‘Dozens of interviews with people deeply familiar or involved with the election process point to a clear consensus: Not only could trump make a second attempt at overturning an election he loses, he and his allies are already laying the groundwork.

…2024 is not 2020. trump’s path to pulling it off this time is even narrower and more extreme. For one thing, trump lacks some of the tools he threatened to wield four years ago to upend the transfer of power; today, the military and Justice Department answer to Joe Biden. trump also needs allies to win elections that would put them in a position to reverse a defeat: Overturning a Kamala Harris victory would require an enormous amount of help from Republican power brokers in statehouses and Congress, some of whom spurned him four years ago.

trump’s first attempt to exploit the neglected machinery of American democracy also spurred real action by congressional Democrats. Updates to the Electoral Count Act in the wake of trump’s 2020 gambit aimed to bind vote counters, election officials and even Congress to the results certified by state governments, all of which makes it tougher, in theory, to steal an election.

But trump is heading into the 2024 election informed by his failure to overturn the results four years earlier. And his incentive to obtain the powers and protections of the White House is likely stronger than ever: If he loses, trump will face an avalanche of criminal proceedings that could last the rest of his life. If he wins, they are likely to go away.

“No one knows exactly what trump’s attack on the electoral system will be in 2024,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), a member of the Jan. 6 select committee. “What will he do this time?”

The answer, according to lawmakers, congressional investigators, party operatives, election officials and constitutional law experts, goes something like this:

— He will deepen distrust in the election results by making unsupported or hyperbolic claims of widespread voter fraud and mounting longshot lawsuits challenging enough ballots to flip the outcome in key states.

— He will lean on friendly county and state officials to resist certifying election results — a futile errand that would nevertheless fuel a campaign to put pressure on elected Republican legislators in statehouses and Congress.

— He will call on allies in GOP-controlled swing-state legislatures to appoint “alternate” presidential electors.

— He will rely on congressional Republicans to endorse these alternate electors — or at least reject Democratic electors — when they convene to certify the outcome.

— He will try to ensure Harris is denied 270 votes in the Electoral College, sending the election to the House, where Republicans are likely to have the numbers to choose trump as the next president….’ (via POLITICO)

‘During an interview with Meet the Press, Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-Pa.) questions the legality of Elon Musk promising $1 million giveaways to voters who sign his super PAC’s petition “in favor of free speech and the right to bear arms.”…’ (via NBC)

‘Two big things baffle me about this election. The first is: Why are the polls so immobile? In mid-June the race between President Biden and Donald Trump was neck and neck. Since then, we’ve had a blizzard of big events, and still the race is basically where it was in June. It started out tied and has only gotten closer.

We supposedly live in a country in which a plurality of voters are independents. You’d think they’d behave, well, independently and get swayed by events. But no. In our era the polling numbers barely move.

The second thing that baffles me is: Why has politics been 50-50 for over a decade? We’ve had big shifts in the electorate, college-educated voters going left and non-college-educated voters going right. But still, the two parties are almost exactly evenly matched….’ (David Brooks via The New York Times)

‘In 2020, when donald trump questioned the results of the election, the courts decisively rejected his efforts, over and over again. In 2024, the judicial branch may be unable to save our democracy.

The rogues are no longer amateurs. They have spent the last four years going pro, meticulously devising a strategy across multiple fronts — state legislatures, Congress, executive branches and elected judges — to overturn any close election.

The new challenges will take place in forums that have increasingly purged officials who put country over party. They may take place against the backdrop of razor-thin election margins in key swing states, meaning that any successful challenge could change the election.

We have just a few short weeks to understand these challenges so that we can be vigilant about them….’ (Neal Katyal, professor at Georgetown University Law Center, via The New York Times)

‘Here is a short and incomplete list of things that former president donald trump has done this week:

• Sunday: trump says the US military should be deployed against “the enemy within” on Election Day. It’s unclear who exactly he’s talking about, but he does refer to Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) as an example of a domestic enemy later in the interview.

• Monday: trump stops a town hall to conduct a 40-minute impromptu dance party, where he plays songs like “YMCA” and “Hallelujah” on stage with an obviously confused South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem (R).

