Good News: September 2024 Edition

Gods, I feel like a negative nabob half the time. So let's try some good news.

I may not trust the polls but the late September numbers keep favoring Kamala Harris for the presidency over donald "34 count felon" trump.

Harris leads over trump in key battleground states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Again, polls don't vote, voters do: So get the damn vote out Democrats.

Just a reminder that the mainstream media polling services - due to billionaire owners or their own craven needs - skew too much rural and conservative, meaning the pro-Kamala numbers should be even more in her favor (and that the tight races in other battleground states aren't really favoring trump).

The polling, for example, shows a tighter race in Alaska for Harris and Democrats than the past 30 years. Harris' numbers in Nebraska - where the shared Electoral College results by congressional district established a single EV dot in a Red State - are strong enough that the Republican Party is trying to pressure the state legislature to undo the shared Electoral and go Winner-Take-All. But there's signs Harris - thanks to her VP ally Tim Walz, who's from Nebraska - could flip the whole state Blue. Again, get the voters out to vote this November, Democrats. (Psst: Fight for EVERY state - well okay maybe not West Virginia, that's a lost cause - just to keep trump from clearing the Electoral College hurdle!)

Thanks to Richardson's escalating scandals, there's a growing chance Harris - and the whole Democratic ticket - can clinch North Carolina. If that happens alongside Harris reclaiming the battleground states Biden won in 2020, there is no way trump and his lackeys can stop the count and claim "they stole the election".

Even trump's schemes to undo the results are going to hit a wall: the Electoral Count and Presidential Transition Act of 2022. That cleaned up a number of loopholes and grey areas at the state level about challenging election results, and required election certifications done certain ways to minimize partisan sabotage. Granted, trump's legal team are going to test that law and insist on undermining the vote counts in key states/counties, but considering how their lack of evidence undercut their efforts in 2020 will be the same this 2024, it's doubtful he and his lawyers will prevail (the one negative thing to consider: That the trump-loving Supreme Court will break the entire Constitution in his favor when his legal battles reach their bench).

A Presidential win for Harris/Walz won't be enough: which is why the signs of a 2024 Blue Wave affecting the Congressional/Senate races provide a positive buzz. Again, voter turnout matters.

The encouraging news on that front: Democratic voter enthusiasm is increasing this 2024.

Voter turnout remains key, America. Republican efforts at voter suppression can't stop that, no matter how hard they try. If we can get the turnout for Kamala over 81 million - Biden's record - trump and the Republicans can't overcome that.

All this good news comes with that call to action: Get the damn vote out.

Get to work, America.

The Portents of September 2024

So heading into September of this year of election, everything turns into a horse race and every poll gets parsed for omens and portents like the days of Rome (mmm, Rome).

I've gotten out of favor with the constant, obsessive polling that's been going on since at least 2012. While the polling then worked out and proved itself, afterwards the Republicans and the Far Right have figured out how to skew the numbers to where the last couple of election cycles weren't as easily predicted. We're at the point where the polling services are intentionally skewing their populations more rural - and conservative - to where you can't trust them.

Thing is, as the election itself draws nearer, the pollsters do shift their habits to better reflect the two demographics they pursue: Likely Voters and Registered Voters. So at this point, the polling gets to be a little more accurate, although we need to take all of it with a grain of salt (just like the Romans used salt for everyt... ow stop hitting me).

So while we can't take polls for granted this September, looking at results like this from Bloomberg/Morning Consult at least will give us Harris/Walz supporters a good reason to wake up every morning and campaign for voter turnout.

Or as Taniel tweets (STOP CALLING IT X, ELON) keeping track of the Electoral College: 

New Bloomberg/Morning Consult polls (RVs here):

Wisconsin: Harris 52/44
Pennsylvania: Harris 51/47
Nevada: Harris 49/45
Michigan: Harris 49/46
[that's 270+]
Georgia: Harris 49/47
North Carolina: Harris 49/47
Arizona: 48/48

— Taniel (@Taniel) August 29, 2024

Considering what we consider a "battleground state" is something within 1-2 points, to have Wisconsin going for Harris well above "margin of error" should make that state a solid Blue.

Here's where it's good news: Wisconsin is one of the states trump was planning on sowing chaos to prevent an Electoral College count from even happening. If it's too big of a blowout, even trump's cries of "stollen votes" won't be believable.

The growing margins for Harris in places like Michigan and Nevada help solidify the likelihood trump and his lackeys can't deny the Electoral College results. Granted, trump will do everything to prevent Georgia or Arizona getting called - especially with the Georgia Elections Board setting up new rules that would allow for massive tampering by Republicans - but if all the other battleground states go Democratic, the mixed party leadership in those states make it harder to rig the results. As soon as Harris/Walz cross that 270 finish line, trump's whole stunt to throw the results to the House of Representatives becomes moot.

What the map looks like based on the Bloomberg poll.
We can try and flip more states Blue, by the way...

This is the map trump wants, unless Georgia, North Carolina, and Nevada
flip Red to him, in which case we're fucked.

It'll then be an issue of both houses of Congress certifying the Electoral results, and unless Republicans control both next January there's every likelihood enough rational members of the GOP will certify Harris' win.

So that's one of the other things we need to consider this September: It's NOT JUST THE PRESIDENTIAL OFFICE ON THE LINE.

Democrats and Left-leaning Independent voters need to understand that voting for every Democratic candidate for the Senate and the House matter as well. To truly ensure trump can't steal his way back into the White House, there needs to be an Honest-to-God Blue Wave for 2024 covering all 50 states and covering every elected office on the ballot.

GET THE DAMN VOTE OUT, EVERYBODY.

And for the Love of God and Country and Mom and Apple Pie and college football - I blame UF's loss on Ben Sasse's scandals by the by - vote Blue, America.

As They Were on September 11

Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.
-- Marcel Proust

We are now 22 years on from the tragedy of September 11 2001.

There's little else we can do except remember how those events affected us then and haunt us to this day. 

What becomes troubling is the loss of remembering how things were before that day, what exactly we were enjoying, what we were debating amongst ourselves, what we were hoping to do with our lives in the futures we were about to engage. 

At best I can remember what it was like moving into an actual home at the age of 31 - a townhouse - instead of living in apartments through my 20s. I can remember I was still thinking of living in South Florida as a temporary thing - even though I'd been there since 1994 - because I was still job-hunting for library work back up towards Tampa-Clearwater where my family and high school friends still lived. Here I am more than twenty years later and I feel regret that I didn't make an honest effort to settle down where I was - to go out and make more friends away from work, to do a better job of finding a love life, stuff like that - because it added into my lack of a social life that affects me still.

And that's just me, and that's me being selfish when this day we need to remember the people we left behind.

What the world was going into 2001 was a lot different than the world we are now in 2023. We've been into and out of troubling wars that did nothing to resolve the political woes of the post-Cold War and in some respects made them worse across the Middle East and Europe. Our nation seems to have gone into this mental fugue state were we don't even talk about what we'd done in Iraq and Afghanistan, unlike the discourse and self-reflection that haunted us in the 1970s over our wreckage in Vietnam and Southeast Asia. There hasn't even been any public discussion about war memorials for those occupations as though we're ashamed to admit we were in those places for 10-20 years, as though our failures to stabilize Iraq and Afghanistan can't be mentioned.

