This cartoon brought me up short.
(WuMo)
My practice has been to take spaghetti out of the box and break the strands into four smaller pieces before cooking it. That way I don’t have to go through what (to me) is the tedious business of winding long strands of spaghetti on the fork when eating. But maybe for some, that is the appeal of spaghetti.
For the benefit of those who started coming to this blog in the previous month, I will be posting my policy on comments (that was updated here) at the beginning of every month.
I thought that weird JD Vance did better than I expected, even if almost his entire shtick consisted of three things: taking about himself and his family, blaming every possible problem on immigrants, and saying that we need to produce more energy.
Tim Walz is clearly not a good debater in that he sometimes spoke too fast and mixed up his words. He was at his best when he got passionate about a topic that he clearly cared about, such as child care, housing, health care, and reproductive rights.
All in all, it was a more even-tempered debate than the Harris-creepy Trump one.
There was no clear winner or loser.
It starts at 9:00pm Eastern time.
It will feature a contrast between the affable geniality of Tim Walz and the smiling-but-not-really-pleased look of weird JD Vance.
I will be watching it and hope that Walz immediately attacks weird JD Vance by listing all the outrageous things he has said in the past, and thus keeps him on the back foot throughout the evening, trying to defend the indefensible.
Some of the extremists in the anti-abortion movement in the US seeks as their goal the complete abolition of all abortions with no exceptions. They are also seeking to make medical abortions even harder by placing abortion pills under the list of controlled substances, making them much harder to obtain. But the end goal is not just the elimination of abortion. They are seeking much broader rollbacks on all manner of freedoms that have been gained in the last half-century.
In his concurring opinion in the 2022 case Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that overthrew Roe v.Wade, Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas said that he wants the Supreme Court to revisit its other landmark decisions such as the right to use contraception (Griswold v. Connecticut 1965), the right to engage in homosexual acts (Lawrence v. Texas 2003), and same-sex marriage (Obergefell v. Hodges 2015). This is perfectly in line with what religious fundamentalists and evangelicals seem to really want, which is the prohibition of all sexual activity except between men and women within a marriage, and that too just for the purpose of procreation.
[Read more…]
To put the current fight within the family of Rupert Murdoch for control of the Murdoch media empire in context, one needs to understand the changing political media landscape in the past three decades.
When the cable news channel Fox News started in 1996, it barely made a blip in the public consciousness. It was designed to be right wing and its founding CEO Roger Ailes was unapologetically so. But initially most people, and even journalists in major media like ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN and the print news were not even aware of its existence or confused it with the Fox TV broadcast network. That changed in 2000 when in the highly close presidential election, Fox News made an early and controversial call giving Florida to George W. Bush and that proved to be a significant factor in determining the final outcome.
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Fox News has been a pernicious influence in US public life. It has promoted extreme right wing policies, cultivated hatred of immigrants, indulged racists, targeted minorities, and in general been on the wrong side of almost every major social issue.
Rupert Murdoch, the founder of Fox News and owner of other major media outlets such as the Wall Street Journal and the UK-based Times and Sun, has been challenged by three of his children who are fighting to prevent him from changing the terms of the irrevocable trust (worth $1.49 billion) he created to take over his empire when he dies. The closed hearing before a probate judge began on September 16 in Reno, Nevada. We will likely not know what is going on until either a settlement is reached that everyone agrees to, or the case goes to court because one or the other side appeals the probate judge’s decision.
In a nutshell, Murdoch has six children by his first three wives. According to this report, “The trust was formed at the time of the 1999 divorce of Rupert from his second wife, Anna Murdoch Mann, the mother of James, Lachlan and Elisabeth. She wanted to ensure her children had a future ownership stake in the Murdoch empire. The trust was “irrevocable,” meaning it would be difficult to alter.”
Under the terms of the trust, Murdoch’s four eldest children (from his first two wives) would end up sharing equally the 40% voting power over the father’s empire. But while the eldest son Lachlan shares his father’s political views, the other three Prudence (from his first wife), Elisabeth, and James have gone in a different direction. In fact, James has endorsed Kamala Harris. That may be why the patriarch wanted to change the terms of the trust so that Lachlan would inherit all the controlling power of 40%.
[Read more…]
Women’s basketball has gained a lot of popularity in the last few years, though the players in the WNBA do not make anywhere near the amount of money that male players in the NBA do. It is disturbing that racism is raising its ugly head in the game as so-called fans yell racist abuse at players.
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In an earlier post, I said that at this stage of the campaign, each side had to decide whether they want to ‘go wide’ (i.e., attempt to win states that are historically tilted against them and, within each state, seek to broaden their appeal beyond their own base so that the opponent’s lead among their base is reduced)) or ‘go deep’ (focus on just the states that you have a good chance of winning and also try to run up the score with their own base and hope that that will be enough to overcome the opponent’s vote). It is hard to do both due to limited resources. A campaign that feels confident and on offense tends to go wide while one that feels defensive tends to go deep. At least as far as the state of North Carolina is concerned, the Harris-Walz campaign seems to be going wide.
Democrats last won North Carolina in 2008 with Barack Obama and it has been seen as a tough state to win. But Harris-Walz seem to be making a push there, and even going wide within the state. They are not just campaigning in the urban centers but also going into rural areas, hoping to make inroads with voters who tend to vote Republican by having campaign workers make personal appeals to win them over. Most of the time, the workers strike out, but occasionally they get a ‘win’, a voter who seems persuadable or who even says they will vote for Harris.
[Read more…]
