Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Relentless negativity is not a sign that you are more realistic.

Disappointing to see gov. newsom with his finger to the wind.

fuckem (in honor of the late great efgoldman)

There are a lot more evil idiots than evil geniuses.

When I decide to be condescending, you won’t have to dream up a fantasy about it.

Reality always lies in wait for … Democrats.

Stamping your little feets and demanding that they see how important you are? Not working anymore.

T R E 4 5 O N

Too little, too late, ftfnyt. fuck all the way off.

You’re just a puppy masquerading as an old coot.

If senate republicans had any shame, they’d die of it.

If a good thing happens for a bad reason, it’s still a good thing.

You are so fucked. Still, I wish you the best of luck.

The media handbook says “controversial” is the most negative description that can be used for a Republican.

Keep the Immigrants and deport the fascists!

Accused of treason; bitches about the ratings. I am in awe.

To the privileged, equality seems like oppression.

Let’s not be the monsters we hate.

If you voted for Trump, you don’t get to speak about ethics, morals, or rule of law.

Our job is not to persuade republicans but to defeat them.

Well, whatever it is, it’s better than being a Republican.

Also, are you sure you want people to rate your comments?

The revolution will be supervised.

Democracy is not a spectator sport.

You are here: Home / Elections 2024 / Monday Morning Open Thread: They’re Off

Monday Morning Open Thread: They’re Off

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Monday Morning Open Thread: They're Off

(Walt Handelsman via GoComics.com)

 
Irritated memes about the self-described ‘undecided voters’ are erupting from all points of the political spectrum, and no sooner than time.

Speaking of which: I checked — we’ve got two more weeks before the Walz / Vance debate (assuming Vance is still the GOP’s candidate by then). There will be many, many chances for JD and his fans and also the guys working for his presumptive boss (who I suspect are no longer Vance fans, if ever they were) to produce evidence of just how far they’re off…


And speaking of OFF, it won’t happen, but Somebody really needs to have his citizenship revoked…

Reader Interactions

222Comments

  2. 2.

    K-Mo

    Nate Silver is a douchecanoe part the zillionth.  Just say a thing, man. Don’t preface it with garbage.

  3. 3.

    MattF

    Musk is spiraling/has spiraled downwards, now in real time. Not a pretty sight. He should… [sigh], why bother.

  4. 4.

    Suzanne

    Elmo deleted that tweet. LMAO. I’m guessing he got a visit from some guys with dark sunglasses who didn’t find it funny.

  6. 6.

    Jeffro

    hey AL, thanks for that earlier “we’re not going to Mars” article – very cool!

    I am just about done with my ‘Postcards to Swing States’ (will finish by Wednesday) and it feels GREAT, folks.  Just a heads-up that when (not if) MVP wins North Carolina, I’m going to be absolutely unbearable in claiming credit.  =)

  7. 7.

    dmsilev

    Vance has managed the impressive feat of being worse than Trump. Every bit as racist and willing to use that to attract votes from scum, but also smart enough that he’s doing it as a deliberate strategy not out of some feral instinct.

  10. 10.

    The Thin Black Duke

    I gets me so goddamned angry seeing the shit rich white men get away with simply because they’re rich white men. As someone who’s old enough to remember when MLK was murdered, Elon’s latest online excrement is offensive, irresponsible and appalling, all the more so since he won’t suffer any blowback from it.

  12. 12.

    narya

    One of my rules of thumb is that, when Butcher’s Bill Kristol (h/t Charlie Pierce) says the Democrats should do X, the Democrats should actually do anything BUT X.

  13. 13.

    Jeffro

    btw here’s what I have up on FB to tweak the RWNJs in my life:

    Yesterday…
    Former president trump (via Twitter): I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT!
    Current OH Senator and candidate for VP of the United States JD Vance, being called out for his lies about legal immigrants on the Sunday news shows: “If I have to create stories…then that’s what I’m going to do.”
    RFK Jr. “I’m being investigated for cutting the head off of a dead whale.”
    RFJ Jr’s brainworm: “…y’all…I mean, come ON now…”

    Maybe what the country needs is a break from the constant abuse, lies, and insanity? #NewPathForward

    (followed by a NYT piece on why women – especially young women – have become much more liberal since 2016)

    (truly a mystery, right?  but it needs to be said: Trumpism is anti-woman in SO many ways!)

  15. 15.

    J. Arthur Crank

    I see the competition to see who is most in need of a knee to the groin is in full swing this morning (Musk, Vance, Silver, et al.),     We might have to declare an N-way tie so that all deserving contenders get their prize.

  16. 16.

    TBone

    @narya: amen!

    Another P.A.B. says whut!?

    But why risk the further incitement?

    It is to laugh!  They will always incite and escalate, it’s what they live for.

  17. 17.

    Frankensteinbeck

    (assuming Vance is still the GOP’s candidate by then)

    My understanding is that he can only be removed by death now that he has the nomination.  Trump cannot fire him.  I’m guessing this goes back to when the president and vice president were elected separately and giving the president the power to fire a political rival seemed Bad?

    Also, there is something about Vance’s declaration he’s happy to ‘make up stories’ that is relevant to conservatism in general and I’m not sure many people understand.  Honestly liberals do it too, but it’s absolutely rampant with conservatives.  What Vance is saying is that it doesn’t have to be true specifically.  It’s the kind of thing that he knows happens.  His bigotry says Haitians are that kind of people, so it doesn’t matter if anyone reported it happening in this instance.

  19. 19.

    jonas

    @MattF: At what point does the board of Tesla decide that having a frog-faced, right-wing troll who jokes about assassinating political candidates as their CEO is more trouble than it’s worth?

  22. 22.

    Frankensteinbeck

    @jonas:

    At what point does the board of Tesla decide that having a frog-faced, right-wing troll who jokes about assassinating political candidates as their CEO is more trouble than it’s worth?

    When Tesla’s stock price gets anywhere near its actual value, which alas it still isn’t.

    @Another Scott:

    I think Silver is using ‘woke’ in the accepted sense here.  He’s saying he doesn’t usually mind bigotry but there are limits.

  25. 25.

    Mark’s Bubbie

    @Jeffro: Ha! I’m still taking credit for the Warnock and Ossoff wins on Jan 5, 2020… a happy day. Of course, the next day was Jan 6, def not a happy day.

  27. 27.

    MazeDancer

    Vance won’t be removed. Vance is the POTUS to be. Peter Theil, Leonard Leo, every rich misogynist trad-cath has been waiting for this moment.

    They knew they could bribe all the Trumps to take their guy.

    They were just discussing how to exit Trump once elected.

    Have wondered if Mr.Biden had Catholic sources who knew this.

    Or if he just recognized its obviousness.

  29. 29.

    Soprano2

    Good morning all. I have a week where I only have one appointment I have to miss a little bit of work for. Next week, though….ugh. Three appointments in five days, and only one of them is for me. That’s my life now…..

  30. 30.

    Ramalama

    @narya:Bill Kristol — wasn’t he the guy who talked about getting a thrill up his leg when first getting introduced to Sarah Palin as the VP candidate for McCain? Yeah no.

  32. 32.

    Suzanne

    @dmsilev:

    Or maybe his accountants explained to him that even now, some liberals still buy Teslas.

     

    I have shared that I have a seen a Cybertruck in the bougie suburb adjacent to my (city) neighborhood. I don’t know if it’s three separate Cybertrucks or one flagrant asshole who goes out in the weekend. It looks so, so bad.

