corporate Transparency Act authorized the Treasury to establish a database of this information. At first, the database would be accessible only to law enforcement, but the plan was to open the database to financial institutions too. If a financial institution sensed something amiss, the federal database would assist its investigation. The goal was less to exclude criminals from the banking system than to use “the banks to track the money and find the criminals,” Aaron Klein, an expert in banking regulation at the Brookings Institution, explained to me.

By destroying the database, the Trump administration has removed that help from financial institutions and foreclosed an essential avenue for tracking crooks.

Despite the Treasury’s claims that this purported deregulation of financial information “is a victory for common sense and American small businesses,” in the words of Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, the change provides scarcely any benefit at all to honest businesses. They still have to report the relevant names, addresses, dates of birth, and government-ID numbers every time they transact with a financial institution. That burden remains the law. They have been relieved only of the slight additional chore of filing the same information with the federal government—a chore that lowered their costs of doing business. Those costs are now destined to rise...

This isn't as much about costs or burdens as it is a loss of accountability, the lost of faith in institutions to do honest business with the vast majority of us who aren't crooks.

This isn't capitalism, at least not the way it evolved in the 20th Century with regulatory guidelines to keep our global economy from crashing every 20 years. This sure isn't socialism, not as "government control of the means of production" as much as trump is forcing businesses to kick him a piece of their action like a mob boss.

This is a rebirth of the economic conditions Mercantilism that created the corrupt East India Company: a small circle of political and business elites raging across the landscape using monopoly power and brute force to vacuum up every cent they can. It's the Five Families, the shakedown artists, the identity thieves who keep stealing our parents' and grandparents' debit card numbers.

Goddamn them. Goddamn the entire Republican Party for defending their only constant constituents: thieves and greedheads. Be honest to yourselves, voters: The modern Republicans have betrayed your trust with their economic malaise, destruction of communities, and desire to sell every inch of America to twisted techbros eager to consume our resources and privacy. 

We need to do better, America. We need to STOP voting for a Republican Party of the crooks, by the crooks, and for the crooks.

The Only Truth That Is Also A Fact: The Republicans Are Beyond Saving

Over on Bluesky I reposted this skeet, because it spells out in easy terms why the Republicans cannot be redeemed.

This is an apt descriptions of Republicans now.

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— migas7.bsky.social (@migas7.bsky.social) July 25, 2026 at 10:11 AM

In case the embed fails

The modern Republican Party defends no virtue, performs no service to others, provides no leadership to our nation in any way.

In every respect, the Republican Party is still dead as a functioning political force. It is now an occupying army, treating other Americans - other humans - as targets for their greed, fear, and hate. Anyone in that party that can claim any rational capability cannot be turned around as a force for good: They have had a DECADE of trumpism to walk away, deny any support of such criminality... and they refused. They are too beholden to "owning the libs" that they cannot break from a corrupt, destructive faction.

This is why I've been screaming to the nation FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, STOP VOTING REPUBLICAN. There is nothing there to vote for, only against (against Blacks, against women, against Latinos, against gays/lesbians/trans, against fiscal sanity, against vaccines, against foreign allies, against holding any person of power/wealth accountable for their crimes).

I'm not taking crazy pills. The Republican downward spiral has been going on for decades now, and it's dragging the United States - and the world - down with it.

Just stop pandering to any Right-leaning faction you think you can appeal to. The Republicans killed the better angels of their nature ages ago. They'll just waste your time (and take your money). Just stop that. There's millions of Democratic and Independent voters to reach for to get them motivated to vote. There's millions more who aren't even registered to vote - and who can - that the Dems and other center-Left forces need to reach to get them in enough numbers to drive the corrupt GOP out of power at the state and federal levels.

Those are the Americans we need to stand up for the nation. Go talk to them, get them on board. Save the true Republic, Dems.

The Ongoing Monotony of the Same trump Traumas

Jason Linkins over at the New Republic pretty much describes the mood most of us are in heading into the 2026 midterms: 

Times have changed. Whereas TNR’s Matt Ford once famously compared Trump’s first term to the episode of Battlestar Galactica where the Cylons attack every 33 minutes, its second iteration has become a dull monotony. Just about everything this White House does is rooted in the president’s desire to get revenge on his perceived enemies, his quest for self-aggrandizement, and the extreme limitations that arise when your best days—from a pure cognition standpoint—are well behind you. Nowadays, there are only really seven types of Trump story, and they’re all bad.

Linkins notes each of trump's calamities, starting with tariffs:

Of all the kindnesses that the Supreme Court has bestowed on Trump, its February decision to strike down the president’s retaliatory tariffs stands out as advice that should have been heeded: “Hey, don’t do this, you are screwing up the economy.” Trump forsook this wise counsel and continues to wake up on random mornings with the yen for imposing tariffs willy-nilly. This week he imposed 50 percent tariffs on a slew of Canadian goods because our neighbors to the north had the temerity to fight back in the trade war Trump started. He followed that up with an announcement that he was going to put a ten percent tariff on 80 other nations. It’s always impossible to gauge whether Trump intends to stick with a tariff fight. After all, it’s in this arena that “Trump Always Chickens Out” was born...

trump would back down from some of the tariff plans he intended to unleash since April 2025 from time to time, but he keeps going back to imposing tariffs because he genuinely believes tariffs work for him. trump revels in the idea of trade wars because he thinks they're "easy to win". And it fits so well into his mob-boss world-view of extorting everybody else to pay up.

trump doesn't care how unpopular his trade wars are, nor does he care about how unpopular his real wars are, such as the ongoing nightmare involving Iran as Linkins notes:

...Trump’s decision to wade into an unwinnable foreign war after limply cosplaying as The One Guy Smart Enough to Do That was born from the fact that he’s a dumb asshole who needed a distraction from a cratering economy and the daily effluvia of the Epstein news cycle. But even I thought that the backslappery that arose from the Memorandum Of Understanding that briefly put an end to hostilities might be a sign that the administration understood it had a much-needed off-ramp. Color me naïve: We’re now back in the big muddy, talking about war crimes and taking over Kharg Island, as the president recoils from public inquiry and his congressional allies fret about their political futures. The only question left is the one asked by TNR contributor Joe Cirincione: Can Trump lose the same war twice?

trump of course will never admit he's losing. trump will - unfortunately - keep repeating the same mistakes, because he's convinced only the suckers among the armed forces will pay the price for him.

