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The Confident Underdog

Published by Tom Sullivan on September 24, 2024

An explanation is warranted

Real Clear politics polling average this morning.

Brian Beutler wisely suggest that Vice President Kamala Harris needs to remind voters why, if she’s ahead in the polls, she and Gov. Tim Walz are still underdogs.

“We’re not going back” suggests inevitability. So does “When we fight, we win.”

Beutler writes:

In this regard, as confident underdogs, the Harris campaign offers its supporters both hope and encouragement to put in work. It’s a simple strategy, and I think it’s a good one.

But I also think Harris herself might benefit from being a bit more explicit about why she and Tim Walz, despite leading steadily in national polls, consider themselves underdogs. They have a good case to make. It cuts right to the heart of critical weaknesses and corruption in our political system. And the messaging might work even better if more of her supporters understood why she’s running into the wind.

It’s the Electoral College. Political geeks know this. Greg Sargent knows this. It’s just a poor assumption that the general public busy with jobs and kids and shopping and church and soccer practice knows it. Team Harris-Walz wants supporters energized but not lulled into complacency by a popular vote polling lead. Tell them why they shoudn’t be.

The problem is: In the Trump era, that’s not good enough for Democrats. Trump lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by 2.1 percent, representing nearly three million ballots, and still won the election. Joe Biden won the popular vote by 4.5 percent, representing over seven million ballots. It was good enough for him to become president, but he only won the tipping point state of Wisconsin by 0.6 percent, representing just a bit over 20,000 votes. It suggests that if Biden had won the national popular vote by just under four points—say, by five or six million votes, instead of seven—he, like Clinton, would’ve lost.

So as Han Solo once said, don’t get cocky. A 2.3 percent polling lead does not a Harris presidency make.

As of this writing, the tipping-point state is likely to be Pennsylvania. That’s the upper-midwest “blue wall” state where Harris’s lead is smallest—a mere 1.2 percent. Her lead there, though slim, mercifully suggests the Electoral College’s pro-GOP bias has shrunk since 2020—that a three point national popular vote margin will be good enough. It also suggests that a tiny change in the dynamics of the election could throw the whole thing to Trump, against the will of a popular majority.

But wait, there’s more.

Harris doesn’t just have to pad her popular vote margin to overcome Electoral College bias. She also has to overcome the margin of Republican cheating and insurrection.

Our Electoral College is indefensible, but its current bias isn’t part of some conspiracy against her. Trump supporters just happened to be better distributed geographically to win 270 electoral votes while losing head-to-head nationwide.

The corruption scandal is that Trump and the GOP want to exploit these arbitrary, antidemocratic aspects of our system to make it even harder for Democrats to win.

Put Tim Walz onto it

Okay, Nebraska’s split vote. The Blue Wall states. The 12th Amendment that could “throw the whole election to the 50 state delegations in the U.S. House of Representatives.” There are a host of Republican lawsuits in swing states aimed suppressing the votes of people Trump will lock up if handed the presidency again. It all matters. But it’s complicated.

Harris is busy selling herself to some voters and still introducing herself to others. Explaining why all that means she and Walz are still underdogs is a job for the guy with the 1979 International Harvester Scout. He can break it down and make the complicated simple.

There’s a difference between the two major parties so fundamental that former Wyoming congresswoman Liz Cheney suggests the Republican Party is now too far gone to save.

But it’s not so weakened that it cannot cheat its way into the Oval Office, Beutler warns. That’s what the Harris campaign must better explain. That’s why it can be leading in the polls and still be the underdog.

This is just the most basic difference between the two parties juxtaposed before us. One that’s happy to ratfuck its way to power without popular support, another that would never dare. It’s why Harris can call herself an underdog. And if more people understood her meaning, Trump’s chicanery would be more likely backfire.

And don’t forget to vote on the first day.

The Ranks Of The Condemned

Published by Tom Sullivan on September 24, 2024

“Revenge does take time”

Policy. We all know that’s what this presidential election is about. Fence-sitters like New York Times columnist Brett Stephens have inquiring minds. They want to know what policies Vice President Kamala Harris will pursue before voting for her. Even knowing the other entrée choice is, as humorist David Sedaris put it, “a platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it.”

Because everyone knows what Donald Trump’s policy agenda for his second term is: revenge. And lots of tariffs.

“I love getting even with people,” Trump told Charlie Rose in 1992, “if given the opportunity.”

