CCR are the most awesomely bizarre case of a classic band that’s bigger than ever right now, without anyone really noticing. But their greatest-hits collection Chronicle is riding high on the Billboard 200 every week, always somewhere in the thirties or forties. It’s currently Number 39, right ahead of the new Ariana Grande album. It’s higher than anything by the Beatles or the Stones or Zeppelin or Queen. It’s crazy because there’s no star power involved, no cult of personality, no Freddie Mercury, no Stevie/Lindsey, no backstory or drama or charisma, no biopic or TV placement, and God knows no sex appeal. Just four anonymous flannel dudes and a bunch of perfect guitar songs about rivers.
Of all the “classic rockers who stay famous forever” stories, this is the one where there’s nothing but the songs. Of all the fans who bought/streamed/whatevered Chronicle this week, I doubt half could give the leader’s name, or tell you a thing about him. But only a hardcore fan could name the other three. Anyone who can tell Stu Cook from Doug Clifford probably is Stu Cook or Doug Clifford. You couldn’t pick any of these dudes out of a police lineup. There’s no hero worship, no narrative, no stars. There’s no love story, no death story. Only the songs.
For the record, I can tell the difference between Clifford and Cook. Most of the time.
The “why” is the interesting part:
But ironically, there’s plenty of dramatic lore in the Creedence story, if anyone knew or cared. There’s two brothers hating each other — after big brother Tom Fogerty quit the band, they never reconciled before his death. John was one of the very few rock stars to get drafted in the Vietnam era — he did his time in the Army, waiting out a year of misery, then returned to fight his way back into the Bay Area bar-band scene. None of his peers had a struggle like that to boast about, but it was a cred card he refused to play, even when he was protesting the war in “Fortunate Son.” There’s even the hilarious lawsuit after his 1985 solo hit “The Old Man Down the Road” — it sounded so much like Creedence, his ex-label took him to court, making him the only rock star ever to get sued for plagiarizing himself. He had to take the witness stand with a guitar, to show the jury why his songs sounded like John Fogerty. During cross-examination, he snapped, “What am I supposed to do, get an inoculation?”
Great stories — but only hardcore fans know them, because Fogerty had zero knack for talking about himself. Since the band broke up, he’s never stopped railing at his ex-bandmates, stewing over business injustices he never had much luck convincing anyone else to care about. His 2015 memoir is a barely-readable pity party. Even in their heyday, the group’s interviews were nothing but drab complaints about not getting taken seriously enough. As Cook groused to Rolling Stone, “People know about our music but they don’t know about our heads.”
I haven’t said “worth a read” about something in Rolling Stone in a long, long time. And it’ll probably be a while before I do it again.
Representatives for Hicks confirmed with FOX 9 that on Aug. 3, political signs in her yard, plus the siding on her home and a shed on her property were all vandalized by the masked intruders.
“My family was a victim of racist vandalism at our home this weekend. It has been a difficult two days, but then our community showed up,” Rep. Hicks said as part of a statement. “My family felt so much love and support from our friends, neighbors, and even strangers who came to lend a hand.”
House DFL Representative Kim Hicks, who represents Rochester and the surrounding areas of District 25A, has confirmed her home was vandalized over the weekend by people wearing masks who left graffiti containing racial slurs. https://t.co/6otblNLC81
All incidents of “hate speech” not captured on video (involving being delivered by someone proven not to be a ringer) shall be assumed to be hoaxes until proven otherwise.
There’ve been so many blown-up hoaxes in Minnesota – especially, curiously, southern Minnesota – in recent years that you’d think even DFLers would realize it’s a bad idea.
I’m just a little bit overjoyed that Kamala Harris selected Tim Walz.
How do I put this? Tim Walz is Bernie Sanders in an Elmer Fudd costume.
Kamala Harris felt the need, for whatever reason – we’ll come back to that – to to whatever sliver of the Democrat Party that is to her left, to a governor of a state that is only academically in play.
