Maybe it is as simple as people realize elections are binary choices between the imperfect and the insane. https://t.co/LMhP3rUX2t
— HawaiiDelilah™ ?? #MauiStrong ???????????? (@HawaiiDelilah) November 8, 2023
Today, Democrats won in Virginia and protected reproductive freedom.
But make no mistake: Abortion and so many other fundamental freedoms are going to be on the ballot in 2024. That’s why we need you to join our campaign. pic.twitter.com/XNKJMei39M
— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) November 8, 2023
It is very good to see Biden's staffers are looking at voters concerns about prices and thinking hard about what can be done, even w/o congressional help.
Meanwhile Trump's staffers are thinking about how to enact payback at the DOJ and suppress peaceful protest.
— Mr. Nick Beaudrot (@nbeaudrot) November 7, 2023
======
Republican debate tomorrow night, so tonight will probably be the the Republicans’ second worst night of the week.
— Dana Houle (@DanaHoule) November 8, 2023
Not really worth its own post, but the Repubs are holding another circular firing squad this evening. The always professional Ed Kilgore, at NYMag, “The Third Republican Debate Could Be Brutal”:
… As the voting phase of the GOP primary approaches, candidates other than Donald Trump are hanging onto viability by their fingernails and really need to do something to help themselves and damage the others. Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis are in a cage match for second place in the Iowa caucuses (the governor hopes a long-expected endorsement from Iowa governor Kim Reynolds on the evening of November 6 will save his steadily sinking ship). Tim Scott is on the edge of elimination in both the polls and the debates. It’s increasingly unclear why Trump mini-me Vivek Ramaswamy is running for president against his idol, even as he annoys Republican voters more each day. And anti-Trump stalwart Chris Christie is simply proving that somebody with absolutely no chance of winning the nomination can stick around by cornering the small market of GOP Never Trumpers.
So this is a group of candidates with little or nothing to lose, each of them desperately trying to become the one that challenges the front-runner. With Trump absent once again, it’s a recipe for intramural carnage…
… DeSantis and Haley will bash each other, and Scott will bash both of them, while Christie bashes Trump and the audience boos. And I’m sure Ramaswamy will find some way to crash every conversation and insult his rivals. It has all the makings of a spectacle that only the front-runner (and Democrats) can enjoy…
Rooting for injuries.gif: Look for unauthorized leaks concerning the ‘dinner’ TFG may (or may not) have thrown for the horserace media touts last night…
We are not involved in this dinner and are not bound by the off-the-record agreement.
— Jake Sherman (@JakeSherman) November 8, 2023
Will Trump be running the barbecue pit? Will there be a tire swing competition in the ballroom? And who's in charge of bringing the donuts? https://t.co/ZXr4rbRqpS
— Ragnarok Lobster (@eclecticbrotha) November 8, 2023
Baud
AKA strategy session.
(This practice may be common. I don’t know)
Dorothy A. Winsor
Ivanka testifies in NY fraud trial today, and Rs “debate” tonight.
This is after Trump’s bizarre testimony on Monday, and yesterday’s walloping of the Rs at the ballot box. The weekend should start at midnight tonight. There’s no way Thursday and Friday can follow up on MTW.
OzarkHillbilly
Better hide the ketchup.
Yarrow
The DC Zoo pandas are going back to China today.🐼
rikyrah
Good Morning Everyone 😊😊 😊
rikyrah
Morning to all those pundits.
They know who they are 🤣🤣🤣🤣
bbleh
The “compromise” appears to be “Wellll, so Democrats pretty much won — except for Mississippi! they lost there!! they LOST!! — so this mmmmaybe sorta kinda balances what we all know are just terrible polls and an old and unpopular President.”
And then you have this self-righteous huffing about how ONE news organization is courageously declaring itself not bound by a SECRET AGREEMENT between news organizations and the Trump campaign.
Honestly, why don’t they just endorse him? “Look, he may be liable for both sexual assault and massive business fraud, he may be under 4 criminal indictments with 91 counts including endangering national security secrets, he may be increasingly incoherent and perpetually out of touch, but BOY is he entertaining, and that makes our job SO much easier! And the leopards will never come for our faces.”
Baud
@rikyrah:
Hahaha. Cold.
rikyrah
Body autonomy matters 🙌🏽🙌🏽🙌🏽
Baud
@rikyrah:
I’m surprised “Your body, my choice” wasn’t a more popular message.
MattF
Not to mention the approaching budget deadline in the House, which is next week, I think. It’s already a shitshow, although not publicly, so far.
Jeffery
@Baud: “It’s abortion stupid.” Works better.
Jeffery
@MattF: The GQP can become even more unpopular shutting the government down.
New Deal democrat
So long as Dobbs is on the books, abortion and the right to bodily autonomy will be decisive, winning issues for Democrats. This will be true even in States that currently have protections. That’s because the GOP fundies want abortion *bans,* period. Full stop.
But as for Biden personally,
This is key. He needs to find, or at very least be visibly trying his hardest to find, ways to lower increased costs that especially younger people are being hurt by (like housing prices, mortgage costs, and car loan payments).
Soprano2
Saw this in the WaPo comments section to that article where there was a sub-head “Another good election for Democrats (when they really needed it) and thought it would be good to copy here. Links to lots of resources for how to get involved in elections. Ah, I see too many links.
Jeffro
DeSantis, Haley, Scott, Christie, and Ramaswamy.
I canNOT imagine those being my alt-trump choices if I were a Republican. I can, however, imagine wanting to jump off of a bridge.
bbleh
@New Deal democrat: the absurd thing — as noted I think in a tweet here a few days ago — is that “people” are blaming “the gummint” for such high prices as they see. Like, uh, who do they think sets retail prices? Even interest rates are set by, y’know, banks. And has anyone noticed all the headlines about how gas prices have come down recently? Like 40-50 cents? No?
And yes, the perception is out there, and everyone is feeling cranky (nothing to do with cold and darkness I’m sure), so yes they have to at least look like they’re “trying to do something about it.” But there is pretty much jack-sht they can do about it — see above re who sets prices — and if they really started trying to bring some tools to bear, the Republicans would rise up crying “sociamalism!!” and the idiotariat would agree with them.
Next election is a year away. We just won another one, bigly. Jeez…
Soprano2
I have a comment in moderation, probably because of the amount of links in it. I didn’t think about that, sorry.
I can’t believe the press is giving so much attention to a debate that’s so irrelevant, because TFG is going to be the Republican candidate. It’s who they want.
I wonder, is it common for people running for president to host off-the-record dinners for reporters?
mrmoshpotato
Since when does ordering a shitload of McDonald’s “food” involve a barbecue pit?
Soprano2
@bbleh: Gas has come down $1.00/gal here in the past month, and is still falling. No one ever says the president is responsible for that!
O. Felix Culpa
@rikyrah: Good morning! Just wanted to say I love your comments on this here top 10k blog, and to ask the earth-shattering question of how do you pronounce your nym? Rik-ee-rah? Rik-eye-rah? Inquiring fans want to know. :)
Jeffro
Here’s a pretty good take, for Slate: Glenn Youngkin fucked up
(not the actual headline, but still!)
mrmoshpotato
@Baud:
“Your body, I control it” also wasn’t popular.
Yarrow
@New Deal democrat:
I posted this in the thread below:
It’s kind of amazing how Republicans and a lot of men don’t understand this. Even if a national law got passed to protect the right of women to govern their own health care decisions, who would trust it? The Supreme Court has shown they’ll just do what they want. The fight is every day and ongoing.
mrmoshpotato
@Jeffro:
LOL!
schrodingers_cat
I posted this on Twitter this morning.
schrodingers_cat
@Jeffro: @mrmoshpotato: Among these 4, Ramaswamy is the absolute worst. So my guess is that the R voters will go for him.
mrmoshpotato
@schrodingers_cat: I don’t doubt that.
Elizabelle
Good morning from Virginia. We yeeted as many Republicans as possible.
And there is always next year. We are all just getting started.
Baud
@Elizabelle:
Congrats, EB.
Frank Wilhoit
@Baud: It is a longstanding practice, but equally, it has always been done by the top-ranking advisors, never the principals: their fingerprints have to be kept off. Trump doesn’t even understand that. His narcissism has reached the point where it has made hash of his instinct for self-preservation. Now, why in exactly-all Hell can we not take better advantage of that?
Elizabelle
@Baud: It was a good night. And met some wonderful people, at the doors and celebrating last night.
Our voters are enthused. And we have big elections ahead in 2024 and 2025 (governor and executive offices).
Frank Wilhoit
@Yarrow: Fifty years. Who remembers what the crowds were like pre-panda? (As in, there weren’t any.) And what will they do with that building, which is their most hardened, because pandas are the most dangerous animals any keeper will ever work with?
Baud
@Elizabelle:
You could get your first woman governor in 2025 if Spanberger wins.
