Sunday Morning Male Beauty

 

More Saturday Male Beauty - Pt 2

 

MAGA Just Wants to Watch People Die

I for one never believe the media storyline that voters cast their votes for the Felon over economic concerns.  Yes, some would claim that was their motivation, but the reality in my view is that the Felon's mainstreaming of racism and hatred of perceived foes - typically, non-whites, gays, and non-Christians - and greenlighting cruelty were the real attraction.  Many were looking for scapegoats to blame for their lost white privilege and restrictions on abuse of others.  Only too happy to embrace this regime of cruelty and hate filled  policies have been evangelicals and "conservative Christians"  who care absolutely nothing about Christ's social gospel message and cherry pick Old Testament passages to justify their hatred of others. Through ICE's lawless operations, the destruction of alleged drug runner boats (no evidence has ever been produced to back up these allegations), cuts to foreign aid, young children ripped from parents and being deported, and now the Felon's doing Putin's bidding against Ukraine, the one constant is the abuse and death of those the MAGA base dislikes. Worse yet, both MAGA and the Felon seem to revel in the cruelty.  Collectively, it is a damning indictment of the MAGA base and alleged "Christians" who have shown their true colors. A piece at Salon looks at this joy at the harm and death of those they deem "other":

For a sizable chunk of its existence, the United States has been remarkably effective at manufacturing death at scale. In the years since World War II, as steel production slowed and agriculture became one big subsidy, untimely ends became one of the few things you could still expect the U.S. to make itself. 

The business of bomb-dropping boomed through economic downturns and outsourcing pushes. NAFTA and the Great Recession couldn’t put a dent in America’s output of explosive ordinance. The lack of a military draft or a requirement to declare war kicked the death factory into overdrive, with defense budgets growing every year. The death toll in Iraq reached one million in the same year that Lehman Brothers collapsed.

Decades after the televised spectacle of the Vietnam War, after which the Pentagon restricted what media outlets could cover, multiple wars in the Middle East were presented as a bloodless spectacle on cable, with shock-and-awe filmed and broadcast on CNN from a safe remove. In the rare instances where Americans were forced to see the deaths of Iraqi civilians up close — such as the infamous 39-minute “Collateral Murder” footage which was released by Wikileaks in 2010 — it turned public opinion against the wars permanently. That revulsion was one small part of the establishment backlash that put Donald Trump in the White House. 

But something has shifted in the ensuing years. The same president who decried “American carnage” in his first inaugural address has inspired an unusual bloodlust in his MAGA base, offering up real-world violence in lieu of a prosperous economy or lower gas prices. Whenever his public approval ratings have flagged, most notably when voters rejected his 2020 re-election bid, Trump has stoked his base with calls to violence.    

He eventually won that second term four years later, a sign from the universe that there would be no real consequences for reveling in violence. Since then, Trump has shown an extreme lack of care for the brutal — and sometimes deadly — effects of his policies. Worse still, many of his supporters seem to hunger for more bloodshed, celebrating each new instance of a Trump policy ending in death. 

Some of this was to be expected. Americans are remarkably skilled at compartmentalizing the bureaucratic ways U.S. actions lead to deaths globally. When Elon Musk’s inartful Department of Government Efficiency cuts to government funding and the Trump administration’s attacks on the U.S. Agency for International Development started racking up a body count, the mood within the MAGA coalition was more indifferent than celebratory. But Trump and his messengers have a tendency to make everything more crude and less abstract.

That’s why it shouldn’t have come as a surprise when administration officials shared footage of extrajudicial killings in the Caribbean. . . . . Given the appetites he has built up among his supporters, it shouldn’t have shocked us to see them cheer the strikes on alleged drug runners. Former conservative fighters against government overreach — the sort who once lamented the deaths of militant separatists like LaVoy Finicum and Vicki Weaver — praised Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents when they killed protesting citizens. Republicans who warned about government tyranny for years celebrated scenes of people being snatched off the street and into unmarked cars. Third-party deportations, intentionally cruel detentions and partnerships with black-box prisons, like the notorious CECOT in El Salvador, created the conditions where deportees will inevitably die. 

The only consistent thread in these examples is a desire to see people they don’t like get hurt or killed. . . . But it’s not enough for the MAGA movement to witness death in the real world. The growing conservative media market is filled with examples of people — mostly non-white or non-Christian — meeting grisly ends. . . . . The Daily Wire’s bloody “Run Hide Fight: Infidels” is set on the campus of a similarly anonymous liberal arts college, and it luxuriates in bloodlust. Blue-haired liberals get their throats slashed while gay men are thrown from buildings. . . . In that context, Pete Hegseth’s recent call for a public execution is hardly strange.

Hegseth’s plan to livestream Hasan’s execution was initially supported by Trump. But on Thursday, following widespread outcry that spanned the globe, the president announced on Truth Social that he was calling off the broadcast. Still, he still half-supported the aborted snuff film, saying that it “might have been a strong deterrent for the World to witness how America deals with Terrorists and SCUM.”

Trump’s supporters didn’t need to wonder if he was drawing a line at broadcasting a grisly death. Earlier this week, the president shared footage featuring the last moments of a man who was killed by a tiger in a U.K. zoo. He followed that up with an AI-generated video that struck a celebratory tone, showing Trump chasing away a tiger while remaining unharmed. 

On the other side of a computer screen, his MAGA base must have been laughing along.

More Saturday Male Beauty

 

Russia Was Losing; Now Trump Betrays Ukraine

It is becoming increasingly hard to ignore the fact that by all appearances we have a traitor and Russian asset occupying the White House.  The Felon is now openly working to aid Russia - a nation that is aiding Iran in the Felon's war of choice - and threatening America's long time allies across Europe. If we had a Congress with a spine - hopefully the mid-term elections will bring a desperately needed change - some of the Felon's transgression might be contained. Unfortunately, a present we have the Felon actively seeking to support Russia's war against Ukraine. As a column in the New York Times notes, part of the Felon's animosity against Ukraine stems from the Felon's impeachment for his efforts to coerce Ukraine into creating lies about Joe Biden.  Part of it also stems from the Felon's corruption and greed that Vladimir Putin is pandering to by promised trade and mining deals if Ukraine is defeated.  And then there is the continuing suspicion that Putin has dirt on the Felon that may range from money laundering and other crimes to the potential that Putin has the complete Epstein files. The bottom line is that the Felon is aiding an enemy and betraying allies.  He needs to be restrained or, better yet, removed from office the sooner the better.  Here are column highlights:

It’s horrible to have to type these words, but the [Felon] president of the United States is throwing Vladimir Putin a lifeline. He is turning the American government against Ukraine, funding Russia and — perhaps worst of all — playing directly into Putin’s theory of victory.

