Prop Bets For The Debate

 

 

A post about Prop Bets from a Baptist may sound a bit odd—almost as odd as "Baptist Sipping Whiskey" or a calendar featuring "The Sexy Women of The WMU".

First, I need to define a Prop Bet. A Prop Bet is a bet which "may or may not have a direct bearing on the final score."  It happens all the time in the betting world, especially for a big game like the Super Bowl, where people bet who wins the coin toss and/or how many times Taylor Swift is mentioned in the broadcast. (In the last Super Bowl, if you bet Taylor Swift was mentioned 480 times in the broadcast,  you won.)

There will be a Presidential debate between President Magoo and ex-President Current Felon Orange, the apparent nominees of the major parties.

This is highly unusual because 1) It is in the middle of the summer, and 2) the parties still need to nominate them officially. 

I think this is because, deep down, both Democrats and Republicans want this election to be over as quickly as possible. Plus, both parties hate us.

This debate, down the street from me in Atlanta, has the political world in a tizzy because the political world thinks debates help decide elections, except when they don't help decide elections

I'm not sure how many people will watch this debate. There's always baseball, and Netflix has a seven-part documentary on The Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders. Of course, I would never watch a documentary on beautiful young women hopping around in hot pants when I could watch two 80-year-men yell at each other.

But I have listed several prop bets if you want to make a little scratch on the side. Remember, this is for simple entertainment purposes only and if you have a gambling problem please seek immediate attention before College Football season starts and you lose a lot of dough.

How many times will Trump say "rigged"?

How many minutes into the debate before Biden wanders off stage?

How many times does Trump keep talking after they turn his microphone off?

How many times does Biden use the word "Democracy"?

How many times will the CNN panel of Jake Tapper and Dan Bash fact-check Donald Trump?  "No, Mr.Trump, this sky is not the most amazing blue you've ever seen in your life."

How many times will Trump mention the border?

How many times will Biden refer to Trump as a felon?

How many times will the CNN panel of Jake Tapper and Dana Bash fact-check Joe Biden.  I already know this one. The answer is ZERO. Even if Biden starts in on one of his patented tall tales like he was once the starting quarterback of the Green Bay Packers and/or that he co-wrote Dr Martin Luther King's "I Have A Dream" speech.

How many times will Trump say something that is rude, crude, and socially unacceptable?

How many times will Biden claim the economy is "not really that bad"?

How many times will Trump say "Drill, Baby, Drill"?

How many times in the debate will Biden challenge Trump to a wrestling match?

How many times will Trump refer to illegal immigrants as vermin and how many times will Biden refer to them as "friends we haven't met yet"?

How many questions from the CNN panel of  Jake Tapper and Dana Bash will be about the growing budget deficit and debt?  (Answer: Zero)

Will both men be asked about Catlin Clark and the WNBA?

How many times will Trump refer to the rioters of January 6th as patriots, "including the guy who pooped on the floor" and promises to pardon them, but he hasn't decided on the guy who pooped on the floor because, "even I would say that was kind of gross". 

How will both men answer the question "the person they most admire"?  (Trump: "Me".  Biden: "My dad because he would always say, 'Joey, don't worry about people who dress up in animal costumes and make out. That's another subgroup that you can exploit for your own electoral  advantage'. He was always saying things like that back in the days when they had bumble bees on quarters and you could take a dollar and tell the guy at the cash registrar that you wanted 'four bees, please' because I was a cool guy back then and all the chicks loved me.  Then I would tell that guy to look out for Corn Pop because he was a bad dude."

Fatherhood

It may sound amazing (or not), but I've been writing this blog since 2009, and I haven't written much about being a father. 

 

This is interesting because Father's Day comes around once a year, and you would think I could come up with some Dad jokes.

 

(This would be an excellent time to remind you that I wrote the forward to Greg Marshall's book Attack Of The Killer Dad Jokes. I probably should win some sort of award for it. You should buy the book and tell people you know who wrote the forward.)

I'm in the time of my life where I am watching my son be a dad to his son, Rowan. Rowan is fortunate because my son is a ten times better Dad than me. Most of it was because my son didn't sleep at all for the first year of his life.

 

My son was born in 1991 and that year is a blur to me. There was something called "The Gulf War".  1992 is a blur to me, too. 

 

I woke up in 1993 to somebody from Arkansas running the country and something called "Garth Brooks" on the radio. My advice for all would-be dads is to get as much sleep as you possibly can before the baby is born. 

 

Being a father is one of the most rewarding things you can do. It is also the most frustrating because, let's face it, most of us have no clue how to be a father and have to rely on how our fathers raised us, which can be tricky.

 

Some of our fathers were Ward Cleaver, but some of my friends' fathers were just a mess. Some drank too much, cheated on their wives, or were just plain mean.

But they didn't have classes to teach them how to be fathers, so they had to rely on how their fathers raised them. This is probably the reason they drank too much.

 

When I was growing up, Dads wanted to be something other than your best friend. They wanted to be the King Of The Castle, where every word was treated like some kind of Holy Writ.

They didn't particularly care if you had an opinion. They didn't care if they called your opinion stupid (which it probably was) and it hurt your pumpkin little feelings.  Deal with it. The Germans didn't care about his feelings when they were shooting at him at Guadalcanal.

