Deplorable

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

It's Sunday

Trump must truly be under God's protection. (Trump and Rasputin, hard to kill.)

The FBI on Sunday said it is investigating a second assassination attempt on former President Trump.

Authorities at a Sunday press conference said a Secret Service agent opened fire on a man with a gun near Trump International Golf Course in West Palm Beach, Fla. [...] [...]

According to Bradshaw, an AK-47-style rifle with a scope, two backpacks and a GoPro were found in bushes where the suspect had been spotted.

Shots were fired by a Secret Service agent after the agent spotted the weapon, Bradshaw said.

  The Hill

What? Did the guy drop his gun as he fled?

State prosecutors were working to secure a warrant and a motion for a pretrial detention for the potential suspect in custody, Palm Beach County State Attorney Dave Aronberg said during the briefing.

[...]

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) on Sunday said he spoke with Trump following the reported gunshots. 

“He [Trump] is one of the strongest people I’ve ever known,” Graham wrote on X. “He’s in good spirits and he is more resolved than ever to save our country.”

Almost Godlike, you might say.

So now people will quit talking about Trump's horrible debate performance and pass around speculation about the latest attempt.

Handy.

The Haitians and Springfield, OH

Makes me wonder: what DID she mean to cause?  Less Hate, but a certain amount of hate is ok? Or is it the number of groups she  meant to cause hate against that wasn't what she intended?  

Just what WAS her reason for doing what she did?

UPDATE 07:04 pm:

Excuses and whining

Any time Trump loses (and sometimes BEFORE he loses) he whines that the situation was rigged.  

I can't forgive Donna Brazille for passing information to Hillary Clinton in 2016, but here's the fix for what they're claiming now: have another debate at a different venue.  Pretty simple, yet he won't do it.  He knows he lost because Kamala was highly prepared and knows her shit.  She also has the best political debate preppers in the country. 

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE 09:35 am:

Trump attacks Penzeys

Trump says “Terrible Over-Priced Product.” Fox says “The meanest spice shop in America.” They want to make us pay for welcoming in Kamala Harris last week and for being the perfect place for showcasing her humanity.

  Penzeys Newsletter

So they're currently running the gift card deal that they periodically offer:

Amici calling for the 11th Circuit to remove Aileen Cannon from docs case

The first brief was filed on behalf of the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), and focuses solely on the removal of Judge Cannon. The second brief was filed on behalf of 18 people and entities including George Conway, Olivia Troye, and Laurence Tribe, and focuses both on her removal and reversing her ruling dismissing the case on the grounds that the Special Counsel was appointed and funded inappropriately.

[...]

In addition to her being reversed twice already, the Amici argue two other controversies that illustrate her inability to be unbiased in the case: The Jury Instruction Controversy, and the Undue Delay Controversy.

The Jury Instruction Controversy was that crazy time she asked both parties to write jury instructions as though the Presidential Records Act actually gave Donald the ability categorize records as either personal or presidential. First, that’s not what the Presidential Records Act says, and second - even if some unsmart person thought it did say that - the PRA has nothing to do with this case. In the Special Master debacle, the 11th Circuit ruled that the classified documents belong to the government and aren’t associated with the PRA.

[...]

They then go on to outline her ridiculous docket, and how multiple pre-trial motions languished on the docket for months, while she held unnecessary hearings, oral arguments, and failed to delegate some of the easier motions to magistrate judges. What they don’t mention is her secret docket - where she added unnecessary time to the docket by requiring the parties to first submit recommended redactions to pre-trial briefings so those could be litigated before they filed them on the public docket.


[...]

They do point out that even though she moved at a glacial pace on pretrial motions, she moved with alacrity on dismissal, waiting only two weeks after Justice Thomas made his off-hand, non-sequitur remarks on the appointment and funding of Jack Smith in his immunity concurrence that literally no one asked for.
  

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Solar power economics

Fact-checking doesn't work on people who don't care about facts

So Vance is right, and Chicago is a hub of lying liberals.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

The QAnon candidate

They've gone from eating your pets to sodomizing your girls.

As Kamala might say: Same old tired rhetoric.

