Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Dumb motherfuckers cannot understand a consequence that most 4 year olds have fully sorted out.

… gradually, and then suddenly.

The words do not have to be perfect.

Every one of the “Roberts Six” lied to get on the court.

There are a lot more evil idiots than evil geniuses.

GOP baffled that ‘we don’t care if you die’ is not a winning slogan.

Oh FFS you might as well trust a 6-year-old with a flamethrower.

Decision time: keep arguing about the last election, or try to win the next one?

JFC, are there no editors left at that goddamn rag?

rich, arrogant assholes who equate luck with genius

I desperately hope that, yet again, i am wrong.

People are weird.

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

Sitting here in limbo waiting for the dice to roll

The press swings at every pitch, we don’t have to.

Democracy cannot function without a free press.

Let’s not be the monsters we hate.

I swear, each month of 2025 will have its own history degree.

Not rolling over. fuck you, make me.

Republicans are the party of chaos and catastrophe.

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

Petty moves from a petty man.

No offense, but this thread hasn’t been about you for quite a while.

The willow is too close to the house.

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Cold Grey Dawn Open Thread: Incorrigible

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There are some immigrants who just can’t adjust to American society… they’re incapable of following our laws, no matter how carefully they’re instructed…

Maybe they were poorly raised — or perhaps their genes are bad!

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War for Ukraine Day 960: President Zelenskyy & Larry the Cat

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A quick housekeeping note: We are safely at the hotel in Tallahassee. Rosie and ruby are curled up on the bed with me as I type this. The Mominator is in the next room racking out.

All we know right now is that the power has been out in my neighborhood since about 4 PM EDT yesterday. The one neighbor that we know stayed – three time cancer survivor who’s my age and is like “FUCK IT! I’VE BEEN THROUGH WORSE!!!” – let us know that the street is flooded as of this morning. Her house is not as high up as mine and it did not flood. What we don’t know is when power will be restored, whether my house took any damage, and when we can get back in. I have a friend who is going to go over tomorrow and check the house for us. Provided there’s no damage or, just some minor stuff, as soon as we get an estimate as to whether the power will be back on is when we’ll head back. We’d like to get home Saturday or Sunday, but there’s no point driving back if there’s no power and/or if the house is damaged to the point where it isn’t livable.

As you can imagine, I’m fried. I’m just going to run down the basics and rack out.

President Zelenskyy did a number of stops today to meet with the heads of government in Italy, France, and the UK. In the UK he had an encounter with Larry the Cat, which led Larry to tweet the following:

Here’s the full text of President Zelenskyy’s tweet:

During my meeting with the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom @Keir_Starmer, I outlined the details of our Victory Plan. We have agreed to work on it together with our allies.

The Victory Plan aims to create the right conditions for a just end to the war. I thank the United Kingdom for its continued defense support of our country, including with long-range weapons.

🇺🇦🇬🇧

Because he’s traveling, there’s no address from President Zelenskyy today.

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Thursday Evening Open Thread: Cleaning Up After Milton

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Earlier, Our Very Serious Media…

Very few people hate ‘gubmint tyranny’ the day after the disaster…

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The Nebraska Ground Game!

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Let’s talk about Field Operations for Dan Osborn in Nebraska!

An update from our contact:

I would describe our ground game as playing catch-up right now.

The campaign had a skeleton staff and minimal funding until the last couple of weeks, meaning they and we are urgently investing enormous time and money in expanding our grassroots capacity.

We are opening 5 new offices in Western Nebraska on Sunday 10/13 and we have instituted part-time organizer positions which is allowing us to hire local Nebraskans across the state.

These efforts are designed to fight for rural pro-labor voters who traditionally vote Republican but are open to Dan’s message. In Lincoln, the focus is on turning out Democrats that are supporting Dan, while in Omaha our focus is on holding or expanding our Republican Support.

Mail-in-Ballots have already gone out across the state, meaning our persuasion door knocks/calls are also doubling as GOTV conversations when we speak with MIB-received supporters.

The door- knocking focus will likely depend on what polling and early-vote data is telling us about our support. If we get soft with Dems, we’ll double down on D doors in Omaha. If we’re still strong with Dems, our focus will remain on turning out independent and Republican supporters and/or last minute emergency persuasion.

Regardless, this race has razor thin margins of the sort that make field especially fun and meaningful.

Fun Facts

  • a little money goes a long way in this small state
  • this is a potential Senate pick up
  • the campaign is using our funds solely for GOTV efforts

Let’s do this!

If we can get Dan to $22,500 by morning, in donations of any amount, we have an Angel who will take us home!  $25k, here we come.  (I hope)

Also, if any BJ peeps are local to Nebraska, or nearby, or even if you want to travel, I’m sure Scott can put you to good use!

Just let me know.

OH MY GOSH, YOU GUYS DID IT!

YOU FINISHED THIS OFF  IN JUST 4 HOURS!

$2,500 in Angel Matches coming this evening or tomorrow.

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Powerful

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There have been a lot of stories and ads, but this one really hit me:

I have a couple of personal experiences with women who have had abortions. But the one who has always stuck with me was a woman who was 16 wks pregnant and started to bleed. Her placenta had broken through the uterus and attached to her bladder. Immediate termination was her only hope, and even then, it was a critical situation.

He son was viable only in the sense that he was a healthy 16 wk fetus, had this not happened, he may have been a perfect full term baby.

So she was heartbroken, but she was going to die otherwise, and she had a husband and a two-year-old daughter to think about, too.

