REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

Elections; 2024

POSTED BY: THG
UPDATED: Wednesday, November 27, 2024 13:36
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PAGE 84 of 97

Wednesday, October 9, 2024 2:56 PM

SECOND

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


Trump Is Doing His Best to Make the Hurricane Into a Bad Issue for Him

By Ben Mathis-Lilley | Oct 09, 2024 2:18 PM

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/10/us-presidential-election-t
rump-hurricane-response.html

About a month ago, polling guru Nate Silver wrote a (paywalled) piece for his Substack called “This Was Trump’s Election to Lose. And He Just Might.” Its most important line may have been this one: “In newsless periods, [Trump] becomes the favorite.” Everything else about him aside — and, granted, it’s a lot to put aside — Trump is a candidate who’s remembered by voters for being president when the economy was good and prices were low, and he’s running against the vice president from an administration that’s unpopular because of inflation. It’s a no-difficulty setting. Lie low and cruise to victory!

Trump is not a “lying low” kind of guy, though, and his response to the hurricane situation in the South — Helene hit last month, and Milton is headed toward Florida presently — is the latest instance of his compulsion to center himself in the national news, to his own detriment.

In a nutshell, his response to the hurricanes has been bizarre and unhelpful. Trump has said that the Federal Emergency Management Agency is trying to avoid helping displaced Republicans in North Carolina, that it has run out of money because it’s housing illegal immigrants, and that there haven’t been any helicopters deployed for rescue missions in areas affected by Helene. None of those things, if you can believe it, are true. He hasn’t yet repeated Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s claim that “they” (Democrats, Jews, whoever) can “control the weather” and are doing it in this instance to attack MAGA voters, but he probably will, sooner or later (in a vague way). Hell, he may have already done it on his Truth Social feed, but they don’t pay me enough to look at that thing. No one gets paid enough to look at it.

Anyway, hurricane conspiracy stuff is probably bad for him electorally. Polls (and common sense) suggest that voters want a president who can “unify” the country during emergencies. And in being as un-unifying as possible, Trump is re-creating some of the circumstances of his loss in 2020.

In that year, the U.S. was experiencing not just the COVID pandemic but civil unrest triggered by video of George Floyd’s murder. Voters as a whole didn’t like Trump’s handling of either issue. If you’ll recall, Trump usually ignored COVID precautions and had to be hospitalized after he contracted the virus in October 2020, which probably did not help instill widespread faith, just before the election, in his pandemic management skills. His responses to police brutality protests were generally considered inflammatory and divisive — perhaps most notably, he had protesters outside the White House tear-gassed and beaten to clear space so he could take a photo in front of a nearby church. According to polls, Biden went on to win voters who were concerned about the pandemic and the issue of racism, and was widely believed to be more likely to “unify” the country.

When Trump was nearly killed this July, he had the chance — really the best possible chance — to show that he understands how to be a dignified, “presidential” leader. He blew that chance pretty much immediately by, among other things, accusing Kamala Harris of lying about being Black (?). Natural disasters in the Gulf present another such opportunity, but he will probably just continue pissing into the wind.

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

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Wednesday, October 9, 2024 4:19 PM

THG


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
Can you say Trump is dumb as a rock. I can, I can say it.

T

What Trump thinks about climate change
Trump is paid to perform. He is the singing/dancing frontman working for the oil & gas executives. He doesn't have to understand the lyrics of the songs he sings. His audience does not understand the meaning of the words any more than he does. The music and sound of Trump's voice calm his audience. It is the executives who know perfectly well what they are doing, what it means to sell fuel, not the zonked-out-of-their-minds customers buying the fuel or chatty Trump selling it to them.

Most oil companies acknowledge that climate change is real. Yet they also argue strongly for the world's continued use of massive quantities of fossil fuels, which power both the global economy and their profits. Dec 5, 2023

How oil firms talk about climate change — and how to decode it

https://www.npr.org/2023/12/05/1215499778/cop28-uae-climate-talks-oil-
exxon-mobil-chevron-climate-change-net-zero-unabated

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



You say Trump is a paid performer. I completely agree. However, I find the way he speaks annoying. Much of what he says is flat, and lacks emotion or tone. It's like he's dead inside. Then he delivers a line with enthusiasm, before going back to a flat emotionless tone.


In reality, his speeches consist of indifferent rhetoric, delivered in a flat voice. Monotone, expressing a lack of interest or concern.

Plus, what he is saying in these speeches is not just untrue, it's complete nonsense. It explains why his voters are uneducated. Maybe to them it's like daddy reading them a bedtime story. Only while he is doing so is he completely detached from the child emotionally. It's disturbing, sickening even.


T

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Wednesday, October 9, 2024 7:42 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK




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

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

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Wednesday, October 9, 2024 7:44 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

How about that?

I'd thought at 45 years old I couldn't be surprised anymore.



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

Trump will be fine.
He will also be your next President.
I've have always been able to work with and get the best out of Trumptards because of my moral neutrality toward their foolish, often evil, ways of life.

Drunks, cheaters, thieves, wife-beaters, liars, incompetent workers, the kind of behavior Trump displays. But there are occasions when a Trumptard has to be sent away because their natural stupidity, lack of self-control, and fundamental dishonesty can't be tolerated in a particular position when their faulty nature is ruining a project of mine. They are sinners, born to be evil, living silly and meaningless lives. And totally unaware, completely oblivious, to what they and Trump are.

I have never been surprised by a Trumptard. They are assholes. They can't help themselves.

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


Shut the fuck up, degenerate.

You're going to be surprised by all of them when you wake up on November 6th. For the 2nd time.



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

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

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Wednesday, October 9, 2024 7:53 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


On this day in History, October 9th:

National00000000Harris +2.0000Biden +9.70000Clinton +4.6
--------------------------------------------------------
Wisconsin0000000Harris +0.5000Biden +5.50000Clinton +6.3
Pennsylvania0000Trump0 +0.2000Biden +7.10000Clinton +9.4
Ohio000000000000Trump0 +8.0000Biden +0.60000Clinton +2.3
Michigan00000000Trump 0+0.5000Biden +6.70000Clinton +7.3
Arizona000000000Trump0 +1.4000Biden +2.70000Trump00 +0.7
Nevada0000000000Harris +1.1000Biden +6.00000Clinton +1.3
North Carolina00Trump0 +0.6000Biden +1.80000Clinton +2.6
Georgia000000000Trump0 +1.5000Biden +0.00000Trump00 +4.7
Florida000000000Trump0 +6.7000Biden +3.80000Clinton +2.9



P.S. Don't forget that 22 days before election, Hillary Clinton rose to +7.1 against Trump in the aggregate from her +4.6 today, and +7.1 isn't even CLOSE to her peak of +11.4 against Trump in 2016. Harris will see no such surge, and you are going to go into election day with the smallest polling advantage of any Democrat hopeful in the last 3 election cycles. So small, in fact, that if the same biases exist in the polls that were there in the last few election cycles, Trump is going to win the Popular Vote by a large margin.





Also in polling news recently...

Trump overtakes Harris in the Michigan polling aggregate for the first time since July 29th. Trump is now up +0.5 in Michigan as of 10/09/2024.

The newest Yahoo "News" poll shows a TIE. For 10/2-10/4 Yahoo had Harris up +2 and back on 9/21-9/23 Yahoo had Harris up +4.

The newest Emerson poll for 9/29-10/1 as previously mentioned was +1 when they had Harris up +4 on 8/12-8/14 as well.

Reuters/Ipsos' new poll for 10/4-10/7 shows Harris up by +2. The last poll they had for 9/21-9/23 had Harris up by +6.

The I&I/TIPP poll for 10/2-10/4 still has Harris at +3 like they did back on 8/28-8/30.

3 out of the last 4 polls are quite a bit lower for Harris than they were a month ago, and now the Yahoo News poll has trended toward Trump 2 polls in a row.


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

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

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Wednesday, October 9, 2024 8:27 PM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Shut the fuck up, degenerate.

You're going to be surprised by all of them when you wake up on November 6th. For the 2nd time.



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

Trump will be fine.
He will also be your next President.
“We pledge to you that we will root out the Communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical-left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country, that lie and steal and cheat on elections,” Donald Trump said this past November, in a campaign speech that was ostensibly honoring Veterans Day. “The real threat is not from the radical right; the real threat is from the radical left … The threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous, and grave than the threat from within. Our threat is from within.”

In the past few months, the former president has described himself as a “very proud election denier.” He has repeatedly threatened and intimidated judges, witnesses, prosecutors, and even the family of prosecutors involved in the cases against him, going so far as to say that his legal opponents will be consigned to mental asylums if he’s reelected. He has suggested that the man he picked for chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff deserves to be executed on grounds of treason. He’s called for investigating NBC and possibly yanking the network off the air, also on grounds of treason—one of his most direct attacks on the First Amendment. And he’s vowed to arrest and indict President Joe Biden and other political opponents for no apparent reason other than that they oppose him.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/01/trump-veterans-da
y-speech-vermin-reelection/676137/

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

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Wednesday, October 9, 2024 8:42 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Yup.

And we're taking it back next month.

Tick Tock



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

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

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Wednesday, October 9, 2024 8:47 PM

THG


Oops...

T

Trump faces ‘devastating blow’ as record Republicans swap to Harris


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Wednesday, October 9, 2024 8:49 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Apparently your clickbaiters don't pay attention to the trending in the polls.

On this day in History, October 9th:

National00000000Harris +2.0000Biden +9.70000Clinton +4.6
--------------------------------------------------------
Wisconsin0000000Harris +0.5000Biden +5.50000Clinton +6.3
Pennsylvania0000Trump0 +0.2000Biden +7.10000Clinton +9.4
Ohio000000000000Trump0 +8.0000Biden +0.60000Clinton +2.3
Michigan00000000Trump 0+0.5000Biden +6.70000Clinton +7.3
Arizona000000000Trump0 +1.4000Biden +2.70000Trump00 +0.7
Nevada0000000000Harris +1.1000Biden +6.00000Clinton +1.3
North Carolina00Trump0 +0.6000Biden +1.80000Clinton +2.6
Georgia000000000Trump0 +1.5000Biden +0.00000Trump00 +4.7
Florida000000000Trump0 +6.7000Biden +3.80000Clinton +2.9

Trump is going to wipe the floor with your girl.

Tick Tock

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

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

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Wednesday, October 9, 2024 10:12 PM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Yup.

And we're taking it back next month.

Tick Tock



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

Trump will be fine.
He will also be your next President.
There is 50% chance Trump loses. If he wins, there is a small chance Biden kills Trump because the Supreme Court granted Presidents immunity for official acts:

For private acts, the court concluded that the president is not above the law. So I assume if the president had an affair with a woman and her jealous husband came to the White House and the president shot the husband in the Oval Office—that’s a private act, and he would not be above the law. But if he ordered Navy SEALs to do it, then it would be an official act and he would be above the law because that’s a presidential act.

