Mendocino County Today: Thursday 11/7/2024

HIGH PRESSURE continues to build, clearing skies and bringing chilly overnight temperatures. Coastal stratus possibly returns tonight. Rain is possible this weekend and early next week. (NWS)

STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): A cool 41F with clear skies this Thursday morning on the coast. 2 more days of dry skies then small rain chances for the weekend. Next week has a lot of wetter days forecast so far, see the 10 day forecast.

Brian, and Maurice Milling In Comptche (via George Hollister)

SHERIFF NEEDS HELP IDENTIFYING THE VICTIM OF BRUTAL DOG ATTACK

Following a brutal dog attack in northern Mendocino County, officials now believe the victim to be female, clarifying earlier scanner reports that indicated the victim was a 15-year-old male.

Captain Quincy Cromer of the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office (MCSO) confirmed that reports from the scene confirm the victim is a female. She remains unidentified and sustained “major, critical, life-threatening injuries” consistent with an animal attack. Authorities have not yet located the suspected dog involved in the incident, which took place in a remote area near Bear Pen Road at the southernmost portion of Piercy.

The incident was reported around 11:12 a.m., with officers from the California Highway Patrol (CHP) in Garberville responding to a request to assist MCSO due to the remote area of the report. Though the CHP CAD stated a dog loose on the roadway was back in its owner’s custody, Captain Cromer stated that the suspected animal and/or owner has not been located by law enforcement.

Emergency responders from CAL FIRE, CHP, and medical personnel quickly arrived, establishing an air ambulance landing zone near the Piercy Post Office. The victim’s injuries were severe, with significant breathing difficulties noted on-site before she was airlifted to an out-of-county hospital.

MCSO is working to identify the victim and notify her family. Anyone with any information of the attack, or that has a missing loved one in the Bear Pen Road area who may match the description of the woman is encouraged to contact the Sheriff’s Office dispatch at 707-463-4086 (option 1). Further updates on the victim’s condition and identity will be provided as available.

(KymKemp.com)

BILL KIMBERLIN:

I am doing a display of some of my photos at Mosswood Cafe in downtown Boonville. Drop by if you have any interest. Here are a few of them.

BIG POST-ELECTION SHOW ON KMUD

On Thursday, November 7, our big, post-election show airs at 9 am, on KMUD. We'll have three great guests packed into one hour.

JOHN QUIGLEY is a professor of law at the Moritz College of Law at the Ohio State University, where he is the Presidents' Club Professor of Law Emeritus. In 1995, he was recipient of the Ohio State University Distinguished Scholar Award.

WENDY VIA is the president and cofounder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism (GPAHE). She will speak on "mapping election-related violence".

EMMA CLAIRE FOLEY is a leading activist with the Defuse Nuclear War Coalition. She will speak on the Election Day ICBM test launch from Vandenberg Space Force Base which was denounced as “dangerous” and “insane" and which could have triggered a nuclear response by one of America's enemies.

KMUD

Our show, "Heroes and Patriots Radio", airs live on KMUD, on the first and fifth Thursdays of every month, at 9 AM, Pacific Time.

We simulcast our programming on two full power FM stations: KMUE 88.1 in Eureka and KLAI 90.3 in Laytonville. It also maintains a translator at 99.5 FM in Shelter Cove, California.

We also stream live from the web at https://kmud.org/

Speak with our guests live and on-the-air at: KMUD Studio (707) 923-3911. Please call in.

We post our shows to our own website and Youtube channels. Shows may be distributed in other media outlets.

Wherever you live, KMUD is your community radio station. We are a true community of informed and progressive people. Please join us by becoming a member or underwriter.

— John Sakowicz

REPEAT INTOXICATED DRIVER CONVICTED BY JURY

A Mendocino County Superior Court jury returned from its deliberations late Tuesday afternoon to announce it had found the trial defendant guilty as charged.

Defendant Jose Remijio Pacheco, Jr., age 61, of Lakeport, was found guilty of misdemeanor driving a motor vehicle with a blood alcohol .08 or greater.

The jury also found true a sentencing allegation alleging that the defendant’s blood alcohol was .15 or greater at the time of the driving.

Outside the presence of the jury, the defendant admitted as true another sentencing allegation that had been charged by the DA that alleged that the defendant had suffered a prior DUI conviction in March 2022 in the Mendocino County Superior Court.

The defendant was on court probation from his 2022 conviction at the time of the most recent June 2024 crime, so a violation of probation hearing was heard by the trial judge concurrent with the jury trial.

After the jury returned its verdict and finding and was excused, the trial judge found that the evidence heard by the jury and jury verdict itself were sufficient to find that the defendant was also in violation of probation.

A sentencing hearing on the defendant’s two cases has now been calendared for November 20th at 9 o’clock in the morning in Department H of Ukiah's downtown courthouse.

The prosecutor who presented the People’s evidence at trial was Deputy District Attorney Sarah Drlik.

Retired Mendocino County Superior Court Judge John Behnke presided over the two-day trial.

(DA Presser)

ED NOTES

NO SURPRISES in the Mendo election results, but this libtard was shocked but not surprised that the Orange Monster swept the national board, not only the electoral college but the popular vote. The forces of darkness also have a good shot at the House of Reps, meaning they may be in position to say, “Open wide, America, this is what we'll be shoving down your maws.”

NOT SURPRISED? No. In a country where millions of people are squeezed to keep themselves fed and housed, abortion is not a priority issue, but the Democrat shot callers are so securely swimming in their decaf lattes that they are oblivious to the desperation many of their fellow citizens live with. The desperate got revenge big time with Trump, not that he'll do anything to ease the burdens of average Americans.

AND I'M NOT surprised at the response to the Orange Wave by a swathe of Mendolib, who attribute Trump's victory to “the racism and sexism of American white men.” If you could know the economic position of the people who say stuff like this — mostly unattached women plus a few caponized men — you'd find that the racist-sexist gang is financially secure, safely outside the unemployment lines, the KZYX-Democratic Labor Day Picnic demographic you might say.

THE EARLY MENDO RETURNS — 15,265 votes counted out of an estimated 54,000 - plus total vote as of Tuesday evening, means some results could change when the final count is in, which will take about a month if history is any guide.

MENDO, the rural home of American delusion, went 2-1 for Bombs Away Harris 10,029; Trump 4782, RFK Jr. 223, Stein 122.

JUNIOR is in line for a “free rein” overseeing America's health according to Trump. One of Junior's priorities is getting fluoride out of drinking water, once a goal of the John Birch Society, circa 1955. Fluoride is proven to help prevent tooth decay, but if Junior is actually installed as Health czar… Well, it's back to voodoo and chicken bones rattling in coffee cans as your health insurance.

STATE ASSEMBLY: Chris Rogers 9764, Michael Greer 5125. Rogers is being installed by the Democrat's cabal dominant on the Northcoast. Rogers: “I was born in this district – it’s my home and where my wife and I are starting our family. I was elected to the [Santa Rosa] City Council in 2016 after nearly a decade of helping to represent the north coast as Senior staff for Senator Mike McGuire and other legislators…”

AN ONLINE COMMENTER notes that the Albion Little River parcel tax requires a two-thirds majority: “Be It Further Resolved, that this ordinance shall take effect immediately upon its confirmation by the voters in the District. Special tax increase must be approved by two-thirds vote of the voters of the Albion-Little River Fire Protection District at the special election held November 5, 2024.”

Agreed, local general tax measures only require simple majorities, special taxes dedicated to specific uses require the higher threshold. So far the Albion/Little River parcel tax is below the two-thirds threshhold.

MENDO UNIFIED: Michael Schaeffer 719, Jim Gagnon 580. We were pulling for Gagnon over the chronophagic Schaeffer, and Gagnon remains within striking distance of Mendo's eternal trustee, but it looks like Schaeffer will filibuster on.

BEST LINE of the election — Matt Taibbi: “Adam Schiff, on the short list of America’s worst humans, will serve as a U.S. Senator.”

AMID THE FLOOD OF POST-ELECTION COMMENTARY about Harris’s loss to Trump there’s a significant missing piece that I have not seen addressed elsewhere. In 2020 when Biden beat Trump, a lot of people rightly blamed Trump for the US’s lousy response to Covid. Take away covid and Trump probably would have beaten Biden in 2020. 2024 is a version of 2020 without covid because Biden-Harris ran the same way against the same deeply flawed opponent. The Dems failed to realize this simple factor. No one should be surprised that Biden-Harris lost. (Mark Scaramella)

DIRTY CELLO PLAYS THE AV GRANGE

by Terry Sites

The Anderson Valley caught up with Halloween on November First with a dinner/costume party/concert at the Grange Hall. The Valley’s free spirits came out in force to strut their stuff incognito as everything from devils to Luna moths and many, many witches.

First was catching up with friends and neighbors while eating the chicken dinner 5:30-6:30. A costume contest was scheduled for 7:00 but so was the concert. So a compromise was arrived at. Music started around 7:30 and the costume parade happened during a break. Lots of creativity was shown as local characters pranced across the stage giving onlookers a full view. Captain Rainbow in his beanie cap MC’ed. A real standout was a Dia De Los Muertos senorita. She (or he) hidden by a skeleton mask wore a beautiful headdress crowned with flowers. Her very full skirt ballooned out with multiple petticoats that floated and swayed prettily as she walked. Never for one minute coming out of character or revealing her real identity, she was hands down the most compelling entrant winning first prize.

