Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Balloon Juice, where there is always someone who will say you’re doing it wrong.

Democracy cannot function without a free press.

Sadly, there is no cure for stupid.

Prediction: the gop will rethink its strategy of boycotting future committees.

The most dangerous place for a black man in America is in a white man’s imagination.

I don’t recall signing up for living in a dystopian sci-fi novel.

The fight for our country is always worth it. ~Kamala Harris

Take hopelessness and turn it into resilience.

People are weird.

The fundamental promise of conservatism all over the world is a return to an idealized past that never existed.

One way or another, he’s a liar.

Good lord, these people are nuts.

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

’Where will you hide, Roberts, the laws all being flat?’

If you tweet it in all caps, that makes it true!

You know it’s bad when the Project 2025 people have to create training videos on “How To Be Normal”.

Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

You cannot love your country only when you win.

“Loving your country does not mean lying about its history.”

Never give a known liar the benefit of the doubt.

Fight for a just cause, love your fellow man, live a good life.

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

Russian mouthpiece, go fuck yourself.

Every decision we make has lots of baggage with it, known or unknown.

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Open Thread

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This post is in: 

I’m dreading this debate not because I think it matters who will win but because I just find JD Vance to be so supremely despicable and odious that the thought of looking at him makes me cringe. Plus the eyeliner and the weird posing and it all reminds me of this:

Open Thread 41

Maybe I will just go to bed.

*** Update ***

I *REALLY* need to start reading this website before I post because I see Rose has already discussed Vance. I am gonna go out on a limb and guess this is the general consensus of all the front pagers, so we can have some closure on that aspect.

Reader Interactions

139Comments

  2. 2.

    zhena gogolia

    I don’t think I can watch it in real time. I love Walz too much.

    I’ll see what the BJ crowd is saying.

    But I’m sure Walz will do fine. I just cannot stand Vance.

  3. 3.

    pat

    Me too.  And no fact checking..????  How the hell is that supposed to work?

    JD lies.  Tim says, that’s a lie.  The monitors say time’s up.

    Shitshow coming up..

  4. 4.

    SiubhanDuinne

    Yes. Shady Vance and Cancun Ted have a great deal in common. Sometime in the last 24 hours I saw (maybe here?) a video of Ted losing his temper and screaming at the person who asked him a question. And while I was watching it, I honestly wasn’t sure if it was Cruz or Vance. They are physically, superficially similar, and they are both nuckin futs.

  5. 5.

    dr. luba

    Same.  I can catch the highlights later.  But watching Trump or Vance for more than a minute or two is not tolerable.

  6. 6.

    Tony Jay

    What are the odds on Snowball having been coached with some kind of incredibly awkward punchback line for when Walz shakes his head and declares his comments “Weird”?

    Extra points for when said punchback line splats like a wet biscuit and Snowball starts getting extra twitchy and pissy.

  8. 8.

    HeleninEire

    I feel the same about Vance. Just the ickiest.

    My first priority for the night is watching the Mets beat Milwaukee.  Then I’ll decide about the debate.

    For sure if I decide to watch, a Gummy will be had.

  9. 9.

    oldster

    I hope Walz spends a lot of time simply quoting what Vance has said over the years. Plus, quoting parts of Project 2025, and pointing out, as frequently as necessary, that Vance wrote the preface to it.

    I continue to believe that the more people see Trump and Vance, the more they’ll hate them. That is certainly what Trump concluded after Kamala walloped him in their first debate.

  10. 10.

    bbleh

    Oh come on. First, Walz knows perfectly well what’s coming, and if anybody could lay it out for him in living color during his debate prep it’s Mayor Pete. And second, he WAS a high school teacher AND coach AND a VERY senior NCO, so he kinda knows how to handle smarmy punk-ass boy-men.

    No idea what their strategy is, but I just can’t imagine that he won’t at some point bring some MAJOR Dad action, and I wanna be there for it.

  11. 11.

    scav

    I’m just pleased it’s time to swab the decks all around the house to prepare them for the winter crop of moss.  I’ll be too tired to even pretend to watch.

  13. 13.

    The Audacity of Krope

    The last debate was surprisingly substantive, so I’m thinking I’ll give this one a chance too, despite different network.

  15. 15.

