Michael Moore weighs in on the election

The documentarian gained credibility when he predicted early on in 2016, at a time when opinion polls showed Hillary Clinton coasting to victory, that there were serious warning signs that serial sex abuser and convicted felon Donald Trump (SSACFT) would defeat her unless she changed her strategy towards the rust belt states and campaign more aggressively there. She did not and lost. In 2022, he predicted that the so-called ‘red wave’ that opinion polls were predicting that Republicans sweep the mid-term elections at national, state, and local levels would not happen and that Democrats would do very well. That turned out to be accurate too.

He does not pay much attention to horse-race opinion polls as to who people will vote for but does pay attention to surveys of what people care about. That, and somehow having an ear close to the ground, makes him someone who should be listened to.

He is now saying that Democrats have an opportunity to crush Republicans in the coming elections because the majority of voters agree with them on almost all major issues but that they must not make the mistake of alienating their strongest supporters. He makes four points that Harris and the Democrats must pay attention to to prevent their supporters from staying home.
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John Oliver on JD Vance and the couch

Oliver’s weekly show ,em>Last Week Tonight starts out with a monologue on contemporary events followed by a long in-depth segment. It is only the latter that HBO puts out on YouTube a few days after the Sunday show is aired. Apparently he had a lot of fun in his monologue last week talking about Vance and the cushion.

I found this clip of it.

It will likely be taken down soon and we will have to be satisfied with this summary.

John Oliver checked in on the US presidential race and the state of illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank on Sunday evening. The Last Week Tonight host ripped into JD Vance, Donald Trump’s running mate and “Great Lakes Ron DeSantis”, who is not polling well with anyone.

The Ohio senator “sucks so much”, said Oliver, that the internet ran wild with a joke tweet that he was the first VP pick to have admitted in a bestselling book to “fucking an inside-out latex glove shoved between two couch cushions, with a citation to a page number from his memoir”.

That is not in Vance’s book Hillbilly Elegy, Oliver emphasized, “but I think the reason it spread so fast might be that A, nobody read that fucking book, and B, it was incredibly easy to believe, because if you ask me to draw a man that fucks his couch, 10 times out of 10, I’m drawing this guy,” he joked. “If you ask me to play two truths and a lie with this man, before he’d even open his mouth, I’d shout, ‘The truth is he fucks his couch!’ Because I’ve never seen someone with more couch-fucker energy.”

“He looks like he watched the Tom Cruise-Oprah interview and was jealous of Tom’s shoes,” Oliver continued. “If you told me that his first celebrity crush was the plastic sofa from Everybody Loves Raymond, I’d believe you without question. If you told me the reason you find coins in between couch cushions is because JD Vance always leaves a tip, I’d be like, ‘Yeah that sounds right.’”

Oliver also referenced the Associated Press’s decision to factcheck the tweet with a headline: “No, JD Vance did not have sex with a couch.” The news site later removed the article with the explanation that the story didn’t meet its “standard editing process”.

“No shit it didn’t, because there’s an obvious problem with that original headline,” Oliver said. “And the reason I know that is we care a lot about facts and precise phrasing on this show. So I can tell you, you can’t say ‘JD Vance didn’t have sex with a couch’ definitively. You can say that he didn’t write about doing that in his book because that is provable, but that’s not the same as asserting he never fucked a couch, especially because he hasn’t officially denied it.”

Oliver’s staff, he revealed, tried to contact the Vance campaign this week; when asked by phone if he ever had sex with a couch, the spokesperson hung up, “which is, and this is critical, not a ‘no,’ is it”? Oliver laughed.

“Who knows where this is going?” he mused. “The news is moving so fast right now – the RNC was only last week, it was only two weeks ago that Trump was shot and there are so many variables between here and November. We don’t know who Kamala’s VP pick will be. We don’t know which candidate will maintain momentum. The race is impossible to predict. But … until he tells us otherwise, I’m gonna assume that JD Vance fucked a couch.”

I wish that clip were freely available.

People are likely to ask Vance about the couch until he or his spokesperson explicitly denies it. Either way, it is not a good look for him.

Kamala Harris moves gingerly away from Biden on Israel

One of the things that we need to be clear about Kamala Harris is that she is not a progressive. Her record is one of a centrist Democrat and that means that while she is not as ardent in Joe Biden in his uncritical embrace, both literally and metaphorically, of Israel and its extremist leader Benjamin Netanyahu, she has been a solid supporter. They paid lip service to a two-state solution while turning a blind eye to Israeli policies of expansion of annexation of Palestinian land that was making that solution no longer tenable. As long as there was no major turmoil, they could pay scant attention to how horribly that country was treating its Palestinian population.

The massacre that is taking place in Gaza that has caused worldwide condemnation has made that kind of silence untenable. Joe Biden made some half-hearted attempts to try and curb Israel’s excesses but Netanyahu scornfully and even insultingly rebuffed him. I was curious as to whether Harris would continue to do what she had to do as vice-president, which was to publicly support Biden’s non-action, or whether, now that she is the party leader in her own right, she would try to move in a different direction.
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The myth of migrant crime

On the latest episode of his show Last Week Tonight, John Oliver debunks the false narrative heavily promoted by serial sex abuser and convicted felon Donald Trump (SSACFT) and right wing media like Fox news that the US is awash in a crime wave being committed by migrants. He shows that crime rates have declined dramatically over recent years and that migrants are much less likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans, and that a few events that have been shown repeatedly as examples of this rampant lawlessness in fact show no such thing.

