The Daily Parker

The sky above Chicago has nothing but sun this morning. It won't last—the forecast for tomorrow night points to July-like atmospheric moisture and epic rainfall—but Cassie and I will enjoy it as much as we can.

Maybe I should stay away from these news stories until the rain starts for real:

• Michelle Goldberg reminds all you Hannah Arendt fans that fascism takes time to establish itself, so we have perhaps a couple of years to emigrate if the XPOTUS takes power in January: "The transition from democracy to autocracy is a process, not an on-off switch."
• Jay Willis shakes his head that "Jeff Bezos doesn't understand that he is the problem:" "[T]he possibility that Americans might also not care for a rich guy leveraging his power to compromise political coverage in the middle of an up-or-down vote on fascism seems not to have occurred to him."
• Dylan Byers takes to Puck to muse about Bezos's side of the argument: "Ultimately, Bezos wants to own, and Lewis wants to manage, a paper staffed by a team that supports their vision for semi-nonpartisan, future-proofed profitability."
• Jeff Jarvis explains in the Columbia Journalism Review why liberals are infuriated with the media: "Journalists like to say they write the first draft of history. Too often that means they ignore history. Today I urge journalists to reread Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism so as to understand her historical antecedents."
• Inae Oh expands on why people not already in the bag for the XPOTUS might hate election coverage right now: "Trump’s menacing language—a constant for almost a decade—rarely draws the notice that Garbage-gate has received. To call this imbalance typical both-sidesism fails to adequately convey the failures of the media in 2024."
• Robert Wright congratulates Elon Musk on becoming America's first true oligarch: "Musk is far and away the most dramatic example of concentrated power. By virtue of his undeniable intelligence, creativity, and drive, he has wound up with an impressively diverse portfolio of influence."
• Micky Horstman, writing an op-ed in Crain's, wants public transit in Chicago that people actually want to use: "Other cities have figured out how to run a transit agency post-pandemic. Chicago can, too."

But after all of this, yesterday Jennifer Rubin made "the case for election optimism." So I'll end this post with her argument:

Americans need to retain perspective, muster up patience, let the vote counting proceed, avoid bestowing MAGA legal challenges credibility they do not deserve and insist on bipartisan recognition of the winner. We can do this, America.

Yes, we can.

"Nice democracy you've got there. Be a shame if something happened to it..."—XPOTUS (paraphrased).

The man whose presidency did more damage to our country than any since James Buchanan's and wants another ride on the pony spent yesterday rallying the brownshirts at Madison Square Garden in an event his own supporters equated with the infamous Nazi rally there in 1939.

But I have to agree with Michael Tomasky this morning, when he says we "may as well spend this last week feeling confident:"

To put it simply, liberals tend toward fatalism and panic; the label often employed is “bedwetters.” Did you see those new anti-trans ads? She’s doomed. Oh my God, did you see what Nate Silver just said? It’s over. Yikes, the polls in Pennsylvania just shifted seven-tenths of a point in Trump’s favor, this is a nightmare. Oh dear, the Nevada early vote totals are a disaster. And on and on and on and on: Liberals look for things to panic about.

I think it starts with the fact that liberals worry more about the world; carry more psychic weight around with them. Conservatives worry about the world too, but they do so in a very different way. Liberals love complexity, while conservatives prefer simplicity.

[M]any liberals have, whether consciously or not, absorbed the lesson from the media that they don’t really represent or speak for America, while conservatives are serenely confident that they do represent and speak for America.

The Republican Party has become so extreme that it no longer represents middle America at all. Middle America wants women to own their reproductive freedom. Middle America wants sensible gun laws. Middle America wants the superrich to pay more taxes. Middle America wants a higher minimum wage, more housing, and more investments made in the middle class.

[F]reaking out and panicking just contributes to an overall atmosphere that helps the other side. Don’t do it. Fatalism is the opium of the people.

