What The Hell Is This?

With each week, Michigan looks more and more like a flip for Trump. That's a hole in the Blue Wall. If Biden loses Michigan and Pennsylvania, he loses the election (assuming he doesn't somehow take North Carolina). The lack of Democratic attention to college students and young people might finally cost them everything. It only takes a few upset defeats like this to ruin hundreds of millions of American lives. Assuming Trump squeaks out a victory, this would be the third time in 24 years that the winner of the popular vote -always a Democrat- loses the election. The sadness, despair and anger that we have felt since Trump took over the GOP in 2015 is going to become unbearable. How does everyone feel about the Democrats having a tiny majority in the House while Trump and the Senate pack our Federal courts to strengthen GOP minority rule? Won't it be fun? And all because the elders in the Democratic party thought it wasn't worth their time to listen to the needs to young people. Seriously. Leaders like Pelosi thought that young people would be a little upset about Gaza, but they'd get over it and vote in November. As unpopular as Biden is, I think young people would rescue him in November if there wasn't an invasion of Gaza. For now anyway, it appears Biden's embrace of Netanyahu's war crimes is the red line that causes millions of young people to abstain from voting this November. Biden barely had re-election in the bag! Now I am not sure.

Democrats Petrified To Do Anything Good

It’s 2023, and Democrats are out of gas, out of ideas, and just hoping that voters don’t give Donald Trump another chance to destroy the republic. You know, it’s all they can do! They are firing of all cylinders! They are working SO HARD to save the USA.

Seriously, though. Democrats spend more time and energy fighting their left wing than dealing with their two rogue Senators who were responsible for stopping Biden’s domestic agenda dead in its tracks.

This is our party. It sucks. And the senior citizens who run it are terrible.

The Biden Presidency Is Over

The original title of this post was “The last political cycle is repeating itself, only worse.” I wrote that in June 2021. Below is the aborted text of that post:

If Joe Biden was hoping for a bi-partisan epiphany from Moscow Mitch and Cowardly Kevin, he's delusional. The Republicans are replaying 2009 and 2010 when a Republican president left a hot mess for Obama and decided they would obstruct everything  Barack needed to do to avoid a depression and begin extracting us from two unnecessary wars. And their plan worked. The stimulus needed to begin a robust recovery was far too small, and Republicans ran in 2010 on the lie that the Democrats were taking over health care and exploding the national debt.

In the 2010 off-year elections, the Democrats were crushed, losing control of the House of Representatives  for the next 8 years, getting annihilated in state legislative races, allowing the Republicans to gerrymander dozens of Congressional seats, and giving Obama an obstructionist legislature for his final six years in office. Mitch and Kev intend to do it again. And this time, if they're  successful,  they stand ready to elect a right wing president in 2024, regardless of the outcome of the vote. A majority of House Republicans voted to overturn the presidential election in 2020. If they control the House and Senate in 2024, they will surely do it again. The Democrats had to have seen this coming. They did nothing to stop it.

Republicans want to win elections when they don't have enough voters. So logically, they want to take rights away. They want to make their rich friends richer. They want to destroy the regulation regime (EPA, CDC, FDA, IRS, Department of Education, OSHA, FEMA). They want to dismantle state gun regulations (as the Court will do to New York this summer). And when leftists complain, they say, "you're being hysterical. You're in power. You're exaggerating. That little rally in he Capitol was overblown. You're making it all up." Or in the case of overturning Roe, they say, "the Court is just sending the issue back to the states." That's what you call taking away liberty from women. That is gaslighting.

It is really happening. And while I might come across as a crazy person now, we shall see where the nation stands in 2025 when President Noem or DeSantis steals an election, and the next one. And then stacks the court 7-2 or even 9-0 to the right. Sotomayor looks ready to walk and Breyer won't live much longer.

Republicans are evil. Anyone who joins their side is in for some fun in online forums, "owning the libs," or encouraging their children to murder their classmates, but it will destroy the nation in the process. And that is the bottom line. Republicans would rather burn the nation down than share power with brown people and women. That is what we are seeing. The bros and their white supremacist allies are having their final stand. It's one last party for the bros who marked keggers in their calendars.

10 months after I wrote those words, it is clear this nation is is being destroyed. The decline is noticeably fast now.

Joe Biden got his single Supreme Court pick. Joe Manchin will ensure he gets nothing more accomplished. The Biden presidency is finished.

This Is The Final Year Of The USA As A Barely-Functioning State

2022. This is the final year of my nation as a functioning state. Once the Republicans take over the House in 2023, we’re an autocracy.

