Elections; 2024 by THG

Trump will be fine. He will also be your next President.

--------------------------------------------------

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Thursday, February 29, 2024 8:54 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Trump will be fine. He will also be your next President.

Increasingly, Republicans are siding with Russia. With Putin.

This 90-second clip goes a long way to explaining why.

The Prime Minister of Australia recounts watching Trump's interactions with Putin as "really creepy", Trump "is in awe of Putin".

“When you see Trump with Putin, as I have on a few occassions, he’s like the 12-year old boy that goes to high school and meets the captain of the football team. ‘My hero!’ It’s really creepy.” @TurnbullMalcolm , 29th Prime Minister of Australia.

https://twitter.com/ResoluteSquare/status/1762577455678660653

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Thursday, February 29, 2024 9:38 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Why Is Trump Trying to Make Ukraine Lose?

The former president isn’t in office—but is still dictating U.S. policy.

By Anne Applebaum | February 29, 2024, 6:15 AM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/02/one-global-issue-tru
mp-cares-about/677592/

Nearly half a year has passed since the White House asked Congress for another round of American aid for Ukraine. Since that time, at least three different legislative efforts to provide weapons, ammunition, and support for the Ukrainian army have failed.

Kevin McCarthy, the former House speaker, was supposed to make sure that the money was made available. But in the course of trying, he lost his job.

The Senate negotiated a border compromise (including measures border guards said were urgently needed) that was supposed to pass alongside aid to Ukraine. But Senate Republicans who had supported that effort suddenly changed their minds and blocked the legislation.

Finally, the Senate passed another bill, including aid for Ukraine, Taiwan, Israel, and the civilians of Gaza, and sent it to the House. But in order to avoid having to vote on that legislation, the current House speaker, Mike Johnson, sent the House on vacation for two weeks. That bill still hangs in limbo. A majority is prepared to pass it, and would do so if a vote were held. Johnson is maneuvering to prevent that from happening.

Maybe the extraordinary nature of the current moment is hard to see from inside the United States, where so many other stories are competing for attention. But from the outside—from Warsaw, where I live part-time; from Munich, where I attended a major annual security conference earlier this month; from London, Berlin, and other allied capitals—nobody doubts that these circumstances are unprecedented. Donald Trump, who is not the president, is using a minority of Republicans to block aid to Ukraine, to undermine the actual president’s foreign policy, and to weaken American power and credibility.

For outsiders, this reality is mind-boggling, difficult to comprehend and impossible to understand. In the week that the border compromise failed, I happened to meet a senior European Union official visiting Washington. He asked me if congressional Republicans realized that a Russian victory in Ukraine would discredit the United States, weaken American alliances in Europe and Asia, embolden China, encourage Iran, and increase the likelihood of invasions of South Korea or Taiwan. Don’t they realize? Yes, I told him, they realize. Johnson himself said, in February 2022, that a failure to respond to the Russian invasion of Ukraine “empowers other dictators, other terrorists and tyrants around the world … If they perceive that America is weak or unable to act decisively, then it invites aggression in many different ways.” But now the speaker is so frightened by Trump that he no longer cares. Or perhaps he is so afraid of losing his seat that he can’t afford to care. My European colleague shook his head, not because he didn’t believe me, but because it was so hard for him to hear.

Since then, I’ve had a version of that conversation with many other Europeans, in Munich and elsewhere, and indeed many Americans. Intellectually, they understand that the Republican minority is blocking this money on behalf of Trump. They watched first McCarthy, then Johnson, fly to Mar-a-Lago to take instructions. They know that Senator Lindsey Graham, a prominent figure at the Munich Security Conference for decades, backed out abruptly this year after talking with Trump. They see that Donald Trump Jr. routinely attacks legislators who vote for aid to Ukraine, suggesting that they be primaried. The ex-president’s son has also said the U.S. should “cut off the money” to Ukrainians, because “it’s the only way to get them to the table.” In other words, it’s the only way to make Ukraine lose.

Many also understand that Trump is less interested in “fixing the border,” the project he forced the Senate to abandon, than he is in damaging Ukraine. He surely knows, as everybody does, that the Ukrainians are low on ammunition. He must also know that, right now, no one except the U.S. can help. Although European countries now collectively donate more money to Ukraine than we do (and the numbers are rising), they don’t yet have the industrial capacity to sustain the Ukrainian army. By the end of this year, European production will probably be sufficient to supply the Ukrainians, to help them outlast the Russians and win the war. But for the next nine months, U.S. military support is needed.

Yet Trump wants Congress to block it. Why? This is the part that nobody understands. Unlike his son, Trump himself rarely talks about Ukraine, because his position isn’t popular. Most Americans don’t want Russia to win.

Often, Trump’s motives are described as “isolationist,” but this is not quite right. The isolationists of the past were figures such as Senator Robert Taft, the son of an American president and the grandson of an American secretary of war. Taft, a loyal member of the Republican Party, opposed U.S. involvement in World War II because, as he once said, an “overambitious foreign policy” could “destroy our armies and prove a real threat to the liberty of the people of the United States.” But Trump is not concerned about our armies. He disdains our soldiers as “suckers” and “losers.” I can’t imagine that he is terribly worried about the “liberty of the people of the United States” either, given that he has already tried once to overthrow the American electoral system, and might well do it again.

Trump and the people around him are clearly not isolationists in the old-fashioned sense. An isolationist wants to disengage from the world. Trump wants to remain engaged with the world, but on different terms. Trump has said repeatedly that he wants a “deal” with Russian President Vladimir Putin, and maybe this is what he means: If Ukraine is partitioned, or if Ukraine loses the war, then Trump could twist that situation to his own advantage. Perhaps, some speculate, Trump wants to let Russia back into international oil markets and get something in return for that. But that explanation might be too complex: Maybe he just wants to damage President Joe Biden, or he thinks Putin will help him win the 2024 election. The Russian hacking of the Democratic National Committee was very beneficial to Trump in 2016; perhaps it could happen again.

Trump is already behaving like the autocrats he admires, pursuing transactional politics that will profoundly weaken the United States. But he doesn’t care. Liz Cheney, one of the few Republicans who understands the significance of this moment, describes the stakes like this: “We are at a turning point in the history not just of this nation, but of the world.” Once the U.S. is no longer the security guarantor for Europe, and once the U.S. is no longer trusted in Asia, then some nations will begin to hedge, to make their own deals with Russia and China. Others will seek their own nuclear shields. Companies in Europe and elsewhere that now spend billions on U.S. energy investments or U.S. weapons will make different kinds of contracts. The United States will lose the dominant role it has played in the democratic world since 1945.

All of this could happen even if Trump doesn’t win the election. Right now, even if he never regains the White House, he is already dictating U.S. foreign policy, shaping perceptions of America in the world. Even if the funding for Ukraine ultimately passes, the damage he has done to all of America’s relationships is real. Anton Hofreiter, a member of the German Parliament, told me in Munich that he fears Europe could someday be competing against three autocracies: “Russia, China, and the United States.” When he said that, it was my turn to shake my head, not because I didn’t believe him, but because it was so hard to hear.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Thursday, February 29, 2024 10:07 AM

Trump will be fine. He will also be your next President.

--------------------------------------------------

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Thursday, February 29, 2024 10:13 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Trump will be fine. He will also be your next President.

You don't believe what you write which is why you have repeated the same words thousands of times as if the repetition of your prayer will make Trump President and fine.

Republicans used to back Ukraine. Then came middle fingers in Alabama.

By Danielle Paquette | February 29, 2024 at 6:00 a.m. EST

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2024/02/29/ukraine-support-alaba
ma-political-divide/

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. — In the early days, long before Russia’s war entered its third year, drivers honked and smiled when Natalia Reznick stood by the roadside holding her handmade sign: “Support Ukraine.”

Then one afternoon in November (2023), a man lowered his truck window and flipped her off.

She might have dismissed that as a fluke if, a few weeks later, another man hadn’t approached her booth in a Trader Joe’s parking lot and asked, “Haven’t we given you enough money?”

“The hostility shocked me,” recalled Reznick, 44, whose late father was Ukrainian. “I felt it then — the shift.”

She had been trying to collect a couple hundred dollars for food and medicine — food and medicine! Yet somewhere along the way, even a stay-at-home mom’s little charity effort outside a northern Alabama grocery store became mired in another American culture clash.

To many Republicans here and across the country, “Support Ukraine” is now a liberal cause — a costly diversion from more pressing domestic issues, such as securing the southern border. Some think European allies should bear the responsibility for stopping Vladimir Putin’s takeover, casting Kyiv’s potential ruin as not America’s problem. Others suspect aid funds might be landing in the wrong pockets. Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) claimed this month, without evidence, that U.S. tax dollars meant to help Ukrainian forces have vanished in an “enormous theft.” Then he slammed Ukraine as “one of the most blatantly, notoriously corrupt places in the world.”

It’s a far cry from the display of unity two years ago, when Putin launched his invasion and politicians from both sides of the aisle scrambled to arm Kyiv, Reznick thought. Billions of aid dollars flowed through her city, Huntsville, a defense industry hub with an Army base one local official called the “center of gravity for supporting the Ukrainians.”

Plenty of conservatives in this community, a purple dot in a sea of bright red, are proud of that distinction. The president of the county’s GOP men’s club, for instance, describes himself as a “Mitt Romney Republican” and openly blasts Putin an enemy of freedom.

The mood among the MAGA devotees, however, has lately veered toward mistrust, said Reznick, a Democrat. Her circle, she acknowledges, is a “progressive bubble,” but still, she had never dreamed of being confronted outside a Trader Joe’s or anywhere else in Huntsville.

She could understand why her neighbors wouldn’t want to spend money on a war overseas. She could understand heartbreak over this nation’s woes. But the nastiness? The way Tuberville had insulted an already battered Ukraine?

“It’s unbelievable,” she said.

By all accounts, her dad’s home country was losing ground to Russia and dangerously short on gear needed to fight back.

Tuberville was one of the two Republican senators from Alabama blocking that gear. They had opposed the latest foreign aid package that includes $61 billion for Ukraine, which was ultimately able to pass the Senate with bipartisan support, Reznick had noted with relief, yet now looked doomed to languish in the House.

Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) has refused to bring the package up for a vote until “we take care of our own first,” raising concerns that it could be held up through spring, if it survives the congressional standoff at all.

Such resistance has become increasingly popular among right-leaning voters, according to a December poll from the Pew Research Center: Nearly half of Republicans said the United States, Kyiv’s single largest defense backer to date, is providing too much aid to Ukraine, a steep climb from the invasion’s earlier stages. Just 16 percent of Democrats shared that view.

Reznick blames the shift on former president Donald Trump, who has expressed admiration for Putin, criticized Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky and declined to say which side should win the war.

