…sometimes knowing something is headed your way doesn’t make it any easier to deal with when it fetches up
…I just don’t know if I can cope with the idea of a second wave of mango unchained
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2020-election/5-things-do-keep-your-ballot-rejection-n1239375
…so it’d be just great if we could skip the “oh, Carolina” moment
Debbie George, 61, a yoga instructor in Charlotte, North Carolina, said she “desperately” wants Joe Biden to carry her battleground state and defeat President Donald Trump in the general election.
But from what George, a lifelong Democrat, said she has seen so far, Biden just isn’t doing enough to galvanize support among Democrats and independents to win the state.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2020-election/presidential-race-narrows-north-carolina-voters-say-they-want-face-n1239255
…because that is some fucking bullshit…I don’t care even a little bit at this stage if you think there’s room for improvement in the platform being proposed by the Biden/Harris ticket…of fucking course there is
…but when the other side is showing this much of their ass
…how tight do you have to screw your fucking eyes closed not to see that the tsunami of shit they’re drowning you with?
…with the consequences of the pandemic causing wholesale chaos across a massive swathe of the economy & the GOP fucking shit up to the point of having no platform & actively working to undermine the entire concept of a free or fair election so much as tenously intended to reflect the will of the majority while California literally does its best to burn to the ground
…if you feel like you personally need more before you’re willing to drag your ass around to getting behind option not-fucking-trump…you need someone to pull your head out of your fucking ass & slap you upside the head because your bullshit posturing is literally killing people…starting with the virus’ butcher’s bill being up there with an actual war
…a war this administration has no discernible interest in fighting…let alone understanding
…& not to mix metaphors to the point of incoherence…but when you get into proscribing a cure for the cure…that doesn’t always work out for the patient
…there are literally people coming out of comas who have a better grasp on what’s at stake than Debbie from Charlotte…& not just Covid survivors
…so what about this is so fucking hard for some people to grasp?
…for crying out loud…these fuckwits are giving lessons to the extreme right in the place that gave the world the actual fucking Nazi party
…while the egregious executive is taking its cue from where, exactly?
…but sure…Debbie from Charlotte still needs her hand held & a little more “me time” to have her personal local issues raised to the level of a national priority before she’s going to feel comfortable with the idea that picking the other guy is really what she wants to do…that doesn’t make me feel like re-casting Airplane…what would give you that idea?
…somehow I get the feeling that for the likes of Debbie from Charlotte it wouldn’t even help to draw a picture
The Trump vs. Obama economy — in 16 charts
…hell, it doesn’t even really say anything good about the health of the electoral process that this reads as good news for fuck’s sake
…although, to be honest…given that financial impropriety is one of the few constants of Dolt45’s entire existence & the fucking absurd amount of laundry his ’16 campaign was guilty of it smacks of naivety to think the early filing of the re-election fund paperwork was about raising a war chest more than it was about filling some pockets…speaking of which
…guess what happens when you cary a lot of filthy water
It’s up to authorities to decide whether DeJoy did something illegal at his former company but, from appearances, DeJoy seems to have been running a classic straw-donor operation. As Davis et al. described the practice, “Known as a straw-donor scheme, the practice allows donors to evade individual contribution limits and obscures the true source of money used to influence elections.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/09/07/trump-huffs-puffs-his-campaign-is-built-strawmen
…for an ungrateful asshole who fundamentally cares about absolutely nobody but himself & has zero issues with hypocrisy?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/louis-dejoy-house-investigation/2020/09/07/story.html
…your ass gets tossed under a bus without a second thought is what
…& you know what?
…Biden winning doesn’t magically fix everything so Debbie from Charlotte can go back to thinking she did everything that could be expected…that ought to be obvious, too…as should the fact that it means absolutely nothing when it comes to the question of whether he ought to fucking win
…but sure, Debbie from Charlotte…the point is that you need to be pandered to more…because what could possibly seem more urgent?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/09/07/rochester-protests-daniel-prude
…so Debbie from Charlotte…I guess this one’s for your sorry ass
…the fuck is wrong with some people?
The reason why Democratic leadership is trying to get rid of the SALT tax deduction limit is it hurts their states the most. California, NY, CT, NJ, MA, high home prices and the mortgages that go with them, relatively high state and sometimes local income taxes, and high property taxes. Relatively high median income rates. The sting is somewhat lessened if you could deduct these without limit on your federal taxes.
