It’s Mon. Feb. 19, 2024 & POTUS Joe R. Biden has been in office for 1,125 days. “Today we celebrate Presidents Day, but the American story isn't a story of presidents, it’s a story of the American people, a story of courage, character, strength, & resilience.” #JoeBiden Tap??RT pic.twitter.com/jybfpQ0q2E
— Taylor A. Smith (@FpotusTruth) February 19, 2024
Harris repudiates Trump worldview and says the US won't back down on Ukraine's defense https://t.co/IVeUH3hdee
— The Associated Press (@AP) February 16, 2024
Glad to join @VP, @SecBlinken, Leader @RepJeffries and the entire U.S. delegation for important conversations about national and global security at #MSC2024. @VP is right: isolation is not insulation. There’s no replacement for American leadership in the world. pic.twitter.com/u4KmOrqQyy
— Senator Reverend Raphael Warnock (@SenatorWarnock) February 17, 2024
To say that the VP is not meeting expectations, to suggest that she should be replaced, to tell the base that someone else should be there…
… is to ignore our issues (as you always have) and to ask some of us to sacrifice this voice, this advocacy, this work.
Hell no. pic.twitter.com/DY05T1Ot52
— Hope ?????? (@HopeisaBison) February 18, 2024
On year ago, Jimmy Carter entered hospice care. This photo from 2019 feels appropriate today. He was 95 years old here, had just had a bad fall, and still traveled to Nashville to work on a Habitat for Humanity home. ?????? pic.twitter.com/kHhwseH7pn
— Warren (@swd2) February 19, 2024
Jimmy Carter with a guitar he made from a tree that he planted. pic.twitter.com/DoD0PNg8a4
— Eugene (@Democracy1stE) February 11, 2024
Let's Go Biden! pic.twitter.com/f7CAAxHcPq
— Leslieoo7 (@Leslieoo7) February 19, 2024
Trump is too old and should step aside for the good of the party. pic.twitter.com/Jm5qChN8Za
— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) February 17, 2024
On The Road – Albatrossity – Westward 2019, installment 2
lowtechcyclist
Good morning, y’all!
Nelle
Just once, I want to read pundits urging Trump to stand down due to age. And indictments. And corruption. And trying to overthrow the last election.
No more, “OH, but that’s just Trump.”
p.a.
Haley benefits from not really being well known, and her policies are bog-standard Republican fascism, but considering the normie-electorate, I think she would be a threat if the Combover Candidate kicks it. Young, female, person of color. The Dem ecosphere (such as it is) should start trashing her, à la the generational campaign against Hillary, now. (Except all Dems have to do is tell the truth.)
Manyakitty
Matt Y made a good comment.
OzarkHillbilly
Too bad that WI poll won’t do Haley any good.
Albatrossity
Jimmy Carter is a great guy, and he actually planted the tree whose wood is in that guitar, but it was made by a very talented luthier named Jason Kostal.
Soprano2
@Nelle: It is strange how no pundits ever say Trump should step aside due to his many, many issues. It’s almost like they want him back as president regardless of how corrupt and awful he is.🤮🙄
MomSense
@Nelle:
And that’s the tell. They don’t care that Biden is old. They care that Kamala is a black woman.
p.a.
@Nelle: I think (hope) the damage to tRump with the general electorate is incremental; a steady drip-drip of hard news about criminality, pro-Russian statements etc. It would be better if the talking head commentators got on their hind legs to trash him as he deserves without both-siderism, of course.
The cultists can’t be turned, but can be discouraged enough to stay home on election day.
MomSense
Anyone else watching the Who TF did I marry 50 part series Rikyrah linked to? Wild. My goodness.
Kay
Biden is really really good when the pressure is on – another reason he’s a very good President – he never chokes when it’s important. His SOTU will be great and they’ll all look like the idiots they are.
Underestimate him at your peril, is what I have learned.
Ohio Mom
@p.a.: I agree but will point out that whenever I’ve said I am scared of Haley, that she could become president, other people always insist that Republican voters are too racist and misogynist to vote for her in enough numbers. I’d just as soon never find out who has the correct prediction.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Nelle: “That’s just Trump.” That’s also what they say when he says he’ll encourage Putin to do whatever he wants. “He doesn’t mean it.” Then how is anyone supposed to know what they’re voting for? That excuse allows people to make up their own image of him and project it on him.
zhena gogolia
@Ohio Mom: First, she will never get the nomination. Second, I’m pretty confident Biden would beat her. Third, she’s not a fascist planning to become a dictator on Day One. It’s bad, but not end-of-democracy bad.
Kay
@Soprano2:
These people would sell their own mothers for those tax cuts. They don’t like Biden because Biden is an actual, old school economic liberal and that scares the shit out of the Reagan babies.
dmsilev
@Manyakitty: Despite Matt’s best efforts, it happens every once in a while.
Another Scott
Meanwhile, senators are shocked, shocked that Graham is a weathervane and can’t keep his word.
TheHill.com:
He’s in Class II and his term ends January 3, 2027. He’s got no excuse.
It’s just the way he is. People being shocked, shocked are being disingenuous.
[ groucho-roll-eyes.gif ]
Cheers,
Scott.
Princess
@p.a.: And Haley would have 100% of the press behind her instead of the 75% Trump is getting.
The WI poll is interesting. I don’t think it’s because they love Haley — it’s because they don’t love the other two (what a *coincidence* they are dead even with each other. I wonder what special sauce was applied to give us that result?)
Frankensteinbeck
@p.a.:
My observation is that a major chunk of voters are clinging to a wishful belief that it’s not going to be Trump vs Biden. The news has certainly trumpeted every possible alternative, giving them an excuse to think it. That’s been the Biden Is Old thing all along, “What if Democrats don’t choose Biden?????”
Of course, the reason why the press clings to that particular attack is Kamala.
Marmot
@Nelle:
I know!
It’s like miniature version of how pundits treat Repubs in general. Some episode of The Daily was about how Repubs blocked Congress, maybe border / Israel / Ukraine aid, and the wrap-up was just “we need to understand that this is where politics is right now.”
Baud
@lowtechcyclist: Good morning.
Baud
@Princess:
Same thing happened in 2016 with Bernie.
Kay
I think what you can say after NY 3 is polls and pollsters are undercounting our voters and they have been doing it since Dobbs, over and over, in every special election. If it was something wrong with “polling” they wouldn’t always be off in the same direction – it’s something wrong with their Democratic voter turnout assumptions.
There should be some actual, on the ground VOTER (not NYTimes vibes) evidence that Biden is doomed and it just isn’t there. I think it’ll be a long slog and full of stupid pundits and media-generated nonsense but we’ll prevail because we’re the reliable voters now, not Republicans.
Baud
@Frankensteinbeck:
I’ll repost my comment from yesterday.
Soprano2
@Dorothy A. Winsor: It’s amazing that they still say that even after all this time and seeing what he’s like. They still don’t believe he’ll do the things he says he will even in the face of all the evidence.
gene108
This popped up in my YouTube feed yesterday. It’s a CBS Sunday Morning interview from 2018, with President John Tyler’s grandson. President Tyler was born in 1790.
Kind of nuts interviewing someone whose grandfather was born when President Washington was in office and lived through the War of 1812.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dGiL2PgC17A
Baud
@gene108:
Human longevity is what the pace of progress feels so slow.
Soprano2
@Kay: That must be it, because there’s no other logical explanation for the wildly different attitudes. If someone came here from 50 years ago, saw Biden and TFG, and were asked to guess who most of the press thinks shouldn’t run again, you’d be shocked at the answer. You also can’t discount how afraid many of them are that Kamala Harris will become president.
Nelle
@gene108: That has me beat. I’m the youngest of the youngest. My grandfather was born in 1863.
Baud
@Kay:
That’s not what they hate. What they hate is that he’s been successful at it. They would love it if this were Jimmy Carter’s economy, which is one reason we heard inflation stories every day and twice on Sundays.
Manyakitty
@dmsilev: stopped clock, etc.
Marmot
@Kay:
I really, really hope you’re right!
And because I want to believe it, I’d usually hesitate to agree, except that Dem turnout has consistently been ~8 points higher.
Kay
@Soprano2:
I think a lot of it is anxiety because Biden is actually changing the economy. I don’t think people realize how profound his Presidency has been in terms of a deliberate reversal of trickle down. These people did very, very well under Reaganonics for their entire working lives – they don’t want anything to change.
What I think people have to realize is pundits and media people are the most conventional, traditional people in the country – much more rigidly conventional than voters are. They fight change of any kind.
Jackie
@zhena gogolia: She doubled down on pardoning TIFG yesterday. Someone should remind Nikki a big reason Ford lost his presidential election was because he pardoned Nixon.
Marmot
@Baud:
They actually want Biden to run, or they don’t want the most likely consequences of a race without him?
OzarkHillbilly
@Nelle: Me too, my paternal GF was born in 1876. Not sure when my maternal GF was born, only that he was young enough to be a Gunner’s Mate in WWI. Deaf as a post, he was.
Kay
@Marmot:
I think they’re maybe keeping the flawed model because they would say “well, Trump’s not on the ballot” – this is what the whole “Trump is unbeatable” rests on – one election 7 years ago. I think that’s an insane amount of weight to put on one election. Donald Trump won in 2016 and lost every single cycle after that.
SiubhanDuinne
FTFNYT is taking a slightly new tack to demoralise us today — by telling us we’re already too demoralised to make much of an effort, so why even bother….?
Baud
@Marmot:
The latter. When’s the last time you heard someone argue Kamala should be the nominee because Biden is old and she is not. Next steps are just never discussed.
Maybe it made some sense a year ago when there was time to have a competitive primary not to talk about consequences. It’s inexcusable to do so now, especially when the most likely consequence would be the current Veep stepping in.
Baud
@SiubhanDuinne:
Haha. People are always saying how tired they are. Leave it to the NYT to ignore the fact that they are a source of much weariness.
OzarkHillbilly
Which he only won by an Electoral College fluke.
Baud
@OzarkHillbilly:
That’s how he would win this year. He’s not going to get the popular vote.
