August 8, 2024

Florida Invests in Catastrophe

The Sunshine State is putting public pension money into risky bonds that transfer risk away from insurance companies.



https://prospect.org/environment/2024-08-07-florida-invests-in-catastrophe/



Florida is at the forefront of climate disaster, rattled by four major hurricanes since 2017 (Irma, Michael, Ian, and Idalia), which caused the deaths of almost 300 Floridians and resulted in hundreds of billions of dollars in economic losses. As flooding persists with regularity and warming waters facilitate increasingly severe hurricanes, the state has pursued a deregulatory approach to resuscitate its death-spiraling property insurance market. Not only have carriers fled Florida in droves, but numerous others have become insolvent amid climate catastrophe. In a bid to entice insurers to continue providing property insurance coverage, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis and the Florida legislature have implemented a series of reforms aimed at protecting consumers and reducing insured losses by clamping down on social inflation, the name the industry gives to perceived cultural factors that drive increases in monetary awards in litigation. The insurance industry and its captive regulators have been quick to lay the blame on fraudsters, unscrupulous contractors, overzealous lawyers, and even gullible juries for burdening consumers, the state, and insurers with superfluous costs.



But the market instability has been twisted to facilitate another form of greed, orchestrated by Gov. DeSantis and his political allies. In implementing what is best described as Florida’s property insurance playbook, the DeSantis administration has homeowners in the state paying more for less, insurers profiting off soaring premiums, and the state pension giant investing hundreds of millions of dollars in investment funds that provide insurance for insurance companies, effectively socializing the risk that property insurers have on their balance sheets, sometimes through high-risk, high-reward allocations to complex financial instruments known as catastrophe bonds. Florida’s playbook resembles the Republican playbook for addressing the home insurance crisis nationwide. As the Prospect reported earlier this year, Republicans have sought to deny climate change perils in their entirety, shift the blame to lawsuit abuse or socially responsible investing, and transform state-controlled insurance markets through market-friendly policies that allow insurers to rake in exceptional profits while gutting consumer protections.

ON MAY 15, 2024, GOV. DESANTIS signed a bill overhauling state energy policy and stripping any mention of ??climate change” from state law. In a post to X following the signing, DeSantis ridiculed “radical green zealots?? for seeking to address the climate crisis and reallocate taxpayer dollars toward clean-energy projects, environmental mitigation, and climate justice initiatives. “This bill is going to have a devastating impact on our ability to address climate change,” Brooke Alexander-Goss, organizing manager at the Sierra Club’s Florida chapter, told the Prospect. Alexander-Goss, a resident of Volusia County, fears the climate denial will exacerbate depopulation in Florida, where homeowners pay three times the national average for property insurance. Many prospective homebuyers consider climate risk when relocating to a new state or region, and may hesitate to pay excessive property insurance costs in dangerous regions. When Hurricane Ian made landfall in Florida in September 2022, Alexander-Goss’s neighborhood flooded. Although her home was not damaged, she saw her insurance premiums skyrocket. By the end of the year, six insurers had declared insolvency.

https://x.com/GovRonDeSantis/status/1790834198682480874
Homeowners whose carriers collapsed were left scrambling, causing many Floridians to turn to the Citizens Property Insurance Corporation—the state’s insurer of last resort, which provides coverage to an estimated 1.4 million homeowners who are unable to access policies on the open market. Over the two years leading up to Hurricane Ian, the number of homeowners receiving property insurance from Citizens had more than doubled. According to a July 2023 report from Milliman, a Seattle-based international actuarial and consulting firm, industry losses after Hurricane Irma in 2017 totaled $27 billion. But loss estimates from Ian averaged out to about $54 billion. As a May 2023 report from the Hedge Clippers, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), Florida Rising, and the Center for Popular Democracy explains, Gov. DeSantis’s policies have advanced the insurance industry’s goal of weakening Citizens, while simultaneously offering only unaffordable alternatives. Furthermore, a Florida Phoenix analysis of insurance handouts passed during the 2022 legislative session found that DeSantis’s policy changes “would drive customers of Citizens … into significantly pricier policies on the private market.”

snip

August 8, 2024

Dreaming Big Again: In which Democrats experience all-but-forgotten emotions -- joy, hope, unity

https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2024-08-07-dreaming-big-again/



