8 thoughts on “Traveling”

1. Happy travels, congrats to the married-to-be, and huge props for managing a post via Kindle!

2. Safe travels.  Just a random thought after looking at this morning's headlines; Bozos seems inclined to do for WaPo what Leon has done for Twitter (WaPo declines to endorse a candidate).  Any editors spending the weekend cleaning out their desks?

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3. How bad is it?  If Trump was your grandfather, you would hide the keys to the car and avoid taking him out in public without his medication.  He is still on his windmill rant, and thinks windmills drive whales crazy so they beach themselves.  At least he is off the flush toilet rant, or we hope he is anyway.  His love of tariffs is another more serious matter.  The bottom line on that is most will pay more for everyday items.  No one needs that.  The Chancellor of Germany has already signaled retaliation if tariffs are put on them.  That sounds like trade war talk, another thing we do not want or need.  

   The Wall Street Journal did a survey of economists who forecast great economic risk and potential peril if Trump's economic plans were enacted.  The WSJ is not considered liberal with views generally biased toward business.  Center to their assessment is the tariff issue.  Still Trump show no heed to their warnings and has called tariff one of his favorite words in the dictionary.  Most writers report he lacks the ability to even come close to an acceptable definition of the word.  Does he like it because it ends in two fs?

   I had to hear quite a bit when growing up about the dirty thirties and the Great Depression.  It was quite the life event for my parents and their families.  Almost everyone had less and most endured considerable hardship that went on and on.  No one needs or wants that either.  A working economy is breakable.  It has been done before.

   The big reason I am writing this is so I can say I tried to tell them, but they did not listen.  I don't want to have to say I told you so.  I don't need it.  I don't want it.  So, hide the keys and send grandfather to the facility that he needs for his "golden years".  It is for your good and the good of your country.  Not fit to lead is not that hard to understand.  Trump would understand it if it was anyone but him. It is that simple.

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4. A few thoughts: One – The polls do not agree with my gut, but of course my instincts are colored by my bias. But one thought reassures me. Polls reflect the answers of "likely" voters. The definition of "likely" is (I think) someone who has voted in at least one of the last two national elections. Which means all new registrations are culled out. All occasional voters who only vote when a candidate excites them or there's an issue of  crucial inportance to the voter. 

   The only poll that matters is in November. By excluding less reliable voters, we're tied in most of the swing states. But are the democrats going to do a better job with "unlikely" voters than MAGA is. If so, by how much.

   My gut says the polls are not counting a significant portion of Harris voters. But I can't put a numerical value to the skew. 

   Two. The Washington Post and the LA Times are not endorsing a candidate for POTUS – ONLY because of the intervention of the owner of each. In my mind, this settles the question of whether or not there is an anti-liberal bias in all major publications. The editor(s) and writers must be aware that the truth has to be couched in bothsiderism to avoid retaliation from on high. For decades, the drection of all publications has been to cut staff. The sword of Damocles hands over everyone in the business and invoking the wratth from on high is likely a career-ender.

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5. The whole Tariff thing from TruVanThiel is a scam.  The top 1% have long coveted replacing the progressive income tax with a flat (and therefore regressive) sales tax.

   A tariff is a tax. TFG started by implying that foreign countries pay tariffs, and that is total BS. Yet his followers now think it will be great to have huge tariffs so that other countries can pay down our national debt.  Bullpucky. US Tariffs are paid by US consumers (indirectly, but nonetheless).  Put that together with another huge income tax cut for billionaires and it's easy to see what's going on. 
   This combination is a stealth way to implement a massive transfer of the cost of our government from the wealthy to the working class. Period. Total Scam.

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   • Tariffs could work if the ‘indirect taxes’ extracted only went into reinvesting in our own businesses for the purpose of enhancing the value and quality of our products.  But today’s plutocratic economics doesn’t work that way.  The money goes into buying back shares, paying off top management and investors, and bribing government officials.

     Tariffs could also work if they targeted extranational businesses which aren’t playing by fair competition rules, to try and keep them in line.  But today’s plutocratic economics doesn’t work that way either.  “Our companies” profits are increasingly generated by employing greedflation, cutting staff well past the productivity sweet spot, and automating or offshoring jobs and tech.  Seems the wrong guys are getting punished.  I mean, how are we supposed to tariff our own who’re having all their stuff designed and built overseas?

     IOW, yeah.  Come to think about it, Trump Tariffs is a scam.  I’d rather buy Trump Trading Cards, the ones that come with a bonus MAGA cap and decoder ring.  At least I'm getting something back.

