Half with a plan, and half just hoping for the best.
5.
SiubhanDuinne
@WaterGirl: I’ve been watching on MSNBC. And yes, what a treat it is to listen to him. The contrast with the man he will replace* is nothing short of stunning.
*DV
6.
dmsilev
@pamelabrown53: Who the hell is this questioner? He’s definitely an ass.
I have no idea who he is; hope we find out because he was unnecessarily hostile, rude and antagonistic.
15.
MisterForkbeard
Unable to watch because I’m single-parenting this morning and there’s no way Uncle Joe is understandable over a toddler and a five year old. Especially if they’re trying to play a videogame “together”.
@MisterForkbeard:
paraphrased
“Yes I’ve been tested, but I also look forward to being in a situation where I can compare my cognitive ability to that of the person I will be running against.”
@MisterForkbeard: So far it is excellent. Not a single thing I could recommend for improvement.
22.
CaseyL
@MisterForkbeard: I didn’t catch all of it, but essentially Biden said he can’t wait to display his cognitive abilities versus those of Trump in a debate.
Jonathan Tamari@JonathanTamari 8m Biden gets asked about “cognitive decline”: “I can hardly wait to compare my cognitive capability to the cognitive capability of the man I’m running against.”
I have finally caught up to the part where he is about to take questions.
29.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@pamelabrown53: I’m just looking at tweets, catching up when I should be doing other things, but…
Yamiche Alcindor @Yamiche·24m VP Biden goes hard at Trump on bounty story: “He talks about cognitive capability. He doesn’t seem to be cognitively aware of what’s going on. He either reads and/or gets briefed on important issues and he forgets it. Or he doesn’t think it’s necessary that he need to know it.”
Let me know what you think about that part. I thought he answered with humor, honesty and surprising amount of clarity.
34.
Baud
I like that Joe continues to hold Trump to a standard. So many of us have just given up on that because we know Trump can’t meet even the lowest conceivable standard for a president, but Joe isn’t letting Trump get a way with the bigotry of low no expectations.
On the other comment about Joe holding tRump to standards, I so agree. We’ve had 31/2 years of chaos, incompetence and destruction that I worry we don’t remember what is normal!
I thought he answered with humor, honesty and surprising amount of clarity.
I think it was less than three months ago that Rose Twitter told everybody that Joe Biden was losing arguments with his morning oatmeal and needed Jill to tie his shoes. Then he had a debate with Bernie and they sounded pretty similar in their grasp of details and verbal fluidity. The lesson the trump people learned was to lower expectations for Biden again. And when saying that Biden couldn’t talk, The Beast actually said, “I don’t want to be nice or… un-nice…”
It wasn’t just Rose Twitter. There were real published articles in media promoting that theme.
40.
Kropacetic
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I think it was less than three months ago that Rose Twitter told everybody that Joe Biden was losing arguments with his morning oatmeal
To be fair, oatmeal can be quite insightful and incisive.
Well maybe Rose Twitter inadvertently gave us an assist because Biden sounded like a veritable statesman.
42.
Geminid
@pamelabrown53: Curious: has El Paso been a good home? And what do think of your freshman representative, Veronica Escobar?
43.
MisterForkbeard
@Baud: I actually might not. I’m pretty sure I don’t really want to see it. It’s probably not going to be particularly cathartic. Joe will be somewhere between on point, angry, or slightly confused depending on how batshit Trump is.
Trump will be batshit crazy. The moderators will be awful.
Not something I really need to watch. I’ll probably read liveblogs or follow them here.
44.
zhena gogolia
Wow, I look away from the blog for 10 minutes and there are 5 new posts
Have to go to another Zoom meeting.
45.
Eljai
There is a big difference between not being able to remember the name of that movie star — you know the one — and mental decline. I’m no scientist, but there’s a lot of literature out now about how even aging brains have the capacity to grow, adapt and change patterns of connections. Things like physical exercise, mental stimulation, health habits play a role in keeping our brains functioning well. As far as mental stimulation goes, Biden is a gazillion light years ahead of the orange blob whose only interest is watching himself on Fox News (which I’m pretty sure is a leading cause of brain atrophy).
“Top US disease researcher Dr Anthony Fauci has told the US Senate that he “would not be surprised” if new virus cases in the US reach 100,000 per day.”
Former U.S Navy Seal Dr. Dan Barkhuff wants to know if @realDonaldTrump is a coward who can't stand up to Putin or if he's complicit.Well, Donald, which is it? pic.twitter.com/rZUsgSpDv2— The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) June 30, 2020
Things like physical exercise, mental stimulation, health habits play a role in keeping our brains functioning well.
So you’re saying Donald should be golden.
50.
Kay
Nate Cohn
@Nate_Cohn
·33m
Biden+12, 53-41 in Suffolk. This had been one of the president’s better national live interview pollsters, including a Trump lead in Dec. and a positive approval rating one year ago
The 53 is the good part. Republicans always lie and say they’re “independents” when their candidate is embarrassing :)
@jeffreyw: Call me a cynic, but wasn’t the CIA under Reagan doing essentially the same thing in the same place? I think Afghanistan has more or less since the dawn of civilization had people who would happily kill the infidels for money.
So, yeah, Trump not listening during his PDB and kissing up to Vladimir Vladimirovich all along is infuriating, but Putin spreading around some hard currency (yeah, not rubles, I bet) to get the Yanquis killed is about the least surprising development of the year.
53.
Ken
@Eunicecycle: If it’s played on Fox, Trump is watching.
54.
Feathers
@David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch: It annoys me to no end when rose twitter whine Why can’t the Democrats make ads like this? Fercrissakes, if they did, it would be instantaneously bothsiderized. This way, the media must actually deal with the implications of the ads.
@Kay: I also like that when you add 53 + 41, that’s 94, meaning only 6% undecided.
It’s the undecideds that still send a chill up my spine when I read the polls.
60.
sdhays
@Gin & Tonic: What’s “surprising” (scare quotes because it’s not really surprising considering who we’re talking about) isn’t that Putin wanted to do this or was doing it, it is that the US did not respond in anyway. Dump’s response, to this day is ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
@James E Powell: I agree. But when it’s 15% undecided, and I assume that most of that is people who just can’t bring themselves to tell someone they will vote for trump, that makes the whole thing neck-and-neck, and that’s even without the inevitable cheating and stealing the Rs will do.
So I much prefer 6%. At least if I add that to the Trump votes, they aren’t neck and neck.
@trollhattan: Did you read Anne Laurie’s longer reads about the pandemic today. I got this far – the first tweet – and had to stop so I wouldn’t slit my wrists:
Dr. Anne Schuchat of the CDC: The U.S. has ‘way too much virus’ to control pandemic as cases surge across country. She says the pandemic is on par w/ the devastating 1918 global pandemic, which was a transformational global experience.
67.
Betty Cracker
Damn, the Trump campaign email outreach is getting whinier and more desperate by the day:
If Trump campaign emails were a person, you’d want to pepper spray him.
But the fucking President knowing about it and giving less than a shit is a BFD. That is the story.
This cannot be said enough. It should not be hard to grasp. Who gives a flying fuck what we’ve done in the past in this regard? At a BARE minimum, the current CiC should not be signing off on the murders of his own troops. As the Seal says, he should be stomping the shit out of someone.
Did the same run-past, while clapping hands over my ears yelling “La-la-la I can’t hear you!” Too much, too early. The county has chimed in today, ruining my bubble.
The county has experienced a record spike in coronavirus infections since mid-June, prompting Beilenson to warn the region’s success in keeping infection rates low could be swept away in a matter of weeks if people – especially extended families – continue to congregate. Those gatherings have increased since the county began easing its stay-at-home orders.
Latino families are emerging as among the hardest-hit groups, including growing infections among younger family members. County officials have launched what they say is a more concerted effort in the last week to reach out to non-English speaking groups.
“The next two to three weeks will tell the tale whether we can turn this around or not,” Beilenson said. “Now, we are getting to the point where it becomes more and more common that someone you are exposed to has the virus, and that you get it as well.”
Sacramento has seen a 60 percent increase in the number of infections in the last two weeks, data show, including a record 228 new cases on Monday, followed by more than 200 again on Tuesday, bringing the county total to more than 3,200 since March. Sixty eight people have died of the virus in Sacramento County.
As of Monday, 98 virus patients were in Sacramento County hospitals, 28 of them in intensive care. That’s a concern because county hospitals currently have only 63 ICU beds free in case of a surge.
Yolo, Placer and El Dorado counties also have seen recent spikes, as has the state of California and numerous other states. Placer health officials say they are seeing growing numbers of infections among younger people. El Dorado officials this week mirrored Sacramento’s concern about family gatherings spreading infections.
A month ago things were looking up. Lesson learned: never let your guard down before the job is done. Heck, NY just added California to their mandatory quarantine list. We have some mighty fine company on that list.
@trollhattan: The lemmings are marching into the sea, and it appears that even people who are following the rules may be swept into the sea along with them.
74.
David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch
Never Trump GOP operative Rick Wilson believes President Trump is guilty of treason.
During Tuesday’s New Abnormal podcast by the Daily Beast, Wilson told editor-at-large and left-wing commentator Molly Jong-Fast that people will “piss” on the president’s grave forever after reports emerged that Russia paid bounties to Taliban-connected militants to kill U.S. soldiers.
“The word traitor and the word treason in this country gets abused like crazy,” he began.
“But in this case, it’s not an abuse of the word. He met the literal definition of treason. He gave aid and comfort to the enemy and abetted the enemy. He did not take action,” Wilson said. “It’s not just treason. It’s high treason. It’s not just treason. It’s historic treason.”
75.
rp
@Chief Oshkosh: Also, maybe I’m naive, but I seriously doubt the US was paying bounties to Afghanis in the early 80s to kill Russian soldiers. There’s a difference between funding and arming a proxy to fight against a common enemy and paying that proxy specific amounts to kill soldiers. Some might argue that’s a distinction without a difference, but I disagree. Generally, the objective in war is not to kill as many enemy soldiers as possible — it’s to take land or resources or prevent the enemy from doing the same, often by undermining the enemy’s ability to wage war. Paying people to kill specific targets is murder for hire
EDIT: Of course, if we did do that in the early 80s it was 100% wrong, and it’s still wrong for the Russians to do it today.