• Tuesday: When asked during a Bloomberg interview about his policy toward Google, trump responds with an extended riff on an election lawsuit in Virginia. When prompted to actually answer the question, trump launches into a rant about critical stories appearing on Google News, said he’d called “the head of Google” to complain, and then threatened to “do something” to the company in response.

• Also Tuesday: trump warns that “hydrogen is the new car,” and tells a story about a man who died in a hydrogen car explosion near a tree and could not be identified by his wife. Hydrogen-fueled cars are in fact a 10-year-old technology with a small and declining global market share. There is no evidence that they can explode like the Hindenburg, as a car with hydrogen fuel cells is not the same thing as a dirigible inflated with hydrogen gas.

• Wednesday: Asked about the “enemy within” comments from Sunday, trump doubles down — saying Democrats like Schiff are indeed such an enemy, that they are “Marxists” and “fascists” who are “so evil” and “dangerous for our country.”

Throughout these events, trump has come off as (alternately) a buffoon and a would-be dictator. One minute, you’re laughing at his campy dance moves and Hindenburg car rants, the next you’re worrying that he really might try to send troops after American citizens.

Yet the two trumps, the clown and the menace, are intimately tied together: The absurdity helps normalize his dangerousness….’ (via Vox)

 

In bizarre town hall episode, sways and bops for nearly 40 min instead of answering questions.

‘Is donald trump well enough to serve as president?

The question is not temperamental or philosophical fitness—he made clear long ago that the answer to both is no—but something more fundamental.

The election is in three weeks, and Pennsylvania is a must-win state for both trump and Kamala Harris, but during a rally last night in Montgomery County, northwest of Philadelphia, trump got bored with the event, billed as a “town hall,” and just played music for almost 40 minutes, scowling, smirking, and swaying onstage. trump is no stranger to surreal moments, yet this was one of the oddest of his political career….’ (David Graham via The Atlantic)

Related:

‘The scene comes as Vice President Kamala Harris has called trump, 78, unstable and called into question his mental acuity…’ ( Marianne LeVine via The Washington Post )

‘Go outside at sunset tonight and see a comet! C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan–ATLAS) has become visible in the early evening sky in northern locations to the unaided eye. To see the comet, look west through a sky with a low horizon. If the sky is clear and dark enough, you will not even need binoculars — the faint tail of the comet should be visible just above the horizon for about an hour….’

— via APOD

‘The New York Times reports that Bob Wordward’s new book War includes a few stories about donald trump being Putin’s stooge.

When the world, including the United States, was suffering a dire shortage of COVID-19 tests, trump was sending tests to his pal Putin for “personal use.” After leaving office, there are stories of donald rushing aides out of his way to take a private call with his good buddy, Vladimir. Campaign spokespeople do a terrible job denying the calls have happened or may be ongoing….’

— via Boing Boing

‘Parable of the Talents, a novel by Octavia E. Butler, published in 1998, portrays a dystopian United States under the control of Christian fundamentalists. The group, known as “Christian America,” is led by President Andrew Steele Jarret, whose slogan is “Make America Great Again.”…’

— via Boing Boing

‘There’s nothing like an antisemite speaking at an event denouncing antisemitism. Which is what donald trump did yesterday in Washington, D.C., where he warned the conservative Israeli-American Council that if he loses in November, “the Jewish people” will be to blame.

“I will put it to you very simply and gently: I really haven’t been treated right, but you haven’t been treated right because you’re putting yourself in great danger,” trump warned, before whipping out his trusty old dog whistle.

“If I don’t win this election…I’m not going to call this as a prediction, but in my opinion, the Jewish people would have a lot to do with a loss…”‘

— via Boing Boing

‘JD Vance’s repeated attacks on Haitian immigrants have fueled a common refrain from Democrats — that he and former president donald trump are “scapegoating” immigrants by trying to shift manufactured blame onto them for the real-world problems of Springfield, Ohio.

The Republican ticket is indeed scapegoating Haitian immigrants. But for Vance, especially, there is likely nothing accidental or impulsive about it. In his own writing, the GOP vice-presidential nominee has clearly conveyed the power — and possible dangers — of scapegoating, casting “efforts to shift blame and our own inadequacies onto a victim” as “a moral failing, projected violently upon someone else.”…’

— via POLITICO

‘donald trump briefly followed the first attempt on his life with calls for unity. This time he’s going straight to a far more brazen message: Democrats’ rhetoric put my life in danger….’