She was alarmed when, at a rally this month, Trump said he would let the Russians do “whatever the hell they want” to NATO allies that didn’t spend enough on defense. Conservatives who had rushed to protect Ukraine, meanwhile, flipped to follow his lead. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), after visiting Kyiv last May, urged Biden to “do more” — and then voted against doing more, explaining, “I talked to President Trump today and he’s dead set against this package.”

Now Trump was railing online against aid for Ukraine “WITHOUT THE HOPE OF PAYBACK,” and Reznick was in the library, checking her email one late February morning to see if Huntsville’s congressman, Rep. Dale W. Strong (R), had responded to her pleas for help.

Strong once backed support for Kyiv, too, before pivoting to say at a news conference last year that his concern “is about the southern border.”

“Nothing,” Reznick said, refreshing her inbox.

So she unpacked her markers and began work on another poster for a Ukraine rally the next morning at a downtown park, wondering who would show up and what they would say.

***

That evening, two women who would not be attending the Ukraine rally were chatting at a fitness studio across town.

Cindy Prylinski was finishing her front-desk shift and thinking, as she often did, about her 30-year-old daughter who lives hundreds of miles away in a much bigger city.

She didn’t like strangers knowing which city. She worried about someone targeting her daughter, hurting her daughter.

“This country doesn’t feel safe anymore,” she said as her clients streamed out of a ballet barre class.

No one she knew had been targeted or hurt, but coverage of the southern border was spooking her. Prylinski, 64, pictured unvetted folks slipping into Texas with drugs and guns and making their way to God knows where.

“We shouldn’t be in Ukraine when our own borders aren’t closed,” she said. “We should worry about our own country, about the cartels.”

Her favorite media personalities — Glenn Beck, a conservative radio host, and Mike Lindell, chief executive of MyPillow — hammered the topic relentlessly, and at some point, Prylinski had grown suspicious of anything to do with Ukraine.

Yes, she knew the aid money was an economic boon for Huntsville and the thousands of workers here who design, assemble and ship out military weapons.

“But we could redirect that money,” she said, “to the invasion on our own border.”

Where had the aid dollars actually gone, anyway? Prylinski could see no impact. Were Biden and the Democrats secretly pocketing some of the money? She believed they had stolen the 2020 election, so that wasn’t out of the question.

“I don’t trust ’em as far as I can throw ’em,” she said.

One of her clients, Stacy Oberman, 56, an engineer now lacing up her tennis shoes, agreed that they shouldn’t trust the left. Democrats, she thought, were courting immigrants to “buy votes.”

She also harbored some skepticism toward Zelensky. Were things really as dire as he had been saying?

“Is Zelensky bluffing?’ she asked.

Trump had recently posted that no aid should be given to any country “unless it is done as a loan,” and Oberman thought that sounded like a better idea, one that prioritized America’s financial health.

“If this country collapses in five years,” she said, “there will be no more aid for anyone.”

Over the last two years, both Oberman and Prylinski have seen people standing around Huntsville with signs in support of Ukraine, among other causes they saw as liberal.

Some people yell at them and flip them off, Prylinski had noticed.

“And that’s never okay,” she said.

The yellers, she thought, should save their anger for Biden and the Democrats.

“Not people expressing their freedom of speech,” Prylinski said.

**

She draped blue and yellow flags on the gazebo at Big Spring Park. She taped signs to a table: “ARM UKRAINE. CALL YOUR CONGRESSMAN.”

She fixed a red beaded crown in her blonde hair, one similar to traditional accessories she had seen people wear in her Ukrainian home city, Kharkiv, which had lately been constructing schools in underground bunkers.

Anya Kuklis, 41, had helped organize dozens of “Support Ukraine” rallies and charity events in Huntsville since the war began, but this one, on the invasion’s second anniversary, felt especially urgent as America’s aid package seemed to be in jeopardy of falling apart.

“Call Dale W. Strong,” she advised anyone who would listen, passing out blue and yellow beaded bracelets.

Kuklis moved here 14 years ago for her husband’s job. Over the last year, like Reznick, she had spotted her first middle finger — then a few more — while standing outside a church with her own “Support Ukraine” sign, trying to direct traffic to craft or bake sales.

On a good day, she and her friends raised $3,000 to cover food and medicine for Ukrainian soldiers. They would PayPal the money to her cousins in the region, one of whom was a soldier.

A lot of people, she was touched to see, were still passionate about that mission. Donations weren’t dropping off. The group’s blueberry lemon lavender bread remained a hit.

Things had taken a painful turn last summer, though, when a man rolled up and mockingly tossed pennies at her feet.

Kuklis chose to focus on what happened later that day, when another man parked his car and handed her a $100 bill. He was from Iraq, he explained, so he understood the horrors of war.

“Trying to look at the positives,” Kuklis said.

That was easy to do on this Saturday when the sun was shining, making up for the occasionally fierce gusts of wind, and she counted at least a hundred people — including a teary-eyed Reznick — bursting into a chant of “Slava Ukraini!” (Glory to Ukraine!)

No middle fingers. No pennies.

Not everyone was chanting along, though. Behind them, families strolled beside the park’s canal, mostly minding their own business and tossing crumbs to ducks.

Virginia Spicka, 26, was hanging out with her 2-year-old son, her 17-month-old daughter and 57-year-old mother, who, much to her gratitude, was making sure their stroller wasn’t blowing into the water.

“Let’s put this way over here in the grass,” her mother said, laughing.

They had been talking about the nursing student who had been found dead two days earlier in a Georgia university town, a tragedy that had dominated conservative media. The nursing student had been out for a jog by herself, and now Spicka was worried about her sister, who loved to run solo.

Federal immigration officials had confirmed that the man accused of murdering the young woman had entered the country illegally from Venezuela.

“That is what we need to be worried about,” Spicka said. “The border. Not Ukraine.”

Her kids looked eager to feed the ducks. They just had to find change for a dollar, since the crumb dispensers around the park accepted only quarters.

“Maybe I can take this to the Ukraine rally,” said her mother, flashing the dollar, “since they’re getting so much money.”

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Thursday, February 29, 2024 12:05 PM

After 12 Republican Governors Rejected Program For Free Lunches For Poor Kids, A Few Have Second Thoughts

A bipartisan initiative to provide essential nutrition to underprivileged children in the summer months has been met with resistance from over a dozen Republican governors. However, the mounting pressure on these governors to reconsider their stance has signaled a potential shift in the situation.

Known as Summer EBT, the program seeks to alleviate food insecurity among children by offering pre-loaded cards that grant easier access to food supplies when schools are closed. This marks a significant expansion of federal nutrition programs, and the Biden administration estimates that it could benefit approximately 30 million eligible schoolchildren in the summer.

Despite its potential impact, 15 states, all led by Republican governors, initially declined to participate due to concerns about costs and ideological opposition to expanding federal benefits. This decision has sparked outrage among anti-hunger organizations, advocates for rural communities, educators and local youths and has led to vigorous efforts to persuade these governors to reconsider their positions.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/after-12-republican-governors-
rejected-program-for-free-lunches-for-poor-kids-a-few-have-second-thoughts/ar-BB1j6P3j?ocid=msedgntp&cvid=95956281201d4010af639fa987741602&ei=79

They remembered it's an election year.

T

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Thursday, February 29, 2024 12:39 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
After 12 Republican Governors Rejected Program For Free Lunches For Poor Kids, A Few Have Second Thoughts

A bipartisan initiative to provide essential nutrition to underprivileged children in the summer months has been met with resistance from over a dozen Republican governors. However, the mounting pressure on these governors to reconsider their stance has signaled a potential shift in the situation.

Known as Summer EBT, the program seeks to alleviate food insecurity among children by offering pre-loaded cards that grant easier access to food supplies when schools are closed. This marks a significant expansion of federal nutrition programs, and the Biden administration estimates that it could benefit approximately 30 million eligible schoolchildren in the summer.

Despite its potential impact, 15 states, all led by Republican governors, initially declined to participate due to concerns about costs and ideological opposition to expanding federal benefits. This decision has sparked outrage among anti-hunger organizations, advocates for rural communities, educators and local youths and has led to vigorous efforts to persuade these governors to reconsider their positions.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/after-12-republican-governors-
rejected-program-for-free-lunches-for-poor-kids-a-few-have-second-thoughts/ar-BB1j6P3j?ocid=msedgntp&cvid=95956281201d4010af639fa987741602&ei=79

They remembered it's an election year.

T

Oh. Is that why Joe Biden* is pretending to care about border security now?

--------------------------------------------------

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Thursday, February 29, 2024 1:24 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

“The Republican Party is dying as Trump and his supporters take it over . . .”

By Heather Cox Richardson | Feb 28, 2024

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/february-28-2024

Behind the horse race–type coverage of the contest for presidential nominations, a major realignment is underway in United States politics. The Republican Party is dying as Trump and his supporters take it over, but there is a larger story behind that crash. This moment looks much like the other times in our history when a formerly stable two-party system has fallen apart and Americans reevaluated what they want out of their government.

Trump’s takeover of the party has been clear at the state level, where during his term he worked to install loyalists in leadership positions. From there, they have pushed the Big Lie that he won the 2020 election and have continued to advance his claims to power.

The growing radicalism of the party has also been clear in Congress, where Trump loyalists refuse to permit legislation that does not reflect their demands and where, after they threw House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) out of office—dumping a speaker midterm for the first time in history—Trump lieutenant Jim Jordan (R-OH) threatened holdouts to vote him in as speaker. Jordan failed, but the speaker Republican representatives did choose, Mike Johnson (R-LA), is himself a Trump loyalist, just one who had made fewer enemies than Jordan.

The radicalization of the House conference has led 21 members of the party who gravitate toward actual lawmaking to announce they are not running for reelection. Many of them are from safe Republican districts, meaning they will almost certainly be replaced by radicals.

The Senate has tended to hang back from this radicalization, but in a dramatic illustration of Trump’s takeover of the party, Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell today announced he would step down from his leadership position in November. McConnell is the leading symbol of the pre-Trump party, a man whose determination to cut taxes and regulation led him to manipulate the rules of the Senate and silence warnings that Russian disinformation was polluting the 2016 campaign so long as it meant keeping a Democrat out of the White House and Republicans in control of the Senate.

The extremist House Freedom Caucus promptly tweeted: “Our thoughts are with our Democrat colleagues in the Senate on the retirement of their Co-Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (D-Ukraine). No need to wait till November…Senate Republicans should IMMEDIATELY elect a *Republican* Minority Leader.”

Trump has also taken control of the Republican National Committee (RNC) itself. On Monday, RNC chair Ronna McDaniel announced that she is resigning on March 8. Trump picked McDaniel himself in 2016 but has come to blame her both for the party’s continued underperformance since 2016 and for its current lack of money.