The other major trauma point for Americans has been trump's - and the Far Right's - war on immigrants, with reemerging signs of ICE violence across more of our communities:

Too many members of the media treated the exile of Greg Bovino and Kristi Noem as a credible sign that the administration had overreached in its violent assault on American cities. But the White House’s bloodthirsty deportation machine suffered little if any lull, and ICE is back to its wanton ways, with new high-profile killings at the hand of Trump’s goons in Texas, Florida, and Maine—the latter of which may prove to regalvanize support for Senator Susan Collins’s future Democratic opponent. As TNR’s Melissa Gira Grant reminds us, the violence is a feature, not a bug. And now, Trump’s FBI has decided to turn a blind eye to investigating those responsible. Far from a drawdown, this looks like the administration is giving carte blanche to the agency to kill at will.

Another growing trumpian scandal is the most obvious and yet the one nobody is in any current position to do anything about it: trump's open graft and money-grabbing in clear violation of the Emoluments Clause and a hundred other laws against insider trading, fraud, and foreign influence:

Trump spent last year becoming a world-class kleptocrat, on the back of self-dealing exploits too numerous to recount (though I did offer readers what I thought were the worst of the bunch). Estimates as to how much his bread got buttered by all the grift and graft are nearly as varied. The New York Times totaled up about $1.4 billion in takings, but this is the low end—financial disclosures released at the end of June put the total at $2.2 billion, while Democratic researchers on the House Oversight Committee estimate that this figure rises to “$9.7 billion when the value of Trump’s digital assets is factored in” to the equation. Regardless, Trump is still lining his pockets, with new schemes including Kazakh tungsten, Pentagon baksheesh, and what appears to be a pay-to-pardon scheme.

Leading into Linkins' next trauma of note: trump's threats to derail democracy altogether this midterms.

When Trump isn’t trying to steal your money, he’s well-nigh obsessed with stealing your vote, a subject that was supposed to serve as the (very) loose framework for his recent prime-time ramble. The president’s monomaniacal desire to see the SAVE Act—his signature voter suppression bill—pass muster has peppered the headlines with updates on the latest weird scheme to somehow enact it over the objections of all the Democratic lawmakers and not a few of their GOP colleagues. Not long ago, Trump was trying to sneak it through the reconciliation process; now Republicans have backdoored voter ID restrictions into a congressional stock-trading-ban bill. It’s clear that Trump would love to rig the upcoming midterms, though it’s not clear how he will accomplish this...

With all of those ongoing acts of criminality and madness, the next one Linkins mentions seems the most frivolous but is in fact one of the more serious and soul-breaking things trump is doing to our nation: Fucking with our monuments and national landmarks.

Millions now living may not recall that it was once possible to go several years without thinking about the Reflecting Pool. Thanks to Trump, we’re now getting daily updates about algal blooms, phantasmal vandalism, and dubious criminal cases that only show how the administration’s Stasi-like authoritarianism can be extended almost everywhere. The real vandal, as TNR’s Michael Tomasky wrote, is Trump, whose desperate efforts to leave a mark in D.C. have led to a demolished East Wing, a hollowed-out Kennedy Center, and an Oval Office decorated with Temu (note: the KMart to Amazon's Target, if you understand the reference) gold wall appliqués...

That's not even going into the unwanted triumphal arch trump wants erected - not for any given war or national accomplishment, but for trump's twisted ego - and the horrors trump wants to inflict on our museums like the Smithsonian. This is stuff that affects the mental psyche / awareness of many Americans, and trump's playing with all that to mess with our heads (and he knows it, he revels in that kind of sadism).

All leading up to the seventh trauma trump's administration is inflicting upon the American people: literal sickness.

Trump’s second term isn’t without its success stories—if you are the measles virus, anyway. As Axios reported this week, the “U.S. measles case count for this year has surged past last year’s total and now stands at 2,295—a level that hasn’t been seen in 35 years, according to a Johns Hopkins University tracker that compiles state and local health data.” This news comes hard on the heels of another public health crisis that also serves as a metaphor for the Trump presidency: the record number of cyclospora infection cases that have turned this into Explosive Diarrhea Summer. This is part and parcel of the long tail of DOGE’s effort to denude the government of its public health capabilities; we see this manifesting in our struggle to contain New World screwworm at home and Ebola abroad. And let’s remember: In the event of a Covid-style pandemic, the adults who were in the room during Trump’s first term have been replaced by quacks like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who make the titular character from “Storm”—Tim Minchin’s seminal song about pseudoscience—look like C. Everett Koop.

When the 2024 election turned for trump, a lot of observers knew he was going to bring in the worst of the worst to demolish federal agencies from within, and his hiring of known anti-vaccinations kook RFK Junior was seen as a prelude to this current wave of viral and parasitic infections decimating America. Well, look upon Kennedy's works, America: Along with measles - which is a serious childhood calamity causing deaths and long-term health woes - we're coping with EXPLOSIVE diarrhea (lemme share the Josh Johnson standup routine to give you an idea how to say "EXPLOSIVE" properly).

Everything Linkins mentions, it's literally the crap a lot of us have had to deal with since 2024 2016: the absolute utter nightmare of an idiotic bully ruining our world on his whims on a daily basis. This is why I complain about being unable to blog every day: Sometimes, there's too much of this shit to cope.

If there's any good news, there is a simple solution to all of this: This is a midterms year, and in spite of trump's (and Republicans') efforts to suppress the vote or skew the results there are good odds that a large voter turnout for Democrats - a Blue Wave larger than the one we saw in 2018 - will flip the US House control away from a Republican Party unwilling to enforce the checks and balances of the Legislative branch. The Senate is iffy at this moment, but if the polling gets worse for Republicans the seats for Ohio, Iowa, Maine - even Texas, Alabama, and Florida - could be in play.

This all depends on voter turnout: Every registered Democrat showing up at the polls this November, casting votes in anger against the daily nightmares our nation's been enduring; Every registered Independent showing and refusing to give Republicans any relief; and Enough registered Republicans deciding to either not show up, or flipping their votes to favor Dems out of frustration of all the damage their own party has inflicted on them.

There is hope. We as a nation must act to protect and promote that hope.

Voters, for the LOVE OF GOD, OUR FAMILIES, AND AMERICA: Throw the Republican bums out. It is THE ONLY WAY TO HOLD trump ACCOUNTABLE FOR THE DAMAGE DONE.

trump and His Cronies Aren't Even Hiding the Theft Anymore

This is how corrupt trump's administration is: he sued his own government for billions of dollars so he could then weasel out of the lawsuit and claim an imaginary settlement for a mere billion to pay off his foot soldiers among the insurrectionist ranks (from Katherine Faulders, Peter Charalambous, and Alexander Mallin at ABC News):

The Justice Department announced Monday that as part of a settlement agreement in President Donald Trump's $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service, the attorney general is establishing an $1.776 billion "Anti-Weaponization Fund" to compensate those who allege they were wrongly targeted under the Biden administration. 