So this decision is outrageous. It’ll be overruled by some future court, God willing. It’s a case that really gives the president a free pass.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/09/trump-roy-cohn-movie-real-
life-version.html

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

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Wednesday, October 9, 2024 10:13 PM

SECOND

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


"Separated": Film Shows How Trump Tore Immigrant Families Apart as 1,300 Kids Still Alone

We speak with Oscar-winning filmmaker Errol Morris about his new documentary, Separated , based on NBC correspondent Jacob Soboroff’s book of the same name. The film details the horrors of the Trump “zero tolerance” immigration policy, under which thousands of immigrant children were forcibly separated from their parents after they crossed the southern U.S. border, part of the administration’s broader crackdown on immigration.

The cruel policy was enforced as early as July 2017, initially without public acknowledgment by Trump officials. It was ultimately rescinded amid widespread outrage, but it continues to impact the families who were targeted, and about 1,000 children remain effectively orphaned years later, with authorities and rights groups still unable to locate their parents.

“It wouldn’t have happened were it not for decades of bipartisan deterrence-based immigration policy that continues to this day,” says Soboroff. Morris says “the most appalling part of the policy” was the lack of record-keeping. “OK, let’s separate the children, but let’s not actually keep a record of how to ever reunite them. Let’s separate them for good. Let’s just create orphans, abandon children,” he says.

Separated plays for a week at the IFC Center in New York, starting tonight, before it gets wider theatrical distribution and airs on MSNBC this December.



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

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Wednesday, October 9, 2024 10:41 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


It airs on MSNBC.

Uh huh.

Yeah. I bet it does.


MSNBC is to News as The History Channel is to History and The Learning Channel is to Learning.



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

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

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Wednesday, October 9, 2024 10:53 PM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
It airs on MSNBC.

Uh huh.

Yeah. I bet it does.


MSNBC is to News as The History Channel is to History and The Learning Channel is to Learning.



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

Trump will be fine.
He will also be your next President.
Trump can't keep track of the thousand orphans he created: Morris says “the most appalling part of the policy” was the lack of record-keeping. “OK, let’s separate the children, but let’s not actually keep a record of how to ever reunite them. Let’s separate them for good. Let’s just create orphans, abandon children,” he says.

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

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Wednesday, October 9, 2024 11:09 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
It airs on MSNBC.

Uh huh.

Yeah. I bet it does.


MSNBC is to News as The History Channel is to History and The Learning Channel is to Learning.



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

Trump will be fine.
He will also be your next President.
Trump can't keep track of the thousand orphans he created: Morris says “the most appalling part of the policy” was the lack of record-keeping. “OK, let’s separate the children, but let’s not actually keep a record of how to ever reunite them. Let’s separate them for good. Let’s just create orphans, abandon children,” he says.

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



I'm sure this is the product of some hard-hitting journalism and receipts have been brought to wrap up all of these claims stating exactly where you can find out who was responsible for what and when. Yanno... Objective journalism and actual facts that matter.

It won't be a flashy emotional puff piece with sad music where the sad parts go and inspirational music where the inspirational parts go, while all those subtle words of propaganda are being spoken to you once they've got you in the right frame of mind.

It won't just be a bunch of words that they tell you are facts because they're backed up by so-called "experts" with job titles you've never heard of before in fields you've never knew existed. You've never met these people in your life, but you should trust them completely and believe that everything they're saying to you is the absolute truth. If they're a minority with a fancy job title than then look out because everything they are telling you is beyond reproach and it would be racist and/or sexist for you to even question them. How dare you even consider such a thing?

It would be Anti-American not to trust them. Maybe it's even a Threat to Democracy if you didn't trust them. You might even be a Putin spy if you don't trust them and believe everything that they told you.

Enjoy the movie.

I'll be watching this right after I get through my first Dinesh Joint, which I plan to watch right after I finish Joker 2: The Musical Poo.

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

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

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Thursday, October 10, 2024 5:45 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

I'm sure this is the product of some hard-hitting journalism and receipts have been brought to wrap up all of these claims stating exactly where you can find out who was responsible for what and when. Yanno... Objective journalism and actual facts that matter.
Most Trumptards I know are focused on the distressing thoughts inside their head and pay little to no attention to the outside world, so they do not do so well in the world. The world wrecks the emotionally distracted ones. See your personal history for an example of a crash, 6ix. Or Trump. That guy has had a traumatic life. One damn thing after another happens to Trump.

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

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Thursday, October 10, 2024 5:45 AM

SECOND

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


In Florida Senate Race, Two Candidates With Vastly Different Views on the Climate

Incumbent Rick Scott, a Republican, reportedly banned the words “climate change” from state agencies as governor. Democrat Debbie Mucarsel-Powell favors climate-resilient infrastructure.

By Amy Green | October 9, 2024

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/09102024/florida-senate-race-vastly
-different-climate-views/

At stake is U.S. climate policy including the Inflation Reduction Act, the $370 billion package President Joe Biden signed into law in 2022. The monumental measure includes clean energy incentives that former President Donald Trump has vowed to repeal if re-elected.

Florida is uniquely vulnerable to the consequences of climate change, especially hotter temperatures, rising seas and more damaging storms. In the last seven years the state has weathered six major hurricanes.

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

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Thursday, October 10, 2024 6:04 AM

SECOND

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


Trump ends speculation on another debate: ‘There will be no rematch’

The former president is turning down both invitations from Fox News and CNN.

His refusal to debate, even on the friendly territory of Fox News, suggests he is unwilling to risk the unpredictability of a head-to-head contest with the vice president in the final weeks of the campaign. Harris has said she’s open to another matchup.

https://www.politico.com/news/2024/10/09/trump-harris-debate-no-rematc
h-00183179

The first and only debate was a traumatic car crash for Trump because he couldn’t stop talking about his angry feelings. Sad for him.

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

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Thursday, October 10, 2024 7:52 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Trump ends speculation on another debate: ‘There will be no rematch’

The former president is turning down both invitations from Fox News and CNN.

His refusal to debate, even on the friendly territory of Fox News, suggests he is unwilling to risk the unpredictability of a head-to-head contest with the vice president in the final weeks of the campaign. Harris has said she’s open to another matchup.

https://www.politico.com/news/2024/10/09/trump-harris-debate-no-rematc
h-00183179

The first and only debate was a traumatic car crash for Trump because he couldn’t stop talking about his angry feelings. Sad for him.

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



The first debate didn't move the needle. We've already been over that in the polls.

Trump's in the driver's seat. He doesn't need to give any of his time to the person that the DNC appointed as the Democratic Party candidate against the will of the people who voted for Joe Biden*.

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

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

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Thursday, October 10, 2024 9:00 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

The first debate didn't move the needle. We've already been over that in the polls.

Trump's in the driver's seat. He doesn't need to give any of his time to the person that the DNC appointed as the Democratic Party candidate against the will of the people who voted for Joe Biden*.

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

Trump will be fine.
He will also be your next President.
Two things:

1) Trump had a mental breakdown during the first debate. Trumptards don't care because their mental health is similarly fragile. Trumptards won't change their vote because they want a President with their weaknesses and defective thinking. They have no use for someone who is calm or stable and doesn't share their freaky ideas.

2) Democratic Party candidates are NOT selected by popular vote. A convention selects the candidates.

(I just realized that these two things are the same things keeping Trumptards from prospering in America. 1) Trumptards go into a downward spiral when faced with even the tiniest adversity. 2) Trumptards don't understand procedures, even the simplest ones. The Trumptards I know in Texas are conceited yet dopey dimwits. Maybe there are smarter ones somewhere?)

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

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Thursday, October 10, 2024 9:49 AM

THG


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Apparently your clickbaiters don't pay attention to the trending in the polls.

On this day in History, October 9th:

Trump is going to wipe the floor with your girl.

Tick Tock




Poor Jack, he has to go back to 2016 and Clinton for hope, because things are looking bad for Trump in 2024. Sorry Jack, a major difference between then and now, is half the country despised Clinton. The republicans had been trashing her for 30 years. That hate drove republicans to the voting booth. And we mustn't forget James Comey.

Comey went outside the department’s chain of command and broke with FBI norms to announce his initial findings, and then later, to announce he was reopening the Clinton investigation without notifying higher-ranking officials. This just 10 days before the election. None of this shit is happening now Jack.

Even though I voted for her against Trump, I still despised her. This is not the case with Kamala. Which is why Trumps campaign message is geared towards getting people to hate her. Evidence shows it isn't working; Oops. Big difference, big difference.

T

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Thursday, October 10, 2024 3:04 PM

SECOND

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


Crypto is spending wildly in the 2024 race

By Kevin Drum | October 10, 2024

https://jabberwocking.com/crypto-is-spending-wildly-in-the-2024-race/

Back in the day — i.e., 2022 — crypto in politics was all about Sam Bankman-Fried, who lavished his millions on politicians under the guise of altruistic giving. It was a lie, of course, but everyone pretended to accept it for a while.

Bankman-Fried is warming a prison cell these days and the crypto industry has moved on. Alexander Sammon explains:

This time, there’s no grand political theorizing. No time to waste on utopian futures or societal aspirations. In fact, Coinbase’s billionaire CEO Brian Armstrong, the closest thing to a leader of this political formation, has openly declared that the United States is a society in “decline” and that “backup” options for existing nation states must be pursued. No, the 2024 crypto money machine has been reborn out of a cold, hard determination to do one thing and one thing only: put politicians in power who will stay out of crypto’s way.

And the crypto money machine is huge beyond imagining. Here's an estimate of corporate political contributions by sector for 2024:



Crypto is massively outspending everyone else combined, and this money is being wielded for one specific purpose: to gain passage of a bill that would only lightly regulate crypto. And it is being wielded ruthlessly:

Ohio Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown, who has advocated for stricter regulation of the crypto industry in the past, is firmly in the lobby’s crosshairs. The group is spending an astronomical $40 million to oppose Brown, the chair of the Senate Banking committee.... That wild spending makes his victory look much more difficult. (“Money moves the needle,” Armstrong told Axios. “For better or worse, that’s how our system works.”)

Now, there's a lot more to the political world than direct corporate contributions. In fact, it's a fairly small share of the billions of dollars in total political spending this cycle. Nevertheless, this is a very impressive figure for an industry that contributed approximate zero in 2022. They want to be left alone to continue scamming the American public, and they're willing to spend eye-watering amounts to insure that.

So if you're wondering why practically everybody is either friendly or at least not hostile to crypto these days, this is it. They're facing too big a war chest to risk saying anything directly about regulating crypto. The $40 million flame thrower aimed at Sherrod Brown is all the warning they need.

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

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Thursday, October 10, 2024 4:13 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
Poor Jack, he has to go back to 2016 and Clinton for hope, because things are looking bad for Trump in 2024. Sorry Jack, a major difference between then and now, is half the country despised Clinton. The republicans had been trashing her for 30 years. That hate drove republicans to the voting booth. And we mustn't forget James Comey.


This has nothing to do with Clinton. It has everything to do with math. And we've got two election cycles to work with here.

Even though the polls tightened up before the 2016 race, Clinton won the popular vote by far fewer than the polling aggregate suggested she would. The same thing happened with Joe Biden*. Right now, Joe Biden* was up 10 full points on Trump. Double digits. Biden* only won the popular vote by 4.5 points.

At no point in the 2016 or the 2020 election was either Democrat as low against Trump in the National polling by only 1.8, which is close to Harris' peak this election cycle.

