Final Arguments

Early voting is going strong, and we’re only eight days from Election Day (as of this writing), so we’re down to the nitty-gritty. Several weeks ago, I voted via drop-off box and have been notified that my vote has been counted. That’s how it works in a state where they want everyone to vote.

If you’re reading this now, you’re probably not in need of persuasion to vote a straight blue ticket, but it will make me feel better if I can provide some hardcore truths about this race. Maybe it will help if you convince someone you know who is undecided and uninformed.

·         TFG is a hypocrite who criticizes his opponents for things he does himself all the time.

·    The Republican candidate lies like it’s his job. They reported that he unleashed over 30,000 lies during his administration and probably 30,000 more in the following years. Some of them cost people their lives, during the COVID crisis and January 6th. Others are just his way of doing business.

·       TFG and his people have unleashed the most terrifying plan for the country since it began, one that will lead to the disenfranchisement of millions, separation of families, consolidation of power and capital under a small cluster of rich white men, and the effective end of the republic, and the plan is called Project 2025.

·       The orange phony is the least intelligent, least qualified, least curious person to ever seek or hold this office. It’s rich that he and his people call his opponent stupid. Listen to each of them speak for a minute or so and it’s clear who is smart and who is an ass-clown with the 4^th-grade vocabulary. Forty out of forty-four of his own former cabinet members plus his Vice President think he’s unqualified for the job and a danger to the country and have said so in public. That is unheard of in modern politics.

·       He intends to empower those who would devalue and enslave women, treating them as breeding property rather than sentient, self-determining beings, under the myth that they are preserving “life.” They preach “small government,” but their idea of government reaches into your bedroom and even your uterus. His people (and judges) are also coming for birth control, same-sex marriage, and possibly women’s suffrage.

·       Dolt 45 has no plan to bring down inflation. His two plans of action, levying wide tariffs and deporting immigrants would cause prices to soar. VP Harris supports a plan to fight price gouging and he and the rest of the Republicans went crazy fighting it, as they do any plan that helps average Americans. Big-moneyed Republican donors want high prices and low wages. That’s the best-case scenario for “them,” and not “us.”

·       TFG and his enablers are already planning on how to steal the election. He will claim victory on Election Night and set loose an army of lawyers and hooligans to intimidate election workers and state government officials. They’re not even trying to hide it anymore. Maryland’s lone GOP US Representative thinks they should award TFG some North Carolina Electoral College votes before the election because a hurricane might have made it hard for his supporters to vote.

·       He is in bed with the worst kind of people, white supremacists, Christian nationalists, racists, sexists, and many other “ists.” These are people interested in keeping governmental (and monetary control with wealthy, white, (pseudo)Christian, males. The racism isn’t even hidden anymore. Did you see his show at MSG? The racism was the marquee event.

·       TFG desperately wants the Religious Right’s votes but doesn’t give a fig about what they stand for. And now, neither do they. Republicans have managed to turn people who worship a man who preached about accepting foreigners, not throwing stones, giving money to the poor, and not judging, into supporting a party that practices the antithesis of every one of those points.

·       I would vote for a brick before this guy because a brick would do less damage to the nation. Luckily we can vote for a highly qualified, smart, tough, empathetic woman instead. She makes lucid points, speaks in complete sentences, has tangible plans for the country which are easy to locate, and that’s a very low bar that the other guy can’t even think of getting under. In any rational culture, she’d be polling at 90%. If you’re rich, racist, sexist, homophobic, evangelical, or nationalist, vote Republican. If not, there’s only one sane alternative.

Director’s DVD commentary: These are only the first points off the top of my head. There are dozens of other reasons why he shouldn’t be president, like sexual harassment and rape charges/convictions, hush money, business fraud, being a Russian operative/stooge, leaking security secrets, blackmailing other countries for personal gain, violating the Emoluments Clause, raking in taxpayer dollars by staying at his own properties and charging the government for his staff and security detail to stay there, and… well, it never ends. But this post has to.

Identifying a Hit Piece

Mainstream media is letting the country down in a big way, by abandoning their traditional roles of truth-tellers in favor of exhibiting favoritism. And I don’t mean leaning one way or another in editorials; I mean writing most stories (outside the sports page) with bias, either cheerleading or condemning as their side would have it.

The most obvious symptom is the sanewashing of TFG, whose daily ravings get reformatted by news editors into something that might make sense. Offensive or off-putting material is ignored or translated, leaving readers and viewers with a vastly different view from what was actually said.

