The Climate Crisis Should Be a Bigger Issue in 2024

I was finally able to reach my friends in Boone, North Carolina and Damascus, Virginia by text today. They said that they are physically fine, but they have no power, no internet, no water, scant cell service, and no way out, really, right now. Both towns are flooded, mud-covered, devastated. One texted that he's "emotionally wrecked" as he waited in a line to get a shower at a truck stop. Because he's my friend, of course he added, "Just found out I didn't have to blow the attendant." We went back and forth a bit on this lucky truck stop employee before I figured I should let him go for the sake of his battery. He probably had more important things to take care of, like getting the tree off his car. I didn't get to ask him how his dogs did. 

Hurricane Helene was going to be a motherfucker of a storm. Forecasters saw that from the moment it formed, and they predicted the storm surge and the wind damage that would hit Florida, which was, in context, pretty fortunate that Helene didn't turn slightly more east and directly hit Tampa/St. Petersburg. The area that was hit is not densely populated, but it badly fucked up towns in the Big Bend coast, like Cedar Key and Steinhatchee, wiping a couple off the map. 

Helene was a fast storm, which not only meant a significant storm surge, but also that its wind and rains would last as it headed inland. So, yeah, parts of Georgia, NC, SC, Virginia, and Tennessee got drowned. Appalachia was hit ridiculously hard; a good chunk of the tourist town of Chimney Rock in NC is just gone. Weather experts predicted flash floods, landslides, and death, and that's exactly what happened, with roads, bridges, and highways just slammed, making getting supplies in that much harder. This is a catastrophe that will change regions of the country.

And it was made significantly worse by the climate crisis that we've been warned about widely for a couple of generations. If you wanna read the science about how warming waters and seas rising has made things worse for Helene and other recent storms, you can do much better than me summarizing smarter people. 

The climate crisis is the most significant issue facing the world. Period. It's more important than immigration (although it's tied to migration because of how climate change is rendering places unlivable). It's more important than the wars going on or crime or inflation. How can that be? Because you can end wars in a heartbeat if the people at war want to. You can arrest criminals. You can do shit that has an immediate impact on almost anything. But not the climate crisis. You're not shooting your way out of a typhoon. We're a few decades behind where we should be in doing anything, and even if we go full force into mitigating the things that cause climate change now, we're a few decades, at least, from preventing shit from getting worse, let alone better. It's possible (see the ozone layer, which is healing but is about 40 years from finally being whole again). 

But before we get anywhere close, we are going to have to deal with the clusterfuck of awfulness that's going to tumble down on us like a Jenga game we couldn't help but play until the end. That means more weather events - floods, fires, droughts, and more - and it means dealing with the massive refugee crisis that is going to play out as areas of South Asia and elsewhere become too hot for human habitation. 

So you'd think that we might want to hear more about their plans to deal with the climate crisis from our presidential candidates. Well, I mean, really, we should hear more from Democrat Kamala Harris because Donald Trump and his Republican death cult have just decided, "Fuck it. Burn it all. We don't fucking care." 

Trump has stopped calling the climate crisis a "hoax" because someone finally told him it didn't poll well (Trump has no problem sounding like a fucking moron if people applaud the moronic statements). Instead, we get snide obnoxiousness. His brain ever stuck in the 1980s, Trump likes to say, as he did in Michigan this month, that the real global warming is the possibility of nuclear war, "not that the ocean’s going to rise in 400 years and eighth of an inch, and you’ll have more seafront property if that happens. I said, is that good or bad? I said, isn’t that a good thing? If I have a little property on the ocean, I have a little bit more property. I have a little bit more ocean." It's all so obviously false that it's shameful to have to fact check it. Otherwise, all Trump says is "Drill, baby, drill" (which is a line he stole from Michael Steele, who coined the phrase in 2008) and both he and Project 2025 talk about eliminating any restrictions on oil, gas, and coal and just basically letting the earth die as rich fucks get ready to leave for Mars in Elon's rockets or what the fuck ever. In other words, more "Fuck it."

It's a perfect opening for the Harris campaign, perhaps another way to appeal to young people, and Hurricane Helene provides the opportunity to bring up how Trump wants to kill any effort to shift to greener energy. Yes, oil production is higher under Joe Biden than under any other president, but Biden is also lighting a fire under the green economy, using the climate crisis as a way to develop new industries and more jobs. Trump would cancel all of that. It's a perfect foundation for Harris.

On her campaign website, here's the entirety of what it says about the climate crisis: "As President, she will unite Americans to tackle the climate crisis as she builds on this historic work, advances environmental justice, protects public lands and public health, increases resilience to climate disasters, lowers household energy costs, creates millions of new jobs, and continues to hold polluters accountable to secure clean air and water for all. As the Vice President said at the international climate conference, COP28, she knows that meeting this global challenge will require global cooperation and she is committed to continuing and building upon the United States’ international climate leadership. She and Governor Walz will always fight for the freedom to breathe clean air, drink clean water, and live free from the pollution that fuels the climate crisis." Her economic plan only mentions it in terms of those jobs. It's honestly a little more vague than it should be.

At the presidential debate, asked directly about it, Harris said, "Well, the former president had said that climate change is a hoax. And what we know is that it is very real. You ask anyone who lives in a state who has experienced these extreme weather occurrences, who now is either being denied home insurance or is being jacked up. You ask anybody who has been the victim of what that means in terms of losing their home, having nowhere to go. We know that we can actually deal with this issue. The young people of America care deeply about this issue." And then she said, "And I am proud that as vice president over the last four years, we have invested a trillion dollars in a clean energy economy while we have also increased domestic gas production to historic levels" before using that to pivot to manufacturing and autoworker jobs in a clean energy economy. 

That's all well and good. I mean, hey, jobs that might help are awesome. And, obviously, when it comes to climate policy, Harris is not just head and shoulders above Trump. In terms of relatively giving a damn, she's a goddamn superhero while he's a dried up turd. And I get that campaigns have to respond to the issues that people say they care about, but mostly they care about those because politicans (and right-wing media) are lying to them, hyping things that aren't real. There is no crime problem. There is no immigration problem (other than the need to fund so many pieces of the immigration system better, from courts to caring for migrants). And, yes, there was an inflation problem, but the rate has slowed tremendously.

The climate crisis is very real. People are far more likely to be victims of a weather-related event than they are ever going to be victims of violent crime or get their throats cut by migrants (which Trump actually said yesterday). Voters deserve to hear how fucked things are and how fucked things are getting and they deserve to know Harris is going to work to unfuck it and Trump is going to ensure that they are fucked even more. 

It's more than just oil vs. wind or coal jobs vs. battery plant jobs. It's about communities and lives being wiped away.

Springfield, Ohio Is a Warning About a Second Trump Administration

As odious as the vast majority of her statements and her beliefs are, former Republican presidential candidate and winner of "Most Predictable Hypocrite of the Year" Nikki Haley did get something right about Donald Trump before her defiance crumbled. She spoke frequently about the "chaos" that follows in Trump's wide wake, like Godzilla without the personality marching through Tokyo again. She even had an ad called "More Chaos," where the narrator says things like "The chaos that surrounds him is bad enough" and "with Trump it’s just more chaos." It's an apt, if relatively benign, word for the clusterfuck of madness, violence, hate, and stupidity that Trump brings to pretty much every situation. 

If you want an object lesson in that chaos, you can look at what Trump and his campaign to stay out of prison...sorry, for president has done to Springfield, Ohio. In just a couple of weeks, it went from a community that was more or less functioning, growing, even succeeding, because of the influx of migrants from Haiti to a tangle of anger, threats, and division. The Haitian migrants are there completely legally thanks to getting Temporary Protected Status from the Biden administration, which means that they can stay in the United States as long as that status is renewed (currently until August 2025). They got that status because of how violent and terrible things are in Haiti. The people there really are living with gangs taking over the place, unlike the bullshit that Trump tosses around about that kind of thing here. 

Why did 10-15,000 Haitians (not the 32,000 that Trump is stupidly tossing around) head to Springfield? Because they heard there were jobs that they could get and that the cost of living was low. That's it. It's that simple. It's no different than what any other immigrant ever wanted from this country. See, TPS is different than just letting migrants in while they await asylum claims going before a judge. The migrants under TPS can work. And that's what they did in a town that was on a downslide. They took jobs that were going unfilled. They opened businesses. They worked their asses off in this city of 58,000 and most of the people there were fine with them. Sure, there were motherfuckers because there are always motherfuckers, and, yes, tempers flared after one Haitian ran a stop sign in August 2023 and crashed his minivan into a school bus, killing one of the kids. When Trump and Vance started using the dead child as a prop weapon against immigrants in general, the boy's father told them, in essence, to keep his son's name out of their filthy whore mouths. But mostly, everyone, including the Republican mayor of Springfield and the Republican governor of Ohio, saw the influx of migrants as a positive, as an opportunity to make the place grow economically. Indeed, employers are thrilled to have the migrants, with some saying they would have had to close down because of the lack of workers.

And then Trump and Vance fucked it all up by bringing chaos to Springfield. They fucked it up by latching onto a hysterical, third-hand Facebook lie about migrants eating people's pets. You know they have have pets in Haiti, right? Just like people everywhere? Then it expanded to ducks and geese from the parks being taken and eaten. Again, none of it, not a single goddamn case, turned out to be true. But that didn't slow Trump, Vance, and all the MAGA masturbators from spewing hate jizz in the faces of the people of Springfield, like the goddamn Attorney General of Ohio, who has been kissing Trump's ass like it's made of candy and money. The truth didn't fucking matter, not even when Trump got fact-checked during his debate with Kamala Harris. 