It's as though we as a nation are only trying to remember the parts where we alone were the victims of a global tragedy, going through the motions to honor the dead in New York and DC and Pennsylvania and nothing more.

But the things we're remembering about 9/11 are not the things as they were. They're just our folklore now, legends fading into myth. We're not remembering the facts of how we failed ourselves and the world leading up to Bin Laden's attack, and how we're failing now as wars continue to rage across the world from our inability to confront the rage of little men in power.

Welcome to the world that not only Bin Laden wanted, but the world that Bush and Cheney and Halliburton and Putin and a hundred dictators and wannabes wanted. All the things we've become after September 11. It's not how we should be honoring the ones we love.

For Our Consideration on Labor Day, the Best American Movies (So Far) of 2023

So here we are September 4th, 2023 set as Labor Day holiday, when our hyper-capitalist society/government pays lip service to the vitality of Workers' rights (while businesses stay open forcing those workers to miss any actual vacation time).

In a nice touch, half of our entertainment industry out of Hollywood/LA California is currently on strike as the majority of workers - the screenwriters, actors, and associated trade groups - are fighting the studio CEOs - many of whom never worked as creators in the business - over royalties from the newer streaming services and guaranteed wages/hirings for their workforce, as well as putting a stop by the companies to using generative AI - computer programming - for cheap and disreputable methods of replacing the creative types altogether. 

There may be a lot of glamour and wealth associated to Hollywood, but the vast majority of people who put it all together - set designers (I know one), writers, editors, background extras (I know a few, ever watch the church fight scene in Kingsmen? The guy with the beard, wait there's like 20 of them well anyway he's in there), associate directors, stage hands, best boys, worst boys (Airplane! reference), second unit camera crews, actors who never get the name on the marquee but are relied on to provide memorable quirky characters - are barely earning minimum wage. Most of the jobs are temp, they're paid by contract that end when the filming projects end, and so a lot of them struggle to pay rent. Even Lawrence Olivier, one of the greatest actors of his generation, took on crappy film roles because "Money, dear boy."

So while we can cheer on the screenwriters and the actors who are fighting for their livelihoods - for better and consistent pay, for ensuring AI doesn't remove the human element of creativity, for bigger pieces of the pie that the CEOs are hogging for themselves - we should also take note of what Labor Day also signals: The unofficial end of the summer.

Technically, autumn begins on the equinox (this year's is September 23) but as most of our lives revolve around school (as kids and as parents and workers) we think of our seasons in that regard. Summer is when school breaks (usually after Memorial Day) and when school resumes (most places the week before Labor Day, although some places planning ahead for bad weather days have moved it earlier).

Hollywood noticed the summer months were great for business, starting in the 1970s when crowd-pleasing blockbusters like Jaws and Star Wars realigned the production model for the decades that followed. As a result, every weekend between Memorial Day and Labor Day were programmed for budget-busting extravaganzas that the studios gambled on generating insane profits to cover their losses on the gambles that failed.

While the summer blockbuster calendar has evolved over the years - Hollywood has found April as good a time for big-budget films as May - it's become an annual tradition. It's also become an annual tradition for Hollywood to release certain types of films in the other seasons: Autumn becomes a time for romance and horror (Halloween, kiddos) flicks, and Winter (at least before January) the time for stylish low-budget movies to get into the film critics Year's Best lists and aim for the Golden Globes and Oscars awards to give themselves artistic pretensions. January is when you dump the movies you don't expect audiences to enjoy - although some do become blockbusters because the studio heads didn't get it or else the film plays to a timely issue - before a mini-cycle of romance and horror flicks in February to lead into the next cycle.

Having grown up to the Blockbuster era - ever since I got hooked on Star Wars - I've paid some attention to how this system works, and have gotten a little frustrated over the years about how Hollywood and their film academy mistreats the big money-makers of the summer when it comes to doling out the awards signifying great work and craftsmanship.

I was livid in 2008 when the Dark Knight got ignored for a well-deserved Best Picture nomination, and it's been a point of contention with me since Mad Max Fury Road that Hollywood needs to realize that despite the money-making interest of blockbusters many of those films are genuinely well-made. Audiences may be lured to spectacle but they're also lured to well-written stories, well-acted performances, and eye-stunning camerawork. The Oscars do hand out technical awards and the production-value awards like Visual Effects and Sound Editing, but the top-tier awards like Best Actor/Actress, Best Director, Best Picture? It's insanely rare for a crowd-pleasing blockbuster to win any of those awards much less get nominated, especially if it was a summer release film.

The Vulture review site is with me.
BARBIEHEIMER OR DEATH!

To that I say "No More." It's high damn time that we start recognizing the effort, sweat and blood and tears that go into the blockbuster films and crowd-pleasing surprise hits. If there was anything good about the backlash following the Dark Knight snub was how it opened up the Best Picture category to cover up to 10 films, expanding the odds that a box-office winner can win the Oscar as well. Here's my list of "YOU BETTER NOMINATE THESE FOOKING MOVIES ELSE THE STREETS OF L.A. WILL SEE RIOTS" nominations:

M3GAN: It's about time the January dump movies get a champion to rally their cause. Yes, it's a campy horror movie. Yes, it's another "Robot Turns Violent" movie. Yes, it's not supposed to win awards. But the audiences picked up on the black comedy, caustic criticisms of the Silicon Valley business model of rushing production, and sly way the whole thing got put together. Getting any of the technical awards would be likely, but also Best Makeup or Costuming (for the work on making M3gan a believable humanoid) as well as Best Screenplay alongside the Picture nom. Horror movies need more love, dammit.

Admit it, this is the Hero Shot for M3gan

Cocaine Bear: IF RAY LIOTTA DOES NOT GET A POSTHUMOUS BEST ACTOR NOMINATION FOR HIS ROLE IN THIS THE GREATEST "ANIMAL GOES BERSERK" MOVIE SINCE SNAKES ON A PLANE I SWEAR TO GOD WE ALL RIOT.

Ahem.

Granted this is another horror-comedy movie in the M3GAN vein, with the caveat that this film had its own interesting real-life backstory that ensured a built-in audience. What gives this film the award-worthy boost is the quality of the cast - a surprising number of A-Listers and award winners - and people involved in its production (Phil Lord and Chris Miller, two guys responsible for the best post-modern franchise works of the past decade). Despite the silliness - and shocking gore - of the film's plot, there's a lot here to qualify Cocaine Bear for Best Picture, along with Best Actor (DAMMIT RAY DESERVES IT) and Best Catering.

Admit it, this is the Hero Shot for Cocaine Bear

Spider-Man Across the Spider-Verse: When the Dark Knight got snubbed in 2008, another critically-acclaimed blockbuster in Wall-E also failed to receive a Best Picture nomination. That snub was due to Wall-E being animated, which exposed the Academy's snobbery when it came to animated film. Apparently, nominating Disney's Beauty And the Beast back in 1991 did not set the standard: All it did was create a new Oscar category so that the award voters could go right back to ignoring high-quality animated works. 

Thing is, animated movies still count (Foreign feature films, after all, can get nominated for Best Picture as well). So Spidey better be under consideration Academy members, because GODDAMN this film was a literal work of art. Pulling from different art styles - watercolor, diagrammatic, cut-paste, stop-motion - and layering it with thousands of details - and thousands of differently drawn Spider-Men - you can hang individual cels from this movie in museums. Tying it all together are impressive voice-acting performances (ANOTHER thing that ticks me off is how the Oscars ignore voice acting, but that's another rant) and a tight yet expansive screenplay pulling on the Spider-Man mythos to set up legitimate drama, humor, pathos, and tears. The last third of the movie itself is considered one of the best (and darkest) cliffhangers since Empire Strikes Back.

