The (no longer) much too early 2024 election thread

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Dave_LF
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Re: The much too early 2024 election thread

Post by Dave_LF »

Mike Pence :shock: in his campaign announcement:

"On that fateful day, President Trump's words were reckless. He endangered my family and everyone at the Capitol. The American people deserve to know that on that day President Trump also demanded that I choose between him and the Constitution. Now voters will be faced with the same choice. I choose the Constitution and I always will."
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Re: The much too early 2024 election thread

Post by N.E. Brigand »

Dave_LF wrote: Wed Jun 07, 2023 7:17 pm Mike Pence :shock: in his campaign announcement:

"On that fateful day, President Trump's words were reckless. He endangered my family and everyone at the Capitol. The American people deserve to know that on that day President Trump also demanded that I choose between him and the Constitution. Now voters will be faced with the same choice. I choose the Constitution and I always will."
From the same announcement: "It would be easy to stay on the sidelines. That's not how I was raised. The crises we face are all man-made. That man is Joe Biden."
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Re: The much too early 2024 election thread

Post by Voronwë the Faithful »

Today's surprising Supreme Court voting rights decision makes it a bit more likely that the Democrats will be able to take back the House.

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Re: The much too early 2024 election thread

Post by Voronwë the Faithful »

I think I'll just drop this here with no comment. I don't think any comment is necessary.

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Re: The much too early 2024 election thread

Post by N.E. Brigand »

In a campaign speech over the weekend, Donald Trump reminded voters that he colluded with Russia and Saudi Arabia in 2020 to raise Americans' gas prices:



Mind you, he had tweeted about this at the time. And as the pandemic crashed down upon us early in 2020, it might be justifiable to make this move to save American companies. But it's a weird thing to bring up in a 2024 speech, especially that way.

In the same speech, Trump also said that he was responsible for the overturning of Roe v. Wade.
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Re: The much too early 2024 election thread

Post by N.E. Brigand »

Andrew Kaczynksi of CNN notes that Donald Trump used to espouse reasonable positions on transgender issues that are now anathema in the Republican Party -- and not secretly and not that long ago. Among the clips Kaczynski shares is a 2012 call-in to Fox & Friends where Trump supports the inclusion of a transgender contestant in the Miss U.S.A. pageant.

He seemingly now has abandoned that position; will his Republican opponents try to make hay of this?
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Re: The much too early 2024 election thread

Post by Voronwë the Faithful »

No.
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Re: The much too early 2024 election thread

Post by N.E. Brigand »

Michael Harriot offers an interesting historical perspective on Nikki Haley's life and career. I'm sorry to say I'd never heard of the Orangeburg Massacre before.

- - - - - - - - - -
Edited to make the post a bit more explicit:

Nikki Haley yesterday tweeted that "Barack Obama set minorities back by singling them out as victims instead of empowering them. In America, hard work and personal responsibility matter. My parents didn’t raise me to think that I would forever be a victim. They raised me to know that I was responsible for my success."

That's obviously bullshit in so many ways.

But Harriot specifically makes a strong case that Haley "was 'empowered by the work and the freedom that America offers. Because BLACK PEOPLE GAVE IT TO HER."
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Re: The much too early 2024 election thread

Post by Voronwë the Faithful »

Thanks for sharing Harriot's thread; I think it gives good perspective.
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Re: The much too early 2024 election thread

Post by N.E. Brigand »

This astonishing fact could go in any election thread, so I'll note it here. In Louisiana, the percentage of Black citizens who were registered to vote didn't recover from Jim Crow suppression to Reconstruction levels until 2008.

Image

William Faulkner's famous line remains true: "The past is never dead. It isn't even past."

Or to put it another way: structural racism really exists.

Edited to add: and major discoveries about U.S. racial past are still being made. Here is a recent article about how a grad student peering through microfilm of old newspapers discovered the largest known slave auction in the nation's history: 600 people in Charleston in 1835.
Last edited by N.E. Brigand on Mon Jun 19, 2023 10:45 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: The much too early 2024 election thread

Post by Voronwë the Faithful »

President Theodore Roosevelt's great, great grandson has a message for us.

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Re: The much too early 2024 election thread

Post by N.E. Brigand »

N.E. Brigand wrote: Sat Jun 17, 2023 7:17 pm Michael Harriot offers an interesting historical perspective on Nikki Haley's life and career. I'm sorry to say I'd never heard of the Orangeburg Massacre before.

- - - - - - - - - -
Edited to make the post a bit more explicit:

Nikki Haley yesterday tweeted that "Barack Obama set minorities back by singling them out as victims instead of empowering them. In America, hard work and personal responsibility matter. My parents didn’t raise me to think that I would forever be a victim. They raised me to know that I was responsible for my success."

That's obviously bullshit in so many ways.

But Harriot specifically makes a strong case that Haley "was 'empowered by the work and the freedom that America offers. Because BLACK PEOPLE GAVE IT TO HER."
Voronwë the Faithful wrote: Sat Jun 17, 2023 8:25 pm Thanks for sharing Harriot's thread; I think it gives good perspective.
I've been thinking a bit more about this. Lots of people, particularly on the right, get very upset by the argument that they've been given anything. See also the response to Barack Obama's "you didn't build that" speech. And yet there is one major exception: conservatives love to praise the "founding fathers" of the U.S. for making freedoms available to successive generations. Apparently it was impossible to give people freedom after 1788. Or maybe it was only possible for white people to give others freedom, I don't know.

