Poor Joe Rogan. Joe, you know, is a right-wing podcaster with a huge ultra conservative following. TFG liked Joe up to the minute that he said some very positive things about independent presidential candidate RFK, Jr. It was kind of like he was endorsing him, but I don’t know, you tell me:

“They gaslight you, they manipulate you, they promote narratives, and the only one who is not doing that is Robert F. Kennedy Jr. [Kennedy is] the only one that makes sense to me.”

The Orange Buffoon took great umbrage at this, and I can understand why – it certainly seems like an endorsement to me, and I thought TFG had Rogan in the bag. He must have thought so, too.

But maybe we should take a step back and recall that it was TFG surrogates who were pushing the Kennedy alternative. But that was to draw voters away from Joe Biden. Who better to vote for president if you won’t vote for Von Shitzenpantz and can’t vote for an aging but benevolent patrician? Vote for the guy with a dead worm in his brain because gaslighting isn’t in his playbook.

Makes sense to me.

Except the whole thing falls apart now after Democrats pulled the old switcheroo on the Teflon Don and nominated a completely new set of people to run against him.

TFG was not amused and, in a “truth” posted on his social network, decided that Rogan’s sentence should be to be “loudly…booed the next time he enters the UFC ring.”

I imagine Rogan is shaking in his boots.

Last time the MAGA Republicans tried to win an election in court, it was because all of their prior attempts to turn the votes in their favor – from precincts to counties to state election boards to Electors – in order to disparage the election results, all failed miserably.

They truly were “The Gang Who Couldn’t Shoot Straight.”

This time, we are all watching as the MAGA campaign, through The Former Guy, its Constitutional Scholar, floats litigation angle after litigation angle.

The Felonious Grifter has told his followers that he doesn’t need votes. No, really. He said that:

“We got more votes than anybody’s ever had. We need to watch the vote. We need to guard the vote. We need to stop the steal. We don’t need votes. We have to stop — focus, don’t worry about votes. We’ve got all the votes. I was in Florida yesterday — every house has a Trump sign. Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump. We have to guard the vote.”

Get it? The man says he doesn’t need any more votes, he’s got plenty and more to spare. It’s just that the gosh darn Democrat Party can’t hold an election without cheating. So watch out for Round Two of multiple challenges in the courts to make last times’ 61 court challenges look like child’s play.

Or maybe not.

Maybe instead, TFG will go after the whole enchilada and get Vice President Harris’s candidacy nullified in court. Yeaaaah, that’s the ticket.

Said the Orange One:

“The fact that you can get no votes, lose in the primary system – in other words you had 14 or 15 people, she was the first one out – and then you can then be picked to run for president. It seems to me actually unconstitutional. Perhaps it’s not.“

Translation: Harris performed a coup, and Biden was “unconstitutionally replaced” on the ballot. The Democrats lost because their candidate(s) were illegal. This one, I think, was borrowed from Venezuela’s dictator Nicolás Maduro, who banned his opposition from running.

Or maybe not.

We have previously explored new methods of getting campaign cash by members of the new (TFG Era) Republican Party. Ted “Cancun” Cruz heads the list, but there is also the constellation of kid lit authors corraled by Brave Books. But here on the Left Coast, that new-fangled stuff hasn’t caught on yet. Republicans here are still engaged in what can now be called old-fashioned grift.

Case in point, my own elected representative to Congress, Ken Calvert (R CA-41). Calvert has been into real estate since he gave up managing his parents’ restaurant in the sleepy inland town of Corona, California, in the 1970s. In 1979, he founded Ken Calvert Real Properties, Inc. which is now run by his brother, Quint. Nevertheless, Ken still keeps his hand in the business, frequently in partnerships.

Like the one identified by the DC Watchdog group End Citizens United, as reported here.

End Citizens United filed a complaint at the Office of Congressional Ethics, citing Calvert’s partnership in his real estate acquisitions where he “failed to disclose information about various rental properties that he owns in Riverside County”.

Calvert, they say, made “use of the legislative process known as earmarking to secure more than $100 million in taxpayer funds for his district, including more than $16 million for transportation projects within a few miles of his own rental properties.”

Calvert’s office claims that this is all stuff and nonsense: “This is a meritless complaint from a far-left super PAC that’s endorsed Ken’s opponent.”

Well, that last part makes so much sense that it probably is true enough.

This couldn’t come at a worse time for Calvert, who is involved in one of the most competitive congressional races in the country. Current polls show Calvert trailing his Democratic opponent by a point. His opponent is Will Rollins, who is back in the saddle again: he nearly defeated Calvert in the 2022 mid-term election.

I can’t think of a worse, more ill-timed thing to occur to Calvert as we ramp up to the general election now that we are inside the 90-day mark. Well, there may be one.

He could accept Will’s challenge to a 3-debate format on a local TV station formerly owned by Gene Autry.

