America is not great but not in deep decline

America has a lot of problems. It needs to invest far more in education and health care so that everyone gets access to decent quality levels of both. It needs to improve its social safety net so that we reduce the numbers of homeless and the level of food insecurity. And it needs to treat its undocumented immigrants and prison population far more humanely.

But when creepy Donald Trump and weird JD Vance talk of America’s decline, they are not calling for the improvement of any of those things. What they are describing is a largely fictional set of problems designed to make their supporters think that the country is on the verge of collapse when it is manifestly not.

Kevin Drum looks at eleven complaints they make and compares it with macro-economic markers of the economy and says that the country is nowhere close to being in decline and is in fact doing quite well. What creepy Trump and weird Vance are describing is based on (is anyone surprised?) lies. Drum sums up:
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What do windmills and bacon have in common?

They both occupy an inordinate amount of space in creepy Donald Trump’s brain.

His obsession with windmills is well known. For one, he thinks that that they kill birds in vast numbers. This has a superficial plausibility since some birds do die by hitting the blades. But that number is far fewer than the number killed by cats, power lines, or by flying into windows.

But bewilderingly, he also thinks that windmills kill whales in large numbers and that the sound of the windmills causes cancer.

So why does creepy Trump hate windmills so much to the point of delusion? Back in 2022, Philip Bump ventured an explanation.
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The election numbers games: polls, ratings, crowd sizes, money

American elections, because of their absurd length, tend to focus a lot on various statistics in order to gauge the changing political fortunes of the candidates. But while each measure provides some indication of how things are going, one needs to treat each with some caution.

Opinion polls: These are probably the best measure of where the race stands but there are important caveats. The weird electoral college system in the US tends to have a bias towards red states so national polls have to be treated with caution. There are roughly seven so-called swing states (Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, and North Carolina) that usually determine the outcome of the election. Polls taken in just those states have more significance than national polls. This does not mean that national polls are useless but it is estimated that Democrats need approximately a +4% margin in the national polls in order to have an even chance of winning the Electoral College.

Right now, it looks like Democrats are approaching that 4% margin, making the race even, which is a huge improvement from the situation just a month ago.

A fresh Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Thursday showed Harris leading Trump nationwide by 45% to 41% – a margin consistent with other surveys since last week’s boisterous Democratic national convention in Chicago that confirmed the US vice-president’s status as the nominee.
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A Fox News poll on Thursday showed the vice-president with narrow leads in three out of four southern Sun belt states; 48 to 47% in Arizona, and 48 to 46% in both Georgia and Nevada. In the fourth, North Carolina – which Trump won by just 1.4% in 2020 – the Republican nominee was ahead by a single point, 48 to 47%.

The poll represented a big jump on recent numbers recorded by Biden, who trailed Trump by six points in Georgia in April and by five points in Nevada and Arizona as late as June.

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The cemetery incident is another example of creepy Trump thuggery

David Kurtz writes that the Arlington cemetery incident is a clear example of how creepy Donald Trump and his campaign use thuggery to avoid the consequences of their blatantly wrong behavior.

The cemetery official who was pushed aside by the thugs in creepy Trump’s campaign has declined to press charges and the Army says that it considers the matter closed. Kurtz says that the fear of being doxxed and have the MAGA cult hordes descend on her and her family likely played a role in the decision to drop the matter.
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The creepy Trump campaign is full of boors

Sometimes one accidentally bumps into someone in a public space. What usually happens is that each person immediately apologizes to the other that is the end of the story, with both people moving on with friendly smiles, to indicate that there are no hard feelings. There is the no attempt to determine who is at fault or place blame over such trivialities. That is the behavior of normal people who have basic social skills. But on rare occasions, one might encounter someone who reacts angrily and immediately yells out “You idiot! Why don’t you watch where you going?” or something similar. Such people are boors who lack basic social skills and are best ignored and avoided.

There has been quite a bit of media coverage of an event that took place at Arlington National Cemetery where creepy Donald Trump and his entourage arrived for a photo op at the graves of dead military personnel. The problem is that federal law prohibits political photo ops in certain parts of the cemetery and that resulted in an altercation between creepy Trump staffers and a cemetery official who was trying to enforce the law.
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Noooo! Not chemtrails again!

From my window I see clear blue skies and airplanes flying in an out of the nearby airport and on occasion I can sometimes see thin white clouds trailing behind high-flying jets. One of the weirdest conspiracies is that the government is spraying population control chemicals through the exhaust of planes, leaving those white clouds.. It appears that RFK Jr. believes this nonsense, just like a lot of the other conspiratorial nonsense he believes, and he is trying to use his new-found alliance with creepy Donald Trump to get him to endorse it.

He has also suggested that Trump would join him in seeking to criminalize the spraying of “chemtrails,” promoting a debunked conspiracy theory about the government releasing toxic chemicals into the air to kill off undesirable elements of the population.

