tHE riOtS HeLp trUmP https://t.co/jVVPiUvzv7
— kilgore trout, non mini-stroke haver (@KT_So_It_Goes) September 6, 2020
the core, very flawed, assumption trump makes about humanity is deep down on the inside, everyone is ugly like him, and their inner racism can be brought out by showing them the right dose of imagery and wordplay. humanity is infuriating him by proving him wrong. https://t.co/c22bJaoS5J
— kilgore trout, non mini-stroke haver (@KT_So_It_Goes) September 6, 2020
Just a reminder the only time in the past 6 months the president said protesters should be listened to were when they were heavily armed and were threatening the governor's life because they wanted haircuts and fertilizer pic.twitter.com/6gSTBKMhUO
— [REDACTED]™ (@quasirealSmiths) September 6, 2020
It looks like sending multiple senior aides to tell every journalist in site that Trump welcomes rioting and thinks it helps him may have been a mistake. pic.twitter.com/vERrTsfbZt
— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) September 6, 2020
You couldn't have drawn up a better lab experiment for the efficacy of "law and order" as a closing argument–if Kenosha isn't budging Wisconsin (at least not in the right direction), and underlying opinion on demonstrations cuts against Trump, seems pretty clear it's a dud. https://t.co/HPxoJNZESL
— Liam Donovan (@LPDonovan) September 6, 2020
I question if they’ve got the guts to show him the polling https://t.co/jiDKjGIM32
— kilgore trout, non mini-stroke haver (@KT_So_It_Goes) September 6, 2020
PsiFighter37
Wonder what that dunce Jared will think is the next great thing to try out. Maybe another Infrastructure Week??
On an OT note, my wife and I went to the NYC suburbs to see a house that came on the market last week. It’s gorgeous and in the school district we had been eyeing for our daughter down the road. But in taking a look at the available nursery / daycare programs…the options are pretty thin compared to NYC. It makes me wonder if sticking it out here in the city until she is approaching kindergarten age is the better move.
LuciaMia
Any sum-up of Trumps presser the afternoon? (Only saw a few seconds where he was , of course, praising the Economy to the skies.) Any questions on the Atlantic story?
MisterForkbeard
@PsiFighter37: Honestly, if you can get a spot in a decent daycare then that’s probably fine. If you’re able to read to your kids every night, play with them when you’re home etc. then the nursery/daycare is more about teaching your kids social skills than anything else.
Honestly, the difference between my kids and some of my nieces and nephews when they got into Kindergarten was pretty big, and it was mostly just due to the fact that my kids had learned how to deal with not-parents and play well with other kids.
HumboldtBlue
I keep thinking back to the AP article I saw linked yesterday where the author was desperately attempting to provide us with two versions of reality. Actual reality and the reality Trump and his supporters inhabit and how it’s shaping the race. It was maddening and yet so disappointingly expected.
And we just got word we may have another power shutoff tonight at midnight due to high offshore winds.
mrmoshpotato
@PsiFighter37:
Haven’t we been living in Infrastructure Week since 1/20/17?
MisterForkbeard
I’m still agog over that thing this morning when Trump referred to Pelosi and Schumer as his customers, so far as anyone could tell.
Maybe he was talking about citizens who think he’s taking the fight to Pelosi, but it really didn’t sound that like. And it sums up his whole problem – he thinks he’s selling a marketing effort or a used car rather than making policy.
In 2016, I told my brother that Trump was clearly a slimy used car salesman and I couldn’t think of him in any other way – he just oozed insincerity and the willingness to screw you for his own gain, and I always wondered about people who couldn’t see that.
ETA: It’s the same thing there. Trump is trying to sell a marketing effort on riots and so forth rather than have an actual response. Pro-tip: If your citizens are rioting because policing is insane, giving the police MORE GUNS and telling them to rough up citizens isn’t going to solve the problem even if you think it makes you look more manly.
PsiFighter37
@MisterForkbeard: Yeah – the problem is that there are not many daycares in the nearby vicinity, and those that are around tend to only be half-day options. My wife and I are both full-time employees who work in midtown NYC (for now).
