Sliders.tv → Posts by Slider_Quinn21
My beloved senator, Ted Cruz, has endorsed Trump. What a spineless moron he is. How can you wholeheartedly bootlick the man who called his wife ugly and accused his father of killing Kennedy? I don't know too many people who have been attacked as hard as Cruz has, and I'm not sure there's anyone on the planet that defends Trump harder.
I know it's a longshot, but I'll be volunteering for and paying into the campaign for Colin Allred.
So Donald Trump could ONLY muster half of that percentage? That's not a good sign.
A lot of people are saying this, but I assume *most* of those people that voted for any of the other candidates will coalesce behind Trump. Not all because some of them are already saying that they'd vote for Biden if Haley doesn't win, but those people might've already said in polls that they'd vote for Biden over Trump. I don't know if it's fair to say that Trump only has half the Iowa vote because someone would rather vote for DeSantis or Haley or Ramaswamy. It matters if they'd rather vote for Trump or Biden.
But it does show that a large swath of people are looking for an alternative. I'm hoping that Haley can win in New Hampshire, perhaps with a large percentage of the Christie vote. And maybe if Trump can be shown to bleed, he can be beaten. I just don't know.
Very well written, ireactions. I don't really have any response to that, but it was helpful to read. I'm always fascinated by the people who are choosing to support Trump and why they do it. It is so entirely foreign to me to follow him, and I've been trying to get into that mindset to I can understand it. From what I can tell, it's most just fear fueled by misinformation. Trump is most effective with older and undereducated people that are more likely to fall for misinformation. So if he says that gas is $8 a gallon or that 8 million terrorists are coming into the country a day, they believe it. And he's convinced them that anything else anyone says is a lie. Again, I don't know how to fight that when people don't believe what they see anymore.
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Good news / bad news.
Good news - Something like 30% of Haley supporters in Iowa said they will support Biden in a hypothetical Biden/Trump matchup. Something like 30% of all Iowans (including Trump supporters) have said that Trump is not fit to be president if he's convicted of a crime.
Bad news - None of that seems to be showing up in polling. Biden has pulled closer in certain polls, but he's still trailing in a lot of the important ones. Yes, it's early. Yes, polls don't vote. But I would feel much better if the 1/3 of Haley voters that claim they'll vote for Biden are showing up. I know it's 1/3 of 20% or whatever, but that should move the needle. And it hasn't yet.
Good news - I read a really interesting article yesterday called "You should go to a Trump rally" (https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/ar … on/677119/). You should read it yourself, but the TLDR is that Trump supporters that go to Trump rallys seem turned off / annoyed by actually listening to what Trump has to say. That he rambles or goes off on too many tangents or whatever. This tells me that as the campaign ramps up and people start paying attention, people are going to remember why they didn't vote for him in 2020. Biden is front and center to most people, even people that aren't paying attention, and his flaws are front of mind. Trump's aren't, especially if (as the Biden campaign maintains) that most 2024 voters think about politics 4 minutes a week.
Bad news - Trump demolished the competition in Iowa. Instead of a dirty and competitive campaign that might lead DeSantis/Haley voters to abandon Trump (sort of what happened with Bernie voters against Hillary in 2016), it seems like the campaign might not last long enough for that to happen. Trump might win all 50 states. Even worse, even people that Trump has attacked (Reynolds in Iowa, Sonunu in New Hampshire) are already pledging to support him in the general. I was hoping there would be less coalescing around Trump, but that doesn't seem like it's going to happen.
Good news - Recent polling has shown that people are feeling better about the economy, which should be huge for Biden if those trends continue.
Bad news - Republicans are refusing to negotiate on their own fixes for the border. Biden is either going to have to completely cave, or he's going to have to somehow flip the issue around on the Republicans. Which he should be able to do, but it will be hard to convince Republicans / Republican-leaning people that Republicans don't want to fix it.
Overall...I feel okay about things. I hope Trump's trials go to trial before the election, and I wish the polls would start showing a better race for Biden. But maybe that will just happen in time.
The problem with an older group of Sliders is that Quinn's actions would be so much more reckless. Even if Arturo, Wade, and/or Rembrandt were all willing to come along, Rembrandt and Arturo are senior citizens. It's one thing to have one older gentleman, but Rembrandt was in his prime. Wade was young and adventurous.
I worry about versions of Arturo, Wade, and Rembrandt that would have any interest in sliding. Maybe Arturo is in for "one last adventure" which might imply that he's ready to die. Same, maybe, with Rembrandt. Wade is either still single in her 50s and still pining for Quinn, or maybe she's divorced/widowed allowing for another chance with him.
In any case, these are retirement age (or close) adults who are choosing to leave their lives behind (or, worse, getting torn away from lives they don't want to leave behind.
Sure, you can make the story whatever you want, and it doesn't have to be sad. Plenty of people are hungry for adventure later in life, and plenty of people are happy with lives where they can start over at the drop of a hat. You could easily write that.
But, I don't know, I think I'd rather all/most of the sliders be home and happy in retirement, ready to leave sliding behind.
Hey, can we move the "Future of Sliders" chatter to the other thread? Just to make it easier for people to find stuff in here. [Moderator Message: Request granted, posts were relocated here: https://sliders.tv/bboard/viewtopic.php … 225#p15225 ]
This was a good call.
I absolutely respect that too. And, honestly, we probably need more shows willing to cast older actors and treat them like they treat younger actors. And I think a cerebral Sliders sequel series that would accommodate older actors could be great. Like Tracy said in the DragonCon panel about a possible Season 4 budget slash...it could make for a more interesting story if you're bound by something out of your control.
At the same time, I don't want a reality where the core four have been sliding for 30 years. I don't want a nearly-80-year-old professor Arturo getting thrown out of a vortex. It just feels sad. That's why any story I consider these guys are home and happy and retired. Leave the sliding to the kids.
Yeah, I think the percentage of people that would've watched a continuation only if it had the original cast is so small at this point. It might just be us.
Make it a rebootquel or whatever and tie it into the original continuity if you want, but younger people aren't going to watch a show about a bunch of people in their 60s. And in regard to the original continuity, I think you need to essentially throw out Seasons 3-5. I can't imagine a new audience wants to watch the show jump through hoops to get the original sliders back from where Season 5 left off. And if you aren't using the original sliders, the point of using the original actors diminishes too.
For all Liz Cheney's faults, I really respect her for torpedoing her own career to do the right thing. She was essentially one of the congresspeople who voted alongside Trump at one of the highest rates, but she signals a time when we could disagree with someone politically but still respect for them. Even root for them.
https://www.mediaite.com/news/liz-chene … stitution/
I saw this conversation (this was simply the first link I saw and I didn't read the whole thing so I'm just posting it for the video and context), but this is what Biden needs to drive home. I think this is a winning argument for Republicans that aren't MAGA. The people who would "hold their nose" and vote for Trump. And as we discussed before, there are millions of people like this.
We Can Survive Bad Policies But Not Torching the Constitution
This should be the message. Biden should, at times (obviously not all the time), directly talk to center-right people and say "Listen, I know you might disagree with me on A, B, or C. And I hope you vote downballot for reasonable conservatives to try and defeat me on those issues. But if you vote for Trump, you won't win. The constitution won't win. Only Trump will win. And then I'll wish you good luck in 2028." We need to convince people (and I know lots of people like this) that they might like Trump's policies more, but there's too much risk involved to do that. Essentially, "you can survive four more years of Biden."
And literally that's all it would take. Take some percentage of reluctant Trump voters and a) get them to stay home b) get them to vote third party c) get them to leave the top of the ballot entirely or d) get them to become a reluctant Biden voter. Especially in toss-up states. Do that enough and get your base to show up, and Biden wins it easily.
I don't know if Cheney herself has enough sway to make that happen, but if she does, I'd get her on as a part of the campaign in some capacity. And I'd promise her some sort of role in a Biden administration (I assume small) if she wants it.
