Today's Tik Tok

First, let's be clear on this whole "majority" thing:

• 76 million voters went with Trump
• 73 million voters went with Harris
• 83 million voters stayed home

So no - the majority of America did not vote for Trump.

@jjmcavoy Why are you not concerned? #election2024 #blackwomen #booktok #blackmen #politics #safespaces #kamalaharris #booktokispolitical ♬ original sound - JJ McAvoy

Heather Cox Richardson

People who are well informed (legacy press, "progressive" media, etc) voted 3-to-1 for Harris, while people who're fed a diet of mis-information and conspiracy fantasies (Twixter, DumFux News, OAN, Reddit, News Max, etc) voted almost 2-to-1 for Trump.

The audience for Wingnut Media approaches twice that for "Liberal" media.

The arithmetic is pretty simple on that one.

Out of 100 people watching DumFux News, 65 voted for Trump.

Out of 60 people watching MSNBC, 45 voted for Harris.

Don't tell me Harris failed, and that you know exactly why. She didn't, and you don't. So fuck you, James Carville.

The Dems ran a really good campaign. Americans were bamboozled into electing Trump and his MAGA clowns.

Consider a few anecdotes via AOC, who put up a constituent Zoom call, asking how people came to vote for both her and Trump.

Voter 1:

"You're both strong advocates for working people."

Voter 2:

"I was a little apprehensive about voting for Trump, so I voted for you to keep him from going too far."

 

Voter 3:

"You both care about me."

 

The main problem is:

knowing enough about something

to believe you're right,

and not enough

to know you're wrong.

Don't obey in advance

Holding Out Hope

Nebraska's Blue Dot

Earn What?

Nope. Not worth more effort than what I've already put into it.

I hate that Kamala has to suck up to republicans. pic.twitter.com/q2MSrJfWMF

— CaterinaMia (@CaterinaCatK) October 16, 2024

The Problem Of Late Deciders

I think most "undecideds" are rationalizing the fact that they don't pay attention, or they just follow the crowd, or they go with whatever sign they see last before they vote ... or they're straight up lying for whatever reason.

Conventional wisdom says there are actual honest-to-god people who wait forever to make a decision.

Two basic kinds of undecided voters, and they can be persuaded.

• I'm definitely gonna vote, but I'm not sure I'll vote for you
• I'm not sure I'm gonna vote, but if I do, I'll definitely vote for you

I've said it before - this can't be considered just another election where it doesn't really matter who we put in charge. It does matter. A lot.

In another demonstration of CNN's toxic neutrality, Tapper lets Johnson lie his ass off, and he never once questions the guy's evasions and word safaris and recitation of GOP ad copy.

And more - Mike Johnson is a believer in The Second Coming - something Christians have been predicting for 2000 years. Why the fuck would anybody put any stock in his predictions for an election?

Compare & Contrast

Obama started his 1st term under the worst economic conditions in 40 years, and he got us through it - in spite of Mitch McConnell's commitment to obstruct everything Obama tried to do.

Trump takes office in 2017 as we're coming out of that shit, and already well on the way back to real prosperity. Then along comes COVID-19, and he chokes - Trump froze at exactly the wrong time - exactly as Hillary warned us he would. He "led" the worst response to the pandemic in the whole fucking world. Enough people recognize what a fuckup he is, and he loses by almost 8 million votes in 2020.

Biden takes over in 2021 with an average of 3,000 - 5,000 Dead Americans every day.

We were hoarding beans and rice and powdered milk FFS. Lysol spray disinfectant was being peddled on the black market. They were using refrigerated semi trailers as morgues, burying the dead in mass graves, people were wiping their asses with coffee filters, and creating a huge demand for retrofit bidets.

Nobody doesn't know that Biden's an old fuck - he glitches on occasion - he dodders - I've always had problems with his style, and his policies have seemed like they were all over the place. But his experience and his ability to make the government work, and his leadership have so far saved us - pulling us back from the brink of a disaster that could've made The Great Depression look like a day at the beach.

Biden's people are knockin' it outa the park - over the bleachers and thru the parking lot and down the street.

Today's RVAT

Actually, from 3 years ago. This lady saw it, and it makes me wonder what took everybody else so damned long.

