remember that old commercial?
the 2024 presidential election is almost over. and at last we get to the topic of the make up wearing ticket of convicted felon donald trump and miss sassy jd vance. josephine harvey ('huffington post') notes:
Jimmy Fallon showed “Tonight Show” viewers a new photo of Donald Trump that makes the former president look nearly as orange as his hi-vis vest.
“He’s wearing a lot of makeup. We did not enhance that. That’s a lot of makeup,” the comic said of the image, taken in Green Bay, Wisconsin.
The Republican nominee had dressed up as a worker for a photo op aboard a Trump campaign-branded garbage truck, in a swipe at President Joe Biden’s gaffe about Trump supporters earlier this week.
“That’s real, that,” Fallon added of the image. “He looks like the Oompa Loompas’ union boss.”
and curtis m. wong ('huffington post') notes:
Anderson Cooper chimed in Thursday on Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance’s recent claim that former President Donald Trump is likely to win the “normal gay guy vote.”
During a panel discussion on his show, “Anderson Cooper 360,” the CNN anchor said he was curious to know exactly where Vance would make a distinction between “normal” and “not normal” gay men.
“At first I was like, ‘Oh, JD Vance thinks there’s normal gay people.’ So I guess that’s sort of progress,” Cooper, who is gay, said. “I’m curious to know what the difference — where the line is between a ‘normal’ gay person and a ‘not normal’ gay person.”
He then suggested Vance may possibly draw the line at “anything related to drag,” before taking a cheeky dig at Trump.
“Wearing as much makeup as Donald Trump wears, that would be considered not normal,” he quipped. “It’s fine for Donald Trump, but on a gay guy, that wouldn’t be considered normal.”
and maria butt ('the independent') notes:
A photographer has explained the mystery behind former president Donald Trump’s varying uses of bronzer.
The tan tones of the businessman and Home Alone 2 star have been under much scrutiny throughout his political career, with countless memes dissecting their colour range.
American photographer Emily Elsie shared her theory behind the ever-changing colour palettes, and explained she believes the intensity of hue is directly correlated to the politician’s stress levels.
Although photographs of Trump’s tan lines have prompted ridicule, similar to mockery over JD Vance’s alleged use of eyeliner, she said the issue was no laughing matter.
“Why is no one covering this very important data point,” wrote Elsie in a series of viral Instagram stories.
“In July 2024, Donald Trump looked like this...” she said sharing a picture of Trump shortly after his assassination attempt. “And now he looks like this,” she added alongside a recent picture of the entrepreneur giving a speech.
“We need to talk about the bronzer,” she began. “I used to think the problem with Trump’s ‘skin tone’ was primarily an issue of photo retouching - aka a photographer’s choice in colour balancing.
that maga trash that's been attacking drag queens for the last 4 years has a presidential team consisting of a man wearing facial make up and the other wearing eye liner.
let's close with c.i.'s 'Iraq snapshot:'
Friday, November 1, 2024. Donald Trump threatens violence against Liz Cheney, Jennifer Lopez nails down why we need to vote for Kamala, and much more
He also attacked senior Democrats Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton and Adam Schiff and warned baselessly against “cheating” at the polls and forced sex-change operations in schools.
Vice President Harris closed out Thursday with a raully in Las Vegas in which singer and actor Jennifer Lopez emotionally endorsed her.
Donald Trump said former Rep. Liz Cheney is a “war hawk” who should be fired upon, as he raged against one of his most prominent intra-party critics while campaigning Thursday night in Arizona.
“She’s a radical war hawk. Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, OK?” the former president said at a campaign event in Glendale with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson. “Let’s see how she feels about it, you know, when the guns are trained on her face.”
Trump also hurled insults at Cheney, once the third-ranking Republican in House leadership, calling her “very dumb,” a “stupid person” and “the moron.”
Trump’s suggestion that Cheney be fired upon represents an escalation of the violent language he has used to target his political foes. And it comes days before an election in which the former president — who never accepted his 2020 loss — has already undermined public confidence. In recent weeks, he has also suggested a military crackdown on political opponents he has described as “the enemy within.”
Cheney is perhaps the most vocal Republican critic of Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, and his role in his supporters’ January 6, 2021, riot at the US Capitol. She played a leading role on the House select committee that investigated the attack, and later was ousted from her deep-red Wyoming House seat by a Trump-backed primary opponent in 2022.
Cheney responded to Trump’s comments overnight, saying: “This is how dictators destroy free nations.”
Over the course of just four years, male voters under 30 have shifted a net of 14 points towards Republicans, according to polling by the Harvard Kennedy School of Politics.
Citing inflation, immigration, the withering of the American dream, the left’s war on “toxic masculinity,” and the former president’s ability to bro-out with their favorite podcasters, young men told The Post what made them ready to get behind Trump this November.
