SAY WHAT?

SAY WHAT? - Whew. For now, the dreaded Red Wave has shrunk into a trickle, a dribble, a malignant puddle that more than one sage suggested had been just angry ketchup on the walls of Mar-A-Lago. "The Red Wave is off," rejoiced one observer, thanks to the steadfast work and hope of primarily women, young people and many others defiantly rejecting our descent into a kakotopia of hate, greed, fear, bigotry and totalitarianism. America to fascist theocracy: No thanks, not today, the best efforts of Mike Flynn et al notwithstanding. With final numbers still emerging, we don't know what the House or Senate will ultimately look like, other than, of course, hopelessly balkanized. We know only that Trump, GOP zealotry and the notion that ever-fickle women had "moved on" from Dobbs lost Tuesday. What won: Abortion rights, activism, equity, truth, the thoughtful prioritizing of real freedoms - to vote, choose, love, organize - over the cost of gas. "We killed the Red Wave," declared Michael Moore, who charged that "we were lied to for months by the pundits and pollsters and media" who claimed the GOP would win 60 more House seats because "simple" Americans cared most about crime and the price of milk. Instead, the people built "a blue wall to stop an ugly wave...It was their Democracy they came to fight for."

SAY WHAT? - This week, tearful but tenacious families of the 19 children murdered in their Uvalde classrooms at Robb Elementary School marked Día de Muertos, Day of the Dead, by marching on the Texas capitol to both honor their lost children and reiterate their (futile) months-long pleas for sensible gun reform from Gov. Greg 'Could-Have-Been-Worse' Abbott and his retrograde cabal of GOP lawmakers - a dauntless act, after so much anguish, one admirer likened to "the courage of a million gladiators." According to tradition, the souls of dead children descend from heaven at midnight on Oct. 31 to reunite with their families; the next day, the souls of dead adults - here, two teachers - come to visit. The Austin event, organized by the Mexican American Legislative Caucus of the Texas Legislature, featured a vigil and speeches at the Statehouse, followed by an eerily silent procession to the governor's mansion; en route, families carried a large ofrenda, or altar, adorned with Our Lady of Guadalupe, painted skulls, photos of the dead, foods they liked, and marigolds said to entice the souls of the dead. A note in front read, "Protect Our Children: 21 por 21" - a reference to their oh-so-minimal demand to raise the legal age to buy an assault rifle from 18 to 21 in honor of 21 lives lost. Ana Rodriquez, whose only daughter Maite was killed: "We should be choosing her Halloween costume together, but instead I'm making her an ofrenda."

SAY WHAT? - Oh look. Another woman has come forward - on-camera - to accuse serial fabulist, "warrior for God," and purported-when-politically-convenient "pro-lifer" Herschel Walker of coercing her to have an abortion, thus bringing his current number of (known) lies about his schooling, business, children and intrepid service on Paw Patrol to...8,472, we think. The vital, potentially Senate-flipping race for Georgia's Senate seat remains (WTF) too close to call. But Walker has pulled slightly ahead, never mind he's an incoherent, ignorant clown who embodies everything the party of alleged family values decries: He has an unseemly history of violent criminal behavior, he had often-abusive relationships with multiple women, he abandoned multiple children whose existence he tried to hide even as he preached about the evil of absentee Black fathers, and now he's apparently helped, per the GOP's fanatical, perfidious world view, murder at least two more of his children while persistently lying about it. He's also a longtime friggin' Texas resident, recruited by the GOP mostly for his deep tan; still, he told Fox News, he "always thought about Georgia," so there's that. Good thing the GOP is so laser-focused on preserving the patriarchal order, and they have no shame.

SAY WHAT? - Even as deaths mount from violent attacks by security forces sometimes firing live ammunition, tens of thousands of unwavering Iranians are still taking to the streets to protest the murder by Iran's "morality police" of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini - for the crime of improperly wearing her hijab - and, increasingly, to call for the end of their country's brutal regime. This week, huge women-led crowds again defied police to commemorate the 40th day since Amini's death, a key Shiite Islam tradition. As thousands traveled to her grave in her Kurdish hometown of Saqqez to grieve, pay their respects, and furiously chant "Death to the dictator!", Iranian forces fired both live rounds and tear gas at them. Six weeks after her death, similar scenes played out the same day across the country as police opened fire on massive crowds of protesters still there, still chanting, "We will fight, we will die, we will take back Iran."

