So many outrageous events, statements, and manipulations it’s hard to stay focused. That’s what they want of course. I just checked and I don’t think Pennsylvania purged any voters who did not vote in the midterms… but I’m going to knock on some doors with my Vot-ER QR code that allows people to check their registrations or sign up. Maybe it will be therapeutic for me if nothing else.
Has anyone done a montage of Trump and MAGA desecrating the Capitol,being impeached twice, stealing intelligence for our foes, asking for Russian interference in our elections, trying to sack the ACA/Medicare/Social Security, promising a magical end to the pandemic by April 2020 while pondering bleach instead of promoting the general welfare, etc set to a tranquil reading of the preamble of the Constitution?
It’s a lovely bit of writing. My daughter is memorizing it for school this weekend:
"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
Today's Morning consult poll has Harris up 5% in Pa. Trump apparently has consolidated his resources in Pa and N. Carolina. I don't believe him but Nate Silver says the entire race rests in those states. Still have to determine "likely" voters and I think women and Gen Z are highly motivated and are undercounted as likely by the polls. 58% of Pa women voters are registered Democratic.
Biden won the state in 2020 by 80,000 votes. That was before Jan 6.
Vote vets has a bus travelling across the state. We feel we can flip a lot of the veterans who have voted twice for Trump via "not suckers or losers." Similarly, hope we can flip a lot of American Ukrainians, Poles and others similarly situated who supported Trump twice but his Putin connection cannot now be denied.
I think that the pollsters are ignoring, on purpose, the female vote, especially motivated by the female sovereignty issue. I would expect that there will be surprises in red states,like Missouri, because of the female vote.
I hope that the DNC, DCCC, DSCCC keep banging that drum. I live in a safe blue state, so I don;t see the political ads.
I don't know the answer, but doesn't purging voter lists of people who didn't vote in the last election, also purge Republicans and Trump voters? Then again I assume that between the general election there are many special elections, like levy elections for schools, the point is that purging the rolls because of failure to vote in an election should also purge Trump voters.
I am assuming that they are single issue voters... Trump and grievance.
I suspect that there isn't universal purging, but targeted removals concentrated on districts with a majority of registered Dems, all while red districts are generally left untouched. If/when it's discovered, the response is either that it was unintended or some seemingly benign procedural reason is given as a cover.
"Has anyone done a montage of Trump and MAGA desecrating the Capitol...set to a tranquil reading of the preamble of the Constitution?" Great idea, Ryan. I would pay to see that on an ad. Maybe a job for the Lincoln Project?
All of the debates have been tilted in the liar's favor. Both candidates should be put in soundproof rooms and there microphones turned off and on when it is their turn to speak, and they need to be fact checked! Honest people have no problem with that, just the liars assume they have freedom of speech to be disruptive demons!
PT Barnum was associated with the saying"there is a fool born every minute", he actually claims it was one of his competitors that made up that saying in order to smear his character. Also WC Fields said that it is"immoral to let a fool keep his money and give a sucker an even break"! Obviously Trump is a firm believer in that line of reasoning. The right wingers are going to give the oligarchs the keys to the kingdom like Putin has in Russia. Look at what Putin has done. The Russian people aren't much better off than they were in the dark ages, if they aren't worse off in some instances. I blame phony religions for teaching children to believe in the supernatural and detach them from reality, truth and reason! The church and the greedy, dictatorous oligarch, demons, have worked together for thousands of years. How else could we have about 80 million delusional lunatics walking the streets able to buy guns and vote?
I'm very concerned that the fix is in. Garland and Jack Smith doing too little too late. I am not even sure if Kamala knows it? The Democratic leadership since Reagan democrats, have marginalized the progressive caucus and the FDR liberals.
I'm glad the storm missed you Thom. Now all the brainwashed cult are going to have their hands out wanting us to rebuild their global warming caused catastrophe again!
Russians don't know any better, they have a tradition of living with a boot on the neck, from the sons of Jenghis Khan, through the Tsars, to the Bolsheviks, Lenin, Stalin, Putin.
That is what normality looks like to the Russians. They don't know any better.
