Well, that’s a wrap on the convention. Kamala gave a good speech. The energy on the left is infectious. It feels all…possible. It’s a very positive message. The Dems aren’t pretending everything is great, but they’re not in a ‘sky-is-falling-so-panic-right-NOW’ mode, either. It’s much easier to align oneself to a message of hope, don’t you think?

Hers was bigger. She didn’t have to do anything special. It just naturally grew bigger. Her crowd, I mean. At the convention. The live crowd on hand was bigger and the ratings showed millions more people tuned in to Harris’ speech than Trump’s. In fact, each day of the Democratic convention brought more viewers than the same day in the Republican convention.

Trump is OBSESSED with crowd size. He has been since his tiny Inaugural Address crowd back in 2017. I had heard that Trump was certain, absolutely certain, that he would have higher ratings than she had. Yet ANOTHER thing Trump was wrong about. Gees, he’s wrong about everything, isn’t he?

Harris was taking the lead even before the convention. I’m sure she’s going to see a huge bump now. Sure, there’s commonly a bump after the convention but she was already trending the right direction and the convention only sealed the deal. The Dems did a pretty good job, staying positive and advancing their message. It looks, to me, like this is Harris’ race to lose at this point.

Obviously, Donald is upset. The better she does, the more he spins out. He’s kind of flailing. His speeches are getting a bit rambling, even for him. Even MAGA has to notice, right? I mean, they may not care but they must notice the guy is increasingly unhinged. He’s being beaten. He hates that. By a woman. He hates that more. A woman of color. He hates that most of all.

Of course, to hear him talk, he hates everything so, maybe he’s just being his normal, bad-natured, weird little self…

He’s trying every trick he knows. Lying, name-calling, disrespect, NOTHING has worked. Hell, he even tried to deliver an actual message in a speech, although he found himself incapable of focusing long enough to get it done. But the fact that he even tried to focus on a single thing, shows how upset he is by the recent developments.

No matter what he says, Donald knows he’s losing, too. How do I know? He’s challenging her to debates. But he has already made clear that he doesn’t participate in debates when he thinks he’s winning. That was his attitude during the primaries, “Why would I? I’m the front-runner.” Now? He’s tossing out dates and trying to goad her into participating. It’s really bugging him that most people don’t love him the way he needs to be loved.

I’m a little surprised at Donald’s brooding. For a while, I took it as a good sign. I’m very worried about the GOP plan to steal the election in January. I keep wondering, they’ve drafted the plan and put the necessary pieces in place. Why wouldn’t they follow through? But if Trump knows the GOP plans to simply install him, why would he CARE what happens in the election, right? In that situation, he can’t lose.

But then I realized, no. Trump just can’t stand the thought that he might lose this election even if he knows they’re going to install him anyway. He’s being confronted by an unavoidable fact: people don’t like Donald Trump. We think he’s weird. We think he’s mean. We think he’s stupid. We think he’s unprincipled, unscrupulous, and undeveloped. In fairness, the poll numbers don’t show all of that. They only show that he’s losing but most Americans know WHY he’s losing…

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RFK, Jr sure has embarrassed the Kennedy name, hasn’t he? He tried running on his family’s political cachet as a serious guy. He told us his brain was eaten by a worm and that he once posed a dead bear in Central Park as a joke. Way to draw the crowds, there, Bobby.

He started his campaign running as a Democrat. He said he was just offering people a choice. He MEANT he was trying to siphon votes from Biden, in an effort to help Trump. When nobody in the Democratic Party was interested in his very conservative brand of “left,” he left the Democratic Party and became an independent. He thought that might help him attract voters. Then Biden stepped down and Harris became the candidate and the left is ecstatic and having a great time and ready to come out and vote for her and the presences of RFK doesn’t stand a chance of siphoning votes from the left.

In fact, he was adversely affecting his buddy, Donald. So, he’s out. He worked it out with Donald that he would step down and endorse Trump in exchange for a Cabinet position. Trump probably promised, but he’s Trump. RFK had to do HIS part first and he did. That does NOT mean Trump will feel any obligation whatsoever to uphold HIS end of the deal. He’s a weasel that way…

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The cons are STILL trying to convince someone, somewhere, that if Trump sticks to policy, he wins. Um, in what world? We’ve seen his policy proposal, in ‘Project 2025.’ There’s not ONE thing in that horrible plan that average American embrace. Project 2025 isn’t a blueprint of what he wants to do FOR anyone (except the richest rich). It’s a blueprint of what he plans to do TO everyone who isn’t rich. Tim Walz said it best, “When someone takes the time to draw up a playbook, they’re going to use it.”

