I promise I’ll quit posting about Ron DeSantis so much once his presidential dreams are smashed to smithereens. Right now, his sad trombone of a campaign womps on, and I feel compelled to jeer at it.
After cancelling high-roller donor events in the Hamptons last week due to “lack of interest” (while his serially indicted former mentor Trump and noted kook RFK Jr. raked in scads of cash), DeSantis returned to pester voters in Iowa and New Hampshire. Even $1 beer couldn’t draw a crowd in Concord:
ROCHESTER, N.H. — For $1, New Hampshire voters were invited to drink beer with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Saturday in Concord.
But barely more than two dozen people showed up at the New Hampshire Home Builders Association, which slashed the ticket price for the general public from $50 late in the week in order to build the crowd.
By the time the event started, an hour late, there were just 30 people in the room.
Live look at the advance team’s frantic prep work for today’s events:
In an Iowa coffee shop, DeSantis again defended his state education board appointees’ decision to emphasize the résumé-building benefits of chattel slavery.
Later, DeSantis interacted with a teen who shared a personal vulnerability while asking a question about military service. DeSantis responded with an incoherent partisan zinger that was shockingly grotesque and insensitive, even for him:
A 15-year-old at the Oskaloosa coffee shop asked about military service restrictions on people with mental health disorders — a topic right in line with the DeSantis campaign’s desire to highlight his military expertise.
“I can’t legally vote,” the teen said, “but I struggle with major depressive disorder.”
DeSantis interrupted the teen with a rejoinder: “It’s never stopped the other party from not letting you vote.”
Good God, what a dick! That’s just inexcusable. I pity Ron and Casey’s poor little campaign props: Moppet, Munchkin and Magpie. Imagine having that monstrous lump for a father!
The smirking, chilled-steel toilet seat of a candidate did no better when an elderly widowed farmer presented a gift-wrapped opportunity for Mr. Personality to simulate human feelings at a subsequent stop.
Later that evening, in Osceola, an 82-year-old farmer told DeSantis that he tends fewer acres since his wife died of cancer five years ago, and asked about the candidate’s thoughts on ethanol, a corn-based renewable fuel used in cars.
DeSantis passed up an opportunity to offer sympathy, launching into a stump-speech promise to “turn back this rush to electric vehicles.”
Jesus, how can anyone be this bad at politicking? It’s truly astounding. When questioned by NBC News on his difficulty connecting with human beings on the trail, DeSantis denied it and concocted an anecdote that made Trump’s infamous “sir” stories sound plausible by comparison:
“That hasn’t been the truth… The truth here on this trip, we’ve gone to all these counties, people coming up to me saying, ‘I’m so glad that you showed up. You know, you’re the first guy to actually show up here where people are signing up committing to caucus for us and really significant numbers in terms of the percentages of people that are showing up.’”
Yeah, that totally happened.
And so Ron womps on, an abandoned, water-logged white shrimping boot borne back ceaselessly to the benighted peninsula where he was begat — and where oblivion awaits. The end.
dmsilev
Gods. He makes Mitt Romney look like an empathetic human in comparison, and I didn’t think that was possible.
Old School
Good grief. There are so many other reasons to not like him, but he can’t deliver a punch line either.
Mike Molloy
Please keep bringing the Ron DeSantis content, it is the best
Jerzy Russian
I want to marry this entire post. If that is not possible, I will marry the sentence that I have partially excerpted here.
Ken
Pretty sure we’re well past that point, though I’ll allow that he might still have hope. Who was it who said presidential ambitions are a helluva drug?
rikyrah
Don’t stop until he’s been completely humiliated.
p.a.
Have any of his large donors actually been in the same room with him? Or maybe they are just like him!!!
Dangerman
I read someplace he and Jackie No Fucking Way are having screaming fights. Apparently, MameALot will not be another Camelot.
hueyplong
Not only do I not desire any slowdown in the creation of Schadenfreudelicious puddin’ posts, but I’m pretty sure I speak for others by demanding that similar posts styled as post mortems continue to appear even after the FAA has competed its review of the smoldering crash site.
Kristine
I will admit that I did not expect him to flame out so quickly and thoroughly. It’s a relief. The threat of a more palatable autocrat concerns me.
OverTwistWillie
What are you asking him for? He never had what it took to be a varsity athlete.
Snarki, child of Loki
Puddin’Boots is just trying to hang on until TFG is forced out by a plea deal or a stroke. He’s too much of a wimpy-wimp to take matters in hand and feed TFG to the ‘gators.
Kristine
@Dangerman: I kinda wonder if Jackie-No will set her sights on a more electable prospect. Assuming she doesn’t decide to run herself.
MattF
It’s OK to take shots at DeSantis. Even George Fucking Will (gift link) can’t resist that particular temptation, and he’s made a career out of resisting temptation.
cain
@Old School: Was he trying to pull some kind of Reagan thing?
cain
@MattF: so he lacked the will and lost to temptation?
Ken
The base got their uncut heroin with Trump, they’re not going to settle for methadone.
cain
@Dangerman: She dreams of re-doing the rose garden in a brand new style and Puddin is fucking it up for her!
OverTwistWillie
These questions were softball campaign plants and he flubbed the prep and the delivery.
Maxim
Frequent reassurance that his campaign continues to flounder is a good thing. Please do not deprive us of this essential service.
His complete lack of empathy and inability to connect with humans makes me wonder if there’s more going on than just him being a malignant asshole. An actual brain defect, rather than “merely” a deficient personality.
Ruckus
When even rethuglicans recognize how shitty a person you are, and reject you, that is saying a hell of a lot.
I mean even all things considered about the grand canyon sized differences between the 2 political parties, it is still amazing that the conservative side has so massively shit the bed that the only fix seems to be burn it all down. The conservative side has a criminal clown ex president as current candidate #1 and a mentally ill racist shit stain as the opposition bringing up the rear. I know that humanity has always had a side with mental health issues but running them for the highest office so that they can burn it all down by their completely asinine selves seems just a bit over the top.
Butch
@Old School: I haz a confuse. Does that sentence mean the “other party” allows you to vote or stops you from voting? It would seem like the graduate of elite Eastern universities could actually put together a sentence in something that sounds like standard English. He didn’t succeed in doing so in any of the quotes presented here.
Betty Cracker
@Dangerman: Oooo, please hook me up if you recall the source. I want to read all the bad things!
Eolirin
@Old School: Kid’s 15, the Constitution is what’s stopping him from voting. It’s such a weird non sequitur.
Shalimar
Someone told him that he was the first guy to show up in IOWA? Where candidates famously travel around the state constantly every four years to get a head start? Where people like Pompeo and Sununu visit every single county before deciding not to run?
It’s a shame no one before ever thought to care about Iowans.
Barbara
@Old School:
Does this actually mean what it sounds like? The “other” party has no problem with letting mentally ill people vote? Am I missing something? I do sometimes have a problem interpreting double negatives and try hard not to use them in writing or speaking.
OTOH, I have to say that I am always a little shocked at how many people try to connect with candidates on a “personal” level in such artificial circumstances. What can I say, I guess I was just born on a different planet.
Skippy-san
DeSantis needs to talk about his military service and the poor record he had on active duty. He needs to explain the Bronze Star he wore, but never earned.
Eolirin
@Ruckus: Racism, fascistic, and white nationalist leanings are not mental health issues, they’re cultural ones.
lowtechcyclist
@Dangerman:
That would certainly be believable. After he won his second term as governor in a slam-dunk, her White House dreams seemed to be on the verge of reality.
Now that reality has flushed those dreams down the toilet, it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if she’s taking it out on him.
I feel sorry for their kids.
Barbara
@lowtechcyclist: Maybe that’s the real reason they like to fly on private jets.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
I dunno, there could be actual people saying this stuff to him. Like members of his campaign staff, who he doesn’t know by name or face anyway, putting on fake mustaches or hats and pretending to be locals.
Ken
@OverTwistWillie: You mean that the campaign arranged for these people to ask these questions, and he still screwed it up? Hilarious.
There’s a running gag in Noises Off where one of the actresses delivers her lines in the memorized order, no matter what. I’m imagining DeSantis doing the same thing; so the young kid with mental issues gets the response meant for the older farmer, and the older farmer gets the answer meant for the single mother, and so on….
Jerry
That boy is as inviting as an outhouse in the winter
Villago Delenda Est
Ron DeathSentence = sad, weak poop.
Old School
@Butch:
@Barbara:
I’m pretty sure what he is going for is “Democrats encourage people to vote who aren’t eligible to.” Voter fraud!
But the line was horribly mangled.
lowtechcyclist
DeSantis makes Nixon look like a human being by comparison. I’d have thought that was impossible.
dexwood
The thought of Ron DeSadist crashing and burning in this campaign makes me smile.
Jackie
@rikyrah: And then keep rubbing it in.
This is a time being a bad winner is acceptable!
Ruckus
@Maxim:
An actual brain defect.
He’s ronnie, he’s always been ronnie, he’s being true to himself. And a totally deficient and defunct personality is a brain defect. A range of political ideals between large groups of humans is normal, his level of well, him, is not.
Elizabelle
Interesting article in the Miami Herald today, about how longtime residents are fleeing Miami-Dade for other parts. (Elsewhere in Florida, Texas [to raise young daughters!! from the frying pan into the fire], Costa Rica.)
So long, paradise. Longtimers and natives depart for homes outside Miami-Dade County
Felt so badly for one elderly couple, in Edgewater neighborhood. They had a condo with a balcony they absolutely loved. Out there all the time. A high end restaurant moved in next door, and the constant whine from the high end cooling system (for food?) made the balcony unuseable and drove them to relocate an hour south. They could not even leave the balcony door open. (Restaurant is Klaw, flies King Crab in direct from Norway.)
Anyway, more in the “don’t cry for me, Argentina” vein. The crack about “pirates” rings true.
