A metaphor for the Trump campaign becomes real

The Republicans now disowning themselves from Trump and the Republicans after helping to create the very climate he has exploited to create the current chaos have been described using the well-worn metaphor of rats deserting a sinking ship. In Austin, Texas, that metaphor came to life.

A spokesperson for the Travis County sheriff’s office in Texas says “several” boats sank Saturday while taking part in a parade in support of President Donald Trump.

“We responded to multiple calls of boats in distress, several of them sank,” but there are no reports of fatalities or injuries and investigators have not determined how many boats sank on the lake near Austin, according to sheriff’s spokesperson Kristen Dark.
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“We have no reason to suspect foul play in any of these,” sinkings, Dark said.

Dark said weather conditions were generally calm and meteorologist Paul Yura with the National Weather Service in Austin/San Antonio said there were were no storms in the area at the time and winds were generally 10 mph or less.

“The lake should be fairly navigable, without issue at those wind speeds,” according to Yura.

It is not clear how many rats escaped.

Trump’s reckless comments on the military

For US politicians there are two sacred cows: God and the military. Even the stupidest of them know to always say only positive things about either in public. Trump had been particularly assiduous in this, waving the Bible about at photo ops and lavishly praising on the military. So it reflects an incredible level of obtuseness that Trump made derogatory remarks about soldiers who died, were injured, or captured in the many, many wars that the US has engaged in, calling them losers and suckers.
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The end of the NRA?


It seems that the National Rifle Association may be in greater trouble than we thought. New York states attorney general had brought charges against the organization that its top executives , especially Wayne LaPierre had been using its funds as their personal piggy bank to live high on the hog. This at a time when the organization had been losing revenue because of declining membership and had had to make cutbacks to staff benefits.
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What happened in Massachusetts

Massachusetts is a strongly Democratic state with all its congressional and the two senate seats held by Democrats. The governor is an outlier in being a Republican but he has been careful to position himself as a centrist moderate technocrat and distanced himself from the nutjobs that currently make up the Republican party. So the primaries are where the real action is and on Tuesday we saw two proxy battles between the party establishment and progressive insurgents.

In the senate race there was a generational switch in that the incumbent Ed Markey who has been in Congress for 44 years represents the progressive wing and the much younger challenger Joseph Kennedy turns out to be the establishment candidate. Markey has aligned himself with the progressives in Congress, co-sponsoring the Green New Deal with Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, and they in turn strongly backed him. Kennedy was clearly seeking to use his famous name to move from the House of Representatives (where he currently holds a seat since 2013) to the Senate. No Kennedy has lost an election in Massachusetts and no doubt he hoped to ride the wave of the family name to victory. His problem is that his politics are more Republican-friendly.
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The silly fuss over Danbury

During one of his recent segments, John Oliver took some shots at the city of Danbury, Connecticut. It was entirely gratuitous and had nothing to do with anything else he was saying and I took it as the kind of thing comedians do, and that is pick on some random city to make fun of, whether it deserves it or not. In the state of Ohio for example, Akron and Canton, two perfectly decent and ordinary cities, are often are the butt of jokes, such as the one about Akron’s city slogan being “Akron: We are not Canton”.

But the Republican mayor of Danbury Mark Boughton took umbrage, declaring that in retaliation they would rename their sewage treatment plant the John Oliver Memorial Sewer Plant.
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What to expect in the next two months

It used to be the case that the day after the Labor day holiday in the US (which is the first Monday in September and this year falls on September 7) marked the kickoff of the presidential campaign. Of course that, like most political norms in the Trump era, has gone extinct. We are now in campaign mode all the time, so the second day of September is as good a day as any to take stock of where things stand now to set a kind of baseline and prepare for what is to come. A couple of graphs provide a good gauge of what is to come in the next 62 days before the election.
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Many people only read the headline before forwarding articles

In an age when we are inundated with information from all sides with little time to carefully digest all of it, it should not be a surprise to find that people often read just the headline and the opening sentences of an article before deciding that they agree with the contents and forward it to others. Twitter is making an attempt to discourage this practice.
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