The announcement came after attorneys representing Trump informed a federal judge in a court filing earlier Monday that the president was dropping his suit against the IRS.

The judge overseeing the case, U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams, subsequently ordered the case closed -- signaling that she does not plan to challenge the controversial settlement. 

In a brief order issued Monday, Judge Williams said she was "stripped of jurisdiction" to continue overseeing the case. She noted that the settlement agreement was never docketed in the case, so there is no "settlement of record" -- leaving her with no authority to adjudicate the private settlement. 

Do you see it? There's no official settlement of record. There's no paper trail the legal system is supposed to rely on. And yet, there's a billion dollars that Congress never approved of getting set up in a slush fund that I doubt will have any real oversight to where it gets turned into a funnel of illegality where even more money gets siphoned off to gods know where.

As thought making the payment amount symbolic to make it say 1776 like it's for FREEDOM on our nation's 250th birthday is going to patch things over. GODDAMN THIS IS CORRUPT.

This is Paul Krugman over at the National Memo:

So the Trump administration is creating a $1.776 billion slush fund — 1776, get it? — to pay off victims of “lawfare and weaponization.” Just to be clear, if you’re a U.S. taxpayer, this action means that almost $1.8 billion of your money will be handed out to whomever a panel appointed by Donald Trump decides to reward. The beneficiaries are likely to include January 6 insurrectionists, as well as Trump, his family, and his allies.

Few things shock me these days, but this development — in which a Justice Department that works for Trump is paying a vast sum to “settle” a lawsuit brought by Trump himself — is a new nadir in self-dealing, further revealing Trump’s utter contempt for the American people.

Now, massive corruption on the part of Trump and his minions isn’t new. But the shamelessness of this latest episode of looting takes it to a new level. Until now, we’ve seen a combination of crony capitalism and insider trading. Plutocrats and corporations have been enriching Trump through back channels, especially crypto, in return for government contracts and policy favors, while Trump himself and people close to Trump have been making hugely profitable market bets thanks to advance knowledge of government policies.

But now Trump has eliminated the middlemen, effectively telling his officials to pay money directly to him or anyone else he favors.

Granted, we already knew that Trump was, by orders of magnitude, the most corrupt president in U.S. history. But now Trump is the most explicitly corrupt leader in today’s world. After all, Vladimir Putin has obviously stolen billions, but never this brazenly. Even Third World dictators normally try to mask their corruption.

If there's any true justice, trump's move here should get tied up in the courts - especially over that fact that there's no judge-approved agreement on record - long enough for the Democrats to win back Congress this midterms well enough to guarantee they will use their Article I constitutional powers to block trump and his cronies from stealing one more nickel from our nation's coffers.

This is why the Republicans are so desperate to gerrymander the hell out of congressional districts, this is why the Republicans are so desperate to suppress voter turnout to keep their Senate seats safe from statewide anger. They're not that stupid to ignore the polls showing how unpopular they've gotten among even independent voters (and even enough registered Republicans willing to flip their ballots).

Voter turnout still matters: that's the good news. The Republicans can't rig enough barricades and tip enough scales to stop all of us angry at them and trump. Everyone needs to understand the mission this midterms: GET THE DAMN VOTE OUT FOR DEMOCRATS. VOTE EVERY REPUBLICAN OUT AT EVERY LEVEL OF THE BALLOT.

We can save this nation from an eternal void of Far Right grifting and greed, if we show up and vote goddammit.

The Arc of Justice, Pretzeled by the Far Right Undoing the VRA

Goddammit. Just as I was writing a long spiel about gerrymandering, this extremist Roberts Court decides to come out with a ruling against redistricting for minority representation that basically made things worse for democracy (via Lawrence Hurley at NBC News):

The Supreme Court on Wednesday further weakened the Voting Rights Act, ruling that a congressional map in Louisiana was a racial gerrymander even though it was drawn to comply with the landmark law aimed at protecting minority voters.

The justices, split 6-3 with the court's (note: Republican) conservatives in the majority, told states they can almost never consider race when drawing maps to comply with Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which was enacted to protect minority voters who long faced discrimination in elections.

Conservative Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the majority, said that while there may be extreme situations where the use of race can be justified to draw a map, no such conditions existed in the Louisiana case. As a result, the new map was an "unconstitutional racial gerrymander," he added.

This ruling ignores the long, horrifying history of segregation when post-Civil War southern states slid back to control under ex-Confederate racists who rigged elections, took away voting rights for Blacks, and drew maps in such a way that pretty much guaranteed racist one-party rule well up into the Second World War. But that's the point: Alito and his fellow Far Right conservatives wanted to return to that segregationist era ever since the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s ended their racist regimes. Labeling the Louisiana district as a "racial gerrymander" is irony of the sickest kind.

The implications could be immediate: as much as we're weeks away from midterm primaries kicking off, a number of Republican-controlled states were already in the process of last-minute gerrymandering efforts that can get a boost from this ruling to erase every Black majority district off their maps. Not only the congressional districts, but the state legislative districts are at risk of seeing every Black/Latino representative getting mapped out of office.

If there's any ray of hope, it's the one David A. Graham shared in that dummymander article I quoted in my previous blog entry:

The math is simple: In order to draw more districts favoring Republicans, GOP legislators had to spread their own voters a little thinner. But if they spread them too thin and Democrats have a good year, Republican candidates will become vulnerable.

The state-level Republicans may be eager to redraw Black majority districts out of existence, but they run into the risk that those voting blocs with blend in with the surrounding districts that the conservatives made sure were racist White enough to lean conservative/Republican. A lot of those "racial gerrymandered" Black districts were intentionally over-packed with Democratic voters to where that district could be +20 Dem while the surrounding four or five districts leaned +2 or +5 GOP. Without that overpack, that +20 Blue can flow into those GOP Red districts and shift them enough to where the Republicans lose their advantages in spite of their map rigging.

This is why the Republicans are also working overtime to take away voting rights from everyone they fear/hate. Don't be surprised if there's a lot of last-minute legislation under the guise of fighting "voter fraud" to take away the constitutionally guaranteed rights of Blacks, women, and college students to solidify whatever "win" the Far Right inflicted on this nation today.

Keep fighting. This was how things were in the 1960s and here we are again, but these rights are worth fighting for, there is an America still out there worth fighting for. Don't let these bastards win: Vote every fucking conservative Republican out of office while we still can.

Update: Adam Serwer at the Atlantic explains it better than I can.

As the historian Nancy MacLean wrote in Freedom Is Not Enough, by the 1970s, (segregationist James Jackson Kilpatrick) had refashioned himself as an opponent of racial discrimination, a champion of color-blindness. Liberal egalitarians supporting race-conscious remedies, he argued, were “worse racists—much worse racists—than the old Southern bigots.” His transformation was so complete, he joked, that he was like the convert who “became more Catholic than the Pope.”