— via POLITICO

‘If the former president wins the East Coast trio of Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Georgia, he will go back to the White House….’

— via POLIICO

‘Students of all ages still haven’t made up the ground they lost during the pandemic….’

— via Vox

‘Thousands of beepers and two-way radios exploded in attacks against Hezbollah, but mainstream consumer devices like smartphones aren’t likely to be weaponized the same way….’

— via WIRED

‘The best times to view the event will depend on your location, but the lunar eclipse will peak at 10:44 p.m. ET, according to NASA. All of North and South America will have a chance to see the partial lunar eclipse and harvest supermoon depending on the weather. Europe and Africa will also have an opportunity to see the eclipse.

This lunar eclipse will be a partial one, with only the upper portion of the moon being plunged into the darkest part of the Earth’s shadow known as the umbra…’

— via NPR

‘Dead Internet Theory says that you’re the only human left online. It started out as a conspiratorial joke, but it is edging ever closer to reality…’ 

— via Prospect

‘In November of 2020, a freak wave came out of the blue, lifting a lonesome buoy off the coast of British Columbia 17.6 meters high (58 feet).

The four-story wall of water was finally confirmed in February 2022 as the most extreme rogue wave ever recorded at the time.

Such an exceptional event is thought to occur only once every 1,300 years. And unless the buoy had been taken for a ride, we might never have known it even happened….

“Proportionally, the Ucluelet wave is likely the most extreme rogue wave ever recorded,” explained physicist Johannes Gemmrich from the University of Victoria in 2022.

 

“Only a few rogue waves in high sea states have been observed directly, and nothing of this magnitude…

Unfortunately, a 2020 study predicted wave heights in the North Pacific are going to increase with climate change, which suggests the Ucluelet wave may not hold its record for as long as our current predictions suggest.”…’

 

— via ScienceAlert

‘The safeguards that kept trump in check during his first term have collapsed — starting with the MAGA-fication of the Republican Party. “We know from the first administration that trump was an amateur and lots of people stopped his most radical actions,” says Jason Stanley, a Yale professor and author of How Fascism Works. He underscores that trump’s darkest ambitions were present from the beginning — from the Muslim ban to the coup attempt of Jan. 6. “The only thing that stopped him from being a full-on dictator was other people,” Stanley says. “We know that that’s not going to happen anymore.”…’ (via Rolling Stone)

‘When asked by Fox News why trump felt moderators hadn’t given the same treatment to Harris, trump answered: “Because they’re dishonest.” Perhaps, instead, Harris didn’t have the gall to lie so flagrantly and frequently on the national stage….’

— via The New Republic

‘If donald trump wins in November and launches a full-blown authoritarian presidency next year—as he has promised to do in his own words—what exactly would that national nightmare look like?

One set of oft-floated worst-case scenarios looks something like this: trump orders his pliant pick for attorney general to prosecute Liz Cheney and other high-profile critics and frog-march them before the cameras. trump invokes the Insurrection Act to dispatch the military into cities to crush mass protests. trump unshackles deportation forces to drag millions of undocumented immigrants from homes and workplaces. trump purges our nation’s intelligence services, stocks them with loyal foot soldiers, and unleashes them as a domestic spying force to gather information on designated enemies of the MAGA movement.

It would be folly to dismiss these possibilities, since trump has repeatedly threatened to carry out something resembling every one of those things. He has vowed to prosecute his political opponents without cause. He has loudly called for the indictment of members of the congressional committee that investigated his January 6, 2021, insurrection attempt. He has mused aloud that he might send the military into Democratic-run cities. trump and his advisers have floated plans for mass migrant removals facilitated by huge detention complexes and even potentially carried out by the military. trump has repeatedly pledged to purge the supposedly corrupt “deep state”—his shorthand for federal law enforcement and intelligence services—and has openly suggested he would use state power to persecute domestic enemies he describes as “vermin.”

