Politics is Stupid

general
3055

And im rolling into why I stopped having these conversations. Its a busy time of year and I am regurgitating raw thoughts into the internet and not properly making my point.

Suffice to say, I believe the language used by the media and used by those in office and amplified by the media was going to cause this reaction. Selectively edited video and audio showing a certain story in order to drive fear and anger, by supposed neutral parties, is going to cause chaos. Just like when those same people called for riots and those happened.

3056

“kill our energy independence”

I was at a table with three Maga relatives last night, and this came up.
I simply asked, ‘how much oil are we pumping right now?’ They didn’t want to answer, because we all know that the US oil industry is pumping more oil than any nation has- ever. Bar none. Most oil ever. The Biden administration apparently plans to strangle the Oil industry by drowning them in pools of cash.

Now the issue is that America doesn’t have enough refineries.

3057

Politics is all about contrasts. While a lot of campaigns can boil down to an “us vs. them” message, here’s a campaign’s message that combines vehicle maintenance with down-to-earth analogies.

3058

Oh, Rudy, Rudy, Rudy. Was it worth it? Everything you gave Donald Trump, like the legal work he didn’t pay you for. Everything you sacrificed for him, like your livelihood, your reputation and your law license in the state of New York.

All because you hitched your wagon to him. Hoping he’d reward you with a posting in his next administration.

Was it worth it now that you’ve been disbarred again, this time in the District of Columbia? Which state will be the next to disbar you?

 
Just hours before the trial was set to begin. Newsmax settled the defamation case with Smartmatic. What they paid wasn’t revealed, but they caught a break when Smartmatic’s lawyers dropped the amount in the suit from $1.3B to $370M.

Fox News settled the suit brought against them by Smartmatic earlier this year.

3059

Tomorrow is the VP debate between Vance and Walz. Trump has said he won’t debate Harris any more for a variety of contradictory reasons, so this will likely be the last one for the 2024 US presidential election.

Or will it?

Whether it is or not may come down to how big of a sin Vance commits against Trump. Will it be merely an egregious sin, or will it be an unforgivable sin?

What’s the difference? Well, it’s a matter of how much you make him look bad.
 

For an example of the first, we go to North Carolina where Lt. Governor Mark Robinson, a Republican, is running for Governor. Trump has endorsed him, calling him “Martin Luther King 2.0” and “Martin Luther King on steroids”. Nothing but praise for Robinson, until September 19th when CNN’s investigative department, KFile, reported they had found Robinson’s messages from 2008-2012 on a porn site where he said things like he was a black Nazi, supported slavery, liked transgender porn and a bunch of other stuff.

Cue the exodus from his campaign. His top staffer and other people in his campaign resign. Any Republican with online posts and/or pictures of them with him begin deleting them. The Republican Governors Association cancels a fundraiser scheduled with him and won’t spend any more money in the NC governor’s race. The NRA stops advertising for him and against his opponent. Ads by the Robinson campaign stop the weekend after the report. Events with him are canceled. Endorsements are withdrawn.

When asked by a reporter what he thought about the report, Trump goes into partial Sgt. Schultz mode and says he doesn’t know anything about it. At a rally in the state, Trump doesn’t mention Robinson at all. Vance deflects and says it’s up to the NC voters to decide what to do about him.

Robinson made Trump look bad indirectly by the association between him and Trump. Trump cuts him loose and doesn’t have to think about him any more. If a reporter happens to bring up Trump’s past praise for Robinson, then he might go into full Schultz mode and vehemently proclaim “I know nothing! He was bad from the moment I laid eyes on him. I’m not going to have anything to do with him ever again even through I never did before and I don’t know anything about what he’s done.”
 

That’s the egregious sin. What’s the unforgivable sin? It’s directly making Trump look bad and it very well could be committed by Vance at the debate. If he’s lucky, it will just be the egregious sin of indirectly making his boss look bad.