Jeffro
@schrodingers_cat: I understand the sentiment, but it looks like he’s treading water while Scott, Christie, and DeSantis are trending down and Haley is trending up. And supposedly, she polls better head-to-head against Biden than any of the others (including trump)
Maybe our snooze media could get around to asking when trump will drop out for the good of the party? He’s old, ya know ;)
p.a.
A good night!
We realize: they’ll never quit. Social Security 1936, Medicare/Medicaid 1965. Griswold 196? Roe 1972. Changing tactics, changing lies, changing threats, changing subterfuges.
It’s exhausting, but we won’t go back.
Frank Wilhoit
@bbleh:
They’re not endorsing him. They’re trying to teach the Democrats (and Biden personally) a lesson. Their narcissism is even greater than Trump’s.
Jeffro
@Elizabelle:
@Baud:
Spanberger is SOOO going to crush AG Miyares (or whomever the VA GOP puts up, once they get done shredding each other over this debacle)
Baud
@Jeffro:
Haley would be their smart choice. And maybe the least bad of the bunch. But it’s hard to see the Trump die hards coming out for her.
Frank Wilhoit
@New Deal democrat: No; regrettably, even indeed unacceptably, what Biden needs to find are better stories.
Geminid
@Elizabelle: A major 2024 task for Virginia Democrats will be unseating Republican Rep. Jen Kiggans in the coastal 2nd CD. I don’t think former Rep. Elaine Luria will seek a rematch. Local heavy-hitters Sen. Louise Lucas and Delegate Jay Jones have already endorsed Ms. Smasol for the nomination. Like Luria and Kiggans, Smasol is a retired Navy officer.
Democrats are already running attack ads against Rep. Kiggans, attacking her vote last May to cut VA funding by 22%. That was an error made by the Republican majority which Democrats will try to tie around Kiggans’ neck. There are a lot of active duty and retired veterans and families in the 2nd CD.
O. Felix Culpa
@Baud:
The only scenario I can maybe see the R’s supporting Haley for top billing is if Kamala Harris is the candidate, matching their brown female semi-person against ours, as they tried to do in Georgia against Warnock. But in the real world, she’ll qualify for R second banana at best.
Correct, and therefore highly unlikely.
Layer8Problem
Just repeating what I said at the end of the early morning post, for Anne Laurie, WaterGirl, and any other interested parties: I’m seeing for the first time blocks of those Twitter widgets at the top of the post by my Privacy Badger extension due to an associated tracker.
Baud
@O. Felix Culpa:
Hadn’t Haley been attacking Trump a little? He won’t choose her unless he listens to his professional advisors for once.
Another Scott
@Jeffro: Youngkin’s big problem is that voters noticed – too late – that he’s a liar.
He’s a plutocrat ideologue who ran as a friendly, safe, moderate, fresh face for the mass media (when he let them see him), and as TIFG without the weird hair and makeup when out with the MAGAts and when in office.
Voters who turned out aren’t buying the “moderate” image. They see the danger he represents and are fighting back.
Yesterday was a good day for Virginia and America.
Cheers,
Scott.
Anoniminous
@Baud:
I think “Shut up sluts, we own you” never got a fair chance.
Tony Jay
O. Felix Culpa
@Baud:
Yes she has criticized His Orange Worshipfulness, in a measured way. And yes, it’s unlikely that she’ll be chosen, for multiple reasons (brown, female, insufficiently devoted to the Tangerine Cult, etc.). Which is why I suggested her best, albeit unlikely, outcome is second fiddle.
ETA: T listening to his professional advisors: hahahaha! You crack me up. :)
EarthWindFire
Who would trust any “compromise” on abortion from the GOP at all? They spent nearly a half century screaming that Roe was baby killing. I know voters have short memories but it isn’t hard to remind them of this. There’s plenty of material.
schrodingers_cat
@O. Felix Culpa: Orange Ogre will prefer Ramaswamy or Lake for the VP slot over Haley.
lowtechcyclist
@schrodingers_cat:
I wonder if the recipient of our most recent mass pie-ing will show up so we can point and laugh.
Starfish
@bbleh: That was SO CLOSE for Mississippi though. I expected it to be far worse, and I was pleasantly surprised.
O. Felix Culpa
@Anoniminous:
I kinda like this slogan. Punchy, with a ring of truth. The Rs should run with it. :)
schrodingers_cat
@O. Felix Culpa: Now fetch my slippers and make me breakfast.
O. Felix Culpa
@schrodingers_cat:
Agreed. Both are appropriately worshipful, and each has only one negative in R race/gender scoring.
schrodingers_cat
@O. Felix Culpa: And both can lie with a straight face.
Bupalos
Just a disgusting result for our exurban school board. Longtime incumbent reasonable-lady former teacher truly in it for kids and community kicked off, to make room for 2 anti-tax developers posing as Republican/Democrat unity ticket, and 1 certified sovial injustice warrior loon lady. None of the winners give a rat’s ass about the education, lives, and happiness of these kids.
This shit will bite America in the ass HARD in 10 years.
Agonizing margins of 1-3% between the slots, which went developer, developer, lunatic, caring teacher, solid parent, ok parent. Lunatic beats caring teacher by 25 asshole votes.
Elizabelle
Fedex’s Panda Express 777 cargo freighter has just touched down at IAD/Dulles, in panda livery, on 90 minute flight from Memphis. Panda flight will refuel in Alaska; 19 hour journey.
NBC Washington stream. I wish they’d show the panda motorcade.
Thank you Democrats for doing so well last night. Otherwise, sad to see the beloved bears leave. I got to see them last week, and they were charming as ever. Thinking of the zoo staff and their fans.
sab
@lowtechcyclist: I hope so. I like the pastry pics.
Betty Cracker
@Starfish: Yeah, it’s disappointing that the corrupt talking canned ham was re-elected in MS but hardly surprising.
narya
@O. Felix Culpa: They already are!
Layer8Problem
I’d be more inclined to believe our betters in the journamalism trade if I had seen a few more articles with headlines like “Democrats Poised to Take Wins Nationwide as Reaction to Republican Overreach Continues”. Instead, we’re offered “Democrats Win Somehow, We’re Not Sure Why, But Trust Us Biden’s Popularity’s in the Toilet”.
cain
@rikyrah: It kills me that they took that word pundit and turned it into the opposite of what it means in India :D
Elizabelle
@Baud: @ Jeffro and Geminid: YESSSS! Governor Abigail Spanberger, please.
Getting redistricted, constantly, has just introduced her to more voters, and they like her. 5 point win in 2022; in 2020, her opponent did not even bother to concede.
Her parents and some staff were at watch party last night, being nonocommital, because it was a night for celebrating the [victorious!] legislature and local candidates.
But bring it on!
hrprogressive
RE: the tweet about Young People™ hating the Democratic Party except on Election Day:
This is a pivotal point about our times, and something that I think savvy left-of-center / Democratic blogs, pollsters, influencers, etc, would be keen to pick up on.
I’m under 40 still, so I’m not a kid, but I guess I’m younger than a lot of the Old Guard of the Democratic Party.
I have never, ever, identified myself as “A Democrat” because…quite frankly, the idea of the nominally left of center party being extremely cozy to business interests, and trying too hard to make nice with the GOP in the name of “bipartisanship” makes me angry because fuck all of that.
But I’ve been a reliable voter for Democratic Candidates for almost 20 years, since I turned 18.
Because the only other viable alternative in our duopoly is the Fascist Republican Party, and I will not ever vote to allow those theocrats anywhere near even the Dog Catcher lever of power.
But young people, especially those a generation or two after me, are much more liberal than their electeds, and they are right to be angry at a party they see as – as one commentor I saw put it in a Reddit thread I was in last night – “offers us nothing”.
Harris made a good point that the Democratic Party does, in fact, offer people things.
But in the eyes of many, it’s hard to see those things even happening and, in the eyes of many more, that’s not enough.
So, yeah. I get it. And I wish at least the Gen X’ers above me got it, maybe we’d get something done.
I don’t want a “make nice” party. I want a fire-breathing party that wants to stop the planet from imploding, stop the shareholders from stealing from us, and try to keep the Republic from becoming the Trump Reich.
I think you’d have a lot more youthful exuberance if you could find more Democrats doing those things.
cain
@schrodingers_cat:
A manic toxic asshole. He’d be the Indian version of the Joker with that grin. If he was a just a bit more demented and insane – he could play the part.
Brit in Chicago
@Baud: “But it’s hard to see the Trump die hards coming out for her.”
Even with Trump urging them to vote for her, after acknowledging that she had beaten him fair and square and was the better candidate? Or am I confusing Trump with someone else?
smith
In other news, it’s 9 days to shutdown, 15 days to Thanksgiving and the GQP is still inventing poison pills to ensure nothing passes. The campaign ads practically write themselves.
