The hysteria over Trump’s election must be tempered by just how awful Biden has been after the entirely predictable, if sinister, decision of the American electorate to return him to power. The liberal abreaction to Trump has revealed how thoroughly blind many have been to the vileness of Biden and his obedient circle of advisors and enforcers. If a secret Biden was waiting until after the election to emerge, it was only a more malicious and baleful version of the Biden we’ve witnessed for the last four years. 

Given a chance to cut Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza off at the knees after the Netanyahu regime blew through Biden’s own redlines on permitting more humanitarian aid to reach the starving Palestinian population of Gaza, Biden shrugged off the flouting of his own demands and kept the arms shipments to Tel Aviv flowing. He never intended to restrain Israel’s rampages in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq or Iran. The redlines have always been greenlights.

This week, the US vetoed for the fourth time a resolution by the UN Security Council calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and the release of all remaining hostages. Anyone who thought Lame Duck Biden was suddenly going to stand up to Israel hasn’t been paying the slightest attention to his previous 50 years in politics. The vote was 14 for and one against. The US stands more isolated internationally than ever. In the span of two weeks, the US has been almost universally rebuffed by the international community on Gaza and its shameful and cruel embargo on Cuba. 

Then there’s Ukraine, where hundreds of thousands have died in a war that no one can win, where maximizing the body count seems to be the only goal. By shipping long-range missiles capable of striking inside Russia, cluster bombs and now landmines to Ukraine in a last-ditch drive to prolong a war in Europe and continuing to arm a genocide in the Middle East,  Biden will go down as one of the most blood-thirsty Presidents in US history…

The harsh but undisputable reality is that Biden’s tenure has made Trump more dangerous, not less. He has freed Trump from paying even notional deference to US and international laws regarding human rights, crimes against humanity, and even genocide. Trump will re-enter office unbound, and Biden, in pursuit of his own imperial ambitions, delinked some of the last chains that might have restrained him. 

There are many reasons to lament and even be anxious about the restoration of Trump, but few to mourn the political demise of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

+++

+ With more votes still to be counted, Trump’s popular vote lead is down to 1.68%, the closest vote margin since 2000 (Bush v. Gore).

Trump 76,666,332 (49.93%)
Harris 74,086,596 (48.25%)

And yet, Trump won the electoral college by 16%…

Electoral college

Trump: 312 (58%)
Harris: 226 (42%)

For four years, while he wailed about the threats to so-called American democracy, Biden did nothing to address the structural perversion of democracy in the US created by archaic institutions like the Electoral College, such as advancing statehood for DC and Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico has more people than 22 states, all of whom are US citizens, yet it has no voice in who the US elects as president. Puerto Rico just decisively voted for statehood “again” with an absolute majority in a three-option race.

 

+ James Zogby: I have been on the DNC for 32 years: 16 on the Executive Committee, 11 as chair of the Resolutions Committee, & on the Unity/Reform Committee. I’m pushing for budget transparency and accountability, and party democracy.  But I guess all I’ll ever be is that “pro-Palestinian” guy. It’s bigotry.”

+ Trump ended up winning New Jersey’s Ninth Congressional district, which includes South Paterson, often referred to as “Little Palestine” because of its sizeable Palestinian-American population.

2020: Biden +19%
2024: Trump +1.2%

+ Top Issues in the campaign, based on Pew’s latest survey of voters…

Economy
All voters: 81%
Trump: 93%
Harris: 68%

Health care
All voters: 65%
Harris: 76%
Trump: 55%

Supreme Court
All: 63%
Harris: 73%
Trump: 54%

Foreign policy
All: 62%
Trump: 70%
Harris: 54%

Violent crime
All: 61%
Trump: 76%
Harris: 46^

Immigration
All: 61%
Trump 82%
Harris: 39%

Gun policy
All: 56%
Harris: 59%
Trump: 53%

Abortion
All: 51%
Harris: 67%
Trump: 35%

Racial/ethnic inequality
All: 37%
Harris: 56%
Trump: 18%

Climate Change
All 37%
Harris: 62%
Trump: 11%

+ Turnout by generation in Georgia…

Gen Z.
GOP: 80%
Dem: 48%
Other: 52%

Millennial
GOP: 83%
Dem: 57%
Other: 50%

Gen X
GOP: 90%
Dem: 73%
Other: 58%

Baby Boom
GOP: 90%
Dem: 78%
Other: 52%

Silent Gen.
GOP: 85%
Dem: 75%
Other: 35%

Pre-Silent
GOP: 68%
DEM: 45%
Other: 15%

+ At the top of the list of crises not mentioned once in the entire campaign by Kamala Harris…