76.
germy
Did I make a mistake in trusting you?
That’s either a great rotating tag or a text from a co-conspirator’s burner phone.
Call me a cynic, but wasn’t the CIA under Reagan doing essentially the same thing in the same place?
Supporting one’s enemy enemy is one thing. Is there a cold war rule against explicit bounties? At any rate, the lack of response or concern on Trump’s part is the main scandal here.
79.
hueyplong
Two fantastic things today that ought to make your heart soar like a hawk:
That 53-41 poll with only 6% undecided. Beauty itself.
A whiny GOP email starting off “Did I make a mistake in trusting you?”
80.
Gin & Tonic
@Mallard Filmore: I know what the main scandal is, folks. I am not a crackpot.
@Chief Oshkosh: Also, maybe I’m naive, but I seriously doubt the US was paying bounties to Afghanis in the early 80s to kill Russian soldiers. There’s a difference between funding and arming a proxy to fight against a common enemy and paying that proxy specific amounts to kill soldiers. Some might argue that’s a distinction without a difference, but I disagree. Generally, the objective in war is not to kill as many enemy soldiers as possible — it’s to take land or resources or prevent the enemy from doing the same, often by undermining the enemy’s ability to wage war. Paying people to kill specific targets is murder for hire
EDIT: Of course, if we did do that in the early 80s it was 100% wrong, and it’s still wrong for the Russians to do it today.
What we are actually talking about is scalp hunting for bounty. The US last did that during the genocidal Indian wars of the 19th Century when scalp hunters were paid bounties for Indian scalps by the US government.
To my knowledge, the US has never done that sort of thing since. Yes, we have done lots of horrible things since then like carpet bombing Cambodia. But we don’t pay bounties to our proxies for scalps of enemy soldiers.
82.
Betty Cracker
@WaterGirl: Right? I’ve been a campaign messaging connoisseur for many years now, and I’ve never seen anything like it. Where there once was bravado and demagoguery, now there’s just whining and wheedling. Sad!
@sdhays: Yes, it sounds like Biden feels he can ask for that, and he said he would ask if things aren’t quickly clarified re: this latest Russia thing..
Are they required to give him what he asks for? I do not know.
Call me a cynic, but wasn’t the CIA under Reagan doing essentially the same thing in the same place?
Let’s stipulate that they were. Even still, the President is supposed to be looking out for *America’s* interests first and foremost, not the interest of world peace and harmony. I mean, the latter might be important to achieve, for America’s interests, but the Venn diagram isn’t a perfect circle.
We all know that our leaders commit some heinous sins in our name. What we expect, is that they’re committing those sins to defend our country and our country’s interests. And there’s no remotely plausible storyline where this “ignore that one of our two main geopolitical adversaries successfully put bounties on our soldiers” is good for our country’s defense.
I think we do a lot of bad things in the world, and wish we would stop with “the solution to all problems is kinetic military action HURR DURRH!” But geez, I’m also a patriot, and this is treason by any commonsense definition [and the definition in the Constitution isn’t a commonsense definition, so hey, go figger.]
I listened to MSNBC in the car (and why wasn’t NPR carrying it??). And how anyone could listen to that Q&A and say anything about Joe’s mental state, is beyond me. Sharp, articulate, thoughtful.
The one about how Biden can’t wait to put his cognitive abilities up against Trump’s in a debate?
96.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
Wife is getting dangerously upset by my declining mood – she’s been remarking on my tendency to snarl and flip off the TV every time I see a car commercial extolling the virtues of driving vacations here in the US or something glorifying camping. My response is “because they are normalizing trapping us behind the borders of this shithole of a country, and I despised my ‘driving vacations’ as a child. They were invariably miserable affairs, and all this slime pit has to offer are shitty beach condos or redneck American shit in the Smokies or the Ozarks”.
If the Soviet Union were still around, I’d figure out a way to betray this place to it (ironic, I know).
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I just finished watching. Yes, I believe that was a reporter. And he asked a bunch of questions. Each time he would say “just one more question”, then Joe would answer that and he’d say again “just one more question”.
Jackass on two counts. Joe answered well. I did like that Joe called him a “lyin’ dog” when he said “just one more question” that last time.
98.
Eunicecycle
@WaterGirl: I read somewhere (sorry no link) that once the nominating convention is over and he for sure is the nominee, he will get an intelligence briefing. He is right now still just the presumptive nominee, so may not be entitled. And I’m sure Trump will do everything to make sure he doesn’t get them.
@pamelabrown53: I thought Joe did a fantastic job with the Q & A.
100.
Comrade Scrutinizer
@Gin & Tonic: Then what’s your point? We’ve engaged in asymmetric warfare since we used to bribe one Native American tribe to fIght a different tribe. We follow a long international tradition in that respect.
@Comrade Scrutinizer: As did the French during the American Revolution, supplying arms and expertise is a time honored tradition, paying for scalps is not.
102.
Jeffro
@WaterGirl:Joe Biden is turning out to be just the right person for the time.
I know, right? =)
And my how he and his campaign are firing on all cylinders. I know the Lincoln Project gets a lot of credit for setting the no-holds-barred tone when it comes to bashing trumpov, but Joe is no slouch either – today sure proved that.
@pamelabrown53: thanks for the answer. I hope it’s a good place for you. Kind of tough moving into a new place and getting quarantined. Veronica Escobar struck me as a solid person and representative. There are 60 or so new reps, and almost all the ones I’ve had a chance to check out seem really impressive, and if the 41 who flipped red seats can hang on to them that class will do a lot of good.
@oatler.: The Trump campaign is sinking millions into shoring up his support in states that were supposed to be in the bag. That is, as they say, not a good look. And all of them are attacking Biden, not touting his own record of achievement (har!). The problem with that is that pollsters are showing that in 2016, voters who disliked both Trump and Clinton broke heavily for Trump. This time around, this same group is breaking for Biden. So unless Trump can make people want to vote *for* him, as opposed to just against Biden, this strategy isn’t going to pay off.
@Eunicecycle: He for sure gets the intelligence briefings once he has been formally nominated. What I don’t know is whether they would have to honor his request if he asked earlier than that.
My guess is that it happens this way:
– Biden asks nicely
– The administration tells Biden to fuck off
– The Dems find a way to formally declare Biden the nominee before the convention
– The administration has to give the intelligence briefings to Biden
It will be Elizabeth Warren all over again. (Obstructed her as head of CFPB and then got her as senator. Win!)
I’m watching this now. I love the moment when Biden says he hasn’t been COVID tested because he has no symptoms and didn’t want to take someone else’s place. Ha! Shade thrown.
The Dems find a way to formally declare him before the convention
I doubt it. I think the nomination resets the contribution limits, so nominating Biden early would prevent him from raising money during the “primary.” Him getting intelligence briefings early really won’t help him because he can’t reveal what he knows.
112.
raven
fuck it
113.
bluehill
Unsurprising, but unsettling article about Jeff Sessions and evangelical support of Trump.
This isn’t reading between the lines; Sessions makes his views quite clear. When Plott asked Sessions, who is now running an underdog campaign to return to his old U.S. Senate seat in Alabama, how Christians could support Trump, he replied with a reference to Egypt and el-Sisi.
“It’s not a democracy—he’s a strongman, tough man, but he promised to protect them. And they believed him, because they didn’t want the Muslim Brotherhood taking over Egypt. Because they knew they’d be vulnerable. They chose to support somebody that would protect them. And that’s basically what the Christians in the United States did. They felt they were under attack, and the strong guy promised to defend them. And he has.”
@jonas: That is, as they say, not a good look. And all of them are attacking Biden, not touting his own record of achievement (har!).
Well, the only policies he succeeded in implementing were a somehow unpopular tax cut and rampant abuse of immigrants. Those don’t seem likely to bring on board anyone who doesn’t already support him.
I wonder if there could be some success in framing the abuse of immigrants as abuse of Christians, given the continuing popularity of the Church in Central America.
115.
Kent
@?BillinGlendaleCA:@Comrade Scrutinizer: As did the French during the American Revolution, supplying arms and expertise is a time honored tradition, paying for scalps is not.
And the fact that today’s scalps are digital, and captured on cell phones changes nothing. They are still scalps and sold for bounty.
116.
The Very Reverend Crimson Fire of Compassion
@Gin & Tonic: Yeah, that’s not the part that has people upset. It’s the part you just yadda yaadad past, about the President of the United States having the blood of American soldiers and marines in his hands in the service of an enemy state’s interests. That’s the outrage.
117.
jonas
@Jeffro: I think what the LP has been particularly good at — and what Democrats have, up until now, sucked at — is getting those attack ads out there fast enough to get inside the MSM’s OODA loop as it were in order to magnify and catapult the message. They pivot perfectly off of what’s getting covered in the NYT, CNN and (esp. Fox) in a way that underscores either Trump’s deceitfulness, or his ineptitude, or both. They even got that great ad criticizing Parscale to air on just the DC broadcast of Tucker Carlson’s show and guess who was all furious at his campaign staff the next morning?
How many times has a Trump, or McConnell or some other horrible Republican done something outrageous and we sit here asking “why aren’t progressive orgs running ads around the clock using [fill in whatever outrageous thing said Republican did]?” I hope they’re taking notes now that someone is showing how it’s done.
Luckily for us all, not all Christians are of the Jeff Sessions persuasion. Nevertheless, evangelicals and Southern Baptists will gladly vote Trump again.
119.
Kropacetic
@Comrade Scrutinizer: Then what’s your point? We’ve engaged in asymmetric warfare since we used to bribe one Native American tribe to fIght a different tribe.
Would hiring bounty hunters in this manner fall afoul of our laws against privateers?
120.
Another Scott
@bluehill: Yeah, protecting Christians in America.
Trump announced he was running for President on June 16, 2015.
@Kropacetic:Those don’t seem likely to bring on board anyone who doesn’t already support him.
