Well, that's gotta hurt... ( Election season fails )

lizkat

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Fortunately, Pompey will take this very personally as he claims to be a Catholic. Personally, I’d love to see the Pope comment on Barr.

Hah, me too. But the request for an audience with the Pope by a US secretary of state during campaign season (and in a timeframe when the USA is considering a SCOTUS nomination of a presumably anti-choice jurist to replace RBG) is pretty much in a category of its own, no matter if Pompeo was trying to frame it as a thing about China.

God and Barr though? Barr should check himself now and then. God might really be old school. He did one day gift us some non-upgradeable tablets (despite rumors to the contrary).

cartoon - SteveHereToUpgradeYourTablet.jpg
 
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lizkat

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Here's a potential fail for the Rs out in Texas... maybe a really big fail.


Thanks to Republican efforts to suppress voter turnout, Texas did not expand vote by mail in midst of a global pandemic. As a result, we will know the winner of the Texas presidential election on election night. If Texas turns blue that night, and its 38 electoral votes go to Biden, then Trump would have no viable path to victory, and the election would be over that night, before Trump’s lawyers can get through the courtroom doors to stop the vote counts in other states.

If Biden wins Texas along with the likely blue states of Colorado, New Mexico, Minnesota and Virginia, he would still win the White House even if he loses all the swing states of Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio, North Carolina, Arizona and Florida. Trump, on the other hand, cannot win without Texas.

Texas is not only more racially diverse and urban than most other swing states, but also more rapidly trending Democratic. Unlike the Rust Belt, where the polls underestimated Trump’s strength on Election Day, the polls in Texas underestimated Hillary Clinton’s performance by 4.9 percent.
 

Scepticalscribe

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When you try to pretend to be presidential, all the while clueless how the internetz don't play that.
https://www.twitter.com/i/web/status/1312809461451501569/

https://www.twitter.com/i/web/status/1312727222998966272/

That reminds me of the stories a few academic colleagues told me - around when I first started teaching - of how the exam papers submitted by some students - who were high on substances when writing - comprised little but the student's name, written again, and again, and again.

Meanwhile, the students in question, buoyed up by a cheerful but somewhat irrational optimism, one that was not supported or warranted by independent evidence, tended to be of the opinion that they had written brilliant papers.
 
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lizkat

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That reminds me of the stories some academic colleagues told me - around when I first started teaching - of how the exam papers submitted by some students - who were high on substances when writing - comprised little but the student's name, written again, and again, and again.

Meanwhile, the students in question, buoyed up by a cheerful but somewhat irrational optimism, one that was not supported by independent evidence, tended to be of the opinion that they had written brilliant papers.

Wow, just flashed back to an Amer History 101 experience. It was a lecture course only (prof's notes were so old they had yellowed, although at first we thought they were just written on yellow legal pads). Terminally boring presentation, surprisingly mediocre overview textbook, some multiple-choice quizzes handed out during the term, with warnings that those didn't count much in the overall grade for the course. The final exam would require our choosing several from a number of essay questions to be posed about various periods of American History.

Right so I doodled through the lectures, skipped most of the book and guessed pretty ok on a lot of the quizzes.... and realized the night before the exam maybe I should read the book because... "essay questions?"

So there I was with a gooseneck lamp on the desk beside my bed shining onto the page... page 20, page 230, page 374... and suddenly a crick in my neck and the feeling I was having a heart attack or something, plus those stories about at the end of life you see "the white light".... ??

Yeah, had fallen asleep, the tome of a textbook was on my chest and I had turned sideways in my sleep and was now staring at the bulb in the gooseneck lamp four inches from my face.

But all was well, it was only 7am so I grabbed a shower and a cuppa coffee and ambled into the testing venue where there were some tables right as one walked into the room. Several humongous piles of those little bluebooks sat there (empty composition notebooks with 16 or so lined pages each), and a stack of legal-paper-sized exam documents next to them.

In front of the bluebooks sat a sign: TAKE FIVE.

