Tag Archives: 2024 election

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Sucking it up with an early vote

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Command decision time at blogging HQ, which happens to be my North Texas man cave.

I have decided to cast my vote early in this year’s election, Early voting begins in Texas on Monday and it is possible I’ll be one of the first voters in line at my Princeton polling place.

As many of you know, I have preferred to wait until Election Day to cast my ballot. Not this year. I am going to get my preferences logged into the secure system early. I am going to get my civic duty out of the way.

Then I’ll just wait for the end of the campaign to exhaust itself until Nov. 5.

My concerns about candidates’ messing up between now and Election Day remain. I am just going to presume that the candidates of my choice will keep it clean until Election Day.

I also am announcing my plan to split my ticket. I am going to vote for some Republicans running in down-ballot contests. You know all about my preferences for the very top of the ballot. I won’t revisit those choices here or seek to explain them to you.

There is no point to trying to persuade readers of this blog about the unfitness of the Republican presidential nominee or try to explain how an incumbent US senator can hightail it to Cancun while hundreds of Texans were dying in the midst of the February 2021 deep freeze that smothered virtually the entire state.

Just know that I remain faithful to opposing straight-ticket voting. That principle remains intact.

Let it never be said that this old man is too hidebound to change the way he casts his ballot. I might not vote early in the next election, or the one after that.

This one? I hear the sound of my conscience telling me to do it.

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!

national news

He defies the odds … again!

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I keep asking: How is this presidential campaign so dadgum close?

Democratic nominee Kamala Harris advises her staff to run this campaign as if she’s the underdog. The polling data I keep seeing suggest that it might not be as close as we are being led to believe.

Republican nominee Donald J. Trump keeps trotting out the same grievances that wore well in 2016, not so well in 2020.

I have concluded that Trump has managed to remake the Republican Party into something only he could admire. The holier-than-thou wing of the GOP gives Trump a pass on his sexual assaults, his philandering, his denigration of people with handicaps, his disrespect of war heroes captured and tortured during the Vietnam War.

GOP faithful are being led to believe him when he calls Biden the worst president in U.S. history. Yet they dismiss his multiple felony convictions, his admitting to cheating on all of his wives. The GOP holy rollers once disqualified candidates who didn’t meet the “character test.” Not now!

Kamala Harris stormed onto the political stage when President Biden performed that rarest of political acts: he gave up the enormous power of his office. Yes, there has been a surge of excitement over Harris’s 11th-hour candidacy. Trump, though, continues to pretend as if he has a chance of winning.

The GOP nominee’s pretense seems to play well among the gullible gang who comprise his base.

How in the world does this guy manage to make this a contest? I cannot find the answer.

political news

If only we could repeat this

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The relatively brief nature of this presidential campaign has been refreshing in one critical aspect.

We have had little time to grow tired of the Democratic presidential nominee, given that she didn’t enter the contest until President Biden dropped out of it.

Of course, we cannot say the same of the Republican Party’s nominee, because we all know him too well. He’s been on the political scene only since the summer of 2015, but we knew about him beforehand by virtue of his TV show and his various high-profile social exploits.

Vice President Kamala Harris, if you believe the polls, has taken a slim — but growing — lead over Donald Trump. She is starting to apply even more pressure to Trump. Harris wants a second debate with him. To be honest, I don’t think a second debate is necessary, other than perhaps to enable her to finish off the former POTUS.

Trump actually said he won’t run again if he loses to Harris. To which I only can laugh. You see, this guy cannot tell the truth on any issue, on any level, at any time, or in any location.

We’re heading into the home stretch of a dramatically abbreviated campaign. For that I am grateful. The VP does represent a welcome change, even as she runs as the current vice president.

May she continue to tighten the vise around her foe and send him packing for the rest of his miserable life.

political news, religious news

They are ‘evangelical hypocrites’

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For those among us who continue to proclaim their fealty to the Bible while condemning their neighbors in the context of a heated political campaign, allow me this brief reminder.

The New Testament places no qualifier on whom we should love. It doesn’t tell us to embrace only those who look like us. It doesn’t say to feed only our political allies. It makes no qualifying statement on who deserves our grace.

So, when you hear the garbage being spewed by those who purport to be “evangelical Christians” while they heap all those caveats on who Jesus Christ instructs them to receive their care, please understand that these are religious perverts. They have twisted the words inscribed centuries ago to fit a political narrative that has zero place in understanding the tenets of faith.

They are not “evangelical Christians.” They instead are evangelical hypocrites lurking among those of us who understand –and honor — the messages contained within our holy book.

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‘Greatest selfless act’

George Clooney is known for a lot of things: accomplished actor and filmmaker, bona fide “hunk,” noted family man in an industry not known for such a lifestyle.

Political scholarship doesn’t come to mind when I think of George Clooney.

