Salem Political Snark

Win or (probably) lose, I'm thankful for how Kamala Harris campaigned

It's turning out to be a sad night. I started watching the election returns on MSNBC around 5 pm with a lot of optimism. After all, a couple of days ago I wrote a blog post called "Why I expect Harris will beat Trump fairly easily."

For sure, that's not going to happen. I was wrong.

At the moment the New York Times Live Presidential Forecast gives Trump more than a 95% chance of victory. Harris' only option is to win Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Currently Trump is leading by 3 points in Pennsylvania, 6 points in Michigan, and 4 points in Wisconsin.

The Blue Wall is crumbling. When I wake up tomorrow, likely it will have fallen, and Trump will have been declared the victor.

Which is so depressing, I had trouble writing that last sentence. My daughter is depressed. Friends are depressed. My wife is watching something on TV that isn't the election results. I read an update from a New York Times reporter that said:

The Harris campaign just shut off the sound on the TVs at her watch party and replaced it with music after a guest on CNN said tonight felt "more like 2016 than 2020."

I feel the same way. Once again, a competent, highly qualified woman is poised to be defeated by one of the worst presidents our country has ever suffered under. And Trump has vowed to make his next term in office even nastier. 

Unless Harris pulls off a near-miracle in the Blue Wall states, get ready for Robert Kennedy Jr. to ban vaccines and fluoride in the water supply, for Elon Musk to make the federal government into a MAGA playground, for millions of hard-working undocumented immigrants to be rounded up in detention camps before being thrown out of the country, for the abortion pill to be banned nationwide along with possibly other forms of abortion due to the Trump administration putting a hitherto unenforced law from the 1800s into effect, for all U.S. aid to Ukraine being withdrawn thereby handing a victory to Putin, for giving unfettered free rein to Netanyahu to kill as many Palestinians as he wants with no consequences, for Trump tariffs devastating our economy via a huge sales tax on all imported goods.

That's what it appears American voters have said they want.

If a Harris defeat is disturbing, equally bothersome will be the realization among those of us who supported her that half of the people in this country are absolutely fine with having an authoritarian, who has been termed a fascist by his Chief of Staff, becoming president again. Well, almost certainly they're going to get what they asked for: a fascist authoritarian president. 

I'm afraid for the United States, and the world. From what I know of the prelude to Hitler taking full control of a Nazi'fied Germany, Trump's plans for his second term in office are disturbingly similar. German leaders thought Hitler wouldn't be as bad as those who warned about him thought he would be. Until, the worst happened. 

Understand: I'm not saying that we will become a 21st century version of Nazi Germany. But the fact that I can even think that we're heading in that direction is beyond disturbing. It's terrifying. 

Obviously voters bought into Trump's incessant lies. They are fine with his stated desire to be a "dictator on Day 1." They can accept all of the things happening that I included in the lengthy paragraph above. In short, they have given a thumbs up to the first truly authoritarian presidency in our nation's history.

I want to end this post on a positive note. And that is, my deep gratitude to Kamala Harris for stepping up after Biden withdrew from the race. She ran a virtually flawless campaign. I found little to criticize in how she presented herself to the American public. Harris gave those of us who supported her hope, joy, and laughter when we needed it in the dark times after Biden's disastrous debate performance.

I don't blame Harris for her impending loss to Trump. I blame the voters who failed to see Trump for who he is: a mortal danger to our country and the world. Say goodbye to federal efforts to combat climate change, young people. Say goodbye to any chance of a two-state solution to the conflict between Israel and Palestinians, American Muslims. Enough of you voted for Trump to help him return to power.

Soon you'll see how wrong you were to dismiss Harris. 

I'm not sure if I'll be able to watch an expected concession speech from Harris tomorrow. I'm sad enough now. I don't need more tears. But if I were able to speak to Kamala, I'd tell her that she ran a great campaign. As her running mate Walz likes to say, she left everything on the field. If she loses, as I expect she will, it won't be due to a lack of effort or competence.

It will be due to the inability of the American public to recognize that they could have chosen a gem to become president. Instead, it looks like they've chosen a piece of shit. 

Why I expect Harris will beat Trump fairly easily

As I told a friend today, when I consider how I feel about the almost-upon-us presidential election, it's difficult for me to separate out my strong desire to see Harris win from factual indicators of how her campaign is going.

Nonetheless, below are reasons for why I'm confident that the election is going to turn out surprisingly well for Harris.

I say "surprisingly," because the general attitude among political pundits is that this is a very tight 50-50 toss-up election. Indeed, that's how the three prediction models that I follow basically are rating the electoral college race: Nate Silver's Silver Bulletin favors Trump 53-47, FiveThirtyEight favors Trump 53-46, and the Economist favors Trump 51-49. 

Each of the models gives Trump a slightly higher probability of winning. But these models try to be a reflection of some aspects of reality and obviously aren't reality itself. They are largely, but not entirely, based on polls. 

