It's sick that Bill's metric of whether an ideology is "good" or "bad" depends on its willingness to throw human lives into an endless meat grinder. https://t.co/2r9v9b3KLq
Pelosi managed to destroy a sitting president on completely fabricated falsehoods with a wink and a smile. You can’t even bring to justice the most blatantly corrupt administration in American history.
Really, no comments or stories on this attack on the press?
Oh that’s right, he’s not one of you.
“Lawsuit: White House Press Office Unconstitutionally Targeted Reporter With New Credentialing Requirement
The revised requirement came after heated exchanges between the reporter and White House Press Secretary over the White House’s alleged refusal to answer the reporter’s questions.”
“A White House correspondent is suing to block the White House’s new press credentialing requirement after he was denied a “hard pass.” The hard pass is “a special form of press credentials that allows unlimited access to the White House press facilities.”
The White House Correspondents’ Association notes that “[a] hard pass is critical for anyone who reports regularly on the White House.”
The Center for American Liberty (CAL) filed the complaint on behalf of Today News Africa‘s White House correspondent Simon Ateba, who has failed to qualify under the new hard pass requirement.
The revised requirement restricts the hard pass to White House correspondents who have “[a]ccreditation by a press gallery in either the Supreme Court, U.S. Senate or U.S. House of Representatives.”
Ateba has not met the revised requirement because the Supreme Court typically limits credentials to full-time Supreme Court reporters, which Ateba is not, and the Congressional Press Gallery has not replied to his request for accreditation, according to the complaint.
The complaint alleges the White House Press Office routinely ignores Ateba’s written questions, Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre refuses to call on Ateba during press briefings, and the Press Office denies Ateba access to President Biden’s press conferences.
Dissatisfied with his lack of access, Ateba took to “speaking up during press briefings” by “asserted himself in the briefing room, speaking over other reporters and the White House Press Secretary in an attempt to make his concerns known,” as he did at a press briefing on March 20, 2023.
Shortly before the revised requirement took effect, Ateba received a letter warning him his conduct violated the Press Office’s decorum policy, which is not the subject of the lawsuit.
“The White House can, and has, adopted a decorum policy for the briefing room,” CAL associate counsel Eric Sell told Legal Insurrection. “We are not challenging this decorum policy, nor are we arguing the White House can’t enforce it.”
“Instead, we are challenging the new criteria all journalists must satisfy to qualify for a hard pass,” Sell continued. “We are also challenging the changes to the hard pass criteria for targeting Simon specifically.”
The complaint accuses the White House of revising the credentialing requirement “in a brazen attempt to exclude Mr. Ateba from the White House briefing room.” The changes came “because the White House no longer wanted deal with him or his questions,” according to the complaint.
“Mr. Ateba’s questions often relate to issues other White House correspondents do not cover. . . . Mr. Ateba covers topics affecting millions of people around the world—and many of his colleagues have little interest in asking the questions to which Mr. Ateba wants answers,” which focus on United States–Africa relations.
“The mainstream media coverage of these incidents,” according to the complaint, “has largely painted Mr. Ateba as disruptive, disrespectful, and even seeking attention for himself. But Mr. Ateba is simply seeking answers to his questions, which the White House refuses to give.”
“It is common for White House correspondents to raise their voices and even shout over each other during press briefings,” the complaint argues.
The complaint alleges First and Fifth Amendment violations because the revised hard pass requirement impermissibly and vaguely delegates accreditation authority to the Congressional Press Gallery in a manner “giv[ing] the government unbridled discretion to permit the exercise of First Amendment rights.””
“With the arrival of the first GOP presidential primary debate, we have reached the semi-official start of the primary process. (In reality, of course, this primary started moments after Joe Biden was sworn into office.) The absence of the runaway leader in the polls has rapidly become the focus of the event, probably more so than anything the rest of the candidates may or may not say on stage. But that awkward situation also seems to highlight how frantically some of the conservatives and Republicans who don’t want Donald Trump to be the nominee (and I’m not just talking about the traditional never-Trumpers here) are grappling with reality at this point, despite there still being nearly five months until the voting begins. And the actual never-Trumps are really in a tizzy, metaphorically wringing their hands and rending their sackcloth over how the wheels appear to be coming off the wagon. ”
—
“I’ll just start by reminding everyone that since I’m not a member of the Republican Party and can’t vote in the primary, I don’t technically have a horse in this race, despite still being extremely interested. I’m also aware that there are some former Trump supporters, including even some of my colleagues here on this site who no longer wish for Trump to be the nominee for various reasons. It’s everyone’s right to choose for themselves and that’s fine.
As for me, I have only one priority this time around. That would be the critical necessity to defeat Joe Biden or whichever of his lackeys winds up running next November. Biden has been nothing short of an abject disaster for the country on almost every score. And it has become increasingly obvious that he is likely the most corrupt figure to ever hold that office, leaving our great nation looking increasingly like a banana republic and a target of global scorn.
With all of that as a backdrop, I care less about the name of the person on the ballot representing the GOP than the outcome. If a non-Trump consensus candidate somehow arises (and don’t ask me how that happens because I don’t see it), I will happily cast my vote for whoever it is, just as I gladly sallied forth and voted for Trump during the previous two elections. And if Trump is the nominee, I shall do it a third time with no regrets.
But I would urge some caution to those who are now furiously paddling in the direction of DeSantis or Ramaswamy (both of whom are fine candidates who I could also easily support) or any of the others. Sometimes paddling too hard will result in the boat taking on water. Yes, there is still an eternity in “political time” until the primary voting begins, but the numbers rarely tell the magnitude of lies you would require to predict a Trump collapse at this point. He’s not just leading the field. He’s carrying an actual majority. If everyone else but DeSantis dropped out after the debate and all of their supporters went to the Florida Governor, Trump would still be leading.
I understand the concerns that some of my well-meaning friends here and elsewhere have expressed. They want to win next November also, and there is a significant amount of Trump hatred baked into a percentage of the electorate that is alarmingly above 40 percent. It’s going to be a tight election, no matter who is on the ballot or how awful conditions are around the country. But even if Donald Trump disappeared in a cloud of burning indictments tomorrow, the media and the establishment would simply turn their full fire and fury on the next GOP target. That would make him or her “the next Trump.” And some of them are already clearing the lanes to do just that if the opportunity arises.
And we should also keep in mind that Donald Trump has one important advantage (along with several supporting ones) that the rest of these people lack, along with Joe Biden. All the other candidates from Ron DeSantis to Nikki Haley to Tim Scott and the rest have some supporters. They have some donors. Perhaps a SuperPAC or two. And that’s great. But Donald Trump has a freaking army. And that army isn’t wavering one centimeter on the front lines. They are out there painting his image on their vehicles. They’re modifying their trucks to mount flags on them. They’re blasting Tom MacDonald songs out their windows at full volume. They show up in droves just to watch him get arrested. And on election day (and hopefully during early voting which we’re still terrible at) they will show up. Each and every one of them. They will show up if they have to be wheeled to the voting booth on a gurney.
Nobody is doing that for Joe Biden. Now look around at the rest of the field of aspirants for the GOP. Can you honestly see any of them driving that sort of a force? As I said, there are quite a few fine candidates who would likely do a good job. (Okay… maybe not so much Chris Christie.) But none of them have whatever magic Donald Trump has somehow unleashed. And if his army shows up in full and enough of the conservatives who might prefer a different choice do as well, along with a sufficient number of moderates who are willing to forgive and forget the mean tweets because of the awful shape the country is in today, we could still pull this off. And we desperately need to do that. I’ll stop preaching now. These are just a few observations I wanted to toss into the discussion while we wait for the debates.”
Yeah, well, the AP says what those of us who have been following the Lahaina wildfire already knew: the people who obeyed the authorities died, and those who said “Screw that!” survived.”
“This story confirms what I have been writing for a few days. Not because I am a particularly astute journalist–everything I have reported has been publicly available, either through various news stories, blog posts, or videos on Twitter.
I just have no faith left in the authorities, so when they spewed out their BS about how hard they worked to save lives and how they did everything they could, but Gaia was too angry at some SUV to placate, I knew they were lying.
As flames tore through a West Maui neighborhood, car after car of fleeing residents headed for the only paved road out of town in a desperate race for safety.
And car after car was turned back toward the rapidly spreading wildfire by a barricade blocking access to Highway 30.
One family swerved around the barricade and was safe in a nearby town 48 minutes later, another drove their 4-wheel-drive car down a dirt road to escape. One man took an dirt road uphill, climbing above the fire and watching as Lahaina burned. He later picked his way through the flames, smoke and rubble to pull survivors to safety.
But dozens of others found themselves caught in a hellscape, their cars jammed together on a narrow road, surrounded by flames on three sides and the rocky ocean waves on the fourth. Some died in their cars, while others tried to run for safety.
The police blockaded the only way out. The only people to survive there were the people who were smart enough to realize that the authorities had no idea what they were doing.
I don’t think for a second that those police officers manning the barricade wanted people to die. They surely didn’t. They thought they were helping because they thought their bosses knew what they were doing. They were told to block the road, so they blocked the road. End of story.
The people up the chain didn’t know what they were doing. They were fakin’ it until they were makin’ it, only what they were making was a tragedy of truly epic proportions. Nobody knows how many people died, but the number is in the hundreds. There is a reason why they won’t admit to having an idea of the number: it is too horrific to admit.”
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The Nazi soldiers were just following orders too. That doesn’t excuse the police.
If it’s too graphic for a school board meeting, it has no business in a school library.
Why is this so hard for the groomers to understand?
BREAKING: Board President of the Fort Worth Independent School District has removed a speaker using police officers since the speaker was reading a book that parents have protested to be removed due to its sexual content. pic.twitter.com/JP2tkeIDin
A taxpayer was forcibly removed by security from a @FortWorthISD meeting tonight after he read from the pornographic book “Flamer” which was available in the school library.
The hypocrisy would be stunning except we’ve seen this over and over. 🙄 The mental gymnastics needed to put a book so dirty you can’t read it aloud to adults in a children’s library are ridiculous. 🤦♀️🤪
Has CNN reached a turning point, and is gonna try actual journalism again?
We can only hope.
NEW: CNN makes a shocking pivot, says they're 'perplexed' by the corruption coming out of the Department of 'Justice' as they continue to cover up for the Biden Crime Family.
“In a Tuesday interview with conservative podcaster Charlie Kirk, Big Data pollster Rich Baris claimed that support for former President Donald Trump is stronger today than in either 2016 or 2020. He also believes the 2024 election will be a “total disaster for the Democrats.” From his lips to God’s ears.
Here’s some of what Baris had to say:
It’s just not 2020. It’s not 2016. They are just totally different races and he’s doing so much better with e-groups – which we can get into – than he was in either ’16 or ’20. I’m not a lawyer, but as a pollster, it’s just very clear why they’re trying to do what they are doing to him.
They can’t beat him. When we look back at 2020 and I know a lot of people, especially Trump supporters, think that he won in 2020 and that’s fine. And you know how I feel about that personally as well. But the truth is, he still could have done better with certain groups that would have made it even more difficult for them to pull something like that off.