Josh Marshall points out that while the polls appear to say the election will be close, they're actually saying the election is actually uncertain:

I think there’s more uncertainty than usual because of 1) rapid changes in the polling industry in response to evolving technology, 2) methodological changes in response to polls twice underestimating Donald Trump’s electoral strength, and 3) the steep and inherent difficulties of separating what about the 2020 election was embedded electoral trends and what was the COVID pandemic. So yes, I really do think there are more question marks, more debatable assumptions packaged into the analyses than usual.

Of course, if the polls said that either candidate was 15 points ahead this would all mostly be moot. We know that the race is at least fairly close. That’s why all these factors are in play. And that’s a good way to conclude on the expectations setting — that I’m not saying some sort of blow out in either direction is likely. Just that it might not actually be that close. And we should be careful to distinguish between these two things — close and uncertain.

But just to remind everyone what's on the line here, even if the XPOTUS won't do all the anti-democratic and anti-American things he has threatened to do, the people coming with him will try to remake the country in ways that almost no one outside their Christian Nationalist bubble wants. To that end, I give you: Stop Project 2025, the web comic. That's right: if you're at all confused about what the extreme right will do should they get into power, this series of comics will explain it.

Happy Monday.

I filled out my ballot yesterday and will deliver it to one of Chicago's early-voting drop-offs today or Monday. Other than a couple of "no" votes for judicial retention (a bizarre ritual we go through in Illinois), I voted pretty much as you would expect. I even voted for a couple of Republicans! (Just not for any office that could cause damage to the city or country.)

Meanwhile, the world continues to turn:

• Matt Yglesias makes "a positive case for Kamala Harris:" "[A]fter eight tumultuous years, Harris is the right person for the job, the candidate who’ll turn the temperature down in American politics and let everyone get back to living their lives. ... [I]f you’re a normal person with some mixed feelings about the parties, I think you will be dramatically happier with the results that come from President Harris negotiating with congressional Republicans over exactly which tax breaks should be extended rather than a re-empowered Trump backed by a 6-3 Supreme Court and supportive majorities in Congress."
• Eugene Robinson excoriates CNN (and by implication a good chunk of the MSM) for covering the XPOTUS as if he were a normal political candidate and not, you know, an election and a Reichstag fire from crippling the modern world: "Oops, there I go again, dwelling on the existential peril we face. Instead, let’s parse every detail of every position Harris takes today against every detail of every position she took five years ago. And then let’s wonder why she hasn’t already put this election away."
• Ezra Klein spends 45 minutes explaining that what's wrong with the XPOTUS isn't just the obvious, but the fact that no one around him is guarding us from his delusional disinhibitions: "What we saw on that stage in Pennsylvania, as Trump D.J.’d, was not Donald Trump frozen, paralyzed, uncertain. It was the people around him frozen, paralyzed, uncertain. He knew exactly where he was. He was doing exactly what he wanted to do. But there was no one there, or no one left, who could stop him."
• James Fallows, counting down to November 5th, calls out civic bravery: "There are more of us than there are of them."
• Fareed Zakaria warns that the Democratic Party hasn't grokked the political realignment going on in the United States right now: "The great divide in America today is not economic but social, and its primary marker is college education. The other strong predictors of a person’s voting behavior are gender, geography and religion. So the new party bases in America are an educated, urban, secular and female left and a less-educated, rural, religious and male right."
• Pamela Paul points out the inherent nihilism of "settler colonialism" ideology as it applies to the growing anti-Israel movement in left-wing academia: "Activists and institutions can voice ever louder and longer land acknowledgments, but no one is seriously proposing returning the United States to Native Americans. Similarly, if “From the river to the sea” is taken literally, where does that leave Israeli Jews, many of whom were exiled not only from Europe and Russia, but also from surrounding Muslim states?"
• Hitachi has won a $212m contract to—wait for it—remove 5.25-inch floppy disks from the San Francisco MUNI light-rail network.
• American Airlines has rolled out a tool that will make an annoying sound if a gate louse attempts to board before his group number is called. Good.
• SMU writing professor Jonathan Malesic harrumphs that college kids don't read books anymore.

