Unsightly Mental Blemishes

I suspect Rep Buddy Carter (R-GA) may find himself being primaried in 2026 as punishment for consorting with the enemy:

I submit that Congress would be more effective if every member slept in their office because there is inherent value in getting to know people across the aisle as people rather than as just the opposition.

Some folks might decry this practice as “rent-free living.” However, if it maximizes Congress’s productivity and camaraderie while respecting professional boundaries with staff, then it is a step worth taking. [WaPo]

Work with, exercise with, it all leads to socialize with – and realize that your political enemy who reputedly eats babies and laughs at God is actually … just another human being, warts and all. Combine that with a Republican Party still trying to accelerate to the right, with a leadership built on the myths about Democrats, not the reality, and it seems unlikely Rep Carter will be in Congress all that much longer.

Bombogenesis:

To understand bombogenesis, you need to first remember the basics of high and low pressure. High pressure tends to clear the skies and calm the winds. Low pressure tends to pull in wetter air and gusty winds. Thus, the higher the pressure, the calmer it’ll be, and conversely, the lower the pressure, the stormier it’ll be.

Pressure? Yes, we measure the state of the atmosphere in millibars. “Static” or standard low pressure is about 1013 mb. Low-pressure systems tend to be in the upper 900 mb range.

As a storm forms, we refer to its “genesis” to borrow the biblical term – it is growing. If a storm grows quickly, it’s called rapid intensification. If a storm’s central pressure drops more than 24 mb in 24 hours, that’s bombogenesis. [krem2]

Sounds a bit silly. Noted in this Ryan Hall video.

The Portable Door (2023) is a whimsical little story concerning starting a new job that happens to involve goblins. It’s all very silly, and then it comes to an end.

The problem? There’s no real risk for the characters’ choices. Think of Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981). Right from the start is a man driven by his ambitious moral choices in one framework, and how they collide with those of another – and the presence of the woman he loves as the background to it. By the time the Ark is opened, the audience is quivering in near-panic.

But this? A colorless Brit with magical powers that he hasn’t earned, another Brit in a fast track to division leadership, oddball management… it may be worth a laugh, but that’s it in the end.

So there’s a reason I’ve never heard of this movie: there’s nothing memorable about it.

Too bad.

From WaPo:

The protests erupted into Parliament’s debating chamber Thursday when Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke, a 22-year-old lawmaker for Te Pati Maori, or the Maori Party, was asked to state how her party was voting on the controversial Treaty Principles Bill, which seeks to reinterpret New Zealand’s foundational agreement between the British Crown and the Maori people.

Maipi-Clarke used the opportunity to perform a haka, or war dance. She tore up a copy of the bill in front of its author, as members of Parliament (MPs) from the Maori, Green and Labour parties, and people in the public gallery, joined in the haka.

Yeah!

Professor Richardson notes:

The protections of the system FDR ushered in—the banking and equities regulation that killed crony finance, for example—are now under attack by the very sort of movement he warned against. Whether today’s lawmakers are as willing as their predecessors were to stand against that movement remains unclear, especially as Trump tries to bring lawmakers to heel, but Thune’s victory in the [election of Majority Leader of the] Senate today and the widespread Republican outrage over Trump’s appointment of Gaetz and Hegseth are hopeful signs.

And what if Senator Thune (R-SD) is trying to bring future President Trump to heel? Consider this from Erick Erickson on Gaetz:

Gaetz has burned every possible bridge in the House of Representatives, and his colleagues want him gone. The House Ethics Committee intended to vote in two days to release its investigation into Gaetz and human trafficking. Only one Republican on the Ethics Committee needed to vote yes, and that would happen. If the Senate holds hearings, that will still come up. Gaetz’s departure last night killed the investigation. That suggests that this nomination is to provide pre-text for Gaetz’s resignation, and the subtext is a congressional finding that Gaetz possibly engaged in sex trafficking of young women.

What if Thune sent the nomination to committee – and they sat on it? Trump doesn’t get his lapdog, and Thune sends a message: Nominations of grownups only.

The Senator was elected in 2005, so he’s pre-MAGA. Interesting times.

Or perhaps Trump sees Gaetz as a liability. hmmm hmmm hmmmm.

