BURNPIT: U.S. Politics, August 2022

Here we go...

More like bum pit

Good afternoon!

oh shit, i forgot it was a new month.

we did it!!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWf1tMa5Ia8

let's see if Biden still has the 'rona on Sept 1st

^^^ should've been thread title

Trump-backed Michigan gubernatorial candidate Tudor Dixon another one for the 'Politicos With Pynchon-esque Names' list.

How/why is this guy re-electable?

NEW: On the The Regular Joe Show, Sen. Ron. Johnson (R-WI) argues for eliminating entitlements: "Social Security and Medicare, if you qualify, you just get it no matter what the cost... We ought to turn everything into discretionary spending so it's all evaluated." pic.twitter.com/bE1KUb6uJ5

— Heartland Signal (@HeartlandSignal) August 2, 2022

Pretty wild for a Senator to not know that you pay into Medicare and Social Security and that the latter is reverse means-tested based on what you paid in.

wau

I've seen enough: in a huge victory for the pro-choice side, the Kansas constitutional amendment to remove protections of abortion rights fails.

— Dave Wasserman (@Redistrict) August 3, 2022

what, i thought I just saw the opposite reported

Turnout exceeding expectations.

From secretary of state's 7 p.m. press conference — a plausible 50% turnout in the election today. That considerably exceeds the 36% turnout previously predicted. #ksleg

— Clay Wirestone (@ClayWires) August 3, 2022

Extremely good to see.

Nice!

MSNBC makes the official call: No wins.

Yup, AP as well. Nice to see it.

Looks like a blowout too

That is good to see.

It'll be a while until we get voter file data on this election, but I think there's a chance this was the largest partisan turnout advantage in a high turnout election that Democrats have enjoyed as long as I've followed election data

— Nate Cohn (@Nate_Cohn) August 3, 2022

That’s re Kansas abortion referendum

jfc, missouri democrats went for the one with Busch in her name rather than the marine who actually sounds like he cared

In other news let’s create a “phone wiper” meme and find them all and ask them why they needed that. “Congressperson, are you a phone-wiper?” “What do you think about Jan 6 phone-wipers?” “Are phone-wipers trustable?” “Tell me about your wiping.”

Trump would want it this way. “People are talking about wiping, it’s gross”

https://www.kansascity.com/news/politics-government/election/article263838597.html

Ha, remember when that asshole was one of Greenwald's pet causes?

No, but I'm afraid to check.

Yeah, scroll back in the GG thread and you'll find it. I can't remember whether he managed to rope Taibbi into defending the scumbag with him, but he was all in for a little while.

https://english.alarabiya.net/News/gulf/2022/08/02/US-approves-sale-of-Patriot-missiles-to-Saudi-Arabia-THAAD-system-missiles-for-UAE

Business as usual. Tell me again how Biden is too tough on Saudi Arabia

get rid of all the gerrymandering and we've got ourselves an election folks!

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/generic-ballot/

don't know what thread to put this but it's quite good

Wow. Sandy Hook parents' lawyer is revealing that Alex Jones' lawyers sent him the contents of Jones' phone BY MISTAKE.

"12 days ago, your attorneys messed up and sent me a digital copy of every text" Jones has sent for years.

"You know what perjury is?" the lawyer asks.

— Ben Collins (@oneunderscore__) August 3, 2022

There's a dedicated Alex Jones thread trending, it's already there. Alex yelling "there's your Perry Mason moment," evidently unaware that it actually was one, was epic.

New — As Sinema stays mum, business groups and Rs lobby her to sink or change reconciliation bill. She asked a business group yesterday about whether the 15% tax provision was “written in a way that’s bad.” “It gave me hope,” official says. w/@arogDC https://t.co/fFNCGoKk40

— Manu Raju (@mkraju) August 3, 2022

"Is this written in a way that's bad?"

A question a child might ask, but not a childish question.

For fucks sake if she tanks this

Narrator: She did indeed tank the bill, but wore a fabulous dress while doing so.

seems like the main thing she wants is to drop the carried interest fix, which sucks but isn't outside the realm of possiblity

“I haven’t seen that,” @SenFeinstein replies when I ask about Kansas voters overwhelmingly endorsing abortion rights.

I then explained.

“Oh, I did see that,” Feinstein said. “It didn’t surprise me.”

— Matt Laslo (@MattLaslo) August 3, 2022

jeez. so she was the only one who wasn’t surprised by the magnitude of the margin and turnout in Kansas, while also not hearing about the result, while also being 168 years old

No wonder she’s a senator, that’s outstanding and hard to pull off all at once

She was with John Brown in Bleeding Kansas

McConnell Reclaims Senate Majority After Convincing Dianne Feinstein She’s Always Been Republican https://t.co/pxQFnYFZbp pic.twitter.com/ngN4NfalO4

— The Onion (@TheOnion) August 1, 2022

yeah but

fwiw, in the Meijer/Gibbs primary with the DCCC ads "criticizing" Gibbs for being way too conservative and too aligned with Trump, Gibbs ended up winning, 52% to 48%. close one

let's see if the Dem's gamble pays off

I think the following propositions are true:

1. Dems should absolutely not be spending money to boost fascists.

2. The Republican voters would have selected these people anyway.

RNC links up with ‘Stop the Steal’ advocates to train poll workers
Recordings of recruitment “summits” show party officials working with Cleta Mitchell and other leaders of Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election

"2. The Republican voters would have selected these people anyway."

it's unclear if that was the case. I think those ads boosted turnout for Gibbs, he was polling behind Meijer until recently.

