I was sold on Walz as soon as I read the "Early life and education" section of his Wikipedia page. West Point, Valentine, Butte. Like most people, I've been to those places. Except maybe Butte.
Let's be fair: Shapiro would also annoy labor.
I hate that people have such strong opinions.
That said the Pa stuff is overrated IMO. I think there is a big difference between popular as a governor and being part of a national ticket.
But let me say what my strong opinion is: I think the demonization of Shapiro has been pretty shameful (and it has led to some equally strident rhetoric how Harris picking Walz would be "caving.")
As I said in the other thread this has been a small glimpse of what The Thunderdome convention would have looked like.
I somewhat prefer Walz. Kelly was my top pick for a while.
It's wild to me how many people have made such strong opinions in like one week.
I've been attached to Kelly since the start of his career--the Safeway where Giffords was shot is where my family shopped in high school, and his first election was the year I went back to Tucson as a poll observer. Any of these dudes will be just fine though. I'm glad people's opinions aren't getting any time to calcify further.
So apparently the reason that Trump keeps saying that illegal immigrants are pouring in from mental institutions is that he's misunderstanding the word "asylum". OMFG.
I cannot bring myself to care very much about VP odds-making.
Almost 9am Eastern and still no leak despite the announcement being later today! Tight ship, it seems. I doubt it when the campaign said Kamala still hadn't made up her mind as of 4:30 Monday, but it is a momentous decision; whoever it is will have a good shot at the White House in the future.
They're milking it well, offering people who donate in a current campaign entry to their live video announcement.
Ten minutes ago, the AP reported sources say she has picked... someone.
It's me. I'm a Pennsylvavian who knows Boyd County Nebraska.
I just had so many emails from top Democratic Party officials, I thought it must be me.
That's good news...for John McCain
Seriously though that's great news if true
Wow!
20: That's the one I was waiting for.
The first major party vice presidential candidate from Butte since Reconstruction.
So much for that live video announcement tho.
Yeah, I like Walz. I think the important thing is to avoid controversy here*, and nobody seems pissed off at him. I hope the vetting was thorough.
*Plus, you know, picking someone capable of being president.
24: I learned in the last 24 hours that he had a DUI in 1995. I read, but without sourcing, that he moved away from his town of residence in shame and rebuilt elsewhere.
It's also good to have someone who thinks legislative majorities are to be used to the hilt, not banked.
Alliance is the proud home of Carhenge.
Goddamnit, I was all in on Moby.
Imported speculation: in November 2032 he'll be 69, so possibly Harris was motivated by not wanting to set up someone younger as a much stronger successor to her.
69 is really young for a first term in White House.
29 would be a super tenuous reason to pick a VP! Weird, even.
31: Well, as a tiebreaker factor. Obviously not the main one.
29
In that case Harris should have picked Joe Biden.
Anyway, here's WonderWalz
Walz has an Ed Asner thing going that I think will help at the polls.
I was hoping for Walz or Beshear because of their support for Labor, but I figured it wouldn't be Walz, because I liked him. So, yay!
I really like that he is progressive but also supports non means tested programs like universal school lunch so that nobody has to apply, and the kids don't know who is in free school lunch.
I think of urple's mother's dangerous fridge and can't help but think free school lunch would have been appreciated.
Nothing is fair about this process but my worry with Shapiro was less about him than about the fact that he's the only candidate who seemed to have some baggage that people would think of immediately. I haven't followed anything closely, so I'm going by the sophisticated measure of what news about each candidate has reached me. Walz seems to be good as a safe pick who is apparently not boring on television.
I don't understand the idea that the VP pick should be from a state that might be close in the election. Is that one of those strategies that only applies to Democrats? I don't remember Republicans needing to win Indiana or Wyoming.
I think urple is probably going to eat spoiled food regardless of the government.
40.2: It's not a requirement, but it's a reasonable consideration imo. Just not as major as people were saying. I agree GOP do it less, but Ryan was from Wisconsin at least; the most recent arguable Dem case is Kaine (Virginia had only flipped eight years before), before that Edwards (NC wasn't close that year but it flipped 2008).
I did not like Edwards. Too much like a televangelist.