Neil H. Buchannan is one of the best scholars to make this consistent argument. He says the US is a “dead democracy walking.”

I have no idea if New York City will become a center of resistance to the GOP, or will fall in-line with the GOP as it did after 9/11. I want the former. I fear the latter. American cable news will carry on, because all it really cares about is ratings.

But while we wait for the GOP autocracy to rise, let’s enjoy this final year of freedom and relative stability. And yeah, I say “stability” knowing that we are stuck in the middle of a pandemic that is currently killing 1,700 Americans each day. That’s what I consider to be “stability” these days.

I haven’t really felt national stability since Bill Clinton was acquitted by the Senate in February 1999. While I hate the Senate, it was rational 23 years ago. Now we brace for another impeachment trial in 2023, which will be the GOPs irrational retaliation for two very legitimate impeachments of Donald J. Trump.

Be safe. Halve a plan to adapt if things become seriously unstable. Don’t stop paying attention to what’s happening locally and in DC.

And don’t stop wearing masks. We’re still living in a pandemic.

The Alternate 2020

What could an alternate 2020 looked like? For a while, in January and February, it looked like the US was headed for a real war against Iran (presumably with Saudi Arabia doing some of the fighting). The illegal airstrike that killed General Solem Soleimani could have easily set the Islamic Republic off. It would have resulted in thousands of civilian deaths, but the US had committed an act of war on top of Iran’s provokation of having their top general in Iraq. Instead, Iran fired warning shots at US forces (which still caused concussions and ruptured eardrums, which Trump didn’t care about, but that’s another story).

Another alternative 2020 would have been a close, but not unexpected re-election for Donald Trump. After all, we didn’t know at the time, but Trump had been gaining in popularity throughout his residency, particularly with Hispanic and Black men. Against a old, non-confrontational Biden, he probably would have won.

And in yet another alternative 2020, the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic still happened, but Trump took it seriously and let a panel of public health experts set a national policy, keeping the death toll under 100,000. His good handling of the pandemic would also result in a re-election victory.

Rudy Giuliani Won't Live Much Longer

When Borat 2 came out, and we saw the edited, embarrassing footage of Rudy Giuliani, I thought of the old joke, “Time wounds all heels.” 35 years ago, Rudy Giuliani was a Federal prosecutor with a self-polished image of being the man who brought down the mafia in the US. 25 years ago, he was the free speech and due process-squashing mayor of New York who was brought to power on the crest of a racist backlash against David Dinkins, mainly from voters in Staten Island and Queens. 15 years ago, he was still riding his title of “America’s Mayor,” and was gearing up for a ill-fated presidential run in 2008. But if you can remember, that new title saved him for a while. He didn’t have nine lives, but 9/11 was one of his three major career shifts. His three significant career phases were US Attorney, big city mayor, and paid homeland security celebrity.

By the time of the 2001 mayoral primary (on the morning of September 11), Giuliani was not liked in New York City. The citizens had enough of him, his bullying, his disregard for the Bill of Rights, and his very public and embarrassing divorce. They were sick of his bratty son, Andrew, as well as his new girlfriend, Judith Nathan. They were ready for him to leave. Just over a year before his career was rescued by a terrorist attack, Giuliani had a disastrous month in his failed bid to run against Hillary Clinton for Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s Senate seat. But 9/11 actually made America forget how nuts he was for about seven years. During that time, he cashed-in and gave six-figure talks at conferences as a so-called expert on terrorism and foreign policy. He also opened a bullshit consulting firm, Giuliani Partners. Giuliani had a renewed political and professional life until Joe Biden, of all people, cut him down.

Joe Biden dispatched Giuliani during a Democratic presidential debate in 2007. “A noun, and a verb and 9/11” pretty much summed him up, as Joe Biden called him unfit for any future office. At that moment, Giuliani was finally done. He had no lucrative future. I can now add Borat, crackpot conspiracies, and heavy drinking to the long list of disqualifications for "America's Mayor”. The site of his November 7 rant, masquerading as a press conference, was held in a landscaping company parking lot, perfectly located between a sex shop and a crematorium.

New Yorkers are currently annoyed by a mayor who falsely claims to be a progressive, who shamelessly attempted to enrich his wife as a senior staffer, and is generally a depressing disappointment in leadership. However, I have to remind my fellow city residents that with Giuliani, we had a deeply corrupt mayor, who demonized people who were tortured and killed by police, who exhibited strange behavior, and annoyingly inserted himself into Christmas with his name being Rudolph. We’ve forgotten the clip below, but we must not forget. In 2000, when this video was shot, these two men were jokes.

