ewsieg

Over the little motownsports downtime our household had a situation where we needed testing. I incorrectly assumed, mostly based on the belief that Biden was handling this issue now, that it wouldn't be a problem. No over the counter tests are available, 3-5 day response on a PCR test. My daughter lost at least 2 additional days of school because of a lack of testing. She lost an additional day because I was confident I could find an over the counter test that our pediatrician said to use. This is not to say Biden is handling this pandemic worse than Trump, but I do wonder how much better we might be right now and going into this fall if Biden was still pushing, and putting resources into, testing. This is what gets annoying about me pointing out that you can't look at a specific statistic alone. If I put a poll up asking if presidents get too much credit for a good economy, and too much flack for a bad one, I'm confident that most, if not all, would agree to that. That's all i'm saying with a job growth number. We also had record unemployment under Trump. It's tough to create new jobs when you can't find people to work them. To my theme though, I would gather the record unemployment was a long time in the making and Obama should receive credit for that too. I don't believe I ever said Trump was better at handling it. My point is that on average, pick any stat(s) you feel is/are the best to determine how a country handled Covid, and i'm going to be able to point to massive and in most cases, record job losses. If Trudeau faced re-election at the same time as trump last year, there is a good chance he may have lost. he than would have had 3 million job losses hanging over his head while the conservative person that won would have had the benefit of the 2.7 gain that Canada has already seen come back.

He also was the only president in the last 100 years to deal with a global pandemic that was so bad, that not only did we see massive shut downs by economies all over the world, we even saw the NCAA choose the welfare of their athletes over money. Yes, that bad.

We certainly are.

Indeed, and even with that, they didn't get rid of the filibuster altogether. As a point of clarity, i'm not arguing that if the dems do it, once the republicans have control, than they'll do it. Well, I guess that is what i'm saying, so to clarify. If the dems don't do it, and we end up with republican control in 2024, I certainly wouldn't put it past them in doing it. What I am arguing is that the GOP is so close from never being able to win a national seat in it's current form. IMO, give them another 4-6 years and they'll struggle in congress too, but i'm getting sidetracked. In 2024, they do still have a good chance of having control of the house and senate. So it's imperative not to let them get one last shot at the White House. To Pfife's point, getting rid of the filibuster alone wouldn't give Trump or one of his lackey's a chance IMO, but if the filibuster is removed and progressive dems decide to push for and overrun Biden, every gain progressives might take, could be wiped out soon after. The overreach I see progressives wanting to do would, at worse, put a burden of debt on the back of our kids. (What's a few more trillion at this point.) The overreach I could see this current GOP do if given a shot, would jeopardize our standing as a democracy.

These never tell the whole story though. H-dub made some economic decisions that Clinton (to his credit, our detriment) kept going and he benefited from them. Some of those decisions also led to the 2008 economic strife that W took the hit on and gave the recovery numbers to Obama, propping his numbers up. As for Trump, he inherited a decent economy and for the most part, didn't screw it up to bad. As for Covid, can't think of too many countries that escaped a harsh economic hit, regardless if they were perceived to be successful against Covid or not.

Legit point. My fear is destroying the filibuster will look like an overreach, especially if the dems start passing laws that aren't wildly popular. These infrastructure bills would be fine, folks want them, it's what after that which could be an issue. History already says the house and likely senate will be controlled in 2 years by the GOP. Overreach (and no Trump) is about the only thing I could see giving the GOP a shot at POTUS. Based on how Trump is destroying the GOP, that puts a bunch more MTG types running the show in the house, McCarthy more than happy to go along as he's in power, McConnell who cares about wins more than the country, and in my scenario DeSantis who you could argue is worse than Trump, because he knows better and goes along anyway. I'd argue it was this way as recent as 2015. Like you say, vast differences in how to get to the same place, but overall goals were close. I think individually that is still the case, but it's clearly easier than we probably all thought it could be in getting swept up. Right now you have only one party that even has goals. The other party just wants to 'own' the other side, there is no policy, no goal, no substance.