We do agree on Garland and Smith. I learned my lesson with Mueller, actually I didn't trust him and his investigation either, but liberals are always hopeful, evidently believing that a savior will descend from the clouds at the last minute and save our bacon.
Every hope that we have had since Trump was first investigated had been squashed, by the established powers that be, even our heroic judges, like Merchan have sold us out. Think of all the times that Merchan gave in to Trump and his lawyers, and let him get away with threats and disrepect and all they got was a verbal warning. If it was anyone else, they would still be sitting in jail.
Worse liberals make excuses for those that betray them.
Thank you Thom for reporting on things the MSM don’t and won’t touch. It’s going to take this kind of truth to power reporting to get the real truth out there
My hypothesis is that the Republican party is now dominated by a contingent of theocrats that were ‘called to order’ by Lewis Powell and his ‘Powell Memo’ in the late 1970s. This group of theocrats have been engaging in a covert coup that we are experiencing today. The members of this coup have grown in fits and starts over the last 45 years and now include Bannon, Koch, McConnell, Leonard, Rand (Ayn), Theil, the developers within Project 2025, Opus Dei people, Friedman (Milton), Knights of Malta people, and no telling how many more. At the end of the day, these people are ‘social Darwinists.’ Now that they have successfully packed the Supreme Court with their devotees, they believe that the time has now come to fully capitalize upon the degree of control that they have been surreptitiously building over all of these years. They now have the perfect presidential candidate (Trump) that they need – who also happens to be a village idiot. All they have to do is play to his monumental need to be important and the center of attention in order to turn him into the total puppet that they can control. In my view, this is why they twist themselves into pretzels and put up with his obvious idiocy and flagrant narcissism. The major issue here is that while we wail and complain and point out every day his latest idiotic statement, behavior, etc., we miss focusing on the big, central, major problem – THE COUP and THE THEOCRACY!!!! We must get the word out that THIS IS A TAKEOVER. Trump is the puppet, not the problem. The problem is the COUP!
Thanks, Thom for all you bring to us with your always great way you deliver the news of the week. We really at this point and time need to stay focused on the facts at hand. Lies are not truth and I am glad the the majority of the people know the difference. Thom just needed to say keep up the great work. This really is the time to stay woke and aware of the facts of the day and time. Know you had a great conference and everything went well. You only have to hands Thom and always get so much done. I, admire all your energy. Only the best! Thom!
"Expect Vance to use the “firehose of lies” strategy, where you throw out a half-dozen or so lies in a single sentence or two, forcing your opponent to burn his time rebutting them."
Republican Party candidates routinely bog down debates with this gish galloping to prevent substantive policy discussion. It's Bannon's "flood the zone with shit" approach. Walz already knows which lies JDV will spin, so he can prepare answers that correct and inform all in the same go. Walz is great on his feet and just like Luke, has one cool hand. I expect him to do very well.
Apparently the MAGAs/conservatives are all upset with the FCC because that august body has fast-tracked applications by (THE) George Soros to buy some 200 Audacy Network radio stations and turn them into progressive talk radio outlets.....
Looking forward to the VP debate to see if Governor Walz calls a sitting Senator "weird" to his face.
Ohio hired a guy that claimed to have some common sense but turned out to be a complete flake that joined the crazy train. Is VANCE the witch or has he been bewitched? That psychopath Trump creates his reality one minute to the next, and JD creates his identity the same way.
This Wallnau guy Vance is joining today is a White Christian Nationalist; if they had a card, he would have one. He is another traitor.
From WIKI: "Religion scholar Matthew D. Taylor has referred to Wallnau as "one of the key Christian mobilizers for January 6th".[4] After Trump lost the 2020 US presidential election, Wallnau claimed that the election had been stolen from him.[19] He defended the January 6 attack against the US Capitol,[19] stating, "Jan. 6 was not an insurrection. It was an election fraud intervention."[19]
First, Thom, why are you using the term Hunter as though it were a normal English usage. It's not.
Second, if Walz has to fact check Vance's lies, I suggest Walz uses a running message bar on top of his lectern that reports the lies as his fact check team runs them down. Walz doesn't have to comment on them or use up his time refuting them. Gosh, the bar could even be running when Walz's microphone is off and Vance is speaking. Wouldn't that be neat! The wireless connected bar could just be carried in to the debate and put on top of Walz's lectern without asking first. That would be a Trump type move.
