It’s a long article, but the general point is the United States, while flawed, is very important for maintaining the current world order and preventing despots (such as Putin) from engaging in further wars of conquest.

Trump, being who he is, is the type of President who would enable this sort of situation to occur; he is a populist, protectionist, and isolationist who also hates immigrants.

It’s a lengthy article. Here is the archived link for those interested.

Thoughts on this? I am a big proponent of nuclear energy, not just because it creates a lot of energy but because it represents a way we can combat the climate crisis.

However, geothermal energy takes advantage of the energy that’s already in the Earth; the trick is accessing it, which the article suggests may soon be a viable option to broadly generate energy without generating greenhouse gases.

Here is the archive link for those interested.

With the last eight years as context, I don’t think Trump will lose any supporters over his performance last night against Kamala Harris.

However, after watching that debate in June, I can say this one left me feeling much better. Trump was easily baited into saying ridiculous shit, such as immigrants are “coming to eat all the pets,” that there are ongoing free transgender reassignment surgeries on illegal aliens in prisons, admitted he negotiated with terrorists by bypassing the Afghan government to directly negotiate with the Taliban, wasted time defending his rallies after Harris is pointed out people were leaving them early because they were “bored,” and defended the consequences of Roe versus Wade being overturned by saying “This is what everybody wanted.”

In my opinion, Kamala Harris set the tone of this debate at the very start when she crossed the stage to force Donald Trump to shake her hand.

Here is the archived link for those interested.

It said that in seats won by the Lib Dems “voters would explain that they were voting Lib Dem in these traditionally Tory strongholds because Ed Davey’s party just seemed more ‘normal’”.

Yes.

Archived version for those who want to read the article.

Democrats are good the economy. Republican are bad for the economy.

It’s amazing that republicans have managed to convince so many people otherwise.

I would be shocked to see Virginia would flip; the DC metro area is heavily dependent on government jobs, and a lot of those jobs are threatened by Project 2025.

Is this the poll that had a democratic sponsor?

Not that it isn’t good news - Nate Silver also has North Carolina pretty close, too.

Personally though, I always add a few points to Trump. The fucker seems to consistently be able to beat the polls and have hidden support.

“The Democrats are talking about giving the vote to 16-year-olds, but let’s do this instead,” Vance said in the speech. “Let’s give votes to all children in this country, but let’s give control over those votes to the parents of those children. When you go to the polls in this country as a parent, you should have more power.”

The idea of “One person equals one vote” is really an alien concept to these people, isn’t it?

Continuing…

When asked how he and Trump would accomplish their stated goal of mass deporting as many as 20 million immigrants – a proposal experts previously told ABC News would be a “nightmare” – Vance said they would take a “sequential approach.”

“I mean do you go knock on doors and ask people for their papers? What do you do,” Karl asked.

“You start with what’s achievable,” Vance said. “I think that if you deport a lot of violent criminals and frankly if you make it harder to hire illegal labor, which undercuts the wages of American workers, I think you go a lot of the way to solving the illegal immigration problem.”

“I think it’s interesting that people focus on, well, how do you deport 18 million people? Let’s start with 1 million. That’s where Kamala Harris has failed. And then we can go from there,” Vance said.

Emphasis is mine, and I think this highlights the overall republican strategy to focus on which parts of their agenda are achievable at a given time and how they see their goals as being “sequential.” Their strategy is to slowly boil America like a frog.

On Friday, Microsoft released a report declaring that a hacking group run by the intelligence unit of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard had successfully breached the account of a “former senior adviser” to a presidential campaign. From that account, Microsoft said, the group sent fake email messages, known as “spear phishing,” to “a high-ranking official of a presidential campaign” in an effort to break into the campaign’s own accounts and databases.

So the campaign was “hacked” by one of the most common and avoidable ways you can get hacked.

Here is a link to yahoo.com that displays this NY Times article.

I mean, there was a lot of negative news articles surrounding Shapiro that came out in the past few weeks. It’s not clear if those skeletons were really Shapiro’s, or if they were just made to look that way by a sudden deluge of hit pieces.

1. The sexual harassment case wasn’t covered up, and the perpetrator wasn’t even Shapiro but actually a republican aide.

2. Some of it was criticizing his views from when he was a twenty-year-old college student, which I thought was a bad-faith argument.

