Late season gardening

       Gardening in April and May is easy.   The season stretches out before you and the possibilities are endless.   Weeds are a phantom and missing a planting is no problem.  The increase in daylight hours allows you to catch up.   Not so in August.   Miss a planting date by a day may increase the harvest time by a week.   The newly planted spinach is likely to be overwhelmed by a blitz of galinsoga seedlings.  An unexpected stretch of cool weather and loss of daylight hours can mess up the most careful plans.

       Welcome to fall gardening!   I have continued to transplant lettuce seedlings and quick growing brassicas, but the first of Sept. is coming and anything planted after that date is a crapshoot in the North Country.   The best case scenario is a light frost in mid October followed by a few weeks of Indian Summer.  The worst...a hard frost followed by snow.  Both have happened in recent years.  

     I spent most of Sunday keeping the fall weeds at bay and fertilizing newly planted beds.  I have high hopes for late planted beans and the second planting of summer squash is producing well.  The winter squash is disease free and looks to produce a bumper crop.  That partially balances some of the drought caused disappointments earlier in the season.   This may be my last hurrah at large scale gardening, so I intend to make the most of it.

As America burns and drowns, the grift goes on

       I did not listen to the finale of tRumpalooza last night.   I'm pretty sure the president* told his marks the world has gone to hell in a handbasket and he alone can clean up the mess he made.   180,000 Covid 19 victims and counting, protestors being gunned down in the streets by 17 year old fanboys and most importantly, wildfires in the west and hurricanes in the east caused by or at least amplified by the climate change Cheeto Jesus denounces as a hoax.  The implications of the last sentence should put a chill into any sentient being.

      However, among the media enabling this fiasco of an administration, everything is fine, unless Joe Biden is elected in November.   Then the hellscape I just described will be blamed on democratic policies.   Already, assholes such as Tucker Carlson are lauding the 17 year old shooter in Kenosha as a hero who was there to defend property using deadly force.  How many copycats will respond to this glorification of murder?

     I could go on, but virtually anyone reading this probably agrees with the gist.   It's time to defenestrate tRump and start moving this country in the direction of human values and sanity.   

There's something happening here

       As the RNC winds up tonight with yet another divisive speech from Cheetolini to his base, those of us on the outside looking in at the GOP's nominating convention have to wonder how did the nearly 40% of Americans who support this cult of personality get so far from the rest of us ideologically?   There are dozens of books on the subject, but I think Rick Perlstein's new book "Reaganland" comes closer than most.

      Perlstein, who has chronicled the rise of the conservative movement since Nixon says the republican party of the 60s and 70s realized that its mantra of small government and tax cuts for the rich was not echoing with enough people to deliver electoral results.   However, social issues that emerged in the 60s, like civil rights, gun control and gay rights, seemed to separate rural areas where progressive issues were unpopular from the big cities, which were seen as incubators of these policies.   Reagan, who worked for the AMA against medicare  when it was being debated in congress was the perfect candidate to exploit the growing divide on social issues.

      While the hagiography of St. Ronnie is such that most of us don't realize he was a liar almost on a par with tRump, the media allowed him to get away with much of it.   He was truly a great communicator who apparently could charm the birds out of the trees.  His message to disaffected working class democrats was the GOP was here for you and will allow you to express your revulsion of the hippie ethos supposedly being jammed down your throats.

     Republicans have been using that message to appeal to working class whites and rural voters ever since with varying degrees of success.   The message seems particularly clueless today when Cheeto Jesus tries to paint Joe Biden as some wide eyed radical, but as the polls have shown, these attacks resonate with the base.   That 40% of the electorate will never be OK with the push for rights for women, blacks, LGBTQ people or anyone else who is not a white man.   The rest of us have just got to put on our big boy/girl pants and vote.  

