What does a BIDEN Presidency look like?

[Admiral Yi]

I thought it looked totally fake and out of synch.  Not a deep fake, just barely plausible lip-synching and well-time cutaways.

I took another look and now I think they spliced together actual footage of Shapiro actually saying those things.  Mehmet Oz [splice] is [splice] really, really bad.

[Razgovory]

Is this real? Ben Shapiro - who to my knowledge has never said a single thing I agree with - endorses Fetterman (D) over Dr. Oz (R) in Pennsylvania?

https://twitter.com/i/status/1584901721980997632

Had to take look and no it isn't.  The Twitter is from a guy who creatively edits video.  Here's one where he make Tucker Carlson attack the cops.  I don't think he's trying to actively deceive people, but it easily can be used to trick people.  He's dabbling in black magic.

[crazy canuck]

Is this real? Ben Shapiro - who to my knowledge has never said a single thing I agree with - endorses Fetterman (D) over Dr. Oz (R) in Pennsylvania?

https://twitter.com/i/status/1584901721980997632

Had to take look and no it isn't.  The Twitter is from a guy who creatively edits video.  Here's one where he make Tucker Carlson attack the cops.  I don't think he's trying to actively deceive people, but it easily can be used to trick people.  He's dabbling in black magic.

That's actually pretty funny

[The Larch]

Intruder Assaults Nancy Pelosi's Husband in Their San Francisco Home
Paul Pelosi was hospitalized after the assault, a spokesman for Ms. Pelosi said. The House speaker was not in San Francisco at the time.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi's husband, Paul Pelosi, was hospitalized after he was assaulted by someone who broke into the couple's residence in San Francisco early on Friday morning, a spokesman for Ms. Pelosi said.

"Early this morning, an assailant broke into the Pelosi residence in San Francisco and violently assaulted Mr. Pelosi," Drew Hammill, the spokesman, said in a statement on Friday. "The assailant is in custody and the motivation for the attack is under investigation."

Mr. Hammill said Mr. Pelosi was expected to make a full recovery. Ms. Pelosi was not in San Francisco at the time of the attack, he said.

"The Speaker and her family are grateful to the first responders and medical professionals involved, and request privacy at this time," Mr. Hammill said.

[Razgovory]

Now that's a Crazy Canuck.

[OttoVonBismarck]

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/10/27/democrats-debate-why-do-we-suck-00063718

Democrats Debate Themselves: Why Do We Suck?
If the party loses the midterms there will be no shortage of I-told-you-so explanations.

By JOHN F. HARRIS

10/27/2022 04:30 AM EDT

Twelve days before the election, Democrats have yet to lose the House or Senate, or confront the dire, your-lab-results-are-back-and-the-doctor-needs-to-see-you implications for a progressive agenda.

Plenty of prominent party voices, however, believe it's best to prepare in advance. It is one of the more notable features of the 2022 midterms — the readiness to perform an autopsy on a living patient. Many Democrats believe there is already sufficient evidence to make the question unavoidable: What the hell is our problem?

Too woke, argued former president Barack Obama in a Pod Save America interview with his former aides. Some Democrats are a "buzzkill," he suggested, by making people "feel as if they are walking on eggshells" that they might say things "the wrong way."

Too timid on the jobs and economy message, warned Sen. Bernie Sanders. "Young people and working people" won't turn out, he told CNN, without "a strong, pro-worker Democratic position."

Too much reliance on abortion-rights positioning, not enough on anti-crime, said James Carville, who believes his 1990s-era political instincts are not as obsolete as a younger generation of liberals believes.

A weak message (and by implication so-so substance) on inflation, pronounced former Sen. Al Franken on his podcast, acknowledging he is "stressed out" by what may happen next month. "Things have not been trending in the right direction of late."

These are just some entries in a long roster of here's-why-we-suck analysis from Democrats, in the closing days before the Nov. 8 election. This kind of told-you-so fretting is common after a disappointing election, or even in not-my-fault, not-for-attribution chatter among operatives beforehand.

There are two, closely related reasons why the soul-searching this year started early, even as there remains a decent (though some polls suggest dwindling) chance it won't be needed.