+ Ralph Nader: “Once again, a leading Democrat did not put a minimum wage increase front and center as part of the Democratic Party agenda. On NBC’s Meet the Press yesterday, Hakeem Jeffries mentioned affordable housing but not the minimum wage and not increasing Social Security benefits—frozen for over 50 years. The Democrats passed a $15 minimum wage bill, spread over 4 or 5 years from the present level of $7.25, but that was in 2019 when Republicans controlled the Senate and they knew it was going to be blocked. Kamala Harris did not put minimum wage front and center. It was a throwaway line that 25 million workers who would get an increase did not believe.”

+ Two weeks before the election, almost two-thirds of Republicans said that their economic situation was worse than a year ago. Two weeks after Trump’s win, less than half still feel the same way.

+ Even the combined efforts of Jesus Christ and Dr. Victor Frankenstein would find it a challenge to resurrect this party…

2028 Democratic Party Presidential Primary Polling:

Harris: 41%
Newsom: 8%
Shapiro: 7%
Buttigieg: 6%
Walz: 6%

– Echelon –

+ It’s like re-hiring the Captain of the Exxon Valdez for another Pacific cruise.

+++

+ At least five nominees for slots in the Trump administration nominees are credited with helping to draft the Heritage Foundation’s notorious Project 2025, including Thomas Homan as “border czar,” John Ratcliffe as CIA director, Brendan Carr as commissioner of the FCC head, Russ Vought as OMB director and Pete Hoekstra as ambassador to Canada.

+ None of Trump’s nominations have a positive favorability rating among registered voters. RFK, Jr. is viewed the most positively, though less than half approve of his nomination.

+ The K File acquired audio of RFK, Jr on his radio show comparing Trump to Adolf Hitler. Kennedy also read and praised a description of Trump and his supporters as “belligerent idiots,” “outright Nazis,” “cowards” and “bootlickers.”

+ Vance, Musk and Rubio have made similar remarks. Perhaps comparing Trump to Hitler is a prerequisite for a top post in his administration.

+ The Brain Trust fueling up on their Brain Food…

+ Dr. Mehmet Oz, Trump’s pick to run Medicare and Medicaid, was forced to pay $5.25 million to settle claims he had promoted phony weight-loss drugs.

+ For his ambassador to NATO, Trump picked Matthew Whitaker, his former Attorney General, who previously served on the board of a company that “hawked time-travel cryptocurrencies, Bigfoot dolls, and toilets specially designed for men with big dicks—and that was shut down for good and paid a $26 million fine to the Federal Trade Commission.”

+ Matt Gaetz withdrew his nomination as Attorney General 45 minutes after CNN called his office to inform him they were going to report that the “House Ethics Committee was told there was a second sexual encounter between Gaetz and 17 year old in girl 2017.” The most recent allegation stems from testimony to the Committee by a woman who was 17 at the time of the second sexual encounter, which she said involved another adult woman.

+ The New York Times obtained a document from the federal sex trafficking investigation of Matt Gaetz that shows he made thousands in Venmo payments to women who told investigators they had sex with him for money.

+ The Gaetz nomination survived only 16 days after Trump’s election. That’s less than Bill Richardson for Commerce (60 days), Linda Chavez for Labor (65 days), Zoe Baird for AG (80 days), Tom Daschle for HHS (90 days), Andrew Puzder for Labor(100 days) and Neera Tanden for OMB (120 days).

Alex Cole: “It seems Matt Gaetz has a minor problem.”

+ With RFK, Jr, and Dr Oz now on the shelf in his cabinet of curiosities, where will Trump place Dr. Hannibal Lechter?

Blowback: A Wyoming judge struck down the state’s abortion ban, citing a 2012 amendment to the state Constitution designed to undermine ObamaCare. The amendment affirmed that “each competent adult shall have the right to make his or her own health care decisions.”

+++

+ When Biden showed up in Amazonia this week bragging about how he’d proved that you could maximize oil production and still protect the environment, his message was somewhat undermined by the fact that he looked like the leader of a Central American death squad, who had been trained in techniques of mass-killing at the School of the Americas…

+ Life expectancy in Delhi is almost 12 years shorter on average than it would be if the air quality met WHO standards: “In several areas of the city, pollution levels were more than 50 times higher than the World Health Organization’s recommended safe limit.”