In fact, Kilpatrick’s conversion was no conversion at all. To understand it is to understand the Roberts Court’s decision today in Louisiana v. Callais. The decision purports to uphold Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits racial discrimination in voting, but effectively nullifies it, ruling that a Louisiana redistricting map that created two majority-Black districts out of six, in a state whose population is one-third Black, was an “unconstitutional racial gerrymander.” The majority opinion uses procedural language to obscure what its rewriting of the VRA will allow lawmakers to do: engage in racial discrimination in drawing political districts as long as they say they are doing so for a partisan purpose rather than a racist one—as if the results would not be identical.

In states with large Black populations that remain under Republican control—half of the Black American population resides in the South—lawmakers will now be able to draw districts that dilute Black residents’ voting power. In his opinion for the right-wing majority, Justice Samuel Alito wrote that “in considering the constitutionality of a districting scheme, courts must treat partisan advantage like any other race-neutral aim: a constitutionally permissible criterion that States may rely on as desired.” The Court’s decision is consonant with the philosophy, articulated by Kilpatrick in his earlier days, that the state is oppressive when it interferes with the right to discriminate, and respects liberty when it allows discrimination. And the decision fits just as well with Kilpatrick’s later spin on that philosophy: Attempts to ban racial discrimination are themselves discriminatory—against white people.

What Kilpatrick wanted, and what the Roberts Court is making possible, is a country where white people can maintain their political dominance at the expense of Americans who are not white. The anticaste provisions of the Reconstruction amendments, intended by their authors to reverse the “horrid blasphemy” that America was a white man’s country, are being inverted to defend that dominance. This is not the color-blindness of Martin Luther King Jr., but what the scholar Ian Haney López has called “reactionary colorblindness,” the purpose of which is to maintain racial hierarchy through superficially neutral means. It takes the view that the Constitution’s “color-blindness” renders any attempt to remedy anti-Black racism unconstitutional, because by definition that would involve making racial distinctions. Similarly, the ruling in this case does not explicitly overturn the VRA’s ban on racial discrimination in voting so much as rewrite it to allow such discrimination.

The best way to stop racists is to stop fucking voting for them. Get every Republican out of office now.

The Fall of Florida's Higher Education Under Far Right Republicans

As part of Ron DeSantis' ambitious agenda - for his insane presidential hopes - in 2023 to "fight Wokeness" in Florida's educational system, we witnessed the Sunshine State's schools fall under the merciless attentions of Far Right wingnuts eager to purge "diversity" and any genuine standards at every level. As I wrote back in February 2023:

 Not only are the classrooms at our public schools been emptied of every book so that DeSantis' foot soldier censors can refuse whichever titles they fear, but DeSantis is happily plugging in conservative political hacks into leadership roles at every major state university...

This is essentially a hostile takeover, not just by DeSantis but also by Far Right Republicans obsessed with dismantling higher educational systems they fear are too liberal...

DeSantis is essentially saying that things like civil rights and Title IX protections won't be upheld at state universities. Segregation and racial discrimination, sexual harassment, hostile workplaces, hostile classrooms... all of this will become the norm in DeSantis' Florida.

This is all echoed in DeSantis' efforts to shut down ANY discussion of "Critical Race Theory" essentially meaning our state cannot teach one iota of Florida's history regarding racism, slavery, Jim Crow, Civil Rights marches, all because Republicans are terrified that White People's Feelings (tm) will be hurt if we teach the facts that Yes Goddammit racism happened and keeps happening. He's just making sure that college students will be kept ignorant as much as our K-12 students.

(Christopher) Rufo is, by the by, a wingnut conservative hack actively campaigning to shut down public education of any kind in an obsessive desire to privatize something for greed and racism. DeSantis, desperate to win over 2024 Republican primary voters, is giving Rufo the opportunity to wreak havoc on Florida's educational system...

So it's been two years since then, with DeSantis' presidential hopes all dashed while Florida's educational standards sank into the swamps. In the meanwhile, we had situations like political hack Ben Sasse - Far Right Republican dragged in from another state - causing massive administrative and financial damage to the flagship University of Florida. We keep witnessing Republican leadership at the state level fail our kids and families when it comes to high school success and getting prepared for colleges. The state's budget for education across the board is disappearing, forcing more cuts that shouldn't be happening.

And DeSantis' takeover of New College? How is that turning out? Let Nate Weisberg's report at Washington Monthly educate us:

As Chris Mullin wrote recently in the Washington Monthly, DeSantis exploited Florida’s unusually centralized system of higher-education governance to insert political control directly into the classroom—stacking boards, replacing presidents, and rewriting curricula. His boldest gamble has been a complete takeover and ideological makeover of ​​New College of Florida, a small public liberal-arts college on Sarasota Bay known for its experimental pedagogy and progressive-left campus culture. Charging poor performance and ideological bias, DeSantis announced plans in early 2023 to transform the school into a “Hillsdale of the South”—a reference to the small, selective, conservative-leaning Michigan college that eschews government funds and focuses on teaching the classics. The governor appointed six new conservative trustees to New College, including activist Christopher Rufo, ​who then ​fired its President, Patricia Okker, and replaced her with former Florida House Speaker Richard Corcoran ​at more than double Okker’s salary​. Within months, the new board abolished the gender​ studies program, dismissed faculty and administrators, created athletic teams, and secured tens of millions in state funding.

Two years later, the picture looks grim. New College’s four-year graduation rate has plummeted from 58.3 to 47.4 percent. The school’s U.S. News & World Report college ranking has fallen by nearly 60 spots, from 76th among national liberal-arts colleges in 2022 to 135th this year. Faculty and staff have fled, and students have followed them out the door. “It’s kind of like a Ponzi scheme,” one professor told Inside Higher Ed. “Students keep leaving, so they have to recruit bigger and bigger cohorts.” Spending​ at the college​, meanwhile, has exploded. ​In Tallahassee, there is now open talk of either privatizing New College or shutting it down completely. 

DeSantis’s justification for the takeover was that New College was an educational disaster—a failed experiment in left-wing academic culture. Though the school ​had its problems (it struggled​​, for instance,​​ to reach its enrollment goals, as do many small, less-selective colleges around the country) and ​was indeed ​​left leaning, it was far from a disaster. In fact, by most objective measures, it was a model of what a small public liberal-arts institution could achieve. As Aalia Thomas reported in the Washington Monthly in 2023, New College consistently ranked near the top of the magazine’s l​ist of l​iberal​ ​arts ​colleges ​​for upward mobility, research, and service. ​​Its graduates earned PhDs at rates higher than many of the nation’s most prestigious private liberal arts colleges. Its curriculum mixed ​​postcolonial theory with Aristotle and Voltaire. The college charged about $7,000 a year for low-to-medium-income students—a bargain compared to most similar liberal arts colleges. It enrolled a high share of Pell​ ​​Grant recipients and produced civically engaged graduates—​​92.6 percent of its students were registered to vote in 2020. Far from failing, New College embodied many of the qualities conservatives say they prize in public higher education: affordability, rigor, civic virtue, and upward mobility. 

