Ironically, we do need to spend more or probably just adjust fundings…but on training, and force cops to get college degrees, like in many European countries.
I think what’s puzzling is that the Israelis haven’t gotten the message and are continuing to escalate in an increasingly fraught relationship with their biggest benefactor.
Gotta admit, I'm not seeing this one. Israel and the USA are in diplomatic tension because of the lib-nasties here in America.
I'm not getting the thing about Netanyahu's political capital. I think that's wrong, and more to the point, we should be hoping it's wrong.
The nasties here in America oppose the settlements of course, but the juice in the issue is the support for Hamas in Gaza.
Netanyahu is trying to comprehensively defeat Hamas in Gaza. That's also a very strong hegemonic consensus position in Israel. If somehow, that gets to be identified as Bibi's partisan interest, all that means is that Bibi will be around for a long time.
Contra Brent and lots of American libs, there's nothing really that Biden or the USA in general can threaten Israel with that will make Israel forgo a victory over Hamas if that appears to be plausible in Gaza.
I dunno, maybe for a good place to start you should try to make amends to the Republican Party, as a credible gesture to repudiate all the elections in your adult lifetime where you've happily voted for the Hamas party.
And you’d be wildly, nakedly, wrong. Hamas supporters are quite opposed to the Dems and Biden as they quite clearly are aware that Biden and his party have been stalwart supporters of Israel.
No no. No way, no how, not on your life.
Hamas supporters are absolutely Team Blue. I also suspect the loudest bitchers will turn around to support Biden in November but that's just a gut feel.
In any event, besides being wrong in the abstract, it's also pretty clear that Biden is trying to appease the lib-Left terror simps. So to some extent the terror simps are having some measure of success.
Yeah, that's basically me, except for the metal part. Taylor Swift makes me get in touch with my inner "get off my lawn" to the kids these days. Like check this out:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZInRE-KryGA
The 80s tune, the Rosie Riveter motif switch. Horrible production values. Just so much cooler than anything I've heard from Taylor, yet Pat Benetar was what, third or fourth tier back then?
Yeah, I don't know all the whys and wherefores of that. I know lawyers have Stupid Lawyer Tricks for that which make it acceptable to do that and even quasi-standard practice for some.
But even the most aggressive billers put in work on their cases, and from what I've read there's significant doubt about that.
As a strong tendency, Trump lawyers are horrendous. Probably more importantly, they are much worse than they would typically be because the client is Trump.
This is significantly related to something I didn't appreciate as much as I should have until recently. The country really believes that Trump is being railroaded. I do too, sorta, but I counted that as a mark against Trump instead of for him. Among other things, it's not a good idea to put Trump in a job whose significant responsibility is managing lawyers if Trump is particularly horrible at managing lawyers.
Whatever can be said for that, either the American voters aren't thinking that deep, or aren't buying it. They think libs are trying to lawfare Trump out of public life, and it's up to us in the grass roots to not let them do it.
It will be interesting to see what sort of weird cognitive dissonances this causes, as Republicans like to pretend these calls are the _entire_ case, so…are they going to admit they were dropped and the case continued?
Republicans? I don't think so. That's the way the case has been portrayed in the media. In fact, that's the way it's been portrayed by North right here in this thread.
If they have something else to litigate, let's hear about that from some other lawyers.
It surprises me a little bit how many people are willing to say this sort of thing. Just to mention a couple facts which may or may not be known to you, I don't know how much if at all it changes your opinion.
The corruption in the Fani Willis office goes way beyond the sexual relationship between Willis and Nathan Wade, even beyond their lies related to that.
Nathan Wade was committing substantial financial fraud on the prosecutor's office, presumably abetted by Willis. His billing rate was 250/hr which is not excessive. But, he was billing an obscene number of hours, eg, 24+ hours in a day in some cases. And, as near as anyone can see, he wasn't doing any work. There was no evidence at all of his work product in the files.
Of course, as it relates to Trump, if there is no case there is no billing and Wade has to make a living from other cases or other clients.
The idea that the corruption of the prosecutor's office is "move along now, nothing to see here" to do with the substance of the case against Trump, at this moment, is ridiculous.
Ok, so what? Is that a crime? I don't think so. Maybe another prosecutor could legitimately or successfully argue an arm's length case for it, but it's pretty clear that Fani Willis can't.
