10.31 Francis Wilkinson on Bloomberg: “[Trump] has been exploiting fear — scary Black man, no birth certificate — since long before he ran for office. His message is an endless cycle of Who’s More Frightening? Haitians starting a new life in Ohio? Or the trans kid at the local high school trying to make it through another day? Are Black women counting votes more terrifying than library books recounting history? . . .Tuesday’s election is a referendum on national cowardice. Weak men have forced the issue, and a strong woman has answered the challenge. Either the US will take a bold step into a multiracial, pluralistic, democratic, courageous future, or it will retreat into cowardly authoritarian chaos.”
10.31 Precipice, by Robert Harris
10.30 Trump, in Green Bay: “[W]hether the women like it or not. I’m going to protect them.”
10.30 Thanks to an ignominious, error-filled fifth inning–an inning that will live in infamy–the Yankees blow a 5-0 lead, and eventually lose to the Dodgers, who win the World Series 4 games to 1.
10.29 Behind Anthony Volpe‘s grand slam, the Yankees beat the Dodgers 11-4.
10.29 Teri Garr dies at 79.
10.29 Jamelle Bouie in the Times: “I’m sure that to some observers, [Trump‘s rally] — even the terrible racist jokes — looks like the confidence and resolve of a determined political movement. But I think it’s just the opposite. Far from showing strength, the Madison Square Garden rally showed that however vicious and virulent its leaders and supporters might be, the MAGA movement is a spent and exhausted force, even if it is not yet defeated. Consider the absence from the stage of anyone in Republican politics who isn’t a bona fide MAGA acolyte. There were no charismatic Republican lawmakers fighting tough races in swing states. There were no popular Republican governors, not even vocal allies like Virginia’s Glenn Youngkin. There were no former rivals, reconciled to Trump’s leadership, like Tim Scott, Ron DeSantis or Nikki Haley. And there were no figures of perceived moderation and propriety that, if they were present, could lend credence to the notion that electing Trump would bring some version of stability back to American life. Instead, the rally showcased an off-putting combination of D-list celebrities, including Dr. Phil and a visibly worn Hulk Hogan, and Trump sycophants, perhaps most notably Elon Musk, who has sunk tens of millions of dollars into the effort to put the former president back in the White House. As for Trump’s speech, it was a long, meandering mess, less vigorous than it was, to borrow a phrase, low energy. There was no positive agenda, no optimistic picture for the country, nothing that came close to the tone of his 2016 and 2020 campaigns, when Trump would pivot, on occasion, to being a candidate of change and prosperity. Not this time: Trump gave the American public a rant, centered on his wounded ego and his desire for revenge and retribution.”
10.28 Dodgers again defeat Yanks 4-2. Ken Rosenthal in The Athletic: “In reality, the Yankees’ embarrassing performance in the World Series is a systemwide breakdown. Crazy as this might sound, considering they won 94 games and their first American League pennant since 2009, they are not very good at baseball. What the Yankees are good at is bludgeoning weaker opponents, something they accomplished in the regular season by leading the majors in home runs and in the American League playoffs by dominating the offensively challenged Kansas City Royals and Cleveland Guardians. For the Yankees to succeed, Judge in particular needs to mash. They got away with a minimal contribution from him against AL Central competition in the first two rounds. They’re not getting away with it against the Los Angeles Dodgers in the World Series.”
10.28 David Rothkopf in the Daily Beast: “[T]he entire event, despite its marathon length and hodgepodge of z-list speakers, delivered over and over again a very focused message. The Trump campaign is about retribution and revenge. It is about the white supremacist desire to purge America of all their neighbors of different colors and beliefs. It is about Trump’s desire to seek out his enemies and punish them. And over the course of its Wagnerian length (and resonances) it singled out group after group that would be deported or punished. From a political perspective the strategy is pure suicide. The rally will almost certainly alienate more voters who might have voted for Trump and it is hard to imagine it has earned him one single new vote. . . .It was a play to the base when the biggest problem Trump has in this election is breaking through his rock solid ceiling of around 47 percent of the electorate. . . .Trump may be thinking the rally will help him mobilize thugs to violence when he contests his loss and we should be wary of that. But he has provided on the eve of the election the best case why he must be defeated that has ever been presented. In the end, because what unfolded was so foul and so offensive and threatening to so many of us, I believe that is why we will someday conclude that for all intents and purposes Trump’s final political act occurred on the biggest stage in America’s biggest city, a couple of blocks from Broadway.”
