I see Joe Trippi selling his upcoming social media platform, rejoinder to a post Elon Musk twitter, and one of a bunch frankly. What I would want to know is when The Babylon Bee comes and posts the same material it does on x formerly twitter, are they going to be banished under the same complaint rule they had been in pre Elon Musk twitter? If the answer is yes, I don’t understand this social media fees except just another “Blue Skies” and etc. Facilitating conversation and etc means whatever it means to you, and you are may than free to sell your Overton Window of social media-ing, as I guess is Trump and company.

The presidential campaign of absurdism. continues. Yes, bottom line is always Vote for Harris, “generic Democrat, and it shows”. But things flutter along with some contemplative parcels here and there. I stare at a National Review headline insisting “JD Vance is Good at This After All”, and weigh whether, despite it all, there is some point here. That as much as he becomes a punchline in the modern Democratic Party toadies of late night talk show hosts, and as much as he slides in the backdrop as Trump rather wants bombastic cranks on stage with him — RFK Jr and Tulsi Gabbard — he is sneaking in the margins off in the states at play. We do see a suggestion that he is playing the role Pence did in 2016 in keeping the wayward Republican politician / influencers in line.

Then Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, got Kemp on the line.

Within hours of their phone call last week, Kemp, who along with his wife had been the target of vicious Trump attacks, was on Fox News publicly declaring his support for the GOP ticket. Soon after that, Trump was thanking Kemp for the kind words.

Looking for an excuse, Kemp was, but if Vance provides it Vance provides it.

Comedy here, Vance paints as good a picture as he can on the doughnut shop workers who were just not into him.

Vance said he enjoys engaging in that kind of retail politicking and added that he has made it clear to his staff that such visits must be planned more carefully in the future.

“We don’t want to have these scripted events — I don’t want to go and do three takes of buying Doritos at a Sheetz,” Vance said, referring to a recent Harris stop at a Pennsylvania gas station. “I like to get out there and talk to people, and we want to make sure we’re doing it but definitely make sure that people are at least OK with being on camera, or we’re going to walk in and you’re going to have a person who has, practically, a panic attack because she’s got 15 cameras in her face.”

Nervous nelly, her. And I suppose him — the other guy standing awkwardly supplying him with doughnuts. It does out a hamper on the “speaks for the rust belt working class” — a funny headline for his Drehrer interview, “I would like to see European elites actually listen to their people for a change“. He the man whose such great rapport with such people?

Look. The Democrats once tried to replace Ted Kennedy with Martha Coakley. Unless you saw a way to play the long game and saw you could wait out a couple years of Scott Brown to get to an Elizabeth Warren Senatorship, if you were a liberal Democrat you were voting for Martha Coakley. A woman who did not know who Curt Schilling was. Awkward personalities happen, people disconnecting completely with parts of “The common clay”. The problem here is — aside from the particular weird “common clay elitism” of JD Vance — is that to flip it over on a “if this were a Democrat” — well, we do see what happened to Martha Coakley. Placing us to points of more relevance — the party now upholding a defense of Trump’s politicking at Arlington and campaign altercation with a worker trying to stop the inappropriate and illegal photographing — up to Vance’s performative “Go to Hell” declaration to Kamala Harris — was the party making hay of John Kerry’s “troops end up in Afghanistan” that seemed to suggest they were uneducated dummies — in 2006, so upholding of the dignity of veterans.

I do come back to some things with Vance – – a point of inference in the National Review “Doing good” column. We have a whole part of the electorate who think they have him pinned and down on a reference to couches. He makes a bad joke, as all politicians do, on the stump, which references a couch. The watch a commentator say “he should know by now not to bring up the couch!”. Should he? My advice to Vance is that in his Senate re-election bid, he make sure to allude to couches. Because there are whole parcels of the electorate who are not clued in on this thing which is — in the end just an inside (immature) joke, who will brush up against it and need something explained. Once it is explained, they will respond with a “so — you just made something vulgar up just to be mean?” , and be more inclined to vote for him.