SAY WHAT? - Predictably, the debate between Pennsylvania's John Fetterman and New Jersey carpetbagger Mehmet Oz turned into a Rashomon-like affair of wildly disparate responses, notably to Fetterman's post-stroke struggle to fully regain speech - though plainly not cognition, as in, "It's the Oz rule: If he’s on TV, he’s lying.” With Fetterman's sometime pauses and stumbles the focus of much gawking, some deemed his appearance "a Rorschach test of comfort with disability (in) a culture of sound bites, mic drops and clapbacks," especially in contrast to a fast-talking, smoothly-seasoned TV doctor. There was harsh coverage- "journalist" and Ann Coulter fan-girl Olivia Nuzzi found Fetterman "absolutely painful to watch" - but also praise from advocates, $2 million in donations, and empathetic push-back on "explicit and deliberate ableism." People lauded Fetterman's transparency on a difficult recovery, his bravery in going ahead with a debate, and his frequent, still-cogent zingers: "One of us is running to serve Pennsylvania, and one of us is running to use Pennsylvania." One observer found it "less painful and off-putting" to watch Fetterman's halting speech than Oz' "cruel and smirking jabs," though alas, for a good segment of today's voters, "cruel and smirking works well." "He's perfectly capable of doing the job, but he has a disability that's 'unseemly,' so the pundit class has to treat him as if he's incapable," went one response. Another: "Welcome to being a disabled person in America."

SAY WHAT? - GOP Florida Senator, walking empty suit and "pathetic liar" Lil' Marco Rubio is looking like a wet pale bath towel hung out to dry this month after two blistering public encounters with very different but equally fierce critics. Running for a third term in the Senate - even though he was sick of it until he got beat by Trump and galvanized by his state's 2016 Pulse Nightclub shooting which he then did "nothing" about maybe because he's missed almost four times more roll call votes than other lawmakers - he faced off this week against incendiary Democratic Rep. Val Demings in their only debate, much of which he spent gazing sullenly down at his lectern looking like his mom was yelling at him. Wonkette's very fine headline: "Val Demings Performs Live Weasel Dissection in Florida Debate." To his shame if he had any, Rubio took far-right positions on both big issues of the day - abortion and guns - but clumsily scrambled not to admit it; confronted on abortion, he said he's "100% 'pro-life'" but repeatedly dodged questions about a national ban without exception, which he's said he supports. "He can make his mouth say anything today," snapped Demings. "He is good at that, by the way. What day is it and what is Marco Rubio saying?" Then she furiously ripped the stance he denied he had: "No, Senator, I don’t think it’s OK for a 10-year-old girl to be raped and have to carry the seed of her rapist...I don’t think it’s OK for you to make decisions for women and girls." One observer, "I wouldn't trust him to make decisions about cereal."

SAY WHAT? - Because evidently nothing is sacred, Alaska’s Katmai National Park officials for the first time uncovered nefarious ballot-stuffing by unknown persons (probably Antifa) in this year's wildly popular Fat Bear Week before crowning a chonky new winner: salmon-scarfing, 1,400-pound Bear 747, aka "Bear Force One." Amidst the world's sorrowful ecological news - like the recent World Wildlife Fund's Living Planet Report that found a devastating 70% decline of wild animals since 1970 in what has become a "fast-emptying ark" - wildlife officials fete the Fat Bear contest as a welcome "celebration of success and survival," a tribute to "the resilience, adaptability and strength of Katmai’s brown bears," along with the park's flourishing ecosystem. Begun as Fat Bear Tuesday in 2014, the contest has blown up into a week-long, knock-out, march-madness-style battle that last year drew almost 800,000 impassioned votes to determine which bear has bulked up the most to prepare for winter. Each spring, the bears emerge hungry and emaciated from hibernation, when they can lose up to one third of their body weight. Each summer, Katmai officials explain, "Bears gorge on the richest and most easily obtainable foods they can find. In Katmai National Park, that most often means salmon" - up to 500 pounds of it, mostly at the salmon-teeming Brooks River where dozens of bears regularly gather to plump up before entering their dens. For bears, they say, "Fat equals survival."

