2024 US Presidential Election

Yes, work on it, though I don't think EvC is part of the problem. But diabetes is serious. It's your life. Get that A1C down, way down, and keep it down. The lifestyle changes you have to make are definitely not fun, but I bet losing your toe wasn't fun, and future amputations, dialysis and blindness won't be fun, either.But I've seen throat cancer patients smoking through their neck stoma. If you want it then you gotta have it. That's just the way the human psyche works. Willpower is no match for craving.And please begin to recognize that there are people out there who can sell snow to eskimos. Look for facts that you can tie directly to reality. That's what you can trust. If you can't tie it directly to reality then until you can it's "I don't know" or at least "I'm not sure."--Percy

CNBC today ran an article about The Ten Worst States for Quality of Life. It rated all the states according to how good they were to live and work in, which included factors like crime, environmental quality, health care, childcare, discrimination, voting rights and reproductive rights. Here they are in ascending order from worst to least worst, and I include CNBC's point score. I also include who they voted for in 2020. I don't expect there are any surprises: I assume this makes the residents of these states proud because it proves how non-woke they are.If someone had asked me to guess which state was worst I would have said Louisiana. And I never would have guessed that Indiana was amongst the worst 10, beating out Florida by a good margin. And Florida should adopt a new motto: "Hey, at least we're not Texas."--Percy

In a column in today's Washington Post George Will predicted that neither Trump nor DeSantis will be the GOP nominee in 2024. I thought he would lean toward Tim Scott, but Scott doesn't even receive a mention (there's a disclosure at the bottom that Will's wife is an advisor to Scott). In fact, none of the other announced candidates are mentioned. My favorite lines:

George Will:

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Trump, as stale as a month-old crust of sourdough, is running to win the 2020 election.
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DeSantis is running hard to be president of Iowa...
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Vladimir Putin’s fifth column is not in Kyiv but in the Trump-DeSantis faction of the Republican Party.

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Putin has two hopes for a less than completely mortifying rescue from his Ukraine blunder. One is the election of Trump,...Putin’s other hope is the election of DeSantis,...

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Political prophesy is optional folly, but: There are not enough Republicans, in Iowa or the nation, enamored of the snarling contest between Trump and DeSantis — their competition to see who can despise the most American defects — to nominate either of them. Which is grim news for President Biden.

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Will's prediction surprises me. It's the support of Republicans that vote in primaries that Trump has to have, and he has that already. I think he has the GOP nomination already locked up.George Will believes that Biden's best chance for reelection is if the GOP nominee is Trump or DeSantis, but who he thinks the alternative might be he doesn't say, and I can't think of a single GOP candidate with the political heft to carry a national stage. It's going to be a Biden/Trump repeat in 2024. The primaries are just the country going through the motions.But I also agree with Will about political prophesy and folly.--Percy

How about if DeSantis makes a strong showing in the early states to the point where Trump has to declare fraud and contest the votes? Then we get to sit back and watch the party burn to rubble.Well I get to hope, anyway.

Personally, I am impressed with Vivek Ramaswamy. He is head and shoulders above all of the rest of the G.O.P. field.

quote:

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Ramaswamy rose to prominence in conservative circles as an "anti-woke" activist.[1][2] He centered his candidacy on criticizing what he calls "new secular religions" such as "woke-ism" and "covid-ism, climate-ism and gender ideology"

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Vivek Ramaswamy - WikipediaWhy am I not surprised. He's a hater of people for political points. He is scum, Phat.

