2024 Presidential Election Thread - Let's keep the party going.

[Constant 6,732]

13 minutes ago, tx 3 putt said:

 

does dumbass realize where nato countries love to buy their high end weapons from ?

And how many people that industry employees? (For better or worse) 

[atomheartbevo 89,675]

1 hour ago, Horn Dogg said:

Is there anything we can use to attack JD Vance?

RFK Jr?

Edited August 27 by atomheartbevo

[atomheartbevo 89,675]

 

1 hour ago, shakahorn said:

It's like Larry Bud Melman if you're old enough to remember that.

 

[F250 28,777]

32 minutes ago, HenryJames said:

[atomheartbevo 89,675]

2 hours ago, Beantown Express 2.0 said:

So, I’m in Philly on business and just grabbed dinner at the bar of nice restaurant.  Next to me at a table were 4 older people (one older white guy, one black woman, one white woman and then a white woman that sounded like she was 80+ years old).  They discussed politics, very loudly, the entire time I was there.  All I heard was the immigrants are pouring into this country and causing problems

Why didn't you put on a fake accent, look at the old guy and say

[F250 28,777]

7 minutes ago, atomheartbevo said:

 

[jimmyjazz 45,961]

1 hour ago, shakahorn said:

It's like Larry Bud Melman if you're old enough to remember that.

I not only saw him live -- I think he opened for They Might Be Giants?  can't remember -- but he gave me a Toast On A Stick.

[BearSchlong 8,098]

@briskettexan warms my heart you saw Hightower. Labor Day 1989 he, I and a group of state congressmen/judges got “stung” by federal game wardens for shooting doves over an allegedly baited field over in Hackberry. That was the day I saw Mark Stiles try to kick Terry Schaunessy’s ass.

Edit - delete post, ban user. Wrong Hightower. I’m thinking of Allen.

[Pato del Muerto 52,504]

I was thinking of Moses Hightower. 

[jimmyjazz 45,961]

I remember when Jim Hightower tried to launch a progressive alternative to right wing radio talk shows.  That didn't go well.

[bluto 4,929]

I remember when Hightower got pissed and deadlift flipped a police car at the academy 

[Horn Under a Bad Sign 20,400]

5 hours ago, Horn Under a Bad Sign said:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[ConferenceRoom 6,141]

7 hours ago, BearSchlong said:

@briskettexan warms my heart you saw Hightower. Labor Day 1989 he, I and a group of state congressmen/judges got “stung” by federal game wardens for shooting doves over an allegedly baited field over in Hackberry. That was the day I saw Mark Stiles try to kick Terry Schaunessy’s ass.

Edit - delete post, ban user. Wrong Hightower. I’m thinking of Allen.

This post had me on a roller coaster of emotions.

[Genco 3,041]

I remember when Reno Hightower wore his white shoes and beat Bakerfield's ass.

[Superhero 8,830]

On 8/25/2024 at 1:17 PM, chainsaw said:

 

I don’t Twitter, but the lot of you who do should go love his tweet and encourage him to encourage his community to do the same. 

[scottsins 1,966]

@briskettexan warms my heart you saw Hightower. Labor Day 1989 he, I and a group of state congressmen/judges got “stung” by federal game wardens for shooting doves over an allegedly baited field over in Hackberry. That was the day I saw Mark Stiles try to kick Terry Schaunessy’s ass.

Edit - delete post, ban user. Wrong Hightower. I’m thinking of Allen.

Are you talking about the dove hunt connected with the Bell County Bar Association golf tournament? I’ve heard a story just like yours for a long time around the courthouse there.

[HenryJames 66,077]

[Hank Kingsley 20,955]

5 minutes ago, HenryJames said:

Good news for Dems, but also a pathetic state of affairs that a fucking criminal can lock down 40% of the vote without even trying. 

 

[TexPx 2,323]

 
 

 

Oops wtf
NM

[TexPx 2,323]

Defacing government property with graffiti

[Goofyboy 3,293]

Good news for Dems, but also a pathetic state of affairs that a fucking criminal can lock down 40% of the vote without even trying. 
 

I think that might be dropping. My old man (92) has been a Republican forever. He’s voting for Harris. It took me, my step mom and Adam Kissinger at the DNC to get him to vote against Trump. He hates Trump and what he has done to the GOP. There are have to be more that are bailing.

