We Now Know Why the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) Refused to Publish the 2024 Autopsy Report

It has finally been published, and the report created by a friend of the DNC Chairman is not just lame and studiously obtuse, it also appears to be AI generated slop.

There never really an autopsy report, just make-work for an incompetent overpaid crony.

The Democratic party has belatedly published a postmortem on its disastrous 2024 election defeat, after an initial decision to withhold the document triggered an angry backlash.

Ken Martin, chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), released the report – which fails to mention Gaza or Joe Biden’s age – accompanied by an apology to party members angered by his initial decision to keep the analysis of Kamala Harris’s loss to Donald Trump and defeat in both houses of Congress under wraps.

Martin had initially declined to publish the report, authored by a veteran Democratic strategist, Paul Rivera. He cited a need to focus on this year’s midterm elections and avoid re-opening old wounds.

The decision backfired, leading to a crisis of confidence in Martin’s leadership among senior Democrats and accusations that he was keeping the findings secret.

The report focuses on key demographics that Harris lost – including Latinos, men and rural voters in many states – and compares her performance to other Democrats in key state races, such as North Carolina governor Josh Stein.

While I do think that Josh Stein had a good electoral strategy, "Have a Black Nazi who frequents porn forums and self identifies as a perv to run against," is not an easily repeatable campaign. 

AOC 2028

If just because Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez scares the bejesus out of Republicans:

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) got a Republican lawmaker to strike his comments after she accused him of trying to intimidate Democratic governors during an immigration-focused hearing. 

New York Governor Kathy Hochul (D), Minnesota Governor Tim Walz (D), and Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker (D) went before the House Committee on Oversight and Reform on Thursday, where Republican lawmakers railed against their states’ “sanctuary” laws.

………

“You are engaged in operations against federal government attempts to enforce federal law that I think now constitutes a threat to our national security, and you’re in violation of federal law,” Palmer said.

“That’s 100% false,” Hochul pushed back.

“And charges should be — for obstruction — should be brought against each one of you for doing this. I’ll leave that up to the Department of Justice,” Palmer said.

………

“Mr. Chair, point of order, point of order. That was a form of intimidation of the witness,” Ocasio-Cortez told Comer.

“Do you have a point of inquiry?” Comer asked.

“Yes, I have a point of inquiry,” Ocasio-Cortez said.

“State your point,” Comer said.

“Raising the prospect of charges against witnesses is a form of intimidation, is it not?” the congresswoman asked.

Palmer can be heard off-mic saying he “strikes” his statement, leading Ocasio-Cortez to withdraw her question.

Making nice to Republicans is a losing proposition.  We need a fighter to run in 2028 for President.

Finally

It appears that some members of the  Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) are beginning to realize that the consultants who have been running the party's political operations are not working for the party, they are working for themselves.

Well, knock me over with a  GBU-57A/B Massive Ordnance Penetrator bomb.

After spending well over a billion dollars, and a significant chunk of that change ending up in consultants pockets, you are just now noticing?

Candidates vying to lead the Democratic National Committee have found a common enemy: the D.C. consultant.

In the first DNC-sanctioned forum in the body’s low-profile race for chair on Saturday, DNC candidates channeled their frustration at the “D.C. insiders,” whom New York state Sen. James Skoufis vowed to “kick to the curb.” Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party Chair Ken Martin pledged the “D.C. consultants” will “be gone when I’m there.” And Wisconsin Democratic Party Chair Ben Wikler promised he’d go into 2025 “with no commitments to anyone who’s been on a campaign payroll before.”

It’s a sign of the times for a party that burned through some $1.5 billion in the final months of the campaign, only to come up short against President-elect Donald Trump. As the party still searches for answers to its devastating losses in 2024, consultants became the punching bag while the DNC candidates largely avoided sparring with one another. They all agreed that the party needed to reground its identity with the working class and commit to a permanent campaign infrastructure across the country. But any light attacks — of which there were a few — came without names attached.

That $1.5 billion was spent in about 15 weeks, and as near as I can figure (unsurprisingly the numbers are incomplete and confusing) a least ⅕ of that went to various consulting firms.

