REALITY CHECK
 
Aquarian Weekly
11/5/24
 
 
AMERICA HAS ALREADY LOST
Strange Vibes from the Final Hours of the 2024 Election

Turning and turning in the widening gyre   
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst   
Are full of passionate intensity.
   – William Butler Yeats, “Second Coming”

’m not going to question how we got here, because I was there. I lived it. I covered it. And tried as I might to make sense of it, I failed. Ultimately, I believe, we have failed, as a nation, as a society, as a people. We should not be standing before a 50/50 choice for president of the United States with a domestic terrorist, traitor, convicted fraudster and sexual assaulter, a failed mogul and politician printed on our ballots. Not even in my most cynical nightmares could I have conjured such a fate for America, after how I grew up, when I grew up, after civil rights, after women’s rights, gay rights, ecological advancements, artistic revolution, and technological dawns, and all the progress against the things he stands for – bigotry, jingoism, misogyny, anger and grievance. I have seen politicians ruined and sent packing for far less than what seethes from his torment daily. I have seen the Fourth Estate step up and call truth to power and our institutions stand strong for what is right and true in the democratic spirit. But that is all gone now, this early November, whether we defeat Donald J. Trump and his minions of divisiveness and spite and vindictiveness and pettiness or not. We have allowed this to linger and be a part of our construct. It is deep in our DNA now, along with the past that haunts us to this day. And for that, no matter the outcome, we have lost.

I do not mean to shade an extremely important election today, as we stand on the precipice of sending the first ever woman to the highest office. Woefully behind as we are to countries around the world who’ve surpassed this mark, it is a glorious thing to behold, that the other part of that 50/50 is Kamala Harris, the first woman elected as vice president of these United States four years ago. And it is, for all the women in my life, even those who are voting the other way, and my wife and my daughter, a historic leap into a new century. And it is right and serendipitous that a woman, especially a woman of color, with origins from varying cultures, stands as our dividing line between political Armageddon and a brighter, saner future. It is damn irony, in fact, that she might be the female bulwark that did not materialize when all this mayhem was loosed on the body politic eight years ago. She is poised, has run a magnificent campaign, and gets no complaints here, as I had with Hillary Clinton’s missteps. Harris has done all that she could, and with a little over 100 days in which to do it, to be thrown as she was into this cauldron, she has performed more than admirably. I would write today, spectacularly.

“There is the world we wish could be, we want it to be, and maybe should be, and then there is the one that is.”

No, it is not for her achievements and efforts, her supporters and those who have toiled with such heroic gusto to save us from ourselves for which I mourn today. I wonder with all of the time and research and education and experience behind me why we have sent such a flawed and terrible man to represent two of our major political parties, who endeavored to circumvent our most sacred duties as Americans, casting a vote for the candidate we wish to lead us, and then to defraud and lie and castigate and cause chaos to deny it and deny us. All the time unleashing dozens of people to commit crimes – fake electors, flimsy lawsuits, “find me votes” in Georgia, meaningless recounts in Arizona, pressuring his vice president to commit treason. And when it all failed, calling a mob to the Capitol and riling them up with vicious rhetoric that led to an attack on our elected officials, our vice president, and speaker of the house, to desecrate the center of our democracy, a building that, for good or ill, represents the church of what we hold most dear. To give him a chance, a sniff at this office again is a pox on the soul of this nation.

I am sincerely and sadly sorry for having to state that today, but it is true.

And as I have written in this space now for nearly three decades and lived most of my adult life, I repeat the mantra of the great Lenny Bruce, who said time and again that there is the world we wish could be, we want it to be, and maybe should be, and then there is the one that is. And in that world, Donald Trump can very well be president once again today… if we vote for him, and nearly half the nation will. It will be close, and it will be as if there was no January 6 and that he still says he did not lose and never handed over power as George Washington did, peacefully. He never conceded, nor did he come to the inauguration of his successor or do anything befitting the office he seeks today. He besmirched it and our nation, and we must strive today to see that he does not have that chance again.

But he does. A 50/50 chance.

And, as it was in the smoldering summer of 1776 and through the ensuing brutal winters and bloody battles and terrible upheaval and slavery and insurrection and Civil War and World Wars and suffrage all the rest, it is us, the people, who are left to make it right. Our courts have failed. Our press has failed. The Republican Party failed. They could have nominated anyone but an anti-American fascist criminal, but they did not. Our institutions too have been hijacked and left wanting, asleep at the wheel, intimidated or stoic or crippled in inertia. They all have a hand in this national sin.

But what of half of our vox populi? What of their voice, their ignoring of this virus? As the Republican nominee speaks of sending snipers to fire on the press, and jailing opponents, dismantling the constitution, and filling his cabinet and his state department and the justice department with sycophants and thugs? His final plea to the people was a hate-filled rally of mutants who only wish to tear at our fabrics, not strengthen them, for his own ends, his own gain, his own trifling vengeance.

This should not be the choice, but I can hear Lenny now, “It is, Campion. It is.”

And that is why I weep for this country today, no matter the outcome of this election. It should not have come to this, but it did. Someday, with the benefit of hindsight, we may have answers that allude us now to why this happened and how it has transpired against all reason. But today, I had a duty to express my horror that we are here. To make sure we take a moment to look in the mirror and conjure our excuses. To be faced with this terror again.

And hope it does not swallow us hole.

REALITY CHECK
 
Aquarian Weekly
11/1/24
 
 
THE BIG LIE – A SEQUEL
Trump, Republicans, and Right-Wing Media Prepare Us For Chaos

Maybe you noticed about two weeks ago as Democratic presidential nominee and current Vice President Kamala Harris’s lead had plateaued in her national polling to about four points that a surge of polling suddenly had her opponent, Republican nominee and former president, Donald Trump surging forward to either tie or best her. Not creep, or even spike, but with no October surprise or any major Trump announcement promising every voter free beer or major fuck ups by Harris, suddenly Trump’s numbers went nuts. This is after over a month of stagnancy and even a dip in his polls after his severe debate shellacking at the hands of Harris, who subsequently enjoyed a building lead. Since joining the race in late July, in fact, Harris had taken former candidate, President Joe Biden’s four-to-six-point national deficit to a two-to-three-point buffer. This was over a slow burn for months, which is normally how this works, unless, say, they find out your VP pick had electroshock therapy (this happened to poor George McGovern in 1972, but even then took a few weeks to plummet). Yet, without a single rational statistical foundation … poof!… Trump leads!

Hmmm.

In the parlance of political science, this is called bullshit. Or more pointedly rat fucking, which is an actual term when members or subsets of a political campaign engage in underhanded or outright criminal behavior to queer the elements of a race not going their way. It was rat fucking that caused the eventual break-in of the Democratic Headquarters at the Watergate Hotel in June of 1972, which led to the inevitable downfall of President Richard M. Nixon. This time the rat fucking is better planned if not just as ineffective (although Nixon did defeat the aforementioned McGovern in the ’72 race, so efficiency is in the eye of the rat fucker).

It was about two to three weeks ago, as this race was solidifying for Harris, a slew of half-assed, right-wing-funded crazy polls began popping up, and were sucked erroneously into the already shaky election models of Nate Silver (Silver Bulletin), and his alma mater, 538, as well as the popular Real Clear Politics. Some of these pollsters, like TIPP Insights and AtlasInsights, are completely new or were strung together with string cheese during the now infamous Non Red Wave 2022 mid-terms to jack up Republican numbers leading to the false narrative that the GOP would flip the Senate and gain some 30 to 40 seats in the House of Representatives, instead of what happened – losing a Senate seat and only gaining about ten House seats. Then there are polls like the Trafalgar Group, which is a Republican propaganda machine and as a result has never been particularly well rated but for some reason still gets publicity.

You would be wise at the juncture to ask why I called these garbage polls “crazy.” One glaring example is AtlasInsights, which recently had Trump winning 46-percent of the African American vote. The Trump Team would be guzzling champagne from stilettos already high on speed capsules by ten on Election Night if they get north of 15-percent.

