The Blue Country Gazette is the successor to the Rim Country Gazette, reflecting our evolution to a nationwide political blog for readers who identify as "blue," liberals, progressives, and/or Democrats. Our mission is to provide distinctive coverage of issues during a time of extreme polarization in the U.S. We strive to provide side-stories and back-stories that provide additional insights and perspectives conventional coverage often doesn't include.
Trump's former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn. Doesn't he look like he could have served Hitler? (photo: Getty)
Former White House national security
adviser — whom Trump has vowed to hire again if he wins —
added: “There’s a way to get after this, but we have to win first.”
Ja'han Jones/MSNBC17 October 24
Michael Flynn, who served as national security adviser in the Trump administration, let his fascist flag fly at a Christian nationalist event Friday.
In a video recorded at the Rod of Iron Freedom Festival in
northeastern Pennsylvania, Flynn responded to an attendee’s question
about military tribunals and potential executions of Donald Trump’s
perceived adversaries if Trump returns to the White House.
The former
president has vowed that Flynn, whom Trump pardoned after the retired Army lieutenant general pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI, would serve in his administration if he’s elected this fall.
The attendee asked:
Is there any chance that, should the election go in a
positive result, you would get your rank reinstated and sit at the head
of a military tribunal to not only drain the swamp but imprison the
swamp — and, on a few occasions, execute the swamp?
The man’s remark was met with applause from this apparently
bloodthirsty crowd. And you can hear in Flynn’s response that he’s
hesitant about offering a full-throated public endorsement of this idea.
But he walked right up to the line.
“What your sentiment is about is accountability,” said Flynn, adding that the Founding Fathers had a similar priority.
“I definitely believe we need accountability,” he said.
“Your question went into some other areas,” Flynn added with a laugh,
before concluding: “I think a lot of people actually think like you do,
and I think that that’s your right and our privilege. ... There’s a way
to get after this, but we have to win first.”
Flynn’s closing remarks offered a frightening window into the havoc he intends to wreak if Trump wins:
I’m about winning. We have to win. And these people are
already up to no good. So, we gotta win first. We win, and then, “Katy,
bar the door.” OK? Believe me: The gates of hell — my hell — will be
unleashed.
As my MSNBC colleague Steve Benen just explained,
Trump is now openly floating the idea of deploying the military against
his critics if he’s elected. It’s easy to imagine Flynn being part of
that violent plan.
Flynn pledges to help angry, vengeful Trump execute political enemies.
Republican presidential nominee and former US
President Donald Trump, right, and South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem
(yes, the dog murderer) dance to the song 'YMCA' at a campaign town hall at the Greater
Philadelphia Expo Center in Oaks, Pennsylvania, October 14, 2024.
(photo: Matt Rourke/AP)
At a campaign event last night, Trump got bored—and great weirdness ensued.
David A. Graham/The Atlantic /16 October 24
Is Donald Trump well enough to serve as president?
The question is not temperamental or philosophical fitness—he made clear long ago that the answer to both is no—but something more fundamental.
The election is in three weeks, and Pennsylvania is a must-win state
for both Trump and Kamala Harris, but during a rally last night in
Montgomery County, northwest of Philadelphia, Trump got bored with the
event, billed as a “town hall,” and just played music for almost 40 minutes, scowling, smirking, and swaying onstage. Trump is no stranger to surreal moments, yet this was one of the oddest of his political career.
“You’re the one who fights for them,” gushed Kristi Noem (the dog murderer), the South Dakota governor and animal-abuse enthusiast,
who was supposed to be moderating the event. But it soon became evident
that Trump wasn’t in a fighting mode.
The event began normally enough,
at least by Trump standards, but, after two interruptions for apparent
medical emergencies in the audience, Trump lost interest. “Let’s just
listen to music. Who the hell wants to hear questions?” he said.
He eventually pivoted for good to a playlist of his favorite songs:
“Hallelujah,” “Rich Men North of Richmond,” “Nothing Compares 2 U,”
Elvis’s rendition of “Dixie.” At one point, he asked his staff to play
Pavarotti and display the immigration chart that he was about to discuss
when an assassin tried to kill him this summer.