Listen To What They Don't Say

First, you accomplish nothing by trying to shame them. You can't shame someone who's deliberately and studiously abandoned their principles. These people have no honor - they've traded it away in order to gain power.

When "conservatives" talk, they're saying a lot that we don't hear.

And that's kinda the key. Listen for the subtext. Take whatever their literal pronouncement is, and flip it - or turn it inside out - in order to hear what they're really saying.

• They're not looking to avoid a constitutional crisis - they're trying to create one
• They're not saying we can't have someone as president who's constantly under investigation - they're saying you can't investigate the president (as long as that president is Republican of course)
• They told us the Dems were engaged in political theater when they impeached Trump for legit reasons, and then when they got a majority in the House, they went completely into theater mode like it's their fucking college major

They're playing the same dangerous game they've played for 50 years. ie: just keep hammering away with "government sucks". "They're all liars". "You can't trust the media".

There will be plenty of rubes who swallow every little turd you float down to them, but the main thing is to destroy the middle. Make that big squishy faction that thinks they're immune to the hype feel pure disdain for the whole mess. Get enough of them apathetic enough to withdraw from the process, and all you have to do is make sure your little gang of 20% - the rubes, the devotees, and the bluff-n-bluster thugs who keep the mob amped up - get them to show up, make lots of noise, and vote the way you need them to vote.

It's long been a ridiculous thing about American elections: on average, 50-60% of people eligible to vote can't be bothered to take part in a democratic system that they either pretend to be knee-jerk proud of, or who've swallowed the propaganda that it's all a sham anyway so why bother.

And voilà - all you need to "win" the election is 20% + 1.

On Getting Rat-Fucked

I don't know what it's like "out there". Like most Americans, I don't spend much time or energy looking at my country from the perspective of any other country.

I've tried to do that, and I know I should try to get back to doing that again, but also like most Americans now, it seems the problems here in USAmerica Inc are such that make it impossible to fight the fire from anywhere but inside the house. And we'll just have to trust that others can see our efforts, and provide the perspective we need to stay oriented and focused.

Of course, that assumes there are more good people who want to help - and who want to see us succeed - than there are who feel the need to tear us down.

Ever cautious though.

A little paranoia is, as always, in order. Because there's always some asshole who just wants to see it all crash and burn.

WaPo:

Suspicious robocall campaign warning people to ‘stay home’ spooks voters nationwide

An unidentified robocaller has placed an estimated 10 million calls in the past several weeks warning people to “stay safe and stay home,” spooking some Americans who said they saw it as an attempt to scare them away from the polls on Election Day.

The barrage of calls all feature the same short, recorded message: A computerized female voice says the message is a “test call” before twice encouraging people to remain inside. The robocalls, which have come from a slew of fake or unknown numbers, began over the summer and intensified in October, and now appear to have affected nearly every Zip code in the United States.

The reach and timing of the calls recently caught the attention of YouMail, a tech company that offers a robocall-blocking app for smartphones, as well as some of the country’s top telecom carriers, which determined from an investigation that the calls may be foreign in origin and sophisticated in their tactics. Data from YouMail shows that the calls have reached 280 of the country’s 317 area codes since the campaign began in the summer.

While the robocall does not explicitly mention the 2020 presidential election or issues that might affect voters’ well-being, including the coronavirus pandemic, it still threatens to create confusion, said Alex Quilici, YouMail’s chief executive. And it illustrates worrisome vulnerabilities in the country’s phone system, he said, that sophisticated actors could exploit.

“If you wanted to cause havoc in America for the elections, one way to do it is clearly robocalling,” Quilici said. “This whole thing is exposing [that] it can be very difficult to react quickly to a large calling volume campaign.”

When Zach McMullen received a call Monday telling him it was “time to stay home,” he assumed the warning was related to the coronavirus. His co-workers at an Atlanta bakery had received the same message, and they initially figured it was the city government enforcing its public health guidelines.

But the “robotic voice” gave McMullen pause, as did the second call — and then the third, and the fourth — delivering the same monotone message on the same day.

“I think they mean stay home and don't vote,” the 37-year-old concluded.

The torrent of calls illustrated the wide array of technologies that voters say are being used to convince and confuse them in the closing days of a dizzying presidential campaign. Four years after Russian agents exploited social media to spread divisive messages, Americans have come to expect similar efforts everywhere — including on their phones.

