Politics: Drinking Games for Political Commercials

While there have been a lot less political commercials lately at least where I live, I realize that there could be drinking games that one could play with them. I recommend against games like this if you are not careful with drinking and I also recommend not doing it if you have to drive or have otherwise use for a brain that isn’t impaired in any way. Thus, one plays drinking games at one’s own risk. Don’t play it if you are pregnant or taking drugs that could negatively affect it. Now I believe that this is when you should drink at political commercials:

• Take a shot if someone approves the message.
• Take two shots if no one approves the message.
• Take three shots if a group like a PAC, Super PAC, Committee, or something other than a specific candidate says they are responsible for the contact of the advertising.
• Take a shot if the ad is purely positive.
• Take two shots if the ad is purely negative.
• Take four shots if the ad is both positive and negative.
• Take a shot if the negative ad never mentions who you should vote for instead.
• Take a shot every time you see an ad for the very first time.
• Take a shot for any new race covered in an ad that you didn't know was happening before since it is bringing up new things.
• Take a shot for every news source mentioned in an ad.
• Take five shots if ad mentions no news source.
• Take three shots if ad airs footage from an opponent's ad or some other ad.
• Take two shots every time a person is compared to another person, be it good or bad.
• Take six shots if ad is only negative comparisons.
• Take a shot if fear mongering is used.
• Take a shot if outdated information is used.
• Take three shots if person is proven to have lied or mislead in an ad.

Politics: Is there a Mutual War on Moderates?

Whether you love moderates or hate them, you have to admit that they never seem to last for as long as pretty much all the other politicians. A Republican can be solidly conservative and never face any troubles as their support from their base is going to trump anyone who hates them. The same is true with Democrats who are solidly liberal. But when someone accepts the sides of both parties and ranks around the middle, it seems like people hate them.

You’d think that moderates would be those who are most liked from either party as they are willing to find the center and still be bi-partisan in this hyper partisan world. But they tend to lose office or are hated by their own party. Often, they can just be accused of going too far with their ways. In truth, they are just seen as traitors of their own party. I believe that I covered a point like this in a previous post called “Are RINOs just a bi-partisan Republican?” Well, it might have had a similar affect on DINOs too.

Of course, maybe the issue isn’t that they don’t garner the support of their own party. They could just be seen as not moderate enough. Could Claire McCaskill still be in office if she had voted to confirm Brett Kavanaugh? Would people hate Susan Collins now if she had voted to convict Trump? Was it good then that Joe Manachin was the only Democrat to vote for both of both of Trump’s nominees to the Supreme Court?

I may not be in favor of moderates so much as I’m in favor of politicians getting along. That just doesn’t seem to happen nowadays. But this might only happen if there are still moderates in the senate and other offices. So what is wrong with moderates?

It more than likely is a problem with their own party. I could be generalizing here, but it seems like when people lose support of their own party, they lose reelection. They might not actually be a moderate, but are still seen as betraying their party’s values. That’s why both Mark Kirk and Bruce Rauner would up being voted out in Illinois. They just couldn’t get the support of their own party even if it meant someone who did properly define the other party got voted in instead.

The fact that neither party seem to like moderates within them can still be an issue. You see, I think that we need people getting together. I don’t want there to be a war on all the Democrats who are pro-life more than I’d want conservatives to hate their own if they came out in support of gay marriage. People can work together and get votes they wouldn’t have gotten otherwise by having more moderate forms of support. Obamacare might not be around if we didn’t have people who, however briefly, still voted with the other party. Clinton might have been voted out of office by the senate if a good chunk of Republicans didn’t vote to acquit.

I leave it up to you to decide how to vote. I can get annoyed by Daily Kos articles about people who don’t think that moderates should ever have elective office. But they do have a good point about some of them. Were they moderates on just one or a handful of issues? And would they be a good representation of their party despite sometimes having policies against it? You can be the judge whenever they are up for office.

Politics: Is Anti-Them a Good Thing?

Welcome back to the miscellaneous posts of this blog. I was wanting to do another theme, but will not put that in this blog just yet. The other theme will continue and alternate as usual. Now let’s get to the post.