Speaking of books, The Economist just recommended yet another book to put on my sagging "to be read" bookshelves (plural). Nicholas Cornwell (writing as Nick Harkaway), the son of David Cornwell (aka John Le Carré), has written a new George Smiley novel set in 1963. I've read all the Smiley novels, and this one seems like a must-read as well: "Karla’s Choice could have been a crude pastiche and a dull drama. Instead, it is an accomplished homage and a captivating thriller. It may be a standalone story, but with luck Mr Harkaway will continue playing the imitation game." Excellent.

Jim Fallows points out that XPOTUS backers and really horrible people Peter Thiel and Elon Musk surely know that the XPOTUS is losing it, so we need to think about what that means should JD Vance become VPOTUS:

Here is a chain-of-being that doesn’t get enough attention:

• Peter Thiel and Elon Musk were two of the co-founders of PayPal. They are the duo you see above, nearly 25 years ago.
• Peter Thiel created JD Vance as a political figure. Vance met Thiel when Vance was a student at Yale Law; he went to work for Thiel’s venture-capital firm in San Francisco and made his money there (before more money, from his book); and Thiel was the crucial donor in Vance’s 2022 campaign for the Senate. Recall that Vance’s success in Ohio two years ago was the rare big GOP victory in the purported “red wave” of that year. Vance is also an isolated success among the political proteges Thiel has funded, whose prominent failures include the right-wing extremist Arizona candidate Blake Masters.
• Musk, Thiel, and Vance himself are all savvy enough to recognize that Donald Trump is falling apart mentally, and perhaps physically, as the world watches. Should he and Vance be elected, the odds are overwhelming that Vance would sooner or later end up in control—through the 25th Amendment or by natural means.

About that last bit: the XPOTUS outdid himself the past couple of days, including uttering an obscenity at the Al Smith dinner (with the Catholic archbishop of New York sitting right there), and going on an extensive riff about the size of Arnold Palmer's penis before calling Vice President Harris "a shit vice president." And take a look at the transcript from his Univision town hall yesterday. Not to mention, of course, that he sounds a lot like our three favorite dictators from World War II. This is who half the country want as their leader.

While you ponder that, you can enjoy The New Republic's list of "the 100 worst things Trump has done since descending that escalator." And then you can bloody well vote for Harris in 15 days.

Two guest essays in yesterday's New York Times caught my attention. The first, by Tony Schwartz, the ghostwriter who wrote the "unintended work of fiction" The Art of the Deal, pivots off the new XPOTUS biopic to warn us, once more, about the psychopath topping the Republican ticket:

What struck me from the first day I met Mr. Trump was his unquenchable thirst to be the center of attention. No amount of external recognition ever seemed to be enough. Beneath his bluster and his bombast, he struck me as one of the most insecure people I’d ever met — and one of the least self-aware. He’d crossed the bridge from Queens to Manhattan but he remained the product — and even the prisoner — of his childhood experiences. As he told a reporter in 2015, “When I look at myself in the first grade and I look at myself now, I’m basically the same.”

I buy that.

The past is prologue and, as Mr. Trump has said, he’s essentially the same person today that he was as a child. That is the central warning “The Apprentice” poses, and it comes just weeks before the election.

Ever since Mr. Trump announced in 2015 that he was running for president, I’ve argued publicly that the only limitation on his behavior as president — then and now — is what he believes he can get away with. Mr. Trump has made it clear that he believes he can get away with a lot more today. If he does win back the presidency, it’s hard to imagine that he’ll have much more on his mind than revenge and domination — damn the consequences — in his doomed, lifelong quest to feel good enough.

The second comes from Harvard Law professors Nikolas Bowie and Daphna Renan, arguing that the legislature should take back the power that the judiciary have essentially stolen from it:

“Make no mistake about it: We have a very strong argument that Congress by statute can undo what the Supreme Court does,” Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader, said recently as he announced the introduction of the No Kings Act. The measure declares that it is Congress’s constitutional judgment that no president is immune from the criminal laws of the United States. It would strip the Supreme Court of jurisdiction to declare the No Kings Act unconstitutional. Any criminal actions against a president would be left in the hands of the lower federal courts. And these courts would be required to adopt a presumption that the No Kings Act is constitutional.

