Presidential predictions for 2024?

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billvon said:
He thinks it makes him look good? Same reason most women wear makeup I imagine.
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???

He's a public persona, presumably he's got a stylist--a stylist who is, again presumably, attentive to public perceptions and such. Trump toned down the orange, back in '15 or '16, because of all the backlash, yes? Didn't look good, looked ridiculous. One would think JD might do the same.

These are things that politicians and public personas do if their aim is to appeal to the masses.
 
I don't know, I find Vance's weird reactions/responses to accusations of "weirdness" informative. If you watch that Dana Bash interview, you'll notice that he really lays into that "weirdness" bit--particularly his reaction to Trump throwing him under the bus by saying that he (Vance) is the "weird" one, not Trump. You'd think he'd want to put it to rest, but, no, he hammers on. Even Bash reacts, somewhat alarmed, to this.

On one hand, he's clearly "sensitive" to this issue of doing things that appear "normal"; but then he does absolutely nothing to allay people's (legitimate) concerns that he is seriously weird--and not in a good way, but a creepy way.

The guy's flailing. The people don't like him. Trump doesn't appear to like him. And it's like he's really going out of his way to assure people that he is, in fact, wholly unlikeable.
 
Here's another:

The ebullient audience at the Republican National Convention was ready to be served up some red meat, but Usha Chilukuri Vance, onstage to introduce her husband, vice presidential candidate JD Vance, delivered the exact opposite.

“Although he’s a meat-and-potatoes kind of guy, he adapted to my vegetarian diet and learned to cook food from my mother — Indian food,” she said.

If it was an applause line, it didn’t have the intended effect, eliciting a few “whoops” and sparse clapping. She pressed on, joking about her husband’s beard and eventually eliciting a “JD!” chant.
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Though Vance may enjoy a vegetarian meal, a spokesman told The Times that the candidate is not a vegetarian.
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Multiple observers who watched Usha Vance’s speech said the line about vegetarianism appeared to be an attempt to humanize her husband. But, for Krishnendu Ray, professor of food studies at New York University, “It was obviously a false note.”

“How do you take these two systems ... and reconcile them? The meat and potatoes — the white nationalism that JD Vance is trying to get credentialed in — and Usha Vance’s vegetarianism,” Ray said. “It feels incongruent.”
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www.latimes.com

JD Vance and the politics of vegetarianism in a red-meat Republican Party

At the Republican National Convention, Usha Vance, wife of the Republican vice presidential nominee, said her husband had "adapted to my vegetarian diet," intriguing many.
www.latimes.com www.latimes.com

So he's married to a woman who has been vegetarian for her entire life, and he eats meat? Yeah, hardly unheard of, but pretty weird all the same--especially considering that his wife has been vegetarian her whole life. With someone semi-"normal" I'd posit that he only eats meat outside of the house, but this is JD Vance/Mandel: He's bringing home his Hamburger Helper (see Hillbilly Elegy) and fucking up her cast-iron skillets with it.

I won't fault Chilikuri here, she was probably just trying to humanize her lame husband whom everyone perceives as a freak. But really, this just underscores how much of a freak and an asshole he is.
 
parmalee said:
He's a public persona, presumably he's got a stylist--a stylist who is, again presumably, attentive to public perceptions and such. Trump toned down the orange, back in '15 or '16, because of all the backlash, yes? Didn't look good, looked ridiculous. One would think JD might do the same.
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Perhaps he will. Or perhaps he just really, really likes the look, and doesn't want to give it up.

I mean, surely Trump publicists have said something similar about any orange at all - but he still likes the orange.
 
Sarkus said:
What may be better would be a move to the electoral college votes being awarded on a proportional basis in all states. That would be a good start, imo. :) Or even the electoral college being awarded on the basis of the national popular vote. If states with 270 electoral votes signed up to and enacted that, then the President would be elected on the popular vote from then on.
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That's ....

The thing is this: What we set up is a Republic in which the president must win multiple contests among the states.

Direct democracy would create something that has never existed in the United States, which could have all sorts of implications.