Look at new voters for instance. Biden won that by 30 points in 2020 and in September of 2021, that turned into a Trump +2. Now in this poll, it is going to be roughly Trump +8. Massive shifts, new generation Xers and millennials that are men working that are coming into the fold. Non-whites that are coming into the fold. And underclass voters. It’s a total disaster for the Democrats. A total disaster. And we do poll other candidates and I have to make this clear, this is only Donald Trump.
So if you are a crook DA or a crook prosecutor for the Justice Department, you’re looking at this and you’re trying to survive. You don’t want him to come back in, now a target of their prosecutorial misconduct and whatever else it is, and have him clean house. So, if you’re the Biden administration and you’re hiding bribes, you’re going to try to make sure that he cannot get on that ballot. You’re going to try to make sure that he doesn’t have the money to campaign, he’s going to be prosecuted, he’s hurt by political prosecutions and right now, that’s just not happening. … Nothing damages him. Nothing.
Kirk reminded Baris that Trump is currently facing four indictments and asked if it was correct to say that he is more popular now than before the indictments.
Baris replied:
Yeah, that’s correct to say. Favorability is one thing. … There are people that always never liked Donald Trump but would vote for him and flirt with voting for him. And to us, that group is what matters. They are going to dislike both him and Biden, but they trust him to do a good job. Or they see what is going on and think it’s just wrong, Charlie. Just wrong. We don’t do this to people in this country. We don’t beat people in the jury box, we beat them in the ballot box. So he has strength with this group right now even more so than he had with Hillary Clinton.
Despite the frequently repeated talking point that Republicans will support Trump no matter what, but his real challenge lies with opposition from independents, Baris claimed that Trump is leading with independents as well.
Baris went on to say that Americans love an underdog. When the trials begin, he said, “It’s just going to look like the guy is being persecuted and Americans don’t like that.”
Interestingly, he pointed out that Martin Luther King Jr. had been “extremely unpopular until they threw him in prison. … He was grossly unpopular. … The beatings really did it. The most popular photo of him back then was the mugshot.”
“Americans don’t like watching someone beat down by the man,” he said.
Rich Baris is obviously a right-leaning pollster, but there are indications he may be right.
A CNN panel worried out loud last week about Trump’s strength in head-to-head polls against Biden. The two are currently neck and neck in the RealClearPolitics average of polls.”
“The Democrats have an ace in the hole in their relentless war on the Constitution – conservative America’s reverence for the concept of the rule of the law.
Only their steadfast commitment to this traditional ideal explains why conservatives are allowing Democrats to flagrantly corrupt our judicial system to destroy their opponents and protect themselves. For all their huffing and puffing, conservatives have effectively taken a let the system play itself out attitude while Democrats nakedly politicize that system through their partisan indictments of former President Trump and their Potemkin Village probes of the Bidens. These are not statements of opinion. These are facts.
Part of me is glad that so many legal analysts have spilled so much ink exposing these charades. But we degrade our country and ourselves when we treat this unspeakable behavior with anything other than horrified contempt. Every good-faith critique normalizes and legitimizes this profoundly un-American conspiracy.
Viewing the obvious forest rather than the tangled trees, the cases against Trump are a continuation of the deceitful effort by Democrats and their deep state allies, especially in the DOJ, to annihilate their chief political opponent. That effort began even before his election when Hillary Clinton’s campaign manufactured false claims that Trump had conspired with Vladimir Putin to steal the 2016 election. When that sham was exposed, they almost immediately made Trump only the third president in the country to be impeached for asking Ukraine’s leader to look into the Biden family’s influence-peddling schemes. They set aside almost every rule and order of business by rushing to impeach him once again after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. While that was going on, Democrats insistently rained down other bogus concerns – that he was violating the Emoluments Clause because wealthy foreigners continued to stay at his hotels, that his alleged mental instability made him unfit – to remove him from office.
The hypocrisy is beyond belief: The party that assails Republicans for questioning the integrity of the highly irregular 2020 election spent years and vast government resources to undo the results of 2016.
The charges Trump now faces are part of the ongoing campaign by Democrats to subvert the rule of law to delegitimize what they see as the greatest threat to their power.
In the meantime, Democrats are blatantly using the criminal justice system to protect President Biden. It is now beyond dispute that Biden lied to the American people when he said he never discussed foreign business with his son Hunter and when he claimed during his final 2020 debate with Trump that Hunter’s laptop, which contained evidence of those corrupt dealings, was a “Russian plant.” Has a candidate ever peddled more consequential falsehoods?
In fact, the president was not only aware of his son’s influence-peddling schemes, whose sole selling point was the connection to his vast power. He was an active participant through phone calls and meetings with clients. Irony does not capture the deviousness of the Democrats’ decision to impeach Trump for asking Ukraine to look into this corruption.
The cover-up of the Bidens’ conduct is equally disturbing. The U.S. attorney in Delaware assigned to the case, David C. Weiss, is a former colleague of Biden’s late son Beau. Although the tax avoidance charges involved are straightforward, Weiss spent more than five years allegedly looking into them – allowing the statute of limitations to run out on millions of unreported earnings Hunter generated in 2014 and 2015. Note that even as the president calls on Americans to pay their fair share, neither he nor his allies have demanded that Hunter pay his.
Indeed, we only know about Weiss’ corruption because of two courageous IRS whistleblowers. In response, Weiss quickly struck a deal with Hunter to settle the matter, crafting a sweetheart deal that would have let him off the hook with a slap on the wrist. All might have been forgiven but for the presiding judge, who rejected the deal last month as “not standard” and potentially unconstitutional.
In response to this scandal, Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Weiss as special counsel to look into the mess. This move is beyond brazen – Weiss is now apparently in charge of probing his own misconduct. The goal is obvious: Protect the president, and let the statute of limitations run out on other alleged crimes while shutting down any questions about the “ongoing investigation.”
The arrogance is jaw-dropping; the lawlessness is in plain sight. Democrats are not even trying to hide their malfeasance – which is part of their method. If they can make us accept their authority to twist the system so that it is no longer a means of justice but a tool of their political power, then their possibilities are unlimited.
Imagine if the roles were reversed: What if Republican prosecutors had indicted a former Democratic president, who was also the party’s leading candidate in the next election, in four separate cases on 91 questionable charges while a GOP-controlled Department of Justice simultaneously protected its sitting-president boss, who was seeking reelection, by slow-walking a probe of his family’s alleged crimes?”
“One of the reasons that Donald Trump is so despised by the beautiful people in this country — the people that New York Times columnist David Brooks memorably evoked when he began a tweet “We in the educated class…” — is that he consorts with so many unbeautiful people: not just working stiffs but B-list entertainers, NASCAR enthusiasts and prize fighters.
It is from the world of the last-named agonistic endeavor that I learned a word that perfectly describes tonight’s festivities. The word is “undercard.” It means that list of “minor or supporting contests printed on the same bill as the main event (primarily fighting or racing.” Fox News, together with the Republic National Committee, hosted what it billed as the first GOP debate of the 2024 season in Milwaukee.
At the same time — or, to be more strictly accurate, about five minutes earlier — an interview that Tucker Carlson recently taped with Donald Trump in Bedminster, New Jersey, began streaming from Tucker’s channel on X, the app formerly known as Twitter.
Which event will garner the most viewers, the highest ratings? Which is the undercard, which is the main event?
Among the contestants on stage in Milwaukee were such rock stars as Asa Hutchinson! Doug Burgum! Mike Pence! Not that this is a welterweight contest. Not at all. Also tipping the scales tonight was snarling Chris Christie! It was not clear at whom he would yell since his bête orange was be far away talking to the most popular commentator in the US, but he is sure to give a heavyweight performance.
Let’s see: who else is on the stage?… oh, right job-applicant Nikki Haley! As one casts one’s eyes over this undercard no one I have mentioned is ready for prime time. I predict two or three, maybe more, will be gone by the new year.
All eyes were be on the new kid on the block, Vivek Ramaswamy and Ron DeSantis, Governor of Florida. Judging from his recent performances, I suspected Vivek would be the most compelling — and indeed he was. One of his major difficulties going forward, however, was encapsulated by a chap I sat with at a dinner party recently. He repeated the going mantra that “Trump can’t win” and averred that he liked… “What’s his name?” “Vivek,” I said. “Right, Vivek Rama-, Rama-, Rama-,” “Ramaswamy,” I interposed helpfully.
Thanks to the magic of the internet, I was able to bounce back and forth between the performances. By the end of his conversation with Tucker, Donald Trump had amassed some 100 million views. I don’t have reliable numbers on the Fox audience yet, but I’d wager it will turn out to be far smaller.”
—
“Despite everyone’s best efforts, the biggest personality on stage was that of the man who wasn’t there: Donald Trump.
Time and again his name up. Would you pardon him if he is convicted of the 867,594 crimes he is accused of? What about his position on Ukraine? On energy? On the regulatory state?
It became ever clearer as the night proceeded that the particular responses from the candidates were almost beside the point.
The real lesson from the televised GOP debate is that the era of staged-managed debates in which each candidate is given thirty seconds or a minute to preen and emit his favorite clichés, and try to upstage his opponents, is over.
This “debate” was punctuated by silly gimmicks, like asking candidate to respond to canned questions from a TV-land that was almost indistinguishable from Barbieland. It was all theater, but mostly theater of the absurd.
Meanwhile, for a little more than three quarters of an hour, Donald Trump discussed issues from energy to Ukraine to the administrative state with Tucker Carlson.
Let’s face it: Trump has an idiosyncratic style of speaking, but in terms of substance, his performance was a sirloin steak with all the trimmings, where the official debate was soggy cotton candy.
In Milwaukee, the undercard show was mostly a disaster. The main event was in Bedminster. The only question now is how long it will take the political apparatus to digest that reality. “
“Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, the candidate in second place, and perhaps the challenger who former President Donald Trump fears most, was not the top target of the evening. Instead, in what seemed a rare moment of unintended unity, Vivek Ramaswamy was.
Former Vice President Mike Pence questioned the maturity of the 38-year-old first-time candidate. Nikki Haley, a two-term governor of South Carolina and former U.S. ambassador to the United States, said the tech entrepreneur was naïve about foreign policy. Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie even compared the fast-talking upstart to Barack Obama – and not favorably.
Otherwise, absent the front-runner, the field sparred spiritedly amongst themselves, shouting at the audience and talking over each other while exchanging insults and ignoring the moderators. After two hours, they pulled off a collective achievement: disproving Trump’s taunt that they were only on stage in Wisconsin to audition to be his running mate. They were there intending to winnow the field, and the established candidates clearly wanted to start with Ramaswamy.
“I’ve had enough already tonight of a guy who sounds like ChatGPT,” Christie said introducing what would become a theme of the night when he compared Ramaswamy first to AI software and then to Obama: “I am afraid we’re dealing with the same type of amateur,” Christie added,
When Ramaswamy and Pence clashed over the accomplishments of the previous administration, the former VP shot back, “Now is not the time for on-the-job training. We don’t need to bring in a rookie.” And when Ramaswamy pledged to stop military aide to Ukraine, Haley accused him of siding with the Russians over an ally. “You have no foreign policy experience,” she said. “And it shows.”
