Even if the Democrats win the election, don’t expect much of a change.

Joe Biden’s transition team is vetting a handful of Republicans for potential Cabinet positions — despite doubts it will win him new support from the right and the risk it will enrage the left.

Reaching across the aisle to pick senior members of his administration could shore up Biden’s credentials as a unity candidate, a message he’s made a cornerstone of his campaign. Past presidents including George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama have all done the same. But that tradition died with President Donald Trump, and liberal Democrats are already warning that a Republican pick, even a moderate one, could sow distrust within the party before Biden even takes office.

It’s bad enough that we’re settling for a tepid centrist Democrat, but if he caves to that degree, I hope he’s ready to be primaried so hard and to be a one-term president.

It’s clear that massive gatherings of unmasked, heedless people spread the pandemic. The Sturgis motorcycle rally, for instance, seems to have sown surges of infection all across the midwest, in the Dakotas and Minnesota and elsewhere, but that doesn’t seem to stop Republicans from saying stupid stuff.

Here’s a Fargo city commissioner dismissing the importance of masks in slowing the rate of infection.

We’re doomed.

pic.twitter.com/V184UYQjrX

— Molly Jong-Fast🏡 (@MollyJongFast) October 18, 2020

The thing is, no one claims that the virus itself is blocked by a mask — what the mask stops are fluid droplets that are spewed out of our mouths and nose when we talk or sneeze or just plain breathe. There is also empirical evidence that states that mandate the use of masks have lower infection rates than our more laissez-faire neighbors. But that twit, Deputy Mayor Dave Piepkorn, thinks the science supports his claim that masks are useless. Great. Fargo, the city only 2 hours north of me, is going to be doing its part to kill me.

I shouldn’t just pick on North Dakota, though. The idiocy has spilled over into Western Minnesota, where we’re afflicted with all kinds of conservative nonsense. Like, for instance, Bill Ingebrigtsen. He’s not my rep, his district is north of mine, but I have heard him speak at political meetings, and he’s a colossal dumbass. Here he is claiming that racism is not a problem in America, because Obama and pro athletes.

“There is going to be some shootings,” he concluded. “That’s really unfortunate. But to sit here and tell and lie to people and say that that we are in a horrible racist situation in this country. I’d have to ask, how did Obama get to where he is? How did these professional sports ever get to where they are. There’s nobody standing in the way of anything in this country.”

His parting shot was the classic, “Well, racism has never affected me,” which is always so convincing coming out of the mouth of a white Republican representing a district that is 0.29% African American.

In his rebuttal, Ingebrigtsen said that he hasn’t seen any instances of racism, and that state offices already have anti-discrimination departments set up to address such issues.

We really have to get these bozos out of office.

We knew it was coming. Remember, several years ago, when Trump, and Scott Walker, and Paul Ryan were all blathering about the great economic progress the Republican party was producing by bringing in Foxconn to the state? They were going to create all these new jobs and trigger an economic renaissance in the entire midwest. I recall watching Wisconsin going down the tubes, instead, compared to Minnesota, which did not fall for the Republican hokum…but it did help turn their state red. It still is. It’ll be interesting to see how the state goes next month.

Because Foxconn was nothing but a lie, yet another Republican grift. They got billions of dollars in subsidies, and there’s nothing to show for it.

That vision got Gou regular access to the White House during a trade war and gave Trump a groundbreaking and almost a ribbon-cutting, too. But maintaining the mirage required a culture of secrecy. Employees were warned not to talk to the press (including, specifically, me). Many were afraid to speak — afraid of getting fired, or of retribution even after they’d left. Publicly, the company issued announcement after announcement — innovation centers, career fairs, smart cities, AI 8K+5G, the AI Institute — each one erasing the memory of the last missed deadline. (One employee quipped that one of the few things Foxconn succeeded in making in Wisconsin was press releases.) The illusion was defended by GOP officials at all levels of government, from Mount Pleasant to the State Assembly to the White House, who accused anyone pointing out that the project was off track of trying to scuttle it for partisan ends, as if the existence of the factory were open to debate and positive thinking might make it real.

