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Post by mhbruin on Mar 10, 2024 9:24:49 GMT -8
How much deeper would the ocean be without sponges?
So Much Hate
According to conservative political strategist and polling expert Sarah Longwell, both Donald Trump and President Joe Biden have a problem with voters who are unhappy about their choices in the upcoming presidential election.
And that is worse news for the four-time indicted former president.
Speaking with CNN host Chris Wallace, Longwell discussed voters labeled "double haters" in a New York Times/Sienna College poll that pegged their number at a whopping 19 percent of the electorate.
That huge number is where the election will be won or lost she explained.
"I want to talk to you about something I've been hearing a term in the last few days that is new to me: 'double haters,'" host Wallace prompted. "I want to put up a poll. I have to say, I like this, it fits the campaign perfectly. In a New York Times poll, 19 percent were described as double-haters because they disapprove of both Biden and Trump. And Biden is, correct, currently leading among the double-haters 45 percent to 33 percent."
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Post by mhbruin on Mar 10, 2024 9:26:21 GMT -8
Ireland Votes to Keep Katie Britt in the Kitchen
Voters in the Republic of Ireland have overwhelmingly voted against amending the Irish Constitution.
Proposals to alter wording in the constitution to include families which are not based on marriage were defeated with 67.7% voting 'no'.
A second proposed change on the wording around the role of women in the home was defeated by a higher margin with 73.9% of voters rejecting it.
It was the highest ever no vote percentage in an Irish referendum.
Maybe they Hate Her Because Her Name is "Britt"
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Post by mhbruin on Mar 10, 2024 9:29:16 GMT -8
Psst! Wanna' Buy a Cheap Office Building?
New York City deli owner Jimmy Yavrodi looks grimly out of the shop that he opened 27 years ago in one of the city's prime business districts.
"Everything is empty," he says. "I don't understand it."
From his perch on Park Avenue South, the 61-year-old sent two children to university and employed 12 people, slinging sandwiches and salads for the office workers that streamed in from nearby buildings.
These days it offers a window from which to watch what some are calling America's office "apocalypse".
The famous triangular Flatiron building nearby has been vacant since 2019. Last autumn, the owners said it would be turned into condos.
Around the corner, there's work under way on a new office fronting Madison Square Park. But its anchor tenant, IBM, is consolidating from other spaces in the city.
His next door neighbour, 360 Park Avenue South, has been empty since 2021 for redevelopment. The 20-storey building, which sold for $300m (£233m) that year, recently drew headlines after one of the owners handed over its 29% stake to one of its partners, walking away from commitments to fund $45m more in upgrades, in exchange for $1.
The area still boasts Michelin-starred restaurants and stable tenants, including part of the state's court system.
On the street, residents will tell you life has returned since Covid.
But sales at Mr Yavrodi's Taza Cafe & Deli, which have sunk 70% since 2020, tell a different story - one revealing the enormous challenges facing owners of office properties around the country, and the risks those issues are creating for the wider economy.
"We depend on office employees and office employees are not here. It's very simple math," he says. "If they don't come to work, places like us can't survive."
Four years after the pandemic sparked a revolution in work-from-home practices, especially pronounced in the US, the shift is proving hard to reverse - and the consequences no longer possible to ignore.
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Post by mhbruin on Mar 10, 2024 9:30:58 GMT -8
I Owe. I Owe. So Off the Buy I Go.
Buying now and paying later is still a popular way to splurge on airfare to Cabo. It’s an increasingly common way to buy groceries and lawn furniture, too.
Consumers ages 35 and under comprise 53% of “buy now, pay later” users but just 35% of traditional credit card holders, according to LexisNexis Risk Solutions. Many of those core “BNPL” borrowers have grown so comfortable using the installment loans for just-out-of-reach luxuries that they’re putting more everyday purchases on them as well.
Apparel and accessories were the most popular product category among millennial (ages 30-44) and Gen Z (18-29) users of the BNPL provider Afterpay in 2021 and 2022. But last year it fell to fourth place behind “arts, travel and entertainment,” “home and garden” and “hardware,” according to data the company provided to NBC News.
The shift adds to signs that fast-growing BNPL services, which let users break up transactions into several payments with little or no interest, are becoming a routine tool in young adults’ wallets as they adapt to higher prices.
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Post by mhbruin on Mar 10, 2024 9:33:46 GMT -8
Rasmussen Gets a Razzie Award
The decision comes after months of consideration that broke into public view in June. At that point, G. Elliott Morris, ABC News’s editorial director of data analytics and 538 lead, presented Rasmussen with questions meant to evaluate its objectivity and methodology. Rasmussen published the letter on its website, triggering backlash against 538 in right-wing media — and by Nate Silver, the founder of what was then called FiveThirtyEight. No change was implemented.