The debate is Vance’s chance to shine and he needs to. It seems like every week even more of his past anti-Trump statements are dug up or he flubs yet another public appearance. It was reported late last week that in private messages to another person in June 2020, Vance said Trump had “just so thoroughly failed to deliver on his economic populism (excepting a disjointed China policy)” and predicted Trump would lose that November. Yet another thing Vance has to atone for as Trump’s running mate. And he’s being labeled as the least popular VP candidate in decades.

Unlike his boss, Vance has been spending weeks preparing for the debate. Actual debate practice against a stand-in for Walz. Maybe preparing for jabs at his thin skin so he doesn’t take the bait like his boss did.

If this isn’t enough and/or Walz is more skilled than Vance is, the result is Vance will look just as bad as Trump did. It won’t help the Trump campaign and that will make Trump look bad in an indirect way because it’s yet another reminder about the poor choice he made and is now stuck with.

But, Vance could do really well, showing competence and providing coherent answers, holding his own against Walz or maybe even landing blows Walz can’t recover from. That would restore voter confidence in the Trump campaign.

On the other hand, Vance could do really well by showing competence and providing coherent answers, thereby committing the unforgivable sin of directly making Trump look bad by doing better than Trump in a debate. Voters could look at how well Vance did and compare that to how bad Trump did and wonder, “Why isn’t he running for president instead of Trump?”

If Vance puts Trump in an unfavorable light by doing better than him in a debate, Trump might just have to do what he doesn’t want to do: save his reputation by debating Harris again, thereby showing the world that he’s better at it than Vance is.

For Vance’s sake, he better hope he does just good enough to beat Walz, but not so good that he embarrasses Trump.

3060

I just hope CBS pull their heads out of their asses and fact checks them. Otherwise Vance can just say whatever the hell he wants.

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3061

I just finished watching the debate and it wasn’t what I expected. About the time I was writing my message yesterday, Vance sent this email:

In 24 HOURS, I’ll be facing my dangerously radical opponent, Tim Walz, for the first and only time on the debate stage.

I have a pretty good idea of how tomorrow will go down:

  1. The biased moderators will tee up softball questions for Tim.
  2. I’m going to be AMBUSHED by the Fake New Media and hit with bogus “fact-checks,” but don’t worry, I’ve been preparing for weeks.
  3. No matter how badly I beat him, liberal mega-donors are going to FLOOD their campaign with millions in dirty dollars

When I saw that, my thought was “Looks like what Vance learned during his debate practice was how to play the victim and coming up with excuses ahead of time for when he loses.”

The J.D. Vance that showed up on stage bore no resemblance to the person who wrote that email. What I saw during the debate makes me think either someone wrote it for Vance (but it wasn’t Trump because it was a lot more toned down than Trump would have written it), or else Vance wisely set that aside so he could focus on the debate.

Vance was reasonable, he was polite, and he acknowledged points Walz made that he agreed with. He never engaged in conspiracy theories or fearmongering.

Likewise, Walz was reasonable, he was polite, and he acknowledged points Vance made that he agreed with.

Both candidates would look at the other when that person was speaking. They almost never spoke when the other was talking, but there was a couple of times they did. But there was one thing Vance did that was a little unusual. He would have his head angled to the left to look at Walz, and then he’d look up and to his right. He might have been looking at one of the moderators, but it almost seemed like he was rolling his eyes at what Walz was saying without actually rolling his eyes. If he wanted to look at the moderator or look at the camera, it would have been okay for him to move his head so it was pointing straight forward again. I don’t understand what this look at the other guy but don’t look at the other guy thing was all about.
 

Both did a good job in pointing to what the other person’s leader had done. Never really attacking, and definitely nowhere near the attacks Trump made against Harris at their debate. Just firmly stating facts about the other side’s leader or whatever talking point was they wanted to use.

I happened to watch the debate on CNN. I could have watched it on PBS but CNN is what I chose. Whatever you think about them as a news organization, they did something really good in their broadcast of CBS hosting the debate. When each candidate was asked a question, about halfway through the two minutes they were given to answer, CNN put the question up on screen to remind the viewers what the candidate had been asked.

