PS

"often the campaignee (?) himself is in on the grift..."

Paging Vivek Ramaswamapetalon...

What would the 2020s-version of the old expression "Paging (name of person to indicate relevance to a matter at and)"?

PS: Anti-Gnostic, to add to your 2nd point, often the campaignee (?) himself is in on the grift. Many of these campaigns accumulate lots of well-meaning working people's money and don't spend it all. "Yeah, had to drop out due to family issues..." whatever. Then they've got that big slush fund to play with. Have you ever seen a small donor get his money back, if the guy quits early? The big donors don't get it back directly...

As for DeSantis, I'll take a guy who gets things done over a visionary who doesn't.

PS: Mr. Blanc, Ann Coulter has a little bit of that Charlie Brown as Place Kicker in her. She got off of that pro-Romney stance as soon as she saw that he backtracked completely on his former anti-immigration-invasion stance. I can't remember if that was after the '12 election or not though. In the event (as they say), who else was there to vote for - Ron Paul was out, so I voted L as usual.

However, I'll give her that she does understand what the most urgently important issue is. She just believes these people too much. With Trump,I can understand that and don't see it as being a sucker. as I've written many times, Trump really did want to fix this. He got a lot done under the radar, but that made it temporary. He didn't do the more permanent and some even easy (revoking the DACA Obama E.O.) things that he'd promised.

"Hi Fidelity" - that was a good movie, anyway? Anyone seen that? John Cusack, Jack Black, and that nerdy guy.

PS I think Ron suffers from two things. First he's not really a visionary. He's a competent public sector manager and I think he wants to be President because it's the next job after "Governor." Second he's kind of an awkward, non-spontaneous guy in public so he figures he'll follow his campaign managers' advice, much of it awful.

I recall an article from several years back that said campaign consulting industry is essentially just a bunch of shallow grifters looking to burn through the donor money. Pure rent-seeking.

PS Oh well, Mx Coulter falls in love with every Repub presidential candidate. Recall that she was head-over-heels with Mitt Romney. Let that sink in. Mitt Romney. Although she’s getting a bit long in the tooth for schoolgirl crushes, she’ll be swooning over the 2028 candidate. And the 2032 candidate. If there’s still a national Repub party in 2028 and 2032. You young whippersnappers have no idea what an advance stereophonic recording over monaural recording was. Or high-fidelity: A high-fi versus a victrola. Or electronic versus acoustical recording. Okay, I don’t actually remember acoustical recording.

PS: Yeah, real stereo made a big difference to me, as I'd put the speakers as far apart in the living room as possible, blasting out REM or whomever. I miss loud music, I gotta say. The old $400 stereo cabinet unit I got when I had my first good-paying job (had to take one of my few allotted sick days for the purchase and assembly of it) finally bit the dust over 10 years back.

I have these 2 speakers, one of which has the amps and all, that can pick up music from the phone or wherever. I don't think there's enough bass there, and we haven't used it much at all.

PS: Haha, great CPR story, Alarmist, and not O/T at all, cause Rhonda. That sounds like a good time.

I linked at the bottom of the last post to my posts in basic disparagement of "First Responders" as heroes, and the one with "The Office" has one of my favorite scenes from that show, the CPR class. (youtube had nixed the previous longer one, but I inserted a new one.) It's probably funny even if you've never seen the show.

My story - it's ongoing actually - regarding CPR, is about dealing with the new Smart Dummies:

"Crash of the CPR smart dummy"

https://www.peakstupidity.com/index.php?post=1926

(Oh, I see I have the office clip in there too - big fan!)

PS

The Air Force required us to learn CPR, as if I would ever use it, so in class I found myself partnered with a young lieutenant named Rhonda. The schtick was that you would come across Resusci-Annie (the CPR dummy, unfortunately not Rhonda) lying lifeless, and you’d commence solo CPR until your partner “came on the scene,” at which point you’d ask for help. I think you can see where this is going....

But it got better. I did the mouth to mouth while Rhonda did compressions, and she continued to sing the refrain to Help me Rhonda, complete with “bah bah bah bah” because the beat kind of matched a good CPR rhythm. But at one point she compressed too hard and the little fake teeth on the dummy poked into my lip, so I pulled back saying, “Ouch! She bit me!”

Without missing a beat, Rhonda said, “You’re not supposed to slip her the tongue.” Help me Rhonda indeed.

I remember Capitol records putting out “stereo” albums with mono recordings with a lot of treble in one channel and a lot of base in the other. I was actually surprised to hear how much better actual stereo recordings better when I bought my first EMI import.