This show was aired last Sunday, before Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the presidential race, but Oliver’s plea at the end about the importance of voting against SSACFT, whatever our reservations and concerns about Biden, are still valid.

‘Weird, sick, creepy, freaks’

At the 2016 Democratic convention, when it was clear that Republican nominee and serial sex abuser and convicted felon Donald Trump (SSACFT) was going to wage a dirty campaign of lies and personal insults against Hillary Clinton, Michele Obama uttered the sentence that resonated with the crowd and that she is remembered for: “When they go low, we go high”. She was implying that Democrats would not get into a mud fight with SSACFT and the Republicans, but would take the high road and focus on the issues. It was a noble goal.

But that was then, this is now.

The early signs are that Kamala Harris is not going to hold back and is quite willing to take the fight to the Republican ticket. One of the things that the Harris campaign seems to be focusing on is that both SSACFT and Vance are both creepy and weird.
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Vivian Jenna Wilson has just about had it with her father

Elon Musk has a transgender daughter who is so angry with the way he has reacted to her transition that she has cut off all ties with him and even changed her last name so that she will not be associated with him. This has not prevented Musk from continuing to criticize her and even repeatedly dead-naming her, most recently when he ranted about her when he spoke with Jordan Petersen and on Twitter/X.

Wilson has issued a statement in a series of posts blasting Musk.

Jones Wilson says that Musk is lying about her, her childhood, and his role in her life.

Musk posted on Monday that Wilson was “born gay and slightly autistic” and added that as a child, she would “pick out clothes for me to wear like a jacket and tell me it was ‘fabulous!’”

In her response on Threads, Wilson, 20, called the depiction an untrue gay stereotype.

“I never picked out jackets for him to wear and I was most certainly not calling them ‘fabulous’ because literally what the (f**k). I did not use the word fabulous when I was four because once again I would like to reiterate… I was four,” Wilson said.

She added that Musk “doesn’t know what I was like as a child because he quite simply wasn’t there, and in the little time that he was I was relentlessly harassed for my femininity and queerness.”

Musk in recent years has become increasingly enthralled with right-wing politics, sharing anti-immigration, anti-DEI and anti-trans posts and ideologies on X.

Being the child of reputedly one of the world’s richest people, there would have been strong incentive for Wilson to just suck it up and be silent in the hope of getting some of that money. It takes a lot of guts to so publicly and completely cut ties with her father and it speaks to how awful a parent he must be.

Kamala or Harris?

A female friend and colleague of mine, a professor of chemistry at my university, recounted to me an incident in which she and a few other professors were being introduced by their department chair to a visiting speaker. The chair went around the group saying, “This is professor X”, “This is professor Y” and so on until it came to her and then he said “This is Z”, giving just her first name. Z is not someone who stands on ceremony. She is friendly in her demeanor, dresses casually, and is not offended when her students call her by her first name, like many other male and female professors. And yet, this incident rankled her because she was the only one being addressed this way. She felt belittled by comparison, less respected. She says that as a woman is science, she is often the only one in a group of her peers, and this kind of thing has happened more than once.
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JD Vance looks worse by the day

It looks like we can expect a steady drip of bad news about JD Vance as people start combing through his past.

For example, in a just-released clip from an interview he gave before the 2022 Dobbs decision that overthrew Roe v. Wade, he makes up some fantasy about in the event that happens and Ohio bans abortions altogether, the possibility of George Soros every day sending a 747 to Ohio to fill it up with mostly Black women seeking abortions and taking them to California to have them, and says that he is sympathetic to the idea of the federal government stepping in to stop this.


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What makes a good running mate

The position of vice-president in the US is a peculiar one. The position carries with it no power, nor substantive daily duties, other than a largely ceremonial one of presiding over the senate and that usually only occurs when a very close vote is expected and the vice-president takes the chair in case it becomes necessary to cast a tie-breaking vote. The real requirement of the role is to be able to take over in the event that the president should die, resign, be removed from office, or is otherwise incapable of carrying out their duties. So the main criterion for being selected to the position is confidence that the person is capable of taking over if necessary. While there are no real qualifications for being president in terms of experience, and serial sex abuser and convicted felon Donald Trump (SSACFT) has shown us that someone totally unfit for the office can attain it, one would hope that the person picked to be the vice-presidential nominee would display some reassuring qualities that they could rise to the occasion if need be.

However, the last election brought to the fore another task that the vice-president has that had been seen as purely ceremonial but became central to SSACFT’s plan to overturn the election and that was presiding over the certification of the counting of the electoral college votes. Vice-president Mike Pence refused to entertain the idea that he had the power to challenge the votes of states that SSACFT lost, and allow alternate slates of electors. On December 23, 2022, Congress passed a law to rectify any ambiguities and close any loopholes that might be exploited in the future.
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