and now it really begins ...

[BrianTCB]

Today, CURRENT Vice President and Presidential Candidate Kamala Harris.

You ain't seen nothing yet, Trumpers.

Can't wait to beat y'all silly at the voting booths in November.

Trump. Is. Done.

=====================================

[arnaudbxl]

I just hope that Kamala knows how to properly return a salute.

She's going to be doing a lot of it starting in January.

Let’s hope she does

She probably does her best salutes while down on her knees!

Now that’s what I call elegance.
I suppose it is humor, but there is no smiley that indicate so
Anyway, no big thing, I have a lot of humor too.

So whatever your classy and so funny answer implicitly describe, I personnally find it a much greater quality instead of being on four to salute Putin, Kim or Elon Musk (why do I always think of a James Bond villain when I see Elon Musk? I don’t know)

«  ». Of course.

[BrianTCB]

Today, CURRENT Vice President & Presidential Candidate

Addressing protesters at the rally. She's a pro.

[Rob]

I just hope that Kamala knows how to properly return a salute.

She's going to be doing a lot of it starting in January.

Let’s hope she does

She probably does her best salutes while down on her knees!

Now that’s what I call elegance.

Do you really expect anything else from a Trump supporter who knows they are going to lose another election?

It's what they do.

[G.I. Blues]

Today, CURRENT Vice President...

Old weak man needs to rest, unfit for office!

[BrianTCB]

Today, CURRENT Vice President and Democratic Presidential Nominee:

Kamala Harris Overtakes Donald Trump, Gains 23 Points: Poll

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/kamala-harris-overtakes-donald-trump-gains-23-points-poll/ar-AA1opzyU?ocid=hpmsn&cvid=b78d457858594621933d5b15713174c1&ei=35

Kamala Harris has gained 23 points in a new poll, with a surge that pushed her 9 points ahead of Donald Trump.

The poll questioning independents, carried out by NPRS/PBS News/Marist, found that 53 percent of voters who identified as belonging to this group supported Harris and 44 percent backed Trump.

This 9-point lead is a huge jump from the 14 points by which she was down in Marist's July poll, which found 46 percent of independents for Trump and 32 percent for Harris.

The August survey, published on Tuesday, was carried out among 1,613 adults between August 1 and August 4 and has a disclaimed margin of error of plus or minus 3.4 percentage points. The July survey questioning 1,309 adults was carried out on July 22 and has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.

Overall, Marist's most recent poll shows Harris has a three point lead over Trump, 51 percent to 48 percent after pollsters spoke to 1,513 registered voters.

Harris has taken the lead in multiple polls after Joe Biden pulled out and endorsed her as the Democratic nominee.

Polling aggregator 538 puts Harris at 45.2 percent, 1.8 percentage points ahead of Trump's 43.4 percent.

Harris is also ahead with 47.4 percent above Trump's 46.9 percent on Polling aggregator RealClear.

Despite this, Harris is still referring to herself and her newly revealed running mate Tim Walz are the "underdogs."

Speaking at a rally in Philadelphia on Tuesday, she announced her official nomination as the Democratic candidate, and said, "So now we have some work to do. We need to move to the general election and win that. And to all the friends listening, we also need to level set. We are the underdogs in this race. But we have the momentum and I know exactly what we're up against."

Harris has been broadly polling much better than Biden was, and since announcing her running mate she has surpassed Biden's peak odds of winning the election, according to the betting odds platform Polymarket.

Pollster Nate Silver, whose statistical model compiles the results of statewide polls and weights them based on reliability, found that Harris took the lead in the race on July 30 when she closed the gap with Trump, and has been moving further away from him ever since.

Harris has used the "underdog" term to describe herself and her voters before, including at a rally in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, on July 27.

"We have a fight ahead of us, and we are the underdogs in the race," she said. "But this is a people-powered campaign, and we have momentum."

[latebloomer]

READ: President Trump’s call with US governors over protests, posted CNN, 1 Jun 2020.

