OFFICIAL LRC President Donald Trump SECOND TERM Thread

The Dem Party is such a dumpster fire (my nod to Biden) now that she probably is one of the party’s best prospects.

Dems always vote for incompetence.

“Now the organization is facing further scrutiny after the county's $750,000-a-year water chief, Janisse Quinones, said her work is guided by an "equity" lens.

Quinones said in a July interview with KBLA radio that the importance of putting an "equity lens" to the DWP was "the number one thing that attracted me to this role."

"It's important to me that everything we do, it's with an equity lens and social justice and making sure that right the wrongs that we've done in the past from an infrastructure perspective, and we involve the community in that process," she said.”

I do have interest in discussing why red states are so relatively poor.
do you?
You all can’t even conceive of the kind of wealth in Pacific Palisades. Hey, go to college, read a newspaper, don’t do business with Trump, move to a blue area and maybe you will get rich like that.
or just stay in West Virginia and Mississippi and complain about the libruls and immigrants.

My comments above were related to Covid, which frankly, I don't care to re-litigate.

I do like to understand how other people think, and how they justify their own hypocrisy to themselves, though. So thank you for that.

Regarding the election, I've written extensively on this site about it, I believe that the USA has entered a period where every election has become a change election. A section of the middle of the electorate has shifted four times in the last four elections (Obama, Trump, Biden, Trump). I don't believe that either party has a monopoly on these people, but instead that those folks will shift their votes depending on the current status of the economy or some other issue. In 2020, those folks flipped from Trump to Biden due to Covid. In 2024, they flipped back to Trump due to high prices. I'm open to the possibility that I'm wrong, but we'll have to wait a few years to find out.

Courtesy of Forbes ...

Solved: Why Poor States Are Red and Rich States Are Blue

One of the great conundrums of the American political scene is why the poorer states, colloquially known as "red" states, tend to vote Republican or conservative, while the richer states, the "blue" ones (and let it be said that this is very confusing for this European, for over here the colours tend to work the other way around, red is Labour, or left wing) tend to vote Democrat. We would think that it should be the other way around, the poor people voting for more from that Great Big Pinata which is government. But it seems that there's a simple solution to this: the red states aren't actually poorer in terms of the way people live.
If we measure by consumption patterns then it's the blue states that are poor, the red states that are rich:

Blue states, like California, New York and Illinois, whose economies turn on finance, trade and knowledge, are generally richer than red states. But red states, like Texas, Georgia and Utah, have done a better job over all of offering a higher standard of living relative to housing costs. That basic economic fact not only helps explain why the nation’s electoral map got so much redder in the November midterm elections, but also why America’s prosperity is in jeopardy.
Red state economies based on energy extraction, agriculture and suburban sprawl may have lower wages, higher poverty rates and lower levels of education on average than those of blue states — but their residents also benefit from much lower costs of living. For a middle-class person , the American dream of a big house with a backyard and a couple of cars is much more achievable in low-tax Arizona than in deep-blue Massachusetts. As Jed Kolko, chief economist of Trulia, recently noted, housing costs almost twice as much in deep-blue markets ($227 per square foot) than in red markets ($119).

That particular piece then goes on to chunter away about how appalling it is that people aren't willing to vote for more blue state type of policies and how this will be the end of America. However, the really interesting part of it is that part quoted above. For it speaks to something that economists just keep trying to point out to people. Yes, sure, income inequality might be important in a way, wealth inequality should have a place in our thoughts. But what really matters to people about how life is lived is consumption. Levels of consumption and also consumption inequality. That last is important in a political sense currently because consumption inequality just hasn't widened out as much as income and wealth inequality have. And levels of consumption: well, that's really what income or wealth is, the ability to purchase consumption. And if you're in a place where prices are lower, leading to greater consumption (whether of food, or square feet of housing, or leisure, or whatever), well, then you're richer, aren't you?
And thus is our conundrum solved. The red states aren't in fact poorer than the blue states. They're richer: that's why they vote more conservative and more right wing.
We could, of course, take yet another point from this essay:
For blue state urbanites who toil in low-paying retail, food preparation and service jobs, for the journeyman tradespeople who once formed the heart of the middle class, for teachers, civil servants, students and young families, the American dream of homeownership — or even an affordable rental apartment — is increasingly out of reach. Adding insult to injury, rapid gentrification in these larger knowledge hubs brings the constant threat of displacement of creative workers. For even the much better paid techies, engineers, financiers and managers who are displacing them, the metropolitan version of the American dream is a cramped condo or a small house and a long commute. Many are opting to move to cheaper red states instead, further driving their growth.
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That rather shows that the way that the blue states are run isn't conducive to good living standards for the poorer half of the population, doesn't it? Or, as we might put it, blue, liberal, policies don't actually do what they say on the tin, aren't in fact pro-poor. All of which is something that ties in nicely with something we noted from Joe Stiglitz yesterday. Restrictive zoning is very much more common in those blue states than it is in the red. And housing is still a family's largest single expense. Meaning that by artificially pushing up the cost of housing those blue states are indeed making life worse for the poor. The adoption of build anything anywhere (almost, we're not quite ready for a steel plant in Manhattan) policies would thus improve the lives and fortunes of the poor substantially.
But that is to become perilously close to snark about all of this. That basic and first observation still stands though. That puzzle of why people in places with lower incomes tend to vote right wing is solved. Because those lower income places have even lower prices, making consumption standards higher. There is therefore no conundrum. The richer people, by the only standard that actually matters, that consumption, are voting right wing, the poorer are voting left.
What we now need to go on and explain is why those nominally left policies, those blue ones, are so to the disadvantage of the poor they're supposedly helping....

West Virginia was diehard Democrat until the 90s. And if you talk about California’s wealth (which already was there when it was GOP until the 80s), you have to look at the tons of homeless encampments and abject poverty as well. Or looking at the highest income state, Maryland - sure, Baltimore has nice areas, but has some of the poorest areas in the US as well

Give me some names of those being mistreated in their sentences. I would like too review their case.

Repeating a post:

news-medical.net

Study finds lower risk of heart attacks and strokes after COVID-19 vaccination

The incidence of heart attacks and strokes was lower after COVID-19 vaccination than before or without vaccination, according to a new study involving nearly the whole adult population of England.

Link:www.news-medical.net/news/20240731/Stu...

This is what Trump does too.

This poster conflates the misdemeanor convictions with the guys in prison. Trump is going to pardon them all and pretend they were all simply tourists trespassing and wrongfully convicted of more serious charges.

Why is this important to Trump?

Trump needs to show his followers that if they take up violence in support of him in the future they will be rewarded or at minimum excused for doing so.

medical studies and research have no place in Trumpism. YouTube videos and Fox News are gospel

If Trump wants to pardon any non-violent Insurrectionists, it is the President's power, but a poor message to America IMHO.

However, pardoning cop beaters and people who plotted to overthrow the government is unacceptable.

Poster does not understand the difference between agents and informants.

Fox News and Tucker are grateful for such ignorance

Jan 6 felons in prison are already making arrangements for their rides home after the pardons in weeks.

If Jan 6 was done by blm / antifa (let’s say in DC or Portland) they wouldn’t have faced any punishment at all

Still waiting.

Easily in the lead and it will widen.