W. Niederhut

Well, there's always Trump's self-professed Temperance-- one of the traditional Puritanical virtues. Although, speaking as a psychiatrist, I've never had a high opinion of strict Tee Totallers, (except in the case of recovering alcoholics.)

I vaguely recall reading somewhere -- possibly in Prouty's book about JFK and Vietnam-- that the early international press releases about Oswald may have originated with JMWave and George Johannides. Does this ring a bell with the forum JFKA experts?

Here's Trumpism in a nutshell. Trump just told a reporter in Vegas that he is not concerned about holding Never Masker rallies because he is, "on a stage, far away from the crowd." Can't make this stuff up.

Trump said that he won the Bay of Pigs Award? Yo, Wheeler, what is Il Douche talking about here? Is this the award Nixon used to refer to as "that Bay of Pigs thing?"

Honestly, Joe, I never thought something like the Trump Cult could happen here in America. Not sure which is more shocking-- that a sociopathic criminal like Donald Trump (and his GOP enablers) could hijack our government, or that Americans would still consider voting for him!

Isn't it kind of amazing that most guys from the Baby Boom generation know the entire Goldfinger screenplay by heart? Bond: You must have been playing the wrong ball, Mr. Goldfinger. I'm afraid that you forfeit the hole and the match. Goldfinger: Fake news, Mr. Bond! I own this golf course, and everyone knows I have the best balls.

Bond: Your Operation Grand Slam will never work, Goldfinger. Even Rob Wheeler won't fall for your scam in another election. Goldfinger: That is where you are wrong, Mr. Bond. Once people have committed themselves to a cult, it is virtually impossible for them to admit that they have been duped.

In psychoanalytic theory, this kind of rapturous bonding and mutual admiration between two narcissists is called, "twinning." Notice the contrast with Trump's historically bizarre, devaluing attitude toward world leaders like Angela Merkel.

Joe, The scenes from California and Oregon this week are horrifying. I hope that all of you folks out there are o.k. Here's a photo of what it looked like on Colorado Highway 34 when we were driving home from Rocky Mountain National Park on Sunday afternoon. Smoke from the Cameron Peak fire had blanketed the Front Range here from Fort Collins down to Denver.

Bond: He's quite mad, you know. Pussy Galore: Yes, James, I suspected that when he demanded his first golden shower. He moved on me like a bitch. Bond: We've got to warn Wheeler and the other goons before it's too late.

Yo, Rob, something about your Nobel Prize post reminded me of David Andrews' recent comment about Trump reminding him of Auric Goldfinger. In describing his plan to nuke the gold reserves at Fort Knox, Auric Goldfinger told his mafia associates that mankind had achieved great things in every field of human endeavor except crime. I think Trump deserves a Nobel Prize for Crime! He's the first media-savvy psychopath who succeeded in completely hijacking the U.S. government! Did you watch Rachel Maddow's Michael Cohen interview yesterday?

Ron, You should be able to take Highway 50 down the Arkansas River Valley to I-25, (at Pueblo) then I-25 south to Raton and (287 to) Amarillo. My guess is that the snow will be gone within 48 hours-- even up on Monarch Pass.

Ron, Did you bring your skis? As for Salida, you are probably familiar with the local Anglo pronunciations of Colorado's old Mexican towns, (acquired at gun point from Mexico in the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo.) Instead of "Sal-ee-da," we say "Sal-aye-da," (rhymes with saliva) and we call Buena Vista, "Byoo-na Vista," (rhymes with, siste(r.) My personal favorite-- white folks from old Colorado call Pueblo, "Pee-ebb-lo."

Sturgis Motorcycle Rally Is Now Linked to More Than 250,000 Coronavirus Cases One study estimates the public health cost of the super-spreading event is near $12 billion. https://www.motherjones.com/coronavirus-updates/2020/09/sturgis-motorcycle-rally-is-now-linked-to-more-than-250000-coronavirus-cases/

Speaking of the Ponderosa, some rancher has created a statue of Donald Trump made entirely of bullsh*t. 🤥

According to Mary Trump, Donald and Ivana Trump once threatened to disown Don, Jr. if he joined the National Guard. I'll go out on a limb here and predict that Don, Jr.'s ghost writer didn't mention this ignominious incident in Little Don's best selling memoir, "Triggered." Perhaps Rob Wheeler knows. No one else around here would have wasted money buying "Triggered."