But in actual reality, the project has succeeded in manufacturing mostly this: an endless supply of wonderful things for the President to promise his supporters. This past weekend, in an interview with a local Wisconsin TV station, Trump insisted Foxconn had built “one of the most incredible plants I’ve ever seen” in Mount Pleasant and would keep its promises and more if he was reelected. “They will do what I tell them to do,” he said. “If we win the election, Foxconn is going to come into our country with money like no other company has come into our country.”

No one wanted to believe promises like this more than the people who went to work for Foxconn in Wisconsin. They each came to regret different things: the wasted time, the jobs they’d left, the integrity lost making deals and offering jobs only to have the company change course. But one common theme was frustration that it hadn’t turned out to be real and that long after they’d learned the truth, they saw the facade still standing. “There are a lot of good people who fell for this,” said one employee, shortly before departing a job at Foxconn. “Who wanted to see it succeed.”

At least awareness is slowly emerging. Ryan and Walker are out, let’s hope Trump gets 86’ed next.

Maybe this article titled “My fling with a Proud Boy”, with the subhead “A young liberal reflects on what a far-right romance taught her about men, women, love, and life”, is supposed to be a joke, except that it got published in The American Conservative, which doesn’t have much of a reputation for humor. It’s usually more about racism.

Elias is a trim, intelligent man about my dad’s size.

My sarcasm sense is already tingling, confirmed later by frequent mentions of Freud and Jung. She’s got to be pulling everyone’s leg.

He seemed quiet, except for his clothes. He wore a jaunty plaid hat and his wool coat reminded me of a Confederate soldier’s. There were anti-PC pins on it.

“I’m fighting the establishment,” he said. (In my mind he added m’lady.)

Elias was on a Tinder spree. His heart was torn. His girlfriend broke up with him a year ago so she could explore the world.

It just gets more and more ridiculous.

Elias told me he didn’t like mainstream media. I referenced Paglia. He countered with Evola. We both read Robert Greene. We kept going until I pulled the trump card:

“I’m reading Jung.”

“Good stuff.”

He tilted the Pepe on his screensaver towards me.

“Have you heard of the Proud Boys?”

There’s a point in a girl’s life when she needs it. This was that point. In 2017 I almost got married. I failed. I’d only lived in New York for six months when I met him; I was definitely influenced by Sex and the City.

Come on. The editors at the American Conservative had to have caught on by now.

One night he brought Guinness and oranges. My place is small; I sat on my chair and he sat at the desk.

“You look dapper,” I said. His outfit was ASOS. He pulled a yellow compass-looking apparatus out of his canvas messenger bag.

“Here, give me your face.”

He held it at several angles across my cheekbone.

“You’re neotenous,” Elias said approvingly.

I raised a brow. He paused, taking a drink. Then he added “You’re cute.”

I smiled. “Come up with me.”

We climbed the wooden ladder to my loft.

“I’m scared,” I told him. “I’ve been watching Jordan Peterson videos.”

“Father Peterson is helping you through?”

“I watched the one about female heroism. How she knows her children will be in pain and she does it anyway.”

“Ah.” He said it knowingly and wisely, like a sage. “So you are paying attention.”

All right, enough. I can’t believe two human beings could be that insufferable, or that the American Conservative would publish it. Tucker Carlson is chairman of the board there, you know, and Rod Dreher is a senior editor, and it was founded by Pat Buchanan? I suspect this article was run simply to discombobulate everyone.

It’s here! Rudy Giuliani has it. Hunter Biden, who is not running for office, is claimed to have left incriminating evidence of terrible crimes on a hard drive.

“The process was that the laptop was left by Hunter Biden, in an inebriated, heavily inebriated state with the merchant,” Giuliani told conservative radio host David Webb of SiriusXM Patriot 125 on Thursday. “The merchant fixed the laptop, tried to reach out to Hunter Biden, and Hunter Biden never came back for it. The document that I have signed by Hunter Biden says that after 90 days, the hard drive is abandoned, and becomes the property of the merchant.”

