Game over, man

Taylor Swift has endorsed Kamala Harris/Tim Walz.

Lest you think the Republicans will be steamrollered, have no fear: Donald Trump quickly countered.

When asked Wednesday morning about Swift endorsing the Democratic nominee, Trump tried to shake it off, telling Fox News he prefers Swift’s close friend Brittany Mahomes over the singer.
“I actually like Mrs. Mahomes much better if you want to know the truth,” Trump said. “She’s a big Trump fan. I was not a Taylor Swift fan.”

Who?

I looked her up on Wikipedia.

Brittany Lynne Mahomes (née Matthews; born August 31, 1995) is an American sports team co-owner and former soccer player who played as a forward for Icelandic club UMF Afturelding. She is a founding co-owner of the Kansas City Current, a team in the American professional top-division National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL).

She is married to Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes.

OK, I’m still saying, “Who?”

It’s a good thing that the election won’t be decided by celebrity endorsements, but I do think Harris might have an edge here.

This is rather horrible.

He’s just confirming that the Trump cult is weird and creepy.

I watched the debate

I did. I sat through the whole thing, and I did not enjoy it.

Harris said nothing radical. No surprising policy changes; she wants to stay the course with Israel, demanding a cease fire and release of the hostages, but what I wanted to hear was that she would leverage the sale of arms to pressure Israel into ending the genocide — nope, she couldn’t say that. She did promise other positive changes, though with a $6K tax credit for new families and $50K for new business startups. Otherwise, she hammered on Trump a bit, as expected. “In this debate tonight, you’re going to hear from the same old tired playbook, a bunch of lies, grievances and name-calling,” she predicted. She was exactly right.

Trump glowered through the whole thing. He looked resentful at being there, and yeah, he kept returning to immigration. He really hates a lot of people, and wants to deport millions of people, all those dangerous criminals pouring over the border, released from prisons and insane asylums. He repeated that nonsense about immigrants hunting down your beloved pets and killing them and eating them.

Asked about abortion, he claimed that everyone, including women, Democrats, and professors, loved the fact that he killed Roe v. Wade. No, they do not. Asked if he would veto a bill that proposed a nationwide abortion ban, he dodged the question. Asked about January 6th, he said “I didn’t do it.” He’s a liar and a coward.

Here’s a 20 minute summary of the whole thing.

The highlight for me, though, was when he was asked about what he planned to replace Obamacare with, he admitted he didn’t have any specific plans, he had concepts of plans.

He’s a hate-filled sack of shit. He’s got nothing but jingo and contempt for anyone who doesn’t look like him.

Maybe that will be enough to get him elected, unfortunately.

Lies, lies, and more lies

It’s just that easy!

What to expect from the debate tonight: as we get closer and closer to the election, the lies get more and more extreme.

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

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

What the hell is wrong with Trump and his audience? And he repeats it again!

When asked by the group’s co-founder how he would address the “explosion in the number of children who identify as transgender,” Trump said: “Your kid goes to school and comes home a few days later with an operation. The school decides what’s going to happen with your child.”

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

My transgender friends are constantly complaining about how many hoops they have to jump through, how many years it takes to get approval, and how many states won’t even allow you to buy the drugs for maintenance. I’ll have to inform them that all you had to do was say that you used a different pronoun in middle school, and zip, you’re sent to the school nurse, who has a fully equipped surgery, and the sex change is done in a day.

Yeah, right.

And the MAGA idiots will believe it, and are ready for the next lie.

Which happens to be that Haitian immigrants are flooding the country and stealing your pets to eat raw in their apartments in the slums. Sure, fully believable. Everyone knows that housecat is the national dish of Haiti.

This summary of Israel’s defenses holds up

Accurate.

A quick guide to Israel’s PR methods:
1. We haven’t heard reports of deaths, will check into it;
2. The people were killed, but by a faulty Palestinian rocket/bomb;
3. OK we killed them, but they were terrorists;
4. OK they were civilians, but they were being used as human shields;
5. OK there were no fighters in the area, so it was our mistake. But we kill civilians by accident, they do it on purpose;
6. OK we kill far more civilians than they do, but look at how terrible other countries are!
7. Why are you still talking about Israel? Are you some kind of anti-semite?
Test this against the next interview you hear or watch.
Adam Johannes, Secretary, Cardiff Stop the War Coalition

Debate schmebate

Great. We’re having a another presidential debate tomorrow. I predict it will be a debacle.

