Got a bit to cover tonight. Let me start with Idiot of the Week.
The winner?
Kim Ogg.
Kim's a Democrat in name only in Texas. She's a lying piece of trash. She's in Ted Cruz's new ad attacking Colin Allred and identifying herself as a Democrat. Here's WIKIPEDIA:
In December 2023, Kim Ogg was admonished by the local Democratic Party,[35] which alleged she "abused the power of her office to pursue personal vendettas against her political opponents, sided with Republicans to advance their extremist agenda, and stood in the way of fixing the broken criminal justice system."[36] She was defeated in the following March primary.[37]
In August 2024, Ogg endorsed incumbent Republican Senator Ted Cruz against Democratic nominee and Congressman for Texas's 32nd congressional district Colin Allred.[38] She was later featured in an advertisement for Cruz.
In September 2024, Ogg appeared at a political gathering which urged citizens of the Greater Houston Area to "Vote Republican Judges."[39] Earlier that month, she appeared before the Kingwood Tea Party where she criticised several prominent Democrats for intentionally allowing crime to increase to conceal public corruption, adding that she believes those Democrats were allowing a "social experiment" that adversely impacts public safety.[40]
Get it? The party admonished her and she was voted out in the Democratic Party primary. But the lying piece of trash says she's a Democrat for the cameras in Ted's new ad. And since being voted out, she's gone around and trashed Democrats.
But if you're not getting what a lousy piece of s**t she is, grasp that Ted Cruz is a homophobe.
Google it, you'll find all the results.
I'll note this one by Stephen Neukam (TEXAS TRIBUNE):
U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz said he will vote against a bill to codify same-sex marriage protections into federal law, ahead of a potential showdown in the Senate over one of the few remaining Democratic priorities expected to get a vote before the midterm elections.
What a piece of garbage and what a cheap whore.
She's not fit to parent. What message is she sending to her son by backing a homophobe.
She's the Idiot of the Week and then some. She should be embarrassed and publicly apologizing. She's not just a traitor to democracy, or just a traitor to equality, she's also a traitor to her own child.
Now here's Colin Allred talking to CBS.
Colin would make a great senator. Forget how awful Ted Cruz is for a moment. Colin Allred would be a great senator.
No matter who he ran against, he would be a great senator. Ted's awful, yes. By comparison, anyone would be better than Ted. But Colin is truly great and truly needed on his own terms.
I believe in Ted and I hope you're following the race. If you're a Texas voter, I hope you're considering voting for Colin.
Now let's turn to little weasel JD Vance. What's Miss Sassy up to now? Eric Garcia (INDEPENDENT) reports:
But immediately afterward, he criticized President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee for president, for not dispatching the 82nd Airborne division of the United States Army.
Midway through a follow-up question, a woman nearly fell off a platform behind him. “Kamala Harris built this platform behind me, that’s what happened,” Vance immediately quipped.
Vance’s events are decidedly different from his would-be boss. They often run shorter and the playlist includes bands like The Clash, Led Zeppelin and Guns N’ Roses as well Merle Haggard’s “America First,” his walk-on song. He often takes a pugnacious tone and remains relentlessly on-message, never meandering like the man at the top of his ticket. He focuses almost solely on talking about restricting illegal immigration and enacting Trump’s plans to conduct mass deportations.
Almost all of the solutions he suggests, from fixing Social Security to lowering the cost of housing, can only happen by restricting immigration.
For example, Vance was asked about Trump’s lie that 13,000 murderers crossed the US-Mexico border during the Biden administration. In response, he immediately pivoted to pushing the message that immigrants were negatively affecting people in North Carolina.
“If the message that our country sends after 25 million illegal aliens coming into this country is: ‘You get to stay here, you get to collect housing benefits, you get to collect welfare benefits,’ while folks in western North Carolina are struggling to survive, we will never have a border in this country again,” he said.
The Trump campaign and his allies have repeatedly spread lies that the Federal Emergency Management Agency was assisting immigrants with money meant for disaster relief. It is a claim that has been repeatedly debunked and that President Joe Biden has pushed back on publicly. Yet it remains a popular talking point for Vance.
Indeed, the vice-presidential candidate went on to say there had been an influx of undocumented children in Michigan and North Carolina’s public schools.
“It’s nothing against those kids, it's saying something against Kamala Harris, who let those kids come in and deprive Americans of good education,” he added.