So here's some other factors that lead me to believe that not only will Harris defeat Trump, she'll do so by winning more than the 270 electoral votes she'd get by holding on to the usually safe blue states, beating Trump in the Blue Wall of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, and gaining the single electoral vote in Nebraska's 2nd District.

(I'm expecting that Harris will win all of the above, plus North Carolina and Nevada. If I'm horribly wrong, gleeful Trump supporters can tell me how stupid I was in post-election comments on this post.)

(1) Turnout is key in every election, but especially this one, given the very tight polling results. Trump has farmed out the Republican turnout effort in swing states to Elon Musk and a super PAC he controls. Harris is doing it the usual way, through the Democratic organizations in those states which rely heavily on an army of volunteers. Musk is a smart guy, but he is in over his head in this effort. So better Democratic turnout will be a big reason why Harris wins.

(2) Women strongly favor Harris. Men strongly favor Trump. This doesn't balance out because women are more likely to vote than men are, a plus for Harris.

(3) The Iowa Selzer poll that was released today sent shockwaves through political observers, since it showed Harris leading Trump 47-44 in the red state. As noted above, Iowa women broke strongly for Harris, seemingly motivated in part by the six-week abortion ban that went into effect in Iowa after a previous Selzer poll that showed Trump with a fairly comfortable lead. Ann Selzer is a highly respected pollster, so there's a good chance what the new poll found points to Harris leading in other mid-west states also.

(4) Trump's closing message to voters is incoherent, unfocused, negative, and hateful. Harris' closing message is much more appealing to independent and undecided voters. This is why a poll found that people who have recently decided between Harris and Trump are breaking for Harris by a significant margin.

(5) Latinos in general, and Puerto Ricans specifically, appear to be returning to the Democratic fold. This was spurred by a speaker at Trump's Madison Square Garden rally referring to Puerto Rico as a floating island of garbage. Black men also seem to be favoring Harris in greater numbers, helping to reduce Democratic anxiety about them defecting to Trump.

(6) Trump is making very little effort to appeal to voters outside of his MAGA base. He is putting more emphasis on challenging the results of the 2024 presidential election than on winning the election. This indicates that Trump isn't confident that he's going to get the most electoral votes, since he is hoping that a second try at overturning the results of an election he lost will be successful this time. It won't be, thankfully.

(7) Kamala Harris did great in her appearance on Saturday Night Live last night. She looked happy and relaxed. People are tired of Trump's habitual nastiness. I'm confident this will lead to Harris getting an unexpectedly large number of "I'm fed up with Trump's antics" voters. 

Climate is best reason to vote for Harris, and nobody's talking about it

There are many strange things about the current presidential campaign, including: how Harris suddenly became the Democratic nominee after Biden withdrew; how the Republican Party could happily get behind Trump, a convicted felon who lost the last election; how neither campaign is speaking much about the climate crisis, even though it is by far the most important long-term issue. 

I've watched all of Harris' debates and major speeches. Her silence on global warming is deafening. So is Trump's, but that's to be expected.

Based on his first term in office, and what he's saying now, if Trump is elected it's a certainty that he will try to undo all of the Biden/Harris accomplishments aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions, once again withdraw the United States from international efforts to combat human-caused climate change, and give free rein to the oil and gas industry to, as he puts it, "Drill, drill, drill."

Yet long after the current furors over securing our southern border, protecting our democracy, and reducing inflation have been forgotten, the climate crisis will still be the most important long-term issue affecting the United States and the world.

So how is it that Kamala Harris has made this such an insignificant part of her campaign?

I expect this from Trump, not from Harris. I've been thinking that because fracking supposedly is a big deal to Pennsylvania voters, an important swing state, and Harris was attacked by Trump for saying in the 2020 presidential primary that she wanted to ban fracking, Harris is avoiding talking about climate change because it runs the risk of bringing back fracking as a campaign issue.

(Currently Harris says that she's OK with fracking, because she's learned that greenhouse gas emissions can be reduced even if fracking continues -- a pretty weak explanation of why she's changed her mind.)

However, an essay by climate activist Bill McKibben in the October 28 issue of The New Yorker casts the climate change silence of the Harris campaign in a rosier light. Here's an excerpt:

This month, in the journal BioScience, a group of the world’s leading climate experts warned, “We are on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster. This is a global emergency beyond any doubt.”

Not that you’d know it from this year’s Presidential campaign. Vice-President Kamala Harris, since becoming the Democratic nominee, has spoken very little about climate change. To the degree that a transition from fossil fuel has been discussed at all, it’s been in the form of her assuring Pennsylvanians that she won’t interfere with fracking. She has spoken about creating green jobs, but not much else.

The reasons are fairly clear. First, the Democratic Party essentially had no primary season. Biden faced only token challenge, and when he stepped down Harris was nominated by acclamation, so activists had no chance to elevate climate change to a crucial electoral issue, as they had done in 2020.