Just over the weekend, TFG decided to make the late Arnie Palmer’s dick into headline news. Sure, we’ve all heard about it not, but not until after the New York Times posted about the appearance and cleaned up the reference, before indirectly mentioning the reference, before the leaked word of mouth eventually caused them to report on what was said. In other words, they had to be dragged into doing their jobs.

This is going on with multiple media outlets day after day. If any one of these word salad ramblings had come from the President or Vice President, it would have been the top story for several news cycles. But because A) they want a horserace and B) the ownership and publishers want their thumb on the scale for the Republicans (which benefits their massive corporate operations) they reshape the news to deprive independent and undecided people of information that may influence them to vote Democratic.

I have another example from the front page of Saturday’s Baltimore Sun. While it’s not focusing on the presidential race, it’s taking shots at the sitting Democratic governor, Wes Moore and it uses many of the same biased techniques we find in the presidential coverage.

You know it’s going to be a hit piece when Fox 45 appears in the byline. They’re a local Fox affiliate that specializes in ambush TV journalism, popping up out of nowhere to pepper local pols with questions while on their way to their cars and then running the most flustered responses.

The point of the article is that Governor Moore is out campaigning while juvenile crime happens.

This is a classic construction, “How can they do ‘this’ while ‘this other thing’ is happening? The details don’t matter, you can fill in the blanks. It’s like, “How can we send money to Ukraine while there are homeless veterans? or How can you talk about mass transit when housing prices are so high?” The answer is usually, “We can do two things at once,” but that seems to be beyond the reach of these “content providers.”

No public official actively works on a single problem 24/7/365. And solving “youth crime” is like solving homelessness or poverty. It ain’t happening by anyone any time soon. And it’s not like there wasn’t youth crime during the previous (Republican) administration. Youth crime doesn’t get solved until there are enough other ways to make enough money to compete with gang or drug life. These guys aren’t going to start working at Arby’s or picking crabs down on the shore, so any solution would need to be massive and grassroots, just like the kind of proposal Republicans always shoot down as too expensive. But that former governor is running for Senator so they want to dirty up his Democratic successor.

So it goes on to say that the Governor’s Administration “broke its silence” on the issue. Watch out for that phrase wherever you see it. That is almost always a false construction. Breaking one’s silence assumes there is an actual, willful silence to begin with, which is different than merely not having said anything yet. I’m just “breaking my silence” on youth crime today. Did I have a silence before? Nope, I just haven’t talked about it yet. If anyone would have asked earlier, I’d have been happy to discuss it. It’s hardly a groundbreaking event.

So, where is the Administration’s statement? We don’t know yet. Next, they go to some critic who wants to add his own two cents. This guy, they breathlessly point out, is a Democrat who wants to speak negatively on the subject. All the complaining and snide inferences are on the front page column. The Governor’s actual statement is buried on the last page of the front section, after the furniture ads.

This is what the media has come to. As a former J-school student, I’m pained by what passes for news coverage today. Unfortunately, I don’t see it improving in the near or distant future. Like almost every other commodity in the 2000s, the news is monetized to the max. There is no point if it doesn’t make money or accumulate power. And with the continued contraction of every industry into no more than several major players, all the news will be bent, folded, spindled, and mutilated to convince you that what’s best for the biggest corporations just happens to be the same as what’s best for you.

It’s just that they’ll be raking in the money and we won’t.

The Price of Admission

What amazes me about the MAGA movement is how they got 40% of the population to believe in verifiable nonsense. I mean, if you don’t tow the Company Line on whatever their leadership spouts off on a given day, you’re out of the club. Look what they make you believe:

Donald Trump won the 2020 election and the January 6^th gathering was a peaceful meeting of civic-minded citizens who merely wanted to support the president. Yes, despite 60 failed court cases, reams of evidence produced before Congress, and our own eyes that saw the violence and damage done live on TV, they still think that somehow evil Democrats skewed the election results across a dozen states including those run by Republicans, left no evidence, and didn’t bother to include Democratic Congressional or Gubernatorial races. No sane person can believe that, putting this article of faith on par with turning water into Jack Daniels.

Democrats can and do control the weather so that hurricanes are sent to red states. I never thought this would get picked up by the MAGAs and Q-tards (because it wasn’t TFG who said it) but there it was last week on my Facebook feed; a bunch of conspiracy drivel forwarded from a MAGA acquaintance, crowing about how this was just proven correct (and naturally all their other batshit theories were correct too). MT Greene needs to take a refresher high school science class before she is allowed back into the Capitol. Or to stand in front of a microphone.