Gin & Tonic
J.D. Vance went to the Munich conference and skipped the meeting with Zelensky because he didn’t think he’d learn anything new. What a cowardly, craven motherfucker. Ohio is the new Alabama, I guess.
Another Scott
@Frankensteinbeck: My take is slightly different.
The press really does need to come up with a serial that drives clicks. Butter Emails was perfect and the prototype. They’re trying desperately to find something similar that makes people angry and uneasy and worried and being obsessive about clicking to find out the latest.
Biden loves his son.
Biden is competent in managing foreign relations and the economy.
Biden doesn’t have any scandals.
Biden kept his word – and went farther than he promised – on student loan debt forgiveness. Even when the reactionaries on the SCOTUS blocked one policy.
Biden has a unified party behind him and will win the nomination easily.
Biden is making sure the party broadens its base and cultivates new leaders.
Biden is a nice guy who demonstrated the ability to learn and respect people [ no more smelling women’s hair ]
Etc.
What else are the pundits going to talk about to drive clicks??
“Biden Age Watch – Day 29,677!!”
TIFG has the nomination in-hand.
Biden/Harris have the nominations in-hand.
What else are the pundits and hacks going to talk about until mid-July??
Yes, there’s the horrors of Bibi and Israel’s flattening of Gaza. Yes, there are severe problems in the world and here at home. Yes, the USA needs to be doing more. But reporting on that stuff takes work, and pundits don’t like work – they like pushing their narratives. And stuff like that just isn’t in Biden’s wheelhouse to do by himself – Congress has to provide laws and funding. And it doesn’t drive clicks anyway (or everyone would read ForeignPolicy and the Economist and …).
tl;dr – As always, follow the money.
My cynical $0.02.
[eta] – All the “Biden is” lines should be strike-through. I forgot that editing kills fancy formatting. Sorry.
Cheers,
Scott.
zhena gogolia
@Gin & Tonic: He’s one of the most disgusting. Surpasses Cruz, I think.
Baud
@zhena gogolia: That is quite an accomplishment.
OzarkHillbilly
@Baud: I know. But after the last election, the GOPs were saying it was be design which is an absolute laugh. Like trump or his wackjob election team were capable of running such a campaign.
I have read that his 2020 team is far more professional, so maybe they are capable of gaming it out, but we all know that no matter how professional they are, trump is still the wild card.
Time will tell.
Kay
@OzarkHillbilly:
“But Trump has to be ON THE BALLOT!”
Also- if this is true why wouldn’t it also be true of Biden? Why does Trump’s poor showing as the head of the GOP not matter but every single special election is characterized as a referendum on Biden? They changed the goalposts of “success”, once again, to make it easier for Donald Trump.
These people have lost their way. They’ve abandoned any actual benchmarks or measures of performance in favor of “vibes”. Donald Trump gave them all brain worms.
Subsole
@Soprano2:
Alternate theory:
They absolutely believe he will. They’re looking forward to documenting the downfall of democracy from their nice, safe, bubble-wrapped existence in a deep blue city nestled in a deep blue state, where all the devils of Hell will never ever reach them.
Or maybe that’s just their bosses.
Jeffro
this
THIS too
Jinchi
@Baud: People who don’t want Biden to run almost invariably will tell you that Harris should drop out, too. Even Ezra Klein, in his latest column, hinted that it wouldn’t be Harris. He’s giddy at the idea of a political convention contest, instead.
Marmot
@Baud:
Good point.
I feel like they’re mad that Keynesian economics works, that deregulation and tax cuts actually don’t! Too much time in the bubble.
And the press, at least, fully behaved as if the Carter economy was the only outcome. But that’s how they’ve treated a wide variety of economic circumstances my entire life.
It’s strange, like no journalist ever took a math or statistics course. But I read a Wall Street Journal handbook for journalists on fiscal policy, and it was solid.
MomSense
@Another Scott:
I think you’re right. It also doesn’t help that they love the horse race and everything is discussed in that context. There is almost no actual examination of issues or policy or even actual data/outcomes.
There is also this skewed idea of fair coverage that makes them think they have to cover a bad thing for Biden for every bad thing for Trump – hence the endless coverage of Biden’s age. The whole “balanced” coverage idea is actually a massive distortion of reality. It has caused harmful consequences in the real world.
trnc
Trump is too
oldTrump and should step aside for the good of thepartycountry.Kay
It’s such chicken shit punditry. They know Biden isnt going to drop out. They just want to be able to say “I told you so” if he loses and if he doesn’t lose they’re not “wrong” either because they’ll just say their choice would have won with more. It doesn’t mean anything.
Sanjeevs
@Baud: Vox pop reporting is never reporting. It’s pushing an agenda without seeming to push an agenda.
trnc
“That’s just …” never fails to reveal a double standard and the media’s preference for anything to which it is applied.
OzarkHillbilly
@gene108: Thanx for that.
Cacti
Happy President’s Day to Genocide Joe!
Jeffro
@Kay:
It is still astounding the degree to which trump’s infantile behavior, incompetent performance, and top-to-bottom corruption are still breezily dismissed/ignored by 99% of the media, 99% of Republicans, and frankly far too many Democrats.
I know outrage fatigue is a real thing, but on any given day, he says things no one would or should accept from an entry-level employee. His track record at literally everything is horrendous (although in fairness, he was really good at getting Americans killed via his Covid non-response). His entire “business” is just different varieties of criminal enterprises. They have completely removed the goal posts. Goal posts, what goal posts?
trnc
She wouldn’t be the direct threat he is, but she would likely appoint SC Justices and other federal judges who support voter suppression.
Jinchi
@OzarkHillbilly:
The Haley poll result is just completely absurd. The same organization (Marquette) currently has Haley losing to Trump by 45 points in the Wisconsin primary. She hasn’t shown polling strength anywhere, and yet we’re supposed to believe that the anti-abortion Republican candidate is the overwhelming favorite in the general election.
TBone
A repost from downstairs I’d almost forgotten about. It’s another why she’s being targeted: witty, scathing, fearless:
https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/fani-willis-targets-jim-jordans-apparent-ignorance-new-letter-rcna120072
Yours In Service,
TBone
OzarkHillbilly
@Kay: As someone above pointed out, their bizness model is built on horse race coverage. It’s one thing they know how to do and they are trying desperately to shove this early electoral season into that box.
Analysis of the actual issues and where trump and Biden are on them? Please, it’s way too early for that!
eta: And I hear just awakened granddaughters downstairs, so play nice y’all.
gene108
@Nelle:
I think there’s an intuitive understanding by the chattering classes that the Republican bench of potential presidential candidates is a lot shallower than the Democrats.
Plus, Republican voters make handling easy questions like “what caused the caused the Civil War?” into a challenge best answered by word salad.
Theres no real room for a non-Trump candidate to differentiate themselves from Trumpism, other than I don’t offend as many people, which isn’t getting overwhelming Republican support so far.
Feathers
@Baud: One sign of an unserious person is when they maintain their views without taking changing circumstances into account. In 2020, there were people talking about how Biden, because of his age, should be a deliberate one term president, finding and then endorsing someone else in 2024. I didn’t agree, but if it happened that way I’d be fine with it.
But Biden’s been a great president. Prosecutor slow walking means Trump is still a very real threat. No one else has really stepped up to be a credible 2024 Dem candidate. So Biden it is. But the sort of people who thought Biden as one term president just can’t let go. So they are spinning it out, keeping their little fantasy from 2020 alive, at the cost of risking the 2024 election.
Fools.
Marmot
@Baud: If only any of that talk actually engaged with the real world! Heck, they’d have to acknowledge raw incumbent advantage for once.
I guess it’s possible, however unlikely, that certain people have an aversion to thinking of Harris as candidate or president, but for the life of me, I can’t imagine why! /s
Kay
I think Democrats are a little delusional about Haley. The Republican field has gotten more diverse. They had a genuinely diverse primary this cycle. Dismissing GOP pols because they’re not white and saying GOP voter will “never” back them is outdated and ignores that they have succeeded in fielding more diverse candidates in the last ten years. At some point we’re going to have to admit that there are quite a few POC running on the Right now. I think voters in general would be more resistant to Haley because she’s a woman than because she’s not white. Clinton was pretty damn white and the misogony there (and some of it on our side) was off the charts.
She won’t win because they have a Trump cult but Republicans are running diverse candidates and Democrats are going to have to accept this fact.
Marmot
@Another Scott:
I believe this too.
MomSense
@trnc:
I think her forced birth position is fascist. It’s the state exerting absolute control over a woman’s body.
Jeffro
Apologies if this was already posted: Biden is the 14th-best president, ahead of Reagan
(primarily because he beat trumpov, LOL)
Happy (non-felonious) Presidents’ Day, ya orange moron!
MomSense
@Gin & Tonic:
Vance, Trump the whole GOP are just disgraceful. Goddamned traitors.
raven
@Kay: I’ve been wanting to catch you and send you this article about free speech on campus.
The Israel-Hamas Conflict Complicates Campus Free Speech Debate
gene108
@OzarkHillbilly:
@Baud:
An EC fluke is pretty much the only pathway for a Republican to be President. That’s one reason we’ll never be rid of it.
Kay
The evidence we have that Republicans will “never” back a POC natinally is Republicans electing both Tim Scott and Nikki Haley in SC. I mean, come on. It’s time to update that opinion to align with reality.
Jinchi
NYT headline, October 28th 2024:
“Biden to announce retirement at re-election victory speech! Will hand the reins over to Harris.”
Baud
@Kay:
They had two Latinos in the primary in 2016.
But there is a realignment going on, so I do think the GOP will get more diverse.
ETA: Women too, even though they hate women.
Geminid
@raven: After I read the Woodward article I scrolled down the Flagpole page and found an article about the 2020 Presidential election in Georgia, with a look into demographic change in Gwinnet County.
There was also one published a month after the Jan. 5 Senate runoffs analysing voting patterns. That was a very interesting election, but it never got much attention because events in Washington the next day overshadowed it.
trnc
Most of the “Biden is old” people aren’t actually trying to fix a problem. They’re stirring up shit and creating chaos to ratfuck the election.
