Election 2024

https://x.com/marlene4719
Marlene Robertson
@marlene4719

"Imbecile Vance strikes again. He claims people would have more kids if it wasn’t for those pesky car seat laws. This is beyond weird." #540
"beyond weird" to the literal-minded perhaps. It's actually a simple formula Trump perfected early in his 2016 presidential campaign. "Crazy like a fox"?
Trump then refined his skill at releasing alarming, and therefore seemingly news-worthy, statements. Trump even demonstrated the discipline to limit such attention-grabbers to the news cycle.
Some estimate Trump obtained about a $Billion dollars worth of free publicity with that technique, also gaining the white house, losing the vote, winning the election.

As Trump's protégé, Vance is using the same technique with similar affect.

Car seat laws suppress population growth? Silly? Of course. BUT !!
It's absurd enough less than 2 months from election day to have entered public discourse.

We fall into the trap by repeating it, amplifying the ridiculous message.

The way to fight back? What did KamHar say today?
 
" @JDVance staffers knew the racist claims were untrue but Vance and Trump continued making them anyway. " #528

fab·u·list (făbyə-lĭst)
n.
1. A composer of fables.
2. A teller of tales; a liar.

[French fabuliste, from Latin fābula, fable; see FABLE.]
The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition copyright ©2022 by HarperCollins Publishers. All rights reserved.

note:
Such flagrant gratuitous falsehoods disgrace the candidate, or in this case, the ticket.
That such candidates lead in electoral polls disgraces the nation, & threaten humanity.
 
Shortly after the Harris / Trump debate Taylor Swift endorsed Harris.
The following suggests Swift has forfeited some popularity as a result. QUESTION: Does Swift think it was worth it?

The significant shift from Republican voters has pushed Swift’s overall favorability rating among registered voters lower than last year, decreasing from 40% in 2023 to 33% this year. While 16% had negative feelings about her in 2023, 27% say they do now.
 
ukEN38l.png


Moreover, tariffs are paid by the American people, not the "other guys" (China or whoever)
 
100% to 2% in 2 centuries

tariffs are paid by the American people, not the "other guys" (China or whoever)
Trump seems to not know that *.
Theatre IRS originates from the Commissioner of Internal Revenue, a federal office created in 1862 to assess the nation's first income tax to fund the American Civil War. The temporary measure funded over a fifth of the Union's war expenses before being allowed to expire a decade later.
In 1913, the Sixteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified, authorizing Congress to impose a tax on income and leading to the creation of the Bureau of Internal Revenue. In 1953, the agency was renamed the Internal Revenue Service, and in subsequent decades underwent numerous reforms and reorganizations, most significantly in the 1990s.
More from Wikipedia

UNITED STATES CONSTITUTION ARTICLE #16: Ratified February 3, 1913
The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration.

* note:
Not sure what to make of this, both Trump and Putin seem baffled, flummoxed by this.
 
While such scandal might sully or destroy the reputation of less dishonest celebrities, such scandal seems to burnish Trump's reputation.

While to the rational benevolent or benign mind that may discredit Trump, it does no better for the millions that support Trump.

=================================

It's impossible to objectively review this Trump era without acknowledging the political consequences.
But the psychology, the dynamics of a sociopath with a microphone, enter ... the age of alarm ?
 
While such scandal might sully or destroy the reputation of less dishonest celebrities, such scandal seems to burnish Trump's reputation.

While to the rational benevolent or benign mind that may discredit Trump, it does no better for the millions that support Trump.
fiYjVJc.jpeg
 
Hasn't Trump invoked the almighty, choosing to spare Trump's life, instead of a shattered skull, JFK style, a nick on the ear?
If so doesn't that equally imply the deceased was equally god's chosen substitute victim? Kill a rally attendee, but spare Trump?

Trump made a joke involving the widow of the man who was killed #549

D.J. Trump:
earning converts to the Harris / Walz ticket one bereaved Republican at a time.
 
