Here’s the guy that inherited $200 million. If he hadn’t inherited $200 million, you know where Donald Trump would be right now? Selling watches in Manhattan.
- Marco Rubio, in a 2016 presidential debate
This week's featured post is "Questions for Donald Trump".
This week everybody was talking about Helene
Hurricane Helene hit the Florida panhandle Friday as a Category 4 hurricane, then proceeded inland through Georgia, the Carolinas, Virginia, and Tennessee "causing 64 deaths and severe damage. Millions lost power, and the storm caused up to $110 billion in losses, with rescue efforts still underway in many areas."
Disaster footage hits harder when you recognize the places the news people are talking about. Here's a news clip from Asheville, NC, where I've vacationed.
There's always an argument about whether any particular storm or disaster is caused by climate change, but Helene's rapid transition from Category 2 to Category 4 is the kind of thing that didn't used to happen. Hurricanes pick up energy from warm ocean waters, and climate change has been warming the oceans.
Page 664 of Project 2025's Mandate for Leadership:
The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) should be dismantled and many of its functions eliminated, sent to other agencies, privatized, or placed under the control of states and territories
and Mayor Adams' indictment
The most recent Democrat to run afoul of Biden's Department of Justice is New York Mayor Eric Adams, who was indicted Wednesday on five counts, revolving around bribery and illegal campaign contributions from sources related to the government of Turkey. (The NY Post had a classic headline: "Grand Theft Ottoman".) The charges go back to his term as Borough President of Brooklyn.
Adams has pleaded not guilty and pledged to stay in office.
Merrick Garland's Justice Department is supposedly "weaponized" against Republicans, but somehow they've found time to prosecute not just Adams, but also Democratic Senator Bob Menendez and Congressman Henry Cuellar, in addition to Jack Smith's indictments of Donald Trump. Maybe it's time to recognize that DoJ is just enforcing the law.
and Israel's attacks on Lebanon
Israel has followed up last week's pager-attack on Hezbollah with bombing raids against Lebanon. Hezbollah's leader Hassan Nasrallah was killed, as well as other Hezbollah leaders and a Hamas leader in Lebanon.
As satisfying as such results are to a country at war, they tend to have little long-term impact. American attacks in Afghanistan were constantly killing high-ranking Taliban officials, and yet the Taliban won the war. Nasrallah himself replaced a previous Hezbollah commander who was killed by an Israeli raid in 1992.
As long as there is grass-roots support for resistance, new leaders will always emerge. And short of genocide, there is no purely military way to stamp out grass-roots resistance. Ultimately, peace has to be negotiated with leaders who have enough popular credibility to make concessions.
Israel’s fundamental problem is that it’s holding millions of Palestinians who lack basic rights and there are many people all over the Middle East who are outraged by that, and some of them are willing to fight Israel over it.
That fact has military consequences, but at its root is not a problem with a military solution.
Thomas Friedman sees Netanyahu's strategy as a blunder that risks Israel's future.
Israel is in terrible danger. It is fighting the most just war in its history — responding to the brutal, unprovoked murder and abduction of women and children and grandparents by Hamas — and yet today Israel is more of a pariah state than ever.
Why? Because when you fight a war like this with no political horizon for this long — one that denies any possibility for more-moderate Palestinians to govern Gaza — the Israeli military operation there just starts to look like endless killing for killing’s sake. That is just what Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran want.
The people I am quoting here are not antisemites or even anti-Zionists. They are American Jews with a strong commitment to Israel who see no future in the current Israeli policies.
and Trump jumping the shark
I was skeptical two weeks ago when Jay Kuo posted "He's jumped the shark" to his Substack blog.
Jumping the shark became a cautionary metaphor for when a show goes awry and is desperate for new ideas and ratings. And since Trump is fundamentally a television personality, and we are all living through his twisted reality show, it is notable that, in desperation over his flagging candidacy and polls showing him trailing Vice President Kamala Harris, the writer, producer and chief protagonist of Unhappy Days has now jumped the shark, too.
