Sunrise — 7:04, 7:07, 7:12.

The desperation begins to show.

Why are the headline and subheadline nearly identical?

That's Politico, where they seem to have lost their mind. 

Democratic operatives, including some of Kamala Harris’ own staffers, are growing increasingly concerned about her relatively light campaign schedule, which has her holding fewer events than Donald Trump and avoiding unscripted interactions with voters and the press almost entirely....

Speaking of unscripted, today, everyone seems to be talking about her incredibly awkward inability to ad lib when her teleprompter malfunctioned yesterday: 

Kamala's teleprompter briefly went out at the beginning of her speech — you can tell the exact moment it happened.

She had absolutely no idea what to do or say.

Humiliating. pic.twitter.com/287bSswwgS

— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) October 4, 2024

At 0:13, she looks as though she's having a vision of losing the election for this — this.

How political is hurricane coverage?

5 days after Hurricane Katrina The New York Times front page was wall-to-wall Hurricane coverage.

5 days after Hurricane Helene The New York Times has moved on to January 6th. pic.twitter.com/Mh7Sdv4jl7

— Alberto E. Martinez (@albertemartinez) October 4, 2024

Sunrise — at 7 — with the UW Marching Band.

It's "On, Wisconsin!" and then random music provided by the silhouetted couple's boombox:

Then the band was playing what to me sounds like random notes, and when I played the video on my desktop just now, Meade says "Send me that one," and I was puzzled....

I'm told it's "Hail Purdue," and I get it. Meade grew up in West Lafayette, Indiana. Purdue is his original home team, and he wants to send the video to someone in West Lafayette. Don't you think it's nice that the band plays the enemy's fight song? It's a tradition, a welcome, played pre-game.

"Trump, during Fayetteville town hall, says he'd change Fort Liberty back to Fort Bragg."

The Fayetteville Observer observes.

The proposal was extremely popular with the crowd, to the point where they booed a man who said he was "an active-duty soldier here at Fort Liberty."

Later, Trump said "I think I just learned the secret to winning absolutely and by massive margins. I'm gonna promise you, as I said at the beginning, that we're gonna change the name back to Fort Bragg, because... I just see this great-looking soldier just accidentally said Fort Liberty and he got almost booed the hell out of the place."

"Once I thought Trump would be an aberration for Republicans. But on Tuesday night, I saw the future of the party and it was lies piled on lies, and darkness swallowing darkness."

Maureen Dowd watched the VP debate and describes how she felt about it, in "JD Smirks His Way Into the Future" (NYT).

Vance seemed like a replicant. There was no sign of the smarmy right-wing troll who said Harris “can go to hell”....

When did Vance say Harris "can go to hell"? I don't remember, and we're not given a link. Earlier in the column Dowd goes on about a Trump ad and fails to give a link. I found that frustrating but I figured she (and the NYT) did not want to boost a Trump ad. But why can't we get the context for that "can go to hell"? It makes me assume that the context would make Vance look better. (I looked it up — here — and it does.)

Back to Dowd:

He has a bizarre, degrading view of the role of women in American society.

Again, no context. 

But on Tuesday night, he put on a mask of likability and empathy.

"In a chilling tale of revenge, a 30-year-old man mowed down his father's murderer in Ahmedabad's Bodakdev locality after waiting 22 years for an opportune moment."

"The accused, who was eight years old when his father was crushed to death in a similar manner, grew up hearing stories about the killers, and nursed a deep grudge and an intense desire to avenge the murder. On Tuesday afternoon, Nakhat Singh Bhati (50)... was riding his bicycle when he was run over by a pickup truck...."

From "After 22-year wait, 30-year-old mows down father's murderer" (Times of India).

Oliver Willis. Remember him? Remember Daily Kos! I did a search and clicked on my favorite headline.

My search was barack obama with kamala harris today and elon musk with trump.

I wanted something to link to for a post about how both presidential candidates are suddenly appearing with their most prominent supporter. Today's a big day and their pulling out their biggest... celebrity.

Here's the headline at Daily Kos that made me laugh: "Obama hits the trail for Harris as Trump teams up with notorious troll."

Obama’s first event for Harris will take place in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on Thursday....

Why is he only appearing now? My hypothesis would be that it was thought that he would overshadow Harris, but now there's a new desperation. Something is needed. Will Obama say we should elect her as a way to have continuity with the Obama Administration? But she's said many times "We're not going back." You're supposed to understand that we're not going back to the Trump Administration, but lately it seems to have meant we're not going back to the Biden Administration, which seems incoherent, give that her performance as Vice President is her primary credential. But how can we believe we could go back — without going back — to the Obama Administration? Oh! It's easy, with Obama speaking. He can make these ideas fit together, with his fine rhetoric and mellifluous voice.

Back to Willis:

On the same day Obama’s plans were revealed, Tesla and X CEO Elon Musk announced that he will attend Trump’s rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, on Saturday. Musk is worth an estimated $261 billion, and has a history of anti-union views.... On social media, Musk has frequently promoted conspiracy theories and racist memes in support of Trump and other conservative causes. The social media platform X, formerly Twitter, which Musk owns, has seen a resurgence of pro-Nazi accounts since Musk took over the business.

That's the view from Daily Kos. 

I'll watch both rallies. I'm interested in seeing how the 2 great men share the stage with their presidential candidate, and I'll judge them by what they do today. 

It's October 5th, so that means 1 month until Election Day.

And maybe you think the race is really tight, almost exactly tied. But I'm looking at this...

Biden was up 6.0 points in Wisconsin in 2020 on October 5th, but he won the state with only a 0.63 margin. Clinton was up 5.5 in Wisconsin in 2016 on October 5th, but Trump won, with a 0.77 margin. How can Harris be looking at a win, when she's only up by 0.8? To believe the candidates are truly tied, you ought to see Harris up by something closer to 5 points.