The other weird thing that has happened – but is only weird if you’re not a former degenerate gambler like me – is the infused pertinence of Betting Markets. Namely, PolyMarket, which is a corrupt gambling hub disguised as a “prediction market” for Wall St. hucksters and billionaire freaks to carve up your 401K into cheap labor, sex toys, and land grabs. If you were considering the concept of communism, PolyMarket would be your gateway drug. It is the kind of eye-of-a-needle capitalist shit Jesus was deriding about two millennia ago.

At the same time the phony polls were being tossed into the 2024 election cauldron, rich cretins like Elon Musk, who is currently the de facto campaign manager for Trump and has a dozen multi-million-dollar PACs and is offering to pay people off to vote for his fascist buddy, were flooding PolyMarket with cash to make Trump a prohibitive favorite to retake the White House with zero statistical or even anecdotal evidence to back it up. It is for all intents and purposes Trump’s big, beautiful wall paid for by Mexico in gambling form. But to be fair to degenerate gamblers everywhere, all bookies or casinos hedge bets – it is how you make money on suckers: Jam the odds up on one team or this case a candidate and collect the bets (with an added vig, which the house’s cut of the bet, win or lose), then flip it to even it out, collect the bets on the other team and/or candidate (get those tasty vigs), and clean up.

Trump is using trash pollsters, PolyMarket, and the Right-Wing Media sphere to claim he’s winning this thing easily when he is not.

Still, although the quasi-criminality of PolyMarket would dramatically shift things anyway, the evidence that filthy swine have used PolyMarkter for their own playground to control business narratives before and are doing it again, allowing their corporate-teat media mogul buddies to report on this low rent nonsense as news. This is the kind of half-assed chicanery that put Donald Trump on the map in the first place.

And so, where does this all lead?

The Big Lie II, but this time we know it’s coming.

Trump’s lazy claims that if things go well, it is his doing, if not, it’s rigged against him. He did it in 2016 but then shut up when he won – although there was bitching about not winning the popular vote and sinking a ton of taxpayer money in a boondoggle to reverse the facts that went nowhere. And, of course, most egregiously, was 2020, when Trump convinced half the nation he actually won an election he lost by somewhere in the neighborhood of eight-million votes, clogged up courts for over 60 cases (all lost), and then riled a mob of idiots to attack the U.S. Capitol. All of this is a matter of record. So, there’s that.

Now, Trump is using trash pollsters, PolyMarket, and the Right-Wing Media sphere to claim he’s winning this thing easily when he is not. All independent polls have Harris if not maintaining her four-point national edge, then dipping slightly to three. He is also not thriving in the early mail or in-persona voting, despite some bumps in Republicans who now don’t see these methods as “fraudulent,” like Trump told them in 2020. So, when he gets spanked on Election Day Trump will claim he won and was ripped off again. “The polls and betting market had me as a lock!” he’ll cry on FOX News, which will be sued again for airing it. Even his former advisor and newly released ex-con, Steve Bannon said as much this week in a press conference in which he’s publicly counseled Trump, as he did privately in 2020, to have a press conference an hour after the polls close on the east coast and declare victory, before unleashing the lawyers.

And, man, if there were any doubt of this plan, there are a lot of lawyers lying in wait. The Trump Campaign has spent more money on legal representation than travel expenses or a Get Out the Vote ground game, which he’s outsourced to a basement podcaster. And within the past 24 hours, Trump has begun claiming fraud in several battleground states and is readying for a fight to attain a job he clearly does not want. His last week has been spent riding around in garbage trucks, threatening to kill Liz Cheney, holding a hate rally in NYC, which he will lose by a billion votes, and mumbling something about white supremacy. He stopped trying once Biden left and has turned his “campaign” into becoming a ruse to toss this nation into the dung heap next to his casino bankruptcy.

But it is clear now that this is ending in the Big Lie II, only with him sitting on the outside. Trump is no longer president and won’t have the levels of unspeakable power at his demented whims. That is unless we give it to him on November 5, which is looking even to Trump to be a longshot he must stop by building his next blueprint for chaos.

You were warned.

REALITY CHECK
 
Aquarian Weekly
10/30/24
 
 
HARRIS, HOUSTON, HIERARCHY
The Republican War on Women Finds its Front Lines in Texas

Texas, I fear, is a harbinger of what’s to come in other states. 
– Nancy L. Cohen, president of the Gender Equity Policy Institute

With less than two weeks to go in a hotly contested and painfully close election, Vice President Kamala Harris is spending one of those crucial days not campaigning in the seven swing states that stand as the battleground for her presidential chances, but deep-red, Republican dominated Texas. The day I write this, Democratic candidate Harris, joined by superstar singer Beyoncé and beloved Texas country legend Willie Nelson, will hold a rally in the state’s largest city, Houston. The reason is not politically strategic, as she has little to no chance of winning it, and for that reason alone maybe it is a down-the-stretch mistake, but she is doing it because what is at stake in this election; the most vital civil rights war since the early 1960s – Women’s Reproductive Rights, which have been stripped from over 50-percent of the electorate by a radical Supreme Court, cobbled together by former president Donald Trump and pushed through by Republicans hardliners like senators Lindsay Graham and Mitch McConnel that moved heaven and earth to enslave women to the state. And Texas is its ground zero.

The state’s draconian horror show that was engineered by Republicans with enthusiastic guidance of Governor Gregg Abbott began taking control of women’s bodies in 2019 by dramatically restricting their healthcare access and was exacerbated in 2021 by a complete abortion ban that included leans on contraception access and prenatal care. From that year until the unconstitutional Dobbs decision by the hack Court, the rate of maternal mortality cases in Texas rose 56-percent, compared with just 11-percent nationwide during that time. These included women of color, as the rate of Hispanic women dying while pregnant, during childbirth or soon after increased from 14.5 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births in 2019 to 18.9 in 2022, after the striking down of the national protections previously provided by Roe v Wade. Black women, who historically have higher chances of dying while pregnant, during childbirth or soon after, saw their rates go from 31.6 to 43.6 per 100,000 live births. Rates among white women too nearly doubled from 20 per 100,000 to 39.1.

The Dobbs decision further emboldened Abbott and his Republican cronies to tighten the government’s fist by implementing arguably the most restrictive abortion bans in the country, bolstered by a criminal ban in 2022, including threatening imprisonment for healthcare providers and doctors for violating the law. This fascistic insanity has forced over 35,000 residents to seek care out of state. And now, in an almost unfathomable move even for Pro Life sycophants, Abbott and the Republicans are aggressively mounting a legal challenge to the federal policy to access the private medical records of patients who seek abortions across state lines.

By any measure this is totalitarian oppression aimed specifically at women that, make no mistake, is the blueprint for the Trump/Vance Project 2025 agenda nationally. Republican VP candidate, J.D. Vance proudly wrote the foreword to the project and the current GOP congress has already voted unanimously to enforce a national abortion ban. Trump has commented that his signing it into law is possible with a “We’ll see” if re-elected. With all this force behind him and his continued bragging on striking down Roe v Wade, there is no reason to believe that everyone, no matter the state, will soon face this kind of madness if Trump and Republicans win this November.

Houston calls because this is what Kamala Harris stands for and what we all must always stand for in these United States: Equal liberty and justice for all.

And so, Madam VP Kamala Harris, coming off a speech in Georgia where anti-woman laws denying basic healthcare has resulted in the recent deaths of Amber Thurman and Candi Miller, is going into the belly of the beast, the front lines of this fight to proclaim her message of returning freedom to her fellow woman citizens and for all those who believe in the sanctity of the United States Constitution and its purported protections against these enemies of our sovereign rights as Americans.

Moreover, what is going on in Texas flies in the face of the utterly weak argument Pro Life Republicans perpetuate, including Trump, that turning women’s rights over to the states to decide is the most democratically fair solution. This, of course, is bullshit on many levels, the most alarming is its ignoring of basic civil rights and the protections provided by the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution, which grants full and complete rights to privacy from government interference and the sanctity of habeas corpus. Where is the vote in Texas? Where is the opportunity to be represented that other states have put on the ballot and has seen reproductive rights (supported now by nearly seven out of ten Americans) secured? There is none. “Let the states decide” is an abject lie.