Eolirin
@Barbara: No, the never stopped doesn’t flip the not letting. The part that’s a double negative is the never stopped. So he’s saying the Democrats are preventing the kid, and people like him maybe? from voting. Which is an intensely bizarre thing to say to a 15 year old.
Ken
That would explain how he got a whole two dozen people to show up for the New Hampshire beer event.
(“Honey, the paper says there’s an event tonight where you can get a beer for a dollar — ”
“Hot damn, I’m in, where is it?”
” — and you get to meet Ron DeSantis.”
“Never mind.”)
OverTwistWillie
@Kristine:
“Housewives of…” reality TV show.
She’ll have to ditch him – he won’t work as a Jay Cutler slacker punchline.
I see a Tampa hate radio gig in his future.
Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg
Can you imagine being stuck at a dinner party with him and Dime Store Jackie? Her, grasping for relevance and status like Betty Grissom (Gus Grissom’s wife) in “The Right Stuff”. Ron speaks awkwardly about “woke, woke, woke” before taking a call from Rufo about some new brilliant scheme, after which, he eats a puppy alive.
kalakal
I’m not only enjoying seeing the bastards campaign crash and burn, I’m looking forward to seeing what’s left of his career getting eviscerated after the elections over. He’s going to be a termed out lame duck with loser stink with a lot of ambitious rivals wanting him gone. He has no friends, the chickens will be coming home to roost on the Fl economy/education system etc, all the consequences of that nasty stuff created by his choice to be a performative jackass rather than govern he was planning to avoid by becoming president will be in his face.
He’s in deep water, surrounded by sharks, and he’s stuck on autochum
Hoodie
Wow. I’ve met a few guys like DeSantis before, i.e., guys who got gold-plated degrees from Ivies or near-Ivies and leave you wondering as to what the purpose of those places is. We once had a summer intern (I was a second year associate) who had a med degree from a near Ivy and was in his second year at the near Ivy’s law school. He was generally unable to interact with people in any way that didn’t exude an unearned arrogance that was incredibly off-putting. At one function, one of the senior partners who wasn’t involved in the hiring process turned to me and asked “why is this fucking guy here?” My only answer was that I guess he looked good on paper. I came away from that experience thinking how a valuable spot in a medical program was wasted on that guy.
I feel similarly about DeSantis. He’s guy that looks good on paper, but that paper is actually evidence of the waste of resources that were expended on him.
Ruckus
@rikyrah:
Don’t stop until he’s been completely humiliated.
That’s one of his problems, he can’t see how shitty a human he is. The only way he might is if he gets to wear a white coat with wrap around sleeves. And it’s quite possible that he won’t see it then. The reason he can’t stop digging the hole he’s in deeper is itself the problem. It always comes to an end sooner or later, it’s just the mess left in it’s wake that hurts anyone/everyone else.
Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg
@Elizabelle:
Oldest daughter moved to Ft Lauderdale with her fella in June, chasing his dreams. She’s not happy – says that too many people are really nasty and it seems to affect all of their interactions.
There are way more MAGAts than she ever had to deal with in Louisville, and while they’ve found a few decent pockets, it isn’t enough.
PatrickG
Betty, these DeSaster jokes are a highlight of my morning routine. Keep ‘em coming!
I hope you’ll be posting a “Where is he now?” series for YEARS after he officially flames out, personally. :)
Ruckus
@Ken:
Good comparison. Describes the contestants and those that like them.
trollhattan
One good thing to report this summer.
Drove past Lake Shasta yesterday and it is nearly full, surface elevation 1,043 feet. One year ago it was 937, more than a hundred feet lower.
Betty Cracker
@OverTwistWillie: His voice is so horrible though, like a mosquito whine in your ear when you’re trying to fall asleep that keeps going no matter how frantically you slap at your own head. I’m not sure even Tampa hate radio would have a sumbitch with a voice like that.
@Elizabelle: I feel sorry for the non-Republicans being driven out of their homes. Fuck the Republicans — they voted for this shit, so they can STFU.
rikyrah
Justin Fenton (@justin_fenton) tweeted at 5:48 AM on Tue, Aug 01, 2023:
Breaking overnight: Henrietta Lacks’ family reaches historic settlement, wins compensation for her stolen cells, by @Calefati https://t.co/vy0inF6jP5
(https://twitter.com/justin_fenton/status/1686328105462292480?t=oHxH3RDXWoOSu5JJ-aTaLw&s=03)
trollhattan
@Ruckus: Pretty much. “Why can’t I have smarter followers who see how brilliant I am?” We’ve all known a Ron or three.
Ruckus
@Barbara:
What can I say, I guess I was just born on a different planet.
Or they were…..
And it’s more like hatched. In a lab. By an absolutely crazy mad scientist.
kalakal
What I don’t get about DeSantis is how he got to rise through the ranks of the GOP. He presumably must have started out as a relative unknown, just one of dozens of wannabees
If you’re in the business of picking a candidate for office surely you’re not going to look around and when you’re falls upon a repellent, social incompetent, disliked by all and go “Aha! The very chap!”.
OverTwistWillie
@Ken:
Off the cuff Ron would have been all wokety, woke, woke-woke…
John S.
@Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg:
I wish her luck. We fled the Ft. Lauderdale metro area after living there for 40 years. It has turned into a cesspool.
Alison Rose
@Old School: But he said “…from NOT letting you vote”. It sounds like he’s trying to claim that Democrats are trying to suppress the vote of teenagers and people with mental health issues???? I mean, as to the former, you can’t “suppress” the vote of someone not legally allowed to vote, and to the latter, what the sandblasted fuck is he talking about?
rikyrah
Larry Sabato (@LarrySabato) tweeted at 7:06 AM on Tue, Aug 01, 2023:
Biden & Trump are tied. This almost certainly means a Trump majority in the Electoral College. Exactly what is needed to cure Dem overconfidence—and there’s a lot of it. Low D turnout and defections to other parties/independents could produce another 2016. https://t.co/f9TEbeH2WW
(https://twitter.com/LarrySabato/status/1686347634406219776?t=NXwWIhbWWZKW3W49mNjdQQ&s=03)
azlib
What a weird dude. Politician are generally an odd lot, but Desantis takes the cake in that regard.
Fraud Guy
I thought fundraising was supposed to raise funds. I am obviously in the wrong line of work.
Elizabelle
@Betty Cracker: They invited the pirates in.
No income tax! Come on down!
Ruckus
@Eolirin:
At this level and given his speech defects they are.
The implantation may be culturally caused but this is not the result of a normal brain. This level is way beyond cultural. This is the reaction of serious issues left untreated and allowed to get far worse.
rikyrah
Dolt45 is not going to drop out.
He can grift to pay his legal bills.
He thinks his only way of avoiding prison is to become President again.
Even if he trusted the fat cats to pay his legal bills..
He doesn’t trust the other candidates to actually pardon them if they became President.
He doesn’t trust anyone that much.
Betty Cracker
@Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg: I’m sorry she’s unhappy, but I understand why. I’ve got friends in South Florida, so I visit occasionally but I would never dream of living there. Everything is a damn hassle.
Where I live is inconveniently far from everything and crawling with MAGAs. That sucks, but there’s still lots of nature that hasn’t been paved over, and the culture is very different.
I can share an anecdote that tells the whole tale: I’ve been stranded in a disabled vessel in Miami and in my backwoods swamp. During the South Florida ordeal, my friend and her two small children were attempting to flag down some help and were repeatedly ignored. In my crappy swamp, we were floating home on the current, and half a dozen people stopped to ask if they could help.
dm
@Shalimar: I’ve heard he’s doing the 99-county strategy, something that even Senate and Gubernatorial candidates find challenging, so I imagine his crack advance team really has found some places in Iowa where candidates are a rare sight.
lowtechcyclist
@Elizabelle:
And this is different from any other U.S. city, how??
And of course, all that development made real estate values skyrocket, which surely helped boost her income into the mid 6 figures. And now she’s bitching about it.
Time to break out the world’s smallest violin.
Elizabelle
@Hoodie: Makes me wonder if DeSantis and the med student (who really should have been in a clinical lab, not with patients) …
are on some part of the autism spectrum. Just do not get the human interaction side, while they might have enough intelligence to succeed in university.
WRT DeSantis: can see why he left the Navy. The military is more “woke” than the rest of society, in many ways.
rikyrah
Another poster put these two things together. I hadn’t thought of it this way:
Badd Company (@BaddCompani) tweeted at 8:15 PM on Mon, Jul 31, 2023:
Wow!!
The Minnesota Republican Party has 60 bucks in the bank to play with.
Who Stole the Money
They are 336 Thousand in Debt
The Colorado Republican Party is filing for Bankruptcy
The Arizona Republican Party has less than
25K in the bank.
The Michigan Republican Party is…
(https://twitter.com/BaddCompani/status/1686183883656847360?t=D1WJHvzLxSv4Q04FF4ySVg&s=03)
………………………………..
Marceline
an hour ago edited
Here’s another reason that I’m hopeful for 2024 and 100 percent supportive of Ukraine.
We’re finally seeing the Russian money dry up and it’s killing both the left and the right. On top of this we’ve seen the lefty organizations suffer too. Brand New Congress is gone and the Justice Dems have laid off half their staff. I’m really looking forward to the Sunrise Movement going under if they haven’t already.
……………………………………..
This makes so much sense.
Elizabelle
@lowtechcyclist: Makes me wonder if the developers are in the bust out stage.
Shalimar
@Elizabelle: When I was growing up 30+ years ago, I knew people in Mobile, AL who had vacation places in Costa Rica because it was cheap and most people there speak English. $150k for 700 square feet is more expensive than anything that size in Mobile now (caveat that no one with money lives in anything that small).