This is a movie that deserves Best Picture consideration as well as Best Director, Best Editing, Best Sound and Sound Editing, Best Screenplay (adapted), and with any luck FINALLY a vocal performance - Shameik Moore, Hailee Steinfeld, Daniel Kaluuya, Oscar Isaac - getting an acting nom.

This is NOT the Hero Shot for Miles Morales or Spider-Gwen Stacy.
You have to watch the movie to see their
individual moments of AWESOMENESS.

Barbie and Oppenheimer:

I've kind of talked about this already, but since both movies came out, the reality of both movies as Oscar-worthy contenders cannot be denied. 

It is hard to separate each movie now, not just because of the cultural memes that the Barbieheimer Event generated, but because of the eerie similarities and reflections shared between both films. Both movies with auteur directors deserving of Oscar consideration. Both movies with surprisingly well-plotted screenplays addressing the human condition (vanity, fear, the questioning of our place in the cosmos, gender role expectations (yes even in Oppenheimer)). Both movies with deep pools of actors that could earn the films multiple Acting nominations.

There is a terrifying possibility that given Barbie's blockbuster status (still ongoing) as one of the biggest box-office hits of all time that the Academy will ignore it for the Big awards - Picture, Director, Actor, Actress, Screenplay, Cinematography - when this year's nominations are made. They dare not. Every critique and review of the movie spells out the artistic merits in spite of it being a mere "Intellectual Property" product. Audiences are not going back to re-watch that movie because of the memes but because Barbie - especially its themes of women's identity - speaks to them as an experience, something very few films - even the artsy pretentious ones - can affect.

Oppenheimer - as I mentioned before - was clearly Oscar bait from the get-go, but genuinely earns that consideration due to the high quality work put into it. That it will get Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor (Cillian Murphy), Best Supporting Actor (Robert Downey Jr), Best Screenplay (adapted), and likely Cinematography and Editing won't even be up for debate. 

What will be up for debate will be which of the two movies - joined at the hip by fate forever now - will actually win the big awards when the time comes next February 2024 when they open the envelopes and hand out the Oscars.

(glances back and forth)

I say go for it. Academy voters, figure out the math and plan ahead to make it so that BOTH Barbie and Oppenheimer tie in each category they qualify for. DO IT. SHARE THE OSCARS. Share the Acting trophies (Murphy and Gosling for Actor, Robbie and Blunt for Actress), share the Director's (Nolan and Gertwig), share the Editing, share the Cinematography, share the Best Picture (it's what they should have done for La-La Land and Moonlight). Hell, share the Sound Editing and Set Designs and the Costuming awards. I think the only things you can't share are the Screenplays (Barbie may be an IP but the script is original) but get the Original and Adapted anyways!

BARBIEHEIMER 4EVAH.

Granted, this will suck if you're a Spider-Man fan, but honestly Best Animated Feature by itself is still a worthy award...

ANYWAY. GET TO IT, HOLLYWOOD. MAKE IT SO THAT WE ONLY AWARD THE TWO BEST MOVIES OF THIS SUMMER TO---

(Hollywood releases in the winter season a Martin Scorsese historical epic Killers of the Flower Moon with its own cast of A-Listers and high artistic quality that makes it an obvious Oscar contender for everything other than Gratuitous Use of the Word Belgium in a Dramatic Presentation)

(muttering) Goddammit why does Martin have to do this every time other good movies are released that same year to snub his work again...?

Quick Update on trump's Legal Woes As We Head Into October 2022

The past week has been a little busy for donald trump's lawyers, so let's recap.

You might remember that trump had found a district judge he appointed to throw up roadblocks to the FBI's digging into all the classified materials they caught him with, when Judge Cannon agreed to his demands for a Special Master to delay everything. Well, the Justice Department appealed that, going to the 11th Circuit to allow the feds to continue their work. The judges at the 11th - including two who were appointed by trump - threw a smackdown on Cannon and trump in response (via Emptywheel):

While reserving judgment on the merits question, the opinion was nevertheless fairly scathing about Cannon’s abuse of discretion. Some of this pertained to her jurisdictional analysis... But two important implicit admonishments of Cannon’s actions pertain to the deference on national security that courts give to the Executive.

The opinion calls the scheme that Cannon had set up — allowing the Intelligence Community to continue its intelligence assessment but prohibiting any investigation for criminal purposes — untenable. In support, the opinion notes that there’s a sworn declaration from FBI Assistant Director Alan Kohler (the only one in this docket) debunking Cannon’s distinction between national security review and criminal investigation. It notes, twice, that courts must accord great weight to the Executive, including an affidavit. The opinion notes that “no party had offered anything beyond speculation” to undermine this representation...

In another section, the opinion makes a finding that goes beyond where the dispute before Cannon has gone (but not beyond where the dispute before Special Master Raymond Dearie has). Even former Presidents can only access classified information if they have a Need to Know. (Italics for the appellate decision)

[W]e cannot discern why Plaintiff would have an individual interest in or need for any of the one-hundred documents with classification markings. Classified documents are marked to show they are classified, for instance, with their classification level. Classified National Security Information, Exec. Order No. 13,526, § 1.6, 3 C.F.R. 298, 301 (2009 Comp.), reprinted in 50 U.S.C. § 3161 app. at 290–301. They are “owned by, produced by or for, or . . . under the control of the United States Government.” Id. § 1.1. And they include information the “unauthorized disclosure [of which] could reasonably be expected to cause identifiable or describable damage to the national security.” Id. § 1.4. For this reason, a person may have access to classified information only if, among other requirements, he “has a need-to-know the information.” Id. § 4.1(a)(3). This requirement pertains equally to former Presidents, unless the current administration, in its discretion, chooses to waive that requirement. Id. § 4.4(3).

Plaintiff has not even attempted to show that he has a need to know the information contained in the classified documents. Nor has he established that the current administration has waived that requirement for these documents. And even if he had, that, in and of itself, would not explain why Plaintiff has an individual interest in the classified documents...

In short: trump had no privilege to claim.

And then there was the 11th Circuit ruling about Cannon's authority to intervene in the first place. Back to Emptywheel:

The summary of this case is a really remarkable description of what has already happened (I’m sure it helped the clerks on that front that they had no page limits). Ominously for Trump’s case, the opinion starts the narrative from the time he left the White House and lays out several moments where Trump failed to invoke privilege or declassification. Trump likes to tell the story starting on August 8 when the FBI arrived at his house out of the blue...

This means trump can't stick to his story that he always had the right to possess these documents when he really didn't. I digress, back to good part:

In Trump’s reply to DOJ’s argument that he couldn’t own these documents, the opinion notes, he specifically disclaimed having filed a Rule 41(g), which is where someone moves to demand property unlawfully seized be returned...

Cannon, the opinion notes, claimed to be asserting jurisdiction under equitable jurisdiction even while treating Trump’s request (in which he had not made a Rule 41(g) motion) as a hybrid request...

