An Independent view of law, politics and social issues confronting Angelinos, Californians, and Americans
Despite a college degree in Advertising my wonderful son quite his job just a few years out of college to open a vinyl record store. His love of music was the driving force. It’s all my fault. I encouraged him to join the school band. Then some bar-mitzvah money went to buy the drums. Fifteen years later he is still in business.
His store is in Campbell California immediately adjacent to San Jose.
Doctor Fauci and other infectious disease specialists are saying the coronavirus may never go away. The best we can hope for is controlling the spread of this disease. The consequences are staggering.
No more crowding onto a San Francisco cable car. How will subways in NYC, Boston, Los Angeles and other cites function? Long waits to board a ferry because social distancing limits the capacity. Stretched lines to enter your local supermarket. Auto shows and other conventions eliminated because of social distancing requirements that cannot be reasonably enforced. Movie theaters with seats removed (can they survive with fewer attendees?). Big weddings will be a thing of the past (No hora or other group dancing).
On the plus side there will be plenty of room to stretch out at the Hollywood Bowl, the Rose Bowl, and other large venues. The public is more health conscious than ever in history.
Sadly America’s leadership is a failure. Politics prevails over national unity. Two old men fighting for the presidency and neither has one good sound idea on how to bring the country back to normalcy.
I am crying for the United States.
Joe Biden will win the U.S. presidency, according to history professor Allan Lichtman, who has accurately predicted U.S. elections for 40 years.
Allan Lichtman, the ‘Nostradamus’ who has accurately predicted U.S. elections for 40 years, sees President Joe Biden in his crystal ball.
This CNBC article should warm the hearts of every Democrat upset every loyal Republican.
The historian who has correctly predicted every presidential election since 1984 – including President Donald Trump‘s win in 2016 – has announced his pick for 2020: Presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden.
Allan Lichtman, an author and history professor at American University, revealed his prediction in an op-ed video for The New York Times published Wednesday.
Lichtman’s predictive method – which puts him squarely in the minority of analysts who were right in calling Trump’s win – largely ignores the detailed cross-tab polling analyses and swing state bean counting that are often prioritized in modern political punditry.
“The pollsters and the pundits cover elections as though they were horse races,” Lichtman said in the Times’ video. “But history tells us voters are not fooled by the tricks of the campaign. Voters vote pragmatically according to how well the party holding the White House has governed the country.”
Polls are “snapshots in time,” Lichtman said. “None of this in the end has any impact whatsoever on the outcome of a presidential election.”
Lichtman’s prediction model looks at 13 different categories, dubbed the “Keys to the White House,” which have more to do with the record of the incumbent party occupying the White House than the nominees themselves.
The keys are presented as true-false statements, framed to favor a win for the incumbent party if true. But if six or more of the statements are false, the challenger – in this case, Biden – is predicted to win the election.
Lichtman’s verdict? “The keys predict that Trump will lose the White House.”
Trump campaign communications director Tim Murtaugh pushed back on that prediction in a statement to CNBC.
“This is an election like no other in history and the choice couldn’t be more clear – between President Trump’s established record of accomplishment for all Americans and Joe Biden’s 47 years of failure and acquiescence to the extreme left,” Murtaugh said. “American voters will decide this election, not academics or professors.”
The Biden campaign did not immediately respond to CNBC’s requests for comment.
The model favors Biden on seven of the 13 prompts. They touch on issues such as which party has a mandate – Republicans lost House seats in the 2018 midterms – and the short-term and long-term economy under Trump.
“The [coronavirus] pandemic has pushed the economy into recession,” Lichtman said in the video.
Despite his impressive track record, Lichtman’s simple-seeming model has its skeptics. Nate Silver, the writer and analyst at FiveThirtyEight who was famously correct in predicting every state outcome in the 2012 election, wrote in 2011 that Lichtman’s results “should be taken with a grain of salt.”
Lichtman himself offers a note of caution in his video for the Times. “There are forces at play outside the keys,” he said, such as voter suppression and potential Russian election meddling.
Here’s where Trump and Biden stand in Lichtman’s model, along with Lichtman’s responses from the video:
I don’t even know where to begin.
The economy is in taters thanks to the coronavirus and President Trump, who is trailing badly in polling of the race for the White House, suggested on Thursday that the Nov. 3 general election be delayed “until people can properly, securely and safely vote.”
This logic could mean we would not have an election for many months and possibly many years.
The president does not have the authority to move the date of a federal election. And Mr. Trump’s other claim on Thursday, that widespread mail-in voting would make the election “inaccurate and fraudulent,” is false.