To watch the event is to see signs of someone having a breakdown.
Like Joe Biden’s disastrous debate against Trump in June, when the
president’s fumbling performance and struggle to get sentences out made
it impossible to believe he was up to the task of serving for four
years, Trump’s rally last night would force any reasonable person to
conclude that he is not up to the grueling task of leading the world’s
greatest nation, handling economic crises, or dealing with foreign
adversaries.
Which isn’t to say that some people didn’t try to reason through it.
Reporters still seem unsure of how to deal with Trump’s stranger
behaviors. Journalists are trained to take information and make sense of
it, even amid chaos. The problem is that doing so conjures logic where
none exists.
Here’s how The New York Times described
the night: “Mr. Trump, a political candidate known for improvisational
departures, made a detour. Rather than try to restart the political
program, he seemed to decide in the moment that it would be more
enjoyable for all concerned—and, it appeared, for himself—to just listen
to music instead.”
ABC News:
“Former President Donald Trump’s town hall in Oaks, Pennsylvania, on
Monday evening was interrupted twice by medical emergencies in a very
warm Greater Philadelphia Expo Center and Fairgrounds before he cut the
program short.”
NBC News:
“Former President Donald Trump turned a town hall event … into an
impromptu listening party Monday night, playing an unlikely selection of
tunes for more than 30 minutes after the event was paused for medical
emergencies.”
The Associated Press:
“Donald Trump’s town hall in the Philadelphia suburbs turned into an
impromptu concert Monday after the former president was twice
interrupted by medical emergencies in the room.”
Trump’s Democratic opponent, Kamala Harris, was blunter. “Hope he’s okay,” she posted on X.
Her reaction is self-interested, but she’s right that he really may not
be okay.
A presidential race is exhausting for even a young and
vigorous person, which Trump, 78, is not. He has campaigned far less
this time around than he did in his prior two runs. In the past few
weeks, as the election has neared, he has ramped up his time on the
trail, and the wear is showing.
Reporters have noticed Trump’s supporters leaving rallies early in recent weeks,
yet many people hung around as Trump bobbed on the stage and said
nothing last night. In a way, the moment seemed to distill a 2024 Trump
rally down to its essence. No one is there to hear policy ideas.
Trump has transgressed so far, for so long, that he can barely shock
anymore.
Kristi Noem (the dog murderer) isn’t a big draw. Instead, people come to say they
saw Trump. At one point, he announced that he’d play “YMCA” and then the
event would end, but attendees stayed, so Trump just kept rolling. The
event wrapped up only around the time that an aide brought Trump a note
during “November Rain.”
As horrifying as it all was, no one expects to see a reaction like
the concerted push for change that followed Biden’s debate collapse.
It’s too late in the campaign to switch candidates, and it wouldn’t
matter anyway. Democrats forced Biden out, even though they like him,
because they want to win.
But Republican officeholders are terrified of
Trump, because rank-and-file Republican voters worship him in an
entirely different way—something demonstrated by them hanging around for
his DJ set and Noem’s obsequious “sir”s all night.
“Total lovefest at
the PA townhall!” Steven Cheung, a campaign spokesperson, posted on X.
“Everyone was so excited they were fainting so @realDonaldTrump turned
to music. Nobody wanted to leave and wanted to hear more songs from the
famous DJT Spotify playlist!” Somewhere, Baghdad Bob was blushing.
But Trump’s musical selections sometimes reveal more than his words
or his aides do. During the 2016 campaign, his choice of “You Can’t
Always Get What You Want” as exit music seemed like a pointed message to
his political adversaries and the nation.
Last night, he might have
been sending a pointed message to himself, with the help of an Andrea
Bocelli and Sarah Brightman hit: “It’s time to say goodbye.”
Former President Donald Trump railed against
the new movie “The Apprentice” in a caps-locked tirade in a post on
Truth Social, calling it “a politically disgusting hatchet job” that’s
trying to hurt “the Greatest Political Movement in the History of our
Country.”