Mai Naem mobile
@Baud: i think Haley’s strategy is to work on being Kamala Harris’ non-black but Asian woman opponent whether it’s as a 2024 or 2028 POTUS candidate or as a non-TFG 2024 Veep. She’s not white enough or bimbo enough to be TFG’s Veep.
cain
@Elizabelle: Our voters are awake. They know the stakes. Now what we really need to them is to also stop reading and supporting news organizations that are overrun by toxic billionaires.
We really need to reform the press. They’ve been wrong consistently and continue to use the Republican playbook and messaging.
Brit in Chicago
@schrodingers_cat: Of the two I’d guess Lake. She seems to be bat-shit crazy, and to make Sarah Palin look like a statesperson (if I can invent a gender-neutral word for it), so well-qualified.
Mai Naem mobile
@cain: Ramaswamy is the SBF of TFGs.
narya
@hrprogressive:
It’s not entirely the fault of the media, but they’re not blameless, either. There is a ton of work being done to stop the planet from imploding–the legislation that Biden & the Ds passed is building plants all over the place that will help, but it’s slow work, and therefore harder to see as meeting the emergency. Biden on the picket line w/ UAW members, and saying, out loud, that the workers deserve a fair share of the profits, speaks to the pushback against shareholders. And people like Marc Elias/Democracy Docket are constantly pushing back against voter suppression. But these are all PROJECTS, and they require time and work. I understand the urgency, and I am NOT saying young people should just STFU–but I AM saying that the above deals got done precisely because Biden worked, mostly behind the scenes, to get them done. I would like people to realize that both the behind-the-scenes work and the fire-breathing work are part of the same project.
And it’s all made harder because the media want to highlight a poll rather than the slow, steady work that’s being done.
Chris
@bbleh:
The whole point of mainstream media political reporting is to launder Republican talking points into non-Republican circles. It’s why so many centrist pundits still insist on defining themselves as, if not liberals, at least part of some broader liberal class in which they’re the rare unconventional truth-tellers. Endorsing Republicans gives the game away. Their entire act is that they’re not just another Fox News outlet.
cain
@hrprogressive: You’re among similarly liberal people here. We totally get it. The Democratic party is probably more right than your “Republicans” in Europe.
The historical cozying has a lot to do with the 80s and 90s. But I see that the pendulum is swinging back towards labor and that is a good thing.
The GOP must look at your cohort and the younger generation as an existential threat to their power..
Yarrow
@hrprogressive:
Well, this is bullshit. The Democratic party offers them plenty. Maybe not as much as they want and as fast as they want and maybe not everything they want. But it’s not nothing.
The Other Steve
Planet Money had a really good episode this past week, an interview with FTC Chair Lina Khan.
I think this is what Bidenomics is really about, reversing many of the economic changes which happened over the past 40-50 years which have destroyed Americans lifestyle. This is all about enforcement of anti-trust, dispensing with the notion that allowing companies to merge is just good for consumers. I’ve lost two jobs as a result of mergers, my wife lost her job. This is common across our entire economy. And it’s not that the newly merged company is so much better, in the examples I’m familiar with the resulting merged company ended up crashing into a flaming pile of turds and everyone lost jobs. Rinse, Repeat… over and over again.
I don’t think a lot of policy makers fully understand this as they either come from an investor class, or work for legal firms which don’t seem to have the same problems with churn.
zhena gogolia
In case you were wondering, here’s the NYT spin (I’m not sure whether they are actually paying a salary to DougJ or not, but they should be):
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@lowtechcyclist:
Oh my god, I saw that yesterday! Completely deranged. Like imagine voting straight GOP just to spite online people you’ve never met. What the hell was he talking about with commenters defending a restaurant supporting a rapist?
Miss Bianca
@Yarrow: Eh? I hadn’t heard about this.
smith
@hrprogressive: There are a number of Dem members of Congress who regularly take on the issues in a fiery way — witness what they did during the bogus impeachment hearing recently, or a lot of their treatment of Jan 6 issues — but it’s not clear younger voters are seeing that on the outlets where they get their news. There may be as much a communication problem as a substantive problem the Dems need to solve.
Even though a lot of the blame belongs on the filter that corporate media imposes, younger voters often go around that filter via online sources, and that’s where Dems should be going to make their points.
cain
@smith:
The Biden Administration has an opportunity to solve problems that people have or at least go through the motions using executive power. The House is not going to be producing anything and they are coming up to an election year next year.
We know that the press is going to do their best to downlplay everything – but we are going to have to do our own outreach where they fail.
zhena gogolia
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): A restaurant owned by José Andrés was suggested for a DC meetup. Apparently it once employed a chef who has been accused of rape. So considering having a meetup there means we all support rape.
evodevo
@Baud: Yes…this. Trumpy’s MAGAt base will NEVER vote en masse for an Indian American…these are the people who couldn’t tell the difference between a Sikh and a Muslim after 9/11. And Trumpy would never endorse him (not that that worked out well for Cameron in KY).
cain
@zhena gogolia: Those fuckers just hate us don’t they? They just refuse to give Biden any kudos. People consider them the liberal newspaper? Where the fuck did that reputation come from?
Jackie
@Brit in Chicago: TIFG endorsed Lake for the AZ senate race. I don’t see him wasting his time and energy (ha!) endorsing Lake if he wants her as his running mate.
At this time, I have no idea who TIFG would choose for his VP.
Baud
@zhena gogolia:
QFT. That is pure parody.
zhena gogolia
@cain: I guess from the fact that there is no mainstream newspaper to the left of them.
EarthWindFire
As a Gen X’er, I wish that too but I know it isn’t happening, at least not soon. Too many of us are Reaganites and many of those who aren’t are deathly afraid of not being bipartisan. We were the GOP’s hostages for decades. Hard to break that conditioning.
Miss Bianca
@Baud:
Oh, dear God. You got me. I am deaded. Had to share this Baudy insight with my local liberal lady FB group – we are something of a secret society in my blood-red county. Right on, Baud!
Marcopolo
Just want to highlight that further down the ticket, last night was pretty good for local school board elections in VA, OH, PA, NJ, and other places. Sounds like especially in districts where MAGA folks had won in 2021 (and started doing their crazy shit) they were roundly repudiated. Good news for those of us who think books should be read not banned/burned & teachers & kids should be supported & protected based on who they are not who MAGA conservatives think they should be.
Edited to add to this article link: https://www.thedailybeast.com/moms-for-liberty-candidates-taught-a-lesson-in-2023-elections
https://www.bleedingheartland.com/2023/11/08/progressives-win-book-banners-lose-many-iowa-school-board-races/
twbrandt
In WaPo, the always-reliable (in a bad way) George Will says
Well maybe George, the Dems know something that you don’t.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@Frank Wilhoit: We have fond memories of being inside the DC giant panda enclosure.
Not with any pandas around. It was back in the 80s and was a project with the Friends of the National Zoo organizing a bunch of volunteers to build play furniture. I think the play equipment has probably gone through many evolutions since then, but I believe that was the first.
Chris
@cain:
The media would be a lot less damaging if people actually perceived it as the right-wing organ than it is – they’d have some idea of what to disbelieve or take with a grain of salt. But all the polls keep showing that the average person views CNN, NPR, the New York Times, et al, as liberally biased, no matter how hard they go in the other direction.
I have some hope that it’ll end someday – people have finally stopped believing that the court system was liberally rather than conservatively biased, several decades after the fact – but I don’t know what the fuck it takes.
Miss Bianca
@Tony Jay: LOL! And yet, Shriek!
But I can’t believe you passed up the Pythonesque opportunity to sign off with:
cain
@zhena gogolia:
Right. Isn’t this the newspaper that supported Hitler till we joined WW2? Always wrong.
zhena gogolia
@cain: And in more recent history, “aluminum tubes.”
C Stars
I’m sorry if this has already been addressed but is anyone aware of how the polls leaned in Virginia (or Ohio/Kentucky) over the last months? Was what happened last night the expected outcome according to polling?
Geminid
Now that her Senate “Brick Wall” is even stronger, Senator Louise Lucas can resume hurling bricks at the NCAA. She threw the first one in October, after the NCAA denied an appeal by James Madison University over its football team’s bowl eligibility. “Virginia will go to war over this.” tweeted the feisty State Senator.
JMU was 7-0 and ranked 25th at the time, but was not bowl eligible because they had transferred to the Sunbelt Conference one season ago. The Norfolk based Virginia Pilot featured Lucas’s tweet in a headline;
Outgoing House of Delegates Speaker Todd Gilbert had also denounced the NCAA decision. The Pilot asked Senator Lucas meant by her war-like tweet, and she answered:
Confident that Virginia Democrats would hold the Senate, Ms. Lucas noted that she would chair the Finance and Appropriations Committee:
I like that “and how they will operate in our Commonwealth.” The NCAA can ask Glenn Youngkin if they should take Senator Lucas seriously.
The James Madison University football team is now 9-0 and ranked 21st. JMU just filed their final appeal over bowl eligibility.
