FairAndUNbalanced.com

 

From Iron Knee at Political Irony:

The question everyone is asking is whether Trump will be able to steal the election. Perhaps Trump will fail, whether that is because of his (and his campaign’s) incompetence, or just because Joe Biden will win in a landslide (I hope, I hope!) that will make a theft too difficult to pull off.

I want to present another alternative ending to this that I have not seen anyone discuss, and which I think might be the most likely. I think Trump will lose, but he is setting himself up so that he can spend the next four years questioning the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s presidency (the same way he did against Obama, questioning his birth certificate, etc.) and giving himself a soapbox where he can get the attention he so craves, along with a source of income, and a large number of followers who will probably turn violent.

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From Jonathan Bernstein:

More than half the country opposes the president. His boorish behavior has done little to win them over.

I’m baffled by the argument that Joe Biden should boycott the remaining debates. We’re within five weeks of Election Day, with millions of people voting. Unless there are extraordinary reasons to do otherwise, Biden should focus on winning, and winning by as much as he can. It’s still too early to say much about the effects of the first debate, but Biden won the instant polls. Democrats were bragging about fundraising while Republicans were quiet about it. Pundits generally took President Donald Trump to task for his unpresidential behavior. And a subsequent set of headlines focused on Republican politicians running away from their nominee. Trump’s most sustained attack on Biden has been that he’s no longer up to the job; refusing to debate would be the one thing that would make that attack seem plausible — and generate significant negative press for Biden.

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From The Propaganda Professor:

Twitter’s shortcomings seem built into its very format. It was originally a platform that limited entries to 140 characters. That’s a constraint that encourages haiku conciseness rather than epic rambling; consequently, it’s pretty hard to develop a discussion in any depth (though not impossible — more about that below). Its best use is for posting pithy, punchline-like observations. And some people have done this quite well. There was even a book published called Twitter Wit, which offered a collection of some memorable gems like the following:

I attribute most of my good days to a couple of people with voodoo dolls cancelling each other out.

You know, most of the Harry Potter book plots would be over in 3 chapters if they had a decent search engine.

I’d love to see a fight between William Of Ockham and Rube Goldberg

Wit, n.: the delicate art of subtly steering a conversation in the direction of the hilarious pun you came up with three weeks ago

When people pick their ‘5 people living or dead to have dinner with’, don’t they worry they’ll be the most boring person at the meal?

Business slow at Heritage Foundation’s AynRandLand, where you build and operate your own damn ride, or there is no ride.

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From Vincent at A Wayfarer’s Notes:

Where We Stand

In the last few years, we were offered two referendums. The Scots were invited to vote for independence from the UK. The whole UK were invited to vote for independence from the European Union. In each case, politics being what it is, they were offered a choice of which falsehoods to plump for. No thought was apparently given to huge constitutional issues. The voters were certainly not told what these were. Even the politicians hadn’t thought them through. Four years later they still haven’t been resolved, because no solution has been found, nor ever will, that isn’t damaging.

Needless to say, I have no remedy to suggest, only a humble opinion, that in our system here, the unelected House of Lords, supported by the unelected Civil Service, under the unelected monarch, can supply enough expertise, wisdom and impartiality to keep the country running in our global emergency.

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From author John Scalzi at Whatever:

A White Supremacist, For White Supremacists,
Counting on White Supremacists

Last night, after catching up with a debate that it turns out I was 100% correct not to watch live, and thus still have a TV that’s functional because I didn’t throw something heavy at it, I wrote this on Twitter:

Now it’s the next morning and it still looks like that was the accurate takeaway from the debate. If there was still somehow any doubt in anyone’s mind that Trump is in the tank for white supremacy, because white supremacy is in the tank for him, last night’s “debate” should have taken away that fig leaf. Not only could Trump not bring himself to disavow white supremacists longer than a sentence or two, he doubled down on them and effectively told them to wait for his signal. Certainly the white supremacists have taken it that way: “Proud Boys” and neo-nazis are openly saying they’re waiting for his further orders. He signaled to them that they were his personal paramilitary shock troops, and they have responded: Yes. Yes they are.

Let’s be clear about this: A sitting president of the United States has openly and actively claimed control of a legion of white supremacist domestic terrorists, and that legion of white supremacist domestic terrorists has openly and actively told him they’re his to command. You can’t pretend it didn’t happen — the white supremacists certainly aren’t pretending that. They heard him loud and clear. This wasn’t a dog whistle. “Stand back and stand by” is an explicit admission of control and a passing of orders.

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From the New York Post:

“Cheering you all on from this side of the border! You got this!” one Twitter user wrote.

Other Canadians were less supportive.

“Sorry, we’ve built a wall on our southern border,” another joked.

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Trump urges Proud Boys and other white militia groups to stand back but stand by…

… because, I’ll tell you what, somebody has to do something about the left.

 

From Earth-Bound Misfit:

What he does is come into a large sum of money, whether by inheritance or from self-promotion and, from that, he relentlessly enters into business deals where he is taken to the cleaners.

There is a lot of detail in the second story in the Times today, how Trump used his stardom from The Apprentice to enter into one shady marketing deal after another, including one company whose business model is little different from a pyramid scheme. He took the money that he made from that and bought a series of golf courses, which have been losing money hand over fist.

That has put Trump into serious financial trouble…

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From Sarah Cooper:

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Listening to the designated moderator try so hard to … well … moderate:
Here’s a thought.

Rather than a continuous pleading with the President to abide by the rules he had agreed to follow…

How about simply controlling the mic?
Only turn on the microphone of each candidate when it’s that candidate’s turn to speak.