[…this…started as a comment on the DOT…until I realized how insane the idea was that because I typed it out in a comment field it would make sense to have it post that way…as ever…feel free to ignore the wall’o’text…but…it was sitting there & hitting delete doesn’t help me out the way clicking post seems to?]

…I’m way too late to get this in under the NOT heading of “send help”…but…the divisions of a common transatlantic language are…fucking with me particularly egregiously this morning?

…like…if I put the news coming out the US & the UK about their respective elections into some giant blender the resulting smoothie feels like it might seem like it had a palatable flavor…but…as served…they’re two kinds of toxic slop

…&…in a sense…it doesn’t seem accidental that they only ever seem to graze the conversations they purport to act as proxies for by accident…like…if the UK PM is determined by having everyone vote for approximately a congress-critter for the lower house…& the party with the biggest headcount gets to internally select their head & slap that on the top of the whole thing as though it were a national decision…you’d think the basis of the debate would be how to make sure the vetting on the available crop of MPs from which to assemble a parliament was better than nige’s lot can muster…which keeps selecting for failing to eliminate out&out fascists in their candidate selection

…but…no…the press & the pols seem to have reached broad agreement that it makes sense to cover it like a popularity contest between party leaders as though the picking of your constituency MP is a direct surrogate for chosing the PM instead of indirect (not to mention it can change between the times you get to change your pick) by design…so…boris…a man caught in so many falsehoods he actually had to make himself scarce…gets to fire up that latin reference to the man who comes back from ploughshare to politics by popular demand & start looking wistfully towards the election after

…meanwhile…in the better dead than redbetter red than dead corner…no crowing about crushing the GOP up & down the ticket in a drubbing not seen in generations…because it’s still a team sport but nobody cares about the outfield when it’s all about pitching softballs to defective batsmen who demand participation trophies in advance

…&…I get it…they play to their strengths…or…normally they would…but for whatever reason the tories have tried to turn stepping on rakes into their featured bug this time around…so the one of those that usually grants approximate parity with the GOP on the gerrymandered deck-stacking has utterly bit them in the ass as far anyone can tell…they redrew the electoral maps & instead of safe seats gifting a few thousand votes to put marginal constituencies into contention…they’ve put the safe ones in contention…& folks are so busy counting unhatched chickens that they’re getting demob happy about the prospect of a whole clutch of “portillo moment“s…& arguing about whether or not the water-soluble paint the “just stop oil” eco-activist lot threw at stonehenge will actually damage the lichen that protects the stones from the elements…because apparently the only “effective means” of demonstration are the ones that alienate the people you need to bring onside…never mind the 1,000+ people who’ve found the hajj to be a terminal pilgrimage this year…or the heat that punished the queues for indian ballot boxes…or…any of the other record-breaking cases-in-point you could point to

…meanwhile…you just don’t seem to get the follow-the-money stuff for the UK campaigns…& part of that is that it’s supposed to be capped in some ways that mean theoretically it’s an even-money deal…but…iirc…the tories basically always bend the rules past breaking by numbers that routinely dwarf the effectively nominal fines they pay to have their wrist slapped with after…so…go figure

…I dunno…I think I’m just finding the play-it-like-a-team-sport thing particularly hard to swallow today…probably because in the face of an election that promised to give them a hiding…it seems like the popular inside-baseball play was to turn a small profit off the front-end…so…first one, then another…then a third & a fourth…have been anything up to & including arrested for the bookie’s equivalent of insider trading…it’s…like this

Ok, I was wrong. THIS is my favourite chart about the last 14 years of British politics: https://t.co/kCpv9Z8MSH pic.twitter.com/Ki5ZtNby5z

— Stephen Bush (@stephenkb) June 20, 2024

…while…stateside…we get this sort of thing

The surge in post-conviction donations — captured in part in May reports filed to the Federal Election Commission on Thursday — is giving Trump a significant boost as he tries to narrow the Biden campaign’s once-enormous cash advantage.
[…]
MAGA Inc., the main super PAC supporting Trump, raised $69 million in May — its best fundraising month of the cycle — and reported $94 million in cash on hand. Its largest donation was $50 million from transportation executive Timothy Mellon on the day after Trump was convicted in New York. Mellon had previously given $25 million to the group and $25 million to a super PACs supporting Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is running as an independent.

[…] about $106 million in May, dramatically more than their previously monthly tallies, according to the new FEC filings. At the end of the month, the Trump campaign and RNC had a combined $171 million in cash on hand.
[…]
The reports filed Thursday offer only a partial picture of the overall strength of Trump’s operation, because their Trump 47 and Trump National Committee joint fundraising committees will not file their reports until July. But Trump campaign officials say the campaign and the RNC raised $141 million during the month of May.
[…]
In addition to the donation from Mellon, MAGA Inc. also received $10 million from Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein, powerful donors to conservative causes, and $5 million from Kelcy Warren, the billionaire chairman and CEO of Energy Transfer Partners, the builder of the Dakota Access pipeline.

Trump’s advisers have attributed May’s surge in donations to donors’ desire to demonstrate their loyalty to the former president after his felony conviction. The campaign claimed it raised $53 million online in the 24 hours after the verdict, but verifying those totals was impossible Thursday because WinRed — the platform that many small donors use to contribute to Republican campaigns — will not file its FEC report for this period until July.
[…]
The Trump campaign says it has dozens of offices across the battleground states that are operated in coordination with the Republican National Committee, but it has declined to detail the scale of its operation other than to say they have an extensive paid and volunteer operation that is “expanding daily.” The Trump campaign had not aired a single general election ad on television as of Thursday, according to AdImpact.