“As far as young male voters are concerned, I feel like the Democrats have no message for them. The Democrats have totally ignored that base,” Alex Bruesewitz, a 27-year-old campaign advisor for Trump, told The Post.
This week, Kennedy told supporters that if Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump wins, he has promised Kennedy “control of the public health agencies,” including the Department of Health and Human Services. Trump transition co-chair Howard Lutnik later denied that Kennedy would have a job with HHS—although, at the same time, he said Kennedy had convinced him to pull vaccines from the market. Trump himself, at his Madison Square Garden rally on Sunday, seemed to lend credence to the idea of Kennedy leading on health: “I’m gonna let him go wild on health. I’m gonna let him go wild on the food. I’m gonna let him go wild on medicines,” Trump said. Trump also said on a three-hour podcast episode with Joe Rogan last week that he’s told Kennedy, “Focus on health, focus—you can do whatever you want.” It’s not clear whether such a promise would have been made in exchange for Kennedy’s political endorsement, which would be illegal. But if Kennedy were to be put in charge of HHS, he would be leading the executive department that oversees the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration, and the National Institutes of Health, among others. In the meantime, Kennedy is an honorary co-chair on the Trump transition team, and claims to be “deeply involved in helping to choose the people who can run FDA, NIH, and CDC.”
In his own speech at Madison Square Garden, Kennedy took aim at Democrats, saying they were once “the party that wanted to protect public health, and women’s sports”—a bizarre pairing that highlights his recent pivot to attacking trans athletes and gender-affirming care. Kennedy, who ran as a Democratic and then independent presidential candidate before throwing his support behind Trump, is also spreading misinformation on chronic health issues such as obesity, diabetes, drug overdoses, and autism; on Tuesday, for example, he said diabetes could be “cured with good food.” In his Sunday speech, Kennedy characterized Trump as a president who would “protect our children … and women’s sports,” as well as “end the corruption at the federal agencies—at FDA, at NIH, at CDC, and at the CIA”—a constellation of bodies rarely joined together, which he implied are conducting surveillance upon and acting against the interests of the American people.
“This unbridled assault on science and scientists, it’s highly destabilizing for the country,” Baylor College of Medicine dean Peter Hotez, author of The Deadly Rise of Anti-Science, told me earlier this year, a few months after Kennedy announced his run. But it’s not just Kennedy—Trump and other Republicans in Congress are also leading the charge to undermine expertise and further erode public trust in the government, he said. “This is what authoritarianism is all about,” Hotez said, lamenting “the collateral damage that it’s going to do to our democracy” and pointing to the ways Stalin portrayed scientists as public enemies during the Great Purge.
Benjamin
and Davies write: “Most Americans have been persuaded that Stein cannot
win the election.” It’s not a matter of being “persuaded”, any more
than we are “persuaded” that Trump did not win the last election. It’s
simply a fact. No one seriously imagines that Jill Stein will get more
than a few percent of the votes anywhere, so I don’t understand what is
served by encouraging anyone to think maybe she’'ll actually win. It’s
not honest.
I also don’t see that we should regard voting for Jill
Stein as just another individual decision, for which no one need be
apologetic. If it leads to a disaster, you should feel bad about it. And
it very well may.
I’ve fleshed out some of the reasons voting for the Green Party is destructive, in these pages; I won’t repeat them all. https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/kamala-harris-gaza-2669543360.
Two
points. First, I don’t see how anyone here can honestly take the
position it doesn’t matter whether Trump or Harris is elected. We now
have a full fledged fascist party, the Republican Party. The Democrats
are far from a fascist party. Are progressives so locked into hating the
Democrats that they cannot see the dangers of fascism? Is Gaza the sole
issue that matters? Not whether we have a president who plans to deport
11 million people? Not climate change, not the elimination of honestly
counted elections? Not abortion rights? Not whether reactionaries
control the Supreme Court for another generation?
Yes, I know the
Democratic Party is a capitalist party dominated by capital. But that
doesn’t mean all the differences between Democrats and Republicans are
trivial. I’m actually mystified anyone could believe that or pretend to.
Second,
on whether building a third party is a realistic goal: There are
structural issues that make this very challenging in a political system
with single member districts, as opposed to multiparty list systems. The
single-member district system pushes very hard toward two major
parties. The trend is supported by the fact that – as is obviously the
case here – third parties tend to injure the party closest to them, and
voters grasp that, actually, yes, the lesser of two “evils” is better
than the worse of two evils. Especially when the supposedly ideal party
has no plan that would lead to victory.
Below is the Green Party’s percentage of the popular vote for President for every presidential election of this century:
2000 2.74%
2004 0.38%
2008 0.10%
2012 0.36%
2016 1.07%
2020 0.26%
There
have been downs and ups. But the Greens have had more than twenty
years, and we see no progression toward the Green Party playing a
significant role in American politics. Other than as a spoiler.
Can someone explain to me what the plan is to break out of this role, in which the Greens are either irrelevant or destructive?