I’d been thinking Josh Shapiro was a lock – there’d even been some “congrats” videos “leaked” last weekend of various Democrat dignitaries congratulating Shapiro.
He would have been a formidable choice. That, too, we’ll come back to.
Walz? He’s got baggage. And I”m going to keep reminding the world of that baggage:
So – why not Shapiro?
Because he’s a JOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO, and the Democrat party has a bit of an antisemitism problem. They don’t want Chicago looking like, well, Lake Street.
Anyway – to all the Dems chanting “Hahaha! He’s America’s fun uncle! Cope!”, I say “his place on the ticket is all the ‘cope’ I need, thank you very much”.
So it’s Walz:
Bring on the fall!
UPDATE: Ben Shapiro captures a lot of what I’ve been thinking:
Barack Oba…er, Kamala Harris has picked Governor Klink to complete her ticket. The precedent was clear to anyone paying attention – Walz was governor because he’d made his deal with the devil.
Part of the deal appeared to be “making Flanagan appear to be a co-governor”; her name appeared below Walz’s on most campaign literature – but was longer, and usually colored such that her name “popped” harder than Walz’s.
You can hear the Twin Cities media going Squeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee all the way to Chicago. Those of us who live here and pay attention – a painfully small Venn diagram, as the 2022 election showed us – know that, as Scott Johnson says, Walz “casts the pale shadow of a man incapable of embarrassment and presents as an example of life imitating art, in this case the advertising art that created Joe Isuzu:
For those of you in my audience who aren’t from MInnesota, let’s go through a little of Tim Walz’s political record.
Congress: Walz spent six terms as a US House rep from the 1st District – the largely rural southern tier of counties, at the time. He ran to the commonsensical center to defeat the very moderate Gil Gutknecht; like Colllin Peterson, Byron Dorgan, Kent Conrad and Earl Pomeroy, he made moderate noises for his rural base. He was a-rated by the NRA.
And when Governor Dayton ran up to his term (and, likely, health) limit in 2018, Walz took that record – sans his NRA rating, which he dumped like it was a “3” when a “5” was batting her eyes at him:
Emerging As A Puppet: Tossing aside the NRA endorsement wasn’t enough to impress the DFL’s newly surgent “Progressive” wing, which pushed the overtly extreme Erin Murphy, backed with the equally gleeful extremist Erin Maye Quade at a convention where even Keith Ellison was too moderate (they endorsed fire-breathing socialist Matt Pelikan over the, I say again, too moderate Keith Ellison.
Not even picking Peggy Flanagan – literally the most extreme leftist in the Minnesota House at that time – was enough to slow the prog wave, although it was a start:
Of course, DFL chair Ken Martin knew the electorate wasn’t quite as demented as the DFL activist base – outside the metro, anyway – and put his foot down, He pulled his backroom deals, put the DFL’s money behind Walz/Flanagan, and dragged them over the line for a win in the 2018 DFL primary.
The precedent was clear to anyone paying attention – Walz was governor because he’d made his deal with the devil.
Part of the deal appeared to be “making Flanagan appear to be a co-governor”; her name appeared below Walz’s on most campaign literature – but was longer, and usually colored such that her name “popped” harder than Walz’s.
Unremarkable: During those years, Walz’s most extreme urges were stymied by the GOP’s slim, often one-vote, majority in the Minnesota Senate. Not that he didn’t try – but the worst instincts of his “progressive” regime got tempered by Paul Gazelka’s canny politicking – one might call it “rear guard action”, either in the military sense, or (to some) the “covering one’s ass” sense. Take your pick.
The Deluge: And then came Covid.
Walz declared emergency power on Saint Patrick’s Day, 2020. In an infamous press conference, he said Minnesota would have a bare minimum of 20,000 dead by July, if everything went perfectly – with 70,000 much more likely. He seized emergency power, and shut down schools, churches, most businesses…
…but not big box stores, liquor stores, or “The World’s Largest Candy Store”, in Jordan, run by a major campaign contributor. He declared broad swathes of Minnesota’s labor force “non-essential”. He instituted a “snitch line”, which countless “Karens” used to report their neighbors for offenses against the Covid regime.