This happens again, and again, and again, and nothing seems to be done about it.

One does hope that the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) will finally do something about fixing this problem.

And It's Done

I guess that I should be grateful that this time it happened without violence, but I take no solace in the certification of Trump's election today.

I accept it, but I am not happy about it.

A joint session of Congress on Monday certified President-elect Donald J. Trump’s victory in the 2024 election, peacefully performing a basic ritual of democracy that was brutally disrupted four years ago by a violent pro-Trump mob inflamed by his lie about a stolen election.

There was no hint of a similar scene this time, although security had been stepped up at the Capitol. Unlike Mr. Trump back then, Vice President Kamala Harris did not dispute her loss in November, and unlike Republicans in the aftermath of the 2020 balloting, Democrats made no objections during the counting of the Electoral College votes.

Instead, Ms. Harris stoically presided over the certification of her own loss without interruption. The presentation of the results unfolded quickly without drama, as House and Senate lawmakers who had been designated in advance read out the number of electoral votes from each state in alphabetical order, and who won them.

Fuck.

Not a Surprise

The impact on Michigan voters was more notable pic.twitter.com/8siEur6Fn9

— Polling USA (@USA_Polling) November 22, 2024

It turns out that Kamala Harris's campaign tour with Liz Cheney actually made people less likely to vote for her.

Hell, it made me less likely to vote for her. (I did anyway)

This non-partisan centrist fetish is, to quote (not) Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, "Worse than a crime, it was a mistake."

The Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) is deeply and profoundly incompetent.

As to whether or not the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) is more corrupt or more incompetent, that exercise will be left up to my reader(s).

Radical centrism is a disease.

There is Never a Single Reason

But Kamala Harris' decision to make Elizabeth Cheney's endorsement of her central to the campaign was an own goal of epic proportions.

It was pandering to a section of the electorate, never-Trumpers, who were already going to vote Harris and whose numbers were vanishingly small.

Additionally, it served to demoralize potential supporters.

Kamala Harris made her first campaign appearance with Liz Cheney in Ripon, Wisconsin, the birthplace of the Republican Party, one month and two days before the 2024 election. The point of the visit was to signal to conservatives that they could split with Donald Trump’s Republican Party over their concerns about the former president’s election denialism, authoritarian rhetoric, and embrace of global strongmen. Republicans could, Cheney argued, cast a “Country Over Party” vote for the Democratic presidential nominee—just like the former chair of the House Republican Conference, who broke with Trump over his refusal to accept the results of the 2020 election, planned to do.

The media loved the story. Lavish attention was paid to the event. Cable channels went live. Ponderous essays were written in the great newspapers of the nation about the prospect that Harris would attract enough Republican votes to upend Trump’s bid for a second term.

Unfortunately, while many Democratic tacticians were enthusiastic about Cheney’s jumping on board as a Harris backer, Republican voters couldn’t have cared less. The Cheney strategy was an abject failure that added few if any votes to the Democratic total, alienated voters who have no taste for the former GOP representative’s neocon extremism, and stole precious time from an agonizingly short campaign schedule.

I'm sure that Harris' advisers thought that this was a good idea, but these advisors are all a product of the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) political consultancy community, and they thought that it was a good idea because running on nothing makes said political consultants money. 

They'll Preside Over the Ruins

Over at The Nation, Jeet Heer demands that we hold the corrupt and incompetent Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) accountable.

Nah Gah Nah Happen.

This is not just power, there are a whole class of people at the top of the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) whose living depends on the incompetence and corruption to continue, and, to quote the great Upton Sinclair, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

They would rather rule over a a Democratic Party in shambles then lose their power over the party.  

The title is the Boies Penrose quote.  When he was accused of destroying the Republican Party in Pennsylvanie to preserve his power within the party, he replied, "Yes, but I’ll preside over the ruins.."

