Just two nights until @GeeksForHarris…
Do you have your free ticket? https://t.co/iOfdF10qsZ— Lynda Carter (@RealLyndaCarter) September 23, 2024
He’s delusional — you better believe women will keep thinking about abortion access when we cast our votes.
ONLY Democrats will restore safe abortion access nationwide — that’s why we must vote for @KamalaHarris and Democrats up and down the ballot! -NPpic.twitter.com/UBgY6W1HH0
— Nancy Pelosi (@TeamPelosi) September 22, 2024
Trump and Vance talk a lot about “freedom” – meaning the government should be free to invade your doctor’s office, your school library, and even your bedroom.
Yesterday, Pennsylvania said it loud and clear: we’re not going to have it. pic.twitter.com/To6LvMegmT
— Tim Walz (@Tim_Walz) September 22, 2024
Yeah, this is one of the best videos of Kamala Harris ever. pic.twitter.com/Kq2amlVcOO
— Aes???? (@AesPolitics1) September 20, 2024
Meanwhile:
Republican activists in swing states say they have seen little sign of the teams tasked with knocking on doors and turning out infrequent voters on behalf of Donald Trump. https://t.co/XaXEq3bvts
— The Associated Press (@AP) September 22, 2024
Per the Associated Press, in Michigan — “Republicans in swing states say they see scant signs of groups door-knocking for Trump”:
LANSING, Mich. (AP) — Republican activists in swing states say they have seen little sign of the teams tasked with knocking on doors and turning out infrequent voters on behalf of Donald Trump, raising concerns about the party’s presidential nominee relying on outside groups for an important part of his campaign operations.
Trump and the Republican National Committee he controls opted to share get-out-the-vote duties in key parts of the most competitive states this year with groups such as America PAC, the organization supported by billionaire Elon Musk.
It is difficult to demonstrate that something is not happening. But with fewer than 50 days until the Nov. 5 election, dozens of Republican officials, activists and operatives in Michigan, North Carolina and other battleground states say they have rarely or never witnessed the group’s canvassers. In Arizona and Nevada, the Musk-backed political action committee replaced its door-knocking company just this past week.
“I haven’t seen anybody,” said Nate Wilkowski, field director for the Republican Party in vote-rich Oakland County, Michigan, which includes crucial Detroit suburbs. He was speaking specifically of America PAC. “Nobody’s given me a heads-up that they’re around in Oakland County areas.”
Trump has relied on the loyalty of his fervent base, in an election expected to pivot on turnout. The spotty evidence, however, of what was portrayed as a sophisticated operation has some party activists questioning the operation’s value. Trump’s campaign views the race with Vice President Kamala Harris as a toss-up among likely voters but believes it has the edge among people who stayed away in 2016 and 2020, making it even more essential to reach them.
The work is particularly important in Michigan, where Trump lost by fewer than 160,000 votes in 2020, and where the GOP began the year mired in debt and fighting an ugly contest over the rightful state party leader…
Harris’ outreach on the ground in the seven states is being led by campaign-paid staff, a number the campaign puts at nearly 2,200 in more than 328 offices. Campaign aides said groups affiliated with labor organizations were canvassing independent of the campaign.
The vast majority of what outside groups that support Harris are doing is advertising. Based on ad reservations for Harris and the leading super PAC supporting her, they are on track to spend nearly $175 million more than Trump’s campaign and the leading super PACs supporting him by Election Day. Harris’ campaign has outspent Trump’s on advertising by 2-to-1 since she entered the race on July 23, according to the media tracking firm AdImpact…
Michiganders are used to door knocks and phone calls, but Ann Arbor residents were not prepared for the one and only @Janefonda at their door! pic.twitter.com/t4CjvtNquY
— Kamala for Michigan (@KamalaForMI) September 17, 2024
In the Upper Peninsula, Menominee County Dems have tripled their membership this year. "If people can change here, they can change just about anywhere" pic.twitter.com/yp1exkzpRY
— Michigan Democrats (@MichiganDems) September 22, 2024
On The Road – Albatrossity – Photo Walkabout August 2024 – 3
TBone
I didn’t think it was possible for me to admire Jane Fonda any more than I already did. 💙
Baud
Welcome, Bob and Martha.
Kosh III
Want to say: A friend of mine posted a pic of her and some friends around a table doing POSTCARDS. I don’t know who it was for but I know it was for progressive/intelligent candidates. WooHoo
Jeffro
Bouie bringing the receipts: The Donald trumpov Guide to Civil Discourse
[many, many receipts follow]
Don’t lecture us, JD. Don’t try to gaslight us, trumpov. This ticket IS a threat to democracy and our national security. I’ll never stop staying it, either. I don’t care how much the hit GOP dogs holler.
narya
I watched “Fail Safe” Saturday night and “Dr. Strangelove” Sunday night, and it was wild to see them back to back. I kept thinking of people like Michael Flynn and the rest of the loonies to whom we’ve been subjected. Perhaps oddly, “Dr. Strangelove” was, yes, funnier, but also more horrifying somehow: it was a reminder that so many of these jamokes are just completely off their rockers. Also too: the assumption that, if the ratio is 10:1 female:male (to repopulate the world), men would still be running things. If I were a creative writer, I’d run with that . . .
