In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

Despite a brief detour into 2008 on Monday, I'm back to thinking the 1972 election is the closest parallel to what we see this year. The most visible Democrat problem then was the running mate, which is precisely what we see now, but the material cause of the problem was that McGovern was going to lose the election, and nobody, starting with Ted Kennedy, wanted to be the loser's running mate. So let's look at what happened to Kamala's field of choices to see if there are parallels to this year. This story at NBC News says With a looming deadline that Democrats concluded they had to meet to finalize their nominee, people close to Harris and outside allies began a few days before [Biden's] announcement to start thinking about what her campaign might look like and started batting around names of potential running mates at daily meetings. Almost immediately after Biden dropped out, her team concluded that it most likely had to be a middle-aged white man...

As of yesterday, the photo above appeared at the top of this story at The Hill, Biden, Harris head to Situation Room as Iran threatens attack on Israel , but by this morning, the photo has bern replaced with short video clips of other news, although the text of the story remains. I tend to believe it's authentic, because it's otherwise so phony. It's clearly intended to show that Joe and Kamala are on top of things, and it's got to be recent, because I can only surmise that Kamala's handlers are telling her to pose for pictures where she isn't cackling. They're belatedly waking up to the fact that she utterly lacks gravitas. In fact, I did a web search for images of "Kamala not laughing", and all I could find was pictures of Kamala laughing. In the other hand, a web search for images of "Kamala serious" brought up mostly images of Kamala suppressing a cackle. Joe in the photo above, on the other hand, is squinting with sort of...

Last Thursday, I asked what could possibly go wrong for Kamala as a candidate, especially over the course of 100 days. I was thinking about this especially in the context I brought up Saturday , I don't think it's out of line at all to envision a world crisis coming up in the next months with Joe literally incompetent to deal with it, a White House staff in disarray, and a collection of amateurs and bunglers on the Harris staff and campaign incapable of maintaining a cohesive and consistent response, domestically or diplomatically. This is where Murphy's Law is definitely going to kick in. This morning, according to the Wall Street Journal , A stock-market selloff intensified around the world, sending U.S. indexes sliding and volatility spiking to its highest levels since the Covid-19 pandemic. In early trading, the Nasdaq Composite tumbled more than 4%. The S&P 500 fell more than 3% and the Dow was around 2.6% lower. Turbulence started in Japan, with the ...

From the first time I saw a photo of Second Dude Doug Emhoff, I thought there weas something cheesy about the guy. Yesterday the UK Daily Mail confirmed my surmise : Kamala Harris’s husband’s first marriage ended after he got his children’s nanny pregnant, DailyMail.com can exclusively reveal. Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff cheated on his first wife Kerstin with the blonde nanny, who also taught at their children’s pricey private school. OK, we're dealing with R-rated materai here that will never get a full explication in polite opinion, but one of my chief interests is Trump's ability to exploit subliminal messages, and boy, is this a subliminal message. Let's start with the question I had before any of the nanny business broke: there's nothing special about Emhoff, especially in the sex appeal department. Among his peers, former Hollywood lawyers around 60 years old, is Kevin Morris, at least in photos a much sexier guy who unlike the Second Dude has manage...

Getting past the simple definition of Murpnhy's Law, "anything that can go wrong, will go wrong", it's worth going into what's thought to be the origin of the name : The law's name supposedly stems from an attempt to use new measurement devices developed by Edward A. Murphy, a United States Air Force (USAF) captain and aeronautical engineer. The phrase was coined in an adverse reaction to something Murphy said when his devices failed to perform and was eventually cast into its present form prior to a press conference some months later[.] . . . [During an initial test,] it became apparent that they had been installed incorrectly, with some sensors wired backwards. .. . Murphy blamed the failure on his assistant after the failed test, saying, "If that guy has any way of making a mistake, he will." The phrase first received public attention during a press conference in which [project head John] Stapp was asked how it was that nobody had been sev...

Just yesterday, of all things, Nate Silver announced that the race is a toss-up . Now that the election is in kamala_mode, however, it’s far from clear whose position you’d rather be in, and I wouldn’t blame you if you wanted to bet either on Harris or on Trump. At FiveThirtyEight, we actually had a formal definition of a “toss-up”, which is an election where each candidate had at least a 40 percent chance of winning. We’re now quite comfortably into that territory. As of this afternoon’s model run, Harris’s odds had improved to 44.6 percent, as compared to 54.9 percent for Trump and a 0.5 percent chance of an Electoral College deadlock. This, of course, is based on a model, and I would suggest that putting the percentages down to a decimal point is at best misleading. The problem is that, as this memo from a pollster to the Trump campaign points out , the fundamentals of the race haven't changed. The Democrats deposing one Nominee for another does NOT change voters discon...

Two pieces in two days at Real Clear Politics say Kamala has the benefit of a "short" presidential campaign. Yesterday, Sean Trende concluded : In short, we can’t think of this campaign as a traditional campaign. It’s a sprint, and a shorter sprint than people acknowledge. This morning, Karl Rove echoed : This presidential election was one of America’s longest: . . . But with Mr. Biden’s withdrawal and replacement by Vice President Kamala Harris, it suddenly became one of the shortest. Regular visitors know that my estimate of both Karl Rove and Sean Trende isn't high, but here I think they've about pegged out on the obtuseness meter. The traditional start of the presidential campaign season is Labor Day, but even if we put the start farther back at the summer nominating conventions, which is when we learn for sure who the actual nominees will be, I don't see how this year's schedule differs much from any other. In fact, it's very similar to 1...