When young children see someone who looks like them running for office, they see themselves and what they can be, unburdened by what has been. pic.twitter.com/SSpPkkmrmq
— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) September 28, 2020
If we want safe communities we have to invest in the health of communities, including access to health care and mental health care. pic.twitter.com/44uOtI5yLq
— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) September 27, 2020
Open thread!
cain
What is this rat fucking going on with Hunter Biden that is all over twitter?
zhena gogolia
thanks for Kamala to perk me up in mid-afternoon
Kent
I think you just answered your own question. Flop sweat rat fucking.
Baud
@cain: First I heard of it, but my guess is that the right wing wants to goose the debate questions by spreading bullshit that “everyone” is talking about.
zhena gogolia
@Kent:
I’ll look into it when I hear that Hunter Biden is running for president.
TaMara (HFG)
@cain: Trumptrolls desperate attempt to deflect from the disaster-in-chief.
germy
germy
MisterForkbeard
@cain: Hadn’t heard of it, but if I had to guess it’s Republicans taking Erik Trump’s lead and whining about Hunter’s “corruption” to try and take the focus off Trump’s taxes and financial implosion.
I don’t think it’ll be very effective. Most it will do is prompt declarations by Republicans that the debate was clearly biased because Trump was asked about COVID, the economy, his taxes, and everything else while Biden wasn’t even asked about the obvious criminality of Hunter Biden. Etc.
It’s a coping mechanism.
lollipopguild
@germy: If Parscale had been black or brown he would have shot to death by the police. I say this as a white male.
MagdaInBlack
@germy: ” Sir, can you do us a favor?” per the body cam video on Rawstory.
LuciaMia
Do we have to remind them again that Hunter isn’t RUNNING FOR ANYTHING!?
lollipopguild
@MisterForkbeard: It’s also projection, it’s ALWAYS projection.
Chyron HR
“Where’s Hunter? Why isn’t Hunter serving as Biden’s chief of staff? Why aren’t taxpayers flying Hunter around the world to kill endangered species? Why aren’t Hunter’s children trained to sing in Chinese and dance for Xi Jinping’s amusement? PEOPLE NEED TO KNOW!!”
germy
Full story at link
Cheryl Rofer
This is good. Amy Barrett will take away health care. That’s the message.
Ken
@LuciaMia: If you do remind them, you could also mention that Hillary Clinton is also not running.
MagdaInBlack
Thank you, TaMara, for the Kamala with the kids. She always makes me feel positive.
Also too, Friday I met a 2 y/o Great Dane, named Clio, the most patient, polite and lovely dog I’ve met in a while. I get why you love them =-)
Baud
I don’t always get to watch the videos, TaMara, but I appreciate your consistent focus on our candidates. It’s so easy to get drawn into Donald Trump’s dark world.
Mallard Filmore
@Cheryl Rofer:
Perhaps this is how we get Medicare For All, or single payer, or whatever variant gets top billing.
Cheryl Rofer
WE WILL NOT. GIVE UP.
AND WE WILL NOT. GIVE IN.
Cheryl Rofer
@Mallard Filmore: It has occurred to me that this may be a final straw when people say okay, I want healthcare assured so that none of those bozos can take it away.
I think it’s too early to make that argument, though.
cain
@MisterForkbeard:
Apparently a Russian oligarch wire transferred money to Hunter Biden back in 2014.
They should be very careful with that messaging that it’s bad that Russians are sending money. It isn’t really a scandal since Hunter is a private citizen – but in any case if they want to go with that – wait till its revealed that Trump has that too..
But yeah it’s about muddying the waters.
sdhays
@zhena gogolia: I could also be persuaded to care if Hunter Biden was going to get Jared’s position in the White House. But Biden doesn’t hire his family to government positions, so I think we’re good.
Mallard Filmore
@Cheryl Rofer: Even when Trump is defeated, there will be millions of uninsurables with a COVID precondition. I have not kept up the the number of Long Haulers. Have they reached past a hundred thousand? Many will be beyond the means of private help.
David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch
He’s run out of money.
The Battle of the Bulge ended when the Nazi tanks ran out of gas.
JAFD
For the politics fans looking for something to do this winter, the 2nd printing of the boardgame 1960: The Making of the President is out and shipping. If you’d like a copy, head for your Friendly Local Game Store, or gmtgames.com
sdhays
@David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch: They’re just waiting for that $100m check from Dump himself to clear. Should be any day now.