Cat state:

Quantum superpositions are typically fragile and fleeting, but one such state has now been maintained for a record-breaking 23 minutes. Keeping quantum states stable for this long could help make more robust quantum devices, or lead to discoveries of strange new effects in quantum physics.

This long-lived phenomenon is known as a cat state, named for Erwin Schrödinger’s famous thought experiment where a cat is placed in a box under such peculiar circumstances that it becomes impossible to tell whether it is living or dead. Cat states are superpositions where a quantum object can be in several mutually exclusive states, but it is impossible to tell which one it actually occupies – it effectively simultaneously occupies them all. [“Quantum ‘Schrödinger’s cat’ survives for a stunning 23 minutes,” Karmela Padavic-Callaghan, NewScientist (9 November 2024, paywall)]

It’s been a week since my last update on the price of DJT, the public stock of Mr Trump’s social media company, when the price/share was $27.69, and it had just dropped 30% in the wake of his victory in the 2024 Presidential Election. Have investors recovered their enthusiasm for the once and future President?

Hardly. While I’m sure the zealous base are convinced it’ll return to dizzying heights soon enough, and it may, the more experienced amateur and professional investors are staying away, as illustrated in the above one month chart.

I can’t help but wonder if Mr Trump’s choices for important government positions are dismaying for them. While the choice of former Governor Mike Huckabee (R-AR) as ambassador to Israel might be simply a way to get a fellow grifter out of Mr Trump’s hair, such choices as Waltz, Gaetz, Gabbard, Rubio, and others may be big red flags that Mr Trump’s judgment is deeply suspect, if only for how he puts control of the House at risk by satisfying the ambitions of House members. There is more than just that here, but that’ll be revealed in the near future, I’m sure, and I don’t care to speculate here.

All this may tempt the ambitious investor to gamble. Between investors from MAGA-world risking all, the more sober investor risking a nickel, perhaps on the downside, and the unknown maneuvering of world leaders eager to buy the favor of a world power about to replace a strong leader with a weak leader, it’s very hard to say where this stock will go. I certainly think the fundamentals are terrible.

I’ll repeat from earlier posts on this thread: I’m not putting any skin into this game.

I will be having surgery on my shoulder in the next few days, and I’m not sure when I’ll be able to resume posting.

Perimenopause:

Perimenopause means “around menopause” and refers to the time during which your body makes the natural transition to menopause, marking the end of the reproductive years. Perimenopause is also called the menopausal transition. …

The level of estrogen — the main female hormone — in your body rises and falls unevenly during perimenopause. Your menstrual cycles may lengthen or shorten, and you may begin having menstrual cycles in which your ovaries don’t release an egg (ovulate). You may also experience menopause-like symptoms, such as hot flashes, sleep problems and vaginal dryness. Treatments are available to help ease these symptoms. [Mayo Clinic]

Noted in “Perimenopausal women are ‘enraged’ — and no longer keeping quiet,” Rachelle Bergstein, WaPo:

[Comedian Samantha Bee] had been suffering for over a year, she admitted. Bee, who debuted her limited-run off-Broadway show “How to Survive Menopause” in New York City this October, said she’d been scared she “was losing [her] mind … I was like, ‘something terrible is happening to me.’”

But the doctor offered another explanation. “She was like, ‘Hold the phone!’” Bee said. “‘How old are you? Oh honey, you’re in perimenopause.’”

Rep Seth Moulton (D-MA), age 46, speaks out on transgender sports, which may require a spot of searching on the reader’s part of this article:

Democratic Rep. Seth Moulton from Massachusetts said on Sunday that he stood by his opinion on transgender athletes, saying that Democrats are out of touch with majority of Americans.

Moulton, who recently won his reelection bid unopposed, told New York Times that the Democratic party should shift its approach to transgender issues, and that as a parent, he does not want his daughters “getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete.” [CNN/Politics]

Look for a few people to start shrieking bigot, as the Pavlovian training kicks in – but I’m not sure how many.

Rep Moulton is certainly young enough to be a long-time leader of the Democrats. This part is encouraging, too:

During the interview with CNN, Moulton said that he’s not an expert on this issue but is willing to engage in thoughtful debate.

My bold, and kudos.