There is no doubt that Vance will use the The Gish gallop tactoc which is a rhetorical technique in which a person in a debate attempts to overwhelm an opponent by presenting an excessive number of arguments, with no regard for their accuracy or strength, with a rapidity that makes it impossible for the opponent to address them in the time available.
It is standard right wing technique. it is the only way that they, like Stephen Moore, talk. On Bill Maher, Rachel Maddow had to stand up to shut him up, it is also the gist of a filibuster.
Here is a copy and paste from Reddit
This is an effective strategy because there's not really an easy way around it, you have to answer the arguments, or you (usually, assuming there is offense) lose. The most straightforward, blunt-force way to do this is to simply match the rate at which your opponent is making arguments. In competitive debate this is often achieved by simply speaking faster.
Problem there is: the other team can also speak as fast as they want, and there are probably people out there who are much faster than you. Plus, if this isn't a structured environment and there aren't established speech times then there's nothing to stop your opponent from simply speaking for longer. So how do you handle a situation where you can't push back through sheer volume of arguments? There it becomes a question of efficiency. Can you answer arguments with less time/effort than your opponent took to make them? Can you find commonalities between the arguments and answer them all simultaneously ("group them" in debate parlance)? Can you safely disregard certain arguments? That kind of thing.
Kamala handled it perfectly, she ignored his rants, and went on the attack herself, attacking his fragile ego which threw him off his stride.
Despite his bravado, Vance has his own achilles heel, like all authoritarians it is his ego and being deried, laughed at and not taken seriously.
So many outrageous events, statements, and manipulations it’s hard to stay focused. That’s what they want of course. I just checked and I don’t think Pennsylvania purged any voters who did not vote in the midterms… but I’m going to knock on some doors with my Vot-ER QR code that allows people to check their registrations or sign up. Maybe it will be therapeutic for me if nothing else.
Has anyone done a montage of Trump and MAGA desecrating the Capitol,being impeached twice, stealing intelligence for our foes, asking for Russian interference in our elections, trying to sack the ACA/Medicare/Social Security, promising a magical end to the pandemic by April 2020 while pondering bleach instead of promoting the general welfare, etc set to a tranquil reading of the preamble of the Constitution?
It’s a lovely bit of writing. My daughter is memorizing it for school this weekend:
"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
Today's Morning consult poll has Harris up 5% in Pa. Trump apparently has consolidated his resources in Pa and N. Carolina. I don't believe him but Nate Silver says the entire race rests in those states. Still have to determine "likely" voters and I think women and Gen Z are highly motivated and are undercounted as likely by the polls. 58% of Pa women voters are registered Democratic.
FT 6 just texted to Pennsylvania. Here is the early voter info. https://election.lab.ufl.edu/early-vote/2024-early-voting/2024-general-election-early-vote-pennsylvania/ Several groups from DC are canvassing today in Lancaster, Hanover and Gettysburg.
Biden won the state in 2020 by 80,000 votes. That was before Jan 6.
Vote vets has a bus travelling across the state. We feel we can flip a lot of the veterans who have voted twice for Trump via "not suckers or losers." Similarly, hope we can flip a lot of American Ukrainians, Poles and others similarly situated who supported Trump twice but his Putin connection cannot now be denied.
https://www.mobilize.us/padems/
Beacon Research/Shaw & Company Research has Casey up 8%. He should be up by much more.
I think that the pollsters are ignoring, on purpose, the female vote, especially motivated by the female sovereignty issue. I would expect that there will be surprises in red states,like Missouri, because of the female vote.
I hope that the DNC, DCCC, DSCCC keep banging that drum. I live in a safe blue state, so I don;t see the political ads.
I don't know the answer, but doesn't purging voter lists of people who didn't vote in the last election, also purge Republicans and Trump voters? Then again I assume that between the general election there are many special elections, like levy elections for schools, the point is that purging the rolls because of failure to vote in an election should also purge Trump voters.
I am assuming that they are single issue voters... Trump and grievance.
