Roaming Charges: Cat Scratch Political Fever

“Chaos: it has no plural.”

– Carlos Fuentes

+ Miss Sassy started the biggest political fire since Mrs. O’Leary’s cow kicked over a lamp and burned down Chicago. Last month, Miss Sassy disappeared from the sight of her owner, Anna Kilgore, a Trump-Vance fanatic in Springfield, Ohio. After a couple of days, Kilgore called 9-11, claiming that her Calico cat may have been stolen and devoured by her Haitian neighbors, who she’d never bothered to get to know.

Someone sent this unverified police report to Ohio Senator and Trump sidekick JD Vance, who tweeted out his racist alarum that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were stealing cats and eating them. A day later, Donald Trump amplified this bigoted slur during his debate with Kamala Harris. Soon, Springfield’s city hall and schools were hit with bomb threats.

This week, the Vance campaign sent the Wall Street Journal a copy of the police report as proof of an epidemic of pet-eating by Haitians in Springfield, Ohio. Later that evening a Journal reporter knocked on Kilgore’s door to inquire about her missing and allegedly gormandized cat. Kilgore said Miss Sassy wasn’t missing; after all, she’d been hiding in the basement and reappeared a couple of days later. Kilgore said that she’d already apologized to her Haitian neighbors, something JD Vance is unlikely ever to do.

+ In the police report on the AWOL Miss Sassy, Anna Kilgore says she found “meat” in her backyard…

+ It was probably meat the “cat had dragged in.” Our cats were always bringing potential meat offerings into the house when we lived out in the sticks in southern Indiana: moles, chipmunks, lizards, sparrows, and three snakes that it discretely deposited under the cradle of Nathaniel when he was an infant. (According to Arrian’s biography of Alexander the Great, an eagle dropped a venomous adder in his crib, a prophetic sign of his future god-like killing prowess.)

+ The alleged Haitian “geese-napper” in Springfield, Ohio, wasn’t in Springfield, but Columbus, 40 miles away. Didn’t steal the geese, he was shown holding, they were roadkill. And, alas, isn’t Haitian. Close, but no cigar, MAGA…

+ Give JD Vance credit for being honest about his pathological dishonesty: “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.”

+ Still even after admitting he was telling racist fairy tales, a majority of Trump supporters believe the Haitian immigrants are stealing-and-eating-pets lie, while independents disbelieve it more than 2-to-1, though.

+ Number of homeless/abandoned/lost cats in the US: 67 million.

Number of domestic pets that die every year of abuse or neglect: 10 million;

Number of animals killed each year in US laboratories: 110 million;

Number of people of Haitian descent living in the US: 1.2 million.

+ When sleazy immigrants sneak into your country and kill your cats…

+ JD Vance, who said this week he will not stop referring to legal Haitian immigrants as illegals, has repeatedly invoked one of the oldest slurs against immigrants, especially black and brown immigrants, by claiming the influx of Haitians into Springfield, Ohio caused a spike in infectious diseases. But in fact, the health data from Clark County, Ohio, where Springfield is located, show a decline in infections since the Haitians began arriving in 2020. Vance specifically blamed Haitians for the “soaring” rates of TB and HIV in Springfield. However, in the last three years, there have only been a total of 8 cases of TB in a county with a population of 135,000 people. As for HIV, the number of people living with the disease in Clark County is lower than the rate for the state of Ohio as a whole.

+ Of course, the Democrats, especially of the Clinton-Biden era, are hardly any better. Here’s Biden to Charlie Rose in 1994: “If Haiti — a God-awful thing to say — if Haiti just quietly sunk into the Caribbean or rose up 300 feet, it wouldn’t matter a whole lot in terms of our interest.”

+ Gary Pierre-Pierre, editor of the Haitian Times: “This past week has been intense for us at The Haitian Times. Threats, a canceled gathering, and our editor being swatted—yet we’re standing strong. Grateful for the support from journalists and leaders. We’ll continue covering Springfield and shining a light on anti-Haitian hate.”

+ Greg Grandin: “Shouldn’t Harris be delivering, on a stage in Springfield, Ohio, a defining, prime-time speech, on immigration, tolerance, racism, and US openness to the world?”

The Harris/Walz campaign is too gutless to make an explicit defense of Haitian immigrants, so the Miami Heat had to do it for them…

+ REP. GLENN GROTHMAN: Democrats are so radical that they want migrants voting immediately.