Another Scott
I’m reminded of Kevin Drum’s magnum opus on lead and crime. Lead messes with our natural inhibitory mechanisms that keep us from doing stupid and dangerous crap when we’re young – but it shows up in the statistics after a lag of 15-20 years.
I’m also reminded of this story from a HS friend when he was telling us about his first time smoking crack with some friends. He said it was interesting and could see why people liked it, but there was this young woman in the group who went nuts for it – she couldn’t get enough… He was horrified, said “no more for me”, and never touched it again.
The point I’m trying to make is – fear is a real thing, and the GOP has been running on it for decades. We’re slowly learning that there are reasons for crime and reasons for destructive behavior and reasons for addiction. It has to do with our brains and our environments. It’s not evil spirits or character flaws or bad juju.
Competence and expertise and science matter. Biden knows and demonstrates he understands the importance of that. Voters can see it, and it’s overwhelming the power of the old fear-based tactics.
Cheers,
Scott.
Captain C
I think the Savvier-than-thou talking heads and analysts are likely underestimating how tired so many people are of having the Narcissist-In-Chief yammering bullshit into their ears from every possible medium, all the time. Alarming number of racist and authoritarian personalities nonwithstanding, I think it is often underestimated how many people immigrated here to the U.S. in order to get the hell away from people and governments like Trump and his fifth-rate cronies are trying to have here. We could well see an unexpected blowout in part because of this. Rather than get complacent, we should keep fighting for this result.
mrmoshpotato
@LuciaMia: I’m gonna go with lies and whining. And sucking Putin’s ass.
Benw
@PsiFighter37: how far out in the ‘burbs? I’m about an hour out of NYC and while my job is right to keep me here it is SUBURBAN HELL
Captain C
@MisterForkbeard:
If Donald didn’t have Daddy Fred’s money and connections, he’d likely be a used car salesman in Queens or Nassau County with at least one fraud- or scam-related prison term behind him already.
Baud
It did kind of work the last time.
MisterForkbeard
@PsiFighter37: Ah. Yeah, that makes it tougher. My kids went to a full-day (8:30 ->4:30) daycare and my wife was working at home, so we’d trade off on morning dropoffs and she’d usually get them in the afternoon.
If they’re only half-day and you guys can’t get away, that’s an issue. Some daycares have after-school programs, though – ours was actually willing to take our kids to a late-afternoon daycare if we needed them to, though we never did.
RSA
I think they do, and I think Trump sees that he’s losing and decides to double down. In a betting context this would be called a Martingale strategy… Wow, it’s as if Trump knows nothing about casinos.
Baud
I also think they thought Biden was going to waiver on condemning the violence and looting.
RaflW
@LuciaMia: “Pretty unusual to see a President accusing his own appointees and senior military in the Pentagon of being war profiteers.” – Tom Nichols
And that was the coherently deranged part!
Ohio Mom
PSIFighter: We are slowly prepping to sell our house — we are looking at two to four years out. But I am wondering if we are screwing ourselves by not pouncing now.
The houses in our subdivision are getting prices I never would have imagined them reaching. And interest rates are low. Oh well.
You of course are in a completely different sort of housing market. Good luck!
Yutsano
@PsiFighter37: Is there an HOA? If so run. Avoid any property in an HOA. Those are the worst by far.
PsiFighter37
@Benw: Would be a 30-minute train ride in normal times.
@MisterForkbeard: We could have our parents help, but to me there is a difference between having them being looked after by our family vs. being in an environment where they can have some enrichment.
p.a.
Donnie Lundergaard!
Baud
trnc
Sure. The guy who revived his fame by saying “You’re fired!” weekly said “I’m not a believer in cancel culture.”
RaflW
@Captain C: More than that, we should be doing all we can to help there be coattails. I mean, look at Arizona. It was trending blue, but probably on a fairly long trend.
Trump appears to be about -10 there, and the idiot appointed doorstop Senator might be as bad as -17. So, what can be done to elect more Dems to the AZ legislature.
Likewise, things look promising in Wisconsin. It will take years to undo the insane imbalance between the district by district gerrymander and the popular vote. But this Nov. is a great opportunity.
