When Presidents realized that adding to the public domain was a good thing.
In 1954 the Harney National Forest was added to the Black Hills, so it is no longer a separate administrative unit.
Dear National Conservatives,
First of all, allow me to say, well played.
You well know that there was no earthly way that the public would vote for one of your members at any time in the near future, if ever. Indeed, while your movement has risen considerably in recent years, you know that it was likely to be at most just an outside influence on the periphery of conservative thought at the very most, and likely not for long. Your sense of urgency required a bold move, before, in your view, things were too late, and you made it.
It required your man, J. D. Vance, to lie and say outrageous things, but he proved willing to do it. Aquinas may have declared all lies to be sins, but obviously you felt that lying for the greater cause, as you see it, would be forgivable. You seek to reform the nation into a province of 15th Century Christendom, and you have been willing to do what is necessary to do that.
Now, of course, your next move depends on Trump getting out of the way. You know, as well as I, that Trump isn't a member of your movement and is unpredictable. Indeed, his philandering and serial polygamy is abhorrent to what you stand for. Moreover, his economic policies are likely to make Vance unelectable as a successor, and you know it. By 2028, somebody else will be waiting in the wings. Vice Presidents are not elected to office more often than not, as Kamala Harris' plight just demonstrated. And Trump's meandering thoughts and unpredictability are just as likely to cause him to replace Mr. Vance with Jenny McCarthy or Robert Kennedy as they are to really keep your boy around.
So you have limited time.
The plan, I suspect, is to declare an increasingly addled Donald Trump mentally incompetent soon. You can't do it in January, 2026. But you likely can by March, 2027. At any rate, the sooner the better.
Not that I'm your fan. Not hardly. You scare me. But you don't scare me as much as Donald Trump.
And he should scare you too.
Sincerely,
Yeoman.
And so the finger pointing, blaming, and name calling has begun.
The 2024 Presidential Election was supposed to be close.
It wasn't. And that means something. How did the nation elect a convicted felon who hung out with a procurer and who is a creepy serial polygamist, who also is likely sliding into dementia, as President of the United States?
Well, there are a lot of views out there. We offer ours, including some things we noted early on.
1. It turns out that we were correct that Biden shouldn't have run in the first place, and that Harris shouldn't have stepped into the breach.
Biden was supposed to be a caretaker President. "Go with the Joe you know" only made sense as long as it was just one cup of coffee. People didn't want a refill. Biden was supposed to carry on for four years while the nation got back on its feet from a traumatic Trump presidency and figured out where to go next.
Biden's diehard insistence on running again doomed that, and in some ways, the Democrats chances in 2024.
Biden, in his defense, was dealt a bad hand right from the onset. Left with an economy impacted by COVID, he had to deal with it, and he did a good job. The inflation that caused was not of his making, and he actually pulled off a soft landing. In the future, he's likely to be regarded as having pulled an economic rabbit out the hat.
And his rallying to the cause of Ukraine is singularly responsible for the country not being overrun by the Russians.
But people are stupid about economics, and stupidly believe that once inflation slows, prices return to the pre inflation norm, which actually required deflation, which generally causes a depression. That tar baby is now Trump's, as Trump won't be able to pull that off either.
More than that, however, Biden's advanced age was showing, whereas its seemingly not as noticeable with Trump. It was real hubris of Biden to run for a second term, and he shouldn't have done it. That set the Democrats behind.
When he finally stepped out, I noted that the time that Harris shouldn't step in. She did. She actually also ran a much better campaign than I initially thought she would. Frankly, I don't know that I can blame her for running, or blame the Democrats for running her. She proved to be too easy to tag with the issues that had hurt Biden, however, which did not make up the reasons that I thought she should not have run.
2. It's actually the social issues, stupid.
El Paso Sheriff : What's it mean? What's it leadin' to? You know, if you'd have told me 20 years ago, that I'd see children walking the streets of our Texas towns with green hair and bones in their noses, I just flat-out wouldn't have believed you.
Ed Tom Bell : Signs and wonders. But I think once you quit hearing "sir" and "ma'am," the rest is soon to foller.