Math Guy
In the past few weeks, I have had four canvassers knock on my door. Three of them were for Democratic candidates; Senate, House, and one for the State House representative. One canvasser was supporting a Republican candidate for the state legislature. When I told him I did not recognize the name, I asked him if she was a Republican. He smiled sheepishly and said yes, so I smiled back and told him that I would never vote for a Republican again until the heat death of the universe, and I wished him a nice day and sent him on his way. Nerdy Minnesota nice.
rikyrah
Good Morning Everyone 😊 😊 😊
PaulWartenberg
I got my ticket for the Geeks for Harris event.
I’m hoping to represent the City of Heroes coalition.
Baud
@Math Guy: Fool! You pretend to be an undecided voter and occupy hours of that guy’s time!
j/k I don’t even get Dem canvassers and calls anymore. I think they have me down as a sure thing, which I appreciate.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
A lawn sign story in three acts.
1. I ordered a lawn sign from the official Harris-Walz sign during the convention,
2. By this weekend it still hadn’t arrived so yesterday we figured out where the local Democratic Party HQ was and stopped by there to get a sign.
3. When we got home, there was a package on our porch containing the back-ordered lawn sign.
Chris
@narya:
Very different from what you’re talking about, but:
I was rewatching The Hunt for Red October yesterday. One of the nice touches that I’d forgotten was how hard the movie goes in its first twenty minutes into making you think you’re watching a very different kind of Cold War thriller, with Ramius as a General Ripper type who’s trying to turn the Cold War into a real war. Soon enough, it’s clarified that he’s really trying to defect, and the rest of the movie is Ryan trying to convince his superiors that it’s not a Doctor Strangelove situation. But the genre shift early on in the movie is part of its charm.
Karen S.
My wife and I hosted a postcard writing party on Saturday. The postcards are to be mailed to Georgia voters. Ten of our friends came over. We should have asked for postcards because we knocked out the ones we had (200) in about an hour and a half. Maybe we’ll do it again.
Karen S.
@rikyrah: Good morning!
trnc
As Adam pointed out last night, the SAVE Act would greatly suppress the vote of married/divorced/widowed women who didn’t officially change their names when they got married. DT’s demand for this needs to be hung around their necks.
NotMax
Movin’ right along music for a Monday.
Fancy fingers.
Jeffro
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: that is exactly what happened to us, too!
Most of the folks who have signs up in our neighborhood have Harris/Walz signs, but they must have gotten them from some private company – they all say, “Harris/Walz : Obviously” LOL
My one neighbor up the hill who had ‘trump temple banners’ down his front porch posts back in 2020 doesn’t have them this time around; however, another trumper further up the hill has revealed himself and has the same type of banners now.
Imagine being a reluctant or quiet trump supporter in 2020, and then deciding to let your MAGA freak flag fly in 2024. “I got a fever, and the only prescription is…more insurrection!” (barf)
Caveatimperator
@trnc:
I think you got that backwards. The SAVE act, IIRC, specifically used birth certificates as references. So a woman who changed her name when she got married would need a state photo ID, a birth certificate, and paperwork proving she changed her name. Three supporting documents just to vote.
Falling Diphthong
Republican activists in swing states say they have seen little sign of the teams tasked with knocking on doors and turning out infrequent voters on behalf of Donald Trump.
This phrasing reminds me of the opening of the Ukraine war, where people were sure the Russian military was about to do something super-powerish, and it kept turning out “So the guy responsible for maintaining these vehicles was diverting the funds to filigree his dacha.”
There was plenty of scamming last time. (Remember the mysterious consultancy (thought to be Lara) who got such a big chunk of the Republican funds?) I’m thinking that was so evident that this time it’s a feeding frenzy of hucksters, all trying to skim 98% off the top and assuming the other organizations are legitimate and so will provide gotv as cover.
Trump’s failing health means that this is the last hurrah of blowing through the money he can bring in and control. (The last bit meaning that if you tell him you have a plan to use electric sharks to protect the pets, he may well give you some money.)
Jeffro
OT but I see in local news that Elise Stefanik was in town here on Saturday…explains the general nausea and headaches I had that afternoon.
Steve LaBonne
@Jeffro: I have an official sign from county Dem HQ on my lawn, but the “Obviously” sign is my Facebook cover photo.
Caveatimperator
@Falling Diphthong:
The whole culture of authoritarianism in the Republican Party pretty much guaranteed that it would eventually turn into a party of grifters.
And I don’t think Trump alone is the cause. This has been in the works ever since they embraced the Prosperity Gospel types, arguably even earlier. We saw it during the Iraq War, where the management of the war and the American-controlled administration was just multiple layers of subcontractors all taking their cut.
dmsilev
This is like the third or fourth straight election cycle that the GOP has gone this route, and it hasn’t worked very well. Trump himself activated a bunch of rarely-votes people in 2016, but that wasn’t door knocking, that was rallies and festering (undeserved) Clinton hatred. The rallies are old news now, and have a lot of repeat viewers. So, they need a strong GOTV operation to drive turnout….
Falling Diphthong
It has the edge among people who stayed away in 2016 and 2020, making it even more essential to reach them.
