Category Archives: national news

media news, national news, political news

Coverage is maddening, confusing

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The horse-race coverage of the 2024 campaign for the U.S. presidency carries many adjectives, none of which that come to mind are positive.

It is confusing, maddening, contradictory, chaotic.

I see headlines on the news services I read each day that tell me “Harris surges with new poll,” and then I see where “Trump is looking at a blowout win.” I am careful, of course, to check the source of these “news” items. Leftie organizations generally will tout Harris successes, while rightie outlets sing the praises of Trump’s efforts.

Even the mainstream outlets send confusing messages hither and yon, confusing the daylights out of folks like me.

All of this, I suppose, is to confirm that the contest is a dead heat. Kamala Harris and Donald Trump well might cross the finish line on Nov. 5 shoulder to shoulder.

Or … there’s a hidden vote out there that is waiting to awaken and put one of these candidates into the Oval Office. One theory believes that the hidden mass of voters comprises suburban women who want to protect their reproductive rights but who have been reluctant to tell pollsters of their desire. Another theory suggests another wave of Americans who aren’t yet ready to elect a woman as POTUS.

I’ll go with the former theory. That’s my hope … but you knew that.

national news

Pollster surrenders

So, you may want to know: How close is the Kamala Harris-Donald Trump race for the presidency?

It is so close — drum roll! — that Nate Silver, a leading statistician who boasts an astonishingly accurate record at predicting these things, says he’s no longer going to try to predict who becomes the next president.

Silver uses all sorts of statistical probabilities to predict who wins these races. He’s been accurate — a lot. His polling firm, 538, is considered one of the premier polling outfits in the world.

This year he’s waving the white flag. He cannot predict who will be up on Election Day. So he won’t even try. He’s out of the game.

Silver does suggest that the contest might not end up as close as so many of us believe. He said there’s enough uncertainty out there on how Harris or Trump voters will react when they enter the polling booth that one of them could win going away.

I am going to stick to the photo-finish so many are predicting. At least for now.

I’m going to gnaw on my fingernails for the next few days and hope for all I can that Americans are going to wise up to what they could get if this election ends with the wrong person winning.

Let’s elect Vice President Kamala Harris to the top job … shall we?

national news, political news

Harris enrages Trump’s base … good for her!

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Vice President Kamala Harris is employing a politically risky strategy as she enters the home stretch in her bid to become the 47th president of the United States.

Oh, how I want this effort to pay off.

She is talking to Donald Trump-friendly media organizations and is telling their audiences the hard truth about their hero.

He is a weakling masquerading as a tough guy, she has said. Trump panders to dictators, seeking favors in return. Harris reminds her audiences it takes far more strength to build people up than to tear them down.

We all know what this will do to the MAGA base that continues to support this buffoon. It will rile ’em up, get ’em stoked, provoke the MAGA morons to levy threats.

The VP is banking on another outcome as well, that she will rile women around the nation who want to restore women’s reproductive rights, who have grown weary of Trump’s dark vision for the future of the country.

Kamala Harris is mining the depths of the electorate for Republicans who can be persuaded that Trump’s darkness has no place in a country that for centuries has been the source of eternal optimism.

You are aware of my bias. I’m all in on what Kamala Harris’s 11th-hour political strategy is seeking to do for her. May it serve to persuade others of the danger that Trump presents for the nation we all love.

national news, political news

We aren’t that dumb … are we?

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I have been wrestling with a nagging notion ever since the campaign between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump began taking shape.

It goes something like this: Are American voters really and truly ready for forgive the actions of a candidate who vows to weaponize the Justice Department to get back at his foes? Are we really prepared to hand over the nuclear launch codes to someone who cherishes love notes from dictators intent on destroying this country? Do we really want to entrust the health and welfare of ;poor Americans to someone who doesn’t give a rat’s rear end about them?

If we are, then we’re in a world of hurt, man.