Things took a more obscure turn when host Patrick said “the globalist view of ‘own nothing and be happy’ is not what the American people want.” Vance responded that “they want you to live in a pod, eat bugs and own nothing
But for those of us who grew up mired in poverty, surrounded by addiction, these systemic problems feel like being trapped in quicksand that only wants to pull you further into despair. There are no boots nor bootstraps, no solid ground to get your footing, when each day is a struggle for survival. But neither the outcry of offended Appalachians nor the book’s glaring inconsistencies mattered to readers or voters in the past; it seems unlikely they will impact Vance’s narrative now.
His story still matters, though. Most notably because, while his memoir resonated with readers for its quintessentially American narrative of a self-made man, the reality is he did not get here alone. He got here because of the policies and programs that support working class people. In fact, it’s one of the few things he and I have in common.
Despite his middle-class upbringing in the Rust Belt, J.D. Vance and I both grew up suffering with the chaos and pain that come with having an addicted parent, violence in the home, and familial mental illness. Any one of those factors will have a negative impact on a child’s well-being and future prospects; growing up with all three, studies show, sets a child up for failure.
Vance and I also both received valuable higher education due to the generosity of others who funded our scholarships. I went to Berea College, a tuition-free college here in Eastern Kentucky where every student works and which has a stated mission to educate low-income Appalachians just as it has educated men and women, Blacks and whites, since its inception in 1855. Vance attended Yale Law School on a generous scholarship, which is a benefit some of our nation’s top schools offer to low-income students. But it’s hardly well-known to most Americans who are just trying to survive. We were lucky to even have known about these schools, much less to get in.
It wasn’t just higher education that helped Vance and me pull ourselves out of the circumstances we grew up in. Despite its imperfections, our national public school system provided a foundation to attend college and even to become writers. My parents and later I, as a single mother, benefitted from social programs like food stamps and medical cards. Welfare programs often keep children fed and even alive—which means that some of us can grow up to become productive adults who not only pay our taxes, but make invaluable contributions to society and our families.
Vance helped perpetuate stereotypes about the “lazy poor” in his memoir when he shared his frustration about discovering, at 17 years old, that there are adults on welfare who dare to own cell phones and buy things that food stamps doesn’t cover (i.e., alcohol and cigarettes). However, he is seemingly also aware of another point that is critical to this discussion, though it isn’t a popular topic in political discourse: Our choices are shaped by our culture, and none of the class issues he critiques can or should be chalked up to immorality.
Here's C.I.'s "Iraq snapshot:"
Friday, October 11, 2024. Barack Obama returns to the public square to serve up the hard truths.
Voting is under way in many places in the United States -- there is early voting, voting by mail and voting in person. The final day to vote in the presidential election is November 5th and that is 24 days away.
Former US President Barack Obama: [T]here is absolutely no evidence that this man thinks about anything but himself. I said it before. Donald Trump is a 78-year-old billionaire who has not stopped whining about his problems since he rode down his golden escalator nine years ago. You get the Tweets in all caps, the ramblings and the ravings about crazy conspiracy theories. You got the two hour speeches. Word salad. Just -- it's like Fidel Castro -- just on and on. Constant attempts to sell you stuff. Who does that? Selling you gold sneakers and $100,000 watch and, most recently, a Trump BIBLE. He wants you to buy the word of God Donald Trump edition -- got his name right there next to Matthew and Luke. I mean, you could not make this stuff up. If you saw it on SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE, you'd say, "Well nah, I mean that's going too far." No, he's doing that.
[Calls of "He's weird!"]
Barack Obama: It's crazy. And the reason he does it is because all he cares about is his ego and his money and his status. He's not thinking about you. Donald Trump sees power as nothing more than means to an end. He wants the middle class to pay the price for another huge tax cut that would mostly help him and his country club buddies. Doesn't care if costs more women their reproductive freedom because it won't make a difference in his life
[Boos]
Barack Obama: Do not boo. Vote. They can't hear your boos but they can hear your votes.
Last night, in Pittsburgh, Barack took the stage in a front of a huge crowd -- the kind of crowd Donald Trump couldn't get in his best days back in 2016 and so much bigger than the smatterings that he attracts today. Barack laid it on the line about what mattered.
And what mattered is you.
And me.
And all of us working for a better future and a better country.
He spoke truth to power.
