Black Men Say What They Think of Project 2025

By Michael Woyton

A lot happened over the past few days that grabbed the headlines, including the convicted felon fake working during a fake shift serving fake customers at a closed fast-food restaurant and the same convicted felon in front of a rally with children present grinningly talking about the size of a dead golf legend’s putter.

But there really isn’t much time left — including today, there are only 16 days left to vote for president — to lose sight of the big picture.

Donald Trump is acting more bizarre by the day and has as Sen. JD Vance as a running mate who is eager to follow through with the GOP’s roadmap to tyranny, which is called “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise” or Project 2025. 

Subscribe for free:

I have no doubt that if Trump retakes the Oval Office the plan written by The Heritage Foundation will immediately go into high gear, gutting the civil service workforce and installing Trump loyalists at every level of government.

All of Project 2025’s almost 900 pages are available online for your perusal, but it is admittedly tough going. 

That is why it’s important to have people who have the time to delve into it and find ways to let the rest of us know what the right wing has planned should they seize power in January.

In this blog, we tried to present a few of those alternatives that present the highlights — low-lights? — of Project 2025 in order to give the public more information about how they will be affected in Trump/Vance land in the White House.

They included comic creators using their graphic talents, the threat to weather forecasting and a riff on Schoolhouse Rock.

One of the latest is via the urban entertainment website HipHollywood.com, founded by American television host Kevin Frazier.

HipHollywood spoke with Black men ages 18 to 65 and had them share their reactions to excerpts from Project 2025. The resulting video can be viewed below.

The various policies outlined in Project 2025 were broken don with the assistance of UCLA Professor Dr. Tyrone Howard.

Among the points the men discussed on camera were eliminating student debt forgiveness, killing the remaining people on death row and ensuring that nothing will prohibit workplace discrimination.

That last topic led one of the men to say, “I can’t imagine an adminstration that would take us back.”

A couple men were concerned about Project 2025’s ending Obamacare and Medicare and allowing insurance companies to deny coverage for pre-existing conditions.

The hits targeting health care made one man say that he was thinking about his grandparents. 

“My grandfather specifically,” he said. “This would directly affect him.”

Many if not all of the goals of Project 2025 would directly everyone — except the most well off, white and straight among us — which is likely the point of the whole Heritage Foundation agenda.

If you care about public education, public health, knowing when hurricanes are on their way, women’s right to control their own medical decisions, Social Security and marriage equality, to name just a few things, then there is no choice about whom to vote for president.

Don’t vote against your own best interests.

SEE ALSO: ‘There Is a Sane Vote Here’: Jon Meacham

Lead art: Screen grab from YouTube

Trump Uses Al Smith Dinner as Grudge Match

By Michael Woyton

The Al Smith Dinner should be retired, IMO.

It’s difficult to imagine that the fundraising that purportedly benefits Catholic charities in the Archdiocese of New York outweighs the public relations nightmare of having a convicted felon and adjudicated sex abuser insult people on the dais, using profanity, and a comedian referencing “grab ’em by the pussy” while mentioning immigrants in Springfield, Ohio.

Didn’t Cardinal Timothy Dolan learn anything from 2016 when Donald Trump was first running for president and was booed after broking with the good-natured humor tradition by tearing into then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton?

Subscribe for free:

According to The New York Times, the dinner hasn’t been the same since.

“Eight years later, the dinner he returned to was not the same,” the Times said. “Like so much else in the Trump era, the Catholic charity even had become savage, warped by blunt force politics.”

It was easy to tell who supported whom, the paper of record said.

“There were sycophants and there were outcasts. You could see the one who had submitted to Mr. Trump, sitting beside members of gorgonized establishment still unsure how to treat him, much less stop him,” the Times’s Shawn McCreesh wrote.

You know how you can stop him? Don’t invite him. It’s as easy as that. 

Watch videos from the 2024 Al Smith Dinner through this YouTube link.

Lead art: Screen grab from WFAA video at YouTube.

Comic Creators Explain Project 2025 in Graphic Form

By Michael Woyton

By now, with less than three weeks until the last day you can cast your ballot in the November general election, I hope you have heard of and tried to familiarize yourself with the 900-page Republican plan called “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise,” otherwise known as Project 2025.

Prepared by The Heritage Foundation, an ultra-conservative think tank, and written by many staffers of former President Donald Trump, it is nothing less than a roadmap for Trump or vice presidential candidate JD Vance to clean out Washington, D.C, of any dissenting voices and usher in an authoritarian government modeled after dictatorships.

