October's supermoon pairs with a comet for a special nighttime spectacle https://t.co/w7yvTAvS8t
— The Associated Press (@AP) October 16, 2024
Biden: He's become unhinged. Look at his rallies … last night, he stood on the stage for 30 minutes and danced. I'm serious! What's wrong with this guy?
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.bsky.social) October 15, 2024 at 8:06 PM
.?@KamalaHarris? takes the rare step of playing clips from Donald Trump’s rallies and interviews to underscore her argument that he is dangerous for the United States. pic.twitter.com/ERkrklvuon
— Jeff Mason (@jeffmason1) October 15, 2024
Gov. Walz: Trump just crossed a line that I have to tell you, in my lifetime, I would have never imagined. He said he would deploy the military against Americans who disagree with him. He called it the 'enemy within.' To Donald Trump, anybody who doesn't agree with him is the… pic.twitter.com/aL37tWX7yz
— Kamala HQ (@KamalaHQ) October 14, 2024
If you're feeling anxious about the election, it's because the stakes are very high, and the historical inflection point is getting closer.
It's not because the odds have worsened. If you feel like they have, the main factor is your social media feed, not anything concrete.
I strongly second this??— Nicholas Grossman (@nicholasgrossman.bsky.social) October 15, 2024 at 11:00 AM
why does this remind of the 2008 voter profiled in the Guardian who said "we're voting for the [RACIAL SLUR]" in PA
— Sharon Kuruvilla (@sharonk.bsky.social) October 14, 2024 at 6:16 PM
A discussion about The Polls:
Incredible. ~94% of TIPP’s Philadelphia poll respondents said they were very or somewhat likely to vote. And TIPP’s response was “yea, but you’re not a white college-educated person over 40.” and thus screened 90% of those respondents out. https://t.co/ABHo6Zdi8M
— Ethan C7 (@ECaliberSeven) October 11, 2024
Flooding the zone in 2022 did NOT move the averages a point to the right in battlegrounds
On 538, it moved the NH Senate race 7 points to the right, Pennsylvania 5 points to the right, and Arizona 4 points to the right and in all three races the pre-flooding results were correct https://t.co/MTZvsurXAi
— Swann Marcus (@SwannMarcus89) October 11, 2024
This matters because the right is doing this for a reason
They are doing this for propaganda purposes. Now, I don't know what the result will be (maybe it helps the Democrats by increasing urgency) but aggregators should not be enabling a right-wing propaganda campaign
— Swann Marcus (@SwannMarcus89) October 11, 2024
If you want to get real conspiratorial, they can goose the numbers to make it appear Trump will win, it helps him claim fraud if he loses.
— Chasing Ennui (@rwlesq) October 11, 2024
Mr. Mack
As is our habit, my wife and I and our two grown children heading out to early vote together here in Tennessee.
Baud
The media heard libs say “Act like we’re 10 points down” and decided to cater to our desires.
Quantum man
Just voted! We live in a super red state so the state’s EV will go to you know who (the orange Voldemort). But our vote goes to Harris/Walz!!!
Jackie
TCFG’s Faux town hall is at 11:00 Blog Time, on The Faulkner Focus. How soon will he start insulting and threatening the all-women audience?
narya
IMHO, they should start saying “and JDivan Vance is even more extreme than TCFG.” AT this point, no one thinks TCFG is going to make it through a term if elected, and Divan WOULD be at least as bad, possibly worse.
different-church-lady
Loose thought: might be the garbage polls are the result of polling slowly becoming entertainment. The polling outfits are more concerned that the product gets consumed than with accuracy.
Mousebumples
Thanks for all this news, AL. And thanks to everyone for voting! Our ballots have been accepted here in Wisconsin.
I finished my 300 Postcards to Swing States for Wisconsin last night. Not supposed to mail until late next week, but I might anticipate a few days… Because USPS/DeJoy.
Next I’ll be writing some follow up postcards for a local Assembly candidate. 😊
JML
The proper way to handle poll flooding is to take the batch of polls that are all dropping at once, aggregate THOSE, and then add them to the model as if they were a single poll. Simple solution to flooding the zone that still accounts for the activity but doesn’t give it improper weight.
Sometimes these things aren’t actually that hard.
lowtechcyclist
Good morning, y’all.
Dorothy A. Winsor
I’ll walk over to the post office in a little while and mail 75 postcards to voters in Wisconsin. It’s a cold but beautiful morning.
satby
His trip to Chicago was a disaster too.
catclub
I like the portent of Georgia massive early voting.
I bet the media will ignore the second day of it.
OId Man Shadow
I just can’t put my trust in the American voters, so the anxiety won’t stop until it’s over and he’s lost and any rebellious supporters he has are arrested and held without bail.
Mousebumples
Jackie
YAY! Michelle!
Soprano2
I spoke privately to the economist at the luncheon I attended yesterday. I told him I refrained from asking the question “What effect would 60% or 100% tariffs and the deportation of 10 million people have on the economy in the next four years?” because I knew that wouldn’t be a popular question in this crowd. He told me they think TCFG’s proposals are so ludicrous they will never happen even if he’s elected. What could I say to that other than “I think you’re wrong”. Evidently most of the professionals are discounting the effects of what he would do because they don’t think those things will happen. I was tempted to ask him what he thought about renewal of the TCFG tax cuts, but other people were waiting to talk to him so I didn’t.
New Deal democrat
As I’ve written a couple of times, Harris’s biggest challenge is to jerk the spotlight away from Trump (and his relentless focus on immigration, his best, and only, good issue), and break through to focus on her strengths vs. his weaknesses.
Playing clips from his rally to focus on his apparent cognitive decline does that effectively (I approve!). This is the second good adjustment in strategy to change the subject of the election in two days (the other being doing interviews with RW leaning popular venues).
TBone
Every time I see the word “poll” now, my eyes glaze over before rolling back in my head.
Jay
@different-church-lady:
cmorenc
@satby: Yes, but some in the audience were actually applauding Trump’s “weaving” non-responses and nonsensical assertions. Which makes me wonder whether the “Economic Club of Chicago” might be a decidedly RW-leaning organization (wasn’t arch-conservative economist Milton Friedman a faculty member at the University of Chicago?).
Almost Retired
@Soprano2: Ugh, the tired refrain that “Trump won’t actually do [insert extremist nonsense) if elected.” If there’s any takeaway from the former Administration officials making the cable news and book tour rounds, he will absolutely do [insert extremist nonsense] this time around.
TBone
@Jackie: someone (Geminid?) said downstairs that the “town hall” was actually pre-recorded yesterday, it is not live today. So Faux Snewz has had all this time to have their way with it in the editing department.
Yarrow
Saw this yesterday and wondered how much this might be true and be part of why people say “the economy sucks.”
Steve LaBonne
Another thing about the new Marist and TIPP polls is that they show Trump still stuck at around 46-47%. He has hit his very hard ceiling but Harris still has room to grow.
The Audacity of Krope
Don’t forget drugs, drugs didn’t forget me.
Wanderer
@Mousebumples: Well done.
TBone
@Yarrow: that, and the cult hews to their talking points without fail or variation.
They don’t get any other information about anything whatsoever.
Hubby spoke with an old friend yesterday, a bestie from days gone by, a nurse who is reasonably educated and nice. But the cult has swallowed her whole thanks to Fux Snews.
Despite the evidence of her own eyes, she sticks to the talking points on every issue.
schrodingers_cat
The Republican Party is the new Know Nothing Party.
schrodingers_cat
@Soprano2: No one thought that GC holders wouldn’t be able to return home from vacation after Trump was elected.