Now Trump has made it clear he wants even closer loyalists at the top of the party, including his own daughter-in-law, Lara Trump. She has suggested she is open to using RNC money exclusively for Trump. This might be what has prompted the Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity to pull support from Nikki Haley in order to invest in downballot races.

But the party that is consolidating around Trump is alienating a majority of Americans. It has abandoned the principles that the party embraced from 1980 until 2016. In that era, Republicans called for a government that cut taxes and regulations with the idea that consolidating wealth at the top of the economy would enable businessmen to invest far more effectively in new development than they could if the government interfered, and the economy would boom. They also embraced global leadership through the expansion of capitalism and a strong military to protect it.

Under Trump, though, the party has turned away from global leadership to the idea that strong countries can do what they like to their neighbors, and from small government to big government that imposes religious rules. Far from protecting equality before the law, Republican-dominated states have discriminated against LGBTQ+ individuals, racial and ethnic minorities, and women. And, of course, the party is catering to Trump’s authoritarian plans. Neo-nazis attended the Conservative Political Action Conference a week ago.

But these changes are not popular. Tuesday’s Michigan primary revealed the story we had already seen in the Republican presidential primaries and caucuses in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina. Trump won all those contests, but by significantly less than polls had predicted. He has also been dogged by the strength of former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley. With Trump essentially running as an incumbent, he should be showing the sort of strength Biden is showing—with challengers garnering only a few percentage points—but even among the fervent Republicans who tend to turn out for primaries, Trump’s support is soft.

It seems that the same policies that attract Trump’s base are turning other voters against him. Republican leadership, for example, is far out of step with the American people on abortion rights—69% of Americans want the right to abortion put into law—and that gulf has only widened over the Alabama Supreme Court decision endangering in vitro fertilization by saying that embryos have the same rights as children from the moment of conception. That decision created such an outcry that Republicans felt obliged to claim they supported IVF. But push came to shove today when Senator Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) reintroduced a bill to protect IVF that Republicans had previously rejected and Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-MS) killed it again.

The party has also tied itself to a deeply problematic leader. Trump is facing 91 criminal charges in four different cases—two state, two federal—but the recently-decided civil case in which he, the Trump Organization, his older sons, and two associates were found liable for fraud is presenting a more immediate threat to Trump’s political career.

Trump owes writer E. Jean Carroll $88.3 million; he owes the state of New York $454 million, with interest accruing at more than $100,000 a day. Trump had 30 days from the time the judgments were filed to produce the money or a bond for it. Today he asked the court for permission to post only $100 million rather than the full amount in the New York case, as required by law, because he would have to sell property at fire-sale prices to come up with the money.

In addition to making it clear to donors that their investment in his campaign now might end up in the hands of lawyers or the victorious plaintiffs, the admission that Trump does not have the money he has claimed punctures the image at the heart of his political success: that of a billionaire businessman.

Judge Anil C. Singh rejected Trump’s request but did stay the prohibition on Trump’s getting loans from New York banks, potentially allowing him to get the money he needs.

As Trump’s invincible image cracks with this admission, as well as with the increased coverage of his wild statements, others are starting to push back on him and his loyalists. President Biden’s son Hunter Biden testified behind closed doors to members of the House Oversight and Judiciary Committees today, after their previous key witness turned out to be working with Russian operatives and got indicted for lying.

Hunter Biden began the day with a scathing statement saying unequivocally that he had never involved his father in his business dealings and that all the evidence the committee had compiled proved that. In their “partisan political pursuit,” he said, they had “trafficked in innuendo, distortion, and sensationalism—all the while ignoring the clear and convincing evidence staring you in the face. You do not have evidence to support the baseless and MAGA-motivated conspiracies about my father because there isn’t any.”

After an hour, Democratic committee members described to the press what was going on in the hearing room. They reported that the Republicans’ case had fallen apart entirely and that Biden had had a “very understandable, coherent business explanation for every single thing that they asked for.” While former president Trump invoked his Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself more than 440 times during a deposition in his fraud trial, Biden did not take the Fifth at all.

The discrediting of the Republicans continued later. When Representative Tim Burchett (R-TN) tried to recycle the discredited claim that “$20 million flowed through” to then–vice president Biden, CNN host Boris Sanchez fact-checked him and said, “I’m not going to let you say things that aren’t true.”

That willingness to push back on the Republicans suggests a new political moment in which Americans, as they have done before when one of the two parties devolved into minority rule, wake up to the reality that the system has been hijacked and begin to reclaim their government.

But can they prevail over the extremists MAGA Republicans have stowed into critical positions in the government? Tonight the Supreme Court, stacked with Trump appointees, announced that rather than let the decision of a lower court stay in place, it would take up the question of whether Trump is immune from criminal prosecution for his actions in trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election. That decision means a significant delay in Trump’s trial for that attempt.

“This is a momentous decision, just to hear this case,” conservative judge Michael Luttig told Nicolle Wallace of MSNBC. “There was no reason in this world for the Supreme Court to take this case…. Under the constitutional laws of the United States, there has never been an argument that a former president is immune from prosecution for crimes that he committed while in office.”

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Thursday, February 29, 2024 6:48 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
“The Republican Party is dying as Trump and his supporters take it over . . .”

Good. Fuck the warmongering, America-Last NeoCon trash.

--------------------------------------------------

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Friday, March 1, 2024 2:10 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Until now Republicans have starved the IRS so thoroughly they didn't even have the staff to ask tax cheaters to fill out a 1040.

One thing nonfilers haven’t had to fear, until recently, was hearing about their shortcomings from the IRS. The agency generally knows who should be filing a return but hasn’t had the staff to handle correspondence with these taxpayers, so it greatly cut back sending out notices, Werfel said.

The first batch of more than 25,000 letters will go out to taxpayers with more than $1 million in income, followed by more than 100,000 letters to people with incomes between $400,000 and $1 million. The notice says to file your return immediately or to explain either why you are late or don’t have to file.

GOP lawmakers are still trying to claw back IRS funding, and the agency is likely to lose $20 billion of the $80 billion it received. On Thursday, the Senate confirmed Marjorie Rollinson to be the IRS’s top lawyer, and just six of the 49 Republicans voted for her.

The IRS program to pursue nonfilers has only run sporadically since 2016, due to budget cuts

https://www.wsj.com/personal-finance/taxes/irs-targets-high-earners-wh
o-dont-file-tax-returns-3a984c1b?st=xt7rps230rrok38&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Friday, March 1, 2024 2:22 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

What I learned when I read 887 pages of plans for Trump’s second term

By Carlos Lozada | February 29, 2024

https://attentiontotheunseen.com/2024/02/29/what-i-learned-when-i-read
-887-pages-of-plans-for-trumps-second-term/

Every new administration that wins power away from the opposing party contends that whatever its predecessors did was terrible and that victory constitutes a popular mandate to fix or get rid of it all. Elections have consequences, politicians love to remind us, and a big one entails trying to change everything, right away.

It is possible to read “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise” — an 887-page document proposing to remake the executive branch, department by department, agency by agency, office by office — as one more go-round in this Washington tradition. With contributions by dozens of conservative thinkers and activists under the leadership of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, the book announces itself as part of a “unified effort to be ready for the next conservative administration to govern at 12:00 noon, Jan. 20, 2025.” There is much work ahead, it states, “just to undo the significant damage that will have been done during the Biden years.”
https://thf_media.s3.amazonaws.com/project2025/2025_MandateForLeadersh
ip_FULL.pdf

The book has not been blessed by Donald Trump or his campaign, and the authors emphasize that they want to help the next conservative president, “whoever he or she may be.” But with so many former Trump officials among its contributors, so much praise for him throughout its pages (he is mentioned some 300 times, compared with once for Nikki Haley) and such clear affinity between Trump’s impulses and the document’s proposals, it is easy to imagine “Mandate for Leadership” wielding influence in a second Trump term. It is an off-the-shelf governing plan for a leader who took office last time with no clear plan and no real ability to govern. This book attempts to supply him with both.

There is plenty here that one would expect from a contemporary conservative agenda: calls for lower corporate taxes and against abortion rights; criticism of diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives and the “climate fanaticism” of the Biden administration; and plans to militarize the southern border and target the “administrative state,” which is depicted here as a powerful and unmanageable federal bureaucracy bent on left-wing social engineering. Yet what is most striking about the book is not the specific policy agenda it outlines but how far the authors are willing to go in pursuit of that agenda and how reckless their assumptions are about law, power and public service.

“Mandate for Leadership,” which was edited by Paul Dans and Steven Groves of the Heritage Foundation, is not about anything as simplistic as being dictator for a day but about consolidating authority and eroding accountability for the long haul. It calls for a relentless politicizing of the federal government, with presidential appointees overpowering career officials at every turn and agencies and offices abolished on overtly ideological grounds. Though it assures readers that the president and his or her subordinates “must be committed to the Constitution and the rule of law,” it portrays the president as the personal embodiment of popular will and treats the law as an impediment to conservative governance. It elevates the role of religious beliefs in government affairs and regards the powers of Congress and the judiciary with dismissiveness.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Friday, March 1, 2024 2:58 PM

You forgot to quote the most important part of the story:

Quote:
Those who earn less than $400,000 and haven’t filed aren’t off the hook. Taxpayers are responsible for declaring all of their income, calculating their tax liability correctly and filing a tax return on time. By not filing, some lower-income taxpayers miss out on refunds.

Those are the only people the IRS are going after.

Not that you'd know, but there's no such thing as somebody who makes over $400k and doesn't file a tax return. They might try to pull some shady accounting, but there is ZERO ROI for a person making nearly half a million dollars a year to not file a tax return at all. They have FAR too much to lose and the IRS can go back 7 years and audit you whenever it feels like doing so.

Yours is a very simple mind.

--------------------------------------------------

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Friday, March 1, 2024 5:46 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
You forgot to quote the most important part of the story:

Quote:
Those who earn less than $400,000 and haven’t filed aren’t off the hook. Taxpayers are responsible for declaring all of their income, calculating their tax liability correctly and filing a tax return on time. By not filing, some lower-income taxpayers miss out on refunds.

Those are the only people the IRS are going after.

Not that you'd know, but there's no such thing as somebody who makes over $400k and doesn't file a tax return. They might try to pull some shady accounting, but there is ZERO ROI for a person making nearly half a million dollars a year to not file a tax return at all. They have FAR too much to lose and the IRS can go back 7 years and audit you whenever it feels like doing so.

Yours is a very simple mind.