El Paso Sheriff : Oh, it's the tide. It's the dismal tide.
No Country For Old Men.
People keep analyzing the race in terms of the economy, which I myself partially did above. But the big issue, to put it bluntly, is that Obergefell shocked many people into confronting the moral decline of the nation, something that had been going on for a very long time.
Sexual immorality in the US really commenced its roll in the late 1940s, as we've discussed before, and started to accelerate in 1953 with the launch of Playboy, and then really took off in the 1960s with the pill and the Sexual Revolution. The irony of all of this, however, is the public tolerated it, although not always very comfortably, as it fit into conventional immorality. That is, the White Anglo Saxon Protestant community basically tolerated a boys will be boys attitude at first, and then accommodated itself to other trends later, as long as things roughly worked out the way they were supposed to in the end, although they have not been working out for quite some time. Once Obergefell came along, however, the public was asked to accommodate something else, and it hasn't, and for a host of reasons. Transgenderism, which really doesn't exist, came hard on the heels of homosexual marriage, and it was just too much for large sections of the country.
At one time, it might be noted, it was a common assertion that the Babylon Berlin atmosphere of 1920's Germany had brought about the Nazis, in part, as they seemed to stand against unconventional immorality. In truth, homosexuality was present in the early Nazis, but the movement did a good job of plastering over it so it was ignored, if known, just like Trump's flagrant immoral conduct with women is at least somewhat known, if ignored. It allowed people to believe that that the Nazis would foster a return to pre 1914 moral standards, while ignoring that they would inflict new horrors.* A lot of that has gone on in the populist movement as well, which sort of imagines that the country will sort of return to an imagined 1950s, or an imagined 1970s.
The Democrats didn't even try to do anything about this, but rather embraced the matters that the Trump populists and their fellow travellers opposed. That's a big part of what occured. Americans proved to be willing to go pretty far with changes in Christian morality before they started regretting it, which they did, but to be kicked into a new room with a bunch of very unconventional behaviors was more than they could bear. It not only spawned a massive counterreaction, but it spawned radical new theories about the nature of what was going on, much of them false, and sort of a modified variant of a Great Awakening, that we haven't seen the end of yet.** This reaction, moreover, wasn't limited to the US, but has been scene all over the Western World, caused by similar events.
You have to know the times you live in.
3. What we repeatedly said about abortion being a hill to die on was correct.
Hell Courtesan by Kawanabe Kyōsai.
Part of the solid evidence of the Democrats being marooned in a post Vietnam War liberal past is the absolute adherence to swimming in a sea of blood.I warned earlier that grasping tight to abortion was a critical mistake for Democrats, but they saw it as a great issue, one that would turn women out to vote in favor of infanticide.
Instead, what it did was to force truly adherent Christians to vote against them, even if not to vote for Harris. I was one of them. I voted for the American Solidarity Party. I would have anyhow, but in a state that was close, this cost the Democrats votes. It may very well have cost them the election.
Ironically, and the Democrats failed to grasp it, Donald Trump's wishy washiness on this helped him. Lots of Evangelicals and even Catholics could rationalize voting for him as he seemed to be against abortion, sort of. Hadn't his court brought Dobbs around? And Republican women who otherwise adhered to the American Civil Religion could rationalize voting for pro abortion ballot measures while voting for trump, essentially voting for the things they were comfortable with from the 1970s, like abortion and birth control, while voting against homosexuality and transgenderism.
Indeed, the entire religiosity of the Trumpites is much like this, although not of the National Conservatives. They're okay with cheating men, up to a limit, premarital sex, and divorce, as long as the plumbing matches. They aren't okay with homosexuality. Truly religious voters were never supportive of abortion, which Harris leaned deeply into.
Democrats should have known that and figures out a way to deal with it. Even simply taking the same position as Trump, let the states deal with it, would have leveled the choice for many. Or they could have just remained completely silent in the election on abortion and transgenderism, which would have caused some votes to swing their way.
If the Democrats don't modify their position on abortion, they're not going to do better in 2028.
