10.13 Accused of blatant corruption both before and during her time as ambassador to Greece, Kimberly Guilfoyle resigns. The White House requested the resignation despite her denials. Tom Nichols in The Atlantic: “The idea that Guilfoyle, and only Guilfoyle, crossed some sort of previously unseen corruption red line is laughable. If ethical and legal questions, including the now-moribund standard of “appearances of impropriety,” were grounds for dismissal in this administration, Trump would have already shed several other members of his team. Rather, Guilfoyle was pushed out because she was an embarrassment. She overstepped her bounds, tried to trade on the president’s name, and then made the administration look bad when she got caught. Also, she is a woman, and in this administration, self-dealing is mostly a man’s game.”
10.12 Pennsylvania-based Hunt Auction house announces that a autographed road jersey worn by Michael Jordan during Game 2 of the 1998 NBA Finals has been privately sold for $14 million to Miami real estate investor Ron Firman. Jordan wore the red jersey on June 5, 1998; the Chicago Bulls beat the Utah Jazz that night to even the matchup at a game apiece. The Bulls won the series in six games. It is said to be the highest price ever paid for a piece of basketball memorabilia.
10.11 David Remnick in The New Yorker: “What more and more voters are coming to understand is how profoundly they have been betrayed. And this is not just about the price of gas and groceries, though “affordability” is scarcely the joke the President thinks it is. Vladimir Putin long ago set out to mock the United States for its hypocrisies. You are no better than us—that was his message and his cover to crush dissent at home and the liberties of an independent Ukraine. When Trump threatens Greenland and Canada or greases a media merger in his interest, he is proving Putin’s point. When the titans of tech obediently line up at Trump’s Inauguration and fund his ballroom, Putin smiles. Who are we to lecture him about oligarchy? This is the ethos of the era defined by Putin and Trump: morality in politics is for dupes; all that matters is interests. Because Trump is simultaneously an autocrat and a performance artist, because Americans tend to cling reflexively to the fraying notion of national exceptionalism, it is difficult to reckon with the idea that a President might be not merely shambolic and incompetent but something far darker, even evil.”
10.9 Mike Ditka dies at 86.
10.6 Eva Marie Saint dies at 102.
10.6 Tina Brown: “The doom that Trump is now facing in the midterms is the result of getting exactly everything he wanted: A cabinet and a Congress of fawning enablers. So now like every authoritarian who banishes ground truth from his inner circle, he’s genuinely lost touch with planet Earth. In his interview with Time magazine last week Trump spent most of the session blaming the “corrupt” press and pollsters for numbers which are worse than Biden’s after his terminal debate and worse than Bush in his post-Katrina hurricane slump. He’s almost as low as Nixon before he resigned, which is perhaps why there’s a growing MAGA call to re-open Watergate and prove that Nixon was a victim of the deep state…. It has always been one of the biggest ironies of Trump’s appeal that many of the MAGA base who idolized him were the very people he has stiffed all his life – the construction workers, bartenders, plumbers; the list is legion in his lifelong habit of unpaid bills. The $5000 checks he’s promising to pay voters to turn out now are in the mail like all the rest…. Without ever being asked to either vote for or design it, humanity is being hijacked and bent into a direction dictated by an uber race of emotional metronomes and the money slaves who promote them….It beggars belief that Mark Zuckerberg drew up the first draft of the ‘White House AI safety accord’, added notes from his fellow tech deities and handed it over fully baked to the analog Bozo in the Oval Office. Trump, whose every action has blowtorched the mere concept of presidential restraint called the “self-policing” pledge the tech barons all signed “morally” binding. The whole chilling scene reminded me of the great set piece in John Milton’s epic 17th century poem “Paradise Lost,” when Satan assembles a grand infernal council of fallen angels to debate whether Hell’s forces should openly confront Heaven or devise a more sinister plan. Maybe Milton was reporting from our future and Trump and The Broligarchs were compiling the Final Part of our own Paradise Lost.”
10.5 Sam McDowell dies at 84.
10.5 Trump, at a rally in Nebraska:”Again, remember, with the war, it’s just artificial, it’s a little bit high, it’s a small price to pay. It’s a small price to pay for keeping the world safe, for keeping our country safe. They could take out a city. Let ’em take out Los Angeles, let ’em take out San Diego. This is a very small price to pay, and it’s going to be over with very soon. It’s essentially almost over with. But it’s going to end very soon, and it’s going to end one way or the other.” 10.5 Dennis Hastert dies at 84 10.1 In a 5-1 Rangers victory over the Lightning, Igor Shesterkin becomes the first goalie in franchise history to score a goal.