Remember the backdrop: Greta Thunberg’s movement had crested in the fall of 2019, with some six million people marching in protests around the world. In this country, the Sunrise Movement was pushing a Green New Deal. The governor of Washington, Jay Inslee, who was also briefly a Presidential candidate, called that time a “magic moment” for climate politics.

NBC reported, “Climate change has recently shot to the top of polls of issues that Democratic voters care about in the presidential primary, rivaling for the first time longstanding bread-and-butter topics like health care.” Harris, in her primary bid, said that global warming “represents an existential threat to who we are as a species.” Biden, after winning the nomination, secured Senator Bernie Sanders’s support by committing to work with him on climate initiatives.

The second reason for the relative silence this year is that Biden, in fact, largely kept to his commitment. He somehow persuaded the Senate to pass the Inflation Reduction Act, which finally devoted serious federal money to an energy transition. His need for Senator Joe Manchin’s vote meant that the bill included gifts to the fossil-fuel industry, but it has nonetheless unleashed hundreds of billions of dollars on everything from heat pumps and E.V. chargers to battery factories.

The basic stance of mainstream environmentalists now is that the country is more or less on the right track. They assume that, if Harris wins, many of the people driving policy in the White House will remain in place and that, in four more years, the momentum behind clean energy will be unstoppable. The fossil-fuel industry apparently assumes the same thing: it has been raising money at Spindletop rates for Trump, who has promised to “drill, drill, drill” and has noted, “I hate wind.” The choice is so obvious that Harris doesn’t really need to say much. But, if she’s elected, she’s going to have to do a lot.

That's for sure. I found an article by Elizabeth Colbert in the October 14 issue of The New Yorker to be super-scary. Here's passages about tipping points in "When the Arctic Melts: What the fate of Greenland means for the rest of the Earth."

Most scientists believe that ice ages—there have been at least ten of them over the past two and half million years—are initiated and terminated by periodic shifts in the Earth’s orbit, caused by, among other factors, the tug of Jupiter and Saturn. But orbital shifts produce only slight changes in the amount of sunlight that reaches different parts of the globe at different times of the year.

Such slight variations are insufficient to explain the growth and subsequent retreat of massive ice sheets. Rather, it seems, the orbital shifts act like a trigger, setting off other processes—feedbacks—that greatly amplify their effect.

One relatively straightforward feedback features albedo, from the Latin word for “whiteness.” Ice and especially snow have a high albedo. They reflect lots of sunlight back to space. Thus, as an ice sheet grows, the planet absorbs less energy. This has a cooling effect, which encourages the buildup of more snow and ice, which results in more reflectivity, and so on. Start to melt an ice sheet and the same cycle spins in reverse.

Today, feedbacks are, to put it mildly, a growing concern. A report published last year by more than two hundred researchers from around the world noted that many of the systems that determine the climate exhibit nonlinear behavior. Such systems may “shift to a very different state, often abruptly or irreversibly, as a result of self-sustaining feedbacks.” The researchers identified two dozen potential “tipping systems,” among them the Greenland ice sheet.

At a certain point, the report warned, feedbacks could become so powerful that, even if CO2 emissions were cut dramatically and temperatures stabilized, the ice sheet would continue to shrink, possibly until it collapsed. The “best estimate” of when this critical threshold will be reached is when average global temperatures rise 1.5 degrees Celsius—roughly three degrees Fahrenheit—above preindustrial levels. Even after that line is crossed, it will take many centuries for the changes set in motion to play out.

Still, as a practical matter, there will be no going back. When it comes to tipping systems, the future is in our hands until it isn’t.

...Climate change is not like other problems, and that is part of the problem. What it lacks in vividness and immediacy it makes up for in reach. Once the world’s remaining mountain glaciers disappear, they won’t be coming back. Nor will the coral reefs or the Amazon rain forest. If we cross the tipping point for the Greenland ice sheet, we may not even notice. And yet the world as we know it will be gone.

My tips about preserving sanity in the runup to presidential election

It takes one to know one, goes the familiar saying. Applying that to the current political situation, I know  the stress lots of people are under right now, because I'm feeling really stressed myself. 

Today I mentioned in my Tai Chi class that I was going to try to use the Tai Chi principle of relaxed softness on November 5, election day, because I'm going to need all the help I can get in staying calm as the votes are counted and announced.

That led to an interesting mid-class discussion among the half dozen or so students in attendance. It turned out that everybody was feeling pretty much the same way. 

We were all supporters of Harris. But given that each of the three election prediction models that I follow -- Nate Silver's Silver Bulletin (you can't see the actual forecast without subscribing to Silver, which I do), FiveThirtyEight, and the Economist -- are basically showing a 50-50 race, both Harris and Trump supporters have good reasons to be nervous.

So here's some tips from my own frazzled brain about how to preserve your sanity as much as possible in the six days until November 5.