Right-wing pundit and radio host Erick Erickson has an important message for Democrats and the left, and it’s Honesty Is The Best Policy.

You lost, in part, because your side of the aisle engaged in a cover-up of the sitting President’s cognitive decline. His staff, Cabinet Secretaries, members of Congress, and senior members of the press with access to Biden told everyone he was fine. They lied, and Biden got exposed on a debate stage.

If you are not willing to hold your own side accountable for engaging in a coverup of the President’s decline, don’t expect Republicans to take you seriously about holding Donald Trump accountable.

In 2008, I launched an effort to find, identify, and drive from politics those people who were leaking damaging information about Sarah Palin to the press from inside the McCain campaign. Nichole Wallace herself told me my effort pushed her out of Republican politics.

If you’re still feeling bewildered by the loss of the Democrats in the recent elections – I’m not so much bewildered as frustrated with myself for underestimating the effects of the immigration problems^[1], the utter botch the Democrats made of the management of the transgender issue under President Obama^[2], and the misjudgment of simply making Harris the nominee when Biden dropped out, although exactly what they were supposed to do is not clear to me – then give this Erickson column a read^[3]. It seems mostly spot on, outside of the religious bit, which I consider so irrelevant that I skipped it after reading a couple of sentences.

The American public needs honesty and adherence to the tenets of liberal democracy, otherwise you look like a pack of autocrat-wannabes. Funny, this message applies to both major political Parties.

¹Senate Majority Leader Schumer (D-NY) should have abolished the filibuster then and there in order to pass the immigration bill written under the direction of Senator Lankford (R-OK). While Andrew Sullivan continues to claim that the bill is best understood as a way to expedite illegal immigration (Dissents of the week, paywall), the fact is that it was written under Senator Lankford’s direction, and he approved it. The scrapping of the filibuster in order to get this bill passed would have created a pivot for stealing the immigration issue from Mr Trump.

² Yes, I knew about it, but now I suspect it was one of the pillars on which many voters chose learned to mistrust the Democrats, and that I could only suspect and not really believe. Truly, neither Party is a Party of honor these days, a remark that would no doubt outrage some in each Party, but cause most just to shrug. If the Democrats want to know honor again, a good first step would be to identify all those who pushed to bypass a public transgenderism debate, and expel them.

³ If all you can think is to shriek, But Erickson’s a right-winger!, try holding your breath until you turn blue in the face and pass out. Remember, he’s a fellow American, and he’s convinced that a better Democratic Party will improve the Republicans as well – and that’s something we all need. The arrogance of thinking your opinions are perfect and all those bad Trump supporters are wrong needs to be left behind; what are needed are people who actually have a connection to A) reality and B) logic. Or can you tell I’ve been reading Daily Kos of late and am running short on patience? Too much CYA riles the ol’ liver, you know.

George Will never liked Kamala Harris, I think, but in the process of condemning her, he’s made the sort of prediction that leaves toothmarks in the wannabe prophet, so deep it’s worth quoting:

The Democratic Party reformers had best be in love with good, hard evidence, and not the wild-eyed finger pointing (“America hates black women!”) that I’ve seen in places. I consider it little more than CYA (Cover Your Ass) if it lacks any kind of backing.

So I think that this report from a WaPo reporter on the ground is an important testimony:

… A lot of voters I [Yvonne Wingett Sanchez] talk to – from Democrats to independents to moderate Republicans who supported Joe Biden in 2020 – feel like it was super unfair and hypocritical for the party that has spent so much time talking about democratic norms to simply up and replace Biden with Harris. It turned off a lot of independent and GOP voters who had been open to voting for the Democratic ticket up until then because it felt like their party was being hypocritical. It just didn’t feel fair to them.

Sure, it’s informal evidence, and should be vetted and confirmed.

But it’s sensible and, more importantly, has no CYA value. Clearly, a competitive, foreshortened primary should have taken place. And I did see, in print, complaints of this nature prior to the election. I didn’t consider them all that important – and I suspect that I was wrong.

But, and more importantly, Joe shouldn’t have run at all. The media didn’t seem to be reporting that he has in a state of decline, as a friend of mine reported, so that’s a ding on them. I think a properly run primary at the start of the primary season would have produced a viable candidate.