Genuinely perplexed by this theory. Is it just doubling down on the silent and bitter majority? Are those people supposed to see Trump as a change agent (16) or more of the same (20)? What’s motivating them to the polls this time? (I don’t think it’s “They were too young to vote.”)
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@Caveatimperator: Hell, I don’t think my passport matches my birth certificate. (I went by my middle name growing up and got tired of explaining it, so rather than go with an initialized first name I had the first and middle names legally swapped.)
Also family history is murky, but my grandparents on one side may have been illegal.
So under a Republican administration, I’d probably be stripped of my right to vote AND deported.
My wife changed her name when we married, so bad luck for her too.
New Deal democrat
As of yesterday, Dan Guild’s aggregator of state level polls showed Harris with her biggest average lead yet, at 4.5%. He wrote: “A Harris win of 6-7[%] is as likely as winning by 2[%].”
https://nitter.poast.org/dcg1114/status/1837898306522919270#m
For reference, Hillary won the popular vote in 2016 by 2.1%. In 2020, Biden won the popular vote by 4.4%.
He has since written that the NYT polls released overnight knock Harris’s aggregate margin down a little, but he hasn’t updated his top line aggregator yet.
It is at least possible that by knocking his ghastly debate performance off the front pages in favor of his (and Vance’s) outrageous statements on (even legal) immigration – his relatively strong suit – he has consolidated some of his wavering support.
TS
AP found the only picture of trump smiling that I have ever seen – but of course they did.
Anonymous At Work
I am betting that Leon Musk is running the “rainmaker” con on TFG. “I spent $40 million of my own money on your behalf [but I won’t show receipts].” If TFG wins, Elmo will seek to claim victory and ask to run the deregulation panel as well as extend his government contracts. If TFG, Elmo will say “It was in the cards the whole time regardless of what I did.” And then he’ll demand that Harris extend his government contracts at premium pay.
TBone
@NotMax: 💜
Matt McIrvin
@narya: That ending, where they’re yakking about the mine-shaft gap and populating shelters with nubile women while the end of the world is seconds away, is such a perfect satire of the psychosexual obsessions driving most of the worst stuff in the world.
Hoodie
@Falling Diphthong: Yeah, that makes no sense, i.e., Trump wasn’t crazy enough to draw them out in ’16 and ’20, but now they might show up? There has to be an end to the cockroaches he can flush out from under the floorboards. Seems to me that most of the potential growth is in younger voters who are predominantly nonwhite and don’t tend to be Trump voters.
Caveatimperator
@Hoodie:
The young hard right voters, the Andrew Tate fanboy types, might be right wing but are so disconnected from anything social it’s going to be hard to get them to vote.
That, and their worldview is so nihilistic it will be hard to convince them that voting is important.
terraformer
I mean, the T***p team completely took over the RNC – and its money.
They control what happens, and where the money’s spent. Or not spent.
Maybe they’re aren’t spending that money for canvassing and GOTV efforts because they don’t expect to win, but do expect to leave the US and take that money with them
Baud
@terraformer:
Not the ideal outcome, but not the worst outcome.
Ken
I just saw another example this morning. As you may have heard, most of Mark Robinson’s campaign staff resigned over the weekend — as several people noted, they were apparently OK with the racism, misogyny, and anti-Semitism, but the porn stuff was a bridge too far.
Anyway, promptly on cue, Jack Burkman announced he’s Robinson’s new campaign manager. However Robinson has denied this, and some are speculating it was Burkman phishing for donations.
Eunicecycle
@Caveatimperator: and it seems like it would be a huge pain in the ass for election workers.
Hoodie
@Caveatimperator: In addition to the fact that hard-right bro types are a relatively small segment of the youth vote. They get amplified by their online presence, which is what substitutes for other types of social interaction.
Matt McIrvin
@Falling Diphthong: I think their theory is just 2016 redux: Trump as the chaos agent for people who hate the whole rotten system of our society and want to blow it up.
I mean, if I wanted to blow up America and burn everything down I’d definitely vote for Trump as the means of doing it. But… I’d probably already have done so in 2016. I knew people who supported Trump then for that exact reason.
Percysowner
Montana Leaves Kamala Harris Off Online Absentee Voting System They are saying it was a big old accident and they have shut down the system to correct the ballots, but it is suspicious.
Matt McIrvin
@New Deal democrat: I’ve stopped watching those aggregators obsessively like I did in past cycles, since I don’t think they’re particularly helpful as a crystal ball, but one thing they do accomplish is taking people’s focus off the latest poll that dropped, reminding us that outliers are a thing.
TBone
@Ken: he is Jacob Wohl’s buddy, so the phishing scam theory is prolly 🎯
https://www.npr.org/2022/12/01/1140096697/jacob-wohl-jack-burkman-robocalls-ohio-sentence
mali muso
Good morning from rainy and cool Virginia. Kiddo is out of school today, so I have a sidekick to bring with me to the polls to early vote for our “first girl president” (her words)!
Jeffro
@Falling Diphthong: I can only think of three “rationales” for them thinking they have an edge with new-in-2024 voters:
One, the number of people voting for trump in 2020 went up by several million vs 2016…(meaning that they’re thinking it’ll go up by another several million in 2024).