Kay
@raven:
Thanks. I went to Michigan Saturday to see my youngest at school- I found out his gf is Finnish ancestry, which is interesting- and the Arab American teenager who served us coffee in the tiny hole in the wall restaurant they like was wearing a beaded bracelet that depicted the Palestinian flag. This is a hot issue in Michigan. It’s everywhere.
Paul in KY
@p.a.: I agree that we need to shine some light on her and her generally odious beliefs.
Paul in KY
@Dorothy A. Winsor: They said the same thing about Hitler. Even though he’d written a book that gave a pretty good outline of what he was going to do if he ever got in power.
Betty Cracker
@Kay: Florida has an amazingly diverse pro-fascism bloc. Also, Haley was elected governor of South Carolina twice. South Carolina, the cradle of the Confederacy!
Another Scott
@MomSense: +1
The latest example is the blowup over the Hur report. They so badly want to be able to milk that for months on end.
Welcome back to TheDaily. Hur’s scheduled to testify before the House Judiciary Committee on March 12!!11 What will he say!!111 For a preview, let’s now turn to Eric Ericson, Ralph Reed, and Chaya Raichik for analysis… [/DougJ]
[ groucho-roll-eyes.gif ]
Cheers,
Scott.
Kay
@Baud:
Yup. I think it’s especially delusional regarding Latinos.
Another Scott
@Jinchi: +1
Cheers,
Scott.
japa21
Just learned a new word today to describe Republicans like Vance, Cruz, Johnson, Jordan, Trump, what the heck, virtually all of them.
Backpfeifengesicht
German for “a face in need of a fist”.
catclub
The counter argument to the Carter economy (The economy CONTRACTED by 5% in 1980 – no president could be re-elected under that condition.) is that the good economy almost guarantees presidential re-election, and they are ignoring that intensely. Obama’s re-election with very high unemployment was against the odds.
Barbara
@Soprano2: Normally, of course, we never talk politics with clients, but I had a client I was particularly close to, and a few years after Obama had been elected, he told me that the anti-Obama backlash was the tidal wave of panic being felt by people who would answer a survey with yes, to the question of whether an African-American could be elected president, but no, to the question of whether they expected it to happen in their lifetime. That gap is what I now call the panic gap. Imagine how large that gap is for a black woman.
Every time I see someone diss Kamala Harris, I ask, what happened to your quality standards when you were judging the credentials of George W. Bush or Donald J. Trump? They simply CANNOT see competence in the form of a Black woman and it makes me so angry.
The latest example was Megan McArdle, who referred to Harris as charming but inept or something like that. McArdle has never done anything in her life but hold opinions that never have to be put to the test of real life success or failure. Whereas I, like most of us, slog along gaining real if narrow expertise over the course of decades and know how hard it is to succeed at anything real.
I mean, who the fuck do these people think they are?
Kay
@Betty Cracker:
Agree. I don’t know how we continue to say this. It just demonstrably isn’t true. I (obviously!) have a huge chip on my shoulder about this issue, but I would bet my house that Haley being female is a bigger problem with US voters in a US Presidential election than Haley being a POC. Again- just going by their actual (shitty and backward) behavior when offered a woman nominee :)
TBone
I donated to the Georgia elections through an outfit called Shop Class and am gonna wear this today in Sen. Rev. Warnock’s honor.
https://www.etsy.com/listing/901276947/four-seasons-total-landscaping
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Barbara: I had similar thoughts as I watched the Fanni Willis testimony. They couldn’t believe a Black woman was a competent professional who earned her own salary and didn’t need man to buy things for her.
Barbara
@Kay: I will not make the groove in my broken record any deeper by repetition, let me just say, I totally agree.
Alison Rose
Last Week Tonight came back last night, yeah? The segment isn’t up on YouTube yet, and they’ve always posted it by the following morning, often even before I’ve gone to bed the night before. I really hope Max isn’t doing some bullshit where they’re no longer going to post the main segments, or they’re going to wait a week to do so or something :/ (I know other channels will sometimes post the episodes, but the quality is usually crappy.)
Chief Oshkosh
@Kay:
I agree that these people did very well since Reaganomics came on the scene. However, as I’ve aged and through luck have done OK financially, and so am coming into contact with these people and their backgrounds, I’ve come to find that they probably benefitted a lot more from the dismantling of regulatory safeguards than whatever benefit they may have experienced due to changes in economic policy. Sure tax cuts helped them, but basically they’re all a bunch of grifters.
And regardless of what field they are in (say, telecommunications or software), most of their true wealth came from essentially participating in legal fraud involving real estate.
Every single one of them
ETA: Understood that it’s all part of the fraudulence that most Conservatives base their lives on; I’m just making the point that economic policy per se is not the motive driver of their wealth “creation.” What allowed that was just good old-fashioned (but legalized!) cheating.
Matt McIrvin
@catclub: The open question is whether a President can be reelected under a strong economy that almost everyone, right and left, claims to believe is terrible.
Marmot
@catclub:
Yep to the nth power. And the inherent advantage of incumbency, neither of which makes an appearance in stories on oldness.
There was one The Daily episode on why the good economy may not be an electoral boon, and “hey Dems, do you think maybe you should worry?” But yeah, I think the latter drove the editorial decision making.
glc
U.S. policing
Curious tale. Something similar going on in Manhattan at the moment. The first report is always a lie., and is always printed uncritically. Then some actual facts are on the back pages days or weeks later.
This particular case is one where the police didn’t even have any skin in the game and the killer confessed to everything. The only point of the lies seems to be force of habit. On the other hand, the current Manhattan case is entirely police misbehavior.
TBone
@SiubhanDuinne: well I’m “tuckered out” 😂 but never tired of JUST WIN BABY!
gene108
@Kay:
The minority candidates that did run in 2024 have all won statewide elections. They have as much experience to be President as any non-incumbent candidate.
Also, this gets overlooked, but one good thing George W. Bush did was make sure to have a very diverse cabinet. A lot of firsts for minorities and women reaching high positions in his administration.
I think it’s also important to note that despite some not being good at their jobs, there has been no real backlash against non-white men in Cabinet positions. The idea that minorities or women can’t do as well as white men is still out there, but it’s not so strong that a bad minority or woman official won’t torpedo others ability to rise through the ranks.
Whatever racism and sexism that exists isn’t as overwhelming as it used to be. It’s not Jackie Robinson and Larry Doby carrying the weight of every black baseball player wanting to play in the MLB on their shoulders.
JMG
Haley has a lead over Biden in polls because she’s so much lesser known than Trump. “Low information” voters, the current euphemism for people poor at citizenship, project their own concept of a good candidate onto her because they really don’t know much about her at all. I don’t know when the big bloc of voters from all parties who don’t think Biden and Trump will be the nominees will recognize that they will be, but until they do, head to head polls are even more meaningless than they usually are over eight months before the election.
Manyakitty
@zhena gogolia: I am so ashamed of my state for electing that waste of carbon.
Kay
@Betty Cracker:
I think we win “the realignment” (which IMO is real – they’re more diverse than they were) with competence. All this bullshit they indulge in (your governor) doesn’t do anything to make peoples lives easier. Governor DeSantis really does has to address the property insurance problem in his state. That’s a hard problem, especially if you’re a Right wing nut who won’t admit a market is failing. Instead he wasted 2 years fighting with the Walt Disney company.
TBone
@Subsole: leopards, faces
Marcopolo
@Nelle: well, it helps that the grandson is 95 and that his father had him when he was 74 and his grandfather, Prez Tyler, had his father at 63. yeah, I looked it up cause it sounded so out there.
TBone
@trnc: she’s a fascist in a skirt, doesn’t fool me for a millisecond. Hubby’s got her # too.
Kay
@Chief Oshkosh:
That’s interesting. My husband is in your corner. He’s just appalled at how many people are engaged in actual fraud and call it a business. He can get really down about it – “the only thing we’re inventing are new scams”.
gene108
@Baud:
They don’t hate women. They find liberal socially progressive policies towards acceptance threatening. A woman who ticks all the right conservative ideological boxes can be accepted.
The same goes with minorities.
American society isn’t nearly as racist as it used to be. It’s not perfect, but it’s a long way from the 1980’s and 1990’s, in terms of acceptance.
Kay
@TBone:
Ugh, the pardon thing. Has she learned nothing? It’s so fucking ELITIST too. This knee jerk “we must pardon people” never applies to ordinary criminals. It’s a racket – powerful people protecting other powerful people from consequences.
narya
@gene108: I see where you’re going with that (and don’t totally disagree), but I contend that any candidate that supports forced-birth policies and government intrusion into whether someone wants to bear a child does, in fact, hate women, despite whatever else they say about it. At the very least, they do not support full bodily autonomy/agency for women, and that goes for women who hold those positions (like Haley).
Kay
@gene108:
Yeah, disagree. I watched some of the interaction between Ramaswamy and Haley and I gotta tell you his treatment of her was incredibly sexist. Democratic voters would have picked it up, I guarantee you, and Ramaswamy would have taken shit for it if he were on our side. They haven’t advanced that much. We’re still better on equity. They like women okay until one of them competes with them and is beating them.
He pitched his sexist hissy fit because she was trouncing him.
Jinchi
@Barbara:
My skin crawls every time I hear Nikki Haley campaign as though she’s running against Kamala Harris. She’s willing to throw away a perfectly on the nose campaign slogan (‘It’s me or the old guys’) and trade it for a dog-whistle attack on a multiracial woman in her prime.
gene108
@Paul in KY:
To be fair, the idea someone wanted to start an all out land war in Europe after the carnage of the Great War, really seemed beyond belief to many people.
What’s relevant to today is what a general consensus on what is rational thinking will not be what some world leaders consider rational from their point of view. It applies in dealing with people like Trump and Putin. Whatever they do is internally consistent with their ideas, despite how crazy it looks like to the rest of us.
Another Scott
@Betty Cracker: @Kay:
There’s a live show with Nikki Fried at 6PM ET today on WSRF in Miami on the importance of the Haitian-American vote in flipping the state.
(via FlaDems)
She really seems to be putting in the work. I hope that folks down there are doing their best to help.
