Little big man

 "I'm going to go there in the next two weeks.  I'm going to Springfield.  You may never see me again but that's OK.  Got to do what I got to do.  'Whatever happened to Trump?'  'Well, he never got out of Springfield.'"

It was the Nassau Coliseum, where the circus used to perform, and not a church in Memphis, but didn't that sound like Dr. King's last speech?  Of course not.  Memphis in 1968 was full of armed racists.  Springfield, Ohio, is full of frightened Haitians, pissed-off residents and extra security dispatched by the governor to deal with a mess created by Trump's lies and aggravated by Vance's.  King used the metaphor of Moses leading his people to the promised land but denied entry himself.  Trump wouldn't recognize the reference.  "You may never see me again"?  Does he expect to be eaten?

"It'd be fine with me if they decided not to make that visit," said Republican Mayor Rob Rue, while Republican Governor Mike DeWine warned that "resources are really stretched here."  So what?  Trump's gotta do what he wants to do, as his poll numbers collapse and his rants grow more incoherent.  He's probably hoping for another "assassination attempt" he can use to demand money from the rubes.  For all the flag-slobbering, he is indifferent to this country, its people, and everything else that isn't TRUMP.

Did you know there is something called a "MAGA antiwoke agenda"?  In a Breitbart interview from 2021 a beardless J.D. Vance talks about using the government to punish American companies which practice incorrect politics, even if this results in higher prices for consumers, unemployment and damage to the stock market.  But like the lies he would later tell with pride about dangerous migrants, it's for our own good.   We must "attack some of the companies financially that are waging war on the American people" because they are really "hostile multinational actors."  He cites Disney, Silicon Valley and social media platforms that are insufficiently right-wing (I assume he thinks better of Twitter now that it's a subsidiary of MAGA).  The arrogance is breathtaking.  Trump would be satisfied with locking up all his enemies.  Vance wants to bankrupt them.  

Oh, and he wants to "destroy the universities" as well.  A four-year degree will only "derange people" by teaching them to "hate your country and hate your family."  It's been half a century since I graduated but I don't remember courses like that.  I never hated my family.  I only dislike my country when it promotes specimens like Trump and Vance.  Right now I have a good feeling about it.

I watched last week's debate and I don't remember a studio audience, but Trump does.  It was Gutfeld!'s turn to indulge him and he's still whining about the moderators.  They "didn't correct her once and they corrected me everything I said, practically -- I think nine times or eleven times" (four times, they only had ninety minutes).  "And the audience was absolutely -- they went crazy.  I walked off, I said, that was a great debate, I loved it."  Here's the champ acknowledging the cheers:

Good news!  According to a poll for Daily Kos, 46 percent of Republicans, 60 percent of independents  and 67 percent of Democrats want a second Harris-Trump debate.  You people should be ashamed.

Trump has zero chance of winning New York but insisted on bringing his circus there anyway, which the Guardian characterized as "his usual ragbag of lies, hyperbole, and dark and racist invective."  In a warmup for Springfield he denounced schools that offer English lessons to Haitians:  "What the hell is wrong with our country?"  As if teaching English to immigrants began two years ago.  

The Coliseum is in Uniondale and most of the MAGA mob came by car, so Trump felt safe in relating a concocted story about the dreaded New York City subway.  "They [his rich parents] had no fear that I was gonna be disappearing.  They would take me to a subway, put me on and say, 'Bye, darling, bye.'  If you do that today you have about a 75 percent chance that you'll never see your child again.  What the hell has happened here?"  Thousands of children ride the subway every day without incident, of course, but Trump would agree with Ronald Reagan that "facts are stupid things."  Besides, the audience didn't come to hear about the Trump family chauffeur.  

I'm just going to quote this without reference to flatulence:  "Six people who sat behind Trump at a rally in Tucson, Arizona, last week were left with strange eye injuries, including one who says she was nearly blind the day after."  

Less than seven weeks before election day, Mark Robinson is under pressure to withdraw as Republican candidate for governor of North Carolina, according to the Carolina Journal.  Tonight is the deadline and it's already too late to remove him from the ballot.  The party was fine with all the misogyny and his claims that "God wants me to run," but the porn shop stories were too much for them.

In Pennsylvania you can now purchase canned cocktails at convenience stores and gas stations.  On Tuesday Governor Josh Shapiro went to a Rutter's with members of the Liquor Control Board and state legislators to publicize the new law but forgot his ID; no one would sell him booze with all the media looking on.  Everyone had a good laugh.  Canned cocktails?  Canned cocktails?  As Trump would say, what the hell has happened here?