Yet as horrifying as all that is, another, less-garish scenario also potentially looms—and in some respects it might be a more plausible one. A second trump presidency could unleash a kind of lower-profile, slow-burn authoritarianism, something that unfolds much more quietly and largely behind the scenes. In its targeting of internal enemies and its efforts to carry out revolutionary changes via far-right governance, it could end up being much less dramatic, visible, or splashy—but at the same time, extremely insidious, difficult to track, and very challenging to mobilize against….’

— via The New Republic

‘The tiny asteroid will complete a wide orbit over the course of 53 days, but don’t get your hopes up about seeing it….’

— via Gizmodo

‘The city of Springfield, Ohio, is already witnessing the consequences of trump’s baseless conspiracy theory that Haitian immigrants are eating people’s pets….’

— via The New Republic

‘…[T]he reaction from Republican vice presidential hopeful JD Vance … stood out as especially amazing. This was the message the Ohio senator pushed on Fox News, just hours after the former president’s related rant:

We admire Taylor Swift’s music, but I don’t think most Americans, whether they like her music, are fans of hers or not, are going to be influenced by a billionaire celebrity who I think is fundamentally disconnected from the interests and the problems of most Americans.”
He added that the celebrity hasn’t been “hurt” by “grocery prices.”

0 seconds of 5 minutes, 49 secondsVolume 90%

Can Swifties shift the election? Taylor ‘absolutely’ moves the needle for young women
05:49
For now, let’s not dwell on the fact that grocery price inflation has already cooled significantly in recent months. Let’s instead consider the latest in a series of examples of Team Trump flunking tests of self-awareness.

Americans are unlikely to be influenced by a billionaire celebrity who is fundamentally disconnected from the interests and the problems of most Americans? Unless Trump is planning to drop out of the 2024 race, Vance’s running mate happens to be a billionaire celebrity who is fundamentally disconnected from the interests and the problems of most Americans.

Despite Harris’ challenge, Trump vows no more 2024 debates
In fact, it was of particular interest that the GOP senator referenced Swift and grocery prices, given that Trump has repeatedly made public comments suggesting he has no idea how grocery stores even work — including suggestions that he thinks consumers need to show identification to buy boxes of cereal….’

— via MSNBC

‘Earthquake scientists detected an unusual signal on monitoring stations used to detect seismic activity during September 2023. We saw it on sensors everywhere, from the Arctic to Antarctica.

We were baffled – the signal was unlike any previously recorded. Instead of the frequency-rich rumble typical of earthquakes, this was a monotonous hum, containing only a single vibration frequency. Even more puzzling was that the signal kept going for nine days.

Dickson Fjord is surrounded by steep mountains. Uwe Dedering / wiki, CC BY-SA
Initially classified as a “USO” – an unidentified seismic object – the source of the signal was eventually traced back to a massive landslide in Greenland’s remote Dickson Fjord. A staggering volume of rock and ice, enough to fill 10,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools, plunged into the fjord, triggering a 200-meter-high mega-tsunami and a phenomenon known as a seiche: a wave in the icy fjord that continued to slosh back and forth, some 10,000 times over nine days.

To put the tsunami in context, that 200-metre wave was double the height of the tower that houses Big Ben in London and many times higher than anything recorded after massive undersea earthquakes in Indonesia in 2004 (the Boxing Day tsunami) or Japan in 2011 (the tsunami which hit Fukushima nuclear plant). It was perhaps the tallest wave anywhere on Earth since 1980….’

— via The Conversation

‘…[H]undreds of millions of dollars wiped off the value of his media company as markets react to a dismal debate performance.

The company’s stock price was at its lowest intraday level since the Truth Social app owner began publicly trading as DJT on the Nasdaq in late March.

The stock price was down about 15% early Wednesday, hovering above $15, though it had risen to $16 and change by lunchtime. After its initial offering earlier this year, eager investors briefly drove the price up to nearly $70. While the stock market is hardly rational, the slump is a reminder that value of the company, little more than a money-losing Twitter clone, is predicated entirely on the prospect of its majority stakeholder returning to power in November….’

— via Boing Boing

‘Let me give you an example. Early on in the debate, the moderators tried to press Harris on President Joe Biden’s unpopular immigration record, asking her if she would have done anything differently from her current boss — a topic favorable for trump.