Notice this video was shot in a department store (is this Loehmann’s?), which is quite prophetic given the active defamation lawsuit against Trump from Jean E. Carroll, who alleges that Trump raped her in a Bloomingdale’s dressing room in 1996.

Rudy’s drag alter ego, “Rudia,” lasted about three years, from 1997-2000. Giuliani’s friendship with Donald Trump goes back 34 years. And in this decade, the two men have only gotten closer. Rudy pledged his full loyalty to Trump and delivered an insane speech at the 2016 RNC. In that speech, Giuliani delivered to the media the first of many iconic images of a man in decline. Soon after Trump took office, Trump lost Michael Cohen and turned to Giuliani as his personal attorney, fixer, and rat fucker. That’s when we saw Giuliani’s behavior take a much more disturbing turn in the spring of 2019.

I am not going to go through the whole saga, which is apparently ongoing. Giuliani went to Ukraine with his subcontractors / henchmen to try to collect dirt on Hunter Biden and get Ukrainian officials to smear the Bidens on the record. Along the way, they nearly got a US ambassador killed. He also began to tell Fox News, Twitter users and journalists of his project while it was in-progress. It’s no wonder it led to Trump’s impeachment. It was in plain sight. He even went to Ukraine late in the impeachment proceedings. It was also around this time that Giuliani finalized his divorce from Judith Nathan and made himself a new base at The Mark Hotel on the Upper East Side.

Despite a sharp drop in income, he has not relinquished his luxurious lifestyle. He reportedly drinks day and night. Throughout COVID-19 pandemic, he has been seen at the bar, maskless, inside the hotel. By this time last year, he was giving bizarre interviews from the hotel. He’s reportedly easy to find at the Mark and is available to rant to any journalist who is willing to endure him.

He was maskless again at his extraordinary press conference yesterday. It made his November 7 event look like a minor gaffe. It was off the rails, with wild conspiracy theories and “constitutional law attorney” Jenna Ellis insulting a reporter who dared ask for any evidence of one of the wild conspiracies they tossed into the public sphere. And we need to confront that shit. Specifically, the charge that vote counting machines were programmed to reduce a set percentage of votes for Trump across all counties, giving Biden a handicap, is insane. They also claimed that late-night reporting of mail-in ballots was actually a dump of manufactured, fraudulent ballots, organized by Democrats in a desperate attempt to to maintain Biden’s lead, because Democrats didn’t program the counting machines to change a high enough percentage of Trump votes. That is even more insane. And yet, here we are, with close to half the nation believing just that - that this election was stolen through a vast Democratic conspiracy that spanned cities, towns, counties and states.

The hair dye dripping down Guiliani's face was an unnecessary but near perfect metaphor for this demented attempt to overturn a democratic election. "America's Mayor", who may be suffering from severe alcohol addiction, is clearly unhinged, and his "legal team" looks like the cast from a Monty Python sketch. Are we really supposed to believe that Hugo Chavez, Venezuelan dictator, dead for more than seven years, funded the installation of thousands of voting machines which could change Trump votes to Biden votes through some mysterious "algorithm,” which is really just described in the Pennsylvania complaint as a percentage cut? Are we really supposed to believe that George Soros and Antifa have engineered a massive theft of the votes that would have delivered a massive landslide for Trump?

I think the republic has been permanently poisoned by Trump’s desperate attempt to delay the Biden transition. But here’s something else I started to think a year ago when Rudy gave that unhinged interview to New York Magazine: Rudy is going to wind up dead soon. And it’s sad because no one has bothered to try to save him. Doesn’t he have any friends?

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He’s going to be found cold and lifeless in his hotel room. His drinking will eventually finish himself off. Rudy Giuliani doesn’t have long to live. His obituaries are not going to be flattering. His legacy is long destroyed. His mind is gone. His heart and liver aren’t far behind.

Who will Donald Trump turn to for legal assistance then? Will Trump even be in the country by then?

Uncle Tim contributed to this post.

More Thoughts On Biden's Stunning (And Infuriating) Victory

As I wrote a few hours ago, I have mixed feelings. First, I harbor a lot of resentment at party elites. Yes, they were correct. But if you think it through, the path to defeat Trump was always to rebuild the "blue wall" from Minnesota to New Jersey. But party elites decided to let the nomination battle play out organically until southern leaders decided to hit the override button and rescue Biden’s campaign. They decided that only Biden can rebuild that wall. They were correct, fine. But I will always have rude words for Jim Clyburn. I will never understand why party leaders in South Carolina and Georgia have to be at the helm when we might never win those states again in my lifetime.