He added, “My former wife, Ivana, was a kind and wonderful
person, and I had a great relationship with her until the day she died.
The writer of this pile of garbage, Gabe Sherman, a lowlife and
talentless hack, who has long been widely discredited, knew that, but
chose to ignore it. So sad that HUMAN SCUM, like the people involved in
this hopefully unsuccessful enterprise, are allowed to say and do
whatever they want in order to hurt a Political Movement, which is far
bigger than any of us.”
Let’s just say it doesn’t seem like Trump is a fan.
The film’s director, Ali Abbasi, weighed in, extending a conversational olive branch to the Republican nominee. In a post on X, Abbasi said, “Thanks for getting back to us @realDonaldTrump. I am available to talk further if you want. Today is a tight day w a lot of press for #TheApprentice but i might be able to give you a call tomorrow.”
Then the film’s official account responded on X on Monday, “We couldn’t think of a better endorsement @RealDonaldTrump. #TheApprentice is Now Playing in Theaters nationwide!” Then, they posted a link to the film.
The official trailer,
released in September, shows a mid-20s Trump as a protégé of big-time
lawyer Roy Cohn in New York City in the early ’70s. The film chronicles
his rise from slumlord to real estate mogul and his relationship with
ex-wife, the late Ivana Trump.
Throughout the trailer, Trump takes pointers, learning “the rules” from his right-wing mentor—and Joseph McCarthy lapdog—as
Cohn instructs Trump to “Attack, attack, attack.” Other popular Cohn
mantras were to “Admit nothing, deny everything,” and to “Claim victory
and never admit defeat.” It’s an ominous map to what we now know has
become part of Trump’s political playbook.
The film stars “Avengers” actor Sebastian Stan as Trump, and “Succession” actor Jeremy Strong as Cohn.
Due to Trump’s litigious history, including a direct threat of a cease and desist letter, Hollywood studios veered away from making the movie. According to Salon,
the producers could not get a distribution deal despite playing to rave
reviews at the Cannes Film Festival this year. Briarcliff Entertainment
and Open Road Films CEO Tom Ortenberg, who worked on the award-winning
journalistic film “Spotlight,” stepped in and made sure the film would
see the light of day.
Now, Trump has raised another potential legal battle for “The
Apprentice”: “Do they even have the right to use that name without
approval?” he wrote. Is Trump suggesting he may pursue the film for
copyright infringement?
The movie was released on Oct. 11. They say you are the company
you keep, and this film shows quite the relationship between Trump and
Cohn, who has often been described as “evil.”
With only three weeks left until Election Day, here’s hoping the movie
makes it even more clear who America should vote to put back into the
White House.
If you have any doubts whatsoever about Trump's moral turpitude, "The Apprentice" is a must-see movie. You owe it to your country.
Haven't
seen this story talked about here much, but it seems our not so
esteemed SCOTUS Chief Justice was having a major sad this summer in the
wake of the negative reaction to his preposterous ruling granting FPOTOS
virtually unlimited immunity for all his 'official' acts as President
-- even when it came to trying to overthrow our constitutional form of
government by overturning the results of the 2020 election.
There have been major stories about this carried in CNN, TNR, NYT and elsewhere, but I'll focus on the one by Dahlia Lithwick at Slate:
John Roberts Knows He Lost the Public. Does He Care?
... Roberts, according to observers, “was shaken by the adverse public reaction to his decisionaffording Trump substantial immunityfrom criminal prosecution. His protestations that the case concerned the presidency, not Trump, held little currency.”
...
The chief justice was meant to be the one with the savvy to
understand the stakes for the court and the country. But Roberts has
either developed a tin ear when it comes to public opinion, or—more
worrying still—he has not just “frozen out” the liberal justices, as
Kantor and Liptak [NYT] put it last month, but has actually frozen out
any feedback or media sources that might have warned him that the public
mood was not going to be welcoming of near-blanket immunity from a
coup-fomenting president, even if that decision came trussed up in
magisterial language about the separation of powers and the safeguarding
of the “unitary executive.”