He doubled down and expanded the hatred of [non-white] immigrants, and skeevy simp JD Vance went right along with it, declaring that even though the Haitians are here legally, he considers TPS an illegal program (that Trump used to protect Venezuelan migrants - no, really) and thus the Haitians are "illegal aliens" to him. Except you can't fucking do that. You can't just jabber out some bullshit and say that's reality now. They are here legally until that legal status is rescinded by assholes like Trump and Vance. One dick's rhetoric doesn't change that fact.

Every single fucking thing they accused the Haitians of turned out to be a lie. Vance said the Haitians caused more communicable diseases. But according to the Wall Street Journal, "Information from the county health department, however, shows a decrease in infectious disease cases countywide, with 1,370 reported in 2023—the lowest since 2015." They said that the Haitians are causing more car accidents. However, the number of car accidents in Springfield has declined in the years since the migrants have arrived, reaching a five-year low. They said that the Haitians cause more crime. The county jail has 199 people in it right now. Two of them are Haitian migrants. None of it is true. Not a single goddamned thing.

And the result of all of these lies is that the anti-immigrant right has turned life in Springfield to shit. No,  again, it wasn't perfect. Obviously, a surge in people moving to a town, no matter where they're from or what their race is, is going to tax the resources of said town, and that has certainly happened. But, for the most part, that was being worked on. 

Instead of steady progress, Donald Trump and JD Vance have plunged Springfield into a fucking nightmare of death threats and bomb threats against schools and hospitals and public buildings, taking away more resources from the town. Yes, the threats have been hoaxes, but you still have to have evacuations and securing the location because you don't want to be wrong if it turns out to be real. Events large and small have been cancelled, like a Culturefest and an art project that were supposed to celebrate the diversity of Springfield. Or a debate between candidates for local and state offices, which was to be held in city hall, the site of several bomb threats. 

The Haitian community is frightened, as you imagine, with some saying that they're afraid of leaving their homes. By the way, home prices are rising because one of the things the Haitian migrants do is buy shitty houses and refurbish them. Yeah, they are directly making Springfield a wealthier town. 

And imagine how fucked this must be for the kids in Springfield. Forced out of their schools and back into online classes for the past week, now funding has been diverted to make the school buildings more secure so the kids can return to the classroom on Monday. More childless cat ladies have given a shit about the kids in Springfield than self-proclaimed champion of children JD Vance has. 

The fuckery is not ending, not with Trump promising to visit, despite pleas for him not to. Bottom-feeding child of immigrant parents Vivek "Fuckboi" Ramaswamy held a town hall in Springfield, and every kind of racist backwards-ass fucknut showed up to say how bad the Haitians are. Everything they said was a repetition of a lie they heard from Trump, Vance, and right-wing media twatfleas. And that’s the point, isn't it? Nobody cared about this shit and then Trump and Vance started talking about it and now because a small group of people listened to those fuckheads, they have made this something that we’re supposed to give a shit about. They essentially willed the problems into being. And now all these assholes are giving a shit about something they didn’t give a shit about before, but the only thing that they are right about is that there are Haitians living in Springfield. Beyond that? Nothing. 

It's chaos and it's terrorism, purely and simply. MAGA is a terrorist movement, and we should be treating it as such. Trump and Vance know exactly what their idiot hordes of voters and their conservative media click whores will do when they say something. It's ludicrous when they pretend they don't. And what's going on in Springfield is a warning about the chaos of a second Trump term. Think about what happens if he's reelected, rescinds TPS status, and deports all of Springfield's migrants. The city would be decimated. Businesses would close. Home prices would plummet. The city would die or need a massive amount of aid.

And that's just the beginning. If they can do this to Springfield, they can do it to any decently-sized town they want. Hell, if they start rounding up all immigrants that either are here undocumented, or the ones who are here legally who they just fucking declare need to be deported, it would fuck up the economies of so many places. Or the entire nation, really. 

Trump's doing this because he fucking well can because no one is trying to use legal means to stop him. He is knowingly causing terrorism. He doesn't care how many kids are scared, how many people are hurt, how much it makes communities take economic hits. He doesn't care if he turns neighbor against neighbor. He would rather all that happen than declare he is wrong. His ego is more important than your life. In his quest to get reelected and avoid prison, he will gladly drag all of us down with him. He will make you cater to his racism and his hatreds or he'll make life a living hell for you. He will sow divisiveness and chaos because it benefits him. 

By the way, before you think Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine is some kind of profile in courage, he says that he still supports Trump for president and he refused to call what Trump is saying "a lie" because "I don’t know what’s inside his head." So, you know, ultimately, they're all totally fine with this shit.

The Joy of Watching Kamala Harris Beat Down an Old Man

It's not hyperbolic to say that Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee for president, beat the shit out of former president (no, really, he was once president. Of the whole United States) and current GOP nominee Donald Trump at last night's debate. She didn't just get the best of him, throwing down genuine facts and insulting observations in equal measure. She beat him down in a way that he probably hasn't been beaten down since his hideous father likely pounded him. She degraded his record, reduced his presence, and obliterated his talking points. She was, to this incredibly biased observer, near perfect in her execution of the execution of Trump's ego. Harris fucked him up good. 

And, goddamn, we needed it. We needed to see someone say exactly who he is with clarity and energy, someone willing to go there, to all those weird and dangerous alleyways where his brain resides, and someone willing to call the Devil "the Devil" to his stupid, evil face. The dichotomy was stark. She's smart; he's dumb. She's poised; he's belligerent. She gives a damn; he couldn't fucking care less. She's lively; he's a fucking lump.

On that last point, Trump barely physically moved the entire debate. It was weird, like he was a mannequin. He looked at Harris very few times. The biggest motions he made were to lean into the mic for emphasis on some moronic point or other or to contort the mushy flesh of his face into a shit-eating grin. Gravity has not been kind to Trump. Always a frowner, his jowls are now pulled earthward by time and weight into a bullfrog-like permanent scowl awaiting a chance to bellow.

Meanwhile, Harris, at her lectern, danced around him with the physical lightness and fierce confidence of a boxer who knows exactly when and where to punch. She baited him constantly, and he fell into every single trap. And when he fell, she hogtied him again and again, like a rodeo cowboy who lassoed a steer. Unlike that steer, which might learn to not leave the pen after a few hog-tyings, Trump would rush out crazily every time, only to end up with his hooves in the air. 

On substance, it was laughable to watch Harris, an accomplished, experienced woman who worked her ass off to get where she is, go up against a convicted felon and rapist whose TV celebrity and blatant racism inspired the worst fucking people in the country to vote for him. You were literally seeing a prosecutor take on a game show host and it went exactly like you'd think that would go.

Every time Trump lied, she tore him a new asshole. When he said, "Every legal scholar, every Democrat, every Republican, liberal, conservative, they all wanted this issue to be brought back to the states where the people could vote," she ripped into him about the suffering that the end of guaranteed abortion rights has brought to women in places where it's banned. When he refused to answer whether or not he'd support Ukraine in its war with Russia, she gutted him by saying that he would let Russia have Ukraine and "Putin would be sitting in Kiev with his eyes on the rest of Europe, starting with Poland. And why don’t you tell the 800,000 Polish Americans right here in Pennsylvania how quickly you would give up for the sake of favor" and talked about how world leaders think he's a fucking joke, an easily flattered bitch boy. By the end, she had torn so many new assholes in him that he'll be shitting out of his arms, legs, and chest for months.

And when Trump would say something completely divorced from reality, Harris would smile as if she thought it was time to give Gramps his pudding cup, shut off Fox "news," and tuck him in. He couldn't deal with her constant emasculation of him. You could see his brain, which is always ready to overheat from the slightest usage, short circuit when she brought up how people leave his rallies because they're bored or when she pointed out all the people who worked with him who fucking despise him now. Once that happened, he couldn't get control again. 

By the way, bragging that you fire people you just hired a few months or a year before isn't the own he thinks it is. It just says that you suck at management. 

But the most disturbing part of the debate was how Trump brings every fucking issue back to his warped view of immigration. Harris nailed it early on when she said, "I’ll tell you something, he’s going to talk about immigration a lot tonight, even when it’s not the subject that is being raised."And she was right. Jobs? "We have millions of people pouring into our country from prisons and jails, from mental institutions and insane asylums, and they’re coming in and they’re taking jobs that are occupied right now by African-Americans and Hispanics and unions." His rallies? "What they have done to our country by allowing these millions and millions of people to come into our country and look at what’s happening to the towns all over the United States." January 6? "I ask what about all the people that are pouring into our country and killing people that she allowed to pour in?" Trump was flailing and always returned to this well. It's like watching the world's stupidest gorilla fall out of a tree again and again and instead of giving up, he shits in his hand and rubs his face with it, thinking it shows how strong he is when all it does is make him have a face full of shit.