10.28 Elaine Blair in the New York Review of Books: “It may seem like a strange time to call for more enmity in political rhetoric, but what I have in mind is not Republican-bashing or Trump-bashing. What I wish is that Democrats would stop thinking of moderates as finicky neurotics with a lot of aversions and imagine them instead as people of frustrated ideals and ready indignation, people whose patriotic feeling is offended by creeping plutocracy even if they are not its immediate victims, people whose gall can be tapped for a positive national purpose. In order to do so, Democrats would have to have the courage to identify an adversary beyond Trump and the current election cycle. They would have to put forward a vision that aligns moderates as well as progressives on the same side of a struggle. As long as they respond to Republicans’ brutal divisiveness by disavowing aggression altogether, they will seem shifty and insincere. They have to redraw the lines of division from immigrant vs. native-born, or Black vs. white, or “real Americans” vs. the cultural elite to: the American public vs. unchecked corporate power. Bernie Sanders proved that corporate greed is a resonant, galvanizing concern. But the Democratic takeaway seems to have been: continue giving bland speeches to avoid alienating the suburbs while letting Lina Khan do her work quietly under the cover of night. I submit that the suburbs have long since been ready to fight corporate overreach—not merely as one item on a list of national challenges but as a principal antagonist whose fingerprints are all over the rest of the list: our delay in facing the climate crisis, the wild proliferation of guns, runaway inequality, the opioid crisis, medical debt, offshored jobs. Moderates too want to feel like part of a shared national endeavor, even if their favored metaphors for collectivity are not the commons or the commune but the neighborhood and the civic body. Harris is actually well suited—presumably better suited than a democratic socialist—to muster the moderates, if she will only dare to make a forceful case.”
10.27 Trump holds rally at Madison Square Garden. Stephen Miller: “America is for Americans and Americans only.” Tony Hinchcliff: “There’s a lot going on. I don’t know if you know this but there’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean. I think it’s called Puerto Rico” Senator Rick Scott: “It’s not funny and it’s not true.”
10.27 Tobin Harshaw on Bloomberg: “The paradoxes of Donald Trump’s popularity are too many to name, but let’s try a few. Why are Black and Hispanic voters trendingtoward a man who said some of the marchers in a rally led by White nationalists were “very fine people”? Why do working-class men favor a guy who took his family’s real-estate empire into six bankruptcies? Why do half of White women support a man held liable for sexual assault? Why do former servicemembers back a man who reportedly called the war dead `losers’ and said, `I need the kind of generals that Hitler had?”
10.26 Michelle Obama, at a Harris rally in Kalamazoo MI: “To the men who love us, let me just try to paint a picture of what it will feel like if America, the wealthiest nation on Earth, keeps revoking basic care from its women, and how it will affect every single woman in your life. Your girlfriend could be the one in legal jeopardy if she needs a pill from out-of-state or overseas, or if she has to travel across state lines because the local clinic closed up. Your wife and mother could be the ones at higher risk of dying from undiagnosed cervical cancer because they have no access to regular gynecological care. Your daughter could be the one too terrified to call the doctor if she’s bleeding during an unexpected pregnancy. Your niece could be the one miscarrying in her bathtub after the hospital turned her away. This will not just affect women. It will affect you and your sons. The devastating consequences of teen pregnancies won’t just be borne by young girls, but also by the young men who are the fathers. They, too, will have their dreams of going to college, their entire futures totally upended by an unwanted pregnancy. If you and your partner are expecting a child, you’ll be right by her side at the checkups, terrified if her blood pressure is too high, or if there’s an issue with the placenta, or if the ultrasound shows that an embryo has implanted in the wrong place, and the doctors aren’t sure that they can intervene to keep her safe. If your wife is shivering and bleeding on the operating room table during a routine delivery gone bad, her pressure dropping as she loses more and more blood or some unforeseen infection spreads and her doctors aren’t sure if they can act, you will be the one praying that it’s not too late. You will be the one pleading for somebody, anybody, to do something. Then there is the tragic but very real possibility that in the worst-case scenario, you just might be the one holding flowers at the funeral. You might be the one left to raise your children alone. See, these are just some of the ways women die during childbirth. I don’t want to be a downer, y’all, but in many cases, there is no warning, and things can go bad very quickly. When it happens, every second of hesitation or delay can lead to devastating outcomes. I am asking you, from the core of my being, to take our lives seriously. Please do not put our lives in the hands of politicians, mostly men, who have no clue or do not care about what we as women are going through, who don’t fully grasp the broad-reaching health implications that their misguided policies will have on our health outcomes. The only people who have standing to make these decisions are women with the advice of their doctors. We are the ones with the knowledge and experience to know what we need. So please, please do not hand our fates over to the likes of Trump, who knows nothing about us, who has shown a deep contempt for us. Because a vote for him is a vote against us, against our health, against our worth.”