I’ll be keeping an eye out for other evidence that isn’t just CYA fingerpointing.

Telegenic:

(especially of a person) appearing attractive on television:
The producers of the show decided they needed a more telegenic host. [Cambridge Dictionary]

Noted in “Don’t lose sight of why Trump won,” Megan McArdle, WaPo:

In the end, that’s probably good news for America. While some voters were undoubtedly voting on democracy, or immigration, or race, or gender, most of them seem to have been participating in a pretty normal anti-incumbent election in which a telegenic candidate beat a weak opponent who was tied to an unpopular administration and following a suboptimal playbook. Obviously, that’s disappointing if you supported Harris and think Trump’s character is unworthy of the office. But it also means that in four years, you’ve got the normal chance of taking that office back.

In case you guessed it, the only reason for this post is to gag over Mz McArdle’s assertion that Mr Trump is, somehow, telegenic. Is she kidding?

If you’re feeling down after the election, or even if you’re feeling up, I wish I could deliver a real live introduction to this dude Stanford referenced in this Daily Kos post. This hits it on the head:

“I’m afraid of living in world that’s gotten crueler!” I burst out. “I don’t want to live in a world in which daily cruelty is normal. I don’t want to live in a world that hurts vulnerable people. I don’t want to live in a world that is mean.”

“Then be kind,” he said.

He reminded me that he and [his late husband] Mac had lived through a world much meaner than this. Those who are kind will continue being kind, and we will carry on fighting. Assholes may be emboldened for a while, which will suck, but that is the way of the world. You win, you lose, you win again, and you do your best.

Sometimes you take backwards steps. The only thing is, taking backward steps with nuclear weapons on hand is unsettling.

I’m not sure the author of the post, SeattleProgressive, fully understands:

Today, I think I was hoping my hatred and fury for the world’s mean people would have some kind of magical power to make other people see how horrible this is and feel bad about it. But mostly, I realized, I am grieving and raging at a world that was always mean getting a bit meaner despite our efforts. We’ve been rejected. The beauty and empathy of our way have not won people over. We’ve been rebuffed. It hurts, and it hurts badly. It is humiliating and frightening. But that’s the way it is, and we don’t stop. We’ve been through this before, and far, far worse. Consider what was normal in 1924. Our work is the work of centuries. This is a battle lost, but we’re still here, and there are still a freaking lot of us, and we’ve got a long string of wins behind us.

It doesn’t appear that he’s begun the self-examination to see why what he believes to be beautiful may seem, oh, autocratic to others.

But, taking a page from his friend Stanford, he’ll probably get there.

For me, I think some of the grief comes from the realization that I do not understand the country as well as I might. 300+ million people can be hard to grasp, but some of the reasons given for Mr Trump’s victory, such as legal Latinos’ anger at the illegal immigrants being permitted to enter, I’ve been hearing for years, and it seems I didn’t give it proper weighting in my analysis. No where close.

Well. Live and learn, eh?

Since the last update on DJT, former President Trump is now future President Trump, and his company’s shares must have surely skyrocketed.

Right?

Here’s a monthly chart.

Yeah. Yesterday, which was Wednesday after the Democrats met reality in an alley and never got their knife out of its sheath, it had a mediocre gain, which I’ll admit surprised me.

So I figured that, surely, today we’d see skyrockets after Mr Trump’s surprise victory. The market gained some more, the Fed dropped interest rates, all was good.

Instead, DJT is down somewhere in the range of 30% in a single day.

It makes you wonder if the investment world is looking at the future, at the quality of the people who may be influencing their investing lives soon – and not liking it. Not liking it at all.

As I’ve said many times before, the Republicans are made up of fourth-raters, and now they’re about to get another grip on the levers of power. Sane people should be very worried, now.

Oh, and now I’d say at least half the membership of the Democratic Party are fourth-rate campaigners and strategists. No, no, accept your laurel wreaths, grit at your teeth at the poison ivy I’ve substituted for the laurel – you’ve earned it.

Which may turn out to be its own punishment. We’ll just have to see if this clematis survives until Spring.

Guarding its root system is this lungwort.

Looking healthy for November, a testament to our historically mild weather.

Funny old phrase, historically mild.

