It's Them or Us

 

There are many possible scenarios which may play out on or about November 5th. 

Several of them would put Donald Trump back in the White House.

Fewer would put  Kamala Harris there.

Gods Taking Sides

There have been times in history when concerted dark forces amalgamated to sweep everything before them. Once, Germany chose to follow a man who found a simple solution to the bewildering array of problems with unemployment, currency collapse, hyperinflation by discovering the Jews were behind it all, along with the Communists, who were mostly Jewish anyway, and he was able to ally himself with Italy to protect his Southern front, a pastiche of neighbors--parts of Czechoslovakia, and Romania and Hungary and if he had only been able to seduce more Americans, his plan would never have failed.

To be sure, there were many reasons to believe the Americans would favor Germany over Britain and its allies: Americans were every bit as racist as Germany--they just chose a different group to vilify. But Henry Ford, Father Coughlin and a host of others including the American Bund, who held huge rallies at Madison Square Garden were all Hitler fans.

As it turned out, though, more Americans drifted toward democracy than dictatorship/monarchy and ultimately the forces of darkness succumbed to the forces of light and progress, which is to say, science and the all men are created equal thing. 

Now, we have the guy who cunningly chose a less definable scapegoat, a "they" who he sees sweeping across our Southern border from "shithole countries," rapists, insane asylum escapees, drug cartel gang members, Haitians who will eat your pet, dark skinned men who want to rape your wife and daughter, if your wife and daughter are White. 

And his party is also against people who insist on telling you their pronouns, who want to not just choose a different sex for themselves, but who want to seize your children at school and change their sex, or make them gay--you decide which is worse--and they control the weather, and start fires with space lasers, and none of that seems at all outlandish, because, you know, you heard it on TV.

And so, if there are more people who want to believe all that than there are who do not want to go back to the days when women could not have credit  cards unless their husbands allowed it, to the days when restaurants, hotels and swimming pools were racially segregated, to the good ol' days, when anti lynching laws could not be passed in Congress, well then, we'll go where the American people, in their wisdom want to go.

Oh, We'll Be Back

Those Pet Eating Democrats! (Phantom Loaner)

 

Everybody's saying it. And I saw it on TV, so it must be true.

All those ketchup ladened French Fries thrown against the wall, were part of a special "Cat and Dog" dish he likes.

And there are miles of caravans, thousands of criminals and insane asylum escapees headed your way, especially if you live in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia or Arizona all because they want to go to his massive rallies, which are bigger than any rallies in the history of the world and definitely not boring. 

Those are the best places for out-of-staters to feast. Ohio was just the beginning.

South Carolinians are crossing the border into North Carolina and not the best ones--they don't send their best; they send the pet eaters.

And don't get me started on Maryland, which is where, you know, the Wire happened, and all those bodies wound up in the vacant houses and Hannibal Lecter had a field day. Jodie Foster was lucky to escape with her life. Oh, lovely Jodie. Poor Jodie, you know she was a child hooker before she became an FBI agent? Very sad. And Maryland shares a border with Pennsylvania: Marylanders are just pouring across that Southern border into Pennsylvania by the thousands, looking for pets, and women, White women. They eat the pets and rape the women in Pennsylvania. 

Is Hillary out of jail yet? You know we didn't lock her up long enough. I bet she's headed to Springfield right now. She has a taste for a certain type of cat, I don't know which type, but she's a very nasty woman with a big cat appetite.

Did you know he could shoot someone on 5th Avenue and nobody would blink an eye and his fans would still vote for him? Everyone says so.

 He's done worse, really. Raping that woman, who was definitely not his type, in the back of that store and we won't even talk about Jeffrey Epstein, but you'd be surprised what we are finding out about him! That was the Clintons who did Jeffrey, who was a very nice guy. A good friend of Alan Dershowitz, you know.

And Alan just changed parties: He's no longer a Democrat. He couldn't stand being forced to eat dogs, which is what all Democrats do. But Republicans don't stop at the cats and dogs--they go after the children, or at least White children. White Christian children.