The evening’s band, Dirty Cello continued burning the house down with their unique string music style. The bass player and the drummer were both out sick so the cello and guitar had to compensate. They filled the hall with so much sound and fury it is hard to imagine what the band would have sounded like with their other two instruments in the mix. It is probably safe to say that this is the only band around that utilizes the cello as a lead instrument instead of an electric guitar.

Rebecca Roudman, a classically trained cellist, takes the lead and was admirably assisted by her husband-guitarist (and former classical flutist) Jason Eckl. Rebecca who has been playing cello since she was seven, says that they will play “Anything that kicks butt and allows us to rock out.” She gets her cello to “wail, emote and shred” in a way that you really have to hear and see to believe. Her vocals are right up there in with Janice and Grace in intensity, soulfulness and sass.

Thanks to the Anderson Valley Grange for bringing music and especially dancing to this little burg. It enriches our lives a great deal being able to celebrate together. A joyful noise and a chance to dance heals the mind, body and spirit. Dirty Cello is a very class act and we were lucky to have them. The energy level they brought with their performance was formidable.

If you missed the party you can catch Dirty Cello in Mendocino at “Valerie,” 10546 Lansing Street in Mendocino on December 14th. Tickets available online: You can go to Dirtycello.com and click on “shows.”

A Sample: https://youtu.be/LoLxV0BHhBk?si=svpTPVLM0giordTb

CATCH OF THE DAY, Wednesday, November 6, 2024

BRETT ADAME, 33, Ukiah. Controlled substance, paraphernalia, failure to appear.

DAVID APPIER, 39, Fort Bragg. Burglary, probation revocation.

JENNIFER ASLESEN, 37, Fort Bragg. Suspended license.

TIMOTHY CHAPMAN, 61, Ukiah. Tampering with fire protection equipment.

KAILAND GARCIA, 19, Fort Bragg. Felony murder, narcotics for sale.

JAIME MARIN-JUAREZ, 27, Ukiah. Probation violation.

JOSE MARTINEZ-LUCAS, 36, Potter Valley. Domestic battery, false ID, probation violation.

MARK MASON, 64, Point Arena. Disorderly conduct-under influence.

JACOB PARMELY, 39, Ukiah. Parole violation.

ADAM PEARSON, 43, Ukiah. Battery with serious injury, parole violation.

JULIO RODRIGUEZ-CHAVARIA, 41, Ukiah. Probation revocation.

JACQUELINE SHEPHERD, 41, Redwood Valley. Probation revocation.

ELOHI TRIPLETT, 18, Fort Bragg. Machine gun, short-barreled rifle, narcotics for sale, crimes by juvenile (enhancement).

EMMA VANHORN, 20, Fort Bragg. Felony accessory of the fact.

NORMA VERDUZCO, 38, Willits. Controlled substance, resisting.

WRONG CANDIDATE

To the Editor:

Trump won. It also looks like Republicans will control both houses of Congress.

Trump may have even won the popular vote.

And Democrats have no one to blame but themselves. We were bullied. Bullied! Kamela Harris was forced down our throats and she was the worst possible candidate. I'll explain why.

In 2020, Harris came in last among the 19 Democratic Party presidential candidates. Dead last with not even 1% of the polling. She withdrew even before the Iowa caucuses.

So why was such an unpopular person Biden's pick for Vice President?

Simple. Identity politics.

But identity politics is not a substitute for either character or talent.

In California, we the people knew Harris for who she really was -- an opportunist. Blind ambition doesn't even begin to describe Kamela Harris's rise to power.

When she was 29, Harris dated Willie Brown in 1994 and 1995, but Brown, at that time who was 60 when their relationship began and who was Speaker of the California Assembly, had been separated from his wife, Blanche Brown, since 1981. appointed Harris to two political posts.

Brown got Harris two cushy, part-time political appointments -- the California Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board, and later, the California Medical Assistance Commission.

In February 1998, Brown also used his considerable influence to get Harris hired to a real job. San Francisco district attorney Terence Hallinan recruited Harris as an assistant district attorney.

Harris's character was also evident in her choice of husbands -- Doug Emhoff.

Emhoff is an older dude. His first wife divorced him for getting his children's nanny pregnant. After the abortion, Emhoff bought the nanny's silence with a settlement. The nondisclosure agreement was bulletproof.

During this year's Al Smith dinner, a glitzy event in New York which raises millions of dollars for Catholic charities and has traditionally offered candidates from both parties the chance to trade light-hearted barbs, Trump joked that if Harris wanted to get elected, she needed to keep her husband “away from the nannies”.

The other thing that bothered me is that Harris, although Black, is not African American. In fact, Harris is descended from the prominent Jamaican 19th-century plantation and slave owner Hamilton Brown.

That's right. The Harris family in Jamacia once owned African slaves.

Harris's own father, Donald Harris, a retired professor of Marxist economics at Stanford, has written that the Harris name comes from his paternal grandfather -- Joseph Alexander Harris, who died in 1939 and who is buried in the church yard of the Anglican Church which Hamilton Brown built in Brown's Town where the family plantation (mostly pimento or all-spice) was once located,

Finally, this terrible candidate, Kamela Harris, was forced on Democrats, like me.

She was forced on us without a primary and without due process. She was forced on us when Biden was pushed aside by the power elites, like Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama, Bill and Hilliary Clinton, and their rich friends on Wall Street and in Hollywood and Silicon Valley.

Now what? Where do we go from here?

Tulsi Gabbard, the former Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii, and herself a presidential candidate in 2020, just gave me an idea. Recently, Tulsi Gabbard became a Republican. I'm now thinking about changing my own party affiliation.

Maybe I'll become a Republican. Maybe I'll become a Libertarian. Maybe I'll join the Green Party. Maybe I'll just be an Independent. In any case, I'm embarrassed to be called a Democrat, and I've been a Democrat all my life -- ever since I voted for George McGovern in 1972.

I hate being bullied.

John Sakowicz

NOT THERE YET

Dear people,

I was studying the bible and following the reading instructions, as it was about only three men who God worked with, or were at His abode, in those times (until Abraham was called ). Abel, Enoch and Noah, after Adam and Eve did not choose for Him and were abandoned by blessings, or left in their sinful nature. We know that “the slumber” of the peoples, in the world, is part guilt and then destiny. Two sites were clearly showing president Trump, or “elect” as it is called, having won and congratulating. Other sites were like, “it is not yet clear,” “the nasty person is not there yet” and so on.

Kind regards,

Jan Bezemer

Ukiah

JANUARY 6th

Historic events
Devoured by the maw of Time
Viciously forgot

— Jim Luther

GIANT ELECTORAL ASTEROID Strikes America's Intellectual Class, Which Fails to Notice

As election results poured in last night, revealing the incredible fact of eight years and millions of hours of hysterical propaganda somehow achieving negative results, America’s opinion-making class continued broadcasting from a magic place far up its own backside, a land no message can reach. They never learn.

— Matt Taibbi

BERNIE SANDERS GOES SCORCHED EARTH on Democrats in blistering statement after Trump's victory

by Charlie Spiering And Stephen M. Lepore

Sen. Bernie Sanders issued a blistering statement criticizing the Democratic party after another loss to President-elect Donald Trump.

'It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them,' the 83-year-old senator from Vermont wrote on social media.

Sanders, who identifies as a Democratic socialist, shared his statement just before Vice President Kamala Harris' concession speech.

Sanders said that it was the white working class who first delivered turned on Democrats, but that they had now been joined by black and Latino workers.

'While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change,' he wrote. 'And they’re right.'

Sanders also specifically referred to the struggle of young people, facing a working environment threatened with the rise of artificial intelligence and robotics.

'Today, despite an explosion in technology and worker productivity, many young people will have a worse standard of living than their parents,' he wrote.

The former presidential contender also condemned the billions of dollars sent by the Biden-Harris administration to the Israeli government to fund the war in Gaza, leading to a 'humanitarian disaster.'

Sanders also condemned the 'big money interests' and 'well paid consultants' that he claimed controlled the Democratic party, saying that they had refused to learn the lessons of past campaigns.

'Do they have any idea as to how we can take on the increasingly powerful oligarchy which has so much economic and political power?' He asked. 'Probably not.'

He vowed to participate in 'some very serious political discussions' and concluded by urging his supporters to 'stay tuned.'

The statement immediately sparked speculation that Sanders was considering running again for president, however he would be 87 in 2028.

The race initially appeared neck-and-neck as Americans went to the polls Tuesday after a tense months-long build-up that peaked when Joe Biden abandoned his quest for a second term and the Democratic party ushered Vice President Harris to the fore.

Throughout the night, the campaign highlighted data points that could spell surprise good news for Harris - higher-than-expected turnout in Philadelphia, votes yet to be counted in Detroit.

But in the end Harris didn't improve upon President Joe Biden's performance against Trump four years ago.