The other thing that's clear is the only source of information for Trump is right-wing media because it is constantly fawning over him.  At one point, he cited "Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity, Jesse, all of these people" for debunking something. The whole "Haitians eat pets" thing came from click-seeking bullshitters on the right and no one who isn't terminally online would understand a single fucking thing about that (trust me - I've had more than a few people ask, "What the fuck?"). When he was fact-checked on that by moderator David Muir, Trump said one of the most pathetic things I've ever heard a grown up say, let alone someone running for president: "But the people on television are saying their dog was eaten by the people that went there." I'd go into hiding from embarrassment, but I'm capable of feeling shame. 

There were too many idiotic things that Trump said to mention. When he said about Putin, "He’s got nuclear weapons. They don’t ever talk about that. He’s got nuclear weapons. Nobody ever thinks about that," I thought, "Yeah, they do, motherfucker. If he didn't have nukes, NATO would have bombed him into submission." When he said that Democrats wouldn't vote "to change" the Affordable Care Act, I thought, "No, motherfucker. The bill wasn't to change anything. It was to get rid of it and then hope your replacement plan might go beyond the concept stage at some point."

Harris has faced so many smarter, sharper, quicker opponents. It was a joy to see her treat him like the skeevy corner masturbator that he is. 

And, yeah, I know, I know, I fucking know that this debate didn't change many minds. One thing I hear often about what I write is that I'm preaching to the choir. And my response is always the same: "The choir deserves to be preached to. That's why they go to church all the time." If I were to expand on the metaphor, I'd say that there is always a chance that a few sinners will come into the church and get religion. That's not the only reason to preach, but it sure as hell is nice when it happens. 

Harris's evisceration of Trump and the entire empty charade of MAGA ideology might sway a few people in the narrow swath of voters who are still persuadable. But the real accomplishment was in pumping up the rest of us, we the choir, and getting us geared up to get out there and work to make this presidency happen and end the tyranny of Trump's drain on our national spirit. She showed us how to handle it: with the sword of muted rage and a dagger of a smile. 

Note to Corporate Media: You Don't Have to Act Like Trump and Vance Are Serious People

Let us say, and why not, that Democratic vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz is asked about his GOP counterpart and declares in an interview, "JD Vance's whole purpose in this world is to blow goats." When asked what he means, Walz could clarify, "I mean that Senator and Republican vice-presidential candidate JD Vance has one reason for living, and that's to suck goat dick. His entire life would be unfulfilled and he will be miserable if he doesn't fellate goats on a regular basis. And I mean the whole act. From gently tongue-bathing the goat's enormous testicles to bring it to full erection and then going down on that straw-sized dick until it ejaculates in his mouth. A goat dick-less JD Vance has no real value system or meaning in his life and he would have chosen a path to misery."

How should the major media outlets react to such an absurd thing? Would CNN ask Vance if Walz is correct? Would they have a panel discussion on the idea that orally pleasuring goats is Vance's purpose? Would commentators on the left quickly agree with Walz and insist that Vance's lack of blowing goats clouds his judgment and the only way he can be a contributing member of society and not some sad goatless dude is to take the goat jizz regularly? Would other Democrats praise Walz for being brave enough to say the truth about Vance and goat blowing? 

The answer is "Of fucking course not." It would be treated as deranged and baffling, as sign of Walz's unfitness for office and of the depravity of Democrats. The condemnation would be general and widespread, including from Democrats, likely leading to Walz being forced to drop off the Democratic ticket. Oh, sure, there would be some of us (me) who would defend Walz for being fucking hilarious. But we know that the outragegasm would be unending, and no reporter would ever let Harris or any Democrat get away with not constantly responding to it. Some things are beyond the pale, and they should be. There should be some things that politicians say that are disqualifying. 

Like, I dunno, maybe being on record constantly that women only have value and worth in American society if they breed. See, it's not just that JD Vance has said and keeps saying shit like that a woman who emphasizes her career is a "miserable person who can’t have kids because [she] already passed the biological period when it was possible." It's that the Most Important Newspapers and other media treat Vance and Donald Trump like they are Very Serious People with Very Serious Ideas that need Very Serious Consideration when, actually, no, they absolutely do not. Anyone espousing a philosophy that says that women who don't give birth to children are innately unhappy or that people without kids don't have a serious stake in the future of the world is an obvious fool and kind of a dick. 

We don't need reporting about how saying such nonsense affects voters. We need journalists saying that none of that is true and no one should believe it. It's that recent canard that if you have one person saying it's raining and the other person saying it's not, it's the journalist's job to open the goddamn window and tell everyone what's real. If someone is saying completely untrue shit, it's actually objective reporting to say that what they're saying is completely untrue shit. And it's completely valid to question other Republicans about what Vance has said and not let them get away with avoiding whether or not they think "the whole purpose of the postmenopausal female" is to help take care of grandchildren.

Last Thursday, in another of his rambling bullshit sessions, this time for the poor suckers in Potterville, Michigan, Trump went on a rant using the lie about transgender women at the Olympics: "You see the boxing in the Olympics, two transitioned people, they transitioned from men to women, did you see? Fighting, a young, beautiful Italian boxer, top boxer, they thought big things from her. And then bing. A left jab, just a jab. She go, 'Whoa, what? I just got hit with a horse.' Again, bing. She said, 'I’m out.' She quit. She couldn’t take it. Two punches. The second one likewise got into the ring with a couple of very talented women, just beat the hell out of them. They both won the gold medal, shockingly."

Trump likes to say that all of his incoherent, disorganized storytelling is called "the weave" by English professors and he says it has a point. Let me assure you, as an English professor (no, really), it's not called that. The only weaving is Trump creating fiction out of lies and the point is to spread hateful propaganda. News media should report that he's lying and then figure out if it's intentional or if he's fucked in the head or both.

There is no realm where this or anything Trump says needs to be taken seriously except as evidence of how delusional he is. And also how confused. In that same speech, without anything that anchored it to what he had been talking about, Trump seemed to swing into talking about his 2016 victory over Hillary Clinton: "And look, we did something that they’re very angry about. We beat somebody that should have been beaten in an election that we weren’t anticipated to win. But I thought we were going to win, because I came to Michigan the night before. We had 49,000 people. She came to Michigan the night before because she was told she may lose it. And this was an upset, so they had a fast tour. She had like 300 people. I said, 'Why would we lose?' We had the crowd you wouldn’t have believed it." 

Prior to this he was talking about electric cars and then, I think, President Biden at the Democratic National Convention. After this he introduced a soldier who was there supporting him. At no point did he mention Clinton. "She" in that quote is simply not defined. Can you show me a single moment from Biden where his brain seemed to leap to something so out out of context it was like he was giving another speech? No, you can't. 

The fact that the GOP ticket consists of an elderly man plainly declining mentally and a guy who lies about women in order to enslave them to childbirth and child care is the story that needs to be covered and simply isn't. And if it turns out that JD Vance is blowing goats, yes, that deserves some mention, too.

(Note: At the beginning, am I comparing having children to goat fellatio? Yes. Yes, I am.)

(Note 2: You are so right. I could have gone with couch-fucking. But, to me, that joke is played out, like a loveseat with too many secret sex holes.)

(Note 3: Yes, there is a cynical side of me which says that, of course, CNN would act like goat-blowing is now worthy of discussion because we'd all click on the clips of that panel to watch odious Scott Jennings talk about how goats need love.)

(Note 4: I couldn't figure out where to put this line, but I liked it, so here it is: "When Walz is asked if he would do anything to help JD Vance blow goats, like buy him a goat or bring him to a goat farm, Walz can put up his hands and say, 'Whoa, whoa, let's not get carried away.'")

A Poem for the Laborers

"Resistors"
by Brandon Som

"I just felt like he was fighting us with his machine."
             —Nellie Jo David

In Guadalajara to see where Motorola took the line
            my grandmother worked on, I can’t find the site
but spend the days in naves of a deconsecrated church

looking up at frescoes by Orozco. Here is a horse:
            a tow chain for tail, train piston for hock & hoof.
Over murdered Mexica, Cortez stands: lug nut hips

& kneecaps, gauntleted hand at the sword hilt, silver
            as a knot of solder. Opposite him: the Franciscan
& his Latin cross—miter-sawed angles hewn down

to dagger point—& an angel in assembly-line armor
            lifting a bloodied banner with the stenciled letters
of an alphabet, the one I must have started learning,

sing-song in the pitch & timbre of milk teeth, at 48th
            & Willetta, a one-bedroom duplex west of Papago’s
greasewood & buttes of sandstone & a block down

from the Motorola where my grandmother punched
            in nights to look after a conveyor of semiconductors—
those nascent ancient rotaries strung up to starlight

& empire (gaslighting like that Gast painting of progress
            & whiteness wrapped in telegraph wire, lithe & looping
as cake shop box string). No wall on O’odham land,

I hear the woman today protest from the bucket
            of a front-end loader—a Caterpillar, by her presence,
dumbstruck on tread wheels tall as vault doors, its maw

metal hollow, a confessional or old Mountain Bell
            phone booth she stepped into amid the felled saguaro
& ribs of organ pipe. Her body where dirt goes says

her body is the land the wall wants to eat. I stream this—
            download by data plan, by bandwidth, from the cloud
servers deep in their grid deserts to the crystalline

& rare earth minerals making my cell phone
            black box theater, making her code, making her
algorithm—both soprano & Mario Savio—the solder

seemingly quantum leap from soldada & solidarity.
            Still, I remember the ram’s horn baritone in my nana’s
King James, imagine her driving those years with riders

to shepherd the sound through solid state & know
            the harder truth: the defiant mic this woman makes,
resonates with her body beneath the digger’s teeth.

