(1) This is fact: if you throw a baseball at a window, there is no harm until the baseball hits the window.

This may seem a simple minded conclusion, which it is. But how about this?

When a president signs a bill into law, the law has no effect until it is implemented. Is that equally simple minded? You would think so. But……

Why do I even bring this up? It’s because I am tired of hearing the Republicans look at everything that is happening during the Biden years that is problematic, and blaming it on Biden. My theory (totally unproven, but logical to me, and something that no one seems to say) is that the actions taken by a president may sometimes (or most of the time, or almost always) have no effect until the next president comes into office. This would be true for good and for bad.

For example, if a president implements policies which may lead to inflation, it is possible that the inflation won’t show up until the next president takes office. If, say, during the Trump presidency, choices were made that led to increased supply chain problems during the COVID period, and therefore to excess inflation from pent up demand as those supply chain problems were resolved by the next president, who is the cause of the inflation? The president whose policies led to the problems, or the president whose policies resolved the problems?

Looking at it the other way, the Democrats like to talk about the infrastructure bill that has been passed during the Biden administration. But the infrastructure projects themselves are just now beginning to become shovel ready and they will be apparent to the general population during the term of the next president. Who is going to get credit for those projects, Joe Biden, or his successor?

It’s like a big ship, heading in the wrong direction. You can change captains, but for even the best captain, the process of turning the ship around will take some time. If the new captain turns the ship around as quickly as humanly possible, but it takes a day or two to point the ship in the right direction, it will be possible to take photos of the new captain leading the ship in the wrong direction. But whose fault is it?

(2) Perhaps a small point, but Trump (foolishly) keeps calling Harris a Marxist or a Communist, and the other day began referring to her as Comrade Harris.

Let me just say that “comrade” is not a title which a capitalist or even a socialist would give to a Communist. It is not a title like Mister or Ms. or Lieutenant. It is more akin to calling a fellow sorority member “Sister”, or a good pal “Bro”.

In other words, only a Communist can call another Communist “comrade”. It is a title of relationship, not of status.

So, if Trump calls Harris “comrade”, it means that he and she are members of the same club, doesn’t it? What is Donald hiding?

(3) I thought that the Harris acceptance speech last night deserved an A or an A- for content, and an A++++ for delivery. I mark it down for content because I think that the Democrats could be a little more careful in how they say some of the things that they say. For example, to say that Project 2025 is the playbook for a second Trump administration, when Trump keeps saying that it isn’t, is probably a bit too much. They can make it clear that many things in the Project 2025 book are the same as Trump or Vance promise, they can say that Vance wrote a cover blurb for the book, they can say that the authors are among Trump’s closest advisors, they can say that Trump has previously blessed the effort or that the authors of Project 2025 have previously said that Trump supports their efforts. All that would be accurate. But to say point blank that Project 2025 and the Trump policies are identical and that we can expect a Trump presidency to implement all of them just goes too far.

Another example would be whether Trump would “with or without Congress” implement a nationwide ban on abortion. He has consistently said that he would not do that, and I have no idea whether he would want to or not. It would be fair to say that “we think Trump would implement a nationwide ban on abortion , with or without Congress, even though he denies it”, but to leave off that final clause goes too far. Same with the concept of appointing someone who would in effect be a White House “anti-abortion counsel”.

(3) On the first day of the Democratic convention, the delegates unanimously approved the party’s platform. I was really surprised when the woman introducing the resolution to adopt the platform said that it had been finished by the party’s platform committee in July. This means that it was approved when it was assumed that Joe Biden would be the party’s nominee for the presidency. Clearly, Harris will change some (we don’t know how many) of the Biden positions on various platform planks. Yet the party platform as approved does not reflect the Harris candidacy. Of course, it would have been difficult to modify the platform on short notice. It would be hard work. But as Kamala Harris has said again and again “We like hard work”.

They should have done something more than they did. It will come back to bite them, I think. Probably not bite them fatally, but bite them nevertheless. (I have already seen one Republican criticism that the party platform refers again and again to candidate Joe Biden.)

(4) One more thing surprised me. In one of the segments on Project 2025, they had some citizens on the screen bemoaning how its implementation would adversely affect them (and by extrapolation others). It was a pretty effective segment, I thought. One of the provisions discussed was the book’s determination that the Department of Education would be eliminated. And they had, as the citizen affected, a woman who, as I recall, described herself as a mid-level manager in Washington at the Department of Education, and she expressed distress that her job (and her Department) would be totally eliminated if Donald Trump was elected to a second term.

Whoa, I said (to myself). Isn’t this an obvious violation of the Hatch Act, which prohibits federal employees from partisan political advocacy? I expect that the federal employee involved is going to hear something about this. They should have known better, and used a recipient of assistance from DOE, not a federal employee, to make their point.