And it’s not just a single debate, it’s a thing people will recognize from their own elderly relatives’ declines. They’ll be sharp as a tack at some times and in some situations and in others they’ll be confused and incoherent. There’s no reason to believe this is a one-off incident that won’t reoccur publicly during the next 4 months. We’ve already been seeing some questionable senior moments that have been brushed aside as being out of context or just some simple mistake unrelated to age. Who really believes those narratives after seeing the debate?

Before my adblocker quashed it, I got a Biden-Harris ad. Probably not the best channel for governing politicians to be advertising on.

I think most Democrats are worried about him being elected more than will he be able to be president for four years. Like he probably won’t, but there’s lots of structure and support to prevent a failing Biden from a catastrophic presidency. There’s basically none to prevent him from tanking his reelection campaign.

If he gets elected I’m not worried. He can die or be puppeted by his staff and things will be roughly as ok as they are now. I’m worried he won’t get elected.

There are a lot of non-democracies with elections.

Mostly true. The DNC is the organization that makes the rules and can change them at any time. That would be a pretty bad move though unless the party really felt united in needing to do a hostile expulsion. Realistically Biden needs to be on board for a change to work, so being able to play Calvinball with primary voting rules isn’t really an out.

You also don’t really need to think for a speech. You’ve got a friendly audience who won’t challenge you and you know exactly what the next topic is, so you can focus on inflection and timing and emotion. It’s good to see him have some life in the speech, but it’s not really much of a counter to his terrible debate performance.

And incidentally, that’s probably why Trump’s performance sounded better. He also didn’t really need to think about substance because he was just speaking to whatever topic he felt like and making things up without concern for truthfulness or challenge.

Not that it helps, but she’s currently more popular than Biden.

I think all the “Biden should step aside” calls are due to concerns about Step 1.

He’s old, it was his bedtime and instead we asked him to go to a debate.

Holy crap how can you say things like this and think it’s supporting him? The presidency isn’t something that just pauses for bedtime and campaigning involves a lot of being “on” over and over again, sometimes at night.

Or just anyone who’s not clued in. Trumpland will vote even if they know he’s lying. It’s the people that barely pay attention to politics that will hear a confident politician say something and assume it’s true.

Trump will be advertising.

It gets really interested if both happen simultaneously and we as a nation have to all just sit in awkward silence for 3 minutes wondering how we got here.

How much of this is not-crossing without an asylum option available and how much is not actively seeking out Border Patrol agents in order to surrender?

We’re there. Netanyahu referenced Amalek in his war speech, a story where god commanded the Jews to kill every last infant of an enemy nation. The deputy speaker in parliament explicitly said there are no innocent civilians in Gaza and it must be wiped off the face of the earth.

Two solutions to that problem:

1. Choose the answer you like. Those other rabbis are wrong.
2. Avoid breaking anyone’s rules (this is, I believe, roughly the actual method). If one rabbi says it’s forbidden to spin counter clockwise while dancing and another says it’s fine, don’t spin counter clockwise because maybe the first rabbi is right and the second just said it wasn’t required, not that you had to do it. There’s no electricity in the Biblical rules, but it’s kind like fire and there are rules about fire on Shabbat, so they’re not supposed to use electricity on Shabbat. It might be overkill, but better safe than sorry.

And that was from a “tough” judge who was doing everything he could not to jail him. Eileen Cannon is absolutely not going to meaningfully enforce a gag order. And she’d probably set aside 3 weeks to hear motions for each violation before refusing it.

That’s the most frustrating thing about all these back and forths. So much angst and arguments when the first question that needs to be asked is “do you live in a state that’s in play?” If not, then you don’t need to tell anyone who you’re not voting for and no one needs to tell you you shouldn’t, because your vote doesn’t matter and you’re not making the decision based on who you’d prefer to see in the White House. Deep-X votes are being decided in relation to their irrelevance and both shouldn’t be shamed as supporting migrant death camps and also shouldn’t be an opinion someone in a swing state should look to when making their own decision.

I’m in a deep blue state. Usually I vote for Democratic presidential candidates merely to drive up the popular vote total and make the argument against the electoral college stronger. That’s all my (presidential) vote is worth, so if I decided not to cast it, it’s in that context, and someone in Georgia should be making their decision in an entirely different context and ignoring the position declarations of people whose votes really don’t matter.

My only guess would be people can get better propaganda elsewhere and the CNN propaganda was supposed to fly under the radar as coming from a “real” news station. CNN has had various stories about right-biased reporting which actually damages their brand, unlike Fox where the target audience is all in.

They even quoted a protester, which shouldn’t be an unusual event when covering protests, but here were are.