I don't think I've ever actually heard him. Not interested in changing that.
I did seven years in Ohio. I know what they sound like.
Walz isn't great out of the gate. Other than being against the Iraq war, his main thing has been domestic policy.
I think Walz's answers are extremely solid, even though I loathe that the "right" answers on many of these questions are bad. Especially immigration.
I'm stricter on immigration than I used to be. Close to everyone who is rude to me when I'm canvassing has a Russian-sounding accent.
And in 2016, all the first-time voters who showed up with Republican registration at the polling place where my wife was watching were Russian.
JD getting pissy about fact checking was fun.
10: Agreed.
9: I've registered an awful lot of immigrants to vote, and no small number of them were Republicans.
Gas is under $3 a gallon, dammit. No one can complain about gas prices right now.
Very dishonest framing of the abortion question by the moderators. In general they've been fairly good, but that was egregious.
I had to turn it off. Vance was doing better than I would have hoped, but more generally it was super boring.
Dumb framing of the gun violence question by the moderators (Vance: should we punish school shooters' parents, yes or no?) but strong answer from Walz. And utterly unsurprising spontaneous eruption of racism from Vance.
Walz has language accidents, I guess you could call it. He said he changed his mind on g7ns after Sandy Hook and becoming friends with school shooters
Whoa. Illegals immigrants are causing the housing crisis as are restrictions on drilling on Federal lands? WTF?!
It's really infuriating that Vance is claiming there are 25 million undocumented people. There is just absolutely no empirical evidence that it's more than 11.5 million or so.
As demographers like to say, people leave footprints. If there were 25 million, we'd see their traces in every economic and physical aspect of our society, and we just don't.
Walz made a good point about businesses raising childcare and housing as major issues for them. He's totally right. It comes up ALL THE TIME.
I fell asleep on the couch before it started and just woke up.
I now do like my dad did and fall asleep right after work. Except he slept on a couch and I sleep in a recliner.
18: Yes. I agree with that.
19: I fell asleep partway through.
Not sad that as an increasingly fragile emotional cripple I stuck to my "never watch the debates" stance.
From my review of stuff afterwards, Dem positive takeaways:
Vance J6 non-answer. And Walz not mods asked the direct question, have not found full video including original mods prompt.
Vance immediate whine when mod mentioned Haitians were here legally--basically "I was told I could lie with impunity."
Apparently, Walz did less direct response/counter-attacks to Vance lies than people (and probably me) would have liked. But did spend more time going directly at Trump. So maybe (and probably appropriately) not looking to "win"debate but more focused on the actual race.
Shorter me: Be the hopium you'd like to see in the world.
Walz wasn't great except when he asked Vance about the 2020 election. Vance was a weasel and a liar. Walz was not well enough prepared to talk about foreign policy. It's a tricky spot for the VP who has to look to the top of the ticket to lead. He also talked a bit too much as a Governor when in his new job, he won't be the one making all of the decisions.
When the mods asked Vance to describe how mass deportation would go, he was eager to talk about how they would start with criminals, and then he changed the subject. Big opening to hit him with the Niemöller slippery slope, and what happens when the bureaucracy of thugs runs out of easy victims and somehow the problems violence was supposed to solve have only gotten worse.
25: I got to believe that's one of those situations where you don't respond well because you can't believe that they are saying it and people are acting like it's normal.
Actual criminals, including permanent residents, are deported under the status quo.
Apparently Walz won over CNN's undecided voter panel pretty thoroughly!
(That's give out of a panel, to make the N clear; two of them said Vance lost them with his non-answer on 1/6, which Walz did go after him on.)
*five out of a panel of six. I did not make the N clear after all.
Walz did as well as can be expected as a normal human against a Federalist society Yale law school debate club asshole. JD Vance's stance was to lie through his teeth on every single thing, and it's hard to hit back against that. Vance came off as generally sane and more like a Paul Ryan asshole than a weird MAGA asshole, so it was a win for him I guess. Walz came off like a likeable normal person so I would count that as also a win for him too. It appears the pundits will count it as a win for JD on style but normal people will count it as a win for Walz on everything else.
The Obama bros pointed out that JD was doing this to rehabilitate his reputation and wasn't so much interested in bolstering Trump. If Trump thinks that JD out performed him and is trying to steal his thunder best case we get a night of the long knives against JD and general chaos in the Trump campaign.
Who is the Ernst Röhm of the Republican Party? Probably not Vance.
Regarding the press calling Trump's ethnic cleansing plan a "housing proposal", I saw this skeet and reply and thought of LB's comment about 9/11:
Again the part that's making me lose my mind is that THE CAMPAIGN DIDN'T EVEN MAKE THE CONNECTION, THE PRESS DID
They needed to compare the candidates on housing but Trump obviously doesn't have a housing plan so they decided his housing plan is lebensraum and that this is totally respectable
"Maybe bin laden was just upset at downtown NY building regulations" insane levels of postrationalization
The media may have created the connection, but Vance pushed it last night, no?
I nearly threw something at the screen when Vance invoked the mercy of someone who is pretty punk rock.
14
but more generally it was super boring.
Agreed. This isn't one of those races where a VP brings gravitas and elder statesmanship to their ticket. (Vance almost could bring gravitas to the Republican ticket just because no one could have less than Trump, but he's made it clear he's going to be a lapdog, so that's not happening.)(As for elder statesmanship, it made me feel old to realize I'm older than Vance.) it's also not one of those races where there's any significant number of undecided who actually have to get to know either candidate.
It's nice to know Walz didn't completely flub it, but even so this is one of the more pointless debates I've seen.
My wife and I watched it when she got home. There's a lot of pausing and adding notes for each other, so it took a while to get through. To us, Vance did well on stage - perhaps it really was a personal rehabilitation effort, given the taunts about him having such large negative favorability prior to the debate. Informed viewers could see the seams where he hopped over the hard parts, but he was pretty smooth with his pivots and didn't appear deranged. The main take away was that it felt like he had more than a minimum viable understanding and intelligence if he has to take over for Trump due to incapacity or death.
DEATH IS NO DISABILITY
INCAPACITY. WHATEVER
Jack Smith redacted J6 filing unsealed. Nice to come so soon after Vance non-answer on Trump losing last night.
Charleroi locals shaming a California right-wing videomaker for coming there to be a racist nudzh. (Apparently the Black guy he's talking to in the first moment he greeted with "Bonjour."
Was in Charleroi last Saturday visiting my former high school coach who has lived there his whole life. He expressed sentiments about the media, mainstream and otherwise, similar to those linked in 41.
I don't think I've ever been out that way.
Charleroi local is great. The thing that's not in the top ten most loathsome things about Vance's lies only because there's so much competition is that for a lot of these area, immigration is revitalization, too. Tiny rust belt towns so long burned out they basically have Billy Joel songs about them actually recover when they have young workers and families moving in (cf. Hazelton). They wind up looking a little different than what they did fifty years ago but it seems like it more like suburbia freaks out about the towns not being white and the people in the towns are a lot more like the Charleroi grandma.