Your mirror after you clean it with CYA-brand vaseline.

Yep, let me say I’m surprised. Either the women of America are not as outraged at losing their rights to abortion as I thought, or other facets of the Democratic platform were sufficiently repellent to make them take their chances with the Republicans, or they were overwhelmed by the male vote.

I must say, when famed vote counter Rep Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) gets something like this wrong, you know the shared model of reality to which the Democrats subscribe needs to be reformulated. What should they do?

1. Gather data. Fingerpointing is, of course, the natural first reaction. But that’s more of a strategy for climbing the social prestige ladder over the bodies of your fellows than it is problem-solving. Don’t get me wrong, some current Party leaders and theorists are best dealt with by expelling them, but picking and dumping scapegoats before analysis is complete is ineffective, and looks more like revenge than a considered judgment.
2. Gather that data by surveys of the disaffected. While exit polls may point the way, sit down and talk to people. Don’t lead them to your preferred conclusion – if you’re not being surprised during the interview, you’re probably doing something wrong.
3. During analysis, pay attention to CYA (Cover Your Ass) maneuvering. Long-time readers may remember when Glenn Youngkin (R-VA) won the Virginia governor’s seat, I wrote that the Democratic analysis of their failure in that election seemed to consist of CYA, and that made me uneasy. This is the category of result I’d expect from CYA that no one closely examined. CYA means less important sources of error are examined, leaving the big source as a festering wound in the flank. I, in fact, would recommend that those employing CYA strategies, at the end of error analysis, simply be expelled from the Party, if not outright, then if they dig in their heels in proclaiming their defense. If they run about in a frenzy claiming The voters are bigots!, so much the better. Blaming someone else for your mistake is the mark of an incompetent.

Of course, fingerpointing has already begun. This fellow, on Daily Kos, is a little hard to follow:

I guess at this point I have already lost my audience; I must be a Bernie Bro (I am not. I am French, remember?), a Progressive (that, yes), a crazy leftist (yes too). But as a purely professional issue, should not you at least wonder about, and try to measure, the possible electoral cost among at least some low-income groups when the candidate does no attack corporate dominance and wealth and income inequality? And while we are at it, did you know that Harris got her best numbers, according to exit polls, from people making at least $100,000 a year, while she lost up to 40% of the low-income groups making less than $30,000 a year? Your answer will probably be that high-income people are educated, low-income people are not, and it’s a matter of education. But then why would 45% of the rich and educated still vote for Trump?

Like any good leftist, he blames the problem on income inequalities. Harris didn’t promise to remedy those, thus she loses. Is that the real problem? Or is this everything-is-a-nail solution?

Erick Erickson’s already in on the fun, although strictly speaking, he’s not a Democrat. He has a number of Democratic foibles he’s going to point at, and while they’re all worth considering, I’ll pull out just one, as it seems to be connected to the aforementioned Youngkin incident:

Eighth, the progressive left has embraced intersectional politics and it is killing them. They cannot align with most voters on transgenderism. They have divided themselves over Israel and antisemitism due to their “colonizer” talking points. Harris could not pick Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania because of the anti-semitism in her party. He might have saved her. These intersectionally woke white Democrats cannot fathom that black voters might not relate to Kamala Harris because, to these white progressives, they share a skin color. Identity politics and intersectionalism will keep tripping up the Democrats. White Progressive Democrats openly fantasized about a Kamala Harris – Pete Buttigieg ticket. If Democrats conclude America isn’t ready for a black female president, good luck with your first gay presidential nominee.

I’ve been running across references to identitarian politics, on both the race and culture fronts, and how intersectionality plays into it for years, and I think that all ties into the analysis of the loss to Youngkin, with an analysis that leads to brushing the white voters with the BIGOT brush. A popular example is the dislike harbored by legal Latino immigrants for illegal Latino immigrants. In Erickson’s world, the Democrats of a certain stripe, upon identifying someone as Latino, would assign them a politics, whether they’re oppressed or not, and that’s about it. In the given example, that would be a mischaracterization of the Latino part of the United States – a misunderstanding of reality, and a causeway to mistakes and disaster.

Is Erickson right? I suspect he is.

