Welcome to the second edition of The Runback. Complete with a cool new logo.
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News and Politics
Make ‘em Pay: If Democrats want to knowingly pass unconstitutional laws, they should be personally financially liable for the state's costs
On Juneteenth…: Let’s not forget about human trafficking, which continues today.
Sunlight Needed for Police Misconduct Cases: Maryland is one of 23 states in which police disciplinary records are kept hidden from view.
Rick Wilson Jumps The Shark: One Republican anti-Trump operative has beclowned himself in the silliest possible way.
Sports
Lamenting the Universal DH: Talking about the DH with Father Keanu. Would Babe Ruth even be Babe Ruth had the DH existed in 1915?
My Dinner With Arte: A True Insider Look at The Challenges of Baseball Ownership.
What Does the Taulia Tagovailoa Signing Mean for Maryland Football? It means more than you think. It makes College Park a destination.
The Top 20 Multi-Sport Uniform Power Rankings Part 2: Play Brass Bonanza.
Entertainment
The High Gear Of Your Soul: A Beginner’s Guide To Phish: The greatest thing about Phish is that you can’t ever understand Phish.
Cheap Plugs
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I appeared on the Dr. Politics & The Political Architects show talking Trump, Juneteenth, and more.
My column in The Capital discussed Anne Arundel County’s budget.
The Monday Thought
There is no better confluence of the inanity of modern politics than the “controversy” surrounding President Donald Trump’s rally in Tulsa Saturday night.
I’m not going to parade the links around because there are various links from various sides making various arguments all around the internet and I’m not Google. However, here’s the rough sketch of what is known to be true:
The Trump Campaign claimed over 1,000,000 ticket requests were submitted for the Tulsa rally;
The Trump Campaign prepared plans for both the President and Vice-President Mike Pence to address the overflow crowd outside the BOK Arena in Tulsa who could not make it inside.
A decentralized network of teenagers who oppose President Trump claimed to have requested millions of tickets to the rally.
Barely one-third of the BOK Arena was full and there were multitudes of empty seats clearly visible all around the arena during the rally.
Those are the things that we know to be true. And it shows just how asinine modern politics really are. To wit:
Everything about this is an own goal for the Trump Campaign. They were spiking the touchdown all week about how many requests they received for tickets to the rally, pretending that it was some sign of strength for their campaign. Instead, they raised expectations to an absolutely absurd level so that there was nothing that could logically explain the attendance away when they couldn’t fill more than a third of the building in a reliably red state like Oklahoma. Maybe if they had kept their mouths shut they’d have a way out. Maybe if the campaign, from the staff members all the way up to the President, took the COVID-19 pandemic seriously, they could have avoided some of this embarrassment. But since Trump sets the tone and the tone is bluff by bombast, they got stuck with this.
Even after the fact, the Trump campaign couldn’t get out of their own way. Take a look at this.
Wow. @TeamTrump just blasted out this statement from @parscale denying that any TikTok teens/K-Pop stans had an effect on the campaign's actions.Brad Parscale makes a lot of money from his job and it seems very clear that he just gave away the entire freaking game. Apparently, they aren’t smart enough to realize they just admitted to kayfabing their entire rally registration plan. Why have people register for a rally which tickets aren’t even required? So they can collect emails for their database and to push their Trump App to those who sign up. Now, Parscale is just telling people that there is never a need to actually register for a rally and there is less reason to sign up to join Trump’s email list. Will that make an impact on the average Trump voter? Probably not. But somebody who is Trump curious who might want to see a Presidential rally might sign up in order to guarantee access, and those voters now know they don’t need to sign up to come and to get their name on the list. Trump guys can’t get out of their own way. Again:
Meanwhile, on the other side of the aisle, the media and those on the left are treating these TikTok Teens like they’re done something. The kids managed to spam a mailing list with email addresses, probably fake ones, to try to disrupt a Trump Rally that would never have been disrupted by their actions in the first place. These kids aren’t exactly storming The Bastile here. The Trump Campaign will likely scrub the bad data before they use it anyway. The only thing these kids really accomplished was helping play into the Trump campaign’s pre-existing hubris, which they likely would have done anyway given the propensity for Trump and his campaign to lie about the size of everything.
Trump supporters on Facebook and elsewhere on the internet claiming that these teenagers “sabotaged” the rally. Seriously, there are stories from “conservative” “media” who are claiming this if it’s some sort of fact or even vaguely factual. This despite all of the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, including statements from the Trump campaign itself.
And then there are the people on Facebook, also “conservatives”, who are claiming that this TikTok prank somehow shows that mail-in absentee voting isn’t safe, which raises my blood pressure to unhealthy levels thanks to the mental jiujitsu necessary to come up with such a wrong conclusion.
The biggest takeaway from Tusla is how unprepared we are to have a serious conversation about serious things. We are stuck with a totally unserious and uncurious lifelong Democrat pretending to be a Republican running head-on into left-wing politicos and activists who are just as unserious and uncurious. They don’t understand their own side of the argument, much less the opposition argument, hence the devolution of yet another campaign into abstract yelling in an effort to “own” the other side.
Somebody pass the Brawndo.