Note that Harris needs Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Trump only needs to pick off one of those states. In all 3, Harris is far behind where Biden and Clinton were on October 5th. Trump won Pennsylvania in 2016 with a 0.72 margin. In 2020, Biden won it, but he had only a 1.17 margin, when the polling on October 5th showed him with a 6.6 point lead. As for Michigan, Biden won by 2.78 points, after showing a 5.8 lead on October 5th. And in 2016, Trump won Michigan — by 0.23 — after Clinton was up by 5.7 on October 5th.

Imagine if Harris were up by 5.7 in Michigan right now, 5.5 in Wisconsin, and 7.5 in Pennsylvania. The media would portray her as absolutely crushing Trump. That's what Clinton had on October 5th. Her supporters were very confident, calling those 3 states the "blue wall." And then Trump won them all.

Of course, Harris's advisers must see this. I presume that behind the scenes, there is panic, if not despair.

ADDED: Here's the headline at The Washington Post for you to read between the lines: "Harris is running a much bigger campaign than Trump. Will it matter? She spends three times as much, employs hundreds more staff and dominates the ad war. But the race is effectively tied."

Sunrise — 6:46.

"Well, she’s — I’m in constant contact with her. She’s aware of where — we all — we’re singing from the same song sheet."

"We — she helped pass the l- — all the laws that are being employed now. She was a major player in everything we’ve done, including passage of legislation, which we were told we could never pass. And so, she’s been — and her — her staff is interlocked with mine in terms of all the things we’re doing."

Said President Biden, at the end of his press conference today, when he was asked what role Kamala Harris has played working on the "crises" of the last few days.

It almost seems designed to hurt her, but perhaps we can credit him with being so out of touch that he thought this was helpful. Has he not noticed that she's been trying to appear unattached to the Biden administration?

Fungus of the Day.

That's a photo by Meade. And here's a photo I took not far from there:

I thought the "Vance" brand for marijuana was amusing. I looked up the company and found this Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, from 2020: "This Milwaukee company rolls thousands of CBD joints every day and is bringing in millions":

At Knuckleheads Tobacco stores, Vance Global's product is the top CBD cigarette, said Madison store general manager Landon Meske. It's the No. 1 staff recommendation for a CBD smoking product, Meske said.

Oh! Knuckleheads. Funny to see "knuckleheads" so soon after the VP candidate who is not Vance called himself a sometime knucklehead. But I know Knuckleheads. I've done photography there:

Write about anything you want in the comments.

"So why [did Melania] come forward with purported support for abortion rights one month ahead of the election?"

"The issue remains one of Donald Trump’s biggest weaknesses in November, no matter how much he tries to flip-flop on his position. His most recent attempt was to say he would veto a national abortion ban.... A cynical read would be that the Trump campaign hopes these Melania excerpts will help them with moderate voters who are angry about Dobbs and fear the former president will go even further to roll back our rights if he’s reelected. The women in his orbit have always been useful in softening his image: In a similar fashion to Ivanka Trump being painted as a 'moderating force' during the first Trump administration, the former First Lady’s memoir helps portray her as someone who will advocate for women’s rights from inside the White House...."

Writes Andrea González-Ramírez, in "Melania Trump Suddenly Wants to Talk About Abortion Rights" (NY Magazine).

Yes, I would presume that Melania's seemingly independent voice is coordinated with the Trump campaign. Those who are imagining that she's antagonistic to Trump and intentionally undermining him are — I suspect, reading their mind while they read hers — projecting.

"When states began legalizing marijuana nearly three decades ago, initially for medical use, they set in motion something of an unintended public health experiment...."

"But cannabis remains illegal under federal law and classified as a tightly controlled substance, which has stymied oversight and scientific study.... [Few states] require warnings about cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome or psychosis. None are monitoring — or are even equipped to assess — the full scope of health outcomes. 'There is no other quote-unquote medicine in the history of our country where your doctor will say, "Go experiment and tell me what happens,"' said Carrie Bearden, a clinical psychologist and neuroscientist at the University of California, Los Angeles.....  The commercial industry that followed [legalization] touted its products as beneficial, while focusing not on developing marijuana’s medical uses but on engineering a quicker, more intense high.... The commercial market expanded further in 2018 when Congress legalized hemp, a cannabis plant used in industrial products, and inadvertently legalized highly intoxicating hemp-derived compounds like Delta-8 THC...."

From "As America’s Marijuana Use Grows, So Do the Harms/The drug, legal in much of the country, is widely seen as nonaddictive and safe. For some users, these assumptions are dangerously wrong" (NYT).

"[Jack] Smith has essentially abandoned any pretense; he’ll bend any rule, switch up on any practice — so long as he gets to chip away at Trump’s electoral prospects."

"At this point, there’s simply no defending Smith’s conduct on any sort of principled or institutional basis. 'But we need to know this stuff before we vote!' is a nice bumper sticker, but it’s neither a response to nor an excuse for Smith’s unprincipled, norm-breaking practice. (It also overlooks the fact that the Justice Department bears responsibility for taking over two and a half years to indict in the first place.)..."

Writes former federal and state prosecutor Elie Honig, in "Jack Smith’s October Cheap Shot" (in New York Magazine).

The way motions work... is that the prosecutor files an indictment; the defense makes motions (to dismiss charges, to suppress evidence, or what have you); and then the prosecution responds to those motions.... [Smith] asked Judge Chutkan for permission to file first.... Trump’s team objected, and the judge acknowledged that Smith’s request to file first was “procedurally irregular” — moments before she ruled in Smith’s favor, as she’s done at virtually every consequential turn.

