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Texas Jeff

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Everything posted by Texas Jeff

  1. Fun fact ... no president has been re-elected after impeachment. Of course, that's not a long list, only Johnson could have been re-elected. However, both Johnson and Clinton ended up with a family member in the Senate, post-presidency. Johnson ran for a Senate seat and won, becoming the only ex-president to serve in the Senate. Clinton never became a senator but Hillary did.
  2. Over the weekend, C-SPAN had some old videos from the Clinton impeachment. I watched the House Judiciary committee debate and vote on one of the articles of impeachment. The civility of that proceeding was amazing compared to what we are watching today. The R's were in the majority but both sides were participating in the debate. Each side was focusing on making an argument rather than just being angry at the other side. Both sides had people saying "I recognize the point you are trying to make but here is where I disagree with you". The R's were focused on the conduct of the president. The D's were focused on not overturning the results of an election. Sound familiar? Today seems to be really different than that day. I'm not putting blame here on either side for this -- or rather I think I am blaming both sides, but these hearings are substantially more divided and angry than those from twenty years ago.
  3. uhhh... enjoy a live football game without being barraged by advertising? Is that asking too much?
  4. These committee roll call votes really show the lack of diversity on the Republican side. They go through all of the Democrats first, and you see a lot of different faces. Then on to the Republican side and it's pretty much central casting of the same dude, with a few women here and there.
  5. Trump will be impeached. He will not be convicted. He will lose in 2020, both the popular vote and the electoral vote. He will claim that the loss was not his fault, that it was because of the media or the dems or rigged elections or something like that. He will take whatever claim is made against him and try to turn it around in his favor, for example he might claim that he lost because China interfered in our elections. He will then milk his post-presidency period for as much money as he can make of it. He will sell tickets for rubes to come to rallies, sell merch, sell meet and greets, continue to tweet and rant against other Americans to get attention, do reality TV and generally try to stay in the public eye by attacking others and promoting whatever theory will make him a buck. There is a slight chance that the Senate will tire of him and convict him so that they can run with Pence in 2020, but it's unlikely.
  6. Sondland comes across as a big-picture CEO guy, not one to worry about details. He seems to be trying to tell the truth as he recalls it.
  7. JFC ... in WWII we had to break Enigma to read Hitler's texts ... now our enemies just need a rogue employee at WhatsApp.
  8. Off topic, but why are gov't officials using whatsapp for messaging? Might as well mail copies to security agencies worldwide.
  9. or he could turn on Trump and say yep all of this is true.
  10. Does anyone else follow the Buffett Indicator? It is a measure of the ratio of the total price of the stock market relative to the US gross national product. In theory, the higher the ratio the more overbought the market is, and the lower the ratio the more oversold it is. Right now this measure is around 146, and historically it's been tough for this measure to exceed the 146-148 range. If you follow that indicator, we would seem to be at a market peak. To lower the ratio the total stock market price needs to drop, or GDP needs to increase. I've been looking at this for about two years and expecting a market pullback that has not yet happened. Getting this number back to 100 would put the DJIA down around 19,000, if dow stocks sank along with the larger market. There is nothing magical about 100, but there have been times when this number was above 100 and under 100, so it's possible. After the dot-com recession, this metric bottomed out in the low 70's, and during the Great Recession the number fell as low as 57.
  11. Yes, it would .... I misread the previous post to say that the market was cooling.
  12. Loss or limit of the property tax deduction may be having an effect...
  13. I think it was Mike "Mr Chairman" Conaway there at the end. Conaway also complained at the beginning of the second half that the witnesses had paper copies of the slides everyone was seeing so perhaps the witness was working together with the Dems on the committee and wanted to know if they were working together. Schiff replied that the witness's TV was broken so they gave her paper slides since she could not see the slides on TV like the committee could. Conspiracy averted...
  14. It's like they have an overnight shift that panics much more easily than the evening team. The evening folks say, you know, we could call it now and let everyone know before alarm clocks are set and everyone could have a nice morning sleep, but it looks like the weather's OK. Then around 1am they hand it off to a group of overnight folks hyped up on too much coffee who freak out around 3 am and start pushing all of the buttons, causing us to get phone calls at 4am. Twice in my case, once per student to the same phone number. C'mon AISD, everyone loves a late start ... call it early for once.
