“Why is Kamala the expert on tacos?” askedFox & Friends co-host Will Cain. “Did she say white guy tacos are tuna in mayonnaise?”
Conservative provocateur Mike Cernovich took it further, accusing Walz of lying about skipping seasoning. “Tim Walz is such a compulsive liar, and deployment dodger, that I decided to see if he lied about not seasoning his food.”
Cernovich pointed to a 2016 award-winning recipe by the Minnesota governor for “Turkey Taco Tot Hotdish,” which included the spices paprika, chili powder, onion powder, and garlic powder. “Tim Walz is such a compulsive liar, and deployment dodger, that I decided to see if he lied about not seasoning his food.”
Apparently, Cernovich, who is s moron in most ways, thinks that a “tot hot dish” is spicy. Here is an example of a taco tot hot dish:
Add taco seasoning and water and simmer according to package directions.
In a 13×9 casserole dish spread taco meat on bottom of pan.
Layer the corn on top of it.
Then place tater tots in a single layer on top of corn.
Spread the salsa and cheese on top of everything.
Cook in preheated oven for about one hour.
That’s “white guy” mexican food. So, by the way, is most of what they serve at Taco Bell if you don’t add the hot salsa.
Even Senator Ted Cruz got in on the drama, writing, “hispanics are not tacos.” Unclear what he meant there.
It seems like Republicans will find anything to get mad about if it comes from Harris and Walz—maybe they’ll eventually launch an investigation on what actually goes into “white guy tacos.”
Calling James Comer.(I’ll bet he’s had a few tot hot dishes in his day…)
It’s been evident for a while that Democrats have been injected with huge amounts of enthusiasm since Harris replaced President Joe Biden on the ticket. Call it “vibes” or something else; it’s real. Polls this week reflect that.
While a Monmouth University poll from June showed just 46 percent of Democrats said they were enthusiastic about a Trump-Biden rematch, that number has nearly doubled to 85 percent for the Trump-Harris race. Democrats’ enthusiasm leapfrogged Republicans, whose excitement stayed steady at 71 percent.
In other words, Democrats went from a 25-point enthusiasm deficit to a 14-point advantage, at least on this specific question. (Other polls have tested enthusiasm to vote, which is a somewhat different question, and the two parties have been closer.)
Also notable from the Monmouth poll: Nearly 9 in 10 Democrats say they’re optimistic about the election, compared with about three-quarters of Republicans.And an AP-NORC poll this week showed that 63 percent of Democrats are excited about a potential Harris administration, compared with 57 percent of Republicans for another Trump administration.
Democrats could be getting a Senate bump, too
A big question has been how much Harris’s momentum might filter down to other Democrats this election year — particularly with both the House and Senate very much in play. It wasn’t guaranteed it would help, especially given that Senate Democrats were already overperforming Biden.
Well, we got a big new set of Senate polls from the Cook Political Report on Thursday, and they suggest the Democrats got a significant bump there, too. Democrats improved their margins by an average of four points across five key Senate races: Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. They now lead in each race by at least seven points.
Democrats also flipped the generic ballot — where people are asked to choose between a generic Republican and a generic Democrat — in two other states that don’t feature a 2024 Senate race: Georgia and North Carolina. In total, Democrats actually gained more down ballot than they did in the presidential race in every state except Wisconsin.
We don’t have a ton of other new polls, but the ones we have do suggest some of these races have moved slightly in Democrats’ direction in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. […]
The ‘double-haters’ break for Harris
My colleague Philip Bump on Wednesday broke down the evolving picture with “double-haters,” or those who dislike both major-party candidates.
The top finding from the Monmouth poll is that they are a shrinking group, declining by about half since Harris’s entry into the race. While about 1 in 5 voters were double-haters before — a historically high number — it’s now about 1 in 10.
Perhaps more important is the big reason for that decline: A lot of them like Harris. And they’re now ready to vote for her.Among voters who still dislike both Trump and Biden, 53 percent say they’re voting for Harris, while just 11 percent say they’re voting for Trump.Previously, those double-haters had been more evenly split between Trump and Biden. Harris winning them over is a big boost for her.
He also observes that JD Vance is very unpopular (maybe because he’s so damned weird) and that other states may be coming into play, notably North Carolina and Florida. Who knows?
I highly recommend this piece by John Marshall on the state of polling in 2024. It’s hard to know what to think about them but Marshall’s analysis is excellent and rings true to me.