Same for Charles Schumer, who failed to convert the all-time voter turnout record for Biden into at least a tied Senate. He has to step down as minority leader, and finally some of his fellow senators agree.

I am furious at how Trump’s projection sometimes worked. Often, the public and media would see through it. But in the case of Cuban and Venezuelan Americans in Dade and Broward counties, it was a brilliant cynical move. Donald Trump, a man who sees himself as an authoritarian and would love to declare himself president for life if given the opportunity, was able to convince hundreds of thousands of hispanics in Florida that Biden was too similar to Fidel Castro and Hugo Chávez. Oh yeah, he is just like them. And that worked. A rare Trump projection that worked right where and when he needed it to work. Bad guys only need to get it right once. We good guys need to block them at every attempt. We failed to block this tactic in south Florida. Spanish language radio and social media in Florida is now an arm of the Republican party, much as it was in the 1980s.

The DNC feared that Bernie Sanders would lose Florida because he would be called a socialist in Miami. However, they failed to protect Joe Biden from the same fate. Pete Buttigieg is a little corporate shit, but he was correct when he said that the GOP would label any Democratic nominee or policy as “socialist.”

But what makes me mad and sad most of all is what the Democrats -as weak and as useless as they are- cannot control. Trump became more popular since 2017. When Charlottesville happened, I and many others thought that Trump just saw himself as president of the 63 Million people who voted for him. We figured some of his voters would die before 2020, and some new, teenage voters would vote with their parents. We thought those should cancel each other out, and Trump ought to to match his 63 Million vote total, but no more. He didn’t do anything to overtly court independents and Democrats to his side. He was never a positive, friendly president. He was angry and negative, which was reflected in the national mood. And of course, he did nothing but harm and insult the 21 states that Clinton won. But this week, Trump got 4 million more votes. 4 fucking million! A Los Angeles of new voters. After everything that has happened. After all the insults and early morning tweets. After all the blatant racism and white nationalism. And in the middle of a pandemic and an economic depression that is ongoing. He gained in popularity. That disgusting, indecent man.

[Update, November 5: Trump now has 5 million more votes than he had in 2016!]

[Update, November 6: Trump now has 6 million more votes than he had in 2016! A Los Angles and a Houston!]

[Update, November 10: Trump now has 7 million more votes than he had in 2016! An incredible 71,469,850 votes and counting]

[Update, November 30: Trump now has over 10 million more votes than he did in 2016! A staggering, scary 74,077,537 votes and still counting!]

And some brothers defected to Trump! A small wave of black men didn't vote at all in 2016 but voted for Trump in 2020. In fact, an estimated 1 in 3 college educated black men in Florida voted for Trump. What would Malcom X say? I know what I say. Ladies, do not give any sex to a man until there's a Federal law legalizing abortion or until Kamala Harris is president, whichever happens first. Actually, all women should make that vow. Yes, it's going to be a long wait.

I will never be comfortable with the fact that 48% of voters would rather burn down the republic than share it with women and brown people. It's been this way for decades. This is just a reminder that nothing has changed. We have made zero progress. Half the nation wants the other half dead. Try to sleep well after being reminded about that fact.

We're Still Doomed

The Democrats won. Joe Biden won. But they also lost. That means that the majority lost. We lost.

They cannot be the progressive party going forward. We need a new party. Do we have the will and the energy to make it happen?

The American news media speculated that Hillary Clinton lost in 2016 because she was a woman. Well, she did much better than Joe Biden in Florida. Let’s give her credit. She might be the last Democratic presidential candidate to ever compete well in the Sunshine State.

I said this in 2017: I am done with American news media and the Democratic Party. This time I mean it. MSNBC is poison Kool Aid. If all you did was watch MSNBC since 2017, you’d be led to believe that Biden would win easily. Biden will win. But this win feels like a loss. The Democratic party is not a good opposition party, nor a good majority party. It’s weak. And the results show that.

The Democrats are terrible. US television news is awful (except for Vice News). This republic is finished.

And we’re drowning in plastic.

Is The Coming Doomsday Real, Or In Our Heads?

I really hope the coming election week crisis is just in our heads and not real.

Like Y2K, I only hope our preparation and experience has already saved us. In the way 2018 prepared us for a high-volume election, Y2K made us check and test everything. It was an exercise in finding out how well we knew our software and our systems. 2020 will be a test of how well we can administer an election while an incumbent president does his best to undermine our political and civil systems.