While the presidential election wasn’t called until early Wednesday morning, by midnight the overwhelming evidence was that the Democrats were heading for a catastrophe on par with 2016. Donald Trump was already leading in all the battleground states; Republicans were poised to win the Senate, and the House of Representatives remains agonizingly close. There is a real danger of a Republican trifecta once the last votes are counted. It also appears that Donald Trump has won the popular vote—something he failed to do in his first two runs for the presidency.

Trump is now in a position to do enormous damage during his second term in office. We can expect that Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito will resign from the Supreme Court soo—and be replaced by much younger right-wing ideologues of the same ilk. This would ensure a right-wing stranglehold on the highest court in America for another generation. Trump will also be able to renew his tax cut of 2017, ensuring that trillions of dollars in wealth will be kept by billionaires rather than taxed for the benefit of the country. Trump will also be able to implement the extremist agenda of Project 2025, a plan to remake the American government along plutocratic lines.

Aside from Vladimir Putin, other alleged culprits for Trump’s victory included Bernie bros who allegedly sat out the election in spite, James Comey for releasing two letters about the FBI’s investigation of Hillary Clinton, the media for overplaying the Clinton e-mail story and giving Trump too much airtime, and the general bigotry of the American public. While some of these factors did play a part in Trump’s victory, they functioned mainly as distractions from the inconvenient—to the party elite—truth that Clinton and the Democrats bore a much greater share of the responsibility. Clinton ran an uninspired campaign that focused too much on Trump’s personal foibles, while her party refused to take responsibility for neoliberal policies that had immiserated the American working class. Further, Clinton focused her message so heavily on winning over suburban college-educated voters who were normally Republican, and who in fact overwhelmingly stayed with Trump. This caused her to ignore the much larger number of voters who were working-class and non-college-educated.

………

The main fact of American politics in the post-Obama era is that an ever larger majority of Americans are angry at the status quo and open to anti-system politics. Trump won as the candidate of anti-system anger in 2016. In 2020, he suffered the liability of being the status quo even as Covid was ravaging the world. But by 2024 he was able to return again as the voice of change, bolstered by the fond memories many Americans have of the economy under his presidency—and of the temporary, but generous, expansion of the welfare state under Covid emergency measures.

I believe that this last paragraph is fundamentally wrong.  "Anti-system politics" were present, and in some election cycles ascendant (2010 "shellacking" anyone?), during the Obama administration, but Obama had the good fortune to be facing someone even more establishment than he was in 2012.

In fact, I would argue that "Anti-system politics" as a political force were in large part created by Barack Obama, when he bailed out corrupt and criminal bankers on the backs of ordinary people.

It's no wonder that a large number of voters want to burn everything to the ground.

Hell, I want to burn everything to the ground, nationalize health insurance, prosecute corrupt Supreme Court justices, throw anti-abortion terrorists in jail, and fire every single major political pundit in the country.

Doom Scrolling for the Past 5 Hours.

The current AP projection is 210 electoral votes for Harris, and 247 for Trump.

Harris needs to win Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Arizona to make it to 273 EVs, and she is behind in all of these but Minnesota right now.

In addition, the Democrats have lost at least 2 Senate seats, Sherrod Brown's loss hurts a lot, and thus control of the Senate, and appear unlikely to take the house.

We are fucked, and I am having a stiff drink and going to bed.

In the morning, I will have to evaluate my options.

(On edit)

Also having pie, my eldest baked a fresh pie tonight.

Expecting a Long Night Tomorrow

I hope for a Harris win, but I do not expect a Harris landslide.

I still have to decide if I want to cover this sober or not.

I Voted Early

Not a Long Video

I voted early, and it went very quickly.

Accompanied by my intrepid, if somewhat half-assed cameraman Charlie Saroff, I was in and out in 15 minutes.

I would have been out in 10, but I thought that it would be cool to use the digital marking machine.

I lost 5 minutes waiting for those, and then switched to the old fashioned stations with a pen.

I'm surprised that it went so quickly.

There were 11 early voting stations in Baltimore County, so I went after I picked up my kid at the train station.

Vote early and often.

The Election is Over

You know how they say that it's all over when the fat lady sings?

