Episode 826 Scott Adams: Democrat Debate in a City Famous for Craps (Not SF), Stone Prediction
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Content:
NBC fact-checks President Trump...NO box for Bloomberg!
Bernie's campaign manager, Faiz Shakir, meets Joel Pollack
The book of Bloomberg alleged quotes
Warren attacks Bloomberg's NDAs
Bernie fends off attack on his "Bernie Bros"
Fairness and a brokered Dem convention
Julian Assange and Dana Rohrabacher
---
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Go. Ah.
The fog is clearing.
Well, as you know, last night there was a Democratic debate in the city that is famous for craps.
No, not San Francisco.
No, the other kind of craps.
I'm talking about the gambling kind.
So it was Las Vegas.
Let's start with the first news from the simulation.
As you know, the simulation likes to wink at us by giving us tiny little coincidences that could be coincidences, or are they?
Or are they?
So before the debate last night, there was a tweet from Josh Lederman, NBC News, in which he said that campaign officials tell NBC News That Mike Bloomberg will, and this is emphasized, will not stand on a box during tonight's debate despite Trump's repeated claims that he requested one to boost his height.
Now, do you think...
I just had this visual.
I tweeted about this. I could just imagine Trump...
Seeing this tweet, like some assistant, maybe Dan Scavino brings it in and he says, stop what you're doing.
Mr. President, I know you're trying to negotiate peace in the Middle East and some trade deals and stuff, but trust me, just stop what you're doing.
You've got to read this tweet.
I can see the president taking a big sip of Diet Coke, And he looks at the tweet and he finds out that NBC News is fact-checking his claim that Bloomberg is going to be standing on a box.
And I could just see the soda, like, shooting out of his nose and covering the Resolute desk as he laughs that once again, once again, it worked.
But here's the simulation winky at us.
Josh Lederman, the journalist who tweeted this, The first four letters of his last name are lead, L-E-D-E. Now that might not mean much to you if you're not in the journalist industry, but L-E-D-E is the end of the sentence, burying the lead.
So burying the lead, the lead in journalist talk is the opening sentence that tells you what the point of the article is going to be.
Burying the lead means that you put the point of the article somewhere down After you've made somebody read a bunch.
That's called burying the lead.
So this guy is a journalist, and the first four letters of his last name are a journalist's word.
What a coincidence.
That was the least interesting thing I'm going to talk about.
I tweeted around an interview that Joel Pollack did.
He had a microphone and he caught, I guess it must have been in Nevada at the site of the debate, and he caught Sanders campaign manager Faiz Shakir, and he was asking him some questions.
And Faiz mentioned the fine people hoax, except he didn't know it was a hoax, apparently.
He said it as if that had really happened.
And, of course, Joel, being one of the primary people in the country who continuously debunks that hoax, the hoax being that the president called the racist fine people, if you look at the whole transcript, he excludes them specifically.
So if you leave out the excluding part, it looks like he included them, so it reverses its meaning.
So here's what's interesting about it and what's worth watching in particular for this.
Watch what happens when Joel corrects him and tells him that that never happened, that the fine people hoax is out of context and the full transcript says that he condemned them totally.
Because you can tell that it's a pretty central part of Faiz's belief system, kind of important to his entire worldview, and it just...
It just got sort of dented while you stand there.
And you watch his face and you see what I call the cognitive dissonance tell.
The tell is that it looks like your brain got rebooted.
So it's worth it just to look for the moment when, because Joel is credible and he's from a major news organization and he said it with such confidence And he actually quoted it exactly, so, you know, you could tell that Joel...
It must have been obvious to Faiz that Joel knew what he was talking about, because the quote was exact, and he had it at the top of his head.
So it was real interesting, because I think he started doubting one of the central pillars of his worldview right there while you watched.
So look for that. President Trump weighed in with another hilarious tweet, in my opinion.
As good as Trump is at coming from behind, as he did in 2016, he's really good as a frontrunner and dancing on the graves of his vanquished foes, that sort of thing.
So he's never funnier than when he's winning.
And so he tweets this, Mini Mike Bloomberg's debate performance tonight was perhaps the worst in the history of debates.
And there have been some really bad ones.