This made it a lot easier to see if each one actually answered the question. And just like last time, the tally is neither of them fully answered any question because they tried to tie in other talking points to the current question.

However, I think Walz got closest to fully answering one question and there were two Vance should have done better on. One of them was pretty critical to get an answer to. Given his past statements about how he wouldn’t have certified the 2020 election, would he certify the 2024 election if all 50 governors certified their state’s elections. Vance dodged around and went to the old standby of there were problems with the last election so he’d do it if it was a fair election.

As a reminder, Trump has already said he’ll accept the results… if it’s a fair election. House Speaker Mike Johnson, whose job it will be to certify the counting of the electoral college votes on January 6, 2025, said he’ll accept the results… if it’s a fair election. That just fills me with confidence Johnson will act in accordance to his official duty on that day.
 

I would say this debate was pretty even. Both did well in supporting their leader. Neither one landed a devastating blow or made a bonehead move like Trump did with the “They’re eating the dogs! They’re eating the cats!” conspiracy theory at his debate.

About the only thing I can think of that Vance might have been pushing a little too hard on was he kept saying Harris has had 3.5 years to fix the nation’s problems, so why hasn’t she? Vice Presidents have a bigger role than they used to. They do a lot more. They work on policies and other issues. He made it sound like Harris has been signing legislation into law since she was sworn in. Biden does that and it should have been him that Vance was saying “Why isn’t everything fixed?” about. I guess with Biden officially in lame duck status, that line of attack has to be shifted over to Harris as the current Democrat candidate.
 

Now, as to the three things Vance said in the email he expected to happen, the first two didn’t.

Both got hardball questions. “You said XYZ. How do you explain that?” or “Your side says it will do ABC. How will you do that?” The CBS moderators re-asked some of the questions when it was obvious the candidate didn’t answer them the first time.

There was little or no fact-checking by the moderators. I would have said none, but at one point, Vance complained about being fact-checked by a moderator, so there might have been. But for the rest, the mods gave the candidates the chance to do the fact-checking themselves.

As for donations post-debate, will there be liberal mega-donors flooding the Harris-Walz campaign with donations? Probably, just as it’s probable there will be conservative mega-donors flooding the Trump-Vance campaign with donations. Both kinds could donate either clean money or dirty money. That’s politics.
 

My overall impression is because this was such an even debate, one that was civilized and respectful on both sides, it’s tough to pick a winner. I think Walz came out ahead because when it came time to talk about immigration and problems at the border and Vance was talking about that’s a big area that needs fixing, Walz reminded everyone that there was a bill ready to go that would have done a lot to fix those issues. It was bi-partisan, with Republicans and Democrats working on it, had points that both sides agreed to, and gave the law enforcement agencies a boost in what they need. It was ready to be signed, and then Trump said, “I don’t like it. Kill it.” and all of a sudden Republicans dropped their support. It’s still there, and could be signed at any time, but if Republicans supported it, then it denies Trump a problem that he can claim hasn’t been fixed yet.

I’m tempted to say that because this debate was nearly a wash, it almost didn’t matter because it’s still the policies and beliefs of Trump and Harris that will be voted on next month. But this debate does matter because it’s a reminder these are the people that are first in line if something happens to the President. In that respect, it’s a little more clear.

Walz supports Harris. Vance is tied to Trump. Walz has more freedom to decide how he will support Harris. Vance is forced to support Trump in whatever Trump does on any given day. Walz stands beside Harris and seems to be her equal. Vance stands beside Trump but shouldn’t have any delusions about being Trump’s equal.
 

Vance did really well in this debate. He was ready for it. He was competent and provided coherent answers.

But like I said yesterday, that could have been the worst thing he could have done. If I had to pick right now between Trump and Vance based solely on what I saw in their respective debates, I’d pick Vance without hesitation. Trump’s performance looks really bad compared to Vance’s. It was awful.

If I was on the Harris campaign or part of Meidas Touch or the Lincoln Project, I’d be jumping on this. Put out ads showing how Trump did compared to Vance. Show how much better Vance did tonight. It wouldn’t convince everyone, but for those who aren’t locked into their current choice, they might look at Vance and ask themselves, “Why isn’t he running for President instead of Trump?”