+ Carbon Brief has put together an interactive summary of 750 extreme weather events, documenting the probable contribution of global warming. Finding: “74% were made more likely or severe because of climate change.”

+ According to the latest USDA survey, over 30% of California’s dairy herds are confirmed to be infected with H5N1 avian influenza. This situation is going to get much worse. Over to you, RFK, Jr.: An analysis of the avian flu virus taken from a hospitalized teenager in Vancouver, Canada, shows mutations that could help the virus spread more easily in humans.

+ The Biden administration has retreated from its previous position that a UN treaty should cap global plastic production. Environmental groups have characterized the reversal as “absolutely devastating.”

+ Indonesia, one of the planet’s most rapacious coal consumers, vowed this week to retire all of its currently operating coal plants within the next 15 years.

+ Poll of Canadians on climate change…

“Global warming is…”

Fact/caused by humans: 61%
Fact/caused by nature: 25%
Not real: 10%

Research Co. / Nov 10, 2024 / n=1000 / Online

+ A great video eulogy to a great grizzly, senselessly run down by a motorist outside Grand Teton…

+ By early November, more than 140,000 acres of forest had burned in the East, double the amount in 2023. Much of the Northeast has experienced drought-like conditions for the past two months. Vast swaths of the region have experienced a rainfall deficit of nine inches or more. The soil moisture rate in New York and New Jersey is 95% below normal.

+ After the first atmospheric river of the season blew through western Oregon this week, I tiptoed across the rickety iron footbridge over 99 East to survey the swollen Willamette River as it nearly washed out the 40-foot falls here in Oregon City.

+ God on Oprah this morning: “I don’t regret the Flood, but I do regret the Ark.”

+++

Not only does Trump want to use the military in his mass deportation scheme, but he has also vowed to  invoke the Insurrection Act to use the US Army “to get crime out of our cities.” He has specifically mentioned sending federal troops into the “crime dens” of Chicago and New York City. During a campaign rally in Iowa this fall, Trump declared: “You look at what is happening to our country — we cannot let it happen any longer. Because you are not supposed to be involved in that, you just have to be asked by the governor or the mayor to come in; the next time, I am not waiting.”

+ The US is currently experiencing 41 “national emergencies.” One of them, which Jimmy Carter declared in 1979, involves freezing Iranian assets and remains in force.

+ Unless, of course, the emergency orders actually help people…

+ The mass arrests and deportations could all, well, go south very quickly. It turns out that public support for deportations in the US varies wildly, from 62% to 33%. The answer depends entirely on how the question is asked…

+ A 2022 study by a team of Stanford economists estimates that nearly a quarter of all US innovation since 1976 has been produced by high-skilled, foreign-born individuals, despite the US’s relatively onerous immigration requirements.

+ This week, Governor Greg Abbott offered 1,600 acres of Texas land for the incoming Trump administration to build detention camps for migrants.

+ Katherine Yon Ebright, Brennan Center: “There is no plausible basis for saying that migration or narcotics trafficking constitutes an invasion or predatory incursion that would justify the president invoking the Alien Enemies Act. That law (deeply flawed as it is) is designed for wartime use.”

+ Jesse Watters on FoxNews: Watters: “If I was a migrant and I saw that Trump won, I’d pack my bags and get on the first flight to Nicaragua because here’s the other option: 6 AM ICE knocks on your door, puts you in a van. Your wife had already left for work. Where is she now?”

+ Watters is such a smug wheezebag that he could have gotten a job as the weekend press spokesman for Blinen’s State Department.

+++

+ Memo to Vivek and Elon: the number of people directly or indirectly working for the federal government as a share of the U.S. population age 16 and older is lower now than when President Reagan was in office. If you’re serious about slashing the federal workforce, you need to target the Pentagon.

+ The Washington Post’s Jeff Stein reported this week on Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswarmy’s plans to purge the federal workforce without Congressional approval…

+ So AI will not only takeover your job, it’s going to be used to target yours for elimination. (Israel’s doing this with live Quadcopter bullets and airstrikes.)

+ Suppose Trump follows through on his promise to kill Biden’s student loan policies. In that case, some payments will go up and some federal loan programs that parents use to fund their children’s education could be eliminated entirely.