Harris answered the question — but then took a seemingly unrelated shot at trump’s rallies.

“I’m going to invite you to attend one of donald trump’s rallies because it’s a really interesting thing to watch. You will see during the course of his rallies he talks about fictional characters like Hannibal Lecter. He will talk about [how] windmills cause cancer. And what you will also notice is that people start leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom,” the vice president said.

This gave trump a choice; either prosecute Harris on immigration, an issue where she’s weak, or go on a rant in defense of his vaunted rallies. You can guess what he chose.

“Let me respond as to the rallies,” trump said. “She said people start leaving. People don’t go to her rallies. There’s no reason to go. And the people that do go, she’s busing them in and paying them to be there.”

That began a tailspin: a series of weird tangents, including a humiliating rant about the completely fake problem of Haitian migrants supposedly eating dogs in Springfield, Ohio, punctuated by immense concern about the honor of trump rallies. He never really got back to what he should have been doing — attacking Harris on migration across the southern border.

By needling trump where it hurts — the rallies he cares about so much — Harris managed to get him off balance, and he honestly never really recovered.

Harris deployed this strategy again and again.

During an exchange on crime, Harris brought up trump’s own criminal conviction — leading him to go on a diatribe about “political prosecutions” instead of effectively pushing Harris on her flip-flops on crime policy.

She brought up world leaders calling him a “disgrace,” pushing him into bragging about his relationship with Hungarian “strongman” (in trump’s words) Viktor Orbán, perhaps not a callout that the swing voters of Michigan, Wisconsin, or Pennsylvania were clamoring for. She needled his closeness with Russia’s Vladimir Putin, blasting “what you think is a friendship” with a “dictator who would eat you for lunch.”

Each time, trump took the bait — losing control of his temper and going off message, while Harris looked on with what must have been glee.

In hindsight, this strategy might seem innovative, but it speaks to something well-known about trump’s psychology….’

— via Vox

If ever it was said that politics makes strange bedfellows… (POLITICO)

‘Coverage of donald trump’s mental fitness for office is not just fair game. It’s necessary….’ (The New Republic

‘There is a reason why trump would rather whine than win: He’s preparing for the post-election Big Lie 2.0…’ (Salon.com)

(Reddit : r/pics)

‘As Kamala Harris visited New Hampshire on Wednesday, donald trump’s campaign in the state is almost nowhere to be seen….’ (POLITICO)

‘Kurt Steiner,… holds a Guinness World Record for “most skips of a skimming stone”—he skipped a rock a whopping 88 times at Red Bridge, near Kane, Pennsylvania, on September 6, 2013… I recently stumbled across a video posted by WIRED where Steiner explains the physics behind stone skipping, and it’s one of the most fascinating and informative things I’ve ever watched. WIRED describes the video:

Kurt Steiner is record holding champion stone skipper—and a master of the physics that underpin the sport. A labor of love that’s evolved into a world-class passion, see where Kurt harvests his preferred rocks, the qualities he seeks in them, and each factor he considers in order to throw like a pro.

In the video, Kurt discusses various aspects of the process of skipping a stone that he has to take into account—including the speed at which he’ll throw it, the spin he’ll give it, and the various angles he has to balance, including tilt angle, attack angle, and twist angle. He also talks about how he must be mindful of the direction of the wind, the water’s surface, and his footing. He also describes the “makings of a really good rock,” which include things like a flat surface and a little bit of a curved top edge that is a bit sharp but not too sharp (stone skipping is clearly both a science and an art). In the video, he demonstrates various rocks that are good choices and shows us some of his throwing techniques as he explains the physics of it all.

In addition to being a world-record-holding stone skipper, Steiner is also a pretty darn good philosopher, which is evident when he describes stone skipping as:

” . . . a simple thing [that], through a mastery, becomes a really visual, spiritual kind of art form. It’s a way of making joy out of nothing. And that’s can’t be valueless, right?”…’ (Boing Boing)

‘…Republicans need to hasten the move to a post-Trump party….’ (POLITICO)

‘The National Institutes for Health has abruptly ended its study of “Havana Syndrome” after it learned that the CIA forced people to participate in it. Though the agency isn’t named in the NIH’s announcement, CNN reports that “some of the people who reported being sick previously claimed that the CIA made them join the research as a prerequisite for getting health care.”

