He won 98 or 99 of Iowa’s 99 counties! Not a bad showing.
No doubt but that with a few more indictments he could have won 100 out of 99.
Maybe they will come through for us with yet more indictments. More Directives 10-28NeverTrump, please!!
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4 hours ago, DavidOdden said:
. . . a vote for Trump might “really” be a vote against Harris whom I consider to be a more-dangerous potential POTUS than Biden. . . .
What policies of Harris as President do you think more dangerous than Biden’s?
“Policies” are emergent, they emerge after the candidate takes office and has to execute the duties of the office. At the campaigning stage, we mostly have slogans like “Make America Great Again”, “Hope. Change”, “Bye, Don”, “Believe in America”. Since Harris is not running for president, she has not declared any policies, that is up to Biden. When it comes to the VPOTUS package deal, all we have to go on is ideological probabilities. The two central questions w.r.t. Harris are (1) is she more progressive than Biden or less – my judgment is “more” – and (2) does she have the political strength to resist the demands of the substantially more progressive Democratic machine – my judgment is “not much”. Of course, we saw the disasterous results of a president who was totally willing to ignore the advice of his betters.
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On 1/16/2024 at 12:15 PM, Jon Letendre said:
He won 98 or 99 of Iowa’s 99 counties! Not a bad showing.
No doubt but that with a few more indictments he could have won 100 out of 99.
Maybe they will come through for us with yet more indictments. More Directives 10-28NeverTrump, please!!
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We are sure Harris is still the nominee, yes?
19 minutes ago, tadmjones said:
We are sure Harris is still the nominee, yes?
We don’t care. What matters is who is on the ballot, which determines the set of electors that will determine the winner. AFAIK, Harris is on the ballot everywhere that gets a say.
So that’s how that works , here I thought Harris as VP gets to decide the election by either accepting or refusing the electors slates.
Sure, she does also wield the power to overturn the results of the election, just as Pence did but did not exercise. All sorts of people get to “decide the election” – voters, vote-tabulators, state governors and secretaries of states, myriad district judges and state Supreme Courts, SCOTUS and the parties who argue before them, party officials, the Archivist, selected electors and whoever counts and records those votes, the USPS (who delivers the results), the tellers in Congress, not to mention each and every member of Congress present at the reading.
Nixon was president of the Senate when he lost to Kennedy, and he conceded that he lost the election. I expect that Harris will likewise concede that Trump lost the election when the time comes.
I think Trump may have a shot at winning the election. If the closeness of the elections in the last few cycles is accurate, there seems to be ‘new’ support from people that in past cycles were reluctant to publicly admit supporting and or change their opinion and now support another administration headed by him.
People like the guys at the All In podcast, VCs in Silicon Valley. And RFK and Tulsi and Elon , he certainly hasn’t lost any MAGA support so on its face it ‘feels’ like more and in a close race…
Both of the congressional links point to the Senate result.
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Harris v. Trump – Some Specific Proposals
Harris – In her convention acceptance speech, the vice-president promised mortgage assistance for first-time homebuyers, a tax credit for parents of newborns and bans on price gouging at the grocery store to help target inflation.
I say: fight inflation by balancing the federal budget (such revenue increase and expense decrease as is required).
I say: the idea that the typical American should be able to afford a home of their own is an outlandish idea, however often it is stated or implied by politicians and newscasters. When I was 60, I was first able to buy a home, for retirement years of life, which purchase was purely by savings over a lifetime of employment. That should be the ideal for people whose only asset was their labor. Borrowing money for a home or getting government subsidies for one should not be ideals.
I say: by the time I finished high school, I had decided that I did not want to have children. That is also the right decision for anyone until they are rich enough to have children. I have not begrudged greatly having to support the education of other people’s children through our property taxes, because I hope the children will fare well in nature and society. But now, the politicians (on both sides) demand we give our savings and pensions, which they have already reduced by half through inflation, to reward people having babies.