He also repeated Andrew Cuomo’s catastrophic errors in handling long-term care of the elder;ly; the carnage in Minnesota’s nursing homes was epic, and inexcusable.
But the death toll lagged his predictions – by about an order of magnitude. And for a brief, weird moment, the media did the unthinkable – they asked questions .
Including at a presser on May 11 – where a reporter asked if the Department of Health department would release the code for the model that had made the initial, alarming preductions .
And Walz’s spokesperson replied “No – because people might use it to get different results than we did”.
Which, for those of us who passed ninth-grade science class, is the opposite of science.
He held emergency power for seventeen months, for an emergency that in effect ended in the summer of 2020.
The Floyd Riots: Walz’s performance during the George Floyd riots was perhaps more controversial – mostly notably when Mayor Frey of Minneapolis asked where the National Guard was, after 2-3 days of rioting, and the Governor, essentially, asked why the Mayor hadn’t put a cover sheet on his TPS report.
Some in emergency management said he followed the plan (although the response was botched at many levels).
Speaking as someone who lives in a neighborhood hit hard by the riots, I didn’t care then, and I don’t care now. The Guard appeared in token numbers on the Friday after the riots came to Saint Paul – four days into the violence – and didn’t appear in numbers sufficient to tip the balance until Saturday.
The Governor may have done his job – maybe. But he did it to the absolute bureaucratic minimum standard. The only two leaders in the whole affair were Chief Axtell, and then-president Trump, whose threat to send the 82nd Airborne may or may not have spurred actual action, but certainly seemed to, whether coincidentally or not.
The Flood: And then came the 2022 elections.
The DFL did what it does best – scare suburban women into thinking abortion (protected in the MN Constitution for years, now) was in imminent danger. They rode that to seizing the “Trifecta” – control of both chambers of the Legislature.
It was a close fight – Keith Ellison and Julie Blaha nearly lost. 1,000 votes would have swung the Senate to the GOP; about 4,000 more, the House. Scott Jensen was a weak GOP candidate at the head of a decreasingly potent state GOP – but Walz only won by 8 percent.
But the DFL governed like they’d had a California-style mandate.
And the results have been wretched. I’ll just brain-dump them here:
He and the DFL squandered a $19 billion surplus. The “surplus” was structurally down to $2B as of the last forecast, but it’s going to be a deficit – right after the election. The money went to buying votes (“Feeding kids!”) and frau/ /
The Metro DFL is a fraud machine, funneling hundreds of millions of dollars through the HHS and Education Departments. Faced with the news, Walz said “it’s not my job, man”.
Much of the surplus also went to “fully funding education”. But school districts are still complaining about money, teachers are striking all over the place, and reading and math scores are still falling. Graduation rates improved, briefly – when they state removed most standards.
While Minnesota’s population is said to be holding steady, it’s mostly because of immigration. Minnesotans in their productive years, or with fungible capital, are leaving and taking their businesses and their money.
College students and young people are leaving Minnesota. That the reverse of the trend that obtained for decades before, when generations of young people – myself included – saw Minnesota as a destination.
While he prattles about “One Minnesota”, he has “sorted” Minnesotans pretty relentlessly.
He made MN a sanctuary State
He pushed drivers licenses for illegals
He drove making Minnesota a “trans refuge” – signing a law that mandated disregarding of child support decrees for children brought to the state by noncustodial parents to seek chemical and surgical neutering (alone among all causes).
Crime in the metro is about double what it was ten years ago – and while it’s down a skosh from 2021, it’s waaaay ahead of pre-pandemic levels.