Hoodie
@Elizabelle: I imagine DeSantis is what my dad (a WWII Marines vet) would have called a shitbird. He said the war tended to weed these guys out because they did stupid things that got them killed, including alienating the guys who would normally be watching their backs.
rikyrah
@Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg:
She should leave
Amir Khalid
It sounds like candidate DeSantis has a really really bad case of Dunning-Kruger.
rikyrah
For those in Indiana, who now have to be subjected to your legislature’s anti-abortion measures.
Illinois and Michigan are right here, willing to help you. You still have body autonomy in our states.
Ruckus
@rikyrah:
He doesn’t trust anyone that much.
Given his history, the crap shack that he’s been his entire life, the bridges he burns just by being near them, why would he? It is a reflection of who and what he is, untrustworthy. He’s got nothing to sell but hate and most people can scrape up enough of that on their own.
trollhattan
This, in a nutshell. Even Trump can count (on those tiny fingers) and knows at least one of the charges is going all the way to conviction. “Butti’m President!” hearkens back to Nixon’s Imperial Presidency nonsense, which Republicans have been very happy to cling to ever since.
Old School
@Alison Rose:
Yeah, he doesn’t seem to be a good public speaker.
Similarly, in the last clip what he seems to want to say people are saying is: ‘I’m so glad that you showed up. You know, you’re the first guy to actually show up here.” However, it ends up being a run-on rambling bit of nonsense.
Ruckus
@Hoodie:
We called them shitbirds when I was in the navy during Vietnam. They swoop in, drop a big load and get transferred to another unit to repeat the cycle. Fewer of them than one might imagine but still useless and annoying as all get out.
lowtechcyclist
@kalakal:
He did, but then Trump endorsed him out of a crowded primary field for the 2018 GOP gubernatorial nomination. He won the nomination, beat Gillum by a really thin margin in the general election, and the rest is history.
Elizabelle
@Hoodie: The Coalition of the Fragged.
Shitbird is the perfect word for DeSantis and his ilk.
Subsole
@Eolirin:
True.
But a larger problem on the right (can’t believe I typed that out…imagine having larger problems than fascist leanings) seems to be that a large majority of their voters have decided that being conservative means never having to grow the hell up. Ever.
I dunno if that’s a mental issue. Our major institutions (media, police, church, courts, etc.) deciding to indulge them is definitely a culture flaw.
I think willfully choosing to embrace madness is a kind of madness. But that’s splitting hairs really. My sole concern is dissecting it so we can kill it faster and better. Ideally, before it kills more of us.
Brachiator
There were a couple of very interesting comments about Trump and DeSantis in an earlier thread that I wanted to respond to. I only saw them recently while catching up on the blog.
I am not sure that this is true. It might make it a choice between a seemingly vigorous, but crazy Trump vs a low key, but wise Biden. But it will still be about two old guys. I don’t know how voters may look at this come election day. However, I suspect that voters and the political media will take a harder (not more honest) look at the vice presidential candidates as potential successors. And voters might give more weight to this as well.
This is just wrong. The GOP faithful refuse to be honest about Trump. They not only see him as a success, they see him as their hero. They feel a connection with him which Trump is working hard to exploit as his legal troubles mount.
Trump was on some stage the other day yacking to his fans that “they are not indicting me. They are indicting you.” Trump is just thisclose from declaring that he is the Messiah, come to wash away MAGA sin.
Also, the Republican leadership refuse to speak any ill about Trump, and the goddam GOP Speaker of the House, McCarthy, is happy to be Renfield to Trump’s Dracula.
The Democrats can talk bad about Trump and woo some Independents. They should blast Trump all day everyday. Chris Christie and about three other Republicans go hard on Trump, and nobody, not even hack pundits pays any serious attention.
I don’t know if DeSantis ever had a real shot at the presidency. But his sadsack disaster of a campaign may sink any future ambitions. Good riddance.
TriassicSands
Betty, I very much appreciate and understand your focus on DeSantis. With so much of the attention on Trump, it’s fine to come to BJ and get the latest on Robotic Ron’s failure to transition into being a human being. Each time I read one of your posts about him, I think, “Betty, aka Auntie DeSantis, (pronounced “anti”) has every reason in the world to despise this arrogant, cruel POS. Until he abandons his campaign, keep on, keepin’ on. Even then, kicking him when he is down won’t be a problem.
One thing about both Trump and DeSantis, either one of them could have simultaneously played the the Tin Woodman, the Scarecrow, and the Cowardly Lion in the “Wizard of Oz.” No heart, no brain, no courage.
Subsole
@Eolirin: Horrible thought: what color was the kid?
Subsole
@Ken: “That’s not an event. That’s a trap.”
Geminid
@kalakal: You were talking the other day about prospective places to move to in a few years. I think I mentioned Roanoke, Virginia, but then it occured to me that Winston-Salem, North Carolina might be worth checking out.
Juju
@Maxim: He was probably poorly socialized when he was a child, or just the weird kid nobody wanted to play with.
Elizabelle
@Subsole: I think we have to get rid of Fox News (in particular) calling itself a news organization. Truth (ha!) in labeling.
They are destroying our country, pulling it apart, and hiding behind the First Amendment to do it. And now there is a whole subset of miniFoxes out there.
The right wing mediasphere, and all the think tanks, are a real problem. Democracy depends on an informed populace, and between the wingnuts and the evangelicals, we are in serious, serious trouble. Where duped people don’t want to admit they’ve been duped, and have concluded that a vote for Democrats is a vote for the devil.
Interesting about Republican state parties with cash crunches. Have no doubt it was foreign money that was propping up some of them. Plus your usual plutocrats.
I wonder if, in the interim, states’ attorneys general could go after Fox’s advertisers, the gold and metals griftosphere, with fraud allegations.
Weren’t Liz Cheney and the rest of the J6 Committee going to go after what was propping up the Republican Party? What is up with that?
It’s not all Trump. Never was. He just answered the casting call.
kalakal
@lowtechcyclist:
No, I mean before that at the beginning of his career. When he ran for Congress. I find it astonishing that the experienced pols who run Fl local elections would meet him and think ” That guy will appeal to the public”. At the start he would have to sway people at a personal level and he’s a whiny, charmless git.
kalakal
@Geminid: Thanks, we have family in NC so it’s on the list but I hadn’t thought of Winston-Salem
Chat Noir
Count me as an “aye” on continuing to post about the implosion of this horrible man’s presidential campaign.
@OverTwistWillie:
Junior! What a great series.
hotshoe
@lowtechcyclist: “Now that reality has flushed those dreams down the toilet, it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if she’s taking it out on him.”
Has anyone seen betting odds for how long before she files for divorce?
She wouldn’t be cut off from alimony by that new divorce law which her incompetent husband signed.
Well, there might be other financial factors for her decision — I don’t even want to know — but I can’t imagine anything which could compensate for the angry misery she’s experiencing while being stuck with that loser.
Sure Lurkalot
MSNBC played one of his say woke 10 times in 10 seconds last night. I can’t imagine not bursting out in laughter if I heard it in person, between his squeaky voice and the meaningless drivel. Miss Cracker has been more than helpful in explaining FLORIDUH to those of us who have barely spent time there but it’s still hard to believe he’s been in political office for a decade now with nary a clue how to talk to people.
cmorenc
To be fair to DeSantis’s curriculum guidelines regarding the benefit to slaves of learning valuable skills while serving their masters, it’s actually spot-on accurate – learning a skill like carpentry was a wonderful alternative to otherwise being assigned by their master to serve as a field-hand stooping and picking cotton all day in the broiling sun, from sun-up to sun-down. As a slave-carpenter, you also often got to work in the shade!
Shalimar
@kalakal: I don’t know how DeSantis got elected to the House the first time, though his legal and military resume is impressive for a local House district. He won the GOP primary in 2018 by being the biggest Trump ass-kisser in the crowd. Squeaked by in the general election against a Democrat fighting typical ratfucking problems right before the election. Then he turned Florida state government into a 24/7 DeSantis PR operation. Somehow he managed to get re-elected easily due to FoxNews appearances and government “events” where he would travel to announce Covid funding for this or that, all the while never taking a single question from local media or constituents.
All of this was obviously carefully planned by campaign managers who realized he had zero personal charisma and made sure it was never exposed. It is on constant display now, and there seems like no going back.
Elizabelle
@hotshoe: Casey seems like she might have been the better retail candidate. She was a news anchor/television host. There is a real audience on the right for women saying mean girl stuff.
I guess little Ron might not have been content as the “power behind the throne,” but we have so far dodged a bullet in that respect.
Geminid
@Ken: Lincoln put it another way: once the worm of presidential ambition begins to gnaw on a man, it gnaws deep.
different-church-lady
@Old School: It doesn’t even make any sense as a zinger.
Kay
I just think it’s really interesting that political media believed DeSantis would be popular. And it isn’t the first time they’ve mixed up what they like with what the (national) public likes- they did the same with Chris Christie, Scott Walker and John Kasich.
Is there a Democratic governor they have promoted like that? I can’t think of one. They basically ignore Whitmer, Polis, Newsom and Pritkzer. Also- Shapiro in PA. Instead they announced that Eric Adams in NYC was the new Democratic star, although he’s a clown.
different-church-lady
@Ken: How many reboots is one candidate allowed.
Ken
@kalakal: I think we may be getting into “Forget it, Jake, it’s Florida” territory.
Also, Matt Gaetz.
CaseyL
I’m pretty sure DeSantis is relying on Trump being out of contention by Summer 2024. He believes the rest of the GOP will coalesce around him if Trump is Unavailable.
And they might, who knows? As I said in a previous thread, I can’t make any predictions about a Party or its voters who have gone balls-to-the-wall crazy and sociopathic.
different-church-lady
@Kay: They believe what they’re told by GOP operatives.
Kay
@CaseyL:
Too, it’s better for us if they all stay in.
eclare
@Geminid:
I have relatives in Greensboro NC, that part of the state is very nice.
Kay
@different-church-lady:
I fall for it too, every time. I thought DeSantis was a threat.
