November 9, 2024
We'll forget how to agonize about money in politics if it keeps getting spent with such ineffective and hilarious profligacy.
The Harris campaign paid Oprah $1 million to do that interview, and she spent $100,000 building the set of the Call Her Daddy podcast so Kamala Harris wouldn’t have to fly out to LA to film it. pic.twitter.com/rg0dthCR7c
— Insurrection Barbie (@DefiyantlyFree) November 9, 2024
How Trump tweets.
wait trump just says shit out loud in a room full of people logged into his social media accounts who post it for him i can't even begin to describe how much i need this set uppic.twitter.com/Or0C5Rfbfe
— manny (@mannyfidel) November 8, 2024
"One day, she was noodling around on an electric piano with a chord sequence... 'Do that again,' he said."
From "Linda LaFlamme Dies at 85; Her 'White Bird' Reflected a Hippie Fantasy/With her husband, David LaFlamme, she founded the rock band It’s a Beautiful Day and wrote a soaring paean to a generation’s dreams of escape" (NYT).
"Those hours of standing also turned out to have their own downsides, increasing people’s likelihood of developing serious circulatory problems, including varicose veins, abnormally low blood pressure and blood clots..."
"This week, the notion of Trump as the leader of a distinctively white movement became harder to defend...."
I'm reading "How Donald Trump, the Leader of White Grievance, Gained Among Hispanic Voters/In 2016, the idea that Trump was a cloaked white supremacist made him seem like a fringe character. What does it mean that his popularity has increased?" by Kelefa Sanneh, in The New Yorker.
"Republican Kari Lake took yet another bite out of Democratic U.S. Rep. Ruben Gallego’s lead in the race for Arizona’s open U.S. Senate seat on Friday evening."
November 8, 2024
"President-elect Donald J. Trump spoke on Wednesday with Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, and during the call handed the phone to Elon Musk..."
It is not clear what the three men discussed or whether they touched on any change in U.S. policy toward Ukraine in the wake of Mr. Trump’s election.
I'm going to guess it was a perfect phone call.
"It just seems to encompass literally everything. It bleeds into everyday life and every interaction you have with other people, and so that’s very stressful."
"What happens on this show is so much more intelligent and thoughtful and deep than anything that's going on at CNN."
"The news media in the eyes of many Americans is discredited. More than half the country have tuned out the mainstream media. We are now in little information silos, so it's almost impossible to overstate how much Donald Trump has defeated the system and how favorable the current composition of the system is for Donald Trump."
Did Swan even consider that mainstream media could be the "little information silos" and people are breaking out?
"Three men have been indicted in alleged Iranian plot to kill President-elect Donald Trump while he campaigned for a second term in office..."
"The bells of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris rang out this morning for the first time today since 2019's fire."
WE ARE SO BACK
— Catholic Arena (@CatholicArena) November 8, 2024
The bells of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris rang out this morning for the first time today since 2019's fire
The Cathedral reopens with Mass on December 8th pic.twitter.com/roQS22b0t7
"His decision to choose someone in his inner circle is a sharp contrast to his choice after first winning the presidency in 2016."
From "Trump Names Susie Wiles as His White House Chief of Staff/The president-elect turned to his top political aide to fill a key post managing the White House when he returns to office" (NYT).
"I'm not leaving anyway. This is my country. You leave."
😂🤣Michael Cohen keeps getting trolled during a livestream about fleeing the USpic.twitter.com/ZodVV17rG7
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) November 8, 2024
The NYT still has the Electoral College race stalled at 295 to 226...
... with Nevada and Arizona lingering, endlessly unreported.
But Real Clear Politics shows all the states decided, with a final score of 312 to 226. We know where Nevada and Arizona are going — into the big landslide.
So I just want to declare my victory as the one who predicted the final score on December 14, 2023: "Predicted Electoral College vote: 312 Trump, 226 Biden."
I mean, the word "Biden" is wrong, but 312 to 226 was right on the nose.
I gave some good advice then too: "The demonization of Trump has not worked for Democrats.... My advice, not that I think Democrats would or even could follow it: Fight Trump on the substantive merits of the issues. Show us that you deserve the power you seek."
That advice is still good advice. Especially now that it's a landslide.
"Cozy, whimsical novels — often featuring magical cats — that have long been popular in Japan and Korea are taking off globally."
[Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s series, “Before the Coffee Gets Cold,”] — set in a magical cafe in Tokyo where customers can travel back in time while their coffee cools — centers on ordinary people struggling with loss and regret who wish they could change the past....
Recent releases of cozy Japanese novels include Mai Mochizuki’s “The Full Moon Coffee Shop,” set in a magical coffee shop run by talking cats.... [There's also] “The Travelling Cat Chronicles,”.... “The Goodbye Cat,” and... “We’ll Prescribe You a Cat,” [and] “We’ll Prescribe You Another Cat”....