“They wanted us to be a lab rat for a week before we actually got treatment at Walter Reed — and at bare minimum, that is unethical and immoral,” Marc Polymeropoulos told CNN in May.

Polymeropoulos, a former CIA officer who says he has been sick, is an advocate for those struck by what the US government calls “anomalous health incidents.” He said in May that he believes that participation in this research was “ordered” by senior leadership at the CIA.

In March, the CIA issued a statement that denied that people were required to participate. The agency did not respond to CNN’s request for comment Friday.

Forced participation in a study is considered highly unethical and is extremely uncommon, ethicists say.

Havana Syndrome—a mysterious collection of ailments suffered by U.S. personnel serving at embassies abroad—is widely thought to be a somatic disorder. Hyped by credulous national security reporters as caused by electromagnetic weapons (or other tall tales from three-letter agencies), the whole saga is now so murky that to discuss it at all is to juggle conspiracy theories….’ (via Boing Boing)

‘A damning report reveals some staffers on donald trump’s campaign no longer think New Hampshire is winnable….’ (The New Republic)

‘There’s nothing remarkable about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s visit to Mongolia on Tuesday — he’s due to meet Mongolia’s leader, hold talks on developing bilateral ties and attend a gala reception.
What is unusual is that Mongolia, as a member of the International Criminal Court, should have arrested the Russian president as soon as he landed on Mongolian soil Monday evening.
Mongolia’s defiance of its obligations to the ICC are likely to have legal consequences….’ (CNBC)

‘Screen icon Mark Hamill called out donald trump for his “childish” habit of mispronouncing Vice President Kamala Harris’ first name, saying it conveys “disrespect & contempt.”
But rather than hope the former president comes around, the “Star Wars” actor suggested another approach.
“When they go low, we should respond in kind,” he wrote on X. “From now on, don’t call him ‘Don’. Call him ‘Done’.”…’ (HuffPost Latest News)

The Electoral College nitty-gritty

‘The margins in all these swing states are extremely tight. Still, as one scenario for how election night could play out, let’s assume that, as the averages currently suggest, Harris wins Wisconsin, Michigan and the other lean-blue states; Trump wins North Carolina and the lean-red states; and Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada are too close to call.

This would place Harris at 251 electoral votes — 19 away from the 270 she needs to win. And she’d have two paths to get over the threshold.

Path one would be to win Pennsylvania. Its 19 electoral college votes would be just exactly enough. (That’s why it’s the most important swing state.)

Path two would be to win Georgia plus either Arizona or Nevada. Winning only the combo of Arizona and Nevada would not be enough, as that would provide Harris with 17 electoral votes. She’d need Georgia too.

That’s why it matters that all of these states — Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada — look so close. Tiny shifts in them could well determine the outcome. And neither candidate looks to lead comfortably in enough of them so far….’ (Vox)

• trump suing over scathing “Apprentice” movie as 1st clip drops today
• trump says Project 2025 has “policies everyone would like”(but he hasn’t read it)
• Paranoid trump staffers call police thinking they are “bugged” by a plastic toy
• Plastic Clip of “childless cat lady” Taylor Swift sure to trigger JD Vance
• Cop-killing drug kingpin freed by trump jailed for choking wife
• Democrats question Trump about that illegal donation from Egypt

• House and Senate Republicans are starting to panic about a huge money gap with Democrats
• Harris campaign, DNC, announce unprecedented down-ballot spending
• Don’t Trust the Election Forecasts
• The map is wide open and the attack ads are coming in ‘snap election’ between Harris, Trump

‘”Who ever heard, you get indicted for interfering in a presidential election where you have every right to do it, you get indicted and your poll numbers go up? When people get indicted, their poll numbers go down,” ttrump said….’ (Raw Story)

‘Because of Republicans’ advantage in the Electoral College, a race that Harris leads nationally by between 2 and 4 percentage points, on average, is the equivalent of a knife fight in a phone booth, and it’s set to be decided in a smaller-than-usual number of states….’ (POLITICO)

