RayDog

I hope you are right. Republicans will try to pull something to get enthusiasm up and a supreme Court vacancy and war are my two biggest fears.

I suspect that if RGB survives for another year someone will make Clarence Thomas an offer he can't refuse so the Republicans have another supreme court hearing in the run-up to the election. That is about the only way the Republicans can get their enthusiasm level up again to the level it was in 2018. If not that they will have to be creative and find something else. Another caravan scare won't be enough.

They could not seat a jury that would convict.

I think Trump would cost a point or two. Democrats are itching to vote against Trump and the best way to get out more Democratic vote is to put Trump on the ballot indirectly. This is such an important race as a predictor of 2020. If Republican voter enthusiasm stays this low, we will see something unprecedented.

The heard needs to be culled of fringe candidates even if they say interesting or entertaining things. I like the approach the DNC has taken to get this done well in advance of the primaries.

The good news is that 49% of 2016 voters were Boomer or older. That percentage drops to 43-44% in 2020.

That must be why all the guys I know who watch Fox like her so much.

I meant with respect to voters who are not paying attention and going by name recognition alone.

I would like media to have to make a public retraction and take a day off work when they tell a lie. The president and Congressmen too.

I just looked at today's dailykos poll. It was Warren 40%, Bernie 18%, Biden 12%, Yang 9%, Pete 8%, Harris 7%. That is where high and medium information voters are at the moment.

I am waiting for Warren plus Sanders to top 50% and then watch the corporate Democrats and media heads explode.

I am hopping for a Tuberville-Moore runoff.

I posted on the Moscow Mitch thread but it deserves to be stated here that in a recent poll he had a 39/56 approval rating. The poll also showed Democrats ahead in the 2019 Kentucky Governor (9 pts), Attorney General (7 pts), and Secretary of State (15 pts) races. I don't want to get too excited about the state of Kentucky possibly flipping to the Democrats, but if it did there is no telling how bad the 2020 election will be for Republicans overall.

I have not updated you in a while on my research. I am an invited speaker at a physics conference in October in Prague on relativity so I decided to do a paper on general relativity theory as a quantum field effect. I figured out that I can physically explain it on the basis of quantum van der Waals forces. Basically, stable matter increases quantum van der Waals torque that changes the local permittivity and permeability, which causes the speed of light to vary near matter. The increased torque also slows clock rates. That is also how clocks slow due to regular relativity, too. General Relativity as a quantum van der Waals Torque effect The quantum field also requires that space is flat. Space is non-physical and can't have dimensions by itself anyway. Space only has dimensions because the matter it contains has dimensions and that matter is the quantum field, which has wavelengths and frequencies. General relativity must be calculated as a flat space, variable clock rate, variable speed of light phenomenon. (This is not to be confused with VSL cosmology where the speed of light is thought to vary during the age of the universe) There have been a number of people working on this idea starting with Einstein in 1911, and including Dicke and Puthoff, so there is already a lot of technical research done. What was missing from those theories was the underlying quantum van der Waals torque mechanism. They usually guessed incorrectly that it was something to do with Mach's principle. There is also need to include the physical cause of acceleration due to gravity and also inertia which leads to a non-electric Maxwell force in any complete gravitational theory. Coming up with the complete gravitational field equations will be a bit tedious, but I will work on that after I finish the book I am writing. I hope to find someone to collaborate with at the conference. I worked on explaining all the physical constants as quantum van der Waals torque effect. As part of that I realized that electric charge magnitude is a property of the quantum field rather than particles. Particles should be thought of as simple polarizers with no charge magnitude. Physical Constants as Properties of the van der Waals Torque of the Quantum Field I also figured out that the fine structure constant is the total volumetric field polarization due to a single polarizer (particle). Come to think of it I may have posted about that on the old site. Fine Structure Constant as the Polarization of the Quantum Field by a Unit Charge As part of that I also determined that the quantum field cannot be polarized without inducing net rotating in the quantum field. This quantum field rotation is where particle spin, angular momentum and magnetic moment come form. Particle Spin and Magnetic Moment as Quantum Field Effects This also made me realize that electron and proton charge, spin, angular momentum, magnetic moment, and mass are all quantum field effects. An electron or proton is simply nothing more than an electrical polarizer that is either matter or antimatter surrounded by a polarized quantum field. The polarized quantum field is the physical structure of the electron and proton (and neutron). The unstable resonances (particles) have a different structure and I am writing a book on particle theory that describes that. It is a total replacement for the quark model since my charge and proton theories already invalidate it. Electron Properties Explained as Quantum Field Effects Matter-antimatter is known to be the same thing as a particle's time arrow, so I wrote about that, although this paper is a more speculative interpretation of the Dirac equation about how that occurs. The Origin and Arrow of Time, Dirac’s Negative Energy, and Matter I also wrote about proton and electron production. Either they can be produced or they have existed for infinity. I think they can be produced and I don't understand why nobody is working on it. I hope to set up my lab once I find a place I want to live for more than a year or two. Electrons and Protons Are Produced Together If GR and Newtonian gravity were correct we would be in a black hole. The mass of the visible universe is at least 10^56 grams which would form a black hole with a 15.7 billion light-year radius. The Universe’s Large Black Hole Problem Anyway, I was really excited to figure out the physical cause of general relativity and thought I would share.

A recent poll puts Democratic candidates ahead in the 2019 Kentucky Governor (9 pts), Attorney General (7 pts), and Secretary of State (15 pts) races. Clarity Campaign Labs It is a Democratic polling outfit so... Moscow Mitch's favorability rating is 39/56

I pointed out that she made that mistake, not me. Her mistake is also relevant to the other 8 Texas races she listed.

Lawrence O'Donnell talked about it on a show last year as he worked in the Senate during an impeachment of a lower level official. He said the Constitution does not require that the trial be timely so they worked on it as they had time and it took over a year. Moscow Mitch does not have to start the trial so he won't.

Moscow Mitch won't allow a trial.

Rachel Bitcofer includes TX-2 in her list of the top 18 Republican districts most likely to flip with 9 in Texas. She does so because 47.1% of the voting age population in TX-2 is college educated and only 48.7% white. I think that she makes the general mistake that all college educated Texans follow the national pattern when she should subtract aggies from the percentage of college educated in Texas to get a more accurate prediction. The Cook PVI is still +11 so even with the generic ballot at +9 it looks to me like Democrats will fall short of winning there. The Republican vote would have to be seriously depressed and Democrats would need a great candidate to even make it a close race.

My point was not that she rode his coattails but that she is nowhere near as good a campaigner and will lose the Senate race by significantly worse than he did. That is unless the presidential ticket has long coattails she can ride.

For the most part it was Beto who flipped the voters and turned out the base as shown by his better numbers. People did not walk up to vote thinking "I am such a big supporter of MJ that I think I will vote for Beto too"

Better how? She lost her district by over 8000 and he lost it by just over 3000. So 5000 or so voters split their ticket. If MJ does not do a much better job campaigning this time on a much bigger scale, she could lose a state race by 500,000. It could be more like the last governor's race than the Senate race.

Everybody repeats what they are told, usually by untrustworthy sources. Few people are subject matter experts performing their own research on a subject on which they can speak authoritatively. Even those people rely on other sources for the vast majority of what they think they know. The vast majority of people have no idea how to determine which sources and information are trustworthy. They have no critical thinking ability.

I did a post on the Republican's 2016 platform and almost every platform position they listed is now unpopular. Or, it was an outright lie such as saying they oppose racism.

Someone on dailykos suggested Red Don.