It's a bit long to post here (CNN claimed its a 39-minute read), but very informative of Trump's heavy-handed style, and it includes his praise of Gov Tim Walz' handling of events in Minnesota.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/01/politics/wh-governors-call-protests/index.html?cid=ios_app

[latebloomer]

Never thought I'd see this: a member of the press lambasting the press for its almost criminally negligent coverage of Trump -- and most politicians:

https://www.msnbc.com/the-last-word/watch/lawrence-stupidest-candidate-trump-did-not-answer-reporters-questions-216787525948

Most satisfying 24 minutes I've spent in years.

[latebloomer]

The Truth About Trump’s Press Conference
His obvious emotional instability is frightening, not funny.
By Tom Nichols, The Atlantic, 9 Aug 2024

Donald Trump’s public events are a challenge for anyone who writes about him. His rallies and press conferences are rich sources of material, fountains of molten weirdness that blurp up stuff that would sink the career of any other politician. By the time they’re over, all of the attendees are covered in gloppy nonsense.

And then, once everyone cleans up and shakes the debris off their phones and laptops, so much of what Trump said seems too bonkers to have come from a former president and the nominee of a major party that journalists are left trying to piece together a story as if Trump were a normal person. This is what The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, has described as the “bias toward coherence,” and it leads to careful circumlocutions instead of stunned headlines.

Consider Trump’s press conference yesterday in Florida. Trump has been lying low since President Joe Biden withdrew from the presidential race, at least in terms of public appearances. But Vice President Kamala Harris, the new Democratic nominee, and her running mate, Governor Tim Walz, are gaining a lot of great press, and so Trump decided it was time to emerge from his sanctuary.

Trump, predictably, did an afternoon concert of his greatest hits, including “Doctors and Mothers Are Murdering Babies After They’re Born,” “Putin and Xi Love Me and I Love Them,” and “Gas Used to Be a Buck-Eighty-Something a Gallon.” But the new material was pretty shocking.

Trump not only declared that mothers are killing babies in the delivery room—he’s been saying that for years—but added the incomprehensible claim that liberals, conservatives, and independents alike are very happy that abortion has been returned to the states. (When asked how he would vote in Florida’s abortion referendum, he dodged the question, which suggests that maybe not everyone is happy.)

He said (again) that the convicted January 6 insurrectionists have been treated horribly, but this time he added that no one died during the assault on the Capitol. (In fact, four people died that day.) He made his usual assertion that Russia would never have invaded Ukraine if he’d been in office, but this time he added how much he looked forward to getting along with the Iranians, despite also bragging about how he tanked the nuclear deal with them.

He claimed that Harris was sliding in the polls, a standard Trump trope in talking about his opponents, but he added that he was getting crowd sizes up to 30 times hers at his rallies. Harris recently spoke to approximately 15,000 people in Detroit; 30 times that would be nearly half a million people, so Trump is now saying that he’s having rallies that are five times bigger than the average crowd at a Super Bowl—bigger, even, than Woodstock—and somehow fitting them all into arenas with seats to spare.

For the moment, let’s assume that Trump just gargled up a number he couldn’t comprehend. But he apparently knows we are in Olympics season, so he followed all of this by going for the gold: His rallies are not just big, they’re the biggest ever.

“Nobody has spoken to crowds bigger than me,” Trump said. And then, referring to the crowd that gathered at his behest on January 6, he compared it to the 1963 March on Washington: “If you look at Martin Luther King, when he did his speech, his great speech, and you look at ours: same real estate, same everything, same number of people.”

The March on Washington drew a quarter million people, almost six times the number that showed up during the attack on the Capitol. Trump agreed that official estimates said his crowd was smaller than King’s. He pressed on anyway: “But when you look at the exact same picture and everything is the same—because it was the fountains, the whole thing all the way back to go from Lincoln to Washington—and you look at it, and you look at the picture of my crowd … we actually had more people.”

Then things got even weirder.

Trump claimed that former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown said bad things about Harris while he and Trump were on a helicopter together. Oh—and the helicopter was in trouble:

We thought maybe this was the end. We were in a helicopter, going to a certain location together, and there was an emergency landing. This was not a pleasant landing. And Willie was—he was a little concerned.

