I’m listening to this right now:
I’m out of town for more family medical stuff. Can confirm traveling during a pandemic is still as stressful as ever. Just want to go home and hunker down until election day. I have voted, my ballot was accepted and now I just wait for the rest of my fellow Americans to do the same.
Open thread
WaterGirl
I listened to this on Pod Save America last night, but I fell asleep partway through. Plus, video is better. Every time I see the Pod Save America (PSA) guys, I laugh because they still look like they are twelve years old.
TaMara (HFG)
@WaterGirl: Right? I thought being in a presidential administration aged you. LOL
JPL
Tamara, Thinking of you, and I do hope everything works out okay.
TaMara (HFG)
@JPL: Family is all good – dad is doing amazing! It’s just the travel that’s stressful at this point. NE gov got rid of any Covid restrictions…so you know, it’s like playing russian roulette here.
Nicole
I’m so glad to hear your dad is doing well, TaMara!
Since it’s an open thread- as I told WaterGirl earlier today, I spent $270 in X-ray/vet visit to learn today that if you refrigerate your dog’s urine sample before dropping it off, it can make it look like there’s crystals in the urine. The X-ray I paid for today was because, after seeing crystals in the urine, the vet was afraid she had bladder stones. All was clear, and then the vet asked if maybe I had put the urine in the fridge?
On the bright side, doggo is fine. On the bad side, $270 because I was an idjit.
CaseyL
@Nicole: That is good to know! But I am sorry that little lesson in Urinalysis Confounding Variables cost you nearly 300 bucks…
TaMara, going to NE right now would scare me silly. And you’re still recovering from Covid! Are you going to drive there, or fly? Hard to decide which one is riskier, since if you drive you’ll have to stop for gas, food, and possibly lodging; and flying… well.
mali muso
So ActBlue raised $1.5 billion in the third quarter. Link to story (warning, Politico).
Maybe some of us little people are motivated to oust the bad guys.
WaterGirl
@TaMara (HFG): Very Important Question.
Why do you have that adorably hot photo of Barack in the black cowboy hat ONLY as the featured image and not in this post where we can see it? :-)
L85NJGT
Reality vs. horse race.
There aren’t enough undecideds out there to move the needle.
Keith P.
Have you heard Trump’s new campaign pledge? It’s a laugher – “We’re going to have a big, beautiful stimulus….and China is going to pay for it*!”
* “One way or another”
Kent
I caught the interview yesterday walking the dog. My heart aches every time I think about what we lost.
On the other hand, with voting in full swing, every day that passes without a fundamental change in the election zeitgeist is a good one. What are we up to? 18 more days? I don’t know if I can take it.
Frank Wilhoit
I voted yday. I voted for one Republican, for the first time since 1976(*), and I owe this community an exact statement of my reasons.
For many years the sheriff of this county was Sheriff B. He was notoriously corrupt and incompetent, but, for familiar reasons, that didn’t matter. (It mattered a little when he bought two new cruisers and pranksters set them on fire within weeks.)
Sheriff B eventually retired and was succeeded by Sheriff S. Sheriff S, unexpectably, is competent, and hires competent deputies, and trains them.
This year Sheriff S had a primary challenger, Chief W, a Trumpist whose platform consisted of right-wing word salad wrapped around a hard kernel of nullification of State law. Someone gave Chief W a LOT of money to campaign with; we’d love to know who, but of course there is no way to find that out. I had a bad feeling about it, but Sheriff S won the primary 60/40 . Chief W’s only comment thereupon was “I’ll be back in four years”.
All three of the abovementioned gentlemen are Republicans. There was no Democratic candidate for Sheriff this cycle; Sheriff S appeared on the ballot unopposed. I voted for him to help run his numbers up. I don’t think I did wrong. I may have done pointless.
(*) One of my guidelines is to vote for the lesser of two demagogues. In 1976, Jimmy Carter appeared to be more of a demagogue than Jerry Ford. In an alternate universe, Ford won in 1976 and Reagan slank back into the shadows; that would have been worth it, no?
germy
Harris suspends travel after two in her orbit test positive for the coronavirus
Bruce K
@Kent: Yeah, that downgrade in executives was like trading Willie Mays for Joe Shlabotnik, wasn’t it?
I’m gonna be biting my nails down to the scapula on Election Night, especially since the polls don’t start closing until about 3am my time. (8pm Eastern is when they start to close, right?)
indycat32
@Bruce K: Indiana closes at 6:00 and at 6:01 they call it for Trump.
Kent
@Frank Wilhoit: Last Republican I voted for was Ted Stevens in the 1996 Alaska Senate race when a completely unhinged and delusional crank named Teresa Obermeyer managed to get through the Dem primary. She spent half the campaign under a court-ordered restraining order to stop stalking Ted Stevens at his home, whom she blamed as leading a conspiracy to keep her husband from passing the bar exam in Alaska. He failed it something like a ridiculous 37 straight times. I had run-ins with her professionally, working for NOAA. She would come to public meetings just to give unhinged off-topic rants. She got herself elected to the Anchorage school board somehow and completely melted down that body until they finally figured out how to expel her.
germy
@Kent:
Local politics is often the most loco.
ixnay
Please hold mr. ixnay in your hearts, as he is a musician and is having surgery on his left hand.
JPL
@Nicole: That’s good information to share.
Kay
We’re having a covid spike here in Trump Country, Ohio. It’s really different when you start to know a bunch of people who are testing positive or quarantined. I wonder if it will change the views of the loosely attached Trump supporters here. It feels like it just got very real and local in a way it wasn’t before. They had just opened nursing homes for 20 minute, outdoor visits and one by they’re shutting them down. I don’t think there’s a school left that hasn’t had a kid test positive now, and this is just in the last 2 weeks. It flies directly in the face of the Trump Administration message, which is “it’s over” – I wonder if that will change anything.
Ohio Mom
Frank Wilhoit:
When you get to the Pearly Gates and St Peter is there holding the clipboard with the list of Pro’s and Con’s for whether or not he should let you in, this vote of yours isn’t even going to be on it.
We have a Democratic woman running for Sheriff, she is definitely the dark horse and Ohio Dad was bemoaning her poor chances yesterday. I cheered him up by pointing out that LE at all levels is so misdirected and often corrupt, it will take a systemic overhaul to make it right.
