Pulls no punches here: LeBron James on X: “What are we even talking about here?? When I think about my kids and my family and how they will grow up, the choice is clear to me. VOTE KAMALA HARRIS!!!
Click through if you don’t see the devastating video…
George Clooney, via Vote Common Good, gives us the bro version of their recent ad featuring Julia Roberts reminding women that the secret ballot means that women don’t have to vote like their husbands tell them to.
Whether either ad will persuade large numbers of people is probably besides the point: it’s a game of small numbers at this point.
Incidentally, one of the terrible things about large-scale mail-in voting (as opposed to early in-person voting) is that it opens the door to voter intimidation and vote selling. It’s tough to sell your vote if there is no way for the buyer to know if you did what you promised. Both sales and pressure are easy at the kitchen table.
I voted via dropbox and it seems Miami-Dade elections accepted my ballot:
“Ballot 1” huh? Does that mean I can have more please?
(I cancelled my subscription today.)
‘Washington Post’ won’t endorse in White House race for first time since 1980s — even though they editorialized that Trump is unfit to be President, and their news columns (frequently, if not frequently enough) make it obvious.
It’s not hard to imagine why owner Jeff Bezos did this: fear and greed. As Josh Marshall put it,
in the case of the Post, this is a bad and cowardly development. We can’t know for certain what went into these decisions. But the most obvious explanation is that they have billionaire owners who, especially in the case of Jeff Bezos, have other business interests which are vulnerable to adverse regulatory and contracting decisions as well as government harassment of other kinds. Those are very real threats and ones that a lawless president has a lot latitude to exact without much if any real prospect of redress. […]
The calculus is straightforward. If Harris wins the election, it doesn’t matter. Democratic administrations don’t play that way. Donald Trump’s do.
The big money is betting that there’s a real chance Trump gets elected. And in so doing helping make it so.
Kudos to Robert Kagan for immediately resigning, as an editorial contributor. Obviously these decisions will be harder for those employed by the Post full-time, and who find themselves in a dying industry where jobs are scarce. Even so…
Via TPM, a link to this 2018(!) video by Yale philosophy professor Jason Stanley on whether Trump is a fascist:
NYT, For Trump, a Lifetime of Scandals Heads Toward a Moment of Judgment
Sometimes lost amid all the shouting of a high-octane campaign heading into its final couple of weeks is that simple if mind-bending fact. America for the first time in its history may send a criminal to the Oval Office and entrust him with the nuclear codes. What would once have been automatically disqualifying barely seems to slow Mr. Trump down in his comeback march for a second term that he says will be devoted to “retribution.”
In all the different ways that Mr. Trump has upended the traditional rules of American politics, that may be one of the most striking. He has survived more scandals than any major party presidential candidate, much less president, in the life of the republic. Not only survived but thrived. He has turned them on their head, making allegations against him into an argument for him by casting himself as a serial victim rather than a serial violator.
…and it then details the scandals for two full newsprint pages.
Vote, already.
Jotwell Blenderlaw