I won’t predict who will win, because that is going to be shaped by people’s subjective impressions and the way impressions will be shaped by the media. And one thing I can definitely predict is that the media will fuck it up.

The first thing to say about the hate and scorn currently directed at the mainstream US media is that they worked hard to earn it. They’ve done so by failing, repeatedly, determinedly, spectacularly to do their job, which is to maintain their independence, inform the electorate, and speak truth to power. While the left has long had reasons to dismiss centrist media, and the right has loathed it most when it did do its job well, the moderates who are furious at it now seem to be something new – and a host of former editors, media experts and independent journalists have been going after them hard this summer.

Longtime journalist James Fallows declares that three institutions – the Republican party, the supreme court, and the mainstream political press – “have catastrophically failed to ‘meet the moment’ under pressure of [the] Trump era”. Centrist political reformer and columnist Norm Ornstein states that these news institutions “have had no reflection, no willingness to think through how irresponsible and reckless so much of our mainstream press and so many of our journalists have been and continue to be”.

Most voters, he says, “have no clue what a second Trump term would actually be like. Instead, we get the same insipid focus on the horse race and the polls, while normalizing abnormal behavior and treating this like a typical presidential election, not one that is an existential threat to democracy.”

This debate shouldn’t be happening, because in a functional democracy the senile narcissist running for the Republican party should have been repudiated long ago.

I wish I had more prairie progressives around here

I’m conflicted about this cartoon.

It’s true that I’ve met some ferociously progressive people living in this rural red part of the state — but it’s still red. The majority of voters in these parts voted for Trump in the last election, for instance. They put up anti-abortion signs and sign up for the NRA and drive megamonster trucks.

So don’t go too far in either direction. The rural midwest is complicated.

Wohl and Burkman sneak back into politics!

These two clowns, Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman, have a long history of failed ratfucking.

In 2020, the two hired actors to stage a fake FBI raid on Burkman’s house and tricked The Washington Post into writing up the phony incident. Wohl used the Klein surname in that incident, too.

The year before, Wohl was charged in California for selling an unregistered security as part of a plot to create fake news items to make money in political betting markets. He pled guilty to four felony counts and was sentenced to two years of probation, according to court records in Riverside County.

Wohl and Burkman drew attention a few years ago by trying to frame multiple public figures, including former Special Counsel Robert Mueller and current Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, for sexual assaults. They conducted other outlandish smear campaigns, including hiring a woman to say that Anthony Fauci had assaulted her and allegedly stealing a USAID employee’s phone to send out tweets blasting the foreign aid agency as “anti-Christian.”

Among the conspiracy theories that Wohl has pushed include saying in 2020 that Biden had tested positive for Covid and would die in 30 days, that Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) had a relationship with a former Marine and that Vice President Kamala Harris wasn’t eligible to run for president in the 2020 cycle.

There are other instances, like the time they came to Minneapolis to ‘prove’ that Ilhan Omar was incestuously married to her brother, and called the west bank of the U of Minnesota “little Mogadishu”. My favorite flop, though, was when they hired an ex-Marine to claim he’d been scarred by violent sex with Elizabeth Warren. They’re absolutely nuts and impressively bad at their con games.

They’re so bad that now they operate under pseudonyms.

A Washington startup pitched as a service to integrate AI into lobbying is covertly run by a pair of well-known, far-right conspiracy theorists and convicted felons who are using pseudonyms in their new business, according to four former employees as well as photo and email evidence.

LobbyMatic was founded last year by Jacob Wohl, who in 2022 was convicted along with his longtime associate Jack Burkman of felony telecom fraud after running a robocall campaign in largely Black neighborhoods in several states telling people not to vote by mail. An Ohio judge ordered them to spend 500 hours registering people to vote, and the Federal Communications Commission fined them $5 million.

In his role as a founder and CEO of the new firm, Wohl uses the name “Jay Klein,” according to the former employees and emails obtained by POLITICO. Burkman uses the pseudonym “Bill Sanders,” the former employees said.

Ha ha, you laugh. Nobody will fall for this.

Their lobbying group has already signed up some big name clients, including Toyota. The corporate lobbying game in Washington DC is a fruitful market for grifters, I guess.

You need an atheist to explain you should respect grieving families?

If you want to see a classic case study of how the American media has degenerated into uselessness, look at how they’re handling the Arlington scuffle. They’ve been skirting around the issue, trying to avoid the blunt truth: the Trump campaign is run by a gang of boors who are incapable of courtesy and restraint. At least the Columbia Journalism Review tells it like it is.

