Kagro in the Morning

David Waldman is back again plowing through another KITM cold bedraggled, and as all of us, undermedicated for the task at hand.

David was out with this cold on Friday, and I wrote a summary to an imaginary KITM. The summary to that summary: Tech bros created Spanish language dialect sensitive AI chatbots algorithm linked to young male Latino social media accounts based on what countries they follow in soccer, or any other niche criteria. They then had disinformation and conspiracy theories tailored specifically to them, but with the ultimate goal being GOTV for Donald Trump. Or to sum up that summary, while we were door-knocking, they were TikTokking.

So, President Donald Trump was… look, all that takes more typing than he’s worth. I’m going with D this term. D’s dictating his cabinet. No Hulk Hogan or Kid Rock, but he might be thinking SCOTUS with them. Susie Wiles will head up Apartheid when Elon’s busy and otherwise will be the focus of media fluff pieces on her grandmotherly charm. Elise Stefanik and Marco Rubio will… Wait, don’t they hate D? Doesn’t he hate them? Sure, they all hate each other. Never Trumpers are just Trumpers who haven’t been assigned a position yet.

Which brings us to Jonathan V. Last and the Bulwark, who urge us to let the Reich be the Reich, those things historically burn themselves out in around 4 years or so, no worries. Kevin Roberts, chief architect of Project 2025, hasn’t found a Reichstag to burn, but does have an otherwise well-rounded list of incendiary targets. Roberts has named the Boy Scouts and Loudoun Schools, but conspicuously snubbed David Waldman for his pyre. Schools urge parents to be more sympathetic to the sexual harassing children. Black people are urged to pick cotton.

Vladimir Putin is itching to take his new country out for a test drive, after all he was promised 24-hour delivery. The Russia-Ukraine war will be over in a day… that is, if no one else objects. Russian TV broadcast images of Melania Trump nude with the United States Seal behind her. If you want a picture of Melania with a Navy Seal behind her, it’ll cost you extra.

Judge Juan Merchan delayed his immunity decision in the NY hush money case, because, why not?

Phil Williams, who we needed 500 more of the last ten years, has joined Bluesky.

David Waldman, brought to you by Cold-EEZE®, brings us a Monday KITM.

How have we failed? Here, let Greg Dworkin count the ways. Turns out that we were all kinds of stupid until a few days ago, but far too dumb for it to dawn on us until now. We were idiots, idiotic in myriads of interconnected ways that will require this program and others years to explore in full. 

First mistake, we elected Joe Biden. Then we tried to elect a Black woman. I mean, what were we thinking? We simply forgot to pretend we were what we are not, which is either a tried and true political technique, or the reason that people hate politicians… one of those. The news will explain which one it is to us soon, I hope.

What do us dummies get for our lack of intelligence? A brand-new streamlined government that won’t ever need to slow down to get our opinions on everything. Heck, we won’t even need a president soon. President Musk… well, acting president Trump demands that the next Senate leader allow recess appointments, so that the next Senate leader can be the leader of nothing. Trump could skip the legislative branch to directly corrupt the judicial branch, thus more than doubling his available golfing hours... Elon already picked Rick Scott for Donald, so when is tee time?

The only thing we have going for us is that they are even more stupid, if that’s possible. Rudy Giuliani got a handout of $200 thousand to keep him from starving to death or ever having to apply for a SNAP card.