Last March, for example, Rasmussen released data purporting to show that Republican Senate candidate Kari Lake (R) had won her gubernatorial election in November 2022. The route it took to get to that determination was circuitous and, to put it mildly, atypical. On behalf of the group College Republicans United, Rasmussen asked Arizona voters who they voted for in Lake’s race and, after weighting the results to exit polls — which is unusual — declared that, contrary to the certified tally, Kari Lake had won her race by eight points.
An election of 2.5 million voters is a better indicator of an election outcome than a retrospective question offered to 1,000 Arizonans four months later from a Republican-leaning pollster that is adjusting its results to a metric, exit polls, that is itself weighted to the election results. But Rasmussen trumpeted this revisionist look at the race loudly — including on Stephen K. Bannon’s podcast — as did Trump allies.
This was one trigger for the questions Morris sent to Rasmussen in June.
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Post by mhbruin on Mar 10, 2024 9:35:26 GMT -8
28% of LBGTQ+s Will Vote for Peole Who Hate Them
New polling shared first with 538 gives us a rare look at a demographic that is often underpolled heading into the 2024 election. When considered alongside just-released survey data from GLAAD, an LGBTQ+ media organization, it paints a picture of a segment of the electorate that is likely to continue supporting the Democratic Party not because it leans particularly left, but because the Republican Party has taken such an aggressively anti-LGBTQ+ tack and made these voters’ rights a partisan issue.
LGBTQ+ voters appear considerably more likely to vote for President Joe Biden than the general population, according to new polling of 600 Americans who identify as LGBTQ+ from The Independent Center, a centrist think tank, and the Bullfinch Group. When asked who they would vote for in a head-to-head between Biden and former President Donald Trump, 43 percent said “definitely Biden,” with another 13 percent saying they leaned toward Biden. Just 28 percent said they would definitely support or leaned toward supporting Trump. Another 16 percent were undecided. When given the option to vote for Biden, Trump or a hypothetical independent third candidate, 21 percent said they’d prefer the independent, but 44 percent still backed Biden.
Historically, LGBTQ+ voters have largely voted Democratic. But this isn’t necessarily because they lean left ideologically. In the Independent Center survey, a plurality (30 percent) of LGBTQ+ Americans identified their political leanings as “moderate centrist/independent.” When asked to place themselves on a scale from 0 to 10, with 0 being the most liberal and 10 being the most conservative, the average response was 3.9. Similarly, a plurality said that they’d like politicians to be a 5 on that scale. And when asked what they thought was the most pressing issue in America today, the top response, with 24 percent, was “jobs and the economy.”
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Post by mhbruin on Mar 10, 2024 9:37:45 GMT -8
Who is This Important To?
The first person on record to declare opposition to ending sentences with a preposition was the poet John Dryden in the 17th century. But what really set the idea in stone was Bishop Robert Lowth’s highly influential “A Short Introduction to English Grammar” in 1762 and its direct descendant, Lindley Murray’s “English Grammar” in 1795. The two manuscripts had the same sort of influence in the 18th and 19th centuries as Strunk & White would have later.
But whence the notion that “the person I arrived with” is somehow inept compared with “the person with whom I arrived”? Anyone who never ended sentences with prepositions in casual speech would risk a certain sparseness of social life. Indeed, even grammarians like Lowth stipulated that keeping prepositions away from the end of sentences was most important in formal rather than casual language. But the question is why it is necessary there, since it usually sounds stuffy even in formal contexts.
The answer is: Latin. Scholars of Lowth’s period were in thrall to the idea that Latin and Ancient Greek were the quintessence of language. England was taking its place as a world power starting in the 17th century, and English was being spoken by ever more people and used in a widening range of literary genres. This spawned a crop of grammarians dedicated to sprucing the language up for its new prominence, and the assumption was that a real and important language should be as much like Latin as possible. And in Latin, as it happens, one did not end sentences with a preposition. “To whom are you speaking?” was how one put it in Latin; to phrase it as “Who are you speaking to?” would have sounded like Martian.
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Post by mhbruin on Mar 10, 2024 9:39:21 GMT -8
An Ex-Cop Finds that Cops Did the Right Thing
A city-commissioned independent review of Uvalde police’s response to the Robb Elementary School shooting cleared local officers of wrongdoing, infuriating parents of the 19 children killed in the massacre and at least two city council members who rebuked the report after it was released Thursday.