4. What we noted as long ago as 2016 about ignoring rust belt issues is still true.
The problem here is that this festering sore has become infected, and crossed from discontent into malevolence. Basically, its much like small town Germans thinking that a local Jewish butcher was odd, to thinking he's in league with evil. This has been downright scary.
Democrats woke up to the problem of decades long mass illegal immigration, but too late. Now, it appears, we're about to engage in a mass immorality.
This one was a hard one for the Democrats. Biden screwed up early in his administration on this issue. Harris was tarred with it. It would have taken a different candidate to distance from it, perhaps, quite frankly, a Hispanic one. There are solutions, but some of them are quite out of the box, very pre 1940, and a bit drastic.
Likewise, Trump introduced his absurd tariffs concept. The idea is underdeveloped and economically flaccid. But Rust Belt people don't care as in their minds if electric vehicles don't come in from China, 1965 Chevrolet Impalas will come back. This won't happen, and this will rapidly prove to be incorrect.
5. Demographics change.
Democrats in the 1960s abandoned white Southern racists in favor of the minorities of the time, much to their credit. Up until that time, African Americans had been Republicans. Democrats remembered that Italian American and Irish Americans had been, and were, theirs.
But they failed to notice that Roe v. Wade shattered the Catholic immigrant retained vote of earlier eras. For some reason, they didn't grasp that retaining abortion and embracing transgenderism and abortion would come to offend large groups of American, and even immigrant, Hispanics, who had a similar Catholic morality. And they didn't grasp that at the pew level, this was also true for the Black Church and many African Americans, who came to resent having their cause compared to ones based on sexual orientation or practice.
They also forgot that minority adherence to patronage only lasts as long as poverty does. Once a demographic moves into the Middle Class, it begins to disappear within a generation or two. Irish Americans and Italian Americans were once solidly Democratic. This hasn't been the case for a long time. Hispanics have been moving out of poverty, and so have African Americans.
And Hispanic Americans, which are a diverse group to start with.
This left the Democratic party a party of old Boomers, and the white upper middle class, and lower upper class, white, effete, elites. They're aren't enough of them to win an election.
Footnotes
*The Nazis ended up sending homosexuals to the death camps. They were highly resistant to women working, and only relented on it as the war began to go very badly. They'd also encourage pregnancy, including out of wedlock, by German women, which was definitely contrary to traditional Christian morality.
This is of note, not because there will be death camps, but because Germans voting on morality issues didn't get what they bargained for at all. Americans doing the same in the 2024 election are likely to find they may be surprised.
**As an example, while at the county courthouse to vote early, I encountered an elderly man wearing a MAGA hat who was informing people that transgenderism "wasn't invented here", whatever that would mean, and that this was a reason to vote for Trump.
Next year with be a Jubilee Year in the Catholic Church. For some reason, the Church felt it needed a mascot for this.
This is what it came up with:
How does a 2,000 year old institution in possession of much of the Western World's great art, come up with something so juvenile, and indeed something that looks like its out of Pokemon?
In announcing this, Archbishop Rino Fisichella stated that the cartoon imagine, titled "Luce" (light in Italian) was inspired by the Church's "to live even within the pop culture so beloved by our youth." This presents the classic problem of the elderly, now the Baby Boomers, recalling the desires of "youth" in terms of when they were fairly youthful themselves. Indeed, in my mind it brings to mind attending the "Teen Life Mass", or whatever it was called, that used to be held on Sunday evenings. I generally tried to avoid it, but when I did, you'd find a guitar band with bongos for the music, lead by a Boomer, and a bunch of aged Boomers who would sway and whatnot to the music.
In contrast, if you hit some Masses with a lot of young people, you'd find young women, some down in their teens, wearing mantillas.
I'm pretty convinced that in 2024, with ready access to the Internet, and all the news that's on it, combined with all the sewage that's washed up with it, such as horrific political arguments, the revival of racism, far right and far left extremist, Hamas murder and rape of young people in Israel, an aged geezer in the Kremlin trying to revive the Soviet Union, and young women prostituting themselves on TikTok, a childish cartoon from the 1980s isn't really going to win hearts and minds. Indeed, its even worse than the Comic Sans Serif font and 1970s vintage art that was officially used for the Synod on Synodality. And it gives emotional support to the Orthodox who are looking for reasons not to come back into the Church, even if superficially. This sure doesn't look like something Saints Cyril and Methodius would have passed out.
