Weekend sensibilities this late-afternoon Saturday here in California’s Central Valley with nice weather coupled with seemingly not much way-horrible news makes relaxing sense.

Yet even some good news was reported just a short while ago — a police surveillance team in Stockton, a city about an hour’s drive from where I’m located, has arrested a suspect in a six murders serial killings case that’s put the town on edge (I posted earlier this month on the situation). Stockton Police Chief Stanley McFadden (CNN): ‘“His patterns were consistent with some of the patterns that we have seen … (He was) around parks, around dark places, stopping, looking around, moving again. And at that point, we thought, for the safety of the public, it was best to take this person in … We are sure we stopped another killing,”‘

No motive ascertained so far and the guy is scheduled to be arraigned this Tuesday.

Meanwhile, the midterms are still hurtling towards us — as of right now there are 23 days until Nov 8. when we hit the voting booth in probably one of the most consequential elections in American history, at least as far as I can remember, going back to the early 1960s when I became conscious of American politics with Democrat and Republican parties.
Mainly due to the rot of the GOP — not the party now of Goldwater, or even Nixon, but horribly cruel crazies
A blurb note from The Washington Post this afternoon:

As the campaign heats up in the final weeks before November’s midterm elections, so have overt appeals to racial animus and resentment. And the toxic remarks appear to be receiving less pushback from Republicans than in past years, suggesting that some candidates in the first post-Trump election cycle have been influenced by the ex-president’s norm-breaking example.

“Anybody who’s got a title in the party could say something — senator, governor, anybody,” said Michael Steele, a former chair of the Republican National Committee, who noted a deafening silence in the party after Tuberville’s comment. “Anyone could stand up and say, ‘Can we stop this please?’ But they won’t.”

Asshole Tommy Tuberville at a T-Rump rally in Nevada proclaimed black people are criminals. As par for the swing of the Republican party via the MAGA hatters, there’s a sweet pitch to inhabitants of the shitty side of the street.
While scrolling the news this afternoon, I did come across this tweet from Steve Schmidt, the Republican party strategist who is way-anti-Trump nowadays, and the horror and fright of the upcoming election
A lot rests on the outcome, but Schmidt deadpans history as nightmare:

“There is a simple truth about this moment. The United States has more political extremism today than it did on January 6, 2021. The water has gotten hotter. The political climate is becoming more extreme and dangerous.”https://t.co/Eqv4dx8Ann

— Steve Schmidt (@SteveSchmidtSES) October 15, 2022

Schmidt’s The Warning newsletter earlier today in its entirety:

There are 25 days remaining until Election Day. The United States has two major political parties. They are the first- and third-oldest organized political parties in the world.

The Republican Party, founded in 1854, was formed to stand against human slavery and end it. Abraham Lincoln was the first Republican President. Ulysses Grant was the second. Today, the Republican Party has become the home to Donald Trump and his MAGA movement. Functionally, the party has abandoned its commitment to democracy, pluralism and equality under the law and US Constitution in favor of absolute obedience to Trump and his demand for unearned political power.

When Trump descended his Trump Tower escalator and declared himself a candidate for the presidency it was a lonely ride. Everyone laughed. He was called a clown and a joke by an overwhelming percentage of the US electorate and nearly every single elected Republican officeholder was repelled by him. Most everyone laughed at the orange-tinted reality show star as he ranted and raved and called into the morning political shows while lying in bed.

The political journalists who covered Trump couldn’t look away. Nobody could. CNN filled its airwaves with his loyalists who would apologize and gaslight away every insane utterance he made. The “experts” said his ceiling was 10 per cent. Then it became 20 per cent. Next, it was 30 per cent. When it was certain that he would become the GOP nominee, there were months of idiotic conversations that played out on TV that said there would be a brokered convention and that he would never be the nominee.

Then it was said that he could never be elected president, and then he was.

One of the dream-like objects the past seven years or so (maybe back to Sarah Palin in 2008, or maybe Reagan in 1980, whenever) is the sense of history being lopsided and unreal, with the T-Rump making such a destructive impact on America — he made it okay to be an asshole and a supporter of shitty-horrible ideas and policies  (See this story at Mediaite this afternoon with a similar theme: ‘“Hey, I didn’t know I could vote for a racist. This is great!”‘).

All-in-all, once again here we are…

(Illustration out front: Edvard Munch‘s ‘The Scream,’ lithograph version, found here.)