This is not true.  It's all over when Insane Clown Posse raps.

In this case, Violent J had endorsed Harris:

In what surely comes as a heartbreaking disappointment to Donald Trump, Insane Clown Posse’s Violent J has endorsed In what surely comes as a heartbreaking disappointment to Donald Trump, Insane Clown Posse’s Violent J has endorsed Kamala Harris for president. Kamala Harris for president.

Speaking with comedian Troy Iwata for a recent segment on The Daily Show, Violent J confirmed that Harris is his preferred pick for the White House, saying “I want her to win because she’s a Democrat, and I love my mom.”

.......

Speaking about why he prefers Democrats to Republicans, Violent J explained, “My mom said the Democrats are saying less taxes on the poor, more taxes on the rich.” When asked about the taxes he pays, he enthusiastically claimed that he pays “up the fucking anus, and I’m happy about it. I pay double what they ask.”

Good.

Posted via mobile.

Headline of the Day

Trump Evasive About Raising Pa. Minimum Wage While Pretending to Work at McDonald’s in Bucks County

—The Philadelphia Inquirer

A suggestion for the New York Times, hire whoever wrote that hed, and have them give lessons.

This is how news is handled, not with the equivocation and both-siderism that one seems to be the rule at the Times.

The McDonald's was closed, no one paid for any food, there were no customers, and the franchise owner refuses to pay his workers well.

That is the story:

While visiting a McDonald’s in Bucks County on Sunday, former President Donald Trump failed to answer a question about raising the minimum wage even though an overwhelming majority of Pennsylvania voters support an increase.

Trump, 78, “worked” the fry cooker at a McDonald’s — which was closed to the public for the event — in Feasterville.

………

The beginning of the question is cut off, so it’s unclear if the reporter was asking about raising Pennsylvania’s minimum wage specifically. At $7.25, the state’s minimum wage is aligned with the federal rate, and is one of the lowest minimum wages in the country. It hasn’t been changed since 2009, the last time the federal minimum wage was increased.

“It’s a beautiful thing to see these are great franchises and produce a lot of jobs and it’s great,” Trump went on. “And great people work in here too.” As several reporters shouted again about the minimum wage, he continued to ignore them.

Trump’s obfuscation could mean something to the more than three-quarters of all Pennsylvanians who somewhat or strongly support increasing the state minimum wage.

That's because in Donald's world, paying decent wages is for suckers.

Who Had Arnold Palmer’s Penis on Their Election 2024 Bingo Card?

Lord knows that I didn't.

Heck, if you had presented this as a story to the editors of The Onion, they would have sent it back as too over the top.

Something is deeply wrong here.

The best comment about this comes from the Golf great's daughter, who noted that Arnold Palmer detested Donald Trump:

Golf legend Arnold Palmer’s daughter said she was “not really upset” by the lewd story former President Donald Trump told about her father at a rally in his hometown on Saturday.

Peg Palmer Wears, the 68-year-old daughter of the golf icon, told the Associated Press “there‘s nothing much to say” about the story the Republican nominee chose to open his rally in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, surrounding Palmer’s manhood.

“This man was strong and tough,” Trump told the crowd in a perplexing speech on Saturday. “And I refused to say it, but when he took showers with the other pros. They came out of there, they said, ‘Oh my God. That’s unbelievable.’ I had to say it.”

………

Palmer, a longtime Republican, died in September 2016 before Trump’s first electoral victory. He golfed with other presidents, including George H.W. Bush and Dwight Eisenhower—a man he looked up to as an ideal leader, The Washington Post reported after his death.

However, Wears previously indicated her father was less enthusiastic about Trump‘s candidacy. In 2018, Palmer’s daughter said in an interview with The Sporting News that he was “appalled by Trump’s lack of civility and what he began to see as Trump’s lack of character” before his death.

 What a surprise.

Ecch (Tweet) of the Day

“The Republican Party is a threat to Democracy, which is why you need to vote for Democrats. And as president, one of the first things I’ll do is make sure the Republicans get a say in my administration” is not a coherent argument for a campaign. https://t.co/q4XaYKzfGl

— Alex Fernie (@FernieCommaAlex) October 11, 2024

Yes, this is completely incoherent.