The Rule Of The Brittle: Walz succeeded Mark Dayton – who was a fairly opaque governor, largely because his health was so atrocious his rarely went to the office (unreported by the state’s compliant media)
Walz is healthier – but far more opaque. Other than the stage-managed pressers during Covid, his only real communication is via his very active Twitter feed, which provides a constant deluge of photos of him cavorting about the state, usually in his “regular Joe” costume of a seed cap and overstretched T-shirt. State Fair time is usually high season – as he and his entourage waddle about the fair, sucking down corn dogs as the cameras roll.
Which is probably a good thing – because he doesn’t handle questioning well. And he appears to know it – the only debate in the 2022 cycle was on a feeble TV station in Rochester. And Scott Jensen got under his skin – which isn’t hard to do. He has a long record of losing his cool when people actually question him.
So his handlers allow none of that.
Speaking of questions:
Why Walz? I think most national GOP strategists thought Josh Shapiro would be the prime choice. Pennsylvania may be the swingiest of the swing states; some day it’s the hinge pin of this election.
While Minnesota is a 50-50 state (four DFL and four GOP reps in Congress), the DFL turnout machine dominates state races against a MN GOP that makes the Vikings look like overachievers.
if the state is in play then things are very bad for the Democrat indeed. This doesn’t seem to track the situation.
We in the conservative alt media often look forward to the demise of the mainstream media (StarTribune, I’m looking at you). And after the latest media outrage, we often repeat “you may think you hate the MSM – but you don’t hate them enough”.
But how did they get this way?
Richard “Wretchard” Fernandez, as often is the case, sums it up:
To understand the collapse of the media it is first important to understand its rise. People trust the voice that brings them plenty. During Cold War 1, Pravda was the voice of sawdust sausage, the gulag and the KGB. The BBC was London buses, miniskirts and American supermarkets. The media was once the song of whiskey, democracy, sexy. Then at some point it became the screech of diversity, equity and inclusion; the drone of degrowth, global warming and self hatred. It became the voice not of plenty but poverty. People stopped believing. Ask yourself: is it really your idea of a good time to watch blank faced faced octogenarians stumble around a stage? Watch obese transvestites caper in the spotlight? We signed up for a future of flying cars and space babes, not to eat bug salad under a creaking windmill. But what really drove most out of the tent was the sheer mendacity of people on TV. They lied repeatedly to our face and threatened those who would not believe their lies, forgetting that even a dog knows the difference between the hand of plenty and scabrous hand of deceit. So to those fact checkers who would exclaim “why don’t you believe? Why don’t you obey?”, the kindest answer is why don’t you just dry up and leave us alone?
The Star Tribune only cared about the Trump assassination when they thought they could call it “staged” or blame it on a Republican.
As this is written, the Harris campaign is evaluating its VP choices.
Inexplicably, Tim Walz is among them.
He’s a brittle little man, who breaks down when prodded on debate stage.
The state is stagnating:
As a Texas transplant to MN I am in the minority of people who have moved north. By the grace of God I pray my Republican vote will help. We need more Christians to get off the couch and vote. pic.twitter.com/z7cXEdvFpF
He squandered a $19B surplus and is driving the state to a deficit (just you watch, this December) just in time for the nation’s economy to start spluttering toward recession.
Crime has held steady at catastrophic levels.
“Haha, Merg. If he’s so bad, how do you suppose he won re-election”
He hid from even the compliant media – the only debate was in Rochester, and he got hammered – and had his fluffers convince enough gullible hysterical suburban soccer moms that abortion was in danger. He was blessed with a poor GOP opponent.
The cons of a Walz choice: it’l likely get plenty of DFL enthusiam going for the state elections, potentially contributing to DFL turnout in the House race.
The pros: it’ll put Klink on the national stage. JD Vance will flense the piglet.
How It Went: Governor Klink – in his “regular Joe” costume – claims credit for coining the “Weird” thing, the little playground chant that the Democrats apparently think is a political strategery
Any reason other than “he’s a mental lightweight with a thin skin who can’t articulate anything outiside an echo chamber, and has never faced any concerted opposition in his life”, I mean?