I've been told you're wrong, see below. No trolling, but yes, heavy on the sarcasm. To be technically correct, Biden has no authority to put a vaccine mandate in place. (POTUS probably had that ability before until an evil GOP legislature took it away just to screw over a democrat at some point in the future) He worked within his administration to identify a legal way to do this and the person with the authority, then took the steps needed to move forward with implementing it. Ironically, this is exactly what Whitmer could do if she wanted to put a mask mandate in place in Michigan. Yet for some reason, instead of asking if or why she's not talking about it, the correct response to that question is that the GOP took away all her power and anyone that says otherwise is a liar. Stop blaming Whitmer, start blaming the GOP. End of story. I don't understand the difference. Mind you I'm not the brightest, so there is that.

UofM has put up some monster rushing yards, but there is always a question of the competition this early in the season. The football powerhouse known as Rutgers managed to slow down that rushing attack. Wisconsin's loss to Notre Dame looked horrible on paper, but it was a close game before they gave up a kick return and had two pick 6's against them. They had pressure on ND the entire game and limited ND to 3 yards rushing. Even if you take the sacks out of that stat, ND's lead back only had like 30-40 yards. Apparently it's going to be wet too, Not really sure if that benefits one team more than the other though.

Or the 50 or so members of the house that are threatening not to take the bird in hand (bipartisan infrastructure bill). Speaking of Sinema, sounds like progressives are talking about primarying her. Apparently as much as they hate Trump, they think the same way. Best way to ensure that flips back to a GOP is to put a progressive up against the GOP there. I understand Sinema and Manchin are the obstacles from getting everything the progressives want and desire. But they appear to be the only ones concerned about what that could entail a few years from now, let's say if we have a DeSantis as POTUS, McConnel leading the senate, and McCarthy leading the house.

I was just stressing the point that POTUS doesn't have the legal authority to mandate vaccines, thus he has absolutely no role in the vaccine mandate that he happened to announce on the behalf of one of his cabinet secretaries. As for that vaccine mandate (rather enforced by the government or demanded by a business entity), i'm not sure if players would be included as they may have a loophole (i.e., independent contractors of a team) whereas the team (coaches/admin/building staff) might be able to enforce mandates on direct employees. Conversely the nba (officials) are possibly subject that way as well. But the crux of it is as you state, the money making assets get more control in determining how they are affected than others.

I enjoyed this unity that we all have had as we lost, and than found, a place to chat again. But let's be real, were we all going to sing Kumbaya? Let's talk Biden. Horrible few weeks. He rises and gains with Coronavirus. He's falling on that now, but ultimately if that's a voting issue, I don't see him getting the blame. I know some think the Afghanistan withdrawal should go down as the greatest US achievement ever, but there were some issues. Add in the whole drone killing of an aid worker as you tout you stopped a terrorist attack and that doesn't help. His party is trying to derail him with the infrastructure bill. Currently the only thing going well for him is the fact that Trump continues to try to destroy the GOP as he points out he's willing to embrace Stacy Abrahms if he doesn't get the candidate he wants.

2 things: 1) Does the mandate effect NBA players? (that Biden has absolutely no role in) 2) A union response is that there is no inconsistency. I work for a fortune 500 company with a large union segment. Prior to the mandate (that Biden has absolutely no role in), our company was working with the union to arrange a vaccination requirement. Prior to the mandate, the union would use my companies desire to vaccinate them all as a carrot to help gain some other advantage. That's exactly what has happened with the nba. Even if the ref's are unionized, they don't have the leverage the players do.

