So Putin’s been having phone chats with Elon Musk,
And we’d like to know more about what they discussed.
By doing Starlink favors for Xi
And spreading misinfo with glee,
Musk is a dangerous rich guy we just can’t afford to trust.
“It turns out we were completely unprepared. The army is a mess. Our industry is a mess. But it’s good that we found out about it this way, rather than when NATO invades us.”
— Russian President Vladimir Putin, to friends, as quoted by the Financial Times.
Vladimir Putin is cruel, as all the world knows.
He’s really good at one thing — making widows.
If I were a Russian oligarch,
I’d keep an eye on that shark,
And stay away from bathtubs, boats and open windows.
“Russian opposition activist Alexei Navalny has been sentenced to three-and-a-half years in prison in a case widely seen as an attempt to neutralize President Vladimir Putin’s most prominent critic,” the Financial Times reports.
“Who needs Vladimir Putin when we have Donald Trump? If you were Vladimir Putin and you wanted to disrupt this election, what would you do? You’d spread disinformation. You’d make people doubt the legitimacy of the vote. You’d peddle conspiracy theories and you might want to mess with mail-in voting. That’s all happening without him. Our president is doing that.”
One of the key lines in the House Democrats’ impeachment report distills the Trump-Ukraine scandal to a simple idea: “[T]he impeachment inquiry has found that President Trump, personally and acting through agents within and outside of the U.S. government, solicited the interference of a foreign government, Ukraine, to benefit his reelection.”
And in the report’s preface, the Democrats place Trump’s Ukrainian caper within the larger context of foreign intervention in US elections, namely Russia’s covert attack on the 2016 contest, which was mounted in part to help Trump win the White House: “we were struck by the fact that the President’s misconduct was not an isolated occurrence, nor was it the product of a naïve president. Instead, the efforts to involve Ukraine in our 2020 presidential election were undertaken by a President who himself was elected in 2016 with the benefit of an unprecedented and sweeping campaign of election interference undertaken by Russia in his favor, and which the President welcomed and utilized.”
The point was clear. Trump muscling Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky to produce political dirt that could influence the 2020 election for Trump’s personal advantage was a continuation of Trump’s behavior in 2016. This contextualization brings back into the spotlight Vladimir Putin’s clandestine assault on American democracy—and how Trump encouraged and exploited that attack. So now, as Trump is under scrutiny for pressing Ukraine to influence the 2020 race, it’s a good time to review all the ways that Trump aided and abetted a foreign adversary’s scheme to subvert a US election the last time the nation was choosing a president.
Every conspiracy theory has a source. More often than not, however, the source is impossible to track down. Not so with Trump’s pet theory that it was Ukraine, not Russia, that interfered in the 2016 election.
The source of that thoroughly disproved assertion was Trump’s handler, Russian dictator Vladimir Putin. Putin first mentioned it in public during a news conference with right-wing Hungarian leader Viktor Orban, in 2017:
So Trump insists there is no collusion,
Despite contrary evidence in profusion.
But when he spends 90 minutes on the phone
With Vladimir Putin — alone,
Well, you can begin to understand our confusion.
Vladimir Putin’s propaganda machine may be beaten and battered,
But it still has a sabre to rattle in its scabbard.
But this time it’s not Trump
The Kremlin’s seeking to pump up —
Its election-meddling websites favor Hawaii’s Dem, Tulsi Gabbard.
To Trump, all politics is transactional, we know,
But he’s reached a level that’s an all-time low.
Trump promises oligarchs tit for tat.
To businesses, he offers this for that,
For Trump, it’s always: “Give me your quid and name your pro quo.”
“If your political capital comes from picking on trans kids or gay kids or anything like that, you’re just bankrupt throughout all of this. My version of being a man is like, hey, I like rib-eyes, I like Motörhead, and I’m never going to pick on trans kids and gay kids… It doesn’t make you tough. It doesn’t make you a man to pick on trans or gay kids. It just makes you an asshole.”
“I’m not making any predictions, but one phrase (I don’t know who coined it) is sticking with me. I find myself ‘nauseously optimistic.’ It’s not based on the polls, the odds, or the punditry. It rests solely on my (possibly naive) belief that the American people cannot and will not look at Donald Trump and say, ‘Yeah, that’s who we are.’”
“When there were questions about Biden’s ability, it made perfect sense to them to switch to Trump, particularly since many believe they could influence him. Now with Kamala, I think they regret it, but they so publicly identified with Trump, they feel they have no choice but to stay with him. I’m guessing they feel that ‘worst case it’s only four years’ and best case they can influence him to do what they want.”
— Mark Cuban, quoted by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, on why many Silicon Valley tech leaders are backing Donald Trump.
“This was a hate rally. This was not just a presidential rally, this was also not just a campaign rally. I think it’s important for people to understand these are mini January 6 rallies, these are mini Stop the Steal rallies. These are rallies to prime an electorate into rejecting the results of an election if it doesn’t go the way that they want.”
— Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), on MSNBC, about Donald Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden.
“I hope that you will forgive me if I’m a little angry that we are indifferent to Donald Trump’s erratic behavior. His obvious mental decline, his history as a convicted felon, a known slumlord, a predator found liable for sexual abuse. All of this while we pick apart Kamala’s answers from interviews that he doesn’t even have the courage to do.”
— Michelle Obama, at a campaign rally for Kamala Harris.
As of 9 a.m. Eastern Time Monday, Nov. 4, a total of 78,041,301 early votes had been cast in the 2024 general election. In-person early votes totaled 42,664,880, with 35,376,421 mail ballots returned out of 67,464,164 mail ballots requested, according to the University of Florida Election Lab.
“As many as one in 20 Floridians, a million people, could be expelled from the country under a mass deportation plan that is a cornerstone of Donald Trump’s campaign, according to a report released by a Washington think tank and immigration advocacy group,” the Miami Herald reports.
The length of time Josseli Barnica suffered before dying during premature labor because doctors refused to treat her since it would have been a crime to give her an abortion.
The Washington Post has now had more than 250,000 cancellations — approximately 10% of all paid circulation — since the newspaper made its decision to not endorse in the presidential race, NPR reports. The Guardian: “The numbers are based on the number of cancellation emails that have been sent out, according to a source at the paper, though the subscriber dashboard is no longer viewable to employees.”
“Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign claimed she drew a crowd of more than 75,000 people in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday to hear her speech at the Ellipse, the site of Donald Trump’s infamous 2021 speech exhorting supporters to ‘fight like hell’ in the moments just before the January 6 Capitol riot,” The Independent reports.