3062

If Trump wins I wouldn’t be surprised if the Republican members of Congress tried invoking the 25th Amendment to make Vance president. And as much as the prospect of a second Trump administration scares the hell out of me, Vance scares me even more because he’s actually competent and won’t get distracted by BS like Trump does.

3063

Which means “Only if I win”

Will almost certainly not be house speaker in January.
If the Democrats win the house then he’s toast (and good riddance)
If the Republicans retain the house then Johnson may still be gone because he kept the government funded at the expense of the SAVE act - which was never going to get past the senate, let alone the President

I didn’t watch all of the debate, just snippets of it so I can’t give a definitive answer on whether anyone won or not. The impressions I got were that Vance was slick and didn’t answer any questions. Walz was anything but slick, but I didn’t see him answer any questions either. However, Walz did land one crippling blow towards the end that may have swayed the debate his way - when he asked Vance directly whether Trump won in 2020 and Vance waffled instead of answering.
As Walz said, “that was a very telling non-answer”

3064

My daughter will help work the election with me this year, so that will be fun. And once again there are elements of the local D and R parties who are so populist they are willing to burn the county down to save it that may make voting day exciting.

It’s wild how little party affiliation means locally here. Both extremes have met back in the middle and are determined to throw the baby out with the bathwater and no smear is too big or small to commit. I ended up in a deposition, a picture of me at least, as someone who was allowed in the courthouse on election day that they didn’t recognize. Dude, I’ve been running a polling station since at least 2012, and working on longer than that. Didn’t even know it came up till last week. I can’t help it if your fake election inspector didn’t make it into the courthouse of the very D city in the very R county.

These people are furious about criminal charges against someone that was considered for an appointment years ago that’s been on the run for child porn for a couple years. It’s like like there is a membership card they could have checked, electronic porn is an invisible crime from the outside. And good lord, it was a 6 month appointment to county government, not the presidency. Apparently, he is getting paid out through a county contract on something or other and that’s a shooting offense, despite the payments being legal and there not being a mechanism to stop the payments, of up to a couple hundred a month or something.

Anyway, at the Primaries we were told to look out for them to come in and try to take pictures of people voting. Usually we have to look out for union stewards, now it’s them and random flouride haters and shit.

3065

Today’s report is brought to you by the words quid, pro and quo.

Aileen Cannon, the Florida judge that ruled in favor of Donald Trump just about every chance she could and threw out the classified documents case against him, is on the shortlist to be Trump’s pick for Attorney General if he becomes president again. It’s part of his presidential transition process.

For those that don’t know, the candidates on a presidential ballot start submitting documents about what staff they would need and plan to have prior the election taking place. That’s so there’s time to get working on it in preparation for the swearing in on January 20. Trump was a bit behind on getting his going, and ABC News found this tidbit after it was submitted.
 

Oh, Rudy, Rudy, Rudy. Was it worth it? You’ve been ordered to turn over all of your valuable possessions to the two women you defamed, Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss. They also get the $2 million in legal fees you say Trump’s campaign still owes you.

What do you have to give them? Oh, just your Manhattan penthouse apartment, your collection of watches, including the one given to you by European presidents back when you were “America’s Mayor”, sports memorabilia, Lauren Bacall’s former 1980 Mercedes, your television, furniture and jewelry.

And you have to do it by October 30th.
 

Elon “I’m not going to take sides in politics” Musk has been actively campaigning for Donald Trump. He’s got this neat little sweepstakes that says if you live in one of the battleground states and you sign a petition in support of the First and Second Amendment, you’ve got a chance to win $1 million during each of the 18 days from October 19 to election day. The first payout was given at a political rally held by his America PAC.

Can anyone spot the huge legal problem in that paragraph?

If you said laws prohibit making cash payments to voters or to get them to register, you get a kewpie doll. If you said it appears as if he’s buying votes, you get another one.