All right, so here's what's brilliant about that.
If he had simply said that Bloomberg did a bad job, well, people would say, of course he's going to say that.
That's sort of the end of it, right?
Yeah, the person who might run against you didn't think you did a good job.
There's no news there. But what Trump does is he puts it in a historical context, which is actually a persuasion trick.
And he does this a lot.
And because he put it in this context, you're left wondering, is it true that That Bloomberg had the worst debate performance in the history of debates.
Now, your first thought might be, well, probably not.
Probably not. I mean, I'd have to think about it for a while.
And then you do. And then you think about it.
You say to yourself, well, you know, there was that time that Nixon was all sweaty.
I mean, that was pretty bad.
But was it worse?
Than what Bloomberg did.
So suddenly, your brain is simply processing the question of whether it was the worst of all time.
Now, it doesn't matter if in the end you say it wasn't the worst of all time, if you say it's the second worst.
It doesn't matter where you end up on that.
But the fact that you used your brain processing power to even consider that it might have been Not just bad, but just maybe.
Just putting that out there. The worst of all time.
So that's just a hilarious thing that Trump does to make you think about it in its historical context until that's all you're thinking about.
And then he says, if this doesn't knock him out of the race, nothing will.
And then I love this last line.
He goes, not so easy to do what I did.
Yes, not so easy to do.
So, as I tweeted this morning, I think a lot of Democrats, and this is just speculation, but it seems like a reasonable speculation to me.
I think a lot of Democrats were watching the debate last night and having this thought simultaneously.
For the first time ever, I think Trump...
Do you know that there are a lot of very smart observers, people who are anti-Trump, who I would consider very rational, very well-informed, just really capable, smart people, who have believed forever, at least forever since 2015-ish, that Trump's success is based on luck.
Literally just luck.
Now, could you watch the debate last night and watch the best field of candidates that the Democrats could field, and then consider how Trump would perform in that same situation?
Because we see him perform at rallies and other situations.
And you hold in your head what a Trump performance would be like, and then you watch all the other candidates, the ones you, you know, if you're a Democrat, the ones you hope are going to take him down.
Is there even one moment when you're watching that you say to yourself, yes, there's somebody in that field who has more skill, just skill.
Forget about policies, you know, personality, but just who has more skill than President Trump at this stuff?
And the answer is...
Nobody. Not even close.
You know, if President Trump did not exist, this is a little mental experiment for you.
Imagine there had never been a President Trump, and you're watching the Democrat debate without that context of ever knowing that there could have been a candidate or a President like Trump.
You would have thought that this bunch of candidates were not bad.
Right? You probably would have said to yourself, oh yeah, you know, it's still true that Bloomberg had a bad night.
But you would have said to yourself, that's a pretty good, capable, solid group of people.
I think any one of them could be president.
But when you keep them in your mind next to Trump, and it's an impossible comparison to avoid, they just don't look like they're ready.
And I think that that's a realization that a lot of Democrats are having.
Now, When I watch the Democrat debate, I immediately go to CNN to watch their pundits respond, because I think you're going to learn more about What the CNN group, the folks on that side, are thinking about the whole thing.
So, John Avalon, I like to quote him all the time because he's an opinion guy.
He does a lot of opinion pieces.
Very anti-Trump.
And he used the phrase that I think you probably have heard a few times since last night.
Circular firing squad.
Now, the first time you've ever heard the phrase, you'd say to yourself, hey, that's pretty clever, but it's a very old phrase.
It's so overused.
You hear it in the corporate world all the time.
But, man, are you going to hear a lot about this debate?
And I think I heard it two or three times last night, pundits looking for a way to describe what happened, and it kind of looked like a circular firing squad.
So if your own side is describing your own performance, meaning the left-leaning media, is describing the Democrats, and you keep hearing the phrase circular firing squad, that's not a good sign.
That is not a good sign.
This is a sign of full-out panic, I would guess.
All right. In no particular order, Bloomberg called out the The socialist-leaning Democrats as communists, basically.
He inferred that they were communists or communist-like.
Who does that remind you of?
Well, it doesn't remind you of a Democrat, does it?
The moment that Bloomberg called the socialist-leaning candidates, you know, Bernie and Warren in particular, communists, he just became a Republican, didn't he?
