30 August—The criminal defense lawyer retained by a Bridgeport Democrat operative charged with absentee-ballot fraud, while not (yet) claiming his client is innocent, blames it on the system, including but not limited to lousy record-keeping and security on the part of the city clerk and registrars. Next thing you know, he’ll be accusing the powers that be of entrapping his client. That’s what lawyers are paid to do, after all.

Brings to mind Donald Trump’s feculent mantra that had it not been for voter fraud he’d easily have won in 2020 and is absolutely sure that this year he’ll just as easily get all the votes he needs to win—notably in California—and will return to the White House, but only if voting and vote counting are done honestly. (Honestly isn’t Trump’s word, of course, and the very concept of honesty is anathema to him.) When you couple that with his refusal to commit to accepting the result of this year’s presidential vote—with an implicit “unless I win”—you know that he’s paving the way for whatever it takes for him to prevail. And with his militant following that’s something to worry about.

It’s obvious that Trump is running scared now because, just as Kamala Harris is pandering right with things like fracking (which never should have been allowed in the first place), he’s pandering left with things like in vitro fertilization.

The Democrats have famously made access to IVF a campaign issue. Yesterday, Trump went one better by reversing his disgraceful anti-IVF stand and going so far as to bluster that he’d have the fed or private insurers pay for it. Trump is short on details, of course, as he is in all of his promises and commitments. But Harris is also short on those silly things. And who takes them seriously, anyway?

“We need great children, beautiful children in our country,” Trump proclaimed. That brings to mind Nazi birthing farms where women and teenage girls were impregnated to produce blond, blue-eyed babies for SS families to adopt. But odds are Trump doesn’t even know they existed and he’s merely indulging in his celebrated rhetoric.

Nothing wrong with IVF, to be sure. It’s merely an expensive technique to get women pregnant. But why should taxpayers foot the bill for it? Why, indeed, should taxpayers foot the bill for anything related to voluntary pregnancy? If couples—make that women—have to resort to government handouts to get pregnant, it’s not unlikely their spawn also will be dependent on government largess.

That segues to private insurance coverage, among innumerable things related to health care in America, but we’ll leave it there . . .