Ghost of LL

I remember my first presidential campaign in 1992. I worked hard for George Bush, but I was a kid who didn't know anything about jack shit. I really thought Bush was going to win. But then one day in mid-October as I was driving around putting up yard signs--I think it was while waiting at the stoplight at Mockingbird and Central--I for the first time had the conscious thought, "but hey--if Bill Clinton wins, the country would be just fine." And before I got across Central--in those days, getting across Central could take several hours, so I'm not crediting myself with a particularly speedy thought process, just to be clear--it occurred to me that if other Republicans were having the same thought, then our turnout was going to be depressed and we were going to be fucked. And it was. And we were. And ever since that experience, I have kept a weather eye for expressions of such sentiment. When people who you know are voting D or R start having the thought "well, if the other party's candidate wins, it won't be the end of the world," then that party's fucked.

And to expand on this just a bit--that was only from Johnson Branch. Travis is going to be getting a whole lot of water from a whole lot of sources. And rain continues to be in the forecast throughout the rest of the week. Oh, and this is July. This isn't even the rainy season.

In complete fairness, the Quinnipiac poll's crosstab was of 18-34 year-olds. So the math works since 30-34 year-olds are going for Trump by a margin of about 125-(-25). And don't forget the Olympics, my brother. What--the Olympics are apolitical? Bullshit. Not in a country in which one of the candidates is actively cheering against our women's teams. Not in a country in which the challenger wants you to think America isn't currently great and shit is in crisis. Perhaps you missed the memo, my dude--we're not going back!

Not just that, but he can also speak credibly as a border-state senator on the issue of immigration. I don't mean that the Democrats can take that issue back. But he can talk about how Trump sabotaged the legislation that Arizona and the other border states need to address immigration. Beyond that--every fucking poll coming out today was in the field before Biden withdrew. It doesn't reflect the present reality. They're polling a purely hypothetical matchup, which we've seen in other circumstances is very different from an actual matchup. No poll of consequence is going to come out before Thursday.

Yeah--it's now up over 60k cfs, and there's no sign that the rain is going to stop over the next couple hours. For the moment, it looks like it may be intensifying a bit right there over Rocksprings.

Absolute prodigious amounts of rainfall along the upper Llano River watershed, with Johnson Fork of the Llano now running at 28K cfs. And it is still coming down out there, all along the Llano. We're going to see some wild streamflows along that river by the end of the day heading down to Lake LBJ.

From my experience in my neighborhood, which has a pretty good number of them, they don't vote as a bloc. I'm friends with several who are dyed-in-the-wool blue. But they acknowledge that they have plenty of Indian friends/family who are Republicans.

I'm not shocked (or even surprised) at all. Because the one great motivating issue for Democrats is beating Trump. Even when you saw people disagreeing on this or other threads about whether Biden should drop out, the question was only ever about who is best positioned to beat Trump. Nobody was arguing that we should rally around Biden because of some overriding loyalty to Biden; nobody was arguing to ditch Biden out of any animosity toward him. It was only ever about whether he could beat Trump. Now that the die is cast, it's very clear that Harris puts us in better position to beat Trump than would any kind of open convention with multiple candidates. So that's how it's going to go. And doesn't take any puppet-master to coordinate the Party coming together to support Harris; it's plainly apparent to anybody with the least little bit of political sensibility that that's what needs to happen. I'm really skeptical about that, because (1) young people--and tipped workers are disproportionately young--are incredibly skeptical of political promises, and (2) I'm not sure how many tipped workers think they're going to continue being tipped workers in two or three years.

These polls poll a hypothetical. Now that it's real, I think you're going to see real movement. If I were a betting man, I would wager that the polls that come out Thursday are going to look a lot like the final results from 2020. And this is why Nancy Pelosi is the GOAT. Back when I was a Republican, I fucking hated Nancy Pelosi. But I hated Nancy Pelosi in that way that, as a Cowboys fan, I hated Joe Montana. Call it a "coup" if you want. Fine. Whatever. Then give Nancy her due--Nancy Pelosi pulled off a coup. Donald couldn't, despite being the sitting POTUS. All he got was indicated for it. I don't know who came up with January 1, 1965 as the cut-off. But I don't think there's universal agreement on that. For one thing, the guy who first coined the term "Generation X" defined it as beginning in 1961. Personally, I think if you were born after the Kennedy Assassination, you're GenX.