So I know him, but I know him pretty well. I mean, I haven’t seen him in years. But he told me terrible things about her. But this is what you’re telling me, anyway, I guess. But he had a big part in what happened with Kamala. But he—he, I don’t know, maybe he’s changed his tune. But he—he was not a fan of hers very much, at that point.

Brown has not had to change his tune, because none of this ever happened. Trump may have confused Willie Brown with former California Governor Jerry Brown, with whom Trump once shared an uneventful helicopter ride. (One might think they’re hard to mix up: Willie Brown is Black; Jerry Brown is white.) In any case, trying to untangle the half-cooked pasta of a Trump story isn’t really worth the effort. The issue is that a former president is frighteningly delusional, and if any other candidate had done this—Biden was roasted over stories that were obscure but turned out to be true—it would dominate the news with understandable alarm about the well-being of the candidate.

Reporters might listen to Trump and then understandably be reluctant to start typing stories that must feel like spec scripts for The West Wing pieced together by a creative-writing circle:

The former president, lying about abortion laws, said women murder their own babies in the delivery room. He megalomaniacally claimed that he gets bigger crowds than anyone in history, and compared himself to Martin Luther King Jr. He descended into fantasy by telling a story about surviving a helicopter emergency that never happened with a man who wasn’t there.

Instead, The New York Times ran this headline: “Trump Tries to Wrestle Back Attention at Mar-a-Lago News Conference.” The Washington Post said: “Trump Holds Meandering News Conference, Where He Agrees to Debate Harris.” The British paper The Independent got closer with: “Trump Holds Seemingly Pointless Press Conference Filled With False Claims,” but CNN went with “Trump Attacks Harris and Walz During First News Conference Since Democratic Ticket Was Announced.”

All of these headlines are technically true, but they miss the point: The Republican nominee, the man who could return to office and regain the sole authority to use American nuclear weapons, is a serial liar and can’t tell the difference between reality and fantasy.

Donald Trump is not well. He is not stable. There’s something deeply wrong with him.

Any of those would have been important—and accurate—headlines.

[monkboughtlunch]

[drjohncarpenter]

Today, CURRENT White House.














President Joseph R. Biden and Vice-President Kamala Harris.

Leading the country, making things better for ALL of us.

[drjohncarpenter]

Never thought I'd see this: a member of the press lambasting the press for its almost criminally negligent coverage of Trump -- and most politicians:

https://www.msnbc.com/the-last-word/watch/lawrence-stupidest-candidate-trump-did-not-answer-reporters-questions-216787525948

Most satisfying 24 minutes I've spent in years.

Lawrence O'Donnell is the best journalist in America right now.

[drjohncarpenter]

Yesterday, EX president.









https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/elon-musk-donald-trump-x-twitter-disastrous-interview-1235078740/





Flailing, entitled stupidity.

Another Elon failure.

A completely mendacious, felonious candidate.

VOTE BLUE.

[drjohncarpenter]

This is called "Two Idiots."

[latebloomer]

Trump’s Latest Falsehood Is a Huge Tell
When the former president feels most vulnerable, he begins to deny reality.
By Brian Stelter, The Atlantic, 12 Aug 2024

When Donald Trump is at his most vulnerable, when he feels most threatened, he tells fans not to believe their own eyes and ears.

After the January 6 attack on the Capitol, he called the event a “love fest,” denying the video evidence of the violence. After the writer E. Jean Carroll accused him of sexual assault, he said he had “never met” her, despite a photo showing them together.

And yesterday, after Kamala Harris finished a week of arena-size rallies, he claimed that images of her crowds were “fake” and AI-generated. Specifically, Trump embraced a conspiracy theory—touted by pro-Trump social-media accounts known for peddling nonsense—that the Harris campaign had posted a fake crowd photo from her August 7 event in Romulus, Michigan.

“Has anyone noticed that Kamala CHEATED at the airport?” he wrote. “There was nobody at the plane, and she ‘A.I.’d’ it, and showed a massive ‘crowd’ of so-called followers, BUT THEY DIDN’T EXIST!”

The turnout at Harris events is entirely real, and political analysts suspect that the crowds she has attracted are making Trump jealous and nervous. But the AI lie is about more than Trump’s size anxiety—it portends a dark and desperate chapter in this already distressing presidential-election season.