Two, there should be no doubt in any R voter’s mind this time around that trump will follow their agenda (ie, Project 2025 and then some) to the letter.
Three, they are high on their own supply (and the snooze media’s complicity) in thinking that this unbelievably horrible economy is going to drive a whole bunch of new voters to trump.
There are some obvious problems with each of these three assumptions.
In the first…yeah, he’s likely to get more votes than in 2020 just because there are more voters and it’s once again a close race. But Harris 2024 is also likely to get more votes than Biden 2020 for the same reason…and of course Biden 2020 beat trump by 7M votes. If they both go up by a couple million votes, Harris still wins by 7M votes (and hopefully a corresponding EC win)
In the second…they’re forgetting that a) there’s also no doubt in ALL voters’ minds as to what trump will do in a second term (ie, hard right all the way) and b) (which is kind of related) here’s where Dobbs comes in to play, and not to their advantage, either. Everyone knows it, too.
In the third…even the Faux News talking heads kind of ‘get it’ (which really is saying something!)…the economy is doing well, has been doing well, is going to keep doing well…they are swimming against a tremendous tide of reality, and reality is telling folks, “times are GOOD”
jonas
Trump doesn’t give a shit about investing in GOTV because he doesn’t give a shit about actually winning. He figures if Election night doesn’t work out, he can just sue and Jan 6 his way back to the WH somehow.
SatanicPanic
ok well fuck you
TS
@Percysowner:
Came up a couple of threads back – incompetence or by design. I vote for the latter.
Scout211
Elon continues to try to be relevant in this election.
Daily Beast Twitter
🙄
Caveatimperator
@Jeffro:
Per your third point, the people who are legitimately doing badly in this economy are city and suburban working class people who are very unlikely to vote for Trump for economic reasons.
The people who like to pretend they’re doing badly, you know, the types who drive gas guzzlers and complain about the price of gas even though gas is on the cheaper side now? If they say they’re voting for Trump, they were probably always going to vote for Trump.
trnc
Right, so those women who didn’t officially change their names through the clerk of court wouldn’t have those supporting documents. Not sure why you thought what I wrote was different, but anyhoo, even in states that automatically make the official name change at marriage, the woman would still have to make the extra effort to have the docs as proof when registering to vote.
Anonymous At Work
@Percysowner: I’d believe them absent anything else. This doesn’t help the Republicans in office at best (TFG is going to win Montana easily), but Streisand Effect could push margins against Republicans at worst. Their goal is Jon Tester in Senate, not Harris in 1/58th of the Presidential Election.
Jeffro
@Scout211: that’s kind of a lot to put on one person, eh Elon?
They just get more ridiculous by the day.
TS
@SatanicPanic:
From your link
I’ll not regret my decision no matter what the outcome would be, and I’m ready to face the consequences.
I doubt he has any idea of the consequences – if it weren’t for the absolute horror of trump winning – I would like him to find out.
Dorothy A. Winsor
I have a guest post up on Scalzi’s site today. Maybe take a look and click the like button? That way John lets me come back next time. :-)
Matt McIrvin
@Hoodie: There have been a lot of news stories implying that young men are swinging fascist, and that that youth demographic are going to put Trump over the top, etc., etc. The Guardian really likes this angle when talking about US politics.
The thing is, I don’t really see evidence for it in surveys by age and gender. They show an increasing gender gap among the youth, but that’s mostly because of young women swinging way to the left while young men stay close to where they were. Yeah, young men are further right than young women, but they’re not further right than, say, GenXer men or Boomer men. In fact, if I recall correctly, they’re a little to the left, just not as much as we’d like.
Restrict it to young white men, then maybe you see a direr story. But it’s actually hard to be worse than white men of my generation.
Jeffro
btw this piece is pretty good – share it around and shake up the RWNJs in your life!
trumpov’s imaginary and frightening world
It’s a good piece. Just needs some more details about how the MAGA noise machine regurgitates his delusional nonsense as truth, 24/7
narya
@Matt McIrvin: I had completely forgotten that part! I only saw it one other time, many years ago, but yes, you’re right, it perfectly encapsulates a lot of what seems to circulate in the RW-o-sphere. It’s so tiring.
Frankensteinbeck
@Ken:
He was caught desiring penis. That is the core shame of toxic masculinity. It is not a wink-wink corruption, it’s the ultimate taboo. Whether they do or not, conservative men are terrified other men will think they do. In their terror they punish suspects to prove their own spotlessness.
While, of course, ‘woman with a penis’ is the #1 most popular porn type in heavily conservative areas. Kinks tend to be defanged versions of powerful fears and hates, so no surprise really.
Chief Oshkosh
@Caveatimperator:
An experience that has stuck with me over the years is a conversation that I had with the guy sitting next to me on a flight to Europe during the Iraq War. He was mid-level “management” for one of those subcontractors. Totally amoral. A true sociopath. And all on the taxpayers’ teat, which he found mildly amusing.
That was one of the confirming events of my life that led to my mantra: You cannot possibly be cynical enough when dealing with these people.
