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I think the Dems are gaming a future loss. They want to exaggerate the polls as much as possible, ostensibly to improve Dem turnout, but also to provide evidence for being “mistreated” in the event that Biden loses. it’s why CNN publicizes that Joe Biden is 16 points ahead:
https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/06/politics/cnn-poll-biden-trump-2020-election/index.html
Fascism is coming. And I don’t doubt it, I just think that it’s coming from the left.
Plus, he’s a local guy. Serra HS, born/raised in San Mateo. Almost makes up for his attending Berkeley. He said “I became a conservative from hanging around liberals in Berkeley.”
Trump lost Chris Wallace when he compared him unfavorably to his father about a year ago. Ever since then, Wallace has had it out for Trump.
I knew the fix was in during the “Economic” section of the night when Wallace asked Trump about how much tax he’d paid in the prior year. Really? You think that is what Americans care about vis-a-vis the economy? Not the record economy, not the trade agreements, not the record numbers of African American, Latino American and female entrepreneurs and business starts, not the record low unemployment for all of those groups. Oh no, we’re not interested in those. According to Chris Wallace, it’s Trump’s personal federal income tax for two specified years. Not other years. Not business taxes. Not real estate/property taxes, excise taxes or anything else. AYFKM?
And just when you thought it couldn’t get worse, Wallace asked him the cherry-picked question of all time, new jobs during Obama’s last three years. In other words, Wallace (a) compared job growth past the end of a normal economic cycle with the prior period and (b) failed to note that interest rates were as low as possible and flat with Obama only having been increased once in eight years whereas they went up continuously during Trump’s administration.
[quote quote=2857]It is almost not possible to perform worse than Trump did tonight – petty, mean-spirited, argumentative, unable to adhere to the agreed protocol, wandering into constant irrelevancies, constantly interrupting himself. All Joe Biden had to do was appear Presidential, which he did. And which Trump did not. La commedia e finita.[/quote]
Maybe Trump wasn’t feeling so good… 😉
I heard the same thing. Trump was all-base, all the time. Biden was very much a moderate Democrat. He did his best to distance himself from the left throughout the debate. He repeatedly denounced the Green New Deal — “no, I don’t support the Green New Deal,” he said — and referred instead to his own climate plan, which includes less aggressive emission reduction targets.
Early on, Biden said he was “not opposed to” Trump Supreme Court pick Amy Coney Barrett and that she “seems like a very fine person.” Biden also went out of his way to make clear he opposes the calls from some left-wing activists to “defund the police,” and disputed a false claim from Trump that he supports Medicare For All, noting that he defeated its leading proponent, Bernie Sanders, in the primary. The remarks were reflective of Biden’s larger strategy, which is not to bet the election on turning out young and progressive voters, but rather to bring seniors and college-educated whites with more moderate views into his coalition. The question is whether Biden turned off enough progressives for it to matter during the election.I thought Chris Wallace was comically biased, but then Trump told him he wasn’t nearly as good as his father. And so it goes.
Neither of these two should be President. And let’s face it, the vast majority of voters have made up their minds. The small sliver of voters who are undecided will be influenced by these debates.
And those people, those undecided voters are unimpressed with end-to-end insults. They want a reason to vote for one of them, not against one of them. And neither of them really gave a great assessment of what they’ll do from 2020 to 2024. And frankly…I was more than a little surprised that Trump didn’t rest on his pre-COVID record which was pretty damned good, compared to Biden’s non-record and complete lack of support from Obamas and Clintons.
[quote quote=2833]The unspoken lie in the NYT article is that Trump actually does his own returns and cheats. He’s no different from any other wealthy taxpayer. The returns are done by big public accounting firms on a continuous basis. Those firms are bound by law to be truthful and they have no incentive to cheat. The cost of compliance is enormous even if they zero out the return. The people from the NYT who wrote the article would have the reader believe that they have the personnel who know tax law. Current and prior. And financial statements. Information returns. There are 80,000 pages of tax law including Code, Regs, Rev Rulings, USTCs, Rev Procs, TCMs, on and on. The same holds for New York tax law and any other jurisdiction where there is a reporting obligation. And foreign if necessary. In order to further understand the complexity of returns for special taxpayers like Trump, you would also have to have some understanding of GAAP. Derivatives, hedging, executive disclosure…you name it. And not only would you have to know current law which changes daily you’d have to know prior law going back to the Clinton Administration. All taxpayers have the right and obligation to minimize their legal tax obligations under Federal and State Laws. There is nothing wrong with that. The Times will never say that. The assumption is always under-payment be it individual or corporate. And illegality. There is no point in reading the article because it’s meaningless.[/quote]
To your point in bold, the law firms and accounting firms who prepare Trump’s taxes — and those who prepare EVERYONE’S taxes — not only don’t have an incentive to cheat, they have an extreme disincentive to cheat. If they’re caught cheating, their license to practice is suspended. If the taxpayer is cheating and the accountant/lawyer knows about it and is caught, their license to practice is suspended. That’s too great a price to pay. No professional tax preparer will do that, not even unethical tax preparers.