​​The governor’s appointees arrived convinced they were rescuing a failing school. ​​They replaced New College’s narrative-evaluation system with traditional grades. They bragged about making the college more “selective” (instead, the percentage of new students with a 4.0 or above high school grade point average decreased from 55.1 percent in 2022 to 42.1 percent in 2024)​.​ They recruited athletes and ​​self-described “normal” students to reshape the culture, ​​many of whom quickly transferred out. ​The campus began to change in telling ways: the reopened campus café, operated by a vendor tied to Corcoran, now serves coffee in cups printed with Bible verses, and the college has commissioned a statue of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk to stand on campus in honor of “free speech​.​​​” ​All this change has been financed by ​​an ​​eye-watering ​​boost​​ in ​​spending​​. The college’s budget has grown from​​ ​$53,232,164​​​​ ​​​​the year before the overhaul ​​​​to​​​​ ​​​​$93,043,119​​​​ ​​​​today​​​​—a​​​​ 75 percent​​​​ increase​​​​.​​​​ ​

​​​​​​​​Even DeSantis allies are turning on the project. “There can be no question anymore about what the numbers really are,” said Eric Silagy, a​​ DeSantis-appointed​​ member of the state Board of Governors. Nathan Allen, ​​who served as ​​​​vice president of strategy​​ for New College ​​during the conservative takeover but has since resigned​​, ​suggested where the blame for those numbers should be placed​: “​​New College is not a House or Senate project … It’s a Ron DeSantis project.”​​ ​​​Corcoran himself has said, ​​if New College doesn’t produce something different, “then we should be closed down.”

That Corcoran - a political hack hire who didn't deserve the job in the first place - is looking for the exit is a telling sign of how screwed up New College under Rufo and the other wingnuts turned out. And as much as this is all on DeSantis - pushing a political agenda on our state's schools - all of the state-level Republicans who backed DeSantis' efforts on this need to answer for their own corruption and incompetence here.

Look at the waste in dollars at New College: almost doubling the spending with reduced results, arguably funneling that money into wingnut ideas that aren't working out, if not funneling that money into their own pockets. Remember what happened at UF under Sasse: He hired in 'consultants' and lackeys at double if not triple the pay for no-show jobs and no-show results. It was... it is a huge grift for these greedheads.

For the Republicans, this was never about improving the educational standards of Florida. This was about viewing public education as a cash cow, a means of filling their own pockets with state money while the system breaks down. It was about playing into the hypocrisy of accusing our schools and colleges of being 'broken' and 'corrupt', while being the ones in charge breaking it all and using their own corrupt urges to make it worse.

We've had almost 30 years of constant Republican (mis)rule in the state of Florida, a straight line of crooked behavior by our elected officials and their shady business allies. Why the hell should they be allowed to retain any office after these decades of deceit and destruction?

Let This Be a Sign Of a Strong Blue Wave This 2024

Update: ...

I still check on Infidel753's blog every Sunday - he does a weekly wrap-up of other online tidbits to read that are solid and cool - and I picked up on his article "Why I Anticipate a Blue Wave" from a few days ago. Inf makes some reasonable observations about what he calls "The Dobbs Effect":

My main reason for expecting a very substantial Democratic win is straightforward.  Since the Dobbs decision, I have believed that this election will be dominated by the abortion-rights issue, and nothing that has happened since then has given me any reason to change that assessment.  The need to restore and protect abortion rights will lead some Republicans (mostly women) to vote for Democrats, and will motivate many people to vote who would not otherwise have bothered.  These effects will swamp and overwhelm all other factors and will determine the outcome.

My supporting evidence for this claim is the results of all the abortion referenda, and almost all the elections, held since the Dobbs decision.  Every time abortion rights have been put to a public vote, they have won overwhelmingly, even in very red states.  Moreover, turnout in these referenda has been high, suggesting both that many Republicans are voting for abortion rights, and that many new voters are being motivated to participate.  As for the elections, in case after case since Dobbs, Democratic candidates have done ten or fifteen points better than the historic norm for the state or district involved.  Sometimes that shift has been big enough to allow the Democrat to win in a "red" district, sometimes not, but the point is that the shift is almost always there.  This recent election in Alaska continued the pattern.  Voters are well aware that Democrats in office will uphold abortion rights, while Republicans will attack them.

Past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior.  This axiom applies to voting as much as to anything else.  I can't think of any reason why the abortion-rights factor would not dominate the federal election just as much as it has dominated other elections since Dobbs (if anything, it's increasing in importance).  Moreover, most of those surprising election and referendum results since Dobbs were not anticipated by polling, which predicted much closer, more "normal" outcomes.  This shows that the Dobbs effect is not being captured by polling.  That may be because many Republicans are telling pollsters they expect to vote Republican again and only changing their minds at the last moment, in the voting booth; it could also be that the pollsters' turnout models are not capturing the effect of so many new voters participating.  It's likely that the current polling we're seeing for the federal election is similarly missing the Dobbs effect, for the same reasons...

Infidel shared in his Sunday round-up link to a USA Today report that is tracking the Early Voting turnout - which has seen an increase in turnout compared to 2020 - showing that where overall turnout is balanced between Democratic and Republican voters, the percentage voting for Harris is at 63 percent(!). All things being equal, we can conclude that a significant percent - at least double-digits - of Republicans have crossed the aisle to support the Dems. Whether this translates to down-ballot seats isn't known, but if the Dobbs ruling is truly pushing moderate pro-choice Republicans to change sides those results should favor the whole Democratic ticket.

Again, this is not just speculation or wishful thinking.  It requires only that the voters behave as they have done in every election since the Dobbs ruling, and that the polls fail to predict this effect just as they failed to predict it in all those earlier cases.  Imagine if this November every state and district votes ten percent more Democratic than it historically has, or even just five percent.  A swing of five percent would mean a landslide; ten percent would be an annihilating tsunami.  I'm not saying something like that definitely will happen, but it would be consistent with the pattern of the last two years...