Also, it typifies the rot in the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) and the rest of the very serious people types operating inside the DC beltway.

The thinking is, "These people cannot be bad, I was just at a cocktail party with them."

Headline of the Day

Trump Gets Unhinged, Even for Him, Over Kamala Harris ‘60 Minutes’ Interview

—The Daily Beast

It's that interior clause, "Even for Him," that makes this headline.

If Trump is so upset over this, he could give the interview that the news magazine program has requested.

Donald Trump—who agreed to an interview with the CBS newsmagazine show 60 Minutes before backing out—has gone on the warpath at Kamala Harris for her performance on the show.

“The Interview on 60 Minutes with Comrade Kamala Harris is considered by many of those who reviewed it, the WORST Interview they have ever seen,” he wrote, in a Tuesday morning post on Truth Social. “She literally had no idea what she was talking about, and it was an embarrassment to our Country that a Major Party Candidate would be so completely inept.”

If the interview were as bad as he claims, and he implies a Razorfish level of fail, he would be happy, not irate.

………

Trump seemingly wants no part of that level of scrutiny. The Republican nominee for president accepted an invitation to a similar sitdown interview on the storied program, but his campaign later “decided not to participate,” a CBS spokesperson told CNN. 

I've not seen the interview, but it appears that it touched a nerve.

Finally

So, the New York Times has finally noticed that Donald Trump is bat-sh%$ insane.

Even then, they do their level best to fob this observation on a 3rd party, specifically a computer program that counts words, because they are cowardly pissants.

Being a cowardly pissant is antithetical to journalism, but they are all nepo-babies there, so it does not matter:

The New York Times has finally weighed in on the subject of Donald Trump’s mental unfitness. On Sunday, Peter Baker and Dylan Freedman described Trump’s obvious problems at great length.

It marked a red-letter day for journalism.

The New York Times is by far the most influential news organization in the media ecosphere. By publishing this story, it has created a permission structure for others to more directly address the issue of Trump’s mental fitness.

So let’s go! Start your engines! As I wrote, perhaps a bit prematurely a few weeks ago, Trump’s mental capacity is now topic one.

………

As Michael Tomasky wrote in The New Republic on Monday, Baker and Freedman’s piece “could stand as the single most important piece of journalism in this election” – particularly if “the Times keeps finding ways to raise this question, and … other mainstream outlets follow.” 

Of course they are.  For some reason, other media outlets see the New York Times imprimatur as authorization to cover this story.  I'm not sure why, because that f%$#ing paper is a sh%$-show, but it is what it is.

I don't expect them to run this non-stop though, because when he was President, Trump gave the NYT a one on one interview, so they lack the motivation of narcissistic butt-hurt.

BTW, here are the weasel words:

………

The heart of the story was a statistical analysis:

According to a computer analysis by The New York Times, Mr. Trump’s rally speeches now last an average of 82 minutes, compared with 45 minutes in 2016. Proportionately, he uses 13 percent more all-or-nothing terms like “always” and “never” than he did eight years ago, which some experts consider a sign of advancing age.

Similarly, he uses 32 percent more negative words than positive words now, compared with 21 percent in 2016, which can be another indicator of cognitive change. And he uses swearwords 69 percent more often than he did when he first ran, a trend that could reflect what experts call disinhibition. (A study by Stat, a health care news outlet, produced similar findings.)

You know, considering the allegations of tumult in his campaign, a real journalist could do more than say, "We have a computer program that counts words," but that is actual work.

………

Another giant problem with the article was that it failed to use the word “lie” even once. And it failed to connect the dots between Trump’s “rambling” and how his constant lies are not random – they come straight from the authoritarian playbook, consistently intended to divide the nation and terrify voters into electing a strongman. (See Ruth Ben-Ghiat.)

