Signifyin(g)Monkey

Registered at IGN in 2002, was a serial lurker forever until around the time of the D1P Great Migration. I just had my 40th… Holy fuck, I’m a grumpy old man. If you’re one of those early-to-mid-2000s-born whippersnappers, you better get off my lawn.

Also, ‘Breaking: Substack Nate Silver Writes Something I Agree With’ I know this was touched on in an earlier thread, but I really don’t know why this isn’t issue #1 for Senate Democrats. The election is far from a shoe-in, and losing one more seat means progressive legislation will be fought tooth-and-nail by the rationalizations of an Uber-conservative Supreme Court for decades. The only other road out of Purgatory short of the nuclear (and probably ultimately counterproductive) option of packing the court is to start talking about term limits for Supreme Court judges. Which would probably be unconstitutional—but would probably have to be struck down by the court before its unconstitutional effects could be curtailed. At which point the problematic judges would be gone, if the gambit works fast enough. As an institutionalist I wouldn’t like that method, but unfortunately Pandora’s box is open and we all know that’s how the game is played now anyway. And it might be (slightly) less end-of-days than a court-packing scheme.

I don’t think you can really make any assumptions about anything in this election, more so than usual. We haven’t had a former president square off against an incumbent since the 19th century; we have more people telling pollsters that they dislike both candidates than we have ever had since we’ve been keeping track; and our media environment is so fragmented that no one can agree on wtf is going on. We had an insurrection at the capitol every moment of which was broadcast on the news, yet half the country believes it didn’t happen. We have a man running for president who was found guilty of sexual assault, with a charge for rape that a judge pronounced to be ‘substantially true’, yet half the country doesn’t even acknowledge it, and claims they’d consider voting for him. Unemployment is historically low and economic and wage growth is stronger than its been in decades yet when polled 4 months ago six in ten Americans say they think the economy is in recession. We are seeing a complete breakdown of the information ecosystem that allows voters to understand what’s going on in the world beyond their immediate environment, and a historic collapse of the civic norms that are the guardrails of democracy. We are not a republic of rational politics anymore, so rational assumptions are no longer a surefire guide to what our future looks like, especially in the matter of elections.

I thought the prosecutors here and in the other cases had a policy of not proceeding with prosecutions against candidates for office after a certain ‘point of no return’ late in the election season, and the gambit was to stall until that date? Maybe it’s just in the Georgia case, I can’t remember.

Trump’s own lawyers are (successfully) violating his right to a speedy trial lol Trump’s hush money trial was set to begin Monday. Here’s what’s happening instead | CNN Politics AMP.CNN.COM Judge Juan Merchan is holding a pre-trial hearing Monday to discuss the discovery issues that led to the delay of the trial on charges brought by the Manhattan district attorney related...

The House GOP just gave Biden’s campaign a huge gift WWW.VOX.COM Roughly 80 percent of House Republicans just lined up behind a plan to cut Social Security and ban all abortions. Memo to Biden and the Dems: blare it from the rooftops Hopefully this will help bring the “but mah groceries” voting bloc to their senses. Although IMO he still needs to remind everyone that Bibi is Hamas’ best friend, and make peace talks a condition of any further aid, if he truly wants to save us from The Orange One come November.

I remember doing some calculations for funsies circa 2010 or so that led me to conclude that plowing your savings into high-value whiskey at that time would net you a better 30-year return than 30-year treasuries or gold. (the luxury stuff actually appreciates pretty reliably) Granted, you'd need to store it safely and not drink too much of it and all that fine print. Yes, I drank a lot of bourbon in my 20s.

Beshear maybe, Newsom has a bunch of skeletons in his closet from the lockdown era and the mantle of California doesn’t appeal to swing voters in Middle America the way it did in the age of Reagan. The problem is timing—Biden would have had to step down, and then giving Harris the shaft would probably tank the black vote. Win or lose, we need some new blood after the 2024 elections, though. Provided Trump doesn’t manage to rig all the elections after that, should he get back into office.