Until Joe Biden agreed to step aside for Kamala Harris, I hadn’t quite appreciated the pit of dread and despair that we had fallen into. We were bracing for a second Trump term, and with it not just the end of American democracy but the loosing of all that is ugly in American life. As journalists, we were consumed by exploring the multiple ways that Trump could quickly turn America into a dictatorship. My last feature article examined how Trump could weaponize the IRS. It was depressing as hell. This election is far from over, but there is now a more than decent chance that we will be spared. Not just that we will be spared, but that as voters decide they’ve had enough of Trump’s sheer meanness and narcissism, Harris might even win big. And that prospect is energizing activism and turnout. Many of us have been experiencing feelings that were all but extinct—a sense not just that we dutifully need to support the ticket to stave off something worse, but genuine enthusiasm and excitement.

In the space of two weeks, the chatter about Harris has gone from “well, at least she is more coherent than Biden” to “hey, she is really good and she is rising to the occasion.” Harris turns out to be not only effective, but cool. Trump just can’t handle that. Tim Walz is a reminder that it’s possible for leaders to be culturally mainstream and substantively progressive—that the American dream is built on supports that only affirmative government can provide. Walz has perfectly captured the renewed sense of possibility by invoking, of all things, joy. Had Joe Biden spoken of joy, it would have been risible if not pathetic. Another unaccustomed experience is total party unity on the Democratic side. In the space of barely two weeks, we’ve gone from enervating fragmentation—with Democratic leaders doing everything possible to undermine their all-but-certain nominee until Biden finally took the hint—to universal embrace of the Democratic ticket.

I literally can’t remember a moment of such unity since Lyndon Johnson ran in 1964 against Barry Goldwater after the assassination of John Kennedy. And Johnson, the greatest progressive since FDR, was already starting to get sidetracked by Vietnam. A button distributed by Students for a Democratic Society at the Atlantic City Democratic convention that year captured the ambivalence: “Part of the way with LBJ.” Even in Barack Obama’s first election, in 2008, when there was such excitement and enthusiasm, the undertow of bitterness from the Clinton camp prevented the kind of unity that we are seeing this year. The possible defection of some on the left was neatly turned into enthusiastic support by Harris’s choice of Walz for running mate. Wonderfully, given his Jimmy Stewart life story, we have the sublime paradox that the left loves Walz for his policies but the Trump campaign finds it impossible to plausibly paint Walz as a dangerous lefty.

We are starting to dream big dreams again. Maybe Democrats can even keep the Senate, with a Harris landslide helping all of the incumbents keep their seats. If Harris wins big on a tide of increased turnout, it’s conceivable that Colin Allred could defeat the loathsome Ted Cruz in Texas. The latest polls show Cruz ahead by only about three points. Even in Florida, Democrat Debbie Mucarsel-Powell has been gaining on the Republican incumbent Rick Scott. If Harris does win big and brings with her both houses of Congress, then she can begin to deliver on her promises, repair democracy, and take on the daunting issues that have been all but sidelined by the intensity of the campaign—from intractable foreign-policy challenges in the Middle East and Ukraine to the scourge of global climate change. Then at least, with MAGA as a bizarre interlude in the nation’s past, we can be depressed about the real issues.

snip

August 8, 2024

Humphrey Without Vietnam, but More Down-Home: Tim Walz, in the best Minnesota traditions

https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2024-08-06-humphrey-without-vietnam-tim-walz/



Rural roots. High school social studies teacher. As coach, turned around losing high school football team and led it to state championship. Twenty-four years’ service in the state’s National Guard. Gun owner; hunts pheasants. As congressman, won historically Republican district six times. As governor, worked with the legislature and signed into law universal free breakfast and lunch program for public school students, paid sick and family leave, groundbreaking sectoral bargaining for nursing home employees, and first-in-the-nation outlawing of employers’ common practice of compelling employees to attend anti-union rants—all with just a one-vote majority in the state Senate. Coined a devastating (because accurate and simple) meme to describe Donald Trump & Co. If you’re a Democrat who understands the need to win back some of the rural and working-class voters who’ve moved right, not to mention the need to enact major progressive populist, pro-worker, and pro-choice legislation, what’s not to like about Tim Walz?

