We’re having a stretch of glorious weather, at least if you’re not a farmer. Those people are never happy with any weather, and ours, lately, has been dry. I don’t think it’s rained since before Labor Day, and the next chance of it — and only a chance — is a week from Tuesday. The skies have been clear and sunny, temperatures topping out around 80 in late afternoon.
Essentially, I’m living in Los Angeles without the traffic. At least for a while.
The weather helps moderate the natural impulse to bang one’s head on the wall. I suppose many of us saw Pete Buttigieg’s comments on the chat shows Sunday, making the very sharp observation that all this talk about dogs and cats and so forth is just dust thrown up to get us to stop talking about Project 2025, et al. I think he’s right. So I’m going to enjoy the weather, ignore the dust in the air, and keep sending a few bucks, here and there, to Democrats.
As for the “assassination attempt” yesterday, well. More will be revealed. But until then, we obviously need to build a wall around golf courses, allow access only through solid-steel gates, and arm caddies.
I keep thinking about November 7, 2020. I’ve written in detail about it before, but the day remains in my brain as the goal for 2024. Vote, win the election, then go play miniature golf on a warm day.
Let’s see if it holds out.
It was a good weekend, in the sense that I got a bunch of stuff crossed off my to-do list for this week, which means I can fritter a little time away here and there as it unwinds. I’ve resolved to try my hand at darning a couple of tiny moth holes in a good cashmere sweater I don’t want to retire just yet. No, never darned before, but that’s why God gave us YouTube. We’ll see how that goes.
Bloggage? Oh, let’s see:
Roy is very smart on the subtext of GOP messaging of late:
What you have to understand is that, while both misogyny and racism are important parts of MAGA, the policy itself is never as important as the hatred and disgust they can engender with them.
That’s why, on abortion, Trump can fudge and lie to his heart’s content. As I’ve explained, he’s worked it so that his fans understand he’s lying and wink at it — they know they’ve already gotten the result they wanted from the Trump Supreme Court, and that their desired further disempowerment and servitude of women relies more on getting the normies to help elect him than on politically dangerous shows of support for the fait accompli.
But his misogynist yap about E. Jean Carroll, Kamala Harris, et alia — and creepy fantasies about women aborting babies after birth — those are non-negotiable. MAGA must have those. Because they demonstrate something more important than policy, or even short-term electoral gain.
An entertaining read on the funeral home used by the rich and famous, in the NYT (gift link). I sent it to a friend here, also a funeral director. Of course he knew it well. A direct cremation there costs around $15K. I guess that’s to be expected. They embalmed Jackie Onassis in her own apartment, which just proves you can get anything delivered in New York.
And now, to work.
alex said on September 16, 2024 at 12:43 pm
With security this poor, I worry about our former presidents Obama, Clinton and Carter.
As for Trump, I find optimism in the old saying “third time’s the charm.”
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Sherri said on September 16, 2024 at 12:49 pm
Dems should bring back the assault weapons ban, call it the “Trump Assassination Prevention Act”, and make the Republicans vote against it.
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David C said on September 16, 2024 at 1:16 pm
It’s a damned shame we can’t have a two-tiered Secret Service protection model. If you’re a guns everywhere asshole, you have to live in the world you want everyone else to live in.
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Dexter Friend said on September 16, 2024 at 1:44 pm
I am convinced that since if I have a hospital-necessary health event, and am too far away from a V.A. hospital, I need the 20% non-covered insurance , the Medicare gap. That gap coverage paid $63,000 for my wife’s end-care in hospitals. Here’s my deal: I would love to send money to my candidates, up and down ballot. However, my gap coverage just jumped. 2 years ago it was a mere $370 monthly. Last year, $449 monthly. Now it just jumped to $523 monthly and I am squeezed like a D.C. cop trapped in a doorway.
Generally speaking, am I getting the hose or does $523 for the 20% gap coverage sound fair for one adult? One thing for sure, this policy pays every damn penny, no questions. I am grandfathered in…my policy is no longer available from this carrier. I have been paying now for 10 years.
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Suzanne said on September 16, 2024 at 2:22 pm
This was a good discussion of Medicare Advantage plans vs Medigap plans.
https://www.npr.org/2024/04/24/1198910851/1a-04-24-2024
My husband and I have Medigap plans as our insurance broker told me that with my diagnosis of cancer several years ago, I could be in big trouble with a Medicare Advantage plan as opposed to a regular supplemental plan. We will see. My sister has recently been diagnosed with cancer and has an advantage plan.
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Jeff Borden said on September 16, 2024 at 3:09 pm
The lying fake hillbilly absolutely refuses to drop the “Negroes are eating cats” shtick. He even posted a video of dusky-hued Africans grilling a cat! Sadly, pretty much everyone who saw the clip noted it was a fucking chicken on the grill.