Just occurred to me that I wanted to post this article, not only to illustrate that the de facto suspension of democracy is certainly a distinct possibility even in an ‘advanced’ Western country, but in case anyone ever encounters another poster—here or elsewhere—minimizing the threat of Trump, and needs a good article that outlines an example of someone like him succeeding in their anti-democratic campaigns, in a place not named ‘Russia’. Also an interesting read even if you already know a little bit about Orban. How Viktor Orbán Wins | Journal of Democracy WWW.JOURNALOFDEMOCRACY.ORG The case of Hungary shows how autocrats can rig elections legally, using legislative majorities to change the law and neutralize the opposition at every turn, no matter what...

If you posit that impeachment has become just another campaign strategy, then it makes perfect sense. Republican voters by and large will not care whether the impeachment succeeds or fails, they will assume Biden's guilt regardless and feel energized; and swing voters are so buffeted by competing sources of information portraying entirely different realities that they won't know what to think, and just go with the prevailing anti-establishment political sentiment and say "Yeah I don't know the details but they're all corrupt so he probably did something naughty." I wouldn't be surprised to see the impeachment process become a recurring staple of campaign season.

So, in other election news: my advice to anyone who thinks polling isn't a totally broken science and has some knowledge of historical precedents in polling trends is...avert your eyes, unless the prospect of living under Orbanian soft fascism and the hellscape of Project 2025 gives you the warm fuzzies. Because right now many of the most recent post-SOTU polls that are dropping show Biden's approval rating at an all-time low--even as views of the economy are improving--and Trump ahead in Georgia, Arizona, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania. Yes, there's close to seven months to go; yes, they are a snapshot of public opinion right now, and not communiques from Delphi predicting the future; yes, people might not be paying attention yet. But no incumbent in the poll era has ever come back from deficits like this, and neither Biden nor Trump are unknown quantities, so a major makeover is a taller order than it would be were they fresh faces. So, if you're trying to brew up some copium with polling data, seek other means, because the ingredients at your disposal are pretty terrible. You've got things like "maybe the coming election will break with historical precedent", "maybe polling is a defunct way to measure public opinion", "hey the midterms worked out better than we thought". But "hey Biden's gonna poll well because he's running against a convicted rapist who's also guilty of fraud who also tried to overturn the results of a presidential election and also has a publicly available plan to create a right-wing authoritarian state" is not a viable ingredient at the moment--it's just a reason to feel like an alien in your own country. Because when polled about half of the country says "Hey that rapist doesn't sound so bad, maybe he'll make my groceries less expensive."

Yeah that's more or less my take, too. I don't think it will stop people from registering concern with his age in polls, but it'll reassure the average voter that he's not senile. It also did a good job of making overtures to all the party factions and voter blocs he's going to need to turn out. There was a little bit for both the centrist and the progressive wings of the party, he leaned into women's issues, and he at least acknowledged the concerns about the conflict in Gaza and backed a two-state solution to bring democrats split on that issue back into the fold. I think the best hope we have is that we'll see more of this from him, and that Trump will engage in his usual lunacy, so that over the course of the final leg of the campaign swing voters will ultimately be convinced that it's a better idea to vote for the boring-but-not-crazy grandpa over the completely insane grandpa.

I do too, but only incidentally, as with every other head; the essential blame I place on the heart that’s pumping blood to all of them.

Not so much cool with it as resigned to the fact that there’s nothing we can really do about it at this point, except probably make it worse. Regardless, I would argue that you’re perhaps overlooking a key dynamic here, which is that Hamas is an accomplice to the IDF in this genocide. They and Bibi (and various other enabling parties, like the U.S.) are interconnected parts of the same genocidal system. The genocide ends when the system gets reformed, and fundamentally both Hamas and the Israeli political and military establishment must play an equal part in that. I just don’t think blaming one head on the hydra more than another for the hydra’s depredations is the right way to think about the beast’s behavior. But I realize it’s not the most popular take.

Don't suppose you've all heard about Ezra Klein's brilliant idea? Biden steps down before the Democratic convention, and the party picks a 'better' nominee. Points for originality, but I'm not sure it would work out like he wants it to.