ABC NEWS reports on a Pittsburgh meet up Barack has with Black males. Barack explained, "When you have a choice that's this clear, when you have somebody who grew up like you, knows you, went to college with you, understands the struggles and pain and joy that comes from those experiences -- who's had to work harder and do more and overcome -- and achieves the second highest office in the land and is putting forward concrete proposals to correctly address the things are vital in our neighborhoods and in our communities from housing to making sure our mothers and our fathers and our grandparents are going to be able to afford medicine and making sure that we are dealing with prices that are too high and rents that are too high and is committed to making sure that we maintain The Affordable Care Act so that everybody's got health insurance, that cares about education and entrepreneurship in our neighborhoods -- and that's on one side. And on the other side, you have someone who has consistently shown disregard not just for the communities but for you as a person. And you're thinking about sitting out? "
Some polling indicates that some Black males are thinking of sitting out this election. I'd argue that the remarks Barack made should also be directed at THE PROGRESSIVE, THE NATION, DEMOCRACY NOW!, IN THESE TIMES and other outlets. In fact, let's note the both-sides nonsense THE NATION just did.
"Democrat or Republican, the next presidency will still mean death for others in faraway places"
That garbage is from Ahmed Moor. He's a Palestinian American and -- as his Tweet on the article makes even more clear, he's only referring to and concerned about Gaza.
I knew there was a reason I wasn't familiar with his name.
See, I've called out the destruction of Iraq, the decimation of its population which turned the country into a land of widows and orphans. I've spoken out, I've written, I've marched. And I'm generally familiar with at least the name of other Americans addressing it.
Not familiar with his name.
Is he so young that he wasn't old enough to protest? No. He was in college in 2002. Before the Iraq War began. I see he had time to work on Wall Street after college.
I don't see any writing about Iraq.
So when Iraqi people died, it didn't matter to him.
But when it's people in Gaza, suddenly, it's important.
He is all that is wrong with the left at present. Not all of the left, but a small sliver -- a sliver with far too much say about what 'independent' media covers and what it doesn't.
Palestinians matter, the people of Iraq matter, the people of Lebanon matter, the people of Syria matter, go down the list.
But when you can reduce the entire world's suffering to just one group of people? Your purity test has left you not just a virgin but an idiot virgin.
Are we in this together or not?
Because together we can win. But together means we work for all of us. And that's not happening currently. Again, Barack's remarks could be directed to 'independent' media. Last night, Marcia noted:
Jill Stein is not going to be president. She is, however, doing her best to ensure that Donald Trump will become president. Radio host, podcaster, author and activist Thom Hartmann writes:
Jill Stein doesn’t give, as the old saying goes, a flying f*ck about democracy. Instead, she’s all about how famous she can become and how much money she can grift off her repeated presidential campaigns. It’s a damn dangerous game.
Fresh off her 2016 political quacksalvery, in which she handed that year’s election to Donald Trump, this professional grifter — who’s been doing real damage to the Green Party for over a decade — is trying to get Trump back into the White House.
As her Wisconsin campaign manager, Pete Karas, told Politico:
“We need to teach Democrats a lesson.”
Arguably, Democrats have already learned that lesson.
In 2016, Hillary Clinton lost Wisconsin to Trump by 22,748 votes; Stein carried 31,072 votes. In Michigan the story was similar: Clinton lost to Trump by 10,704 votes while Stein carried 51,463. Ditto for Pennsylvania, where Trump won by 44,292 votes and Stein pulled in 49,941 votes.
Had Clinton carried those three states she would have become president.
The Green Party — that I safely voted for in 2000 when I lived in non-swing-state Vermont — deserves a candidate who’ll work to produce real change rather than simply run repeated vanity campaigns that cripple our admittedly flawed electoral system.
Those slim margins may be a distant memory, however, given how hard Stein is pounding on Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania Democrats against President Biden’s unfortunate support of Israel’s brutal bombing campaign in Gaza. As Newsweek reported last week:
“In Michigan, a battleground state where the Greens are campaigning hard, and which has a large Arab American community, 40 percent of Muslim voters backed Stein versus just 12 percent for Harris and 18 percent for Trump, according to a late August poll by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).
“Michigan has more than 200,000 Muslim voters and 300,000 with Middle Eastern or North African ancestry. Biden won there in 2020 by 154,000 votes, while Trump carried the state with a victory margin of just 10,700—or 0.23 percent—in 2016.
“In Wisconsin, the CAIR poll showed Stein on 44 percent and Harris on 29 percent, while she also leads the Democrat candidate among Muslims voters in Arizona.”
I moderated the 2012 presidential debate between Stein and Libertarian Gary Johnson; she and Johnson both had the smell of cheap political hustlers to me then, a feeling that’s only been reinforced in the years since.
Stein certainly hasn’t done much to advance the stated goals of the Green Party. Back in the day, it was the Greens leading the charge against climate change and in favor of instant runoff voting, having considerable success with the latter.
