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I don't think Trump cares all that much about his supporters and just expects them to go along with whatever he ends up doing

Regarding the Book, I'd be curious to know what it is to keep my first grader away from it. But to your first sentence, I don't think the majority of the public loves him for it. It's way too big a number that does, and it speaks poorly that character didn't matter at all when evaluating the decision who to vote for (or whether to vote at all), but his character issues weren't the specific reason why he won the election. He won it on the economy and on the perception that he would make life more affordable for people. Obviously he campaigned on doing he opposite of doing all of those things just on policy, but whether it was not paying attention or just flat out lying to themselves that he wouldn't do all of the things he was going to do, that was enough. Anecdotally, it's been shocking how many people in my own life (even people who voted for Harris) have admitted to thinking he wouldn't do various things he campaigned on. I push back hard here because at a time when his popularity has dropped considerably on the back of policy and his own character (ie. Epstein, corruption, etc), just writing off the public and just saying "they all of love this" is inaccurate and counterproductive

Some of the differences are policy related between states, but whenever you see such hard cutoffs between states, some of that has to be differences in data collection / lack of normalization. I'm not convinced that Walworth County, Wisconsin is orders of magnitude more drunk than McHenry County, Illinois, despite the two sharing a pretty decent amount of border with one another.

Putin needles U.S. by giving Trump envoy an award meant for CIA official whose son died fighting for Russia So not only are we letting that war criminal come onto US soil to embarrass us, this happened apparently....

Every so often when I hear his name in the headlines, I think about how he wrote the book as one version of JD Vance and, when faced with his political ambition and the need to pivot, conveniently uninstalled that version from his hard-drive and installed a version 2.0. Just one of the phoniest human beings alive.... no core convictions, no beliefs, no personality.

He's come a long way from the 'Holler, that one lol

The byproduct of all of this is that he's made us all cynical. These guys just all suck, they're all corrupt, there's no truth so might as well just put on my foam finger and root for my guy. It's pure unadultered nihilism. I remember saying something to this effect to Melody (on the last iteration of the board), but all the cynicism and all the defenses that hinge on saying "they're all like that" is a self fulfilling prophecy. If you expect nothing from your government, nothing is all you are ever going to get. I don't know what to do about that.... I truly believe that most Americans, on an individual level, are better than our current government. Not enough, but a majority anyway. And while I understand all the political science reasons for why he won in 2024, he's governing how he campaigned, and anyone who was really listening to the campaign should have ****ing known better.

A real test for the Ds here.... make him go ahead with it.

In a more sane world, he'd be 25th'd out of there... just seems like he's decomposing in real time

The thing is that, politically, so much of how people view the economy runs off of vibes anyway... and like Biden before him (who never could outrun 9% inflation in 2022 despite many good jobs reports), his vibes are in the toilet. Also similar to COVID as well.... people built an impression of him, and he never did outrun it (even with Operation Warp Speed and some other successes).

There's, very correctly, a ton of concern coming out of this about Trump cooking and / or juking the numbers to make things look good for his political concerns (I'll leave those for the other thread), but the reality is that businesses need reliable data in order to make decisions that are in their strategic/fiduciary best interests. Trump, by doing this, is basically undermining the basis of the data going forward. Just adds yet another level of uncertainty to an environment that he's already injected a bunch of uncertainty into.

Sounds about right.... it's been over 10 years since I've been in San Diego, but it's about as safe and desirable a major city as there is in this country.

I will hand it to Ohio in that the Ohio Turnpike service plazas are lightyears better than the new ones they built on the Indiana Toll Road...

The Don apparently is taking over labor statistics now, so I'm sure the cooking will get worse.

I would be surprised if Louisville didn't have a higher murder rate than San Diego....

It was dumb then, and this is dumb now. Personally I'd prefer a society where stupid culture war **** was less pervasive and didn't matter more than material consequences as it pertains to society, but here we are. And while you can blame the influencers, the media that blows the stuff out of proportion and the consumers of said media who eat it up bear as much or more responsibility for why it keeps happening.

For what it's worth, the only reason I've heard about the outrage over the ad is because of people complaining about the outrage over the ad. I don't claim to be the most up-to-date person on pop culture, but I get the sense that this is a case of a small non-representative amount of outrage being blown up into something bigger by people on the right and the Nate Silver / Matt Yglesias types who act like Twitter is real life. So having said all of that, what exactly am I supposed to do about it? What steps can I, person who isn't raging over Sydney Sweeney and hadn't heard about said controversy until RW influencers lost their **** about it, supposed to do to ensure other people don't react to said things?

1.) Those are massive revisions downard 2.) No wonder Americans have bad vibes about the economy

Certainly cannot understand why we are supposed to just accept Paramount's framing given the obvious conflict of interest at hand

"It's Liberation Day... Again..."

As always, his actions fail the basic "how is he making your life any better" test.

Really they got two solid BP arms once Sewald gets healthy... I wish they would have gotten a bat, but I think they did fine. Could have been better, but they did fine with the needs they had