10.26 Yanks lose Game 2, 4-2, as Dodger pitching mostly controls the NY offense.
10.25 America PAC, Elon Musk‘s PAC, on X: “Viewer discretion is advised. Kamala Harris is a ‘C word.’ You heard that right. A big ole ‘C word.’ In fact, all of the other ‘C words’ think she’s the biggest ‘C word’ of them all. That’s right. She’s a tax-hiking, regulation-loving, gun-grabbing communist. And the worst part? She’s proud of it. Kamala Harris: the ‘C word America simply can’t afford. See you nationwide Tuesday, November 5th.”
10.25 Yanks lose Game One of the World Series, 6-3, when Freddie Freeman hits a walk off grand slam home run in the 10th inning. An exciting, gritty, hard-nosed game; the Yanks will rue wasting Gerrit Cole‘s excellent performance.
10.25 Phil Lesh dies at 84.
10.24 The Atlantic‘s Ronald Brownstein, in conversation with William Kristol: “With the exception of John Kerry in 2004, Democrats in this century have won women voters by somewhere between 11 to 13 points pretty consistently. Biden pushed that up a little higher, maybe to 15 points. Harris might push it up a little more than that. And it is possible that Trump will run a little better with men than he did last time, because you are seeing improvements, certainly among Latino men. He is going to run better with Latino men than he did last time, maybe a little bit better with Black men, and probably somewhat better among younger white men that he’s put a lot of effort into courting. I would not be surprised if Harris wins women by more than Biden did and loses men by more than Biden did. Celinda Lake, the Democratic pollster, has a rule of thumb that says, “Democrats win when they win women by more than Republicans win men.” In point of fact, if you look at the data from Bill Frey, they don’t actually have to do that. In every swing state, women will be a majority of the electorate. So, what does that mean? That means if Harris wins women by as much as Trump wins men, she can win the states. That is easier said than done in the Southeast states, where a lot of white women are also evangelical Christians and don’t vote for Democrats in the same way that they do in the North. It may be more doable in the Southwest than it will be in North Carolina and Georgia for her. But certainly, if you’re looking at the former “blue wall” states, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, those are states where, in 2022, the first election after Dobbs, the Democratic gubernatorial candidates all ran better among college-educated and non-college-educated white women than Biden had done two years earlier. That would seem to me a real opportunity for her, especially among college white women.”
10.24 Ari Emmanuel, quoted in Puck: “This election is gonna come down to probably 120,000 votes. You probably have 60 percent of the male vote for Trump, and the female vote is 60-40 for Kamala. It’s a jump ball. We’re gonna find out who wants this more — men or women.”