Nothing has changed in the intervening years. Trump’s view of the world — of women especially, a pundit said this week — was frozen in amber in the late 1980s when his real estate empire was at its peak. On Trump’s revenge agenda should he win in November is an expanding list of enemies, many of whom he’s never met, against whom he holds grudges. People he wants rounded up by troops and deported. People he thinks should face military tribunals. Or IRS audits. Or federal investigations that upend lives. People he thinks should be put in jail for criticizing Supreme Court decisions or him.

This is not theoretical, Michael Schmidt wrote on Saturday in the New York Times. He sought to deploy the Department of Justice as a weapon for personal revenge in his first term. He was frustrated, albeit not entirely, by advisers who sought to stall, dissuade, and divert him:

In an Oval Office meeting, Mr. Trump told startled aides that if Attorney General Jeff Sessions would not order the department to go after Hillary Clinton and James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, Mr. Trump would prosecute them himself.

Recognizing the extraordinary dangers of a president seeking not just to weaponize the criminal justice system for political ends but trying as well to assume personal control over who should be investigated and charged, the White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, sought to stall.

Those efforts were not entirely successful. Schmidt and Matthew Cullen detailed ten people on Trump’s enemies list eventually hit with punitive actions that disrupted their lives and cost hundreds of thousands in fines and legal fees.

MSNBC’s “Deadline White House” opened on Monday with a montage of Trump’s musings on revenge. Treason is punishable by death in the Constitution, a reporter noted in May 2019: “Who specifically are you accusing of treason?”

Trump didn’t blink. He cited a list of people he felt had wronged him who should be charged with treason (extremely loosely defined).

“Revenge does take time,” Trump told “Dr. Phil Primetime.”

Trump is biding his. If he wins a second term and anyone opposes him, he told a rally last September, he’ll order his attorney general to indict them.

He’ll go full Queen of Hearts given a second chance at the Oval Office.

Truth Social Tanks

Published by digby on September 23, 2024

In case you were wondering how The Great Businessman is doing:

It would appear that now that the lock out period is over, Trump or other big stock holders are dumping stock. Too bad about the suckers and losers.

He’s A Great Businessman

Published by digby on September 23, 2024

Many people say they want Trump to be president again because he is a great businessman and they believe he will lower prices. That’s what he’s promising, after all.

He gave an interview to a friendly reporter, Sheryl Attkisson, who asked him how he planned to do that:

Attkisson: Kamala Harris has been very short on specifics when it comes to the economy other than saying she wants an opportunity economy. What are the specific mechanics of how prices come down. You know the steps that would be taken in a second term for you?

Trump: So first of all, she can’t do an interview. She could never do this interview because you ask questions like give me a specific answer. She talks about her lawn when she was growing up. This woman is not equipped to be president She is not equipped to deal with President Xi, — I took in hundreds of billions with him.

And Putin, we had no war with Putin. Remember, and I’m just going to go off just for this. With Bush, they took a lot. Russia. With Biden, they’re trying to take everything. With Obama, they took a lot. With Trump, Russia took nothing, Just remember that. It’s a little, a little chart.

But what happened, and when you look at what took place, it was so sad. When they took over, they cut the oil way down, and oil started going through the roof. It was going to $10 a gallon. It was going to go to numbers that nobody has ever seen. And so they went back to the Trump drilling, They said, let it go back.

That was the only good thing. But they stopped, because I wold be there, but four years later I would be triple what the number was. Right now, they’re just about even where I was. But they only did that because of the fact that they would have an election coming up.

And you remember at the beginning what happened? That’s one of the reasons that Putin went in, because it went to $100 a barrel instead of $40 a barrel. And he could fight all the wars he wants with those kinds of numbers because he’s a big seller of gas and oil. So what happens is they went back to what I was doing just to reopen. Just reopen.

It wasn’t hard. It’s so crazy what they want to do. They’re going to destroy lives. They’re going to destroy — what they have done to this country, and especially in the sense of allowing millions and millions of people come in, because that’s something. You know we can fix the gasoline situation and we can fix the — anything.

Did that answer the question about the specific mechanics of what he’ll do to bring prices down? No? Attkisson (who is a MAGA sympathizer) didn’t seem to think so either.

Attkisson: Do prices come down magically because it’s not them?

Trump: They come down with energy and they come down with interest rates. We’re going to get, as I told you, we’re going to get energy down by 50% in 12 months. We’re going to have it. It’s going to be a major smash on energy.

