Sunrise — 6:31, 6:33, 6:55.

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."

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

ADDED: "How Kamala Harris plowed through $1 billion" (Washington Examiner).

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."

"Two hours later, they had written their magnum opus, which became the opening track of their debut album.... [W]ith its imagery of a 'white bird in a golden cage' who 'must fly, or she will die,' the song encapsulated a longing by the flower-power generation to escape a conformist life and soar toward a loftier plane of existence. The song lived on, but the romance between the LaFlammes did not.... 'What we didn’t realize,' Ms. LaFlamme once said... 'is that we were connected so musically that we were not connected in the sense that you would say, married people had this love....'"

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).

What was the "loftier plane of existence" described in that song? Meade and I had entirely different impressions (dating back half a century). Tell me yours and I'll fill you in on ours later.

"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..."

"... compared with people who rarely stood.... In theory, being upright should stave off this harm, since it’s the postural opposite of sitting.... But surprisingly little credible science supports all this verticality, and some studies have raised doubts.... [A]s you stand still, blood flows through your legs sluggishly at best and often pools there, potentially contributing to circulatory disease. You also barely raise your heart rate, which is necessary to improve cardiovascular health...."

From "Your standing desk isn’t making you any healthier/A large new study found that standing for more than two hours a day doesn’t protect against the cardiovascular risks of too much sitting" (WaPo).

I have a motorized stand/sit desk. I recommend switching from sitting to standing and from standing to sitting whenever you notice that you feel a bit uncomfortable. Be in touch with your own feelings. 

And by the way, is standing "the postural opposite of sitting"? I was going to say no, but then I remembered...

"This week, the notion of Trump as the leader of a distinctively white movement became harder to defend...."

"Although exit-poll data can be unreliable... [his coalition is] unusually nonwhite.... For instance, Trump became the first Republican in more than a century to win Starr County, along the Mexican border in Texas, which is almost entirely Hispanic; he did similarly well throughout the state’s majority-Hispanic border counties.... Late in the campaign, during a Trump rally at Madison Square Garden, one of his opening acts, the antagonistic comedian Tony Hinchcliffe... made a joke about Puerto Rico being a 'floating island of garbage,' which for a time became the campaign’s top story.... But... Osceola, a majority-Hispanic county in Florida with a large Puerto Rican population, swung from a fourteen-point Biden victory in 2020 to a narrow Trump victory this year.... [P]erhaps Trump’s coalition will help Americans rethink the assumption that 'white' and 'Hispanic' are mutually exclusive categories, and will boost a new version of the old white identity. But, as far as we can tell, Trump’s America is a place that is more polarized by education than it used to be and less polarized by whiteness and non-whiteness—by race, broadly understood...."

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.

I don't know how much postmortem I'm willing to read. If your perception and analysis are so good, why didn't you see this before the election? I guess that's another way of saying hindsight is 20/20. But I chose this little essay to quote because it's not purporting to understand what happened and it is pretty modestly conceding confusion. That's appropriate. I would like to see much stronger criticism of Democrats. They were boosted by mainstream media, which either pretended not to notice how awful they were or just didn't see.

By the way, is "antagonistic comedian" a standard term? I've heard "insult comedian."

Anyway, to escape from elite media for a moment — I mean for 3 hours — I listened to Joe Rogan and Dave Smith talking about Tony Hinchcliffe (go to 00:04:00):

"In a world of steel eyed death, and men who are fighting to be warm/Come in, Walz said, I'll give you shelter from the storm."

A Redditor gives the right answer to the question:

 

"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."

"After cutting nearly 13,000 votes off Gallego’s lead on Thursday and Friday morning, Lake gained about 2,100 more votes when Maricopa County released the results of nearly 100,000 ballots just before 7 p.m. The state’s largest county is expected to release another update Saturday morning.... Gallego... was ahead 5.4 points in the initial results posted after the polls closed on Election Day...."

KTAR News reports on the only Senate race that is still not yet determined.

Sunrise — 6:43, 6:45.

"President-elect Donald J. Trump spoke on Wednesday with Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, and during the call handed the phone to Elon Musk..."

Writes Maggie Haberman, in the NYT.

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."

Said Mallory Roelke, 35, from Dallas, about presidential election politics, quoted in "Exhausted by the Election, Some Americans Are Catching Flights Abroad/For some voters, the campaign season has felt draining. Some are recharging by heading to Mexico City, Barbados or the English Cotswolds, to name a few," in the NYT, which seems to be ever on the alert for new ways to promote travel.

The banality of the photographs at that link is enough to make a sensitive person swear off foreign travel forever. Sample caption: "Mallory Roelke traveled to the Greek island of Santorini in late October, just as the Election Day in the United States was approaching." Don't go to the link and look. You know exactly where Roelke is standing. Other Roelke photos include her standing in front of the Parthenon and a closeup of a glass of white wine held aloft in front of a vineyard in Sicily.

Credit..."

"What happens on this show is so much more intelligent and thoughtful and deep than anything that's going on at CNN."

"You just can't... tell me that you sitting down with Elon Musk for 3 hours and then compare that to like Wolf Blitzer with all his graphics behind him talking for 30 seconds before he goes to a pharmaceutical commercial and then coming back and having the dumbest left winger yell at the dumbest right winger. Really? And you guys are going to act like you're the grownups in the room? It's just, it's too ridiculous.... So the entire young generation has, they've all turned that off.... None of them are getting their news from from CNN anymore. And look man, that's I think the most beautiful part of this election is that mainstream media's dead.... I don't think [CNN has] a show that regularly cracks a million views....."

Said Dave Smith to Joe Rogan (actually the words "mainstream media's dead" are inserted by Joe):

Compare this bit from the NYT "Daily" podcast this morning. The episode is "Inside Trump World as the Next Chapter Begins." Jonathan Swan says:

"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..."

"... according to a criminal complaint filed in the Southern District of New York."

WaPo reports.

There's nothing to the report other than that 2 of the 3 men are in custody, but there is a comments section, with idiocy I won't quote but you can easily guess.

"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."

WE ARE SO BACK

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

— Catholic Arena (@CatholicArena) November 8, 2024

"His decision to choose someone in his inner circle is a sharp contrast to his choice after first winning the presidency in 2016."

"Then, he selected someone with whom he had little history for the chief of staff role: Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee at the time. Most members of Mr. Trump’s extended orbit wanted to see Ms. Wiles as chief. She has close relationships with Vice President-elect JD Vance and with Mr. Trump’s family, including his two older sons, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric...."

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).

"Ms. Wiles, the daughter of the football legend Pat Summerall... kept [Trump's] world functioning as he was charged criminally four times in four courthouses, and steered him through primary victories, the aftermath of a criminal conviction, two assassination attempts and a change in his opponent just after the Republican National Convention. Ms. Wiles championed the former president’s effort to expand his coalition in the general election beyond the party’s older white base to appeal to Black and Latino voters who typically had not supported Republicans.... ...Mr. Trump’s previous picks for chiefs of staff... were chosen either because they were recommended by top Republicans in Washington, in Mr. Priebus’s case, or because they seemed likely to bring order to chaos, in Mr. Kelly’s case.... [On Election Night, Trump] tried, twice, to get Ms. Wiles to come to the microphone to speak. She declined. Mr. Trump praised her as an 'ice queen'...."

"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