Half that page of the opinion consists of footnotes, recording that Trump’s claims about Rule 41(g) have been all over the map...

trump and his lawyers are wary of filing actual paperwork - that Rule 41(g) - on ownership because if they do, and the courts rule he had no right to classified materials in his possession, he'll basically be confessing to breaking that particular federal law. Instead, they claim everything and anything just on say-so in the hopes a favorable court will buy that defense. Oh, right. I'm interrupting. Back to Emptywheel.

The opinion doesn’t come to any conclusions about all this nonsense from a jurisdictional position. It doesn’t have to. But it did capture conflicting claims that Trump made and Cannon’s reliance on a “hybrid” claim to avoid pinning Trump down.

The reason the 11th Circuit didn’t have to resolve all this is because, regardless of which basis Cannon claimed to have intervened, Richey governs (which is exactly what Jay Bratt said in the hearing before Cannon, as I laid out here).

And the first prong of Richey — and the most important one — is whether there has been a Fourth Amendment violation. Cannon says there has not. That should be game over...

While this is an appellate ruling, trump can arguably push the matter further up the chain - is SCOTUS next? - but one interesting development from this ruling was how Cannon went back and revised parts of her court ruling to fit the demands of the 11th Circuit... which apparently makes it harder for trump to appeal those parts. Interesting.

Meanwhile, the Thing Cannon Set Up - the Special Master situation involving a court-approved arbitrator over the documents in question - settled on Judge Raymond Dearie to serve in that capacity, and he promptly kicked trump's lawyers in the collective tuckus in ways that showed trump wasn't getting an easy out (the AP News but quoted via the Guardian):

The independent arbiter tasked with inspecting documents seized in an FBI search of Donald Trump’s Florida home said on Tuesday he intends to push briskly through the review process and appeared skeptical of Trump lawyers’ reluctance to say whether they believed the records had been declassified.

“We’re going to proceed with what I call responsible dispatch,” Raymond Dearie, a veteran Brooklyn judge, told lawyers for Trump and the Department of Justice in their first meeting since his appointment last week as a so-called special master...

Though Trump’s lawyers requested the appointment of a special master, they have resisted Dearie’s request for more information about whether the seized records had been previously declassified – as Trump maintains. His lawyers have consistently stopped short of that claim even as they asserted in a separate filing on Tuesday that the department of justice had not proven that the documents were classified. In any event, they say, a president has absolute authority to declassify information...

But Dearie said that if Trump’s lawyers will not actually assert that the records have been declassified, and the department of justice makes an acceptable case that they remain classified, he will be inclined to regard them as classified.

“As far as I’m concerned,” he said, “that’s the end of it.”

In a letter to Dearie on Monday night, the lawyers said the declassification issue might be part of Trump’s defense in the event of an indictment. Trusty said the Trump team should not be forced at this point to disclose details of a possible defense.

He denied that the lawyers were trying to engage in “gamesman-like” behavior but said it was a process that required “baby steps”. He said the right time for the discussion is whenever Trump presses forward with a claim to get property back.

Dearie said he understood the position but observed: “I guess my view of it is, you can’t have your cake and eat it...”

A US district judge, Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee who granted the request for a special master, had set a 30 November deadline for Dearie’s review and instructed him to prioritize classified records.

Dearie, a Ronald Reagan appointee, made clear during Tuesday’s meeting that he intended to meet the deadline...

Other reports have it that Dearie is looking to wrap up by October, likely because he already sees the reality that there's not much to separate between the classified documents and anything trump claims as privileged. Granted, that's my speculation. No matter what, trump's traditional gaming of the legal system - delay, delay, delay - isn't going to work here.

The other big bombshell from last week was the breaking development in the state of New York's civil case against trump, trump's family, and their corporation. As mentioned earlier when I looked at the big four legal matters dogging trump, AG Letitia James had wrapped up her interviews for the grand jury, and apparently had enough to take it all to court seeking major damages and a long-overdue crippling of trump's crooked financial empire (via John Cassidy at the New Yorker (paywalled)): 

The lawsuit that her office filed in State Supreme Court alleges that, from 2011 to 2021, the Trump Organization’s financial statements systematically exaggerated the value of at least twenty-three of his properties and other assets—from his Fifth Avenue triplex apartment and his daughter’s penthouse on Park Avenue to his estate in Mar-a-Lago, Florida, and his far-flung network of golf courses. “The number of grossly inflated asset values is staggering, affecting most if not all of the real estate holdings in any given year,” the lawsuit states. It also says that Trump’s alleged deceptions reaped him and his co-defendants financial benefits worth up to an estimated $250 million, and asked the court to force him to repay these gains, plus interest.

In addition to Trump, the lawsuit names his children Donald, Jr., Eric, and Ivanka as defendants. In 2014, the complaint says, Ivanka was granted an option to buy a penthouse at Trump Park Avenue for $14.3 million, but the apartment was valued in the Trump Organization’s 2014 “Statement of Financial Condition” at $45 million. According to the lawsuit, Trump’s son Eric was “taking the lead” on Seven Springs estate, a large property in Westchester County, New York—which Trump bought for $7.5 million, in 1995, but between 2011 and 2021 valued at up to $291 million. The complaint also alleges that, in 2016, the Trump Organization misled an outside appraiser that prepared a valuation of the Seven Springs property, which it then submitted to the Internal Revenue Service in support of an application for a conservation easement “that ultimately, and fraudulently, reduced Mr. Trump’s tax liability by more than $3.5 million...”

In short: trump lied about how valuable his properties were when it came time to profit from them, and then lied that the properties were valueless when it came time to pay taxes on them.

Where Trump and his businesses crossed the legal line, the complaint alleges, was in producing false financial statements that grossly inflated his net worth to “induce banks to lend money to the Trump Organization on more favorable terms than would otherwise have been available to the company, to satisfy continuing loan covenants, and to induce insurers to provide insurance coverage for higher limits and at lower premiums.” The complaint identifies numerous loans and insurance policies that it said were granted at least partly on the basis of claims Trump made about his wealth in a “Statement of Financial Condition”—a list of his assets and liabilities that the Trump Organization produced annually...

This is where there's more good news:

James said her office is also referring her case to federal prosecutors in Manhattan and the I.R.S. In the absence of actions by those agencies, the potential sanctions facing the Trumps, if James wins her case, are a big financial penalty, the appointment of an independent monitor to oversee the Trump Organization for at least five years, a prohibition on Trump or the Trump Organization buying any new commercial real estate in New York during the same period, and a ban on any of the Trumps named in the lawsuit serving as an officer or director in any businesses licensed or registered in the state.

Effectively, James is trying to banish Trump and his family from doing business in their longtime home state...

James apparently uncovered criminal acts in all of the fraud trump and his people committed during their shell games with property values. It would be pretty to think that despite the City of New York's failure to bring more criminal charges against trump, the IRS will go after him for tax evasion like they've done to every mob boss since Al Capone. 

It could be argued that even after all this, trump and co. could simply relocate their business efforts to a more favorable state and restart, except that James is looking to keep trump from doing any business with any entity in New York. That covers New York City, and THAT - the financial capital of the world - covers nearly every bank on the planet. Meaning if James wins her case, there will be no way for trump and his adult progeny to do business they way they've done - through sketchy loans to pay off other sketchy loans - for at least five years.

It would kill trump not to run any kind of con job at all. trump has no actual value outside of his scams, he's a clown living on credit. A victory by AG James would be a fate worse than death for trump.