One, candidates and progressive commentators are describing 2022 as the most important midterm election in generations. Someday, perhaps, we will have an election in which people say, "You know, this one is actually not that big a deal — there's little at stake either way." Still, this year — with Donald Trump's past, present and future still looming over all American politics — does genuinely qualify as consequential. Which means the after-election ruminations will similarly be among the most consequential.

Two, Democrats are genuinely confronting a political moment that for most defies comprehension. As Nancy Pelosi put it in an interview with the New York Times, explaining her against-the-current optimism: "Part of it is, I can't believe anybody would vote for these people."

In the 30 years that I have been covering politics, one constant was that people in both major parties had the same envious complaint about the other: We are too principled for our own good. The opposition is just better at being ruthless than we are.

What has changed in recent years is the end of equivalence. It is inconceivable to imagine any Democratic politician in modern times having such a grip on supporters that he or she would remain an unchallenged leader after losing an election or being under multiple simultaneous criminal investigations.

The possibility that two seismic events — the revelations of the Jan. 6 committee about Trump's effort to overturn the 2020 election, and the Supreme Court's June decision to revoke a constitutional right to abortion — might not reshape the political landscape in Democrats' favor puts the question in the starkest light: What will it take to change the fundamentals?

One answer is that Democrats perhaps shouldn't be so hard on themselves, even if they lose congressional control. Since World War II, the party holding the White House has lost seats in every midterm election, except in 1998 (amid backlash to the Bill Clinton impeachment) and 2002 (with George W. Bush still commanding support a year after 9/11). It is only because Democrats last summer allowed expectations that 2022 would be another of those anomalous years to soar that the likely return of old patterns is so jarring.

But another answer is that 2022 is in fact a year of useful experiments for Democrats. For decades, progressives like Sanders have argued that voters want a choice, not an echo — that drawing sharp stylistic lines and advocating an ambitious liberal agenda would motivate voters more effectively than play-it-safe centrism.

Democrat John Fetterman's Senate campaign in Pennsylvania against Trump-backed television physician Mehmet Oz, as well as Democrat Mandela Barnes's effort to unseat Republican incumbent Sen. Ron Johnson in Wisconsin, both offer good tests of the hypothesis. As both contests have become more challenging for Democrats, some allies of Barnes and Fetterman have complained of ineffective support from establishment Democrats in Washington.

Also facing a severe test is the long-time belief among many Democrats that demography is destiny — that as the country becomes more diverse, a multiracial coalition would inevitably yield huge benefits for progressive candidates. In Nevada, however, a state with a large and growing Hispanic population, a Democratic incumbent, Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, whose mother was a Mexican immigrant, is in a close race against Republican Adam Laxalt, a Trump-backer who has challenged the legitimacy of the 2020 election.

Above all, the Democratic post-election analysis will have large implications for President Joseph Biden. Legislative victories and modestly improved poll numbers last summer quieted widespread grumbling among Democrats that he might be too old or too weakened to be the best Democratic nominee in 2024, especially if the outcome of losing is Trump's return to the White House. This stewing will return in force if Democrats have especially weak midterms, in which an unpopular president was simply not welcome in many key races.

Of course, it is not just Democrats who will be facing post-mortems. If Republicans fail to take the Senate, there will be widespread recriminations over candidate choices in several states, including Pennsylvania if Oz loses, and also in Georgia, where former football star Herschel Walker has run a stumbling campaign beset by allegations over his personal life.

Amid all this fluidity, there is one reliable constant. Post-election debates are always a way of returning to arguments that the debaters have been waging for years. Just as no one ever says any election is unimportant, there has never been a documented case of an operative or election analyst saying, "Unfortunately, these results show that premises I have articulated for years now are just not true. I'm not sure what to say about the results except that I have been wrong about everything."

FILED UNDER: JOHN HARRIS, COLUMN | ALTITUDE

As I get older and I see this play out year in and year out, I find myself increasingly questioning many of the core premises underlying the sort of discussions and theories being considered in this article.

There's many criticisms of Democrats that seem perfectly on point, and seem to highlight bad political instincts they have.