Kuo interpreted the eating-cats-and-dogs libel and "I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT!" as shark jumps, desperate pleas for the public attention Trump used to get as a matter of course. Well, maybe. Both took old reliable Trump themes -- immigrants are ruining America and outspoken women are nasty -- and turned them up to 11. But I wasn't convinced.
Lately, though, Trump himself has been convincing me. Another longstanding Trump theme has been: "I'm a billionaire. Can you send me your money?" Initially, of course, he bragged about being so rich he could self-fund his 2016 campaign. ("I don't need anybody's money.") But that didn't last, and much of that early self-funding consisted of loans that were paid back to him by red-hatters from trailer parks who sent his campaign $25 a month.
During his presidency, he continued to run businesses that at times doubled as pipelines for bribes. Want to get the President's attention? Pay a few hundred thousand to join his golf club. Stay in his overpriced hotel when you come to Washington. Hold your favor-seeking organization's executive retreat at a Trump property.
But as Election Day approaches and the possibility of permanent exile from the spotlight looms, Trump may not be campaigning that hard, but he is going all out to fleece his sheep as thoroughly as possible. The latest grifts are dialed up well past 11, to 14 or 15.
Of course there are the $500 gold (or silver, if you're not really a true believer) Trump sneakers, and the autographed Trump Bible for $1,000 -- or $60 without the signature. ($1,000 is cheap. You're thousands of years too late to get Jesus or Moses to autograph your Bible. But it's not too late for Trump.) Those have been available for a long time.
But now you can get a gold-plated coin commemorating him surviving the July assassination attempt. And $99 Trump digital trading cards that (if you buy 75 or more of them) will get you a fragment of the suit he wore when he debated Biden in June.
Even that is just chump change, though. If you're a real Trumper, how can you resist the new Trump Watch? For a mere $100K, you can get 1 of 147 numbered gold watches with diamonds. They don't actually exist yet, will probably be made in China, may not look like the ones in the ad, and Trump has nothing to do with them other than a licensing agreement and a marketing video. But they're guaranteed to be gaudy and say "Trump" somewhere. What more could you ask for?
Too rich for your blood? Get the $499 version (which The Bulwark estimates costs $60 to make; they guess the $100K watch might cost as much as $20K).
And then there are Trump investments. If you had bought Trump Media stock when it went public on March 26, you might have paid $79 a share. Friday it closed at $14.75, so your $10,000 investment would be worth $1,867. And even at that price, investment professionals warn that it's wildly overvalued.
Given that DJT’s main asset is the social media platform Truth Social, with annual revenues less than $5 million, it’s hard to validate an enterprise value above $2 billion.
Have any more capital burning a hole in your pocket? Soon you'll be able to invest in World Liberty Financial, a Trump-controlled cryptocurrency exchange that will have its own digital coin (which you could use to bribe the president should Trump manage to win the election). Now that's a sure thing if I've ever seen one.
Even Melania is trying to cash in before the windows close.
Trump has also been pushing his authoritarian rhetoric past 11. In Erie Sunday, he discussed shoplifting and other retail crime. His solution: Turn the police loose on criminals without any rules.
The police aren’t allowed to do their job. ... You know, if you had one day, like, one real rough, nasty day ... One rough hour, and I mean real rough. The word will get out and it will end immediately. End immediately. You know? It will end immediately.
A right-wing media-watching group says that Google's search algorithm is more favorable to Harris than Trump. Trump's reaction: Prosecute Google.
This is an ILLEGAL ACTIVITY, and hopefully the Justice Department will criminally prosecute them for this blatant Interference of Elections. If not, and subject to the Laws of our Country, I will request their prosecution, at the maximum levels, when I win the Election, and become President of the United States!
Fox News "shouldn't be allowed" to cover Kamala Harris rallies:
And then I have to sit there and listen to her bullshit last night. And who puts it on? Fox News. And they shouldn't be allowed to put it on.
