Hopefully she’s teachable. He’s definitely declined, physically and mentally in recent years which isn’t that odd with his age, and diet. I hope it’s not another car crash like the last debate. Probably one of the roughest spectacles I’ve watched live.
As a woman, her brain is much smaller so it levels the playing field with his decline.
Zuckerberg has come out and said the Democrats pressured FB into sensoring covid related content. Dominos are starting to fall
https://twitter.com.com/patrickbetdavid/status/1828222506899009777?t=kTPjNnhLSuiGaSa-XosufA&s=19
Do you think the Republicans wouldn’t do anything like that?
Zuckerberg is a fucking freak
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They should be utterly ashamed of themselves for trying to do something responsible like trying to suppress whackjobs with no critical thinking skills to influence more people lacking in critical thinking skills.
I’ve a fairly young relative, got sucked into vaccine scepticism and got covid and the guys fucked. Doctors told him he’ll probably never work again. Vaccine skepticism is fine. People can believe what they want, but unqualified nuts going out of their way to influence people whose lives could be irreparably changed for the worse, is downright negligent.
It’s not like the vast majority of facebook vaccine sceptics ever finished school.
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Your ramblings become more and more suspicious by the day…
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There’s a very good chance that Alphakrul1 is Sid
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He is tbf. All those tech people are. Musk is also a freak tbf
How is the number crunching looking on this? Haven’t really looked too closely at individual states yet.
Just having a quick look at it now, the declared electoral college results in 2020 were Dems 306 GOP 232. With changes to the electoral college since 2020, that would now read Dems 306 GOP 2020.
I believe it’s all down to just 7 swing states which account for 93 electoral college votes. I’ll assume that Maine and Nebraska with their split voting remain as is. That makes it in the staring blocks according to my calculations, Dems 226 GOP 219 with 270 the total or 269 for a tie.
The 7 states up for grabs are
19 Pennsylvania
16 North Carolina
16 Georgia
15 Michigan
11 Arizona
10 Wisconsin
6 Nevada
Are there any other states like Florida, Ohio, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Colorado that could be in play? I suppose though if any of those are flipping it will be indicative of a comprehensive winner.
You have a remarkable grasp of things you barely have an interest in
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Arizona I assume you meant.
Maine and Nebraska in play with their systems. I don’t think any of the non 7 you mention will swing but consistently the campaigns have gotten where is in play wrong.
Trump has a very narrow route now. He needs a massive economic shock.
He will lean into the race and gender stuff more which is counterproductive for him. That’s why a State like North Carolina suddenly comes into play when it was nowhere close with Biden there.
Musk could really help get Kamala elected
I’ve had a gut feeling for a while that Harris could win North Carolina. There’s a total headbanger running there for the Republicans in the Governor election who is going to lose bigly and he could drag Trump down with him.
As well as that the demographic trend in North Carolina is moving irrevocably towards the Democrats in a similar way to what has happened in Virginia, Colorado and New Mexico and is happening in Nevada, Georgia and Arizona, and might in time happen in Texas.
Florida and Ohio have gone the other way.
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Vance begging Peter The Freak for money. Absolute desperation in the camp.
https://www.ft.com/content/52a7c7b8-945c-4357-af36-cea77645b164
Florida is in play, as is a few others that shouldn’t be. She just needs to hammer the swing states in the ground assault, ace the media interviews and the debates, and not put much of a foot wrong but it reminds me of Billy Connolly’s skit about the Romanian gymnast who’s been up in the air for half a week, and when she lands, the fat judges point out that she moved her foot.
It’s a long 67 days left to try not to move that foot. Harris-Walz joint interview tonight at 02:45 GMT
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An Obama level 2012 win is possible for her I think.
Walz is the best VP pick in living memory.
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I think this column is pertinent. The great Sarah Kendzior has been shouting about the cancer of “both sides” horse race political “journalism” for many years. Horse race “journalism” is devoid of morals and ethics and basic regard for truth and context and only cares about ratings and clicks. But it’s a self-defeating enterprise which only leads to the self-destruction and discrediting of its practitioners and their employers, and its practitioners either don’t realise that or don’t care.
The New York Times is one of the worst, if not the worst offender.
This column, about the decline and fall of America’s political news media in such a pivotal election year, has proved very hard to write — not for a lack of material, but because I can’t keep pace with every day’s new and stunning examples of bad journalism, each one spiraling a tad lower.
I’ll start with the weekend’s lowlight: a news story that worked up the media food chain from the muck of smaller right-wing outlets, then got boosted on X/Twitter by Alex Thompson, a widely read national political correspondent for Axios, before the New York Post hyped it in your local Wawa and eventually the New York Times felt compelled to address it. You see, an idea that has animated the right for the last couple of weeks is the fantasy that Democratic vice presidential nominee Gov. Tim Walz is a phony. Sunday’s purported news slammed Walz for a 2006 episode when his then-congressional campaign claimed he’d won a youth award from the Nebraska Chamber of Commerce when really it was — get this! — the Nebraska Junior Chamber of Commerce!
Never mind that the 2006 Walz campaign had corrected this tiny mistake (picture Barack Obama doing the hand thing, but even smaller), probably the work of a junior staffer, the second they learned about it. The nattering nabobs of negativism had accomplished their mission in a year when the elite mainstream media has lost its doggone mind — going after small daily clickbait like a puppy chasing its tail, demanding news conferences only to ask trivial questions, issuing ludicrous “fact checks,” and desperately seeking gravitas in the candidate just found guilty on 34 felony counts and liable for rape and financial fraud, who was dinged by NPR for 162 lies or distortions in just one news conference.