    PaulWartenberg

    my mom is in the hospital.

    she had tripped at the grocery store and cracked her head. she’s at the hospital in New Port Richey, they were supposed to transfer her to another one in Largo that handles head trauma, but they haven’t moved her yet.

    none of this is good. and dad’s at home on hospice care dealing with terminal cancer. gods…

  16. 16.

    Baud

    @bbleh:

    Honestly, the only times I can think of when our candidate didn’t do great where

    1. Obama’s first debate with Romney.
    2. Kaine’s debate with Pence.
    3. Biden’s debate this year.
  17. 17.

    lamh47

    I won’t be watching live, but I’ll be following along on my main socials.

    I actually think Gov Walz will do well against Vance.

    It’ll be about optics maybe?  Vance just always comes off as swarmy.

    Tim Walz always comes off as wholesome even when he stabbing at Vance and orange.

    All in all though, unless come big quip comes out of it, I don’t expect the VP debate to matter much.

  21. 21.

    Capri

    Vance radiates wierd and smarmy. Walz appears and acts normal. I’m not sure anything they say will matter.  The contrast should be enough.

    Having said that I won’t be watching – second game of the WNBA semis will be on.

  23. 23.

    mali muso

    @PaulWartenberg: Holding you in the light.  My mom has had several falls within the past year and it’s always scary.  I hope that she will be able to make a full recovery.

  24. 24.

    bbleh

    @PaulWartenberg: oh gawd that’s awful. I’m very sorry.

    FWIW, having kinda been there, being there for them if you can will matter a lot to them. And remember, you can’t fix it, and nobody expects you to.

  25. 25.

    Chief Oshkosh

    @PaulWartenberg: Good luck, Paul. I’ve been there when both parents had issues simultaneously yet lived a thousand miles apart. Thankfully I have wonderful sibs. I hope you have similar family or friends to help you and your parents.

  29. 29.

    The Audacity of Krope

    Predictions for the debate tonight:

    Stuff will be said. That stuff won’t matter to more than a handful of people and a “winner” will be declared based on on-screen presentation.

  30. 30.

    TBone

    @PaulWartenberg: deep breathe, center yourself in your mind, and take each moment as it comes. Try not to anticipate the worst.  Just breathe and act out of a calm place inside, not from the terrible circumstances you’re facing. We’re all sending our best wishes for all of you.  You can crumble later and we will catch you.

  31. 31.

    HeleninEire

    @Omnes Omnibus: Noooooo. Although as a lifelong Mets fan…they were “born” the same year as me, they are often disappointing.

    But I still love them. ⚾️

  33. 33.

    prostratedragon

    Alternative viewing includes royalty night on TCM. Anne of the Thousand Days at 9 Eastern. All such malignant narcissists should be 500 years in the past.

     

    ETA I forgot — there’s also baseball.

  36. 36.

    Scout211

    I was just perusing an  Atlantic piece with the title, What Democrats Don’t Understand About J. D. Vance

    I ran into the paywall after the first few paragraphs but decided it wasn’t worth it.  Like the piece that mistermix posted earlier, it is just amazing how many journalists believe that know best when it comes to campaigns and candidates.  They are also just so super smart and so very in touch with the inner workings of that mysterious Trump voter out in the wild. (Who cares about the Harris voters, amirite?)

    But now the focus is on Vance and why MAGA loves him.

    Subtitle: The vice-presidential candidate’s foes see him as unlikable—but MAGA world sees him as a brainy counterweight to Trump.

    He can squeeze Trumpism through his own post-liberal-populist tube and produce something that looks like a coherent ideology. Whereas Democrats are fond of mocking Vance for being socially awkward, Trump’s supporters see him as their very own Pete Buttigieg: a man with a theory of the case who is eager to defend it both on television and in real life. He is the sharp TV-sound-bite counterweight to Trump’s rambling rally speech.

    OMFG.

  43. 43.

    Lethe

    Waiting for someone to do the trump/vance/Benny Hill supercut. Can’t look at trump without ‘yakkety sax’ ear-worming me.

  44. 44.