And when Warren did a really good job, boy, credit to Elizabeth Warren.
Elizabeth Warren took out, in my opinion, she took out Bloomberg, I think for good.
I doubt he's going to make it now.
I think she wounded Bloomberg to the point where it's hard to imagine him making it to the finish line.
But she also took out Buttigieg.
I'll talk about that in a minute. But the brilliant thing that Warren did was to paint Bloomberg as Trump-lite.
In other words, to say, if you get Bloomberg, you're just getting another Trump, just sort of a smaller version.
And before she did that, I was thinking that was the smart play.
And to watch her do the smart play and execute it really well.
Her execution. Wow.
And I don't know how she got her voice.
I thought she had lost her voice to just some laryngitis even a day or two before that, but she seemed in good form.
So while I don't think that Warren helped herself that much because she was attacking the wrong person, if Warren wants to get the nomination, doesn't she have to attack Bernie?
But instead, she was attacking the one she's not really directly competing against.
Because she's kind of competing against Bernie for that channel.
So I don't think Warren helped herself, which is weird.
But I think she did hurt Bloomberg a lot because she...
And here's the trick that she used.
And when I say trick, I mean technique, persuasion-wise.
A+. And she made a joke that was really memorable.
And of course, it was good enough that it got picked up and repeated a lot.
And she said, here's her joke.
She said, I'd like to talk about who we're running against.
All right, so that's the setup to the joke.
Because your mind goes to, oh, Trump, right?
That's who we're running against.
That's who we are, the Democrats.
We're running against. And then Warren said, a billionaire who calls women fat broads and horse-faced lesbians.
And then the punchline.
And she says, no, I'm not talking about Donald Trump.
I'm talking about Mayor Bloomberg.
Now, if you're a professional humor writer, You could see this one coming.
From the first sentence, I thought to myself, oh, is that where she's going?
This is a good play.
And of course it was clever enough.
Obviously this was a prepared remark.
She probably had some professionals helping her on that because it has a joke frame and format that That you don't usually see from a politician.
And I don't think we've seen it from Elizabeth Warren.
So if I had to put a bet on it, I would say that this was a joke essentially written by a professional, which she practiced until she could deliver it.
And by the way, none of this is a criticism.
If she hired somebody who wrote her a good joke and she practiced and delivered it perfectly and it had the intended effect, I mean, that's all to Warren's benefit.
So congratulations, Warren, on the kill shot there.
But anyway, because it was funny, it's more memorable.
That's the technique part.
And she made us have a little bit of mystery about how the sentences were going to end.
That's an excellent technique.
And how do you forget this sentence?
A billionaire who calls women fat broads and horse-faced lesbians?
I mean, how do you not talk about that the next day?
So it was memorable, it was different, it was provocative.
But was it true?
Was it true? Here's the beauty part.
It doesn't really matter, does it?
Because people are primed to think it's true.
They're going to think it's true.
Because people think, well, even if these exact words aren't true, we're pretty sure by now that this Mike Bloomberg...
He has said some things we don't like sometime over his many years of life.
So people are primed to believe it.
But here's my take on it.
So Warren was referring to something that was published in something called the booklet of alleged Bloomberg quotes.
So for years and years, there have been this booklet going around alleging to be the exact quotes that Bloomberg had made in business and other settings, I guess.
But are they real?
Bloomberg says no, at least for most of them.
So I don't know if he's denied every single thing is not real, but basically he said that it's fiction.
So let's see.
Here's one of the claims that's in the book.
It says that Bloomberg once criticized the British royal family, calling them, and listen to the quote and the exact words, because the exact words are what I'm going to talk about.
So he's alleged to have said this, about the British royal family, calling them, quote, a bunch of misfits, a gay, an architect, that horsey-faced lesbian, And a kid who gave up coup start for some fat broad.
Now, here's why I, as a professional writer, have a different window into this than many of you do.
And I'm going to give you an insight that everyone here who is a writer probably already sees.
But those of you who are not professional writers, this would be a little bit invisible to you.
So this is the point I make in my book, Loser Think, that if you have experience in different domains, you just have a little more visibility into it.