The “issues” Trump focuses on aren’t real. He can say they are all day, every day, but he’s tilting at windmills. The inflation rate is 2.9%. Their hoped-for economic crash they thought they were getting that day the DOW dropped never happened. The border is a non-starter since HE killed the best bill on the topic in a long time, just for political reasons.

I STILL can’t find any place that he has picked up votes. I can see places where he has certainly lost votes but I can’t see anyplace where he gains them. Conventions commonly bring a bounce to the candidate (unless you’re JD Vance, apparently). Trump enjoyed that. Getting shot at give him a temporary boost, too, but even THAT he overplayed. Slapping that feminine napkin on his ear to cover his teeny, tiny, little owie just made him look stupid. MAGA swooned, but MAGA has no self-respect.

At this point, all that’s left is to get out and vote. It’s not enough to have enthusiasm for your candidate. You MUST cast a ballot. We need all we can get. I’m STILL more concerned about what the unethical Republicans are planning to do in January, and having the largest margin of victory in the popular vote will help prove they’re stealing. Nobody (but MAGA) wants Trump. NO patriotic American would tolerate Trump. Let’s prove it with the numbers, shall we?

There’s a movie, released in 1944 and starring Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman, called ‘Gaslight.’ Basically, it’s the story of a man who tried to drive his wife insane so he could steal her estate. He makes things happen, then denies they happened. So, for example, she says she hears sounds from the attic when nobody else is home. He tells her there are no sounds. She’s just imaging them. When the gaslight that lights the house dims momentarily, he tells her it’s in her mind, the gas did NOT dim.

He plays some other nasty little tricks on her, insisting a letter she saw didn’t exist and hiding a brooch she KNEW she had, that kind of thing. After a while, she starts to doubt reality. The name of the movie refers to only one of his tricks, but it became the basis of a term we’ve all come to know: gaslighting.

In modern terms, gaslighting is insisting something didn’t happen that did (or vice-versa). Like the movie, it’s intended to cause one to question their memories or even reality. Like the movie, it’s usually done by bad people intending bad things. Oh, AND it’s stock-in-trade for MAGA. The MAGA mythology couldn’t exist without gaslighting. It’s very important to their ethos.

You see it from them ALL the time. Remember when a group of armed, radicalized cons attacked the Capitol building and threatened to murder the Vice president in an attempt to disrupt the certification process? That’s what happened. But ask MAGA, they’ll tell you it was just a friendly and certainly peaceful but unauthorized tour through the building. (Make America Gaslight Again?)

Trump, himself, recently said in an interview, “Nobody died.” Ashli Babbitt and Brian Sicknick died as a direct result of the events of that day and a handful of others followed. But MAGA will tell you, insist, that “nobody died.” MAGA will insist there was no violence, despite the mountains of evidence to the contrary. MAGA is gaslighting you. They know what happened. They just need YOU to doubt yourself.

Remember after 2020, when MAGA started screaming about all of that horrible disarray and mismanagement of the election that never happened? All of their pretended Democratic attempts to steal the election, all of the “abnormalities” that could never be proven? Gaslighting. MAGA KNOWS the election was fair and honest. They just need YOU to doubt yourself.

We’ve all seen Project 2025 by now. We know what’s in it. We know who wrote it, the American Heritage Foundation and a bunch of Trump cronies. We KNOW what the cons are planning to do to this country if they can manage to get it back. But they’ll tell you differently. “What? What is this ‘Project 2025’ you speak of? Never heard of it. Oh, AND it has some terrible things in it, that document I’ve never heard of.” MAGA is gaslighting you. They know what the plan is. They just need YOU to doubt yourself.

You don’t even have to doubt yourself for long. Just long enough for them to accomplish whatever evil goal they have in mind at the moment. Of course, it’s better if you buy into their game and come to question what you saw for real. Pick an issue, any issue. MAGA will try to gaslight you. It’s quite common from them. They do it all the time. And they’re doing it for the same reason the bad guy in the movie did it to his wife: there’s something they want to steal. In this case? It’s the entire effing country!

The bad guy in the movie didn’t expect to drive his wife mad in one fell swoop. It took time. He had to keep coming up with new examples of her “erroneous” thinking to create a deep mistrust in her of her own stability. But he was willing to put in the time because his goal was so important to him. He was patient.

So, too, has MAGA been patient. They started all this whining about unfair elections in 2020 and have kept at it because they have to put in the time. They want and need Americans to question the validity of our elections so that when they start complaining about how unfair the 2024 election was, people might doubt the outcome just long enough for them to steal the thing in Congress.