Trump – Trump has pledged to expand US energy production, opening areas such as the Arctic wilderness to oil drilling, which he argues would lower energy costs. He proposed reducing housing costs by preventing illegal immigrants from getting mortgages and by launching a home building program on federal land. He has since proposed a massive roundup and deportation of all illegal immigrants; the earlier proposed mortgage interventions then become irrelevant. Trump promises to impose large tariffs on our international trade, and he thinks this would result in a net increase in government revenues.
I say: let the market determine energy exchange prices and housing exchange prices. I have no issue with allowing drilling for more petroleum. I support laissez-faire in our private trade with all countries not at war with the US. No excuses by projected aggregate patterns in outcomes. I oppose Trump’s tariffs.
Harris – She supports a woman’s legal right to procure an abortion. She supports the idea of making a federal law to defend that right across the land.
I say: Not news here is my support of this right; opposition to it is an election deal-breaker for me. All major legislation, for the foreseeable future, requires a two-thirds Yes from the US Senate. Democrats are not going to have that coming out of this election. The processes by which the right can be protected by amending the Constitution are also unlikely to succeed. To boot, Harris is unlikely to get even one Supreme Court appointment, because the Senate will be Republican, and they will reject any nomination that is not anti-abortionist. The best we can do is to get a referendum in each State for that State. And continue privately keeping the underground railroad running.
Trump – will appoint anti-abortionist Justices, as in his first term. If the Republican Senate majority reaches two-thirds, a law for banning abortions in all States can land on Trump’s desk.
I’ve had some big losses in my political campaigning. Candidates for President can get no traction in campaigning for a balanced budget. My marching and letter writing against reinstatement of draft registration in 1980 was unsuccessful. I campaigned for Roe across its era, and my Objectivist and libertarian associates just replied that Roe would never be overturned and just went on supporting Republicans. I had a couple of wins: gays and lesbians were gotten squarely into the military during Obama. In 2003 by decision at the Supreme Court, gay sex became legal in every State, including the one my lover and I had been born in, which had refused to repeal their old criminal statute, and from which we then emigrated to a more decent place. 7 hours ago, Boydstun said:
Borrowing money for a home or getting government subsidies for one should not be ideals.
Of course government subsidies for any purpose are the opposite of ideal.
But what’s wrong with borrowing money for a home? Isn’t it better to start building up an estate by paying on a mortgage than to just pay rent?
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6 minutes ago, Doug Morris said:
Of course government subsidies for any purpose are the opposite of ideal.
But what’s wrong with borrowing money for a home? Isn’t it better to start building up an estate by paying on a mortgage than to just pay rent?
I’ve listened to a fair amount of am talk radio over the years investment/financial advice shows make up an appreciable amount of content programming and I’d say there isn’t really a definitive answer to that particular question. It reminds me of Thomas Sowell’s maxim, there are no solutions just trade offs (paraphrasing).
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@Doug Morris – my advice is to incur no debts. Stay on the other side of the economic equation. Life is much cheaper without interest payments. I was fortunate to have a rental apartment that was below the market because the owner was pleased to keep his old renters whom he liked rather than finding new renters. Once he decided to sell and go into assisted living, we, for the first time ever, considered owning our own place (because I didn’t want to be continually disturbed in my studies and writing by needing to find a new rental apartment and moving). We could not afford anything there in Chicago worth having. (If you’re not near the Lake, what’s the point?) I was fortunate also in having a long lead time to search online for history of temperatures in the different areas of the country, then search for real estate in the better weather areas. We had time to drive down (rental—we didn’t own an auto then) to the mid-South, where there were offers we could afford. Down here we found a couple of wooded acres, a couple of fireplaces, and 3400 square feet for only 230,000 dollars back in 2009. It has been wonderful to live here with nature, nice people (even ones indoctrinated against us over at Liberty University), and mild weather. But we were in this opportunity because we were retiring. I had crossed over from the debtor (credit-card) class in 1990, and that turn had also happened for my husband Walter (we had not known each other back then). Never since would we ever buy anything on credit.