I remember the chaos following his Muslim ban.
narya
Also, completely off topic: the Consumer Product Safety Commission’s feed on Bluesky is both helpful AND amusing.
TBone
@schrodingers_cat: 👍 not a shred of sanity or curiosity.
different-church-lady
@Yarrow: Everyone has 400 bucks to bet on the score of a football game, but nobody has 4 dollars for eggs.
Soprano2
@Almost Retired: I wish I had asked the question during the Q&A “Can you please clarify for all of us a) who pays tariffs and b) what effect they have on the economy?” That would have been a constructive but less explosive question.
Steve LaBonne
@Almost Retired: And he can raise tariffs without needing control of Congress.
Yarrow
This piece is really good. It’s about family and women and reproductive rights and care in Texas. Warning, it can be a bit difficult to read. It could give one hope about voting patterns in Texas.
https://thebarbedwire.com/2024/10/09/she-voted-for-trump-then-she-had-two-terrifying-miscarriages-in-texas/
lowtechcyclist
@Yarrow:
Interesting if true, but I’d like to see some substantiation that this affects more than a single-digit percentage of adult white males. But I really don’t know what we can do about people who are ready to fall for ‘double your money in thirty days’ type scams. They want money without having to work for it. And during the past two or three years, there have been opportunities aplenty if you don’t mind working.
twbrandt
Re: the last cartoon. As a Michigan grad, I immediately thought of Michigan Stadium rather than prison when I saw “Big House”. Confused me for a second.
lowtechcyclist
@schrodingers_cat:
If only! Straightforward ignorance can be rectified. But the GOP is really the Know Less Than Nothing Party. It’s the things their followers know that aren’t true that is the problem.
Yarrow
@schrodingers_cat: The green card holder in my family was terrified to leave the US after that happened. Wouldn’t even consider it for the next year. Figured they might never get back in. And this person is in a demo and from a country that would be one of the last on the list to be targeted.
Geminid
@cmorenc: I suspect Trump’s campaign was allowed to pack the Economic Club audience with supporters.
The Audacity of Krope
They know what they believe and what they believe is that they can assert what they “know” and impose it over reality itself.
Mousebumples
@Wanderer: it took me like a month and a half, but productivity! Thanks.
schrodingers_cat
@Yarrow: Yeah my immigration lawyer advised me to cancel my trip to India out of an abundance of caution that May. I had applied for naturalization the evening before Trump took office and even had my interview date by then.
ETA: Despite not being a Muslim or a citizen of the countries that the ban targeted.
Baud
@lowtechcyclist:
Or if you mind working, you could have just invested in the Biden stock market.
Aziz, light!
I start every reading day not with BJ but with electoral-vote.com, whose authors provide a knowledgable and highly nuanced take on polling results. They show the race to be too close to call. But polling, accurate or not, does not reveal turnout. In a country in which, historically, only 50 to 60 percent of voters cast votes in presidential years, polling is a significantly compromised measure for predicting outcomes.
I’m fine with Dem voters panicking about the swing state polls if it prompts them to crawl over broken glass, etc. to get their voices heard, and am hopeful that this year will be a resounding chorus.
Chris
@Soprano2:
“Is this or is it not the same thing you would’ve told me on any day through 01/05/2021 if I told you that Trump was going to try to overthrow the government?”
Nora
@Yarrow: That is a harrowing article, and the woman in it was one of the lucky ones for whom doctors were willing to make the exception. You know there are many more who aren’t so lucky.
It shouldn’t be a matter of luck. You shouldn’t have to risk your life because you got pregnant in the wrong state.
The Audacity of Krope
Never tell me the odds.
Baud
@Aziz, light!:
If you take out the garbage polls and accept the margin of error in the rest as legitimate, the range of outcomes extends from a loss to a blowout win. You really don’t even have to unskew.
Yarrow
@schrodingers_cat: Two of my neighbors who are naturalized citizens from different US-ally European countries also canceled trips. Everyone I talked to who wasn’t a born-in-America citizen was either nervous or afraid. One is married to a US-born American citizen who is an immigration lawyer. That’s the decision they made.
Baud
@Chris:
Or end abortion rights.
Ironcity
@Jackie: If it’s 1100 eastern he will not have started sunsetting yet so just being his “normal” self 2 or 3 substantive/obvious questions that he will give stump speech replies to, then his train of thought will jump the tracks and it will be word salad after. Threats will begin maybe 15 minutes into the program. Who is recording it or hopefully doing the Cliffs Notes for the BJ jackals?
rikyrah
Good Morning Everyone 😊 😊 😊
Steve LaBonne
@Yarrow: I was terrified for my ex-wife, a naturalized citizen from India. And I will be again if the worst happens.
Baud
@rikyrah:
Good morning.
schrodingers_cat
@Yarrow: Ds have been winning the vote of the naturalized citizens handily.
Trump also made it difficult for people coming here on tourist visas and long term visas like student visas or work visas. The interview schedule is still not back to normal in India. One has to wait for 2 years to get a visa interview
ETA: My friend’s son who was then 10 asked if he was an anchor baby. His parents hadn’t become citizens when he was born.
Yarrow
@Nora: Absolutely. Colin Allred really hammered Ted Cruz on this issue last night.
“So, to every Texas woman at home and every Texas family watching this, understand that, when Ted Cruz says he’s pro-life, he doesn’t mean yours.”
Jackie
@New Deal democrat: Harris agrees with you:
Nora
@Yarrow: That’s a great line, and accurate, too. Do you think it’s worth sending money to him? I would love to see Cruz go down in flames.
matt
Here’s an article about Trump’s disastrous interview with Economic Club of Chicago yesterday. Trump’s only idea on economic policy is tariffs. The whole interview is worth watching. https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-lashes-live-fact-checks-201400416.html
Jackie
@TBone: True, but it’ll still be worth a peek, IMO.
Harris has a sit down interview with Bret Baier airing today, recorded earlier. I also plan to watch it. 🤷🏼♀️
TBone
For my only surviving aunt’s 80th birthday on Nov. 4, I am sending beautifully framed portrait photos of my cousin (her daughter) posing with Tim Walz and Gwen Walz at the pumpkin patch farm where they met, along with another family photo. My cousin said my aunt doesn’t usually get photos printed (they stay on her phone) so I think she’ll really like these! She lives in New Hampshire and was a dyed in the wool hippie.
catclub
But why risk letting him get in and finding out he will do those things? The usual ‘Trump adjustment’… he doesn’t really mean it.
TBone
@Jackie: good plan! I’ll be doing the same. 💙
Marmot
For your edification, here’s Rick Perlstein’s rundown of the problems with polling though the last ~100 years!
https://prospect.org/politics/2024-09-25-polling-imperilment/
And who writes like this?
Oh, does it “remind”? Maybe it “reminds one”? You’re so fancy and upscale! Gross. (Not you, AL!)
catclub
@Jackie: CNN casts this as ‘Harris throwing out the script in panic’. I am not so sure.
The Audacity of Krope
I cast that as CNN being an operation run by dipshits. YMMV.
satby
@cmorenc: yes, it is and Friedman was. But the news is that in a “friendly” setting it still was a fiasco, enough for him to whine about bias. And scattered applause from cultists probably won’t balance off the others who take economic policies seriously.
Mousebumples
@Nora: you know your budget better, but I think less expensive races (eg Nebraska, Montana) are better bets. I know WaterGirl has been fundraising for North Carolina recently, but I don’t think they have a Senate race this year.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Steve LaBonne:
Yeah, that’s been a constant for a good while and people tend to overlook that fact. It’s depressing that that number of people in this country will vote like that but it’s always been a hard ceiling of support.