As the candidates clashed like this throughout the night here, jostling over everything from abortion to Ukraine, Ramaswamy, who sits in third place in the RealClearPolitics Average, leapt into almost every contentious scrum. DeSantis, the candidate the field must topple to take on Trump one-on-one, sometimes seemed an afterthought.”
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So shouting and insults are only bad when Trump does it?
I only saw a few clips from the debates last night, but it was enough to let me know it would be unfruitful to watch any more. (And the moderators again seemed to be trying to become part of the show.) So I spent my evening after work watching the 50 minute Tucker interview with Pres. Trump. It was quite good. I had already watched all of Tucker’s interviews with the GOP candidates anyway, so I doubt I missed anything of substance from last night’s circus….though I did hear that the clowns showed up in full force. I prefer to get my laughs from re-runs of Psych or Monk rather than the side-show that our election season has become.
The only thing I’m really curious about relative to the debates is the ratings. Since Carlson’s Trump interview happened at the same time as the debate, I’m wondering how or if the FOX ratings were affected. And how did the Tucker interview rate? I’m sure someone will do a comparison at some point.
I watched all the debate and thought the moderators did a good job. It is difficult to have much debate with so many candidates. I did think that Ramaswamy’s inexperience was shown. Debates are only one tool we have to see potential leaders in action.
I’m a little curious as to whether Pence (or Haley or ANY of the pro-war candidates) presented any kind of domestic agenda, or was he still channeling 1990’s ‘power through strength’ and ‘fight Russia there so we don’t fight them here’ rhetoric? If he had a substantial domestic agenda, I might wade through the debate video to hear it.
One thing you don’t get in interviews that you get in debates is the live interaction between the candidates, and that can be telling. But I think what you get in the interviews that you don’t normally get in the debates is less grand-standing for sound bites and more substance.
~ … Ron DeSantis had to counter the perception that his campaign is in free-fall, and he did a good job of explaining his greatest hits as Florida Governor on Covid and fighting progressive prosecutors. He said he would have sacked Anthony Fauci, a nice contrast with Mr. Trump’s Covid delegation to the doctor.
But the Governor also ducked more than one question, such as whether he’d support a national ban of 15 weeks on abortion. He didn’t raise his hand at first on whether he’d vote for Mr. Trump if he’s convicted of a felony, but then did raise it when he saw others do it. He had to be coaxed into saying Mike Pence did the right thing by counting the electoral votes on Jan. 6.
Most disappointing was his answer on providing more military aid to Ukraine, indulging the dodge that he’d ask Europe to do more first. All of this made him look more poll-driven and afraid of Mr. Trump than the fearless leader he portrays himself to be.
Vivek Ramaswamy is close to Mr. DeSantis in the polls, and he has the gift of energy and verbal facility. He can sling appealing phrases, and his line that Americans are hungry for purpose will resonate with many voters. But he can also sound like a young man in too much of a hurry, and his rapid-fire one-liners and insults (“I’m the only person on the stage who isn’t bought and paid for”) give him the air of a supercilious grad student.
He seems to have made a calculation that he can prosper by running as Mr. Trump’s biggest defender, almost as if he wouldn’t have to defeat Mr. Trump to get the nomination. But he would be more credible if he weren’t so slavish in his defense. He left himself open for Chris Christie’s roundhouse that landed about being the candidate from ChatGPT. …
… Mr. Ramaswamy, and to a lesser extent Mr. DeSantis, are playing to an emergent strain of isolationism in the GOP that is always latent and which Mr. Trump has exhumed. So Mr. Pence and Ms. Haley are taking a risk with their view about the necessity of U.S. global leadership, and good for them.
Democrats and the press would have Americans believe that every Republican candidate is a MAGA replica of Donald Trump. But the debate was a repudiation of that claim on the events of Jan. 6, 2021, and foreign policy in particular. …
… The debate benefited enormously from Donald Trump’s decision to stay away. The Fox News moderators asked a round of questions about Mr. Trump’s indictments, and Mr. Christie told the audience what it didn’t want to hear about Mr. Trump’s behavior not being worthy of a President. Even if GOP voters think, rightly, that Democrats are using prosecution as a political weapon, tens of millions also know in their hearts that Mr. Christie is right.
The press corps and Democrats were disappointed because they wanted the debate, like they want the entire 2024 campaign, to be all about Donald Trump all the time. The former President will dominate the news again Thursday when he presents himself for booking at a Georgia courthouse. But at least for one night GOP voters were able to see that they have better choices. ~
From watching the debate I found I liked several of the contenders more than I expected to like them. The clips are the highlights of the insults rather than giving the important relevant info. I agree with what Kathaleena said about the new guy in the mix. He made me think, arrogant and fast-talking though he has some good ideas. I think he is one who would be disrespectful of age and experience of others and not welcome all to the table. He appeared cocky, and I understand the comparison with Obama.
AJ – It still looks to me that he is bowing his head, closing his eyes for a bit (as many people do while listening to and concentrating on speeches or sermons), and the nod was intentional nodding, not a sleeping bob of the head kind of nod, which tends to be more of a jerking motion than nodding. Also, although hard to see, even while his head was down he did have his eyes open for much or most of the time his head was bowed. Even if his eyes were closed, it was for a few seconds.
At last Monday’s ladies’ meeting at church, one of the ladies was laughing about a young man in the congregation who had fallen asleep in church on Sunday. So yeah, maybe Biden nodded off for a few seconds. It happens, even among younger folks.
I’m sure some internal polling among the candidates indicated Vivek was a rising candidate and DeSantis was a fading star. Hence, the focus on Vivek instead of DeSantis. Vivek seems to be positioning himself to be an alternative to Trump without slavishly imitating him. Haley, Christie and to an extent Pence want to bring the Republican to a more winnable party.
In an interesting bit of irony, Vivek, the man who favours a civics test for young people to vote, seems to think the Constitution came before the Revolution.
Debates especially those with multiple candidates tend to be chaotic and not very conducive to presenting policy. They serve a purpose but anyone thinking this is the best way to know a candidate is mistaken.
My left side of the internet found the Trump interview boring and wonder if a rerun of 2016 and 2020 issues will still resonate especially if Trump seems more interested in his own grievances. Can you motivate people with a thrice given message?
Don’t believe I’m defending Kristol but …… The tweets (purposely?) misunderstand Kristol. He’s not saying the US did nothing – obviously the US is, but that’s because of the Democrats mostly. He’s actually criticising the isolationist wing of the Republican party; a wing who he thinks will endanger support for Ukraine.
Don’t believe I’m doing this but….. Police aren’t Nazis, fascists maybe but not Nazis. And in Maui, they were clearly stupid and not independent thinking about changing circumstances. It reminds me of bad drive-in disaster films where the police refuse to listen to the teens who are warning them and asking for help against whatever is the threat. But it does not remind me of Nazis.
The Republicans are eating their own and their base. Law and order has become incompetent, politicised, and should be defunded. Republicans of the past not in tune with Trump policies, isolationism, etc are now objects of scorn. In the two party system, you need a big tent, you don’t win by shrinking it.
Flamer is a semi-autobiographical graphic novel (graphic meaning full length comic book style). It is stocked in high schools not elementary schools – these are not children libraries nor are they captive children; there should be plenty of choice in the library. I’d recommend Steinbeck and Orwell over anything like this but to each their own. Anyone who thinks 14 to 18 year olds are innocent children should check the teen’s internet browsing history.
It is puzzling why the parent couldn’t read passages of the book aloud. Perhaps, society is more offended by the verbal rather than the written. I’ve read books to students which contain foul language or the “n-word” but I don’t read those words aloud. When giving the book to students, I discuss the words I skipped, provide context, and discuss. Saying these words aloud tends to distract the students so I wait til the end of the story.
The one tweet which had a photo link of one page reminds me of those who criticise Of Mice and Men or To Kill A Mockingbird. Providing words and scenes out of context is done to enrage.
Baris and Bid Data is the same group who polled expected votes vs intended votes in 2016. He said polling people who they thought would win was more effective since they would be more honest and also share who their neighbours appeared to vote for. Based on expected votes, he predicted a Trump win in Pennsylvania and Michigan. Based on intended votes, traditional polls predicted a Biden win. The latter were correct.
The Republican base is old and dying. Not sure why Baris thinks young people will break towards the Republicans unless he has a skewed sample.
Since the US doesn’t go by popular vote, only five states really matter – Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, Michigan and Pennsylvania. Without counting those states, its Biden 236 to Trump 235. State polls aren’t very accurate right now but they show Biden winning in Michigan and Pennsylvania and Trump in Nevada and Arizona. Georgia is a coin toss. Doing the math, Biden has 270 and Trump has 252. If Trump wins Georgia, he still loses at 268. Trump needs Michigan or Pennsylvania along with the other three to win and that’s going to be tough.
Looking at the newest polls, Biden is pulling ahead nationally as is the Democratic vote in general. The current average poll is 2% Biden. FOX news which was very accurate in 2020 has Biden at 3%. A new poll has Biden at 2% in Pennsylvania. It will be close but I see a Biden win and the Democrats taking the House. There are 25 toss up seats (out of 435?? Gerrymandering ruins democracy) . Democrats will need 15 and the Republicans 10. It will be tight.
The polls indicate the indictments are having an effect. The Republican base is rallying around the leader, but independents are going to the Democrats. The other issue raised somewhat at the debate is abortion. Will abortion increase turnout and will that help Democrats? The last two years suggest yes. A hard line on abortion by Republicans and especially a nationwide law will turn out the vote.
Tucker’s Trump interview above currently has 235.3 million views.
Click the tweet above for updated numbers, as the views are still piling up.
Fox had 12.8 million viewers. That’s higher than the network expected, but pathetic against the Tucker/Trump numbers.
Fox did this to themselves. Keep alienating Trump supporters, keep losing viewers.
The party is divided, but nobody wins anything without Trump voters. That’s a fact. The WSJ and NTers are going to have to accept that reality, or lose another election.
“Going in, former President Donald Trump’s view of the first Republican debate was that it would turn into a bunch of people fighting over second place, while Trump remained untouched and far ahead of the pack. The idea in the Trump camp was that if the former president skipped the debate, his absence would inevitably lead the other candidates to attack each other, bringing themselves down while Trump, and his big lead, remained unscathed.
That’s pretty much what happened at the Fiserv Forum Wednesday night. There were large segments of the debate in which the candidates sparred and sometimes fought and sometimes insulted each other, while Trump remained an unspoken and untouched presence. And when Fox News moderators Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum turned the subject to Trump, whom Baier called “the elephant not in the room,” the debate turned even more contentious, but much of the conversation involved how much the candidates were inclined to defend Trump even after his four indictments.
Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), the leading candidate onstage, was clearly the most uncomfortable with the subject. He had a terrible moment when Baier asked the field, “If former President Trump is convicted in a court of law, would you still support him as your party’s choice? Please raise your hand if you would.” Entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy’s hand shot up. DeSantis hesitated, then glanced to his left to see Ramaswamy and then former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley and then Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) and then Gov. Doug Burgum (R-ND) all raise their hands. Only then did DeSantis tentatively raise his hand. To DeSantis’s right, former Vice President Mike Pence waited even longer to raise his hand, and the two clearly anti-Trump candidates, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, did not raise their hands. True or not, it looked like DeSantis was waiting to see what everyone else did before taking a position.
Yes, DeSantis had some good moments. He rebelled at another raise-your-hand question about climate change and took control of the subject. But overall, two things happened that the DeSantis campaign did not anticipate. First, even though he leads the rest of the field in national polls, DeSantis was not the main target of attacks from the rest of the candidates, as he had predicted. And second, the climate change moment aside, DeSantis failed to seize control of the debate. A breakdown of how long each candidate spoke showed that Pence, Ramaswamy, and Christie all spoke longer than DeSantis, with Pence being particularly aggressive in keeping the microphone.
The short version is that the debate was DeSantis’s opportunity to break out from the field, and he did not take it.”
—
“By the end of the debate, there was little doubt that all the candidates loathed Ramaswamy. The bigger question, though, was what did the voters think? In an earlier newsletter, I noted that huge majorities, over 60%, of voters did not know enough about Ramaswamy to say whether they had a favorable or unfavorable opinion of him. Now, after a two-hour debate, many of them know a lot more. And the early indications, from TV focus groups, man-on-the-street interviews, and internet surveys, are that some voters, perhaps many voters, liked what they heard from Ramaswamy.
Will the debate change the race? Yes, it marked the beginning of a new stage in the campaign, but will the new stage be new and different? The answer is, probably not. It could be that the debate, for all the talking and insulting, did not make any fundamental difference at all in the race.
Certainly the Trump camp feels that way. After the debate, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), one of the former president’s surrogates, was a happy man. He was particularly happy with Ramaswamy, the most pro-Trump candidate in a pro-Trump field. “It almost seemed like at every point in the debate, a different candidate tried to tangle with Ramaswamy, and it was like they were putting a wet fork in an electric socket because he seemed to be giving as good as he got,” Gaetz said.
“Vivek won the debate,” Gaetz continued. “Ron DeSantis lost the debate, and probably President Trump does the best coming out of it because you saw nothing in this debate that is going to reshape the fundamental contours of this race — nothing at all.””
“Wagner mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin, who led a failed mutiny against the Kremlin in June, has died in a “plane crash,” Russian authorities claim. Prigozhin, an ex-convict turned billionaire, was to leave for Belarus as part of an amnesty deal offered by President Vladimir Putin to him and his mercenary force.
While thousands of his armed fighters arrived in Belarus, Prigozhin did not leave Russia — raising questions about President Putin’s real intentions regarding his former confidant.
Prigozhin’s private jet, en route to St. Petersburg, reportedly crashed some hundred miles north of Moscow. “The Embraer business jet crashed in the Tver Region near the settlement of Kuzhenkino. According to preliminary data, all 10 people on board the plane have died,” Russian state news agency TASS reported Wednesday. Wagner chief’s “plane showed erratic flight altitude shifts before the crash,” the news agency added, citing flight data.”
⚡️The bodies of all 10 people killed in the crash of a business jet in the Tver region of Russia, including #Prigozhin, the leader of the #Wagner PMC, have been taken to a morgue for examination, Russian state media reported. pic.twitter.com/4SAieSenHL
“The U.S. Department of Defense on Thursday said there was currently no information to suggest that a surface-to-air missile took down the plane presumed to be carrying Russian mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin.
Air Force Brigadier General Patrick Ryder, a Pentagon spokesperson, offered no evidence or further details on what U.S. officials believe caused the crash as he made his remarks at a Pentagon news conference.
Reuters had reported earlier on Thursday that the United States was looking at a number of theories over what caused Prigozhin’s plane to crash, and cited two U.S. officials saying a surface-to-air missile likely hit it.
The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, stressed that the information was still preliminary and under review, and did not rule out a change to the assessment.
“We don’t have any information to indicate right now the press reporting stating that there was some type of surface-to-air missile that took down the plane,” Ryder told reporters.”
—-
“The Wall Street Journal on Thursday reported a different theory, citing unnamed U.S. officials: that a bomb aboard the aircraft or some other sabotage caused the crash.
It is not uncommon for there to be competing, even contradictory, intelligence views in the U.S. government in the hours and days after major international events.”
Since Twitter has a world wide reach and can be streamed at any time, numbers are deceptive. It’s obvious Tucker won the ratings but did Trump have more Republicans watching him versus the debate? Probably but not at these numbers – probably a lot of people watched both. Are the twitter views, unique views or just a count?
Watching hi or low lights, the impression I get is Vivek won the debate if we count only the Republican base but Haley won the NT Republicans and independents. Want to win the general election? Run Haley.
It really doesn’t matter if there was an explosion onboard or anti-aircraft missiles, we know who did it. Prigozhin had a cult following in Russia so there’s been speculation on how this will affect government stability and Putin’s popularity. There are reports that Wagner troops currently in Belarus are leaving for Russia – what that means is unclear. The Russian army is organised by regions which means Chechens, and other ethnic minorities are in their own battalions or corps. There have been reports of internal fights in the Russian army on ethnic lines. So we have ethnic clashes plus a private army who might be out for revenge.
No thanks. Hard pass on yet another neocon warmonger who wants to cut actual Americans out of what they were promised when their money was confiscated by govt.
Take off, eh…
Nikki Haley has the same view as the billionaire-heir owners of the NYT:
We must continue to send hundreds of billions if necessary, indefinitely, to Kiev.
But we must also tell Americans that our debt is too high and therefore they must prepare for cuts to SS and Medicare: https://t.co/nAELMHEMQh
Trump was charged with trying to overturn the election.
DeSantis probably lost a few percentage points of support with that move. Not the first time I saw it. Not much of a leader if you need to see what others are doing. Christie and Hutchinson didn’t raise their hands.
Well that changes things – don’t touch social security while campaigning, older people vote. Unfortunate for Republicans as she was the most electable until she said that.
Besides Social Security is not for the gov’t to use – once you pay into the system, it’s a contract.
Ha! Vivek is definitely lacking that kind of foreign policy experience! And I thank God for that. The more I hear him the more I like him. He’s got talent and lots of positive energy. Just what the GOP needs— and probably one reason the uniparty dislikes him.
Oh, and thanks AJ for the ratings numbers. I’m actually surprised (pleasantly) that FOX was so blown out of the water by Tucker. I expected it to be much much closer, and thought FOX might actually like out a little on top. Glad to see that was not the case.
I get that there is a difference between web views and tv viewers as some are pointing out, although to be fair, tv viewers come and go every commercial as well.
I confess to this.
But even if only 10% of those views watched it, it would still double Fox’s numbers
It’s a new landscape now. They old media has competition.
HRW @8:43. That’s the problem with the uniparty Republicans. They pretty much all want to cut SS, medicare, and food assistance. At the same time they cheerfully funnel large sums to their cronies via Ukraine or whatever war or region they can convince us needs it more than we do. And the Democrats are not much better with the money laundering, though they do occasionally throw a meatless bone for us to fight over.
I don’t think that the people advocating raising the age for Social Security understand that not everyone has a desk job that they can do into their 70s. A lot of people work jobs that are tough physically. An obvious example is construction work, but nursing takes a lot of physical exertion at times as well. Many nurses end up with serious back problems.
The memes have already started — its going to be a fun night on social media.
As I stated before, Trump is not charged with questioning the election – he’s charged with attempting to overturn the election through a conspiracy, lying and encouraging others to violate their oath. That’s a lot different than questioning the election.
Debra – I agree the neo-Cons who have run and still run the economic policy of the Republican party can’t be trusted with social programs nor can the Clinton part of the Democratic party. I’d trust Biden more than Clinton or even Obama when it comes to Social Security.
I’ll differ with you on the Ukraine war. In my 55 years of life, I’ve never supported any war yet I’m in the awkward position of not criticising and even supporting the Ukrainian side. For me it has to do with Enlightenment values and anti-authoritarianism
A conservative Cdn prime minister once suggested raising the retirement age to 67. He didn’t get reelected. The most difficult opposition Putin faced is when he raised the retirement age from 60 to 65 for men and from 55 to 63 for women. Given the protests he changed it to 60 for women and made exceptions for men. The average life expectancy for men is 67 and falling. Obviously the French protested any change in retirement age but several European countries have raised it to 67. However, when you have 6-8 weeks vacation a year and far less stress at work coupled with an excellent health care system, two more years is okay, especially given the life expectancy is in the 80s for most Europeans.
I just checked life expectancy by country — the US is only 76 years – 73 for males and falling. Wow, raise retirement to 67 and the average male only has 6 years of retirement….Reminds me I just took out a book called Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism. It looks at the increase in suicide, opioids, and alcoholism in America. I expect my depressed and cynical view of the world won’t improve.
But I also think of Colson’s transformation that came following Watergate and time spent in prison. May God be at work in all of those who are facing these charges. Prayers that justice will be done. If they are innocent, prayers that they will be acquitted. If not, prayers that they will acknowledge, take responsibility, and make use of the hard lessons God gives all of us in various circumstances.
The challenge with SS is how to fully fund it into the future. The discussion will have to be held at some point, no one wants to see SS changes, but it’s something that has to be figured out. Hard conversation, to be sure.
Wandering Views 
In her defense, she wasn’t the only one. 🙂
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He ain’t wrong.
Sooner or later, the establishment shills always out themselves….
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Clown Alert! 🤡
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Put up or shut up time.
#USELESS GOP
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Hello?
Corrupt Media?
Really, no comments or stories on this attack on the press?
Oh that’s right, he’s not one of you.
“Lawsuit: White House Press Office Unconstitutionally Targeted Reporter With New Credentialing Requirement
The revised requirement came after heated exchanges between the reporter and White House Press Secretary over the White House’s alleged refusal to answer the reporter’s questions.”
https://legalinsurrection.com/2023/08/lawsuit-white-house-press-office-unconstitutionally-targeted-reporter-with-new-credentialing-requirement/
“A White House correspondent is suing to block the White House’s new press credentialing requirement after he was denied a “hard pass.” The hard pass is “a special form of press credentials that allows unlimited access to the White House press facilities.”
The White House Correspondents’ Association notes that “[a] hard pass is critical for anyone who reports regularly on the White House.”
The Center for American Liberty (CAL) filed the complaint on behalf of Today News Africa‘s White House correspondent Simon Ateba, who has failed to qualify under the new hard pass requirement.
The revised requirement restricts the hard pass to White House correspondents who have “[a]ccreditation by a press gallery in either the Supreme Court, U.S. Senate or U.S. House of Representatives.”
Ateba has not met the revised requirement because the Supreme Court typically limits credentials to full-time Supreme Court reporters, which Ateba is not, and the Congressional Press Gallery has not replied to his request for accreditation, according to the complaint.