Brit in Chicago
@narya: “the behind-the-scenes work and the fire-breathing work are part of the same project”
Yes! This is very important. We need both to insist on where we ought to be and to recognize where we are, and work with what we have to try and get us closer. The importance of the latter task for getting anything done, given the radically imperfect circumstances, makes me very grateful for Biden. I don’t know that anyone could have done as much as he has; that’s compatible with thinking that what he has done is nothing like enough (he probably thinks that himself).
RevRick
In terrible news for the Democrats, they swept the four statewide judicial races in the Supreme, Superior, and Commonwealth courts in Pennsylvania.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@Marcopolo: Yep. Our ballot was all local races nobody had ever heard of, even locally. But everywhere I was able to check, it looked like the Dems had won. (@RevRick: Including those).
Up till a few years ago, our county council was 100% Republican and had been that way for over a century. It’s now gone the other way. The blue shift is definitely happening, despite weird horse-race stories in the press that want to make it appear more even.
schrodingers_cat
@cain: He is the caricature of the vile cunning Brahmin come alive. I bet he went to RSS (they call themselves HSS in the US) run summer camps
ETA: Apparently he said that free markets defeat casteism and the example he gave was his Brahmin family tipping the pizza delivery guy.
Omnes Omnibus
@Chris: As a lot of their coverage is good, it would make sense to treat the NYT as I do The Economist. It is stuffed full of valuable reporting as long as you remember that it leans right and adjust for it.
gene108
@Starfish:
Given that 38% of MS is AA and most are likely Democratic voters, cutting into the white GOP vote by some amount will turn it into a purple state for statewide races.
By cutting into the white GOP vote means something like the GOP gets 70% to 80% of the white vote versus what they have now.
If demographics are destiny, and younger voters are more liberal, it needs to manifest in places like MS for it to really have an impact.
Miss Bianca
@narya: your response is far more measured and diplomatic than mine would have been.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@zhena gogolia:
Wow, that’s an even dumber and crazier explanation than I thought it would be. If he’s not a troll, I sincerely hope he gets help
cain
@Chris: I think the people who watch 24 hour news are all older people. Nobody I know watches these networks. Hell a lot of us don’t even have cable subscriptions. I think that is a reflection of GenX and higher – and they tend to rely on news networks more.
Everyone else is getting their news through tiktok, instagram, and social media.
Michael Bersin
@Soprano2:
Yesterday in west central Missouri.
Suzanne
@Anoniminous:
FUCK ME AND HAVE MY BABIES was also focus-grouped.
schrodingers_cat
@zhena gogolia: Was it Jaleo? Its pretty damn good. The chef in question was a contestant on Top Chef, Mike Isabella IIRC. I don’t think he works there any longer.
schrodingers_cat
@Brit in Chicago: That would be my guess too.
C Stars
@twbrandt: the op ed, like all of George Will’s musings, is laughable. Will may be a never Trumper but he very clearly also doesn’t want Democrats to win. Why does the WP editorial board suppose he’s in any position to offer salient advice about Democratic candidates? It’s just more predictable media fluffing of the GOP.
Omnes Omnibus
@schrodingers_cat: It was a different restaurant, but that was the chef in question.
Chris
@cain:
All of which still take their cues from the mainstream news outlets, however.
Like, the big story that’s had all the people-who-talk-about-politics talking until last night (even if it was just to rage about it, like it is here) was a New York Times opinion poll. Even if nobody actually clicked on the link to the New York Times, that’s still where the story came from.
Baud
@Chris:
Yep. Social media still isn’t a generator of significant original content. They mostly build upon content generated by traditional media.
Jeffro
@twbrandt: I just saw that and had to LOL.
George, George…howzabout you save your worries for your party, eh?
Ken
Oh please let karma take this as a challenge, and arrange a repudiation in the form of, say, Trump being jailed for contempt of court.
cain
@Ceci n est pas mon nym:
The GOP must be thinking that maybe bonding with the religionists was a bad idea. The fact their destruction is rooted in their misogyny and women is the cause of losing is going to drive the evangelical part even more crazy.
My bet is that their party is not going to get the kids joining their party at least not at the rates that the Democratic party is. I think it’s delicious that women are destroying them.
Geminid
@cain: The assertion that the Democratic Party is probably more right than “Republicans” in Europe is often made, but it does not hold up when applied to actual European countries.
Eduardo
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): Jesus H. Christ. I didn’t understand his rant yesterday and it isn’t such an important topic to ask but I am flabbergasted. We all have our pet peeves and hang-ups but I hope he gets help.
schrodingers_cat
@Geminid: I agree. The only metric used are the welfare state policies like universal health care for making the said determination.
DougL
@hrprogressive:
This is such a smart point. The “youth” are looking for fighters. They see the future and it is scary af. Even we olds are keenly aware of how precarious it all feels…
Marcopolo
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: Yep. Based on the down ballot results, serious election number crunchers (Tom Bonier @ Votesmart; Simon Rosenberg @ NDC) are now starting to talk about last night as a blue Tsunami 🌊. Just saw a comment about how many towns in CT flipped from R to D last night. Really hope this story/aspect gets half the coverage of that single NYT poll. I think it was Bonier who said you have to view results of a poll a year out as an airing of grievances, not a real indication of how a person will vote 🗳 when faced with two names on a ballot.
Redshift
@Jeffro:
I confidently predicted this would fail, so I can be smug about it. :-)
The entire “focus grouped” premise was that what was unpopular was the Republican position on abortion, and that’s what the backlash to Dobbs is about, so if they could find the right position, they could sell it as a compromise.
But seeing a wide swath of Republicans piously claim that their real objection to Roe v Wade was that it should be decided “by the states” and then pivot immediately afterward to calling for a nationwide ban, Dobbs also woke up a lot of people to the reality that every Republican “compromise” on abortion is a lie, just a marketing pitch to get enough people on board to move toward a total ban. (The fact that it was easy on hidden recordings to get multiple VA GOP candidates to admit they still really wanted a total ban just made this more obvious, but it wouldn’t have worked even with complete discipline.)
Omnes Omnibus
@Geminid: The Democrats are a fairly broad party ideologically. I think the center of the party is center-left, but you are going to find center-right people as well as democratic socialists on the flanks. The other factor in this is that the parties on the right (here and internationally) have moved toward the hard right.
lowtechcyclist
@twbrandt:
How the fuck does anyone keep giving George Will a sinecure on their op-ed page? When I was still reading the paper, I could practically write his columns for him, he’s so predictable.
Tony Jay
@Miss Bianca:
That Generic Democrat, he’s an ambitious guy.
Mike in NC
Maybe these fascists who have pledged to back Fat Bastard should just go ahead and cancel their worthless “debate” tonight.
Matt McIrvin
As the night went on I heard a lot of people speculating about causes of the difference in margins between the Issue 1 (abortion rights) and Issue 2 (cannabis) votes in Ohio, but in the end, there was almost no difference. Maybe there were urban/rural demographic splits.
schrodingers_cat
@DougL: To get the political power they think is their due they need to be reliable voters not throw toddler tantrums about witholding their votes.
Not voting is giving up your power.
cain
@schrodingers_cat:
This is one of the interesting bits for me. While I come from a brahmin background – my family has been pretty progressive – and they are the only brahmins I know. I don’t give a shit about caste and will be happy to be an apostate and destroy it all. But that caricature is hard to relate to – the moustache twirling asshole. lol. I’m sure the caricature is true – it’s just not one that I relate to.
On the flip side, I don’t know anybody outside of the brahmin caste and likely because I don’t ask or care and I couldn’t tell between one or another.
eclare
@cain:
I have wondered the same thing many times, the liberal FTFNYT? The paper that hated both Bill and Hillary, helped to lie us into Iraq, that newspaper?
I cancelled my subscription years ago. I get the WaPo now, which has issues, but it’s better.
Miss Bianca
@Redshift:
Yeah, with Republicans and matters pertaining to sex and choice, it *always* comes down to a matter of the “right position”, doesn’t it?//
oldgold
@C Stars: I am not so sure Will is off the mark in the opinion piece cited.
Yesterday’s good results for the Democratic Party and reproductive rights do not mute the meaning of recent polls concerning the the 2024 presidential race.
The recent NYT/ Sienna poll that signaled problems concerning Biden, indicated that a generic Democratic would beat Trump by 8 points.
Jeffro
this right here
Ken
You would be too, if polls said you would beat any and all of your political opponents.
Chris
@Geminid:
Let’s say that, at best, it requires a lot of parsing. It’s based almost entirely on economics (the Democrats are well to the left of most European center-left parties on quite a few social issues, especially pertaining to immigration). It varies heavily by just which European country we’re being compared to. Most of all, it seems to seems to rest heavily on the fact that people who would be center-right in Europe often vote Democrat in the United States… while ignoring the fact that the Democrats consist of a lot more than just these people. Democrats are just a broader tent, by necessity given the way the U.S. political system works.
schrodingers_cat
@cain: I mean in literature and among anticaste activists. I follow several anticaste voices on Indian Twitter.