I don’t know whether Trump will be able to win this election. Late polling indicators are causing me some mild dyspepsia. The idea that Americans would embrace this clown — whom they fired four years by 7 million votes — simply boggles my noodle.

His recent lies about the government being unwilling to assist storm victims are laced with ignorance, buttressed by loathing of those victims.

Furthermore, as a veteran who was sent to Vietnam in the late 1960s, I resent viscerally his description of my fellow vets as “losers and suckers” who answered their country’s call to report for duty in a hostile-fire zone.

But that, too, is OK with many of the MAGA cultists who comprise the bulk of this guy’s base.

If this guy can pull this charade off … well, God help us.

national news

RIP, Republican Party

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May a once-great political party rest in peace while those who remain loyal to what it once stood for find the courage to shirk its current incarnation.

Republicans, you have a stern challenge ahead of you … even if hell freezes over and the MAGA warrior in chief actually wins the 2024 presidential election.

I fear the once-Grand Old Party has been hijacked by a huckster disguised as a politician. The men and women who are its stoutest adherents all comprise a group of dimly lit chuckleheads who somehow have managed to be heard above the din in this wildest of presidential election campaigns.

The MAGA cult would have us believe that Democrats caused Hurricanes Helene and Milton to ravage the Southeast. They also seem to believe that immigrants are eating our puppies and kitties. They also continue to insist that the2020 presidential election was stolen from their guy, who actually was indicted by the US House for …. trying to steal the election.

Republicans once called a candidate’s character to be the end-all to determine their fitness for high office.  These days? They embrace the blathering of a boastful Bozo.

More items are revealed daily.  My latest favorite involves reporting by Robert Woodward that the 45th POTUS offered to give COVID test kits to Russian thug Vladimir Putin while they were being rationed to Americans who also were suffering — and dying — from the killer virus.

The Republican Party I knew as a child and as a much younger adult no longer exists.

I am going to miss it as long as it remains captive to the gullible goons who call its cadence.

national news, political news

Trump hits new low … again!

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Donald Trump’s lying seemingly plunges into a bottomless pit, but hold on, because it’s likely nowhere near the bottom of the abyss.

As emergency services personnel in Georgia, and the Carolinas struggle mightily with rescue and recovery efforts in the wake of Hurricane Helene’s devastation, the Republican Party’s presidential nominee started fomenting the lie that the federal government is withholding resources to deliver to the struggling Americans.

Trump tossed despicable falsehoods contending that money that should have been spent on hurricane relief instead has gone to assist those who have entered the national illegally. The government lacks the money to provide help for hurricane victims, the numbskull nominee has alleged.

President Biden has called Trump out directly, accusing him of undermining relief efforts, of sowing fear among victims. Vice President Harris asked out loud “where is the empathy, the compassion?” that Trump should be exhibiting. I have an answer for the Democratic presidential nominee. Both traits are MIA, that Trump possesses neither of them!

And yet this idiot continues to draw cheers from the MAGA cultists over his profoundly stupid accusations.

Wait for more of the same rubbish to fly out of this nincompoop’s mouth. It is an endless array of lies that he has turned into some sort of perverted art form.

Dude is dangerous to the nth degree.

national news, political news

It’s laughable … but I am not laughing

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Human beings cannot control how they look, as some of us are born to be attractive while others … are not.

We can, however, control our actions, some of which leave indelible marks on our past and which can haunt us for the rest of our lives on Earth.

So … when Donald Trump pokes fun at others’ appearance, I tend to leave that kind of crap alone, allowing it to stand as a statement of the Republican presidential candidate’s ignorance. When he declares out loud that he intends to be a “champion” for women’s rights, I have to guide us to what the public record already has delivered.

Trump recently made the “champion” remark at a rally. This comes from someone who has admitted to cheating on his wives, who’s been found liable in a sexual assault, who has admitted to groping women because he’s “famous,” who has used hideous language to denigrate women’s appearance; who once said his daughter is so hot that he’d date her if she wasn’t his daughter.

I shake my head out of disbelief and disgust.