He also echoes a point I’ve made a couple of times:

Finally, if you lose the presidency to a multiply indicted and once convicted felon as well as losing the popular vote, the Senate, and the House of Representatives, maybe stop accusing everyone else of being bigotted [sic], racist, transphobic, homophobic, misogynistic, or whatever else and accept that you are out of touch, unable to relate, and lost to Donald Trump.

Actually, I believe he has 32 convictions to his name, although they’re on appeal. Does 32 make things worse for the Democrats? Don’t forget he’s demented and a few other terms of denigration.

Erickson has a very good point.

There’s a more subtle point here as well, having to do with how to play a game. All games are played through the mental model we construct of the game, whether we’re playing at the kitchen table or engaging with the real world. The good players connect evaluation methodologies to the game itself, meaning selecting the next tactic is based on how the tactic will affect the game.

Bad players mistake the mental model of the game for the game itself. Why they do this will be as varied as all the games themselves, from the sometimes insoluble nature of some games to, as I believe in this case, a combination of sloth, a desire to retain social prestige/position by acceding to dubious political models, and the bullying ways of transgender advocates who either do not understand the essence of liberal democracy, or have deliberately chosen to ignore it in service of their haste to embed transgenderism and its associated medical surgeries in American culture, even in the face of European withdrawal from same.

The result? The Daily Kos stream of popular posts was instructive, progressing from wild-eyed confidence to assertions that victory was still viable to the beginning of a post-mortem. Will they get to Erickson’s thoughts on the matter, or will they remain self-absorbed and disconnected from real people?

I’ve had a lot more thoughts, but I think I’ll stop this rant here. Maybe more later.

Continuing a thread: Well, well, well. Secretary of State Raffensperger (R-GA) continues to impress:

Bomb threats that caused disruptions at polling places at the Etris Community Center and Gullatt Elementary in Union City, Georgia have been deemed non-credible, according to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.

“We’ve heard some threats that were of Russian origin. I don’t know how to describe that that’s viable—we don’t think they are, but in the interest of public safety, we always check that out, and we’ll just continue to be very responsible when we hear about stuff like that,” Raffensperger told reporters Tuesday. “We identified the source, and it was from Russia.” [Time]

I wonder if we’d dare to toss a missile at Russia. Say, a dud. With pre-launch notification.

Just to make a point.

Did you scoff at the reports, multiple, that the Russians are interfering with our elections, trying to tilt it to the right? Here’s Erick Erickson with a short update:

The Haitians Voting in Georgia. Remember the video from a week or so ago about the Haitians voting in Georgia? It showed illegal aliens with drivers licenses. They claimed they’d been in Georgia for six months, were registered to vote, and had photo identification to do so? Turns out a man in Massachusetts now admits Russian agents paid him to post the fake video.

Paid $100 to stir up trouble. It’s insulting, and it speaks to the poor moral upbringing of the “influencer” – and lack of discernment by the person’s followers.

Necropolitics:

Necropolitics is a sociopolitical theory of the use of social and political power to dictate how some people may live and how some must die. The deployment of necropolitics creates what Achille Mbembe calls deathworlds, or “new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to living conditions that confer upon them the status of the living dead.” Mbembe, author of On the Postcolony, was the first scholar to explore the term in depth in his 2003 article, and later, his 2019 book of the same name. Mbembe identifies racism as a prime driver of necropolitics, stating that racialized people’s lives are systemically cheapened and habituated to loss. [Wikipedia]

Noted in “Why I’m choosing to fight Harris,” Karen Attiah, WaPo:

Yet I could not stop thinking of an idea expressed by the Cameroonian historian and theorist Achille Mbembe. “Necropolitics,” he observed, is the terrible reckoning that “the calculus of life passes through the death of the Other.” I had hoped the administration would enact arms restrictions to force right-wing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to stop the needless death of the Palestinian “Other.” I had hoped it would not toss aside the concerns of Arab, Muslim, Palestinian and Lebanese communities.

A way of looking at society from a post-colonial perspective? Or just another way to express everyday life? I’m not sure.