(1) Ponder the wisdom of the lyrics to the Doris Day song from the 1950s, Que Sera Sera (Whatever Will Be, Will Be). Here's a sample:

When I was just a little girl
I asked my mother, "What will I be?"
"Will I be pretty? Will I be rich?"
Here's what she said to me

"Que será, será
Whatever will be, will be
The future's not ours to see
Que será, será
What will be, will be"

(2) In line with the above, read a recent article in The Atlantic by Brian Klaas, "The Truth About Polling: We Don't Know What We Think We Know About How Americans Will Vote." If you're worried about how your favored candidate is faring in the polls, Klaas shows why that worry is misplaced, since polls are pretty bad at capturing what is going to happen in an election. 

Here's how the article starts out. 

Well, it’s that time again: Millions of Americans are stress-eating while clicking “Refresh” on 538’s presidential forecast, hoping beyond hope that the little red or blue line will have made a tiny tick upward. Some may be clutching themselves in the fetal position, chanting under their breath: “There’s a good new poll out of Pennsylvania.”

The stakes of this election are sky-high, and its outcome is not knowable in advance—a combination that most of us find deeply discomfiting. People crave certainty, and there’s just one place to look for it: in the data. Earlier humans might have turned to oracles or soothsayers; we have Nate Silver. But the truth is that polling—and the models that rely primarily on polling to forecast the election result—cannot confidently predict what will happen on November 5.

(3) Keep in mind that in the lifetime of geezers like me (I'm 76), the criteria for what it means to be a good citizen has changed a lot, and not necessarily for the better. When I was in high school, 1962-66, I recall being taught that a good citizen's main duty was to vote.

If you've done that, or plan to do that, congratulations, you're a good citizen. Now relax and wait for your vote and that of your fellow Americans to be counted.

Unless you live in a swing state -- Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona, Nevada -- there's little you can do at this point to encourage other people who share your political view to vote. 

And despite the large number of texts and emails I've gotten every day for many weeks, asking me to send more money to the Harris campaign (I've already donated twice), I feel fine ignoring those pleas. I haven't read a single one, since the email subject lines alone tell me what B.S. they are. For example, from today's emails: Lots and lots of people are donating today, and now they are hoping you'll do the same.

No they aren't. Most of them are hoping they will never get another donation request from the Harris campaign (I'm sure Trump supporters feel the same way). Plus, it's too late for more money to make a difference.

Of course, I'm expecting that after November 5, I'm going to get many more texts and emails asking me to contribute so the Harris campaign can defend against Trump's attempt to overturn the results -- assuming Harris is victorious.

(4) No matter the outcome of the election, know that your life will go on pretty much as it always has. You'll have the same family, the same friends, the same co-workers, the same acquaintances. You'll eat the same food, exercise in the same way, go to the same places. The main difference is that once the outcome is known, you won't be worrying about that any more, since it will be a fact rather than an anxiety. 

Sure, new worries will pop up. You'll fret over how the newly elected president is doing, whether or not you voted for him/her. That's the nature of our minds. Instead of saying "I think, therefore I am," Descartes could have said, "I worry, therefore I am." 

But in line with the Two Arrows adage of Buddhism, when you worry, try not to worry about your worrying. 

Trump campaign is self-destructing. Great news for Harris.

Like lots of Democrats, I worry incessantly about how well the Harris campaign is doing. Even though the presidential race is essentially a toss-up, us Democrats fret that Harris isn't doing better, while Trump supporters look at the same toss-up and think, "We're going to win for sure."

But today I'm feeling a lot more optimistic. 

Right on schedule, with just over a week to go before the election, the Trump campaign is self-destructing in plain view of voters. The clearest sign of this is the disastrous Trump rally in Madison Square Garden Sunday night. 

Trump and other speakers were their usual racist, hateful, misogynistic, insulting selves.

That would have made headlines by itself, since this is when presidential campaigns make their closing arguments to the American public, and the Trump campaign is getting darker and more negative as November 5 nears. 

However, the icing on the cake for those of us strongly opposed to Trump ever inhabiting the White House again was a supposed comic (he wasn't at all funny) making a lame joke about Puerto Rico.

In his joke, Hinchcliffe, known for his comedy podcast Kill Tony, said: "There’s a lot going on. I don’t know if you know this but there’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. I think it’s called Puerto Rico."

There was little reaction from the attendees at the Trump rally, other than shock that someone would go on stage, stand at a podium displaying a Trump - Vance sign, and say something so stupid. I can only imagine that the reaction from Harris campaign staff was much stronger, since this was a gift to them.

It spurred Bad Bunny, a highly popular Puerto Rico singer, to endorse Harris. And the Harris campaign is publicizing the "floating island of garbage" statement to Puerto Rico immigrants in swing states, notably including hundreds of thousands in Pennsylvania. 

Given how close polls show the race is between Harris and Trump, small shifts in voter preferences can have a big impact. The fallout over the Hinchcliffe's remark is impacting the campaigns.