Democrats had been counting on holding the trio of states - Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania - to give Harris the White House. Biden won them in 2020.

But Trump won them instead, giving him 292 electoral votes to Harris's 224. It takes 270 to win the presidency.

Harris is now on track to do worse than Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election. She could even be on pace to have the worst Electoral College result of any Democrat since the 1988 race.

Trump is the first president in over 130 years, and only the second in history, to win a non-consecutive second term.

Exit polls show his victory came after he made gains with nearly every voting bloc he lost in the 2020 election and put together a coalition of multi-ethnic working-class voters.

And Harris did worse on Tuesday than Biden in the 2020 contest among key voting groups including women, the working class and Latinos.

The exit polls suggested voters trusted Trump more to fix the economy.

They overwhelmingly believed the Biden-Harris administration had put the country on the wrong track.

Democrat candidate Harris' support came from her party's strongholds on the East and West coast in states like New York, Delaware, and California.

A notable difference between this year's election night and that of 2020 is that fewer voters - which leaned Democrat - used mail-in ballots, while states have been quicker to process those votes.

Four years ago, that meant Trump's votes were often counted first as his supporters voted in-person, before Biden votes piled in later and helped the incumbent president to a late victory.

This year, however, the number of voters from both sides using mail-in ballots are more even, meaning the Harris campaign cannot count on large batches of outstanding votes to put her over the line in the key battleground states.

That prompted many election watchers and political experts stateside to predict a Trump victory as early vote counts suggested a favorable result across several swing states, leaving Kamala's supporters at election watch parties in for a long night.

By 2:30am ET, Trump had won Pennsylvania, Georgia and North Carolina, capturing three of the seven heavily contested battlegrounds and coming within a few electoral votes of winning the presidency.

He declared victory and took to the stage in Florida to deliver a lengthy speech to legions of adoring fans, that also featured shout outs to the likes of his vice presidential pick JD Vance, Robert F. Kennedy Jr, Elon Musk and UFC President Dana White.

The Republicans also reclaimed control of the Senate, picking up seats in West Virginia and Ohio.

Top House races are focused in New York and California, where Democrats are trying to claw back some of the 10 or so seats where Republicans have made surprising gains in recent years.

The upset led CNN Strategist Scott Jennings delivered a stinging indictment of the 'political information complex', noting that the story that had been portrayed about Harris' chances was, 'not true'.

(dailymail.co.uk)

TRULY, the mainstream media has learned nothing. Again, just as with Hillary — and Joe Biden — they ignored or discredited stories harmful to their candidate, disparaged Trump and his supporters at every turn ('garbage', per Joe), cried sexism and, now, racism, then watched in disbelief as this very same electorate gave them the middle finger.

Make no mistake: This thumping victory was as much a repudiation of Joe Biden as Kamala Harris.

It was a cri de coeur for a return to normalcy, law and order, a secure border, an economy that works for the middle class and strong foreign policy.

It's also a rejection of race-baiting, wokeism, trans madness and the kind of DEI orthodoxy that brought us Kamala Harris herself — a candidate so lazy, unoriginal and patronizing that she thought she'd win the female vote on one issue alone: abortion.

How wrong she was. How very, very wrong.

— Maureen Callahan (Daily Mail)

LEAD STORIES, THURSDAY'S NYT

Harris Says She Concedes the Election, but Not Her Fight

Devastated Democrats Play the Blame Game, and Stare at a Dark Future

Trump Weighs Personnel Choices and Fields Congratulatory Calls

With Political Victory, Trump Fights Off Legal Charges

Here’s What to Watch as the Fed Meets Thursday

The ‘Super Bowl of Pickleball’ Looks to Grow the Sport

WILL OF THE PEOPLE

Editor,

Donald Trump collected enough Electoral College votes to win the presidency, and he got the popular vote, too (quite an eye-opener). America has spoken. But who and what is America (and are Democrats listening)?

America is certainly not a gaggle of A-list celebrities, and I’ll throw most of the mainstream “news” media into that barrel. Real journalists were not backing Kamala Harris (or Trump). They were doing their jobs, covering the chaos as objectively as they could.

America is also not who the pollsters thought it was. They got it wrong again.

America is not made up of mega-donors (of which there aren’t that many compared to the entire population).

America is the average person, with an average job and an average family. They’re not rich or famous or powerful. On Tuesday, those people spoke. They prefer what Trump represents over Harris.

Arthur Saginian

Santa Clarita, Los Angeles County

CHRONICLE OF A DEFEAT FORETOLD

by Jeffrey St. Clair

What does history repeat itself as after it does farce?
Kamala Harris proved too cowardly even to address her supporters Tuesday night, as her loss to Trump became more and more inevitable. But what could she really say? She couldn’t honestly say she’d run a vigorous campaign that championed the poor, the downtrodden, and the voiceless or that she’d fought for peace, and human dignity, and to fix an unraveling climate. I’d be really interested to hear her say what she thought her campaign was all about, but even Harris probably couldn’t have pinpointed the purpose or the meaning of her doomed run…
From the outside, Harris’s entire campaign seemed to be about saving an economic system (neoliberalism) that she described falsely as “democracy,” which isn’t working for large segments of both the political left and right; at the same time she and Biden were flouting an international system of laws in order to arm and finance a genocide in Gaza. The hypocrisies were too transparent to sustain.
There was this fatal moment in the friendly confines of the Stephen Colbert Show around the time that her post-convention/debate bounce began to deflate and she never got any better…

Stephen Colbert: “Under a Harris administration, what would the major changes be and what would stay the same?”

Harris: “Sure. Well, I mean, I’m obviously not Joe Biden. So that would be one change. But also I think it’s important to say with 28 days to go, I’m not Donald Trump.”

Like Hubert Humphrey, Harris was saddled with an unpopular war (a war & a genocide in her case) that her own boss was waging. Humphrey tried to break from LBJ on Vietnam but too late. Harris never did.
Harris’s stubborn refusal to separate herself from Biden to any degree went so far as to turn her campaign over to his campaign staff, the same brilliant strategic minds that had him trailing Trump by 10 to 15 points in July…
Harris had very different policies when she ran against him in 2016, maybe she should’ve stuck with a few of them, instead of saying stuff like her beliefs haven’t changed but her position on fracking/national health care/the border/ have….
In what was obviously going to be a “change” election, when Harris had the chance to differentiate herself from Biden, she said there wasn’t a “thing she could think of” she’d do differently…
Harris’s flip-flop on fracking is emblematic of her entire campaign, a relatively minor issue that gave devastating insight into her vacuous political character. She could never explain it because the only explanation was pure political calculation (and a bad one). She was willing to invalidate her climate policy to court a few thousand votes in Pennsylvania. It was the equivalent of Hillary telling Goldman Sachs she had one policy in public and another in private. But even more inept. How could you make the campaign about honesty & trust, once you’d shown yourself to be dishonest and untrustworthy on an issue you’d described as being an existential threat to human life on earth?
Harris sold out the climate movement (and the climate) and still lost Pennsylvania…
Harris losing Pennsylvania almost ensures that the Democrats will turn to Josh Shapiro as their champion in 2028 and won’t reverse course on their blind support of Israel.
Maybe in Harris’s case she’d’ve had a better shot at winning Wisconsin if she skipped it like Hillary. It could be the more they saw of her, the less there was to see…
Exit Poll in Wisconsin: Trump doubled his support among Black voters. He now has about 20% of the Black vote, compared to 78% for Harris. Four years ago, Trump won only about 8% of Black voters in the Badger State.
John Kerry lost in part because his “Ready to Serve” campaign emphasized his military career as the war in Iraq unraveled. Harris played up her role as a hard-ass prosecutor at a time of record police shootings–no wonder her support with Black and Hispanic men collapsed.
As I wrote in my column two weeks ago, Harris’ strategy to use Liz Cheney as a surrogate to win the mythical Haley voters when Haley herself was out campaigning for Trump was doomed to fail. And fail it did, spectacularly. Recall that when Cheney left office, he was one of the most universally reviled figures in American history, with an approval rating of 13%.
The Harris campaign’s messaging was so bad that they lost to Trump on the issue she hit the hardest, his MAGA movement being a threat to democratic values…
The Cheney gambit didn’t help her with independents. In Pennsylvania, independents went 50-44 for Donald Trump.
If any good comes out of this disaster, it would be driving the final nails in the coffins of the Clintons, Bidens, Bushes, Obamas, and Cheneys… It won’t. They’ll all be back in one manifestation or another. The one thing we can count on is that no lessons will be learned from this debacle. The Democrats lost to Trump the same way they did in 2016, only worse.
Ryan Grim: “The Cheneys have now stolen two elections from Democrats, but you can’t really blame them for the second.”
Sending NAFTA Bill Clinton to scold Arab-American voters in Michigan (of all places!) and Obama to harangue black men in Pennsylvania during the last week of the campaign seems to have gone over well…
The Harris campaign refused to allow one anti-genocide speaker at their convention, even one willing to give a tame, non-confrontational, pre-approved speech.
Harris lost south Dearborn, Michigan, a 90% Muslim area that Biden won with 88% of the vote four years ago…

Trump: 46.8%

Harris: 27.68%

Stein: 22.11%

Dr. Gassan Abu Sitta: “Gone is a genocidal president too hypocritical to admit it. And in comes a genocidal president who wears it as a badge of honor.”