Everyone will fall for it with Youngkin too- they’re already ga ga over him. They’ve really primed the pump there.
But odds are if political media/pundits like him he will flop nationally. It would be unusual if they were right.
Bugboy
It just occurred to me that his answers sound quite similar to answers that ChatGPT would produce. Q: has anyone run the questions he is asked through an AI? While there something to be said about the “uncanny valley” going on with his wife, for him it’s the “uncanny canyon”…
Ken
I wonder if he feared that if she were affected, she might choose the widowhood path instead of filing for divorce.
Kay
I’m actually sorry the 15 year old hasn’t figured out how to pick better adults. He’ll need to learn that.
To expect some kind of human reaction from this ambition-monster creep was just doomed. DeSantis cares about DeSantis. Remember the poor kids he uses as props in Florida?
CaseyL
@Geminid:
@eclare:
Bear in mind that NC is very much a red state, despite having blue areas. The places there I would consider moving to, if I absolutely had to, are also becoming very expensive.
According to a fair number of articles, if you want to avoid the worst climate change impacts in the coming decades, Michigan and Wisconsin are worth looking into. That is, if you can tolerate their winters, which are very harsh.
kalakal
@Shalimar: It’s the getting into the House bit. Florida local politics is intensely personal ( where we are at House level it’s practically a set of family franchises) but there’s a lot of groups you have to keep sweet and kiss up to., I just can’t see him doing that. He must have been picked up on from his legal position and been carpeted in from the get go with the gold stamp of approval of the local bigwigs. He doesn’t seem to have changed personally over the years, his fellow congresscritters loathed him
Betty Cracker
@kalakal: I’m not sure what district DeSantis repped as a House backbencher — somewhere near Jax? Tacky O probably set up a website and published a photo of him in Navy whites, and that did the trick. As we can see from the shit-show that is the US House Repub caucus, the vetting process isn’t particularly robust in many districts
ETA: I take your point about local grandees though. The truly puzzling case to me is Anna Paulina Luna. How in the wide world of fuck did she get that gig?
Another Scott
Hmm…
Cheers,
Scott.
kalakal
@eclare: Thanks, another place to look
@CaseyL: Yes, I agree about Mi and Wi, but the winters are almost certainly a showstopper for Mrs kalakal. If we had the money I’d be a snowbird
trollhattan
@Shalimar: He’s the Mike Pompeo of Michael Flynns.
“I was in the military,”
“Yay you, now go do that criming.”
Subsole
@Elizabelle:
All good points.
If one wanted to lowkey put a solid dent in the alt-right Manopshere (your various Andrew Tates and Joes Rogan), they could do worse than an FDA mandate on herbal supplements.
Cracking down on those woo-peddlers would probably be a herculean task, and manalive would it stir the hornets, but I could see Alex Jones getting a good, hard screw if he had to start actually selling pills that work.
Barbara
@Eolirin:
It’s a bit like a triple negative — “stop” being negative in its own right. They “never stopped” means “they still” . . . “are not letting you” vote?
But that’s such objective nonsense I assume that he meant something — well something that might have made more sense.
Much easier to say — “Of course you should be able to vote!” I guess that doesn’t score enough points or check enough boxes.
trollhattan
@kalakal: Same. Long thought I’d bail California for somewhere with four seasons, but now think of snow and ice as things to visit, then flee quickly.
Friend who moved to Idaho noted his lawn disappeared every October and reemerged every March, or April, depending.
Subsole
@Kay:
Bobby Jindal.
Paul Ryan.
Also, too.
Jeffro
@Geminid:
@kalakal: I have to say, we are really enjoying living in central VA!
(also love getting over to the Shenandoah Valley from time to time)
Jeffro
“You know what would work? How about a lower-key, less-obviously-corrupt, more-cruelty-competent trump acolyte as trump’s replacement? Someone who really kicked ass in his own recent statewide election? Young wife and photogenic normal family to boot? I know trump’s not ready to leave the spotlight but I’m sure he’ll fade away or his schtick will get old with the GOP base and then in steps…hmm…maybe DeSantis?”
-more than one DC pundit, back in 2022
Geminid
@Brachiator: Well, we’ll just have to agree to agree!
Betty Cracker
@Kay: As much as I enjoy dancing on RD’s political grave, I won’t truly consider the horrifying prospect of him becoming president over until someone else gets the nomination (at which point I’ll pivot to worry about that monster). If Trump drops dead today, which wouldn’t be actuarially anomalous, it’s possible RD could still scoop up the prize, though I think someone like Kemp would be more likely. RD is just terrible at this.
Regarding the shitty MSM celebrity pundits’ lack of attention to Democratic governors, I agree that’s largely true though I’ve seen a groundswell of enthusiasm for Gretchen Whitmer in some of the “prestige” outlets. Well deserved, IMO — she is impressive.
kalakal
@Betty Cracker:
I don’t get that one either. Her district starts about a mile south of me and she just appeared from nowhere. She was/is a full time Trump ass-kisser but other than that I think she was a grifter over Miami way with a several pipelines into the MAGAsphere ( TurningpointUSA etc). She also has a resume that ranges from USAF to cocktail waitress in a strip club* so I guess she has appeal across a wide demographic. She’s completely unhinged
*And a lack of credibility that rivals that of George, man of a 1,000 namess, Santos
Jeffro
In Salon yesterday: he ain’t gonna change
Kent
Talk about cognitive dissonance! A real estate professional complaining about traffic and developers! Heh.
Another Scott
@Jeffro: Keep an eye on the proposal to do uranium mining in Coles Hill… :-/
Cheers,
Scott.
Roger Moore
@Hoodie:
The purpose is to give people like that the credentials they need to get ahead. They do have to bring in some people whose only recommendation is strong academic achievement rather than the right kind of parents in order to maintain their academic reputation, but the main point of the places is to keep the rich and powerful at the top of the social ladder.
Jeffro
@Another Scott: true but that’s way way south of Cville
Kent
Upper great lakes and Northeast (MN, MI, WI, upstate NY, VT, etc. As well as coastal Pacific Northwest (west of the Cascades) so Puget Sound and Willamette Valley.
It isn’t just climate. Access to water resources will be critical too. Not necessarily for an individual homes, but for the industry, agriculture, and economy of a region that makes it a livable place.
Jeffro
OT but here’s Josh Marshall on 2024:
Jeffro
mind-reader! Mrs. Fro and I were talking about this very thing just last week!
Geminid
@Ken: Gerrymandering has enabled a race to the bottom for ambitious Republicans. Now, they often elect their worst. This creates a real problem for them in the medium and long term, I think.
I have not seen a similar decline in candidate quality among Democrats. If anything, the trend has been in the opposite direction.
Miss Bianca
Betty Cracker, I love you. (Not sure what F. Scott would think of this rework, but I call it sublime.)
different-church-lady
“Okay Governor, let’s go over what went wrong at the last campaign stop.”
“Woke!”
“No no, Governor, we’re not rehearsing, we’re just talking…”
“Okey wokey!” [makes face like a howler monkey]
“Right. Fine. So, the young man who couldn’t vote…”
“The retard?”
“Jesus, NO! The kid is just depressed.”
“Because he’s woke.”
“Because he’s too young. Now, it seemed like you were trying to turn that into a zinger.”
“The woke Democrats let retards vote.”
“STOP SAYING RETARDS!”
“Trump says it.”
“YOU’RE RUNNING AGAINST TRUMP!”
“You’re acting woke. Are you woke?”
“Governor… the thing you’re supposed to say is Democrats let people vote who shouldn’t.”
“Because they’re woke.”
“Yes, they are woke, but that’s not the problem. The problem is you turned it into some kind of triple-negative.”
“Negative is the good one.”
“It’s… yes, fine, negative is the good one. But you said Democrats won’t let him vote. It’s the opposite of what we are supposed to say the other party does.
“They’re all depressed because they’re woke.”
“Then they would let him vote.”
“See? Now you know why it’s funny!”
[PAUSE, BLINK]
“I’m getting hungry. Are there any babies around?”
Roger Moore
@kalakal:
Just think how bad the competition must be that Ron DeSantis looks promising. More seriously, I think it should tell you a lot about how people get ahead in Republican politics. The most important part is to be reassuring to the party backers who are paying for all this stuff. You look at DeSantis and see an alien in a skin suit failing his attempts to look human; Republican movers and shakers see someone to be trusted because he’s just like them.
pacem appellant
A month ago I was concerned DeSantis could make a comeback. I have that worry no more.
An FYI to @Betty Cracker et al. The gerund of the verb “to cancel” is “canceling” with one ell (same goes for the past participle “canceled”) in American Standard English. Filthy monarchists spell it with two ells. Please make a note of it. /pedantry
Brachiator
@cmorenc:
You’re joking, right? That’s a weird way to look at things and not always true. Or I appreciate the snark if intended.
Also, enslaved people often brought skills with them, or had skills which were nurtured in slave communities based on their own traditions in Africa. They were not empty vessels that were shared by the people who owned and exploited them.
But we can note one possible example of how an enslaved person dealt with having a more specialized skills set. Hercules had been trained to be the chef to President George Washington. He went with Washington to New York and Philadelphia, and was sometimes rotated back to Virginia.
Hercules dropped out of history, so we don’t know if he was ever able to use his cooking talent as a free man.
But this is the kind of history that should be taught. Kids can understand courage and acts of rebellion.
Elizabelle
@Kent: I know. That was, um, a tad ironic.
lowtechcyclist
@different-church-lady:
These reboots are made for…kicking his sorry ass back to Florida.
Alison Rose
@pacem appellant: One of my favorite text memes I’ve ever seen was one person asking “Why do Americans spell it ‘canceled’ and here in England we spell it ‘cancelled’?” And someone responding “Because we gave you that L in 1776.”
