This was also my takeaway from the debate. Trump looked weak from the jump when he let Harris take the lead in shaking his hand. He was on the defensive all night. All this capped off by a cringe-inducing “I saw people on television talking about it” when fact-checked on the immigrants eating cats and dogs comment (which was also batshit insane enough to lose some of the 67 million watching). Truly an “okay, let’s get you to bed, grandpa” moment.

The substance behind his words has never mattered to his supporters, no matter how vile or dissembling, but the vibe absolutely does. They won’t turn around and vote for a Black woman, but there has to be a loss of enthusiasm that comes about from this, if not breaking the spell entirely for a few people. He looked old, small, and weird.

Yes, it happens, but the majority of American workers still had Labor Day off this year.

It would have a measurable impact on voter turnout.

Jon Stewart’s appearance on Crossfire was also 20 years ago now.

I’m subjected to a few hours of Fox News/right-wing YouTube a week, and it’s certainly felt like the vibe has shifted. Reading between the lines with some of the talking heads, it sounds like they’d rather Trump lost and the GOP made gains in both the House and the Senate.

They can still run the party status quo ante that way for at least a little while. If Democrats get through voting rights legislation, the GOP will be forced to come up with an actual party platform beyond “loot the treasury.”

And it’s bound to come up at the debate (if the debate happens). Some of his low-info voters will hear about it for the first time that night, and it being a simple thing is important in that scenario.

I’m not sure what made me feel older, how rough he sounded, or him dropping a self-deprecating McDonald’s joke. Talk about a throwback.

I’m also already seeing that “two-bit union buster” line a lot.

Kinzinger, too. Plus with Bernie, Jayapal, and others attending a progressive side show I’m getting the sense progressives (or anyone staunchly anti-corporate) aren’t going to get much time on the podium.

If they don’t have significant local progressives like Chuy Garcia or Delia Ramirez up there, and their “local” speaker is Pritzker, I’m going to have a real hard time buying this campaign promise.

Grocery is a very low margin business, even at the conglomerate stores.

The food producers are the problem. Cargill is one example.

A feel-good story about a J6 participant with a photo of a little old lady holding her dog, no less. It’s fucking bizarre.

They left out the part that it wasn’t her first time (she was involved in the Idaho Capitol breach in 2020) along with her posting a pic of herself with a gun on a Facebook post about J6.

Yeah, I think this article has an important message that needs repeating, but I don’t buy this angle from it. Empowering men to control women has always been a simpler argument. Cultural reinforcement of “traditional” family and gender roles stem back to that, too.

The difference between Roe and progressive policies is that said policies are broadly popular with the electorate. Making durable, unpopular changes under minority rule is virtually impossible with our federal legislature, and the right had to finally luck out and enact them by installing enough Supreme Court justices willing to upend the system. From a long-term view, Roe wasn’t a sustained effort, or at least not a successful one until very recently. The evangelicals had been losing support on the issue every year and exploited a crack in the system that McConnell exposed in 2016.

The GOP and the conservative coalition within the Democratic Party can’t afford to allow significant progressive policy through even once because it becomes political suicide to repeal without years of propaganda and budgetary ratfucking. Obamacare is the latest example. It’s not even close to the same effort level.

A second New Deal Congress is coming within our lifetimes. The demographics say it’s inevitable (as long as we have elections, anyway). Yes, it will take work, and it starts in the primaries.

Should Harris win (and especially if she wins big), I could see it changing the nature of campaigning here. Three months goes against all the conventional wisdom.

The media won’t be happy about it, but it’s past time we bring the press back to public service and away from profiteering anyway.

Between the response to this ticket and the big antitrust win today, this is the most optimistic I’ve been about the direction of American politics in a very long time.

Killing the GOP is in your best interest if fracturing the Democratic Party is what you want. Progressives have been ready to bail since 2016. It’s not likely to make American politics any less statist, though.

Significant electoral reform is the only other path, and any constitutional amendment is not happening without a major cultural shift in partisanship.

By the way for anyone reading that wants the end of the Trump era, I’m also in a 0% chance state, and this will be the first time I vote for the Democrat on the presidential ticket since moving here, and I encourage others in similar positions to turn out and do the same. I always vote third party to give them extra relevance, but this is a year where the popular vote total will matter. Running up the score will be necessary to make false election integrity claims irrelevant.

This was also left out of the discussion with Palestinian voters in Michigan at the peak of the blowback for Biden’s support of Israel a few months ago.

The most unproductive House in decades. I’m old enough to remember when government shutdowns and legislative inaction were considered political suicide. Many of these idiots survived their primaries already, and I can’t imagine them being massively swept out even in the best-case scenario.

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