Alex King, a 32-year-old political organizer who lives outside Detroit, was at the August 7 rally holding a Harris-Walz sign and wearing a blue shirt. He immediately recognized himself in the picture that Trump shared and pretended was fake yesterday. “There was nobody there!” Trump wrote. But King was there, and he told me the former president’s post was “disheartening and frankly disrespectful.”

Every time Trump challenges his fans to side with him over photographic proof of reality, it’s disrespectful. I have been keeping an informal list of such episodes since the inauguration-crowd-size controversy of 2017, and they are typically driven by Trump’s enormous insecurity.

“The first lie of the Trump presidency,” as The Atlantic’s Megan Garber dubbed the inauguration freakout, began with a 5 a.m. segment on CNN the day after Trump was inaugurated. The CNN anchor John Berman very gently pointed out that Trump had predicted “they were going to break records with the crowds” in Washington, but “it doesn’t look like they did,” and he showed a graphic juxtaposing Barack Obama’s historic 2009 crowd on the left and Trump’s smaller crowd on the right. Trump erupted, and his aides came up with “alternative facts” to deny reality.

Toward the end of his presidency, Trump minimized the crowd sizes at protests, claiming that Black Lives Matter drew a “much smaller crowd in D.C. than anticipated” when in fact a rally over the death of George Floyd in police custody was the largest gathering in the nation’s capital since the Women’s March on the day after his inauguration.

More recently, during his hush-money trial in Lower Manhattan this spring, Trump was reportedly disappointed that his supporters did not flock to the area around the courthouse. He made excuses when reporters pointed out that the park across the street was practically empty. “Thousands of people were turned away from the courthouse,” he lied, calling the area “an armed camp to keep people away.” I pulled out my cameraphone to show how easy it was to visit the neighborhood, and told New Yorkers to come see for themselves.

But Trump’s repeated claims that you shouldn’t believe your own eyes have been buttressed by his near-decade-long insistence that real news is “fake.” A Trump devotee would have a hard time trusting my photo of the wide-open courthouse entrance over Trump’s comforting lie.

I have come to view this as a method of control. The rejection of video evidence, the dismissal of photo proof, even the new lie invoking AI—these claims all leave people arguing over the most basic tenets of reality, and cause some people to give up and give in. As Chico Marx asked in the 1933 film Duck Soup, “Who are ya gonna believe, me or your own eyes?” Richard Pryor later adapted the line: “Who you gonna believe? Me, or your lying eyes?” Trump has brought the concept into the 21st century.

Some of his photo-denying disputes have been minor, and maybe even humorous. One day in 2019, The Washington Post reported that Trump’s advisers “wrote new talking points and handed him reams of opposition research” for his attacks against the Democratic lawmakers known as the “Squad.” Trump claimed that “there were no talking points” even though a Post photographer, Jabin Botsford, had taken a close-up photo of his prepared notes.

Every instance of Trump disputing the indisputable is revealing in its own way. As Hurricane Dorian sideswiped the Eastern Seaboard, in the fall of 2019, Trump contradicted his own government’s weather maps and claimed that Alabama was in the path of the hurricane when the state was not, then tried to convince people that his faulty forecast was correct. That same year, as Britain’s Prince Andrew was ensnared in sexual-misconduct allegations, Trump said “I don’t know him, no,” despite multiple photos of the two men together, including one taken just six months before.

Vulnerability seems to be the through line here—whether Trump is at risk of trivial embarrassment, criminal exposure, or being caught in lies. A public figure with truth on their side would say Roll the tape to show they’re right. Trump, instead, says, Don’t believe the tape. Just believe me instead.

The aftermath of January 6 is probably the most extreme example of his reality-denial. He watched the insurrection unfold on live TV but then tried to erase the public’s memory of the images. On the one-year anniversary of the attack, Representative Jamie Raskin said on CNN that he felt bad for Trump adherents because “they are essentially in a political religious cult, and their cult leader, Donald Trump, is telling them they can’t believe their own eyes, the evidence of their own experience, and their own ears.”

