Artful Dodger

Yeah. I can't believe this. I've been waiting for months to see who Nicky Jam would endorse so that I would know who to vote for. Once he endorsed Trump, I mailed in my ballot and now he's backed off. So now what am I supposed to do? 😐

Perhaps there are some very good reasons why so many Puerto Ricans live in Pennsylvania and not in Puerto Rico.

I strongly doubt there will be a civil war, but if there is, it will be over quickly. Most soldiers come from the red States, and red state citizens have more guns. More importantly, the red states would have internal lines of communication, while the blue states are mostly on the coasts, separated by 3,000 miles of red state counties. Also, even in states like California and Oregon, most of the areas outside of the major coastal cities are deeply red. The red States could deal with the blue states and blue enclaves within the red states in a piecemeal fashion.

I have no idea how you came up with that one. To the point of this thread, the Biden Administration blamed the rise in prices on "corporate price gouging" without ever bothering to explain why the so-called price gouging didn't start until the Biden Administration.

Your information is out of date. Most of the large OECD economies now have a lower inflation rate than the US. My main concern is that I'm paying about 35% more for groceries than I did when Biden took office. Perhaps that doesn't bother you, but it does bother me.

The endless gaslighting about all the bad policies, including the open border, overspending which caused runaway inflation, crime, the $2 trillion and rising deficit, the catastrophic Afghanistan withdrawal, etc. According to the Biden/Harris Administration, they're not responsible for anything that's happened on their watch. The constant lying about everything is a big issue for me. Just to be fair, the single greatest thing that makes me not want to vote for Trump is that he's a drama queen. And he also lies constantly, though his lies tend to be reflexive and more personal and less deliberate. It's just who he is.

In CNN's defense, at the time of the debate, the FBI's numbers showed that crime was down. But someone ought to look into why a variety of different agencies have been getting their data numbers wrong so consistently. Another example would be the recent vast downward revision of the number of jobs created over the last several years. However, one should never attribute to a conspiracy what can be explained by incompetence. I just got back from a west coast trip, where I drove along the Pacific Coast and visited Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco. No one visiting those cities could possibly conclude that crime and disorder are not a problem. In Portland, during the day in the downtown area, "normal" looking people outnumbered the homeless and obvious drug users and crazy people only by about 3 to 2. I saw a woman walking around with open sores on her face. It was positively medieval. in San Francisco, I walked from the waterfront area up Market Street to the former HQ of Twitter to see if the city was the "dystopian hellscape" that Elon Musk described. It isn't quite as bad as Musk said, though if nothing changes, it's easy to see that it could get there. On the way up Market Street, I passed the Harris/Walz campaign HQ. There was literally no other occupied ground floor retail on the same block. Everything was shut down. When government agencies publish false information that clearly doesn't jibe with reality, sensible people will always choose reality, which is why it's so dangerous for government agencies to produce false and misleading statistics, whether deliberately or (more likely) through incompetence. They lose their credibility.

I'm not a fan of Harris, but I thought she did OK, especially given that this was one of the first interviews she's had where she was asked some difficult questions. While she didn't answer any of the questions directly, she appeared to be tough and serious, and she pushed back successfully. At least she didn't giggle inappropriately like Dr. Hibbert on The Simpsons. The worst moment for her was when she said, "You know what I mean" and Bret Baier, speaking for all of us, said, "I don't know what you mean." She has to defend her administration's mostly failed policies while somehow being an agent of change, which puts her in an impossible position.

I have heard there's an opening on the Cleveland Browns... 😑

As a reminder to all the skeptics, on average SpaceX is launching a rocket into space once every three days.

According to wikipedia, X was the 6th most visited site on the internet in July. And with 1/10th the number of employees it had when he bought it less than two years ago. Twitter is doing just fine. Edit: Should note that Twitter was #9 in 2022 when Musk bought the company.

Mild recessions are a necessary part of the business cycle and are not a bad thing. They shake out the bad companies in the economy and push capital, labor, and resources toward more productive companies. On the other hand, severe recessions are a bad thing and inflict a lot of pain. What's interesting is that the US is currently running a $2 trillion deficit at a time of close to full employment. During recessions, deficits go up due to automatic stabilizers and fiscal stimulus. I can't imagine that there's room for much more fiscal stimulus that would increase our current $2 trillion in deficit spending. We've been stimulating the hell out of the economy for the last four years and we may be getting a recession anyway. At some point, the bond markets will revolt. We're on pretty shaky ground right now.

It played like the special teams' equivalent of three yards and a cloud of dust.

After watching tonight's speech, I would say that the verdict is still out.

Wait. That was USA Today's prediction from 1969.