Artful Dodger

When you're losing on the issue of democracy to a guy who refused to accept the results of the 2020 election, you know you've got a problem. A little introspection for the Democrats might be order here. On the other hand, Trump is not running against the president; he's running against Vice President Harris.

Due to the tied vote, there's news reports that both sides in Dixville Notch have started to riot over the results.

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Your information is out of date.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.

There's never been any evidence that the Republican Senate has desired to kill the filibuster; most of the calls for that have been from the Left. Perhaps now that Mitch McConnell's gone that may change, but there's no reason so far to think that it will. Unless there's a Republican landslide this fall, which seems very unlikely, there won't be enough support in either the House or the Senate for an abortion ban. As I've suggested, most legislators know that's not what their constituents want. I think you have a better case with your point about an anti-abortion activist in place at the FDA. But recent Supreme Court rulings have greatly diminished the power of administrative agencies to issue regulations and make laws without legislation. That ruling applies to Republican governments as well as Democratic governments. You do make an excellent case for divided government. Neither party can be trusted.

There were more abortions in America in the first post-Dobbs year than in the year before Dobbs. And if this ruling did little to stop abortions, it becomes an even less salient issue, except for extremists on the right and on the left as a way to get the base riled up. Restricting all abortions is unpopular, even in red states. For example, both Kansas and Ohio held referendums where voters established a constitutional right to an abortion. And once that's done, the issue was off the table in those states. Many politicians are not bright, but they do have a keen survival instinct, and they want to be where most of their voters are. There's no chance any legislation will succeed on the national level. I completely disagree that this issue is not going away. It's already going away, which is why only 5% of voters consider it the most important issue. The polling data suggests that the country knows that it has much bigger problems to worry about. To me, centering one's campaign around this issue either illustrated the essential unseriousness of a candidate or else the fact that they know they can't win on other more important issues.

I guess it will gin up her base who are included in that 5% of people who think that abortion is the most important issue and who are already in a frenzy to vote against Trump. But most of the rest of the country wants to hear what she's going to do about the cost of living and uncontrolled immigration and so on. Insofar as she's talking about abortion, she's not talking about those things.

No. I think that it should be in the hands of the states. After all this shakes out, I suspect that most or all of the states will have laws that make abortion legal through four months or so, which is comparable to the status quo in most European countries and is where most voters are. It will be messy getting there, but when it does, the issue will cease to be controversial and will no longer be politically salient for either party. But, frankly, it's not an important issue to me. And the polling suggests that compared to inflation or immigration or health care costs, it's not an important issue to most Americans.

According to Statista, from a YouGov survey, the most important issues to voters in the 2024 election are as follows: inflation, healthcare, immigration, the economy, climate and the environment. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1362236/most-important-voter-issues-us/ The eight most important issue is Abortion rights, which is the most important issue to 5% of voters. All those voters were going to vote for Harris anyway, whether Roe v. Wade was repealed or not. Trump has also said that he's not in favor of imposing restrictions on abortion at the federal level. So you may want to think twice about making this your party's main issue.

“And when you’re talking about an atmosphere, oceans are very small. And it blows over and it sails over.” - Donald Trump " It's time for us to do what we have been doing." - Kamala Harris We've got a helluva choice in 2024.

While one should never attribute to a conspiracy what can be explained by incompetence and stupidity, Director Cheatle of the Secret Service is as incompetent a public official as one can imagine. The congressional committee had asked for a timeline of the events on the day of the assassination attempt and nine days after the assassination attempt, the Secret Service still hasn't been able to provide it. She looked feeble and clueless in front of the Congressional committee grilling her. Insofar as her job is to defend her agency and explain what happened and went wrong, she failed utterly. The only reason I can think of that she hasn't been fired or asked to resign is because there's no one in charge of the Biden Administration right now.

Never attribute to a conspiracy what you can attribute to stupidity and incompetence.