(For those who didn't Harriott's comments: he explains how Nikki Haley's parents were only allowed to immigrate to the U.S. thanks to laws changed as a result of the Civil Rights movement in the 1950s-60s, because in the 1920s, the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled that people from India, although nominally Caucasian, weren't white, and thus were not eligible to enter the U.S. during the days of white-dominated immigration quotas.)
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Re: The much too early 2024 election thread

Post by N.E. Brigand »

Bret Baier completely tripped up Donald Trump (the former President and sometime insurrectionist who is vying to be the 2024 Republican nominee for President) by pointing out that Trump boasts about having pardoned a convicted drug dealer as President, resulting in her release from prison many years before her sentence would have concluded, and he is pushing a plan that would have resulted in her execution.

Speaking of Donald Trump, New York Times reporter Eric Lipton says that despite having previously written extensively on Trump deals in numerous foreign countries, he's "never seen anything like the Oman deal" in terms of "the potential for a conflict of interest" as Trump vies to return the White House: "A presidential candidate in the U.S. is part of a multi-billion-dollar project in the Middle East with Sultan of Oman that will have hundreds of migrant, low-wage workers in harsh working conditions? That was just one of many issues I identified" in this 30-year deal.

- - - - - - - - - - - -
Former New Jersey governor and 2024 presidential candidate Chris Christie today said that as president he would support (1) raising the retirement age for people currently in their 40s or younger and (2) cutting Social Security benefits. I give him credit for admitting to these awful positions held by many Republicans.

- - - - - - - - - - - -
Another 2024 presidential candidate, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has been much in the news for his dangerous views on the subject of vaccination (and other weird and sometimes conspiratorial views that he espouses: among other things, he compared mask mandates to the Holocaust). Recently he was interviewed for NBC by Brandy Zadrozny, who has followed Kennedy's crazy talk for years but still came away even more alarmed from their meeting. Among other things, Kennedy all but admits that one of his motivations in running for president is that as a candidate he will be freer to share his antivax message on public airwaves than he otherwise would be.

In other words, while he wouldn't put it this way, he's running a hopeless campaign for president in order to kill vulnerable people.

But what if he actually won?
President Kennedy would order childhood vaccines, which have already gone through clinical trials and constant safety studies, to undergo bigger, double-blind controlled trials. That sounds scientific, but those studies, health professionals say, would needlessly and unethically deny children vaccines, offering them a placebo instead, in a quest to find out what we already know: that vaccines are safe and prevent myriad illnesses.

President Kennedy would gut the agencies that currently regulate, monitor and recommend schedules for childhood vaccines — the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — and the expert advisory panels of doctors, scientists and professors they rely on. The agencies have become “sock puppets” for the industries they regulate, he says, so he’ll impose more stringent conflict-of-interest qualifications and replace the bad guys with good ones. Kennedy won’t tell me who he’s got in mind (“not until they’re vetted”) but says he’s got many names.

President Kennedy would also order his Justice Department to investigate the editors and publishers of medical journals for “lying to the public.”

And when the next pandemic arrives — and it will — would President Kennedy pursue vaccines as Trump did? Kennedy won’t directly say. He says he’d prioritize treatments, like ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine — which Kennedy says worked against Covid, despite numerous studies saying they didn’t (and the retraction of flawed or fraudulent studies that claimed they did).

Besides, Kennedy says, the vaccines didn’t work.
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Re: The much too early 2024 election thread

Post by N.E. Brigand »

If you are amoung the veery yong at hart...

Florida's governor and presidential candidate Ron DeSantis boasts that Florida, "for one year straight," has had the lowest unemployment rate "amoung" the ten largest states. Not much of a boast, really, to say your state was thirteenth overall for a whole twelve months, but there it is.
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Re: The much too early 2024 election thread

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Ron DeSantis says that as President he would appoint more reliably conservative justices than Donald Trump did. Dave Weigel says that DeSantis is referring to Bostock v. Clayton County, in which Justice Neil Gorsuch, Trump's first SCOTUS appointee, was joined by Chief Justice Robert and the Court's then four liberal justices (Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan) to rule that (as Wikipedia says) "Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 protects employees against discrimination because they are gay or transgender." The case would still have been a civil rights victory even without Gorsuch, but perhaps would be on the chopping block now given the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg later that year.
Last edited by N.E. Brigand on Sat Jun 24, 2023 1:07 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: The much too early 2024 election thread

Post by Voronwë the Faithful »

That's funny because other than Bostock (which is one of the most significant opinions in my area of law in recent years), Gorsuch has been the most reliably conservative of Trump's three picks.
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Re: The much too early 2024 election thread

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Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and U.N. ambassador running to be the Republican nominee for president, today called for a return to "how simple life was, how easy it felt" during her childhood when life was about "faith, family, and country," but as noted here, Haley herself has previously talked about once in her younger days being "disqualified from a pageant because they didn't know whether to put me in the white category or the black."

Ah, those happier, more racist times of our youth!
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Re: The much too early 2024 election thread

Post by Voronwë the Faithful »

This was expected after the Alabama case, but it is still good news.

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Re: The much too early 2024 election thread

Post by River »

Well the Supreme Court put a fork in the Independent State Legislature theory (in other words, state election laws and redistricting plans remain subject to judicial review and all other checks and balances). So that wild card for 2024 is off the table.
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Re: The much too early 2024 election thread

Post by N.E. Brigand »

A Quinnipiac poll finds Donald Trump leading Joe Biden in Pennsylvania 47%-46%.
In 2020, Biden beat Trump in Pennsylvania by 1.2%.

A Marquette poll finds Joe Biden leading Donald Trump in Wisconsin 52%-43%.
In 2020, Biden beat Trump in Wisconsin by 0.6%.

I think it's impossible for these recent polls to both be accurate.
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