I’m hopeful that: 1. many folks appear to now understand the need to build from the grass roots, town council on up strategy (and fund it! which ActBlue numbers suggest is happening) and 2. young people think the GOP is utterly toxic (by something like 25 or more points).
trnc
Your’s and DT’s idea of what the problem actually is may have some daylight between them.
Gvg
@PsiFighter37: you are better off picking a daycare close to where you work, not where you live. That way you can drop her off just before work and pick up right after. You also can get to her quicker if she gets sick or has a fever.
many daycares here have rules you need to be able to pick up a sick child within 30 minutes of a call. I think it is state health rules to cut down disease spread. In addition, a lot of them shut down about 6 and we found we couldn’t count on getting to them fast enough after work if we picked close to home. There was also a problem with needing to drop them too early because we had to get to work and the district we lived ins schools were in the opposite direction of where we worked. We applied for an exemption when school age started to put my nephew in the school next to my work not near where we lived.
MisterForkbeard
@trnc: True. Trump probably believes people are rioting because they’re… black? And/or paid off by Soros?
Sister Golden Bear
Ugh. About to hit 96 degrees (with only a portable AC unit) and unhealthy air from all the fires.* And I’m starting have nasty headaches from the smoke again.
*Please bear with the complaining about the heat from us Bay Area residents. Most of the older houses here on the Peninsula, and virtually all of SF, don’t have air conditioning. And even if you do, there’s threats of rolling blackouts.
RaflW
@Yutsano: I’ve lived in two sequential HOAs, and have a condo in the Rockies also in an HOA. I get that they can be messy. But they are not all created equal.
If one is considering a townhouse, condo, etc. Read the financial statements, annual report, several session’s worth of minutes, and the reserve study. If they go over your head, seek some assistance understanding them.
We’ve lived in healthy HOAs. Heck, I’ve done terms on HOA boards. Not something for the faint of heart, perhaps. But my experience is that they’ve been alright. Just know that some people who come to meetings are primed to be mad, and some are in tight financial situations and resent paying dues.
(The worst, IMO, are people who never owned their own freestanding home before buying into an HOA. I owned homes twice before going association maintained. Once you’ve experienced a $4,000 boiler failure, or bid out re-roofing two houses in a row, you realize that the HOA is likely not ripping you off — if as I say, you’ve done the homework ahead to see that they’re decently managed.)
The quality of the professional co. assisting the HOA board matters as well. Can be hard to suss out. We knew people in our first HOA before we bought in, so we felt OK.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@LuciaMia: Tom Nichols twitter is my go to for trump’s rambling and babbling, Aaron Rupar for later short clips of the crazy that are all I can take
Redshift
@Baud:
There are a lot of reasons for that, but the more important difference may be that Trump has had four years, and he hasn’t Made America White Again, or stopped people from speaking Spanish, or brought back coal, or…
Just like with “law & order,” Trump’s main argument on all of these amounts to “yeah, I haven’t made anything better, but if you don’t reelect me, it’ll get worse.” That’s a tough sell to anyone who isn’t already a cultist.
Jeffro
@HumboldtBlue: yup
the media’s really reaching for “ok, Dems are in array…but they’re gonna fight at SOME point, by god!”
meanwhile, Lincoln Project, never trumpers, trumpov campaign almost out of money due to internal grifting, etc. but you do you, national snooze media ?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
The video is even worse
super-sophisticated historian types who use the phrase “most innocent guy”
Ohio Mom
Gvg: PsiFighter will know more than I do but imagine that any daycare in (or even near) midtown Manhattan might cost as much as the monthly mortgage payment he’s considering taking on.
But you may be on to something. Maybe PSIFighter can enlarge the day care search to areas between the new house and midtown. Might be more choices and more affordable ones because the day cares won’t be paying midtown rents.
Where’s my nym and email?! They are missing.
Baud
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Trump seems to believe he has friends.
Another Scott
The tweet he comments on is entertaining. And yet another indication that they all have some sort of prion disease…
(via HelenBranswell)
Cheers,
Scott.
Redshift
@Baud: He has sycophants, and doesn’t understand that anyone has any other kind of “friends.”