    That suburb is getting really yard-sign-y in recent days. I see more Harris than Trump, but not by a lot. And holy shit….. some of the signs for Trump and McCormick are gigantic. One person has TWO 4’x8’ signs for McCormick in their yard.

  34. 34.

    Starfish

    @K-Mo: Nate Silver knows that a lot of his audience is bitcoin, sports betting, douche canoes, and he wants to let them know that he is one of them.

  35. 35.

    Another Scott

    I don’t know if Walz is going to “pulverize” JV, but I do know this: anyone who is still “undecided” at this point is unlikely to have a sudden epiphany as a result of a 90-120 minute TV show in a couple of weeks.  Walz will do well because he’s a normal human being who is also an accomplished retail politician.  But we already have a vast amount of evidence of that…

    And lies about eating pets is hard to rank above lies about post-birth abortions and lies about millions of insane criminals invading the country  and lies about concepts of a plan and lies about tariffs being paid by the exporter and lies about a peace plan for Ukraine and all the rest.  The man is a liar about everything.  JV will clearly do and say anything that helps him achieve greater political power.

    They’re all disqualifying.  They’re all the signs of a broken brain and absent senses of duty and obligations to others.

    We’ve got to do the work to reach every possible persuadable voter and get them to turn out and vote blue on the whole ticket.

    Have a good week, everyone.  Forward!!

    Grr…,
    Scott.

  37. 37.

    TBone

    @Suzanne: I was in Selinsgrove (Rump country) yesterday, bicycling on the Isle of Que.  Sign ratio: approx. 30 Harris to exactly 2 Dumbvict.  Just an anecdote but comforting.

  39. 39.

    Marmot

    @Frankensteinbeck:

    I am surprised this isn’t a fucking mathematical theorem with a name:

    Also, there is something about Vance’s declaration he’s happy to ‘make up stories’ that is relevant to conservatism in general and I’m not sure many people understand.  Honestly liberals do it too, but it’s absolutely rampant with conservatives.  What Vance is saying is that it doesn’t have to be true specifically.  It’s the kind of thing that he knows happens.  His bigotry says Haitians are that kind of people, so it doesn’t matter if anyone reported it happening in this instance.

    My favorite instance of this is when Limbaugh had to admit Obama never said what Limbaugh claimed, but “We know that’s what he thinks.”

    They never cared about the truth.

  40. 40.

    sdhays

    @Frankensteinbeck: In other words, he completely validates the stories about how he lost his virginity to a couch. He may not have actually written that passage in the first edition of his book, but he admits that it’s definitely the sort of thing he would do.

  42. 42.

    sab

    @dmsilev: I saw my first cybertruck in the wild Saturday. It was parked in a Best Buy parking lot. It was even more ugly than I had imagined.

    I live in the hometown of the Soapbox Derby, so I know that every year thousands of children build better looking vehicles.

  44. 44.

    dmsilev

    @Suzanne: I’ve seen a few of them (or maybe it’s just one that I’ve seen a few times) around here (Pasadena) over the past few months. Truly a hideous design.

    Not many yard signs in this area; joys of not being a swing state I guess.

  45. 45.

    Steve Crickmore

    He now says he was just joking, when he asked why anyone hadn’t attempted to assassinate Harris, but Musk is a unserious man, a Peter Pan entitled character who can cause serious consequences. Two years ago he bought Twitter because an account tracking his private jet dismayed him and made him paranoid.

  47. 47.

    Ceci n est pas mon nym

    @Jeffro: And you’ll deserve it!

    We’ve been postcarding for Simon Rosenberg’s (Hopium Chronicles) favorite organization, Winning The House. As the name implies, it’s aimed at key House races with the intent of winning back the majority.

    Simon is heavily focused on early voting, and the message of the postcards is to vote on the first day of early voting. The theory (borne out in 2022) is that you get the most dedicated voters to bank their votes early, then the party GOTV efforts can focus on other voters.

  48. 48.

    Soprano2

    @Dorothy A. Winsor: This is the reason I accumulated so much vacation and sick time. I’m maxed out on sick time, and have over 300 hours of vacation. They don’t question me on the time I take off, at least not so far. I try to only take portions of days when it’s feasible, and to schedule appointments at the beginning or end of the day to minimize the disruption. Sometimes I just can’t though.

  49. 49.

    hrprogressive

    The only people claiming to be “undecided voters” at this point in time are people who are either being dishonest with the media for attention, or dishonest with themselves.

    This includes people who run the gamut of: Closet Trump Supporters, “Real Leftists”, “Bothsiderists”, Asinine One-Issue Voters, and/or Closet Racists/Sexists.

    At this point, fuck every single last one of these people who can’t see with their own eyes and ears that the only legitimate choice for governing this country is Kamala Harris.

    Also, Fuck Nate Silver, Fuck Elon Musk, and fuck every fascist terrorist trying to reduce this country to ash to get their way.

    We’re not gonna see the DOJ do anything worthwhile with Merrick Fucking Garland as AG, so, hopefully Kamala appoints a swift and decisive prosecutor to actually do their damn job when she wins.

  51. 51.

    Jeffro

    @Another Scott:I don’t know if Walz is going to “pulverize” JV, but I do know this: anyone who is still “undecided” at this point is unlikely to have a sudden epiphany as a result of a 90-120 minute TV show in a couple of weeks.  Walz will do well because he’s a normal human being

    I sincerely hope he opens just like Harris did vs trumpov, only harder:

    “I’m here tonight to talk to the American people, but before I do, I just want to say something that should resonate all night long: JD Vance lies.  He lies like he breathes, just like his boss.  He lied about legal immigrants and didn’t care about the impact to them or their community – still doesn’t.  His own constitutents!  And tonight you’ll hear him lie, lie, and lie some more…”

    go meta on JD’s ass, Coach!  frame the whole thing for our low-info normies and our blessed snooze media!!

  54. 54.

    Ceci n est pas mon nym

    @Marmot: Sounds like what Colbert called “truthy”. It isn’t true, but it seems like it ought to be true.

    Amusingly in a nerdy way, the term “truthy” has been adopted in the computer world in the popular Python language for objects which are not true, but will be treated as true. (They aren’t false either. An example would be “3”. Should you treat 3 as true or false? The question does arise.)

  57. 57.

    Trivia Man

    We are listening to the audiobook of Black As Fuck History. And it is amazing. Of particular note is the section on Haiti. Founded by escaped slaves it terrified every country as a cautionary tale. France graciously allowed them to pay reparations to the slave owners for lost “property”. And the USA helped enforce it. I think they finally finished paying in the 1980s.

    Quiz: why is Haiti so poor?

  58. 58.

    Anne Laurie

    @Frankensteinbeck: My understanding is that he can only be removed by death now that he has the nomination. Trump cannot fire him. I’m guessing this goes back to when the president and vice president were elected separately and giving the president the power to fire a political rival seemed Bad?

    Pretty sure Vance can ‘voluntarily’ quit the campaign, citing a newly discovered medical condition, or need to spend more time with his groyper fans family, or whatever.

    And I’m sure LaCivita is currently trying to assemble a team of TFG’s favorite big, strong men to visit Vance, and explain how ‘medical conditions’ have been known to happen to people who cross Mr. Trump.

    But seriously — Vance is a distraction from Trump, which may be a boon to the Permanent GOP, but is sure to be pissing off his titular ‘boss’.  If Trump wants to spend the next two weeks, or six weeks, very publicly fighting with his ‘hand-picked successor’… sounds like a good plan, to this Democrat!

  59. 59.

    Wapiti

    @Another Scott: Yeah, I don’t think Walz is going to dominate the debate. For starters, Harris just set the standard, and while Vance is venal, he’s not as impaired as Trump.