The Trump campaign, meanwhile, is declining to condemn Kennedy’s latest conspiratorial remarks, instead telling Salon that its “proud” to have him on the former president’s “transition team.”

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The debate over the debates

It used to be the case that people would argue over whether debates between the presidential nominees really mattered but that is no longer the case. The dramatic fallout following the Joe Biden-creepy Donald Trump debate on June 27 has settled that issue. I recall watching it with a sinking heart as Biden fumbled his way through it and afterwards resigned myself, barring some kind of miracle, to watching a slow motion train wreck as the Democrats headed towards defeat in November. I did not think it was possible to change the nominee at that late stage.

And yet, that is what happened, and it was the debate that precipitated it as enough influential figures in the Democratic party felt that Biden was no longer capable of winning and would drag the party down. To his credit, Biden, after going through various stages of grief and denial, seemed to have finally reconciled himself to the calls to step down, not an easy thing for a career politician to do, and as a result we have seen a truly astonishing change in fortunes, in which Kamala Harris rapidly replaced him as the presumptive nominee, unified the party base, and attracted new people, so that she has surged to a small lead in the polls. The situation is still dicey but at least an improvement from dire.
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The last chance for some Republicans to do the right thing?

There are quite a few Republicans who have become so disenchanted with, and even alarmed by, the direction that. creepy Donald Trump has taken their party, that they have become what are called Never Trumpers. Some have found a home in a site called The Bulwark. There you will find neoconservatives like Bill Kristol and David Frum, the very people who urged the Bush-Cheney administration into the disastrous invasion of Iraq in 2003, seeing it as way of showing American global dominance and the first step of a plan to take over the Middle East by successively invading or instigating regime changes in those Arab countries that were seen as enemies of Israel. Their goals were outlined in a document somewhat grandiosely titled Project for a New American Century.

At The Bulwark you will find commenters like Tim Miller who is urging other Republicans who are disenchanted with creepy Trump to not sit on the fence but instead rally round and endorse the Harris-Walz ticket. He applauded the few Republicans who attended the DNC rally and spoke in favor of voting for the Democratic ticket but wondered why so many much higher-profile Republicans who held high office in the creepy Trump administration but have publicly distanced themselves from him and even excoriated him, did not show up.
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Can RFK Jr. get any weirder?

Since he dropped out of the presidential race, RFK Jr., has become even more of a cipher than he was before and I had planned to ignore him but I couldn’t help share this story that was recounted by his daughter Kick Kennedy.

When she was 6, her dad chopped off the head of a whale that washed up on Squaw Island in Hyannis Port. Due to RFK Jr.’s love of studying animal skulls and skeletons, they then strapped the dead whale’s head to the car and spent five hours driving it to their home.

“Every time we accelerated on the highway, whale juice would pour into the windows of the car, and it was the rankest thing on the planet,” Kennedy said. “We all had plastic bags over our heads with mouth holes cut out, and people on the highway were giving us the finger, but that was just normal day-to-day stuff for us.”

It was “just normal day-to-day stuff” for them.

I can understand having a hobby of studying animal skulls. What amazes me is that he would subject his six-year old daughter to the experience of watching him cut up a whale with a chain saw and then have her wear a plastic bag with holes cut out for the mouth (which is still very dangerous) and deal with whale juice pouring over her through the car windows.

I doubt that he won any parent of the year awards.

No wonder RFK Jr. endorsed creepy Donald Trump and weird JD Vance. They are a natural fit for him.

Is Kamala Harris adopting a ‘Ming vase’ strategy?

I wrote before about a very interesting interview that Rory Stewart had with David Remnick. Stewart was an ambitious Conservative politician in the UK who had all the traditional qualifications, coming from a privileged family, attending an elite private school (Eton) and then Oxford University. He quickly rose up the ranks and even made a bid to become party leader, losing out to Boris Johnson in 2019. He left the party just prior to Brexit.

The interview mainly dealt with what Stewart described as the soul-killing nature of political leadership but he also had interesting things to say about the general election that was due to held in the UK this year. Labour party leader Keir Starmer had been criticized for not detailing specific policies that he would implement if elected, choosing instead to speak in broad generalities. Stewart described this as the ‘Ming vase’ strategy, where you are holding a precious Ming vase and walk very carefully so as not to break it. Starmer had clearly decided that the country desperately wanted to throw the Tories out and were not that interested in specifics of Labour policies, having the general idea that they were more on the side of ordinary people than the Tories.. They had a general idea of what Labour stood for and that seemed to be enough. Starmer did not want to make specific promises that might alienate some voters and thus break that consensus. Stewart said that this can be a successful strategy for winning elections (as it was for Starmer) but can cause problems after you win office because you do not really have a mandate for anything specific.
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