Re #544


William McKinley is having a moment (which I confess is a sentence I never expected to write).
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump is elevating McKinley, representative from Ohio from 1877 to 1891 and president from 1897 to 1901, to justify his plan to impose new high tariffs.
Trump’s call for tariffs is not an economic plan; it is a worldview. Trump claims that foreign countries pay tariff duties and thus putting new tariffs of 20% on all imports, and as much as 60% on Chinese imports, will bring enough foreign money into the country to fund things like childcare, end federal budget deficits, and pay for the tax cuts he wants to give to the wealthy and corporations.
This is a deliberate lie. Tariffs are essentially taxes on imported products, and they are paid not by foreign countries but by American consumers. Economists warn that Trump’s tariff plan would cost a typical family an average of more than $2,600 a year, with poorer families hardest hit; spike inflation as high as 20%; result in 50,000 to 70,000 fewer jobs created each month; slow economic growth; and add about $5.8 trillion in deficits over ten years. It would tank an economy that under the Biden administration, which has used tariffs selectively to protect new industries and stop unfair trade practices, has boomed.
Trump simply denies this economic success. He promises to make the economy great with a tariff wall. On September 27, he told rally attendees in Warren, Michigan: “You know, our country In the 1890s was probably…the wealthiest it ever was because it was a system of tariffs and we had a president, you know McKinley, right?... He was really a very good businessman, and he took in billions of dollars at the time, which today it’s always trillions but then it was billions and probably hundreds of millions, but we were a very wealthy country and we’re gonna be doing that now….”
By pointing to McKinley’s presidency to justify his economic plan, Trump gives away the game. The McKinley years were those of the Gilded Age, in which industrialists amassed fortunes that they spent in spectacular displays. Cornelius and Alva Vanderbilt’s home on New York’s Fifth Avenue cost more than $44 million in today’s dollars, with stables finished in black walnut, cherry, and ash, with sterling silver metalwork, and in cities across the country, the wealthy dressed their horses and coachmen in expensive livery, threw costly dinners, built seaside mansions they called “cottages,” and wore diamonds, rubies, and emeralds. When the daughter of a former senator married, she wore a $10,000 dress and a diamond tiara, and well-wishers sent “necklaces of diamonds [and] bracelets of diamonds, sapphires, and rubies.”
Americans believed those fortunes were possible because of the tariff walls the Republicans had begun to build in 1861. Before the Civil War, Congress levied limited U.S. tariffs to fund the federal government, a system southerners liked because it kept prices low, but northerners disliked because established industries in foreign countries could deliver manufactured goods more cheaply than fledgling U.S. industries could produce them, thus hampering industrial development.
So, when the Republican Party organized in the North in the 1850s, it called for a tariff wall that would protect U.S. manufacturing. And as soon as Republicans took control of the government, they put tariffs on everything, including agricultural products, to develop American industry.
The system worked. The United States emerged from the Civil War with a booming economy.
But after the war, that same tariff wall served big business by protecting it from the competition of cheaper foreign products. That protection permitted manufacturers to collude to keep prices high. Businessmen developed first informal organizations called “pools” in which members carved up markets and set prices, and then “trusts” that eliminated competition and fixed consumer prices at artificially high levels. By the 1880s, tariffs had come to represent almost half a product’s value.
Buoyed by protection, trusts controlled most of the nation’s industries, including sugar, meat, salt, gas, copper, transportation, steel, and the jute that made up both the burlap sacks workers used to harvest cotton and the twine that tied ripe wheat sheaves. Workers, farmers, and entrepreneurs hated the trusts that controlled their lives, but Republicans in Congress worked with the trusts to keep tariffs high. So, in 1884, voters elected Democrat Grover Cleveland, who promised to lower tariffs.
Republicans panicked. They insisted that the nation’s economic system depended on tariffs and that anyone trying to lower them was trying to destroy the nation. They flooded the country with pamphlets defending high tariffs. Cleveland won the popular vote in 1888, but Republican Benjamin Harrison won the electoral votes to become president.
After the election, steel magnate Andrew Carnegie explained that the huge fortunes of the new industrialists were good for society. The wealthy were stewards of the nation’s money, he wrote in what became known as The Gospel of Wealth, gathering it together so it could be used for the common good. Indeed, Carnegie wrote, modern American industrialism was the highest form of civilization.
But low wages, dangerous conditions, and seasonal factory closings and lock-outs meant that injury, hunger, and homelessness haunted urban wage workers. Soaring shipping costs meant that farmers spent the price of two bushels of corn to get one bushel to market. Monopolies meant that entrepreneurs couldn’t survive. And high tariffs meant that the little money that did go into their pockets didn’t go far. By 1888 the U.S. Treasury ran an annual surplus of almost $120 million thanks to tariffs, seeming to prove that their point was to enable wealthy men to control the economy.
 
