That’s the best I can do for a photo from the back set of our Uber. How unfortunate! We are in Washington, DC for one day, and it happens to be at the same time as a two-day visit by Chinese President Xi Jinping. That’s not something we care about, but it means that they have blockaded side streets in the area of Reagan Airport down to where we are staying. Our poor Uber driver was patient, but totally frustrated at almost standstill traffic. It took 90 minutes to get to our hotel, a trip that should have lasted 30. Each intersection was blockaded to prevent side street traffic, and had high barrier fences across to allow only one car at a time. What nonsense! Such a frightened way of life.
I have no doubt there are plenty of people who detest Jinping, just like Trump, but the only violence possible would be a fake shooting complete with a fake clipped ear, as real assassins don’t wander in off the streets. They have to be specially trained, and don’t miss.
Which reminds me, I used to watch a TV series called Bosch, and the lead, played by Titus Welliver, was a reasonably convincing actor until an episode where he had to wear a Green Beret getup, as his character was supposedly an ex-member. He looked ridiculous with the hat and baggy getup, so that the whole tough-guy mystique was destroyed. He looked a bit more like Woody Allen in fatigues.
Anyway, they did a big airport red carpet ceremony for Jinping, and I watched it on a reel, and thought man, how cheesy! They laid down a red carpet on the tarmac, and lined up American’s finest on either side as the Great Man stepped down off the plane to meet our Great Man, but the honor guard just doesn’t work for me. They have to include everyone, all service branches, women, blacks and Asians, probably gay and transgender too. So what was at one time a long gray line of evenly-sized men is now tall and short, most not even looking very tough, firearms not becoming on the shoulders of the soldiers at all. I know, don’t judge. It’s more like real life than movies.
So today we planned on seeing the American Gallery of Art and the Museum of Natural History, and then Hop-On Hop-Off for the rest of the day. Traffic will be a nightmare. Tomorrow I go to Wilmington to visit cousins, while my wife and daughter go to NYC to take in a ballet and a show. The show is about Mary Todd Lincoln. The ballet, I just can’t do. I am not Titus in the beret, just a regular guy with limited culturing.
https://www.boston.com/news/politics/2026/09/28/backlash-ensues-after-the-libertarian-party-of-new-hampshire-calls-for-assassinations-again/?p1=hp_featurestack
This one is rich. So this agent provocateur named Kaufmann is trying to blow up the libertarian party in New Hampshire and discredit it by calling for assassinations. Operation Chaos. As a New Hampshire native I can tell you they don’t like government in general, and that in a fair election the libertarian party would be the most popular in New Hampshire, even with little funding.
Hopefully Miles hits this Kaufmann agent who is blackwashing people who don’t like the government.
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They don’t quote the full tweet in the article, or get much of any comment about it from the guy, so it very easily could be being misrepresented.
Actually far from sabotaging the libertarian party, maybe they’re trying to give it a boost.. that’s how Trump got so popular after all – constant media freakouts and pearl clutching from establishment types. The public naturally concluded, that if those types hate and fear him so much, maybe he’s just what’s needed to shake things up. Not realizing that editors and producers were playing them, and perfectly well understand that the way to shut down trump would be to starve him of attention altogether. They recognized a growing anti-establishment wave, so they found a guy who could play the heel and lead it. Of course the libertarian party probably gets 2% of the vote or less, so maybe they just like spotlighting a guy that’s divisive and goes off half-cocked, makes good copy..
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I long ago concluded that the only use of third parties was to tip the outcome between the two regular parties. They can never win. Even Ross Perot, who scored large numbers in ’92 and ’96 as a third party candidate, was used merely to get Clinton elected. As I view it.
I also have it in the back of my mind that they don’t need to count votes anymore, at least in places where they use electronic voting and don’t keep the ballots. That doesn’t mean that they don’t count votes in all elections, as most people running present no threat to power, so vote counting and outcomes are not important and they are a useful distraction, elections are.
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I agree, one of their main uses seems to be to strategically split the vote among Rs and D’s depending on which way they want to tip the election. “Dr. Fustercluck”, one of my favorite callers on Fakeologist audiochat, often points out how their figureheads are often a little goofy too.. Perot, Ron Paul, both have funny voices. Dr F does a good imitation to illustrate his point.. and reminds us about that time when Paul’s eyebrows were sliding around on his face, evidently he was wearing false ones, I guess out of place even normally, to give him a strange look.. I don’t remember Nader well enough to say he fits – my recollection is that he was sort of a bore and a scold in his affect and presentation, a little unpalatable to a mass audience. Only of interest to genuinely policy-minded people, a rare breed –
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Just by observation, it appears that in 1992 and 96, when Perot ran to split the Republican vote, that they did so because votes were being counted. 2000 then, Bush v Gore and Dade County, was the year that technological innovation made it possible to substitute electronic voting machines. The Dade County debacle appears to have been invented to discredit use of paper ballots, which offer true accountability in vote counting (always subject to other means of manipulation, such as ballot stuffing). Nader appears to have played a critical role then, whether he knew it or not. (One of the important players in Dade at that time was Janet Reno).
In response to Dade, Congress passed HAVA, the Help America Vote Act, in which easily hacked machines were substituted for paper ballot counting in most jurisdictions. It is then that, in my view, actual vote counting went out the window. The Democrats still ran liberal candidates, like Jesse Jackson, Dennis Kucinich, and Bernie’s Sanders, but this is done merely to keep progressives and liberals in the party. (Bernie’s Sanders sounds, to me alone, as a man reading his lines, trite and rote and boring, never intending to win anything.)
So, my life-learning places me in position to suspect that our two-party system is really one party with two offshoot wings used to give the illusion of choice. We are a one-party state.
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Sanders often sounds like he’s doing a bit, hamming things up with the whole accent and pseudo-impassioned style.. he comes across as so transparently phony at times, I’m amazed his supporters think he’s a genuine ideologue, not just a comedian doing schtick.. I guess that’s why Larry David was able to do such a successful impression –
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