Some Perspective After the DNC Hangover

The 2024 Democratic National Convention was, by most ways you could look at it, a shockingly spectacular success, even if Beyonce' and Taylor Swift didn't show (and, really, they'd have been in the way). The absolute exuberance on display made it plain that President Joe Biden's decision to step aside and not seek reelection had unclenched the anxiety-puckered anuses of the Democrats, and that let them be able to cut loose, open one extra button on the shirt, loosen the belt, and have a great fucking time. The process of anointing Vice President Kamala Harris and Governor Tim Walz as the Democratic ticket was masterfully conceived and executed, and its purpose was clear: You wanna really make America great again? Kick Trump and his MAGA motherfuckers into the shitcan of history. 

To put it another way, the message was "Don't you want the crazy shit over with? Don't you just wanna go back to normal?" And that's a damn fine message 

So much of it was just energizing, hitting the right spot like a well-placed vibrator. Harris's speech was a solid Democratic wish list, with a few specific things. Mostly, she's going to keep going on Biden's trajectory, with maybe a few twists, because Biden's agenda has been really successful, even if most Americans don't know it. It just felt good to watch someone who can explain that shit in a straightforward way and who isn't a fucking lunatic. Harris has fully come into her own as the nominee for president, embodying the energy and hope that has been unleashed in the last month. And we needed that in ways that we didn't even realize.

Mostly, I was totally into it, often slobberingly so, if you read the other two posts I've done on the convention. I stand by those. Biden got it up one last time to kick some ass. Michelle Obama was the best speaker of the whole thing. And the whole event was filled with highlights. 

The biggest "fuck those fuckers" of the DNC was the concerted effort to take back American identity - the iconography, the symbols, the chants. Unlike previous times when Democrats wanted to out-patriot Republicans, it wasn't cringe or in shitty taste. Because Donald Trump is a convicted felon and a rapist, and because he led an insurrection on January 6, and because he regularly denigrates the country, including the military, it was easy for the Democratic Party to steal back the patriotism trophy. You wanna know who loves the country? The fucking party that doesn't celebrate the dickholes who stormed the Capitol to stop the certification of the 2020 election. You wanna know who sides with the military? The party that celebrates their elected veterans. Between the flags being waved and the chants of "USA! USA!," a casual viewer might have thought they turned into a Republican gathering. That is, until the cameras panned the faces in the crowd and saw the incredible diversity of the people waving and chanting. Instead of just one very white segment of the country claiming the mantle of patriotism, it was almost all of us represented there, the real United States. 

Other individual moments just hit hard for me. I couldn't adore Tim Walz's family more, and his son, Gus, sobbing and pointing while yelling for everyone around, "That's my dad!" was simply pure and honest love and emotion. It was a distillation of how this event was a catharsis for Democrats, a release, an exhalation, and a good cry. And all of the cockmites of the right who tried to degrade Gus for having feelings are just showing that they don't understand the true meaning of the very idea of family they lie about championing. (And the fact that Gus is neurodivergent doesn't matter here. You're allowed to love your parents unabashedly.)

Speaking of catharsis, for a whole bunch of us, seeing the Chicks up there performing the National Anthem was some kind of sweet vengeance. If you don't know the saga of how the then-Dixie Chicks had their superstardom squashed in a wholly bullshit controversy in 2003, then do yourself a favor and read about it. Every single right-winger who whines about "cancel culture" would have been part of the gabbling mob who demanded the blood of anyone who criticized the war in Iraq. The restoration of the Chicks as genuine American icons was long time coming. 

The other highlights for me belonged to the speakers who demonstrated how Republican policies and politicians affect the very real lives of very real, everyday people. The appearance of four of the Central Park 5, the Black and Hispanic men who were accused as teens of a horrific rape in 1989 and were later exonerated, reminded us not just of how shitty Donald Trump has been for his entire life (he took out a full-page ad in the New York Times calling for them to receive the death penalty) but also of how the criminal justice system mistreats non-white people. Others, like those who were affected by gun violence and those who have suffered because of the repeal of Roe v. Wade, reminded us that this shit is personal. If Republican fuckery hasn't taken something away from you yet, it's just a matter of time before it does. 

All of that was terrific and necessary and heartening. But one reason I waited for a couple of days to comment any more on the DNC is because I wanted the drunk feeling of ecstasy to pass and I wanted to recover from the hangover after. I'm not trying to kill the joy buzz. I love it. I want us to ride the joy wave into fully taking back the federal government and at least a few more states. Still, some bullshit must be acknowledged, if for no other reason than to understand when that bullshit potentially comes back to bite us on our joy-brimming asses.

For example, the lack of a Palestinian-American speaker was shameful. For most voters, it's not a deal-breaker, if they even noticed. But if Harris was going to make the statement she ended up making about the war in Gaza, having someone with family under threat speaking to the delegates would have framed it more poignantly. The delegate who was ready to go, Ruwa Romman, a state representative from Georgia, had a speech that would have emphasized the suffering of Gazans, but also mentioning freeing the hostages held by Hamas and how important other issue are to Muslim voters. 

It would have been a simple gesture that would have gone a long, long way to getting out a message about inclusivity, that the tent is large enough to encompass such difference, and that freedom of speech means including speech that everyone might not agree with (although what Romman wanted to say was not really any different from what Sen. Raphael Warnock, the parents of a Hamas hostage, and Harris herself said). But she was denied by the convention organizers. I get that one "from the river to the sea" yelled from the stage would have been exploited by the right. But there's no way that Romman, who is an ambitious politician with a real future, would have said that because it would undermine the credibility of the group she was representing, Uncommitted, a new organization that has a chance to make some real inroads on US policy towards Israel and Palestine. 

Along the same lines, the complete erasure of transgender speakers or issues was also significant. Yes, the transgender population in the United States is small, but issues related to transgender rights loom large in the political discourse. Hell, just before the convention began, the Supreme Court refused to lift a block on the Biden administration's new rule saying that Title IX covers transgender students. Trans people are literal and figurative punching bags on the right; they are victims of violence and the subject of a stream of laws attempting to make their treatment and existence illegal, especially when it comes to trans youth. And they deserved a couple of minutes to assert their right to live their lives unimpeded by the government. "Mind your own damn business" could certainly apply to those attacking the parents of trans kids.

And I gotta be an old school liberal here for a minute. I'm all for loving your country, but I'm a little uncomfortable with the flag-waving and chanting of "USA." I'm conflicted in that I do love taking that away from conservatives, but I just want to be cautious that the patriotism doesn't tilt into jingoism. I'm not being churlish for the sake of churlishness. I loved the state pride in the roll call, for example. But patriotism can end up being used as a convenient cover for lots of sins and a cudgel on those who dissent.

Along those lines of discomfort, I was frankly put off by the constant emphasis on the military and the promise to keep military spending high (and I don't mean veterans care, which should be more highly-funded). But the prime time part of the DNC avoided much talk about people living in poverty, beyond mentions about how the expanded tax credit took kids out of poverty. We have issues with people suffering from hunger and too many people who are unhoused. Sure, Harris promises more housing, but that's targeted at the middle class. Keeping the military "the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world" isn't nearly as important to me as expanded poverty programs like job training and community development. If the emphasis on the military was a way to appeal to Republicans or those mythical "independents," well, honestly, I'd rather expand the Democratic voter base to bring in the vast numbers of those with low incomes who don't vote. 

And one final thing, as long as I've already pissed you off: Yes, Harris's speech was very good, very much of the moment, very attuned to the vibes that came from the convention floor and the snowballing anti-MAGA movement. But it was also a cautious speech, one that didn't take any big policy swings. We're no longer talking about Medicare for All; instead, we're talking about lowering the cost of health care. Again, there's nothing wrong with that, but it surely doesn't take care of one of the most pressing ills in this country, medical debt. You can argue that this cautious approach is a way of getting back to normal, of continuing to recover from Trump and the pandemic, but you could also argue that this moment of great unity in the Democratic Party is a time to take a big swing or two. 

Look, I'm not saying that any of this takes away from what was, truly, possibly the most successful DNC of my lifetime. I get that it had to be cautious even in its exuberance (and especially after the incredibly daring change of the person at the top of the ticket). And I'm totally on board with getting past the election, killing the MAGA demon, and growing from there, all with a sense of joy and recommitment to what it means to be American. I see that as a strategy, and I hope that's what it is. I like Harris and Walz. I desperately want them to win. I just don't want caution and return to the previous normal to become the most we can hope for.  

Michelle Obama Shows How It's Done

In her pre-recorded speech for the Covid-limited 2020 Democratic National Convention, former First Lady Michelle Obama explained one of her standard lines about dealing with your opponent: "Over the past four years, a lot of people have asked me, 'When others are going so low, does going high still really work?' My answer: going high is the only thing that works, because when we go low, when we use those same tactics of degrading and dehumanizing others, we just become part of the ugly noise that’s drowning out everything else. We degrade ourselves. We degrade the very causes for which we fight." She went further, saying, "But let’s be clear: going high does not mean putting on a smile and saying nice things when confronted by viciousness and cruelty...Going high means standing fierce against hatred while remembering that we are one nation under God...And going high means unlocking the shackles of lies and mistrust with the only thing that can truly set us free: the cold hard truth." And then she said her harshest line of the speech: "So let me be as honest and clear as I possibly can. Donald Trump is the wrong president for our country," which isn't all that harsh, really, although she gave reasons why she believed that, especially highlighting the chaos caused by Trump during the pandemic's early days.