If you look at the energy for, and I’m not just talking about cars. I’m talking about air conditioning, heating your basic energy — operating a bakery operating any kind of business. It’s all having to do with energy.

That was where they all started wrong when they cut way back on what I did, and again, just so you understand, they let it go back to where it was which was a very smart thing, Otherwise, I think you would have had, I think you would have had a depression, if you want to know the truth.

But energy was rising at a level that nobody had ever seen, and then they said, go back,go back. They would tell people, go back to your wells, go back to drilling, fracking, whatever you have to do. But if they win, the day after they’re going all the way. They were only doing that because of an election coming up. They’re going all the way, What they are doing to our country is madness. And what they’ve done to our country is mad.

I guess that gobbldygook was meant to say that he will lower energy prices by going back to what he did before — except the Biden administration allegedly went back to what he did before already so his plan is to lower energy prices by 50%. (Don’t even ask if he knows anything about whether oil prices can go below their break even price because he’s an imbcile and doesn’t understand anything.)

In addition, aside from all the gibberish, he apparently believes that inflation occurred because Biden changed his energy policy? What?

I’m just taking a wild guess about what he was trying to say so it’s possible I’m sanewashing him. Most of that was him vamping with incomprehensible bullshit because he doesn’t have a clue ab out inflation and doesn’t care.

But sure, he’s a great businessman so let’s put him back in charge. What could go wrong?

Meanwhile:

The Big Lie Will Never Die

Published by digby on September 23, 2024

At least until Trump does

JV Last reminisces about America’s halcyon days when winning the popular vote meant that you’d also win the electoral college, something we all took for granted until 2000 when we learned otherwise. (Ye, it happened once before in the 1870s but nobody gave it much of a thought after that.)

He talks about all the variables, including the impact of late-breaking news about one side or the other,and how these variables have changed over the years and concludes:

Unless Harris expands her lead over Trump to greater than a +5 margin on Election Day, we’re in coin-flip territory for the next 42 days.

Yeah. This is one of the reasons I really wish the news media would be careful about how they frame the polling.

Here’s the bad news we can definitely count on:

Not being able to see over the electoral horizon is a problem because we know what Trump is going to do on Election Day: He’s going to claim victory.

His voters will believe him, and this in turn will cause Republican elites to support his claims, irrespective of evidence.

We saw how quickly and easily Republican voters believed Trump in 2020, when Biden’s margin of victory was overwhelming and had been anticipated by polls for months.

Within days a supermajority of Republican voters believed that Trump was the winner, even though there was no evidence to support this view and a great deal of evidence against it.

Ask yourself: What are these people going to say—and do—if Kamala Harris is not a heavy favorite going into Election Day? And if no one really knows what’s happening until the returns come in?

As Last says, even if she wins and none of Trump’s attempts to overturn it succeed, he will still say that he won and will convince many Republicans that it’s true. The results of that will be a Republican Party that continues to be required to adhere to the Big Lie even if Trump is out of the picture which means:

[W]e’re going to have another four years in which the price of admission to Republican politics is claiming that the sitting president is illegitimate.

I’m afraid so.

Donald Trump’s Lurid Fantasy World

Published by digby on September 23, 2024

The Washington Post’s Ashley Parker with a long overdue proper description of Trump’s campaign theme:

In Donald Trump’s imaginary world, Americans can’t venture out to buy a loaf of bread without getting shot, mugged or raped. Immigrants in a small Ohio town eat their neighbors’ cats and dogs. World War III and economic collapse are just around the corner. And kids head off to school only to return at day’s end having undergone gender reassignment surgery.

The former president’s imaginary world is a dark, dystopian place, described by Trump in his rallies, interviews, social media posts and debate appearances to paint an alarming picture of America under the Biden-Harris administration.

It is a distorted, warped and, at times, absurdist portrait of a nation where the insurrectionists who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, to deadly effect were merely peaceful protesters, and where unlucky boaters are faced with the unappealing choice between electrocution or a shark attack. His extreme caricatures also serve as another way for Trump to traffic in lies and misinformation, using an alternate reality of his own making to create an often terrifying — and, he seems to hope — politically devastating landscape for his political opponents.

