The 2024 U.S. Presidential race

[Beebo Brink]

Yeah, it really sucks to realize you were played for a chump by one of the most obvious cons of the century.

 

[Jopsy Pendragon]

Yeah, it really sucks to realize you were played for a chump by one of the most obvious cons of the century.

Queue the the deer-in-the-headlights "Of course we knew it was a con! But we thought we the perpetrators! Not the victims of it!"

 

[Casey Pelous]

Shades of House of Games.

 

[Dirran]

PEOPLE WITH THE LAST NAME WALZ FOR TRUMP

(And what's with the apostrophe in the name on the shirt?)

A surprising number of those people have only 4 fingers on their hands, and one appears to have two hands on the same arm. It must be a hereditary trait. Or not…

 

[Jopsy Pendragon]

A surprising number of those people have only 4 fingers on their hands, and one appears to have two hands on the same arm. It must be a hereditary trait. Or not…

Sniff sniff.. Smells like AI fakery to me... I mean seriously, that hand is -wrong-.

 

[Dirran]

Sniff sniff.. Smells like AI fakery to me... I mean seriously, that hand is -wrong-.
[/Didnt
didnt

Sniff sniff.. Smells like AI fakery to me... I mean seriously, that hand is -wrong-.

Simple explanation. The Walz family has a werewolf branch.

 

[Innula Zenovka]

Photo Shows Relatives of Tim Walz Wearing 'Nebraska Walz's for Trump' Shirts? | Snopes.com

The high-quality nature of the original image upload helped to clarify that the claims about AI and people having "four fingers" were simply due to some fingers being obscured by others.

The family in the picture are the descendants of Francis Walz, who was brother to Tim Walz's grandfather.

(ETA I think that makes them Tim Walz's nth cousins, so hardly close relations, particularly the younger ones).

 

[Veritable Quandry]

Sniff sniff.. Smells like AI fakery to me... I mean seriously, that hand is -wrong-.

Arthritis. Thickening of the ligaments around the joints and low muscle mass in the hand.

 

[Free]

Mary Trump has a group called the Nerd Avengers? What?

 

[Free]

The story won't go away.



Trump deputy campaign manager identified in Arlington National Cemetery dustup

 

[Dirran]

Photo Shows Relatives of Tim Walz Wearing 'Nebraska Walz's for Trump' Shirts? | Snopes.com





(ETA I think that makes them Tim Walz's nth cousins, so hardly close relations, particularly the younger ones).

I generally trust Snopes, but not this time. There is absolutely no sign of a fifth finger. The three visible fingers have the extensor muscles you’d expect. There’s no extensor muscle for the missing finger. Look at your own hand, then try to hide your index finger behind your thumb or middle finger. These people may well support Trump but Snopes’ explanation for the missing fingers is absurd.

 

[detrius]

Mary Trump has a group called the Nerd Avengers? What?

With that cast, they could improvise a brand-new Star Trek series on stage.

 

[detrius]

Liz Cheney says Dick Cheney will vote for Kamala Harris, and she will support Democrat Colin Allred in Texas Senate race - The Texas Tribune

Liz Cheney endorsed Allred at The Texas Tribune Festival Friday.

www.texastribune.org

FFS

 

[Innula Zenovka]

I generally trust Snopes, but not this time. There is absolutely no sign of a fifth finger. The three visible fingers have the extensor muscles you’d expect. There’s no extensor muscle for the missing finger. Look at your own hand, then try to hide your index finger behind your thumb or middle finger. These people may well support Trump but Snopes’ explanation for the missing fingers is absurd.

Which of the two images are you looking at? I agree the one with the rings drawn on looks odd but, if you look at the second, higher quality, image as it was originally posted by Charles W Herbster, all the hands look OK -- at least they do to me -- except where fingers are plausibly hidden by folds in people's clothing.

 

[Jopsy Pendragon]

Arthritis. Thickening of the ligaments around the joints and low muscle mass in the hand.

You may be right. Looking at the high-res version, I do spot a metacarpal for the pinky on the problem hand. And the other hand has rather pronounced curvature that -might- cause the first joint of the pinky to be curved back enough to be hidden from view.

It still looks as wrong as that apostrophe.