And, of course, Biden is also going to need to deliver for reluctant Trump voters. As I've said a bunch, he's going to have to do something to make them feel better about the economy, the border, and social issues. I don't know what that would be, but I think that's Biden's best avenue to victory.
So I would love for a reboot/continuation to happen at some point. Like I said, I think a lot of people liked Sliders when it aired (although a lot of people obviously didn't watch it), and I think in the overall cultural zeitgeist of a certain age (obviously a lot of people under 30 wouldn't have even heard of it) is positive. Like Quantum Leap (but less so since Sliders hasn't done much in syndication), I think if it was done well, it could be successful. And obviously the lower the stakes (Peacock original? Lower budget?), the better the chance of it succeeding.
The problem with a continuation is the ages. 1) it would be harder for older castmembers to do the type of stuntwork that we'd want from a show similar to seasons 1-2. Not impossible but harder. 2) It would be harder to market the show to younger audiences if the characters are all very old. Like look at this:
Current ages of the original sliders:
Jerry O'Connell - 49
Cleavant Derricks - 70
Sabrina Lloyd - 53? (Her age isn't on wikipedia, but IMDB lists her birthday as 11/20/70)
John Rhys-Davies - 79
Average Age - 62.75
Ages of the Golden Girls cast at the time the show premiered:
Rue McClanahan - 51
Betty White - 63
Bea Arthur - 63
Estelle Getty - 62
Average age - 59.75
Golden Girls was a show about retired old people, and their cast was younger than the Sliders cast is right now. I'm not saying they couldn't and I would love to see it, but it would be a much different show. I assume much more cerebral and much less action. Which could be great and help with the costs.
I still think the best avenue and most logical one is a show about Jerry O'Connell with a bunch of younger characters. The way I've always envisioned it (and the way I started writing a Earth 214 sequel series*) was with Quinn as the mentor figure in the Arturo role. Quinn could either be our original Quinn looking for the original Sliders or something else. One idea I liked would be a Quinn who gave up on sliding (maybe a version of Smarter Quinn never helped him), settled down, maybe went into teaching, and then a brainy kid like him finally cracks the code. Something like that could be a good way to involve the original cast without making it about them. Arturo could be the dean of the college or someone still mentoring Quinn in retirement. Wade could be his wife (or ex-wife) that Quinn has to leave behind when he goes sliding. Rembrandt could be harder to rope in, but maybe he teaches music at the same college or something? Could also just be a fun cameo (maybe he's performing at the school in some weird concert that the young kids don't get, or maybe it's some sort of nostalgia thing that Rembrandt is taking advantage of).
I think there's a lot of ways to do it. Jerry's the youngest and most active and most well known of the cast, and he's basically the exact age that JRD was when the show started. I think it makes the most sense.
* Not that anyone cares, but I still think this is a good idea and I'm never going to write this. My E214 sequel would've had my Quinn-1 (the original Quinn that rescues the original Sliders) taking a group of young scientists around the multiverse. The show would've started out fairly standard with standard adventures - the timer wouldn't be damaged, and they'd basically have full-time communication with their home base on their home Earth through some sort of "satellites in the vortex sci-fi nonsense." The twist would've been that on one of their adventures, one of the scientists gets injured and ends up in a coma in a hospital. With no other choice, they break into the hospital to rescue their friend and take him back to their home Earth. I can't remember if I did a time skip or waited an episode or two, but eventually the scientists would wake up from his coma...and it's not him. It's a double that happened to be in the same hospital with a similar injury.
So they try to take him back to his world, but his world is completely off the map. It's gone. Its either been destroyed, wiped out of existence somehow, or is being blocked by something. They can't access it. Not only that, but the double of their friend that they have is nonverbal (I'm sure I would've written him as nonverbal autistic at the time but I don't know if that would've been an insensitive move considering my education level on the subject) *and* can create wormholes organically (this part is lifted from a TF story, I believe). So instead of finding a way back home, the plot would essentially be about finding a lost person. I thought it was a pretty fun spin on things. If anyone writing a Peacock spinoff wants to use it 
Oh I'm not bashing Jerry by any means. He's free to feel and think whatever he wants. Even if he was making it about himself, I think that's still Jerry's brand. I just wanted to see what anyone else read into it.
Biden had a brutal poll come out where he was losing to Trump by almost ten points in Michigan. I know it's early and it's one poll, but I'm hoping they're taking this election as seriously as they say they are. It's been almost entirely one sided as far as campaigning goes, but Michigan is a state Biden needs to win.
Jerry O'Connell tweet
https://twitter.com/MrJerryOC/status/17 … w&s=19
Tracy Tormé was the smartest dude I had ever met, when he cast me in SLIDERS. Rest In Peace Genius.
I can't tell if this is Jerry high fiving himself or not. Is he saying that Tracy was the smartest dude he'd ever met at the time he cast him? Or that he was the smarted dude he'd ever met *because* he cast him?
Either way, I know Jerry's sense of humor can be a bit wacky. It might be a little of both?
Damn. Rest in peace, Mr. Torme. Thank you for sharing your art with us. Thank you for sharing your mind with us. You've inspired a lot of us to write, even if our writing paled in comparison to your own.
Even though Sliders was, at the end of it all, a giant mess, I still hear it brought up a lot. Not just with nerdy folks like us but with normal people. No one ever seems to remember seasons 3-5...it's always just how cool the premise was and not being quite sure what happened to it.
I don't know much about his personal life and haven't done too much digging into it. But he created Sliders, and that says enough about him in my eyes.
I don't think it is a weak case in New York at all. It is a fact that Trump overvalued his real estate properties. He even admitted it. He deserves to be punished to the fullest extent of the law.
Oh, I'm sorry, I meant the Stormy Daniels criminal case in New York. The only reason I say allegedly weak is that a lot of the law analysis I looked at at the time said that it's almost always a civil case. And that a lot of them didn't know how New York was going to twist itself to make it criminal. I think of the four criminal indictments, it has the least chance of succeeding.
But I'm not a lawyer so please feel free to disregard that opinion. Maybe it's the strongest, I legitimately don't know. But I feel like it's the only one that's for sure to happen in 2024.
Yeah I haven't seen anything that would indicate that Trump stands any chance of winning this argument. And he's lying about having to be there - he's choosing to be there. And then there's the question of whether or not the Supreme Court would take it up. They denied Jack Smith's request to jump straight there (which would've bypassed today's proceedings), but it's unknown if they denied it because a) precedent - they don't often skip a step in the process, b) to help Trump, which seems unlikely because no one dissented the decision...if it was political, someone would've, or c) they aren't planning on listening either way. I think C is the best route (and maybe a likely route) because the appellate judgment would be final and maybe we could still hit a March trial date.
I just want at least one of the Jack Smith trials (Florida or DC) to go to trial before the election. I know New York will but that's such a weak case (allegedly) and we know Georgia won't go to trial before.
For the record, this is the only place (on Earth?) that I can have a civil political discourse, and I would hope that this remains that. Now that Informant is gone we don't really have any true right-wing voice here (TF is the closest?), Grizzlor is at least able to discuss things from a "Biden better be careful" perspective, and I think that's important that we don't lean too far either way. That's no fun.
[Look, I do NOT want Trump to win, but it's increasingly possible due to the disastrous candidacy of Joe Biden. His atrocious polling cannot be simply ignored as though it's the media or right wing made up crap. 2016 was the same story. The liberals laughed at the notion, and then cried, because they chose to focus on social issues that the country didn't care about or were sick of hearing of. It's still the economy, stupid.
To be fair here, I do think the Biden campaign is doing a better job of handling this than the Clinton campaign did. I don't think Biden is a perfect candidate by any means, and I genuinely wish there was a better candidate. But there isn't. Any replacement is almost certainly worse (Harris), extremely flawed for the current times (Buttigieg), or simply too unknown to hop in this late in the game (Whitmer, Newsom, or my personal favorite, Warnock). The Democrats needed a wide-ranging campaign to get a sub-70-year-old candidate ready for 2024, and they didn't pull it off. Like it or not, Biden is the guy.
