I guess Biden should send out some surrogates, that are removed enough, that he can plausibly distance himself from them, to spread the message "Biden knew how to deal with CornPop (sp?), he'll know how to deal with looting protesters. If he is concilatory now, thats because it's tactically sensible not because he is a bleeding heart."

It's not 1968 any more. A significant majority of the electorate thinks the cops are in the wrong here. Playing to the folks who are left is a fools errand: they're not going to break with Trump because Biden weaseled about policing and race, while it will infuriate everyone else.

Public opinion has swung in favour of the protesters, extremely rapidly. A flood of images of cops shoving elderly white people to the ground, pepper spraying children, blinding bystanders, assaulting reporters, buzzing people with helicopters, and tear gassing a peaceful crowd for the sake of a presidential photo-op will do that. Police brutality, it's not just for black and brown people. If the police hadn't gone stormtrooper and suburban America mostly saw videos of looting, it might have gone the other way.

I see that Trump's approval rating has finally dropped. I mean it only took a pandemic, over a hundred thousand deaths, the biggest recession on a century, and his threatening to set the military on civilians. But his approval rating still isn't the lowest it's ever gone - that was back when he praised the Charlottesville neo-nazis.

I usually have my doubts, that large opinion swings are sustainable. I suppose there is a faction, that now is for police reform, that is generally happy with police brutalizing lower class people, but are upset that it also hits middle class people now.

I think it would be sensible to give them some rhetoric scraps, so they don't swing back before election day. Not anything policy wise (since AFAIK their policy ideas rest on theories on group psychology, that contradict state of the art science on that matter, and the means they promote will not achieve the ends they want anyway) and i don't think rhetoric aimed at them should not become an official stance. Hence my suggestions of a surrogate, you can distance yourself from.

Not that Facebook and Twitter need to be regulated or anything, but when someone on both sites copied Trump's accounts verbatim they were immediately flagged for inciting violence.

It seems the president in perfect health, who most certainly doesn't make unannounced visits to the hospital because he needs to or anything, can't drink a glass of water with one hand or walk down a short flight of stairs without trouble. Because things just aren't interesting enough.

Right now I see that the polling between Trump and Biden is statistically tied in the red states of Ohio, Iowa, Utah, Missouri, Arkansas, Georgia, and Texas; while Biden is ahead beyond the margin of error in enough of the normal swing states that he'd still win if he underperforms all his polls by four points (for comparison, Clinton underperformed hers by one). In fine, Trump's way behind and the trend is currently against him.

Against that background: Trump's advisors are telling him that he's winning. Indeed, they threw away half a million dollars to run his ads in the DC market (where they will be seen nowhere that he could possibly win) so that he could see them and feel better about things. They also hired a new pollster so bad the RNC blacklisted him (his previous client underperformed this fellow's internal polls by over 20% on election day), with the specific purpose of explaining away Trump's current numbers.

It's like watching the opening of the second act of Springtime for Hitler again, though with considerably less chance that the author will complain that Trump never called anyone 'baby'. Hopefully no one will try to blow up the theater this time, that would be bad.

IIRC, it wasn't even stairs, but a ramp complete with grip tape to avoid slippage. Both his right arm and leg seemingly not fully functioning really give creedance to the idea he has suffered a mini stroke.

Looks like it's Biden's election to lose, then. As long as he can sit tight and not do anything too stupid. I always said it would take a major economic crisis to damage Trump politically, and now it has finally happened. And just when I was starting to earn a non-microscopic amount of interest on my bank account, too. Well that was a fine eight months. (We're pegged to the US dollar.)


The peak probably isn't sustainable, but I think a lot of these people aren't going to easily unsee what they've just seen. The shift in favour of gay marriage also happened quite quickly (although nowhere near this suddenly) and has proved durable; once people met gay married people, they realized it wasn't a big deal. It has become increasingly difficult of late to argue that police brutality in the US is just because of a few bad apples. The cops provided the best argument against that by behaving terribly en masse, on camera.

Biden probably doesn't need to do much to reassure suburban white people that he isn't going to become some kind of starry-eyed radical on law enforcement reform precisely because of his tough-on-crime record. He can talk about reform without sounding scary to these folks in a way that someone like Bernie or AOC could not.