Belafon
My parents are Democrats, but Jane Fonda is not welcome at their house. Luckily, in this case, we’re in Texas, and I have no fear of her showing up at their doorstep.
jonas
@Chris: I still always remember the late Fred Thompson playing the carrier captain looking out on the flight deck where a jet has just crashed:
A handy quote for a lot of situations these days…
trnc
I’ve seen plenty of pictures of Trump smiling, but it’s usually when he talks about harming someone.
TBone
@Scout211: 😆
Belafon
@Jeffro: They have trained Republicans over the last 40 years to see violence as the solution to problems, and that is why both of the attempts (not quite the right word in the second case, but close enough) were done by people that Identified as Republicans
NotMax
BTW, if you’re thinking about ordering any stuff from Amazon you may want to hold off a bit as October 8th and 9th there’s another Prime Days sales event.
Hoodie
@Matt McIrvin: I think one thing we can all agree on is that news writers and opinionators generally suck at interpreting data. They tend to have a narrative and then squint real hard to try to justify it from data that isn’t even designed to address their hypotheses. This one probably stems from Joe Rogan having a popular podcast.
HinTN
@Caveatimperator: Mrs H had to get all that to support her Real ID drivers license. It was a minor inconvenience for us (not time critical) but could be a real burden for some.
Of course the Real ID puts a gold star on the Tennessee license. Interesting choice, I thought.
trnc
@SatanicPanic:
And those principles time and again have clearly been “let Israel do whatever they want to Gaza” and pretty much anything else that fucks over Muslim’s, so that’s kinda weird.
Caveatimperator
@trnc:
But unless I’m misunderstanding your intent, the women who didn’t change their names through the clerk of the court wouldn’t have their married name on any of their documents at all.
My wife, for example, sometimes goes by Mrs. Caveatimperator socially, but all of her legal documents have her birth name. Her birth certificate, Social Security card, and driver’s license all have the same name, which is the same one she was born with. And she also uses an altered spelling of her first name; her legal first name is the Spanish spelling of her name. Socially, she uses a spelling that is more clear to English speakers.
What I’m saying is that a critically dangerous piece of the law is that it mentions birth certificates specifically. And birth certificates, unlike other common forms of ID, never get changed in a legal name change. So a woman who went through the legal process to get her name changed couldn’t just show her driver’s license with the new name. She’d need her driver’s license, birth certificate, and paperwork proving the legal name change.
Unless there’s something I’m misunderstanding.
jonas
@Belafon: Jane Fonda is still such a polarizing figure for her antiwar activism and visit to North Vietnam that one time, yet a lot of the same people think it’s totally fine that Trump goes and yuks it up with North Korea while its guns and nukes are still pointed at US and South Korean troops and sends Kim Jong Un “love letters.”
The cognitive dissonance in some people… At least Fonda has said she regretted posing on that anti-aircraft gun. Trump says “he did nothing wrong.”
Jeffg166
@jonas:
That is my thought. Don Old plans on the election being stolen and handed to him no matter how much more Harris actual election is obvious.
zhena gogolia
@Chris: And Sean Connery has the worst Russian accent (true, he’s not supposed to be ethnically Russian, but his Russian should be a lot better than that) in history. Alec Baldwin does much better and he’s supposed to be American.
jonas
How many psychedelic drugs do you have to be on simultaneously even to entertain that idea when it comes to Trump? There has never been a more completely amoral figure in American history.
The mind reels…
Ken
@Scout211: Gee, and I thought what would destroy the Mars program was the radiation, lack of oxygen, toxic soil, et cetera ad infinitum.
There are several analyses of the problems available online. I recall one said that Musk seems to think the problems begin and end with how to drop a hundred tons of construction materials on a site.
RevRick
@Baud: I’m in the same boat with Democrats, except I get bombarded with texts begging me to donate to candidate x.
Hilariously, I have gotten several phone calls from the RNCC! Mostly, I don’t answer, but once I did and burst out laughing hysterically.
In a paradoxical way, I find the fact that a Republican group is trying to reach me as a good sign. It indicates that they are so disorganized that they think I might be a good fundraising partner.
jonas
@Scout211: Good lord. The fact that Musk thinks colonizing Mars is a feasible thing tells you just how disconnected from reality that bozo is. If Harris does become president, the first thing I hope she does is order a review of all Musk’s government contracts. The man’s a menace and a security threat.
Hoodie
@RevRick: We’ve been buried in GOP mailers even though we’re registered Dems who have voted in every election, which makes me think this is just a case of grifters grifting off of other grifters. These groups that the Trump campaign has contracted out to are as corrupt as he is and have no trouble wasting his supporters’ money.
RevRick
@Baud: Biden got 4,316 votes in Menominee county in 2020, which was 34% of the total. Shaving margins down in places like that makes a huge impact.
Steve LaBonne
@Ken: Musk indeed only seems to think.
Matt McIrvin
@jonas: I remember hearing stuff like this from Mars colonization advocate Robert Zubrin during the Obama years– because Obama wasn’t all in on sending people to Mars, he was an enemy of science and progress and the free mind of humanity. It got really nutty.
Mind you, I even agreed with him that Obama was too cool on planetary exploration. But spaaaaace fans can be… very unusual politically.
