Robert F. Kennedy Jr. continues to amaze. He is a lawyer; he worked for years for environmental protection. Then he became involved in opposing vaccines and spread the claim that vaccines cause autism. Most members of his illustrious family have publicly opposed him as a candidate.
He found a very wealthy running mate, Nicole Shanahan, the ex-wife of Sergey Brin, one of the founders of Google. She poured millions into the campaign.
The Kennedy-Shanahan ticket has had trouble getting onto the ballot in every state. So far, they have succeeded in 19 states. Their ticket has declined in the polls, and it’s running short of money.
Kennedy has approached both of the major candidates about joining forces with them. Trump was enthusiastic and even hinted that there might be an important post for him, something like a major Cabinet post (Health and Human Services, perhaps?). Imagine RFK Jr. with the power to recall or ban vaccines.
He also tried to meet with Democratic leaders, but they rebuffed him. After Biden’s disastrous June debate performance, he offered to take Biden’s place at the top of the ticket. When Kamala became the consensus candidate, he tried to meet with her, but she was not interested.
It turns out that RFK Jr. draws more votes away from Trump than from Harris. The anti-maskers, anti-vaxxers, and other conspiracy theorists like him.
The New York Times reported that Shanahan, RFK Jr.’s running mate, was interviewed in a podcast, where she mentioned that they were thinking of joining forces with Trump. She expressed bitterness towards the Democrats and blames them for undermining the Kennedy-Shanahan ticket. She said that one of the options for the future is forming a third party.
Hmmm Robert F. Kennedy Jr. working on behalf of Donald Trump? Trump is a guy who doesn’t believe in climate change. He says it’s a hoax. Will RFK Jr. abandon his many years as an environmentalist to get a shot at political power? Shameful.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Brain worm.
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Agreed! Severe brain worm.
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Why should/does anybody give a tinker’s dam what Kennedy thinks, says, does?
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Exactly. He’s just another guy who needs desperately to be on meds and in psychiatric treatment.
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If there’s anything we’ve learned over the past eight years is that politics brings out the grifters in droves.
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His Daddy and Uncle are rolling in their graves right now! Wormbrain and trump….politics makes for some strange bedfellows.
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Funny thing is, If JFK and RFK were living today, they’d be Republicans. They’re way too conservative for the modern radical progressives that run the DNC.
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JFK’s grandson spoke at the Democratic Conventuon.
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modern progressives more radical than past moderates? Just barely. The bar for left wing radicalism should be 19th century folks like Red Emma Goldman and Eugene V Debs. Calling for nationalization of the railroads, steel producers, and heating oil companies. That is what socialism looks like.
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So modern progressives are socialists?
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No, he’s saying that modern progressives are far more moderate that past socialists were.
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No, they’d still be Democrats based on their beliefs and the party’s positions.
Nice try, though. Kind of.
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This kind of stuff from Repugnicans kills me, JSR. Consider Barack Obama, whom Republicans skewer as the ultimate in libtardism. He filled his cabinet with people from the financial services industries. He bailed out the big banks instead of the homeowners. He adopted a REPUBLICAN healthcare plan–one developed by Governor Mitt Romney of Massachusetts. He made NO CHANGES in the basic Bush military and intelligence game plans in Afghanistan and Iraq EXCEPT to expand our drone programs. In other words, he was as moderate as they come and in many ways a complete RINO who out Republicaned the Republicans. And yet they treat this guy as though he were a left-winger. So freaking weird. Is it ignorance of what actually happened? Is it perversity? I often wonder about this. Democrats could run someone whose policies were identical to Jim Jordan’s, and the Pugs would scream that he or she was a Communist. ROFL. Idiots.
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Yup, Bob, and now that call Kamala “Kamunist.”
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nuts
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“Democrat” is as far as their little brains will go. Nuance and complexity are quite beyond them.
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You must have Brain Worm as well. Harry S Truman proposed Medicare for All , vetoed Taft Hartley, had 90% + tax rates,
Integrated the armed forces . LBJ expanded Social Security, passed Medicare ,MEDICAID The Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts and a war on Poverty with food Stamps …
I would have thought the ivermectin would have helped with the worms.
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Joel, WHAT A GREAT COMMENT!
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Yeah, I just read it, and it’s a corker!
Though I’m probably all geed up from Jim Walz’s stem-winder.
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You ask:
RFK Jr. is not a true environmentalist; he is an attention seeking opportunist. Environmentalism was merely one of his means of gaining attention. Then is was anti-vax nonsense, and after that, a presidential campaign. He will do whatever is necessary to stay in the limelight, and in that sense, he and Trump are of a single kind.
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nailed it
He’s also nuts.
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RFK is funded by many of the same billionaires that are behind Trump. He was a “ghost” candidate with a big family name that was designed to pull votes from the Democrats.
