Good news, finally.

But his accounts of other episodes are bolstered by his contemporaneous notes, video footage and text messages exchanged by members of the unit and reviewed by The Times.

Kind of sounds like we need to stop giving judges so much power.

I am so shocked. /s

Be the trendsetter you want to see in the world o7

♪ "Whatever happens, we have got♪

♪ The Maxim gun, and they have not!" ♪

[WW1 starts]

[screaming internally and externally]

“Right, Baldrick. This is an old trick I picked up in the Sudan…”

To be fair, Europe had spent most of the time the Gatling and Maxim had existed for fighting under the rules of engagement, as the great British Captain Blackadder once noted, that the “prerequisite of a… campaign was that the enemy should under no circumstances carry guns.”

No, ranked choice would give us an option to express a stronger preference for other candidates. It would not fix the fact that Biden and Trump hold near-majority support in this election cycle and one of them will be the winner of the election, making every voter with any sense pick one of them to support over the other.

Good to see you still can’t read worth a damn.

Yeah, unfortunately, there’s a calculus here that isn’t entirely clear. The right-wing, the accelerationists, and the Russian shills are all on board with this because they THINK it’s a losing proposition for the Democrats. However, whether it is ACTUALLY a losing proposition is… uncertain.

We live in a fucked-up political era. I think a replacement could go either way. I’m not thrilled about the idea, but we’re rolling the dice either way, so I’m not going to let either outcome change my disposition much. What I know is that I’m voting against fascism this November, and anyone who expresses doubts as to whether THEY’RE voting against fascism are, at best, useful idiots for fascism, and at worst, fascists who are too cowardly to admit it.

“You do you, special car, don’t go changin’ for nobody.”

I see you’re hip to the new form of left praxis on Lemmy.

Polls taken before Thursday all largely deliver the same answer: any Biden alternative — Vice President Kamala Harris, Govs. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, Gavin Newsom of California, Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg — performed about the same, or worse, than Biden against Trump when voters were asked how they’d vote in head-to-head matchups.

In averages of national polls fielded between February 2023 and January of this year, for example, Harris underperformed Biden by about 2.3 percentage points, per tracking by the former Democratic pollster Adam Carlson.

Buttigieg, Newsom, and Sanders did worse than Biden against Trump (Newsom, for example, trailed Biden’s margin against Trump in every poll in which he was included, by about 3 percentage points on average). Whitmer did roughly the same as Biden, but that’s also based on only two polls.

ahh we’re gonna know sooner. Couple weeks, max.

Biden’s not going to win in the next few weeks, on account of the next few weeks not including the election, so the first bit is right out.

Whether the party (and, perhaps more importantly, low-information voters) unite behind a new candidate won’t be certain until the results of election day. If you think that the information environment is going to be coherent and clear in the aftermath of a contested convention, I don’t know what to tell you other than that you’re setting yourself up for disappointment. You aren’t going to get the ‘clean’ result that you want, regardless of whether an open convention is our best possible choice.

Joe Biden is losing this election and is a lost cause candidate. I got there through my own analysis of his polling data and the probability that he can actually get the level of “swing” in his polling numbers that he needs (my results showed it to be, a practical statistical impossibility).

It would be phenomenal marketing, and whomever came out on top would be riding a rocket.

Second, for whoever wins, they get a suddenly unified Democratic party behind them. We get leave the baggage of Joe Biden behind and they get to mount a rocket ship coming out of the convention. What they do with that rocket is on them, but theyll have more earned media than any candidate other than maybe 2016 Trump.

No its a great thing; an open convention best possible outcome.

!remindme 1 year if I’m still alive.

So I’m interested in where you are getting this, because from what I’ve seen, its the most politically engaged that have been shouting from the roof tops for months, longer even, that Biden needs to be replaced. Specifically, the Nate Silvers, Ezra Kleins of the world.

Yes, and recent events haven’t affected their opinions much. They’ve been on this kick for a while now. Recent events HAVE effected low-engagement voters’ opinions, on the other hand; people who don’t generally pay close attention to politics until and unless something ‘big’ hits the news that’s hard to ignore - like clips of a presidential debate.

Specifically, an open convention would be so dominating of the news cycle, there is no way they’ll be able to stay un-informed.

… I’m not sure you’re getting where the low-information low-engagement voter is coming from. They’re not going to look at an open convention and say “Wowee, look at that, interesting new candidates!”

They’re going to say “Wow, the Democrats are really in disarray! I wonder if I should even bother voting for them.”

An open convention may be our best choice. But it’s not going to be our best choice out of some idea that low-information voters will be positively influenced by the events of the convention itself; only that a new candidate may (and the emphasis here is on ‘may’) be a better choice to influence them positively.

Whatever we’re doing, we need to do it fast and commit to it.

Bernie was like 60-70 something percent donations of less than $200?

Bernie was in the 60s and his whole ‘thing’ was his ability to motivate small dollar donors. Most Dem politicians, even excluding Blue Dogs and the like, have numbers that resemble Biden’s, post-Citizens United.

Small dollar donations are less likely to “move” than large donations are. It gives you a sustainability and independence that you don’t get when most of your donations come from big donors.

If any candidate, really at any level, fundraising dropped by 60% thats it. They’re cooked. Because those dollars are going to go some where.

This is true and I don’t disagree. I only disagree with the assertion that small dollar donors have ‘dried up’ for Biden recently. Fact is, most of us who are politically motivated enough to not just be ready to vote, but actively donate, are still quite concerned with the prospect of fascism winning. Biden’s loss of support is largely with the sadly important contingent of low-information low-engagement voters who are the difference between victory and defeat in most elections in this fucking country.

The only silver lining there is that other events can (not necessarily will, but can) sway them back. Low-engagement voters necessarily have short political attention spans.

34.7%

Which is a pretty normal percentage for candidates, and not at all evidence of small dollar donations ‘drying up’.

But Biden’s campaign said the bulk of its funds came from grassroots donors – 96% of its first-quarter donations were under $200. In March alone, 704,000 unique donors made 864,000 contributions to the Biden-Harris campaign.

Unless my sense of time is mega-fucked, March is only four months ago. Do you have any sources to the contrary substantiating your claims on Biden’s small dollar donors drying up?