Don’t let them. The sounds from the attic are real. The gaslight IS dimming. MAGA DID attack the Capitol. People DID die. Our election process is essentially sound. (Generally, when someone IS caught trying to cheat, they’re cons and they’re cheating FOR the GOP.) Project 2025 is a real and present danger to the United States of America. Trust what you know. NEVER take a con’s word for anything. Highlight their gaslight attempts. Oh, and vote for the Democrat. This might be our last chance if we’re not careful…

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Speaking of which, did you hear that the Trump campaign is pretending Taylor Swift has endorsed Trump? Donald released a bunch of AI-generated photos that make it look like Swift and her fans are all-in for Trump. They’re less of a “gaslight” and more of an “outright lie.” She hasn’t endorsed anyone for this election – yet. But in 2020, she endorsed Biden/Harris. With the introduction of these fraudulent photos, Trump might well be unintentionally pressing Swift to make an endorsement, after all. My guess is, that won’t go well for Trump…

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Can we please, once and for all, focus on claiming the entire Congress for sane Americans and not these MAGA “nattering nabobs of negativism,” as Spiro Agnew might describe them? I’d really like a Congress that can get something done and not be constantly obstructed by what Agnew described as “…their own 4-H club—the hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history.” Agnew described MAGA perfectly and he’d never even met one. I wouldn’t gaslight you…

According to Rolling Stone magazine, the cons have positioned as many as 70 pro-Trump election deniers in roles as election officials in battleground states. They work on local certifying boards. At least 22 of them have already tried to disrupt previous elections by claiming they don’t believe the results. No, they never – and I mean EVER – have or even offer any evidence. It’s just something they feel, something they choose to believe.

We all know the standard by now. If Trump wins, the election was “fair.” If he loses, it was not. Sure, it’s a stupid standard but that’s the one they insist on using. Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania are all suffering election conspiracy theorists who will simply refuse to certify the results, even though that’s their job. It’s not optional. It’s their duty – and they intend to NOT do it.

I should add, the author of the article made clear that there was no evidence of some national movement to foist these loyalists on certifying boards. These are, apparently, just your average, true-believing, Trump loyalist MAGAS who moved themselves into those positions because they believe the lies being spewed from MAGA media. But the Deceived are always more dangerous than the Deceivers. The Deceived truly believe they’re there to “stop the steal,” never realizing THEY are the ones doing the stealing.

The reason this is important is that this is the first step in their coming January coup. Now, listen, I know people think that’s some kind of crazy conspiracy theory and maybe it is. But I know they have a plan to steal and the plan revolves around denying the results of any election Trump doesn’t win outright. Discovering the cons have already installed 70 people willing to do exactly that to subvert elections in favor of their beliefs adds support to the idea.

The only real way to stop it is lawsuits, though a handful of states can impose criminal penalties on certifiers who refuse to do their duty. Lawsuits, ultimately, end up in front of the Kangaroos of Roberts Corrupt Court, who rule for Trump. That will NOT be good for America. This is the reason I’d like to see Biden add four seats. Yes, it would start a tit-for-tat but it would save America in the meantime.

At this point, I believe Kamala is going to win the election. I believe the cons will try to install Trump anyway. They have the plan. They have the pieces in place to execute the plan. They’re ONE LIE – “The election was rigged” – away from initiating the plan. I can’t see a single, peaceful way to stop them. They went to all the trouble to put the pieces in place. They are so close to success, I can’t see any reason they would just…stop.

So the question is, how do you think this country will react? Will we just sit back and let a felonious, rapist, lying, little man steal our country? Will we hit the streets for some France level protest? How do YOU think America will react to such a chain of events?

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Apparently, Trump thinks that showing a photo of Kamala wearing a Sari proves she has always and only embraced her Indian heritage. He needed to do something after he told the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) that she had only recently “turned black.” He did that. He doubled down. “See? She wore a Sari once. That’s not black.”

Sorry, man, that’s not the way it works. One can embrace many aspects of one’s heritage. There’s no rule that says I can’t honor my mother’s (and, therefore, my) Indian history AND my father’s (and, therefore, my) Jamaican history.

You’re just wrong on this one, Donny. She didn’t just turn black. She’s been half black all of her life. You’re just wrong…and really weird.

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I also liked that Trump got called out for one of his racist scare statements at the NABJ. We all know, by now, scare statements are part of the MAGA mind control. Trump keeps them scared or angry, always. It’s BEST if he can keep them both scared AND angry. People responding to strong emotions are not people thinking at their best. One of his more common stories is that undocumented immigrants are taking “black jobs.”

It’s a line that works well when talking to racists and scared, angry minds. Fearmongering. Someone “different” is taking something from someone. The jobs most of these undocumented immigrants end up with are menial labor. To suggest they’re taking “black jobs” pretends that black people only work in menial jobs. MAGA eats that crap up. Not surprisingly, black people seem a little offended.