But the best part is, if you vote right, you'll never have to vote again, ever. Which is such a pain. Having to wait in line with all those foul, stinky immigrants the Democrats imported to vote for them but are now voting for Republicans, which is just so perfect. Really.

Really, I don't know why I bother. 

You can take a bullet for Democracy and all you get is complaints.

Lenacapavir: Not a Vaccine But a Solution for HIV/AIDS?

For forty years Tony Fauci labored away at the NIH trying to develop a vaccine to prevent HIV/AIDS, and failed. He consistently said that because of the peculiar nature of HIV, it's ability to attack and disable T cells, to destroy the very immune system which protects against infection, a Vaccine against HIV was probably never going to happen.

Many private companies have failed to develop a vaccine or a preventative molecule.

But now a drug company, Gilead, has developed a molecule, lenacapavir, which binds to the viral mechanism required for viral replication, a classic anti viral drug. Taken twice a year, it apparently prevents HIV infection safely and effectively. Who needs a vaccine if you've got a drug to prevent the disease?

So, where are the headlines in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post? 

HIV DEFEATED! 

AN END TO THE SCOURGE OF HIV!

Apparently, not so fast.

While the drug can be produced inexpensively and used to great effect, as it has been during large trials in Africa, the company which makes it, Gilead wants to repeat the rewards of its discovery. That means charging $40,000 a year in the United States, whereas in the 3rd world, it can be profitable at $40 a year.

As of 2024 the drug, produced by Gilead, costs US$42,250 for the first year. A study presented in July 2024^[22] found that mass production of a generic version would allow a profit margin of 30% on an annual price of $40 if used by 10 million people. The authors said that lowering HIV levels significantly would probably require 60 million people to take the drug preventative.

--Wikipedia

According to Endocrine lore, when Banting and Best discovered insulin in 1922, they sold the patent rights for $1. They wanted to get insulin produced in industrial quantities because they had wards full of dying kids with Type 1 diabetes. Money did not matter to them. It was all about the kids. Every month's delay meant more kids literally dying before their eyes in Toronto.

Mother holds Child with Diabetes 1922

Now, there is a difference between a vaccine and an antiviral: a vaccine might be used once and provide years of protection, but there are vaccines, like the flu vaccine, which require annual injections and if this drug requires twice yearly injections, would it not be almost as good? Currently COVID vaccines are  twice yearly vaccines.

But here, with HIV and this new drug, we have a financial structure and an ethos working against public health and individual fates.

1$ for the patent to Insulin

CAN THE GOOD GUYS WIN THIS ONE? STRATEGY & TACTICS

 

If Strategy is the grand plan and tactics are the steps you actually take to execute that grand plan, then what is the strategy to beat Mr. Trump and his MAGA hordes? And what does that imply for tactics?

Mad Dog believes the strategy is to take the offense and that means committing to humiliating the Donald and his masses of Orcs. Only by calling them out for what they are, shattering the fantasies they peddle, push past the amnesia of what he did and how that played out last time.

The alternative is singing kumbaya and sitting quietly with our hands folded, as if politics were a tea party which requires not raisings one's voice. 

As today's NYT editorial noted Donald Trump and his minions spin their own version of memory and history: Senator Katie Britt of Alabama exhorted the Republican National Convention with the stirring words that Donald Trump gave us the "greatest economy in history."

Of course, inflation was low during part of his tenure, when gas prices dipped below $3 a gallon--but selective amnesia, when gas prices were that low, there was no place to drive to--stores, restaurants were closed and the economy careened toward a second Great Depression because President Trump refused to believe we had a pandemic, despite the box cars outside hospitals being used as temporary morgues to store the bodies, and when he finally came around, he had his own creative ideas about finding a cure for COVID--intravenous injections of bleach.

We would be well served if Governor Walz and Vice President reminded everyone face to face with Trump, Vance and the other Magats out there.

Don't Eat Me, Donald!

But we cannot depend on that happening. We have to act ourselves, in our own small towns, along the highways and byways, to express our opinions, which is our most fundamental right, upon which all other rights depend. 

