Nazis return to Madison Square Garden

Back in 2017, I posted about a six-minute documentary A Night at the Garden that used archival footage about a rally that American Nazis held at Madison Square Garden on February 20, 1939. Billed as a ‘Pro American Rally’, it was attended by 20,000 people and is truly chilling to watch because it looked like it could have been made in Nazi Germany by famed Nazi propagandist film maker Leni Riefenstahl.

Donald Trump had a rally on Sunday evening at the same venue and the speakers are making the same kind of appeals to white Americans to ‘take back their country’. The speeches of the early speakers tell you that they have all got into the spirit of the 1939 event..
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Why won’t they stand behind their own words?

I have written before of the work done by the comedy duo known as The Good Liars who are attending creepy Trump events and recording their interactions with his supporters, like the way that Jordan Klepper does for The Daily Show.

In a recent one, they ask Michele Morrow, a candidate for the position of North Carolina Superintendent of Public Instruction, for her autograph. She is of course gratified until she is shown the document to be signed which is a social media post by her calling for the killing of Barack Obama.

Here are the tweets.

I am puzzled by her reaction. Why would she be willing to proudly make a public post and then embarrassingly try to escape signing it? That looks worse than if she had nonchalantly done so.

The second return of Sherlock Holmes

From a very early age, I was enraptured by the mystery genre, devouring novels mostly by British writers whose style, less noir and more cerebral than their US counterparts, appealed to me. I particularly enjoyed the Sherlock Holmes canon by Arthur Conan Doyle, and read all of the stories at least twice, and have watched many adaptations of the stories for films and television.

One experiences a sense of sadness when the author of stories that you like dies and you know that there will be no new ones coming and I am certain many aficionados of Sherlock Holmes wish that there were more stories to enjoy. When Conan Doyle, tiring of being stuck in this series, killed off his much-loved character in one short story The Final Problem, the resulting outcry pressured him to bring him back three years later in another short story The Adventure of the Empty House, using a highly contrived plot device to explain how he hadn’t really died.

The Holmes canon is so well known and the character so iconic that many authors have written stories based on him as well as other characters that appear in the stories and copying the style of writing, a literary form known as pastiches, a high-brow version of fan fiction. I have resisted reading them, thinking that they would never be able to accurately recreate the atmosphere of the stories and thus would be a disappointment. Then I heard that the Conan Doyle estate had authorized Anthony Horowitz, a well known mystery writer in his own right, to write new Holmes novels. I just read the first one The House of Silk (published in 2011) and it was very satisfying. Horowitz not only portrays Holmes in a way that is consistent with my impressions of him, he also captures well the writing style of Holmes’s biographer Dr. John Watson.
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Tucker Carlson gives repellent parenting advice

Listen to what he said at a MAGA rally in Georgia

The audience at a Donald Trump rally in Georgia on Wednesday erupted into bizarre chants of “Daddy’s home!” and “Daddy Don!” after an extraordinary and borderline creepy and sexist speech by far-right personality Tucker Carlson likening the Republican presidential candidate to an angry father spanking his daughter.

This man is sick. Someone who fantasizes along these lines and speaks of it with such relish reveals himself to be deeply sadistic and misogynistic.

Carlson has three daughters. I wonder what they make of such utterances

Why US elections are so complicated and take so long

US election campaigns, especially for national offices like the presidency and both houses of Congress, are interminably long and absurdly expensive. This is partly a consequence of the fact that the date of the election is fixed (for federal offices they are held every even year on the day after the first Monday in November), which means that planning can be done a long time ahead. Furthermore, the almost complete absence of restrictions on the money that can be raised and spent (whatever flimsy restrictions there are are easily worked around) means that vast sums, billions of dollars, are involved, giving an outsize influence to wealthy individuals and organizations.

People in other countries are incredulous that elections in the US are run by the states and that each state largely makes its own rules, and these rules are determined sometimes by highly partisan state legislatures that seek to give an advantage to their own party. They do this as far as the law and the constitution allows but in the age of creepy Trump, they are sometimes willing to go over the line. In many other countries, elections are run by a central, largely non-partisan, body. The reason for the state variability in the US goes way back to the origins of US that required the 13 colonies that had been separate entities to join together to form a single nation. Since each colony had been operating largely independently of the others, they jealously guarded their autonomy as much as possible and thus gave as little power to the central government as they could. Hence we have this patchwork of systems. One argument in its favor is that it allows for innovation in that each state can be a laboratory to try out different ways of doing things and, hopefully, the ones that works best may be copied by others.
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Biden proposes free birth control and condoms

Joe Biden is showing that he is not going out quietly. His administration has announced a new proposal that would have private insurance companies provide free birth control pills and condoms to all the people they insure.