Anonymous At Work
pacem appellant
@Alison Rose: That’s a good one! I’ll make a note of it!
piratedan
@Kay: you notice that the media tends to focus on rather flawed Dems and they stay away from Governors that are media savvy for fear of being gotcha’d themselves. It’s decidedly a pattern that I see play out over and over again… it’s either the mean girl treatment or the silent treatment of any Dem politician suspected of being clued into the 4th estate tactics.
sometimes they can’t help themselves tho…. i.e. AOC, they can’t believe that she’s able to continually turn the framing narratives on their ears, after all, she’s just a bartender…
Elizabelle
@Roger Moore:
Why we’re afflicted with the pundit class and journalism “elite” and opinion leaders we are stuck with.
Thinking of the FTF NY Times and the FTF Sulzbergers: current publisher seems to be a well-degreed moron, and the editor, Joe Kahn, is scion of the founder of Staples.
Merit, all around.
I wish DOJ (isn’t it?) well with whacking the Ivies and other expensive universities for their legacy admissions.
We deserve better work product from them.
louc
@Betty Cracker:
They split Gainesville down the middle to gerrymander. A friend of mine tried to alert the local media that she lied about her degree and some other things on her resume, but it never gained traction. Same couple, recently moved to Gainesville, went to a local festival and a guy was handing out “Vote Blue” stickers. She asked him what voting/campaign activities were out there she could sign up for. Couldn’t tell her a single one. And that’s Florida Dems in a nutshell.
Brachiator
@Geminid:
We will actually see what happens later in the campaign. We will see how the political media deals with the issue of the candidates’ age, and the possibility of succession if the president does not complete his term. We may see how this is reflected in voter polls.
Whoever becomes the GOP candidate, it will be interesting to see how old, or young, the VP choice might be.
different-church-lady
@Brachiator:
I’m not going to address cmorenc’s assertion, but I will share a surprising experience I had in Natchez, Mississippi.
We were there recording people for an oral history project. It’s one of the few places in the south where there’s still a antebellum mansion. And what caught me off guard was that both the white and the black citizens were very proud of that mansion: the whites because it was one of the highlights of the city, and the blacks because their ancestors were the ones who physically constructed it.
Alison Rose
@Anonymous At Work: On your last point…yikes. I mean…so far at least, Ron hasn’t yukked it up with TIFG about how horribly ugly his own wife is, so I suppose he’s got that one thing over Cruz.
Jinchi
It seems obvious that the only hope for any of the minor league candidates, like Ron, is for Trump’s support to collapse totally. Which is only likely if Republicans realize that he has virtually no chance of winning the general election.
Even in the event that Trump implodes and is carted off to prison, I don’t think Ron wins the nomination. Unlike the rest of the field, he had a shot to close the gap with Trump, and he failed. He should be polling much better than 17% after all the months of media fawning and daily press exposure.
The rest of the field have the benefit of being virtually unknown as candidates at this point. (I still don’t know where the heck Vivek came from – did this guy even exist before May 2023?)
They all seem different flavors of awful. Do any of you have an idea of who would be a viable candidate in a TFG-free environment?
JaySinWA
Is anyone making plans for National Night Out tonight? Maybe a blog post this evening?
There are three events within 5 blocks of me here
https://natw.org/
Tony Jay
@Brachiator:
Not sure how it’s wrong. To beat Trump to the candidacy RoDS had to make the MAGOP faithful prefer him. To do that he had to give them what they wanted in a candidate while also giving them licence to move on from Trump. The only possible way to do that was to set out from the very start hammering Trump as a President who failed, not because of the policies or because of the ideology or because good, patriotic, heartland Americans (you know, morons) didn’t support him strongly enough, but because he personally was a weak, incompetent man too self-obsessed and criminally descriptive to properly serve them.
I’ve said a million times that it wouldn’t be easy to do this, and that RoDS is obviously not the person to pull it off, but it was the only way to actually beat Trump as opposed to maybe, hopefully, outlasting his ability to stay ahead of criminal charges.
different-church-lady
@Anonymous At Work:
It’s far more likely that some day DeSantis will be in a bunker crushing cyanide capsules in his kids’ mouths, so…
Baud
Maybe hatred of DeSantis can bring this polarized country together.
Kent
When my wife and I decided to flee Texas we went through that whole process. Looked at the upper NE and Minneapolis. Finally settled on Camas WA which is suburban Portland across the Columbia river. In part because we have family and roots in the area, but also for long-term climate reasons and we wanted to launch our kids in a place where they had long-term multi-generational prospects.
Texas was an aberration for us. My wife’s medical residency took us there and we ended up staying longer than we had planned. It was a decent place in some ways when we arrived in 2003 and got progressively worse the more the GOP took over
Turned down a very good job prospect in the St. Petersburg FL area because how can you raise your kids in Florida? What will the future be for them and your grandchildren? Same as Texas.
OverTwistWillie
Ron’s a creature of the GOP big money boys. Top down, thrown enough money around, and the rank and file will fall in line.
Nope.
Consider a hypothetical GOP administration nominating him for whatever, and a GOP controlled Senate confirmation.
He will get blown up.
This is it, all in, he’s not going to quit, no matter how embarrassing it gets.
Anonymous At Work
@Alison Rose: Children. Cruz threw his daughters under the bus for Cancun trip. And they might be old enough to understand how sleazy their father is.
OTOH, Ron’s inability to be human in any way in public is probably also how he acts in private.
Hoodie
@Roger Moore: I thought the story is that DeSantis jumped the line because Trump endorsed him in the GOP gubernatorial primary. No doubt that was mostly due to DeSantis’ sycophancy (e.g., that sickening ad using his own kid). DeSantis is not the product of the natural selection process of a party apparatus, but that’s mostly broken down in the GOP in the era of Trump, where we get an eruption of characters like MTG. Trump’s candidate choices have generally been awful and tend to lose except in the redder districts. DeSantis is somewhat of an exception, but that may have more to do with Florida’s weird electorate and the sad state of the FL Dem party. In other words, Trump picks bad candidates and DeSantis is no exception.
twbrandt
@CaseyL: the winters in southeast Michigan, where I live, have not been that harsh these past few years.The Upper Peninsula, though, continues to get harsh winter weather
ETA: although I guess the definition of “harsh” is in the eye of the beholder.
Juju
@CaseyL: Actually, NC is not a very red state. It’s just gerrymandered and voter suppressed to death. We have a very popular Dem governor and statewide races tend to be very close to 50/50. My big disappointments this past election cycle were the Cherie Beasley loss and the state Supreme Court results. Given the gerrymandering, it was a pleasant surprise that dems won two house seats that were not really expected. I think that if the VRA hadn’t been obliterated by the Supreme Court we would have representation that went along with the makeup of the state.
Redshift
@Brachiator:
Oh, it’s worse than that. Hercules (and Washington’s other slaves) were regularly sent back to Mount Vernon, not just when Washington was going there, but because Pennsylvania had a law that slaves of non-residents could claim freedom if they were kept there for more than six months.
Alison Rose
@JaySinWA: I mean…if cops want to foster better relationships with their communities, maybe they could stop threatening and terrifying and murdering Black people over literally nothing. Feels like that might do more than a coffee klatch or whatever.
Jinchi
@Kay:
Well, they tried really hard to make it a thing.
Kent
Trump candidates ALWAYS underperform. Even when they win. Like say JD Vance in Ohio who hugely underperformed other recent statewide GOP candidates for Senate and Governor.
DeSantis did well in the 2022 election against anemic Dem opposition. But was he ENDORSED by Trump in 2022? I kind of recall that Trump didn’t really endorse him. He mostly dissed DeSantis until the last moment and then basically said “you might as well hold your nose and vote for him” so to speak. Which was hardly a full throated endorsement.
Miss Bianca
@Betty Cracker: That’s sounds like my experience here in Redneckistan, CO.
Geminid
@CaseyL: The winters up north will get better.
But I suggested Winston-Salem knowing that it is in a “red” state (although my guess is that the city is blue and Forsyth County purple). I’m not sure what the politics are where you live, but I think people in blue states tend to exaggerate how oppressive life is in Piedmont North Carolina, Republicans and all.
I certainly would not advise younger women to move there so long as their bodily autonomy is at risk. But aside from that important caveat, I think someone can have as good a life in Winston-Salem, North Carolina as they can in say, Grand Rapids, Michigan or Minneapolis, Minnesota, and maybe even better.
North Carolina is going to be blue state in ten years anyway, and it might be kind of fun helping make that hapoen.
Jinchi
@Barbara:
Once Ron learned the kid couldn’t vote he had no use for him. He probably wondered why the little pest was allowed near the microphone in the first place.
Elizabelle
@Jinchi: I am just not interested.
That party is a threat to democracy, so who cares what figurehead nominee they york up? Job number one is elect Democrats. Period.
Roger Moore
@Hoodie:
That explains how he got from one of many Representatives to being candidate for governor. It doesn’t explain how he got to be in the House.
Baud
I guess DeSantis never figured out where to go to get his apology.
Hoodie
@Kent: I don’t think anyone who was picked by Trump or has been loyal to him has any chance of unseating him, so everyone currently running against him is either delusional or running for VP. The people I’d be more afraid of are Republicans who won despite not being very closely tied to Trump, e.g., governors like Kemp or Youngkin. I hope neither of them enters the GOP race. However, I think they’re likely to wait until 2028 because Trump will sabotage anyone who beats him in the GOP nomination race. There’s no way for a GOP candidate to win without Trump’s base and the Georgia senate races give you some idea what will happen if he encourages his voters to sit it out.
Another Scott
Meanwhile, … Reuters.com:
Being able to point the car in the correct direction seems pretty important…
Cheers,
Scott.
Betty Cracker
@pacem appellant: Oh my God, can you even hear yourself?
Hoodie
@Roger Moore: You can get elected to the House by simply having an R after your name in a red or red-leaning district.
Baud
@Betty Cracker:
I think it’s important for those of us who have he power to cancel people to spell what we did to our victims accurately.