The political posturing in the party roll call is sometimes interesting. The major hubs have political figures needing to posture — governor Hochul gets her face, never mind how underperforming she is against the Democratic vote in New York. States have got their connections with Carter, Clinton, Obama — and I guess Massachusetts has moved on from Kennedy and Texas from Johnson — that state has Ann Richards to sell. Then there are states hovering in the mind as Republican bastions. Florida gets a “we are fighting back”. Idaho has a wisp of Libertarian Party pride of accomplishment in their “fighting back” declaration — a candidate in every legislative district! I do not know what to make of Utah — “the next battleground state” — the other states attempting the mantle are on former ground.

A number of the southern states can get in with dissertations of civil rights history. Important when you look at a barren party. I was curious to see what Tennessee was going to do. The speakers were those two kicked out of the legislature for bullhorn disruption. Cause celbres are what they got there. Wyoming plucked in the “first woman elected governor” — making sure to put in that she was a Democrat, which is not anything Montana can do when they put in “first congress-woman”.

Missouri seemed the most curiously cautious in addressing a political legacy. While other states pronounced proud Progressive political figures, their speaker told of “Moderates” like Eagleton and President Truman. And I guess the reason for this came in when they pumped up a Senate race “we will dump Josh Hawley”. It seems a thankless job at the moment — a d it is either to Hawley’s credit or not that he is acknowledging his Democratic opponent as though the opponent were within earshot in the race. I was curious here to see how Montana and Ohio — with the two incumbent Democratic Senators needing to run ahead and clearly ahead of Harris and not be tied to this race — would address their man. The show of political stature and partisan positioning differs from Brown and Tester. Ohio placed Brown into their spiel. Montana did not mention Tester.

And I guess in Oregon’s delegation loved them.some Modest Mouse. Washington’s attempt to put in NirvanaSoundGardenPearlJamAluceInChains must have gotten vetoed with a “this isn’t a nationally broadcast Seahawks game!”

He remains in the ballot, but —

In April, after becoming the Natural Law Party’s nominee in Michigan, Kennedy held a fundraiser in Royal Oak with several comedians at the Royal Oak Music Theatre.

Doug Dern, chairman of the Natural Law Party of Michigan, said Friday he was “feeling used and taken advantage of” by Kennedy.

“He pretended to support third-party politics then goes running back to the two-party system,” Dern told The Detroit News.

The Natural Law Party doings populated by big, or even minor, name comedians? Does this party have its cadre of celebrity activists?

The funny thing is that Kennedy is still probably the best vote better for this ballot line. He cannot be removed at this late juncture. I kind of an curious what would have happened had it been done — would the keepers of this ballot line, apparently two people with an eccentric public stance of getting the line to someone in need shut out of the process — have been allowed to find the replacement?

I have no idea why I ever should have ever formulated an opinion on Michele Obama. I guess during the Obama presidency she took to some “healthy foods in school lunch” initiative, which you can deliberate some problems and issues on if you want. How to keep the garbage can from just being a healing mass of broccoli, and how to squelch the whining kids demanding their form dogs. Other than that, their may have been an inver-satuation of forced politeness in some initiative she brought to some educational initiative. But as an apolitical figure — I do not know how you were ever supposed to answer a poll question on favorability ratings. I am told she had the highest ratings, the most popular public figure anywhere. I do not know what that means, but good for her — I guess. I also hear she knocked it out of the park with her speech. I have not watched it, and I assume she did. Though maybe I won’t like it. I mean, I am apparently the only person anywhere who liked Bill Clinton’s speech. Maybe I will be the only person anywhere who does not like Michele Obama’s?