Cats are such a staple in healing fiction that Kawaguchi’s publishers in the United States and Britain added a fluffy brown cat to the covers of “Before the Coffee Gets Cold,” even though, in a break from tradition, cats are not central to his novels....
No mention of Trump (or Vance) in this article, published yesterday, but it's featured at the top of the home page like this...
She is still the Vice President. She could concentrate on being the best darned Vice President ever.
Start doing that border control job effectively — coordinate with incoming President Donald J. Trump and incoming VP JD Vance.
Or just do the obvious things: 1. Rest and enjoy whatever it is you enjoy (you, the "joy" person), and 2. Oversee the pursuit of money through a ghost-written book and scripted personal appearances.
I just saw the headline at the NYT: "What’s Next for Kamala Harris? Here Are Six Options. Her friends, aides and political allies say it’s too soon for her to even contemplate her next career move. But the speculation has already begun."
6 options, eh? I only thought of 2. It's hard to care long enough to think of 4 more options. Wear comfortable clothes? Get drunk? Divorce Doug? I don't know. Run for Governor of California in 2026 (Newsom is term-limited)?
Let me, at long last, read the actual article:
Where are all the protests of the election?
November 7, 2024
"Nearly two years ago, I wrote that Democratic prosecutors’ lawfare campaign against Donald Trump would make the 2024 election the single largest jury decision in history...."
Writes Jonathan Turley, in "Donald Trump just won the greatest jury verdict in American history" (The Hill).
"Merchan doesn’t have the stomach to imprison a former president or president-elect. Now that Trump has won, his criminal problems go away."
Waiting for Biden to speak.
It’s not a concession speech. It’s… perhaps something graceful and inspiring.
So now comes the postmortem.
I see this little collection of chastened musings on the edge of the NYT front page...
... but I don't have to read this stuff. For you, though, I'll power through it super-quick and say...
1. "In this new era, in which supporting Palestinian freedom has become central to what it means to be progressive, the Palestinian exception is not just immoral. It’s politically disastrous."2. "In the longer term, we’ll need liberal politics that are about more than just fending off the right."
3. "Instead of proposing sweeping new programs or even taking a stand, as Ms. Harris did, in defense of the status quo, [Democrats] could try to redefine themselves as responsible reformers."
4. "She spoke in the foamy blather of a corporate human resources manager. She pandered to low-information, single women voters by appearing on podcasts like 'Call Her Daddy' and goofballing along to her 'brat' label. She often came across as fake and scripted... seeming to parrot whatever her political consultants told her. The act wore thin."
"[Jack] Smith could proactively withdraw the charges himself, or simply resign..."
From "Trump’s biggest courtroom nemesis is looking for an exit strategy/The special counsel is expected to wind down the federal criminal cases he has spent the past two years building" (WaPo).
November 6, 2024
Waiting for Kamala Harris to come out and give her concession speech.
Here's a link to the YouTube live feed.
It was scheduled for 4 PM ET, and it's running more than 20 minutes late.
"A Party of Prigs and Pontificators Suffers a Humiliating Defeat."
[L]iberals thought that the best way to stop Trump was to treat him not as a normal, if obnoxious, political figure with bad policy ideas but as a mortal threat to democracy itself.... [T]his style of opposition led Democrats... into their own form of antidemocratic politics — using the courts to try to get Trump’s name struck from the ballot in Colorado or trying to put him in prison on hard-to-follow charges. It distracted them from the task of developing and articulating superior policy responses to the valid public concerns he was addressing. And it made liberals seem hyperbolic, if not hysterical, particularly since the country had already survived one Trump presidency more or less intact....
Yeah, I wanted Democrats to campaign on the substantive merits. Maybe they'll change their ways now that this over-the-top attack on the man, Trump, failed so badly. But for that, they'll need to come up with some good substantive merits. They'd better get to work.
"This Time We Have to Hold the Democratic Party Elite Responsible for This Catastrophe."
Writes Jeet Heer in The Nation. Subheadline: "Trump won because the opposition party is committed to ancien régime restoration in a country that desperately wants change."
The key to understanding the Trump era is that the real divide in America is not between left and right but between pro-system and anti-system politics. Pro-system politics is the bipartisan consensus of establishment Democrats and Republicans: It’s the politics of NATO and other military alliances, of trade agreements, and of deference to economists (as when they say that price gouging isn’t the cause of inflation). Trump stands for no fixed ideology but rather a general thumbing of the nose at this consensus....
Democrats... need... to embrace radical policies to change that status quo. This is the only path for the party to rebuild itself and for Trumpism....
"That little thing called special."