Even if every reform candidate won, it would not be enough without other forces (read: federal funding pressure) to change things.
TL; dr: you’re absolved. Have a good day!
JPL
@Frank Wilhoit: Normally I’ll research and vote accordingly. This time straight dem. Both sons did the same. I blame trump and his enablers for this.
zhena gogolia
@ixnay:
Oh, I hope everything goes perfectly!
trollhattan
@Nicole:
Our first Dalmatian had kidney stones from a young age and was on meds and prescription food his entire life. You dodged a bullet, even at that price!
frosty
You’re not alone, that was my take too. That vote, and John Anderson in 1980 are my two big regrets. Ever since 1980 I’ve learned my lesson: I’m a Yellow Dog Democrat all the way.
trollhattan
@Kent:
Did anybody ask Teresa whether she’d been near that plane Ted took his last ride in? Just sayin’.
WaterGirl
@ixnay: Holding mr. ixnay in my heart, as requested, and also good thoughts and actual prayers for the surgeon, as well.
Almost Retired
All four registered voters in the Almost Retired family have voted, including the two millennial Bernie Bros. They’ve gone from grousing about the Primaries to becoming relatively enthusiastic Biden voters (I may have made some vague insinuations about disinheriting children who vote third party). All votes have been tracked and counted! Woo Hoo! It’s Los Angeles, so it doesn’t count as much….but still! Next up for me is election monitoring in Las Vegas (yeah, hardship duty).
Ohio Mom
Kay:
I snuck in a haircut last week and had it cut ridiculously short because I could see the numbers were heading up too far, too fast. I left a big tip because I don’t think I’ll feel comfortable going back for a long while.
I don’t pretend to know as much about Ohio politics as you but what is left for DeWine? I can’t see him cracking down beyond his mask mandate, and it looks like we’ve gotten all the mileage out of that we can.
The Thin Black Duke
@Kay: Yes, I think it will. Some people don’t take it seriously until it affects them personally.
Kent
@trollhattan: Yeah, no. She was crazy though. Their one and only debate is epic Alaska political lore. Here is a 4 min clip ending with Ted Stevens telling her that she needs to get help: https://youtu.be/MaIsLeqfwM4
cain
@frosty:
The last Republican I voted for was Gordon Smith. But after 2000, I voted from Jeff Merkley – and i don’t regret that vote one bit. Jeff has been amazing representative of Oregon. I couldn’t ask for better senate representation IMHO.
cain
@Almost Retired:
Every. Vote. Counts. Every single one.
trollhattan
@Frank Wilhoit:
The sheriff thing drives me nuts. We had competent sheriffs for ages and I had no issue with reelecting them (non-partisan ballot in our county). Then we got in a “new sheriff” who began issuing concealed carry licenses like chewing gum and then decided to run as a Republican against a Democratic House rep in the district. He lost but wasn’t done–he became an early Trumper and announced his retirement, backing a hand-picked successor. When the successor lost the primary he decided to unretire, run and keep his seat, which he still holds.
So in a strong Democratic county we have a gun-humping, Trump-humping sheriff whose deputies have shot and killed numerous civilians with few consequences.
Litlebritdifrnt
Twitler has been promoting his “Trump Army” heavily today wanting people to sign up to monitor the polls. I think there could be a flaw in his cunning plan. It seems to me that Dems are voting early and by mail in huge numbers. His “Trump Army” don’t know or cannot guess when this is going to happen, so they can’t monitor shit. From the reports I have seen the majority of voters who are going to show up on election day are Republicans, and so the “Trump Army” are going to be intimidating Trump voters. Ooops.
Kay
@The Thin Black Duke:
I’ve been following it, I knew it was coming sooner and later, and it feels different even to me. It changes when it’s no longer “preventing” but instead attempting to remediate. We now have a staff member missing- not because she’s preventing infection in an abstract way but because her school age son was exposed and is awaiting test results. I had a hearing yesterday that was continued because the litigant on the other side tested positive and her lawyer is now quarantined, so no one came from that side.
Kay
Well, “never-ending”. Or ends in less than 3 weeks. We CAN get out of this Mr. Murdoch. We’re not actually required to continue to employ the low quality hires.
narya
@ixnay: Am doing as requested!
@Ohio Mom: I haven’t had a haircut since last December, I think. I normally go every 3 months or so (I wear it long), so it’s VERY long and looks like weasels chew on the ends while I sleep, but I see no point in getting it cut–I see only 1-2 people in person.
I’m off tomorrow, so will Vote Early–apparently there were some lines & glitches yesterday, so waiting two days may help with both, I hope. ETA: I don’t think I’ve ever voted for a R (my first vote was for Carter, in 1976), and I see no reason to change that for the forseeable future. Exceptions such as described above I’d consider, but they’re not likely in my location.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@ixnay: Best wishes for Mr. Ixnay. Scary moment.
@Kay: My experience has been that when a case of COVID was diagnosed here, some formerly cavalier people got more serious. Then a month passed while they gradually reverted to stupid. Then last week there was another case. Tuesday, my entire book club kept their masks on during the meeting.
Marcopolo
OT but if any BJers have not completed their census forms, the final (like real final) deadline appears to be tonight at midnight HI time. Please please go here to complete your census information. It should not take you more than a couple minutes unless you have a gargantuan family. Thanks.
dmsilev
@Kay: Maybe Mr. Murdoch should have thought of that before backing an obviously-unqualified Trump for President four years ago. Or, for that matter, using his media properties to launder pro-Trump fake scandal news just yesterday.
Kent
@trollhattan: Sheriff’s elections drive me nuts. One of those offices that frankly shouldn’t be elected. County commissioners should hire sheriffs like cities hire police chiefs. And then do performance reviews and such like any other employee.
We had a pretty damn crazy sheriff when we lived in Waco because all the rural gun nuts voted in mass for the most crazy candidate in the primary and we ended up with a hick in a cowboy hat who wasn’t even a licensed law enforcement officer.
WaterGirl
@Dorothy A. Winsor: Do you actually stay for the book club meetings if one or more people in the group are not wearing masks? I would walk out, and say why.