In 2000 a polling question was invented. It has probably had a pernicious effect on our politics. “Which candidate would you rather have a beer with?”. As an intellectual exercise, I go over the list since 2000 and expand each year to include the vice presidential candidates, as fairly frequently these candidates are picked out to balance a ticket with the “have a beer with” choice — such is the case with the Democrats this year. I see 5 Republicans and 2 Democrats here. And I guess I would be obliged to just lie to a pollster lest the answer come back to the candidates and mean something, and result in the hamming up of folksiness. And. I am of course going to be too cute by half. I am having a beer with Mitt Romney, just to send him on his way to Mormon Hell. And the question is supposed to get at some “likability” question, but that is not necessarily what I am going for in having one beer drinking meeting. To be sure, the “beer drinking partner” pick that is this year’s Democratic running mate is someone who is really wearing thin on me. I watch him up the convention — he does a pep rally. Screw this! I fled those regular high school fixtures as soon as I had the chance. Are we going to be subjected to four more years of this crap? Do it is, JD Vance. I do have the sense that if he stumbled out of electoral politics he might have another book in him that is not just careful political positioning. Maybe? No one else here does — Obama, for instance wrote one book in the nineties and then after his Senate victory it is all turgid campaign props and maybe book signing bair. Even Vance’s inflammatory statements suggest a wide ranging bullshitting that is moderately interesting for a spell. More to the point, the dude is flailing right now, and isn’t that the whole “beer sharing” thing — commiserate or something? What does this mean electorally? Jack and squat. Unless I watch a few more things from Tim Walz and decide — screw it! Jill Stein. Though. Do I want to have a beer with her? Maybe I do, actually — identify all the people she is sitting with in Russia.

Trying to figure out a creative or productive or amusing way of watching The DNC convention, I pluck over to Newsmax for their hard hitting analysis. I cannot help but think they may be one up against Fox News for dropping out of, say, the Kamala Harris speech in order to make any of any violence emanating out of the three digits of protesters outside the convention hall. Surely someone here is throwing a bottle?

I await the Free Palestine for LGBTQ+ People solidarity speakers out in Gaza.

The horseshoe theory, of sorts, comes in that these protests also figure more highly in Any Goodman and Democracy Now’s coverage of the convention. Though, they are less likely to call them “pro Gaza”, ascribe a mythical double application of “antifa” demonstrators, and any violence will be placed back over to the police.

The ads for the Newsmax coverage of the AND are illuminating.

And imaging gets a bit weird.

Yeah, they all stand right with your messaging. It ends on Reagan, which raises some odd questions in relation to the recent Trump total focus RNC Convention, the one with no history to it prior to 2016, all living presidents, vice predidents, and nominees dropped out of circulation. Maybe Sarah Palin wanders around somewhere?

Consider too the playlist of JD Vance at a campaign stop in Georgia.

Between the bunch of opening speakers — hitting hard on immigration — and Vance in what is… A parking lot in front of a police station? Correctional building of some sort?

… The stereo played this list of songs.

Metallica “Enter Sandman”. Beach Boys “Surfing USA”. Elton John “Yellow Brick Road”. Kid Rock “American Badass”. Mearle Haggard “Rebuild America First”.

Hitting isolationist sentiment, the song suggests an America that … Terminal decline

Why don’t we liberate these United States, We’re the ones that need it worst?, Let the rest of the world help us for a change, And let’s rebuild America first.

I gather it fits into the Republican anti-NATO message if you also ignore a Democratic Party snortle on “what’s this ‘infrastructure week’?”. We do see the great jump away from the previous Republican presidents.

Yeah, the men in position are backin’ away, Freedom is stuck in reverse, Let’s get out of Iraq an’ get back on the track, And let’s rebuild America first

Accompanying images just after these lines on the music video.

RINOs one and all.