Smith has complained throughout the case that Trump’s words might taint the jury pool.... Yet Smith now uses grand-jury testimony (which ordinarily remains secret at this stage) and drafts up a tidy 165-page document that contains all manner of damaging statements about a criminal defendant, made outside of a trial setting and without being subjected to the rules of evidence or cross-examination, and files it publicly, generating national headlines. You know who’ll see those allegations? The voters, sure — and also members of the jury pool....

The Justice Manual — DOJ’s internal bible, essentially — contains a section titled “Actions That May Have an Impact on the Election.” Now: Does Smith’s filing qualify? May it have an impact on the election? Of course. So what does the rule tell us? “Federal prosecutors … may never select the timing of any action, including investigative steps, criminal charges, or statements, for the purpose of affecting any election.”

Remember, Smith begged the judge to flip the rules on their head so he could file this document first, and quickly — “any action,” by any reasonable definition — with the election right around the corner.....

"Biden hasn't scheduled public events in 43 of the 75 days since he dropped his re-election bid, a reflection of the 81-year-old president's unpopularity and age limitations...."

"Vice President Kamala Harris — who has praised Biden but doesn't routinely talk about him in her speeches — has had just one campaign event with him along with a few official events in Washington. First Lady Jill Biden also has largely withdrawn from campaign events, and Harris' team hasn't pushed for her to do them, people familiar with the matter told Axios.... Some Biden aides and close allies believe he's been aging more rapidly in recent months under the stress of the job and the legal troubles of his son, Hunter (the White House disputes this). Biden has sat for just two interviews since July 21, despite lingering questions about his mental fitness.... Behind closed doors, Biden has acknowledged to aides that he is unpopular and will do whatever Harris' team thinks will help her win — including not campaigning in certain states."

From "The disappearing Bidens: A quiet end to a presidency" (Axios).

That piece is larded with statements that a President's work is mostly done behind closed doors, but that means that the President's work could be done without the President's conscious, competent participation. Aren't we Americans entitled to know if we have a President? This idea that he's fading out quietly is a distraction from the real question: Do we have a real President right now and for the next 4 1/2 months? It's a dangerous world.

Maybe Doug Emhoff hates Kamala — ever think of that?

These baseless comments from Sunny Hostin about President Trump and First Lady Melania are despicable.

ABC should take The View off the air! pic.twitter.com/GTcmnBnnOb

— Brigitte Gabriel (@ACTBrigitte) October 3, 2024

This is the article I've been wanting to see but — at this point — thought I'd never see.

"Kamala Harris and the Influence of an Estranged Father Just Two Miles Away/Donald J. Harris rarely speaks to his famous daughter, who lives nearby. But he helped shape who she became."

That's the NYT, and I'm giving you a free-access link.

Dr. Harris’s spectral presence in Ms. Harris’s life began when he and her mother separated in 1969, when Ms. Harris was 5. The couple divorced in 1972 after he lost a bitter custody battle that brought his closeness to Ms. Harris and her younger sister “to an abrupt halt,” Dr. Harris wrote in a 2018 essay. The sealed divorce settlement, he said, was “based on the false assumption by the State of California that fathers cannot handle parenting.”

He added that it was “especially in the case of this father, ‘a neegroe from da eyelans’” who “might just end up eating his children for breakfast! Nevertheless, I persisted, never giving up on my love for my children.”...

They're eating the.... 

The question is why Kamala Harris never found a way to connect to him. Did she not want to understand what happened in that momentous court case? Was her father discriminated against by the U.S. authorities? She is forefronting her genetic inheritance from her father (and making that her dominant racial identity over that of her mother), so shouldn't she want to make that connection to her father? Compare Barack Obama, who made an elaborate search for his father — recorded in "Dreams From My Father." And his father had not been there in his young life or fought to preserve the relationship the way Harris's father (apparently) did.

Sunrise — 6:50, 7:03.

"If writing requires a person to store information using multiple types of working memory at the same time..."

"... then back-and-forth conversations with ChatGPT may provide moments of respite, by temporarily offloading some of this information.... So even seemingly unproductive interactions might provide the subtle benefit of increasing your over-all writing stamina. Collaborating with A.I. can also offer you a high-tech 'shitty first draft,' allowing you to spend more time editing bad text and less time trying to craft good text from scratch. ChatGPT is not so much writing for you as generating a mental state that helps you produce better writing.... A.I. isn’t writing on our behalf, but neither is it merely supporting us while we write from scratch; it sits somewhere in between. In this way, it is both on the spectrum of writing hacks and rituals and also, in some sense, beyond it. This helps to explain our discomfort with the technology. We’re used to writers moving to a quiet location or using a special pen to help get their creative juices flowing. We’re not yet used to the idea that they might chat with a computer program to release cognitive strain, or ask the program for a rough draft to help generate mental momentum...."

Writes Cal Newport, in "What Kind of Writer Is ChatGPT? Chatbots have been criticized as perfect plagiarism tools. The truth is more surprising" (The New Yorker).

Struggling to write the final line to his essay, Newport asked ChatGPT. It offered: "In the end, the true value of tools like ChatGPT lies not in making academic work easier, but in empowering students to engage more deeply with their ideas and express them with greater confidence."

I quoted that last line and asked ChatGPT to write a 1 or 2 sentence blog post reacting to it. I got: "This perspective highlights the transformative potential of tools like ChatGPT, not as shortcuts, but as catalysts for deeper intellectual engagement and self-expression. Embracing technology in this way can truly empower students to explore their ideas with newfound confidence and creativity."

Bleh.

Trump's word: "fight."