As someone said in a thread yesterday, it’s probably a given that Harris will win the popular vote. The only way the Orange Fart Cloud gets in, again, is by the antiquated Electoral College, again.
Baud
@catclub:
I can’t believe she went from hiding behind her script to throwing it out in panic.
Ironcity
@Marmot: Could it be AI we could blame? Or just illiterate as well?
satby
@matt: I totally waste my time here, don’t I?
UncleEbeneezer
I can’t find the tweet now, but I saw something this morning saying that early-voting in Philly (I think) showed 14% of voters didn’t vote in 2020. Also, GA first day of early voting shattered previous record. No guarantees obviously, but big turnout is generally good for our chances.
Jackie
@lowtechcyclist:
I think they’re The Know Better, but Don’t Care Party.
As long as the GQP can regain POWER, they don’t care who gets hurt – if they’re in the way of the GQP achieving it.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Marmot:
The Perlstein piece is a great read, not surprisingly.
Plus he uses the word “epigones” in relation to noted hack, Silver.
lowtechcyclist
@Yarrow:
Truth.
We all know the ‘pro-life’ movement doesn’t give a damn about the life of anyone that’s already been born. They don’t care if people are slaughtered by gunfire, or if Covid-19 kills over a million here and tens of millions worldwide, or if Russia bombs apartment complexes and shopping centers where people live and shop in Ukraine every day, or if Israel slaughters tens of thousands of noncombatants in Gaza.
And so it’s not the least bit surprising that they don’t give a damn about the lives of pregnant persons, and would put them in jeopardy just because. Like fanatics of all stripes, their principles, if they can be called that, are more important to them than the lives of flesh-and-blood human beings. They are an abomination.
Geminid
@schrodingers_cat: The Republican Party has been home to the reactionary, nativist Know Nothings ever since 1860. That’s when the American “Know Nothing” Party dissolved itself and most of its members joined the new Republican Party.
Their ideology survived the following decades, and animated the Taft Republicans who were defeated by Eisenhower in 1952. But the Know Nothings were just down then, not out. Now it’s the Eisenhower Republicans who are in retreat
Booger
@cmorenc: IIRC, the Chicago School of Economics is referred to as ‘brownwater economics,’ which I assumed was because it’s so full of bullshit.
Chris
@The Audacity of Krope:
Yeah, I mean.
The thing is that Democrats will make mistakes and stupid calls and sometimes even panic, but it can be hard to take this sort of analysis seriously when literally everything a Democrat does is treated by the media as a mistake, and preferably the kind of mistake that implies concerning things about their state of mind.
(“Panicky woman panics,” of course, is a story that writes itself in our still-misogynistic-as-hell culture).
TBone
CNN interview with Omarosa. It would be irresponsible not to speculate about the heart stent:
https://crooksandliars.com/2024/10/omarosa-says-trump-was-showing-cognitive
Covid nearly killed him (but not nearly enough for me).
Ironcity
@Baud: She didn’t throw the game plan out. It’s always the game plan to take advantage of the opposing team’s weaknesses. TCFG has a number of them to exploit and using his own BS spewing is so fine.
Marmot
@Aziz, light!:
I’m not disagreeing with the sentiment, but I happened to check the TX 2020 turnout the other day: ~67%, with Austin at 72% and Dallas closer to the state average with 68%. Dem areas vote harder. Or at least, they did in 2020.
Hell yeah.
HumboldtBlue
This sort of shit is my concern:
SatanicPanic
I’m ignoring the polls. Everyone who still hasn’t made up their mind is probably waiting for the letters in their alphabet soup to tell them how to vote.
Soprano2
@catclub: What’s particularly bad about this is that he should be knowledgeable enough to know that TCFG doesn’t need Congress to raise tariffs or to start mass roundups of immigrants. For some things you can make the argument that he can’t do them without the cooperation of Congress, but not for these things.
FWIW I certainly don’t think he’s a TCFG supporter based on the fact that his presentation was fact-based; he said the economy is doing well.
TBone
@Jackie: it’s time!
“Murderers!”
I already want to light these brainwashed women on fire.
Chris
@Geminid:
Yeah, it’s kind of sad. On the one hand, it’s a good thing that out of all the political parties that were born around that time period, the Republicans (anti-slavery and pro-immigration) are the one that endured. But on the other hand, they were hobbled pretty early on by the fact that the Know-Nothings had nowhere left to go but into the Republican Party, which quickly started dragging it down in a nativist direction.
KatKapCC
@Yarrow: No one fucking forced them to do it. Man up, pathetic little crybabies.
karen marie
@Geminid: I’d guess it’s more a matter of it being a self-selected group. People who support him would be first in line. People who don’t have better ways to spend their time.
Marmot
@schrodingers_cat:
That’s reassuring. The few recent citizens who’ve offered their presidential choice to me while I was doing nonpartisan voter registration — they’ve all been Trumpers. That’s probably because they want to show they’re not like you’d expect. Oh they’re so special.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@Ironcity: I’m impressed at how she does runs around the legacy media who are trying to control the narrative. When they wouldn’t cover the increasing dementia TFG was showing at rallies, she started saying “watch his rallies yourself” and now showing video of the meltdown.
Resulr? A couple of mainstream media outlets are reluctantly starting to mention it. Because it was already news.
Chief Oshkosh
@Yarrow: Problem is, they never, ever, ever understand that the leopards will eat their faces, too. I’m glad she survived to vote another day, and hopefully vote for Harris, but, you know, fuck ‘er.
KatKapCC
@Marmot: I mean…pretty sure the person just mistakenly left out the word “me”.
lowtechcyclist
@Jackie:
It depends. The cultists are Know Less Than Nothing. Even to the extent they know their bullshit is bullshit, they neither know nor care what’s true.
The people like Mitch McConnell are Know Better but Don’t Care. But there’s fewer of that sort all the time. The Tea Party midterm of 2010 was a watershed, AFAICT, when people who’d been absorbing the propaganda of Rush and Newt for two decades got into Congress in large numbers. Now the ‘governing’ class of the GOP has too many Marsha Blackburns and MTGs, who either believe the propaganda, or don’t care whether it’s true or not as long as it can be wielded as a political weapon. Know Less Than Nothing.
Bruce K in ATH-GR
@Ironcity: Yeah, “capitalizing on the enemy’s mistakes” is kind of understood to be part of the plan. Granted, there’s the school of thought that goes “don’t interrupt the enemy when he’s making a mistake”, but that’s contradicted by the maxim of “when the enemy’s drowning, throw him an anchor”.
The Audacity of Krope
Motivated reasoning will get you to the conclusion you want every time. It’s fool proof!
Booger
Alright kids, I just jumped on the BlueSky bandwagon. Who should I follow?
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Chief Oshkosh:
Also too, nowhere in that piece does it say how she’ll vote the rest of the ticket. A vote for Rafael “Calgary!” “Ted” Cruz would be the height of cognitive dissonance in her case but nobody ever presses people like her on that issue.
Baud
@Booger:
What’s your nym there?
Steve LaBonne
@The Audacity of Krope: Admitting that she’s running an excellent campaign would blow up their whole world view. Democrats are always in disarray.
Chief Oshkosh
@Baud:
Yep. And consider ignoring your financial adviser a bit. Most FAs that I’ve come across are Republicans. They just cannot “believe” that Democratic policies are going to benefit the stock market (even if it’s just a ‘side-effect’), and so they are overly-conservative in their advice during Democratic administrations. Providing financially conservative advice is OK, but only to a point, and that point is when confirmation bias results in advice that produces mediocre outcomes in a time of soaring gains, and gains that were (and are) predictable if one takes a hard, cold look at previous performance.