Bring it. Bankrupt the bastard. Send him into financial exile for the rest of his short life. And be rid of trump forever.

The Moment Democrats Must Simplify This Nation

(Update: Thank you again to Batocchio for including this blog on Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up!)

Riddle: How do you know when Democrats have slim majority control of both Houses of Congress?

Answer: When Republicans are happily playing a game of Chicken with the national debt ceiling. Again.

More details from Kelsey Snell at NPR:

Congress has fewer than 10 days to pass legislation to prevent another partial government shutdown, and Democrats hope to use the deadline pressure to force Republicans to help them pass a critical suspension of the federal borrowing cap.

Republican leaders have flatly rejected that plan, leaving Congress in a familiar political standoff over spending and debt that could have serious economic consequences...

The House voted on the bill Tuesday evening, passing the measure on party lines — 220 Democratic votes in support and 211 Republican votes against.

Democrats had sufficient votes to pass the legislation without Republicans in the House. But the fate of the bill is far less certain in the Senate, where GOP leaders have vowed to oppose it over objections to Democrats' broader spending ambitions...

Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., has said Republicans would support a spending bill that includes basic government funding paired with disaster funding and money for Afghan refugees — but not if the bill addresses the debt limit.

"We do not have divided government. Democrats do not need our help," McConnell said in a statement. "They have every tool to address the debt limit on their own: the same party-line process they used to ram through inflationary spending in March and already plan to use again this fall..."

Mitch however is making a subtle Lie of Omission here: What he's NOT telling the media is that the Senate Democrats may have a 51-tiebreaker vote with VP Harris, this debt ceiling and budget vote currently both fall under the Cloture rules where the Republicans are threatening to filibuster and deny a straight up-or-down vote.

Back to the reporting from Snell:

This latest political fight over the debt is infuriating Democrats like Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York. Democrats voted to increase the borrowing cap under then-President Donald Trump even as the debt ballooned when Republicans approved costly tax cuts and partisan spending priorities.

"It is quite rich coming from a party, and the party of Trump, who did $1.5 trillion in tax cuts and didn't pay for a penny of them," Gillibrand said in an interview with NPR.

Democrats have said Republicans need to take ownership of the debt they helped create — both through partisan legislation and when Congress voted for bipartisan COVID-19 relief spending under Trump...

There IS one way the Democrats can get around McConnell and his GOP Senate buddies' obstructionist plan: They could amend the budget they're trying to pass along with this debt ceiling hike through the Reconciliation process, which avoids the Cloture process and allows an up-or-down vote. However, it would force the Democrats to give up their biggest agenda items, it would limit the time frame any tax increases would work, and it would alienate the Progressive caucus in the House to where they could refuse to vote for the Infrastructure bill that had passed the Senate and needs passage in the House. 

There is an even easier way the Democrats can get around the GOP obstruction: Just fucking kill the Filibuster and the Cloture rule that forces these shenanigans every fucking time the Republicans are in minority the last 15 years. Sadly, if the Democrats try to do that, there are two self-serving "Centrist" Dems - Sinema and Manchin - who would refuse to do that because without that filibuster their lobbyist buddies are screwed they lose their importance as "independent Senators" in that august body.

McConnell is pretty much trying to force the Democrats to turn on each other just when they need to unite.

And the Democrats are letting him.

We're facing another Long October Shutdown. And while it WILL BE the fault of McConnell and his wingnut buddies, the Democrats are going to be the ones forced to pay the costs.

Simplify your world, Democrats. Get rid of the fucking Filibuster. Stop letting Mitch pull his obstructionist shit.

It Was Going to Be a Beautiful Day

It's a beautiful day, the sky falls/
And you feel like it's a beautiful day/
It's a beautiful day/
Don't let it get away...

- "Beautiful Day," U2

The first thing I remember about September 11 was how clear the skies were, how blue it was that morning even in South Florida. I had gone to the Main Library in Ft. Lauderdale for a meeting with other tech lab librarians to set up training materials for a new interoffice email/calendar software (Groupwise) the county library system was signing up to use.

One of the librarians came late to the meeting. She brought word about a plane crashing into one of the World Trade Center twin towers in New York City. We immediately thought it was a tragic accident. I considered the weather up in the northeast might have been foggy or rain-filled for something like that to happen. As librarians we all knew our trivia, and noted there had been a plane crash hitting the Empire State Building back in World War II due to bad weather.

I didn't find out until later that the entire Eastern seaboard of the United States had clear blue skies. I found out after that training meeting that a second plane hit the second tower. We all found out what was going on as the day got worse.

It was going to be such a beautiful day...

The Irish have been coming here for years/
Feel like they own the place/
They got the airport, city hall, concrete, asphalt/
They even got the police/
Irish, Italian, Jews and Hispanics/
Religious nuts, political fanatics in the stew/
Living happily not like me and you/
That's where I lost you...

- "New York," U2

That day remains such a gut-punch to those who lived through it that the emotional scars won't ever go away for us. One of those national traumas - like hearing about the bombing of Pearl Harbor - that cut across everything: If you were an American, regardless of gender or age or ethnicity or religion or even politics, you felt the blow in some way.

From Bob the Angry Flower webcomic, by Stephen Notley

Sad thing was, whatever that moment of grief was that united us as Americans, it didn't last. A number of us turned right back into our partisan (and racist, and sexist) opportunistic ways. We had the likes of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson pin the blame of 9/11 on "abortionists, gays, and feminists" to fuel their culture war bullshit.

We had the Neoconservatives jump up in eagerness to send us all off into their interventionist wars in the Middle East. While going into Afghanistan made sense - where the 9/11 culprit Osama Bin Laden and his Al Qaeda cohorts were hiding - in our rage and revenge we got dragged into another quagmire of a decades-long occupation that only ended last month to tears and further political recrimination. And by 2003 these Neocons made it worse tricking us into an Iraqi invasion/occupation that shredded our international standing and broke our military.

Saddest of all, in spite of the moment's call for us all as Americans to unite as one nation, our racism and fear created an increase in anti-Muslim anger that led to increasing persecution and violence towards anyone even looking Muslim. That rage fueled the rise of trumpist-backed anti-immigrant bashing that is tearing apart our national heritage of immigration as a global beacon of opportunity and liberty.

Whatever unity we had in the wake of the Twin Towers falling was gone the second our rage got the better of us.

We haven't seen many beautiful days since 9/11, have we...

And love is not the easy thing/
The only baggage you can bring/
And love is not the easy thing/
The only baggage you can bring/
Is all that you can't leave behind...

- "Walk On," U2

Recovering from the trauma of 9/11 is an ongoing thing for a lot of people. Many of the survivors from Ground Zero itself - and the families who lost loved ones there and at the Pentagon plane attack and those on Flight 93 - have to carry their guilt and sorrow to the end of their days. The rest of us who stood on the sidelines watching the tragedy unfold have to come to terms with the unresolved anger we've felt that has now branched out into waves of violence and recrimination towards ourselves.

The culture wars that Falwell and Robertson and others had been pushing on 9/11 have pretty much consumed the mental state today of a Far Right evangelical Republican Party, to the point where the biggest threat to our nation's safety isn't overseas terror groups like ISIL it's homegrown groups like Proud Boys. Our rage has gotten, is getting the better of us as Americans, and even in our remembrances of that tragic morning it's going to take a lot of letting go for us to move on into days that could be beautiful again...