C-SPAN HOST: What’s the evidence that’s happening?

GROTHMAN: I haven’t seen it, but you know it’s happening, right?

+ Portage  (Ohio) County Sherriff Bruce Zuchowski took to Facebook this week with an important message to his constituents on his emergency plans in the event of a  Kamala Harris victory in November: “When people ask me, ‘What’s going to happen if the Flip-Flopping, Laughing Hyena Wins?? I say, write down all the addresses of the people who had her signs in their yards! Sooo, when the Illegal human “Locust” (which she supports!) Need places to live…We’ll already have the addresses of the [sic] their New families…who supported their arrival!!”

+ Ralph Nader: “Last week, Senator Bernie Sanders issued a statement praising Kamala Harris’ debate performance and recommended four more progressive agendas—1. Higher taxes on the undertaxed wealthy and large corporations 2. Limits on election spending 3. Expanding Medicare to cover dental, hearing and He omitted full Medicare for All—his signature campaign issue in two presidential races and no mention of raising the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $15 an hour. Sanders is hewing to the Democratic Party line, which has dropped these highly popular and vote-getting agendas. Why?”

+++

+ Trump is fortunate that unlike much of the South, Florida isn’t an open-carry state. Otherwise, someone carrying a gun 500 yards from him–as he “improves” his lie on the 5th hole–would be perfectly legal. It still took the Feds 12 hours to notice a guy with an SKS assault rifle with a scope …

+ It looks like the SKS guy, apparently driven to despair by Trump’s lack of support for Ukraine, went to the park next to Trump’s golf club on Gun Club Road through a gun-enthusiast subdivision known as Gun Club Estates, where he would have fit right in with the neighbors mowing their lawns with assault rifles strapped to their backs…

+ The cop who arrested the alleged Trump shooter in a 2003 weapons of mass destruction case in Greensboro, NC, said Ryan Routh got into armed standoffs with police all the time. “I figured he was either dead or in prison by now.” Any doubt he would be dead…if he were Black, Hispanic or Native American.

+ Did this really qualify as an “assassination attempt”? Routh never had Trump in his sights and from his position behind a fence, he was 500 yards (1500 feet) from where he might have had a glimpse of Trump, putter in hand. The SKS is not a very accurate long-distance weapon, even a scope. By comparison, Oswald took his improbable shots at JKF from 280 feet away with an unobstructed view. Manson groupie Squeaky Fromme got within two feet of Gerald Ford in Sacramento when she reached inside her robe to draw a Colt .45 from her leg holster–Fortunately for Ford, Fromme had neglected to chamber a round, and the pistol merely “clicked” twice as she futilely pulled the trigger. Three weeks later, Sarah Jane Moore, packing a Smith and Wesson 38 Special,  got off two shots at Ford from 60 feet away as he left the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco. The first shot missed Ford by five inches; the second hit taxi driver John Lloyd in the groin.

+ Markenzy LaPointe, the US Attorney for the Southern District of Florida, will oversee the prosecution of would-be assassin Ryan Routh.  LaPointe is the first Haitian-born American lawyer to serve as a U.S. Attorney.

+ 25 million: the number of AR-15/AK-47/SKS assault-style rifles owned by civilians in the US.

+ Coming Soon from Lifetime Movies: “Something’s Wrong With Eric”

+ Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley and JFK would like a word, Eric. As would Alexander Hamilton…

+ There have been at least 58 American politicians assassinated since the South Carolina politician David Ramsey, the first major historian of the Revolutionary War, was shot in the hip and back with a “horseman’s pistol” by a certain William Linnen near the courthouse in downtown Charleston.

+ Speaking of political violence, here’s former Defense Secretary Mark Esper on 60 Minutes describing how Trump wanted military paratroopers brought in to break up Black Lives Matter protests by shooting protesters in the legs …

Mark Esper: On June 1, 2020, the president is ranting in the room. He’s using a lot of you know foul language. You all are f-ing losers. Now he’s going to finally give a direct order to deploy paratroopers into the streets of Washington, D.C. and I’m thinking with weapons and bayonets. And this would be horrible.

Nora O’Donnell, 60 Minutes: What specifically was he suggesting the US military should do to these protesters?

Esper: “He says, can’t you just shoot them? Shoot them in the legs or something? And he’s suggesting that’s what we should do, that we should bring in the troops and shoot the protesters.