Not a great time to be stricken by a nasty cold, but that’s among the many unfortunate turns we’ve been dealt this week!   But we haven’t been carted away in irons just yet. We’ll be back on Monday. But until then, it’s another time-travel episode. As usual, the theme is “this time last year.” Because “what it was like last time we did this” was just too much.   A year ago today...   The collective sigh of relief here at KITM World Headquarters probably delayed our first local snowfall by weeks. Host David Waldman and Guest Star Greg Dworkin are here today to do whatever the opposite is of “fret” … (We might not have a word for that.)   We won. That is, we the people of the United States who care about democracy and what not. Dems romped, Gops flopped, pretty much everywhere, notably in Ohio, as voters knew Republican gaslighting by heart after seeing it being used to failure in state after state before them. Freedom and liberty continue to reign as the Buckeye State turns a new leaf. Ohio Republicans pledge to continue to fight freedom, liberty and the rights of individuals until their last breaths. Virginia won big by helping Glenn Youngkin lose big. Loudoun County of course did their state proud. Even Pennsylvania triumphed and extended their Democratic majority.   Pundits wonder if all this winning should worry Joe Biden and embolden Donald Trump, and someone continues to pay them. Someone keeps paying House Republicans also, including even Marjorie Traitor Greene. At least Marge is out there proposing some staff cuts.   Republicans understand that the biggest obstacle to their governing would be democracy, and no one is more behind that idea than Donald Trump. George Stephanopoulos would like to know where people stand on this before his interviews.   Hey, now that you’re in a good mood, isn’t it a great time to consider donating to one or more grassroots campaigns as we head into the Big One next November?

Let’s see… We lost Tester and Brown. We kept Greene and Boebert. And soon both Biden and Trump will be spending more time brushing up on their golf. Why does it feel like the math isn’t right? David Waldman and Greg Dworkin try to help cypher it out. 

First things first, whose fault is it? Maybe anti-incumbent sentiment drove voters to the former President running for his third or fourth term, or it was the insidious far left media… or maybe a plurality of dumbass voters just like Trump.

Young Latino males made a huge shift to Donald Trump. Was it economic anxiety? Racism? Sexism? Well, yes… but who motivated them to vote?

Gops win elections through voters who don’t trust the government. Therefore, once elected they will strive to make it less trustable. People made poor then vote for people to make them poorer.

Here in Ohio, there was a campaign to reduce gerrymandering, and a campaign to confuse voters about what they were voting for.  I can tell you that an issue that takes up more than 2 pages of a ballot to describe is pretty tempting to skip over. David can tell you about how this trick has been used before.

Will Trump go to jail? No. Will Trump be sentenced? No. Will anyone connected to Trump’s crime sprees go to jail? No… Other than Jack Smith, maybe.

The good news is that we won’t be reading all the Post and Times articles telling us it’s time to reach out to MAGA, across the aisle to Gops, pardon Trump to unite the country, etc. Otherwise, you know, it sucks.

Our bubble was fun and all while it lasted, but theirs turned out to be a bit more accurate. Probably because theirs now speaks in many national, regional, and local Spanish dialects, and we use Google Translate. It was Hispanic vs. Women’s outreach, and the women won when it was something that didn’t involve men, like pregnancy.

David Waldman showed up to work today, and Greg Dworkin had a Raft O’ Stories™, which we sunk in the harbor after we keelhauled the pollsters and fed them to sharks. 

Oh, a few items washed up on shore... Russian fake bomb threats, FBI impersonators, billionaire ratfuckers, bad cops, Supreme Court Justices with multiple allegiances… little things that used to feel kind of relevant but are simply microscopic compared to what’s next.

Wait, don’t leave sad! There must be some good news around here… Ann Johnson Stewart won a special election which gave DFL control of the Minnesota Senate! And uhm, Democrats broke the Republican supermajority in the North Carolina General Assembly! Hooray!

Want to relax, and escape the stresses of today? Take some time out with KITM and listen to David Waldman talk about politics for a couple of hours! (Sort of a “hair of the dog” solution.) If 2 hours aren’t enough, check out our archives! (Probably skip October - November 2016, just saying.)

This morning, Harris volunteers filled up six buses to head to Pennsylvania in order to… well, it depends on who you ask. Gop false electors returning after receiving their felony indictments probably suspect the worst, but all those people in line could be there for the dope drops.  Donald defines voter suppression as not voting for him and an offence punishable by… you know.

