I've turned up two things. First, an overseas bank would not be bothered by the New York judgement. So in theory Deutsche bank can lend him the money, assuming he has any collateral.

Second, the judge down in Georgia is a member of the Federalist Society; so abusing their discretion to sabotage the case against Trump wouldn't be completely out of character. We're just going to have to see when they rule.

The judge in Georgia is also elected, and as bizarrely American as that is as a way of picking judges, means that he has motivation not to torch his own job.

Ignoring, for a moment, the political and legal issues of both men: Biden is aggressively reaching out to the people in his potential voting pool that don't currently intend to vote for him; and Trump is aggressively high-hatting their opposite numbers, who represent a greater percentage of a smaller pool. Were I a Trump partisan with an economic interest in the outcome, I'd be placing significant (and quiet) safety bets with a British bookie just on the strength of that.

But with that said: I'm amused that having told one court he can't possibly come up with a quarter of the money he needs to post to stop his properties from being seized and sold by that court, another court just told Trump that he needs to post that sum with them instead, by tomorrow, or the seizing and sale can start immediately.

Well, he posted the $91 million he had to post on time (the judgement plus two years interest, because he's a criminal scum and his credit is legally worth nothing). This is everything he told another court he could possibly raise; but now he's got to find another roughly $540 million, in about two weeks, to keep the sheriff from selling his dump in Florida at bargain basement rates.

And you know, that stock fraud company with about $3 billion to buy his blog could easily save him, and the deal is now technically allowed; but the degenerate cretin couldn't stop himself from defrauding some of his partners (with a total share of 10%) by diluting the stock. So they sued, and now there's very little way he'll live long enough to see the courts clear that money again. Oops.

Just a note in passing. One hears that Trump's going to get rid of 60 of the RNC professionals soon, pretty much ensuring that no one with a clue remains in the one entity legally permitted to drop money on any Republican race in the country. Not that it really matters any more, because no one is going to donate to an entity which exists entirely to be looted by Trump to pay his legal bills.

Not withstanding the Senate map, the odds of a Democratic trifecta just keep getting less absurd.

Except for the small matter that Biden's still performing poorly in the polls. I know, polls this early on are not reliable, yadda yadda, but they're not outrageously wrong and nobody is expecting Biden to suddenly jump 10 points. That never happens.

There is once again a sizeable contingent of left-wing Democrats threatening to vote third party (they never learn). Everyone seems to be trying to block Covid out of their memories.* Florida is no longer a swing state thanks to Ron DeSantis. So much for predictions that it would turn blue.

So this is going to another close election, as though one of the parties hasn't been taken over by actual fascists.

* Not really surprised, people did that after the 1919 flu too.

The interesting thing about the polls is that you do have to bump Biden up 3-4 points, and Trump down 3-4 points, to make them accurately model the elections they were supposed to be predicting. Trump is statistically significantly under-performing the polls for the first time in his 'career' in 'politics'; Biden is over-performing.

All of that aside, Trump's been benefiting enormously because no one has been talking about him except among the usual suspects (thus encouraging forgetfulness among the deliberately tuned out). That privilege is about to go away, and it's not likely to help him. Yes, he could win; pretty much every foreign and domestic enemy of the Constitution will be working to make it happen. But I suspect his odds are not as good as the pro-Trump and pro-horse race press wants to make it seem.

If the US were behaving like a normal country, Trump's chances of making a comeback ought to be somewhere around Jair Bolsonaro's and Park Geun-hye's - between Haha No and Prison.

Democratic backsliding is a real threat, backed by some 30%-40% of the population and passively ignored by another 20-30%. Democracy does not work when only one of the parties believes in respecting the rules. When you consider that despite its myths, universal suffrage has only been around in the US for 60 years - a reactionary movement makes total sense.

It certainly does, and with active corporate press assistance may finally succeed; but Trump really isn't the one to be the figurehead. Like Goldwater before him he's seen as an active danger to his own voters, and the psychopathically selfish Republicans with 'middle class' mindsets tend to find that unacceptable. They're all about everyone else paying a price for their gain, not doing it themselves; and they know full well how badly off they were under him when the epidemic hit four years ago (assuming they've forgotten all the other problems).