O’Donnell: The Commander-in-Chief was suggesting that the US military should shoot protesters?

Esper: Yes. In the streets of our nation’s capital.

+ JD Vance: “The big difference between conservatives and liberals is that no one has tried to kill Kamala Harris in the last couple of months. I’d say that’s pretty strong evidence that the left needs to tone down the rhetoric.”

+ Political slander is as American as Apple Pie. Adams on Jefferson: “a mean-spirited, low-lived fellow, the son of a half-breed Indian squaw, sired by a Virginia mulatto father.” Jefferson on Adams: a “hideous hermaphroditical character, which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman.”

+ As a factual matter, Vance’s assertion (surprise!) isn’t true…

+ In a commendable attempt at lowering the temperature of the political rhetoric in America, Ryan Walters, commissioner of public schools in Oklahoma, said today: “The radical left is trying to kill the Constitution by killing Trump. They want to kill Trump in order to assassinate the Constitution..so that the country will cease to exist. If they take him out, they take the Constitution out.”

+++

+ Things sitting North Carolina Lt. Governor and current GOP candidate for Governor of North Carolina Mark Robinson wrote in forums on the pornographic site Nude Africa between 2008 and 2012…

“I’m a black NAZI!”

“Slavery is not bad. Some people need to be slaves. I wish they would bring it (slavery) back. I would certainly buy a few.”

“I’d take Hitler over any of the shit that’s in Washington right now!”

“That’s sum ole sick ass faggot bullshit!” 

“I don’t care [if a celebrity woman’s had an abortion]. I just wanna see the sex tape!” 

“The moral of this story….. Don’t f**k a white b*tch!”

“I like watching tranny on girl porn! That’s fucking hot! It takes the man out while leaving the man in!”

“And yeah I’m a ‘perv’ too!”

+ Things Robinson called Martin Luther King, Jr.: “Commie bastard,” “worse than a maggot,” “ho fucking phony,” “huckster.”

“I’m not in the KKK. They don’t let blacks join. If I was in the KKK I would have called him Martin Lucifer Koon!”

+ In March, former President Donald Trump said declared North Carolina Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson as, “Martin Luther King on steroids.”  Trump said he told Robinson that he was “better than Martin Luther King.”

+ The GOP is fine with smears on King and his declaration of being a Black Nazi, but they draw the line at him being turned on by transexual porn stars.

+ Gillian Branstetter: “If you’re confused about how someone like Mark Robinson could oppose trans women’s social and political equality while also sexualizing us, it’s probably because we’re women.”

+ This is the second time this week that a GOP politician has been revealed to have a desire to own slaves. According to an affidavit filed by his former stepson, Rep. Jeff Dotseth, a member of the Minnesota State House, said that he’d own slaves if enslavement was allowed now:

He would say things like, if slavery was still around today, he would have slaves. I hated this because it showed his lack of care for humans and their basic freedoms. I was often referred to as Kunta Kinte in a joking manner. I felt like it was always a little more than a joke.

The allegations against Dotseth, which appeared in court documents stemming from a 2008 legal case over his serial domestic abuse of his then-wife, Penny Kowal, also struck a blow at the GOP’s current efforts to promote itself as the protector of family pets. In her affidavit, Penny Kowal, accused Dotseth of abusing their 14-year-old dog:

This Christmas, our dog Misty, who is 14 years old, grabbed a small candy bar from one of Jeff’s bags he had sitting on the floor.  Misty came into the kitchen, I looked at her and said, ‘What do you have in your mouth?’ Jeff was there and had seen she had a candy bar and punched her and was yelling at her to let go. He hit her again, (their daughter saw) this and was saying, ‘Dad stop, she’s old.’ If the dogs are in his way, he’ll kick them to get out of his way.

+++

+ Douglas Emhoff responded to Sarah Sanders’ dissing of his wife for not having biological children: “Somehow, because Cole and Ella aren’t Kamala’s ‘biological children,’ that she doesn’t have anything in her life to keep her humble…As if keeping women humble, whether you have children or not, is something we should strive for.”

+ I’m not a huge fan of Jill Stein (how hard is it to call Biden, Putin, and Assad war criminals?), but “producing nothing” is a substantially more compelling political resumé than “producing a genocide.”

