This poll is done online based on selection by address, and they’ll even hand out a tablet if the person at the address doesn’t have internet access. There are undoubtedly still old school polls doing landline cold-calls, but I think they’re growing rarer, and frankly at this point they’re Karoline Leavitt’s favorite ones.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/how-are-reutersipsos-us-public-opinion-polls-conducted-2024-05-09/
Good for the recall folks, though I’m sure there’s a share of pure NIMBYs in there and some folks definitely having the day they voted for. That’s funny that the supporters think the 1000 construction jobs will be for locals and not the specialized oilfield-like firms that are already staffed up to work these projects, or that Google will have 200 permanent staffers tied to the location and contributing to the town’s tax base.
“This was a lie and is the same tactic the Israelis used to draw us into the disastrous Iraq war that cost our nation the lives of thousands of our best men and women. We cannot make this mistake again.”
I’m pretty sure Dick Cheney and pals needed no particular urging from Israel for that one. If nothing else, it was on its face a complicated issue for Israel that would have left them without a particular desire to spend political capital with the US, though they would have undoubtedly been on board once it kicked off.
Now that said, it certainly does seem strange that any time there is a report of negotiations making progress with Iran or a proxy, this particular Israeli government seems to get stuck in and something violent happens. I think what we have here is an blind and anti-semitic squirrel finding a nut.
I received a metric fuckton of texts that were like, “ZOMG YOU GUYS WE ARE SO REPUBLICAN AND CROCKETT HATES ICE CAN YOU BELIEVE IT-ZORZ?!?!?!?” They seem to trace back to a shady republican group. Apart from a couple of milquetoast Cornyn ones, everything else I got was for various Dem candidates despite my living in a very red zip code.
The campaigns have excellent lists, and somebody on the right wanted blue voters to know how very “terrified” they were of her. The only reasonable alternative is that she ran them herself as a low-grade false-flag, and in either case it made me go ahead and decide on Talarico, though I’d have happily voted for either in the general. I think he’s made such a brand of being a blue christian that he’d probably feel obligated to make separation of church and state an important part of his brand, and he’s speaking very explicitly to the wealth divide in a way she hasn’t.
I do tend to think the dust-up over the Talarico’s Allred comment has at least some truth to it, but while I assume he’s much more calculating than his public persona, even in the worst case the story hit my (admittedly white) ears like someone who assumed that his allyship exempted him from micro-aggressions, rather than his being some cackling hypocrite. He’s got his work cut out for him, but if he can energize the base, recover Trump 2024 Hispanics, and get a couple of percentage points’ worth of red voters to flip or even just say, “meh” and stay home, he’s got a chance.
Realistically, I think the most likely scenario is that we’re looking at a pre-guns Beto campaign that comes close but can’t get over the hump versus an unpopular Republican, but I think he’s the best chance we’ve had since then to flip a seat. All of which is incumbent on elections happening semi-normally.
Rubio’s gonna get fired anyway. He made a speech that that didn’t terrify people in Munich as badly as MAGA speeches usually do, so he got a standing ovation, and Trump HAAAAATES that.
I think they’ve both had their issues with where their money comes from, her corporate PACs, him with the Adelson family that’s trying to somehow get gambling legalized in Texas without any Native American reservations and with a Christofascist state government. That said, neither one is a Schumer-style appeaser. He wears a brand of class-conscious social justice theology on his sleeve, throwing the Christian Nationalists’ so-called faith into clear focus, but because of that he’s also very much pitching “electability,” which in Texas right now means “I’m a cishet white guy so maybe some of the racists will stay home on election day.”
She is a firebrand who has made calling out Trump and the gang her full-time job, but her campaign seems to revel more in the idea of pissing off Donald Trump than in letting us know what she’ll do. There is a zeitgeisty element to that, and I think she’d be a more prominent and powerful advocate in Congress, but I think either would slot more into the Progressive wing. Ultimately, either would also be an insane improvement over Cornyn or (gag) Paxton.