    But – I think that Walz can attack Vance on Vance’s Springfield lies, for the racism, for the lies themself, and for the real danger it brings down on people. I think he can make a direct connection between Trump inciting the Proud Boys on January 6th, and Vance inciting the Proud Boys in Springfield.

  61. 61.

    Jeffro

    @Ceci n est pas mon nym: the message of the postcards is to vote on the first day of early voting. The theory (borne out in 2022) is that you get the most dedicated voters to bank their votes early, then the party GOTV efforts can focus on other voters.

    I hear ya!  My postcards are supposed to be the 3rd and final ones that these particular folks will be receiving, urging them to vote in-person on Nov 5th.  They send me a very specific ‘window’ to mail them, based on how far I am from NC (I’m in VA, so they want these mailed on Oct 28-29).

    Side note: it’s kind of funny but ‘Postcards to Swing States’ actually had to put out a video explaining to its volunteers that the organization actually knows what it’s doing, please don’t send your postcards earlier than we asked, please don’t stress about mail delivery times (we accounted for that), etc etc.

    It’s a brave new world where everyone knows better, all the time…”does their own research”.  LOL

  62. 62.

    Anne Laurie

    @Ramalama: Bill Kristol — wasn’t he the guy who talked about getting a thrill up his leg when first getting introduced to Sarah Palin as the VP candidate for McCain?

    No, that was Rich ‘Sparklepants’ Lowry.  Kristol, even when he was notoriously Always Wrong, has always been smarter than that.  Evil, but smart(er).

  63. 63.

    BR

    @Wapiti:

    I think it’d be a mistake for Walz to try to get into a back and forth sparring session with Vance during the debate. Vance’s weakness is his void of charisma, and that’s Walz’s strength. Walz should just ignore Vance and speak earnestly to the public.

  64. 64.

    Jeffro

    @sdhays: yup – “thrill up my leg” was none other than Chris Matthews (MSNBC) re: Barack Obama

    “starbursts” was Rich Lowry (National Review) re: Sarah Palin

  65. 65.

    cmorenc

    @TBone:

    @J. Arthur Crank: don’t forget Chief Ass Kisser John Roberts, please!  Secret memo(s) leaked yesterday revealing him to be the Manchurian Candidate of the Supremacists Court.

    Link to the story about said memo, please?

  66. 66.

    TBone

    @Wapiti: I disagree – I believe Walz will use part tonic masculinity, part fuckimup on the battlefield soldier, and part teacher of (sometimes) asshole children to decimate that utter waste of human skin.

  67. 67.

    Frankensteinbeck

    @Ceci n est pas mon nym:

    ‘Truthiness’ is a publicly accessible and easily understood word for ‘rationalization’.  Sadly, this is the basic process of the human brain.  We decide based on our emotions, then figure out logic to explain it.  It takes effort and training to override that with actual logic.  Humans are not rational animals, we’re animals capable of reason.

    The point is, science says Colbert was right.

  68. 68.

    jonas

    @Wapiti: Agreed that Vance is going to be more formidable than the flailing, sundowning Trump. He went to law school. He knows how to debate. Walz just has to drive home to the viewers that we simply can’t trust an admitted fabulist like Vance. Also, he’s about as likeable as crotch lice.

  70. 70.

    jonas

    @TBone: Finding solutions to get more mental health professionals out into the field is not necessarily a bad thing, but since it’s Texas, I can only assume that their intentions are to replace evidence-based psychological treatment with reading the Bible together or something.

  71. 71.

    BR

    @TBone: ​

    I think if we listen to the words from Vance and Walz in the debate it’ll be a tie — because Vance knows how to debate and BS. But you’re totally right that Walz has dealt with teenagers like Vance his whole life and will know how to set the right tone that’ll make everyone see that Vance is weak and smarmy.

  72. 72.

    waspuppet

    The only thing that could make me—and, I think, all other actual Americans—admire Tim Walz more is if he took the first question at the debate, which is going to be about the price of eggs or something, and just swat it aside: “Yeah, no. This guy admitted on TV that he lied and that’s what we’re going to talk about tonight.”

  73. 73.

    trnc

    @narya: ​
     Kristol has been relatively good as an anti-Trump republican, but his idea about Walz pulling out of the debate is pretty stupid. It won’t stop the assholes from saying anything they want to say, and it gives them an additional thing to screech about.

  74. 74.

    TBone

    @jonas: 🎯 how would it be if they do the same for airline pilots and nuclear reactor operators?  Because that’s prolly the next tip of this iceberg.  Onerous certification and testing requirements? thpfffffft!

  76. 76.

    comrade scotts agenda of rage

    Bill “Always Wrong” Kristol wanting Walz to cancel the debate is priceless.

    Letting Vance get up there to say stoopid shit unedited is exactly what we want.

    Der Wankpanzer, ala the Cylon Transport Vehicle, ala the Cybertruck: it doesn’t look like a stainless steel, Cubist urinal from a couple of angles but in general, is fugly, the interior is stark and god forbid you ever get a fingerprint on the exterior.

    Some photos of my Bolt next to one:

    flic.kr/p/2pVebgs

    flic.kr/p/2pV8x8Z

    The school will be a private STEM school run by this guy who’s a massive Tesla nut, claims to know his brother Kimbal (has a residence in Boulder and I’m sure in richer CO mountain towns), etc.  He gave me a tour of the car as this place is about a 2-minute drive from my house.

    If he’s indicative of your average Wankpanzer owner, then let the stereotypes fly because he is one.  He even wrote a book (I have an autographed copy!  Please note eye roll):

    autoevolution.com/news/the-ugly-truckling-cybertruck-reservation-holder-writes-book-about-it-elon-mu…

  77. 77.

    Spanky

    Just getting here and don’t know if y’all addressed it, but I for one am a little comforted to see that Bill Kristol is back to being wrong

  78. 78.

    Scout211

    ProPublica is out with another investigative piece well worth a read. The first part of an investigation of the consequences of new anti-abortion laws.  Read the whole thing, but here are a few snippets.

     

    In her final hours, Amber Nicole Thurman suffered from a grave infection that her suburban Atlanta hospital was well-equipped to treat.

    She’d taken abortion pills and encountered a rare complication; she had not expelled all of the fetal tissue from her body. She showed up at Piedmont Henry Hospital in need of a routine procedure to clear it from her uterus, called a dilation and curettage, or D&C.

    But just that summer, her state had made performing the procedure a felony, with few exceptions. Any doctor who violated the new Georgia law could be prosecuted and face up to a decade in prison.

    Thurman waited in pain in a hospital bed, worried about what would happen to her 6-year-old son, as doctors monitored her infection spreading, her blood pressure sinking and her organs beginning to fail.

    It took 20 hours for doctors to finally operate. By then, it was too late.

    . . .

    Tasked with examining pregnancy-related deaths to improve maternal health, the experts, including 10 doctors, deemed hers “preventable” and said the hospital’s delay in performing the critical procedure had a “large” impact on her fatal outcome.

    Their reviews of individual patient cases are not made public. But ProPublica obtained reports that confirm that at least two women have already died after they couldn’t access legal abortions and timely medical care in their state.

    There are almost certainly others.

  81. 81.

    Frankensteinbeck

    I’m not sure what to expect from Vance.  He has been competent in the past, but that doesn’t mean he’s competent in the present.  How much of the absolute dumbfuck ‘say the worst thing possible’ act he’s been putting on is an act?  As near as I can tell he’s a chameleon mini-me, turning into a cheap copy of whoever owns him.  Since he got the nomination he’s become a cheap copy of Trump, which is stupid and racist indeed.  Old quotes surfacing suggest a lot of this is letting his freak flag fly.  Is he capable of getting self control back when he really needs it?  I guess we’ll find out.