The polling, as Infidel noted, doesn't seem to pick up on the shifts happening with women voters - they seem to stick to the same 2020 models that White Women voters will stay with a Republican Party that devastated their health care rights two years afterward and are threatening even more harm to come - and as always the caveat is that voter turnout still matters. That 63 percent vote for Harris in early voting (with 34 to trump) is tempered by that same article noting the voters waiting for Election Day itself support trump at 52 percent over Harris' 35 percent with the same group... but that's nowhere near the numbers Harris is getting and promises to get by November 5th. Put those two sets together and the average you get - 63+35 for Harris, 34+52 to trump - splits to a 49 percent Harris vs. 43 percent trump result (the 7 percent different is going to third parties as usual). 

Of course, results will vary from state to state - not every Red state will shift 10 percent to favor Democrats, some may not even shift 5 percent - but if enough states DO shift in favor for Harris and the Democratic Party, we should see an increase in states (and Electoral Votes) more than Biden's results in 2020.

Those hopes I have of securing battleground states like Pennsylvania, Arizona, Michigan and Wisconsin grow stronger. The odds of keeping Georgia Blue as well grow greater. The possibility of flipping Texas, Ohio, Florida, even Kansas and Nebraska (maybe even Missouri) - any other states where the abortion rights referendum have happened or are happening now - are within reach of Democratic - and pro-choice - voters angered by the Culture War bullshit of the Far Right in their own communities.

Again. Voter turnout matters. Every vote in favor of Harris - and Democratic Senators, and Democratic Congresscritters, and State Legislators - needs to get into the ballot boxes now while Early Voting is still happening or on Election Day itself on Tuesday November 5th. Every blue vote matters, everybody. Stopping trump and stopping the Republican War on Women (and minorities, and immigrants, and schools, and Social Security, and...) is the mission.

Let's fucking GOOOOOO, America. Vote for Harris and every Democratic candidate you've got on the ballot. Vote like your life and your liberty and your families and friends are on the line. Because it all is on the line this 2024.

Update: thinking again about how close certain states were in 2020, if we consider a five percent shift minimum in favor of Harris for the Electoral count, the website 270towin has a map where states within five percent popular vote were left blank:

Now consider ALL of those blank states flipped Blue for Harris. Some already went for Biden - Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, Nevada, and especially Georgia - but now add in North Carolina and Florida(!). Even without the huge gain of flipping Texas - or my personal desire to see Kansas and Nebraska flip because THAT would break the "Heartland of America is Conservative" narrative in the Beltway media - that's still a massive 349 EV count and a good chance the popular vote for Harris goes over 90 million(!).

The only thing to worry at this point is if DeSantis goes full MAGA and declares secession in order to stop the Electoral certification. If Texas flips Democrat, I'll guarantee you the state GOP led by that jerkass Abbott will.

This Is It. Early Voting Begins for 2024.

Early voting started in a number of states already, and while the turnout is higher than expected in several of them - North Carolina and Georgia especially - there's not really any hope that this turnout favors the Democrats over the evil that is MAGA trump.

We're in the final lap of this damned election cycle, yet another horse race for a national media that treats it all like a game while the rest of us living in the real world are terrified of the outcomes. I've been here before - on the edge of a war none of us can escape - we all have, and our nerves are as frayed as my friend Emily's:

So I've been feeling anxious & a little paralyzed about a lot of things that I very much have no control over & I'm trying to remember that I have no control over those things but I can have input. Election Day is coming up FAST. We can't control the outcome, but we can have input. Here's one way ⬇️

[image or embed]

— Emily L. Hauser (@emilylhauser.bsky.social) October 20, 2024 at 1:11 AM

If we existed in a nation that wasn't coping with a broken Electoral College system - and a voting system vulnerable to trumpian sabotage - maybe we'd be feeling more calm and saner heading towards Election Day. 

All we can control - each of us, in the corners of America where we live - is making sure we can get out to vote when we can - for example early voting to avoid the lines on Election Day for those who haven't gotten mail-in ballots - and then making sure within our circle of friends - the ones voting for Kamala Harris and for Democratic Senators and for Democratic Representatives and for Democratic State officials - also get their votes in when they can.

I would recommend getting to early voting if you're in battleground states especially ones where trump and his RNC lackeys are threatening to send in "poll workers" to delay, derail, or deny voters their right to vote on November 5th itself. It's harder for them to do it at the Early Voting locations due to the likelihood of interfering with NPA or GOP voters (they're hoping to sabotage the Democratic-heavy precincts filled with ethnic and youth voters).

The Republicans do not trust the actual majority of voters: They themselves are a minority party using suppression and gerrymandering to give them political power they don't deserve. The best way to stop the GOP from sabotaging - overwhelming the zone with their shit - is to overwhelm the ballot boxes with actual voters voting against that shit.

We can do this America.

Vote Democratic Party across the board. Deny trump and his Far Right cohort any victory everywhere.

Florida 2024 General Election Ballot: LET'S EFFING GOOOOO

So here I am coping with the outer bands of Hurricane Milton crossing overhead, finding the Sample Ballot for the 2024 general election sitting in my mailbox.

I don't do mail-in, I tend to vote on Election Day itself, but in the meantime here's the information my fellow Polk County residents need and for my fellow Floridians to consider whenever they submit their votes to the ballot boxes.

(The nine regular readers of this blog probably already know how this is gonna play, but it doesn't hurt to refresh)

President

FOR THE LOVE OF GOD AMERICA APPLE PIE AND EVERYONE YOU HOLD DEAR: do NOT vote trump. Considering everything I've written in the past eight years, my tune has not changed. trump is the most dangerous, self-absorbed, greedy, wrong-headed, racist, sexist, hate-driven son of a bitch this nation ever produced.

On the positive side, Kamala Harris has a record and reputation for competency, empathy, focus, commitment, sheer will. There is every GOOD reason to vote for Kamala.

Ballz to the Walz, people.

Meanwhile, RFK Jr is noticeably not on the ballot - which is funny in its own way - but he is on the ballot in other states, desperately trying to draw votes away from the Democratic tickets. Pay him no mind: His anti-vaxxing stance and his troubling personal misdeeds make him unlikeable to the liberal base. I'm asking all the independent voters (or the ones thinking to hold a protest vote re: Israel's genocide of Gaza) to just don't. The primary objective is to not give trump any advantage. HE'S the real threat.

Senate

There is a Senate seat open this cycle, the one occupied by Rick "Medicare Fraud" Scott who is most deserving to get kicked out of it. Partly because it'll be funny to watch his ambitions to become the Senate Republican caucus leader crumble to ash; Mostly because Scott has been a terrible Senator and a destructive presence in Floridian politics.

Running against him on the Democratic ticket is Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, a one-term congresswoman (who had won as part of the 2018 Blue Wave) with a background in academics and social work. She's mostly focused on gun background checks and relief efforts for Venezuelan refugees. She's solid and she's cool. VOTE FOR HER.

