Saturday Report 8/31/24 - The “Other Project 2025”

The Best of the Rest of the News

— For fans of Ali Velshi’s brilliant weekend show on MSNBC, internet gods permitting, I’ll be on with him at 11:45 AM Eastern time tomorrow.

— The “Other Project 2025.” The Heritage Foundation’s notorious effort to radically transform America by undoing FDR’s New Deal, LBJ’s Great Society, and the gains made by President Biden in the past three-plus years has become so well known, and thus so toxic, that Trump himself is backing away from it (even though over 140 of his former administration staffers and cabinet members helped put it together). Not to worry for rightwing world, though; with some overlap, another group, just formed three years ago, has their own 250-page blueprint to turn America into a fascist state. The America First Policy Institute has, like America First Legal, borrowed the notorious “America First” phrase from the actual Nazis who formed and ran it back in the 1940s and is positioning itself as the new leader of the Trump transition, should he win the White House this fall. Their agenda apparently includes gutting protective regulations and the agencies that enforce them, stepping up the production and use of fossil fuels, killing off programs to reduce the impact of climate change, and expanding the role of police in everything from our bedrooms to our schools to keeping an eye out for people who disagree with the new Trump administration. So far, AFPI has largely flown under the radar, but they’re definitely worth keeping an eye on as they appear to have major funding from rightwing billionaires (they don’t disclose their donors) and are well-stocked with Trump alumni.

— Trump is promoting a street-sign campaign by a notorious racist who goes by the name “Sabo.” The racist recently said on his YouTube channel, “If a civil war breaks out and the fucking Guatemalans and Ecuadorians are like coming over the fence and stuff like that, it is straight up target practice” and has put up street signs around Denver that look like they’re official. The signs include “BLACKS MUST SIT AT THE BACK OF THE BUS: KAMALA’S MIGRANTS SIT IN THE FRONT” and a street-crossing caution sign saying, “KAMALA’S ILLEGALS [CROSSING].” Trump reposted a tweet from the notoriously racist and hateful “Libs of TikTok” account promoting the signs. But that’s just the beginning of the bizarre and hate-filled posts he’s made this past week to his failing vanity social media site. Others include verbatim posts of Qanon slogans, a disgusting and misogynist meme saying that Harris and Clinton got their political positions by giving “blowjobs” to men in power, and threats to imprison his critics and Democrats if he becomes president. Curiously, while the media is all over Tim Walz having said, way back in 2019 in a rant after a school shooting, that we shouldn’t have weapons on our streets “like I carried to war” when he meant “like I carried in the military,” (see the pathetic Dana Bash interview on CNN), they appear to have little to no interest in what Trump is daily saying to his most fervent and violent followers. Apparently that might hurt Trump electorally and thus dial back the neck-and-neck horse-race, which they see as necessary to keep high levels of viewer and reader engagement so people will see more of their advertising. Putting money and fame above country is nothing new; it goes all the way back to Benedict Arnold…

— “The bullying needs to stop.” That was the plea from former 2007 Miss South Carolina Teen USA beauty pageant contestant Caitlin Upton when Senator JD Vance posted a video clip of her struggling to answer a political question as a way of attempting to ridicule Vice President Harris. Upton was so devastated by the ridicule she received when she flubbed the question on television in 2007 that she later wrote that she contemplated suicide. When a reporter asked Vance if he wanted to apologize to her for amplifying her painful and mortifying moment to a worldwide audience again this week, he snarled, “I’m not going to apologize…” For her part, Upton took the high road, telling her followers on Xitter (and then deleting her account when the hateful blowback from Trump’s fascist legions began): “It’s a shame that 17 years later this is still being brought up. There’s not too much else to say about it at this point. Regardless of political beliefs, one thing I do know is that social media and online bullying needs to stop.” Amen. Although the cardinal characteristic of fascism is the use of bullying and violence to cow and intimidate political opposition; the only way America is going to turn the page on this past decade of Trump’s hate and violence is to so overwhelmingly defeat him and his fascist followers that their movement dies like Gerald LK Smith’s and Joe McCarty’s did in the 1950s. That day can’t come soon enough.

— CNN shows everything that’s wrong with 2024’s repeat of 2016’s election coverage. In an interview with Vice President Harris and Governor Walz Thursday night, CNN’s Dana Bash chose to repeat pathetic rightwing attacks on the candidates instead of engaging in issues of importance to a majority of Americans. Only four of the questions she asked during the entire interview were not rightwing talking points. She could have asked about their pledge to protect Social Security and Medicare after Trump proposed cuts to both programs every year for his 4 years in office, or the 90% of Americans who want weapons of war off our streets, or their efforts to revive labor unions in the face of GOP opposition, or how they feel about Republicans on the Supreme Court thwarting Biden’s efforts to cut student loan debt, or what they’d do about the severe ethics problem with bribed Supreme Court justices Alito, Roberts, and Thomas, or their support for the queer community in the face of unrelenting attacks by JD Vance and other rightwingers, but, no. Instead, she had to ask about a one-word misspeak by Walz five years ago, whether Harris identified as Black or Indian or what, and why Walz implicitly lied when he said he and his wife had undergone “IVF” treatment for infertility when, in fact, they’d undergone the similar “IUI” treatment. As if anybody, anywhere, gives a damn. Probably the best analysis of the interview is here on Substack by Jeff Teidrich. Meanwhile, CNN’s management is ebullient about having pulled in a “whopping 6 million viewers.” Like I said, money over country…

— Why aren’t the Department of Defense or the Department of Justice seeking criminal assault and trespass charges against the Trump staffers who assaulted an Arlington National Cemetery employee and then proceeded to use gravestones as end-tables and campaign props? And what about House Speaker and notorious white supremacist christian nationalist Mike Johnson’s role in setting the entire thing up in the first place? If the SecDef and AG are too timid, the Senate should convene a hearing next Tuesday to look into this desecration of America’s most sacred ground. Veterans and veterans’ groups of all stripes are outraged, and the groundswell is growing. Democratic senators, grow a spine!

— Hunter in a Farmer’s World Alert: How to deal with the problem of time.

ADHD: Is the Future a Mushy Haze? Pretend “Then” is “Now”!

— Wisdom School Alert: Are you reaching the happiness available to you?

Are You In the “Having Mode” or the “Being Mode?”