Seth Meyers had a lot of catching up to do

The last three weeks have been a political whirlwind but the late night talk show that he hosts has been on hiatus during that time. They must have thought this was a good time to plan their break. It is the summer doldrums, the Republican convention had just ended, the Olympics were going to dominate the news for two weeks, and they would come back just before the Democratic convention

But things have been so crazy that when he returned on Monday, he had a lot of catching up to do and it was worth watching his summary to be reminded about how things have changed so dramatically.

The politics of crowds and poll numbers

There has been a lot of reporting about the size of crowds at campaign rallies. I have never been too impressed by crowd sizes as an indicator of popularity because however large they may be, they represent just a tiny fraction of the votes one needs to win. They measure more the depth of intensity of the most ardent supporters of a candidate, not the breadth of support. For example, in the case of creepy Donald Trump, there seem to be many of the same people who go to rally after rally, sometimes traveling great distances. It is like a cult following. Such people can swell multiple rally crowd numbers but still have only one vote.

But rally crowds do help campaigns in several important ways. The people who are enthusiastic enough to spend a big chunk of a day going to a campaign event and lining up to get in are those who are very likely to vote and, more importantly, more willing to work on the campaign in some way. You can be sure that there are campaign staffers at these events who are signing up people as donors and volunteers. While getting money helps since so much is needed for expensive TV advertising, American elections are awash with so much dark money that by the time elections come around, the airwaves are saturated with so many ads that they are unlikely to sway voters. Their purpose is largely to remind those who are already committed as to why they should stick with the candidate. The main benefit of getting new people to contribute even a small amount is not the money but because once you have given money to some cause, you are more invested in that candidate and want that person to win, like betting on a horse or a sports team.
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The Musk-Trump interview is a bust

[UPDATE: The interview has finally started, 50 minutes late. The Guardian is live blogging it.]

The much ballyhooed interview was supposed to start at 8:00pm ET but at 8:40pm, there was nothing. The number of people who were able to sign in and now hear just silence or cheesy music keeps dropping.

Musk came on to say that they had experienced a DDOS attack, where “DDOS stands for distributed denial of service, and is when a network of computers infected with special malware, known as a “botnet”, are coordinated into bombarding a server with traffic until it collapses under the strain.”

I am skeptical of the DDOS explanation, especially given that Musk also promoted the Ron De Santis presidential launch last year on his site and that too was a mess of glitches. People are being reminded about what creepy Trump said then.

Surely the alleged genius Musk would be able to cope with a DDOS attack. Either Twitter/X is a hot mess or he is lying.

Creepy Donald Trump will not be happy with this debacle and that just five people will be able to hear it live, assuming that it goes ahead at all.

A little logic puzzle

As a respite from political news, here is a nice little logic puzzle.

Alice and Bob are two infinitely intelligent logicians. Each has a number drawn on their forehead. Each can see the other’s number but not their own. Each knows that both numbers are positive integers. An observer tells them that the number 50 is either the sum or the product of the two numbers. Alice says to Bob, “I do not know my number,” and Bob replies, “I do not know my number either.” What is Alice’s number?

The above link also points you to the solution.

The politics of insults

When it comes to media coverage of campaigns, there is no question that a candidate will get a lot more coverage with a well-timed zinger at their opponent than with a detailed policy analysis. Hence it should be no surprise that much attention is paid by campaigns to crafting the kind of insult that can go viral.

When it comes to campaign speeches, those of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz have some actual policy substance with some insults thrown in, such as describing creepy Donald Trump and weird JD Vance as, well, creepy and weird. Of course, creepy Trump’s main campaign strategy is as usual to hurl insults while making either vague and ambiguous policy proposals or hardline concrete ones that appeal to the racists and xenophobes in his base but are unlikely to be implemented, such as building the wall and deporting every undocumented immigrant in the country.

Weird Vance is trying to follow in creepy Trump’s footsteps, most recently saying that Harris “bent the knee to the Hamas caucus of the Democratic party” by picking Walz. He should be careful since they could respond by saying much more accurately that weird Vance and creepy Trump represent the Nazi wing of the Republican party, since white supremacists and neo-Nazis are being embraced by them.
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Tim Walz’s unusual finances

It is not unusual for elected officials to have humble beginnings and then become very wealthy while in office. But although Tim Walz has been in elected office for nearly 20 years, first as a US congressman for 12 years and then as the governor of Minnesota, he appears to have very little wealth.

Either he is a very clean politician or is extremely clever at hiding his wealth.

Laughter can be the best medicine in politics

Democratic vice-presidential nominee Tim Walz seems to have a good sense of how to pithily capture the political mood. He is credited with popularizing the use of ‘weird’ in describing the Republican ticket. He did this even before he was selected and this apparently was what caught the attention of the Kamala Harris team.