But don’t take my word for it.

Subscribe for free:

According to USA Today, Project 2025’s site states, “If we are going to rescue the country from the grip of the radical Left, we need both a governing agenda and the right people in place, ready to carry this agenda out on day one of the next conservative administration.”

Among the tenets of the plan are reclassifying as many as 50,000 federal civil servants to political appointees, dismantling the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Education, eliminating the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and getting rid of the Head Start program.

To get more information out about Project 2025 and how it could affect Americans should Trump or Vance take over in January, comic creators gathered their forces to explain the radical plan that Project 2025 really is — but in comic form.

Stop Project 2025 is a collection of online comic strips that were created to “decode and explain what’s actually in the monolithic agenda”, according to Graeme McMillan of Popverse.

The comics feature 15 strips, with more to come, created by such artists as Jeff Parker, Steve Lieber, Matt Fraction, Gene Ha, Greg Pak, Zoe Tunnell and Cheryl Lynn Eaton.

In a statement provided to Popverse, the creators said they wanted “to stand up and shine a light on something we feel is a major problem — attempting to usurp our fundamental rights.”

They called Project 2025 a “terrifying blueprint of what the far right is trying to perpetrate against the freedoms of the people of the United States.”

On the Stop Project 2025 website, one can not only read the comics but also find information about registering to vote. The comics are also available to download as a PDF.

The creators explain on the website that the comics, hopefully, will explain the Project 2025 agenda, but also move readers to vote against it.

“We did this because you shouldn’t have to read this monstrosity. After all, it’s more than fifty times as long as the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution … combined,” they wrote, adding, “Project 2025 is longer because it’s a detailed plan to shut you up, and shut you out.”

The sections of Project 2025 that are graphically explained include anti-trans discrimination, authoritarianism, children, Christian nationalism, climate, education, the EPA, health care, immigration, internet freedom, police abuse and teachers. And the artists use footnotes to show they aren’t making up their points.

Here is a sample from the Children section:

Here is a sample from the Education section:

I really had a tough time selecting examples to illustrate what the creators did. It was overwhelmingly bleak, but it is extremely important to find out just what could be in store for the U.S. if Trump or Vance assume power.

And with Trump’s mental acuity under more scrutiny, there is a good chance that Vance could assume the office before we know it.

SEE ALSO: Hurricane Helene Good Reason to Keep NOAA and ‘Just a Little Paper for the Ages’: Project 2025

Lead art and comic illustrations: Screen grabs from StopProject2025Comic.org

Higher Turnout Will Favor Harris: Marist

By Michael Woyton

It sounds simplistic, but voter turnout from now to Nov. 5 will decide who wins the White House.

According to the latest Marist National Poll released Wednesday, higher turnout will likely favor Democratic presidential candidate Vice President Kamala Harris over Republican candidate former president Donald Trump.

The survey, conducted Oct. 8 through Oct. 10, found that Harris continues to lead Trump 52 percent to 47 percent among likely voters nationwide.

Subscribe for free:

That includes those who say they are undecided but are leaning toward a particular candidate, Marist said. Earlier in October, the candidates were separated by two points with Harris at 50 percent and Trump at 48 percent among likely voters.

Dr. Lee M. Miringoff, director of the Marist Institute for Public Opinion, there are two things to keep an eye on in the closing weeks of the presidential election.

“First, when you look at those who are likely to vote, Harris does better,” he said. “So higher turnout favors her.”

The second thing is the gender gap, Miringoff said, which should not be overlooked.

It is “unusually high, cuts both ways,” he said. “Trump carries men, and Harris carries women.”

The Marist National Poll found that Trump leads Harris 53 percent to 47 percent among men who are likely to vote while Harris has the advantage over Trump — 57 percent to 42 percent — among women.

Harris is favored over Trump when the Marist Poll divided the voters by generations: Gen X — Harris at 51 percent to Trump at 48 percent; Gen Z/Millennials, Harris at 53 percent, and Baby Boomers/Silent-Greatest Generations, Harris at 55 percent.

The poll also asked people how they intend to vote in the November election, and almost half — 47 percent — said they will show up to cast their ballots on Election Day.

Twenty-nine percent said they will vote at an early voting location, 24 percent said they will vote by mail or absentee ballot and 2 percent said they do not intend to vote. No one said they were unsure whether they would vote in the November election.

