Saturday Report 9/14/24 - Will Trump’s people embedded in our election systems disrupt this year’s vote?

The Best of the Rest of the News

— Will Trump’s people embedded in our election systems disrupt this year’s vote? According to a new report from the Center for Media and Democracy, it sure looks like they’re going to try. Under the 12th Amendment, if no candidate can get to a majority of the electoral college votes (a plurality doesn’t work), then the election gets thrown to the House of Representatives, where each state gets one vote. With 26 Republican-controlled states — the result of years of efforts by rightwing media and think tanks to flip rural states where it’s cheap to buy radio/TV stations and run advertising — the vote in the House would definitely go for Trump. So their plan is to so screw things up, mostly by refusing to certify votes or claim “irregularities,” that the vote will ultimately end up being handled by now-Speaker Mike Johnson, the guy who literally led the election deniers coup attempt on January 6th. CMD reports that Trump partisans who dishonestly claim the election was stolen from him in 2020 now have the power to disrupt elections in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. There are, in those states alone, 50 deniers running for Congress, 81 deniers running local GOP groups, six running for statewide offices, and 102 who are now members of state or county election boards. All have supported Trump’s efforts to end democracy in America; some even participated in the coup attempt on January 6th. They frankly laugh at the disapprobation of America. Keep an eye on this; if/when Trump loses on November 5th, the fireworks will really begin, with Roger Stone — who orchestrated the successful “stop the steal” effort in Florida in 2000 that put Bush into the White House even though Gore won the state and the national vote — running the program again this year. It could be a real mess, and many Republicans are now planning for violence and even advocating outright bloodshed in a second Civil War.

— Conservative billionaire Leonard Leo announces his plan to “crush” liberals. Beware of smarmy, unctuous men who claim to be Christians but push policies Jesus would have rejected. After a billionaire left $1.6 billion to Leo (the man most responsible for packing the Supreme Court and Federal judiciary), he’s now saying he’s using the money to build out an even more robust network to spread rightwing “news” and opinion while attacking any companies who make any good-faith efforts to hire Black, Hispanic, female, or queer employees. As I noted yesterday, Leo, consumed by proud loquacity, told The Financial Times: “We need to crush liberal dominance where it’s most insidious, so we’ll direct resources to build talent and capital formation pipelines in the areas of news and entertainment, where leftwing extremism is most evident. ... Expect us to increase support for organizations that call out companies and financial institutions that bend to the woke mind virus spread by regulators and NGOs, so that they have to pay a price for putting extreme leftwing ideology ahead of consumers.” If he follows through — and he has a history of doing so and being effective at it (just look at our court system) — things could get really, really ugly for a new Harris/Walz administration.

— Germany talks back to Trump’s debate lies. You’ll recall that during the debate with Kamala Harris, Trump told her, “You believe in things that the American people don’t believe in. You believe in things like, ‘We’re not going to frack. We’re not going to take fossil fuel. We’re not going to do, things that are going to make this country strong, whether you like it or not.’ Germany tried that and within one year they were back to building normal energy plants.” As usual, Trump was lying. And the German government had enough of it. Their Foreign Ministry — the equivalent of our State Department — issued an official statement on Xitter not only rebutting Trump’s claim but then ridiculing the orange clown for his absurd and racist claim about immigrants eating pets: “Like it or not: Germany’s energy system is fully operational, with more than 50% renewables. And we are shutting down—not building—coal and nuclear plants. Coal will be off the grid by 2038 at the latest. PS: We also don't eat cats and dogs.” So far this year, in fact, over 60 percent of Germany’s total energy production came from renewables. We are way, way behind! And BS rhetoric like that coming from Trump and the fossil fuel billionaires who own the GOP doesn’t help.  