Layer8Problem
@zhena gogolia: “We musht give thish American a wide berth” sounds Russian after a few pints. Ok, maybe more than a few pints. Or do you mean the quality of the actual Russian he and Sam Neill were speaking at the very beginning?
jonas
@Ken: Haven’t you ever seen The Martian? You take a dump, plant some corn and hey, terraforming!
PaulWartenberg
@Dorothy A. Winsor: Scalzi’s hosting you?! lucky devil…
Layer8Problem
@Ken: You are not showing Titan submersible levels of positive thinking, man. Too many negative waves.
TBone
@Layer8Problem: it’s the Achilles heel of hubris 😆
As always, must pwn teh libs!
Belafon
@jonas: Also from the Martian: If you flush the toilet wrong, it will probably try to kill you.
jonas
@Matt McIrvin: Planetary exploration is great. With probes and robots and stuff. And who knows? Maybe it will be possible someday to send astronauts to Mars on a brief mission and bring them home before their bodies atrophy from years in low gravity and they die of cosmic radiation poisoning. Actually settling large populations on the red planet? Not. Gonna. Happen.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@Ken: He’s probably the type of manager who thinks he can scream “just solve it!” loud enough and everybody’s all motivated and inspired to overcome all those silly obstacles like the laws of physics.
Chief Oshkosh
@jonas: See, that’s just how much you’re wrong and a Luddite.
It was potatoes.
Ken
In fairness to toilets, that’s true of pretty much all space technology.
RevRick
@Ken: The problem starts with having to build an industrial base here on Earth large enough to support the operations in the first place. There’s a narrow window for launches to Mars in order to minimize fuel consumption. More fuel needed = less payload capacity. Dumping hundreds of tons on to the surface of Mars would require thousands of launches!
Which would mean hundreds of launch pads with all the concrete and steel that would go into them.
And all the specialty materials for the rockets that will be hurled on a one-way mission. And the millions of tons of propellant needed to launch them to Mars. And all the energy wasted here on Earth to make this shit.
And that doesn’t even begin to answer the question of how we would get anyone to survive the trip without succumbing to radiation poisoning or starving to death.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@Caveatimperator: This is a generational thing, I think. When we married in 1980, my wife took my last name and it was pretty much automatic that it became her new legal name on everything, just by virtue of marrying.
When my kids married, they discovered that taking their husband’s last name required a legal procedure well after the marriage. That kind of surprised me, I hadn’t realized there had been this shift, and I’m not sure when and how it happened.
dmsilev
@Ken: Musk may want to send people to Mars (you go first, Elon), but NASA doesn’t have any vaguely near-term plans to do so. So, not sure what he thinks (using the term very loosely) Harris might do to “disrupt” non-existent plans.
What NASA does have is a plan (in collaboration with ESA) to bring back some Mars rocks. The Perseverance rover has been gathering and caching interesting rocks, and the “Mars Sample Return” mission would send a craft to Mars designed to pick up this set of sample vials, launch it into Mars orbit, to rendezvous with yet another craft that would return to Earth. It’s a complicated mission, and planning is …not going well. To the point where NASA is doing a complete ground-up reassessment of the whole plan. Maybe that’s what penetrated into Musk’s thick skull?
Layer8Problem
@Ceci n est pas mon nym:
“Make it happen! Like Gene Kranz said in Apollo 13, ‘Failure is not an option!!'”
“Uh, boss, Kranz didn’t actually say that in the real world and the crew’s lives were at- ”
“YOU’RE FIRED!”
Matt McIrvin
@jonas: Zubrin literally believed that support for his Mars project was the key marker of the difference between freedom and totalitarianism.
zhena gogolia
@Layer8Problem: The actual Russian.
JML
I’m baffled by the GOP’s canvassing and turnout plans this cycle. They really seem to think that they can just buy a canvass team and turn them loose on a moments notice, and that’s never really been how it works. It takes time to build a good canvass team, and you need to winnow people out a lot of times. not everyone is good at it, no matter how much some people treat it like unskilled labor. They need to be trained and need time to build experience as well to be actually good at it. You can’t just scoop up a bunch of MAGA-heads and turn them loose on the doors in a week and expect it to work. There’s also a lot of work that needs to happen leading up to the door, long before you start cutting turf. Good canvass operations have fresh IDs on people, not guesswork from voter registrations or assumptions from old data sets.
Something is going on here: 1) they really think they can buy a canvass operation off the shelf, deploy it late, and everything will be fine. 2) It’s a big ol’ grift and because they’re outsourcing it they barely even know who is stealing from them (assuming their not just pocketing donor money for themselves). 3) they think the MAGA-heads are so dedicated to the Cult of Der Leader that they’re going to turn out so long as they see the Giant Orange Idiot on tv enough and Faux News and the related right-wing echo chamber keeps hyping him and the election with their lies, sexism, and racism.
but this election might be the test of whether traditional canvassing still has real impact in a national election. If it does, Harris might win every close one.
SatanicPanic
@TS: He’s going to be surprised when that leopard eats his face
Ken
@RevRick: I’ve seen quite a few people noting that it will be much cheaper to keep Earth habitable for a few billion people than to make a small part of Mars something habitable for a few dozen.