It might seem unusual for Congress to instruct federal courts how to interpret the Constitution. But the No Kings Act follows an admirable tradition, dating back to the earliest years of the United States, in which Congress has invoked its constitutional authority to ensure that the fundamental law of our democracy is determined by the people’s elected representatives rather than a handful of lifetime appointees accountable to no one.

In recent years, however, the court has seemed particularly uninterested in forbearance, as five or six justices routinely upend Congress’s longstanding interpretations of the Constitution. For example, nearly 50 years after Congress and the president first decided that the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was appropriate legislation and after several more Congresses, presidents and Supreme Court majorities agreed that the law was constitutional, five justices in 2013 invalidated a crucial provision of the law.

Congress could pass a statute declaring that when asked to apply a federal law, a judge must do so unless the judge believes the law is unconstitutional beyond honest dispute. To ensure there is no honest dispute, Congress could require the judge to enforce the law unless the Supreme Court certifies by a supermajority or unanimous vote that there are no reasonable grounds to defend it. In this way, Congress would require the justices to show, by their votes, that the incompatibility of the law with the Constitution is beyond honest dispute.

The No Kings Act is well grounded in our constitutional tradition. Rather than allow any president or justices to hold themselves above the law, Congress should force them all to live by it.

Bowie and Renan only hint at something obvious to anyone who has read our Constitution: in the document, the legislature comes first, the executive second, and the judiciary a distant third. I agree with them that Congress needs to remind the other two branches of that fact.

My day got away from me yesterday afternoon, so all this shiznit piled up:

• In the first of two gobsmacking First Amendment stories this week, the Florida Dept of Health has threatened television stations with criminal prosecution after they aired a pro-choice ad that appears to be working.
• In the second horrific First Amendment violation story, the state of Oklahoma is backpedaling after mandating that every school kid gets a Bible that just happens to look like the one the XPOTUS is hawking. (Note to international readers: the First Amendment to our Constitution not only protects free speech, but also prohibits the government from establishing an official religion. Handing Bibles to school kids is a prima facie violation of the Establishment Clause.)
• The XPOTUS has such a credibility gap that his own supporters don't believe he'll do the things he absolutely would do if re-elected.
• Mara Gay traces the downfall of New York mayor Eric Adams to his time with the police force, and says the city deserves better.
• Hurricane Milton destroyed Tropicana Field's roof, leading one to hope that they tear the monstrosity down and build something people would actually want to visit.

Finally, it turns out the principal difference between the 12-year-saga to replace the Ravenswood train station and the 15-year-saga to build the Peterson/Ridge station was that the Ravenswood station actually started construction 13 years ago. Streetsblog explains in detail why Chicago can't have nice transit things, and why I may never get to ride on a fully-electrified express train from Evanston to the Loop.

For once, Chicago's legendary corruption isn't the biggest news story of the day.

Let's start with New York, where the Adams administration seems determined to set new standards for public corruption, going so far as to float the "we're only a little bit criminal" defense:

The indictment alleged that, for years, starting during his tenure as Brooklyn borough president, Adams had cultivated a relationship with a representative of the Turkish government who arranged for him to receive some $123,000 worth of illegal gifts, such as discounted business-class tickets on Turkish Airlines and a stay in the Bentley Suite at the St. Regis in Istanbul. When Adams ran for mayor, his Turkish supporters allegedly channeled illegal donations to his campaign through straw donors with the connivance of Adams himself. In return, prosecutors say, Adams performed a number of favors as a public official, most notably pressuring FDNY inspectors to certify that the new Turkish Consulate near the U.N. was safe without conducting the necessary inspections.

The mayor’s defenders described all this as a whole lot of nothing. His defense attorney, Alex Spiro, ridiculed the indictment, calling it the “airline-upgrade corruption case,” and filed an immediate motion to dismiss the bribery charge, citing a recent Supreme Court decision that enlarged the bounds of acceptable gift taking. (He had less to say about the foreign donations.)