I have a simple point to make, but before I do, I want to acknowledge that "fight" was also Hillary Clinton's word, and here we see the music video shown at the 2016 Democratic National Conviction and it's full of celebrities brimming with determination to fight (for what we know they went on to lose):

Trump won in 2016, and he went on to lose — or are you one of the millions who think he won? — in 2020, and now he's fighting to win again. Out there fighting, we know what happened in Butler, Pennsylvania, and we know that "fight" was Trump's word in the most immediate dire moment:

NYT opinion columnist M. Gessen displays shockingly little concern for free-speech values...

... in the podcast "The Real Loser of the V.P. Debate/It’s our politics": 

I think we need a harm reduction philosophy of covering Trump and his party and the election. And these are some things to consider: One is to cut his or Vance’s mic when they start lying.

So not only is censorship the go-to remedy, but it's one-sided — openly one-sided.  

And I know this is a hugely controversial idea, and it’s usually controversial because it will enable them to scream censorship, but there needs to be a philosophy of journalism that is oriented toward the public good.

That is, Gessen has thought through the censorship problem and determined that "harm reduction" or "the public good" supervenes the free flow of ideas to the people and allowing us to choose what we like. Gesson seems to object even to the speech that is objecting to the suppression of speech — to the "them" who "scream censorship."

When I talk to my students about it...

Gessen teaches journalism at the City University of New York.

I always say: Imagine that information is water and some of the water is poisoned.

How is speech like water? Speech comes from a human mind. And when is speech "information"? When it is truth? Poison is not water, but an additional substance tainting the water. Lies and mistakes in speech are not like poison in water. How would you go about purifying speech and turning it into "information"? The traditional American ideology is that the way to get to the truth is to have a free flow of words — a marketplace of ideas — and to let people read and hear and think and have their own discussions about what is true. How could you possibly know the truth in advance and deliver it to the people? 

But Gessen pushes on with the analogy, which has been tested in the CUNY classroom:

And if you are tasked with conveying the water to the public...

So a censor is posited at the outset. 

... it would be a crime for you to convey poisoned water.

The censor is presumed to have the capacity to tell truth from lies. And the government is visualized as having the power to criminalize speech.

And I think that political lies, lies in the public sphere, are just as poisonous to our politics as poisoned water is to humans. And if we think of ourselves as conveyors, as mediators, as media, who transport this information, this water, then we have this abiding responsibility to do something about it. We can’t just turn to one of the candidates and say, “I’d like to see you take a sip of that. And see what happens to you.”

So one idea is to turn off the microphone when the disfavored candidate is deemed to be lying. But that is not all. Gessen continues:

I think we also need to figure out ways to contextualize the candidates. Certainly, this two-minute-per-person debate format is not conducive to creating nuanced or contextualized pictures.

Ah! Nuance! Context! I have tags for "nuance" and "context." I love when that happens. A chime goes off in my blogger brain. But back to Gessen:

But what if we had a different format? What if journalists prepared fact-based reports to create context for the debate? Who said that the debate absolutely has to be broadcast live? If we have one person who is lying in the debate, maybe that’s not the best possible format.

If you increase the power of the journalists who are known to disfavor one of the candidates, why would that person agree to debate? There are so many other outlets for free speech. The water overflows its once-solid banks and floods where it will. Now where is your fantasy of control?

Sunrise — 6:29, 6:55, 6:57.

"At one point, Vance wanted to correct something about how Haitians got into this country — and he was RIGHT...."

Muted mics were only supposed to be used if things went off the rails. But this was a civil policy back and forth about what voters say is the most or second most important issue in this election! We can't have debating in a debate! Shut up now! https://t.co/aC69URTs9O

— Ben Domenech (@bdomenech) October 2, 2024

"... I’ve written pretty harshly about Vance.... But I thought he actually did himself and his ticket some good."

"Vance came into this debate with a mission, which was to make himself and his running mate seem more reasonable, less extreme and more respectful of women. He knew exactly what he wanted to achieve, and he was just really good at it. He calibrated his tone really shrewdly. Whereas, I don’t think Walz had an objective other than to answer the questions and talk a lot about Minnesota.... He didn’t seem to want to achieve any one main thing, and so he didn’t really achieve much of anything, other than to do no harm.... And I was very surprised that Walz didn’t... point to the pretty extreme things Vance has said about women. I guess he was waiting for the moderators to do it. But the first half-hour of a debate is when viewers are really locked in, and Vance has a serious vulnerability there. I think I would have made that my main objective. The phrase 'cat ladies' never even came up."

Says Matt Bai, in "Did Tim Walz miss a crucial moment at the VP debate? The governor didn’t seem to have a clear objective in his face-off with Republican JD Vance." That's a free-access link, so you can read the whole conversation Bai has with Megan McArdle and Gene Robinson.

At one point, Megan McArdle talks about watching the debate with the sound off. Vance looked "much more composed." What Matt Bai noticed with the sound off was "how deeply concerned Walz looked about everything, as if he feared bad news." Which is basically the same point. McArdle asks "At a visceral level, who wants a president who looks anxious?"

I did the opposite mostly. I watched without looking at them.

"Russian Telegram channels published video of triumphant troops waving the Russian tricolour flag over shattered buildings in Vuhledar."

"In one clip, four soldiers stood inside a gutted highrise flat and placed a flag outside. 'Everything will be Russia. Victory will be ours,' an officer declared. The communist hammer and sickle was also raised. Vuhledar was originally built around a mine in the mid-1960s when it was within the Soviet Union. Before the war it had a population of about 14,000. It is now a sprawling ruin, with apartment buildings smashed apart and scarred...."

From "Ukraine says its forces have withdrawn from defensive bastion of Vuhledar/Eastern city had resisted repeated attacks but Russian troops are close to ‘encircling’ it in Donetsk advance" (The Guardian).

This morning, the betting odds converged.

Link.