Routing the electoral college around the states simply bypasses the states that are expected to administer that elections. The original formulation described one Congressional representative per thirty thousand people; we'd have to rebuild the Capitol, but there are lots of options for tinkering with an Electoral College that will always carry the risk of the lesser national vote total still winning the election. As it is, Congress would have over eleven-thousand members, and the electoral college an additional hundred for the Senate. It's probably easier to stay at 538, apportion the "House" EC votes according to congressional district returns, and the two "Senate" votes according to the statewide vote. At that point, the question of what is "local" depends on how many House seats. And simply on the point of virtually erasing the "Senate", or statewide, result, it's true the U.S. Senate is probably unlikely to support further Congressional apportionment that will dilute its share of the Electoral College in that manner.

Oh, and, just to complicate things a bit: I don't know if anyone remembers, but a couple elections back, electoral college delegates tried to subvert the state vote; in Washington state and Colorado it went all the way to SCOTUS. And while the SCOTUS response in Baca was per curiam according to a unanimous decision in the Washington case, the Kagan-authored Chifalo decision did not settle the question in part because it would be so hard: While the judicial outcome was the same, the two states use different instructions to their electors.

It's one thing if I can't tell you how simple or complicated that bill would need to be, but there is also the Roberts Court: Would SCOTUS accept a national standard for state electors?

This Supreme Court, Your Honor?

†​

Any reform of the Electoral College will still allow for these backward-seeming outcomes with the national vote winner losing the election. Compared to direct democracy in the national popular vote, localizing College representation, as such, while not the same usurpation of the states, is nonetheless a usurpation of the states.

And toward that, we might consider a suggestion↑ that amending the Constitution is "too hard": It's supposed to be hard. If it was so easy to amend every time we didn't like an electoral outcome, the Republic would not survive. The flipside of that is kind of like an old Simpsons joke that you can always rely on the kindness of strangers.

One thing about the Constitution is that it relies on the integrity of politicians. Compared to the Johnson impeachment, Nixon resigned to avoid trial, Reagan was never impeached for Iran-Contra, Bush was never in danger of being impeached for Panama; Bush Jr. was never impeached for 9/11 (negligence/dereliction), Afghanistan (dereliction), or Iraq (dereliction, war crimes, crimes against humanity); Congressional Republicans subverted the Trump impeachment, and would use their offices to harass the states in order to obstruct justice.

At some point, the people are expected to do something, but that's not how we've treated the Constitution over the last hundred sixty years since the Civil War, and especially in the shadow of Nixon.

And consider the chatter about amendment; in most cases, there are things we can do without amendment. We don't need amendment, for instance, to add justices to the Supreme Court, or simply impeach the corrupt, but we do need amendment to install term limits on the federal judiciary.

We don't need amendment to shore up the Electoral College, but we will need amendment to eliminate it. And you'll notice nobody has any real plan for what happens after we somehow manage to amend the EC out of existence. To invest the presidency in a national popular vote will also fundamentally alter the relationship between Americans and their government; and that part is really, really dangerous.

It doesn't mean do nothing; it just means to think very, very carefully before we do.

But it's also true my assessment is very cynical about our American circumstance.

Here's a joke: Q: Do you support the amendment? A: I don't know, I haven't seen the rider, yet.

And it only goes downhill from there.

There is an old Maher joke about California being ungovernable, how it's an example of why the Founding Fathers didn't go with direct democracy. And I happen to live in a state where populists convinced people to follow the California model. The thing is that the gray area around a national popular vote isn't just fog; it's volatile, and it's quite clear that we already know how to light it. I have no idea how to prevent that outcome, because the only safeguard is an arbitrary pretense that we won't actually take it so far.

Which, in turn, doesn't really mean much, these days. If ours is a broken system, as our neighbor suggests, what broke the system was the forsaking of good faith among traditionalist and economic conservatives. The problem with bothsidesing the history is that the fact of data results plotting on both sides of an arbitrary line does not in any way require or even imply symmetry. One would think the tax bill written in crayon should have made some sort of point about what Democrats were desperately forestalling through years of tortuous political compromise. Even more so the whole white supremacist and Christian nationalist clamoring.