 

Maybe they were not the most emphatic, but most dads taught you by example. Some of them were bad, but still it was an example nonetheless.

Before the pandemic, a group of our friends from the church we grew up in, had a little reunion. All, except for one, were married to the same person. 

 

 It wasn't that we were holier or better than other people. It was just that we saw our parents, and our parents stuck together. Buying a ticket to Splitsville wasn't in our emotional DNA when things got rough.

All our fathers did one thing: they got up in the morning and went to work.  They made a living to support their families. They didn't gamble their money away and didn't chase skirts. 

When my son came along, our church had something called "The RA Racers." It was a pine box derby race in which the kids "made" their cars and would race them to see who won. 

Another bit of  advice for any dad is to avoid living in an area that has a pine box derby and a large aerospace manufacturer that employs a boat load of engineers.

I have never been handy, crafty, or particularly smart, so my son was at a complete disadvantage when it came to his RA Racer car.

I was hands-off of the RA Racer car, but one year, his car came in second place for "design."  He was really proud of his second place. That's as close as he got to winning anything in the five years we did the RA Racers.

But he learned that he wouldn't win an award every time he showed up somewhere and would have to figure out how to make a fast race car.

Long story short,  he didn't grow up and work for General Motors.

But he did grow up and marry a girl. They saved their money and bought a house.  They had a baby.  

That's what he learned from me.
 

I did teach him how to tell a joke. Greg Marshall had a little to do with that, too.

 

 

About The Other Day

 

Look, I have never claimed to be Nostradamus.

But, I wasn't surprised about a Manhattan court convicting former President Trump of thirty-four felonies, especially when they came back so quickly after the start of deliberations.

You hate to say the fix was in, but the fix was in.

Anytime something doesn't go Trump's way, he'll squawk that the system was rigged so he couldn't get a fair shake. In the past this has included, but was not limited to, The Emmy Awards and buying a NFL football team. 

A broken watch is right twice a day, and a blind pig can find an acorn.  It is one of the few times you could watch one of Trump's screeds and think, "Well, he's got a point."

The judge has given money (not a tremendous amount, but still) to the Biden campaign, and his daughter is a consultant for the Biden campaign.

If Alito is supposed to recuse himself because his wife flew a flag upside down, then we should at least concede that Judge Juan Merchan should have done the same.

Jonah Goldberg made a good point about the recent Trump mess.

"Donald Trump had sex with an adult film actress while his third wife was nursing their newborn child. He had an affair with a former Playboy model. He denies this, but as far as I can tell no one else does. Even Trump’s staunchest defenders don’t try—at least not very hard—to do so. He falsely recorded his effort to pay off to Stormy Daniels as legal expenses. He spent his entire professional life abusing the legal system, stiffing contractors out of their fees by threatening to bankrupt them in frivolous legal actions. As a landlord, he violated fair housing laws. As a presidential candidate, he promised to put his business interests in a blind trust, but once elected he didn’t and monetized the presidency for his own benefit. Also as a presidential candidate, he led chants of “Lock her up!” about his political opponent. He invited Russia to release information about her.  He was impeached (the first time) for abusing his power in an attempt to intimidate a foreign leader to investigate Joe Biden for corruption. When he tried to steal the 2020 election, he pressured his own Justice Department to allege crimes to buttress his false claims that the election was illegitimate. This was also around the time he encouraged a mob that visited riotous violence upon the Capitol in an effort to intimidate Congress out of fulfilling its constitutional duties. He’s promised to pardon people who beat up cops on his behalf. He defended the mob that chanted “Hang Mike Pence.” He’s argued—through lawyers in court—and in his own words that he should be immune to any criminal charges that stem from actions he took as president, and to a certain extent, as ex-president. He’s vowed that when he’s president again he reserves the right to do what he’s outraged is being done to him. I could go on, but you get the picture. Now, I want to be clear: Except for the misdemeanor of false records, none of these things are proven crimes and some of them are not crimes at all."

 

I'm not an attorney, and I've only spent two nights in a Holiday Inn Express, but I don't understand how any of this case was "against the law," much less a felony. Maybe it was, and I'm just too dumb down here in Jawja to understand it.

But please spare me from all the "rule of law" nonsense.

I spent a good bit of my life listening to people call Edward Kennedy a "lion of the Senate" even after he left a girl at the bottom of a pond to drown. He didn't get one minute in a courtroom for a trial because he was a famous Democrat in a state run by Democrats.

In contrast, Trump, at worst, mislabeled an account on purpose.

As far as I'm concerned, Trump was convicted thirty-four times of being Trump

Everybody got what they want. Democrats get to refer to Trump as a  "convicted felon," which he is, and the Republicans get to refer to it as a show trial, which it was.

The problem for the Democrats is they are like the dog that caught the car.  It is a feather in their cap for "finally" getting Donald Trump, who they laughed and golfed with less than twenty years ago.

Despite the conviction, Trump has a better-than-average chance of returning to The White House

Look, Trump is a lout and total jerk. But even fat orange crybabies deserve a fair trial and if they are convicted of a felony for the felony to actually be a crime.