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Sherri said on September 16, 2024 at 3:34 pm
Has a Senator ever attacked his own constituents like this? Vance has turned a city in a state he represents into a target for violence.
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Mark P said on September 16, 2024 at 3:59 pm
We originally signed up with a Medicare Advantage plan, but after a couple of years, we switched back to regular Medicare with a supplement. My wife kept losing her PCP every year when they ended up out of the network. Our plan included a dental plan, but the only dentist within about 50 miles that was in the plan dropped out after one year. So that was a worthless advantage.
The big advantage with Medicare Advantage is that it’s cheap. The big advantage with regular Medicare is that there are no networks and virtually everything is covered; there is almost no back and forth about whether you can get some procedure at a particular facility, and there are no copays. The big disadvantage is that supplemental coverage is expensive, and finding a good plan is confusing because the insurers have different plans for different geographic regions. But I’m satisfied with regular Medicare and don’t want to go back.
A friend in Denver has a Medicare Advantage plan, which seems to have worked pretty well for him, especially since he and his wife have limited income. But they are thinking of changing to regular Medicare because of the network problem. Also, one of their specialist doctors thought regular Medicare would be better for them.
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Julie Robinson said on September 16, 2024 at 4:17 pm
If I understand it correctly, you can be rated for pre-existing conditions after your first year if you change from Advantage to Supplement. I despise having to get permission for everything, and we’ve had doctors leave too. I think we’re stuck in Advantage, but will try to find a better one for next year.
Ireland turned sunny and got up to 21 today! Or 70 as we dumb Americans know it. Tomorrow night we’ll be home, and I’m ready.
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Jeff Borden said on September 16, 2024 at 4:42 pm
Sherri,
That’s an excellent question. MAGA senators are required to despise any large cities in their state, but I can’t recall one going at a town in his own state quite like Vance. He’s such a fucking weasel. Wounded when racist MAGAette (and possible tRump side piece) Laura Loomer smears his Indian wife, but determined to slander the black people with funny accents in Springfield. The depths of my dislike for this lying punk gets deeper by the day. He cannot be allowed within a heartbeat of the presidency. He just cannot.
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Sherri said on September 16, 2024 at 5:33 pm
I can’t even recall Ted Cruz going after a town in Texas like this, and everyone hates Ted Cruz. Usually the lying weasels make up shit about big cities in other states, like San Francisco, Chicago, New York, etc.
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Dexter Friend said on September 16, 2024 at 5:57 pm
Thanks for the info and thoughts. My step-daughter was here last evening and she told me to never give up my supplemental plan because , like I wrote above, how they paid every supplemental nickel of her mom’s many, many bills. I just have to cut out some dumb stuff like excessive lotto tickets and long non-purposeful joy rides. I will not cut my streaming services nor my cable. I love all the choices. Funny how I watch fewer Hollywood movies anymore; I watch a lot of YouTube programming.
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Jeff Borden said on September 16, 2024 at 7:06 pm
Sherri,
In Texass, the wingnuts just seize power, as they’ve done in blue Houston. They took over Houston schools in 2023. In red Missouri, the Qopers have seized the water system in St.
Louis. In Mississippi, it was the court system in Jackson. Etc. Etc. Etc.
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Sherri said on September 16, 2024 at 7:19 pm
Sure, there are lots of examples of GOP legislatures taking away local control when they don’t like what local control is doing. And there are plenty of examples of GOP politicians attacking Dem leaders of towns. But what Vance has been doing to a town in his own state seems unprecedented to me. It’s like he doesn’t understand that he’s the Senator of a physical place called Ohio with real people, rather than the Senator of an online tribe of weird right wing nut jobs.
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Sherri said on September 16, 2024 at 11:41 pm
Let’s see, the junior Senator of Ohio is promulgating lies about a city he represents that have resulted in over 30 bomb threats to that city, the racist editor of a racist magazine used a racial slur on a racist woman’s talk show*, and Elon Musk tweeted the equivalent of “will no one rid me of this meddlesome VP?”
Just another day in paradise.
*Rich Lowry, the National Review, the n-word, Megyn Kelly
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Mark P said on September 17, 2024 at 1:58 am
Musk’s explanation for his tweet is that it was funny when he said it in person to a bunch of his bitches. You know, locker room threats. Ha ha can’t anyone take a joke any more?
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Deborah said on September 17, 2024 at 7:46 am
If Trump had been assassinated who would be the Republican candidate for president? Would it become Vance? Would there even be an election in November since there are less than 50 days left?