Miss Bianca
@different-church-lady: OK, in addition to being hilarious in your right, you’ve now taken to channelling Tony Jay?!
I may not survive the giggle fits.
Mike in NC
A rubber white shrimping boot stomping on a human face forever. That’s DeSaster’s campaign pledge.
Brachiator
@Tony Jay:
This has not happened with any contender. Chris Christie mocks Trump and is either ignored or booed by the Trump faithful. And DeSantis’ notable lack of personality makes it virtually impossible for him to connect with the Trump base. Or with any normal human being.
Republicans don’t give a rat’s ass about Trump’s personal weakness. Hell, they identify with Trump’s personal weakness. Makes them think that they are okay. And I have rarely seen any poll or interview that suggests that the GOP faithful would ever abandon Trump because of his personal failures. They gave him immunity on this a long time ago.
And obviously you see something similar in the UK with Boris Johnson. He may be out, but he still has his devoted fans. And Charlotte Owen.
Trump is running as an unofficial incumbent since he continues to push the fantasy that he won the 2020 election. This gives him additional cache, especially since the GOP leadership will not disavow him.
The only good thing is that Democratic Party voters don’t accept this nonsense. But Trump continues to rock a sizeable portion of the GOP base and DeSantis was never going to shake this. And more to the point, the other candidates who are trying to attack Trump are getting nowhere with that approach.
artem1s
I’m honestly hoping he limps on until Super Tuesday at least. I fear what awful substitute the GOP and MSM will trot out as the next messiah who can save the Party from MAGAism. It’s totally self serving too. I fear Ohio will be where they draw the next batch of deplorables from. Please jeebus don’t let Gym Jordan decide to hit the grifter trail.
Roger Moore
@Hoodie:
Only if you win the nomination. I think that’s the underlying thing to understand about DeSantis. Most of his career has been about winning the Republican nomination. At the lower levels, that’s about kissing the right asses to get ahead within the party. DeSantis was able to succeed at that because those local leaders looked at him and saw someone they could trust because he was one of them.
EmbraceYourInnerCrone
@Kristine: Same, in the past, when he had not had nearly as much public exposure he seemed like another Trump-alike just more competent at getting his agenda implemented. Apparently though, he is the worlds worst campaigner. An has even less empathy than Trump if that’s possible or at least doesn’t have the bluster to carry off Trump’s schtick… He really does resemble one of the lizard aliens from the TV series V…
Jeffro
@Kent: that’s really interesting (and sounds like it was a good process!)
Florida and Texas are setting themselves up for years if not decades of folks making the same kind of choices. Get out if you can; stay out if you can.
Hoodie
@Brachiator: Re Christie, listened to his interview with Lovett on PSA. Hilarious how he tries to thread the needle regarding his recent conversion to quasi never Trumper. He’s a fairly capable bullshit artist, but it’s still bullshit. Lovett went after him about that, basically saying that it’s hard to believe someone as Jersey savvy as Christie would not have known Trump was a fucking con man from the get go.
Brachiator
@Jeffro:
Josh Marshall is an idiot. I don’t see that any of these fringe candidates have any appeal.
The money that Republicans spent on RFK Jr is as much a waste as any money spent on DeSantis.
eclare
@Jeffro:
He also punched his son DJTJ to the ground in front of his college roommate because he dressed in a baseball jersey, not a suit, to go to a fucking ball game.
If TFG did that in public, imagine what hell those kids went through in private. Doesn’t excuse current behavior, but that’s awful.
Geminid
@Jinchi: I think Sununu could be a strong general election candidate. A lot people from the radical and bible-thumping wings of the party might stay home, though.
Kemp would be stronger in that respect, but I think he’ll avoid the likely train wreck, finish out his second term in 2026 and then start laying the groundwork for a 2028 run.
Baud
Whoa.
Roger Moore
@Brachiator:
That’s “cachet”.
Cache: a hiding place, especially one in the ground, for ammunition, food, treasures, etc.
Cachet: superior status; prestige
They’re both from French, so the final letter is not normally pronounced. Thus “cache” is pronounced about the same as “cash”, and “cachet” is pronounced like “cash-a”. /pedant
TruthOfAngels
@Alison Rose: As both a limey and an excellent spelling-nower, I nonetheless wish I’d tried that on my English teacher.
‘Hey, I spelled ‘canceled’ correctly.’
‘No, you didn’t.’
‘Loyalist!’
Roger Moore
@Jeffro:
As long as the people leaving are a bunch of liberals who might otherwise take the place over, the PTB in both those places are perfectly OK with that outcome. They’d much rather rule over a smaller, meaner place than be ruled over by liberals in a happy, prosperous one.
zhena gogolia
@Jerzy Russian: She is a poet!
eclare
@JaySinWA:
We do ours later in the year in my neighborhood in Memphis. Too hot right now.
Jackie
@Ken: And the deplorable Anna Paulina Luna. She’s determined to out MAGA Boebert and MTG.
pacem appellant
@Betty Cracker: Constantly. I can’t turn myself off.
CaseyL
@Geminid:
I live in Seattle, the bluest city in one of the bluest states. We’re so progressive here it can, tbh, set my teeth on edge. I attended a workshop on transectionalism where the moderator got hung up on a 10-minute discussion of whether something genuinely innocuous (I can’t remember what, maybe a specific job title?) was inherently transphobic. If this sort of thing drives me nuts, I can just imagine how it sounds to anyone who isn’t as deep a shade of blue as I am.
But Red State madness is never very far: Eastern Washington, most of Oregon outside of Portland, and Oh Dear God Idaho are crazy bad, and within driving distance of me, more or less.
Jinchi
This is a feature, not a bug. Elon has always dreamed of removing the manual controls from his vehicles. We’re only there to serve as scapegoats when his technology fails.
zhena gogolia
@Butch: I do not understand that sentence at all. He’s blaming Democrats for not making the voting age 14?
Geminid
@Kent: You must be in Marie Gluesenkamp Perez’s district. I’m curious, and hope you would appraise her job performance so far, and her prospects for next year.
Hoodie
@Roger Moore: True, but the vast majority of people from the House don’t get on the train to an executive position like the presidency. Some people are leaders and others are just filling the billets. DeSantis might good enough for a House seat in the same way any other run of the mill GOP House rep is, e.g., he has a resume and can win if he’s not exposed too much, but he doesn’t have what it takes to be president unless someone influential puts his thumb on the scale. IIRC, he was losing the FL GOP gubernatorial primary when Trump elevated him.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@Roger Moore: Ah, but en français, both cachet and caché are pronounced the same way.
/pédant
A weird thing about “cancelled”. I’ve been spelling it that way most of my life, and I’m American. I could have sworn I was taught to spell it that way. I was very surprised to be told (by annoying spell checkers) that I was wrong. Perhaps I had a UK textbook at some point.
Matt McIrvin
@Roger Moore: I think they’re not feeling it because Texas and Florida have been exploding in population for a long time–they don’t think it’s going to hurt them, that, in fact, hard-right government is what’s been attracting people and any drain of liberals and minorities will be exceeded by influx of people who like this kind of government. It remains to see whether they’re right.
For a long time, the Big Sort was hurting us electorally because the Democratic base was getting concentrated into a smaller number of large blue states. It’ll be interesting to see if this reverses eventually, that Texas and Florida become magnets for mostly hard-right people and the conservative vote becomes similarly concentrated while other states flip blue.
rikyrah
@Brachiator:
this is why I am so glad that the Democrats changed their state order for 2024 Democratic Primaries.
THE BASE of the party will take care of this shyt.
rikyrah
@Baud:
RIP :(
Jinchi
@Brachiator: I agree that candidates like RFK Jr. and Mariane Wilson have no actual appeal. But it’s true that Republicans fund their campaigns in hopes of creating a spoiler.
They seem genuinely surprised that Democrats are swooning over the Kennedy name.
Chris
@Kay:
The media is generally terrible at picking “popular” candidates, because “the media” has the sensibilities of an East Coast elite “moderate” Republican, which most people on both sides of the aisle loathe. They also loved Mitt Romney, Jeb Bush, George HW Bush, etc.
The only time their choices work out is when you have something like 2000, where the candidate who spoke to them for their own reasons (George W. Bush, multi-millionaire heir to a dynasty of New England bluebloods) also happens to speak to the Republican base for completely different reasons (George W. Bush, born-again evangelical and cosplay cowboy).
The only Democrats they like are the ones they perceive as actively sticking it to the overall party, like Joe Lieberman or Joe Manchin. I can well believe that Eric Adams, ex-cop and anti-BLM activist, tickles their “he’s so independent! He’s a different kind of Democrat!” fancy.
pacem appellant
@Roger Moore: And Betty’s getting on my case. Sheesh. There’s a long and storied tradition of Jackal pedants.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
I think I found DeSantis’ next speech writer, the one who’s going to turn his campaign around.
(It’s a New Yorker article. Not sure of the restrictions. I think you get X number of free articles per month.)
It’s an AI that can handle any of those problematic human-human interactions he so struggles with. Here’s an excerpt.
pacem appellant
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: My wife reads a lot of British mysteries (As do I). In her own writing, I’ve had to remind her, that as Americans, we only have one ell in compound forms of “travel” and “cancel”, and that adverbs like “backward” and “forward” do not take an extra ‘s’ like we’re Michael Palin in a Monty Python Dead Parrot sketch.
different-church-lady
@Another Scott: “Mandatory self-driving mode”
cain
@Brachiator: I hope they continue to spend and drain the pockets of MAGA billionaires, millionaires and MAGA assholes so that there is no money left to fund real candidates.
sab
@cmorenc: A lot of the slaves had job skills before they were kidnapped from Africa. South Carolina needed people who knew how to grow rice, for example.
Anyway
@kalakal:
WG and other Jackals are eagerly waiting for TFG indictments – the prize I’m looking for is Santos getting nailed for falsehoods in his financial statements, resume etc. I’m getting a little impatient …
Jackie
@Jeffro: I see he’s threatening to primary any GQP House members who don’t support impeaching Biden. I hope they ignore him like a fang-less old cur. All bark and no bite.