    Tony Jay

    @Baud:

      Maggie Halbermann
    @nytdebatewatch

    Three words! That’s all it took for @senatorvance to clean @walz4vp’s clock and turn the narrative of this election on its head. Politics, baby! It’s why we live this crazy life. #knockout

     

    President Biden                    @smilingjoeyb

    Drinking the book advance, Mags? 😂

  46. 46.

    raven

    My last meeting with the Neuro PA she told me to get a flu shot so I got both that and the covid.  The last covid hit me pretty hard and I’m feeling a bit woozy now!

  50. 50.

    HeleninEire

    @Omnes Omnibus: OK, now you have me conflicted.  While I stan the Mets it would be real cool if Ueker gets his WS win. I absolutely love him.

    Reporter: “How do you catch a nuckleball?”

    Ueker: “Wait till it stops rolling and pick it up”

  51. 51.

    WaterGirl

    @pat:

    JD lies.  Tim says, that’s a lie.  The monitors say time’s up.

    Shitshow coming up.

    There’s a succinct beauty to that, even in its sad truth.

  52. 52.

    Captain C

    @Tony Jay: Mags’ reply:  “NO!!!  And VD Jance throwing the moderators aside so he could pork their chairs won’t matter to anyone!”

  53. 53.

    Scout211

    Want a distraction while we wait for the debate?

    CNN   New York magazine writer Olivia Nuzzi is publicly accusing her ex-fiancé Ryan Lizza, a prominent political journalist with Politico, of orchestrating a harassment and blackmail campaign against her after their split and while Nuzzi had a personal relationship with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

    The accusations — which Nuzzi made in a filing and before a judge in Washington, DC’s Superior Court this week and which he denies — are the latest explosive twist to emerge from the fallout of her previously undisclosed relationship with Kennedy, the former independent presidential candidate, and as the national political press has turned the saga into a discussion of journalism ethics.

    Nuzzi wrote in a court filing that in mid-August, Lizza “explicitly threatened to make public personal information about me to destroy my life, career, and reputation—a threat he has since carried out.”

    . . .

    The court has set the next hearing for October 15, when Lizza will have a chance to appear before the judge and respond.

    Nuzzi said she believes Lizza began his alleged harassment at the beginning of July, as a way to blackmail her back into a relationship with him and punish her when she wouldn’t acquiesce.

    She said by the next month, Lizza had stolen a personal electronic device from her, was hacking her devices, then anonymously shopping information about her to the media. Some of the information may have been “doctored” to hurt her more, Nuzzi alleged, and she believes Lizza impersonated “an anonymous campaign operative” to give a political campaign information that would hurt her further, according to the court records.

    Nuzzi also accused Lizza, potentially “through a third party or anonymous channel,” of tipping off her employer last month about what she calls “the matter.”

  54. 54.

    Bill Arnold

    @pat:

    JD lies. Tim says, that’s a lie. The monitors say time’s up.

    JD lies, a lot.
    Tim says “I counted 7 lies from Mr. JDV. The fact checkers can handle them. [Answer the actual question]”
    Or something.
    I am reasonably confident that they have worked out an approach to the spurts from Firehose of Falsehoods that does not waste time. Pete Buttigieg especially.

  61. 61.

    dmsilev

    My guess is that, like Harris’s debate with Trump, they’ve worked out a strategy for baiting Vance into saying weird and creepy and off-putting things. The approach will be different; Trump is stupid and thin-skinned, Vance is smarter but very arrogant and (as noted at top) about as likable as Ted Cruz. Trapping him in a “I’m smarter than you about …abortion” (for instance) would be likely to yield dividends.

  63. 63.

    cain

    Look ya’lls – it’s not big deal. Trump is watching and supposed to be live tweeting, tooting or whatever passes for flatulence of the mouth and fingers. In any case, keep the same attacks, especially crowd sizes and people leaving. This guy is going to explode is ketchupy goodness. Once that debate is done, he’s going to call a press conference. He’s gotta be the main character.

     

    Just keep hammering home what we do good at and ignore the questions.

  67. 67.

    Redshift

    I’m with you, JC, I can never stand to watch debates, even if I think my candidate is going to do well. I’m probably be hanging around here following along virtually.

  68. 68.

    prostratedragon

    @rikyrah:  The first set of comments there, mostly from Germans, echo cautions a couple of Argentine friends used to impart in the ’80s. One minute you think everything is workable within known parameters, and the next you’re seeing people snatched off city buses. We need to pay attention, vote, and keep paying attention.