— Should we unleash Ukraine? The latest saber-rattling from Putin suggests he may do some unspecified terrible thing if we allow Ukraine to use our weapons to strike inside Russia. Let’s be clear. This is a war of aggression, the first time a nation has attacked a European country and tried to seize it since Hitler’s era, and it was entirely Putin’s idea. He started it. And now he’s trying to imply he’ll use nukes to stop Ukraine from defending themselves. This has predictably triggered the tankies on the left and the Putin-lovers on the right. But rational observers, like Lucian K. Truscott IV, are pushing back. As Truscott noted in his excellent Substack newsletter yesterday, calling out Putin’s threat: “It’s bullshit.  If Russia used battlefield tactical nuclear weapons against Ukraine, Russian forces would suffer an immediate overwhelming NATO conventional response that would wipe out the entire Russian military presence in eastern and southern Ukraine.  Vladimir Putin knows this as well as he knows the name of the current mistress he has squirrelled away in his 200,000 square foot $1.4 billion palace that he had built on the coast of Crimea.” I couldn’t have said it better myself. The US and UK need to authorize the use of our weaponry before Putin succeeds in destroying this country that’s the size of Texas and has 38 million residents who are facing a brutal winter with half the country’s power infrastructure already destroyed.

— Trump and Vance are trying to make political hay out of the death of an 11-year-old boy, and his parents are having none of it. Aiden Clark, 11, was killed when his school bus was accidentally hit by a car driven by a Haitian immigrant in Springfield, Ohio, the town where Trump and Vance falsely claim immigrants are eating pets. Republicans have been calling it a “murder” by the “Black illegals” (the Haitian immigrants in Springfield are all legal with green cards) and Aiden’s father, Nathan Clark, spoke at a public event this week, saying: “The last thing that we need is to have the worst day of our lives violently and constantly shoved in our faces. But even that’s not good enough for them. They take it one step further. They make it seem as though our wonderful Aiden appreciates your hate. That we should follow their hate. And look what you’ve done to us? We have to get up here and beg them to stop. Using Aiden as a political tool is, to say the least, reprehensible for any political purpose. And speaking of morally bankrupt politicians, Bernie Moreno, Chip Roy, JD Vance, and Donald Trump, they have spoken my son’s name and use his death for political gain. This needs to stop now. They can vomit all the hate they want about illegal immigrants, the border crisis, and even untrue claims about fluffy pets being ravaged and eaten by community members. However, they are not allowed, nor have they ever been allowed, to mention Aiden Clark from Springfield, Ohio.” As attorney Joseph Welch said to Republican Senator Joe McCarthy when that fetid excuse for a human was trying to trash an Army veteran, “Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness. Let us not assassinate this lad further, senator. You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency?” Decency is not a word, tragically, that can be applied to Trump, Vance, or any of the Republicans who empower them and grovel at their feet.

— Senate Budget Chair Ron Wyden says the uber-wealthy are dodging over a trillion dollars in taxes every decade, enough to make Social Security solvent forever. The subject came up at a recent hearing on the fate and future of the entitlement program. Right now, if you make more than $168,600 you no longer pay a penny into the Social Security trust fund, enabling wealthy people to avoid the tax and stressing the program. It’s crazy that it was ever even set up this way, but that was part of the compromise FDR had to make to get the law passed; it’s now time to lift the cap so billionaires pay the same percentage of their income as bus drivers.

— Crazy Alert! Donald Trump brought a 9/11 truther and self-proclaimed white nationalist conspiracy theorist to a 9/11 memorial event — and the media yawned. Trump brought Laura Loomer, who says 9/11 was an inside job perpetrated by our own government, to the 9/11 memorial event in New York this past week. Our nation’s corporate media has almost entirely ignored the story. As if they’d do the same for Harris or Walz? Over at his excellent Substack newsletter The Garden of Forking Paths, Brian Klass refers to it as “the banality of crazy,” echoing Hannah Arendt’s famous “banality of evil” essay on Adolf Eichmann. Perfect. Meanwhile, numerous commentators including Steve Schmidt are speculating that Trump is actually having an affair with Loomer, which is why Marjorie Taylor Greene is so angry with her. It makes sense: he’s already had several affairs since he’s been married to Melania, one of which led to his prosecution in New York…

— Wisdom School Alert: The Amnesia of Healing. Our minds are miraculous things, and can heal from injury just like our skin and bones…

The Amnesia of Healing

— Hunter in a Farmer’s World Alert: Are people with ADHD carrying genes that insured survival in earlier times?

Are ADHD Characteristics Leftover Hunter Genes?

— Herbs to take on viruses! As a former student of herbal medicine, I was delighted and fascinated to see Jessica Wildfire summarize some great plant-based remedies for viral infections at her OK Doomer newsletter. You can check it out here.