That’s what Trump did again yesterday—only this time, the proliferation of AI-image-making tools made it easier than ever to sow doubt. Trump is “entering the ‘nothing is true and everything is possible’ phase, as predicted,” the Atlantic contributor Renee DiResta wrote on Threads. “The ability to plausibly cast doubt on the real is the unintended consequence of being able to generate unreality.”

King, one of the real people in the Michigan crowd that Trump said didn’t exist, found the new crowd-size lie dispiriting. “It would be nice for us voters to be able to have discussions on the substantive issues that are at stake in this election,” he told me, “not be hyperfocused on distractions and conspiracy theories.”

Yes—but it is also essential to track how Trump tries to trick people. His is a campaign of disbelief. If Trump is so shaken by Harris that he will insist her thousands of supporters don’t exist, what else will he say and do to deny reality?

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/08/trump-claims-ai-images-kamala-harris-rallies/679445/

[drjohncarpenter]

Pay attention.

[latebloomer]

The other big shift in the presidential race
Trump was running against Biden on crime, inflation and the border. Now Biden’s out — and those other issues aren’t as potent as they were.
Philip Bump, The Washington Post, 14 Aug 2024

One month ago, the Republican Party was convening in Milwaukee to anoint Donald Trump as its presidential nominee for the third consecutive election. The convention was energetic and brash; the attempt on Trump’s life had reinforced Republicans’ already robust enthusiasm for their candidate, and Trump skeptics had long ago been rooted out of the inner circle. Polling showed that the former president was on a glide path to election. States that hadn’t been red in decades suddenly looked like they might be in play in 2024.

Then the convention ended. President Joe Biden announced that he would no longer seek the Democratic Party’s nomination, clearing the way for Vice President Kamala Harris. Democrats, suddenly giddy about their chances and about their candidate, threw cash at the revamped candidacy. Harris surged in the polls.

But that wasn’t the only shift the race has undergone in recent months. In addition to Trump suddenly facing an entirely new opponent — to his obvious chagrin — he’s also facing a shifted political landscape. He’d intended to run against Biden and the Biden administration’s track record on crime, immigration and inflation. But none of those attacks is as potent as it was two years ago.

Crime
It goes without saying that the coronavirus pandemic upended the country in numerous ways. What was not clear at the time, though, was how sticky the effects might be. When violent crime surged in 2020 and into 2021, for example, it wasn’t clear whether this was a permanent reversion of the downward trend the country had seen since the early 1990s.

Fox News has been consistently insistent that crime is surging under Biden, making fearmongering about crime a central component of its coverage before the 2022 midterms. Since that point, though, data has repeatedly indicated that crime — and violent crime in particular — has declined over the past few years.

As we’ve noted, measuring national crime trends in real time is tricky. Data are available in some cities, but consistent national data is gathered only well after the fact. Even then, it’s often incomplete. But the data that are available and outside analyses of city-level trends suggest a noteworthy decline.

Last week, the Major Cities Chiefs Association, an organization of law enforcement leaders, released data showing sharp drops in violent crime in a number of large American cities between the first half of 2023 and the first half of 2024. Biden hailed the data, crediting the American Rescue Plan.

CATEGORY .......... 2023 .......... 2024 .......... CHANGE
Homicide .......... 3,783 ......... 3,124 .......... -17%
Rape .............. 14,472 ........ 13,064 .......... -10%
Robbery .......... 48,529 .........45,575 ........... -6%
Agg. assault .... 141,944 ....... 134,293 ........... -5%

This is not the only such data. FBI data released in June showed a similar year-over-year decline, as did data the bureau released in December. When the agency released its data for 2022, it showed a decrease in crime that year — contrary to Fox News’s coverage.

Immigration

Mirroring his 2016 campaign for president, Trump has focused heavily on immigration in his bid to regain the presidency. He's fond of amplifying data about the number of apprehensions at the U.S.-Mexico border to suggest that the country is overrun with new arrivals, particularly those who entered the country illegally.

This rhetoric is enabled by the complexity of the subject (like that those entering the country to seek asylum are often granted permission to remain and that a large percentage of those apprehended have been quickly removed from the country). But Trump's assertions about an “open border” are also hobbled by the striking decrease in apprehensions in recent months.