  71. 71.

    Tony Jay

    @Captain C:

    “I’m not here to put Senator Vance on the psychiatrist’s couch, I wouldn’t do that to the nation,”

    Snowball’s little pug face reddens

    “but the things Senator Vance says and believes, the things he and Donald Trump say they want to do. It’s all way out there. Sofa (coughs) so far out there. Dangerous stuff. Couch it in whatever code words you like, the question Americans are left with is how does a man talk about women the way he does and not hear himself? The disrespect. The cruelty? Speaking as the father a beautiful daughter and the luckiest husband in the world, I hear it loud and clear. And I’ll tell you, I don’t care for it.”

    Snowball seethes, Walz looks down at his notes, hides a smile. 

  72. 72.

    Captain C

    @Tony Jay: FTFNYT the next day:  “Walz pushes totally false couch rumors about our favorite hillbilly.  Also, we’re totally not biased.”

  73. 73.

    JoyceH

    I’d like to see Walz spend one of his two minutes outlining the damage done to Springfield due to Vance and Trump’s deliberate lies and deliver the punch line in exasperated Dad-Coach mode: “And for cryin’ out loud, the cat was in her owner’s basement all along!”  And somewhere in there point out that when your campaign tactic activates the KKK, that’s the wrong tactic.

  74. 74.

    Bill Arnold

    @rikyrah:
    Ah, the Maddow piece was about Curtis Yarvin’s influence on JD Vance.
    Good. People need to understand that we are not fearmongering about the threat of fascism posed by the current Trump-led GOP.

  75. 75.

    MisterForkbeard

    I’m with JC. I can’t watch debates anymore. It’s just too weird and infuriating to watch one candidate (and it’s always the republican) just lie for 90 minutes and get zero pushback at all. Even in the rare cases where they do get pushback, it’s rare and insufficient: Trump was only (mildly) corrected 4 times in 90 minutes, and he was still given substantially more time to talk than Kamala and was also allowed to rebut her repeatedly when she wasn’t.

    I’ll wait for the commentary. This debate promises to be much worse: Vance is a charismatic black hole, but he also lies cleverly, rapidly and with impunity. I expect the best case here is that he sounds like a mild whackjob but is given the benefit of the doubt, while Walz looks and sounds like a normal dude exasperated with this weird asshole.

  77. 77.

    Tony Jay

    @Captain C:

      NYT OPINION

    …in a departure from his carefully scripted image of avuncular Everyman, Governor Walz fell back on an unpleasant mix of saccharine primness and below the belt salaciousness, leaving the field clear for Senator Vance to rise above his opponent’s tawdry digs and hammer home Republican arguments on the economy, immigration and cultural issues…

  78. 78.

    Miki

    @BretH: I’m a Minnesotan, and that’s the Tim Walz I know. He’s not perfect. He sometimes lets his mouth get ahead of his brain. He could benefit from advice to slow the fuck down.

    But his sparring partner is our beloved wizard Secretary Pete, while Vance’s has been Fucking Tom Emmer.

    I went to law school with Emmer, although our paths never crossed because he just wasn’t one of the cool kids (yeah, I was). He’s a certifiable asshole, politically, and has deservedly lost multiple political battles.

    Choosing a Minnesota Asshole for debate prep proves the incompetence of the team at the same time it reveals their strategy – a shouty flood of name-calling, lying, gish-galloping hate. 

    I hate seeing this done to Walz, but trust he can stand up to it.

  79. 79.

    Captain C

    @Tony Jay:

    Republican arguments on the economy, immigration and cultural issues…

    On page A23, three days later, they report that the economy stuff was all blatant lies, he called for the vigilante death of all immigrants who don’t pass the paper bag test, and demanded that women be stripped of the right to say no, at least to men such as him, and that they be subject to forced pregnancy by any Republican who wants to impregnate them.  Then they never mention it again.  Maga Habs and Pinch the Lesser do a weekend podcast about how unfairly they are treated for being bold, competent truth-tellers.

  80. 80.