VeniceRiley
@germy: I hope that doesn’t cancel her Texas trip. I know they were excited. Only so many days l;eft though. It does highlight how responsible we are in comparison to Typhoid trump’s campaign.
bemused
@Kay:
The Murdoch family knew about covid turning to pandemic early on. They cancelled Rupert’s 89th birthday party three days before the March 11 party.
dm
@mali muso: Half of that $1.5 billion has been in the 28 days since Ruth Bader Ginsburg died. They will probably cross $1 billion since her death this weekend.
Kent
No, they know exactly what they are doing. They aren’t going to go monitor voting in nice white Republican suburbs. They are going to surgically monitor only the most Dem and minority precincts in the inner cities and try to scare people into not voting by having uniformed cops and such out front. And do whatever they can to slow down voting and make the lines longer in those places by trying to challenge voters and make scenes until the actual cops get called. Anything to gum up the process of black people voting.
Kay
@dmsilev:
They’re not upset that he’s a lousy President who harms people and the country- they’re upset that those things may make it impossible for him to retain power. I just enjoy reading it because it means he’s doing poorly politically. If he wasn’t tanking they’d continue to kiss his ass, and he knows that too.
AnonPhenom
*cough*ACORN*cough
Amir Khalid
@ixnay:
Positive vibes and healing thoughts to mr ixnay.
James E Powell
@Frank Wilhoit:
Even though I was and still am a big fan of Jimmy Carter (the only president who I ever met in person and spoke with for five seconds), this is one of my favorite historical what ifs. Ford gets re-elected, no supreme court justices die or retire, the whole mess of the oil crisis, stagflation, Iranian revolution, etc. lands on Ford & the Republicans. Opens up all kinds of possibilities. Start with President Jerry Brown appointing Ruth Bader Ginsburg as the first female justice
ETA – I have never voted for a Republican. I have never not voted for the Democrat. I guess I’m just lucky that I never had to vote for any of the odious Ds who sully our banner. I came of political age in Ohio in the days of Nixon & Rhodes. Republicans have never been any better than those two corrupt a holes.
Marcopolo
@Kent: Hah, the last time I voted for an R was also in AK. I voted for Jim Whittaker for Mayor of Fairbanks North Star Borough in 2003. He was running against a far right looney so I was voting for the saner conservative–there was no D running and no D would have won anyhow. In 2008 he endorsed Obama at the 2nd night of the DNC.
The Thin Black Duke
@WaterGirl: More to the point, why meet in person at all? My wife and I belong to a SF book reading group, and ever since the pandemic we get together via Zoom.
satby
@ixnay: fingers (and everything else ) crossed for mr. ixnay
Baud
@James E Powell:
Hard to say. White grievance had to go somewhere. Reagan could still have won in 1980 running against “Washington.”
ETA: The Dems would still have controlled Congress.
Marcopolo
@Kay: If that is the case then he could instruct his employees at Fox & the NY Post to pull the plug on supporting Trump though the remainder of the campaign season. That’s not happening, is it? I’ll give credit to his son James Murdoch who recently quit the company and has been donating quite a bit of money to electing Ds this cycle.
Baud
@ixnay: ?
burnspbesq
My luck with sheriffs didn’t improve when I moved from OC to Williamson County, TX. At least there is a credible challenger to the incumbent, who is under indictment for evidence tampering in connection with an incident where an African-American suspect ended up dead for no good reason.
BR
@Kay:
This is my take on the Project Lincoln and Never Trumper folks as well, especially Wilson. I sort of buy that some of them — Stuart Stevens, David Frum, Jennifer Rubin, and a few others — have had a change of heart and while not lefty now are at least a bit chastened, but a lot of them just want exactly what you said — a non-lousy arch-conservative.
Edit: I should have definitely added Conway along with Wilson — they haven’t changed at all.
Marcopolo
@L85NJGT: As of noonish today 17.5 million folks have voted, about 12.5% of the total 2016 vote. We are firmly in the midst of the election & each day goes by another million or two folks will have voted. Time is running out for orange asshole.
burnspbesq
I didn’t see it, but from what I have read it seems like Trump’s phone-in therapy session with Stuart Varney this morning was pretty epic.
Kent
@James E Powell: Yeah, you can just make endless “what-ifs” that will make you crazy. Without Nader, Gore wins in 2000 and we start down the path towards national leadership on climate change and no Iraq war or ISUS and SCOTUS is reliably progressive.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@WaterGirl: I don’t, though I probably should.
Rationalization coming: They all live in this building, which is relatively isolated. The people who can come in are limited and have their temps taken, etc. We meet in a large room with chairs spread a good 10 feet apart. So I feel reasonably safe, but it is a risk because people go out and are not careful, and workers come in.
Matt McIrvin
I would have voted for Bill Weld over John Silber in the 1990 Massachusetts gubernatorial election, if I had been registered in the state at the time, which I wasn’t, having just moved here for grad school. And I don’t like Bill Weld very much. Silber was sort of an educated, Democratic Trump. Every week he’d say some new bigoted-grandpa thing. Mike Barnicle loved him.
Ken
About forty years ago in college I wrote a very primitive text prediction program that scanned a corpus, built a table of probabilities that word A is followed by word B, and generated random sentences using the table.
Trump’s word salads read a lot like that ancient program’s output. There’s a phrase, then it hits a common word and abruptly switches to another phrase, ad infinitum.
zhena gogolia
@burnspbesq:
FlyingToaster
@Kent:
But, as a city kid, I’m used to voting at the police station (4 blocks away). And the Fire Station. And the grade school. And the Old Age Home. Every one of which has at least one detail officer on the line, and usually a second on traffic control.
Hell, my grade school in the ’60s in KCMO had two cops outside on Election Day. And people carry guns in MO (unlike MA, whence I emigrated).
I understand that Trump wants to start Civil War II, Electric Boogaloo, in order to sieze power, but his tactics are epic fucking fail.
J R in WV
@ixnay:
Will do. Have off and on problems with my hands, but am only an amateur musician, not a pro.
Typing speed much lower now than back when I was a coder/analyst writing and grant applications.
Hoping everything goes at least as well as expected!!! Tell Mr Ixnay to Do the physical therapy !!!
FlyingToaster
@Matt McIrvin: Bill Weld is the last Republican I voted for.