Then this numbskull has the audacity to declare that he stands with women while vowing to be their protector.

The record is full of examples that demonstrate clearly that Trump is unfit to wear the noble title of Women’s Champion in Chief.

national news

One month out … I’m still nervous

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They have just sounded the gun for the final lap in the 2024 race for the U.S. presidency.

I am still a nervous wreck for reasons that should defy all logic and common sense. I keep hearing statements such as “this is a margin-of-error election.” That it’s “too close to call.”

How in the world can it be that one of the leading candidates for the presidency is a convicted felon, an admitted sexual assailant who’s also been found liable in the rape of a woman; he’s admitted to cheating on all of his wives and who never spent a single moment of his miserable life before entering politics worrying about anyone other than his overfed self.

Kamala Harris should be running way with this contest. Donald Trump is causing my stomach to roil.

What’s going to happen now that we’ve entered the home stretch? I am hearing that the Kamala Harris campaign is going to trot out some big hitters to speak on her behalf. Barack and Michelle Obama will clear their throats; so will Liz Cheney and perhaps her dad, former GOP Vice President Dick Cheney.

Maybe we’ll have another October surprise in the works. Special counsel Jack Smith’s court filing alleging even more about what Trump did on Jan. 6. Call it Smith’s “Jim Comey moment,” channeling what the then-FBI director did to Hillary Clinton on the eve of her stunning loss to Trump in 2016. Comey decided in the final month of that campaign to reopen the FBI probe into the Clinton email matter, which energized the Trump MAGA base into a frothing frenzy.

I want my gut to settle down. I want Kamala Harris to thrash Trump on Nov. 5. I cannot predict what will happen. I am left with just expressing my desire.

May every bit of it come true!

Donald Trump, national news, political news

Counsel heaves new grenade into Trump’s lap

You just had to know that special counsel Jack Smith would have more to say about Donald Trump’s role in the Jan. 6 uprising.

Today, Smith delivered the goods in a stunning 165-page filing that chronicles what many with the government told Trump in advance of the assault on the government.

According to ABC News: Trump intentionally lied to the public, state election officials, and his own vice president in an effort to cling to power after losing the election, while privately describing some of the claims of election fraud as “crazy,” prosecutors alleged in the 165-page filing.

Do you get what Smith is suggesting? It is that Trump knew right after the 2020 election that he had lost to Joe Biden … but he insisted anyway on contesting the results of what has been described as the “cleanest election in U.S. history.”

Vice President Mike Pence told Trump the truth.  So did others within the Justice Department, his key campaign aides and advisers and others within the White House national security staff.

Trump blew it all off.

This filing only makes me return to a question I keep asking of my Republican friends, many of whom say they intend to vote for Trump this time around: How in the name of all that is righteous and holy can you vote for an individual who knowingly sought to commit a criminal act by overturning a legal, fair presidential election?

national news

Pardon the traitors?

Of all the things Donald J. Trump has pledged to do if hell freezes over and he wins the next presidential election, one of them stands out as genuinely spine-chilling and dangerous in the extreme.

He vows to issue blanket presidential pardons to the hundreds of traitors who stormed the Capitol Building on Jan. 6 while attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

There you have it, kids. The mob that sh** on the floor of the Capitol, threatened to murder Vice President Mike Pence, who injured dozens of Capitol cops, who inflicted serious damage to our sacred public property could get a pardon from the idiot who called on them to do what they did.

I cannot think of a single more compelling reason to vote against this Republican monster than that.

What in the world does such an act signal to any other traitor who would plot such a heinous act?

It gets more difficult for this patriot — that would be me — to watch video of what happened on that day. Trump praised the mob, has called them political prisoners. He let them storm the Capitol for more than two hours before issuing a tepid request for them to go home.

And then he called them “special people” who he “loves.”

Good grief! They were traitors to the nation. Every …. damn … one … of … them!

Please ponder the consequences of endorsing an individual who embodies such visceral loathing for the rule of law.