If voters are unaware of the list of fascist Republican-run states with reproductive rights curtailed or outright banned with no recourse to vote, here is the list: Idaho, Utah, Arizona, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa, Missouri, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Indiana, Kentucky, West Virginia, Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, and the worst, Texas. None but Florida and Arizona have deigned to put the measure on the ballot (it is on this year). Women have been summarily stripped of their fundamental rights to live free by the very hypocrites who bitched about wearing a lousy mask during Covid, yet now control what is happening inside a citizen’s body. Let that sink in, because I am fucking tired of writing it: 22 of 50 states, nearly half the nation, are ignoring our constitutional rights and have summarily put women under the thumb of government oppression.

This is why Kamala Harris is going to Houston, Texas. Not for her election prospects there but to make her stand for us, for the freedoms of all Americans denied by Republicans in these states and their aim to take over the federal government again next year, as they did when they eliminated federal protections for women and sent this modern form of Prohibition into reality. And like Prohibition, it cannot stand under the weight of its fascist idiocy. And we all know there is only one way to defeat it, and it is to rid the nation of the Republican scourge. And it is right and historically imperative that a woman running for president of the United States stand tall at the forefront of this sacred fight. In Houston. In Texas. To reveal its evils. To proclaim its assault on freedom and the fundamental right to exist. To promise to appoint judges and attorneys’ general, who will not deny freedom, but secure it, because Trump has and will appoint the former. 

And, finally, Houston calls because this is what Kamala Harris stands for and what we all must always stand for in these United States: Equal liberty and justice for all.

Reality Check  

Aquarian Weekly
10/23/24
 
 
TRUMP’S “ENEMY FROM WITHIN” IS YOU

In one of his increasingly unhinged and incoherent rambles masquerading as interviews, Republican nominee for president, Donald Trump framed Americans that were not on board with his MAGA agenda and his exercise in manic vanity as “the enemy.” When asked about the migrants he attacks viciously by the hour, he spat, “I think the bigger problem are the people from within. We have some very bad people. We have some sick people.” These “sick and bad people,” the “enemy within” Trump speaks of are around 50 percent or more of the electorate. They rightly see Trump as a threat to democracy, especially after the attempts to steal the 2020 election culminating in the bloody insurrection of January 6, 2021. They also blanch at his racist, misogynistic rhetoric, and the promises to slap inflation-boosting ten-percent tariffs on every imported good, mass deportations, and the continued support of handing the civil rights of women over to radical right-wing states that strip them. But to Trump, these people are “the enemy.” But if you consider Trump’s track record, this title applies to everyone eventually. Everyone becomes Trump’s “enemy” – friend and foe. Everyone.

To wit: right now, there are dozens of former supporters, members of his cabinet, close confidants and even his former vice president, whom he fed to a mob on January 6, who have become “enemies.” So too are the media friendly outlets of the Wall Street Journal and the Drudge Report, that bend over backwards to sane-cleanse his daily hysteria, and even FOX News that was sued a record $787 million perpetuating his Big Lie that he won the 2020 election. Trump immediately attacks them all if there is even a scintilla of critique or rebuttal. “Enemies” all. 

There are also dozens of former aids, lawyers, minions, and mouthpieces who have either gone to jail or were disbarred for working with him, many of whom, like former NYC mayor and current crazy man, Rudy Giuliani, who has become a bankrupt and desperate shell of a man standing by Trump. And when he reaches out to Trump weekly for some monetary or even vocal assistance, his is ignored.
The Republican Party, which Trump has gutted and turned into his family Ponzi scheme, now run by his daughter-in-law, while funneling donations from hundreds of thousands of lower middle-class people to lawyers to defend his half-dozen ongoing or already convicted civil and criminal cases, is his “enemy.” GOP candidates everywhere are hung out to dry because the Republican National Committee is hording cash, while Trump sells watches, bibles, and other junk to pad his pockets. He did no debates during the party’s primary – the only eventual nominee to do so – forcing out top party people to replace them with sycophants as he bashes former party leaders and makes a mockery of its legacy. This is precisely why nearly ten percent of Republicans are voting for his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris.
After Nikki Haley, a woman who worked in his administration, left the GOP primary, and nearly 25-percent of the votes still went to her, she at first hesitated to walk the party line and endorse Trump (she has since capitulated), but Trump still humiliates her at every turn and tells her followers he doesn’t need them. Instead of reaching out, bringing in the disaffected and enlarging the GOP tent, he closes ranks to only the most cult-addled amongst him.

And MAGA acolytes? They are the most conned, rejected, and used of any of Trump’s “enemies.” In private, Trump belittles them, as he did when he told the world that even if he shot someone on Fifth Avenue, they would support him – boldly framing his most loyal followers as mindless drones incapable of seeing a murderer as anything less than saintly.

And the insults are not just rhetorical. Just this week, The Trump Campaign hosted a rally in Coachella, California, bussing hundreds of people out to the desert, but when the event concluded, Trump abandoned them, as they stood in the dark and cold with no exit. Why? As he has done for nearly half a century, the proposed billionaire Trump refused to pay the bussing company. Meanwhile he sells these poor, misguided fools cheap, garish crap as collector’s items, hundreds of thousands of flags, hats, posters, and other nonsense. And once video began to emerge late in the summer of many at his diminishing-in-number rallies leaving early, he stood on stage and told them he didn’t need them. “If they leave early, I tell them, ‘Get out. Go home.’”

Trump will inevitably fuck you over. That, if anything, is his brand.

Even the one thing these suckers care about, Trump has pulled out from under them. He has run on one issue that continues to work for him: immigration. But this would be less a problem now had he not asked his soon-to-be-humiliated and rejected doormats in Congress to stop the bill. It was a comprehensive, and by all measures an ultra-conservative bill crafted in what the American people crave, a bipartisan manner. But Trump killed it. And with it, dozens of Republicans, who must go back to their districts and explain why things could be better now, but are not so it can be a continuous Trump Campaign slogan.
The other day when asked by an audience member, a former Trump voter, at a Univision town hall how he could stand there and defend the attack on the U.S. Capitol in 2021 based on his lies, Trump called it “a day of love,” referring to the mob as “we” and the police, five of whom were killed as a result, as “them.” This is your Law and Order, Blue Lives Matter candidate, who abandons law enforcement while he shouts about shutting down the FBI.

Trump has turned on everyone – his family, his closest allies, and his doe-eyed followers, every single time, turning them all into the “enemy within.” If you support Trump, it is only a matter of time before you are counted among the duped, angry, and abandoned. Ask the hundreds of normal citizens turned crazed insurrectionists who are sitting in jail cells right now because of him. Ask the Republican mayors, governors and attorneys-general who would not commit his crimes in 2020 who he has attacked incessantly and sent flawed candidates to primary them since.

Remember this: No one, I mean, no one agrees 100-percent with anyone. There will be MAGA people who will argue that Trump should stick to the issues (something he has mocked his own campaign advisors in public for counseling) instead of his off-kilter lunacy, or begged him to stop his angry, middle of the night tweets, or his screaming about American citizens eating pets or kids getting sex-change operations in schools or babies being murdered after birth, or the other completely outrageous insanity he conjures and bleats every hour of every day. If those who support him occasionally wince or try and spin this idiocy, he turns on them like a rabid animal.

Make no mistake, like the thousands of contractors, lawyers, hotel staff, business associates, and fake Trump University victims, the Republican candidate will turn on you at some point. You are the “enemy within,” or you will be very soon. And like his “big, beautiful wall that Mexico will pay for,” releasing his taxes and health records, and repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act with “something much better,” Trump will inevitably fuck you over. That, if anything, is his brand.

Let’s hope this country wakes up one last time to expunge this false god from our body politic before it’s too late and we become his most dangerous and lasting grift, and thus, his latest victims.

All of us becoming Trump’s “enemy within.”

