Don’t forget - Monday the 10th is a national holiday and the Post Office is closed.
In other news, Taco Trucks across the Southwest are offering voter registration, including having deputy registrars standing by.
Cool beans - but deadlines are approaching fast, everyone! Make sure your registrations are all in order at your county Board of Election websites.
Down, down, down !!! 538 nowcast shows Trump at 12.8% !!! There is no way to spin this, surely Trump and his advisers know they are in deep deep trouble now.
The next debate should seal the deal. Trump cannot prepare, even if he wants to, he can’t focus for long enough, he can’t help himself, he will lash out and then get in another stupid twitter rant.
I watched the rest online, and he got baited into ranting about people who slighted him several times. Nate Silver, John Harwood, John King from CNN, and maybe more. And you know Hillary is going to drop a new name in front of him on Sunday. (If she even needs a new one. He’d probably voluntarily spend another week talking about Miss Universe 1996.)
That’s about what I expect. Trump is incapable of learning from his mistakes, because he isn’t capable of believing that he’s ever made a mistake. Whenever he doesn’t get what he wants, it’s someone else’s fault - the microphone was broken, the moderator was biased, he had too much respect for Chelsea, etc.
Anywho, tonight at work I was opening the receiving dock for a truck that had pulled in with a delivery, and I discovered that someone had used their finger to write “VOTE 4 TRUMP” in the dust on its back door. I did the only thing I could think of to do, erased the T in “TRUMP”, and left the rest of the message intact.
Moreover, Donald Trump doesn’t do things that Donald Trump doesn’t want to do. He either gets other people to do them - qualified or not - and often the work just doesn’t get done. He enjoys self-promotion; he doesn’t enjoy running a business – that’s for other people that he ends up stiffing or badmouthing when the bill is due. He enjoys talking to large crowds in front of a camera. He loves hearing the sound of his own voice. He detests the hard work that goes into preparing for a debate. He doesn’t enjoy politicking. He’s been fortunate in that he’s had a large number of people who are angry at the system and will vote for someone – anyone – to give the finger to a status quo that is seen to be not delivering on its promises.
It basically means implementing a radical fiscal agenda that would take the country back to the 1920s.
The problem I envision is that it would not stop there. If Trump were to get elected, it would give all sorts of fringe elements, from Ron Paul’s bark-at-the-moon gold standard and end-the-Fed cult to Ted Cruz’s calls to abolish the IRS. It sounds like crazy speech on late night AM radio or the far right campaign trail, but it would become a reality in a Trump world. This would take us back to an economy that existed in the late 1800s. A related problem is that this form of economic liberty inevitable competes with and at times overtakes other notions of liberty and natural rights – many of which we take for granted. Extreme forms of neo-classical and neo-liberal economics value freedom of corporations (capitalist freedom) over basic human dignity. The result is a return of a type of quasi-slavery. This is not as far-fetched as it might seem. In short, we are a 5-7 percentage point swing nationally from taking the United States and turning it into a complete shit hole.
Just a follow-up thought – what Ryan and Cruz’s endorsements mean is that anyone who thought the party would divide now is proven wrong. The right wing is united because they think they can gain something from unity, namely implementing a heartless right wing economic agenda. They’re not united on racism – yet. But they will be before long. The Republican party is now uniting under the alt-right banner. It’s the party of Reagan, Bush, and Eisenhower no more.
It would also mean taking our immigration laws back to the 1920s:
Richard B. Spencer is the founder of the alt-right movement.
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The problem is that all of this will be blamed on Trump. Trump isn’t the reason the alt-right is associated with the GOP to begin with. Trump isn’t the reason the “Protect Our Border” people vote Republican. Trump didn’t win sufficient votes in the GOP primary to become the GOP’s candidate because the GOP is the wrong place for him to peddle this shit.
Trump found an audience for what he’s selling, and we need to look long and hard at why the GOP contains that audience.
The erosion of institutions that are responsive to the needs of ordinary working class people, the commercialization of education, and a media apparatus that completely and utterly distorts reality. Given this background, people are left to form opinions based on their gut and what their eyes and simple correlations tell them. Retiring baby boomers in Youngstown, Ohio look at how blacks “have it so easy” now that - wow, holy shit - they can actually afford to buy a home, while their white grandchildren are strung out on heroin. “Must be that Black Muslim president’s fault.”
Good points on immigration act revivals – this is at minimum what we can expect. But I don’t think it ends there. I could absolutely see the right wing loading the bench with conservative justices who will question not just the civil rights voting act (like Scalia did) but ALL civil rights acts. We will return to the era of States rights, and States will be given more latitude to decide for themselves what civil rights really means. A second Jim Crow era is coming.
“When it comes to protecting our country against natural disasters and the threat of climate change, once again, Donald Trump is totally unfit and unqualified” - Clinton
Clinton and the authoritarian left lack any sense of hubris. They elevate government to an all-powerful status previously reserved for gods. Quetzalcoatl 2016!
