Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Sitting here in limbo waiting for the dice to roll

I’d like to think you all would remain faithful to me if i ever tried to have some of you killed.

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

Keep the Immigrants and deport the fascists!

The line between political reporting and fan fiction continues to blur.

Reality always gets a vote in the end.

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

Roe is not about choice. It is about freedom.

The world has changed, and neither one recognizes it.

If ‘weird’ was the finish line, they ran through the tape and kept running.

“woke” is the new caravan.

Human rights are not a matter of opinion!

The National Guard is not Batman.

You would normally have to try pretty hard to self-incriminate this badly.

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

Perhaps you mistook them for somebody who gives a damn.

We will not go back.

Everybody saw this coming.

Find someone who loves you the way trump and maga love traitors.

The Giant Orange Man Baby is having a bad day.

The poor and middle-class pay taxes, the rich pay accountants, the wealthy pay politicians.

Stay strong, because they are weak.

Jesus, Mary, & Joseph how is that election even close?

He really is that stupid.

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Monday Evening Open Thread: ‘The Other C-Word’ Is… Childish

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Kamala’s a… Communist! *snigger* Lookit us bad boyz, fearlessly testin’ the guardrails!… like a gang of preschoolers who’ve just discovered the power of potty words. No wonder Elon greenlit the media buy.

Josh Marshall has an excellent explication:

2/ political awakenings on sites like 4chan, 8chan, various far-right, incel and incel adjacent online communities. It crops up in various ways if you know where to look. It’s why DeSantis had those weird frankly homoerotic campaign vids during the primaries.

3/ They’re all awash in this world of casual racism, ironic provocation, not just misogyny but a weird emotionally-stunted kind of misogyny that to normal people isn’t just often either offensive or weird but even kind of inexplicable because it’s a very weird …

4/ inside idiom and self-referential world that is fairly alien to mainstream audiences. Again, I know I’m not saying anything new to say Trumpers are weird and racist and sexist and all the rest. But young staffers make up the world of political life. They’re …

5/ not the ‘talent’ or the big names yet. But they’re the workforce that makes thing happen. And that weirdo 4chany world is just deeply, deeply in the DNA. It’s not just that they’re into Trumpism. It’s that that largely only world is the space and the idea world …

6/ that made them decide they were conservatives, or Republicans or whatever association and home-ness in the right and far-right they have. So like I said, it’s deep deep in the political DNA.

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Apparently the Trump Campaign Is Unable to Count

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I really wanted to title this “They thought the only thing in their speeches that would be a bridge too far would be calling the Democratic Candidate for President a c*nt.”

The Trump Campaign Apparently Thinks Last Night Wasn’t That Big a Deal (The Bulwark)

h/t BR

My favorite paragraph:

Campaign advisers are united in their opinion that the Hinchcliffe controversy will blow over. Some were heartened by the fact that for once it wasn’t Trump who was at the center of the maelstrom. Others noted that they have overcome far worse.

Another excerpt:

Carlos Odio, a Democrat and founder of the Latino research firm Equis Research, said he’s not sure about the severity of the downstream political consequences of the controversy, save that it would be bad for Trump.

“We’ve gotten so used to the idea that nothing Trump or his allies say ever seems to move the needle,” he told The Bulwark. “Maybe it is the same now. Or maybe the exception turns out to be insulting a critical community in your tipping-point state while voting is already underway, using a joke so incendiary it breaks through almost instantly.”

Can these people even count?  Do they know that black people, Puerto Ricans, and women can vote?

Open thread.

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The Only Poll That Matters…

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…is already in the field. About two weeks ago I started checking in with the University of Florida’s Early Voting tracker website. Back in 2020, the daily updates there offered me a dose of reassurance, and this year is no different. The scholar who’s in charge of the project is Michael McDonald, who notes that as of this morning approximately 43 million of us have voted in the election. Click the embedded post to follow him on Bluesky (you can also find him at the Other Place, but I’m going to try not to embed tweets here when there’s a Bluesky account available):

#earlyvote morning update 10/28: at least 42.9 million people have voted in the 2024 general election 🥳
election.lab.ufl.edu/early-vote/2…

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— Michael McDonald (@electproject.bsky.social) October 28, 2024 at 12:45 PM