The Democratic Party could lodge the same claims of “inaccurate and fraudulent” results if Joe Biden lost the election.
The nation has such a complicated patchwork of voting regulations, with some states allowing early and absentee voting; some permitting voting by mail or same-day voter registration; others requiring certain kinds of identification for voters; and many states doing few or none of those things. Even before this year, five states — Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Utah and Washington — regularly conducted their elections almost entirely by mail and there have been few cases of fraud.
Donald Trump will do everything he can to remain in office for a second term.
There will be dirty tricks and Trump will use lies and fear to convince the public that Joe Biden will destroy America.
Once again Donald Trump promotes hydroxychloroquine cure for COVID-19. Then he doubles down on fringe theories promoting the views of a doctor Stella Immanuel who has previously attracted ridicule for claiming that alien DNA is included in medical treatments and that gynecological problems can be caused by people having sex with demons in their dreams.
Conservative columnist George F. Will writes “Biden’s election will end national nightmare.”
According to CNBC, a cable finance news channel, 25% of cars in the U.S. are at least sixteen years old as vehicle age hits record high.
On average, 1 in 4 cars and trucks you pass are at least 16 years old, according to new analysis of what Americans are driving. With the economy struggling due to Covid-19, prompting companies to lay off millions of Americans, the age of vehicles in the U.S. is likely to rise. It may even climb at a faster rate, according to IHS Markit the highly respected survey company that provided the data.
As someone who believes in driving a car until it is ready for the junk yard I was delighted to learn that I am not alone.
Of course we all want a new car. We might even shop for a new car. Then we hear what the monthly payment will be and that stops us from proceeding with the purchase.
It is the same thing when it comes to the purchase of any high priced item. The picture on the old TV is still good so unless the new television has some new features we can’t live without, we turn to our family members and say “What we have does the job. Let’s wait until black Friday and we’ll make it a family Christmas gift.”
Despite all of these efforts to keep our expenses under control and avoid using our credit card, the Average US Credit Card Debt is at $15,983.
Sadly many of us have been laid off as a result of the virus epidemic and are now using our credit card(s) to buy our everyday needs.
Is personal bankruptcies going to grow? Putting food on the table is a priority.
As retired Material Manager I can tell you that you can’t make everyone happy. Deliver the goods to one or two people on time and another three or four are unhappy including your boss. This T-shirt now being offered on Facebook gave me a laugh. Any old bosses of mine reading this should laugh too!
Are the clever, humorous marketing labels given to ethnic products at Trader Joe’s to be denied?
“Trader Ming’s”, “Trader Jose’s” and “Trader Giotto’s” are all meant to be amusing.
Instead of being racist, these ethnic names draw attention to the fact that many popular, beloved foods in America originated in other countries, thus paying tribute to their country of origin and highlighting the fact that immigrants have contributed to the enrichment and expansion of our culinary repertoire and gustatory pleasure. In truth, American cuisine is a “melting pot,” or smorgasbord, of foods from all over the world.
Are these titles any more ethnic or offensive than Polish sausage, English muffins or German chocolate cake, to name a few? Or will there be another demand to also change these names?
It’s all about political correctness.
Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Teddy Roosevelt, FDR all made mistakes but they were the guiding lights that made the country great. John Muir did impact the way we treat the environment. Elon Musk has lots of problems but he also pushed the electric car market into prominence.
Try focusing on that.
As Michael Smerconish on CNN pointed out on his Saturday July 18, 2020 program, Hillary Clinton led in almost all the polls at this point in the 2016 election campaign. That is why the Democrats should not believe this race is over.
Trump will not go graciously and concede if he loses in the November election. And as he did in 2016, Trump declined to guarantee that he would accept the election outcome, saying it was too soon to make that commitment on today’s Fox News Sunday program. “I have to see,” he told interviewer Chris Wallace. “I’m not going to just say ‘yes.’ I’m not going to say ‘no,’ and I didn’t last time either.”
Repeating a contention he has often made in recent weeks, the president said he believed that mail-in voting would “rig the election.” Critics have said Trump is trying to delegitimize the vote in advance, fearing a loss, especially if the pandemic means that balloting by mail is more widely used than usual.
“The American people will decide this election,” the Biden campaign said in a statement. “And the United States government is perfectly capable of escorting trespassers out of the White House.”
If Donald Trump is re-elected he will do everything he can to tear up the Constitution by blocking the press and claiming that elections that do not favor him are fraudulent and ignoring the law. That will end the great experiment.
We will be ruled by King Donald the First.
Coast Contact 