One day after the rally, the fallout over the vulgar and racist comments made by some guests in the pre-program continue to reverberate across the campaign. Republican allies of the former president have had to publicly defend Puerto Rico and denounce the comments. Puerto Ricans in the crucial battleground state of Pennsylvania are planning to protest Trump’s rally in Allentown, Pennsylvania, Tuesday. And Harris’ campaign has cut a new digital ad over the rally comments and held events with Latino surrogates in Philadelphia.

There's more good news for Harris. Worries about Black men deserting Harris appear to be overblown.

A new NAACP survey found Republican Donald Trump’s support among young Black men has dwindled with a little more than a week to go before Election Day.

The poll found Black men under 50 years old decreased their likelihood of voting for the former president, dropping from 27 percent to 21 percent since a previous survey asking the same question was released last month.

Researchers involved with the survey say Vice President Kamala Harris’ support among this bloc jumped from 51 percent to 59 percent over that same time frame.

“What we know from these data is that the voter apathy is being concentrated among folks who already had a plan to vote for Donald Trump, and so that’s really the big takeaway here,” said Joshua Doss of HIT Strategies, which conducted the survey.

...While the overall support among all Black voters for Trump is down slightly in the new NAACP survey — 11 percent compared to last month’s 13 percent — it’s roughly the same percentage of the Black vote Trump received in 2020. Another 9 percent said they were undecided.

I ditched my Washington Post subscription after Bezos tanked a Harris endorsement

After Trump won the presidency in 2016, I subscribed to the digital versions of the New York Times and Washington Post. For about $15 a month each, I figured this was money well spent to support some of the best journalists in the country.

You know, those who Trump calls "the enemy of the people." Or more recently, "the enemy within." (That category includes many others as well, including Democratic politicians and liberal activists.)

For almost eight years I've enjoyed both newspapers. But today I went to the Subscriptions section of my iPhone settings and unsubscribed from the digital Washington Post. I'm paid up until the middle of next month, so the Post won't notice I'm missing until they fail to get $16.99 from me on November 15.

My reason? A story in yesterday's edition, "The Washington Post says it will not endorse a candidate for president," tells the annoying tale.

The Washington Post’s publisher said Friday that the paper will not make an endorsement in this year’s presidential contest, for the first time in 36 years, or in future presidential races.

The decision, announced 11 days before an election that most polls show as too close to call, drew immediate and heated condemnation from a wide swath of subscribers, political figures and media commentators. Robert Kagan, a longtime Post columnist and editor-at-large in the opinion department, resigned in protest, and a group of 11 Washington Post columnists co-signed an article condemning the decision. Angry readers and sources flooded the email inboxes of numerous staffers with complaints.

...An endorsement of Harris had been drafted by Post editorial page staffers but had yet to be published, according to two people who were briefed on the sequence of events and who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. The decision to no longer publish presidential endorsements was made by The Post’s owner, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, according to four people who were briefed on the decision.

So the Post's billionaire owner, Jeff Bezos, followed in the footsteps of the billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Times, who also ordered that his newspaper not make a presidential endorsement this year, which also would have been Kamala Harris. The Post story says:

The Post decision marks the second time this week that a major media organization has declined to issue an endorsement in the race between the Republican nominee, former president Donald Trump, and his Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, after years of making such endorsements. Earlier this week, Patrick Soon-Shiong, the billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Times, blocked a planned endorsement of Harris, prompting the resignation of the newspaper’s editorials editor.

I can't stand billionaires who acquire a media company (Elon Musk is another example, with Twitter) and then turn it into a vehicle for their right-wing views. It would be bad enough if this was based on their sincerely-held conservative political beliefs, but worse is what seems to have happened with the tankings of a Harris endorsement by the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times.

Namely, that Bezos and Soon-Shiong wanted to avoid making Trump angry at them and their newspapers if he defeats Harris for the presidency and then embarks on his promised revenge tour against those who opposed his campaign. To me this is the most likely reason for the non-endorsements of Harris. 

If Bezos and Soon-Shiong had merely wanted to stop the practice of making presidential endorsements, which other papers have done for decent reasons, they could have done this months ago, well before the November election.

Instead, they ordered a stop to a Harris endorsement just a few days before November 5, which makes the decisions reek of narrow self-interest, given the stakes involved in who succeeds Biden as president. That's why I sent this message to the Washington Post after cancelling my digital subscription. I used a Contact feature that offered help with subscription problems. 

I don't need any help, as I just cancelled my digital subscription. I did this because Bezos squashing the paper's endorsement of Harris showed me that I can no longer trust that the Post is neutral when reporting on politics. You guys apparently want to rely on subscriptions from Trump supporters. Good luck with that. Trump calls journalists the enemy of the people. It saddens me that the Post cares more about sucking up to Trump than being a factual reporter of the news and fearless when it comes to endorsements. 

My prediction is that Kamala Harris will be a great president

Last night I watched the CNN town hall featuring Kamala Harris and a group of undecided Pennsylvania voters. No Donald Trump, because he was afraid of an invitation to debate Harris on CNN that she accepted, and when CNN offered Trump his own town hall, he chickened out of that also.