Tim Walz knows how to talk shop with voters, nice! What’s really nice is having Joan McCarter on to talk shop! If Joan knows who’ll be elected president, she’s not telling. She recommends checking in with the Center for Politics site. They don’t know either, but like Joan, they do know many things. So do the folks at Uncharted Blue. No matter how hardcore online you are, you might find some new voter day distractions at these places, and all the better to keep tabs on which states are protecting abortion rights. Joan also isn’t sure what has fallen out of Gop candidate Tim Sheehy lately, or at least, what it fell out of.

Marge Lamp, one of the nuts trying to ban fluoride back in the 60’s, was Ginni Thomas’ mother! Must have been something in the water…

You can’t say that Rudy Giuliani had learned nothing prosecuting the mob, but you can say that he hasn’t learned enough yet.

Elon Musk revealed that his $1 million dollar giveaway trolling wasn’t as illegal as thought, but twice as disgusting. So, Trump Media outsourced jobs to Mexico, what are you going to do about it, impose tariffs? JD Vance’s key adviser gets fired, says he was only joking, things just seem a lot funnier while high AF. A Trump field director was fired for being a White Nationalist. Cut off his head, and two more will pop up… cut off those, and it would be a start.

David Waldman and Greg Dworkin are on the air today with a new KITM, instead of quietly slipping across the border, a development that can only be interpreted to portend positively.

Have you heard? Pollsters actually receive paychecks for what they do! Now, now... Nates do work hard… to explain and rationalize their previous errors. But pollster Ann Selzer ain’t no Nate. Yesterday, Selzer startled the rest of her herd with the release of a poll showing a Kamala lead in Iowa! Perhaps Iowans woke up and decided to not be extremists, or perhaps it was women voters... Maybe it was the youth vote, or maybe the youths talking sense into the olds. The last-minute surge might signify some hard decisions, or some easy ones finally being made. Already, some of the polling herd is beginning to sidle up. Who knows the real why, but it does feel pretty good.

It also could be that Gops and Trump are demented MFers and voters are tired of giving them any more chances, money, or pity. Elon Musk has been overestimated for the millionth time. Lucky for him, Elon does have a buffer of several billion more. Over on the same end of the spectrum, RFK Jr. is planning to safeguard the nation’s precious bodily fluids, including our two most precious: Mountain Dew and mayonnaise. Calgary turned off the fluoride and now will invest millions to turn it back on again.

Donald Trump sure does look like he’s going down, however his troops might not have received the news. It’s not election day yet and they’re brandishing machetes, punching little old ladies, and blowing up drop boxes… not exactly unexpected. Donald has a few lawsuits cooking already with CBS and the Washington Post, which are heading to his first or second favorite judge, Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk. NBC, feeling good after landing a cameo by popular TikTok phenomenon Kamala Harris, is now throwing Donald a bone: TV King for 90 seconds.

RIP to this election’s Harambe, Peanut the Squirrel.

David Waldman counts down the days until Thanksgiving and Christmas… both due in about 4 days if all goes well…

Gops cut the money to monitor elections, making it much easier for MAGA to create problems. Trump’s Supreme Court skips Congress, the Constitution, precedence, whatever, to disenfranchise voters. Donald Trump relentlessly lies, cynically grifts, maniacally rants, and viciously threatens... Every. Single. Day. Donald Trump wants you to accept this as normal. And we are… at least half of us, or maybe, maybe, a few less than half of us. 10 years ago, the only thing normalized about Trump was his raping… Okay, his racism, fraud, criminal connections, ineptitude, too. Maybe a few more things… maybe a lot more things. Family man Elon Musk was considered a bit weird back in the day as well.

People who vote in person can be terrorized. People who use drop boxes can be terrorized as well. A so far pretty unsuccessful ballot box burner is being described as a balding 40-year-old white male against occupying Gaza, into metal crafts, and driving a Volvo on the streets of Portland… well, that cuts it down.

Meta’s weaknesses are many, as their defenses seem mostly reactive, and bots are designed to actively exploit them.