Continued

“Wall Street owns the country,” western organizer Mary Elizabeth Lease told farmers in summer 1890. “It is no longer a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, but a government of Wall Street, by Wall Street, and for Wall Street.” As the midterm elections of 1890 approached, nervous congressional Republicans, led by Ohio’s William McKinley, promised to lower tariff rates.
Instead, the tariff “revision” raised them, especially on household items—the rate for horseshoe nails jumped from 47% to 76%—sending the price of industrial stocks rocketing upward. And yet McKinley insisted that high tariff walls were “indispensable to the safety, purity, and permanence of the Republic.”
In a chaotic congressional session with members shouting amendments, yelling objections, and talking over each other, Republicans passed the McKinley Tariff in May 1890 without any Democratic votes. They cheered and clapped at their victory. “You may rejoice now,” a Democrat yelled across the aisle, “but next November you’ll mourn.”
Democrats were right. In the November 1890 midterm elections, angry voters repudiated the Republican Party. They gave the Democrats a two-to-one majority in the House; McKinley himself lost his seat. Even Republicans thought their party had gone too far, and in 1892, voters gave Democrats control of the House, Senate, and White House for the first time since before the Civil War.
Republican stalwarts promptly insisted that Democrats would destroy the economy by cutting tariff rates, and their warnings crashed the economy ten days before Cleveland took office. Democrats slightly lowered the tariff, replacing the lost income with an income tax on those who made more than $4,000 a year. Republicans promptly insisted the Democrats were instituting socialism.
As the nation recovered from the economic panic of 1893, Republicans doubled down on their economic ideology. In 1896 they nominated McKinley for president. While he stayed home and kept his mouth shut, the party flooded the country with speakers and newspaper articles paid for with the corporate money that flowed into the Republicans’ war chest, all touting the protective tariff. Warned that the Democrats were trying “to create a red welter of lawlessness as fantastic and as vicious as the dream of a European communist,” voters elected McKinley.
And then the Republicans had a stroke of luck. After the election, the discovery of gold on Bonanza Creek near the Klondike River in Canada’s Yukon Territory brought enough gold into the U.S. to ease the money supply, letting up pressure on both farmers and workers, and the fight over the tariff eased.
It reemerged in 1913 when Democratic president Woodrow Wilson challenged the ideology behind Republican tariffs. A Democratic Congress cut tariff rates almost in half, from close to 50% to 25%, and to make up for lost revenue, Democrats put a tax on incomes over $3,000. Republicans complained that the measure was socialistic and discriminated against capitalists, especially the Wall Street community.
As soon as Republicans regained control of the government, they slashed taxes and restored the tariff rates the Democrats had cut. This laid the groundwork for World War II by making it difficult for foreign governments to export to the United States and thus earn dollars to pay their debts from World War I.
It also recreated the domestic economy of the 1890s. Congress gave the president power to raise or lower the tariffs at will, and in the 1920s, Republican presidents Harding and Coolidge changed tariff rates thirty-seven times; thirty-two times they moved rates upward. (They dropped the rates on paintbrush handles and bobwhite quails.) Business profits rose but wages did not, and wealth moved upward dramatically. By 1929, 5% of the population received one third of the nation’s income, and more than 60% of American families earned less than they needed for basic necessities.
When the bottom fell out of the stock market in 1929, ordinary Americans had too little purchasing power to fuel the economy. In June 1930, Republicans fell back on their faith in tariffs once again when they passed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff,* raising rates to protect American business. Other countries promptly retaliated, and the resulting trade war dramatically reduced foreign trade, exacerbating the Great Depression.
When Smoot-Hawley failed, it took with it Americans’ faith that tariffs were the key to a strong economy. After World War II, ideological fights over the structure of the economy would be waged over taxes rather than tariffs.
Trump’s insistence that a tariff wall will make America rich is not based in economics; indeed, it would destroy the current system, which is so strong that modern economists are marveling. Trump is fantasizing about a world without regulations or taxes, where high tariffs permit the wealthy to collude to raise prices on ordinary Americans and to use that money to live like kings while workers, farmers, and entrepreneurs barely scrape by…a world like McKinley’s.
.....
*In 2009, then-representative Michele Bachmann (R-MN) made history by referring to this as the “Hoot-Smalley” tariff and blaming FDR for passing it (FDR didn’t take office until 1933).
 