...
At minimum, the fact that the new John Roberts may be tuning
out any of the voices that are critical of the high court’s current
public approval trajectory would explain why he has failed absolutely to
take seriously the ethics violations of his colleagues; failed to show
up for congressional hearings when summoned; and even seemingly failed
to concern himself with the court’s nosediving public confidence
numbers... cc
And once you have lost your ability to read the room—because
you think the room is full of liars, whiners, and liberal
operatives—you are going to keep misjudging how much rank partisanship
the American public will tolerate.
As should we all dissent. This Supreme Court is not acceptable. Retire Roberts. Impeach Thomas and Alito. Bribe Kavanagh to resign with a lifetime supply of beer. (He loves beer.)
Child rape survivor Hadley Duvall campaigns for
legislation to add exceptions for rape, incest and nonviable
pregnancies to Kentucky’s near-total ban on abortion. (photo: Lucas
Aulbach/Courier Journal)
Time for women to take back their bodies
13 October 24
Marc Ash/Reader Supported News
On June 24th, 2022 the Supreme Court issued its Dobbs decision officially overturning the landmark Roe v. Wade decision of 1973, which had stood for nearly 50 years. While Dobbs was shocking, it shouldn’t have been surprising.
Social
conservatives and their evangelical allies had been hard at work for
decades plotting and planning to overturn the decision that they viewed
as nothing less than a sacrilegious affront. The overturning of Roe was a
culmination of decades of right-wing efforts, but also of Democratic
failures.
The stage was set for the overturning of Roe by the
efforts of then Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky.
McConnell and his conservative Republican allies had long been stymied
in their efforts to overturn Roe legislatively. McConnell understood
that congress was a dead end-end in terms of overturning Roe. The only
chance to kill Roe was at the place it was born, the Supreme Court.
Mitch McConnell literally set out to hack the Supreme court.
Through
a series of brazen parliamentary maneuvers McConnell managed to block
the constitutionally mandated appointment of a Supreme Court Justice by
then President Barack Obama and forestall that appointment until Donald
Trump was sworn in eleven months later. McConnell then dramatically
accelerated the appointment of a replacement for Justice Ruth Bader
Ginsberg in the waning days of Donald Trump’s control of the Oval
Office. The result was arguably the most politically partisan court in
US history. More to the point it was a court constructed for the express
purpose of overturning Roe v. Wade.
Political poll analysts in
the US have coalesced around a theory that there tends to be a ‘hidden
Trump vote’ that pollsters miss. In fact there has been a significant
discrepancy between the number of votes the polls predicted Trump would
get in 2016 and 2020 and the actual vote count on election day in some
cases, particularly in battleground state races.
But
there’s another powerful voting dynamic that the pollsters have
difficulty quantifying, American women in the wake of the Dobbs
political earthquake. We are preparing for the first presidential
election since fall of Roe. What will American women do in the upcoming
election cycle? There are clues to be found in the non-presidential
elections, particularly those relating to Abortion rights over the past
two and a half years.
Over that stretch Republican candidates
and initiatives haven’t fared well. To be fair the republicans did take
back control of the House just five months after the Dobbs decision. But
what was predicted to be a Red Wave with Republicans gaining enough
seats to rival the 1994 Republican/Gingrich Revolution fizzled and
turned out to be a surprisingly strong showing for the Democrats in a
very unfavorable electoral climate.
Democrats have fared even
better since that time in off year elections, winning the vast majority.
Of special note are the ballot initiatives relating to women’s
reproductive rights. The protection and expansion of reproductive rights
has won on every occasion.
July, 2022: Pro Choice supporters rally in Kansas. (photo: Shawn Brackbill/NYT)
So
yes there seems to be a voter that has historically tended not to vote
that Donald Trump seems to be able to inspire to come out and support
him, that traditional polling may not accurately gauge. But there is
also a potential seismic political event brewing out there in the
discontent of American women and the men in their lives who actually
care what they think.