The complaint alleges the White House Press Office routinely ignores Ateba’s written questions, Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre refuses to call on Ateba during press briefings, and the Press Office denies Ateba access to President Biden’s press conferences.
Dissatisfied with his lack of access, Ateba took to “speaking up during press briefings” by “asserted himself in the briefing room, speaking over other reporters and the White House Press Secretary in an attempt to make his concerns known,” as he did at a press briefing on March 20, 2023.
Shortly before the revised requirement took effect, Ateba received a letter warning him his conduct violated the Press Office’s decorum policy, which is not the subject of the lawsuit.
“The White House can, and has, adopted a decorum policy for the briefing room,” CAL associate counsel Eric Sell told Legal Insurrection. “We are not challenging this decorum policy, nor are we arguing the White House can’t enforce it.”
“Instead, we are challenging the new criteria all journalists must satisfy to qualify for a hard pass,” Sell continued. “We are also challenging the changes to the hard pass criteria for targeting Simon specifically.”
The complaint accuses the White House of revising the credentialing requirement “in a brazen attempt to exclude Mr. Ateba from the White House briefing room.” The changes came “because the White House no longer wanted deal with him or his questions,” according to the complaint.
“Mr. Ateba’s questions often relate to issues other White House correspondents do not cover. . . . Mr. Ateba covers topics affecting millions of people around the world—and many of his colleagues have little interest in asking the questions to which Mr. Ateba wants answers,” which focus on United States–Africa relations.
“The mainstream media coverage of these incidents,” according to the complaint, “has largely painted Mr. Ateba as disruptive, disrespectful, and even seeking attention for himself. But Mr. Ateba is simply seeking answers to his questions, which the White House refuses to give.”
“It is common for White House correspondents to raise their voices and even shout over each other during press briefings,” the complaint argues.
The complaint alleges First and Fifth Amendment violations because the revised hard pass requirement impermissibly and vaguely delegates accreditation authority to the Congressional Press Gallery in a manner “giv[ing] the government unbridled discretion to permit the exercise of First Amendment rights.””
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It’s time to admit the obvious.
https://hotair.com/jazz-shaw/2023/08/23/it-may-be-time-to-stop-trying-to-fight-trumps-army-n573028
“With the arrival of the first GOP presidential primary debate, we have reached the semi-official start of the primary process. (In reality, of course, this primary started moments after Joe Biden was sworn into office.) The absence of the runaway leader in the polls has rapidly become the focus of the event, probably more so than anything the rest of the candidates may or may not say on stage. But that awkward situation also seems to highlight how frantically some of the conservatives and Republicans who don’t want Donald Trump to be the nominee (and I’m not just talking about the traditional never-Trumpers here) are grappling with reality at this point, despite there still being nearly five months until the voting begins. And the actual never-Trumps are really in a tizzy, metaphorically wringing their hands and rending their sackcloth over how the wheels appear to be coming off the wagon. ”
—
“I’ll just start by reminding everyone that since I’m not a member of the Republican Party and can’t vote in the primary, I don’t technically have a horse in this race, despite still being extremely interested. I’m also aware that there are some former Trump supporters, including even some of my colleagues here on this site who no longer wish for Trump to be the nominee for various reasons. It’s everyone’s right to choose for themselves and that’s fine.
As for me, I have only one priority this time around. That would be the critical necessity to defeat Joe Biden or whichever of his lackeys winds up running next November. Biden has been nothing short of an abject disaster for the country on almost every score. And it has become increasingly obvious that he is likely the most corrupt figure to ever hold that office, leaving our great nation looking increasingly like a banana republic and a target of global scorn.
With all of that as a backdrop, I care less about the name of the person on the ballot representing the GOP than the outcome. If a non-Trump consensus candidate somehow arises (and don’t ask me how that happens because I don’t see it), I will happily cast my vote for whoever it is, just as I gladly sallied forth and voted for Trump during the previous two elections. And if Trump is the nominee, I shall do it a third time with no regrets.
But I would urge some caution to those who are now furiously paddling in the direction of DeSantis or Ramaswamy (both of whom are fine candidates who I could also easily support) or any of the others. Sometimes paddling too hard will result in the boat taking on water. Yes, there is still an eternity in “political time” until the primary voting begins, but the numbers rarely tell the magnitude of lies you would require to predict a Trump collapse at this point. He’s not just leading the field. He’s carrying an actual majority. If everyone else but DeSantis dropped out after the debate and all of their supporters went to the Florida Governor, Trump would still be leading.
I understand the concerns that some of my well-meaning friends here and elsewhere have expressed. They want to win next November also, and there is a significant amount of Trump hatred baked into a percentage of the electorate that is alarmingly above 40 percent. It’s going to be a tight election, no matter who is on the ballot or how awful conditions are around the country. But even if Donald Trump disappeared in a cloud of burning indictments tomorrow, the media and the establishment would simply turn their full fire and fury on the next GOP target. That would make him or her “the next Trump.” And some of them are already clearing the lanes to do just that if the opportunity arises.
And we should also keep in mind that Donald Trump has one important advantage (along with several supporting ones) that the rest of these people lack, along with Joe Biden. All the other candidates from Ron DeSantis to Nikki Haley to Tim Scott and the rest have some supporters. They have some donors. Perhaps a SuperPAC or two. And that’s great. But Donald Trump has a freaking army. And that army isn’t wavering one centimeter on the front lines. They are out there painting his image on their vehicles. They’re modifying their trucks to mount flags on them. They’re blasting Tom MacDonald songs out their windows at full volume. They show up in droves just to watch him get arrested. And on election day (and hopefully during early voting which we’re still terrible at) they will show up. Each and every one of them. They will show up if they have to be wheeled to the voting booth on a gurney.
Nobody is doing that for Joe Biden. Now look around at the rest of the field of aspirants for the GOP. Can you honestly see any of them driving that sort of a force? As I said, there are quite a few fine candidates who would likely do a good job. (Okay… maybe not so much Chris Christie.) But none of them have whatever magic Donald Trump has somehow unleashed. And if his army shows up in full and enough of the conservatives who might prefer a different choice do as well, along with a sufficient number of moderates who are willing to forgive and forget the mean tweets because of the awful shape the country is in today, we could still pull this off. And we desperately need to do that. I’ll stop preaching now. These are just a few observations I wanted to toss into the discussion while we wait for the debates.”
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“Disobeying the authorities saved their lives”
https://hotair.com/david-strom/2023/08/23/disobeying-the-authorities-saved-their-lives-n573145
“Trust the experts they say.
The government has your best interests at heart.
Don’t think for yourself, we keep being told.
Yeah, well, the AP says what those of us who have been following the Lahaina wildfire already knew: the people who obeyed the authorities died, and those who said “Screw that!” survived.”
“This story confirms what I have been writing for a few days. Not because I am a particularly astute journalist–everything I have reported has been publicly available, either through various news stories, blog posts, or videos on Twitter.
I just have no faith left in the authorities, so when they spewed out their BS about how hard they worked to save lives and how they did everything they could, but Gaia was too angry at some SUV to placate, I knew they were lying.
As flames tore through a West Maui neighborhood, car after car of fleeing residents headed for the only paved road out of town in a desperate race for safety.
And car after car was turned back toward the rapidly spreading wildfire by a barricade blocking access to Highway 30.
One family swerved around the barricade and was safe in a nearby town 48 minutes later, another drove their 4-wheel-drive car down a dirt road to escape. One man took an dirt road uphill, climbing above the fire and watching as Lahaina burned. He later picked his way through the flames, smoke and rubble to pull survivors to safety.
But dozens of others found themselves caught in a hellscape, their cars jammed together on a narrow road, surrounded by flames on three sides and the rocky ocean waves on the fourth. Some died in their cars, while others tried to run for safety.
The police blockaded the only way out. The only people to survive there were the people who were smart enough to realize that the authorities had no idea what they were doing.
I don’t think for a second that those police officers manning the barricade wanted people to die. They surely didn’t. They thought they were helping because they thought their bosses knew what they were doing. They were told to block the road, so they blocked the road. End of story.
The people up the chain didn’t know what they were doing. They were fakin’ it until they were makin’ it, only what they were making was a tragedy of truly epic proportions. Nobody knows how many people died, but the number is in the hundreds. There is a reason why they won’t admit to having an idea of the number: it is too horrific to admit.”
—-
The Nazi soldiers were just following orders too. That doesn’t excuse the police.
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If it’s too graphic for a school board meeting, it has no business in a school library.
Why is this so hard for the groomers to understand?
CONTENT WARNING!!!!!!!
This is OK for kids?
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Has CNN reached a turning point, and is gonna try actual journalism again?
We can only hope.
This is on the heels of Jake Tapper admitting Trump was right about Hunter Biden.
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“POLLSTER: TRUMP IS ‘STRONGER TODAY THAN HE’S EVER BEEN’”
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2023/08/pollster-trump-is-stronger-today-than-hes-ever-been.php
“In a Tuesday interview with conservative podcaster Charlie Kirk, Big Data pollster Rich Baris claimed that support for former President Donald Trump is stronger today than in either 2016 or 2020. He also believes the 2024 election will be a “total disaster for the Democrats.” From his lips to God’s ears.
Here’s some of what Baris had to say:
It’s just not 2020. It’s not 2016. They are just totally different races and he’s doing so much better with e-groups – which we can get into – than he was in either ’16 or ’20. I’m not a lawyer, but as a pollster, it’s just very clear why they’re trying to do what they are doing to him.
They can’t beat him. When we look back at 2020 and I know a lot of people, especially Trump supporters, think that he won in 2020 and that’s fine. And you know how I feel about that personally as well. But the truth is, he still could have done better with certain groups that would have made it even more difficult for them to pull something like that off.
Look at new voters for instance. Biden won that by 30 points in 2020 and in September of 2021, that turned into a Trump +2. Now in this poll, it is going to be roughly Trump +8. Massive shifts, new generation Xers and millennials that are men working that are coming into the fold. Non-whites that are coming into the fold. And underclass voters. It’s a total disaster for the Democrats. A total disaster. And we do poll other candidates and I have to make this clear, this is only Donald Trump.
So if you are a crook DA or a crook prosecutor for the Justice Department, you’re looking at this and you’re trying to survive. You don’t want him to come back in, now a target of their prosecutorial misconduct and whatever else it is, and have him clean house. So, if you’re the Biden administration and you’re hiding bribes, you’re going to try to make sure that he cannot get on that ballot. You’re going to try to make sure that he doesn’t have the money to campaign, he’s going to be prosecuted, he’s hurt by political prosecutions and right now, that’s just not happening. … Nothing damages him. Nothing.
Kirk reminded Baris that Trump is currently facing four indictments and asked if it was correct to say that he is more popular now than before the indictments.
Baris replied:
Yeah, that’s correct to say. Favorability is one thing. … There are people that always never liked Donald Trump but would vote for him and flirt with voting for him. And to us, that group is what matters. They are going to dislike both him and Biden, but they trust him to do a good job. Or they see what is going on and think it’s just wrong, Charlie. Just wrong. We don’t do this to people in this country. We don’t beat people in the jury box, we beat them in the ballot box. So he has strength with this group right now even more so than he had with Hillary Clinton.