Sure Lurkalot
@catclub:
While on the other hand, Trump fans support him because “he tells it like it is” and “he says what I’m thinking.”
Trivia Man
Nebraska courts: a felon who has served their time may vote
Good news for democracy
Chris
@Ceci n est pas mon nym:
I don’t know if it’ll work, but my God, I’m glad she’s trying. The MSM’s an utterly toxic factor in any presidential campaign and it’s turned into one of the biggest factors hobbling Democrats. Figuring out how to end-run around them is absolutely essential, and it’s good to know that the people at the top of the campaign understand that.
lowtechcyclist
@Bruce K in ATH-GR:
Of course, the issue is that a political mistake is often only a mistake if the public finds out about it. “Don’t interrupt” is fine if the media’s already covering it, but if they’re not, then gotta throw that anchor by getting the word out ourselves. And that’s what the Harris campaign is doing.
Geminid
@lowtechcyclist: I thought Bush’s stupid and destructive Iraq war was one of the indirect causes of the Tea Party’s dominance in the last decade. Bush managed to discredit the Party’s Internatiinalist establishment. And the war also drove a number of moderate Republicans and Independents away from the party and that weakened the estsblishment’s position even more.
Marmot
@KatKapCC:
Nope. It’s preciousness. You’ll see it all over the place, once you start looking. Then you can’t un-see it.
matt
@satby: I watched the interview. Trump sounded as clueless as you can get. He really has no other ideas about economic policy except that we should raise tariffs.
Melancholy Jaques
@Chief Oshkosh:
Not sure if it was his politics or his dismal outlook on like, but my former FA spent two and half years telling me that the deep recession was just a month away. I coulda shoulda dumped him sooner.
Reminds me of the old one about economists correctly predicting nine of the last five recessions.
Trivia Man
@Dorothy A. Winsor: thank you. I believe postcards helped in our supreme court election and we are already reaping benefits
Steve LaBonne
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: And the legacy media will never ever admit that she’s reaching many more potential voters via social media and podcasts than she possibly could by talking to them. That would bring them face to face with their own irrelevance. CNN doesn’t have a fucking clue about what the campaign is doing.
TBone
@matt: I’m watching the Faux Snewz pre-recorded and probably heavily edited “town hall.” His many economic statements so far, while sensical, are spewing lies so fast I can’t keep up watching or I might vomit. He has not mentioned tariffs yet. He is taking credit for everything good Dems have done.
Yarrow
@Chief Oshkosh: Gah. I hate this sort of reaction. Did you read the article? People learn and grow. This woman did. We need people like her.
Steve LaBonne
@Yarrow: Though it would be nice if they could be motivated by watching the leopards eating other people’s faces rather than waiting until it was their turn.
Chris
@lowtechcyclist:
IMHO, this is possibly the best definition of fascism, at least in purely technical terms. Fascism is what happens when the crazies who for decades have been absorbing the identity-based bullshit that conservatives were flooding the zone with, finally lose faith in the conservatives and go into politics for themselves.
For the OG, it was a hundred years of anti-Semitism and other popular prejudices, shaped into conspiracy theories, and merged with anti-liberal and anti-socialist politics, by the conservative elites that were desperately looking for ways to turn the people against the democratizing trend… followed by the gut-punch of World War One and, if that hadn’t been enough, the Great Depression.
For the modern generation and in the United States, it’s a half-century of Southern Strategy politics put out by the Republican Party, followed by their crisis of faith when the Bush administration turned out to be an utter disaster that set the stage for a black president – which, in their mind, they square by explaining that Bush wasn’t a real conservative, that the entire GOP was shot through with RINO traitors, and that real conservatives had to be elected to replace them.
It’s why I was diagnosing the teabagger movement as fascist or at best protofascist at the time it emerged, in a way that I never had the Bush administration. The teabaggers are the transition point from conservatism to fascism.
scav
@Melancholy Jaques: Most economists remind me fundamentally of nothing so much as astrologers in that they really really believe in their theories and don’t much care about actual planets. Oh, and they both make a metric shitload of predictions.
Baud
@Yarrow:
I don’t.
TBone
@Melancholy Jaques: my FA is of dubious politics BUT has cut through every lie he’s heard. He laughed when I brought up the promised recession, and that’s the day I decided he’s a keeper.
Yarrow
@Steve LaBonne: Sure. But people are complicated. Different people learn differently. Take the win.
KatKapCC
@Marmot: Okay, well, you’ve apparently decided to make up your mind about a person based on one sentence, but I scrolled her Bluesky feed and every other post I saw that she wrote sounds 100% like normal conversational language. But I guess go ahead and make judgments if it makes you feel better for some reason.
Yarrow
@Baud: So you’re still a newborn? Who’s doing the typing for you?
Marmot
@Yarrow: Speaking of this kind of thing, a friend mentioned some article in the Atlantic about conservatives only caring about an issue if someone they love is affected. My standard example is Newt being pro-gay people, at least nominally, because he has a gay daughter. (Or sure, maybe that’s just coincidence!)
I’d love to read it, but I can’t find it.
Baud
@Yarrow:
I have people.
Chris
@Chief Oshkosh:
It’s seriously concerning for society that we’re increasingly at a point where the most reliable guide to whether you can trust someone on basic facts is “are they a Republican or not.” Not just in their general worldview or how they vote, but even on the things that are supposed to be their area of expertise.
cmorenc
@TBone:
Here’s hoping that Harris’s team was able to extract a commitment by Baier / Fox to have a verbatim complete video of the entire interview, just in case Fox’s editing department tries to show only deceptive edits.
Ohio Mom
Just came back from voting early. I feel so light, like a load has been lifted off my shoulders. I was not expecting to feel that way and I am enjoying it.
Baud
@Ohio Mom:
👍
Captain C
@lowtechcyclist:
I’ve read this elsewhere, and there’s something to it. Before that election, most Republicans, while happily spouting whatever Gingrich-esque bullshit they felt they needed to get elected, understood that you had to do a bare minimum to at least keep the lights on. But in 2010, the teabaggers who got in took all that extremist rhetoric seriously, considered all Democrats enemies and traitors, and didn’t remember a time when Republicans knew that they at least had to pass a budget, and thus made it much harder to govern as a sane party.
TBone
@TBone: per Atrios, who gift linked WaPo Philip Bump:
It continues at the link.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/10/15/heres-how-donald-trump-will-lower-grocery-prices/
When he started in on Vanky being his advisor on the Child Tax Credit I had to nope out.
Sure Lurkalot
That Musk reportedly donated $75 million to his PAC which is supposedly illegally coordinating with the candidate doesn’t seem to cause much of a ripple in our money is free speech, corporations are people regime. Why, one of our justices opined that the Citizens United case would “not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.”
But at least it warranted a mention or two here and there in our media landscape. What didn’t warrant mention is that Musk could donate $75 million dollars per day for about 9 years for his pet political subversions. It’s hard for democracies to thrive or even survive with that outsized supposedly legal influence.
Anoniminous
@Soprano2:
The utter cluelessness of our public “intellectuals” (sic) is enraging. They said the same about some dude in Germany in 1933.
Jay
@Yarrow:
Sadly, for the “Conservatively Inclined”, they sometimes only briefly “learn”, when the Leopards Eat Their Face or someone close to them.
Few ever change.
Then you have Steve Scalise.
Or The Lincoln Project.