After a bit of backpedaling, the PAC said it’s payment for a job as a spokesperson, but they forgot to update the official terms of entry.
 

Meanwhile, Trump was also overdue for opening campaign offices and just somehow didn’t get around to do it. Now it seems a bit too late to even try.

His “I can use the money to pay my legal bills” super PAC had $200 million last year. It’s now at $2 million with debts around $5 million.

He cancelled several appearances recently, including being on the CNN Town Hall that Kamala Harris participated in tonight and turned down being interviewed by 60 Minutes. But he did have time to taunt Harris on her 60th birthday by going to a McDonald’s and working the fry station and the drive through.

It didn’t take long for that to get exposed as a staged event. The restaurant had a sign announcing it would be close on that day. That would be normal given the security procedures used when he goes anywhere. But then the photos emerged of the cars practicing going through the drive through so the drivers could act surprised when it was none other than The Donald himself that handed them their order.

And the Fox News event with Trump and “undecided women voters” was revealed to have people in it that already decided to vote for him, identified themselves as supporting him when they got their chance to ask a question and/or were wearing Trump-supporting clothing. If it wasn’t for a person from a different news organization that brought an audio recorder with them, you wouldn’t know that Fox had edited out the admissions of supporting Trump before they asked their questions. Methinks they forgot to scrub the video to remove the MAGA hats and Trump pins.

And the people pretending to be union workers at a non-union shop.

And the people pretending to be firefighters that supported Trump were not firefighters and were given the “Firefighters for Trump” shirts to wear.

And Trump has violated the Logan Act twice this year by meeting with leaders of two foreign governments (Egypt and Ukraine), which is illegal because as of now, he is a private citizen, not a government official authorized to talk to them.

And he received a pistol as a gift earlier this year, which is illegal because he was a convicted felon at the time. And a custom-painted Cybertruck valued at over $100K, which is well over the threshold of what a political candidate can receive.

And the person that helped create The Apprentice is now apologizing for helping create the illusion that Trump is a successful businessman.

But, hey, that’s all perfectly normal behavior for a very stable genius, right?

3066

Local elections are promising to be rough in my county. The tin hat crowd is out in force, with populist Republicans and Democrats who both hate fluoride and vaccinations pouncing on anything they can find that they think looks shady and then making a whole story out of one thing.

The latest is that our voting machines have modems in them, after they recorded a company rep saying they don’t have internet access. First of all, those aren’t the voting machines, that’s the tally machine that simply counts the ballots as they are fed in. And the model Indiana bought doesn’t have the modem, since we don’t use it. The polling books OTOH, do connect to the internet, via a cellular router they automatically log into. The tablulators don’t connect to shit. They are fancy input machines that print the ballots out.

No, you didn’t hit party vote and it deselected the Presidential vote. It was selected and your dumb ass selected the selection, which deselects it.

The Republican chair has sidestepped the crazy people by having no poll watchers this election, the Democrat has decided to have one at each location, despite the fact that they can’t even staff the D positions at the polling centers already. The city in our county is 70% Democrat and they can’t get enough people that want to make $200 bucks to work them all, forget the more rural areas, but lets add another worker to that tally. And I’m sure several of this “grass roots” movement will be appointed as watchers.

And now because of the people sure the fix is in for County Dog Catcher or whatever, we have to toe the line on bipartisan work. No more one judge helping a voter, but both have to be present to make sure the other isn’t influencing the voter. That’s always been the law, but both sides have agreed that oversight can be waived to a certain degree. There are forms to be signed to actually vote for a person, but just to answer a mechanical question it’s usually a 5 second walk over to handle it. Now despite having two Judges and two clerks, they’ll only be able to really do one thing at a time since both must be present. Thankfully, I’m the inspector and I can fill in as a second person, but it will still slow things down.

Don’t get me started on how freaked out they are that the votes are stored on a USB drive… and paper. Like I can modify them with the D Judge watching me and change the votes on the USB drive and reprint the vote tally, while also somehow changing the voting records at the courthouse.