    Quantum man

    I know others have said this, but I think it bears repeating. This election is really between Harris and Vance. Trump will not make it through the next 4 years. If he wins the election Vance will be President before 2028. That is a godawful prospect. This likelihood needs to be emphasized as the election gets closer. A Vance presidency would bring horrific changes to this country, none of them good.

  81. 81.

    Anonymous At Work

    I think we’re being too mean to Senators Cruz and Vance.  Think from their perspective.  How would you feel if you never knew if your country could decide it never knew you, never elected you, had no record of you living there, oh well you take him?

  83. 83.

    Snarki, child of Loki

    Walz should bring a hot-dish to the debate.

    Vance is going to bring a hot mess.

  88. 88.

    Omnes Omnibus

    Trump is speaking in Waunakee, WI.  While the Brewers are playing a wild card game.   Great planning.

  89. 89.

    stinger

    @BretH: ​
     I was saying this earlier, that Walz isn’t a newbie when it comes to political debating, but hadn’t seen this article. Thanks!

  92. 92.

    stacib

    @JoyceH: I REALLY hope Walz gets to say that the cat was found in the owner’s basement.  That, of course, hasn’t been reported nearly as loudly as the charges of Haitians eating the cat.

  94. 94.

    PsiFighter37

    Apparently there’s pretty concrete evidence Walz lied repeatedly about being in China during Tiananmen Square (he got there a couple months after). By ‘old’ political standards that would be a career-ender; of course, such standards don’t really exist anymore. But I am really worried that this does lend an element of someone who embellishes things a bit.

  97. 97.

    prostratedragon

    Matthew Seligman, who was an expert witness at Eastman’s disbarrment trial, on the dangers of the GOP veep nominee:

    @JDVance has repeatedly said he would have interfered with the electoral count on Jan. 6, 2021, if he had been VP.

    There can be no doubt that this is part of why he, and not Mike Pence, will debate tonight as Donald Trump’s running mate.
    And there can be no doubt that it makes Vance a grave threat to democracy and the rule of law to whom the American people must deny the power of the vice presidency.

  99. 99.

    Greebe

    Regarding fact-checking the debate:

    “Multiple outlets are reporting the fact-checking will happen online, as opposed to the moderators correcting false statements during the debate itself.

    “As the New York Times explains, the moderators won’t call out false claims during the live debate, but a QR code will show up on your screen. When you scan it, it will take you to the CBS website, where about 20 CBS journalists will post fact-checks of the candidates’ remarks in real time.”

    —source: wkyc.com/article/news/verify/will-cbs-fact-check-vice-presidential-debate-jd-vance-tim-walz-how-to-w…

    The article goes on to note that the QR code will only appear on CBS broadcasts and many people may not understand how the codes work. So It’s effectiveness may be reduced.

  102. 102.

    Jackie

    @karen marie: @Omnes Omnibus:

    “Newly unearthed reports contradict previous claims made by Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz about his travel to China, including a claim that the Democratic vice presidential nominee was in Hong Kong for a teaching position in 1989 during the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests that ended in hundreds of protesters killed by the Chinese government,” CNN reports.

  106. 106.

    Bupalos

    Best thing Walz can do is get VD talking about how and why he makes up lies to manipulate the media. Which VD is shockingly willing to do, because he can’t stand for people to think he’s as stupid as he has to pretend to be.

  107. 107.

    PsiFighter37

    @Steve in the ATL: The easy way out is to blame CNN. But by all accounts, the report is credible, and there is quite hard evidence from local reporting back then that he was still in Nebraska during June.

    It’s peanuts compared to what Trump and Vance lie about every day, but I honestly do not get why people feel the urge to lie about things like this. Same goes for Brian Williams and his tales of close calls in Iraq, too. At a base level, it makes me really uncomfortable that folks are not comfortable in their own skin, with their own experiences

    What is worse, IMO, is that the Harris campaign, when queried, had no response. Clearly this is something that was missed in the vetting process.

  109. 109.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Jackie: It looks as though the evidence shows that he was in Nebraska for a least part of May of 1989.  That neither proves nor disproves Walz’s story.

  111. 111.

    karen marie

    I think Jamison Foser is on to something.