I guess if you lost, you have to come up with some excuse.

Also, even if those ridiculous lies were true, how would that have made HIM say STUPID shit?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Despicable MAGA

And their leader is an ignorant asshole.

Back to Venezuela, huh?

Trump debate rebuttals

They just keep on comin'.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Kamala in North Carolina

According to Trump on debate night, people don't go to Kamala's rallies.

Literally every rally she's had has been like this.

Click here to see the extent.

It started when she said people leave his rallies early, bored.  

Click here.

I've seen several clips of people streaming out of his rallies before he's finished.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE 05:36 pm:

Sad!

And that looks like an all white audience.

UPDATE 11:11 pm:  And then she packed a stadium in Greensboro, NC the same day.

Randy Rainbow has entered the room

Hmmmmm

Speaking of Trump's lawyers...

He has the best lawyers

For an officer of the court, wouldn't that normally be cause for disbarment?

The case is one brought by Alice Bianco, a former waitress at Trump's New Jersey Bedminster golf club.

Bianco’s lawsuit against Bedminster [...] opens up Habba to a possible ethics investigation that could put her professional credentials at risk. New Jersey Superior Court Judge Joseph L. Rea, who oversaw the club lawsuit, hinted at a possible subsequent investigation in handwritten notes he scribbled at the bottom of a court order last December.

Citing the state’s Code of Judicial Conduct, Rea promised to “take appropriate action” with Habba “if this court receives reliable information indicating a substantial likelihood that a lawyer has committed a violation of the rules of professional conduct … that raises a substantial question as to the lawyer’s honesty, trustworthiness, or fitness as a lawyer.”

[...]

Habba’s professional ethics were called into question last year when [Bianco] sued the golf club for having allegedly “defrauded” her into accepting $15,000 on the condition that she keep quiet about sexual harassment allegations.

[...]

In March, the club agreed to void the hush money deal in a settlement agreement, let [Bianco] keep the cash and [to] pay her lawyer, Nancy Erika Smith, $82,500 in fees. But the club cut Habba out of that settlement, leaving her wide open to getting personally sued for her role in the ordeal.

Habba and Bianco attended mediation and later agreed to settle the matter out of court.

  Notus

Surprisingly, it wasn't Trump who was harassing Bianco. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it was a manager at a Trump business.

[Originally,] Bianco hired an employment lawyer to consider her options and discussed the [harassment] matter with coworkers. Then, she was approached by Habba, who portrayed herself as a concerned friend willing to give legal advice. At the time, Bianco only knew Habba as a member of the social club who loved to grab the microphone on party nights and belt out songs in the dining hall.

[...]

Habba ultimately convinced Bianco to ditch the lawyer and go with her instead — then advised the waitress to sign a hush money deal that would keep the club out of news headlines and leave Bianco with a paltry sum, per text messages cited in the lawsuit. When Bianco later discovered she owed taxes on the $15,000 she had received, Habba gave her the cold shoulder.

“I can’t technically give u legal advice,” Habba texted back, in a message attached to the lawsuit. “That’s the problem.”

Hmmmmm. Seems like she already had.

[Bianco and a new attorney] pieced together a timeline that they believe shows how Habba silenced Bianco to cozy up to Trump.

And how Habba's still there is a testament to Trump not giving a rat's ass if his represenatives are either capable or legit, as long as his freedom isn't on the line.

Habba also represented Trump when he sued The New York Times and three investigative reporters over a Pulitzer Prize-winning story in 2018 about his family’s tax practices — a lawsuit that remains active against the former president’s niece, Mary Trump, but resulted in him having to pay the newspaper $392,639 in attorney’s fees. Habba also represented Trump in his shotgun pleading against former rival Hillary Clinton, which was tossed out by a federal judge who called out Trump’s “pattern of misusing the courts to serve political purposes” and found Trump and Habba jointly and severally liable for $937,989.

Habba has since elevated her prominence in the Trump 2024 campaign, speaking at rallies and continuing to defend him on conservative news networks.