+ The big early financial winners from Trump’s election: Crypto, dentist suppliers, private-prison operators and Elon Musk…

+++

+ Over to you, Don McLean…

Oh, and as I watched him on the stage
My hands were clenched in fists of rage
No angel born in Hell
Could break that Satan spell
And as the flames climbed high into the night
To light the sacrificial rite
I saw Satan laughing with delight
The day the music died

A new study in Nature shows that among  87,000 people aged 50 and older in 22 countries, internet use was associated with better mental health. The exceptions are England and the US.

+ Claud Cockburn: “Sure, there were moderates in Spain. But moderates never do anything–nothing except tell radicals to be more moderate.”

+ Trump won the 15% of swing voters by 8 points. These voters intensely disliked the Biden presidency and cited inflation as their top issue. Generally, they viewed the Trump presidency more positively than they did Trump as a person. 

+Nearly three-quarters (72%) of the American electorate want to transform the U.S. political and economic system, while 1 in 4 independents say that “the system needs to be torn down completely” (26%). (Navigator Research Survey, Nov. 14).

+A survey cited in a column (Does Anyone Trust the Government) by the New York Times’s Serge Schmemann “asked whether they believed America’s best days were ahead, whether the U.S. was the greatest country in the world and whether they can trust people in government, a strong majority of respondents from every political leaning gave a resounding ‘no.’”

+ Nobody seems to like anyone, anywhere…

Favorability ratings of the four main parties in the UK

Labor
Favorable 28%
Unfavorable 49%
Net: – 21

Reform (Farage, et al.)
Fav 27%
Unfav 46%
Net: – 19

Greens
Fav 25%
Unfav 31%
Net: – 6

Conservatives (Tories)
Fav 24%
Unfav 49%
Net: -25

–Ipsos

+ The same poll says that one in five Britons think they’re worse off economically since Labor took power.

+ You can understand why they feel that way: More than one in three children and one in four adults live in poverty in the UK, the highest levels in the 21st century, according to a study by the Social Metrics Commission.

+ Special Forces Vet. Evan Hafer to Joe Rogan on Trump Declaring War on the Cartels: 

“‘It is going to get wild come January 20th…If we declare war on the cartel, these dudes are not gonna understand what the fuck is going on. They are in for a world of ultra-violence they’ve never actually felt before … They have fucking no clue if we organize these Tier 1 units against them … What I would be doing if I was down there … I would be getting ready to retire right now because if Delta Force is hunting me, bro I would be so terrified.”

+ Are we really meant to believe that the Mexican cartels are strangers to violence?

+ The truth is that American wars in Vietnam, Laos and Afghanistan caused opium poppy cultivation to spike and heroin use in the US to rise, while the CIA’s covert wars in Central America sent guns and money down south and returned cargo planes full of cocaine to the US, sparking the crack epidemic.

+ Montana’s Senator Steve Daines wants the NFL team in DC to return to its racist name and logo, saying it’s a “symbol of strength.”…

+ In 36 hours, Nancy Mace posted 262 times on X about banning  Sarah McBride, the highest-ranking transgender elected official in American history, from the women’s bathrooms at the Capitol.

+ Sen. John Kennedy, the crackpot from Louisiana, making depraved remarks about Palestinians on the floor of the US Senate during the debate over Bernie Sanders’s resolutions to block some “offensive” arms sales to Israel: “They’re just bad people. And they hurt other people and they take other people’s stuff…They want to kill us and drink our blood out of a boot. It’s just a fact.”

+ In the end, Sanders could only muster 19 votes for his rather tame resolutions to support existing US law on weapons sales to Israel: Durbin, Helmy (on one of 3 resolutions) Heinrich, Hirono, Kaine, King, Lujan, Markey, Merkley, Murphy, Ossoff, Sanders, Schatz, Shaheen, Smith, Van Hollen, Warnock, Warren, and Welch. Where was Rand Paul? Surely, his father would have been onboard.

+ Tammy Baldwin, the Wisconsin progressive, courageously voted: “Present.”

+++

+ Likely in retaliation for Ukraine firing both US and British missiles into Russia, Russia launched a “large ballistic missile,” which the Ukrainian military ominously described as an ICBM, into Ukraine. If true, it would be the first ICBM used by Russia in the war, though the Pentagon’s initial assessment was that the missile didn’t have an “intercontinental” range. In addition to hypersonic Kh-47M2 “Kinzhal” missiles at Dnipro from a MiG-31K fighter jet flying over Russia’s Tambov region and “seven Kh-101 cruise missiles fired from Tu-95MS strategic bombers.” 