Leave it behind
You've got to leave it behind
All that you fashion
All that you make
All that you build
All that you break
All that you measure
All that you steal
All this you can leave behind...

(Requiem to those we left behind)

(With thanks to Infidel for adding this to his Sunday blog wrap-up)

Conservatives At War

Update 9/12: With thanks to Infidel for linking this to his Sunday's weekly blog wrap-up!

I'm not talking about the Far Right's obsessions with putting the United States into war zones in Afghanistan or Iraq or other places in the Middle East or Central America that would make them feel good about regime changing the rest of the world into their puppet states.

I'm talking about how everybody in the Far Right is so driven to be in a state of spiritual, cultural, economic, and political war with everybody else (and even sometimes within their own ranks as they fight a purity campaign against perceived RINOs).

Just try reading Rude Pundit, who keeps track of these things, documenting how the craziness of the Far Right fringe is now the Republican mainstream. Watch how the Far Right goes charging into school board meetings to scream and intimidate the boards over the simplest of pandemic measures like masking their own kids for safety, as though every little particle of FREEEEEEEEDOM is threatened by a cloth mask that can prevent the spread of COVID.

The entire political fight this year over masking, and vaccines, and the mad push to take "alternative cures" that are toxic just to "own the libs" is all part of a Contrarian effort by the Far Right: Not against Liberals but against an entire world where facts and evidence and expert analysis are in opposition to the wingnuts' ignorance-driven faith (and not faith in God, but faith in their own value, their dominance over the rest of us as God's Chosen Ones. Listen to them sometime, you'll realize they're not praising God they're worshipping themselves and their own greedy success).

Republicans crow about being the friends to Big Business but the second a company or twelve steps out of line they'll be threatening those businesses with retaliatory regs and investigations. The power leadership of the conservative party willing to wage war against billionaires all the while pandering to those same billionaires about defending their almighty tax cuts.

The Far Right hatred of immigrants - railing against the reality that our nation was built, is built, will be built by immigrants - is now condemning us to a cycle of sadism and cruelty towards those who need the shelter we ought to provide to those who want to become Americans just like the rest of us. All driven by a racial Fear Of The Other that opposes the faces of Blacks, Latinos, Asians, Afghans, anyone else Not-White.

And the ongoing war against women - against their rights to live their lives and make their choices and be free of the chains that the Far Right would lock upon their bodies - turning darker and malevolent as Red states like Texas impose abortion restrictions so severe no woman could get a safe abortion, as well as threatening to unleash a bounty-snitching war between neighbors without oversight or control.

But this is where we are now, as a nation, isn't it? Even before trump forged deep rifts within the U.S. through his inept rage, even before the warmongering of Bush/Cheney, even before the Call to Culture War by the likes of Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh and Pat Buchanan in the 1990s, even before the callous shredding of social safety nets under Reagan, even before Nixon's paranoia, that conservative rage against the rest of the world was there. The Birchers and the anti-Fluoride nutcases may have been fringe, but they were patient, and let the rest of the conservative ideologies merge into their epistemic bubble of madness. Now it's all QAnon anti-vaxxing anti-immigrant anti-women anti-voting pro-insurrection madness, and it's all they live for.

It seems weird and sad and dangerous how one political faction in what's supposed to be a participatory democracy is driven to make sure there's no participation AND no democracy, only their hold on power. But this is where the Republicans and their rabid voting base are at now: fully aware of their own minority status in the demographic makeup of the United States, and terrified that they can't retain or at least share that power through concession or moderation.

So rather than redirect their energy, rather than come to terms with the reality that they should pander to the better angels of our nature: the Far Right would rather sink deeper into rage, and wallow in the delights of hurting others, and answer to their demons desperate to fight a war they can't win.

It must be tiring to be so angry and spiteful at the world every minute of the day, Republicans.

Then again, all that hate seems to keep you Republicans all warm at night.

And yet, all that hate is the kind of fire that will burn yourselves straight to Hell.

I'd pity you, wingnuts, but you honestly wouldn't understand why.

How America Fell Into The Darkest Timeline of 2020

(Update 10/24: Thank you Tengrain for linking this to Crooks & Liars on the daily Mike's Blog Round-Up page! Welcome to mah award-winning blog, people! Browse around, don't cost nuthin'...)

In some of my insomnia-driven nights of anxiety and stress, I wonder often just how the hell this all happened. In these moments I know I'm not the only one who thinks this, I know far too many people at work and online and in my circle of family and friends who are just as stressed as I am.

Part of me knows this Darkest Timeline didn't just crop up out of nowhere: This is the end result of decades of plans and schemes by a Far Right element of our political discourse that despised how things were turning in the 1960s and 1970s and had decided to play The Game more ruthlessly and recklessly than ever before.

But this all still seemed like it creeped up on us, doesn't it? Perhaps too much hope and too much faith in the Long Arc of Justice, I suppose. I can only speak for myself on that.

The groundwork of this destruction had been there ever since the fearmongering of the 20th Century against Communism and its first cousin Socialism, added to the racism that had ruined the United States since the days of Slavery and even worse through Jim Crow, the backlash against the Civil Rights era of the 1960s, and to today with the struggle against police brutality against poor (read: Black) communities. (There's an item to discuss later on, that there's proof of how racism directly hurts the U.S. especially in the area of finance and Capitalism we're supposed to be so good at)

All that fearmongering comes into play as the partisan divide between the two major parties grew: Where there had been moderate factions in both Republican and Democratic ranks, the Republicans pursued a Southern Strategy that sought to merge all conservative thought - economic, ethnic, religious, cultural - into one Far Right Conservatism without room for Moderate bipartisanship and no love for accountability.

We've been at the point for more than a decade where John Cole's observation - I really don’t understand how bipartisanship is ever going to work when one of the parties (re: the Republicans) is insane - has been proven again and again... and yet everyone else in a position to make note of it and react against that madness - the Beltway punditry - sit there and pretend these problems only cropped up yesterday. And worse, the media is already pretending that if trump is forced out of office this problem of being in the Darkest Timeline goes away.

trump alone is not the source of the cruelty, greed, and racism dominating current Republican ideology. It's been there before he rolled down that escalator in 2015, and there's every sign it will get worse once trump goes away. Look at Ed Kilgore's evaluation of past and future GOP malevolence documented in Steve Benen's work The Imposters, reviewed here in Washington Monthly:

...The Imposters is a skillful illustration of how rank cynicism allowed Donald Trump to easily take control of the Republican Party. Republicans, Benen shows, already had subordinated their traditions and alleged values to unprincipled hypocrisy, indifference to facts and empirical data, and self-serving partisanship long before Trump arrived. The GOP created a vacuum in its own soul that the 45th president was easily able to fill with his inflated self-regard and his uninhibited politics of lies and polarization...

Over the last several decades, the Republican Party has been conquered by the Christian right and the overwhelmingly white Tea Party movement. The former has a theocratic vision for America. The latter militantly opposes economic redistribution. These movements converged with a realization that demographic trends were unfriendly to their party’s older base, generating a white identity politics that found its natural expression in the intensely divisive and intermittently racist stylings of Trump.