That’s the other thing. He’s doing absolutely *nothing* to attract voters outside his original base. Why they’re running the 2016 campaign again and thinking it’s going to work in 2020, particularly with everything going on now, is beyond me, but I suspect the problem is that that’s what Trump wants and he’s too stubborn and stupid to change course. Nobody on his campaign can seriously think it’s a winning strategy. They’re in it simply for the grift at this point, not a serious political campaign. Look for insane stories of looting and embezzlement when this is all over.
122.
Kropacetic
@jonas: Look for insane stories of looting and embezzlement when this is all over.
What? Worse than he was already doing?
123.
Martin
@trollhattan: Given the curve, probably more than that.
Here’s what I’ve learned – you can affect when the inflection point happens and it starts to turn down, but it’s really hard to speed up the rate at which it turns down short of really aggressive quarantining and such as Wuhan did. Given that the inflection point isn’t yet apparent nationally, I think doubling the current daily rate is pretty unavoidable.
Nationally we have to learn how to move more rapidly, more decisively, more aggressively, and act with greater discipline. Look at how quickly China moved when they had a dozen new infections, and they put in stricter restrictions than we have at 50K per day. I’ll not compare with China’s discipline because they have entirely inappropriate ways of enforcing that, but S Korea is comparably good without the police state.
124.
Robert Sneddon
@Kent: Camp X-Ray in Guantanamo Bay is mostly populated by people sold to the US Government for “bounties” after 9/11 happened. A lot of those folks shipped to the States on the twenty-first century version of blackbirder slave transport aircraft were later released when the authorities found out they had been sold a bunch of farmers, smugglers and anyone the sellers could round up and accuse of assorted “crimes”. A bunch more are still locked up in Cuba, no charges have been brought against them and no trials have taken place.
125.
jonas
@Gin & Tonic: I wouldn’t be surprised if, at some point during the Cold War, the CIA or US special forces might have engaged in a scheme like this. I can’t imagine that some units weren’t offering bounties for Viet Kong or NVA kills or something, for example. But I could also imagine that if the Kremlin had found out that the US was targeting Soviet soldiers this way, they would have summoned the US ambassador or put a call in directly to POTUS and demanded it stop immediately and threatened serious consequences. Maybe that did happen and we just don’t know about it.
Trump, apparently, just shrugged his shoulders and ordered more hamberders.
126.
Jay C
@jonas: “why aren’t progressive orgs running ads around the clock using [fill in whatever outrageous thing said Republican did]?”
Because if/when they did, the reflexively Republican-enabling “Mainstream Media” would be all the h*ll over it, clutching their pearls, and vaporing away about the “nasty” “Leftists” and their “hate-filled” advertising.
When it’s done by “renegade” Republicans (especially as slickly as LP does it), the bothsiderists can’t get a handle on it…
@Baud: It would help Biden to know what he’s up against, at least.
Good point about contribution limits. He did say, though, that he would ask for briefings if this latest Russia thing doesn’t get cleared up licit-split.
@Kay: Yes, I like it when the undecided numbers aren’t so big. Hope they keep shrinking.
130.
Martin
@bluehill: This is why I keep saying that Democrats need to break the cycle of Christian supremacy in governing. I know that’s hard for them to say out loud, but this cycle is functionally identical to white supremacy in the US.
Barr and McConnell are not preserving a GOP worldview on the courts but a Christian worldview on the courts, and trusting that will help keep them in power. And that is invariably also a white worldview. We gotta start electing some diversity in religious views for the top spots. Push for gender and race now because those are also needed, but don’t think those two problems are going to get measurably better until we put an atheist, Jew, Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist – anything else in the WH.
Historically, there’s also a lot of whining on our side when our candidates don’t talk about the issues and give voters something to “vote for.” We have more concerns to balance than LP does.
132.
Martin
@Robert Sneddon: Would have helped if Dems didn’t freak the fuck out when Obama tried to close Gitmo and move them to the US. That was a really low moment for the party, IMO.
133.
Omnes Omnibus
On the bounty issue, I don’t really have a problem with the Afghans. I don’t even get overly upset about the GRU doing what it did. Foreign nationals acting in their supposed national interest are not the problem. A president who knows that our soldiers are being hunted for bounty and does fuck all about it is the problem.
134.
Jeffro
@jonas: trumpov can’t run away from his pathetic record, no matter how hard he tries. Sucks to be the incumbent. Maybe he should just resign – what do you say, America?
I thought of you watching the new Lincoln Project ad because the veteran is “right out of central casting” :)
It will make Trump crazy with envy. All he has is big, doughy Barr.
136.
Barbara
@Baud: I tell my husband this every time he says something like “well what did you expect?”
I fully expect some percentage of people to drive drunk. I also fully expect to keep prosecuting them when they do. Ditto for any and every kind of crime. The fact that Trump has manged to fall below expectations should be an indictment not an excuse.
@Another Scott: There’s a reason he’s called the kkkebler elf.
138.
Jeffro
@Beth in VA:Yes, I like it when the undecided numbers aren’t so big. Hope they keep shrinking.
They may as well have the election next week, ’cause it’s hard to imagine the anti-trumpov vote lessening in intensity or numbers. And that’s before Covid rages across the country the next couple of months, and more comes out about the bounty payment scandal.
This coming election might have more locked-in, unpersuadable voters than any in recent memory.
@jonas: Trump sees this election the same as 2016, he just needs to motivate his base and demotivate and suppress his opponent’s.
The problem with this approach is that it’s different when you’re the incumbent and have a record(that motivates folk against you) and it only worked on the margins(just enough) to win last time.
@Baud: I’m so old that I remember that one of the problems pointed out about Hillary in 2016 was that she focused too much on why Trump was bad and not her policies.
Agreed. Trump is going with what brought him. He hasn’t changed. It’s the rest of the country that has.
143.
evodevo
@Comrade Scrutinizer: And it wasn’t just us…review the history of the Wyandotte and Hurons vs the Iroquois in Canada for an eyeopener…though, to be fair, a lot of that was the Hudson Bay Company vs the French over the fur trade…(Americans aren’t the only ones who had corporate scumbags paying people to kill each other)
@Betty Cracker: The ad does smell of desperation. Like they’ve been shoveling big bucks out to themselves and grifter friends, and now the cashflow is drying up because donors won’t support a loser. That campaign may be running on fumes by September.
I’m so old that I remember that one of the problems pointed out about Hillary in 2016 was that she focused too much on why Trump was bad and not her policies.
The other problem with Hillary is that she was doing the exact opposite.
Partway through Hillary Clinton’s speech accepting the Democratic nomination for president, she launched into a discussion of her reputation for caring about policy details. That may sound boring.
And that Vox link is actually praiseworthy of her being “boring,” but there are tons of stories with the same theme that aren’t.
You could power the earth harassing the excuses.
147.
Miss Bianca
@bluehill: Well, yeah, he’s “protected” them until they all get culled by COVID-19.
Ugh, the whininess of “Christians” and their persecution complexes are just disgusting. Are they baked in from history?
Which reminds me of an ancient cartoon I saw when I was a kid: two lions in the Colosseum, one saying to the other: “Christians give you heartburn? Let me tell you something – Christians give *everybody* heartburn!”
And when HRC did focus on her policies in her campaign, she got called out for being “too wonkish”, and – inevitably – contrasted negatively with Trump’s “simple and direct messaging” – or whatever excuses the “MSM” wanted to flog as reason to dump on Hillary….
That said, white people still have Trumps back. I guess we need to get louder, yet.
151.
Mike in NC
That thing atop Fat Bastard’s head appears to have turned completely white, based on recent photos.
152.
Geminid
@WaterGirl: the thoughts expressed on your refrigerator are almost too good to be true, and make me suspect you have something to hide. Like a stash of expensive gourmet ice cream.
153.
Eunicecycle
That reporter at the end of Bidens press conference was from Fox! Bill Hemmer was just giving him a tongue bath for his great questions. The reporter (didn’t catch the name) basically said it’s been obvious for some time that Biden is experiencing cognitive decline blah blah blah..
NPR interviewed John Weaver from The Lincoln Project this afternoon. Yowsa!
The interview is worth a listen. At one point, Ari Shapiro indicates his surprise at Lincoln Projects’ deliberate provocativeness and lack of coyness.
155.
catclub
@WaterGirl: There were a couple of guys who said a house divided against itself cannot stand. One was a bearded hippie. the other was a bearded president.
156.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@Martin: That said, white people still have Trumps back. I guess we need to get louder, yet.
Even though Trump has personally flushed the economy down the toilet by his own very-traceable actions, he still gets a majority of people when pollsters ask “Who do you trust to fix the economy?”
It’s bizarre and disgusting. The cult thinking runs deep.
I live in Boise, ID (as my wife likes to say “a purple dot in a red state”). We’ve been seeing a lot of Trump commercials. While many of the Mormons don’t like the immigration policies, they are otherwise strong for him. He got 59% of the statewide vote in 2016 and he’s not going to lose a substantial portion.
So he’s either desperate to keep up levels in a state locked in for him (why?) or his campaign is incompetent and/or grifting him by doing worthless ad buys.
And these are during the local news If I’m seeing ads for him it because someone is buying them for this market.
158.
Betty Cracker
@Kay: That reminds me — I haven’t heard anything lately from the central casting war criminal Trump pardoned (and forced the Navy to return the SEAL insignia to, over their objections). Surely we’d have heard about it if that lunatic got drunk and wasted a few civilians, right? “Jared, get me another beefy warfighter!”
@Geminid: Yep. Like jonas said at #121, it’ll be a smash-and-grab among the minions.
159.
JPL
@Seanly: In GA they are running nonstop Biden signed the crime bill ads in the Atlanta area.
160.
Barbara
@Martin: One thing that Brad De Long has done from time to time is to regionalize poll results of white people. The South tends to be such an outlier that it skews national results if not accounted for, and might make you wonder how you personally know so many white people who are true swing voters or consistently vote Democratic. So, for instance, whites in a state like Pennsylvania might have had a 55/45 favorability split for Obama in 2012, down from, say 52/48 in 2008. Whereas, looking at Southern states, you will find that the BEST Obama did in 2012 was 35% of white voters in North Carolina. And it went down from there. This is from memory, since it has been a while since I looked at it. Basically, the other three regions tend to be closer together and the South is just off the charts. The mountain states can be just as lopsided but they tend to have so little population they don’t skew poll numbers.
