I assume it was painful to watch Senate candidate John Fetterman, stroke victim, at the debate stage, because the reviews indicate it was. I do not know if it is excusable with the man functioning as I have not watched nor will do so, nor do I know if he recovers and wins the race as, to see the Atlantic article headline, “Pennsylvania Voters have good options.”. And if we want to be honest, neither would the Democratic Party post stroke. There is a disingenuousness which emerges here — the National Review spits out a finger wringing ” Shame on the Democratic Party” for putting him up, leaving him campaign, even though if the partisan markers were reversed they would be the ones minimizing the damage and conceding circumstantial fault lines but charging the will recover and be a great Senator with ideas better in keeping with the voters than his opposition and that political party.

Now I need to track back and see what everyone was saying way back in 2004 with Republican Senator Jim Bunning of Kentucky. He snuck through with a percentage win off of Bush’s twenty point headwins.

We await, it appears, a Republican victory. The polls trend that way. Patty Murray has showed up with ads — urging you to not neglect the vote, flashing the closest poll that has it closer than you’d think or her behind (don’t recall which) — normally not done but here Murray has a pretty specific message and sense the partisanship bears her out. Then comes a single issue mantra — abortion. Fraught that — it is that which bring the Democrats into contention overall this cycle but was not that which was ever going to bring them in.

But maybe if I was in a rural area she would be micro targetting something else at me.

Tina Kotek’s ads flail. Okay, so we have an outside Pac with a reasonable campaign — “I like Betsy Johnson, but she just can’t win”, and make sure to use the moniker where ” we can’t a MAGA Republican”. Turn off tge volume to watch the visuals. The Kotek ad itself now places Drazan next to the Incumbent Democratic governor, words fladh “not Drazan, not Kate Brown”. The ads with a slow fade of Drazan, but here I note they forgot to stockpile unflattering imagery, or make it themselves with dumb effects. The visuals uplifting Drazan ad that popped up in my youteed feed, volume down, just flashes through a bunch of happy looking ethnically diverse people — I don’t know what it says because I am here just seeing the visual effects and purposefully not listening. I assume it assails Brown and Motel in one manner or other.

Kind of interesting, the map shows that the folks in Eugene were shown the Falcons — Bengals game. I assume this is the Oregon alum QB Mariota, now a certified journeyman, so not warranting the full state of Oregon coverage.

At this point quarterback Genome Smith has ten starts for the Seahawks in his name. A mile marker for sure to compare with the rest. Tier three in terms of tenure — down below those four who hog three quarters of the starts with triple digits, and down below those with more than a regular season’s allotment. So, compare him with the 6-5 John Friesz, the 8-4 Trent Dilfer, the 7-7 Tarvaris Jackson, the 5-9 Seneca Wallace, and the 5-12 Kelly Stouffer. All misleading, perhaps — and worth noting the process moment for John Friez came in relief for with a comeback win against the Broncos. Heck — the proudest moment for 1-8 Stan Gelbaugh came in relief of Stouffer — a comeback win against the Broncos –with his onewin better allotted to Gino Torretta — so we should probably re-allot QB records, hand Friesz another one and drop one from Stouffer. (Though then you’d have to do the same with Dilfer.).

In the realm of feel good moments, this game against the Broncos represents high Kitna. Two weeks later things turned south in a hurry.

A shifting of the guards for the future on running back. It is something like Sean Alexander finally clearing out Ricky Waters. Wait to see if the defense continues a turn. And everyone who chimed in that “I don’t care about any game but the first one” drops away.

For the record, if this is High Geno Smith, he stands at 5-5. If only he could have snagged that Rams game last year, he would have one moral win — if allowed to Wilson. If this is not High Genocide Smith, well –I guess he is the new Stan Humphries or Rich Gannon.

The last line in this opening to an otherwise reasonable conclusion on Trump in the coming election, and hopes it can turn back to something of a referendum on him, tells us why things continue into some cluelessness.

