Posts Made By: James Brown

Originally Posted by James Brown

Hi Maurice and friends:

It has been beautiful tonight and last night.  Tsuchinshan-atlas has been naked eye and big!  I captured a bunch of images with my deep sky camera last night and should be able to process them tomorrow.  Processing comets is a challenge!  Stay tuned.  With any luck, I'll have a really nice composite, since the comet set to the SSW of us, right over a nice mountain.

Jim

Hi Maurice and friends:

Here is the final from my deep sky camera - unguided but on my equatorial mount.  30 second R, G, B images, 10 for each filter.  100mm Canon lens wide open (F2.0).  If I had it to do again, I would have done longer exposures guided on the comet nucleus, with the lens stopped down a stop or two.  I am just setting up this camera, and do not have guiding on line yet.  Comets come at inconvenient times!  My composite will be up next.  Jim

Originally Posted by James Brown

Hi Maurice and friends:

It has been beautiful tonight and last night.  Tsuchinshan-atlas has been naked eye and big!  I captured a bunch of images with my deep sky camera last night and should be able to process them tomorrow.  Processing comets is a challenge!  Stay tuned.  With any luck, I'll have a really nice composite, since the comet set to the SSW of us, right over a nice mountain.

Jim

This is a quick snapshot of the view from our patio.  (Same 100mm lens).  Tsuchinshan-Atlas is setting over Mt. Shavano.  I used this as the template for the composite I'll post next.  This is pretty much exactly what it looked like naked eye.

Originally Posted by James Brown

Hi Maurice and friends:

It has been beautiful tonight and last night.  Tsuchinshan-atlas has been naked eye and big!  I captured a bunch of images with my deep sky camera last night and should be able to process them tomorrow.  Processing comets is a challenge!  Stay tuned.  With any luck, I'll have a really nice composite, since the comet set to the SSW of us, right over a nice mountain.

Jim

The composite, lots of artistic license, but it is an accurate rendering (see previous post).  At least it is accurate if we had 100 mm eyes!

Originally Posted by Rod Kaufman

"Former Romney adviser: Harris will ‘win fairly comfortably’"

"GOP strategist Stuart Stevens suggested in a recent interview that Vice President Harris is running what looks to be “the best presidential campaign ever.”

“Harris is going to win fairly comfortably. I think Harris is gonna win by a larger margin than 2020. [Republicans are] gonna say this election was rigged, and the Republican Party is going to fail again. And it’s going to be very, very ugly,” Stevens added later.

https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4951697-stuart-stevens-mitt-romney-adviser-kamala-harris-2024-election/

I don't buy this above quote.  Do you?  While the race is going to be extremely close, the polling averages and major polling models show Trump creeping slightly ahead.  Still well within the MOE for the swing states.  

The only way Harris wins "comfortably" is a significant polling error in her favor.  That outcome seems unlikely to me given the polls under-polled Trump in 2016 and 2020.  I know they are implementing fixes this time, but I sure do not anticipate a large error in Harris's favor, specifically a large over-polling of Trump.   Jim

p.s.  Nate Silver has Trump ahead in the EC race 55 to 45, his biggest lead since September.  The average in the betting markets is 60/40 in Trump's favor.  538 has the EC race at 54/46 - which is ominous for Harris fans because they have been the model most favorable to Harris this cycle.  The RCP averages of polls have Trump slightly ahead in all 7 swing states.  It is possible to predict a Harris win, but to predict that she wins comfortably?  That is unlikely.   Unless one considers Harris winning all swing states by less than 1% or so "comfortable."  This is the second most likely outcome from Silver's model, after Trump winning all 7 swing states of course.

Originally Posted by Rod Kaufman

I don't buy this above quote.  Do you?

Nope, I've been saying all along I expect Trump to win. I just posted it to trigger Rich which it obviously did. And he obviously has the ample time to respond to it despite claiming to be super busy being the prodigious woodworker he claims to be...

Catch his nazi-style MAGA bash at Madison Square garden on youtube or the news? Quite reminiscent of the nazi rally there in 1939. I wonder if Fred Trump was really there. I've seen comments that he was...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Ue7GcpUj9A&t=466s

Just bits and pieces.  I've disengaged some since voting last week.  I'll still read Silver every day and peruse RCP, but I'm sure not going to invest hours watching a rally.  Not going to spend 3 hours listening to Rogan's podcast either!  Who would?

Originally Posted by Brian McFarland

These polls just aren't passing the smell test to me.  You can bet no Democrats are voting for Trump, and a lot of Rs say they aren't either (very much like you and Russ).  Even in my business (historically R), none of the people I interface with are voting for Trump - they universally find him unfit.  What's going on here?

