He remains in the ballot, but —

In April, after becoming the Natural Law Party’s nominee in Michigan, Kennedy held a fundraiser in Royal Oak with several comedians at the Royal Oak Music Theatre.

Doug Dern, chairman of the Natural Law Party of Michigan, said Friday he was “feeling used and taken advantage of” by Kennedy.

“He pretended to support third-party politics then goes running back to the two-party system,” Dern told The Detroit News.

The Natural Law Party doings populated by big, or even minor, name comedians? Does this party have its cadre of celebrity activists?

The funny thing is that Kennedy is still probably the best vote better for this ballot line. He cannot be removed at this late juncture. I kind of an curious what would have happened had it been done — would the keepers of this ballot line, apparently two people with an eccentric public stance of getting the line to someone in need shut out of the process — have been allowed to find the replacement?

I have no idea why I ever should have ever formulated an opinion on Michele Obama. I guess during the Obama presidency she took to some “healthy foods in school lunch” initiative, which you can deliberate some problems and issues on if you want. How to keep the garbage can from just being a healing mass of broccoli, and how to squelch the whining kids demanding their form dogs. Other than that, their may have been an inver-satuation of forced politeness in some initiative she brought to some educational initiative. But as an apolitical figure — I do not know how you were ever supposed to answer a poll question on favorability ratings. I am told she had the highest ratings, the most popular public figure anywhere. I do not know what that means, but good for her — I guess. I also hear she knocked it out of the park with her speech. I have not watched it, and I assume she did. Though maybe I won’t like it. I mean, I am apparently the only person anywhere who liked Bill Clinton’s speech. Maybe I will be the only person anywhere who does not like Michele Obama’s?

In 2000 a polling question was invented. It has probably had a pernicious effect on our politics. “Which candidate would you rather have a beer with?”. As an intellectual exercise, I go over the list since 2000 and expand each year to include the vice presidential candidates, as fairly frequently these candidates are picked out to balance a ticket with the “have a beer with” choice — such is the case with the Democrats this year. I see 5 Republicans and 2 Democrats here. And I guess I would be obliged to just lie to a pollster lest the answer come back to the candidates and mean something, and result in the hamming up of folksiness. And. I am of course going to be too cute by half. I am having a beer with Mitt Romney, just to send him on his way to Mormon Hell. And the question is supposed to get at some “likability” question, but that is not necessarily what I am going for in having one beer drinking meeting. To be sure, the “beer drinking partner” pick that is this year’s Democratic running mate is someone who is really wearing thin on me. I watch him up the convention — he does a pep rally. Screw this! I fled those regular high school fixtures as soon as I had the chance. Are we going to be subjected to four more years of this crap? Do it is, JD Vance. I do have the sense that if he stumbled out of electoral politics he might have another book in him that is not just careful political positioning. Maybe? No one else here does — Obama, for instance wrote one book in the nineties and then after his Senate victory it is all turgid campaign props and maybe book signing bair. Even Vance’s inflammatory statements suggest a wide ranging bullshitting that is moderately interesting for a spell. More to the point, the dude is flailing right now, and isn’t that the whole “beer sharing” thing — commiserate or something? What does this mean electorally? Jack and squat. Unless I watch a few more things from Tim Walz and decide — screw it! Jill Stein. Though. Do I want to have a beer with her? Maybe I do, actually — identify all the people she is sitting with in Russia.

Trying to figure out a creative or productive or amusing way of watching The DNC convention, I pluck over to Newsmax for their hard hitting analysis. I cannot help but think they may be one up against Fox News for dropping out of, say, the Kamala Harris speech in order to make any of any violence emanating out of the three digits of protesters outside the convention hall. Surely someone here is throwing a bottle?

I await the Free Palestine for LGBTQ+ People solidarity speakers out in Gaza.

The horseshoe theory, of sorts, comes in that these protests also figure more highly in Any Goodman and Democracy Now’s coverage of the convention. Though, they are less likely to call them “pro Gaza”, ascribe a mythical double application of “antifa” demonstrators, and any violence will be placed back over to the police.