Indeed, the outrageous overinflation of the Walz story was nearly forgotten by Monday morning when the Times, which has bent over backwards to belittle the joy of Kamala Harris’ wildly successful Democratic National Convention in Chicago last week, published an op-ed from the editor of the conservative National Review, Rich Lowry, headlined simply: “Trump Can Win on Character.” Perhaps that’s true, as critics noted, if voters do what Lowry did in his piece and pretend that inconvenient facts like the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection or the fraud verdict had never happened. But while the column was ridiculed on social media, few people said they were giving up on the Times — because in this annus horribilis for the American media, many had already tuned out the NYT weeks or months ago.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this. The NYU professor and media critic Jay Rosen urged journalists to cover “the stakes, not the odds” of the 2024 election while Margaret Sullivan — who writes for the Guardian and her Substack after stints at the Times and the Washington Post — was more blunt in beseeching the press to ignore the pull of both-sides journalism and take seriously the threat to democracy posed by Trump, who tried to override his 2020 election loss and has made no comforting assurances that he won’t try to do the same after Nov. 5, 2024.
Few journalists — if any — have listened. Much of the righteous fury during the Chicago DNC was directed at fact**-**checkers from the Times, Post, and independent organizations like PolitiFact. These organizations or practices were mostly established after the endemic political lying of the 2000s — remember the Iraq War? But while no one would argue with their stated approach of tough, unbiased scrutiny of all sides, the fact-checking industrial complex can’t handle the truth when one party’s platform is based on a firehouse of lies and the other party is trying to be serious, if not always literal, about reality.
So Democratic convention week brought absurdities like PolitiFact tackling a DNC video that showed an actual Trump 2016 quote that “there has to be some form of punishment” for women who have abortions and labeled it “mostly false” (!!) because his panicked aides later told him to walk back such a politically damaging statement. Also typical was USA Today calling it “false” when the DNC talks about “Trump’s Project 2025″ because the blueprint for his presidency was produced by the Heritage Foundation, even though most of its authors are former and would-be future Trump staffers and it offers the only program for filling jobs in a Trump administration.
C’mon, man.
It would require another column — maybe a book — to explain why this is happening. I see it as less the public’s main complaint (corporate control of the media) and more about our profession’s weird value structure, where it’s more important to be savvy, cynical, and not be portrayed as naive shills for liberalism than to care about saving democracy from authoritarian rule, on top of maybe a new and not always healthy brand of careerism from younger journalists.
The Chicago-based media critic Mark Jacob, a retired veteran editor of that city’s Tribune and Sun Times, nailed it Monday with a piece headlined “Mainstream media on a path to irrelevance.” Jacob has harsh words for how reporters have covered the race, writing that “too many political journalists are marinating in the Washington cocktail culture, writing for each other and for their sources — in service to the political industry, not the public.” But he also notes that traditional media can’t figure out how to compete for young eyeballs against sites like edgy and fast-paced TikTok. Jacob pointed out that public faith in mass media has plunged from 72% in 1976, after Watergate, to just 32% today.
You know who gets the new landscape better than anyone else? Kamala Harris.
The vice president and Democratic nominee is running to be America’s first post-media president. In Chicago, much was made of the fact that Team Harris and the Democrats invited 200 sometimes fawning internet “content creators” who got VIP treatment while mainstream journalists fought over nosebleed-level seats and refrained from eating or going to the bathroom for fear of losing them.
But more broadly, Harris and her campaign is 100% focused on message discipline to build her brand and sell it to the American people in a few short weeks. The surest way to get thrown off that message discipline would be a stray answer at an open news conference or in an interview with the likes of NBC’s Lester Holt — so for now, Harris is simply not doing that.
And she’s getting away with it. Mainstream journalists can carp and whine about this all they want, but when less than a third of Americans trust the mass media, few folks are listening to them. What’s been really striking this year is that while traditionally deep distrust of the mainstream press has been the domain of right-wing Republicans, now it’s liberals who once cheered for the media to do better who seem to be giving up on them.
This is not great. For one thing, the plunge in faith leads to cancelled subscriptions that leads to laid-off reporters or shuttered printing plants — not the vision of America’s founders who believed a free press is essential. In this campaign, I think the healthy journalistic mindset is that we want to save democracy in November, but we also want Harris to show she can answer at least a few tough questions and explain her policies beyond hopelessly vague generalities.
The reality, though, is that Harris might surge into the White House in January doing very little of this — maybe none at all, especially if Trump actually chickens out of their Sept. 10 debate in Philadelphia. Fifty years ago this summer, Richard Nixon resigned the presidency because people believed what they read about him in the Washington Post. Today, Harris feels she doesn’t need journalists at all, and a lot of the public is cheering her on. And a vainglorious elite news media with severe tunnel vision has no one to blame but themselves.
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Agreed, normally VP picks don’t move the dial either way but the contrast between Shady and America’s Dad is going to have an impact no doubt.
It is possible, but unlikely. Don The Con AKA Rapey McFraudsalot will make some sort of comeback between now and the vote. He’s as slippery as an eel. I feel the Obama first term landslide will only come if the polls slip further, and triggers a complete public meltdown for the oompa loompa, or he sinks into a deep depression, like he did after january 6th and loses the motivation to campaign. If that happens, I’m going to hijack a popcorn truck, and gleefully watch his backers go into meltdown.
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