The Biggest Loser

lousubcap

CHEETO is running scared and just playing to the basest of his base. His only path out of jail is to win. A sphincter tightening vision right there.  
CHEETO makes Nixon (who resigned 50 years ago tomorrow) look like a saint.  

Legume

I'll give him some credit, he trolls harder than @fishlessman

Legume

   

Botch

This morning, Beau "Belle" reported that his new genius masterstroke was to "officially endorse" the top 2 or 3 trumplican candidates in various races; he's done this in three states now.  I guess his Master Plan is to be able to claim his endorsement gave the person a win, whoever it is (at least in the primaries).  
Have read his education level is that of a fourth-grader, but I think they're overestimating.   

fishlessman

Legume said:

I'll give him some credit, he trolls harder than @fishlessman

maybe because he needs a get out of jail card o-elliptical one

JohnInCarolina

Botch said:

This morning, Beau "Belle" reported that his new genius masterstroke was to "officially endorse" the top 2 or 3 trumplican candidates in various races; he's done this in three states now.  I guess his Master Plan is to be able to claim his endorsement gave the person a win, whoever it is (at least in the primaries).  
Have read his education level is that of a fourth-grader, but I think they're overestimating.   

Yeah, I saw that, lol.   He is so friggin needy.  

JohnInCarolina

lousubcap

A good read about where we are today- From The Atlantic:

Tom Nichols STAFF WRITER

A Tire Fire

The Democratic ticket has now taken shape, and Donald Trump is not handling it well. Meanwhile, his running mate and the rest of his party are stumbling. Vice President Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party have defied the expectations of many observers—and as usual, when I say “many observers,” I mostly mean “me”—by making an almost flawless transition from President Joe Biden’s faltering chances to a new and energized campaign. Yesterday, Harris rolled out the ebullient Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate at a rally in Philadelphia, where one of Walz’s former competitors for the job, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, gave a rousing address to the crowd. So far, the Democrats have avoided the backbiting and chaos that could have erupted after Biden’s unprecedented departure from the race. They’ve left that to the Republicans, who don’t seem to be handling any of the news from the past few weeks very well. Before we turn to Trump himself, let’s review some of the recent banner moments for the Grand Old Party. This week, the former Trump lawyer Jenna Ellis accepted a deal from the state of Arizona to cooperate in its fake-elector case. Ellis, who served as a deputy district attorney in a Colorado county for six months before getting fired, was finally disciplined in May by the Colorado Supreme Court for her actions related to the 2020 election, and agreed to give up her law license for three years. An Arizona grand jury described by Politico as “unusually aggressive” (read: deeply pissed off) indicted 18 people in the scheme to overturn the results of the 2020 election, even asking to bring in others who were not targets of the investigation. In the days since Ellis flipped, one of the fake electors became the first to take a plea deal. Nevertheless, Arizona Republicans last week nominated Kari Lake—the MAGA darling, election denier, and loser in the 2022 gubernatorial election—for one of Arizona’s Senate seats. Early polls show Lake running behind Democratic candidate Ruben Gallego, and her weakness as a statewide candidate prompted the conservative Arizona commentator Jon Gabriel to post a simple prediction on X: “Onto another loss in the general.” Other GOP state parties are flailing about as well. A number of former GOP state and national officials are ditching their party’s nominee and joining “Republicans for Harris,” a group with a name few conservatives could even have parsed five years ago. These defections are understandable when new GOP leaders are people like Lake and Mark Robinson, the Republican nominee for governor in North Carolina who said in June—while standing in a church—that “some folks need killing.” At the national level, GOP commentators seem especially flummoxed about the Walz rollout. They are, for now, trying mightily to make it seem as if Harris opting for Walz over Shapiro is evidence of roiling anti-Semitism in the Democratic Party. Scott Jennings, who seems to be vying for the Jeffrey Lord Chair of Republican Sycophancy at CNN, mumbled that Harris chose Walz because the Democrats are “awash in anti-Semitism,” a smear that even his network colleagues on the panel wouldn’tlet pass. Other Republicans have tried with increasing churlishness to make the charge stick online, and Trump himself has called Walz’s selection “insulting to Jewish people,” which, of course, makes no sense. Meanwhile, J. D. Vance’s excruciating flameout as Trump’s running mate seems to have some Republicans wishing they could just drive him back to Ohio and leave him there. One source of the bad-mouthing appears to be the GOP strategist and former Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway, who issued one of the greatest non-denial-denials in recent political history: “When it comes to concerned people questioning the vetting or selection of JD Vance, the calls are coming in, not going out,” she said. “I’m not calling them and saying this is bad. People are asking me. They’re not just asking me. They’re asking lots of people.” Did you follow that? I’m not out there saying bad things about J. D., and I never said he was a mistake; I’m just answering the many calls—so many!—from people who think he’s a mistake. Oh. Trump, for his part, backed up his running mate a week ago by telling the audience at the National Association of Black Journalists convention that vice presidents really don’t matter for the outcomes of elections. (Well, Trump admitted, “maybe Lyndon Johnson mattered, for different reasons.”) Vance might be grateful that so much of the news this week was about Walz, because at least it overshadowed the story in The Washington Post that Vance—a United States senator—was texting with a notorious internet troll named Chuck Johnson. Vance and Johnson exchanged views on conspiracies: “Do you think [Jeffrey] Epstein actually killed himself?” Vance asked. He asked Johnson his views on the existence of UFOs, and mocked the death of the GOP mega-donor Sheldon Adelson. “Never met him,” he wrote. “Hes dead. Don’t care.” The senator also discussed potentially sensitive military-assistance issues with his new friend. (“Dude I won’t even take calls from Ukraine,” Vance reportedly told Johnson, claiming that senior Ukrainian officials had reached out to him, “bitching about F16s.”) A Vance spokesperson claims that Johnson “spam texted” the senator and that Vance “usually ignored him, but occasionally responded to push back against things [Johnson] said.” That’s not how those texts read, but as a former Hill staffer, I might suggest to Vance’s assistants that someone like Chuck Johnson isn’t even supposed to have your boss’s phone number. To paraphrase Succession’s Logan Roy: These are not serious people. No one is handling the past few weeks more poorly than Trump himself, who, as The Bulwark’s Andrew Egger noted, seems to have retreated into an Aaron Sorkin–inspired fantasy. Yesterday, the former president posted this on his Truth Social site: What are the chances that Crooked Joe Biden, the WORST President in the history of the U.S., whose Presidency was Unconstitutionally STOLEN from him by Kamabla, Barrack HUSSEIN Obama, Crazy Nancy Pelosi, Shifty Adam Schiff, Cryin’ Chuck Schumer, and others on the Lunatic Left, CRASHES the Democrat National Convention and tries to take back the Nomination, beginning with challenging me to another DEBATE. He feels that he made a historically tragic mistake by handing over the U.S. Presidency, a COUP, to the people in the World he most hates, and he wants it back, NOW!!! “Kamabla”? This might be too much even for a Sorkin script. Trump’s reactions lately are so unhinged, so hysterical, that they could pass for one of those scenes in a soap opera where a drunken dowager finds out that her May-December romance is a sham, and she begs him, as mascara flows down her cheeks, to fly off with her to Gstaad or Antibes to rekindle their love. In reality, of course, this is all a disturbing reminder that Trump is a deeply unwell person who is not fit to be the commander in chief, and that should he return to office, other Republican officials cannot be counted on to protect the nation—especially Vance, who reveals himself daily as every bit the intellectual lightweight and political fraud his critics believe he is. The Democrats are doing well, and Republicans are sitting in the middle of a tire fire. But Trump is still in a commanding electoral position, and he could still win. (Emphasis added-always remember).  The pro-democracy coalition has every reason to enjoy some good news, but these past few weeks should not obscure the existential danger America faces in November.

JohnInCarolina

DoubleEgger

JohnInCarolina said:

He doesn’t have any friends. Every person in his life is transactional. 

Legume

Surely not his wife? Tell me it isn't so.

DoubleEgger

Legume said:

Surely not his wife? Tell me it isn't so.