"We're gonna turn our country around. Make it something very special. It lost that, lost that little, it lost that little, that little thing called special. We have to make it, so we're gonna make this so great. It's gonna. It's the greatest country, and potentially the greatest country in the world by far and right now we're gonna just work very hard to get all of that back. We're gonna make it the best it's ever been. We can do that. We just, if we had to wait longer. I don't know. It was going bad and it was going bad fast...."
"I’m worried that if the Harris campaign wins on an abortion, abortion, abortion, presidential message, that the Democrats will take the lesson..."
"Mr. Vance will become the nation’s youngest vice president since 1953, when Richard M. Nixon..."
About that dead horse.
Sorry to beat a dead horse, but can we go back to what happened here? pic.twitter.com/FkScNHivuU
— zerohedge (@zerohedge) November 6, 2024
"... and quietly just do whatever we want."
Lil X and Elon Musk with Tucker Carlson.
— DogeDesigner (@cb_doge) November 6, 2024
The best video you'll see on the internet today. 🫶🏻 pic.twitter.com/fnCTOqO4R5
I heard Dana Bash say it at 1:15 a.m. on CNN: “We’re all living in the manosphere now.”
And let's see who else was talking about the election in terms of the "manosphere." 1. November 5, 6:15 AM, in The Washington Post: "Into the nervy climax of the 2024 elections/Our columnists are trying to keep calm as this year’s immensely consequential vote wraps up." The columnist James Hohmann speaks of the "manosphere"... disparagingly:
The party’s coalitions are changing. We’re going through this realignment that Trump has hastened. And Republicans are now much more dependent than they really ever have been in our lifetimes on low-propensity voters. They’re counting on the "Manosphere," the Joe Rogan listener, the crypto bro, “the guy who vapes.” And these are not high-propensity voters.
The king of the manosphere has spoken. Celebrity podcast host Joe Rogan officially endorsed Donald Trump in a lengthy post Monday evening on X. Receipts immediately followed... Fans were quick to point to the many times Rogan has criticized Trump....
Then, Brittany is joined by Code Switch's Gene Demby to explore the roots of a corner of the conservative internet that may have surprising effects on the election: The Black Manosphere.
And, to go back to August 2016, something from The New Yorker — previously blogged here — there's "WHAT HAPPENS WHEN WE DECIDE EVERYONE ELSE IS A NARCISSIST," a New Yorker article by Jia Tolentino, who quoted "An Essay on the Fear of Narcissism" by Kristin Dombek:
"'If you are an especially giving person, warns the Internet, you are a prime target for narcissists,' Dombek writes. The narcisphere has a gendered inverse, which some call the manosphere and which is dedicated to teaching men how to dominate women by feigning self-confidence. This is the realm of pickup artistry. It is much worse than the narcisphere...."
"What I was surprised to find was the extent to which [the 'manosphere' is] using ancient Greek and Roman figures and texts to prop up an ideal of white masculinity," said Donna Zuckerberg, interviewed in "Donna Zuckerberg: ‘Social media has elevated misogyny to new levels of violence’/When the academic, sister of Mark Zuckerberg, began exploring online antifeminism, she discovered far-right men’s groups were using classical antiquity to support their views" (The Guardian).
"Baldwin officials said the numbers were not final but that she has taken the lead and the margin is too large for Hovde to make up."
With 97.3% of the votes counted, Baldwin led Hovde by 49.2% to 48.7% — a margin of nearly 16,000 votes — in a race that drew attention and big bucks from around the country. Absentee ballots had not yet been counted in Racine and Oshkosh and votes had not all been counted in various places in Oshkosh.... The Democratic incumbent outperformed Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris, who was losing to former President Donald Trump by more than 41,000 votes.
Control of the Senate doesn't hinge on this race: "Republicans Clinch Control of the Senate/After picking up seats in West Virginia and Ohio and winning an unexpectedly close race in Nebraska, the G.O.P. had enough for a majority. Tight races in swing states will determine their margin" (NYT).
Just now: The NYT observes that Trump has won.
November 5, 2024
It's Election Night at last, and the results are almost in.
"You can read Ivanka’s inane musings below, but they’re not the real point. She turned 43 on October 30."
Writes Margaret Hartmann in New York Magazine, reacting to Ivanka's stoicism-studded thread on X.
"Our ruling class is disgusting."
Hear Tucker narrate this ad. It captures the truth and emotion. Chills. 👇🏻🔊✊🏻
— Sheri™ (@FFT1776) November 4, 2024
pic.twitter.com/qTAlLQcsRh
"Trump and allies have primed supporters to falsely believe he has no chance of losing."
That's the headline at NPR for a piece by political reporter Stephen Fowler.