If the same Democrat bias is in the polls in 2024 that existed in both 2016 and 2022, Trump doesn't only win the electoral college easily, but he also wins the popular vote.


On this day in History, October 10th:

National00000000Harris +1.8000Biden +10.0000Clinton +5.8
--------------------------------------------------------
Wisconsin0000000Harris +0.4000Biden +5.50000Clinton +6.8
Pennsylvania0000Trump0 +0.3000Biden +7.10000Clinton +9.4
Ohio000000000000Trump0 +7.4000Biden +0.60000Clinton +2.3
Michigan00000000Trump 0+0.8000Biden +6.70000Clinton +7.3
Arizona000000000Trump0 +0.9000Biden +2.70000Trump00 +0.7
Nevada0000000000Harris +1.0000Biden +6.00000Clinton +1.3
North Carolina00Trump0 +0.6000Biden +1.90000Clinton +2.6
Georgia000000000Trump0 +0.8000Trump +0.40000Trump00 +4.7
Florida000000000Trump0 +6.2000Biden +3.90000Clinton +2.9

Trump is going to wipe the floor with your girl.

Tick Tock

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

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

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Thursday, October 10, 2024 4:27 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

I'm sure this is the product of some hard-hitting journalism and receipts have been brought to wrap up all of these claims stating exactly where you can find out who was responsible for what and when. Yanno... Objective journalism and actual facts that matter.
Most Trumptards I know are focused on the distressing thoughts inside their head and pay little to no attention to the outside world, so they do not do so well in the world. The world wrecks the emotionally distracted ones. See your personal history for an example of a crash, 6ix. Or Trump. That guy has had a traumatic life. One damn thing after another happens to Trump.

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


You're just salty that I did everything you ever dreamed of doing and will never achieve by the time I was only 32 years old.



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

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

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Thursday, October 10, 2024 4:46 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


The Hill: Democrats start to hit the panic button

https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4922690-democrats-nervous-kamala
-harris-campaign/

Quote:
Democrats’ nerves are at an all-time high.


Maybe this explains Second's and Theodore's terrible disposition over the last week.

It doesn't excuse it, but it explains it.


They'd probably be in a better mood right now if they listened to me when I was telling them reality vs. the nonsense they fill their heads with every day from the media.

At the very least, expect nothing and that way you won't be let down.






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

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

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Thursday, October 10, 2024 6:15 PM

SECOND

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


America Has Quietly Been Changing Before Our Eyes. They’re Behind Much of It. They’re Just Getting Started: Ban Abortion. End Gay Marriage. Outlaw Birth Control.

A powerful Christian conservative legal group is quietly reshaping America through the courts. Here’s what it’s after.

By Susan Rinkunas | Oct 10, 2024 5:45 AM

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/10/abortion-supreme-court-all
iance-defending-freedom-agenda.html

If you heard about a well-funded right-wing group with a detailed plan to achieve conservative policy goals, you’d likely think of Project 2025. The Heritage Foundation–backed coalition has crafted an agenda for a second Donald Trump term that encompasses some truly unsettling policy ideas, and the amount of negative attention it’s gotten from Democrats, celebrities, and even Trump himself has led its leaders to retreat from the spotlight.

The thing is, there’s a lesser-known organization that’s already been working for decades to reshape America into a Christian nation—and will keep doing so, regardless of who wins the presidential election in November. It keeps racking up wins at the Supreme Court: It’s the Alliance Defending Freedom, and it may be the country’s most sinister advocacy group that people have never heard of. The law firm, which is based in Scottsdale, Arizona, says its work “advances the God-given right to live and speak the Truth” and publicly describes itself as “the nation’s largest legal organization committed to protecting religious freedom, free speech, marriage and family, parental rights, and the sanctity of life.” ADF reported more than $100 million in revenue in both 2021 and 2022.

The organization has already made great strides in implementing its far-right agenda through its work on behalf of Christian fundamentalist, anti-LGBTQ+, and anti-abortion plaintiffs. It was integral to the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade in 2022, and now it’s waging war against protections based on sexual orientation and gender identity. The group’s CEO, Kristen Waggoner, has said she believes that the 2015 marriage equality ruling should be overturned as well.

ADF has also faced scrutiny for apparently manufacturing lawsuits involving Christian wedding vendors who object to same-sex marriage; one such case involving a website designer succeeded at the court in 2023 even though the plaintiff, Lorie Smith, had never designed wedding websites and a potential customer who contacted her turned out to be straight. ADF also seems to have invented a group from scratch to be the plaintiff in an ongoing case about an abortion drug. These actions aren’t illegal, but they are deeply unethical. The group is weaponizing the court system to remake laws despite no actual plaintiffs being harmed. (ADF did not respond to Slate’s multiple requests for comment, made by phone and email, nor did it respond to a detailed list of questions.)

By bringing lawsuits before friendly judges, ADF can shape American society to match its vision for the nation. The group’s individual cases may not appear all that connected, but when taken together, they paint a very clear picture. As Gillian Branstetter, a communications strategist at the ACLU, put it, ADF “is using the state to uphold the heterosexual, patriarchal nuclear family as the primary—if not the only—way of living one’s life.”

Here are 10 things we can conclude about ADF’s agenda, based on its lawsuits, model legislation, and comments to the press.

1. Ban Abortion Nationwide

ADF wrote and defended the Mississippi law that the court used to overturn Roe and end the federal right to abortion. Now it’s working on getting courts to agree to federal restrictions on abortion pills and procedures as stepping stones to a national ban.

2. Reclassify Birth Control as Abortion — and Ban That Too

Eight more at https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/10/abortion-supreme-court-all
iance-defending-freedom-agenda.html

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

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Thursday, October 10, 2024 6:37 PM

SECOND

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


In his grand giveaway tour, Donald Trump has now casually proposed making the following tax free:

• Tips
• Overtime
• Social Security benefits
• Auto loans
• "Double taxation" of overseas income

I'm no deficit hawk, but it's still become obvious that the deficit is out of control and needs to be reined in. So forget all the Trump tax breaks. What we need to do is return to the tax rates we had in the late 1990s—which was a pretty prosperous time, as I recall:


This is approximate but pretty close. If we simply returned to the tax rates of 2000 we'd increase revenue by about $850 billion—and cut the deficit by half. Add in some moderate payroll tax increases to keep Social Security and Medicare solvent and you'd be up to $1.2 trillion.

This reduces the deficit to $600 billion or so, and that will mechanically reduce interest rates and therefore interest payments too. The deficit would be all but gone in a few years.

Easy peasy, except that no one is willing to do it despite the fact that our experience during the Clinton era suggests it would work great and not overburden anyone.

To summarize:

• Return personal and corporate rates to 2000 levels.

• Increase Social Security taxes from 6.2% to roughly 7.2% and Medicare taxes from 1.45% to maybe 1.75%. This is an inevitable consequence of demographics and everyone knows it.

• Find about 5% in budget cuts to the military, domestic programs, and welfare spending.

• Bank a few hundred billion dollars in interest payments as a result of reduced interest rates.

We could literally do this tomorrow with very little pain if we felt like it. We're not Greece, after all. We're the most powerful economy in the world with loads of leeway to do what we need to. Instead we seem dedicated to running ourselves into a ditch and eventually being forced to make genuinely painful choices, which is Stupid.

https://jabberwocking.com/its-time-to-raise-taxes-not-cut-them/

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

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Thursday, October 10, 2024 8:25 PM

SECOND

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


Donald Trump’s Plan B

Here’s how he’s already laying the groundwork for contesting an election loss.

By Dennis Aftergut | Oct 10, 2024

https://www.thebulwark.com/p/donald-trump-plan-b-contesting-election-l
oss

“IT DOESN’T MATTER IF YOU WON OR LOST THE ELECTION. You still have to fight like hell.” That is, according to Special Counsel Jack Smith’s recent evidentiary filing in his case against Donald Trump for the January 6th insurrection, what Trump said at a crucial moment in 2020. That was his plan then—and all signs indicate that it is his plan now.

There’s nothing normal about Trump’s campaign this year. Even the standard features—the rallies, fundraising, and ads—are dominated by appalling lies, conspiracy theories, and grotesque exploitation of fear and xenophobia. Case in point: On Monday, Trump quintupled down on his earlier hateful messaging that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country”—language straight from Mein Kampf—by telling conservative broadcaster Hugh Hewitt that immigrants bring the “bad genes” of murderers.

Running alongside Trump’s out-in-the-open campaign is the political Plan B that he and his allies are quite clearly pursuing. It’s a strategy that we can piece together from reliable reporting and Trump’s own ever-escalating unhinged threats and rants. It involves setting the stage right now for trying to overturn the vote if he loses so he can grab power anyway.

In other words, there’s an obvious reason Trump has repeatedly refused to say he would accept the election results if he loses: Just as in 2020, he’s ready to “fight like hell” to overturn his defeat.

There’s a method to his madness. Trump and his allies are

(1) softening the public’s belief in the legitimacy of election results ahead of time by hammering the message that the election will be rigged;

(2) abusing the courts with pre-election lawsuits as a launching pad for the claim that he was the real winner; and

(3) inciting anger among his followers—including perhaps armed militants eager to turn to violence—should he suffer election defeat.

The good news is that there’s an antidote. As John Pitney, a political scientist and Never Trump conservative, recently wrote:

Trump will almost certainly refuse to accept defeat. But if he loses big in the popular vote, as well as losing the electoral vote, it will be harder for him to claim that he is the people’s choice. The larger the margin, the weaker his claim.

Simply put, every vote matters, even outside the swing states.

Let’s look at each of the three parts of Trump’s strategy.

(1) Normalizing the idea that Trump won what he lost.

Trump is the sorest loser in American history. Refusing to accept election results and saying that an election was “stolen” from him are among the oldest moves in his playbook. In 2016, after his Iowa primary loss, Trump tweeted, “Ted Cruz didn’t win Iowa, he stole it.”

Sound familiar?

Later that year, he preemptively sowed distrust by tweeting this about an election he expected to lose: “The election is absolutely being rigged. . . . SAD.” And after he prevailed, he falsely boasted: “In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.”

Months before Election Day 2020, Chris Wallace asked Trump if he would accept the election results. The then-president answered: “It depends.” He said he’d “have to see.”

And of course, once he lost, he began to push his Big Lie that the election was stolen by ballot fraud, tried to interfere with the certification of Joe Biden’s win, and set loose violence upon Congress and the nation on January 6th.

Jack Smith’s evidence details how Trump was repeatedly told by insiders that his claims could not be proven. Trump’s response: “The details don’t matter.” What does matter for propagandists untethered from truth is repetition of falsehoods. The message is the medium.

The same is true this time around: On October 1, when a reporter asked Trump if he would trust this year’s election results, he responded: “I’ll let you know in 33 days.” The day before, when a CBS reporter asked the same question, Trump answered: “If I see that we had a fair and free election.”

Trump is clearly desensitizing us to the notion that defeated candidates should not accept their losses so that power transfers peaceably. The man shows us over and over again that he cannot tolerate the idea of being a loser. Last go-around, he mounted a coup trying to prove he hadn’t lost. It failed, but now, emperor’s-new-clothes style, he forces all his Republican allies to agree that he really won—or, in House Speaker Mike Johnson’s case, to be too scared to admit he lost.