Would be remiss of course without mentioning the dustup where a Tiktoker left the Talarico camp for the Crockett camp, saying that Talarico told her he was expecting to run against a mediocre black guy, not a talented black woman. He’s admitted to using the word mediocre about Colin Allred’s prior campaign, and TBF it was extremely mediocre (like Allred knew from day one he had no chance, so why knock yourself out?), but if Talarico did try to add in Allred’s race as (one would hope) a rhetorical flourish, then it was a tone-deaf moment that harmed his credibility in promising to advocate for the black community. “Electability” with white people doesn’t help if you simultaneously depress the vote of the usual 4/9 of Texans who vote blue. I’m as white as Talarico is, but it really gave me pause.
They say they used a paid actor. Of course, even if that’s true, it’s not particularly hard to find someone with a similar pitch, accent, and timbre, and then finish fixing it to make sure it’s as confidently soothing as the NPR voice you wanted to steal in the first place. I suppose in one sense it’s not utterly different from hiring a soundalike, but now the soundalike is damn near perfect (the clips in the article are VERY similar and feel more like the difference in recording equipment than anything else) and doesn’t need to actually be available to perform for new impressions. Yet another example of “withstand motion for summary judgment, string it out, lobby against future guiderails” as the totality of Silicon Valley’s legal philosophy.
Maybe it can repost racist MAGA slop, creep on the granddaughters of ex-girlfriends, and put private messages into the public feed, just like your dad!
Stratasys and Ultimaker already killed it.
At this point dealing with the predictable and polite asshole is easier than the unpredictable and rude one. Trump is making a diplomacy mess that will take decades to clean up, if ever.
Well, I did say possibility.
If nothing else, and back in the Bush days it’s pretty much all we had, they accept the possibility that they can lose elections. The bar is literally laying on the ground, yet MAGA still can’t clear it.
drive through Lubbock
Well, yes. Lubbock is as Lubbock was. It is known.
Texas is a mess.
This is also true.
This is pretty much what I said to my wife while scritching my dogs. First it’ll just be expanded to missing kids and olds, because of course everyone wants to reunite families, but eventually it’ll be something that “law enforcement” can request for whatever the hell they want, because after all they’re the good guys keeping us safe!
I was using a 2012 “vintage” minitower PC that originally came with Win7 as a crappy little plex/local FTP/Minecraft server, and I had been wanting to try MacOS after not seeing it for a while, so I got a Mac Mini with an M2 in it, and while I’ve hardly stressed it, it seems really nice. It’s small and completely silent, and if I did want to use it more, Apple has certainly tried to keep their walled garden pretty and well-organized.
Some highlights:
“They seek nothing more than some modicum of due process and the rule of law,” wrote Biery.
He said the case of Conejo Arias and his son “has its genesis in the ill-conceived and incompetently-implemented government pursuit of daily deportation quotas, apparently even if it requires traumatizing children."
“Civics lesson to the government: Administrative warrants issued by the executive branch to itself do not pass probable cause muster. That is called the fox guarding the henhouse. The Constitution requires an independent judicial officer.”
“If you have nothing to hide…” always assumes some modicum of goodwill, or at least restraint, from those doing to the looking.
Both things could be true.
7-11 theoretically already has it for their app; you scan with your phone and pay with Apple or Google Pay. The only thing is that you’re supposed to sort of wave the completed transaction at the cashier as you go, but the only reason you’d really need to use portable self-checkout is if the cashier is busy, and when they’re busy they don’t want you breaking in line or to stop what they’re doing to see that you’re showing them a plausibly legitimate checkout screen.
In a completely, utterly, definitely unrelated story, I got accused of shoplifting by a 7-11 cashier the other day.
I had to look that up. Apparently the limit is 6’8", and they claim he’s 6’9". Now, the kid is clearly a tall motherfucker, but how much y’all wanna bet he actually tops out at 6’7"? (6’9" is 205.74cm)