So much for the fake-macho Republican presidential candidate that world leaders supposedly fear. Trump doesn't even have the courage to go head-to-head with Harris again, undoubtedly because she kicked his ass badly in their previous debate.

Watching Harris answer questions from the undecided voters, occasionally side-stepping a pointed question but always giving a good response, made me think, "She's going to be a wonderful president."

Sure, I realize that Harris first has to win the November election. That's by no means a foregone conclusion, given how the polls have the presidential race as a 50-50 proposition. Way too close for comfort. 

But I'm predicting that Harris is going to come out on top in the election.

I don't have a magic ball, or even any unique insights into the state of the race. However, I follow politics closely, and Harris seems to have the edge over Trump when it comes to voter turnout -- which is going to be the factor that determines who wins.

The Trump campaign seems to be placing more emphasis on challenging the results of the election than on winning it. That's a sign of weakness. The Harris campaign strikes me as much more organized when it comes to turning out its base. 

I readily admit, though, that part of my confidence in a Harris victory stems from a strong reluctance to believe that a majority of voters are okay with electing a candidate as flawed as Trump: convicted criminal, incoherent speaker, habitual liar, a fascist according to his chief of staff, consumed with a desire for retribution against his enemies.

When independents and Republicans who don't like Trump vote, I want to believe that enough of them will cast their ballot for Harris to preserve my confidence in the wisdom of the American public. It's just so damn obvious that Harris would be a hugely better president than Trump. 

She's intelligent, caring, strong, competent, a good leader. This is evident to Republicans also, since they are much less fearful of Harris becoming president than Democrats are of Trump becoming president. Even Trump voters know that Harris will be a solid president who won't abuse her power for selfish ends -- something that can't be said about Trump. 

Next week Harris will be holding a rally in Washington, D.C. at the spot where Trump spoke before a mob of his followers staged an insurrection at the Capitol in an attempt to overturn the 2020 Biden victory. 

Great decision. This will remind the American people that Trump sat on his fat butt for three hours, sipping Diet Coke and watching Fox News, doing nothing to stop the violence at the Capitol that he incited. 

After Harris wins on November 5, I'll be looking forward to the trial of Trump on the charges of attempting to overturn the election results moving forward. He deserves to go to jail for what he did. But even if that doesn't happen, a Harris victory will mean that Jack Smith is able to continue his prosecution of Trump.

The nation deserves a jury trial where evidence of Trump's wrongdoing is presented in a court of law, not just the January 6 committee. We also deserve a Kamala Harris presidency, and I'm looking forward to that coming to pass.

Trump is a fascist, says his chief of staff, John Kelly

What bothers me the most about today's Republican Party isn't the conservatism -- my mother was a lifelong Republican with deeply held conservative values -- but the Party's dangerous submission to Donald Trump, thereby elevating a single man's personality over Republican principles.

The Republican Party that my mother belonged to was fervently anti-communist and anti-totalitarian. It believed that the United States had an almost sacred duty to spread democracy across the world and resist authoritarianism.

Yet here we are, in 2024, with whatever Trump spouts off becoming the de facto policy of the Republican Party. Trump admires the dictatorial leaders of Russia, North Korea, and China; fine, says the GOP. Trump wants to weaken NATO and allow Putin to get away with his unprovoked invasion of Ukraine; fine, says the GOP. Trump refuses to admit that he lost the 2020 election and expresses admiration for the mob that invaded the nation's capitol on January 6, 2021; fine, says the GOP.

Worst of all, by far the worst, is that when Trump openly behaves like a fascist, the Republican Party looks the other way -- pretending that he isn't a genuine fascist, just an ex-president and current presidential candidate who plays around with fascistic speech and actions. That's wrong. Trump is clearly a genuine fascist.

Very strong evidence for this came out today after the New York Times published a story based on an interview with Trump's chief of staff, John Kelly. The story should be required reading for every voter in the November election. I've made the link to the story a gift from my subscription, so everybody should be able to read "As Election Nears, Kelly Warns Trump Would Rule Like a Dictator."

A tweet from the Harris campaign was what first alerted me to the New York Times story.

Here's excerpts from the New York Times story relating to Trump being a fascist. 

Few top officials spent more time behind closed doors in the White House with President Donald J. Trump than John F. Kelly, the former Marine general who was his longest-serving chief of staff.

With Election Day looming, Mr. Kelly — deeply bothered by Mr. Trump’s recent comments about employing the military against his domestic opponents — agreed to three on-the-record, recorded discussions with a reporter for The New York Times about the former president, providing some of his most wide-ranging comments yet about Mr. Trump’s fitness and character.

Mr. Kelly was homeland security secretary under Mr. Trump before moving to the White House in July 2017. He worked to carry out Mr. Trump’s agenda for nearly a year and a half. It was a tumultuous period in which he drew internal criticism over his own performance and grew disenchanted and distressed by conduct on the part of the president that he considered at times to be inappropriate and reflecting no understanding of the Constitution.