The Marist National Poll surveyed 2,021 adults who are 18 or older living in the United States. They were contacted by text or online.

Among likely votes, the partisan breakdown for the poll was 40 percent Democrats, 33 percent Republicans and 26 percent independents.

The margin of error is ±3.2 percentage points.

You can view the entire Marist National Poll here.

Lead art: Photo by Michael Woyton

‘There Is a Sane Vote Here’: Jon Meacham

By Michael Woyton

Historian Jon Meacham was selected by the family of George H.W. Bush to be the official biographer for the president. He as chronicled presidents from Jefferson to FDR to Andrew Jackson to Lincoln.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning writer has not been shy since the rise of Donald Trump on the political scene — and the threat to democracy he poses — about where his sentiments lie regarding the state of our nation and who should lead it.

During an appearance Monday on “Morning Joe,” Meacham made an impassioned statement about the upcoming election, saying that his political leanings haven’t moved. The political right has, though.

He weighed in with advice for those who haven’t quite made up their minds between the two major presidential candidates by saying that people should simply “vote for Harris.”

Meacham acknowledged that it likely is difficult for those who have never voted for a Democrat to do so.

He said we are in as important a test of citizenship as any moment he could think of in American history.

“There is a sane vote here and then there is risky vote,” Meacham said. “I just don’t see what’s the upside here of voting for Trump if you are in fact a center-right person or centrist — period.”

Please take 90 seconds and listen to Jon Meacham speak in the clip below

Lead art: Screen grab from MSNBC’s “Morning Joe”

Yes, Abortion IS on the Ballot in NY

Voters in New York have to flip over their ballots to weigh in on an amendment to the state constitution on abortion rights, though those in opposition say it’s something more ominous.

NBC News filed this:

One measure on the ballot in New York state this November means two very different things to its supporters and its opponents. 

The measure, Proposition 1, seeks to expand the state’s Equal Rights Amendment by adding “sex, including sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, pregnancy, pregnancy outcomes, and reproductive healthcare and autonomy,” as protected classes. The New York Constitution currently protects against unequal treatment based on race, color, creed and religion.

Advocates of the measure argue that it is simply a way to codify New Yorkers’ right to reproductive care. But, because the language of the proposition is vague and does not explicitly include the word “abortion,” opponents are arguing the measure has an ulterior motive: expanding transgender rights for minors and taking parental rights away. 

Read the entire article here.

Applications for early mail-in and absentee ballots can be found here. Early voting begins Saturday, Oct. 26.

Lead art: Screen grab of ballot from Dutchess County Board of Elections

During Detroit Economic Club Speech, Trump Insults Detroit

By Michael Woyton

How many times have you seen a comedian or a musician say, “It’s great to be in [name that city] today,” as a way to endear themselves to crowd?

Convicted felon and former president Donald Trump used a different tactic in the city of Detroit Thursday while holding forth at the Detroit Economic Club.

He chose to insult his host city of Detroit.

In a long, rambling — well, normal for him — speech, he talked about the threat Vice President Kamala Harris would bring, he believes, to the United States if she wins the 2024 presidential election, according to reporting in the Detroit Free Press.

Subscribe for free:

“The whole country is going to be like, you want to know the truth?” the Free Press quoted him as saying. “It’ll be like Detroit. Our whole country will end up being like Detroit if she’s your president. You’re going to have a mess on your hands.”

Trump went on to repeat his claim that Harris destroyed San Francisco, without offering any specifics.

The Free Press said that, while the audience didn’t appear to have any reaction to Trump’s remark about their city, some state and local leaders did.

Democratic Michigan House Speaker Joe Tate lit into the former president on the social media site formerly known as Twitter.

“Donald Trump might not remember where he is right now so here’s a quick reminder about what Detroit’s all about,” Tate wrote, adding that the city bounced back after Trump killed its jobs, closed its business and tried to throw out its votes.

The Atlantic contributing writer Jemele Hill posted on X with the suggestion that the clip of Trump’s remarks be plastered on billboards, television ads and elsewhere.

“He insulted the entire city and it isn’t the first time,” Hill wrote. “He’s invalidated Detroit voters countless times, and instructed his people to riot in Detroit over the vote count in 2020. For the Detroit Economic Club to invite this absolute clown to speak there is a slap in the face to all Detroiters.”

