Open Threads

While waiting for our baseball game yesterday evening, we watched a segment on CNN about Trump and the adult sons being found liable for fraud and losing their business certification in New York. One of the talking heads looked familiar, but I couldn’t quite place him. Then it hit me — it’s George Conway, who evidently shed more than former wife Kellyanne!

I’m sure George Conway holds many views I find repellent. But the man lived through an earthly purgatory most of us can scarcely imagine, so I hope his health is good, and I wish him well.

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Gold Bar Bob and Mrs. Gold Bar were arraigned this morning. So far, two dozen Democratic senators, including fellow New Jerseyite Cory Booker, have called for Menendez to step down, along with several House members, Gov. Murphy, the state party chair and several county chairs. I like the contrast with Repubs, who are trying to get their corrupt, serially indicted felon elected to the highest office in the land.

I thought it was interesting that Fetterman was the first senator to urge Gold Bar to resign. Fetterman is still new to the clubbiest of clubs and is already shaking things up for the better, IMO. May he continue to be a force for change.

Repubs Tom Cotton and Marco Rubio said Menendez should hang in there until a jury or voters decide his fate. That serves their purposes, which are the opposite of the interests of the people of New Jersey and the Democratic Party.

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The second Repub debate will take place at the Reagan Lie-berry tonight as the long slog to determine the 2024 GOP runner-up continues. I don’t plan to watch it live but may turn on MSNBC to see what Maddow makes of it all at 11 PM ET. Conventional wisdom holds that DeSantis, Haley and Ramaswamy will feel compelled to make a move, so it could be a bristly, screechy affair that leaves hard feelings all around.

It’s not a real debate, though, as Zack Beauchamp at Vox points out. Calling the debate “a cosplay of a competitive election — and a distraction from an ugly truth” — Beauchamp says normal media coverage of the debates are a troubling sign:

(DeSantis) is a whopping 41 percentage points behind Trump in FiveThirtyEight’s average. That’s only slightly better than Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s 49-point deficit in his fake bid to unseat President Biden. A recent poll in the critical early state of New Hampshire put DeSantis in fifth place. His presidential campaign has been so humiliating that it’s actually hurting him back home: The once-captive Florida Republican party is rebelling against a governor who now looks like a weakling…

New York Magazine’s Eric Levitz recently argued that Trump’s undeniable authoritarian tendencies have put the mainstream press in a difficult position: Either it describes him accurately, and sounds like a “partisan rag,” or else it deceptively treats Trump and the Republican party he controls as essentially normal. Too often, he writes, they make the latter choice — acting like “an amnesiac, or an abusive household committed to keeping up appearances, losing itself in the old routines, in an effortful approximation of normality until it almost forgets what it doesn’t want to know.”

The breathless coverage of the presidential debate fits this description to a T. We are all pretending that this is something like what we’ve seen in the past, a normal event held by a normal party, when it’s actually a pageant masking the true nature of the Trump-enthralled GOP: a political vehicle of a strongman whose second term would represent an existential threat to American democracy.

He’s right. None of this shit is normal, and only death or an incapacitating medical event can keep the 2024 GOP nomination prize out of Trump’s grubby little mitts. Wouldn’t it be ironic (not to mention hilarious) if, after all the media hysteria about Biden’s 80 years, the 77-year-old Trump took a tumble down the campaign airplane steps and ended up in a geriatric ward?

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Last night I made fettucine from scratch, plus an eggplant sauce using a recipe I nicked from Italian Grandma Gina on YouTube. It all turned out great EXCEPT I should have cooked the pasta a little longer before adding it to the sauce to finish cooking. The leftovers would have been perfect if there were any.

Open thread!

 

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