  82. 82.

    martha

    Walz can also talk about the benefits of having great people from all over the world move to Minnesota to work in poultry processing facilities. The output from these facilities feed the country. (Remember he and Hope at the state fair where he said “turkey is special” LOL?)

    Turkey and chicken processors rely on immigrants to function. And poultry eating Americans would be screwed without them.

  86. 86.

    SatanicPanic

    Digby is making the same point about Trump distracting us with dead cats. I like Digby but it’s not a good column today. The  “he’s distracting us” narrative has and will always be silly.

  88. 88.

    narya

    @trnc: I heard him on a podcast, maybe BEFORE the Biden/TCFG debate, saying that oh, they’re both too old, the Dems should have a blitz primary or get Whitmer and (I think) Shapiro as the ticket, completely skipping over Harris. His constant wrongness is impressive in its constancy, and the BigBrainPolitics of skipping over the sitting VP to completely create chaos was just . . . so much of what I’m used to hearing from him. Speaking of legacy hires . . .

  91. 91.

    Falling Diphthong

    The spiel about undecided voters watching debates really irks me: “I need to hear their policies, of which I am completely unaware. I need to hear the nitty gritty details of those policies, not broad strokes. And how they will affect ME: not the person sitting next to me, or behind me, or over there–just ME.”

    It’s an informational tool aimed at 300 million people–no, it’s not going to be laser focused only on your concerns.

    Since the rise of the internet, claiming golly you sure do wish someone would tell you all the details of their policies is disingenuous.

  93. 93.

    sdhays

    @Wapiti: Let’s not forget how much JV has talked about the worthlessness of women who aren’t raising babeez. I think that should come up.

  95. 95.

    BR

    @narya:

    On the flip side, I’ve been impressed by someone I knew nothing about from that never-Trump world — Johnathan V. Last. He does those Bulwark videos with the rest of the never Trumpers including Bill Kristol. But unlike Kristol, he has a really keen political sense. Right after the Biden-Trump debate he was saying that Harris was not only the only logical choice for replacing Biden but that she would energize the party. And he’s been similarly right about less obvious things over the last couple months.

  96. 96.

    tam1MI

    @dmsilev: Vance has managed the impressive feat of being worse than Trump.

    Trump managed the impressive feat of picking a Vice Presidential candidate even more repulsive than Ron DeSantis.

  97. 97.

    comrade scotts agenda of rage

    @Falling Diphthong:

    So-called “Undecided Voters” are actually the main component in The Great Excusening. It’s a quadrennial exercise where millions of mostly white voters who do not consider themselves RWNJs search for excuses why the cannot join Democrats in opposing fascism. They are Embarrassed Republicans hiding behind the “undecided” moniker.

    I mean really, this election is a tough call because one candidate was endorsed by both the Taliban and the KKK and the other was endorsed by a broad bipartisan coalition and the New England Journal of Medicine.  /s

  98. 98.

    SatanicPanic

    @trnc: it’s definitely dumb as strategy for the Democrats. He does make a good point though that Vance getting a big platform to spread lies about the Haitian community in Springfield is a bad thing. It’s probably too late to matter for Springfield- the lie is halfway around the world now.

  99. 99.

    Falling Diphthong

    @Suzanne: I think the image was photoshopped, but someone did a yard sign of one of Harris’s facial expressions at the debate, reacting to their neighbor’s Trump yard sign. Someone should get on that market.

  101. 101.

    Geminid

    @martha: Earlier this year Cummings Engines celebrated the opening of a new assembly line at their Minneapolis area plant. The new facility producers electrolysers for “green” hydrogen production, and Walz and Energy Secretary Granholm spoke at the ceremony.

    So did Rep. Ihlan Omar, and she touted the good jobs the plant would provide for her constituents including immigrants. I was glad to be reminded that Rep. Omar is a very normal Democrat in many respects.

  102. 102.

    Jeffro

    @O. Felix Culpa: I’ll happily share credit!

    looks like J-Rubs at the WaPo is also smelling MAGA blood in the water, metaphorically speaking, in NC: an early Harris win in NC could make it an early night in November!

    (fingerscrossedfingerscrossedfingerscrossed)

    It was no accident that Vice President Kamala Harris’s first two rallies after her smashing debate victory were in North Carolina. Two rallies, with an estimated total of 25,000 people attending, were raucous and enthusiastic affairs, rekindling Democratic prospects of a win in the state.

    Democrats hope that momentum determines the presidential winner and even changes the contours of election night. North Carolina polls close early, at 7:30 p.m. Moreover, state law allows processing of mail-in votes well before Election Day, making an early count possible. (Some states, including Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, cannot start processing until Election Day, which could result in delays of several days before a winner is determined.) Should Harris win North Carolina’s 16 electoral votes, Trump’s chances of victory diminish greatly. He would need a virtual sweep of other battleground states (and likely all of the blue-wall states).

    (letsputintheworkletsputintheworkletsputinthework)

  104. 104.

    SatanicPanic

    @TBone: I should have been more clear I was talking about her Salon column. My phone won’t let me link. Thanks Steve Jobs ☹️

  107. 107.

    Falling Diphthong

    Re the idea that the debate might make visible Vance’s dangerous ideas, oh dear:

    A few weeks ago, white supremacists were marching in Springfield to try to intimidate the local Haitian immigrants. Government officials and local press took the “Pretend you can’t see them; if they don’t get the attention they want they’ll get bored and go away.” Instead, they did what we’ve seen this past week for stage 2.

  113. 113.

    lowtechcyclist

    @Glory b:

    Don’t forget, DeWine said he’s still endorsing & voting for Trump.

    It’s not a surprise, of course, but I still find it impressive, in a perverse way, the sorts of things DeWine and other current GOP officeholders fail to find disqualifying.

  114. 114.

    Jackie

    @Another Scott: It looks like the Harris campaign needs to keep defining what tariffs actually are and do:

    Donald Trump’s campaign vow to increase tariffs on imported goods, particularly from China, has the support of a narrow majority of U.S. voters, a new Reuters/Ipsos poll shows.

    This surprised me, although I don’t know why🤷🏼‍♀️🤦🏼‍♀️

  116. 116.

    ArchTeryx

    Maybe the big secret to winning this election is make undecided voters moot. If we turn out enough of OUR people and independents, we win without them. They all tend to break one way or another anyway; if they all break for trump, it’s 2016 all over again. If they all break for us, it’s a blowout for MVP. And they tend to follow the herd.

    So make them moot. Get our partisans excited and going to the polls early, and the undecideds hopefully are dragged along for the ride.

  117. 117.

    trnc

    @narya: ​
     I hear ya. I definitely wouldn’t take any advice from him, but I like to give credit for being a republican without his head all the way up DT’s ass.

  118. 118.

    geg6

    @Frankensteinbeck: ​
     
    Based on his interview with Dana Bash yesterday, I’m gonna say no. No, he can’t get self-control. Jesus, I really dislike Bash, but I’d have found a way to punch him in the face if he talked to me the way he did her.

  121. 121.

    martha

    @Geminid: Exactly. Mr. Martha used to visit a lot of these facilities conducting facility energy and process improvement assessments. He saw more than he wanted to see (gross!) of the work they did. But they were amazing and the management knew how lucky they were to have workers.

  123. 123.