In the interviews, Mr. Kelly expanded on his previously expressed concerns and stressed that voters, in his view, should consider fitness and character when selecting a president, even more than a candidate’s stances on the issues.

“In many cases, I would agree with some of his policies,” he said, stressing that as a former military officer he was not endorsing any candidate. “But again, it’s a very dangerous thing to have the wrong person elected to high office.”

He said that, in his opinion, Mr. Trump met the definition of a fascist, would govern like a dictator if allowed, and had no understanding of the Constitution or the concept of rule of law.

He discussed and confirmed previous reports that Mr. Trump had made admiring statements about Hitler, had expressed contempt for disabled veterans and had characterized those who died on the battlefield for the United States as “losers” and “suckers” — comments first reported in 2020 by The Atlantic.

...Kelly said that based on his experience, Trump met the definition of a “fascist.”

In response to a question about whether he thought Mr. Trump was a fascist, Mr. Kelly first read aloud a definition of fascism that he had found online.

“Well, looking at the definition of fascism: It’s a far-right authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy,” he said.

Mr. Kelly said that definition accurately described Mr. Trump.

“So certainly, in my experience, those are the kinds of things that he thinks would work better in terms of running America,” Mr. Kelly said.

He added: “Certainly the former president is in the far-right area, he’s certainly an authoritarian, admires people who are dictators — he has said that. So he certainly falls into the general definition of fascist, for sure.”

New Yorker article: "Trump is a distinctively vile human being"

At this late date in the 2024 presidential campaign, what mystifies me the most about the election if how about half of this country's voters still support Trump despite his obvious vileness.

In an article in the October 21, 2024 issue of The New Yorker, Adam Gopnik, a highly skilled writer and analyzer of current events, discusses the disease of Trumpism in "As Bad as All That: Donald Trump and the unmaking of America." (Online title: "How Alarmed Should We Be if Trump wins again?")
Download How Alarmed Should We Be If Trump Wins Again? | The New Yorker

The final page of the article is a devastating, entirely accurate, warning of Trump's villainy and the danger he poses to the United States and the world should he regain the presidency. 

Think hard about the probable consequences of a second Trump Administration—about the things he has promised to do and can do, the things that the hard-core group of rancidly discontented figures (as usual with authoritarians, more committed than he is to an ideology) who surround him wants him to do and can do.

Having lost the popular vote, as he surely will, he will not speak up to reconcile “all Americans.” He will insist that he won the popular vote, and by a landslide. He will pardon and then celebrate the January 6th insurrectionists, and thereby guarantee the existence of a paramilitary organization that’s capable of committing violence on his behalf without fear of consequences.

He will, with an obedient Attorney General, begin prosecuting his political opponents; he was largely unsuccessful in his previous attempt only because the heads of two U.S. Attorneys’ offices, who are no longer there, refused to coöperate. When he begins to pressure CNN and ABC, and they, with all the vulnerabilities of large corporations, bend to his will, telling themselves that his is now the will of the people, what will we do to fend off the slow degradation of open debate?

Trump will certainly abandon Ukraine to Vladimir Putin and realign this country with dictatorships and against NATO and the democratic alliance of Europe. Above all, the spirit of vengeful reprisal is the totality of his beliefs—very much like the fascists of the twentieth century in being a man and a movement without any positive doctrine except revenge against his imagined enemies.

And against this: What? Who? The spirit of resistance may prove too frail, and too exhausted, to rise again to the contest. Who can have confidence that a democracy could endure such a figure in absolute control and survive? An oncologist who, in the face of this much evidence, shrugged and proposed watchful waiting as the best therapy would not be an optimist. He would be guilty of gross malpractice. One of those personal-injury lawyers on the billboards would sue him, and win.

What any plausible explanation must confront is the fact that Trump is a distinctively vile human being and a spectacularly malignant political actor.

In fables and fiction, in every Disney cartoon and Batman movie, we have no trouble recognizing and understanding the villains. They are embittered, canny, ludicrous in some ways and shrewd in others, their lives governed by envy and resentment, often rooted in the acts of people who’ve slighted them. (“They’ll never laugh at me again!”) They nonetheless have considerable charm and the ability to attract a cult following.

This is Ursula, Hades, Scar—to go no further than the Disney canon. Extend it, if that seems too childlike, to the realms of Edmund in "King Lear" and Richard III: smart people, all, almost lovable in their self-recognition of their deviousness, but not people we ever want to see in power, for in power their imaginations become unimaginably deadly. Villains in fables are rarely grounded in any cause larger than their own grievances—they hate Snow White for being beautiful, resent Hercules for being strong and virtuous. Bane is blowing up Gotham because he feels misused, not because he truly has a better city in mind.

Trump is a villain. He would be a cartoon villain, if only this were a cartoon.