One Weird, Creepy, Senile

One thing Mad Dog would like to see is the placement in public places of signs expressing unhappiness with Trump and his MAGA cause. 

Objections have been raised this may violate some local laws, signs needing names and addresses of sponsors.

But there are two things to note:

1. The other side already does this: Examples from my bike ride around Hampton below.

No Attribution

Political Statement

2. Local towns and states cannot defy the United States Constitution in violating the First Amendment which protects freedom of expression, particularly of political thought.

That is found in McIntyre v Ohio Board of elections:

Held: Section 3599.09(A)'s prohibition of the distribution of anonymous campaign literature abridges the freedom of speech in violation of the First Amendment. Pp.341-357.

(a) The freedom to publish anonymously is protected by the First Amendment, and, as Talley indicates, extends beyond the literary realm to the advocacy of political causes. Pp.341-343.

(b) This Court's precedents make abundantly clear that the Ohio Supreme Court's reasonableness standard is significantly more lenient than is appropriate in a case of this kind. Although Talley concerned a different limitation than § 3599.09(A) and thus does not necessarily control here, the First Amendment's protection of anonymity nevertheless applies. Section 3599.09(A) is not simply an election code provision subject to the "ordinary litigation" test set forth in Anderson v. Celebrezze, 460 U. S. 780, and similar cases. Rather, it is a regulation of core political speech. Moreover, the category of documents it covers is defined by their content-only those publications containing speech designed to influence the voters in an election need bear the required information. See, e. g., First Nat. Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, 435 U. S. 765,776-777. When a law burdens such speech, the Court applies "exacting scrutiny,"

---

335

upholding the restriction only if it is narrowly tailored to serve an overriding state interest. See, e. g., id., at 786. Pp.343-347.

(c) Section 3599.09(A)'s anonymous speech ban is not justified by Ohio's asserted interests in preventing fraudulent and libelous statements and in providing the electorate with relevant information. The claimed informational interest is plainly insufficient to support the statute's disclosure requirement, since the speaker's identity is no different from other components of a document's contents that the author is free to include or exclude, and the author's name and address add little to the reader's ability to evaluate the document in the case of a handbill written by a private citizen unknown to the reader. Moreover, the state interest in preventing fraud and libel (which Ohio vindicates by means of other, more direct prohibitions) does not justify § 3599.09(A)'s extremely broad prohibition of anonymous leaflets. The statute encompasses all documents, regardless of whether they are arguably false or misleading. Although a State might somehow demonstrate that its enforcement interests justify a more limited identification requirement, Ohio has not met that burden here. Pp. 348-353.

It is weird to claim immigrants are eating pets; weird to say police could bring law and order if only they were allowed to get violent enough just briefly; weird to call Hannibal Lecter "the late great," weird to ponder, at a rally which is worse electrocution or being eaten by a shark; weird to claim the cure for COVID could be intravenous bleach; Weird to say Kim Jung Un of North Korea writes such beautiful letters Trump is now best buddies with him;  creepy/weird to speculate about dating your daughter because she is just so hot.

So, we ought to get out there and say our piece and not allow the other side to intimidate or dominate us.

DEFINING TRUMP

 

Not for the first time, Doonesbury comes to the rescue. 

Mad Dog has been trying to persuade his local Democrats it is not just okay, but mandatory to throw some punches in this campaign, especially as regards Mr. Trump.

Oh, Melania, You've Been Replaced

Here in New Hampshire, folks are very reluctant to put up signs calling Trump Weird or Creepy or Senile. Stick with the positive message. But don't stray into the negative. 

Of course, that's only Democrats saying that. Republicans have imposed no such shackles on themselves:

All this Democratic positivity is actually self destructive: Kamala Harris dug herself into a hole in the first debate when she launched into a Hillary Clinton Redux with a pre-canned story about her middle class affinities in answering a straightforward question about whether or not we are better off now, economically, than we were 4 years ago. 