My favorite poster from that campaign was the picture of Silber with the legend of “VOMIT LIVES”.
waratah
I was excited to see how many Democrat women were on my mail in ballot in Northwest Texas. I think Texas is going to have a surge of women elected for city county and state.
Baud
Call me cynical, but if this is their first action in this election, it seems more like jumping on the bandwagon after everyone else has done all the work.
Still, I’ll take it. We need Senate seats.
Ruckus
@mali muso:
Maybe a lot of us little folks are looking at kicking out the selfish little/big/massive assholes so that we can have an actual county/government for all of us, not just the bastards who cheat and steal everything.
WereBear
@ixnay: from the whole house, which includes a guitarist.
Betty Cracker
@Litlebritdifrnt: I was wondering about that too. I think many of us are still so traumatized by 2016 that, although we know Trump really is a moron who’s running the worst fucking campaign any of us have ever seen in our lifetimes, we dare not draw the obvious conclusions.
I mean, it’s understandable. I was certainly way overconfident, and it haunts me. But a whole flock of black swans had to land just so to drag Trump’s stupid orange ass over the finish line last time, and now he’s not only got a hideous record as an incumbent to explain, he steps on rake after rake after rake as a candidate.
There’s the super-spreader events, which Trump might possibly be the only person on the planet holding right now because it’s so fucking dumb. There’s the “army” that’s being set up to harass each other and the broke-ass fraudster campaign staff and advisors. There’s the rising wave of infections that may crest at the exact time Trump needs his idiot followers to show up in person to vote.
I think he’s going to lose in humiliating fashion. I think the race will be called reasonably early on election night. And I think with that perspective, we’ll marvel at how much we agonized these past few months. I am not counting chickens! But that’s my sense of it now. He’s a fucking idiot heading for a gigantic faceplant.
Ken
@Kay: @Marcopolo: @burnspbesq: If Fox does cut loose from Trump after the election, they’re going to have to change the phone numbers. They may need a restraining order. So might some of their on-air personalities.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@Frank Wilhoit:
@frosty:
To my shame, I also voted for Ford. I was as much a Nixon-hater as anybody but to my 19-year-old self Carter seemed to be a little naive on dealing with the Soviet Union. I definitely felt more sympathetic toward the hippie / liberal side in politics but on foreign policy thought too many people did not take the Soviet threat seriously enough.
By the time Carter’s term ended I was a rabid supporter and never cast a vote for a Republican for anything ever again.
trollhattan
@Marcopolo:
Jim Whittaker the climber, first American to summit Everest? If that Whittaker he was a Celebrity in Seattle back in the day and coincidentally, buddies with Governor Dan Evans, also a climber (but not hard core like the Whittaker boys). A more-or-less moderate Republican, Evans, of the kind who would be driven out with torches and pitchforks today.
Betty
@Kay: Same thing happening in my old home town where everyone knows everyone, and several people are suddenly gravely ill. The Trumpers thought they were exempt.
Kent
Yeah, it’s cynical. They want a seat at the table in 2021. Shrug. They mostly seem strongest in deepest blue areas like Seattle or NYC rather than swing states like Arizona or Wisconsin. But whatever. Every vote does matter.
Kent
@Betty Cracker: The problem is that if we had even the remotest semblance of true Democracy the race actually wouldn’t be in question. I don’t think there is any statistical chance that Trump could ever win the popular vote.
The problem is that we have to win a landslide popular vote margin just to compensate for all the institutional racism from the electoral college to surgical voter suppression to Russian meddling to everything else. After 2000 and 2016 I will never again feel comfortable about a presidential election. Unless, and until we actually establish true democracy in this country.
Ruckus
@Ohio Mom:
Here in LA county we have an indoor mask requirement for businesses. I don’t see people without masks in stores, although there are a few who don’t seem to be smart enough to know how a mask works – but they are a small minority. But I’m the only person at work that wears one.
trollhattan
@Ceci n est pas mon nym:
Candidate Carter was an odd duck and off-putting from the standpoint of being Southern (the home of still-breathing George Wallace) and Southern Baptist (‘nuf said). Plus, he seemed to drop out of the clear sky. Jimmy who?
Dan Aykroyd made him a LOT more likeable.
One could be convinced the Republican Party might recover from Nixon during that period. Reagan made that sentiment an obvious lie. And here we are.
Kent
@Ruckus: Here in SW Washington State we have near universal mask compliance from what I have seen on the occasional trip to the store. We still have MAGAts here too, lots of them. But they seem to mostly favor car parades for their protests. So even that is actually pretty safe.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
I am reasonably confident that he will be humiliated by the votes that are counted by election night, but I hope it isn’t called. I would like to see the media be responsible and point out how many votes remain to be counted.
Although if there’s a message that “the mail-in ballots are overwhelmingly from Democrats and therefore we project that Trump will lose the EC 47,245 to -500” that would be OK with me.
Marcopolo
@trollhattan: Sorry, not the climber. He was an oil industry guy (apparently one of the sane ones) prior to entering AK politics.
WaterGirl
@Dorothy A. Winsor: We all have to do what we’re comfortable with, so I’m not judging. For me, book club would not be worth the risk, but I realize I am on the more COVID-cautious end of the continuum.
Even regular haircuts aren’t worth it to me, so I have gone from every 5-6 weeks to every 4 months. ?♀️
Barbara
@Litlebritdifrnt: It’s one reason they don’t like expanded early and mail voting. It definitely limits the opportunity to engage in polling shenanigans. The main reason they don’t like it however, is that overall it increases turnout because it’s easier for people to find a time that is convenient to vote.
And as for poll watchers, it’s really way too late to begin that kind of initiative — to identify people who are interested, figure out where they are located and assign them to polling locations. I assume they have no interest in training them, but if they did, that would be another hurdle.
Kent
@trollhattan: I was young in 1976. But as I recall, Carter ran a near flawless outsider moral scold campaign in the wake of Watergate and Vietnam, which was well received. All the Baptist peanut farmer schtick got him a lot of rural conservative type votes. He ran around the country talking to farmers and such. Without Watergate, Carter goes nowhere.
Matt McIrvin
@Kent: 538’s model gives a 5% chance of Trump actually winning the popular vote, and about an 8% chance of Trump winning the EC without the popular vote.