SAY WHAT? - Honestly, we dunno if there's any good or godly reason to go there, stomach-churning as it is, but what the fuck is wrong with these sick soulless cretins like Alex Jones and Sean Hannity whose sole purpose in life is evidently to cause pain, stir chaos and otherwise mess with what one rightly horrified observer calls "the very underpinnings of civilization...the gestalt of the social universe"? On Wednesday, a Connecticut jury ordered far-right psychopath Alex Jones and his heinous Infowars to pay a $965 million penance to the families of young Sandy Hook victims for a decade - their kids would be teenagers now if not slaughtered - of trauma and terror and grief upon grief. As the verdict was read - 15 plaintiffs awarded from $28 million to $120 million each - the families quietly wept, bowed their heads, reached out to each other. And in a split-screen video, a deeply demented Jones cackled through a live-stream, grotesquely cheering on each award - "Yes! Get those numbers up!" - like a fat witless ghoul, pausing only to hawk diet supplements. What the ever-loving fuck. Parkland father Fred Guttenberg captured the all-round revulsion: "Alex is a scum-sucking low-life dirtbag who deserves his place in hell." One wistful observer, skeptical of a smiting God: "I actually wish I believed in hell just so Alex Jones could go there."

SAY WHAT? - It's an apt day to pay tribute to Native American actress and activist Sacheen Littlefeather, who died earlier this month after a lifetime of "keeping my voice and the voices of (our) people alive" - most famously, in a commanding, 60-second speech at the 1973 Academy Awards when she rejected an award on behalf of Marlon Brando to protest "the treatment of American Indians (by) the film industry." A 26-year-old member of the Screen Actors' Guild, she was the first woman of color and the first indigenous woman to use the Awards to make a political statement - now, a common gesture, but at the time a radical act by a gutsy young woman who'd lived a hard life "between two worlds." Her father was a mix of Apache and Yaqui, her mother was white, both were mentally ill and unable to care for her; in her teens, confused about her identity, she'd had a breakdown: "I could not tell the difference between me and my pain." But amidst the birth of a Native American rights movement in the 1960s and early 70s, she began visiting reservations, traveling to activist actions and re-learning Native traditions: "The old people...taught us young people how to be Indian again. It was wonderful."

SAY WHAT? - The shiny, sordid, calamitous political spectacle and immorality tale that is Herschel Walker's Senate campaign is still unspooling after the predictable revelation the hard-core "pro-life" philanderer with (at least) three covert kids paid for a girlfriend's abortion, and likely more than one. Despite his campaign's dubious boast that Walker's messy, violent, fabrication-filled past reflects his "commitment to excellence," his effort to unseat the decorous and competent incumbent Raphael Warnock to flip Georgia - and possibly, scarily the Senate - back to red has been a train wreck of lies, gaffes, dodges and unintelligible word saladabout China's bad air stealing our good air because, no, obviously, as a psycopathic loser he is not fit to serve tea, never mind in Congress, but since when has that stopped Republicans? On Monday, The Daily Beast's meticulously documented bombshell charged that Walker - a rabid fan of forced birth who's repeatedly said he's never abetted an abortion and who's dismissed exceptions for rape, incest, or the life of a mother as “excuses” - paid for a 2009  abortion for a woman he got pregnant. Walker, unmarried at the time, told the woman it wasn't "the right time for him to have a child"; he failed to tell her he'd already fathered a child that year with someone else. The woman told Daily Beast that after months of hearing Walker compare abortion to murder, "I just can't with the hypocrisy anymore."

SAY WHAT? - In resistance both poignant and enraged, thousands of Iranians - largely women but also many men - have thronged the streets for the last two weeks to protest the murder in police custody of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old  Kurdish woman reportedly beaten to death after being arrested by Iran's brutal "morality police" for... improperly wearing the hijab. From the northwestern city of Saqez, Amini was visiting Tehran with her family Sept. 13 when she was arrested by the officially named Guidance Patrol, who enforce the Islamic Republic's strict dress code, for  "unsuitable attire." Her family were told she would be released from the police station after a “re-education session.” Instead, eyewitnesses said police beat her in the police van, and again at the station. Amini collapsed a few hours later, was taken to Kasra Hospital, fell into a coma, and died three days later. Police say she suffered sudden heart failure; her family say she had no heart problems, a leaked medical report showed severe head injuries and skull fractures, and seemingly everyone in Iran except those in power believe Amini was murdered by the state agents of “a monster which came out from the deepest and darkest cave of religious fanaticism.”