Beshear was a Gen X progressive example. That would have been a bonus.
But you need him to hold down KY, right? Likewise Kelly in AZ. Like several were saying in game theory thread, all the offices matter. Speaking of, what are the implications in MN?
I'll say this about Walz, working his way all the way up the NCO ranks and being faculty advisor to the gay straight alliance in the 90s are both more genuinely impressive lines than I'm used to seeing on a polician's resume.
43: Did those VP picks actually help? All of those candidates lost. Obviously very had to isolate any causality, but maybe Clinton wins one of the non-Virginia states she needed with someone who is picked for more than being bland and from a swing state.
VP pick really does seem to usually give you a 1 or 2 point bump in their home state, and a 1 point bump in PA would completely negate Trump's EC edge.
People are really underestimating how much of the awful older people getting "O.K. Boomer"ed are really Gen X. Harris and Walz are just a year too old to count as Gen X, but I don't care.
46: Beshear is in his second consecutive term as KY governor. He has to sit out at least one term before he could run again.
50: Yeah, white guys who started listening to Rush in the 90s because they thought he was edgy or funny or whatever, bunches of them are X rather than actual Boomer. A legacy of growing up under Reagan, among other things.
48: It didn't swing those states and they did lose (and Obama and Biden won with non-swing-state running mates, though Gore lost), but something can fail and still be the best you can do at the time. In theory. Hard to tell counterfactuals.
50: Obama was born three years before and everyone thinks of him as Gen X.
It's almost as if these Generations are arbirary slogans rather than rigorously defined terms of art.
It's really hard to believe that Harris and Walz were born in the same year.
That foggy NorCal weather really helps with the UV.
52: His father didn't hang around, his mother married a slightly sketchy second husband and took him somewhere far away for a while, plus he got a half-sister. Then he blew off lucrative opportunities after his bachelor's degree to try to make a difference. After that, he went off to a beach to write his memoirs before he had even turned 35. Obama is so Gen X it isn't funny.
People are really underestimating how much of the awful older people getting "O.K. Boomer"ed are really Gen X.
My favorite are reddit comments along the lines of: "I (21F) just had a baby and my boomer mom (40F) keeps giving me bad advice."
Jonathan Chait is very disappointed Harris is not looking for opportunities to hippie-punch.
58: Actual Chait quote:
She needs to specifically understand that the likelihood a given action or statement will create complaints on the left is a reason to do something, rather than a reason not to.
It's refreshing to have a presidential nominee who apparently doesn't reflexively believe stuff like 59 or listen to people like Chait.
I'm pleasantly surprised she went with Walz. Even as of yesterday it felt to me like she would ultimately choose Shapiro. Shapiro had some real upsides and there were real reasons to choose him on balance, but doing so would have reflected a willingness to overlook his downsides that was worrying as a reflection of decision-making in general.
59 Amazing. That's the most Chait thing I've ever read. Carve it on his tombstone.
"Moderate Dem football coach" is extremely targeted content for my family specifically, so of course I'm happy with the pick.
It would have been wall to wall coverage of Ellen Greenberg if she'd gone with Shapiro. Also the sexual harassment scandal. Dodged a bullet there.
65: Yeah, I think that stuff was a bigger problem than I/P for him.
I'm delighted. Harris has been firing on all cylinders, the Democratic energy is palpable and Republicans are frightened. I'm loving it.
66 Fetterman may have been decisive here which is hilarious
Chait's problem with Walz is not that the leftists love him, but that they don't hate him. What are Walz's dangerous liberal positions? Chait identifies one:
Walz is not a leftist, but he has adopted some unpopular positions, like providing free health care to unauthorized immigrants.
The horror!
Chait isn't dumb. He certainly knows the difference between apples and oranges when he compares the election results of the "liberal" Walz -- who was a House member seeking the governorship -- and the "moderate" Klobuchar -- a two-term Senate incumbent running against a chump from the state House who subsequently finished third in a primary for a state Senate seat.
I can't imagine how anyone thinks it's a good idea for Harris to emphasize Israel/Palestine -- probably the single most divisive issue among Democrats. You get the feeling that Chait read Mark Penn's foolish endorsement of Shapiro in the NYT and said, "Hold my beer."
