Odds and Ends — 5 November 2024
Cryptocurrency, Investing, Money, Economy, Business, and Debt:
Meet the pro-crypto contenders who could replace SEC chief Gary Gensler
Bitcoin ETFs Saw Huge Outflow Ahead of US Election
Coronavirus News, Analysis, and Opinion:
Deadly Fungal Outbreaks Are on the Rise Since Covid
Behind the Election Anger May Be Something Else: Lingering Covid Grief
An Election Day Haiku:
Gallons of bronzer
covering his lying face.
Can’t hide the treason.
Politics:
Russia Suspected of Plotting to Send Incendiary Devices on U.S.-Bound Planes
Western security officials say they believe that two incendiary devices, shipped via DHL, were part of a covert Russian operation that ultimately aimed to start fires aboard cargo or passenger aircraft flying to the U.S. and Canada, as Moscow steps up a sabotage campaign against Washington and its allies.
The devices ignited at DHL logistics hubs in July, one in Leipzig, Germany, and another in Birmingham, England. The explosions set off a multinational race to find the culprits. Now investigators and spy agencies in Europe have figured out how the devices — electric massagers implanted with a magnesium-based flammable substance — were made and concluded that they were part of a wider Russian plot.
Trump Campaign Memo Admits He Could Lose
Behind the bluster, former President Trump’s campaign is preparing staff members to wind down the operation while privately acknowledging that Trump could lose Tuesday’s election.
It’s unusual for Trump or his campaign to portray anything but rosy scenarios. But an email to staff on Friday offered a clear-eyed view of what could happen in this coin-flip election.
Trump himself has been quick to belittle unfavorable polls and has vowed that the only way he could lose is if Democrats cheat. He has laid the groundwork for legal challenges if things don’t go his way.
https://twitter.com/HabibKhanT/status/1853084427313713177
Members of the Proud Boys, key instigators in the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol riot, are mobilizing in support of Donald Trump—and in some cases, making threats about the presidential election.
While it isn’t clear what the far-right group is planning or how coordinated its plans are, many chapters are amplifying election-cheating claims made by Trump or his allies and discussing potential responses, according to a review by The Wall Street Journal of dozens of accounts on Telegram, the messaging app, and Trump’s Truth Social platform.
Chapters have gathered across state lines, talked about watching polls and have been boasting about attending Trump rallies to protect the former president.
https://twitter.com/KvotheTheArcane/status/1852784938531029448
Latest Rallying Cry From Trump’s Allies: ‘Men Must Vote!’
Liz Cheney: ‘Women are going to save the day in this election’
https://twitter.com/McKay4Senate/status/1852494510347177987
Gotta wonder if they did any vetting: A Key Trump Staffer Was Fired For Being a White Nationalist
Luke Meyer was Trump’s regional field director for western Pennsylvania. Online, he was the white nationalist Alberto Barbarossa and a co-host of Richard Spencer’s podcast.
https://twitter.com/KellyScaletta/status/1853450181833826642
Trump Knew He Stepped on a Rake
Donald Trump doesn’t admit to mistakes, but he knew he made one Sunday morning.
For 96 minutes, at his first of his three rallies that day, Trump barely looked at his teleprompter. He darkly obsessed about election fraud, railed against polls showing him down, and savaged the ‘bloodsuckers’ in the news media, adding he wouldn’t mind if ‘the fake news’ took an assassin’s bullet for him.
The crowd laughed. Privately, campaign staffers groaned. Trump sounded as if he were losing. And this was no way to start the week or close out a presidential campaign with three days left until Election Day.
Said one confidant: “He knew after he got off stage.”
https://twitter.com/Kasparov63/status/1852742502475776264
China and the Axis of Disruption
North Korean troops are in Russia. Is that really what’s best for Beijing?
Over the succeeding four years of Trump’s term, I lived almost every day in a state of dread. Perhaps you did, too. Yet the American people proved equal to the work required of them. The guardrails shook, and in some places they cracked, yet when the ultimate test came, in January 2021, brave Americans of both great parties joined to beat back Trump’s violent attempted seizure of power.
Now here we are again. You are needed once more. Perhaps you feel wearier than you did seven years ago. Perhaps you feel more afraid today than you did then. Yet you must still find the strength to answer your country’s call. You can do it. We can do it. We believe in America.
Donald Trump’s most mystifying quality is that his collection of political liabilities are so vast that they defy all attempts to summarize them. He is a career criminal, devoted authoritarian, longstanding racist, completely ignorant of basic facts of how government works, a sex pest, and overtly corrupt, just to name a few of his most obvious flaws.
Nearly a decade into his nonstop campaigning, fresh evidence of his unfitness continues to emerge almost daily. Imagine if we discovered tapes of Jeffrey Epstein calling Joe Biden one of his best friends! It would have destroyed Biden’s candidacy. The Harris campaign and most of Trump’s critics have ignored this for the same reason most of Trump’s offenses have been forgotten: Nobody has enough room in their head to contain them all.
https://twitter.com/mswmediapods/status/1853584901393494313
The Great, Disappearing Trump Campaign
Kamala Harris is hard to avoid in North Carolina these days. Turn on your TV and there she is (except when Donald Trump is on instead). On the radio: Kamala. Switch to Spotify if you want, but you’ll get Kamala ads there too. It’s enough to make you want to get out of the house and drive somewhere, but that’s only going to take you past a parade of Kamala billboards. You might even find yourself passing a Harris-Walz field office.
This makes sense. North Carolina is a key swing state in the election. Harris can win without it, but Trump probably cannot. In 2020, it gave Trump his narrowest victory, with a margin of fewer than 75,000 votes. Harris; Trump; their respective running mates, Tim Walz and J. D. Vance; and a host of surrogates have made many visits to the state and plan to keep coming right up until Election Day. Both campaigns are blanketing the airwaves.
But the similarities end there. The Trump campaign is running a lean operation in North Carolina, with far less physical presence: fewer field offices, fewer paid staffers, less footprint in general. I’ve driven on interstates across half the state in the past couple of weeks, and dead deer have outnumbered Trump billboards by roughly a 2-to-1 ratio. Simply put, the Trump campaign seems to barely exist here.
The Trump campaign is panicking
One Republican operative who has worked with the ex-president’s campaign in the past said it’s clear that Trump is “decompensating” in response to the late Harris surge.
“He’s realizing that he could lose the election, go to prison, and maybe die there,” they said.
https://twitter.com/NotHoodlum/status/1853596061639876786
RNC Official Admits Noncitizen Voting Is Not a Thing
In public remarks, former President Donald Trump has repeatedly made unfounded claims about the threat of widespread voting by ‘illegal aliens’ and noncitizens in the 2024 election.
Away from the spotlight, though, at least one Republican National Committee official is telling volunteer poll watchers a completely different story: that such voting is close to impossible.
Serendipity:
https://twitter.com/Daniel_Sugarman/status/1853360899811049583
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