Trump is such a volatile man, and there are so many guns in this country, it seems almost inevitable that there would have been attempts on his life. His rhetoric is so incendiary it’s almost like he was asking for it, for some mentally unstable person with a gun to take a shot at him.
What have we become?
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Suzanne said on September 17, 2024 at 9:03 am
This is from a conservative publication written by a conservative. I mostly ignore these people but this is worth reading.
https://thedispatch.com/newsletter/wanderland/exotic-cat-eaters-springfield-ohio/
“… while J.D. Vance’s hillbilly ancestors may not have been the inbred, possum-eating, superstitious bushwhackers of legend and lore, as they descended on Ohio from the hills of Kentucky they had more than a little in common with the Haitian immigrants Sen. Vance now spends his days vilifying in terms that would have been familiar to Fritz Hippler, the filmmaker whose 1941 propaganda film Der ewige Jude comes to its climax with images of leering kosher butchers covered in the blood of animals slaughtered in the service of “the so-called Jewish religion.” ”
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FDChief said on September 17, 2024 at 9:14 am
The whole GOP schtick is what any three-card-monte shuffler would recognize; keep the rubes watching the hands and listening to the patter while he cheats them out of their socks.
This Ohio pet-eating? SSDD. It’s to keep the idiot “news” outlets following the patter so nobody starts asking those embarrassing questions “what’s this “Project 2025″ thing again..?” and “Dictator on day…what?”
So I think it’s not particularly useful to analyze this beyond the always-useful “What do Republicans have to gain from THIS lie..? because it’s always “that” lie.
And re: randos shooting at Tubby, I’ll leave you with Jim Wright:
“An angry man with a history of mental illness and violence, armed with a military grade assault weapon, made Trump feel endangered while he was just doing something he enjoys on a Sunday afternoon?
Fucking LOL
Welcome the world the rest of us have to live in. Welcome to the country Republicans flush with NRA money created and absolutely refuse to do anything about. Welcome to every single day in Florida, every public school, every theater, every mall, every church.
How’s it feel?”
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Deborah said on September 17, 2024 at 10:13 am
Suzanne, that was such an interesting article and amazing that it was written by a conservative who used to write for National Review. Another wild thing about it is that it mentions Espanola, NM of all places which I have commented about herewith many times. Espanola is halfway between Santa Fe and Abiquiu, it’s pretty much the armpit of the world. It’s surrounded by some of the most beautiful natural landscape that you’re likely to see anywhere in the world but it’s a mess, full of poverty and add to that corruption in it’s local government that is right out in the open and written about extensively in the local paper. Drugs and homelessness are an enormous problem there. The only thing that even slightly approximates an industry there is that it’s relatively close to the Los Alamos National Laboratory. They actually have rush hour with cars going to and from the labs in the mornings and evenings. We’ve been stuck in that sometimes on our way to or from our cabin. So it’s good to see that there is a place that offers employment to enough people to cause traffic jams.
Anyway, I could go on and on about Espanola, so I’ll stop. But thanks for the link Suzanne. We have an interesting country for sure.
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Mark P said on September 17, 2024 at 10:25 am
It seems like there was something in some book somewhere about sowing the wind and reaping the whirlwind. Maybe they should try to find that book and read it some time.
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Mark P said on September 17, 2024 at 11:01 am
There has been some discussion about whether Rich Lowry said, or started to say the n word, and attempted explanations for what happened. The favored explanation of the apologists is that he was confusing “immigrant” with a short i, and “migrant” with a long i, so he started to say migrant only with a short i. Mark Liberman, at Language Log, did a detailed and unbiased examination of a recording. His conclusion was: “So what he said is clear, in phonetic terms: it was [ˡnɪgɚ]. As for why he said it, there’s a range of explanations from a word-substitution error, perhaps of the Freudian slip variety, to an innocent phonemic scramble of the general type that McCarthy was proposes.”
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Dexter Friend said on September 17, 2024 at 11:14 am
I guess the closest scenario that Deborah laid out was when Artie Bremer shot George Wallace in 1972. But if one of the 2 main party candidates fell to disease or murder, that would be a real shitshow.
Back when I was a tiny boy in the early/mid 1960s, dads were falling over dead frequently in their early 40s of heart disease. Along with Jonas Salk and the scientists who developed the Covid19 immunization shots,
Akira Endo, a Japanese biochemist and microbiologist, discovered statins, which are a class of drugs that treat and prevent heart disease. (internet quote last half-sentence.)
Without Akira Endo, believe me, a lot of us codgers would be resting in urns on mantlepieces or scattered to the winds or down 6 feet under. I would guess Trump, a fat`ass, is on statins. I have been on them since Hector was a pup.