Despite the frequently repeated talking point that Republicans will support Trump no matter what, but his real challenge lies with opposition from independents, Baris claimed that Trump is leading with independents as well.
Baris went on to say that Americans love an underdog. When the trials begin, he said, “It’s just going to look like the guy is being persecuted and Americans don’t like that.”
Interestingly, he pointed out that Martin Luther King Jr. had been “extremely unpopular until they threw him in prison. … He was grossly unpopular. … The beatings really did it. The most popular photo of him back then was the mugshot.”
“Americans don’t like watching someone beat down by the man,” he said.
Rich Baris is obviously a right-leaning pollster, but there are indications he may be right.
A CNN panel worried out loud last week about Trump’s strength in head-to-head polls against Biden. The two are currently neck and neck in the RealClearPolitics average of polls.”
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Kizzie,
You may have seen other doctored video, but not mine.
Here’s the video I posted. Everyone is moving normally, except for Sleepy Joe, who appears to be nodding off.
The video was not doctored, nor would I post one that obviously was.
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In case you missed it….
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“Democrats Have Broken America: Where’s the Outrage?”
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2023/08/24/democrats_have_broken_america_wheres_the_outrage_149666.html?callback=in&code=ZTC3OGM3MJGTZDVHZS0ZZJCYLWI0MJQTMJKZY2IZNZG2ZTQZ&state=05f1a2d7efe542cdb1b25c558a3ef4de
“The Democrats have an ace in the hole in their relentless war on the Constitution – conservative America’s reverence for the concept of the rule of the law.
Only their steadfast commitment to this traditional ideal explains why conservatives are allowing Democrats to flagrantly corrupt our judicial system to destroy their opponents and protect themselves. For all their huffing and puffing, conservatives have effectively taken a let the system play itself out attitude while Democrats nakedly politicize that system through their partisan indictments of former President Trump and their Potemkin Village probes of the Bidens. These are not statements of opinion. These are facts.
Part of me is glad that so many legal analysts have spilled so much ink exposing these charades. But we degrade our country and ourselves when we treat this unspeakable behavior with anything other than horrified contempt. Every good-faith critique normalizes and legitimizes this profoundly un-American conspiracy.
Viewing the obvious forest rather than the tangled trees, the cases against Trump are a continuation of the deceitful effort by Democrats and their deep state allies, especially in the DOJ, to annihilate their chief political opponent. That effort began even before his election when Hillary Clinton’s campaign manufactured false claims that Trump had conspired with Vladimir Putin to steal the 2016 election. When that sham was exposed, they almost immediately made Trump only the third president in the country to be impeached for asking Ukraine’s leader to look into the Biden family’s influence-peddling schemes. They set aside almost every rule and order of business by rushing to impeach him once again after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. While that was going on, Democrats insistently rained down other bogus concerns – that he was violating the Emoluments Clause because wealthy foreigners continued to stay at his hotels, that his alleged mental instability made him unfit – to remove him from office.
The hypocrisy is beyond belief: The party that assails Republicans for questioning the integrity of the highly irregular 2020 election spent years and vast government resources to undo the results of 2016.
The charges Trump now faces are part of the ongoing campaign by Democrats to subvert the rule of law to delegitimize what they see as the greatest threat to their power.
In the meantime, Democrats are blatantly using the criminal justice system to protect President Biden. It is now beyond dispute that Biden lied to the American people when he said he never discussed foreign business with his son Hunter and when he claimed during his final 2020 debate with Trump that Hunter’s laptop, which contained evidence of those corrupt dealings, was a “Russian plant.” Has a candidate ever peddled more consequential falsehoods?
In fact, the president was not only aware of his son’s influence-peddling schemes, whose sole selling point was the connection to his vast power. He was an active participant through phone calls and meetings with clients. Irony does not capture the deviousness of the Democrats’ decision to impeach Trump for asking Ukraine to look into this corruption.
The cover-up of the Bidens’ conduct is equally disturbing. The U.S. attorney in Delaware assigned to the case, David C. Weiss, is a former colleague of Biden’s late son Beau. Although the tax avoidance charges involved are straightforward, Weiss spent more than five years allegedly looking into them – allowing the statute of limitations to run out on millions of unreported earnings Hunter generated in 2014 and 2015. Note that even as the president calls on Americans to pay their fair share, neither he nor his allies have demanded that Hunter pay his.
Indeed, we only know about Weiss’ corruption because of two courageous IRS whistleblowers. In response, Weiss quickly struck a deal with Hunter to settle the matter, crafting a sweetheart deal that would have let him off the hook with a slap on the wrist. All might have been forgiven but for the presiding judge, who rejected the deal last month as “not standard” and potentially unconstitutional.
In response to this scandal, Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Weiss as special counsel to look into the mess. This move is beyond brazen – Weiss is now apparently in charge of probing his own misconduct. The goal is obvious: Protect the president, and let the statute of limitations run out on other alleged crimes while shutting down any questions about the “ongoing investigation.”
The arrogance is jaw-dropping; the lawlessness is in plain sight. Democrats are not even trying to hide their malfeasance – which is part of their method. If they can make us accept their authority to twist the system so that it is no longer a means of justice but a tool of their political power, then their possibilities are unlimited.
Imagine if the roles were reversed: What if Republican prosecutors had indicted a former Democratic president, who was also the party’s leading candidate in the next election, in four separate cases on 91 questionable charges while a GOP-controlled Department of Justice simultaneously protected its sitting-president boss, who was seeking reelection, by slow-walking a probe of his family’s alleged crimes?”
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“Notes from the undercard
Milwaukee was mostly a disaster. The main event was in Bedminster”
https://thespectator.com/politics/notes-undercard-bedminster-trump-tucker-debate/
“One of the reasons that Donald Trump is so despised by the beautiful people in this country — the people that New York Times columnist David Brooks memorably evoked when he began a tweet “We in the educated class…” — is that he consorts with so many unbeautiful people: not just working stiffs but B-list entertainers, NASCAR enthusiasts and prize fighters.
It is from the world of the last-named agonistic endeavor that I learned a word that perfectly describes tonight’s festivities. The word is “undercard.” It means that list of “minor or supporting contests printed on the same bill as the main event (primarily fighting or racing.” Fox News, together with the Republic National Committee, hosted what it billed as the first GOP debate of the 2024 season in Milwaukee.
At the same time — or, to be more strictly accurate, about five minutes earlier — an interview that Tucker Carlson recently taped with Donald Trump in Bedminster, New Jersey, began streaming from Tucker’s channel on X, the app formerly known as Twitter.
Which event will garner the most viewers, the highest ratings? Which is the undercard, which is the main event?
Among the contestants on stage in Milwaukee were such rock stars as Asa Hutchinson! Doug Burgum! Mike Pence! Not that this is a welterweight contest. Not at all. Also tipping the scales tonight was snarling Chris Christie! It was not clear at whom he would yell since his bête orange was be far away talking to the most popular commentator in the US, but he is sure to give a heavyweight performance.
Let’s see: who else is on the stage?… oh, right job-applicant Nikki Haley! As one casts one’s eyes over this undercard no one I have mentioned is ready for prime time. I predict two or three, maybe more, will be gone by the new year.
All eyes were be on the new kid on the block, Vivek Ramaswamy and Ron DeSantis, Governor of Florida. Judging from his recent performances, I suspected Vivek would be the most compelling — and indeed he was. One of his major difficulties going forward, however, was encapsulated by a chap I sat with at a dinner party recently. He repeated the going mantra that “Trump can’t win” and averred that he liked… “What’s his name?” “Vivek,” I said. “Right, Vivek Rama-, Rama-, Rama-,” “Ramaswamy,” I interposed helpfully.
Thanks to the magic of the internet, I was able to bounce back and forth between the performances. By the end of his conversation with Tucker, Donald Trump had amassed some 100 million views. I don’t have reliable numbers on the Fox audience yet, but I’d wager it will turn out to be far smaller.”
—
“Despite everyone’s best efforts, the biggest personality on stage was that of the man who wasn’t there: Donald Trump.
Time and again his name up. Would you pardon him if he is convicted of the 867,594 crimes he is accused of? What about his position on Ukraine? On energy? On the regulatory state?
It became ever clearer as the night proceeded that the particular responses from the candidates were almost beside the point.
The real lesson from the televised GOP debate is that the era of staged-managed debates in which each candidate is given thirty seconds or a minute to preen and emit his favorite clichés, and try to upstage his opponents, is over.
This “debate” was punctuated by silly gimmicks, like asking candidate to respond to canned questions from a TV-land that was almost indistinguishable from Barbieland. It was all theater, but mostly theater of the absurd.
Meanwhile, for a little more than three quarters of an hour, Donald Trump discussed issues from energy to Ukraine to the administrative state with Tucker Carlson.
Let’s face it: Trump has an idiosyncratic style of speaking, but in terms of substance, his performance was a sirloin steak with all the trimmings, where the official debate was soggy cotton candy.
In Milwaukee, the undercard show was mostly a disaster. The main event was in Bedminster. The only question now is how long it will take the political apparatus to digest that reality. “
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Of course….
The establishment stooges try to take out another outsider. He’s not uni-party enough for them.
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2023/08/24/gop_eight_take_debate_stage_in_milwaukee_149668.html?callback=in&code=OGRKNZLHNWITMWU0MY0ZNDUYLTLJZDQTNTI2NTE0ZJGXMMIZ&state=3961ddca951d493fb89269753058d4bc
“Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, the candidate in second place, and perhaps the challenger who former President Donald Trump fears most, was not the top target of the evening. Instead, in what seemed a rare moment of unintended unity, Vivek Ramaswamy was.
Former Vice President Mike Pence questioned the maturity of the 38-year-old first-time candidate. Nikki Haley, a two-term governor of South Carolina and former U.S. ambassador to the United States, said the tech entrepreneur was naïve about foreign policy. Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie even compared the fast-talking upstart to Barack Obama – and not favorably.
Otherwise, absent the front-runner, the field sparred spiritedly amongst themselves, shouting at the audience and talking over each other while exchanging insults and ignoring the moderators. After two hours, they pulled off a collective achievement: disproving Trump’s taunt that they were only on stage in Wisconsin to audition to be his running mate. They were there intending to winnow the field, and the established candidates clearly wanted to start with Ramaswamy.
“I’ve had enough already tonight of a guy who sounds like ChatGPT,” Christie said introducing what would become a theme of the night when he compared Ramaswamy first to AI software and then to Obama: “I am afraid we’re dealing with the same type of amateur,” Christie added,
When Ramaswamy and Pence clashed over the accomplishments of the previous administration, the former VP shot back, “Now is not the time for on-the-job training. We don’t need to bring in a rookie.” And when Ramaswamy pledged to stop military aide to Ukraine, Haley accused him of siding with the Russians over an ally. “You have no foreign policy experience,” she said. “And it shows.”