At the same time I reflect on the fact that in 2020 you could say the same. In 2018 you could say the same. In 2016 you could say the same--also 2014, 2012, 2010, etc. The only significant election where I felt like you really couldn't point to any serious Democratic missteps was the 2006 and 2008 election cycle.

Note that the Democrats did end up winning the Senate and White House in 2020--including winning two Senate seats in Georgia and winning states like Georgia and Arizona in the electoral college. Note that the Democrats won a pretty thumping victory in the House elections in 2018.

It doesn't really seem like the results actually correspond that much to "mistakes." Likewise I can breakdown some pretty serious and stupid mistakes the GOP has made in every election cycle going back at least to 1980, and again, they win some they lose some.

I think the bitter reality is in a two party country, unless one party somehow slips into a weird structural position of being a clearly weak minority party (which has happened a few times--see the era after the Civil War, the New Deal era and a few others), both parties are going to command large bases that just aren't really persuadable. This serves as an important backstop.

Additionally, there seems to be a disconcerting portion of our population that simply is always perpetually unhappy with whomever is in charge. These voters are often self-identified independents, usually have a partisan lean, but are fairly unpredictable. They also tend to be lower information, lower education voters, likely to get "upset" about something pretty easily, even if their new position conflicts fairly directly with their expressed preference via voting just the election before.

None of that is to say that I don't think the mechanics of politics ever matter, but I think it seems more like large events shape how people are going to vote, and all the braying we focus on may move things fairly minimally. Parties appear to be able to win convincingly when external forces conspire to help them--think the Great Depression for FDR, or the double whammy of the full scope of Bush's inept management of the Iraq war rolling into the Great Recession in the back to back '06/'08 elections. I don't think these mega-wave elections represented amazing politics by the victors, just more that they were in the right place at the right time.

Covid probably ended Trump's Presidency, and likely was going to have done so regardless of what he did. Inflation likely will end the Democrats current congressional majorities. It can be fun to blame it on political strategy, and maybe even a little reassuring because it tells us we control our own destiny, but I don't know that it's really true.

[Admiral Yi]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-izbh7UECIc

Nancy Pelosi's husband has his skull fratured by home invader yelling "where's Nancy, where's Nancy."

[Josquius]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-izbh7UECIc

Nancy Pelosi's husband has his skull fratured by home invader yelling "where's Nancy, where's Nancy."

I wonder what this guys Internet history looks like. Hmm.

[Admiral Yi]

I wonder what this guys Internet history looks like. Hmm.

I wondered the exact same thing until I watched the link, which told me.

[Admiral Yi]

 

[Razgovory]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-izbh7UECIc

Nancy Pelosi's husband has his skull fratured by home invader yelling "where's Nancy, where's Nancy."

Jesse Watters, Fox News host, wants the attacker released, thinks he is being treated unfairly.  https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/fox-news-host-suggests-releasing-pelosi-suspect-says-hammer-attacks-common/ar-AA13uRoS?ocid=winp1taskbar&cvid=c35c16daafbe4217f082fc01de7b52ce

[Josquius]

I wonder what this guys Internet history looks like. Hmm.

I wondered the exact same thing until I watched the link, which told me.

Not much on his internet history though dancing at a nudist wedding. 

[The Larch]

A far right nudist activist is something I was not really expecting. I guess that San Francisco is truly weird like that.

[Sheilbh]

A far right nudist activist is something I was not really expecting. I guess that San Francisco is truly weird like that.

I don't know if it's that surprising any more - what with the QAnon shaman etc.

Also the weird stuff going round about masculinity, lifestyle, diet etc on the far-right at the minute which seems like the sort of stuff that, when I was younger, you'd associate with conspiracies but not necessarily racism or being far-righ

[alfred russel]

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/10/27/democrats-debate-why-do-we-suck-00063718

Democrats Debate Themselves: Why Do We Suck?
If the party loses the midterms there will be no shortage of I-told-you-so explanations.