Millions of people with private health insurance would be able to pick up over-the-counter methods like condoms, the morning-after pill and birth control pills for free under a new rule the White House proposed on Monday.

Right now, health insurers must cover the cost of prescribed contraception, including prescription birth control or even condoms that doctors have issued a prescription for. But the new rule would expand that coverage, allowing millions of people on private health insurance to pick up free condoms, birth control pills or morning-after pills from local storefronts without a prescription.
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“The proposed rule we announce today would expand access to birth control at no additional cost for millions of consumers,” the health and human services secretary, Xavier Becerra, said in a statement. “Bottom line: women should have control over their personal health care decisions. And issuers and providers have an obligation to comply with the law.”

The emergency contraceptives that people on private insurance would be able to access without costs include levonorgestrel, a pill that needs to be taken immediately after sex to prevent pregnancy and is more commonly known by the brand name “Plan B”.

Without a doctor’s prescription, women may pay as much as $50 for a pack of the pills. And women who delay buying the medication in order to get a doctor’s prescription could jeopardize the pill’s effectiveness since it is most likely to prevent a pregnancy within 72 hours after sex.

If implemented, the new rule would also require insurers to fully bear the cost of the once-a-day Opill, a new over-the-counter birth control pill that the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved last year. A one-month supply of the pills costs $20.

Expect Republicans, evangelicals, and the Catholic church to go ballistic about this. Their long-term goal is to prevent anyone having sex other than within the framework of heterosexual marriage, and even then only for the purpose of procreation. This move goes completely counter to that.

I do not know if this move requires congressional approval, which would be tough to get.

What to expect in this election

We are just two weeks away from election day on November 5th. I of course do not know who will win the presidency, although I am cautiously optimistic that Kamala Harris will. But that does not count for much since I am an optimistic person by nature, tending to look for hopeful signs that the future will be better than the past, even if the odds are against it.

The national polls have been showing a small but steady lead for Harris ever since the beginning of August. When Joe Biden dropped out on July 21 and the Democratic party quickly coalesced around Harris, there was a surge in enthusiasm for her, with massive numbers of volunteers signing up and huge campaign contributions that rapidly erased the lead that creepy Donald Trump had had up to that point. People tend to expect trends to continue indefinitely but they don’t, and when the support for Harris predictably plateaued, it felt to some observers that her campaign was losing steam when it wasn’t. What we were seeing is a new equilibrium state with Harris that is much better than the previous equilibrium state when Biden was the presumptive nominee.
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Creepy Trump fixates on the weirdest things

For some inexplicable reason, creepy Donald Trump fixates on the strangest things, like toilets, dishwashers, sharks, windmills, and so on. When it comes to Kamala Harris, he tried to make an issue out of whether she in Black or Asian. That did not catch on. Then he tried to make out that she is really stupid and has a low IQ. That did not catch on either. Now creepy Trump has decided that Kamala Harris’s claim that she worked at McDonalds when she was young is false because it does not say so in her resume, and that this should somehow be disqualifying. He has become obsessed with this and speaks about it frequently.
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If Harris wins and faces a Republican senate

Even if Kamala Harris wins the presidency, there is a distinct possibility that the Senate might have a Republican majority of 51-49. This would be the first time a newly elected Democratic president faced a Republican Senate since Grover Cleveland was elected in 1884 and that was a very different time where the party labels signified different things from what they do now and members were not so rigid in their party allegiances.

So what challenges would Harris face in that eventuality?

Harris’ first task will be getting the Cabinet confirmed. This could require at least one Republican vote for each nominee, and that Republican might just ask for something in return. The most likely Republican crossover is Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK). Unfortunately for Harris, her state’s biggest industry is oil and she might demand that Harris cut out all this talk of getting rid of fossil fuels as the price for her votes. Another possibility is Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME). Her state’s biggest industries are fishing, logging, and farming. That could prove easier, especially since she is up in 2026 and Murkowski is not. The Green New Deal does not threaten the profits of the lobster industry.

Since cabinet appointments never expire, Harris could keep any current secretaries indefinitely, and possibly move them to new posts. She could also appoint acting secretaries for a limited amount of time. A real Hail Mary play would be for Biden to appoint Harris’ choices in December and have the current Senate ram them through in a lame duck session, but that would really poison the well.

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