†​

Cynicism: Think of what's about to happen. On the continental west coast, for instance, the vote will go just fine, including the mail-in state. What will actually throw the election into doubt is conservatives behaving badly in Republican states, which voters will then turn around and blame on Democrats. They've already publicly announced the plot in Georgia, and success would disrupt an election under either the electoral college or national popular vote.

After five cycles of trying to stop the voters, Republicans are back to not counting votes, because that's the only path they perceive. Compared to the question of what to do about the Electoral College, the more pressing issue is how to survive the Republican Party. Just remember the basic formula: The appearance of irregularity in Republican counties in Republican states is to be held against the Democratic candidate. As dumb as it sounds, yes, that is apparently part of the plan, because they are telling us it is. And it might be the whole plan.

Every time I doubt they would take it so far, Republicans remind me how naïve I am.
 
billvon said:
Perhaps he will. Or perhaps he just really, really likes the look, and doesn't want to give it up.

I mean, surely Trump publicists have said something similar about any orange at all - but he still likes the orange.
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Trump is gonna do what Trump is gonna do. Vance, despite his awfulness, doesn't strike me as stupid. But you watch his interviews and appearances and it just doesn't seem like he does any prep. Even with that vegetarian thing, I understand his wife's motivations there, but it really just underscores the incoherence and incongruence* of everything that is JD Vance. It's a bit like whatshername killing her dog and thinking that's a good thing to bring up.

*
Multiple observers who watched Usha Vance’s speech said the line about vegetarianism appeared to be an attempt to humanize her husband. But, for Krishnendu Ray, professor of food studies at New York University, “It was obviously a false note.”

“How do you take these two systems ... and reconcile them? The meat and potatoes — the white nationalism that JD Vance is trying to get credentialed in — and Usha Vance’s vegetarianism,” Ray said. “It feels incongruent.”
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Yeah. No one on the Trump team thought that ill-advised?
 
parmalee said:
Speaking of, why does Mandel (JD) wear eyeliner? It doesn't suit him, not that anything would really, but still.
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It's to tie his lush eyebrows into the eye color and full head of hair. It creates a dramatic look that enhances his manliness.
 
Jeeves said:
If he's clever, why is he rowing like crazy on a sinking boat?
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In a hundred years, there will likely be a fair bit of Midrashic commentary about Vance/Mandel. Yiddish has dozens of words for the many varieties of idiots that exist in the wild, and Vance undoubtedly conforms to a type, just not sure which one that is yet.

Trump may be right: Vance is the "weird" one, not him. Trump is fairly standard, garden variety malignant narcissist, but Vance has got something unique going on.
 
Do the White Thing: Fuentes Threatens Some Kind of War

parmalee said:
Yeah. No one on the Trump team thought that ill-advised?
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And it's only making things worse; according to Fuentes, there's a Groyper war coming ... against Trump.

Fuentes was outraged by Trump’s decision to tap Sen. J.D. Vance as his running mate because Vance’s wife is Indian and Hindu, complaining that Vance is someone who clearly “doesn’t value his racial identity” since he was willing to marry somebody “that far outside your race who isn’t even a Christian.”

Following the completion of the Republican National Convention last month, Fuentes was fed up, declaring that he would not vote for Trump and that “you could not bribe me to care” about the election. But all of that changed last week, when Fuentes reversed course and decided that instead of sitting out this election, he was going to actively work to undermine the Trump campaign in retaliation for allegedly abandoning the issues that Fuentes cares about.

Last night, Fuentes used his program to lay out his demands for the Trump campaign to meet if it hopes to prevent Fuentes and his followers from “formally declaring war”: promising a complete ban on all immigration, vowing to avoid going to war with Iran, and firing campaign advisers Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles.

Should these conditions fail to be met, Fuentes vowed to deploy activists to swing states to encourage Republicans to “refrain from voting.”

