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Earlier today I responded to a comment asking if Armenia and Georgia are next after the Ukraine.

Kamala Harris held some Q&As with Liz Cheney today in an attempt to persuade Republican women to vote for Harris. When asked how she deals with the despair so many are feeling she said this: Let me just speak to what people are feeling. We cannot despair. We cannot despair. You know, the nature of a democracy is such that I think there’s a duality. On the one hand, there’s an incredible strength when our democracy is intact. An incredible strength in what it does to protect the freedoms and rights of its people. Oh there’s great strength in that. And, it is very fragile. It is only as strong as our willingness to fight for it. And so that’s the moment we’re in. And I say do not despair because in a democracy, as long as we can keep it, in our democracy, the people — every individual — has the power to make a decision about what this will be. And so let’s not feel powerless. Let’s not let the — and I get it, overwhelming nature of this all makes us feel powerless. Because then we have been defeated. And that’s not our character as the American people. We are not ones to be defeated. We rise to a moment.

A few weeks ago a friend of mine from Nicaragua visited. One aspect of American culture he admired was our lack of corruption.

“Oh dear, Marlon,” I replied. “We are a deeply corrupt nation. The difference between our two nations is that in Nicaragua you have both ‘corruption of the poor,’ such as bribes to police officers, bribes to health inspectors, home inspectors, low level bureaucrats and the like and ‘corruption of the rich’ which is usually institutionalized, a part of the legislative process, includes the corrupt purchase of large scale national rents collection, and is unambiguously unethical. Everyone, in Nicaragua, wets their beak, whereas only the rich and powerful in America participate.”

Today Responsible Statecraft offers up the epitome of American corruption:

That is not an overstatement: In a video obtained by CBS News, the leader of an “election protection” activist group of 1,800 volunteers in North Carolina is seen instructing attendees at a virtual meeting to flag voters with “Hispanic-sounding last names” as one way to identify potentially suspicious registrations as the group combs through voter rolls ahead of the 2024 election. “If you’ve got folks that you, that were registered, and they’re missing information… and they were registered in the last 90 days before the election, and they’ve got Hispanic-sounding last names, that probably is, is a suspicious voter,” said James Womack, the leader of the effort, who chairs the Republican Party in Lee County, North Carolina. “It doesn’t mean they’re illegal.

LISTEN TO THIS: His closing argument is: Vote for me. I’m batshit insane!

This should be devastating for Donald Trump but since his cult has been trained not to believe anything bad about him, it probably won’t have much of an impact. Still, it’s pretty shocking for a man who depends on older people to vote for him: Former President Donald Trump’s campaign plans would significantly accelerate the already-fast-approaching date when Social Security is projected to run out of money, a nonpartisan budget group said Monday. Trump’s agenda would make the popular government program, relied upon by millions of American seniors, insolvent in six years — shrinking the current timeline by a third, the group found. The Republican nominee’s proposals would also expand Social Security’s cash shortfall by trillions of dollars and lead to even steeper benefit cuts in the coming years, said US Budget Watch 2024, a project of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. “We find President Trump’s campaign proposals would dramatically worsen Social Security’s finances,” the CRFB budget group said in a blog post.

Interest groups backed by conservative operatives and billionaire interests are pushing the high court to use upcoming Facebook and Nvidia cases to gut consumer protections.

An urgent inquiry has been called in to security at Canberra’s Parliament house after King Charles’ visit was marred by former PM, Tony Abbott, getting within knighting distance of his majesty. ”We nearly had a disaster on our hands what... Read More ›

Yeah, I know he entertained his crowd over the weekend with talk about Arnold Palmer’s allegedly huge male member and then shut down a McDonalds so he could pretend to work there for 15 minutes to somehow prove that Kamala Harris is a liar. But I think this is yet another low point: I hope he didn’t mean that FEMA would do a better job if they knew that armed gunman would shoot them if they didn’t. But you never know. I think he meant that it was important that people tell them when they’re not doing their jobs but in reality he’s saying that they should be able to lie with impunity during a disaster for political purposes. It never ends… The chef’s kiss? The guy with the beard standing over Trump’s left shoulder is this guy: Even Republicans are getting fed up with MAGA’s hurricane conspiracy theories. Representative Chuck Edwards of North Carolina is one of them. In a press release put out on Tuesday, Edwards condemned the misinformation about Hurricane Milton and Hurricane Helene that has been circulated online by the likes of Donald Trump and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene.

The 2024 election is just a little over two weeks away now and most Democrats are down to their last nerve with worry. This is nothing new, of course. That’s just the way they roll. Republicans meanwhile are already cracking the champagne strutting around saying they have it in the bag no need to worry. That’s how they roll. Both of these phenomenons are indicative of a certain kind of temperament but they are also real political strategies and it’s worth taking a look at them. I’ve written before about the Republicans’ love of the bandwagon effect which really just holds that if you act like Donald Trump and pretend that you know you’ve got it won, some people will naturally follow because they want to go with the winner. They’ve actually been doing that long before Trump came along but nobody in politics has ever been more naturally adept at deploying it than he is.

So Mike Johnson textd with is erstwhile friend Liz Cheney after her appearance on Meet the Press last week. He told Axios they “agreed to disagree.” Liz says, not so much: Cheney disputed Johnson’s characterization of the exchange, telling Axios that she and the speaker “used to be friends, but we did not ‘agree to disagree.'” Johnson said he had not spoken to Cheney in a “very long time,” but decided to text her after “she said some very uncharitable things.”“I do not have faith that Mike Johnson will fulfill his constitutional obligations,” Cheney told NBC on Oct. 13. Johnson told Axios he shared “how disappointed I was in that, to make things personal, because I’ve not done that.

First they ignore you…. The Washington Post this morning offers a “narrative busting” poll, says Simon Rosenberg. But still within the margins of error or, as activists put it, within the margin of effort: Among these key-state voters, Harris runs strongest in Georgia, where she has an advantage of six percentage points among registered voters and four points among likely voters, which is within the margin of error of plus or minus 4.5 percentage points. Harris also is slightly stronger than Trump in the three most contested northern states — Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — but by percentages within the margin of error. The seventh battleground state, Nevada, is tied among likely voters though Harris is three points stronger than Trump among registered voters. Naturally, the polling from North Carolina has me concerned. I’ve repeatedly made my pitch for turning out more neglected independents in heavily blue urban precincts where they underperform Democrats. But shaving GOP margins in rural areas is also part of a winning equation. Democrats’ state chair Anderson Clayton and friends at groups like Down Home North Carolina are on it.