Trump is apparently afraid of campaigning so now he’s just calling “press conferences” and rambling for an hour or so and then taking a handful of questions which he doesn’t really answer.
CNN's Daniel Dale with a brutal fact check of Trump, " I made a whole list here of other claims that were just flat out wrong, like this was just a whole bunch of nonsense." pic.twitter.com/i0pkTHA0ps
Trump: The wind is ruining everything, killing all your birds, destroying the fields, all these gorgeous fields, you got windmills all over the place and you have birds. You want to see a bird cemetery, just go under a windmill. The bald eagle. These windmills knock them out like… pic.twitter.com/Qk1b4gvvHZ
Trump: You're all going to be thrown into a communist system. You will be thrown into a system where everybody gets health care. pic.twitter.com/nfimx3aAgs
Trump on if he's comfortable with companies threatening workers who go on strike: "I want companies to get workers that are gonna love them and work for a wage that lets the company make a profit." pic.twitter.com/Pa3ABU5hzW
"I'm very angry at her … I think I'm entitled to personal attacks. I don't have a lot of respect for her. I don't have a lot of respect for her intelligence … she actually called me weird" — Trump on Kamala Harris pic.twitter.com/zT2drtblgU
Trump: Virtually 100% of the net job creation in the last year has gone to migrants In fact I've heard substantially more and actually beyond that number 100%. It’s a much higher number than that but the government has not caught up with that yet. pic.twitter.com/OhXChdai8n
He just can’t stop trashing the military. Here he is saying that giving the Presidential Medal of Freedom to his top donor Miriam Adelman is better than the medal of honor because only broken down or dead soldiers get that one.
“They’re either in very bad shape because they’ve been hit so many times by bullets or they’re dead. She gets it and she’s a healthy beautiful woman.”
Trump: When we gave her the Presidential Medal of Freedom… It’s the equivalent of the Congressional Medal of Honor— it’s actually much better because everyone who gets the Congressional Medal, they’re soldiers. They’re either in very bad shape because they’ve been hit so many… pic.twitter.com/a766KxAC2e
NEW We went undercover in Project 2025. Our investigation uncovered details of the secretive second phase of Project 2025 being led by a Trump insider, with plans to feed hundreds of highly-confidential battle plans directly into the Trump transition team. Watch here.
NEW
We went undercover in Project 2025.
Our investigation uncovered details of the secretive second phase of Project 2025 being led by a Trump insider, with plans to feed hundreds of highly-confidential battle plans directly into the Trump transition team.
— Centre for Climate Reporting (@ClimateReport_) August 15, 2024
I wrote about Russell Vought a while back. He’s quite the piece of work. I can’t imagine that Trump is happy about this one bit — assuming he is aware of anything at this point but his grievance that Joe Biden unfairly dropped out and made it harder for him to win.
The 900 page Project 2025 is a shocking manifesto. But it’s always been this secret transition and first hundred days plan by Vought that we needed to see. That and the data base of hacks and henchmen they’ve been building to stack the administration are the two aspects of the project that are the most threatening because Trump himself is so addled he won’t have a clue that it’s happened until it’s already done. (Not that he would be against it if he did …)
Ahead of her planned speech today in Raleigh, North Carolina, Vice President Kamala Harris announced a dozen proposed policies for “lowering costs for American families” (Washington Post):
The most striking proposals were for the elimination of medical debt for millions of Americans; the “first-ever” ban on price gouging for groceries and food; a cap on prescription drug costs; a $25,000 subsidy for first-time home buyers; and a child tax credit that would provide $6,000 per child to families for the first year of a baby’s life.
The last item followed a suggestion earlier this month from JD Vance, the GOP vice-presidential nominee, that the credit be raised from $2,000 per child to $5,000. Harris is also calling for restoring the Biden administration’s child tax credit that expired at the end of 2021, which raised the benefit for most families from $2,000 per child to $3,000.
The flurry of policy positions — just days before the Democratic National Convention in Chicago — represented the clearest articulation yet of how Harris, who has only had a relatively brief time on the national stage, would handle economic policy if elected this fall. Harris has thus far surrounded herself with many former aides to Biden, and her team had made some overtures to business leaders that they hoped reflected a more centrist approach. But the policy positions she embraced Friday suggest she will continue, if not deepen, the party’s transformation under Biden, who pushed for more aggressive government intervention in the economy on industrial, labor and antitrust policies.
