Lord High Overseer of Gibberish A friend owned an outdoor equipment store near me when I was in my 20s. When I stopped in to browse, Jim would smile and greet me like a stranger, saying mock-formally, “Good afternoon, sir. How may I help you?” Glancing through the glass counter at backpacking accessories on display, I replied with meandering nonsense. It was a running gag. “Yeah, I’m looking for one of those narrow, square, round things that’s kind of, you know, yellow with the, the purple pointed part that’s rounded on one side, with the, the, clippy thing that hooks onto the other part. You know. They’re about this long, but shorter, so they’ll nest inside if you have another one so you can put two of them together?” Jim would grin and answer, “Oh, I’m so sorry, sir, we just sold the last one.” Among new employees looking on, heads would explode. A large fraction of the American electorate wants to hire a president who talks like that for real. Behold. Donald Trump answers questions from the Economic Club of New York: Trump’s uncle worked at MIT, dontcha know. Genius is in his genes.
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They know nothing, nothing! By now you’ve read that the Department of Justice has indicted two employees of Russia’s RT network for spending nearly $10 million to pump pro-Russian propaganda into the U.S. digital mindstream: “The Justice Department has charged two employees of RT, a Russian state-controlled media outlet, in a $10 million scheme to create and distribute content to U.S. audiences with hidden Russian government messaging,” said Attorney General Merrick B. Garland. “The Justice Department will not tolerate attempts by an authoritarian regime to exploit our country’s free exchange of ideas in order to covertly further its own propaganda efforts, and our investigation into this matter remains ongoing.” “Our approach to combating foreign malign influence is actor-driven, exposing the hidden hand of adversaries pulling strings of influence from behind the curtain,” said Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco.
It seems like only yesterday that the elite media were extremely concerned that President Joe Biden had mistakenly referred to the president of Egypt as the president of Mexico. In the course of an otherwise cogent discussion of foreign affairs, he’d made that mistake in passing but it caused a huge uproar and spawned yet another round of critical reporting about his age and mental capacities. No one in the press blew off the gaffe and the substance of his comments went virtually unreported. That press conference came in the shadow of the Hur report, in which the Special Counsel had made a gratuitous comment about Biden being an elderly man with a bad memory. From that moment on almost every story about Joe Biden was framed in terms of his advanced age and the question of whether he was up to the job. The drumbeat continued for months until Biden’s disastrous debate performance validated their narrative and it continued until the day he withdrew from the race. No one in the media cut Joe Biden any slack for his performance.
Trump held another unhinged “press conference” (at which he took no questions) today: Trump today: “I grab her and I start kissing her and making out with her. What are the chances of that happening?” Well.. Trump 2005 Access Hollywood: “I’m automatically attracted to beautiful women — I just start kissing them, it’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait.” He went on for an hour like that. My favorite part was when he trashed his own legal team (standing behind him) and got mad that they didn’t bring up “the dress” in the hearing today. Apparently, he didn’t understand that this was an appellate hearing and there would be no new evidence presented. (The dress was disallowed at his original trial.) He was obviously very upset. Here are some excerpts: (It was not AI generated) Aaaand like clockwork:
Everyone’s been waiting for this so naturally it’s a dud: The judge overseeing Donald J. Trump’s criminal case in Manhattan postponed his sentencing until after Election Day, a significant victory for the former president as he seeks to overturn his conviction and win back the White House. In a ruling on Friday, the judge, Juan M. Merchan, cited the “unique time frame this matter currently finds itself in” and rescheduled the sentencing for Nov. 26. He had previously planned to hand down Mr. Trump’s punishment on Sept. 18, just seven weeks before Election Day, when Mr. Trump will face off against Vice President Kamala Harris for the presidency. “This is not a decision this court makes lightly but it is the decision which in this court’s view, best advances the interests of justice,” Justice Merchan wrote in the four-page ruling, which noted that “this matter is one that stands alone, in a unique place in this nation’s history.” Yes it does. But once again, Trump gets the benefit of being a criminal who is running for president in order to evade accountability for his crimes. What a sweet, sweet scam this is.
