Thoughts For This Weekend’s Calm Before The Election Storm
More independent Congressional candidates please
Going forward, I think the Dan Osborn independent candidate situation in Nebraska, win or lose, is a worthwhile strategy Democrats should pursue in future elections. Convincing Fox News-addled rural people in Western and Southern states to vote for the Democrat has become a Sisyphean task because the Democratic brand has become so toxic in these regions, and Democrats could ease them back toward liberal policy ideas and perspectives by spending a cycle or two helping support real independent candidates who have a better chance of winning.
Democrats deserve to win now — the Biden Administration has brought us back from the COVID brink and defeated inflation without causing big joblessness (which was previously thought impossible) and given us the best economy in half a century with unemployment at a 50-year low, stock prices regularly setting records, and manufacturing coming roaring back thanks to Biden’s legislative accomplishments—but Republican voters will have to be brought back to the moderate center gradually.
52 States
If Democrats win, they should make adding Puerto Rico and D.C. top priorities. The Senate is a preposterous farce of democracy when Wyoming and California have the same number of senators. A work-around is adding two new states and four new senators to represent millions of people who are not actually fully represented. Democrats should also work to get more states signed up for the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact so the Electoral College stops electing presidents who don’t win their elections.
Old Man Trump’s potential irrelevance
If Trump loses convincingly enough that Republicans don’t go along with another coup attempt, I bet he’s going to start pretending to be too senile to go to court for his various criminal trials. He’ll do the Harvey Weinstein thing where he’s suddenly being wheeled around in a wheelchair. However, he’s a narcissist so he’ll still do the hair and makeup minstrel look, and it will get steadily more ridiculous as his old age finally catches up to his unhealthy body. I’m going to enjoy watching him get wheeled around to his criminal trials.
The natural outcome of Citizens United
We do not need gladiator billionaires spending billions of their own money each election to get their token candidates elected. That’s an oligarchic republic America was never intended to be. The example Elon Musk is setting stumping full time for Trump and bribing voters to register with a million dollar lottery is so wrong for our country and politics.
A Harris victory will ruin Musk’s life for good reason
Tim Walz once again read the room and vibe-checked the zeitgeist by calling Elon Musk a dipshit last week. Just like Walz’s iconic “weird”-ification of JD Vance and Donald Trump, “dipshit” seems like just the right word. Musk is proof that just because you’re smart at one or a few things, doesn’t mean you’re a genius at everything.
A great reason to hope to see Trump lose the election is you’ll also see Musk start to lose his government contracts for being a hyper-partisan lunatic whose lack of loyalty to US national security interests can no longer be ignored. And maybe then the Tesla board will fire him for turning the company’s target liberal customers off their electric cars. And maybe SpaceX can publicly admit Musk has been much too busy retweeting God Emperor Trump style memes and replying to @catturd2 literally all day and night for two years to deserve any credit for all the rocket successes. Karma is coming for Musk.
Stop the mob bosses
The idea of Musk being in charge of the government’s budget and “cutting costs” by deciding who gets government grants (when he’s the biggest welfare queen in the country right now) is like replaying the 1990s Russian sell-off of all the Soviet monopolies in a rigged auction that created its present-day debilitating oligarchy. The kind of strength Trump and apparently Musk respect in Vladimir Putin is the strength of a mob boss, and no doubt their ceaseless phone conversations with Putin are about now to emulate Russia’s totalitarianism in America.
Trump’s entire agenda is inflationary
The corporate media has utterly failed us. Voters are heading to the polls right now to vote for Donald Trump because of economic anxiety from inflation, despite the fact that Trump’s entire agenda is inflationary. You know what happens when 10 million under-the-radar people get deported, and the agricultural and landscaping companies they worked for have to raise wages and benefits to attract native-born white US citizens to do those jobs? Inflation.
All our food will get more expensive when the labor costs to grow and process it increase. You know what happens when Trump willy-nilly applies steep tariffs to every imported good, from screws to electric vehicles? Inflation, and supply chain chaos as every company in America either passes on those tariff costs right to the consumer (no business owner in America will forgo profits by NOT raising prices to cover the cost of the tariffs) or goes out of business.
Trump’s tariff proposal is literally insane because Trump is literally the worst person imaginable to be in charge of handing out tariff exemptions
His entire business career and personal life have been exercises in record-breaking fraud, blackmail, avarice, and self-aggrandizement psychologically consistent with narcissistic sociopathy. He’s the worst person possible to be in charge of deciding which corporations get tariff exemptions that will make or break their profits, stock prices, and salary bonuses.
Donald Trump abuses any and all power he has ever gotten in his life, whether he’s sexually assaulting women, screwing over everyone who does business with him, or using the power of the state to enact vengeance on his critics. It is literally preposterous that Donald Trump should be given the authority to oversee an oligarchy of billionaires dependent on Trump’s good graces like a coward aristocracy of bootlickers hoping to ride his grifting coattails. And Elon Musk’s record of taking Twitter from a $44 billion valuation two years ago to just a $9.4 billion valuation today is reason enough for Trump to lose and to keep Musk out of having any say over our public bureaucracy.
The Washington Post controversy?
I don’t think it will move literally anyone politically, but it is blatantly an example of Jeff Bezos “obeying in advance,” which you’re not supposed to do if you’re interested in resisting fascism. They lost something like 250,000 subscribers, and, though I think the boycott does kind of fuck over one of the last bastions of print news, frankly corporate titans need to learn the lesson that there is a large group of people in this country who are liberal and conscientious, and you don’t get a free pass from them to be passive against a clear, demagogic and fascist threat to the democracy to help your bottom line.
Also, print and professional media is dying anyway so I feel like all these companies (including ABC, CNN, etc.) that are in the business of selling well-written, detailed, and nuanced news and commentary are essentially ruining their product by catering to bad-faith attacks from Republicans who are really only interested in partisan opinion and conspiracy theories. The Washington Post is essentially ruining its “user experience” with pedantically centrist both-sidesism in a doomed-from-the-start effort to attract Republican viewers who hate objective news. 🥃
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