Of course if the GQP falls in line, several will get voted out regardless.
Brachiator
@different-church-lady:
Very interesting. A lot of black people are reclaiming all of their history in America, and this is something that fools like DeSantis are blind to as they embrace racism.
When I was in college, an African American studies professor made a good case that African building techniques were reflected in the buildings that enslaved people worked on.
Also, a while back there was an interesting video about a black family who bought the plantation their ancestors lived on. They intend to preserve their legacy and especially the slave cemetery where their ancestors rest.
Your anecdote I think illustrates how an inclusive history can embrace varying perspectives. Some of this is a result of historians deliberately attempting to honor all of the past. I remember when tours of historical buildings would avoid any mention of enslaved people or simply remark on it in passing.
pacem appellant
@Another Scott: FSD is a lie. Billions of dollars were pumped into a technology that can never be realized—could have saved a lot of money if they’d have asked me first. Most auto manufacturers are steering away from it (see what I did there). Assisted Driving, or AD, is all we can hope for, and reasonably expect.
different-church-lady
@Miss Bianca:
There’s enough ore in that mine for two.
Betty Cracker
@pacem appellant: At least you have that power over others. ;-)
@CaseyL:
I know exactly what you mean, but it’s puzzling that the people who seem angriest about it are the least likely to be exposed to that sort of excessive navel-gazing. They aren’t attending that workshop.
Omnes Omnibus
@pacem appellant:
And there is a long and storied tradition of Jackals being annoyed by other Jackals’ pedantry.
Anyway
@Chris:
This. Lamestream media hate establishment Dems.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@pacem appellant:
I grudgingly accept that the spell-checker is right about those words. But I’m still mightily annoyed that it keeps trying to force me to misuse “it’s” or change “were” and “well” to “we’re” and “we’ll”. Also random capitalization of things that should not be capitalized.
Bugboy
Not to get in the way of poking fun at our ersatz presidential candidate, while white boots might look funny, boot choices have gotten deadly serious, at least here in South Florida. See, I’ve spent 35+ years tromping around the swamps of Florida, and you *used* to be able to wear black “wellies” do to so. Not any more. The sun has gotten so intense, you can literally burn yourself if you wear black boots, so what’s the answer to that? White boots…
JPL
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: You are giving DeSantis too much credit, because he wouldn’t be that kind.
different-church-lady
@Jinchi:
You meant Democrats aren’t swooning, yes?
Brachiator
@Roger Moore:
I know the difference. I’m just a shitty speller who is posting hastily while riding the bus. I’m trying to make up for missing interesting threads earlier.
But thanks anyway.
Ruckus
@different-church-lady:
Those 2 things are true and while the slavery was absolutely wrong, they did build a beautiful building. The rational was wrong, the results shouldn’t have happened but they did, they know the work, the effort was good. The world isn’t always a great place, history is full of crappy humans doing crappy things. But what, 175 yrs later, that building is still standing, and their ancestors built it. This is humanity, some of us are the epitome of shitty, some of us are not and some rise beyond the norm to see the beauty in their actual history. We are all part of history, the good, the bad, the great, the horrible. Humanity gets better very slowly, sometimes immeasurably slowly, because mostly we learn from our mistakes. Sometimes it takes multiple lifetimes for enough people to learn to effect a better change. And sometimes some take advantage because humanity is not one thing, it’s billions of us, the good, the not so good, the shitty. Sometimes the shitty win – I give you #45.
Matt McIrvin
@Brachiator:
Cornel West has appeal. I know people he appeals to. He’s a little like if Bernie were a Green, at this point in his life, and I think he’s going to pull some of the Bernie dead-enders: white progressives and kids who are deeply skeptical of the System. That’s why he’s the one I’m worried about, not RFK Jr. or Williamson.
cain
@CaseyL: I find that somewhat tedious in mastodon. Some polish guy decided to call me out about generalizing about Asia and rice eating. Like I don’t know there aren’t parts of Asia that doesn’t eat rice – it’s based on climate of course. Sometimes they eat wheat instead of rice. But being mansplained by some non-Asian guy about Asia was pretty annoying. Instead tearing him out – I just ignored him.
different-church-lady
@Ruckus:
Part of the takeaway I got from it was that the blacks had a shit-ton more reason to be proud. But that realization came out of left field.
rikyrah
@cain:
clap clap clap
let the rubes keep rubing.
pacem appellant
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: Which spell checker is that? I switched mine to Grammarly which gets those right often enough that I’m unbothered when it occasionally makes a mistake. Google is wrong enough that I had to disable it.
My complaint about Grammarly is that it constantly wants me to remove adverbs from my writing—like “constantly”, “really”, and “literally”. I generally choose my adverbs carefully, and certain voices require causal speech. It is incapable of detecting that, but I don’t expect it to.
Omnes Omnibus
OT: Important news! New Dessa album coming soon. Here’s a track.
rikyrah
@Brachiator:
While I hate the state of Mississippi, if I had the money, and if it still existed, I would buy the plantation my family were slaves on. I see it as a full circle moment.
Jinchi
@different-church-lady: Correct. Republicans thought they could trip up Democrats with Kennedy nostalgia
cain
@Matt McIrvin: RFK is a waste of time – the guy keeps getting crazier as more attention falls upon him.
Omnes Omnibus
@rikyrah:
Buy it to preserve or buy it to bulldoze? I could see either response as valid.
Baud
@Jinchi:
I kind of wonder what would have happened if Kennedy had at least made an effort to pretend to have Democratic values instead of overtly playing footsie with Nazis and conspiracymongers.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
Hard to believe a lot of West voters were potential Biden voters. More likely they would have just sat out.
Alison Rose
@cain:
You need to work a few more negatives into this sentence.
Omnes Omnibus
@Matt McIrvin:
But would those putative West voters have voted otherwise? If he doesn’t actually pull from Biden’s numbers, it is immaterial.
Baud
@Alison Rose:
I thought this was a “talk like DeSantis” thread.
Geminid
@Omnes Omnibus: Yeah, those captious Balloon Juice pedants, always gasping at straws.
rikyrah
@Omnes Omnibus:
I would ask Peanut’s mother if she wanted to live there.
While I have no interest in Mississippi, both my oldest sister, and her daughter, have no problems with living in the South.
Bostondreams
In related news, the DeSantis District that took over administrating Disney territory has scrapped minority hiring and contracting programs ‘because it is racist and sexist.’
Brachiator
@Matt McIrvin:
Fair point. I hope he is wise enough to back the Democratic Party. We don’t need third party spoilers.
Omnes Omnibus
@Alison Rose: No, no one ever said it’s not like he doesn’t know there aren’t parts of Asia that don’t eat rice.
Baud
@Brachiator:
Pretty sure he’s not.
cmorenc
@Brachiator: yes that was some industrial-grade snark about the benefits of slaves learning skills – it truly did benefit a slave learning enough carpentry skills for his slaveholding owner to assign him doing that rather than as a field hand doing the brutally hard work of picking cotton all day in the hot sun, albeit still as an unpaid slave still owned abd at the mercy of his master. But yes, that’s not the spin the DeSantis guidelines are going for, which attempt to strongly imply this enabled them to become independently employable in the future.
different-church-lady
@Alison Rose:
Get one more in and it becomes the square root of negative.
karen marie
@Old School: I don’t know what DeSantis even means. Is it that he thinks15-year-olds should have the right to vote but Democratic objections have stopped it or that Democrats have banned people with severe depressive disorder from voting?
He’s not just rude, he’s incoherent.
pacem appellant
@cain: Mastodon has a lot of performative virtue signaling. But I’ll take that any day over the racism and transphobia of Twitter.
Chris
@Baud:
Feel like a lot of those “I’m too cool to have a party” edgelords have thrown in the towel since 2016 on even pretending to be anything other than balls-to-the-wall Republicans. Glenn Greenwald is of course the ur-example.
tam1MI
No kidding. I live around Lansing, Michigan, and my first reaction when I heard my state described as having harsh winters was “Have you been to Montana or South Dakota?! “
hueyplong
@different-church-lady: Does Natchez still have a place that sells donuts and tamales and pretty much nothing else?
cckids
@Kristine:
I think it’s stunningly obvious that she should be the one running – she’s got the drive and ambition, and she can at least impersonate human emotions and charisma infinitely better than Ron.
Ken
I respectfully disagree. He’s been that crazy for a long time, as shown by his online history. But up to now, no one — or at least no one in the mainstream media — noticed or cared.
cain
@Baud: ♬Let’s talk bout Dee Santis, baby! Let’s talk about Trump(!) and he – let’s talk about all the things that we love to hate about Dee Santis baby ♬
Steve in the ATL
@Omnes Omnibus: I thought it was spelled “jackall”
Alison Rose
@Baud: I’m not able to say woke that many times in one breath.
Alison Rose
@Omnes Omnibus: You’re cruisin’ for a bruisin’, Omnes.
The Thin Black Duke
@Matt McIrvin: Any white person who would vote for a third party candidate isn’t a “progressive “; these are poseurs who just like to break shit. After Anderson, Nader and Stein, anybody who claims to be politically well-informed can’t ignore the irrefutable evidence that voting for third party candidates benefits Republicans, end of story.
hueyplong
@Steve in the ATL: Is that because Sherman gave the ATL an “L” in 1864?
Brachiator
@cmorenc:
What I utterly hate about all this is that DeSantis wants to create fantasy propaganda to protect the delicate sensibilities of white children. This insults black children. It insults history.
And it also suppresses a deeper understanding of history that young students might actually find interesting.
I don’t know what “educators” contributed to this folderol, but they are also at fault.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@pacem appellant: The most stupid spellchecks I cited are autocorrects from my iPhone while composing text messages. I know the difference between “its” and “it’s”. It really annoys me when my phone takes the correct one and makes it incorrect just before I hit the Send button.