Congress

There's 28 House seats up for election in the state of Florida and 20 of those districts are ridiculously gerrymandered towards Republicans (Go FUCK yourself, DeSantis) so it would be an absolute delight if enough Democratic and Indy voters turned out the vote to where Democratic candidates can win about 14 or 15 of those seats to give DeSatan BOTH middle fingers. Please and Thank You.

If there's good news, it's that state party leader Nikki Fried worked to get a Democratic challenger in every congressional district, giving local voters incentives to show up and vote. So let's do that, Florida. Flip the Sunshine State Blue.

State Legislature

I know it's hard going at the state level, but with every House seat up for vote and half the state Senate seats up for vote, it sure would be nice for Democratic turnout to break the near-absolute hold the Republicans have held on Tallahassee since the 1990s. Given all the lobbyist corruption and calcification - the failures by the GOP to fix our homeowner insurance regulations and lowering of costs has become painful to residents and HOAs across the state - we need a shift in the power alignments to force through needed reforms that one-party rule will never seek. This is serious, Floridians. Pay attention to the state officials who need to get swept out of the legislature for failing to serve our needs.

State Supreme Court

Our state uses a retention voting process for appellate and Supreme Court positions, and in this cycle two state Justices - Renatha Francis and Meredith Sasso - are up for consideration after being on the bench one year (retention will earn them a six-year term). 

Both Francis and Sasso are DeSantis appointees: On that alone, voting them out would be a huge - and deserved - black mark on DeSantis' standing. Francis in fact was denied an earlier appointment to the high bench back in 2020 (!) but it was more procedural - she hadn't been on the state bar for the 10-year requirement - than political. However, Francis has had a troubled history as a circuit judge even before her appointment in 2023, and she was clearly a partisan hire.

Both Francis and Sasso were part of the ruling upholding a horrific "six-week ban" - which is medically impossible - and dissented on the decision to allow the Abortion referendum - which would codify women's rights to get the health care they need, undoing that six week ban and requiring more sensible state laws - so their position on abortion rights are pretty clear. Kick them off the bench, vote No. While it's likely DeSantis will replace them with other Far Right appointees, the signal needs to be sent to the Republicans that Floridians want their rights over our own persons upheld.

County Sheriff

For Polk, it means Grady Judd is up for re-election (where are the damn term limits?) but at least this cycle he's facing a challenger in Theodore Murray. Judd, I swear, is more of a media hog than DeSantis, and whether he's good at his job or not he's been in that seat for too long (five terms since 2004!). Vote for Murray. It's time for fresh leadership.

Supervisor of Elections

Well, Lori Edwards does such a good job of mailing out notices and providing information and offering proper electoral services. Also she's NPA and the other choice is a Republican. Keep up the good work, Lori!

State Amendments

I've posted about the 2024 referenda earlier, but here's a recap:

Amendment One is allowing Partisan School Board elections. I'm of a mind to allow it because it means we'll see who the Far Right Republicans support, but the common consensus is that this will make an already fraught electioneering for vital community offices - especially as the wingnuts are warring on teen reading and trans students - more combative. I was leaning the other way - not because I'm pro-Party but because I'm pro-:Let's See Who The Crooks Are" - but by now I've decided to vote No on this.

Amendment Two is over the Right to Hunt and Fish, which would open up more hunting seasons - and hunting targets - across Florida. This would be a massive disruption to already fragile ecosystems and a severe threat to many of the endangered animals still in our open lands. This ought to be a huge No from all us voters.

Amendment Three is to Legalize Marijuana for recreational use. We had a medicinal use amendment pass earlier, but now - especially as the federal government is looking to reschedule pot as a lesser banned substance - there's the need to reduce the criminalization and incarceration that's become a gross injustice in our War on Drugs. Again, I don't encourage drug use, but I also don't see why we're over-pursuing punishments for a non-lethal drug like marijuana. We should be treating pot use as a health issue, not a criminal one. I'm a Yes on this one.

Amendment Four is the biggie: Protecting Abortion Rights for women. This would enforce the right of access to the medical procedure for women at-risk and ensure the bans are set at more appropriate time limits (say 23 weeks instead of 6). DeSantis and the other hard-liners are fearmongering like crazy to stop this one from passing, but it's polling above the 60 percent supermajority needed to pass and in order to save the lives of thousands of at-risk women we need to vote Yes for this.

Amendment Five is another Homestead Exemption bill, this time to Adjust exemptions to Annual Inflation. It'll basically use the Cost of Living Index to increase tax cuts to homeowners with dire impact to city and county governments that NEED property tax revenues to balance their budgets. This is a hard No, even coming from a Florida homeowner, because I'm tired of these Republican tricks to gut tax revenues.

Amendment Six offers to Repeal Public Financing for Statewide Campaigns, which would essentially allow PACs and dark money to overtake the costly campaigning at the state level where candidates who can't afford to run will be shit out of luck. We need to go the other way and require public financing for ALL campaigns, to get the goddamn corrupt forces of lobbyists and the uber-rich dominating our electoral choices. This should be a hard No, everyone.

Polk County Amendments

There is one item for the county Charter - Merging the Efficiency Commission to the Charter Review Commission - which would clear out some of the committee requirements and extend the Efficiency commission's work cycle from 8 years to 12 years. I don't know, this doesn't seem all that efficient to prevent the commission from working in closer cycles to keep up with the constant changes and demands on county services and resources. This could increase the bureaucratic logjam instead of lessening it. I'm inclined to vote No unless someone can show me honest projections of costs and improvement.

Pasco County Mosquito Control Board

You know, when I lived in Pasco County this was a big deal. I even had people show up on this blog because it was the only thing posting any information about the choices. Well, alas, I don't live there anymore so I can't be sure. I do know there's two seats open (One and Three), all of the candidates are from New Port Richey (seriously, Land O Lakes?) this cycle and the best I would suggest is voting for the candidates with the coolest names (owstophittingme).

--

As I wrap this up, the hurricane weather is picking up, I'm hearing thunderstorms in the distance, and I know damn well the local McDonalds is closed. Gods help me, Milton is coming.

If I don't make it out: Promise me. PROMISE ME NED. Promise you will vote Kamala Harris and Democratic party straight down the ballot. Promise me, Floridians, to vote Yes on Amendment 4 to save women's lives.

I hope to see you at the ballot this November.

Flooding the Zone With Lies

The wave of outright lying by the Far Right Noise Machine - and their Republican Party allies hacks - is overwhelming us now as the 2024 election day nears.