10.23 Gary Indiana dies at 74.
10.23 Tucker Carlson at a Trump rally in Duluth GA: “If you allow people to get away with things that are completely over the top and outrageous; if you allow your 2-year-old to smear the contents of his diapers on the wall of your living room and you do nothing about it; if you allow your 14-year-old to light a joint at the breakfast table; if you allow your hormone addled 15-year-old daughter to slam the door of her bedroom and give you the finger, you’re going to get more of it. Those kids are going to wind up in rehab. It’s not good for you. It’s not good for them. No, there has to be a point at which Dad comes home. Yeah, that’s right, Dad comes home—and he’s pissed! He’s not vengeful. He loves his children—disobedient as they may be—he loves them because they’re his children. They live in his house. But he’s very disappointed in their behavior.…You know what he says? ‘You’ve been a bad girl, you’ve been a bad little girl, and you’re getting a vigorous spanking right now…. And no, it’s not going to hurt me more than it hurts you. No, it’s not. I’m not going to lie. This is going to hurt you a lot more than it hurts me. And you earned this. You’re getting a vigorous spanking because you’ve been a bad girl.’”
10.22 Fernando Valenzuela dies at 63. On May 8, 1981, at the height of Fernandomania, Ginny and I and our friend Jerry Skurnik went out to Shea Stadium to see this moon-faced phenom pitch against the dolorous Mets. About 40,000 other people had the same idea. As a result, the parkways were 
overrun. Stuck in traffic as the start of the game approached, Jerry half climbed out the back window of our Ford Nova and began pounding on the roof and railing against the sea of cars in front of us. We ended up leaving our car on the median, and hiking across the parking lots of Greater Flushing to the stadium. It was like we were going to Woodstock. Arriving at the top of the second, we missed the run the Dodgers scored in the top of the first. Because this happened to be a game where the Mets themselves ran out a couple of real pitchers, Mike Scott and Jeff Reardon, that missed run consisted of the entirety of the night’s scoring. I guess it didn’t matter; Fernando struck out 11 enroute to a complete game win, his seventh of an amazing strike-shorted season that saw him win 13, along with Rookie of the Year award, the Cy Young award, and a World Series ring. RIP, Fernando.
10.20 The Liberty beat the Lynx, finally win their first WNBA title.
10.20 Dodgers eliminate the Mets, will face the Yanks in the World Series.
10.20 Eagles beat Giants 28-3. Connor, Shawn and I struggle through three quarters, then leave early. Outside the stadium, we saw Giants owner John Mara doing the same.
10.19 Trump at a rally in Latrobe PA: “Arnold Palmer was all man, and I say that in all due respect to women, I love women. … This man was strong and tough, and I refused to say it, but when he took showers with the other pros they came out of there, they said ‘Oh, my God. That’s unbelievable,’”
10.19 Yankees beat Guardians 5-2, on Juan Soto‘s three run homer in the 10th, and win the AL pennant. Giancarlo Stanton wins series MVP. “This is a special moment for me, but this ain’t the trophy I want. I want the next one.”
10.17 The Guardians beat the Yankees 7-5. It was the first game in MLB history—regular season or postseason—that featured four game-tying or tie-breaking home runs with two outs in the eighth inning or later. The Yanks lead the best of seven series 2 games to 1.
10.16 Kamala Harris, as quoted by Bob Woodward in War: “That might be the only reason that [Biden] still really is comfortable with me to a point, because he knows that I’m the only person around who knows how to properly pronounce the word motherfucker.”
10.16 As Bob Woodward recounts in War, in the fall of 2022, as Russian forces were retreating, U.S. intelligence warned that, if it turned into a rout, there was a 50 percent chance Putin might resort to nuclear weapons. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin called Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and said ‘We know you are contemplating the use of a tactical nuclear weapon in Ukraine. If you did this, all the restraints that we have been operating under in Ukraine would be reconsidered.'” Shoigu responded by saying, “I don’t take kindly to being threatened.” Austin replied, “I am the leader of the most powerful military in the history of the world. I don’t make threats.”
10.16 Trump, at a Fox News Forum: “I’m the father of IVF.”
10.16 Capitol police officer Aquilino Gonelling, posting a video of the mob attacking him, on X. “Here’s me receiving an outpouring amount of affection during the ‘day of love. They almost loved me to death.”