    So why have any of us even heard of this Heartland Hitler? Why is JD Vance, less then two months after his 40th birthday and with only a couple of years’ experience as a corporate lawyer and a few more as a venture capitalist, perhaps only a few months away from being a heartbeat away from the presidency? Because elites in academia, the news media, entertainment, and the tech industry have promoted him like no other candidate in memory — except, perhaps, Trump himself.

    JD Vance is not a “product” of America’s elite institutions so much as he is a creation of them.

    …

    Why is it important to understand how Vance happened? Because the guy is a deeply racist and sexist autocrat on the cusp of power — and he got here in large part because some of the most powerful and influential people in academia, news media, entertainment, and tech saw something in him they were desperate to promote. Merit didn’t have anything to do with it; he hadn’t ever really accomplished anything. They just liked him.

    That’s likely to affect how these industries react to tonight’s vice presidential debate. Only a fool would bet against Elon Musk’s Twitter promoting praise for Vance’s performance. Vance is all but certain to unleash a flood of disingenuous, faux-intellectual bullshit tonight …

  112. 112.

    PsiFighter37

    @Omnes Omnibus: From the NYT article about this: “The Harris-Walz campaign did not offer any official comment for this article on Tuesday, beyond saying it would not dispute that Mr. Walz had spoken erroneously about the timing.”

    Pretty clear-cut. The problem is that this will now give life to any small thing that the right wing has claimed Walz has fibbed about, even if it’s stupid and far-fetched (like ditching the National Guard because they were going to Iraq). It won’t meaningfully move poll numbers, but it will bring down his favorability, which is the highest of the 4 names on both tickets.

  113. 113.

    Chief Oshkosh

    @Scout211: These people really are trash.

    They deserve each other. We don’t deserve them. And I don’t mean that in a good way.

  116. 116.

    Jackie

    @Omnes Omnibus: I haven’t seen Walz’s response; I only posted what was reported by CNN.

    I don’t like the thought that Walz may have said something not accurate, for something so easily verified as true or false.

    This makes me remember that some of Walz’s military career may have been misrepresented.🤷🏼‍♀️

    I don’t like this, but I’ll vote for Harris anyway. //s

  117. 117.

    PsiFighter37

    @Parfigliano: They should put this one on Court TV.

    @Omnes Omnibus: No, but it’s such a stupid small thing to have not vetted for. Of course the vetting process was more rushed than before, but pulling a thread like this means the media is going to be on the hunt to vet every single utterance Walz has ever made – and now I don’t have confidence that there isn’t a ‘there, there’.

    That said, the media also has the attention span of a gnat nowadays, so it may be nothing. I dunno. Perhaps my political sensibilities are stuck in the pre-Trump era.

  118. 118.

    karen marie

    @Jackie:  Misrepresented by who?

    I shouldn’t be but I’m continually amazed that people who should ostensibly know better are so gullible.

  120. 120.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Jackie: His military career was not misrepresented.  He was promoted to CSM and served in that role.  He retired before he attended the Sergeants Major Academy.  As a result, he retired at the rank of Master Sergeant.  Things like this are actually quite common in the military.  One of the most common is a requirement of serving two years at a given rank in order to retire at that rank.  It really only affects retirement pay.  No one denies that the person was a LTC or a CSM.

  123. 123.

    Jackie

    @karen marie: I didn’t follow the circumstances closely, because I didn’t really care – I only vaguely recall Walz might have retired from the NG at a lesser rank than claimed – but it was a technicality? I didn’t go into the deep woods over it – just headline skimming, and it dropped off the media radar AFAIK.

    I actually only remembered because I think Vance was the accuser (another reason I didn’t dwell about it) but it might be brought up during tonight’s debate.

  124. 124.

    Jinchi

    @Greebe: ​
    the moderators won’t call out false claims during the live debate, but a QR code will show up on your screen

    That would have been utterly pointless during the Harris-TFG debate. If Vance starts inciting violence with lies about immigrants, he needs to be called out on it in real time.

  126. 126.

    MisterForkbeard

    @Greebe: It’s effectively NOT fact-checking. It literally won’t show up during the debate for 98% of watchers and certainly not for Vance.

    If they put it up on the screen during the debate, that’d be something else. “This is false. See the website for details” would be fine – though I suspect you’d get a lot of “this is a little false” notes for Walz when he says something totally anodyne and the media would just jump on it.

  127. 127.

