In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

I was thinking about another puzzle when I got up this morning: why do "the polls" say most people thought Kamala "won" the "debate", when the more respectable polls say Trump is inching ahead in electoral preference? The title of this post came to me in the shower: debate team is what the nerds do to get into Harvard. Look at Nate Silver's Wikipedia entr y, for instance: As a student at East Lansing High School, Silver won first place in the state of Michigan in the 49th annual John S. Knight Scholarship Contest for senior high school debaters in 1996. Silver actually went to Chicago; same differece. But this reminds me of a presentation on cognitive dissonance I heard from psychology profs as an Ivy sophomore myself: looking back, it was remarkably cynical. Their point was that experiments had shown that the more unplesant an experience was -- like, just for instance, hazing -- the more respondents were inclined to rate it as valuable. The ex...

Via the Mew York Post, The internet is lapping up a catchy new parody song poking fun at former President Donald Trump’s “they’re eating the cats” debate comment — with the music video raking in hundreds of thousands of views Friday. . . . A video of the tune had raked in more than 267,000 views on X Friday — with fans howling with laughter and calling it the purr-fect fall “banger.” It’s “too too, too good,” one listener gushed, while another called it “brilliant.” So all of a sudden, a 78-year-old teetotaling Republican becomes a Gen Z icon. Love him or hate him, they love him. But let's check in with Sean Trende of Real Clear Politics , who as I've been saying all along has brain waves amazingly well tuned to the conventional wisdom, as he acknowledges here: Let’s start out by stating that the emerging conventional wisdom surrounding Tuesday’s presidential debate is probably correct. The night started out promisingly enough for former President Donald Trump. He ...

I ended yesterday's post with a puzzle. According to the links, the Springfield, OH city elders somehow made a policy decision to encourage Haitian immigrants to move into town, because the local proletariat was unreliable, ungrateful, and unsuited to the low-pay jobs the employers had to offer. Bringing in a replacement working class was thought to be a win-win, the employers would get docile, grateful, and hard-working new employees, while the town would prosper. The links yesterday weren't completely clear on whether the Haitians were legal or illegal, but this story in the UK Daily Mail says , Springfield experienced a wave of legal Haitian migration in 2020 in a bid to revitalize the struggling local economy. Willing to do the blue-collar jobs locals were unenthusiastic about, the Haitians, who were already in the country legally, moved to the town. Within a few years, 20,000 immigrants arrived, swelling Springfield's population, which was only 58,000 in 20...

One of Trump's most controversial claims in Tuesday night's debate was that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, OH were eating local people's pets : "They're eating the dogs, the people that came in, they're eating the cats," Trump said during an answer to a question about immigration. "They're eating the pets of the people that live there, and this is what's happening in our country, and it's a shame." . . . David Muir, the ABC News anchor co-moderating the debate, immediately fact-checked Trump's claims, saying that the city manager in Springfield, Ohio, told the network there had been no credible reports of pets being harmed, injured or abused by people in the city's immigrant community. PolitiFact chimed in: But are the social media claims true about the immigrants eating their neighbors’ pets and dining on local waterfowl? City spokesperson Karen Graves, in a statement to PolitiFact, said no. "In response to...

ABC News tries to fact-check Donald Trump on Springfield, Ohio. Kamala Harris' reaction to this exchange might be her most cringe moment yet. pic.twitter.com/mhjaeqw8Bs — Townhall.com (@townhallcom) September 11, 2024 The consensus take on last night's debate was something like this : Trump wasn't at his best, but it wasn't all his fault. Two things were all on him, however: his preparation — or lack thereof — and the fact that he walked into the lion's den of bias in the first place. Kamala Harris didn't provide much real competition for Trump last night. The bar was low for her — all she had to do was show up and not be Joe Biden. Mission accomplished. She spent the evening doing little more than regurgitating DNC talking points from New York Times and WaPo editorials from the last few years. It was remarkably brain-dead, but it was all she needed. I keep making the point here that subliminal messaging is far more important than whether you can make t...

At the end of yesterday's post, I speculated idly about the lizard people possibly replacing Nancy Pelosi -- I don't think she gives the ultimate orders any more than Barack Obama, and certainly nobody believes that about either Joe or Kamala. A few hours later, I saw that this isn't just a vain fancy . In an appearance on The View recounted by Ed Morrissey, Pelosi attempts to claim that the Bidens got her all wrong two months ago. Pelosi didn't want Biden to withdraw at all, she now claims. She only wanted Biden to revamp his campaign after his disastrous debate performance . . .as though his campaign looked like it suffered from middle-stage dementia on June 27. He cites a tweet by Jacqui Heinrich: Pelosi on The View denies she wanted Biden to drop out, but says his campaign needed to change. PELOSI: "My point was we need a better campaign, as I said, a decision to win. I didn't see us on a path to victory. So it wasn't about him not running. It...

We've had a couple of articles on Kamala's debate prep. What strikes me is that they really don't seem to differ from what we learned about Joe's debate prep before June 27. For instance, Vice President Kamala Harris is holed up for five days in a Pittsburgh hotel, doing highly choreographed debate practice sessions before Tuesday night’s clash. There’s a stage and replica TV lighting and an adviser in full Lee Strasberg method-acting mode, not just playing Donald Trump but inhabiting him, wearing a boxy suit and a long tie. In addition, On Saturday, Fox News reporter Bryan Llenas revealed the extreme lengths Harris’s team is going to ahead of the debate. “We know that Vice President Kamala Harris is in her hotel in Pittsburgh. They’ve got the lights as if it’s in a studio. They’ve got the stage. They’ve even brought in somebody who’s dressed and acting like the former President,” Llenas told GOP strategist Pete Seat. This debate prep strategy mirrors...