10.16 Trump, on January 6th, during a Univision town hall: “Some of those people went down to the Capitol, I said, peacefully and patriotically, nothing done wrong at all. Nothing done wrong. And action was taken, strong action. Ashli Babbitt was killed. Nobody was killed. There were no guns down there. We didn’t have guns. The others had guns, but we didn’t have guns. And when I say “we,” these are people that walk down, this was a tiny percentage of the overall, which nobody sees and nobody shows. . . .But that was a day of love, from the standpoint of millions …”
10.16 General Mark Milley, on Trump, quoted in War, by Bob Woodward: “We have got to stop him! You have got to stop him! He is the most dangerous person ever. I had suspicions when I talked to you about his mental decline and so forth, but now I realize he’s a total fascist. He is the most dangerous person to this country. A fascist to the core!”
10.15 Trump, at the Economic Club of Chicago: “To me, the most beautiful word in the dictionary is tariff, and it’s my favorite word. It needs a public relations firm to help it, but to me, it’s the most beautiful word in the dictionary.”
10.15 After two people fainted during a Trump Town Hall event in Pennsylvania, Trump says “Let’s not do any more questions. Let’s just listen to music. Let’s make into a music (sic). Who the hell wants to hear questions, right?” And the next 39 minutes, he swayed on the stage, listening to James Brown‘s “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World,” Sinéad O’Connor‘s “Nothing Compares 2 U,” and “Ave Maria.”
10.13 Libby Titus dies at 77.
10.12 James Parker in The Atlantic, reviewing Sonny Boy, by Al Pacino: “It’s 1973. Al Pacino and Frank Serpico are sitting on the deck of a rented seaside house in Montauk, two men staring at the ocean. Serpico is the whistleblower cop, refuser of bribes and kickbacks, whose testimony before the Knapp Commission helped expose systemic graft in the NYPD. He has paid a high price for his rectitude: Isolated and vilified by his fellow officers, he’d been shot in the face during a suspiciously botched arrest in 1971. Now Pacino is preparing to play him in Sidney Lumet’s grimy, funky biopic Serpico, and the actor has a question. “Frank,” he says, “why didn’t you take those payoffs? Just take that money and give your share away if you didn’t want to keep it?” “Al, if I did that,” Serpico answers, “who would I be when I listen to Beethoven?”
10.11-12 Ivy, Logan, Cara and Connor visit
10.11 Charlie Warzel in The Atlantic: “It is difficult to capture the nihilism of the current moment. The pandemic saw Americans, distrustful of authority, trying to discredit effective vaccines, spreading conspiracy theories, and attacking public-health officials. But what feels novel in the aftermath of this month’s hurricanes is how the people doing the lying aren’t even trying to hide the provenance of their bullshit. Similarly, those sharing the lies are happy to admit that they do not care whether what they’re pushing is real or not. Such was the case last week, when Republican politicians shared an AI-generated viral image of a little girl holding a puppy while supposedly fleeing Helene. Though the image was clearly fake and quickly debunked, some politicians remained defiant. “Y’all, I don’t know where this photo came from and honestly, it doesn’t matter,” Amy Kremer, who represents Georgia on the Republican National Committee, wrote after sharing the fake image. “I’m leaving it because it is emblematic of the trauma and pain people are living through right now.” Kremer wasn’t alone. The journalist Parker Molloy compiled screenshots of people “acknowledging that this image is AI but still insisting that it’s real on some deeper level”—proof, Molloy noted, that we’re “living in the post-reality.” The technology writer Jason Koebler argued that we’ve entered the “‘Fuck It’ Era” of AI slop and political messaging, with AI-generated images being used to convey whatever partisan message suits the moment, regardless of truth.”
10.11 Interference: The Inside Story of Trump, Russia and the Mueller Investigation, by Aaron Zebley, James Quarles and Andrew Goldstein
10.10 Drea De Matteo
10.10 Hurricane Milton makes landfall Wednesday night as a “dangerous Category 3” storm near Siesta Key, on Florida’s central west coast
