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What they need to do with SSI is remove the annual income cap on having to contribute to it, or at least triple or quadruple it. EDIT: Whoops, looks like a lot of other people got there first.

It also depends on what Trump has on her.

So do I.

Trump would win the election if it were held today only if we woke up to learn that a snap election were called for today so vote now or forever hold your peace, and no one has a chance to put much thought into their vote. I reject the ideas that most people hate democracy, that Americans are chronically apathetic about everything all the time, and that what we see today in polls is exactly how people are going to vote in eight months. Trump has a super-energized fan base tuned into him 24-7, so hell yes they're gonna show up for polling. Most other people won't even think about the election until at least October, and based on the last three cycles in which Republicans were predicted for months ahead of time that they were going to trounce Democrats only to end up losing in the end, I believe that once people start paying attention to what they are being asked to vote for, just like the last three times, they will be horrified by the choice on the right and will pull to lever for the choice on the left.

Also, they will flatly deny that the United States is the most influential or wealthiest country in the world right now.

They want to live in America as the dominant race, just as their forebears from the Greatest Generation and before did. They want to do whatever they want to anyone they want any time they want, and they want their perfect version of government, permanently installed and immune from ouster, to support them. They want to be able to coerce people they don't like or respect to labor for them for cheap or, where possible, for free. They want a single state Presbyterian religion. They want might to make right. In short, they want to Make America Great Again.

We took a long drive out to PEI in 2019 and we wanted to go by Bar Harbor specifically to be the first people on American soil to see the sun rise, but it would have added something like ten hours to our drive. Maybe some day.

There is no convincing the hard right. They love Trump because he’s a criminal who’s getting away with it all, or because they love chaos and want to watch the world burn, or because they sincerely already believe he is being persecuted. Those numbers are already maxed out and will not be added to, at least to any decisive degree. I understand that a marginal number of right-leaners can be talked out of Trump, and that some will turn toward him, but I would bet it’s way more the former than the latter, because most people don’t like criminals, despite what hair-on-fire people may fear. There will be no talking moderates into suddenly loving the cut of Trump’s jib because he’s being “persecuted”. That is not a moderate position. That’s a whatever-Tulsi-Gabbard-is position—flip-flop, for lack of a better descriptor at this moment. You may be right about some folks in the middle of the spectrum throwing up their hands, but only because they’re low-information people who are paying almost no attention to the news about him, and then I wouldn’t call them moderates. I would call them uncommitteds, or perhaps apathetics. But if someone is paying attention, if they are really taking in the news about Trump and not actively avoiding it because news triggers them, then they will not be apathetic about it. They will form an opinion about it, and probably a firm one. Left-leaners and dedicated liberals will not be throwing up their hands. They will be racing to the polls, and in record numbers. Adding this all up, I don’t see how Trump wins unless some unforeseen dramatic or drastic event happens between now and then to upend the calculus. Whatever that is, it won’t be the Court running out the clock on the criminal cases. I hypothesize that will hurt Trump’s election chances.

Don’t worry your erstwhile pretty little head about it, Nikki. That presidency is not going to happen. I just don’t see any way on god’s green earth that the more criminal and legal trouble Trump gets in, the more voters come off the sidelines, or peel off Biden’s camp, to vote for him. In fact, I’m close to coming around to the idea/hypothesis that if the Court does end up ruling in favor of Trump’s immunity—or even better, figure out a way to rule for his immunity while ruling against similar immunity for any other president—that would be the final nail in his campaign’s coffin, since anyone with a minimally-operational prefrontal cortex would see that as proof positive that Trump cooked the Court, and that alone would frighten enough voters to race to the polls at one in the morning on Election Day to make sure they don’t lose out on the chance to vote against him to ensure his defeat. Yeah, I know I said all this in 2016, too, but I didn’t realize then that so many people simply did not know anything about the Trump I’d been reading about for thirty years. There’s practically nobody who doesn’t know about him now, and based on how Trumpsim has lost Republicans elections for three cycles now, I can’t envision any way that the electorate just does a 180 and Trump crushes Biden now, age issue or otherwise. Something else would have to happen disqualifying of Biden for Democrats to lose the White House, e.g., he truly does get indicted for gross corruption, or, he dies and Kamala runs instead. But absent that kind of October surprise, what I can basically guarantee is that voters won’t just suddenly decide that they like the cut of Trump’s jib after all because of his criminal trials and vote for him based on that.

😉

I hope Larry David does well with the inheritance.

It would be more convincing if the guy had dropped two of the exact same brand and one bounced and the other didn’t, rather than dropping two of the same brand and they both bounce, and then dropping two of a different brand and they both don’t. Also, not for nothing, the lady dropped one battery only, an Energizer, and it bounced; and then the guy dropped two that bounced, also both Energizers. The two the guy dropped that didn’t bounce? Not Energizers, and from the looks of it, probably a different manufacturer, possibly with different physical specs and/or materials for their battery’s outer shell than Energizer has. So, until I see this happen with two of the same brand, then yeah, I’m thinking ain’t no way.

Yes! Now do yawning.

Man, neither of these guys are good enough to even get work in Asia.

Nepo baby

He has now given the red hats explicit cover to claim that nothing that Trump says proves he’s positively impaired, and in fact, because he can seamlessly go back and forth between perfect lucidity and apparent cognitive impairment, the latter proves that he’s merely joking and being sarcastic and he’s actually aping Biden. First-class gaslight move.

There’s a crux of the biscuit here: what constitutes strong evidence? The red hats believe there is strong evidence that Biden stole the 2020 election. We say there is not. So we could say there is strong evidence that Trump steals the election in 2024, and they will say there is not. So how do we figure out what the truth is in a post-truth society?

It’s hard to argue against success, but to be fair, everyone including me and perhaps even you, criticized the pick of a high school pitcher at 1/3 as being same old Avila. What would be a fun and even spirited debate is whether Jobe would have amounted to anything has Chris Ilitch been asleep at the wheel like many including I believed, still kept the Avila regime and their coaching choices on board today, and trusted Jobe’s development to that lot. The wild card is that A.J. was here by then, so who knows whether and how much influence he had on the pick, although developmental guru Ryan Garko was not as of yet.

Good thing one eyewitness was there to witness it with his eye and tell us the tale.

We already know that people will not “come to their senses and reject silly superstitions”. Those silly superstitions are the only way a lot of people can make any sense out of the world. That itself may not make sense to a lot of other people, but the fact is that entire nations and even civilizations have been and still are developed and operated on such superstitions, and even if the superstitions are a fantasy, the effect they have on our world is real, and that has to be dealt with and respected on at least a certain level. The real trick is how to establish compromise in a way that achieves peace while still respecting the beliefs based on things others, especially opponents, don’t believe or even respect. The barrier to that is that many if not most religions, many of the majors included, are completely and unyieldingly opposed to compromise in any form. And the $64 question is, can we ever get there and hold onto it for any number of generations. It’s a balance so tricky that in all these millennia, it still hasn’t been figured out as a bottleable formula yet. And so here we are.

Actually, I’d like to see this. At your leisure. Thanks. EDIT: Hold that pizza, I see some detail has been provided in subsequent posts. Will review. Thanks.