Aquarian Weekly
10/7/24
 
Reality Check
 
THE MAGA PIVOT
Fabulist J.D. Vance Attempts to Prime the Party for Post-Trump

It was plain as the smirk on the Ohio Senator’s face; Republican VP nominee J.D. Vance spent 93 of the 96-minute debate against Democratic opponent, Minnesota Governor Tim Waltz this past week building a bridge from what is looking by the day to be the end of Donald Trump’s MAGA cult into his own minted version. Then in those last three minutes his meticulously cobbled house of cards came tumbling down, thanks to Waltz’s finest and most memorable moment of the evening.

Vance: “It’s really rich for Democratic leaders to say that Donald Trump is a unique threat to democracy when he peacefully gave over power on January the 20th, as we have done for 250 years in this country.”

Waltz: “This was a threat to our democracy in a way that we had not seen. And it manifested itself because of Donald Trump’s inability to say, he is still saying he didn’t lose the election. I would just ask that. Did he lose the 2020 election?”

Vance: “Tim, I’m focused on the future.”

Waltz: “That is a damning non answer.”

Vance miscalculated one key element of his plan: Donald Trump is still at the top of the Republican ticket. He was watching. Vance was threading a difficult needle – he needed to survive the hour but by skirting the issue of the 2020 election that caused the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the Capitol and all the rest, he scarified the larger picture for him: take over the Republican Party in 2025 by backing his Project 2025 agenda that the rest of the Trump Campaign is trying to distance itself from, and position himself for a 2028 run.

Vance’s rehabilitating of his historically low approval and likability ratings and putting a fancy sheen on the horrors and idiocy of the top of the ticket was ostensibly what we heard and saw, which, for reasons discussed below, will be the last such word from the campaigns. But what tuned-in politicos digested was a larger more potent audition for the man who hopes to emerge from the 2024 ashes as a less odious if not more dangerous MAGA model.

The reporting from the leakers inside the Trump Campaign, whatever is left of it, has not been sterling for the ex-president. Only garbage rightwing polls have him within three points of VP Kamal Harris nationally, and even some internals rival the trusted A+ polls that is more like four to six points with all seven battleground states either fair-to-solid in her column or tied. No polls, cooked or respected, have Trump ahead. The talk is of his dwindling crowds at rallies, many of whom run for the exits halfway through his nearly two-hour old man ramblings, is rampant. Whispers of his low-energy press conferences with him slumped over podiums and slurring worn axioms about mass deportations and everyone sucking except him are everywhere. As are complaints from trailing Republican senate and congressional candidates, who endure the dismal drag on their hopes for a comeback while a lunatic screaming about pet-eating migrants and the coming “rough days of violent retribution” haunt them. Many are pissed that money better spent on their behalf is being funneled to lawyers and videos hawking watches, bibles, and cryptocurrency. But those frightened and defeated voices only echo what is being shown to all the world: the Trump Campaign is giving up.

To wit: In the last week alone, the Trump and his minions across Congress tried in vain to strike an over-30-year law allowing Nebraska’s 2nd District to provide one electoral vote of the state’s five to whomever wins it. This is because if Harris secures the famed Blue Wall of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin with all her guaranteed states, and she wins what is now referred to as “the Blue Dot,” she gets to 270 electoral votes and the presidency. This shameful and overt flouting of conventions merely 40 days out from Election Day prompted Republican State Senator Mike McDonnell to stop the ad hoc madness citing capitalistic reasons – the district in which the city of Omaha rests gets a shitload of advertising cash and tons of media staying in hotels and packing restaurants, and, incidentally, is where he wishes to run for Mayor in 2025.

Next, Trump has refused to debate Harris again on the proposed date of 10/23. After his shellacking at the hands of his capable and sharp-talking opponent, whom he is now reduced to calling “mentally disabled” in a clumsy attempt to reclaim his tattered “manhood,” who could blame him? But it does speak loudly to where things are when the candidate who craves cameras and the spotlight like a smack junkie and props his fat, old carcass up as “strong” any chance he gets can’t bring it a week out from the big day. Those defending this crap, like all the other Trump crap, say it is too late for a debate, (despite Trump debating then candidate Joe Biden on 10/22 in 2020) and so it was left to Vance to be the final word of 2024.

And man did he take it.

Bolstered by a report hours before the two VPs took the stage that Trump had backed out of the seemingly obligatory 60 Minutes interview all presidential candidates have done (including Trump twice) for over 50 years, Vance poised himself to not only clean up Trump’s abysmal debate performance, incoherent public appearances, and sinking poll numbers, but pitch himself as the next MAGA standard-bearer. With nary a MAGA snarl or the usual crazed rhetoric from what he kept referring to in the debate as his “running mate” (a dismissing of Trump, since “running mate” should refer to Vance– ouch!), the slick-addled VP candidate began rewriting the 2024 narrative one answer at a time.

He complimented his opponent, softened Trump’s “mass deportations” to somehow helping migrant families find their children, claimed more than three times that Trump, whose main goal for four years as president, was to proudly strike down the Affordable Care Act, “saved it from ruin.” He evoked the name of Christ in response to the gun violence gripping the nation, and beyond a call to turn schools into fortresses and some spectacular craziness about the preponderance of American guns coming from Mexico (guns are illegal in Mexico, they get their guns from us), evoked a compassionate tone unheard from Trump, who routinely tells grieving parents of slain children to “get over it.”

Vance deftly played both sides as best he could, which always suckers the great unwashed.

Next, Vance complained that Republicans must do a better job explaining why 52-percent of the citizenry can’t have bodily autonomy, mentioning his love for a female friend who got an abortion in a tender moment of enviable political showmanship from a man who used to have a National Abortion Ban page on his website. He quickly deflected the albatross of Trump proposing “the seizure of public land” for some kind of socialist housing project, and during the Iran/Irreal discussion, Vance never once mentioned one of Trump’s most personally valued moves as president, the asinine striking down of the Iran Nuclear Deal that was supported by the entire planet, including China and Russia that has consequently strengthened America’s most virulent enemy. Republicans have always known this was an atrocious mistake and Vance did the best he could to distance himself from it.

Vance also did a masterful job putting Trumpism in the rearview mirror while staying the rhetorical course about the economic numbers, all of them – not some, but all – made up. But all of it was from a long-gone conservatism’s standpoint, not the populist anti-trade, tariff-boasting, bloating of the deficit Trump policies.

Those on the Right who knew Vance when he was a social liberal and a fiscally conservative voice in the party, calling Trump “America’s Hitler” in 2016 and again in 2020 criticizing Trump’s inability to stem the tide of a booming deficit, figured as soon as his gambit to tie himself with a winning MAGA formula went south he would abandon ship and make his own way. But now we hear that the “they’re eating the pets” thing he made up and fed to Trump, which has further sunk his chances, was pure sabotage. Vance never once mentioned this lunacy during the debate.

Vance’s approvals went up 18-points as a result to a now rousing negative- eight, while Waltz’s skyrocketed to over 60-percent, which makes him currently the most popular politician in America. Waltz was there to continue the joyful warrior, ‘let’s try and find common ground rather than accentuate our differences” rhetoric from the Harris Campaign that the voters are now embracing. Vance, who is an anti-woman, anti-democratic, full-on fascist who wrote the foreword to the radical Project 2025 agenda and goes on white supremacy podcasts to demean “childless cat ladies” who have “no stake in the future of this country,” was there to reintroduce himself to the nation as the better lying-vacillating-racist alternative to Donald Trump, who is headed for oblivion and maybe prison soon.

But, alas, in the end, forced to hang for another month with the most unhinged human to ever attempt to be president much less hold office, Vance crapped the bed. His inability to come with any answer about who won the 2020 election and the criminal madness that followed it soiled the whole thing.

For now.

Vance deftly played both sides as best he could, which always suckers the great unwashed. Of course, none of it helped his “running mate.” It was all for J.D. Vance. And for that, the megalomaniac that is Donald J. Trump should be proud. But then again, the last Trump VP who went his own way, almost ended up hanged, so there’s that.