And here's the insight. When people talk, they talk in very simple terms.
And when people write a sentence that they want to be read, they write differently.
So you can usually identify a sentence that was written to be on the page, Versus something that actually somebody said in the wild.
And the difference is that you can write sentences to be read that are a little clunky.
Because when you read them, you don't have to pronounce them.
So you can read them fine, and they can be a little more complicated.
But when you're speaking, you keep things simple.
And this alleged sentence is very complicated, and it's got embedded in a joke that That's kind of sophisticated.
And maybe you didn't see the joke in it, but here's the joke.
And this joke is the list If you had to give it a name, I'd call it the list form of a joke.
And the way that works is you have a list of things, but there's one thing in there that doesn't belong, and that's the joke.
The joke is that the thing that doesn't belong, you're made to think, at the same time you know it doesn't belong, you're made to think there's something about it that's similar to the other things in the list.
So let me say it again and look for this item.
So the list that Bloomberg is alleged to have said is that there are a bunch of misfits, a gay, an architect, that horsey-faced lesbian, and a kid who gave up Ku-Stark for some fat broad.
First of all, that sentence is way too complicated.
Nobody said that. Nobody said that live.
You have my professional opinion.
Nobody ever spoke those words spontaneously.
That is a written sentence.
That's a sentence somebody engineered and put a little work into it.
Because the second thing in there is an architect.
Now, it starts out saying a bunch of misfits.
Would you imagine that someone who is a trained architect would be described as a misfit?
And the answer is, well, not really.
It doesn't fit there.
That's why it's funny.
It's funny because it's got these homophobic, gay...
It's a very funny yet offensive sentence because they threw in the word architect.
The odds that Mike Bloomberg, the odds that he constructed that complicated and yet well engineered sentence on the fly, zero chance.
Zero. That's my estimate.
My estimate is there is no chance that he actually said this the way it's said.
Now, has he used these phrases before?
Yeah, maybe. Maybe.
I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if he once called somebody horsey-faced.
I mean, that wouldn't surprise me.
But there's no evidence that it happened, in my opinion.
Alright. So, but the point is that Warren's attack did Did turn Bloomberg into Trump-lite in the eyes of other Democrats?
And how in the world did they nominate Trump-lite to compete against the original Trump?
It wouldn't even be a winning formula.
I mean, so there's just nothing to recommend about it.
So basically Bloomberg got turned into a Republican and specifically into Trump.
Now last night when I heard Warren Mocking Pete Buttigieg, and she was very cleverly, and again, this is really good technique.
I'm very impressed with Warren's kill shots, because she branded Pete as sort of an empty consultant who's full of jargon and no content.
And remember I've been saying?
I've been saying this early on.
I hope she's not getting these ideas from me, because this was sort of the first thing I said about him.
Is that you could frame him as an empty suit.
Because he had a few bad moments where he seemed to just be babbling jargon.
And then you started to see it.
You're like, hey, he's really smart.
He speaks all these languages.
He looks good.
He presents well. I mean, he's so educated and knowledgeable.
He's the only one of the three who were asked who knew the president of Mexico.
He's got all this going for him.
But Is it genuine?
Or is it just a bunch of consultant speak that got cobbled together?
Now, Warren did a good job of making that case, but when I heard her use the word, or I don't know, is it one word or two words, PowerPoint?
I thought, well, it's over.
The moment Elizabeth Warren said PowerPoint, P. Buttigieg's campaign ended.
Now, that doesn't mean he won't bounce around in the polls, but he's done.
You cannot rise above being paired with PowerPoint.
Because there are a lot of people in this country who vote.
The demographic of people who vote crosses over quite a bit.
With the demographic of people who know what PowerPoint is and they don't like it a bit.
They don't like it. I mean, it's a great tool, but it does not say leadership.
It says consultants.
And so I think that's going to stick.
Now here's the funny part. As soon as I heard that, PowerPoint, I thought to myself, PowerPoint, Pete, Pete, PowerPoint, PowerPoint Pete.
Hashtag PowerPoint Pete.
And I thought to myself, I am going to be the first person who thought of this.
And I'm going to tweet that hashtag PowerPoint Pete.
But then I fell asleep because it was last night.