‘donald trump shared his bizarre reason why people don’t want to eat bacon anymore. The former US president said wind power is stopping people from eating bacon after he delivered a campaign speech in Wisconsin on Thursday (29 August). trump gave his comments to a young rally-goer asking what his plan is, “to make life more affordable and bring down inflation for someone like me.” trump launched into what one critic denounced as a “word salad” and said: “You take a look at bacon and some of these products, and some people don’t eat bacon anymore.”…’ (Flipboard)

‘Back in 2022, the former president had told allies — as the Supreme Court was preparing to overturn Roe v. Wade — that the move would hurt his party. Since that year, when Republicans underperformed expectations in the midterm elections, Mr. trump has been privately emphatic with advisers that in his view the abortion issue alone could kill their chances of victory in November. And he is willing to make as many rhetorical and policy contortions as he deems necessary to win….’ (The New York Times)

‘NOAA Fisheries scientists attribute the abrupt collapse of snow crab in Alaska to borealization, or an ecological shift from Arctic to sub-Arctic conditions in the southeastern Bering Sea due to human-caused climate change.

Cold-adapted species like snow crab are well suited to Arctic conditions. However, when borealization occurs, the ecosystem shifts to subarctic conditions that are less conducive to snow crab survival. Instead, they favor warm-adapted species and temperature marine ecosystems.

“What is particularly noteworthy is these boreal conditions associated with the snow crab collapse are more than 200 times likely to occur in the present climate (1.0° –1.5° of warming rate) than in the preindustrial era,” said Mike Litzow, lead author and director of the Alaska Fisheries Science Center’s Kodiak Lab. “Even more concerning is that Arctic conditions conducive for snow crabs to retain their dominant role in the southeastern Bering Sea are expected to continue to decline in the future.”…’ (NOAA Fisheries)

‘Former Georgia Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan criticized his party for working “more like a cult” in his speech at the Democratic National Convention…. “[T]he Republican nominee’s actions disqualified him from ever, ever, ever stepping foot into the Oval Office again.” “If Republicans are being intellectually honest with ourselves, our party is not civil or conservative. It’s chaotic and crazy. And the only thing left to do is dump donald,” said Duncan, a CNN political commentator who has endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 race…’ (HuffPost Latest News)

‘After two days of policy-focused addresses with modest crowds, former President donald trump returned to form Wednesday with an outdoor speech in North Carolina, where he insisted that he would not give up personal attacks on Vice President Kamala Harris and continued to sow doubts about the integrity of the election in November.

Speaking to thousands of supporters outside a hangar at an aviation museum in Asheboro, North Carolina, trump ridiculed his advisers for pressuring him to focus on policy instead of on personal insults as he mocked President Joe Biden’s physical appearance. He called former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi “crazy,” labeled Harris both “stupid” and a “Marxist or a Communist” and said former President Barack Obama was “nasty.”

And as he promised to invest in America’s military, criticized the Biden administration’s foreign policy and vowed that only he could restore world peace, trump repeatedly revived his false claims of widespread election fraud in 2020 and spun them forward to November….’ (Seattle Times)

‘CNN’s Kaitlan Collins reports 2024 Republican presidential nominee donald trump and his campaign are irritated by the references to “Project 2025” during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago….’ (CNN Politics)

‘Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro spoke Wednesday at the third night of the Democratic National Convention with a speech focused on freedom. Gov. Shapiro also said donald trump ‘wants to take away our rights and freedoms.’ trump then attacked Shapiro on social media, referring to him as the ‘Jewish Governor’ of Pennsylvania. The Morning Joe panel reacts….’ (MSNBC)

‘donald trump insisted that Kamala Harris had a private chat with Vladimir Putin in 2022. That conversation never happened….’ (MSNBC)

‘A couple of aides told me, a little implausibly, that the former president is not tuning into the Democratic National Convention because he has no interest in watching a Democratic Party “infomercial”.

But one senior campaign official confirms, anonymously, that donald is watching and is irritated by the attacks against him.
In the view of one ally who speaks to the former president every week, trump wins in November if he sticks to talking about the economy, the border and crime.