You are a jackass, 6ixStringJack, believing the propaganda that rich tax cheats such as Trump want you to believe. But you believed Trump paid his taxes because he said he did, which means you are extra stupid. His fictional losses are whatever amount he wants and his taxes are set by himself, and continues to be fiction until a judge goes over his accounting. And then Trump goes to the Supreme Court over his taxes.

https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/30/politics/donald-trump-tax-returns-relea
sed/index.html

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Friday, March 1, 2024 6:36 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
You forgot to quote the most important part of the story:

Quote:
Those who earn less than $400,000 and haven’t filed aren’t off the hook. Taxpayers are responsible for declaring all of their income, calculating their tax liability correctly and filing a tax return on time. By not filing, some lower-income taxpayers miss out on refunds.

Those are the only people the IRS are going after.

Not that you'd know, but there's no such thing as somebody who makes over $400k and doesn't file a tax return. They might try to pull some shady accounting, but there is ZERO ROI for a person making nearly half a million dollars a year to not file a tax return at all. They have FAR too much to lose and the IRS can go back 7 years and audit you whenever it feels like doing so.

Yours is a very simple mind.
You are a jackass, 6ixStringJack, believing the propaganda that rich tax cheats such as Trump want you to believe. But you believed Trump paid his taxes because he said he did, which means you are extra stupid. His fictional losses are whatever amount he wants and his taxes are set by himself, and continues to be fiction until a judge goes over his accounting. And then Trump goes to the Supreme Court over his taxes.

https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/30/politics/donald-trump-tax-returns-relea
sed/index.html

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Read what I said again, then try again. You stupid fuck.

--------------------------------------------------

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Saturday, March 2, 2024 7:30 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Read what I said again, then try again. You stupid fuck.

6ix, I know all about Trumptards. You are a bunch of tax cheaters. Cheating and getting upset when called out for cheating is Trumptard standard practice.

Hunter Biden’s opening statement, where he calls out Republicans running for office in 2024 for their cheating/lying/stupidity:

https://andrewtobias.com/the-hunter-biden-transcript/

I am here today to provide the committees with the one uncontestable fact that should end the false premise of this inquiry: I did not involve my father in my business, not while I was a practicing lawyer, not in my investments or transactions, domestic or international, not as a board member, and not as an artist, never.

You read this fact in the many letters that have been sent to you over the last year as part of your so-called impeachment investigation. You heard this fact when I said it weeks ago standing outside of this building. You heard this fact from a parade of other witnesses, former colleagues, and business partners of mine, including my uncle, who has testified before you in similar proceedings. And now, today, you hear this fact directly from me.

For more than a year, your committees have hunted me in your partisan political pursuit of my dad. You have trafficked in innuendo, distortion, and sensationalism, all the while ignoring the clear and convincing evidence staring you in the face: You do not have evidence to support the baseless and MAGA-motivated conspiracies about my father because there isn’t any.

You have built your entire partisan house of cards on lies told by the likes of Gal Luft, Tony Bobulinski, Alexander Smirnov, and Jason Galanis. Luft, who is a fugitive, has been indicted for his lies and other crimes; Smirnov, who has made you dupes in carrying out a Russian disinformation campaign waged against my father, has been indicted for his lies; Bobulinski, who has been exposed for the many false statements he has made; and Galanis, who is serving 14 years in prison for fraud.

Rather than follow the facts as they’ve been laid out before you in bank records, financial statements, correspondence, and other witness testimony, you continue your frantic search to prove the lies you and those you rely upon keep peddling.

Yes, they are lies. To be clear, I have made mistakes in my life, and I have squandered opportunities and privileges that were afforded to me. I know that. I am responsible for that. And I am making amends for that. But my mistakes and my shortcomings are my own and not my father’s, who has done nothing but devote his entire life to public service and trying to make this country a better place to live.

During my battle with addiction, my father was there for me. He helped save my life. His love and support made it possible for me to get sober, stay sober, and rebuild my life as a father, a son, a husband, and a brother. What he got in return for being a loving, supportive parent is a barrage of hate-filled conspiracy theories that hatched this sham impeachment inquiry and continue to fuel unrelenting personal attacks against him and me.

Over the last year, Republicans have taken my communications out of context, relied on documents that have been altered, and cherry-picked snippets of financial or other records to misrepresent what really happened. Examples of this include a few references to my family in emails or texts that I sent when I was in the darkest days of my addiction. If you try to do that today, my answers will reveal your tactics and demonstrate the truth that my father was never involved in any of my businesses.

My testimony today should put an end to this baseless and destructive political charade. You have wasted valuable time and resources attacking me and my family for your own political gain when you should be fixing the real problems in this country that desperately need your attention. Thank you.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Saturday, March 2, 2024 7:36 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

https://andrewtobias.com/the-hunter-biden-transcript/

Mr. Swalwell: At any time your father was in government, did he ever operate a hotel?

The Witness: No, he has never operated a hotel.

Mr. Swalwell: So he’s never operated a hotel where foreign nationals spent millions at that hotel while he was in office?

The Witness: No, he has not.

Mr. Swalwell: Did your father ever employ in the Oval Office any direct family member to also work in the Oval Office?

The Witness: My father has never employed any direct family members, to my knowledge.

Mr. Swalwell: While your father was president, did anyone in the family receive 41 trademarks from China?

The Witness: No.

Mr. Swalwell: As President and leader of the party, has your father ever tried to install as chairperson of the party a daughter-in-law or anyone else in the family?

The Witness: No. And I don’t think that anyone in my family would be crazy enough to want to be chairperson of the DNC.

Mr. Swalwell: Has your father ever in his time as an adult been fined $355 million by any State that he worked in?

The Witness: No he has not, thank God.

Mr. Swalwell: Anyone in your family ever strike a multi-billion-dollar deal with the Saudi government while your father was in office?

The Witness: No.

Mr. Swalwell: That’s all I’ve got.

The Witness: Thank you.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Saturday, March 2, 2024 7:41 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

The big take-away from his 7 hours of closed-door testimony is that whatever you may think of Hunter Biden — and of his father for loving his troubled son — there is “no there there.”

Whereas, if you read Volume I and Volume II of the Mueller report, it’s virtually all there — except for the parts missing because of obstruction of justice so egregious that more than 1,000 former Republican and Democratic federal prosecutors deemed it unquestionably indictable. Watch! (2 minutes).
https://twitter.com/protctdemocracy/status/1134089330576777216

Shamefully, only one Republican, Mitt Romney, voted to convict Trump the first time around.

His second impeachment came a lot closer — 57-43 — but failed to reach the required two-thirds because Mitch McConnell would go only so far as to call Trump “morally and practically” responsible for the January 6 mayhem . . . but argued that punishment should be meted out by the criminal justice system, not the Senate.

The evidence of his guilt was on TV for all the world to see.

https://www.justice.gov/storage/report_volume1.pdf
https://www.justice.gov/storage/report_volume2.pdf

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Saturday, March 2, 2024 11:05 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
You forgot to quote the most important part of the story:

Quote:
Those who earn less than $400,000 and haven’t filed aren’t off the hook. Taxpayers are responsible for declaring all of their income, calculating their tax liability correctly and filing a tax return on time. By not filing, some lower-income taxpayers miss out on refunds.

Those are the only people the IRS are going after.

Not that you'd know, but there's no such thing as somebody who makes over $400k and doesn't file a tax return. They might try to pull some shady accounting, but there is ZERO ROI for a person making nearly half a million dollars a year to not file a tax return at all. They have FAR too much to lose and the IRS can go back 7 years and audit you whenever it feels like doing so.

Yours is a very simple mind.
You are a jackass, 6ixStringJack, believing the propaganda that rich tax cheats such as Trump want you to believe. But you believed Trump paid his taxes because he said he did, which means you are extra stupid. His fictional losses are whatever amount he wants and his taxes are set by himself, and continues to be fiction until a judge goes over his accounting. And then Trump goes to the Supreme Court over his taxes.

https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/30/politics/donald-trump-tax-returns-relea
sed/index.html

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Read what I said again, then try again. You stupid fuck.

6ix, I know all about Trumptards. You are a bunch of tax cheaters. Cheating and getting upset when called out for cheating is Trumptard standard practice.

Once again, you're changing the subject.

Stay on topic moron, or shut the fuck up.

--------------------------------------------------

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Saturday, March 2, 2024 11:55 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Once again, you're changing the subject.

Stay on topic moron, or shut the fuck up.

The subject is that Trumptards are attracted by degenerate Trump's stories. Trump's life is a historic mess and his followers are more messed up than he is.

6ix, read the full definition of degenerate, a word that fits Trump and his Trumptards:
https://www.google.com/search?q=degenerate
Be sure to click on "See More". You will read about how fitting the word degenerate is to describe Trumptards.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Saturday, March 2, 2024 12:13 PM

I'm done playing stupid games with you this morning.

Go be a waste of carbon in somebody else's life today.

--------------------------------------------------

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Saturday, March 2, 2024 1:04 PM

Betting Odds hit 17 points in favor of Trump for the first time today.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/elections/betting-odds/2024/presiden
t/

--------------------------------------------------

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Saturday, March 2, 2024 1:27 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Betting Odds hit 17 points in favor of Trump for the first time today.

I bet you are full of shit, 6ix. But what's news about that, Trumptard?

Oct. 3, 2023, 8:22 AM CDT -
Trump's former Chief of Staff John Kelly confirms that Trump called American service members "suckers" and "losers," refused to visit their graves and that he didn't want to be seen with amputee veterans because "it doesn't look good for me."

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/john-kelly-confirms-trum
p-privately-disparaged-us-service-members-vete-rcna118543

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Saturday, March 2, 2024 2:25 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Betting Odds hit 17 points in favor of Trump for the first time today.
I bet you are full of shit, 6ix.

Well. You lose then.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/elections/betting-odds/2024/presiden
t/

It's been fun. Better luck next time.

--------------------------------------------------

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Saturday, March 2, 2024 8:00 PM

New York Times: Voters Doubt Biden’s Leadership and Favor Trump

https://1ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2024%2F03%2F02%
2Fus%2Fpolitics%2Fbiden-trump-times-siena-poll.html

Gee... You don't say.

The longer I stick around the more I'm right about pretty much everything. It took NYT over 3 years to figure out what I knew from day one, but they're run by a bunch of braindead Leftists with agendas, so it's amazing it happened at all.

--------------------------------------------------

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Sunday, March 3, 2024 9:03 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Biden and Trump are in a dead heat

Kevin Drum / Mar 2, 2024 at 7:10 PM

https://jabberwocking.com/biden-and-trump-are-in-a-dead-heat/

I rely frequently on the YouGov polls done for the Economist. There are two reasons for this. First, they have an excellent reputation for accuracy. Second, they routinely make crosstabs available, which helps a lot if you want to dig past the simple topline numbers. Here's their latest poll of Trump vs. Biden:
https://d3nkl3psvxxpe9.cloudfront.net/documents/econTabReport_XLG2Z6p.
pdf

Nationally, they have Trump and Biden in a dead heat, with nearly identical in-party support for both. The two also have nearly identical approval ratings.