[babysdaddy 2,725]

 

[Js1 85,348]

Fuck the media.  Seriously.

Not one article about Trump "flip flopping" on abortion bans.  None. 

[Red Five 40,859]

Trump flip flops in the same sentence. No one cares.

[South Austin 52,515]

6 minutes ago, babysdaddy said:

 

She has a better chance of getting Mexico pay for it than Trump did.

[Horn Under a Bad Sign 20,400]

 

2 minutes ago, Js1 said:

Fuck the media.  Seriously.

Not one article about Trump "flip flopping" on abortion bans.  None. 

I was for abortion before I was against abortion before I was for it.
 

[Brisketexan 105,151]

1 hour ago, Hank Kingsley said:

Good news for Dems, but also a pathetic state of affairs that a fucking criminal can lock down 40% of the vote without even trying. 

Bottom line, what this last decade has shown us, under a bright spotlight, is that AT LEAST 40% of our fellow Americans are giant pieces of shit, always have been, and probably always will be.

40% of our body politic is pure cancer.  A proper diagnosis is an essential first step in figuring out how to live with a disease.  Trumpism has been the ultimate full-body biopsy.  We now know, with near-perfect certainty, how much cancer we have, where it grows/among what groups it exists, and how badly it can hurt us.  Let's take the "W" of obtaining that knowledge.  Then what comes next is the treatment.  For the first time since this diagnosis became apparent, the American people seem to have coalesced enough to say "okay, let's fight this shit."  That is fan-fucking-tastic.  Let's fight.

Just know that it's going to be a brutal and long fight (and we'll never totally cure the disease).  We're gonna puke a lot, lose all our hair, look like concentration camp victims, all that shit.  But let's fucking do this.

[Kyrie Eleison 9,312]

22 hours ago, Goredho said:

 

 

[Js1 85,348]

FAU (National) - Harris 49, Trump 45 (+4)

[Js1 85,348]

2 minutes ago, Js1 said:

FAU (National) - Harris 49, Trump 45 (+4)

Also forgot to post that Echelon (right wing pollster) threw out a Trump +1 national poll yesterday.  Reiterating that Trump +1 to Harris +7 is the range of outcomes we'd see if she is truly up 3 or 4.

[cactusflinthead 27,598]

 

[mdmost 43,003]

32 minutes ago, babysdaddy said:

 

I'm confused. Since when is compromising to get a bill passed considered flip flopping? She wants a border bill to get done. Everyone has to give something to get it done. If building a wall that will eventually be breached is the dumb position she has to give on then so be it. It's still a stupid waste of money but if it gets a larger bill accomplished to help with the issues at the border, I don't see that as a flip flop. But of course it's a great gotcha point for the media. 

[chainsaw 9,869]

Just now, cactusflinthead said:

 

With these kind of numbers he'd lose OH-SEN to a generic dem

Just now, mdmost said:

I'm confused. Since when is compromising to get a bill passed considered flip flopping? She wants a border bill to get done. Everyone has to give something to get it done. If building a wall that will eventually be breached is the dumb position she has to give on then so be it. It's still a stupid waste of money but if it gets a larger bill accomplished to help with the issues at the border, I don't see that as a flip flop. But of course it's a great gotcha point for the media. 

$650M vs. $18B so there's still a big difference, but I would be pissed as a landowner who doesn't want it built on my land

[HenryJames 66,077]

[cactusflinthead 27,598]

Just a little reminder about election fuckery fighters 

[Jive Turkey 12,603]

29 minutes ago, Red Five said:

Trump flip flops in the same sentence. No one cares.

Trump was for gun control until he wasn't for gun control.  hell, he wanted to ban assault weapons, which made Feinstein show more emotion than she had in the prior 10 years.  Trump is all over the place, but he gets a pass because "it's just Trump being Trump." 

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/timeline-trumps-record-gun-control-reform/story?id=64783662

[TonyTexas 10,515]

8 minutes ago, cactusflinthead said:

 

Trump “JD is doing great. His favorable numbers have tripled in 5 weeks. It’s the biggest jump in the history of the world!”

[Js1 85,348]

6 minutes ago, cactusflinthead said:

Just a little reminder about election fuckery fighters 

Yeah but Putt found a tweet from IncelMagent6969696 that says Trump will win California because they will SUE for only REAL VOTES to be counted.