I've long held, and have stated it here, that Western culture had experienced Post World War Two materialism and found it lacking, and that the generations that have come up in the wake of the Baby Boomers are struggling to through the cultural innovations of the 1960s and 1970s off. We don't believe that "Greed is good" or that the Sexual Revolution was freeing. The problem is that so much was destroyed that recovering is hard, particularly when the aged hand remains on the tiller. Often that aged hand reaches out with what it thinks the young want, not grasping what that is, and actually making things worse.
This cartoon is really bad. Somebody should look around the Vatican and see if something serious might be available. The young Catholics in blue jeans, the mantilla girls, and myself, will all be thankful.
Postscript
I'm hating this image slightly less after some Twitter person made some interesting riffs off of it, but I still don't like it.
Today is Halloween.
It's also Reformation Day.
Everyone sort of knows what Halloween is, although in its extremely secularized form. It's become so popular in that style that its now the second most popular holiday in the US, and you don't even get the da off from work or school.
Originally, and in Catholic and Orthodox Churches, it was All Hallowed Evening, the day before All Saints Day, which in the Catholic Church is a Holy Day of Obligation. There are some debates about it, but the secular traditions that are observed stem from Celtic cultures of Great Britain in a much modified form. The door to door trick or treating stems from a religious tradition in which the poor went door to door for food and were given it in exchange for a promise to pray for the donor's dead.
Reformation Day is a day not much observed in North America commemorating Martin Luther nailing his 95 Theses to the Cathedral door at Worms, which he actually didn't do. The legend was that he did it on this day. No matter, he did get the rebellion of the reformation going, and with it the concept that people can make up their own minds on anything, no matter how ill informed they are. Luther was fairly well informed on some things, but that was the unintentional result of his act of rebellion.
At the time of his 95 Theses, he hadn't intended a rebellion at all, but he worked his way sort of around to it. It'd be interesting to know what he thought he'd done by the time of his death, but one thing he knew is that he'd caused others with more radical ideas than his to also break away and create their own Christian sects.
Many of those new denominations have considerably changed over the years. Some of the Lutherans, who followed Luther, often with no choice due to their localities, have become almost more Catholic than the Catholics, while others have gone in another direction. The Reformation, at any rate, is winding down,and its really collapsing.
With its collapse has come the mess of contemporary culture, much of which we seeing being fought out in the United States right now, which is a Protestant country. The massive secularization is a minor example of that, but is evident in all of our religion derived holidays, including this one, but also including Thanksgiving and Christmas.
The last acts of rebellion were those against nature, which we also see playing out doay. They began in the late 1940s and came into full bloom in the 1960s, and are still enormously playing out today. Part of that has been the acceptance of rebelling against truth, which we see in the current election in more than one way, and in both political parties, although certainly Donald Trump has manifested it in a heretofore unseen level.
So its Reformation Day and Halloween in 2024. Lots of tricks on the culture are being played, and not too many treats being received.
President Ford launched his "Whip Inflation Now" (WIN) campaign.
There are some very serious lessons from The Great Inflation that have been largely forgotten, not the least of which is that running the massive deficits we currently are inevitably will feed into an inflationary cycle. Neither party, nor the American public in general, have any fiscal restraint.
The campaign was a failure. High inflation would persist until the Reagan administration intentionally through the economy into a recession, which cured it.
Pins with WIN were offered for free.
The Franklin National Bank on Long Island failed, the largest bank failure in U.S. History.
Baja California Sur as its 30th state and Quintana Roo were added as the 30th and 31st Mexican states.
Last edition
Frankly, in my view, he shouldn't even be in the country. He was from a wealthy family in South Africa when he entered Canada. Immigration shouldn't have a place for wealthy ex pats.
South Africa might have been able to use him better. And we didn't need him. He didn't need us. All that's done is made a rich man richer.