But the economy is doing much better. The stock market is up. GDP is up. Gas prices are down. Inflation is falling. There will be a large swath of the country that isn't going to give Biden credit for any of this, but assuming there isn't a reversal of any of this in the next ten months, the economy should be much better by November and people will have over a year of a strong economy in their memory banks. Now the Biden campaign is going to need to hammer this in the next ten months (and not just on social media like they are), but if it comes down to the economy, Biden is going to be in a good spot.
And I agree this election cannot be about social issues. Biden needs to downplay essentially all of those. And even though it's a big issue for me, I think he's going to need to downplay stuff like climate change. Biden would obviously be much better than Trump on climate, but I don't think that needs to be the center of any debate. Like I've said a bunch of times, Biden needs to move to the right on as many issues as he can to reach the largest amount of people he can, and he needs to trust that people on the left will vote for him anyway.
Edit: I see Grizzlor already made a lot of these points, but I'll leave mine up.
~71,000,000 votes for Trump (Hitler) is not half the country. Let's stop spreading nonsense, please.
Population of the United States: 331.9 million (2021)
Half that: 165,950,000So, 71,000,000ish (who voted Trump, a.k.a. Hitler) is around 21% of the country.
Not half.
Outlandish lies.
You seem to be taking that academic psychological assessment a bit personally, Grizzlor.
I stand by it.
To be fair, the 331.9 million includes a lot of people who are not eligible to vote. Children, for example, would make up a large percentage of those people, and I would assume the children of Trump voters would vote for Trump.
In 2020, about 239.2 million people are eligible to vote, and of that population, 159.7 million did. Of that number, 74.2 million voted for Trump. So it's 46% of the eligible population and 31% of the eligible population. I assume half was simply talking about the people that voted, and I think it's somewhat safe to say that people that didn't vote would break out somewhat similarly if they were forced to vote.
There should absolutely be a separation between Trump voters and MAGA because I think that's significant. I don't think 74.2 million people are fanatical about Trump - they voted for him because they felt like they had to (for whatever reason) or felt like Trump was the lesser of two evils. MAGA will vote for Trump no matter what, but I think the remaining percentage of 2020 Trump voters can be reached and reasoned with. A recent poll had a large number of Republicans that stated that they would no longer support Trump if he was convicted of a crime. That number wasn't *nearly* as large as it should've been, but it was enough to make the election impossible to win for Trump (assuming the voters weren't all in, say, California).
I don't think it's unreasonable to say that half the country supports Trump. Not all of them voted for him, and not all of them are nearly educated enough about Trump to actually defend anything other than a vibe of what 2018 was like. But I think if you did a formal poll of who supports Trump vs who doesn't, I think that number would be much higher than any of us would like.
I also wanted to state, simply as my personal opinion, that you both are being a little hard on Grizzlor.
Yeah, I assume so too. But if they're in disarray, that means it failed again. Which would be frustrating. I'd like a time period where the good guys are able to do something without it immediately falling apart.
"The Jedi are in disarray"
I'm curious what this even means. In the Rise of Skywalker, there are no Jedi. So does that mean the Jedi were rebuilt and then went into disarray? Or are they just still in disarray from Revenge of the Sith?
Yeah Gunn is doing it the right way, and Marvel couldn't have anticipated something like this at the time. As I said in the other thread, I don't really fault What If. It'll just be fun to have that level of continuity in the DCU.
Interesting updates from the border debate. Republicans in the House have a partisan bill they've passed and sent to the Senate. The Senate has a bipartisan compromise bill that they're working on.
Republicans came out and said that they're not willing to accept any compromise, actually stating out loud that they're not willing to give Biden any wins. And the White House has started openly saying that Republicans are blocking legislation and funds that are supposed to help the situation at the border. In other words, Republicans are complaining about the border and actively working to stop the problem from being fixed.
They need to do this. And a lot more of it. If they can spin this properly to the right people, this could be good. Republicans are creating a problem and then complaining about it. With the right spin, it could get him voters back.
The Israel stuff is more difficult. There's a decent chance that foreign actors (Putin?) are trying to make sure there's a war in Ukraine and Israel through the election, and Biden is getting hit from both sides. He's siding almost exclusively with Israel, but people are saying he's not doing enough (again, Republicans are blocking help), but he's getting killed from his left flank by supporting Israel at all.
It's hard to fathom that Muslims are so mad about this situation that they'll allow Trump to win (or actually vote for him!), but it seems like that's where we're at right now. I did a little bit of research, and what Muslim leaders are saying is that Trump is at least honest about being anti-Islamic. That Biden pretends to be a friends to Muslims and is now stabbing them in the back.
I think a big part of people's lack of fear of Trump is that they survived four years of him, and I think the expectations are that the second term will be like the first. My fear is that a lot of the guardrails (being either people in Trump's administration that moderated him or legislation/policies/norms that prevented some of his more extreme actions being done being eroded). People think Trump will mean another Muslim ban, and they can survive another one of those. What it could mean is a mass Muslim deportation.
When Biden tried to talk about Trump's openly anti-Muslim rhetoric and Biden's work in the Muslim community, he got attacked by Muslim leaders. It's a real problem, and I don't know how he navigates it if the war in Israel continues.
He's in a similar situation with voters of color. Black voters know that Trump is racist, but the argument I'm seeing is "Yeah, Trump is racist but pretty much every president has been racist but at least the economy was good under Trump." Latino voters are saying "yeah, Trump is anti-immigrant, but I'm an American and we have to fix the border." Young voters are saying "Biden promised to get rid of my student debt and failed me. It can't be any worse under Trump."
I think Biden and his team need to be very clear that Term Two won't be the same as Term One. People need to understand that they can be mad at Biden about X, Y, or Z, but that it will be so much worse under Trump.
Most importantly, Biden needs to listen to these voters and enact actual programs that help these people. That's the only way they'll forgive him, I think. He has lots of time, but he needs to be moving right now.
Watched Rebel Moon. I don't think I'm a Snyder guy. Most of his movies are fine on a first watch but I'm never all that interested in rewatching them. I didn't think the Snyder Cut was all that much better than Whedon's version, especially when you take into account that Snyder would've had to edit the movie at some point. Snyder had three movies that he claimed were building to an epic story, but we never ended up getting there. It reminds me of the Flash's final season, when the producers claimed that they had these big stories they were going to do if they'd been given more episodes. Snyder had three movies and just needed a couple more to tell the good one.
Rebel Moon certainly feels like a part one. It doesn't feel like a complete movie. It's got everything you love from Snyder (slow motion, bleakness, characters who have given up), but at least it's only a few minutes over two hours.
I hope Snyder's fans love it. He seems like a genuinely good person, and I'm glad that Snyder fans have something that they really enjoy. It just doesn't seem like his stuff is for me.
Watching Marvel's WHAT IF? with the full motion animation, lush and dense environments, smooth camerawork, hyperkinetic editing, compelling shot composition, immersive soundscape, high energy voice acting -- and I have to wonder, why exactly are those DC Universe Original Animated movies still being made? They look stiff and immobile compared to WHAT IF?
I'm pretty sure the new DCU is ending the unrelated animated movies (at least the constant stream of them). And unlike What If...?*, future DCU animated films will be entirely voice-acted by the original live action voices.
* Just needed to mention that
I think the voice acting is great. Downey and Johansson have very distinct voices, and I'm sure a talented voice actor would have no issue doing a seamless impression. I feel like the actor that replaced Chris Evans didn't nail it as much, but Evans doesn't have as distinct a voice. I'm not sure you can do an "impression" of Evans, and it might sound silly if someone tried. I assume the creative team picked the best voice for Steve and just had him use his normal voice.
Again, I don't mean to insult Wingert or Bell. Nothing about the voice work was distracting or bad. It's almost more distracting when it's a fake Chris Evans talking to a real Chris Hemsworth. Then I spend time wondering if that's really Jon Favreau (and it is...he just sounds off even when he's playing normal Happy Hogan).