Every time I see Cleta Mitchell’s name I think of the Seinfeld episode with Mulva.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/will-3-pro-impeachment-house-republicans-survive-tuesdays-primaries/

Meijer, the scion of the eponymous Midwestern grocery chain family, is hoping his sizable financial advantage can save him. As of July 13, Meijer had raised $2.8 million, dwarfing the $484,000 Gibbs had brought in, and Meijer has used that money to both criticize President Biden and attack Gibbs. Meijer has lambasted Gibbs for recently moving to western Michigan from California (although Gibbs is originally from Lansing), and he’s also portrayed Gibbs as the Democrats’ “handpicked candidate” in light of the DCCC’s recent ads. Meijer has also benefited from about $3 million in outside spending, according to OpenSecrets. But with no recent polling to go on, Meijer’s fate in this race is unclear.

That respected news division Yahoo News.

"Too many people are studying history! Shut it down." — a conservative

There is a massive oversupply of history PhDs and the obvious solution is for at least the bottom quarter of programs to shut down, maybe the bottom half or bottom two-thirds. Question for academic tweeps: Is this happening? Is anyone discussing it? https://t.co/OhDSNvQmfC

— Megan McArdle (@asymmetricinfo) August 29, 2022

I dunno, seems like you could still employ history Ph.Ds in the private sector--ghostwriting Bill O'Reilly's "Killing" books and whatnot.

gee Megan I wonder if there are any economic or ideological reasons universities have embraced a system that creates a pool of extremely cheap labor plus some extra tuition money on top, regardless of the long-term outcomes?

those who can’t earn from history are doomed to retweet it

McArdle is a ~spooooooky ghooooooooooooooost~

I'm sure she haunts some of her former professors, at any rate.

“tweeps”?

Tracer

tweeps = twitter peeps, which shows you what a 00s blogosphere relic she is

anyway, I retract my earlier post, of course Mcardle knows that neoliberalizing unis culminates in selective austerity for anything that doesn't aid capital; that is the point

Sounds like Gender Studies majors are this year's Welfare Mothers. I keep hearing how they're bankrupting America by running up student debt and cashing in on government handouts to buy drugs. You'd think as professional grifters, Republicans could come up with more plausible schemes than people having multiple babies or getting advanced degrees in order to fund their drug habits, but I guess they're afraid of shitting to close to where they eat.

gender studies majors
make better gaugers

Gender studies majors
Throw better ragers
Hey birth person,
Hey birth person!
I'm thirsty!

News possibly of interest only to me and Alfred:

NBC's Meet The Press Shakeup Puts Chuck Todd In Jeopardy

The executive producer of Meet the Press, who NBC announced last week is ”shifting” over to the streaming side, was pushed out amid the Sunday politics show’s ratings woes, two people familiar with the matter told Confider.

John Reiss, who had been EP for the last eight years, was officially punted over to the NBC News Now streaming service, and David P. Gelles, a long-time CNN producer who helped develop the now-defunct CNN+ streamer, was parachuted in to help fix the sinking show, which is down 21 percent in total viewership and 24 percent in the key advertising demographic compared to last year—more than any of the other Sunday politics shows.

Gelles’ first order of business, multiple sources said, is deciding what to do about Chuck Todd, who despite recently signing a two-year extension, as Confider has learned, has baffled many at NBC with how long he’s remained atop the struggling show.

NBC White House correspondent Kristen Welker is being groomed to replace Todd, multiple insiders with knowledge of the matter said, and is expected to take on more hosting duties as the midterm elections approach.

Todd was already demoted once this year when his Meet the Press Daily broadcast on MSNBC was relegated to NBC’s streaming service. And earlier this year, with NBC Universal CEO Jeff Shell in attendance, Todd was brutally roasted by Trevor Noah at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. “How are you doing?” the Daily Show host asked Todd. “I’d ask a follow-up, but I know you don’t know what those are.”

According to 30 Rock insiders, these incidents have all demonstrated how Todd remains unpopular with viewers and critics and that the Meet the Press franchise has been overexposed.

“At what point does anyone have the balls to say ‘Maybe the problem is the face of it’?” one Meet the Press source wondered. The show has thus far been unable to replace its booking producer, who recently left for Meta, according to sources familiar with the situation.