One more time? No. As I mentioned a few installments ago, my shoulder is sometimes giving me problems, and tonight is one of those. Tonight’s dump on FiveThirtyEight includes pollsters such as Emerson College (2.9) as well as unknown pollsters, such as Research Co, who could be simply looking to improve their ratings, or to influence voters in races still thought to be undecided. Some may be adding a final result as influenced by Selzer & Co’s (2.8) shock-result of Harris leading Trump in Iowa, which I discussed at the above link.

Have a good night, folks, and don’t stress over your favored candidates. We’re Americans and our shared goal should be finding our way beyond the arrogance with which we struggle, not doomscrolling until your hair falls out.

Erick Erickson is, for a voter shepherd, analyzing a bit too deeply:

The reality is pretty simple. Based on the fundamentals, Donald Trump should win. But based on emotions, Harris should win.

The fundamentals are that this election comes as the incumbent White House party has wrecked the American economy. The press claims we’re doing better than every other country, which is true, but the reality is voters vote on microeconomic issues and not macroeconomic issues. At the microeconomic level, prices are still too high and not offset enough by growth in wages. Gas is higher than when Trump left office. The border is less secure and American communities are overflowing with illegal aliens. International gang activity in the heartland is on the rise. Abroad, we are less stable and less secure. The Chinese have hacked into our internet service providers and have access to our data. The Biden Administration does not know how to stop them from that access. Iran is on the verge of more strikes against Israel. Americans are still being held hostage by Hamas.

Notice how he admits that, world-wide, America is doing quite well, which indicates Democratic economic plans have been successful, as I have bolded. But as a right wing radio host who, from his blog posts, has been tasked with holding his conservative audience together and have them vote for Republicans, Erickson’s admission is foolishness.

I’ve noticed the right wingers have been quietly backfilling behind Mr Trump, which is to say, they’ve been trying to build a degree of separation between Mr Trump and right-wing ideology. For example, Senator Lindsay Graham (R-SC) pronounced thusly not long ago:

“President Trump can win this election. His policies are good for America, and if you have a policy debate for president, he wins. Donald Trump the provocateur, the showman, may not win this election,” Graham told Welker.

“I’m looking for President Trump to show up in the last 80 days to define what he will do for our country, to fix broken borders, to lower inflation,” Graham added. [NBC News]

Republicans continue to stomp their feet on economics, noisily proclaiming the excellence of their policies, while, as we’ve already noted with Mr Erickson, they assert the economy, as managed by the Democrats, is a flaming wreck – ignoring a superb unemployed rate, return of manufacturing, etc etc, along with the concrete evidence of poor economic performance under Republican administrations – the arch-example being, I think, the Great Recession under President Bush. Under President Biden, yes, inflation was a problem, but, first, cleaning up after the Trump Administration is an expensive business, and, second, it’s come back down to normal.

There are certainly some truths in portions of his message. The social policies of the Democrats have exhibited an arrogance that nearly approaches the Republicans’ arrogance on the same matters, which is to say their shared certainty of the rightness of their solutions in a complex, difficult world exacerbates already difficult problems, and irritates people who feel they should be participating in debating and solving them. There are evident problems on the left and the right.

In the end, though, the real problem with Erickson’s analysis is his complete omission of Dobbs, i.e., abortion. Without Dobbs, we’d be facing a tight race and even a second term for Mr. Trump. But the fourth-raters that make up most all of the Republican Party these days more or less guaranteed Dobbs – and the disaster that appears to have followed them home.

A week ago DJT, the stock of the company of Mr Trump, was selling for $40 a share. Give or take. How about now?

Bad news for share owners:

That’s a 25% drop in a week. I’ve also chosen to show the monthly chart, rather than the usual daily chart. This view illustrates the frantic lifting of DJT to the heights, and the equally catastrophic fall. While unrealized losses aren’t really losses unless the company actually goes under, I think there’s a lot of Trump supporters who are crying into their beer on this fall, and I doubt it’ll recover. Mr Trump may be one of them, as I’m not seeing any news items saying he sold out. One site claims his net worth declined $1.3 billion. My oh my.

Again, I could be wrong, but as an old colleague, Stu, once said concerning the stock of Silicon Graphics, That was a dead cat bounce. The stock may go up, but that doesn’t mean much.

And I will not be trying to take advantage of DJT. I do not expect this company to survive, but dying companies can rip the avaricious investor into little pieces.