+ On September 18, 1969, the House voted 338 to 70 to abolish the electoral college. The vote was supported by 81% of the Democrats and 86% of the Republicans. Most of the opposition came from Southerners from both parties. The resolution was sponsored by Indiana’s Birch Bayh, whose squeaker re-election campaigns I worked on as a teen, first stuffing envelopes and then driving around pro-Bayh dignitaries like Waylon Jennings. The resolution failed in the Senate.

+++

+ The estimable Stephen Semler reports that global nuclear weapons spending was $7 billion higher last year than in 2020 when the Biden-Harris team took office. The US share of this global total was 52% in 2020. Now, it’s climbed to more than 56%.

+ This week, the Biden-Harris administration quietly renewed the special government powers (i.e., Dick Cheney’s “dark side” powers) initiated by George W. Bush after 9/11. The Forever Wars may be over in Afghanistan and almost-but-not-quite in Iraq but will continue unabated here at home… 

+ No wonder Dark Lord Cheney and his cadre of neo-con orcs endorsed Harris…

+ According to a piece in the WSJ this week, “in the first half of this year, three times as many Ukrainians died as were born.” The piece cites a confidential Ukrainian estimate that tallies the number of dead Ukrainian troops at 80,000 and the wounded at 400,000. In addition, since Russia’s seizures of Ukrainian territory over the past decade Ukraine has lost another 10 million former citizens who are now under occupation or fled as refugees.

+ This war is not sustainable. Who will be the last Russian conscript or Ukrainian teen to die in a conflict that should have been resolved soon after it began?

+ Last week, Putin called for the Russian military to be increased by another 180,000 troops–the third such increase since Putin ordered the full-scale Ukraine invasion in 2022 (with 137,000 and 170,000 soldiers added during those announcements). China. The new decree would swell the size of the Russian military to 1.5 million active troops (supported by 890,000 civilians), making Russia the world’s second-largest military force behind China.

+ List of anti-China bills and resolutions passed by the US House of Representatives in the last ten days alone…

H.R. 8152 – “To amend the Export Control Reform Act of 2018 to provide for control of remote access of items.”

H.R. 8361 – “To impose sanctions with respect to economic or industrial espionage by foreign adversarial companies.”

H.R. 5613 – “To require a review of whether individuals or entities subject to the imposition of certain sanctions through inclusion on certain sanctions lists should also be subject to the imposition of other sanctions and included on other sanctions lists.”

H.R. 7151 – “To amend the Export Control Reform Act of 2018 to provide for expedited consideration of proposals for additions to, removals from, or other modifications with respect to entities on the Entity List.”

H.R. 6606 – “To amend the Export Control Reform Act of 2018 relating to the statement of policy.”

H.R. 6614 – “To amend the Export Control Reform Act of 2018 relating to licensing transparency.”

H.R. 1157 – “To provide for the authorization of appropriations for the Countering the People’s Republic of China Malign Influence Fund.”

H.R. 1103 – “To require the President to remove the extension of certain privileges, exemptions, and immunities to the Hong Kong Economic and Trade Offices if Hong Kong no longer enjoys a high degree of autonomy from the People’s Republic of China.”

H.R. 5245 – “To amend the State Department Basic Authorities Act of 1956 to require certain congressional notification prior to entering into, renewing, or extending a science and technology agreement with the People’s Republic of China.”

H.R. 7701 – “To require the imposition of sanctions with respect to any foreign person that knowingly participates in the construction, maintenance, or repair of a tunnel or bridge that connects the Russian mainland with the Crimean peninsula.”

H. RES. 1056 – “Recognizing the importance of trilateral cooperation among the United States, Japan, and South Korea”

H.R. 4741 – “To require the development of a strategy to promote the use of secure telecommunications infrastructure worldwide.”

H.R. 7159 – “To bolster United States engagement with the Pacific Islands region.”

H.R. 7089 – “To authorize the Diplomatic Security Services of the Department of State to investigate allegations of violations of conduct constituting offenses under chapter 77 of title 18, United States Code.”

+ Signs you may be living in a Shithole Country…

+ $32 billion: amount migrants pay into Social Security and Medicare every year. Amount of benefits migrants are eligible to receive: $0.

+++

+ In 1995, productivity in the European Union nations was 95% of America’s; now, it is less than 80%. 

+ Since 2017, industrial production in Germany has declined by more than 15 percent. 

+ Kidney dialysis accounts for nearly 1% of the federal budget, three times the size of NASA.

+ The vaccination rate of kindergarteners in Florida has fallen to 90.6%, the lowest in more than a decade.