The ads for the Newsmax coverage of the AND are illuminating.

And imaging gets a bit weird.

Yeah, they all stand right with your messaging. It ends on Reagan, which raises some odd questions in relation to the recent Trump total focus RNC Convention, the one with no history to it prior to 2016, all living presidents, vice predidents, and nominees dropped out of circulation. Maybe Sarah Palin wanders around somewhere?

Consider too the playlist of JD Vance at a campaign stop in Georgia.

Between the bunch of opening speakers — hitting hard on immigration — and Vance in what is… A parking lot in front of a police station? Correctional building of some sort?

… The stereo played this list of songs.

Metallica “Enter Sandman”. Beach Boys “Surfing USA”. Elton John “Yellow Brick Road”. Kid Rock “American Badass”. Mearle Haggard “Rebuild America First”.

Hitting isolationist sentiment, the song suggests an America that … Terminal decline

Why don’t we liberate these United States, We’re the ones that need it worst?, Let the rest of the world help us for a change, And let’s rebuild America first.

I gather it fits into the Republican anti-NATO message if you also ignore a Democratic Party snortle on “what’s this ‘infrastructure week’?”. We do see the great jump away from the previous Republican presidents.

Yeah, the men in position are backin’ away, Freedom is stuck in reverse, Let’s get out of Iraq an’ get back on the track, And let’s rebuild America first

Accompanying images just after these lines on the music video.

RINOs one and all.

Pondering how much of what to “defend” within the mass of JD Vance material. The Democrats have it trickling out, toss it into the ether at sporadic moments to prolong the political agony, knowing we don’t really need Iranian hacking of Republican research and media leaks to get at this stuff. The new item — Vance sliding right past the “purpose of post-menopausal women” — is a sentiment of armchair biology whose basic terms I have heard more from women than men — obliged to sit it all out. I suppose this may mean that Vance would have been better off in some trad-woman’s podcast on this sphere of thought than an obnoxious bro — but I gather the fallout would be about the same.

Roadkill has become another issue in this political campaign. Not quite at the point that cannibalism had and has been in the campaign — Biden’s random cannibalism anecdote no longer anything to mull over given he has left the campaign which has left Trump alone with his stump speech reference to a fictitious cannibal, he now has cannibals all to himself. Roadkill was on my mind because of a comment made by a Democratic congressman to the biggest and most immediate Republican congressman who said Harris was a DEI hire — “this from a person who supported legalizing keeping roadkill”. I am stuck on the question of how to approach when you respond to one but if nonsense from a political opponents by reference a sane point of disagreement s/he has with them as though it is of the same type of nonsense. I would not exactly trust someone who campaigns on roadkill as a central platform issue, but it is a matter that needs to be adjudicated and I have no interest in prosecuting everyone, hailing tgem, and throwing away the keys. As it were, I have not interrogated the matter of Robert F Kennedy Jr and his dumped bear at Central Park — I am lead to believe that it is transparently false — but Kennedy may have been weaving the story in just such a way as to keep the taking of roadkill into the bounds of acceptance in New York state law.

Fox News, ladies and gentlemen.

I stare at the Trump press conference. The whole thing is untethered by reality. Like, this differs from, oh, Bill Clinton and sexual relations with that woman — which is a lie tethered to reality — you can connect its falseness to the truth that he is evading. Or the Bush Administration and a large constellation of war propaganda, that I have to equovicate on what are actual lies in the 2000s era speeches and what were conclusions fitting priors makes the difference here. On Trump in this year 2024, the old man lives in a myopic fantasy world and he has dragged us all along with it. I really don’t know what to say or do with it, but let us see what is animating Rod Dreher.