So I woke up this morning and I saw it again and I was like, ah, I'm going to be the first.
So I tweeted hashtag PowerPoint Pete in a little tweet, and then I waited to see if it was catching on, to see if it would trend.
So I click on it, and sure enough, there were a whole bunch of tweets using the hashtag PowerPoint Pete, except the earliest one was 11 hours before mine.
So the punchline is, I'm not the only person who thought of PowerPoint Pete!
Turns out that PowerPoint just leapt into a variety of people's heads spontaneously and instantly.
And let me tell you, if I had been the only one who thought of it, it would have been me trying to force a hashtag.
But the fact that people spontaneously came up with the same hashtag, that tells you there's something there.
There's something there.
When lots of people come up with it at the same time.
All right. Let's see what else we got going on here.
When Warren brought up the NDAs, you know, the non-disclosure agreements that apparently the Bloomberg Corporation has, at least one of them must involve Bloomberg himself.
He seemed to indicate that.
But if you remember...
Compare how Trump handled the first Republican debate When he was asked about his comments about women, and he not only got out of it by saying, only Rosie O'Donnell, which wasn't even true.
It was just ridiculously funny, and nobody expected it, and it became, you know, the moment of the entire thing.
But that was the moment, and I tell this story all the time, that was the moment when I actually stood up.
I literally stood up in my living room and walked toward the television and just said, what did I just see?
I think I just saw the next president.
And what I saw was skill.
And I thought to myself, if you can get out of that, I think you can get out of anything.
And that was the moment that I started seeing something that the president was doing that looked more like skill than luck.
And when we watched Bloomberg essentially be falling into the same trap, in this case it was Warren who sprung it, not the moderator, But she brings up all these terrible things he said, and I won't belabor you with how he awkwardly tried to address those, but he failed. I think everybody on both sides agrees that just objectively, I don't believe anybody saying he did anything but crash and burn.
So that was really interesting, because he's another...
You know, New York billionaire, tremendously successful, very smart, very clever.
He's been in every situation, gotten out of every situation.
You would expect he would have the highest level of capability for this exact kind of trap.
Obviously, he knew it was coming, right?
Everybody knew it was coming, so he should have been ready.
I'm not even sure Trump was ready.
Certainly, he wasn't ready with the Rosie O'Donnell quip.
Because that quip only made sense with the exact way the question was formed.
So I don't think Trump, I don't think he even had a canned response.
I think he saw an opening and just said, eh, boop, Rosie O'Donnell, bang, president.
So when you see the comparison, it's just even more stark that Trump is skilled and a lot of these Democrats, including Bloomberg, are just not on the same level.
When it comes to communication.
So I'm starting to think of Bloomberg like that emergency spare tire.
You know the small spare?
If you have a flat tower and you've got a spare, sometimes the spare isn't the same size as the other tires.
Bloomberg feels to me like the emergency spare in case something happens to Trump.
What I mean by that is my best world, this is just for self-interest, right?
My perfect best world is if the general election were Trump versus Bloomberg.
Because if something happened to Trump, I mean just, you know, they're all a certain age, you know, anything could happen.
If something happened to Trump before Election Day, and Bloomberg got elected instead, I don't think things would be that different.
Do you know what I mean? I don't think it would be that different.
Because I think there's a gigantic elephant in the room that nobody wants to talk about, which is that after four years of Trump, you're going to know what he did that worked, and you're going to know what he did that didn't work.
And I don't think Democrats are going to be able to come in and stop doing the things he did that worked.
So, Bloomberg's going to feel like Let's say that Trump decided to retire tomorrow or something.
Well, then you've got Sanders. Sanders is not like the small emergency spare.
Sanders is like driving the car off the ledge and nobody finds the body for six months.
There's no emergency backup.
At least Bloomberg's like a tourniquet.
He can keep you alive for a while.
He's not going to break anything.
So that's how I see him.
Anyway, I thought Bernie was boring and Bernie and there was nothing interesting he did, but Bernie just had to hit singles.
So Bernie hits a single last night and probably is enough.
Probably is enough. So Biden, interestingly, had protestors interrupt him.
I guess there were immigration people who were protesting Biden like they might protest Trump.
