If nothing else, the selection of Tim Walz for VP should teach us that the political pundit class sucks. They know nothing — they want to claim that they’re objective, neutral observers, but they’ve all got an agenda that they lie about. For instance, Jonathan Chait has the worst take. He wants the Democrats to move to the right.

When Kamala Harris emerged as the Democratic presidential nominee, I expressed cautious optimism that she had learned from her disastrous 2020 campaign, which revolved around placating left-wing activists by adopting highly unpopular issue positions. The data point that seemed most compelling was her rumored slate of vice-presidential selections, which consisted of Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, Roy Cooper of North Carolina, and Andy Beshear of Kentucky — the three most moderate governors in the party. “What this leak indicates,” I wrote, “is that Harris understands the assignment.”

But … does she? Her decision to pick Tim Walz, while not completely irrational, makes me much more cautious and less optimistic that Harris does understand the assignment.

The assignment, to be clear, is to win over voters who don’t like Donald Trump but worry Harris is too liberal.

Gosh. The Democrats need to be more Republican. Democrats embracing their principles is bad.

This is possibly the most idiotic take yet. Ask a Minnesotan: Walz is not the radical socialist some of us would like to see. He was elected to congress in a rural, southern Minnesota congressional district, where he had to be a conservative public servant, and he was selected to run for governor because he could appeal to both the urban Minneapolis/St Paul electorate and to the rural shitkicker vote. As governor, he’s been both pro-business and pro-civil liberties, a combination that might once have been natural for Republicans before Reagan, when they chose instead to follow the path of hating the poor.

He could be more liberal. The alternatives Chait favors are all consistently more conservatives. Screw that. It’s long past time Democrats moved to favor unions and schools and the social safety net, and that’s what Walz does, to the chagrin of the Chaits of the country.

And then there’s the awful Nate Silver, who favors the same candidates that Chait does, but for confusingly different reasons (that’s Silver all over the place, making counter-intuitive arguments for confusingly wrong-headed reasons). He thinks Walz is the risky product of triangulation.

If you surveyed Democratic members of Congress, he’d probably be who they’d choose. But I believe he’s probably the wrong choice, a step back toward the Democratic Party’s instincts to triangulate instead of the boldness the Harris campaign has displayed so far.

You’re just making it overly complex and twisting everything around. Walz is an advocate for politically popular choices, like childcare and free school lunches and abortion, and he’s an avuncular, friendly voice. That sounds like a good choice — true, making a smart decision is way off brand for the Democrats. Silver would rather see a radical, alienating weirdo in the position, a Democratic complement to JD Vance.

Nate Silver will always favor seeing the party don a handicap to keep the horserace close, because that’s where he makes his money and notoriety.

You know, these are the kinds of political pundits who get favored by the conservative media. Don’t trust them.

The next vice president of the USA will be Tim Walz, currently the governor of Minnesota.

It’s a good choice, in part because I had reservations about him, which is OK because I’m not representative and I want this ticket to win. He was perfect for Minnesota because he was the pro hunting and fishing candidate (not my thing), but was also a former liberal school teacher (that’s my thing). I think he’ll be a solid complement to Harris and will get her a few more votes. He has accomplished a lot with narrow margins in the Minnesota congress.

After my initial misgivings, I’ve been happy with him as governor. I think you’ll all be happy with him as VP.

Idaho Republicans have taken a different tack in their approach to limit access to books they don’t like. They now require the ‘bad’ books in library to be sequestered into a special section that requires special permission to access, and that requires children to be accompanied by an adult. They have to sign in every time they enter the Forbidden Room, so they’ve got a record of who wants to access the naughty books. One woman named Carly took her 11 year old child into the Den of Sin to get a specific book.

Carly explains, “The sign says that if you are under 18, you’re not allowed up there unless you have an unrestricted library card or your parent that is over 18 signs an affidavit for you.” So Carly shows her ID and her daughter’s library card, thinking she’s in the clear. But the librarians still don’t allow her to enter the adult section.