Even his kids are transactional. 

lousubcap

DoubleEgger said:

JohnInCarolina said:

He doesn’t have any friends. Every person in his life is transactional. 

That right there captures the essence.  

JohnInCarolina

Sure, Donny.  Sure.

JohnInCarolina

JohnInCarolina

Saw someone describe Trump as entering his “Fat Elvis” stage.  He’s playing all of his old hits to a decreasing audience of old white fans.

lousubcap

DON’T CALL IT A RESET — DONALD TRUMP’s news conference yesterday was meant to offer him a fresh start after his campaign has struggled to respond to the new Democratic ticket. Going into the event, the question on the minds of many Republicans was posed by the Wall Street Journal editorial board in yesterday’s paper: “Will Donald Trump Blow Another Election?”

In a briefing for reporters beforehand, Trump advisers argued that Harris' recent good run was just a “honeymoon” or “suspended reality” and would end “in a few days.” This line of thinking reminds us a little bit of the many times that Biden's advisers told us that Trump’s lead in the polls was just temporary because voters weren’t paying attention and that once the race was joined, the numbers would shift. But we learned with Biden that this doesn’t just happen — the candidate matters. When Biden showed up at the CNN debate, his party realized he was incapable of making the case against Trump.

In terms of reach and impact, the Mar-a-Lago news conference was nothing like the debate. (How many people were watching basic cable at 2 p.m. on a Thursday in August during the Olympics?) But Trump’s lack of focus and his inability to mount a coherent case against Harris and TIM WALZ reminded us a little of Biden’s communications breakdown, even if it wasn’t as bad.

Again, the WSJ editorial articulated what Republicans have been saying privately, noting before the event that “the problem is the candidate” who “seems to think he’s still leading in the polls against a feeble incumbent” and “doesn’t seem to realize he’s now in a close race that requires discipline and a consistent message to prevail.”

That was the bar set for Trump after two weeks when the metrics he cares about — polls, fundraising and crowds — were all trending Harris’ way. Did he clear it?

The big news was that Trump agreed to the Sept. 10 ABC News debate (after saying five days ago that his previous commitment to the debate was “terminated”). He also proposed two additional events that Harris quickly brushed off, saying she would consider them after the first debate.

But much of the rest of the news conference was either old news, false claims or unfocussed attacks on his opponent. The WaPo called it“meandering.” The Times said Trump’s “remarks were littered with falsehoods.”

Here’s a sampling:

• In discussing his infamous speech on Jan. 6, 2021, Trump claimed the crowd — which later stormed the Capitol — was bigger than the crowd on hand for Rev. MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.’s “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963. (For the record, MLK’s crowd was 25 times larger, per the AP.)

• His case against Tim Walz had a lot of adjectives but was short on details: “He’s going for things that nobody’s ever heard of. Heavy into the transgender world, heavy into lots of different worlds, having to do with safety.” You don’t get the sense he’s really studied the Walz oppo yet.

• We’ll quote the NYT on this one, because we appreciate the understated tone of the reporting here: “He has called the move to replace Mr. Biden with Ms. Harris ‘unconstitutional,’ but when challenged about what section of the U.S. Constitution would prohibit the change in the ticket, he acknowledged that perhaps it was not actually unconstitutional.”

JohnInCarolina

It actually isn't clear that he's agreed to the debate in September.   He seemed to condition acceptance on Harris participating in the Fox News debate, which is scheduled earlier.  

lousubcap

CHEETO is struggling to get the attention back on him.  Flailing and wailing come to mind.  The longer he goes the more unhinged he gets.  

JohnInCarolina

JohnInCarolina

lousubcap

And yet the acolytes continue to follow. Face it, you have been taken for a ride for several years by CHEETO with $$, bibles, NFT's, sneakers, college degrees, steak and so on.  Once you are so far in and gullible the only way ahead is to keep going with the Clown Show loser.  Too bad some 45% +/- of our voting population are ensnared.  F' me.  