David Cobb, a Texas environmental attorney, ran on the Green ticket in 2004 and was a regular on my radio program that year. He explicitly told people listening to my show in swing states to vote for John Kerry instead of him, calling it his “safe states” strategy.
He refused to campaign or even appear in battleground states, a statement of both high integrity and real patriotism.
Stein has neither. This is her third run for president (Howie Hawkins was the Green candidate in 2020 and was not on the ballot in most swing states.)
Instead, she’s bragging about how she’s going to hand the 2024 election to Donald Trump. Presumably she’ll be spared the imprisonment that Trump says he’s preparing for the rest of us in politics and the media. As Stein boasted to Newsweek:
“Third Way found that, based on polling averages in battleground states, the 2020 margin of victory for Democrats would be lost in four states — Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina and Wisconsin — because of third party support.
“So they can’t win. There’s a fair amount of data now that suggests the Democrats have lost. Unless they give up their genocide.
“We’re doing outreach all the time to a lot of different groups, but it’s really been the Muslim Americans and Arab Americans who have really taken this campaign on like it’s theirs — like they have enormous ownership over this.”
Running for president and keeping an iron grip on the once-noble Green Party has become Stein’s singular mission. And she’s killing the Party — and its once-sterling reputation — in the process. As Alexandria Ocasio Cortez said:
“If you run for years in a row, and your party has not grown, has not added city council seats, down ballot seats and state electives, that’s bad leadership. And that to me is what’s upsetting.”
As Peter Rothpletz wrote for The New Republic in an article titled Jill Stein Is Killing the Green Party:
“As of July 2024, a mere 143 officeholders in the United States are affiliated with the Green Party. None of them are in statewide or federal offices. In fact, no Green Party candidate has ever won federal office. And Stein’s reign has been a period of indisputable decline, during which time the party’s membership—which peaked in 2004 at 319,000 registered members—has fallen to 234,000 today.”
Stein brought along a Fox “News” film crew when she crashed the 2016 Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, cementing her reputation as a hustler who’ll hook up with anybody who’ll provide her with fame or fortune.
There are, apparently, no Democrats in America clean or pure or virginal enough for Stein; as Rothpletz reports, she even attacked Bernie Sanders for being a “DC insider” and “corrupted” by corporate money.
Meanwhile, her campaign, theoretically opposed to giant monopolies and defense contractors, has taken money from Google, Lockheed Martin, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, and McKinsey.
Jill Stein has never delivered anything to the American people but empty words. She shows up every four years to deliver empty words and then vanishes. Spending that money she raised for recounts in 2016 apparently -- she never did, as she said she would, donate it to charity.
It's a good little grift. And she goes around attacking Kamala Harris. While defending and apologizing for Putin. At ZETEO, Mehdi has posted his full interview with Jill Stein. Previously, clips had gone viral but the full interview was only available to ZETEO subscribers.
In the past, some have argued that the point of voting for a Jill Stein is so that the Greens can hit a certain percent and have ballot access.
Why?
I've made the argument before for that. And I do understand the argument and I could endorse it before.
I cannot now.
Why?
The 2016 vote gave them access in 20 states. That's on the ballot, that's not needing petitions or write-ins or anything.
20 states.
And yet, per their own website, this year, they have four candidates for Congress. Four people running for the House and the Senate. The House has 435 members, the Senate has 100.
And with their automatic ballot access, they can only offer four candidates?
No, I don't buy the nonsense that a vote for Jill helps the Green Party.
Nor do I buy the argument that we burn the playhouse down and rebuild something better.
That's a theoretical in good times. We're not in good times. The notion of sinking this election and something better will emerge from the disgust?
Who believes that?
Oh, I know!
People who take pictures of their children's genitals and are stupid enough to then try to have them developed at a drug store and they are called -- because they're a big name that everyone reading this would know -- and told to come pick them up and told that, by law, the drug store is actually supposed to call the cops but since this person is a big, big, big star, they'll do a favor for them this time and just pretend they never saw the kiddie porn that the parent took of their own child.
I've teased this one before. Certain people better get their act together real damn quick because when I burn the playhouse down, I burn it down. And I have no problem naming this one person we've been teasing out for some time.
But while I'll burn the fake asses' playhouse down, I'm not stupid enough to think we destroy our way of life -- and the way of life for so many Americans -- by voting for Trump or sitting it out because wah-wah Kamala doesn't say everything on Gaza that we want. Wah! Wah! Wah!
Aurora DeStefano (2 PARAGRAPHS) reports:
It’s the same phrase he uses to describe the country he hopes to lead, frequently saying “we are a failing nation.”
