Saturday Report 11/2/24 - Did a demon attack Tucker or was it his......

The Best of the Rest of the News

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— Don’t despair! I’ve been saying for months that I believe this election is going to be a blowout for both Harris and Democrats generally, although the $6 billion or so and efforts in kind that rightwing billionaires, Israel, Putin, and Musk have thrown in on behalf of Trump and the GOP will make it a challenge. Particularly in the Senate. Yesterday’s stats from Pennsylvania’s early voting, however, are encouraging: Of the 1.62 million ballots returned, roughly 918,000 came from registered Democrats, 530,000 from registered Republicans, and 178,000 came from independents. Those numbers — realizing this is initial data and Republicans are more likely to show up on or closer to election day — are pretty impressive! And they don’t begin to measure the Republican-registered women who are crossing over to vote for Harris and other Democrats. After surveys showed that many women didn’t realize their vote is secret and can never be revealed to their husbands, the Harris campaign has released an ad pointing just that out; it’s infuriating Republican men and the male commentators at Fox “News,” including Jesse Watters who says that if his current wife did this it would be “disloyal,” (like when she and he had an affair while he was married to his first wife). None of this positive news should cause any of us to take a breath and slow down: we need to get every voter out there to the polls and keep up the pressure. But I continue to be very optimistic that I won’t be entering one of Trump’s concentration camps this next year…

— Last year Trump wanted General Milley put in front of a firing squad; now he’s saying that should happen to Liz Cheney. Do you still think he’s joking? At an event moderated by frozen fish heir Tucker Swanson Carlson, Trump said of former Congresswoman Liz Cheney: “Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with 9 barrels shooting at her. Let’s see how she feels about it. You know, when the guns are trained on her face.” This is an explicit death threat, a violation of federal law 18 U.S. Code § 373: Solicitation to commit a crime of violence. Where’s Merrick Garland when you need him? Hiding in the White House bunker?

— Crazy alert! Tucker says a demon attacked him while he was in bed with his wife and four dogs. While skeptical Republicans are trying to blame one of the dogs in the bed for the bloody claw marks Tuckums is telling us all about, I’m far more inclined to believe it was his wife, who’s probably voting for Kamala and knows her vote is secret…

— Europe’s Greens ask professional grifter Jill Stein to pull out of US election to prevent a Trump victory. Noting that the American Green Party is not affiliated with the rest of the world’s Greens (but instead has become a giant scam), the Green Parties of Germany, France, Denmark, Italy, the Netherlands, Ireland, Estonia, Belgium, Spain, Poland and Ukraine issued a joint statement saying: “We are clear that Kamala Harris is the only candidate who can block Donald Trump and his anti-democratic, authoritarian policies from the White House. Right now, the race for the White House is too close for comfort. We call on Jill Stein to withdraw from the race, and endorse Kamala Harris for the presidency of the United States.” Stein, of course, will do no such thing, even though she’s polling around 1 to 1.4 percent across all the battleground states. Instead, she’s happy to continue benefiting from rightwing billionaire money promoting her candidacy in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Arizona. America really needs to get rid of the damn Electoral College and bring in instant runoff voting so a real Green Party can emerge here.

