I hope I never disappoint my daughter this much

Politics is personal, as Rudy Giuliani’s daughter, Caroline Rose Giuliani, demonstrates. She’s voting for Kamala Harris because Trump wrecked her father.

As Rudy Giuliani’s daughter, I’m unfortunately well-suited to remind Americans of just how calamitous being associated with Trump can be, even for those who are convinced he’s on their side. Watching my dad’s life crumble since he joined forces with Trump has been extraordinarily painful, both on a personal level and because his demise feels linked to a dark force that threatens to once again consume America. Not to disregard individual accountability in the slightest, but it would be naive for us to ignore the fact that many of those closest to Trump have descended into catastrophic downward spirals. If we let Trump back into the driver’s seat this fall, our country will be no exception.

She still cares about her dad! She wants his descent to stop.

I know that some people may question whether I truly care about my father, since another Trump presidency could theoretically mitigate some of the problems he’s facing. It distresses me to think that my dad might even wonder this. But if you zoom out, Trump being the president was the worst thing that ever happened to my dad, to my family, and to our nation’s modern history. The consequences will only be more severe—and irreversible— a second time around. Thanks to the extremist Supreme Court he stacked, Trump would take office with full immunity: no checks on his power whatsoever. If the president isn’t going to be subject to the law like every other citizen, which remains incomprehensible to me, then our president had better have a moral compass. A 34-time convicted felon who’s been found liable for sexual abuse, tries to steal elections, and demeans people based on their race, sexuality, disability status, and gender falls remarkably short of the bar we must set for ourselves as a country. Fortunately, we have another choice in this election: a life-long public servant who has spent her career upholding justice and fighting for those who cannot fight for themselves.

Listen to your daughter, Rudy.

This summary of Chris Rufo is tight

Here’s everything you need to know about Chris Rufo.

In case anyone forgot Chris Rufo posted a $5,000 bounty for a video of Haitians eating cats in Springfield then posted a video of unknown people with chicken on a grill in Canton then we remembered he was married to someone who came to the US illegally then it turned out he had an Ashley Madison account and he threatened to sue @lawindsor about it and said it was a lie but then @stevanzetti showed how the Ashley Madison database has gps coordinates for Topanga where Rufo lived at the time and then Rufo started deleting tweets about Topanga and wowza.

There’s more! He called on his wife to write about her experience as an undocumented immigrant.

There have been rumors circulating that call into question the harassment against my family. Here s a statement from my wife Suphatra: | came to the United States as an undocumented immigrant in the late 1980s. My mother brought me here to escape abuse and human trafficking in my native Thailand. | grew up in a small town in New Hampshire where we were the only minority family. I experienced a lot of intolerance growing up. | remember being refused service in a restaurant. | remember boys holding back the doors at my school so | couldn’t get in, yelling “go back to your country.” | remember the school librarian asking me if | was a child prostitute in Thailand. | remember my college boyfriend being stopped at a grocery store and asked if he had purchased me abroad.

So…someone very close to him is a witness to the injustice and discrimination perpetrated against immigrants in this country, but Rufo has so little concern about that personal testimony that he goes on to promote the same kind of hatred against other immigrants? OK.

I think that in order to be a conservative you have to go to a filthy back alley clinic where they take a flaming red hot wire, ram it into your ear, and scour out your empathic nucleus to leave only a charred black lump in the middle of your brain.

I hope your house doesn’t look like this, Floridians

Hurricane Helene has passed by now, leaving wreckage in its wake.

If you suffered any losses, you know how you can fix it? Close your eyes! Project 2025 wants to close the National Hurricane Center and NOAA because they keep telling people about these kinds of natural disasters.

“The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) should be dismantled and many of its functions eliminated,” reads the introduction to Project 2025’s chapter on proposals for the Department of Commerce (of which NOAA is an agency). It goes on to simply say “Break up NOAA” as the first sentence in the section covering that agency.

Project 2025 calls NOAA and the National Weather Service “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry,” and “harmful to future U.S. prosperity.”

See, the damage due to Helene was simply alarmism. If you don’t know about it, it didn’t happen.

Their idea of prosperity, though, is to privatize and commercialize weather forecasting. Make people pay for their warnings and safety.

Oliver also unearthed a 2018 interview with AccuWeather’s Founder and Executive Chairman Joel Myers, describing what he felt was a success story for privatized-weather forecasting, but which actually stands as a cautionary tale:

“Union Pacific: We told them that a tornado was heading to a spot. Two trains stopped two miles apart, they watched the tornado go between. Then unfortunately it went into a town that didn’t have our service and a couple dozen people were killed. But the railroad did not lose anything,” Myers said.