Cheers,
Scott.
Frankensteinbeck
There has always been room at the white supremacist table for a small number of token minorities who can be relied to be good sidekicks and parrot the white man line that their own demographic is inferior. Ask Justice Thomas. They face a glass ceiling because they can never, ever be allowed to actually be in charge. Trump got elected because White America freaked the fuck out when a black man became president. No, the Republican Party is not getting more diverse and if they thought she had a chance in Hell, Nikki Haley wouldn’t.
TBone
@Kay: AND on that note, don’t miss this:
https://twitter.com/rshereme/status/1758734413259534844
Marmot
@Kay:
I don’t know if you intended this point, but it looks to me like there’s an only-Nixon-could-go-to-China dynamic at work. Non-White or non-male candidates are only penalized for that when they’re Dems.
Your reactionary countrymen at work!
Paul in KY
@SiubhanDuinne: I enjoy whupping up on him and his loser sad followers. Looking forward to it!
Marmot
@gene108: Beat me to it.
Edit: But Kay is right here:
oldgold
After 8 years, I still just cannot get it through my thick skull how anyone could support Trump.
His ideology is worse than puke worthy, but even if you agreed with him 100 percent, his character is so damn wretched he makes the execrable Ted Cruz look like a good old boy.
Last night at a large family gathering I hosted, after quietly and patiently listening to my MAGA minded nephew blow for way too long, I finally said, “What the F**K is wrong with you!?!” It went steeply downhill after that.
This morning, I am sorry I lost my temper and caused family turmoil, but at some point enough is enough. My sister, who generally agrees with me politically, called this morning and asked me to apologize to her son. My response, “Right after Hell goes Baptist or he pays back all the money he owes me.” Neither is likely to occur, but the Baptist conversion has a much better chance.
gene108
@Kay:
I never said Republicans are enlightened. They don’t support equality. They support some sort of hierarchical structure to society, where some people have a bit more social clout than other people.
It’s just not as clear cut on racial lines as the LBJ quote about a white man will take less, as long as black people have it worse.
TBone
I know he gets a bad rap here, but Michael Moore’s podcast today is worth every second of my time spent listening. I don’t normally like podcasts because I can be impatient & I’d rather read, it’s quicker, but this one is bangin’. If anyone wants a link lemme know.
UncleEbeneezer
@gene108: Republican voters will support minorities who hate and shit on minorities. A candidate’s race, gender etc., really doesn’t matter so much, as long as they have the proper hate for minorities. It wasn’t Obama’s Blackness that offended them so much. It was his Blackness combined with the fact that he was honest about racism in America. Tim Scott and Nikki Haley are fine as long as they do the shuck and jive that is expected of them. Haley’s gender isn’t a deal-breaker because she still hates Women (see her abortion stances) and at the end of the day, that’s what really matters. Republican voters don’t hate women candidates, they hate pro-Women candidates (in other words, Dems). Hell, there’s nothing they love more than trotting out their Black Friend (who spews constant anti-Blackness) or an anti-Feminist woman that they can hide behind and say “see we’re not racist/sexist!” It’s a stupid argument that anyone should be able to see right through. But the media and too many voters go along with it and give it legitimacy. It’s the hatred and oppression that appeals to Republican voters, not the race/gender of the person delivering it.
grubert
@TBone: well put it up. I would listen
TBone
@oldgold: ❤️ sometimes ya gotta do whatcha gotta do. No regerts!
Barbara
@oldgold: Losing your temper like that is unlikely to work, I am sure you already know, but I honestly can’t think of any other method that works either. Maybe mocking humor, but I doubt it. Losing your temper has the advantage of being more likely to make him shut up in your presence at least.
grubert
@UncleEbeneezer: exactly right
TBone
@grubert:
https://www.michaelmoore.com/p/the-true-number-of-trumps-fines-650m
It’s about much, much more than Rump. I don’t necessarily agree with all his points BUT the guy’s heart is in the right place. I might write to him about part of this I disagree with. But I can listen to opposing views without disparaging the locus of origin.
Wapiti
@Baud: This. Biden showed that the US Government can use stimulus to avoid an impending recession.
He also showed that the US military can leave a war zone even if things are not perfect.
Which means all of the people who said it couldn’t be done… were wrong, and they squandered resources because they were wrong.
glc
@raven: Side note. (Popehat)
Definitely a side note, but in the same general area.
Yarrow
@Kay: I quote your “we have an epidemic of white collar crime” a lot. It’s interesting to see people’s eyes widen when I say it. It’s pithy, memorable and easy to repeat. I keep thinking it should catch on in a wider context.
Kay
@Another Scott:
I’m going to a Sherrod organizing event tonight. I’m missing my local Republican Ladies Book Club for this so don’t say I never sacrificed :)
It’s a 75% Trump area so my book club was always Right leaning but we lost 2 of the three Democrats to retirement moves so I’m all alone now.
Sherrod’s ads are good. They’re about his pension bailout. It’s legit. He worked 5 years to get that through and it saved a lot of working class retirees.
Barbara
@Wapiti: They squandered lives as well. This seems to be something that totally escapes the calculus of the group of people in our midst I have taken to calling the chatterati. Just in love with the sound of their own voices spouting opinions that generate praise from their peers and employers.
Kay
@Yarrow:
Lawyers see a lot of the victims. Sometimes people are just amazed “isn’t this…illegal?” Well, yeah, probably, but someone would have to enforce it and no one is paying me to do that!
UncleEbeneezer
@Frankensteinbeck: Exactly. Hell, the Modern Republican Party was built on the backs of white women like Phyllis Schlafly and numerous housewife/activists. See: Mothers of Massive Resistance by Elizabeth Gillespie McRae and Mothers of Conservatism by Michelle Nickerson. And conservative men have been fantasizing about a Republican woman (a “hot” one of course) becoming President, for my entire life. As long as she will ban abortion and promote “traditional” family values, it’s all good. Black People in the GOP are far less common because the most they have ever supported it is 20% of Black Men for Trump and that is more than offset by Black Women’s overwhelming support of the Dem Party. There just aren’t that many Black people out there willing to go along with the horrifically racist Republican Party. So you get the handful of Clarence Thomas, Nikki Haley, Tim Scott types but it’s a very small pool of talent to choose from.
Yarrow
@Kay:
And you want to move out of the state too. If that’s what’s happening in Ohio it’ll be awhile before it votes Dem again.
TBone
@Kay: I spent a lot of time in shock while working at law offices just as you describe. I had to muzzle myself so much, maybe that’s why I’m off the leash too much now. It was PTSD inducing.
Paul in KY
@oldgold: God bless you. I know you bit your tongue for a looooooong time. Wish I’d been there to help you out!
Barbara
@Kay: Texas and Pennsylvania largely escaped the predatory housing loan catastrophe that decimated cities in Michigan and Ohio, because their laws made it a lot harder to perpetrate such schemes. The sham business model that infuriates me the most are for-profit colleges that receive more than 95% of their funding from federal student loan programs. Rules that have tried to rein in these institutions have been stymied. Using my money to cheat my fellow citizens. It just makes my blood boil.
Jeffro
@Wapiti:
Great points (yours and Baud’s)
No wonder RWNJs are shook. Government actually can do something right (for folks other than rich people), wars don’t have to be forever, unions help provide a higher standard of living and are worth supporting…the list goes on and on
Paul in KY
@UncleEbeneezer: Yup. All correct summations.
Kay
@TBone:
I decided a long time ago not to judge them. If they come to me they will not get “but why did you get into this shitty deal?” or any type of backwards looking lecture on ultra saviness. I’m here to help them get out of it. I take sides and I know who I’m against- it isn’t them.
Paul in KY
@Barbara: I do like mocking humour. Think it makes them do some critical thinking at a further time when they are alone with their thoughts.
Kay
@Barbara:
The bankruptcy lawyer in our office used to plead with people to stay away from for profit colleges. Beg them – say “tell all your friends!” He’s great. We cannot get them out of that mess, which kills us :)
Barbara
@Paul in KY: There have been times when I wanted to say, not WTF, but “why do you care?” My SIL has a sister and husband who are MAGA types and I can’t remember what their pet peeve is because they have actually made it a point not to bring up political subjects anymore, knowing as they do that everyone else mostly disagrees. But there are times when I want to say something like, “You have a really good life living in your corner of the state, with land and a few horses and a healthy daughter and so far as I can tell no one here at the other end of the state — the dreaded NoVa — has any desire to change the things that make you happy. Why make yourself unhappy worrying about things that won’t happen? Why all this self-inflicted anxiety?”
TBone
@Barbara: I beg to differ about PA subprime victims. We actually represented one and I got to be instrumental in helping him win his case by providing research one of the partners had missed. That victory was sweet, but there were many, many victims who didn’t get such legal counsel because they couldn’t afford to fight back. It was one of my pet bugaboos at the time (my bank had schnookered me about a mortgage which I’m now glad I didn’t get) and some friends refinanced to their utter detriment. Other friends almost lost it all sanity-wise. We may not have had it as rough, but we were not unscathed.
Jeffro
Dan Pink’s 1st piece for the Post is up: why don’t we raise teacher pay to $100k/year minimum?
(gift link here)
He ties it to a longer school year and greater accountability. The latter is, of course, almost always problematic but it’d still be worth it.
Let’s go, America! The teacher pay gap is only getting bigger!!
TBone
@Kay: I had an elder family friend try to encourage me to go back to school. I told him “I’m not interested in incurring the debt.” I don’t think he understood why I used the word “interested.”. He was a retired college professor. But relentless about trying to make me feel bad about not being a PhD.
Barbara
@TBone: I know that it might still have happened, but it did not reach the kind of critical mass it did in some other states, where whole neighborhoods were at risk of foreclosure. It wasn’t just subprime lending, it was also consumer loans that were tied to the consumer’s house, and a whole host of other tactics. I used to get phone calls from these refinancing outfits and I learned to respond with, “I don’t have a mortgage” even when I did.
Chief Oshkosh
@Kay: And they get VERY upset if you even hint at maybe noticing even just a little bit what they are actually doing, what they’ve devoted their lives to. Hell, a lot of them have never even considered it. They are very shallow people, but boy are they rich.