By JOHN F. HARRIS

10/27/2022 04:30 AM EDT

Twelve days before the election, Democrats have yet to lose the House or Senate, or confront the dire, your-lab-results-are-back-and-the-doctor-needs-to-see-you implications for a progressive agenda.

Plenty of prominent party voices, however, believe it's best to prepare in advance. It is one of the more notable features of the 2022 midterms — the readiness to perform an autopsy on a living patient. Many Democrats believe there is already sufficient evidence to make the question unavoidable: What the hell is our problem?

Too woke, argued former president Barack Obama in a Pod Save America interview with his former aides. Some Democrats are a "buzzkill," he suggested, by making people "feel as if they are walking on eggshells" that they might say things "the wrong way."

Too timid on the jobs and economy message, warned Sen. Bernie Sanders. "Young people and working people" won't turn out, he told CNN, without "a strong, pro-worker Democratic position."

Too much reliance on abortion-rights positioning, not enough on anti-crime, said James Carville, who believes his 1990s-era political instincts are not as obsolete as a younger generation of liberals believes.

A weak message (and by implication so-so substance) on inflation, pronounced former Sen. Al Franken on his podcast, acknowledging he is "stressed out" by what may happen next month. "Things have not been trending in the right direction of late."

These are just some entries in a long roster of here's-why-we-suck analysis from Democrats, in the closing days before the Nov. 8 election. This kind of told-you-so fretting is common after a disappointing election, or even in not-my-fault, not-for-attribution chatter among operatives beforehand.

There are two, closely related reasons why the soul-searching this year started early, even as there remains a decent (though some polls suggest dwindling) chance it won't be needed.

One, candidates and progressive commentators are describing 2022 as the most important midterm election in generations. Someday, perhaps, we will have an election in which people say, "You know, this one is actually not that big a deal — there's little at stake either way." Still, this year — with Donald Trump's past, present and future still looming over all American politics — does genuinely qualify as consequential. Which means the after-election ruminations will similarly be among the most consequential.

Two, Democrats are genuinely confronting a political moment that for most defies comprehension. As Nancy Pelosi put it in an interview with the New York Times, explaining her against-the-current optimism: "Part of it is, I can't believe anybody would vote for these people."

In the 30 years that I have been covering politics, one constant was that people in both major parties had the same envious complaint about the other: We are too principled for our own good. The opposition is just better at being ruthless than we are.

What has changed in recent years is the end of equivalence. It is inconceivable to imagine any Democratic politician in modern times having such a grip on supporters that he or she would remain an unchallenged leader after losing an election or being under multiple simultaneous criminal investigations.

The possibility that two seismic events — the revelations of the Jan. 6 committee about Trump's effort to overturn the 2020 election, and the Supreme Court's June decision to revoke a constitutional right to abortion — might not reshape the political landscape in Democrats' favor puts the question in the starkest light: What will it take to change the fundamentals?

One answer is that Democrats perhaps shouldn't be so hard on themselves, even if they lose congressional control. Since World War II, the party holding the White House has lost seats in every midterm election, except in 1998 (amid backlash to the Bill Clinton impeachment) and 2002 (with George W. Bush still commanding support a year after 9/11). It is only because Democrats last summer allowed expectations that 2022 would be another of those anomalous years to soar that the likely return of old patterns is so jarring.

But another answer is that 2022 is in fact a year of useful experiments for Democrats. For decades, progressives like Sanders have argued that voters want a choice, not an echo — that drawing sharp stylistic lines and advocating an ambitious liberal agenda would motivate voters more effectively than play-it-safe centrism.

Democrat John Fetterman's Senate campaign in Pennsylvania against Trump-backed television physician Mehmet Oz, as well as Democrat Mandela Barnes's effort to unseat Republican incumbent Sen. Ron Johnson in Wisconsin, both offer good tests of the hypothesis. As both contests have become more challenging for Democrats, some allies of Barnes and Fetterman have complained of ineffective support from establishment Democrats in Washington.

Also facing a severe test is the long-time belief among many Democrats that demography is destiny — that as the country becomes more diverse, a multiracial coalition would inevitably yield huge benefits for progressive candidates. In Nevada, however, a state with a large and growing Hispanic population, a Democratic incumbent, Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, whose mother was a Mexican immigrant, is in a close race against Republican Adam Laxalt, a Trump-backer who has challenged the legitimacy of the 2020 election.

