Ghost of LL

I wonder if it's not so that lab results can come back before the medals are handed out. That way you don't have another instance like what happened to our figure skaters, who just got their gold medals yesterday from the Beijing Olympics after the Russians were disqualified.

I don't think I've ever seen a runner gritting his teeth like that in a winning effort. Just incredible.

I'm just going to observe that, even assuming that the necklace did cost $62,000, her husband was a fucking partner at DLA Piper. Yeah--I think he can afford to buy his wife some nice bling.

I like it. And irrespective of what you think of it on its own merits, it's a fuckton better than the previous flag and better than any of the alternative proposals.

I mean, for real--the only reason everyone isn't moving to Minnesota is (a) the winter and (b) the cuisine.

As much as we are fan-girling over Tim Walz right now, let's not lose sight of what Kamala Harris just did. She picked a running mate who can easily be seen as upstaging her. And that's tough for any politician--Donald Trump could never do it. A lot of people have alleged that was part of what was behind Bush's choice of Cheney rather than McCain. And I imagine that has to be particularly tough for a candidate who didn't go through the primary process and is herself still introducing herself to the voters. But she put her ego to the side and made the best pick for the campaign and for the country. Yeah, fellas--we got a winner on our hands.

I think it's an under-studied phenomenon that the Olympics may tend to benefit an incumbent president/party in power. And I think it's an interesting coincidence that the two times the United States didn't participate in a Summer Olympics in a presidential election year (1980 and 2020) were two of the three times in the postwar era that the incumbent president lost his reelection bid (the other being 1992). Is there a causative relationship there (or at least a contributory one)? I don't know, but I think it's worth considering.

She's not losing Pennsylvania.

You don't need to sway a single rural voter. And that's not the point in appealing to them. You still have to put on the show of appealing to rural voters for two reasons: 1) Suburban and (particularly) exurban swing-ish voters are frequently not far removed from rural/small-town existence. A voter in Frisco or Conroe is quite likely to have grown up in Longview or in rural Austin County. And so while we write off those people on this message board as "hopeless" and their communities as "dying," those voters take it as a personal insult when that view is expressed, even if they privately would concede the truth of it. So part of appealing to those suburban and exurban voters is making the show of trying to conciliate their friends and family who are still in rural areas. 2) I've shared the experience before of my first campaign, when I had the conscious thought "well, the country will survive if Bill Clinton becomes president." And it was at that moment that I knew Bush would lose. Because I knew that if I was having that thought, other Republicans were, too. And at least a certain number of those Republicans would be so consoled by the thought that they wouldn't vote. So yeah--you don't have to sway any rural voters. But if you can persuade just a small number of them that it wouldn't be the end of the world if Harris and Walz won, then you not only hurt Trump, but you also hurt Republicans straight down the ballot.

I'm dead serious--the campaign needs to do whatever it needs to do to get him in as the guest picker for College Gameday from Ann Arbor on September 7.

I'm shocked; I'm stunned, it's Mack Brown Tim Walz.

You joke, but some real talk here--for a lot of the country up until about 2010, a DUI was just the cost of doing business. Outside of New York or Boston or San Francisco, if you wanted to go to a bar, then your options for getting home were pretty fucking limited. There's no mass transit in most places. And outside of a major city center, good fucking luck getting a cab at 2:00 AM. And let's just be honest--for much of the year walking even short distances in Minnesota could be fatal. In the age of smartphones and Uber, I don't have a lot of sympathy for anyone who gets a DUI. That's pretty fucking dumb. But pre-2010? Yeah--there but for the grace of God . . . .

I gotta say--I don't love this post from a man in your line of work.

I don't agree with your dismissal of a geographical impact, though sometimes it's not as obvious as "X will bring his/her home state." In the case of Al Gore, it was that simple. Gore won Tennessee for Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996. But in other cases, it's a bit more attenuated. Kamala Harris definitely helped with Black voters, and in Georgia and Wisconsin that may have been determinative. And Joe Biden helped with the white conservative Boomer population that were critical to Obama's win in Pennsylvania (which neighbors Delaware, and which shares a major media market with Delaware). And I definitively don't agree with that. I think Mike Pence was definitely a positive for Donald Trump. I know this is hard to remember, but evangelicals were really very skeptical of Donald Trump. Pence was pretty significant in getting them to swing over in his favor. And as pointed out above, Joe Biden was a major positive for Obama. There were plenty of white voters who were very iffy about a Black guy, particularly in the critical Upper Midwest states. Biden was pretty important in shoring that up.

