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[the gap between biden and trump seem to be growing bigger and bigger for donnie]

Good, Biden deserves nothing.

Lol were you here in 22 when the Trafalgar polls were wrong on a red wave, yes you were but you are ignoring it, it's in the database the Trafalgar polls that were wrong

There are always surprise states that's why I hope Biden picks up NC/TX AZ and GA were supposed to be Lean R in 20 but Biden won then

There a major difference between midterms and presidential election though
Plus everyone could see from a bit of a mile away by July/august that 2022 wasn't going to be a Redwave with roe v wade being overturned and trump endorsing republicans in states were they hated him
Look the polls for months have been saying trump leading and the gap between biden and trump seem to be growing bigger and bigger for donnie so i'm just going to say that this election isn't looking good for joe.

This is not true.  Check the aggregators.  All show a close race, and in the last couple months Biden has improved slightly overall.

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-general/2024/national/

https://www.realclearpolling.com/polls/president/general/2024/trump-vs-biden

https://www.economist.com/interactive/us-2024-election/trump-biden-polls

https://www.racetothewh.com/president/polls

People say that they want people in government to stand up and do the right thing, then minimize a display of conscience when someone does.

Good for Ms. Call. 

?

Crockett and Green both represent the worst of our government, and I'll throw in AOC, Ilhan Omar, Tlaib, Gaetz, and Boebert as well. This is one of the worst things to come out of the Trump era, and unfortunately has infected both sides of the aisle. Completely eschew dignity and professionalism and in favor of bombast, ad hominem attacks, and theatrics. Politics isn't supposed to be entertainment, it should be boring. Because actually getting things done is not exciting - it's heavily procedural and tedious. Unfortunately, certain members of government don't seem to be there to actually get anything done but rather make a name for themselves. They couldn't make it in show biz so instead they ran for office.

MTG is a trashy grifter who I still can't decide if she actually believes half the stuff she says or if it's just to grift the lowest common denominator of voters. Crockett, OTOH, is a very nasty, mean-spirited person with zero respect for decorum or decency and also is a butcherer of the English language. Watching the two of them go out it is like watching two s-l-u-t-s on a VH1 reality show get in a drunked brawl. They're both idiots and an embarrassment to their districts and need to GTFO of Washington and let the adults get back to governing.

I'll agree with this.  It was worthy of booking a Steel Cage Match on WWE.

MTG is who she is.  If she's not a racist, she acts in ways to allow people to think she is, and she always ends up doing something that's not helpful to more important causes.

Jasmine Crockett is a black woman who hates white people, and is allowed to pretty much let that show.  She's not a "racist" in the sense that she thinks white people inferior to black people, but she hates white people as a group and pretty much lets it show.  The same is true of the worst Squad members (Pressley, Bush, Omar); they hate white people, and they're not really trying to hide that.  They, too, hurt their own causes, some of which have merit and could be advanced by reasonable compromises, but that's not in their nature.

This is the result of a "Resistance" mentality being the default response to problems.  In a real sense, this is the only way the spreading of the "Resistance" mentality can turn out.

No it's not Biden had a 45% Approval rating in 22, and to try to say that is wrong you Rs lost and about to lose again.

We just haven't voted yet, and think we can't win blue states again in a Prez Eday is preposterous funny

Look i'm going to admit things are not looking good for your Dem president with these protests Inflations and well the israel-situation i just feel well things are looking up for Trump especially with the fact that trump might have a few coming cards up his sleeve to use against Joe.

Marist +3 Biden

No it's not Biden had a 45% Approval rating in 22, and to try to say that is wrong you Rs lost and about to lose again.

We just haven't voted yet, and think we can't win blue states again in a Prez Eday is preposterous funny

Look i'm going to admit things are not looking good for your Dem president with these protests Inflations and well the israel-situation i just feel well things are looking up for Trump especially with the fact that trump might have a few coming cards up his sleeve to use against Joe.

it’s pointless arguing with a hack 😄

ignore button is your friend.

Lol I have been in here since 2006 and no one has ever called me a haxk

[GA still is full of the types of voters and communities that are shifting towards Democrats.]

If Biden is in a solid position this fall, I think Georgia will come home for him.