As the candidates clashed like this throughout the night here, jostling over everything from abortion to Ukraine, Ramaswamy, who sits in third place in the RealClearPolitics Average, leapt into almost every contentious scrum. DeSantis, the candidate the field must topple to take on Trump one-on-one, sometimes seemed an afterthought.”
—-
So shouting and insults are only bad when Trump does it?
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I only saw a few clips from the debates last night, but it was enough to let me know it would be unfruitful to watch any more. (And the moderators again seemed to be trying to become part of the show.) So I spent my evening after work watching the 50 minute Tucker interview with Pres. Trump. It was quite good. I had already watched all of Tucker’s interviews with the GOP candidates anyway, so I doubt I missed anything of substance from last night’s circus….though I did hear that the clowns showed up in full force. I prefer to get my laughs from re-runs of Psych or Monk rather than the side-show that our election season has become.
The only thing I’m really curious about relative to the debates is the ratings. Since Carlson’s Trump interview happened at the same time as the debate, I’m wondering how or if the FOX ratings were affected. And how did the Tucker interview rate? I’m sure someone will do a comparison at some point.
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I watched all the debate and thought the moderators did a good job. It is difficult to have much debate with so many candidates. I did think that Ramaswamy’s inexperience was shown. Debates are only one tool we have to see potential leaders in action.
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I’m a little curious as to whether Pence (or Haley or ANY of the pro-war candidates) presented any kind of domestic agenda, or was he still channeling 1990’s ‘power through strength’ and ‘fight Russia there so we don’t fight them here’ rhetoric? If he had a substantial domestic agenda, I might wade through the debate video to hear it.
One thing you don’t get in interviews that you get in debates is the live interaction between the candidates, and that can be telling. But I think what you get in the interviews that you don’t normally get in the debates is less grand-standing for sound bites and more substance.
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From WSJ’s take on part of the debate:
~ … Ron DeSantis had to counter the perception that his campaign is in free-fall, and he did a good job of explaining his greatest hits as Florida Governor on Covid and fighting progressive prosecutors. He said he would have sacked Anthony Fauci, a nice contrast with Mr. Trump’s Covid delegation to the doctor.
But the Governor also ducked more than one question, such as whether he’d support a national ban of 15 weeks on abortion. He didn’t raise his hand at first on whether he’d vote for Mr. Trump if he’s convicted of a felony, but then did raise it when he saw others do it. He had to be coaxed into saying Mike Pence did the right thing by counting the electoral votes on Jan. 6.
Most disappointing was his answer on providing more military aid to Ukraine, indulging the dodge that he’d ask Europe to do more first. All of this made him look more poll-driven and afraid of Mr. Trump than the fearless leader he portrays himself to be.
Vivek Ramaswamy is close to Mr. DeSantis in the polls, and he has the gift of energy and verbal facility. He can sling appealing phrases, and his line that Americans are hungry for purpose will resonate with many voters. But he can also sound like a young man in too much of a hurry, and his rapid-fire one-liners and insults (“I’m the only person on the stage who isn’t bought and paid for”) give him the air of a supercilious grad student.
He seems to have made a calculation that he can prosper by running as Mr. Trump’s biggest defender, almost as if he wouldn’t have to defeat Mr. Trump to get the nomination. But he would be more credible if he weren’t so slavish in his defense. He left himself open for Chris Christie’s roundhouse that landed about being the candidate from ChatGPT. …
… Mr. Ramaswamy, and to a lesser extent Mr. DeSantis, are playing to an emergent strain of isolationism in the GOP that is always latent and which Mr. Trump has exhumed. So Mr. Pence and Ms. Haley are taking a risk with their view about the necessity of U.S. global leadership, and good for them.
Democrats and the press would have Americans believe that every Republican candidate is a MAGA replica of Donald Trump. But the debate was a repudiation of that claim on the events of Jan. 6, 2021, and foreign policy in particular. …
… The debate benefited enormously from Donald Trump’s decision to stay away. The Fox News moderators asked a round of questions about Mr. Trump’s indictments, and Mr. Christie told the audience what it didn’t want to hear about Mr. Trump’s behavior not being worthy of a President. Even if GOP voters think, rightly, that Democrats are using prosecution as a political weapon, tens of millions also know in their hearts that Mr. Christie is right.
The press corps and Democrats were disappointed because they wanted the debate, like they want the entire 2024 campaign, to be all about Donald Trump all the time. The former President will dominate the news again Thursday when he presents himself for booking at a Georgia courthouse. But at least for one night GOP voters were able to see that they have better choices. ~
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For now, though, the party itself clearly remains deeply divided.
And divided parties warring within aren’t in a good position to win a national election.
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From watching the debate I found I liked several of the contenders more than I expected to like them. The clips are the highlights of the insults rather than giving the important relevant info. I agree with what Kathaleena said about the new guy in the mix. He made me think, arrogant and fast-talking though he has some good ideas. I think he is one who would be disrespectful of age and experience of others and not welcome all to the table. He appeared cocky, and I understand the comparison with Obama.
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AJ – It still looks to me that he is bowing his head, closing his eyes for a bit (as many people do while listening to and concentrating on speeches or sermons), and the nod was intentional nodding, not a sleeping bob of the head kind of nod, which tends to be more of a jerking motion than nodding. Also, although hard to see, even while his head was down he did have his eyes open for much or most of the time his head was bowed. Even if his eyes were closed, it was for a few seconds.
At last Monday’s ladies’ meeting at church, one of the ladies was laughing about a young man in the congregation who had fallen asleep in church on Sunday. So yeah, maybe Biden nodded off for a few seconds. It happens, even among younger folks.
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Dj, the booking will be at the jail, not the courthouse so the WSJ needs to correct that statement in the article.
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AJ – I did not intend to insinuate that you knowingly shared a doctored video. And yes, maybe it was another one that was doctored.
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I’m sure some internal polling among the candidates indicated Vivek was a rising candidate and DeSantis was a fading star. Hence, the focus on Vivek instead of DeSantis. Vivek seems to be positioning himself to be an alternative to Trump without slavishly imitating him. Haley, Christie and to an extent Pence want to bring the Republican to a more winnable party.
In an interesting bit of irony, Vivek, the man who favours a civics test for young people to vote, seems to think the Constitution came before the Revolution.
Debates especially those with multiple candidates tend to be chaotic and not very conducive to presenting policy. They serve a purpose but anyone thinking this is the best way to know a candidate is mistaken.
My left side of the internet found the Trump interview boring and wonder if a rerun of 2016 and 2020 issues will still resonate especially if Trump seems more interested in his own grievances. Can you motivate people with a thrice given message?
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Don’t believe I’m defending Kristol but …… The tweets (purposely?) misunderstand Kristol. He’s not saying the US did nothing – obviously the US is, but that’s because of the Democrats mostly. He’s actually criticising the isolationist wing of the Republican party; a wing who he thinks will endanger support for Ukraine.
Don’t believe I’m doing this but….. Police aren’t Nazis, fascists maybe but not Nazis. And in Maui, they were clearly stupid and not independent thinking about changing circumstances. It reminds me of bad drive-in disaster films where the police refuse to listen to the teens who are warning them and asking for help against whatever is the threat. But it does not remind me of Nazis.
The Republicans are eating their own and their base. Law and order has become incompetent, politicised, and should be defunded. Republicans of the past not in tune with Trump policies, isolationism, etc are now objects of scorn. In the two party system, you need a big tent, you don’t win by shrinking it.
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Flamer is a semi-autobiographical graphic novel (graphic meaning full length comic book style). It is stocked in high schools not elementary schools – these are not children libraries nor are they captive children; there should be plenty of choice in the library. I’d recommend Steinbeck and Orwell over anything like this but to each their own. Anyone who thinks 14 to 18 year olds are innocent children should check the teen’s internet browsing history.
It is puzzling why the parent couldn’t read passages of the book aloud. Perhaps, society is more offended by the verbal rather than the written. I’ve read books to students which contain foul language or the “n-word” but I don’t read those words aloud. When giving the book to students, I discuss the words I skipped, provide context, and discuss. Saying these words aloud tends to distract the students so I wait til the end of the story.
The one tweet which had a photo link of one page reminds me of those who criticise Of Mice and Men or To Kill A Mockingbird. Providing words and scenes out of context is done to enrage.
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So many social media posts and stories are “done to enrage”. Edit out the the correct context, hit post, and watch the fireworks. 😦
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Baris and Bid Data is the same group who polled expected votes vs intended votes in 2016. He said polling people who they thought would win was more effective since they would be more honest and also share who their neighbours appeared to vote for. Based on expected votes, he predicted a Trump win in Pennsylvania and Michigan. Based on intended votes, traditional polls predicted a Biden win. The latter were correct.
The Republican base is old and dying. Not sure why Baris thinks young people will break towards the Republicans unless he has a skewed sample.
Since the US doesn’t go by popular vote, only five states really matter – Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, Michigan and Pennsylvania. Without counting those states, its Biden 236 to Trump 235. State polls aren’t very accurate right now but they show Biden winning in Michigan and Pennsylvania and Trump in Nevada and Arizona. Georgia is a coin toss. Doing the math, Biden has 270 and Trump has 252. If Trump wins Georgia, he still loses at 268. Trump needs Michigan or Pennsylvania along with the other three to win and that’s going to be tough.
Looking at the newest polls, Biden is pulling ahead nationally as is the Democratic vote in general. The current average poll is 2% Biden. FOX news which was very accurate in 2020 has Biden at 3%. A new poll has Biden at 2% in Pennsylvania. It will be close but I see a Biden win and the Democrats taking the House. There are 25 toss up seats (out of 435?? Gerrymandering ruins democracy) . Democrats will need 15 and the Republicans 10. It will be tight.
The polls indicate the indictments are having an effect. The Republican base is rallying around the leader, but independents are going to the Democrats. The other issue raised somewhat at the debate is abortion. Will abortion increase turnout and will that help Democrats? The last two years suggest yes. A hard line on abortion by Republicans and especially a nationwide law will turn out the vote.
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Let’s see….
Tucker’s Trump interview above currently has 235.3 million views.
Click the tweet above for updated numbers, as the views are still piling up.
Fox had 12.8 million viewers. That’s higher than the network expected, but pathetic against the Tucker/Trump numbers.
Fox did this to themselves. Keep alienating Trump supporters, keep losing viewers.
The party is divided, but nobody wins anything without Trump voters. That’s a fact. The WSJ and NTers are going to have to accept that reality, or lose another election.
https://deadline.com/2023/08/fox-news-republican-debate-ratings-1235527492/
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From Byron York….
“Trump wins, DeSantis struggles, Haley shines, and everybody hates (or loves) Vivek”
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/trump-wins-desantis-struggles-haley-shines-and-everybody-hates-or-loves-vivek
“Going in, former President Donald Trump’s view of the first Republican debate was that it would turn into a bunch of people fighting over second place, while Trump remained untouched and far ahead of the pack. The idea in the Trump camp was that if the former president skipped the debate, his absence would inevitably lead the other candidates to attack each other, bringing themselves down while Trump, and his big lead, remained unscathed.