In December, nearly 250,000 people were apprehended between border checkpoints on the border with Mexico. In January, though, the number was half as large. From February to March, the monthly figure dropped by 2 percent. From March to April, it was down 6 percent. Then 9 percent the next month and, in June, down 29 percent over May — the month in which the Biden administration unveiled new rules governing asylum applications. The result is that apprehensions in June were a third of those seen in December.

The figure is still high, certainly, more in line with levels of apprehensions seen during the administration of George W. Bush than that of Barack Obama. Apprehensions were low under Obama in part because the U.S. economy was still recovering from the recession; they were unusually low in 2020 because of the pandemic.

immigration.jpeg

Another way to look at it: There were fewer apprehensions between border checkpoints in June 2024 than there were in June 2019 under Donald Trump.

Prices

The central argument Trump has been using for his candidacy, of course, is that the country has been wracked by inflation. And that's true; after the initial restrictions linked to the pandemic were eased, prices surged along with demand.

Trump points to various products to emphasize those price increases. He often claims that gasoline jumped from $1.87 during his administration to somewhere north of $5 under Biden. Speaking to Elon Musk on Monday, he offered another example: Bacon now costs “4 or 5 times more than it did a few years ago.”

The reason gasoline was cheap during the Trump administration, of course, is that demand crashed as people were staying home to avoid the coronavirus. Nor are national prices north of $5; they’ve leveled off in recent months in the $3.50 range, according to the Energy Information Administration. Bacon did surge in cost in 2021, but has since stabilized (well below four times what it cost a few years ago).

gas.jpeg

It's worth noting, by the way, that the national average price of gas in recent months is somewhat lower than it was under Obama. It was during the Obama administration that prices dropped to the levels that Trump now exaggerates.

gas2.jpeg

What's important about the gas and bacon prices, though, is that, after the initial surge, prices didn't keep climbing higher and higher. Prices of those products jumped — and then remained at those new higher levels.

This isn't great, and these are just two products. It is also true, as the administration argues, that average wages have increased more rapidly since 2021 and that the increase in the rate of inflation has slowed. (You can see it on the graph at right below, that little inflection point marked with the vertical dotted line.) The rate of increase in wages has in recent months consistently been larger than the rate of increase of inflation, in fact.

wages.jpeg

On Wednesday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released new data on inflation showing that the annual increase last month was lower than at any point since March 2021. Again, this isn't deflation, a decrease in prices. But it does suggest that the valid concerns about the rate at which prices were increasing have been significantly addressed.

This is an esoteric evaluation of the economy, certainly, but polling data suggests that Trump’s advantage on the economy has narrowed, in part thanks to the change at the top of the Democratic ticket.

These shifts also are not likely to change Trump’s rhetoric. He is no more interested in presenting accurate information about crime, immigration and inflation than he ever was, so he highlights things like the unmeasured-and-exaggerated concept of “migrant crime” to stoke fears about the direction of the country.

Still, the current numbers are a reflection of how the ground under Trump’s feet has shifted. He’s running against the first half of Biden’s administration, when Biden was his opponent and crime, inflation and immigration were acute problems. But now, to his chagrin, it’s 2024. The landscape is very different.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/08/14/other-big-shift-presidential-race/

[drjohncarpenter]

Today, CURRENT president.











President Joseph Biden and Vice-President Kamala Harris.

Leading the country, making things better for all of us.

[drjohncarpenter]

Today, CURRENT White House.











President Joseph Biden and Vice-President Kamala Harris.

Leading the country, making things better for ALL of us.

[latebloomer]

Thanks for the list, Doc. Prices still too high, and won't drop for too long -- but, at last, Mitch McConnell's determination to enrich the pharmaceutical companies and bankrupt the rest of us -- or simply deprive us of medicines -- is thwarted. How he must hate that!

There is no point in developing all the wonderful medications that can save lives, improve the quality of lives, or extend lives, if the people who need them cannot afford them...because of greed, and nothing else.

Where, when, in our past, and how, did we develop so many utterly selfish, greedy people? That's my first great question.