Personally, I think their model has longer tails than the situation actually warrants–if you look at the scenarios equally out on the other side from the Trump wins, they seem absurd: scenarios where Biden wins Montana, Kansas or Mississippi, which is just not going to happen. But the thumb on the scale of election corruption, and the memory of 2016, make the Trump wins seem more plausible.
taumaturgo
@Baud: This is keeping it real:
The digital ad, reported first by POLITICO, features a fed-up mother who lost her job because of the coronavirus and is caring for her child at home, all while being frustrated by President Donald Trump’s management of the pandemic. Like other progressive campaigns supporting Biden, it doesn’t attempt to sugarcoat the fact that Biden is an unexciting candidate to many on the left — a candid approach that progressives say is needed to connect with infrequent voters and Bernie Sanders supporters.
“Look, maybe you don’t like the other guy running for president,” the woman says in the spot. “I get it. I don’t like anyone right now. But could you do me a favor? Take 10 minutes this November and f—ing vote.”
MomSense
@FlyingToaster:
Only Republican vote in my voting history.
Kent
If Biden wins, on day 1 he needs to start with a Post Office voting reform package. There is no reason why every single Post Office in the country can’t install red ballot drop boxes right out front next to the regular blue drive-through mailboxes.
Houston, for example, has 57 separate Post Office locations: https://www.postallocations.com/tx/city/houston
The Post Office could then coordinate with local elections officials to have ballots dropped in these locations collected daily and delivered every evening to the local elections offices. And there is absolutely NOTHING that the State of Texas could do about it because they are Federal facilities and outside State jurisdiction. No matter what your state authority is, you can’t fuck with the US mail.
They will still get ballots in the regular mail. But this would take up much of the volume.
Baud
@taumaturgo: I read the article. Like I said, I’ll take it, and I hope it helps. But Justice Dems aren’t a new organization, so it strikes me as odd that they seem to have been quiet before now.
Soprano2
I don’t think it’s going to work as well as they think it will. People in these places are determined to vote, and this has been talked about as a tactic for months, so many of them should be prepared for it. Also, since so many people are voting early that will mean fewer people for them to try to intimidate. I’m sure he’s recruiting heavily for people to go to voting location in St. Louis and Kansas City. They don’t do that crap down here because there aren’t enough black voters to make it worth their while.
Kelly
My dear departed father served on our local school board when I was a teen. A local “taxes are theft” crank showed up at one of his first meetings. The crank was well known to the school board, city council, etc. They’d let him rant for a little while then get on with business. My Dad, a heavy equipment operator, lifetime logger and construction worker was unaware of this tradition. The crank’s choice of words for his “taxes are theft” rant caused Dad to stand up, lean over the table and in a fierce “shall we take this outside” voice said “Are YOU calling ME a THIEF?”. The rest of the school board settled things down and the crank never showed up at another board meeting.
Betty Cracker
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: Good point, but I think some of the swing states that Trump has to win count mail-in votes early. Florida definitely does, and if Trump loses Florida decisively, he’s toast. Not saying that’s definitely going to happen; I would not bet the farm on it. But I think a humiliating loss on election night is far more likely than another EC squeaker win via 70K votes distributed over three states like what happened last time.
MomSense
@ixnay:
So with him right now!!!
trollhattan
@Marcopolo:
Ah, that makes sense because I couldn’t guess why a climber would be hanging out in Fairbanks.
Omnes Omnibus
@Kent: You know, I am starting to think that there won’t be enough hours in that first day for Biden to do everything people want him to do on that day. I expect him and his admin to hit the ground running, but we have to remember that some of this shit is going to take time.
Kent
Yeah. I don’t know that it is actually going to work. But that is the obvious strategy. They aren’t going to spread across rural Kansas to monitor polling places. It’s all about intimidation in minority precincts. Hopefully the Dems are ready to respond.
The other thing they will try to do is gum up the speed at which voting proceeds by challenging voters and such wherever they can, and pushing the envelope until thrown out. Anything to make the lines longer.
That kind of shit works better when you aren’t prepared for it. Hopefully Dems are, and social media will enable rapid response, which wasn’t the case decades ago.
Hopefully if some white yahoos in police or military garb show up in front of minority precincts there will be 50 cell phone cameras right in their fucking faces.
Barbara
@Kelly: Oh that is epic! I think a lot of places have such cranks. My husband had a matter that had to go through multiple county board meetings and an elderly woman showed up at all of them, with practically the same comments over and over that were only tangentially related to the matter. They handle it by limiting comments from individuals to two minutes. Whatever she had to say could not take more than two minutes.
RaflW
@Kay: We’re having a Covid spike in every part of the state of MN except the Twin Cities, suburbs, and SE MN (where Rochester/Mayo is). Even the non-spike parts are on an upswing, but NW, NE and SW are tripling the rate of infections per capita of a month ago.
Meanwhile the MN GOP leadership are still grandstanding against mask mandates, phased restrictions on bars and so on. Utter sh*tshow.
I hope to g-ddess they lose big. We only need to swing two MN senate seats (and defend out house majority) to have a trifecta.
The house GOP has finally sensed the mood of the public and after 5 special sessions finally passed our biennial bonding bill (how big projects get financed here. Usually about $2bn per cycle). GOP senators are pissed off today, not clear if it’ll pass or not. Reckless fools.
Mary G
@ixnay: I’ve had a lot of surgeries on a lot of joints, and I always say the hand surgeon was the best. I can only imagine how stressful it must be for Mr. ixnay, and will hold him in the light.
Roger Moore
@Kent:
The last Republican I voted for was Steve Poizner when he was running for insurance commissioner, since his Democratic opponent, Cruz Bustamante, was clearly in the pocket of the insurance industry. I don’t have many hard rules for choosing candidates, but I will not vote for an insurance commissioner who has taken big campaign contributions from the industry he’s supposed to be regulating.
Kent
Well yeah. Of course. They have a whole year full of first day agenda items. But I really like the idea of turning the Post Office into a quasi-Federal voting facility. Especially in states with a history of voter suppression. They already handle millions of ballots in regular mail. Just make it more overt and systematic, convenient, and secure. Take Trump’s wall money and divert it there. Wouldn’t even require legislation.
