Lots of people can't even spell 'tariff'...

I've been scrolling around and adding twenty-plus percent to Sellier & Bellot, Magtech, Fiocchi, Wolf, PMC, some varieties of Winchester...

(This is to say nothing of CZ, Taurus, most HKs and Glocks, all the various Turkish companies, lotsa Berettas...)

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Clownshoes

Trump's cabinet picks started off normal enough. Marco Rubio as SecState? Sure, dude's been a senator for over a decade, with most of that time on the Senate Committee for Foreign Relations and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (he's currently the ranking member on the latter), and that's as solid a resume for the job as you can want. 

Things got progressively sillier from there, though. I'd make fun of RFK, Jr. for Secretary of Health and Human Services, but that's been thoroughly covered elsewhere.

The proposed Director of National Intelligence, though, is a huge yikes. You know who's excited about her? Komsomolskaya Pravda.

“The C.I.A. and the F.B.I. are trembling,” Komsomolskaya Pravda, a Russian newspaper, wrote on Friday in a glowing profile of Ms. Gabbard, noting, positively, that Ukrainians consider her “an agent of the Russian state.” Rossiya-1, a state television channel, called her a Russian “comrade” in Mr. Trump’s emerging cabinet.

Jesus wept.

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U-Turn

Looks like Rubio's investment in the good kneepads has finally paid dividends.

Gotta wonder if Don's gonna slip up and refer to his Secretary of State as "Widdle Marco" in a tweet out of sheer force of habit?

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Politics as Team Sportsball

So Bumpstock Donnie is coming back because in the Fox News Cinematic Universe anybody to the left of Pinochet is a "communist"*.

Inflation's down, unemployment's as low as it's been in decades, and they keep having to add new lines to the top of stock market charts in newspaper business sections because the market's never been this high... and apparently neither have American voters because everyone seems sure that we're in the middle of The Great Depression II: Electric Boogaloo.

Ask the Man (or Woman) on the Street (or Facebook) what the state of the nation is, and you get some unfocused argelbargle along the lines of "Eggs are eating our pets and immigrants are expensive and it costs four dollars a gallon to trans our kids or something. Plus Ukraine** is taking all the FEMA away from decent American retirees."

Truly we are a fundamentally unserious people.

*Y'ever notice how you can't call someone "Hitler" until they've actually killed six million people and invaded Poland, but if someone proposes jacking the upper marginal tax rate a few percent, they're definitely Stalin?

**You know they broke out the good vodka in the Kremlin this morning.

Vote or GTFO

I paused my morning activities of cleaning some pistols for photography to go take a picture.

Go and thou do likewise.

A reminder for fellow Indianapolis residents...

IndyGo doesn't charge bus fares on Election Day. I'll have a free ride on the Red Line to and from my polling place.

(Not a big deal for me because it's only about a five or six block walk, but hey, a free ride is a free ride. And it might be raining.)

Info Flow

"It isn’t necessary to buy politicians if you can launder narratives through the information ecosystem and have politicians repeat them."

There's a weird pattern to information churn, especially in the Very Online Right, these days.

Stuff gets posted in Facebook groups or forums or wherever, and the various influencers, podcasters, vloggers, et cetera trawl these spaces to find stuff that's generating buzz or is outlandish enough that it will draw clicks. 

Then these social media influencers amplify it, generally in as clickbait-y a way as possible, to grab eyeballs and ad revenue. This causes it to buzz even more on social media and it gets noticed by staffers in various politicians' offices, who pass on to their bosses that "People seem to really be riled up about this. You need to jump on this bandwagon!"

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I'll never order a lemonade & ice tea blend the same way again.

The op-ed and political pages at the Washington Post and New York Times have been laboriously "sanewashing" the former president's speeches, translating his rambling, discursive weirdness into something resembling policy positions in the interest of trying to present somewhat normal coverage of a typical quadrennial political horse race.

Yesterday at a rally in Pennsylvania, though, the Donald finally said something too weird for the WaPo to try and spin it into normal political dialogue.

Seventeen days from the election, here in arguably the most decisive swing state, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump spent the first 10 minutes of his speech without mentioning politics.

Instead, he delivered a long tribute to Arnold Palmer, the late golfer who was born here and is the namesake of the airport where Trump was speaking. Trump’s soliloquy about Palmer included an account of how other athletes reacted to seeing him in the showers.

“Arnold Palmer was all man. And I say that in all due respect to women and I love women. But this guy, this guy, this is a guy that was all man. This man was strong and tough. And I refused to say it, but when he took showers with the other pros, they came out of there, they said, ‘Oh my God, that’s unbelievable,’” Trump said.