The tRump Voter

        The NYT probably thought it was doing a public service by interviewing tRump voters across the country and showing us the human beings behind the caricatures.   Look here, the reporter says, a 59 year old woman with a law degree who admires the president.   Here's another woman who has a black son-in-law and still intends to vote for a racist and misogynist.  It's almost like they have a list of stereotypes they must explode to somehow validate the president*.

        I get it.  In a country of 330,000,000 people, there are bound to be millions of voters who would vote for Attila the Hun or even Jeffrey Dahmer if he was the republican candidate.   If many of these tRump voters were magically transported to 1776 they would have declared the Founders of the republic were dangerous revolutionaries who should be executed.  Move forward 80 years and they would have lauded the "beneficial" aspects of slavery.   There are always people who move at slower pace than the arc of history.  I don't believe their views should be validated by media attention.   

Fear itself

      It is readily apparent to the fact based reality community that fear is the only thing our president* hopes for.   Turning FDR's phrasing on its head, Cheeto Jesus and his henchmen hope fear of crime and economic decline which he attributes to China and illegal immigrants will drive "low information" voters to the polls.   Based on facebook conversations with former classmates, there seem to be plenty of the later willing to look past tRump's many peccadillos and vote for him as their savior.

      Fortunately, the rising level of education in this country has produced a more educated electorate than 2016.   That and the coming of age of the latter part of the millenial generation and the first voters of Gen Z to be voter eligible provide a counterweight to the working class voters who put tRump over the top in 2016.    Many pundits are predicting and looking for a close election.  However, as the economic carnage and Covid 19 deaths continue to pile up, I think the chances of tRump stealing the election will grow more untenable.   Fear is a powerful weapon, but information is mightier.

The Coming Darkness

      For those who choose to watch the GOP convention this week, be prepared for American Carnage 2.  I have a feeling tRump is going to run as if he was a bystander for the last 3 1/2 years.   While tRump and republicans have been restoring American greatness, the democrats have been causing untold suffering.  Somehow, Covid 19, 176,000 deaths and the economic ruin that has followed are all democrat plots to thwart our glorious leader.   Blah, blah and blah.  

      Of course, the Q Anon set and even some rank and file republicans will buy what tRump is selling.   With the amplification provided by Rushbo, Breitbart, Faux News and OAN, the faithful will supposedly become terrified of the prospect of Joe Biden, the drooling socialist tool or Kamala, the not black enough, but too "other" to be considered a real Murcan.   Rioting in the streets and the eviceration of "our beautiful suburbia" will be his appeal to the female demographic.  

      I doubt much of this scaremongering is going to work on most of its target audience.   It took Russian interference in the election with a timely boost from James Comey to put Cheeto Jesus over the top last time.  This time it will take wholesale voter suppression and intimidation to produce an outcome favorable to republicans.  

Biden or Bannon

       Yesterday offered Americans a pretty stark reminder of what our political parties have become.  On the one hand, Steve Bannon was hauled off a Chinese billionaire's yacht and charged with bilking hundreds of thousands of his fellow citizens by promising to help build tRump's wall across the southern border.   Pledging to put all the funds he collected toward the wall, he   instead is alleged to have  diverted close to a million dollars for his own use, laundering the money through shell companies.   Joe Biden, on the other hand, asked his fellow Americans to be allowed to lead them out of the wilderness of four years of the most corrupt administration in modern history with the kind of earnest, heart tugging speech many of us hoped he was capable of giving.  

     A friend of mine from high school must have seen one of my shared posts on facebook the other day and sent me a message saying she was voting for tRump in November.   I would like to say she is an aberration, an otherwise very nice person who fell for a line of BS.  Unfortunately, there are many more like her out there.   They are Faux News listeners who have been poisoned by right wing talking points.  After I told her it was her prerogative to vote for whomever she pleased, I pointed out tRump is a racist, sexist narcissist who is basically running a crime syndicate out of the White House.   She replied Obama did the same thing.   This is the game the GOP will play all of the election season.  Heaven help us all.