Or the EMF generators they carry around with them in their pockets, A.K.A their phones.

Yeah, that was the single biggest Biden blunder of the evening, IMO. I was dumbfounded.

Biden has been conspicuously avoiding speaking at unscripted public encounters for quite a while now, though, and reading from an autocue at SotU is a far cry from having to react on the fly and put together coherent arguments in response to moderator questions and Trump's lies during a debate. I have the feeling Biden's staff knew full well that the debate was going to be rough going into it.

What happened is that Biden and his team completely screwed up. They called for this debate and agreed to its terms, which included the fact that the moderator team would not be fact checking Trump in order to avoid accusations of bias.

These terms shifted the onus of calling Trump out on his biggest lies to Biden himself, who would have known that Trump would try to gish-gallop his way through the debate and avoid discussing policy because that's precisely what he did in 2020. The fact that Biden failed spectacularly to counter Trump in any meaningful way is the reason why he lost the debate.

From the article:

A 2022 study found that of the 57 justices who have sat on the court over the past century, the six justices with the most pro-business voting records are the six members of today’s 6-3, rightwing super-majority, all appointed by Republican presidents

That's the point - they closed ranks and kept riding the Biden train whilst quietly hoping that no one would notice it was in danger of coming off the rails.

https://theintercept.com/2024/06/28/biden-debate-dnc/

Democrats have nobody to blame but themselves. They stayed mum for three and half years and now they’re reaping the whirlwind.

☝️

I'd say a good-sized part of it is simply the American preference for watching beautiful, weathly people doing beautiful, wealthy people things. Hollywood rom-coms and US TV shows in general clearly skew towards upper middle class settings when compared to the equivalents from, say, the UK.

In other words, I reckon US media prefer their fictional characters to be aspirational whereas other cultures prefer theirs to be relatable.

Calling Biden articulate is being incredibly generous. I mean, what on earth was he trying to communicate here?

Overall, Biden put in a very lackluster, unconvincing performance while Trump did his usual schtick of rambling off topic, lying through his teeth, and refusing to answer any questions on policy. The whole thing was a shambles.

I think Tlaib did a decent job at giving some kind of pushback, but it was particularly galling to see Moskowitz stand up and repeat Israeli propaganda without anyone calling him out on it.

In his speech, he alluded to misinformation that was debunked over a month ago: that the numbers from the Gaza Health Ministry were allegedly unreliable and that the numbers of dead civilians had recently been halved by the UN. Neither of these things were true, and so therefore he was either lying on Israel's behalf or he didn't care enough to do the appropriate research.

That's why they're running the disclaimers now - the trial hasn't been held yet and they're bracing themselves for impact.

Unlike Fox News, who could settle with Dominion for $787M and carry on as usual, Newsmax's pockets don't run nearly as deep. If the court rules against them in September, they'll most likely be utterly screwed.