TGIF [DOT 16/8/24]

16/8/24 MegMegMcGee 57

Woot woot it’s finally Friday!

Winners, I’m sure /s

Trump adds five new campaign advisers as he attempts to find attack lines against Harris
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/aug/15/trump-campaign-new-advisers-election

Someone missed The West Wing

Stonks!

Stock futures are little changed as Wall Street heads for a winning week

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/08/15/stock-futures-are-little-changed-as-wall-street-heads-for-a-winning-week.html

Sprots!

Billy Bean was a safe space for a sport that couldn’t find a safe space for him
https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2024/08/15/billy-bean-was-safe-space-sport-that-couldnt-find-safe-space-him

Holy crap, worth the click just to see a picture her as a young actress

Gena Rowlands was a legend long before ‘The Notebook’ proclaimed her lovable
https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/movies/2024/08/15/gena-rowlands-death-notebook-appreciation

Have a great day!

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57 Comments

  2. More evidence that RFK Jr, is a legal resident of New York: Not only does he have a NYS driver’s license, he has a New York State falconry license. Had I known that falconry licenses existed I would have guessed that Bobby had one. Bobby, as he is commonly known. He’s 69.

    • I have so many questions. Do you suppose you have to own a falcon to get a license? What would the test be like? Is it just care and feeding, or do you have to go out and have your falcon kill a rabbit or something? Is it a requirement if you want to own a falcon? Is there an office that checks up on that sort of thing? Where do you buy falcons, anyway? If your falcon … expires, does your license expire as well? Do you have to reapply regularly? What about falcon-adjacent birds of prey? Do they have separate licensing requirements? Is it in fact required?

      I’m going to need more information here.

    • Miriam Addelson? That idiot? What she (but especially her asshole hubby Sheldon) done for Murrica is basically make it easier for them to make money.

      But that’s not why they give out medals to soldiers.

      Yeah, you’re right about 2/3 of the military will vote for Trump because authoritarian and non thinkers.

      • I mean, Trump is obviously gonna prefer awards where you can basically buy it for the right price (or in this case, have your husband lay the groundwork to buy it for you).

        But it is funny how much he fucking haaaaates the military and will shit on them given an open mic. And especially wounded soldiers! The man just isn’t good at this!

    • I dunno if that many of the Military *will* vote for Mango Mussolini and Vladimir Fouton *this* go-round, what with Governor Guard-Dad and his 24 years of common sense & service running, against the guy who calls Combat Wounded & Killed vets “Losers” and the PR Marine who can’t tell the VFW from Vetran of Foreign Affairs…

      • …I mean…that makes sense to me…& would track with the bits of family I’ve had who have been in some sort of military service…but…those weren’t modern teens who went into the US marine corps…many of whom may be deserving of due respect but at least some of which do seem to live up to a worrying stereotype or two in terms of what is & isn’t properly speaking part of the country they swore to protect?

  6. I just saw the (tentative) speakers’ line up for Monday night at the DNC. Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, and New York’s sweetheart, Kathy Hochul.

    Oh for Christ’s sakes. If there is a hell and I go to it those three are going to be my roommates, if it’s anything like “No Exit.” No.

    You know what the DNC should do? Give all four nights to Barry and Mich. They could reminisce, riff off each other,  crack wise, maybe share some vacay photos from Hawaii and Martha’s Vineyard. That I would watch. Maybe they could have the daughters on. They seem kind of sullen (I suppose I would be too if I were just trying to have a quiet ciggie and the paps were stalking me) and plus they dress like their outfits were pulled from the dumpster behind the nearest Salvation Army, but I know nothing about kids today and they’re either wearing the trendiest of outifts or the outfits will be the trendiest once they are seen in them.

    • Honestly I’d much rather hear from Biden — though please for the love of God make it a short speech so he doesn’t die during it — than Obama. Barrack, that is; I’m fine with a fired-up Michelle so long as she isn’t pushing that “we go high” shit.

      • I was thinking less stemwinder and more cozy, Oprah-like chat. Actually, I suppose there should be a moderator. What’s Katie Couric doing nowadays? Her interview with the Snowbilly belongs in the Television Hall of Fame and helped Barry on his path to the White House. They could get together for old times’ sake.

         

    • Meanwhile this is how NY Times editors who write headlines decided to spin things, probably with the input of Trump’s team.

