Election Temperature

Havingfun......where do you think Mike Pompeo is right now? I hear taking care of business in Italy

He blocked me two years ago. From Fullerton CA. Sixty years ago I almost went to the college there. Uncle & cousin lived there.

Just messing with tbrmskss :)

J C, "Lol. You are one angry fella." Who are you referring to as angry fella?

Lol. You are one angry fella.

Stop being stupid.

During the Lewinsky/Clinton scandal I was in early 20s and didn't watch the news. The asterisk is yes Sherlock me referring to voter fraud. Yes has not been proven and yes it was just me being a smart ass. Stop asking questions you know answer to.

What happened to the U S Supreme Court in all this Election Fraud? Can they still rule against Pence and find the 1887 law unconstitutional and send the Electors back the State Legislatures to correct?

".if you want to stay reality based then stop cherry picking the topics you want to hit on and ignoring the ones you aren't comfy with."

Explain your asterisk comment.

The main stream media is not politically biased.

They are ratings biased. If it bleeds, it leads.

Or maybe you have forgotten the media freak out over Monica's blow job?

I am not sure if biased is the word I would use to describe Fox, OAN, Newsmax. I would call them agenda-driven. To me, to show a bias would to not report on something. As an example, if CNN were biased, it would not report on something good that Trump did.

What I have seen, is Fox has an agenda. It's agenda is power to control politics. Look at their lineup throughout the day. You don't get stories about changing climate, but stories about people against climate change. You don't get stories about tax breaks for the rich. You don't get stories about a lot of things.

So if I were to randomly turn on CNN, what can I see? I can see a fucking cooking show segment. I can see them bash Trump. I can see them bash Obama. I can see them praise Trump (rarely and that is, imo, not bias, but opinion) I can see them praise Obama. I can see stories about the weather. I can see a lot of different things.

What I do not see is the intentional use of Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt. There is no, "You should not vote for X because they will (something negative)"

And before I forget and I should put this at the top . . .

Thank you for a civil discussion.

@erotic
I can't educate you on that it is just my opinion as well as others. I guess I could ask you same with ones you feel are biased. They all take snipets from interviews or speeches and twist them to fit a narrative. I am often amazed at how people believe a meme is factual. Lol

@JC

Please educate me.

I often hear that CNN is some bastion of left wing bias with an agenda to push out this left wing material.

I have not seen it. So what is it that you and others are seeing that I am missing?

If you want to learn something interesting, learn more about Rupert Murdoch. He has built a worldwide media empire based on promoting fear and anger. While it can be argued he gave news to people who wanted it, he used pure psychology to fatten his wallet. When he came to America, he found a person to run things with the same level of FUD, but this time in politics in Roger Ailes. I think they have done more to divide the country than any politician.

Tbrmskss......if you want to stay reality based then stop cherry picking the topics you want to hit on and ignoring the ones you aren't comfy with.

Reality has a well known liberal bias...

Erotica, "Some would say the US is the same." Some start in poverty or immigrants, become $billionaires. What do you say?

@erotic
I agree we need less biased media. Some of the names you mentioned are pushing right wing material but also we have plenty of left wing media. Don Lemon, Anderson Cooper, Chris Cuomo all from CNN. Just naming one's I am familiar with. I think social media causes lots of problems also for both sides. Next several months will be interesting to see. Hopefully things will improve. The pandemic has not really disturbed my family. We have not had any sickness and no financial problems. We have actually saved more from less travel and such. Lots of others have no been so fortunate. Thanks for your input

"You know what I am talking about."

I have no fucking idea what you are talking about.

I'm relatively sure it is something about voter fraud somewhere, but you have to have evidence for that.

And you don't.

I know it is hard for you, but let's try to stay reality based, shall we?

@JC

Thank you. Thank you for coming around a little and not going off on people. That is cool.

"74 million people is the most votes an incumbent President has ever received. I may be wrong but that is what I read."

Yes, you are 100% correct. But please do not leave out that 81mm for a vote is also the most a President has ever gotten. This is one of those recognition things that has a small amount of value. Get people to stop fucking and having babies and that number will go down. The number that matters the most is the turnout of eligible voters. This was the highest in the last 50 years. This is why I have praised Trump. He got people involved. He did not have a unifying personality. He had a personality that you either loved or hated. If you hated him, you fucking voted to vote his ass out. So he got people involved, but imo, for the wrong reason. As I mentioned before, CA had more votes for Trump than any other state.

"Second swing states are just what they are. They can vote one way and then another. Georgia is not really surprising if you are familiar with the state and its people. " True. But the last time that GA voted for D president was Carter. Georgia has been reliably red, that's why Newt was allowed to do the shit he did. Yes, I know Clinton won in 92. That should have an asterisk because of Perot. Swing states are generally ones that have been toss ups for a bit. If you look at Ohio, they are one for a while. Florida is generally a swing state. You also look at their governors to see how they are swing states. Florida has had numerous D and R govs. Hell, Jeb did a decent job as FL gov.

"I think we should all be concerned at how divided we all are." Why is this a phrase I tend to only hear from Rs? And why am I hearing it now that they are not in power? I agree, we are divided. However, please do not neglect to determine how we got there and who pushed that as a goal.