On a kinda related note, I'm pretty clear the Georgia case had a bunch of Georgia state RICO counts, I think it's how they got all the defendants in the case.
In general, my thoughts on RICO are influenced by Ken White. His basic argument is, unless it's the DOJ going after the mob or some other organization with an army of lawyers, it's bullshyt. Most of the time it's prosecutors or lawyers showing a basically irrelevant middle finger to the opposite parties.
This case is a little different in that this is state RICO as opposed to federal RICO. I don't know how much this changes things. But it would be nice to see Ken White say or write some things in Trump's defense. Unfortunately I'm not expecting that to happen since he turned himself into a pretty nasty hack over the last five years or so.
Ms. Willis’ misbehavior, even cast in its worst light, is utterly picayune compared to the naked graft and corruption on the right which, while it’s not a reason to defend her idiocy, doesn’t speak to Trumps guilt at all.
You've written this a couple times, but I think you're underselling things quite a bit. There would be more to say for that if this were a Medicare fraud case, or a carjacking, or a man beat up his ex-girlfriend. In that happened, the policy rationale for prosecution would be obvious. Then, even if the prosecutors were corrupt, the case could stand or fall on its own merits. That's not the case here. This is a very dubious theory, and the first key development is the decision to charge it. In that case, the reality that the prosecutors are not acting in the public interest, but instead are clearly acting for self-aggrandizement on many levels, means the case itself is very likely corrupt.
Again from before, it's difficult to litigate the decision to file criminal charges, that's the only reason why the case exists at all.
But the stink around Fani Willis and her office is going to taint everything she does. Which, I suspect is good enough for Trump to win the case politically and create opportunities for Trump to win legally as well.
For me, the Jack Smith Florida case is very strong. All the others seem to be flawed in one or another way. The more he loses from malicious prosecution and getting outlawyered, the more fundamentally innocent he seems to the American voters.
Yeah, sorta. What you wrote is fine as far it goes, but I think you're underselling the point quite a bit. The Willis controversy does create legal avenues for Trump to delay the case past the election, but it goes quite a bit beyond that as well.
It shows that libs are corrupt, that Demos are incompetent, that the lib narrative about Trump is bullshyt that can't stand up to scrutiny, that the lawfare against Trump is malicious and ignorable. Not conclusively necessarily but in combination with other like things we're definitely heading in that direction.
Thus polling now is simply a snapshot of knee jerk impressions of Biden qua Biden- not Biden vs Trump.
I'm with you on this one. To my mind, there's a big, big difference between a voter who supports Trump and intends to vote for him in November, and one who actually pulls the lever for him in the voting booth.
That, and I suspect the best case for Orange Man Bad isn't going to come from libs, Demos, or resistance GOP like the OP, but from Trump himself. Those two things are the bullish case for Biden.
But there's a lot of things in the bullish case for Trump. From a big picture point of view, I am influenced by the fact that now the vibes and the polls are consistent with each other and showing a Trump win. Whereas before Trump was polling well vs Biden but it was a headscratcher because the vibes were horrible.
The commonality between those two things (the Georgia case and the horse race) is that libs, including the libs here, want to amplify and leverage Orange Man Bad. To the extent that I was rooting for the Demos (obviously I'm not), I think that's a bad idea. For the American voter, the impulse for Orange Man Bad is at its lowest ebb now than it's been for five years or so. So it's a poor strategy to double down on Orange Man Bad in a world where Orange Man Isn't So Bad.
If the libs and Demos want to go for Orange Man Bad, they need to argue and win their case on the merits. That's not happening now, and if they try, I think they will have to defend themselves on issues that they really want to bury.
And as questionable as that opinion is it’s also moot because what Willis did was completely irrelevant to the prosecution she was pursuing. At best she wanted to get laid. At worst she wanted to get laid and give her lover a payday.
Legally, there is a narrow enough context to where that might hold. As a practical matter, it's ridiculous.
In practice, it's difficult but not completely impossible to directly litigate a prosector's decision to charge (or not charge) a case.
In political terms, I suspect Trump has already won this case, and contrary to the imagination of libs (and me!) he's won all the recent litigation against him. But the libs and the OP haven't gotten the memo on that yet.
In the bigger picture, libs want to campaign in a world of Orange Man Bad, but for now at least we're living in a world of Orange Man Not That Bad, and that's negating what we expect the Demo message to be in the fall.