When you listen to Twin Cities mainstream media people talk amongst themselves – especially the print hacks – something “weird” emerges.
They admire the late Nick Coleman.
The guy who taught all of us bloggers, 10-20 years ago, that boundless smug entitlement, arrogance, and clubby paternalism masquerading as “life experience” didn’t necessarily equal credibility.
I should’ve screenshot all the examples over the years of Twin Cities media people paying dutiful homage to the greatness that was, er, Nick Coleman.
.@stribrooks coming in hot!!! Not quite channeling the ghost of Nick Coleman yet, but on the same half of the bell curve.
And it says that, whereas in Minnesota until today you had to make a reasonable effort to retreat before using lethal force in self-defense (outside your home), now you must retreat before even attempting to present a firearm.
In other words, you have to try to run away BEFORE you can draw your firearm to defend your, and your family’s, lives. 
That means if someone is trying to kill you, you have to give them a couple of seconds of trying to get away before you can even start to see to your own protection.
And that’s if you meet all the other criteria of self-defense; showing the threat to your life is reasonable and immediate, that you were not the aggressor, and that you only use the force to end the threat.
Now, you can do a completely correct self-defense shooting, and still go to prison because some district attorney thinks you should’ve tried harder, against a subjective standard that nobody’s figured out yet, to run away BEFORE you drew a firearm (or picked up any other weapon). 
Put succinctly, it says the life of a criminal is worth more than the life of their victim. This is completely backwards.
Huge congrats to our Women's Gymnastics team for taking gold in Paris–especially our local hero Suni Lee!
Suni has been an amazing advocate for Minnesota and stopped by the Capitol last year to help bring the U.S. Gymnastic Trials to Minneapolis this June. https://t.co/iui0HWVUkppic.twitter.com/QE3GaEg37p
— Senator Nicole Mitchell (@Sen_NMitchell) July 31, 2024
Courtesy Senator Mitchell’s Twitter account
…the cringiest photo you’ve seen since that collection of seventies family photos you got tricked into looking at?
Second: She’s got no intention of leaving office, does she?
She’s got a plea deal in the work with some sympathetic prosecutor, she’ll plead down to “disorderly conduct” – really, no worse than Matt Wolgamott/Brion Curran/Dave Hutchinson/Julie Blaha driving drunk! Maybe even less! – and ride the issue out, and stay in office, until she gets a sinecure at some state agency – like, the state sentencing board, just to add hilarious insult to injury.
This is intended to go viral among the clubby environs of local blue-city media – in this case, the Star-Tribune’s – what’s a good adjective – pointless Jennifer Brooks, whose column about the issue…:
Brooks: GOP melts down after Walz calls Trump and Vance weirdness 'weird' https://t.co/BqRIHUb0eM
— The Minnesota Star Tribune (@StarTribune) July 30, 2024
“Melts Down?” Hey, we found where the “Dump Bachmann” people went when they molted!
…shows us what happened to those people who were writing all those “FIX INDIGESTION WITH THIS ONE WEIRD [!!!] TRICK” copywriters from ten years ago.
Did I say “clubby”?
.@stribrooks coming in hot!!! Not quite channeling the ghost of Nick Coleman yet, but on the same half of the bell curve.
This is, of course, a classic instance of Berg’s Seventh Law . They’re calling Republicans “weird” to deflect away from their very, very weird – no, bizarre – presidential candidate, at the head of a party that believes a lot of things that go way beyond “weird”.
Klink, of course, has been practicing the rookie-league Beria handbook for years:
Snitch Lines
“Badthink” databases
The relentless sorting and name-calling
Of course, Walz serves as governor solely at the sufference of the metro DFL establishment, which is increasingly dominated by actual socialists. He is nothing but their “moderate” beard.
But given Kamala Harris’s radicalism, will that be enough to get on the ticket?
SCENE: Mitch BERG is whacking weeds along his alley. He doesn’t notice Avery LIBRELLE, who appears to be inspecting peoples recycling bins for inappropriate material.