Like Mohan Agashe’s character in Satyajit’s Ray, Sadgati for example.
Marcopolo
Going to get on w/ my day here but throwing out this question: after last night’s election results does one of the Republican debate moderators tonight ask about the giant millstone that the Orange 🍊 one is around the R party & how they will address it? Would love to see it. Or maybe they’ll ask about the clear evidence that Americans, even in red states (4 so far), support a woman’s right to body autonomy and Rs being on the wrong side of that. Fingers crossed.
cain
@DougL:
Sure – but working in policy takes time because there are a lot of stakeholders. Fighting against the GOP is one thing, but doing policy that will help everyone is harder since there are people all across the spectrum.
eclare
@gene108:
I have to think most young, liberal people in MS plan to leave MS if they can afford to.
Miss Bianca
@oldgold: Oh, you mean the recent NYT/Sienna poll that apparently had its own serious problems?
Jesus, dude. Just admit it once and for all – you hate Biden cuz he’s so OOOOOLLLLDD and you hate that Democrats are going to vote for him despite the fact that he’s so OOOOOLLLLDD. And then shut the fuck up about it. You are so on beyond tiresome at this point.
Omnes Omnibus
@oldgold: I know you are CONCERNED, but a notional candidate almost always does better in polling than an actual human. Until the chips are down and the choice is between the two actual candidates. Also, Biden is busy actually governing and stacking up accomplishments that he will be able to run on when it is time to begin campaigning.
Barbara
@hrprogressive: I think what might help is if more people who were around your age — or at least under the age of 50 — ran for office.
After Barack Obama was elected, I did a deep dive in a website that had a lot of data that showed how people voted by a lot of different demographic metrics. And I discovered a lot of things that made me realize that many things are just baked in generationally and can only change as generations age out and are displaced by younger cohorts (in the absence of waves or outlier candidates). For instance, a close interpretation of this data told me that Bill Clinton was elected in 1992 mostly because there were still enough FDR Democrats — people whose formative years occurred while FDR was president. By the time George Bush was elected those people were mostly gone.
Over the ensuing decades, the zeitgeist of the electorate, generationally speaking, has been of people who came of age, broadly, while Reagan was president. Those people (the whites among them, anyway) — born approximately between 1955 and 1970 — are among the most reliable Republican voters ever, in any generation. There are a lot of them.
Those people are often my peers as well as the peers of Barack Obama and many others, and that’s why Obama and others are so apparently conciliatory.
But you’re right. The baton is passing, and as someone who has felt out of step with many of my peers for my entire adult life, all I can say is, I can’t wait for you to pick it up fast enough.
Tony Jay
@Ken:
Everyone gets to be Eisenhower for fifteen minutes.
oldgold
@Miss Bianca: Well, yesterday’s CNN poll reflected only 25% of voters deem Biden to have sufficient stamina/fitness to do the job of President. While 52 % believe Trump does.
We ignore these warning signs at our peril.
Matt McIrvin
@Geminid: The claim that “The Democrats would be a right-wing party in Europe” is, I think, a holdover from the 1990s when you could reasonably argue that it was kind of true (at least, if the country of comparison was from Western Europe or Scandinavia).
The Democrats have moved left since then, and the center in much of Western Europe hasn’t. There are specific issues, like socialized healthcare, where the whole political spectrum in most EU countries is still to the left of the Democrats. Others, like immigration, where that’s clearly not true. And on the cultural stuff, our liberals largely caught up.
eclare
@Jeffro:
QFT
Geminid
@Chris: Another difference is that almost all European countries have parliamentery systems, typically with 3 to 5 substantial parties. That creates a very different dynamic than in the US, but the dynamic does not favor the Left parties. They usually have to form coalitions wih Center Parties to govern.
Jeffro
Betty, I see in the WaPo that DeSantis’ biggest donor – the guy who has been super-super-PAC-ing all of DeSantis’ campaign expenses – has had enough and is about to throw his support to trumpov.
holeeeeeee shit, the good news just won’t quit this week!!
C Stars
@oldgold: There’s no doubt that those NYT and CNN poll results were concerning (although I remember similarly upsetting poll results during Obama’s first term). What I wonder about is if the Washington Post’s editors considered whether George Will would actually support any Democrat, and if not, why the ridiculous pretense of having him offer good faith advice to Democrats? What journalistic value does such disingenuousness produce, other than rage/fear clicks?
Jeffro
@Marcopolo: I haven’t watched any of the GOP “debates” thus far but this one, I gotta.
I gotta see them all squirm and hem and haw about reproductive rights.
I gotta hear them all weasel out when invited to criticize Hair Furor directly.
I just gotta!
Omnes Omnibus
@Geminid: Hence the saying: In a parliamentary system, they have elections and then for coalitions. In the US, we form coalitions and then have elections.
Alison Rose
@bbleh: The very notion that people are trying to turn the fact that Democrats lost in Missifuckingssippi into some kind of ominous bellwether of coming doom is so laughable to me.
smith
Oh, good grief — now an Ohio GQP pol is claiming the Dems made a big mistake in backing Issue 1, because it took our best issue off the table, and by next Nov voters won’t have any reason to vote D.
eclare
@C Stars:
Joe needs to put out a meme like Obama did in 2012: chill the fuck out, I got this.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/10/obama-his-base-chill-f-out/322687/
Barbara
@Redshift: I made a similar point in an earlier thread. The outright bans in so many states makes this really obvious, but the torture that pregnant people are put through when their life is actually endangered is really frightening. Forcing women to sit in the parking lot and gauging whether they are close enough to death to merit intervention is just — I don’t know — beyond even what I had imagined. Denying other women access to cancer and other drugs because they might be or become pregnant is similarly grotesque.
These cruel and dangerous practices are occurring even where there are supposedly exceptions in place.
Chris
@C Stars:
This, yes – it probably gets to the root of the problem more than the posts I made.
The mainstream media punditariat is just an endless river of disingenuous “advice” to the Democrats, which is couched as just being helpful suggestions as to how they could win, but in reality is just “you should adopt the Republican Party’s policies in all particulars, ad infinitum.”
eclare
@Jeffro:
Not enough sedatives in the world for me.
Baud
@oldgold:
Everything we do we do at our peril. Your concerns are legitimate. Your constant beating of the dead horse is not. Dems aren’t going to replace Joe with someone else (or Kamala either).
Tim Ellis
@hrprogressive: The good news is, Democrats ARE doing those things now.
My formative political experience was the Iraq war – I was in the military at the time, fresh out of high school, and it pushed from my nebulous conservativism (thanks to my upbringing) to generally leftist views, and Democrats at the time frankly sucked lol. It was obvious that the war was bullshit but Democrats all seemed terrified to oppose it. They constantly got steamrolled and constantly offered wishy-washy half-measures (or at least that’s how it felt).
I only got involved in the party because Bernie made me feel like here was somebody calling out the core problem (capitalism) and fighting mad about it, finally. I put heart and soul into that race, and yeah it sucked to lose, but I believed him that we could keep organizing and make gains and I also could see that Trump was keening headfirst into fascism and Democrats clearly offered the best opportunity to stop him, so I stuck around. And I’m so glad I did. Democrats today are fierce, unified, have shifted left in the important ways. It’s been just a few years since I got drawn in and already the party has delivered big on some of my core priorities.
I didn’t think of myself as a Democrat til 2016 and it was an uncomfortable marriage at first, but these days I find I am damn proud to be a Democrat and damn optimistic about what this broad coalition can continue to achieve. This is not the 90s Democrats I grew up with.
Barbara
@smith: I’m going to guess that Ohio Republicans will continue to make abortion a reason to show up. No doubt they are busily plotting how to limit access with licensing and similar restrictions for doctors and other providers even as I type this.
eclare
@Alison Rose:
Yep. I live in Memphis, at times half my coworkers commuted from MS. I’m surprised Brandon came as close as he did.
Matt McIrvin
@Barbara: I also think that younger people don’t have a visceral sense of the power of Commie-baiting among older Americans who lived through the Cold War, even ones who identify as liberal.
That’s a real divide. I hang out in some leftish online fora, not primarily about politics, where basically you have to be some kind of Marxist or socialist to be cool. And this is just almost unheard of among people of my generation. Our basic instinct is that it’s electoral poison too. It still apparently is to some degree, since there are whole classes of votes the Republicans can get by making the absurd claim that Joe Biden is a Communist.
Geminid
@Jeffro: After about fifteen minutes of this debate you could be saying, “Ok. Now I gotta watch something else! Is there basketball game on somewhere?”
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
Seems like that’s how a lot of young boomers were in the late 60s.
rikyrah
Jake Sherman (@JakeSherman) posted at 4:27 AM on Wed, Nov 08, 2023:
While you were sleeping, House Republican leadership pulled the Transportation, Housing and Urban Development bill from the floor. They didn’t have the votes.
