Before & After

Blogger is giving me gobbledegook when I try to go to many of the blogs I have listed on my sidebar.

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Tuesday was a real blue sky day.

But our first frost was in the forecast for Tuesday night.

Here's Wednesday morning.  Temp was 31º.

In preparation for winter Dan has removed our chairs and side tables.

More leaves have fallen from the maple trees.

Before frost

After

Before

After

I didn't take a before photo of the Hosta.  Here's after frost.

Before

But little change after.  It will come.

No before for the canna.  I am going to see if I can save the rhizomes like I do the dahlia tubers.

Before for these potted annuals.

But after shows little change other than their position.  Dan moved them so we could move the grill to the barn.

Another photo from Tuesday.

And in the raised bed the volunteer squash plant took the frost hard.

It even had formed a fruit.  What it was I don't know.

The lettuce did just fine.

Did you have your first frost yet?

The Contrarian Tells it Like it Is

Words & Phrases: A Crazy Rant Isn’t a ‘Speech’ or an ‘Interview’

🚨 28 Days to the Midterms 🚨

JENNIFER RUBIN OCT 6

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Donald Trump’s political toxicity, rampant illegality, and utter incompetence should not obscure a bigger worry: namely, that he is stone-cold nuts. Yet the legacy media continue to use language to describe his “speeches” as ordinary political addresses and “interviews” as within the realm of normal presidential interactions with the press.

Donald Trump speaks to the media as he departs the White House on October 01, 2026 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

Legacy media’s sanewashing of Trump’s campaign appearances as “speeches” bears less and less resemblance to the reality of his verbal incontinence, evidenced in recent campaign blather about Iran:

We did it in one night with those beautiful B-2 bombers. They left Missouri. They flew both ways, 37 hours. They were refueling. We have the greatest tankers. We have the greatest military in the world. They went from Missouri and then at one o’clock in the morning, with no moon, dark as can be, these unbelievable machines led by the most incredible pilots in the world, they unloaded every single bomb, went right down air chutes into this, uh, drug factories, really. That’s what they were doing. They were nuclear and drugs. They were doing drugs, but they were doing the nuclear. These drug factories/nuclear factories were hit so hard.

When he unilaterally dragged us into a war, did he think we were attacking “drug factories” (or did he think the Iranians were “doing drugs”)? Examination of his unedited verbal vomit should provoke further, frightful questions about the 25^th Amendment.

What we get from legacy media, instead, is the sort of New York Times’ light-hearted trip down nostalgia lane in lieu of exacting coverage of his crazed appearance in Mobile, Alabama on Friday. One had to search for independent media to uncover full accounts of his crazed rants.

Trump was more unhinged in Ohio on Saturday, where Trump blathered about James Talarico: “I see that ‘Tala-freako’ in Texas. So he’s been a vaygan' all his life. He’s a vaygan vaygan, I didn’t even know what the hell a vaygan was. A vaygan is vegetables. A vaygan is eating a piece of lettuce all day long.” Ignoring his apparent ignorance of the word ‘vegan,’ the nature of his obscene, irrelevant insults suggests a complete loss of impulse control. These are not “speeches,” but rather psychological breakdowns. But, unfortunately, you would not know it from mainstream media coverage. He was back at it in Nebraska on Monday with more unhinged rambling. (“With the war, it’s just artificial. It’s a little bit high. It’s a small price to pay ... let them take out Los Angeles, let them take out San Diego. This is a very small price to pay.”)

Similarly, Trump’s encounter last week with TIME was routinely labeled an “interview.” But an “interview” denotes responsive answers — not a stream of non sequiturs, insults, and outbursts. A few commentators ventured that the session was “grievance”-filled or “emotional,” but even those descriptions falsely suggest some orderly presentation of reality-based complaints in response to questions.

By lopping off his full replies and interweaving explanatory narrative, reporters often wind up sanitizing Trump’s babbling, as TIME did:

He said he regretted appointing Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, after they ruled against him on tariffs, mail ballots, and birthright citizenship. “I gave them the position of a lifetime,” he said, “and they voted against me often.” On his expectation of fealty, he was unapologetic: “I do like loyalty, yeah.” Again and again, he returned to the condition of the White House itself, complaining that his predecessors had left the building in disrepair and deriding Barack Obama as someone who “doesn’t know if something’s dirty or clean.”

They also posted the original, “lightly edited” transcript, which was exponentially crazier:

You said [Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Coney Barrett] were like shells of their former selves. Do you regret nominating them?

Yeah. Yeah. What can I do? I put them in. They voted against me too often. I was very—I gave them the position of a lifetime, and they vote against me often. They vote for me too. The Democrats stick like glue—those three, they virtually never vary. You can come up with the worst thing in the world and they’ll vote as a group. And while I don’t like it, there’s something I admire about it: there’s loyalty. So they have loyalty to Barack Hussein Obama. They have loyalty to Biden, even though Biden doesn’t even know who the hell they are. He wouldn’t know. He doesn’t even know what the Supreme Court is. And me, I gave them the chance of a lifetime, and it’s unfortunate what they did.

