The Race For 2024

[Jimmy Higgins]

Yesterday, Trump said that Harris was mentally unstable. I've never heard anyone project like Trump does. He is the most mentally unstable, compulsive liar that has ever run for president and his VP nominee is as well. It's hard to understand how people don't see that.

We are bombarded with ads here in Georgia. Every Trump ad does nothing but call Harris names, while every Harris ad expresses a plan that she hopes to accomplish. There are also lots of ads from organizations that support the right of women to have control over their own bodies. Since I record most of the things I watch, I'm not subjected to many of these ads, as I fast forward them whenever possible.

And I say that’s why she will lose. Sorry. She needs to attack him

She needs to turn out the women vote as high as possible to win.

 

[Toni]

But it's not wrong to consider her being selected as racially motivated.

Suppose one of the people on Harris' VP list were a black female. Would it matter that she was a PhD in political science, and elected to state legislature four times, because she's brilliant? No. She'd be a drag on the ticket and everyone knows it.

Walz was a DEI hire. Harris needed a white male to "balance" the ticket. Harris is smart enough to realize that. So she did hire the middle aged, Midwestern, white dude.
Tom

Exactly: Comfortingly heteronormative former high school teacher and football coach turned Congressman and Governor , who knows how to change a tire and who absolutely will help you out if a snowdrift.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Trump ad confuses state of Georgia with Republic of Georgia

Online sleuths linked the image to the country of Georgia, not the battleground state that Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris are fighting to win in November.

www.ajc.com

Did Trump do the ad himself?

Can we persuade him to hold his next big rally in Tbilisi?

IIRC, this is not the first time his campaign has done this. I guess it's what happens when your definition of "the best people" is "the people who said the best things about me" rather than "who is the best person for this job?"

But he thinks their job is saying good things about him!

 

[Politesse]

But it's not wrong to consider her being selected as racially motivated.

Suppose one of the people on Harris' VP list were a black female. Would it matter that she was a PhD in political science, and elected to state legislature four times, because she's brilliant? No. She'd be a drag on the ticket and everyone knows it.

Walz was a DEI hire. Harris needed a white male to "balance" the ticket. Harris is smart enough to realize that. So she did hire the middle aged, Midwestern, white dude.
Tom

How is that a "DEI" hire? How is the purpose of either equity or inclusion served, and what formal organization oversaw consistency and accountability for how candidates were recruited for the role?

 

[unapologetic]

When there is only one opening for a job, And everybody to pick from, You either flip a coin (random number generator/draw lots) or start making trivial distinctions like race or gender, or laugh. Or by what voting demographic will approve of your choice.
Biden picked Harris, TWICE (for VP and Pres.), Because he thinks she will get votes. No other reason.

But, the bottom line remains. Trump is not looking for the best candidate from the whole population. He's only willing to consider the straight white male candidates. people who kiss his oversize ass ego.

Fixed it for you.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

That's manipulation??? Here all this time I thought it was the politics of compromise. But righties don't do compromise so I can understand why you would not be familiar with it.

Biden ran as a moderate and then swerved hard left when elected. His shift went well beyond compromise.

The Republicans portrayed him as hard left. Doesn't make it so.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Such a weird flex to make fun of someone who laughs and shows joy.

Women aren't supposed to have joy!

 

[Loren Pechtel]

An interesting opinion by Adam Nichols:

'Furious' Trump is panicked as MAGA becomes monster he no longer controls: analyst

The MAGA movement has grown to such an extent that it’s now more powerful than Donald Trump is — and it’s become one of the former president's biggest threats, an analyst wrote in the New York Times. . . . Trump as an individual is losing his grasp on it — and it's becoming a Frankenstein monster its creator has little control over.

“This is why J.D. Vance has been a political liability to Trump’s campaign: Vance represents MAGA as it has evolved — esoterically ideological, deeply resentful, terminally online — unleavened by Trump’s instincts for showmanship and the winds of public sentiment.”

“It has absorbed more specific and unusual ideologies than he has. It is more hostile to abortion than he is, or than he wants to appear to be. It is more committed to deregulating health insurance than he is, or than he wants to appear to be.

“There is a great gap between the MAGA leader who slept with a porn star and the factions in the MAGA movement that want to outlaw pornography, as Roberts proposed on Project 2025’s first page.”

And Trump is now so associated with it that it could be what brings him down.

The Republican party is going to implode spectacularly when they find there's no winning the game of trying to be the most extreme.

I just don't want them taking the country with them when they do.

 

[ZiprHead]

Woman upset about MAGAts that try to run her off the highway because she has a Harris/Walz sticker on her truck.

 

[ZiprHead]

OMFG!!!