Aquarian Weekly
10/2/24
 
Reality Check
 
WOMEN WILL SAVE AMERICA
The Estrogen Tsunami Revolution is Here… And it WILL be Televised

You know, the left has a lot of single-issue voters. Sadly, there’s a lot of suburban women that are like, ‘Listen, abortion is it. If I can’t have an abortion in this country whenever I want, I will vote for anybody else.’ … Okay. It’s a little crazy, by the way – especially for women that are like past 50 – but I’m thinking to myself, ‘I don’t think that’s an issue for you.’
 – Bernie Moreno, Ohio Republican candidate for Senate at a Primary Watch Party, Westlake, Ohio, 3/19/24 

I am your protector. Women will be happy, healthy, confident, and free. You will no longer be thinking about abortion.
  – Donald J. Trump, Republican presidential candidate speaking at his rally, Indiana, Pennsylvania, 9/23/24

Nearly 70-percent of women are now poised to vote for Vice President Kamala Harris and Democratic nominees across the nation. White. Black. Urban. Suburban. Educated. Non-educated. Young. Old. In-Between. This figure is historic, and it is growing. It will far exceed the paltry numbers gained by Hillary Clinton in 2016 and of those enjoyed by Joe Biden’s winning bid for president four years ago. This is not a Female Wave. It is an Estrogen Tsunami.

The Revolution that was born in January of 2017 at the Women’s March following the election of an admitted assailant of women, and accelerated on former president, Donald Trump, and the Republicans’ hand-picked justices that struck down Roe v Wade in 2022, is now on the brink of landing hard on the fascists who aim to hasten this pilfering of constitutional freedoms. Mothers. Daughters. Sisters, Wives. Aunts. Friends of Friends. An X Chromosome storm is a-comin’.

As I write this, Harris sits on a whopping 38-percent lead among women in all the battleground states crucial for Trump to gain the presidency again. Comparatively, the Republican candidate has only a ten-point lead among men. This is the greatest gender gap in American political memory, and it is not being won by men. 

And, for reasons only clear to the myopic doom-spiral that has been the Grand Old Party these past few decades of its war on women’s rights, the men involved in this ongoing pogrom have little to no idea why they are about to see a deluge of rejection from the non-penis crowd. As evidenced above by both Bernie Moreno and Donald Trump, there’s a preponderance of condescending mansplaining going on, not to mention an alarming lack of medical knowledge, as there have been pregnant women in their fifties that are the most in need of healthcare being denied them in nearly half the states in the union: ALL run by Republicans.

After Trump’s bold statement that women will be so mesmerized by his coming presidency, they’ll forget about losing their civil rights to bodily autonomy, for which he keeps repeating everyone wanted dumped to the states like some gender-based Jim Crow, the former Republican candidate for president, a woman, Nikki Haley posted on X this week, “Are you trying to lose the election? Asking for a friend.” She gets it. Her friend gets it.

But not all women do. Trump’s VP pick, Ohio Senator J.D. Vance, has a partner in shaming women without children. Vance has repeatedly stated that people without children “don’t have a stake in the future of our nation.” Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders took to a stage in Flint, Michigan this week with Trump and mocked Kamala Harris for only having adopted children through marriage, stating smugly, “My kids keep me humble. Unfortunately, Kamala Harris doesn’t have anything keeping her humble.”

This senseless and vitriolic attack on childless women, or even women without biological children, is further alienating the almost 52-percent of the populace and the most reliable voters in the pool.

Of course, none of this middling rhetorical religious-fanaticism used to enslave women to the state matters as much as women in Georgia under draconian Republican abortion bans dying, or in crisis as they are denied care by doctors fearing the loss of their license, or in Texas, facing possible jail time, or women fleeing to other states, or in some states, Republicans pushing for laws to keep them from leaving legally to get the reproductive healthcare they need and deserve as citizens of this country. 

The hole Trump is digging with women is deep and the digging continues unabated. 

But fear not, they are coming out to vote, make their voices heard – not on the air or the Internet, not in the streets or social media or at the kitchen table or family gatherings or rallies, but in the polling booth. And the numbers are not small. And the enthusiasm is building. Working class. Upper Class. Middle Class. 

Harris framed the gender-gap issue of 2024 this way: “Women will vote this November as if their lives depended on it.”

How has Donald Trump defended his case against women? One interesting maneuver happened hours after the woman candidate for president wiped the floor of a debate stage with him: the most famous pop culture figure on the planet, Taylor Swift, poked fun at the Vance/Huckabee/Trump “childless cat ladies” bullshit while endorsing Harris. Trump took to social media in all caps, “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT.”

Good luck with that.

Trump followed that up with the notion that former House Peaker Nancy Pelosi, the most powerful and productive speaker – woman or man – in a century, should be indicted for a crime he committed in starting the January 6 insurrection after his months of lying about having won the 2020 election, a lie he now has admitted to in several public appearances. A lie in which 1,186 MAGA rioters have been convicted, 102 of which were women. 

One wonders how 41 and 42 percent of women ever voted for any Republican or especially a candidate who boasted on tape of assaulting women and has now been convicted of sexual assault, in 2016 and 2020 respectively. But those numbers continue to dwindle. The hole Trump is digging with women is deep and the digging continues unabated. 

And that hole leads to sudden battleground-state, Florida, where the abortion issue is on the ballot this November and requires, thanks to Republican shenanigans, over 60-perecnt of the vote to pass and return rights to women beyond the six-week ban currently put in place. Harris now trails Trump by three points in a state current Republican governor and former presidential candidate Ron DeSantis won by over 20-points. The measure is also prevalent in battleground Arizona as well, where the gender gap has widened in the latest Marist poll by five.

Now, because I’m a mensch and believe in a healthy democratic landscape not muddied by lunatics, I tried to save Republicans more than once on the Dobbs issue. Since 2022, Democrats have won every major election based on abortion rights. I proposed a lifeline to the GOP last November: Protect women’s rights nationally, as Roe did, but this time legislatively and avoid this issue in future elections. They could have done so before this election season and given some cover to the Trump candidacy and many of the down-ballot races for the House and the Senate, but they decided instead to deride women, make jokes about keeping their knees together, and make light of their plight. 

“If Republicans want to see a generation shift of women sway from the Republican party, we’re doing a pretty good job of it right now,” an angry Erin Perrine, former press communications for Trump Campaign, spat on CNN this week. 

Get ready for the Estrogen Tsunami.  
 

Aquarian Weekly
9/24/24
 
Reality Check
 
KAMALA HARRIS IS ROLLING
Momentum, Money & Organization Has the VP Surging

It is officially autumn. As of this writing the presidential election is now 45 days away. Vice President Kamala Harris, thrown into this thing on July 21, has only been on the trail for a mere two months, yet she has galvanized the Democratic base, solidified President Joe Biden’s 2020 numbers, in some cases exceeded them, raised a record amount of cash, headed a flawless DNC convention, and wiped the floor with her dullard opponent, Donald J. Trump in a “debate” that was viewed on TV by nearly 70 million people and over 90 million total when considering online viewership. During this run, Harris’s poll numbers have flipped where Biden was in July, and after the debate trouncing has nearly doubled in this week’s bevy of polls – her best numbers yet – as nearly every single one has her up four to six points nationally and extending modest leads in the battleground states. I believe if the election were held today, she would win.

But we have those 45 days to go.

On the other side, Trump and his laughably inept and hate-addled VP pick, J.D. Vance, has decided to take the worst moment of the debate – the wildly insane claim that Haitian migrants are eating pets in Springfield, Ohio – and made it their rallying cry. For the past two weeks, instead of downplaying it, they are making this demonstrably false and dangerous claim the centerpiece of their interviews and rallies, further proving their spectacular cluelessness on reaching moderate independents and soft Republican voters needed for them to win this race.

Furthermore, the Trump Campaign, which has half the funds and an alarming fraction of the battleground state field offices as the Democrats, are spending most of their cash on lawyers to fight what is looking, as each day passes, like another loss, which they hope to spin into a “rigged” election narrative. For instance, reports out of Georgia frame Republicans having put in place a way to block the electoral votes in their state legislature, which is horrifying if you are a fan of democracy, but in reality, is a minor annoyance because at this rate Harris doesn’t even need the state to blow past the 270 electoral votes required to become the 47^th president of these United States.