Something that seems to happen a lot today in politics is the anti-them message. Don’t vote for x because of various reasons mentioned in this advertisement. They are bad due to their association with another person. This message is clearly anti-them. Them can be one person or a group of persons. It is not the same person all the time. Both of the sides might do this at once in the same election. It could even spread to different races in the end.

I think that most people from both sides can agree that anti-them is wrong. Why make your only argument for why you should win be that someone else shouldn’t? Why is it good for some people if your best argument for the race is that someone else is bad?

You’d think that there would be nothing positive to the anti-them message. But, from what I have been able to gather from recent years, it works as a message. Anti-them probably helped out the Democrats in both 2006 and 2008. Obama won with anti-Bush rhetoric in 2008, even though he wasn’t even running against Bush. Anti-Obama rhetoric then won the day for Republican’ts in 2010, 2014, and even 2016, despite Obama never being on the ballot once in any of those elections. Mitch McConnell was able to win in 2014 doing this although it might have helped that his opponent wasn’t wanting to embrace Obama being a good person. Trump then won with the anti-Obama rhetoric himself even though smart people should have known just how great we were doing under the Obama administration.

Of course, one also needs to remember and realize that this isn’t always what is done. Some might think that all the other party wants is for one to lose. But that’s not it at all. While some might think that the 2020 Democrats wanted Trump out of office as their only messaging, they have plenty of other ideas beyond that as many will state on their websites.

Still, a point that one needs to remember is that if one is challenging an incumbent to the race is that they don’t want to current person to win and would thus have to be anti-them in at least some minor way. Even the one who wants to stay in office would have to make the case for why he or she should win instead of the other person. Even if you don’t want to point out flaws, there has to be a bit of anti-them in your way of thinking or else they might not understand what is wrong with this other candidate in the end.

I would have to say in the end that anti-them is always a bad message. I want to know why I should vote for someone and not against another person. Even though I know you have to point out a person’s flaws in the end or a party’s problems, I want to know why you are good and not why the other party is bad. Those are my thoughts on why anti-them is not a good thing.

Politics: The Third Party Option

Something that might be highly debated in the future of this country for a good long while is whether or not third parties are viable choices for office. Should one vote for them and actually think that this would be a vote in favor of them? Can third party candidates actually win? More importantly, can they win the presidency? Well, I’m going to talk about this option and see if it is a good one or quite a terrible idea. Honestly, it could depend on a lot of different factors. But I might as well get into it in this blog post.

People might feel this way about the election for president right now. They may not like either Trump or Biden. I mean, don’t both have women accusing them of sexual misconduct? To the unobservant, both or just Biden is guilty until more research is put into this. But that’s not what I’m here for. I’m wondering if voting third party for president in 2020 is a good idea.

This takes me back to when I was in eighth grade and taking a history class. The class of maybe around 20 students (myself included) voted in a mock election. After the votes were all counted, only one person (namely me) had voted for the third party candidate. (This was 2004 and before I realized that John Kerry was the better candidate.) Everyone else had voted for either of the main party candidates in the election. This is how it often seems to be in elections of all sorts. The third party gets a notable minority of the votes, but not close enough to getting anywhere close to winning. Would you vote for someone that you didn’t want to win? I doubt it. Would you vote for someone that you felt couldn’t win even if you wanted them to win? That becomes the next great question to ask.

Just two years later in 2006, the election for governor in Illinois gave people two major party candidates that weren’t well liked at all. This gave the green party candidate 10% of the vote as that many people wanted him governor versus the major party candidates. That party was even a major party in this state for a while as a result. The winner of that election got 49% of the vote. You might wonder, if all of the green party candidate’s votes went to the Republican who lost, would she have won? The answer is no. She would have just barely lost a close election. But this creates the big problem in the race.

Many suspect that voting for a third party candidate is throwing your vote away. Others think that it is far worse as you are ensuring that a party loses by not voting for that party. But this is not always a problem by just voting third party. There were enough people in 2016 who had done write-in ballots in Florida for people that don’t exist that if all of them had voted for Hillary Clinton instead, she would have won that state. That proves just how crazy the voting system is at times nowadays.

