The games in Cleveland

         The Yankees had a good night in Cleveland.   They beat the Indians and Shawn Bieber 13-3.  A few blocks away, Democracy had a very bad night in Cleveland.   Although Joe Biden was the clear winner, it was an ugly night, driven wild by an addled demagogue who seems hell bent on taking America down with him when he is defeated in November.

        The moderator of the "debate", Chris Wallace tried to restrain tRump on numerous occasions when the president* shouted over Biden and Wallace.   He completely disregarded the rules agreed upon by both campaigns and showed a stunning disregard for decorum and norms that made his debates with Hillary Clinton look like a ladies' tea party.   If I was Wallace, I would have shut the mikes and the lights off midway through the proceedings and walked off the stage.   As it is, his reputation as a tough but fair moderator is toast.

      I think Biden made the best of a bad situation.   Several times during a nightmarish 90 minutes he looked into the camera and spoke directly to America, promising to be the president of all the people, not just those who support him.   I believe a small but significant cohort of tRump's supporters will look at last night with the disgust most of us felt and switch their allegiance.   I believe a tidal wave is coming.

The tRump voter

       As the "typical" tRump voter becomes more and more hesitant to declare his/her allegiance to the president*, some pundits have sought out an even rarer specimen, democrats who have switched loyalties even if Cheetolini has made his disdain for them evident.

      So it was that NYT columnist Bret Stephens was able to find a Manhattan lesbian who is voting for tRump.    A former Bernie Sanders fan, Chris, no last name please, is voting for tRump mostly because the stock market is filling her 401 K at a blistering pace.   I guess Stephens didn't point out the market does not reflect any genius on tRump's part.  The Federal Reserve has pumped over a trillion dollars into Wall Street to avoid a catastrophe caused by the coronavirus pandemic.  But I digress.

      Chris also approves a buffoonish foreign policy, the president's* serial sexual assaults and only hesitated at the Charlottesville incident.   This "interview" was conducted before the latest revelations about Cheetolini's taxes, so there is a little journalistic malpractice going on.  Shown the criminal tax evasion practiced by the president, it is possible Chris may have changed her mind. 

     I can only imagine Stephens' next scoop;  the surviving Koch brother  is a secret Biden voter! 

Another nail

        As if there were any reasons left for supporting the president* in the upcoming election, a new blockbuster piece in the NYT last night conclusively removed the "he's a successful businessman" meme from the list.

       tRump has refused to release his tax returns to the public, ostensibly because he is under audit by the IRS, and ha spent freely to keep them secret.  The Times reporters, who are incidentally the same who documented the Trump family's tax frauds in the 1980s and 90s.  These frauds were used to pass on Fred Trump's wealth without paying any inheritance taxes.  tRump's tax returns show a far more illegal use of the tax system.   When a supposed billionaire pays nothing to the IRS for 10 out of 15 years and a meager $750 the year he won the presidency, it seems to me prima facie evidence of crimes being committed.

    Of course, if the right wing media covers this story, it will put a gloss on the illegality, telling listeners that all wealthy people game the system and if we had access to high powered tax lawyers we could write off junior's tree house as a business expense.   This toxic fairy  tale impugns all the people who contribute to the defense of the country as well as the myriad expenses of the modern nation state.  

    This is not a case of "both sides do it".   Cheetolini failed to show his taxes to the American people because he has a lot of explaining to do.  What else do we not know about a president* who has as much as half a billion dollars of bills coming due in the next several years.   We need to find out before election day.

An irreversible split?

       In today's NYT, Jamaal Bouie makes  a compelling argument using the Missouri Compromise of 1821 as his jumping off point.   He says the nation was of course more factionalized in the early part of the 19th century by the issue of slavery.   Both sides believed they were playing a zero sum game and if one or the other established a preponderance of legislative power their adversary was doomed.   By allowing Missouri to enter the union as a slave state along with Maine as a free state, both sides kept a precarious equilibrium which allowed 40 more years of peace.

      Bouie compares that uneasy peace with the conflict between the newly emboldened authoritarian Republican party and the Democrats who oppose it.  The latest bare knuckled tactic; the evident approval of whomever the president* nominates to fill Ruth Bader Ginsberg's seat in seeming contradiction to the party's stance when Obama faced a similar situation.   

      In both era's, the party of reaction faced a similar demographic decline.   The slave owning south would eventually be numerically overwhelmed by the industrial north.  Similarly, the white nationalists who mostly represent the Republicans will sooner or later be rendered irrelevant by the coming majority of non-white and progressive Democrats.   The south did not go down without a fight, and whether Bouie says it or not, he believes today's Republicans will do the same.   So far, it is a legislative brawl.  Let's hope they don't adopt the other tactic of the Lost Cause.

Stolen election porn

       Now comes an article in The Atlantic magazine, detailing how the tRump campaign is going to steal the election in November.   Barton Gellman, the author, describes voter intimidation, ballot stealing and even colluding with state legislatures to vote in tRump electors instead of respecting the people's choice.  Obviously  these plans did not come from Cheetolini, whose powers of concentration rival those of a fruit fly.   These plans exhibit the fingerprints of Billy Barr and Moscow Mitch.

      I haven't read the 10,000 word article, but I am curious as to who Gellman thinks is the mastermind behind plans to deploy more than a thousand lawyers to challenge voters' signatures on mail in ballots.  The Biden campaign has its own army of litigators set to go as well.  My main worry is the perennial failure of Democrats to realize Republicans will always bring a gun to a knife fight.

     As one pundit put the challenge to Democratic voters, we must run up the score so even the most hardened partisan will realize the will of the people is to be done with Cheeto Jesus in the wake of the most disastrous 4 years in American history.

Outrage meter maxed out

      Following the latest outrages perpetrated by tRump and his merry band of nihilists is exhausting and ultimately futile.   It seems there  is no norm they will not violate, no agency of the government they will not compromise and no lie they will not tell in service to the dear leader.   The Divine Mrs. M has stopped watching the news in an effort to preserve her sanity.

      Now the media has given up on the horse race metaphor since Cheetolini is so far behind in most polls.   In an effort to keep eyeballs on the screen we are now treated to endless articles on how the president* will steal the election if he is within a certain margin on election day.  Of course tRump aids this effort on a daily basis, telling his followers the election is rigged unless he wins.  Most of these poor souls are so far into the right wing news bubble they swallow this garbage and prepare for armageddon.

     There seems to be little the average person can do except to keep informed, donate to democrats with a credible chance of being elected and be prepared for the blizzard of BS which will hit the proverbial fan on election day and the weeks following.  

Let's play hardball

      While the title of this post quotes the odious Chris Matthews, the spirit applies to Democrats as tRump and McConnell propose to enshrine a conservative majority in the Supreme court for a generation.  Appealing to cultural norms or even Republican pledges is a fool's errand.  It is time for Dems to play hardball if they win a majority in the Senate.

      Statehood for DC and Puerto Rico are surely on the table.   How about Guam?  Packing the Supreme Court would be next on the agenda.   Surely 4 new 30 something millenials would give Joe Biden and his agenda their stamp of approval.   Conservatives have been playing the long game on judicial appointments for 40 years, confirming men and women to whom the progressive agenda is anathema.  Democrats can erase this advantage immediately so small d democratic legislation can be passed and upheld by a court no longer beholden to Republican daddies.

      Of course all these suggestions assume Chuck Schumer and his caucus are not just as firmly in the pockets of American oligarchs as McConnell and tRump.   Here is their chance to prove it if the levers of power are delivered to them by voters in November.   If they fail to act, then my nephew will have been proved right to disdain the Democratic party as a frail imitation of the Republicans.