All we have to do, is keep the polls open, peaceful and orderly during the voting hours. And when the polls close, we must do the business of counting the votes and reporting the results within 6 hours, as usual (aside from counties where the margins are tiny, of course).

There would have to be a 9/11 level of breakdowns if election day turns into doomsday. The Secret Service would have to side with Trump over the people. So would the military. So would local police. The news media and corporations wouldn’t. So how much blood is spilled on the streets of our nation might depend on how the Fortune 500 handles a Trump loss. They handled the legalization of same sex marriage pretty well. Let’s see how they handle Trump declaring victory on Election Day and telling his supporters to commit mass murder.

If that happens. If Trump and his cult resort to killing hundreds or even thousands of citizens in our streets, then we fucking deserve it. It means all of our systems failed.

Top That, GOP

No major technical gaffes. Eight hours of content. Capped by the best speech of Joe Biden’s life. Chris Christie and Diamond and Silk have their work cut out for them.

I was disappointed by the DNC choosing Joe Biden when any number of younger men or women could carry the torch. Biden could have run in 2016 and Hillary might have stepped-aside. But here we are, four years late, and Joe Biden delivered the best speech of his life. I have been watching Biden since his plagiarism scandal in 1987. This is far and away the best speech he's ever delivered.

Now win it, Joe. As Dwight Evans told the Red Sox in 2004: “Win it.”

Who do we think the highest-profile speaker will be at the RNC? For the second year in a row, there won't be a former president at the RNC. For a Gen-Xer like me, that's unprecedented. So could it be Chris Christie, Rudy Giuliani, Ted Cruz, Tom Cotton, Lindsay Graham, Mike Pence, and the Don himself? James Woods? Diamond & Silk? Ted Nugent (wait, is he dead)? Jon Voight? Rosanne Barr? Herman Cain would have been a speaker, and because it's 2020, we already forgot what happened to him.

For comparison, look at the RNC roster from 2016. Look at how many people on this list are either convicted, disgraced (Fallwell!), missing, out of politics, avoiding this year's convention (Mitch!), or on Trumps shit list.

Also, what are the odds that the RNC won't have any major technical gaffes or issues? Who is their IT guy?

The Jacket Comes Off

Oh, SNAP! Joe Biden is going to break 'em OFF! Don't mess with Scranton.

Michigan Stays Blue / Palin's Huge Gamble

McCain pulls out of Michigan. He has canceled TV ads, and is closing his Michigan campaign offices. With Obama now surprising everyone with a double-digit lead in Pennsylvania polls, McCain has sounded the alarm to fall back and regroup.

Oh, and his campaign is beginning to run short on cash. Not good.

And in Palin news today, her handlers have revealed her strategy: aggressively go after Biden:

“This is going to finally put her back into a position where we see her like we saw her the first couple weeks,” a McCain official said. “She was herself. She was authentic, and people related to that. ... Tonight, she’ll get into a rhythm. You’re going to see her in a way that you haven’t seen her yet.”

Really? I thought she was just going to portray herself as a humble regular Jane Doe. But, if she wants to go down swinging at the wrong guy, she can go right ahead.

Andrew Halcro's Debate Advice For Joe Biden

Andrew Halcro: What It's Like To Debate Sarah Palin

On April 18, 2006, Palin and I sat together in a hotel coffee shop comparing campaign trail notes. As we talked about the debates, Palin made a comment that highlights the phenomenon that Biden is up against.

"Andrew, I watch you at these debates with no notes, no papers, and yet when asked questions, you spout off facts, figures, and policies, and I'm amazed. But then I look out into the audience and I ask myself, 'Does any of this really matter?' " Palin said.

While policy wonks such as Biden might cringe, it seemed to me that Palin was simply vocalizing her strength without realizing it. During the campaign, Palin's knowledge on public policy issues never matured – because it didn't have to. Her ability to fill the debate halls with her presence and her gift of the glittering generality made it possible for her to rely on populism instead of policy.

...

So what does that mean for Biden? With shorter question-and-answer times and limited interaction between the two, he should simply ignore Palin in a respectful manner on the stage and answer the questions as though he were alone. Any attempt to flex his public-policy knowledge and show Palin is not ready for prime time will inevitably cast him in the role of the bully.

On the other side of the stage, if Palin is to be successful, she needs to do what she does best: fill the room with her presence and stick to the scripted sound bites.