“But no, why don’t they let me? Because I’m holding a baby, my 1-year-old.” Yep, you read that right. Even a literal baby now needs the proper documents to be in Carly’s library. “They said that because I had a baby there (who can’t read), I’m not allowed in the library with her unless she has a library card or I signed an affidavit. So me and Daphne just watched from the edge while Scarlett goes in to find her book. The librarian ended up helping her.” Carly’s clear in her video that she doesn’t blame the librarians, saying, “They were being so nice and patient… I felt like the librarians are sick of it. They feel so bad turning kids away from going into the library.”

The wicked book? The Fellowship of the Ring by JRR Tolkien.

This is a lovely example of how Republicans are weird — this is a silly law against a non-existent problem promoted by lawmakers who are completely out of touch with their constituency.

Most Idahoans — 69% — trust library staff with book selection, while 23% of Idahoans do not, according to this year’s Idaho Public Policy Survey. More than half of Idaho librarians are considering leaving library work as a result of library-related legislation, according to an informal survey conducted by the Idaho Library Association.

This is not new. When I was a young kid, my local library put all the science books in an adult section and would shoo kids away if they tried to enter — I had to call my parents to get permission to read books about dinosaurs. By the time I was in high school, they’d so thoroughly loosened that stupid policy to the point that they openly displayed copies of Playboy on the periodicals rack. I wasn’t interested in Playboy, but much appreciated free access to all the other books in the library.

We’ve got to be careful about the whole “weird” thing. I saw this story about a
man in Oklahoma who raises spiders and felt a moment of self concern.

His life’s mission is to save spiders for a greater purpose. Edmond resident Nick Krueger said spiders are important to the environment and science.

He sends the spiders he collects to researchers worldwide to help solve problems. Inside Krueger’s home, people would discover a whole new world.

“There’s always something new to learn,” said Krueger, inside his “spider room. “Most people hear that you do that, and they say, ‘What? Why?’”

He uses the words “weird and enthusiastic” to describe his hobby, but Krueger loves being unique.

“It’s fun to be weird,” Krueger said. “Being normal is boring.”

Some people might think I am weird, and I really don’t mind. Maybe I would if I were running for high office. I still think it’s a good tactic to label this current crop of Republicans as weird, though. I remember the Republicans way back, when their schtick was that they were staid, sober, strait-laced, boring conservatives who wanted no nonsense and just wanted to get the job done…the job of making money. They were bankers and shop-keepers. They didn’t like Communists. That was their whole image, and they rode that reputation into office, promising stability and restraint.

Now they’ve morphed into creeps who obsess over bathrooms and want to ban books and are upset about non-white people having civil rights. Their whole rep rests on being the boring guys wearing suits, and it’s fair to point out that no, they’re not that any more at all, they’re fanatical freaks who are trying to control other people’s lives.

And they’re not cool enough to raise spiders in their living room.

It’s worth pointing out that where, once upon a time, the Republican agenda was mainstream and entirely comfortable for the typical middle-class family, they have evolved into this weird alien anti-American freak show that is “at odds with the average American’s life”.

They have become the party of the wealthy elites, out of touch with the day-to-day reality of the people. Thomas Paine wrote about what happened to the French nobility, and it’s exactly how to make them hurt.

The more aristocracy appeared, the more it was despised; there was a visible imbecility and want of intellects in the majority, a sort of je ne sais quoi, that while it affected to be more than citizen, was less than man. It lost ground from contempt more than from hatred; and was rather jeered at as an ass, than dreaded as a lion. This is the general character of aristocracy, or what are called Nobles or Nobility, or rather No-ability, in all countries.

We know this. Mel Brooks spelled it out.

You know that Trump hates being made to look like a fool. Keep it up.