At the other end of the Acela, retired US District Court Judge Nancy Gertner and Georgetown law professor Stephen Vladeck warn the US Supreme Court that they are losing credibility, and thus, farther down the road, the power to do their jobs:

We have both been critical of the current justices for how their behavior, both on and off the bench, has undermined public faith in the court. Too many of its most important rulings can be chalked up to nothing more than the fact that Republican presidents appointed six of the justices, and Democrats appointed only three. And then there are the alarming ethical lapses of two of the six justices in the majority — lapses that have close connections to their relationships with right-wing megadonors.

A court that loses its institutional credibility is a court that will be powerless when it matters most.

A court without legitimacy is a court unable to curb abuses of political power that its rulings may well have enabled. It is a court that will be powerless when the next Chip Roy calls for disobedience because it will have long since alienated those who would otherwise have defended it. It would become a court powerless to push back against the tyrannies of the majority that led the founders to create an independent judiciary in the first place.

Will Republican Justices Thomas, Alito, Kavanaugh, and Gorsuch heed the warnings? Probably not. At least Special Counsel Jack Smith seems to have figured out how to get around some of their illegitimacy:

Smith’s filing tries to slice through the Court’s security shield regarding the insurrection. Skillfully quoting from or alluding to language in the Court majority’s own opinion, the filing demolishes the notion that Trump’s activities, culminating on January 6, deserve immunity. Outwardly, Smith’s filing respects the Court’s dubious ruling about the immunity of official presidential acts. Legally, Smith had no choice but to operate within that ruling, a fact that sharply limited how far his filing could go. But even though it never challenges the conservative majority directly, the filing makes a case, incontrovertible in its logic and factual detail, that the core of Trump’s subversion involved no official actions whatsoever. It persuasively argues, with fact after fact, that Trump was the head of an entirely private criminal plot as a candidate to overthrow the election, hatched months before the election itself.

The crucial point to which the filing unfailingly returns is that none of Trump’s actions listed in the revised indictment, even those that the Court cited as “official,” deserves immunity. As Smith makes clear, the Framers of the Constitution deliberately precluded the executive branch from having official involvement in the conduct of presidential elections. The reason was obvious: Any involvement by a president would be an open invitation to corruption. To make the case that any such involvement falls within a president’s official duties would seem, at best, extremely difficult.

It is here that Smith turns the Court’s Trump v. United States ruling to his own advantage.

Only 28 more days until what I think we can comfortably predict will be the XPOTUS's last election—one way or another. But I think we'll be stuck with corruption for a very long time, until people get fed up with it enough to demand and enforce real anti-corruption laws.

The extreme-right-wing US Supreme Court begins a new term today, which we can all expect to continue the trends they have been on for the last 30 years. All we need is a razor-thin margin in one or two swing states on the 5th, and then, as George HW Bush said once, "Zip-a-dee-doo-dah! Now it's off to the races!"

Meanwhile:

• A new book argues that the "originalism" practiced by many Republican judges, like Justices Alito and Thomas, has absolutely no basis in historical fact. But we knew that already.
• Josh Marshall wants everyone to calm down about the Harris campaign: "[Y]ou thinking she’s screwing up or stalling or whatever, if you are, is probably your angst talking more than some real analysis of what’s happening in the campaign."
• Republican-leaning columnist Matt Bai thinks Maryland governor Larry Hogan (R) made a strategic error by choosing to run for the US Senate as a Republican instead of as an independent.
• Consumer DNA analysis company 23andMe doesn't seem to have a plan for what to do with my personal data if they get into trouble or shut down.
• Kate Kaplan of the Nielsen-Norman Group has some excellent advice about iconography in software.

Finally, Cloudflare announced late last week that it blocked the largest distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack in history. The attack, whose packets came mainly from Russia, peaked at 3.8 Tbps, beating the previous record of 3.47 Tbps against a Microsoft Azure customer.

The only reaction to last night's debate that I need to share is Cassie's:

Talk about on-the-nose commentary!

