Pun Salad

Maybe I'll just find a different joint, the bartender looks kinda sus.

Our weekly look at what the oddsmakers think:

So it's close, but Kamala maintains, and improves, her advantage a bit.

And you'd think Trump would realize that he's got his base, he doesn't need to throw them any more red meat, he needs to appeal to some undecideds.

Or maybe he just doesn't want to win.

Also of note:

• Meanwhile, we're gazing into the abyss. And the abyss is gazing also into us, checking focus group responses, and asking for our vote. Scott Johnson risked looking at the Oprah/Kamala town hall, which demonstrated The art of vacuity.

  Oprah Winfrey moderated a 90-minute love-in online for Kamala Harris this past Thursday evening in Michigan. In case you missed it, the White House has posted the transcript here and Forbes has posted the whole thing on YouTube (video at the bottom). The New York Post covered it in this story by Diana Glebova.

  No one can afford to shed the brain cells that will be lost by those who dare to take in the whole thing. It is an embarrassment to the United States, if not to humanity. With help from the gentlemen who brought us Barack Obama, Harris has perfected the art of vacuity.

  At my age, I especially can't afford brain cell loss. But at the transcript, I used control-F to count

  • 4 "ambition/ambitions"
  • 7 "dream/dreams"
  • 3 "aspirations"

  More concrete matters? "Inflation" shows up once, only in the charge that Trump's tariffs would cause more of it. (Accurate enough.) She mentions "price gouging" twice (she's gonna be "taking on" that.)

  Zero occurances of Gaza, Israel, Palestine (or Palestinians), Ukraine, China, Social Security, Medicare, antisemitism, …

  And there was a certain amount of "acceptable" child exploitation:

  MS. WINFREY: Fifteen-year-old Natalie Griffith and her parents, Doug and Marilda, are here. And, Natalie, we are so sorry to know that you, too, have been added to that number because you were in algebra class when you were shot twice by a 14-year-old fellow student.

  We’re so glad that you lived to tell your story. And so, how are you tonight?

  If only there were laws against shooting people in algebra class!

  Bottom line: it was, indeed, vacuous.

• For sufficiently small values of "funny". Jeff Maurer thinks Bret Stephens is being mean to Kamala. But also thinks: It Would Be Funny if Harris Called Bret Stephens' Bluff. On his NYT perch, Stephens posed numerous queries he'd like Kamala to answer, including:

  What does Kamala Harris think the United States should do about the Houthis, whose assaults on commercial shipping threaten global trade, and whose attacks on Israel risk a much wider Mideast war?

  Now Maurer is not a huge Kamala fan, but he really despises Trump. (He doesn't have much to say for those of us who think it's a very close call on who's worse.) Still, he offers a suggested answer

  The first thing I’ll do about the Houthis will be to read the briefing paper that my staff gives me about the Houthis. This would differentiate me from my opponent, who famously responds to briefings the same way that a dog responds to taking its earworm medication. My next act would be to turn to an adviser and say “thoughts?”, and that adviser will be some glasses-wearing egghead who was on everyone’s short list of Stodgy Foreign Policy Dweebs. That adviser will not be Omarosa or Laura Loomer or Rudy Giuliani or Linda McMahon or Jared Fucking Kushner or God knows who else — that “black Nazi” porno dude in North Carolina, perhaps? I’m not quite sure what will happen after that, but my administration will already be on a trajectory towards a sane decision that the clown car of dyspeptic freaks that my opponent will assemble could never replicate.

  I think that would be a pretty good answer. I still wouldn't vote for her.

  By the way, the word "Houthis" also did not show up in the Kamala/Oprah transcript.

• Don't worry, be happy. Because, according to Noah Rothman (in this NR gifted link) Kamala Harris Is on Autopilot. He's looking at the substantive questions Kamala "parried" from the National Association of Black Journalists.