(https://x.com/JakeSherman/status/1722199162576675064?t=zWZvovVltttz_RcNiS-Kng&s=03)
rikyrah
Phuck Outta Here!
Alexander Petruska![]()
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(@apetrusk) posted at 8:54 PM on Tue, Nov 07, 2023:
Tennessee Republican argues federal funds to feed schoolchildren should be performance-tested
Performance tested?![]()
Your paycheck should then be 0.00, Rep. John Ragan @RepRagan
https://t.co/9TT3ykdW4d
(https://x.com/apetrusk/status/1722085100035223820?t=uKPK6JW_CLU-w7MuJ9mCWw&s=03)
Matt McIrvin
@Baud: I think the extent to which they were is vastly exaggerated. It was a tiny loud bunch of young boomers and the rest of them were engaged in backlash. When the voting age was lowered to 18, didn’t most of the youth demographic vote for Nixon?
eclare
@Tim Ellis:
Thank you for sharing that. Iraq definitely opened my eyes too. Being against the invasion was one of the few things that my dad and I agreed upon, politically. He was a WWI history buff, unprovoked wars are bad, period.
Geminid
@Omnes Omnibus: Also, in the US the voters choose the party’s candidates in primaries, while in Europe party committees usually choose them. I think that is a strength for our system.
oldgold
The reaction I am getting is very similar to when early on in the Russian investigation I raised concerns here about Robert Mueller’s fitness. “STFU!”
taumaturgo
@hrprogressive: What you are describing is systemic change, while the current party leadership lives and dies with incremental change. One type of change is seen by party leaders as reckless and imprudent, the other as prudent and wise in the pursuit of preserving the status quo. Never hold the party accountable, never criticize the majority corporate wing of the party, always be ready to squash any and all liberals call for change, especially primary challenges to the party line faithful. In the name of “unity” voices that stray too far demanding reform are silenced, suppressed and censured. It was disgraceful that 12 democrats joined insurrectionist and voted to censured one of their own, that happens to be a global majority member, female and liberal. What are the odds?
eclare
@rikyrah:
Gawd I hate my state.
Matt McIrvin
@smith:
Well, gee, by that reasoning the Republicans royally fucked up by appointing judges who would overturn Roe, didn’t they? It put the issue on the table in the first place.
If you see the goal of politics as winning elections rather than achieving policy preferences, you’ll be in Backwards Land forever.
gene108
@hrprogressive:
I hope they get involved and run on their agenda.
I keep hearing about younger generations being more liberal, but ultra-conservative states like Alabama or Louisiana don’t seem to be getting less conservative.
I don’t if there’s data on how younger voters lean in those states, because as long as there are ultra-conservative states and districts, it will be hard to pass a liberal agenda because those states will fight it every step of the way.
BethanyAnne
I don’t even care if some concerns are valid, today. Fuck it, it’s the day after the election, and mostly we won all over the place. I’m allowed one goddamn day to not fucking worry about the future.
O. Felix Culpa
@schrodingers_cat:
OMG. Do these people even hear themselves? (Silly question, I know.) But how do they not see how blatantly ludicrous such a statement is? (Silly question #2.)
hueyplong
@C Stars: Will can’t understand why the trumpian gop isn’t finally giving Robert Taft his shot at the big prize.
smith
Those more liberal young people took off for NY or CA as soon as they were of age. And in some red states, they’re being replaced by right-wing retirees from Ohio.
C Stars
@Chris: The national media has transformed into a corporate revenue device above all (I saw this process happen very clearly at the Arizona Republic when I worked there 20 years ago). It’s sad, but the role of providing information to the public really is secondary to most of these outlets (including the WP and NYT). I don’t think it’s so much that they support the GOP (although the bothsidesing is obvious and gross) as that they will do whatever they can to win the biggest chunk of eyeballs/ad money in a day.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
Dems were associated with Vietnam in 68.
Jeffro
@eclare: oh, I should be fairly sedate by the time it gets underway =)
eclare
@BethanyAnne:
Absofuckinglutely!
C Stars
@oldgold: I was in the minority here too with the Mueller stuff. I didn’t think he was ever going to bring the law down on Trump the way people imagined he would, and even if he had, it wouldn’t have made a difference. But I disagree with you about this. Both candidates have flaws, but only one party is yoked to extremely unpopular policy and a batshit insane candidate, and that is the GOP. We will have to work with what we got, and as the election results last night revealed, what we’ve got is extremely powerful.
Baud
@oldgold:
Maybe Biden will lose next year and you can gloat. But the fact is you’re not presenting an argument because you don’t have a plan for an alternative that would clearly be superior. You’re just rehashing the same risk that we’re all aware of over and over again.
Omnes Omnibus
@oldgold: And the Mueller report has been the basis for a shitload of actions the DOJ has been taking.
BethanyAnne
@oldgold: I was going to pass this by, but you know, no. You and Will are wrong. Just wrong. There are so many things y’all aren’t noticing. It’s a year out. Polls are not realistic at this point. It’s a whinge fest, that’s it. And confidence is attractive. People notice it, and want to support it. Flippity floppity running from their own goddamn shadows every fucking time a pundit says “Boo!” makes people hate to support Democratic politicians. Why would you support any politician who cowers like that? No. Now is not the time to lean in to weakness. Gah!
Geminid
@Matt McIrvin: Another argument against pushing this initiative to next year: Ohio women needed their rights protected as soon as possible.
Chris
@C Stars:
I used to believe this, or at least that this was a big part of it, until 2016. There is no universe in which, when one candidate’s biggest scandal is her email server management practices, and the other candidate’s biggest scandals involve sex, the mob, and Russian spies, a purely eyeball/clickbait driven media decides to concentrate on the first one. It took a herculean lift by the entire media to make Butter Emailz the story of the year in 2016, precisely because it’s so snoozeworthy on its own merits compared to what else was out there. They didn’t behave like a shallow and clickbait-driven media, they behaved like they would if they were affirmatively trying to promote one candidate and undercut another.
(And, really, right-wing interests have been pretty explicit about their intention to buy up the media and turn it into their echo chamber; the “become Dan Rather’s boss” campaign was all the way back in the eighties. It’s now advanced to the point where a longtime Murdoch stooge is about to be made CEO of the Washington Post).
Mel
@rikyrah: Yet again, so much for their “protect the precious children” schtick. Apparently, the moment the child pops out the birth canal, it’s open season.
They just cannot get enough of hurting kids. They are such monsters.
hueyplong
@oldgold: Well, STFU. Hope you’re pleased. I know I am.
smith
I don’t think the motivation for the corporate media is primarily boosting the profits of that outlet, at least in cases where the outlet is owned by a much larger corporation. I’m guessing Bezos would keep WaPo going even if it lost a lot of money.
Corporate media are on the side of whatever rich people think will be to their economic advantage. There are some issues where the corporate media look “liberal” to people judging them on a L-R spectrum, but those are just the issues for which rich people have no economic stake. Think LGBTQ+ issues, for instance. The fact that what’s best for increasing rich people’s money piles is usually in line with GQP policy is somewhat coincidental, due to the fact that the same rich people own both the GQP and those media outlets.
C Stars
@Chris: Maybe you’re right and I’m naive about big name journalism. The NYT was certainly on an anti-Hillary tear. I used to subscribe and remember multiple articles every day if she so much as cleared her throat during a meet and greet. The emails story…I don’t know. I think the GOP were the architects of that smear campaign and the media just thoughtlessly went with it. And as a woman, it’s pretty clear to me that misogyny was a big part of what happened there.
Elizabelle
@oldgold: Give it a break. Could you go do something productive?
Old Gold. The adult beverage for when you want to whinge all day. You may notice the lingering aftertaste of urine, and feel a resulting sense of desperation. Drink up!! Life is short, and Biden ain’t getting any younger.
We are doooooooomed!
geg6
@Omnes Omnibus: Mike Isabella is accused of rape? Since when? I have heard nothing about this.
ETA: I know he’s had financial issues and a harassment suit that was settled, but no rapes.
oldgold
C Stars
@smith:
I don’t know. I mean, surely that happens to some extent, but I’m not sure it works that way explicitly in the newsroom. It’s been a long time since I worked in newspapers but when I did, departments, sections, features–they lived or died based on ad buys and subscriptions.
Soprano2
@Michael Bersin: I saw $2.68/gal yesterday on the main drag in Springfield!
Chris
@C Stars:
I’m sure they did thoughtlessly go along with it, but they did it in the same way they thoughtlessly go along with pretty much every other Republican narrative. And I’m sure sexism was a huge part of it, but when there isn’t a sexist angle to play they just come up with something else (i.e. Biden’s age).
I would also say it’s steadily gotten worse and more blatant as time goes by – I’ve never seen the media as bad as they currently are, for example. For the duration of an election year – 2000, 2016 – yes, but the kind of total scorched-earth campaign they started waging against Biden just six months into his presidency and never let up from, that’s pretty much unprecedented. I have no trouble believing it wasn’t as bad twenty years ago when you said you were at the Arizona Republic.