If anything, the best news for the Demos right now is that even if they're losing, they're still within striking distance. I still think that Biden reelection is an undervalued asset, simply because once the campaign heats up, Trump will do some more heretofore unknown or unforeseen things that will remind the voters why he was at 40% approval when he was President.
But libs aren't doing themselves any favors, which is just as well for me I suppose.
A couple of months ago, I thought this election was the most fundamentally unpredictable thing I'd ever seen or ever likely to see. That's still true to some extent but still, it's a lot clearer now than it was then.
As things stand, the Demos theory of the case has been repudiated pretty clearly (not really something I expected to happen but it did). You want to vote over inflation, border security, or lockdowns? Too bad, those are normal issues but now it's all about keeping democracy in America so you have to vote Demo whaddyagonnadoo?
The voters ain't having that, and for that matter the Demo partisans haven't even really tried to argue the case as much as assert it, something the OP should bear in mind more than he does. Among other things this line of argument runs up against the perception of the first Trump Administration in the minds of Americans, which is much different than libs imagine it to be.
Trump has been running ahead of Biden in the polls for a while, but now the vibes are cutting Trump's way as well, consistent with the polls. It's become clear that Trump has been the victim of malicious prosecution in many if not all of the cases against him.
It's also become clear that President Biden's lack of energy and engagement are real, to the point where it's hurting the President among libs as well as conservatives. Special prosecutor Robert Hur basically called the President an incoherent deluded old man, in the nicest lawyerly way he could.
Having said all this, strictly in horse-race terms I'd still rather be Biden than Trump. Lots of people agree with Trump about this or that. Some of those even support Trump. But it's big hurdle to get people to actually _empower_ Trump, over the nuclear launch codes, the Secret Service, the DOJ, his Twitter account, etc.
For a typical American who disapproves of President Biden, it's much easier to tell a pollster that you're going to vote for the other guy and much harder to actually pull the lever for Trump from the voting booth.
Honestly, this change is basically a hit job because the loudest crowd of people on student debt relief are probably people with degrees from prestigious universities but underpaid jobs like journalists or editorial assistants.
That's a very important point. Conceptually speaking, it's the last piece in the puzzle to explain why Trump and the GOP have won the last six months or so politically.
Basically, just very recently, maybe within the last 1-3 years, we've begun to see a reversal of 100+ years of wage trends. Ie, due to AI, Trump, interest rates, nationalism and maybe a couple other things, we've seen absolute _and relative_ wage increases to blue-collar, less educated, meat space labor at the expense of more educated, white collar, idea space/symbol manipulators.
This is really hitting the low-wage-but-educated part of the workforce especially hard: editorial assistants, nontenured college faculty, document review lawyers, nonunion state or municipal employees, etc. It's very dispiriting for them to get up in the morning and watch themselves be comprehensively outearned by swimming pool maintenance contractors.
What's worse, their jobs are coming under increased pressure and need political protection, and Biden isn't giving it to them. Therefore, they are not especially motivated to go to bat for the Democratic Party as it is presently constituted, without holding a single positive thought for Team Red.
I don't think it's necessarily going to be that way in November, but it's working in the Republicans favor for now.
Maybe I didn't write anything, but more probably you just missed it.
I have quite a bit of respect for Melania (and for that matter I have no beef against Barron or Tiffany).
Nobody of any political inclination seems to have any use for Jared or Ivanka. Though, in what seems like the most unrealistic foreign policy development of all time, Jared deserves substantial credit for bringing peace and realignment to the Middle East.
But in general, they are all turds and I hope they all go down the same toilet as The Donald.
Of course we can. That, in particular, is the legacy of Afghanistan.
Anything bad that happens is the result of Biden's bad motives or lack of intelligence, energy or engagement, eg Afghanistan or border crossings. Anything good that happens, Biden was just there warming the chair and would have happened without him.
And it's going to stay that way until Biden can meaningfully demonstrate some energy, stamina, or engagement to the American people, to the point where he's something more than an NPC figurehead for Team Blue.
Of course, our team has our share of problems with Trump, probably worse.
However, the idea that this election is about repudiating Trump over and above everything else, that had a lot of traction six months or a year ago. Now, not as much.
Biden crime family stuff huh? Based on what the now discredited fabrications of an indicted liar? That Biden crime family?
Based on patterns of criminality and corruption relating to Joe, Hunter and Jim that have been largely swept under the rug by Demo-friendly media.