What does "primed" even mean? It seems to admit that Trump never said he has "no chance of losing," but he said something that has caused a belief. And then what's the evidence that Trump supporters believe that? No chance of losing — who believes that? And then to ding these people for "falsely" believing this thing Trump never said... well, the "falsely" ought to be appended to this NPR article: NPR political reporter falsely believes Trump somehow caused his supporters to believe he has no chance of losing.
Am I being unfair to Fowler? As Shakespeare put it: "Fair is foul, and foul is fair: Hover through the fog and filthy air."
Okay, let's hover. Fowler writes:
Republicans pounce... on Peanut.
In the frantic last days of an election when candidates are scrabbling for any edge, the death of P’Nut (who also went by Peanut) has been pounced on by some Republicans as something of a fur-covered November surprise....
Trump's final campaign rally — in Grand Rapids, beginning after midnight and continuing until after 2 a.m.
"The great and powerful @elonmusk . If it wasn't for him we'd be fucked. He makes what I think is the most compelling case for Trump you'll hear..."
"You know I did a thing a couple of weeks ago with a very smart guy and a very special talent. He's got the number one podcast they say by like four times. Joe Rogan.... And I said Joe I got a rally of this size waiting for me in a very far away place. I'm going to be very late, like 2 and 1 half hours late, but we kept talking. It went 3 hours and 15 minutes or something, then when I got up there, it was cold little bitter, and everybody waited nobody left, and I explained to him, look, Joe is the number one guy he kept me late but I'm doing it because we have to win, and not one person was unhappy. We had a great time, and I said we're going to devote a lot more time. It was pretty late at night. It was worse than this, okay, I can tell you. But Joe Rogan just announced and he doesn't do this at all I don't think he's ever done it but he just announced that he's giving me his complete and total 1:37:07 endorsement.... Wow. Wow...."
"It was worse than this" = later at night.
November 4, 2024
Trump is down to his last 4 rallies.
The delightful subjectivity of money in politics.
Funny that she has never said a word about Soros, who has cumulatively put a hundred times more money into elections than I have 🤔
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 4, 2024
If I can figure out 🚀science with SpaceX and 🧠 surgery with Neuralink, then maybe I can figure out politics too 🤷♂️ https://t.co/cW9sKHGgs3
"If what you're selling is let's get back to normal, be normal. We know Trump isn't normal, but if you lose this election..."
"I'm a sign guy. I notice signs...."
“Don Lemon left this interview practically in tears 😭 — he tried talking to a Pennsylvania resident and got a major reality check. Turns out, in Pennsylvania, it’s Trump signs 10 to 1 over Kamala 😂” pic.twitter.com/0VwTTMw2Bn
— 1776 (@TheWakeninq) November 3, 2024
My curiosity about the term "permission structure" pays off.
[This ad] employs this device of the disillusioned Trump voter as a stand-in for the viewer. It's a permission structure for the small sliver of undecided voters who might have voted for Trump before to say: It's okay, there are other people just like you, other people who don't think that Donald Trump is good anymore....
Here is a Harris supporting celebrity saying he is disillusioned with what she Harris has said. It's the same permission structure for Harris. You have a white lady saying: You know what? Maybe I can actually vote for Kamala Harris.
"Permission structure" was used as if it's a standard term, so I wanted to get up to speed.
I can see that Obama used it back in 2013, but I'm interested in its repeated use in the last few days. I'm seeing it first in Ms. Magazine, on November 1: "New Ad Creates ‘Permission Structure’ for Men to Support Harris":
"NBC is giving former President Donald Trump’s campaign free commercial time in response to Vice President Kamala Harris' appearance on Saturday Night Live..."
"Quincy Delight Jones Jr. was born on the South Side of Chicago on March 14, 1933, to Quincy Sr. — a carpenter who worked for local gangsters..."
From "Quincy Jones, Giant of American Music, Dies at 91/As a producer, he made the best-selling album of all time, Michael Jackson’s 'Thriller.' He was also a prolific arranger and composer of film music" (NYT).
November 3, 2024
"I also think it’s important to acknowledge that, as much as I detest Trump the man, there are sides of the MAGA movement that deserve respect."
Said Bret Stephens, in "A Second Trump Term? Three Conservative Columnists Unpack What Could Happen" (NYT). The other 2 columnists are Ross Douthat and David French.
"Japan stole our Halloween magic that tracks cause it died here about 10 years ago."
From a Reddit post asking what millennials did (supposedly) that ruined Halloween.
Yeah, I can imagine it. I didn't tell anyone. And I don't even have a bad relationship.
Trump: "Can you imagine a wife not telling a husband who she's voting for? Did you ever hear anything like that? Even if you had a horrible -- if you had a bad relationship, you're gonna tell your husband." pic.twitter.com/gd5of817VY
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) November 2, 2024