+ The barrage of missiles apparently targeted a medical rehabilitation center in Dnipro. No injuries were reported, but “emergency power cuts in Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, Odesa, Dnipropetrovsk and Donetsk regions following the air alert.”

+ Jeremy Corbyn on reports that Ukraine’s military used British-supplied Storm Shadow cruise missiles to strike targets inside Russia for the first time:

The Prime Minister should make a statement to Parliament immediately to confirm whether UK missiles have been fired into Russia.

He must tell the British public if this means we are now at war with a nuclear power, what risk this poses to people in Britain, and why this action was taken without any approval from Parliament.

I have consistently condemned Russia for its invasion of Ukraine and called for a diplomatic solution to stop the endless bloodshed.

As we edge closer and closer to catastrophe, we should be doing everything in our power to bring about de-escalation and peace. Instead, our political leaders have added fuel to the fire and gambled with people’s lives for political gain.

Presidents and Prime Ministers must know that in the event of nuclear war, nobody wins.

I’m not interested in bombs. I’m interested in peace – and I will continue to campaign for peace in Ukraine, Gaza, Yemen, Sudan, the DRC and beyond.”

+ Pete Hegseth, Trump’s pick to run the Pentagon, wants women removed from combat roles, alleging they are destructive to unit cohesion.  According to a November 2023 Defense Department report, as recently as 2022, women made up 17.5% of the U.S. military’s active-duty force and 21.6% of the selected reserve.

+ Since March 2011, at least 30,293 children have been killed in Syria, including 225 who died due to torture, according to the Syrian Network for Human Rights. Another 5,298 children are still detained or have been forcibly disappeared.

+ Brazil’s federal police indicted former President Jair Bolsonaro and 36 other people on charges of attempting a coup to keep Bolsanaro in office after his electoral defeat in the 2022 elections.

+++

+ Let them force public school students to read the Scriptures and soon enough Texas schoolkids will hate the Bible as much as they do algebra and English comp…

+ Alexander Cockburn said that compulsory school prayer was the best inoculation against contracting the virus of Christianity in adulthood.

+ How can the people who constantly plead for a return to comity, civility, and decorum in politics–assuming there ever was such a prelapsarian state in the US–be counted on to fight the most outrageous policies pursued by people who don’t have those words in their vocabulary? 

+ MAGA Youth leader Josiah Moody says sexual intercourse should only be for procreation and that sex without procreation is “gay sex” and people who are infertile should remain celibate. But is it ok to spill Onan’s seed if you’re infertile?

+ So much for those famously pesky fact-checkers at the New Yorker… From Brendan Gill’s review of the film version of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold: “in every respect an admirable translation to the screen of the fantastically popular thriller by Jean le Carré.”

Here’s a Story About Surfer Joe, He Caught the Big One But He Let It Go

Booked Up
What I’m reading this week…

A Woman Among Wolves: My Journey Through 40 Years of Wolf Recovery
Diane K. Boyd
(Greystone)

The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World
David Graeber
(Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Didion & Babitz
Lili Anolik
(Scribner)

Sound Grammar
What I’m listening to this week…

Pink Elephants on Parade
Sun Ra and His Arkestra
(Modern Harmonic)

All American Music
Jimmy Dale Gilmore and the Flatlanders
(Omnivore)

Soulful: the Jamaican Upsetter Singles (1969-1970)
Scratch “Lee” Perry
(Doctor Bird)

Every Subordinate Leader Despises His Own Underlings

“Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology, insofar as it is fundamentally aristocratic, and aristocratic and militaristic elitism cruelly implies contempt for the weak. Ur-Fascism can only advocate a popular elitism. Every citizen belongs to the best people of the world, the members of the party are the best among the citizens, every citizen can (or ought to) become a member of the party. But there cannot be patricians without plebeians. In fact, the Leader, knowing that his power was not delegated to him democratically but was conquered by force, also knows that his force is based upon the weakness of the masses; they are so weak as to need and deserve a ruler. Since the group is hierarchically organized (according to a military model), every subordinate leader despises his own underlings, and each of them despises his inferiors. This reinforces the sense of mass elitism.” – Umberto Eco, “Ur-Fascism”

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