161.
Barbara
@Seanly: Yeah, one would think Idaho is a state where Trump can skip advertising altogether. All those morally upright Mormons, voting for the pussy grabber in chief who is in thrall to the guy putting out hits on American soldiers. I am never listening to a lecture about morality or patriotism again, from someone who votes for Trump in 2020. They may know the Bible better than I do, but they don’t seem to have absorbed its contents.
“Beware of false prophets,who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravenous wolves.16 You will know them by their fruits.Do men gather grapes from thornbushes or figs from thistles?17 Even so,every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit.18 A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit.19 Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.20 Therefore by their fruits you will know them.
Fuck each and every one of them.
162.
Kay
As a committed girther, I didn’t need the analysis. I present it only as a public service:
ETOPS @__ETOPS__
Using an AI platform & 1000’s of photos, @realDonaldTrump is ~ 315-322lbs. based on: 21.5” Neck 39-40” Chest* 53-57” Waist* 41” Stance**
163.
Uncle Cosmo
@debbie: Ha! I think the Secret Service ought to change Needy Amin’s call sign to Zombie-One!
164.
Betty Cracker
@Kay: Hahaha! That sounds about right to me. Remember when Dr. Feelgood tried to pass him off as 239? No fucking way.
That reminds me — I haven’t heard anything lately from the central casting war criminal Trump pardoned (and forced the Navy to return the SEAL insignia to, over their objections). Surely we’d have heard about it if that lunatic got drunk and wasted a few civilians, right? “Jared, get me another beefy warfighter!”
So true. He had “future sloppy drunk” written all over him. I’ll search the internet. At the very least there will be a bankruptcy. I see him involved in a “business deal” with Sarah Palin.
My brother in law gave me an edible and I decided to eat ONE QUARTER of it before a debate. 1/4 of a gummy. I turned into a philosopher. I was watching the debate, texting with one of my sisters and I wrote “Joe Biden has beautiful, delicate bones in his face”
@Geminid: It’s true! I do have 2 containers of Vanilla Haagen Dazs in my freezer right this minute!
I will add that they get their own little section of the freezer, always in the same place, in what is supposed to be the overflow ice area. Nothing else is allowed in there, even if I am nearly out of ice cream, because there must be a place for the ice cream when I get it. So I not only eat the elite ice cream, but I also discriminate against other lesser items that might need a spot in the freezer. I am indeed a flawed person!
170.
jonas
@Seanly: He’s running ads in Idaho? Krikey — that’s like a Dem candidate having to pour money into Berkeley. And election day’s still five months away. This is a campaign standing in a Lake Superior-sized pool of flop sweat.
171.
Miss Bianca
@Kay: Hey, as long as you don’t start rhapsodizing about his slender, elegant foot that you long to suddenly cradle, a la Peggy “High” Noonan and Reagan, we’ll call it all good. ; )
172.
JMG
What would be the point of working on the Trump campaign if you weren’t stealing with both hands and feet? And if he’s losing, so much the better. Nobody does much accounting after a loss.
173.
Kropacetic
@?BillinGlendaleCA: I’m so old that I remember that one of the problems pointed out about Hillary in 2016 was that she focused too much on why Trump was bad and not her policies.
It was the most bizarre thing. I remember a friend of mine who had been pretty consistently positive on Dems and their policy positions being upset about how negative Hillary’s campaign was. I specifically remember him complaining about one campaign ad where every word was spoken by Trump, set against disapproving faces. If that’s too negative, but R advertising isn’t I don’t even know what to say.
And if you don’t think Hillary was pushing policy in 2016, you were taking the media’s word for it and not actually paying attention to the candidates.
Carville (and others) had Parscale dead to rights. He fluffed Trump with a Death Star plan, and went big in every state and TV market. Why? Because Trump wouldn’t understand or accept anything less, and Parscale only gets one shot at the grift.
if you don’t think Hillary was pushing policy in 2016, you were taking the media’s word for it
My observation has been that the media is terrible at telling people what to think, but is fantastic at defining what they’re thinking about. If they want to pay no attention to Hillary’s policies whatsoever, pretend they don’t exist, then even most liberals don’t know about them – and didn’t know about them, back in 2016.
YAY! Now go watch She Ra! It’s been killing me having no other cartoon enthusiasts around here.
186.
Betty Cracker
@Kay: Hahaha! My sister and I dog each other like that too. What else are sisters for? :)
187.
Kropacetic
@Frankensteinbeck: Some of the best campaign moments from 2016 were Hillary talking policy. I remember a little town hall she had with (I think it was) visiting nurses. She was empathetic, knowledgeable, and put forward a lot of reasonable ideas that were attainable and could make a huge difference.
I was enthralled. It was a very enjoyable watch. Precisely the type of thing the media wouldn’t put front and center because it wasn’t candidate attacking candidate.
188.
Kropacetic
@Frankensteinbeck: Ooh, I put that on my watch list recently but haven’t gotten to it yet. Just finished my fourth watch of Avatar the Last Airbender and have my second viewing of the Legend of Korra underway.
189.
hueyplong
@Betty Cracker: The fact of a TRO doesn’t necessarily mean we can tell how the final ruling will go down. Setting the hearing for after the July 28 release date would have been a sign of bad faith, but the hearing is set for a pre-July 28 date.
One thing I wonder about is, if a judge did enjoin items subject to the NDA section of the settlement agreement, how can you say it applies to anything after the date of that agreement?
And because the agreement is dated 2001, wouldn’t we get to see lots of what we’re interested in?
Time for those review copies to make it out into the wild. WTF do they think they can accomplish, other than denying her some sales (while ironically driving up demand)? “What, Trump’s cousin has a tell-all book? I didn’t know that.”
192.
Geminid
@WaterGirl: Confession is good for the soul. And ice cream is just good!
I’d like to know what that clown thinks about Trump’s looking the other way while Russia pays the Taliban to kill his brother soldiers.
198.
CarolDuhart2
@hueyplong: Good point…and what about matters before the lawsuit as well? Like his childhood, or things that happened before the inheritance when Fred was alive? Nobody gets to have their whole life locked up this way. And of course,what about her opinions about things? She has a right to a point of view.
199.
Uncle Cosmo
@Calouste: I seem to recall that when {not sure who} joined Nixon’s Cabinet in 1973, some wag remarked that it was the first time in recorded history that a rat had jumped aboard a sinking ship.
@Omnes Omnibus: Indeed. As a political observer, I approve of the play that the “bounty” issue has gotten – it outrages hawks, active service personnel, veterans and their families and it is an issue on which Democrats can actually gain votes in red states. And it is yet another indication of how incompetent and un-empathetic Trump actually is, which plays into a lot of the anti-Trump critique.
But as someone interested in policy, I’m more ambivalent. Stripped to its essence, it really is a story of how the GRU is surreptitiously funding the Taliban, who are trying to drive out coalition forces from their country. Which, as you and others say, is really what the U.S. was doing in the Charlie Wilson’s War and Reagan era; except that we were actually supplying arms and shoulder-fired missiles to the mujahadeen in addition to providing a lot more money. And our purpose was to, uh, kill Soviet soldiers in order to drive them out of the country.
At the time of the 2001 invasion, our purpose was to capture/kill/weaken al Qaeda and OBL. That was comprehensible and, I think, justified. But he’s been dead for years now and AQ doesn’t really exist anymore (except to the extent that it has morphed into other groups). That is, we accomplished our mission. What is our purpose now? I suppose it’s to prop up and provide security for the Kabul government and one could argue that that is beneficial because that regime has expanded women’s and other rights, doesn’t wantonly kill people and more or less behaves like a civilized government. But is that kind of nation-building worth the investment and lives that it continually costs? And why should we be doing it? Still? Will it ever end?
I favor a gradual withdrawal of coalition forces and a negotiated agreement with the Taliban (who are certainly bad actors and killers but weren’t responsible for 9/11). Ironically, that’s kind of what Trump has been trying to do; albeit incompetently. The February agreement was really only a holding action; not a settlement, and will be re-visited by the next President next year. And it was negotiated only by the U.S., without a lot of coalition input.
A hawkish response to the “bounty” issue would argue for increasing our presence in Afghanistan, aggressively sanctioning Russia and, basically, re-starting the war. I don’t think I favor that. Instead, I favor a carrot-and-stick diplomatic effort designed to change Russian behavior and end the war; hopefully with a workable modus vivendi between the Taliban and Kabul that each can live with.
I guess that’s a long way of saying I’m ambivalent too. I hope that it hurts Trump politically, but am concerned about possible ramifications.
203.
Kropacetic
@trollhattan: Time for those review copies to make it out into the wild. WTF do they think they can accomplish, other than denying her some sales (while ironically driving up demand)? “What, Trump’s cousin has a tell-all book? I didn’t know that.”
Is this what I’ve seen referred to as the Streisand effect?
@trollhattan: THC/LSD, three letters not so far apart. :-)
Sounds like you aren’t so familiar with at least one of those.
Unfortunately, there’s not much information at the link beyond the headline. I assume that he’s able to request this as a former Vice President?
No, as a potential president as of next January 20th. Former Presidents or Vice Presidents don’t need security briefings, FUTURE presidents actually do need to prepare for their term in office.
Ha! It was like rapid fire texts, judging each of them, then I just head off in this WHOLE other direction. I was struck by his beauty, is all I’m saying.
dmsilev
It’s so nice to listen to an actual sane, responsible, competent adult.
WaterGirl
@dmsilev: It really is.
pamelabrown53
Thanks for this WaterGirl. Last question sounds like a surly one about the destruction of monuments.
WaterGirl
SiubhanDuinne
@WaterGirl: I’ve been watching on MSNBC. And yes, what a treat it is to listen to him. The contrast with the man he will replace* is nothing short of stunning.
*DV
dmsilev
@pamelabrown53: Who the hell is this questioner? He’s definitely an ass.
Baud
Love that last line.
WaterGirl
@pamelabrown53: I’m still almost at the beginning.
I will always put stuff like this up if no one else does. Feel free to send an email if you know something is coming up.
zzyzx
Great answer on the cognitive decline.
Baud
@dmsilev: The assiest.