It goes on to describe many of the details, most of which you no doubt are aware of. But I wonder how many so-called “normies” who aren’t paying close attention know about this. Here’s just one example:

Immigration is another topic ripe for Trump’s land of make-believe. For example, the former president repeatedly references Hannibal Lecter, the fictional serial killer from “The Silence of the Lambs,” as a way of conflating migrants seeking asylum with people in mental institutions to suggest without evidence — but with dehumanizing language — that those crossing the U.S.-Mexico border are migrants from insane asylums.

“We have people that are being released into our country that we don’t want in our country,” Trump told a Wildwood, N.J., crowd in May, after mentioning “the late, great Hannibal Lecter.”

Trump also regularly claims that the government is putting up undocumented immigrants in “luxury hotels.” In Manhattan, for instance, the city has spent millions converting motels, office buildings and even some upscale hotels into housing for thousands of migrants, but the accommodations are shelter operations, not five-star opulence.

“You have soldiers right now laying on the streets of different cities, all Democrat-run. They’re laying on the streets in front of hotels, in some cases luxury hotels, and you have illegal immigrants coming in and living in those hotels and laughing at our soldiers, as they walk by into a luxury lobby,” Trump said during an economic speech in New York this month. “Is there something wrong with that thinking? Is there something wrong with our country?”

There is another way to describe all this, of course. Donald Trump is a pathological liar and a grotesque demagogue. But this will do.

The problem we have, as I’ve been annoyingly hammering, is that a very large plurality of the public either believes him or admires him for being the demagogic liar that he is because it triggers the libs. These are all people who seem to be in love with hate.

Either way, the fact that we have a man who is portraying America as a dystopian hellhole despite all evidence to the contrary virtually tied in the polls with the person living in the real world is profoundly disturbing.

Double Standard?

Published by digby on September 23, 2024

You betcha

In her newsletter today, Margaret Sullivan discusses the astonishing fact that media organizations are sitting on a trove of hacked emails from the Trump campaign and refusing to publish them, in stark contrast to their behavior in 2016 when they eagerly pounced on similarly hacked emails from the Clinton campaign. She asks herself, what if it these were hacked emails from the Biden or Harris campaign. Would they be similarly protected?

A group of well-known journalists got together last week to kick this topic around at the behest of Steve Adler, the former top editor of Reuters who now runs an ethics initiative at NYU. Adler moderated a panel including Ben Smith of Semafor who — when he was the editor of BuzzFeed News — famously published the so-called Steele dossier. That dossier was full of unverified and in some cases salacious information about Trump, much of which has turned out to be untrue. The other panelists were Sewell Chan, the new editor of Columbia Journalism Review, and Kathleen Carroll, the former executive editor of the Associated Press.

These media bigwigs agreed, in general, that the standard for publication of hacked information has to be true newsworthiness. In other words, does the public need to know what’s in documents that come from such a tainted source? Smith, though, said he has a strong (and, I would add, well-proven) tendency to go ahead and publish, reasoning that the press shouldn’t be in the business of keeping secrets.

Maybe the media really has learned something from mistakes made that helped get Trump elected. But I’m aware of precious little soul-searching about 2016 campaign coverage — particularly the way Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server was vastly and damagingly overplayed. There have been even fewer admissions of wrong-doing or plans for reform, at least that I’m aware of.

So, while I’d like to think that what we’re seeing in the media’s silence about the Iran hacks is mostly “lesson learned,” I’m not convinced. That’s probably one element, with the lack of urgent newsworthiness a bigger part, combined with a desire — however unacknowledged, even to themselves — to avoid inflaming right-wing criticism.

I have absolutely no doubt they would find a reason to publish them. They would rationalize that people don’t really know enough about Harris or that Biden has not been available to the press so they simply have to do whatever is necessary to inform the public.

I think there is a lot to the idea that they are afraid of being called liberal — an old story. And this rationalization from Tara Palmieri at Puck is instructive:

Is this a Reverse Podesta situation? Who knows. The reality is that the media has become more responsible with hacked information, and frankly, it’s hard to imagine anything about Trump that would move the needle post January 6, post-bankruptcies, post-Access Hollywood, post-E. Jean Carroll, post-indictments, post-Arlington, and even after the dog-eating and baby-executing bit. 

Since when is their news judgment dependent on what “moves the needle?” By making decisions based on the fact that with Trump “nothing matters” they are moving the needle.

I have no idea if the hacked emails contain anything important. But I do know that the media hugely benefited Trump when they published the DNC emails and turned “butheremails” into the overwhelming theme of the 2016 campaign. And now it seems they are helping the Trump campaign again. Can they not see how this looks to their readers?