+ The rate of stillbirths in the U.S. is 1 out of every 175 live births, which is higher than the rate of deaths during infancy and higher than the rate of death for any age before 50.

+ Shawn Fain, UAW president: “I believe there’s just two classes of people. There’s the rich and there’s everybody else. When I talk about the working class, I always say, union or not. If you work for a living, we’re in this fight together.”

+ The gender pay gap has widened for the first time in two decades. Men’s median earnings rose at twice the rate of women’s earnings, partly because men are overrepresented in high-wage jobs and women in low-wage jobs. Men’s median earnings rose 3% last year, compared to 1.5% for women.

+ Only 27% of people in the US polled earlier this year said “the American dream holds true.” More than 50% of Americans said it was still attainable just 13 years ago.

+ A study in Nature estimates that by 2050, around 2 million people — most of them aged over 70 — could die from drug-resistant infections each year.

+ Private equity firms now own at least 1200 parks across the country. Many people who live in these spaces have seen their rents soar by as much as 100% over the last six years.

+ In his debate with Harris, Trump said he still wants to abolish Obamacare. When asked what he’d replace it with, Trump said he had a “concept of a plan.” His little buddy JD Vance has put some details into the concept, including placing people with chronic pre-existing conditions into separate insurance pools with higher rates:

We’re going to actually implement some regulatory reform in the healthcare system that allows people to choose a healthcare plan that works for them. If you only go to the doctor once a year, you’re going to need a different health care plan than somebody who goes to the doctor fourteen times a year because they’ve got chronic pain or they’ve got some other chronic condition. 

That’s the biggest and most important thing that we have to change. Now, what that will also do is allow people with similar health situations to be in the same risk pools, so that makes our health care system work better, makes it work better for the people with chronic issues, it also makes it work better for everybody else.

+ In a recording of a phone call obtained by the Wall Street Journal, Wayne Borg, a former executive in Hollywood who was hired as the head of the media division for Saudi Arabia’s troubled NOEM project, erupted in fury over the fact that his evening plans had been interrupted by the deaths of construction workers, most of whom were South Asian. “A whole bunch of people die, so we’ve got to have a meeting on a Sunday night,” Borg fumed. He ranted that the Indian workers who died were “fucking morons” and “that is why white people are at the top of the pecking order.”

+++

+ It’s late summer here in the PNW, when the low flows of the creeks plunging over the basalt cliffs of the Columbia Gorge give the waterfalls a sinuous elegance they don’t have when flush with rain or snowmelt…

+ The US is adding more gas-powered plants than it has in more than a decade, mainly to keep up with the energy demands created by big tech data centers and the AI boom.

+ Emissions from data centers are likely 662% higher than big tech claims. Last year, data centers consumed a fifth of Ireland’s electricity, more than all the electricity used by homes in its towns and cities combined.

+ Canada has made real progress in adding renewables to its electric power sector. But these gains have been wiped out by significant increases in oil and gas production, which now account for 31% of its national emissions.

+ The unnamed storm that smashed into North Carolina last week unloaded as much as 20 inches of rain in 12 hours and inflicted $7 billion in damage. There have now been more than 20 extreme-weather events in the US so far this year that have each wreaked $1 billion or more in damages.

+ Over the last 30 years, the average gas tax in France has been around eight times higher than in the United States.

+ Toxicologist George Thompson on the lingering poisonous fallout from the chemicals spilled by the Northfolk Southern train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio: “‘I’ve been a toxicologist for 55 years, and this is the worst event I’ve ever seen. And I’m talking about worldwide. None are as dangerous.’”

+ Nearly 200 environmental defenders were killed last year, most of them by the mining industry in Latin America.

+ Bidenmentalism in Action: A month before the elections, the Biden-Harris administration, which has been dismal on the environment, is moving to strip protections for gray wolves. They seem confident the enviros will vote for them no matter what they do and they’re likely correct…

+ A new report in Nature argues that most climate change models significantly underestimate the risk, severity, and duration of droughts, particularly in North America and Southern Africa. The report says that by 2100, the average most extended periods of drought could be ten days longer than previously projected.

+ Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) explained his opposition to solar energy: “At night, it just doesn’t work.” Crenshaw’s own state is second only to California in solar power generation (31,700 GWh), and solar power has repeatedly saved the ERCOT power grid from collapsing during recent power surges.