That’s pretty much what happened at the Fiserv Forum Wednesday night. There were large segments of the debate in which the candidates sparred and sometimes fought and sometimes insulted each other, while Trump remained an unspoken and untouched presence. And when Fox News moderators Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum turned the subject to Trump, whom Baier called “the elephant not in the room,” the debate turned even more contentious, but much of the conversation involved how much the candidates were inclined to defend Trump even after his four indictments.
Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), the leading candidate onstage, was clearly the most uncomfortable with the subject. He had a terrible moment when Baier asked the field, “If former President Trump is convicted in a court of law, would you still support him as your party’s choice? Please raise your hand if you would.” Entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy’s hand shot up. DeSantis hesitated, then glanced to his left to see Ramaswamy and then former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley and then Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) and then Gov. Doug Burgum (R-ND) all raise their hands. Only then did DeSantis tentatively raise his hand. To DeSantis’s right, former Vice President Mike Pence waited even longer to raise his hand, and the two clearly anti-Trump candidates, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, did not raise their hands. True or not, it looked like DeSantis was waiting to see what everyone else did before taking a position.
Yes, DeSantis had some good moments. He rebelled at another raise-your-hand question about climate change and took control of the subject. But overall, two things happened that the DeSantis campaign did not anticipate. First, even though he leads the rest of the field in national polls, DeSantis was not the main target of attacks from the rest of the candidates, as he had predicted. And second, the climate change moment aside, DeSantis failed to seize control of the debate. A breakdown of how long each candidate spoke showed that Pence, Ramaswamy, and Christie all spoke longer than DeSantis, with Pence being particularly aggressive in keeping the microphone.
The short version is that the debate was DeSantis’s opportunity to break out from the field, and he did not take it.”
—
“By the end of the debate, there was little doubt that all the candidates loathed Ramaswamy. The bigger question, though, was what did the voters think? In an earlier newsletter, I noted that huge majorities, over 60%, of voters did not know enough about Ramaswamy to say whether they had a favorable or unfavorable opinion of him. Now, after a two-hour debate, many of them know a lot more. And the early indications, from TV focus groups, man-on-the-street interviews, and internet surveys, are that some voters, perhaps many voters, liked what they heard from Ramaswamy.
Will the debate change the race? Yes, it marked the beginning of a new stage in the campaign, but will the new stage be new and different? The answer is, probably not. It could be that the debate, for all the talking and insulting, did not make any fundamental difference at all in the race.
Certainly the Trump camp feels that way. After the debate, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), one of the former president’s surrogates, was a happy man. He was particularly happy with Ramaswamy, the most pro-Trump candidate in a pro-Trump field. “It almost seemed like at every point in the debate, a different candidate tried to tangle with Ramaswamy, and it was like they were putting a wet fork in an electric socket because he seemed to be giving as good as he got,” Gaetz said.
“Vivek won the debate,” Gaetz continued. “Ron DeSantis lost the debate, and probably President Trump does the best coming out of it because you saw nothing in this debate that is going to reshape the fundamental contours of this race — nothing at all.””
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“Our Republican debate poll finds Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy won”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/interactive/2023/poll-republican-presidential-debate/
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He just got Clintonized…..
Or Putinized in this case….
“Wagner Chief Prigozhin Presumed Dead in ‘Plane Crash’ Two Months After Failed Mutiny Against Putin
AP News: “Russia’s civil aviation agency said that Prigozhin and six top lieutenants were on a business jet that crashed Wednesday.”
https://legalinsurrection.com/2023/08/wagner-chief-prigozhin-killed-in-plane-crash-two-months-after-failed-mutiny-against-putin/
“Wagner mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin, who led a failed mutiny against the Kremlin in June, has died in a “plane crash,” Russian authorities claim. Prigozhin, an ex-convict turned billionaire, was to leave for Belarus as part of an amnesty deal offered by President Vladimir Putin to him and his mercenary force.
While thousands of his armed fighters arrived in Belarus, Prigozhin did not leave Russia — raising questions about President Putin’s real intentions regarding his former confidant.
Prigozhin’s private jet, en route to St. Petersburg, reportedly crashed some hundred miles north of Moscow. “The Embraer business jet crashed in the Tver Region near the settlement of Kuzhenkino. According to preliminary data, all 10 people on board the plane have died,” Russian state news agency TASS reported Wednesday. Wagner chief’s “plane showed erratic flight altitude shifts before the crash,” the news agency added, citing flight data.”
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Take it for what it’s worth, as they are a corrupt group themselves….
After all these are the frauds who brought you the Russian Collusion Hoax and the Iraq has WMDs.
“US intel: Prigozhin’s plane was likely shot down from inside Russia”
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/us-believes-missile-inside-russia-likely-shot-down-prigozhins-presumed-plane-us-2023-08-24/
“The U.S. Department of Defense on Thursday said there was currently no information to suggest that a surface-to-air missile took down the plane presumed to be carrying Russian mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin.
Air Force Brigadier General Patrick Ryder, a Pentagon spokesperson, offered no evidence or further details on what U.S. officials believe caused the crash as he made his remarks at a Pentagon news conference.
Reuters had reported earlier on Thursday that the United States was looking at a number of theories over what caused Prigozhin’s plane to crash, and cited two U.S. officials saying a surface-to-air missile likely hit it.
The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, stressed that the information was still preliminary and under review, and did not rule out a change to the assessment.
“We don’t have any information to indicate right now the press reporting stating that there was some type of surface-to-air missile that took down the plane,” Ryder told reporters.”
—-
“The Wall Street Journal on Thursday reported a different theory, citing unnamed U.S. officials: that a bomb aboard the aircraft or some other sabotage caused the crash.
It is not uncommon for there to be competing, even contradictory, intelligence views in the U.S. government in the hours and days after major international events.”
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Since Twitter has a world wide reach and can be streamed at any time, numbers are deceptive. It’s obvious Tucker won the ratings but did Trump have more Republicans watching him versus the debate? Probably but not at these numbers – probably a lot of people watched both. Are the twitter views, unique views or just a count?
Watching hi or low lights, the impression I get is Vivek won the debate if we count only the Republican base but Haley won the NT Republicans and independents. Want to win the general election? Run Haley.
It really doesn’t matter if there was an explosion onboard or anti-aircraft missiles, we know who did it. Prigozhin had a cult following in Russia so there’s been speculation on how this will affect government stability and Putin’s popularity. There are reports that Wagner troops currently in Belarus are leaving for Russia – what that means is unclear. The Russian army is organised by regions which means Chechens, and other ethnic minorities are in their own battalions or corps. There have been reports of internal fights in the Russian army on ethnic lines. So we have ethnic clashes plus a private army who might be out for revenge.
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Maui County agrees with leftist narrative – they’re suing the utility company
https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/lahaina-hawaii-wildfires-electric-company-lawsuit-1.6946905
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Oof.
This is Dukakis in a tank level cringe.
Not a good look.
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No thanks. Hard pass on yet another neocon warmonger who wants to cut actual Americans out of what they were promised when their money was confiscated by govt.
Take off, eh…
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Trump was charged with trying to overturn the election.
DeSantis probably lost a few percentage points of support with that move. Not the first time I saw it. Not much of a leader if you need to see what others are doing. Christie and Hutchinson didn’t raise their hands.
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Like I said above, the uniparty stooges hate an outsider.
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Yep.
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Well that changes things – don’t touch social security while campaigning, older people vote. Unfortunate for Republicans as she was the most electable until she said that.
Besides Social Security is not for the gov’t to use – once you pay into the system, it’s a contract.
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Ha! Vivek is definitely lacking that kind of foreign policy experience! And I thank God for that. The more I hear him the more I like him. He’s got talent and lots of positive energy. Just what the GOP needs— and probably one reason the uniparty dislikes him.
Oh, and thanks AJ for the ratings numbers. I’m actually surprised (pleasantly) that FOX was so blown out of the water by Tucker. I expected it to be much much closer, and thought FOX might actually like out a little on top. Glad to see that was not the case.
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*come
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I’m sorry, but it appears that the mugshot above may not be real.
Here’s the real one…
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Debra,
I get that there is a difference between web views and tv viewers as some are pointing out, although to be fair, tv viewers come and go every commercial as well.
I confess to this.
But even if only 10% of those views watched it, it would still double Fox’s numbers
It’s a new landscape now. They old media has competition.
That’s a good thing.
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HRW @8:43. That’s the problem with the uniparty Republicans. They pretty much all want to cut SS, medicare, and food assistance. At the same time they cheerfully funnel large sums to their cronies via Ukraine or whatever war or region they can convince us needs it more than we do. And the Democrats are not much better with the money laundering, though they do occasionally throw a meatless bone for us to fight over.
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AJ, yes the competition is a good thing. It’s very refreshing to see all the independent podcasts and small networks attracting attention.
And love the mug shots. :–)
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I don’t think that the people advocating raising the age for Social Security understand that not everyone has a desk job that they can do into their 70s. A lot of people work jobs that are tough physically. An obvious example is construction work, but nursing takes a lot of physical exertion at times as well. Many nurses end up with serious back problems.
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The memes have already started — its going to be a fun night on social media.
As I stated before, Trump is not charged with questioning the election – he’s charged with attempting to overturn the election through a conspiracy, lying and encouraging others to violate their oath. That’s a lot different than questioning the election.
Debra – I agree the neo-Cons who have run and still run the economic policy of the Republican party can’t be trusted with social programs nor can the Clinton part of the Democratic party. I’d trust Biden more than Clinton or even Obama when it comes to Social Security.
I’ll differ with you on the Ukraine war. In my 55 years of life, I’ve never supported any war yet I’m in the awkward position of not criticising and even supporting the Ukrainian side. For me it has to do with Enlightenment values and anti-authoritarianism
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A conservative Cdn prime minister once suggested raising the retirement age to 67. He didn’t get reelected. The most difficult opposition Putin faced is when he raised the retirement age from 60 to 65 for men and from 55 to 63 for women. Given the protests he changed it to 60 for women and made exceptions for men. The average life expectancy for men is 67 and falling. Obviously the French protested any change in retirement age but several European countries have raised it to 67. However, when you have 6-8 weeks vacation a year and far less stress at work coupled with an excellent health care system, two more years is okay, especially given the life expectancy is in the 80s for most Europeans.
I just checked life expectancy by country — the US is only 76 years – 73 for males and falling. Wow, raise retirement to 67 and the average male only has 6 years of retirement….Reminds me I just took out a book called Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism. It looks at the increase in suicide, opioids, and alcoholism in America. I expect my depressed and cynical view of the world won’t improve.
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I find the mug shots very sad.
But I also think of Colson’s transformation that came following Watergate and time spent in prison. May God be at work in all of those who are facing these charges. Prayers that justice will be done. If they are innocent, prayers that they will be acquitted. If not, prayers that they will acknowledge, take responsibility, and make use of the hard lessons God gives all of us in various circumstances.
The challenge with SS is how to fully fund it into the future. The discussion will have to be held at some point, no one wants to see SS changes, but it’s something that has to be figured out. Hard conversation, to be sure.
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“Can you motivate people with a thrice given message?”
The people are already motivated, like never before…
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