"Mind-blowing that Tim Walz said he was 'friends with school shooters' 🤡" said Elon Musk...

 ... at the top of the X page headlined "Controversy Over Tim Walz's School Shooter Comment/Last updated/17 minutes ago/Grok can make mistakes, verify its outputs."

Why can't he just answer? He left out a word or 2. It was supposed to be "friends with victims of school shooters" — right? Why let this fester? Why so withholding? It doesn't make sense!

Tim Walz goes silent when they ask him about being friends with school shooters 🤣pic.twitter.com/XgytfRhwP1

— Hodgetwins (@hodgetwins) October 2, 2024

"In contrast to the various septuagenarians on the national stage, [Doug Emhoff is] a youthful, keenly focussed guy who says 'awesome' a lot."

"I spoke with Tricia Gronnevik, a forty-four-year-old credit-union marketing analyst who attended the San Antonio rally. 'Doug just blew me away with how real he is,' she said. 'It doesn’t seem fake or forced, like good old J. D. Vance.' Gronnevik is a fifth-generation Texan—she grew up on a ranch—and she thought Emhoff would be a worthy First Gentleman. 'We need a new version of masculinity represented,' she said. 'I’m really tired of the alpha-male toxic bullshit. Being a South Texas country girl... I grew up in deer camps listening to a lot of misogynistic shit. It’s refreshing that we have men here who are supportive and not punching down, being bullies.' Emhoff’s 'super-cool' musical taste 'is making me love him even more,' she added. 'I’m a big New Order fan, too. The Cure is my favorite band of all time, so if he’s a Cure fan I’m gonna die.'"

Writes Sarah Larson, in "Doug Emhoff Takes His Gen X Energy on the Road/On the trail, Emhoff has made loving music, and his wife, look like a campaign in itself. 'If he’s a Cure fan, I’m gonna die,' one rallygoer said" (The New Yorker).

I asked Google what's the most famous Cure song. I got this:

Now, there's your nontoxic masculinity. Aim higher younger-than-boomer guys. I saw JD Vance's fuchsia tie at the debate last night, but there are miles ahead on the road to detoxification.

IN THE COMMENTS: People are talking about this Daily Mail article, so I want to note that I have seen it:

"There is a quite narrow truth at the heart of the film: yes, many grifters have flourished under the guise of 'diversity work,' descending like vultures..."

"... upon guilty—or H.R.-constrained—white people hungry to be lashed for (and then duly absolved of) their supposed racial sins. To hear some of these so-called D.E.I. consultants speak is to want to rip your ears off. They speak a fuzzy, specialist language, meant to be minimally refutable and maximally emotionally manipulative. If this is anti-racism—in fact, it isn’t—you might find yourself quietly resolving to give racism another chance.... A gag that comes up a couple of times during 'Am I Racist?' is Walsh’s encounter with the 2002 book [with the N-word as its title] by the brilliant legal scholar Randall Kennedy. The joke is that it’s hard for a white person to buy the book because of how it’s hard to say the title. Get it? But Walsh never cracks the book. If he were to give Kennedy’s work a try, he might find a probing, refreshing antidote to the thinking set forward by DiAngelo’s simplistic, overly binary, and often quite patronizing work—and a total refutation of the blithe, resentful attitude of quick-twitch cultural reaction that produces a world view like his own."

Writes Vinson Cunningham, in "Is Matt Walsh Trying to Make “Am I Racist?” the “Borat” of the Right?/In his work with the Daily Wire and in a new movie, the conservative podcaster and activist tries to expose the hypocrisies of the left" (The New Yorker)

Cunningham writes out the name of Randall Kennedy's book, but I can't. Here's an Amazon Associates link to it.

It felt like an imitation of Kamala Harris's "I grew up a middle-class kid" — Tim Walz began his answer with "I grew up in small, rural Nebraska, town of 400."

The moderator, Margaret Brennan, purporting to delve into "personal qualifications" — that is, character — asked Tim Walz to explain why he said he was in Hong Kong during the Tiananmen Square protests when, in fact, he was not.

Here's the transcript of the full debate. Walz answered:

Well, and to the folks out there who didn't get at the top of this, look...

That "look" makes me feel as though I'm being chastised for not paying attention. Am I one of the "the folks out there who didn't get at the top of this"? What does that even mean? "At the top of" what? "Get at the top"? Did he mean those who didn't watch — get in on — the debate from the beginning? Anyway, that sets up this:

... I grew up in small, rural Nebraska, town of 400. Town that you rode your bike with your buddies till the streetlights come on, and I'm proud of that service.

That's like Harris's "grew up in the middle-class" safe space. Instead of answering the question asked, he goes back to a snapshot of his youth. Somehow he's "proud of that service." The service of riding your bike around until it got dark. Much as I'd love to see the kids of America riding their bikes around and I'd be willing to regard them as performing a "service" if it would help, Tim Walz was just deflecting the question and doing so in a way that reminded me of all the times Harris deflected questions by directing us toward a picture of her as a child. Walz's picture is at least a happy one.

Let's talk about the Vice Presidential Debate.

I'll probably refrain from saying anything until tomorrow, so please keep the conversation going in the comments.

At the Mushroom Café...

... you can talk about whatever you want... except the Vice Presidential Debate. I'll put up a separate post for that.

"Iran fired a large barrage of missiles at Israel on Tuesday evening, an attack that could set off a sharp escalation in the long-simmering conflict...."

"Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps said in a statement that the missile attack had been in retaliation for the assassinations of Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, Hamas’s political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, and an Iranian commander. The statement said Iran would launch more missiles if Iran were attacked.... Loud booming explosions were heard above Tel Aviv, and flashes of light from the arcing intercepting rockets of Israel’s air defense system were visible. The salvo of missiles from Iran came a day after Israeli forces began a rare ground invasion of southern Lebanon aimed at crippling the Iranian-backed militia Hezbollah there.... A senior White House official said the United States would help defend Israel and warned that a direct attack against Israel 'will carry severe consequences for Iran.'... President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris... reviewed plans to help Israel defend against the attacks and protect Americans in the region."

The NYT reports.

"I just wanted to get out of legacy media. I feel like it’s just really, really difficult to do the kind of reporting that I want to do on the internet..."

"... within these kind of older institutions as a primary job. I like to have a really interactive relationship with my audience. I like to be very vocal online, obviously. And I just think all of that is really hard to do in the roles that are available at these legacy institutions.... I write about the attention economy, and I write about the content creator industry, and I just want complete autonomy to write and do and say whatever I want, and engage a little bit more directly with my readers, with the public, when it comes to my work."

Says Taylor Lorenz, quoted in "Taylor Lorenz Exits Washington Post to Launch ‘User Mag’ on Substack/Lorenz, who is leaving the newspaper to launch the publication, says that it will 'cover technology from the user side,' in contrast to traditional coverage of social media" (Hollywood Reporter).

I just want complete autonomy to write and do and say whatever I want.... 

"Donald Trump is gaining on Kamala Harris in the polls. I have some theories why."

It's Robert Reich in The Guardian.

Theories rejected by Reich: 1. The polls are skewed against Harris, 2. Media make it look close for ratings, 3. Voters think Trump is better on economic matters.

Theories Reich entertains: 1. Voters know all about Trump and don't know much about Harris (Trump is "the devil they know"), 2... oh! #1 is the only theory he likes. The rest is just inferring that Trump, who can't change and is know, is working to prevent Harris from becoming more known. 

Trump's methods for keeping us from learning more about Harris: 1. Declining to debate her again. 2. Creating chaos (and thereby turning people away from politics), and 3. Running ads that provide negative information about Harris (e.g., pointing out that she supported "gender transition surgery for incarcerated people").

If Reich has the right theory for why Harris is falling behind, why doesn't he call on her to make herself better known? She could do serious interviews and press conferences instead of lightweight fluff. The sensible presumption is that she is choosing to avoid revealing depth and substance. It is, in fact, rational to guess that she and her advisers have determined that the pure state of being NOT TRUMP is her best option. People wouldn't like what she'd reveal if she laid her cards on the table. To blame Trump for her predicament is to conceive of her as a passive, ineffectual person, which is to say utterly unsuited to the presidency.

My bet is that Reich knows all that but is just making another column out of how much he hates Trump.

The audience for the theater of hurricane empathy is vast, observant, and ready to put its critique in writing.

This is the most VEEP-like photo ever -- pretending to be on a phone call but forgetting to plug in the antiquated earphones while pretending to write on a blank piece of paper instead of actually doing anything. https://t.co/tkzHPplKhe

— Mollie (@MZHemingway) September 30, 2024

"Perhaps no previous politician has taken up the mantle of Dad in quite the way Tim Walz has."

"From late summer’s Vice-Presidential pageant of Democratic middle-aged American white men, Walz emerged as an avatar of football-coaching, social-studies-teaching, father-figure affability, and this appeal helped carry him past arguably more strategic choices to a spot on the Harris ticket.... Walz embodies a model of nontoxic masculinity the Harris campaign has hoped to represent with such outreach as the 'White Dudes for Harris' fund-raising Zoom. 'Weird'—Walz’s inspired epithet for magaleadership—was delivered in a tone of goshdarnit perplexity, and with it, he laid claim to the role of norm-setting paterfamilias. The other guys were the basement-dwelling nephews and conspiracy-theorizing uncles.... The idea of fatherhood that Vance and his pronatalist ilk present is at once maximally literal and maximally abstract: it is a matter of gametes and hormones on one hand and social order on the other. In contrast, Walz’s rendition of fatherhood conveys an identity rooted in particularity—the reality of particular children, particular parents, a particular shared life...."

I'm reading "Tim Walz and J. D. Vance’s Battle of the Dads/Duelling visions of fatherhood will define the Vice-Presidential debate" by Mollie Fischer (in The New Yorker).

Abstract versus particular... dad.

I don't know if that's a fair representation of either man (or the theater surrounding them), but it makes me think about the way human beings can reason from the abstract or the particular. For example, in a legal case, one could begin with an abstraction like fairness or equality, listen to arguments by ideologues, and then decide what will be done, in the future, when particular cases arise, or one might wait for a concrete controversy between adversaries with a real stake in the outcome and then work from the particular to a rule that can be stated in the abstract.

Do you like things in context or out of context — abstract or concrete — when you're doing your own thinking? When you're stuck relying on the decisions of others?

"Not even 48 hours after word got out a 43-foot-tall nude effigy of Donald Trump hung suspended from a construction crane, the indecent artwork was gone."

"But for most of Saturday and Sunday, a mile or two off Interstate 15, a few hundred yards from the always-bustling Love’s Travel Stop just north of Sin City, the statue had people stopping and staring.... [T]he statue was what some would call 'anatomically correct,' displaying the unknown artist’s concept of the very public billionaire’s private parts.... Alex Lannin, a 53-year-old special-education teacher in Las Vegas, brought Spirit Airlines flight attendant Honey Hunter, 27, of Spokane, Wash., to view the piece. 'I would say [it’s] very creative, like a piece of artwork, you know,' Hunter said.... Real-estate professional Clem Zeroli, 25, brought his girlfriend Tommi Alexander, 24, to pose together for a selfie at the site.... 'It’s not very respectful,” Zeroli said, “but I think it’s kind of funny. Any publicity is good publicity.'"