There’s no other way to understand [the Felon's] President Trump’s actions since Friday. There’s a lot to cover, so hang with me. But the bottom line is that a sequence of events that began with his announcement on Oct. 9 that the United States had agreed to purchase potentially millions of tons of diesel fuel from Russia may be culminating in a near-total betrayal of the Ukrainian people.

The purchase, justified by Trump as bringing down diesel prices in the United States, isn’t nearly enough to meaningfully move America’s immense diesel market. It could, however, put roughly $4 billion into the Russian treasury — cash that it can use to fund its war in Ukraine or to help prop up its ally Iran.

What came after the deal was even worse than the deal itself. On Sunday, Trump decided to protect his investment. He declared — all on his own — that Russia and Ukraine had agreed to an “energy cease-fire.” Ukraine had been conducting a remarkably successful series of strikes deep inside Russia aimed at Putin’s oil industry. The attacks have been so effective that they’ve raised doubts as to whether Russia would even be able to deliver the agreed upon amount of fuel to the U.S.

Trump’s cease-fire announcement came as a surprise to both nations. He wasn’t announcing an agreement; he was trying to coerce compliance — including, according to President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, by also threatening to cut off intelligence sharing.

Consider that for a moment. Trump wasn’t announcing a deal at all. There was no deal. He made it up and then demanded that both nations do what he said.

How did the two nations respond? Ukraine complied with Trump’s demands. It paused its successful energy strike campaign. . . . . Russia had different ideas. On Monday night, Russian munitions slammed into six Ukrainian energy sites, plunging parts of the city of Izyum into darkness. And then on Tuesday night, Russia struck Ukrainian energy sites once again, this time deluging Kyiv with missiles and hitting Kyiv’s Combined Heat and Power Plant 4, one of Kyiv’s “key energy facilities,” according to Zelensky.

Most ominously, on Monday and Tuesday night, ballistic missiles slammed into Kyiv, with no meaningful warning at all. Zelensky said that Ukraine had not received the usual warnings that it gets from its partners, most notably the United States. . . . . And then, to make matters worse, news emerged on Wednesday that the Pentagon-funded version of Starlink, called Starshield, was being throttled for Ukrainian forces. It was dropping connectivity for objects moving at speed, crippling its use by many Ukrainian drones.

If we want to understand what is really going on, we can’t look at these events in isolation. They’re occurring just as Russia has escalated its so-called gray zone attacks on our NATO allies. Gray zone attacks are acts that are just below the threshold for open war. The aim is to frighten and destabilize allies (and alliances) without triggering a direct conflict with NATO that Russia would almost certainly lose.

In July the Council on Foreign Relations issued a report chronicling a staggering array of Russian gray zone attacks. For example, the International Center for Counterterrorism and Globsec has documented “151 confirmed Russian-directed industrial sabotage incidents in Europe between February 2022 and February 2026.”

In addition, “Russian-linked drones have forced repeated airport closures across Europe and even penetrated Estonian and Polish airspace in September 2025.” Russia has also used a Baltic Sea shadow fleet to damage “Nord Stream pipelines, the Estlink 2 power cable and at least 11 undersea telecom cables.”

How do all these events fit together? First, we have to understand Russia’s evolving theories of victory in its war against Ukraine. Russia began with a failed blitzkrieg — an attempt to take Kyiv in a matter of days, if not hours. The initial attack resulted in a stunning Russian defeat. It suffered catastrophic losses on the outskirts of Kyiv, and a Ukrainian counteroffensive later in 2022 clawed back much of the territory that Ukraine lost in the opening days and months of the war.

Then Russia changed tactics. It tried to turn the battlefield into a kind of meat grinder — a war of attrition designed to slowly but surely destroy the Ukrainian Army and capture the entirety of the Donbas region of Ukraine. . . . .Then something surprising happened: The Ukrainians revolutionized warfare with their drone operations, and Ukraine started grinding down Russian forces, to the point that Russia is now losing more soldiers than it can easily replace, and — as the Institute for the Study of War reported on Tuesday — “Ukraine has retaken significant territory from Russia in 2026, and at the theater level has nearly zeroed out Russian gains for the year.”

In fact, according to the institute, “Russian forces have only made a net gain of about 100 square kilometers thus far in 2026, thanks to Ukrainian counteroffensives, which have liberated at least 1,046 square kilometers.” . . . “Ukraine is taking away its fuel,” Petraeus said. Russia is “one of the world’s largest oil producers,” and yet “increasingly, that doesn’t mean that Russians can find gasoline.”

In addition, Ukraine’s strike campaign has been so effective that it has sunk roughly 300 Russian vessels in the Black Sea and surrounding areas, and it has isolated Crimea so effectively that “they’re essentially starving Crimea of fuel, refined fuel products and other important commodities,” Petraeus said.

But Ukraine still needs Western support. American interceptor shortages have left Ukraine vulnerable to Russian ballistic missile attacks, and the country still depends on European aid, on American intelligence and on American weapons it’s able to purchase with European funds.

Remove that support, and Russia has a chance to win the war. It may well be Putin’s last hope, short of total national mobilization, to defeat Ukraine.

So now you see the game and the part that Trump is playing. Everything he’s doing now is exactly what Putin wants. Putin has brilliantly manipulated Trump using a meaningless injection of diesel fuel into the American market (designed to play well in the midterms) to portray himself as Trump’s friend and to drive an even bigger wedge between Trump and Zelensky.

But that’s not all. As my colleagues in the newsroom reported this month, Trump’s negotiations to end the war also include lucrative oil deals that “would benefit Middle Eastern business executives with ties to the two main U.S. negotiators, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner.”

And there’s something else in play. Trump has long held a grudge against Ukraine and Zelensky — for the dumbest reason imaginable.

It’s easy to forget the 2019 Trump-Ukraine scandal that led to Trump’s first impeachment. There have been so many scandals since that it hovers at the edge of our memories and can feel small compared with, say, Jan. 6. But it wasn’t. It was a big deal then, and it’s a big deal now.