Voting fraud is possible, but it’s not going to happen on any sort of real scale at the polling centers. If it’s done, it’s done at the county level, and it’s going to be done in an analog way, not freaking Swordfish style with multiple hackers and cut out men swapping USB sticks and hacking poll books. It will be done by inserting absentee ballots if anything.

And that’s without worrying about the fact that non-citizens can fill out a provisional ballot and that people without ID can only fill out a provisional ballot. Both of which are an utter pain in the ass and I’ve never had anyone do it. They go home and get their damn ID, or they don’t vote if they can’t prove citizenship. And the cure rate of provisional ballots is in the single digits anyway. No one bothers to fix the issue after the election is done, despite having 15 days to do so.

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3067

Yet another senior member of Trump’s previous staff has just come out against him. This time it’s John Kelly coming out saying Trump is a fascist and too dangerous to let back into the White House.
Almost all of the people who worked closely with him last time and know him best have publicly said he isn’t fit to be president again.
Yet he could still win the election.
What more do people need to see he is a danger to America?

3068

This video has a really good explanation about how tariffs work, with a simple 3% example. Trump says it’s the most beautiful word there is and he keeps pushing it as only the country exporting to the U.S. pays the extra cost. Any further and/or detrimental effects will be negated by how much money will be coming into the Treasury.

Watch the video and continue reading.

If you’ve got a Treasury agent standing right there to collect the 3% at the time the goods are received, that’s still an extra cost paid by the U.S. company. It isn’t like the cost stays the same for the U.S. company and Uncle Sam goes to the exporting country and gets the 3% directly from them, lowering what they earned from the sale to 97% of the intended price.

The actual scenario is the cost of the goods becomes 103%. The U.S. company pays 3% more and the exporting country still gets 100% of what they were expecting to sell the goods for. The result is the tariff money goes from the U.S. company to the U.S. government. The only negative effect for the other country is if U.S. companies reduce what they buy from those places. Some companies may not be able to and they’re stuck with the imported goods.
 

I’m going to take the choice the U.S. company has to make and add another layer.

Choice A is to absorb the increased cost of the goods, which causes their profit margins to go down, which hurts their stock price if they are a publicly-traded company. Shareholders don’t like seeing the stock price go down, even if it’s a tiny amount.

That leaves them with Choice B: pass the increased cost onto their customers, Joe and Jane Consumer in the U.S. If costs on necessities go up, then Joe and Jane reduce discretionary spending, which hurts other businesses like restaurants, entertainment, and more.

You know which choice companies went with for the tariffs Trump put in place as president? It wasn’t just B. Those companies chose B, but other companies that weren’t affected as much saw the opportunity to raise their own prices, partially due to the perception that a lower-cost item is a lower-quality item, even if they are at the same quality level as they were before.
 

The video addresses the assumed intent of a tariff: bring manufacturing back into the country so they don’t have to import as much. The problem is time. Besides increased regulations, wages, unions, etc., it take time to build a manufacturing plant.

You either keep paying the increased cost on imports due to the tariff until you get that plant up and running so your output stays the same, or you reduce your imports and reduce your output, which creates shortages, which drives up prices.
 

Trump has said he doesn’t want to be remembered like Herbert Hoover is. Since he won’t back down on tariffs, he will be.

It was during Hoover’s time as president that the Tariff Act of 1930 was implemented, placing a tariff on over 20,000 imported goods. The U.S. tariffs plus retaliatory tariffs by other countries caused U.S. imports to decrease 66% and U.S. exports to decrease 61%. Economists and economic historians have a consensus that passing of the Act worsened the effects of the Great Depression.

Trump has a sliding scale on who should be tariffed if he becomes president again. It’s 10%-20% on most countries exporting to the U.S. It’s 60% or higher on the countries he doesn’t like. (I had said previously it was 100%.)

If the U.S. starts putting tariffs on every country, what’s to stop them from putting tariffs on the U.S.? It happened last time Trump was president. Does anyone really think Trump would be able to tell China’s president, Xi Jinping, “Hey, buddy. Sorry, but I gotta put really high tariffs on the goods you export to us. Could you do me a yuge solid and not put tariffs on what we export to you?”
 