On Tuesday, NPR’s Quil Lawrence and Tom Bowman broke the news that Trump and members of his campaign appeared to violate federal law during an appearance at Arlington to mark the third anniversary of the deadly attack on US troops that punctuated the deeply flawed withdrawal from Afghanistan. Members of Trump’s staff had sought to film the event for a campaign video, and got into an altercation with an Arlington National Cemetery staff member who tried to stop them. Steven Cheung, a Trump campaign official, strongly denied that any altercation had taken place and said the campaign was ready to release a video to prove his point. (They have yet to release it.) It wasn’t surprising that these two NPR pros with deep knowledge of the military, and sources among veterans, were the first with the news. The Washington Post followed with a story the same day, as did the New York Times. The public took note.

As more publications followed suit, the Arlington stories suffered a dreadful fate: they all started to sound the same. News outlets ended up with articles bogged down in parsing federal law, carefully defining what exactly counts as an altercation, and quoting milquetoast official statements like “There was an incident and a report was filed.”

Look. I’m a heretical atheist who is blunt and sometimes rude about disrespecting religious traditions, but even I know that you have to be kind and circumspect with grieving families (do I even need to say something so obvious?) I spent some time in civilian cemeteries in July, and even there I knew you don’t make a scene. You don’t annoy people in those circumstances, and you don’t make excuses. You apologize, you back away, you stop what you’re doing. Not the Trump campaign!

Lumped together, the reporting this week left readers and listeners, especially those with no knowledge of the military, at a loss to understand what actually happened—and, crucially, why it mattered so much. The Trump campaign team had successfully muddied the waters by alleging that the photographer had been invited to the event by family members of soldiers buried there.

I don’t care if you found someone who invited you to caper in a graveyard, you’re supposed to be considerate to all the people visiting. Trump was of course politicizing the most recent deaths so he can criticize Biden. It was tacky and inappropriate.

But as any veteran knows in their bones, the solemnity of the ceremony is exactly why the unauthorized photographer had no business being there—regardless of who invited them. Section 60, the part of the cemetery where the incident occurred, is one of the most sacred places for this generation of troops. It is where those who were killed in Iraq and Afghanistan are buried. Those graves are visited not by tourists looking for historical figures, but by mothers and fathers visiting their fallen son or daughter. In Section 60, wounds are still raw. Political activity there is never appropriate, and under the law, only cemetery staffers and approved photographers are permitted to film or take pictures there.

Readers needed to know that, when you visit Arlington, you might not know exactly what you’re supposed to do when confronted by those rows of headstones, but you damn sure know what you’re not supposed to do. But the coverage this week left many readers with the impression that the whole thing might have been a bureaucratic mix-up, or some tedious violation of protocol. It focused on bland horse-race coverage so common during election season, rather than clearly stating what really took place: an egregious and willful violation of long-standing norms. What was missing from the coverage was a willingness to quickly and decisively state what a grievous insult the whole debacle was to the dignity of Arlington. The sacred had been profaned.

I don’t believe in the sacred, but otherwise, yes: the Trump campaign has insulted the military and the dead. Own it, Donald. Making excuses just makes it worse. It’s time for him to apologize…which may not be possible for him.

You don’t get to control teacher’s lives once they go home

In the 19th century, there was a different set of rules for teachers.

Among the terrible crimes: “Any teacher who smokes, uses liquor in any form, frequents pool or public halls, or gets shaved in a barber shop will give good reason to suspect his worth, intention, integrity, and honesty.” But also “Women teachers who marry or engage in unseemly conduct will be dismissed.” Those were the old conservatives. The new conservatives are just as dictatorial and demanding, but they have some different rules.


“And I think our conservative idea is that parents and families should determine what children learn and what values they are brought up with. It’s so many leaders of the left. I hate to be so personal about this, but they are people without kids who try to brainwash the minds of our children,” Vance said in the clip.

“And that disorients me. And it disturbs me. Randi Weingarten, who’s the head of the most powerful teacher’s union in the country, doesn’t have a single child, he added.

“If she wants to be brainwashed and destroy the minds of children, she should have some of her own and leave ours the hell alone.”

So the party that thinks all women should be traditional homemakers, and doesn’t want to invest a penny on childcare, now thinks that skilled professional teachers should be required to have children.

How about if you leave the private lives of teachers the hell alone?

Wow, but Vance sure is a creepy weird autocrat. Don’t elect him, OK?