Elections; 2024 by THG

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
RFK Jr. suggested COVID is a Chinese bioweapon “ethnically targeted” to “attack Caucasians and Black people” and to spare “Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese” people.

https://www.politico.com/news/2023/07/15/rfk-jr-covid-19-ethnically-ta
rgeted-00106478

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
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Right, he's nuts.

T

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Sunday, July 16, 2023 8:14 AM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by THG:

Right, he's nuts.

T

But RFK Jr. is smart enough to say that's not what he really meant to say. He really meant it and only regrets the words that escaped his mouth. Once he is President, the craziness inside RFK Jr., without apology, will come out as it did with Trump.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
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Sunday, July 16, 2023 11:02 AM

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

Trump described as 'most evil person I've ever met' by member of his own cabinet

Miles Taylor, who worked for the former President, wrote on Twitter Tuesday that one Trump cabinet official even went so far as to describe the former president as "evil."

"I’ll never forget an ex-Trump cabinet member telling me: 'He is truly the most evil person I have ever met,'" Taylor wrote. "We cannot make this mistake again."

Although Taylor did not identify this former cabinet official by name, he did follow up with a quote from former Trump chief of staff John Kelly, who offered a similarly withering assessment of the former president's character.

https://www.rawstory.com/miles-taylor-trump/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
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Sunday, July 16, 2023 1:24 PM

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

The 2024 Election Is a Fight Over America’s Way of Life
GOP voters see a country corrupted by liberal ideals

It's natural for Republicans to dislike the Democratic agenda and vice versa. But check out these Republican quotes from a Wall Street Journal story:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-2024-election-is-a-fight-over-america
s-way-of-life-36d09b18?st=lr1qr5b0makpwwb&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

“It’s like half the country has lost their minds. People don’t even know what gender they are.”...If Republicans lose again, “it’s going to be the downfall of our society.”

“We have lost our K-12 schools to radical-left activists. We’ve certainly lost our universities to the same, and other institutions. Everyday Americans,” are being forced “to bend your knee to the rainbow flag.”

“Our base believes that we’re losing our country, and that the left has become radicalized to a point that they no longer believe in America and want to burn it all down and remake it in their image.”

About 80% of Republicans believe that the Democratic agenda, “if not stopped, will destroy America as we know it.”

"Downfall." "Bend your knee." "Burn it all down." "Destroy America." The apocalyptic language is what makes things so toxic these days. If you truly believe that Democrats deliberately want to destroy America, what wouldn't you do or believe to defeat them?

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

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Sunday, July 16, 2023 3:34 PM

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

In Adam Smith’s famed 1776 disquisition on economics, “The Wealth of Nations,” he ponders the behavior of the “great proprietors” of feudalism. They owned the most valuable property available — i.e., land — and with their income from this property supported a class of attendants and retainers, and, below them, a class of tenants of the land.

But the proprietors gradually lost the taste for this. They eventually wished to consume “the whole surplus produce of their lands … without sharing it either with tenants or retainers. All for ourselves and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.”

“The Wealth of Nations” is full of this kind of ferocious criticism of the psychology of the powerful, so it’s peculiar how today’s powerful champion the book so frequently. There was even a vogue among male members of the Reagan administration for wearing ties with little pictures of Adam Smith. The most likely explanation here is America’s top apparatchiks don’t waste their time reading stuff.

In any case, Smith’s perspective was generally correct: both about the way societies can develop three different tiers, and the overall view of the people at the top of them. Their vile maxim — all for ourselves and nothing for other people — seems to be reaching a level of virulence Americans haven’t experienced in living memory.

Like feudal England, America has, roughly speaking, three classes. At the top are today’s great proprietors. The basis of their wealth is no longer mainly held in land but in direct ownership of their own businesses plus financial instruments including corporate stocks and bonds. The top 1 percent owns over half of U.S. corporate stock.

The people just below them are no longer attendants and retainers but technocrats. They’re the people who go to school to develop the specialized skills that are necessary to keep society running day to day: doctors, lawyers, scientists, computer programmers, engineers. (Journalists are also technocrats but among the weakest of the group.) The rest of the top 10 percent — i.e., the 9 percent — owns almost all the rest of U.S. corporate stock.

Then there’s everyone else. They’re no longer tenant farmers, but they still have to get up every day and clock in at Home Depot and Walgreens and Chipotle to cultivate the possessions of the great proprietors. This working class has the least leverage and the fewest options.

In retrospect, it’s clear America’s masters of mankind were shocked enough by World War II to dial the vile maxim back. As President Franklin Delano Roosevelt said in his 1944 State of the Union address, “Necessitous men are not free men. People who are hungry, people who are out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.” Even if you were the son of a National City Bank executive destined to follow in your father’s executive footsteps, you would be able to hear Roosevelt’s message after spending time facedown in the mud on Okinawa, covered in your platoonmate’s viscera.

Thus the great proprietors were willing to share quite a bit with the bottom two classes — for a while. During the three decades after the war, median wages went up hand in hand with productivity. That is, as America overall got richer, so did regular people.

But by the 1970s, the great proprietors had gotten tired of this arrangement. The generation with direct adult experience of how destabilized societies can explode into a worldwide slaughterhouse was retiring and dying.

So the masters of mankind decided to alter the deal vis-à-vis the working class. This was such a gargantuan success, it’s amazing they pulled it off without bloodshed. If the minimum wage had continued to go up in step with productivity, it would now be not $7.25 but about $25 an hour. A recent RAND study found that if the U.S. had remained as equitable as it was in 1975 for the next 43 years through 2018, the bottom 90 percent of Americans would have earned an extra $47 trillion. Instead that money flowed in a great flood to the top.

More at https://web.archive.org/web/20230716100820/https://theintercept.com/20
23/07/16/class-warfare-1-percent-technocrat/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
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Sunday, July 16, 2023 5:36 PM

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

Right, he's nuts.

T
But RFK Jr. is smart enough to say that's not what he really meant to say. He really meant it and only regrets the words that escaped his mouth. Once he is President, the craziness inside RFK Jr., without apology, will come out as it did with Trump.

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

After Trump, I think the country is wise to any double talk coming from RFK. He looks like an idiot. To me anyway.

T

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Sunday, July 16, 2023 7:11 PM

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Sunday, July 16, 2023 7:22 PM

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Sunday, July 16, 2023 7:26 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
DeSantis Fires Roughly A Dozen Staffers With More On The Way

Sunday, Jul 16, 2023 - 03:35 PM

The 2024 presidential campaign of Ron DeSantis (R) has fired roughly a dozen staffers, with more 'expected in the coming weeks,' after the Florida governor has failed to gain ground on former President Donald Trump less than two months after he entered the race.

DNC/central committee dems are afraid of RFK, so they attack him

GOP/central committee repubs are afraid of Trump, so they attack HIM.

What they don't realize is that being attacked by TPTB is, to some voters, a badge of honor and validation of the candidates' vote-worthiness.

Seriously, central committees, get a grip.