Barbara
@geg6: To the best of my knowledge, he was accused of ignoring, at best, and encouraging the abusive treatment of at least one female manager in one of his restaurants, in full view of many other employees, and or even facilitating similar behavior in various public settings. Here is a link: https://cohenandcohen.net/chef-isabella-settles-lawsuit-over-sexual-harassment/
It also came to light that, basically, he was drunk a lot of the time (not a good fact if you had invested money with him) and he became overextended financially with some big projects that were not helped by either set of allegations. His empire collapsed, all of his restaurants in the DC area are closed and he now lives in Miami, or so Google tells me.
smith
@Chris: The story that got me in 2016 was not so much Butteremailz, but ones about the Clinton Foundation. At this same time stories were coming out about the Trump Foundation ,and how it was donating $$$ to state Attorneys General who were considering joining the lawsuit against Trump University. It was blatant, illegal bribery, but the stories that kept coming up again and again in corporate media were about how scandalous it was that officers of the Clinton Foundation were (*checks notes*) meeting with wealthy donors.
Formerly disgruntled in Oregon
@Tim Ellis:
Just wanted to see this again. I love it.
Today’s Democrats are different! All the old assumptions and idioms no longer apply.
Omnes Omnibus
@geg6: eversor said it was true. I don’t know the details of the harassment case, but enough evidence appears to be out there that Isabella is a scumbag that I wouldn’t want to go to one of his restaurants. The issue here being that there was no evidence that Isabella has anything to do with the restaurant people were considering other than that he had been a chef there 14 years ago.
gvg
@oldgold: We cannot change our nominee. Any attempt to nominate anyone other than Joe for any reason other than he dies before then, will result in Democrats losing. It will cause a fight and break up the unity that is the real strength the party has used to get anything done that can impress voters into keep supporting us. We were all really careful when running the primary that picked Joe, not to go too far attacking the others and give republicans attack ads. Since then we have really stuck together except Manchin and Simena sometimes. That is important and valuble. The republicans haven’t. It gives us an advantage.
Past history of Primary challenges to incumbent Presidents has not been favorable, especially Democratic ones. I think now would be even worse and I don’t like taking chances anyway. So, I am very negative to whatever the heck you want us to do about your “concerns”
wjca
Hey, it’s an opportunity to vote for Christie, and thus vote against TIFG, and all his minions, twice in one year.
gwangung
@hrprogressive: I think there are politicians who do what you want, but the mainstream media won’t magnify them unless they kneecap the Democratic party.
The key, for me, is to bypass the media and go more grassroots with uplifting and magnifying the politicians that DO what we like. Harder work, but necessary; it takes more of us, making the effort longer to bypass the mainstream media.
Chris
@gvg:
Even if there’s no fight for the nomination, it would still be a death mark. There’s no way for a President to step down after only one term without it being seen as an admission that he shouldn’t have been selected four years earlier, and that the party is afraid to run on the record of the last four years. It isn’t fair (anybody who’s had an even moderately difficult job in their life should be able to relate to “I don’t want to do this for eight years, four years is quite enough”), but it’s true all the same. If Biden stepped down, it would simply be wall-to-wall “Democrats Running From Biden’s Failed Record” from now until election day.
Plain fact is, if Joe Biden’s age was an issue, it should have been dealt with in 2020 by picking somebody else. That was the last time we could have usefully rejected Biden, and it’s in the past now. The question of his age is water under the bridge.
oldgold
@gvg:
Two things:
First, the solution or possible solution is not necessarily replacing Biden as our nominee.
Second, to label it my concern is laughable. The latest polling reflects only 25% of the country currently considers Biden as having the stamina and sharpness to be President.
We need to admit this is a problem and work to fix it.
wjca
Actually, no. The D candidate for Governor did substantially than the previous candidate did. Perhaps because he was solidly anti-abortion? Just maybe….
zhena gogolia
@oldgold: Robert Mueller did an excellent job. Have you read the Mueller Report? He could not control the actions of AG Barr in burying it.
zhena gogolia
@Elizabelle: Old Gold was a cigarette.
It’s what the guy in the bar tells Don Draper is his brand in the first episode of Mad Men.
cain
@schrodingers_cat: I follow some of the anti-caste folks on Mastodon. Very interesting point of view.
As someone interested in DEI – in this particular thing with caste – I’m the white man/colonizer – and so I do a lot of listening there.
EarthWindFire
@oldgold: OK, I’ll bite. We ignore this at our peril. So what do we do about these warning signs?
Along with having no clue who would replace Biden, every “replace Biden” advocate I’ve talked to so far never seems to consider that kicking your incumbent President off the ticket could come with negative consequences. That’s fantasy land.
So who replaces him? What do we do about the constant questioning and likely AA voter dropoff (SC AAs gave Biden his primary victory after all) that’s sure to follow?
Assuming you’re not pushing to replace Biden, what does he do about these perceptions that he isn’t already doing?
Mike in NC
@oldgold: You appear to be incapable of understanding that polls are complete bullshit. Get a clue!
schrodingers_cat
@cain: Same here. I have learned a lot and reexamined my own biases. Some of which I didn’t even realize that I had.
I also found this series of books by Johannes Bronkhorst, a scholar of Buddhism enlightening.
Greater Magadha
Buddhism in the Shadow of Brahminism
How the Brahmins won
oldgold
@EarthWindFire: Better advance staff work for starters.
oldgold
@zhena gogolia:
Adam Schiff:
“I did understand immediately why his staff had been so protective and why they were so reluctant to have him testify,” he told NPR. “And I immediately told our members, ‘We need to cut down our questions. We can’t ask for narrative answers. We need to be very precise in what we ask. We need to have the page reference of the report ready.’”
“And it was very painful. Honestly, it was painful. And if I had known, I would not have pushed for his testimony.”
Schiff blamed a “protective instinct among the people around” the former FBI director as a reason for not knowing how poorly the hearing would go.
“It was difficult for them to convey,” he said. “Now we did get some inkling as we negotiated over the format of the hearing that we were better off with shorter periods of questioning. So there were signs.”
EarthWindFire
@oldgold: That’s not at all enlightening. When you can do something other than ring your hands, let me know.
RevRick
@Matt McIrvin: The problem with comparing the Democratic Party to various left wing parties in Europe is that we’re operating under two distinct systems. Ours is a Presidential democracy, while theirs are parliamentary democracies. In a parliamentary democracy,they have an election and then establish a governing coalition. In ours, because Presidential elections are binary choices, the coalitions have to be established beforehand, even if they are somewhat incoherent. On top of that, we have veto points that don’t exist in Parliamentary democracies. To get anything done, you need to have a 218, 60, 5, 1 majority, at bare minimum.
Elizabelle
@zhena gogolia: I have enjoyed the spectacle of someone whose ‘nym begins with “old” going off the rails about Joe Biden.
Cough cough.
Not knowing about the cigarette, I was wondering if it was some cultural reference (to marijuana?) I was not getting.
Anyway, we are fortunate to have President Biden, and no question that we all need to help educate voters about him. The MSM is pushing a false narrative, which the gullible and lightly informed swallow uncritically.
Omnes Omnibus
@oldgold: Your complaint is about his testimony, not the report? I see.
MisterDancer
That’s not “we”. That’s the Biden Campaign team, of which none of us are members, to the best of my knowledge.
But that’s a sidebar. I’m reminded of this piece from “Z” over at Electoral Vote. It lists 25 articles from 2012 where media reports were that the Obama re-election campaign was in “serious trouble” for various reasons, including that awful debate (even Barack has admitted he didn’t prep at all properly for it).
And I recall that period, myself. There was a lot of hand-wringing, if less “replace Obama”. And I don’t just mean online; I went to a watch party for one of the debates, thinking I’d have time to start working the campaign (I did not!) and Barack’s poor poll performance was a major topic.
I’m not discounting there are issues. I am saying that the media forces — and they are such — driving these poll numbers are not ones we can just whip up, here, a solution for. Sometimes, we do have to acknowledge that we do what we can and should, we push where we must, but there are forces and work that is beyond our capability to change.
And also, that said issues are oftentimes out of our power because there’s a desire to push narratives in our media, not because the Biden team has made a horrific misstep. Given how clear it is, now, the lean of the people in change of many of these media outlets, I’m shocked we’re still of the opinion that just whipping out a team to counter these narratives will just work.