[Ghost of LL 15,531]

3 minutes ago, Jive Turkey said:

Trump was for gun control until he wasn't for gun control.  hell, he wanted to ban assault weapons, which made Feinstein show more emotion than she had in the prior 10 years.  Trump is all over the place, but he gets a pass because "it's just Trump being Trump." 

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/timeline-trumps-record-gun-control-reform/story?id=64783662

Everyone gets a "pass" for supposed "flip-flopping."  Because nobody cares about flip-flipping.

And really, why would they?  Why would we expect anyone--politician or otherwise--to maintain the same position year after year?  Why would we expect anybody not to change position as they receive new information?

And in a democracy, we expect our leaders to reflect the positions of the people who elect them.  If Kamala Harris said "defund ICE" in 2020 and it became apparent that defunding ICE was a powerfully unpopular position, why should we expect her not to change that position?  In a democracy, shouldn't her position reflect the position of the vast majority of the people who elect her, even if that means that she changes her position?

 

 

That is not to say that you can change your position willy-nilly from one day to the next based on what group you're talking to.  That just indicates you're untrustworthy.  And that's why Trump is suddenly getting into a little bit of trouble with the single-issue anti-abortion crew.  But that's different from the run-of-the-mill flip-flopping that all candidates do.

[Brisketexan 105,151]

17 minutes ago, cactusflinthead said:

 

JD Vance is the "you think you hate it now, wait until you drive it!" of politicians. 

[Js1 85,348]

1 minute ago, Ghost of LL said:

And really, why would they?  Why would we expect anyone--politician or otherwise--to maintain the same position year after year?  Why would we expect anybody not to change position as they receive new information?

 

This.  Things change, people evolve.  It's one thing to say as Senator running for President that you would never support building a wall or parts of a wall, it's another when you have 4 years as VP, you've been to the border in an executive capacity and the issue has changed since 2020 to say "you know, I support building parts of a wall now after being intimately involved in the border issue since I was elected VP, which is why we negotiated that in the Bipartisan Immigration Bill that Trump killed.  We stand by that bill and I still intend to sign it into law." 

[TwiceHorn 31,486]

55 minutes ago, babysdaddy said:

 

Man, Axios is usually better than that, as far as baity headlines.

What she really means, according to the article, is that she would support the "border bill" that Trump killed, which does include wall building.

[The Hot Dog Buffet 1,291]

1 hour ago, TexPx said:

Defacing government property with graffiti

Pretty sure he just said anyone doing that should get 10 years.

[wildcat09 29,354]

Pretty good coincidence that this great Rick Pearlstein piece on flip flopping and effective political communication just dropped yesterday:

Quote

A quiet revolution has been unfolding in how Democrats campaign, and it helps explain why being a Democrat has suddenly felt so joyous these past five weeks—and maybe why the Harris-Walz ticket is pulling ahead of the opposition.

Democrats are suddenly allowed to say what they mean.

No trimming. No “triangulation.” No rhetorical bank shots, no apologies. Really, we haven’t seen anything quite like it since the surprise landslide of Ronald Reagan in 1980 shocked the party of “Give ’em hell” Harry Truman into its modern-day defensive crouch.

You probably know the story of how Truman got the nickname. His political calling card was a Tim Walz–like, down-home Midwestern plainspokenness. He was tearing into the opposition with a fierceness when a delighted audience member cried lustily, “Give ’em hell, Harry!” He shot back, devil-may-care: “I don’t have to give ’em hell. I just tell the truth and they call it hell.”

And that’s what Democratic presidential candidates never seemed to do again after that Reagan trauma: simply tell their truth.

It wasn’t that they lied, precisely; outright untruth remained the province of the party of Nixon, Reagan, George W. Bush, and Trump. But they were never quite truth-tellers, either. Campaigning as a Democrat, at the highest level of the game—especially at the presidential-nominee level of the game—has come to mean never directly and precisely saying what you believed.

If, that is, you even remembered what you believed, after the consultants got through with you.