Martin
Reminder that there’s really only one scenario where anything in this country gets fixed and it’s full Dem control of Congress and the WH. The filibuster is out the window at that point. The Dems can pass whatever fucking fixes to the ACA or new health care plan that they want. It’ll be a WAY easier lift than the ACA that still needed to hit 60.
Cheryl Rofer
@Mallard Filmore: Covid as a pre-existing condition will be part of why we need healthcare for all. We don’t know how long it lasts for some people, and we don’t know how many people will be affected for how long. Private insurance will want to exclude all that.
Those uncertainties about Covid show why making healthcare generally available is important. It’s the only humane way we can deal with the uncertainty and keep the population healthy. A sick population will be a drag on the economy.
TaMara (HFG)
@MagdaInBlack: That’s sweet. Me looking at my Danes: You hear that, sweet and polite. You could learn a few things.
The other day, our neighbor wanted her 6-month-old to meet them. Bixby was Bixby all sweet, toe kissing and gentle. Scout: batshit crazy.
Kid couldn’t get enough of Scout. Mom said, well, of course, two peas!
Betty Cracker
@David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch: I’m hoping a big scandal with all the campaign cash is about to bust wide open. There is absolutely ZERO chance these crooks handled a billion in campaign donations without hoovering it up. Maybe that’s why Parscale was drinking and ranting and waving guns around.
MJS
@sdhays: I couldn’t be persuaded to care about this nonsense even if Joe had selected Hunter as his running mate. Jill showed the way to respond to any inquiries on this shit yesterday, when Jake Tapper wanted to ask her about “gaffes”, like the current occupant of the White House isn’t an imbecile who stumbles over every other word. The same holds true with regards to any payments Hunter may have received – that ship sailed loooong ago when the media decided that what Manafort, Ivanka, Jared, et al have done is no big deal.
Kay
@Betty Cracker:
I love that it was like “didn’t they have a billion dollars? Where did it go?”
Oh, I can guess!
trollhattan
Where goalkeepers come from.
https://twitter.com/jimemaud/status/1310314907783528448
Barbara
@David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch: Fox News had a poll in Ohio that showed Biden 5 points ahead. It’s an outlier, but Ohio has looked more favorable to Biden in other recent polls
The other whisper I am seeing in the most recent polling data is that the LV versus RV numbers are tipping towards Biden. The polls of LVs in some states look better for Biden than RVs. Does that portend lower turnout for Trump? These are just data points for now.
trollhattan
@David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch:
If there’s one thing Trump won’t run out of, it’s gas.
Still boggled at the maintenance cost of the thing atop his pate. Somebody is due a refund.
Kay
Probably true of the Fox personalities, who make millions of dollars a year.
dmsilev
@Betty Cracker: It’s a virtual certainty that Trump, his family, and the associated grifters that follow them around like remoras have siphoned away as much of that billion in donations as they could possibly manage.
For instance, his campaign has spent heavily on Facebook advertising, but apparently a large fraction of that is aimed at fundraising from his existing supporters, and there’s bound to be substantial…overhead on those expenditures.
MagdaInBlack
@TaMara (HFG): She WAS with her (human) grandmom, so you know…kids always behave with gramma =-)
Barbara
@Kay: Well, as a woman I guess I could say that gray hair is so offputting to employers that I should get to deduct my cut, color, style appointment, but on second thought, no, I don’t think so. The book on that one is actually pretty old and hasn’t changed.
dmsilev
@Kay: It’s an obvious and outright lie. Most normal people dont have very complicated taxes. You have wage or salary income, and the withholding gets you close. Then some adjustments and deductions and so forth, but relatively simple things like a mortgage or child care or whatever. And that’s about it.
RobertDSC-Work
She lifts my sprits. It’s a bad day with a bad back but Kamala is a joy to listen to. Thank you.
David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch
Barbara
@Kay: I remember during one of the debates in 2012 when some tv based moderator was asking about raising taxes on “average” families and let slip something about, “for instance,” a couple making a combined income of $200,000 and the audience started tittering. These guys have no fucking clue what average people are like or how they file their taxes. The “average” person doesn’t itemize at all.
