Dear Everybody:
The big news today is a bombshell documentary called the Closetocracy–about Lindsey Graham:
–The documentary, which was just released online, has interviews with three male prostitutes, including one who was 17 at the time he had sex with Graham.
–In the interview with the underage prostitute, he says he was summoned to Arizona to have sex with Graham. He describes the sexual encounter in detail and says Graham demanded he promise him he was 18.
–The men all have receipts and tickets for travel to prove they’re telling the truth, although the media is saying “There is nothing conclusive that puts the men and Graham together.”
–One of the problems here is that rumors about Graham’s being a closeted gay man have followed him for his entire political career, though he always denied them. The other is that everyone has wondered what caused his sudden transformation from someone who was ready to impeach Trump into one of his biggest supporters after he spent time with Trump on a golf course, and this would provide an answer to that question.
The big news today continues to be Ramaswamy’s disgusting ad about Amy Acton, using her estranged mother to claim she was not raped as a child.
–In How Low Can You Go, Day Two news (or Reason #13,999 to despise JD Vance) news and just when you thought the whole Vivek Ramaswamy thing couldn’t get any worse, JD Vance decided to leap in with both feet.
–JD Vance: “Now the media and the Democrats in the state of Ohio are obsessed because Vivek Ramaswamy had the audacity to run a TV commercial which calls it out like it is and call Amy Acton a liar.” (Which means you think she’s a liar, too.)
–lesliead717: “Call it out like it is??? What the actual fuck. Trivializing a court documented case of the rape of Amy at 9-12 years of age is vile and JD will pay dearly for this.”
–cai: “Outright denial of crimes against a child.”
–Whatsnuts; “Enter the Epstein files.”
–He then went on to say, “When you’re mean to Amy Acton, she sics the American media and of course the Democrat Party operatives all across the state of Ohio after you. But I think a person who is more worried about whether somebody says something mean about them, that person can never serve in the governor’s mansion.” (Note: 1) Saying something mean to someone is “That dress makes you look dumpy,” not “You lied about being raped by your stepfather when you were a little kid.” And 2) Once again, people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. Trump is THE most thin-skinned person who ever lived and has actually sicced law enforcement and his ICE thugs on people who dared to say something mean about him.)
–Kevin Kruse: “Vance is in Ohio to support the Ramaswamy campaign, which is in hot water for an ad in which they promote a woman who sided with her husband after he was arrested for raping her 12-year-old daughter.”
–Aaron Rupar: “WOW–Vance DEFENDS Vivek’s reprehensible ad.”
–Side note: The music that JD Vance came on to was a song by Jerry Lee Lewis, who married his thirteen-year-old cousin. (You will never convince me that was a coincidence. And just in case you forgot, Amy wasn’t 13 or even 12–she was 9 years old when he started raping her.)
–David Yeplz: “Just when you think JD can’t be any more despicable.”
–As Sparks Fly Upwards: “Vance finally picks a side, and characteristically, it’s the wrong fucking one.”
–This We Will Defend: “Without any additional information, JD Vance sides with the wife of an indicted fugitive child sexual abuser over her own daughter, who bravely stood up and accused her stepfather of raping her from the age of 9 to 12. I believe the child. Republicans protect predators.”
–Catherine E. Cullen: “Between the appalling mess Ramaswamy’s campaign created in Ohio and the remarks of JD Vance when he attempted to defend (it), I can’t even begin to imagine anything low enough to call either of them.”
–Adam Parkhomenko and Sam Youngman: “Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised that the people who attacked the Capitol and routinely side with Putin are inhuman garbage, but we keep thinking there will be some point of degradation that is too far for even the creepiest Republican. JD seems happy to prove us wrong.”
–MM: “Imagine being the worst person who ever lived in Ohio when Jeffrey Dahmer lived in Ohio.”
In other Vivek Ramaswamy’s disgusting ad news:
–Ramaswamy continues to double down, saying, “She has no vision other than to complain about what someone else did to her.” (There are no words.)
–JD Vance isn’t the only Republican on board with Ramaswamy. Roger Stone (who did dirty tricks for Nixon before he started doing them for Trump) posted: “Turns out she’s been lying for personal gain.”
–Laura Loomer was loathsome, as usual: “Democrats told you to believe Brett Kavanaugh’s accusers and now they are telling you to believe Amy Action. I stand with Vivek Ramaswamy because I know white liberal women love lying about sexual assault.”
–Dan Bongino, who got fired from his job as head of the Border Patrol and likes wearing Nazi trench coats, jumped on board, too, saying “This is the most destructive political ad I have ever seen. How do you vote for this lady? It’s her mom.”
–Fox News’s Scott Jennings, who always defends conservatives said the ad “is not a confidence-inspiring item considering Jason Rantz won’t bite for him–I do think he could lead. But this shows he can’t.”