This is because the polls this week have not only surged Harris into her most convincing lead yet, but the all-important crosstabs best underline her momentum. Nearly 70-percent of women of all races and creeds support the VP, and she is closing the gap among men in the crucial states that make up the Blue Wall – Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Voter registration – in part thanks to a post-debate endorsement from the most famous human on the planet, Taylor Swift – has reached record highs. Gen Z, Gen X and even most Boomers routinely back Harris in poll after poll. Voters over 65 are soft, but most experts think this is minor fallout from Biden’s ousting from the race, which will come home to Harris by November.

Now, most pundits still living in 2016 (and I get the scars, I do) point to Hillary Clinton’s commanding lead in September of that year before she coughed up the election to the very same Trump. However, forgetting the horrors of January 6, and the devasting Dobbs decision by Trump’s handpicked Supreme Court justices that stole women’s national reproductive rights, which has goosed Democratic candidate vote totals to a whopping six-percent over-performance since 2022, Harris has one huge advantage over Clinton: people like her.

Since entering the race in July, where Harris was 14 points under water in approval ratings, she has catapulted to one-point positive. She is now the most popular presidential candidate since Barrack Obama in 2008. It’s not even close. Most politicians since then have sat in the thirty to forty percent range. Trump has never been above the mid-forties and mostly hangs in the high thirties, where Biden was before getting the boot, and, coincidently, where Hillary Clinton was in 2016. People did not like Hillary Clinton, for many and varied reasons, but that is not a problem currently for Kamala Harris. This is why most of the undecided voters, which did not factor into the 2016 polling, flowed to Trump in the final days of the election. Harris’s positive approval ratings are a hidden advantage.

Kamala Harris remains the final bulwark to turning this nation over to a crazy man…

But the race is still close enough to shift. Right before the debate, Harris’s sugar-high summer numbers began to wane. Voters on the fence, who would not vote for Biden due to his age, and abhor Trump, want to hear more for Harris. Her stellar debate performance clearly convinced a number of these potential voters, but she has work to do. But considering the money at her disposal and field office advantage, she has room to move. Trump, however, has routinely remained stagnant, whether he gets convicted of crimes or nearly shot, his numbers never seem to shift. His ceiling is 47 percent. It is what he got in 2016 when he won and 2020 when he lost. The paucity of viable independent candidates this time has also calcified the race, wherein during the 2016 election they were getting two to three points in key states.

And finally, the economic indicators, which speak to the number one issue for undecided voters, have been mostly positive for months now. Currently, the stock market is at record highs, gas prices are at a three-year low, the GDP is humming, and wages are out-distancing prices for goods and services, and with the interest rates being cut this week by the Fed, housing and automobile prices will soon dip lower. Harris has positioned herself outside the Biden Administration as a forward-thinking candidate that will “turn the page” with notions of a “Opportunity Economy” for the middle class, but the mood of the country, and if consumer confidence is any indication, is leaning toward good, and that is perhaps the final element in this surge.    

All of this is terrific news for those of us who support democracy and denounce fascism, but there is still the manner of Trump’s mere existence in this race. It speaks volumes about the damage we have endured these past nine years and is quite frankly a national embarrassment. After January 6 alone, Trump should have been tried and convicted of treason, and yet he is a 50-50 shot for the presidency.

Beyond the dream of electing the nation’s first woman, Kamala Harris remains the final bulwark to turning this nation over to a crazy man who will be older than Joe Biden is today before the end of what could only be a disgusting parade of demented maleficence. The numbers are finally starting to reflect America rejecting hate, violence, and childish stupidity, and that is good.

Early voting starts today. Keep it up until November 5.  

Aquarian Weekly
9/17/24
 
Reality Check
 
TRUMP’S EMPTY VESSEL 
An Ornery List of Crazed Fascists Primed for White House Party

Republican nominee for president, Donald J. Trump’s “performance” in the 9/10 debate proved once again how completely unhinged and dangerous his rhetoric is, but more importantly it underscored a key element to his first run as president: his spectacular ignorance of all things. Trump was never one for details. He doesn’t care to read. He has no capacity for nuance or intellectual curiosity. He is stuck in an atavistic 1980s grievance spiral, where he remains quite comfortably ensconced in the right-wing echo chamber that makes it easy for him to never have to face the realities of 2024 or really any time outside of that bubble. This is, of course, scary when considering that he might be president again, but it becomes ever more frightening when envisioning who would fill this empty vessel of ego-myopia if he were to regain power.

One thing that was evident for those who worked in Trump’s White House between January of 2017 and the chaotic violence and criminal activity that marked his final days: whoever was the last in front of him had his ear – swaying his thinking on any matter. He could and did change his mind sometimes four or five times an hour as one sycophant after the other followed someone with a scintilla of understanding about governance. In and out of the Oval Office they strode playing him like a cheap fiddle, until either inertia or madness emerged. Moreover, anything Trump saw on television, or the Internet, duly affected policy. This was usually propaganda (see the current “Haitian migrants eating dogs and cats” thing, which was a concocted internet rumor initiated by a Neo-Nazi group called Blood Pride).

And now, those entering Trump’s yawning ideological chasm and continuing this doom-cycle are some of the most reprehensible people known to the American political landscape.

Just this week, at the 9/11 remembrance ceremony, attended by Trump along with legitimate political dignitaries, the former president brought along his newest advisor and traveling companion, Laura Loomer, who just last year proclaimed 9/11 an “inside job” staged by Donald Rumsfeld to “take over the national security military bureaucracy.”

Loomer is a proudly vociferous white supremacist and wild conspiracy theorist, who has toiled for every far-right radical organization. In 2017, she posted a celebratory tweet after the death of 2,000 migrants crossing the Mediterranean Sea with “Good. (with a clapping emoji) Here’s to 2,000 more.” It was this and more that got Loomer banned from the site, but after billionaire racist, misogynist, Elon Musk bought the thing and drove its net worth into the ground, she was reinstated. If you have a strong stomach, check out her feed; it is remarkably vile, even under Trump standards. In one snappy post she accused Democratic nominee Kamala Harris of being “a drug-using prostitute.”

Loomer travels in Trump’s private plane and is seen in his arms, whispering in his ear, and posting selfies and trite conversations with him fawning over her. The Republican candidate has repeatedly called Loomer during several recent rallies “a tremendous woman and fantastic patriot.”

Even radical Georgia Congresswoman Margorie Taylor Greene and South Carolina Senator Lindsay Graham, two of the most ass-smooching Trump lackies, have railed against Loomer’s treacherous lunacy and worry that her cozy spot next to Trump, as he paws her creepily in front of cameras, is a liability to his already sinking campaign. They also know Loomer is positioning herself above them as a major voice in the new Trump Administration, who in the absence of sane Republican guardrails like the last time will be front and center. In fact, Loomer spewed her thoughts on how that would go when she called for the jailing and execution of those who “stole” the 2020 election during the next Trump Administration.

Back to Musk, a bleating swine of a “man,” who uses his own Twitter (X) feed to share debunked conspiracies and racist memes, further perpetuating the newest pet-eating migrant lies, and returning hate-peddling scum like Loomer back onto the platform. Trump has announced he will task him with something called a Government Efficiency Minister position. This, of course, came after the toadying “interview” Musk conducted with Trump a few weeks back in which the two laughed with glee on the joys of firing people, proving Harris’s point that should dictators suck up to the easily flattered Trump, he would capitulate to a bevy of ugly ideas.

Just a day or so from writing this, Musk publicly offered to impregnate uber pop star, Taylor Swift when she posted her support of Harris on Instagram.

Continuing this doom-cycle are some of the most reprehensible people known to the American political landscape.

Another warning sign that the inmates are poised to run the Trump asylum should it get anywhere close to clutching distance of the White House, is twice this past summer, Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, N.J. featured speeches from convicted domestic terrorist, Timothy Hale-Cusanelli regaling his part in the January 6 insurrection on the U.S. Capitol. Google this maniac, he is pictured in full Adolf Hitler haircut and moustache – I shit you not. His most heinous excretions being, “Hitler should have finished the job” and “babies born with any deformities or disabilities should be shot in the forehead.”