But the kicker, the reason I remember this so vividly, is because even though Roe was law, it had been fucked with enough that each state had to track abortions and report them. This woman was a strict Catholic (thankfully NOT having this crisis at a Catholic hospital, that’s another horror story for another day) and the doctor, if she were not restricted by politicians, could have put the actual cause of death on the certificate. But she had to put abortion, which decimated this woman further.

Anyway, I don’t want to restore Roe, I want to make abortion a legal right, without interference by any government entity, just a decision between a patient and a doctor. No exceptions, no restrictions.

Open thread

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After the Storm (Open Thread)

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I hate it when storms blow through at night. We lost power at 7:30 or so, and the peak wind from Milton arrived at our location (about 100 miles north of the landfall area) around midnight. We could hear trees falling and debris raining down on the roof all night, which was unnerving.

At first light, I let the dogs out. The poor creatures had been crossing their legs and really needed to pee! But there were obstacles on the stairs:

Hurricane debris on stairs

That didn’t slow Badger and Pete down — they wriggled under the debris and sought relief in the muddy, branch- and leaf-strewn yard. Then Bill cleared the stairs with the aid of a chainsaw.

It was a big-ass tree, and we’re really fortunate it didn’t cause structural damage, including to our well, which big trunks landed to the left and right of.

Downed trees

But mah bananas!

Banana tree stalk on the ground

The river came up more than a foot overnight. Unfortunately, it’ll keep on rising. I don’t think it will flood our downstairs, which is an enclosed game room and storage area. But we’re probably gonna have to move shit outta the way just in case. Ugh.

Pete is superintending the debris clearing:

Dog next to power saw

Meanwhile, I’m trying to mop the standing water off the porch. I told Bill I’d go fetch the shop-vac from downstairs for the task, but he reminded me it would require electricity. Duh!

Anyhoo, we’re feeling lucky. It could have been a lot worse. Our friends and family in the immediate impact zone are all okay. I hope the same is true of the Floridians who comment here. Let us know when you can.

As a bonus, Milton sucked all the humidity out to sea, and the weather is beautiful! It’s downright chilly, in fact; I had to put on socks and flannel!

Hopefully this means we’ve seen the last of hurricanes in 2024. Open thread!

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Josh Marshall Has Some Thoughts about Polls

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Here’s a free link to Josh Marshall’s members-only article on polling.

I’m glad he has the patience to write this all out because all I can personally muster is to say that the polls have gotten to be way more black magic and secret sauce, which I sometimes shorten to “ignore the polls, they’re more bullshit than science at that point, just do the work.”  Because I seem to be out of patience at the moment.

But lucky for us, Josh Marshall isn’t!

I wanted to share with you a few ideas, possible insights and caveats about campaign polls. These aren’t original to me in most cases, just some general points, observations, etc.

First, herding: Herding is the phenomenon in which even professional, good-faith polling operations start grouping together in the latter stages of a campaign because you don’t want to go too far out from the consensus numbers. Right now the national top lines have been between 2 and 4 points in Harris’ favor for a couple months. If you do a poll that gets you plus 10 in either direction, you’re going to think or are liable to think something’s wrong with your numbers. Somehow you’ve just got a spoiled set of data. Maybe you don’t release that poll or maybe you look again at the numbers and decide there are too few of some demographic subset and you re-weight that and it brings the topline back close to that 2-4 range.

It’s also the case that voter choice gets more settled in the final weeks of a campaign. So maybe the voters are actually herding themselves. There are lots of possibilities. But the general point here is that there are factors which can drive even ethical and professional pollsters in this herding direction.

It goes without saying that the more fly-by-nightish operations probably do this a lot. It’s sort of assumed that a lot of the junk pollsters let their freak flags fly for most of election season but then try to bring them in line with the herd in the final weeks to protect their reputations.

Implicit in the herding discussion above is what I’ve noted several times recently: the stability of this race is one of its most defining features. That could just be how settled the public mind is on this choice. It must be some of that. But I’ve heard another possibility proposed recently: Maybe pollsters are now modeling so aggressively that they’ve wrung all the movement out of the numbers?

Remember in earlier discussions I’ve noted that a poll is based not just on the 500 to 1,000 people polled but also on the pollster’s theory of the electorate. This is the art part of the art and science of polling. Modeling has become more aggressive as non-response has become a bigger and bigger problem. So you’re not just weighting men and women and Black people and white people but affluence, education levels, city vs. rural, how people say they voted last time, perhaps party identification. At a certain point you’re basically just saying you need 49% Trump supporters and 49% Harris supporters. I jest of course. But there could be something to this: maybe the race is so stable because the variability has been squeezed out through aggressive modeling. No one is proposing this as more than an idea, a “what if.” But it’s worth having in the back of our minds.

Next there’s an article you should read by Nate Cohn of the Times. It gets at a key methodological question about this year’s polling. Historically, it was always considered bad practice to weight polls based on how voters say they voted in the last election. Basically, people don’t always remember or tell the truth about how they voted. And it tends to pump up the advantage of the party that lost the last election. In other words, by traditional standards and accepted methodological considerations, by adding this voter recall weighting the pollsters have built a pro-Trump advantage into every result. But in an effort to more effectively avoid missing hidden Trump voters, most but not all pollsters decided to weight for voter recall for 2024. This isn’t obviously a bad idea, as Cohn explains. Polls did underestimate Trump in 2016 and 2020. And there are various ways pollsters have tried to account for the reasons why traditionally this isn’t a good idea to do. Cohn’s point and one I think he’s right to make is that that decision leads to two very different stories of the election. I’ve argued here and on the podcast that there’s as good a reason to think pollsters over-adjusted after 2024 as there is to expect Trump to again outdo the polls. Depending on how the race plays out it might be this specific decision that explains why one group or another of pollsters missed the mark.

Open thread.

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