We had to evacuate Estes Park/Rocky Mountain National Park yesterday afternoon because of the smoke from the Cameron Peak forest fire. Trail Ridge Road was closed at 3 PM yesterday, and the fire is now burning the northern perimeter of RMNP. The creepiest part was driving down Highway 34 through the heavy smoke in Lyons and Longmont, Colorado. It was like a scene from the Apocalypse. Highs in the 90s forecast for smoky Denver this afternoon, followed by six inches of snow tonight! Thomas Friedman has accurately called this, "Global Weirding." It's weird.

Ron, We can file this one under "toxic positivity"-- one of the more interesting characteristics of Trump's family of origin described by Mary Trump. Fred Trump, Sr. never tolerated screw ups or honest acknowledgement of mistakes. Trump's childhood schoolmates have noted that he could never admit that he was wrong-- even when it was painfully obvious to his teachers and classmates. There are, obviously, some benefits to focusing on the positive, but there is also a down side -- especially when a relentless focus on the positive is part of a denial of a problem that need to be acknowledged-- e.g., COVID-19, atherosclerosis, left frontal cortical strokes, etc. 🤥 This tendency in Trump also seems to be integral to his cult-like idealization by his fans, who continue to steadfastly dismiss the evidence of his felonious conduct. As he said in 2016, "I could shoot someone on 5th Avenue and not lose a single voter."

Spot on, and I say this as a guy who was, literally, the only white guy on my neighborhood school bus by the time I was a senior in high school in 1975. Do I know really know what it's like to grow up as a black guy in America? Hell no, but some Caucasians probably have a better idea about these issues than others. I vividly remember some of my black friends in the old neighborhood complaining about store clerks following them around in stores, or guys trying to hit them with their cars, etc. I remember telling them that they were imagining that stuff, until I actually observed it. The profiling and targeting of blacks by police was always common knowledge-- long before cellphone cameras and the BLM movement. As for Trump, in a Hegelian sense, I view him as the Anti-Obama-- the Birther-in-Chief whose disastrous presidency was always predicated on the denigration of blacks and Latinos. People who deny that obvious fact remind me of those who try to argue that the American Civil War wasn't about slavery. They're fooling themselves.

My wife and I are up in Estes Park this month, and I have been pleasantly surprised to see that almost everyone is wearing a mask on the hiking trails in Rocky Mountain National Park. One notable exception was a portly couple we crossed paths with yesterday who were both wearing TRUMP 2020 T-shirts. I felt unusually annoyed, but resisted the temptation to make a snide remark. When we got up to the Alpine Center on Trail Ridge Road yesterday, we could see columns of smoke billowing from the Cameron Peak forest fire a few miles away. Creepy.

Was it, perchance, an orange-headed New Jersey sap sucker?

Trump always follows Sutton's Law, in lieu of a moral compass. He goes where the money is.

Rob, I agree with your observations about 9/11 and the Neocon establishment but, for a "loose cannon," Trump has been dead silent about 9/11 since 2016. And Michael Wolf claimed in Fire and Fury that Adelson, Singer, et.al., bribed Trump to become a "Neocon mule" back in 2016. Trump has, certainly, gone along with the Neocon agenda to withdraw from the international Iranian nuclear disarmament deal and escalate conflicts with the Iranian/Shiite Axis in the Middle East. He also launched Tomahawks at Syrian government positions twice, in response to false flag "chemical weapons" attacks.

I thought Kellyanne Conway was taking a break from promoting Trump's alternate facts, to focus on her family. In this case, she must have been referring to the "undercover Trump voters" at the BLM protests-- like Umbrella Man, et.al.

There it is, in a nutshell. Obama said it quite clearly at the DNC convention. Trump can't solve the problem at the root of the BLM protests, because he won't even acknowledge that it exists. He has systematically refused to acknowledge the deaths of numerous unarmed black men murdered by police, or to condemn the many right wing attacks on BLM protesters this year, (by 60+ cars and guns) while lamenting the unusual death of a single gun-toting white supremacist vigilante who drove to Portland to threaten American protesters. Trump's perverse message is unequivocal here. Right wing, white supremacist vigilantes with guns are good. American citizens who protest for justice and civil rights are bad.