It’s also worth noting that Baker snuck an astonishing revelation into his 19th paragraph:

Some of Mr. Trump’s cabinet secretaries had a running debate over whether the president was “crazy-crazy,” as one of them put it in an interview after leaving office, or merely someone who promoted “crazy ideas.” There were multiple conversations about whether the 25th Amendment disability clause should be invoked to remove him from office, although the idea never went far.

How long has Baker been sitting on this quote? And while there have been vague reports in the past about such conversations within the cabinet, they’ve been in the context of the Jan. 6 insurrection, not his mental health. That strikes me as newsworthy.

He sat on it until he was certain that he could not get a book deal out of this, like many other NYT staffers (looking at you nepo-baby Maggie Haberman) and Bob Woodward did.

I don't expect much to come of this.  The Times spent years writing about Biden's alleged cognitive decline, and there is less than a month to the election, but we should see more coverage from places like the Washington Post, LA times, Boston Globe, Chicago Sun Times, etc.

They Are Laughing at You, Not with You

I’m sorry, this is the funniest single photo of the entire election cycle. pic.twitter.com/w6PuJlPPmW

— Sonny Bunch (@SonnyBunch) October 6, 2024

I'm not getting a Tesla. I'm keeping my 1978 Trabant.

tfw you have acquired another idiot son https://t.co/E3tTVBBCXb pic.twitter.com/sBS2Eu29n9

— Alex Shephard (@alex_shephard) October 6, 2024

Donald Trump is the sane looking one. (WTF?)

The Apartheid Era Emerald Heir Pedo Guy™ spoke at a Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.

Not a good look, but it was made even worse by him jumping around like a chihuahua on meth.

People memed the sh%$ out of this.

What can I say about this but, somewhere in America there is a village looking for their idiot who has wandered off.

Filed Under, "Pass the Popcorn"

The Jack Smith filing has been released in redacted form to the public.

There is a lot to go over, but the short version is that the President has no role in elections, and as such attempts to subvert the election are not an official act.

Also, the filing appears to show that Trump knew that he had lost which eliminates even that potential loophole.

Also, I think that it inevitable that former VP Mike Pence will be a witness in the trial. 

When the special counsel, Jack Smith, charged former President Donald J. Trump last year with plotting to overturn the 2020 election, the federal indictment filed in Washington had only one defendant: Mr. Trump himself, who stood accused of working with a small team of conspirators.

But in a court filing unsealed on Wednesday, Mr. Smith drew on the actions of a much larger group to tell the tale of how Mr. Trump lost the race but sought to stay in the White House.

He populated his brief with a sprawling cast of characters — lawyers, longtime Trump aides, campaign operatives, even some of the rioters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 — who all played a supporting role either for or against Mr. Trump’s attempts to cling to power.

Most of them were not named in the 165-page filing, and were referred to only by numeric monikers, though many of their identities could be divined from details in the brief. And the sheer scope of the crew was evidenced by the fact that the anonymized references started with Person 1 and went all the way to Person 71.

………

Among those characters was Eric Herschmann, a lawyer who had met Mr. Trump through his childhood friend, Jared Kushner, the former president’s son-in-law.

Identified as Person 9 in the brief, Mr. Herschmann started working in the White House as an assistant to the president in August 2020. During the chaotic weeks after Mr. Trump had been defeated, Mr. Herschmann offered what Mr. Smith described as “the unvarnished truth” about the “claims of fraud” that Mr. Trump and his allies were advancing.

……… 

As the brief says, Mr. Herschmann — whose name appears unredacted but slightly misspelled at one point in the document — was aware that two outside consulting firms had looked at and debunked most of the claims. At one point, he warned Mr. Trump that if he brought them into court “they would get slaughtered” because they were “all bullshit.”

………

The brief asserts that Mr. Trump had a conversation with Mr. Bannon a little less than 15 minutes before he called Mr. Pence on Jan. 1.

During that call, Mr. Trump is said in the brief to have told Mr. Pence that if he did not go through with the plans, hundreds of thousands of people were “gonna hate your guts” and were “gonna think you’re stupid.”