INDIRECTION BECAME DEMOCRATS’ BRAND. You saw it in Michael Dukakis’s appeal to the electorate in 1988. As a point of pride, he adamantly refused to name what Democrats were fighting against. Conservatism’s crass worship of money and explicit contempt for the notion of disinterested public service made Reagan’s administration the most corrupt in U.S. history. Figures like Attorney General Ed Meese, HUD Secretary Samuel Pierce, and EPA Administrator Anne Burford were either guilty of or stood credibly accused of outright looting of the public purse. The scar of inequality grew deeper and deeper each year of his presidency, and creepy theocrats increasingly called the tune at the base of the party.

But “this election,” Dukakis simpered in his DNC acceptance speech, “is not about ideology. It’s about competence.” In a fleeting reference to the Iran-Contra scandal, which proved that Republicans were ready, willing, and able to leapfrog the Constitution whenever it fit their ideological needs, Dukakis said, “It’s not about overthrowing governments in Central America—it’s about creating jobs in Middle America.”

Rhetoric like that only served to confirm what Republicans often said: Democrats’ existing system of beliefs—the definition of “ideology”—must be pretty damned weird, if they’re running away from it so hard.

In 1992, Bill Clinton made his own unique contribution to his party’s newfound tradition of not giving the opposition hell. It was called “triangulation.” What that meant—explicitly—was that the party’s nominee found the rest of his party distasteful. He surely wasn’t like those callous Republicans, but he also wasn’t like all those other icky Democrats in Congress either. That was the reason you should vote for him. Any wonder that, two years later, voters turned so many of those icky congressional Democrats out of office in favor of Newt Gingrich’s Republican revolutionaries? At least, after all, those guys seemed proud of what they were selling.

Then there was Al Gore. If there’s one thing any random person on the street can tell you about Clinton’s vice president, it’s that his greatest passion, the truest thing he knows, is that human-caused climate change is the worst problem the world has ever faced. Indeed, he believed that in 2000, when he ran for president. He just never talked about it on the campaign trail. The reason, probably, was that the wizards running party strategy crunched the numbers, ran the focus groups, and decided that was not what the public wanted to hear. Useful enough to know, as far as that goes. But what did that mean for how the candidate appeared to the electorate?

Well, it’s hard work saying something other than what you believe in your heart. It makes a speaker sweat. You see the gears turning—and maybe grinding—inside their head. And it’s unpleasant to avoid talking about what you really want to talk about. It makes a person look and sound squirrelly. It conveys an inherent untrustworthiness.

Which, no wonder, has been the dominant image of Democratic presidential candidates for most of our lifetimes.

STEPHEN COLBERT, UNFORGETTABLY, labeled Republicans’ habit of uttering things that feel emotionally true, even though they are made up, as “truthiness.” The Democrats had their own, photo-negative version of truthiness: utterances that are meticulously factual, but that convey an unmistakable emotional falsiness.

John Kerry was the worst of them all. His entire candidacy was built upon a foundation of inauthenticity. The party sachems thought they were geniuses for boosting a Vietnam veteran to run against an incumbent president who avoided fighting in Vietnam. This was wartime, and the electorate was supposed to believe a warrior could fight wars better.

Except, oops, framing Kerry as a warrior occluded the fact that he had also been, once upon a time, America’s most celebrated anti-warrior.

One of the most heartbreaking research tasks I’ve ever carried out was tracking down video of Kerry’s early 1970s television interviews as spokesman for Vietnam Veterans Against the War. They were magnificent. He would explain, with aching sincerity and searing clarity, the futility of fighting a war of occupation amid another country’s civil war, what that does morally to those who fight it, and why wars like that are almost always all but impossible to win.

Like the time he told Dick Cavett: “Quite frankly, when I was in Vietnam … I just could never feel that I was there fighting to save that country, to make it safe for democracy. The only feeling you could have was that you were like the Germans—that you were there occupying another country. And really this feeling of imperialism is one that actually does pervade much of the world now when they look at the United States of America.” Then he showed a film he made of one of his Swift Boat crew’s operations, lingering upon a peasant farmer dead on the ground: “This is the enemy, so to speak, in South Vietnam.”

He certainly couldn’t say anything like that in 2004, as Iraq became an outright fiasco: After all, he had enthusiastically voted to authorize that war. Which meant he couldn’t criticize the war as flawed in its very conception, only in its execution. Worse, Kerry had to force himself to pretend he had never known that to be true.