That was a dong too far for the Post's writers...

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I didn't know that taste buds had handedness...

When I joke that a "nation cannot long stand half Chick-Fil-A and half Panera Bread" I mean it mostly tongue-in cheek... I mean, I happen to be a fan of both chains ...but it absolutely seems to be a thing.

Earlier this year, a reporter at NBC News posted on X that she’s “not sure [she] will ever recover from learning” that a colleague gets restaurant recommendations from Federal Election Commission filings, the periodic reports that reveal how candidates for Congress and the White House spend their campaign dollars.

Her colleague tweeted in reply: “If one of the 535 people who run our legislature is gonna spend thousands of dollars at a barbecue place I’ve never heard of, you better believe I’m gonna go to there.” Immediately, we had questions.

Do political campaigns know something about America’s restaurant scene that we don’t? Do Republicans and Democrats dine differently?

Thus began our effort to glean gems of dining wisdom from the seemingly mundane depths of the nation’s campaign finance reports.

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"Tempura-breaded buffalo cauliflower? You some kinda commie or something'?"

As the Wind Blows...

There's a good explainer here on what caused the rapid intensification of Hurricane Milton, why "bigger" doesn't necessarily mean "stronger" when it comes to hurricanes, and what's likely to happen over the next couple days as Milton continues to track to the northeast and encounters less favorable (for the hurricane) atmospheric conditions while still remaining over unusually warm Gulf waters...

The hurricane went from a Category 1 storm at midnight to a Category 5 hurricane by noon. And it didn’t stop there.

By 8 p.m. on Monday, the storm’s maximum sustained wind speeds had increased to 180 miles per hour, making Milton one of the strongest Atlantic hurricanes ever. Based on wind speed, it joined a handful of other hurricanes to rival the strongest Atlantic storm ever recorded: a 1980 hurricane named Allen, which had a peak wind speed of 190 m.p.h. before it made landfall along the United States-Mexico border.

As a small, compact system, however, Milton was more similar to Hurricane Wilma in 2005, which holds the record for the lowest pressure in a hurricane, another measure of a storm’s intensity. Its small size, an excess of extremely warm waters in the Gulf of Mexico and calm atmospheric conditions allowed Milton to “explosively” intensify, as hurricane center forecasters noted Monday afternoon.

The standard meteorological definition of “rapid intensification” is 30 knots in 24 hours, or roughly 35 miles per hour daily. Milton increased by more than double this definition on Monday, at a pace similar to that of Wilma and another record storm, Hurricane Felix in 2007.

It's funny that, like, the sixth post ever made at this blog, just over nineteen years ago, was about politics making people stupid about hurricanes...

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A penny saved is a pain in the ass.

People save pennies, but don't spend them. They pile up in coffee cans and pickle jars around the country and once in a blue moon someone gets arsed to roll all theirs and take them to the bank, or go dump the jar in a CoinStar machine.

So the government has to keep minting a jillion of the things so that retailers can make change for every purchase which totals up to a number that doesn't end in a 0 or 5. It costs three cents to make a penny. We're flushing money down the toilet and we've known it for almost my entire life.

But when it comes time to get serious about eliminating the penny, the legislature and the Treasury Department, and the general public make like that Spiderman meme.

The one thing I do know is that there's a particular flavor of conservative who absolutely lose their tiny little minds anytime you change anything about the money.

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Haven't we seen this movie?

Interesting choice of words for its headline from The Economist, there. I'd say this is pretty well-charted territory, actually.

The elections in the two states in the former East Germany were being closely watched in Berlin as a measure of the rising strength of extremist parties, left and right, as well as of the weakening position of the centrist parties that make up the current federal coalition. It was the first time since the Nazi era that a far-right party had won a state election.

The returns were seen as a worrying indicator of the health and future of German democracy, and they were likely to intensify a quandary over whether and how mainstream parties can isolate extremists and keep them from entering government.

Well...

Zero to jackboots...

We tease the Germans about their love for elaborate compound words, but they can be remarkably concise when they want to be. This AfD poster, for example, condenses fourteen English words down to four German ones.

"It's not a Nazi salute! They're just making a protective roof over their darling, pure-blooded Aryan children!"

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It's that time again...

As a presidential election looms, everybody's talking about the electoral college again. "Oh, each voter in Wyoming has three times as much weight in the EC than each voter in California!" 

You hear this a lot about the Senate, too, since Wyoming gets one senator per every 288,000 people while nearly 20 million Californians have to share one senator among them.