Nothing is logical (or ethical) in Trumpland.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

RFKJ shouldn't get ALL the blame

Pretty sure the NC Supreme Court's partisans were happy to oblige.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Surprising no one

Of course, he's playing it as she lost so badly she demanded another chance.

He also says she was a "no show" at "the Fox Debate."  There never was a scheduled Fox debate.  He simply talked to Fox about the possibility.  HE "agreed" to one.

In truth, she beat him so badly in the ABC debate, he dare not risk another humiliation.

Harris took to the stage for a rally in North Carolina where she addressed her desire to face the former president again.

“I believe we owe it to the voters to have another debate, because this election and what are at stake could not be more important,” Harris told supporters.

[...]

A CNN rapid poll found 63 percent of debate watchers said Harris won Tuesday’s debate, compared to 37 percent who said Trump won. Multiple polls released Thursday showed Harris widening her lead over Trump nationally.

  The Hill

Even Newsmax, Trump's Fox replacement, MAGA outlet, showed a poll with Trump as the loser by far.

Trump cited multiple social media polls in the Wednesday morning interview, including one posted by C-SPAN, that showed he fared better than Harris. And a Trump campaign poll found Trump got a 2-point bump from the debate, while Harris’s support in battleground states remained flat.

Do you think "The Hill" might dig a little? RFK Jr (even) said he'd seen those polls that said Trump won, and that they were "polls you see on the internet" that "probably have statistical" problems.   Like maybe being polls of five or six MAGA diehards?

Trump campaign polls, on the other hand, are meant to tell Trump what he wants to hear.

Inch by inch, state by state

Newsmax!!!

MAGA bullshit will keep endangering Americans

A bomb threat has prompted a major police response in Springfield, Ohio, on Thursday morning, according to the city commission office.

[...]

Though it is not yet known if they are connected, the threat comes after baseless rumors spread online in the wake of viral social media posts claiming Haitian migrants were abducting people's pets in Springfield order to eat them. The rumors were amplified by right-wing politicians, including former President Donald Trump and his running mate Sen. JD Vance.

  ABC

Perhaps not yet connected, but I think it's pretty clear they are connected. JFC.

Springfield estimates there are around 12,000 to 15,000 immigrants living in the county; migrants have been drawn to the region because of low cost of living and work opportunities, according to the city. The rapid rise in population has strained housing, health care and school resources, according to the city. But city officials also said the migrants are in the country legally and that many are recipients of Temporary Protected Status.

[...]

Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, who dispelled the rumors this week, said the state would send more resources to Springfield.

A cautionary moment

From Sarah Kendzior's substack.

I had long predicted both Trump’s win and that his goal was to rule like an authoritarian kleptocrat. These predictions were derided in 2016 but have now become mainstream to the point of spawning a cottage industry. Unfortunately, the cottage industry does not address the root causes of American autocracy but reduces them to Trump — and Trump alone.

[...]

As a result, Americans are forced to live forever on the precipice, while politicians and pundits feign opposition for profit. They need you to see Trump as a novel and singular threat, instead of a long-time player in multiple corrupt networks — because they inhabit those same networks, as do their financial backers.

[...]

The Autocracy Cottage Industry [...] would rather join the Trump administration and then write tell-all books about crimes they witnessed but did not stop. They would rather pass the same repressive policies Trump did but cloak them in gentler rhetoric. They fundraise off your fear.

[...]

Instead of fighting the autocrat or analyzing the institutional corruption that rendered the US the first country in history to let a coup plotter run for president, an “opposition” swarming with scammers bolstered Trump’s brand — elevating it instead of ending it.

[...]

Trump’s voters no longer consider him a threat, even though a record number did in the months after the Capitol attack. The lack of punishment for committing sedition has convinced them that Trump is innocent, which he is not, and further inflamed his base.

But lack of accountability does not bother Vichy Democrats or Never-Trump Republicans or the predatory scammers surrounding them. It keeps them in business. For their operation to succeed, the public must abandon critical thinking in favor of cult logic. Memes and mantras replace contemplation and compassion, rendering humans indistinguishable from bots.

[...]

In their formulation, there is only Trump and Not-Trump. Your thinking must never extend beyond that binary.