    JML

    I’m not surprised that Vance has been completely making things up on the campaign trail: spinning stories that might be true with no care for if they’re really true, or picking up an outlier to pretend it’s indicative of a broader reality has been part of the GOP playbook for at least 45 fucking years. They always set their narrative and description of reality before looking for “evidence” to support what they already believe. It’s confirmation bias all the way down.

    “I want to believe that immigrants are a danger and threat to my way of life, so any story that says they are MUST be true!” – JD Vance, probably.

    What’s shocking is that ol’ JD said the quiet part out loud again, admitting that he and his party will just make shit up in order to maintain/gain support or smear others. nothing matters to these shitstains except power.

  127. 127.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Frankensteinbeck: Ah, the pre-12th- Amendment presidential electing system. This should be the prime example of the fallibility of the Founding Fathers–a system so messed up it broke the, what, second time there was a seriously contested election?

  131. 131.

    Marmot

    @Mark’s Bubbie: I don’t mean to be excessively particular—aw, hell, yes I do—but “Truthiness” is a larger category that includes A ton of other things, in addition to what they believe, their opponents believe, or what they say, they believe their opponents believe.

  133. 133.

    TBone

    @Betty: Teh Sky Gawd they worship is a lie.  So it’s only natural.  I wish they’d get raptured while their pants burst into spontaneous combustion during lying on live TV.

  134. 134.

    Matt McIrvin

    @JML: It’s just his version of probably-Karl-Rove’s “we’re an empire now and we create our own reality”. If you’re strong enough you can just say bullshit and the bullshit will be as good as real– the world is something you make with your imagination. It’s a vision out of self-help books and the rhetoric of bullies.

  135. 135.

    Another Scott

    @Jackie: Normal people really don’t understand national economics at all.  And that’s not surprising, because much of it is totally unintunitive.

    Dean Baker at CEPR from August 2011:

    […]

    Starting at the beginning, we know that we can add up GDP on the output side by summing its components, consumption, investment, government, and net exports. This must be equal to the incomes generated in production. This gives us a basic identity that:

    1) C+I+G+(X-M) = Y

    where Y stands for income. This identity must always hold, it is true by definition.

    We can then divide Y into disposable income, which is total income, minus taxes. This gives us:

    2) Y = YD + T

    We can then divide disposable income into savings and consumption, since by definition any income that is not consumed is saved. This gives us:

    3) YD = C+S

    since we now know that Y = C+S+T, we can rewrite equation 1 as,

    4) C+I+G+ (X-M) = C+S+T

    we then eliminate consumption from both sides and we get:

    5) I+G+(X-M) = S+T, rearranging terms gives:

    6) (X-M) = (S-I)+(T-G)

    This one actually has a clear meaning. X-M is exports minus imports, or the trade surplus, S-I is private saving minus private investment, and T-G is taxes minus government spending, or the budget surplus. This identity means that the trade surplus is equal to the sum of the surplus of private savings over investment and the government budget surplus. Remember, this is an accounting identity, it must be true.

    Now, let’s bring this back to the concerns that the Post and Samuelson raise today. Both are very concerned about inflation (I’ll beat up on them for this is another post), but they also hold out the hope that the economy will get back to full employment once consumers and firms are more confident about the economy.

    But consider the accounting identity. The country has a large trade deficit, which means that X-M is a large negative number. It’s currently around 4 percent of GDP (just under $600 billion), but would certainly be much larger if the economy were near full employment. Imports rise with income, so that with a higher level of GDP the trade deficit would expand.

    If X-M is negative, then either or both (S-I) or (T-G) MUST be negative. This means either or both that we have negative private savings or we have a budget deficit.

    We can have the former with a very low private saving rate, as we did during the stock and housing bubble. In both periods there was aa consumption boom driven by transitory wealth created by the bubbles. It is difficult to understand why anyone would want a low private saving rate.

    It means that people reach retirement with very little to support them other than their Social Security or Medicare, which both the Post and Samuelson want to cut. So no one can consistently want both low private saving and cuts to Social Security and Medicare, unless they want the elderly to be very poor. (It is in principle possible to raise investment, but in practice very difficult. The equipment and software investment share of GDP is already almost back to its pre-crash levels, so the prospects of further increases are very limited.)

    The other possibility is that we can have a large budget deficit, making T-G a big negative number. But, we know the Post and Samuelson hate budget deficits, they complain about them all the time.

    For those who believe in accounting identities and evolution there is only one other place to go, we must get our trade deficit down. We need X-M to be a much smaller negative number. The best mechanism for getting the trade deficit down is reducing the value of the dollar.

    A lower dollar would make imports more expensive for people in the United States, leading them to buy fewer imports. It would also make our exports cheaper for people living in other countries, leading them to buy more of our exports. Fewer imports and more exports translates into a smaller trade deficit.

    So we should want a lower dollar, right? Not so fast, Samuelson explicitly warns that a falling dollar could be a bad consequence of higher inflation. The Post editorial never mentions a lower dollar as a possible benefit of more expansionary monetary policy.

    What can we conclude from this? We can conclude that Samuelson and the Post do not know national income accounting.

    (Emphasis added.)

    The Trade Deficit was $78.8B for the month of July. The total was $773B for 2023.

    The way these economic terms are defined, and what that means based on objective math, there’s no getting around that the US running a huge trade deficit since Reagan’s days has caused big distortions in the US economy. But almost nobody in Congress talks about the trade deficit or doing anything about it…

    Similarly with tariffs. Normal people don’t think about them, so they believe whatever their team says about them.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  136. 136.

    Jackie

    @waspuppet: I saw Vance on multiple talk shows yesterday; he’s SO SMARMY. He talked over and through the various host’s questioning him  – mostly about his bald-faced lies re Springfield. I wanted to reach through the tv and throttle him at multiple times.

    When he and Walz debate, I really hope the muted mic rule is used. Vance WILL NOT shut up when told and will attempt to interrupt Walz when Walz is speaking.

    I KNOW Walz can and will handle him, but I won’t count on the moderators to keep Vance in line.

  137. 137.

    Anyway

    @Jackie: I seem to remember Chis Matthews getting  a thrill out of Dubya on the aircraft carrier in his fake-airman outfit. Mission Accomplished …

  138. 138.

    Steve LaBonne

    @Falling Diphthong: Indeed, pretending that bad things will go away if we ignore them is not an adult strategy. Neo-Nazis would love for us to just slink away and leave them to their disgusting work.

  139. 139.

    Steve LaBonne

    @Jackie: Take a look at that old photo of Walz not long after he joined the National Guard. Underneath the affable exterior is a guy you do NOT want to fuck with. (Harris is like that too.)

  141. 141.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Another Scott: Trump seems to think he can fix the trade deficit with tariffs. I guess the assumption is that other countries will just accept the high tariffs and not retaliate. Or maybe he’s not even thinking one step ahead, which is likely.

  142. 142.

    The Audacity of Krope

    @Jackie:

     “thrill up the leg”

    Chris Matthews; but I can’t remember what hapless female was the cause.

    I believe that was a response to an Obama speech.

  144. 144.

    Anyway

    @Matt McIrvin:It’s a vision out of self-help books and the rhetoric of bullies.

    Reminds me of “The Secret”. Dotard is very much into this magical thinking too – one of his early influences is Peale (hope I have the name right). A lot of RWers esp salespeople are into this kind of thinking.

  145. 145.