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6. Peter Baker wrote a powerful piece for the NYT today.  Well referenced and supported it examined critically the contention that Trump is a fascist.  The following quote I found shocking, and the supporting link even more so:

   After Mr. Trump lost the election to Mr. Biden later that year, a pivotal moment arrived when Michael T. Flynn, a retired lieutenant general and Mr. Trump’s first national security adviser, recommended the president declare a form of martial law by ordering the military to seize voting machines and rerun the election in states he lost.

   Flynn received a Trump pardon.  

   The supporting link is authored by Robert Draper and is entitled Michael Flynn is Still at War.  Here is a sample and the link is below.  A podcast is available.  

   At the time Trump announced the pardon, Flynn was encamped at the historic Tomotley estate in South Carolina, a more-than-700-acre former plantation dating back to the 17th century, where enslaved people harvested rice until much of the property was destroyed by federal troops at the close of the Civil War. Tomotley now belonged to L. Lin Wood, the Trump-supporting defamation lawyer who sued Georgia election officials over the state’s 2020 election results showing a Biden victory and predicted that the state’s Republican governor and secretary of state “will soon be going to jail.” (One of his suits was later dismissed; another is pending.) Though the next day would be Thanksgiving, Flynn had not brought his family with him. He had flown to South Carolina on the private jet of the former Overstock chief executive Patrick Byrne and set up camp at Tomotley, where he threw himself into the project of reversing the results of the election Trump had just lost.

   The president and his loyalists, together and independently, had been working toward this end in various ways since Election Day. Byrne told me that he and Flynn’s attorney, Sidney Powell, met with Trump’s legal adviser Rudy Giuliani in Arlington, Va., shortly after the election to offer their assistance. Through Powell, Flynn soon became part of the group as well. Byrne said he had rented several rooms at the Trump Hotel for a few months — paying a full rack rate of about $800,000 — which he, Flynn, Powell and others would move in and out of. Byrne considered the hotel “the safest place in D.C. for a command bunker.” But Flynn suggested that they also establish a separate working area far from the Beltway. Powell contacted Wood, who agreed to host them at his secluded estate. As the group began to assemble in mid-November, Wood told me that he was surprised and “honored” to discover that Flynn, whom he had never met, was among his guests.

   Powell had brought along two law associates. The other guests were there to gather and organize election information alongside her and Flynn. Among these was Seth Keshel, a 36-year-old former Army military intelligence captain who told me he got Flynn’s attention three weeks earlier by sending what he believed were suspicious election data to Flynn’s LinkedIn page. Another, Jim Penrose, was a cybersecurity specialist who had worked for the National Security Agency. A third, Doug Logan, was an associate of Byrne and the chief executive of a Florida-based software-security firm called Cyber Ninjas. (Powell, Penrose and Logan did not respond to requests for comment.) Wood and Byrne said the group had brought computers, printers and whiteboards. “It looked like Election Central,” Wood recalled.

   This is just the beginning of quite a long article.  It inspired a comment:

   As someone who served in the U.S.A.F. in military intelligence, I find General Flynn’s conduct offensive and fitting the definition of seditious conspiracy, even if only one quarter of what is reported here is true (and I believe that the overwhelming majority this reporting is true). General Flynn’s actions concerning the 2020 Presidential Election represent a stain on the honor of those of us who served in the military protecting our freedoms. General Flynn should be accorded his right to Freedom of Speech, but that right ended when he got involved in conspiring to overturn the 2020 Election through non-legal means. Mr. Trump had his numerous days in Court, and failed each time. Continuing on with this represents a direct threat to our system of laws.

   ASPruyn of California is the author of this comment, written in 2022.

   The NYT gets credit for running this and backing Harris.  The WP and the LA Times totally dropped, fumbled, and have continued to shame the fourth estate. 

   It appears the owners are to blame.  Totally shameful for those who gained so much from this country to stab Uncle Sam in the back.

   Michael Flynn Is Still at War – The New York Times 

   Amid Talk of Fascism, Trump’s Threats and Language Evoke a Grim Past – The New York Times

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7. Been watching the world series, Stump is running his "gender change surgery for federal prisoners" ad in heavy rotation it's a horrible but effective ad for low info homophobe types. My wife said "hey I guess that is all they got". Anyway Harris is running ads on the world series too but not as many and really not going after Stump. I've seen a bunch of her ads and have yet to see any of them tie him to the J6 riot. There is so much footage of those horrible magats beating up cops at Stumps direction it seems like political campaign malpractice not to use it in tee-vee ads. That has always been my problem with democrats, they don't know how to fight back, taking the high road against Stump is a huge mistake. There is video J6 violence and of Stump paling around with that creep Jeffry Epstein, there are statistics showing the economy and the markets crashing, high unemployment at the end of his presidency use it already before it's too god damn late.

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