At one of those Bedminster events, a fundraiser for the Patriot Freedom Project, which raises money to support Capitol riot defendants like the dangerous MAGA militia, the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, Trump praised Hale-Cusanelli in a video message. “All of the people there, you’re amazing patriots,” Trump said. “Have a great time at Bedminster.”

These are the mutants who will fill the next Trump Administration.

And then there are those, like Loomer, Musk, and the Nazi fanboy, who not only openly campaign for Trump, but those on his payroll. This includes the return of the 2016 rogue’s gallery of Corey Lewandowski and Steven Miller. The former was reinstated as a key advisor with campaign manager status after things went south following Kamala Harris entering the race this summer. Lewandowski, one of those violent macho types that tickles Trump’s testicles, was his first campaign manager back in ’16 when his shoving and shouting and general boorish behavior cost him his gig. In 2021, it looked as if he had become persona non grata around the former president when a visibly drunken Lewandowski made sexual advances towards the wife of a major Trump donor, leading to a Trump spokesman saying that the disgraced lout “will no longer be associated with Trump World.”

Lewandowski is not only back in Trump World, he is now at the center of it, and according to witnesses was the perpetuator of the physical altercation with a female official at Arlington Cemetery last month when a grinning Trump gave thumbs up during an illegal photo op, as he stood over the graves of fallen soldiers.

Steven Miller, who needs about a thousand more words I don’t have to cover his abhorrent existence is also back in the fold, after turning the last Trump White House into a wretched Gulag, causing even the most radical MAGA drones to recoil in horror. Miller was last seen trying to defend Trump’s abysmal debate performance by curiously extoling the virtues of Venezuelan dictator, Nicolás Maduro.

And then there are the authors of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, dozens of whom worked in and around the first Trump Administration, most notably the ex-president’s vice-presidential pick, Ohio Senator J.D. Vance (aka James Donald Bowman and aka James David Hamel), who wrote the foreword to the 900-page draconian playbook for what Trump plans to do with this country.

Predictably, Trump has denied knowing much about Project 2025, although he says there are “some good ideas in there I agree with,” because it is a horrifying screed of anti-women, racist, fascist lunacy.

I have no doubt Trump doesn’t know what the hell is in it. He could barely make it through 900 words of anything much less 900 pages, but those who crafted it will be right next to him in the White House if he wins because Trump is only interested in MAGA loyalists (a key element to Project 2025). Because that’s all that is left for him – drones, who will fill positions to influence his every move. Pundits, cable news hosts, even Republican House and Senate members are merely trying to gain power, keep the GOP brand relevant, as it submerges into the putrid mist of ancient history. The true believers will be the ones to fill Trump’s empty vessel with hate and rage and dangerous fascist nonsense that will work overtime to crack the foundation of our republic.

Aquarian Weekly
9/11/24
 
Reality Check
 
SLAUGHTERHOUSE PHILLY
VP Harris Steamrolls Citizen Trump in Debate Beatdown for the Ages

Having witnessed debates of all size and scope for well over half a century and, if I may, excelled at these in an amateur setting in school many moons ago, I can confidently say that the first presidential stand-off between Vice President Kamala Harris and former president, Donald Trump was a monumental one-way affair. In every possible way, Harris not only bested Trump, stomping him on substance, rhetoric, comportment, and most assuredly, sanity, but she deftly laid out her #1 goal, as I saw it going in: Sell herself as presidential timber to the 28-percent of voters intrigued by her campaign but needing more info. As a bonus, she strategically managed to bait the easily triggered Trump into a frenzy. Conversely, Trump looked as if he had exited on the wrong floor, embarrassingly unfamiliar with the concept of the event he’d attended, and in dire moments (of which there was legion) descended into a wild avalanche of monosyllabic anger, conspiracy meandering and outright lies about everything.

Harris crushed this.

Trump crapped his diapers.

At no point in the ninety minutes did the Republican nominee score any points, or express a cogent narrative, while his Democratic opponent began, right out of the gate, combatting sticky queries by adroitly providing her middle-class bio, framing her vision of opportunity over grievance, and solidifying her economic and moral superiority to him. It was a masterful pivot from the jump – calcified by her opening gambit to shake hands with a visibly stunned Trump, who recoiled, and then reluctantly grabbed her hand as she introduced herself and said her name (correctly and out loud), confronting the former president, who has repeatedly mispronounced it in childish trolling on the campaign trail.

And it was from that point we witnessed a dramatic visual contrast for the ages: a reversal of the previous Biden-Trump debate, when the former looked frail and appeared confused with a distributing slack-jawed pallor. Contrarily, Harris was animated, vigilant, and always commanding, continuously glancing at Trump perplexed as he blathered incoherently, as New Yorkers usually do with the mentally ill on subways. Throughout, Trump, scowled – his eyes barely open, his lips pursed like a petulant urchin – refusing to look her way and striking an irritated stance. If one watched this with the sound off, Trump appeared as if an old Bond villain, as Harris scored time and again.

But where the rubber hit the road was in the verbal parry, of which there was almost no fair exchange that didn’t involve Harris swerving back into bolstering her bona fides as Trump veered off into madness, grab-assing coded insider right-wing memes and dog whistles, desperately trying to hold onto a semblance of offense in a constant backpedal. Harris repeatedly talked about “moving forward” and “turning the page” by controlling the narrative, pushing into a flustered Trump, keeping him at bay and leading him into every dead-end alleyway in which she had the upper hand.

To wit: Even on the immigration issue, which should have been an easy way for Trump to hold his ground, Harris blithely referred to his dwindling rally crowds filled with bored sycophants who walk out disappointed, which visibly knocked him off his feet. He never recovered. Watch it again, you can see Trump twitch, his eyes widening, and his head bobbing as if hit on the chin. At that point in the debate, less than fifteen minutes in, the ex-president looked unmoored and proceeded for the remainder of the debate to lash out, completely forgetting to even comment on issues to instead offer a disjointed word-salad attack that seemed to circle in on itself like a soused ouroboros.

On the issues where he has major problems – inciting a riot on January 6, 2021 in which cops were beaten and killed as his mob sacked the Capitol, his striking down of Roe v Wade by appointing corrupt justices, and his overtly racist attacks on Harris, it was a slaughterhouse. And for once, the moderators attempted to call him on his outlandish bullshit, especially the right-wing echo chamber craziness that included migrants eating pets in Ohio. Incredibly, instead of taking the “L” on that one, Trump wanted to expound on the dog-eating migrants by saying, “I saw it on TV!”

Of course he did.

Throughout all this Trump-mania, Harris remained calm, and continued to make a case that she wanted to be president for the middle class, talked small businesses and non-tariff laden answers to economic challenges, and protecting reproductive rights. Trump’s answer to the latter was to erroneously cite liberal states murdering of children out of the womb and called his Supreme Court justices “geniuses,” in an bizarre claim that “everyone” – Dems and GOPers – wanted their rights stripped away.

Harris crushed this. Trump crapped his diapers.

Especially damaging to centrists, right leaning geopoliticos and the sane, Trump would not confirm support for Ukraine, despite being given five chances to do so. His continued defense of Russia in an off-putting careen of nonsense, ended with his using Hungary dictator, Viktor Orbán as a character witness to his foreign policy ideas. Just to put a finer point on this, Orbán was the #2 most Googled name during the debate – and to say reading about him would not be of any help to Trump is an understatement. The #1 name? Kamala Harris.

Mission accomplished.

But maybe the finest moment came when the subject of the Affordable Care Act came up, and Trump had nothing. He said, as he did in 2016, that he had a plan to repeal and replace it. He did not and does not. Instead, he spewed gibberish that ended when pressed with, ‘I have a concept of a plan.” And when further pressed about what hell that could possibly mean, he said, “I don’t know, I’m not president yet!”

Again, isn’t the concept of debates to bring up what you would do before you’re president? 