The lingering questions about Todd’s future atop the Sunday show have garnered comparisons to the long, drawn-out, messy saga of former Meet the Press host David Gregory, who was ultimately pushed out in 2014 and replaced with Todd.

“After being the EP of the Sunday broadcast for eight years, at the end of his contract, John Reiss was looking for a different opportunity within the MTP franchise,” a NBC News spokesperson emailed Confider. “Kristen Welker is the co-host of Meet the Press NOW on NBC News NOW and has been since the show launched. And she and Chuck have been leading NBC News NOW’s election specials all year long.”

those who can’t earn from history are doomed to retweet it

― Tracer Hand, Tuesday, August 30, 2022

Underrated post!

I’d love to be a fly in the room while Chuck Todd skims this story on his phone

Maybe the problem is the fucking existence of shows like MTP.

A few times Todd has said something like, "Well, I can't ask hard questions or people wouldn't come on my show."

Those shows were designed to cheaply fill up 'dead' Sunday morning time slots and to bulk out the 'public service' licensing requirements for broadcasters. They've always sucked.

Meanwhile, this is awful: It's 100 degrees in Mississippi and Jackson (the biggest city, the capital, and 80 percent Black) has almost no water.

https://mississippitoday.org/2022/08/29/jackson-water-system-fails-emergency/

Of course, the white Republican governor will probably blame it on the Black Democratic mayor. But the real problem appears to be a lack of state funding. Anyway, it's horrible.

AND the fucking state has a "historic" budget surplus jfc this country

https://mississippitoday.org/2022/07/24/mississippi-historic-state-revenue/

weird how you can get a budget surplus when you don't do jack shit for your people

They're going to spend it on the public schools.

Whoa, Biden is saying we need to FUND the POLICE, not defund them, no, but FUND the POLICE

I repeat, we need to FUND THE POLICE

outside the box

Biden closes by urging voters to send Shapiro to Senate, and elect "that big guy" as Gov - reversing the offices Shapiro and Fetterman are actually running for

— Jonathan Tamari (@JonathanTamari) August 30, 2022

Correction: Biden referred to Fetterman as "that big ol' boy"

— Jonathan Tamari (@JonathanTamari) August 30, 2022

see it’s both sides really pic.twitter.com/yVJh5VnfuM

— Andy Downing (@andydowning33) August 29, 2022

pass. https://t.co/1XHwOkJYah

— Monica Lewinsky (she/her) (@MonicaLewinsky) August 30, 2022

We’ve terminated college accreditors that allowed colleges – like ITT and Corinthian – to defraud borrowers.
@usedgov will also publish an annual list of colleges that leave students with unmanageable debt so that students can avoid these programs.

— President Biden (@POTUS) August 29, 2022

seems good!

Those shitty for-profit colleges are/were all over Virginia. Virginia’s state laws were notoriously lax and during the 2000s they sprang up like weeds and died just as quickly after the Great Recession.

50 pro-worker actions by the Biden administration:

https://www.epi.org/publication/biden-first-18-months/

alaska's congressperson is a democrat

Breaking: Mary Peltola (D) defeats Sarah Palin (R) in the #AKAL special election.

— Dave Wasserman (@Redistrict) September 1, 2022

I was waiting to see how that came out. A pleasant surprise.

What's the over/under on how long it takes Grizzly Mama to claim fraud?

whoa

was that expected??

it was ranked choice for the first time, so i think nobody really knew, but it seems like a surprise to me.

probably the begich (the other republican, who didn't make it into the run off) would have beaten peltola. but it was palin vs a democrat, and 50% (!!!) of begich voters refused to rank palin second.

Voters who went for Nick Begich split as follows in the final round of ranked choice voting:

50% Palin
29% Peltola
21% exhausted ballots

I recreated what we were shown here: pic.twitter.com/wikJGjdWcd

— Taniel (@Taniel) September 1, 2022

All three are running again in November, right?

alaska's congressperson is a democrat

Breaking: Mary Peltola (D) defeats Sarah Palin (R) in the #AKAL special election.
— Dave Wasserman (@Redistrict) September 1, 2022
― 𝔠𝔞𝔢𝔨 (caek), Wednesday, August 31, 2022 7:07 PM (forty minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

You love to see it

I really do

I know Palin is a god awful candidate but wow

damn, that is some good ol' fashioned good news, and i also love to see it

Lol

The amount of land mass represented by House Democrats just went up by 104%. #AKAL

— Dave Wasserman (@Redistrict) September 1, 2022

Hell of a thread eh Joe

Police in Columbus, Ohio shot and killed an unarmed black man who was laying in bed today. They shot him within one second of opening the bedroom door. His name Donovan Lewis.

— Erick Bellomy 🏳️‍🌈 (@erickbellomy) August 31, 2022

Quite the trend in O-HI-O

Got A Thread For That: Ongoing U.S Police Brutality and Corruption Discussion Thread

Belongs here too

Yeah, but this thread's probably getting locked tomorrow.

Why is everyone so mean?? US Politics: September 2022