Donald Trump, Republicans, and their industrialist backers will come after Harris with torches and pitchforks. Financing details for the policies were not immediately available, but Harris and her party have made a commitment to a “pro working-family agenda,” The Post adds. Their calculation is that victory in November lies down that path.
“Vice President Harris faces a dilemma: On the one hand, America is on a fiscally unsustainable path, and if we’re going to embark on some of the more ambitious programs she’d like to pursue we need more revenue,” said Daniel Hemel, a tax policy expert at the New York University School of Law. “On the other hand, democracy is in peril, and that crisis feels — and is — more imminent than the fiscal crisis, and I think she’s made the correct calculus that sacrificing on fiscal policy for a few hundred thousand middle-class voters in the battleground states is worth it.”
A butter knife to a gunfight?
Policy proposals signal to serious people that Harris is a serious presidential candidate. But Donald Trump operates in a different universe altogether, one of lies and insults. Dana Milbank catalogues a host of Trump’s insults in his Washington Post column this morning in addition to Trump anecdotes that are simply “bananas.” Less-MAGA Republicans are begging Trump to stop. But insults are all he has.
CNN's Daniel Dale with a brutal fact check of Trump, " I made a whole list here of other claims that were just flat out wrong, like this was just a whole bunch of nonsense." pic.twitter.com/i0pkTHA0ps
Trump’s disastrous pick for vice president, J.D. Vance, dismissed concerns about a campaign built on insults and “a whole bunch of nonsense.” Vance thinks giving offense is just fine (via Talking Points Memo_:
“The reason people love him is because he is his own man, he is unfiltered and he lets the American people see who he is,” Vance said during a campaign rally in Byron Center, Michigan. “We’d much rather have an American president who is who he is, who’s willing to offend us, who’s willing to tell us the truth, who isn’t a fake who hides behind a teleprompter but lets the American people see exactly who he is.”
So let’s hope Harris is not bringing a policy butter knife to a gunfight. A substantial number of Americans are happy to live in an authoritarian Trumpistan. They are willing to risk themselves and the western alliance to bring it about.
They have abandoned democratic principles to establish a white, Christian nationalist homeland where the land of the free once stood. “Truth, justice, and the American way” is not the 1950s to which they hope to return. They condemn liberal aspirations for equality of opportunity as a demand for equality of outcomes while backing a convict whose foot soldiers are at work rigging election outcomes.
ELIAS: “People underestimate Trump — he’s not just interested in rigging the rules, he’s interested in rigging outcomes. Until people accept that they fail to understand how far he’ll go, and how much loyalty he will expect.” – @marceelias of @DemocracyDocket 🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/X6RSFhdSJY
I still remember reassuring volunteers in October 2016 that despite Trump signs dotting the highways and byways outside the city that there was no way Americans were crazy enough to elect the orange-hued reality star over Hillary Clinton, the former senator and secretary of state. But they did.
He’s not just unfit. He’s not just amoral. He’s a walking repudiation of every aspiration the Founders had for this country.
Trump: When we gave her the Presidential Medal of Freedom… It’s the equivalent of the Congressional Medal of Honor— it’s actually much better because everyone who gets the Congressional Medal, they’re soldiers. They’re either in very bad shape because they’ve been hit so many… pic.twitter.com/a766KxAC2e
“This is shocking but not surprising because of the pattern,” said MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” co-host Willie Geist. “This is not a one-off, this is the way he thinks about people who serve the country in uniform.” Trump infamously mocked Sen. John McCain for being a POW.
“Yeah, there’s something really warped inside of him, there really is,” Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson added. “Just something — I guess the word weird is overused, but all that we just played is weird.”
“And it is just appalling that he would speak of America’s heroes that way,” he continued. “I mean, the heroes, many who made the ultimate sacrifice for the country, and he simply does not get it. He doesn’t understand. There’s a connection there that’s not being made, and, you know, you saw it where for years he was president and, boy, if he ever became president again, I would really worry about this country because of that emptiness, that lack inside of him, that lack of empathy, that lack of patriotism. It’s just not there. It’s not there.”
Equivalent means equal in value. The two medals are not comparable other than being the highest award in their fields. A medal being “much better” than the other is a matter of opinion. The Medal of Honor is for extraordinary heroism in the face of great danger on battlefields. The Presidential Medal of Freedom is given for significant achievements in the arts, public service, science and other fields. Recipients chosen often reflect a president’s political and personal interests per CRS.