+Harris made little effort to court the youth vote and, at times, seemed to actively disdain it. They repaid her in kind. CBS News Exit Poll in Michigan: “Younger voters (age 18-29) are narrowly going for Trump right now…This deficit for Harris is largely due to younger men in Michigan who are more for Trump.”

Around 67% of voters rated the economy as “not so good/poor.” Dissatisfaction with the post-pandemic economy has been evident for at least two years. But Biden and Harris did nothing to address the core issue of the election except tell people that the economic pain they were feeling was psychosomatic.
According to the AP’s Votecast, Union members voted for Harris 57-39. Maybe the Harris campaign should have featured more Shawn Fain and less Liz Cheney and Mark Cuban.
Households $100,000 and under…

2020: Biden 70%, Trump 29%

2024: Harris 48%, Trump 49%

Both Harris and Biden turned their backs on the most successful and popular economic policies of the early Biden era in an attempt to convince the public the pandemic was over–even though COVID continued to sicken, kill and impoverish folks–all while Biden kept writing blank checks to Israel and Ukraine
Remember when the Democrats promised $2000 stimulus checks and then only delivered $1400? People living on the economic margins, as most of us were during the pandemic, have long memories….
Voters in the red state of Missouri voted to raise the statewide minimum wage to $15 by 2026 and guarantee paid sick days to workers. Nebraska voters also passed Initiative 436, giving workers the right to earn paid sick leave. Harris waited until the campaign’s last two weeks to call for a hike in the federal minimum wage.
Aside from Gaza and the economy, the Harris team seemed to totally misread the electorate, perhaps believing they could win on the gender gap (21 points) alone. They couldn’t. 71% of voters were White (up from 67% in 2020), 11% were Black (down from 13%), and 12% were Hispanic (slightly down from 13%. This “white surge” and “black/brown ebb” is at least in part because Harris didn’t give Blacks and Hispanics much of an affirmative reason to turn out to vote and many reasons to stay home.
Harris is no Claudia Scheinbaum…

Latino men, 2020: Biden 59%, Trump 36%

Latino men, 2024: Harris 45%, Trump 53%

Hidalgo County, Texas, is 92% Latino. Hilary Clinton won with 68.5%. Biden won with 58% of the vote. Harris and Trump are 50/50.
In 2016, HRC won Cameron County, Texas, which is 80% Hispanic, by 16%. Last night, with more than 95% of the vote counted, Trump was leading Harris 52% to 47%.
Ted Cruz won Latino voters by 6 points, according to NBC News exit polls. In his last race in 2018, Cruz lost Latinos by 29 points—a 35-point swing.
Some quarters expected Harris to have a shot at winning North Carolina. She didn’t. In fact, Trump won Anson County, North Carolina, which is 40% Black. This makes Trump only the second Republican to win this county since Reconstruction.
But it’s not just Hispanics and Black men. In NYC, with more than 95% of the vote in, Kamala Harris was polling at 67.8%. If that stands, it will be the worst performance for a Democratic Presidential candidate in the city since Dukakis in 1988…
Harris seems likely to lose the popular vote as well, which would relieve the Democrats of having to pretend to take action regarding the Electoral College.
The Democratic Senate candidates are running ahead of Harris by 1 to 3 percentage points, but they’ve already lost seats in WV and Ohio and are likely to lose Montana, as well, to a Republican who lied about being shot in Afghanistan.
Doug Henwood: “Tim Walz. Remember when he was a thing?”
Walz was a thing who was never let loose to do his thing…
Biden picking Merrick Garland as AG was the most self-defeating cabinet pick since Obama picked Tim Geithner to run Treasury and bail out the same bankers who’d screwed over the people who elected him.
In the end, Harris didn’t outperform Biden in a single county in the country.
Maybe they should’ve had a primary…?

(Jeffrey St. Clair is editor of CounterPunch. His most recent book is An Orgy of Thieves: Neoliberalism and Its Discontents (with Alexander Cockburn). He can be reached at: sitka@comcast.net or on Twitter @JeffreyStClair3. CounterPunch.org.)

KAMALA HARRIS’S DEMOCRATIC BETRAYAL

by Zaid Jilani

There was a moment that occurred a few days before Election Day that few Americans heard about, but I doubt it would surprise them. Kamala Harris was asked by a reporter how she would be voting on Proposition 36 in her home state of California. Proposition 36 involved increasing certain penalties for drug and theft crimes. Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ll know that retail theft and open-air drug use have become high-profile issues in the Golden State. Criminal-justice hawks and doves bitterly debated the issue, seeing it as a referendum on whether California would adopt tough-on-crime policies or continue to pursue a more reform-minded approach.

It was the perfect issue for Harris, who started her career in politics as San Francisco district attorney before rising to state attorney general. If there’s anything Harris knows, it’s the debate over tradeoffs between punishment and rehabilitation, public safety and human rights. And yet, rather than launching into a robust defense of the proposition, which would have helped her push back on Trumpian accusations that she is soft on crime, or attacking it, which would’ve been standing on principle against a measure some Californians regarded as draconian and excessive, Harris did the most Harris thing possible: She dodged the question in an inartful way.

“I am not going to talk about the vote on that,” she responded to a reporter. “Because honestly, it’s the Sunday before the election, and I don’t intend to create an endorsement one way or another around it.” The reply nicely summarized Kamala Harris’s political career, which came to an abrupt end in the wee hours of Wednesday.

It’s hard to say that Harris, aged 60, ever took a bold or courageous stand on anything during most of her political career. The closest she ever came was opposing the death penalty as DA—but come on, she was in San Francisco, not San Antonio. As I wrote in these pages months ago, she was a candidate without convictions.

Despite her party endlessly pronouncing that they are the guardians of democracy, she was elevated to the presidential slot without winning a single primary or caucus—the first such nominee in decades. I was shocked by the democratic backsliding in the party—which began by insiders hiding President Biden’s frail state until late into the summer, then deposing him, and then anointing a successor without even the “mini-primary” some party elders had advocated for.

But maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised. One of the most consistent beliefs I’ve encountered working in and around politics is anti-populism: a belief that the people are fundamentally untrustworthy and need to be guided by elites. This is how vast swaths of professionals working in think tanks, academia, and elected office think about Americans.

Had Americans had an opportunity to pick a presidential nominee for the Democratic Party, it wouldn’t have been Kamala Harris. There’s a reason her frequent remarks about growing up “in a middle-class family” became the butt of online jokes. She was unable to establish an authentic connection to the struggles that people face—and not just economic struggles.

How little emotional intelligence did Harris have to be parading around the endorsements of Liz and Dick Cheney? This was at a time when Muslim Americans, loyal Democratic voters for some two decades, had been watching people of their faith killed by the thousands on their television screens for a year. Unsurprisingly, early data from states like Michigan suggest that Arab and Muslim voters fled from her campaign in droves. (Comically, she had to rework an interview with a Muslim influencer who was prevented from talking to her about the Middle East but who she also awkwardly offended by suggesting that bacon is a spice.)

And what was the upside? Does anybody know any substantial number of voters in this country who were leaning toward Trump before were persuaded by Cheney’s appeals? All of this was obvious to ordinary voters—Democrats, Republicans, and independents alike. People intuitively knew that Harris just didn’t understand policy deeply, nor did she have very strong convictions about how to tackle pressing problems like the economy, the border, or wars overseas. She didn’t know how to talk to Republicans, either, which is why she dragged Cheney—a figure who has zero purchase in the modern GOP—all over the country in a vain effort to broaden her coalition.

“She was a bad nominee because she would have been a bad president.”

Harris’s lack of convictions wasn’t a problem that Democrats could simply market their way out of with coconut memes, appearances with Oprah Winfrey, or Saturday Night Live hits. She was a bad nominee because she would have been a bad president, and anyone not deeply in the Democratic hype bubble knew this. How could someone who was too anxious to do a three-hour sit-down with Joe Rogan manage international negotiations? How would someone who never had the courage to come up with a single bold idea as a senator or vice president come up with solutions to wars in Ukraine or Gaza?

My hope is that Harris’s loss might prompt the Democratic Party to reflect on its own name. Founded by Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren as an anti-elite vehicle, the party of what they called “the democracy” is supposed to embrace, well, democracy. That means elevating people to the highest levels of power only after robust debate, fierce competition, and the consent of rank-and-file members.

By installing a candidate without convictions, the Democrats have lost yet another winnable election to Trump—a deeply flawed man whom a capable opponent could have easily overcome. If they want to win again in four years, Democrats need to learn to trust the American people and the democratic process. That means a robust presidential primary and candidates who are fully transparent about their strengths and weaknesses. The Democratic Party lost this election by abandoning democracy. It can retake the White House in four years by learning to love it again.

(AP)

“Tunney” Zunino, Susanville Logging, 1951

A PARTY OF PRIGS AND PONTIFICATORS SUFFERS A HUMILIATING DEFEAT

by Bret Stephens

A story in chess lore involves the great Danish-Jewish player Aron Nimzowitsch, who, at a tournament in the mid-1920s, found himself struggling against the German master Friedrich Sämisch. Infuriated at the thought of losing to an opponent he considered inferior, Nimzowitsch jumped on the table and shouted, “To this idiot I must lose?”