Most of the crosstabs look reasonable with one exception: Black voters. I'm not sure what's going on here, but short of an electoral cataclysm there's no way Biden gets only 71% of the Black vote. It will almost certainly end up at 90% or so, which adds a couple of points to his overall total.

NOTE: This is a poll of all registered voters. A poll of likely voters might look a little different.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Sunday, March 3, 2024 10:23 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Biden and Trump are in a dead heat

No. They're not.

Quote:
I rely frequently on the YouGov polls done for the Economist.

That's called cherry picking, and it looks REALLY bad for Biden* when you have to cherry pick a poll that shows that they're tied.

What Kevin Drum isn't telling you is that leading up to the 2020 election there was not a single day that Biden* wasn't up on Trump in the polling aggregate by at least 4 points. (It was exactly 4 points on January 24th, 2020). A majority of the time Biden* was up on Trump by at least 8 points, with a great deal of that time being over 10 points and almost as much as 12 points.

https://www.realclearpolling.com/polls/president/general/2020/trump-vs
-biden

On March 3rd, 2020, Joe Biden* was up on Trump 5.4 points. On March 3rd, 2024, Joe Biden* is trailing Trump by 2.2 points. That's a 7.6 point difference.

Though there was a brief period of 2 days where the polls were tied for Joe Biden* and Trump in October, the last day that Joe Biden* had a lead on Trump was September 11th, 2023, and Trump has been up on Joe Biden* by as much as 4.3 points since that day.

Also, at the end of 2020 right before the election, the polling aggregate showed Joe Biden* was up 7.2 points on Trump. But on election night Joe Biden* only won by 4.5 points, which was a 2.7 point error in Joe Biden*'s favor.

https://www.realclearpolling.com/polls/president/general/2020/trump-vs
-biden

If even half of that error still exists currently, Trump would beat Biden* by 3.5 points if the election were held today.

And this is all for nothing more than bragging rights on the Popular Vote. That's right... Trump may actually win the Popular vote this year, according to the polls.

The actual election is going to be determined by 7 states, and it's not looking good at all for Biden*.

Arizona (Trump +5.5): https://www.realclearpolling.com/polls/president/general/2024/arizona/
trump-vs-biden

Nevada (Trump +7.7): https://www.realclearpolling.com/polls/president/general/2024/nevada/t
rump-vs-biden

Wisconsin (Trump +1.0): https://www.realclearpolling.com/polls/president/general/2024/wisconsi
n/trump-vs-biden

Michigan (Trump +3.6): https://www.realclearpolling.com/polls/president/general/2024/michigan
/trump-vs-biden

Pennsylvania (Biden +0.8): https://www.realclearpolling.com/polls/president/general/2024/pennsylv
ania/trump-vs-biden

North Carolina (Trump +5.7): https://www.realclearpolling.com/polls/president/general/2024/north-ca
rolina/trump-vs-biden

Georgia (Trump +6.5): https://www.realclearpolling.com/polls/president/general/2024/georgia/
trump-vs-biden

Biden* is only slightly up on 1 of the 7 states in the polls, currently, and not even by a single point. 4 of the states Trump is up so high that it's well outside of any margin of error. And the 3.6 points that Trump is up in Michigan is basically a lock if the election were held today as well.

Quote:
Most of the crosstabs look reasonable with one exception: Black voters. I'm not sure what's going on here, but short of an electoral cataclysm there's no way Biden gets only 71% of the Black vote. It will almost certainly end up at 90% or so, which adds a couple of points to his overall total.

Incorrect. Joe Biden* will not end up with 90% of the black vote. The reason that this perplexes you, Kevin, is because you only get your news from one side and they don't like telling you the truth above telling you what you want to hear. Joe Biden*'s border issue is hitting the black community far harder than anybody else, particularly in the big blue cities.

You'd best prepare yourself for that electoral cataclysm. But don't blame the blacks when it happens to you. They were trying to warn you all along, but you ignored them like you've always done and you continue to do.

--------------------------------------------------

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Sunday, March 3, 2024 4:50 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Surprise, Surprise: Trump Now Wants an Even More Extreme Abortion Ban
https://newrepublic.com/post/179468/trump-more-extreme-abortion-ban
Trump is now talking about banning abortion after 15 weeks. Just two weeks ago, Trump suggested a 16-week federal abortion ban. So it’s possible — likely, even — Trump will keep reducing what he considers a reasonable number of weeks to allow abortions until he’s reached zero.

The anti-abortion playbook for restricting birth control

By Rachel M. Cohen | Mar 3, 2024

https://www.vox.com/24087411/anti-abortion-roe-dobbs-birth-control-con
traception-ivf

Randall Terry, who founded the group Operation Rescue — known for blockading and protesting abortion clinics and patients — once laid out the logic against birth control plainly: “Any drug or device that prevents us from having children” is “anti-child,” he said. “How do we expect to defeat child-killing in the world when we cannot defeat child-rejection in our own midst?”

The political playbook for attacking birth control shares some similarities with the playbook for attacking abortion — a slow and steady chipping away of rights and access. Both efforts rely on measures like slashing funding for low-income patients, enacting parental consent laws to restrict minors’ use, and empowering ideologically supportive lawmakers and judges who push friendly legal frameworks.

But the major difference between pushing to restrict abortion access and pushing to restrict birth control is that leaders are typically much quieter about their goals for the latter, aware that open discussion will prompt fierce backlash. They typically try to paint those who suggest they’d take aim at contraception as alarmists and conspiracists.

When Democrats in Congress introduced a bill to codify access to birth control following the overturn of Roe, for example, they were met with emphatic performances of exasperation.

“This bill is completely unnecessary. In no way, shape, or form is access to contraception limited or at risk of being limited,” declared Florida Republican Rep. Kat Cammack during debate on the House floor. “The liberal majority is clearly trying to stoke fears and mislead the American people.”

Still, a growing number of Republican lawmakers — including Sens. Marsha Blackburn and Mike Braun — have recently declared that Griswold v. Connecticut, the 1965 Supreme Court decision establishing a constitutional right to birth control, was wrongly decided. Griswold relies on the same legal right to privacy that underpinned Roe, and in his concurring Dobbs v. Jackson opinion in 2022, Justice Clarence Thomas encouraged the Supreme Court to “reconsider” Griswold and other privacy-related decisions. Former Arizona Senate candidate Blake Masters went so far as to pledge to “vote only for federal judges who understand that Roe and Griswold” should be overturned.

Leaders more than occasionally reveal their underlying beliefs. Recent statements, as well as recent actions from reproductive rights opponents, have sent clear reminders about how some influential activists really think about contraception: that it’s just another form of abortion.

Activists aim to blur the line between birth control and abortion.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Sunday, March 3, 2024 6:10 PM

Better rail hard on that abortion issue.

It's all you got left.

--------------------------------------------------

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Monday, March 4, 2024 8:23 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Better rail hard on that abortion issue.

It's all you got left.

There is also the issue of who Trumptards are. Do you want to vote for the candidate preferred by Nazis, racists, gun nuts, anti-abortionists, angry poor white trash, etc? Vote for Trump!

What attracts Trumptards to Trump? This comic answers that question:
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/post-2

"I feel like more comics need to use the word salience."

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Monday, March 4, 2024 9:37 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

President Biden told the New Yorker's Evan Osnos that he doesn't think former President Trump will concede if he loses in November.

"Losers who are losers are never graceful," Biden says in the 14,000-word profile, "The Last Campaign," which the magazine posted Monday morning. "I just think that he'll do anything to try to win. If — and when — I win, I think he'll contest it. No matter what the result is."

During the interview, Biden tossed a white note card on the Resolute Desk. The card was filled with quotes by Trump: threatening "termination" of parts of the Constitution, talking of being a dictator on "Day 1," and describing immigrants as "poisoning the blood of our country."

"What the hell?!" Biden says.

https://www.axios.com/2024/03/04/biden-trump-2024-election-concede

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Monday, March 4, 2024 10:18 AM

It's just started. We have 9 months to go.

tick tock

T

Donald Trump confused Barack Obama for Joe Biden at a rally in Virginia, triggering further questions about the age of the likely Republican presidential nominee who has made a string of such gaffes. Trump said: 'Putin has so little respect for Obama that he’s starting to throw around the nuclear word'. The crowd reportedly went silent as Trump referenced Obama, who left office more than seven years ago.

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Monday, March 4, 2024 10:24 AM

tick tock

T

'He looks lost': Trump has gaffe-filled weekend on the campaign trail

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Monday, March 4, 2024 10:32 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by THG:

'He looks lost': Trump has gaffe-filled weekend on the campaign trail

It is not just the #1 Trumptard Donald Trump. The #2 Trumptard, Elon Musk, has misplaced his mind.

Why Elon Musk Is the Second Most Important Person in MAGA

By David French | March 3, 2024

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/03/opinion/musk-x-maga-trump.html

One of the most remarkable developments of the new century has been the concentration of right-wing power and adulation in two men. Donald Trump is the obvious one, the unquestioned king of the American right. But easier to miss if you’re outside the MAGA world is the central importance of Elon Musk.

We’re familiar with Trump’s arc, of course. But why is Musk so important to the right? Why is a reported illicit drug user and unmarried father of 11 children by three women, a man whose social media site, X, is overrun with hatred and pornography, celebrated across the length and breadth of the new right, including parts of the Christian right?

The answer is that if Trump is MAGA’s champion, Musk is its gatekeeper. He doesn’t just use his immense reach (he has 174 million followers on X) to fight the left; he owns the right wing’s public square. This is because outside of X, the public isn’t reading the right. And as a result, X now shapes the right as much as even Fox News.

On Feb. 22, a website called The Righting released an analysis using Comscore data to compare web traffic at top right-wing sites from January 2020 to January 2024. The findings are surprising: Right-wing media appears to be struggling even more than mainstream media. Of the top right-wing sites in 2020, only Newsmax gained audience over the past four years. Every other right-wing site lost visitors, and most lost a staggering percentage of them.

For example, The Righting reports that The Washington Examiner lost 66 percent of its visitors. The Washington Times lost 82 percent. Breitbart lost 87 percent and The Daily Wire 73 percent. Aside from Newsmax and Fox News (which lost only 24 percent of its visitors), every other right-wing site has lost at least half its visitors in four years. Some have lost so many that The Righting could no longer measure their reader numbers.

In fact, the loss is so profound that there are individual articles and columns in The New York Times that get more visitors than all of the content that many of these sites post for an entire month. As a practical matter, this means that social media — and principally Musk’s X — becomes the central way in which many right-wing figures reach the public.

There are several consequences of this reality. It’s altering the way the right speaks. People will be naturally prone to focus most of their efforts on the medium through which they interact with the most people. A vast majority of people who interact with my work, for example, do so by reading my pieces, not by viewing my social media posts. My written work is the central focus of my professional life, while my social media posts are essentially an afterthought.