Head and shoulders above the 20-foot deep cesspool under the outhouse is still full of shit, Phat.The GOP is a criminal organization who wants you to march in their formation or DIE.here is an article by Dr. Joanne Topol:
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Joanne Topol
Ph.D. in Molecular Genetics, California Institute of Technology (Caltech)Updated Jun 21
Why do the Democrats fear the Republicans winning?If the Republicans win in 2022 and 2024, the 240 year American experiment in democracy will be over, and everything once viewed as exceptional or admirable about the United States will no longer exist. I am in no way being hyperbolic; every respectable scholar or historian (from across the political spectrum) who studies authoritarian regimes has warned us that this country is displaying all the usual signs of a failing democracy!! And the cause is today’s breathtakingly depraved Republican Party!To be clear, today’s GOP is the most corrupt, dishonest, selfish, anti-knowledge political party in modern history. If a GOP candidate wants to win a Republican primary, they have no choice but to spew proven lies and conspiracy theories—most notably, Trump’s big lie that he won the 2020 election!! Their entire agenda is about 1) doing whatever they can to “own the libs” and 2) doing whatever they can to turn this country into a white, Christian nation. They are a bunch of hateful, vindictive racists who will happily destroy the country as long as it allows them to remain in power.I must admit, until Trump came along, I never imagined that those freedom-loving, Constitution carrying, law and order advocates would be so immune to feeling shame. Trump taught them that as long as they successfully brainwash their followers with an endless stream of disinformation, they need not hide their bigotry or their mind-numbing hypocrisy. He showed them that they can lie and cheat all they want without suffering any consequences. So now there is nothing too morally depraved or blatantly hypocritical for them to say or do.They also know that they do not represent the views of the majority of Americans, so their only path to victory is to destroy our democratic institutions and promote, instead, an authoritarian system of government. They would be perfectly happy if Trump returned to the White House and behaved just like his BFF Putin. They are so delusional that they actually believe that if Trump follows his dream to turn this country into a corrupt, kleptocratic autocracy—their freedoms will remain intact or even expand.There is NO moral or ethical justification for being a member of today’s Republican Party. Period!!
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Since the upcoming presidential campaign will likely see a lot of lies, this thread is probably a good place to post my complaint about the "miscaptioned" classification of debunking sites. Today there was this at Snopes: Did a Young Girl Hit Mike Pence in the Head with a Water Balloon? The answer is no, and they called the video miscaptioned.But if instead of a video there had been a brief article claiming that a young girl had hit Mike Pence in the head with a water balloon they would have classified it as "false" or "pants on fire" or whatever's equivalent in their classification system. They wouldn't have given it a milquetoast classification like "misstated" or "needs context."So why is a video "miscaptioned" when a short article would have been "false"? I posted a note to Snopes.--Percy

I never researched his platform, to be honest. I heard him yesterday in an interview. The consensus in the comments was that he was the most impressive. I didnt know that he was thought well of by Trump, but after actually listening to him, I find that I agree with many of his points.I am against affirmative action, as was he.
I wanted the truth behind Covid and it eventually came out.
The only uncertainty I now have is the "long Covid" mutation.He mentioned that the populists felt as if the truth was suppressed and that led to their overreaction on Jan 6th. Democrats would respond that they only suppress rumors and that facts are what they go by, but my jury is still out on whether the Republican party is totally corrupted. I think that there is a gray area that neither side acknowledges.He scored high in this most recent interview, but

BPR:

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But some critics aren’t all-in for Ramaswamy just yet. Some worry about his previous stances, specifically regarding COVID, the jab and masking, and whether they can trust what he’s saying now that the man is vying for the White House.

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“Vivek made all his money in bio labs,” one user claimed. “He was big on the shot. He was big on masking. And he’s surrounded himself with people who were some of the most authoritarian… I’m very nervous about this guy.”

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.I like the fact that he is young, and I think that this country has gone too far into this whole "woke" agenda described elsewhere. We need to move right in order to reach the middle.AbE: He has a book that I want to read.

quote:

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Nation of Victims: Identity Politics, the Death of Merit, and the Path Back to Excellence
by Vivek Ramaswamy
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The New York Times bestselling author of Woke Inc. and a 2024 presidential candidate makes the case that the essence of true American identity is to pursue excellence unapologetically and reject victimhood culture. Hardship is now equated with victimhood. Outward displays of vulnerability in defeat are celebrated over winning unabashedly. The pursuit of excellence and exceptionalism are at the heart of American identity, and the disappearance of these ideals in our country leaves a deep moral and cultural vacuum in its wake. But the solution isn't to simply complain about it. It's to revive a new cultural movement in America that puts excellence first again. Leaders have called Ramaswamy "the most compelling conservative voice in the country" and "one of the towering intellects in America," and this book reveals why: he spares neither left nor right in this scathing indictment of the victimhood culture at the heart of America's national decline. In this national bestseller, Ramaswamy explains that we're a nation of victims now. It's one of the few things we still have left in common--across black victims, white victims, liberal victims, and conservative victims. Victims of each other, and ultimately, of ourselves. This fearless, provocative book is for readers who dare to look in the mirror and question their most sacred assumptions about who we are and how we got here. Intricately tracing history from the fall of Rome to the rise of America, weaving Western philosophy with Eastern theology in ways that moved Jefferson and Adams centuries ago, this book describes the rise and the fall of the American experiment itself--and hopefully its reincarnation.