As a result, when Putin appeals to Trump, he can not only dangle lucrative business deals in front of Trump’s team but also exploit existing animosity that is rooted in the fever dreams of Trump’s bizarre imagination. Zelensky is an enemy; Putin is a potential friend.

And what of the gray zone attacks against Europe? As Petraeus told me, “These are probes. They are intended to intimidate, disrupt, test individual countries and the alliance collectively.”

The purpose, according to Petraeus, is to “complicate the flow of assistance to Ukraine and even discourage it and create public anxiety, test to see where the alliance’s real red lines are. Perhaps drive a wedge between some of the countries that are a bit soft on Russia, if you will.”

In Trump’s second term, the United States is far worse than unreliable. It’s becoming unhinged. It threatens its allies and begins trade wars with its closest friends, and now the combination of corruption and conspiracy drives an American president into the arms of one of our most dangerous enemies.

This is not America first; it’s Trump first. If Putin prevails, rest assured that it will not be Ukrainians alone who pay the price.

The Felon is betraying all of us.

Saturday Morning Male Beauty

 

More Friday Male Beauty

 

Democrats Are Coming For Trump While He Hurls Insults

Congressional Republicans running for election/re-election - and by extension, the Felon - are faced with the problem that putting aside daily lawlessness of ICE agents the last almost two years have seen only one real legislative accomplishment, if one can call it that, is passage of the falsely described "big beautiful bill."  Unfortunately for these candidates, more and more voters are coming to realize that the bill only served the interests of the very wealthy who received huge tax cuts while everyone else got table scraps, if that. All kinds of social safety net programs have been slashed, millions are losing healthcare coverage, and rural hospitals are being pushed to close due to lost revenues.  The Felon's two other signature policies have been tariffs and the war of choice with Iran that have caused consumer prices and gasoline prices to soar.  Added to the draconian cuts to public services and Medicaid under the "big beautiful bill" it's not exactly something one can run a positive campaign on citing beneficial policies.  The Felon's solution, sling insults at Democrats and lie about the failure of his policies.  A piece at The New Yorker looks at the state of things:

Only one subject truly animates Donald Trump on the campaign trail, and it is, of course, the same one that delights and fascinates him in the Oval Office and everywhere else: himself. “No President has ever achieved what we’ve achieved,” he told the audience at a campaign rally over the weekend, at a high school in Vandalia, Ohio.

“We achieved more in two years than any other Presidency in the history of our country,” he said on Wednesday, in San Antonio, Texas, where a Democrat—running against Trump’s hand-picked candidate—now stands an even chance of winning a Senate seat in the state for the first time since 1988.

No wonder, then, that Trump’s diagnosis of his party’s plight in advance of the midterm elections flows back to this one key insight of his, which is that politics is, and should be, solely about him. Hence his refrain at these rallies. “Please pretend that I’m on the ballot,” he told the crowd at the high school in Ohio, where Democrats are threatening to retake both the governorship and a U.S. Senate seat just two years after Trump won the state by double digits.

By my reckoning, Trump spent some seven hours and fifty-six minutes addressing the (dwindling) Trump faithful in his campaign tour this week, a last-ditch effort to stave off what an increasing number of both Democrats and Republicans believe may be a loss of both the House and the Senate. The President’s itinerary speaks to the abrupt reversal of fortunes for the G.O.P. this election year, with Trump stumping in what should be safely red territory: Texas, Oklahoma, Alabama, Ohio, Nebraska, and back to Texas. . . . In Texas, where he will soon return for a third visit, nearly all recent polls have the Democratic nominee for Senate, James Talarico, leading the Republican state attorney general, Ken Paxton, several of them with more than fifty per cent support—a key threshold.

Historically unpopular and trapped in a war of his own choosing in the Middle East, which has sent global prices spiking upward for just about everything, the President has nonetheless been going with a standard stump speech that is a litany of all the winning that’s taken place during his reign—so much of it that, really, he told the crowd in Ohio, one could be forgiven for thinking that perhaps, under Trump, America was actually “winning too much.” On and on he lectured his audiences about the great stock market, the terrific tariffs, and the most closed-shut border in history. He waxed poetic about his incredible poll numbers . . .

All this, and yet two-thirds of the country thinks the U.S. is on the wrong track?

Denial, of course, has long been one of Trump’s signatures as a politician. But in this of all years it seems a bit of a surprising choice for a campaign theme. “We have almost no inflation, by the way,” he said in Ohio. As for affordability, he explained in Nebraska, it was a plot that “they” had cooked up to attack him with.

In all of the rallies, Trump said little about the self-inflicted crisis that has become the dominant issue in the 2026 campaign: the war against Iran and the attendant global economic squeeze. To the extent that he mentioned the conflict at all, it was to promise that it would be over “very soon,”

But there was a note of un-Trumpian insecurity to it all that made this performance unlike any of the many previous Trump campaign tours I’ve watched during the past decade. In Alabama, he said the quiet part out loud and admitted that the conflict was not likely to end until “probably right after the midterms.”

One thing that struck me, listening to Trump at each of his six stops, was how little joy the President seemed to take from the exercise. Back in the 2018 campaign, his eyes still lit up with hatred for the enemies of the people, and he exuded delight to be joined onstage by some of the Fox News personalities whose shows consumed so much of his White House workday. Rallies were always his happy place. . . . But this 2026 Trump is not nearly so much of a happy warrior. His present mood seemed better exemplified by a threat that he casually threw out on Saturday night, in the midst of his Ohio speech, apropos of what I was not entirely sure: “We’re going to shove it up their ass,” he vowed. “O.K.?”

As a speaker, Trump remains at his best, or at least at his most animated, when on the attack, and there’s nothing more practiced in the Trump lexicon than the language of dark horror with which he describes conditions in the hellscape that is blue America. He is forever reliving the glory of that “American carnage” Inaugural address. . . . “When the blues get in, everything becomes dirty. The streets are dirty. The doorknobs going into stores are dirty. The sidewalks are filthy, dirty. Everything becomes dirty and has a bad smell.” Huh? That’s a new one, as far as I can tell, even for Trump.

And it’s not just those blue-state cesspools that Trump likes to rail against. Democrats, in his speeches, are “cheaters, they cheat like hell,” as he put it in Oklahoma, a rabble of Communists and child mutilators and illegal-immigrant lovers who are going to ruin everything that he and his base have done.