SAY WHAT? - As always, the competition was stiff. But this week's Head-Spinning Right-Wing Hypocrisy Award goes to former A.G., longtime fan of mass incarceration, and egregious, serial abuser of the prosecutorial power of office as a political weapon Bill Barr, who went on the T.V. - Fox, duh - to whine that New York A.G. Letitia James suing the Trump Mafia was an "abuse of office" and "political hit job" that "grossly overreaches when she tries to drag the children into this." Whew. There are so many layers of irony, fraudulence, hilarity and out-and-out dickishness here - where to begin? James' 220-page lawsuit, the result of years of exhaustive investigation, found that for decades Trump committed even more "staggering" criminal fraud than everyone thought, issuing annual financial statements packed with lies that wildly inflated the worth of almost all his crappy properties - for example, tagging the gaudy Mar-A-Lago as worth $739 million when its actual worth was maybe $75 million - to get loans, while simultaneously deflating them to avoid paying taxes.

"With the help of his children and senior executives at the Trump Organization," James said after the lawsuit was filed, "Donald Trump falsely inflated his net worth by billions of dollars to unjustly enrich himself and cheat the system." Of course his "children" - endangered animal-killer Don Jr., 44, fashion grifter and icky daddy's girl Ivanka, 40, doofus Eric who stole money from a kids' cancer charity and took the 5th over 500 times in a deposition for the suit though "only the Mob takes the 5th," 38 - are almost middle-aged executives of a multi-million company they helped manage while raking in millions from it, and oh yeah one was a "senior presidential adviser." Still, Barr argued in laughably patronizing fashion, none had the smarts to understand things like loans or contracts or financial statements: "The children aren't going to know the details of that, nor are they expected in the real world to do their own due diligence." And besides, Hunter Biden.

SAY WHAT? - Whoa. The frenzied, hateful, gonzo base - in thrall to a cheap con man they blindly deemed "a vessel for God" - albeit a smiting, lying, transactional, grifting one - was always bad. Now, it's worse. Like, Leni Riefenstahl worse. With the pressure mounting - lawsuits, prosecutors, a Jan. 6 Committee bearing down - a flailing Trump has veered sharply to the right, threatening mob-style "problems like we've never seen" and posting brazenly QAnon-flavored missives and photos, including one sporting a "Q" lapel pin with, "A storm is coming." Subtle. Aptly, he ended "the week he went QAnon" with a feverish, hate-spewing rally in Youngstown, Ohio. Ostensibly there to endorse cracker Senate candidate J.D. Vance - ever-gracious, he sneered, "J.D. is kissing my ass" - he was really there to rave, literally. Ulysseus? Introduced by an equally demented Klan Mom MTG - he is the GOP's "one true leader" and God help us all - he railed to the less-than-massive crowd about a fictional America in ruins: No border, invasion by "millions of illegal aliens," crashing economy, enemy-of-the-people media, "horrible convicts," spying Obama, an "unhinged persecution." Aaron Rupar - thanks again for sitting through this - summarized the tired jeremiad: “Murders, shootings stabbings, r-r-r-rapes, carjackings are skyrocketing.”

SAY WHAT? - On a good day for duplicitous zealots peculiarly fixated on controlling women's bodies, Lindsey Graham, a childless, partnerless ghoul who's never experienced any pregnancy welcome or not, proposed a nationwide abortion ban backed only by a tiny, rabid minority that four months ago, and many times before, he insisted he opposed in the name of evidently fictional "states' rights," offering up a mountain of lies, dodges, racist taunts and delusional gobbledygook in a hapless attempt to mask his hypocrisy. Graham boasted his "Protecting Pain-Capable Unborn Children from Late-Term Abortions Act," a title he may have swiped from John Cleese, reflects "a consensus view by the most prominent pro-life groups in America," seemingly unaware that, ideologically, the most prominent pro-life groups in America reside many thousands of self-righteous miles to the right of a majority of Americans, roughly 70% of whom have long supported the right to abortion. (For proof, see even Kansas for God's sake.) The ban is also, in name and intent, a lie. "Pain-capable" fetuses at that stage, according to vast medical evidence, do not exist; and 15 weeks into a 40-week pregnancy - or two months before a fetus is viable - is not "late term," again according to established medical terminology or any pregnant woman who's tried to comfortably sleep in, say, her ninth month.