City officials hired private investigator Jesse Prado, a retired Austin police detective, to conduct the review into the response from the city’s police department to the May 24, 2022 mass shooting that also resulted in the deaths of two teachers and injured 17 others.
The findings of the report were presented in a question-and-response format with Prado at a city council meeting and the actual 182-page report was released later Thursday after city officials shared it with families. Prado said the review identified training, communication and leadership lapses, but he also commended some of the city’s officers and characterized their actions as in “good faith” — contradicting findings of previous audits by state and federal officials.
Those reviews have illustrated a catastrophic law enforcement failure in which children remained trapped with the gunman for more than an hour as nearly 400 law enforcement officers arrived at the school and encountered a chaotic scene without leadership.
Several people walked out of the impromptu council chambers roughly 40 minutes in when Prado said one of the issues that police encountered was crowd control. Some families tried to breach police tape to run into the school and try rescuing their children, some of whom ultimately died while others had called their parents and 911 pleading for help.
Following the presentation and right before the public hearing, Prado left.
Kimberly Mata-Rubio, whose daughter Lexi was among the children killed, slammed a podium in the civic center and in between tears demanded that Prado return to the meeting. A crowd then began chanting, “Bring him back!” One person shouted, “Coward.”
Prado returned five minutes later and sat with an expressionless face, underneath a big white cowboy hat he did not once remove, for the following hour as relatives of those killed castigated him and dismissed his audit as “bullshit,” “a joke” and disrespectful.
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Post by mhbruin on Mar 10, 2024 9:48:32 GMT -8
What He Said
Look, in its decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court majority wrote the following, and with all due respect justices, “Women are not without electoral, electoral power” — excuse me — “electoral or political power.”
You’re about to realize just how much you got right about that.
What They Heard
LI-POSTER #1: This is beyond disturbing. In last night’s SOTU, Biden and the rabid democrats — live and in front of the world — just threatened the Supreme Court justices. REPOST for exposure!! The constitution is being shredded before our very eyes.
LI #4: A verbal threat to SCOTUS is a crime and should be held accountable. Will the DOJ take action? What is interesting is that SCOTUS gave the rights to the states to make their own decisions (we would not want the voters to have decision making power.) ...
LI #5: Isn’t that interesting that all totalitarianism comes from the left? Who is threatening our constitutional republic? No folks, we are not a democracy.
LI #6: Correct, we are a Republic. Thanks for sharing.
LI #7: Seriously! Why are they standing and clapping? These people are so ingrained in the present administration that they can’t or won’t resist. If they don’t agree with him, why don’t they stay seated and not clap? …
LI #9: If the bar for the SOTU was — Not falling as he walked up the steps. — Not falling asleep. — then I guess it was a resounding success!!
LI #10: For a guy that has traveled in DC political circles for the past 45 years, that was an incredibly ignorant thing to say. ...
LI #12: (H)is cabinet is made up of people like Josef Goebbels, Hermann Goering, Heinrich Himmler, Rudolph Hess, Albert Speer, and Karl Donitz.
LI #13: It is clear that the capture of the Democrat party through the DEI and identity agenda is complete. …
LI #14: They strongly believe the Supreme Court should be their political arm and not follow the constitution. Again, another very sad moment from this president and his administration.
LI #15: Take note of who stood…they need to go. And the two behind him sit with emotionless stares.
LI #16: I don’t understand why the conservatives don’t call him out about his “Against Democracy” BS lines — as far as that goes, where is Newsmax? Fox not asking the question — We are a Constitutional Republic!!! Democracy can be used in many forms of Regimes — Socialism, Marxism, Communism …
LI #18: The whole thing was a disgusting display of a lust for power.
LI #19: Tyrants will always say what they plan to do! Tyrants brag! …
LI #20: If I was a justice, I wouldn’t forget the threat as I reviewed the many cases impacting our freedoms in America.
LI #21: He has already shown his contempt for SCOTUS. He ignored the ruling that he cannot forgive debt, why would he listen to anything else they do? With the feckless RINOs in the house, he knows he will never be held responsible. Why should he care?
LI #22: Weaponization. Let’s count the ways he divided this country even more last night.
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Post by mhbruin on Mar 10, 2024 9:51:59 GMT -8
THe Gig Economy Isn't All Giggles
Many drivers for Uber, Lyft, and other rideshare and delivery apps say they value the flexibility of gig work over any other component. But that flexibility can be limited — drivers often need to work early mornings or late nights to get more profitable rides.