Specific policies can change, but more general principals endure. "Civilization rests on a Jenga-tower of sexual morals" did endure, the fight just moved from the gay marrige Jenga block, to the transgender Jenga block.

So i assume "Hoodlums need to be kept in check by threat of violence" is still there, even if some people, who hold that notion are at the moment more concerned about the police brutalizing people, who clearly are not hoodlums.

And it's a pattern that i often see, that after leftwingers conquer some hill, they assume their opposition has now seen the error of their ways with regards to general principles and are hit unprepared by a backslash, when rightwingers fight again on the next hill.

How well is Bidens tough on crime record known among the politically uninterested? My impression was that the Sanders crowd tried to taint him with it, but not a lot did seem to stick. Thus my idea that it might be a good idea to do some reminding. I base this on a lot of speculation though.

There will always be people who justify violence against people they see as Undeserving, but I think more people are starting to realize that wait, maybe it's a bad idea to let cops have all this military gear, or to give them legal immunity when they maim and kill people because they didn't kill or main them in a way previously determined to be illegal (1), or to have abusive cops fired from one job only to be hired by the next town over, or to have taxpayers foot the bill for excessive force lawsuits while the cops in question face no consequences, or to allow cops to seize people's property on a whim, or to fund towns by continually harassing poor people with fines. Even the conservatives who care more about small government than about being racist (albeit a sadly diminished group) now see this as an abuse of state power.

I think in a few months, some of these people will go back to justifying the use of unreasonable force against the next victim who isn't as obviously harmless as George Floyd or Martin Gugino (the old man who got shoved over by a cop and broke his skull), but at least some will remember that these policies also allow cops to tear gas little kids and assault Australian journalists with impunity.

(1) The legal doctrine of qualified immunity is bananas. If means that if you sue a cop for abusing you, you won't win unless you can find a previous case in which a someone else was abused in almost the exact same way as you, and won. So apparently courts have found that there is no established legal right not to be robbed by the cops, or to not have tear gas fired into your home, or not to be mauled by police dog after you have already surrendered. Because nobody had ever sued a cop for that specific thing before and won, so you can't expect a cop to know that's illegal. Tough luck.

American judges have a long history of being corrupt tools, and no one expects it to stop any time soon. Granted it's a bit harder to get away with things like Assumed Risk (if you work there, it's your fault if you get hurt or killed on the job) or upholding contracts that openly violate the 14th Amendment (the typical Hollywood contract for decades); but corporate personhood and qualified immunity will probably roll on for a while to make up for it. At least if the judges have anything to say about it.

Apparently now is the season of books. Bolton, much too late, tells us that Trump is apparently asking every foreign leader who will hold still long enough for reelection help. Which will pretty much provoke two reactions: shrugs of those who both believe it and see it as changing nothing; and lies from the folks who believe it but must pretend it couldn't have happened (who also see it as changing nothing). Though apparently the latter are getting a bit tired of being Trump's second class citizens; his latest approval numbers are down to the mid 30s.

From over here, I'm hoping that this news will FINALLY burst the bubble of those Hong Kong protesters who've been thinking of Trump as their saviour.

There's a subset of protesters who got on Twitter last year for the first time and started retweeting any foreign politician who jumped on the anti-China bandwagon. And thus got sucked into supporting US right-wingers, because those are the guys who are vocally anti-Communist. American left/right politics don't map onto Hong Kong's, but here because "Left" = CCP = bad, some protesters came to the conclusion that "Right" = Anti-CCP = good. Trump is right-wing, so Trump must be good. Some are doing this pragmatically - they know that Trump is a turd, but they need any foreign attention they can get. Others have drunk the koolaid.

So let it be known that Trump not only asked Xi to help him get re-elected, he verbally approved of the Xinjiang concentration camps.

Trump wants the US Attorney in charge of the Southern District of New York replaced with an utterly unqualified henchmen, with obvious felonious intent. So Barr announced that the current fellow has resigned and Trump appointed a replacement. The problem? The current fellow issued a press release saying he hasn't resigned. Even for Trump and his fellow morons this is badly done.