In other words, Biden put kids in cages and his administration deported people too, if you want to put them in those terms.
But I wonder, who is behind those protestors?
Who exactly? Were those protesters sent there by Bernie people?
Were they sent there by Trump supporters?
Or were they genuine?
Were they just literally just people who believed what they believed and they were Democrat-leaning and they just wanted to get in there and not get Biden elected?
But I think that makes Biden look a lot less appealing to anybody who was watching that.
Now, the argument still is that Biden, at least in polls, looks like he's the only one who could win in the battleground states, and he's still leading nationally and all that.
And people are saying he had one of, or maybe his best debate night.
But why did he have one of his best debate nights?
I think it's because nobody thinks he can get elected now.
I think that Biden is benefiting from being off of everybody's target list.
Because he just doesn't seem viable.
Now, could it be that just by being ignored allows him to crawl back up into contention and get lucky?
Maybe. But I think even the people who say that Biden had a good night, they're not excited about it.
Nobody is pretty happy about it.
I don't even think Democrats...
Can take any joy if Biden had a good night?
Because they don't think he can beat Trump.
I don't think they think that.
I thought Sanders had a really good response when PowerPoint Pete criticized him for the Bernie Bros.
So the Bernie Bros are a segment of Sanders supporters who are allegedly...
And probably in reality, misogynistic and everything else.
Mostly misogynistic.
And so PowerPoint Pete wanted Sanders to answer for that.
And he asked, and Pete asked, quote, Why did this pattern arise?
Why is it especially the case among your supporters?
He says to Sanders.
And here's Sanders' response, which I thought was kind of perfect.
He said, I don't think it is especially the case.
And then he went on.
Now, that's as good as you can do because the claim doesn't have any data to back it up.
Is it true that Sanders supporters are the ones who are especially bad?
Well, it's widely reported, but how can you measure such a thing?
You can't, really. So the best thing that Bernie could do is say, I don't think it's especially the case.
And how are you going to fact-check that?
You can't really fact-check it.
So that was a good way to handle it.
I had something fascinating that I was going to talk about that I may have skipped.
Let me just check quick. All right.
So here's the problem that I think Democrats are going to have.
I've talked about this a lot, but one of the big differences between conservatives and Republicans on one side and the left-leaning Democrats on the other is that I've said that the Democrats...
Tend to be goal-oriented and fairness-oriented.
The trouble is that fairness is subjective.
So if your operating principle is fairness, you're just always going to be in fights because nobody will agree what fair is.
So we have this situation where you're really going to see this come into play.
It looks like the Democratic Convention...
Will happen with probably Bernie having a plurality of the votes, meaning he has the most votes, but not close to more than half.
So nobody would have more than half, but Bernie would have the most.
So what do you do?
What would fairness look like in that question?
Well, here we see the problem.
If you're a Republican, instead of arguing fairness, they tend to argue system.
If you follow the law, if you follow the Constitution, and optionally, you know, follow the Bible, for those who care about that, there's just a set of laws, and everybody should just follow the same set of laws and we'll be fine.
And that's the best you can do for fairness.
But the outcome certainly won't be equal.
So the Republicans have what I would call a workable worldview.
Which is, look, we're all looking at the same document.
It's called the Constitution.
You follow these rules.
I follow these rules.
It's the best we can do.
Good luck. You can try to make a better system.
If you do, we'll look at it.
But good luck.
That's as close as you can get to fair.
Democrats live in more of a, I would say, an ideal dream world fantasy in which fairness is an actual thing.
And you can get it. Well, fairness isn't a thing, and you can't get it, because nobody will agree what it is.
And here's the perfect situation.
When the convention happens, Bernie supporters will say, it's fair if the person who got the most votes also gets the nomination.
It sounds fair, right?
It sounds pretty fair. And then the people who are on the other side will say, but wait, There were fewer people in total who voted for Sanders than there were people who didn't want Sanders.
In fact, two-thirds of all Democrats don't want Sanders, because that's how they voted.
So, shouldn't we be servicing the two-thirds, not the one-third?
Wouldn't that be fair?
And the answer is, sure.
It's just as fair as the thing that's the opposite.
That's the problem. It would be fair that the person with the most votes gets it.