MomSense
@RaflW:
I am so lucky to be in Maine. We have the highest rate of testing and the lowest positivity rate in the country. Our governor didn’t wait for trump administration. In December they started planning with IDEXX labs to do human testing.
brantl
@Nicole: I think your vet is the idiot; they have reason to know that, you didn’t.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@Omnes Omnibus: I never even knew till this year that the new Congress is sworn in on Jan. 3, weeks before the President. It wasn’t important to me before. But it damn sure is now.
So I’m hoping for a nice huge pile of bills waiting in Joe’s inbox on the first day of work. And I’m happy with Nancy Smash and whoever becomes Senate Majority Leader (Liz Warren?) deciding on the legislative priorities.
There’s only so much you can do in one day. I’m OK if it takes a couple days, even a whole week to fix all the damage.
Patricia Kayden
burnspbesq
@Betty Cracker:
But see, e.g., UEFA Nations League.
brantl
No
Betty Cracker
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: Do we have any reason to believe anyone other than Chuck Schumer will be the Senate Majority Leader if the Dems flip the Senate? Not a fan of that outcome, but I don’t know how it works.
Barbara
@Betty Cracker: If you are the minority leader, you are probably living for the day when you get to be the majority leader. I would imagine if he wants it he will get it.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@Betty Cracker: I don’t know how it works either, so I left that vague.
You’re probably right that Schumer is in line for it.
Ken
True, one of the few good things about the Trump administration is that they discovered the president’s special power to move funds from one project to another, ignoring Congressional budget directives.
Even better, the Republicans have already assented to this by their silence.
Baud
@Betty Cracker: Last I heard, the Senate caucus likes Schumer well enough. That’s his only constituency for the majority leader position.
Chyron HR
@taumaturgo:
It appalls me that once the primary was over all you ‘progressives’ just went, “LOL no hard feelings about the fake rape accusation, right bro?”
laura
@trollhattan: you forgot to add that Scott Fucking Jones is not willing to accept any oversight At All – and is openly hostile to the County Board of Supervisors. He’s racist af. He is tight with ICE. Otherwise on point.
Kent
I agree. That’s the thinking that leads to Susan Sarandon arguing that if Trump wins it will lead to a progressive revolution.
The orcs are ALWAYS at the door and you never willingly give them an inch that might take decades to get back.
taumaturgo
@Baud: They have been fighting to have their voices heard, not an easy task especially when the leadership of the party is reflexively anti-liberal and insists on governing from the center-right with an old and stale political playbook. JD has some important victories mainly against entrenched and entitled Democrats who have succumbed to the legal bribery game of donors always first in line. They also had an important victory in the Senate with Liberal Senator Markey from Massachusetts – endorsed by them – defeating the younger and center-right Kennedy.
Humanities Prof
@Matt McIrvin: The Economist’s forecast model is a lot more bearish on Trump’s shot at the popular vote. They have him at less than 1% to take the popular vote this year.
Of course, they also have him sitting on a 9% chance of winning the EC vote, which means they, like 538, have Trump’s EC-victory chances 8% higher than his odds of winning the popular vote.
James E Powell
@Baud:
Yes, but it’s my historical counterfactual fantasy and I get to say how it turns out! And while I’m at it, I decide not to get married and the Browns win Super Bowl XV!
Baud
@taumaturgo: C’mon, man. If you like JD, fine. I don’t care. But nothing prevented them from being more active in the campaign at some point well before two weeks before election day. That has nothing to do with the leadership of the party or individual primary fights. The Lincoln Project certainly didn’t wait for anyone’s permission to take some initiative.
taumaturgo
@Chyron HR: You’re absolutely right, some of the progressives, not Liberals decided to go the route of Hillary’s PUMAs.
Ohio Mom
Re: Poll “monitoring.”
At one of Ohio Dad’s old workplaces, his Ditto-head co-workers would fantasize loudly about volunteering to scare “those people” from voting but the truth was, they were too afraid of Black people to venture into their neighborhoods. And these jokers all owned guns.
Ask me how well Ohio Dad fit in with this group…
trollhattan
@MomSense:
The narrative seems to be we didn’t know nuttin’ until January but your story re. Maine put the lie stamp to that. I was sure as hell paying mind to the stories at the end of last year.
When Pence pretends as though “banning China flights” was all the administration needed to do, he’s parroting the line I hear from every Republican re. the COVID fail. They didn’t fail, see, they did all the right things, way ahead of time.
Kent
@Baud: Exactly. In the 250 year history of this country, even at the absolute high water marks for liberal policy, like during Roosevelt’s New Deal, there were still majorities of centrists, because that’s what it took to win and govern in large swaths of the country. Change is either violent or incremental. And that has been the case for as long as politics has existed.
BR
@Baud:
I’m fairly convinced that the Lincoln Project is no different — they are trying to ride the coattails of the Biden campaign. The vast majority of their ads seem to be preaching to the converted. Their spending is dwarfed by official ad spending. I think the only thing they’ve done well is the ads for an audience of one that are only shown on DC-area Fox. I don’t trust Wilson or Conway one bit. The others (Stevens, Schmidt, Nichols) seem a bit more sincere that they aren’t going to jump right on board with Tom Cotton or someone in two years.
Kay
So many things have to be repaired it gets overwhelming.
James E Powell
@BR:
I have no evidence, but I also get the sense that the Lincoln Project ads had the attention of the Village and helped to prevent them from becoming a force for Trump’s re-election or a 24 hour mocking & smearing machine against Biden.
Some of the LP ads required some insider-savvy knowledge or at least above-average political attention to make sense.
Kay
If we succeed in getting of them and are able to find out the extent of the damage I think we know that happened to more than the CDC.
tam1MI
Has anybody tried to verify the claim made in the other thread that Repuke voter registrations are outpacing Dem registrations in key states? Because that has got me terrified
What if the Shitgibbon is bringing in loads of new voters and the pollsters are catching them because they are screening for likelys?
BR
@Kay:
I assume Biden could issue an executive order that fires all hires made in the previous 4 years on a basis of public evidence of corrupt hiring practices, and since the executive branch controls its own staffing it’s not like there’s any recourse.
Separately I wonder if he could do an executive order to immediately revoke all administrative changes made in the last 4 years.
