Trump is too lazy & undisciplined to actually prepare for the debates & his flacks are trying to cover for him & it is hilarious. cbsnews.com/news/biden-tru…
"The president prepares by being president" will be the epitaph of the Trump administration.
Reminder: Clinton crushed Trump in the debates by any conceivable metric and it didn't matter a whit. These upcoming debates won't matter either. The election's down to a handful of undecided voters who don't watch debates or read the news or know anything at all.
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Y'all, I just got back from a car dealership. Holy shit. I thought, "maybe my stereotypes are outdated, maybe it's not so bad any more."
It's ... so much worse. I couldn't believe it. I have to rant a bit.
We're thinking about leasing a RAV4 Prime -- the PHEV. We thought we should at least test drive one. Dealer didn't have a Prime, but they had a normal hybrid, fine. But of course, after the test drive, they drag us inside to talk about leasing.
I'm not exaggerating when I say that the guy we were forced to talk to knew *nothing*. "What's the difference between the trims?" "I don't know, let me go check." (He's gone for 10 minutes, during which time we look up the difference in trims online and read all about them.)
I spent considerable time trying to get through to McKay about what an extraordinary achievement IRA is in light of the constraints Dems faced. In the moment, I managed to get to some begrudging acknowledgment. See the pod: volts.wtf/p/talking-thro…
Ultimately, though, McKay--like many, many others--is more invested in maintaining his carefully constructed political identity than he is in adjusting to new information. He's a Radical calling out The System. That's the role he's going to act out no matter the circumstances.
It's disappointing, but it's disappointing in exactly the way that virtually every public commentator has been disappointing in our era: they stick with their identities, their narratives, no matter what happens in the actual world. (And of course social media helps them.)
Friends, let me tell you a story about the @seattlePD. 🧵
Our story begins in Tuscon, AZ, in the early 2010s. A young man named Kevin Dave is recruited into the Tuscon police. He does not do well. Several complaints are filed, including one involving a "preventable collision."
Dave was the subject of six separate investigations during his short stint with the Tuscon police -- firearm violations, avoidable collisions, and just general conduct unbecoming an officer.
This failure to meet basic standards led the Tuscon police to fire Dave. Eight months later, Dave was driving drunk, fled the police, & abandoned his pickup in an alley. When officers took him in he was belligerent & shouting that it was the police's fault for firing him.
Said it before, will say it again: in the current political/media climate, *any* Dem presidential candidate would face a fusillade of shit & quickly come to be seen among VSPs as "flawed." It is structural.
People want to think Her Emails was some unique Clinton flaw and His Age is some unique Biden flaw, but I promise you the combination of the RW shit machine & an artificially "balanced" MSM would find *something* to pin on anyone in that position.
I'll add (might as well make a wreck of my mentions): one of the dumbest pretenses re: 2016 is that the same thing wouldn't also have happened to Sanders. I promise you it would have. He would have been "uniquely flawed" before you could finish your first M4A tweet.
Think about everything this snapshot captures: Big Oil shilling for Trump, Big Oil being corrupt AF, high oil prices being about *greed* rather than any Biden policy, the need for a clean energy future, etc.
In short, an episode that seems tailor-made to advance D narratives.
The right, of course, immediately leapt to the scumbag's defense, working to establish its own narrative -- to overwrite the natural, instinctive response that any decent human being would have to this.
I just said this to Chris Hayes for an upcoming pod and I think it's so important for people to understand: you can make a bulletproof case for the clean-energy transition that *doesn't mention climate change at all*.
National security. Economic competitiveness. Productivity. Lower air pollution. Less inflation. Less macroeconomic volatility. Any one of these is sufficient. But if you really want to get wild ...
... clean energy opens up the prospect of genuine, enduring energy abundance, which is something the human species has never experienced & would represent the greatest leap forward for collective human welfare since ... ever.