But what if that balance is reversed? It bends a person (or a movement) around the attitudes of social media and away from the kinds of arguments that require the length of a column or essay. Social media creates not a marketplace of ideas so much as a gallery of takes, where you can spend hours doomscrolling through short videos and snappy retorts.

That’s how a movement transfers its allegiance from the ideas of a man like William F. Buckley Jr. to an X influencer like @Catturd2 and his 2.4 million followers. It’s one reason a person like Tucker Carlson devolves from an interesting, idiosyncratic writer and thinker to an online shock jock and outrage merchant.

This transformation has the effect of further radicalizing the right. There’s a “Can you top this?” dynamic to posting that pushes people to extremes. In the offline world, paranoia is a liability. It inhibits you from seeing the world clearly. In parts of the online world, you’re considered a rube if you’re not paranoid, if you’re not seeing a leftist plot around every corner, if you’re not believing that Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s romance is a Biden administration psy-op that culminated with rigging the Super Bowl.

Moreover, a social media-centered movement understands what to think — the marching orders, however incoherent, typically trickle down from Trump — but often breaks down on the why. To take one vivid example, last month the Washington Post journalist Taylor Lorenz interviewed the founder of the popular X account Libs of TikTok, a woman named Chaya Raichik. Libs of TikTok is one of the most influential accounts in red America. Her posts don’t just trigger public outrage (and sometimes spawn an avalanche of threats against her targets); they directly affect legislation. Yet the interview is agonizing to watch. Time and again, Raichik proves unable or unwilling to articulate the basis for her beliefs. Her attitude is clear. Her ideas are not.

Finally, this dependence on social media is shaping the right’s position on free speech. As the platforms they created lose traffic, it becomes even more important that right-wing figures secure their place on the platforms they did not create. Thus, the same Republican Party that circled its wagons to protect corporate speech and the corporate exercise of religion in Supreme Court cases involving Citizens United, Hobby Lobby and 303 Creative has now passed laws in Florida and Texas trying to dictate private companies’ moderation policies.

To be clear: The dynamics of social media are corrosive to both right and left, and it’s not just right-wing sites that are losing readers. (The Righting also reported that CNN had lost 20 percent of its visitors, for example.) Left-wing activists on social media can be just as conspiratorial and vengeful as the worst actors on the right. But there’s been a substantial divergence. Whereas pre-Musk Twitter was once a center of the left-leaning journalistic and activist universes, they have substantially abandoned the site as a sideshow. For the right, meanwhile, Musk’s X has become the main stage.

It’s hard to think of a worse pair of human beings to shape the character of a movement than Donald Trump and Elon Musk. Yet here we are, with Trump controlling the right’s access to power, and Musk increasingly controlling the right’s access to the public. At best, those on the right who wish to maintain that access must cynically ignore, rationalize and minimize the two men’s profound flaws. At worst, it means actively embracing their values to curry favor. Like Trump’s ugly, erratic politics, Musk’s website is substantially contributing to the devolution of thinking on the right. The ideas are in retreat. It’s the attitude that matters now.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Monday, March 4, 2024 10:57 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
It's just started. We have 9 months to go.

tick tock

T

Donald Trump confused Barack Obama for Joe Biden at a rally in Virginia, triggering further questions about the age of the likely Republican presidential nominee who has made a string of such gaffes. Trump said: 'Putin has so little respect for Obama that he’s starting to throw around the nuclear word'. The crowd reportedly went silent as Trump referenced Obama, who left office more than seven years ago.

He's referencing to the crowd that it's really been Barack Obama's 3rd term that we've been living through.

I've seen lefties take clips of Trump making fun of President Roomba getting lost on stage and pretending like it was Trump himself who was lost on stage too.

You're such a fucking moron, Ted.

--------------------------------------------------

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Monday, March 4, 2024 11:03 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

He's referencing to the crowd that it's really been Barack Obama's 3rd term that we've been living through.

I've seen lefties take clips of Trump making fun of President Roomba getting lost on stage and pretending like it was Trump himself who was lost on stage too.

You're such a fucking moron, Ted.

Trump has stumbled through life for decades and he has a thousand lost lawsuits to prove it. Who'd admire his life, other than Trumptards who see themselves in him?

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Monday, March 4, 2024 11:37 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by THG:

'He looks lost': Trump has gaffe-filled weekend on the campaign trail
It is not just the #1 Trumptard Donald Trump. The #2 Trumptard, Elon Musk, has misplaced his mind.

Why Elon Musk Is the Second Most Important Person in MAGA

By David French | March 3, 2024

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/03/opinion/musk-x-maga-trump.html

Yes yes, hands down without a doubt. Musk is losing it to the point of being traitorous.

T

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Monday, March 4, 2024 12:40 PM

Fmr. RNC Chair Taunts Trump: "We're Coming For You"

MSNBC political commentator Michael Steele, former chair of the Republican National Committee (RNC), responded to former President Donald Trump‘s claims that the GOP is “maybe 100%” MAGA and “getting rid of the Romneys of the world.”

[Trump has called Utah Senator Mitt Romney (a vocal critic of Trump) a Republican in Name Only (RINO) and successfully urged RNC chair Ronna McDaniel to resign.]

On MSNBC Weekend, Steele looked into the camera and said: “Game on, Trump,” and accused the GOP frontrunner of being “the biggest RINO.”

(Note: Trump has changed his political party affiliation five times since 1987 before returning to the Republican Party in 2012.)

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Monday, March 4, 2024 2:13 PM

The truth behind Trump and his smiling black supporters – they’re fake

Donald Trump supporters are targeting black voters with disinformation, including AI-generated fake images of the former president, campaigners have warned.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/the-truth-behind-trump-and-his
-smiling-black-supporters-they-re-fake/ar-BB1jiRDq

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Monday, March 4, 2024 3:42 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
The truth behind Trump and his smiling black supporters – they’re fake

Donald Trump supporters are targeting black voters with disinformation, including AI-generated fake images of the former president, campaigners have warned.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/the-truth-behind-trump-and-his
-smiling-black-supporters-they-re-fake/ar-BB1jiRDq

Sure thing Ted.

We'll see how AI generated they are when they vote for Trump in November.

Tick Tock

--------------------------------------------------

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Monday, March 4, 2024 3:42 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by THG:

'He looks lost': Trump has gaffe-filled weekend on the campaign trail
It is not just the #1 Trumptard Donald Trump. The #2 Trumptard, Elon Musk, has misplaced his mind.

Why Elon Musk Is the Second Most Important Person in MAGA

By David French | March 3, 2024

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/03/opinion/musk-x-maga-trump.html

Yes yes, hands down without a doubt. Musk is losing it to the point of being traitorous.

T

TRANSLATION: Everybody who doesn't agree with me politically is a traitor to America.

Get fucked, Ted.

--------------------------------------------------

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Monday, March 4, 2024 3:49 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Biden's Disapproval Rating Soars To 59%, Trump's Lead Biggest Yet

In the latest New York Times/Siena Poll Trump has his biggest lead over Biden ever. And Biden’s disapproval rating is a whopping 59 percent. I list 18 key points from the poll.

The Big Change

Nate Cohn, New York Times chief political analyst notes The Big Change Between the 2020 and 2024 Races: Biden Is Unpopular.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/02/upshot/poll-biden-trump-2024.html
That’s a free link for interested readers.

President Biden is not winning, at least not now. Polls show him trailing in states worth well over 270 electoral votes, and this morning he lags Donald J. Trump in our newest New York Times/Siena College national poll by five percentage points among registered voters, 48 percent to 43 percent.

That’s the largest lead Mr. Trump has ever had in a Times/Siena national poll. In fact, it’s the largest lead Mr. Trump has held in a Times/Siena or Times/CBS poll since first running for president in 2015.

Why is President Biden losing? There are many possible reasons, including his age, the war in Gaza, the border and lingering concerns over inflation. But ultimately, they add up to something very simple: Mr. Biden is very unpopular. He’s so unpopular that he’s now even less popular than Mr. Trump, who remains every bit as unpopular as he was four years ago.

Many voters will apparently agonize between two candidates they dislike. It’s exactly what Democrats sought to avoid when they nominated Mr. Biden in 2020. It’s what Democrats largely avoided in the 2018 and 2022 midterm elections, when they mostly nominated acceptable candidates or ran incumbents against right-wing opponents. And it’s exactly what led to the election of Mr. Trump in 2016.

Remember Hillary?
"We came, we saw, he died? *giggle*"?
"Sexist, racist, homophobes ... basket of deplorables"?
Squeezing Bernie out of the race?
Hallucinating on stage at the DNC convention?
RUSSIA!TRUMP! COLLUSION!

Eeewww!
One of the most unpalatable candidates ever to be fielded by the DNC.

Quote:
Double Haters

Overall, 19 percent of registered voters in the Times/Siena survey have an unfavorable view of both candidates — a group sometimes referred to as “double haters.” These voters say they backed Mr. Biden by a three-to-one margin among those who voted in 2020, but now he holds the support of less than half. Every vote counts, but these voters will undoubtedly be pivotal in deciding the November election.

The double haters might ultimately return to Mr. Biden’s side. There are still eight months left until November, and it’s not as if these voters like Mr. Trump. If they do come back to Mr. Biden, perhaps their return will have seemed inevitable in retrospect.

Poll Results

In a second post, the New York Times goes over the Poll Results.

With eight months left until the November election, Mr. Biden’s 43 percent support lags behind Mr. Trump’s 48 percent in the national survey of registered voters.

Eighteen Key Points

* Only one in four voters think the country is moving in the right direction.

* More than twice as many voters believe Mr. Biden’s policies have personally hurt them as believe his policies have helped them.

* A majority of voters think the economy is in poor condition.

* The share of voters who strongly disapprove of Mr. Biden’s handling of his job has reached 47 percent, higher than in Times/Siena polls at any point in his presidency.

* About as many Democratic primary voters said Mr. Biden should not be the nominee in 2024 as said he should be — with opposition strongest among voters younger than 45 years old.

* Mr. Trump is winning 97 percent of those who say they voted for him four years ago, and virtually none of his past supporters said they are casting a ballot for Mr. Biden.

* Mr. Biden is winning only 83 percent of his 2020 voters, with 10 percent saying they now back Mr. Trump.

* Among the likely electorate, Mr. Trump currently leads by four percentage points.

* The historical edge Democrats have held with working-class voters of color who did not attend college continues to erode. Mr. Biden won 72 percent of those voters in 2020, according to exit polling, providing him with a nearly 50-point edge over Mr. Trump. Today, the Times/Siena poll showed Mr. Biden only narrowly leading among nonwhite voters who did not graduate from college: 47 percent to 41 percent.