And freedom-of-speech be damned; people who criticize judges he likes should be put in jail.
They were very brave, the Supreme Court. Very brave. And they take a lot of hits because of it. It should be illegal, what happens. You know, you have these guys like playing the ref, like the great Bobby Knight. These people should be put in jail the way they talk about our judges and our justices, trying to … sway their vote, sway their decision.
Of course, trying to intimidate a judge is exactly what he was doing during his Manhattan trial. But that's the heart of authoritarianism: For my friends, everything. For my enemies, the law.
and abortion
Republicans continue to discuss abortion in the most ham-handed ways. A little over a week ago, Ohio Senate candidate Bernie Moreno said this:
You know, the left has a lot of single issue voters. Sadly, by the way, there’s a lot of suburban women, a lot of suburban women that are like, "Listen, abortion is it. If I can’t have an abortion in this country whenever I want, I will vote for anybody else." … OK. It’s a little crazy by the way, but — especially for women that are like past 50 — I’m thinking to myself, "I don’t think that’s an issue for you."
It's hard to beat the response of The Daily Show's Desie Lydic:
Yeah. How dare a woman who can't get pregnant care about abortion? Only men who can't get pregnant are allowed to care about abortion. People should only care about issues that effect their bodies. Why do you care about it, Bernie Moreno? It's abortion, not the rising price of extra-small condoms.
More generally, Moreno's "whenever I want" framing shows a profound misunderstanding of the whole concept of Freedom. There may be a lot of things I don't want to do at the moment. But that doesn't I'm OK with the government telling me I can't do them. For example, I may not be planning to read any of the books Moms for "Liberty" wants to ban from public libraries. But I still object to banning them, because Freedom.
And then there's this from Trump, which I'm cobbling together from two sources:
I make this statement to the great women of our country. Sadly, women are poorer than they were four years ago, are less healthy than they were four years ago, are less safe on the streets than they were four years ago, are paying much higher prices for groceries and everything else than they were four years ago. I will fix all of that, and fast, and at long last this nation, and national nightmare, will end. It will end. Because I am your protector. ... You will no longer be abandoned, lonely or scared. You will no longer be in danger. You’re not gonna be in danger any longer. You will no longer have anxiety from all of the problems our country has today. You will be protected, and I will be your protector. Women will be happy, healthy, confident and free. You will no longer be thinking about abortion.
My first thought after hearing this was "These are not the droids you're looking for." Trump seems to be making a very inept attempt to do a Jedi mind-trick, and I'm not sure who he expects to fall for it. Women are supposed to forget about their right to bodily autonomy because a man (who has a long history of fraud) offers some vague promises about how wonderful he will make their lives? Who's going to buy that pitch?
and you also might be interested in ...
The Walz-Vance vice presidential debate is tomorrow night. I expect Walz to do well, but VP debates seldom move the needle.
A progressive grass-roots media group in Michigan posts a disturbing report about their experiences at a Trump rally in Warren Friday. I'm not putting too much stock in it, because it is an anti-MAGA group I've never heard of before, and they offer no video or other supporting evidence. But it's worth noting to see if it lines up with any subsequent reports.
The WaPo provides and in-depth look at a Florida woman raising a trans daughter during the DeSantis era.
In Eugene, Oregon you get three choices when you call for help from the city: Police, Fire, and CAHOOTS (Crisis Assistance Helping Out on the Streets). If somebody is losing control and acting out in disturbing (but not obviously dangerous) ways, maybe they don't need armed police officers shouting orders at them. Some other professionals might be better trained to deal with their situation.
Here, all you have to do is press 3 instead of 1. This is what is meant by “defund the police” (a phrase that we need to eliminate asap). Diverting SOME funds away from police in order to bolster community services like this.
A Wisconsin mother explains why school shootings worry her more than drag shows.
and let's close with something memorable
In honor of Maggie Smith, who died this week at age 89, here's a collection of memorable lines she delivered as the Dowager Countess of Downton Abbey.
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