I don't think normie America cares about this. Tbh I don't care about it very much.
Nonetheless I don't think Biden is going to want his or Hunter's financial history to gain any traction, which is yet another narrative burden Demo's are going to have to carry.
Look we all get it. There is no Democrat you will ever support, no matter how much you have pivoted away from Trump.
That's just it. One of the reasons why I know the last six months or whatever have been legit good for Trump winning in November is that I'm personally moving toward Trump. If the election were held today (and I were registered) tbh I'm not sure what I'd do.
Like I wrote before, for libs like you and the more obnoxious NeverTrumpers, the point of the election is that Trump has to go, over and above any other consideration.
We may yet be living in that world in November, but we're not now.
There's the Biden Crime Family-type stuff, which nobody cares about but has produced the goods more than enough to not get boomeranged on.
More important for the campaign, there's the eye test, which Biden has consistently flunked since Afghanistan.
Biden is old, but the problem goes substantially past that. Ie he's old, not that bright in the best of circumstances, and he's only coherent for two hours a day, four tops.
Right now, the Demos are split between trying to sweep the whole thing under the rug and blame anybody who bring it up, and Yglesias types who say Biden should be leaning on staff less and do more public media.
Maybe there's alternative universe where Matt is right, but this world that ain't happening specifically because Biden can't be trusted to hold it together.
And when he does lose it, it's far better for the Demos is Biden is inside where nobody can see it.
This was more credible six months or so ago, but right this second it's basically so much lib copium.
Specifically the idea being circulated by a lot of prominent libs and NeverTrumpers that the point of this election is about getting rid of Trump to the exclusion of all other things, well that idea is in the process of being repudiated right now imo.
This cycle is the most fundamentally unpredictable of my lifetime, and there are _a lot_ of outcomes which are legitimately in play.
If I had to guess, Trump is winning the race as it stands right now by a healthy margin. But strictly in horse-race terms I'd still rather be Biden than Trump.
As we get closer and closer to Election Day and the intensity of the camaign increases, I suspect Trump will do some ugly-Trumpy things in a context where people are paying attention, in way where people recoil and remember why they were so happy to get rid of Trump the first time.
But like I said, that's just a guess. Right now, the tide is with Trump and against Biden.
We really need to get clear on why that’s bad since he won’t be the last Republican to try and do that.
It's not bad. Disney wasn't punished for what it thought, it was punished for what it did, which it shouldn't have done so it was rightly punished. Disney should obey the law instead.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Open Mic for the week of 3/25/2024”
F that sideways. Cops cost way too much as it is.
"
Gotta admit, I'm not seeing this one. Israel and the USA are in diplomatic tension because of the lib-nasties here in America.
I'm not getting the thing about Netanyahu's political capital. I think that's wrong, and more to the point, we should be hoping it's wrong.
The nasties here in America oppose the settlements of course, but the juice in the issue is the support for Hamas in Gaza.
Netanyahu is trying to comprehensively defeat Hamas in Gaza. That's also a very strong hegemonic consensus position in Israel. If somehow, that gets to be identified as Bibi's partisan interest, all that means is that Bibi will be around for a long time.
Contra Brent and lots of American libs, there's nothing really that Biden or the USA in general can threaten Israel with that will make Israel forgo a victory over Hamas if that appears to be plausible in Gaza.
"
I dunno, maybe for a good place to start you should try to make amends to the Republican Party, as a credible gesture to repudiate all the elections in your adult lifetime where you've happily voted for the Hamas party.
On “Open Mic for the week of 3/18/2024”
No no. No way, no how, not on your life.
Hamas supporters are absolutely Team Blue. I also suspect the loudest bitchers will turn around to support Biden in November but that's just a gut feel.
In any event, besides being wrong in the abstract, it's also pretty clear that Biden is trying to appease the lib-Left terror simps. So to some extent the terror simps are having some measure of success.
On “Girl Dadding in the Taylor Swift Era”
Yeah, that's basically me, except for the metal part. Taylor Swift makes me get in touch with my inner "get off my lawn" to the kids these days. Like check this out:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZInRE-KryGA
The 80s tune, the Rosie Riveter motif switch. Horrible production values. Just so much cooler than anything I've heard from Taylor, yet Pat Benetar was what, third or fourth tier back then?
"
Gotta admit, I find Taylor Swift to be really frustrating, probably because I'm not really close to the Taylor Swift fandom.