Baud
@Ceci n est pas mon nym:
My android does that with in and on. Always changes it to the wrong one.
Omnes Omnibus
@Steve in the ATL: Well, actually…
Matt McIrvin
@Brachiator: West has already announced he’s running on the Green ticket and Jill Stein is his campaign manager. His main thing seems to be “US out of Ukraine”. He’s gone full to the spoiler side.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@tam1MI: I don’t know anything about winters in any of those places, but I remember watching a scene in “Fargo” and thinking, “wait, are we supposed to be thinking this car driving around an empty parking lot with a half-inch dusting of snow is supposed to be looking bleak and wintry?”
dnfree
@The Thin Black Duke: Yes,I learned the third-party lesson in 1980. I voted for John Anderson, which made no difference in the election because I live in Illinois, but still…I learned my lesson.
Sister Golden Bear
This is my unshocked face….
Senior DeSantis Aides Were Thrilled With Nazi Video
Elizabelle
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: I love Daily Shouts.
Why not, Mom?
eclare
@Ceci n est pas mon nym:
My android regularly inserts apostrophes everywhere, not just in words like its, it also changes hell to he’ll. Very annoying.
Ken
Congratulations, his campaign has achieved all its goals. He can drop out now.
Scout211
Yeah, DeSantis is a sad joke, but in the battle of super PACs, DeSantis is winning. At least in the money race, at this moment. Donald Trump’s $100 million PAC is down to just $3.6 million in cash
Ken
@Sister Golden Bear: And I thought I was making a joke a couple days ago, when I lamented that the writers’ strike was blocking a great comedy skit where the DeSantis video is played to his campaign committee, who react by demanding more swastikas.
rikyrah
@Scout211:
But, Dolt45 isn’t running for President. He’s running to keep out of jail, and his funds pay his lawyers.
Sister Golden Bear
@Brachiator:
Marshall isn’t saying this will happen, he’s saying that’s what Republicans think and why they’re pushing folks like RFK Jr. He’s not saying they’ll succeed.
Roger Moore
@The Thin Black Duke:
Not to argue the point too hard, but I don’t think you can hang Reagan’s victory in 1980 on Anderson. Reagan still would have won the electoral college if all the votes for Anderson were given to Carter. Reagan actually won the national popular vote outright.
Also, if you want to talk about third party spoilers, you need to think about Perot’s role in the 1992 election. He got a much larger share of the vote than any other third party candidate since Teddy Roosevelt in 1912, and it seems likely that helped Clinton more than Bush.
So third party spoilers aren’t guaranteed to help the Republicans. What you shouldn’t do is to vote for a third party candidate where there’s plausible suspicion that candidate is being funded by the Republicans to serve as a spoiler. That includes every candidate from the Getting Republicans Elected Every November party.
Roger Moore
@Baud:
You aren’t even touching on the biggest autocorrect error. No, autocorrect, I very rarely mean duck.
laura
@JaySinWA: there’s a National Night Out “thing” down the street and around the corner, with special features guests- the cops. Yes, our cops are coming to my swell little neighborhood in East Sacramento to do their Officer Friendly routine while the incidences of gross, racist and abusive conduct keep leaking out into the public. A hootenanny of Nextdoor and Unaccountable Power makes me feel all stabby, so I am unable to attend. Here’s a news story that was covered by the local paper as well as the LA Times https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-07-25/two-sacramento-cops-handcuffed-black-teen-after-name-calling-group-of-kids
zhena gogolia
@laura: They’re doing this on our Main St. tonight. I wondered what it was, it looked sinister.
Ruckus
@different-church-lady:
This.
Slavery is absolutely fucking wrong.
But the results can sometimes, in the long run be beautiful because the slaves were human and better humans by far than the shitty humans who thought they owned them. I’ve met some of those shitty humans in my lifetime. One was an asshole in the navy who took me in a room to tell me what he didn’t like about me. He was really surprised when I told him that he was one of the shittiest humans I’d ever met and that some day he’d likely cross someone who didn’t give a fuck about his outranking them and he’d pay dearly for being such a fucking jackass. He never talked to me again and actually avoided me like the plague, so mission accomplished. I found out that a good buddy of mine got the same treatment but he was a bit more pissed than me and put his hand around the guys throat and held him up against the wall with that one hand – he had been a member of the Hell’s Angeles, and was also never bothered by that chump ever again. Some take assigned power and abuse it, he thought he was one of them.
Miss Bianca
@Brachiator: I’m shivering as I read this because I am now reading a novel called When the Reckoning Comes, about a haunted plantation that some white fools buy and try to turn into a wedding destination (complete with antebellum “happy slave” re-enactments), and I can tell already – don’t ask me how, I just have a feeling about this – that it’s not going to turn out well…
Ruckus
@rikyrah:
I see it as a full circle moment.
It is.
It is an extremely shitty part of the history of this country which still has repercussions to this day. 50+ yrs ago I was stationed in Charleston, SC while in the navy and living there was a hell of a lot different from SoCal. We as a nation have today still not 100% recovered or moved on from that time and we should never forget what made it what it was and how it was different and why it was so wrong.
Elizabelle
@Miss Bianca: Oooh. Sounds like a good summer read.
Looked it up, and just the book cover art tells you There Will Be Blood.
Ruckus
@cmorenc:
I wonder if I’m the only person on this blog to have spent a moment picking cotton? It was 15-20 minutes while we were on a family vacation. Driving down a 2 lane road dad saw a cotton field with people picking cotton. He stopped and asked the foreman if the 3 kids could pick cotton and learn what real work was. I was youngest, maybe 5 or 6 yrs old. Yep, we could. It was less than fun. It’s hot, nasty work that is more difficult than it looks. Cleaning house didn’t seem so bad after that.
Noskilz
I’ve been enjoying the coverage of Juiceless Ron’s campaign death spiral, so carry on!
With any luck, perhaps it will haunt any future political ambitions he might have.
Miss Bianca
@Elizabelle: I think someone on this yere blog recommended it, probably on a Medium Cool post. All my reads lately are coming from BJ, so I am going to return the favor by recommending a fun little summer “feminist serial killer” read that I just finished: look up They Never Learn, by Layne Fargo. You’re welcome. >:>
Brachiator
@Sister Golden Bear:
Marshall was clearly talking about his own thoughts about the election.
He’s still an idiot.
The Pale Scot
As long as you can hire for snow removal what’s the difference between there and the south. Here 10 months of the year you walk from your A/C house to your A/C car the drive the the A/C destination. It’s no different than cold areas.
Barry
@Chris: You misspelled ‘Nazi’.
hotshoe
@Ken:
made me laugh ;)
but with the recognition of a creepy kernel of truth …
just think what a favorable position she’d be in: “brave widow carrying on the MAGA legacy” — without the drag of Go-go-boots Rhonda.
Ladies and gentlemen: our next President Casey DeSantis!
rikyrah
Jamie is so petty…I love it ..LOL
Jaime Harrison (@harrisonjaime) tweeted at 9:02 PM on Mon, Jul 31, 2023:
Folks should stop trying to turn this skunk into a greyhound. He ain’t it!
(https://twitter.com/harrisonjaime/status/1686195667608182784?t=wI8Rfwz8glDz3LL5MJxNnA&s=03)
The Pale Scot
@Jeffro:
The downside of Wi and MI is the prediction is that western WI and eastern MINN will be subject to the same kind of wild fires as east of the Rockies dries out. I’m thinking Cleveland which has a small scene, the population is decreasing but I think that is majority retirees. Problem is we have family in Erie we don’t want to get too close to
Elizabelle
@Miss Bianca: It’s in our library. On the list for August. Pool reading. Thank you.
Snickered at the title. Brilliant.
The Pale Scot
Friend of a friend once asked an Asian Indian why so many of the engineers for there spoke English with a Scottish accent.
“We don’t think much of the Empire, but we know who built it”
Elizabelle
Gift link for jackals: story of the Miller family, who bought an old plantation home, Sharswood, in Gretna VA (southeast of Roanoke, VA, in Pittsylvania County). Their family had lived in the area for generations, and it was a big house that would be perfect for family reunions.
And then learned their forebears had been enslaved there. Washington Post:
An old Virginia plantation, a new owner and a family legacy unveiled. (gift link)
Really good article by Joe Heim, from 2022. Air Force veteran Fred Miller, now living in California, bought the property for $225,000, FWIW.
Kent
That might be true. But I can tell you that my mental health and perspective on life is far improved after having moved to Washington where my point of view is on the winning side at least sometimes. I know lots of liberals in Texas who relish and live on being the underdogs, and more power too them. But I’m not going to sit there and wait for generations for that blue wave to never arrive. Meanwhile watching every issue I care about from education to the environment to health care get trashed.
Kent
Yes, she is great and doing exactly what she needs to to in order to hold her seat. She is caring out blue collar issues like the right to repair and economic development in rural areas that should help keep her competitive here.
Geminid
@Kent: Thanks. I try to learn what I can about our House members, and am especially interested in the ones who flip red seats.
Chris
@Barry:
I thought I’d covered that when I said “Republicans.”
You’re right that “Nazis” saves pixels, though.
Barry
@The Pale Scot: “The downside of Wi and MI is the prediction is that western WI and eastern MINN will be subject to the same kind of wild fires as east of the Rockies dries out. I’m thinking Cleveland which has a small scene, the population is decreasing but I think that is majority retirees. ”
Note that Minnesota and Michigan are separate states. The major problem with Cleveland is that the GOP has a massive lock on Ohio, and will trash it.
Barry
@Chris: My point was that to these guys, full Nazi is now their core belief.
Kayla Rudbek
@rikyrah: good news for today!
LiminalOwl
@Eolirin: YES. Thank you. I was trying to phrase this.
Quaker in a Basement
I love you, Betty.