JPL
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: That was just so bizarre.. Super sophisticated types helps him with the rural vote.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@JPL: his thirst for recognition and acceptance by the elites he ran against is so transparent, so pathetic
Kent
@RaflW: And in some newer parts of the country it is virtually impossible to even find a neighborhood that isn’t governed by an HOA. Sure you can move into older neighborhoods built in the pre-HOA era. But that isn’t always convenient to work, school, etc. And not everyone wants a 50-year old fixer-upper. I know my wife didn’t.
zzyzx
So, if you need something amusing today…
I organized a virtual race for the Mockingbird Foundation that took place this weekend. Now the whole thing about virtual runs is that since you’re selling the ability to run around their neighborhood like they could normally, it’s all about making it fun, and creating a community. Part of that was that I was going to run all three distances this weekend.
I was setting up for the third race, and taking a photo. I put my phone on top of the cat tree and activated the 3 second delay from my watch. That made my phone go, flash, flash, flash, and took the photo. The shot was OK but I thought I’d try one more. I put the phone back on the cat tree, hit the remote button, but this time my still somewhat young Tapioca saw the flashes and decided to climb up the tree. I was watching this and was wondering what would happen… Well this was the result:
NoraLenderbee
@MisterForkbeard: A slimy car salesman may cheat you out of thousands of $, but at least you’ll go home with a car.
Another Scott
@zzyzx: Moustachio!
:-)
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
Patricia Kayden
Dee’s not gonna take it.
JPL
@PsiFighter37: haha Although I take offense at that, I kinda get it. Fortunately my grandson is super bright so the changes since he can no longer be in daycare have been minor. haha
mrmoshpotato
@Jeffro: Wait. The ratfucking trash at the Lincoln Project fleeing the result of 40+ years of ratfucking and turning their party into a shitpile of bigots and imbeciles (h/t Driftglass) are running out of money?
Patricia Kayden
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Trump is innocent of being a leader. Innocent of being inclusive. Innocent of being intelligent. Innocent of being dignified. Yes. Definitely innocent.
mrmoshpotato
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: LOL! Everyone but Faux and One Kremlin-Humper News should’ve fucking walked out. I wonder if W wonders,”Is our medias learning?”
Uncle Cosmo
@NoraLenderbee: I’m old enough to remember when the Democrats circulated photos of Nixon (with his patented 11-o’clock shadow if possible) captioned
NLT the 1960 campaign but might’ve been earlier.
(NB My future-Dad owned the proud distinction of having despised Tricky Dick from his campaign against Jerry Voorhis for the House in 1946 – all the way from Baltimore. [He’d fallen in love with CA en route to Pearl, Leyte & Okinawa & still had hopes of talking future-Mom into moving out there.])
Martin
Here’s what makes big fires dangerous – they create their own weather. The downdraft causes the fire to rapidly push out horizontally and can really catch firefighters out.
More acres burned this year so far than any year in CA history. Peak fire season just started.
RaflW
@Baud: It would amaze me if anyone associated with Trump actually believes he is their friend, though.
Uncle Cosmo
@mrmoshpotato: Nyet, nyet, Moshkartoshka! Ambiguous antecedency here. Replace commas with semicolons –
and all will be clarified.
RaflW
@Kent: I admit, I’m not personally familiar with the whole HOA for a neighborhood of free-standing houses.
zzyzx
@Another Scott: Yeah, he’s a tad goofy looking but so sweet!
Sab
My tiny college town is under a tornado warning! I don’t live there, and haven’t been there for years, but it was lovely, and YIKES!
J R in WV
@mrmoshpotato:
No, read it again:
Trump’s problems include Never Trumpers, the Lincoln Project, AND RUNNING OUR OF MONEY because of the grifting in his own campaign.
Barbara
@PsiFighter37: I endorse what Gvg said. Close to work is better. In a pinch you can take the kids back to your office, and it beats the anxiety of having to leave early enough to make a pick up time through traffic and transit delays.
mrmoshpotato
@Patricia Kayden: Haha. And his Twitter photo is from when he made Tipper Gore and the rest of the Congressional committee look like assclowns.
Steeplejack (phone)
@zzyzx:
Kitler!
scav
@RaflW: One my parents suffered through had officially recognized xmas decorations — which they insisted that my non-decorating parents hang up. Others are extremely involved in what you can or can’t plant in yards.