  15. We've been to Maui and Kauai in the last few years and used the GyPSy guide as an audio tour book as we drove around the islands. They have them for most of the Hawaiian islands and also some mainland US and Canadian spots. It's a phone app that you connect to your car radio. As you drive around and pass GPS waypoints, the guide gives you some local information on what you are about to pass or see. The waypoints have direction, so if you do something like the road to Hana you hear one set of stories on the way out and another on the way back.
  16. Uh, try here: https://www.ranker.com/list/best-documentaries-on-hulu/ranker-streaming?l=2180325&collectionId=1198 "Free Solo" - dude clubs El Capitain without a rope "Too Funny to Fail" - Dana Carvey creates a comedy show but not an audience for said show "Fyre Fraud" - dude convinces wealthy young people to come to his festival but it sucks Hulu has tons and tons of SNL and every dang ole dang ole episode of King of the Hill ... which is kind of like a documentary for Texans.
  17. Not me, I spend too much time watching documentaries on Hulu...
  18. Matthew McConaughey makes a subtle entrance:
  19. The Biggest Little Farm is now up on Hulu. It is a documentary about a couple that moves from the city to the country to start an organic farm. They have some help from a guy who knows how to transform soil, but they have to troubleshoot along the way to figure out how to use the forces of nature to benefit the farm.
  20. Check out Trump vs the Minion:
  21. Also from Federalist 65 (66 talks about the Senate two-thirds rule to convict) Hamilton was smart enough to realize that impeachment would always be partisan, but thought enough of the impartiality of the Senate to give them the power to convict, so long as two-thirds of the Senate was on board and the Chief Justice was empowered to see over the proceedings. He argued that it was tough to find any reasonable way to handle impeachments, but this system was reasonably sound and there were many other choices that were worse. If he were alive today he would think we were all morons.
  22. I agree that below ground transit can be pretty awesome if roads are just flat impossible to use. I've used BART, MARTA and the DC Metro to get around when I was in those towns and if it goes from where you are to where you need to go it's great. BART is incredibly noisy and I'm not sure I could take it every day. The old Austin monorail project pretty much proposed the "Orange Line" route about twenty years ago and that was grade separated. That project went nowhere but was a cool idea. It is possible that we are maybe 10-15 years away from a world where you push a button on your phone, a car shows up and takes you where you want to go ... and at much lower cost than owning a car. At that point, I think CapMetro will struggle to attract passengers even though our roads are likely to be more crowded than ever due the automated cars. Fewer people will care about their commute because it will suck a lot less as a rider than a driver. For the price of those tunnels we could fundamentally transform Austin ISD. Maybe it isn't the same money bucket, but if I had to pick I'd invest in the schools before transit.
  23. CapMetro is trying this idea today, kind of. They are running the 335 bus crosstown with the idea that people will transfer to another bus to move north south (or stay on the 335 and you can travel from Mueller to Tarrytown). I asked them for the data showing how many people are boarding the bus each day west of Mopac. The answer was about 100 people per day, although there was a spike for a few months in 2018 up to 200 people. They are running about 66 busses per day along this route. You could probably run the western part of this route with a Nissan Leaf on a loop. It's just too easy to get in a car and go directly to your destination, while wishing that everyone else was on the bus. Traffic will get worse once self-driving car services reduce the cost of travel by car.
  24. 1978, Barton Creek Mall site, looking north towards downtown. 360 under construction: A more recent photo: Could be a tad more crap in the aquifer now ... just a guess.
  25. I think they maxed out the tax rate this year because they know they are capped at a lower percentage increase starting next year. By maxing out the rate increase this year, they raised more revenue than they needed. The "surplus" ended up as a one-time resource to use on the homeless. Stuff will hit the fan over the next few years as the tax rate increases are slowed by the new legislation. Either city programs are going to fight each other for funding and/or we are going to have elections to raise the tax rate beyond the new legislation's limits.
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