I've been critical about Obama's belief in "going high" because it simply seems quaint and unsuited to the moment, part of an imagined time in politics that really never existed but we like to pretend it did. But that speech demonstrated a small but significant shift in tone for Obama, from a seeming refusal to denigrate an opponent to stating, essentially, that Trump is a motherfucker and he will fuck mothers because that's what motherfuckers do. 

Last night, in person while getting a deservedly worshipful reception at the 2024 DNC in Chicago, her hometown, Michelle Obama's version of "going high" evolved even further. I don't think she gave up on the notion, as some have said. I just think she showed how to disembowel Trump with a stiletto rather than a chainsaw. You can do it without calling Trump "weird" or "crazy" but by demonstrating how he's both of those things. You can do it by treating him like a petulant child in need of a long time out (preferably in a small cell) and you can do it by showing how this shit is personal.

Obama eviscerated Trump's entire career with a simple phrase: "the affirmative action of generational wealth." It's got a side benefit of eviscerating RFK, Jr., too. She put it in terms that everyone there could understand, explaining how capitalism privileges those with that kind of wealth: "If we bankrupt the business or choke in a crisis, we don’t get a second, third, or fourth chance. If things don’t go our way, we don’t have the luxury of whining or cheating others to get further ahead. No. We don’t get to change the rules so we always win. If we see a mountain in front of us, we don’t expect there to be an escalator waiting to take us to the top." 

Yes, the Obamas are extremely rich now. But they didn't inherit it. They busted their asses from humble beginnings. Obama pointed out how Trump's skewed sensibilities make him so vile: "For years, Donald Trump did everything in his power to try to make people fear us. See, his limited narrow view of the world made him feel threatened by the existence of two hard-working and highly educated, successful people who happen to be black. I want to know, who’s going to tell him that the job he’s currently seeking might just be one of those black jobs? Look, it’s his same old con, doubling down on ugly, misogynistic, racist lies as a substitute for real ideas and solutions that will actually make people’s lives better." Obama wasn't holding back, but she was carving Trump up in the most "going high" way possible: using the insults to pump everyone up and hit them in the heart and the brain. It was kind of brilliant, as was the pivot to how Kamala Harris is the very opposite of that decadent, louche, ignorant asshole. 

Again, like Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton the night before, here was a party elder (I know she's just a few years older than Kamala Harris) saying, "Yes, go for Trump's neck and bite into those saggy orange labial folds and take him down." They took different routes there, Biden more personally angry, Clinton with more of a done-with-his-shit attitude. But Michelle Obama's speech, which will likely be the most-remembered from this convention (not the least because she is an electrifying speaker), asked us to turn away from Trump and all his petty shit and lies and bloviation and turn to each other to finish the job, that electing Harris has the effect of watching someone who has been sliced with a stiletto come to realize he's been gutted before he could do anything to stop it. That's some going high I can get behind. 

Joe Biden's Gifts to the Democratic Party and to the United States

Look, I don't know whether or not President Joe Biden is pissed off about giving in to the pressure put on him to drop out. If I were to venture a guess, I'd say that one thing he's angry about is that he didn't get to punch Donald Trump in his stupid, bulbous Tang-toned face. Rhetorically, of course. He wanted a knockout on Election Day. But rather than boxing, this has become tag-team wrestling, with Biden high-fiving Vice President Kamala Harris to enter the ring and finish the job.

If there is one thing that has come through since Biden first started running for president in April 2019, it's that he fucking hates Donald Trump. I mean, viscerally, savagely hates Trump with his whole body and soul. Even before Trump and his shit-flinging lunatic brigade decided to try to destroy Joe Biden by eviscerating his son, Hunter, Biden has held Trump in contempt, palpably disgusted that Trump even exists, let alone that he actually was able to become president and wreck Biden's beloved federal government. Biden destroyed Trump in 2020, but he left Trump strong enough to return, and so Biden wanted to, as he said so often when he was running, finish the job.

At the Democratic National Convention last night, Biden gave what was likely a variation of what would have been his acceptance of the nomination, turning into a valedictory speech, taking the well-earned victory lap on everything that he accomplished. He is absolutely one of the most consequential presidents in history. He took us from the depths of a pandemic that had been exacerbated in lives and in the economy by the rank incompetence and rampant narcissism of Donald Trump and raised us up. He pulled us back, using all the skill and tenacity he had accumulated and earned in his many decades in DC. 

Unencumbered by having any fucks left to give or needing to resupply his fucks for the future, Biden bore into Trump. In his 2020 DNC speech, Biden didn't say Trump's name. He didn't use the word "lie." He was aghast at what Trump had done as president, but he kept that personal hatred in check. Now, in 2024, after years of Republicans denigrating him and his family, he didn't have to pretend to be above it all. The working class kid could drag the rich dick into the street and brawl him there. He said, "In America, they’re safer today than when we were under Donald Trump.  Trump continues to lie about crime in America, like everything else" and "Trump continues to lie about the border" and "Typically Trump — once again putting himself first and America last."

The abject rage came out when Biden talked about Trump's routine and unrepentant denigration of the military. He fumed, "Who in the hell does he think he is?  Who does he think he is?" And he continued, "They are the words of a person not worthy of being commander in chief, period.  Not then, not now, and not ever." Biden brought up how Trump says he won't accept the election results if he loses (again) and that it will be a "bloodbath." "If anybody else said that in the past, you’d think he was cra- — he is crazy," Biden said, "but you’d think it was an exaggeration.  But he means it."

One of the gifts Biden gave to the Democratic Party and to the United States last night was that his remarks implied a blessing for the end of Democratic hesitancy to dive into insults and attacks, that the language of politicians, especially presidential candidates, had to stay elevated and high-minded, even when going negative. To their eternal credit, Harris and her campaign said, "Fuck that." When traditional consultants said she and Tim Walz shouldn't use "weird," she said, "Fuck that," and leaned into it. By finally being so open in such a high-profile setting about calling out lies and craziness, Biden was telling Harris, the Democrats, and the rest of us, "Fuck that. Take this asshole down any way you can." Hillary Clinton did the same in her speech, especially when she didn't try to silence the chants of "Lock him up." Her smile and nod was as clear as if she said, "Fuck you, Donald." Adios to going high when they go low. Let's get in the gutter and rumble.

Another gift Biden gave the nation was that, whatever he was feeling in private, his public statements on giving up on his re-election have demonstrated grace, self-awareness, and, above all, patriotism in its purest sense, not in the hateful, nationalist perversion of it that the GOP has contorted patriotism into. "I love the job, but I love my country more," he said. And then later in the speech, "I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my career, but I gave my best to you.  For 50 years, like many of you, I’ve given my heart and soul to our nation." That's one of the most meaningful things Biden will leave us with: the presidency doesn’t belong to a person. It belongs to the people. And the nation itself takes work, the work of all of us, not one person. 

Finally, Biden passed the torch at the end to Kamala Harris. And if this story ends like it's supposed to, with the orange hell-giant defeated by a spontaneous movement of a unified people, with Harris, the first woman president, triumphant and, recognizing the path forward is not going to be easy or without conflict, the belief in our national soul restored, this country could never thank Joe Biden enough for the gift of this joyful rejuvenation of the American spirit. 

Arrogant Dipshit JD Vance Goes to Michigan

Kent County in western Michigan is anchored by Grand Rapids and it's the fourth most populous county out of 83 in the state. (Yes, that is too many fucking counties.) Byron Center is a suburb of Grand Rapids, just 20 minutes from downtown, not some rural enclave. You'd have to be a vapid couchfucking clown to pretend otherwise. 

So, of course, JD Vance, the vice presidential candidate and Yale Law School's most embarrassing grad since Samuel Alito, acted like he was out in a field in the ass-end of nowhere, which does exist in Michigan, but without easy access to a decent airport. Vance was there to give a speech to the extremely white locals (the town is like 95% white) sitting outside at a trucking company. And by "speech," I mean, "bitching about bullshit." 

Vance, who always sounds like a smug asshole trying to talk so the yahoos understand what he's saying, blathered about allegedly horrific damage done to places like Byron Center by the Biden/Harris administration: "Byron Center has been cast aside, and a lot of places in this country have been cast aside by America’s ruling class in Washington D.C. Now, politicians come into places like Michigan. They say nice things, but they crush our industries, they offshore our jobs, and they undercut American wages with illegal labor. You, my friends, have been betrayed." 

Betrayed how exactly? The unemployment rate in Kent County is 4%. It's one of the lowest in the state, ranking sixth out of, once again, 83 counties. The median income in the county is $77k. The poverty rate is 10%, lower than the state or the country. The population is growing there and expected to keep growing. Home ownership is at 75%. And all of those trends have improved or stayed steady during the Biden administration. So what the fuck is Vance even talking about? And what the fuck were the gathered white people clapping for? Oh, wait. There has been an uptick in the number of immigrants, and the population is getting more diverse. That must be the fucking nightmare. 

By the way, Kent County went for Biden in 2020, 52 to 46 percent. He won Grand Rapids by over 30 points. He's the first Democrat to win by a margin that big there since LBJ. Obama won by just 2000 votes in 2008. 