TBone
@Kay: 💙❤️💙❤️💙❤️
UncleEbeneezer
@oldgold: Good for you. You spoke the truth and sorry but your nephew isn’t entitled to kid-glove treatment for his shitty views. And while conventional wisdom says that “WTF is wrong with you?” is the wrong approach and will only make someone double-down, I can attest that some of the biggest, most important changes of my worldview were a result of similarly harsh treatment of my own shitty views. So it sometimes does work to shake/shame someone out of their foolishness and start them on a road to being a better person.
TBone
@Barbara: 👍 I have a bestie in Delaware who was suicidal about her subprime mortgage and I had to be on watch. It was awful.
raven
@Geminid: Gwinnett is a real melting pot!
StringOnAStick
@Barbara: it doesn’t work against a MAGAT but having facts memorized has worked in my experience against dirt bag lefties for whom punishing D’s for insufficient purity is more important than winning against fascists. Or at least it did before Gaza.
catclub
Yeah, times have changed. There is no chorus of warmongers saying that Biden lost Afghanistan. and they tried hard for about 4 months.
Mr. Bemused Senior
@Barbara: @TBone:
You put your finger on a serious problem in our society. Laws that are unenforced, wrongs that go unpunished and the prohibitively high cost of legal action all lead to cynicism and disrespect for the rule of law.
Donald Trump is the epitome of this decay. All his life he has cut corners and deployed the courts to protect himself. He is a well-known chiseler and a vexatious litigant. Look at the way he behaves in court even now. He is clearly in the camp of “whatever I can get away with is legal by definition.”
In a way the 2024 election represents a choice on this issue, although there are many other threads tangled in the decision. Do we, as a nation, support living by the rule of law? Alas, this is probably not a winning political argument. To me, though, it is paramount.
Barbara
@TBone: There were people who originated mortgages that they could not pay, even from day one, and I found that to be utterly baffling. The idea was that the property would rise in value so fast you could still sell and get a lot of equity.
However there were people who had mortgages and were doing okay but ended up falling for the idea that they could get a better mortgage if they refinanced, and it was all a big sham, with spiking variable interest rates and balloon payments and gazillions of dollars in fees. To a certain extent, this activity is made possible by U.S bankruptcy laws that “protect” first mortgages from bankruptcy — which is just a fancy way of saying that the bank will get your house if you try to get out of it.
geg6
@Kay:
So, including Byron Donalds (MAGA-FL), these are the evidence there is some kind of wave of GOP politicians of color? Nah, sorry. There’s a reason every person of color I know calls them tokens. It’s the same thing as Clarence Thomas. Yes, he’s a person of color. And he’s also a token as was discussed way back when he was nominated for SCOTUS. It’s insulting to people of color, the vast majority of whom are not GOPers, in or out of office.
catclub
I am amazed that the foreclosure mills were allowed to lie in court and got away with it. They had NO supporting documents.
TBone
Here’s to you, President Carter! 💙 🎶
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wwyXQn9g40I
TBone
@catclub: that’s how we won that one 😊
geg6
@Baud:
Cuban Americans (though are we sure about Cruz being American? ;-)), a Latino demographic that has always trended highly Republican.
TBone
@Barbara: in my original comment: “and some friends refinanced to their utter detriment” – there are always people who bite off more than they can chew but when they’re scammed into it (Remember Dubya’s role in all of this) it’s particularly galling. I cannot blame the victim. I was seething with rage and marched with Occupy in Philly. Wish I could post photos!
Barbara
@catclub: Debt collectors have equally dubious tactics. After my brother died, I guess he had some credit card balance that had long before gone into collection that we knew nothing about, but when they finally caught up with us, it was most likely out of time. The nominal amount was less than $100. I was not the executor and I had to tell my sister who was that even though it seemed like a low amount, paying anything on it might open up a larger balance so she needed to make them file a formal written request to her as executor for the amount. They never did.
On the other hand, I have had to tell people that if someone does make a formal written request for amounts owed, you can’t just ignore it!
Manyakitty
@Barbara: this is a good tip.
oldgold
Well, the family’s BIG KAHUNA, she who must be obeyed and the wisest of us all, my aged Mother, Just called, after hearing from my sister.
She said, “It was long overdue! Now, do the right thing and in a couple of days put out some peace feelers.”
TBone
@Barbara: I love screaming STATUTE OF LIMITATIONS into the phone like an airhorn! Then “click” line gets disconnected one way or another 😂
Mr. Bemused Senior
@TBone: I imagine you saw the Big Short. The crash of 2008 was not an accident, it was the logical result of “financial engineering” that amounted to a huge ripoff. The perpetrators didn’t just escape justice, they walked off with pockets full of money from the Treasury.
Barbara
@TBone: No financial institution should be permitted to make loans to people that they know cannot be paid back. It just gets squishy at the margins — some people will find a roommate that helps them to pay the mortgage, and others won’t. I have a friend right now whose son is struggling with a mortgage in California, where real estate is such a sure thing that people make all kinds of eye popping decisions — the problem is when your income isn’t stable enough to keep you from slipping off the high wire.
geg6
@UncleEbeneezer:
Exactly.
Barbara
@Manyakitty: In some states, if you start paying on an amount that was foreclosed due to statute of limitations, you can make it “current” again. Make anyone trying to collect a debt send you a written statement that identifies the date on which the debt was incurred by the debtor. Don’t pay it by credit card over the phone.
Baud
@Barbara:
Dodd-Frank limits that practice.
TBone
@Mr. Bemused Senior: yes of course. I saw part of Wolf of Wall Street just last night (penny stocks) for the umpteenth time out of sheer nostalgia 😉
John S.
@geg6:
Venezuelans and Colombians are also proving to be reliably Republican thanks in part to Spanish language radio. Univision has also lurched rightward under their new management.
The bigger challenge seems to be Mexicans who are leaning into conservatism, despite being a reliably Democratic voting bloc (historically).
TBone
@Barbara: Philly recently had a case where a private contractor “eviction specialist” shot and killed the homeowner.
Geminid
@raven: One interesting point was that the construction boom occasioned by the 1996 Olympics coincided with a recession in the Texas oil industry, and Gwinnett County had an sizable influx of Hispanic people.
TBone
@Barbara: I simply didn’t pay and completely ignored until the S.O.L. had run. I was younger then.
TBone
@Mr. Bemused Senior: George Dubya was one hell of an “engineer.”
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_x2m6i4KFqg
Wapiti
@catclub: Biden’s a smart cookie. He got us out of Afghanistan while things were relatively calm – so we weren’t fleeing. And he did it very early in his administration, so the furor died down. Smart – and lucky it was calm.
Wapiti
@oldgold: Good on your mom.
Approaching nephew with sorry for my outburst, but I just think of all of the people MAGA has screwed over and well I shouldn’t take it out on you… Something along that lines, sounds like an apology, gets some points in, put outburst blame on you.
narya
@TBone: I have talked several people out of going to grad school for a Ph.D. (even though–or perhaps because–I have one myself). I always say: what is it you want to do that requires that you have a Ph.D.? What do you want to do that you can’t do now? When I frame it that way, it helps people decide what’s right for them, it seems–one person DID decide to go to grad school, but in a program that’s a much better choice for them, and not a Ph.D. program. I even wrote a letter of support–because they had clearly thought about it and weren’t just going to grad school w/o thinking it through.
TBone
@Wapiti: After menopause, all I can bring myself to say is “No, I’m NOT sorry!” Sometimes an eff off comes after that.
TBone
@narya: you are doing the Lort’s work and deserve high praise. I wish I’d been able to stand up for myself more often and forcefully to the pressure that was placed upon me to continue with higher education, but that cudgel often left me speechless back then.
Madeleine
@Barbara: I attended a meet and greet in the fall during which I was in conversation with the host (wealthy, white, male) who expressed the hope that Harris would be replaced because she has no personality.
schrodingers_cat
Every demographic has craven careerists and people who kowtow to TPTB. What is more instructive is looking at how the voters of a particular demographic vote. And as of 2020. The only demographic that consistently votes majority Republican is white people.
In 2020 after 4 years of Trump, 55% of white people (57% men and 55% women) voted for the Orange Beast. Pew has the numbers and I had posted a link a few days ago. Anyone can Google it if they want
As for R voters whether a majority of them will vote for Haley or Scott on the top of Presidential ticket I have no clue. I doubt it. But it has a non zero probability of happening.
narya
@TBone: In two cases, the people w/ whom I spoke ended up using my words WITH THEIR PARENTS! I was glad to be helpful, tbh. It’s a lot of time, energy, and debt, and folks should have a clear understanding of what they want at the end other than an expensive piece of paper.
Geminid
@schrodingers_cat: I wonder what those percentages are for Massachusetts. That state’s white population seems to have stayed relatively loyal to the Democratic Party.
TBone
@Madeleine: did you laugh right in his stupid face?
TBone
@narya: Goddess bless you, wish I’d have known you when…
Eyeroller
@Geminid: The overall percentages for white people are somewhat distorted by the overwhelming Republicanness of Southern whites. But I think only New England is likely to have a majority of whites voting D (that must be true in NH and VT since they elect Ds and both are almost entirely white). A state-by-state breakdown would be interesting to see.
Sure Lurkalot
@Mr. Bemused Senior:
Yep, we bailed out the banksters and I tire when I get the inevitable “the taxpayers were repaid and made a profit!” Sorry, no. There’s a time value to money, there were millions of lives ruined and people displaced, a bunch of housing stock gobbled up by rich opportunists that is a major cause of the housing shortage to this day and I haven’t even addressed the moral hazard outrage that was leveled at people who indeed used their houses as piggy banks but not those who raked in millions and billions perpetuating the fraud.