Anyhow, he's not a lawyer, and he's an American by the grace of the country. If he wants to share his opinion about constitutions, he should go back to South Africa and comment on theirs, in my uncharitable opinion.
Great.
Making a formerly pretty wild area an effective city park.
This is just the kind of bullshit that ruins everything.
I hope the 4x4s coming off the muddy roads rip this newly paved road to shreds as soon as possible.
The 2024 race for the Oval Office has been so shaken up since Joe Biden dropped out, and Kamala Harris stepped in, its simply unprecedented. Trump, armed for a race against Biden, has been, for lack of a better word for it, simply freaking out, engaging in calling Harris (and former President Obama) racist names, and even engaging in absolutely wild fantasies, such as this:
Not hardly. That's delusion in full flower. It is, frankly, weird.
But then Trump is weird.
The use of the world "weird" to coin the GOP campaign has been freaking the Republicans out as well, with it really hitting home after J. D. Vance, whom Trump might very well wish to dump, was named VP. I don't think Vance is weird, but he is a full fledged National Conservative and the risk that entailed to Trump started to hit home almost as soon as Vance was picked, and hasn't let up since. Trump, who embraced the National Conservatives earlier, probably only dimply aware of their views and not really caring about them as he saw them as just a sales opportunity, not realizing they saw him as their ticket to power as he won't be around very long, ran away from the National Conservatives as soon as they became a liability.
As Coulter has says, Trump is like a couch, bearing the impression of the last person who sat on him.
Ever since Harris came on the scene Trump and his backers have been looking for something that hits against her and failing. And now they're doing the same thing with Tim Walz, her VP pick, launching into him nearly immediately. Meanwhile, they're abandoning social conservatives who voted for him reluctantly, giving them a reason to move to somebody else.
I've seen the American Solidarity Party mentioned in that context now more than once.
Walz is getting flack for retiring after a long National Guard NCO career before his unit was to deploy to Iraq. Walz was originally a Nebraska National Guardsman, and enlisted in the Guard the same year that I did. Shoot, he may have been in basic training when I was. He stayed in for something like 24 years and retired in 2005, several months before his unit deployed to the Middle East. He's taking criticism for his retirement.
He was in an E9 slot at the time, but because he hadn't completed a training cycle, which a former E-9 I know states takes two years, his retirement was at the E8 level.
There are reasons to criticize Walz, in my view, for his stands on social issues. But retiring from the National Guard after 24 years in is not one of them. Even if he simply felt like not going to Iraq that wouldn't be one of them. It's not like we saw Donald Trump beating the doors down to go to Vietnam, now is it?
But that seems to have become a hallmark of the Boomer generation. Lots of opinions on service by people who didn't wear a uniform.
A hallmark of recent times is that military service is something the right claims as its own, which is odd. This has become more and more the case as the number of people who have actually served has continued to decline. Walz would have been part of the big Cold War Army in its last decade. Vance was not, he wa part of the 9/11 generation of servicemen. It's easy to forget, seemingly, that a lot of figures served in uniform, and many still do, who aren't of the political right.
Slamming a National Guardsman, it might be noted, is an old tactic that makes Guard veterans, including myself, bitter. Those joining the Guard in 81, like Walz, or me, served a longer period of time, six years minimum, than active duty servicemen of the same era did. We received the same basic and advanced training, and were in the Army when we did, and we often pulled multiple actual periods of activation All in all, that six years, for many of us, gave us as much or nearly as much active duty time as the two years that regulars pulled.
Vance, it might be noted, served in Iraq in 2005, but he didn't see combat.
Combative Harriet Hagerman is slamming the City of Boulder, Colorado, for no real apparent reason. Boulder is notably liberal, and that seems to be the reason. She stated in Teton County:
The pilot project is, you take out all their gas stations,” she said to a crowd of about 70 people in the Teton County Library. “We take away all their internal combustion engines — cars. We take away all of their highways and streets, because that’s all oil-and-gas-produced.
We fill out open space with windmills and solar panels, and we’ll see if we can actually run a city of 100,000 people [with] no fossil fuels whatsoever.
We’ll see if I can get that off the ground.