The site has a nifty dashboard for parsing data by reported characteristics such as gender, party registration, etc. (Note that not all characteristics are available for all states.) Professor McDonald also has a Substack where he breaks down what he’s seeing in the data, but most of those posts are for paid subscribers only, unfortunately. This post, “Republican Antipathy Toward Early Voting May Haunt Them”, however, isn’t. It’s from October 20th, over a week ago now. It focuses on data out of North Carolina and notes that:

“North Carolina law allows counties to set times and hours for in-person early voting within state guidelines. The 2024 general election schedule of in-person early voting is here. Importantly, counties have the option of holding in-person early voting on the weekends, which the larger Democratic counties opted to do.

“Why didn’t Republican counties do the same? Probably because their election boards when making their plans heeded Donald Trump’s warnings that early voting is fraudulent. But as the unusual surge in Republicans voting the first days of in-person early voting suggest, these decisions were perhaps shortsighted because it cut off eager Republicans from voting over the weekend.”

He also notes that when Republicans are voting in North Carolina, they seem to be more women voters than men (I wonder how many of those Republican ladies are Nikki Haley crossover voters). In fact, early voting data generally shows a much larger gender gap so far this year:

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Full-Blown Hate Rallies, Mini-Stop the Steal Rallies, Mini Jan 6 Rallies

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AOC makes the point that these Trump rallies are full-blown hate rallies.  Mini versions of Stop the Steal.  Mini versions of Jan 6.  I think she’s right.  But if even 1% of Trump voters turn away in disgust, and decide not to vote,  that can be the difference between winning and losing.

Is this the October surprise?  Remember, almost none of the conventional wisdom applies anymore.  October has turned out to be more of an Advent calendar, with a surprise a day.

In the midst of all the ugliness, in the midst of seeing the terrible reality of the current Supreme Court, in the midst of seeing so may office holders caring nothing about democracy, caring nothing about the actual human beings they “serve”…

In the midst of all that, we have seen who the real leaders are and what our leaders are made of.  A few of them came away tarnished, but damn, do we have a great bench, or what?

As a party, we have learned to fight back in a different way.

We have learned to speak the truth in a different way.

We are learning to ignore the media organizations that have little or nothing to do with journalism.

In some cases, what where there once was coal, or what appeared to be coal, there are now diamonds.

OAC and Walz on Twitch yesterday.

Assuming we get through this with a win, we couldn’t possibly have a better team to help us move forward.

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Monday Morning Open Thread: Gird Your Loins & Stay Joyful

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Monday Morning Open Thread: Gird Your Loins & Stay Joyful

(Mike Luckovich via GoComics.com)

A comment on Twitter said "This is like The Rolling Stones and The Beatles playing for Latinos.” Latino voting expert Mike Madrid says "Some of the biggest news yet actually."
"Maná and Los Tigres Del Norte Will Perform at Kamala Harris Rallies in Nevada and Arizona"

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— Bob Morris (@bobmorris.bsky.social) October 25, 2024 at 11:06 PM

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Cold Grey Dawn Open Thread: We Live in Hope

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Wonkette is a national treasure, and this Evan Hurst post deserves the widest possible circulation… “Maybe Elon Musk *Is* The 2024 Russian Election Attack”:

With a week and a half to go until the election — and nothing but chaos in sight between now and then — a huge article has come out in the Wall Street Journal about Elon Musk’s secret telephone tonguefuck sessions with blood-covered Russian baby murderer Vladimir Putin, which brings to mind just one question for us:

Is the 2024 Russian attack on the US election actually just one pathetically needy absolute loser of a richest man in the world named Elon Musk?…

