The Books of Bokonon

I have had a very eventful last few days, making blogging more or less the lowest priority item on list of things to do. Tonight I am going to take a bit of a breather. Any Monday Jon Stewart hosts The Daily Show, I am going to watch it, one way or another. Most of the time I simply stream it later. Tonight I wanted to catch it when it aired, and it worked out. We are a couple weeks out from a very consequential election in the US and Jon Stewart has plenty of sharp words for the campaigns. Jon Stewart has plenty of things to say about media coverage of the campaigns, and as he sees it (correctly I might add) the media is largely failing. So too are Trump's political allies at calling him out for his very deranged attempt at campaigning. Jon Stewart sees this and he roasts the spineless SOBs who dissemble whenever Trump's darker, more dictatorial words are presented to them to comment and critique. The absurdity of Trump "working" at a McDonald's is what it is. Tr...

There is a channel I follow on Telegram called Military & Strategic, and is typically signed by a blogger who refers to himself or herself as The Analyst. The primary topic is the on-going Russo-Ukraine war, but US politics gets mentioned from time to time, which is very pertinent to the Ukrainian cause. Here is one of The Analyst's most recent posts , which deals with the prospects for the Harris/Walz campaign's success in November: GROWING CONFIDENCE IN A DEMOCRATIC VICTORY We all know how important the coming election is in the US. We are quite literally faced with a fork in the road - one side takes us down a dark and dangerous path towards a semi-fascist autocracy and the other is the real America that despite its many flaws is a decent and honest democrat at its core. It’s a truly shocking difference in possible futures. However I am ever more certain that Kamala Harris will win the presidency. I am growing more certain that the Democrats will regain the House, and ju...

When I drive around Fort Smith and surrounding areas in Arkansas, I've noticed a few Harris-Walz yard signs - certainly more than I saw for Biden-Harris in 2020 or Clinton-Kaine in 2016. I am also seeing far fewer Trump signs and flags this time around. There are still people who show up with their Trump-Vance signs, but it's nothing like 2020 and 2016. I have yet to see the usual Ford F-150s and F-350s with huge Trump flags hogging the roads as in years past. Now, I don't doubt that Trump will have many in my community who vote for him, but the enthusiasm that I see on the ground is just not there for Trump this time around. At least not yet. As I've mentioned before, when I go to my county Democratic meetings, that room is packed. Good luck finding a parking spot at Creekmore Park when we all get together. That never happened in any prior election year. Something is changing, even if we are still going to be a red state when all is said and done. I'll share with y...

I'll admit I had never heard of Dr. Allan Lichtman prior to 2016, when he correctly predicted that Donald Trump would become the next US President. My reaction was along the lines of "who is this guy" and "you've got to be kidding me". But I learned who he was and realized that he knows his stuff. Lichtman uses a set of thirteen keys (answered as true or false) developed by him and a colleague in 1981. This model ignores polling data, which is the stuff that most take for gospel. Instead, the model is guided by historical precedent. As someone who relied on polling aggregators at the time (e.g., 538), I can see how his approach to prediction seems unsophisticated to the data wonks.  Here's the thing: he's used those keys to make the right prediction for nearly all US Presidential elections since 1984. That kind of track record establishes his credibility. We ignore his predictions at our peril. A lot of hay has been made out of the Democratic Party l...

Harris has it figured out: don't give Trump any political oxygen . Most importantly, that includes not playing the game the corporate media expects of Harris. Don't take Trump's bait. Reject the media's preferred framing of this particular election. That may lead to fewer headlines and fewer clicks for CNN, NYT, WaPo and other media outlets, but that's hardly my concern. Leaving Trump no option but to melt down on his own is more important. The approach Harris and Walz took in their interview with Dana Bash last week was a master class in how to deal with hostile interviewers. I hope they continue doing what appears to be working.

 Maybe:   The contrast is stark. As we saw during the Democratic Convention last week, quite a few of the speakers were Republican Party members who endorsed Harris. It's clearly not because they see eye with Harris on the issues. Quite the opposite. But they do share a love of our nation in common with their Democratic counterparts and are willing to be part of what in different contexts would be called a popular front. We've seen since then other former staffers (not only Trump's) from previous GOP presidential campaigns and Presidencies endorse Harris. They've turned their backs on Trump, and with good reason. He was unfit for office in 2016 and he is even more unfit today. For many, the events of January 6th that resulted in a coup attempt turned out to be the last straw. Others might be looking carefully at the policies promoted in Project 2025, which is very much tied to Trump, and realized that those policies were simply weird: un-American and more befitting more...

I am glad to have Jon Stewart back. He's consistently funny, and he is not one to pull punches. Here is his recap of Day 4 of the DNC convention:   Jon Stewart's take on Fox News' coverage was brilliantly brutal. Jesse Watters comes across as the GOP's "Baghdad Bob". If you are too young to know who that is, Wikipedia is your friend. The absurdity of reporting on how miserable the convention-goers are while literally next to a screen showing the convention-goers having the time of their life is truly a sight to behold. He loves highlighting the internal contradictions of the Democratic coalition. Speaking as a Democratic Party member, I can tell you that we are truly a big tent party, and perhaps even more so this election season. We can be a bit like herding cats - always have been. Diversity is our strength, but the DNC programmers' choice to not focus on Palestinian Americans strikes both Stewart and me as something that may come back to haunt them lat...

As I have taken a few hours out of each evening this week to watch the DNC convention, it is not lost on me that several speakers have been Republicans who have chosen to endorse the Democratic nominee for President, Kamala Harris, over their own party's candidate, the failed former President Donald Trump. I am grateful that the audience of Democratic delegates, officials, and fellow travelers have given these folks a warm welcome. I hope we all give them a warm welcome. This evening I listened to the remarks of a Republican mayor from Arizona at the convention endorse Harris. What I saw was a man probably close to my age who has dedicated himself to a party for an entire adult life and found that it was no longer recognizable; that it had become a cult of personalty centered around Trump. To realize that party no longer exists, that the cause one had served had become corrupted by what amounted to a crime syndicate is difficult, to say the least. To have the moral clarity to say ...

It's late now, but earlier today I awoke to the news that Kamala Harris had picked Tim Walz as her running mate. Harris had plenty of good choices. Walz signals to me that she is building something akin to the Obama/Biden coalition of 2008 and 2012. Tim Walz, as Governor of Minnesota since 2019 presides over what is arguably a purple state. It's not really a swing state when it comes to Presidential elections. Minnesota also borders Wisconsin (which is a true swing state). Like the other "blue wall" states in the Midwest, it is both an industrial and agricultural state. Walz himself hails from rural Nebraska. He's made a career in the military and as a high school educator, and has worked in a relatively GOP-leaning area in Minnesota for most of his career. As a Congress member from 2007 until 2019, Walz earned a reputation as a moderate who worked with his GOP colleagues to pass legislation. As Governor of Minnesota, he's presided over an impressive number of...