*Not all women

 Trump's promise to "protect women" has a footnote.  You knew it would.  He won't be protecting the ones he has called "crooked," "low IQ," "nasty" or "fat pig."  Now add "radical war hawk."  

He shared a fantasy of executing Liz Cheney by firing squad with the equally excited Tucker Carlson at an event in Glendale, Arizona.  Both salivated at the picture of "a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her," which doesn't make any sense unless he has plans for a nine-barreled rifle.  "Let's see how she feels about it.  You know, when the guns are trained on her face."  Blowing a woman's face off is a considerable escalation from wanting to lock up Hillary Clinton for some imagined offense.  I think this is what the professionals call "decompensating" (when a person's mental health worsens and the usual coping mechanisms no longer work).  Clearly he wants to watch, and maybe shout "Fire!"

No doubt the boys would have enjoyed the Mount Pleasant, Pennsylvania, Halloween parade, which featured a golf cart with a rifled mounted on its roof and followed by a woman in chains representing Kamala Harris.  The mayor, the volunteer Fire Department and just about everyone else have disavowed all knowledge of the display, but the town went for Trump in 2020 by a wide margin.  A thirty-second search turned up 2016 parade displays of Hillary Clinton behind bars (Arcadia, Iowa) and Hillary Clinton in an electric chair (Aurora, Indiana), so the idyllic small towns of Real America seem to have lost their edge.  But don't call them "garbage" -- it hurts their feelings.

Speaking of Tucker Carlson, as I suppose we were, he's having a demon problem.  In a "documentary" called Christianities he reports being attacked in his sleep by "something unseen" which left him with bleeding claw marks.  His assistant, who just happens to be an evangelical, told him it was probably the work of a demon, and that was good enough for Carlson, who sleeps with one wife and four dogs.  He says it got him reading the Bible.  Maybe he should also read up on Occam's Razor.

Here's a woman who should have been protected from Trump and his Supreme Court:  Amari Marsh, who didn't even know she was pregnant, was charged with homicide by child abuse and jailed for more than three weeks in South Carolina before the charge was dropped.  Her crime was suffering a miscarriage which she thought was the onset of a normal menstrual period.  Thousands of pregnancies end this way every year, usually because the fetus is not viable.

It's too late to protect Joselli Barnica, who was 17 weeks pregnant when she miscarried.  Texas doctors didn't dare abort although she was dilated and in danger of infection, because a new law required them to wait for the fetal heartbeat to stop, which took forty hours.  She died of sepsis four days later.

Also in Texas, Nevaeh Crain went to the emergency room twice with abdominal cramps last year and was diagnosed with sepsis.  Doctors sent her home because her 24-week fetus still had a heartbeat.  On her third visit ultrasound confirmed that the fetus was dead and Nevaeh was moved to intensive care, where she died of organ failure.  She was eighteen.

Laura Calderwood would like Trump to just leave her alone.  Her daughter Mollie Tibbetts was murdered in 2018 by an undocumented immigrant.  Calderwood came home from the funeral and saw Trump on television ranting about "that incredible, beautiful young woman" whose name he clearly had not bothered to learn, but who was now a talking point in his demonization of all immigrants.  Calderwood has had enough:  "Where is your compassion?  Where's your humanity?"  These are good, if naive, questions.  I can imagine Trump's answer.  "I have the best compassion, I have humanity at a level never seen before..."

"I told Bobby, Bobby, I want you to take care of health," Trump told a crowd in Henderson, Nevada.  They seemed thrilled that Roadkill Bob, who wants a national abortion ban as well as NO VACCINES, is "going to work on health and women's health and all of the different, because we're not really a wealthy or a healthy country."  Do me a favor.  Don't help me.

Four days out and we have to figure out a new demographic -- "normal gay guys."  According to J.D. Vance they're all voting for him and Trump.  One theory is that he's trying to split the LGBTQ community by turning "normal" against "trans," or as Vance calls them, "all this crazy stuff."  Creating categories (gender, race, religion, ethnicity) and stuffing people into them is a full-time obsession for the right.  It used to be legally mandated in Germany and South Africa.

Trump and his keepers are apparently losing touch with their base.  On Rumble, YouTube and Twitter, their official video of the love fest at Madison Square Garden has not a trace of funnyman Tony Hinchcliffe and the fans are pissed.  "So he made a little joke about Puerto Rico," wrote one.  "I want to hear Tony speak where is it?!?!?!?!?"   I'm surprised Hinchcliffe hasn't scored his own show on X.  And yet the censorship-averse Trump gang have the nerve to sue CBS and Sixty Minutes for $10 billion because they didn't like the editing of the Kamala Harris interview (which Trump was afraid to do).

While Trump was braving the desert heat confusing Nevadans and insulting Hispanics in New Mexico, Vance was in an air-conditioned studio saying weird shit to Joe Rogan.  All of it was bizarre and ugly but I think my favorite was his assertion that President Biden and Hunter Biden both voted for Trump.  Joe was "ousted in a coup" which evidently caused him to lose his mind.  I'm not sure what happened to Hunter.  Maybe he was overcome by Trump's promise of a pardon.  Sir, he said, with tears in his eyes, you have earned my vote.

As of today over a quarter-million readers have cancelled their subscriptions to the Washington Post, it says here in the Washington Post, angered by its refusal to endorse anyone for president in the most crucial election since 1860.  The abrupt departure of Hugh Hewitt in the middle of a podcast with Ruth Marcus and Jonathan Capehart probably won't cost them many more.  They were discussing Trump's pre-emptive whining about election theft in Arizona and Pennsylvania, and Capehart's objection to Hewitt's unsubstantiated claims set him off.  Never mind, there's still Marc Thiessen, who used to write speeches for George W. Bush.  I wonder if he came up with "It's hard to put food on your family."

At this time I would like to predict a Harris landslide.  I have lots of reasons and one of them is in today's Guardian.  According to a sociology professor at Brigham Young University, Mormons in Arizona "are poised to support Kamala Harris more than any other presidential Democratic ticket in sixty years," which is to say Johnson-Humphrey in 1964.  Now that was a landslide.