10.10 Ethel Kennedy dies at 96.
10.8 Jessica Karl on Bloomberg: “Ryan Walters, the Oklahoma Superintendent of Public Instruction, who is (still) dead-set on cramming 43,000 Bibles into every public school classroom in the state. Of course, he doesn’t just want the state to buy any old Bible. The Oklahoma Watch says he has criteria for what religious texts the taxpayers should be financing: Bibles must be the King James Version; must contain the Old and New Testaments; must include copies of the Pledge of Allegiance, Declaration of Independence, U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights; and must be bound in leather or leather-like material. A salesperson at Mardel Christian & Education searched, and though they carry 2,900 Bibles, none fit the parameters. But one Bible fits perfectly: Lee Greenwood’s God Bless the U.S.A. Bible, endorsed by former President Donald Trump and commonly referred to as the Trump Bible. They cost $60 each online, with Trump receiving fees for his endorsement. ”
10.8 Helen Lewis in The Atlantic: “The legacy [media] brands no longer have a monopoly on people’s attention, and the online right, in particular, has been extremely successful in building an alternative, highly partisan media. Fox News is no longer the rightmost end of the spectrum—beyond that is Tucker Carlson’s podcast, or the Daily Wire network, or Newsmax, or Elon Musk’s X. Now candidates tend to talk to the traditional media only when they want to reset the narrative about them, because other journalists still watch 60 Minutes or whatever it might be. There’s still a noisiness around a big legacy interview that you don’t get with, say, Call Her Daddy—even if more people end up consuming the latter.”
10.8 Zoe Schlanger in The Atlantic: “Milton is exactly the type of storm that scientists have been warning could happen; Michael Wehner, a climate scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, in California, called it shocking but not surprising. “One of the things we know is that, in a warmer world, the most intense storms are more intense,” he told me. Milton might have been a significant hurricane regardless, but every aspect of the storm that could have been dialed up has been. A hurricane forms from multiple variables, and in Milton, the variables have come together to form a nightmare. The storm is gaining considerable energy thanks to high sea-surface temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico, which is far hotter than usual. And that energy translates into higher wind speeds. Milton is also taking up moisture from the very humid atmosphere, which, as a rule, can hold 7 percent more water vapor for every degree-Celsius increase in temperature. Plus, the air is highly unstable and can therefore rise more easily, which allows the hurricane to form and maintain its shape. And thanks to La Niña, there isn’t much wind shear—the wind’s speed and direction are fairly uniform at different elevations—“so the storm can stay nice and vertically stacked,” Kim Wood, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Arizona, told me. “All of that combined is making the storm more efficient at using the energy available.” In other words, the storm very efficiently became a major danger.”
10.8 Luis Tiant dies at 83.
10.7 Tom Nichols in The Atlantic: “Trump and his running mate, the hillbilly turned multimillionaire J. D. Vance, have little in common with most of the people in the audience [at the rally in Butler PA], no matter how much they claim to be one of them. The mask slips often: Even as he courts the union vote, Trump revels in saying how much he hated having to pay overtime to his workers. In another telling moment, Trump beamed while talking about how Vance and his wife both have Yale degrees, despite his usual excoriations of top universities. (He always carves out a glittering exception for his own days at the University of Pennsylvania, of course.) Trump then welcomed the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, to the stage. Things got weirder from there, as Musk—who, it should be noted, is 53 years old—jumped around the stage like a concertgoing teenager who got picked out of the audience to meet the band. Musk then proceeded to explain how democracy is in danger—this, from a man who has turned the platform once known as Twitter into an open zone for foreign propaganda and has amplified various hoaxes. Musk has presented himself on his own platform as a champion of the voiceless and the oppressed, but his behavior reveals him as an enemy of speech that isn’t in his own interest. What happened in Butler over the weekend, however, was not some unique American moment. Around the world, fantastically wealthy people are hoodwinking ordinary voters, warning that dark forces—always an indistinct “they” and “them”—are conspiring to take away their rights and turn their nation into an immense ghetto full of undesirables (who are almost always racial minorities or immigrants or both). The British writer Martin Wolf calls this “pluto-populism,” a brash attempt by people at the top of the financial and social pyramid to stay afloat by capering as ostensibly anti-establishment, pro-worker candidates. In Britain, former Prime Minister Boris Johnson dismissed the whole notion of Brexit behind closed doors, and then supported the movement as his ticket into 10 Downing Street anyway. In Italy, a wealthy entrepreneur helped start the “Five-Star Movement,” recruiting the comedian Beppe Grillo to hold supposedly anti-elitist events such as Fuck-Off Day; they briefly joined a coalition government with a far-right populist party, Lega, some years ago. Similar movements have arisen around the world, in Turkey, Brazil, Hungary, and other nations. These movements all claim to represent the common voter, especially the “forgotten people” and the dispossessed, but in reality, the base voters for these groups are not the poorest or most disadvantaged in their society. Rather, they tend to be relatively affluent. (Think of the January 6 rioters, and how many of them were able to afford flights, hotels, and expensive gear. It’s not cheap to be an insurrectionist.) As Simon Kuper noted in 2020, the “comfortably off populist voter is the main force behind Trump, Brexit and Italy’s Lega,” a fact ignored by opportunistic politicians who instead claim to be acting on behalf of stereotypes of impoverished former factory workers, even if there are few such people left to represent.”
