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It’s the Republican National Convention week, or as pundits on the right call it — Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanza, and whatever other major holiday you want to thrown in there. We break it all down: the pluses, the minus, the hits and the misses. And we make some predictions for the next couple of months. As you’re hear, we recorded this show on Zoom in front of an audience of our beloved Ricochet members. We’ll be doing a few more of these on Zoom before the election, so if you’d like to participate, join us!
Music from this week’s show: Street Fighting Man by the Rolling Stones
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This simply can’t be done and still accomplish anything else, like stopping single payer. We have been managing asset bubbles since 1997 or so. When you spend less it pops. So you can’t do that. You will lose all political power. You have to trick or force the Fed into being easy so you get reelected again. That is just the way it works. It’s been that way for at least two decades.
I call this “inflationism”. I wanted Ted Cruise to stop it, but you simply can’t do this until the bond market starts backing up uncontrollably.
I have posted about this ad nauseam, but if you really want details go ahead and ask me.
That’s the big question. One way Trump was like Reagan is both had been pop culture media figures for over 30 years when they successfully ran for president, which made it harder for the media to define who they were to the public, since they had already defined themselves.
If you have a Trump-supportive pol like a Josh Hawley who tries to enter the national media spotlight as Trump v2.0, he or she runs the risk of being defined by the media with all of Trump’s negatives to voters outside of their home state. It’s going to be a major tightrope for any GOP candidate to walk.
Many books about the period contain the recollections of people around him that he looked terrible and his health was precarious, he was only 63 and looked 80. Of course the war was still on and commenting on it could be seen as giving comfort to the enemy, so not wanting to change horses in mid stream etc. He was warned in 1944 to cut back to 4 hours work a day. Maybe I’m the one who’s cynical but I can’t imagine a Republican president getting such consideration, war or no war.
https://www.history.com/news/memo-from-1944-warned-that-fdr-would-likely-die-in-office#:~:text=By%201944%2C%20Roosevelt%20was%20no%20stranger%20to%20keeping,wheelchair%20but%20never%20appeared%20in%20it%20in%20public.
https://www.history.com/news/franklin-d-roosevelt-health-final-term?li_source=LI&li_medium=m2m-rcw-history
You also never seemed to notice that if Clark takes off his glasses he looks a lot like Superman! 😆
Closest would be Ike’s 1955 heart attack, 53 weeks before the next presidential election. While some Democrats did try to make an issue about his health, both the news and pop culture media of the day weren’t as in the tank for the Dems as in later years, so the effort didn’t become a media obsession.
Re: Trump supporters heads exploding when you explain how he didn’t follow through on so many things. His failure to wipe out the ACA or completely overhaul it is not his fault, at all. That should have been the number one objective of everybody.
Don Lemon has to act a certain way to make money. Most of these people do it for the money or survival.
@paulhoover We’ve received complaints about these emails in the past (“stop spamming your paying customers — you have a website, make these announcements there”). So we experimented with not sending out an announcement for this on this one.
We plan to do these on a regular basis now — at least twice more before the election, probably in the evening so more people can attend, so don’t worry about missing this one.
We do too. And he’s not defined by his feelings for the current occupant of the White House.
Thanks @jameslileks, but no worries. I used many of them for another show I do.
First rule of producing: Use all parts of the buffalo!
Stop peddling the lies. Netflix knows when Express VPN is activated, and will not play anything.
That’s something I noted in a previous “episode.” Express VPN and others promote the “anonymizing” that they provide by putting everyone pretending to be in a certain country, on a single IP. But that makes it easy for services like Netflix to block that IP.
Love Rob!
Not defined, no. But those feelings would seem to limit his objectivity in that area.
Good grief, where are these old-line fiscal conservatives?!? Mythical, I’d say. As an organized group, you need to go back to Gingrich to find even a spark. As much as I revere Reagan, he didn’t make progress on that front, but can be forgiven since the had the Cold War on his plate. While on fiscal matters Republicans are generally better than Democrats relatively speaking, they are not competent in moving us toward Limited Government. The best we can do for the foreseeable future is vote for those, across the board, who will do the least damage on the spending front, while not compromising on other critical issues.