GA still is full of the types of voters and communities that are shifting towards Democrats. But there will always be a very high floor of very conservative voters since it’s still in the Bible Belt. So for this race, I see it as a turnout battle.

I’m excited to see you cry when the Democrats get flushed down the sh**tter of human history.

Lol you support this man Trump he isn't gonna give you a penny if he wins with his millions

Well, New Zealand would have been the objectively correct answer (of the options given, anyway) until about forty years ago, and many stereotypes have not really caught up.

So what would the answer be today in your opinion?

A tie between Australia and New Zealand. Liberalization made Australia mildly more like Britain as the elements of Australian society and political economy that withered in the face of it had no real equivalent here, whereas liberalization in New Zealand made it a lot less like Britain, compared to how it had been before, in part due to the way in which it was done (we can make a lot of 'Post Soviet Britain' jokes about particular privatizations and how they played out here, but the equivalents just wouldn't work in New Zealand) and the extent to which it was taken.

There shouldn't be a partisan narrative. The problem is that the lab claim was made prior to the emergence of evidence. Asking questions is one thing, but you don't get points for guessing sh!t.

This is from the famous Nicholas Wade article written in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists in May 2021.

https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of-covid-did-people-or-nature-open-pandoras-box-at-wuhan/

From early on, public and media perceptions were shaped in favor of the natural emergence scenario by strong statements from two scientific groups. These statements were not at first examined as critically as they should have been.

“We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin,” a group of virologists and others wrote in the Lancet on February 19, 2020, when it was really far too soon for anyone to be sure what had happened. Scientists “overwhelmingly conclude that this coronavirus originated in wildlife,” they said, with a stirring rallying call for readers to stand with Chinese colleagues on the frontline of fighting the disease.

Contrary to the letter writers’ assertion, the idea that the virus might have escaped from a lab invoked accident, not conspiracy. It surely needed to be explored, not rejected out of hand. A defining mark of good scientists is that they go to great pains to distinguish between what they know and what they don’t know. By this criterion, the signatories of the Lancet letter were behaving as poor scientists: They were assuring the public of facts they could not know for sure were true.

It later turned out that the Lancet letter had been organized and drafted by Peter Daszak, president of the EcoHealth Alliance of New York. Daszak’s organization funded coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. If the SARS2 virus had indeed escaped from research he funded, Daszak would be potentially culpable. This acute conflict of interest was not declared to the Lancet’s readers. To the contrary, the letter concluded, “We declare no competing interests.”

Virologists like Daszak had much at stake in the assigning of blame for the pandemic. For 20 years, mostly beneath the public’s attention, they had been playing a dangerous game. In their laboratories they routinely created viruses more dangerous than those that exist in nature. They argued that they could do so safely, and that by getting ahead of nature they could predict and prevent natural “spillovers,” the cross-over of viruses from an animal host to people. If SARS2 had indeed escaped from such a laboratory experiment, a savage blowback could be expected, and the storm of public indignation would affect virologists everywhere, not just in China. “It would shatter the scientific edifice top to bottom,” an MIT Technology Review editor, Antonio Regalado, said in March 2020.

A second statement that had enormous influence in shaping public attitudes was a letter (in other words an opinion piece, not a scientific article) published on 17 March 2020 in the journal Nature Medicine. Its authors were a group of virologists led by Kristian G. Andersen of the Scripps Research Institute. “Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus,” the five virologists declared in the second paragraph of their letter.

Unfortunately, this was another case of poor science, in the sense defined above. True, some older methods of cutting and pasting viral genomes retain tell-tale signs of manipulation. But newer methods, called “no-see-um” or “seamless” approaches, leave no defining marks. Nor do other methods for manipulating viruses such as serial passage, the repeated transfer of viruses from one culture of cells to another. If a virus has been manipulated, whether with a seamless method or by serial passage, there is no way of knowing that this is the case. Andersen and his colleagues were assuring their readers of something they could not know.

The discussion part of their letter begins, “It is improbable that SARS-CoV-2 emerged through laboratory manipulation of a related SARS-CoV-like coronavirus.” But wait, didn’t the lead say the virus had clearly not been manipulated? The authors’ degree of certainty seemed to slip several notches when it came to laying out their reasoning.