The fear, very much founded in observable evidence, is that high earners living in these expensive houses with high property taxes will flee south and west (but not to CA), crippling state budgets and leading to population loss. Every decade New York State loses a seat or two in the House because we’re either shrinking or not keeping up with population growth elsewhere.
For them, they don’t need things like extensive public transportation (one of the largest bus systems in the country is in car paradise Los Angeles) and if the public schools in general are lousy, well, they wouldn’t be where they move to, and if they are, there are plenty of non-public schools to choose from. If they like living among their peers in Greenwich , Scarsdale, and Englewood Cliffs, they’ll find plenty of them in the Raleigh-Durham area, or scattered around Houston.
Whoever came up with this idea is a genius, an evil one, but an effective one. I’m surprised Reagan didn’t try this. How can we best screw the bluest states? Well, they make a lot of money and pay a lot of taxes…I know! Limit the federal tax deductibility!
Not for nothing, but if Debbie from Charlotte doesn’t get the word to Biden that he needs to pay attention to liberal priorities and simply falls in line without a word, then Biden has zero impetus to shift his priorities. Yeah, yeah, existential world crisis, I get it, but the fact is if he isn’t challenged by the very people he needs to vote for him, then assuming he wins the presidency, he will have no reason to do anything other than pander to Republicans like he’s doing now.
…I hear what you’re saying…or at least I think I do…but “pandering to republicans” doesn’t feel like a fair assessment to me
…there’s a time & a place…& whatever place you might have mind has seats in Congress & the Senate where that kind of complaint would be more useful than at the top of the ticket
…if it were useful at the presidential candidate level I dare say there’d be a different candidate but that isn’t how the primaries went & all the improvement we’d like Joe to make getting his act together won’t mean squat if he loses because folks made bett the enemy of not-nearly-as-bad
…so I don’t see me being less irked by the whole way that piece is framed any time soon…& there’s a lot of that sort of thing going around
…for the next couple of months Debbie from Charlotte needs to make her peace with the fact that it literally isn’t about her right now
A huge reason for these pieces is media traditionally divide campaign reporters into two teams. Team R and Team D are each told to write policy reports and whatever negative pieces they can come up with, and then editors then run equal numbers from both teams.
The problem is that the stuff coming out of Team R is things like “Millions of service members and families flip on Trump after sucker comments” and all that Team D has is “Debbie from Durham wants more Biden sparks.”
But they’ve allocated the resources, so they have to pump up the Team D stories and tone down the Team R stories to make everything fit preset slots.
The only reallocation they can manage is to move some of the policy people within a team to the “scandal side” which is how 2016 reporting got so screwed up. Trump kept the policy reporters busy with fatuous wall and swamp stories, which kept them from being reassigned to his real scandals. Clinton got all of her healthcare and economic policy reporters moved to idiotic email stories.
They could cover campaigns more holistically — talk about the economy and how the campaigns relate to it, for example. But as long as they treat it like Super Bowl coverage, it is going to be trash.
Eh, I find these “first person” accounts somewhat difficult to care about. In order to put a “face” on this campaign, NBC News locates Debbie and coaches her through certain responses, from which they then extract “talking points” to support their “sky is falling” narrative. News is a business, and they need clicks. Debbie knows the score. We don’t need to worry about Debbie.
More interesting to me, and I don’t know if this was brought up over the weekend, is that the Republican National Committee is rapidly running out (or has run out, accounts vary) of money with just weeks to go before the election. Short overview here:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/9/7/1975716/-NYT-details-how-Trump-campaign-ineptly-blew-800-million-to-trail-Joe-Biden
Longer article here, behind paywall:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/07/us/politics/trump-election-campaign-fundraising.html
Lots of graft, stupidity and buck-passing on display in the NYT article. Everything Trump touches dies.
…”Debbie from Charlotte” isn’t herself the thing that ticked me off so much as the way the whole piece frames her concerns…but you’re right that that last bit is interesting, certainly
They have stopped TV ads in MI, OH, AZ and other battleground states.
Now, that isn’t automatically a big deal for them. It may mean 3rd parties are picking up the slack for Trump. It could mean they have a new TV campaign about to launch. Or maybe they have some reason to shift to an all-Facebook ad campaign.
But it sure is weird. The New Yorker reports that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has stopped helping the Trump campaign. I’ll need more evidence to believe that sweat stain has turned on Trump, but that is also weird.