It’s a thought that must have crossed the minds of more than a few liberal pundits and Democratic eminences late Tuesday night, as Kamala Harris’s hopes for winning the presidency began suddenly to fade.

How, indeed, did Democrats lose so badly, considering how they saw Donald Trump — a twice-impeached former president, a felon, a fascist, a bigot, a buffoon, a demented old man, an object of nonstop late-night mockery and incessant moral condemnation? The theory that many Democrats will be tempted to adopt is that a nation prone to racism, sexism, xenophobia and rank stupidity fell prey to the type of demagoguery that once beguiled Germany into electing Adolf Hitler.

It’s a theory that has a lot of explanatory power — though only of an unwitting sort. The broad inability of liberals to understand Trump’s political appeal except in terms flattering to their beliefs is itself part of the explanation for his historic, and entirely avoidable, comeback.

Why did Harris lose? There were many tactical missteps: her choice of a progressive running mate who would not help deliver a must-win state like Pennsylvania or Michigan; her inability to separate herself from President Biden; her foolish designation of Trump as a fascist, which, by implication, suggested his supporters were themselves quasi-fascist; her overreliance on celebrity surrogates as she struggled to articulate a compelling rationale for her candidacy; her failure to forthrightly repudiate some of the more radical positions she took as a candidate in 2019, other than by relying on stock expressions like “My values haven’t changed.”

There was also the larger error of anointing Harris without political competition — an insult to the democratic process that handed the nomination to a candidate who, as some of us warned at the time, was exceptionally weak. That, in turn, came about because Democrats failed to take Biden’s obvious mental decline seriously until June’s debate debacle (and then allowed him to cling to the nomination for a few weeks more), making it difficult to hold even a truncated mini-primary.

But these mistakes of calculation lived within three larger mistakes of worldview. First, the conviction among many liberals that things were pretty much fine, if not downright great, in Biden’s America — and that anyone who didn’t think that way was either a right-wing misinformer or a dupe. Second, the refusal to see how profoundly distasteful so much of modern liberalism has become to so much of America. Third, the insistence that the only appropriate form of politics when it comes to Trump is the politics of Resistance — capital R.

Regarding the first, I’ve lost track of the number of times liberal pundits have attempted to steer readers to arcane data from the St. Louis Federal Reserve to explain why Americans should stop freaking out over sharply higher prices of consumer goods or the rising financing costs on their homes and cars. Or insisted there was no migration crisis at the southern border. Or averred that Biden was sharp as a tack and that anyone who suggested otherwise was a jerk.

Yet when Americans saw and experienced things otherwise (as extensive survey data showed they did) the characteristic liberal response was to treat the complaints not only as baseless but also as immoral. The effect was to insult voters while leaving Democrats blind to the legitimacy of the issues. You could see this every time Harris mentioned, in answer to questions about the border, that she had prosecuted transnational criminal gangs: Her answer was nonresponsive to the central complaint that there was a migration crisis straining hundreds of communities, irrespective of whether the migrants committed crimes.

The dismissiveness with which liberals treated these concerns was part of something else: dismissiveness toward the moral objections many Americans have to various progressive causes. Concerned about gender transitions for children or about biological males playing on girls’ sports teams? You’re a transphobe. Dismayed by tedious, mandatory and frequently counterproductive D.E.I. seminars that treat white skin as almost inherently problematic? You’re racist. Irritated by new terminology that is supposed to be more inclusive but feels as if it’s borrowing a page from “1984”? That’s doubleplusungood.

The Democratic Party at its best stands for fairness and freedom. But the politics of today’s left is heavy on social engineering according to group identity. It also, increasingly, stands for the forcible imposition of bizarre cultural norms on hundreds of millions of Americans who want to live and let live but don’t like being told how to speak or what to think. Too many liberals forgot this, which explains how a figure like Trump, with his boisterous and transgressive disdain for liberal pieties, could be re-elected to the presidency.

Last, liberals thought that the best way to stop Trump was to treat him not as a normal, if obnoxious, political figure with bad policy ideas but as a mortal threat to democracy itself. Whether or not he is such a threat, this style of opposition led Democrats astray. It goaded them into their own form of antidemocratic politics — using the courts to try to get Trump’s name struck from the ballot in Colorado or trying to put him in prison on hard-to-follow charges. It distracted them from the task of developing and articulating superior policy responses to the valid public concerns he was addressing. And it made liberals seem hyperbolic, if not hysterical, particularly since the country had already survived one Trump presidency more or less intact.

Today, the Democrats have become the party of priggishness, pontification and pomposity. It may make them feel righteous, but how’s that ever going to be a winning electoral look?

I voted reluctantly for Harris because of my fears for what a second Trump term might bring — in Ukraine, our trade policy, civic life, the moral health of the conservative movement writ large. Right now, my larger fear is that liberals lack the introspection to see where they went wrong, the discipline to do better next time and the humility to change.

(NY Times)

ORIGINAL PHOTO (left): Le violoncelle sous la pluie, Paris (1957) by Robert Doisneau

IT’S THIS MAN’S, MAN’S, MAN’S WORLD

by Maureen Dowd

I can no longer count the number of times I’ve counted out Donald Trump.

Every time, what I thought would stagger him made him stronger.

I assumed that he would have to drop out in 2016 after the “Access Hollywood” tape. I thought he would be driven into exile after he egged on the Jan. 6 insurrectionists hunting down Nancy Pelosi and Mike Pence. I thought his cynical move stacking the Supreme Court with religious fanatics who yanked away women’s reproductive rights would doom his comeback attempt. I thought his deranged, nasty, out-of-control final weeks of campaigning would surely sink him.

But Trump never disappeared in a puff of orange smoke. Every time, he bobbed back up, defying convention and luring voters I thought he had lost, given how he, JD Vance and his rally carny barkers delighted in disparaging so many voting blocs with utter abandon.

We must now fathom the unfathomable: All the misogynistic things, the racist things, the crude things, the undemocratic things he’s said and done don’t negate his appeal to millions of voters. Because he will once again be our president, and he has declared that he has “an unprecedented mandate.”

Fasten your seatbelts. It’s going to be a bumpy America.

We have to accept that a lot of Americans want Trump in charge. Even a lot of Republicans who cringe at his words and actions approve of his policies on the economy and the border and his promise to “keep men out of women’s sports.”

Seeking Black and Latino votes at a Bronx barbershop, Trump delivered this message: “They take your kid. There are some places, your boy leaves for school, comes back a girl, OK, without parental consent.”

“What is that all about?” he wondered.

His support among Latino men jumped, despite the fact that he was running against a woman of color who could have made history as the first Madam President. He held his own with Black men. “A small but significant slice of Black men have historically been hesitant to support Black women seeking the highest positions of power,” Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Erica Green presciently wrote in The Times in August.

As Van Jones noted on CNN, there are many disappointed African American women who are trading in a “lot of hope for a lot of hurt.”

James Carville warned that Democrats needed to stop coming across as the party of preachy women. But then Barack and Michelle Obama tried to woo Black men by scolding them.

“We have every right to demand the men in our lives do better by us,” Michelle Obama said. “Our lives are worth more than their anger and disappointment.”

In the last days of the campaign, as Trump’s language got darker and his insults cruder, as he wore a neon orange safety vest and rode in a garbage truck as a stunt, it felt that he might end up unmanned by women.

This was an epic battle of the sexes. Kamala Harris ended her campaign with Beyoncé, Oprah and Lady Gaga. Trump and Vance went down the rabbit hole of the bro ecosystem and ended with Joe Rogan’s embrace.

Shortly before the polls closed, the Trump adviser Stephen Miller tweeted, “If you know any men who haven’t voted, get them to the polls.”

At a polling center in Charlotte, N.C., a young man told CNN’s Brianna Keilar that he had been coerced to come vote for Harris at the last minute by his girlfriend, who was “blowing up” his phone and telling him she would break up with him if he didn’t.

But even the “Lysistrata” tactics did not work.

According to a CNN exit poll, Trump won 54 percent of the male vote, and Harris won 54 percent of the female vote. Her strategists hoped that her percentage with women would overwhelm his advantage with men. But many of the suburban women that Harris thought she could get voted for Trump.

It was striking that Harris couldn’t get the margin with women she needed, given the shocking behavior of the Republicans toward women.

It looked as if Trump, Vance and other Republicans were doing everything they could to alienate women, acting more like sexist jerks you run across in bars than pols casting the widest net for possible voters.

In one of his final speeches of the campaign, Vance called Harris “trash.” In his last speech in Grand Rapids, Mich., early Tuesday, Trump called Pelosi “a bad person, evil. She’s an evil, sick, crazy” word that “starts with a b.” Someone in the crowd shouted “bitch” to help out Trump. He has called Harris “retarded,” “lazy as hell” and “dumb as a rock” and privately labeled her a “bitch.”