Since Vance is running with Donald Trump, a man for whom the truth and reality are as sacred as wedding vows, of course he lied continuously. Here's what the gopher-looking motherfucker said about electric vehicles and battery manufacturing: "[Harris] supported these EV mandates that taxed you, took your money, and sent it to electric vehicles that are made in China instead of made right here in the state of Michigan, destroying thousands of Michigan auto jobs in the process. And it’s not just the car jobs themselves. Y’all know this. It’s the carburetors. It’s the transmissions. It’s the people who are making the components. They are the ones who suffer when Kamala Harris sends your tax dollars to Chinese-made cars." Just to put on my perfesser hat for a hot sec, the way the end of that is stated makes it sound like carburetors and transmissions are suffering, which is, yeah, weird.

But, see, the Biden administration (and, sorry, Harris is not president right now) is helping Michigan get massive investment from companies so that, according to one analysis, the state will be one of three that will "dominate" EV battery manufacturing by 2030. The state has received billions of dollars from the Inflation Reduction Act and from auto corporations. There have definitely been some bumps along the way (as there always are), not the least of which is Republican antagonism to electric vehicles, as if there's something anti-American and un-manly about them. No, they don't go "vroom." But the future is going to involve EVs, and you're either ready for that future or you can go fuck yourself into poverty with your carburetor.

Also, being Trump's mate means that everything your opposition does is either the worst thing in the history of everything or it's a hoax of some sort. Beardy Buzzkill here said, "When she does these rallies and does these events and does these fake dances, remember that there are parents who lost their children to drugs or violence who will never see their children move again, much less dance again." Honestly, that's like some asshole on social media who says, "Yeah, but what about climate change?" when you post that you had a good time with your husband this past weekend. And, for fuck's sake, Trump enters every Nazi rally of his by doing the double hand-job boogie, waddling like a walrus on a floating dock, and the gathered Nazis cheer like he's Simone Biles doing her floor routine. That's a fake fucking dance.

The bitterness that Vance and Trump have towards Harris is stunning, like they're insulted that they have to run against a non-white woman. Vance went on, "Everything about her campaign is fake, a fake joy that comes from being promoted to a new position, instead of using the position you already have to do your job and make the lives of the citizens of this country better. It’s a fake ticket that never earned a single Democrat primary vote. It’s a fake platform that offers no specifics about how to do the people’s businesses, and a fake promise to change the government." You know, it takes a level of self-delusion that approaches psychopathic to call anyone or anything "fake" when you are running for office alongside someone who has been found, multiple times, to have committed actual fucking fraud. 

In the entire speech, Vance put forward almost no policies while criticizing Harris for running on slogans instead of policies. The idea that was just, well, weird was that the way to control inflation is to stop printing so much money. No, really: "We ought to do is stop printing trillions of dollars that we don’t have and sending it to China. We should keep our money right here at home, build in America, buy in America, manufacture in America, and that gives Americans the wages necessary. But it also means that you’re not printing a bunch of money, which makes our dollar more and more worthless." Yes, money has been printed at a higher rate (which doesn't necessarily mean actually making more bills, but releasing...you know what? Google that shit) but that's because the world relies on the dollar and needs more dollars. To say it's a major factor in inflation is just one of those things you put out there because stupid people understand it (not to mention that inflation is way down now).

This was in answer to a question (from the Epoch Times, so fuck them generally) that was simple: "What other steps besides drilling can the Trump-Vance administration take to lower those grocery prices for people?" Other than not printing more money, Vance had nothing. Not a single goddamn idea. I mean, shit just got embarrassing when he was asked by a local reporter what the Trump campaign would do in Kent County specifically to get votes and his answer was, more or less, "Fuck all." He really replied, "We think, look, the entire state of Michigan is important, right?" And then he talked about how they want votes in Detroit so they're working more there, which is always what someone in Grand Rapids wants to hear. One topic that he avoided was women since everything he says about women is some Handmaid's Tale-level oppression and subservience. 

JD Vance is a fucking empty-headed weirdo, to be sure. But he's also an arrogant, preening dipshit desperately attempting to sound smart, folksy, and tough, like Trump without whatever panache we used to ascribe to Trump. He's the gleeful fuck toy of billionaires (or putative billionaires), and he seems to relish the role of trying to be as cruel and dismissive of any opposition as Trump is, all while attempting to act like he gives a damn about other humans.

But, goddamn, he's so fucking transparent about it that everyone can see right through him. 

Harris/Walz: We Need This Joy

Something occurred to me while watching yesterday's rally in Philadelphia kicking off the campaign for the full 2024 Democratic ticket of current Vice President Kamala Harris for president and Governor Tim Walz for vice president. It occurred to me while watching Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, who had been considered a frontrunner for the VP job, pumping up the crowd like the greatest hype man in history. It occurred to me when Harris introduced Walz to a nation that, beyond those of us damned to be terminally online in the political world, knew very little about him. It occurred to me when Walz, all big  dad energy, scolded the Republicans, Donald Trump and JD Vance, for their deprivations and degradations while telling the gathered 10,000 people how they needed to get out on that field and beat the cross-town rivals. It occurred to me as I felt myself getting caught up in the excitement of the moment, with the expected cheers and spontaneous chants from the audience at Temple University. And it kept occurring to me today as I saw the elated crowds in Eau Claire and Detroit.

It was simple. I thought, "Man, we need this." And by "this," I mean all the joy and energy and possibility being embodied on that stage. But it's not only about this moment. We need this because the one thing that's been missing as we emerged from the worst part of the Covid pandemic (and recognizing that Covid is still very much a problem) is a catharsis, some release where we all recognize that we survived. And it's not just a catharsis for getting through the lockdowns and mass deaths and required health safety measures. It's a catharsis for surviving the presidency of Donald Trump, which took this country down some incredibly dark alleys, leaving it battered and weary, with a good deal of PTSD.

We couldn't actually celebrate, or even fully exhale, because hanging over all of us was the tension of what would bring the Trump saga to its end. We waited for something to validate the anger we had and to demonstrate that things would be different. We hoped that Trump would be convicted and sent to prison, but that didn't happen and may not. 

The election of Joe Biden was an absolutely necessary step to get to this point. We needed someone who knew how the federal government worked inside and out, an old hand to get to the bridge and right the ship, weld the holes, scrub off the rust, get rid of the piles of garbage, and get us back on course, all while restocking the bar. We were all scared out of our weary minds in 2020, awaiting the even deadlier next surge of Covid deaths that was coming in January 2021. Then January 6th happened, and our sense of security in the very things that are supposed to function in this country were undermined, all while watching a large percentage of the population go down a red-capped abyss of crazy and conspiracies they will likely never return from. Biden's skill was in allowing the rest of us to chill out, to see that the government hadn't lost the ability to actually work.

In the last few months, though, everything kept hitting us, even as Trump was found guilty or liable, owing hundreds of millions of dollars. All of it still didn't lead us to anything like a feeling of completion, a feeling we could, indeed, move on. We were hit again and again with insane Supreme Court decisions, with the polls that showed Biden losing, with Biden's obvious signs of aging, with this feeling that it was all going to go south again. We would stick by Biden if we had to (and more than a few were doing so gladly), but, my god, we needed celebration. We needed joy. Real joy, not the kind of joy that says, "We made it," but the joy that says, "We crushed it." We need to face our American demons, who are easily identifiable, and we need to unify to exorcise them and send them back to whatever crevices in the earth they crawled out of, not just defeat them at the polls. 

So, yeah, it's more than a little over-the-top to say this, but I got that feeling from the Harris/Walz rally yesterday, from the ecstasy with which people are reacting to this ticket. We suffered a mass trauma, both physical and psychological, from Covid, compounded by the savage incompetence and wanton cruelty of the Trump administration. And the effects of that trauma haven't been dealt with. 

But maybe this is how we heal: by coming together in joyful purpose, to laugh and mock and chant and celebrate, all in service of unifying to keep progressing, to make sure that the hard work that's been done doesn't get wasted by another Republican president, like Bill Clinton's work was wrecked by Bush, like Obama's work was wrecked by Trump. God, imagine how incredible it will be for Biden to hand it off to Kamala Harris, with no Republican in the middle to ruin it all first. God, imagine how amazing it will be to know that so many of us came together, all these disparate areas of the left, all these generations, all these races and genders and identities, for once not bothering with the in-fighting that divides us every election season, to make this happen. We can get back to all those difficult discussions about what direction we should go once we can exhale without that feeling that it's all about to end terribly.

This isn't just about vibes. It's about our deep need to feel connected again, to not just wander in our algorithm-induced scrolling comas, but to see that all that we have been through means something and can achieve something. It's a desire for authenticity, for modernity, for an embrace of who we really are. And it's a desire for normalcy again. God, we know we can never go back to what was before Trump and before Covid, but let us come up with a way to tell the delusional, harmful, weird GOP that we're done being afraid of the phantoms they demand we fear. 

In our Harris and Walz-induced joy is our strength. 

Hope and Weirdness on the Campaign Trail in 2024

As much as I still viscerally despise former president, shitty artist, and war criminal George W. Bush, the man pretty much nailed it early on when, referring to the inauguration speech of Donald Trump on January 20, 2017, he said, "That was some weird shit." That speech, where Trump shit all over the three presidents gathered there and talked about "American carnage," was genuinely weird in that "Why the fuck is he talking about all that in this dickish way?"