…&…why fucking would they? …they already have saturation coverage on that & every other preferred vector…of which their most successful (& quite possibly best on a bang-for-buck basis) ones are the kinds that need to be either entirely off or only on the cooked books…& making that kind of concern out to be tinfoil-wrapped at this point is fucking irresponsible, frankly…so…I get that you got to talk up your team…but…fuck…this?

“With just over four months until the election, Donald Trump couldn’t match our battleground infrastructure if he tried,[ w]hile Trump’s team is desperately trying to spin their lack of infrastructure as ‘strategic,’ the bottom line is that Donald Trump cannot buy back the time he has lost — and invisible campaigns don’t win.”

…that’s…”the Biden campaign’s battleground states director”?

…you’re killing me, here

“send help“

…if both sides of the pond are agreed that nobody’s prepared to put in the extra effort to stop giving away what are theoretically the hard yards from the bottom up to determine who the players are in the cast for the prime-time positions…& the way that’s agreed to shake out in practice in the states is that…broadly speaking…enough of the game is called in advance that you can boil it down to offensive & defensive plays in a handful of fixtures…& the spread for those is smaller than the registered numbers of people who demand their god-given right not to be informed enough to figure out how to vote their interest…or…often…even enough to accurately identify those when they’re right in front of their face…whose fealty must be solicited in the forcibly-evolved performatively-garbled idiom they find most pandering

…how in all the circles of “why this is hell, nor am I out of it” does the god-forsaken director of the campaign for exactly that dog-wagging tail-end of this cavalcade of reprehensible bullshit have the bare-faced audacity to say “invisible campaign’s don’t win” when the fucking iceberg that turned hillary into the fucking titanic of tickets still has the most singularly visible orange fucking tip on it & it was the fucking parts they turned a blind eye to that shredded them below the waterline?

…seriously…I wanna fucking understand this…but the ways it went in the UK require archaeology & the fossil record doesn’t stretch that far for the founding fathers…so it seems like there’s…less to stop it from getting people singing from a different hymn sheet…& saying the differences can all be explained away if you appropriately crunch the numbers to produce a calculus of equivalence when you follow the money…is persuasive in the senses it’s undeniable…but equally seems insufficient to fully match the data without inventing extra coefficients & playing around with weighting until you might as well just ask chatGPT for the answer

Jason Miller, an adviser to Trump, pointed to the former president’s edge in battleground polls — arguing in a statement Thursday that “what Biden could use is 1000 more votes in states like Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, because he’s losing to President Trump in all of them!”

…maybe he is…maybe he isn’t…but it’s fucking beyond insane that the country widely characterized as the head of “the free world” continues to be held hostage by a voting bloc so perversely insane that it makes the original intent of the electoral college seem like a flawed but remarkably insightful attempt to remediate a flaw that requires uncanny foresight if people & politics have really changed so much since tech sprinted from telegrams & newsheets to telegram, tik tok & news-cycles…to wit…that the outcome of a raw vote might give fucking idiots the deciding interest & malignant bad faith the whip hand

…& I’m not renouncing my lifelong love of irony…I buck enough trends in the birthright stakes without cutting my nose off to spite my face…but…because game theory says once you lay off the sure things you can get competitive odds on convicts’R’us making good on the ol’ electoral college try…both the last men standing remain in the “coulda been a contender” spotlight…on “even terms” with a “level” playing field in which their individual pros & cons…or amateurs & convicts…if you’re nasty…get debated on a basis of parity when it comes to the points docked that might snatch defeat from the jaws of divinely ordained victory that’s reduced to a binary outcome…so…you get…with the assistance of the likes of come-on-aileen & the frat-wing of the supreme court…this

Though Trump outpaced Biden in fundraising in April, his legal bills have strained his political operation as he has defended himself in four criminal cases. He has paid many of his legal bills for himself and some of his associates through a leadership PAC known as Save America, which typically gets a $5,000 cut from contributions of $11,600 or more to the Trump 47 committee.

Filings Thursday showed that Save America raised just $4,337 in May but spent $4.3 million, finishing the month with under $4.5 million cash left to spend. Legal bills accounted for 85 percent of May spending by the PAC, which also racked up $862,000 of unpaid legal bills.

The party committees battling for control of the House and Senate also reported their latest numbers on Thursday night. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee reported $78.8 million in cash on hand after being narrowly outraised by the National Republican Congressional Committee, which reported $64.7 million in cash at the end of the month.

The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee reported $48.3 million in cash on hand to the National Republican Senatorial Committee’s $41 million. The DSCC raised $10.6 million in May while the NRSC raised $12.4 million.

Trump’s felony conviction fuels a donation surge that narrows Biden’s advantage [WaPo]

…the bet that kicked off the blood-in-the-water feeding frenzy that may yet consume more than one tory candidate for office?

…less than $130

…& that…ladies & gentlemen…is why I’m out here yelling “my kingdom for a sense of fucking perspective” while failing to understand how it can be impossible to find firm footing when it’s a storm in a teacup…at the same time a fully submerged echo chamber fails to be crushed in defiance of the laws of physics while simultaneously not registering the oncoming iceberg…or the underlying supervolcano…on state of the art sonar equipment

…I fucking miss douglas adams

…lab mice being the most intelligent life-form seems so much more reasonable a premise than any of this bollocks?

…if we turned the whole process into a gamified sequence of sub-quests & turned the parties into gamer-style guilds & made the whole thing into a squid-game-style reality tv pay-per-view thing…anyone else reckon that might give taylor swift a run for her money…not to mention make more sense…or…nah…probably just me, then?

…anyway…if you got this far

…umm

…sorry?

…they do say misery loves company…yours is appreciated, though