* Only 23 percent of Democratic primary voters said they were enthusiastic about Mr. Biden

Who could POSSIBLY be enthusiastic about Biden* unless their brains hd been sucked out?

Quote:
— half the share of Republicans who said they were about Mr. Trump. Significantly more Democrats said they were either dissatisfied or angry at Mr. Biden being the leader of the party (32 percent) than Republicans who said the same about Mr. Trump (18 percent).

* Both Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden are unpopular. Mr. Trump had a weak 44 percent favorable rating; Mr. Biden fared even worse, at 38 percent. Among the 19 percent of voters who said they disapproved of both likely nominees — an unusually large cohort in 2024 that pollsters and political strategists sometimes call “double haters” — Mr. Biden actually led Mr. Trump, 45 percent to 33 percent. The candidate who had won such “double haters” was victorious in the elections in both 2016 and 2020.

* Unhappiness with the state of the country is plainly a drag on Mr. Biden’s prospects. Two-thirds of the country feels the nation is headed in the wrong direction — and Mr. Trump is winning 63 percent of those voters.

* Only 12 percent of independent voters said Mr. Biden’s policies had personally helped them, compared to 43 percent who said his policies had hurt them.

* Overall, Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump were dead even among prized independent voters, drawing 42 percent each.

* The gender gap is no longer benefiting Democrats. Women, who strongly favored Mr. Biden four years ago, are now equally split, while men gave Mr. Trump a nine-point edge.

* The poll showed Mr. Trump edging out Mr. Biden among Latinos, and Mr. Biden’s share of the Black vote is shrinking, too.

* The poll showed that 53 percent of voters currently believe Mr. Trump has committed serious federal crimes, down from 58 percent in December. But viewed another way, Mr. Trump’s current lead over Mr. Biden is built with a significant number of voters who believe he is a criminal.

* Nikki Haley, Mr. Trump’s Republican rival, who has made the case that he will lose in November, leads Mr. Biden by double the margin of the former president: a hypothetical 45 percent to 35 percent.

https://mishtalk.com/politics/bidens-disapproval-rating-soars-to-59-pe
rcent-trumps-lead-biggest-yet

And what about the elephants in the room they failed to ask about- border security, Gaza, and endless wars?

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM

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Monday, March 4, 2024 9:28 PM

Hillary Clinton: The Election Is Between One Candidate Who Is Old But Effective And One That Is Old But Barely Makes Sense

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2024/03/04/hillary_clinton_ele
ction_between_one_candidate_who_is_old_but_effective_and_one_that_is_old_but_barely_makes_sense.html

I agree, Hilary. Joe Biden* is just the worst.

--------------------------------------------------

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Monday, March 4, 2024 11:26 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Trump Claims 82% of People Believe in 'Rigged Election'

Published Mar 04, 2024 at 9:04 AM EST

"Did you ever notice they go after the people that want to find out where the cheating was and, by the way, 82 percent of the country understands that it was a rigged election, OK? You can't have a country with that.

"A poll came out, 82 percent, but they go after the people, they don't go after the people that rigged the election, they go after the people that looking, they're looking for the people that rigged the election.

"And that's the people they go after. They got away with something; they're never going to get away with it again."

The Facts

No evidence supports this claim.

Trump has made multiple provably false claims throughout his Republican presidential primary campaign. In an interview aired on February 29, the former president told Fox News' Sean Hannity that some abortions are carried out after a baby is born.

In February, he also falsely alleged that Joe Biden boasted about serving in the military and had been a pilot.

https://www.newsweek.com/fact-check-trump-claims-82-believe-rigged-ele
ction-1875537

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Monday, March 4, 2024 11:32 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

President Biden recently went to New York to appear on “Late Night With Seth Myers.” On the show he was the same guy whom those of us who’ve spoken with him have seen: not a spring chicken, obviously, but lucid, well informed and moderately funny. The contrast couldn’t be greater with Donald Trump, whose ranting has become increasingly incoherent; after mixing up Nikki Haley and Nancy Pelosi a few weeks back, he has now once again appeared to confuse Biden with Barack Obama.

But not to worry: Trump recently assured an audience, “There’s no cognitive problem. If there was, I’d know about it.”

Oh?

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Tuesday, March 5, 2024 10:02 AM

Newsweek: All of Democrats sham cases have fallen apart and now they're going to have to run on their own abysmal record.

https://www.newsweek.com/fani-willis-ethics-hearing-nathan-wade-187585
5

That was your "best" case. And diversity hire Girl Boss was fucking the help that she paid 10 times as much as more competent lawyers with actual experience trying felony cases.

November will be here quick.

Tick Tock

--------------------------------------------------

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Tuesday, March 5, 2024 10:04 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
President Biden recently went to New York to appear on “Late Night With Seth Myers.” On the show he was the same guy whom those of us who’ve spoken with him have seen: not a spring chicken, obviously, but lucid, well informed and moderately funny. The contrast couldn’t be greater with Donald Trump, whose ranting has become increasingly incoherent; after mixing up Nikki Haley and Nancy Pelosi a few weeks back, he has now once again appeared to confuse Biden with Barack Obama.

But not to worry: Trump recently assured an audience, “There’s no cognitive problem. If there was, I’d know about it.”

Oh?

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Once again, he didn't mix them up.

Your media goons are taking clips out of context and presenting you with lies to regurgitate because they know you're stupid and you won't look into it at all.

The world is laughing at you.

P.S. You stole your thought of the day from Paul Krugman again, huh?

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/04/opinion/trump-biden.html

Quote:
President Biden recently went to New York to appear on “Late Night With Seth Myers.” On the show he was the same guy whom those of us who’ve spoken with him have seen: not a spring chicken, obviously, but lucid, well informed and moderately funny. The contrast couldn’t be greater with Donald Trump, whose ranting has become increasingly incoherent; after mixing up Nikki Haley and Nancy Pelosi a few weeks back, he has now once again appeared to confuse Biden with Barack Obama.

But not to worry: Trump recently assured an audience, “There’s no cognitive problem. If there was, I’d know about it.”

Oh.

Word for word too...

You can find much better people to plagiarize than that sorry little dwarf. He's also a mental midget.

--------------------------------------------------

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Tuesday, March 5, 2024 10:32 AM

WSJ: Panic Time for Democrats

Biden is losing to Trump in every poll as Super Tuesday arrives.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/panic-time-for-democrats-trump-biden-elec
tion-polls-08ef51ef?mod=opinion_feat1_editorials_pos1

Quote:
Four major polls rolled out in the past few days, and Mr. Biden is losing to Donald Trump in all of them. He’s down two points in a head-to-head matchup in the Wall Street Journal and Fox News surveys, more if you include third- or fourth-party candidates. He’s down five points in the Siena-New York Times poll, and he’s getting crushed in the swing states in the Bloomberg News survey.

Worse is the public mood. A quarter or less of Americans think the country is moving in the right direction, and they think Mr. Biden’s Presidency has done more harm than good. They think Mr. Biden is too old to be President, and they view Mr. Trump’s Presidency far more favorably than they do Mr. Biden’s.

Most important, Mr. Biden is viewed even more unfavorably than Mr. Trump in the polls (59% to 57% unfavorable in the Fox survey, which is Mr. Biden’s best showing). This is hard to do considering that Mr. Trump never cracked 50% approval in the Gallup poll during his Presidency. In the 2020 campaign, Mr. Biden never trailed Mr. Trump in polling averages.

Yup.

--------------------------------------------------

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Tuesday, March 5, 2024 10:35 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

6ixStringJack always does the same two things: accuse Krugman, the Nobel Prize winner in economics, of being stupid compared to genius Trump and plagiarism. 6ix is a Trumptard, which is synonymous with "an asshole". There are approximately 85 million Trumptards in America, which is why America has an excess of assholes problem. It is not only Trumptards' political opinions that mark them. It is also their work life, home life, investment decisions, psychiatric disorders, obesity, drunkenness, etc. -- their whole gambet of life marks them as assholes.

Here is the whole Opinion | Donald Trump Is Running Against Dystopian Fantasies

By Paul Krugman | March 4, 2024

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/04/opinion/trump-biden.html

President Biden recently went to New York to appear on “Late Night With Seth Myers.” On the show he was the same guy whom those of us who’ve spoken with him have seen: not a spring chicken, obviously, but lucid, well informed and moderately funny. The contrast couldn’t be greater with Donald Trump, whose ranting has become increasingly incoherent; after mixing up Nikki Haley and Nancy Pelosi a few weeks back, he has now once again appeared to confuse Biden with Barack Obama.

But not to worry: Trump recently assured an audience, “There’s no cognitive problem. If there was, I’d know about it.”

Oh.

Republicans aren’t going to acknowledge either Biden’s lucidity or Trump’s increasingly more noticeable lack thereof. But the reaction to the “Late Night” appearance that I found most revealing wasn’t about presidential age; it was about what happened next. Biden and Myers went for ice cream after the show, and Senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama fired off a post on social media hoping Biden enjoyed his ice cream “while the rest of the city is afraid of crime and migrants.”

Reporters and readers were quick to point out that according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in 2021 Alabama had a homicide rate more than three times as high as that of New York State, and, as Bloomberg’s Justin Fox notes, New York City is among the safest big cities in America. Tuberville has become known for getting crossed up on the issues, but his comment illustrated two larger aspects of our politics.

First, there’s a striking double standard in the ways politicians are allowed to talk about different regions of America. Voters from rural states often complain about not getting enough respect, but can you imagine the reaction if, say, the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat, were to describe Alabama — which in 2021 had an extraordinarily high rate of firearm mortality — as a place where everyone runs around shooting one another and themselves?

Second, and more important, I’m always struck by the extent to which today’s right-wing politics is driven by a grim, dystopian image of America, especially American cities, that just isn’t grounded in reality.

A lot of this seems to reflect perceptions that congealed long ago and haven’t been updated to reflect the ways in which urban America has changed for the better. New York really was a dangerous place a few decades back: There were 2,262 murders in 1990. Last year, however, with the pandemic-era bump in crime rapidly receding, there were only 391 — still too many — and early indications are that violent crime is continuing to fall.

Nationally, violent crime, at least according to the F.B.I., is approaching a 50-year low.

Those are official statistics, but what about personal experience? I remember New York in the bad old days, and it’s nothing like that now. Polling on crime is remarkable, especially when broken down by partisan affiliation: According to Gallup, 78 percent of Republicans say that crime is an extremely or very serious problem for the nation, but only 16 percent say it’s a serious problem where they live. That’s not because Republicans live in safer places: Only 15 percent of Democrats say that local crime is a serious problem.

Crime isn’t the only subject where Republicans seem to be living in the past. In another recent speech, Trump declared: “We’re like a third world nation. Look at our airports. … I mean, how bad are the airports?” He may have been thinking of La Guardia in the 1970s. I recently landed at Newark’s new Terminal A, and it was a striking reminder of just how gentrified America’s major airports have become.