My second is, considering how many men are both kind and gentle, and strong and brave, what have we done, generation after generation, that developed men who prey on others, particularly on women and children?

I've hoped for answers for more than 50 years. I'm still hoping.

Someone finally thought to ask men imprisoned for violent abuse of their wives why they did what they did. The answer (oversimplified) was that they had been raised by abusive father, and knew no other way to deal with anger, frustration, disappointment. That answer has helped us to devise ways to "retrain" such sons, and to raise better fathers.

Someone please ask the greedy and the rapists and the pedophiles why they behave the way they do. Let's see if we can come up with answers that will help us to "retrain" grown men, and to raise our sons so they are not violent.

Do not think I give women a pass. I don't. But most of the rapist and pedophiles, like most of the abusive spouses, are men, as I think are most of the avaricious. We must do better at raising our sons...and our daughters...to be better people, and better parents, themselves.

[latebloomer]

Trump Is Lying to the U.S. Military
He demonstrates contempt for Americans in uniform while claiming to adore them—but wants service members to “revolt” for him at the ballot box.

By Tom Nichols, The Atlantic, 10 June 2024

Donald Trump has yet again denied that he called people who gave their life in the service of their country “suckers” and “losers.” But he said those things—and now he wants to goad the military into voting for him as a “revolt.”

Donald Trump routinely attacks the institutions of American government, especially when he feels that those institutions have not served his personal interests. He has, for example, repeatedly claimed that American elections are corrupt and rigged, thus smearing the state, county, and local volunteers and officials who make American democracy a model for the world. He plans to gut the apolitical U.S. civil service and place it under his political control. And he has long harbored a special hatred—compounded by his new status as a convicted felon—for courts and the rule of law. This weekend, at a rally in Las Vegas, he continued his attacks on the Justice Department and referred to Special Counsel Jack Smith as “deranged” and a “dumb son of a bitch.”

Give the 45th president credit for being candid about his scorn for most of America’s institutions. He looks down upon the members of the United States armed forces as well, but where the military is concerned, Trump engages in a monumental hypocrisy: He has repeatedly expressed disdain and even disgust for Americans in the military while claiming to adore them. In Las Vegas, Trump said yet again that no one loves the military more, or has done more for them, than him. Such constructions—“no has done more for group X; no one loves group Y more; no one understands subject Z more than I do”—are a routine part of Trump’s Mad Libs approach to public speaking.

But these bursts of verbal chaff are especially meaningless in the context of Trump’s well-documented contempt for the military. Think of his 2015 shot at John McCain’s time as a prisoner of war (“I like people who weren’t captured”), his comments floating the idea of executing former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley, and his sneering earlier this year about Nikki Haley’s husband (an Army officer who was serving in Africa at the time). As Michael Hirsh wrote in 2020 in Foreign Policy, even when Trump was at the military school where his parents effectively exiled him when he was a teenager, he showed, according to one of his fellow students, “contempt for military service, discipline, and tradition” and an “ungoverned sense of entitlement” that included, according to some students, the cardinal military sin of wearing decorations and medals he had not earned.

This weekend, he was particularly incensed (read: humiliated) by the resurfacing of Atlantic editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg’s reporting about Trump referring to dead American soldiers as “losers” and “suckers.” Goldberg’s article gained renewed attention during coverage of President Joe Biden’s D-Day speeches in Europe, when some media outlets pointed out the obvious differences between the two presidents, noting Trump’s unwillingness in 2018 to visit an American military cemetery in France. At the Vegas rally, Trump fumed (as he has for years) at The Atlantic’s reporting on his vulgar disrespect for the fallen, calling it “a made-up deal from a magazine that’s failing, financial disaster.” He also referred to Goldberg as “a horrible, radical-left lunatic.”

(These are, of course, standard Trump insults, but for the record, The Atlantic is profitable, and although I have not formally interviewed our editor on his political views, I suspect most readers of his work would not place him on the “radical left.”)

“Now, think of it,” Trump continued, referring to his own comments disparaging the U.S. military. “Unless you’re a psycho or a crazy person or a very stupid person, who would say that, anyway? But who would say it to military people?”

Sometimes, a rhetorical question is a little too tempting. But let’s move on.