Marmot
@KatKapCC: You’ve never seen that syntax? Like, ever? Friend, I don’t want to insult you, but “in future” you will curse me for pointing it out.
TS
@lowtechcyclist:
They are told over and over that “anyone can make good in America” – so when they don’t they go looking for the scams – or vote for trump who will get rid of all those others taking their money, so they will reach the American dream.
Steve LaBonne
@Anoniminous: Fascists offer the ownership class and their “intellectual” toadies a lot of what they want, and they’re too short-sighted to look beyond that. Historically this has happened every time. They don’t get it until it’s too late, and then they mostly conform meekly to the new order.
Captain C
@Chris:
I think Rove (Mr. One-Party-Rule-Forever) and Gingrich (Let’s use rhetoric straight out of the Nazi playbook) and Limbaugh (see Gingrich) and their ilk had a lot to do with paving the way. The teabaggers were the natural result.
Jackie
@TBone: Faulkner is struggling to keep him on subject. He started “the weave” immediately; subject was economy – he went to the wall and illegal immigrants.
Faulkner’s expressions…! 🙄😬😳
narya
@Booger: I’m @gingerchef; if you go to my list, you can see whom I follow. Also, there’s a Jackals feed; I forget who can add you to that.
West of the Rockies
@lowtechcyclist:
The Wilfully Stupid Party.
Chris
@matt:
I’m increasingly wondering if “tariffs” isn’t just an all-purpose magic word that conservatives are taught to use for all circumstances in which they have no answer?
What was the Civil War really about? “Tariffs!”
How are we going to pay for XYZ? “Tariffs!”
Mr. Trump, what is your economy policy? “Tariffs!”
Steve LaBonne
@TS: Huge and rising inequality is what is powering the rise of the far right all around the world. It’s much easier for ordinary people to blame (and be propagandized to blame) the “other” for the way they’re falling behind than to understand that billionaires give less than a shit about them and profit from grinding them into the dust. We are at levels of wealth inequality at which democracy is on life support.
Booger
@Baud:boogertom.bsky.social
Steve LaBonne
@Chris: His brain has turned to oatmeal. He can’t hold more than a very small handful of ideas in his head, and on economics tariffs are the one that happened to stick.
Jeffro
@TBone: he (trumpov) always does his addled best to sound like a smart person, doesn’t he? but then his brain gets in the way LOL
H.E.Wolf
It’s Dick Cheney you’re thinking of. :)
thylacine
@Yarrow: Allred was en fuego last night.
Jeffro
I’m glad to hear that Harris is “sharpening” her attacks on trumpov by making a point to show clips of him babbling, doing the blessed ‘weave’ at his rallies, etc.
trump unfiltered and un-sane-washed is the best argument for not electing trump, period.
Chris
@Yarrow:
In college, I once handily won a game of Bullshit by repeatedly putting cards down, truthfully stating what they were, waiting for one of my friends to call bullshit, and then leaving her stuck with the cards.
This happened five or six times in the same game before one of her friends finally exploded. “WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING!!! Even a fucking lab rat would’ve learned by now! They know you don’t keep eating the cheese that gives you the electric shocks!”
cmorenc
@matt:
Actually, that’s only half of his one idea about economic policy. The other is that the income from increased tariffs can be used to replace the massive lowering (or elimination) of income taxes (particularly those by higher-income people).
Marmot
@Chris:
I would fucking love see the correlation between Bob Altemeyer’s (sp?) “Double-high” authoritarians and the “governing class” GOP you’re talking about. And the correlation between the dipshit Tea Party members and Altemeyer’s “authoritarian followers.”
Don’t forget roiling unrest that German Communists (and Italian Communists and Russian Communists) treated their country to, just prior to the rise of fascism.
In Germany, there was nearly a Communist revolution, in addition to big, frequent protests. In Italy, Mussolini’s OG fascists reaped reactionary hatred after the tumult of the Red Two Years. And in Russia, reactionary Black Hundreds thugs did their damnedest to fight for the Czar.
In fact, I’d add reactionary fervor to your recipe.
Jeffro
btw Matt Bai at the WaPo has an amusing take on things for Republicans with ears to hear (ie, none of them): are you really gonna do this all over again, GOP?
Pssssst! Matt! This is the GOP – no one’s expecting them to do what’s smart, either!!
Anoniminous
@Ceci n est pas mon nym:
I credit Harris’ campaign manager Ms. Julie Chávez Rodriguez. She is the granddaughter of American labor leader César Chávez and American labor activist Helen Fabela Chávez. Her parents were volunteers for the United Farmworkers. She has personal experience organizing strawberry workers in California. And as she says, “on Sundays when other people were going to church we went to the picket lines.”
She knows how to get her message out in a hostile media environment.
Bruce K in ATH-GR
@Jeffro: Matt Bai is one of those sphincters who was pushing the “Biden is too old and must go” narrative, I’m guessing? Based on his assertion-without-evidence that Kamala Harris will have no mandate and will massively overreach?
Jackie
The women at TCFG’s town hall seem to be a bit frustrated. He’s weaving and bobbing, while not really addressing their questions SURPRISE! And each response is “I,” “I,” and more “I.” Nothing about “you.”
Only a few women have already voted (Georgia) and I’m hoping several are fed up enough to leave the town hall, head directly to the polls and vote HARRIS!🤞🏻
Baud
@Anoniminous:
I really hope it works. The current state of the media is killing us. They need a little comeuppance.
Baud
@Jackie:
They’re not pre-screened Republican die hard women?
Trivia Man
@Booger: years ago my econ 101 class used Free To Choose as the text book. I now wish id attended class so i would know how it was presented. (My GPA that quarter was 0.2 so… not a serious student)
Melancholy Jaques
@Jeffro:
Republicans are not stupid. They put all their chips down on white supremacy. It has been working for them more often than not. They won’t change them until it costs them three in a row.
Marmot
@H.E.Wolf: We’re both wrong! I’m thinking of Newt’s sister.
TBone
@Jackie: I couldn’t stand it, so posted the Philip Bump WaPo link where Bump is putting out the exact transcript instead of sanewashing today!
Comment #130
Captain C
@Marmot:
“I’ll make the trains run on time” didn’t refer to Italy’s notorious non-punctual train system (which AFAIK didn’t improve after the balcony man took over); it referred to the frequent strikes which disrupted service which Mussolini was promising to stop by whatever means necessary.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
Stats on the 328,000 first-day GA voters, if anyone is interested, from my favorite new early-voting statistics geekery site.
Unfortunately, there’s no breakdown by party, not even on the mail-in ballots. So it’s hard to glean much. As in other states and nationwide, by far the biggest age group is the over 65s. This is the first state where I saw the 41-65 group being nearly as large.
In almost every state I’ve peeked at on that site (including GA), the early voting runs about 55-45 in favor of women. That’s probably good news for Democrats. When there’s party information, it definitely skews Democratic. For example in my state of PA, it’s running 68-23 Dem-Rep
Baud
@Melancholy Jaques:
Agree. Until they learn they can’t just wait for people to turn on Dems and ride back into power, they have no incentive to reform.
Baud
@Ceci n est pas mon nym:
I don’t trust old people.
TBone
@Jeffro: for the cultists who have been listening to his every utterance this whole time, he just throws in a buzzword or three and it makes every nonsense word ok. All they hear are the buzzwords.
TBone
@Anoniminous: 💙
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@Baud: The ones I know seem pretty cool.
Of course, most of them are Quakers, the kind who get arrested at protests. So it may not be a representative sample.