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

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM

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Sunday, July 16, 2023 7:43 PM

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

Donald Trump brands US a 'third-world hellhole' run by 'perverts' and 'thugs'

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/donald-t
rump-florida-us-2024-b2376034.html

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
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Sunday, July 16, 2023 11:08 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Donald Trump brands US a 'third-world hellhole' run by 'perverts' and 'thugs'

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/donald-t
rump-florida-us-2024-b2376034.html

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

Biden* is a thug and Hunter is a pervert, and many areas of our once -liveable cities are indeed hellholes.

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

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM

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Monday, July 17, 2023 8:28 AM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

Biden* is a thug and Hunter is a pervert, and many areas of our once -liveable cities are indeed hellholes.

The creators of hellholes live in the city, the county, and the state and it is their responsibility to fix their problems, not the Federal government. But the problem makers think the White House, not themselves, must fix their problem, which is why there are unfixable problems, to begin with.

History explains insults from Trumptards such as Signym and 6ix: Abraham Lincoln probably would have loved the irony. The president so grandly memorialized in marble today was savagely maligned in his own time -- far more than any modern presidential candidate. "Filthy Story-Teller," he was branded during his reelection campaign in 1864. His opponents called him Ignoramus Abe, despot, liar, thief, braggart, buffoon, usurper, monster, old scoundrel, perjurer, robber, swindler, tyrant, fiend and butcher. And those were just the insults from the North. The rebellious South, literally at war with Lincoln, had its own arsenal. No matter how nasty, how "negative" or personal the intensifying contest between President Clinton and Robert J. Dole may become, it almost certainly will not compare with the viciousness that defined Lincoln's presidential campaign and many others almost from the time the office first was contested. For all the complaints about modern campaigns, presidential races today are positively tame compared with the venom that was spewed almost from the beginning. By the end of George Washington's two-term presidency, partisan politics were emerging, and not even the revered father of the new country was immune from their blistering sting. "If ever a nation has been debauched by a man," wrote Benjamin Franklin Bache, Ben Franklin's grandson, "the American nation has been debauched by Washington." George-bashing by Bache and others was an inevitable result of budding political factionalism represented by Washington's heir apparent, Vice President John Adams, and his opponent in 1796, Thomas Jefferson. It was the dawn of a virulent American tradition.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/1996/09/11/when-politics-was-re
ally-ugly/dd3cd4b8-5e85-44de-a795-36e211c1a032/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
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Monday, July 17, 2023 8:36 AM

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

The far right’s war on “woke” has real-world consequences for the military

Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville has held up the confirmation of more than 260 generals for new command posts — including members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the head of the Marine Corps — over his objections to the Pentagon’s abortion policy.

Tuberville, a former football coach who is closely allied with former President Donald Trump, has refused to go forward with the routine confirmations and is essentially using defense policy as leverage to promote his cultural ideology. But the Department of Defense has repeatedly warned that holding up the confirmations is damaging the military’s chain of command at the highest levels.

Any senator can hold up these confirmations, even if the other 99 wish to move forward with them, because of the Senate concept of unanimous consent. The Senate has long relied on unanimous consent to promote military personnel through batch confirmations, but with Tuberville’s hold, the only way to move the confirmations forward would be to vote on them one by one, through regular order. Sen. Jack Reed, a Democrat from Rhode Island and the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, told the Associated Press that doing so would take up to 84 days with the chamber working regular, eight-hour days, or 27 days if they worked “around the clock.”

Tuberville’s hold, which could affect 650 military promotions by the year’s end, is based on a misrepresentation of how the Pentagon’s abortion policy works. And he isn’t the only Republican using legislation related to the military to force right-wing policies into defense policy.

More at https://www.vox.com/2023/7/16/23793775/republican-wokeness-pentagon-mi
litary-tuberville

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
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Monday, July 17, 2023 3:03 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:
DeSantis Fires Roughly A Dozen Staffers With More On The Way

Sunday, Jul 16, 2023 - 03:35 PM

The 2024 presidential campaign of Ron DeSantis (R) has fired roughly a dozen staffers, with more 'expected in the coming weeks,' after the Florida governor has failed to gain ground on former President Donald Trump less than two months after he entered the race.

DNC/central committee dems are afraid of RFK, so they attack him

GOP/central committee repubs are afraid of Trump, so they attack HIM.

What they don't realize is that being attacked by TPTB is, to some voters, a badge of honor and validation of the candidates' vote-worthiness.

Seriously, central committees, get a grip.

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

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM

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Monday, July 17, 2023 4:33 PM

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Monday, July 17, 2023 10:11 PM

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

The weather is one of the most important political issues. If the GOP wins control of the White House and Congress next year, it will dismantle the green energy subsidies enacted by the Biden administration that lead to a major reduction in emissions.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
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Monday, July 17, 2023 10:29 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Originally posted by THG
CHRIS CHRISTIE LAUNCHES SCATHING ATTACK..

Exactly as I posted.

And you think what Chris Christie says is important to me? Dood, not pledged to the GOP and Christie can flush himself for all I care.

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

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM

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Wednesday, July 19, 2023 6:57 AM

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

The revolutionary Republicans who are determined to establish a Judeo-Christian theocracy in Tennessee

Is Tennessee a Democracy?

by Anne Applebaum

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/07/tennessee-republican
-partisanship-one-party-state/674732/

What happened when a Republican supermajority gained control—and wasn’t satisfied

Drive along the outer rim of the exurbs north of Nashville, past structures that might be barns or might be wedding venues, around developments called Vineyard Grove or New Hope Village, and eventually you will arrive at what is meant to be the new headquarters of the election commission of Sumner County, Tennessee. A featureless one-story brick warehouse with some makeshift offices attached, it has just enough space for the tiny handful of election-commission employees, the 275 voting machines that they recently purchased, and maybe some of the maintenance workers who used to share rooms with them, back when the agency was still in the basement of the county-administration building.

Dusty picnic tables crowd against the wall. An elementary school stands a few hundred yards away. Nothing about this building or its location screams “controversy.” But when Sumner County’s local elections brought a faction that calls itself the Constitutional Republicans to power last year, that is what it nevertheless became.

To fully grasp this story, you need to understand that the standard forms of American political polarization don’t exist in Sumner, a rural but rapidly suburbanizing county where Democrats are not part of the equation at all. None has won any county office for more than two decades. Instead, the main opponents of the Constitutional Republicans, who won 14 out of 17 seats on the county commission (following a general election in which only 15 percent of eligible voters cast ballots), are the ordinary Republicans—or, as their opponents would call them, RINOs (“Republicans in name only”). The Constitutional Republicans’ website explains that RINOs are different from themselves: “They raise taxes, they vote to silence the citizens, they won’t protect private property rights. They often partner with Democrats to defeat true Constitutional Republicans like us.”

Upon taking over the county commission, the Constitutional Republicans issued a document formally declaring that their activities will be “reflective of Judeo-Christian values inherent in the nation’s founding.” They also shut down the HR department, tried to privatize a public historic building, and refused to pay for the election commission’s move to the brick building, although it had been agreed on by the previous administration. The old offices—three basement rooms that recently flooded—were too small to store the new voting machines, and also insecure. The entrance to the basement stood right beside a cashier’s window where dozens of people were lined up to pay taxes on the day I visited. The county commissioners are unmoved by those arguments. “If we don’t fund it, you don’t get to do it,” Jeremy Mansfield, one of the Constitutional Republicans on the county commission, told the election commission at one public meeting about the move last fall. At a meeting in June, another county commissioner, angered because the new voting machines had been delivered to the new building, said that although he would “hate to pull the ace card,” the commission could always “declare this property surplus, and sell it.” That would leave the election commission, and its machines, with nowhere to go.