10.5-6 We visit Ticonderoga, where we see the fort and the Star Trek Studio Tour. Btw, Kirk‘s library consists of Moby Dick, a Star Trek manual, and Sandburg‘s six-volume biography of Lincoln
10.3 Shocking to read that when Trump was told Pence‘s life may be in danger, he responded `So what?’ Shocking, but hardly surprising. Separate migrant families at the border, and sequester children hundreds of miles away from their parents? So what? Fight Covid by advising people to inject bleach? So what? Offer Ukraine weapons to defend itself only if they implicate Biden in a bogus fraud scheme? So what? Store top secret documents in the bathroom? So what? That’s who he has been–President So What?
10.2 Megan Marshack dies at 70. In her self-composed obituary, she quoted lyrics from “A Chorus Line”: “Kiss today goodbye, the sweetness and the sorrow, Wish me luck, the same to you… (But I) won’t forget, can’t regret what I did for love.”
10.2 Judge Tanya Chutkan makes public portions of a filing by Special Prosecutor Jack Smith explaining why Donald J. Trump is not immune from prosecution on federal charges of plotting to overturn the 2020 election. The New York Times: “Part of the brief focuses on a social media post that Mr. Trump sent on the afternoon of the attack on the Capitol, telling supporters that Vice President Mike Pence had let them all down. Mr. Smith laid out extensive arguments for why that post on Twitter should be considered an unofficial act of a desperate losing candidate, rather than the official act of a president that would be considered immune from prosecution under a Supreme Court ruling this summer. After Mr. Trump’s Twitter post focused the enraged mob’s attention on harming Mr. Pence and the Secret Service took the vice president to a secure location, an aide rushed into the dining room off the Oval Office where Mr. Trump was watching television. The aide alerted him to the developing situation, in the hope that Mr. Trump would then take action to ensure Mr. Pence’s safety. Instead, Mr. Trump looked at the aide and said only, “So what?” according to grand jury testimony newly disclosed in the brief. Much earlier, the brief says, one of Mr. Trump’s lawyers gave him an “honest assessment” that his false claims that the election had been marred by widespread fraud would not hold up in court. But Mr. Trump seemed not to care.“The details don’t matter,” the brief quotes Mr. Trump as saying.”
10.1 WNYT News: “Twenty-one people have been arrested in a major takedown of cocaine and fentanyl trafficking in the Capital Region. The ring brought drugs from Brooklyn and distributed them to Rensselaer, Albany, Saratoga, Warren, and Washington counties, the Attorney General’s Office announced Tuesday. Investigators seized more than 4.5 kilograms with a street value of around $450,000. The alleged ringleader was Heather Thompson, 38, of Troy, who is accused of purchasing cocaine by the kilo to then distribute to a network of dealers throughout the local area. Investigators said that Thompson primarily conducted business in Saratoga County and made sales at a local pub and bowling alley. The other major ringleader was 48-year-old Jermaine Moreno, of Brooklyn, who allegedly drove kilos of cocaine from New York City to sell to Thompson. She would then divide the supply into quantities ranging from 10 to 100 grams and contacted her buyers, according to the Attorney General’s Office. Thompson and Moreno have been charged with operating as a major trafficker, which carries a mandatory life sentence in state prison.”