October 5, 2024 - Mostly About Lies

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Do Not Believe Lies! 

Donald Trump and JD Vance are proven liars. (Trump actually won the 2020 election, Haitians are eating their Ohio neighbors’ pets, etc.)  Even the ‘devout’ House Speaker talks about voting irregularities of which he has no evidence, but 'intuitively' believes occurred. Get used to the fact that Republicans routinely make up stories. They lie.

JD, the vice-Liar candidate

This election is about more than candidates.  It is about the willingness of millions of voters to be taken in by lies, repeatedly uttered by liars, until the point is reached where they achieve a level of false legitimacy.  When enough Americans accept lies, then democracy dies!  Do not believe lies!

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In her Oct. 4 posting, Heather Cox Richardson summed it up by saying that ‘the firehose of lies is designed to make it impossible for voters to figure out the truth. The technique is designed so that eventually voters give up trying to engage, conclude everyone is lying, throw up their hands, and stop voting.’ She went on to point out that ‘holding on to facts combats the effects of the storm of lies.’                                                

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Economist Paul Krugman has noted: ‘We’ve all become desensitized, but it’s amazing how at this point the Trump campaign rests entirely on denouncing things that aren’t happening: an imaginary bad economy, imaginary runaway crime and now an imaginary failure of Biden and Harris to respond to natural disaster.’

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Trump criticized the president for not immediately authorizing FEMA assistance for Tennessee.  Well, it seems that just when other similarly affected States were requesting such aid in regard to damage inflicted by Hurricane Helene, a legal pre-requisite for obtaining it, Tennessee’s governor was instead introducing legislation for a day of prayer and fasting as a way of dealing with the storm’s damage.  How dumb are voters in Tennessee? 

But people in solid Republican areas believe these lies and will vote accordingly.  It’s a disease that infects their minds.

JL                                             

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Did You Check Out Timothy Snyder's Column?    

Jackspotpourri’s posting just prior to this one included a piece by Timothy Snyder entitled ‘Trump’s Hitlerian Month.’  Please go back and read it again.  Please.  It may, for many of you, automatically follow this posting. Otherwise, it can be found by  CLICKING HERE or copying  https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox/WhctKLbMwJvtVHwSqpGHmPzqNrtxCppMTqjDBWNgXbSVzcdCnwnBqRFsLkbwgsGlNSDqTZg and pasting it on your browser line.

Don't miss this column!

JL

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Time to Endorse Truth

The other day Liz Chaney personally endorsed Kamala Harris, adding to the other Republicans who have recognized the danger of a second Trump term. 

In the New Yorker magazine’s endorsement of Harris, they point out that ‘Trump is a menacing presence in American life, and most of his former associates know it. Of his forty-two former Cabinet secretaries, only half have endorsed him. More than two hundred staffers for four previous Republican Presidents and Presidential candidates have endorsed the Democratic ticket. High-ranking officials who once surrounded Trump—including former Vice-President Mike Pence, former Defense Secretaries Jim Mattis and Mark Esper, former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, the former chief of staff John Kelly, the former national-security advisers John Bolton and H. R. McMaster, and the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley—regard him as unfit, a threat to national security.'

(The full New Yorker endorsement, which is a worthwhile but lengthy read, can be found by visiting https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/10/07/kamala-harris-for-president-endorsement or BY CLICKING HERE.)

JL

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Baseball Confusion

Apologies are in order regarding the National League playoffs, the description of which in the preceding Jackspotpourri was inaccurate.  The Arizona Diamondbacks, finished the season with exactly the same record as did the Atlanta Braves and the New York Mets, both of whom made it to the playoffs, but they were left out in the cold.

This mess was the result of an incomplete game between the Mets and the Braves that was finished after their double header’s first game, the result of that first game determining their seeding in the playoffs. (The Mets won the doubleheader’s first game. The Braves won the second game, the completion of the earlier unfinished game.)  Afterwards, all three teams had identical 89 win and 73 loss records.  The ‘tiebreaking’ rules in such situations call for referral to the teams’ record between them during the regular season.  The Diamondbacks came up short against the Braves and the Mets over the entire season, so the result of the unfinished game did not really matter. 

But what, Diamondback fans argue, would have been the case if the Mets had also won the uncompleted game? Then play-off bound Atlanta would have had a worse record than the Diamondbacks!

To avoid this mess on the last day of the regular season, the National League should have seen that the incomplete game was finished earlier.  A rule requiring that all incompleted games that might affect the league’s final standing be completed at least one week before the end of the regular season should be considered.  And if that doesn’t solve the problem, it would be no sin to postpone the playoffs, and the World Series, until they were resolved. I suspect that rainstorms have caused postponements in the past.

Repeating my World Series prediction:  Yankees over the Phillies in seven games.

JL

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Housekeeping on Jackspotpourri 

Forwarding Postings: Please forward this posting to anyone you think might benefit from reading it (Friends, relatives, enemies, etc.) If you want to send someone the blog, you can just tell them to check it out by visiting https://jackspotpourri.blogspot.com or you can provide a link to that address in your email to them. There’s another, perhaps easier, method of forwarding it though!  

Google Blogspot, the platform on which Jackspotpourri is prepared, makes that possible. If you click on the tiny envelope with the arrow at the bottom of every posting, you will have the opportunity to list up to ten email addresses to which that blog posting will be forwarded, along with a brief comment from you. Each will receive a link to click on that will directly connect them to the blog. 

Either way will work, sending them the link to https://jackspotpourri.blogspot.com, or clicking on the envelope at the bottom of this posting. 

Email Alerts: If you are NOT receiving emails from me alerting you each time there is a new posting on Jackspotpourri, just send me your email address and we’ll see that you do. And if you are forwarding a posting to someone, you might suggest that they do the same, so they will be similarly alerted. You can pass those email addresses to me by email at jacklippman18@gmail.com. 

Again, I urge you to forward this posting to anyone you think might benefit from reading it, particularly if they are a registered voter. There is just a month remaining until Election Day. Spread the word. 

JL  

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