Above all, the Democratic post-election analysis will have large implications for President Joseph Biden. Legislative victories and modestly improved poll numbers last summer quieted widespread grumbling among Democrats that he might be too old or too weakened to be the best Democratic nominee in 2024, especially if the outcome of losing is Trump's return to the White House. This stewing will return in force if Democrats have especially weak midterms, in which an unpopular president was simply not welcome in many key races.

Of course, it is not just Democrats who will be facing post-mortems. If Republicans fail to take the Senate, there will be widespread recriminations over candidate choices in several states, including Pennsylvania if Oz loses, and also in Georgia, where former football star Herschel Walker has run a stumbling campaign beset by allegations over his personal life.

Amid all this fluidity, there is one reliable constant. Post-election debates are always a way of returning to arguments that the debaters have been waging for years. Just as no one ever says any election is unimportant, there has never been a documented case of an operative or election analyst saying, "Unfortunately, these results show that premises I have articulated for years now are just not true. I'm not sure what to say about the results except that I have been wrong about everything."

FILED UNDER: JOHN HARRIS, COLUMN | ALTITUDE

As I get older and I see this play out year in and year out, I find myself increasingly questioning many of the core premises underlying the sort of discussions and theories being considered in this article.

There's many criticisms of Democrats that seem perfectly on point, and seem to highlight bad political instincts they have.

At the same time I reflect on the fact that in 2020 you could say the same. In 2018 you could say the same. In 2016 you could say the same--also 2014, 2012, 2010, etc. The only significant election where I felt like you really couldn't point to any serious Democratic missteps was the 2006 and 2008 election cycle.

Note that the Democrats did end up winning the Senate and White House in 2020--including winning two Senate seats in Georgia and winning states like Georgia and Arizona in the electoral college. Note that the Democrats won a pretty thumping victory in the House elections in 2018.

It doesn't really seem like the results actually correspond that much to "mistakes." Likewise I can breakdown some pretty serious and stupid mistakes the GOP has made in every election cycle going back at least to 1980, and again, they win some they lose some.

I think the bitter reality is in a two party country, unless one party somehow slips into a weird structural position of being a clearly weak minority party (which has happened a few times--see the era after the Civil War, the New Deal era and a few others), both parties are going to command large bases that just aren't really persuadable. This serves as an important backstop.

Additionally, there seems to be a disconcerting portion of our population that simply is always perpetually unhappy with whomever is in charge. These voters are often self-identified independents, usually have a partisan lean, but are fairly unpredictable. They also tend to be lower information, lower education voters, likely to get "upset" about something pretty easily, even if their new position conflicts fairly directly with their expressed preference via voting just the election before.

None of that is to say that I don't think the mechanics of politics ever matter, but I think it seems more like large events shape how people are going to vote, and all the braying we focus on may move things fairly minimally. Parties appear to be able to win convincingly when external forces conspire to help them--think the Great Depression for FDR, or the double whammy of the full scope of Bush's inept management of the Iraq war rolling into the Great Recession in the back to back '06/'08 elections. I don't think these mega-wave elections represented amazing politics by the victors, just more that they were in the right place at the right time.

Covid probably ended Trump's Presidency, and likely was going to have done so regardless of what he did. Inflation likely will end the Democrats current congressional majorities. It can be fun to blame it on political strategy, and maybe even a little reassuring because it tells us we control our own destiny, but I don't know that it's really true.

I'm not sure why you would conclude that the bases aren't persuadable during an ongoing political realignment and rather significant shifts in the policies of the parties. Hell, even on major issues the public has changed extremely rapidly: see gay rights and race relations.

I think that the democrats are badly erring by not fighting harder during the realignment to stop republicans from becoming a culturally reactionary party with the values and prejudices of the non college educated and educated voters that only really care about not paying much in taxes. I think with that coalition republicans will be tough to stop the next decade, especially if they find a leader less personally repugnant than Trump.