Right. Anyway, in other news since yesterday:

• Elaine Godfrey explains what Democrats don't understand about JD Vance.
• Julia Ioffe interviews Justice Dept official Matt Olsen, who heads up the Biden Administration's anti-election-interference group.
• Meteorologists estimate that Hurricane Helene dumped 150 trillion liters of water on Appalachia as it stalled out, with one town in North Carolina getting a staggering 796 mm of rain.

Finally, the New York Times dips into the history of chicken tenders, an American pub staple that (allegedly) turns 50 this year. Love me tenders, love me sauce...

Well, here we go: the only real debate between the candidates for President of the United States during this election cycle. We have 8 weeks to go until November 5th. Both candidates are, for reasons passing understanding, neck and neck in the polls. (Don't read the polls!) Just remember what President George HW Bush said during the 1988 campaign: "It's no exaggeration to say the undecideds could go one way or the other."

I'll update this post throughout the event. I'm watching the PBS broadcast on YouTube, if it matters.

All times are local to the event site, Eastern Daylight Time:

21:03: "We're looking forward to a spirited...debate."

21:04: "Are we better off than four years ago?" You mean, during the darkest time of the pandemic?

(I'm adjusting my monitor, because those two people can't possibly have the same skin color. One of them might be wearing way too much makeup.)

21:05: Harris labels the 20% tariffs a "sales tax," which it is.

21:05: The XPOTUS really doesn't understand how tariffs work. Tariffs are paid by the country imposing them.

21:07: "Inflation like no one has ever seen before." Harris is laughing at him. Then "Jobs are being taken from African-Americans" and she rolls her eyes, which I almost missed because I was rolling mine.

21:08: "What we have done is clean up [the XPOTUS's] mess. ... You're going to hear from the same old tired playbook."

21:10: Maybe appealing to the authorities of the Wharton School and Morgan Stanley might not be her best appeal to the voters. But then again, he doesn't actually know the name of the school where he got his MBA.

21:11: WTF is "run, spot, run?"

21:12: He just does not get what tariffs do. It's sad, really.

21:13: OK, he's starting to yell now. (DUDE, HE'S NOT THE PRESIDENT.)

21:14: Harris is controlling this debate. He's completely on defense. She's openly laughing at him now.

21:16: Hey, XPOTUS, what about your complete flip-flop on abortion? "They have abortion in the 9th month! The baby will be born and we'll execute the baby!" Whaaaaa? "Execution after birth is OK!" What in the name of hell...?

21:19: "There is no state in the country where it is legal to kill a baby after it's born. VP Harris?" Linsey Davis isn't having his bullshit either.

21:21: Why is he harping on the lie that everyone wanted abortion back in the states?

21:23: "I didn't discuss it with JD. ... She'll never be able to get [the abortion law]. So it doesn't matter." And back to the lie about going back to the states.

21:25: "What you are putting her through is unconscionable." True. "I have been a leader on IVF!" False.

21:28: "The people of this country need a leader. ... Attend one of his rallies. He'll talk about Hannibal Lecter, about windmills. People leave out of exhaustion and boredom."

21:29: Oh, marvelous, he took the bait on the rallies.

21:30: "They're eating the dogs, eating the cats, eating the pets!" Whaaaaa...?

21:31: "This is one of the reasons why I have the endorsement of 200 Republicans. ... When we listen to this kind of rhetoric, when the issues are not being addressed, the people deserve better."

21:34: How would you deport 11 million undocumented immigrants? "They allowed criminals! Terrorists! Dogs and cats, living together! Mass hysteria!"

21:36: According to the FBI, the "murder rate fell by 26.4%, reported rapes decreased by 25.7%, robberies fell by 17.8%, aggravated assault fell by 12.5%, and the overall violent crime rate went down by 15.2%" in the first 3 months of 2024.

21:37: "They're the ones that made them go after them! Joe Biden was found guilty on the documents case! My hand-picked judge, that I appointed after I lost the election, threw my case out!"

21:39: NYT Pitchbot: "Harris seems a little overprepared for this debate."

21:42: "A true leader understands the value of building people up, not beating people down." "My father only gave me a small fraction of that $400 million..." Wow, he's chasing every dog treat she throws at him. "I'm talking now. Does that sound familiar?" And there go the suburban women.