I think the production did the best possible job. They got as many of the real actors as possible and filled in the rest the best they could. I still just think it's a little weird that they get some people and don't get others. I get Chris Evans not wanting to ruin the legacy of his Captain America with a cheap return or Downey not wanting to get paid minimum wage after he's made a fortune off his Iron Man. But I have to assume a lot of these guys did recordings at home, and they're all playing alternate versions of their characters. Maybe it's just the principle of not coming back.
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I watched all of What If...? Season 2, and overall it was really good. I feel like maybe they played way too hard into the Captain Carter thing? She's a fun character, and I'm glad she's getting some spotlight after she sorta got shortchanged in live action. But she's the star of 1/3 of the episodes, and almost every line of dialogue from Uatu is about how great she is. It's just a little odd that it's a show about endless possibilities and we keep returning to the same character over and over again.
Haley won't be offered. Trump 2024 is not going to compromise on anything. He will choose a sycophant like Kari Lake. Has to be someone who will spew the same bile lies as him. His attitude now is Biden is so bad, all Trump needs is MAGA to be revved up and he'll win.
See, as an anti-Trump guy, I think Lake would be a good pick for him. She's going to be loud and irritating and turn people off like she did in the Arizona governor's race. She doesn't get him suburban women or college educated whites.
Would it still be enough? Maybe. But it wouldn't gain him any votes, and most "Trump-like" people that aren't Trump end up turning off even more Republicans.
His best bet is to pick someone who would appeal to Republicans that don't like Trump. But I agree that he'll probably pick someone who has been loyal in the past.
She's said she would turn it down. She may underestimate Trump's insanity and think that being Trump's VP makes you the nominee by default in 2028 as long as she doesn't make him mad. Obviously that didn't work out for Pence, but a) Trump is still running and b) Haley may think she's smarter/better than Pence.
But I think Trump is just as likely to a) try to stay in power for a third term b) name one of his kids as the next nominee or c) pick someone absolutely random.
Haley was Governor of South Carolina. She did succeed in removing the Confederate flag from state property. She's surely had to answer this question 500 times, and yet sounded like an idiot. Regardless, her answer is about as relevant in this election as John Schneider, zilch. Donald Trump will be the GOP nominee.
It isn't zero. If Trump is smart (and we know he isn't), then Haley should be his VP candidate. She'd go a long way to repairing his image with Republican women and people in the suburbs. She polls extremely well with those groups, and I think people could be convinced (especially people that don't really like Biden except as an alternative to Trump) that she could be the adult in the room. Or that she'd take over when his criminal trials end. Or that she'd take over when Trump is impeached, etc.
If it's Trump-Haley, I'm very worried. If Haley is damaged goods (either with the people that help or the people that would pick her), then obviously that won't happen. Anti-Trump people are better off with Trump going with a loyalist like MTG.
On the 14th Amendment
I don't think there's any question that Trump committed in an insurrection attempt. Having read the text, I think it's vague enough that a true reading of the text should disqualify Trump. He doesn't need a conviction to qualify.
There's two issues I have with this, and I think they compound each other. The first is that I don't think that the Supreme Court will agree. I think they're not going to want to set that precedent, and I really don't think they want to be involved. I also think they'd be (rightfully) afraid of the social unrest that would happen if Trump was deemed ineligible. He still has millions of fervent followers, and I think if Trump was declared ineligible, there would be violence. Second, I do think it plays into Trump's narrative. Trump supporters only believe Trump, and he insists that "the deep state" is out to get him. If Trump is kicked off the ballot, it fits Trump's narrative. If he's not kicked off the ballot, the attempt itself will fit Trump's narrative. And like the indictments, it could increase his support, not limit it.
I think Trump getting kicked off the ballot is, long term, the best solution. If someone does what Trump did, they shouldn't be allowed to run again. And if there were real consequences to Trump's actions, it would deter others from doing it. But I think short-term, win or lose, it might be better to just defeat him in November.
On Nikki Haley
I don't like Nikki Haley, but if you gave me the choice between a guaranteed President Haley and the risk of another term of President Trump, I'd take President Haley*. I think Haley sucks and would be bad for the country, but she wouldn't be catastrophic. Trump is another level of terrible, and I think Haley, while misguided, wants the country to succeed.
What I think the problem is that Haley/DeSantis know that they cannot win the nomination without people that are devoted to Trump. People that would fight and die for Trump. And as much as they seem to hate it, they cannot speak out against Trump. That's why their argument is "Trump is great, but pick me"
And that means not upsetting white nationalists. I'm sure she sees it as a means to an end, but it's still deplorable for her to do it.
*Just to clarify again, I do not like Haley and would not vote for her. But if it's her or Trump, I pick her. If it's anyone and Trump, I pick anyone.
On John Schneider.
If he's a conservative, that's fine. I don't want Hollywood to only be liberals or progressives. Entertainment should be for everyone. But Schneider crossed so many lines, and it's disappointing. Be mad at Biden if you're mad, but there shouldn't be any more inciting of political violence. Schneider should be investigated and punished if possible.]
It sucks because I think Jonathan Kent is a great character, and he was great in the role. And now it's kinda tainted for me.
Hopefully Tom Welling and Michael Rosenbaum continue to be good people. Smallville's cast is looking rough on re-examination.
It's very funny to read someone (probably not unreasonably) take issue with how Poison Ivy is an angry eco-terrorist and Black Widow is a master spy and Bell's voices for them are too similar.
Ha, that is funny. To be fair, Bell is a great voice actress. Her Poison Ivy is great - funny, loving, and terrifying. The problem is that while I'm very good at remembering voices, I'm not great at recognizing them. So I will hear a voice actor and think "I know that voice" but I'll have to look it up on IMDB to figure out where I know it from. But with Bell as Natasha, I immediately knew it was Ivy.
And she does a great job with Natasha too. Scarlett Johansson has a pretty distinct voice, and she nails it. I don't actually know what Lake Bell's true voice sounds like so maybe it's that Ivy is too much like Scarlett Johansson.
One thing I'm struggling to determine. I fully expect the Supreme Court to overturn Colorado, but is the Supreme Court's decision (whatever it ends up being) going to apply to all states? In other words, would the determination on Colorado either make him allowed to be on the ballot in all 50 states or make him eligible in no states? Or would this hypothetically need to be 50 separate Supreme Court decisions?
What's frustrating about this stuff is that this is something that could've been done years ago. I keep reading that all these decisions might be too late to actually keep him off any ballots. I understand why the Jack Smith cases needed years to come together, but I feel like this could've been figured out in 2021. No?
I think Lake Bell does a good job, but now I associate her voice with Poison Ivy. And I don't think she does enough to separate Ivy and Natasha.
I think the replacement voices are good, but it's just distracting to get legitimate Hollywood stars for minor roles and you can't get the actual voices for major roles. It doesn't take me out of the story or anything, and I think all the replacements do a good job. It just feels weird to me, but I can see how it would be impossible for the money to work.
It doesn't have to be devoid of conflict, but I just didn't like that instead of being a new conflict, it was essentially the same conflict again. Instead of Endor being the end of one war, it was a footnote in a much larger war. That's what was frustrating.
If there are sequels to the sequels, they would obviously still be about war, but it should be a new war that looks different.
MODERATOR NOTE: This post about John Schneider was moved from the SMALLVILLE thread to the politics thread.
Did you guys see this?
https://www.msn.com/en-us/tv/celebrity/ … r-AA1lRVlQ
I guess I shouldn't be surprised, but this was disappointing to read.
Is removing more illegals than the Trump administration enough for you? How is that doing nothing? That's not exactly something he wants to advertise, but let's get our facts straight before saying that he's done nothing.
Thank you for the information! Unfortunately, Biden has to advertise something because that message isn't getting to voters:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics … r-AA1lHyvN
Voters aren't getting the message. There's still plenty of time for them to get the message, but Biden is going to have to be really careful about how he sells it. Whatever he's doing (and again, thank you for letting me know) is not getting through to voters. For Biden's base, I'm sure what he's doing is enough. But, especially now that the Republicans are campaigning and Biden isn't, the message is that the border is wide open. Stories with thousands of people at the border isn't helpful.