How In The World Is This Thing So Close?

Published by digby on September 23, 2024

Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans got a little bit of good news over the weekend with some highly respected polls coming in showing that Kamala Harris is continuing to grow a lead over Donald Trump. According to the NBC poll, Harris leads by 5 points nationally and has received a mind-boggling 16 point bump in favorability since July. NBC reports that it’s “the largest increase for any politician in NBC News polling since then-President George W. Bush’s standing surged after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.” It appears that the more people see of her, the more they like her.

The CBS News Poll found Harris up 52-48 percent nationally and 51-49 percent in the battlegrounds. Importantly, the poll found that views of the economy have improved a bit and her numbers on that issue have improved with them. Those who are voting on personal qualities favor Harris 66-33% and those who are voting on “policy” are 50% for her and 50% for Trump.

G Elliot Morris of 538, posted this on Sunday night:

That does throw some cold water on any euphoria Harris supporters might be feeling. The race remains very close and it’s hard to understand how that can be after everything that’s happened over the past eight years of Trump dominating our politics. In fact, it’s downright disorienting.

The good news is that he has, for the first time, said that he won’t run again. Of course, he’s not exactly a man of his word so I wouldn’t take that to the bank. If he loses this time and disputes the results and continues to run a shadow government from Mar-a-lago I’d say the chances are pretty good that even at the age of 82 he’ll be primed for another comeback, especially if the GOP is still drowning is weirdo extremism.

Despite the Trump campaign insisting that their own polls are showing that he’s far ahead in the battlegrounds, Trump’s behavior indicates that he knows he’s not running away with it. And he’s very disappointed about that since he had probably already told Melania she could make plans to follow up her hideous destruction of the White House rose garden with plans to dig up the rest of the grounds and turn them into a putting green and Christmas tree sculpture garden. He thought it was a foregone conclusion and he didn’t expect that he would have to actually do anything. And so far, he has not been able to rev himself up to campaign very much.

Axios reported on his low energy rally schedule compared to the past:

He was even doing more rallies in 2020 during the pandemic. And, as Harris pointed out in the debate (much to Trump’s chagrin) they just aren’t the raucous, fun events they used to be. She described how people are leaving early, “bored and exhausted” which is absolutely true. He held a rally this past weekend in North Carolina that once again had people streaming out while he was still speaking. The MAGA magic isn’t what it used to be. And Trump isn’t the candidate he used to be.

The Washington Post reported on the state of the Trump campaign as we head into the final stretch of the campaign and it’s looking pretty frayed around the edges. Not only is Harris outraising and outspending them, the Trump campaign is experiencing serious internal problems. What was considered to be the most disciplined, professional campaign Trump has ever run has devolved into yet another edition of the Trump show.

The Post runs down some of the events of just the past two weeks, pointing out that Trump’s “chaotic and widely criticized debate performance” didn’t happen in a vacuum. He had already brought back the troublesome Corey Lewandowski into the fold, who had immediately challenged the authority of the campaign leadership and Trump was travelling around the country with far right conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer. That’s not all:

Trump picked a fight with the international icon, posting last Sunday on social media, “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT!” — the sort of impulsive, impetuous display that has become increasingly common in recent weeks. In a single 24-hour span at the end of last month, for example, he amplified a crude joke about Harris performing a sex act; falsely accused her of staging a coup against President Joe Biden; promoted tributes to the QAnon conspiracy theory; hawked digital trading cards; and became embroiled in a public feud with staff and officials at Arlington National Cemetery.

One Trump insider told the Post, “the through-line is his campaign is 96 percent him. It’s not even ‘Let Trump be Trump. It’s ‘Let Trump be unsupervised at all times.’ They just feel like, ‘We can’t control him, so let’s hope he wins anyways.’”

Imagine what he’ll be like when he’s back in the White House, knowing that he has immunity from virtually any criminal accountability and will not need to seek the approval of the voters ever again. I can’t imagine that Donald Trump will spend much time worrying about his “legacy.” He believes that he will be remembered as the greatest president in American history and probably the greatest leader in world history. And if others disagree he will spend the rest of his life saying it on a loop, sure that if he just says it enough people will agree it’s true.

