CSotD: On Beyond Logic

There’s been a lot of chatter down in the Antipodes about the high cost of housing, and so it makes sense that Matt Golding would go international with this example of an American couple who has found a place to live rent-free.

It might take you a moment to examine where they’re living to get the political reference, which involves a bit of a cliche but certainly an applicable one this time around, though it’s also true that Harris has raised more than a half-billion dollars for the privilege of getting inside that head.

But she’s in there for sure. Trump made 59 posts on Truth Social during her DNC speech and he has continued to make attacks on a level that has observers wondering if he is mentally fit to be president.

Aside from his praise of Hannibal Lector and odd speculation about sharks and electric boats, Trump has gone from boasting with pride over having appointed the Justices who overturned Roe v Wade to announcing “My Administration will be great for women and their reproductive rights.”

Pedro X. Molina (Counterpoint) begs to differ.

Adding to that contradiction, we’ve had hints that SCOTUS may overturn decisions allowing same-sex marriage and sales of contraceptive devices, while former Trump aide Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ Republican government has managed to keep a pro-choice citizen’s initiative with over 100,000 signatures off the ballot in Arkansas due to a technicality.

Chris Riddell may be overly optimistic about how women view Trump — there are still plenty of conservative women who support laws that keep them in their place — but it’s hard to reconcile much of what Dear Leader has said about women, and done to them, over the years with the notion that he supports their reproductive freedom.

Meanwhile, his runningmate claimed on Meet The Press that his “childless cat women” remark was sarcasm rather than a sincere comment, and he’s sorry they took it wrong but he’s not sorry he said it.

In other words, it was their fault. It was probably also the fault of the audience at that NABJ conference for misunderstanding Trump’s comment “I have been the best president for the Black population since Abraham Lincoln.”

Which doesn’t explain this photograph from FDR’s funeral procession, or the number of Black men named “Roosevelt,” as Cab Calloway noted in 1938, well before the war or Roosevelt’s death.

Then again, Trump seems a little unclear on FDR’s role in American history. For that matter, when visiting the USS Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor, he reportedly asked General Kelly “Hey, John, what’s this all about? What’s this a tour of?”

At least he has the excuse of not having been born then, or when George Washington seized the British airports during the Revolution.

It’s a little harder to explain his ignorance of a political dynasty that served during his own lifetime, as seen in this

Juxtaposition of the Day

John Buss

Jimmy Margulies — KFS

There seems little value to Trump in allying himself with RFK Jr, except that, as Buss suggests, he provides a name that Dear Leader thinks will bring in those who once followed the Kennedy family.

The Kennedy Family appears to disagree, and not just Bobby’s other kids.

As Margulies suggests, the addition of RFK Jr to the Trump team is mostly a way to increase the oomph of the nonsensical conspiracy theories, bizarre anti-science beliefs and hateful approaches to life already at work within hardcore MAGA.

It certainly won’t bring any new followers to Trump, since most RFK Jr supporters seem now to be planning to sit out the election and adding him won’t appeal to anyone who wasn’t already on board with Trump.

The oddities of the whole thing — the brain worm, the bear, the anti-vax mania and the rest — can seem funny, but the last sentence of that family statement seems a wistful hope, that this is the “sad ending to a sad story.”

Who knows? As someone pointed out on social media, at least Jill Stein has the decency to disappear between elections. RFK Jr may want to cling to the spotlight, and, if so, there will always be some outlet desperate for clicks and ratings.

But Greg Palast, a reporter who co-wrote books and articles with Kennedy, has a sad, subdued memoir of watching him lose his mind that should kill some of the laughter.

Back in the mainstream, Graeme MacKay notes that one development at the DNC was that the Harris/Walz campaign is making a move to take back patriotism from the GOP, which has turned love of country into an obedience-to-government litmus test.

That’s not entirely the work of Trump and MAGA. Rather, they are the result of a process that has been going on for two generations.

Back in 1969, the Mike Douglas Show blurred Abbie Hoffman’s American flag shirt rather than offend viewers with the desecration. Today, the flag is worn as clothing, flown in dirty tatters from pickup trucks and printed on napkins to be smeared with food and thrown in the trash.

And “freedom” means the right to be loyal to authority.

Amid all this, Randy Bish hints at an odd contradiction. The far left is down on Harris because, as a prosecutor and attorney general in California, they say she put too many people in jail unnecessarily.

Meanwhile, the rightwing is attacking her for being soft on crime, with Trump spreading lies about her record and about how the level at which shoplifting goes from a misdemeanor to a felony.

But it’s been a long time since common sense, logic and facts had any place in our election process.

The latest example of our disjointed values system, Clay Bennett (CTFP) points out, is the introduction of blatantly partisan election officials who threaten to disrupt the voting system to assure the rigged outcomes they claim to be preventing.

The good news, to the extent there is any, is that Georgia, where the most outrageous examples of corrupt vote regulation appear to be festering, may not be subject to a great deal of harmful manipulation after all.

There’s no Senate race there in 2024, and, while polling trends favor Harris/Walz in most swing states (subject to margin of error), it appears Trump/Vance could take Georgia without cheating.

What a waste of corruption!

Here: Cheer yourself up.