Oh, lord. I just remembered something.

Back in April 2022, Texas Governor Greg Abbott pulled a political stunt of increasing inspections for a week of trucks coming from Mexico. (Click here to start reading the first and there’s a second one a few posts below.) The immediate result is Texas lost hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue but it became $4.23 billion as that rippled outward to all affected companies. The long-term effect is the Canada-USA-Mexico railway that’s trying to get made will go around Texas instead of through it.

In the follow-up post, I referenced a study that said when a car is made, it crosses the US/Canada border seven times during the various stages of production.

If Trump’s tariffs go into effect on Canada and they put tariffs on the U.S., wouldn’t that mean that each car has six tariffs applied to it? Actually, wouldn’t it be a tariff on each crossing that gets progressively larger as the value of the vehicle increases on its way towards completion?

Would it make a difference if the vehicle is considered the property of the company throughout the assembly steps and they just happen to be doing those steps at plants they own in other countries? What if they contract with a company in a different country to do the assembly? Or is it just the fact that it crosses the border means it’s tariffed?

If the determining factor is just the fact that it crosses a border, then that drives up the cost of every car a whole lot more than you or I might be able to afford.

Let’s use a simple example. MSRP will be $49,000 when it’s done. The starting value when it finishes the first step is $7000 and goes up $7000 through each of the remaining six steps. Tariff is 10% each way. (US and Canada put equal tariffs on each other.)

Step 1: Value is $7000. Crosses border first time, incurring the 10% tariff. New cost is $7700.
Step 2 assembly completes, making the value now $14,700. Crosses border with 10% tariff. New cost is $16,170.
Step 3 assembly completes, making the value now $23,170. Crossing tariff makes new cost $25,487.
Step 4: $25,487 + $7000 = $32,487, plus 10% = $35,735.70
Step 5: $35,735.70 + $7000 = $42,735.70, plus 10% = $47,009.27
Step 6: $47,009.27 + $7000 = $54.009.27, plus 10% = $59,410.20
Step 7: $59,410.20 + $7000 = $66.410.20. No further tariffs as long as the car stays in the country assembly was completed in.

A $49K car increases in price by $19,410.20 due to tariffs, a 35% increase.

Wouldn’t we see the same thing as happened during the pandemic? People stop buying new cars and hang onto their existing cars longer. If they have to get a replacement, they get used ones. Next step is auto makers start laying off workers again.

If anyone thinks Trump’s blanket tariffs will be good for the U.S., they have no idea how wrong they are.

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3069

I forgot to include the part where you have to be a registered voter to be eligible. Super illegal, Elon, to give registered voters money or to entice them with money to register…

Elon’s initial reaction: Don’t care. Gonna keep doing it.

DOJ’s reaction: You better care because you can face up to five years in prison for this.

Elon’s second reaction: The sweepstakes has ended.

Elon’s third reaction: Okay, boys. Give me the good news. How much personal information did I get from the people that signed up? Got those targeted ads ready?

3070

Then of course you have the 23 nobel laureate economists who rubbished Trump’s economic plan (or was that a concept of a plan?) and backed Harris’s

What exactly does Trump offer the country?

3071

Hate and division.

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3072

Politics is all about contrasts. You compare what your side does to the other. But sometimes, the comparison is about how something is similar.

Such is the case with Trump preaching the word of hate and division. It’s a message that has gotten stronger and more angry as his current campaign has gone on, more so with the change from Biden to Harris as his opponent.

In the past, the concerns about him becoming The Next Hitler™ were centered around him taking actions along the same lines as Hitler. So far, he has not had the ability to take such actions, even when he was in office before.

If he’s not able to directly take such actions (yet), what’s the next best thing? Preaching the same message as Hitler, using almost exactly the same rhetoric and phrases. If you want to ballpark it, a 90% match would be close.