Kamala Harris’s decision earlier today to pick the Minnesota governor as her running mate was anything but devoid of political smarts. To be sure, picking Josh Shapiro would likely have helped in the must-win state of Pennsylvania, but it might also have guaranteed the kind of heckling from those opposed to Israel’s war on Gaza (only some of whom are anti-Israel and only some of them are antisemitic, too) that had been guaranteed at all of Joe Biden’s campaign events. That would have stepped on the story of Harris’s attacks on Trump’s past, present, and future. Besides which, when you consider Walz on his own merits, he’s both programmatically and politically the candidate from central casting. The Prospect has been chronicling the course of Minnesota’s progressivism and its leaders for a long time. In 2002, I covered Paul Wellstone’s last campaign just a few weeks before he was killed in a plane crash. In 2014, I covered the emergence of a labor-community coalition in the Twin Cities that knitted together service, retail, and construction unions with immigrant, civil rights, environmental, and pro-choice groups.

The goals of that coalition had to be put on hold for nearly a decade, however, as Republican control of one house of the state legislature continually thwarted their proposals. In 2022, however, not only was Walz re-elected as governor but the Democrats were able to cling to their narrow majority in the lower house and win a one-vote majority in the state Senate. Whereupon, as my colleague Ryan Cooper noted last year, the legislature passed and Walz signed into law new statutes that created paid sick days for nearly all workers, which will accrue at the rate of one hour per 30 hours worked up to a maximum of 48 hours; forbids noncompete agreements in labor contracts; establishes a sectoral bargaining system for nursing homes; allows teachers to negotiate class sizes; and bans “captive audience” meetings where employers force their workers to listen to anti-union propaganda. It also sets up new protections for meatpackers, construction workers, and Amazon employees. And a separate bill passed on Sunday guarantees a minimum wage for Uber and Lyft drivers.

In other words, second-term Walz had a first hundred days almost comparable to Franklin Roosevelt’s in 1933. Walz deserves huge credit for this—no other Democratic governor can claim a comparable level of success, much less with a one-vote majority in a legislative house—but so does the entire and very disparate Minnesota left, which had stuck together and worked together for nearly a full decade in preparation for such a day. Biden could have used that kind of unified push in his unsuccessful fight to enact his Build Back Better bill and the PRO Act, which would have effectively resurrected a pro-worker National Labor Relations Act. Walz, to be sure, wasn’t subjected to the same legislative roadblocks—the filibuster and Sens. Manchin and Sinema—that derailed Biden’s proposals. That said, Walz is still one hell of a veepick. In the best traditions of Minnesota’s progressive populism. Humphrey without Vietnam, but more down-home.

snip

August 8, 2024

Jenna Ortega Steps Into the Light

https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/story/jenna-ortega-cover-interview

https://archive.ph/IyvPt





On the eve of Wednesday’s cultural domination, “Tim” invited Jenna Ortega to his house for a meeting. I love when this happens in Hollywood conversations: casually, not even pretentiously, legends referred to by first names only, as Ortega does over a clandestine morning coffee. Here is Wednesday on a Sunday at Velvet, a moody cocktail bar at the Corinthia hotel in London.



Tim, in this case, is Tim Burton, the mad goth genius behind Edward Scissorhands and The Nightmare Before Christmas, and Wednesday’s director and executive producer. Even before the biting teen take on The Addams Family exploded into Emmy nominations and TikTok choreo and tween girls’ birthday party themes, the hallowed filmmaker wanted to talk to Ortega, his show’s then 20-year-old star, about a second season. She dutifully compiled ideas.



A week after that, Ortega arrived at Burton’s California home, the stuff of legend itself: “You walk in and it’s the huge throne from Alice in Wonderland.” Ortega sets the scene. “There’s a jar of eyeballs in the bathroom.” Burton is known to tote figurines, “his little creatures,” she says, in his pocket at all times. They small-talked, though Burton doesn’t really do small talk. A season two of Wednesday, yes, but first something else. “He just pretty much plopped a script in my hand,” Ortega says, “and it was Beetlejuice.”