JohnInCarolina

Legume

lousubcap

From the BBC today(8/12):

Trump's false claim about Harris crowd

Local media outlet MLive covered the event and estimated that about 15,000 people were at the rally. Credit: Harris Campaign The first rallies jointly held by Democratic presidential candidate, Vice-President Kamala Harris, and her running mate Tim Walz have attracted large crowds. But their Republican rival Donald Trump took issue with a recent image from a Michigan rally, claiming it was a fake and there was “nobody” there.

What do we know about the image Trump disputes? The first version we could find of the photo Mr Trump has highlighted was posted on X by a Harris campaign staffer, Bhavik Lathia, on 7 August. Mr Lathia says the picture was sent to him by another campaign official. BBC Verify checked the metadata of this image, which confirmed it was taken on an iPhone 12 Pro Max device on 7 August at 18:28 local time.  Which other sources are available to verify what's shown in the photo? There are multiple other images and videos, some taken by people present but also by TV news teams and agency photographers. They show a large crowd of people at the event. Could an AI-powered software have been used to edit the image? Prof Hany Farid, a specialist in image analysis at UC Berkeley, has examined the photograph using software designed to detect AI-generated images and says “we found no evidence that this image is AI-generated or digitally altered”. Disputed account: Donald Trump said that former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown disparaged Kamala Harris during a helicopter ride that ended in an emergency landing - a story Mr Brown has dismissed as "creative fiction".    Music rights: The family of the late soul singer Isaac Hayes has ordered Trump to stop playing the star's song Hold On, I'm Coming at his rallies. A similar complaint was issued on Saturday by Celine Dion's team. ‌Edit to add the following: (From Next Draft) "Over the weekend, the rally crowd size-obsessed Donald Trump accused the Harris campaign of using AI and other tactics to make it look like their crowds were bigger than they actually were. At this point, is it really newsworthy that a pathetic, jealous narcissist who lies about everything is lying about something relatively trivial? Unfortunately, yes. Because like so many of his strategies over the past several years, this is is all about laying the groundwork to deny the election results. For his backers to believe he won, they can't be allowed to believe that the Harris/Walz campaign has the momentum.  Bottom line: Diminishing Harris's popularity lays the groundwork to try to steal the election. The claims are easily disprovable and patently ridiculous. But as Philip Bump explains, "the point isn’t to increase Trump’s credibility. It’s to erode everyone else’s. That way, when they accurately report the results in November, Trump can remind his supporters to reject them if necessary." Trump falsely argued that 3.5 million people illegally voted in an election he won. He began laying the groundwork to claim that the 2020 election was stolen months, if not years, in advance. The worse reality gets, the more aggressive these claims will become."

lousubcap

CHEETO and the numbers article:

Trump, By the Numbers

Maureen Dowd, New York Times August 11, 2024

https://dnyuz.com/2024/08/10/trump-by-the-numbers/

Botch

lousubcap said:

CHEETO and the numbers article:

Trump, By the Numbers

Maureen Dowd, New York Times August 11, 2024

https://dnyuz.com/2024/08/10/trump-by-the-numbers/

This part of the article I found interesting:
 

Brown said that he was never on such a helicopter ride. Also, the ebullient Brown happens to really like his former inamorata, Harris; he has told people that she is “a special lady” and that, for a few years, in the period after he was elected mayor of San Francisco, they had wonderful times in Hollywood and Paris. Brown said Donald Trump did send his plane to bring them to New York to get Brown’s advice on a Los Angeles real estate deal. Trump was still “fun” then, Brown said, and Trump contributed to Harris’s attorney general campaign.

lousubcap

Another good read on CHEETO and why he worries about crowd (and other) size issues:

Charles Sykes

Trump’s rally-crowd denialism is yet another sign of his break with reality. But it is also a warning of a different sort: The former president is laying the groundwork for challenging the legitimacy of the November election.

“Trump, enraged and rattled, is reverting to his feral ways,” Peter Wehner wrote in The Atlantic today. Among those is Trump’s insistence on refusing reality: This weekend, the former president pushed a bizarre conspiracy theory that the massive crowds at recent rallies for Kamala Harris were faked by AI.