DeSantis is trying to put daylight between Trump and him. He’s getting hammered on school, nursing homes, and business reopenings, which are sparking new cases of coronavirus. However, he’s much more wary of opening government. And by that, he’s not opening it at all. So it’s cool for you and your kids and your parents to die, but not Republican legislators. They are invaluable.
https://www.orlandosentinel.com/politics/os-ne-desantis-reopening-florida-20200908-i6r6zvvdhnbnhpe2lzyd5nibc4-story.html
The ad cancellations are VERY weird, largely because Trump is trailing. This isn’t the time to stop spending unless the money is gone, and that’s what the speculation is. Personal supposition: We WILL find out the Trump Cartel managed to steal millions from the RNC. Bet on it.
The money thing is pretty easy to explain. The donors have finally figured out that giving money to Trump’s campaign is just giving money to the Trump crime family. The money they do have they are going to need after the election if they lose and for legal spending even if they do win. His advisors are smart enough to know that he is not going to win by changing minds at this point, he is going to win by changing ballots and choosing voters. The only one he needs to campaign to now is Putin.
There is one theory that the Trump campaign is suffering from a cash flow problem because vendors are so tired of being stiffed on bills that they are demanding a lot more money up front.
Campaigns usually run on credit. Money raised in August all went to pay for ads they ran in June, and they were hoping to pay for ads now with money they raised in November.
If vendors are worried that November money either gets grifted away, or doesn’t ever come in because Trump may lose and he doesn’t want to raise money for his debts, they will demand a lot of money up front. Which they may not have.
Watch for even more shady taxpayer financed campaign events.
Makes sense. Stiffing contractors is a signature Trump move. If I was a vendor, I’d want my cash up front, too.
I mean, it makes sense when you realize that Trump never really wanted to win in 2016 and only seems to kinda sorta want to win in 2020 to avoid prosecution of some sort. And that’s part of the reason why whenever there’s a thing he can easily turn around he instead makes the choice to make everything worse. Like, he vehemently denies that he ever talked shit about soldiers, and then holds a press conference on Labor Day talking shit about military generals. In as much as Trump is able to have sub-conscious desires that don’t revolve around seeing his own daughter naked, I think the fact that he so routinely fucks up and exacerbates terrible situations could potentially be his own way of trying to get rid of this job so he can go back to be obscenely wealthy and somehow escaping actual jail time.
And there is basically no question that Trump is 1.) stealing millions of dollars from the RNC, because they’ve kinda already done that and have been doing that since “Trump becoming President” became some sort of reality, and 2.) there is no reality in which shacking up with Trump ends with anyone other than Trump getting fucked over.
It’s a microcosm of Trump’s whole life; an aloof goofball wannabe mobster boss keeps tripping over his dick into people who give him gobs of cash despite all evidence being that he’s a piece of shit who will fuck them over pretty much at will. Trump doesn’t even need a reason to be a felonious asshole in most cases; he just is. The entire reason he’s indebted to the Russian oligarchy (allegedly) is because rich dipshits in the states finally wised up to maybe not just handing him piles of money so he can burn them all without a second thought.
So yes, without question, Trump is stealing from the RNC, and I’m pretty sure they are well aware of that fact. Which might be part of the reason they’re less than inclined to pump even more money than they’ve already wasted into him.
More information about the Trump Cartel squandering campaign money:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/9/8/1975758/-Trump-campaign-is-broke-because-it-has-burned-through-800-MILLION
This is … amazing, to say the least. Seriously, this is Wile E. Coyote levels of stupidity and incompetence.
At least they can rely on this asshole!
https://buzzflash.com/articles/casino-magnate-sheldon-adelson-pumps-millions-into-and-gop-and-trumps-coffers
I’m sure Sheldon is doing this only out of an abundance of patriotism, and does not want anything in return for his millions.
Last night it smelled like a campfire at my place, this morning you can’t see more than a mile and air quality is terrible. Our whole state is on fire too!
https://gacc.nifc.gov/nwcc/information/firemap.aspx
After seeing this, I may just have to rethink not voting for Trump!
A strong listing of achomlishments from the Covfefe-in-Chief.
A fascinating look “inside” the Trump campaign — the reporter details attempts to locate the famous Trump “ground game” in Pennsylvania. There is literally no one there. Most of the recruiting efforts don’t generate any response, and posted events don’t actually take place. The chaos is pretty much indescribable.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/donald-trump-reelection-campaign-2020.html
Add one more reason to the “I’m pretty sure Trump doesn’t want to be President and is just stealing RNC funds at this point” column.
File this under “couldn’t see this coming” and “this is why we can’t have nice things”…