This is a hell of a lot more leeway than what either EW Erickson granted Biden post debate (or any other showing his age moment) on how that man could “reset” his campaign. It kind of throws me back to Nikki Haley’s campaign drop out race speech comment that “now hopefully Trump will earn my voter’s support”. Somehow after everything there is no “I’ve seen enough”. No permanent statement is permanent — no “I’m done with this guy” ever sticks.

And Erickson’s “reset”, simply looking at what Dreher has clipped here, is a little bit off kilter from the baseline Republican cries that he needs to get back to messages of the onerous regulation state and tax and spend inflationary big government! — in that what he wants is for him to pound the names of every undocumented / illegal immigrant who committed a violent crime, a matter of demagoguery that though at least tethered to reality — stems from something, anything — still cannot be cut off from the rest of Trump’s spiel. A guy who does that is going to be the same guy who goes after a party member, a guy who does this makes hay over Kamala Harris’s mixed race background — that mean tweets that are your static noise.

Still, I am always trying to find a “something sensical” in the insane morass. By way of contrarianism if nothing else — let’s debate the merits of water storage policy or something. The illustrious reporters here a tad tied down to horse race coverage, I do find myself in agreement with Trump’s sneering of “what a stupid question” on why we are not seeing him campaigning. It is ultimately nothing that should concern me or you — spectator sports are all good and well but I am wanting and hoping for a mass re-conceptualizing of it all. And maybe we see it anyways — the broadest part of the populace only tunes in now. After this statement, Trump makes no sense and then bobs back into sense. He is filming ads on a level you have never seen from right here. Nonsensical statement. He shuffles away the statement “Montana is a swing state” by offering, sanely, he is out campaigning for Senate candidates. Though, he throws in what is apparently a stop-over in Wyoming, which I assume there are rich jackasses there to meet and raise funds out of, but in political terms other than maybe trolling Lynne Cheney there is not much political point. A Republican primary is set, but he is just endorsing the incumbent. Like, I am sure there are elected Democrats somewhere in the state, but I have to squint hard to figure out where this dirty trick flier is even aimed at.

Well. We need to know the evil that lurks in Tim Walz.

I see the National Review has Rich Lowry land him as a combination force of Blagojevich and Menendez. There was a third name but it evades me. At least more interesting a charge than radical leftist, but I kind of figure that their worldview is one that views any expansive government run program as corruption defacto. But the bigger issue here is that on Lowry, he already said multiple times he is done with Trump and yet… Nothing sticks.

Oh great. It’s that high school football coach calling everyone a little different from him and his “weird”. But, you can’t stick to that — he was the guy who spear-headed the school’s new “Gay Straight Alliance”. Oh, great. He’s the high school football coach who thinks all the “weird” kids are gay.

There is a limit to the “weird” line. It encompasses too much, somewhat predictably overlapping Clinton’s “Basketful of deplorables”, gets shoved into the policy matters as he lays down some absolutes. We can’t clutch too many pearls on it, going up against some clown who defenders always dismissed problems with as “mean tweets”, Bringing in early JD Vance promoter and superfan Rod Dreher to this parade:

Yeah, this is a guy who had (still is?) for the past decade or so been posting to “libs of tik tok” and Andy Ngo various bizarre and self centered terminally online sexual micro-minorities, specializing in ever so exotic and meaningless pronouns. This is presented as though it is bigger than it is, and the main problem with most is a terminally online nature. His response to them is to shout that they are weird. Dhrer’s guy, meantime, does his terminally online act, spouts his mouth off for… Um… podcaster “Bronze Age Pervert”, and Dreher is horrified that some peoples outside of the political and cultural mainstream but in his direction (with certain contradictory caveats on that) are called “weird”.

I hope we can somewhat shuffle from this line, but it is hardly a concern. More irksome is that the man threw out a line about “couch”, a premise of immaturity I don’t know what I am supposed to do with and whose proliferation moves me away from having any strong attachment to this Harris / Walz cause beyond my bottom line “they’ll do”. The problem of presidential campaigns is everyone becomes irritating.