Trump has also been going on lately about “migrant crime” being “through the roof,” singling out New York (naturally). But as I’ve already noted, homicides in New York — where 36 percent of the population is foreign born — have been falling rapidly.

And while there have, of course, been violent crimes committed by immigrants, including those here illegally, an analysis by NBC News found that “despite several horrifying high-profile episodes, there is no evidence of a migrant-driven crime wave in the United States.”

None of this says that we should have an open border. Indeed, this year Democrats and Republicans in the Senate agreed on a bill that would have greatly stiffened border security; Republicans then backed out at Trump’s behest, pretty clearly because Trump wants to keep the fear factor going.

Now, I’m not saying that everything is fine. Americans were badly rattled by a crime surge in 2020-21 and an inflation surge in 2021-22, both of which were probably, for the most part, aftershocks from the Covid-19 pandemic. Both surges now appear to be rapidly receding, but the unease remains, and there are still plenty of social and economic problems to address.

Yet in 2024, Trump and his party appear to be running not against America’s rising problems but against problems that have actually become much less dire.

Can a political party really win a national election on the strength of dystopian fantasies? Unfortunately, current polling suggests that it can.

Paul Krugman has been an Opinion columnist since 2000 and is also a distinguished professor at the City University of New York Graduate Center. He won the 2008 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his work on international trade and economic geography. @PaulKrugman

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Tuesday, March 5, 2024 11:35 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

The Real Reason Trump Loves Putin

A new book explores the American right’s tendency to admire and want to emulate foreign dictators.

By Franklin Foer | March 1, 2024

https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2024/03/jacob-heilbrunn-amer
ica-last-trump-putin/677609/

For nearly the entirety of the past decade, a question has stalked, and sometimes consumed, American politics: Why do Donald Trump and his acolytes heap such reverent praise on Vladimir Putin? The question is born of disbelief. Adoration of the Russian leader, who murders his domestic opponents, kidnaps thousands of Ukrainian children, and interferes in American presidential elections, is so hard to comprehend that it seems only plausibly explained by venal motives—thus the search to find the supposed kompromat the Kremlin lords over Trump or compromising business deals that Trump has pursued in Moscow.

But there’s a deeper, more nefarious truth about people on the right’s baffling unwillingness to criticize the Kremlin: They actually share its worldview. Putin worship isn’t even an aberration in the history of conservatism, merely the latest instance of a long tradition of admiring foreign dictators. Over the past century, without ever really blushing, the American right has similarly celebrated the likes of Adolf Hitler, Francisco Franco, and just about every Latin American military junta that called itself anti-communist.

The right hails these dictators as ideological comrades in the war to preserve traditional society, the values of order and patriarchy, against the assault of the decadent left. Unlike conservative politicians in the United States, these foreign leaders don’t even need to bother with mouthing encomiums to concepts like tolerance, freedom, and democracy. They can deliver reactionary politics in the unvarnished form that some hard-liners on the American right have always hoped would take root in their own country. As the journalist Jacob Heilbrunn argues in America Last, his history of conservatives’ romance with dictators, “Conservatives have searched for a paradise abroad that can serve as a model at home.”

Heilbrunn makes the interesting decision to begin his history on the eve of World War I. A primary villain in these chapters is the newspaper columnist H. L. Mencken, perhaps the most celebrated curmudgeon in the history of American letters. Walter Lippmann called him “the most powerful influence on this whole generation of educated people.” A conservative movement as such did not exist in the earliest decades of the 20th century, just a constellation of reactionary intellectuals and their wealthy patrons who nodded in agreement, nostalgic for the antebellum South and a world before mass suffrage. Mencken, the most eloquent of the reactionaries, put their cantankerous thoughts into ornate, often quite funny prose.

Mencken believed fervently in the superiority of German civilization—and in the leadership of its racist, war-mongering monarch, Kaiser Wilhelm. This reverence stemmed from ancestral pride; Mencken’s paternal grandfather came from Saxony. But his affection for Germany also grew from his disdain of American democracy, which he believed ceded control of society to mediocre politicians. By contrast, he liked that Germany was “governed by an oligarchy of its best men.” Just before America officially entered World War I, he submitted an article to The Atlantic in which he imagined that Germany might one day conquer the United States and create a new utopia on its shores. Ellery Sedgwick, then the editor of this magazine, had the good sense to reject it. “I have no desire to foment treason,” Sedgwick wrote him.

At the height of the war, Mencken worried that he might be persecuted for propagandizing for an enemy regime, so much so that he buried the German keepsakes he collected and a diary from his wartime visit to the country in his Baltimore backyard. But in the years that followed the conflict, he returned to extolling the virtues of Wilhelmine autocracy. His publication, The American Mercury—perhaps the greatest literary journal of the age and also home to retrograde political opinions—ran revisionist accounts of the war, which shifted blame away from Germany.

Looking back on World War I, there were compelling conservative reasons for considering intervention a catastrophe. Financing the war required the imposition of a federal income tax, which never went away in peacetime. And no matter one’s political stripe, the war’s staggering body count was hard to justify. But what emerged on the right in the aftermath of the fighting wasn’t a form of pacifism—rather, it was a set of conspiratorial arguments that became a dishonorable tradition of isolationism. This pattern would repeat itself at the onset of every war: The isolationists would point an accusatory finger at bankers, whom they accused of being eager to profit off bloodshed. They would describe the authoritarian enemies of the United States as helpless victims, peaceful governments minding their own business. In the course of casting the dictators as the injured party, conservatives airbrushed their records of militarism and racism. Minimizing these sins wasn’t just a matter of rhetorical convenience; it was an act of sympathy. In the case of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, a significant segment of the intellectual American right shared their racialist views about the superiority of Nordic peoples.

Heilbrunn isn’t the first to tell the story of the right’s barely submerged affinity for Hitler. Philip Roth’s great counterfactual novel, The Plot Against America, takes this affinity as its premise—as does Rachel Maddow’s recently published history, Prequel. But it’s always bracing to be reminded of how former President Herbert Hoover made excuses for Hitler before the war and how the press baron William Randolph Hearst commissioned stories by him.

The biggest fans of fascist autocracy weren’t yokels shaking their pitchforks, but cultivated patricians from the oldest New England families. Benito Mussolini’s American fan section consisted of the eminent literary critic Irving Babbitt, a legendary Harvard professor, and the modernist poet Ezra Pound. Not just Hearst but also Henry Ford and others among the nation’s richest men were some of the chief apologists for Nazi Germany. Their attraction—sometimes subconscious, but quite often stated flatly—was born of fear that America was slipping away from them, as immigrants poured into the country and mass democracy took hold. Fascism represented a hopeful example of a revanchist elite reversing the tide.

Hitler’s defeat, and the full knowledge of the horrors of the Holocaust, did little to spur the right to rethink its admiration of authoritarianism. In fact, the historian Fred Siegel once described the late 1940s and early ’50s as the moment when the isolationists attempted to exact revenge. Senator Joe McCarthy and his allies tried to tear down the reputations of the internationalist proponents of the New Deal who most fervently advocated for the war, by smearing them as Communists. But McCarthy was also waging a retrospective argument about World War II: that the Americans had no claim to superiority over the Germans. When he burst onto the scene, in 1949, McCarthy held hearings into what he described as the mistreatment of a Nazi Panzer division, on trial for murdering dozens of American prisoners of war. McCarthy speciously argued that the Germans were being tried on trumped-up evidence. Such accusations about America’s supposed abusive treatment of Nazis became a right-wing trope. Henry Regnery’s publishing house provided an outlet for criticism of the Nuremberg trials, before it went on to print books by William F. Buckley, James Burnham, and Whitaker Chambers that launched the modern conservative movement.

In its Cold War guise, the revived right made the celebration of autocrats abroad a foundation of its foreign policy. Buckley’s magazine, National Review, the flagship of the movement, published regular panegyrics to anti-communist generalissimos, heaping adoration on the likes of the Dominican Republic’s Rafael Trujillo, Portugal’s Antonio de Oliveira Salazar, and Spain’s Francisco Franco. Regardless of how many opponents they murdered or how many dissidents wasted away in their jails, they were described as the true defenders of Christendom against the heathen mob. The implication was that these dictators weren’t just on the right side of the Cold War; they possessed spine and ideological fervor that American leaders lacked.

Because the American right was so quick to extol foreign dictators in hyperbolic terms, its members were frequently treated like suckers by those regimes. During the Reagan era, the lobbyist Paul Manafort—who would go on to be Trump’s 2016 campaign chairman—made a fantastically lucrative living by trying to bolster the image of autocrats as latter-day incarnations of Thomas Jefferson. In the late ’80s, Manafort took the Angolan guerrilla leader Jonas Savimbi, a former Maoist, and whisked him around Washington think tanks, touting him as a “freedom fighter.” That label required overlooking, among other inconvenient facts, how Savimbi’s army conscripted women into sexual slavery.

The Cold War, at least, provided a plausible geostrategic case for supporting these goons—and many of the socialist movements they battled were unsavory in their own ways. In fact, one school of foreign-policy thought, embodied in the realism of Henry Kissinger, a name that goes strangely unmentioned in Heilbrunn’s book, argued that alliances with dictators made sense on purely utilitarian grounds. Aligning with Chile’s Augusto Pinochet and the apartheid government in South Africa was a matter of national interest, nothing more, nothing less. The moral calculus of realism was repugnant in its own way, because it turned a blind eye to human suffering caused by dictatorships. But it was very different from the right-wing celebration of autocracy, which was a matter of shared values. That reactionary faction of the right continued to espouse affection for dictatorship even after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when there was no longer an overriding foreign-policy justification for championing such regimes. Those affections persisted, because the impulse to find an alternative to America’s democracy persisted.

Heilbrunn’s book opens with verve, then becomes a touch slapdash as the narrative drives toward the present. Even though Trumpism is his hook, Heilbrunn spends exceedingly few pages on the subject. But the present moment should be the shocking culmination of his narrative: Foreign dictators are now thoroughly attuned to the tendency that America Last describes. How else to explain why Putin grants exclusive interviews to Tucker Carlson, or why Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán hosted a gathering of the Conservative Political Action Committee? These autocrats understand that the American right’s tendency to treat its favored leaders, domestic and foreign, with servile devotion makes it a supremely useful ally. If Trump returns to power, Putin can count on him to turn a blind eye to his military adventures, and Orbán can count on him to refrain from criticism of his power grabs.

But what makes Heilbrunn’s history, ultimately, so poignant is that the American right no longer needs to project its displaced desires onto leaders in other countries. It doesn’t have to shop abroad for a tribune who channels the movement’s deepest, most subversive desires. Trump is the foreign dictator that they craved all along.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Tuesday, March 5, 2024 11:38 AM