I mean, seriously--presumably the Turks built them with the agreement that the corvettes get to pass through the Straits once to reach their home port? Or perhaps they're not warships until they're officially commissioned at Odessa? Or maybe they'll just roam the seven seas as commerce raiders, which would be fucking awesome. By the way, can the Ukrainian Rada issue letters of marque and reprisal? Because maybe I want to be a pirate privateer when I grow up.

Question on this--on what side of the Straits is the shipyard? If it is on the Mediterranean side, are the Turks going to let it pass through the Straits into the Black Sea notwithstanding the restrictions of the Montreux Convention? Or, alternatively, are these two corvettes just going to go out into the world on commerce-raiding missions to take Russian oil tankers as prizes?

Weird. Creepy. Cringe. That's the progression.

I think this is a very astute and accurate take. And it's exactly what Harris digs into with "We're not going back." It's not just about abortion rights and gay rights and voting rights, though that's definitely the intellectual and policy part of it. But it plays on a more emotional level. We're not going back to the stress-inducing and emotionally exhausting era of watching Trump spew shit on our television every fucking day for four fucking years. Joe Biden hasn't been perfect. But I'll say this for him: for most of the days of his term, I haven't even thought about who was in the White House. Who the president is or what he is doing isn't a thought that even crosses my mind most days. And I--and I suspect most people--like it that way. We're not going back. Let me tell you something as a former Republican: The Democrats are fucking ruthless when it comes to failing candidates; the Republicans are not. We just saw it with Biden. But before that we saw it with everyone who wasn't Biden in 2020 two days before the South Carolina primary. And before that you saw it with Bernie Sanders. And I can go back to Gary Hart and, ultimately, to LBJ. If you're not going to win the White House, and particularly if you're going to do so badly that you're going to threaten Congressional and state-level Democrats, the party establishment will slit your fucking throat at the drop of an uneaten hat. The Republicans don't do that. That's how Trump got the nomination in 2016--they couldn't force Rubio or Cruz or any other non-Trump candidate out of the race. They couldn't force Palin to withdraw from the ticket (even when she had a pretty good built-in excuse of having to deal with her family (i.e., her teenaged unmarried daughter's pregnancy)). And they sure as shit couldn't do to Bush or Dole what the Democrats just did to Biden, notwithstanding the fact that it was equally apparent that they were going to end up how Biden would've ended up. Instead, Republicans just distance themselves from the disaster so that they can say later that others fucked it up and they would've run a better campaign. The recriminations often begin well before Election Day--just remember back to 2008 and all of the strategists pointing fingers at one another over Palin and McCain's stupid idea of suspending his campaign when AIG failed. Because--and this is the important thing to keep in mind--Republicans are rats. And rats will always flee the sinking ship.

That's the vibe I'm getting from my small handful of acquaintances who are Republicans or Republican-leaning. I just had a coworker who leans heavily Republican tell me that there was "no chance" that Trump wins. Really? "Yeah," he said--"no chance Kamala doesn't win." Honestly, it feels a lot like the level of despair we had three weeks ago. But maybe without the hope that their candidate could be persuaded to drop out. And on their side, I think you can't discount the number of people who treat electoral politics as entertainment or sport. Voting for Trump is just a mechanism to make the libs cry and whoop it up after you win. But if Trump isn't going to win, then it's no fun. And beyond that, there's no real point. Why bother supporting a team if you know it's going to lose? And if you're a person who votes only infrequently, why go out and vote if you know you're just going to be on the losing side? With a little luck and some good work on the campaign, we can get a snowball rolling downhill to bring about an electoral thumping.

You want to know why I'm excited to vote Democratic this year? Well, let me tell you: It's morning again in America. Today, more men and women will go to work than at any time before in our nation's history. With interest rates that are down from the highest levels we've seen this century, more than 13,000 families will buy homes. This afternoon, 5,600 couples will get married. And with inflation less than a third what it was just a year ago, they can look forward with confidence to the future. It's morning again in America. And under Democratic leadership, the country is prouder, and stronger, and better. Why would we ever want to return to where we were less than four short years ago?

I think we won. Fucking NBC isn't showing the score, but ok.

Jordan just killing the floor.

The beam is just eating people up today.

"Weird, creepy, and cringe." We could just repeat those three words from now until November 5, and it would basically summarize everything that comes out of a Republican candidate's mouth.