Consider, for example, Trump’s promise to “Make America Great Again.” It is effectively a pledge to return to the days when white men walked tall in America, Christianity was a quasi-official creed, and foreign influences were on the margins of national life—precisely the world that most Republicans yearn for. Trump’s steady appointment of conservative judges gives evangelicals, many of whom believe that abortion is literal murder, exactly what they want. His heavy (if erratic) investment in restrictionist immigration policies has always been central to his appeal, and the sudden lurch of the GOP in that direction after George W. Bush and John McCain championed a more diverse future was far from being just another area of Republican electoral opportunism...

The modern Republican cannot reform because they dare not. Even in the face of demographic shifts away from their power base - away from the religious extremists, the racists, and the defenders of the uber-rich - they had put in so much effort to create this power base they have no way to redirect that base onto different paths. They can't change their tune about immigrants being monsters, they can't take back their "Birth Control Is Murder" chants, they can't reject the massive and unpopular tax cuts they've granted to their deep-pocket overlords. 

Republicans have staked out positions of ideological value so extreme that any attempt to move away from them would cause permanent schisms in the factions they've merged together, and would push the party out of any national role - which it currently clings to only due to Minority Rule status thanks to gerrymandering and geographic factionalism - for multiple future generations. And given the purge of Moderates (the RINOs hunted into obscurity) since the early 1990s, there are no leaders among those factions willing or able to moderate themselves or find the power within the party's structure to force such decisions for the long-term good of their own organization.

One of the hopes of various pundits is that once trump is gone, some form of sanity will return to the Republican Party and they'll take steps to rehabilitate themselves and their image. But it's too late. And it wasn't even trump's fault they're like this. All trump did was show how to exploit the rage and fear to create a devoted cultish voting base. There is no coming back from this. The Republicans had their chance to reject Trumpism (tm) but ignored it when they refused to rally to the likes of Jeb, Rubio, Christie, or Kasich. It's all trump now, and when trump is gone his replacement will play the same strategy. 

This is now the foundation of the modern Republican Party: Racism, Sexism, Political Obstruction, Tax Cuts Forever, Own the Libs, Make America Lose Again. There is no savior coming to save the Republicans. It's trumps all the way down.

And if the Republicans succeed in rigging the game against Democracy and the needs of the nation, they're dragging the rest of us down with them.

The only way out of this pit of doom is to stop voting Republican across the board. Just stop. You don't have to vote Democratic, although that helps the most. Just stop putting Republicans in political power, because they honest-to-God cannot be trusted with that power, not now not for another ten generations, not until all this extremist madness is drained out of their descendants.

We can climb out of the Darkest Timeline, America. But we're going to have to leave the Republicans in that dark deep pit that they made for themselves.

You Don't Have to Be Crazy to Work for trump... But It Sure As Hell Explains A Whole Lot

So under the categories of "Florida Man," "Republicans Are Insane," and "Baker Acted," we have this report coming out of Ft. Lauderdale (via the Sun-Sentinel):

President Trump’s former campaign manager Brad Parscale was taken from his Fort Lauderdale home by police Sunday afternoon after his wife reported that he was armed and threatening suicide.

The police, called by his wife, went to the house in the Seven Isles community, an affluent area in which houses have access to the water. They made contact, “developed a rapport” and negotiated his exit from the house, the police said in a statement. He was taken to Broward Health Medical Center under the Baker Act, which provides for temporary involuntary commitment.

My dad worked as a legal guardian and I studied for it as a profession for a bit (didn't go anywhere, wasn't any good at it) when I was unemployed, and let me tell you the Baker Act is a huge step, if the doctors find out he's got serious issues Parscale is going to get wrapped up in a whole slew of legal issues and intense treatment that will take him out of circulation for a good while (for example, he will likely - for his own safety as well as everyone else's - lose his rights to own or keep any firearms if this happens).

The thing you gotta remember about Parscale was how... intense he was regarding his work as trump's campaign manager this 2020 election cycle. Right up to the point where all of Parscale's financial mismanagement - and self-indulgence - got out in the open. Along with a disastrous attempt to host a campaign stop at the height of the COVID pandemic in Tulsa - poorly set up, rife with flaws that were exploited by Korean boy band followers for God's sake - Parscale quickly lost favor with his boss and quickly lost his campaigning top job.

Everything since then was probably not a fun ride for Mr. Parscale. A public object of ridicule, likely not finding many allies, and also facing the possibilities of investigations into how he managed the 2020 campaign, he had to have been under massive emotional pressure.

But don't expect me - as a fellow half-mad Florida Man - to offer any sympathy to Parscale, who willingly signed up for this job with all the warning signs about trump. I only wish well to his wife, friends and/or family members in case Parscale's madness doesn't go away.

This is what you get with trump, when you think about it. Given trump's history of being a demanding bad boss with his own obsessions, narcissism, and paranoia, you'd have to be as crazy as Parscale to willingly work for that Shitgibbon in the first place. The question is how much sanity you'd still have once you get kicked to the curb.

(Glances at half of trump's ex-employees showing up on Dancing With the Stars) Well, maybe that question's been answered anyway...

And to think: This isn't even the most embarrassing story coming out of trump's world tonight.

trump's Body Count for 2020 Keeps Going Up

For the year so far, still in September 2020, the COVID-19 Coronavirus death count for the United States went over 200,000 fallen due to a superflu that could have been managed since March if only we had the national leadership to guide us towards safe distancing, mask-wearing, and better awareness. 

And donald trump's response while the news was breaking that America has suffered more deaths in less than a year than many of our wars combined?

Sayeth trump: "It affects virtually nobody."

200,000 DEAD ARE NOT NOBODIES. Those are families, friends, loved ones...

If we take a moment to note what Tengrain observes at Mock Paper Scissors:

...And I suppose those families grieving with their loss and/or dealing with the long-term struggles of having survived a round of the damn Trump-virus (including heart, lung, and seeming brain problems) might be surprised to learn that they don’t actually exist.

These are evil people and I sincerely hope that when this era is over that they are marched through the streets, heads shaved, so decent people can spit on them there is an accountability. The entire 4th Reich needs to be locked-up and suffer the consequences for their astonishing crimes against humanity.

To hell with the Republicans and their attempts to steal 2020 while we're all DYING from their madness and cruelty. Get the vote out, America, #VoteBlue across the board, for the LOVE OF GOD OUR SURVIVAL DEPENDS ON IT NOW.

It's September 2020 and All Is NOT Well

Our situation on the streets of America isn't getting any better with trump actively stirring unrest as a means to win re-election in November. Via Aaron Rupar at Vox.com: 

On Monday afternoon, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden addressed unrest in cities like Kenosha, Wisconsin, and Portland, Oregon, saying that President Donald Trump “long ago forfeited any moral leadership in this country.”

“He can’t stop the violence, because for years he’s fomented it,” Biden added during his speech in Pittsburgh. “You know, he may believe mouthing the words ‘law and order’ makes him strong, but his failure to call on his own supporters to stop acting as an armed militia in this country shows how weak he is.”

Within hours, Trump proved Biden right, delivering a press conference in which he stoked unfounded fears about “left-wing political violence” while refusing to condemn right-wing vigilantes — including a 17-year-old supporter of his who has been charged with first-degree murder in the shooting deaths of two protesters in Kenosha...

...Not only does Trump habitually refuse to acknowledge that police violence and right-wing violence are problems in the US, but he goes out of his way to justify it.

Asked by Ingraham if he wants his supporters to confront protesters, Trump said, “I want to leave it to law enforcement, but my supporters are wonderful, hardworking, tremendous people, and they turn on their televisions and they look at a Portland or a Kenosha ... they can’t believe it.”