The Democratic-Republican breakdowns on early voting are really encouraging though. There are lots of “none / minor party” ballots, but even if you throw those all into the Republican pile, in most states the Democratic ballots outnumber them.
Anyway
Agreed. His crazy scary extreme comments about women got memory-holed to some extent. have ads with unvarnished Dotard; interspersed with JDivan’s interviews with RW podcasters. That should turn off some independents and normies.
Baud
@Ceci n est pas mon nym:
Our voters usually are over represented in early voting. At least that’s continuing to hold.
Ruckus
Biden: He’s become unhinged. Look at his rallies … last night, he stood on the stage for 30 minutes and danced. I’m serious! What’s wrong with this guy?
He is a deranged old fart. Some humans have an ego as big as all outdoors and tell themselves that they are the top of the heap. The heap they think they are top of is deranged, deluded, demented and basically aged out. It doesn’t happen this way to everyone, but mainly those with an oversized ego and nothing to show for it. He also has an audience because who/what he was not long ago was BMOC. (That’s big man on campus) At least in his mind. He appeals to a segment of humanity who’d like to be him because somehow he made it to the top of the pile for a bit of time. He didn’t do anything when he got there because he’s him, but he still made it there. And to him that justifies him being considered top of the heap forever. He didn’t earn this position – he just ended up there. And he thinks – such as it is, that this makes him special. Being him has made him special, but no where near why and what he thinks that actually means.
Trivia Man
@matt: “my favorite english word is tariffs”
🙄 EVERYTHING is a superlative at the precise instant he is talking about it
Marmot
@Marmot: And both Newt and Dick Cheney went pro-marriage equality because of their personal connection to a gay family member. (My assertion.)
Ruckus
@Baud:
I don’t trust old people.
We aren’t all untrustworthy, just some whose egos are so much bigger than anything they’ve ever been or done deserves.
He’s the prime example. He had position but really, he did zero to prove why he was there. He got there because of his BS. That and his admirers have no one that better exemplifies what they think is good and proper.
Bill Arnold
@cmorenc:
It’s also easy enough to record the audio directly, with a phone or dedicated recorder.
Cuts, at least, are obvious. Trump’s recent interviews often have a lot of cuts, FWIW.
Mike E
@Captain C: here in NC the sclerotic, attenuated century-old Dem party were ripe for a GOP insurgency and the TEA movement was just the right vehicle to capture the levers of governance. Much like the UK where their 14 year Tory run kept Labour at bay long enough to impose their will, our TEApublicans solidify their hold through a combination of legislative action and pathetic lack of political competition…but unlike the UK where the faceplanting RWers eventually couldn’t outlast a head of lettuce there’s no sign of GOP let up here (though Mark Robinson is a nice gift to the Dems and may help break the supermajority, one can hope).
Anoniminous
Things to keep in mind.
GOP pollster Frank Luntz said:
and
As a Rule of Thumb, anytime you lose a voter to the other you need to find two voters to replace them. One to counter the switch and another to add to your total for victory. IF those women decide to vote straight Democrat the Republicans are fucked.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Chris:
The GOP weaponized the stupid and then was surprised at the results. It’s why I don’t give a pass to most Never Trumper conservatives.
We are where we are because of conscious and deliberate choices by the GOP, going back decades, to demonize its opponents, to polarize and obstruct, to pursue policies that enfeeble the political weal and to yoke the bigot and the ignorant to their wagon and to drive them by dangling carrots that they only ever intended to feed to the rich.
Trump’s ascendancy was laid down and paved by the Southern Strategy, by Lee Atwater and Newt Gingrich and Karl Rove, by Faux “News” and the Tea Party, and by the smirking cynicism of generations of GOP operatives, who have been fracking the white middle and working classes for years, crushing their fortunes with their social and economic policies, never imagining it would cause an earthquake.
I think in the beginning, Republican leaders couldn’t do a thing about it because they carefully molded this most spiteful segment of their party—angry, racist, sexist, and conspiratorial—for a decade. Fox News’ whole existence has been a buildup to this campaign.
But now, the angry, racist, sexist and conspiratorials run the GOP. Mission Accomplished!
Baud
@Anoniminous:
Three large groups I hope come through are women, young people, and labor. The Republicans have made their intentions clear as to each of them.
EarthWindFire
@Chief Oshkosh: Thank you for reminding why I don’t have a financial advisor. Index funds FTW!
Betty
@cmorenc: Digby has a story with interviews from the attendees. Not economists, business people who asserted he wouldn’t actually do those things.
NotMax
@Chris
Conference call from Misters Smoot and Hawley on line 1. They’re calling collect.
HumboldtBlue
@comrade scotts agenda of rage:
That paragraph is why we read this blog.
Citizen Alan
Hell, they don’t really care about fetuses. Or else they’d care about the infant mortality rate and the miscarriage rate. But they fight any proposal that might help a pregnant woman to deliver a healthy baby, and they see miscarriages as grounds for homicide investigations.
The Audacity of Krope
… miscarriages of justice…
different-church-lady
@TBone:
Funny, I don’t remember my grocery bill going down while Trump was president either.
Anoniminous
@Baud:
AFL have always been knob-slobbers for the bosses. I expect the police unions to go Trump. Ever since the AFL-CIO back stabbed McGovern for Nixon I have no expectations for the other unions. If they vote D — GREAT! However I put no trust in them.
Booger
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: Add to this the full-throated embrace of home schooling and the evisceration of public schools (or the concept of a public school) and you end up with a very malleable voting populace.
UncleEbeneezer
Citizen Alan
@scav: My limited understanding of economics is that its foundation is the idea of a 100% Free Market, which is something that does not exist and cannot exist because it presupposes that every market participant has instantaneous and perfect knowledge of the cost of all goods at all stores and every market participant instinctively knows how much every merchant is willing to sell their goods for and how much every consumer is willing to buy their goods for. A true Free Market requires omniscience on the part of the whole human race.
Villago Delenda Est
The military swears an oath to protect and defend the Constitution, not the Commander-In-Chief. Of course, TCFFG/PAB does not comprehend this. He may find talking the generals and admirals into going after citizens who dare to disagree with him no nearly as easy as ordering two scoops at Merde-A-Loser.
Villago Delenda Est
@Citizen Alan: I concur. Plus, the market is a social construct, not a force of nature and as such is subject to human frailties.
Steve LaBonne
@Citizen Alan: For all of the limitations of economics, no actual economist believes that, only people who only took Econ 101 and understood maybe a fifth of that.
The Audacity of Krope
I swear my parents’ Fox News app signs them out once a week and leads with the sign up for new account bit to get them to accidentally set up extra additional accounts for themselves.
This has only succeeded twice. They noticed and sought a refund with no small difficulty, but damn…
Mr. Bemused Senior
Aha! Machine learning will solve this. Something something robot overlords…
Steve LaBonne
@The Audacity of Krope: Sometimes I think about teasing my daughter by telling her I’ve started watching Fuck Snooze and it’s making a lot of sense to me. But I’m not mean enough to do that to her. ;)
Citizen Alan
@Steve LaBonne: So, Republican economists? And Megan McArdle, I suppose.
Steve LaBonne
@Citizen Alan: Not even Republican economists, although they’re bad enough. McMegan is a nothing. Adding: remember that under perfect competition nobody makes a profit.