Every taxpayer, even the 1040-EZs, try to reduce their tax burden. So does Trump. And in Real Estate, it’s particularly easy to do, there are lots of options to do so. They’re implying he’s done something wrong or something unethical, which they are (as you noted) profoundly ill-equipped to do.
You would think, that after losing the Presidential election, the Democrats would go back to the drawing board and try to figure out what they did wrong. You would think that they would realize that they failed to dance with the ones that brung them to the ball, essentially the lower-middle class and the middle class. The Dems fawned all over rich Wall Streeters and rich Hollywood and they provided for the poorest of the poor — as they should.
But they took for granted their large constituencies. Trump didn’t, and he got elected. I remember that, for two months, about every third time I flew into the Detroit airport I saw Trump’s plane. Never saw Hillary’s plane.
So after colossally screwing up the election and screwing over their constituency, their reaction was not “we have to get more in tune with average Americans.” It was “how can we force everyone to do what we want?” And it morphed into completely nonsensical fiction. Kavanaugh’s a pervert. We’ll just add justices to the Supreme Court when we have the Senate and Presidency. Trump likes pee sex. Hunter Biden did nothing wrong. Property destruction, arson, theft, vandalism is “mostly peaceful protest.” Those codicils of the Left are abhorrent to normal people. The sooner the Dems understand that, the better off they’ll be.
[quote quote=2274]I am scared to death that expectations for Biden’s debate performance are so ridiculously low that he will be declared the winner if he is even standing at the end.[/quote]
He just needs to perform as well as Melone:
https://youtu.be/fL2EAq1dcdM?t=428
Nancy Pelosi doesn’t think Biden should debate Trump. I think most Democrats don’t, though not for the reasons in Pelosi’s dissembling. I think I’d respect Pelosi more if she just told the truth: that Biden shouldn’t debate Trump because Biden’s cognitive impairment will be onstage for all to see. And BTW, her own cognitive skills are deteriorating.
Michael Moore is the only person of whom I’m aware that called the 2016 election for Trump before I did. He’s very much on top of that voter demographic and he’s right to sound the alarms.
What people don’t understand is that the average voter doesn’t want to be identified as a Trump voter…to anyone, and certainly not to pollsters. I still don’t think Trump will be re-elected and the Republicans will lose both the House and Senate, but the Presidential election will be closer than I thought.
Once the Democrats capture all three and Biden slides out of office and President Kamala Harris is sworn in (summer of 2021 is my guess), they’ll be overconfident and think they have a mandate, not realizing that people will have voted against Trump in the same way that they once voted against Hillary. They’ll return to forgetting about (and cr@pping upon) the lower middle and middle classes. In the old days, the Dems forgot about blue collar white voters. In these brave new times, the blue collar white voters are to be actively disliked because they’re, well, you know…white. And therefore deserving of disgust and hatred.
The midterm elections won’t be kind to the Dems.
Yes, they have a specific theme they need to convey, and I’d say Ms. Ali captured her master’s words better than most. Her alternate universe is of her own making and doesn’t reflect reality.
Candidly, I thought Trump would get whupped in November. Based upon independent observations, I still think he’ll get beat…but it’s a lot closer than I’d expect:
https://www.axios.com/trump-upset-biden-2020-election-da37cdd6-1b96-4377-9584-9df9f2554055.htmlOne of my closest friends left Orange County because he was a red and OC was turning blue. He landed in Texas, just north of Dallas. Dallas is now turning too blue for him, so he’s moving to Oklahoma.
[quote quote=2195]Unfortunately, daughter in law can’t escape. Asst principal at Willow Glen Middle School. I guess her attendance is mandatory.[/quote]
That’s great. We used to live four blocks from WGMS. My father, uncles and aunt went there. Boys used to play NJB in their gym for years. We’re still about 1.5 miles away from WGMS.
I remember the last time I voluntarily took a taxi. Dropped my youngest son off at college. We needed to go to a Target store to stock up. Took a taxi. It was 3.4 miles. $26!! I complained and the cabbie said “You need to get used to New Jersey cab fares.”
Well, I’d taken my fair share of fares in NYC, NJ, SF, LA, Chicago and other high-cost transportation towns. $26 to go 3.4 miles seemed a bit unreasonable to me. I downloaded Uber while I was in Target and got an Uber back to the college. $12.
No sir. I don’t need to get accustomed to New Jersey cab fares.