Just another night in Trumpland: At a rally over the weekend in Texas, Donald Trump was talking about the leak last spring to Politico’s Josh Gerstein of Samuel Alito’s draft decision in the Dobbs case, and he said that the way to find the leaker was to haul in the publisher or the reporter and explain to whichever one was in custody that he was going to jail, and “when this person realizes that he is going to be the bride of another prisoner,” he’ll spill the beans.

So, typically Trump in every way—boorish, ignorant, rooted in an idea of frontier justice that he probably gets from the movies, and homophobic in that 1970s locker-room way to which his sense of humor, if we can call it that, remains relentlessly captive.

Rule number one: everybody everywhere is stuck in every decade. Can we knock off this particular conclusion in knocking a supposed bit of nitwittery? Rule number two: No one cares about the vulgarness of a backroom statement, and I would be stunned if nothing ever came from the Clintons along these lines. The substance may be another matter. This point is separate from the rest of these concerns, and need to be identified as such.

The Dobbs leak is a curious matter, because we have the right who think it is self a evident it was the left that did it for political ends — a matter that parsing meanings I have no clue regarding — supposing it was either side just excited / fretful on this history and that the practical conclusion of the leak was it shut down any possibility of a Roberts convincing a member of the right to language upholding Roe.

A recent New York Times/Siena College poll—a survey that feels like it’s becoming a kind of self-fulfilling doom-scenario prophecy for Democrats and liberals, found that while 71 percent of respondents agreed that democracy was at risk, only 7 percent called it the most important problem facing the country.

It tends to be a curious dilemma where everything is on the ballot. Parse out and dig into data to find what percentage think tax payer support and educational curriculum supporting “drag queen story hour” is the matter that puts democracy at risk.

Generally I am content to have politicians flail about at those mid 30 percent approval ratings, in a world of malcontents with contradictory demands, all of which is what makes the British political system a little hard to fathom.

Boris Johnson proceeds Liz Truss, and then follows Liz Truss. Good lird, when the Americans traded in Grover Cleveland for Benjamin Harrison and then went back to Cleveland, they gave Harrison a good four years!

Okay. Johnson isn’t that slam dunk as yet. But nobody is.

You know who those two twerps who vandalized a Van Gogh remind me of?

The Taliban when they were blowing up Buddhist statues.

Just saying.

I am in the right, legally, to be walking into the middle of the street. I am in the right, safety wise, to pause as a pick up truck hurtles on. He would be better in the right to continue hurtling as opposed to making a screeching stop. As I make my way after this stop, he is in not in the right — in some frame of reference — t to shout curses out at me.

I flipped through some bs web talk during the baseball game yesterday. I saw a poster Houston Astros fan I assume, make a vulgar remark to all gleeful Mariners fans and assorted mockers as the team was up big that when the Astros win, would have to stick a part of their anatomy up the Astros anatomy apart, so get ready with the lubrication. At this point the Astros homerun victory becomes annoying not so much because of any emotional attachment to a sporting team — really, everything is met with a shrug by me — but because I encountered that guy in passing, and he will now proceed with a pile more anal sex cracks to make his good day complete.

I looked up the NFL scores during the late slate of games and, thought — hey! Neat! All the nfc west teams are losing! — but then saw that I miss saw and that the 49ers were winning. Which is just as well, as they are likely the best team there. But if everyone list, everyone would be 2-3 and I could smirkily consider — maybe another golden season for the Seahawks like 2010?

By sheer happenstance, I see the Twitter feed of an LA sports fan who… Contradicts herself depending in the fortunes of her teams. An up and down last season that resulted in a Rams championship and… who said LA football fans don’t exist? And… No one is giving this title team it’s due. Today, she bemoans that the stadium is always filled with opposing teams’ fans because LA football team fans don’t exist and, oh lord this tram sucks and last season was a fluke. And from there I begin extrapulating past her teams to wonder for sports ball fans: would you rather have five double digit division winning and make a conference championship game seasons, or four lousy seasons with one championship fluke season tossed in the mix?