The building seems a small thing to get worked up about. But Facebook posts and videos of public meetings, all available online—the Constitutional Republicans are very transparent—make clear that this is not a trivial jurisdictional dispute and these are not petty people. They have ambitions and interests that extend well beyond their county. Their Facebook page reacted to the news of Donald Trump’s latest indictment by declaring, “The Biden family is an organized crime family,” and “Our justice system is rigged against Trump.” Another post asked whether Tennessee “should secede from the Union.” More to the point, Mansfield, who didn’t respond to my request for an interview (his view of the press is clear on his Facebook page, on which someone refers to the Associated Press as “American Pravda” and he responds, “except that Pravda does more honest reporting”), wrote a long post back in February attacking early voting and voting machines: “The gold standard for election integrity would be paper ballots filled out by people and counted by people in local precincts on election day.”

The Constitutional Republicans are confident in these views for a reason. “Our beliefs are derived from the bible,” their website declares: “We pray at every meeting and we seek God in all we do! His wisdom guides our decisions.” The same source gives them confidence that their enemies are wrong. “Evil never sleeps,” Mansfield wrote on Facebook, after reflecting on the critics who he said were attacking him for fighting against new development in the county, “so we must heed Churchill’s words, never give in, and never give up fighting for what is good and right.”

Few of these ambitious goals are within their reach. The Sumner County commissioners can’t arrest President Joe Biden. They can’t secede. But the county’s election commission, whose members are appointed by the bipartisan state election commission, is right there. It’s a local embodiment of the broader culture they dislike and of the government they distrust. If they can stick the agency back in the flood-prone basement, they will.

Tom Lee, the lawyer for the Sumner election commission—it is now suing the county—has an additional explanation as well. Lee points out that the Constitutional Republicans arrived in office wanting to enact deep, revolutionary change. That means that, whatever the previous regime decided, they are against it: “They are coming to power and saying, ‘Everything that came before us doesn’t count. We represent something new and different, and we don’t have to have any allegiance to the past.’” I told him that this sounded like the language used by the Bolsheviks, among other revolutionaries. He didn’t laugh.

Most of the time, Tennessee politics doesn’t make national news. That changed in April, when the leaders of the Republican supermajority in the Tennessee House of Representatives expelled two Democratic legislators, Justin Jones and Justin Pearson. The two men were accused of disrupting proceedings, because they repeated the demands of gun-control activists on the floor of the chamber, during a recess, using a megaphone.

The incident created a wave of outrage. The punishment seemed both extreme—since Reconstruction, only two people have been expelled from the Tennessee legislature, one for bribery and the other for alleged sexual misconduct—and racist, because it deliberately targeted two young Black men. A third protester, Representative Gloria Johnson, who is white, was allowed to keep her house seat. Belatedly, the Republicans who made this decision realized that it looked bad. At an acrimonious meeting held afterward (a tape of which leaked to The Tennessee Holler, a local online publication), they expressed no regret at the expulsions, but they did berate one of the members for not voting to expel Johnson, on the grounds that leaving her out made them all seem like racists. The decision also made heroes of the protesters, now dubbed the Tennessee Three, a title previously bestowed on Johnny Cash’s backup band. Jones and Pearson were reinstated by local officials, pending special elections in August, and became instant national stars.

But in truth, their story did not start on that day. Not so long ago, Tennessee was not merely a more bipartisan state but a model of bipartisanship, an example to others. Keel Hunt, a columnist for the Tennessean newspaper (and a Democrat who once worked for a Republican governor, Lamar Alexander), wrote a book about the 1980s and ’90s, an era when moderate Democrats and liberal Republicans ruled the state; when Tennessee sent Alexander, Howard Baker, Al Gore, and Jim Sasser to the U.S. Senate; and when many of the decisions that paved the way for Tennessee’s current investment boom were made. The book is called Crossing the Aisle: How Bipartisanship Brought Tennessee to the Twenty-First Century and Could Save America. So much has changed since then, Hunt told me, that the book “might now qualify as an obituary.”

Today, Tennessee is a model of one-party rule. It has a Republican governor and legislature. Republican appointees run the state supreme court. The state’s nine-member U.S. House delegation contains eight Republicans; Tennessee has sent two Republicans to the Senate. The governor is the only other official elected statewide. Unlike in other states, the attorney general and secretary of state in Tennessee are appointed, and they are both Republicans too.

Nor will the situation be easy to change, because gerrymandering is something of a blood sport in the state. The still-blue city of Nashville had a single Democrat representing it in Congress, but when the map was redrawn before the 2022 elections, GOP lawmakers split Nashville into three districts that stretch out into the countryside. Each elected a Republican. Instead of Jim Cooper, a Blue Dog moderate Democrat who held the seat for two decades, Nashville is now represented by, among others, Andy Ogles, who is best known for sending out a holiday card featuring himself, his children, and his wife all holding guns in front of a Christmas tree. State-level gerrymandering is just as vicious—Johnson reckons that one redistricting included a special effort to eliminate her from politics: “They split my precinct and drew a line basically a few blocks around my house to draw me out of the district,” she told me. (She moved, ran again, and won.)

Getting people to vote is not so easy, either, because Tennessee has some of the nation’s most restrictive voting laws. You can’t register to vote any later than 30 days before an election. If you vote by absentee ballot, it has to arrive by mail on or before Election Day. There are no drop boxes. First-time voters have to vote in person, which is a special problem for college students studying out of state. In 2019, the legislature passed a law subjecting voter-registration campaigners to financial or criminal penalties if they submit too many erroneous forms—a provision that seemed designed to discourage get-out-the-vote campaigns, was blocked as unconstitutional, and later repealed. Perhaps none of these rules alone would seem outrageous. But the “cumulative effect,” argues Tricia Herzfeld, a Democrat who serves on Nashville’s election commission, “is to make it hard to vote.” There is evidence for that theory: Tennessee has either one of the lowest or else the very lowest voter-turnout rates in the country, depending on how you count. And that, of course, is even before Sumner County moved to deprive its election commission of office space, conceivably making it difficult for anyone there to vote at all.

I came to Tennessee partly because I wondered how similar it might feel to Poland and Hungary, where for the past decade I’ve been warily observing the decline of democracy and the rise of the one-party state. The very large differences are immediately clear in Nashville, where music is the backdrop to everything, where everyone seems to be coming from a party or heading to one, where people on both sides of the political spectrum went out of their way to introduce me to other people. “This is a son-in-law kind of town,” someone told me. I wasn’t quite sure what that meant (something to do with everyone looking after friends and relatives?), but it was amusing. For that and many other reasons, Nashville is not Budapest-on-the-Cumberland. The Bill of Rights still applies. Federal judges rule on Tennessee laws. The U.S. Constitution is widely and even ostentatiously revered. There is no Central European gloom.