“Walz repeated it at his first appearance as Harris’ running mate in Philadelphia on Tuesday night, when referencing Republicans. “These guys are creepy and, yes, just weird as hell,” the governor said to huge applause.”
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Much of the Walz buzz was self-generated on the cable news circuit. With a round of hits on MSNBC and CNN, Walz popularized calling Republicans, including Sen. JD Vance, “weird.”

Walz repeated it at his first appearance as Harris’ running mate in Philadelphia on Tuesday night, when referencing Republicans. “These guys are creepy and, yes, just weird as hell,” the governor said to huge applause.

The initial “weird” reference marked a rhetorical shift from the high-minded, “threat to our nation,” that Biden leaned on to a more retable one that may have taken root in Walz’ early career as a social studies teacher and cafeteria monitor.

McCollum said her congressional colleagues “kept coming up to me and saying, ‘Did you see him on Morning Joe?’”

It also caught the ear of the Harris team, which started incorporating “weird” into their own campaign talking points. For them, it became clear that Walz could be an effective messenger, a defender and a bulldog against the Republican ticket.

“His stock turned with the ‘weird’ comment because they saw him as someone who could, in a Midwestern, folksy way, sum up everything that people think about Republicans that is so damning but doesn’t sound partisan,” said Morgan Jackson, a top adviser to North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper. “He did in one minute what six months of research didn’t surface.”

Clips from his cable news appearances zinged across the internet. Democratic fans unearthed other videos of Walz as governor, living out his suburban dad energy, including teasing his daughter about being a vegetarian — a clip that garnered more than 3 million views. Many fans on X declared themselves “Walz-pilled,” a flattering reference to the Matrix.

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Creepy Trump is going even further off the rails

While the Kamala Harris-Tim Walz ticket has lit a fire under the Democratic party, with people reacting with wild enthusiasm as if they have already won the election, even though the race is pretty much tied at this point and could go either way. This wild enthusiasm will undoubtedly fade somewhat over time. However, it looks like the Harris-Walz ticket are not lowering their guard and know that a lot of hard work lies ahead.

One has to feel a pang of pity for Joe Biden. He is someone whose presidency was on the whole better than I expected ( I was not expecting much), although there were some serious issues that I strongly disagreed with, his condoning of the Israeli massacre of Gazans being one of the biggest. I wonder what must be going through his mind when he sees how happy Democrats are with him leaving the race. Does he feel that they are ungrateful? He did, after all, save the country from a second creepy Donald Trump presidency in 2020. There have been no reports that he is sulking and he has been publicly supportive of Harris. In fact, now freed from the rigors of campaigning, he is reportedly looking at doing things in the last six months that would secure his legacy

But there is one person who seems to be deeply upset by Biden leaving and that is creepy Trump. He seems really angry that Biden is not running and that Harris is surging in the polls.
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John Oliver excoriates RFK Jr.

In a detailed analysis, Oliver looks at RFK Jr.’s history and reveals a very unpleasant, dishonest man who has spread dangerous misinformation about AIDS, autism, vaccines, and other topics throughout the world. He says that he did good work on environmental issues earlier in his career that he has exploited to get the support by many young people who may not be aware of the dark anti-science turn he took later and how damaging his ideas became, and that he might be able to sway enough voters to swing the election on creepy Donald Trump’s favor.

Meanwhile, the RFK Jr. dead bear story keeps on giving. I had taken at face value his claim that a vehicle ahead of him had hit the bear and that he decided to collect the carcass as roadkill to skin and eat later, because he knew that you can get a legal permit in the state of New York to keep a bear that is roadkill. It seemed a little suspicious that he knew about this specific and esoteric law because how often does one encounter a bear by the side of the road that has just been killed by a vehicle? Or indeed, any dead animal at all? But he is a lawyer who likes to go falconing, so I gave him the benefit of the doubt for knowing weird trivia.

But then I read this article that aroused my suspicions.

On Wednesday a spokesperson, Stephanie Spear, told the Associated Press that Kennedy, a longtime falconer who also trains ravens, used roadkill to feed his birds.

She also said Kennedy once had a 21-cubic-foot refrigerator, used for roadkill, at his New York home.

Wait, he has a freezer dedicated to just roadkill? How much fresh roadkill does he encounter in his daily life? I can understand that people who spend a lot of time on the highways (truck drivers, highway patrol officers, highway maintenance people) can see a lot of roadkill. But ordinary people? I have seen dead animals by the side of the highway but not often. And you should never go near it because you do not know how long it has been rotting there.

But apparently this weird guy has a preternatural sense that enables him to be frequently in the vicinity of fresh roadkill.