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I agree by and large with that paragraph. I do not support identity politics.

Would this be the consensus of comments of people you don't know? If you mean how SARS-CoV-2 originated, this is still not known with any certainty. There is no "long covid" mutation, just some variation among strains. Where are you getting this stuff? This if from the abstract for Comparison of Long COVID-19 Caused by Different SARS-CoV-2 Strains: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis:

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The findings of this study suggest that there is no significant difference between long COVID-19 that has been caused by different strains, except in certain general symptoms (i.e., in the Alpha or Omicron variant) and in sleep difficulty (i.e., the wild-type strain).

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Where did the idea of the suppression of truth come from? Certainly didn't come from the liberal side. No party, no group anywhere, has a monopoly on truth and honesty. But it is undeniably true that a large segment of the Republican party is hostage to a significant part of their base that is being fed lies that they swallow whole. The 2020 election was stolen. Fauci funded Chinese development of covid and engineered the virus's release. The head of the FBI, a conservative appointed by Trump, is biased against conservatives. The Biden's are a crime family. There's nothing gray here. When it comes to believing things that simply aren't true, the Republicans win running away. Someone has bought into someone else's propaganda again.Here in New Hampshire, Ramaswamy is definitely killing the most trees. His glossy flyers arrive constantly.--Percy

Today's NYT reports that Trump Plans to Expand Presidential Power Over Agencies in 2025 - The New York Times. They're "planning a sweeping expansion of presidential power over the machinery of government if voters return him to the White House in 2025..." It continues:

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Mr. Trump and his associates have a broader goal: to alter the balance of power by increasing the president’s authority over every part of the federal government that now operates, by either law or tradition, with any measure of independence from political interference by the White House, according to a review of his campaign policy proposals and interviews with people close to him.

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A few of Trump's specific goals:

• Bring the FCC and the FTC under direct presidential control.
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• Resume fund impoundment, referring to when a president refuses to spend money allocated by Congress, a practice banned over a half century ago.
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• Remove employment protections from the civil service so that it can be "cleansed," and rout out from the State and Defense Departments all who are disloyal.

Trump claims that Article 2 says the president can do whatever he wants and that Congress has no right to give executive branch agencies any independence from the chief executive.At a recent campaign rally in Michigan Trump said:

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We will demolish the deep state. We will expel the warmongers from our government. We will drive out the globalists. We will cast out the communists, Marxists and fascists. And we will throw off the sick political class that hates our country.

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Who exactly is the dictator actually referring to? Anyone he doesn't like.--Percy

He’s referring to anyone who contradicts him or says anything he doesn’t like. We know that, SharpiegateFor those who don’t remember Trump contradicted NOAA, claiming that Alabama was at risk from Hurricane Dorian, and NOAA was pressured to agree with Trump, regardless of the actual forecasts.Anyone who votes for Trump votes for tyranny, which explains Marc’s support for Trump.

As I have said before, I'm behind Vivek Ramaswamy. The young man makes sense and nearly all of his views are ones I share. Trump and Biden both should be put out to pasture. If Ramaswamy made it to the general election, (a long-shot, admittedly) the Dems would not put Biden up against him. They would find another way.A.O.C. vs Vivek would indeed be a celestial fire show! He could match her wits, but her experience at debate would challenge his every ideology.He sounds great when he is in an interview, but lets see how he is in debates.

You don't seem to understand how candidates are chosen in the United States. Can you point to a single time, in the whole history of this country, when either major party changed candidates after the other party elected a candidate during the primaries?

What I meant was that if Vivek becomes a front runner before the primaries are over, the Dems may rethink going with Biden. Unless they plan on keeping him quiet. Anything he says wont make a whole lot of sense.