But both entities — The New York Times and U.S. citizens — are helping Trump more than he deserves, according to critics. In the case of the Times and other so-called liberal media outlets, they say, Trump is extended the benefit of a pernicious both-sides-ism that consistently creates false equivalencies between Trump and his Democratic opponent, Kamala Harris.
Media critics have long criticized the Times for its Trump coverage, but two adjacent headlines this week serve to encapsulate the kind of coverage each candidate receives and, critics says, shows the media bending over backwards to make Trump’s latent racism palatable while questioning Harris’s veracity.
The journalistic malpractice is so stark that the headlines “should be studied in journalism classes for decades,” according to anti-Trump pundit and author Stuart Stevens, a Republican in exile during the MAGA insurgency.
This alleged false equivalence in coverage is occurring against the backdrop of a Trump-launched storm of disinformation about FEMA and the federal government’s response to Hurricane Helene.
On active X user called ScaryLawyerGuy, an unrelenting critic of the differing levels of accountability demanded from the two candidates, wrote:
“The New York Times thinks Trump is better for its business model, the (literal) fortunes of multiple people on their politics desk depend on him winning and they will sane wash his Hitlerian views on eugenics if it helps him win.”
Back in May, after Times editor Joe Kahn defended his paper’s coverage of what was then the Trump-Biden race, an article in The New Republic asked:
“When one of the candidates is running on an express vow to wreck the political and legal systems themselves, do typical conventions of political reporting-ones geared around presenting both sides as equivalently conventional political actors fighting on an even civic playing field-really get the job done in communicating what that means?”
Greg Sargent, TNR
TNR also credits the Times for producing “indispensable journalism about Donald Trump's authoritarian designs for a second term” exposing “Trump's schemes to unleash the Justice Department on political enemies, to gut the bureaucracy and stock it with loyalists, to functionally wreck our intelligence agencies.”
But it's not just THE NEW YORK TIMES -- it's 'independent' media as well. They are depressing and suppressing turnout and there's no excuse for that.
This is nonsense. People will be harmed and, look at the areas effected by climate change right now, people are being harmed. And they're harmed further by liars who tell them hurricanes are from cloud seeding and other b.s. No, the weather is the effect of climate change. And when the future looks so potentially stark, I don't know how you waste your vote or your voice or your platform by acting as though Donald and Kamala are the same. They are not.
One person can lead us forward over the next four years. It might mean work on our part, getting off our lazy asses and marching and making demands of our elected officials. But we already know Donald Trump won't respond to pressure. We already know he'll just come up with a new lie to tell the world and himself while most likely either trying to imprison us or sick the national guard on us. The choices are not vague or in doubt. Donald is not an unknown. We have seen the damage he can do and he tells us every day the damage that he wants to do.
On a sunny Wednesday in late September, Vice President Kamala Harris took the stage at Carnegie Mellon University for the first comprehensive economic-policy speech of her short presidential campaign.
Addressing a sedate audience in suits and ties, the Vice President outlined plans to strengthen small businesses, cut taxes on the middle class, and build more affordable housing. "I am a capitalist," she told the Pittsburgh crowd, detailing how she would invest in startups and increase public-private partnerships, and describing an approach to economic growth that stressed stability.
It was a business-friendly speech tailored to business-friendly voters. But in a neck-and-neck presidential race, wonky pitches like these could make the difference. In a September New York Times/Siena poll, nearly 30% of likely voters said they felt they needed to learn more about the Vice President before making their choice. The fight to define Kamala Harris—who she is, what she stands for, and what kind of President she would be—will be one of the central battles of the campaign’s final weeks.
To examine these questions, TIME spoke with 20 current and former Harris campaign advisers, former aides in her vice presidential and Senate offices, senior officials from each of the past five presidential administrations, and a range of policy experts. The portrait that emerged was of a politician who is more practical than ideological—a cautious candidate running in a change election, juggling the liabilities and benefits of her ties to her boss, President Joe Biden, as well as her own past positions, all while trying to keep the focus on her opponent. For Harris, policy specifics are in service to the larger goal of her campaign, which is to present a credible alternative to a second Donald Trump presidency.
The following sites updated:
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Spanish as a First Language2 hours ago
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SPEED6 hours ago
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Trump's never ending lies6 hours ago
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How is 'independent' media helping6 hours ago
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Dystopian Days6 hours ago
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THIS JUST IN! THE FUTURE?6 hours ago
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Ethel Kennedy11 hours ago
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Let's remember who tried to destroy her11 hours ago
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