She could have said, "Of course, it depends whose economy you are talking about--billionaires are always better off than they were 4 years ago. And actually, all of us are because we were handed an economy on the brink of a Great Depression by Trump. Sure inflation was low. Gas was $2 a gallon, but you had no place to drive because all the businesses were closed."

But no, she missed that opportunity to throw a punch.

It was only when she went on the offensive, and attacked Trump on outlawing abortion, on the size of his rallies, on how autocrats world-wide laugh at him that she steam rolled him into a blithering befuddlement and won the debate.

click to view

Hopefully, Tim Waltz will take to the offense in the first round this coming Tuesday and brand Trump/Vance/Laura Loomer ("Looney Loomer?") as weirdos who think only citizens who produce children are real Americans, who insist immigrants in Ohio are eating pets, who think the 9/11 attack was an inside job and the Holocaust never happened, and Donald Trump did not lose the election by a whisker but won in a landslide. [Not to mention, of course, those Jewish Space Lasers, which start fires in the Mountain West--an oldie but goodie from Marjorie Taylor Greene.] It's difficult keeping the weird separate, and remembering which one of the loonies said what--it all comes spewing out so fast.

But in Donald's case, his fascination with the late great Hannibal Lecter, with those horrible windmills as causing cancer and a bird Holocaust (as if cats do not kill more birds than windmills, but then again, with all those aliens eating cats, maybe that trend will be reversed), with choosing the electric chair over sharks, if you are ever presented with that choice. 

This should be the theme. When Barry Goldwater proposed using nuclear weapons to win the war in Vietnam, it wasn't the only thing he said, but it was the only thing we ever heard about him from the Democrats, who seized on a simple idea--he's a Dr. Strangelove--and Democrats won with that.

Democrats should seize on "weird" or "weird and creepy" with all their hearts and drive home that point, over and over until everyone knows just one thing about the Donald: He's weird.

Well, Laura, where's your GQ photoshoot?

He lusts after his daughter, or, when she's not around, Laura Loomer.

Apple of Daddy's Eye

Weird. Creepy, maybe a little senile, but basically weird.

Trump Steaks

Stop the Presses! Trump Calls Kamala Mentally Deficient!!!

One does wonder now and again about the mental deficiencies which may be present among the editors at the New York Times, given the selection of articles they choose to publish.

Most recently was this shocker: 

 [Trump] told supporters at a rally in Prairie du Chien, Wis., that “Joe Biden became mentally impaired; Kamala was born that way.”

Mr. Trump then tied Ms. Harris to the Biden administration’s border policies, adding, “And if you think about it, only a mentally disabled person could have allowed this to happen to our country.”

Now that ranks right up there with the sun rose in the East this morning for newsworthiness.

I mean, Trump does not talk about whether we should raise the taxable amount for millionaires paying into Social Security, or whether the country should be preparing for the next pandemic, or whether vaccines are a good idea. He calls his rivals horrible people, stupid, immoral or weak. That is the scope of his intellectual range.

And the New York Times treats each new insult as front page news.

Why?

The one aspect of this which is interesting is that here in New Hampshire, we do not, ordinarily, post lawn signs with political statements, certainly no signs with criticism of opposing candidates. Our lawn signs simply give the name of candidates we like. 

But, given the opponent we now face, would it not be appropriate to throw a punch every once in a while?

Here is one sign Mag Dog likes.

He would like to see it crop up along roadways, intersections, all the spots Trump Magat's have chosen for their signs.

But this is New Hampshire. Only Republicans throw punches here.

Danielle Pletka: Neurons Misfiring

 

Never heard of Danielle Pletka until she appeared in David Brooks's spot on the News Hour segment with Jonathan Capeheart.

No doubt conservatives and Republicans (two different things now) have been annoyed by the fact Brooks has transformed from a conservative voice to an anti-Trumper, so the pro and con aspect of having the ying and the yang on a segment meant to discuss the week's events has been lost. Brooks so despises Trump and all those who sail with him, he can barely bring himself around to voicing opposition the Capeheart's relentless attacks.