This time, Trump is even more desperate than in 2020 because he’s been indicted. He needs the shield of presidential immunity from the trials and potential prison time that await him unless he is elected. So he’s working overtime to get not just his supporters but also the press and the wider public to shrug off the post-election denialist threat as just Trump being Trump.

In fact, the real threat would come from that collective shrug. We need to vote in blue states and red in such volume that his margin of defeat by a popular majority makes his loss impossible to deny.

(2) Pre-election abuse of the courts.

The Republican National Committee has filed more than a hundred pre-election lawsuits aiming to disenfranchise voters more likely to cast their ballots for Kamala Harris and other Democrats than for Trump and his tribe.

They may win some cases before Trump-appointed judges they’ve shopped for. Mainly, though, they have been on a losing streak, likely to continue with cases like one in Nevada state court where they flimsily allege that the Democratic secretary of state is not doing enough to keep immigrant noncitizens from voting.

That case illustrates the key point: There is a propaganda value to court cases creating media narratives that can raise questions about election processes. The value is that if Trump loses, he can point even to frivolous cases his allies lost, claim they were wrongly decided and say that he would and should have won the election had the courts ruled properly.

And then, lying in wait, there’s the Supreme Court and its right-wing majority, ready to raise Trump from the dead if he loses. An overwhelming margin of defeat can make that resurrection too heavy a lift. Every vote matters.

(3) Inciting violence.

You might be wondering why Trump has of late been leaning ever harder into insanity on the campaign trail. Maybe he just can’t help himself. Maybe it’s accelerating mental degradation associated with aging and the stresses of campaigning.

But it serves a strategic end: riling up his most extreme supporters to enlist their violence if he loses.

You know about his bizarro September 10 debate statements about Haitian immigrants—here legally, by the way—eating dogs and cats. That led to bomb threats, hateful emails and phone calls, evacuated government buildings, and closed schools to keep children safe.

Trump returned to the theme that immigrants threaten the American way of life at a September 30 rally in Erie, Pennsylvania: “Thousands of migrants from the most dangerous countries are destroying the character of small towns and leaving local communities in anguish and in despair.”

Then there was Trump’s call-in on Monday to Hugh Hewitt’s show where Trump unsubtly blamed Vice President Harris for deluging the country with criminals from Mexico and Central America:

“How about allowing people to come through an open border, 13,000 of which were murderers . . . and they’re now happily living in the United States?”

Back in reality, statistics show unequivocally that immigrants commit far less crime than citizens. And that border crossings are at a four-year low.

Last month, Trump claimed that the way to stop crime—which dropped dramatically last year—is an unconstrained police brawl against citizens: “One rough hour, and I mean real rough, the word will get out and it will end immediately.”

Consider how Trump’s most violent followers will hear that message: Street violence is the way to solve problems, including the nonexistent problem of “replacing” white Americans with immigrant murderers who will poison the country’s gene pool.

A large popular-vote majority would do two important things: discourage many from joining in violence as they might in a close election, and bolster the forces of law and order in quickly bringing any such violence to an end.

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

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Thursday, October 10, 2024 10:54 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


That's a moot point since Kamala Harris doesn't stand a chance.

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

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

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Thursday, October 10, 2024 10:56 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Teamsters President Sean O'Brien: Democratic Party Is "Bought And Paid For By Big Tech Companies"

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2024/10/08/teamsters_president
_sean_obrien_democratic_party_is_bought_and_paid_for_by_big_tech_companies.html

Quote:
SEAN O'BRIEN, TEAMSTERS PRESIDENT: I'll be honest with you, I'm a Democrat, but they have f*cked us over for the last 40 years. Not all of them -- but for once, we are standing up as a union. I'm probably the only one right now saying, WTF have you done for us? And I'm getting attacked from the left.


You think you've got it bad, buddy? Be a black person who doesn't vote Democrat and watch how they get attacked for stepping off the plantation.

Quote:
I was like, "You had no problem taking $550,000 from me three weeks prior to me going to the Republican convention, and then you want to be a tough guy on Twitter -- like, whatever.


Yup.

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

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

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Friday, October 11, 2024 1:15 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
That's a moot point since Kamala Harris doesn't stand a chance.

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

Trump will be fine.
He will also be your next President.
You do realize Harris has a 50-50 chance? Which precludes "Harris doesn't stand a chance." You and Trump will be enraged if Trump doesn't win. Next step after a loss would be for Trump to go crazy, insist he won, file hundreds of cases to "prove" he won, lose the cases, go to the Supreme Court where the 6 Trumptards will rule in his favor, etc. etc. More and more craziness and nonsense from the Trumptards, exactly the same way they live the entirety of their sub-optimal lives.

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

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Friday, October 11, 2024 1:24 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
That's a moot point since Kamala Harris doesn't stand a chance.

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

Trump will be fine.
He will also be your next President.
You do realize Harris has a 50-50 chance?


No. She doesn't.

With the entire might of the Legacy Media behind her, she couldn't peak higher than +2.2 in the national polls, which she has hit twice and is now receding a second time, even harder than the first in between. And she sits at only 1.8 points right now.

Joe Biden* was up by 10.0 points today by comparison.

2020 was a coin flip and was ultimately decided by 44,000 extra votes for Democrats combined in Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin.

This is not a coin flip. This is a blowout that just hasn't been announced yet.


You'd do best to reconcile with the truth now instead of having to take it all in on November 6th. You are quite a volatile person.

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

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

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Friday, October 11, 2024 6:40 AM

SECOND

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


From phys.org

Study: Disappointment, not hatred is driving polarization in the United States

Hebrew University of Jerusalem | Oct 10, 2024

https://phys.org/news/2024-10-disappointment-hatred-polarization-state
s.html

A new study is redefining how we understand affective polarization. The study proposes that disappointment, rather than hatred, maybe the dominant emotion driving the growing divide between ideological groups.

The findings are published in the journal Cognition and Emotion. The team was led by Ph.D. student Mabelle Kretchner from the Department of Psychology at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, under the supervision of Prof. Eran Halperin and in collaboration with Prof. Sivan Hirsch-Hoefler from Reichman University and Dr. Julia Elad-Strenger from Bar Ilan University.

Affective polarization, characterized by deepening negative feelings between members of opposing ideological groups, is a major concern to democratic stability worldwide. While numerous studies have examined the causes and potential solutions to this phenomenon, the emotional underpinnings of affective polarization have remained poorly understood.

The study addresses a critical gap in current research, which typically relies on one-dimensional measures of affect, that gauges the general positive or negative feelings (ranging from cold to warm) of ideological group members toward their opponents. This traditional approach, according to Kretchner and her colleagues, oversimplifies the complex emotional landscape between ideological group members. Instead, their research advocates for a more nuanced exploration of discrete emotions, emphasizing the role of disappointment.

In particular, we propose that the nature of the ideological relationship is ambivalent and complex, as members of opposing groups simultaneously hold roles as both ideological adversaries and fellow citizens within a common nation and society. As such, we suggest that the emotions underlying ideological conflict should capture this complexity, encompassing both the intense negative experiences of ideological rivalry and the positive regard and expectations from the outgroup to advance and support shared group goals as fellow citizens.

"Disappointment is an emotion that encapsulates both positive and negative experiences," explains Kretchner.

"While hatred is destructive and focuses on viewing the outgroup as fundamentally evil, disappointment reflects a more complex dynamic. It includes unmet expectations and a sense of loss, but also retains a recognition of shared goals and the potential for positive change. This dual nature makes it a more accurate representation of the complexity embedded in ideological intergroup relations."

Across five studies conducted in the US and Israel, disappointment was the only emotion consistently linked to affective polarization, while other negative emotions did not show the same consistent association. Notably, hatred did not predict affective polarization in any of the studies, even during politically charged periods such as the Capitol riots, the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the Supreme Court hearings on Roe v. Wade.

Mabelle Kretchner noted, "Recognizing disappointment as the key emotion underlying affective polarization, even in challenging times, offers a silver lining: it explains not only the hostility observed between ideological adversaries, particularly as we may feel now during election times, but also the underlying hope that the 'appointment' may still take place in the future—that the other side will eventually act in a way that benefits the national common good."

This finding suggests that interventions aimed at reducing affective polarization might be more effective if they target specific emotions underlying affective polarization like disappointment.

As societies across the globe grapple with rising political tensions, the insights from this study offer a fresh perspective on how to heal divisions. By recognizing the complexity of emotions like disappointment, this research provides a more comprehensive understanding of the affective forces at play in polarized environments.

The study has already garnered attention in academic circles, and its findings are expected to influence future research and policy-making aimed at reducing ideological polarization.

More information: Eran Halperin et al, The affective gap: a call for a comprehensive examination of the discrete emotions underlying affective polarization, Cognition and Emotion (2024). DOI: 10.1080/02699931.2024.2348028

Citation: Study: Disappointment, not hatred is driving polarization in the states (2024, October 10) retrieved 11 October 2024 from https://phys.org/news/2024-10-disappointment-hatred-polarization-state
s.html

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

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Friday, October 11, 2024 6:25 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
That's a moot point since Kamala Harris doesn't stand a chance.

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

Trump will be fine.
He will also be your next President.
You do realize Harris has a 50-50 chance?


No. She doesn't.

With the entire might of the Legacy Media behind her, she couldn't peak higher than +2.2 in the national polls, which she has hit twice and is now receding a second time, even harder than the first in between. And she sits at only 1.8 points right now.

Joe Biden* was up by 10.0 points today by comparison.

2020 was a coin flip and was ultimately decided by 44,000 extra votes for Democrats combined in Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin.

This is not a coin flip. This is a blowout that just hasn't been announced yet.


You'd do best to reconcile with the truth now instead of having to take it all in on November 6th. You are quite a volatile person.

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

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



As of today, based off the state polling aggregates, a no toss up election electoral college breaks for Trump 302 to 236.

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

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

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Friday, October 11, 2024 6:51 PM

THG


T

Obama: ‘For Trump, freedom is getting away with stuff’



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Friday, October 11, 2024 6:58 PM

THG


T



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Saturday, October 12, 2024 4:58 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


On this day in History, October 12th:

National00000000Harris +1.8000Biden +10.2000Clinton +6.2
--------------------------------------------------------
Wisconsin0000000Harris +0.3000Biden +6.30000Clinton +6.0
Pennsylvania0000Trump0 +0.1000Biden +7.30000Clinton +9.2
Ohio000000000000Trump0 +7.4000Biden +0.60000Clinton +2.3
Michigan00000000Trump 0+0.9000Biden +7.00000Clinton +9.6
Arizona000000000Trump0 +1.0000Biden +2.70000Trump00 +0.7
Nevada0000000000Trump0 +0.2000Biden +6.00000Clinton +1.3
North Carolina00Trump0 +0.5000Biden +2.70000Clinton +2.6
Georgia000000000Trump0 +0.5000Biden +3.50000Trump00 +4.7
Florida000000000Trump0 +6.2000Biden +3.50000Clinton +3.2

Trump has a lead in the aggregate in all swing states except for Wisconsin now. Harris' lead in Wisconsin is only +0.3.