It would also be fair if the two-thirds of Democrats got what they wanted and not the one-third.
Which one wins?
And the answer is, it's an unwinnable, you know, angels dancing on the head of a pin, ridiculous conversation that can't be won.
But because Democrats live in that world where they think there is an answer to that, And they think there is something objectively fair, and that their opinion is the one that knows what that is.
I can't even imagine what kind of a mess that's going to be.
That is going to be a skunk fight like no other.
The other thing that's like this is when you see discussions about taxes.
Somebody will say, well, the rich don't pay as much as a percentage.
And other people will say, actually, the rich pay most of all the taxes in actual dollar amounts, which is fair.
There's no answer to that.
Those are just opinions.
All right. Trump retweeted late last night A segment by Tucker Carlson who was directly calling, I think you could say this, he was directly calling for Stone to be pardoned by the president.
The president tweets that piece without comment late last night.
Foreshadowing.
If the president does not go ahead and pardon Stone, after tweeting that and after pardoning Blagovich and the others, if it doesn't happen now, I mean, it doesn't have to be today, but if Stone doesn't get pardoned, you can call me amazed.
I will be amazed if he's not pardoned.
Stone's going to be pardoned.
Alright, so, and the president, as I often say, he knows how to put it on the show.
So tweeting that piece is clearly foreshadowing, which is a writing technique where you let the audience know that there's something coming, and I'll bet you could guess what it is.
And that's what Trump is doing.
There's this weird little story about WikiLeaks and Julian Assange.
And I guess he's making a claim through his lawyer That Congressman Rohrabacher, who's no longer in Congress, but the claim is that Rohrabacher offered him a pardon on behalf of Trump in exchange for denying Russian involvement in the Democratic National Committee email leak.
And the White House and Rohrabacher have denied that happened.
Now, I wasn't there.
But I don't think that happened.
That sounds like fake news to me.
I'd be amazed.
I'm sure that didn't happen.
And here's why I think it didn't happen.
You don't offer pardons to people before you know what they're going to say.
And you certainly don't offer pardons to people to make up something.
I mean, it's sort of what they're indicating that maybe he's asking him to make up something.
Now, here's the other tell on this.
It's a little too perfect, isn't it?
Isn't it a little too perfect because it fits the Ukraine hoax and the Russia collusion hoax and it just feels like one of those?
So it's a little packaged, a little too neatly.
So, I'm not sure I feel sorry for Julian Assange anymore.
And I've been tweeting and saying, yeah, you should get a pardon, because I'd like to hear what he has to say.
But I don't think this happened.
It doesn't smell right.
And I think I lose some sympathy for him because of that.
But I don't know what's going on.
It could be mental illness.
It could be anything. There's just no way to know what's going on with Assange.
All right. Assange didn't say that.
Well, I'm looking at the news reports, and I'm guessing that there's a lot confusing in this story.
Yeah, and somebody's saying in the comments, Assange had already said publicly it wasn't the Russians, so why would Trump offer him a pardon to say what he already said publicly?
Does that even make sense?
I mean, the story doesn't even make sense.
All right. How am I feeling?
Well, you know, I don't like to talk about health stuff, but so here's the bottom line.
It turns out that my sinuses are like 10 miles a bad road.
And as sinuses go, according to a CT scan, mine's in pretty, pretty bad shape.
So I'm going to have to get surgery.
They're going to go up inside my sinuses and rotor route it out.
The odds are that nothing bad will happen because of that.
But it's going to be unpleasant.
There's a good chance I'll miss a good deal of periscoping when that happens, but I'll let you know.
Maybe if you're willing to see me bleed out of my nose, we can do it anyway.
I'll wear a mask. All right.
How do you offer a pardon without a conviction?
I don't know. Praying for you.
Thank you. Are you allergic to your cat?
Not that I can tell. No.
In fact, I don't even know.
Oh, somebody says, how does that involve your stomach?
Yeah, I've had searing stomach aches for the last week.
That's from the antibiotics.
So, I was taking antibiotics for this.
And it was a known side effect.
So my doctors say, don't worry about it.
Today was the first day that I was not in serious screaming pain.
But I also made sure that I was well medicated 24 hours a day here.