Yutsano
@zzyzx: Just an FYI: I called Professor Levenson.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Jeffro:
I always thought trump would have rivers of cash, but it would be interesting if the Mercers and the Ricketts et al decided not to send good money after bad, and Shelley Adelson can’t be having a good year…
Benw
@PsiFighter37: don’t go further out than that! :)
J R in WV
Regarding Home Owner Associations…
My mom and dad bought a pair of condos in a beautiful development in Osprey FL, just N of Venice FL and slightly farther south of Sarasota. Wonderful plantings, close to the Intracoastal Waterway, beautiful biking on the barrier islands. But the HOA had rules.
My dad never wanted a motorcycle until he learned that the HOA wouldn’t let him have one. He couldn’t have a PU Truck either.
They weren’t considered upper class by folks from New Jersey and NY state, even though a high end truck costs more than the common Caddy. Dad was furious for weeks, but they didn’t sell until mom couldn’t travel down from WV for the winter any more. And neither of them wanted to spend summer down there!
debbie
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Those aren’t friends. Those are the raving lunatics raging inside his head.
mrmoshpotato
@Uncle Cosmo: That’s a fucking shame. And, as always, fuck Rick Wilson, etal.
Calouste
@Patricia Kayden: The shitgibbon isn’t doing really well with the hair metal vocalist demographic these days, is he?
Redshift
@zzyzx: Hah! Very cute!
mrmoshpotato
@J R in WV: Yes. :( See my response to Cosmo at 66.
Redshift
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Oh, they do have rivers of cash, they just don’t have reservoirs of cash, because it’s been flowing out as fast as it’s been flowing in…
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: The campaign may have oodles of money coming in, but the Trump family siphons a lot of it into their own pockets or to pay personal legal fees, and then there are all the rest of the grifters all the way down. Precious little left for campaign-y things like ads.
Also I think the fiasco of the convention planning / un-planning / re-planning made a lot of donors feel like keeping their wallets closed for a while.
Kent
Developers typically build out a whole subdivision and then turn over responsibility to the HOA (that they create) to manage the common areas (trails, parks, common landscaping, etc.) that they are actually required by many city ordinances to put in in the first place. So in many newer suburban areas it is really difficult to even find a house that is not part of some subdivision that has an HOA.
They can be good and bad. I haven’t had any bad experiences but I have heard stories. Most of the really disgruntled types are those who deliberately clash with the HOA over things that they knew they weren’t allowed to do when they bought the place. Like permanently park a massive RV in their front driveway or open up a dog kennel business, to cite two recent clashes in my neighborhood, which has maybe 400 homes.
My own neighborhood has a lot of green belt trails and pocket parks and common landscaping in green areas that are maintained by the HOA. I’m fine with that and happy to pay my share. To get out of a HOA I’d have to move to an older part of town and buy a house probably built in the 1920s and then deal with all of that. I don’t have time for that sort of thing at this point in my life. Would I rather live somewhere all of those amenities are provided by the city and not the HOA? Sure. But that has drawbacks too when it is a distant city bureaucracy making all the decisions.
In larger subdivisions like mine the more common approach is to turn over HOA management to a property management company that deals with all the landscaping and such, and all the billing. And the actual HOA board only meets every 3-6 months to deal with business that the property management company can’t handle. Mine is fine, they do a good job of keeping up the landscaping and common areas and keeping the peace between neighbors. I have no complaints. But I also know I can’t keep 6 dogs in the house or buy a 35′ 5th wheel and park it along the side of my house. Or pave my front yard and turn the entire thing into a parking lot. So I don’t try to do those things.
Martin
There’s a LOT of variation among HOAs. Ours is pretty low-key, despite being huge. There’s no limits on what kind of car you can own or that garbage. There are limits on parking RVs on the street, you can get an okay for a few days, but if you want to own an RV, find a place to store it (tons of those nearby). But a number of blocks over is a guy with about 6 Hummers/Humvees filling his driveway, street parking. Pretty much constantly pisses his neighbors off, but tough.
Most of the restrictions are clearance ones. Want to paint your house a funky color, you might have trouble convincing them of that, but not impossible – we’ve gotten quite a few things changed/added. Never had anything rejected. There’s really no polices going around looking for infractions. We tore out our front lawn and replaced it with native plants – that’s fine. Yard signs, fine. Flags, fine. Backyard structures, fine.