She's so successful commercially, and musically she's so mid. Can't at least do a couple good, catchy pop songs a la Britney or Christina Aguilera?
On “Fani Willis Survives, But Not Unscathed”
Yeah, I don't know all the whys and wherefores of that. I know lawyers have Stupid Lawyer Tricks for that which make it acceptable to do that and even quasi-standard practice for some.
But even the most aggressive billers put in work on their cases, and from what I've read there's significant doubt about that.
"
As a strong tendency, Trump lawyers are horrendous. Probably more importantly, they are much worse than they would typically be because the client is Trump.
This is significantly related to something I didn't appreciate as much as I should have until recently. The country really believes that Trump is being railroaded. I do too, sorta, but I counted that as a mark against Trump instead of for him. Among other things, it's not a good idea to put Trump in a job whose significant responsibility is managing lawyers if Trump is particularly horrible at managing lawyers.
Whatever can be said for that, either the American voters aren't thinking that deep, or aren't buying it. They think libs are trying to lawfare Trump out of public life, and it's up to us in the grass roots to not let them do it.
"
Republicans? I don't think so. That's the way the case has been portrayed in the media. In fact, that's the way it's been portrayed by North right here in this thread.
If they have something else to litigate, let's hear about that from some other lawyers.
"
It surprises me a little bit how many people are willing to say this sort of thing. Just to mention a couple facts which may or may not be known to you, I don't know how much if at all it changes your opinion.
The corruption in the Fani Willis office goes way beyond the sexual relationship between Willis and Nathan Wade, even beyond their lies related to that.
Nathan Wade was committing substantial financial fraud on the prosecutor's office, presumably abetted by Willis. His billing rate was 250/hr which is not excessive. But, he was billing an obscene number of hours, eg, 24+ hours in a day in some cases. And, as near as anyone can see, he wasn't doing any work. There was no evidence at all of his work product in the files.
Of course, as it relates to Trump, if there is no case there is no billing and Wade has to make a living from other cases or other clients.
The idea that the corruption of the prosecutor's office is "move along now, nothing to see here" to do with the substance of the case against Trump, at this moment, is ridiculous.
"
Hopefully not. Until they have more than what they have shown so far, this shouldn't see a jury.
"
Ok, so what? Is that a crime? I don't think so. Maybe another prosecutor could legitimately or successfully argue an arm's length case for it, but it's pretty clear that Fani Willis can't.
On a kinda related note, I'm pretty clear the Georgia case had a bunch of Georgia state RICO counts, I think it's how they got all the defendants in the case.
In general, my thoughts on RICO are influenced by Ken White. His basic argument is, unless it's the DOJ going after the mob or some other organization with an army of lawyers, it's bullshyt. Most of the time it's prosecutors or lawyers showing a basically irrelevant middle finger to the opposite parties.
This case is a little different in that this is state RICO as opposed to federal RICO. I don't know how much this changes things. But it would be nice to see Ken White say or write some things in Trump's defense. Unfortunately I'm not expecting that to happen since he turned himself into a pretty nasty hack over the last five years or so.
"
You've written this a couple times, but I think you're underselling things quite a bit. There would be more to say for that if this were a Medicare fraud case, or a carjacking, or a man beat up his ex-girlfriend. In that happened, the policy rationale for prosecution would be obvious. Then, even if the prosecutors were corrupt, the case could stand or fall on its own merits. That's not the case here. This is a very dubious theory, and the first key development is the decision to charge it. In that case, the reality that the prosecutors are not acting in the public interest, but instead are clearly acting for self-aggrandizement on many levels, means the case itself is very likely corrupt.
Again from before, it's difficult to litigate the decision to file criminal charges, that's the only reason why the case exists at all.
But the stink around Fani Willis and her office is going to taint everything she does. Which, I suspect is good enough for Trump to win the case politically and create opportunities for Trump to win legally as well.
For me, the Jack Smith Florida case is very strong. All the others seem to be flawed in one or another way. The more he loses from malicious prosecution and getting outlawyered, the more fundamentally innocent he seems to the American voters.
"
reply misthreaded, see below.
"
Yeah, sorta. What you wrote is fine as far it goes, but I think you're underselling the point quite a bit. The Willis controversy does create legal avenues for Trump to delay the case past the election, but it goes quite a bit beyond that as well.