Even if you don't want to do it, take the faceplate off, shine a light inside, and check to see if you see a bare copper wire in the back. Being able to give that information to an electrician might change it from "I'll call you in 8 weeks when I have a chance to come give you a quote" to 'Well, that's a quick job, if the end of the day works, I can run by after my Thursday job and take care of that real quick. When I sold my old house, I had outlets on both sides of my kitchen sink. The one to the right was on the same circuit and closer to the box and was a gfci, so it was protecting the one on the right as well. Which could be confirmed with similar testing tool as posted above designed to trip the gfci. Their inspector claimed both had to be gfci outlets. I honestly don't if that's the case based on local codes, but a 20 dollar outlet wasn't worth fussing about. I then learned I had to have a licensed contractor make the change. A little annoying. I had no luck finding an electrician that could come out quickly even for that, ended up searching 'handyman' and found a local jack of all trades guy that was licensed and came out within a day or two.

Ending term limits might just be the easiest, achievable way to fix many legislative bodies throughout the nation. Still, there is a huge demand in having them, it wouldn't be easy.

I can't believe this isn't bigger news. I don't think it's going to be that hard to prove that this memo was the process being used by Trump and his admin.

Can't remember what podcast I was listening to, but they had a Doc on who didn't expect anything huge this year as he expects a lot of mask usage still this winter. He expects one more Covid surge in the North east / Midwest. As such, he doesn't think the flu will be that bad this year, but expects a really bad flu season next year. Negative test for my daughter! About 6 more weeks before we can get her vaccinated, assuming it's not approved sooner.

I don't know enough about his district to say one way or the other. We are definitely going to have a lot more of the MTG ilk in congress in the short term. Long term, I hope that does open some eyes to folks that just keeping pulling the "R" level right now. But ultimately, until those districts that have a history of flopping between D and R only trend towards "D", only then will you see change in the GOP.

Last weekend I ran a few errands and decided to just flip through some stations, I don't even know the station I landed on, but they were playing this. Just fantastic.

No battle lines are being drawn, there is no competition either. Trump has control of the party. Old members are allowed to stay if they stay silent about the big lie, new members must openly embrace it in order to join. There is a small fraction that are speaking out, but they have only two choices. 1) Play the media circuit as they claim they are fighting to take back the GOP, 2) Try and run as an independent. They have zero influence within the GOP. That playbook is going to be fine for well established GOP strongholds, but once you start putting MTG type folks up for election in districts that traditionally are closer split between the parties, that's when the rails fall off. That's also when the GOP finally starts to reshape.

She's the only one in the household that isn't eligible yet for the vaccine, so no concern for the rest of us here, but while she seemed better all day, right before bed she started complaining that her chest hurts and she doesn't feel like she can take deep breaths. Oh vey. Cancelled Walgreens and setup a test with CVS tomorrow, they claim 1-2 day turnaround. Found this, how infuriating. https://www.newsweek.com/home-covid-tests-hit-shortage-after-companies-scaled-back-production-1631271

They may have in July, it was close at least. Right now though, we have a chance to finish 9-3 in the last 12 games against some of the best teams in baseball. Just fun to watch (or listen).

My daughter has been home from school since last Friday. Initially just felt I was being extra cautious as she was complaining about a runny nose Thursday night and coughed a little bit. No fever, no nausea, but an occasional cough and a lot of sinus draining. Over the weekend she complained about her throat. No sign of Strep. Overall doing better, but still draining a bit. Pre-covid, i'd chalk it up to the common cold and hope it didn't turn into a sinus infection. Finally called the doc today though at my wife's urging. Based on her symptoms/severity, they don't want her to come in, but say to try and get an over the counter covid test and not to send her back to school until confirmed. Weeks ago I noticed them everywhere. Can't find them and if you are looking for one, don't trust the 'in stock' reporting on any pharmacy website. So now, PCR test scheduled for tomorrow, Walgreens is saying 3-5 days for results though. I'm pretty confident she's going to be out of school for at least a week over the sniffles...annoying.

You guys wouldn't believe how productive i've been at work in the last week.

Probably should have taken the points there. Not a horrible call though.