They can always rehire and reinstate the 2% or whatever of people and policies that are worth keeping.
Mary G
San Diego Union-Tribune has a great column by US Attorney Phillip Halpern, who prosecuted Duke Cunningham and Duncan Hunter, about why he’s leaving – Bill Barr.
It’s a lovely bashing, richly deserved.
Baud
@BR: I don’t trust them, but at least they committed early in the process.
frosty
@ixnay: Best wishes and good luck to Mr. ixnay from an amateur musician.
Baud
@tam1MI: I’ve heard about GOP success in Pennsylvania, not in other states. The theory I heard is that Dems are not doing registration drives because of COVID and the GOP is still going out to meet people. But the polls have Biden ahead in Pennsylvania, so who knows?
BR
@Baud:
Yeah. I see it as opportunism for some of them, like Wilson, who are more clever than the ones who didn’t flip, and true remorse for some of the others. At this point everyone has an incentive to double down until the election because they will be in the wilderness if Biden doesn’t win.
piratedan
@Baud: i thought I had come across something along the lines that Texas has registered over 1.6m new voters and that they were registering as Dem on a 2v1 basis… but I am old, perhaps what I read did not mean what I thought it meant.
Kay
@Mary G:
Good for him. The CDC, but it will be the same for all the institutions they’ve discredited:
It’s really important they speak up.
Soprano2
Evidently today Trump basically admitted that the U.S. Marshalls executed that antifa murder suspect in Washington or Oregon, I can’t remember which state it was. Pretty close to the shooting someone on Fifth Avenue thing.
SiubhanDuinne
Charlie Pierce has some advice for Joe Biden:
When Charlie gets going, he turns a phrase as well as anyone I know. Maybe only excepting Betty Cracker.
joel hanes
@TaMara (HFG):
My mom lives in a big outside of town place in rural Iowa, and needs help and company.
I’m purposing to leave sane California, where masking compliance in my community is 99% and the new case curve is almost flat, to go live her for a month or two. Gonna drive instead of fly because I’m not insane.
Gotta transit Nebraska on the way.
I’m planning on sleeping in the car, minimizing even drive-thru by taking a lot of trail mix and dried fruit and jerky and a huge thermos of coffee, and never setting foot inside a motel, or a restaurant or gas station. Taking
And then, once I’ve gotten tested and quarantined in a little motel I’ve scoped out, once I’ve moved into her basement, I won’t be able to go to indoors in Iowa except in Mom’s place.
Humanities Prof
@piratedan: There’s a good summary of this at electoralvote.com today (link is at the top of the BJ home page).
Long story short version; there have been 3 million new voters registered in Texas in the last 4 years, 60% of them registered by Democrats.
That won’t correspond perfectly to party ID, because if you’re registering voters, you’re not going to refuse to do so because the person you’re registering supports a different party. But those figures should be at least in-the-ballpark accurate, since parties try to recruit new voters who are likely to support them. If broadly accurate, that would yield about 1.8m new Democratic registrants vs. 1.2m Republican registrants.
frosty
@Barbara: I just signed up as a poll watcher yesterday. There’s still plenty of time to assign people once they’ve volunteered. Beating the bushes to find them is another matter.
Roger Moore
@Ruckus:
We also have a mask requirement for public transit, but it seems like I can’t get on the train without seeing someone ignoring it.
SiubhanDuinne
@Mary G:
Excellent read. Thank you.
catclub
of course, without watergate, Nixon gets elected to a third term. in a landslide. and a goatee.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Yes, it sure seems like the Blacks are as mad as hell and not going to take it anymore from the dumb White People. Enough of them have gotten beaten and shot this last six months making that point.
frosty
@trollhattan: It’s really ironic that the first call Carter (Aykroyd) answered was from a postal worker trying to figure out why the sorting machine wasn’t working. Prescient!!
catclub
@Kent: In the Ford case, you re-elect him after he pardoned Nixon and it is even more open season for GOP crimes in the future.
Kay
@tam1MI:
You need more information. If it’s phased “closing the gap” that includes inactive voters dropping off (fewer registered Democrats, but they were unlikely voters anyway or they are people who moved or died) plus R leaning voters going from I to R, or ’16 Trump voters who were registered as D’s but switched to R’s.To be newly registered voters they have to be new. A Trump voter who was a D or an I and is now an R is not a plus 1, as opposed to a non-voter who is now a Trump voter.
You could close the gap in registrations and not change the number of votes.
stinger
@WaterGirl:
WANT.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Reagen tried to primary Ford in ’76, it as clear he would be the GOP candidate in 1980. So no.
Kent
@James E Powell:
I don’t think this can be overstated. I think they have been instrumental in tilting the jaded apolitical villager types away from laundering Trump talking points and mocking Dems like they usually do. There is the mass battle to influence public opinion and the meta battle to influence the influencers of public opinion. And LP is more of the latter. But still important.
This is an all-hands-on-deck for the future of the country election.
Barbara
@frosty: Right, and I might too. We are still being solicited, but the organizations that are asking for people have a plan already in place for where people are needed and what they are going to do, as well has having training modules.
Omnes Omnibus
@Betty Cracker: Schumer will get the job. Also, why do people think that Warren would either want the job or be good at it?
Kent
About a million people also died in Texas in the past 4 years. The majority of them old white Republicans.
Kay
Donald Trump is telling people the US Marshals executed a protester without charges or a trial.
I know they’re all afraid of him or actively working exclusively on his behalf but they should probably start thinking about protecting themselves from charges. He’s saying they committed a very serious crime.
Kent
Yeah, no. None of that is possible.
All the political appointees are gone on day 1. But civil service hires are protected, as they should be. Or Trump would have fired them all. Any right wing tools who obstruct can be sent to the basement on new duties to count paperclips. But they can’t be fired. I expect in most agencies there are loyal Democrats who know who the problem people are. Trump actually did very little civil service hiring. Mostly they brought in contractors to skip profits.
Likewise there is no blanket reversing of regulations issued during Trump. Individual regulations that were improperly promulgated can perhaps be pulled back. Interested parties can sue and the Federal government can “settle” by agreeing that the regulation was improperly done and pull it back. That sort of thing. But it will be case by case basis.
glory b
The only Republican I ever voted for was John Heinz. Interestingly the first job Tom Nichols had in politics was as an aide in his office.