  • Putin and Elon been having their little secret fuckchats for a while now, going back as far as 2022, plus Elon’s had other fuckchats with other Russian bigwigs close to Putin.
  • Putin was like hey Elon, can you plz not let Taiwan have Starlink? Asking for a friend who is the dictator-for-life of China.
  • Though Elon was initially supportive of Ukraine’s side in the Russia/Ukraine war— as one would expect any decent person to be, since it’s customary to defend the side that gets invaded for no reason, which in this case also happens to be our ally, as opposed to the side that does the invading/baby murdering — he quickly changed his tune on that later in 2022, when he wouldn’t let Ukraine’s military use Starlink for any kind of offensive operations. Guess who benefited from that? Elon has said he wouldn’t allow it because he — in his infinite fucking wisdom about goddamned nothing — was pretty sure it would cause a nuclear war. Any idea who whispered that Kremlin lie in his butthole? We can only imagine.
  • One of the Russian officials Elon has fuckchatted with is Putin’s first deputy chief of staff Sergei Kiriyenko, who according to the US government has created domains for the spread of Kremlin disinfo, including on the Nazi hell-husk formerly known as Twitter, which Elon owns.
  • The Kremlin has put pressure on Elon and his businesses, and there have been “implicit threats against him.” Cool friends, dude. Beggars can’t be choosers, we guess.

    • As we have discussed previously here, there is just about no Russian propaganda Elon Musk isn’t a stupid enough useful idiot not to fall for. Whenever he speaks on the subject, it’s amazing how he just barfs out whatever Putin wants…

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    War for Ukraine Day 977: A Brief Sunday Night Update

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    Two quick housekeeping notes. First, Rosie continues to improve as we get farther away from her final chemo treatment last Monday. Her appetite is coming back and we did a 3/4 of a mile walk this evening. Thank you for all the good thoughts, well wishes, prayers, and donations.

    Second, despite spending much of the weekend asleep, I am still fried. I am just going to run through the basics so I can get cleaned up and racked out. I know I still have to get to the Dougan and Musk influence operations and I will get to them this week.

    Over 75% of Ukraine is currently under air raid alert at 8:50 PM EDT/2:50 AM local time in Ukraine. No indication of Russian strategic aviation aloft, so this morning’s attack will be another drone swarm.

    I’m actually going to start with the Georgian election. Salome Zourabichvili, the President of Georgia, has rejected the outcome of yesterday’s election and alleged that the ruling Georgian Dream Party, which is aligned with Putin and Russia, has engaged in widespread and wholesale election rigging and fraud.

    From Civil Georgia:

    After a day of intensive consultations with opposition parties following the 26 October parliamentary elections, Georgian President Salome Zurabishvili held a briefing in which she said she would not recognize the official results.

    She thanked all the voters who voted for Georgia’s European future: “There were lots of you, you won in these elections and no one has a right to take this European future away from us.”

    President Zurabishvili thanked observers and media who, who in difficult circumstances, did everything to protect the votes.

    But she said “there were so many violations that it was impossible to detect them all”. She said: “We witnessed something very unusual: this was a total falsification, a total stealing of votes, using all the tricks that can be used to falsify elections, and on top of that – the use of modern technologies to whitewash the elections.

    She said it was unprecedented, adding: “We were witnesses and victims of a Russian special operation, a new type of hybrid warfare waged against our people.

    “On that day we were deprived of the right to vote. These were Russian elections, they stole the electoral institution from us, and they stole our constitutional right to vote, including from our emigrants.”

    “I am grateful to our international partners who exposed the violations,” she said, but noted that it was not enough.

    “I want to say, as the only independent institution, that I don’t recognize these elections. These elections cannot be recognized. We won’t accept this.” She added: “We are going to stand together and say: We will not accept this new form of subjugation by Russia”.

    The President called on citizens to gather on Rustaveli Avenue on October 28 and “tell each other and the world that we don’t recognize these elections, we defend our constitutional right and every vote and our future. It is our right to have just, free and fair elections. This will be a symbolic act to show the world our will”.

    She called on international partners to stand by the Georgians.

    “Nothing can make these elections legitimate,” she concluded.

    Putin has already dispatched his catspaw to Tblisi:

    🇬🇪🤝🇭🇺 @PM_ViktorOrban will make an official visit to Georgia on October 28-29.

    📋 Invited by Georgian @PM_Kobakhidze, PM Orbán will be accompanied by Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó, Minister of National Economy Márton Nagy, and Finance Minister Mihály Varga. The visit will feature both one-on-one and plenary discussions, followed by a joint press statement.

    No we wait to see what the Georgians do because at the end of the day, no one – not the EU, not NATO, not the US – is going to do anything more than issue public statements.

    Here is President Zelenskyy’s address from earlier today. Video below, English transcript after the jump.

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