Nor can your knowledge of history. Or you will see a recurring cast of corrupt characters guiding politics, some of whom — Elliott Abrams, Michael Chertoff, Jamie Gorelick — pop up in both Democratic and GOP administrations for decades on end.

You will notice parallels to Trump’s rise in war criminals like Dick Cheney, who was elevated to power in the 2000 SCOTUS ruling buoyed by a riot led by Trump advisor Roger Stone.

You will note that Cheney is endorsing Trump’s opponent, Kamala Harris, and that Harris is “honored” by his support.

Harris cannot control who endorses her. But her warm response to Dick Cheney’s approval should be greeted with alarm — particularly when war criminals are welcomed into the Harris fold while antiwar protesters are rejected.

  Sarah Kendzior

Dick Cheney, and other staunch Republicans, including Alberto Gonzales, W Bush's apologist for terror Attorney General.

Bush-era Republican operatives, unable to function in the chaos of MAGA, saw an opportunity to remake the Democratic Party, which had been lurching to the right since the 1990s, and took it. They left receipts: the conservative Lincoln Project is Harris’s fourth biggest donor. Change in Democratic Party policy is determined by donations — not only the Lincoln Project’s — and then rationalized with the Trump/Not-Trump binary.

Kendzior, an author and anti-war progressive who has made St. Louis her home for many years, is a literal student of authoritarian regimes. She's something of a Cassandra for Americans, whom the mainstream label a crank.

I listen to the Trump-converted "never Trumpers" on podcasts and welcome their support for Harris, but while they see the danger in MAGA, they are cheering Harris' "move to the center." I don't think Kendzior is being alarmist here. What she doesn't say is there really is no other choice right now. The choice IS binary. We just have to hold on to what we need to do to correct the flirtation with fascism the country is experiencing when Harris gets in office.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

The answer is still "No"

More insanity from Trump's debate rants

This campaign has to be one of the most hilarious, if appalling, MAGA self-owns out there. Are they trying to get back some of the "cat ladies" Vance dissed?

BTW, Vance is at a central spot in this. He's proving to be a gift to Democrats.

Trump got in trouble with it at the debate:

[O]ne particularly bizarre whopper about Haitian immigrants in Ohio killing and eating pets dominated the headlines.

“In Springfield, they're eating the dogs. The people that came in. They're eating the cats. They're eating — they're eating the pets of the people that live there,” Trump babbled during the debate, thrown off by Harris’s transparent attempt to bait him with a dig at his crowd size. “And this is what's happening in our country. And it's a shame.”

[...]

[...]

The story was thoroughly debunked even before the debate. But examining how it got laundered from the fringes of the internet to Trump’s lips perfectly illustrates the hollowness at the center of the Trump movement, and indeed in modern conservatism itself.

According to the Springfield News-Sun, the racist meme started with a post to a Facebook group for residents of the Ohio town. The poster claimed that a neighbor’s daughter’s friend had discovered her cat butchered near a home lived in by Haitians, and further that the poster had “been told” that pet dogs as well as wild geese and ducks had been killed as well.

  Public Notice

And that was NOT an obvious fake to Trump people. Sheesh.

[L]ocal police never received any reports of pets being killed. The Federalist did manage to dig up a police report that accused four Haitians of illegal goose hunting, but that’s hardly the stuff that rightwing memes are made of. If you want to foment racial hatred against minorities and immigrants, you can’t just accuse them of participating in the Real American™ hobby of hunting. So instead the wingnutosphere cooked up a ridiculous lie about a plague of brown-skinned invaders devouring family pets, then went pedal to the metal with it.

Charlie Kirk, Kremlin-funded Benny Johnson, and even Elon Musk all tweeted about it on Monday. But things really got out of hand when Trump’s vice presidential candidate JD Vance, the junior senator from Ohio, joined the fray.

[...]

All day Monday and Tuesday, as Trump “prepped” for the debate, the weirdos who populate his social media feed vomited out meme after meme of Trump protecting cats and ducks — most of them clearly generated using Elon Musk’s AI, known as Grok.

[...]