About that teen gunman:

You might think that condemning this type of vigilante-style violence would be an easy thing for a president to do — but not for Trump. Asked about the case during Monday’s news conference, Trump defended the shooter.

“That was an interesting situation. You saw the same tape that I saw, and he was trying to get away [from protesters], I guess, it looks like, and he fell, and then they very violently attacked him,” Trump said. “I guess he was in very big trouble. He probably would’ve been killed.”

Never mind the reality that the teenager traveled across state lines with that rifle, never mind the reports that he shot someone first, and the other two were shot trying to stop him from shooting any more people. To trump, the gunman is the hero and the protesters are "Antifa terrorists" (You might notice the Far Right refuse to spell that out as "Antifascist" because the full word makes it damn clear those protesters are the good guys).

Amid all of this, trump and his campaign handlers have been trying to spread the crazy conspiracy that the current round of protests and all the violence - a lot of it caused by Far Right counter-protesters trying to frame the anti-fascist groups - are all coming from "Biden's America" and that's how things will get if Joe wins the election this November. Never mind the reality that all of this is happening today under trump's mismanagement of everything, and under trump's unwillingness to lead a united America.

If there's any good news, it's that the current post-convention polling still shows Biden with a healthy national lead in the popular vote and decent leads in key battleground states for the Electoral College.

The bad news is: trump is going to make things worse because it's the only way he knows how to survive.

Gods help us.

September 11 Again And We're STILL Not Okay

It's just another morning in a United States scarred deeply by the tragedy of this September 11.

My memories of that morning still fresh in my mind and in the minds of so many others.

It took a few seconds. It took a few seconds to realize that one plane was an accident. Two planes, one right after the other… hitting each tower…

I knew then it meant war.

The lobby TV was terrible, snow and static, and I went up the 8th floor to see if reception for a TV in the staff lounge was better up there. It wasn’t. They tried moving it into a meeting room closer to the windows to see if that could help. And barely. There was still a lot of static and snow, and some of the guys I was with didn’t agree with me when I swore one of the towers had collapsed...

Our whole country hasn't been the same since.

Since then, a raw nerve has been exposed. A terrible, racist pulse of anger has driven half of this nation into rage towards anyone Muslim, anyone Latino, anyone Black, anyone and everyone who fits the definition of "Other."

It's why there's a raging Shitgibbon in the White House, someone who tapped into that racism and obsession and used it - still uses it - as a weapon.

It's why we're still in Afghanistan 18 years later, unable to secure any lasting peace because that effort was so mismanaged the second we leave it falls to chaos and the Taliban again.

It's why we're still caging babies and kicking military troops - men and women who volunteered to serve this nation - out because the racists refuse to accept them as citizens or even as humans.

We're not winning any War on Terror because we let the Haters and Monsters gain control of our nation.

Gods help us. These scars are not going away any time soon.

The Storms of September Stay With Us

Right about now, the outer bands of Hurricane Florence are covering the coastline of North Carolina.

If there's any good news at the moment, it's that the storm weakened on approach down from a Category 4 to a Cat 2.

The rest of the situation, of course, is a disaster for the East Coast.

It's not that Florence will be a monster storm with deadly winds, deadly floods, and deadly power outages.

It's that Florence is predicted to overstay its visit. Most times, these storms move past within a day, no more than two days, and pulls itself away from its source of energy - the oceans - to where it disappears over the land.

Florence will be different. The weather models are all predicting the hurricane will get stuck hovering over the middle of North Carolina - right along the South Carolina border, soaking both states - for three straight days. It could still feed off the Atlantic coast to retain its shape and strength as a Tropical Storm, meaning high winds preventing any repair jobs to downed electrical wires... and especially meaning constant rainfall that will get measured in feet not inches.

The context is last year's Harvey: a standard hurricane that slammed into Houston TX but then stayed put for days unleashing so much rain the entire city flooded. What had happened: Both the city and the state failed to observe natural flood zones, overdeveloping neighborhoods into places that would turn into rivers and lakes. A lot of these places built into wetlands or riversides, ignoring the need for water to flow away in case of massive rains. We paved over a lot of places with concrete and asphalt, preventing the ground from absorbing rain and forcing the water to flow in ways we didn't expect.

This is a horrifying reality of the last 30 years or so where the suburban expanse of metro areas did not plan well or outright ignored warnings. Developers are gonna develop, and state legislators across the country are usually more than happy to let rich developers build fancy big neighborhoods in the most scenic of places...

New Orleans was the first big warning. With Katrina in 2005, it wasn't the hurricane itself that was the killer, it was the aftermath of aged out levees breaking and flooding half the city that no longer had wetlands or canals to manage the overflow. They built into areas they shouldn't have built.

Harvey last year was the reminder: The city failed to build highways away from flood zones, allowing roads to turn into rivers trapping residents and delaying recovery efforts.

Florida is a constant threat to collapse. We're dealing with coastal cities facing flooding issues even without hurricanes blowing in. All it will take is one powerful hurricane to wash this all into the sea...

And yet, we're still not learning. We're still at the mercy of developers who want to keep putting up condos along our beaches, shopping malls in our wetlands, and highways connecting everything without care of how roads become rivers in a hurricane.

September is usually the worst month for hurricanes: while June-November is the schedule, September is where all the conditions for Atlantic-based storms are just right to cause these types of nerve-wracking nightmares. This is fast becoming a month of dread for the East Coast anymore.

Well, when the levee breaks...

P.S. and things might be tolerable if we had a government that knew what it was doing when handling these crises. But it's clear from trump's mismanagement of Puerto Rico relief - DEAR GOD what the HELL happened here? - that we're in for Katrina-style disasters for now.

Whither Now the Withered Nation

A personal note: I am running into high school students born after 9/11. An entire generation that has grown up in the shadow of the War on Terror. They're writing term papers on what happened this day 17 years ago. (Poorly researched term papers... /headdesk)

A War on Terror that has devolved into an ongoing and seemingly unending siege in Afghanistan.

A War on Terror that has failed to resolve even half of the conflicts that bedevil the Middle East and does nothing for the painful refugee crisis surrounding Syria, Yemen, North Africa. A crisis now spilling into Europe fueling a harsh rise of Far Right anti-immigrant sentiment that may have been a key factor in Brexit (a separate nightmarish issue of its own right now).

A War on Terror that put the United States on its own path of Far Right paranoia against immigrants - not just illegals but also legal immigrants suddenly getting punished - to the point where the United States is separating kids from families and shoving babies into jails.

An argument can be made that the attacks on the World Trade Center and on the Pentagon using passenger aircraft is a direct link between Osama Bin Laden and donald j. trump. That Bin Laden's attacks were so traumatizing that a large portion of the citizenry is willing to lash out in anger at everything they fear, eagerly accepting the leadership of any conman offering salvation through brutal repression of the dread Other.

If only one could hop into a time machine and go back to 1999, to find Bin Laden, and let him know that the results of his planned attacks would lead to a donald trump presidency.

Would Bin Laden recoil at the horror of even THAT level of madness?

...nah, probably not. Bin Laden was a dick just like trump.

We are so royally screwed.

Remember your loved ones, America.

Also, for the peeps I know in the Carolinas and Coastal Virginia. Stay dry and get out of the flood zones, Hurricane Florence is going to be a drencher.