We’re a long, lone way from the days of “spin rooms” and people like Carville/Begala being able to re-construct candidate narratives on the fly. And acting as though any negative narrative on the national news level is solely the result of bad campaign staff, given all we know now about the Right’s long campaign to push their narratives into the mainstream, to get outlets like CNN to cater to them, seems…weird, to me.
catclub
@Starfish:
Yeah, right. Just remember this: IN 2008 if 18% of white voters in Mississippi had voted for Obama – that is an 82-18 slaughter among white voters, Obama would have won Mississippi. Instead it was an 89-11 wipeout and surprise, surprise he did not win Mississippi. That is how bad Mississippi is. Much worse than the soon to be purple Texas.
schrodingers_cat
@Elizabelle: Fool’s gold is trying to spread the message of doom and gloom. Who does that benefit. Republicans.
cain
@schrodingers_cat:
The one thing that I think I tend to stick to my biases on and it’s just because it is a Brahmin thing is stuff like cusine. I’m so used to some things that should not have meat in it. lol. If you make Rasam or sambar – I’m sorry you can’t put meat in it. I will die on this hill. :D
MisterDancer
His criticism is a bit baffling to me, but I’m no legal expert. that said, I did find a source for what OG quoted, and I noted this line a few paragraphs below his quote:
I mean, I maintain the main issue with all this is the lack of clear laws prohibiting what the Trump campaign did, as much as alack of what we’ll call ability, to prosecute.
We do live in a multi-tier justice system, gang. That should have been a key takeaway from the Black Lives Matter movement. It took me a while, personally, to align my expectations around the Muller report with that awareness!
So I offer this not as a scolding, but as a reminder that even the best of intentions in this Justice system are not always realistic.
Chris
@RevRick:
It’s also interesting to look at historically, because until fairly recently, using “Democrat” and “Republican” as synonymous with “left” and “right” was, at best, oversimplified. For most of history, both U.S. parties were loose coalitions of regional party organizations that each contained at least a certain number of progressives, moderates, and conservatives, even if one of these factions was usually more powerful than the others.
If you look at the Democratic Party in particular, for most of history its two biggest constituencies were 1) white Anglo-Protestant landed gentry in the South, and 2) Catholic and Jewish urban immigrant workers in the North. In other words, for most of its history, the Democratic Party was (the American equivalent of) an aristocratic conservative party and a workers’ labor party.
Good luck translating that into European terms. (Latin America might be a better bet for finding foreign equivalents to the U.S. political system).
Chris Johnson
@schrodingers_cat: He could be a working troll, as in literal Russian op. Mueller knew about those years ago.
You gotta understand that the troll brigades working the America beat are literally Russia’s last hope, as they absolutely must stop the Biden administration and the Democrats and now some of the Republicans from supporting Ukraine, or they are toast. (by some of the Republicans, I mean that they lost McConnell and the ever-faithful Lindsey Graham)
Trolling worked in 2016 and failed in 2020 and is their only hope in 2024.
You just have to ask ‘do you really, REALLY want to side with Jimmy Dore, or does that make you suspicious?’. If you don’t know who that is, he’s a product of the Young Turks, and evidence that Russia’s been trying to run the online left since well before 2016.
RevRick
@Chris: We cannot control what people think nor is it productive trying to convince them they’re wrong. But it’s worth reminding ourselves that in November 2011 a generic Republican would beat Obama, and on May 14, 2012, an NYT/CBS poll showed Romney beating Obama 46-43. We all know the outcome six months later.
I don’t question the validity of the polls that have so many Democrats freaking out, but they need to be put into two contexts:
1). A huge chunk of the electorate thinks our country is on the wrong track. They’re grumpy. Grumpiness tends to cloud judgement in a negative way;
2). A huge chunk of the electorate thinks the President is in charge of everything. Consequently, when they’re in a sour mood, they blame the President.
Biden understands this. He has already made clear that he will campaign on a choice between himself and that God-damned fascist.
Biden’s bragging about his accomplishments are mainly directed at shoring up his support among Democrats and Democratic leaners. His emphasis about the choice will be directed at the 20% who like neither Biden nor Trump.
oldgold
@Omnes Omnibus: No I had complaints about the investigation.
oldgold
@Chris Johnson: You got me. Ha!
Elizabelle
@schrodingers_cat: Amazeballs, right?
Chris Johnson
@oldgold: Sooo… how much do you REALLY want to seem like a Jimmy Dore alt? :D
zhena gogolia
@oldgold: What does this have to do with what is in the Mueller Report?
zhena gogolia
@oldgold: Let’s hear them. Chapter and verse, from the report.
oldgold
I do not have time to go through the many problems with the investigation. But, here is one that was of the OMG variety. They agreed to allow Trump to answer by using interrogatories in lieu of deposing him. Unforgivable.
zhena gogolia
@oldgold: Have you read the report? It contains a wealth of information, specific and detailed, about Russian interference in the 2016 election. As Omnes mentions above, it is continuing to be used by the DOJ. The Mueller team did an excellent job. Have you read the report?
oldgold
Yes, I have.
Tim Ellis
@oldgold: I am a campaign manager by trade and have worked advance on presidential races. What, specifically, would you like to see improved about Biden’s advance team?
oldgold
@Tim Ellis:
Look, I certainly do not have all the answers. But, I do know to that to find solutions you first have to acknowledge the problem. Many here apparently do not want to take that first step in acknowledging the problem. That problem is that a clear majority of the American public have very serious concerns about Biden’s fitness for office related to his age.
Where does that perception come from? In large part, I think it comes from his poor public outings. Some of which, I think his staff could help with. For instance, too many times after making remarks he seems baffled as to what direction he is to go. it looks horrible. That seems like something the staff could address and correct.
To my eyes and ear does not do well off the cuff. I would limit these type of interactions. I would make him available in more formal settings with the trappings of the presidency around him. Rather than talking to reporters while shuffling to the helicopter, invite the reporters into the Oval Office. And, for god sakes stop those biking interviews.
Matt McIrvin
@Chris:
Butter Emailz was one of those motte-and-bailey things. The boring argument was the one they could directly print. The idea that the mysterious Missing Emails were hiding evidence of some lurid sex-and-treason conspiracy was the tease they weren’t saying openly but that all the articles implied. The bombshell was always going to drop any minute now.
That was what Comey restored at the last minute–the idea that the bomb was just about to drop, we just didn’t know quite what it was yet, but we’d probably find out right after election day.
dirge
Concerns, yes. Even I have concerns about it. Very serious concerns? Are you sure you’ve seen that poll result?
All I’ve seen are polls showing widespread concern, but no measure of how many votes that might change. I only get the “very serious” bit from talking heads laying a spin on it.
oldgold
@dirge:
I admit “serious concerns” was my take. The poll was just yes or no.
“..25 percent of those polled answered “yes” to the question of whether he “has stamina/sharpness,” while 74 percent said “no.” Trump received vastly better scores in that category, with 53 percent saying “yes,” and 47 percent “no.”
Among Democrats, 51 percent said Biden has the sharpness/stamina, compared with 90 percent of Republicans who say the former president does.”
Ramona
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): The vibe I get is that he is a she and not a troll but newly converted to atheism after being brought up a fanatic Catholic. They haven’t said this but I am inclined to posit this as my first squishy hypothesis.
Ramona
@schrodingers_cat: The suggested restaurant was Zaitanyas (sp?).
The alleged rapist was indeed Isabella. 3v3$0r’s (replace 3 with e and $ with s) contention was that even though Isabella had long sold off the restaurant, frequenting it today benefited him financially. They did not specify how this was the case even when explicitly asked. Instead, they doubled down on accusing us of being apologists for rape.
Ramona
@cain: I eat meat, but meat in rasam or sambar, NO WAY! Until you typed that, I has not even conceived of such!
dirge
Ok, so how many of the other 49% say they will stay home or vote for Trump because of this issue? Of those, how many will really do that after watching Trump loudly and publicly decompensate over the next year? I think not many.
It’s a cult. Trump possesses all positive attributes to the people left in the party. Nearly everyone else has already been driven out.
Also, there’s frankly no point dwelling on this unless there’s an actual, feasible solution. I don’t see one, unless you count “Biden continues to get shit done; his supporters continue to point out that Trump is a compulsive liar, career criminal, and obviously demented.”
Tim Ellis
@oldgold:
Yeah, I think everybody here has acknowledged that concerns are real, which is why everybody has now moved on to “so what should be done about it”.
I appreciate that you think he does not do well off the cuff; I disagree, but that’s an opinion thing to some extent (he’s quite clever with the quick remarks actually, especially for an 80 year old dude). Personally, I don’t think the interviews are damaging him (it’s fine if you disagree). Apparently his advance team has come to the same conclusion, as they keep happening.
Neither you nor I have enough information to make an informed decision about the best way for Biden to handle this stuff. The people I know who work advance are some of the best in the biz and I do trust their judgment, but it’s fine if you don’t. It all still leaves us with the question though of “what should be done?” and for me, the answer is pretty clear: given the situation, I’m going to go out there and fight like fire for Biden until November 2024, because like it or not, he’s what I got – and lucky for me, I just so happen to really like it. He’s done more to advance my priorities than any President in my life, he’s showed up for my community when we’re under attack, he’s ended wars, he’s made material progress on the climate crisis at a scale I’d honestly given up hoping for. Dude fucking rocks, and if he’s done all this in three years, I damn well want to give him the rest.