TBone
@Mr. Bemused Senior: I somehow missed your comment there and I’m upset because you’re SO right and I have so much to say about it! ❤️🔥
Brit in Chicago
@Jeffro: Any poll that ranks Reagan that high is discredited in my eyes, just in virtue of that fact. His anti-government rhetoric caused immense damage. His tax policy and general advocacy of the nonsense of ‘supply-side economics’ greatly contributed to the increase in economic inequality, which is one of the greatest problems we face. His high deficits led to high interest rates which caused the over-valuation of the dollar which probably did more than NAFTA to contribute to good jobs leaving the country. A sunny disposition and an actor’s ability to deliver a line do not compensate. In my ranking (only of FDR and later, as I’m weak on some of the earlier presidents) he rivals W and TFIG for last place.
Rant over.
Betty Cracker
@John S.: IIRC, you used to live in Florida, so you’ve seen our big diverse pro-fascist bloc in action! I believe my lying eyes too.
Miami-Dade County’s white population is about 15% or so. The county has trended more Republican every year. Clinton won it by a hefty margin. Biden won it by a narrower margin. In 2022, Rubio and DeSantis trounced Demings and Crist in Miami-Dade, and if I had to guess, I’d predict Trump will win it this year.
But yeah, tokens.
Barbara
@Madeleine: So many ways to avoid saying what they really mean, which is “No one should trust a woman . . . but especially not a Black woman.”
Harris has the kind of career that we would find really compelling in a man — a local prosecutor, state AG, U.S. Senator, all achieved without being wealthy. This is the kind of career lots of men run on — George Allen, in Virginia, had just this kind of career when he was considered to be a top contender for succeeding Bush in 2008. Christie, Giuliani both used being prosecutor or U.S. Attorney as the main stepping stone to other offices and then presidential candidacy.
Harris’ questioning of Bill Barr in the Senate reduced him to a babbling idiot, so clearly was he trying to avoid lying to her penetrating questions.
ETA: I would be happier if they could just say what I often feel: I don’t know if my fellow citizens, including my fellow Democrats, will vote for a woman. Not after Hillary Clinton.
Mr. Bemused Senior
@TBone: no worries, it’s easy to miss a comment. I admit, I was hoping to provoke some discussion.
TBone
@TBone: in case anyone didn’t know this:
https://ultimateclassicrock.com/gregg-allman-jimmy-carter/
“You’re my blue sky, you’re my sunny day!”
Another Scott
Meanwhile, big data has the potential to do big good. If we’re smart about it.
Science.org:
Good, good. If the data is used responsibly.
Remember that the Human Genome Project was a breakthrough, but was also extremely limited:
Cheers,
Scott.
Paul in KY
@Barbara: Maybe keeping poor black/white people down and making any advancement/help as hard as possible is what makes them happy?
Paul in KY
@Barbara: Some poor devils just have a very hard time saying no to a slick and well delivered presentation. Especially if the presenter is sympathetic in some manner.
TBone
@Another Scott: thank you, my Ashkenazi genes are VERY hopeful with that news! It is why bro and I have Dupuytren’s and Lederhose, maybe…
TBone
@Paul in KY: ❤️🍊🤬
Kay
@geg6:
This is head in the sand, IMO, and ignores what’s right in front of us. See: Betty C above on Miami Dade county:
If the giant state of Florida wasn’t enough of a wake up call for you guys I don’t know what will be. Florida is an incredibly diverse state. We lost it.
Look down from the national rung to state and city – they have a more diverse bench coming up. They succeeded in diversifying their Party.
This is always how it goes. We’ll be ahead on some measure for a while, resting on our laurels, and they’ll catch up. It works the other way too, where Republicans miss what’s right in front of their face – for them it’s suburban voters. They denied we were winning them until it became impossible to ignore.
Another Scott
Meanwhile, …
Good, good.
More at ProPublica.
Cheers,
Scott.
prostratedragon
@Gin & Tonic: “Arrogant sumbich” is the phrase that leaped to my mind.
TBone
Ever’body wants to know where Jimmy has gone…🎶
Here’s to you, fuckinrumpus
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VOaQAMC17GQ
Another Scott
@Kay:
It’s not a level playing field, though. Voter suppression in Florida is a huge problem.
If the GQP were confident of their new-found diversity, they wouldn’t be suppressing the vote as strongly as they are.
FWIW.
Cheers,
Scott.
Geminid
@Eyeroller: The Plains and northern Rocky Mountain states probably distort those numbers as well.
I would like see the numbers for White, Black and Hispanic voters for the ten closest states in the 2020 Presidential election. That would inlude Florida, Texas, North Carolina, Georgia Pennsylvania and New Hampshire. Arizona and Nevada and Wisconsin also.
Paul in KY
@Wapiti: I wouldn’t say shit to the nephew. Talk with his mother the sister.
TBone
@prostratedragon: it’s the style these days, check the belt for onions.
Ksmiami
Nikki Haley wants to make women second class citizens and endanger their lives. She can fuck right off.
sab
Kay, Do you have any idea why Ohio Democratic Party has endorsed Lisa Forbes over Terri Jamison in the primary for the stste supreme court? They both seem well qualified, so why pick one in the primary.
schrodingers_cat
@Geminid:New England states including Massachusetts are the exceptions to the national trend of wp voting majority R
IIRC over 60% of white demographic votes D. In western MA its close to 70%.
raven
@Geminid: I worked what is now Georgia Gwinnett College and the diversity went well beyond hispanic. Lots of folks from the Balkans.
Kay
@Another Scott:
Haley and Scott won statewide in the Cradle of the Confederacy – they didn’t just get Republicans- they got the most conservative Republicans in the country.
This is a cherished belief of Democrats at this point – the facts on the ground tell a different story. Things change and this is a realignment that will escalate.
TBone
@Another Scott: the bells they are a ringin’!
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=K-xKri5Jmik
wjca
Make that:
Goal posts? What’s a goal post?
Because I’m not really sure moving them is an accurate description.
Ksmiami
@Betty Cracker: having lived there, it’s a lot of Cubans and South Americans pining for the dictatorships they left behind as long as their taxes don’t go up. I’m not sure it’s an analog for the nation.
Paul in KY
@TBone: Rock on Allman Brothers Band! Great story!
Kay
@Another Scott:
It’s probably still true in Ohio and Kentucky and West Virginia – that’s where they’ll have problems with diverse candidates, not Texas or Florida or Georgia. They openly admit this in Ohio.
Kay
@Another Scott:
Pennsyltucky, thereabouts, parts of rural western Michigan. Those areas. Now THAT would be an interesting poll- Haley v Trump and Biden in Kentucky.
TBone
@Paul in KY: 💙🌹
NotMax
@Jeffro
I’m rooting for gaol posts.
;)
Kay
Indiana. I’d like to see a Haley poll in Indiana. Missouri too.
Another Scott
@Kay: Tim Scott was appointed to the Senate after being in the US House from 2011 to 2013. We all know the benefits of incumbency.
Nobody is disputing that there are more minorities with (R) after their names. It doesn’t mean that there’s a groundswell of support for them. As long as the GQP suppresses the vote, it’s hard to argue that their candidates are the obvious choice of the citizens as a whole.
My $0.02.
Cheers,
Scott.
Madeleine
@Barbara: Yes, I think the no personality claim was cover for the real reasons. It was a new one for me, and flabbergasting.
As you outlined, Harris is a woman with impressive and varied experience and presence, now augmented by her time as a very active Vice President. I wish I’d said this in response to the person I was speaking with, but I’m unfortunately slow to answer back . . . And, TBone, laughing in his face would not have suited the context I described. It would have been downright harmful.
TBone
@Mr. Bemused Senior: you provoked me! I SO want the plain language of the 14th Amendment, the LAW OF OUR LAND, to be put to the use it was intended for! And I want Clarence and Ginni to drive off with John Oliver’s RV and lifetime paychecks! A girl’s gotta dream and I dream BIG.
Big. Big like sky!
Ruckus
@Nelle:
Actually I don’t believe that age should matter. It’s the person and what that person has learned over their years that matters. SFB is only 3-4 calendar yrs younger than President Biden but he is a billion miles/years behind him in every other meaningful, human, measurable/immeasurable way. Age does not make one smarter or better automatically, but it can give one the experience that does help do that. SFB has lived a life of the exact opposite and he’s the kind of human that only sees their mirror image. And he sees not the one in a piece of shinny glass but the one in that giant shit bowl of a head. Which always shows exactly the opposite of reality. SFB’s mirror shows what he wants, not what exists, you know, reality.
wjca
Democrats have long had a problem wrapping their heads around the fact that a lot of blacks, and especially Hispanics, are really quite conservative in their worldview. (See, for example, polling of Hispanics on the subject of illegal immigrants and border control.) Not reactionary, but conservative.
They have voted Democratic, not because they are liberal but because the Republicans have loudly rejected and demonized them. If/as Republicans get, not less bigoted but less loud about it, those demographics are increasingly possible for them.
As with white working class voters, they can be won over. But just assuming they will always be faithful Democratic voters is a serious error. Just like assuming that union support meant that the working class was safely Democratic turned out to be.
Ksmiami
@TBone: as long as they drive off a cliff… I’m down
TBone
@Madeleine: I have a knack for that in stressful situations 🤣 but claim “nervous woman.” If they paint you with a crazy card, why not raise ’em?
TBone
@Ksmiami: ❤️
japa21
@wjca:
This is the key. Yes, as Kay says, we need to acknowledge that the GOP is making inroads into all the demographics that the Dem party considered solid supporters. Equally important is that the party figure out why it is happening, what is attracting these voters to see themselves as Republican, supporting a party that would pretty much betray them in a heart beat.
The same is happening in religion in this country. Latino, Filipino and other ethnic groups, long considered strongly Catholic, are slowly (very slowly at the moment) looking elsewhere, particularly to the Baptist denominations and the so-called Mega Churches.
There needs to be some major studies done to figure out why this is happening.
RevRick
@Mr. Bemused Senior: The causes of the financial crash of 2008 are a lot more complex than what is commonly understood, and, in part, goes back to the struggles of commercial banking in the US in the 1970s. It’s lost in the mists of history that JFK’s Comptroller of the Currency called for the repeal of Glass-Steagall soon after his appointment! And Sen. William Proxmire led repeated attempts to undo its stranglehold on commercial banking. Back in the good old days, both commercial and savings banks were limited to the interest they could pay on deposits. When inflation hit in the 70s, this squeezed banks, with the result our economy faced repeated credit crunches and led to stagflation.