My response would really be theatrical, not policy. I think Harris is the best one to handle this (and she's in charge of the border anyway), but I think the administration needs to appear harsher on the border. Americans don't really dig into statistics (obviously), but they tend to follow a "vibe" - if people around them are saying something, even if it's 2nd/3rd/4th hand, they're going to tend to believe it and do no research. And unfortunately, Biden is going to need a ton of those people to vote for him.
Like with the economy, I don't think Biden needs to do anything different. He just needs to change the narrative.
(Although, like I said, I'm willing to punt the issue entirely and let the Republicans have a victory in the negotiations. If it means aid for Ukraine and a better chance at Biden's re-election, I'll sacrifice the border issue and deal with it again in 2025. Because no matter what the Democrats agree to now, it'll be so much worse with Trump).
I really think the original is just so well done. You can tell that Kevin is a sweet kid with a good heart, but you can also see how he'd really annoy his parents and siblings. Parents and kids sometimes say terrible things to each other, but you can tell that Kevin really loves his family at the end of the day. And his mom, even though they made two awful mistakes, basically walks through Hell twice to get back to her son.
The first two movies are funny, fun, and have a lot of heart. I watched the first Home Alone for the first time (I think?) as a parent, and the scene where Kevin and his mom are reunited hit me differently.
It's funny because so many things about the movie won't make sense to my daughters' generation, but I think it'll still hold up because the story is really solid and pure.
I'm making my way through the What If episodes. You're telling me that they can get basically everyone (Michael Douglas, Kurt Russell, etc) to come back and do voicework for this, but they can't get Downey or Evans to do anything? It's a little distracting to get everyone back and not have those guys. I get that they're done, but a lot of these voices are done. Wouldn't this be like 20 minutes of work they can do from their own house?
I'm not saying they owe us or anything. If they want to be done, they're free to be done. It's just a little weird that they got so many and the big two just aren't coming back.
Biden has to do something at the border. He can't shrug it off as a fake problem, even if he thinks it is. The border is a huge topic in Iowa, which is nowhere near the border. He has to appear tougher on the border, or it's going to be a huge issue that they will hammer him on. Again, like with my vampire analogy, it doesn't matter if the problem is real. It doesn't matter if it's racist or un-American. Voters, and not just MAGA voters, think it's a huge problem. Here in Texas, which was shifting blue for years, Biden is losing deep blue cities on the border. He's losing working-class Hispanics that have voted Democrat for years.
He has to do something, and he has to do something that he can take credit for. The number of border crossings has to come down. I still think he should let Republicans put (basically) whatever they want in the Ukraine deal. He can hammer any bad stuff to appease his own base, but if he gives Republicans what they want, they aren't going to be able to hammer Biden without shooting their own legislation.
The border isn't the problem that MAGA makes it out to be, but it's a big enough problem with enough voters that Biden cannot do nothing. If he does, the race will be exclusively about the border, and Biden will be on the defensive on an issue that Americans (on the whole) do not trust Democrats on. And Biden needs to act *now* so that most Americans won't even remember it was an issue by November.
War never ends. It's Star Wars, plural, because it goes right from one to the next one. They blow you up today, you blow them up tomorrow.
Sure, but you can essentially erase the original trilogy from existence and it no longer matters. If someone was in a coma when Rogue One happened and stayed for 15-20 years, he'd wake up in a galaxy that was basically the same with only minor differences. They blew up a couple Death Stars, sure, but they didn't even kill the Emperor. They made the Empire go into hiding/hibernation, but they definitely didn't beat it. It just makes, at least, to me, the main trilogy seem pointless.
I don't think they needed to get rid of the "Wars" - no one would want to watch a sequel trilogy about Luke doing a peaceful Jedi academy with no conflict. But the Expanded Universe did a bunch of different stories without just re-doing A New Hope again. Do something new. Or at least sell the idea that they're now stuck in a never-ending Groundhog Day of fighting the same enemy (slightly renamed) over and over again.
Say what you will about the prequels, but at least it was a new story. The sequels (and I'm including all three in this) don't break any new ground. And, worse, they essentially make most of the original trilogy pointless. That's what sucks (to me).
I saw the first The Santa Clause and liked it, but had no interest in further endeavors which I presumed were just the same premise recycled.
Kind of but also not really. The second movie is about Scott, now comfortable as Santa, having to both a) save Charlie, who has landed on the Naughty list and b) find a wife so he can continue being Santa. It's basically a romantic comedy with some silly Christmas stuff. The "villain" is a robotic toy Santa that Bernard creates to keep order at the North Pole while Santa is away.
The latter part is a bit silly because Santa is gone *the entire year* of the first movie. Bernard seems to have the whole toy process working, making Santa more of a figurehead than anything else. If he's gone for a year, who really cares?
The third movie is sillier and dumber, and revolves around Santa's personal life being a bit of a mess. His in-laws come to visit the North Pole (he's convinced them it's Canada), and Jack Frost (played by Martin Short) tries to steal the spotlight from Santa. True story: this one has time travel.
So they do go in different directions. Just sillier / dumber directions. In the first movie, Scott is fighting being Santa. In the sequels, he's fighting to stay Santa.
Just a note, again: I am absolutely not recommending these movies.
Speaking of X-Mas movies, I opted for a back to back the other night of the classic Chris Columbus Home Alone movies.
We watched these too. I thought they held up great. One thing that I loved about it is how well they sold the whole premise both times. They've basically made it so that Kevin's whole family doesn't like him so they probably wouldn't immediately notice that he's gone. It's a little unbelievable that a house full of parents would sleep in (I can't sleep until 7am if I wanted anymore, and I love sleeping in), but they do a bunch of different things to sell it:
- the power going out
- they throw out Kevin's ticket so that the number of tickets is correct for the number of people
- O'Hare is a disaster
- The only neighbor around is scary to Kevin so he doesn't go for help
I don't buy that the police would only stop by once (or that the McAlisters would let them only stop by once). They especially should've sent someone during the day because I don't think it's reasonable to expect Kevin to answer the door at night. Also the policeman probably should've announced himself.
I also think they should've considered checking with the pizza company. Kevin loves pizza and they probably assumed that was the only way he'd be able to get food. They're shocked that he went shopping and it would've been reasonable to expect he'd call there (and he did).
The second movie does an easier thing and had Kevin follow a different guy in a similar coat. Peter (Kevin's dad) does a terrible job of keeping an eye on his son, but other than that, in a pre-9/11 world, I think it's possible. Kevin is also the last one on the plane so assuming the flight wasn't full, it was believable that no one would notice. Nowadays, he obviously wouldn't have been able to get on the wrong plane, but at the time, it would've worked.
I love both those movies. Sure, the punishments that Harry and Marv gets are nonsensical, but it's still a lot of fun.
Reminds me of this:
This year, my girls were young enough to watch some Christmas movies. One movie that my daughter really enjoyed was The Santa Clause. It's a fun and charming movie, and my oldest daughter really enjoyed the North Pole hijinks. I remembered that The Weekly Planet (my favorite podcast) did a series on YouTube covering the Santa Clause trilogy so I showed my kids the full trilogy.
What's crazy about the series is that they started out with a sort of deep mythology in the first movie that was sorta ahead of its time. For those who don't know (and spoilers I guess?) Scott Calvin is a divorced dad who, after the real Santa Claus falls off his roof, becomes the new Santa. As I said, hijinks ensure, but one of the fascinating details of the movie is that elves are interspersed throughout the movie. Even before Scott becomes Santa, elves seem to be watching him. After he starts becoming Santa, elves are still watching him.
Two things are a little crazy about this. The first is that it's never mentioned or explained. Scott is "legally" required to be Santa so it makes some sense that elves are watching to see if he's committing to it or not. But elves watching Scott *before* he becomes Santa implies that Santa's "death" wasn't an accident. But that's not stated in the first movie at all. It's up to the audience to figure that out. Secondly, the movie doesn't really hide it. It isn't ambiguous which kids are elves and which are kids. Their ears might be partially covered, but they're fully shown to be elves if you know where to look. And the more you look, the more you see. Once you know there are elves everywhere, it makes the movie a little more fun on a rewatch.