But he won’t.

Donald Trump has been walking around and telling people that he doesn’t need their vote. He has plenty of votes. There are three possibilities of why he is using this gambit and all of them are still on the table. The first is that he is using some kind of Eric Cartman reverse psychology where you will all of the sudden want to vote for him since he told you he doesn’t want your vote.

Before you call me crazy let me explain how this works. No one is storming the capital or any of the state houses. Instead, they have installed loyalists at the county and state levels that will simply refuse to certify the vote if it goes against them. Heads I win and tails you lose.

Trump is using the same playbook he ran in 2020. Essentially, there is no way the Democrats can beat him. Look at the size of his crowds. Look at how much merch these people buy. Look at all the monster trucks with his face and the MAGA flag on them. So, if the vote turns out differently you know they cheated. I know the polls say they are ahead, but that’s a vast left wing conspiracy from the liberal mainstream media.

That’s why if you look carefully you can see cracks in the veneer. Harris’ crowds are bigger than Donald’s crowds. The enthusiasm gap has been narrowed and Harris is pulling ahead. He knows this and can’t trot out the same lines about nobody coming to Joe’s rallies. Instead he has to pivot to Georgia St. somehow cheating and keeping his people out.

This is an important first step to beating him. Listen, I know this as much as any of you. I’ve listened to family members and friends parrot the big lie even now. There is no way Joe Biden got 81 million votes. It was fake news. It was all made up. So, seeing Harris one or two points ahead in the polls is nice and certainly better than the alternative. Still, it isn’t enough.

As hilarious as this is to say, Trump is playing a longer game. He doesn’t have to convince a majority of voters. He just has to keep it close enough to allow his minions on the ground to contest the results. If enough counties and states throw their results into chaos then he can eek out an electoral college victory and become the first president to serve two terms without ever winning the popular vote.

Obviously finding a way to make one person, one vote the law of the land is the long-term plan. That’s years or even decades away. The plan now is to play for the blowout. A one point victory isn’t going to do it. I might not even feel comfortable with a five point win. So, ignore the polls and put your foot on the gas. We need a buffer to win this thing. We need a blowout so significant that they will be shamed into accepting it. Remember, all MAGA accusations are a confession.

Here’s this week’s assortment of dark humor. Fran said she’ll be back next week.

The effort has begun. As someone that pays a lot of attention and used to study this stuff it makes perfect sense. Conservatives are test-marketing different insults and slogans to see what sticks. So, their opener is that Tim Walz is a San Francisco liberal. That’s an interesting insult given the circumstances. I have been to San Francisco on two separate occasions. I have apparently been to San Francisco more frequently than Walz.

The two policy planks that are getting the most attention is his desire to make sure every child is fed in school in his home state. Additionally, he wants every citizen in Minnesota to get paid family leave. Those planks are very popular amongst voters. According to Pew researchers, more than 80 percent of voters think that workers should get paid leave for their own medical problems. Well over 60 percent think that fathers and other family members should receive paid leave WHEN OTHERS IN THEIR FAMILY are dealing with a medical crisis or just gave birth.

Free school lunches are not quite as popular. Those programs test out in the high fifties and low sixties depending on how the question is asked and who is doing the asking. However, let’s ignore the numbers for a bit and consider the pros and cons of such proposals.

The cons are obvious and short. It costs money. Government is about priorities and some people think we shouldn’t be prioritizing those things. There are three groups of people that this would describe. There are libertarian types that don’t think the government should be spending on anything like this. Pure libertarians think the government should fund for national defense and that is pretty much it. So, they also eschew tax breaks and other subsidies for corporations and wealthy Americans as well.

As much as I admire their consistency, that kind of opinion is not common and not horribly realistic. That horse done left the barn. That brings us to the second group. It is an unholy combination of people that either feel cheated because they didn’t get it or they object to helping poorer people because they are becoming dependent on assistance and need some tough love. Of course, then you just have the assholes that are happy when the people they don’t like get hurt. I’d like to think they are in the minority.

I can’t do anything for the last group of folks. The first folks we will call the “anti-progress” crowd. That logic can extend out to almost everything. Why should younger people have cell phones? I didn’t have one until I was 26. Why should my car have automatic steering or seat belts? The first cars didn’t have that. If we want our children to have things better than what we had then that comes with improvements in technology and programs that makes life easier.

The bootstrapping folks are the hardest nut to crack. There are some instances where this ideology makes sense. It doesn’t in this instance. An eight year old cannot pick themselves by their bootstraps and as much as you might think their parent is a lazy piece of shit, the kid has no control over that. Feeding them only helps them. There are other tangible benefits. A fed child is a happier child and a child that can focus more in class.

If you are a conservative operative you know all of this. You at least know that feeding children and giving people paid leave is incredibly popular. Yet, this is what happens when you have no other policies to campaign on.