(Mantyla↱)​

The question remains↑ whether the white supremacist bloc will sit out the vote, and it would seem even Fuentes wants to find out what will happen if they do.

To the other, as Mantyla observes, "Fuentes has a history of impulsively announcing ambitious campaigns that never materialize, so whether he actually has the capacity, resources, and motivation to follow through on these threats remains to be seen."

And if the first question is whether the white supremacist bloc will sit out the vote, the next obvious question is whether it will make a difference. But that also points to a third: What is the threshold for making a difference?

With Georgia, Arizona, and North Carolina in play, we can watch the margins, there. But, still, that's not quite like Texas, which just isn't voting Harris this year. To the other, some of the more ambitious projection maps I've seen suggest Democrats can win the Dakotas, and, honestly, if that happens, it ain't the Groypers.

So, I don't know. Watch the margins in five states, maybe? It is also possible that we won't be able to find the Fuentes effect if Trump's vote drops significantly enough↑.
____________________

Notes:

Mantyla, Kyle. "Nick Fuentes Threatens to Wage Guerilla War Against the Trump Campaign". Right Wing Watch. 14 August 2024. RightWingWatch.org. 14 August 2024. https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post...wage-guerilla-war-against-the-trump-campaign/
 
I'm done with trying to humanize that piece of shit. If for whatever reason you feel compelled to check out his trash, Hillbilly Elegy, which I'd advise against, puhleazze steal it, do not pay for that trash--I'll send you a link.

Finally, there's this:
“I grew up as a poor kid,” Vance said on Fox News in August 2024. “I think that’s a story that a lot of normal Americans can empathize with.”
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But Vance himself was never actually impoverished. His family never had to worry about money; his grandfather, grandmother and mother all had houses in a suburban neighborhood in Middletown, Ohio. He admits that his grandfather “owned stock in Armco and had a lucrative pension.”

He falsely introduces himself to his Yale classmates as “a conservative hillbilly from Appalachia.” Over the course of the book, he confuses himself – and the reader – by variously saying that he is middle class, working class and poor.

In order to justify his memoir as something more than a tale of a drug-addicted mother and a son who went to Yale, he fashions a grand theory that being a hillbilly does not have to be related to social class – or even living in Appalachia.
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www.salon.com

"Poornography": Vance an example of rich trying to speak for the poor

Vance is no pauper — and there’s a bit of a shell game going on when it comes to his poverty credentials.
www.salon.com www.salon.com

Vance was a slummin rich kid, which is about the lowest form of life there is. Except slummin rich kids usually idealize the poor, Vance shits all over them. Fuck him.

I'm not allowed to say what I really think here, so I'll just say this: Can someone please dox this guy?
 
parmalee said:
I'm not allowed to say what I really think here, so I'll just say this: Can someone please dox this guy?
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Honestly, I think we should just keep playing up his wife and kids, and celebrate the diversity of his Galtian individualism.

You know, GI Bill, Yale Law, venture capitalist, standard American Dream stuff. To the other, he's a transvestite who married a brown-skinned woman and diluted the white race. That's American diversity, right there.

Thing is, part of me really does want to see what Fuentes brings. What online activism, what escalation? Guerilla political tactics? What does it mean to put boots on the ground? How will he encourage Republicans to refrain from voting?

Three press organizations are currently holding off on what is probably an embarrassing campaign document, because it would be embarrassing to Republicans; that one won't stay hidden much longer. And, really, I want to see what Fuentes' G-men bring.

Because, compared to the two hundred seventy or so pages about J.D. Vance, rightist enumeration of grievance is often insane, so the idea of a groyperdoxx nearly promises to be vicious, even depraved, and absolutely hilarious.

Just sayin'. Nature has a way of doing its thing.
 
Tiassa said:
You know, GI Bill, Yale Law, venture capitalist, standard American Dream stuff. To the other, he's a transvestite who married a brown-skinned woman and diluted the white race. That's American diversity, right there.
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I do like that portrait! Make it positive, classy, upbeat... happy. They hate that.
Tiassa said:
Thing is, part of me really does want to see what Fuentes brings. What online activism, what escalation?
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I hope it's a part you can keep in check. When exciting shit goes down, people get hurt.
 