James E Powell
@cain:
I’m not seeing Hunter Biden trending on twitter. I’m getting Parscale, Johnny Rotten wearing a MAGA shirt, Victor Oladipo trade rumors, and BTS hitting #1
Usually when some bullshit right-wing fantasy starting trending on twitter, it’s in their responses to bad news for them. For example, when Trump’s admissions to Woodward about COVID came out, the number of deaths from flu during the Obama administration was trending. Some other thing made Clinton Foundation show up. It’s a strange algorithm.
HumboldtBlue
B…b…b…but I just read more threads on Twitter that Joe and Harris are hiding?
This must be fake news.
germy
@Barbara:
I’ve seen that so many times! One of the newspapers, I think it was the NYTimes lifestyle section, did a story for recent college graduates, and it was all “Okay, so you’ve just graduated and you’ve got your first job, and you’re making $80k/year…”
It reminds me of the TV commercials featuring twenty-something couples, and the husband gives his wife a surprise gift of a… car… for christmas.
David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch
@trollhattan: Scaramucci was on CNN saying Dump won’t let anyone touch his hair out of fear someone will take a photo with their cell phone, so he does everything himself. Which means he paid himself $70,000 to cut and comb his own “hair”.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
Abraham Lincoln paid more in federal taxes in 1864 ($1,279.13) than President Trump paid in 2016 ($750.00).
https://quod.lib.umich.edu/l/lincoln2/5250244.0001.001/1:17.4?rgn=div2;view=fulltext
clay
@David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch: S’weird. The Trump campaign is behind Biden in fundraising, but they still pulled in $200 million in August. They shouldn’t be out of cash!
If I were a donor, I’d want to know where that money is before opening my wallet again.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Barbara: Charlie Gibson, said $200K/yr was probably the salaries of two married professors at St Anselm’s College, where the debate was being held
Bluegirlfromwyo
@MisterForkbeard: Isn’t Chris Wallace tomorrow night’s moderator? Might be a ploy to get him to ask about Hunter Biden.
Ken
No, makes perfect sense.
catclub
The whole point of a campaign is to burn cash through advertising. When they tell you ‘we spent it on advertising’, do you really know anything more about where it went?
Leto
@germy: Not more than 6 mins into the story do we have a person saying, “A big mistake Hillary made was coming to Wisconsin in April and then never coming back.” I’ll go to my grave saying how fucking stupid that is. If you have to have a candidate personally come and fluff you for months on end to feel “special/valuable”, then you were never going to vote for them in the first place. I mean, I guess I should be eternally pissed that she didn’t fly her ass out to RAF Croughton, UK and personally make her pitch to all 100 of us, plus dependents, to vote for her. It’s just monumentally stupid.
WaterGirl
@Mallard Filmore: Even without symptoms, you can bet that if they can find any scarring or any tiny little blood clots anywhere… that they will use that as proof of a pre-existing condition.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Martin:
Our senior Senator does not seem to be on board with that idea.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
Wonder if Shelley Adelson is inclined to stroke any 10 figure checks this cycle?
WaterGirl
@JAFD: If only i had someone to play a boardgame with during the pandemic.
indycat32
@James E Powell: Oladipo trade rumors!? Noooo!!
catclub
see also: Iowa caucuses and biofuels, NH primary politicking, the 2016 election.
Kay
@clay:
It’s a mystery, all right. This huge collection of pathological liars who file wholly fictitious financials raised millions of dollars and now no one knows where it went. Maybe…catering?
Ken
@catclub: Maybe some campaigns can do that, but when there’s a regular drip-drip-drip of stories about how the advertising agencies and consulting services are run by the candidate’s relatives, donors will want a higher level of scrutiny.
Ken
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: I think one of the BJ commenters said that Adelson and Trump had a falling-out, over Trump demanding money.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
That, or the annual salary (less perks) of the Junior Associate Assistant Dean of Stapler Acquisition at any medium to large public land grant university, given current levels of administrative bloat in higher education.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@Ken:
Exactly. Which hyperdonor is he still going to be able to lay some guilt on?
Kay
@clay:
This looks legitimate, right?
IMO, it is an absolute given they robbed their small donors. Of course they did.
catclub
@David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch:
The germans didn’t get free gas from the movietone newsreel folks.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Leto: Yeah, that grated on me as well. I felt the report also minimized the voter ID laws that suppressed the vote.
Leto
@Kay: I think hair care is under-reported. Same with pancake makeup.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Kay:
They gotta eat.
catclub
These are people who still believe Trump is a successful businessman that we need to run the country.