First, it's clear, giving Trump's history of stochastic terrorism, that this is an explicit threat.

Second, it makes clear how Pence has to testify.

………

If Mr. Smith’s filing was in many ways a trial brief, setting forth the most detailed picture yet of how Mr. Trump had sought to disrupt the lawful transfer of power, it also had a much more narrow legal purpose: It was sent to the judge in the case, Tanya S. Chutkan, to help her determine how much of the indictment can survive the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling granting Mr. Trump a broad form of immunity for many official acts he took in office.

Which reminds me, we need to start getting serious about reforming the deeply corrupt Supreme Court.

God Help Me

I'm desperately trying to wrap things up at work before I take two days off for Rosh Hashanah, so I ended up leaving work late, so I had to drive home, Sober listening toe the Vice Presidential debate.

When I got home, I just wasn't up to catching up on the booze, so I listened to the whole thing while I went through my blogroll for interesting stories, again I was Sober.

The horror ………

My overall take is that Vance was glib but evasive, and, yes,  kind of weird, and that Walz appeared very sincere.

The moderators were crap, but not as bad crap as the white hot dense neutron star of awfulness that was Jake Tapper and Dana Bash at the CNN debate between Biden and Trump.

In terms of providing a summary as to the effect, I'm probably not a good person for this.

A lot of people seem to find the candidates telling their personal life stories to justify policies to be a positive thing, and I simply find it contrived and meaningless.

Vance did this more often than Walz, but they both did it a lot, and it pissed me off.

Also, I found that they were far too solicitous toward each other, and so they minimized the policy differences between them.

That being said, even while Vance was more disciplined than Trump (So are my cats in the presence of catnip) I think that you still got the Opus Dei adjacent weirdness that has been a feature for him for a rather long time.

Who won?

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Headline of the Day

When Odious Foreign Policy Elites Rally Around Harris

— Responsible Statecraft

When Dick Cheney endorses you, you are doing something wrong.

Efforts to bolster the candidacy of Vice President Kamala Harris by the D.C. foreign policy establishment kicked into overdrive over the course of the past week with the near simultaneous release of two open letters signed by hundreds of former U.S. national security officials.

It is an accelerated version of previous campaigns in 2016 and 2020, where ex-officials and military officers on both sides of the aisle vocalizing major opposition to Trump offer to give national security cred to the Democratic candidate — in this case Harris. For their part, the candidate virtually ignores that many of these endorsements are in many cases coming from odious individuals, including architects of wars and interventions that Democrats have openly criticized as stains on recent American history.

………

Critics of course point out that many of these people are the same Washington creatures who got our country into endless foreign wars and profited from them for 20 years straight — and until this day support cruel, authoritarian dictators when convenient to U.S. policy. They are not wrong.

………

Yet for the most part, the letter carried with it the odor of the consensus minded War Party, if not 9/11-era neoconservatism. In the past this would have been a problem for traditionally liberal and progressive outlets, but Mother Jones and the New Republic were quick to applaud the letter as a “win” for the Harris campaign. Not surprisingly, only The Nation has called out their fellow liberals and progressives for making common cause with the likes of Vice President Dick Cheney and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, both of whom have also endorsed Harris in recent days (except for columnist Joan Walsh, who found Liz Cheney's endorsement of Harris "strangely moving," writing, "Liz, I told you we could find common ground. Let’s have a cup of coffee. Or even a beer?"

………

The second letter, boasting 700 signers and released on September 22 by the group National Security Leaders 4 America, is a more serious effort if only because the caliber of people, whether you agree or disagree with them, is far higher.

………

While the signatories were mainly retired generals, flag officers, and diplomats, the letter boasted its own share of armchair militarists, very much including the 2016 Democratic nominee for president, Hillary Rodham Clinton. The inclusion of a number of the most reckless and irresponsible civilian national security leaders of our time only serves to dilute the seriousness of the message — any letter featuring John Brennan, Victoria Nuland, Michael McFaul and Leon Panetta is one that can and should be safely ignored.

 One hopes, in private at least, that Harris is embarrassed.