       

      The process, by the way, for cutting time to go live is to get the campaign’s take on events in advance. In a functional operation there’s an effort to get multiple takes from different viewpoints in order to have a good perspective and avoid obvious problems. The Times is clearly avoiding that and just mainlining straight from Trump’s team.

      It’s not a big problem if all you’re covering is a ribbon cutting ceremony at a new post office. For something like this it’s complete malpractice.

      • Yeah, I’m pretty sure all this crap is prewritten and the reporter just pushes “send” about 10 minutes into the event. Literally none of that took place during Trump’s “speech.” He did muse about Cheerios, though.

    • Apparently it was a visual aid about how much grocery prices have gone up since Harris became VP, you know, because the VP controls what General Mills or Kraft charges for their products.

  9. So let’s look at some other election tells that aren’t polls.

    Crypto bros are betting on Harris.

    The Crypto Lobby Is Spending Big Money on Democrats, and Republicans Aren’t Happy

    Windmill developers are betting on Harris.

    Wind developers bid $93M for mid-Atlantic — blowing off Trump 2.0 threat

    Trump had promised to gut the wind power industry because he hates windmills for … reasons. An auction in the Gulf last month was canceled. My, how times have changed.

    And let’s take a look at the stock market.

    Trump tries to make ‘Kamala Crash’ a thing, but stocks keep rallying

    And in polling, WaPo admitting Harris might, y’know, have a shot at this presidency thing.

    Harris has opened up a second path to victory, according to The Post’s polling model

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/08/15/kamala-harris-polling-electoral-college-polling-model-donald-trump/ 

    • RFK Jr. hates wind turbines too. He took up the call from the Koch brothers years ago to fight them, and attacked them on the grounds that yachters’ views would be less picturesque.

    • …the WaPo polls/paths thing kind of undersells it in the headline, too

      The Democratic nominee could win in the Rust Belt or the Sun Belt and get to the White House, while Donald Trump must win in both geographic regions to triumph.

      …where they previously had joe down at a disadvantage because he had to hit all his marks to thread the needle while the other guy could be denied this or that state but make it up elsewhere they have it literally the other way

      …I mean…I don’t want to jinx anything & I halfway think it might mean almost nothing if all the “leads” in the polls add up to one big “within the margin for error” to the point that neither might in fact have to do it the way they think is the viable option because the difference between viable & not is not-implausibly a bigger spread than the one they’ve picked for their margin of error

      …but assuming they’ve managed to be consistent in their methodology & none of the sources they aggregate have switched up how they gather the data much…even then it still seems fair to say that’s literally the tables turning all the way around?

      • All of my prior “polling sucks and shouldn’t be trusted” still stands, but the post-Nate Silver 538 polling averages had Democrats basically in a statistical dead heat even before Harris stepped up. Now it’s a widening gap in their favor. I’m also not counting chickens, but a lot of the earlier polling came with caveats that seems absolutely fucking baffling and the new polls are much more in line with a “nobody’s really new in this election” election.

        • Same. Polling sucks. But it definitely seems to overemphasize Republicans, for reasons I’ve discussed ad infinitum. So my take is that a poll that shows Harris leading by two points is actually a much better margin than the two points. Again, overconfidence is deadly, but I don’t think we’re being too crazy here to say Harris is in really good shape.

  11. We now know J.D. Vance has gone after German immigrants for creating crime, along with Irish and Italians.

    https://newrepublic.com/post/184936/jd-vance-bashed-immigration-podcast-host-advocated-rape

    Vance of course was demogouging.. Despite stereotypes created by 30s gangster movies and The Godfather, Italian American communities weren’t higher in crime, but Italians were often victims of lynchings.

    https://www.wgbh.org/news/2017-10-24/a-brief-history-of-americas-hostility-to-a-previous-generation-of-mediterranean-migrants-italians

    And of course Germans had been immigrants before the Revolution, and were more common in the late 1700s than most immigrant groups like the Dutch.

    He said this to a podcast host  who is an absolute creep.

    Murphy wrote that “behind even the most ardent feminist facade is a deep desire to be dominated and even degraded,” adding that “rape is the best therapy for the problem. Feminists need rape.”

      • …this passed me by until now…but I figured I’d try wikipedia to see how it said this shook out…& now I know he picked “vance”…was born “bowman” later changed after his mum ditched his dad to “hamel”…if there’s a part that says when or why he switched to vance I couldn’t be bothered to read that far

        …but the JD was different to begin with, too…he was james donald…but that was after his dad so when she ditched his surname his mom shifted that over to james david so he could keep being JD but…you know…she wouldn’t have to hear about the donald part

        …tell me that isn’t funny

        …nearly as funny as the part where

        He is of Scots-Irish descent.[13][14]

        …is it possible they’re just really-really bad at this…like…much worse than you’d think you could be while ostensibly having a political campaign operation up & running?

