186 Comments

I canceled my subscription to the Post immediately after Bezo's act of cowardice.

HOWEVER, I really only wanted to leave a comment on the awesome photos of your dogs. I have had dogs for 50 of my 75 years and the first was a German Shepherd. Thanks for all that you write!

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Of course. Once on Trump’s hit list, people who want his favor again will forever after walk around with a brown face for all to see.

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Aka “Anticipatory Obedience.”

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Charlie: !!!

Had to share. Thanks for your clear-eyed commentary.

https://open.substack.com/pub/johnnogowski/p/remembering-what-we-wereand-need

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And still 48% of us cheer and roar for more of the same. All I can say is “ Just wait…your turn is coming!”

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I guess the one silver lining here, if there is one to be found,i s that everyone who reads the Washington Post and has half a brain knows that the editorial board at the Post are themselves endorsing Hsrris, regarding of what is printed in the paper. So, while I think Bezos’s capitulation is pure cowardice and subversive, I question how much the lack of an endorsement really matters when it comes to getting votes.

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Thanks Charlie for the infantile, penile photo and text regarding Bezos' junk. Since he bent the knee to The Donald maybe The Donald will rename the Washington Monument for Bezos' junk and not Arnold Palmer's!

A Few Thoughts From A Geologist:

https://substack.com/@rbdgeologist1/p-148559426

https://substack.com/@rbdgeologist1/p-149885543

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This is what is coming if Trump/Vance are elected. Threaten corporations into compliance. DeSantis tried this with Disney. The Georgia legislature tried this with Delta. At the end of the day, corporations have to play to their customers and employees. Disney canceled the move of 2000 high paying jobs to Florida. The PR around this hurt the tourism economy. Orlando politicians freaked out. Let’s watch Amazon sales and memberships, not so much Post subscriptions.

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Safe travels! Thank you sir for everything!

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Charlie, you need to get out more, read others who may disagree with you about what ails the Republic. Take Ambassador Charles Freeman, who bluntly states neither party has addressed the fundamental issue, that the overwhelming majority of Americans think that the elites who run the country are oblivious to their concerns. People support Trump because they feel they have been shafted over the past thirty years by both the George W. Bush Republican Party and the Bill Clinton New Democrats, and they hunger for revenge. I, for one, have a hard time disagreeing with them. I am the beneficiary of the golden age of American labor, the period between 1948 and 1970 when people like my Dad, who earned a postal worker’s wage, could raise a houseful of kids, buy a modest house, while my mother went to work only when their children finished grade school. Try that today. You will be crap out of luck. Who exactly has benefited since Bill Clinton was elected until today? Not the bottom sixty percent of the country. The American dream? Forget about it. Clinton and Bush presided over the economy becoming more driven by financial services, and less driven by manufacturing actual products, de-industrialization. Who benefited? Who benefited from the globalization fad? Not those who saw their good- paying jobs get shipped overseas. Who took the hit when the frauds of Wall Street tanked the economy during the 2008 meltdown? Hint! It wasn’t the SOB’s who caused the crisis, but the ones who suffered downstream. Think about it. At the height of COVID, we could not get hospital masks and other PPE from domestic sources, but had to get in line with everyone else in the world for the Chinese to come to our rescue. What a disgrace. Are you aware of the extent to which the USA depends on China-sourced components of our military’s high-tech weapons? Who the hell is running this show? And my absolute favorite, spending a trillion dollars per year projecting military power all over God’s green earth while spending damn little preparing for increasingly epic natural disasters that hit us at home. Anybody thrilled with the response to Hurricane Helene? While we ignore the need at home to prepare and then respond to once freak but now common weather and fire events, we are spending ourselves into the poorhouse pursuing global military supremacy. Give it a decade or so, and we will have maxed out our national credit card, and then we will face the mother of all financial meltdowns.

Excuse the rant, but neither political party has the mojo necessary to address our stark need for a fundamental change in our national priorities. Our social contract is in shreds. Our elites, that is, the wealthy, could not care less about the penury their control of policy has created in the bottom sixty percent of Americans, and there is no Roosevelt anywhere in sight. Trump could have been a traitor to his class, but no, he just had to gift his uber rich friends with a massive tax cut, whose primary effect has been to balloon the deficit. We need more democracy, not less. Plus, he is a sore loser, the worst sore loser we have ever had. I really despise cry babies.

If the increasing brain-addled Trump, one cheeseburger away from a fatal heart attack, is the cleverly diabolical threat to our constitutional republic, then why oh why did the party self described as Democratic allow a self-appointed cabal to select its candidate through an entirely opaque process without the slightest tint of democratic legitimacy, no primaries, no open convention, no nothing. Sorry, dears, this smells to highest heaven. Deprived of my primary vote, this boy is not falling into line. And let’s face it, VP Harris is a terrible candidate. She brings new meaning to the phrase, “Can’t chew gum and walk at the same time.” Look deep into her eyes, you’ll find no political skills staring back. Truly listen to her interviews and her town halls. She can’t give straight answers to simple questions, let alone give a cogent and compelling explanation why the American people should entrust her with the awful responsibilities of the presidency. The reason a modern political party has primaries is to separate the one golden grain of wheat from the chaff of mediocrity. Candidate Harris, facing one of the greatest flimflam artists of the age, is simply out of her league. The jackasses who selected her as the nominee have committed a truly heinous act of political malpractice

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Thanks for starting with the dog pictures! They are much needed.

I envy you for being in France during the US election. I hope and pray that democracy wins and you can return home knowing the first page of the former guy’s era has finally been turned.

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Stunning frankness, Mr. Sykes. Cold hard truth. People cannot say they weren’t warned.

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How is it possible that radical red states like Mississippi are purging voters, and allowing people to masquerade as poll security when they will intimidate voters… where is the DOJ? Where is homeland security?

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Conservatives have pretended that free markets solved problems. Thus for any and every issue they have imagined that simply removing restraints would result in the best of everything. But look at us now. The concentration of power in large businesses has created a monstrosity where the very vehicles that should carry forward free speech are themselves restrained because they fear that their free speech will hurt their business prospects.

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I admire all of your work, Charlie and thank you for all you do for democracy

I'm jealous that you get to go away. Have a wonderful time with your family.

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Oct 27·edited Oct 27

I had tripped over the term “Capitulation” earlier today and made a few posts with it. The verbiage, with the “Premature” ejaculation added to it, is the perfect term to describe what the billionaire owners of WaPo and LAT have “pulled out” of their ass. I am coasting along today with the fantasy that MacKenzie Scott will wrestle WaPo away from her ex and immediately get the endorsement out.

Among the egregious results of the pullout is that DonOld gets to gloat that “Harris is so bad that even WaPo won’t support her."

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