Robocalls long have represented a national scourge: Scammers contributed greatly to the 4 billion automated calls placed to Americans just last month, outwitting years of efforts by Washington regulators to crack down on the spam. But these tactics — dialing Americans en masse, sometimes illegally and without their consent — have taken on greater significance given the contentiousness of the 2020 presidential race. The same tools that have helped candidates and their allies reach their supporters properly also represent new avenues for falsehoods to spread widely — and without much visibility.

The “stay home” robocall appears to have bombarded Americans since the summer, sometimes yielding a roughly estimated half-million calls each day, according to data collected by YouMail.

USTelecom, a trade association for AT&T, Verizon and other telecom giants, has sought to trace and combat the campaign in recent days, according to Brian Weiss, the group’s spokesman. He said early evidence suggests that the calls are “possibly coming from Europe,” though they are sometimes routed through other foreign telecom providers.

The unidentified actor behind the robocall campaign also appears to have relied on other sophisticated tactics to ensure that the companies behind the country’s phone systems could not easily stop it, according to USTelecom and other robocall experts. That includes cycling through phone numbers, often using a number similar to the one owned by the person they are trying to dial, a practice known as spoofing.

Unlike most robocall scams, which seek to swindle Americans into returning the calls and surrendering sensitive information, the “stay home” campaign also has raised suspicions because the calls include no such effort.

“They’re usually threatening you to provide your Social Security number or something will happen to you,” said Giulia Porter, the vice president of marketing at TelTech, which owns the smartphone blocking app RoboKiller. “From this robocall, we can’t see anything that is indicating they’re actually trying to get something from you.”

The nature of the message gave many recipients across the country the impression that the cryptic alert sought to keep them from the polls. The concerns they expressed — that it might succeed in turning people off from voting — reflect long-standing fears that the pandemic could undermine participation in the 2020 election. Numerous states have expanded opportunities to vote by mail in response to safety concerns, and election administrators have taken pains to retrofit in-person voting for the coronavirus, supplying hand sanitizer and other safeguards.

“My reaction was this is likely an attempt to get people not to vote,” said Kevin Porman, a 40-year-old living outside Indianapolis.

For some recipients, there was no risk of that.

Laurie Chiambalero, a nurse in Philadelphia who has a Boston area code, said she answered the call out of a belief that it might be a friendly public health reminder.

“But when I got it a second time,” she said, “it really felt like it was telling me to stay indoors the next few days because of the election."

Chiambalero, however, said she’d already cast her ballot. “They’re not intimidating me,” she announced.

RVAT

There's still plenty of denial and deflection going on - and more than a little bit of admitting to not paying any attention to the process at all.

Still, they're people. They just want to make a little headway for themselves and for their families. Kinda like that part in the preamble about wanting to "...secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity..."

And as a reminder - as much for myself as for anyone else - they're Americans.

Even the rapid schmucks who act like Berserkers when it comes to partisan politics are friends and neighbors.

Republican Voters Against Trump

We're getting a little taste of what it must have been like in this country in the 1850s and 60s. The kind of real animus that leads to bloodshed and open revolt and formalized armed rebellion. And it's going to take an awful lot of really hard work to mend those fences.

I think Trump believes he's just kinda playing it out as a "strategy" to line his pockets, but there are those working under him - just beyond our view - whose lust for power is the same shit we've seen forever. The kinda of Greater Fool attitude that pushes to conquer the world even while knowing that men far better than them have tried to make that parlay for 500 centuries - and the world remains undefeated.

We have much to do.

RVAT

Republican Voters Against Trump

What's Wrong With Congress

Ryan Costello (R-PA06) went on All In last night and couldn't manage to say much of anything except that it all makes him sad.

MSNBC - Pressure building to expel Steve King
(MSNBC sucks green weenies when it comes to embedding their video)

BTW - I'm not interested in bashing the Dem for "soft-peddling" on this. Boyle made his point even though I'd like to hear it made in much sharper terms.

Costello (and Repubs in general) refuse to confront the problem. They speak in neutral terms - like Costello saying it's up to the people to vote Steve King out. He says the voters need to send King the message that they're not with him.

