DeSantis: I know Donald Trump and a lot of his people have been focusing on things like footwear. I’ll tell you this. If Donald Trump can summon the balls to show up to the debate. I’ll wear a boot on my head. pic.twitter.com/CF11I4JtOT — Acyn (@Acyn) November 3, 2023 I’ll be so glad when I don’t have to see or read about this guy anymore: Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis on Thursday contributed to the seemingly never-ending discourse about whether or not he wears lifts in his boots by outlining a bizarre scenario in which he would wear a boot on his head at next week’s GOP primary debate. During an interview on Newsmax, the Florida governor—who has denied wearing any sort of height-boosting footwear—first responded to the chatter by saying that “this is no time for foot fetishes” because “we’ve got serious problems as a country.” He went on to mention how Donald Trump has weighed in on the topic. On Tuesday, the former president’s campaign declared “#BOOTGATE” to be the “KISS OF DEATH” for DeSantis.
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A different kind of soother for a Friday afternoon This is what we call a happy thought in these troubled times: Whenever I look at the latest polls and start to freak out about Donald Trump winning the presidency again, I calm myself by remembering that the guy is very likely going to be an at-least-once convicted felon by next November. While that won’t bother his fans, I still think it will bother enough swing voters that he will lose, and maybe spectacularly. That scenario got a little more likely Thursday when the California judge overseeing a misconduct trial against Trump attorney and coup-plotter John Eastman made a “preliminary finding” of culpability on Eastman’s part for his attempts to halt the certification of the 2020 election results. What’s the upshot? No, Eastman isn’t guilty of anything just yet. But he is now closer to being disbarred, and that could make it more likely that he flips.
And why is he running for president We’re less than a week in to @repdeanphillips campaign, and it’s clearly one of the best-run campaigns in America. And by “best-run” I mean you take three-dozen coked-up rabid monkeys, coat them in motor oil, tape knives to their paws, and set them loose in a Cracker Barrel on a… — Rick Wilson (@TheRickWilson) November 3, 2023 This is what Wilson’s talking about: MANCHESTER, New Hampshire—Dean Phillips, the newly minted 2024 primary challenger to President Joe Biden, made a lofty promise to hold 119 town halls in New Hampshire in 13 weeks. But if the other 118 town halls are anything like the first, the Minnesota congressman—and New Hampshire voters—may be in for a painful ride. By the end of Phillips’ three-hour event in Manchester on Wednesday night, two voters had been thrown out after a tense exchange with the candidate over Israel, one voter stormed out when trying to defend the person who had been thrown out, and the candidate’s team was preparing to scrub the recording of the event from the internet.
That’s all he said about Ivanka. As you can see, it’s really all about him. It is perfectly justified to bring Ivanka to testify. She wasn’t made part of the case because of the statue of limitations. A technicality. She was one of the main conduits between the Trump org and its major lender, Deutsche Bank so she is certainly an important witness. “It doesn’t get better than this,” Ivanka Trump boasted in 2011, in an email celebrating the low interest rate she’d just won on a $125 million loan her father needed for his Miami golf course. Lawyers for the New York attorney general’s office, who plan to call Ivanka Trump to the witness stand on Friday at their ongoing, $250 million Trump fraud trial, agree it was quite the deal. As Donald Trump’s top loan negotiator, Ivanka Trump indeed excelled at securing rock-bottom interest rates, they say, saving her father as much as $150 million on $400 million in Deutsche Bank loans used to develop Trump’s palm-studded Florida golf course, his luxury hotel in Washington, DC, and the Chicago tower that is his tallest skyscraper.
Judi Dench was on Graham Norton last night to push her new book about her life and work with Shakespeare. After making the point we quote Shakespeare daily without knowing it, this happened: pic.twitter.com/CIhP39b4Bs — Justin Sherin (@wychstreet) October 27, 2023 One of the greats.
The whole world is watching Geopolitically, Israel could no more not retaliate for the Hamas butchery and hostage-taking than the U.S. could brush off the 9/11 attacks. The question in each case was always how. “While you feel that rage, don’t be consumed by it,” President Joe Biden cautioned on his 7 1/2-hour visit to Israel after seemingly ISIS-inspired Hamas attacks. “After 9/11, we were enraged in the United States. And while we sought justice and got justice, we also made mistakes.” Some of us still remember the mistakes. The PATRIOT Act, the Office of Special Plans, “Curveball,” aluminum tubes, yellowcake uranium, Colin Powell’s U.N. address, the Iraq invasion, Coalition Provisional Authority Order Number 2, Abu Ghraib, extraordinary rendition, enhanced interrogation techniques, Guantanamo. Plus, “We’re an empire now.“ Speaking of ISIS, ISIS was the product of our mistakes too. Did Israel listen to Biden? This is from the Times of Israel on Friday (which I’ve not seen reported elsewhere): Cabinet said slated to okay police use of live fire against protesters blocking roads during multi-front war.
What a healthy church needs, a healthy political party needs too This message from a retired minister in Knox County, Tennessee has wider application than southern churches: God may not be dead, but his church is headed for hospice if we don’t get our heads out of our ecclesiastical backsides. My wife and I visited a mainline church on a Main Street in a deep red southern town last month and found … the audience from a 1972 episode of Lawrence Welk. Every hymn sounded like a dirge from the funeral I feared we had stumbled in on. But, no, the only thing dying was this church. We couldn’t count five people under the age of 50. That is a problem Democrats have as well in many places. Political life in this country is dominated by a gerontocracy. That is one reason so many younger people are rejecting political parties and opting to register to vote unaffiliated. If they register. If they vote. Churchgoing is on a steady decline. Buzz Thomas suggests that if churches don’t evolve, they will die.
Protest votes are not. They only help the worst people. To anyone contemplating not voting for Biden over the Israel war, it’s probably a good idea to also contemplate what will replace him if you do that: Trump: All the resident aliens that joined in the pro jihadist protests this month.. Come 2025, we will find you and deport you. pic.twitter.com/n00sGlzSnH — Acyn (@Acyn) October 28, 2023 Trump on murdered Israels: “They’ll be avenged even beyond what you’re thinking about” pic.twitter.com/gIFcOvxSLa — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 28, 2023 Trump brags about cutting off all aid to Palestinians while he was president pic.twitter.com/bOtvT3DcKV — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 28, 2023 Trump promises to cancel student visas of Hamas sympathizers pic.twitter.com/3uN6dgCuxN — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 28, 2023 To all those who say that it’s simply too painful for them personally to vote for the lesser of two evils, I’ll just quote that old establishment puppet Noam Chomsky who famously said, “of course you should vote for the lesser of two evils — you get less evil.”
Mike Johnson’s “commitment is not to democracy” “If Republicans vote for a medieval insurrectionist, and nobody knows, does it count?” Brian Beutler recommended on Friday at Off Message, meaning the new Republican speaker from Louisiana. Make Mike Johnson famous: Instilling an idea about a person in the social consciousness and making it stick is an unending and tedious process. Republicans didn’t define Al Gore as a wooden teller of Big Fish tales in one day, it required relentless scoffing; same with John Kerry as the out-of-touch cheese-eating surrender monkey, Hillary Clinton as Mrs. Emails. Nancy Pelosi as Mrs. San Francisco values, and so on. Nancy Mace wants to wear a Scarlet Letter? How about two? MJ. Republicans hung “Nancy Pelosi liberal” around Democratic candidates’ necks for decades. Two parties can play that game. The press is obliging. Politico’s Katelyn Fossett spoke with Kristin Kobes Du Mez, a historian of evangelical Christianity and politics.