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Sherri said on September 17, 2024 at 12:16 pm
No analysis of what Rich Lowry did or didn’t say is complete without a larger context. He’s a Trump defender, editor of a magazine with a history of racism (defending segregation and apartheid), and most telling to me, if it was just a slip of the tongue, wouldn’t you just say so immediately and apologize?
Here’s one reason I think the GOP debasement matters: the 10 year old boys from 2016 are now 18 and voting age, and they’ve grown up in this environment. It looks like young men prefer Trump.
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Suzanne said on September 17, 2024 at 12:22 pm
I honestly believe that many of the conservatives, like the writer of the article I linked to, are just now finally realizing what they have wrought. Too many thought of their incendiary rhetoric as a kind of joke, a wrestling kayfabe that everyone was in on. Vance’s lies are opening their eyes to the fact that they were irredeemably wrong. The ship is headed straight for the iceberg that they had spread fear of for years because they thought it was mythical and enjoyed watching people cower and buy the anti-iceberg wares they sold, thereby enriching themselves. Now, to their horror, they realize it doesn’t matter if the iceberg is real because we are all in the same ship heading nowhere and the ship’s captain is a madman.
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Jeff Gill said on September 17, 2024 at 12:25 pm
Another echo here is that Bremer took a serious try at shooting Nixon first, but the security was too good (and from what I read today, not all that intense), so he moved on to the easier target.
That’s the ongoing issue here: there have been and will be Guiteaus and Oswalds and Bremers, whose motives are obscure and inscrutable. They will keep trying. We have to keep vigilant, and vigilance includes wise legislation as well as alert security staff. It also requires those at risk for having high profile in public office cooperate with reasonable precautions.
I don’t think the latest Trump attempt was any more a fake than the first one, but I do wonder if word went down to make sure the next intruder alert is met with gunfire and full spotlight. Because the number of armed crackpots who get picked up around the White House perimeter on an ongoing basis is striking; the number of shots in the direction of that building are more than you might think. But they just get downplayed, I think prudently. This guy was serious and armed and I’m not downplaying the threat, but the response has me wondering if there wasn’t a little emphasis on getting the new news cycle started with a new “assassination attempt.”
These are just the tip of the iceberg, and I’d forgotten in 1974 there was a helicopter that landed on the grounds, plus a plane hijacked and nearly flown into the White House, within weeks of each incident.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_White_House_security_breaches#Onto_the_grounds
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Deborah said on September 17, 2024 at 12:41 pm
How vigilant can we be when there are soooooooo many guns out there, lethal military type guns in the hands of nuts who have nooooooo trouble getting them?
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Mark P said on September 17, 2024 at 1:18 pm
There are conspiracy theories on the left, too. Apparently the alleged assassin had been on or near the golf course for about 12 hours. How did he know Trump was going to play golf there 12 hours before he went to the course? Golfing at that course was apparently a fairly spontaneous decision, but if it wasn’t, how did the alleged assassin find out about it so long beforehand?
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FDChief said on September 17, 2024 at 5:05 pm
Mark: because that’s pretty much Tubby’s whole life? Rage-tweeting from the toilet and golfing? Staking out Trump at his home course seems as difficult as stalking a Gurnsey at a milking shed…
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Dave said on September 17, 2024 at 5:19 pm
I read that he camped out there in the bushes with the assumption that T**** would play golf, he had no knowledge.
Today’s Fresh Air with Terri Gross is about how The Apprentice did everything to make him look like a big success, despite the contrary being true.
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Mark P said on September 17, 2024 at 8:56 pm
I didn’t realize that he was playing on one of his own courses. I was certain that I heard he was on another course not his own.
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Dorothy said on September 18, 2024 at 7:51 am
Happy birthday Dexter!
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Jeff Gill said on September 18, 2024 at 11:14 am
Dexter, have a great day (but with no outdoor burning)!
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Heather said on September 18, 2024 at 12:28 pm
Apparently Trump has been warned against golfing there because the course is so close to public roads and hard to secure, but he insists on doing it anyway. I mean, you’re in a state where basically anyone can carry a gun, what does he think is going to happen.
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Suzanne said on September 18, 2024 at 1:14 pm
He golfs at his own golf course because he makes money off the secret service protection people staying there, for which he charges the top rate. If someone “attacks” him, he can ask for more security which has to stay where he stays, which is likely a property he owns. So he makes more money.
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Dexter Friend said on September 18, 2024 at 5:46 pm
T.Y. 4 the birthday wishes. My little party was cancelled last Sunday because of how I threw my lower back out…better now, and it’s this Sunday in Findlay. 75. Goll-ll-ee.
Vance so far has no video of anyone complaining of missing fur babies…one woman called the Springfield cops to say her cat was found in her basement. My Senator, the honorable 🙂 Vance !
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