Of course, some might have to point out that third party candidates can and do win elections. And this isn’t by them switching parties after winning in a major party (although that does happen a lot from time to time). It is just such a rare and uncommon occurrence that all of them tend to stick out as unusual in most places unless they are from states or rare elections that did not have major party candidates on one of the spaces.

As we look towards the 2020 election for president, to me, it makes zero sense if you don’t like Trump to vote for a third party candidate. If you want Trump to lose, you would have to vote for Biden or you are just giving Trump more of an edge. There might be some issues with Biden, but to vote third party makes no sense this time around.

Ever since I first started voting in 2010, I have always voted for one Democrat, one Republican, and one third party candidate. People don’t get a free pass by running unopposed. Yet I do not vote often for third party in any major races and tend to give it to something that I don’t care that much about or to a race I feel is largely unimportant in some way to me at least. One time, the vote was for a two month term which would have meant little to nothing if they did win.

Honestly, part of the issues with third parties are the varied views that they support. The libertarians, for instance, seem to combine the worst ideas of Democrats and Republican and they also throw in some other horrible ideas of their own as well. The green party offers no real identity that I can tell. I couldn’t tell you much about the reform party nor do I know about the constitutional party and what they do. Independents often switch parties or represent one of the major parties while not actually officially labeled that in some ways.

Maybe a third party could break through all the gridlock that is going on and create a way through all of this partisanship. But it seems to me that instead we’d get another set of people who want their way and won’t get along with other people leading to even more partisanship. In fact, I would say that since I’ve heard talk about a major third party for a long while now and have yet to see anything come close to it in recent years, that it might be like how the red hair gene is going extinct as a thing that people say without any evidence to ever back it up.

That’s all that I can think of for this post. Maybe there is more to say, but their probably isn’t. Justin Amash, a former Republican, is considering running as a libertarian for president. I don’t think that he could hurt Biden’s chances, but we’ll have to see if he even wins the nomination or enters the race. Biden has been shown doing better in the polls then Trump, but that’s only if this remains a two way race. Trump could win a three way race and that is why we don’t want there to be any third parties messing things up.

Cast Update 5-2-2020

There isn’t as much to talk about nowadays since most projects are delayed until later, if they are even still being made at all. I don’t think that there is too much special to talk about in this introduction as a result, but hope that things will go back to normal at some point in time in the future. Until then, enjoy this update. Sorry about the odd time that it was updated because there is no normal time for this blog right now, although that could change in the future regarding different posts.

Tea Leoni: She will be in a project called Endangered, which will be a movie. There are no other things that I see her in right now besides that. I don’t know when they finished filming the show, but you’d think that those who are still doing projects will have stuff right now to do (if that makes sense).

Endangered: This is a movie about the lives of threatened species. We’ll see what role she has in it. The website I’m checking makes it seem like she’ll be lending her voice to it so maybe it will be some sort of documentary. The release date is unknown now.

Bebe Neuwirth: She’s had a recurring bit on Blue Bloods and may show up on it from time to time. There are other minor things that she has done. It appears that she will be in a new movie called Modern Persuasion. Another thing she is appearing in is Julia.

Modern Persuasion: This movie has an unknown release date at this time. The plot is about a woman’s ex-boyfriend hiring her company which forces her to deal with various things in her life. I don’t know yet what role Bebe will play in this.

Julia: This is a pilot for a show about Julia Child, the chef. We’ll see if anything comes from the pilot in the future or not. It would have an edge if it was already filmed. The release date is currently unknown for this.

Geoffrey Arend: He hasn’t really been doing that much yet. Maybe he will later. I guess we’ll see what will become of his career. Maybe there will be something in the future. I can only hope so. Until then, just wait to see what happens.

Kathrine Herzer: She hasn’t been doing much since the show ended or now, it seems. Maybe she is going back to a more normal life. Not all the child actors or actresses continue into the field when they get older as they want to do other things in life. Remember the people from Shining Time Station?

Evan Roe: Again, this person has not been doing much after the show ended. I guess it hasn’t been over long enough or a lot of these people just haven’t found a new job yet. You’d think that the filming would have ended long enough ago, but maybe not.

Tim Daly: I might easily run out of ways of saying that people from this show haven’t done much of anything yet now that the show has ended and it hasn’t been over that long. I can only hope that there are a lot of people who have something in the work at some point.