At the start of this week, that looked possible. trump scheduled a string of rallies, in Pennsylvania, Michigan, North Carolina and Arizona – each was themed to focus on exactly those political and economic topics.
But with night after night of anti-trump speeches here in Chicago, staying on message has gone out the window. And it’s not what his supporters tell him they want anyway.

The North Carolina event on Wednesday was vintage trump – and it became a referendum on his own team’s strategy. “They always say, ‘Sir, please stick to policy, don’t get personal’… and yet [the Democrats are] getting personal all night long, these people. Do I still have to stick to policy?” trump asked.
Then he polled the crowd: more policy or go personal? His fans roared, they wanted the trump show, not a list of boring economic proposals. “My advisers are fired!” he joked. Then he said he’d stick to policy but couldn’t let the attacks go unanswered.

So the campaign strategy now seems to be at the whim of the candidate and the feedback of his crowds. That makes life difficult for his campaign advisers who repeatedly tell me their single biggest concern in this election campaign is whether they can keep trump focused on issues and off the controversial personal attacks….’ (BBC)

‘Referencing Rep. Jamie Raskin’s (D-MD) night one speech warning Vance “They tried to kill your predecessor,” Tapper asked Vance if that bit of attempted murder energy gives him any pause…’ (Mediaite)

J.D. Vance’s Latest Anti-Democrat Quip Blows Up in His Face: Brutally roasting his running mate without even realizing it.

‘Vance tried to brush off Raskin’s comments and accused the Maryland congressman of claiming victimhood.

“I just don’t understand a person in American politics in 2024 who’s whining about what happened to them instead of using their leadership and using their influence to make the lives of American citizens better,” Vance responded.

The remark, unchallenged by Tapper, quickly brought to mind the many times Trump has whined about his many grievances, from the criminal and civil charges against him to his baseless allegations of election fraud in 2020, among so many others….’ (The New Republic)

‘“For years, donald trump did everything in his power to try to make people fear us. See, his limited, narrow view of the world made him feel threatened by the existence of two hard-working, highly educated, successful people who happened to be Black… I want to know, who’s going to tell him, who’s going to tell him that the job he’s currently seeking might just be one of those ‘Black jobs?’”…’ (Poynter)

‘The Republican candidate for vice president seems unable to say anything that would encourage voters to consider his ticket….’ (Boing Boing)

‘Up from Conservatism advocates repeal of Civil Rights Act, investigations into ‘gay lifestyle’ and defunding childcare…’ (The Guardian))

‘The most important reason a second trump term would be far more dangerous than his first is that if he does win this year, trump will have triumphed with the electorate’s full knowledge that he has been criminally charged with 88 felonies and convicted of 34 of them (so far); that he has promised to “appoint a real special prosecutor to go after the most corrupt president in the history of the United States of America, Joe Biden, and the entire Biden crime family”; that he intends to “totally obliterate the deep state” by gutting civil service protections for the 50,000 most important jobs in the federal work force, a central tenet of what he calls his “retribution” agenda….’ (Thomas Edsall in The New York Times)

‘America’s leaders — from both parties — have long been guided by what’s often called the neoliberal consensus: the idea that “barrier-free international markets, rapidly advancing communications technology and automation, decreased regulation and empowered citizen-consumers would be the keys to prosperity, happiness and strong democracy,” as Mr. Murphy put it. More simply, it’s a shared assumption that what’s good for markets is good for society.

This assumption shapes our politics so deeply that it’s almost invisible. But the idea that modern life is a story of constant economic and technological progress steadily making the world a better place has stopped lining up with how Americans feel. You can look at statistics about suicide, depression, overdoses and declining life expectancy. You can point to the fact that roughly 70 percent of wild animals on Earth have disappeared since 1970 or examine the astonishingly pervasive sense of loneliness that now seems to color so many American lives. But no statistics really capture the feeling, shared by growing numbers of Americans, that the world is just getting worse….’ (James Pogue in The New York Times)

‘A week after falsely claiming Kamala Harris’ campaign used AI to inflate crowd sizes, trump is now posting AI-generated photos of Taylor Swift fans endorsing him….’ (WIRED)

‘The US Defense Department’s grand strategy for protecting Taiwan from a massive Chinese military offensive involves flooding the zone with thousands of drones….’ (WIRED)