        …only I’ve seen parent take more pains over how to pick a name for their kid that would be hard to manipulate in the playground into something to tease them with than it seems like the GOP put into their VP pick

        …&…great…love it…please be this bad at that sort of thing

        …but…wow…now I can’t help thinking the licoln project or that midas touch lot culd probably get his mom on a hot mic making clear how much she hates all things “donald”…the old fashioned way…no AI required…& how that might make a funny clip

        …this whole circus clearly isn’t healthy even for us spectators?

        • Trump’s dad Fred was conceived in Germany then the family moved to the US. Fred ended up getting arrested at a KKK rally for assaulting a police officer, so while German Americans in general weren’t criminals, there were obviously bad apples.

          And that’s not even mentioning the rapist fraudster in the next generation.

        • …ok…this is just plain silly…but when I said I know parents who put more thought into ways you could distort a name in a playground & I hadn’t bothered to learn why or when he picked vance…I couldn’t help thinking he imagined it being like branding & wanted to sound like he was, if not the future, at least forward facing…not in a particular direction but take the ad- off & you’re just vance-ing only not towards anything…that sort of thing…only…etymology says no?

          Middle English: from Old French avance (noun), avancer (verb), from late Latin abante ‘in front’, from ab ‘from’ + ante ‘before’. The initial a- was erroneously assimilated to ad- in the 16th century.
          [oxford languages via google]

          …”a” vance…was “from before”…but this one thinks he’s the future

          …don’t tell me the universe don’t got jokes

      • It says something about his absolutely tone deaf political instincts that he didn’t limit his xenophobic fiction to smearing the specific Irish community in blue state Massachusetts.

        He decided to go after all Irish and Germans and Italians too.

    • When I first moved to New York young (white) single women were encouraged to seek apartments in Italian neighborhoods. If you got past the sexism and could find a landlord who would offer you a lease, you had an entire neighborhood keeping an eye out on you. Walking from the subway stop to your apartment drunk at 3 in the morning? Oh, people had your back, especially since outsiders weren’t particularly welcome. An extreme form of Neighborhood Watch.

      • …I don’t know about extreme but I do know some friends who found a similar bonus from living off a spot called “brick lane”…which is sort of whitechapel-ish in london terms but has a lot of indian restaurants on it…or…possibly I should be saying bengali…which might have been then not now because this is probably 20years ago or so

        …but I remember visiting them during summer school holidays & being mildly surprised the neighborhood kids were running in & out of different houses like a localized whirlwind & they explained that contrary to what I’d have probably told you was an immutable law of london…people just didn’t lock the front doors a lot of the time

        …so I’d say it can work a lot better than any neighborhood watch I ever heard of?

    • …we had a surfeit of stuff written about the pros & cons of qualified people offering opinions that bordered on diagnosis of mental conditions based on reporting…& whether the ethical issues of doing so without doing it properly while in possession of a license were more or less troubling than letting people who definitely aren’t qualified loose to do it in a less restrained fashion…with his dad

      …so…leaving out whether there’s other ways to write that up that might be less guilty of teetering into salacious territory…& they do put a #notallkidsthatkillthingsaresociopaths in there for form’s sake…the path they’re talking about is commonly understood as escalatory…& the more well-known examples of that ladder are popularly referred to as “serial killers”…which is a hell of a thing to imply about a person…& I not only don’t claim to know I haven’t even made a serious effort to find out how seriously to take the idea that whoever posting wherever might not be making the whole thing up…but the very last bit sort of summed that up for me

      Whatever the truth is about Barron Trump, you can be sure it will eventually come to light. For now, we’re going to keep a close eye on these disturbing, utterly believable claims.

      …”these disturbing, utterly believable claims”…in conjuction with that family…I mean that’s got to be a rabbit hole that eventually drowns out everything but the echoes in your chamber on the one hand…but…it’s true…that’s really disturbing…& seems completely credible…in the context of so much that’s not only credible but provably true & hella disturbing in its own right about the house of trump

      …in game of thrones terms…fronting like they’re the lannisters when actually they’re the boltons would be 100% on brand?

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