  • Make America Great Again? In the 1930s, Making Deutschland Great Again was the goal, spurred on by the humiliation Germany endured after losing World War I and the restrictions imposed by the Armistice of Compiègne and the Treaty of Versailles.
  • Saying he will be the retribution for the country? Saying he will be the retribution for the country.
  • Poisoning the blood of the country? Poisoning the blood of the Aryans.
  • Hatred towards migrants? Hatred towards immigrants.
  • The enemy within? The enemy within.
  • Promising to use military force against the enemy within? Actually using military force against the enemy within.
  • We’ll have a new golden age of prosperity? We’ll have a new golden age of prosperity.

Trump held a rally at Madison Square Garden on Sunday. Projections are he’s not going to win New York, he never got around to opening the campaign offices in critical states he should have, and his campaign is running out of money. Probably doesn’t help that he’s paid Chris LaCivita, one of his co-campaign managers, $22 million over the last two years while Susie Wiles, the other co-campaign manager, has been paid 70% less than LaCivita, getting about $648,000.

So why was Trump holding a rally at a place that’s not going to help him bring in new voters? Holding a rally at a time when he needed to make a strong closing argument to them? Same as always: playing to his base. It’s a great place for spectacle, which appeals to him.

In more parallels with the past, the rally continued preaching the same message. it also happened to be the same venue the Amerikadeutscher Bund held their rally on February 20, 1939. Any guesses what ideology they held? I’ll give you a hint. Six letters, starts with an N, ends with an M and also has A, Z, I and S in it.

But as with so many of the things Trump does, there were unforced errors unforced errors throughout the rally. Racist language, misogynistic attacks, and starting off with a supposed joke about Puerto Ricoh being a floating island of garbage. For the latter, the Trump campaign issued a statement that the joke “does not reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign”. But since all of that kind of language was being read off of teleprompters, which means someone from the campaign saw all of it ahead of time, there’s a lot of internal finger-pointing about who may have approved what and who may have allowed what. And since they told that comedian one of his jokes couldn’t stay but let the rest of his and the others’ material stay, that undermines their attempt to distance themselves from what happened.

Way to go, Donald. Honking off yet another group you need to vote for you.

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I decided to split this into a separate message because there’s three videos I want to include.

Another contrast as of now in this campaign continues what I said about the two conventions in July and August: “The GOP looks old, tired and stale.” and “Democrats look young, energetic and vibrant.”

If you watch Donald Trump give a speech, there’s times when he’s a little more animated. The rest of the time, he looks and sounds tired. Really tired. He’ll drone on and on, to the point where he might put you to sleep, only to jolt you awake with his Jerry Lewis impression. (Think Lewis doing his “Hey, LADY!” schtick. Or maybe that’s Mr. Director from Animaniacs.)

While Trump’s new/old theme song is “Everything’s Awful”, William Galison wrote an uplifting and positive song called “We’re Not Going Back”, based on the Harris campaign slogan.

Tim Walz showing Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez how bad he is at playing Crazy Taxi.

If you play Fortnite, there’s a new map called Freedom Town, USA:

The code for the map is 7331-5536-6547. There’s a section of the Kamala Harris website with the video and the code.

Any of those beats the Official Donald Trump Coloring Book he put out a few years ago.

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So, maybe putting ballots in an unsecured box on the street is a bad idea.

I can’t believe this passes anybody’s sniff test on secure voting. If someone could put something in, who’s to say they couldn’t open it and find ballots to replicate? All those votes are gone now, and good luck revoting if you think your vote was destroyed I’m sure.

Tarriffs make about as much sense as a VAT tax. But once again, the economic plan of whoever is President doesn’t mean a hill of beans if Congress doesn’t do it. It’s power that they are claiming to have, that they don’t have. Just like this latest crap about making companies make it easier to unsubscribe, or anytime the ATF decides to reinterpret the law and change policy based on the new definitions. The Executive Branch holds too much power, and progressives seem content with giving it more and more power, until a conservative gets in office. TBF, Republicans do the same thing, just less of it most of the time.

In other news Nevada will now accept mail in ballots with no postmark or date.