But, in almost all of his speeches, Trump reserved special ire for Talarico, or, as he referred to him in San Antonio, “Dumocrat Communist James Talafreako.” Perhaps Trump feels on the hook for the Texas Senate race, which most likely would have been easily won by the Republican incumbent, John Cornyn, had Trump not insisted on backing the scandal-plagued Paxton in the G.O.P. primary runoff. Whatever the reason, he seems to have saved up extra bile for Talarico, demeaning him as a “weak, gutless, self-hating, transgender-promoting freak show” who threatens to “destroy everything that we’ve built.”

I did not learn from Trump all that much about what nature of threat to the Republic Talarico poses, though I found it notable that, at several rallies, the President took off on rants about Talarico’s alleged veganism, accusing him of eating meat only in order to suck up to the meat-loving Texas electorate and thus causing himself to be “throwing up all over the place.”

In 2018, the President closed with what seemed, at the time, a pretty crazy message: Vote for me and my party, because we’re the only ones who can stop the invasion of a caravan of brown people currently making their way toward our southern border. It was untrue, of course, yet also something of a model of clarity compared with this year’s parting thoughts from our President: Vote for me because high prices due to my policies don’t matter and also because, if you don’t, the Dumocrats will turn your kids into Communists and force them to have gender-reassignment surgery, unless they happen to live in Los Angeles, in which case the Iranians will nuke them. Got that? Twenty-six days to go. 

Friday Morning Male Beauty

 

More Thursday Male Beauty

 

Trump's and the GOP's Big Lie About the Economy

One of the biggest public misconceptions over the last fifty years or more is that the U.S. economy does better under Republican administrations. Like most of the myths pushed by today's GOP this myth is untrue and historically the opposite is true: there is far more job creation under Democrat administrations and the increase in the federal deficit is either reduced or eliminated by Democrats.  The current state of the economy has been driven into the ditch by the Felon and rubber stamp Republicans in Congress and the Felon has exploded the deficit. An increasing number of surveys shown considerable percentages of American families are struggling to pay bills, buy food, and make ends meet. Nothing in the Felon's "big beautiful bill" helped average Americans. Social programs have been slashed, millions will soon lose healthcare coverage, and child nutrition funding has been cut - all so the very wealthy can have huge tax cuts and live more extravagantly.  Belatedly, the American public is believing that a Democrat controlled Congress would bode better for the economy and perhaps rein in the Felon's most disastrous policies.  A piece at Salon looks at this issue: 

Donald Trump lies. Telling untruths is not merely second nature to him; it is of the first order, automatic. He lies as naturally as he breathes.  From his claim to being a great businessman and dealmaker to calling himself not the worst president in U.S. history — which he is, by far — but the best, Trump has spewed a firehose of falsehoods to the public. But he has never reserved his lying only for his political opponents.

He has lied to his MAGA followers about, well, everything — bringing grocery prices down, ending this or that war “on day one,” the value of his cryptocurrency offerings, creating any number of “unbelievable” plans to fix our infrastructure, our healthcare, our economy. All those “beautiful” plans that were never plans but so-called concepts of plans. You know, back-of-the-envelope musings on critical national issues while heading off for another taxpayer-funded golf outing. Suffice it to say: If you can name it, Trump has lied about it.

Journalists often write of Trump’s Big Lie about how the 2020 election was stolen from him, but that is only one of the big lies Republicans tell, and it is not the one that most adversely affects working Americans.

The biggest lie is the one Republicans have told for more than half a century — about how they are better than Democrats at managing the economy. A majority of Americans have believed this for my whole lifetime. But with Trump’s wild mismanagement of the economy, public sentiment is finally changing. More people now trust Democrats on the economy, and for good reason.

The idea of telling a lie so massive that not many people would think that it could be made out of whole cloth comes from Adolf Hitler’s 1925 book “Mein Kampf.” The failed artist and future German führer thought that most people would not believe that someone “could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.” This theory was later put to use by Joseph Goebbels, the Third Reich’s propaganda minister, to scapegoat and dehumanize Jewish people, and it led directly to the Holocaust — a horrible truth many Nazi-curious conservatives love to deny.

Trump, a fanboy of ruthless dictators, was determined to stay in office after losing the 2020 election decisively in both the Electoral College and the popular vote to Joe Biden, and he naturally turned to Hitler’s technique.

The Republican’s lie on the economy is such a whopper — so “colossal,” as Hitler put it — that it has defined American politics for decades. That’s the ruse of the colossal lie, which is not merely the propagandist’s use of repetition (Trump’s main go-to move) but a sort of verbal legerdemain. People are cunningly led to disbelieve what they see with their own eyes and feel in their own pocketbooks.

As we head into the November midterms, and as candidates begin to emerge in the 2028 presidential race, it’s a good time to refresh our memories of how costly the GOP’s colossal lie about trickle-down economics, which began with President Ronald Reagan, has been for Americans.

Running for the presidency, the former Republican California governor and B-list actor said that giving tax breaks to the wealthy and corporations would “trickle down” benefits to the working people of America. This sounded good in theory, but it was “voodoo economics” in practice, as George H. W. Bush, Reagan’s opponent in the 1980 Republican primaries, noted — until he was chosen as the Californian’s running mate).

In his two terms, Reagan’s tax cuts increased the national debt from $1.1 trillion to $2.7 trillion. But that’s nothing compared to Trump. While occupying the White House, the president has increased the national debt by a staggering $11.6 trillion so far, an increase of more than 25%.

Democratic presidents have almost always done better — I should say much better — than Republican presidents in managing the U.S. economy. According to a 2016 academic study by Alan S. Blinder and Mark W. Watson, this was true from the Truman administration through the first Obama term across all major macroeconomic measures: job creation, unemployment, national debt, GDP growth, growth in real wages and controlling inflation.

As Blinder and Watson concluded: [T]here is a systematic and large gap between the U.S. economy’s performance when a Democrat is president of the United States versus when a Republican is. Democrats do better on almost every criterion.

We can tack on Biden’s term as well, which, amid the global inflation spikes caused by the COVID-19 pandemic shutting down supply chains, recovered far better than any other advanced country. As The Economist put it at the time, the quickly recovering economy under Biden was “the envy of the world.” People may not have felt “the vibe,” but things were on the right track by all standard economic measures.