Sasha
No point canvassing for votes if the plan is to subvert and overturn the election.
yellowdog
@Percysowner: Hanlon’s Razor may be applicable.
SatanicPanic
@Ken: sure but would that include pew-pew spaceship laser battles?
Checkmate, lib.
opiejeanne
@jonas: Potatoes. It was potatoes, and that’s what the little plant near the end of the movie is, the one growing next to the bench Mark Watney is sitting on back on earth. Watney says, “Well, hello there”.
Seeing a volunteer potato in that place is very, very unlikely.
Matt McIrvin
@JML: What’s sustaining them is the same thing that gives us heart attacks: the thought that this cycle is like 2016 and actually running a good campaign or having a likable candidate just doesn’t matter any more.
fancycwabs
Two things to remember about the lack of Republican canvassing:
Jackie
@HinTN: Re Real ID licenses, will that be all that’s needed as proof of citizenship for voting purposes should the Save Act be passed?🤔
Belafon
@RevRick: Along side plans to take care of ourselves better, I think it would be a worthwhile project to attempt to tackle as a civilization, just a big project to attempt to solve. So, you know, basically the Martian.
Steve in the ATL
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: the first act was a little slow, but did a nice job introducing the characters and setting up the story. The second act was action-packed and exciting, and I loved the ironic denouement in the third act!
Falling Diphthong
@Matt McIrvin: I am developing a severe irritation with the conviction–across the political spectrum–that the only possible reason for everyone not rallying to someone’s great idea for how to set up society is that we haven’t wiped out civilization yet.
There’s going to be 10 survivors with 12.8 manifestos between them, all equally astonished that wiping out most of humanity wasn’t enough to make everyone else admit that they were right all along. They were sure that was the One Cool Trick.
Matt McIrvin
@Baud: All I ever get from Democratic campaigns is demands for more money. They know who and what I am.
Matt McIrvin
@Falling Diphthong: Accelerationism is abuser thinking in the collective sphere. It’s not all on the right but we shouldn’t be surprised when people who subscribe to it swing hard right, because that is abuser thinking’s native territory.
Citizen Alan
@zhena gogolia: Sean Connery was known for resolutely refusing to even try to do an accent in any film. There’s an old joke about his casting in the first Highlander movie.
Producer: Okay, Sean, we need to talk about your accent. You’re an immortal born in Ancient Egypt who has spent the last several centuries living as a Spanish nobleman throughout the Middle Ages.
Connery: Houw’s thish? (/thick Scottish burr).
Producer: PERFECT!
FastEdD
@JML: When I see you using the phrase “cutting turf” I can tell you’ve been doing just that! Cool. Our local Dem club started organizing over a year ago. To build an effective outreach program takes time and dedication. We built a system with coordinators who have responsibility for other volunteers-if they don’t do the work they are replaced with someone who will. Since Harris became the nominee there has been such fierce interest in volunteering we don’t even have enough jobs to go around. We will have an organization already in place for 2026 and ready to go.
Anoniminous
@jonas: @Matt McIrvin:
The notion of Mars colonization is strictly Bullshit* from a Biological** perspective.
First getting there requires a minimum of 7 to 8 months of constant exposure to cosmic rays meaning the colonists would arrive with all kinds of new, interesting, & wonderful cancers. Second, the same 7 to 8 months of low gravity means the crew would develop mild to severe brain damage from dendritic arbor changes and decline in axon density; since Mars’ gravity is ~38% that of Earth’s the brain damage would continue to worsen. Third, when they got there the Martian soil is laden with perchlorates, which are toxic to humans.
* a la Frankfurt
** a Science of which your standard issue TechBro space freak incel knows nothing
Geminid
I have been eagerly waiting for the Wason Center’s first poll of Virgia voters (they usually do 3 between September and the last week of October. The Center has put out an appetizer: a poll of Virginia’s Second CD race taken September 6-10.
Democrat Elaine Luria flipped the 2nd in 2018, held it in 2020 and then lost by 3 points Jen Kiggans in 2022 after redistricters made in a couple points more Republican. The 2nd is centered on Virginia Beach. Ed. This is a military-heavy district, and Luria, Kiggans and Smazol are all retired Navy officers.
This is a swingy district. Joe Biden would have carried it by 2 points in 2020 if were in its present form, while Glenn Youngkin would have carried it by 9 in 2021.
Anyway, the poll of 792 likely voters showed Rep. Kiggans leading challenger Missy Cotter Smazol 46% to 41%. Wason Center pollsters asked a “favorable/unfavorable” question and found Kiggans was +5 with 28% responding “Don’t know/No opinion.” Smazol was +6, but 61% of likely voters answered “Don’t know/No opinion.”
In Presidential preference, Vice President Harris and Trump were tied 46-46 among the district’s “Likely Voters.” That’s not bad considering that Cook’s rates the 2nd CD as R +2. Harris was viewed favorably by 47% of respondents and unfavorably by 47% with 6% having no opinion, while Trump was down 4, 45-49 with 6% expressing no opinion.
The Wason Center described their polllng method including that they reached 76% of respondents by cell phone and 24% by landline. They stated a margin of error of plus/minus 4.7%.