Vance’s behavior was mystifying. He is 40 and Yale educated and has a lovely wife who had a high-powered career as a lawyer. But his incendiary words against women over the years echoed through his campaign, suggesting he’d like to shove them into a time machine back to the 1950s. He insulted “childless cat ladies” and agreed with a podcast host who said that postmenopausal women had no purpose but to help raise children.

Bernie Moreno, the Republican who beat Sherrod Brown to flip a Senate seat in Ohio, echoed that insult when he said about older women who were upset at the erosion of reproductive rights: “It’s a little crazy, by the way — especially for women that are, like, past 50. I’m thinking to myself, ‘I don’t think that’s an issue for you.’”

But the 78-year-old Trump had no qualms about running a campaign resonant of a steam room in Rat Pack Vegas. He even entered the arena one night at his Milwaukee convention to the James Brown song “It’s a Man’s, Man’s, Man’s World.”

Those rooting for Kamala hoped that election night would bring Trump a comeuppance on his attempt to drag women into the past.

As Michael Beschloss, the presidential historian, told me, it would have been a wonderful morality play if Trump had been brought down by his misogyny and his contempt for women’s rights.

Trump and Harris offered a contrast in their views on democracy and the rule of law. They also offered a contrast in styles.

On the trail, Trump seemed out of control, and Harris was an exemplar of self-control. But she was so self-controlled that she sometimes came across as opaque and staged.

Many voters complained that they did not have a good feel for who she was or where she wanted to take the country. Her tale of growing up in a neighborhood with folks “who were very proud of their lawn” did not cut it. Her message could be bland and confusing.

When she was asked in a CNN town hall by Anderson Cooper if she had made any mistakes she had learned from, she replied: “I’ve probably worked very hard at making sure that I am well versed on issues, and I think that is very important. It’s a mistake not to be well versed on issues and feel compelled to answer a question.” As David Axelrod, a CNN commentator, noted afterward, “Word salad city.”

Harris pulled together her abbreviated campaign swiftly and improved as a candidate. But she was still guarded and tentative in explaining why she wanted to be president and still lacked answers for where she would take the country. She did not acknowledge the obvious; that the border became a disaster under the administration.

Privately, many Democrats were worried from the beginning, feeling that two governors from swing states would have been stronger candidates.

resident Biden deserves a lot of the blame. He was selfish and vain. You know he’s sitting home, polishing his own enemies list and telling Jill that he could have beat Trump and pushing him out of the race was a lot of malarkey.

He hurt his party, his legacy and his country by not saying at the beginning of his term that he would not run for a second term as an octogenarian — in time for all the stars of the party to compete, so Democrats could choose the most potent ticket to protect democracy.

Harris had an awful lot to prove and a short time to prove it. She pulled in a lot of people who were simply thrilled that she wasn’t Trump, but for too many people, that wasn’t enough.

She got onto a good message in the homestretch when she said Trump would come to the White House with an enemies list and she would come with a to-do list. She said she would wake up thinking about Americans, not vengeance.

When Biden was still in the race and Trump survived an assassination attempt in Butler, Pa., the former president seemed to have it in the bag. But when Biden was replaced by Harris, Trump began whining and acting as though he felt he was losing control of the race. That made him lose control of himself. The last couple weeks were a cascade of craziness, as Trump’s anxious advisers tried to wrangle their unmanageable candidate and deal with the fallout from the Madison Square Garden fiasco with a comedian calling Puerto Rico “a floating island of garbage” and Rudy Giuliani talking about how “the Palestinians are taught to kill us at 2 years old.”

Trump was surrounded by surrogates like Tucker Carlson, who spoke of being attacked by demons; Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who wants to take fluoride out of the water supply; and Elon Musk, who amplified baseless voting conspiracies.

Trump was making offensive comments at a rapid-fire rate, saying he should never have left office when he lost and that he wouldn’t mind if reporters at his rallies got shot by an assassin going after him. Even some of his allies wondered if he was engaging in self-sabotage. Maybe he didn’t really want to win.

Some who voted for Trump were not afraid he would wreak vengeance. Others want him to, still seeking — as they were in 2016 — a Rottweiler to tear the face off Washington.

Trump did better than he did in 2020, and Harris did worse than Biden did in 2020, possibly in every demographic.

In CNN’s exit polls, 58 percent disapproved of Biden, 43 percent were dissatisfied with the direction of the country, and many voters said they were “angry.”

Joe weighed Kamala down. She never broke with the unpopular president or gave people an inspiring vision of change. As Carville says, the change candidate always has the edge.

For his fans, Trump’s weird humor and wacky comments deflated Democrats’ attempts to say he was a fascist.

In the final analysis, Trump can slide past problems that would be insurmountable for other politicians because he’s Trump — a unique amalgam of con man and showman.

He always seems like a fake tough guy to me, but his audiences love his swagger and his ability to come out a winner, even when he seems to have lost.

He bonds with supporters by talking to them in an intimate, spontaneous, confessional way, unlike typical politicians who offer repetitive speech chunks. Trump does not have many, or any, close friends. But he talks to rallygoers — many of whom rightly feel that Democratic elites have treated them with disdain — as though they were his friends.

He is a billionaire whose life is gilded, yet he is able to make his supporters feel that he is their cheerleader in a world where they are having trouble affording food and housing.

Like Bill Clinton, Trump loves being onstage talking endlessly to people who love him. Many politicians give the impression they can’t wait to get away. Trump’s narcissism is fueled by the crowds, who love him just the way he is, warts and all, 34 felony convictions and all.

They think he is fun to be with and says things they have on their minds but don’t have the nerve to say. And if he also says some crazy things, well, that’s Donald. None of the bad stuff would have happened, they believe, if Trump had been running things.

The healing that Kamala promised is now on hold. The federal cases against Trump are certain to vanish. The vengeance tour begins.

That highest glass ceiling will be shattered, and there will be a Madam President. But not this time.

“Look what happened!” Trump marveled at his West Palm Beach, Fla., victory speech. “Isn’t this crazy?”

Yes, it is.

“THE NECESSITY FOR POWER is obvious, because life cannot be lived without order; but the allocation of power is arbitrary because all men are alike, or very nearly. Yet power must not seem to be arbitrarily allocated, because it will not then be recognized as power. Therefore prestige, which is illusion, is of the very essence of power.”

– Simone Weil

OLD MEN:

A poem by Ogden Nash

People expect old men to die,

They do not really mourn old men.

Old men are different. People look

At them with eyes that wonder when…

People watch with unshocked eyes;

But the old men know when an old man dies.

WHAT TRUMP CAN AND CAN'T DO TO IMMIGRANTS

By David Bacon

From our January/February 2017 issue, in the wake of Trump's first election to the presidency, David Bacon's perspectives on the economic context of immigration policy and how Trump can-and can't-shape it are still relevant after his recent re-election victory. -Eds.

“People make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.”

-Karl Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” 1852

https://davidbaconrealitycheck.blogspot.com/2024/11/what-trump-can-and-cant-do-to-immigrants.html

ENVIRONMENTAL GROUPS SAY TRUMP REGIME WILL FACE 'UNPRECEDENTED RESISTANCE'

by Dan Bacher

Following the election of Donald Trump to his second term as president last night, environmental and anti-corporate groups vowed “unprecedented resistance” to his anti environmental policies on water, land, the climate and fish and wildlife.

“Trump 2.0 is going to get twice the fight from the protectors of our planet, wildlife and basic human rights,” said Kier¡n Suckling, executive director of the Center for Biological Diversity. “We’ve battled Trump from the border wall to the Arctic Wildlife Refuge, and in many cases we’ve won. This country’s bedrock environmental laws stand strong. We’re more prepared than ever to block the disastrous Trump policies we know are coming.”

For example, the Center said it will resist Trump’s plan to “drill, drill, drill” and his efforts to “fulfill promises to the oil industry to reverse dozens of federal measures that protect public lands, imperiled wildlife and human health.”

“It’s going to take a few more rounds in the ring, but we’re confident that Trump’s greed, bigotry, misogyny, his anti-democratic zealotry, all will be defeated,” said Suckling. “Our fight is about freedom. We won’t rest until people across this country have agency over their own bodies, marginalized communities are free from attack, and every imperiled animal is free to flourish.”

With Trump set to take office in January 2025, the Center said it is calling on the Biden administration to “safeguard as many environmental protections as possible” in the coming weeks.

As United Nations climate talks get underway in Baku, Azerbaijan, the Center and allies urged President Joe Biden to deliver “robust climate targets.” In addition, the Center pressed the Biden administration to reject fossil fuel expansion ahead of Trump taking office by halting projects like the behemoth CP2 liquified natural gas export facility.

Other groups also vowed resistance to Trump’s anti-environmental policies.

In response to the election of Donald Trump, Elizabeth Bast, Oil Change International Executive Director made the following statement:

“Although millions of Americans voted to reject Trump’s dangerous agenda, we face another four years of a Trump presidency. Trump has promised to double down on oil and gas production, accelerating climate catastrophe while continuing to enable violence against vulnerable communities — from environmental defenders to Palestinians facing genocide. His policies will compound environmental racism and human rights abuses, with Black, Brown, Indigenous and frontline communities in the US and around the world bearing the heaviest burden.