Leto
@?BillinGlendaleCA: Yeah, he briefly talked about it but these two actions go hand in hand. Voter disenfranchisement and suppression. I know back in 2016 the disenfranchisement part was talked about quite a bit but it needs to be re-introduced.
Omnes Omnibus
@?BillinGlendaleCA: Don’t get me started on that.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Kay: Geez. Most people don’t even itemize, much less write off a ton of losses from our casinos.
HumboldtBlue
@Kay:
Of course they did, that’s why that punk-ass Parscale beat his wife and got his thieving ass arrested.
James E Powell
@indycat32:
I believe the Oladipo trade rumors are coming from Celtics fans who a few years ago were bragging that Ainge was the GM of the century and Stevens the greatest genius coach alive.
James E Powell
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
That was because the press/media wanted to say that voters hated Hillary as much as they did.
M31
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:
hey, that’s Junior Associate Assistant Dean of Stapler Acquisition Innovation
geg6
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:
Oh, how I wish that was true!
jonas
Squirrel!
Also, if we want to very closely scrutinize candidates’ kids’ financial records, by all means, bring it, Trumps! We can start with the $750,000 in “consulting fees” to Ivanka Trump claimed as a tax deduction.
Mary G
With the caveats that this is a preprint study that hasn’t had the rigorous vetting a medical journal will apply to publish it, and that I do not understand the jargon involved at all, it appears some researchers have found a “neurotoxin-like motif” in the coronavirus spike protein that might explain why a few kids get the multi-system inflammatory syndrome that is so serious.
Baud
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
You don’t write off your gambling losses?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Kay: I never saw or heard Mollie Hemingway before people started retweeting her often spittle-flecked defenses of trump on trump TeeVee, but I used to see her named as one the rising “intellectuals” of the right.
Baud
@James E Powell: Plus, people prefer to blame other people rather than take a hard look in the mirror at themselves.
Kay
We might collect more money if we started auditing people who have some.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Frank Figluzzi (ex-FBI counter-intel grand poobah) just had a great line on the Nicolle Wallace show: trump’s refusal to release his taxes is essentially taking the Fifth
Ken
@catclub: The question was about the big donors, like Adelson or the Mercers. They don’t have any emotional investment in Trump. I might even speculate that they want to get rid of him to protect the longer-term viability of their Republican assets.
Leto
@Kay: If we don’t continually punish the poor, how will they ever know to use those bootstraps?
David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch
HA!
Omnes Omnibus
@Baud: Gambling losses can only be deducted if you are itemizing.
NotMax
@Ken
Rule 1: Don’t restock the china until the bull has been removed from the shop.
//
@Ken
Yup. Sturgeon’s Law is an overly optimistic assessment when it comes to Twitter.
;)
Martin
@Kay: Yup.
You can’t build an organization staffed by people whose core competency is stealing money and expect them to not steal money.
That’s always been the Trump virtuous cycle. Where a good administration attracts professional public servants and where criminals can’t find any purchase, Trump attracts criminals who push out ethical staff.
dnfree
@Baud: I don’t have any gambling losses for the same reason that I don’t have any gambling wins.
Patricia Kayden
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@Martin: He doesn’t even know how to run a crime syndicate right. People don’t steal from the boss in your better-run criminal enterprises. Source: countless killing of minions in countless movies for being a few bucks short.
Sab
@TaMara (HFG): My step-daughter next door has a pit-bullish mutt, and also used to have a chihuahua-terrier mix. The pit-bull used to race around the yard with the terrier firmly attached to her ear by his teeth. They were both deliriously happy during these romps. (The terrier is still happy and alive. He just moved out with a roommate.)
jonas
The story I saw was that he was having some kind of mental breakdown and threatening to harm himself (and maybe his family too) with a firearm. Did his wife file a domestic abuse complaint?
Princess
@Leto: I’m going to regret wading into this, but…here I go.
Hillary and Wisconsin. On election day 2016 in Hillary headquarters in downtown Chicago, they had us phoning Iowa. Iowa. Iowa was long gone. We should have been calling Wisconsin. In 2012, we were calling Wisconsin on election day. Hillary’s campaign had no idea what was going on around the country. Sure, she lost for all the reasons we know, over which she had no control. But it’s a fact that she didn’t do a great job with the things over which she did have control.
Sab
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: I didn’t read your link. What Federal tax did Lincoln pay? We didn’t have an income tax until about 1913. Excise taxes?
