● I dunno about you, but I feel as though I can breathe again. Joe Biden announcing his withdrawal from the 2024 presidential race marked the first time I’ve felt upbeat about the November election.
● Kamala Harris is a spectacularly uninspiring speaker. That said, she just may be the perfect foil for Donald Trump, inasmuch as she’s a calm, cool, collected former prosecutor. Her best play over the next three-plus months is to hammer away at the ex-president’s lengthy record of spewing misinformation and outright fabrications, his criminal conviction, the civil judgements against him, his history of stiffing contractors, his numerous business failures, and his fraudulent “university” and “charitable” foundation. If she does this in an understated, relentless manner, she just might drive him to start raving like a maniac again.
● Secret Service boss Kimberley Cheatle has just resigned. Good. The single most important job of the Secret Service is to protect the president and candidates for the office. It didn’t do that on July 13th. And while nobody or no agency is perfect, the Secret Service’s miscue in allowing a lunatic kid armed with a high-powered rifle to take up a straight shot position on a roof overlooking the platform where Trump was speaking was inexcusable.
● Sticking with the assassination attempt, Biden flubbed it when he immediately declared confidence in Cheatle in the aftermath of the shot. That was as dumb as George W. Bush’s, “Brownie, you’re doin’ a heckuva job” remark even as millions tried to recover from Hurricane Katrina despite FEMA’s blunders.
● One last thought on the shot that bloodied Trump: I don’t buy that it was a bullet that hit his ear. A bullet fired by a high-powered rifle travels so fast, creates such a powerful localized field of atmospheric turbulence, and is accompanied by such a powerful sonic blast that if perchance the bullet did strike DT’s earflap, it would have knocked him clear off his feet, caused significant damage to that side of his face and head, sent him snoring with at very least the mother of all concussions, and even possibly causing potentially fatal brain damage. No, my guess is one of the bullets fired by the little bastard struck an object — perhaps a teleprompter screen — that shattered, with a shard hitting Trump.
● I’m betting Kamala Harris tabs PA Gov. Josh Shapiro as her VP running mate. Imagine: between the two of them, the 2024 Democratic pair will be Black, Indian, female, and Jewish. And you thought the most deplorable of the Trump basketful went apeshit over a nice, suburban, Anglo presidential candidate like Hillary Clinton in 2016. Just watch how they react to this year’s melting pot ticket!
● JB Pritzker, governor of my home state of Illinois, also has been mentioned as a possible Harris veep. Ain’t gonna happen, though. Fat people do not do well in national politics. In fact, the last two generally tolerated bigotries in this holy land are those targeting fatties and atheists. Anyway, have you heard Pritzker’s commencement address at Northwestern University in 2023? He speaks plainly and boldly about the different between kind people and, in his word, idiots. Here it is:
● Pritzker, Part II: I like him a lot. And I wouldn’t hold his girth against him. I just don’t like the idea of another billionaire running things.
● Tomorrow will mark the 55th anniversary of the splashdown of Apollo 11. Fifty five freaking years, people! For perspective, 55 years before that event in 1969 would have been — hold on a minute while I whip out my calculator — 1914. That was the year the first regularly scheduled airplane passenger service was initiated, connecting St. Petersburg and Tampa, a 23-mile air trek. Oh, and some loony Bosnian Serb nationalist shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, setting off the first of the 20th century’s two world wars. We are, to be sure, a confounding species.