In addition, in 2021, the Biden administration’s $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act was passed with bipartisan support to rebuild or upgrade the nation’s aging transportation, water and broadband systems. The following year, the $280 billion CHIPS and Science Act was enacted and called for microchip manufacturing to be started up in rural areas, mostly Republican-voting districts. Unlike Trump, Biden understood that the president is charged with working on behalf of all Americans, not just those who voted for him.

Since the Republican President Dwight Eisenhower, about 70% of all jobs have been created during Democratic administrations, and in recent decades, the percentage is more than 90%. Of the 11 recessions the country suffered between 1953 and 2020 — when the pandemic began — 10 began while a Republican was in the White House.

What Blinder and Watson studied was independently updated in 2024 with similar findings of a “striking” positive difference on the U.S. economy when a Democrat is in the White House. One doesn’t need academics or economics experts to tell that Republicans never look out for the interests of the working class, or even the middle class. But for those who still like evidence, a series of charts by Steven Rattner and graphic artist Taylor Maggiacomo tell the story of Trump’s promises on the economy and his results so far.

What these charts cannot show is the long-term economic disaster of lost markets for farmers and U.S. manufacturers caused by Trump’s tariffs and his disparagement of our trading partners, or what it will mean to our economy as countries move to de-Americanize their tech — which they must do to protect themselves from Trump.

Democrats are not only better stewards of the economy, but they also want the wealth created by American workers to be shared more equitably and for the social safety net to be made more robust, so Americans can better weather any financial vicissitudes.

Do I need to point out that Republicans have little to no desire to help workers and those in need, outside of, say, charitable contributions or church work? Indeed, rather than looking out for the poor or loving the stranger — and growing increasingly annoyed by those darned Biblical verses about a camel passing through the eye of a needle — the wealthy and powerful long ago undertook to remake American Christianity.

As Salon’s Amanda Marcotte recently noted, the right’s perversion of the message of Jesus knows no bounds; to justify their greed and avarice, they are taught that it is inconceivable to be Christian and vote other than Republican, which is yet another colossal lie by the GOP.

Public sentiment about which party does best in managing the economy has finally shifted to Democrats in the face of Trump’s gross mismanagement of the recovering Biden economy. Trump’s tax cuts, tariffs, attacks on education and journalists, his disparagement of historical allies and his war of choice with Iran have undermined nearly every aspect of what has made the United States prosperous.

But it is up to journalists to regularly tell this truth to the public in the face of the colossal Republican lie about the economy that began with Reagan, a man who had the sheer audacity to claim that the budget deficit was affected by restaurant servers not declaring their tips.

Today’s Republicans are even more Dickensian, focused as they are on deporting hard-working immigrants who long to be American citizens and taking healthcare and even food stamps away from struggling American families.

Why are Republicans terrible with the economy? Because they do not believe in government — unless it helps them.

Thursday Morning Male Beauty

 

More Wednesday Male Beauty

 

The Felon's BBC Lawsuit Backfires

The Felon likes to file lawsuits to intimidate both critics and the news media outlets that accurately report on his failed policies and misdeeds.  Often the targets of the Felon's intimidation either roll over and pay money to make the lawsuits go away or reach some other kind of settlement. One such defendant, the British Broadcasting Corporation ("BBC") is not rolling over as the Felon expected and the rules of federal court discovery in lawsuits now has the Felon - and other Trump family members - dodging depositions where testimony would be under oath and perjury charges could be applied to parties giving false testimony (the only thing that comes out of the Felon's mouth). The Felon hates anything and any forum where he is not free to lie at will. As pieces in the New Republic and Politico lay out the Felon is again trying to dodge being deposed and is claiming to be unavailable until after the court ordered discovery period is over.  Hopefully, the court will force him to testify or dismiss the case with prejudice so that it cannot be revived down the road.  Here are excerpts from The New Republic:

[The Felon] President Trump is trying to get out of testifying in a lawsuit that he initiated.  As part of his $10 billion defamation lawsuit against the BBC, Trump was scheduled to sit for a deposition with the U.K. broadcaster’s lawyers on Friday. However, according to a court filing Tuesday, the president’s attorneys canceled the session, saying he would be unavailable for about two months, well after the discovery period in the case ends, Politico reports. . . . The broadcaster is trying to get a federal judge to force Trump to commit to a date for the deposition.

“Nearly eight months into discovery, after seven depositions of BBC witnesses, and with only two months of discovery remaining, the BBC still has not been able to depose, and does not even have a schedule to depose, the most central figure in this case: Plaintiff himself,” BBC attorney Charles Tobin wrote in the filing. “There is hardly a more crucial and relevant piece of discovery in a defamation lawsuit than the deposition of the Plaintiff.”

Trump’s lawyers had reportedly agreed in July that Trump would testify on October 16 as long as both sides agreed to keep the location and other details secret. But on September 28, the president’s attorneys said that the previously agreed date no longer worked. This past Friday, they finally suggested moving the deposition to the second or third week of January, nearly one month after the discovery period ends.

Now the BBC’s lawyers want the judge on the case, U.S. Magistrate Judge Enjoliqué Lett, to add the deposition’s scheduling to the agenda of a hearing scheduled for next week.  

Trump sued the BBC last year, claiming the broadcasting company funded by the British government defamed him by deceptively editing one of his speeches on January 6, 2021, for a documentary aired one day before the 2024 presidential election. 

Since then, the lawsuit has backfired for him, as the court ordered the release of Trump’s finances, as well as records from special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into Trump’s attempts to overturn the election. Even Trump’s children are dodging subpoenas from the BBC’s lawyers for records related to the January 6 Capitol insurrection.   

The BBC is trying to get Trump’s case thrown out entirely, pointing out that the documentary never aired in the U.S. and that the south Florida federal court where Trump filed the lawsuit doesn’t have jurisdiction over the case. Trump’s refusal to testify on camera is probably going to help the BBC’s efforts and expose his attempts to browbeat news organizations he doesn’t like. 

The piece in Politico notes how the Felon has avoid being deposed in other lawsuits of his own instigation:

In 2023, Trump dropped a lawsuit he’d filed against his former personal attorney, Michael Cohen, after a judge ordered Trump to sit for a deposition in the case and refused further requests to change the established date. Trump said through a spokesperson that he had elected to “pause” the suit, rather than cancel a campaign rally he had planned in New Hampshire for the same day as the testimony. The suit was never refiled.