"Trump claims that foreign countries pay tariff duties and thus putting new tariffs of 20% on all imports, and as much as 60% on Chinese imports, will bring enough foreign money into the country to fund things like childcare, end federal budget deficits, and pay for the tax cuts he wants to give to the wealthy and corporations.
This is a deliberate lie. Tariffs are essentially taxes on imported products, and they are paid not by foreign countries but by American consumers." #551
Trump doesn't know this? Fine.
MAGA's don't too ?! - or -
They know, but don't care ?
Not sure about the intent of the grim detail. Intended point, it may take equally long for MAGAs to relearn this history lesson in economics 101?
 
Media Alerts:
KamHar scheduled for ABC-TV The View today, and
CBS-TV The Late Show this evening.

Busy gal.

And depending on local schedule, PBS may broadcast Frontline: The VP Choice: Vance vs. Walz today.

Truthiness doesn't seem to be a Vance strong-point, BUT
Walz seems to have embellished on his own. Will PBS address that?
 

Trump to propose making interest on car loans tax deductible​

By Nora Eckert and David Shepardson / October 10, 2024 12:48 PM GMT-5
DETROIT/WASHINGTON, Oct 10 (Reuters) - Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump on Thursday will propose making all interest on car loans fully tax-deductible and taking steps to prevent Chinese automakers from selling vehicles in the United States, according to excerpts of a speech seen by Reuters ahead of remarks in Detroit.
Trump will say at the Detroit Economic Club he plans to impose new tariffs to prevent Chinese automakers from building cars in Mexico and exporting them to the United States, part of an effort to appeal to autoworkers in the battleground state of Michigan.

Trump to propose making interest on car loans tax deductible


The deeply offensive part of this for conservatives is, we are all for cutting taxes, rah rah ! BUT !!

Cut spending farther FIRST ! $Balance the $Budget !! The U.S. spends over one third of the solar system's military budget. And the U.S. spends more on interest on its own debt than it does on military.
The MAGAs thrive on criticizing Biden.

Trump added twice as much to the national debt as Biden: Analysis by Tobias Burns - 06/24/24 11:12 AM ET


Trump voters evidently either don't understand, or don't care: Government cannot give citizens anything it has not first taken from them. And when government spending is already in deficit, further tax cuts merely increase deficit and debt, now at $35 $Trillion.

"...everyone's for big government. The American People say we hate big government, but we like our social security and medicare. That's 38% of government right there. The biggest components of government are the most popular components of government."
"What's pernicious about deficits for conservatives is this. It makes big government cheap. What we're doing, we're turning to the country, the"conservative" administration turns to the country and says: We're going to give you a dollar's worth of government,
we're going to charge you seventy five cents for it. And we're going to let your kids pay the other quarter." George Will Nov 30, 2003
 
The New Republic
Opinion

The Kremlin Throws Trump Under the Bus on Secret Putin Gift​

Hafiz Rashid / Wed, October 9, 2024 at 9:10 AM EDT
Donald Trump denies sending Vladimir Putin Covid-19 tests during the height of the pandemic. But Putin himself says it’s all true.

On Wednesday, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov confirmed journalist Bob Woodward’s account from his upcoming book, War, that Trump sent the tests, but denied Woodward’s claim that the two had spoken multiple times since Trump left office in 2021.
“We also sent equipment at the beginning of the pandemic,” Peskov said in a written response to questions from Bloomberg about the book. “But about the phone calls—it’s not true.”

Trump reportedly sent the tests to Putin amid a shortage of tests in the United States, and Putin told him to keep it a secret for fear of a backlash against Trump from the American public.
“I don’t want you to tell anybody because people will get mad at you, not me,” Putin reportedly said to Trump at the time.
Trump’s campaign vehemently denied the report Tuesday, calling Woodward a “total sleazebag,” “an angry, little man,” “a truly demented and deranged man,” and “a boring person with no personality.”
“President Trump gave him absolutely no access for this trash book that either belongs in the bargain bin of the fiction section of a discount bookstore or used as toilet tissue,” said Steven Cheung, the Trump campaign’s communications director, in a statement.