WaterGirl
@Baud: What last line?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
turned it on time to hear that guy say he was sixty-five and starting to experience cognitive decline, and has Biden been tested– that was a reporter?
WaterGirl
Fix the PPE shortage before you tee off on another round! zing
pamelabrown53
@dmsilev:
I have no idea who he is; hope we find out because he was unnecessarily hostile, rude and antagonistic.
MisterForkbeard
Unable to watch because I’m single-parenting this morning and there’s no way Uncle Joe is understandable over a toddler and a five year old. Especially if they’re trying to play a videogame “together”.
How is it so far?
Baud
@WaterGirl: Go to 49:00.
pamelabrown53
@MisterForkbeard:
It’s over. If you get the chance, watch it in it’s entirety later.
MisterForkbeard
@zzyzx:
Can someone tell me what that answer was?
WaterGirl
@MisterForkbeard: Just drag the little bar and start at the beginning.
zzyzx
@MisterForkbeard:
paraphrased
“Yes I’ve been tested, but I also look forward to being in a situation where I can compare my cognitive ability to that of the person I will be running against.”
WaterGirl
@MisterForkbeard: So far it is excellent. Not a single thing I could recommend for improvement.
CaseyL
@MisterForkbeard: I didn’t catch all of it, but essentially Biden said he can’t wait to display his cognitive abilities versus those of Trump in a debate.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@MisterForkbeard:
WaterGirl
LuciaMia
Biden on CNN now : Trump should fix the shortage of PPE “before you tee off for another round of golf, Mr. President.”
Ouchie!
Jeffro
WELL DONE UNCLE JOE!
pamelabrown53
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Didn’t he also say that tRump didn’t have the cognitive ability to understand Russia?!
WaterGirl
I have finally caught up to the part where he is about to take questions.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@pamelabrown53: I’m just looking at tweets, catching up when I should be doing other things, but…
Baud
@MisterForkbeard:
So you’re not going to watch when Joe debates Trump?
WaterGirl
@Baud: hahahahaha
Baud
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Oh, I didn’t see that part. Nice, Joe.
pamelabrown53
@WaterGirl:
Let me know what you think about that part. I thought he answered with humor, honesty and surprising amount of clarity.
Baud
I like that Joe continues to hold Trump to a standard. So many of us have just given up on that because we know Trump can’t meet even the lowest conceivable standard for a president, but Joe isn’t letting Trump get a way with the bigotry of
lowno expectations.SiubhanDuinne
@Baud: LOL
pamelabrown53
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Thanks! That was a helpful tweet to share. Glad others can read the fuller response.
pamelabrown53
@Baud:
Awesome sauce!!!
On the other comment about Joe holding tRump to standards, I so agree. We’ve had 31/2 years of chaos, incompetence and destruction that I worry we don’t remember what is normal!
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@pamelabrown53:
I think it was less than three months ago that Rose Twitter told everybody that Joe Biden was losing arguments with his morning oatmeal and needed Jill to tie his shoes. Then he had a debate with Bernie and they sounded pretty similar in their grasp of details and verbal fluidity. The lesson the trump people learned was to lower expectations for Biden again. And when saying that Biden couldn’t talk, The Beast actually said, “I don’t want to be nice or… un-nice…”
Baud
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
It wasn’t just Rose Twitter. There were real published articles in media promoting that theme.
Kropacetic
To be fair, oatmeal can be quite insightful and incisive.
pamelabrown53
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Well maybe Rose Twitter inadvertently gave us an assist because Biden sounded like a veritable statesman.
Geminid
@pamelabrown53: Curious: has El Paso been a good home? And what do think of your freshman representative, Veronica Escobar?
MisterForkbeard
@Baud: I actually might not. I’m pretty sure I don’t really want to see it. It’s probably not going to be particularly cathartic. Joe will be somewhere between on point, angry, or slightly confused depending on how batshit Trump is.
Trump will be batshit crazy. The moderators will be awful.
Not something I really need to watch. I’ll probably read liveblogs or follow them here.
zhena gogolia
Wow, I look away from the blog for 10 minutes and there are 5 new posts
Have to go to another Zoom meeting.
Eljai
There is a big difference between not being able to remember the name of that movie star — you know the one — and mental decline. I’m no scientist, but there’s a lot of literature out now about how even aging brains have the capacity to grow, adapt and change patterns of connections. Things like physical exercise, mental stimulation, health habits play a role in keeping our brains functioning well. As far as mental stimulation goes, Biden is a gazillion light years ahead of the orange blob whose only interest is watching himself on Fox News (which I’m pretty sure is a leading cause of brain atrophy).
David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch
Lincoln Project just went New Clear (video)
trollhattan
Will Fauci stop trying to cheer us up?
jeffreyw
Gin & Tonic
@Eljai:
So you’re saying Donald should be golden.
Kay
The 53 is the good part. Republicans always lie and say they’re “independents” when their candidate is embarrassing :)
Eunicecycle
@David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch: That is amazing. I hope it’s being played on Fox when Trump is watching.
Gin & Tonic
@jeffreyw: Call me a cynic, but wasn’t the CIA under Reagan doing essentially the same thing in the same place? I think Afghanistan has more or less since the dawn of civilization had people who would happily kill the infidels for money.
So, yeah, Trump not listening during his PDB and kissing up to Vladimir Vladimirovich all along is infuriating, but Putin spreading around some hard currency (yeah, not rubles, I bet) to get the Yanquis killed is about the least surprising development of the year.
Ken
@Eunicecycle: If it’s played on Fox, Trump is watching.
Feathers
@David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch: It annoys me to no end when rose twitter whine Why can’t the Democrats make ads like this? Fercrissakes, if they did, it would be instantaneously bothsiderized. This way, the media must actually deal with the implications of the ads.
WaterGirl
@David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch: I couldn’t figure out what New Clear meant at first.
But wow, that’s a hard-hitting ad.
WaterGirl
@trollhattan: Holy fuck.
Feathers
@Gin & Tonic: But the fucking President knowing about it and giving less than a shit is a BFD. That is the story.
WaterGirl
WaterGirl
@Kay: I also like that when you add 53 + 41, that’s 94, meaning only 6% undecided.
It’s the undecideds that still send a chill up my spine when I read the polls.
sdhays
@Gin & Tonic: What’s “surprising” (scare quotes because it’s not really surprising considering who we’re talking about) isn’t that Putin wanted to do this or was doing it, it is that the US did not respond in anyway. Dump’s response, to this day is ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
James E Powell
@David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch:
How do we get all the cable shows to run that LP ad like they did with the Swift Boat ads in 2004?
James E Powell
@WaterGirl:
I believe almost all “undecideds” have decided, but just are not going to tell a pollster.
The true “undecideds” are those who have not definitely decided whether they will vote.
pamelabrown53
@Geminid:
Actually, I was loving El Paso for it’s diversity, stark mountain desert beauty and friendliness. I don’t feel as invisible as an older citizen.
However, with almost 4 months of isolation, it really doesn’t matter.
I’m going to start looking at and paying attention to Rep. Veronica!
Did I answer your question?
P.S. I can’t tell you how often I’ve heard people exclaim their disbelief that I moved from the ocean to El Paso.
trollhattan
@WaterGirl:
Yup. That’s effectively one city becoming infected each day. How do we stanch this before it rolls right over us all?
WaterGirl
@James E Powell: I agree. But when it’s 15% undecided, and I assume that most of that is people who just can’t bring themselves to tell someone they will vote for trump, that makes the whole thing neck-and-neck, and that’s even without the inevitable cheating and stealing the Rs will do.
So I much prefer 6%. At least if I add that to the Trump votes, they aren’t neck and neck.
WaterGirl
@trollhattan: Did you read Anne Laurie’s longer reads about the pandemic today. I got this far – the first tweet – and had to stop so I wouldn’t slit my wrists:
Betty Cracker
Damn, the Trump campaign email outreach is getting whinier and more desperate by the day:
If Trump campaign emails were a person, you’d want to pepper spray him.
Chief Oshkosh
@Feathers:
This cannot be said enough. It should not be hard to grasp. Who gives a flying fuck what we’ve done in the past in this regard? At a BARE minimum, the current CiC should not be signing off on the murders of his own troops. As the Seal says, he should be stomping the shit out of someone.
VeniceRiley
Nice tips on dealing with anger in here https://www.chron.com/news/article/Americans-are-living-in-a-big-anger-incubator-15376110.php
sdhays
@Betty Cracker: Pepper spraying anyone in the Dump campaign works equally well.
WaterGirl
@Betty Cracker:
That’s how they start a fundraising email. holy shit.
Wow, does this mean that the russians are now contributing $6 for every dollar of legitimate contributions?
edit: forgot to say hell yes on the pepper spray.
trollhattan
@WaterGirl:
Did the same run-past, while clapping hands over my ears yelling “La-la-la I can’t hear you!” Too much, too early. The county has chimed in today, ruining my bubble.
A month ago things were looking up. Lesson learned: never let your guard down before the job is done. Heck, NY just added California to their mandatory quarantine list. We have some mighty fine company on that list.
WaterGirl
@trollhattan: The lemmings are marching into the sea, and it appears that even people who are following the rules may be swept into the sea along with them.
David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch
rp
@Chief Oshkosh: Also, maybe I’m naive, but I seriously doubt the US was paying bounties to Afghanis in the early 80s to kill Russian soldiers. There’s a difference between funding and arming a proxy to fight against a common enemy and paying that proxy specific amounts to kill soldiers. Some might argue that’s a distinction without a difference, but I disagree. Generally, the objective in war is not to kill as many enemy soldiers as possible — it’s to take land or resources or prevent the enemy from doing the same, often by undermining the enemy’s ability to wage war. Paying people to kill specific targets is murder for hire
EDIT: Of course, if we did do that in the early 80s it was 100% wrong, and it’s still wrong for the Russians to do it today.
germy
That’s either a great rotating tag or a text from a co-conspirator’s burner phone.
sdhays
Biden says he will consider asking for a classified briefing on possible Russian bounties.
Unfortunately, there’s not much information at the link beyond the headline. I assume that he’s able to request this as a former Vice President?