If the state polls look like that on Election day, the blowout is going to be even bigger than anticipated with the chronic historical Democrat bias in polls.

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

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

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Sunday, October 13, 2024 7:05 AM

SECOND

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


The Wrong-Direction Election

A brief history of the phrase — directionally correct — the right uses to justify Trump’s BS.

The Phrase the Right Uses to Explain Why It’s OK That Trump Makes Things Up

By Ben Mathis-Lilley | Oct 12, 2024

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/10/us-presidential-election-d
onald-trump-lies-directionally-accurate.html

At an Oct. 5 rally in Pennsylvania, Donald Trump told a seemingly apocryphal story about a decades-old women’s weightlifting record that was purportedly broken with ease by a man who had “never lifted before” but cheated the system by identifying as trans. A Canadian women’s powerlifter named April Hutchinson, who seemed to believe that the former president was referring to a specific trans rival of hers from the province of Alberta, posted a clip of the anecdote (which Trump tells frequently) on Twitter/X. The details Hutchinson gave, though, don’t really line up with the vague scenario that Trump describes in his stump speech, in which he sometimes claims to have watched actual footage of a woman losing a competition to the trans lifter in question.

Fortunately Jay Richards, director of the DeVos Center for Life, Religion, and Family at the right-wing Heritage Foundation think tank, was there to square the circle. “Classic Trump hyperbole,” he declared. “Directionally correct but carefully engineered to drive critics crazy over the details.” Problem solved: Trump wasn’t exaggerating, and he definitely wasn’t just getting mad about something that never happened—he was being directionally correct.

And being directionally correct—or sometimes directionally accurate—is, according to many of Donald Trump’s supporters, something that Donald Trump is very good at. His claims about trans athletes, immigrants, and the 2020 election might not be strictly true, these advocates say, but they are directionally so, because he’s talking about a real problem, or at least a feeling that there’s a real problem.

“Trump’s hyperbole is directionally accurate and benign,” wrote Scott Adams, the Dilbert creator–turned–right-wing thought leader, after the presidential debate in June during which Trump (for example) described Jan. 6 rioters as “a relatively small number of people that went to the Capitol and in many cases were ushered in by the police.” On Fox News, host Greg Gutfeld said the same thing. “Trump doesn’t lie more than Biden,” Gutfeld elaborated. “He lies better.”

Trump’s defenders responded similarly to his outburst, in the second presidential debate, about illegal Haitian immigrants in Ohio stealing and eating U.S.-born Americans’ pets. That rumor had no basis in reality; not only were Springfield, Ohio’s Haitian residents not eating pets, they had also been admitted legally through a refugee program created by an act of Congress in 1990. Trump’s running mate, Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, nonetheless told reporters that he planned to continue to refer to the individuals in question as “illegal aliens” because he considered the refugee program to be “fundamentally” illegal. Directionally, in other words, he believed Trump was accurate about who should and should not be in the United States.

Lawyerly justifications of Trump’s bogus claims are Vance’s stock in trade, but he doesn’t appear to have used the phrase directionally correct himself. He did endorse a book by far-right conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec, though, that lays out what might be the ultimate theory of directional honesty in a passage that attempts to explain why its premise—that the United States is controlled by repressive communists—is a fair one despite the abundant evidence that the United States is not controlled by repressive communists.

Something is deeply wrong with the way things are going and you know it. You may not be able to explain it with studies, surveys, or statistics, but you feel it. You’ve felt this way for a while. Like there’s some outside force or group or … something … that’s sent us all off course from the libertarian utopia we should’ve achieved by now. It doesn’t seem like one -ism or -ation is entirely to blame, like globalism or immigration, capitalism or inflation. … Evidence of the unhuman activity is everywhere we look. But can we really pin all those on communists? Nobody pays attention to CPUSA. And there hasn’t been a Carmelite nun–style massacre. Or mass arrest and torture of landlords. But they’re arresting landlords in New York City, now. And yet … the history of the revolution … the present day … it feels directionally accurate, doesn’t it?

Does it? (It appears that a landlord was arrested in March for repeatedly failing to address cockroach violations. Classic instance of communism.)

(This case might be what Posobiec is referring to with the landlord thing, for what it’s worth, although it’s not landlords plural and doesn’t have anything to do with redistributing property to the proletariat.)

A claim that is directionally correct, it seems, is simply one that the person using the phrase wants to be true. The phrase is commonly used in the business world: It pops up often in transcripts of earnings calls, and a satirical 2014 Forbes piece about management consulting jargon defined it as a useful way to describe a theory that is not supported by the numbers that are supposed to support it. The consulting firm McKinsey & Company actually puts out a weekly crossword (what a world!) whose rules note that answers that are “directionally correct” but not actually correct should not be used. (Very cheeky, McKinsey & Company!)

Appropriately, the first instance of the phrase in the Nexis news database is attributed to Donald Rumsfeld—a man whose career spanned both business and politics, and who is pound-for-pound probably one of the most full-of-shit people in American history. Rumsfeld’s life as a national figure began with his service in the teemingly criminal Nixon administration—Richard Nixon called him a “ruthless little bastard,” high praise considering the source—and ended with a five-year tenure as secretary of defense for George W. Bush, during which he advocated for the invasion of Iraq on the basis of weapons-of-mass-destruction programs and ties to al-Qaida that didn’t turn out to exist.

In 1982, though, Rumsfeld was serving as CEO of a pharmaceutical company when the United Press International wire service contacted him to ask about Ronald Reagan’s economic policies. Reagan had come into office promising to cut taxes, and he argued that this would actually increase federal revenue by stimulating economic growth and creating a bigger pie from which the government could take its slice. This didn’t actually happen under Reagan and hasn’t happened when any other presidents have tried it either, but Rumsfeld felt that the idea was … well, you know:

Donald Rumsfeld, former White House chief of staff and former defense secretary, agreed Reagan ”has set us at least on the right path. We don’t know if his economic approach will work,” Rumsfeld said, but we have learned earlier approaches did not work.

”It is important to leave it in place long enough to see if it does work,” said Rumsfield, now chief executive officer of G.D. Searle. ”He gets very high marks for being directionally correct.”

Rumsfeld, who died in 2021, would have loved Trump’s campaign this cycle, which accuses the Biden administration of creating lawless open borders, runaway crime rates, and out-of-control inflation during a year in which undocumented border crossings, crime rates, and inflation are all falling. If you can convince enough people that the country is headed in the wrong direction, it ultimately doesn’t matter if you’re correct or not.

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

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Sunday, October 13, 2024 2:08 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Using Don Rumsfield's opinion to try to win the election isn't going to help you any more than the endorsement of other 200 NeoCons did.

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

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

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Sunday, October 13, 2024 2:17 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


NBC just gave Kamala some bad news in polling and even wrote an article about it...

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/dead-heat-trump-pulls-e
ven-harris-nbc-news-poll-rcna174201

Their last poll from 9/13-9/17 had Harris up +5. Today they have the race at a Tie.


ABC News just put out a poll today that has Harris up +2. Their last poll from 9/11-9/13 had Harris up +4.

That's now 5 of the last 6 polls from Leftist outfits showing huge drops for Kamala.


Keep in mind that when NBC "News" says it's a "dead heat", what they really mean to say, given ample evidence of chronic oversampling of Democrat voters in polls, is that Trump is up by about 4 or 5 points now in reality. For the popular vote.

Calling this a "dead heat" now only works on your idiot readership who never catches you lying about anything. With a peak of +2.2 in the national polling aggregate, there is not one single time that Kamala Harris has been tied with Trump since they went against the will of the people and crowned her the candidate. She's always been down by at least 2 points or around 4 Million votes in the popular vote. From last weekend until now, it's edged closer to a 5 Million vote loss for Harris.





On this day in History, October 13th:

National00000000Harris +1.7000Biden +10.0000Clinton +6.7
--------------------------------------------------------
Wisconsin0000000Harris +0.3000Biden +6.30000Clinton +6.0
Pennsylvania0000Trump0 +0.1000Biden +7.00000Clinton +9.2
Ohio000000000000Trump0 +7.4000Biden +0.60000Clinton +1.8
Michigan00000000Trump 0+0.9000Biden +7.00000Clinton +11.4
Arizona000000000Trump0 +1.0000Biden +2.70000Trump00 +0.7
Nevada0000000000Trump0 +0.2000Biden +5.20000Clinton +1.3
North Carolina00Trump0 +0.5000Biden +3.20000Clinton +3.0
Georgia000000000Trump0 +0.5000Biden +0.80000Trump00 +5.3
Florida000000000Trump0 +6.1000Biden +3.70000Clinton +3.2

Trump has a lead in the aggregate in all swing states except for Wisconsin now. Harris' lead in Wisconsin is only +0.3.


If the state polls look like that on Election day, the blowout is going to be even bigger than anticipated with the chronic historical Democrat bias in polls.


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

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

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Monday, October 14, 2024 7:11 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Using Don Rumsfield's opinion to try to win the election isn't going to help you any more than the endorsement of other 200 NeoCons did.

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

Trump will be fine.
He will also be your next President.
6ix, Rumsfeld loved and used Trump's rhetoric. Both knew that "if you can convince enough people that the country is headed in the wrong direction, it ultimately doesn’t matter if you’re correct or not."

Trump Wants the Military to Target Americans Who Oppose Him

October 13, 2024

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/trump-military-tar
get-americans-oppose-him-1235132806/

Historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat told NBC News that Trump’s threats to curb dissent are “out of the autocratic playbook. He’s actually rehearsing, in a sense, what he would be doing as head of state, which is what Orban does, Modi is doing, Putin has long done,” naming the dictatorial leaders of Hungary, India and Russia, all of whom Trump has lavishly praised.

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

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Monday, October 14, 2024 6:08 PM

SECOND

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


In Texas, Republican politicians do NOT really oppose illegal immigration

By Kevin Drum | October 14, 2024 – 1:34 pm

https://jabberwocking.com/in-texas-no-one-really-opposes-illegal-immig
ration/

In the current issue of Texas Monthly Jack Herrera has a top notch story about illegal immigration in Texas. https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/border-crisis-texas-solutio
ns/

He writes about the main reason for the recent spike in border crossings:

Arguably the most important factor—one too rarely considered—is the interplay of supply and demand. In 2021, as the pandemic began to ease, “We’re Hiring” signs started to appear in the windows of businesses across the U.S. Acute labor shortages hobbled entire industries, interrupting supply chains and fueling inflation. In response, a record number of workers crossed the southern border.


Hererra then focuses specifically on worker shortages in Texas's booming construction business:

The deficit in construction is historic, by some measures.... Texas building executives are speaking in apocalyptic terms about the labor shortage they’re still facing. Behind closed doors, they bluntly acknowledge that countless new projects won’t get off the ground unless they hire workers who are in the country illegally.

....The industry also faces a labor-force problem it cannot address quickly simply by raising pay. For two decades, the number of U.S.-born workers entering the construction trade has nosedived.... Cutting off the supply of undocumented workers, then, would be like cutting off the supply of concrete and lumber.