Boulder city councilman Mark Wallach retorted:
If she doesn’t understand the actual serious nature of the threat posed by climate change, I’m afraid she’s going to be living in a very warm state in the next decade.
If somebody wants to make light, that’s their business. I deal in the real world, not in her fantasy world.
Having jus tsustained a loss on the ranch of her youth, Hageman's refusal to recognize what Wallach is pointing out is really remarkable.
Of course, the danger here is that somebody takes Hageman's suggestion serious and the pilot program works.
Out in the hinterlands Democrats and Republicans might actually be moving more towards the center. "Squad" member Rep. Cori Bush lost her primary in Missouri’s 1st Congressional District to St. Louis County prosecutor Wesley Bell, a moderate Democrat. Nutty Valentina Gomez, a far-right MAGA candidate for Missouri Secretary of State is now in 6th Place, her ads showing her running around armed and burning books with a flame thrower not withstanding.
August 12, 2024
Dawn's Early Light's release date has been pushed back after the election.
August 13, 2024
He was rambling, babbling on about crowd sizes and immigration and President Joe Biden and whatever else seemed to pass through his mind. He was also badly slurring his words, raising questions about his health, and doing nothing to knock down rising concerns about his age and well-being.
He sounded like a disoriented, racist Daffy Duck.
The USA Today in Elon Musk's Twitter interview of Donald Trump.
Others sources were mixed, one calling it dull.
Cont:
Teachers’ lobby targets candidates ahead of ‘pivotal’ Wyoming election: The Wyoming Education Association has publicly criticized Freedom Caucus members who oppose its positions. Some call foul.
August 14, 2024
Secretary of State Chuck Gray on Monday called for some county clerks to retest electronic voting systems with just over a week before the 2024 primary election. The request was made through a letter sent out on Monday to all 23 Wyoming county clerks
Casper Star Tribune, August 14, 2024.
Ilhan Omar her fourth Democratic Party nomination for her seat in Minnesota.
August 15, 2024
Some good economic news:
Inflation has hit a three year low.
Total employment in Wyoming grew by a scant 1.3% from first quarter 2023 to first quarter 2024, but total payroll grew by 4.1% over the year, the Research and Planning section of the Wyoming Department of Workforce Services reported Friday. Average weekly wage in the state grew by 2.8%.
In spite of this, however, GOP politicians are still campaigning on inflation.
It makes very little sense.
Consider this chart from the US Inflation Calculator:
This would indicate that average rates reach this rate relatively frequently. We would note that they were down below 2% in 2019 and 2020, right before COVID hit, and during Trump's Presidency, but they were at .1 in 2015, right before Trump took office.
The Federal target rate of inflation is 2%. We're about 1% higher than that right now, but generally the rate has been down around there under Democratic and Republican Presidents for the past twenty years, with some notable exceptions that were somewhat higher or somewhat lower. What seems to be routinely missed in the Republican complains here is the giant war in the grainbelt for the third world and southern Europe going on, and the massive impact of a global pandemic.
We have of course recently been tracking the Great War, which featured similar economic shocks. What happened then?
Massive inflation caused by the war, combined with the destruction of global trade to such an extent that by some measures it had only recovered. . . just before COVID 19.
Oh well, in the current political era facts and analysis are deflated.
Regarding facts, I've noted it before without being hugely pointed about it but the race in Senate District 28 has featured some truly disgusting campaigning by Bryce Reece. It's appalling.
Floods of flyers for Reece, who is challenging Jim Anderson, regarded as the most effective Senator in Wyoming's legislature, have been sent out and they contain lies. One calls Anderson a "gun grabber".
Reece also sent out a letter from his wife in which she makes appeals to religion, noting how they devout they are (from the text it's clear they are members of some branch of Evangelical Protestantism).**
Lying is a sin, and in some circumstances a grave sin.
Reece at one time was a sheep rancher, but is notably hostile to the science regarding COVID 19. I really don't grasp why people believe that COVID 19 was exaggerated, which Reece's propaganda asserts. The disease has ripped through the ranching community, however, due to similar beliefs, even while ranchers continue to vaccinate their livestock without hesitation for animal diseases.