Is that—

It’s unfortunate what they did—not to me, to our country. Birthright citizenship. It’s becoming a major industry now. People are making millions and millions of dollars, and we’re losing trillions of dollars. And it’s become a corrupt business, all because of the Supreme Court decision. That decision was for the babies of slaves. Look at where it was—look at where it was approved. It wasn’t for Chinese people, wealthy or unwealthy, coming, you know, pouring into our country. And this tariff decision again, all they had to do was a little clause saying any money paid does not have to be paid back…would have saved $400 billion. They chose not to save that.

You mentioned the word loyalty a moment ago. Is that what you want from your Supreme Court picks?

I do like loyalty, yeah.

Is that what you want from your Supreme Court justices?

No, I don’t want loyalty. I want good decisions. The tariff decision was disastrous for the country. I want good decisions for the country.

Sir, do you care about—

They’ve treated me. . . . Look, I put these people in. It is what it is. Very disappointing, very disappointing for the country—their decisions. And the country knows it. Very disappointing for the country. The other ones—they stick like glue. It’s unbelievable, right?

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The Mob boss mentality, lack of logical connection between sentence fragments, self-contradictions, and elementary-school-level vocabulary in a froth of vicious anger reflect a deeply unwell mind — albeit notably less so absent in the sanitized version. Obsessive efforts to explain what Trump mustmean are indicative of PR; not journalism. It takes a heavy hand and no small amount of spin, for example, to transform his rant on his disastrous war into: “In Trump’s telling, he is simply doing what has to be done, even when that means breaking foundational promises to his voters. He campaigned as a president of peace, but is now waging a war he says was necessary to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.”

Aaron Rupar, who assiduously records and posts Trump’s and his minions’ remarks arguably more thoroughly than any journalist, recommended (of the transcript) that we “read this to get a sense of the president’s grave cognitive impairment.” As he put it, “Trump is either unwilling or unable (or maybe both) to answer the questions he’s actually asked, so he just rants and raves while the interviewers do their best to provide structure to his random brain firings.”

As he ages, Trump’s decline will continue (maybe accelerate), meaning this is likely the “best” version of Trump we will see from here on out. Billionaire-owned media has essentially covered up that national crisis, refusing to acknowledge that he is deteriorating mentally and emotionally, just as he is physically (evidenced by bruising, swollen ankles, consistent somnolence).

Responsible coverage would highlight his mental unfitness daily, provide ample extracts of rants, and play them back to Republicans’ faces. Conscientious journalists, at the very least, could stop calling unhinged rants “speeches” and vitriolic outbursts “answers to interview questions.”

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Sunday Outing

 We joined the leaf peepers on Sunday to check out the leaf colors in Vermont.  Our destination was Brookfield, Vt for a craft/farmers market with lunch options, at least that's what the notice said in a local online newsletter.  It sounded promising and we knew the drive northwest on Interstate 89 would be gorgeous.  The route has spectacular views of the Green Mountains to the west.

Not taken from the Interstate but looking at the Green Mtns.

Well the leaf colors along the interstate were just okay but once we got off and took the backroads to the town the colors were more of what we've come to expect here in New England.

As to the town of Brookfield the first clue should have been the dirt road into town.  It does have this going for it.

Yes, a pontoon bridge.  We walked across it and later leaving town drove across it.  It didn't move as I expected it to.  I imagine earlier versions were probably very bouncy.

Those buildings are the extent of the town.

Sorry I didn't take any other photos of the town.  It was quaint but as to the craft/farmers market - disappointing.  Very few vendors and the lunch option was soup from crock pots prepared by locals.  I was expecting food vendors or food trucks.

Driving to Randolph, VT south of there we saw these lovely spots.

We were headed to The Forge a restaurant/pub that at the door had a sign that Sundays was half priced burgers.  Perfect!  And delicious!  We may return some Sunday to Randolph for burgers.

Below is not the restaurant but an interesting barn I spotted for Tom, Backroads Traveler

News from The Contrarian

 

Please, Mr. President, Campaign For My Republican Opponent!

🚨 29 Days to the Midterms 🚨

JENNIFER RUBIN OCT 5

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The horrendous September jobs numbers — only 29,000 new jobs (a fraction of the 84,000 expected) and unemployment up to 4.2% — tell only part of the story. With downward revisions, the economy actually lost 10,000 jobs in July and added just 133,000, not 162,000, in August (as Donald Trump touted in his rant-filled encounter with TIME magazine last week). Coupled with inflation, the soaring debt, and spiking energy prices, the Trump economy has become a nightmare for ordinary workers and consumers.

These rotten jobs numbers, the last monthly jobs report before the election, will prove difficult for all but the most indoctrinated MAGA cultists to spin. The New York Times reported, “Yes, it’s a hard time to be looking for a job — the average unemployed worker has been looking for a job for nearly six months.” But even people with jobs are struggling given the “weakness in wage growth.”