    Redshift

    I’m glad there’s plenty of media attention on Vance admitting he knows it’s bullshit, but even after that he still lies about the immigrants’ legal status (which Bash did call him out on) and says this this lie, which slipped by unchallenged, I think (to be fair there were a lot of lies):

    And they’re overwhelmed because Kamala Harris allowed 20,000 Haitian migrants to get dropped into a small Ohio town of about 40,000 people

    As others have noted here, there appear to be about 5000 Haitians in all of Ohio.

  147. 147.

    BR

    @Matt McIrvin:

    I am happy to see that Harris is now leading Trump on the economy in multiple polls, such as this one:

    For the second month in a row, the FT-Michigan Ross poll showed Harris with a narrow advantage over Trump on stewardship of the economy, with 44 per cent of registered voters saying they trusted the Democratic vice-president to handle the economy and 42 per cent backing the Republican former president. Last month, she led 42 per cent to 41 per cent.

    ft.com/content/5f68cc51-f608-4fab-bfa3-8a9187236116

  148. 148.

    Elizabelle

    Good morning, jackals.

    All I will say:  I am glad we are in our shoes in this campaign, and not theirs.

    And.  Bill Kristol thinks Walz should cancel the debate.  Oh, right!

  149. 149.

    Suzanne

    @Frankensteinbeck:

    I’m not sure what to expect from Vance.  He has been competent in the past, but that doesn’t mean he’s competent in the present.  How much of the absolute dumbfuck ‘say the worst thing possible’ act he’s been putting on is an act? 

    He will be competent, and slippery, and full of shameless lies.

  150. 150.

    Elizabelle

    Some of the undecided voters might be vibes (aka low information) people.  Once it’s clear that Kamala-Tim are the better team, and there is more enthusiasm for them, they will break our way.

    Internal polling probably does not look like externally released polling.  We all know:  a lot of those polls are dubious, and prepared and issued to demoralize Democrats and tamp down on voting.  Not falling for it.

  151. 151.

    Redshift

    @Matt McIrvin:

    Trump seems to think he can fix the trade deficit with tariffs.

    Oh, it’s worse than that – he thinks he needs to “fix” the trade deficit because he can’t think in terms of anything but winners and losers, and he thinks the country with a trade deficit is “losing.” It’s insane.

  153. 153.

    Chris

    @sab:

    @dmsilev: I saw my first cybertruck in the wild Saturday. It was parked in a Best Buy parking lot. It was even more ugly than I had imagined.

    It looks like something the Cylons would have, but specifically the Cylons from 1979, not 2003, with all the budget and production values attendant thereunto.

  154. 154.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Anyway: yep, exactly. Peale, “The Secret”– the idea that you can control reality by magic thinking is central to so much of this. And, I mean, it’s infantile. Positive thinking is probably important to keep yourself from getting in your own way. But this is like thinking you can mind-whammy traffic lights to turn green faster.

  157. 157.

    catclub

    @BR: again, make it simple:  “IN 1984 Reagan said it was morning in America.  Today, Under Biden and Harris, Unemployment is better, inflation is better and the stock market is better than in 1984.”

  158. 158.

    Chris

    @Falling Diphthong:

    The spiel about undecided voters watching debates really irks me: “I need to hear their policies, of which I am completely unaware. I need to hear the nitty gritty details of those policies, not broad strokes. And how they will affect ME: not the person sitting next to me, or behind me, or over there–just ME.”

    I just love the idea that a guy who’s so uninvolved in politics that he’s apparently never heard any policy proposals from either side is somehow now going to pay attention or even understand when they sit him down and explain it to him.

  159. 159.

    catclub

    @Matt McIrvin: ​
     

    But this is like thinking you can mind-whammy traffic lights to turn green faster.

    Are you telling me that saying ‘wishy-washy-woo-woo’ to change lights to green does not work? Now I have no reason to live.

  161. 161.

    Redshift

    I continue to believe that TCFG’s obsession with tariffs started and continues because he found out it was one of the few things a president can just do without and process or working with other people. He’s lazy AF, he’s never had any interest in doing the job of president, he just wants to be CEO of a privately-owned America, Inc. and give unquestioned orders to underlings.

    When he talks about how tariffs will solve any policy problem (which he does a lot), it’s not because he’s put any thought into it, it’s because he already wants to do the tariffs for their own sake and just wants to make the policy question go away.

  162. 162.

    Scout211

    Making national news today Portage County Ohio Sheriff appeared to call for residents to record the addresses of residents who publicly display support for presidential candidate Kamala Harris.

    Sheriff Bruce D. Zuchowski, who took office in 2021, made the remarks in Facebook posts shared to two separate accounts on the night of Sept. 13.


    When people ask me…What’s gonna happen if the Flip – Flopping, Laughing Hyena Wins?? I say…write down all the addresses of the people who had her signs in their yards! Sooo…when the Illegal human “Locust” (which she supports!) Need places to live…We’ll already have the addresses of the their New families…who supported their arrival!” Zuchowski wrote.

    You know, before Trump decided he didn’t need to hide behind subtlety and dog whistles, there didn’t seem to be as many horrible examples of elected officials showing their racism so proudly.  Obviously it was always there but public displays of it were not so overt and horrible.  This is just disgusting, like Trump and Vance are everyday.  Ugh. And none of them will ever take responsibility for what happens when their words incite violence and crimes against innocent citizens.

  163. 163.

    Anonymous At Work

    So far, Vance has not pushed back on TFG’s latest crush insulting his wife and his children.  He is telling lies about “those Others”.  He’s selling his wife and children down the river.  How can anyone think Vance will defend them or their family?

  164. 164.

    C_Scrutinizer

    @Jeffro:

    @O. Felix Culpa:

    Before all y’all get too happy about North Carolina, be aware that the NCGOP is doing all that it can to suppress votes.  In addition to the new voter ID laws, they are waiting until the last minute to sue NCBOE over ballot design and access.  The NC Supreme Court is playing along, so this won’t be a slam dunk.

  165. 165.

    Redshift

    @Chris: For the NYT panel of undecided voters for the debate who said that kind of stuff, it was so clear they were just repeating what the NYT had said voters wanted to know.

  167. 167.

    Marmot

    @Steve LaBonne: Yeah? Let’s return to this after the election to see whether Matt McIrvin or I were more correct about the election.

    (I mean the Matt McIrvin of like a year ago—nothing personal Matt, but as you know, I think pessimism from individuals is a net negative for the group.)

  169. 169.

    Soprano2

    @Scout211: More are going to die after they give birth in Louisiana because they made a medication used to stop hemorrhaging a Schedule 1 drug because it’s also used in abortions. I heard a story about it on “Morning Edition” this morning, doctors in the state are extremely concerned about this. They say the drug will still be available in the hospital, but because of this categorization it will be harder to get, and even two minutes delay could make the difference between life and death. The religious fundies really don’t seem to care whether these women die or not.

  170. 170.

    Scout211

    @Redshift: When he talks about how tariffs will solve any policy problem (which he does a lot), it’s not because he’s put any thought into it, it’s because he already wants to do the tariffs for their own sake and just wants to make the policy question go away.

    Good point.  And to add to that, he doesn’t understand shopping and pricing and the average American’s budget.  He has minions for that.  Being forced to buy a product you need even if the price increases due to the tariff increase is not within his understanding of the world.  And in fact, don’t try to explain it to him, he doesn’t want to know and he doesn’t care.

    Being that big strong leader who can punish other countries is the image he needs and craves so he will continue to spew that nonsense.  Nothing will stop him from repeating it again.

  171. 171.

    Steve LaBonne

    @Marmot: For the record, I think we’re going to win this election AND keep control of the Senate. Not because I’m optimistic by nature, but because I can see the trend and I know that undecided cretins like to hop aboard the Zeitgeist train.