“We’ve been here before and we know that our movement’s collective power stands ready to protect our communities, our climate, and stand for justice. We will adjust our strategies and our tactics, but we stand strong in our fight for a just and fossil-free future. We call on our allies, both in the United States and around the world, to keep pushing for justice, for climate action, and an end to fossil fuels.

“Movements for change have won important victories under the toughest conditions. It would take more than a Trump presidency to change that. Every pipeline, every fossil fuel export terminal, and every fracking well we can stop matters. Together we will keep fighting for climate justice, for social justice, and to protect our communities.”

Also in response to the election of Donald Trump, Oil Change International United States Program Manager Collin Rees made the following statement:

“In his final months in office, President Biden has the opportunity to secure his climate legacy by taking bold action to phase out fossil fuels and protect our climate and communities. We are calling on Biden to immediately end fossil fuel expansion, make permanent the pause on new LNG exports, shut down the disastrous Dakota Access Pipeline, and fulfill the US’s commitment to stop financing international fossil fuel projects.

“Biden must seize his final moment at COP29 in Azerbaijan this November to cement real climate action before Trump takes office. After pledging to move away from fossil fuels at COP28, Biden needs to deliver by championing a bold new $1 trillion annual climate finance package and putting forth a plan for a fast, fair, forever, funded, fossil fuel phase out. This funding will transform last year’s fossil fuel promises into genuine support for adaptation, mitigation, and loss and damage — but only if Biden acts now.

“The clock is ticking — for the Biden administration and our planet. What Biden does now will determine whether he’ll be remembered as the leader who did his utmost to limit the Trump administration’s damage and keep the world from hurtling towards climate chaos.”

Diana Vazquez Ballesteros, Co-Executive Director and Denise Glaze, Co-Executive Director, of the California Environmental Justice Alliance (CEJA) also responded to the Trump victory, calling Trump “an aspiring fascist” in a statement:

“Donald Trump has been re-elected. Amid the many emotions this statement evokes, we bravely face this dangerous new reality with clear eyes: Trump is an aspiring fascist with a disastrous environmental and human rights record. There is no doubt that his administration will try its best to make the lives of our community members materially worse.

“But as we process our grief and plan for the future, we are called to remind one another that together we can fight back. Just as powerfully as we always have. During Trump’s last term, CA environmental justice communities’ determination and grit culminated in historic environmental justice protections and the election of more progressives to office at the local, state, and federal level than ever before. We are braced to meet that challenge once again.

“CEJA is doubling down on our unwavering commitment to justice in the face of the threats posed by another Trump administration. The billionaires and industrialists who funded this election are trying to take our power, and we will not give it up. We will not bury our heads in the sand and pretend this is business as usual. It’s time for a real progressive platform built by the people.

“We know that those closest to problems are those closest to solutions. The only way to build an environmentally just future is through amplifying our greatest assets: the wisdom and power of our communities. And during this election, we saw a flood of support for progressive candidates and measures at the local level, and strong showings from CEJA-endorsed candidates for the state legislature. Environmental justice communities in California have spent generations building power and grabbing more seats at the table. We will not stand down, and they will not kick us out.

“The call to action now, perhaps more than ever before, is to deeply engage in organizing our communities and strengthening the movement for democracy and justice. Take time to volunteer. Connect with your neighbors. Don’t let despair win. Stand in your power. Please also keep an eye on CEJA’s updates (https://www.instagram.com/cejapower/) as we share opportunities to get more involved in direct action and healing spaces with our members and partners.”

Sejal Choksi-Chugh, Executive Director of the San Francisco Baykeeper, described the day after the election as a “bleak day” for the bay and the nation:

“With Trump officially heading back to the White House, we're bracing for another four years of chaos and assaults on the rule of law, the environment, and climate justice.

“I know many of us are scared about what the future holds. I'm right there with you. And I want you to know that Baykeeper will be on your side for the coming four years, as we have been when past administrations have prioritized an anti-environmental agenda.

“It's not going to be easy. Trump's playbook, *Project 2025, *includes plans to gut environmental regulations like the Clean Water Act, Endangered Species Act, and environmental justice protections. It will accelerate destructive coal mining and oil drilling, hand over scientific evaluation to dirty industries, and make it easier for corporate polluters to dump chemicals into our waters. At the same time, we expect the Supreme Court and a new Senate majority to rubber stamp these dangerous policies.

“One good thing: Baykeeper's scientists and attorneys are ready for what's coming.

“Thanks to you, we spent Trump's first term fighting back. We challenged his administration's harmful policies on pollution and bad science on water policy. We threw up roadblocks to their attempts to expand toxic fossil fuel operations, hand over California's fresh water to industrial agriculture, and decimate fish populations. And we stopped their plan to pave over 1400 acres of wetlands in the South Bay.

“This time, we're ready to fight from day one.

“We've studied Project 2025 and its impact on the Bay. We've created our own playbook to deal with a weakened EPA and to use novel legal arguments to challenge bad decisions. We're tracking Supreme Court cases that could undermine the Clean Water Act and working with legislative partners to strengthen California laws to fill the gaps.

“Our experts are gearing up to face the many threats coming the Bay's way. And we need your support.”

In a message emailed to supporters this morning, Wenonah Hauter, Executive Director of Food & Water Watch, didn’t mince words about the significance of last night’s election results:

“There’s no sugarcoating it. Last night’s election results were disheartening and scary. Next year, we’ll be living under a second Trump administration and all that it brings. Last night, I was sad and dejected. Today, I’m ready to fight back.

“During the campaign, Trump and his allies made it clear that they intend an all-out assault on civil rights, environmental protections, and people who disagree with him. We can expect four years of chaos, corporate cronyism, and an assault on our freedoms.

“We still don’t know the outcome in the House — it’s essential that all votes are counted.

“Either way, we’ve seen this playbook before. We know what it takes to win, and we’re prepared to fight — from the streets to the courts to the halls of Congress — while advancing protections for our food, water, and climate at the state level.

“We can’t let Trump and his allies succeed. Together, we’ll fight Trump’s actions from day one, while projecting a bold vision on food, water, and climate that speaks to people’s basic needs.”

In a similar vein, the Sierra Club, in an email to supporters, stated, “There's no sugarcoating this. A second Trump presidency will be hard and dangerous. But we are not powerless. As we grieve, we also recommit to fighting to protect our communities and our future, to do everything we can to block Trump and his extreme agenda, and to defend and build on the progress we've made. We will be a force of nature.”

“We must again stand together to fight back. While pundits will spend the coming days and weeks talking about what happened last night, I want to make one thing clear: the movement for a safe and livable future, for a world where all our communities have clean air and water, and for good green jobs that support our families remains overwhelmingly popular. The Sierra Club is part of a massive, nationwide movement, and we're still marching forward.”

In California, it couldn’t be a worse time for fish, water and the environment. Four runs of Sacramento River Chinook salmon, Delta and longfin smelt, green sturgeon and other species are in imminent risk of extinction, due to the export of massive amounts of water to corporate agribusiness and other factors. A Big Ag-friendly Trump administration will only make the prospects for recovery of the state’s fish populations even worse.

ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY

“The youth have nothing purposeful to do.”

This makes me ask why the youth in Austria, Germany, Finland can figure out how to sell 2x4s to homebuilders in the forests of Alabama, Florida and Georgia. That's quite a feat. Our leaders and parents should be ashamed of themselves for letting the youth waste their lives on facebook so that they now depend on far away countries to be able to put a roof over their heads.

MEANWHILE…

At least 40 people were killed in Israeli airstrikes on the historic city of Baalbek, in Lebanon’s east, and the surrounding area, Lebanon’s health ministry said late on Wednesday as strikes also pounded an area south of the capital.

The ministry said that the toll in Baalbek, which is famous for its Roman ruins, and in the broader Bekaa Valley, was a preliminary estimate. Over the last week, Israel has widened its campaign against Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant group, from its initial focus on border villages in the south.

Baalbek was home to around 80,000 people before Israel’s military launched its assault and ground invasion aimed at crippling Hezbollah. While it was largely spared during the early weeks of the campaign, Israeli military warnings in late October prompted much of its population to flee.

— NYT

LEST WE FORGET

by Loubna El Amine

The death toll in Lebanon has now risen past three thousand with more than thirteen thousand wounded. Entire neighborhoods have been flattened in the southern suburbs of Beirut, the villages of the south and the Bekaa Valley. More than a million people have been displaced. Schools have been turned into shelters, making it difficult to resume the school year even in areas considered relatively safe. Yet even the schools cannot hold enough people; tents and makeshift homes have been built on the corniche and in the public square in central Beirut. You would not recognise the city, my friends there tell me.

Some of the latest attacks have focused on Tyre, a city not normally associated with Hizbullah. Nor is my mother’s village, which was heavily pounded in the early days of Israel’s latest war on Lebanon, and pounded again since in intermittent bursts of destruction. The youngest of my mother’s brothers, who lives there, is now staying with another brother in Beirut. The Israelis hit car repair shops, metal sheds, even bakeries, he said. In Nabatiyeh, the closest big town, the whole historic centre was destroyed; the mayor, who had refused to leave, was killed. One of my cousins celebrated her wedding in Nabatiyeh; we danced the night away in an outdoor restaurant overlooking the town and its surrounding villages.