The Trump spawn are in over their heads as usual It looks like the two oldest Trump boys are following the footsteps of their father the online media mogul whose stock will soon be worthless. They’re going to lose a lot of people a lot of money with this scam too: Plans by former president Donald Trump’s eldest sons, Donald Jr. and Eric, to launch a crypto startup have set off alarm bells among even his staunchest allies in the sector, according to a new report in Politico. The two brothers have spent recent weeks touting World Liberty Financial, their soon-to-be-launched, shrouded-in-secrecy cryptocurrency firm. But a string of mishaps, including Trump family members getting hacked by scammers and concerns about World Liberty’s deep connections to a blockchain firm that lost $2 million because of security shortfalls, has some arguing they should pack it up before they begin. “This is a huge mistake,” Nic Carter, a partner at crypto venture capital firm Castle Island Ventures and a Trump backer, told Politico.
Michelle Goldberg takes on the latest rad fad on the authoritarian right: Hitler apologia and holocaust denial. You knew it was coming, right? She is responding to (yet another) right wing “influencer” and alleged historian named Darryl Cooper and his embrace by none other than Tiucker Carlson. Some on the right found Carlson’s turn toward Holocaust skepticism surprising. “Didn’t expect Tucker Carlson to become an outlet for Nazi apologetics, but here we are,” Erick Erickson, the conservative radio host, wrote on X. But Carlson’s trajectory was entirely predictable. Nazi sympathy is the natural endpoint of a politics based on glib contrarianism, right-wing transgression and ethnic grievance. . . . For parts of the contemporary right, however, the social consensuses undergirding liberalism are artificial and even tyrannical. After all, the “Matrix”-derived metaphor of being “red-pilled” implies a realization that all you’ve been told about the nature of reality is a lie, and thus everything is up for grabs.
Baby Koala! Yay! A few fun facts: – Baby Koalas are known as ‘Joeys’. Scientists often refer to them using terms like ‘juveniles’, ‘pouch young’ and ‘back young’. – Younger breeding females usually give birth to one Joey each year, depending on a range of factors. However, not all females in a wild population will breed each year. Some, especially older females, will produce offspring only every two or three years.– – When the Joey is born, it’s only about 2 centimetres long, is blind and furless and its ears are not yet developed. On its amazing journey to the pouch, it relies on its well-developed senses of smell and touch, its strong forelimbs and claws, and an inborn sense of direction. Once in the pouch, it attaches itself to one of the two teats which swells in its mouth, preventing it from being dislodged from its source of food. – The Joey stays in its mother’s pouch for about 6 or 7 months, drinking only milk.
Taxpayers could pay for striking Kennedy’s name Elections staffs across North Carolina had prepared over 100,000 absentee ballots to go into the mail on Friday as the law requires. A lawsuit by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. put a halt to it: The State Board of Elections has appealed Friday’s order by the NC Court of Appeals, which required election officials to remove Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s name from 2024 general election ballots and print new ones. The appeal was filed with the NC Supreme Court Friday afternoon. As the Supreme Court considers the appeal, State Board staff will work through the weekend to begin the process of coding new ballots without Kennedy’s name and providing proofs of the new ballots to county boards of elections for review. There are 2,348 different ballot styles statewide for the 2024 general election. More than 2.9 million ballots had already been printed before the order by the Court of Appeals. The State Board instructed county Directors to hold and not destroy ballots already prepared until the matter is resolved.
Is Trump Fever breaking? Politico on Friday announced that the Harris-Walz campaign has hired my friend Matt Hildreth of progressive Rural Organizing dot org as the campaign’s National Rural Outreach Director. Hildreth’s group announced it formally in a tweet shortly thereafter. Politico: Hiring Hildreth, whose grassroots organization is already knocking doors for Harris and Democratic candidates across the country this fall, signals the campaign is looking to seriously expand a resource-intensive ground game to reach rural voters who could swing the election. The Harris-Walz team doesn’t expect the ticket to flip many rural counties. But some of Harris’ top advisers have argued that simply losing by slightly fewer percentage points in these areas could help carry her and down-ballot Democrats to victory. In recent memos, the campaign has argued “the key to decreasing margins in rural areas is to show up and compete everywhere — which is exactly what we’re doing across the country.” Exactly right. That’s how Democrat Heath Shuler ousted eight-term, NC-11 Republican Rep. Charles Taylor in 2006.