  172. 172.

    Suzanne

    @Scout211:

    And none of them will ever take responsibility for what happens when their words incite violence and crimes against innocent citizens. 

    A reminder that they are eager to kill liberals.

  173. 173.

    UncleEbeneezer

    Vance specifically denigrates a racial group: Haitian immigrants. We describe this specific idea as racist. We describe those threatening Haitian immigrants, fueled by this idea, as being racist. We describe as racist the ideas suggesting Black immigrants as a group (or Black people as a group) are generally violent.

    After Vance misrepresents Haitian immigrants, he misrepresents those describing him as racist. He misrepresents himself and Trump as caring about the people of Springfield, Ohio. When we all know they don’t care about the people in Springfield just as they don’t care about Haitian immigrants. Trump and Vance likely see both groups as stepping stools to their power.

  176. 176.

    Jackie

    @Scout211: I read that this morning and hoped someone would post about it! He was elected in ‘21, so he’s not facing re-election until next year?

    He’s an openly loud and proud bigoted MAGA POS.

  177. 177.

    Geminid

    @Steve LaBonne: I was thinking about Harry Truman this morning and remembered that Truman was a National Guardsman and like Tim Walz, an artillerist.

    Harry Truman would have gone to college but his father suffered financial reverses and Truman ended up working the family farm from dawn to dusk. He made time for National Guard service and had advanced to the rank of Major when the U.S. entered the First World War. Truman never plowed another field after his Guard unit was activated.

  178. 178.

    Belafon

    @narya: At one level, I actually do get what Kristol is saying. It’s one thing to debate Trump, who we all know will sound crazy if given enough time. Do we give Vance a chance to sound credible, when we really haven’t seen in him in a national debate? What if he does sound rational enough that people start questioning whether Springfield should have so many Haitians?

    Do we know how Walz will handle this kind of debate?

    For the most part, though, we go through with it, just like Biden had to do on the first debate, because it’s been scheduled.

  181. 181.

    Jeffro

    @Baud: I did?  I’m sorry!  (I don’t see anything broken but maybe the mods took care of it in the interim?)

    @Geminid: Jeffro thinks he can do anything now that he knocked Bob Good out

    LOL

    “Me am Fro!  Me call special power “vo-tang” and it grow by day and also night!!”

    If McGuire loses VA-05 because of GOP infighting that I helped contribute to, though, I probably am going to print signs or shirts or something…

    …maybe a screenshot of that ‘300’ movie’s Spartan shield formation, switch their red cloaks to blue, and change the number to 370 (McGuire’s margin over Good)?

    Hmmm.  Let’s see how many votes Witt beats McGuire by, that’ll be even better!

  182. 182.

    Chris

    @Redshift:

    @Chris: For the NYT panel of undecided voters for the debate who said that kind of stuff, it was so clear they were just repeating what the NYT had said voters wanted to know.

    I’ve noticed the same thing about the Cletus safaris.  Notice how no matter how many wholesome small-town folksy people from Iowa they talk to, all of their concerns still come down to the same few talking points?  “The economy” and “Washington’s forgotten about us?”

    Which means either the NYT is picking the kind of follow-the-crowd idiots who can be trusted to follow whatever cues it gives them, or, far more likely in the Cletus Safaris’ case, they’re cleaning up everything they say to a degree that makes even the Trump sanewashing come off as restrained.

  183. 183.

    Belafon

    @C_Scrutinizer: Yes, yes, that’s why:

    1. The comment at the end was PUTINTHEWORK.
    2. It’s a nice to have, not a need to have
    3. Does every “Wow this would be awesome” need to followed with “Hey, don’t get hopeful”?
  185. 185.

    Belafon

    @Baud: Agree, but in this particular case, I suspect you can find some Democrats also having the same thought as Kristol. He’s just the one willing to say it out loud.

  186. 186.

    Chris

    @Belafon:

    For the most part, though, we go through with it, just like Biden had to do on the first debate, because it’s been scheduled.

    Right.  These things are, as I’ve said, pro wrestling for nerds, and that means that if you refuse to show up, everybody’s takeaway is going to be that you’re a chicken and therefore a loser and therefore the other guy must be better at presidenting.

    Have I mentioned how much I loathe the institution of presidential debates?  It’s nice when they go our way, it sucks when they don’t go our way, but the entire process in either case is just such goddamn horseshit.

  188. 188.

    Another Scott

    @Matt McIrvin: He talks like he has no understanding of anything outside of real estate.  Maybe that’s a reflection of what he knows, maybe he’s just very bad at talking.

    E.g.

    • NATO’s 2% of GDP for defense goal/commitment isn’t a 2% of GDP payment to the USA.
    • “Many countries are leaving the dollar. They not going to leave the dollar with me. I’ll say, you leave the dollar, you’re not doing business with the United States because we’re going to put 100% tariff on your goods,” he said.
    • “We’ll start paying off debt and start lowering taxes even further. We gave you the largest tax cut. We’ll do it more.”

    Etc.

    It’s all just mouth noises for him.

    “Never give a known liar the benefit of the doubt.” – Dan Davies.

    Grr…,
    Scott.

  189. 189.

    Ramalama

    @narya:

    @sdhays:

    @Anne Laurie:

    Trying to come up with a modern-day equivalent, a term that says the same thing but about Vance.

    So far I’ve got “I felt a trickle in my beard hair.”

    But enough about me. I will henceforth heed to Watergirl’s admonition talking about people supporting other people getting attacked by teh GOP. While I don’t know that many people in Ohio, I do know an academic (professor) from Haiti, that when he began teaching at the university, some other profs mistook him to be the janitor. Which was weird because my friend dressed very nicely.

  190. 190.

    sdhays

    @Anyway: I never understood the draw of Chris Matthews. He’s a shouty muppet whose only value was a peek into what the Beltway circle-jerk that is The Village found entertaining, and…man, I didn’t want to know.

  191. 191.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Steve Crickmore: It’s always Schrödinger’s Asshole with these guys. Their favorite rhetorical mode is scary, violent hyperbole with “joke” deniability. Everything’s a trial balloon– if it doesn’t go over well, you accuse critics of not being able to take a joke; on the chance it does, you just discovered what you can get away with.

    It’s a Very Online mode of communicating, but it predates that–Sartre’s now famous passage about arguing with antisemites describes a version of it. The more out-there Sixties counterculture types were fond of it too, but these days it’s mostly a far-right thing.

  193. 193.

    cain

    @jonas:

    Vance has a problem as well. If he is too good, then the orange menace is going to be very pissed off. Pissed off he will attack Vance himself.

  194. 194.

    scav

    @Soprano2: Unless hemorrhaging is now something only birthing women do, there are a lot of bleeding out accident victims of all ages and genders that’ll have good cause to haunt the holier-than-everyone Louisianans eternally.

  195. 195.

    cain

    @Jackie: a real reason why talking about policies seems like it is dumb when you don’t have a press that educates. If a narrow majority of Americans can’t assess a good policy from a bad one. That’s to some extent on the media who rather cover banal nonsense

  196. 196.

    geg6

    @Soprano2: ​
     

    The religious fundies really don’t seem to care whether these women die or not.

    That’s because they don’t. Women are lesser than cattle because we aren’t even good for meat.

  197. 197.

    Another Scott

    @Redshift: Unsurprisingly, lots of the reporting is mixing up numbers of Haitians (who may have been there for decades) with numbers of TPS people and with numbers of TPS Haitians.

    FAS.org has a CRS report (32 page .pdf):

    As of March 31, 2024 in Ohio – 12,775 total individuals with Temporary Protected Status.