Gasoline prices at a Shell gas station in Houston on October 2. (Ronaldo Schemidt/AFP via Getty Images)

For millions of workers, salaries have not kept up with inflation, and with mortgage prices now streaking past 7.3 percent, dreams of purchasing a home any time soon have evaporated for many Americans. Heather Long, a former economics reporter and now chief economist of the Navy Federal Credit Union, explained, “The financial pain is real: Wage growth fell to 3% (y/y) in September. That’s the lowest in 5 years.” With wage growth at 3 percent but inflation at 3.4 percent, “Inflation has eaten up all wage gains for the average worker since April. Many people are having to make hard choices about what to buy and what to skimp on right now.” Though consumption is still sustained by richer Americans, “a lot of people have to think hard about every dollar they spend,” she explained. “Notable: Wages only ticked up 0.1% in the month of September. That was the weakest monthly gain since December 2025.”

No wonder Trump’s economy approval numbers are cratering. The latest AP-NORC poll reported:

Sixty-five percent of adults overall say higher-than-usual prices are the result of Trump’s policies, while 67% of Republicans say higher prices are due to factors beyond the president’s control….

Trump is also falling short of expectations on the cost of living, with 69% of the public saying his handling of the issue has been worse than expected, including 52% of Republicans.

More than half of adults say the country as a whole, the national economy, and their local economy are worse off since Trump was reelected in 2025. Forty-six percent say they and their families are worse off since the start of Trump’s second administration. Most Americans (73%) say the country is heading in the wrong direction, including 92% of Democrats and 47% of Republicans.

This is no outlier. In the most recent Quinnipiac poll, Trump’s approval on the economy is at an all-time low (31 percent). Likewise, Fox’s September pollshowed “nearly two-thirds of voters (63%) say the Trump administration has made the economy worse, including a quarter of Republicans.”

Democrats were quick to underscore the lousy job numbers. As Yahoo Finance reported: “Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts calculated that Trump’s economy has added an average of 33,000 jobs a month since Inauguration Day in 2025 — ‘far below the 120,000-a-month average in 2024’ of the last year of former President Joe Biden’s time in office…. Like other Democrats, Warren also zeroed in on weak wage growth, writing that ‘since the start of Trump’s war [in Iran], real wages have fallen.’” Former Biden official Gbenga Ajilore added that “in the broader context, lower wage growth is a warning sign given the administration’s harmful policies.”

The regime’s utter contempt for voters’ economic woes (Vice President JD Vance lectures them to stop worrying about “little things”) leads Trump and his flunkies to make ever-more cringeworthy comments that, if anything, will only infuriate voters. After the miserable September report, Kevin Hassett, the National Economic Council director, when asked if he was disappointed in the jobs report, told Fox Business, “No, not even a little bit.” Well, for now, he has a job.

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Trump makes even more appalling gaffes in instructing Americans not to believe their lived experiences. Last week en route to Texas, he declared, “I give us an A+ on the government, on economics, on everything.” Voters struggling to decide whether to pay medical or grocery bills will recoil at that grade inflation. Likewise, Trump’s insistence that energy costs are “worth” his unpopular, disastrous war is of little consolation to those paying sky-high prices for regular gas and all-time high prices for diesel.

With Trump’s poll numbers so dismal and his self-congratulatory pronouncements so jarring, Democrats are no doubt delighted that Trump has announced he is heading out to campaign for Republicans, although his focus on already-safe red areas means the amount of damage he can inflict on his fellow Republicans may be less than we hope for. (A Republican president going to Alabama, for a shockingly sparse crowd, this close to the election, as Trump did on Friday, should be a flashing siren that things are terribly amiss for his party.)

Indeed, a flock of vulnerable Senate Republicans wants nothing to do with Trump. The Hill reported on an anonymous Republican senator warning it was a mistake for Trump “to campaign in Midwestern states where higher costs caused by the Iran war and Trump’s tariff policies are fueling voter anger.” That senator confessed, “We need our voters to turn out, but the ones that are making the decision, really, are those independent voters. And right now, they’re not looking favorably at President Trump.”

As Democrats make their final pitches to voters, they will no doubt emphasize that House and Senate Republicans are wholly responsible for Trump’s inane tariffs, Iran war, huge deficits, chaos-generation (e.g. ICE wreaking havoc with local economies, incompetent financial advisers spooking the markets), and self-indulgent graft (building monuments to himself while ordinary voters cannot pay the bills). They could have taken back tariff authority. They could have cut off authorization and funding for the war. They could have reined in ICE to, among other things, protect hard-hit industries rocked by loss of workers (e.g. construction, agriculture, hospitality, tourism). They could have refused to confirm unfit Cabinet secretaries and a weak Federal Reserve chairman. And, most of all, they could have rejected the Big, Ugly bill which took away SNAP benefits and healthcare coverage, doled out trillions to the ultra-rich, and sent the deficit soaring.

Republicans did none of those things, and now they will have to face the voters with an economy that cannot be blamed on anyone but them and their addled president. And if they now dread Trump coming to their district/state or appearing in ads paid for by the taxpayers (another egregious affront), that’s simply political karma.

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