Holy shit Walz was a geography teacher, here he is talking about some of his favorite maps. As a former map librarian and curator I couldn't be more thrilled
https://minnesotareformer.com/2024/08/06/former-geography-teacher-tim-walz-is-really-into-maps/
49: I think they can win PA without Shapiro. They just didn't like Hillary, and my non-insane Republican friends are now voting for Democrats until the party gets rid of Trump. (Endorsing Mastriano, who is fucking nuts, didn't do the party any favors.)
That Shapiro was running against Mastriano is why I don't buy the magnitude of Shapiro's win as an especially strong endorsement of Shapiro's attractiveness to Pennsylvania voters.
Chapter umpteenth plus one in fuck the fucking New York Times:
Walz Instead of Shapiro Excites Left, but May Alienate Jewish Voters
Many Jewish organizations backed Harris's pick for running mate, but beneath that public sentiment is unease over antisemitism on both the left and the right.
This a straight "news" piece. I can't even figure out what the "and the right" has to do with anything about it other than giving a semblance of "balance."
Republicans are of course going to call very moderate Dem Walz "far left" but many in media seem to be also using that framing (and not that they are necessarily uncritically mimicking Republicans. I think it is just sort of a lazy uncritical horse race slotting of various players).
Locally, the left has done graffiti on some Jewish buildings while falling to break a window and the right has done the mass murder of 11 people. Pretty much the same.
The thing that makes me most optimistic about the NY Times is sorting comments by reader upvotes. It turns out the kids middle aged bourgeoisie is alright.
I mean the latter. I'm not a reader of the NYT.
73: Walz Instead of Shapiro Excites Left, but May Alienate Jewish Voters
Also blurbed as:
Harris's Choice of Walz over Shapiro mollifies the left but misses the chance to reassure Jews.
69: I'm not sure Chait isn't dumb--at least professionally. Maybe I'm not clicking on articles where he knows stuff, but I honestly don't know what subjects he can write honestly and knowledgeably on. Certainly not charter schools or electoral politics in my experience. Am I wrong?
Kilgore Trout (I should know who he really is but don't recall on Bluesky had a good take:
tim walz is a permission slip for nice and quiet people exhausted of being weirded out by let's go brandon bumper stickers and flags with stripes on them that aren't in the actual flag to say out loud actually they like the other ticket,
Would love if that actually happened to any degree at all.
80: The wise move is to not click on any of his articles.
82: Yeah. I click on headlines that sound like interesting takes, then I see the byline. I feel like a chump every time it happens.
72: yes! Shapiro is good, but his margin is due to Mastriano appealing only to the crazification faction.
I like Walz. His name ought to have a T. The media will call anyone not actively kicking a puppy far left, and their evidence seems to be school breakfast, sooooo.
72, 84: Yes. I do note that the very much not beloved Tom Wolfe* won the governorship in 2018 with a slightly bigger margin than Shapiro. To be fair opponent was also a bit of a nut and it was more of a wave election-- Wolfe outperformed Casey for Senate by about 2.5% while Shapiro outperformed Fetterman by ~10%.
*Running with John Fetterman ...
The people in big house when I was canvassing did not like Fetterman.
Hmm, thought he would have support among the inmate population.
Oh hell yes
https://x.com/govtimwalz/status/1653934907905720320?s=46&t=nbIfRG4OrIZbaPkDOwkgxQ
I thought it was like the Nobel Prize and they only gave awards to the predeceased.
80: Chait is like Yglesias in that he's routinely clever and occasionally insightful when talking about Republicans.
Minivet's link in 58 appears to contradict me on that, but the contradiction is superficial. Chait ridiculously praises Trump and the Republicans for recognizing the political benefits of moderation on the abortion issue. But Chait would never say something that silly about Trump if he were writing about Trump. Like everybody else in the world, Chait understands that Trump has delivered a gigantic victory to the forced birthers, and that given a chance, he'll do so again. Trump has almost unlimited goodwill from the troglodytes because if he pretends to not be repugnant, his supporters know they can trust him to be lying.
No, Chait just likes to beat up on hippies the way Yglesias likes to promote racists.