From "Pop-up exhibit? 43-foot naked Nevada Trump effigy vanishes after roadside ruckus" (NY Post).

We've been through this before.

I blogged naked Donald Trump effigies on August 19, 2016. There were 5, simultaneously, in 5 difference cities. I said: "The brutality is already there in politics, so we should have the words and pictures to express it. Here's Frank Zappa saying that on 'Crossfire' in 1986.... '[Brutality] is already in politics....'"

And on October 18, 2016, I had "Gender equality: Naked statue division": "In August, we saw the naked Trump statue set up in Union Square in NYC, and today we get the naked Hillary statue at the Bowling Green subway entrance in downtown Manhattan."

What goes around comes around as they say, and I'm not encouraging the creation of retaliatory naked statuary. I'll just quote Bob Dylan again: "Even the President of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked."

Decorating your front lawn for Halloween in an election year.

I laughed but somebody else might be truly horrified (and by what, exactly?):

"'Many, many of the other artists who saw it really hated it,' Mr. Pettibone told Art in America magazine in 2011."

"'They were pounding the tables with anger, screaming, "This is not art!" I told them, "This may be the worst art you’ve ever seen, but it’s art. It’s not sports!"' Warhol’s appropriation of the soup can — and Lichtenstein’s use of existing comic-book imagery — inspired Mr. Pettibone’s career. 'He said, "I was told in school to be original, but you guys aren’t inventing anything,"' said Barbara Bertozzi Castelli, who runs the Castelli gallery in Manhattan.... 'He said, "I’m going to copy you."'"

From "Richard Pettibone, Master of the Artistic Miniature, Dies at 86/He painted tiny reproductions of works by Warhol, Lichtenstein, Duchamp and many others, raising questions about originality and creativity" (NYT).

You can see reproductions of Pettibone's works at the Castelli website, here. Sample:

I'm using the "plagiarism" tag, because it's my established tag on the subject of copying someone else's work, not out of any desire to accuse Pettibone of doing anything wrong. As with Pettibone and Andy's soup cans, when it comes to tags, I prefer another one of the same thing. Creating something new is to be avoided.

"According to court documents, Ms. Harvey met Mr. Gadd in 2014 at the pub where he worked in London, and went on to stalk and harass him..."

"... including sending countless emails and social media messages, shoving him in the back of his neck and touching him without his consent. The behavior continued until 2017, when Mr. Gadd was granted a harassment warning notice against Ms. Harvey. But in the Netflix show, the character of Martha is said to have stalked a police officer, sexually assaulted Donny, violently attacked Donny and gouged his eyes, and been convicted of stalking and served five years in prison. None of those details were true of Ms. Harvey, the judge said...."

From "Based on a True Story, or a True Story? In ‘Baby Reindeer’ Lawsuit, Words Matter. A defamation suit against Netflix boils down to how the company presented its story about Martha Scott, a fictionalization of what the show’s creator has described as a real-life stalking incident" (NYT).

Notably, the words at the beginning of "Baby Reindeer" are "This is a true story," not "Based on a true story."

Sunrise — 6:50, 6:55, 6:57.

"The river that has flooded this street is normally 20 feet below it...."

One of many alarming, compelling videos to be found on TikTok right now, so use the hashtags to go in and see:

"Well, Kamala Harris, of course, hasn't had a lot of experience in foreign policy, but she's learned a lot at the side of President Biden as his vice president."

"So we're sort of guessing a little bit about her vision and her views. I think our general assumption is that she's pretty close to where Biden is, and I think it's safe to assume that she is basically a pretty conventional center left Democratic, foreign-policy thinker. I mean, to the extent that she brings her own individual perspective, it probably comes from her time as a prosecutor and a lawyer that she believes in the international rules-based order. So she looks at foreign policy in the sense of who is following the rules, in effect, in terms of whether it be trade security or economics."

Said Peter Baker on "Alliance vs. Isolation: Harris and Trump’s Competing Views on Foreign Policy," today's episode of the NYT "Daily" podcast (transcript and audio at that link)(I've tweaked some punctuation, etc.).

How are we to understand Harris as anything other than a continuation of Biden? That's what Peter Baker is doing.

And here's how he contrasts Trump:

"Everybody’s building the big ships and the boats. Some are building monuments. Others are jotting down notes...."

You won't have to wait even half a minute to see Kris Kristofferson in this clip of "Big Top Pee-Wee."

You may wonder, what's he doing there, but there he is...

"The debate has been a source of anxiety for Walz, according to people close to him..."

"... who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss his private mood. Walz conceded to Harris when she was evaluating him as a potential running mate that he was not an experienced debater, the people said, adding that he is concerned about letting the campaign down on Tuesday night. Asked shortly after the Harris-Trump debate whether he had started thinking about his own meeting with Vance, Walz said he had. 'Yes, I need to,' he told MSNBC. 'Look, he’s Yale Law guy. I’m a public school teacher. So we know where he’s at on that.'"

The Washington Post sets the expectations low, in "Vance and Walz face contrasting pressures in much-anticipated debate/For Vance, Trump may be his most important viewer. For Walz, the task of introducing himself to voters looms large."

The hope seems to be that Walz can win on likability. We're told that "Some Democrats are less concerned" about Walz's lack of thinking/speaking ability, because "Walz is far more popular than Vance." The public school teacher would like to make the young guy seem like the nerd that "popular" kids shun? If that's a debate strategy, I hope to detect it in real time. 

I like the "probably" in this sentence:

"Can I touch your beard?"

Sunrise with crescent moon — 6:26.

"The woman is more important than the man, but it’s bad when the woman wants to be a man."

Said Pope Francis, quoted in "Pope criticized for giving ‘reductive’ view on women’s role in society/A Catholic university took the rare step of criticizing Pope Francis, saying that he called women 'a fertile welcome, care, vital devotion.'"

