Vox Populi – 4-22-2016

Vox Populi, our weekly live chat about the week’s events begins tonight at 7:00pm PST. Hope to see you then!!

AdLib 7 days ago

Hey PPO!

AdLib 7 days ago

All well on this side, how are your legs doing?

AdLib 7 days ago

Very glad to hear this! Glad you’re also a pro at healing!

AdLib 7 days ago

Doing well, Glenn! All well your way?

AdLib 7 days ago

PPO – This would be the equivilent of Nixon saying, “Yes indeed, I am a crook!”

AdLib 7 days ago

What gets me is how exposed the political game is and how pols now openly tell us, “Yep, I’m going to pander to the extreme side to win the nomination then move to the middle in the General Election. You know, display that I have no principles and will change my positions to get the power of the Presidency. You sure can’t trust anything I promise you, that’s for sure!”

AdLib 7 days ago

Isn’t Manafort publicly stating, “Don’t worry, Trump is a total phony”?

AdLib 7 days ago

PPO – No, I missed that! Very funny! Have a feeling there will be a lot of yellow grass growing on that golf course.

AdLib 7 days ago

glenn – I’ve been debating that myself as well, is it better to have a convention battle or Trump win the nom. I think Trump winning the nom would make the convention just as crazy and we’d be assured that the Dem would face that hated loser. What do you think?

AdLib 7 days ago

PPO – I have an ides that some of the sand traps will look like kitty litter boxes.

AdLib 7 days ago

glenn – Trump boasts proudly about winning “uneducated voters”. Of course he loves them, they make up most of his party’s base.

AdLib 7 days ago

glenn – Maybe the best scenario is for Trump to be very close but not have the full 1237 delegates. Then it can get really ugly but Trump can win and have a damaged party under him. Cruz would lose to Hillary but polling shows her with only a 5% lead over him, she does better against Trump. Bernie of course beats both by much larger margins.

AdLib 7 days ago

glenn – The thing is, as the MSM french kisses Trump, more and more Americans are repulsed. Let them have their disgusting love affair, both will be left at the altar by Americans. I expect cable news viewership to plummet after the election, lower than it ever has been.

AdLib 7 days ago

glenn – Don’t know about Murph, he may show up tonight.

AdLib 7 days ago

glenn – But what wins elections is an energized constituency and Trump won’t have that outside of the fraction that represents his core supporters in the GOP. Other Repubs will stay far away from him so as not to be associated with his crushing in Nov. and that will peel off supporters for him as well. Dems will be far more motivated. I’ve said it before, I don’t like or trust Hillary but I will vote for her enthusiastically because it will be about defeating Trump and the GOP. But many of the indies that support Bernie and would give him a far bigger win over Trump may drift away from the Dem Party. These aren’t Dems for the most part who are threatening not to vote for Hillary, many are indies who aren’t attracted to the old fashioned machine politician Hillary represents.

AdLib 7 days ago

glenn – We saw the same thing when OWS was becoming a real force, the MSM wouldn’t cover it and when they did, ridiculed it as meaningless. Bernie was treated the same way, ignored as long as possible until they had to report on him. It’s pretty simple, there is an elite running the corps that own the MSM and anything that represents a change for them and the status quo is smothered as much as possible. Trump isn’t smothered because he’s making them lots oof money and that’s their only mission in owning the MSM, to make tons of mooney even if it destroys the country.

AdLib 7 days ago

glenn – We completely disinvested our retirement money from the stock market two recessions ago and since the 2008 crash didn’t impact our savings, I think we’re way ahead of where we would have been. Wall Street is a rigged game, all the most wealthy and powerful know in advance what each other’s corps are doing and they make their billions from ripping off the people who invest their savings in the stock market. It’s a fraud and over the long term, I think one would end up with more money staying out of it than staying in it.

AdLib 7 days ago

glenn – I really wish we could get indies to vote for Hillary against Trump, hopefully some will in the “better of two evils” way but it’s hard to see what indies would be inspired by in Hillary. She is an old school politician, pandering and flipping from day to day on issues just to win. There’s a reason why a majority of voters see her as untrustworthy and that is what has and may continue to keep indies away from supporting her. The higher margin that Bernie has against any of the Repubs probably comes from all the indies that would come out to vote for him. Hillary doesn’t get those now, hard to say that she would even against Trump.

AdLib 7 days ago

glenn – Yes, we moved our savings into CDs, Treasuries, etc. The returns are minimal but if the market crashed tomorrow, we’d have all our savings intact. We know for a fact that the stock market is designed to boom and bust, that’s a risky game to play when you can’t afford to lose a big chunk of that money.

AdLib 7 days ago

PPO – That’s a smart way to go! The way Wall Street is rigged today, with high speed trading computers gaming all the regular investors who have no access to that technology or inside info, it’s too crooked a game for me.

AdLib 7 days ago

glenn – I do think Cruz would get crushed too so either way, Dems win. I just think that Trump stirs up so much anger towards him, he could rally a bigger turnout for Dems than Cruz.