True. I consider the failure of the Republican Party to repair the damage done by Obamacare and begin a managed transition to a more market oriented healthcare system a tragedy. They had YEARS to work out a plan, and no shortage of serious ideas and approaches available (great work done years ago by many think tanks and also by NR writers). To be caught flatfooted after the 2016 election was a disgrace. They controlled the presidency and both chambers, and wasted it. That cannot be dropped at the feet of Trump. There should have been coordinated legislation ready to go, prepared by Republican leadership across the federal government and the states. Sad.
Soft? This is baseball bat league.
I agree, today. But in 1944, I can imagine newspapers holding back news and commentary on the health of a president – even a republican president, in the name of a war effort. Again I can’t see this happening today.
Naked swimming, regardless of the sex of the Secret Service agents.
but not succinct
Rob Long is my spirit animal. I’m kind of a boring guy.
I’m reminded of a perhaps apocryphal story of reporters during Vietnam complaining to a communications officer about not getting heads up on upcoming operations as they had in previous wars with the officer replying ‘ Back then the press was on OUR side’
That was the crux of the infamous late 1970s Harvard roundtable on media ethics, where Prof. Charles Ogletree asked Mike Wallace if he would try to warn American troops of an ambush if he knew it was coming. Peter Jennings agrees, but — this still being the late 1970s — there is pushback on that ethos on the panel:
When someone criticizes Trump about not building the wall, I ask, “How much money has Congress authorized for the wall in a spending bill?”
Silence.
I then ask, “How many lawsuits have been filed against the wall from the local, all the way to the Federal level to stop construction?”
Again, silence.
I end by asking, “How many Federal employees – including the military – have blocked any attempt by Trump to use existing funds to build the wall?” (The brass loves their planes and tanks to much to lose finding.)
Not a peep.
The point is, Trump has tried in every way possible to build the wall legally. As was pointed out by one of the podcasters, Trump has followed the law and the rulings of the courts, even those rulings that went against him.
Rob is right about the memory-holing going on. You would think the Dems would take credit for impeaching Trump, but they know the country is against it (regardless of what the polls say). The other memory-hole item is how they did everything possible to prevent the wall being built. You would think they’d crow about that accomplishment, but they also know people want the wall built.
Yes, that kind of stuff is also reminiscent of how the left and others fight and sue and obstruct over capital punishment, and then argue that it should be banned because it takes too long. Right up there with the Menendez Brothers asking for leniency in sentencing for killing their parents, because they’re orphans.
It’s the same with the construction of nuclear power plants. These plants take years to build, so lawsuits which stall bringing them on line drive up the cost. Then they turn around and say, “Nuclear energy is too expensive!”
Yes, nuclear power is expensive to begin with, but making it more expensive doesn’t do anyone any favors . . .
And it needn’t be that expensive to start with, if they’d use less nuclear-weapon-type technology and not demand construction by what amounts to the local plumber’s union.
This is a promise that Trump supporters know he tried very hard to keep. Very hard. They don’t blame him not because they are deranged, (Basically Rob is calling all of us deranged, par for the course), they don’t blame Trump because they see he was blocked.
And if Rob thinks Ann Coulter is a soul of a reasonable, balanced human being, well, I doubt Rob’s judge of character. Ann Coulter appears unhinged to me.
I kinda find all that comforting. Even though I’d like a wall, I’m glad that Congress can limit the President’s power. Even when the President wants to do stuff I like.
Well of course we want people to understand that they need to elect Republicans to the House and Senate too, not think it’s enough to elect Trump but they can still vote for lame-brains like Pelosi and AOC to have lefty street cred or to show their “diversity” or whatever.
Ann Coulter is correct that Mexican culture is more or less inferior to American culture. I’m not sure that Mexican-Americans are doomed to making America Mexico. I’m with her that limiting Mexican immigration to America and spending some time assimilating Mexican-Americans would be good but I’m not convinced that Mexicans are everywhere and always bad for America.