Mallard Filmore
@Gin & Tonic:
Supporting one’s enemy enemy is one thing. Is there a cold war rule against explicit bounties? At any rate, the lack of response or concern on Trump’s part is the main scandal here.
hueyplong
Two fantastic things today that ought to make your heart soar like a hawk:
Gin & Tonic
@Mallard Filmore: I know what the main scandal is, folks. I am not a crackpot.
Kent
What we are actually talking about is scalp hunting for bounty. The US last did that during the genocidal Indian wars of the 19th Century when scalp hunters were paid bounties for Indian scalps by the US government.
To my knowledge, the US has never done that sort of thing since. Yes, we have done lots of horrible things since then like carpet bombing Cambodia. But we don’t pay bounties to our proxies for scalps of enemy soldiers.
Betty Cracker
@WaterGirl: Right? I’ve been a campaign messaging connoisseur for many years now, and I’ve never seen anything like it. Where there once was bravado and demagoguery, now there’s just whining and wheedling. Sad!
Mary G
WaterGirl
@sdhays: Yes, it sounds like Biden feels he can ask for that, and he said he would ask if things aren’t quickly clarified re: this latest Russia thing..
Are they required to give him what he asks for? I do not know.
Leto
@David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch: Haha, he thinks I’m only going to piss on it!
WaterGirl
@Gin & Tonic: I am nominating this as a rotating tag.
Chetan Murthy
@Gin & Tonic:
Let’s stipulate that they were. Even still, the President is supposed to be looking out for *America’s* interests first and foremost, not the interest of world peace and harmony. I mean, the latter might be important to achieve, for America’s interests, but the Venn diagram isn’t a perfect circle.
We all know that our leaders commit some heinous sins in our name. What we expect, is that they’re committing those sins to defend our country and our country’s interests. And there’s no remotely plausible storyline where this “ignore that one of our two main geopolitical adversaries successfully put bounties on our soldiers” is good for our country’s defense.
I think we do a lot of bad things in the world, and wish we would stop with “the solution to all problems is kinetic military action HURR DURRH!” But geez, I’m also a patriot, and this is treason by any commonsense definition [and the definition in the Constitution isn’t a commonsense definition, so hey, go figger.]
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Gin & Tonic:
That’s what crackpots say.
Mallard Filmore
@Gin & Tonic: Right-O, and others had a better message than me.
TaMara (HFG)
I listened to MSNBC in the car (and why wasn’t NPR carrying it??). And how anyone could listen to that Q&A and say anything about Joe’s mental state, is beyond me. Sharp, articulate, thoughtful.
Jeffro
@David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch:
Ye
Gods
oatler.
I see where the funds are going. TV in my part of AZ is drenched in attack ads on Biden,
WaterGirl
@TaMara (HFG): I just finished watching the Q & A a minute ago, and I completely agree. Sharp. Articulate. Thoughtful.
Joe Biden is turning out to be just the right person for the time.
rp
@Kent: Yes — that’s more accurate. I’m guessing that’s outlawed by the geneva convention, but I’m not sure.
WaterGirl
@Baud:
The one about how Biden can’t wait to put his cognitive abilities up against Trump’s in a debate?
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
Wife is getting dangerously upset by my declining mood – she’s been remarking on my tendency to snarl and flip off the TV every time I see a car commercial extolling the virtues of driving vacations here in the US or something glorifying camping. My response is “because they are normalizing trapping us behind the borders of this shithole of a country, and I despised my ‘driving vacations’ as a child. They were invariably miserable affairs, and all this slime pit has to offer are shitty beach condos or redneck American shit in the Smokies or the Ozarks”.
If the Soviet Union were still around, I’d figure out a way to betray this place to it (ironic, I know).
WaterGirl
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I just finished watching. Yes, I believe that was a reporter. And he asked a bunch of questions. Each time he would say “just one more question”, then Joe would answer that and he’d say again “just one more question”.
Jackass on two counts. Joe answered well. I did like that Joe called him a “lyin’ dog” when he said “just one more question” that last time.
Eunicecycle
@WaterGirl: I read somewhere (sorry no link) that once the nominating convention is over and he for sure is the nominee, he will get an intelligence briefing. He is right now still just the presumptive nominee, so may not be entitled. And I’m sure Trump will do everything to make sure he doesn’t get them.
WaterGirl
@pamelabrown53: I thought Joe did a fantastic job with the Q & A.
Comrade Scrutinizer
@Gin & Tonic: Then what’s your point? We’ve engaged in asymmetric warfare since we used to bribe one Native American tribe to fIght a different tribe. We follow a long international tradition in that respect.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Comrade Scrutinizer: As did the French during the American Revolution, supplying arms and expertise is a time honored tradition, paying for scalps is not.
Jeffro
I know, right? =)
And my how he and his campaign are firing on all cylinders. I know the Lincoln Project gets a lot of credit for setting the no-holds-barred tone when it comes to bashing trumpov, but Joe is no slouch either – today sure proved that.
Redshift
This is good.
WaterGirl
@VeniceRiley: I have this up on my fridge:
I don’t always follow it perfectly, but I do try.
Geminid
@pamelabrown53: thanks for the answer. I hope it’s a good place for you. Kind of tough moving into a new place and getting quarantined. Veronica Escobar struck me as a solid person and representative. There are 60 or so new reps, and almost all the ones I’ve had a chance to check out seem really impressive, and if the 41 who flipped red seats can hang on to them that class will do a lot of good.
Gin & Tonic
@Comrade Scrutinizer: Do I have to have a point?
jonas
@oatler.: The Trump campaign is sinking millions into shoring up his support in states that were supposed to be in the bag. That is, as they say, not a good look. And all of them are attacking Biden, not touting his own record of achievement (har!). The problem with that is that pollsters are showing that in 2016, voters who disliked both Trump and Clinton broke heavily for Trump. This time around, this same group is breaking for Biden. So unless Trump can make people want to vote *for* him, as opposed to just against Biden, this strategy isn’t going to pay off.
Chyron HR
@Betty Cracker:
Why doesn’t the guy doing the 600% matching just donate 18 million dollars and the rest of us can keep our money?
WaterGirl
@Eunicecycle: He for sure gets the intelligence briefings once he has been formally nominated. What I don’t know is whether they would have to honor his request if he asked earlier than that.
My guess is that it happens this way:
– Biden asks nicely
– The administration tells Biden to fuck off
– The Dems find a way to formally declare Biden the nominee before the convention
– The administration has to give the intelligence briefings to Biden
It will be Elizabeth Warren all over again. (Obstructed her as head of CFPB and then got her as senator. Win!)
Dorothy A. Winsor
I’m watching this now. I love the moment when Biden says he hasn’t been COVID tested because he has no symptoms and didn’t want to take someone else’s place. Ha! Shade thrown.
Baud
@WaterGirl:
I doubt it. I think the nomination resets the contribution limits, so nominating Biden early would prevent him from raising money during the “primary.” Him getting intelligence briefings early really won’t help him because he can’t reveal what he knows.
raven
fuck it
bluehill
Unsurprising, but unsettling article about Jeff Sessions and evangelical support of Trump.
Kropacetic
Well, the only policies he succeeded in implementing were a somehow unpopular tax cut and rampant abuse of immigrants. Those don’t seem likely to bring on board anyone who doesn’t already support him.
I wonder if there could be some success in framing the abuse of immigrants as abuse of Christians, given the continuing popularity of the Church in Central America.
Kent
And the fact that today’s scalps are digital, and captured on cell phones changes nothing. They are still scalps and sold for bounty.
The Very Reverend Crimson Fire of Compassion
@Gin & Tonic: Yeah, that’s not the part that has people upset. It’s the part you just yadda yaadad past, about the President of the United States having the blood of American soldiers and marines in his hands in the service of an enemy state’s interests. That’s the outrage.
jonas
@Jeffro: I think what the LP has been particularly good at — and what Democrats have, up until now, sucked at — is getting those attack ads out there fast enough to get inside the MSM’s OODA loop as it were in order to magnify and catapult the message. They pivot perfectly off of what’s getting covered in the NYT, CNN and (esp. Fox) in a way that underscores either Trump’s deceitfulness, or his ineptitude, or both. They even got that great ad criticizing Parscale to air on just the DC broadcast of Tucker Carlson’s show and guess who was all furious at his campaign staff the next morning?
How many times has a Trump, or McConnell or some other horrible Republican done something outrageous and we sit here asking “why aren’t progressive orgs running ads around the clock using [fill in whatever outrageous thing said Republican did]?” I hope they’re taking notes now that someone is showing how it’s done.
trollhattan
@bluehill:
Luckily for us all, not all Christians are of the Jeff Sessions persuasion. Nevertheless, evangelicals and Southern Baptists will gladly vote Trump again.
Kropacetic
Would hiring bounty hunters in this manner fall afoul of our laws against privateers?
Another Scott
@bluehill: Yeah, protecting Christians in America.
Trump announced he was running for President on June 16, 2015.
The Mother Emanuel AME Church massacre was the next day.
Surely a coincidence. Surely.
:-(
Sessions is a rationalizing monster.
Cheers,
Scott.
jonas
That’s the other thing. He’s doing absolutely *nothing* to attract voters outside his original base. Why they’re running the 2016 campaign again and thinking it’s going to work in 2020, particularly with everything going on now, is beyond me, but I suspect the problem is that that’s what Trump wants and he’s too stubborn and stupid to change course. Nobody on his campaign can seriously think it’s a winning strategy. They’re in it simply for the grift at this point, not a serious political campaign. Look for insane stories of looting and embezzlement when this is all over.
Kropacetic
What? Worse than he was already doing?
Martin
@trollhattan: Given the curve, probably more than that.
Here’s what I’ve learned – you can affect when the inflection point happens and it starts to turn down, but it’s really hard to speed up the rate at which it turns down short of really aggressive quarantining and such as Wuhan did. Given that the inflection point isn’t yet apparent nationally, I think doubling the current daily rate is pretty unavoidable.
Nationally we have to learn how to move more rapidly, more decisively, more aggressively, and act with greater discipline. Look at how quickly China moved when they had a dozen new infections, and they put in stricter restrictions than we have at 50K per day. I’ll not compare with China’s discipline because they have entirely inappropriate ways of enforcing that, but S Korea is comparably good without the police state.