Apparently suffering from a severe case of crowd envy, Trump seized onright-wing social-media speculation and claimed that “NOBODY” had really shown up at Harris’s rallies. Despite extensive photographic evidencethat thousands of supporters had turned out at an airport in Detroit, Trump insisted that the crowds “DIDN’T EXIST.” In fact, he declared, “there was nobody there,” and cited as evidence “the reflection of the mirror like finish on the Vice Presidential Plane,” which did not reflect images of the crowd that was otherwise in plain sight.

Trump’s claims were pathetically easy to debunk. His rally-crowd lie is yet another of his denials of the truth in front of him. But it was also a warning of a different sort: The former president is openly laying the groundwork for challenging the legitimacy of the November election.

After claiming that Harris had “CHEATED at the airport,” Trump telegraphed his other message: “This is the way the Democrats win Elections, by CHEATING – And they’re even worse at the Ballot Box.” Trump has been workshopping his claims that Harris’s candidacy is illegitimate; he has already suggested that the replacement of Joe Biden with Harris was somehow “unconstitutional.” (It wasn’t, because the Constitution is silent on party nominations.) In his weekend rant, Trump suggested that Harris “should be disqualified because the creation of a fake image is ELECTION INTERFERENCE. Anyone who does that will cheat at ANYTHING!”

In the 2020 race, Trump used the lie that the election had been stolen to incite a violent attack on the nation’s Capitol; now he and his allies have the added advantage of an infrastructure for sowing chaos the next time around. One of Trump’s campaign managers, Chris LaCivita, has already made it clear that Trump may fight the outcome of the election long after November 5. “It’s not over until he puts his hand on the Bible and takes the oath,” LaCivita said in a recent interview with Politico at the Republican National Convention. “It’s not over on Election Day, it’s over on Inauguration Day.” An investigation by Rolling Stone last month found that nearly 70 pro-Trump election deniers serve as election officials in key battleground counties.

In Georgia, Trump supporters on the state election board have adopted rules requiring “reasonable inquiry” before election results are certified, a move that could give GOP county-election-board members the ability to reject the 2024 election’s outcome. And as The Guardian reports, the lawyer and Trump ally Cleta Mitchell “has spent the last few years building up a network of activists focused on local boards of elections.” At the national level, the Republican National Committee says that it hopes to mobilize 100,000 volunteers, including thousands of poll watchers, to focus on “Democrat attempts to circumvent the rules.” Meanwhile, one RNC senior counsel for election integrity, Christina Bobb, was criminally indicted earlier this year for her role in trying to overturn the 2020 election (she pleaded not guilty).

Then there is the mood of the MAGA base. Trump’s lies about the 2020 election have become a litmus test in the GOP, and a recent Pew Research Center poll found that although 77 percent of Democratic voters believe that the election will be conducted “fairly and accurately,” less than half of Republican voters have faith in the system. Despite Harris’s recent surge, the majority of Trump supporters are confident that he will be victorious. (A recent YouGov poll found that nearly eight in 10 Trump supporters think he would win if pitted against Harris.) Trump fully intends to stoke his supporters’ disbelief and anger at the possibility that he could lose. As Wehner warned recently: “If you have friends who are Trump worshippers, a word of counsel: They’re heading to a very dark place psychologically … They felt this race was won; now it’s slipping away. Expect even greater self-delusion and more toxic rants.”

A defeated Trump could be even more dangerous this year than he was in 2020, because the personal stakes for him are higher than ever: Trump is already a convicted felon, but if he wins, he can make many of the remaining criminal cases against him go away. If he loses, he faces not only personal humiliation but also a potential legal nightmare. This makes Trump a desperate man—and that desperation could drive his actions even after the final votes are cast."

CHEETO makes Nixon look like a saint.  

lousubcap

From The Hill today:

Bolton says Musk interview ‘another case of Trump making things up’

by Sarah Fortinsky - 08/13/24 2:29 PM ET

https://thehill.com/homenews/media/4825937-john-bolton-donald-trump-elon-musk-vladimir-putin-ukraine-invasion/?email 

lousubcap

This Daily Show is rich regarding the current Presidential race:
https://youtu.be/-VW6tHIcGfc.