Rain in the Sahara

A week ago FishOutofWater of the Daily Kos community and of Climate Change SOS wrote that quite a bit of rain has been falling in the Sahara Desert. Yes, it is one of the driest places on earth. It has been a desert for about five millennia. Some places there get rain perhaps once a decade.

In normal years the subtropical high pressure area, a heat dome, sits relentlessly over the Sahara. The sands are so reflective, the air so dry and the ground is so hot that heat is actually lost to space over the Sahara under normal conditions. ... But this summer something is different. The waters of the north Atlantic are relatively hot while the waters of the south Atlantic are relatively cool. And the waters of the Indian ocean on the east coast of Africa are very warm. And the Mediterranean sea is hot. The high heat content of the north Atlantic and the Mediterranean sea has affected the atmospheric circulation patterns bringing exceptional heat to far northern Europe and allowing the heat dome over western north Africa to break down, bringing monsoon moisture north into the Sahara desert.

The good news is this has disrupted the formation of hurricanes. There have been a lot fewer this year. The bad news is a more humid Sahara means more water vapor in the atmosphere and that is a strong greenhouse gas. On Sunday Mark Sumner of Kos discussed the nasty guy’s claim that schools are performing gender reassignment surgeries on students without parental permission. Instead of simply ignoring such a bizarre claim, CNN decided to fact-check it. First, there is no evidence of this happening. No one has reported an instance of it. Second, school nurses are barely willing to hand out an aspirin without parental permission.

And when CNN asked Trump’s campaign for examples of the “transgender thing” their candidate was pushing, the outlet didn’t receive any. Instead, a Trump spokesperson insisted that she had personally talked to parents who were upset after learning that their children were “being called entirely different names” at school. Somehow, that doesn’t seem like the same thing.

We’re not surprised to learn the nasty guy lied. Alas, some conservative groups are delighted with the lie, such as Tiffany Justice, co-founder of Moms for Liberty. She doesn’t care if it is true. She cares whether audiences will be outraged by it. Which is why the nasty guy will keep repeating it. JP tweeted:

As a conservative voting for Harris, someone asked what policies of hers I actually liked. I like the one where she didn’t call to terminate the constitution to overturn an election her own legal team repeatedly told her she’d lost. Mainly that one. When choosing between someone I disagree with on policy and someone that tried to overturn an election to unlawfully stay in power like some 3rd world dictator, it’s an easy choice.

A week ago Sumner pondered if everyone hates JD Vance why is the nasty guy campaign thrilled with him? His weird comment are frequent and repeated and he will be out campaigning to say them a lot more. The Bulwark said Vance is still there because he’s an asset in turning out the base, not win over liberals or even persuade moderates. But there are problems with that. This election isn’t so much about turning out the base, but in reaching out to the middle. And the nasty guy is terrible at reaching out to the middle – see his many flip-flops on abortion rights. At the start of this week Sumner reported the nasty guy claimed that 20% of mail-in votes in Pennsylvania are fraudulent. But how can he claim they are fraudulent if they haven’t been sent out yet?

Trump’s claim about Pennsylvania doesn’t represent concern over votes in the state. Just as in 2016 and 2020, Trump is lying about voter fraud or a “rigged election” far in advance of Election Day. He’s preparing to lose and prepping his followers to repeat the kind of actions seen in 2020 to perpetuate the Big Lie.

In a pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin included a couple good quotes. First, from Peter Hamby of Puck talking about how hard it is to reach a large number of voters:

That much-hyped Harris interview on CNN with Dana Bash? More than a third of swing state voters (34 percent) didn’t know it happened. More than half of voters (53 percent) haven’t seen or heard any of Trump’s many podcast interviews this year. Almost half of battleground state voters (43 percent) said they’ve never seen or heard a Harris meme on social media. As I wrote a few weeks back, TikTok gets a lot of press coverage. But TikTok, like Twitter, Is Not Real Life.

Second, a tweet from Tim Alberta discussing the debate:

One way to look at it: ABC moderators fact-checked Trump 2-3 times and Harris zero times Another way to look at it: ABC moderators fact-checked Trump 2-3 times instead of 500 times

In the comments exlrrp posted two memes with the same image of Putin and Kim of North Korea with a bottle of alcohol as seen through a hotel room door peep hole. One says, “Open up it’s your homies... heard you had a bad night.” The other says, “Hey asshole... why you let a girl beat you up?” That debate was split-screen. Both candidates were visible the whole time. And Harris did a fine job of using facial expressions to respond to the absurdities spouted by the nasty guy. She didn’t need to say a thing. WTFGOP posted a chart to decode her expressions. And a ways down in the comments is a cartoon from The New Yorker Humor. It shows a man in a highly decorated uniform saying to a psychiatrist, “It’s like Trump is deliberately praising every brutal dictator except me.” Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos, quoted late night commentary. Here’s one of them.

"Kamala Harris came in needing to rattle Trump's cage, and now that it's over they're still looking for pieces of his cage in low orbit. Harris got under his skin like she was stuffing in butter and rosemary. It was beautiful—by the end of the debate the meat was falling off the bone. … Trump was so nonsensical that she looked at him the way a parent looks at a kid giving a presentation of why they should be allowed to get a pet tiger." —Stephen Colbert