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Those folks miscalculated big time. lol
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The first thing to understand about RFK, Jr. is that he’s a grifter. And he and his wife were burning through money with a flamethrower.
I’m sure Trump has dangled false promises of money, and RFK, Jr., is falling for it.
And Trump will screw him.
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Like they used to say, “Game recognizes game.” Here it’s more like “Scam recognizes scam.”
They deserve each other, two losers.
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lol. yes.
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I haven’t seen any analysis of this but one would think this would be a bad development. I think the battleground polling numbers that have shown Harris pulling ahead of Trump (by narrow margins) include Kennedy. Kennedy’s numbers have been falling but they are not negligible—they’re far higher than those of prior spoilers in elections past. There has been debate, non-conclusive, about whether Kennedy is pulling votes from Harris or Trump. I don’t know the answer to that, but my gut says that Kennedy voters would be more likely to go to Trump than Harris if Kennedy dropped out. That seems more certain if he actually endorses Trump. So, given the narrow margins at play, this sounds like bad news.
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Who are these mythical Kennedy voters anyway? I’ve never met one — have you?
I suppose they could be billionaires who want lower taxes but were slightly concerned about, well, democracy.
If some young people were drawn to Kennedy’s faux anti-establishment run with his billionaire VP, are they really going to vote for Trump?
RFK was always a movement funded by Trump billionaires to draw votes from the Democrat so there was never any chance of RFK running if his campaign was drawing votes from Trump. His VP pick made that clear when she said they were going to endorse Trump.
RFK’s entire campaign was dependent on right wing billionaires as a way to hurt Dems.
It is what it is. You can’t force RKF not to endorse
Trump when Trump is much closer to the views RFK believes are most important — faking concern for the environment and science while getting rich.
Bernie Sanders endorsed the dem in 2016, but his supporters didn’t all follow. I just don’t buy that whoever those mysterious folks are who love RFK – except the billionaires – will move over to Trump in big numbers but if they do, they were never going to vote for a Black woman anyway and we should forget about them and concentrate on not letting the same right wing billionaires behind RFK Jr. successfully fight to disenfranchise the people who will vote for the Dems and despise Trump.
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A secretive billionaire named Timothy Mellon has funded RFK Jr. And his running mate Shanahan is a billionaire from her divorce to Brin.
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Well, it takes a special kind of person to want to be on a ticket with RFK, Jr.
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He’s related to Richard Mellon Scaife.
Says a lot right there.
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I live in Florida, where people think that there is a George-Soros-sponsored invasion at our borders, that Fauci and the Chinese worked together to create Covid, and that vaccines are part of the great liberal conspiracy to end America and turn all her citizens transgender. So, yeah, I’ve met RFK, Jr., supporters. He has the signatures he needs to be on the Florida ballot in November.
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RFK was always a movement funded by Trump billionaires to draw votes from the Democrat
Big mistake because at this point, if RFK, Jr., does not drop out and join forces with Trump, he will be drawing votes FROM TRUMP, not from Harris. So, the scheme is backfiring. ROFL.
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Yes indeed. The crazy anti-vaxxers are drawn to RFK. Not to Kamala.
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I see no realistic way that Trump can win, barring a major Harris/Walz scandal.
Otherwise, Trump’s numbers will continue to decline. And RFK will drop off the national attention span.
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I agree. Trump hasn’t yet found a nickname for Kamala.so he calls her a communist out of desperation.
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He truly lives in the ’50s, doesn’t he?
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Why in the world would Shanahan possibly expect the Democratic Party to support the ticket of a rival? Talk about clueless.
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By this point in our nation’s history, shouldn’t it be obvious by now that getting into politics is a subpar choice for anyone in the Kennedy family?
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JFK was bad news. He consorted with mobsters. He was a serial philanderer. He was addicted to drugs. He got us into Vietnam. He dragged his feet on Civil Rights (though he eventually did the right things). I do not understand why he has been canonized by Democrats.
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Bob: Good question about JFK’s canonization.
My take is (in part) that, because in a democracy, we have no kings . . . on principle–political power rests in the people (if we can keep it); and so good leadership MUST take the transformed place of what was (and still is in some cases) the iconics of power centralized at the top, so to speak, as much as could be, and that most need for oh-so-many reasons . . . some of which are just downright practical. And he was a dam good speaker.
Dictatorship is just another manifestation of that old-style king power, secularized, sans bloodlines and the king’s relationship with religious forces (as in tribal orders). The grand difference, of course, is the source of power.
But JFK seemed to have what, at the time, the people needed–the trappings of the royalty we could not have–and then there was Jacquiline.
The other thing: he was a martyr who was a democrat and so is brought forward now as a part of our history.
It was a different time and most of JFK’s foibles were hidden by the press and by the limited kinds of communications we all dealt with, as with FDR, only different. I was in high school at the time; and so “my take” is from a rather immersive, one-off kind of memory. He was our loved leader. CBK
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