Supah_Schmendrick
No bio...
User ID: 618
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
She's been mostly hidden during the administration; it won't be difficult for her to stake out different positions that people who don't particularly like Trump but really couldn't stomach voting for a guy who appeared to be non compos mentis will believe. This isn't an election about convincing anyone - Trump's taken all the political oxygen in the room for all but a couple of months for the past decade - but instead about limiting discouragement among supporters. Remember, both the 2016 and 2020 elections went to the candidate who avoided having the last negative news cycle.
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
People really overestimate the degree to which people plan their moment-to-moment actions/statements. 95% probability that someone wrote her that line in a speech sometime, she liked it/it stuck in her head, so it got filed away in her brain's library of verbal tics, the same way musicians fall back on favorite licks.
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
Joe Manchin is making noises about re-registering as a Democrat in order to contest the convention. Lawl.
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
And native Californians. But we don't matter in presidential elections.
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
He also really likes Kamala, even now.
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
OK, debates matter if they reveal your staff and inner circle has been engaged in a years-long conspiracy to hide the fact that you're non compos mentis and probably aren't actually capable of exercising the powers of your office consistently - let alone engaging in the strenuous work of campaigning.
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
Do you really think this passes an ideological turing test and accurately models the reaction of marginal democrats and independents? Also, why do you think a 30-year-old sex scandal would hurt Harris when multiple such scandals haven't hurt Trump?
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
Aaron Sorkin's West Wing club staffing the WH
Speaking of, he has a piece in the NYT arguing that the Dems should nominate Mitt Romney. I find this hilarious.
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
Brown unironically was just about the best mentor she could have gotten. The dude bestrode the state like a colossus, and even at 90 is still pretty sharp. And I admit this against interest, not being in favor of his political agenda.
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
No, that's Willie Brown, her then-boyfriend/political patron.
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
and there's nothing about Joe Biden's health today that wasn't known six months ago--or even four years ago.
Au contraire; there were all sorts of things that weren't publicly known. Four years ago Biden was obviously on the downslope, but still capable of speaking in public for more than 15 minutes without garbling half his words or having his vocal timbre described as a "whisper." Just pull up the footage yourself: even at his bumbling worst 2020 Joe is worlds above 2024 Joe. Even six months ago he was still doing ok. Something really changed in the last 6-12 months; his "wandering" moments got a lot more frequent, and his speaking just dove off a cliff.
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
I'm talking about his actual, literal policy positions that are considerably to the right of the median voter.
Except for the ones on labor and trade, which are to the left of some segments of the Democrats.
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
The Reagan experience in his second term suggests not
Not the same at all. Look at Reagan's press conferences in December of 1988...the dude obviously had command of himself and of detail.
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
- Josh Shapiro won Pennsylvania handily and has great approval ratings.
- Jared Polis is a popular two-term libertarian-ish gay governor of Colorado who got Covid mostly right and is still only 49.
- Andy Beshear won re-election as governor of KY by 5 even while the GOP kept a supermajority of the legislature.
- Joe Manchin has an ego the size of the Appalachians, and a history as an effective legislator.
- Gavin Newsom has failed to actually fix anything in CA, but he certainly looks Presidential, has boatloads of money, and is quite glib.
- JB Pritzker has all the money in the universe and has run IL like his own personal fief for a while; he might have higher ambitions too.
- AOC will be eligible in 2028 and remains very vivid and high-profile (though I can't vouch for whether the progressive wing of the party still likes her)
- Gretchen Whitmer is also someone people still talk about, though I don't understand why.
And that's just off the top of my head.
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
the convict Donald Trump
Don't you mean the justice-involved individual, Donald Trump? Kidding, kidding. But it really is Russell-conjugations all over the place.
A felony is a kind of serious crime.
And famously our lawbooks are groaning with such a profusion of them that we each, on average, inadvertently commit three each day. Seriously, criminal laws are often rather vague, and great power is entrusted to the hands of prosecutors to not go off the reservation and become little tinpot tyrants, using their awesome powers to for personal grievances. Unfortunately, this often doesn't work.
Moreover, which act works more harm on the commonweal - Donald Trump classifying payments to Stormy Daniels as "legal expenses" in his personal books, or a mob of 34 people ransacking a convenience store like a swarm of locusts? Because the first is a 34-felony indictment and got millions of dollars in legal resources thrown at it. The latter is a 34-misdemeanor nothingburger that ruins people's livelihoods and blights a neighborhood, but goes ignored by the progressive legal system. I'm not going to bitch at anyone who looks at this and concludes that the law is more than a bit of an ass these days.
Trump is a liar. He lied about something to such a serious degree that twelve citizens were firmly convinced that he is guilty.
The evidence in the case was highly publicized, and other fellow citizens are fully capable of disagreeing on the proper conclusion to be drawn. This isn't a new or controversial point. It's not a defection against the commonweal to argue that Sacco & Vanzetti or the Rosenberg were actually innocent, or on the other side that OJ or Alec Baldwin are actually guilty.
If you care at all about law and order, at some point you have to stop endorsing the person who attacks law and order.
There's law and order, and then there's law and order. I'd actually argue that Trumpian tendencies are much closer to the original understanding of the term, given Trump's hostility to public disorder.
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
It's a shame that DeSantis flamed out so spectacularly against Trump - someone who can take a purple state and turn it blood red through competence and effective culture-warring, as DeSantis did in FL., would definitely belong on that list.
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
It is very "late-season West Wing," isn't it?
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
If Mario Cuomo was "Hamlet on the Hudson" for forever waffling about throwing his hat in the ring, what does that make Manchin - the Farmington Fence-Sitter?
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
Doesn't that just make people more sympathetic to her, and more likely to give her the benefit of the doubt?
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
Definitely the one where the mob goes into the government building to try and disrupt the peaceful transfer of power.
Unfortunately that's not what he was convicted for.
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
I hope you're right.
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
Yeah, that ranking is deceptive. Finland has 32.4 guns per 100 civilians. The U.S. has 120.
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
A pot of boiling water is a one-shot item. Once she threw the water and missed, what was she going to do, refill it, wait 5 minutes for it to reboil, and then throw it again? Throw the pot itself? Okay, that's not fun, but not an imminent lethal threat. This wasn't a situation where someone was going to be harmed without officer involvement; there wasn't even a concern about passing fake money a la Floyd. There was nothing stopping the officers from just turning around and leaving the domicile of the crazy lady who thought she saw a non-existing prowler.
Frankly, it would be unprecedented for the polls to not change to some degree. Things happen, especially with modern short attention spans/news cycles.
More options
Context Copy link