A Russian court ordered Google to pay $20 decillion, making Trump wish he went bigger in his $10 billion lawsuit against CBS. Donald will probably go quattuordecillion in his upcoming lawsuit against Trump Media. Kenneth Chesebro won’t be his lawyer, though.

They say that the only thing that can stop a bad government database of gun owners is a good government database of gun owners.

Tucker Carlson only wishes that the demons he sleeps with would have the common courtesy to trim their nails before they came to bed.

Happy Halloween! Even David “Wooooo” Waldman and Greg “Disquieting” Dworkin can’t scare us any more than we already are.

For Halloween, Donald Trump appeared in Wisconsin sporting his unwiped butthole face accessorized by a reflective vest and came so tantalizingly close to falling on his head before taking a ride in a garbage truck… in the front this time. Garbage-Man, Garbage-Man! Toss him into that garbage can. Blocking peen, any size, MAGA eats it up, just like flies! Look out! Here comes the Garbage-Man!

But wait… what do the polls say? They say it’s a close one, and about 10 people’s votes will count. Ah, but which 10 is now the question, eh? It’s time for some 19th Amendment solutions for our problems. More than half of us will vote before election day, with some surprising niches backing Kamala Harris, like Arnold Schwarzenegger! Who knows who will pop up tomorrow, but they probably won’t be for Donald Trump.

KITM Senior Amenities Correspondent Darwin Darko is not positively Yelping the Kamala Harris Eclipse overflow space experience but figures it could be a sign of her campaign’s overperformance.

Kamala is getting a few Halloween treats, so Gops are working on some Mike Johnson tricks to even things out. Yet, they keep forgetting to leave the bag on the step when they light it on fire to run away. The Trump Supreme Court is fine tuning their voter disenfranchisement with 1600 voters tossed to them from Glenn Youngkin.

Want to see something scary? Check out this North Carolina superintendent race.

We’re under a week to go! Well, under a week until we transition into Trump’s post-election chaos plans.

We’re also on Day 3 of fallout from the Madison Square Garden debacle. So it was high time that the Gop attempt to manufacture some counter-outrage. But it didn’t take, largely because Kamala Harris supporters turned out so, well, largely, at the Ellipse.

Greg Dworkin was on hand to round up the day’s news and themes, commentary on the strength of the economy, late-breaking state-of-the-race items, and of course, reminders of what’s at stake.

Quants will enjoy parsing the stats on early, in-person (EIP) voting, and some more of those polls that can’t actually tell you much.

Why can’t they tell you much? Well, we’ve got that, too.

Oh, and speaking of EIP voting, do you know why that’s so much better to do in Connecticut than voting absentee, now that it’s available to you? Greg does!

As if to signal the end of the Era of the Newspaper, Gannett and others now join the parade of non-endorsing papers. But the Gannett order goes much further than just their flagship, USAToday. And it also turns out that the manipulation at the LA Times goes much further, as well.

The panic is setting in over in the Trump camp, so the accusations are ramping up. And as you know, Every Republican Accusation is a Confession.™ So what are they confessing to? Well, in Pennsylvania, it’ll be fake video of “vote” tampering. In Minnesota, it’s just plain voter fraud. While in Indiana, it’s a ballot theft. By someone who was, just recently, on the ballot.

Somehow, though, repeatedly getting caught does not persuade Republicans that voter fraud — let alone large-scale voter fraud — would actually be quite difficult.

From TikTok World comes a reminder that even old news can be new news to somebody. In this case — because it’s TikTok — it’s “the kids.” And “the kids” are alright. Although we definitely feel their pain as they discover, for the first time as adults, the Access Hollywood tape. More specifically, what it means to find out that their fathers, uncles, brothers, pastors, etc. knew about this years ago, and have been voting for Trump ever since.

Still to come, if the story can break through some time in the near future: Elon Musk, immigration hypocrite. What? No way!