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I caught some of Harris' speech she gave yesterday on economics. I find her rather personable in this type of setting, not being in rally or debate mode. I like this Kamala.
She referenced a couple times about putting pragmatism above ideology, understanding nothing gets done in government by being a Bernie.
She mentioned going after corporate landlords who hoover up entire neighborhoods and drive up costs. She mentioned geothermal while speaking about clean energy. Something I think is going to be huge in the near future.

But the problem with geothermal is it involves using a heat pump. Why go through all the extra effort of digging/drilling geothermal wells/lines and use a heat pump... when you could just heat and cool the home with a heat pump? There is virtually financial savings using Geothermal over a heat pump. Now, for areas with strong geothermal sources, I think the math changes a bit.

Depends on the temperatures.

Around here ground source HVAC is a thing sometimes done on expensive custom houses. It's considerably more expensive up front but makes up for it over the long run with a lower bill. And it means you don't have to have any equipment outside which is good from a maintenance standpoint. Note that this is not geothermal, it's simply using a deep hole as a source of constant temperature. The AC has a much easier time of it discarding heat into 70F water than 110F air.

It's cost prohibitive but here you could make a fan-only HVAC system that would be acceptable to most people. Just pull the air through enough underground space on the way into the house. You can do AC that way anywhere you have the space for it, but most of the country you can't heat your house that way as the air comes up too cold.

If the water comes up warm enough you use it to generate power instead. Not a heat pump.

Harris is starting to get into the weeds of policy. It took a while, because generally running for President takes a while. It is good to see her expanding a bit more into details. Now the right-wing will pivot from she isn't talking to, her radical agenda of dealing with housing shortages.

There's nothing much to do about housing shortages. More people want to live in cities than there is land. Building tall is the obvious answer to pack more people in but it adds enough to the construction costs that it does nothing about housing cost.

 

[Derec]

Let’s face it: by explicitly saying that he would be looking for a VP who was black and female, he actually soared the fragile feelings of white men everywhere who cannot deal with the fact that the best person for the job was black and female.

Why do you think she was the "best person for the job"? What makes her better than other people he might have selected in 2020? And you are not even saying that this is your opinion, you are claiming that it's a fact. Again, why? And please, use reasoning and arguments, and not your usual condescension like "fragile feelings of white men") just because we dare disagree with you.

I’m not happy he gave bigots something to try to hang their hats on,

Quite the contrary, it is bigoted to say that only black women should be considered for vice president, SCOTUS justice and US Senator from California.

 

[Derec]

OMFG!!!

He did butcher that line, a part of a much longer speech. However, I need to point out that the clip is from 2020 btw even if the twit posting it is implying it was something new.
Did Trump Say Operation Desert Storm Took Place in Vietnam?
Full video:

 

[Derec]

Around here ground source HVAC is a thing sometimes done on expensive custom houses. It's considerably more expensive up front but makes up for it over the long run with a lower bill. And it means you don't have to have any equipment outside which is good from a maintenance standpoint. Note that this is not geothermal, it's simply using a deep hole as a source of constant temperature. The AC has a much easier time of it discarding heat into 70F water than 110F air.

Likewise heating with a heat pump. Your outside unit (functioning as an evaporator) may freeze because it is pumping hear from the outside to the inside. Using a warmer underground cold reservoir avoids that.

There's nothing much to do about housing shortages. More people want to live in cities than there is land. Building tall is the obvious answer to pack more people in but it adds enough to the construction costs that it does nothing about housing cost.

A lot of people also do not want to live in huge high rises. If they have a family, they want a detached house with at least a small yard.

 

[Derec]

Biden picked Harris, TWICE (for VP and Pres.), Because he thinks she will get votes. No other reason.

No, he picked her because he was backed into a corner.
The first time because of a) his pledge to only consider women and b) the George Floyd insurrection made it politically untenable for him to pick somebody non-black.
The second time because he waited too long to quit and so Dems could not have a primary and were pretty much stuck with the crown princess.

 

[Politesse]

He has also said that the Revolutionary War involved airports, Andrew Jackson fought in the Civil War, and that human trafficking has increased since the abolition of slavery. History is not Mr Trump's strong point, which is not surprising given that opposition to accurate history education is a major plank of his party's platform.

 

[Derec]

I believe no first lady has ever given a speech to be paid.

Hillary made a career out of being paid to speak to the likes of Goldman-Sachs, although admittedly she waited until she was no longer the first lady to start that hustle.

 

[Derec]

So Biden is responsible for bird flu now.

Nobody is saying that. Neither is he responsible for the overall supply crunch due to the Pandemic.
However, he is responsible for letting the increased levels of largess continue well beyond when the economy had largely reopened. There was no reason to continue expanded unemployment benefits well into 2021 for example. That did contribute to inflation.
And he would also have been responsible for the $3.5T Spendapalooza, but luckily Manchin and Sinema put a kibosh on that.

 

[Derec]

And we were whiping our asses with coffee filters.

Keep your kinks in the Lounge, where they belong!

 

[Patooka]

What a dipshit...