Have American Women gone back to sleep in
the two years since the abolition of federal reproductive rights? Or is
this the moment they have been waiting for to make a statement that
cannot be ignored. Ask the women in your life and see what they say.
Donald Trump held a rally in Scranton, Pennsylvania, on Wednesday, where he attacked the wind and called it “bullshit.”
Trump’s rally rant, filled with all of the lies,
misinformation, and general self-pitying grievances we have come to
expect, reached a new level of bonkers when the convicted felon got to
his favorite subject: windmills.
“They're falling down,” Trump explained. “They're all over the place.
They're all over the place. The gorgeous, beautiful Pennsylvania
countryside. They got these big ugly suckers hanging down there, rusting
and rotting.” He added that most windmills were spinning slowly or not
at all.
“You know, the environmentalists say it's also, very importantly, the
most expensive form of energy there is. You cannot get more expensive,”
Trump said, which isn’t true at all. Studies show that renewable energy plants like sun and wind are far more cost effective than coal-powered plants 99% of the time.
Trump bypassed his standard attack on windmills being bird killers in order to voice an even larger grievance: the wind itself!
“The wind, the wind. It sounds so wonderful,” Trump meandered
on. “The wind, the wind, the wind is, the wind is bullshit. I'll tell
you. It's horrible.”
Trump followed up this terrible haiku by doing another
well-worn windmill story about a couple that cannot watch TV at night
because there is no wind. “You remember when I used to say, ‘Darling, I
want to watch our president tonight on television,’ and the husband
looks, ‘I'm sorry, dear, but the windmills aren't wind. There's no wind
tonight.’”
He did say “the windmills aren’t wind.” Just remember, this could be our next president, so vote accordingly.
It's a fat bird. It's a grotesque plane. It's blubber-butt the windmill slayer.
Former
President Donald Trump ranted about illegal immigration this afternoon to an audience of supporters at the Gaylord Rockies Resort and Convention
Center on the outskirts of Aurora, Colorado.
City leaders, community members
and law enforcement have painted a more nuanced picture of the
situation than Trump's. Around a dozen people with alleged ties to the Tren de Aragua
gang have been arrested for a range of crimes in the metro area.
Trump said he could be spending time on the most beautiful beaches in the
world but instead, he came to Colorado to figure out what “the hell
happened to Aurora.”
He blasted Gov. Jared Polis, referring to
him as a coward, a fraud and pathetic. He also blamed Vice-President
Kamala Harris for the surge in new immigrants arriving in the country in
the past two years.
“Kamala has imported an army of illegal
alien gang members and migrant criminals from the dungeons of the third
world,” said Trump. “And she has had them resettled, beautifully, into
your community to prey upon innocent American citizens, that’s what
they’re doing. And no place is it more evident than right here.”
Researchers
have repeatedly found that immigrants, whether or not they are
documented, don't commit crimes at higher rates. City officials have
repeatedly denied that the gang controls any building or part of the
city, as have many residents of the affected buildings.
Of the tens of thousands of new immigrants who have come through Colorado in the past two years, local law enforcement say they’ve arrested around a dozen with suspected gang ties.
Trump
announced if re-elected, he would target migrants for mass arrests and
deportation and call the effort “Operation Aurora.” He said he’d rely on
the Alien and Sedition Act for his legal authority. The 1798 law allows a president wide powers to detain and remove foreign nationals from countries judged to have invaded the United States.
Late
in the speech he also declared, “I am hereby calling for the death
penalty for any migrant who kills an American citizen.” The line
received some of the loudest cheers of the rally.
Trump paused his remarks to show television clips including Fox News segments about migrant crime.
“They
burst into a building and held tenants at gunpoint and knifepoint,”
Trump said. He also talked more broadly about migrants from all over the
world.
“Our criminals are like babies compared to these people. These criminals are the most violent people on earth.”
Cindy
Romero, the woman who posted the viral video that sparked the entire
controversy in Aurora, briefly joined Trump on stage. Trump called her
brave and applauded her for posting the video.