Nevertheless, the cascade of tiny legal and procedural changes designed to create an unlevel playing field, the ruling party’s inexplicable sense of grievance, the displaced moderates with nowhere to go—this did seem familiar from other places. So was the sense that institutional politics has become performative, somehow separated from real life. The Tennessee Three staged their protest on the floor of the legislature, after all, because the conversation unfolding there had taken no notice of the much larger protests happening outside the chamber. A few days earlier, a horrific mass shooting at Covenant, a private Christian school in Nashville, had galvanized the public. Opinion polls showed that more than 70 percent of Tennesseans want red-flag laws that would allow officials to remove guns from people who might misuse them, while more than 80 percent support background checks and other gun-safety laws.

Those enormous majorities were not reflected in the legislative debate. In the days following the school shooting, it was just “business as usual,” Justin Kanew, the founder and editor of The Tennessee Holler, told me. Kanew, a transplant from California like a number of people in Nashville, is himself a former Democratic candidate for Congress in Tennessee. During his campaign, he saw a gap in the public conversation, and that experience led him to found the Holler. Or rather the Hollers: There are now several Twitter offshoots—the Chattanooga Holler, the Clarksville Holler, and so on—all focused on the hyperlocal issues that the statewide media were missing. Kanew’s own talent is for a form of campaigning journalism: He produces short video clips, often of state legislators, and then circulates them on social media. Sometimes they go viral. That’s what he was doing on the day the Tennessee Three made their protest. “There were thousands of people showing up at the capitol,” he told me, “asking for something to happen. And if nothing had happened, that would have been pretty deflating.”

This was not the first time that the Republican leadership sought to shut down debate. The house’s “two Justins,” as they are now known, brought their megaphone precisely because the Republican leadership commonly turns off Democrats’ microphones when they are speaking. Representative Bo Mitchell was once cut off when he told the house, “Please don’t say you are pro-life and put more weapons on the street”—a statement ruled to be insulting. Jones told me that he was ruled out of order during a committee meeting because he’d said the leadership was “putting a Band-Aid on the issue” of school shootings; a few days later he was also told he had to remove a ban assault weapons pin from his jacket. Republicans insist, as Tennessee House Majority Leader William Lamberth told a local television station, that speakers are meant to stick to the topic: “It’s not open-mic night.”

Under relatively recent rules, individual members’ question time has been cut from 15 minutes to five. Occasionally, people who want to raise objections are not called on at all. During a debate on a bill regulating abortion, Gloria Johnson told me, “I stood on the house floor for 45 minutes, the entire argument of the bill, and they refused to call on me.” These tactics are new. Johnson, who has served in the legislature on and off for more than a decade, told me that although the house also had a Republican supermajority when she joined in 2012, the speaker at that time didn’t exclude Democrats from debate. “I don’t recall her refusing to call on me,” she said. Jones, who was a community organizer in Nashville for a decade before being elected, agreed that previous speakers were more open to conversation. “This was the most extreme session I have ever seen,” he said. “Republicans now treat the legislature as a private palace, a fraternity house or a country club.”

Nor is radicalization visible only in the legislature. Just as Hungary’s Viktor Orbán fights with opposition-controlled Budapest (and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan fights with Istanbul, and Poland’s Jaroslaw Kaczynski fights with Warsaw), so do Tennessee Republicans fight with opposition-controlled Nashville. Over breakfast at the Elliston Place Soda Shop—he likes showing off the city sites—Nashville Mayor John Cooper, a Democrat (and brother of Jim Cooper, the former member of Congress), ticked off the various disputes between the city and the state with a certain level of weariness: about control over the airport, about the beer board, about the sports authority, about the size of the city council (Republicans tried to cut it from 40 members to 20), and about the 2024 Republican National Convention—which, partly thanks to all of the other quarrels, will not take place in Nashville.

Some of the disputes are just about who controls the money, but he thinks real cultural friction underlies those too. Whereas Nashville used to be what the mayor calls a “big county-seat kind of town,” famous for its music clubs, now it’s also a focus of international investment, health-care investment, and tech investment. Oracle is building a $1 billion–plus campus in the city; Amazon has a major presence here too. On the morning we met, Mayor Cooper was jet-lagged, having just returned from Kurdistan. He went there because Nashville, aside from being the city that launched Taylor Swift, is also home to one of the largest Kurdish communities in America. After breakfast, he drove me to the East Bank, the site of the city’s next major development project, one that will include a new stadium, new housing, and some infrastructure renovations; along the way, we passed a remarkable collection of building sites, replete with giant cranes. Still, in the conservative mediaverse, Nashville’s city leaders are just another set of enemies. Fox News once devoted a whole segment to Cooper—in which Tucker Carlson accused him, falsely, of concealing information about COVID.

Kanew (and he isn’t alone) thinks the state serves as a kind of “guinea pig,” a test market in this same mediaverse, a place where new culture-war themes can be experimentally stoked. A war on judges as well as on remote voting began in 2021, when the chair of a key house subcommittee sought to remove a judge who had ruled in favor of expanding the right to vote by mail during the pandemic. Last September, the governor and other Republicans lashed out at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, allegedly for suppressing employees who criticized the university’s gender clinic, charges the university denied. More recently, the state attorney general has investigated the clinic, demanding private medical records.

Sometimes these efforts are clawed back. A determined group of local lawyers and lobbyists helped get some exceptions for the life of the mother enshrined into the state’s abortion ban. A Trump-appointed federal judge recently overturned another culture-war gesture, a Tennessee law banning public drag performances, on the grounds that it chilled free speech. But whether individual pieces of hard-line legislation stick might not matter, because part of the point of passing them is just to allow local politicians to align themselves with the general views of that same conservative mediaverse. One example: a recent resolution passed by the legislature to “recognize and commend” Orbán’s think tank, the Danube Institute, which promotes illiberal and antidemocratic ideas. Jones, objecting to that resolution, asked Tim Hicks, the Republican who proposed it, if he knew who Orbán was. He did not. One disgruntled Republican described this whole process to me as “governing by anecdote.” You could also describe it as “governing by Fox News.”

But every so often, a glimpse of something uglier appears, a hint that some people want more than culture wars designed for TikTok, Twitter, and the evening news. Walking to her home in Nashville, an acquaintance saw a car with a shoot your local pedophile bumper sticker, showing an outline of a man holding a gun to another man’s head. T-shirts with this image, phrasing, and implied approval of violence are for sale online. “This isn’t new to you, but it’s new to us,” she told me, which isn’t quite true. Poland, where I live part of the time, has had one political murder in recent years, but it was a knife murder. In Tennessee, people have guns. Jim Cooper, the former member of Congress, told me that getting anyone to run for office as a Democrat in some rural parts of the state is difficult partly because Democrat and pedophile are so often conflated by Republican activists, and potential candidates are spooked. About half of the state-legislature seats were uncontested in 2022.

Not that the problem of finding Democrats to run for office is new. Cooper also told me that one of his staff used to comb through local newspapers and look for people who had written angry letters to the editor. Then she would call them up and ask them to stand for election. Some said yes. Though most of them lost, he considered that a kind of victory. Jones thinks that after the expulsion crisis, “young people are fired up, bringing urgency to our politics,” and that more candidates will come forward. But there will be a steep road to climb if people fear that what is at stake in their local election is not tax rates and building permits but the safety and even the lives of their children—and if they fight back with real weapons.