I’m just going to predict right now that when the first real polls come out around Thursday, a lot of people are going to be shocked.

I’ve long said Joe Biden is the best president of my lifetime. An infrastructure bill; the CHIPS Act, insulin, eliminating bank fees—most presidents would be happy with any one of those accomplishments. But now—an act of Washingtonian selflessness. If Harris can beat Trump and save the Republic, he goes down as one of the best presidents ever.

Just a straight line of rain from the edge of the rain dome straight up the Colorado River all the way to San Angelo. It’s beautiful.

Ha—it’s like you think this country was founded 7 years ago.

Just talking to people who are partisan Dems, but who were very dispirited—that’s all over now. They’re super-energized and ready to go. Including , and especially, Mrs.LL. In related happy news, I am so getting laid tonight.

So what does black smoke coming from the Baptican City signify?

No fucking shit. And if anyone should feel betrayed, it’s the Democrats who stood up for Biden against a year of Republican attacks on Biden’s mental state, only to find out those attacks were legitimate.

I think you ascribe to AOC motives that may not, in reality, be so pure, and to her opponents motives that may not be so uniformly malign. AOC wants power just like everyone else in Washington. She clearly thinks it is to her advantage to have Biden in the White House rather than Harris, and in that I suspect she may be correct. And to your point, she has no real downside. Her seat will be one of the last 20 to fall to the GQP. As to "deserve," well--deserve's got nothing to do with it. But if you want to talk about who deserves what, then yeah--Biden's team does deserve this. Because Biden's team hid his condition from the public--and from the Democratic Party--for untold months. This present kerfuffle is the natural consequence of their dishonesty. And for his part, Biden doesn't get harmed by standing down. He goes down in history as one of the most consequential presidents of the post-war era. And friendly biographers will certainly ascribe his decision as being for the good of the country--the final sacrifice of a patriot. His legacy would only be enhanced. It'd be far better than losing, which seems a near-certainty if he doesn't withdraw.

He doesn't need to be a candidate to be on the campaign trail. Dude--he's 81. He doesn't have "early onset" anything. At this point, anything that onsets is doing so in a pretty timely fucking manner.

The last two times I've been there, it's been actively bad. Perhaps Darden can improve it; it really couldn't get worse.

Given that they’ve been lying to the country about Biden’s mental state for the better part of a year, I don’t give a fuck about their fucking feelings.

I mean, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding. Obama won in 2008 against a goddamned war hero. He won again against a very generic Republican. And both times, he won pretty handily. Hillary Clinton won the popular vote in 2016 despite (1) having the distinct handicap of being Hillary Clinton, which is to say a person against whom a GOP rage machine had been pointed for the previous quarter-century (into which, it must be said, she played perfectly), (2) running a spectacularly bad campaign which saw her completely ignore the three states that everyone knew to be the tipping-point states in the EC, and (3) having Jim Comey announce the reopening of an FBI investigation without any real justification and in contravention of Bureau guidelines just ten days before election day. I'm not saying there aren't racists and misogynists in America. But I am saying that there's strong evidence that they aren't an electoral majority.

Donors play a part, of course. But it's not just them. It's volunteers. And it's local party officials. And they're all signaling that there is a massive enthusiasm gap. She's doing it because she has the best political instincts of any Democrat of her generation. And she sees an iceberg dead ahead. I think you're giving her far too little credit when you ascribe her political instincts to some donors.

Ok--so here's the thing: once again I think the NYT is doing us all a disservice, because this isn't really the story. And I infer that a fair amount of your frustration originates from this misleading NYT article. It's not "a handful of billionaires" who think Joe Biden should stand down. It's me. It's the majority of posters on this thread. It's somewhere in the neighborhood of 70% of Democratic voters. And on the night of the debate, it was you. And that demonstrates that it wasn't "a handful of billionaires" who caused 70% of Democratic voters and a whole bunch of Democratic officeholders to reach that conclusion. That was the immediate conclusion that both you and I separately reached that night. You have changed your mind on that; I haven't. But regardless--neither you nor I came to that thought based on any billionaire. The NYT speaks of elites because the NYT is elite and that's the only thing it can conceive of. But elite opinion immediately after the debate was 100% to rally around Biden and minimize that debate disaster. The shift since doesn't represent the hidden hand of some nefarious elites. It is a demonstration of the will of the Democratic grass roots.