Some gig drivers have recently told Business Insider that because they rely on driving for most or all of their income, deciding when to drive is less of a choice. For instance, Starla, 27, is a single parent who sometimes has to drive 16 hours a day for Uber Eats to provide for her eight-year-old in Jacksonville, Florida. She sometimes drives overnight shifts or late nights on weekends to make ends meet.
For some drivers, the best rides in their area are at 5 a.m. or 9 p.m., while other drivers say midday is most optimal. For drivers with disabilities, single parents, veterans, and others, making enough money to pay bills requires sacrificing family time or other life events.
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Post by mhbruin on Mar 10, 2024 9:54:04 GMT -8
Previous Guy is Multi-Lingual
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Post by sagobob on Mar 10, 2024 15:29:40 GMT -8
Previous Guy is Multi-Lingual Donald Trump. He's like a door that has broken off its hinges. Where are all those "best words"? |
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Post by mhbruin on Mar 11, 2024 6:22:36 GMT -8
Previous Guy is Multi-Lingual Donald Trump. He's like a door that has broken off its hinges. Where are all those "best words"? Isn't "hamburder" one of the best words? |
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Post by gainsborough on Mar 11, 2024 7:07:14 GMT -8
Yes, "hamburder" is one of those best words, along with "covfefe".
Anyone who frequently speaks in public will occasionally flub a word or a sentence. It's not a big deal, I expect it from politicians. I try to look at the big picture. And when it comes to a politician's overall objectives, I see Joe Biden attempting to improve life for most Americans: he's trying to re-shape our economy to move towards clean, renewable energy; he's trying to eliminate corporate rip-offs in medical prescriptions and in banking fees; he's attempting to reduce student debt; he's proposing to reduce the loopholes that allow the uber-rich to avoid paying their fair in taxes; and he's trying to protect a woman's right to choose. What's not to like there?
With Trump, there is no agenda other than gathering power to himself. His so-called policy positions - whatever they are - are simply transactional postures designed merely to attract votes. His tendency to hate anyone in his path lent itself easily towards criminalizing others, and of course it's easy to focus on immigrants. Clearly, Trump's hostility to immigrants is the glue that holds his base together. Income inequality in the US is so vast - and the consequences so severe - that we are becoming a society of fearful, hateful people. And it's easy for politicians to lead a crowd of fearful hateful people, leading to predictable tragic results.
It will be a disaster of global consequences if Trump becomes president. But even if Joe Biden prevails, I can't help thinking that America has already lost: the fact that Donald Trump has a reasonable chance to re-take the White House is a big red flashing sign that states "the American experiment is over."
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Post by mhbruin on Mar 11, 2024 13:16:06 GMT -8
Yes, "hamburder" is one of those best words, along with "covfefe". Anyone who frequently speaks in public will occasionally flub a word or a sentence. It's not a big deal, I expect it from politicians. I try to look at the big picture. And when it comes to a politician's overall objectives, I see Joe Biden attempting to improve life for most Americans: he's trying to re-shape our economy to move towards clean, renewable energy; he's trying to eliminate corporate rip-offs in medical prescriptions and in banking fees; he's attempting to reduce student debt; he's proposing to reduce the loopholes that allow the uber-rich to avoid paying their fair in taxes; and he's trying to protect a woman's right to choose. What's not to like there? With Trump, there is no agenda other than gathering power to himself. His so-called policy positions - whatever they are - are simply transactional postures designed merely to attract votes. His tendency to hate anyone in his path lent itself easily towards criminalizing others, and of course it's easy to focus on immigrants. Clearly, Trump's hostility to immigrants is the glue that holds his base together. Income inequality in the US is so vast - and the consequences so severe - that we are becoming a society of fearful, hateful people. And it's easy for politicians to lead a crowd of fearful hateful people, leading to predictable tragic results. It will be a disaster of global consequences if Trump becomes president. But even if Joe Biden prevails, I can't help thinking that America has already lost: the fact that Donald Trump has a reasonable chance to re-take the White House is a big red flashing sign that states "the American experiment is over." It's hard to know what will happen if Trump loses again. However, the big question is what direction the Republican Party goes in. Their white-supremacy base is shrinking. There has always been a racist element in the US and every other country for that matter. Look at what is happening in India. This election seems like a pivot point to me. If Trump gets elected, I don't think he is leaving office in 4 years. If he loses, I am not sure the QOP can continue on the path of Trumpism and become anything except a minority party. But I am not very good at predicting the future. |
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