Marmot
@comrade scotts agenda of rage:
This is a kickass metaphor. That is all.
sab
@different-church-lady: My grocery bill went down during Trump because there was nothing much to buy and I wanted to get the hell out of the store as quickly as possible.
scav
@Steve LaBonne: It’s exactly those sorts that are most out and about running things, advising investors, opining on TV and writing policy. Free Marketeers and believers in Homo Economicus.
wjca
@Yarrow:
Pity that they don’t recognize that these are all Trump specialties.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@Villago Delenda Est: I remember an incident where TFG sent the military to the border (I suppose I don’t need to clarify that it wasn’t the Canadian border?) and gave them orders to shoot migrants. After they left, the officers had to inform the troops that was an illegal order and anyone who did it would be guilty of a war crime.
JiveTurkin
Lee Atwater did have a “come to Jesus” moment when he was dying of brain cancer. He apologized to many of the people he had said terrible things about. But he had a lot to apologize for, he helped invent the modern negative campaign in the US.
Villago Delenda Est
@JiveTurkin: I’ve never accepted his sincerity at that moment. He was irredeemable scum, and will always remain so.
Melancholy Jaques
@Villago Delenda Est:
Totally agree. He was among the worst and he never did anything to undo the damage.
JoyceH
@thylacine: I saw an awesome ad over on Twitter, not video but a still ad. Has two pictures. One is Allred in his heyday in football regalia, looking simply too manly for words, and the other is that photo of Cruz in the airport, with his mask and potbelly and little wheelie bag. Caption is: Texas, choose your fighter. I literally laughed out loud.
Emily B.
@UncleEbeneezer: It’s maddening. So many companies require customers to make a phone call to cancel a subscription—so that they can try to talk you out of it—while they’ll sign you up online as fast as you can type in your credit card number.
Of course, it was quite satisfying to have an opportunity to tell an FTFNYT rep exactly why I was cancelling my subscription. So there’s that.
SatanicPanic
@different-church-lady: I didn’t spike notably until the very end tho. I mean we can mock these people or we can offer solutions like, say, going after price gouging like Kamala Harris has suggested. I tend to agree with her strategy.
Anoniminous
@JiveTurkin:
Fuck Lee Atwater and the horse he rode in on.
Seanly
@Yarrow:
Yeah, just last night my wife & I saw a gambling ad on Hulu. I don’t bet on sports but it was something like betting on 2 players in a game and which would do X before the other did Y. I mentioned that maybe people think the economy sucks coz they are blowing all their money on parley bets and betting on every f’king thing.
Misterpuff
@cmorenc:
This is the part I don’t get (or the Tariffs will lower taxes crowd don’t get). A Tariff when enacted will initially generate revenues (yes, from the importer and ultimately the consumer) but the real point of a tariff is to protect production of goods in the country that enacts one. So a home grown car industry is protected from a competitor that has lower costs (perhaps due to lower resource or labor costs). So if you want to buy the foriegn car, you will pay basically the same or more than the domestic version, and the difference will be revenue collected by the Tariff.
But economic logic leads to a counterintuitive result. The consumer, in most cases, will opt for the cheaper product, so sales of the product with the high Tariffs will decrease and the revenue generated will decrease, so over time the Government’s revenue inflow will decrease, and shortfalls will hit the budget.
This, of course, may be a feature , not a bug for the GOP. But tariffs are not a cure-all.
SatanicPanic
If Trump wins it’s going to be like living in North Korea. State news will claim he invented everything from the IPhone to Yoga to Caesar salads and bowls 300 every single time.
Juju.
@catclub: Or, let’s run this one up a flagpole, it could be that she’s adjusting her tactics a bit as the situation requires from time to time.
Baud
@Juju.:
That can’t be right because that would make her smart instead of scared.
mappy!
@JiveTurkin:
Atwater & Stone started out together with tricky dick, later working for Paul Manafort. So much of this goes back to Nixon.
https://www.theatlantic.com/membership/archive/2018/02/the-characters-in-paul-manaforts-career/552443/
Kirk
@SatanicPanic: Has he claimed yet that he, not Gore, invented the internet?
wjca
@Baud: I don’t.
So, are you saying you’re an AI then? I.e. not people. Hmmmm….
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@Melancholy Jaques: Don’t forget the misogyny. Misogyny helps wire the MSM for the GOP. Misogyny drives the younger, less racist bros into the arms of the GOP. Misogyny absolutely whips the God botherers into a frenzy of Trump love. It is an animating principal of the far right and unites a lot of people who would normally be at odds.
Kent
@Misterpuff: And that isn’t even getting into the whole issue of reciprocal trade restrictions.
Tariffs don’t happen in a vacuum. Every country hit with US tariffs will impose reciprocal trade restrictions on American goods. Which is going to hit the agricultural industry the heaviest because it is the most trade-dependent. Red state farm communities across the country will be impacted, not just with higher prices, but with lower incomes. And not just farmers, but all the farm-adjacent rural communities whose economies are based on ag.
For example, the bourbon industry in Kentucky is super export-reliant and will be hammered by a new trade war.
It is all just too stupid for words.
Kent
Most financial advisors are nothing more than sales people. Take Edward Jones, for example. They hire anyone and all their training is in sales. They don’t do anything to teach their people about macroeconomic trends or finance. Nor do they seek out people who have actually studied finance in college. You could be a drug rep or appliance sales person. They don’t give a rip. All they train you to do is upsell their highest commission products and give you fancy brochures to hand out that make it look like you know what you are talking about.
Getting finance advice from a so-called “financial advisor” (especially the retail type like Edward Jones) is like getting medical advice from your local Aetna or Cigna insurance rep. Or the 18 year old clerk at your local Walgreens.
SatanicPanic
@Kirk: no just the personal computer
catclub
@Geminid:
aged out? evaporated?
🐾BillinGlendaleCA
A SuperMoon and a comet is NOT a good thing, a new Moon and a comet is a good thing. The moonlight washes out the details of the comet’s tail and color. Will the media ever learn, probably not.
catclub
More to the point most are NOT fiduciaries in their responsibility to you, the customer. Some are.
I wonder what the ratio is?
The ones who ARE fiduciaries typically know more and know that upselling is not to your financial benefit.
catclub
@Booger: Whom!
Soprano2
I saw that stupid Bill Ackman list on one of my friend’s FB pages. I started to comment, then it kind of got out of hand. Ackman is saying he doesn’t like Democrats both because they censor free speech and they didn’t do anything about what he calls “anti-American, anti-Israel protests” on college campuses. Most of the stuff on that list isn’t even stuff a president has anything to do with! I ended up with saying I wish Ackman would just be honest, that he’s supporting the person who will continue his huge tax cuts. That list is so stupid.
wjca
That would be the Chicago (Milton Friedman/ulltra-libertarian) School of economic theory.
There have been, and continue to be, others. Many of which do a rather better job of describing the real economy. And do a better (far from perfect, but better) job of predicting the impact of economic policies.
The Audacity of Krope
Almost harmonic in its dissonance…
Chris
@Kent:
Tariffs are the one kind of government intervention in the economy that Republicans are huge fans of while Democrats are queasy about it, and for the same reason: it puts the whole question in the international sphere.
Republicans love this because it allows them to externalize their economic problems and turn them into the kind of us-versus-them situation they love. Tariffs allow you to pose like you’re standing up for American businesses and workers by protecting them from the filthy foreigners that, in this story, are undermining them. Sure, they’ll retaliate, but that only goes to show that they were indeed shifty and untrustworthy and trying to hurt Americans in the first place, which justifies our punishing them and suggests we should do it some more.
Democrats hate it precisely because the involvement of foreigners makes it so hard to control the outcomes and compensate for side effects. While the federal government is at least theoretically the final authority in domestic matters, it has no control over how foreign governments, foreign businesses, and foreign workers and consumers will respond with their own tariffs and boycotts and whatnot. Which makes it much harder to control what the bottom line will be for American citizens.