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8 hours ago, Boydstun said:
The best we can do is to get a referendum in each State for that State.
You do know that’s Trump’s stated position anyway, right?
3 minutes ago, Harrison Danneskjold said:
You do know that’s Trump’s stated position anyway, right?
Trump declares that having this right decided at the State level is right. I do not. The US constitution should be invoked to protect the individual rights of women at stake. I think State referendums are now the best we can do under the Republican boot on this at the US Senate and Supreme Court and State legislatures (a route for Constitutional Amendment). And I say it presuming the majority of the people in most States will vote against these prohibitions on elective abortions coming from the Republicans in power, all beholden to the “Moral Majority” that took over the Party back in the day. I never voted for Ron Paul because I knew that his cop-out of saying “let’s get this issue back into the States” was simply code at that time for “let’s get Roe overturned and this right of women again quashed.”
Trump has had to play hot potato over the referendum in Florida. How many votes can he gain or lose by saying he is yes or no on the initiative?
Citizens, and theologians and philosophers, and perhaps you and I too, have simply disagreed on where the individual rights lie on the issue of abortion. On both sides, the issue is correctly seen as a matter of individual rights, and both take it as a sacred, highest-values matter. Some politicians think it is something that can be negotiated over, like dollar amounts on taxes or expenditures, in setting terms of mere number of weeks of gestation in a compromise legal zone. That is a foggy headedness of political folks, especially politicians, just wishing the issue would go away. Heads analyzing the issue in terms of individual rights see through that shallowness.
I take all rights to be ultimately individual rights, and that is a certain type of ought-relationship holding between autonomous human agents. Rights of small children are in my assessment rights among adults having various interests in protecting and nurturing those children. Adults on either side may see the immature offspring as a gift from God or a precious way of nature, but when it comes to deliberate force between these adults in a contest over control of what happens to the children, it is in this era the proper task of the non-sectarian government to adjudicate the use of such force and, in my view, to do so in accordance with protection of individual rights.
I do not agree that we have at hand a human being when a conceptus is formed, nor when there is a blastomere, which by nature may or may not attach to the uterine wall. Nor when there is a “fetal heartbeat” which is actually beginning of pulsing tissue, though not yet a heart. This question of when does the human being as human being begin has been a long-time derailment of right thinking about rights concerning the fetus or infant, which is not itself an independent and autonomous agent. A would-be guardian wanting a fetus to be brought to birth and maturity must not impress anyone else into their service in that project. That is the rights violation of involuntary servitude, as in military conscription or in our formerly slave States (and in Indian Territory). Prior to a stage of fetal viability, i.e., a plausible chance of survival outside the womb, with or without artificial support, a would-be guardian of the potential mature life, must remain “hands off!” Unless the voluntary assistance of the mother can be obtained. Once viability is reached in the individual case (hopefully in the assessment of objective physicians, not politicians), the situation of the would-be guardians and the mother changes. Then it is physically possible to have new guardians in place of the declining mother without need of her personal services.
The issue is that complex.
We shall have to continue our challenging thinking about this, with citizens on opposite sides of this absolute sort of issue, however much it makes politicians squirm. The Republican Party did not have to let itself be taken over by the so-called Moral Majority back in the day. Because they did, I almost always voted against Republicans across my life (a sheriff and a States Attorney in Illinois were the exceptions), as vote against involuntary servitude, even though I agreed with some Republicans’ support for a free market and fiscal responsibility.
There can be no compromise on this. So far we have agreement in non-violence between the the two sets of adults holding opposite views on the issue (save the rare violence by anti-abortionist citizens against abortion clinics). Both sides have been willing these past decades and hopefully for more to come to stay with the rule of law on this, pay our lawyers, and get out our arguments and voters.
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