SAY WHAT? - High-minded, big-hearted, deeply substantive: We love the lofty tenor of our national political discourse. Just kidding. Aristotle's sanguine tenet, "They should rule who are able to rule best," is forcefully refuted by the Senate race in "the perennial battleground state" of Pennsylvania, where ill-equipped, pill-pushing, uber-rich clown and GOP candidate "Doc Oz in his Gucci loafers" has plunged ever deeper into the gutter with multiple debacles in his campaign against the "unapologetically progressive" John Fetterman. To wit: Oz' inflation-themed grocery shopping trip to "Wegner's" to make crudités - Fetterman: "In Pennsylvania, we call this a veggie tray" - got so badly burned it sparked a parody site. Then he mis-counted the houses he owns, claiming two when public records show it's 10; they include a Palm Beach mansion he calls "my 'chi' source" that just earned him a bigly tax exemption after a multi-million-dollar renovation paid for by years on TV hawking fake miracle cures, also hydroxychloroquine. After he crassly mocked Fetterman's May stroke - an "unconscionable" act that "goes against every tenet of medicine" - 100 doctors launched "Real Doctors Against Oz," blasting his slimy history of peddling "dangerous fad diets" and "using his medical degree (as) an ATM for personal gain," and declaring him "a major threat to public health" for his opposition to abortion. The final cringe factor: A re-surfaced interview in which he proclaimed incestuous, possibly under-age, sex between cousins "not a big problem...It's fine."

SAY WHAT? - Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand on Wednesday joined several local New York Democrats in condemning Starbucks' recent firing of two union leaders in the state, part of a string of terminations the company has carried out across the country in recent months as it tries to crush worker organizing.

"We are writing to express our dismay around the firings of Austin Locke and Joselyn Chuquillanqui, two Starbucks partners who were also union leaders at their stores," the New York lawmakers wrote in a letter to Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz and the rest of the company's management.

"We have heard reports that the company has been targeting pro-union partners and firing union leaders all over the country," they added. "We continue to stand by these workers and would like to remind you that all workers have the right to join a union, and that retaliation based on exercising these workplace rights is unlawful."

"We urge you to respect workers' right to organize and follow the law," the lawmakers continued. "We stand in solidarity with Austin and Joselyn, and other partners in New York, in calling for you to reinstate these two workers."

Starbucks has fired dozens of union leaders across the nation since December, when employees in Buffalo voted to form the company's first union in the U.S.

SAY WHAT? - Oh dear. Even though they've spent the last furious year shrieking "Fuck Joe Biden" at the guy they revile as a decrepit, Nazi, grooming, socialist pedophile, the sleepy old man evidently hurt the poor MAGA cultists' fragile feelings the other night in Philly with his "earthquake of truth" speech correctly labeling them "a threat to this country" and "semi-fascist," but why he bothered with "semi" is beyond us. Standing before a red-lit Independence Hall, Biden noted this was where the Constitution was written, "where we set in motion (this) extraordinary experiment of self-government with three simple words: 'We, the People.'” But now "equality and democracy are under assault," he warned. "Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic." In his truth-telling, Biden noted, "Too much of what's happening in our country today is not normal," like the spectacle of the former Mobster-In-Chief still out here babbling that the Jan. 6 thugs are "very much in my mind" and if he's re-elected he would "look very, very strongly" (he still doesn't know any other adverbs) at pardoning them all from his prison cell.