....Whenever Texas politicians threaten to pass laws that would make it harder for businesses to employ undocumented workers, phones in the Capitol start ringing. Stuck with the need to show their base that they’re cracking down on migrants, politicians, including [Governor Greg] Abbott, have instead found a middle ground: They keep up their bombast regarding the border, but they avoid stringing any razor wire between undocumented immigrants and jobs in the state’s interior.

Herrera's main takeaway is that Texas politicians deliberately do things that get public attention—Project Lone Star, high profile disputes with the feds, busing immigrants to New York—but that won't make a dent in the numbers. That's because the business owners who really control Texas politics won't abide anything that actually works. So the charade continues.

In 2017, after Donald Trump first moved into the White House, his acting ICE chief, Thomas Homan, declared that he intended to increase worksite enforcement by “four hundred percent.” He largely succeeded. By the end of 2018 ICE had quadrupled investigations of undocumented workers, and agents had arrested seven times as many immigrants in workforce raids compared with the year before.

But one metric stayed virtually static: the number of managers arrested for hiring undocumented immigrants. In 2019 the Associated Press reported that convictions of managers who hired workers without legal status had even declined.

Williams made an argument I heard from Marek and others: that the government doesn’t have an interest in shutting down construction projects, which is what would happen if it required contractors to hire only legal workers. Of all the immigration-related crimes to prosecute, why go after those building the houses the country so badly needs?

It's not just construction, of course. And there's an obvious solution: mandatory E-Verify and real penalties for employers who violate it. But precisely because it would work, Republican business donors oppose it and Republicans, therefore, aren't much interested in it.

The simple truth is that there aren't enough legal residents to fill all the jobs in the US. Everyone knows this. When Donald Trump thunders about deporting every illegal immigrant in the country, it's just empty talk, red meat for the rubes. In reality, our economy would collapse without immigrants, and no one wants to risk that. So we continue appealing to xenophobia with walls and agents and raids, but it's all theater. As Herrera notes, it's just enough to keep illegal immigrants scared and exploitable, but always stops carefully short of making any meaningful dent in their numbers. Quite the coincidence.

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

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Tuesday, October 15, 2024 5:30 AM

SECOND

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


Nixon's Reelection and Watergate: Why Americans Ignored the Warning Signs

An administration called the “most deceitful in history” went on to win 49 states.

By Julian E. Zelizer, a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University | October 14, 2024

https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/10/14/warning-signs-presidential-electi
on-nixon-mcgovern-watergate/?tpcc=recirc_latest062921

A famous parable revolves around the troubled relationship between a scorpion and a frog. A scorpion needs to cross a river. Unable to swim, the scorpion asks a frog to carry him on his back. Listening to the request, the frog responds that he is hesitant because he fears that the scorpion will sting and kill him. After the scorpion assures his new friend that he would never do that, the frog agrees. Halfway through the journey, the scorpion stings the frog. Slowly dying, the frog asks, “Why did you do this?” The scorpion responds, “I’m sorry, but it’s in my nature.”

The story is a classic lesson about how dangerous people don’t usually change. Even when promising that they will act differently, the likelihood is that they won’t. It is also a tale about taking warning signs seriously. The frog understood the risks that he faced, yet he chose to ignore them.

U.S. presidential elections frequently involve warnings signs. Over the course of a campaign, voters learn a great deal about the candidates running and the potential costs of putting someone in office. Sometimes, a majority of voters decide to heed those warnings, yet there are other times in U.S. history when voters end up the frog.

In 2024, there are more warnings signs than usual about one of the major candidates: the Republican nominee, former President Donald Trump. There are big red flags from both his first term in office and his post-presidential years waving over and over about what Trump 2.0 would bring. Another one came on Wednesday, when the Washington, D.C., district judge handling the federal election conspiracy case against Trump unsealed a 165-page document with the fullest picture of what special counsel Jack Smith had found.

To understand how voters have the capacity to cover their ears to avoid hearing alarm bells, look back to 1972, when President Richard Nixon won reelection in a landslide victory against Democratic Sen. George McGovern. Too often, the story of Nixon’s reelection in 1972 and Watergate are treated separately. The thing is, there were, in fact, many people warning of who Nixon was as a politician and what he would likely do when freed from the restraints imposed by having to worry about reelection.

The familiar narrative on the 1972 election is that, riding high on diplomatic breakthroughs with the Soviet Union and China, Nixon defeated McGovern in a stunning victory that rivaled President Franklin Roosevelt’s coalition-building reelection win in 1936. There were many Americans who didn’t like Nixon or his policies, but it wasn’t until investigations in 1973 that his severe abuses of presidential power were revealed. Had the country only known more, so the story goes, the electorate could have averted the disaster they collectively faced on Aug. 9, 1974, when Nixon stepped onto a helicopter, leaving the White House in the middle of his second term.

In fact, numerous representatives and senators had been trying to expose Nixon’s nature even before that election. After Nixon announced on April 30, 1970, that he had secretly deployed troops to Cambodia and conducted a massive bombing campaign, there was a fierce outcry from Democrats about how he had lied and threatened the balance of power to accelerate a disastrous war. Idaho Sen. Frank Church and Kentucky Sen. John Sherman Cooper began drafting a bill to prohibit the president from using congressional funds for operations in Cambodia. Congressional critics railed against Nixon’s turn to impounding funds that they had appropriated and which he failed to veto. Soon after the break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate building in June 1972, Democratic Rep. Wright Patman, a Texas populist, attempted to launch an investigation into the connections he suspected between the burglars and Nixon’s reelection campaign. The effort, covered by the press, was undercut by Nixon and his allies on Capitol Hill.

Journalists and public intellectuals were on Nixon’s case long before most voters cast their ballot. In 1971, the administration’s efforts to prevent the press from publishing the Pentagon Papers, a secret Defense Department study exposing the lies told to justify the war in Vietnam, required the Supreme Court to intervene, culminating in the 6-3 decision in New York Times Company v. United States, which allowed publication. The media praised the decision as a blow to a president who was intent on stifling the press. In March 1972, Life published a story based on a nine-month investigation that accused the Nixon administration of having “seriously tampered with justice” to insulate supporters in San Diego from criminal prosecutions involving illegal campaign contributions. “The administration has in several instances taken steps to neutralize and frustrate its own law enforcement officials,” the magazine noted.

By mid-October 1972, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and Time were publishing stories about an FBI investigation into whether Nixon’s reelection team was involved in sabotage operations, including the break-in at the Watergate building, against the Democratic campaign. On Oct. 16, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein published a blockbuster story about how Nixon’s personal lawyer, Herbert Kalmbach, revealed that he “was one of five persons authorized to approve payments from the Nixon campaign’s secret intelligence gathering and espionage fund.” Nixon campaign manager Clark McGregor was so frustrated with reporters that he accused the press of acting politically, stating, “the Post has maliciously sought to give the appearance of a direct connection between the White House and the Watergate, a charge the Post knows—and a half dozen investigations have found—to be false.”

And then there was McGovern, who made Nixon’s corruption a major theme in his final months on the campaign trail. In his acceptance speech at the Democratic Convention, McGovern said, “From secrecy and corruption in high places, come home, America.” In late September, during visits to three states on the East Coast, McGovern called Nixon “scandal-ridden” and “corrupt.” Speaking to labor leaders in Atlantic City, he warned that “If we let this Nixon-Agnew administration have another four years, I think they’ll make Warren G. Harding look like a Sunday school teacher.” McGovern called the Nixon administration the “trickiest, most deceitful” in U.S. history. On Oct. 17, he told a rally in Fort Worth, Texas, that Nixon was attempting to “escape responsibility” for the break-in and, in the process, “polluting the faith of the American people in government itself.”

McGovern’s emphasis on corruption intensified in the final weeks of his campaign. “As the net of truth closes tighter and tighter around the president himself,” he said, “they try to persuade us that the spying, and lying, and burglary, and sabotage will not affect the election because people expect these things of politicians.” If voters chose Nixon, he said, they would be selecting four years of “Watergate corruption.”

The problem was that McGovern was running against the wind. In mid-October, Gallup found that a minute percentage of Americans ranked corruption as a top issue; only 52 percent had even heard of the Watergate affair. The public concluded that both parties were equally corrupt, so it didn’t matter who was in office.

Nixon defeated McGovern by winning 49 states, including a sweep of the South, and 60.7 percent of the vote.

Today, the warning signs about Trump are all in broad daylight.

The first threat is Trump’s embrace of election denialism. The former president demonstrated that he is willing to destabilize the democratic system when election results don’t go his way. Multiple investigations have unpacked the systematic campaign by Trump and his allies to overturn the 2020 election, which culminated in the violence of Jan. 6, 2020. Since the insurrection, Trump has continued to deny the outcome—as did Sen. J.D. Vance during his debate against Gov. Tim Walz, when he refused to acknowledge that Joe Biden won. Moreover, the Trump campaign has made several strategic moves, such as supporting a change of rules by Trump-allied members of the Georgia State Election Board that will make it easier for local officials to question and delay the counting of ballots; this could easily create a certification crisis.

During his time in office, Trump refused to accept that there were limitations on what a president could do. Surrounded by advisors who believed in the unitary executive theory, Trump did what he wanted to do until someone was able to stop him. Formal or informal guardrails were not his thing. Trump’s expansive, and dangerous, views of presidential power were clear during the first impeachment trial when the United States learned how he had threatened congressionally appropriated aid to Ukraine if Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky did not agree to help dig up dirt on Biden and his son. Trump and his supporters were very clear that he will flex even more of that muscle should he be given another chance to do so. He has often spoken in public about collapsing the firewall that has separated the president from the Justice Department since Nixon’s downfall, and he has threatened to use that prosecutorial power to go after his opponents. In one Truth Social post about Smith’s investigation, Trump said that there would be “repercussions far greater than anything that Biden or his Thugs could understand.” Written by many high-level officials in Trump’s operation, including Stephen Miller, Project 2025 is a 900-page road map to a massive expansion of executive power.

Finally, Trump poses a serious risk to human rights. Between 2017 and 2021, undocumented immigrants were subject to intense and inhumane punitive measures, such as the separation of families, in an effort to disincentivize border crossings. In response to #BlackLivesMatter, Trump asked former Defense Secretary Mark Esper about shooting civil rights protesters in 2020. He famously had peaceful protesters in Lafayette Park cleared out with tear gas all so that he could get a photo-op. Finally, he was the instrumental force behind the creation of the 6-3 majority on the Supreme Court that overturned Roe v. Wade.

The United States paid a high price for its decision in 1972. Nixon’s second term was consumed by the Watergate scandal, which rocked U.S. politics, traumatized and divided the nation, and resulted in decades of deep distrust of government. In 2024, will voters heed the warning signs?

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

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Tuesday, October 15, 2024 7:05 AM

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


Trump campaign furious Walz using Trump’s own 'reckless, dangerous rhetoric' against him

By David Badash | October 14, 2024

https://www.alternet.org/tim-walz-trump-campaign/

The Trump campaign lashed out at Minnesota Governor Tim Walz on Monday after the Democratic vice presidential nominee quoted the Republican presidential candidate who repeatedly over the weekend has been saying he would like to use the U.S. military against American citizens.

As NCRM reported, the Republican presidential nominee said he thinks the U.S. Armed Forces should be used against Americans who oppose him, called his critics “the enemy from within,” and declared they are more dangerous than America’s greatest foreign adversaries, including Russia, China, and North Korea.

