What creepy Trump has wrought

In South Carolina, a supporter of creepy Donald Trump threatened a group of female poll workers but they were not having it.

A man wearing a “Let’s Go Brandon” hat grew incensed when told he could not vote while wearing political paraphernalia of any kind. So he did what any other self-respecting MAGA idiot would do: he started a fight with poll workers.

Another man in Texas punched an elderly poll worker who told him to remove his MAGA hat.
[Read more…]

Has creepy Trump’s campaign given up on women?

One thing that is sure about this election is that the Kamala Harris-Tim Walz ticket has a big advantage when it comes to women. Creepy Donald Trump, weird JD Vance, and their campaign surrogates have attacked women’s reproductive rights and freedoms and in addition made all manner of sexist and misogynistic remarks. We now see women from prominent Republican families announcing that they plan to support Harris.

Barbara Bush, the daughter of former Republican President George W. Bush, campaigned for Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris in Pennsylvania over the weekend, marking her official endorsement of the vice president.

“It was inspiring to join friends and meet voters with the Harris-Walz campaign in Pennsylvania this weekend,” Bush said in a statement to People Magazine. “I’m hopeful they’ll move our country forward and protect women’s rights.”
…

While her father has not weighed in on the race, Bush joins a growing list of daughters of former Republican politicians announcing their support for Harris, including former Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, Susan Ford Bales, daughter of former Republican President Gerald Ford, and Caroline Giuliani.

[Read more…]

Teri Garr (1944-2024)

The endearing actor had an offbeat zany charm that made her perfect for comedy. I always enjoyed seeing her in films and so was saddened by the news of her death at the age of 79.

She became famous after she appeared in Young Frankenstein.

Her big film break came as Gene Hackman’s girlfriend in 1974’s Francis Ford Coppola thriller “The Conversation.” That led to an interview with Mel Brooks, who said he would hire her for the role of Gene Wilder’s German lab assistant in 1974’s “Young Frankenstein” — if she could speak with a German accent.

“Cher had this German woman, Renata, making wigs, so I got the accent from her,” Garr once recalled.

The film established her as a talented comedy performer, with New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael proclaiming her “the funniest neurotic dizzy dame on the screen.”

She was a popular guest on TV talk shows.

The actor Lisa Kudrow, who became famous for her role as Phoebe in the hit TV series Friends and then went on to act in many films, strongly reminded me of Garr, both in terms of looks and zaniness and charm. So it seemed like no-brainer casting to have Garr playing Phoebe’s mother in a few episodes of the show. I had not watched Friends and so was unaware of this until I read about it in her obituaries.

Here is a clip from one of those episodes that I found and you can see the resemblance in looks, personality, and acting styles.

A nice analysis of poll uncertainties

As we enter the final week of the election, a slew of last minute polls that will emerge. This is a good time to remind ourselves that we should not put too much stock in what they say. As I said in an earlier post, pollsters have to make adjustments to the raw data and this introduces systematic uncertainties so that the actual margin of error could be about double the statistical one.

Josh Clinton has done an interesting analysis to try and get a better idea of how much these adjustments can affect the results.

He says that pollsters have to address four questions.
[Read more…]

The fallout from the insult to Puerto Rico and Latinos

An obscure comedian has managed to hijack the campaign of creepy Donald Trump in the final week of the election by giving a disgusting speech at the Nazi-style rally in Madison Square Garden. In his speech, he managed to insult Latinos in general and Puerto Ricans in particular.

Latinos “love making babies. There’s no pulling out. They come inside, just like they do to our country,” Hinchcliffe said to laughter inside the arena. He added: “There’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. I think it’s called Puerto Rico.”

This was a bridge too far for even some Republicans, who generally have no problems with insulting people of color and minorities, because they realized that this could have serious blowback by undercutting their courting of the Hispanic vote and because of the large numbers of Puerto Ricans who live in the swing states.
[Read more…]

The different ground game strategies

I have written before about how important the so-called ‘ground game’ is in US elections. This is the name given to the efforts by candidates to get voters to actually vote for them. By themselves, such ‘get out the vote’ (GOTV) efforts may only contribute marginally to the final vote tallies but in close races, as the current one between Kamala Harris and creepy Donald Trump is, they can prove to be the decisive factor by boosting turnout.

Traditionally these efforts operate under the umbrella of the national parties that coordinate with state and local branches, since that provides an ongoing organizational structure and institutional memory that can be called upon in each election cycle. The national party organization provides funding to supplement whatever is raised by the candidates, and this money goes to hire staff members at all levels, down to the precincts. But the bulk of the actual work, consisting of making phone calls to voters, sending out mailers and postcards, distributing yard signs and flyers, and most importantly, going door-to-door and talking to people, is done by volunteers and these volunteers play a crucial role.
[Read more…]

Nazis return to Madison Square Garden

Back in 2017, I posted about a six-minute documentary A Night at the Garden that used archival footage about a rally that American Nazis held at Madison Square Garden on February 20, 1939. Billed as a ‘Pro American Rally’, it was attended by 20,000 people and is truly chilling to watch because it looked like it could have been made in Nazi Germany by famed Nazi propagandist film maker Leni Riefenstahl.

Donald Trump had a rally on Sunday evening at the same venue and the speakers are making the same kind of appeals to white Americans to ‘take back their country’. The speeches of the early speakers tell you that they have all got into the spirit of the 1939 event..
[Read more…]

Why won’t they stand behind their own words?

I have written before of the work done by the comedy duo known as The Good Liars who are attending creepy Trump events and recording their interactions with his supporters, like the way that Jordan Klepper does for The Daily Show.

In a recent one, they ask Michele Morrow, a candidate for the position of North Carolina Superintendent of Public Instruction, for her autograph. She is of course gratified until she is shown the document to be signed which is a social media post by her calling for the killing of Barack Obama.

Here are the tweets.

I am puzzled by her reaction. Why would she be willing to proudly make a public post and then embarrassingly try to escape signing it? That looks worse than if she had nonchalantly done so.

The second return of Sherlock Holmes

From a very early age, I was enraptured by the mystery genre, devouring novels mostly by British writers whose style, less noir and more cerebral than their US counterparts, appealed to me. I particularly enjoyed the Sherlock Holmes canon by Arthur Conan Doyle, and read all of the stories at least twice, and have watched many adaptations of the stories for films and television.

One experiences a sense of sadness when the author of stories that you like dies and you know that there will be no new ones coming and I am certain many aficionados of Sherlock Holmes wish that there were more stories to enjoy. When Conan Doyle, tiring of being stuck in this series, killed off his much-loved character in one short story The Final Problem, the resulting outcry pressured him to bring him back three years later in another short story The Adventure of the Empty House, using a highly contrived plot device to explain how he hadn’t really died.

The Holmes canon is so well known and the character so iconic that many authors have written stories based on him as well as other characters that appear in the stories and copying the style of writing, a literary form known as pastiches, a high-brow version of fan fiction. I have resisted reading them, thinking that they would never be able to accurately recreate the atmosphere of the stories and thus would be a disappointment. Then I heard that the Conan Doyle estate had authorized Anthony Horowitz, a well known mystery writer in his own right, to write new Holmes novels. I just read the first one The House of Silk (published in 2011) and it was very satisfying. Horowitz not only portrays Holmes in a way that is consistent with my impressions of him, he also captures well the writing style of Holmes’s biographer Dr. John Watson.
[Read more…]