Democratic officials defend Aurora: ‘Trump doesn’t seem to care who he hurts’
Democrats
offered their own pre-rebuttal to Trump’s visit and message about
Aurora in the city, speaking Friday morning several miles closer to the
apartments than the former president at Stanley Marketplace.
Sen.
Michael Bennet was blunt in his assessment of the visit. “Donald Trump
has invited himself to Aurora to do what Donald Trump does best, which
is to demonize immigrants, to lie and to serve his own political
purposes.”
Democratic Rep. Jason Crow, an Army veteran who lives
in and represents Aurora, defended his community. “We know in Aurora
that our vibrancy, our strength, our culture, so much of who we are …
are drawn from that beautiful heritage of immigration.”
Crow also
wanted to set the record straight. He said he’s spoken with local law
enforcement and there is no uptick in transnational gang activity in
this area.
“What is occurring is minimal and isolated and, to be
clear, never acceptable,” Crow said. “But it’s not a surge, it’s not a
change. There is no takeover of any part of this city, of any apartment
complex. It has not happened. It is a lie.”
Gov. Jared Polis
acknowledged that there are victims of crime in Aurora, but noted that
statistics show the city has gotten safer over the last two years. He
also pointed out that the city’s mayor, Republican Mike Coffman, has
“called out the former president’s lies and distortions about Aurora.”
“It
really just shows, as a matter of character, that very often when he
speaks, former President Trump doesn’t seem to care who he hurts with
his words and his rhetoric or the consequences of what he says,” Polis
added.
Crow added Trump is using Aurora, “because they see an opportunity to try to lie and distort the situation.”
Crow
held a round table with recent immigrants the day before the rally and
said many told him that they were afraid that anti-immigrant feelings
have increased.
Sen. John Hickenlooper and Denver Rep. Diana
DeGette also spoke up in defense of Aurora and criticized Trump’s
inaccurate description of the community and its newest members.
After
the speech, Aurora's Republican mayor, Mike Coffman said he was
disappointed Trump hadn't taken the opportunity to see the reality of
the city.
"The reality is that the concerns about Venezuelan gang
activity in our city – and our state – have been grossly exaggerated and
have unfairly hurt the city’s identity and sense of safety," Coffman
said in a statement. "The city and state have not been “taken over” or
“invaded” or “occupied” by migrant gangs. The incidents that have
occurred in Aurora, a city of 400,000 people, have been limited to a
handful of specific apartment complexes, and our dedicated police
officers have acted on those concerns and will continue to do so."
A quiet scene at the apartment buildings Trump was talking about
While
Trump and others were speaking at the Gaylord, Rick Martinez was
holding a one-person rally in front of the Edge at Lowry, the apartment
complex that was oftentimes the center of Trump’s speech.
Wearing
a shirt depicting a hand shushing Trump and holding a sign urging
readers to vote for Kamala Harris, Martinez, a resident of West Denver,
said he felt compelled to travel to the apartment complex because he
disagreed with Trump’s rhetoric that Aurora has been “invaded” by
immigrants.
“It's just sad that he would make a mockery out of
these people and make them look like they're such a bad group of people
that are coming over here from Venezuela, traveling thousands of miles
just to get to another country, to have a better chance at life for
their kids and their families,” Martinez said.
Martinez, who by
1:30 p.m. had spent about an hour and a half in front of the apartment
complex, said he hadn’t seen anything he thought was out of the
ordinary. He said he held polite conversations with residents and
neighbors, many of whom don’t speak fluent English.
Aside from
Martinez, the complex was relatively quiet. From some windows, many of
which were broken and shoddily repaired with makeshift cardboard
barriers, sounds of children playing could be heard. Residents came and
went from their buildings, avoiding a small group of reporters waiting
outside the apartments.
CPR’s Caitlyn Kim and Denverite’s Paolo Ziacita contributed to this story.
Shame on Trump and shame on the MAGAts who follow blindly.