Pondering how much of what to “defend” within the mass of JD Vance material. The Democrats have it trickling out, toss it into the ether at sporadic moments to prolong the political agony, knowing we don’t really need Iranian hacking of Republican research and media leaks to get at this stuff. The new item — Vance sliding right past the “purpose of post-menopausal women” — is a sentiment of armchair biology whose basic terms I have heard more from women than men — obliged to sit it all out. I suppose this may mean that Vance would have been better off in some trad-woman’s podcast on this sphere of thought than an obnoxious bro — but I gather the fallout would be about the same.

Roadkill has become another issue in this political campaign. Not quite at the point that cannibalism had and has been in the campaign — Biden’s random cannibalism anecdote no longer anything to mull over given he has left the campaign which has left Trump alone with his stump speech reference to a fictitious cannibal, he now has cannibals all to himself. Roadkill was on my mind because of a comment made by a Democratic congressman to the biggest and most immediate Republican congressman who said Harris was a DEI hire — “this from a person who supported legalizing keeping roadkill”. I am stuck on the question of how to approach when you respond to one but if nonsense from a political opponents by reference a sane point of disagreement s/he has with them as though it is of the same type of nonsense. I would not exactly trust someone who campaigns on roadkill as a central platform issue, but it is a matter that needs to be adjudicated and I have no interest in prosecuting everyone, hailing tgem, and throwing away the keys. As it were, I have not interrogated the matter of Robert F Kennedy Jr and his dumped bear at Central Park — I am lead to believe that it is transparently false — but Kennedy may have been weaving the story in just such a way as to keep the taking of roadkill into the bounds of acceptance in New York state law.

Fox News, ladies and gentlemen.

I stare at the Trump press conference. The whole thing is untethered by reality. Like, this differs from, oh, Bill Clinton and sexual relations with that woman — which is a lie tethered to reality — you can connect its falseness to the truth that he is evading. Or the Bush Administration and a large constellation of war propaganda, that I have to equovicate on what are actual lies in the 2000s era speeches and what were conclusions fitting priors makes the difference here. On Trump in this year 2024, the old man lives in a myopic fantasy world and he has dragged us all along with it. I really don’t know what to say or do with it, but let us see what is animating Rod Dreher.

This is a hell of a lot more leeway than what either EW Erickson granted Biden post debate (or any other showing his age moment) on how that man could “reset” his campaign. It kind of throws me back to Nikki Haley’s campaign drop out race speech comment that “now hopefully Trump will earn my voter’s support”. Somehow after everything there is no “I’ve seen enough”. No permanent statement is permanent — no “I’m done with this guy” ever sticks.

And Erickson’s “reset”, simply looking at what Dreher has clipped here, is a little bit off kilter from the baseline Republican cries that he needs to get back to messages of the onerous regulation state and tax and spend inflationary big government! — in that what he wants is for him to pound the names of every undocumented / illegal immigrant who committed a violent crime, a matter of demagoguery that though at least tethered to reality — stems from something, anything — still cannot be cut off from the rest of Trump’s spiel. A guy who does that is going to be the same guy who goes after a party member, a guy who does this makes hay over Kamala Harris’s mixed race background — that mean tweets that are your static noise.

Still, I am always trying to find a “something sensical” in the insane morass. By way of contrarianism if nothing else — let’s debate the merits of water storage policy or something. The illustrious reporters here a tad tied down to horse race coverage, I do find myself in agreement with Trump’s sneering of “what a stupid question” on why we are not seeing him campaigning. It is ultimately nothing that should concern me or you — spectator sports are all good and well but I am wanting and hoping for a mass re-conceptualizing of it all. And maybe we see it anyways — the broadest part of the populace only tunes in now. After this statement, Trump makes no sense and then bobs back into sense. He is filming ads on a level you have never seen from right here. Nonsensical statement. He shuffles away the statement “Montana is a swing state” by offering, sanely, he is out campaigning for Senate candidates. Though, he throws in what is apparently a stop-over in Wyoming, which I assume there are rich jackasses there to meet and raise funds out of, but in political terms other than maybe trolling Lynne Cheney there is not much political point. A Republican primary is set, but he is just endorsing the incumbent. Like, I am sure there are elected Democrats somewhere in the state, but I have to squint hard to figure out where this dirty trick flier is even aimed at.