Tiassa said:
Thing is, part of me really does want to see what Fuentes brings. What online activism, what escalation? Guerilla political tactics? What does it mean to put boots on the ground? How will he encourage Republicans to refrain from voting?
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I wonder if he'll bust out the "he's secretly a Hindu" trope. That always leads to some interesting sketch comedy, at the very least.
 
Trigger Warning: This post discusses white supremacism[/font]

parmalee said:
I wonder if he'll bust out the "he's secretly a Hindu" trope. That always leads to some interesting sketch comedy, at the very least.
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This is actually something that I cannot possibly explain to our international neighbors. Let's take a moment to recall Stew Peters' outburst↑ last month, worrying that Vance is both "married to a Hindu" and is "beholden to the Zionist political operators that are steamrolling us into World War III":

So, anyway, after this pick was announced, right on cue, the corporate media goes into this fake tailspin, claiming that some right-wing, white male, Christian theocracy was about to take over our government, but unfortunately, that's not the case. No, because J.D. Vance is married to a Hindu, who likely eats shit and brushes her teeth with the same. He's beholden to the Zionist political operators that are steamrolling us into World War III, but we're supposed to believe that he's some kind of fire-breathing populist.​

And his guest, Frankie Stockes, was a little more particular, explaining that "the Indians are a very tribalistic people" with a "mother-ship mentality", "just like the Zionists", and that's why "it's no wonder that they're such good friends":

And it's also, I just want to throw out there, we talk a lot, and rightfully so, about Israeli foreign influence; there is a lot of concern to be had, here, about the ties back to the Old Country of India, up to and including J.D. Vance. You know, the Indians are a very tribalistic people, they have this caste system, the higher castes have fanned out all over the world, and they have what you could call a mother-ship mentality: They're all contributing back to the mother ship, just like the Zionists. It's no wonder that they're such good friends. Every time you go on, actually seeing some Indian worshiping Israel and vice-versa, so they both seem to have this supremacist mentality where they go into other countries and they get involved in politics, and they contribute back to the mother ship. And, you know, Israel, that video is freaky with J.D. Vance and that Jewish ceremony. This is a guy who's only been in Congress, in the Senate, since 2023. He's already taken six-figure checks from the Israel lobby, I mean, he is bought and paid for. He hasn't even had to face a re-election campaign yet, and he's already raking in the Israel shekels.​

So, now ... are you ready for this one? RightWingWatch↱:

On the Victory Channel's FlashPoint program, "prophet" Joseph Z explains that Tim Walz was chosen by the spirit of antichrist because he fits right in "with the wicked overlord lizard mafia that is really driven by their goblin masters." Good to know.​

Transcript says:

Well, it's a mixed bag, Gene, because I believe very clearly the Spirit of the Lord is making a way for the Body of Christ to go through in this time, and, you know, even when we bring up guys like Tim Walz, you're looking at what's going on, people say he's, you know, Midwestern folksy. I have another word for him, being from Minnesota, myself, and it's weird. The guy is just weird. You see the way he hugs his wife, you see the way he does everything. I think the Spirit of the Lord is letting them overextend their reach. I believe He's giving them a sense of confidence that's actually going to be a surprise silver-lining turnaround in this whole narrative. I believe the Spirit of the Lord is going to bring victory and breakthrough. And, you know, it's interesting how the spirit of Antichrist just loves to pick these people that fit right in with wicked overlord lizard mafia that is really driven by their goblin masters. And when you're looking at this, I believe that's exactly what we're facing, right now, a spirit of Antichrist that wants to have its way.​

(Show of hands, who needs it explained?)

But, yeah, "secret Hindu" sounds about as inevitable as the Indians running the Jews sounds weird.
 
Funny, how the antichrist keeps choosing people with clean, wholesome lives to represent its interests, while the Spirit of the Lord prefers liars, cheaters and frauds.... Maybe it's some kind of game the two supernatural powers are playing with us mortals.
 
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