Elsewhere in his almost two-hour speech, the former president “drifted in and out of coherency,” according to reporting by The New Republic’s Edith Olmsted.

Among the rants and weaves — a word Trump uses to make excuses for his inability to put together coherent sentences — were such topics as Biden circles, the word “grocery,” rocket engines landing on a raft, Harris being “dumber than hell” and Democrats opposing proof of citizenship to vote in presidential elections, which is already required by the federal government.

Take a gander at the second clip below (I didn’t dare transcribe it):

Harris has been saying that people should really listen to what Trump says during his rallies and speeches. All too often what ends up in the press has been cleaned up drastically — or “sane-washed,” which is the term going around now.

Olivier Knox, of U.S. News & World Report said “sane-washing” is the way reporters covering Trump “sometimes take a rally speech filled with incoherent asides and falsehoods and deliver bite-sized news nuggets that don’t convey how wild the event was.”

Knox added as an explanation, not as a defense, that reporters are “trained to focus on the signal, not the noise.”

I would hope, after seeing the way President Joe Biden was treated by the press before he decided to withdraw from the race, that every verbal wandering, every lie and every mention of retribution — every noise — made by Trump be covered in the same way.

Our democracy depends on hearing what is actually being said.

Lead art: Screen grab from Right Side Broadcasting Network.

‘Who’s 3rd on Line?’; Trump Stumped on Succession

By Michael Woyton

One would think that after four years in office, in spite of being spectacularly disengaged from the actual workings of the presidency, that Donald Trump, who wants to win a second term in the White House, doesn’t know even one of the basics of the position.

During a phone interview with ultra right wing podcaster Ben Shapiro, the topic of removing President Joe Biden from office via the 25th Amendment came up.

Trump mused that maybe both Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris should be removed using the Constitutional process.

Subscribe for free:

“Who’s third on (sic) line?” Trump asked, astoundingly, with Shapiro chuckling and responding “the speaker Mike Johnson.”

https://twitter.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1843748590319218783

All right then — forget that we are in the final three months of Biden’s presidency, as well the fact that, under the 25th Amendment, the request for removal of a president in this case is unlikely to come from the vice president and a majority of principal officers of the Executive Department, and the majority party in the House of Representatives — hey there, third-in-line Johnson! — has shown no inclination to come back from recess early for other more pressing matters.

FYI: The question of who becomes president if both the sitting president and vice president can no longer serve, is one of the possible 100 civics questions those applying for citizenship could be asked as part of the naturalization test.

To be fair, that question is not one of the highlighted ones the United States Citizens and Immigration Services says those who are 65 years or older and have been a legal permanent resident of the country for 20 or more years need to study in order to pass the naturalization test.

Trump is, after all, 78 years old and has live in America more than 20 years.

This is not a normal election by any measure. The convicted felon — and his running mate — have lied time and again about matters that put American citizens at risk. And Hurricane Milton hasn’t yet made landfall.

When are we going to stop making excuses for Trump and grading him on a curve?

Lead art: Screen grab from the Ben Shapiro Show.

Harris Doesn’t Give Serious Interviews? Seriously?

By Michael Woyton

I know we won’t, but I will ask it anyway. Can we finally stop saying that Vice President Kamala Harris should do, won’t do or can’t do serious interviews?

Granted, most of those saying it are just pissed that the Democratic candidate for president won’t clear her extremely tight schedule for a sit-down with a reporter whose publication or outlet has done nothing but sane-splain the increasingly incoherent convicted felon and former president Donald Trump.

And then there’s Andrea Mitchell, who’s married to former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan, who on Sunday said that Harris has  a problem with men and the business world (to whom is Mitchell married?) and that the Veep needs to “double down on more interviews and serious interviews.”

I seriously doubt that Mitchell approves of the torrent of interviews Harris has undertaken and will undertake — with the likely exception of “60 Minutes” on Monday — over the past couple of days.

Subscribe for free:

“The Late Show with Steven Colbert,” “The View” and “The Howard Stern Show” are all scheduled for Tuesday. 

Uploaded Monday was an interview with podcaster Alex Cooper for her “Call Her Daddy” podcast, which is popular among Americans under 35 and especially younger women, NPR reported.. 

A clip of the podcast can be seen below, but it can be streamed or downloaded via such apps as Spotify and Apple Podcast.

For those who might say the podcast isn’t really a serious format and that Harris is surely wasting her time doing it, take a listen.