It would be like if Nick Fury was in the background of every scene in Iron Man watching Tony but never shows up at the end to explain about the Avengers Initiative. We just know that SHIELD is watching Tony and that's it.
Later movies get sillier (and less good), and the elves tracking Scott is never mentioned in them. The movies switch to a focus on a bigger world where Santa is part of a Council of Legendary figures, and in each movie, Santa faces a situation where he might no longer be Santa. Both are watchable but obviously dip in quality.
Because I'm a completionist, once I finished the movies, I had to watch both seasons of the Disney+ revival. I was interested in which parts of the movies they were going to continue and which parts they weren't. I was pleasantly surprised that Charlie (Scott's son) was in the series. He's a huge part of the first movie, a fairly large part in the second movie, and he's background by the third movie. Same with Bernard who has the same sort of role in the first two movies but is completely absent in the third. David Krumholtz was becoming a bit of a star by the third movie, and it was probably hard to explain how an immortal aging elf was now obviously older.
But both Charlie (now a grown up with his own kids) and Bernard (who gave up his elf powers to become an aging human) return in the first season of the show. Both are fairly small returns, but they're both welcome. Oddly enough, Charlie's mother (and Scott's ex-wife) Laura and her new husband Neil don't show up in the series at all. As far as I'm aware, neither are mentioned. Neither is their daughter Lucy, who is a fairly big part of the third movie. I don't know if there's a behind the scenes reason for that or not, but it's strange because Laura and Neil are prominently in all three movies.
I was a little worried about watching a Tim Allen show about Christmas in 2023 because Tim Allen is a prominent right wing actor in Hollywood. And to be honest, in the first couple episodes, there's some overt joking about the War on Christmas. But oddly enough, one of the main actors in the first season is Kal Penn, who worked in the Obama White House. So I figured that he wouldn't want to work on anything that's particularly right wing. And after the first couple episodes (and into the second season), those references are essentially dropped. A vague drop in Christmas spirit is used as a plot device and then replaced by a much more defined reason for a drop in Christmas spirit by the end.
The second season has almost no references to the original movies (outside of the characters that are returning) and tell a much better story in my opinion. The series shifts to Scott's family at the North Pole and builds on some Santa lore. What's notable about the second season is that the climax is really dull. Santa is facing off against an evil Santa, but the big clash that's been built to is basically just a conversation. Not even like a battle of wits. Santa has no plan and doesn't really outsmart anyone. Scott seems to win just because the bad guy doesn't really care enough when the battle tips in Scott's favor. It's a bit bizarre. I would think it's maybe budgetary, but even if it's budgetary, I would think they could've written a better climax.
All in all, it was a mostly-entertaining ride. Allen is good in the role and seems to be having a good time with it. The series is able to keep the elf characters interesting as it's mostly new people every movie. I don't know if I actually would recommend that anyone spend any time watching it unless you're doing it with/for your kids like I did. But for a series that seemed pretty standard when I originally watched it 30 years ago, I was surprised at how deep the lore ended up being. Especially since, I assume, most of that was an accident.
Actually, no we don't. The entire border BS is just that - BS. Another BS lie the rethuglicans tell you to make you think they know what they're talking about. They feed on republican racism and bigotry to get votes for their cause.
Democrats, we simply ignore it because we know they're all lies.
Okay, but you get that it doesn't matter right now, right? If Republicans are able to trick voters into thinking that vampires are a significant problem, Biden needs to do something to "fix" that problem too. It might mean putting garlic on every intersection in the country or doing subsidies for the timber industry to lower the cost of wooden crosses, but he'd have to do something whether or not the problem is real. Otherwise, he loses.
And what's crazy, at least to me, is that a fake problem is much easier to solve than a real problem. And in Biden's two biggest problems with voters (the economy and the border), I think his solutions are more theatrical than anything. On the border, as I've said a bunch of times, I think Vice President Harris is the key. 1) she's got a lower approval rating than Biden and needs a boost 2) she's a former prosecutor who thrives in that role. So send her to the border and "take care of it"
Biden is legally required to build more border wall. So make it an event. Take credit for the wall you're building. Take tons of videos and make Harris the star of those videos. Then you can make campaign videos of actual border wall being made, with Harris looking prosecutorial, and intersperse it with videos of Trump saying he's going to build the wall and long stretches of unwalled border. Take a loss and turn it into a win.
It's going to be theatrical and it isn't going to convince everyone, but there are absolutely voters (particularly in the southwest) that are only voting against Biden because they think the border is open. And I don't think doing nothing or telling them that there isn't a problem is going to work. I think they're actually going to have to do something. And if you're going to beat Trump, I think theatricality is a way to work. The people that have switched from Biden to Trump fall for it, and I think it would work to get them back.
As for the economy, the hard work is already done. They just have to sell it. People are now separating their personal financial situation from the situation of the economy as a whole. They either need to tie that back ("If you're doing well, America is doing well") or with theatrics. Trump has convinced people that gas is $5-$8 a gallon across the country. As gas prices continue to fall, they need to celebrate that. Do ads that show gas prices all over the country. Do events at gas stations where gas is under $2 no matter where that happens.
Wherever he can, he needs to do what he can to bring prices down for staples. Bread, eggs, milk, meat. If he can also help American farmers, I think that would be good.
And, again, the key to all this is exposure and exposure to the right people. He needs reliable surrogates that can go on Fox News (and even places like Newsmax) and talk about how border crossings are dropping, how much oil is being drilled for, how prices are dropping, how the stock market is doing, how the infrastructure plan is helping etc. These need to be surrogates that non-MAGA conservatives are willing to listen to or it won't matter.
Running a typical campaign might work to get Biden re-elected. But I think making things a bit more theatrical would a) reach voters b) make Biden and Harris more likeable and c) ensure re-election. Even if it's not the most liberal path, it doesn't matter if it means Trump stays out of the White House.
Yes, well the point is to WIN the war at the conclusion of whatever heroic story you're telling. Star Wars now is just wedging stories all over the place, in a war that was already "won."
Is it won? The Empire technically has superiority at the end of 2/3 of the trilogies (and the third isn't even all that definitive). At the end of the prequels, obviously the Empire wins. At the end of the original trilogy, the Empire appears to have lost, but all their victories are wiped away within 30 years. To the point where, at the end of episode 8, the Rebellion/New Republic/Resistance is entirely on one ship. It's implied during the sequel trilogy (and the Filoni stuff) that the Empire was still infecting the New Republic and biding its time.
And the Empire is able to essentially convert into the First Order and take over every bit of what the Empire held (I think, it's really unclear on how much they control). By the end of episode 9, the heroes have reformed some sort of new rebel alliance and they defeat Palpatine, but I can't even remember if they do anything about the actual First Order. I assume they still have tons of territory and ships and might actually have competent leadership from whoever is next in line.
That's what souring about all Star Wars with me. In three trilogies, they have a couple of wins (episodes 4, 6, and 9), but for the most part, the theme seems to be "keep fighting but the bad guys will always come back bigger and stronger"
Rudy Giuliani has filed for bankruptcy. All the people he defamed are SOL.
Apparently these types of judgments aren't protected by bankruptcy. So I think he still has to pay these out. Of course, they're probably SOL either way because Alex Jones hasn't paid a penny to the people he defamed, and he's still living a lavish lifestyle. Last I checked, the people are willing to take a fraction of what was awarded just so they get something.
The Republicans complain about how the courts are out to get them, but they seem to be insulating Rudy, Trump, and Jones.
Will Biden actually cut a deal on immigration, in order to fund Ukraine's war? To me these are the key issues to be decided I presume next month. The current news on the border is not good for the White House. Video of thousands of migrants standing around in the wilderness like they're waiting to get into a Taylor Swift show, very bad.
This seems like such an easy solution to me. Cut the deal. Have Biden be like "look, we need to help in Ukraine, and this is what it cost" - politicians make compromises all the time and have to explain it away to their consituents.
