"Will you shut up, man?" US Politics October 2020

FWIW, ExxonMobil was aware of climate change in 1977 (x-posts)

Texas added almost 300,000 more voters in 2 weeks just before the registration deadline.

It beggars belief to think that such a jump comes from a ton of would-be Republicans rushing to get their chance to vote for the status quo.

16.9 million voters queueing at 3 ballot drop boxes

the ballot drop box thing is bad, but there's still three weeks of early voting, which you can do anywhere... I'm going in the morning.

Most people in Texas couldn't get an absentee ballot to put in the drop box anyway - you have to be over 65 or be out of the area for election day and the entirety of early voting.

Fun little Lincoln Project reminder thread:

How it started. How it ended.

We were so "naive how racism was so imbedded in the party." Lincoln Project pic.twitter.com/ZSNoPyU6uJ

— Nadine van der Velde 🕊(she/her) (@nadinevdVelde) October 12, 2020

Yeah Texas (despite the drop-box problem) will know early.

I would not bet on TX or SC flipping this time, but it is pretty heartening that they are even getting talked about.

However, to permit myself a fantasy scenario... As has been noted, calling Texas for Biden would mean an epic blowout, and an early night. It would make PA / FL / OH suddenly irrelevant, for perhaps the first time in our lives.

this is admittedly pretty funny, but will it get ol' joe into a spot of trouble?

Donald Trump is running TV ads taking Dr. Fauci out of context and without his permission.

So, here’s a message from the President in his own words. pic.twitter.com/WCYbIfrQLR

— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) October 12, 2020

Nah.

Lincoln Project still getting it better

I have read Lincoln Project's ads are done by FuckJerry (at least that's what Vic Berger is claiming; they apparently also ripped him off, but the one ad I watched where he claimed that didn't seem like a rip off). I do think the LP ads are good. But that Biden ad is great.

dems going to be lining up to gargle LP ass n balls

your outlook is refreshing

dems going to be lining up to gargle LP ass n balls

― A-B-C. A-Always, B-Be, C-Chooglin (will)

you have a problem with gargling ass and balls, sailor?

I mean it’s not as funky fresh as ‘Iran’s going to murder Trump to make Biden look bad’

you tell me

you have a problem with gargling ass and balls, sailor?

https://images.app.goo.gl/QMKknAX43RHyMUGRA

They're that desperate, are they? (They would absolutely not be spending ANYTHING there unless they were really worried.)

Senate GOP's campaign arm is officially going up in Alaska https://t.co/y8L4m0QmwI

— Sam Brodey (@sambrodey) October 12, 2020

aight y’all I came in too hot. sorry about that.

if the LP wants to rake in and spend $$$ dunking on Trump it’s *clearly* better than them lining up to back him.

But prior to the Trump era these folks were quite literally the Worst People in American Politics. They’re part of the reason Bush got two terms. They’re the reason you even know Sarah Palin exists. I just think it’s incumbent upon liberals, progressives, salty internet leftists, angry soccer moms, and urban Home Depot dads to eye them with a healthy suspicion.

DON: Well, yeah.

Dude, will...who exactly the fuck do you think you're proselytizing to itt?

Lincoln Project people are republicans and ergo trash. They're theoretically useful trash atm but no one with a brain is going to magically forget that they're trash.

I suspect the Lincoln Project will "magically disappear" if Trump loses, unless they really feel the need to crush those Q people in primaries.

Dude, will...who exactly the fuck do you think you're proselytizing to itt?

The Lincoln Project people backing Trump would have zero effect on the election. Never Trump Republicans have no actual constituency.