Andrea Grillo, professor of sacramental theology at the Anselmianum, a pontifical university in Rome, said that Francis’s statements sounded “as if a woman can only be a mother, wife, daughter or sister — roles that are always beholden to man. Whereas men are free to be what they will. … It’s a very old kind of 'wisdom' that the contemporary world has walked past.”

"September 27th is the most important day in the Middle East since the Abraham Accords breakthrough."

"I have spent countless hours studying Hezbollah and there is not an expert on earth who thought that what Israel has done to decapitate and degrade them was possible. This is significant because Iran is now fully exposed. The reason why their nuclear facilities have not been destroyed, despite weak air defense systems, is because Hezbollah has been a loaded gun pointed at Israel. Iran spent the last forty years building this capability as its deterrent...."

Writes Jared Kushner, on X.

"The three [Arizona Democratic] state officials learned a computer glitch meant 98,000 voters had not provided proof of citizenship. In a candid phone call, they debated what to do."

The Washington Post reports (free-access link).

Their predicament was “an urgent, a dire situation,” Gov. Katie Hobbs said, according to audio of the call obtained by The Washington Post. Secretary of State Adrian Fontes said critics would “beat us up no matter what the hell we do.” Attorney General Kris Mayes worried they would be accused of rigging the 2024 election in a crucial state....

Nick Gillespie confronts Donald Trump about the deficit. Trump absconds.

WATCH: Former President Donald Trump blames COVID for his deficit spending. But @nickgillespie delivers a live fact check—much of that spending occurred before the pandemic.pic.twitter.com/EA0064nGn5

— reason (@reason) September 28, 2024

Starlink in Asheville.

Asheville is relying on @elonmusk for communication. Thank God for Starlink or we may have no information from the storm affected area at all. https://t.co/E13IcJwgKW

— Emily Zanotti 🦝 (@emzanotti) September 29, 2024

"The damage is so severe, we are telling drivers that unless it is an emergency, all roads in Western North Carolina should be considered closed."

Said a spokesman for the North Carolina Department of Transportation, quoted in "More Than 400 Roads Closed in North Carolina After Damage From Helene/The closures, including on two interstates, left motorists scrambling for options" (NYT).

Why isn't the hurricane damage the top story right now? That story isn't linked on the NYT home page.

I can't help feeling that the NYT is trying to protect the Biden/Harris administration from suffering political damage (like what happened to George W. Bush over Katrina).

The top of the home page is dominated by Israel's wars: "Why the World’s Biggest Powers Can’t Stop a Middle East War/The United States’ ability to influence events in the Middle East has waned, and other major nations have essentially been onlookers," "Israel Keeps Up Strikes Against Hezbollah in Lebanon/The Israeli military said it had hit dozens of Hezbollah targets, a day after deadly strikes near Beirut. Israel killed the group’s leader on Friday," "Having ignored allies and defied critics, Benjamin Netanyahu is basking in a rare triumph. Having ignored allies and defied critics, Benjamin Netanyahu is basking in a rare triumph," "Iran projected caution after Israel’s killing of Hassan Nasrallah and bombings in Beirut," "Despair, Celebration and Shock Follows News of Nasrallah’s Death in Beirut," and "A Decimated Hezbollah Is a Serious Blow to Iran." 

Six stories! Important, though, and there's a lot of depth to those stories, including very new material.

But the next set of stories is the old 2024 presidential campaign:

He seems to think what he is saying is perfectly bland.

It's hard to tell in the uncanny valley of his face (is that Botox?):

"Our First Amendment stands as a major block to the ability to be able to hammer [disinformation] out of existence. What we need is to win...the right to govern by hopefully winning enough votes that you’re free to be able to implement change."

No thanks.pic.twitter.com/SLGHOLVjCr

— Colin Wright (@SwipeWright) September 29, 2024

"Our First Amendment stands as a major block to the ability to be able to hammer [disinformation] out of existence. What we need is to win... the right to govern by hopefully winning enough votes that you’re free to be able to implement change...."

Via Elon Musk, who opines "This is crazy."

Song parody idea: If John Kerry had a hammer/He'd hammer the First Amendment out of existence...

"Saturday Night Live" cold opens with lots of political impersonations — including Dana Carvey as Joe Biden.

Scroll ahead if you must — to 10:23 — but don't miss Dana Carvey:

 Also — beginning at 2:22 — Jim Gaffigan as Tim Walz.

Maya Rudolph does Kamala Harris well, but the show's urgent need for us to love Kamala makes it too hard to like what Rudolph is able to do. The show presumes we agree politically and will simple-mindedly experience fun as "Kamala" has "fun" (and that's how Harris's campaign feels to me). I resist feeling the candidate's emotions as enacted on the political stage. And, for political satire, I want to laugh at her. Speak to me as someone on the outside. Don't treat me like a willing guest at her party. 

Sample line, spoken by the Trump impersonator: "We had this in the bag, but then they did a switcheroo and they swapped out Biden with Kamala. And now everything is chaos. They're eating the dogs. They're eating the cats. They're taking your pets, and they're doing freak offs. They're doing freak offs with the dogs, and they're making the geese watch. It's very sad. It's very sad. They're doing a Diddy."

ADDED: Mixing the P. Diddy story with the Haitians-in-Ohio story: Is that racist? It would be considered racist if Trump did it. It's in the black-people-remind-me-of-black-people mode. But in the sketch they have the Trump character combining the 2 topics, so if it's racist, it looks as though the racist is Trump. Clever? That's how you (try to) get away with it.

ALSO: For clarification, I substantially rewrote first 2 sentences of the paragraph that begins "Maya Rudolph does Kamala Harris well...."