The fact of the matter is that Trump did say some of this to a general, the retired four-star Marine John Kelly, who served as his secretary of Homeland Security and later as his White House chief of staff. In 2017, Trump, according to Goldberg’s reporting, was standing with Kelly in Arlington National Cemetery at the grave of Kelly’s son, a Marine killed in Afghanistan. “I don’t get it,” the new president said, standing among the headstones. “What was in it for them?” A year and a half later, Trump went to Europe, where he referred to an American military cemetery as “filled with losers.” On the same trip, he said that the more than 1,800 Marines who lost their lives at Belleau Wood in World War I were “suckers” for getting killed.

Since Goldberg’s initial scoop, Kelly has confirmed all of this on the record (and others have affirmed that they heard similar comments as well). But Trump’s disgraces don’t end with his insults to the dead and their families: Kelly also confirmed The Atlantic’s reporting that Trump didn’t want to be seen at a military parade with wounded veterans, including amputees. Goldberg reported, in a separate article, that Trump objected to appearing at an event that featured a singing performance by a wounded warrior, Captain Luis Avila. “Why do you bring people like that here?” Trump said to Milley. “No one wants to see that, the wounded.” He then told Milley never to let Avila appear in public again. (When Milley retired, he invited Avila to sing at his farewell ceremony.) The writers Peter Baker and Susan Glasser, in their 2022 book, The Divider, relate a similar story: After seeing a Bastille Day parade in France in 2017, Trump told Kelly he wanted to stage a similar military parade, but without any wounded veterans. “I don’t want them,” Trump said. “It doesn’t look good for me.”

Trump followed his angry denials in Las Vegas with some burbling about Russia and Ukraine and hoaxes, and then added a direct appeal to U.S. servicepeople: “I hope the military revolts at the voting booth and just says, ‘We’re not gonna take it.’”

The political neutrality of America’s armed forces has been a sacred principle of civil-military relations in the United States since George Washington first took command of the embryonic Continental Army in 1775. (For years, many active-duty military officers, including Generals Dwight Eisenhower and George C. Marshall, have refused as a matter of principle even to vote.) And although politicians have often made promises to military families—better pay, living standards, equipment—none has asked for an electoral “revolt.”

When most Americans refer to “the military,” they mean the fellow citizens who have chosen to serve the nation. Trump wants to use “the military” to mean a coherent and tightly bound interest group of armed people that sees itself as distinct from American society and loyal, above all else, to Donald Trump. (Think of some of the late-20th-century Latin American militaries or the uniformed commissars of the former Soviet Union.)

Trump distrusts the senior officer corps even more deeply after the January 6 insurrection. As I wrote last winter, he felt that they thwarted his efforts to stay in power. He wants a “revolt” from his military that will empower him, as the 47th president, to purge the other military—the one loyal to the Constitution. Despite all of his hypocrisy about the U.S. armed forces, Trump is being up front about at least one thing: If he returns to the Oval Office, he intends to treat the men and women of the American military not as citizen-soldiers of a democracy but as an armed constituency that exists to serve only one man and his personal whims.

https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2024/06/trump-is-lying-to-the-us-military/678649/

[HungerMoon]

New get out and vote song from The Rainmakers and other Kansas City musicians, "Waiting on a Wave".

[drjohncarpenter]

No.

No.

YES.

[latebloomer]

Harris and Trump offer worlds-apart contrasts on top issues in presidential race

https://apnews.com/article/trump-harris-issue-positions-worlds-apart-3f80a342c790da64e3de92a4f5760991

Written on 18 August by The Associated Press, this is the best encapsulation of the positions of the two candidates and their Parties that I've read so far. It is not behind a paywall and so is available to all.

For general information: Many news sources rely heavily upon AP, https://apnews.com, for their news feed; Reuters, https://www.reuters.com, is probably about equally relied upon. Both are available for all to read, free, although access to Reuters' videos may require sign-in. For quick scans of what's happening in the world, they cannot be bested. Read beyond the "front page" and you'll find most topics of interest covered. Reuters, I think, maintains journalistic high-quality workmanship and balance better than anyone.

[drjohncarpenter]

Yup.