The exam document was a six-page thing stapled together. First two pages had like 20 multiple choice questions on it. No problem. Turned to page three. That page and the rest in the document each had five essay questions shown on it. We were to choose five of the 20 questions and compose our answers, using the five empty bluebooks we'd acquired.

Man oh man. I sat there leafing through pages 3 through 6 of that exam paper over and over... reading each word, considering the punctuation, wondering if they were chronological questions or he was just trying to trick us with references to other dates in some of the... puzzles....

The very first question on that paper told me I was done:

"Keeping in mind the importance of the Lousiana Purchase to development of the United States of today, explain the significance of the early history of what is now eastern Arkansas to settlement of our westward expansion."

The rest were no better and believe me I still have no clue. I submitted five bluebooks with just my name on the cover. Got a 22 (of 100) for the course.

But that's not all. I was the babysitter for that prof's family, and stored my belongings in their basement every summer. Yeah, had to go face him in the fall that year to get my stuff for the new term. So humiliating.

Well, his wife as was our annual tradition laid out coffee and pastry; we both just laughed about that horrible exam day, and he clued his wife into my having definitely earned a total fail of his course. She said something like "I guess you learned SOMETHING in that course anyway... if not history."

Maybe. It def was the last time I tried to read a 500 page book in one night.
 

SuperMatt

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Here‘s an epic election season double-fail!

I pity the voters in North Carolina. Choices for Senator: Vote for the idiot who got Coronavirus by not wearing a mask? Or the guy who is apparently cheating on his wife?

 

lizkat

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Fundraising fails for the GOP? They're pulling ads from midwestern states Trump won in 2016 and are now having to dump figures like 120 thousand dollars here and there in races they never thought they'd even have a serious opponent, like some NYS Senate districts in rural upstate areas.

Meanwhile Act Blue contributors have raised 475 million bucks for Democratic Party candidates in the past 17 days. Hasn't let up after the quarter close, either.

Dems piling on for October surprises.jpg
 

lizkat

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Wow, no wonder Lindsey Graham was crying on TV about Jaime Harrison having raised so much money. Guess Graham's just totally confounded about how a liberal Black candidate for the Senate in South Carolina could end up with an $86 million war chest in the effort to send Graham back to private life. $57m of that in just the past quarter.

https://www.twitter.com/i/web/status/1315251818608373760/
 

Eric

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Wow, no wonder Lindsey Graham was crying on TV about Jaime Harrison having raised so much money. Guess Graham's just totally confounded about how a liberal Black candidate for the Senate in South Carolina could end up with an $86 million war chest in the effort to send Graham back to private life. $57m of that in just the past quarter.

https://www.twitter.com/i/web/status/1315251818608373760/
Wow that is an insane amount of money. I know it's tight but I hope he crushes Graham, he's such a hypocritical asshole who deserves to have his ass handed to him and after that debate performance could very well be on his way out. Go Jamie!
 

lizkat

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A month after its publication, I keep rereading this CNN piece now and then, about Bob Woodward speaking with Jared Kushner during research for Woodward's book Rage, and the four texts Kushner offered up to Woodward as a way of understanding his father-in-law.


Boggles the mind really: Kushner's choices of the particular texts, and the arrogance of Kushner in apparently figuring even they turned up in the book, or Trump connected with them, "so what?". It's not every special advisor to a US President who has the temerity to suggest the likes of Alice in Wonderland as a key to understanding that leader.

Kushner's willingness to limn his father-in-law's chaotic idea of management only underlines this administration's premise that chaos serves the hijacked GOP's real mission. The whole lot of this crew is about the dismantling of governance limited by a constitution, a document once upon a time viewed as oriented towards legislative and judicial checks on a potentially too strong executive branch.

Now the Trump administration and a complicit GOP pitch government by fiat from the White House backed by a court packed with right wing ideologues... leaving an eventually all blue legislature to pass unanimous resolutions with no teeth in the courts' eye? Kushner's attitude suggests "sure, maybe..." and half-brags that it's all being arranged by a guy who, if you really want to understand him, requires us to remember the Cheshire Cat more or less saying ""If you don't know where you're going, any path will get you there."
 
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