It's not the first time anyone called Trump "weird." On his show, John Oliver has regularly gone off about Trump's innate strangeness. And Trump's behavior has always been on the creepy side of weird. I know she's regretted not saying anything, but I do wonder how things would have gone if Hillary Clinton had stopped in the middle of an answer at her second debate, a town hall with Trump in 2016, when he was stalking behind her, so close she could hear his labored breathing and huffing as she answered a question, and said, "Back up, you creep. Get away from me." They probably would have accused her of being hysterical because that's how shitty and sexist the media was towards Clinton. 

And, you know, a bunch of out here in the filthy environs of the internets, with our blogstackletters or whatever, have gone off for years about the unending fucking weirdness of Donald Trump and his crazed followers. I haven't been shy about calling a weirdo a fucking weirdo. When he started hugging the American flag like it was the teddy bear his prick of a father took away from him when he was two, I wrote, "It was weird. No, that's not strong enough. It was fucking weird. Disturbing even that such an overtly simple-minded move could garner such a strong reaction, that while the left passes around photos of it to mock, the right sends it around with pride. Hell, the White House tweeted the picture with the single word, 'America!' Which is just even weirder. I wasn't triggered or anything. I just thought, 'How fucking pathetic. Of him. Of everyone there.' And how, for lack of another phrase, fucking weird."

It's been one of those things that some of us have wanted his opponents to emphasize because bullying always has supporters and racism is just built into the right. Sure, the line "this is not normal" became a thing, a way of responding to the broad array of fuckery committed by the Trump administration, but also to the rhetoric coming from the MAGA movement and the GOP. But that didn't really capture the essence of what so many of us were feeling and saying (although, you know, "abnormal" might have been fun) because it really is just so strange to see the Republican Party transform itself into a giant machine that is at the service of a single man, a rapist and felon, and his whims. 

Deeply fucked people do that, and, goddamnit, we tried outrage. We tried to point out the stripping of rights, the violence from white nationalists, the alliance with Nazis, the desire to dismantle democracy. We shouted that shit from the rooftops, and that's exactly the reaction all those idiotic fucknuts wanted. When you express pain to a bunch of sadists, they get off, laughing at you for giving them the gleeful orgasms that they wanted by baiting you into your rage. 

Apparently, though, they don't have a shame fetish. All it took was Minnesota Governor Tim Walz echoing a sentiment that's been out there, saying, "These guys are just weird" on MSNBC last Tuesday, and adding later in the day, "These are weird people on the other side. They want to take books away; they want to be in your exam room." It was like light bulbs went off all over and "weird" went viral because, goddamn, it's perfect. And they can't fucking handle it.

It implies "creepy" as well as strange and fucked up, and if demanding to examine the genitals of children to check their sex for playing sports in middle school is anything, it's strange and creepy and fucked up. So is listing innocuous words that people are not allowed to use. So is denying history and science that is plainly factual and threatening to jail librarians as sex offenders if anyone under 18 can get their hands on a book that mentions that gay people exist. So is your Bible fetish, forcing classrooms to display the Ten Commandments and forcing teachers to teach biblical lessons in public school classes. So is any politician declaring that childless people are "sociopaths" and women who don't have children are miserable. So is a presidential candidate talking about Hannibal Lecter and water pressure and bird-killing windmills and how the women who said he raped and groped them aren't attractive enough for him. So is declaring that an election was "rigged" when every single court and every single expert says it wasn't. It's all, all, all so fucked, so creepy, so wrong, so weird. And I haven't even gotten into the shit their voters do. Take off your red cap, Jesse. You look like a dickhead.

Kamala Harris is just a little older than me, and I'm sure that, as someone watching Democrats back down time and again from Republican attacks, she wished for the gloves to come off. Like me, she watched as the idea of going high when they go low failed to meet the moment, with Democrats trying to stick to some kind of unwritten rules of behavior. I mean, I wrote about this shit starting in 2003, about how Democrats need to be willing to stop depending on norms and traditions and fuck all that only rarely works and only at moments of great crisis, like in 2008 or in 2020. What about times like now, when there really is no great crisis in the United States other than the chaos that Trump and MAGA pukes bring about? Yeah, it's time to get in the gutter and bring the fight to them, but on our terms.

So we get the Harris campaign machine, which is an amped up version of the Biden machine, shifting into mocking mode with social media posts immediately reacting to Trump's insanity in speeches and interviews with "This is weird" and that have headlines like "JD Vance Is a Creep (Who Wants to Ban Abortion Nationwide)." They also post ludicrous things from Fox "news" and from the candidates, like a deleted part of JD Vance's campaign website about his being "100% pro-life." They're not afraid to get juvenile, with a post that says, "JD Vance does not couch his hatred for women." 

A joke about Vance fucking couches? Saying he has "hatred for women"? That's going way further than even Hillary Clinton did when she posted, for instance, "A running list of all the worst things Donald Trump has said about women. It’s long." She called Trump "unqualified and temperamentally unfit," which wasn't cruel enough. It was what was expected from Democrats: harsh, sure, but dignified. But saying he's "weird"? No one likes to be called that unless it's meant in an endearing way, like "eccentric." And plenty of men have egos that are so fragile that a woman calling them "weird" or "creepy" makes them collapse into a ball of incel self-loathing.

This whole campaign just feels different now. It's filled with life not just because Harris is younger and more energetic than Biden (although, at 60, she would still be older than most of the leaders in Europe). It's because I don't think the corporate media and many older Democratic leaders understand the vibe shift or the change in the zeitgeist, if you wanna be fancy. 

I'll go with it being a paradigm shift. See, I don't think that those people I mentioned up there get that the old shit is done and the old ways of responding to Republican attacks have to be shitcanned. Lemme put this in Gen X musical terms. Remember how shitty hair metal was so popular and then Nirvana came along and destroyed the whole genre? All the shit that we have put up with for so long doesn't apply right now because Harris has done what Biden could not. With Biden running, we just wanted to get him in office and keep things going as they are. Harris offers something different.

The Harris nomination and campaign and movement (which is really what it's become) offers hope, yes, in the Obama sense of making life better for more people. But because she's taking the fight right to MAGA's dumb faces, she is offering hope that Trump and MAGA can be crushed out of existence. The "weird" attack has punctured the rhetorical dome they were living under. They are hurt and confused, like baboons with shit to hurl but no idea how to hurl it in the right direction. And taking down JD Vance, who was the billionaire class's choice to make Trumpism outlast Trump, is a strategy that cuts off a future. 

And what does Harris offer in these months before the election? Not just a sense of purpose, but a sense of joy, as seen in her rallies where the jubilation between people of all ages is palpable. Megan Thee Stallion? Charli XCX? Beyonce'? Sign us all the fuck up. And it's not just a call to duty, but a call to enjoy it while you're doing it because you know that the people who have fucked with you for the last nine years are shitting themselves in fear. What I love is the feeling that, unlike Biden and Obama before him, she won't forgive and forget and demand we move forward without accountability for those who dragged us backward. God, I hope that's true.

Yeah, the weirdos are gonna get a whole lot weirder before this is over. But maybe now that we're making them play our game, we can make the rules. 

Harris, the Democrats, and Biden Take Back the Narrative at Last

Vice President Kamala Harris's first rally speech yesterday as the presumed Democratic nominee for president was remarkable for several reasons. In Milwaukee, which was a special fuck-you to the savage Republican National Convention that was there last week, you could watch in real time as she grew into the role of nominee, moving from slightly stilted delivery to full-on warrior preacher by the end, latching onto the chanted phrase that will no doubt become her slogan: "We're not going back." That's a perfect distillation of the significance of this moment in electoral and American history. The audience there lost their goddamn minds with glee.

Until this past weekend, there was a feeling of dutiful drudgery to the presidential election, along with a frisson of dread, for me and pretty much everyone I know. As I said over on the Threads, we understood the assignment: vote for Joe Biden to be re-elected president with the full knowledge that there was a very real chance that Vice President Kamala Harris would have to take over at some point. And it made sense, even to someone like me who wanted Biden to withdraw. Biden has been a strong president, a consequential one, and, even if I disagreed with him on some things (like Israel's war on Gaza), the man had a hell of a record to run on. But, goddamn, it sucked to have to worry that every time he made an appearance, we had to just be thankful he didn't stumble too much. 

I also always said it had to be Biden's decision whether or not to stay in. While that meant it would have been a terrible idea to push him out through some kind of effort to get delegates to go rogue, it didn't mean that people couldn't try to convince him to drop out. I thought how it played out in public was unseemly and unnecessary, and that it had gone on too long, but, as I told a few people, I didn't think Biden would stand down until after the Republican convention and after assuring that Harris would be the nominee. But the longer Biden waited, the more I thought that it was getting too late to do it. I dreaded the possible fight over the nomination, especially with too many Democrats calling for some kind of stupid fucking "blitz primary." Democrats can be Machiavellian motherfuckers when they want to be. Sadly, too often, it's with members of their own party. I was ready to just get back to the forced march feeling and live with the anxiety of whether or not enough Americans would come through when voting happened.