According to NPR, “Call Her Daddy” has an audience of which half identify as Democrats, a quarter as Republicans and 20 percent as independent. The largest portion of Cooper’s audience lives in the South, and appearing on the podcast gives Harris the opportunity to speak with younger people she hasn’t been able to reach elsewhere.

Some of the topics Cooper asked Harris about included women in abusive relationships, abortion access, the definition of family, younger people and the economy, tax credits for the middle class and student debt relief.

Howard Stern’s syndicated radio audience is about 10 million listeners. Cooper’s “Call Her Daddy” is second in size to Joe Rogan’s Spotify podcast. “The View” brings in around 2.3 million viewers among daytime network talk and news programs. Andrea Mitchell’s MSNBC noontime program is watched by an average of 634,000 viewers.

The bottom line is, Kamala Harris for real is sitting down and answering questions in complete sentences — unlike the other presidential candidate — and she is making the most of her valuable time in the last month before the election is over.

The interviews Harris has been giving are all audiences that are nothing to be sneezed at, and she would be remiss if she didn’t take advantage of the opportunities.

Lead art: Screen grab from “Call Her Daddy” YouTube page.

Trump Lies About Helene Response Hurt Those Who Need It

By Michael Woyton

People have long thought that convicted felon and former president Donald Trump will do and say anything to take over the White House once again, thereby avoiding going to jail.

Until recently, one of the most obvious things was scuttling a bipartisan border security bill, telling GOP leaders that it would give the Democrats a win and lessen his chances of victory by taking away the immigration talking point.

During a January Las Vegas rally, Trump told the crowd, “Please blame it on me,” according to The Washington Post.

Subscribe for free:

Then Hurricane Helene tore through southern states, jumping trillions of gallons of rain, and leaving at least 225 people dead and untold numbers unaccounted for.

Almost from the get-go, Trump and his MAGA followers began casting aspersions on the federal response to the second deadliest hurricane to hit the mainland United States since Katrina.

During a nearly two-hour rally Sunday in Juneau, Wisconsin, the Republican presidential candidate criticized the Biden administration’s response to Helene, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported.

He leveled the blame on Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential candidate, saying she left the victims stranded.

“This is the worst response to a storm or a catastrophe or a hurricane that we’ve ever seen,” the Journal Sentinel quoted Trump as saying. “And, you know, it’s a largely Republican area, so some people say they did it for that reason.”

Those comments come from man who, as president, delayed aid to Puerto Rico, withholding about $20 billion in funds following Hurricane Maria in 2017, NBC News reported.

A report from the Department of Housing and Urban Development Office of the Inspector General, released in April 2021, said there were “unprecedented procedural hurdles that produced delays in the disbursement of the congressionally approved funds,” NBC said.

Audits by the OIG said that Puerto Rico needed a better system for requesting federal grants and keeping track of them, but noted that Texas and Florida had similar issues, but their money wasn’t held up after disasters.

We won’t even talk about Trump tossing rolls of paper towels at struggling Puerto Rican hurricane victims, many of whom were still without electricity two weeks after Maria hit.

Some in the GOP are pushing back on Trump’s lies about the government’s disaster response.

U.S. Senator Thom Tillis, R-NC, said that that focus needs to stay on rescue and recovery operations, and “we don’t need any o these distractions on the ground. It is at the expense of the hard-working first responders and people that are just trying to recover their lives.”

CNN’s Daniel Dale put together a list of lies and distortions that Trump has continued to spread, calling the presidential nominee “one of the country’s leading deceivers on the subject.”

Among them are: Trump saying Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp hasn’t been able to get in touch with the president; Trump saying the administration’s response to Helene had “universally negative reviews”; and saying Harris spent all of the FEMA money on housing illegal migrants and that $1 billion of FEMA money is “missing.”

And Trump’s supporters are doing their part to spread the lies and try to dissuade anyone who may desperately need aid from trusting FEMA and the rest of the government.

It’s one thing for Trump to say that he only can fix everything he thinks is wrong with America or that Harris is “mentally impaired.” 

The man lied more than 30,000 times during his time in office. So what are the odds that he’s turned the page and is now telling the truth?

But the people affected by Hurricane Helene deserve better. They deserve the truth. The deserve help. 

They do not deserve the lies of Donald Trump that only are designed to help him.

HELPING VICTIMS OF HURRICANE HELENE:

Lead art: Screen grab from PBS News via YouTube