Here's the thing, Mr Costello - you have to put your money where your mouth is. You have to stand up in public, and in Congress, and tell King straight out: "I won't be voting with you on anything. I won't support or endorse or co-sponsor anything you propose. Ever. And Mr Speaker, until you do something about Mr King, I won't be voting with the Republican caucus on much of anything either."

Stop blaming his asshole constituents for a problem they refuse to solve when you refuse even to help them identify the problem as a problem.

You're a leader - so fucking lead already.

Robin DiAngelis - On White Supremacy  and why being nice isn't going to end racism:

The Whole Standing Army Thing

The debate had begun to rage as I entered high school - All-Volunteer vs Conscription-Augmented.

We're seeing the reality of what both the Founders and the Wacky Hippie Alarmists tried to warn us about.

The Brookings Inst:

The gap in civilian and military experiences in the United States over the 17 years since 9/11 has led to persuasive, persistent, and unrealistic myths that have eroded faith in civilian leadership of defense policy. Among these myths are the superior virtue of military over other kinds of public service; that battlefield experience is the most authoritative source of military policy expertise; and that an exclusively civilian background is inadequate for strategic defense leadership. In the United States, these myths are nurtured and perpetuated by both military and civilian communities and affect general public opinion as well as the attitudes of national security professionals. These myths are also corrosive. Unless they are acknowledged, addressed, and challenged, future civilian leaders may struggle to control the use of force—a profound problem for a democratic system. Downgrading civilian leadership will weaken U.S. national security and the military itself.


It's easy for a Boomer like me to have a knee-jerk reaction against reinstating the draft.  "My war" was Viet Nam, and by the time it was my turn to sweat the lottery, I knew it was already very unlikely that I'd ever be anywhere near the joint, even if I hadn't beaten the 4-1 or 5-1 odds against being selected in the first place (my magic number was 239 in a year when they were "only taking" 1-95).

Anyway, fast forward to other wars of choice - Afghanistan and Iraq - and we see a very familiar variation on the theme of how fucked it all gets if we're not careful. 

During Viet Nam, the draft system got totally corrupted because the "privileged white" kids who had access to lawyers and doctors and other influencers could practically opt out of the draft while the poorer kids - ie: black kids, and others from the lower rungs of the socio-economic ladder - ended up being way over-representated.

In the 2000s, you start out with a really solid military - fairly representative of the American society as a whole. But once it's clear that Afghanistan and Iraq are turning sour, the military starts to run dry (because people do wise up eventually), and we get a lower quality product as a result of the same piss poor management that gets us into stoopid-ass wars to begin with.

I won't recount all the shitty things we've done to our people in uniform (and continue to do to them). Suffice to say that I hope we've relearned the lessons of the founders - that we understand that it's a bad idea to let anybody with guns and tanks and airplanes have too much unchecked power to make the decisions on how they use all that shit.

And the draft? No matter how you try to unrig it, there will always be major problems with a conscripted military. But if we allow the military to be part of a Plutocratic system of government (that a professional military always pushes towards), we let ourselves in for problems that pose the same level of existential threat to the democracy that having no military at all would pose.

Any professional military - standing army or otherwise - is a danger to democratic self-governance.

I think it all goes back to the basics of how we build in the checks and balances. The system that makes sure we maintain the appropriate separations of power. 

And all of that depends on a well-informed public.

You Are Not So Smart

David McRaney's podcast looks at rationalization - particularly how we rationalize our way around an innate fear of change, and how that explains a few things about why 35 - 45% of us seem to be OK with Cult45.

A Closer Look

tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors:

Pundits have told us since that fateful day when Comrade Preznint Stupid won the election, a large number of white, working class Dims had changed lanes. The Villagers told us that these voters so hated Crooked Killery (“but her E-MAIL!!1!) that they voted for Hair Führer. The very serious media people told us that these voters were deserters and that they must be appeased for the Dims to ever win anything again.

Looks like that might be BS.

Shocking, I know.

BTW - tengrain is so good, he inspires his blog followers to come up with the bestly brilliantest nicknames.

Everybody - say hello to Pee Wee Goebbels:

A Pox On All Their Houses

Keep in mind The Daily Beast has been very much like that one mean girl who is kinda the champion mean girl, pretending not to be a mean girl at all, while constantly stirring the shit between rival cliques of mean girls, in order to assert her supremacy as Queen O' The Mean, even as she operates from a position of stealthy independence. 