In short, the two parties’ attitudes towards tariffs are defined by the fact that Democrats want actual results and Republicans want pointless wars with no winning strategy against tribal others.
catclub
@The Audacity of Krope: yeah, he wanted them to censor anti-Israel free speech on campus.
Chris
@wjca:
As near as I can tell, economics as a whole isn’t a terrible profession. It’s just that the ones who get promoted, funded, listened to, and otherwise placed in positions of importance tend to be right wing.
Which matches pretty well with my observations of foreign policy. The average IR student I knew was either a Democrat or an HW-style Republican who’s voted Democrat at least a couple times. If the upper echelons of our foreign policy community reflected the general population of people with these degrees, we’d be doing okay. Instead, we have The Blob.
The Audacity of Krope
@catclub: Prexactly.
The Audacity of Krope
Not a lot of money to be made in spending one’s time figuring out how society can realistically care for as many people as possible, the real money is in figuring how to accrue money to an employer.
catclub
Are you sure?
Now tell me again which side was more for the NA Free trade act in the 1990’s? Which was cutting tariffs and costing jobs in the US.
I am pretty sure Clinton had a very hard sell to convince Democrats on it.
I would say in an age of massive transfers of jobs overseas by GOP owned businesses, the GOP was pretty solidly in favor of lowering tariffs.
Captain C
@Soprano2: Stuart Stevens gave a concise point-by-point refutation of Ackman’s nonsense on the hellsite which can be seen at Digby’s.
Chris
@The Audacity of Krope:
Yep.
catclub
@sab: Gas Price TODAY is low! re-elect!
stupid but it sells.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@Kent: That is not true. I live in STL and Edward Jones is based here. I know plenty of people who work there. FAs are required to get their Series 7 certification which requires extensive knowledge of how stocks, bonds, etc work. What’s more, they have a whole research branch that looks into whether stocks or other products are a good buy. That information is available to all Edward Jones employees.
StringOnAStick
Let’s get real, tRump is so far gone that he loves the idea of tariffs because he thinks he gets to collect all the tariffs for himself! Prove me wrong!
Baud
@🐾BillinGlendaleCA:
We’ll add it to the list.
Kent
The Republicans of the 1990s are not the same as the MAGA cult of 2024. Especially when it comes to trade.
Chief Oshkosh
@Yarrow: I’ll cop to that. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Kent
Oh PLEASE.
A Series 7 Certification takes about 40 hours of independent study and some YouTube videos. Basically memorizing facts. It takes a couple of weeks. By contrast, here in Washington State a cosmetology license requires 1,600 hours of training.
They are sales people who have memorized some fancy vocabulary, nothing more.
UncleEbeneezer
The Audacity of Krope
@UncleEbeneezer: They tried that play with gays and Muslims in 2016.
Chief Oshkosh
@Kent: Weeeelll, that’s not been my experience with the three FAs I’ve worked with over the years, or the two I know (knew) non-professionally. While every one of them do (or did) happen to be a Republican, they are (or were) ethical and knowledgeable (as far as I can tell). However, they very much followed what I consider old-school Republican thinking, and that very much limited how much I acted on their advice.
Tony G
It needs to be noted that Trump’s half-hour of “dancing” occurred AFTER two members of his audience passed out from potentially life-threading heat stroke. So, yes, Trump apparently is in the late stages of dementia but it should be noted that the core of his personality — i.e., absolute disregard for the lives of other people — remains intact. Like many people, I’ve seen family members descend into dementia, but they continued to care about other people because that was the core of their personalities. The core of Trump’s personality is that of a narcissist and a moral monster.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@Kent: I forgot about the Series 66 Certification. There’s a reason they came through the 2008 financial crisis fine. They took a careful, risk adverse approach and didn’t bankrupt their clients. If you want to beat up a financial firm, there are plenty of other targets out there who deserve it. Not sure why you are so fixated on a company that by all accounts treats their employees well and with whom I’ve had decent advisors.
Kent
I just spent the past 6 months disentangling the mess that my parent’s nice respectable “old-school” Republican Financial Advisor made of their accounts. They had used him for years and he was a longstanding member of their church.
He had them in so many different individual stocks and sector bond funds that he has basically duplicated a generic mutual fund. Plus a ridiculous John Hancock variable annuity that was losing them money. None of it remotely necessary compared to just a couple index funds other than the fact that all those individual stocks and all that churning generated lots of sales commissions compared to just buying and holding plain jane no-fee index funds. Plus it let him sound smart at their annual meetings. “I’m putting you in Pfizer or Nvidia or Samsung or German bonds for 2025 because….blah blah blah.”
When I showed them how much total money they were actually paying in fees over the years they were pretty shocked. They do a good job of hiding it. Even just a 1% annual fee over 30 years means you will have given your financial advisor about 1/3 of your total nest egg over that time. And I guarantee none of them justify their fees by doing 30% better than a S&P 500 or total market index fund over a 30 year period. And Edward Jones fees are MUCH higher than that.
Kent
Edward Jones charges annual account management fees of about 1.35%. https://smartasset.com/financial-advisor/edward-jones-wealth-management-review On top of that, they tend to put clients into actively managed mutual funds that themselves have internal management fees in the 1% range and often charge load commissions of up to 5%. They are also not fiduciaries.
Just for the sake of keeping the math simple, let’s assume total combined management fees of 2% for a generic Edwards Jones retirement account that has a mix of various mutual funds, even though it is likely higher. You do the math for us. How much of YOUR nest egg will Edward Jones accumulate for themselves in fees over a 30 year time period? Relative to what you would have accumulated if you had put your money in Vanguard index funds for the same time period with fees in the 0.05% range.
If you need help with the math try multiplying 2% x 30 years and see what you get.
cmorenc
@New Deal democrat:
Even though Trump’s spotlight-seizing antics don’t win him approval from many voters not already in his corner, they crowd the MSM attention-space that Harris benefits from to sell herself positively to gettable voters to turn out and vote for her. Trump’s MAGA voters get their energy freshly recharged by what is repulsive conduct to anyone not already not firmly in his camp, but the sheer amount and volume of chaotic noise he constantly injects crowds the available attention-space and patience normies have available to tune in without overload pushing them to tune politics out of attending the demands of daily life, work, and family.
wjca
His gloss works IF, by “Republicans” you mean the MAGAts (and Trump himself). The big money guys, not least the libertarians (e.g the Koch types) and those doing lots of business overseas, are still very much Free Trade advocates.
Whether they can control the monster they have unleashed is questionable. I suspect that they are optimistically extrapolating from Trump’s first term, when lots of their guys, and lots of establishment Republicans, were in place to restrain him. Which ignores the ideologues that are positioned to be surrounding him next time. (Or surrounding Vance, who is likely to succeed him sooner rather than later. And is one of them besides.)
cain
@Jay:
My hope is that they’ll bankrupt themselves and have to ask for money from their daddies. I hope they give it so these people all suffer a loss.
cain
@Steve LaBonne:
My wife’s like “yeah, kick me out..i fucking hate this country” :D
Steve LaBonne
@cain: I could get an Irish passport based on having two grandparents born there, and thought about it during Trumpreich I. Residency for my wife would be the snag.
Chief Oshkosh
@Kent: Boy, I sure am sorry to hear that. Thanks for the additional data, though.
Chief Oshkosh
@Kent: Interesting that you mention Vanguard. My favorite for a few reasons, not the least of which is how easy they make it to see your options and to act on them (though usually there’s not much need to act).