Gee. I don’t kniw, Rod Dreher. Must be something endemic to Trump’s thinking, you know the mastermind of the “Beer Belly Putsch” of January 6, 2021?

Yeah must be horrible. But have to wait and see when this madness begins before we demand that it stops. I have not been watching a second of Olympic Action, but apparently the big right-wing cause celebre is against the big dominant winner in woman’s boxer who was born with two “x”-chromosomes and never at any minute transitioned, and who despite have two x chromosomes could pass by the eye test as being a man — which, strictly speaking, might indeed benefit her in the world of woman’s boxing — but today instead of early 80s un-pc jesting at some female abnormally heavy-set athletes as “that’s a man!”, they just declare her an ex-man anyways. I knew something was off here when I saw the nationality of the boxer — oh, sure. Algeria. Okay, yes, I know it is not the end point for Matt Walsh’s search for “What is a Woman?” – – and then I would just dumping the Massai people’s with the nation of Algeria, but you know — we are not terribly progressive here on this one.

Trump is plucking his way into weird Internet streamers — accidentally a 23 year old kid whose trademark is that he smells the chairs of the peoples he interviews after they leave. Also he apparently can’t define fascism — to be sure I can’t give a straight forward definition either — and has trouble reading it off the Internet and has never heard of Mussolini. Trump is evidently making an appearance in Montana — big Senate seat available, I guess he may be thinking down-ticket and figure his niche targeting will lift him up in the swing states? JD Vance — not too much to say on this — the friendly network has dropped the image out lest the only visible word you get is “Kamala” — and looking over the tens of people in this crowd — I do highlight the woman, third from the right, too row, floof of hair, looks a week away from dying her hair green, looks like she should own a number of cats.

Well that’s super.

The 2024 presidential election throws a number of mini or micro stories to jump in and out of or follow. I guess the Biden Zombie campaign is over and done with, and watching the post debate Biden campaign had an appeal all its own — points of desperation, telling into a void, politicians flaking away. I do stand amused a story that Jill Biden warns that the Biden will not remember the Democrats who orchestrated his ouster — which, a similar story about the Clintons following 2008 has its meaningfulness — watch out in post 2010 redistricting primary battles with Obama endorsing Democrats — but in terms of Biden… Yeah, Pelosi and Axelrod are shaking in their boots.

Another story keeping an eye on, and I did drop out of looking at the National Review sensing a pointlessness because they were pontificating on a scene that you knew was about to change, is people who I some level know the follows of Trump and do see Authoritarianism in him, but are talking their way right back into voting for him. Here Biden offered a convenient back-way: would vote for the Democrat against Trump, but he is old, frail, and doddering into senility and forgetfulness, so it is Trump. If the Democrats had gone with literally someone, anyone else. And now watch a line change. Would vote for the Democrat over Trump, even a dead rock like Biden, but now we have (litany of liberal crimes) supporter Kamala Harris — so no thanks on that! The game continues.

Item three, and this gets a little hard. I want to take a look see on JD Vance fanboy Rod Dreher as the wider public pours over Vance. And this is going to get illuminating.

The battle over “normie” status continues unabated, a man who decried the decadence of American culture to the point where he fled to Hungary cries out over the implications on this term. I will go ahead and say that some Democratic Party discourse leaves me flat and dead — something I noted in Biden’s state of the union address as it moved to its litany stage, and something I saw in presumed Democratic Vice Presidential pick Josh Shapiro (The announcement has made that she is going to announce the pick at a Pittsburg event on Tuesday — I can do the math and read the tea leaves)’s stump speech for Harris. There is a blind spot, one a Republican in the Virginia gubernatorial race will waltz right in on, in this framing as they catapult through the list of “freedom”s the nasty Trumpists and Republicans under away of Agenda 2025 want to destroy — “the right for children to read what they want”. Yeah, I know, Tipper Gore has long left the stage — as much as you may mock the old “Parental Advisory” labels as “greatest promotional tool ever” for the albums, they did serve as useful guidelines for parents to know that — at the very least, the kids are listening to some things now — should steer them to some fuller understanding on meanings. We are past an era on v-chip arguments. The “TV-7” ratings I never knew what it meant. Perhaps the right now hates these things and thinks it is coddling “trigger warning” adjacency. But you stare at the easy line from Governor Shapiro and see it falls into the line of books accepted and not accepted into school libraries — and I don’t want to stuck crying “censorship!” because a school library has dropped a graphic novel coming of age memoir from a gender non-comformist expressing graphic lust regarding illustrated genitalia.