News of my father’s village, closer to the border with Israel and near many of the villages that have been heavily targeted by Israeli attacks, has been hard to come by. It was heavily bombed in 2006. The only footage I have seen comes from an Arabic TV station’s report, which my brother managed to record. The houses shown were destroyed beyond recognition. My father sends updates when an acquaintance tells him that houses of people we know have been hit. We don’t know what has happened to my parents’ house there.

This is what I tell people when they ask me how things are back home. But I am never quite sure where the questions come from and whether my answers make any difference to their views. After all, even Israeli officials, when interviewed, express compassion for innocent civilians in Gaza and Lebanon, placing the blame for their ordeals squarely on Hamas and Hizbullah.

In any case, no one asked me about Lebanon today. Instead, I found myself wondering whether it was incumbent on me to participate in the lamentations about the results of the US elections, the discussions of how deeply divided American society is, the predictions of the end of democracy and the rise of fascism in America. The end of the world is relative to the world you take for granted. As Adam Shatz wrote after Trump’s victory eight years ago, American exceptionalism ‘lives on … in the unprecedented horror we imagine ourselves to be experiencing’.

Someone recently asked me if the latest war on Lebanon was in a way familiar, something we were used to. I said that the death toll from the July 2006 war had already been vastly surpassed by this one, which has also caused much more widespread destruction. This one has been long in the planning, too, with nearly twenty years of intelligence-gathering paving the way for the devastation. The pager and walkie-talkie attacks gave way to aerial bombardment and continuous drone surveillance, the constant buzz of further intelligence-gathering, heralding further devastation, and the long, painful work of trying to pull bodies out from the rubble.

I only knew the Israeli occupation of the south, where they retrenched in 1985 after withdrawing from Beirut, from a distance, though it was sometimes a short distance: we used to visit my father’s village, just across from the occupied zone. I am not old enough to remember the carnage of the Sabra and Shatila massacres in 1982, perpetrated by Lebanese Christian militias with the cover of Israeli forces. But there were Israeli attacks on Beirut in 1996, 1999 and 2006, which I vividly recall, with their attendant death, displacement and destruction.

And I remember the final years of the civil war that lasted from 1975 to 1990, in which Israel participated, along with the Palestine Liberation Organisation and Syria. The motto of the years after the war was ‘lest we forget’. But before it there had been the war of 1958, and it was followed by an uneasy peace that always threatened to shatter. I don’t recall many times in my life when there were no predictions of war in Lebanon.

At the end of September, someone sent me a cartoon, published in the Lebanese daily L’Orient-le Jour, showing war as the cherry on top of a multi-layered cake of financial collapse, Covid, the Beirut port explosion, political deadlock and mass depression. I wondered, though, if war, or the threat of it, should not be the base. Since independence from the French mandate in 1943, Lebanon has been under constant threat of Israeli aggression, of conflict between the social groups that make the country up, and of being engulfed in wider wars across the region. In the moments of respite, as if powered by the incredible ability to survive against the odds, Lebanon is buoyant. But then it gets submerged again. The latest Israeli war has been crushing. I struggle to see how, even after a ceasefire, itself a distant prospect, the country can bounce back from this level of destruction – which seems to be precisely the aim of the war.

In a short video on Facebook, two women discuss what they have felt, and done, since the war started: they say they felt tired, depressed, helpless; they could not see the future, analysed but did not come to conclusions, shared posts, donated, followed the advice to ‘keep talking about’ Lebanon, felt guilty for being all right while others are dying. One of them says that she wrote things down so that she could remember them later, but then she wondered when later would be. ‘But you did not think of leaving?’ the other asks her. ‘I did not,’ she responds, ‘because even if I leave, would I even be able to forget?’

I left, many years ago. I also cut short my visit this summer because of the escalating events. This last departure shattered my heart. Something about it was different: the premonition of things never being the same again. Not being there to bear witness, I am frightened of forgetting, as life here goes on and the drama of the US elections unfolds, the death and destruction being inflicted on Lebanon and on Gaza.

(London Review of Books)

20 Comments

George Hollister November 7, 2024

BRUTAL DOG ATTACK

Let me guess, Pit Bull.

- Harvey Reading November 7, 2024
  
  Could have been a Lab, a collie, a shepherd, etc. Dogs tend to become what their owners make them, George. The human love for fairy tales results in bad conclusions.
  
Chuck Artigues November 7, 2024

Thank you for the Lawrence Ferlinghetti poem. For those who are interested there is an exhibit featuring Ferlinghetti at the San Francisco Historical Society, I think it runs through March.

Me November 7, 2024

That poor girl, attacked by a dog, nearly dead, dog owner retrieves dog and disappears, can’t find girls family…… something very hinkcy happening here. I hope she survives, heals and thrives. I hope the responsible party is found and dealt with. I hope her family finds her. I hope someone shows her love and support. What a horrible ordeal to suffer.

Harvey Reading November 7, 2024

A PARTY OF PRIGS AND PONTIFICATORS SUFFERS A HUMILIATING DEFEAT

When you get right down to it, the main reason Harris lost was because Trump got more votes, for the very first time in his life. Neither is worthy of being in charge of anything. And so, we swirl a little faster down the toilet bowl leading to extinction…humans are proof positive that there is no god.

- Craig Stehr November 7, 2024
  
  Just left the (lower) Crypt Church at the Basilica in Washington, D.C. following Catholic Mass. It is one place which offers an experience which is always uplifting and satisfying. And then, walked out into the chaos and depression of the District of Columbia, which is reeling from the shock that the elite Democrats idiotically gave The Donald the American presidency for the second time. Right now, the mind is anchored within; one goes where necessary and does what is needed. I’d say this is proof of God! ;-))
  
  - Harvey Reading November 7, 2024
    
    You apparently confuse proof with wishful thinking.
    
    - Craig Stehr November 7, 2024
      
      A centered mind is not “wishful thinking”!
      
      - Harvey Reading November 8, 2024
        
        Center of what, O wise one?
        
    - Sarah Kennedy Owen November 7, 2024
      
      I would say belief in “God” is one way to navigate these times, which it seems Craig is doing quite nicely. We are all going to need a road map to find some semblance of reality. I enjoy hearing about his experiences in Washington DC. There will come a time (soon) where we will all be reeling under the insanity which we have now inflicted upon ourselves.
      
      - Harvey Reading November 7, 2024
        
        I’ve been reeling from the disintegration of this pathetic country for decades now, but the disintegration just gets worse. Belief in imaginary beings is NOT a solution. It is nothing but a rationalization, just a way of shifting the blame, a form of surrender, one which, if anything, accelerates and encourages the attack of authoritarians on whatever freedom we once were allowed.
        
Fog November 7, 2024

Quit a bash at the AVA, today.

- Fog November 7, 2024
  
  Rushing to go…I dropped the ‘e’, darn.
  
  Quite a bashing, today, at the AVA.
  
Call It As I See It November 7, 2024

Love that Bruce Anderson now refers to himself as a Libtard. Your Welcome! It’s probably the first time we agree.

Jim Armstrong November 7, 2024

From above:
“…the DA that alleged that the defendant had suffered a prior DUI conviction in March 2022 in the Mendocino County Superior Court.”
I know what suffer means to most folks, but what does it mean to lawyers?

- Jim Armstrong November 8, 2024
  
  Still no answer. I guess nobody knows.
  Maybe I will ask Eyster.
  
  - McEwen Bruce November 8, 2024
    
    Please, Jim, DA Dave is a strict disciplinarian and an even stricter grammarian so he cuts decisively with his verbs and would never stoop to using a passive construct like “she was convicted of” instead of inflicting a sense of how painful a DUI can be to your wallet, credibility, reputation, prospects. Mike used to make Dave’s utterances conducive to even the meanest intelligence— journalist are trained to use only the vocabulary of a twelve-year-old — but Dave is in the custom of speaking to sophisticated juries who would yawn at such twaddle. All he’s saying is she had a prior misdemeanor of the most pedestrian kind but has to give it an air of courtroom drama.
    
Lazarus November 7, 2024

“In legal terms, suffering is the physical and emotional pain, discomfort, and distress that a person experiences after an injury. It can also include the inability to perform normal activities.
Suffering is a type of non-economic damages that can be awarded in a personal injury case. It’s often combined with the term “pain and suffering”. The dollar value of pain and suffering damages is subjective.
To recover damages for pain and suffering, the injured party must prove that the defendant’s actions caused them harm. This is done by establishing the following four elements of negligence:
Duty of care: The defendant had a legal obligation to act in a certain way.
Breach of duty: The defendant failed to uphold that obligation.
Causation: The defendant’s breach of duty caused the plaintiff’s injuries.
Damages: The plaintiff suffered harm as a result of the defendant’s actions.”
You’re welcome,
Laz

- Jim Armstrong November 7, 2024
  
  Laz: I was glad to see a response to my question, but disappointed it was yours.
  Did you read the referenced article? Did you read my question?
  
  - Lazarus November 7, 2024
    
    Thank you…
    Laz

20 Comments

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