ewsieg

They still do an international 1/2 marathon? If I remember they stopped it during Covid. I'm so stupid out of shape, but the thought of running over the ambassador has always intrigued me.

Said no one, ever!

The only thing I wish Kamala would have done more on with her response to this is call out the right wing media for letting him get away with this ****. My Trumper friends will tell me he 'says what he means' and tout that as a great trait, but in their media bubble, they don't see that he initially said X until he got called out on it, then said well really I mean Y, but not completely, because X is pretty much the right answer too, but honestly I will just say Y. He gets called out on that again and just says, I meant Y the whole time and that's all the right wing media covers. That said, by avoiding this, it does allow her to say she went into the Lions den, faced tough questions, and answered them without blaming media. I have two long time conservative friends, we all listened to Rush Limbaugh as kids, we all read reports from the Heritage Foundation and even if we didn't agree with it all, thought they made good points. They know Heritage wrote Project 2025, I have played the 'Heritage will play a big part in my administration' quote from Trump, but they still insist that Trump has denounced it and won't follow any of it. That said, I bet you if they actually read it, they would probably agree with 80% of it, it's only the few things that made it into the media that caused Trump to back. Scariest thing is, if elected, it's that 20% that he is currently denouncing that he would probably push and would ignore 80% of the fiscal stuff that probably isn't all that bad.

I won't say free markets regulate themselves, but both Democrats and Republicans have consistently instituted laws that protect the industry leaders in a market. Not saying government needs to get completely hands off like your hard core libertarians suggest, but government picking winners (the biggest guy on the block with the most money to feed them) hasn't faired well either.

A true libertarian....yes. He was the most centric libertarian candidate ever though. We would have been better today if he was voted in over Trump.

I don't think she'll do it, but I could be wrong. Like I said I think she's playing prevent now. That said, I think you're right, there may be more benefit for her if she does Fox and Rogan. Will Rogan have her though? He has refused to have Trump in the past because he was afraid it could help Trump. If he opens the door for Harris, he might be concerned that if he continues to snub Trump it'll actually help Trump with his victim mentality. If I were Harris, I'd only go on if Trump goes first, that way he doesn't back out. I do not think Rogan would play softball for Harris, but I do think an interview with Trump would come off much more contentious.

Do you ever listen to Rogan? He doesn't come across or even try to be a 'tough guy' on the podcast. I would seriously be surprised if he was combative towards her. He will force a topic back to the front if he feels it's being dodged though, but every interviewer should do that. 2 months ago I would have said her doing Rogan's show would be the best thing for her. I don't think this media blitz has done anything to make me think that anymore. I know she's not stupid, but she hasn't shown anything to indicate she's smart either. If she goes on Rogan with the same playbook she's been using, I don't think it wins over anyone and long form interviews always have a risk to them. I kind of feel like she's playing prevent defense right now and it scares me a bit, but it might be the best thing.

Iran is absolutely a concern and I wouldn't have had a problem with Kamala mentioning China, Russia, Iran, and NK as legitimate concerns to the US, but seriously, that is a seriously bad answer. Iran is a regional threat, a region which we obviously care about, but also have tons of allies in that very region as well that fight against Iran too. China has no comparison, Putin has tried to make Russia look just as tough by trying to strengthen ties with China, it's still a mockery to China to compare Russia to them. In this little media blitz Kamala has done, she really hasn't answered a single question straight on with the exception of this and she got it so horribly wrong. That's alarming.

I liked a candidate that blanked at the word "Aleppo" and once he was given a hint of "Syria" he gave a legitimate answer, one better than anything you'd ever hear out of Kamala. This very forum declared that alone made him unworthy to be POTUS. (I still contend that prior to that media blitz against him, at least 50% of the people that mocked him would have paused on "Aleppo" as well). I'm not saying she won't correct it, but it's inexcusable that a candidate doesn't know this and even worse she's our current VP.

Also worrisome that our clearly better choice for POTUS thinks Iran is the biggest adversary.

https://www.freep.com/story/news/politics/2024/10/04/michigan-teachers-to-pay-less-into-retirement-fund-in-future/75501728007/ Hopefully this is a one-off and not a 'let's govern like Granholm and pass the buck to the next governor to deal with' trend.

Evidence #135 that Trump is a democratic operative as he squashed an advantage the GOP had with this and threw his support to him.

Glad to see that. The immigration numbers are interesting as well, Walz did a pretty good job to drive home the bill that Trump told everyone not to back...after they initially backed it.