Yet the actor has offered what I believe is a spot-on critique of President Biden when he calls the president’s decision to step down from his re-election campaign the “greatest selfless act” perhaps since the time George Washington decided that two terms as POTUS was enough.

Biden’s withdrawal from the campaign and his endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris is the rarest of all acts, given that Biden surrendered the enormous power he possessed as POTUS.

That act of selflessness is going to ensure, in my mind, historians’ verdict on Biden’s presidency and his willingness to surrender the power that goes with occupying it.

Biden did not want to step aside after that debate performance that prompted the tongue-wagging that questioned his mental acuity. He faced enormous pressure from Democrats, his friends and allies … and from George Clooney, whose op-ed column in the New York Times shook the political world at its core.

It is President Biden, though, who deserves the bouquet, as his decision to surrender power well might save this country from madness and mayhem.

national news

No on launch code access

The advent of social media in our lives has brought us an unanticipated treat: memes that go “viral” and bear repeating.

Such as this one … and I am paraphrasing; Those who promoted lies about immigrants eating dogs and cats need to have their head examined, not receive access to our nation’s nuclear launch codes.

That’s pretty good, right? But Donald Trump is now doubling down on that idiocy he offered the other night while debating Vice President Kamala Harris. He said Springfield, Ohio, is the place where this lunacy is occurring. He’s going there soon to repeat it.

This individual is nuttier than a Snicker’s Bar. Dude can’t help himself … I reckon. I am certain as sure as I am sitting here that that he’ll never provide a scintilla of proof to back any of it up. He’ll just keep repeating it and the MAGA cultists will swallow it.

A quick post script: I met a family from Brisbane, Australia the other day while whiting for a ferry ride to Pireaus, Greece, from a charming place called Naxos. The Au,ssie dad was as certain as I am about Trump …. that the loon is off his rocker. What he cannot get, nor can I, is how Trump continues to make this presidential race a competitive affair.

My answer: Ignorance is tough to scrub away.

national news

Trump says ‘no mas!’

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Can you really blame Donald Trump for not wanting any more of Kamala Harris than what he got the other evening?

I totally get what he might be thinking: I’ve got too much to lose and probably not much to gain by standing toe-to-toe with the former district attorney/former California attorney general/and current vice president of the United States.

One debate whoopin’ is enough for the former POTUS.

The Democratic and Republican presidential nominees now will slug it out at a distance. We’ll get to hear Trump spit out his lies, his fabrications about such things as dogs and cats being eaten by immigrants. We won’t see a scintilla of grace from the GOP nominee who gets to run for POTUS for the third consecutive election cycle, despite his multiple felony convictions and other felony indictments awaiting trial.

He gets to join the ranks of “quitters” to go along with his membership in the club of losers.

national news

Trump: small and old

NAXOS, Greece — Of all the analysis I read after watching the Kamala Harris-Donald Trump debate, one media observation stands out.

Kamala Harris managed to make Trump look and sound “small and old” during their 90-minute insult fest.

The decisive moment likely came when she mentioned how Trump rally-goers have been leaving his rallies early out of boredom. Trump was having none of that, contending that his rallies are the greatest in human history; then he fires back with Harris being a “low IQ vice president” serving the “worst president in history.”

Well, there you go. Trump is 78 years of age, the oldest presidential nominee in the history of the republic. He also no longer has the presidential seal behind which he can hide.

Small and old? Yep … that’s Trump.

national news

Friendships suffer grievous collateral damage

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Quiz time, kids: What part of our political existence has suffered the most grievous example of collateral damage from the current political climate?

Time’s up. I’ll offer my own belief. The greatest casualty happens to be, in my view, the political friendships that at one time survived whatever political differences existing between politicians.

The wounds being inflicted these days almost appear to be mortal in nature. Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump calls Kamala Harris “not very smart.” He questions her ethnicity. The convicted felon accuses the current president, Joe Biden, of being the most corrupt politician in history.

For her part, Harris will not let anyone forget about the disgraceful conduct Trump endorsed during his term as POTUS.

There once was a time in this country when losing presidential candidates would lick their wounds, concede to the winner and then pledge to work with the winner to solve the nation’s problems. Trump brought us a whole new element into how not to lose an election. He never conceded he lost to Joe Biden in 2020 and then commenced to sic the mob onto Congress to stop the certification of the 2020 electoral result.

I will presume that Harris wins this election. Can you imagine Trump doing anything different from what he did in 2020? Hillary Rodham Clinton, who lost to Trump in 2016, even had the good taste and grace to offer to work with Trump as he sought to build his administration. So did Mitt Romney and John McCain, who lost to Barack Obama in 2012 and 2008, respectively.

These days political foes have become mortal enemies.

I much prefer the time when foes would batter each other with hammer and tong … and then shake hands when it ended. It’s the democratic way.