Technically, it was Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, the sequel to Burton’s camp-horror 1988 original. Almost 40 years in the making, the film arrives this month and revives Michael Keaton from the undead alongside original cast members Winona Ryder and Catherine O’Hara, plus a terrifyingly vampy Monica Bellucci (with whom Burton is now in a relationship). An overcome Ortega thanked Burton and drove off, but after only 15 minutes, curiosity killing her, she pulled over on the Pacific Coast Highway, stared out over the rocks and sea, and then devoured the script: “Instantly I was like, ‘Oh man, they’ve done a thing here.’ ”

snip

August 7, 2024

ARCH ENEMY - The Watcher (OFFICIAL VIDEO) Female-fronted Swedish melodic death metal 🩵💛

August 7, 2024

Crow Jim: Project 2025's Obsession With Reverse Racism

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-08-07-crow-jim-project-2025-reverse-racism/



When you split your time between writing the history of American conservatism, and writing journalism about conservatism now, bouts of déjà vu are an occupational hazard. Last week, one had me flashing back to the days of disco. Roy Cooper is the Democratic governor of North Carolina. His lieutenant governor, Mark Robinson, is one of the most terrifying authoritarians in the Republican bestiary, the guy who recently told a church audience that “some folks”—in context, he appeared to be including liberals who want to “cancel you” and “kick you off social media”—just “need killing.” Under North Carolina’s constitution, this is the person who becomes acting governor any time the governor goes out of state. That is why Cooper announced he was withdrawing his name from consideration to be Kamala Harris’s running mate—because every time he left the Tar Heel State to campaign, he feared the same thing would happen that happened to Jerry Brown after his re-election as California’s governor in 1978.

A colorful Republican record producer named Mike Curb had won the race for lieutenant governor. He had been specifically recruited to run, he revealed in his memoir, precisely to make it harder for Brown, who Ronald Reagan’s advisers believed would be harder to beat than Jimmy Carter, to run for president while simultaneously running the state. California, you see, had a similar provision in its state constitution. Just as soon as Brown traveled to Washington to testify on the California gasoline shortage, Curb started appointing Republican lawyers to lifetime judicial appointments. You really must have just fallen out of the coconut tree if you think the GOP only started hating democracy when Donald J. Trump arrived on the scene. I felt similar déjà vu when Republicans started calling Kamala Harris a “DEI hire.” The charge is as old as the civil rights movement itself. Back then, they called it “reverse racism,” or “Crow Jim”: same thing as Jim Crow, only with the object of oppression reversed—get it? The jargon changed, but the principle is the same: Any effort at equity for minorities is “racism” against whites: affirmative discrimination, as the title of a 1975 book by the neoconservative Harvard social scientist Nathan Glazer put it. You saw that last week when Elon Musk momentarily banned the jocularly named “White Dudes for Harris” account from X, because, after all, X doesn’t allow “racists.”

This same snot-nosed fallacy absolutely saturates Project 2025. On page 692: The Biden administration’s “‘equity’ agenda” is “racist.” On 342: “officials should protect educators and students in jurisdictions under federal control from racial discrimination by reinforcing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and prohibiting compelled speech.” Translated from wingnut-ese, they aim to compel teachers in schools run by the Bureau of Indian Education, or schools on military bases, not to speak about the racist parts of the American past. To do otherwise would be racist. This old-time religion threads its way through the chapters on the Departments of Labor (582), Education (336, 342, 348, 358), HHS (495), Treasury (708), State (88), Defense (103), the National Security Council (51), USAID (279)—and, naturally, Dr. Ben “Totally Not a DEI Hire” Carson’s chapter on the Department of Housing and Urban Development (515). The solution, naturally, is “colorblindness.” The same thinking is present in the document’s many attacks on measuring “disparate impact,” the civil rights enforcement technique of measuring discrimination by results rather than impossible-to-discern evidence of intent. Counting how many minorities are represented in a given institution in order to build a case that they are being discriminated against is bad, because “crudely categorizing employees … fails to recognize the diversity of the American workforce.” We’ve noted that quotation before. Mark it well. We’ll return to it.

IN LARGE PART, A REAGAN-ERA HERITAGE FOUNDATION STAFFER who fell asleep on a Friday and woke up exactly 40 years later would be able to return to work the following Monday. All he would need is a copy of the Project 2025 version of Mandate for Leadership and a glossary. He’d surely be delighted to read how much of the language he and his colleagues came up with back then (“During the past 15 years there has been a concerted nationwide effort by professional educationalists to turn elementary school classrooms into vehicles for liberal-left social and political change in the United States”) finds exact echoes today (“Large swaths of the department have been captured by an unaccountable bureaucratic managerial class and radical Left ideologues who have embedded themselves throughout its offices and components.”). Other stuff, though, would require several years of Fox News highlight reels before he could make heads or tails of it. Far more than in 1981, the date of Heritage’s first Mandate for Leadership, to be a conservative in 2024 demands fluidity in an entire parallel reality. This is no more harrowingly the case than in Project 2025’s chapter on the Justice Department—from which our Republican Rip Van Winkle would come away learning that one of the two or three gravest challenges for law and order in the United States is “violent attacks on pregnancy care centers.”