    MisterForkbeard

    @PsiFighter37: I have a hard problem caring. “I was in the country the same time and had to decide to stay or not” or “I was about to go and had to decide if I was going to stay or not” doesn’t matter at all.

    If he’s asked about it, that’s what he should say. He’s sorry he got a detail wrong, but it doesn’t matter and doesn’t affect anything he’s ever said about it.

  128. 128.

    Ceci n est pas mon nym

    We are in the middle of evaluating long-term care insurance and considering various end-of-life issues (not for any particular reason; the entire point is to think this stuff through while we’re healthy and insurable). So we’ve had some kind of depressing conversations.

    Maybe I’ll look for something on TV tonight to cheer me up, like maybe a political debate or something.

    (We’re actually still wavering on watching. Not sure if it will be fun to watch Walz pummel Vance, or whether Vance will be completely unwatchable. We’ll probably give it 5-10 minutes before deciding.)

  132. 132.

    frosty

    @Ceci n est pas mon nym: We are in the middle of evaluating long-term care insurance and considering various end-of-life issues (not for any particular reason; the entire point is to think this stuff through while we’re healthy and insurable). So we’ve had some kind of depressing conversations.

    Same here. Looking at CCRCs, just heard about Continuing Care At Home. Our issue is that the only bathroom with a shower is on the second floor, and eventually stairs will be an issue so we’ll have to move. You’re right, it’s depressing. OTOH we’re both healthy enough to talk about it so there’s that.

  133. 133.

    Gloria DryGarden

    @prostratedragon: @rikyrah:  The first set of comments there, mostly from Germans, echo cautions a couple of Argentine friends used to impart in the ’80s. One minute you think everything is workable within known parameters, and the next you’re seeing people snatched off city buses. We need to pay attention, vote, and keep paying attention.

    Now you make me want to watch that Rachel m clip above. Holy fuck. I was across the river in Montevideo in 76-77, right after a military takeover. I heard some stories, of people who escaped just in time, stories only told after dark, at night, in the middle of a street while walking, so we weren’t in a place to be overheard. And I met an Uruguayan in Europe, who got let out of some kind of political detention for a day, and he said he threw himself into the French embassy, and got out of there.
    these stories of disappeared people are very real for me.
    there are more echoes, too.  One day in buenos Aires , across the river, 50 Jewish people were found dead on a street corner. At the time, nothing like it had happened near me in the USA, in my lifetime. (That I was aware of)
    we can’t have this shit happening here. And where it already has been, there’s so much fighting we need.

    so that man talking about an hour of really rough violence, to fix all crime…. And the echo of kristallnacht..

    (is he talking about himself, saying violence is the only way to resolve a problem?)
    There are so many directions to go on a rant about it. Missing native women. Racism violence. Domestic violence, where an hour of beatings hasn’t solved anything yet.

    I’ll hope for a lovely salient debate summary on Colbert, later.

  134. 134.

    Gloria DryGarden

    @frosty: my sister built a first floor apartment in her house, converted her living room, put in a bathroom w shower, and a ramp. My dad helped pay for it, and that 50k was well spent. They lived there 10 years, hospice at home. Way better than 6-7 k /month for assisted living.
    I’m so grateful my sister and my parents had the resources to take that on.

    I hope you find some good options.

  135. 135.

    wjca

    @Jackie: I only vaguely recall Walz might have retired from the NG at a lesser rank than claimed – but it was a technicality?

    He served as a command sergeant major.  However, because he didn’t complete a couple of the classes required to make that rank permanent, he retired as a sergeant major.  The fact that the rank wasn’t “permanent” doesn’t change the fact that he held it, and served in that capacity.

  136. 136.

    wjca

    I’m really hoping Walz will complement Vance on how much bigger his crowds are than Trump’s.   Watch Vance contort himself into a pretzel trying to insist that his are smaller.  Meanwhile Trump will be going ape inline.

  137. 137.

    Jackie

    @wjca: Thanks. I appreciate the explanations explaining the “so called GQP controversy.” I understood it was just a lot of smoke blowing by Vance and MAGA, so I didn’t pay it much mind at the time. This Tiananmen Square debacle just reminded me of it, and I trust Walz will clarify anything that needs clarifying – IF there’s any clarifying needed.

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