I just donated to a presidential campaign for the first time in my life
The bear thing moved you into RFK's camp?
Chait-speech exists only to draw attention for no purpose other than to waste.
Watching VP Harris's face trying to keep from totally cracking up after Tim Walz drops a couchfucker joke.
95: Wow.
"I've got to tell you, I can't wait to debate the guy," Mr. Walz said, pausing again as he savored the attack line to come. "That is, if he's willing to get off the couch and show up."
Walz seems to be some sort of messaging savant: the weird thing, mind your own damn business. I knew essentially nothing about him two weeks ago. This election continues to be the damnedest TV show I've ever watched.
I newspaper article explained Walz's couchfucker joke as a reference to the insinuation that JD "got amorous with a sofa," which somehow makes it way worse.
Yeah. It's worse to have a sexual and emotional attachment to a couch than to just fuck one.
Amorouswithasofa was the woman from reality TV land who was an early Trump advisor, right?
100: I don't want to just be your couch. I deserve better. I want to be somebody's love seat.
Having an actual relationship with a couch seem like basically the same thing as the weebs with their creepy pillows.
"In November 2032 he'll be 69, so possibly Harris was motivated by not wanting to set up someone younger as a much stronger successor to her."
Am I missing something here? Why would Harris not want to set up a strong successor?
Transference most commonly involves projection of romantic feeling onto the therapist, but transference to other entities associated with the therapy -- in extreme cases, even inanamimate objects -- is not unknown.
From a recent podcast I learned that Sigmund Freud reacted to the outbreak of the First World War by enthusiastically declaring "all of my libido is now directed at Austria-Hungary!"
Just lie back while I think of the Dual Monarchy.
You were great in Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure.
96 +++
We shouldn't get drunk on our own whiskey here, but I sure like our team a lot better than their team.
I assume it will all end in tears, but that hasn't kept me from enjoying Harris's rollout. For a little while, at least, following politics hasn't made me grind my teeth.
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I didn't think a battle of Kursk was in the cards for 2024.
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113: And it's a Martian invasion, what with the little green men and all.
On topic because absentee voting: two astronauts went to the ISS in June, their Boeing capsule had all sorts of problems, and now instead of just spending eight days there it looks like they won't come home until February.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cg4yqepr469o
Luckily, cosmonauts are available to ensure a free and fair election.
Look, just because Boeing stranded two astronauts in space and Elon Musk now controls key elements of national security infrastructure doesn't mean that privatization of the space program was a mistake.
Spike, who do you think built the Apollo spacecraft?
Nope, at that time Welch was head of GE's plastics division, which made Lexan, which is what they made the CM windows and the spacesuit helmets out of.
Uh oh we're in trouble:
https://x.com/malmesburyman/status/1821221478676763107
TIL the "swarthy Swedes" tradition is still alive.
121: quite happy to have a "no German-Americans anywhere near the White Hiuse" rule because Trump is, of course, one himself.
Apparently Trump is less orange today than usual. I'm not sure what that means.
121: Ah, a blast from the past. I'm not old enough to have been immersed in this stuff, but my grandmother was a virulent anti-German racist (in addition to all the other kinds of racist she was).
On the other hand, anti-Polish bigotry was a real and virulent thing when I was a kid (as most of you are old enough to remember, I bet). I'll have to ask my kids if that's still a thing.
I remember the Polish jokes. The last one I heard involved John Paul 2. They kind of died after that.
I'm pretty sure attacking German-Americans is a great way to win Wisconsin.
I remember that really large blonde men would get called "Bohunk" or "Swede", with no concern for their actual ancestry. Not to their faces.
Yeah, the emergence of JPII and Lech Walesa correlated with the dwindling of that, I think.
Jeez did no one vet this guy??
https://bsky.app/profile/johnbrownstan.bsky.social/post/3kz35jllscc2v
America's not ready for its first ELCA Vice President.
With this messaging, the Republicans have the 150-year old demographic locked up tight.
I believe I've discussed the prevalence of Polack jokes in my elementary school. It didn't seem to me to have anything to do with any actual prejudice against Polish people. As I recall at first I wasn't even sure who Polacks were other than that they were supposed to be stupid.