They are less so now that Tina Brown is gone - but still - this could easily be an exercise in cat-fighting, which seems altogether fitting since that was pretty much the main objective of Russian Fuckery last year.

I've had this whole thing rattling around in my head for quite a while, and much of it fits with everybody's suspicions that The Bernie Bros and The HillBots and The Evil Duopoly crowd (and and and) were all stoked by the Russian rat-fuckers working overtime just to disrupt the process. 

Anyway, this piece has value - I just have to remind myself to check my Confirmation Bias regularly.

The Daily Beast:

Moscow’s attempts to cultivate America’s far-left long predate the presidency of Vladimir Putin. The Kremlin, according to available evidence, donated more funds per capita to the U.S. Communist Party than any other communist claque during the Soviet period, when Moscow’s intelligence operations against the “main adversary” involved recruiting agents of influence and spies of a progressive background who were sympathetic to the Soviet cause. But the past 18 months have seen a noted spike in information warfare aimed at gulling the Bernie Bros and Occupy-besotted alternative-media set, which saw Clinton as more of a political danger than it did Trump.

Perhaps the starkest case in point is Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein and her constituency. In December 2015, the Kremlin feted Stein by inviting her to the gala celebrating the 10-year anniversary of Kremlin-funded propaganda network RT. Over a year later, it remains unclear who paid for Stein’s trip to Moscow and her accommodations there. Her campaign ignored multiple questions on this score. We do know, however, that Stein sat at the same table as both Putin and Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn, Trump’s soon-to-be national security adviser. She further spoke at an RT-sponsored panel, using her presence to criticize the U.S.’s “disastrous militarism.” Afterward, straddling Moscow’s Red Square, Stein described the panel as “inspiring,” going on to claim that Putin, whom she painted as a political novice, told her he “agree[d]” with her “on many issues.”

Stein presents herself as a champion of the underclass and the environment, and an opponent of the surveillance state and corporate media, and yet she seemed to take pleasure in her marriage of true minds with a kleptocratic intelligence officer who levels forests and arrests or kills critical journalists and invades foreign countries. Their true commonality, of course, is that both Putin and Stein are dogged opponents of U.S. foreign policy.

Silence Can Be Deadly

When there's an incident of somebody "going off", I try to remember that such behavior is often the language of repression (MLK's "language of the unheard") - it's a reaction to thinking you've been ignored for too long; or told to shut up; or that your needs are not being met and nobody seems to give a fuck, so "dammit, somebody's gonna hear about it one way or another".

New Republic:

Another week, another racist rant from a Trump supporter going viral.

This time it’s the white woman at the Michaels crafts store in Chicago, who, after she was apparently asked to buy a $1 bag for her bigger items, proceeded to berate black employees, with an onlooker capturing the incident on video. The ranting woman repeatedly claimed she’d been “discriminated against” because of her race and presidential preference (“I voted for Trump—so there”) while attacking the “black women” workers and calling one “an animal.”

This was only the latest of the viral videos showing white Trump supporters going off in public places—most notably, a racist ranter at a Starbucks in Coral Gables, Florida, and a sexist Trumpeter on a Delta flight. There’s been widespread agreement about what these videos mean: “more evidence that Trump supporters are emboldened by his victory,” as the website Mic called the Chicago ordeal. And on the surface, they do look (and sound!) like the fulfillment of countless campaign predictions about Trump normalizing bigotry, evidence of the “trickle-down racism” that Mitt Romney, of all people, warned us about. “Trump victory would embolden the bigots,” CNN warned on November 7, summing up the long-running meme.

There’s unquestionably some truth to that. But what the viral videos of Trump supporters gone wild reveal is actually more complicated—and fascinating. The closer you look, the more you listen, the clearer it is that these bigoted ranters aren’t so much empowered as they are fragile and pathetic. And what’s gone largely unnoticed is the reactions that the other people in the videos have to their bigoted ravings—reactions that hint at something to be kinda, sorta hopeful about—that non-racist whites have also been woken up by the Trumpian surge of white nationalism.

Important also to remember the White Anxiety angle when we're talking about Repressed thinking.

What We're Up Against

(keep in mind what happens to a segment of any population when it's been isolated for a long enough period of time)

Single-Thread explanations are not very useful when you're trying to figure out "what went wrong".