Of course, quite a few years ago his widow, Theresa Heinz Kerry said if he was still alive, he would have joined the Democratic party.
Haroldo
Good fortune, Mr. Ixnay. May your left and right hands work in concert as they always have.
WaterGirl
@joel hanes: That sounds awesome! //
But it also sounds like you are a good son.
glory b
@BR: Yes, a few of the Lincoln Project guys have pointed out that it’s clear they burned their bridges.
WaterGirl
@stinger: TaMara is clearly otherwise engaged, so I snagged this from the media library.
No idea where it came from or when it was taken, but the man’s got style.
He also has gorgeous hands.
Omnes Omnibus
@Kent: Executive orders can be reversed in one fell swoop. Or near enough.
Ken
@Omnes Omnibus: Especially Trump’s executive orders, which half the time don’t exist except as a tweet or a line thrown out during a rally.
Kent
Oh sure. But 95% of the consequential stuff they have done (mostly under the radar) is regulations, not executive orders. Like all the relaxing of environmental regulations and banking regulations. That will take harder work to reverse.
Betty Cracker
@Omnes Omnibus: I assume people just want Warren to have a higher profile because she’s such a talent and inspirational to so many. I‘ve been pushing back on the Warren for SML idea periodically for months. Whipping votes and horse-trading is a distinct skillset that Warren may or may not possess and/or enjoy using. (Patty Murray seems like a better fit, tbh.)
If Warren doesn’t snag a high-profile cabinet slot (which could be tricky given the GOP governor), maybe she’ll stay right where she is and keep working with House members to address the rampant corruption and wealth inequality that are killing the country. That’s what she seems most passionate about.
Betty Cracker
@Kay: Saw that on Twitter — appalling, and it won’t even be the top news story. I imagine it WILL be the top piece of evidence the deceased’s family cites when the sue the federal government for a kajillion dollars.
dogwood
@Baud: I have no idea why Warren fans think she should be the Majority Leader. The Majority and Minority leaders don’t serve on Committees. They run the caucuses and make committee assignments. That doesn’t appear to be a good way to use her talent. We need to be serious about establishing a well-staffed government if we get that chance, and that means getting over this “celebrity” obsession that permeates contemporary politics.
Ruckus
@Kent:
Do yo trust the PO at this moment? And it’s because of who is currently trying to stop citizens from voting. Yes it can be fixed, and we’ve never had to before but. I don’t want one federal department in charge of voting, sorry that doesn’t get it.
Geminid
@Betty Cracker: To me, E. Warren’s highest skills are drafting legislation- assisted by her very capable staff- and effectively advocating for that legislation. I think she can have a greater impact in that role than as a Cabinet member or Majority Leader.
Kent
The PO is currently involved in voting. It handles tens of millions of ballots both coming and going. That’s not going to change. I’m just suggesting that they be given a much more strictly regulated and collaborative role rather than us all hoping that crates of ballots get handled correctly through the regular mail. It would streamline everyone’s job of the PO collected pre-sorted ballots separate from the regular mail stream from dedicated drop boxes.
The great majority of Postal workers are Democrats, union members, and people of color. It’s only the Trump lackeys installed at the top who are the problem. They can be easily dispensed with simply by opening up actual DOJ investigations into their corruption and conflicts of interest and then settle for their quiet resignations to be replaced by Biden appointees.
Ken
@Geminid: Plus, no poaching Democrats out of the Senate unless Biden’s damn sure another Democrat will replace them.
Frank Wilhoit
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: My point about Reagan has not been taken. It would depend upon assumptions that I have not fully shared and do not have time or space to share. I will confine myself to rebutting this particular narrow point. Reagan ran his 1976 primary campaign explicitly as an outsider against the then Party Establishment. He evoked great bitterness and vengefulness among them. If Ford had won, they would have been able and very highly motivated to shut him out in 1980; and by the standards of that time, he would have been too old to try again. It was only the vacuum created by Ford’s loss (to the then incomprehensible figure of Carter) that enabled Reagan to capture the Party.
I am always surprised at how few people seem to really remember those years and how many, even among communities such as this and even among those who are old enough, seem to have sort of cauterized their memories and to remember Reagan as a very pale shadow of what he actually was. Trump is nothing compared to Reagan.
StringOnAStick
@Kent: The R county clerk for Mess County (western CO) had ballots blowing in the wind and an uncounted box full of them in the last election. That area is ruby red. I’d rather see the PO being the official ballot drop off point.
I dropped off our ballots yesterday at the video monitored drive through across from the sheriff’s and on the grounds of the county government centre. I’ve taken them there for 20 years, but I think I will remember this time. There was even a small line! I’ve never even seen someone else when I’ve done this in the past.
Ok, back to packing for our move to Cascadia.
J R in WV
@Marcopolo:
I went online and completed our census data in their web database. I was pretty disturbed when weeks later a stranger knocked on our front door, was a census worker. When I told him we had completed our census form online, he told us he heard that a LOT ~!!~
I didn’t curse at him, not his fault, but I believe the Rs in charge of this decad’s data collection are cheating, deleted lots of data submitted online, because those are folks who can read and use computers, so not really countable.
I hope the new president calls this census what it is, a clusterfuck, and demands a real, new, census taken starting January 22nd or so.
Uncle Cosmo
@traumaturdo: Real? Bullshit. Justice Democrats? Hah. The “Just Us” pseudo-Democrats – all two dozen of them per state (three dozen in the big ones).
You represent no one but a vanishingly small bunch of WATBs. I know that minuscule number of votes still count but on the whole I’d prefer not having any of yours.
Tl; dr: Fuck off and die, asshole.
frosty
@tam1MI: I followed up by reading a bunch of newspaper stories about PA. Yes, there are more R registrations than D. A lot of them are Ds switching to R but I’m betting they all of those voted for Trump the last time around so it’s a wash. But I think there’s a significant amount of new voters and I’m pretty sure the Dems didn’t keep up. I’m starting to panic too.
Miss Bianca
@Frank Wilhoit: Sometimes you have to vote for Republicans at the local level. I plan to vote for two Republicans for County Commissioner, because the write-in alternatives are *way* worse.