This is what the former president’s media diet looks like 365 days a year. His Truth Social feed contains dozens of links a day to wildly inaccurate stories, along with slavish coverage from Fox, Newsmax, and the lesser outlets that make up the rightwing ecosystem. That’s why he claimed during the debate without a trace of irony that his “very fine people” quote about Nazis in Charlottesville had been debunked because “Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity, Jesse — all of these people, they covered it.” To him, that is what real news looks like.

And in this airless void of sycophants, Trump routinely reposts AI-generated images of himself as a superhero. Or of Harris cheering the Russian hammer and sickle. Or of Taylor Swift endorsing him.

[...]

Vance, who did more than anyone to make this racist hoax a thing, was unapologetic.

“It's possible, of course, that all of these rumors will turn out to be false,” he tweeted Tuesday. “Do you know what's confirmed? That a child was murdered by a Haitian migrant who had no right to be here.”

That is false in every respect. Approximately 15,000 Haitian immigrants have moved into Springfield in the past few years, most of them legal residents under a since-halted Temporary Protected Status granted to migrants from war-torn countries. They have work permits and have been a boon to local factories, which were desperate for reliable employees.

[...]

[Vance] tweeted that his office had received calls from Ohio residents complaining about Haitian immigrants eating pets and wild animals. He failed to explain why these residents would report their supposedly missing pets to a US senator and not local law enforcement.

[...]

In a post-debate interview with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins [Vance had this to say...]

 [...] 

As Reuters reports, the influx of new residents has indeed stressed social services. But there has been no concomitant uptick in crime rates, and the child who died was not “murdered,” but was accidentally killed when his school bus was struck by a car driven by a Haitian migrant.

And we have seen videos from a company manager raving about the work ethics of his Haitian employees and wishing he had more, and the father of the child decrying GOP use of his son as a political prop, begging them to stop, and setting the story straight.

“I wish that my son, Aiden Clark, was killed by a 60-year-old white man. I bet you never thought anyone would say something so blunt, but if that guy killed my 11-year-old son, the incessant group of hate-spewing people would leave us alone,” the boy’s father Nathan Clark said tearfully at a recent county meeting. “They can vomit all the hate they want about illegal immigrants, the border crisis and even untrue claims about fluffy pets being ravaged and eaten by community members. However, they are not allowed nor have they ever been allowed, to mention Aiden Clark from Springfield, Ohio.”

[...]

It doesn’t matter if they conscript dead children as unwilling pawns in a meme war, or if they incite pogroms against ethnic minorities — unlike, say, puerile jokes about the vice presidential candidate’s amorous activities with furniture or even the “Tampon Tim” smear of Governor Walz.

[...]

“Don't let the crybabies in the media dissuade you, fellow patriots,” Vance tweeted Tuesday. “Keep the cat memes flowing.”

And if it makes them seem deranged and out of touch, or even gets some people killed, they do not care. All they care about is winning. But fortunately, America is not an incel chatroom, so these filthy lies are hurting Trump more than they’re helping. Normies are laughing at him, not with him.

I just hope there are enough normies out there.

These are some of the ridiculously hilarious graphics they are choosing to try to make Trump look like a hero...

Hilarious. 

Pathetic.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE 09:41 am:  JD Vance, the MAGA gift to Democrats that keeps on giving.

UPDATE 12:20 pm:

A bomb threat has prompted a major police response in Springfield, Ohio, on Thursday morning, according to the city commission office.

[...]

Though it is not yet known if they are connected, the threat comes after baseless rumors spread online in the wake of viral social media posts claiming Haitian migrants were abducting people's pets in Springfield order to eat them. The rumors were amplified by right-wing politicians, including former President Donald Trump and his running mate Sen. JD Vance.

  ABC

Perhaps not yet connected, but I think it's pretty clear they are connected. JFC.

Springfield estimates there are around 12,000 to 15,000 immigrants living in the county; migrants have been drawn to the region because of low cost of living and work opportunities, according to the city. The rapid rise in population has strained housing, health care and school resources, according to the city. But city officials also said the migrants are in the country legally and that many are recipients of Temporary Protected Status.

[...]

Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, who dispelled the rumors this week, said the state would send more resources to Springfield.