Success: a couple dozen people died, but the railroad company didn’t lose any money.

AccuWeather’s Founder and Executive Chairman Joel Myers is no relation, and if he is, I disown him.

They’re not even good liars

You know what’s fun? Put JD Vance in front of a friendly interviewer and let him talk. In this case, He sat down with a Breitbart drone and felt confident to just unfurl his freak flag and sing.

I actually think we have to destroy the universities in this country. They get too much money, they have too much power, I don’t think they do anything good.

He also claims that universities teach students to hate your country and hate your family. I had to quickly review my syllabi to see if I included those points…oops, no, I guess I’m going to have to spend my weekend doing revisions.

There’s so much hatred of education and learning in that interview…I’d go on, but he’s such a prolific source of insanity that The Cut listed a guide to his most unhinged public statements. It doesn’t even include his DESTROY ALL UNIVERSITIES talk.

And he’s just the vice president candidate. CNN compiled a list of 12 blatant lies Trump said in the last month.

Definitely a PR stunt, and quite stupid

The New Tolerance Campaign is a weird little right-wing organization founded by Log Cabin Republicans who are claiming to be “tolerant”, but their entire raison d’etre is to hate Muslims and anything “woke”. They are also hating on gay people who think Palestinians don’t deserve to be killed.

They have a Hate Map page that lists all the organizations across the country that they hate. Antifa, they hate. Muslim student associations, they hate. Socialists, they hate. Multiple chapters of Jewish Voice for Peace, they hate (because they’re anti-Semitic, obviously). You get the idea. This organization is run by people so twisted by hatred for Muslims in general and Palestinians in particular that they have put every faintly left-wing organization on a List.

They’ve also come up with a stunt.

The New Tolerance Campaign has secured $1,000,000 to underwrite expenses for an LGBTQ Pride Parade in Gaza or the West Bank!

Oh, wait. It’s not a publicity stunt. We know this because they say so.

This isn’t a joke. It’s not a publicity stunt. Our offer is real.

It’s absolutely insane, though, and reflects a lack of understanding and empathy on the part of the New Tolerance Campaign. They are incapable of comprehending the idea that people can simultaneously recognize that people living in a conservative, patriarchal culture or following a religion that is antithetical to LGBTQ values are not on their side, and that those people don’t deserve to die for their beliefs. You can believe that the best approach to dealing with a group that contains many misogynists and homophobes is education, coexistence, and, you know, tolerance, while recognizing that they do not share your goals.

I don’t know what the New Tolerance Campaign expects to demonstrate with this PR stunt (which is what it actually is). That LGBTQ people are actually aware that some people have ideological values that harm LGBTQ people? I think they’re already very aware of that. But maybe, just maybe, they’re capable of empathizing with other groups that are being oppressed and persecuted, and are able to allow them to live.

Maybe they’re also smart enough to realize that the West Bank and Gaza are free-fire zones for the IDF, and taking a walk with banners and flags is a good way to get a bomb dropped on you. Also maybe they can see that this is a relatively trivial cause to throw in the face of people who are being bombed, who might resent a stupid parade through the ruins of their homes.

We’re all happy to see Miss Sassy safe and sound

They keep trying to validate their racist claims.

Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance tried to prove his baseless claims about Haitian immigrants eating pets by pointing to a police report from one resident in Springfield, Ohio, that alleged her cat may have been stolen by her Haitian neighbors.

How’s that going for them?

Anna Kilgore in Springfield, Ohio with a Trump-Vance hat and flag. The Springfield resident told police last month that her Haitian neighbors may have stolen her cat Miss Sassy. The cat turned out to be hiding in her basement the whole time, and she apologized to her Haitian neighbors

The Trump campaign is not backing down, though.

I’m sorry to say that this is the very last time I’ll link to Snopes. They have a lengthy article straining to justify the statement that they’re animals, because Trump was referring to illegal immigrants who committed crimes. I hate to tell you this, but those are human beings, too.

I finally unsubscribed

I donated to the Harris/Walz campaign a while back, and you know what that means: I’ve been inundated with texts/emails begging me for money a dozen times a day. I tolerated them because I support the Democrats, and I was planning to donate again soon.

I finally had to unsubscribe/block/delete all their messages, because right now they are constantly pushing the Oprah endorsement. No. Oprah is a soft-brained snake oil salesman who got rich promoting feel-good nonsense, and who inflicted Dr Oz and Dr Phil on the world. Go away.

I’m still voting for Harris/Walz in November, but I am not going to stomach Oprah cluttering up my in-box.