Part of the amusement of this is Trump campaign claims include that Biden is a weak leader, and that the reason there wasn't War in Ukraine or the Middle East while Trump was president was because Trump was respected.
This The New Republic report if true, raises doubt about whether Putin takes Trump seriously.
 
The Harris campaign broadcast the following 60 second campaign ad.

RACE
FOR THE
WHITE HOUSE

NBC Brian Williams: "One hundred Republicans who worked in national security for Presidents Reagan, both Bush's, and for President Trump now endorsing Harris for president."
General Stanley McChrystal (Ret): "She came up as a prosecutor, an attorney general, into the senate. She has the kind of character that's going to be necessary in the presidency."
Former Republican Congresswoman Liz Cheney: "Vice President Harris is standing in the breach at a critical moment in our nation's history. We have a shared commitment as Americans to do what's right for this country. This year I am proudly casting my vote for Vice President Kamala Harris."
Former generals, secretaries of defense, secretaries of the army, navy, and air force, CIA directors, and national security council leaders under Democratic and Republican presidents, Republican members of congress, and even former Trump administration officials agree. There's only one candidate fit to lead our nation, and that's Kamala Harris.
Vice President Kamala Harris: "I'm Kamala Harris and I approve this message."

View attachment 596
"The use of U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) visual information does not imply or constitute endorsement of the U.S. military, any military personnel or the Department of Defense."
 
"NBC Brian Williams:" #557
note:
Williams' connection to NBC may have disintegrated years ago.

#558

Trump's bizarre music session reignites questions about his mental acuity

With President Joe Biden out of the race, Democrats have started questioning the mental fitness of Trump, who would be the oldest president in history if he wins in November.

Oct. 15, 2024, 11:41 AM GMT-5
By Matt Dixon, Emma Barnett and Dasha Burns
Donald Trump’s campaign wants its candidate to talk more about policy, but on Monday night it was all about the music.
Trump was in Oaks, Pennsylvania, to host the type of town hall event his advisers hope will keep the former president on track talking both about his policy positions and those of his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris. But the evening quickly took a bizarre turn after two rallygoers had medical issues.

Rather than continue after paramedics assisted the two people, Trump instructed his staff to just play music from a playlist he has personally curated and famously often turns on during dinners at Mar-a-Lago.
“Who the hell wants to hear questions?” Trump said at the event where the entire point was to take audience questions. “Right?”
What followed was more than 30 minutes of Trump swaying on stage and occasionally doing his well-known two-handed dance to some of his favorite tunes, chatting with the event's host, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, and occasionally interacting with attendees who were seated behind the stage.
 

Trump visits Aurora, Colorado, pushing misleading narratives about migrants

Former President Donald Trump visited Aurora, Colorado, for a campaign rally on Friday where he continued to push misleading narratives about the city's migrant population.

"My message today is very simple," Trump told the crowd. "No person who has inflicted the violence and terror that Kamala Harris has inflicted on this community can ever be allowed to become the president of the United States. We're not going to let it happen."

In the final weeks of his campaign, Trump has continued to focus on the issue of immigration, escalating his rhetoric on undocumented immigrants he often paints as violent criminals.

"I will rescue Aurora and every town that has been invaded and conquered," Trump said. "These towns have been conquered ... And we will ....

CONTINUED
 

Trump ... misleading narratives

"I will rescue Aurora and every town that has been invaded and conquered," Trump said.
Have we misunderestimated the father of IVF ?
Donald Trump Calls Himself the “Father of IVF,” Then Says He Only Learned What IVF Was This Year, at Women’s Issues Town Hall
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/sto...n-says-he-only-learned-what-ivf-was-this-year
Vanity Fair and balanced ?

- Donald Trump said something nutty again -
Does it even qualify as news anymore?

Meanwhile as Trump's lead slowly increases, so too does the list of prominent Republicans endorsing Harris / Walz.
On 24/10/16 CBS-TV reported from Washington Crossing, PA on the "Country Over Party" portion of the Harris campaign.
Though not explicitly named, Republicans literally standing beside Harris appear to include William Kristol [R] and Karl Rove [R].
Trump would need some powerful mojo to turn these otherwise staunch Republicans to the Democrat's ticket in 2024.
 
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