Which is reason enough to shit on them regularly, because their danger is that they can build a constituency with centrist melt Democrats.

as the old saying goes, it all depends on whose ox cock and balls is being gored gargled

Early voting total now over ten million.

https://electproject.github.io/Early-Vote-2020G/index.html

An interesting detail:

.@KansasSOS reports 444,392 mail ballots requests have been processed statewide, just under 24 % of all registered voters in Kansas. That's more than double the total of requests for 2016 or 2018. Douglas leads in percentage with 36.6 %, followed by JoCo with 33.3 %. #ksleg

— Bryan Lowry (@BryanLowry3) October 12, 2020

what's the matter with ka-

oh, nevermind. carry on kansas.

There's no question about what's the matter with Georgia:

This is a picture of voter suppression. Why do Americans have to wait in lines this long? This is the line in Suwannee Georgia today to vote. pic.twitter.com/rHl4Gr5kEi

— Claire McCaskill (@clairecmc) October 12, 2020

This is terrible, but I imagine distancing and eagerness to vote are a big factor.

Austin, TX does a good job of accommodating early voters, but I fully expect it to be a shitshow when polls open tomorrow.

I'm voting tomorrow morning in Austin, but I'll be on campus which I predict will be less crowded than other places in town.

Let us know how it goes, I wanted to vote as soon as possible, but realized the first couple days might be bad.

early voting in Georgia is today through October 30, so I think the big lines shown above are more an expression of pent-up angst than a sign of suppression

as I read the data, there are almost 1 million more active voters in Georgia now than there were in 2016 ... not saying, just saying

having to wait longer than 10 minutes to cast your vote is suppression imo

elections should be funded fucking appropriately

Which is reason enough to shit on them regularly, because their danger is that they can build a constituency with centrist melt Democrats.

yeah, this is the thing. the members* themselves are (probably, mostly) sincerely never-Trumps, but TLP is a grift/psyops project to get money and ongoing attention/admiration from Dem voters who "don't really pay attention to politics" and ppl with Sorkin brain sydnrome.

*ie not FuckJerry

Tombot otm, also obv election day should be a national holiday

lest my comments be misconstrued, organized voter suppression efforts by the Georgia GOP are definitely still a thing, but they've been set back pretty hard by enforced compliance with the Motor Voter Act (thank you, ACLU) and the efforts led by Stacey Abrams

personally i think the lincoln project are greater americans than abraham lincoln

McConnell’s gleeful laugh when McGrath talks about his failures on COVID is...something pic.twitter.com/axoFqqGG8D

— Don Moynihan (@donmoyn) October 13, 2020

personally i think the lincoln project are greater americans than abraham lincoln

smile when you say that, pardner, or we might not take it kindly

mcconnell might as well be sucking the marrow out of a baby with a crazy straw in public these days, what a fucking ghoul

Has anyone tried just like pouring some salt on old McThulhu?

Thank god he's old.

There was a recent New Yorker article about the Lincoln Project. This seems to be who's directing their social strategy:

In May, the Project added a new communications staffer, Keith Edwards, a thirty-five-year-old liberal who was breaking up with his boyfriend and ready for change. Edwards had moved to New York in 2005, from Detroit, after having worked in a beauty salon. In Manhattan, he no longer wanted “to do anything related to hair,” and wound up with a production job on reality shows—“The Real Housewives of Miami,” “Wicked Single.” He wasn’t a consistent voter. But after Trump was elected Edwards joined the communications staff of Corey Johnson, the Democratic speaker of the New York City Council, and, later, the Presidential campaign of Michael Bloomberg.

Edwards’s Twitter habits aligned with the OODA-loop strategy: he is always online, a habit he describes as a form of addiction. (He is eleven years sober.) He shortened and sharpened the Project’s tweets: “Something’s not white about this”; “How much is that in rubles?” He also upped the pace: in February, the Project tweeted only forty-seven times; in June, when Edwards took over the feed, the number jumped to eight hundred and fourteen. When followers asked who was behind the edgy tweets, Edwards often tweeted back “Abe.” The Project’s audience subsequently exploded, in large part because the founders amplified the official tweets: collectively, they and their top advisers have more than four million followers.