It shows that libs are corrupt, that Demos are incompetent, that the lib narrative about Trump is bullshyt that can't stand up to scrutiny, that the lawfare against Trump is malicious and ignorable. Not conclusively necessarily but in combination with other like things we're definitely heading in that direction.
I'm with you on this one. To my mind, there's a big, big difference between a voter who supports Trump and intends to vote for him in November, and one who actually pulls the lever for him in the voting booth.
That, and I suspect the best case for Orange Man Bad isn't going to come from libs, Demos, or resistance GOP like the OP, but from Trump himself. Those two things are the bullish case for Biden.
But there's a lot of things in the bullish case for Trump. From a big picture point of view, I am influenced by the fact that now the vibes and the polls are consistent with each other and showing a Trump win. Whereas before Trump was polling well vs Biden but it was a headscratcher because the vibes were horrible.
The commonality between those two things (the Georgia case and the horse race) is that libs, including the libs here, want to amplify and leverage Orange Man Bad. To the extent that I was rooting for the Demos (obviously I'm not), I think that's a bad idea. For the American voter, the impulse for Orange Man Bad is at its lowest ebb now than it's been for five years or so. So it's a poor strategy to double down on Orange Man Bad in a world where Orange Man Isn't So Bad.
If the libs and Demos want to go for Orange Man Bad, they need to argue and win their case on the merits. That's not happening now, and if they try, I think they will have to defend themselves on issues that they really want to bury.
"
Legally, there is a narrow enough context to where that might hold. As a practical matter, it's ridiculous.
In practice, it's difficult but not completely impossible to directly litigate a prosector's decision to charge (or not charge) a case.
In political terms, I suspect Trump has already won this case, and contrary to the imagination of libs (and me!) he's won all the recent litigation against him. But the libs and the OP haven't gotten the memo on that yet.
In the bigger picture, libs want to campaign in a world of Orange Man Bad, but for now at least we're living in a world of Orange Man Not That Bad, and that's negating what we expect the Demo message to be in the fall.
If anything, the best news for the Demos right now is that even if they're losing, they're still within striking distance. I still think that Biden reelection is an undervalued asset, simply because once the campaign heats up, Trump will do some more heretofore unknown or unforeseen things that will remind the voters why he was at 40% approval when he was President.
But libs aren't doing themselves any favors, which is just as well for me I suppose.
On “Hail to the Champs”
A couple of months ago, I thought this election was the most fundamentally unpredictable thing I'd ever seen or ever likely to see. That's still true to some extent but still, it's a lot clearer now than it was then.
As things stand, the Demos theory of the case has been repudiated pretty clearly (not really something I expected to happen but it did). You want to vote over inflation, border security, or lockdowns? Too bad, those are normal issues but now it's all about keeping democracy in America so you have to vote Demo whaddyagonnadoo?
The voters ain't having that, and for that matter the Demo partisans haven't even really tried to argue the case as much as assert it, something the OP should bear in mind more than he does. Among other things this line of argument runs up against the perception of the first Trump Administration in the minds of Americans, which is much different than libs imagine it to be.
Trump has been running ahead of Biden in the polls for a while, but now the vibes are cutting Trump's way as well, consistent with the polls. It's become clear that Trump has been the victim of malicious prosecution in many if not all of the cases against him.
It's also become clear that President Biden's lack of energy and engagement are real, to the point where it's hurting the President among libs as well as conservatives. Special prosecutor Robert Hur basically called the President an incoherent deluded old man, in the nicest lawyerly way he could.
Having said all this, strictly in horse-race terms I'd still rather be Biden than Trump. Lots of people agree with Trump about this or that. Some of those even support Trump. But it's big hurdle to get people to actually _empower_ Trump, over the nuclear launch codes, the Secret Service, the DOJ, his Twitter account, etc.
For a typical American who disapproves of President Biden, it's much easier to tell a pollster that you're going to vote for the other guy and much harder to actually pull the lever for Trump from the voting booth.
On “Joseph and The Coat of Many Expectations”
That's a very important point. Conceptually speaking, it's the last piece in the puzzle to explain why Trump and the GOP have won the last six months or so politically.
Basically, just very recently, maybe within the last 1-3 years, we've begun to see a reversal of 100+ years of wage trends. Ie, due to AI, Trump, interest rates, nationalism and maybe a couple other things, we've seen absolute _and relative_ wage increases to blue-collar, less educated, meat space labor at the expense of more educated, white collar, idea space/symbol manipulators.