If that possibility sounds ludicrous, or incredible, it shouldn’t. Kanew, the Tennessee Holler editor, woke up one night last April to the sound of gunfire. Someone had shot up the front of his house. No one has yet been arrested.

“You know the old saying: All politics is national.” That’s what the mayor of Nashville told me over his ham and eggs. “All politics is national,” several other people said to me too. It’s a joke—“All politics is local” is the old political chestnut—but also not a joke. In the past couple of years, prominent and less-prominent conservatives have been flocking from all over the country to Tennessee and, more precisely, to Williamson County, adjacent to Nashville and, partly thanks to that proximity, now one of the wealthiest counties in the country. The town of Franklin, Williamson’s county seat, has a large and well-lit (I visited at night) monument to the soldiers of the Confederacy. It is also home to equally monumental culture-war clashes and school-board battles that can rival those anywhere else in the country. The New York Times columnist David French, who lives there, reckons that “only 15 percent of my neighbors are Democrats.” The Daily Wire, a conservative media company that specializes in culture-war clashes and school-board battles, is now based in Nashville, as are a handful of its stars.

“All politics is national” is also the explanation that a lot of people gave me when I asked how Tennessee went from having a culture of bipartisanship to de facto one-party rule in a mere two decades. Almost everybody wanted to explain that Tennessee politics used to reflect the state’s particular geography (mountains in the east, Mississippi River Delta in the west, rivers and forest in the middle) and complicated history. Some Tennesseans had declared for the Confederacy; others fought against it. The Ku Klux Klan was founded in Pulaski, Tennessee; Nashville was the site of a series of sit-ins that were important to the civil-rights movement. The disgruntled Republicans in particular mourn the death of what used to be called “Tennessee enlightened mountain Republicanism,” the liberal, business-oriented party that once challenged the pre-civil-rights “Old South” Democratic one-party state, which relied on Jim Crow and voter suppression. For a long time, both parties celebrated the demise of that system, and no one wanted it back. Or so it seemed.

By some accounts, the shift began in the 1990s, during the Clinton administration, when talk radio and a confrontational new style of national media began to weaken the local newspapers that people used to read, and the local culture too. Others think the turning point came in the 2000s, when Barack Obama’s presidency produced a racist backlash. In 2012, one poll showed that nearly half of Tennessee Republicans believed in the birtherism conspiracy theory.

Still others think the harder shift inside the Republican Party began more recently, after it gained full control. John Geer, a Vanderbilt political scientist, told me that whenever a supermajority controls a legislature for a long period of time, “those in the minority have no political ability to effect change, and so they stop acting like politicians and instead become activists,” a thesis that explains the actions of the Tennessee Three, as well as the feeling that politics has become a form of performance art, only distantly related to real life.

But the supermajority is also affected, and its members become activists of a different kind. To stay in office in a state where few people vote and districts are gerrymandered, Tennessee legislators need to appeal to only a tiny number of very dedicated, very partisan people. The competition for those votes can quite quickly turn into a competition for who can sound most radical. Even the minority leader of the Tennessee State Senate, Raumesh Akbari, a Democrat, told me that it’s harder to do deals with people from heavily gerrymandered districts: “You don’t have anybody to check you and your district is extremely partisan.” Her own district skews heavily Democratic and heavily Black. “If I wasn’t someone who was willing to compromise, I wouldn’t have to,” Akbari said.

There is another element: Call it the lesson of Sumner County, the place where Republicans won everything, control everything, and yet still feel aggrieved and victimized. As in Hungary or Poland or as in Venezuela, the experience of radicalism can make people more radical. Total control of a political system can make the victors not more magnanimous, but more frustrated, not least because they learn that total control still doesn’t deliver what they think it should. No county commission or state legislature can possibly meet the demands of a quasi-religious movement that believes it has God on its side and that its opponents herald the apocalypse. But that doesn’t mean they give up. It just means they keep trying, using any tool available. Eventually they arrive at the point described by Tom Lee, the lawyer for the Sumner County Election Commission: “It’s not enough to get your majority and get your way—they have to make the minority lose their voice.”

On the tape leaked to The Tennessee Holler after the expulsion of Pearson and Jones, this dynamic is powerfully revealed. Grim Republican legislators talked about what they think is really at stake, and it isn’t megaphones. “If you don’t believe we are at war for our republic,” one of them says to the group, “with all love and respect to you, you need a different job.” They don’t believe that this is a normal political competition, either, or that their opponents are a normal, legitimate, small-d democratic opposition. Democrats, says another, “are not our friends.” They “destroy our republic and the foundation of who we are.” At one point, an apocalyptic tone creeps into the conversation: “The left wants Tennessee so bad because if they get us, the Southeast falls and it’s ‘game over’ for the republic.” So urgent and so dramatic is this challenge that some of them have come to believe that rules might have to be broken: “You gotta do what’s right, even if you think it might be wrong,” one of them says.

You gotta do what’s right, even if you think it might be wrong. Fight for the republic, because otherwise it will be “game over”: The language itself wouldn’t be unusual, if this were a radical minority fighting for its very existence. But this is the Republican Party, the party that controls pretty much everything in Tennessee. They are going to win the next election, and probably the one after that. Yet they sound as if winning isn’t enough: They also want their opponents to fall silent, and they are doing what they can to make that happen.

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

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Wednesday, July 19, 2023 11:49 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Is Tennessee a Democracy?

A question that Democrats always ask when they don't like the results of elections after people wake up and vote against their policies that ruin lives.

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

How you do anything is how you do everything.

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Wednesday, July 19, 2023 5:48 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:

Is Tennessee a Democracy?

A question that Democrats always ask when they don't like the results of elections after people wake up and vote against their policies that ruin lives.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene's words used against her in Biden campaign ad

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Wednesday, July 19, 2023 8:51 PM

Game over

T

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Thursday, July 20, 2023 1:37 AM

LOL

Fuck Maddow.

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

How you do anything is how you do everything.

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Thursday, July 20, 2023 7:13 AM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
LOL

Fuck Maddow.

Trump has a plan to become America's Julius Caesar. He is preparing to massively expand the power of the presidency.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/trump-plans-to-massively-expand-exec
utive-power-if-elected-report-says

Big Caesars and Little Caesars by Ferdinand Mount review

A needle-sharp book about political liabilities from Julius Caesar to Donald Trump

Wed 19 Jul 2023 07.00 EDT

One by one, the toxic giants have come crashing to earth. In the last month or so Boris Johnson has quit, Donald Trump has been arraigned on felony charges, Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi has died, and even Vladimir Putin looks significantly weaker than he did. It’s sorely tempting to conclude that the chaotic ride of recent years is finally over, and life might return to something more like normal.