But this is win-win for Biden. If they pass something on the border, even if it's a "win" for Republicans, then it knocks out a whole talking point for Republicans, especially if Biden gives them everything they want. Republicans would have to knock their own legislation for being weak.
He has to do something at the border, even if it's not what his base wants. This issue is 100% negative for him, and his base might get mad but won't abandon him over it. This is another example of Democrats just not playing the game very well. This is something that can very easily get Biden re-elected, especially if he spins it right. He could even do the political trick of downplaying it to his base and celebrating it to the other side (like Republicans have done with the infrastructure bill).
I get that it has to be about a war, but if the wars are endless and repetitive, then no action done by anyone has any impact. It makes winning any particular battle (or even war) meaningless if the cycle just repeats a few years later.
As for a state jailing a sitting president, that's a thornier issue. Being president doesn't grant immunity to state laws. I don't think it will come to that, however.
Yeah, I'm not sure either. But I can see why it might make sense for a sitting president not to be imprisoned under state laws. It would definitely be an interesting argument either way.
I worry about the Colorado decision. Obviously I would love a situation where Trump isn't allowed to run. I do think he tried to overthrow the government and stay in power, but he doesn't have a conviction. Barring a conviction, what's stopping red states from doing the same thing (under bogus circumstances) to a future Democratic candidate? It's a slippery slope that I'm not entirely comfortable with.
It's the same as Trump going to jail for the Georgia case (if convicted) if he's re-elected. Should a state be allowed to jail a sitting president? If Alabama was able to convince a jury that Biden committed a crime there, should Biden have to spend time in jail? There are reasons for some of these rules and regulations, and I'm worried what Republicans would do if we opened things up to get to Trump.
Again, I'm not saying it's not the right thing to do. I'm just worried about what would happen if the other side tries the same stuff for false reasons.
Yeah, I struggle to get excited about this stuff. Alex Jones owes so much money to grieving families, but I don't know if he'll ever pay that. And Jones still gets to live like a king. I get that our system has to have a system of appeals, but I hate that the appeals system is just another stalling tactic.
I'm also getting very nervous that Trump isn't going to face any of these trials (I guess maybe New York) before the election. Georgia already won't happen, the judge in the Florida case is probably more likely to throw the case out entirely than start it before the election, and I'm worried this immunity appeal is going to drag on forever.
I just want the guy to face the music. If he's a convicted felon, there's a decent chance that even the Republicans in Congress impeach the guy even if he wins. But if he wins and throws all the cases (but Georgia and New York) out, it will all have been for nothing.
One of the things that I think Biden's going to really struggle with is that people don't seem to care about the truth of the matter on anything. Trump was talking at a rally in Iowa the other day, and he talked about how gas was "$5, $6, $7, and even $8 a gallon" now. But those people would've gotten into their cars after the rally and passed stations where gas is $2.84. I looked it up myself....that's the price of gas (on average) in the town where Trump spoke.
So are those people so disconnected with reality that they think gas is $8 when it's $2.84? Or are they thinking "well I'm fine but imagine those poor people who really are paying $8?"
How do you convince people that see something different from what everyone else sees? Based on recent polling, this isn't an issue that's just MAGA being crazy.
No, but he's suffering with voters because of it. And if he initiates fiscal policy that temporarily brings prices down but then they shoot back up, it isn't worth it. Even if gas prices are down and GDP is up and the Dow Jones is up (which is all true), voters might judge Biden simply on the price of milk. I'm just saying I don't know how Biden fights that unless he gets the price of milk down.
All this is true. Unfortunately, voters aren't (yet) seeing it that way. I know you don't like polls, but people still think the economy sucks. I assume the economy will continue where it's at, but even if it does, are people's opinions on Biden re: the economy baked in? Will they judge him based on how the economy was in 2024, or are they going to compare where they're at in 2024 against where they remember being in 2020?
https://www.npr.org/2023/12/09/12182915 … ation-jobs
I still think Biden has to do something about prices. I don't have any idea what he could do that wouldn't steer right back into more inflation, but he either needs to make it happen or very publicly try to make it happen. And quick.
I think that's the problem, pilight. Is it a focus or is it a perceived focus? I don't think Biden ever talks about LGBT issues or transgender surgeries or critical race theory, does he? Maybe he does, and it just isn't covered much. I think Republicans campaign on this stuff more than Democrats, but I think the public perception is that the Democrats are much more into identity politics than they are (at least, policy-wise).
But that's something Biden's going to need to fight.
The Democrats already had the means to lock out republicans and any hope of victory, and they handed it away. Ironically, they did it to court people like me (white, college educated, and focused on forward-facing issues like climate change).
After 2012, it looked like the Democrats would win every presidential election. Democrats had a huge coalition of blue collar workers, people of color, women, and several others. Republicans seemed like they had rich white men and nothing else. The problem was that as Democrats tried to improve their coalition, they started alienating other sides. Right or wrong, Democrats started focusing on issues that appealed to certain groups (LGBT issues, climate change, etc).
And it worked! Between Trump turning off college educated white people and those people appreciating the forward-thinking of the Democratic Party, that segment of the Republican base started to flip.
But in exchange, Democrats lost the working class that used to be the backbone of their party. Why should Joe Smith worry about climate change in 2050 when they're struggling today? Why would he want their politicians to focus on LGBT bathroom issues and preferred pronouns when they couldn't put food on the table? Why would they want to gear towards renewable energy when the coal plant in town was all that was keeping it alive?
(These are not my opinions, BTW. Just an example).
Instead of being for unions and entitlements and working class wages, the perception of the party became pronouns and transgender bathrooms and climate change. To some, Democrats cared more about illegal immigrants than Americans. Republicans *talked* about the things they wanted to talk about. The economy. The border. Sticking with fossil fuels that kept them paid and their towns alive.
Don't get me wrong. Republican policies don't actually help blue collar workers. But Republicans are at least saying the things that they want to hear. Democrats are trying to straddle two different groups with wildly different agendas. It's like with Israel and Palestine. Most Americans support Israel. Progressives support Palestine. How can Biden support Israel (the largest part of the country) and support Palestine (people in his party)? Essentially what Democrats have to do is pick one and hope the other still supports him. He has decided to support Israel (keeping him strong with Independents and older people) and hope that young progressives that support Palestine stick with him because the alternative is worse.
That's why I think Biden needs to pivot to the other side. A lot of the worker-focused items from the Inflation Reduction Act got removed in favor of climate-focused items. The college-educated people can have those things to hang their hats on. But now Biden needs to ignore them for a minute and focus on blue-collar workers. If these people, especially in Pennsylvania and the Midwest, think that the Democrats are more about LGBT issues than the economy, Biden can lose. If Biden can just remind them that Democratic policies are better for them than Republican rhetoric then the Democrats can build a coalition that Trump can't beat.
SQ21, yes, on the surface, Biden has had a mountain of accomplishments, ones that any incumbent should be able to easily tout and do a victory lap with. You say he hasn't "campaigned yet" but WILL he? Seriously? Can he?
I don't disagree here. I think Biden's age and his mannerisms are a huge liability. I think a debate between Biden and Trump could end up being a bloodbath. Trump is straight crazy (and, honestly, showing as much mental decline as anyone) but he clearly acts like a much younger man in terms of stamina and energy. But here's my reason for optimism:
1. Trump is a one-man show, but that's not how I expect the Biden campaign to work. I think this will be much more of a team effort. Biden will obviously have to do his part, but I would have to think we'd see a lot of the Obamas and Mayor Pete and Gretchen Whitmer and Raphael Warnock and Gavin Newsom and anyone else they can get. I would think these surrogates would need to do a lot of heavy lifting and be strategically deployed to get the most impact. And it doesn't have to just be politicians, either. Or even Democrats. I think Biden needs to get a team of celebrities and businessmen and activists and academics and everyday Joes that can speak to what a Biden administration has done and what it will do.