He’s full of them, and we’re just waiting for someone to open the basement door and shine a light on the scuttling, slimy critters chittering down there. Here’s one that I haven’t seen on CNN yet: he has a pet Curtis Yarvin aka Mencius Moldbug in that dark cellar.

In 2008, a software developer in San Francisco named Curtis Yarvin, writing under a pseudonym, proposed a horrific solution for people he deemed “not productive”: “convert them into biodiesel, which can help power the Muni buses.”

Yarvin, a self-described reactionary and extremist who was 35 years old at the time, clarified that he was “just kidding.” But then he continued, “The trouble with the biodiesel solution is that no one would want to live in a city whose public transportation was fueled, even just partly, by the distilled remains of its late underclass. However, it helps us describe the problem we are trying to solve. Our goal, in short, is a humane alternative to genocide.”

He then concluded that the “best humane alternative to genocide” is to “virtualize” these people: Imprison them in “permanent solitary confinement” where, to avoid making them insane, they would be connected to an “immersive virtual-reality interface” so they could “experience a rich, fulfilling life in a completely imaginary world.”

Yarvin’s disturbing manifestos have earned him influential followers, chief among them: tech billionaire Peter Thiel and his onetime Silicon Valley protégé, Senator J.D. Vance, whom the Republican Party just nominated to be Donald Trump’s vice president. If Trump wins the election, there is little doubt that Vance will bring Yarvin’s twisted techno-authoritarianism to the White House, and one can imagine—with horror—what a receptive would-be autocrat like Trump might do with those ideas.

Vance has several other “intellectual” peers, but Yarvin is one of the more damaging. He’s the source of this proposed plan to fire everyone in the civil service.

As Yarvin told Vanity Fair in 2022, “The fundamental premise of liberalism is that there is this inexorable march toward progress. I disagree with that premise.” Instead, Yarvin believes that American democracy has denigrated into a corrupt oligarchy, run by elites who strive to consolidate their power rather than serve the public interest. The solution, Yarvin argues, is for the American oligarchy to give way to a monarchical leader styled after a start-up CEO — a “national CEO,” [or] what’s called a dictator,” as Yarvin has put it — who can de-bug the American political order like a computer programmer de-bugging some bad code.

Vance has said he considers Yarvin a friend and has cited his writings in connection with his plan to fire a significant number of civil servants during a potential second Trump administration. “There’s this guy Curtis Yarvin, who has written about some of these things,” Vance said on a conservative podcast in 2021, adding: “I think Trump is going to run again in 2024 [and] I think that what Trump should do, if I was giving him one piece of advice: Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.”

There’s a rich vein of disturbing sickness in the Vance basement — Yarvin, but also Rod Dreher, the Claremont Institute, and a whole host of bizarre conservative Catholic goons. Keep digging, everyone! It’s the creepy season!

I can’t keep up with the trail of poop-nuggets JD Vance leaves behind him. The latest is one that I don’t have to issue with a disclaimer — he really is this bad this time.

An article by Rolling Stone, dated October 25, 2022, has exposed allegations of animal cruelty linked to a company financed by JD Vance’s venture capital firm, Narya.

Wait — the reminder that Vance is a venture capitalist isn’t the horrifying revelation?

The report claims that AmplifyBio, which received funding from Vance’s firm, carried out severe experiments on live animals, including monkeys and dogs.
These revelations have ignited a firestorm of outrage and heightened scrutiny regarding JD Vance’s suitability for high office. Rolling Stone’s investigation uncovered troubling details about AmplifyBio’s testing practices, revealing that many animals suffered and died due to toxic testing exposures and harsh conditions. Particularly shocking were reports of “dreadful mistakes,” including a lab monkey that died after becoming trapped in faulty equipment and technician errors causing severe burns to other monkeys’ genitals, TOI reported.

We seem to have moved out of the comical phony exposé phase of the attack to dragging him for the things he actually does and says. He’s a Sideshow Bob surrounded by rakes.

I blame the childless cat ladies.