Edwards and two colleagues make up a “rapid-response” team, which monitors the Internet for exploitable material: when a tape of Trump’s sister describing him as dishonest was leaked, Edwards tweeted, “Joe Biden’s sister cherishes him.” In July, after Trump bragged, in a televised interview, about having passed a mental-acuity test by successfully repeating “person, woman, man, camera, TV,” Wilson hired Shawn Patterson, a composer who, in 2015, was nominated for an Oscar for “Everything Is Awesome,” from “The Lego Movie,” to work on a Twitter video. Using heavy synth beats, Patterson remixed the audio of the Trump interview overnight. Edwards captioned the clip with nothing but emojis. The spot has been retweeted, quoted, and liked nearly sixty thousand times.

mcconnell is a ghoul in that clip, and mcgrath can't manage to put together the basic rant against mcconnell that we've all delivered to our bathroom mirrors at some point in the last 4 years

David Roth back on the Big Wet beat at Defector, using a public tantrum by Ammon Bundy at his child's football game as part of a way to make the essay sports-relevant:

Two of Bundy’s sons play for Emmett, which was up by five touchdowns at the time the game was called. “Bundy was told before the game was stopped that he could cost Emmett a win and potentially a playoff spot,” the Idaho Statesman noted in its story.

Bundy’s exhausting public life is proof that, for some people, this country is an absolute wonderland of public places in which to become upset. But there’s something perfectly apposite about this last gratuitous, thirsty, unreasoning tantrum happening at a football game. No venue, and no tragicomic streaming meltdown, could have better anticipated or mirrored the President and his party belatedly attempting to defeat a rampaging pandemic with old-fashioned smash-mouth football.

The broader national failure to manage or even really confront the pandemic is not entering a baroque phase, really; it has had no non-baroque phases.

Trump has always responded to adversity by simultaneously quitting and declaring victory; this has, because of how things work for rich people, mostly worked out for him. ...

...When Trump emerged on what either is or isn’t the other side of his illness, vibrating and fluttering and looking even more like a photographic negative of himself than usual, he brought with him a realization. He had faced Covid and bested it, and in so doing he’d learned that the soaring collective threat of the pandemic was … exactly what he has always thought everything was all along. In proclaiming that Covid was a test of individual will and personal strength, Trump spoke with a liberation and purpose that couldn’t be credited to the various powerful steroids currently bearing him aloft on a storm cloud. He had finally found a way to care about the pandemic, which was to make it about him. He had found a solution that appealed to him, which was to make it about his lifelong fixation on fear and domination in general, and his fear of being dominated in particular. Once he had confirmed that he was in fact immortal and the pandemic was just another binary matter of winners and losers, Trump was free to live as a dumb god.

re: mcgrath, like, at the very least, at least deliver the core message, "FUCK YOU MCCONNELL!", that we all desire. if you're down 15 points and you have no chance in kentucky because everyone knows someone that was in the kkk, at least deliver the core message. jfc

Column: Make way for Slayer Pete. Buttigieg is the Biden campaign's ruthless secret weapon https://t.co/edBdBkjLCf

— Los Angeles Times (@latimes) October 13, 2020

I tweeted this about Mayor Pete after his appearance on Fox News on the night of the Vice-Presidential Debate. pic.twitter.com/8f7KYqYwMW

— mark hutchison (@MarkHutch1965) October 13, 2020

re: mcgrath, like, at the very least, at least deliver the core message, "FUCK YOU MCCONNELL!", that we all desire. if you're down 15 points and you have no chance in kentucky because everyone knows someone that was in the kkk, at least deliver the core message. jfc

― president of my cat (Karl Malone)

I simple "what the hell are you laughing at? people are dying!"

Omg, could Graham sound more pathetic? I feel embarrassed watching this.

Lindsey is real mad at @harrisonjaime for out raising him

pic.twitter.com/FIgRDuLjfm

— Molly Jong-Fast🏡 (@MollyJongFast) October 13, 2020