But that, according to Ferdinand Mount’s absorbing tour of populist rogues through the ages, would be a rookie mistake. It may be comforting to think of so-called Caesars – a type of leader defined by what Mount calls his (and it’s mostly, though not invariably, his) “relentless egotism, his lack of scruple, his thoughtless brutality, his cheesy glitz” and above all his loathing of democratic checks and balances – as freakish aberrations from a generally orderly norm. But trace the line from ancient Rome to Oliver Cromwell, from Napoleon Bonaparte to modern-day strongmen, and it becomes obvious that they are a regularly recurring phenomenon for which nations just as regularly fall, and from which they don’t recover overnight. “These ill-starred comets,” Mount writes, “leave a long trail of debris.” But they also have something to teach us about stopping the next Caesar early.

Few are better qualified to take the long view than Mount, the sort of Tory who has done everything – run Margaret Thatcher’s policy unit, been political editor of the Spectator – and knows everyone, without feeling the need to go on about it endlessly. He is also the sort of Tory who voted remain, believes in rules-based world order, and writes skilfully enough to get away with comparing Julius Caesar’s public agonising over whether to cross the Rubicon – and thus start a war that risked destroying the Roman empire – with Johnson’s famous writing of two articles on Brexit, one for and one against. (The original Caesar, he argues, never seriously wobbled; he just wanted to suggest that he’d been nobly wrestling with his conscience when in reality he was always going to do what suited him best, ditto our former prime minister. One can’t help feeling the classicist in Johnson might have loved this book, were it not so rude about him.) For conventional politicians, Mount notes, charisma can be a useful communications tool. But in a Caesar’s hands, the ability to dazzle his way out of trouble becomes “a license to go beyond, to break the rules … he is beyond good and evil, and beyond a lot of other boring stuff too”. The true Caesar, Mount writes, feels “dangerously free”.

Admittedly, one or two of the historical comparisons feel like something of a stretch. But the power of this needle-sharp book lies in the acuity of its observations and in its ability to zoom out and see modern politicians in broader context, bringing something both fresh and timeless to an otherwise well-worn subject. When it first crossed my desk, I wondered if the world really needed another book on the dangers of populism. Then Johnson resigned and unleashed a Trumpian attack on the MPs who found him guilty of lying, and I wondered whether you can’t have too many. Every MP should be made to read its rousing final chapter, on the importance of a properly muscular and sovereign parliament in defending democracies against Caesarism.

For if the five acts he identifies as Johnsonian assaults on democracy – including attacks on the civil service, curbs on the right to protest and bringing in compulsory voter ID for elections, which Mount sees as outright voter suppression – haven’t exactly turned Britain into a police state yet, laws like this remain on the statute book long after their author is gone. Even if the last Caesar refrained from exploiting them fully to his advantage, the next one might not, and history suggests that there is always a next one.

Mount is right; the point isn’t whether Johnson, or Trump for that matter, can successfully come back themselves. It’s that what they represent will always be back, sooner or later, and democracies must be ready for it.

Big Caesars and Little Caesars by Ferdinand Mount is published by Bloomsbury (£20).

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/jul/19/big-caesars-and-little-c
aesars-by-ferdinand-mount-review-rogues-gallery

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

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Thursday, July 20, 2023 9:09 AM

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

How you do anything is how you do everything.

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Thursday, July 20, 2023 6:52 PM

Brutal New Poll Shows Trump Losing Big to Biden, Even With Third Party Spoiler

Anew Monmouth University poll suggests that former president Donald Trump would be easily dispatched by President Joe Biden in a 2024 rematch of the 2020 presidential election, even if Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) were to mount a third party bid that most analysts believe would hamper the Biden campaign.

In the national survey of 910 voters, 47% of voters said they would definitely or probably support Biden, while just 40% said they would back Trump.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/brutal-new-poll-shows-trump-lo
sing-big-to-biden-even-with-third-party-spoiler/ar-AA1e8d2Z?ocid=msedgdhp&pc=U531&cvid=1f7b598fb8d24b3180a3ada146e64827&ei=51

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Thursday, July 20, 2023 8:08 PM

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

Thanks to the Republican Party, Florida Schools Will Teach How Slavery Brought ‘Personal Benefit’ to Black People

The Florida Board of Education has approved shocking new standards for African American history, despite overwhelming backlash from the public.

By Allison Quinn, Published Jul. 20, 2023 8:31AM EDT

Middle school students in Florida will soon be taught that slavery gave Black people a “personal benefit” because they “developed skills.”

After the Florida Board of Education approved new standards for African American history on Wednesday, high school students will be taught an equally distorted message: that a deadly white mob attack against Black residents of Ocoee, Florida, in 1920 included “acts of violence perpetrated against and by African Americans.”

Dozens of Black residents were killed in the massacre, which was perpetrated to stop them from voting.

According to members of the board, that distorted portrayal of the racist massacre is factually accurate. MaryLynn Magar, a member of the board appointed by Gov. Ron DeSantis, said at the board’s meeting in Orlando on Wednesday that “everything is there” in the new history standards and “the darkest parts of our history are addressed,” the Tallahassee Democrat reported.

The majority of the speakers who provided public testimony on the planned curriculum were vehemently opposed to it, warning that crucial context is omitted, atrocities are glossed over, and in some cases students will be taught to “blame the victim.”

“I am very concerned by these standards, especially some of the notion that enslaved people benefited from being enslaved,” state Rep. Anna Eskamani (D-Orlando) said, per Action News Jax.

“When I see the standards, I’m very concerned,” state Sen. Geraldine Thompson said at the board meeting. “If I were still a professor, I would do what I did very infrequently; I’d have to give this a grade of ‘I’ for incomplete. It recognizes that we have made an effort, we’ve taken a step. However, this history needs to be comprehensive. It needs to be authentic, and it needs additional work.”

“When you look at the history currently, it suggests that the [Ocoee] massacre was sparked by violence from African Americans. That’s blaming the victim,” the Democrat warned.

“Please table this rule and revise it to make sure that my history, our history, is being told factually and completely, and please do not, for the love of God, tell kids that slavery was beneficial because I guarantee you it most certainly was not,” community member Kevin Parker said.

Approval of the new standards is a win for the DeSantis administration, which has effectively sought to create a new educational agenda that shields white students from feeling any sense of guilt for wrongs perpetrated against people of color. The Florida governor signed the “Stop WOKE Act” last year to do just that, restricting how issues of race are taught in public schools and workplaces.

In keeping with the administration’s crusade against “wokeness,” Education Commissioner Manny Diaz defended the new standards against criticism, saying, “This is an in-depth, deep dive into African American history, which is clearly American history as Governor DeSantis has said, and what Florida has done is expand it,” Action News Jax reported.

Paul Burns, the Florida Department of Education’s chancellor of K-12 public schools, also insisted the new standards provide an exhaustive representation of African American history.

“Our standards are factual, objective standards that really teach the good, the bad and the ugly,” he was quoted as saying Wednesday by Florida Phoenix. He denied the new standards portray slavery as beneficial.

Although education officials say teachers are meant to expand upon the new curriculum in the classroom, critics say teachers are unlikely to do that for fear of being singled out and possibly punished for being too “woke.”

The Florida Education Association, the state’s largest teachers union, called the new standards “a big step backward for a state that has required teaching African American history since 1994” in a statement after Wednesday’s vote.

Derrick Johnson, president and CEO of the NAACP, also condemned the new curriculum, saying in a statement: “Our children deserve nothing less than truth, justice, and the equity our ancestors shed blood, sweat, and tears for.”