This is really hitting the low-wage-but-educated part of the workforce especially hard: editorial assistants, nontenured college faculty, document review lawyers, nonunion state or municipal employees, etc. It's very dispiriting for them to get up in the morning and watch themselves be comprehensively outearned by swimming pool maintenance contractors.
What's worse, their jobs are coming under increased pressure and need political protection, and Biden isn't giving it to them. Therefore, they are not especially motivated to go to bat for the Democratic Party as it is presently constituted, without holding a single positive thought for Team Red.
I don't think it's necessarily going to be that way in November, but it's working in the Republicans favor for now.
On “Ponderings on Presidents’ Day”
Maybe I didn't write anything, but more probably you just missed it.
I have quite a bit of respect for Melania (and for that matter I have no beef against Barron or Tiffany).
Nobody of any political inclination seems to have any use for Jared or Ivanka. Though, in what seems like the most unrealistic foreign policy development of all time, Jared deserves substantial credit for bringing peace and realignment to the Middle East.
But in general, they are all turds and I hope they all go down the same toilet as The Donald.
"
Of course we can. That, in particular, is the legacy of Afghanistan.
Anything bad that happens is the result of Biden's bad motives or lack of intelligence, energy or engagement, eg Afghanistan or border crossings. Anything good that happens, Biden was just there warming the chair and would have happened without him.
And it's going to stay that way until Biden can meaningfully demonstrate some energy, stamina, or engagement to the American people, to the point where he's something more than an NPC figurehead for Team Blue.
Of course, our team has our share of problems with Trump, probably worse.
However, the idea that this election is about repudiating Trump over and above everything else, that had a lot of traction six months or a year ago. Now, not as much.
"
Actually, no. If I do end up voting for Biden (and I might) things like that will be a large part of the reason why.
"
Based on patterns of criminality and corruption relating to Joe, Hunter and Jim that have been largely swept under the rug by Demo-friendly media.
I don't think normie America cares about this. Tbh I don't care about it very much.
Nonetheless I don't think Biden is going to want his or Hunter's financial history to gain any traction, which is yet another narrative burden Demo's are going to have to carry.
That's just it. One of the reasons why I know the last six months or whatever have been legit good for Trump winning in November is that I'm personally moving toward Trump. If the election were held today (and I were registered) tbh I'm not sure what I'd do.
Like I wrote before, for libs like you and the more obnoxious NeverTrumpers, the point of the election is that Trump has to go, over and above any other consideration.
We may yet be living in that world in November, but we're not now.
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There's the Biden Crime Family-type stuff, which nobody cares about but has produced the goods more than enough to not get boomeranged on.
More important for the campaign, there's the eye test, which Biden has consistently flunked since Afghanistan.
Biden is old, but the problem goes substantially past that. Ie he's old, not that bright in the best of circumstances, and he's only coherent for two hours a day, four tops.
Right now, the Demos are split between trying to sweep the whole thing under the rug and blame anybody who bring it up, and Yglesias types who say Biden should be leaning on staff less and do more public media.
Maybe there's alternative universe where Matt is right, but this world that ain't happening specifically because Biden can't be trusted to hold it together.
And when he does lose it, it's far better for the Demos is Biden is inside where nobody can see it.
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This was more credible six months or so ago, but right this second it's basically so much lib copium.
Specifically the idea being circulated by a lot of prominent libs and NeverTrumpers that the point of this election is about getting rid of Trump to the exclusion of all other things, well that idea is in the process of being repudiated right now imo.
This cycle is the most fundamentally unpredictable of my lifetime, and there are _a lot_ of outcomes which are legitimately in play.
If I had to guess, Trump is winning the race as it stands right now by a healthy margin. But strictly in horse-race terms I'd still rather be Biden than Trump.
As we get closer and closer to Election Day and the intensity of the camaign increases, I suspect Trump will do some ugly-Trumpy things in a context where people are paying attention, in way where people recoil and remember why they were so happy to get rid of Trump the first time.
But like I said, that's just a guess. Right now, the tide is with Trump and against Biden.
On “Disney Lawsuit Against DeSantis Dismissed: Read It For Yourself”
It's not bad. Disney wasn't punished for what it thought, it was punished for what it did, which it shouldn't have done so it was rightly punished. Disney should obey the law instead.
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