But it is that thing where The Moral Majority was founded, with assumptions inherent in its name, and then as they progressed they had to share down at the reality that — they weren’t in the majority. And the fight for normalcy continues, unwinnable by anyone, as it should be.

Jimmy Carter was blasted away with a “weirdness factor” question. In some part, I guess Dreher ought relate to that. America was not used to vote for born again Christian, as I guess they aren’t Catholics – – or church going Catholics such as our elderly president who I see in other tweets I can see Dreher mocking away at in terms of the terms of his Catholicism. It figures. I am almost giving JD Vance too much credit is placing it into some cultural points of what a same conservative parent might object to in current liberal assumptions. Because when he asked about the great “unmarried cat lady” policies, and spit-balling notions that parents ought get extra votes for children they have — the line he took went to economic and tax policy, the sane point where we actually do make way for parental burden which does do some of the “ought tax the childless more” idea — the child tax deduction. He lied and said Harris opposed this, sought its removal. At this point I almost feel like the man no longer deserves my defense and call out of his inane and stupid the couch thing is — and it is further exasperated that the man at the top of the ticket wants to move to a nineteenth century system of financing by tariff anyways.

I don’t know who the man on the lower left is. This clip has thehost, upper left, turning to Allan Lichtman at the lower right, he of the “13 Keys”. James Carville in the upper left can not hide a certain disdain,Though he sits silently and lets him ramble on. Carville has long been of the opinion the Democrats need to get a new candidate for 2024 and let Biden retire, Lichthman believes they have just thrown away one of the keys. To be sure, he still sees the Democrats as holding the correct number of keys.

I imagine Obama’s endorsement is of zero significance. It would be significant only if he didn’t, or he endorsed Trump or Jill Stein.

At the moment and for the rest of the election JD Vance has bestowed upon the Republican a “weirdness” factor, a repellent toward normies, swimming in a pool of odd sub-cultural squares that speak a language middle America does not understand. Should Harris win the election, and should the Republicans clean themselves up even a tad, and makes some kind of breaking retiring Trump from their active roster, it is worth marking a ride turning. Looking over to the next Hunter Bidens —

An entrepreneur and social media influencer, I suppose. It is a misnomer to say that the Democrats have won all the elections in the past four years. They did lose the Virginia gubernatorial election, on issues that burble into people’s lives — education policy — and have some cultural clashing undercurrents in it, one side gets a little smug in its perception of where the normies are at.

Reportedly Manchin, not a Democrat, called Donna Brazille, not an official with the DNC, on how to run in the post Biden world. A wacky asterisk if there ever was one.

The Internet has lots of opinions. Though are they any more insightful than the Old Media figures?

A step down from Trump’s previous tendency to call all the Dems “marxist”s.

I want to tell everyone to knock it off on the couch thing. I don’t even really understand it. It is not true, verifiably not the case — supposedly in the book and look in the book and it is not there — and if it were the case that it is in there, would be a thing that is… I don’t know… Humanizing the jackass? Kind of? At the very least hanging it over him leads to more risk-taking in book writing — see too why Obama’s first book is an actual book and after winning any election nothing he puts out reads as anything worth reading. I can’t even see how this idea gets at some “hypocrisy” angle — it is a weird dunking of a political foe which when it evaporates muddied the water for things that are legitimate — an escape clause to point to immature lies the liberals are promulgating and justify their own distortions with a “whatabout”ism. I hope to find out that the source of it was apolitical and “in it for the lulz”, because this meme is just kind of annoying.