Republicans only push for voter ID to safeguard elections. Yes, for themselves. This would only be plausible if they weren’t using what the North Carolina State Supreme Court described as “surgical precision” to limit acceptable forms of ID that their opponents were deemed least likely to have. But they were, as their internal emails to each other described in detail.

Republicans are better for the economy than Democrats. This is false now and has been since the 60s. Every spike in our economic numbers has come after a Democratic administration stepped in to fix a Recession left by Republicans. Right now, inflation is down, Wall Street is hitting record numbers every other week, joblessness is down, and wages are up. Unfortunately, price gouging is still up, given the recent record corporate profits. When the Dems proposed limits on price gouging, Republicans went nuts fighting against it. Why do you think that is? It’s because their benefactors are the ones doing the gouging. Letting them back in charge of the economy only guarantees that the gouging continues.

JD Vance had a chance recently to address the insane cost of child care by offering a Republican plan:

Republicans have no plan to reduce the cost of child care, housing, groceries, or anything else.

Immigrants are criminals. It doesn’t really matter to Republicans if immigrants are legal or not; they don’t want the brown ones around. So whenever an immigrant commits some terrible crime, it’s trumpeted all over the right-wing media echo chamber, while dozens of similar crimes committed by dumbass white men aren’t addressed at all. They’re all about demonizing immigrants even though statistics show that they are far less likely to commit crimes here than the natives. It’s like they’re fighting for our rights to only be killed by white American men.

They had a chance to address immigration in a real way but torpedoed that in favor of bitching about the status quo as a campaign issue. This daily comic from last week’s paper nailed it completely:

So does this one:

Democrats are controlled by billionaire George Soros, who they say bankrolls every group and social justice program they don’t like. Republicans have dozens, if not hundreds of Soroses bankrolling everything they do, from creating disinformation campaigns to buying Supreme Court judgeships. Those who fund the Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society are far more threatening to the union than a single do-gooder whose money is spent on issues that may end up costing him money from his fortune. The difference is that he does it for the benefit of society and these other rich fucks do it to increase and safeguard their own fortunes. I saw this in the paper last week and included it here for one reason; the best F.U. I’ve seen in print in years.

This is another Baltimore Sun article provided by Fox 45/Sinclair Broadcasting. They’re trying to do a hit piece on Soros and whatever group he’s bankrolling here. I don’t really care about that, but look what the group’s spokesman told the reporter: “Sinclair is not a serious media organization…I am only choosing to engage you because I wanted you to know directly how little regard I have for you all professionally.”

Game, set, match.

The “liberal media” is still a thing. After all the mergers and takeovers left the nation’s media in the hands of only a few giant corporate entities, the notion that the media skews liberal is laughable. Just look at how TFG is covered. No one is even touching on the dangerous drivel that comes out of his pursed mouth. They call it sanewashing now, as in leaving out the more bizarre and threatening language and printing what they think he means. There are no doubt still some liberal reporters and writers, but the direction of newspapers and newsrooms is determined far above the reporter position, in the boardroom. They order the direction and it’s up to everyone else to make it so.

Democrats want to raise your taxes. No, Democrats want to raise taxes on the rich, which is something left out of every Republican anti-tax ad. Dems propose raising taxes on those making more than $400k. And the notion of taxing unrealized capital gains applies to an even smaller percentage:

Republicans don’t want to highlight that distinction, they’d rather make you think the liberals are coming for YOU, which is all the better for THEM.

Donald Trump cares about the working man. I would love to see an example of TFG doing something for the average citizen that doesn’t somehow benefit himself. To him, we’re all just commodities to be programmed to vote for him and feed his ego. Last week, Taylor Swift donated five million bucks for hurricane victim assistance. Dolly Parton donated two million.  Have you heard of any equitable donations from big Republican figures? Of course not… there’s nothing in it for them. They might not even get votes out of it if they can’t get their infrastructure together by Election Day. They’d much rather campaign on blaming Democrats for whatever modern problems arise. That’s all they’ve got.

That, and a full-speed sprint towards Fascism.