It bears noting that in 1950, US commercial banks held about 2/3s of global capital, but by 1980, not one was in the top ten globally. And the purpose of commercial banking is to grease the wheels of commerce. In order to work around this problem, Wall Street devised a bunch of nonbank financial instruments- like CDOs. Remember, even Sears had a financial arm back then. So, it wasn’t a nefarious plot, but a desperate workaround.
Fast forward to the late 90s and Bush years, and the GOP Congress loosened financial regulations at the same time a credit glut was growing globally. This was, in large measure, due to the US chronic trade deficits. Dollars were sloshing around in search of decent investment opportunities. The recession of 2001 led the Fed to cut interest rates to zero. But every financial institution is required by law to keep a certain amount of their assets in AAA instruments. US Treasuries, for one, which effectively were paying negative interest rates. Mortgage-backed CDOs seemed like a safe alternative. The math guys out of MIT ran simulations that said so. (What they failed to account is what happens when everybody’s holdings blow up). And distress was popping up not only in the US but also in Ireland, Spain, Australia, South Africa. The collapse of Lehman Brothers triggered the global economic meltdown.
We think that it was the big banks that got the bailout, but it was actually the insurer, AIG, and the quasi governmental entities of Freddie Mac and Ginnie Mae that got the lion’s share. In fact, the big banks resisted taking the TARP funds. But Paulsen insisted, because he wanted to stop the bleeding.
What benefited the big banks was the Fed’s Quantitative Easing, which allowed them to borrow at zero% , something done by central banks around the world.
TBone
🎶 You gotta know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em. Know when to walk away, know when to run! You never count yer money, while yer sittin’ at the table. There’ll be time enough for countin’, when the dealin’s done!”
geg6
@Betty Cracker:
And there is absolutely NO voter suppression there and FL isn’t an anomaly of a state for any number of reasons. And there are NO Florida men or women among people of color either. And lets not even get to talking about the Cuban or Venezuelan communities’ political proclivities.
They are tokens. Maybe not in your nutso state, but across most of America they definitely qualify as tokens. I have never met a Black Republican here.
Chris
@Kay:
Something else that I think gets totally ignored is that pundits and elite media people are, not necessarily more tribal than voters, but certainly not less. It tends to be completely ignored in narratives (the narratives they write), because it’s simply assumed that people like media pundits are so sophisticated that they’re above it all, and “tribal” thinking is only for the riffraff in the ghettos and trailer parks.
But the plain fact is that the average media pundit is a rich white East Coast city boy, and “rich white East Coast city boys vote Republican” is, in fact, one of the oldest and strongest “tribal” affiliations in the nation. (Their cities are blue because of working class and middle class voters, not because of Ross Douthat and David Brooks). It’s been true ever since around or soon after the Civil War, once Republicans definitively established themselves as the successor to the Federalists and Whigs. In that time, black people have gone from Republican to Democrat, white Southerners have gone from Democrat to Republican, “white ethnics” have gone from Democrat to Republican, Asians have gone from Republican to Democrat… but rich white East Coasters have remained Republican, and it bleeds through (hemorrhages through, really) in everything that’s printed in their mouthpiece, the mainstream media.
Their obsession with “moderate Republicans” as the rightful rulers of the country comes straight from this. Even those who are too young to remember any of it grew up on stories where East Coast Republicans were the adults in the room, the sane reasonable moderates putting a brake on the impulses of those out-of-control liberal radicals in the mainstream Democratic Party, but also the scary reactionary lunacy of Southern Democrats and heartland Republicans. On some level they can sense that it’s all gone wrong and that their party no longer has a space for anyone like them, but the anti-Democratic tribal impulse is just too strong, so instead of making the hop and being a voice for Mike Bloomberg type technocrats (or, God forbid, Joe Biden like moderates), they stay stubbornly entrenched in their party, spinning increasingly fantastical wishcasting about some savior like Nikki Haley coming to rescue them (and increasingly fantastical bargaining about what such a “moderate” savior might be, like their years-long campaign to promote Ron freaking DeSantis as the Anti Trump).
schrodingers_cat
@japa21:People are comfortable in discussing all demographics and their voting patterns except one, ww. There will be immediate howls of protest if you point out that after wm they are the most reliable R demographic. Immediately it will be # not all ww. Let’s talk about Latinos or just change the topic
Mr. Bemused Senior
@RevRick:
As did General Electric (GE Capital). We all know how that ended.
I was thinking specifically of AIG as a perpetrator. It is an object lesson in privatizing profit while publicly assuming risk. The perverse incentives lead to a predictable result: crash. This is not new, there are ample historical examples.
geg6
@Kay:
I just don’t see it. Florida is a crazy place with lots of rightwing Cubans and Venezuelans. It’s not like the rest of America.
How many Black Republicans do you know? I don’t know any and I meet a lot of people on a daily basis. More than you do, I’d venture. Even in this idiot county I live in, there are no Black Republicans of whom I am aware and I know everyone in politics here.
jonas
@Kay: I dunno — at least the polls I saw heading into the special election showed Suozzi with a small, but comfortable, lead almost from the beginning. It would have been a shocking upset if Mazi had in fact won.
TBone
@RevRick:
good history lesson. I was listening to news radio one day and Japan had a crash. I knew that, since shit rolls down hill, we were in big trouble.
“Between 1991 and 2001, Japan’s once red-hot economy was in trouble. An asset bubble had formed in both its housing and stock markets, and when the Bank of Japan implemented a series of steep interest rate hikes as a way to tame inflationary pressures, you could almost hear the bubble pop.”
I had a group of friends over after a while, and we speaker phoned the AIG Customer Service line. They got an earful! 😆
schrodingers_cat
@geg6: Nationally in 2022, our last federal election only 6% black men voted R.
Millionaire rappers who throw shade on Kamala Harris are not representative of the black vote.
Soprano2
@narya: My college advisor tried to get me to get an MBA, but I didn’t think it would be useful to me. My 30+ year career in the sewer department of city government, where I love my job most of the time, has proven me right. All an MBA would have given me is debt. OTOH, my sister got one several years after starting her business because she felt she needed the business knowledge (she was a geography major with a geology minor). I think it served her well. After getting an undergraduate degree you shouldn’t be getting degrees just to have one.
jonas
@Kay: The FL Democratic party was a complete clusterfuck until recently, so that’s part of it. The other issue is that things are sort of returning to the mean after a couple of generations of liberal Jewish New Yorkers retiring to Miami Dade and forming a solid Democratic voting bloc from the 70’s to the 90’s. They’re mostly gone now, so it’s back to rednecks and right-wing Cubans.
geg6
@japa21:
Meanwhile, the biggest shift in religious views in America is the Nones. But no one every gives a shit about them. It’s always about the religious. We Nones are not considered at all.
So sick of this bullshit fear mongering, especially in this thread by people who ought to know better.
Miss Bianca
@Kay: If Haley was such an all-fire great candidate for advertising the new “diversity” of the Republican base that she won the South Carolina governorship, then why aren’t the good citizens of the “too big to be a lunatic asylum” state rushing to elect her in the Republican primary for POTUS? Hell, she ought to be winning it in a landslide, right? And yet, that’s not what’s projected to happen – she’s projected to *lose* it in a landslide.
TBone
@Mr. Bemused Senior: “smartest guys in the room.”
Kay
@geg6:
Republicans are voting for POC. Democrats want to insist this isn’t happening but it is.
That’s what is so amusing to me in their newest War on Women – it’s the exact wrong move at this time because there is a gender split developing now – it was always there with Latino voters – Latino women are more Democratic than Latino men – but that’s now spreading to all groups.
It was the worst possible time to jettison women :)
It’s like they couldn’t handle two ideas at the same time so they dropped the “women” one.
geg6
@schrodingers_cat:
Totally agree. But FL is trending hard right!!!111!!! So we must panic that Black and Hispanic voters are deserting the Dems! *runs around screaming
Kay
@geg6:
There was absolutely no mention on this blog of the fact the NY 3 Republican was a WOC. I mean, you can’t ignore this and “follow politics”. She would have been replacing a Latino gay man, also Republican.
TBone
@geg6: for some reason, my hair is not on fire.
schrodingers_cat
@geg6: Also don’t many Hispanics identify as white? (Rubio and Cruz are quite pale). I know of fair share of Hispanic people IRL from Puerto Rico who do because they are (descendants of Spanish)
Grifters of all shades are Republicans now. How much vote do they get from non-white demographics is the question.
TBone
@Kay: 💙
Jeffro
@NotMax: you too?
Chris
@Baud:
I’m not sure “they’re getting more diverse,” so much as the definition of diversity is changing.
By the standards of 1924, the Republican Party is stunningly diverse and has been my whole life. There are large numbers of Northerners and Southerners, Protestants and Catholics, WASPs and Germans and Irish-Catholics and Italians and Poles, and people are so tolerant that hardly anybody ever even mentions these dividing lines anymore. Of course, that’s less about the party diversifying in any conscious way, and more about the lines of identity politics changing deeply in the twentieth century.
“The Irish became white” is a very crude way to put it, but for lack of a better phrase, I believe the definition of “white” is going to change so that a lot of previously excluded people can now consider themselves part of the same club, as occurred with the white Southerners and “white ethnics” of the New Deal coalition in the sixties, seventies, and eighties. Exactly what the new lines will be, who’s included and who’s excluded, I can’t say yet. I do think the process still has a long way to go, though, and that a lot of the worrying is premature. (And fed by a media that will always define any electoral losses by Democrats in any demographic, and any gesture Republicans make towards diversity, as huge and defining in a way that the facts often don’t justify).
TBone
@Jeffro: that’s gauling
Geminid
@jonas: Suozzi outperformed the polls. Sienna had him up 4, Emerson had him up 3, and Suozzi won by 7.7%. Tom Bonior monitors a lot of polls and elections and on Tuesday night he commented, “the polls had a pro-GOP bias, again.”
Soprano2
@Ksmiami: I’ve always thought it was that they think Democrats are just like the repressive communist leaders they fled from.