Robert Sneddon
@Kent: Camp X-Ray in Guantanamo Bay is mostly populated by people sold to the US Government for “bounties” after 9/11 happened. A lot of those folks shipped to the States on the twenty-first century version of blackbirder slave transport aircraft were later released when the authorities found out they had been sold a bunch of farmers, smugglers and anyone the sellers could round up and accuse of assorted “crimes”. A bunch more are still locked up in Cuba, no charges have been brought against them and no trials have taken place.
jonas
@Gin & Tonic: I wouldn’t be surprised if, at some point during the Cold War, the CIA or US special forces might have engaged in a scheme like this. I can’t imagine that some units weren’t offering bounties for Viet Kong or NVA kills or something, for example. But I could also imagine that if the Kremlin had found out that the US was targeting Soviet soldiers this way, they would have summoned the US ambassador or put a call in directly to POTUS and demanded it stop immediately and threatened serious consequences. Maybe that did happen and we just don’t know about it.
Trump, apparently, just shrugged his shoulders and ordered more hamberders.
Jay C
Because if/when they did, the reflexively Republican-enabling “Mainstream Media” would be all the h*ll over it, clutching their pearls, and vaporing away about the “nasty” “Leftists” and their “hate-filled” advertising.
When it’s done by “renegade” Republicans (especially as slickly as LP does it), the bothsiderists can’t get a handle on it…
WaterGirl
@Baud: It would help Biden to know what he’s up against, at least.
Good point about contribution limits. He did say, though, that he would ask for briefings if this latest Russia thing doesn’t get cleared up licit-split.
WaterGirl
@raven: That’s not good, what’s up?
Beth in VA
@dmsilev:
@Kay: Yes, I like it when the undecided numbers aren’t so big. Hope they keep shrinking.
Martin
@bluehill: This is why I keep saying that Democrats need to break the cycle of Christian supremacy in governing. I know that’s hard for them to say out loud, but this cycle is functionally identical to white supremacy in the US.
Barr and McConnell are not preserving a GOP worldview on the courts but a Christian worldview on the courts, and trusting that will help keep them in power. And that is invariably also a white worldview. We gotta start electing some diversity in religious views for the top spots. Push for gender and race now because those are also needed, but don’t think those two problems are going to get measurably better until we put an atheist, Jew, Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist – anything else in the WH.
Baud
@Jay C:
Historically, there’s also a lot of whining on our side when our candidates don’t talk about the issues and give voters something to “vote for.” We have more concerns to balance than LP does.
Martin
@Robert Sneddon: Would have helped if Dems didn’t freak the fuck out when Obama tried to close Gitmo and move them to the US. That was a really low moment for the party, IMO.
Omnes Omnibus
On the bounty issue, I don’t really have a problem with the Afghans. I don’t even get overly upset about the GRU doing what it did. Foreign nationals acting in their supposed national interest are not the problem. A president who knows that our soldiers are being hunted for bounty and does fuck all about it is the problem.
Jeffro
@jonas: trumpov can’t run away from his pathetic record, no matter how hard he tries. Sucks to be the incumbent. Maybe he should just resign – what do you say, America?
Kay
@Betty Cracker:
I thought of you watching the new Lincoln Project ad because the veteran is “right out of central casting” :)
It will make Trump crazy with envy. All he has is big, doughy Barr.
Barbara
@Baud: I tell my husband this every time he says something like “well what did you expect?”
I fully expect some percentage of people to drive drunk. I also fully expect to keep prosecuting them when they do. Ditto for any and every kind of crime. The fact that Trump has manged to fall below expectations should be an indictment not an excuse.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Another Scott: There’s a reason he’s called the kkkebler elf.
Jeffro
They may as well have the election next week, ’cause it’s hard to imagine the anti-trumpov vote lessening in intensity or numbers. And that’s before Covid rages across the country the next couple of months, and more comes out about the bounty payment scandal.
This coming election might have more locked-in, unpersuadable voters than any in recent memory.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@jonas: Trump sees this election the same as 2016, he just needs to motivate his base and demotivate and suppress his opponent’s.
The problem with this approach is that it’s different when you’re the incumbent and have a record(that motivates folk against you) and it only worked on the margins(just enough) to win last time.
Kay
@Betty Cracker:
Trump will say “their veteran is dreamy. Go get me one of those, Jared!”
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Baud: I’m so old that I remember that one of the problems pointed out about Hillary in 2016 was that she focused too much on why Trump was bad and not her policies.
Baud
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
Agreed. Trump is going with what brought him. He hasn’t changed. It’s the rest of the country that has.
evodevo
@Comrade Scrutinizer: And it wasn’t just us…review the history of the Wyandotte and Hurons vs the Iroquois in Canada for an eyeopener…though, to be fair, a lot of that was the Hudson Bay Company vs the French over the fur trade…(Americans aren’t the only ones who had corporate scumbags paying people to kill each other)
Fraud Guy
@?BillinGlendaleCA: scalping was quite common during colonial days…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scalping
Geminid
@Betty Cracker: The ad does smell of desperation. Like they’ve been shoveling big bucks out to themselves and grifter friends, and now the cashflow is drying up because donors won’t support a loser. That campaign may be running on fumes by September.
Baud
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
The other problem with Hillary is that she was doing the exact opposite.
And that Vox link is actually praiseworthy of her being “boring,” but there are tons of stories with the same theme that aren’t.
You could power the earth harassing the excuses.
Miss Bianca
@bluehill: Well, yeah, he’s “protected” them until they all get culled by COVID-19.
Ugh, the whininess of “Christians” and their persecution complexes are just disgusting. Are they baked in from history?
Which reminds me of an ancient cartoon I saw when I was a kid: two lions in the Colosseum, one saying to the other: “Christians give you heartburn? Let me tell you something – Christians give *everybody* heartburn!”
Jay C
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
And when HRC did focus on her policies in her campaign, she got called out for being “too wonkish”, and – inevitably – contrasted negatively with Trump’s “simple and direct messaging” – or whatever excuses the “MSM” wanted to flog as reason to dump on Hillary….
Baud
@Baud: harassing = harnessing.
Martin
That is a VERY precipitous drop.
That said, white people still have Trumps back. I guess we need to get louder, yet.
Mike in NC
That thing atop Fat Bastard’s head appears to have turned completely white, based on recent photos.
Geminid
@WaterGirl: the thoughts expressed on your refrigerator are almost too good to be true, and make me suspect you have something to hide. Like a stash of expensive gourmet ice cream.
Eunicecycle
That reporter at the end of Bidens press conference was from Fox! Bill Hemmer was just giving him a tongue bath for his great questions. The reporter (didn’t catch the name) basically said it’s been obvious for some time that Biden is experiencing cognitive decline blah blah blah..
debbie
@David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch:
NPR interviewed John Weaver from The Lincoln Project this afternoon. Yowsa!
The interview is worth a listen. At one point, Ari Shapiro indicates his surprise at Lincoln Projects’ deliberate provocativeness and lack of coyness.
catclub
@WaterGirl: There were a couple of guys who said a house divided against itself cannot stand. One was a bearded hippie. the other was a bearded president.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
Even though Trump has personally flushed the economy down the toilet by his own very-traceable actions, he still gets a majority of people when pollsters ask “Who do you trust to fix the economy?”
It’s bizarre and disgusting. The cult thinking runs deep.
Seanly
@jonas:
I live in Boise, ID (as my wife likes to say “a purple dot in a red state”). We’ve been seeing a lot of Trump commercials. While many of the Mormons don’t like the immigration policies, they are otherwise strong for him. He got 59% of the statewide vote in 2016 and he’s not going to lose a substantial portion.
So he’s either desperate to keep up levels in a state locked in for him (why?) or his campaign is incompetent and/or grifting him by doing worthless ad buys.
And these are during the local news If I’m seeing ads for him it because someone is buying them for this market.
Betty Cracker
@Kay: That reminds me — I haven’t heard anything lately from the central casting war criminal Trump pardoned (and forced the Navy to return the SEAL insignia to, over their objections). Surely we’d have heard about it if that lunatic got drunk and wasted a few civilians, right? “Jared, get me another beefy warfighter!”
@Geminid: Yep. Like jonas said at #121, it’ll be a smash-and-grab among the minions.
JPL
@Seanly: In GA they are running nonstop Biden signed the crime bill ads in the Atlanta area.
Barbara
@Martin: One thing that Brad De Long has done from time to time is to regionalize poll results of white people. The South tends to be such an outlier that it skews national results if not accounted for, and might make you wonder how you personally know so many white people who are true swing voters or consistently vote Democratic. So, for instance, whites in a state like Pennsylvania might have had a 55/45 favorability split for Obama in 2012, down from, say 52/48 in 2008. Whereas, looking at Southern states, you will find that the BEST Obama did in 2012 was 35% of white voters in North Carolina. And it went down from there. This is from memory, since it has been a while since I looked at it. Basically, the other three regions tend to be closer together and the South is just off the charts. The mountain states can be just as lopsided but they tend to have so little population they don’t skew poll numbers.
Barbara
@Seanly: Yeah, one would think Idaho is a state where Trump can skip advertising altogether. All those morally upright Mormons, voting for the pussy grabber in chief who is in thrall to the guy putting out hits on American soldiers. I am never listening to a lecture about morality or patriotism again, from someone who votes for Trump in 2020. They may know the Bible better than I do, but they don’t seem to have absorbed its contents.
Fuck each and every one of them.
Kay
As a committed girther, I didn’t need the analysis. I present it only as a public service:
ETOPS
@__ETOPS__
Using an AI platform & 1000’s of photos,
@realDonaldTrump
is ~ 315-322lbs. based on: 21.5” Neck 39-40” Chest* 53-57” Waist* 41” Stance**
Uncle Cosmo
@debbie: Ha! I think the Secret Service ought to change Needy Amin’s call sign to Zombie-One!
Betty Cracker
@Kay: Hahaha! That sounds about right to me. Remember when Dr. Feelgood tried to pass him off as 239? No fucking way.
JCJ
@Kay: girther
LOL
Kay
@Betty Cracker:
So true. He had “future sloppy drunk” written all over him. I’ll search the internet. At the very least there will be a bankruptcy. I see him involved in a “business deal” with Sarah Palin.