I suspect that there isn't universal purging, but targeted removals concentrated on districts with a majority of registered Dems, all while red districts are generally left untouched. If/when it's discovered, the response is either that it was unintended or some seemingly benign procedural reason is given as a cover.
I think you are correct, makes sense.
"Has anyone done a montage of Trump and MAGA desecrating the Capitol...set to a tranquil reading of the preamble of the Constitution?" Great idea, Ryan. I would pay to see that on an ad. Maybe a job for the Lincoln Project?
All of the debates have been tilted in the liar's favor. Both candidates should be put in soundproof rooms and there microphones turned off and on when it is their turn to speak, and they need to be fact checked! Honest people have no problem with that, just the liars assume they have freedom of speech to be disruptive demons!
PT Barnum was associated with the saying"there is a fool born every minute", he actually claims it was one of his competitors that made up that saying in order to smear his character. Also WC Fields said that it is"immoral to let a fool keep his money and give a sucker an even break"! Obviously Trump is a firm believer in that line of reasoning. The right wingers are going to give the oligarchs the keys to the kingdom like Putin has in Russia. Look at what Putin has done. The Russian people aren't much better off than they were in the dark ages, if they aren't worse off in some instances. I blame phony religions for teaching children to believe in the supernatural and detach them from reality, truth and reason! The church and the greedy, dictatorous oligarch, demons, have worked together for thousands of years. How else could we have about 80 million delusional lunatics walking the streets able to buy guns and vote?
I'm very concerned that the fix is in. Garland and Jack Smith doing too little too late. I am not even sure if Kamala knows it? The Democratic leadership since Reagan democrats, have marginalized the progressive caucus and the FDR liberals.
I'm glad the storm missed you Thom. Now all the brainwashed cult are going to have their hands out wanting us to rebuild their global warming caused catastrophe again!
Jeff did an excellent job on your radio program.
Russians don't know any better, they have a tradition of living with a boot on the neck, from the sons of Jenghis Khan, through the Tsars, to the Bolsheviks, Lenin, Stalin, Putin.
That is what normality looks like to the Russians. They don't know any better.
We do agree on Garland and Smith. I learned my lesson with Mueller, actually I didn't trust him and his investigation either, but liberals are always hopeful, evidently believing that a savior will descend from the clouds at the last minute and save our bacon.
Every hope that we have had since Trump was first investigated had been squashed, by the established powers that be, even our heroic judges, like Merchan have sold us out. Think of all the times that Merchan gave in to Trump and his lawyers, and let him get away with threats and disrepect and all they got was a verbal warning. If it was anyone else, they would still be sitting in jail.
Worse liberals make excuses for those that betray them.
I have been filling out the IRS form to report religious leaders who promote politics. I see I have more work to do. Stop the madness!!!
Thank you Thom for reporting on things the MSM don’t and won’t touch. It’s going to take this kind of truth to power reporting to get the real truth out there
My hypothesis is that the Republican party is now dominated by a contingent of theocrats that were ‘called to order’ by Lewis Powell and his ‘Powell Memo’ in the late 1970s. This group of theocrats have been engaging in a covert coup that we are experiencing today. The members of this coup have grown in fits and starts over the last 45 years and now include Bannon, Koch, McConnell, Leonard, Rand (Ayn), Theil, the developers within Project 2025, Opus Dei people, Friedman (Milton), Knights of Malta people, and no telling how many more. At the end of the day, these people are ‘social Darwinists.’ Now that they have successfully packed the Supreme Court with their devotees, they believe that the time has now come to fully capitalize upon the degree of control that they have been surreptitiously building over all of these years. They now have the perfect presidential candidate (Trump) that they need – who also happens to be a village idiot. All they have to do is play to his monumental need to be important and the center of attention in order to turn him into the total puppet that they can control. In my view, this is why they twist themselves into pretzels and put up with his obvious idiocy and flagrant narcissism. The major issue here is that while we wail and complain and point out every day his latest idiotic statement, behavior, etc., we miss focusing on the big, central, major problem – THE COUP and THE THEOCRACY!!!! We must get the word out that THIS IS A TAKEOVER. Trump is the puppet, not the problem. The problem is the COUP!