At any rate, I've never seen more lies circulated in a Wyoming election year in my lifetime, all of which are originating in the far populist right. This isn't unique to Reece by any means. I'm only aware of it here, as I pick up propaganda in favor of him nearly every day. It's going on all over the state.
Interestingly yesterday one of the things that came was a flyer for this area including all the populist far right candidates together. Included was House candidate Pete Fox, who has not run a nasty campaign, but who is clearly on the far right, incumbent Jim Allemand and Jeanette Ward. I don't recall who else was on it. At the same time, precinct committee members for the GOP, who here are not extremist, sent out their own flyer endorsing Senator Jim Anderson and Elissa Campbell for the House. They also listed Casey Coates and Paul Bertoglio for County Commissioner, and Amber Pollack and Pat Sweeney for Casper City Council.
In the far right oddities category, far right candidate for the Senate, Reid Rasner, is getting no love from the organized populists, which is interesting. At the same time that they're locally willing to rip to shreds other Republicans, including incumbents, and resort to lies, they're ignoring Rasner, who is as far right as they are (but who hasn't been telling outrageous lies). In the race for the U.S. Senate, he's the real deal, while frankly Barrasso is basically posing as being from the far right, bending to the wind in order to fend off the challenge. In a year in which the far right has even accused a prominent member of the legislature as supporting the Chinese Communist Party (an absurd claim), you'd think that the populist would attack Barrasso as its a safe thing to do Republican seat wise.
Nope.
Of course, Barrasso has done a good job of adopting their themes, although I frankly doubt he believes hardly any of them.
On PACS
August 16, 2024
Somebody left a threatening message on Chuck Gray's voicemail, which stated:
You’re playing with fire. I want you to know that if you start cheating, stealing, election denying this time around and shit hits the fan in November — you’re going to fucking get it Mr. Chuck Gray,
Gray resorted to his usual line in regard to this, it's the media's fault. The Tribune reports that he wrote them, stating:
False media reporting incites individuals like this. As mentioned by the individual leaving the message, the message was clearly triggered by false reporting by publications such as WyoFile and their syndication partners around the state.
WyoFile hasn't been reporting falsely, and Gray did make false statements in the last election about the election being stolen, none of which justifies threatening him.
Regarding false statements, I received a text of all things referencing the attack ads in favor of Bryce Reece noting that they were paid for by an organization located in Virginia. This was some sort of unsolicited text, like spam.
Anyhow, I haven't checked it out, but that information is basically of the type that's otherwise been in the news. It's disturbing that an out of state organization would sink money in Wyoming in favor of a populist candidate and circulate lies.
Donald Trump apparently gave a long rambling press conference yesterday. It's full of odd statements and has been real fodder for his critics.
Included in them was a claim about China's nuclear arsenal equalling the U.S's one, which China immediately corrected, noting also that China, unlike the US, has an official no first use of nuclear weapons policy.
China termed the U.S. arsenal, correctly, as "way bigger".
Also in Trump's comments was this item, we've already commented about:
You're all going to be thrown into a communist system. You will be thrown into a system where everybody gets health care . . .
Donald Trump.
So the Red Horde was actually fighting for universal health care?
In fairness, that was just apparently a snippet of what he said. In the same speech he accused Harris of "badness" to an unnamed ally. But, in terms of speech, well this is, um, weird.
Other gems included the following.
Concerning the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Medal of Honor, which are not equivalent in any sense:
When we gave her the Presidential Medal of Freedom… It’s the equivalent of the Congressional Medal of Honor— it’s actually much better because everyone who gets the Congressional Medal, they’re soldiers. They’re either in very bad shape because they’ve been hit so many times by bullets or they’re dead. She gets it and she’s a healthy beautiful woman.
This is a bizarre comment and once again into Trump's world outlook. Trump seems to have a problem with injured people and he doesn't seem to respect military service much.