So enter Danielle Pletka who when asked about Kamala Harris's visit to the southern border voices the FOXNEWS response: "Where's Kamala been the past three years when she was supposed to be the immigration czar who fixed the border crisis?"

Of course, there never was such a czar and no one person, no group of administration cabinet officers and all the angels of Heaven with trumpets who could solve the "border crisis" (a term suggesting this tidal flow from poor to rich nations is something new and different.) Only Congress, the people's elected representatives can do this and when the most conservative Republicans put together a bill increasing border surveillance and some pretty draconian measures, the Democrats agreed and a new law was on its way to take at least a first step--but then Donald Trump called up Congressional Republicans and told them not to fix the problem he intended to ride into the White House, and like the sheep/lemming chimeras they are, Congressional Republicans caved and withdrew the bill.

"Don't fix this problem!" Donald Trump cried. "I need this problem!"

Where would Donald Trump be without pet eating immigrants?

Then Ms. Pletka threw in the assertion that the bill was killed because it would have weakened Presidential powers to intervene and assert a greater (and proper) role for Congressional oversight. (How many Congressmen would vote for children to be separated from their parents and imprisoned?)

Capeheart was not given a chance to say any of this.

Then we got Ms. Pletka's take on Volodymyr Zelensky's visit to the factory in Pennsylvania where weapons are manufactured and sent to Ukraine. Ms. Pletka was in high dudgeon about how this was turned into a political show in which Mr. Zelensky was manipulated. 

And she railed with righteous (Right-eous?) indignation that Kamala and Biden have been a dollar short and day late in aiding Ukraine, and unwilling to allow Ukraine to fire missiles at Moscow or elsewhere into Russia throughout the war. 

For months, if not years, the Right (J.D. Vance in the lead) have been saying Ukraine should not get a dime from the United States, that Ukraine isn't worth wasting U.S. Treasure on (unlike Afghanistan). Now the Right is all on board in defending Ukraine's right to exist and all over the Democrats for not doing more to save Ukraine in the face of Russian onslaught!

Of course, 

Wait! Are we talking about the same Mr. Zelensky who Donald Trump hauled into the White House and said, "Look I might help you, but you have to do me a personal favor first" ? The Don Donald Trump, "Help me get Hunter Biden, and then we'll talk about your problem with Russia."

Not to mention the many times Trump asserted,Oh well, if I'd been President Putin would never had dared! There would have been no war in Ukraine, no Hamas attack on Israel, and North Korea would have asked to become the 51st state in the US and China would have to pay for all our imports and Mexico would pay for the Wall. (If they haven't already.) 

And, of course, Trump noted that he wanted nothing to do with that NATO wall against Russia because NATO was a bunch of deadbeats who didn't pay enough for their own national defense, and if Putin wanted to overrun that  crowd, he should do whatever he wants because those NATO welshers deserved it for not spending enough money.

It's all about the money for the Donald, and for Ms. Pletka.

If Zelensky had just bought some of Donald's bitcoins, all would be forgiven.

So suddenly, the American Enterprise Institute, which pays Ms. Pletka's salary, is all in for Ukraine. Fire away Volodymyr! No matter if Russia responds, as Putin has threatened, with "tactical nuclear weapons" against Poland, Finland and Germany. 

President Biden said some time ago he wants to help Ukraine defeat Russia, but not at the cost of starting World War III. Seemed like a reasonable stance for an American President to take.

But that's just a day late and dollar short for Ms. Pletka and the American Enterprise Institute, who are a bit more than a day late with their own indignant support for poor, suffering Ukraine.

I'm sure Mr. Trump will find a place for her in his cabinet, along with one for Sidney Powell, Rudy Giuliani , Ivanka, Jared Kushner, Mike the Pillow Guy, Hulk Hogan, that guy who sings "Proud To Be An American," Steve Miller, the entire FOXNEWS team on their white leather couches and anyone who buys his new silver coins for the bargain price of $100 a pop. 

Because, in the end, it's all about the money, isn't it?