AdLib 7 days ago

PPO – What I’m referring to is how she has openly geared her campaign in the primary to adopt nearly all of Bernie’s positions to undercut him. I don’t think these are earnest positions because they are new to her and not coincidentally the same stands Bernie was taking from the start.

AdLib 7 days ago

This is what The Clintons have a long history of doing, they triangulate to take away the issues of their opponents and undercut the reasons for voting for them. Bill did this to win the Presidency in 1992, adopting all of the Republicans central issues. This is what they’ve done, her campaign actually announced that she was going to do this before she did (she started her campaign positioning herself to the right oof Obama and criticizing him…when his poll numbers were down).

AdLib 7 days ago

glenn – Not at all, our IRAs are at banks that offer a variety of investment options. They do charge a small fee when you “trade” from one to another, like a brokerage, but there are no penalties for doing that OR moving your IRAs from the bank they’re in to a bank or brokerage that provides more investment options.

AdLib 7 days ago

glenn – Absolutely, the best way to win the Senate (and maybe even the House?) in this election along with the WH is to nationalize the election, IMO. Attack the Repubs for how they’ve controlled Congress, shutting down government and now refusing to do their jobs to put a SCOTUS judge in place…let alone stoonewalling everything good that is pursued. And use that to attack the sneaky Repubs who are trying to claim they’re not part of the problem by saying, “Whether they personally voted to shut down the government or not, refuse to confirm a SCOTUS jusdge or not, they empower those things to happen by giving Repubs a majority and control in Congress. They have to go if you want to fix Washington.”

AdLib 7 days ago

glenn – Just an assumption on my part, I may be wrong but I really can’t see anything that could happen as a US or world event, anything that Trump could say or do that would reverse the ongoing slide of women to oppose him, Latinos to oppose him, young voters, black voters, Muslim voters, on and on. Indies generally dislike the games politicians play on the public so that hurts Hillary too because she is a game player but Trump is so obvious and offensive. She will win against him…but I wouldn’t be so sure about her chances in a re-electioon against a non-extremist Repub.

AdLib 7 days ago

PPO – Will get to work on that!

AdLib 7 days ago

glenn – I’m not crazy about brokerage firms but some provide more options than banks on safe investing. It does help to research but don’t be concerned about penalties or such for moving your IRA to different investments or a different institution. You can rollover IRAs to wherever you want once a year.

AdLib 7 days ago

glenn – Excellent point! There should be a straight line drawn through the Bush crash of the economy under “trickle down” and the crash of Repub states using it as well. Trickle Down should be Beaten Down for good and all and take down the Repubs with it.

AdLib 7 days ago

glenn – It’s a standard rule in the law about IRAs, you can always change the investment vehicle, say, moving your money from a mutual fund into Treasury bills and you are allowed to take part or all of your IRA out of the bank it’s in now to any other bank or brokerage as an IRA Rollover once every year (every 365 days). I’m not an accountant so this is not officially investment advice but a quick Google of “IRA Rollover” and “once a year” will bring up that info from reliable sources.

AdLib 7 days ago

glenn – My daughter came home from school explaining that they talked about the election in History class and her teacher said she liked Bernie but she wouldn’t vote for him because he would raise her taxes. So here’s a teacher who is ill informed and sharing that fear of taxes with her class…unaware that the taxes she would pay woould be far smaller than the savings she would get from Single Payer and free college for her kids (I think the health care savings alone annually would be a net of at least $5,000 per household under Bernie’s plan). It’s that fear of taxes that blinds people to how taxes can help them if used to doo so.

AdLib 7 days ago

PPO – That is a big victory! Not a huge fan of McCauliffe, he is far better than any Repub though and has done some good things. This is sure one of them!

AdLib 7 days ago

My damn “o” key keeps repeating on its own, sorry about that!

AdLib 7 days ago

glenn – Your husband sounds like a good guy, sharing the coompany of Warren Buffet, Ben and Jerry and many more millionaires and billionaires who are fine with paying more taxes than they do to help oothers and the country.

AdLib 7 days ago

glenn – We should indeed sharply reduce our military spending and funnel a lot of that money into rebuilding infrastructure, attacking poverty and supporting the futures of the younger generation. We’ve screwed up the future (not us personally but our generation) and we owe it to the younger generations to give them a better future. And cutting taxes for the wealthy and tearing up regulations against polluters and Wall Street fraudsters ain’t the way that’s going to happen.

AdLib 7 days ago

glenn – It’s true, in the real world, who could not live like a king with $20 million in the bank? We should have the tax rates back to Eisenhower rates, a 90% tax rate on any earnings above, say, $10 million a year. Who couldn’t live well grossing $10 million? And if they earned $100 million more, they get to keep $10 million. The deficit would collapse and the economy would boom as it did in the 1950’s.

AdLib 7 days ago

Night glenn! Enjoy the game tomorrow!

AdLib 7 days ago

So kind of you glenn but don’t leave yourself out of that trio!

AdLib 7 days ago

Have a great rest of your day, PPO!

AdLib 7 days ago

How cool! Wish I could attend!

AdLib 7 days ago

Happy early birthday!

AdLib 7 days ago