RobertB
@Omnes Omnibus: Back when I thought the dog track was quality entertainment, a big winning bet there was called a “Tax Ticket”, because you had to fill out an IRS form if you won more that $450 on a single bet.
Sab
@Leto: She was all over Ohio all through the campaign (also too PA) and she lost by a lot more in those states.
RobertB
@Sab: The attached article described a ‘war tax’ imposed on Federal employees, of 3% of all income over $600.
geg6
@Princess:
That said, she practically camped out here in PA, her ads were ubiquitous here and we were phoning all over the state for weeks. So I don’t quite agree with you here. The problem here was too many assholes who voted third party and too many urban voters stayed home. If I can’t put the blame on Hillary or Russia, I can only blame the arrogant assholes that thought she’d win anyway, so they threw away or passed on their vote.
geg6
@Sab:
Yes, this. I so hate this whole stupid “she lost WI because she didn’t fluff them enough” argument. That’s not what happened.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@geg6: my recollection is Hillary and Bill and Barack and Michelle were all shuttling between PA and FL the last week of the campaign. But I also remember press gossip they were talking about spending more in Arizona.
and speaking of states and spending, Biden is increasing his spending in Ohio, trump is pulling some scheduled ad buys
Baud
@Princess: Anyone can flyspeck her campaign. The problem is “Wisconsin” has become the go-to whataboutism that people use when they don’t want to deal with the more serious issues caused Trump to win in 2016.
Yutsano
@Kay: @Leto: It’s even simpler than that: poorer people don’t hire tax attorneys. The big reason exam hits poorer people harder is easy. They don’t have a budget to pursue anyone higher. There is a LOT of pressure for cases to be closed quickly, and the easiest way to do that is to target the most vulnerable. You want to get the IRS to change that? Bring up a race discrimination class-action lawsuit. Because yes this hits the minority populations a lot harder.
I mean actually giving the IRS money so the culture in the Examination division would help too but I’m being practical here.
Omnes Omnibus
@RobertB: Oh, you have to pay tax on any winnings. You just can’t deduct your losses if you don’t itemize.
Sab
@RobertB: Thank you. I did not that, and it is worth knowing.
Omnes Omnibus
@geg6: You hate it? I live in the state. Fuck all the shit at the margins. She lost WI due to voter suppression. End of story. Fin.
What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us?
@Barbara: Last Friday Ohio turned blue for the first time over at Nate Silver’s joint. Things there are trending in the right direction. And it appears Trump is out of money to stop the slide
Peale
@Baud: It’s a stand in for “abandoned the White Working Class” from people who didn’t want to say “Well maybe if she would have spent more time talking about black crime and how Hispanics ruin everything, she’d have won.”
Ruckus
@Baud:
Closest I’ve come to real gambling was when I worked in pro sports and we’d have our awards banquet in Las Vegas, sitting at a bar with my boss playing quarter poker on the machines that your drinks sat on. Play $10 worth of poker in a tux and get free drinks. A zero sum game.
Ruckus
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
A bit on Mollie from the google.
She is a senior editor at the online magazine The Federalist and a contributor for Fox News. A harsh critic of Donald Trump in the 2016 Republican primary, she has become a staunchly pro-Trump pundit since then.
Sab
@Ruckus: Nickel slots was my thing. 4 years living in Vegas and I lost $ 2.50.
Sab
@Omnes Omnibus: Also too you cannot deduct losses above winnings, and nobody has more winnings than losses.
Whole point is that you don’t have to declare net winnings, which no one actually has.
People are chumps. Ding ding !
J R in WV
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
Do you guys know how much you can spend on a single bottle of top shelf scotch? The lowest priced bottle of the top 50 whiskeys starts at an average of $2,287 for a 750 ml bottle… not the highest priced bottle, the least expensive bottle!!! Bunnahabhain Limited Edition 40 Year Old Single Malt Scotch Whisky, Islay.
So catering can run up pretty fast if you provide a really high end tipple to the gentlemen at table 1A… I have to admit I was stunned when I googled up that data!
Pappy Van Winkle’s Family Reserve’ 23 Year Old Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whiskey, averages $2,602… I prefer bourbon to scotch, personally. But never gonna have Pappy’s Family Reserve unless I win a lottery… which is hard if you don’t play.
frosty
@geg6: One other PA problem was the rural first-time voters who came out for Trump. That’s my anecdata from the bottom of the T.