Kerry also said in the VVAW days, “Clearly, as you fight with the Vietnamese, you become aware that this is a war of the people,” and that it’s “impossible to wage guerrilla warfare without the support of the people to hide and harbor and supply you”—and that was, obviously, why America was losing in Vietnam.

And this was exactly what was happening in Iraq by the time he won the nomination. Kerry just couldn’t say it; he could only imply it—indirectly, with circumlocution.

The one guy who could tell the truth about Iraq was Howard Dean, but Democratic elites had done all they could to push him out of the race. Because it was “wartime,” and America would supposedly not abide an anti-war nominee in wartime.

Kerry clinched; Democrats clenched. That is the only way I can describe what it felt like listening to the nominee on the subject of Iraq: cringe after cringe. I can’t imagine what it must have been like inside his head, threading those needles, censoring what he knew to be true, squaring the circle of scourging a failed war without implicating his own support of it before venturing any utterance on the subject, grinding his gears lest he accidentally let slip those darker truths his deepest experience had taught him. No one is a good enough actor to convincingly pull that off for long.

And it showed.

In March of 2004, a CBS/New York Times poll found only a third of Americans thought Kerry “says what he believes.” And that was before Team Bush began beating him up as a “flip-flopper.” No wonder he sounded that way: He had imposed upon himself a sort of lobotomy on the very subject that had once been most deeply inscribed upon his very heart.

I recently asked a friend what she remembered about John Kerry back then. She replied, “I never listened to what he had to say because it just sounded like he was saying what he was supposed to say, not what he believed. There was no there there.”

Kerry even enforced a version of his own self-censorship on the rest of the party: At the 2004 convention, criticizing George W. Bush by name was banned.

FOR DECADES, IT HAS FELT LIKE EVERY leading Democrat was performing some version of that—because all of them, to greater or lesser degrees, bought that the success of Reaganism, and the supposed failings of liberalism, proved what Republicans said it did: that “Middle America” inherently agreed with them, and thought of us all as a bunch of unpatriotic, extremist … weirdos.

But now: farewell to all that. Now, we can tell them the truth, and let them call it hell.

You saw that all last week in Chicago, from likely and unlikely sources. Oprah Winfrey: “Let us choose common sense over nonsense.” Gov. Wes Moore of Maryland, on enlisting in the Army at 17: “I had to ask my mom to sign the paperwork for me, because I don’t have bone spurs.” Rep. Jamie Raskin, also of Maryland: Trump is a “career criminal … and his pet chameleon J.D. Vance.” Coach Walz: “Health care and housing are human rights.” Because, simply this: “Freedom!”

Pete Buttigieg especially impressed me for the way he came, hard, at a foundational source of Democrats’ past inauthenticity. It is the learned helplessness that holds that certain Middle American prejudices are ineluctable and unmovable, to be accommodated, not challenged. The most frustrating victim of that learned helplessness was President Barack Obama. Buttigieg had the guts to take that on directly.

Obama is never more excruciating than when he pronounces one certain word with a little scowl, as if he had just bit down on something gross. That word is politics. In Barack’s lexicon, it’s the opposite of “doing what’s right,” an antonym for “character” itself. And if you think I’m exaggerating, listen to what Obama said at the convention in describing Biden’s successes beating back the COVID epidemic: “At a time when millions of our fellow citizens were sick and dying, we needed a leader with the character to put politics aside and do what was right.”

Secretary Buttigieg handled that mistaken notion at the United Center, like Michael Jordan swatting away an opponent’s shot in the same arena in 1993.

He was talking about what transformed “the existence of [his] family”—him, his husband, and their two adopted children—from “literally impossible as recently as 25 years ago” to a simple fact performed every morning at their kitchen table. He pointed out how it “didn’t just happen. It was brought about. Through idealism and courage. Through organizing and persuasion. And storytelling, and, yes, through politics.”

I think he was deliberately tweaking Obama. Hearing him do it, I thought of a story from 2007, when the Obama campaign recruited a popular gospel singer to perform as part of his campaign entourage. His name was Donnie McClurkin. I’ve written about him in a previous column, describing his performance as the warm-up act for George W. Bush at the 2004 Republican convention as a dog whistle to Christian evangelical homophobic bigots. A prominent “ex-gay,” McClurkin had recently appeared on The 700 Club braying that homosexuals were “trying to kill our children.”