Every time you try to give him a break—to grasp his charisma, historicize his ascent, sympathize with his admirers—the sinister truth asserts itself and can’t be squashed down. He will tell another lie so preposterous, or malign another shared decency so absolutely, or threaten violence so plausibly, or just engage in behavior so unhinged and hate-filled that you’ll recoil and rebound to your original terror at his return to power.

One outrage succeeds another until we become exhausted and have to work hard even to remember the outrages of a few weeks past: the helicopter ride that never happened (but whose storytelling purpose was to demean Kamala Harris as a woman), or the cemetery visit that ended in a grotesque thumbs-up by a graveside (and whose symbolic purpose was to cynically enlist grieving parents on behalf of his contempt). No matter how deranged his behavior is, though, it does not seem to alter his good fortune.

Villainy inheres in individuals. There is certainly a far-right political space alive in the developed world, but none of its inhabitants—not Marine Le Pen or Giorgia Meloni or even Viktor Orbán—are remotely as reckless or as crazy as Trump. Our self-soothing habit of imagining that what has not yet happened cannot happen is the space in which Trump lives, just as comically deranged as he seems and still more dangerous than we know.

Nothing is ever entirely new, and the space between actual events and their disassociated representation is part of modernity. We live in that disassociated space. Generations of cultural critics have warned that we are lost in a labyrinth and cannot tell real things from illusion. Yet the familiar passage from peril to parody now happens almost simultaneously. Events remain piercingly actual and threatening in their effects on real people, while also being duplicated in a fictive system that shows and spoofs them at the same time. One side of the highway is all cancer; the other side all crazy. Their confoundment is our confusion.

It is telling that the most successful entertainments of our age are the dark comic-book movies—the Batman films and the X-Men and the Avengers and the rest of those cinematic universes. This cultural leviathan was launched by the discovery that these ridiculous comic-book figures, generations old, could now land only if treated seriously, with sombre backstories and true stakes. Our heroes tend to dullness; our villains, garishly painted monsters from the id, are the ones who fuel the franchise.

During the debate last month in Philadelphia, as Trump’s madness rose to a peak of raging lunacy—“They’re eating the dogs”; “He hates her!”—ABC, in its commercial breaks, cut to ads for “Joker: Folie à Deux,” the new Joaquin Phoenix movie, in which the crazed villain swirls and grins. It is a Gotham gone mad, and a Gotham, against all the settled rules of fable-making, without a Batman to come to the rescue.

Shuttling between the comic-book villain and the grimacing, red-faced, and unhinged man who may be reëlected President in a few weeks, one struggled to distinguish our culture’s most extravagant imagination of derangement from the real thing. The space is that strange, and the stakes that high.

Poll shows Salem residents oppose higher property taxes for city services

Not at all what Salem's city officials were hoping for when they commissioned a survey to learn the degree of support for two possible proposals aimed at increasing property tax revenue to fund city services. 

A Salem Reporter story lays out the main survey findings. Here's how "In poll, Salem residents say they won't pay more property taxes for public safety, library or parks" starts out. 

Salem voters won’t pay more in property taxes to avoid deep cuts to the city’s library, parks or emergency services.

That’s according to a new poll commissioned by the city of Salem, which targeted over 400 potential voters, asking how they’d feel about two potential property tax increases. It was conducted by DHM Research over the phone and online between Sept. 10 and 16. 

The poll found at this point in time Salem voters would likely reject either of two levy options: a “livability levy” focusing on libraries, Center 50+ and parks, or a public safety levy funding police, fire and emergency response. 

The poll aimed to gauge voter support, and see if there was a preference between the two options.

Many of the voters opposed to the levy options said they couldn’t afford new taxes.

“The only thing that I was surprised by was the magnitude,” City Manager Keith Stahley told Salem Reporter. “Nearly 40% of the respondents said they were certain they would vote no. That’s a high number.” 

The City of Salem Levy Survey report is interesting reading. Here's screenshots of two key results.
Download City of Salem Levy Survey

Opposition to both the public safety and community livability levies is almost exactly equal. This will disappoint those who thought people would prefer either funding police/fire or libraries/parks. The answer: neither.

Library services are much beloved by a small group of passionate proponents. Unfortunately for them, the survey found that library services aren't very important to the general public. Here's a summary of the findings.

I don't envy the City Council. They'll discuss the survey findings next Monday, needing to figure out in what direction to move in dealing with City of Salem budget shortfalls.

My feeling is that they should take a closer look at the proposal for a city income tax targeted at higher earners that was considered by a revenue-raising task force, along with other options such as the property tax levies that are much disliked by citizens. 

I suspect that a local income tax exempting low income people, with the highest rates paid by those with the greatest ability to pay the tax, would be more popular than increasing property taxes on all property owners. 

But the City Council will have to deal with a general feeling that the City of Salem is on the wrong track, which makes passing any sort of option to raise more revenue an uphill battle. Yes, voter mood has improved since 2022, but it is way down from 2017-18.