Wednesday Morning Male Beauty

 

More Tuesday Male Beauty

 

Trump’s October Surprise: Helping Russia Again

Continuing the theme of yesterday's posts, there is much discussion of the Felon's decision to ignore a law he signed himself last month and to stop sanctions against Russia and to import Russian diesel supplies.  The move is claimed to be an effort to reduce diesel prices domestically, yet the Russian imports would do little to actually lower prices even though some in MAGA world are ignoring that reality, not to mention the fact that the USA is EXPORTING diesel stocks. An easier way - although still not very effective - way to reduce domestic diesel prices would be to cease diesel exports, something the fossil fuel industry would likely oppose. Thus, the correct take away from the Felon's action is that the real motivation is to help Putin and Russia with millions of US dollars flowing into Russia from the USA.  As noted, it makes it difficult not to see the Felon as a Russian asset perhaps compromised and reeled in by Russia as far back in the late 1980's. The Felon's behavior betrays decades of America's efforts to promote democracy abroad and displays his catering to dictators - or in the case of Putin - war criminals.  It's an embarrassing time to be an America when treason is on display at the White House. An column in The Atlantic looks at the Felon's deference to Putin:

It rained most of Sunday in Washington, as the remnants of Hurricane Isaias washed over the East Coast. Unable to golf, and stuck inside the White House, [the Felon] President Trump spent part of his morning on social media touting the size of his rallies and defending Christopher Columbus. He also declared that Russia and Ukraine had agreed to halt strikes against each other’s energy infrastructures. Except that he hadn’t first confirmed that with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky—and Russia spent the hours that followed bombarding Ukraine with missiles and drones, hitting a Kharkiv power plant.

Trump’s inability to bring the Iran war to a close has left him incensed but also oddly paralyzed, two people close to him told us. One of them, an adviser, said that Trump “is used to snapping his fingers and having the whole world—Republicans, world leaders, the media—come to attention, and he is losing his mind that Iran won’t listen.” Iran has resumed menacing oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz, and the average price of diesel in the United States has crossed the $6-a-gallon mark, raising the cost of goods that travel the nation’s highways on trucks.

Republicans are panicked that those high energy prices could help Democrats take control of the House and Senate in the midterm elections, which are now only three weeks away. Trump has been searching for a scapegoat, and appears to have settled on Ukraine. Although blaming a European country that’s fighting for its existence for the rise in global oil prices might seem implausible, Trump seems to prefer that to accepting responsibility for his decision to attack Iran. His broadsides against Ukraine, moreover, are consistent with his decade-long deference to Vladimir Putin.

A U.S. president siding with the Kremlin is quite an October surprise. But in just the past few days, Trump appears to have fully turned against Ukraine. He announced on Friday that he had reached an agreement with Putin to import Russian diesel fuel, undercutting the new sanctions bill against Moscow’s energy industry that Trump signed into law last month. Even if the roughly 2.25 million barrels headed to the U.S. only marginally ease fuel costs, the deal allows Trump to tout efforts to help Americans while also providing Russia with additional revenue.

Despite the opposition of European allies and some Republicans on Capitol Hill, [the Felon] Trump has followed up by placing even more pressure on Ukraine. He called for Zelensky to be replaced.

Ukraine has expanded its strikes deep into Russian territory in recent months, targeting the larger nation’s oil refineries. Those attacks sparked an energy crisis in Russia and were cheered across Europe—but not in the White House. Russia imposed a ban on diesel exports in response, which added more pressure to global diesel markets already under strain from the war in Iran. Zelensky told Trump and his envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner that he was willing to stop attacking Russian oil refineries if the Russians halted attacks on Ukrainian power plants, a White House official told us. But Trump doesn’t see the strikes as equivalent—and demanded that Ukraine first stop attacking Russian refineries, the official said. Zelensky refused.

[The Felon's] Trump’s next move against Ukraine came, as it so often does, after a phone call with Putin. . . . Trump spoke with Putin on Friday to wish him a belated birthday, even though some in the White House counseled against the call, the adviser told us, believing it would yield little. During the 90-minute conversation, Trump told Putin that he would lift the sanctions on Russian diesel exports.

That undermined sanctions applied in 2022 and undercut the tougher Russian-sanctions bill that Trump signed last month; the law was named in honor of one of its champions, the late Senator Lindsey Graham. A bipartisan group of lawmakers was infuriated by the move, and some Republicans denounced Trump for siding with Putin. Four GOP senators—Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Susan Collins of ⁠Maine, Thom Tillis of North Carolina, and John Curtis of Utah—joined some of their Democratic colleagues to release a statement yesterday saying that lifting the sanctions “runs directly counter to that law” and that the U.S. should not provide “Putin with a financial lifeline while Russia continues to kill Ukrainian civilians.” . . . . Even if Trump wouldn’t fully support Ukraine, officials in Kyiv had hoped he would not actively hurt their cause. That hope may be fading.

Recent talks between Kushner, Witkoff, and Putin have included the promise of massive business deals that Russia could strike with U.S. interests once the war concludes, according to reports. Ukrainian officials have long believed that Trump’s foreign policy focuses on opening up business deals—and the potential enrichment of the president’s family and friends—over the defense of democracy, human rights, or territorial sovereignty.

Ukraine was already bracing for a difficult winter. Moscow has escalated its attacks on Ukraine’s cities. It has grown its missile stockpiles and debuted a jet-powered drone that Ukrainian defenses have had difficulty stopping. Europe has tried to fill the gaps left by Trump’s indifference—and the U.S. being bogged down in Iran—but Zelensky’s aides believe that Putin will use the winter to pummel their cities before making another lunge at Kyiv in the spring. If, suddenly, Ukraine were left without U.S. intelligence or American-made weapons, Kyiv might be in its most vulnerable position since the first days of the war.

Trump’s admiration for Putin has been one of the most enduring geopolitical subplots of the past decade. . . . . he has refrained from holding Putin to account for helping Iran, even after American intelligence agencies revealed that Moscow gave Tehran targeting information to strike U.S. military assets in the region. Some of Trump’s closest outside advisers have privately wondered what Putin has done to so thoroughly enthrall the president . . . .

Though Putin has been charged with war crimes by the International Criminal Court, Trump welcomed him to Anchorage last summer. Trump’s move to undo the diesel sanctions could provide a boost to Russia’s faltering economy. And he has overruled the objections of some in his own party by inviting Putin to this winter’s G20 summit, which the United States is hosting at a Trump-owned golf course in Doral, just outside Miami.