"I personally want whoever the President is to be very successful because that means the country as a whole is." As long as you say they are not personally successful, but successful as a president, I completely agree.

"I will say Obama did something's that were good for us all and things I didn't think were so good." I agree. I can say the same about Clinton, Trump, Reagan, etc.

"Hopefully our leaders will find common ground and get this country to some kinda normalcy." There are a few tests to this. Will Schumer do what Mitch has done for the last 10 years? Payback is a fucking bitch. Will Mitch let Schumer do what he has done and just be silent? Mitch had a few agendas. His first was to be an obstructionist and not allow for normalcy. His second was to pack the courts with young conservatives regardless of any criteria other than young and ultra-conservative. But to get what you want requires the other side to work together. And by other side, I do not mean politicians, I mean citizens. You need people to denounce Rush's bullshit. You need people to denounce the Carlson/Hannity shit. You need people to denounce the OAN/Newsmax crap. Once that happens, you will see things progress and people become happier, instead of angry.

@FUN

"These communist countries sound like a good idea but there are people on top who never let you prosper. "

Some would say the US is the same.

Let's work with facts, not fiction.

Trump is not worth 2.1 billion. Trump may or may not be a billionaire. That is in dispute. Why? Because Trump has a tendency to exaggerate the value of intangible assets. As he is not a public company, he has a lot of leeway on how he can value them. So when Forbes builds out the list, they pull data from public companies' records. As you see, Elon Musk is the richest man in the world. How do they figure that out? It is a public record of how many shares of Tesla he has. They multiply that by the share price. They scour other public records and figure it out. This is why Trump's net worth is often in dispute.

What is NOT in dispute is that he is rich. He is the richest person to be in an elected position. At least I think so. I think someone from the gilded age was appointed an ambassador, but never elected. I have no problem with saying Trump is rich. He is very typical for a RE guy though. He be cash ass poor and highly leveraged. What happened when he had the apprentice was he now had cash coming in which allowed him to expand his debt. RE guys tend to buy something with as little down as possible, then have the cash come in and cover the debt, hope for a little bit of profit in the cash flow, then sell it later and the appreciation of the asset is the big profit.

His tax returns will not be understood by 99% of America. They don't understand the tax laws, they do not understand depreciation, they do not understand carry loss forwards. I am not concerned that he has 400+ million coming due in a few years. So the fuck what. What matters is if he can't refi it. Thanks to capitalism, anyone can get financing. The only point of contention is the terms. Right now from what I have read is that the banks already classify him as a risk. When I had a 150mm line of credit, I was at prime -1 on it. He is at prime +2. I had 20% collateral assigned to the bank. He has 100%. Ever wonder why he was pushing the fed to lower interest rates? Pushing them down means prime goes down. Prime goes down, his payments go down.

I thought Trump might make a bunch of money, ala TV/Book/Speaking deals after he left. That cash flow would replace his Apprentice cash flow. However, I think the Capitol raid may have done enough to tarnish his brand that he may barely be busy on the speaking circuit. It may make a book publisher scared to advance him for a book. I think TV is off the scope now. When more comes out about who these rioters are and who he praised, you may see public sentiment shift. His base will dwindle.

MoeandKathy,

When I evaluate the presidents in my lifetime (going back to JFK), one rubric I use is how many people have they gotten killed in unnecessary or questionable wars or escalations of a war or military interventions.

Here, as you point out, could be the one accomplishment of Trump. He did not get the USA involved in a new war or intervention that got people killed and he made some efforts to de-escalate.

There are rumors, probably pretty good ones, that hexes considering an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. I’m sure he would have liked to drop some big bombs before he left office. He did do one in Afghanistan, I believe, and he did assassinations of two key figures in Iran, which could have been his provocations for Iran to do something so he could them “bomb the shit” out of something.

LBJ greatly escalated Vietnam War. Nixon continued Vietnam War and expanded it into invasion of Cambodia. GW Bush lied us with Cheney and Rumsfeld into an unnecessary war in Iraq. Reagan and GHW Bush did small military interventions that got people killed. We can count others too. I did agree with GHW Bush’s Iraq War after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait.

I’d argue that Trump did cost many, many American lives by his terrible mishandling of the COVID 19 crisis.

Every president has allowed too much spending on military. Reagan was mad with his Star Wars funding and Trump-Pence are silly and wasteful with their Space Force stuff, which is cartoonish

I can see Trump itching to drop a bomb somewhere. I think somehow they have checked him on doing it.

You know what I am talking about. Take Big Mike's dick out of your ass. Haha

@Moe , what you have just described is communism ...for the betterment of the commune . The world working together is great but assigning different people of different areas to do that is not free. You soon have a classless society. You need fair competition and fair trade. Ask a Russian or Chinese person if they would like to live in the US . These communist countries sound like a good idea but there are people on top who never let you prosper. We should never be able to tell a person where to put a factory but we should never encourage or embrace slave labor . We are a Christian country and we outlawed that years ago. The US is something special and I don’t k law for how long .

What are you talking about asterisk?

Take Trumps dick out of your mouth when you talk.