“Today’s actions by the Florida state government are an attempt to bring our country back to a 19th century America where Black life was not valued, nor our rights protected. It is imperative that we understand that the horrors of slavery and Jim Crow were a violation of human rights and represent the darkest period in American history. We refuse to go back,” he said.

https://web.archive.org/web/20230720223647/https://www.thedailybeast.c
om/florida-schools-will-teach-how-slavery-brought-personal-benefit-to-black-people

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

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Thursday, July 20, 2023 8:24 PM

JAYNEZTOWN

Good on them, normally I think the party stupid but to give credit Republicans originally helped Free the Slaves and now they might even help tell the truth of it all.

Yup there is truth to it, every writing you dig up every historical archeological find you will see slavery has been a natural state of the human race for thousands of years, it seems cruel and uncivilized today but almost everywhere you look South America, Asia, Africa, Europe, North America one tribe beat the other and often took them as slaves, North African Arabs had slaves, the Jewish sold people, the Pagan Romans and Greek had slaves, the Shinto Japanese and Buddhist, the Hindu Indians, the Russians, Ottoman Turks everyone had slaves or took slaves

"Africans sold other Africans into slavery"

but when the truth becomes uncomfortable and politically incorrect it causes minds to go into cognitive dissonance and almost short circuit?

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Thursday, July 20, 2023 8:34 PM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by JAYNEZTOWN:
but when the truth becomes uncomfortable and politically incorrect it causes minds to go into cognitive dissonance and almost short circuit?

Daughter: So, I started dating this guy...he seems to have a lot of money...

Mom: That's nice

Daughter: But he's got sexual assault accusations.

Mom: What?

Daughter: In fact more than 20.

Mom: WHAT?

Daughter: Well he's only been found guilty of one...

Mom: *speechless, sputtering*

Daughter: And he's declared bankruptcy 6 times.

Mom: WHY WOULD YOU DATE THIS MAN?!?

Daughter: Well, you voted for him for president...

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

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Monday, July 24, 2023 2:05 PM

PA city demands Trump cough up thousands owed from 2018 rally before he returns again

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/pa-city-demands-trump-cough-up
-thousands-owed-from-2018-rally-before-he-returns-again/ar-AA1eidsY?ocid=msedgdhp&pc=U531&cvid=f9307268b3d44a70911b8eecf1f30feb&ei=43

You can add deadbeat when describing Trump.

T

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Monday, July 24, 2023 2:58 PM

Christie responds to Trump fundraising boost amid legal battles

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Monday, July 24, 2023 3:03 PM

Chris Christie: Donald Trump is a ‘con artist,’ conning people out of their money

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Monday, July 24, 2023 3:41 PM

tick tock

T

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Monday, July 24, 2023 5:12 PM

Special counsel Jack Smith’s office has asked former US officials about a February 2020 Oval Office meeting where then-President
Special counsel scrutinizing February 2020 meeting where Trump praised US election security protections

Donald Trump praised improvements to the security of US elections, according to multiple people familiar with the matter.

In the meeting with senior US officials and White House staff, Trump touted his administration’s work to expand the use of paper ballots and support security audits of vote tallies. Trump was so encouraged by federal efforts to protect election systems that he suggested the FBI and Department of Homeland Security hold a press conference to take credit for the work, four people familiar with the meeting told CNN.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/special-counsel-scrutinizing-f
ebruary-2020-meeting-where-trump-praised-us-election-security-protections/ar-AA1eiC1W?ocid=msedgdhp&pc=U531&cvid=a88ee21feb0d4b26ad4be8b08e2e8469&ei=68

Isn't that nice.

T

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Tuesday, July 25, 2023 10:43 AM

Jack, send Trump more money. Yes, he is a billionaire but still, you should help pay his lawyer fees. You could win a prize. Two tickets to one of his debates.

T

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Wednesday, July 26, 2023 9:23 AM

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

Kennedy Jr., whose candidacy has been praised by a who’s who of right-wing provocateurs like Tucker Carlson, Roger Stone, Steve Bannon, Michael Flynn and Charlie Kirk, dismissed the idea that Russia would lose the war it started.

“It would be like us losing a war to Mexico,” he said. “They are not going to lose the war.”

Fox host Sean Hannity pushed back at RFK Jr.’s assertions that the U.S. was ultimately responsible for the Ukraine war, and not Vladimir Putin.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/rfk-jr-clashes-with-sean-hannity-during-
fox-news-town-hall-says-us-pushed-ukraine-war

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

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Wednesday, July 26, 2023 9:32 AM

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

Did Donald Trump ever apologize to the ‘Central Park Five’?

Claim: Donald Trump "never said sorry for calling for my execution" as a member of the "Central Park Five."

Fact check by PolitiFact: Trump still believes group's guilt

Trump’s campaign did not respond to inquiries for this article but we found at least five occasions when Trump spoke derisively about the original defendants who have been officially exonerated. (Another man was proved to have been the perpetrator, based on DNA evidence.) In 2014, New York paid the original defendants a $41 million settlement, and supporters have called the group the Exonerated Five.

https://www.politifact.com/article/2023/jul/25/did-donald-trump-ever-a
pologize-central/

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

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Sunday, July 30, 2023 9:24 AM

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

RFK Jr.'s Latest Tweet Is Being Widely Interpreted As A Nazi Dog Whistle

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/robert-f-kennedy-jr-tweet_n_64c3fab7e4b
021e2f29310ba

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

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Sunday, July 30, 2023 12:47 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
RFK Jr.'s Latest Tweet Is Being Widely Interpreted As A Nazi Dog Whistle

No it's not. "Widely Interpreted" is a dog whistle by the Leftist Legacy Media for "That's what we think and we tell you idiots what to think".

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How you do anything is how you do everything.

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Monday, July 31, 2023 6:00 PM

Joe Manchin Handed Grim News About Reelection Chances

The poll, which surveyed 2,112 voters from April 4 to June 30, found that 55 percent of West Virginia voters disapprove of Manchin's job performance, while only 39 percent gave him positive marks. The poll had a margin of error of plus or minus two percentage points.

Manchin is the second least popular Senator in the United States, according to the poll. Only Senator Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, received lower approval from his constituents.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/joe-manchin-handed-grim-news-a
bout-reelection-chances/ar-AA1eBx59?ocid=msedgdhp&pc=U531&cvid=b7c155f4024145a1af9b3bb2a7fa999d&ei=141

Take a walk buddy.

T

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Monday, July 31, 2023 10:05 PM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
RFK Jr.'s Latest Tweet Is Being Widely Interpreted As A Nazi Dog Whistle

No it's not. "Widely Interpreted" is a dog whistle by the Leftist Legacy Media for "That's what we think and we tell you idiots what to think".

RFK Jr. went crazy, just as you are crazy, 6ixStringJack:

For a while, Kennedy’s pseudoscientific and conspiracy theories remained focused on his opposition to vaccines. But then they metastasized, spreading to a broader range of public health–related issues. He opposed not only vaccines but the fluoridation of water. He attacked mainstream medicine and extolled the virtues of alternative and holistic therapies. He suggested that the cause of AIDS was the use of “poppers” (alkyl nitrite inhalants), not the human immunodeficiency virus, and he blamed firearm deaths on psychiatric drugs, teenage depression on aluminum in vaccines, and the rise in the number of those identifying as transgender on drugs released into the water. He claimed that Wi-Fi and cell phones are health threats and described 5G technology as both medically dangerous and part of a plan to control the population.

