My good friend’s brother will almost certainly be the next governor from the great state of Delaware. Notably, considering the leader of the Democratic Party in Delaware is the president of the United States, Matt Meyer won despite not being the Establishment’s choice. Support from unions, particularly the teachers’ union, put him over the top in the primary. And my friend is a labor lawyer, so it runs in the family. Go unions!. [Correction: The unions also preferred his main opponent. So it was even more of an upset of the party establishment].
I didn’t really want to watch the debate on Tuesday between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris but I sucked it up and I’m glad I did. After the first 10 minutes, which were painfully familiar, it was a tsunami of disaster for Trump. One note of caution, however. Democrats almost always win these debates. Obviously the last debate between Biden and Trump is an enormous exception, and Obama’s first debate against Romney was like watching Mike Tyson fight Buster Douglas in Tokyo. Obama was completely off his game and was almost knocked out. But Al Gore won every debate against George W. Bush, Obama won every debate against John McCain, and two out of three against Romney (“please proceed, governor“). Hillary Clinton crushed Trump in their first debate and won all three. And Biden won all the 2020 debates against Trump. It helps to win debates, but it guarantees nothing.
I didn’t write about the debate in advance, but I did do a piece on Elon Musk and J.D. Vance pushing the lie that Haitian immigrants in Ohio are stealing and eating people’s pets. My main point was that spreading this hateful bile is a pretty big gamble that Florida is safe for Trump and he doesn’t need to do decently well with the Haitian community there. I did not expect Trump to advance the same baseless slander at the debate, but he did and he’s paying a very hefty price. The internet is aflame with memes mocking him for it, and it has definitely hurt his efforts to win Haitian-American votes, including in Florida where they make up over two percent of the population.
In a sign of how badly Trump performed in the debate, shares of Truth Social immediately tanked to a record low. Owning that stock is definitely a bet on him winning the election, and that’s obviously perceived as being less likely after Kamala Harris wiped the floor with him. It’s gratifying to realize that his poor debate performance not only made it likelier that he’ll wind up in prison where he belongs but also may cost him possibly tens of millions of dollars when he goes to cash out on his Truth Social stock.
Back on August 29, I wrote in a piece entitled “How the House Republicans Will Sabotage Trump and Themselves” that in September, Speaker of the House “Mike Johnson of Louisiana…will try to avoid the umpteenth effort by MAGA/Freedom Caucus Republicans to cause a government shutdown.” I predicted that he would fail to pass a continuing resolution using only Republican votes and remind voters of the dysfunction that has plagued House Republicans throughout this entire Congress. I called it political malpractice, and the process has now begun.
House GOP leaders pulled their six-month stopgap funding plan on Wednesday, hours before a scheduled floor vote.
Facing a number of Republican holdouts, Speaker Mike Johnson said they’ll delay the vote until next week as they work to quell Republican opposition and “build consensus.”
In the end, he will almost certainly have to cave to the Democrats’ demands, just as both he and deposed Speaker Kevin McCarthy did in the previous rounds over the last two years.
On this 23rd anniversary of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, it’s sad that survivor families are still fighting in court to hold the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia responsible.
Nineteen years after Katrina, I still get nervous when hurricanes make landfall in Louisiana. This one is more of a Category 1 storm, so hopefully it won’t be catastrophic.
This is just a head’s up. Two of the last three homes I’ve visited had bidets instead of standard toilets. I didn’t try either of them but I did check them out. It’s a trend that is taking off. Personally, it might be nice but making the change is pretty low on my priority list.
Does anyone think saying “thank you” after sex is appropriate?