Hi Brian:  

I can think of two answers and you are not going to like one.  First, it is possible that the polls are systemically wrong in favor of Trump.  This happened in 2016 when the polls were systemically wrong in favor of Clinton. 

The second option, that you won't like, is that your bubble is too tight.  You interface with a highly educated class of people, and that is Harris's wheelhouse.  How many people do you know who listen to Joe Rogan's podcast?  I personally had not heard of it before last week.  But it apparently has more devoted fans than Fox News, CNN, the NYT and the Washington Post put together.

I think Harris has lost enough votes in the non-college educated, black and Latino demographics to lose the race.  I think the polls are substantially correct, but close enough that this is functionally a toss up.  There are 54 red balls and 46 blue balls in the electoral college bag, and you get to pick one.  J

There have been a ton of recent editorial comments from Democrats, including Harris and her primary surrogates, comparing Trump to Hitler, calling him out as a fascist, and of course announcing that his election would end democracy.  Hillary Clinton has been over the top.  The comparisons of his Madison Square Garden rally to a 1939 Nazi rally were all the rage over the weekend.  There are far too many examples to cite, this has been an ubiquitous line of attack the past few days.  Does anyone here think this fear mongering is going to push Harris to an EC victory?

It is an accepted truism that playing the Nazi card in an on line debate is an acknowledgement you have lost the argument.  Why is the Harris campaign's strategy any different?     

I personally think "Trump is a fascist" is a horrible closing argument for the Harris campaign and suggests Harris and her people know they are losing.  J

Originally Posted by Brian McFarland

Actually, I'm trying to look at the broader picture, and that is this:  The Ds are fully united in their opposition to Trump, and the Rs are divided as never before. He lost last time, and he's now more unpopular and polarizing than ever.  That sure doesn't seem like a winning formula to me.

My "bubble" description was only meant as an example of the R's division as I see it.

According to the polls (I know you are skeptical) Trump is viewed far more favorably now than he ever has been.  Seriously.  Maybe more importantly, Trump's favorability ratings are much closer to his opponent's than they ever have been.  It is a dramatic shift based in large part upon Harris's collapsing favorability ratings compared to Biden's in '20.

The D's are not fully united either.  Of course the highly engaged voters are lined up behind Harris, but significant numbers of men under the age of 35, blacks, and Latinos have moved into the Trump camp.  D Senate candidate Casey from PA is featuring favorable comments about Trump and tariffs in his recent campaign ads.  https://www.wsj.com/opinion/bob-casey-plays-the-trump-card-pennsylvania-senate-race-presidential-campaign-bd0593f8?st=5xCnsa  Inflation is still the main issue on most voter's minds.

I think Trump is going to win, based upon the polls, and based upon the weakness of Harris's closing arguments, and based upon the tone of her campaign now.  See my new thread.  We'll know soon.  I'd say we'll know in a week, but that is optimistic.  It is going to be really close.

Originally Posted by Brian McFarland

Actually, I'm trying to look at the broader picture, and that is this:  The Ds are fully united in their opposition to Trump, and the Rs are divided as never before. He lost last time, and he's now more unpopular and polarizing than ever.  That sure doesn't seem like a winning formula to me.

My "bubble" description was only meant as an example of the R's division as I see it.

I agree the Rs are divided.  I, and people like me have been peeled off from the R herd because we do not think Trump is a suitable presidential candidate.  Please consider this counterpoint though, for every moderate RINO like me Trump has lost he has probably picked up a handful of union guys, young men, minorities, and others who used to vote D, or perhaps never voted at all.  

Trump is an effective populist.  Inflation ran rampant through much of Biden's term, and that hurt large swaths of the population.  Biden mishandled the border, and there are objective graphs that show it.  If Trump were a competent politician, I think this would be an enormous landslide in his favor.

Originally Posted by Rod Kaufman

"Stocks fell sharply on Wednesday, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average
on pace for its worst day in over a month, as higher Treasury yields weighed on market sentiment."

"The 30-stock Dow shed 479 points, or 1.1%. That put the benchmark on track for its biggest one-day loss since Sept. 3 — when it lost 1.5%. The S& 500
dropped 1.1%. The Nasdaq Composite
lost about 1.9%."

"Both the Dow and S& 500 were headed for their third straight losing session."



" Some have pointed to recent economic data as a source for the move higher, while others have noted the potential of growing fiscal deficits in the U.S. under a second Donald Trump presidency."


https://www.cnbc.com/2024/10/22/stock-market-today-live-updates.html

I am pleased that this post has not aged all that well.