“I always say we have the outside enemy, so you can say China, you can say Russia, you can say, Kim Jung-Un,” Trump told supporters at an Aurora, Colorado rally on Friday. But, he added: “It’s the enemy from within, all the scum that we have to deal with that hate our country. That’s a bigger enemy than China and Russia,” he said as the audience cheered.

Then, on Sunday, Trump told Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo of his desire to use armed forces against Americans on Election Day.

“I think the bigger problem are the people from within, we have some very bad people, we have some sick people, radical left lunatics. And I think they’re the — and it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary by the military.”
https://x.com/VetsForRL/status/1845502168788599137

Trump War Room, the official social media account of the Trump campaign, posted video of Walz on Monday speaking with supporters.

“Donald Trump over the weekend was talking about using the U.S. Army against people who disagree with him,” Walz had said. “Just so you’re clear about that, that’s you. That’s what he’s talking about. This is not some mythical thing out there. He called it the ‘enemy within.'”

The Trump War Room social media account wrote: “Tim Walz peddles a disgusting lie that President Trump will use the U.S. Army against his political opponents: ‘That’s you, that’s what he’s talking about.’ This is reckless, dangerous rhetoric,” the campaign stated. “Tim should be ASHAMED of himself.”

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

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Tuesday, October 15, 2024 8:56 AM

SECOND

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


The term fascism has been so overused as a denunciation that many people have understandably tuned it out. But every American should be shocked to hear a presidential nominee say that other Americans (including a sitting member of Congress) are more dangerous than two nations pointing hundreds of nuclear warheads at America’s cities. Indeed, one might expect that other Republicans would be horrified to hear such hatred directed at their fellow citizens and such comfort given to the nation’s enemies.

Pretty to think so. But today’s Republican leaders are cowards, and some are even worse: They are complicit, as Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin proved today in an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper. At least cowards run away. The GOP elected officials who cross the street against the light just to get away from the reporters are at least showing a tiny, molecular awareness of shame. Youngkin, however, smiled and dissembled and excused Trump’s hideousness with a kind of folksy shamelessness that made cowardice seem noble by comparison.

Tapper read Trump’s remarks verbatim, and then asked: “Is that something that you support?” Youngkin replied that Tapper misunderstood Trump, who he said was referring to undocumented immigrants. No, Tapper responded, Trump clearly meant American citizens. Tapper added that Trump had singled out Schiff. Youngkin aw-shucksed his way through stories about Venezuelan criminals and Virginians dying from fentanyl. “Obviously there is a border crisis,” Tapper said. “Obviously there are too many criminals who should not be in this country, and they should be jailed and deported completely, but that’s not what I’m talking about.” And then, to his credit, Tapper wouldn’t let go: What about Trump’s threat to use the military against Americans?

Well, Youngkin shrugged, he “can’t speak” for Trump, but he was certain that Tapper was “misrepresenting [Trump’s] thoughts.”

Some of the people who watched Youngkin’s appalling dishonesty immediately thought of one of the most famous passages from George Orwell’s 1984: “The Party told him to reject the evidence of his eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

But this interpretation gives Youngkin too much credit. Orwell’s dictators were able to terrify people with torture and deprivation into accepting the government’s lies. Youngkin, however, is not a terrified subject of an authoritarian regime: He’s just an opportunist. Like J. D. Vance, he knows exactly what he’s doing. Youngkin is demanding that everyone else play along and pretend that Trump is just a misunderstood immigration hawk, and then move on—all so that Youngkin can later say that he was a loyal Republican when he contends for the leadership of the GOP after Trump is either defeated, retired, or long gone.

In this, Youngkin joins a long list of utterly dishonorable people, including Nikki Haley, who ran against Trump with energy and honesty and then bowed and scraped after she was defeated. As The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, has noted, 10 Republican senators could have changed the course of history by supporting Trump’s impeachment. Ohio Senator Rob Portman, a supposed GOP moderate, is a particularly galling example. Portman twice voted against convicting Trump. He announced his retirement just weeks after the January 6 insurrection, and he had no electoral chances to protect (not that protecting one’s electoral chances is an honorable excuse). Still, he let Trump slide, perhaps out of fear of reproach from his neighbors back in Ohio.

It’s not exactly a revelation that the Republican Party’s elected ranks have become a haven for cranks and opportunists, and sometimes, it’s hard to tell the difference: When Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, for example, talks about how “they” can control the weather, it’s hard to tell if she is just a kook, if she herself is an anti-Semite, or if she is employing yet another anti-Semitic trope because she knows that some of the MAGA base feasts on such garbage.

For someone like Greene, the difference doesn’t matter. She is ignorant. And she traffics in ignorance. Her constituents have rewarded her with a safe seat in Congress. But in the Trump era, the conceit all along has been that more responsible Republicans such as Youngkin are lurking in the background, keeping their heads down while quietly and competently doing the people’s business.

Americans should therefore watch Youngkin’s exchange with Tapper for themselves. They should see that supposedly competent Republicans have already abandoned the party. To believe otherwise—especially after watching someone like Youngkin—is to truly obey the commandment to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/donald-trump-s-fascist-romp/ar-
AA1sgRFl?rc=1&ocid=winp1taskbar&cvid=9d73d47caf8d4d03bbc693ba93e7e6bc&ei=10

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

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Tuesday, October 15, 2024 4:49 PM

SECOND

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


Trump Crumbles When Pressed on Economic Policy in Tense Interview

By Nikki McCann Ramirez and Ryan Bort | Oct 15, 2024

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/trump-crumbles-pre
ssed-economic-policy-bloomberg-interview-1235134459/

Donald Trump continued his pre-election economic event tour on Tuesday with a lengthy interview with Bloomberg at the Economic Club of Chicago. It was a total mess.

Bloomberg Editor-In-Chief John Micklethwait did not take it easy on Trump, and it quickly became clear that the former president has no conception of the mechanics of or the potential ramifications of the economic platform he's running on. Bluntly, the former president was incoherent when pressed with real questions about his policies.

Micklethwait spent most of the interview attempting to break Trump out of what the former president repeatedly referred to as "the weave," his term for his rambling digressions - with ever-decreasing intelligibility - and general inability to focus on a given topic for more than a few seconds during his rallies and interviews.

Micklethwait didn't weave along with Trump, however, repeatedly working to bring him back on topic and answer the actual questions. The grilling exposed Trump's total cluelessness with regard to his own economic policy, and led Trump to attack Micklethwait as biased.

Here are the most notable moments from the most rigorous round of policy questioning Trump has been subjected to in recent memory.

Trump gets schooled on tariffs

The central pillar of Trump’s economic plan is widespread tariffs on all imported goods, with penalties appearing to increase depending on how much he dislikes the country. Economists have warned that such a policy could have devastating effects on American consumers, who would be saddled with increased costs for all imported goods.

When questioned about the specifics of his plan, and if he was aware of its pitfalls, Trump seemed ignorant of basic economic principles, insisting that other countries, not American consumers, would pay for the tariffs.

Micklethwait tried to explain the actual impact. “Three-trillion worth of imports and you will add tariffs to every single one of them, and push up the cost for all of these people to buy foreign goods,” he said. “That is just simple mathematics.”

Trump countered that he was “always good at mathematics,” and that high tariffs — and thus costs — would force companies to move production into the United States.

“That will take many, many, many years,” Micklethwait said, to which Trump replied that high enough penalties would make the move immediate as if companies could simply wand wave production plants, orchards, wineries, factories, and the like into existence.

The former president also insisted that his tariff proposal would not result in the loss of jobs that are dependent on trade, because companies that moved to the U.S. would not be subject to the tax. “All you have to do is build your plant in the United States and you don’t have any tariffs,” he said.

Trump gets frustrated and bashes the interviewer

Micklethwait’s attempts to keep Trump on topic earned him no grace from the former president, who hates few things more than being contradicted.

When Micklethwait asked Trump to address a report by The Wall Street Journal estimating that his economic proposals would raise the national debt by upwards of $7 trillion, the former president fell back on his standard playbook: bashing the interviewer.

“What does The Wall Street Journal know? They’ve been wrong about everything, and so have you by the way, you’ve been wrong,” Trump replied, crossing his arms and curling into his seat.

“You’ve been wrong all your life on this stuff,” he added. 

Much more at https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/trump-crumbles-pre
ssed-economic-policy-bloomberg-interview-1235134459/

Donald Trump speaks at the Economic Club of Chicago on the economy, crime, trade



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

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Tuesday, October 15, 2024 6:09 PM

SECOND

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


Book Review: Good Reasonable People : The Psychology Behind America's Dangerous Divide

Do They Really Believe That Stuff?

According to a new book, America’s political derangement has psychological roots.

By Joshua Rothman | Oct 15, 2024

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/open-questions/do-they-really-believ
e-that-stuff

Over the last couple of months, a neighbor of ours has been upping her sign game. In addition to the usual stuff—“Law and Order,” “Not My President,” “No Legal Rights for Illegal Immigrants,” and so on—she’s added “Democrats Are Communists and Terrorists—ARE YOU?” and “The Democratic Party HATES AMERICA—DO YOU?” Since I’m a Democrat, these signs make me mad. But, as a fellow-resident, they inspire a different feeling. We’re not friends, but I’ve had nothing but the most pleasant interactions with my neighbor over the years; I doubt that, if she knew anything about my politics, she’d treat me or my family all that differently. I just can’t square the extremity of the signs with the normalcy of the person.

That sort of dissonance is commonplace now. In parts of the country where everyone is of the same political persuasion, it’s possible to think of those on the other side as entirely evil, stupid, or deranged. But in places like the one where I live, where voters are roughly split, there’s no avoiding the fact that many ordinary, likable, and reliable people hold opinions that you find not just disagreeable but disturbing. Where do those opinions come from, and how deep do they go? Should they cause us to reconsider the character of those who hold them? These worrisome questions have been at the center of American life for years.

In theory, we should be able to answer them through conversation; by interrogating our zany uncles, we might find out what they really believe. But talking it through doesn’t always help. A central roadblock, the psychologist Keith Payne writes, is that people employ “flexible reasoning.” By conceding here and asserting there, they evade our queries, leading us into mazes of rationalization. Once we’re in the maze, it can seem as though these people don’t have stable beliefs, or don’t believe things in the usual way. In “Good Reasonable People: The Psychology Behind America’s Dangerous Divide,” Payne recounts arguing with his brother, who supported Trump, about whether the 2020 election was stolen. “I didn’t know how I could relate to him if he embraced Trump’s lie,” Payne recalls. To Payne’s great relief, his brother rejected Trump’s denialism, writing, on Facebook, that “by the letter of the law, yes, Biden won.” Yet his brother went on to say, “I think there was some malfeasance there in areas, I do. But it can’t be proven.” Like many people, Payne concludes, his brother had arrived at a kind of semi-belief, which allowed him both to acknowledge reality and “to hold on to the larger feeling that Biden’s victory was, deep down, illegitimate.”