Zeljko Ivanek: He also has no new projects in the works right now, although he could be wanting to retire in the future or something like that. I won’t make assumptions and just wait until the next time I see something potentially in the next post.

Erich Bergen: He’s also doing nothing yet as of the show ending. How recently did filming wrap? Was it not that long ago? Why is no one that I’m looking up doing anything yet? I don’t get it. Whatever the reason, he has nothing yet and maybe that will change later.

Patina Miller: She is the narrator of a show called Word Party. That’s all that she’s doing for now. I think that she’s a mother so that may affect how much work she’ll be able to do. We’ll see what goes on in her life and I hope she can do something I can watch. She will also be in a project called Power Book III: Raising Kanan.

Word Party: This is a Netflix kids show that is available now. Patina is the narrator of it. I don’t know much about it. I doubt that I will be able to see it in the future. This show is about teaching others how to talk and learning simple things like that.

Power Book III: Raising Kanan: This isn’t set to air until 2021. It is a prequel about Kanan Stark, whoever that is. I doubt already that I’ll be able to see it, although I guess that it is possible that I might at some point. I hope to find out more info about this soon.

Wallis Currie-Wood: She has done very little outside of the show. Maybe she will do something more in Hollywood or maybe not. It will be hard to understand some of why I’m not seeing much in terms of what the cast is doing in the future unless or until more time passes.

Keith Carradine: He has two projects in the works. One is called Sallywood. The other one is called The Daylong Brothers. We’ll see what happens between those and anything else that he does. I look forward to hopefully seeing these films at some point in time. He will also be in something called The Power of the Dog. Maybe more will happen in the future.

Sallywood: This movie romantic in some way, but I don’t know if it’s a comedy or not. It is about a man who moves to Hollywood and becomes a woman’s personal assistant. They’ll be more to it than that. It has an unknown release date at this time.

The Daylong Brothers: This has an unknown release date at this time. It is about three brothers who try to get revenge on their father for selling their souls. This could be interesting, even if I don’t really like to watch horror films. But this could just be normal supernatural.

The Power of the Dog: I don’t know why they are making a Trump based movie. Wait, this has nothing to do with politics. It is about sibling rivalry that happens between two men who are brothers when one of them gets married. It is set for release in 2021.

Sebastian Arcelus: It looks like he will appear in a TV movie or perhaps potential pilot called Blanco. He’s doing better than others in terms of projects in the works. He’s also doing a project called Homebound. That is it for now.

Homebound: This is set for release in 2020. It is about a woman searching for her therapy dog as she deals with personal fears or things like that. There is no trailer for this yet or specific release date. It could be good, but I won’t know unless I can see it at some point.

Blanco: This has an unknown release date at the moment. It is about a criminal who seeks to work with the cops only to build his criminal empire. I have no idea what network this would air on, if any. This might be just another in a long line of passed pilots that I get confused about and wind up in this blog for a long time like what you might have seen in my CSI: Cyber blog.

Sara Ramirez: Despite not appearing or even being mentioned in the final season of this show, she has not done a thing since leaving this show. The others I can understand as they haven’t been off the show this long, but I want her to do something. And I hope she improves her hairstyle for the future.

Kevin Rahm: While the entire world is crazy right now and pilot season messed up, there still might be hope that he is doing something as I see him in Vegas High, the potential pilot for a TV show. We’ll see what, if anything, comes of it later.

Vegas High: This is a pilot for HBO Max. Whether or not it becomes a series is unknown, but if they already filmed the pilot, it would have an edge on other shows. The plot is about a female torn between her Mormon life and the fast paced life of Las Vegas. The release date is currently unknown.

Barbara Hall: It does not appear that she will have much of a role in the new show Tommy after all so I’m removing it from the updates. I will see what future, if any, she might have in the film or movie industry, but will not be covering that show in this blog anymore. If you want to get a brief review of that show, read my TV blog.

Schedule

Available now- Word Party (on Netflix)

Unknown 2020- Homebound

Unknown 2021- The Power of the Dog, Power Book III: Raising Kanan (unknown time on unknown network)

Unknown year- Endangered, Modern Persuasion, Sallywood, The Daylong Brothers, Blanco, Vegas High, Julia