Most of their energy is on policing the pools, lake, etc. and running recreation programs. Their summer activity catalogue runs near 100 pages – babysitting coops, tennis lessons for kids, swim lessons, music lessons, pretty much you name it – tiered by age, etc. Lots of those for adults as well.
Patricia Kayden
Patricia Kayden
@Calouste: Nein.
Kent
Would YOU give a million dollars of your own money to the Trump campaign knowing that 95% of it is going to wind up in the pockets of the Trump family and his cronies rather than advance your conservative agenda?
If say… some wackadoodle like Jill Stein or a corrupt grifter Dem like say Jim Trafficant had captured the Democratic Party and was obiously a sinking ship, would you continue to pour money into his/her campaign, or cut your losses and move on to the next interesting progressives in waiting?
The Rich like the Mercers and Adelsons will be just fine. They are thinking about the conservative movement as a multi-generational project. Trump was just the convenient vehicle in 2016. They will move on to others.
debbie
@Patricia Kayden:
Great. It’s back to in-person voting for me.
RaflW
@Patricia Kayden: The earlier tweet in the thread made me laugh. Reading the “whenever possible one should” this is a guy who took his grammar studies seriously. Dee Snider! love it.
Kay
The people the Trump Family attack are always more popular than the Trump Family:
Any one of the sleazy Trump Family would kill for a 67% approval rating, on anything.
azlib
@RaflW: The Dems actually have a fairly good shot at taking the Leislature this year. They ony need to pick up 3 seats in the house. The Senate is more of a stretch, but a tie is very likely in the upper chamber.
RaflW
@mrmoshpotato: While I enjoy watching Rick Wilson and Steve Schmidt turn their attention to the current sheen of pond scum surrounding Trump, I certainly don’t forgive them their long roles in the deepening horror of Republican politics.
And Geo. T. “Federalist Society Member” Conway can eat a bag of salted donkey balls.
Jeffro
@Kay: call me crazy, but it’s almost like competence matters? Maybe just a little bit? ?
Formerly disgruntled in Oregon
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
“I am not a crook”
debbie
@Formerly disgruntled in Oregon:
And that’s another thing. He has no sophisticated friends. They’re as sleazeball as he is.
evodevo
@MisterForkbeard: Yes. This. both my son and the kids of our best friends were in good daycares (federally funded and therefore had to meet federal standards) from the time they were 5 or 6 months old. The difference between their behavior/socialization/learning skills and that of peers who had been raised by one sitter or grandma or whatever was striking, by the time they were 6. I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it…
Skepticat
I have a good friend in Mill Valley who spent an obscene amount of money (much of it for a permit) on a whole-house generator to avoid these all-too-frequent blackouts.
Martin
Interesting ‘tactic’ by Trump.
Let’s throw the generals under the bus. A few of them leaked that I hate the troops, so let’s burn them all in a desperate attempt to convince my base the troops actually like me. That’ll work out great.
trnc
Yup. Pretty sure he’s mentioned Soros in a tweet, and there’s no doubt he thinks brown people were born with a rap sheet.
different-church-lady
A few years ago I was unknowingly under the thumb of an emotional manipulator. And I read something it one of those books (might have been something like, “Who’s Pulling Your Strings”) that helped me break the psychological hold, and stuck with me ever since.
The basic idea is that emotional manipulators behave the way they do because they believe that emotional manipulation is the only state that human being operate under. So if they are not the first to manipulate then they will be the ones manipulated. There simply isn’t such thing as mutual benefit. And that’s why you can’t reason with them: they will simply see your attempt to reason as a sneaky way you are trying to manipulate them. Meeting in the middle is simple not conceivable.
