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Ghost of LL

Certifiably Surly
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Everything posted by Ghost of LL

  1. 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.
  2. I'm shocked; I'm stunned, it's Mack Brown Tim Walz.
  3. 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 . . . .
  4. I gotta say--I don't love this post from a man in your line of work.
  5. 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.
  6. 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.
  7. 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?
  8. Weird. Creepy. Cringe. That's the progression.
  9. 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.
  10. 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.
  11. 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?
  12. I think we won. Fucking NBC isn't showing the score, but ok.
  13. Jordan just killing the floor.
  14. The beam is just eating people up today.
  15. "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.
  16. Yeah, but I'll tell you that in Preston Hollow the Trump yard signs are out in force. I'm also going to observe that Preston Hollow is a heavily Jewish neighborhood. I also saw a couple "USA Stands With Israel" signs. So maybe that reflects that issue more than any widespread enthusiasm for Trump.
  17. Back when they were HL&P, they were owned by the City of Houston. But at some point, the City divested itself and it became an IOU.
  18. My bold prediction--a line of fire going up the Champs Elysees to the Arc.
  19. Oh, my god--are they now going to run it all the way up the Champs Elysees? Because that's going to take a half-hour.
  20. Oh, shit--the cauldron is Notre Dame. They're going to light that fucker back up and watch 'er burn again!
  21. These speeches are interminable.
  22. The fact that nobody has claimed credit undermines the "protest" theory. The whole point of protest is to raise awareness of a cause. But if you don't claim responsibility, then nobody's awareness is raised as to your cause. That indicates that the purpose was the disruption itself, not the communication of any message. And that implies that there may be further acts to come. The other thing that points in the direction of Russia is that it was not designed to kill or maim, but only to severely disrupt and inconvenience an event from which Russia has been banned. If this were al Qa'ida or some other terrorist group, they would've placed a bomb on the trains. But this just damaged infrastructure. It's an act designed to come just short of what would bring about a declaration of war.
  23. And I'm totally here for it.
  24. Ok--real talk, and please explain it to me like I'm 5: what makes J.D. Vance a bad pick as a running mate? You can't count the couch shit--we could've made that up about anyone. Now admittedly, maybe it wouldn't have been as believable if one said it about some people. I mean, it's a lot more funny, believable, and gross when it's J.D. Vance rather than, say, John Cornyn. But still, . . . As for his lack of charisma, he's still probably better than DeSantis. And while he may hate cats, at least he didn't kill the family dog unlike Kristi Noem. And his political positions--shit like putting tracking devices on women of childbearing age--isn't that just pretty standard Republican fare these days? I guess my point is that all of these people are fucking weird and noxious. J.D. Vance just seems like he's kind of league average for that party.
  25. As a matter of fact, . . . .
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