–The Columbus Dispatch just withdrew its endorsement of Ramaswamy: “The conduct of Vivek Ramaswamy in attacking his rival has been reckless, shameful, and unusually depraved. Therefore we are pulling our support of Ramaswamy and endorsing his rival, Amy Acton, instead.”
–Ohio’s Republican governor Mike DeWine told Ramaswamy to take down the ad. “It’s wrong to run this ad.”
–And former Republican Congressman from Ohio, Jim Renacci, said: “The floor may just have fallen out from under the Republican campaign for Ohio governor. And any Republican who fails to distance themselves from this ad risks taking on water as well.”
–When Ramaswamy tried to hold a campaign event, a furious heckler confronted him, shouting, “He raped her as a child! The child was 12 years old!” as security guards tried to remove him.
In Trump dementia/madness news:
–Trump is looking more confused at his events–not recognizing people and not knowing where to go. He is abruptly canceling events after only a few minutes. He was especially bad at a rally last night.
–At one point, in the middle of a sentence about Nikki Haley, he made a weird sound that was hard to describe. Some observers described it as a belch or a gag (or a frog-like sound) and others thought he was making an “ugh” type sound to describe how he felt about Haley, but the sound was clearly involuntary and something he seemed to be entirely unaware of.
–Republicans Against Trump: “WTF was that?”
–The NIH: “Weird or unexpected noises from a dementia patient are often a substitute for lost verbal communication, or a response to physical discomfort, anxiety, or environmental stimulation.”
–At another point, he started ranting about not winning the Nobel Peace Prize and then forgot what it was called. Trump: “I settled all these wars and they gave the wonderful peace prize, right? Does anybody know the name of that peace prize? The peace prize. They gave the Pulitzer Prize to that young lady.”
–Later on in the rally, he remembered the name and said, “But I didn’t get the Nobel Prize. I didn’t get the Pulitzer. I should have gotten the Pulitzer for writing, too. The people who got it shouldn’t have gotten it, you know? They got a Pulitzer Prize for their accurate and wonderful writing on the subject of Russia Russia Russia.”
–He also called his most ardent fans–the Front Row Joes–the “Front Row Jacks.”
–He used a new word–“impersonization,” and is slurring more than ever. He mangled the name “Cairness” into “Canichiovoi” and “Kearrinisass” before giving up.
–Trump: “I’m in a very good mood…the fake news would say he rambled. I don’t ramble. I got to know everything I’m doing. I got aptitude that they dream about. Why would I be unhappy?”
–Heather Delaney Reese: “Something is very wrong with what we are watching, and it keeps getting worse. He wandered through a ninety-minute speech saying things that made no sense at all.”
–Evvie: “From the way he was acting (this week), the dementia looks to be accelerating with the decline in his speech and appearance. As he grows more demented, he will grow more narcissistic.”
–Centrism Fan Acct: “His brain is just completely gone. It’s genuinely terrifying. And I don’t see how we get through the next few years.”
In Russia’s War on Ukraine news:
–Ukraine took down a Russian Su-30SM fighter jet.
–Ukraine hit the Nikolskoye LPDS, a major fuel pumping and storage hub in the Tambov region.
–Ukraine struck Ugie Telekom, a key communications operation in occupied Donetsk.
–All of Yalta in occupied Crimea is currently without electricity.
–And what’s Russia’s response to all this? They’re voting on a bill to rename Volgograd Stalingrad and St. Petersburg Leningrad. (Remind you of anyone?)
–Russian official Lavrov said that any peace deal had to mean the end of Zelenskyy’s regime–AND OF ZELENSKYY PERSONALLY.
–Ukrainian journalist Vitaly Portnikov: “Trump has always admired Putin…He never hides his strong sympathies for Putin, for Xi Jinping, for Kim Jong-Un. He’s always saying what great guys they are–first and foremost because they don’t have to listen to anyone. And Trump would love to be able not to listen to anyone. That stupid Supreme Court, those stupid Congress members, Democrats–they all get in his way. But no one is getting in Putin’s way. And that’s part of his worldview. First of all, he likes tough guys who can whack anyone they want–preferably with a cannon. Secondly, he is convinced that the world is divided among these three tough guys: himself as top dog; Putin, who is his role model; and Xi Jinping, whom he has to accommodate.”
–The Bulwark: “At this point anyone committed to Ukraine’s freedom and sovereignty must be committed to stopping Trump.”
In The Grift Goes on news:
–Remember how last week Alina Habba was accusing Ric Grenell of stealing a donation which she and her husband made to the Kennedy Center and keeping the money for himself? And then we found out that her husband was actually acting as a shell company for the Congolese government so they could make an illegal donation to Trump? Well, it gets better.