That said, there's something very compelling about this from AlterNet:

As the aftermath of the election of Donald Trump is being sorted out, a common theme keeps cropping up from all sides: "Democrats failed to understand white, working-class, fly-over America.”

Trump supporters are saying this. Progressive pundits are saying this. Talking heads across all forms of the media are saying this. Even some Democratic leaders are saying this. It doesn’t matter how many people say it, it is complete bullshit. It is an intellectual/linguistic sleight of hand meant to throw attention away from the real problem. The real problem isn’t east coast elites who don’t understand or care about rural America. The real problem is rural America doesn’t understand the causes of their own situations and fears and they have shown no interest in finding out. They don’t want to know why they feel the way they do or why they are struggling because they don’t want to admit it is in large part because of choices they’ve made and horrible things they’ve allowed themselves to believe.

--and--

At some point during the discussion, “That’s your education talking,” will be said, derogatorily, as a general dismissal of everything I said. They truly believe this is a legitimate response because to them education is not to be trusted. Education is the enemy of fundamentalism because fundamentalism, by its very nature, is not built on facts.

--the kicker:

Everyone who isn’t just like them has been sold to them as a threat and they’ve bought it hook, line, and grifting sinker. Since there are no self-regulating mechanisms in their belief systems, these threats only grow over time. Since facts and reality don’t matter, nothing you say to them will alter their beliefs. "President Obama was born in Kenya, is a secret member of the Muslim Brotherhood who hates white Americans and is going to take away their guns." I feel ridiculous even writing this, it is so absurd, but it is gospel across large swaths of rural America. Are rural, Christian, white Americans scared? You’re damn right they are. Are their fears rational and justified? Hell no. The problem isn’t understanding their fears. The problem is how to assuage fears based on lies in closed-off fundamentalist belief systems that don’t have the necessary tools for properly evaluating the fears.

 So if you just gotta have something simple to hang onto, here it is: 

You can say the system is broken all you want, but it's worse than that - the voter is broken.

So you can make all the noise you wanna make about how "Hillary didn't make the case" and "Hillary didn't connect with the voters she needed to connect with" and and and - but what that all boils down to is a complaint that she shoulda spent more time and energy catering to a giant load of Middle-Class Middle-Aged White Christian Men who are listening to absolutely nothing you, or I, or "your Libtard FemiNazi candidate" has to say about anything.

Fellow Travelers

Hey Trump/Pence voters - these are your guys.

Then this guy starts trying to say the Nazi's didn't intentionally gas 6 million Jews, another man agrees. I ask if they are together. "No" pic.twitter.com/42Iy10ttyW

— Gadi Schwartz (@GadiNBC) October 6, 2016

hat tip = Tweeter @GadiNBC 

Not saying there are no loonies on the left, but dang - don't you have to wonder just a little about who you're willing to hang out with, and why they're enthused about your candidate?

Today's Tweet

HuffPo:

The entire event promoting his hotel ― carried in it's entirety by all three cable news channels ― lasted more than 30 minutes. Trump proceeded to spend approximately 30 seconds blaming Hillary Clinton for inspiring his quest to find Obama’s birth certificate.

Ashleigh Banfield on CNN is completely fed up with Trump's "birther crap" 🔥🔥 pic.twitter.com/4AvcEckaAb

— John Whitehouse (@existentialfish) September 16, 2016

So Trump did the usual politician thing - at least, the usual Trump thing, by inviting the inference that Hillary caused the problem, so he had to fix it.  It's classic - the arsonist taking credit for pulling the fire alarm.

It really was just a free ad for Trump's hotel in DC.  The thing went on for 30 minutes and there was nothing but a tour of the hotel and some pander-fawning of Medal Recipients, ending with Trump spending 30 seconds "renouncing" his birtherism bullshit. 

Finally - FINALLY - the Press Poodles are starting to get a little hip to the simple fact that they actually are the suckers Trump is playing them for, and that some of us have been trying to tell 'em about for years.

And yet, The Trump Scampaign® marches on.

Fun Facts: 
The cheapest room at the Trump DC hotel is almost $400 a night
The Penthouse is rumored to go for $100,000 per night, with a 5-night minimum
Of course, if you have to ask how much it costs, then you can't afford it anyway - so fuck off, loser.