    200,005 Haitians total have TPS in the entirety of the USA.

    More than one-third (34%) of those covered by TPS reside in Florida; most of these individuals are Venezuelan (57%) or Haitian (35%).

    295,720 people with TPS in Florida.

    Colorado has 6,5909 people with TPS.

    As usual, it’s a generated panic about a minority, done for political reasons, in places where they think the panic will benefit them.

    Grr…,
    Scott.

  198. 198.

    Elizabelle

    @cain:  I agree.  Trump’s “ascension” is the failure of the MSM press, and, of course, the careful preparation for his arrival by Fox News and the rightwing media complex.

    They were not gifted with the First Amendment so they could exploit controversy and “vibes.”

    I do not believe for a minute these “undecided” voters are concerned with “policy.”  This is the clearest choice between anthrax and lasagna since … 2016 and 2020.

  202. 202.

    wjca

    @Soprano2: The religious fundies really don’t seem to care whether these women die or not.

    I think it is more that they are ignorant,  proudly ignorant.  So they have no clue about the impact of their idiocy.  And, to preserve their ignorance, refuse to learn anything — on this or any other subject,

  203. 203.

    comrade scotts agenda of rage

    @ArchTeryx:

    A gazillion times this.  GOTV.

    “Undecided” voters (which is their way of saying “we want to vote for this man but can’t actually publicize the fact we are hollow shells of people”), the kind of people that that Frank Fucking Luntz typically has on his “focus” groups, need to see the unvarnished picture of Hair Furor not just continuing the Mussolini “Strong Facist Leader” persona but showcase the look of the angry, stupid, evil person he is.

  205. 205.

    peter

    @Elizabelle:Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. The delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument, but to intimidate and disconcert. (Jean-Paul Sartre, 1945)

  206. 206.

    Trivia Man

    @Soprano2:  I am looking forward to a zoom call later this month for a Well Spouse support group. I am happy to support my spouse but it would be nice to have conversations with others in the same boat.

    When we adopted the special needs adoption support group was a fantastic resource

  207. 207.

    a thousand flouncing lurkers (was fidelio)

    @MazeDancer: And if he’d tailored what came out of his mouth to soothe the business “moderates” (AKA Nice Polite Racists with Megabucks) and non-MAGA GOP/ex-GOP he’d have maybe managed it.
    But now? Pepperidge Farm will remember.

  210. 210.

    Matt McIrvin

    For what it’s worth, I don’t really have a sense of how good Tim Walz is at countering the kind of unserious bad faith Vance barfs out. Harris could pulverize him but that debate got preempted.

  211. 211.

    Steve Crickmore

    @Matt McIrvin: Thanks for your contribution. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, a contemporary and an ex-friend of Satre was my favourite philospher. He stressed human responsibility as the fundamental value. He came to disagree with Sartre’s rather hard-line Marxism, that was a major factor in what was eventually a rather acrimonious ending to their friendship.

    Elon Musk went to my university, Queen’s in Kingston, Ontario for two years because of “the girls”, he said and majored in Commerce. He has always been an irresponsible frat boy.

    Here is the excerpt from Sartre’s essay, Anti Semite and Jew, that you referenced…

    “Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”

  212. 212.

    Soprano2

    @scav: The story referenced that they use it specifically for pregnant women. I think there’s something hormonal about it, so it might not help with other bleeding. IANAD, so I’m not sure.

  213. 213.

    Bill Arnold

    @Steve Crickmore:

    He now says he was just joking, when he asked why anyone hadn’t attempted to assassinate Harris,

    It was attempted “stochastic assassination”, and given the reach of his tweets/xeets, probably with a higher probability of success than that of a single lone wolf, since his incitement could trigger multiple lone wolfs to start their planning processes.
    When one has a reach of 10s of millions, one’s speech is qualitatively different in it’s ability to motivate nutcases; a person with a reach of a few hundred has a near zero chance of randomly motivating a nutcase; a person with a reach of 10s (hundreds?) of millions has a probability very near one of motivating one or more nutcases. (ETA the same applies to convicted felon D.J. Trump.)

  214. 214.

    Kent

    @Suzanne:I have shared that I have a seen a Cybertruck in the bougie suburb adjacent to my (city) neighborhood. I don’t know if it’s three separate Cybertrucks or one flagrant asshole who goes out in the weekend. It looks so, so bad.

    One pulled up next to my wife and me when we were parked at Target last weekend.  An Asian family with 3 little kids poured out.  Which kind of surprised me although come to think of it I’m not sure why.  This area is full of tech engineer types and no doubt some are Musk fans.

  215. 215.

    Bill Arnold

    @TBone:

    I wish they’d get raptured while their pants burst into spontaneous combustion during lying on live TV.

    That’d be a down-rapture.

  216. 216.

    Bill Arnold

    @Matt McIrvin:
    Re-upping this: as Paul Campos says today at LGM, ” ‘Kidding on the square’ — to be joking but at the same time really mean it — is a central aspect of fascist aesthetics.”
    (wictionary has a 1907 usage reference, “kiddin’ on the square”)

  217. 217.

    Ironcity

    @Bill Arnold:

    The probability of him persuading a given person reading his tweets/xs/ whatever  doesn’t change, the quantity of people he can get to increases enormously.  The probability of at least one of his audience being receptive and having the means and opportunity to  carry out his suggestion approaches 1.  As Stalin was reputed to have said, quantity has a quality all it’s own.

    The philosopher quotations are interesting.  I never got further than undergraduate Philosophy for Engineers as a freshman.  That was a real course along with English for Engineers (heavy on Herman Hesse(?), History for Engineers (which was history and philosophy of science and pretty good), and Sociology for Engineers.  That was part of what passed for a liberal education so our knuckles didn’t drag too much.

  218. 218.

    artem1s

    This warrants both a visit from the Secret Service and a Senate hearing, given that he’s a major defense and national security contractor

    How about Homeland Security/TSA travel ban and a warrant to collect his internet and phone records too.

  219. 219.

    Chris T.

    @Redshift:

    [ShadyVance claims 20,000 Haitians in Springfield OH, yet] … others have noted here, there appear to be about 5000 Haitians in all of Ohio.

    Well that’s simple though: there are negative fifteen thousand Haitians in Ohio outside of Springfield.

  221. 221.

    SomeRandomGuy

    JD Vance looks like every venture capitalist’s image of a real, tough, masculine man. I bet they’re SALIVATING at seeing him go up against Walz. Tim Walz is the real deal – not some rich moron’s thought about what one looks like. Yeah, yeah, JD survived four years in the Marines, good for him, but Walz did real service,

    I know who I’d trust to have my back in a brawl (Walz) and not to get his teeth punched out ten seconds in (Walz), and who I’d trust to run away screaming, only to come back with an AR-15 and a .44 magnum that would break his fingers if he tried to fire it, only to realize the cops were taking witness statements, so he’d kick one of the guy’s Walz took down, and run away again when that guy groaned, for some warm couch comfort. (You know, a hot water bottle really does work wonders!)

    Not that I’m looking forward to the debate or anything.

    I hope Walz pulls, “all this crap about what women want… JD, how many women have you *talked* to beside your wife?” because there’s no way to answer that.

  222. 222.

    SomeRandomGuy

    @Chris T.: They mistook Apu for Haitian and multiplied him by 15, then dreamed it up a thousand-fold. and they just BARELY SURVIVED.

    THIS is why you shouldn’t watch Simpsons Treehouse of Horror while drinking shots of Mad Dog 20/20.

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