The reason for the slippage is clear once the technical language has been penetrated. The two reasons the authors give for supposing manipulation to be improbable are decidedly inconclusive.

First, they say that the spike protein of SARS2 binds very well to its target, the human ACE2 receptor, but does so in a different way from that which physical calculations suggest would be the best fit. Therefore the virus must have arisen by natural selection, not manipulation.

If this argument seems hard to grasp, it’s because it’s so strained. The authors’ basic assumption, not spelt out, is that anyone trying to make a bat virus bind to human cells could do so in only one way. First they would calculate the strongest possible fit between the human ACE2 receptor and the spike protein with which the virus latches onto it. They would then design the spike protein accordingly (by selecting the right string of amino acid units that compose it). Since the SARS2 spike protein is not of this calculated best design, the Andersen paper says, therefore it can’t have been manipulated.

But this ignores the way that virologists do in fact get spike proteins to bind to chosen targets, which is not by calculation but by splicing in spike protein genes from other viruses or by serial passage. With serial passage, each time the virus’s progeny are transferred to new cell cultures or animals, the more successful are selected until one emerges that makes a really tight bind to human cells. Natural selection has done all the heavy lifting. The Andersen paper’s speculation about designing a viral spike protein through calculation has no bearing on whether or not the virus was manipulated by one of the other two methods.

The authors’ second argument against manipulation is even more contrived. Although most living things use DNA as their hereditary material, a number of viruses use RNA, DNA’s close chemical cousin. But RNA is difficult to manipulate, so researchers working on coronaviruses, which are RNA-based, will first convert the RNA genome to DNA. They manipulate the DNA version, whether by adding or altering genes, and then arrange for the manipulated DNA genome to be converted back into infectious RNA.

Only a certain number of these DNA backbones have been described in the scientific literature. Anyone manipulating the SARS2 virus “would probably” have used one of these known backbones, the Andersen group writes, and since SARS2 is not derived from any of them, therefore it was not manipulated. But the argument is conspicuously inconclusive. DNA backbones are quite easy to make, so it’s obviously possible that SARS2 was manipulated using an unpublished DNA backbone.

And that’s it. These are the two arguments made by the Andersen group in support of their declaration that the SARS2 virus was clearly not manipulated. And this conclusion, grounded in nothing but two inconclusive speculations, convinced the world’s press that SARS2 could not have escaped from a lab. A technical critique of the Andersen letter takes it down in harsher words.

Science is supposedly a self-correcting community of experts who constantly check each other’s work. So why didn’t other virologists point out that the Andersen group’s argument was full of absurdly large holes? Perhaps because in today’s universities speech can be very costly. Careers can be destroyed for stepping out of line. Any virologist who challenges the community’s declared view risks having his next grant application turned down by the panel of fellow virologists that advises the government grant distribution agency.

The Daszak and Andersen letters were really political, not scientific, statements, yet were amazingly effective. Articles in the mainstream press repeatedly stated that a consensus of experts had ruled lab escape out of the question or extremely unlikely. Their authors relied for the most part on the Daszak and Andersen letters, failing to understand the yawning gaps in their arguments. Mainstream newspapers all have science journalists on their staff, as do the major networks, and these specialist reporters are supposed to be able to question scientists and check their assertions. But the Daszak and Andersen assertions went largely unchallenged.

Like you said, you don't get points for guessing sh*t.

2 real responses to this, really? This pandemic killed 7 million people globally. Meanwhile there are 37 responses of some piece of sh*t Rep calling another piece of sh*t Rep a beach blonde butch bitch

look man, we have SUPER serious issues to discuss right now, a professional kicker said some crazy sh**t dontchaknow.  If you want people to pay attention and post in your threads, don't remind them of something they were wrong about, they hate that sh**t.  You've got to give the otherside something to bite on or at least some easy dunks so they can pat each other on the back and say "attaboy".

also, a naked link with no commentary or quote is not likely to spawn much.

We helped fund all this. We gave money to the Chinese government that was used outside of the terms of contract given to perform gain of function virus research. And years later, 7 million people are dead. The number of dead in Ukraine and Israel/Gaza combined from those wars will be a small fraction of 7 million to give a sense of scale to all this.

Meanwhile, Peter Daszak is still a free man that has not been charged with a crime.