–Now we find out that Alina Habba was paid $50 million dollars to engineer a pardon for Julio Herrero Velutini, which she did. He got the pardon.
–The problem (or one of them)? She did it while she was working at the DOJ as a special government employee and a senior adviser to Pam Bondi. She had an office at the DOJ and a security detail of her own.
–Velutini hired her to be the general counsel at his company Concord Partners and agreed to pay her $50 million dollars a year for four years if she got him the pardon. Mere weeks after she began working there, she got a full and unconditional pardon for her boss.
–Alina Habba: “Any insinuation that my employment had anything to do with securing a pardon is false.” (Sure, Alina.)
–Raw Story: “Alina Habba may have just lit the fuse on the bomb that finally blows up Trump world.”
In What We’re Up Against news:
–During a town hall, Dem candidate El-Sayed was asked by an audience member named Tommy, “Will you disavow allegiance to the Muslim Brotherhood?” El-Sayed answered, “Yes, absolutely,” and the guy then asked, “Do you swear allegiance to the Constitution?” El-Sayed said yes to that, too, and showed the guy the copy of the Constitution he carried in his pocket, but the guy just kept asking, and this is where things got really interesting.
–El-Sayed asked the guy why he’d asked the question (and why he hadn’t asked anyone else in the room that question) and then said, “You’re asking because you assume I have some dual loyalty?” He compared himself to John F. Kennedy when he was running as a Catholic, and echoed what Kennedy had said, “I’m not running to be a Muslim senator. I’m running for the US Senator and happen to be Muslim.”
–El-Sayed’s calm and logical answers drew applause, and the exchange promptly went viral–and not in the way that “Tommy” intended.
–You can watch the entire exchange here if you haven’t already seen it on the internet (it went viral): https://x.com/AbdulElSayed/status/2111627277578731885
–It then developed that the guy who asked the question was the son of a Republican party operative who had run Bobby Jindal’s campaign, and that he (his name is Thomas Teepell) was the operations director for Missouri Republican Senator Josh Hawley and political director for Kansas candidate Philip Sarneck. He is a Christian nationalist and has ties to the movement. (Talk about allegiances!)
–And NOW we’re finding out that the conservative PAC America Next offered College Republicans (including Tommy Teepell) $200 apiece to boo El-Sayed at his town halls and ask provocative questions and that they are sending people to every one of El-Sayed’s events.
In promising news:
–Senate Republicans fear Mississippi is in play. (That’s right–MISSISSIPPI!)
–Daily Kos: “Much like yellowjackets, wasps, and mosquitoes start freaking out as the cold sets in, stinging and lashing out at everything in sight in a last-ditch bid for achieving something meaningful in their truncated lives, so goes the republican party. The media discussion right now is focused on blatantly transgressive and shameful video attack ads, bullshit accusations of familial, religious, and cultural treachery, and just simply over-the-top nastiness, all with one thing in common: they’re all coming from the right. All of them. Democrats aren’t generating this stuff. And that should tell you something. The GOP is losing it. And they should be. They’ve tied themselves to a cult, and the cult is breaking down.”
In historical news: Today marks the day the photocopier was invented, even though the idea was not developed into a working model until 1946. (I have a special fondness for the Xerox machine since I VIVIDLY remember the days when we had to make carbon copies of our stories to pass around to our writers’ group, and the poor person who got the third carbon copy couldn’t read the manuscript at all.)
In other news:
–New Mexico’s Attorney General filed a lawsuit against Epstein’s lawyer, Darren Indyffe, and his accountant, Richard Kahn, accusing them of helping Epstein finance and conceal his sex trafficking operation at the Zorro Ranch.
–Trump’s Truth Social keeps losing its audience. Traffic fell more than 30% this year, and the platform averaged 260,000 daily users in September, down from a peak of 420,000 in June 2025.
–St. Mary’s Glacier, the only glacier which remained in the state of Colorado, is now gone due to global warming.
In good news:
–While Trump and his henchmen are spending all their time vilifying Somali-Americans, a young Somali-American in St. Paul, Minnesota leaped on a school bus when he saw the driver was having a medical emergency, brought the bus with its 18 little kids on board to a safe stop, and then called 911 and the school to get help for the driver and get the kids safely home.
–A new study finds the thriving of salmon after the Klamath River Dam was removed wildly surpassed researchers’ expectations.
–New York state authorized funding for electric and battery-powered lawn equipment, climate research, and school energy updates.
Best sign from the No Kings rallies: “Our expectations for you were low, but holy fuck!”
Best comment of the day, from Hunter Biden: “As long as we are doing DNA tests now, someone should DNA test Vivek Motherfucking Ramaswamy to see if he is even a fucking human being.”
Keep calm and carry on,
Connie Willis