— Texas Republicans Ted Cruz, Ken Paxton, and Greg Abbott just put another notch in their manly-man belts: An 18-year-old Texas woman died after being turned away from two hospitals for her miscarriage complications. This is the second Texas woman we know these men (and the six rightwing Catholics on the Supreme Court) murdered. As ProPublica wrote: “Nevaeh Crain was crying in pain, too weak to walk, blood staining her thighs. Feverish and vomiting the day of her baby shower, the 18-year-old had gone to two different emergency rooms within 12 hours, returning home each time worse than before. The first hospital diagnosed her with strep throat without investigating her sharp abdominal cramps. At the second, she screened positive for sepsis, a life-threatening and fast-moving reaction to an infection, medical records show. But doctors said her six-month fetus had a heartbeat and that Crain was fine to leave. Now on Crain’s third hospital visit, an obstetrician insisted on two ultrasounds to ‘confirm fetal demise,’ a nurse wrote, before moving her to intensive care. By then, more than two hours after her arrival, Crain’s blood pressure had plummeted and a nurse had noted that her lips were ‘blue and dusky.’ Her organs began failing. Hours later, she was dead.” Cruz, Paxton, and Abbott appear quite proud of themselves; this is the second dead Texas woman we know about, not to mention the 30,000-plus rape victims they’ve forced to carry their rapists’ babies to term and the thousands of women who’ll be scarred for life by their high-risk pregnancies. Meanwhile, in South Carolina Republicans are cheering the 22-day imprisonment of Amari Marsh, 23, a Black woman who miscarried before she even realized she was pregnant. Police arrested her and charged her with homicide, claiming that she didn’t do enough to prevent her miscarriage — which, again, happened before she even realized she was pregnant. When she got out of jail after more than three weeks, Marsh said, “When I was initially arrested, I thought it was a joke. I genuinely thought it was a joke because I had never been in trouble in my life. As I was sitting there, I couldn’t do nothing but cry.” John Roberts, Sam Alito, Clarence Thomas, Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch, and Donald Trump are all so very, very proud of themselves. Just ask them.

— WTF? Our National Archives are removing displays and information about MLK, Native Americans, the Holocaust, the Civil Rights movement, unions, birth control, and the American internment of Japanese during WWII because it may upset Republican legislators. When US Archivist Colleen Shogan was grilled by the Senate during her confirmation, neofascist Josh Hawley called her a Democratic “extremist” and warned her that he and other Republicans “would be watching closely for signs that she was pulling the independent agency to the left.” Looks like this effort to “work the refs” is succeeding. Most recently, a photo of Martin Luther King Jr. was replaced by a picture of Richard Nixon meeting Elvis Presley, pictures of the camps where we interred Japanese-ancestry US citizens were taken down, references to the coal industry causing environmental hazards were removed, and Shogan “also ordered the removal of labor-union pioneer Dolores Huerta and Minnie Spotted-Wolf, the first Native American woman to join the Marine Corps, from the photo booth, according to current and former employees and agency documents.” They even removed a picture of Republican President Jerry Ford’s wife Betty because she was wearing an Equal Rights Amendment button, and in the display of “patents that changed the world” the birth control pill was replaced with the bump stock that turns semi-automatic weapons into functionally fully-automatic machine guns. This “obeying fascists in advance” is beyond the pale, and hopefully now that it’s getting some publicity Shogan will reconsider bowing to the GOP’s white supremacist base.

— Georgia official warns of Russian interference in this year’s election. Over on Elon Musk’s cesspool Xitter, a Russian-produced phony video purports to show Black Haitian immigrants showing off multiple fake IDs and claiming they voted in multiple Georgia counties on multiple occasions. It’s gone completely viral among rightwingers with a apparent big push from Xitter’s secret algorithm. Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (pronounced “Raff-ens-purger,” and he’s purged over a million voters from Georgia’s rolls so far) called a press conference to say: “Earlier today, our office became aware of a video purporting to show a Haitian immigrant with multiple Georgia ID's claiming to have voted multiple times. This is false, and is an example of targeted disinformation we’ve seen this election. It is likely foreign interference attempting to sow discord and chaos on the eve of the election.” The feds have since confirmed it is from Russia. Meanwhile, Rudy Giuliani is saying the quiet part out loud, echoing the sentiments of the racists who make up the base of the GOP. Speaking of the Black Haitian immigrants working legally in Springfield, Ohio, the former senior Trump aide said: “It’s not their fault. They live back 200 years ago. They just shouldn’t have been taken out of the jungle and placed in the middle of small town America. That’s ridiculous. Or big town America, for that matter.” Meanwhile, Rudy’s refusing to cooperate with efforts to transfer his assets to the two Black Georgia poll workers he defamed, even though he’s been ordered to do so by a court. This isn’t going to end well for New York’s former mayor.

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