So it is with Trump: he believes his behavior is the only way people behave. It thoroughly explains why every accusation is a confession. All human behavior must be an attempt to wound him because wounding each other is the only state of human behavior possible, so he needs to wound others before they wound him.
trnc
@Martin: As someone pointed out in the tweet thread, congress declares war, not the generals. But even that leaves out some important context – when was the last time congress approved a war that the president didn’t ask for?
different-church-lady
@Patricia Kayden: My vote-by-mail application will be delivered to City Hall by hand tomorrow. And my ballot will be placed in a sanctioned and trustworthy drop-box on election day. I ain’t giving no chance of shenanigans I can avoid.
mrmoshpotato
Same, which is why I say fuck Rick Wilson, etal.
evodevo
@Patricia Kayden: Have no idea, but the postal service doesn’t use rental trucks…just guessing, I would say that was a contractor who for unknown reasons decided to dump mail rather than deliver it to the destination PO…some of the contractors who bid for these jobs employ drivers who are not experienced or responsible people…just sayin’ – the postal inspectors will easily be able to tell what truck it was, what the destination was supposed to have been, who the driver was, etc. just from the addresses on the mail….
?BillinGlendaleCA
@evodevo: The places the mail was dumped is close to the post office, probably about a 1/2 mile.
Martin
@trnc: True, but you’re giving ‘wars’ too little license here. Trump has green lit a ton of military operations that aren’t wars, but achieve the same goals.
Consider that the V-22 was a Pentagon demand to address a military problem that was a presidential not congressional action (Iran hostage rescue). That was $35B to design and acquire a vehicle that by all estimations couldn’t have achieved the original mission goal anyway, and which has never been used for a similar mission since. But the Pentagon spent 3 decades insisting we needed it for a mission profile that almost never happens, and which it’s bad at doing regardless. And no war needed.
I mean, I don’t think it’s really disputable that the Pentagon backs projects to appease their contractors and to set themselves up for positions after they hit their 20.
Trump deserves no credit for this, as he’s campaigned on funneling infinite money into these programs, but it’s a bit of a self-fulfilling outcome that the Pentagon needs to justify these programs and they tend to do that by creating uses for them.
Central Planning
@PsiFighter37: check out Montessori schools instead of daycare. Some start as early as 18 months. I had 5 kids that went through Montessori (3 years old through 6th grade) and, even though I’m their dad, are some of the smartest, self-starting, independent kids in the school. And they all love learning.
Ken
Trick question, because when was the last time congress approved a war? Versus the open-ended “authorizations for use of force”.
Ken
And we don’t need another Matt Gaetz.
Obvious Russian Troll
Speaking of variation in HOAs, we built a house in a neighborhood with what was supposed to be an aggressive HOA. They had the right to approve the plans for your house, you couldn’t have plants of a certain color in your front yard, blah blah blah.
About the only thing they actually cared about was the plans to your house. They wanted to make sure that it fit in with the rest of the neighborhood, which was fine with us (as that was the reason we built a house there in the first place). They didn’t bother to enforce most of the other clauses.
However, I suspect they could have used the other clauses in our HOA agreement to clobber somebody over the head if they got out of line. I also wonder if they’ve changed since the kids of the guy who originally ran the project moved in after we left (I think).
Kent
Off the top of my head without googling the answer I would say WW2.
ballerat
@Ohio Mom: You don’t need to be in midtown Manhattan for that.
We lived in a small midwestern city and there were several years where both of our kids were in daycare. It cost us a third more than our mortgage.
Granted, the city we lived in had an extremely tight market for daycare, but daycare’s going to be a major if not the major expense if you are anything but rich.
Small children are expensive.
Oh hell, our kids are teens now and they’re still expensive.
This is why we don’t have a boat. We could have had a trump flotilla type boat and even a lake cabin or a camper and a big rig to pull it too, but we opted for a small family in a 1,100 sf ranch and a 529 plan for each kid instead.
I think that’s called “the educated working middle class” in America.
evodevo
@?BillinGlendaleCA: these contractor trucks take mail every AM from the sorting facility to one or several POs within a 50 mile radius, and then return at the end of the day to pick up outgoing mail from the same set of POs and offload at a distribution ctr…Like I said, it should be easy to tell whose truck it was and who was driving it…that may or may not be made public, however…but everyone at either end of the route will know the details, believe me…
Sally
@Central Planning: Too late to the thread, but I want to second this comment. All my boys went to Montessori and it was fantastic. They all enjoyed the after care as well, which was very Montessori like. Like yours, my children are all brilliant, fabulous people! ;) They are curious and love learning, two PhD Science students so far.