The thing is, he wasn’t talking to MAGA. The NABJ is made up of educated, thinking people who understand the inferences of that comment. So, one of them asked, “What IS a “black job?” Trump had an answer. “Anybody that has a job.” There. Not racist at all, right? The audience groaned out loud.

I believe gold medal winning gymnast Simone Biles put him in his place the best. After winning another gold medal, she tweeted, “I love my black job.” Oh, no! You don’t suppose someone is going to cross the Rio Grande and just push Biles off the US Gymnastics team and take her job, do you? Trump thinks so. Yeah, that sounds like a guy who should lead a nation.

I’m glad the Dems started with their “weird” campaign because, you know what? They ARE weird. I’m glad I finally have the right word for it: weird.

Wow, the crazies come out, don’t they? Something maybe happened to Trump’s ear. Maybe a bullet, maybe not. Maybe shrapnel, maybe not. Hell, maybe he cut himself. Maybe not. No one knows because no one trustworthy will say. But the whole thing healed faster than most people expected from a gun shot that took “the top of his ear off” – as reported by Ronny “Candy man” Jackson-Johnson, once, apparently, a doctor but no longer because of his casual distribution of drugs throughout the Trump White House.

Photos taken less than two weeks after the shooting show no sign of any damage to Trump’s ear whatsoever. No scab. No scar. No piece missing. Nothing. Trump’s ear looks exactly the same as it always has in the photo. So, of course, MAGA came out in droves – to attack the photographer! They trolled him pretty heavily. So badly, in fact, he had to pull his brand X account. All because he took a picture that shows a perfectly healthy, intact ear.

Dear MAGA, that’s not the photograph’s fault, nor does the fault lie with the photographer who took the effing picture in the first place. If the photo offers evidence that something hinky is going on with Trump and his story, that’s not the fault of the evidence. You should check with your lying dear leader. Something isn’t right with his story…

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He can’t even fix it. Trump told a group of maybe-Christians they had to come out and vote for him one more time, then they’d never have to vote again because he would have it “fixed so good” he won’t “need their votes.” That caused rational people to think he was telling the world he was going to put an end to voting. No need, when we have a dictator.

So, he did an interview on Fox Not-News with Laura Ingraham and tried to clear up the “confusion.” Cleverly, he doubled down, even after she tried to help him. “You meant you won’t have to vote for you because you’ll have four years in office,” Ingraham pressed, trying to give him an out, suggesting he only meant he’d be at the end of his second term.

“I’m saying go out, you must vote,” Trump replied. “I said to the Christians in the room … you have to vote on Nov. 5. After that, you don’t have to worry about voting anymore — I don’t care — because we’re going to fix up, the country will be fixed and we won’t even need your vote anymore because, frankly, we will have such love.”

That answer still leaves me feeling like ‘no need, when we have a dictator.’ But I don’t WANT a dictator. MAGA might be looking forward to the end of the country and the Constitution, but I’m not. I prefer the rule of law to the rule of loyalty. Whatever you do, do NOT vote Republican…

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It’s STILL a great indicator. If a conservative is “warning” people about something, it’s because their scheme is at risk of being stopped. For example, Trump toady Bill Barr and Kelly Shackelford, president, CEO and chief counsel for First Liberty Institute, a “Christian” conservative organization, wrote an op-ed “warning” cons that the left wants to pack the court with additional liberal justices. (I know I do…) They wrote, “The last thing we need in this country right now is a Supreme Court coup that would threaten our democratic republic.” They’re correct on both points.

I want to pack the court with four more liberal justices in an effort to offset the criminally corrupt cons currently infesting the court and making decisions based on what’s best for rich people and Trump and NOT based on the Constitution. THIS court, the Roberts Court, has already done so much damage to our democratic republic, it could take decades to fix, if it’s fixable at all. The longer the kangaroos hold sway, the more damage they’ll do.

As always, the cons say it backwards. From ‘The Hill,’ ‘The op-ed painted a grim picture for what “court packing” could look like, suggesting civil and religious liberties will be limited and First Amendment rights for the left’s political opponents would be “trampled.”’ You know, exactly the results cons are calling for in their Project 2025, except they intend to do it TO the left.

The op-ed continued. “In truth, ‘court reform’ is nothing more than a desperate attack to subvert the legitimacy of the Supreme Court because it contains a majority of justices committed to the Constitution and originalism,” Barr and Shackelford lied. “If this coup succeeds, the rule of law will be over as the judiciary will become little more than a political tool of whomever holds power.”

Yeah, that would suck. But not as much as the corrupt court we have now that is little more than a political tool of one party, MAGAGOP, regardless of who holds power. And remember, the cons started all of this when they stole Merrick Garland’s seat and gave it to Neil Gorsuch, meaning their actual complaint is that the left might do to them what they did to the left. Suddenly, it seems really unfair, to them…