The “childless cat ladies” thing is a lot serious in part because it is not a one-off, there is — as everyone is finding out now — a good deal of policy proposals spouted off off of this frame of mind. (Some of which, in some variant, championed as mildly liberal politicians, or if you want to propose an expansion of the child income tax credot, go at it, cause “it takes a village” after all.) And I am not the person who posited this thought but — I pity the Democratic OPPO worker who are now having to sit through right wing podcast interviews with Vance, and ensure the thoughts of variants of trad Catholics and neo-paleo con whatevers. Vance emerges as a bizarro-version of the problems that inflicted the lot of 2020 Deocratic presidential aspirants in 2019: forgetting that the Internet is not the realworld. Or, in his case, thinking he can bum-rush the world y amassing these podcasters.

There is one thing more that strikes as I in a very second hand fashion reassess his once broadly touted book. The cat ladies comment can essentially be taken as another version in that “basketful of deplorables” comment that oh so doomed Hillary Clinton. But, taking another gander at what I understand on his book — he basically took that line as well. Fled the area and declared them all drug addicted laggards. Coming and going! The most Elitist of Populists!

This assessment: Good at pandering up, but not down.

Peter Thiel is getting all the attention relation to the selection of JD Vance, and as a matter of actual policy implications he probably ought to. The cultural debris will land with a thud. But the Silicon Valley Crypto Currency design could work it’s way in through its sheer degrees of separation from mass understanding. Still. I do come right back to Rod Dreher, sitting and it has been a while since I read the stimulating and varied comments section under his not much interesting (or sometimes too damned interesting) blog column at the American Conservative, wandering away when the comments section went away, then of course completely as he headed off to Hungary under his favored leader Viktor Orban. Dreher considers himself a man instrumental to Vance’s rise, promoting his “at one time universally” or largely so “praised book”, praised before he took that step into electioneering and you you had fuller reason to interrogate his politics and concern yourself with more than just passing input on his book. And we see him, alongside Thiel, in “the seven intellectual forces behind JD Vance” politico article. He heard the speech. Thrilled to it, I guess.

I think the phrase is “playing to the base”. You can take it as an amusing anecdote and eccentricity. Or you can ask if we really want to be that turbo-paranoid.

You have to pay for his substack, or get a free week, but i do see he spent the last week on the JD Vance train, posting old photographs of him next to him. A title, “Reagan of the Milennials”. And I am not wholly sure of the Vanity Fair article, seeing that he now is in charge of “The European Conservative”, where we find Dreher chomping at the bit on behalf of Vance, and explaining that he hated Trump too but then that Covington Kid thing happened. And then changed everything. Not mentioned in the article, but from my reading it changed again on January 6. But then there was a book in a school library somewhere that has a drawing of a penis, and that changed that. The penis book is more important than January 6.

It is interesting that The Nation magazine has an article up which pulls the latest found epithet on “childless cat ladies” — a category which includes step-parents such as Kamala Harris and gay men such as Peter Buttigieg — back to Rod Dreher, because I was thinking about this independent from The Nation. I am not even dipping far into fullest explications, but I do recall Dreher tossing the phrase about here and there — a jeering reference to jezebel-ish publication article excerpt that a litmus question in a relationship should be asking your would-be partner what the legal state on sex workers should be. “How to secure ‘Cat Lady’ status”. I would be one to think you make up what litmuses work for you. Beyond this, I am curious to see how he treats the misinformation about JD Vance and his couch — “lust in your heart?” – – but have a pretty good idea that he thinks on the rest, pontificating wildly on divorce and abortion laws and extra parental voting to subdue these cat ladies — just clueless liberals that don’t get the real America, or have closed their minds to new ideas. Or, as I see, a “and you???” , long held outrage on the big “mostly peaceful protests” — interesting diversion, cultural cross current battle. It will be worth poking at Twitter for this all.