Day: September 19, 2023

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I have to admit this one brought a little tear to my eye.

Poor little rich people can’t guarantee that their children will get into Harvard so they are forced to game the system by moving their families to Southern states and rural communities. You see people from Southern states and rural communities are underrepresented at Ivy League schools so when the schools get applications from these areas it increases the child’s chances of getting into the Ivy League.

Imagine that. Having the money to spend on a new house, the movers, the flights back and forth and the consultant fee to figure out how to do it all just to get Junior into Harvard. How horrible that rich people have to spend all that extra money to get their kid into the Ivy League. Excuse me for a moment while I clutch my hanky.

This is disgraceful. I would rather pay for a student smoking lounge at the toughest public school in American than allow parents to game the system to increase their kid’s chances of attending Harvard. Besides, they can easily send their children to a perfectly good community college or a state university. Or is that not good enough for them?

This may also explain why rich people think poor people are always gaming the system. I mean if I, a God-fearing good upper middle-class person like myself is forced to do this, imagine what those awful poor people must being doing. It has to be much worse. Right?

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Charlie Kirk, conservative commentator, is suggesting cuts in Social Security because those no good seniors are just playing golf and watching television. They should be doing something constructive like helping people.

WTF. I thought that the whole underlying idea of the conservative movement was freedom. Freedom to do what ever the Hell you wanted to do, whenever the Hell you wanted to do it. Now Kirk wants me to give up my retirement fun in order to help people. Help people, no less, what kind of conservative is he. Oh, yes, a cheap one because he both proposes cutting social security payments and then wants these very same seniors to volunteer at schools and hospitals. That’s right less money and more work. What an asshole.

And, how exactly is that going to happen? If I get less money, I won’t have enough to retire comfortably and all of my free time will have to go to my part-time shift as a Wall Mart greeter. Of course, this is just another advantage to proposal. More cheap labor.

More grating and more dangerous is this frequent misconception that conservatives love to throw around about Social Security. They make it sound like a government handout. It isn’t. It is a government sponsored retirement plan. People pay into it until they retire, then they receive a monthly payment from the government. It is owed to you because you worked for it. You never should feel bad about taking this money. You deserve it.

So, in case Kirk has misunderstood me. Fuck you Charlie Kirk. You can pry my social security check from my cold dead hands.

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David Faris, in Slate, and Josh Marshall, in Talking Points Memo, are telling Democrats who might want another choice other than Biden/Harris to stop making trouble and deal with it. There is no alternate to the two. Why would the Democrats risk losing the White House by changing the line up?The wise men back east have spoken. Now is not the time to buck the conventional thinking. Biden is the only one who can win, so shut up and do what you are told. I neither like the tone nor the content of these instructions.

Biden is a deeply unpopular president. 538, the polling amalgamation site, has his approval rate at 40%. He has been at about 40% for months which suggests that a lot of people have made up their minds about him. Some of these disapprovers will vote for Biden in a Biden Trump match up but why not try to do better than another close election. Now, if Biden was wildly popular or, say, even at 50%, it might be sage advice to let him be. But he isn’t.

I voted for Biden once and will vote for him again if he is the Democrats candidate, however he isn’t my first choice or, for that matter, on my Top 10 ten list. I voted for him because I was scared of Trump not because I liked Biden. This should be concerning. I am liberal Democrat and I voted for Biden grudgingly. I don’t have another option really if Trump is the Republican nominee or, for that matter, any other Republican who might win the nomination.

Other people, however, do. A majority of Americans don’t want either Biden or Trump. Think about that a large portion of the US electorate doesn’t want either candidate. I would suspect that those voters are all highly moveable — an intemperate comment from Trump or a disastrous senior moment from Biden could easily change their vote. I would be concerned to have this many regular people unhappy with their choice. But apparently I just need to get over it and get in line.

Why though? One of the way to test how good a candidate is through the primary system. Isn’t it better to find how strong Biden is during the primaries? This requires challengers to Biden. If he turns out to be a weak candidate, the party had the opportunity to find someone stronger. And, if Biden perform well in the primaries, he will allay people’s fears about him being weak. But to tell Democrats to get in line a good year before the election is irritating. It sounds like they are afraid of what will happen in contested election. They want to keep Biden hidden from public view until the election next November. This isn’t a particularly encouraging strategy.

What do these men really know? The wise men in Washington convinced me Sanders couldn’t win in 2016. They were probably right about that but they also believed that Clinton was the best chance of beating Trump. So I sucked up all my ambivalent feelings about her and voted for Clinton in the primary. Well, we all know how that turned out.