And I guess for the Seahawks, we now enter the stage where everyone thinks Geno Smith’s prime years are being wasted by a lousy defense…

… And then the Libertarian Party candidate spouts this out:

Oliver thinks there is a possibility that Walker may drop out of the race. “When there’s family involved, sometimes family takes precedence over things like politics. I think he should probably take a good long look at whether he wants to stay in this race or whether he wants to just get out of the race and start repairing the damage that’s been done by his campaign.” According to Georgia law, the deadline for substituting a candidate is 60 days before the general election, which would have been nearly a month ago.

If Walker drops out, voters will still have Warnock and Oliver to choose from. But if Walker had run for a House seat instead, voters would have had no other option than his Democratic opponent. That’s because Georgia law stipulates that for House races, third-party candidates must collect signatures from 5 percent of the registered voters in their district to get on the ballot—more than 20,000 in total. In nearly 60 years, no third-party candidate has successfully achieved that goal. Yesterday, the Supreme Court declined to hear a challenge to that law, leaving the restriction in place.

In Georgia, candidates need to surpass 50 percent of the vote to win outright and avoid a runoff. In 2020, Warnock secured his Senate seat by surviving a crowded special election and eking out a two-point victory over incumbent Sen. Kelly Loeffler in a January 2021 runoff. Oliver worries that the new revelations about Walker may “cause more people to not vote at all and maybe push Warnock over 50 percent.” Considering that Oliver is polling well enough to cover the difference between the two candidates, he hopes to prevent an outright win from either side and that enough Republican voters will abandon Walker “and maybe put me in the runoff” against Warnock.

He is a politician selling his chances. But if the Green Party candidate could make no headway against Democratic candidate Alvin Greene, the Republican voter isn’t jumping ship here. Heck, Gary Johnson barely made a dent with Donald Trump on the ballot and a theoretical bunch of “never” or close to that Trumpers.

Meanwhile, a familiar pattern in Pennsylvania. Fetterman OWNS social media in comparison with Oz. And his lead, predictably enough as the lead was always inflated and undecided Republicans were set to “head home”, is at the same time shrinking. He probably will win. But it won’t match his CRUSHing virtual landslide.

Sometime after reading a Rolling Stone hit piece against Betsy Johnson which, showing a divergence of politics only made Betsy Johnson look good —

— The problem with political discourse: you think you made a point, but the receptors of someone else with a different frame of reference and working against your assumptions and biases will feed in something else —

The YouTube algorithm kept feeding me a giant pile of Tina Kotek ads which… were aimed at someone not me and failed to do their job in making her an attractive candidate. As time has gone by the ads spit at me have greatly improved for a rather obnoxiously cynical reason: they are now negative ads aimed at Christine Dra. That being said, I encounter one weird problem with them — a visual which I assume ties her to the January 6 events of our nation’s capital, words blare across the screen — “Ties with extremists”. Shut off the volume and I assume it’s a Republican ad showing footage of the events before the Federal building two summers’ back in what the liberal weeklies gleefully charged as an ” uprising”. But I guess the ads are targeted well, and Kotek is playing the base strategy of sorts.

I suppose watching a close game where the defense falters — and the opponent seems to emerge as a marginal playoff probability — gets us …

Wait. The airspace was invaded by a drone! That’s the most exciting non playing sporting happening in a Seattle sports game since… an explosive device went off in a game in 1979.

Back to the game: Wow. Defense stinks. We have to turn back next week to see how they do against the preseason viewed as up and coming Lions team. Check out the ads on this sports ball site. Hm.

Are you horny and depressed? Well then! Got a psychographic down, I guess. Um. Exactly how does this depression treatment work?

OK. Check in on the Srahawks and Lions. Defense wins championships and things and all that! Hhow Did they do? Geno Smith has tremendous stats and looks like an all pro! But then again, so does Jared Goff. Wow. That was… Offense! Like, the 31st and 32nd best defenses in the league, I gather. And now everybody is claiming that Smith is better than Wilson, which…

… Wait. What the Heck just happened in that Broncos – Colts Thursday night classic?