snip

August 7, 2024

Tim Walz: From Small-Town Minnesota to the Campaign Trail

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-08-06-tim-walz-kamala-harris-running-mate/



As of two weeks ago, the only more unlikely political campaign in America than Harris for President was Walz for Vice President. But now that’s a reality. Six-term backbenchers in the House and governors from Upper Midwest states far from the Acela corridor don’t often make this kind of rapid dash to the center of American politics. How did Tim Walz do it? I’m sure a lot of people would attribute it to one word: “weird,” which has become a Walz catchphrase. But while single-handedly turning around Democratic messaging overnight is noteworthy—and a refreshing return to Democrats talking like human beings and not people reciting a dissertation—I don’t think that’s what triggered the decision. Being good on TV is something Walz can do as a surrogate. And in a copycat business, any advantage from novel messaging is likely already gone; other VP candidates could pick that line of argument up. Walz brings other attributes to the ticket.

Yes, he’s a down-to-earth speaker who can connect with Midwestern voters, a crucial need in two battleground states, Wisconsin and Michigan. He was also a frontline Democrat in the House for 12 years, who in 2016 won a district that Trump took by 15 points. The frontliner mentality to put yourself in the position to win elections adapts well to a national campaign. And in Walz’s case, that didn’t mean just voting conservatively; he knows how to message good and popular ideas for all audiences. Having ties to longtime House members will help with governing; Walz had more congressional experience than any of the other VP candidates under consideration. His military record—he was a noncommissioned officer in the Army National Guard, and the ranking member of the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee, also making him the highest-ranking enlisted man ever to serve in Congress—could be an asset as well. But it’s Walz’s experience as governor of Minnesota that would be most helpful to Harris as a partner. In a best-case scenario, a President Harris will step into the same situation that Walz did in his second term in Minnesota, with a thin legislative advantage and a public desire for real advances.

Walz’s improbable success in governing with a one-seat majority in the state Senate, and not much more in the state House, may have been an important factor in his favor. Plus, the details of what Walz and the Democratic legislature in Minnesota got done look a lot like what Harris appears to want to get done in her first two years: focusing on child development and family care. Walz signed legislation giving paid sick leave for nearly all workers, as well as a paid family and medical leave law, with up to 12 weeks in benefits and a progressive replacement rate, where poorer Minnesotans get a higher percentage of their income while on leave. His 2023 budget included a $1.5 billion expansion of the child tax credit worth up to $3,000 per family. His 2024 education law expanded public funding for pre-kindergarten to 12,360 seats, and funded increases to the supply of child care. Long-term care and nursing home investments, Head Start grants, and “early learning scholarships” for preschool have also been part of Walz’s budgets.



These are all state-level versions of the key elements of the Build Back Better agenda that were left behind in 2022. While they are not perfect—the work history requirement of $3,500 in income is suboptimal, because mothers without work history need money even more—in other areas Walz recognized and advocated aggressively for universality, like with the free school breakfast and lunch program. “This just makes sense,” Walz said at the bill-signing ceremony at a local school, citing the improvement over the previous system, where families had to attest to income and sign up for a reimbursement program to get free meals. “This is the assurance that no one falls through the cracks because a busy parent didn’t fill out a form.” That recognition is critical to more effective government, to taking away the “time tax” that often comes with means-tested programs. And it will be critical to deliberations over the signature legislation of a potential Harris presidency. The messaging helps too; the “happy warrior” ebullience of Walz’s successes in Minnesota harks back to another of the state’s vice presidents, Hubert Humphrey.

snip

August 7, 2024

44 days until early voting starts in some states

https://ballotpedia.org/Early_voting_dates,_2024



Minnesota 11/5/2024 9/20/2024 11/4/2024 Source
South Dakota 11/5/2024 9/20/2024 11/4/2024 Source
Virginia 11/5/2024 9/20/2024 11/2/2024 Source