Once a person believes in a conspiracy theory, two key psychological factors can make it hard for them to disentangle themselves from their beliefs: First, shared beliefs bind people together. We want to believe what others who are important to us believe. To not do so would threaten our relationships with them. The beliefs become part of a person’s identity: I am a person who believes such and such. By the late 2010s, Kennedy was increasingly surrounded by people who thought as he did, and he was increasingly cut off from the environmentalist community oriented toward more conventional science.

Second, we also try to maintain consistency in our beliefs. Information that is not consistent with our other beliefs and values gives rise to an internal sense of discomfort—what psychologist Leon Festinger called ”cognitive dissonance.” Either the old narrative must go, or we must find a way to discredit the new facts so that they can be incorporated into what we already believe. Belief in pseudoscience to belief in conspiracy theories is a short step. Kennedy’s narrative became one of extreme distrust.

More at https://slate.com/technology/2023/07/robert-f-kennedy-jr-rfk-covid-con
spiracy-history.html

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

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Tuesday, August 1, 2023 1:06 AM

Get fucked, Slate.

AI will be doing your job soon, if your outfit even remains open by the end of 2023.

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How you do anything is how you do everything.

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Tuesday, August 1, 2023 7:10 AM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Get fucked, Slate.

AI will be doing your job soon, if your outfit even remains open by the end of 2023.

Unfortunately, RFK Jr. has said many things that are false and he won't stop, but that was also true of Trump and look how smoothly Trump's life has always been, going from one courtroom to the next, thousands of times over the last 40 years.

How Many Times Has Trump Been Sued?
https://www.google.com/search?q=how+many+times+has+trump+been+sued

It happens to be true that if Trump had invested his billion-dollar inheritance in the S&P 500 Index rather than buying golf courses, he would be far richer than he now is cheating his subcontractors and being sued.

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

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Tuesday, August 1, 2023 11:31 AM

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

Get fucked, Slate.

AI will be doing your job soon, if your outfit even remains open by the end of 2023.
Unfortunately, RFK Jr. has said many things that are false and he won't stop

Accusations made by sources that lie all the time themselves.

*yawn*

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How you do anything is how you do everything.

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Tuesday, August 1, 2023 8:16 PM

"He's going to get drubbed": Fox News legal analyst says "Trump doesn't have a prayer" in 2024

Fox News legal analyst Andrew McCarthy in a recent article for the National Review had grim predictions about former President Donald Trump's ability to win the 2024 election. "I persist in the conviction that Trump doesn't have a prayer of being elected president again," McCarthy wrote, citing the former president's "unfavorability" that "hovers around 60 percent."

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/he-s-going-to-get-drubbed-fox-
news-legal-analyst-says-trump-doesn-t-have-a-prayer-in-2024/ar-AA1eEvPF?ocid=msedgntp&cvid=183be64e063b46dba262d96e6f16b81a&ei=44

So much winning. I'm buried in winning.

T

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Wednesday, August 2, 2023 1:02 AM

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

You need some hobbies or something, Ted.

You're far to emotional and not fit for following or taking any part in politics.

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How you do anything is how you do everything.

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Wednesday, August 2, 2023 8:51 AM

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

Trump doesn’t have a prayer of being elected president again. Democrats have drawn the same conclusion, based on a lot of sensible data — Trump’s past performances (i.e., his 46 percent high-water mark, even as an incumbent, before the stop-the-steal nonsense, the Capitol riot, and the string of indictments and civil complaints), the 2018 midterms, Trump’s costing Republicans control of the Senate in 2020, and the 2022 “red wave” that never happened thanks to Trump-supported candidates.

The Democrats are trying to get Trump nominated because they know they would beat him decisively in November 2024. The indictments (and there will probably be two more — one from Biden DOJ special counsel Jack Smith, perhaps as early as today, and one from Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis (in the next two weeks or so), coupled with the civil cases teeing up for trial (New York attorney general Letitia James’s fraud case on October 3, and a second E. Jean Carroll sexual-assault/defamation case in mid January), are both firing up the Trump base and preventing other GOP candidates from getting any traction. That is the intention.

Harry Enten’s CNN polling analysis, to which Rich and MBD refer, deals mainly with the nomination battle and the patent unlikelihood that another Republican could beat Trump given his quasi-incumbent status and his commanding lead in the polls — pulling more than 50 percent and registering more support “than all his competitors combined,” as Enten tautologically puts it. This squares with the latest RCP data, which has Trump polling at 54 percent — nearly 26 points ahead of his closest rival, Ron DeSantis.

The problem for Trump is he has no upside. He is as known a quantity as has ever sought the presidency. In a normal race, the 46 percent of Republicans who do not favor Trump could be expected to “come home” in droves in the general election if he is the nominee. That is not true of Trump. As the Guardian reports, recent Pew polling indicates that just a hair under a third of Republicans now view him very or mostly unfavorably. The remaining two-thirds view him favorably, but that is down from three-quarters last year. It is reasonable to forecast that at least a quarter of Republicans will not support Trump under any circumstances. That doesn’t mean they will vote for an unpopular Democrat, they just won’t vote (or will vote third-party, write-in, or some similarly futile vehicle for registering discontent).

To have a chance in the general election, Trump has to make up that support. But from where? Polls consistently show that Democratic opposition to Trump is nearly universal. They also consistently show that his unfavorability with the general public hovers around 60 percent. There is no reason to believe this will change. To the contrary, about 54 percent of voters cast their ballots for someone other than Trump in 2016 and 2020, when he was more popular nationwide than he is now. He couldn’t win in 2020 with 46 (he won by a miracle in 2016 with 46). He is not going to win with less than 46, but there’s no reason to think he would ever sniff 46 again.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/trump-cant-win/

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

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Wednesday, August 2, 2023 9:48 AM

It's 2016 all over again.

Good luck with that, buddy.

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How you do anything is how you do everything.

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Thursday, August 3, 2023 8:56 AM

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

Two bodies have been found stuck in the lines of orange buoys installed by Texas authorities in the Rio Grande along the U.S.-Mexico border. The Texas Department of Public Safety notified the Mexican Consulate in Eagle Pass, Texas, on Wednesday afternoon that a person was found dead in the southern part of the floating barriers. Members of the Mexican National Institute of Migration's assistance unit, Grupos Beta, are spearheading efforts to recover the body, according to the Mexican Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The Mexican National Institute of Migration told ABC News on Wednesday that a second body has been discovered in the buoys.

The Mexican Ministry of Foreign Affairs repeated its condemnation of the buoys, calling them a "violation of our sovereignty." The U.S. Department of Justice has sued Texas Gov. Greg Abbott over the use of the buoys.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/2-bodies-found-in-rio-grande-buoy
-barrier-at-us-mexico-border-mexican-officials-say/ar-AA1eIUfV

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

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Thursday, August 3, 2023 2:28 PM