The shop owner told the New York Post that he had given a copy of the computer’s hard drive to Giuliani, who later provided a copy of the drive to the tabloid earlier in October. The New York Post subsequently published some of the contents in the hard drive on Wednesday, including an email that spoke of potentially setting up a meeting between a senior official from Ukrainian energy firm Burisma Holdings, where he sat on the board, and his father, former Vice President Joe Biden.

Uh, OK. So Hunter Biden got drunk, left a broken laptop at a repair shop, and forgot about it, so the repair shop owner gets possession and passes it on to the always credible Giuliani, who sits on it for 6 months and is now trickling out little bits info while promising that the remainder proves that Hunter Biden is owned by China.

Weak sauce.

A better surprise is that Rudy Giuliani’s daughter, Caroline, has repudiated her father’s politics.

If being the daughter of a polarizing mayor who became the president’s personal bulldog has taught me anything, it is that corruption starts with “yes-men” and women, the cronies who create an echo chamber of lies and subservience to maintain their proximity to power. We’ve seen this ad nauseam with Trump and his cadre of high-level sycophants (the ones who weren’t convicted, anyway).

What inspires me most about Vice President Biden is that he is not afraid to surround himself with people who disagree with him. Choosing Senator Harris, who challenged him in the primary, speaks volumes about what an inclusive president he will be. Biden is willing to incorporate the views of progressive-movement leaders like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren on issues like universal health care, student debt relief, prison reform, and police reform. And he is capable of reaching across the aisle to find moments of bipartisanship. The very notion of “bipartisanship” may seem painfully ludicrous right now, but we need a path out of impenetrable gridlock and vicious sniping. In Joe Biden, we’ll have a leader who prioritizes common ground and civility over alienation, bullying, and scorched-earth tactics.

Do people still listen to Giuliani? He’s terrible.

Why do you have to ruin this pitch-perfect rant about the election by dissing spiders, Cody? That one line hurt, you know.

The rest, though, is spot on. Biden sucks, but we’ve got to vote for him.

I won’t be able to watch the election returns on 3 November. Because of the electoral college, and the corruption, and the rat-fucking Republicans, and the poisoning of the courts with unqualified evil jerks, I don’t have that much confidence that Trump will be thrown out of office.

I had an hour before class, so I decided to take a short walk in the fall sun in this, the land of the Dakota peoples. On the way I met an older man holding a newspaper, and he stopped in front of me — wearing a mask, of course, and 2 meters away from me. He said, “It’s Columbus Day! They’re tearing down statues in Portland!” He seemed distressed.

I was going to say, “Good. Portland is in many ways a progressive city, and I’m pleased that they’re acting to address injustices. Columbus was a genocidal monster who enslaved and tortured and murdered native people, and we should all be tearing down the statues and the myths of our nation that have so far honored mainly cruelty and oppression.”

Unfortunately, I am unable to say that in Anishinaabemowin, which would be the most appropriate language to use, so I just gave him a thumbs up and walked around him.

A remorseful Indigenous Peoples’ Day to all my fellow colonizers! Take a moment to think about the true history of the land you’re living in!

We are a NASNTI (Native American Serving Non-Tribal Institution) with 24% of our students being Native American. Our state’s name comes from the Dakota people’s name for their homelands – Mni Sota Makoce – ‘the land where the waters reflect the skies’.

— University of Minnesota Morris (@UMNMorris) October 12, 2020

Trump has something novel to complain about. In addition to failing to rake their forests, California allows their rivers to flow.

"California is gonna have to ration water. You wanna know why? Because they send millions of gallons of water out to sea, out to the Pacific. Because they want to take care of certain little tiny fish, that aren't doing very well without water." — Trump pic.twitter.com/g0PrXZRgOq

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 9, 2020

To add to the irony, he complains to Hannity that AOC and others are “not-bright people” who “don’t have any experience with the environment”.

Why is this nincompoop still president?