He is speaking of Miriam Adelson, who charged two German machine gun nests, was wounded sixteen times but managed to pull five other wounded members of a platoon to safety before collapsing herself.
Wait, I just checked the award citation and Ms. Adelson received the Medal of Freedom for donating several million dollars to Mr. Trump’s political campaigns.
Americans elected this soulless grifter to lead them. We actually did that. And incredibly, a plurality of us want to do it again. If we do, we deserve the world’s astonished contempt.
There are people living among us who, once burned by a hot stove, cheerfully stick their hands on it again. Oh, and people like Talks to the Sky.
Do everything you can to make sure they are the ones disappointed on November 5.
Recent polling shows Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris is beating Republican nominee Donald Trump among Pennsylvania voters — a brand new poll by Quinnipiac University, for example, puts her four points ahead. That represents a significant change from when President Joe Biden was still at the top of the ticket.
However, a poll by TelevisaUnivision’s Strategy & Insights provided to WHYY News prior to its publication reveals that shift may have been particularly significant among Hispanic voters in the state. Whereas 39% of Hispanic voters in the Commonwealth said they definitely planned to vote for Biden just before his announcement, 49% now say the same about Harris.
That checks out, according to Sarina Torres, 23, of Allentown.
“I think a lot of that shift comes from Latina voters,” Torres, a college student and movement politics organizer, told WHYY News. “It’s more exciting to vote for a woman of color.”
The TelevisaUnivision poll provides a rare look into voter reactions to Biden being replaced by Harris atop the Democratic ticket. The poll was already being conducted when Biden made his announcement, and researchers were able to record the immediate change in public opinion. Trump saw a marginal gain in votes in his head-to-head contest against the Democratic nominee.
Kathy Whitlock, VP of Strategy & Insights at TelevisaUnivision, warned that it’s still too early to make concrete predictions, but said the poll also gives key insights into a growing voting bloc that may impact the results in what is expected to be a close race in Pennsylvania.
“In the past, it was a virtual tie and this breathed new blood into this cycle,” she said.
Every single person at a Trump rally will tell you that the reverse of this chart is true, because that’s what Trump & Fox/Newsmax tells them. They live in an alternate angertainment fact-free reality. They believe commie democrats have stopped fossil fuel production. pic.twitter.com/SZR6iCjvbX
Will this unreality last after Trump? I suspect it will.The precursors were talk radio and Roger Ailes’ Fox. They aren’t coming back to earth any time soon. They’ve been orbiting Bizarroworld for decades now.
Donald Trump has privately expressed faith in his campaign leadership and no firings are currently expected, but senior advisers find themselves in the most vulnerable moment as they struggle to frame effective attacks against Kamala Harris, according to multiple people familiar with the matter.
The past month, starting with Joe Biden’s withdrawal and his endorsement of Harris to succeed him, which propelled her to draw roughly even in key swing state polls, has easily been the most unstable moment for the Trump campaign since its formal launch in late 2022.
In that period, Trump has often committed one unforced error after another as he tries to frame arguments against Harris, struggled to break through the news cycle hyping Democrats’ enthusiasm, and suddenly found himself on the defensive with a narrow window left until November.
The sudden difficulty for the Trump campaign to lay a glove on Harris has led to Trump’s allies seeing an opening for the first time to openly challenge decision-making by senior aides and privately challenge whether some advisers should remain in their positions or be sidelined.
And the past month has been bad enough for the Trump campaign that advisers have taken those challenges – whether from enemies real or perceived – as serious threats or slights that necessitate devoting time and effort to slap down.
In a statement referring to the campaign chiefs Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita, a Trump spokesperson said: “As President Trump said, he thinks Ms Wiles and Mr LaCivita are doing a phenomenal job and any rumors to the contrary are false and not rooted in reality.
Uh huh. Sure.
Trump doesn’t really seem to be engaged enough with his campaign to care to tell you the truth. He’s obsessed with his assassination attempt and the fact that Joe Biden isn’t his opponent anymore. To the extent he cares at all, he’s convinced that he can persuade the courts that the election was stolen and take power whether he wins or loses. Or maybe he just wants to whine about the election being stolen and hold court at Maralago with the ragged remainder of his cult until the end of his days.
Honestly, I’m not convinced he really wants to be president again, he just wants to prove that he isn’t a loser. Now that he knows he can convince nearly half the country of that without having to prove it, he may just be satisfied with saying that he won without having to actually do anything. He is almost 80, after all.
