That is a very likely explanation, but I don’t want to stop investigating there. Conservatives were complaining about skewed polls in 2020 as a way of coping with the inevitable. To be clear, I believe the polls are wrong and that Harris will squeak out wins in the swing states. I just need more concrete evidence to point where something is broken.
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It’s not necessarily intentional on 538’s part. Their model is robust about predicting popular vote totals, but the electoral vote totals and chances of winning are sensitive to small changes in swing state polling. That makes it easy to game, as @brian512 points out.
The rest of the media sanewashing Trump to generate more horse race coverage, on the other hand, looks completely intentional.
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When they were independent, I’d have err’d on the side of giving them the benefit of the doubt.
Now that they’re wholly-owned by ABC? I don’t.
I read that as “The Strong Indolence of Trumpism”. I know he has a bizarre campaign strategy and pretty much just whinges about how unfair the media treat him and migrants everywhere, but the laziness kicks in when he’s reelected. Crickets at the state department, Putin getting whatever he asks, US disengaging from Europe, tariffs and tax breaks for his buds. Oh and Elon and Peter are handed the keys to the treasury to transform all human existence into a binary choice between roboworld and off-planet contract-based development of the asteroid belt.
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Goldwater (or Au H2O in some of the old Herblock cartoons), the paradigmatic RWNJ of an earlier time, looks downright reasonable, sane, and above all patriotic compared to the current loony tunes.
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Goldwater lamented on his deathbed in 1998 that the party had moved too far to the right to accept him and his ideas. This was about a year before the end of Glass-Steagall and a decade before the Tea Party.
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So, you’re saying it’s a side effect of consuming too much substandard “maple” syrup? 
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Trump’s handing out french fries and happy meals at McDonald’s was interestingly quaint. Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class was thought by some to be a joke or parody when it first came out in 1899. The book not only gave us the term "conspicuous consumption’, it told us what expected elite behaviors to look out for. For one thing, the leisure class does not “work” so when Trump is golfing or laying in his bed eating fried chicken and watching tv, he is in character and being a respectable non-producing member of society. He also focuses on accumulating wealth, owning capital or land, and garnering family distinctions such as Time Man of the Year (even if imagined). He abuses servants or human furniture, and portrays an image of economic importance to the community. However, fake working as in pretending to do something some workers of the working class must do (pecuniary struggle), including touching a means of production fryer, puts him on a slippery slope of mocking social contexts. Of course, McDonald’s itself is a “cathedral of consumption” for the working class, a safe place to take the kids while not performing unpaid home duties such as preparing dinner. One assumes that humble-bragging about taking the family to McDonald’s is somehow virtuous in some circles, but I can’t say if is a step up or down from say Waffle House or Olive Garden. Ruth’s Cris Steakhouse, now that’s more up-market luxury for social climbers.
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I’m pretty sure their changing station would not support the weight of TSF. It would be fun to watch.
I was minding my own business watching the Steelers when the teevee producers flashed him across the screen. Fortunately, my remote has an off button.
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Under close supervision.
And no gloves or hairnet.
Oh yeah, Donnie is really just a regular guy.
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Looks to me like Arnold is creeped out at having tsf near him.
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It is funny.
I think it’s because that’s the only thing his oppo researchers have been able to come up with that can be called a “lie”. Mostly because it was so long ago any documentation has long been recycled.
Pretty damn pathetic if you ask me.
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He’s proving that he has the ability to do a job that Kamala did…when she was a teenager. Good job Donnie!
Wotta man…
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Morning Memo is up and linkless. Although I did find Hunter Walker’s
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You know how you watch the evening weather report and it says sunny and clear and you look out the window the next morning and it’s not? The model is not really a prediction, but rather a statistical approximation based on past events. Climate change is messing with the models and they’ve become less dependable
This is like that, except it’s fascists creating spurious data (rather than CO2) and dumping it into the system and fucking with the model. The outcome is the same - chaos. Which can be used to sow doubt, which can be used to justify a fascist coup
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TCF lies about his “cognitive tests.”. He would have definitely flunked his “serial sevens” (count down from one hundred by sevens):
he said that he (at the age of 78) was closer to 75 than to 80. I’d bet that he counts on his fingers, too.
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Morning Memo back door
I have no idea how @ralph_vonholst ended up in this - it does not show in my post contents
[Fixed]
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I was stunned to hear his ‘story’ about ARNOLD PALMER’… ARNOLD PALMER??? why him? i don’t go to mens golf course locker rooms very often… but i would assume PALMER has his own facilities that he uses. Trumpf was speaking to black men, and i suppose this is how he thinks black men talk to each other, Trumpfs comtempt for men he knows are better than he is and are repsected by most, is sure indicater of just how small he is…he knows he will never, ever be their equal…Arnold was also amuch better golfer and never had to cheat at the game!
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I’ve been inundated with Dem fundraising texts and emails and every SINGLE one of them comes with some version of “absolute panic we’re losing and we’re doomed if you don’t read/send/money” messaging. It’s exhausting, and I gotta ask whether this junk is genuinely motivating, and to what extent it’s playing off of existing anxiety or amping it up artificially. I’ve taken to deleting and/or typing “stop” to get rid of this depressing stuff.
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Arnold Palmer has been dead since 2016. Interestingly, he died at the age of 87. Lucky for him, the cause of death was not due to schlonging, but “in the end he just died of old age and a tiring heart. At 87 he had lived a life few of us can even imagine.” (says one of those AI generated thingies on my search engine.)
I agree, Arnold was definitely a better person, and a better golfer, than TCF ever could be.
We don’t have to worry about TCF’s heart, as he hasn’t got one.
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