Obama, I’m sure, could not have agreed with this less. And, in that particular instance, Obama was saved from himself: The hue and cry raised by his gay supporters forced McClurkin’s cancellation from the campaign tour. But that he thought this was a good idea in the first place spoke deeply to Democrats’ infinite resourcefulness, in the bad old days, in thinking they somehow help themselves by not saying what they actually believe.

Obama somehow thought he could accomplish something to better the nation by signaling that he was somehow on the same side as this monstrous person—that meeting the bad guys halfway would somehow convince them to denude their badness.

Instead of just telling the truth, and letting them call it hell.

YOU KNOW WHO ELSE TWEAKED Barack Obama a little bit about that? Michelle Obama. In a suit that suggested a warrior’s suit of armor, with a speech borne aloft by the same spirit of truth-telling combativeness sweeping the rest of the party—and which her husband himself leaned into a little bit with his now-infamous joke about the size of Donald Trump’s penis—she launched into a peroration about how “we cannot be our own worst enemies,” and that the minute a lie takes hold, we cannot start wringing our hands. “We cannot get a Goldilocks complex about whether everything is just right!”

Exactly!

Which brings us to Kamala Harris’s speech. No need to rehearse the best lines; history will do that for us. That’s largely because the soul of the thing was not its specific sentences. It was in her affect. That sense you had that there were no gears grinding away inside her head, nor negotiations with herself. That feeling that she was telling the truth as she saw it, devil take the hindmost. That it seemed to emerge not from her teleprompter, but from her being, singing a song in the key of her life.

Maybe because the consultants didn’t have time to assemble their focus groups, she was left alone to tell her truth.

But look at what happened next: They’re calling it hell. Keep that up, Kamala Harris. Keep it up.

 

[Ghost of LL 15,531]

15 minutes ago, wildcat09 said:

Pretty good coincidence that this great Rick Pearlstein piece on flip flopping and effective political communication just dropped yesterday:

 

Yeah--I don't know about all that.

But what I will say is that the Democrats have finally flipped back to playing traditional politics against Trump.  And the traditional style of politics had a tradition behind it because it worked.

From 2015 to just a couple months ago, Democrats were purely reactive to Trump.  They framed themselves as the Contra-Trump.  Whatever Trump said he was for, they were against.  And for the most part, that worked because Trump is generally in favor of policies that are noxious, racist, or often just plain dumb.

Harris has abandoned that.  Now, Trump says "I will get rid of taxes on tips."  It's kind of popular.  So Harris, instead of instinctively rejecting it, steals it and makes a few tweaks to ensure that it can't be used by hedge fund managers to evade taxation.  

That's fucking old-school politics.  Your opponent has a popular policy proposal?  Fucking steal it.

Democrats were so drawn offside by Donald Trump for sixteen goddamned years that we forgot how to do that.  It's good to see us remember how to actually do electoral politics.  And now it's Trump who's completely off balance.

[Goredho 17,406]

49 minutes ago, cactusflinthead said:

 

 

49 minutes ago, cactusflinthead said:

 

Somewhere someone is writing an elegy for this wannabilly.

[TexEx15 17,535]

No words.

[HenryJames 66,077]

Always. Be. Grifting.

[WhatTheBuck 28,783]

1 hour ago, babysdaddy said:

 

Is that entire article based on her saying she’d sign the border bill that Trump killed?

[Gatorubet 30,242]

25 minutes ago, Ghost of LL said:

Democrats were so drawn offside by Donald Trump for sixteen goddamned years that we forgot how to do that.  It's good to see us remember how to actually do electoral politics.  And now it's Trump who's completely off balance.

His various insults and nicknames have not worked on her.  Trump is not used to that.   He desperately wants her to do interviews so he can take a soundbite and misstate/lie about what she meant.    

The Democrats finally figured out that the election will be won more on emotional connection to the candidates who can provide a vision of a brighter future - and not the candidates who have the strongest wonky plank of issues that can be matched against the other party’s  platform.  

I have a suspicion that calling young women who don’t immediately want to become mothers useless psychotics who hate society will not age well this election cycle.   As an old guy, I know plenty of women of a certain age who never had a kid.  I know three women who have gotten involved as Harris volunteers they are so pissed off at that comment. 

Edited August 27 by Gatorubet