SAY WHAT? - In our own ongoing "national security Hindenburg," a fed-up FBI just explosively got down to it in their latest filing against the deranged old man who stole state secrets after committing many, many other crimes, brazenly stashed them in his moldy hotel because lookit all the tawdry stuff he already got away with, and then kept/still is lying about it. A review in case you've once again sought solace under your rock: After Trump blithely, illegally took home a stash of classified information, he and his hapless merry-go-round of "lawyers" stonewalled the FBI for 18 months as they tried to get it back; when they issued a subpoena, he tossed them a few in January but kept obfuscating; when the FBI, no longer fucking around, got a search warrant, they found 33 more boxes with over 100 records, or double what he'd begrudgingly given them; he's still fighting/lying/making up gonzo arguments to get them back. Prosecutors' latest 36-page earthquake of a filing came only because Trump, in one more desperate, stupid stall, had filed his own incoherent request for an entirely pointless "special master" to oversee the investigation, thus giving the feds a chance to lay out their most comprehensive, damning, whoah-go-get-him account yet. 

SAY WHAT? - Citing the need to "reflect on the terrible toll of slavery," Joe Biden last weekend observed this country's first Slavery Remembrance Day, marking the "ignominious milestone" of the day in 1619 when the first slave ship, the British White Lion, landed in the American colonies at Virginia's Point Comfort. (Surreal names, all.) "More than 400 years ago, twenty enslaved Africans were forcibly brought to the shores of what would become the United States," Biden said in a statement. "Millions more were stolen and sold in the centuries that followed, part of a system of slavery that is America’s original sin." The official recognition of those "sins worth hiding" came as a result of a bill introduced by Dem Rep. Al Green of Texas and Sen. Elizabeth Warren; it has passed in the House but will likely languish in the Senate. In their statements, Warren and Biden both pointedly reject the right's current white-washing of history. Warren: "The horrors of slavery can never be forgotten." Biden: "Great nations don’t hide from their history. They acknowledge their past, both the triumphs and the tragedies."

SAY WHAT? - Reproductive rights advocates on Wednesday warned that pregnant people across Texas are now at risk of facing life-threatening health crises without access to emergency abortion care, following a ruling by a federal judge who rejected guidance from the Biden administration.

U.S. District Judge James Hendrix's ruling Tuesday night rejected guidance issued by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) that—regardless of the state's abortion ban—would require Texas doctors to perform abortions in the case of a medical emergency.

Following the overturning of Roe v. Wade by the Supreme Court's right-wing majority in June, HHS issued guidance saying the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA) requires medical professionals to provide abortion care to a pregnant patient experiencing a medical emergency.

The 1986 law requires anyone who comes to a hospital's emergency department to be "stabilized and treated," and the Biden administration argued that abortion care qualifies as stabilizing treatment for a pregnant person in a medical crisis.

Hendrix, who was appointed by former Republican President Donald Trump, sided with Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and two doctors' associations in Texas which support forced pregnancy.

The ruling was handed down a month after the story of Houston resident Elizabeth Weller became public. Weller experienced a premature rupture of membranes at 18 weeks of pregnancy, causing her own health and that of her fetus to decline. Weller was told that under Texas's abortion ban, she would have to wait until the fetal heartbeat stopped before having a medical abortion, even as her condition worsened. An ethics committee at her local hospital eventually determined she could receive care—after an ordeal she described to NPR as a "dystopian nightmare." 

SAY WHAT? - Because girls - also young, progressive, female political leaders - just wanna have fun, video emerged last week of Finland's Prime Minister Sanna Marin on a night out joyously dancing, singing, drinking and getting down with friends, a spectacle of glad normalcy that horrified dour male misogynists who harrumphed this was Just Not Done. Cue the ensuing "absolutely stupid political scandal" known as Partygate, a "very classic 'Finnish scandal,' which is actually not a scandal at all but because Finnish politics tend to be so uptight and slightly boring you have to get creative to stir things up." At 36, Marin is the world's youngest head of state; raised by two women, she is also a fierce supporter of LGBTQ rights, the happily married (straight) mother of a four-year-old, and the  multi-faceted, competent leader of a majority-women government who since being elected two years ago has successfully advocated for Finland to join NATO and navigated growing tensions with neighboring Russia after their invasion of Ukraine - all while periodically taking time out to attend music festivals, looking very cool yet. Still, because misogyny, Marin has been criticized for having a life beyond work; in the recently leaked video, she was filmed rowdily singing and dancing with several friends in the private VIP room of a nightclub in Helsinki.