+ The Kern River, which flows out of the Sierra Nevada in southern California, has dried up outside of Bakersfield this summer, leading to the deaths of at least 3000 fish. The river flows have been steadily dwindling since a court ruling allowed more of its water to be impounded and diverted into industrial farmlands. Bonnie Compton, who has lived along the Kern for the last ten years, told the LA Times: “This place had actually started to become beautiful again, and now it’s turning into the desert. It’s horrible. They’re killing the fish. They’re killing our wildlife. Everything’s dying. This is public ground, and they’re taking the water away from the public. We want the water back.”

+++

+ Policing in America: Last Sunday, two NYPD cops started chasing a suspected subway fare evader. They tried tasering Derrell Mickles twice, but he kept running, jumped off the L train and allegedly pulled out a knife, prompting the cops to pull out their guns and shoot the suspect multiple times in the stomach. They also shot a male bystander in the head (who was later declared brain dead), a woman bystander in the leg and another cop in the armpit–all over a $2.90 unpaid subway fare. Mickels’ mother said she had no idea her son was shot. An officer left a business card at her door the day of the shooting, but she had no idea why.

+ A witness said that the alleged farebeater was walking away from police when he was tasered and then shot at nine times. The witness also says Mickles’ hands were in his pockets and that he never saw a knife.

+ Some may recall the role a mysterious knife played in the justification for arresting Freddie Gray, who Baltimore police beat up and killed during a “rough ride” in a police van. The cops said they initially stopped and arrested Gray for possession of a switchblade knife that later turned out to be a pocket knife legal under Maryland law, which the cops only found after they’d already detained him.

+ NYPD Tasers fail 40% of the time.

+ Embattled NY Mayor Eric Adams said that the NYPD cops showed admirable “restraint’ in the subway shooting. How many more bystanders should they have taken out over the $2.90 fare, Mr. Mayor?

+ Before former cop Adams was elected Mayor in 2022, the NYPD overtime pay for patrolling the subway cost the city $4 million annually. It’s now $155 million.

+ What’s interesting about this crime scare-story from the NY Daily News is that the NYPD can count their own police shootings to boost the crime stat numbers. As Rebecca Kavanaugh pointed out, the “Beware of Strangers” story “cited NYPD statistics showing 14 people killed by strangers in 2020 and 26 in 2021. What it didn’t mention is that 8 of the 2020 and 5 of the 2021 killings were by police.”

+ New York State judges allowed prosecutors to introduce evidence in more than 400 cases that appellate courts later determined police had obtained illegally.

+ Over the last couple of decades, 163 police agencies across California allowed cops charged with misconduct to quietly retire in exchange for permanently burying the misconduct cases. The cops then soon get hired for other police jobs. All of these backroom deals were engineered by the same police lobby group.

+ Two days before the state of South Carolina was scheduled to execute Khalil Divine Black Sun Allah, 46, the prosecution’s key witness at trial, Steven Golden, came forward to admit he lied at trial and that Khalil is innocent: “I don’t want [Khalil] to be executed for something he didn’t do.”

+ In order to more repressively police its students, the University of the University of California announced a list of military weaponry it wants to escalate its warfare on its students: 

+ 3000 rounds of pepper munitions
+ 500 rounds of 40mm impact munitions
+ 12 drones
+ Nine grenade launchers 

+ The US is no longer the world’s leading jailer. Even though the incarceration rate in the States has remained steady, it has been surpassed by the mass arrests taking place in El Salvador. Under the repressive Bukele regime, the incarceration rate in El Salvador has soared to nearly twice the rate in the US. 

+ Trump: “My parents would drop me off at a subway and I’d go to Union Turnpike, or I’d go to wherever. They had no fear that I was going to be disappearing. They would take me to a subway, put me on, and say, bye, darling, bye.” The murder rate in NYC in 1960, when Trump was 14, was nearly twice what it is today.

+ The sheriff of Letcher County, Kentucky, was arrested after shooting a judge at the county courthouse. But he didn’t shoot the deputy…

+++

+ No one bangs out more banal Tweets every day than Elon Musk. But nearly everyone who still uses X (neé Twitter) is force-fed Musk’s insipid homilies on their timeline. A piece in The New Statesman by Will Dunn explains why…

+ Bob Costas on Trump: “He is by far the most disgraceful figure in modern presidential history. You have to be in a toxic cult to believe that Trump has ever been emotionally, psychologically, intellectually, or ethically fit to be POTUS.”