2. Biden might not want to debate, but does Trump? Trump isn't even doing Republican debates. He says he doesn't have to, but I don't think he wants to. He's doing a ton of events, but they're all highly controlled. What's he afraid of, Chris Christie? He doesn't want to have to answer a question he doesn't want to answer. So I'm not sure either candidate would want to debate. No debate means no chance for a Biden gaffe.
I would love it if Obama or someone like him could step in and run. I think Warnock would be a great candidate right now. I think Whitmer could be really good right now. But who else is there? The Democrats have done a bad job of building up the next person so Biden is the guy. And while I think Biden has a lot of things going against him, Trump has more things going against him.
And again, I don't even think Biden needs people to like him. They just need to a) remember how much they hate Trump and b) realize how good things actually are right now. If he can do those two things, I think people would be fine with four more years of Biden. Not excited or motivated or joyous. Fine. And I think that's really the bar for keeping Trump out of the White House.
To me, the answer is somewhere in the middle.
1. There's no real sense in panicking right now. The election is a long way away, and Biden hasn't really started campaigning. He should have the most money to spend on campaigning (even if Trump gets more in his war chest, he'll have to spend a ton of it on legal bills), and there's no way the trials against Trump help him with any additional votes (the people that think it's a political witch hunt already support him).
2. Biden's approval rating is terrible. It's not quite as bad as Trump's was during his presidency but it's really close. And what's bad is that I'm not really sure what's leading to it. The economy is doing better. Inflation is down. Jobs are up. The stock market is up. Biden overwhelmingly supported the more popular side in the Gaza violence. What are folks mad about? Well...it may just be that their opinions on Biden are baked in. Even if the economy is doing better, people think he's bad at it. Unless the economy continues cruising, people might not care. A recent poll said that something like 80% of the population says their personal finances are doing good but that the overall economy is bad/fair. I don't know how you reconcile that if you're Biden unless he can do something to bring all prices down to pre-2020 levels.
3. So where does that leave us? If Biden's accomplishments don't matter to the majority of Americans, then we're going into 2024 with a deeply unpopular incumbent vs a potential felon. It's such a disaster for both parties.
4. I still think there's things Biden can do. I think he needs to move to the right on immigration / the border. He just needs to. Not forever and obviously nothing like Trump-era border policy. But he's getting slammed there, and if you listen to complaints about Biden, it's all about the border. He has to do something there. And again, I'd have Kamala Harris do the work there. This is an area where she can look strong and tough, and they *desperately* need people to like her. You can't have an unpopular president who is very old and also a very unpopular vice president. If people trusted or liked Kamala Harris more, I think Biden's age would be much less of an issue.
5. And the campaign needs to do much better to get the word out. If there's a new bridge anywhere in the country, it needs to have a Biden campaign flag showing that Biden got that done. If there's new cheap high speed internet available in a rural area, Biden's name needs to be everywhere. The Infrastructure bill is a huge accomplishment that is helping people, and people need to know it. And Biden surrogates need to be on television every day telling voters about how strong the economy is, how much domestic oil drilling is happening, whatever Biden is doing at the border, and anything he's doing to help working class people. He needs Spanish-language media all over the place. He needs popular surrogates that can convince his base and independents that he's making the country better. And he generally just need people to feel better about the direction of the country.
Biden should win. He should win easily. But for whatever reason, Biden is very unpopular. He's even unpopular with people who voted for him three years ago. And whether or not you believe in polls, that has to change. And it has to change quickly.
Part of my enthusiasm for what Filoni is doing is marred by the fact that the sequel trilogy has yet to be played out. I know there's a story to be told about how fascism must be watched at all times, even when you think it's been snuffed out. And that good people must always been on guard for the actions of bad people. The New Republic has good intentions and is working hard to make things better, but it's doomed to fail. The Empire, even if has a dumb new name, is primed to come back.
And it's just frustrating. The whole "history repeats itself" story of the sequels is just a bummer of a story, even when the good guys won. It makes any victory hollow because the bad guys are never really defeated and the galaxy will never know peace.
I'm not one to say that the sequels should be erased and replaced with what Filoni is doing, but I would probably feel better about these "midquel" stories if I didn't know what was coming next.
The Biden impeachment and the Hunter Biden indictments look like wins for Republicans....but are they? Or do they undercut the arguments that Trump is making?
If Trump's two impeachments were just political witch hunts...what is this?
If Trump is "innocent" of the crimes he was charged with because the senate didn't convict...won't Biden be "innocent" too?
If Biden is weaponizing the department of justice to go after his political opponents, why is he going after his own son?
I think Grizzlor is right and the impeachment is probably good news for Biden as opposed to bad. I think the Trump and Clinton impeachments actually improved the approval rating for the presidents involved, and I would expect this would also boost Biden's popularity, particularly if the "evidence" is as flimsy as it seems like it is. I think Democrats that are disillusioned with Biden will come back into the fold, and I think, depending on how Biden handles it, might paint him as an underdog/fighter/resilient. I don't know if any of those boosts would help him a year from now, but it wouldn't as we move into an electoral cycle.
And for non-MAGA voters, it's going to be really hard for Trump to spin that the DOJ is going after him at the same time that DOJ is going after the president's son. Especially if both are convicted by the time the election happens (again, I'm doubtful that any of Trump's trials will be finished by the time the election happens....Trump is bad at pretty much everything but he's great at stalling legal troubles).
Because Trump is going to sell all his trials as witch hunts and MAGA will eat it up. But will non-MAGA Trump and/or undecided voters be able to disconnect "Biden himself is trying to jail Trump" from "Biden is trying to jail his own son?" I really don't know. But it's much easier for Trump to make that argument if Hunter Biden isn't on trial.
And I don't know what Hunter Biden is accused of (like QuinnSlidr, I don't care), but if he's guilty, I hope the DOJ goes after him hard. No sweetheart deal, no plea, a hard, contentious trial that the government tries to crush him in. The worse things go for Hunter, the better I think things look for Joe (assuming, of course, Joe isn't dragged into any of it).
Trump's numbers have barely moved. Biden's have fallen off a cliff. He's tried to assuage the public's economic fears. But they stared higher gas prices, higher food, and everything else prices in the face for some time.
Well, you have to remember that the *vast* majority of the country doesn't follow specifics on anything. When they're responding to polls between Biden and Trump, they're judging their memory of their time in Trump's term vs their assumption on what's happening with Biden.
In other words, Trump's numbers haven't moved because the memory of the Trump era is static. I don't think the majority of poll takers are thinking about the trials against Trump because I don't think the majority of poll takers (on either side) are paying that much attention to pre-trial stuff. The polls that looked so bad for Biden a few weeks ago acknowledged that the bottom falls out of Trump's support if he's convicted of any of the charges he's accused of.
And let's not forget that Trump has been on the offensive for months, and Biden hasn't even started yet. Trump is on the news every ten seconds, and whenever you see him, he's railing against Biden. He's doing a rally or a town hall or whatever every week it seems. It's like a football game in the first quarter. "Wow, the Broncos have 92 yards and the Panthers have zero!" Well, the Panthers haven't even had the ball yet. Maybe the Panthers are going to get crushed, but it's a bad time to really think about it.
I assume when Biden, who should have way more money in his campaign war chest since Trump has to spend his on legal bills, starts running campaign ads every day, people will remember why they didn't vote for Trump in 2020. When Trump can't spend all of his time doing rallies and town halls because he has to be in court, I assume people are going to stop thinking about Trump's version of reality and realize that gas prices are down, inflation is down, etc.
All that's not to say it's not bad news. Biden should be crushing Trump. He's insane and has been indicted on serious crimes across the spectrum (they're attacking him on his character in New York, his corruption in Georgia, his incompetence in Florida, and his megalomania in DC....amongst other factors). But he's not. Trump is winning. And all I'm saying is that there's tons of things Biden can do if he wants to guarantee a win. And I'm concerned he's not willing to do those things.
And I'm still somewhat confident Biden can win. But I'd feel much better if he moved to the center. Not because that's what's best for the country or what's best for the Democratic Party, but that's what he needs to do if he wants to be sur he's going to win.
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