Thanks, Thom for all you bring to us with your always great way you deliver the news of the week. We really at this point and time need to stay focused on the facts at hand. Lies are not truth and I am glad the the majority of the people know the difference. Thom just needed to say keep up the great work. This really is the time to stay woke and aware of the facts of the day and time. Know you had a great conference and everything went well. You only have to hands Thom and always get so much done. I, admire all your energy. Only the best! Thom!
"Expect Vance to use the “firehose of lies” strategy, where you throw out a half-dozen or so lies in a single sentence or two, forcing your opponent to burn his time rebutting them."
Republican Party candidates routinely bog down debates with this gish galloping to prevent substantive policy discussion. It's Bannon's "flood the zone with shit" approach. Walz already knows which lies JDV will spin, so he can prepare answers that correct and inform all in the same go. Walz is great on his feet and just like Luke, has one cool hand. I expect him to do very well.
Apparently the MAGAs/conservatives are all upset with the FCC because that august body has fast-tracked applications by (THE) George Soros to buy some 200 Audacy Network radio stations and turn them into progressive talk radio outlets.....
Mr. Hartmann, I think you meant to write “ help out down-ticket Blue state candidates…” not down-ticket Red state candidates.
“Democrats are going to try to break some Republican supermajorities and help out down-ticket Red state candidates…”
Looking forward to the VP debate to see if Governor Walz calls a sitting Senator "weird" to his face.
Ohio hired a guy that claimed to have some common sense but turned out to be a complete flake that joined the crazy train. Is VANCE the witch or has he been bewitched? That psychopath Trump creates his reality one minute to the next, and JD creates his identity the same way.
This Wallnau guy Vance is joining today is a White Christian Nationalist; if they had a card, he would have one. He is another traitor.
From WIKI: "Religion scholar Matthew D. Taylor has referred to Wallnau as "one of the key Christian mobilizers for January 6th".[4] After Trump lost the 2020 US presidential election, Wallnau claimed that the election had been stolen from him.[19] He defended the January 6 attack against the US Capitol,[19] stating, "Jan. 6 was not an insurrection. It was an election fraud intervention."[19]
First, Thom, why are you using the term Hunter as though it were a normal English usage. It's not.
Second, if Walz has to fact check Vance's lies, I suggest Walz uses a running message bar on top of his lectern that reports the lies as his fact check team runs them down. Walz doesn't have to comment on them or use up his time refuting them. Gosh, the bar could even be running when Walz's microphone is off and Vance is speaking. Wouldn't that be neat! The wireless connected bar could just be carried in to the debate and put on top of Walz's lectern without asking first. That would be a Trump type move.
Team Jack! 😃
There is no doubt that Vance will use the The Gish gallop tactoc which is a rhetorical technique in which a person in a debate attempts to overwhelm an opponent by presenting an excessive number of arguments, with no regard for their accuracy or strength, with a rapidity that makes it impossible for the opponent to address them in the time available.
It is standard right wing technique. it is the only way that they, like Stephen Moore, talk. On Bill Maher, Rachel Maddow had to stand up to shut him up, it is also the gist of a filibuster.
Here is a copy and paste from Reddit
This is an effective strategy because there's not really an easy way around it, you have to answer the arguments, or you (usually, assuming there is offense) lose. The most straightforward, blunt-force way to do this is to simply match the rate at which your opponent is making arguments. In competitive debate this is often achieved by simply speaking faster.
Problem there is: the other team can also speak as fast as they want, and there are probably people out there who are much faster than you. Plus, if this isn't a structured environment and there aren't established speech times then there's nothing to stop your opponent from simply speaking for longer. So how do you handle a situation where you can't push back through sheer volume of arguments? There it becomes a question of efficiency. Can you answer arguments with less time/effort than your opponent took to make them? Can you find commonalities between the arguments and answer them all simultaneously ("group them" in debate parlance)? Can you safely disregard certain arguments? That kind of thing.
Kamala handled it perfectly, she ignored his rants, and went on the attack herself, attacking his fragile ego which threw him off his stride.
Despite his bravado, Vance has his own achilles heel, like all authoritarians it is his ego and being deried, laughed at and not taken seriously.