Well. We need to know the evil that lurks in Tim Walz.

I see the National Review has Rich Lowry land him as a combination force of Blagojevich and Menendez. There was a third name but it evades me. At least more interesting a charge than radical leftist, but I kind of figure that their worldview is one that views any expansive government run program as corruption defacto. But the bigger issue here is that on Lowry, he already said multiple times he is done with Trump and yet… Nothing sticks.

Oh great. It’s that high school football coach calling everyone a little different from him and his “weird”. But, you can’t stick to that — he was the guy who spear-headed the school’s new “Gay Straight Alliance”. Oh, great. He’s the high school football coach who thinks all the “weird” kids are gay.

There is a limit to the “weird” line. It encompasses too much, somewhat predictably overlapping Clinton’s “Basketful of deplorables”, gets shoved into the policy matters as he lays down some absolutes. We can’t clutch too many pearls on it, going up against some clown who defenders always dismissed problems with as “mean tweets”, Bringing in early JD Vance promoter and superfan Rod Dreher to this parade:

Yeah, this is a guy who had (still is?) for the past decade or so been posting to “libs of tik tok” and Andy Ngo various bizarre and self centered terminally online sexual micro-minorities, specializing in ever so exotic and meaningless pronouns. This is presented as though it is bigger than it is, and the main problem with most is a terminally online nature. His response to them is to shout that they are weird. Dhrer’s guy, meantime, does his terminally online act, spouts his mouth off for… Um… podcaster “Bronze Age Pervert”, and Dreher is horrified that some peoples outside of the political and cultural mainstream but in his direction (with certain contradictory caveats on that) are called “weird”.

I hope we can somewhat shuffle from this line, but it is hardly a concern. More irksome is that the man threw out a line about “couch”, a premise of immaturity I don’t know what I am supposed to do with and whose proliferation moves me away from having any strong attachment to this Harris / Walz cause beyond my bottom line “they’ll do”. The problem of presidential campaigns is everyone becomes irritating.

Gee. I don’t kniw, Rod Dreher. Must be something endemic to Trump’s thinking, you know the mastermind of the “Beer Belly Putsch” of January 6, 2021?

Yeah must be horrible. But have to wait and see when this madness begins before we demand that it stops. I have not been watching a second of Olympic Action, but apparently the big right-wing cause celebre is against the big dominant winner in woman’s boxer who was born with two “x”-chromosomes and never at any minute transitioned, and who despite have two x chromosomes could pass by the eye test as being a man — which, strictly speaking, might indeed benefit her in the world of woman’s boxing — but today instead of early 80s un-pc jesting at some female abnormally heavy-set athletes as “that’s a man!”, they just declare her an ex-man anyways. I knew something was off here when I saw the nationality of the boxer — oh, sure. Algeria. Okay, yes, I know it is not the end point for Matt Walsh’s search for “What is a Woman?” – – and then I would just dumping the Massai people’s with the nation of Algeria, but you know — we are not terribly progressive here on this one.

Trump is plucking his way into weird Internet streamers — accidentally a 23 year old kid whose trademark is that he smells the chairs of the peoples he interviews after they leave. Also he apparently can’t define fascism — to be sure I can’t give a straight forward definition either — and has trouble reading it off the Internet and has never heard of Mussolini. Trump is evidently making an appearance in Montana — big Senate seat available, I guess he may be thinking down-ticket and figure his niche targeting will lift him up in the swing states? JD Vance — not too much to say on this — the friendly network has dropped the image out lest the only visible word you get is “Kamala” — and looking over the tens of people in this crowd — I do highlight the woman, third from the right, too row, floof of hair, looks a week away from dying her hair green, looks like she should own a number of cats.

Well that’s super.