3. Other criticisms were regarding his support for Israel, which was valid but also misrepresented and cherry-picked.

4. Senator Fetterman did warn Harris against Shapiro (apparently he thinks Shapiro has too much personal ambition).

5. As for the Ellen Greenberg case and Shapiro’s involvement with it, I did find this article. It looks like his involvement with it is limited to his office declining to reopen the case in 2019. The article says the following:

His office stood by the city’s 2011 suicide ruling in 2019 and continued to do so through 2022, when it referred the case to another office after critics claimed Shapiro had connections to Greenberg’s fiancé’s family. While the AG’s Office insisted there was no conflict of interest, a spokesperson said at the time they referred it due to “the appearance of a conflict.”

Shapiro himself has never publicly spoken about the case or his office’s investigation into it.

[…]

As the case gained attention in online forums and true crime podcasts over the years, various conspiracy theories started to swirl, including one which alleged Shapiro was familiar with family members of Goldberg, Greenberg’s fiancé.

So, the AG’s Office has declined any conflict of interest (a relationship between Shapiro and Goldberg) and Shapiro has never publicly commented on the case.

Personally, I don’t think we can allow conspiracy theories to create a connection between Shapiro and Goldberg. A similar tactic was used to muddy the waters surrounding Hillary Clinton (for example) to the point where many believed she had someone on her staff murdered. No offense to True Crime folks, but they get things wrong more often than they get things right. We will need to wait for this to play out as the investigation continues or in court later.

(To be clear, I do agree this case should have never been ruled a suicide. People do not commit suicide by stabbing themselves in the back of the head. But not reopening a case eight years after it was closed by someone else does not automatically mean Shapiro is guilty of a coverup, or that he has connections to Goldberg. The sad reality is there are many, many murder cases that never get reopened for a variety of reasons.)

At the end of the day, I think he has a lot of things people can pick apart and dissect but I also think there were people and groups with a lot of money digging up his past and plastering it everywhere. Not saying some of them weren’t valid, but I think the campaign to discredit him was so aggressive that it actually made me wonder, “Who, with that much money and influence, doesn’t want Josh Shapiro?”

In the end, Harris chose Walz. I don’t know if we will ever know what really happened behind closed doors, but the narrative is Harris and Shapiro didn’t really vibe together while she and Walz did. Shapiro is now publicly campaigning for Harris.

Not that I have any objections - I do like Walz’s energy, and Shapiro was never my first choice anyway (I liked Mark Kelly).

I’m not sure if Vance was a true mistake yet - only time will be able to tell that for certain.

I was just saying I don’t think there would be a way for Trump to get rid of Vance without tacitly admitting he thought picking Vance was a mistake.

I do think Youngkin would have been a very dangerous pick for democrats, but I disagree with you in that I think Nikki Haley would have been devastating as well; I think her presence on the ticket would dispelled many criticisms of Trump. Granted, they would only be dispelled on a surface-level, but I think that would be enough for the ticket to be devastating for democrats.

The problem for republicans is not their own base - they are notorious for falling in line, regardless of who is at the top of the ticket. The problem for republicans is capturing independents and others who believe republicans are “good for the economy” and who don’t think the worst will happen, and Nikki Haley would have surely put some of their concerns to rest.

I’ll say he’s gonna stick with Vance. It would make Trump look weak and scared if he dumped him now.

Also, given Trump’s very strong narcissistic tendencies, his admitting he made a mistake in choosing Vance is a near-impossibility. If it happens, Trump will need to blame it on someone else, which would also be an admission that someone else had control over his campaign choices (which also doesn’t look good for his base). These are all reasons I don’t think it will happen.

All hypothetical though lol.

I guess Walz must have really nailed the interview? I admit I didn’t even know who the guy was two weeks ago.

I have to say I like his energy though lol

In a rant rife with misspellings and baseless conspiracy, Trump wrote: “What are the chances that Crooked Joe Biden, the WORST President in the history of the U.S., whose Presidency was Unconstitutionally STOLEN from him by Kamabla, Barrack HUSSEIN Obama, Crazy Nancy Pelosi, Shifty Adam Schiff, Cryin’ Chuck Schumer, and others on the Lunatic Left, CRASHES the Democrat National Convention and tries to take back the Nomination.”

The ex-president continued, “He feels that he made a historically tragic mistake by handing over the U.S. Presidency, a COUP, to the people in the World he most hates, and he wants it back, NOW!!!”

Ummmmmmm

Looks like it’s Walz!