But you know you felt it on Sunday the second that Biden dropped out, that mixture of "oh, fuck" and "holy shit," and then when he endorsed Harris a half-hour later and then when Democrat after Democrat and caucus after caucus endorsed and then when the donations pretty much tsunamied in (including one from me), you kept feeling it. Unless you were the hardest Ridin'-with-Biden stan, it was a quick journey through surprise, confusion, realization, and release. Think of it like you've been with the same lover for 30 years, fucking more or less the same way, and then they tell you they want to try something new in the sack, like role-play or ben-wah balls or nipple torture. You're taken aback until you understand that it's fucking awesome, that those clamps feel incredible.

I've been watching politics as closely as anyone who isn't in the shit themselves for the last 40 years, and I've never seen the Democratic Party do anything with as much unity and grace as the insanely quick coalescing behind Kamala Harris. It was so perfectly-timed, so skillfully done, that it bears all the hallmarks of a well-planned operation. In the end, I want to believe that Biden and Harris outplayed everyone and fucked over everyone who needed to be fucked over. 

I don't know if it's true, but if Biden, who has been at this game for over a half-century, convinced Trump and the Republicans that he was not going anywhere so that they would waste millions of dollars and their entire convention attacking him and make Trump choose fascist dullard JD Vance for his running mate, it was brilliant. If the pants-wetting Democrats were really worried that the country was still too sexist to elect a woman (a non-white woman, too), Biden and Harris made sure that she was about as inevitable as they come. But it could just as easily been a spontaneous action that spurred more spontaneous actions, and it definitely was Democratic voters saying, "Oh, fuck no" to a primary or an open convention. Like I said, we understood the assignment. If it wasn't Biden, it was Harris.

Of course, the outpouring of support for Harris was relief that the forced march was over. Even more importantly, Biden's act of extraordinary patriotism completely took back the narrative on the election. True or not, fair or not, what was baked into every single thing that Democrats did was the corporate media's obsession, fanned by Republicans and even some Democrats, that Biden was suffering cognitive impairment and he should drop out. That was the narrative. That was what every Democrat running for every office would have to answer for. It was fucked up in the extreme, but, sorry, it wasn't unwarranted. 

In an instant, the entire narrative changed. Hell, it was burned to the ground. Now Trump is the very old man. Trump's criminality, venality, and incoherence are now front and center because nothing overshadows it. And by being a woman who is Black and AAPI, Harris represents a huge part of the population of the country and the huge number of us who ache for the end of the rule of old white men. If you wanna call that DEI, fine. Fuck, yeah, I love diversity, I think equity is imperative, and there's not a goddamn thing wrong with inclusion. Blow me if you use DEI in a pejorative sense. If someone votes for her because she's Black, well, shit, how many fucking white men have been voted for because they're white men? Wait, I know the answer: all of them. Plus, she's also a former prosecutor running against a convicted felon and rapist. That's its own narrative, too.

So now all of these constituencies are activated and are ready in a way that I honestly have never seen, not even when Barack Obama became the nominee. In addition to the ridiculous haul of campaign cash (which is great, but shows just how fucked our campaigns are, thanks to the Supreme Court), Harris's nomination has energized Gen Z, millions more of whom will be able to vote than in 2016 (on top of the millions of Boomers who have died since 2016). 

The thing is that Gen Z and a whole bunch of the rest of us won't give a shit about the attacks that desperate Republicans are going to throw at Harris. You're gonna attack her race? Her sex? Her having sex? Good fucking luck. None of that will have any effect. And the idea that they are going to use Willie Horton-like attacks on her is absurd coming from a criminal who is literally out on bail and awaiting sentencing for his felonies. 

See, we live in a time of vibes, where people want to part of where the vibes are. We want the feeling of belonging, of community, of actual joy without the burden of hate. We want to feel like we're moving forward, not, you know, going back. And that's a powerful attractor. When we get more of them post-Biden, polls are going to show a tight race, possibly with Harris a little ahead. Then comes the Democratic National Convention, and the vibes will continue. 

There's a long, long road ahead, and if this election season has taught us anything, it's who knows what the fuck is going to happen. Harris's position on Israel's war with Gaza could kill some of the Gen Z buzz. Republicans with blistered asses are always dangerous. Trump is an elephant with a raging hard-on in the middle of a crystal factory. Who knows how much he'll bust up the joint until he gets off?

But I have one more thing that Harris offers and it relates to Trump and the MAGA bullshit and JD Vance and all of it. It's a simple idea: Don't you want all of that to be over already? God, don't you want it to be done and gone? We can do that. We've already defied all the expectations about how this was supposed to go. We can defy them all the way through to turning the goddamn page at last on the old narrative and living in the new one.

At the RNC, the Rapist Finally Speaks

The delegates at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee finally got to hear from the rapist last night. Of course, the rapist is a former president, elected when it was suspected he was a rapist, and now the presidential nominee of the Republican Party, which happened after he was adjudicated to be a sexual abuser by a jury, which the judge clarified really meant "rapist." The people there, from all 50 states, from various walks of life, primarily white, but not exclusively, were elated any time the rapist sat down in the auditorium to listen to other speakers during the convention. Well, more accurately, to fall asleep while others spoke. 

A number of the delegates wore large white patches or bandages on their right ear. It was a way of showing support for the rapist because he had almost been shot and killed a few days before. We don't know why the would-be assassin targeted him, but it wasn't for being a rapist. One could wonder if the bullet had taken part of the rapist's ear off, would they have cut off parts of their own flesh in sympathy. It sadly does not seem out of the realm of possibility. 

In his speech, the rapist, who was also convicted by a jury of and is awaiting sentencing for 34 felonies related to paying off a porn star who he had had an affair with, spoke vividly about the shooting. The rapist bragged how he had been "speaking very strongly, powerfully and happily." There was nothing humble in how the rapist talked about himself, despite what some in the press have said. There was no humility. He focused on how much people love him, so much so that even as "we had many bullets that were being fired," people didn't run away at the rally. Rather than attribute that to the fact that no one knew what was going on, the rapist said, "They just, this beautiful crowd, they didn’t want to leave me. They knew I was in trouble. They didn’t want to leave me. And you can see that love written all over their faces." The rapist was saying that, even with bullets "flying over us," the people didn't care about themselves or their loved ones. They only cared about the rapist. That's frankly disturbing, not "beautiful."

The rapist, who was fined $2 million for misuse of funds from a charity for children with cancer, then talked about Corey Comperatore, a fire chief who was at the rally and who was shot and killed protecting his family from the bullets. Comperatore's firefighter's jacket and helmet were on display on the stage, set up like a ghost was wearing them, and the rapist walked over to them and kissed the helmet with his rapist lips. It was, to anyone not inclined to love the rapist, creepy, at best. People in the crowd wept at what they saw as the rapist's kindness and decency. They wept when he talked about his own blood being spilled. "My god," they must have thought, "how much that rapist has suffered for me."

They also applauded and cheered in those first 15 minutes or so of the 93-minute speech as the rapist kept talking about "unity" and "In an age when our politics too often divide us, now is the time to remember that we are all fellow citizens — we are one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all." It seemed, for some in press, the rapist had really been changed by his near-death experience. 

Of course, the rapist would never admit that he was one of the primary people dividing the country. The rapist has never admitted wrongdoing, no matter how many court cases go against him. He has almost never apologized for his failures. He dismisses dissent and disavows errors. The rapist has one true belief, and that belief is that he is owed...something, whether it's a fortune or the presidency or freedom. For some unknown reason, he believes the universe owes him, and, for some even more unknown reason, the universe keeps complying. 

Yet, even as he was willing to give credit to whatever his rapist mind conceives of as "God" for that bullet missing him, he could only see it filtered through his narcissism. "Unity" means he doesn't budge an inch on anything, but everyone must unify under what he wants. When he said, "As Americans, we are bound together by a single fate and a shared destiny," that destiny was his reelection. Join the rapist in transforming the nation or you are the problem, not the rapist, not the people who worship the rapist and have no problem at all electing the rapist. 

Indeed, a few seconds after quoting the Pledge of Allegiance, the rapist, who owes a half-billion dollars in fines for various frauds, took us on a journey into his dark heart, explicitly stating that the only way for the United States to unify is to dismiss all of the cases against him, that his crimes should go unpunished. And then the rapist, who others called a "changed man," showed that he hadn't changed one whit. 

Beyond his unchanging stances on immigration, taxes, foreign policy, and the economy, beyond his continuing to speak about his opponents in ways that invite further violence, the rapist did what all rapists do: he piled lie upon lie upon lie, building a mountain of lies that he could stand on and look down at everyone else. And there was no greater lie than his calls for everyone to come together. 

After his litany of horrors and bizarre tangents and weird asides, all the words that alienate more than half the people who listen to him and that ended up boring even the most loyal of his groveling followers, the rapist, who, it should always be noted, is only at the convention because he is out on bail, veered back to his script. "We must now come together, rise above past differences. Any disagreements have to be put aside, and go forward united as one people, one nation, pledging allegiance to one great, beautiful — I think it’s so beautiful — American flag," he said. 

Those words rang hollow. The only words that a rapist can say that wouldn't sound hollow would be "I'm sorry" and "I was wrong" and "I accept my punishment." When we speak of change and redemption, which is possible, even for a rapist, that is what we mean: acknowledge one's sins and ask forgiveness. Instead, we got to see an audience of fools cheer a rapist who is proudly, arrogantly irredeemable, and, thus, for those of us not cheering, will only ever be a filthy rapist.