So Trump is losing a fifth of the registered Republicans who are sufficiently politically active to get out and vote right now (while Biden is losing about a tenth of the Democrats). Heck, half of that fifth are saying they'll vote for Biden. This bodes poorly for Trump sweeping that roughly third of the Republican coalition that won't admit they're Republicans, largely because they can't stand to associate themselves with Trump's base, while he's running a 'base only' campaign and couldn't care less if he alienates them.

Biden, on the other hand, will find it hard to actually lose many of his coalition (as opposed to the Republican fellow travelers who call themselves left wing) in a real election. Trump will ensure the next election is a referendum on Trump in spite of the corporate media, and that's all Biden needs.

Mr. 'I can't raise a half billion dollar bond because no one will lend me the money' has posted on his blog that he has half a billion dollars in cash. One suspects the judge has questions, and the appointed monitor who just had her term extended three years and her powers enhanced a few hours before that post also has a few.

1. Most Republican-leaners have been Fox Newsed into blaming Anthony Fauci for whatever economic hardship they suffered through the pandemic. And since most of the painful slog to recovery occurred under Biden, he gets the blame for not waving a magic wand and Bleachy McHorsepaste gets off scot free.

2. Assuming that there are "sane" Republicans, they still need to show up to vote for Biden instead of staying home. That makes it way closer than I am comfortable with. I'm not convinced that they actually exist in large enough numbers to make a difference, or that they're more afraid of Trump than the liberal boogeyman du jour. Critical race theory? Transgender children? Immigrants??

This is once again coming down to several tens of thousands of votes in a small number of swing states, which by the way, no longer include Florida. I'm not writing Biden off, mainly because I believe most American women do not want to live in some sort of Gileadean nightmare. But I am not discounting the possibility that the US will sleepwalk into some Eastern European strongman LARP either.

Biden's delivered what people voted for - boring normalcy - and nobody gets credit for being boring. And the thing about Trump's clownishness is that it makes it easy for those looking for a plausible excuse to dismiss the threat he poses. Oh stop hyperventilating. He's joking. You think they wouldn't fall for that again, but a lot of these people think his first term was basically fine.

Well, unless another of his wives is found mysteriously dead at the bottom of a stairwell, it looks like Trump will be in criminal court come Monday. For what it's worth: there's a bit of local lore that Bragg, the DA, is cautious to the point of cowardly when it comes to prosecutions; he hates to do it unless it's a slam dunk conviction.

Amusing bit of trivia, btw; if convicted, Trump will be disenfranchised. It will be a felony for him to vote for himself.

Idly amusing to me, anyway: the crosstabs of the current polls between Biden and Trump tend to show that the more likely someone is to vote (judged by how many of the last few elections they actually voted in or statements that they'll definitely vote this November), the more likely they are to favor Biden. The most recent poll I saw with this breakdown showed Biden up 8 among people who voted in '20 and '22, Trump up 22 among people who sat out both.

One wonders if someone on the inside is contemplating the Democratic get out the vote efforts, and/or the Republican suppress the vote efforts, and wondering if they're going about it wrong...

They thought they had a baked-in advantage, didn't they? Senior citizens lean Republican and reliably turn up to vote; they've literally got all day. But maybe the result of all this conspiracy stuff is to persuade their supporters that their vote doesn't count. If it's rigged, why bother?

I wonder if anyone's studied how likely it is that people who say they'll vote actually do, and whether that varies by demographics.

A working adult has to arrange for time off, or get the paperwork sorted out for early voting. A parent has to arrange childcare, or may find that the day when their kid is cranky and feverish is a very bad day to wait in line at a polling station. A college student has to figure out how to register for the first time. A renter who's moved 4 times in the last 6 years has to change their address before the deadline, again. They may have every intention of voting, but stuff happens.

A retiree in reasonably good physical health who's lived in the same place for many years just has to roll out of bed and head down to the polling station if they feel like it; they've got nothing else going on.