Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/08/05/more-republicans-endorse-kamala-harris.html
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As Kamala Harris contemplates her choice of Vice President today, some Republicans are choosing her, including former White House aides to then-president Donald Trump and former GOP congresspersons.
In its Sunday announcement, the Harris campaign also included dozens of prominent current or former Republican figures, some of which now identify with a different party, who have already endorsed the vice president.
Former Representative Adam Kinzinger of Illinois was among the list, which he shared on X, formerly Twitter, on Sunday morning.
“There is nothing ‘conservative’ about Donald Trump. Conservatives believe in the Constitution, not a ‘man’s’ ego. Endorsing American democracy and the future today, and leaving the past in the dust. I’m endorsing @KamalaHarris,” he wrote.
She’s now ahead of Trump (albeit within the margin of error) in a number of nationwide polls. Some media punditry is getting nervous about the potential for her to surge and trying to figure out what will limit her appeal. The headline below, all but triangulated with Trump’s stream of racist gibberish about her, is a good example of two things: editors sending out reporters to vox pop their own opinions, and media using overton windows to manufacture parity in a horse race. You might say it was … weird.
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Despite the media being determined to control the public perception and push their own need for a race, I hope we see more reports like this as the election approaches (with numbers increasing by 20%, just like they claimed support for 45 went up dramatically from 24% 
):
Instead of a close race, we want more of this:
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Unsurprisingly, I’m seeing a ton of stories about how the economy is now on the verge of a recession again. All because there was less job growth in the latest jobs report than was forecast (but there was still growth), and because unemployment crept up slightly for the first time in a loooong time. And it’s still near a historic low. Also, inflation is down. Even though they assured us a year or two ago that we needed higher unemployment to control inflation and avoid a recession, now higher unemployment and lower inflation is somehow a sign that a recession is coming soon. These people are shameless.
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That. They really, really hate quiet competence.
Also, Belle from Beau of the Fifth Column pointed out that they are citing the Sahm rule like it’s some kind of immutable, ancient economic law; meanwhile the originator of the rule, Claudia Sahm has downplayed the risk of recession.
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Whether they are political opportunists trying to turn all economic news into something that damns Biden, or just ‘economists’ who still believe in spherical cows, still all shameless fuckwits trying to manipulate facts to confuse and pull the wool over the public’s eyes.
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They KEEP doing that… predicting an oncoming recession… and then it just… doesn’t happen. It’s like they WANT a fucking recession…
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You might say it was … weird.
Not weird, just lazy, short-sighted, and complacent. Senior editors like the NYT’s Joe Kahn can’t fall back on ignorance – they spent more than a decade covering the fate of the independent press in Russia but still think they’ll somehow be spared the consequences.
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It’s also completely unsurprising that Kinzinger would endorse Harris, since he had already endorsed Biden before Biden dropped out.
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They do. Wealthy people experience net gains from a recession and recovery (see COVID) while everyone else suffers. A recession right now would help T**** electorally, so that’s also a benefit to the corporate media overlords.
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Exactly my fears.
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This assumes senior NYT editors are on the side of independent press and not on the side of the authoritarians.
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It’ll happen right after that Mayan apocalypse from 2012 that is just riiiiiggggghhhhtttt around the corner!
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The pic of Harris mid laugh made me think of something:
You can always picture in your head moments where presidential candidates are laughing. Think of moments where these candidates were laughing:
Obama,
Biden,
McCain,
Romney,
Clinton,
Bush,
Gore…
Now picture a time when Orange Julius was laughing.
#TrumpNeverLaughs
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This is a bit like the reaction to Y2K, people said afterwards it was all overblown because nothing happened. Well nothing happened because the work was done in the background to deal with the issues before it became a disaster.
Same situation here, the Non-Farm number was a surprise and spooked a lot of people and the markets have gone into a spin, but people are working on making this just a correction and not anything more.
Recession has a technical definition and US economy doesn’t go into recession very often but it can happen. Other countries are not so fortunate and can have short recessions more frequently.
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The people who believe that an economy is simply a force of nature, rather than a man-made system, want to normalize the boom-bust cycle again, because of who it empowers. But good governance of an economy can certain ensure that’s less likely to happen.
Yes, and the reason why we have economists and such like is to help us to avoid that… to say, “hey, these numbers of looking worrying, maybe we can take some action to head that off”… Such as the Sahm rule everyone was invoking this week… but of course Sahm herself said:
“The Sahm rule is an empirical regularity. It’s not a proposition; it’s not a law of nature.”
As Marx said (and I’m obviously paraphrasing here) the point of the various kinds of philosophizing people do around things like economics isn’t to just describe this stuff, but it’s to change it… use it for our own benefit and betterment.
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I recently saw someone say a financial publication (can’t remember which) “Has predicted seventeen out of the past zero recessions.”
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And the worst thing that came from that is how dated this cartoon is.
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Honest laughter is often tied to a connection to other people.
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