It's been well-documented that trump lies nearly every line he says in public; but he's been spewing offensive allegations the past few months that hospitals in Blue states are "performing post-abortions" (which is legally infanticide), and the past few weeks that there are schools forcibly performing transgender surgeries on children (the second part of that covered by Matt Lavietes at NBC News):

Former President Donald Trump repeated his false claim that children are undergoing transition-related surgery during their school day, worsening fears among some conservatives that educators are pushing children to become transgender and aiding transitions without parental awareness.

“Can you imagine you’re a parent and your son leaves the house and you say, ‘Jimmy, I love you so much, go have a good day in school,’ and your son comes back with a brutal operation? Can you even imagine this? What the hell is wrong with our country?” Trump said Saturday at a campaign rally in Wisconsin, a vital swing state.

Trump made similar remarks — saying children were returning home from school after having had surgical procedures — the previous weekend at an event hosted by Moms for Liberty, a parent activist group that has gained outsized influence in conservative politics in recent years...

There is no evidence that a student has ever undergone gender-affirming surgery at a school in the U.S., nor is there evidence that a U.S. school has sent a student to receive such a procedure elsewhere...

According to trump and his Far Right acolytes, our public schools have the medical facilities and the means to perform surgeries at a whim: Considering how most of our schools are struggling to keep up with office supplies makes this deluded narrative a clear fantasy.

You'll notice trump doesn't mention where these things are happening: No mention of which school, which state. If any school has been transitioning kids without parental consent we'd have heard of it by now, even by the traditional media outlets expressing some level of outrage. If any hospital has been killing newborns as trump is claiming, the pro-fetus crowd in those states - even in deep Blue states like California or New York - would be massed outside that building protesting every minute of every day. Vague allegations without any eyewitnesses or documentation, not a thing that could stand up as factual evidence in an actual court of law.

So we know he's lying, we know he's fearmongering to his MAGA base... and yet the mainstream media isn't holding trump accountable - they are not challenging him to his face - for these blatant lies.

And now just over the past few days, JD Vance and several of his GOP buddies are sharing the outrageous and debunked claim that Haitian immigrants are out there eating our pet cats. Even Ian Millhiser over at Vox's Explainer can't fully explain it:

For the record, there is no evidence that any Haitian immigrant ate a cat in Springfield, Ohio, or anywhere else in the United States, for that matter. But the lack of factual evidence hasn’t stopped the GOP from pushing the nativist narrative, which seems designed to play off bigotry and suspicion against the mostly Black population of Haitian immigrants.

More than 300,000 previously unauthorized migrants from Haiti received temporary protected status in June, which means these Haitian immigrants are now — despite Vance’s suggestion otherwise — legally present in the United States. Still, Vance and other Republicans’ attacks on these immigrants come at a moment when more Americans have grown skeptical of immigration...

Springfield’s Police Division said on Monday that there have been no reports of any pets being stolen or eaten in that city. However, there apparently was an incident in Canton, Ohio — a nearly three-hour drive from Springfield — where a woman was charged with cruelty to animals for allegedly killing and eating a cat. But there’s no evidence that this woman is an immigrant or of Haitian descent.

Despite that lack of evidence, the woman appears to have been identified as of Haitian descent in far-right tweets...

The wingnuts are twisting the facts to make it fit their narrative that Haitian refugees - that immigrants in general - are inhuman. That's the only explanation here. And these wingnuts are desperate to turn the manufactured fear of immigrants into easily-promoted hate.

So it’s not surprising that many prominent members of the Republican Party, a party that frequently flags isolated crimes committed by immigrants to fuel nativist sentiment, latched onto an unfounded internet rumor about Haitians and cats as “proof” that immigrants present a problem (that Republicans can fix).

Still, none of this context changes the fact that Republicans at the pinnacle of the party, including sitting US senators and even one of the party’s two nationwide candidates, see no downside to spreading racist, completely unfounded rumors based on random social media posts spread by far-right trolls...

Millhiser spells it out at his conclusion even though he doesn't want to discuss the implications further: Vance and everyone else at the top of the GOP chain of command are happily spreading the fearmongering lies because there's no one willing to hold them accountable for being liars. The ones who could sue for defamation - right now, the entire Haitian community in the United States have every right to sue the GOP for their slander - are too poor or too constrained by their legal status to fight any courtroom battles. The media outlets that are supposed to maintain professional standards of journalism are too cowed by their rich owners - and too blinded by the need for "access" - to push back.

There's been a long and troubling history of the Far Right - especially as trump rose to power among their ranks - to exaggerate at best and outright lie at worst about so-called "criminal" acts committed by liberals and Democrats in order to excite their base into violent action. Think of every attack on Planned Parenthood facilities whenever the wingnuts claim that "baby killers" are farming for body parts. Remember how accusations about a child sex smuggling ring involving Hillary drove a man to attack a pizza parlor in Washington DC.

This is where we are at now in America, as the November general election draws nearer and trump - fearing he is going to lose the Popular vote again and likely the Electoral College - is desperate to stir up the passions of his MAGA base... but not to show up and vote, instead to show up with guns and commit acts of terror and chaos to do whatever it takes to disrupt any voting at all.

Gods help us. The lying is going to get worse until November and beyond, not until every wingnut liar is out of power... and in trump's case sitting in a jail cell.

FOR THE LOVE OF GOD AND TRUTH, AMERICA, STOP VOTING REPUBLICAN. Hold them accountable. That IS in your power to stop their lies.

Update: A historian from Northwestern University is raising the warning flag that violence aimed at immigrants is sure to follow:

So let's not get confused: the debunked claims that refugees are eating cats aren't just nonsense. They are the beginning of a wave of violence. The people spreading this rhetoric either know exactly what they're doing, or they should know. But violence follows. Every time. (3)

— Kathleen Belew (@kathleen_belew) September 10, 2024

trump wants the blood to flow: It's how he knows he has his mob doing his dirty work for him.

One Sentence Thought About trump's Hideous Performance at the National Association of Black Journalists

By appearing for an interview at the NABJ conference in Chicago this Wednesday just to use his time to attack Kamala Harris' ethnicity and mock not only the attendees but every honest American watching at home, trump got exactly what he thinks he wanted: Not only did trump get his fearmongering racist bullshit out there in the national dialogue for his racist voting base to lap up, he got to present himself as a "victim" of a hostile and angry audience so that he can justify further attacks against Kamala Harris as well as everyone supporting her.

As I mentioned in my previous post, trump and his Republican handlers seem to think that attacking their opponent's very existence is a winning move, when history proved that the same tactics applied to Barack Obama never worked at all as he won decisive majorities in 2008 and 2012.

Okay, that's two sentences three sentences on this topic, but it had to be said.

Update: YES I KNOW this is going to be more than one sentence, but the Psy Of Life blogger CalicoJack goes into a more thorough review of trump's racist actions and intent, and it a must-read.