Illinois 11/5/2024 9/26/2024 11/4/2024 Source

Vermont 11/5/2024 10/1/2024 11/4/2024 Source

California 11/5/2024 10/7/2024 11/5/2024 Source
Montana 11/5/2024 10/7/2024 11/4/2024 Source
Nebraska 11/5/2024 10/7/2024 11/4/2024 Source

Indiana 11/5/2024 10/8/2024 11/4/2024 Source
New Mexico 11/5/2024 10/8/2024 11/2/2024 Source
Ohio 11/5/2024 10/8/2024 11/3/2024 Source
Wyoming 11/5/2024 10/8/2024 11/4/2024 Source

Arizona 11/5/2024 10/9/2024 11/1/2024 Source

Georgia 11/5/2024 10/15/2024 11/1/2024 Source

Iowa 11/5/2024 10/16/2024 11/4/2024 Source
Kansas 11/5/2024 10/16/2024 11/4/2024 Source
Rhode Island 11/5/2024 10/16/2024 11/4/2024 Source
Tennessee 11/5/2024 10/16/2024 10/31/2024 Source

North Carolina 11/5/2024 10/17/2024 11/2/2024 Source

Washington 11/5/2024 10/18/2024 11/5/2024 Source

Massachusetts 11/5/2024 10/19/2024 11/1/2024 Source
Nevada 11/5/2024 10/19/2024 11/1/2024 Source

Alaska 11/5/2024 10/21/2024 11/5/2024 Source
Arkansas 11/5/2024 10/21/2024 11/4/2024 Source
Colorado 11/5/2024 10/21/2024 11/5/2024 Source
Connecticut 11/5/2024 10/21/2024 11/3/2024 Source
Idaho 11/5/2024 10/21/2024 11/1/2024 Source
South Carolina 11/5/2024 10/21/2024 11/2/2024 Source
Texas 11/5/2024 10/21/2024 11/1/2024 Source

Hawaii 11/5/2024 10/22/2024 11/5/2024 Source
Missouri 11/5/2024 10/22/2024 11/4/2024 Source
Utah 11/5/2024 10/22/2024 11/1/2024 Source
Wisconsin (Fall) 11/5/2024 10/22/2024 11/3/2024 Source

West Virginia 11/5/2024 10/23/2024 11/2/2024 Source

Maryland 11/5/2024 10/24/2024 10/31/2024 Source

Delaware 11/5/2024 10/25/2024 11/3/2024 Source

Florida 11/5/2024 10/26/2024 11/2/2024 Source
Michigan 11/5/2024 10/26/2024 11/3/2024 Source
New Jersey 11/5/2024 10/26/2024 11/3/2024 Source
New York 11/5/2024 10/26/2024 11/3/2024 Source

District of Columbia 11/5/2024 10/28/2024 11/3/2024 Source

Oklahoma 11/5/2024 10/30/2024 11/2/2024 Source

Kentucky 11/5/2024 10/31/2024 11/2/2024 Source

August 6, 2024

Get off the couch, Vance!

August 6, 2024

"Second-Tier Rapper"-- Trump / Vance Campaign Attacks Megan Thee Stallion

Team Trump directly attacks one of the most popular entertainers on the planet

https://meidasnews.com/news/second-tier-rapper-trump-vance-campaign-attacks-megan-thee-stallion


The Trump / Vance campaign has officially attacked Megan Thee Stallion, calling the superstar a "second-tier rapper." The attack appeared in the Trump / Vance campaign's Palm Beach Playbook newsletter on Monday on Trump's official campaign page.



In a section falsely claiming the Kamala Harris campaign lied about their empty seats, Trump's campaign implied that the only reason the arena was full was that "Kamala essentially bribed people to see her speak with a free concert." The newsletter also embedded a tweet from Trump staffer Steven Cheung stating Trump "didn't need entertainers twerking on stage to sellout an arena," a dig at dance moves performed by Megan Thee Stallion.





In photos reviewed by MeidasTouch, there were several seats empty when Trump's Atlanta rally started and while he was speaking. More opened up at Trump continued to speak on and on about his grievances. Perhaps some entertainment would have also kept people from leaving before Trump concluded speaking.



Megan Thee Stallion was the only entertainer to perform at Kamala's rally, and Trump's newsletter launched the "second-tier rapper" attack on her without mentioning her by name. Far from being a "second-tier rapper," Megan Thee Stallion sells out stadiums, and has received over 50 worldwide music awards, including 3 Grammys and 4 American Music Awards.



snip