+ Trump speaking at a rally this week: “I’m the greatest of all time. Maybe greater even than Elvis.” Does this mean we will be fated to suffer decades of Trump impersonators?

+ According to a report in Status by Oliver Darcy, Olivia Nuzzi, the DC correspondent for New York magazine, has been placed on leave after editors at the magazine learned she’d had an affair with Robert Kennedy, Jr., at the same time she was reporting on the 2024 presidential campaign. Was it RFK, Jr.’s dead animal magnetism that attracted her, the dead bear cub, the decapitated whale, the barbecued dog?

+ No, question. Larry David simply has to return for one more season of Curb Your Enthusiasm,…

+ If you’re a journalist covering the campaign and you’ve decided to screw one of the candidates, shouldn’t you screw all of them and then report back your findings?

+ Billy Preston on Aretha Franklin: “I don’t care what they say about Aretha. She can be hiding out in her house in Detroit for years.  She can go decades without taking a plane or flying off to Europe. She can cancel half her gigs and infuriate every producer and promoter in the country. She can sing all kinds of jive-ass songs that are beneath her. She can go into her diva act and turn off the world. But on any given night, when that lady sits down at the piano and gets her body and soul all over some righteous song, she’ll scare the shit out of you–And you’ll know–you’ll swear–that she’s still the best fuckin’ singer this fucked-up country has ever produced.”

+ Joyce Carol Oates on William F. Buckley: “William Buckley represented American “aristocracy” of the kind satirized in 1930’s movies. He’d married into wealth & was consequently a worse snob than most persons in his milieu. he was an old-style Catholic–a bigot. Of course, being attracted to young men, he was publicly homophobic; it goes without saying that he was sexist, & would have laughed hysterically at the very notion of a woman, any woman, let alone a “Black woman,” in any public office.”

+ Luchino Visconti on his struggle to make Death in Venice: “Hollywood mentality is money & the bogus morality. Not just about gay things; about anything they do not like or understand. Always, they want to lower the picture, to make it pleasing to the most uneducated man in the smallest town in the most faraway state.”

+ The FBI seized 1,000 bottles of baby oil and lube from two of P. Diddy’s houses following his arrest on sex trafficking charges.

+ According to Fox Business News’ ex-money honey and resident conspiracy theorist Maria Bartiromo, the arrest of P Diddy was coordinated to distract from the Trump assassination attempt: “I saw right through it. The timing of the arrest, please. They must’ve had the P Diddy arrest on the shelf waiting to take it off-the-shelf for when they needed it.”

+ One JD worth listening to died this week at 78 in his New Mexico home, the singer-songwriter JD Souther, a driving creative force behind the Southern California country-rock sound of the 1970s. Souther, a trained jazz musician who returned to his roots later in life,  wrote a series of hits for Linda Ronstadt, James Taylor and the Eagles and fronted the Souther-Hillman-Furay Band with the Byrds Chris Hillman and Richie Furay of Buffalo Springfield. When asked whether it pissed him off that the Eagles had turned his songs (Best of My Love,  New Kid in Town, Victim of Love, Heartache Tonight) into mega-hits, Souther replied: “Would you like to see the checks?”

They will never forget you ’til somebody new comes along…

Booked Up
What I’m reading this week…

The Barn: the Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi
Wright Thompson
(Penguin)

Crude Capitalism: Oil, Corporate Power and the Making of the World Market
Adam Hanieh
(Verso)

Lucky Loser: How Donald Trump Squandered His Father’s Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success
Ross Buettner and Susanne Craig
(Penguin)

Sound Grammar
What I’m listening to this week…

Indoor Safari
Nick Lowe with Los Straitjackets
(Yep Roc)

The Forest is the Path
Snow Patrol
(Polydor)

Cascade
Floating Points
(Ninja Tune)

The Simple Act of Pushing a Button

“Since the appearance of visible life on Earth, 380 million years had to elapse in order for a butterfly to learn how to fly; 180 million years to create a rose with no other commitment than to be beautiful; and four geological eras in order for us human beings to be able to sing better than birds, and to be able to die from love. It is not honorable for the human talent, in the golden age of science, to have conceived the way for such an ancient and colossal process to return to the nothingness from which it came through the simple act of pushing a button.” – Gabriel Garcia Marquez, “The Cataclysm of Damocles” (1986)

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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Jeffrey St. Clair.