LIBRELLE: Merg!
BERG: Oh, shiiiiiure as I live and breathe, it’s Aver…
LIBRELLE: Shut up. Republicans are the worst possible combination of Nazis, Fascists and slave-owning Confederate traitors!
BERG: You don’t say.
LIBRELLE: I do – and so does America’s best governor and fun uncle, Tim Walz!
Tim Walz calls Trump a "threat to Democracy" and a "fascist" who will "put people's lives in danger" just two weeks after Trump survived an assassination attempt. pic.twitter.com/ssNQdGFqEr
To: America From: Mitch Berg, Obstreporous Peasant and American Re: Tim “Governor Klink” Walz
America,
Some of you – OK, most of you – may be getting your first introduction to Governor Tim Walz, as the noise machine frantically tries to position him as a viable VP candidate.
“Small town regular Joe” is one of the costumes he puts on, complete with an ancient International Scout and an NRA cap…
…well, no. He ditched the NRA cap when he had to power-suckup to the “progressive”/Democrat Socialists of America (DSA) wing of the party to beat back Erin Murphy and Erin Maye Quade in the primary in 2018. He still puts on the costume on occasion – the DFL sends a social media intern with him for pictures at the lake, or driving the Scout, or having Peggy Flanagan feed him a corn dog.
Anyway – if the news blitz is your first introduct5ion to Governor Klink, let’s go through some pros and cons of him and his administration.
Cons of Tim Walz
Led the plundering of an $18B surplus, leaving the state with what will likely be at least a $2B deficit later this year. Minimum.
Turned a deaf ear to the most epic wave of corruption in Minnesota history, as DFL stakeholders from the DSA non-profit/industrial complex pillaged a bare minimum of a half billion dollars worth of funds “intended” to “feed hungry children” during the pandemic…
…after having been equally incurious about at least $250M being piillaged by some of these same stakeholders from Health and Human Services budgets.
Like many governors, he assumed emergency powers in March 2020, when nobody knew muich about the pandemic. He announced that, according to the model he’d gotten from the Minnesota Department of Health, Minnesota faced upward of 70,000 deaths in the next four months – perhaps 20,000 as a best case scenario if the state shut down completely and submitted to draconian control of society. By May, it was clear that the model was wrong – at which time the administration declared the model double-dog top secret, because in the words of an MDH staffer at one of his press conferences, “people might reach different conclusions”. Y’know – try to reproduce results. Like actual scientists, as opposed to propagandists, do.
He created castes of “essential workers” – which included grocery store workers (but only at “big box” stores), liquor stores, “the World’s Largest Candy Store” (run by a campaign contributor, as luck would have it),
In particular, he instituted rules in nursing homes that created absolute carnage among seniors. Minnesota had among the worst death rates in the nation among people in long term care – up there with New York City. For this alone, I’ve got beef with the little fella – this happened right as my stepfather died and I needed to move my mom to Minnesota. There was a six month delay – which caused plenty of other problems.
Notwithstanding that the “emergency” was effectively over in three months – six if you want to be cautious to the point of paranoia – he held onto “emergency powers” for well over a year and a half.
After the death of George Floyd, he publicly sided with Floyd, long before any facts were known about the incident. Which contributed to the 2020 Riots.
During those 2020 riots, he followed his bureaucratically-defined role to an anal-retentive “T” – even publicly chiding Mayor Frey for not submitting a cover sheet on his TPS form when requesting the National Guard. But he ceded the “bully pulpit” to the rioters and their symps in state government . And to his daughter, who served as a source of intel for the rioters regarding police and Guard movements.
He also coddled lawlessness within government; when “protesters” tore down a statue of Christopher Columbus on the State Capitol Mall as his Capitol police looked on, he giggled until his belly jiggled like a bowl of jello.
He has actively contributed to the tribalizing of Minnesota politics.
On his watch, crime in Minnesota in general is up by at least 50% since he assumed office.