Complaining about this is like complaining about the rules of Monopoly in the middle of the game, or being mad that chess pieces only move certain ways. This is a federation of sovereign states. Does China get more ambassadors at the UN than Luxembourg? No it does not. (Although the USSR tried to play that game during the Cold War. "Oh, Ukrainian SSR is own nation and deserves ambassador!" Funny how now Ukraine is traditional part of Russia, according to Vlad, since when he was in the KGB they had their own seat at the United Nations.)

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ELL OH ELL

Watching Trump implode at the NABJ conference in Chicago, faced with a huge audience laughing in his face and causing grievous narcissistic injury is just hilarious.

Super lulzy.

I have no idea why he thought his reception there would be any different…

Argh.

Oh, gawd, NBC has some pasture pool tourney in Scotland on this morning, which probably means that half of my usual Sunday morning yelling at senators entertainment is going to be preempted.

Hopefully ABC isn't covering croquet championships or anything. At least I'll have Stephanopolopolopolous.

"If it's Sunday, it's Meet the Press... unless we're preempting it for golf, or motor racing, or the Brightinghamshire Stoats are playing the Twarfton-by-Blight Tea Cozies in the English Premier League."

Oh, puh-leeze...

"Vance’s memo and intensive scrutiny of President Biden’s ambassador nominees reflects his view that cultural elitism has infected America’s diplomatic corps and needs to be rooted out through extraordinary vetting efforts, said U.S. officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss closed-door meetings."

Listening to a multimillionaire Yale lawyer venture capitalist rant about “elites” is surreal. It’s like water denouncing wetness.

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Trump's Bump Stock Ban Struck Down

The press is in a real tizzy about the most pointless piece of firearm regulation in the last couple decades getting struck down by SCOTUS.

(And it was pointless no matter what angle you looked at it from. They're dumb and I wouldn't take one if it fell off the back of a truck and landed at my feet, but at the same time they do nothing to make guns more dangerous or "assault-y". They're range toys for turning money into noise. I can already do that with my thumb and a belt loop, neither of which I have a tax stamp for.)

The Normie Take

If you don't own a red MAGA baseball cap or a "Let's Go Brandon" bumper sticker, but also aren't some raving Bernie Sanders voter who brings your tofu sandwich lunch to work in an NPR tote bag, Ben Dreyfuss's take here is pretty much how things look:

I live in a small town. I drive by the same five police cars every day. If I constantly played “Fuck The Police” as loud as possible and flipped them off as I drove by, if I were ever pulled over for speeding, I would not expect them to let me off with a warning.

Trump, more than any politician in my lifetime, chose a political strategy that involved him antagonizing half this country. From day one, he “owned the libs.” He made himself the main character in our culture. And he won a personality cult on the right that loves him. But, he earned the intense disdain of the other half of the country.

There are lots of reasons why I think that was bad for this country and the world, but one reason you shouldn’t do it out of self-interest is that a lot of people are going to be rooting for your downfall. And they are going to go over everything with a fine-tooth comb. And if you are a criminal who has broken/does break the law, your chances of getting away with it are going to drop precipitously.

If you have a person bound and gagged in your trunk, you probably shouldn’t speed.

So many people in Trump’s orbit were convicted of various low-rent crimes over the last decade, and none of that would have happened if Trump hadn’t won in 2016. They would have gotten away with all of their fraud and bribery schemes. They had gotten away with them. Then they decided to loudly associate themselves with a hugely divisive person who antagonized so many people that the world gave them a closer look.

That’s what happens in life! It’s just a fact of human nature. It’s how attention works. Of course, that now applies to Trump. And it applies to his enemies, too.

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Your car is not a gun safe.

No, seriously.

Eleven days later, on the morning of Oct. 23, Hallie Biden took her two children to school, dropping them off at 8 a.m. When she returned home, as Hunter slept inside, she searched his black pickup truck and found the handgun in the center console, according to police records. Around 11:20 a.m., she put it in a black shopping bag and drove her BMW to Janssen’s Market, a local institution frequented by the Bidens that offered baked goods, fresh flowers and high-end groceries.

She threw the handgun into a trash can and entered the store. A review of video footage showed that she bought beef, bread rolls and a bottled drink.

When she returned home, she later said, Hunter’s car was gone, so she called and told him she had found his gun and thrown it into a trash can. He immediately became alarmed, angrily telling her to go retrieve it, text messages show.

For bonus points, Hallie says the truck was unlocked and the windows rolled down.

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