Friday Stuff (updates)

(My take on last Tuesday's disaster for what it's worth is here.)

I think Jonathan Pie was a bit harsh in his assessment of the Kamala Harris campaign (not saying he doesn't make good points, though), but I also think his core argument that there could have been more separation on the issues by Harris from Biden is well taken; as far as I’m concerned, our “fourth estate” also had an outsized role in what happened on Tuesday with continually dumping on Biden and giving him ZERO CREDIT for bringing this country back from the ruinous Trump 1.0 years of COVID and job losses in the millions, leading to Biden's unpopularity and depressing turnout (there were many other factors too, most of which I tried to outline in the linked post above...I think Pie’s “across the pond” perspective on this and other matters is always interesting and often funny, though not humorous now I’ll admit...NSFW/H)...



Update 1: By the way, I don't totally absolve myself for blame here, in case you were wondering about that. I was probably a little "Trump-and-Vance-obsessed" in the last couple of weeks especially also, but first and foremost, I was trying to communicate what a threat he was and not so much commenting on the perverse spectacle of what he said and did. And I would have included instead information on what the Harris/Walz campaign was proposing along with Democrats generally...but I couldn’t find the damn information! I will always favor subject matter about actual policy versus "the horserace" if I can manage to track it down.

...and Jesse Dollemore brings us the tale of this Trumpist nut Mike Davis (who may be Attorney General) wanting to drag bodies of Democrats through the streets, apparently...and we’re supposed to find a way to make common cause with these lunatics...oh, but he means “political” bodies, so it’s not really violence, huh? Suuuure...also NSFW/H)...



Update 2: And get ready for plenty more of this.

Update 3: I have a feeling that I will have MANY updates to this post, so I might as well include this also.

...and Thom Hartmann lets us know about Trump’s coming attack on America’s economic backbone (e.g., the “administrative state”)...and Thom’s right about every Republican president having an economic downturn, something else that I suppose the @DNC decided not to remind voters about during the campaign because I guess they thought it was impolite or something (and I know it’s hard to translate for low-attention-span voters just how bad it was for the SCOTUS to nuke the Chevron ruling as Thom points out, but that was a critical development also)...one of Thom’s great points is that recessions are great buying opportunities for billionaires, and I can’t imagine that we won’t see that again sadly (I also didn’t know about the origins of our civil service as a result of the assassination of President Garfield and the connection to Schedule F employees...interesting stuff, but potentially tragic of course unfortunately)...



...and with fingers crossed I’ll admit, I want to give a bit of a qualified endorsement to what Jon Stewart says here...



Update 11/9/24: It also just occurred to me that, in my lifetime, there have only been two occasions where a presidential candidate for the party of the incumbent president has won election in his own right. The first was LBJ in 1964, and the fact that JFK was assassinated the year before was a big factor (as I’ve read – I was quite young at the time). The second was in 1988, when Poppy Bush defeated Michael Dukakis in a presidential campaign run by Lee Atwater that was so lowdown (i.e., Willie Horton) that it created a template that was followed by other Repug politicians ever since (still, though, it worked). I’m only pointing this out to emphasize how important it was for Kamala Harris to separate herself from President Biden; in many ways she couldn’t, though, to be fair...I don’t know if a little more imagination from Harris in that regard would have mattered, but it’s just a thought, you might say.

Update 11/10/24: I don’t know about the attribution of the diagram from this link, but that’s an absolutely staggering number of eligible voters who didn’t participate, considering that Biden got about 80 million four years ago – just proves my point that Mango Mussolini benefitted from depressed turnout and really didn’t build on the base that made up his popular vote total in 2016 (Update 11/11/24: Actually, the number of Harris voters I'm seeing now is 76 million, which tells me that all of the garbage that led to suppressing her vote worked infamously well).

...and before everything hit the fan last Tuesday, I was getting ready for a tribute to Quincy Jones, so please allow me to present that now...



...and here is a tune from one of Jones’s many terrific recording sessions.