On the other hand, capital is leaving the state. Movers and shakers, entrepreneurs (other than coffee shops, which along with small political consultancies are the only for-profit businesses DFLers even pretend to understand), retirees – they’re leaving the state and taking their money with them. Minnesota’s net wealth is down by billions.
Young people are also leaving Minnesota, reversing decades of Minnesota as a destination for young people just getting started on careers and life. I was one of them, once. If I were me, today, and not seeking a career in government or the non-profit/industrial complex, I wouldn’t do it again.
(SCENE: Mitch BERG is at a kitchen store, recycling some Nespresso pods. Too late, he notices Avery Librelle.)
LIBRELLE: Merg!
BERG: Hey, Av…
LIBRELLE: Shut up. JD Vance’s real name is John David Bowman.
BERG: It was the name he was born with. He changed his name to his maternal grandparents name, “Vance”, when he was married.
LIBRELLE: Don’t care. Republicans are so diligent about never using new identities, so you should make sure you “deadname” him.
BERG: Go ahead. Give it a try.
(SENATOR VANCE walks past, looking for a wok).
BERG: Go for it.
LIBRELLE: (Mildly flustered). Senator Bowman!
VANCE: (Looks at LIBRELLE. Then BERG. BERG shrugs, rolls eyes. VANCE nods, walks on).
BERG: Nobody cares what someone wants us to call them. It’s being berated about it out of nowhere. Want to name yourself “Fido”, knock yourself out. Just don’t yap at me for not assuming you’re a dog, or threaten to destroy my career for not affirming that you’re really a dog. Seem reasonable?
LIBRELLE: No.
BERG: Because of course not. Hey (hands LIBRELLE the bag of used capsules) don’t let these spill, OK? For the good of the environment?
Last week, our intrepid news media were falling all over themselves trying to find Donald Trump’s medical records, to verify that he’d almost been shot in the head.
If it happened in Belarus, Burundi, or Myanmar, Joe Biden’s blitzkrieg withdrawal from the presidential race would have inspired eye rolls. We jettisoned an incumbent president’s re-election campaign with all the pomp of an NFL practice squad transaction, announcing the move via a blip of a social media post. Only in America is anyone tempted to take such head-scratching events at face value.
You think you hate the media – but it’s still not enough.
Kamala was in on it. She covered up Joe's obvious mental decline. Kamala knew Joe couldn't do the job, so she did it. Look what she got done: a border invasion, runaway inflation, the American Dream dead. pic.twitter.com/H3Oyew0ug9
My humble opinion – there’s no need to react to any of them differently, at least as individuals. they all different faces of the same machine; the same back-room figures who animated our current occupant in terms of policy will be pulling the levers and wires behind Harris, Newsom, Gretchen Whitmer.
There was, and may remain, about of speculation that Tim Walz could wind up on one of the potential VP short lists.
My fearless predication: if Walz oozes onto a ticket, it’ll be terrible news for Democrats, not merely because Walz is a chameleon who turns into whatever he needs to turn into for expediency’s sake – that’s no different than Harris, Newsom, Whitmer of any of them.
But there are two reasons to pick a Veep candidate:
Shore up a key state, region or constituency: That’s why Mike Pence, George HW Bush, not to mention Biden and Harris themselves, got their nods; to shore up the POTUS candidates support respectively among evangelicals, moderates, moderates and progressives.
To serve as the President’s political enforcer/”Bad Cop”: That was the purpose LBJ served for Kennedy, in terms of legislative support. I think it’s why Trump picked Vance.
HarrisNewsomWhitmer need the former; current polling shows them weak in all sorts of important states. Governors Josh Sharpiro (PA) and Andy Bashear (KY) could buoy a Democrat campaign’s chances in some key swing states.
What does Walz bring?
Minnesota.
A state the Democrats consider theirs as a birthright.
If the pick Governor Walz for Veep, that’s a sign the DNC is “breaking the glass”.