According to the NY Times, which published a similar story on Sunday, Trump’s antics have the rest of the party worried. Not only has he been agitating for a government shutdown under the ignorant assumption that because he was blamed for one when he was president, Biden/Harris will be blamed this time, his incoherence on the stump is potentially bringing down the rest of the ballot. (Apparently, Speaker Johnson defied Trump and agreed to a deal to avert he shut down without the provision Trump demanded. No word from Trump yet, but his protege Laura Loomer had angry words for “Rino” Johnson.)

The Times reported:

Some Republicans worry that the collective impact could alienate more moderate Republicans, whose support could prove to be decisive in such a tight contest, as Mr. Trump perhaps reminds those voters why they denied him a second term.

As Harris said in the debate, he’s having a very difficult time processing that fact which should have disqualified him from the presidency and would have it the party had been willing to take responsibility and convict him in the second impeachment trial.

People often comment on social media about Democrats being nervous nellies about the election, never able to feel confident while the Republicans just march on regardless of how daunting the electoral challenge. Democrats know despite Harris’s slight lead and the fact that her campaign is operating smoothly while the Trump campaign is a chaotic mess Donald Trump could win this campaign.

And that’s the problem. Considering all we know and everything that’s happened, how in the world is it even possible that it’s this close? Even if Harris wins and Trump finally shuffles off into obscurity that’s the question that will haunt us as a country for many years to come.

Salon

That’s his hat

Published by Tom Sullivan on September 23, 2024

Mark Robinson’s sinking campaign

N.C. Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, Republican candidate for governor, had a pretty lousy weekend. He’s looking at a blue Monday too (CNN):

Several top operatives on Republican Mark Robinson’s campaign for North Carolina governor have stepped down, just days after a CNN report uncovered inflammatory comments the candidate made on a porn website.

Robinson’s campaign announced Sunday evening that general consultant and senior adviser Conrad Pogorzelski III, campaign manager Chris Rodriguez, finance director Heather Whillier and deputy campaign manager Jason Rizk have stepped down from the campaign. Pogorzelski confirmed the news when reached by CNN.

“The reports are true that I, along with others from the campaign have left of our own accord,” he told CNN in a statement.

Republicans expect Robinson to lose. Reports suggest he is persona non grata at Trump-Vance rallies in the state. Trump frets that Robinson’s drag on the slate will cost him North Carolina’s 16 electoral votes and the presidency (and in due course, his freedom).

WUNC reports that the only Robinson staff who remain are “two campaign spokesmen and a bodyguard.” Where to find anyone to man his rapidly sinking ship this late in the campaign?

Oh! There’s Jack Burkman volunteering!

“For those not familiar with Jack and his partner, Jacob Wohl, be sure to Google them,” tweeted one FKA Twitter user. “Jack and Jacob are the political version of the burglars in Home Alone.”

Burkman is on a two-year probation after conviction for a telecommunications fraud felony involving false robocalls in Ohio. This guy attended the Baghdad Bob School of Political Flackistry and has a long history of false claims. This is likely another.

I’m old enough to have watched The Beatles’ first appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show.” Deadpan comic Jackie Vernon was a regular. He’d stand on stage with a slide clicker and blandly narrate his unseen “vacation slides” from the Everglades.

[CLICK!] Here’s the guide I got. His name was Guido. Very famous guide, in fact he was known as Guido the Guide.

[CLICK!] Here’s Guido the Guide leading me around a bed of quicksand.

[CLICK!] Here’s Guido the Guide from the waist up.

[CLICK!] That’s his hat right there.

[CLICK!] Here’s my next guide, Son of Guido the Guide.

[CLICK!]

[CLICK!]

[CLICK!] That’s his hat.

Change that to North Carolina’s Great Dismal Swamp and that’s Mark Robinson’s campaign about now.

Popular Information has a report on corporate sponsors backing Robinson’s campaign through the Republican Governors Association (RGA).

Kamala Abides

Published by Tom Sullivan on September 23, 2024

It’s good knowin’ she’s out there

Sam Elliot has had lots of memorable film roles, but perhaps none more memorable than the The Stranger in The Big Lebowski (1998). The Lincoln Project recruited the voice of that icon of manliness to pitch Kamala Harris to the dudes out there who need to hear it.

“I can’t believe we’re having this conversation again,” Elliot begins. “Are we really going back down that same fucking, broken road? Or are we moving forward? Towards hope? Towards freedom? Towards change?”

“It’s time to be a man and vote for a woman,” made me burst out laughing. That’s pretty damned unsubtle. Hope it has an impact with the target audience.