Vance presented much better than Walz. He was more smooth and you never got the sense he was going to break character. In presentation alone, Walz didn't have some good looks during a Vance answer from scribbling down notes to just the look he'd give Vance when Vance was speaking. Walz was trying to 'old school' debate Vance too, you know, stupid things like giving data to support an answer. Vance was really good at not answering the question, while at the same time not obviously looking like he was deflecting the question. The abortion answer for one, he kept saying 'we need to build trust again' or something like that as he sounded compassionate and even approving of abortions, yet he wouldn't just answer the question which should give everyone the answer they need. I will say, as a person that has had their boss put them in a no win situation, he handled that quite skillfully.... I just hope those independents and right leaning folks saw through it. The CBS fact checking.....horrible. I really feel that may have 'won' the debate for Vance. While I was not agreeing with anything Vance was saying and some of it was factually wrong, they specifically said they would give the other candidates the opportunity to fact check each other, yet would specifically call out Vance if Walz didn't respond to a specific issue they had. The whole point of Walz was to appeal and maybe even carve out some votes in those rural areas. My concern is those folks which likely already lean right but just don't want to vote for Trump saw it as the media taking sides again and may not have been as receptive to Walz' answers.

The problem with X and Facebook is it's just to easy to make a nonsense comment/reply. My mom still occasionally shares stupid stuff or comments on other peoples stupid stuff with quick 1 line responses that look idiotic. Yet if you talk to her, she fully understands many of these issues are more complicated. Most people that read anything my brother posts would assume he's full on MAGA, in his case he's just a troll.

Not sure why 6'5 makes this more impressive, 5'6 would make this more impressive.

I feel the start of this season was very similar to 2006. Unlike 2006, once the season started, this has been completely opposite of 2006.....until these last few weeks. Just unbelievable. If I told you Baez would be as worse as you thought was possible, that not only Meadows and Keith were sent down, ALSO Tork! Maeda didn't work out, but Flaherty did, so you traded him.... I would have thought we'd be in the White Sox position this year.

Not so much bogus, just wrong. They finally learned to understand earlier Trump/GOP voters didn't want to say they were Trump voters and adjusted for that percentage they felt still weren't telling them. What they didn't realize is by 2022, Trump voters were proud to tell pollsters they would be voting GOP and the overall drop in their numbers was related to people finally getting tired of him and the gop.

Sorry if this was posted already, haven't been on here much recently. I just learned that apparently a young boy was killed in an accident by a Haitian immigrant in Springfield and in part this is what the right riled up their base as they exaggerated the incident. This is his dad speaking recently.

So, my hope this whole time was that Trump loses badly, GOP is gutted, and eventually a better version of the traditional GOP eventually comes out of this. While JD has been an absolute joke, I feel like Trump thinks he's doing a good job and even if they lose, I fear JD is able to take Trumps spot. I'd like to hope JD just doesn't have that 'it' factor to be able to do it, but man it's scary. So, he definitely has no problem lying, but there was something telling in the debate when he basically said the entire premise that the election was stolen was that his pollsters got it wrong and he so badly wants to believe they couldn't make a mistake. It was actually kind of sad if not for the bull**** he put the country through because of it.

I'm definitely joking about this as a conspiracy theory, but unlike 'facts' about the moon landing that can easily be reputed, I could point to so many things that the old GOP would destroy a Dem candidate for, his foreign policy as a whole, tariffs, spending with no plan, even how he has cost his party seats in both federal and state elections because of his need not to support the candidate with the best chance to win, but the one that is willing to look and sound the weirdest and agree with him on everything.

I've mentioned my conspiracy theory before, but I'm about ready to drop 'conspiracy' from it. Trump is an agent of the Democratic party and was used to sink the GOP, yet they were surprised he won so they doubled down on the crazy to try and sink the GOP more. JD Vance hated him, until he was let in on the joke and together they are stacking weird on top of crazy, on top of weird, and behind the scenes have to be amazed that they could possibly still win.

Yeah, I'm not looking for a guy that looks like the Rock, in full gear like he's getting ready to take on the entire world by himself with an AR strapped to his chest. My daughter's high school has a uniformed county sheriff posted at the school. We do have additional SRO's at both the high school and at least the middle schools. You'd assume they are a teacher if you saw them in the hall. Militarization of the police is an issue, but not sure if that's an issue in regards to SRO's at schools.

I have no issue with SRO's. In fact while it was noted it that it isolates Brown and Black kids, I think they can be important specifically for this case. No different then cops walking the beat and getting acquainted with the community, that's a good thing. That said, they are not a solution for mass shootings at schools. Bulwark recently had a good conversation on focusing on reactive force to deal with these solutions. Spend a trillion dollars basically installing TSA style security (and for this arguments sake let's pretend that's really good security) and lock down schools, it just moves the opportunity for these shooters to the school parking lot, drop off/pick up, outside school events.

I'm not saying no one didn't do anything legally wrong, I was just saying I was pausing on condemning everyone named until I learned some more. That said, I listened to a podcast that I believe gives some good news and views on issues and they discussed this a bit and pointed out that better questioning of where the money was coming from would definitely had happened from them, but from their standpoint, if they were told by a team that employs them that it was coming from a 'wealthy Belgium man dedicated to free speech', they would have assumed the investment was being done legally. I don't know anything about Benny Johnson or Dave Rubin, but they did laugh that if this happened to a political opponent of theirs, they wouldn't give the benefit of the doubt they are asking of others right now though.