Also vile socialists: German immigrants to Texas, New Braunfels and so forth.
126: I don't think I saw actual anti-Polish bigotry in the flesh, but I saw its remnants. I didn't know enough Polish people to be aware of it, but I remember I had a high school teacher who thought that some ethnic jokes, particularly Polish jokes, were acceptable.
126: I don't think I saw actual anti-Polish bigotry in the flesh, but I saw its remnants. I didn't know enough Polish people to be aware of it, but I remember I had a high school teacher who thought that some ethnic jokes, particularly Polish jokes, were acceptable.
My daughter had some kind of discussion of racism back in high school that included the claim that "well, there are some ethnic groups, like Swedes, where no one refers to them by ethnic slurs." Allowing Sally to pipe up with "My Grandma calls them 'squareheads"."
I'm sure the teacher appreciated that.
Mom was bringing the old school racism there. That was also a school where Sally had to explain the significant class issues between two teachers who were respectively private-school Irish-American and Boston Southie Irish-American to classmates who didn't understand that there were different kinds of white people. (The two teachers got along fine, but the private school girl bullied the Southie guy shamelessly in a way that made no sense unless you understood that she was better than he was, which the Dominican kids just weren't getting.)
I grew up in a mostly Irish area without either of those types.
They were both excellent English teachers. The private school woman was this 6'2" ex-model with a shattering level of sarcasm, and the Southie dude was this little scuttling rat-like beaten-down husk of a man. I exaggerate a little, but not much. She used to make him calculate her grades because she couldn't manage percentages.
140: sounds like a cute couple. Were they married to each other?
Both happily married to other people. He just recognized his betters and obeyed unquestioningly.
This is suddenly making me remember a very funny night class in college, where I spent quite a bit of time having to give examples to convince a Black classmate (born and raised in very Black communities without much close contact with white people) that yes, indeed, white people have ethnic differences that they will viciously discriminate and harm each other over. I think he legit thought that was a Hollywood exaggeration.
I also had a born-in-Poland professor who (as part of a critical discussion about the portrayal of ethnic groups in mass media) asked the class to name stereotypes about Polish people. I legitimately had never heard of any, but I think from the dead silence in class, a lot of people HAD heard the "dumb" stereotype.
At some point in my youth, all the Polish jokes transformed into jokes about West Virginians.
I thought those were mostly about incest.
And not the modern incest with the washing machines.
Ethnic feuds between groups that nobody can make sense of are the best. My parents used to joke about their mixed marriage, because mom was Litvik Ashkenazi Jewish and dad was Galitziani Ashkenazi Jewish.* One time my grandfather tried to teach me a bunch of anti-Litvik jokes to tell the other grandparents, but he would translate the set up into passable English and leave the punchlines in Yiddish. So all I know is that Littvik Ashkenazis were farmers and their daughters who would be told things by businessman traveling through the area.
*Lithuanian vs. Polish, more or less.
Isn't that how most anti-[ethnicity] jokes go? My first thought was that your other grandparents probably knew exactly the same jokes going the other way, although this may be a special case.
I was dumbfounded by the anti-Portuguese bias in the San Joaquin Valley that I first encountered when I went to ag school. People distinguish Portuguese ancestry?! And care?! Who knew!
I bet the Portuguese say "Joachim" instead of "Joaquin".
We're the Caffirs of Europe, don't you know?
I'm reminded that my wife's parents, that lived their whole lives in Sandusky, Ohio, owned a book of Michigander jokes. As I recall the two themes of the jokes were 1) how stupid Michigan people are and 2)how ugly Michigan women are.
150: What we Americans think of as old school American corny humor derives from the first comics who had nationwide distribution on early network TV. Most of them were native Yiddish speakers and grew up in the same tradition as my grandfather. Groucho Marx, Milton Berle, Henny Youngman, George Burns . . .
Also possible that my grandfather was ironically taking standard U.S> Pollock jokes to be anti-Littvik.
Every day I learn something about Walz that makes me like him even more.
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"Willie is the short Black guy living in San Francisco," Holden said. "I'm a tall Black guy living in Los Angeles.
"I guess we all look alike," Holden told POLITICO, letting out a loud laugh.
Helicopter story tracked down.
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