But to be fair, Trump was elected president in 2016 by promising with his ubiquitous “trust me” blather that he would reveal his taxes, build a wall and have Mexico pay for it and, ahem, repeal and replace Obamcare, without offering a scintillate of evidence on how this would happen. And, as a reminder, none of that happened.

When it was mercifully over for Trump, he was a humiliated husk of a man. Harris, beaming, ended with a flourish.

Immediately after this televised massacre, the Harris Campaign issued a challenge for another debate.

I bet.

Trump, on the other hand, made an unprecedented beeline for the Spin Room, where he attempted to clean up the dung heap he’d just erected.

Those two maneuvers are all you need to know about how things went.

Not sure if there will be another debate, but while anyone still paying attention might give Trump a 0.0 chance of actually winning the thing, it cannot be this bad. This was a beating of historically epic proportions that by all rights should leave the Republican candidate as political roadkill. And no matter how good a former prosecutor can bring the pain; it is hard to fathom that Kamala Harris could levy this level of evisceration again.

But then again… tee it up.

Aquarian Weekly
9/4/24
 
Reality Check
 
TRUMP & THE FLORIDA ABORTION REFERENDUM TRAP
Ex-President Flip-Flops Into Campaign Oblivion 

Fact: The current Republican nominee for president of the United States, Donald Trump is a resident of Florida.

Fact: Florida currently has a referendum on the ballot – Amendment 4 – which codifies a woman’s rights to her body without any government interference, nullifying its current draconian six-week abortion ban.

Fact: Trump campaigned in 2016 on nominating Supreme Court Justices with litmus tests to end the national Roe v Wade protections. He won that election and as president duly appointed three Justices that all lied to the Senate saying that Roe was settled law and then voted to overturn that decision and strip 51-percent of our citizens of their rights.

Fact: Post Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization SCOTUS decision, 14 Republican-led states have enacted various abortion bans, some of them, like Texas and Alabama, horribly vicious, including Florida with its severe and wildly unpopular six-week abortion ban.

Fact: As a citizen of Florida, Donald J. Trump will now have a chance to put his political gambit on the line and vote on Amendment 4.

Question: How will he vote?

One would think he would vote “no” and stick to the six-week abortion ban. The overturning of Roe is essentially his doing – pushing the decisions on women’s rights to the states. But since six out of ten Americans (four out of ten Republicans and eight out of ten Democrats) support reproductive freedom for women, it is campaign poison to support any bans on abortion. Predictably, wanting to win this election, Trump, who really has no ideological center on this or any issue (he was pro-choice until he decided to become Republican to gain power) has been running away from a maneuver he has repeatedly claimed to be extremely proud of – trashing Roe v Wade, as he’s bellowed that “Everyone wanted Roe overturned and I did it and I’m proud of that.”

And so…

Fact: On August 23, Trump posted on his Truth Social app: “My Administration will be great for women and their reproductive rights.”

All of this is fair political vacillating for someone still claiming to not be a “typical politician,” and it may have actually worked. But when Trump fled New York for his Florida residence, becoming a citizen of the state, he entered the crosshairs of Amendment 4.

Opinion: Oops.

Fact: Amendment 4 states: “No law shall prohibit, penalize, delay, or restrict abortion before viability or when necessary to protect the patient’s health, as determined by the patient’s healthcare provider. This amendment does not change the Legislature’s constitutional authority to require notification to a parent or guardian before a minor has an abortion.”

Now Trump is forced to strip away the blather and posturing and braggadocio and cast a vote as a citizen. No lawyering up or FOX News pundit mansplaining. Which means he, as a presidential candidate, must reveal what he will do. No “kind of” and “sort of” or even “maybe if” stuff. This ain’t “going to release my taxes” or “build a wall” con job speak. Decide. Either or. Abortion ban or a return of Roe rights to Florida. That is the ballot question. No rhetorical half-assed escape: Yes or No. Choose.

This is what I believe Buddhists call karma. It is a bitch, and it has not gone well for the ex-president.

Fact: On Thursday, August 29, Trump was rightfully asked in Michigan by an NBC News reporter how he will vote, as a citizen of Florida, the lead man on the necessity for such a vote because of his rights-killing justices, and because he is running to be president and a national abortion ban is absolutely on the table should Republicans take both houses of Congress: He answered, “I am going to be voting that we need more than six weeks.”

Since it was a person-on-the-street type interview, and it was damaging to the Evangelical community’s Baby Murder agenda, currently representing his staunchest supporters and understandably pitched a public fit about this quote immediately after the interview aired, the Trump campaign issued a statement later that day saying that their candidate misspoke (nice word to smooth over the “made it up on the spot” crap Trump usually spews), and has not “made up his mind” on Amendment 4.

When Trump fled New York for his Florida residence, becoming a citizen of the state, he entered the crosshairs of Amendment 4.

If this was a normal election, and a crazy man who tried to overthrow a free and fair 2020 election wasn’t one of the candidates, voters might be alarmed to consider that with a little over two months left in a presidential election campaign, one of the two candidates has not made up their mind on the third most pressing issue in the nation. This is especially vexing when faced with the current Republican Party platform expressly supporting something called “fetal personhood,” a radically right-wing position on the issue.

Fact: “The Republican Party endorsed a platform at its national convention that would interpret the U.S. Constitution’s 14th amendment to grant embryos the same legal status as people – an anti-abortion ideology known as ‘fetal personhood,’ which could be used to ban abortion and other reproductive health services like in vitro fertilization. Trump’s campaign website links to the party platform.”

 Fact: The Trump/Republican Campaign supports embryos as persons. It is in black and white, espoused at their convention a mere six weeks ago. 

So, um, what?

Fact: The very next day, Friday August 30, Donald Trump told FOX News, “I’ll be voting no” on Amendment 4.

So… wait… what? 

His ostensible reasons for the flip-flop? He was confused (this guy is running for president) on Amendment 4. He is apparently unfamiliar with ballot initiatives and their “Yes” or “No” concept, which is taught at the Eight Grade level in this country. He thought it was some kind of political buffet because Trump knows nothing about law or governance or civics or pretty much anything. He is an idiot. And now apparently, despite his crowing about not being owned by anyone, he is an admitted puppet of the Religious Right. 

Let’s face it, hate or love Trump, everyone knows that there is zero chance a guy who only wants to “win” would put a gaping hole in his campaign by supporting a six-week abortion ban. And so, no one knows what he thinks, but at the very least, his last statement (wait for another one tomorrow or the next day) supports a six-week abortion ban. And it doesn’t take much to extrapolate this to a time when and if he is president, and, again, with a Republican House and Senate, there is a very real chance a national abortion ban will be presented to his desk, and if his answer on 8/30 is to be believed, then he would sign it into law. 

Fact: The first thing the current 118^th Republican-controlled Congress voted on (unanimous GOP votes to zero Democrats) was abortion-related. On January 9, 2023 (six days after being sworn in) Republicans offered up and voted on Bill H.R. 7: “This bill modifies provisions relating to federal funding for, and health insurance coverage of, abortions. Specifically, the bill prohibits the use of federal funds for abortions or for health coverage that includes abortions. Such restrictions extend to the use of funds in the budget of the District of Columbia. Additionally, abortions may not be provided in a federal health care facility or by a federal employee.”

With a Democratic Senate and president, this had no chance of passing. But what if Trump wins?

Fact: Donald Trump is on record now as wanting a Six-Week Abortion Law in Florida, which means he wants one nationally as president, backed by his party that has “fetal personhood” on their platform and in their previous legislative actions. 

Fact: Amendment 4 can only become the law in Florida if over 60-percent of its citizens vote for it, instead of just a majority – a prevision Republicans put in there to make it more difficult to pass. But currently 67-percent of Floridians are for the amendment, and Trump’s Democratic opponent for the White House, Vice President Kamala Harris is polling within four points of him in what has been a solid red state since the 2008 election. 

Fact: Since the Dobbs decision, reproductive rights has been on the ballot seven times, and it has won every time.

Fact: Trump’s promise to vote against an amendment to protect abortion rights has put Florida in play for Harris and the Democrats.

Opinion: Oops.