I expect the Center will release a poll covering the whole state soon, and then conduct another poll mid-October and one more a few days before the election.
The Wason Center is associated with Christopher Newport University in Newport News. Rachel Bitecofer used to direct their polling before she left CNU in Spring of 2020 (Bitecofer is now a freelance campaign consultant based in Salem, Oregon). The new director seems pretty solid, and she has a particular focus on climate change and related political issues..
Ken B
@NotMax: Amazon is already doing some Pre-Prime Day sales as well.
brantl
So, one of the great things is, the volunteers emulate their candidates, the Harris Walz volunteers are go get ’em, personable, energetic peoples and the Trump Vance volunteers are sleezy, grumpy, lazy grifters!
Kayla Rudbek
@Jeffro: yeah, I got pretty irritated yesterday on my bike ride when I saw that one of the single-family houses on a corner had put out a bunch of Trump/Vance signs all along their front yard along the entire sidewalk. I flipped them off as we passed by. And thinking about it, they must have put them up later that afternoon because I didn’t see the signs when we passed by on our way outbound to old town Alexandria (Sunday ride tends to be out-and-back ride).
brantl
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: Put out both!
Geminid
@Geminid: I like looking at the Wason Center’s findings regarding party self-identification and ideological self-identification. In this case, 32% of 2nd CD voters described themselves as Republican, 35% as Democrats and 30% as Independents.
When given 5 choices– Very Liberal, Liberal, Moderate, Conservative and Very Conservative– 4% of district voters chose Very Liberal and 15% chose Liberal. Moderates were tied with Conservatives at 34% each while Very Conservative came in at 8%.
Ruckus
@Caveatimperator:
This is one of the reasons that shitforbrains got elected in the first place. People that like his style are not thinking about the country, the population, democracy. They are thinking about power. And they are getting a bit more desperate because their guy is exactly who and what we all think he is. He’s not in this for the job of actually being a leader, he was in this for his ego, now he’s in this trying to save his ass, and mainly because he knows doodly squat about leadership, governing, democracy. And doesn’t give a damn about any of that. He liked the power and position and now that he’s proven who and what he actually is, and how he’s gone about doing that – which is not how or what he thinks he’s done because he’s a selfish, entitled, pompous, arrogant jackass, who has backed himself into a very small, tight corner by his arrogance and stupidity.
My point is that he is not in this to be a leader, he’s in this to save his ass. We have a candidate who is a pretty good leader, politician, she’s smart, driven, thoughtful, fair and a good human being. shitforbrains is the exact opposite, none of those things.
piratedan
@Citizen Alan: yeah, you don’t cast Sean Connery for his linguistic skills, you cast him because he’s fucking Sean Connery. He’s a great actor still because he does have a screen presence and gravitas. He can do comedy (Indy III) as well as drama, just not as many opportunities to play against type.
Lynn Dee
Trump sounds like he’s trying to hypnotize women with that “You will no longer be thinking about abortion” line.
“Ladies, you are getting sleepy … very sleepy …”
Ruckus
@terraformer:
they don’t expect to win, but do expect to leave the US and take that money with them
Sure that’s a possibility but my thought is that they want power simply because that gives them stature and allows them to create a richer and more pompous, arrogant life, because the only real thing they think about is themselves. It isn’t about country or politics, it is about pompous, arrogant wealth and power.
They appreciate shitforbrains because they want to be him. Money, power, position is what they want. Democracy? Give me a break, that’s the least of their desires.
lowtechcyclist
@Geminid:
I was a math instructor at what was then Christopher Newport College for three years in the mid to late 1980s. It’s been a while, but it still makes me glad to see CNU doing good things.
Geminid
@Geminid: District demographics are important in elections, and the Wason Center’s 2nd Va. CD poll included a demographic profile of respondents.
This included findings that 64% described themselves as non-Hispanic White, compared to 58.7% for Virginia as a whole (according to Wikipedia). Black voters were 22% compared to 20.1% statewide, while 2nd CD Hispanic voters were 6% compared to 10.5% statewide.
Virginia’s population has an 8.6% “Asian American” component but I’m not sure if the Wason Center reported that group’s number for its 2nd CD respondents.
As for education, 58% of 2nd CD respondents were “High School or Less” and 42% were “College or More.”
Ruckus
@jonas:
shitforbrains gives a shit about winning. He is a huge, steaming pile of shit. He is in this for ONE person and ONE person only – HIMSELF.
He knows he’s screwed the pooch in so many ways that his only hope is winning his safety in the voting booth. He was a shitty president and he is far worse now than he was. He’s aging out and not in style. Everyone who lives to be old ages out, some do it gracefully, some do it painfully and some do it rather badly. He’s in group 3 because that’s how he’s done everything in his pompous, arrogant, monied life. Because that’s who and what he is.
Geminid
@lowtechcyclist: The clean energy transition is an interest of mine, and I noticed that Dr. Becky Bromley-Trujillo, the Wason Center’s director of polling, describes herself as a “Political scientist at Christopher Newport University researching climate policy/public opinion.” She comments on Threads.net
Geminid
@Matt McIrvin: I thought Hamas’s attack on Israel last October 7 was a good example of accelerationism run amok; trying to make a bad situation better by making it far, far worse.