TBone
I posted this xit earlier but no one noticed? Iz true?
“Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, received campaign contributions from American Ethane, a company 88% owned by three russians, including russian nationalist Konstantin Nikolaev, who previously funded a russian spy Maria Butina. No wonder he is against the aid to Ukraine.”
Maybe somebody should do something? 🤔
Another Scott
@TBone: Saw it.
The report I saw said he claimed to give the donation back.
FWIW.
Cheers,
Scott.
Soprano2
@Kay: In Missouri I don’t think she’d do well against any white man, but it would be interesting to poll it.
I got polled on my cell phone for the April school board race. I’m worried about it, because the local NEA endorsed two book banners because they say things they like about discipline in schools, which has become a problem here. One of the candidates they endorsed is known to have posted racist memes on his FB page!
TBone
@Another Scott: I have a bridge for sale, also too.
Chris
@Matt McIrvin:
Yep. I was fairly confident in Obama’s reelection starting sometime in mid-2011, because the economy by then had clearly started to improve. But part of that is that the media was willing to say that the economy was improving. As much shade as they were happy to throw at Obama over eight years, they weren’t spending every day saying that the economy is terrible or phrasing every economic improvement as “why isn’t this helping Obama?”
We’ll see where this goes.
TBone
For President Joe Cool today.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=q1Syd7kRIuk
karen gail
Trump’s sneakers:
‘We are not liable’: Fine print says Trump gold sneakers won’t ship for months (msn.com)
Soprano2
@Kay: It seems to me that a significant amount of these people are immigrants or children of immigrants. They see our politics differently, and don’t have the experience of the long history of prejudice in this country that most minorities have.
wjca
Since he has no bank account, how could anyone tell where the payment (if any) actually went?
Anyway
I struggle to understand what looking at how a particular demographic votes “nationally” does- it’s like looking at the popular vote for POTUS – there’s no national/popular election for president. Isn’t the real breakdown at the state level? what am I missing?
Manyakitty
@karen gail: yep. Just another money laundering scam.
Chris
@UncleEbeneezer:
Looking back at late 2008/early 2009, it’s really obvious that what the bulk of white America really hoped for was that Obama’s election was not only going to prove that Racism Is Over, but that Obama would be willing to play along with the idea that that’s what his election meant, which to them basically means that he’d be their Black Best Friend, whose commentary on racial matters would be limited to defending them from accusations of racism, putting down any minorities who tried to agitate for anti-racist politics, and generally telling the less bright, less clean, less articulate black men out there to get a job, raise their kids, and pull up their pants.
That’s the promise that they all blame Obama for breaking even though he never made it.
Betty Cracker
@geg6: There’s lots of data about the drift toward the GOP — I alluded to the ongoing shift in Florida’s most diverse county, which was until very recently solid Dem. There’s data showing a drift outside of Florida too. You can Google it or bury your head in the sand. Whatever.
Chris
@John S.:
YES.
In the same way that our biggest problem overall heading into this election is a mainstream media that’s turned unprecedentedly fascist, our biggest problem with Latino voters going forward is going to be the fact that rich right-wingers have finally clued in to the fact that they can’t allow this demographic to slip under their propaganda radar anymore, and have started putting a lot of money into Spanish-speaking equivalents.
Florida has a head start on this because so much of the Spanish-speaking big money down there have been fascist loonies all along, and eagerly promoting their ideas.
Gretchen
@Gin & Tonic: Vance didn’t want to give Zelenskyy the chance to confront him with doing Putin’s bidding. Coward.
Another Scott
@Betty Cracker: OTOH –
Florida Bulldog:
Preaching to the choir here, but I think that it deserves mentioning whenever we talk about changes in the electorate.
FWIW.
Cheers,
Scott.
geg6
@Betty Cracker:
I just don’t see the evidence the same way you do. Yes, there is some loss among Hispanics, but that does not surprise me as many of the Hispanics are of Cuban and Venezuelan descent, so wing nuts before they ever got here. But the idea that Tim Scott, who was appointed and never would have won without that, is some harbinger of doom to us in the Black community is nuts. And FL, again, is anomalous among states in so many ways, from voter suppression to the moribund Democratic Party to the inherent crazy for which it’s so famous. I just don’t see it.
TBone
@karen gail: slow boat from ghina
TBone
@Another Scott: DeathSantis’s Special Election
MilitiaPolice Farce?The Thin Black Duke
I don’t think it’s a big mystery why some POC are voting for Republicans.
The odds are good that these non-white folks are usually more conservative. Vlad TV specializes in showcasing black celebrities who are misogynist as fuck, for example. And they hate gay people and the trans community. There’s a reason why Ice Cube is “Trump curious”.
It isn’t just white bigots that miss the “good old days”.
Baud
@The Thin Black Duke: Yeah, every human has a lizard brain.
Chris
@The Thin Black Duke:
A fairly good rule of thumb is that the average person in any given demographic has exactly all the same prejudices as the average person in any other demographic, except one.
Paul in KY
@geg6: I’m pretty sure I’ve met at least one or two around here. Think one of them was running for something as a GQPer. Very rare though.
Paul in KY
@geg6: To win in FL, we need every (just about) working non-Cuban Hispanic person to vote for our candidates. Used to be they would do that, in part cause they hated those asshole Cubans so much. I have heard that the Spanish talk radio down there is very right wingish & dumps on us mucho.
Ksmiami
@Soprano2: the media just yells socialism when talking about moderate democrats… it’s nuts and the FL Latinos fall for it without fail.
stinger
@UncleEbeneezer:
It’s all about the fantasies. The popularity of superhero films, the plastic, replaceable, “hot” women on Fox News — too many people just don’t want to grow up and live in reality. Hence the appeal of ludicrous conspiracy theories.
dirge
I’m convinced that a serious, appropriately resourced effort to deal with this might cost a percent or two of GDP, but would buy a percent or two of sustained growth in GDP. Not to mention the quality of life gains, and the joy of watching a bunch of parasitic assholes get shut down hard.
hueyplong
@Miss Bianca: I’m with you, and for the moment am absolutely not taking Haley seriously. I see her as the GOP version of what LGM calls the “Johnny Unbeatable” generic Dem who “should be” running instead of Biden.
How can anyone imagine Haley as the GOP candidate without imagining how that happens? It would happen because the orange god was “betrayed,” because Haley piled on when Trump was in his hour of greatest need and persecution, and as it was happening, Trump would have gone negative on her in a nuclear way that is easily forseeable from this point in time.
Haley’s literal survival of the Trumpster’s ire would be in question. Never mind the political survival of someone who was put into a crisis by a question as to whether slavery might have been a factor in the American Civil War. The toughest thing she’s done is beat a Democrat in South Carolina, and her only national spotlight was being laughed at as our UN Representative.
It’s going to take a lot for me to turn my fretting attention from Trump to Haley.
evodevo
@Mr. Bemused Senior:
Yes…THIS. And when Obama appointed Larry Summers, of all people!, top economic advisor, I had a conniption fit..
Betty Cracker
@geg6: I don’t think any of this is a harbinger of doom either, but realignments happen, and it’s a good idea to stay on top of them. Democrats are benefiting from another realignment trend — white college grads leaving the GOP. If Republicans were smart, they’d be trying to address that. It’s basic blocking and tackling.
Miss Bianca
@Betty Cracker: The way Republicans are “dealing with it” is to discourage people from going to college. Checkmate, libtard!
Chris
@Miss Bianca:
More precisely, by trying to redefine college education as the one class marker in the country, and then trying to rally all the non-college grads around them with the message that they’re an oppressed underclass that must revolt.
We’ll see how that goes.
dirge
Clearly and concisely put. I’ve had the misfortune (or poor character judgement) to associate with several people to whom the rules evidently don’t apply (e.g. as I mentioned in today’s earlier thread). The takeaway from those experiences, collectively, is that this is a low trust environment, and the smart move is to screw others before they get the chance to screw you. I’m just not wired that way, so not playing that game. Anyway , there’s tons of evidence that a low trust regime severely stunts economic growth, and makes people miserable.
I think it’s a winning issue if you can just get people to see it. The problem is that it’s diffuse, and people don’t connect up the way their landlord or lender treats them, with the way their employer treats them, with all the spam, scams, bait & switch deals, enshitification of services, exploitation of gig workers, tax dodges, and regulatory loopholes. It’s everywhere, and everybody experiences it, and hates it, but they think it’s bad luck, or their own fault, or just the way things are. It’s only salient as a political issue if you perceive that it’s all part of the same structure of bullying, cheating, and gaslighting, that the structure was designed that way intentionally, and that there’s some realistic policy to change all that.
I don’t know how you get that lightbulb to go on over everybody’s heads, but if you can, it’s an enormously powerful issue.
dirge
The major innovation here is that anyone can now put on a stupid hat, recite the conspiracy catechism, and be granted honorary straight white male status (some limitations apply). If you perform your assigned role in their racist, sexist, homophobic morality play, you’ll be granted provisional, contingent exemption from the abuse. Your role, of course, largely involves justifying the hierarchy you’ve subjugated yourself to, and obfuscating, excusing, and perpetuating the abuse it dishes out.
There are always going to be people in every demographic group who will jump at the chance to participate in the abuse, rather than be a target. Not sure I want them in our coalition anyway.
Chris
@dirge:
This is trickier than it sounds. Because while in theory this is true, in practice, anybody who doesn’t check the correct boxes is going to find it much much harder not to make a misstep that immediately triggers the lunatics.
Sally
@Dorothy A. Winsor: The magats were in two groups during the 2016 election. The ones who said he didn’t mean all those terrible things he was saying, just saying them for giggles, and those who were damn sure they were going to ensure these things were implemented because if he didn’t mean it (or had no clue how to do it [= everything]), they sure did.
Leopards Eating Faces Party.
dirge
Having met some people playing this game with varying degrees of success, I’ll grant that you have a point. I’ll just note that when the misstep happens, the first lunatic to put the boot in is very frequently a member of the same minority as the one on the receiving end. That’s really the essence of how it all works.
grubert
@TBone: belated thanks!