It's worth noting, although it probably deserves a separate thread, that I've pretty much come to the conclusion that everyone should:
1) Be or live poor at some time. I'm not keen on poverty, and I wish nobody had to stay poor, but having had to live poor at some point, which a lot of people do when they are students, really serves as a great leveler. People who are rich their whole lives often believe they're super smart or superior to other people, when often circumstances of birth or luck have as much to do with that as anything;
2) Work a labor job. By that I mean be in the Army, work in the oilfield, work in a gas station, and not for your parents. People who've never had to do that often don't really respect those who do have to do that, or want to do that.
Working for your parents, I'd note, doesn't count.
I don't know much about young Trump, and I'm not going to bother to learn, but he's been rich his entire life, didn't serve in the Army, and has never, in so far as I know, worked a labor type job. His character seems to suffer for it.
The Harris campaign replied.
Regarding the "weird" tag:
She actually called me weird. He is weird. It was just a sound bite and she called JD and I weird. He's not weird. He was a great student at Yale.
For the record, I don't think J. D. Vance is weird. I do think there's reason to be concerned that something is wrong with Trump's mental status. And this "great student at Yale" thing is interesting. Nothing keeps you from being a great student, and weird.
Regarding a Taliban leader:
He called me 'Your Excellency.' I wonder if he calls that to Biden. I doubt it.
Um. . . .
Regarding job creation under Biden:
Substantially more than 100% of job creation went to migrants.
Um. . . .
Concerning Iran:
I’m not looking to be bad to Iran. We’re going to be friendly, I hope, with Iran. Maybe. But maybe not. But we’re going to be friendly, I hope. We’re going to be friendly.
Regarding windmills:
You want to see a bird cemetery, just go under a windmill, you see thousands of birds dead. The bald eagle, if you kill an eagle, they put you in jail for years. And yet these windmills knock them out like nothing.
Regarding acting like a 7th grade snot:
As far as the personal attacks, I’m very angry at her because of what she’s done to the country. I’m very angry at her that she weaponized the justice system against me and other people —- very angry at her, I think I'm entitled to personal attacks. I don't have a lot of respect for her. I don't have a lot of respect for her intelligence.
Intelligence is one of the things Trump brings up a lot. To some degree, I wonder if he's insecure about his intelligence.
Regarding Harris:
She's a very strong Communist lean.
That's nonsense as well as grammatically nonsensical.
Also regarding Harris:
She's been unbelievable in terms of badness to some of our great allies. You know who I'm talking about.
Badness?
Regarding a millionaires mutual admiration society:
Elon endorsed me strongly, the most powerful endorsement, said it three or four times the other night during our little chat. A chat that was very well listened to and attended, we know that, right? Broke every single record I think in history.
On Harris replacing Biden, combined with what was supposed to be a comment on inflation:
It was a coup by people that wanted him out, and they didn’t do it the way, not the way they’re supposed to do it. $129 more on energy, and $241 more. This is all per month on rent,
Choice words from a person who tried to subvert the election.
And, on wars and inflation, oddly.
We have wars breaking out in the Middle East. We have the horrible war going on with Ukraine and Russia. All these things would have never happened if I was president. Would have never, ever happened, and they didn’t happen. Since Harris took office, car insurance is up 55%,
August 18, 2024
The Democratic National Convention is next week which means its time for the Democrats to do something really dumb.
Hillary Clinton will speak at the convention.
Regular voters can't stand her. Having her speak is not a good idea.
And, in a Trump rally:
I am much better looking than her. I'm a better looking person than Kamala.
Weird.
August 19, 2024
And the verbal oddness just keeps on keeping on:
When you get the Medal of Honor, generally speaking…It’s much more painful to get…Where’s the Presidential Medal of Freedom, to my knowledge, I don't think anybody suffered
Trump.
The VFW is unhappy.
*"Brat" used to be negative thing to call somebody, but in recent years young women have embraced it as symbolizing assertiveness and somebody has an album coming out this summer called "Brat". Harris' supporters, and Harris, have embraced it, claiming this summer as "Brat Girl Summer".
**Included in the letter is statement that both she and her husband believe the U.S. Constitution is a divinely inspired document. Few Christians believe that, but it is a minority view in certain strains of American Protestantism and the LDS.
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