 

[Innula Zenovka]

Donald Trump is losing it

His alarming cognitive decline deserves the scrutiny that Joe Biden received.

www.newstatesman.com

Evernote Link

The process of removing Biden as the Democratic presidential candidate can’t exactly be said to have worked well, but it worked. And now it’s time for Americans to turn the same self-regulatory instincts to Biden’s 78-year-old former rival. Trump’s campaign is already falling apart – most recently with the shameful attempt to use a ceremony at Arlington Cemetery as an electioneering platform. But there are deeper reasons to inspect Trump’s political credibility now. Because cognitively speaking, Trump is beginning to make Biden look like Oscar Wilde.

Incredibly, in America, where just about everything goes – Trump, for example – there is a tacit prohibition against discussing Trump’s obvious mental incapacity in public.

 

[Soen Eber]

Donald Trump is losing it

His alarming cognitive decline deserves the scrutiny that Joe Biden received.

www.newstatesman.com

Evernote Link

I wonder what happens if he becomes too incompetent to stand trial?

 

[Innula Zenovka]

Interesting insight into the conflicting priorities of right-wing media incentives vs right-wing political incentives. It certainly echoes our recent experience in the UK, where one of Labour's biggest fears during the election campaign was that their supporters would see the election as a done deal. As a member of the Labour Party, I regularly received two or three fundraising emails a day that tried to convince me that the election was on a knife edge, with the result dependent on Labour supporters sending still more cash, along with digests from my subscriptions to both The Guardian (left-wing) and The Times (generally Conservative) telling me that opinion polls were --correctly, as it turned out -- forecasting a Labour landslide.

R-pilled Polls Are Bad For Rs…and This Week’s Writing 9/7/24

Nate Silver's a grifting dope, plus! what I published this week.

www.everythingishorrible.net

Evernote Link

GOP pollsters want clicks and attention which they can convert to ad dollars. The inventives for them are to put out polls that show Rs winning.

But! Candidates would if anything prefer to be seen as underdogs. Harris/Walz have been fundraising hard off of Silver’s crappy polls, warning Ds that they’re behind and need to contribute more. GOP partisans want to feel like they don’t need to worry. But in a close election like this one, candidates want their partisans to worry! They want them to donate, to volunteer, to vote. A constant barrage of R pollsters insisting that the election is over is demobilizing. If it has any effect, it’s going to hurt Rs, not help them.

I'm a bit puzzled, though, by the reference to "GOP pollsters." Over here, we have both public opinion polls, commissioned by various newspapers and broadcasters, and private polls commissioned by the various parties, for their internal use. The latter are far more granular than the former, and generally kept secret, since campaign managers use them to help shape their decision-making about committing resources, and obviously don't want to provide their opponents with insights into their planning.

In both cases, the commercial polling companies responsible for the polls -- particularly the public ones -- have a strong incentive to be as accurate as possible, since they make most of their money by running polls to assist regular commercial advertisers in their sales and marketing strategy, and don't want to be known for getting the General Election results embarrassingly wrong. Different pollsters results regularly show small biases one way or the other, but this is a result of their sampling strategies, which are regularly discussed and compared when their results are published. There's no sense in which any particular polling companies are seen as deliberately pro-Conservative or pro-Labour.

 

[Veritable Quandry]

Nate Silver has paywalled his model, so it has far less reach this cycle. He used to adjust polls for bias based on the track record of each polling company. Sounds like he's gone all in on junk polls.

The race is closer in the Electoral Collage than it is in national polls. I have seen a strong and sustained boost in enthusiasm among Democrats. If we can keep that up and drive turnout Harris has a very good chace. But the race is still closer than it should be, and the press avoiding giving Trump the same scrutiny as Biden is no small part of that.

 

[Dirran]

You may be right. Looking at the high-res version, I do spot a metacarpal for the pinky on the problem hand. And the other hand has rather pronounced curvature that -might- cause the first joint of the pinky to be curved back enough to be hidden from view.

It still looks as wrong as that apostrophe.

Donald Trump is losing it

His alarming cognitive decline deserves the scrutiny that Joe Biden received.

www.newstatesman.com

Evernote Link

All presidents and prime ministers should have to pass a medical at regular intervals. And it should be an independent board, not their personal physicians, that administers the medical.