  The panel interviewing Harris appeared to become frustrated with her vagueness when she was asked to explain what her administration would do to curtail gun violence. The vice president retreated to the need for “universal background checks” when her interlocutor noted that her go-to on the issue of guns, an assault-weapons ban, would only “address a significant but small part of the problem.” But Harris was interrupted when she extolled the virtues of “reasonable” checks on firearms purchasers. “I’m asking specifically about handguns,” said NPR host Tonya Mosley. To this, Harris established her bona fides by reminding voters that she herself “protested at a gun show” in opposition to “the gun-show loophole.”

  Harris repeatedly cited the potential for would-be criminals to evade detection by purchasing firearms at “flea markets” — a specter the Biden administration invoked when it tasked the Justice Department with crafting new rules designed to extend the new background checks passed into law in 2022 to all for-profit gun sales. A federal judge blocked that rule in May on the grounds that it violated “safe harbor provisions” for most gun owners who engage in private transfers. Harris didn’t reconcile the unconstitutionality of her policy preferences with her desire to see Congress do what the White House could not. Rather, Harris once again defended her failure to think through the issue more deeply. “There are very few solutions that we haven’t thought of,” she insisted.

  Rothman's bottom line: "Americans didn’t learn much about Harris from this interview, though they may have gained a fuller understanding of why she doesn’t do many interviews."

• Welcome to Panderfest 2024! Jim Geraghty sounds slightly amazed at his own headline: Now Trump Wants Limitless State and Local Tax Deductions. His Corner post in its entirety:

  “I will turn it around, get SALT back, lower your Taxes, and so much more!” Republican nominee Donald Trump declared on Truth Social Tuesday. He’s probably really irked at the guy who signed the $10,000 limit on state and local tax deductions into law, which was… er, Donald Trump, back in 2017.

  Under current law, an “individual’s deduction of state and local income, general sales, and property taxes is limited to a combined total deduction of $10,000, $5,000 if married filing separately.” Plenty of taxpayers in blue states pay considerably more than $10,000 in state and local taxes combined. It’s a high priority for Republican House members in blue states; most Republicans in red states see no point in efforts to change the limit on the SALT deduction.

  I’ve flipped back and forth on the SALT limit. It’s easy to see why wealthier blue state taxpayers are an easy and satisfying target for increased tax revenues. But in the 2016 campaign, Republicans barely mentioned it on the campaign trail and didn’t mention it in the party platform, and blue state Republicans deserve tax relief, too. If you enact policies that spur tax-sensitive right-of-center voters to move out of blue states, you make life easier for the tax-hiking Democratic elected officials who remain.

  Beyond that, Trump’s flip-flop again demonstrates that the 2024 presidential campaign is a bidding war – no taxes on tips, no taxes on overtime, no income taxes on Social Security. No one worries about the deficit, no one worries about the debt.

  I rarely disagree with Geraghty, but I've never "flipped back and forth" on this. To quote Eric Boehm from back in 2021: "Repealing the SALT cap would add roughly $500 billion to the deficit. Whose taxes do you want to raise instead to close that gap?"

• Probably thought "baseless" meant "popular with our base" or something. Jacob Sullum notes J.D. Vance Promoted Rumors of Pet-Eating Immigrants Even After Learning They Were 'Baseless'

  "Reports now show that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn't be in this country," Sen. J.D. Vance (R–Ohio), Donald Trump's running mate, averred on X the morning of September 9, referring to rumors that Haitian immigrants were eating stolen cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio. That same morning, Springfield City Manager Bryan Heck told The Wall Street Journal, a Vance staffer called to ask him, "Are the rumors true of pets being taken and eaten?"

  Heck's response was unequivocal: "I told him no. There was no verifiable evidence or reports to show this was true. I told them these claims were baseless."

  Heck's rebuttal did not stop Vance from re-upping those claims the very next day. "My office has received many inquiries from actual residents of Springfield who've said their neighbors' pets or local wildlife were abducted by Haitian migrants," he wrote on the morning of September 10. Perhaps based on his staffer's belated attempt at fact checking, Vance acknowledged that "it's possible, of course, that all of these rumors will turn out to be false." Still, he said, that possibility should not dissuade his "fellow patriots" from spreading those rumors: "Keep the cat memes flowing."

  For the 243d time this year, I'm wondering "What the heck is wrong with that guy?"