The Long Game

 Earlier in September I wrote about the crap-TV shows I can’t stop watching, the 90-Day Fiancé franchise. I mentioned how I chafe at the storylines involving American women marrying Arab/Muslim/African men who expect obedience, subservience, and second-class citizenship. Describing the storyline that’s just developing this season, I wrote:

“There is a couple this season, where the 40ish American woman is going to Jordan to marry her 22–year–old beau on the very day she arrives because his religion won’t permit them to be alone together in a room. This story is just getting underway and she has no idea what he will expect of her. This is basically a “boy” who told the cameras he wants her to always obey his wishes and not question him as the man of the house. And he needs her to cover up with loose clothing

I think she ought to spank his 22-year-old ass and send him to his room without dinner. These stories always seem to end up the same way, with the American women taking a powder either before or shortly after the wedding.”

Well, they did, indeed, get married the day she arrived and as expected, she’s chafing at the new rules about which she’s just now finding out.

To me, it’s beyond comprehension that someone intending to marry into this (or any) foreign culture didn’t take five minutes or so to Google what it’s like for a woman to live in Jordan (or wherever.) The guy always seems to hold back on the details of his expectations until after it’s too late. In last night’s show, the woman reacted harshly after finding out the rules her boy-husband gave her did not apply to him.

She was upset because

·         She was told she couldn’t hug or shake her long-time (male) friend’s hand, yet he shook her hairdresser’s hand immediately after.

·         He criticized her outfit as being too revealing (there was the faintest hint of cleavage) while his shirt was unbuttoned to his midsection.

·         He wouldn’t listen to her concerns.

·         He occupied their room getting himself dressed, (meaning she couldn’t because he had his friends there), and was then furious because he had to wait for her to change.

·         He insisted she be covered to his approved level wherever she went, whether in Jordan or back in the US. But he can wear whatever he wants.

He was upset because:

·         Her clothes were too revealing, and when they did conceal what he wanted, they were too tight.

·         She insisted on sitting up front in the car with him, while his brother had to sit in the back.

·         She questioned him about his “rules,” rather than happily accepting them.

·         She was not swayed by his and his brother’s default explanations, “But I’m the man.”

Meanwhile, I’m left yelling at the television, saying, “Honey, what the hell do you expect? How did you not check this out beforehand? How it is possible that no one you know told you this might happen?”

I mean, for Pete’s sake, take some initiative and responsibility.

At least, I take some comfort in knowing this is one set of people and there were probably side issues regarding the creation of TV episodes, with which I’m not familiar. You can’t take everything at face value with these shows. They want you to get all worked up about it.

But it got me thinking about how this dynamic is exactly what our modern conservatives are trying to recreate in this country. Every new law or movement that restricts the rights of women, no matter how small or isolated in scope, is a chip away from the fading standard of gender equality. It’s a bedrock principle of the Heritage Foundation and Federalist Society types. They want women out of the workplace and back in the kitchen with babies on each hip, leaving men to remain free to make all the important decisions, so they don’t have to worry their pretty little heads.

I recall our Democratic presidential nominee once asking a prospective Supreme Court Justice/Bro, “Can you name any laws that place restrictions on what a man can do with his own body?”

The Republican gambit is that if you control the health care, you control the women. Hence Sen. Vance (SS/OH) is resurfacing this old tactic:

This is why you can’t believe them when they say, “But we’re not after birth control.” Yes, they are. Just watch their actions. Plus, one of the SCOTUS Bros has already made it clear they want to go after Griswald.

Constrict health care.

Limit birth control.

Ban abortions.

Limit post-natal aid, child care, SNAP.

Attack women’s very right to vote.

Attack breast-feeding in public.

How long before they try to repeal the laws that gave women the right to hold property, get loans, or credit cards? How long before they start selling petticoats and bloomers at Forever 21?

These things add up to putting women under duress, in a state where all they can do is fight to survive, unless, of course, they can find a man to take care of them.

And there it is… The Incel’s wet dream… to rescue a woman who must then submit to his control.

This is where the GOP is taking us… to a place not so far from Jordan, Saudi Arabia, or Iran, as far as how they treat their female citizens. Well, maybe not citizens… more like pleasant-smelling property.

The Republicans are playing the long game. They started immediately after the Roe decision and never let up until it was reversed. It took over 50 years but they kept at it, collecting enough state legislatures, governorships, and occasional presidencies until they had a willing Supreme Court. They created “news” outlets to radiate their toxic point of view, be it with misdirection, propaganda, or outright lies.

And because they’re playing a long game, they’re counting on young people growing up with abortion restrictions being seen as commonplace, while those who remember winning reproductive freedoms are dying off. Eventually, the whole struggle will be limited to history books, and we know what they do with those when they include history the Right doesn’t care to remember.

And here we are. They’re not done and neither should we be done resisting, for as long as it takes. The very fate of our mothers, sisters, and daughters is riding on it.