It’s tempting to assume that only one’s political opponents are this slippery. But flexible reasoning, in Payne’s view, is “a bipartisan affair.” He recalls hearing, in the spring of 2020, that Tara Reade, a former Senate aide, had accused Joe Biden of sexual assault. His first thought was entirely partisan: “Would this mean four more years of Trump?” His second thought was that Reade had no evidence. Then he remembered how, during Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings, he himself had argued that claims of sexual assault should be taken seriously even when evidence couldn’t be produced. Eventually, he reasoned that “the worst-case scenario would be that we have two men, both accused of sexual assault, running for president.” This whole thought process, Payne recalls, “unfolded over about ten seconds while I rinsed the coffee pot.” What, exactly, did he think about the allegations? Who knows. The main thing “was that I was once again comfortable that I didn’t need to change my preference or my vote.”

We expect people to perform mental gymnastics in the political sphere. We call it spin, and regard it as normal. Yet sometimes we sense that people are spinning out of control, or we realize, queasily, that we’re spinning quite a lot ourselves. This adds another turn of the screw to the problem of appalling opinions. We can ask what those opinions suggest about the people who hold them. Or we can wonder how much they—or we—hold rational opinions in the first place.

According to Payne, a professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, flexible reasoning is a fundamental part of our mental tool kit. We reason flexibly in all sorts of nonpolitical situations. A young scholar might dread being denied tenure; a girlfriend might fear being dumped. But, when disaster strikes, they find ways of reasoning themselves back to happiness—as do we all. “Being denied tenure has a way of suddenly illuminating how much better paying and less stressful a nonacademic job might be,” Payne writes. Getting dumped helps us think, Good riddance! We have “psychological immune systems,” Payne concludes, and they keep us feeling good. Really, they do more than that—they help us maintain a stable sense of who we are.

So, who are we? Payne argues that, although our identities are infinitely variable, we share a “psychological bottom line”: the conviction that we are “good and reasonable people.” It’s not necessarily true, of course. We treat each other badly, do and say mean things, and repeatedly discover that we’ve been mistaken, ignorant, careless, or worse. Yet, despite our missteps, we still see ourselves as basically decent, and decades of work in psychology have affirmed that we freely rewrite history to maintain this view. When psychologists convince people that they’re wrong about an issue, for instance, those people often later misremember their prior stance, forgetting that they ever thought differently.

Our tendency to rewrite the past can annoy our friends and significant others. But its political consequences are far graver. For one thing, our determination to see ourselves as good, reasonable people extends to our tribes: we pledge our strongest loyalties to those groups that can “create and sustain our sense of identity as a good and valuable person.” Meanwhile, studies have shown that most people are pretty disorganized in their political thinking: very few of us hold a suite of positions that’s intellectually coherent or consistent over time. Payne describes an eye-opening series of experiments conducted in Sweden, Argentina, and the United States, in which researchers surveyed people about a wide range of political topics (asking, for example, about whether a wealth tax was a good idea, or if counterterrorism agencies should be able to monitor citizens’ phones). After taking the surveys away, the researchers secretly altered some of the answers that the respondents had given, then handed the surveys back and asked people to explain their views. Those surveyed only noticed that the answers had been changed twenty-two per cent of the time. “Astonishingly, on the majority of switched questions, participants then proceeded to explain why they chose an answer that they had in fact rejected,” Payne writes. “And the explanations they gave were every bit as sincere and compelling as the explanations they gave to answers that they actually had chosen.”

We desperately want a stable sense of ourselves, yet our views are profoundly unstable. What this adds up to, Payne argues, is the near-total subordination of political discourse to group identities. He writes that most people are “winging it,” saying and thinking what they need to do in order to “preserve the bottom line that they are good and reasonable people and their group is good and reasonable.” What if a group does things that aren’t good and reasonable? What if—say—its leader encourages people to invade the United States Capitol and overturn an election? And what if that group’s opponents say, loud and clear, that what happened was bad and crazy? In that case, winging it goes into overdrive. The insurrectionist group may even find it necessary to “say that the other side are fascists or socialists bent on destroying America,” Payne suggests. This is extreme behavior—but it’s in keeping with perfectly ordinary mental habits. In fact, Payne insists, it reflects a genuine desire to be good, giving one’s zany improvisations the feeling of moral force.

In an old comedy sketch by the British duo Mitchell and Webb, two S.S. officers are standing in a trench, waiting for Russian troops to attack. “Hans,” one of them says to the other. “Have you looked at our caps recently? . . . They’ve got skulls on them!” The other officer shakes his head—he doesn’t get it. The first officer persists. “Are we the baddies?” he asks. The two men look around, notice even more skull stuff—a scarf, a mug—and flee.

The skit is funny, of course, because it never works that way. In Payne’s account, we’re far more likely to try seeing ourselves as the good guys; we might accomplish this most efficiently by further dehumanizing those who have accused us of being bad. Also, it’s not so easy to walk away from your identity. The group affiliations that necessitate our ad-hoc beliefs are often “thrust upon us by accidents of history,” Payne writes. He points to the experience of Southern whites during and after slavery: having been born into a group that was perpetrating a heinous crime, many found it almost impossible not to believe that racism was in some sense justifiable.

Much of “Good Reasonable People” is devoted to America’s historical and socioeconomic divisions. How Americans vote can be easily predicted depending on whether they are rural or urban, religious or secular, educated or uneducated, white or nonwhite; to a degree, it’s even possible to predict how you’ll vote based on how prevalent slavery was in the county where you live. For Payne, the divisions in our society are baked in, and we don’t really choose to belong to one tribe or another. Moreover, whether we are actually good and reasonable people depends on much more than our political opinions. Our lives are wider and deeper than our votes.

Still, politics is powerfully magnetic; it’s easy (and perhaps convenient) to experience it as the central moral arena of our lives, and so to invest extraordinary energy on the tending of our political identities. Payne wants to be clear: he isn’t saying that politics is an illusion, nor that Democratic and Republican policies are indistinguishable. But the uncomfortable reality we face, he argues, is that psychological drama is of national importance. Journalists and policy experts focus on the issues, and our changing views of them. But “the reasoning loops we go through are less like the linear thinking of a computer and more like painting,” he writes. “If something doesn’t feel right, you can always go back and change it. News channels and social media are constantly serving up an assortment of arguments to fill your palette. If one combination doesn’t work you can keep mixing and shading, until everything feels right.” Our pictures alter from day to day, but a troubling status quo is preserved.

Some of what Payne describes is familiar. Of course we’re partisan; obviously, we have blind spots. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Trump administration used an old public-health regulation called Title 42 to expel hundreds of thousands of migrants. Democrats criticized the action vociferously—yet, when the Biden Administration used the same regulation to expel even more people, many overlooked it. Republicans say they want the government out of our lives, but support developments, in reproductive health and elsewhere, that increase government interference. These inconsistencies are just part of politics.

Yet Payne’s analysis points to a different, more troubling level of irrationality. In his version of our political life, our deepest and most ineradicable habits of mind push some of us to indulge in radical fantasies about the rest of us. Irrespective of the underlying reality, these fantasies shape our collective life. “We need more humanizing, because people in our country have been dehumanizing one another a lot,” he writes. “Democrats call Trump supporters MAGAts. Republicans call Democrats demon rats.” And “decades of research have found that dehumanizing words and images are a strong predictor that political violence is around the corner.” It’s possible to blame the intensification of partisanship mainly on external factors, such as the Internet, which can, at least in theory, be addressed. But Payne points to internal factors that are even more tenacious.

If Payne is correct, then a certain kind of future scenario seems likely. Democrats dream of a time when Republicans turn their backs on Donald Trump, and when all of America views him as a baddie. But is this really possible? If there’s a path out of our current political hellscape, it may very well involve the cultivation of a vast, exculpatory fiction in which the extremities of Trumpism are either forgotten or framed as understandable. Maybe, looking back, it will all be seen as part of some larger and largely innocent semi-mistake—a good-faith effort, undertaken for decent reasons, by people who were ultimately good and reasonable. This fiction will be galling to some people, but deeply reassuring to others. It could be that living with it will be the price we’ll have to pay to live with each other.

Download for free the book from the mirrors at https://libgen.is//search.php?req=Good+Reasonable+People

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

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Tuesday, October 15, 2024 8:19 PM

THG


He was supposed to take questions. It was after all, a town hall. He couldn't do it so he stood there for 40 minutes and swayed to music. What the fuck?

T


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Wednesday, October 16, 2024 6:32 AM

SECOND

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


Notes on Trump’s Bloomberg interview

By Kevin Drum | October 16, 2024 – 3:01 am

https://jabberwocking.com/notes-on-trumps-bloomberg-interview/

. . . Trump also complained that Fed chair Jerome Powell kept interest rates too high while he was president—until Trump threatened to fire him. That scared him so much he cut rates immediately. In fact, "he dropped them too much."

This is nuts. Even in 2019, when the economy was running hot, interest rates were always below 2.5%. Late in the year they were lowered moderately, but it was only after the pandemic started that they went to zero—as they certainly should have.

Then Micklethwait made the mistake of asking Trump precisely what he'd do to cut waste in the government. It probably seemed like a nice, concrete question, but Trump wouldn't answer. Instead he took the opportunity to yet again brag about how he saved $1.7 billion dollars almost overnight on a new pair of Air Force Ones. All he had to was call the CEO of Boeing and ask, something that no one before him had ever thought to do.

This is yet another Trump fantasy. He played no role in negotiating the Boeing contract, which ended up where everyone always thought it would. But no one ever challenges him, so he keeps repeating this tall tale every chance he gets.

On the subject of fantasies, Trump also insisted that he gave Apple a break on tariffs but only if they started manufacturing in the US. And they did! They opened a factory in Austin to make Mac Pros.

Except for one little detail: that factory opened in 2013, long before Trump was around. But he's been taking credit for it anyway since 2019.

After it was all over and Trump had done nothing but repeat his usual lies and demonstrate that he knows nothing about the economy, his fans at Fox News immediately began marveling at Trump's masterful performance in schooling Micklethwait. Why, Trump's command of economics was so overwhelming the poor guy never stood a chance. Seriously, they said that. It's a case study in toadying unrivaled in recent history.

At https://jabberwocking.com/notes-on-trumps-bloomberg-interview/ there are graphs showing that what Trump claimed to be happening did not happen.

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

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Wednesday, October 16, 2024 8:17 AM

SECOND

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


During the Biden administration, the Republican controlled Supreme Court wielded its power aggressively. It greenlit abortion bans in numerous red states. It abolished affirmative action at nearly all universities. It has turned itself into a printing press for court orders benefiting the Christian right. It’s given itself sweeping veto power over literally anything done by a federal agency that should be controlled by the president. And then there was that whole affair where the Republican justices said that Donald Trump was allowed to commit crimes while he was in office.

Along the way, the Court has pulled new legal rules out of thin air, then used these newly invented rules to nullify many of Biden’s most ambitious programs.

If the American people had voted for this agenda then it would be difficult to criticize the Republican Party's Supreme Court justices for pushing it. But the electorate did nothing of the sort.

More at https://www.vox.com/2024-elections/377729/kamala-harris-supreme-court-
electoral-college-senate-constitution

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

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Wednesday, October 16, 2024 10:37 AM

THG


Have I said I'm voting for Kamala? I am, I am voting for Kamala.

T

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