If Putin accepts the invitation to that December meeting, it would be the first time he has attended a multilateral summit in a Western country since his invasion of Ukraine. Zelensky has said he’ll be there, and is hoping to meet with Putin to negotiate the end of the war.

Tuesday Morning Male Beauty

 

More Monday Male Beauty - Pt 2

 

The Felon Is Trying to Force Kyiv to Surrender.

One might assume that Vladimir Putin has once reminded the Felon of the "kompromat" that Putin holds over the Felon given the Felon's latest efforts to force Ukraine to surrender.  Between his diesel fuel purchase from Russia - which hopefully, Congress will block since it will do nothing to lower domestic diesel prices - that would provide billions of dollars to Russia, his constant attacks on Volodymyr Zelensky, and his constant parroting of Putin's talking points while maligning European allies, it is increasing difficult to believe the Felon isn't a Kremlin asset.  Russian strikes are deliberately targeting civilian sites including power plants needed for civilian purposes and Putin is wantonly killing Ukrainian children and entire families, yet the Felon lies and blames Ukraine - which was invaded by Russia and not vice versa - for the war, the high diesel prices withing the USA (even as the USA continues to export diesel) and wants Ukraine to surrender and give up parts of the country to satisfy Putin's megalomania.  Thankfully, Ukraine seems determined to keep fighting and, better yet, to continue to hit Russia's energy facilities and Russian data centers that are the basis for Russia's efforts to cause division both in the USA and around the world. The Felon, in my view, is a traitor and a threat to international law.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at the Felon's dangerous - and perhaps treasonous - actions.  Here are highlights:

In the past 72 hours, [the Felon] Donald Trump has dropped all pretense, torched a couple decades of American policy, and undermined 18 months of his own diplomacy. He lifted sanctions on the import of Russian diesel fuel, in violation of the letter and spirit of laws that he himself signed. He has threatened to stop sharing intelligence with Ukraine, unless Ukraine agrees not to target Russian refineries, thus demanding that Kyiv give up its most effective weapon while asking nothing from Russia in exchange. He has not criticized Russian attacks on Ukrainian power plants or factories, even those owned by American companies. He has offered no condolences for the recent deaths of Ukrainian children in Russian bombing raids.

He has lied repeatedly. He declared that Ukraine and Russia had agreed to an “energy cease-fire,” an announcement that surprised the Ukrainians and that in any case the Russians immediately broke, hitting a power plant in Kharkiv only hours later. He accused Ukraine of blocking negotiations, when in reality the Ukrainians have repeatedly proposed cease-fires and Russia has never agreed to a cease-fire or any meaningful negotiation at all.

He has described Ukraine’s democratically elected president as an obstacle to negotiations and told him to leave office. But on Friday, before making these new decisions, he held yet another long, friendly telephone conversation with the Russian dictator, who really could end the war today. All Vladimir Putin has to do is tell his soldiers to stop fighting, and then the war is over. The Ukrainians cannot stop fighting because, if they do, their country will be conquered and they will suffer the fate of their occupied territories: leaders murdered, children kidnapped, repression and concentration camps for everyone else. If Trump knows this, then he does not care.

The [Felon] president has implied that the point of his new policy is to lower fuel prices for Americans. Perhaps he wants to convince voters that the cause of high prices is Ukraine and not his own war of choice in Iran. But this is not a sufficient explanation or justification for these dramatic actions. The amount of fuel that Russia could export is too small, the impact on pricing too slight, the narrative too late to shape electoral outcomes.

This looks, instead, like something very different: an abrupt, Hail Mary attempt to force Ukraine to surrender and to save the Russian economy, perhaps in order to finally complete the multiple business deals that the Russians are known to have discussed with American negotiators and others in Trump’s orbit. These include deals involving the Nord Stream gas pipelines, mineral mining in the Arctic, the Russian assets frozen in European banks, and more.

Since the beginning of Trump’s second term, American allies in Europe and elsewhere have tried to explain to the president the significance of the war and the threat that Russia poses to peace and prosperity in Europe, in the Middle East, in Africa. Now it looks as if they have failed, and [The Felon] Trump has followed his oldest instincts to side with Putin. What lessons will they draw?

The first and most obvious is: Don’t rely on the United States. America is now a capricious, unpredictable power, one whose long-standing foreign policies can be impulsively reversed, from one day to the next. The U.S. has been sanctioning Russia for many years, and now suddenly, at the whim of the president, it is not. Also: Dictators receive better treatment in Trump’s Washington than elected leaders. Canada is a far more reliable energy partner for the U.S. than Russia, and yet Trump has not sought to improve relations with the Canadian government.  European security will be directly at risk in the case of a Ukrainian collapse or surrender, and yet Trump listens to Moscow, not Berlin or London.

Another lesson: This administration is for sale. A few days ago, The New York Times reported that, as part of peace negotiations between the U.S. and Russia, the property of Lukoil, a Russian company, may soon be acquired by a business consortium that includes Middle Eastern partners of Trump’s two lead negotiators in Ukraine, Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, as well as Trump’s daughter Ivanka and Witkoff’s son. . . . Even if none of them is ever completed, the mere fact that Trump’s negotiators discuss them gives the Russian regime reason to believe that it can continue the war with impunity.

However, democracies can cooperate without the American president. Ukraine will continue fighting, and will probably continue striking Russian refineries, thanks to its friends in Europe and beyond. French intelligence, German weaponry, and broad packages of aid from Scandinavia, Poland, and elsewhere will help. Everyone else should take note. For the past couple years, Europeans, Canadians, and the Pacific democracies have been building deeper commercial and security links with one another, as well as with India and Latin America. They’ve just been given another reason to make those links stronger.

The Trump-Russia relationship remains intense, important, and very weird. In the end, Trump always adopts Russia’s perspective, whoever the leader. Since his first trip to Moscow in 1987, when it was still the Soviet Union, he has loudly repeated Russian propaganda and reflected Russian views. Upon returning from that trip, he took out full-page advertisements in three newspapers, attacking American alliances in Europe and Asia. For nearly 40 years, he has been saying much the same thing.