Wow, does this old man need a nap:

21:45: A long-time Daily Parker reader texts, "He's making faces like an orangutan." And the entire island of Borneo lodges a complaint.

21:47: My entire Facebook feed is about people eating their pets.

21:48: "I was in the capitol, bub. Don't piss on my head and tell me it's raining." And let's not forget Charlottesville, and "fine people on both side." "We're not going back. It's time to turn the page."

21:50: Using Laura Inghram and Sean Hannity to say something is debunked? They build the bunks. They are bunkies. But whatever.

21:51: Old man is getting angrier. It's at this point where the bouncer comes over and says, "OK, Donnie, keep it down or we're going to have to go outside for a minute."

21:52: "I got more votes than any sitting president!" Yes, but your opponents got more votes both times.

21:53: Now he's shouting at the moderators. The bouncer looks at the bar manager and shrugs, but moves closer.

21:54: "World leaders are laughing at [the XPOTUS]. ... It leads one to believe [you] do not have the temperament, and the ability not to be confused." And he responds with Victor Orbán's endorsement.

21:55: "I ended the Nord Stream 2 pipeline!" Uh, no, Ukrainian Special Forces did. Unless...was he in the Ukrainian Special Forces?

21:59: Cassie has a comment about the debate:

22:02: Apparently, I don't get half of what he's saying because I don't read 4Chan.

22:09: OK, we're back, with a drink, because oh my god. "It's worse than the numbers you're getting and they're fake numbers." Whaaa...?

22:10: He still doesn't understand how NATO funding works. It's always transactional, and always someone else pays, and always it's not his fault.

22:11: Did he just admit to a violation of the Logan Act by meeting with Putin? And wow, his jaw is working hard. 

22:12: "Tell the 800,000 Polish Americans right here in Pennsylvania how you would give up to the dictator who would eat you for lunch."

22:14: "Putin would have been sitting in Moscow, and he wouldn't have lost 300,000 men. ... And maybe he'll use [nuclear weapons]." WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK. WHAT. THE. FUCKING. FUCK. But he didn't say whether he wants Ukraine to win.

22:17: "I agreed with President Biden's decision to pull out of Afghanistan. ... The first time this century no American soldier is on combat duty anywhere in the world."

22:19: "And this...[meaningful pause]...former president invited [the Taliban] to Camp David." Wow.

22:22: "Let's remember he was investigated for not renting to Black families. ... The Central Park Five full-page ad. ... Birther lies about the first Black president. The American people want better than this." And he defended his choice to slander the Central Park Five.

22:24: I'm just going to leave this Tweet from Betty Bowers right...here.

22:29: "So, just a yes or no, you still do not have a plan?" Oh, Linsey, you are wonderful.

22:32: "Access to health care should be a right, and not just a privilege for those who can afford it."

22:34: I have to say, as someone who lived through the 1980s and 1990s, there's some frission hearing that an American presidential candidate has the endorsement of Sinn Féin. Sorry, Sean Fain. See what I mean? (Gerry Adams could not be reached for comment.)

22:36: What is the old man yelling about now? Joe Biden getting paid by the mayor of Moscow's wife? OK, viejo, time to pay your tab and go home.

22:41: "Two visions ... the future, and the past ... and we're not going back. ... Having a plan. Understanding the aspirations, the hosts, the dreams ... Giving hardworking folks a break and bringing down the cost of living ... Sustaining American's standing in the world ... Protect our most fundamental rights and freedoms ... "

21:43: "They've had 3½ years ... why hasn't she done it? She should leave right now ... You believe in things like 'we're not going to frack' ... Germany tried that and within one year they were back to building normal energy plants ... We're a failing nation ... serious decline ... all over the world they're laughing at us ... we're not a leader ... we don't have any idea what's going on ... Because of nuclear weapons, the power of weaponry ... allowing millions of people to come into our country ... the worst president." Literally nothing at all about what he would do.

Well, the XPOTUS's campaign did not get Uncle Fluffy today, did they?

And will someone let that poor deranged old man have a nap?