Kay
@Betty Cracker:
And Biden’s so slender! He’s practically willowy.
My brother in law gave me an edible and I decided to eat ONE QUARTER of it before a debate. 1/4 of a gummy. I turned into a philosopher. I was watching the debate, texting with one of my sisters and I wrote “Joe Biden has beautiful, delicate bones in his face”
WTF. She asked.
schrodingers_cat
@Betty Cracker: Isn’t he running for Congress as a Republican somewhere.
WaterGirl
@Geminid: It’s true! I do have 2 containers of Vanilla Haagen Dazs in my freezer right this minute!
I will add that they get their own little section of the freezer, always in the same place, in what is supposed to be the overflow ice area. Nothing else is allowed in there, even if I am nearly out of ice cream, because there must be a place for the ice cream when I get it. So I not only eat the elite ice cream, but I also discriminate against other lesser items that might need a spot in the freezer. I am indeed a flawed person!
jonas
@Seanly: He’s running ads in Idaho? Krikey — that’s like a Dem candidate having to pour money into Berkeley. And election day’s still five months away. This is a campaign standing in a Lake Superior-sized pool of flop sweat.
Miss Bianca
@Kay: Hey, as long as you don’t start rhapsodizing about his slender, elegant foot that you long to suddenly cradle, a la Peggy “High” Noonan and Reagan, we’ll call it all good. ; )
JMG
What would be the point of working on the Trump campaign if you weren’t stealing with both hands and feet? And if he’s losing, so much the better. Nobody does much accounting after a loss.
Kropacetic
It was the most bizarre thing. I remember a friend of mine who had been pretty consistently positive on Dems and their policy positions being upset about how negative Hillary’s campaign was. I specifically remember him complaining about one campaign ad where every word was spoken by Trump, set against disapproving faces. If that’s too negative, but R advertising isn’t I don’t even know what to say.
And if you don’t think Hillary was pushing policy in 2016, you were taking the media’s word for it and not actually paying attention to the candidates.
L85NJGT
@Seanly:
Carville (and others) had Parscale dead to rights. He fluffed Trump with a Death Star plan, and went big in every state and TV market. Why? Because Trump wouldn’t understand or accept anything less, and Parscale only gets one shot at the grift.
The Thin Black Duke
@Kay: Fear and Loathing on Balloon Juice.
Calouste
@Barbara:
Obviously, blackberries were unknown to whoever wrote that passage.
NotMax
@WaterGirl
The granite fridge magnets are a dead giveaway.
:)
BTW, Recent Comments is currently not consistently keeping up, also missing listing some comments posted. This is new (mis)behavior.
Kropacetic
@WaterGirl: That is beautiful handwriting, especially for a vertical surface.
Calouste
@JMG: It takes a special kind of rat to jump on a sinking ship.
Betty Cracker
So Mary Trump’s book was temporarily blocked by a judge. Do our resident lawyers think that will stand?
L85NJGT
@JMG:
Parscale steered $330k in ads to his own Facebook page.
Frankensteinbeck
@Kropacetic:
My observation has been that the media is terrible at telling people what to think, but is fantastic at defining what they’re thinking about. If they want to pay no attention to Hillary’s policies whatsoever, pretend they don’t exist, then even most liberals don’t know about them – and didn’t know about them, back in 2016.
Kay
@Miss Bianca:
Sometimes she sends me the text, just in the middle of the day, all by itself. I will never live it down.
Yutsano
Since no new thread yet:
I’M FREE!!!!
Frankensteinbeck
@Yutsano:
YAY! Now go watch She Ra! It’s been killing me having no other cartoon enthusiasts around here.
Betty Cracker
@Kay: Hahaha! My sister and I dog each other like that too. What else are sisters for? :)
Kropacetic
@Frankensteinbeck: Some of the best campaign moments from 2016 were Hillary talking policy. I remember a little town hall she had with (I think it was) visiting nurses. She was empathetic, knowledgeable, and put forward a lot of reasonable ideas that were attainable and could make a huge difference.
I was enthralled. It was a very enjoyable watch. Precisely the type of thing the media wouldn’t put front and center because it wasn’t candidate attacking candidate.
Kropacetic
@Frankensteinbeck: Ooh, I put that on my watch list recently but haven’t gotten to it yet. Just finished my fourth watch of Avatar the Last Airbender and have my second viewing of the Legend of Korra underway.
hueyplong
@Betty Cracker: The fact of a TRO doesn’t necessarily mean we can tell how the final ruling will go down. Setting the hearing for after the July 28 release date would have been a sign of bad faith, but the hearing is set for a pre-July 28 date.
One thing I wonder about is, if a judge did enjoin items subject to the NDA section of the settlement agreement, how can you say it applies to anything after the date of that agreement?
And because the agreement is dated 2001, wouldn’t we get to see lots of what we’re interested in?
CarolDuhart2
@Yutsano: Congrats!
trollhattan
@Betty Cracker:
Time for those review copies to make it out into the wild. WTF do they think they can accomplish, other than denying her some sales (while ironically driving up demand)? “What, Trump’s cousin has a tell-all book? I didn’t know that.”
Geminid
@WaterGirl: Confession is good for the soul. And ice cream is just good!
Mary G
@Yutsano: Hurray! That was a long haul.
Baud
@Yutsano:
Excellent. Hospitals are death traps.
James E Powell
@raven:
You mean like this?
trollhattan
@Kay:
THC/LSD, three letters not so far apart. :-)
debbie
@Kay:
I’d like to know what that clown thinks about Trump’s looking the other way while Russia pays the Taliban to kill his brother soldiers.
CarolDuhart2
@hueyplong: Good point…and what about matters before the lawsuit as well? Like his childhood, or things that happened before the inheritance when Fred was alive? Nobody gets to have their whole life locked up this way. And of course,what about her opinions about things? She has a right to a point of view.
Uncle Cosmo
@Calouste: I seem to recall that when {not sure who} joined Nixon’s Cabinet in 1973, some wag remarked that it was the first time in recorded history that a rat had jumped aboard a sinking ship.
Amir Khalid
@Yutsano:
I’m free!
debbie
@Yutsano:
Nice!
patroclus
@Omnes Omnibus: Indeed. As a political observer, I approve of the play that the “bounty” issue has gotten – it outrages hawks, active service personnel, veterans and their families and it is an issue on which Democrats can actually gain votes in red states. And it is yet another indication of how incompetent and un-empathetic Trump actually is, which plays into a lot of the anti-Trump critique.
But as someone interested in policy, I’m more ambivalent. Stripped to its essence, it really is a story of how the GRU is surreptitiously funding the Taliban, who are trying to drive out coalition forces from their country. Which, as you and others say, is really what the U.S. was doing in the Charlie Wilson’s War and Reagan era; except that we were actually supplying arms and shoulder-fired missiles to the mujahadeen in addition to providing a lot more money. And our purpose was to, uh, kill Soviet soldiers in order to drive them out of the country.
At the time of the 2001 invasion, our purpose was to capture/kill/weaken al Qaeda and OBL. That was comprehensible and, I think, justified. But he’s been dead for years now and AQ doesn’t really exist anymore (except to the extent that it has morphed into other groups). That is, we accomplished our mission. What is our purpose now? I suppose it’s to prop up and provide security for the Kabul government and one could argue that that is beneficial because that regime has expanded women’s and other rights, doesn’t wantonly kill people and more or less behaves like a civilized government. But is that kind of nation-building worth the investment and lives that it continually costs? And why should we be doing it? Still? Will it ever end?
I favor a gradual withdrawal of coalition forces and a negotiated agreement with the Taliban (who are certainly bad actors and killers but weren’t responsible for 9/11). Ironically, that’s kind of what Trump has been trying to do; albeit incompetently. The February agreement was really only a holding action; not a settlement, and will be re-visited by the next President next year. And it was negotiated only by the U.S., without a lot of coalition input.
A hawkish response to the “bounty” issue would argue for increasing our presence in Afghanistan, aggressively sanctioning Russia and, basically, re-starting the war. I don’t think I favor that. Instead, I favor a carrot-and-stick diplomatic effort designed to change Russian behavior and end the war; hopefully with a workable modus vivendi between the Taliban and Kabul that each can live with.
I guess that’s a long way of saying I’m ambivalent too. I hope that it hurts Trump politically, but am concerned about possible ramifications.
Kropacetic
Is this what I’ve seen referred to as the Streisand effect?
Sounds like you aren’t so familiar with at least one of those.
Kropacetic
@Yutsano: I’m free!
NotMax
@Yutsano
Hip hip hoorah!
Patricia Kayden
Whoa. Republicans just don’t care.
Delk
@Yutsano: ?????
zhena gogolia
@Yutsano:
Oh, goody!
SiubhanDuinne
@Yutsano:
YESSSSSSSSSSSS !!!
raven
@James E Powell: What an awful fucking movie.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Yutsano: Now you be on your best behavior, so you don’t have to go back to the big house again.
SiubhanDuinne
@Kay:
For one appalled, albeit highly amused, moment, I thought you were one of the debaters!
J R in WV
@sdhays:
No, as a potential president as of next January 20th. Former Presidents or Vice Presidents don’t need security briefings, FUTURE presidents actually do need to prepare for their term in office.
James E Powell
@raven:
It’s even worse on re-watch. But whenever I hear “fuck it” I think of that scene.
Kay
@SiubhanDuinne:
Ha! It was like rapid fire texts, judging each of them, then I just head off in this WHOLE other direction. I was struck by his beauty, is all I’m saying.
Miss Bianca
@Yutsano: Yay-ee!!
joel hanes
@Kropacetic:
To be fair, oatmeal can be quite insightful and incisive.
[sings]
A bowl of oatmeal tried to stare me down. And won.
Kropacetic
@joel hanes: Is that a thing? Where’d that come from?
Gvg
@debbie: he tried to kill his brother soldiers as I recall. They turned him in.
joel hanes
@Kropacetic:
John Prine, Illegal Smile
joel hanes
@Martin:
a really low moment for the party
As was the panic-stricken defunding of ACORN.
bmoak
@Frankensteinbeck:
I’m a cartoon enthusiast and I loved She-Ra!