He continues to hold these views in defiance of the American military and American intelligence, as well as majorities in the country and in Congress. Immediately after his statement on diesel and his comments about Volodymyr Zelensky, a bipartisan cohort of U.S. representatives and senators attacked the deal and vowed to reverse it. Earlier today, U.S. Air Force General Alexus Grynkewich, America’s highest-ranking soldier in Europe and the top NATO commander—a job always held by an American—delivered a very different message to Russia. Speaking at a security conference in Warsaw, Grynkewich said that any attack on NATO, something many now genuinely fear, would be met with overwhelming force: “We will stop the attack and deny them the ability to achieve their ​objectives, whatever those ​might be. We will, ⁠in short, ensure any attack, against any ally, proves utterly futile.” He implied that there would be massive retaliation targeting “anything and everything that supports, sustains, and controls” an aggressive force.

This is the kind of language that, if it also came from the White House, might deter Russia from expanding its current campaign of sabotage and cyberattacks in Europe, from continuing to aid Iran, or from committing war crimes in Ukraine. But this president absolutely refuses to use it, and at this point, we have to assume he never will.

As I said, it is difficult to believe the Felon is not a Russian asset at this point. One can only hope that the mid-terms bring a massive blue wave that will allow the Felon to be restrained - impeachment might also find more fans even among some Republicans.

More Monday Male Beauty

 

Can a Blue Wave Rein In the Felon

So far the signs appear to be that Republicans may lose control of both houses of Congress as the Felon's failed policies - think tariffs, trade wars and a war of choice in Iran - are turning previously thought safe seats in red states into contested, toss up districts.  Meanwhile, having driven the economy into a ditch and alienated long time allies, the Felon's corruption and obsession with lining his own pockets would make some crime bosses blush.  Sadly, short of finding 60 votes in the U.S. Senate for an impeachment conviction, the nation faces the prospect of more economic damage and betrayal of allies and citizens alike.   I'm not one to be over confident and it is crucial that anyone and everyone who opposes the ruin the Felon is bringing to the nation get to the polls and vote, preferably early and in person.  A piece in The New Yorker looks at where the nation finds itself and the crime syndicate operating from the White House.  What cannot be predicted is what the Felon will do if he finds himself diminished and better yet reined in by a Democrat controlled Congress and perhaps a re-energized judiciary.  Here are article highlights:

Signs of a midterm blue wave are everywhere, and yet it would be journalistic malpractice not to attach some nervous caveats to any prediction. Polls are sketchy. Campaigns have never been more subject to the desires of the wealthy. What is more, the President of the United States has the impulse control of a toddler, though most toddlers have neither the authority nor the inclination to spark an insurrection, destabilize the Western alliance, live-stream an execution, or threaten to end “a whole civilization.” We are subjected daily to the caprices of a mind both unregulated and amoral. As Mark Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has said, the Commander-in-Chief is “fascist to the core.” You may prefer milder terminology. Fine. But, after a decade defined by Donald Trump’s unceasing presence, a growing percentage of the American electorate appears to recognize the uniqueness of this President and the mayhem that he has instigated from the Oval Office.

We are, collectively, on guard against undue optimism. Still, if the coming election does result in a blue wave, Trump will be faced with the fact of his diminishment. The rest of us will be faced with the wreckage.

A decade ago, those who believed that Trump’s ascent represented a grave and multifaceted danger, a national emergency, were often met with sneering dismissal. The right generally regarded Trump’s most vocal opponents as pussy-hatted snowflakes, woke snobs indifferent to the struggles of working people. They were, in a word, “deranged.” . . . . All that distinguished Trump was “aesthetics”—“He is vulgar. He is rude.”

In the passage from lame duck to pensioner, Trump still has plenty of time to inflict further damage on the Republic while milking it for profit. He is the sum of his whims and his rages, and, a change in Congress or not, he will likely go on flouting the law, tightening the screws on universities, cultural institutions, and the press. What he seems to value most of late is the humiliation of his enemies and, even more, the accumulation of vast wealth. Since the second Inauguration, the Trumps and their satraps have operated with all the commercial cunning of the Corleone family; the White House is their front, their Genco Pura Olive Oil Company.

Every week brings word of a new grift, a new meme coin, a Melania doc, a pay-for-access club, or fresh funds from Gulf grandees looking for leverage. The other day, we learned that Kimberly Guilfoyle, Donald, Jr.,’s ex and the U.S. Ambassador to Greece, texted a maga donor insisting that he pay off her hundred-thousand-dollar Amex bill in exchange for favors from, in no particular order, the I.R.S., Tucker Carlson, and Kid Rock. . . . The Administration counts on an exhausted nation’s distraction. This may well have been the singular lesson that Trump absorbed from his moral instructor, Roy Cohn: if you keep up a steady stream of bullshit, if you keep denying and counterattacking, all of Monday’s trespasses will be forgotten by Tuesday.

What more and more voters are coming to understand is how profoundly they have been betrayed. And this is not just about the price of gas and groceries, though “affordability” is scarcely the joke the President thinks it is. Vladimir Putin long ago set out to mock the United States for its hypocrisies. You are no better than us—that was his message and his cover to crush dissent at home and the liberties of an independent Ukraine. When Trump threatens Greenland and Canada or greases a media merger in his interest, he is proving Putin’s point. When the titans of tech obediently line up at Trump’s Inauguration and fund his ballroom, Putin smiles. . . . because Americans tend to cling reflexively to the fraying notion of national exceptionalism, it is difficult to reckon with the idea that a President might be not merely shambolic and incompetent but something far darker, even evil.

But if we are uncomfortable using a word like “evil,” how else are we to describe the spectacle of the President unleashing Elon Musk, the wealthiest person in the history of humankind, to slash the budget of the U.S. Agency for International Development? According to an article in The Lancet and the intensive research of Atul Gawande, a surgeon, a former assistant administrator for U.S.A.I.D., and a writer for this magazine, the agency’s support—focussed on fighting malaria, polio, malnutrition, tuberculosis, and H.I.V.—saved at least ninety million lives in the previous two decades. Researchers estimate that the cruelty-by-budget-cut has been responsible for the loss of as many as seven hundred thousand lives.

This is among the many depredations that this supposedly mainstream Administration has committed. In 1788, at a ratifying convention in Richmond, James Madison defended the newly drafted Constitution, but warned that its fulfillment would depend on the quality of the people as well as the document’s written principles. “To suppose that any form of Government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people,” he said, “is a chimerical idea.” Election Day is November 3rd. In some states, voting has already begun.