atomheartbevo

I've seen a couple in the past week and it was a little jarring. Knowing one of the families that put one up, I think they just did it because they put a few other signs up.

Yep. Especially Jasmine, but I love Talarico making the evangelicals squirm like nobody's business.

Image from the NewsGuard article that @Pancho posted earlier.

So we've already got a couple of videos of them being all handsy with one another (they just need to go see the Beetlejuice musical together) and you all are missing an opportunity if you aren't sending those videos around to your MAGA relatives and acquaintances and saying something like "you know what, I don't like Trump, but I'm glad he dumped Melania and is living his best life with his girlfriend because at 78 and given his physical shape, old age is catching up with him really fast. I think we should all be so lucky to reach his age and be dating somebody less than half our age! Kudos to Trump for that!"

Nah, Ole Joe has Presidential immunity and Kamala has the authority to unilaterally disqualify legitimate electors. Trump already told us this.

I wish Lobo was here for a lot of reasons - but with all of his more interesting and unorthodox predictions, I don't know if he could have predicted that Laura Loomer would be Trump's top advisor heading into his most important debate, and that she'd show up with him at a 9/11 memorial service. Shit's getting really weird.

Hitler could be quite the fatalist at times and was very loony towards the end - Putin is not. In fact, he's obsessed with remaining alive - witness the ridiculous tables, the meetings with his staff where he was 20 or more feet away from them in the large rooms, the body doubles, security agents pretending to be civilians or workers for photo ops, taking armored trains, nobody knows where he is at, the underground bunkers, the killing of his enemies, etc. That doesn't mean that Putin doesn't have a few screws loose, but not the way Hitler did. The West is not going to go after Putin and kill him unless he goes too far (i.e. nukes) and he knows that, which is why his borders are relatively unguarded. As much shit as he and his TV proxies talk about NATO invasions, the reality is that he's not worried about Russian borders being invaded (well, at least before last month, LOL), and that includes Kaliningrad, and that includes along the Finnish border. Putin does crazy shit, yes, but sometimes we confuse it with gambling or taking calculated risks, both of which he's prone to do, and this invasion is the culmination of decades of him taking calculated risks and occasionally gambling everything on one roll of the die. When he took part of Georgia in 2008 and then all of Crimea in 2014 and the West did nothing, in his mind, there was no real risk that they'd lift a finger if he went ahead and finished off Ukraine later on, which led us to 2022. Putin broadcast these moves in 2021 and up to 2022 when he and his advisors would tell the media that Ukraine is Russia, that Russia needed to revamp and expand its economy, etc.. Given that the West did nothing substantial after 2008 and 2014, there was no doubt in his mind that he could just take the rest of Ukraine (or at least up to Kyiv and down to Odesa) and then he'd have a lot more mineral rights in the Black Sea, and a bit of a stranglehold on Europe's energy needs. He could keep Ukraine from competing in the oil & gas arena, and he'd have a prime market on his doorstep. Because of all of the shit that Putin has done, particularly in knocking off any would-be competitors for the leadership of Russia, as well as the Russian oligarchy and Russian society in general, there's not a lot of people who could knock him off, step up, and the run the country. That's a whole other discussion because that could easily lead to Russia breaking down like Yugoslavia did. When the Soviet Union collapsed, Russia at its core maintained a central control that ran from Gorbachev to Yeltsin right to Putin in 1999, and in that timespan, there were multiple people that we could name who could have stepped up and taken over. Now? Nope.

I knew of her when she handcuffed herself to the twitter HQ doors 6 or 7 years ago, and she's even nuttier now. I really did not have this on my bingo card, but will happily take it, because it means that Ivanka and Don Jr. are not handling him, and she's going to help write commercials for Kamala Harris.

You know what, we should be happy for him, they look so happy together today.

I've already pointed out to a few MAGA relatives that our German ancestors settled in towns in Missouri, Oklahoma, and Texas over 150 years ago and they chose towns that had German communities that had German-language newspapers, with German-language signs on the stores, streets, etc.. These were podunk towns that still managed to crank out newspapers in multiple languages.

Russia is having to mine their own country.

Thank the Gods that Trump is there to save the day, at least according to the MAGA racists on social media.

SpaceX needs to toe the line a lot more than they are doing, because they are pissing off a shitload of people (not just the locals). And if they keep it up and there is action taken against SpaceX, Elmo will take his ball and move to Mexico. You have to be nice to your neighbors, especially when the taxpayers are helping subsidize your operation.

I don't think he would, for a lot of reasons, including that he's afraid of being killed (witness his 20 foot-long tables to prevent COVID/assassination attempts, using his security detail as pretend factory workers for photo ops, having a tight inner-circle, his KGB background, his use of doubles etc.). But most of all, he's somewhat of a control freak, and using a nuke kicks off a lot of variables that are out of his control. He counted on the West being passive, and he was quite wrong and it's cost him dearly, to the point where Ukraine is not only still kicking 30 months into the main invasion with plenty of Western weapons, but is now hitting places inside of Moscow proper. Putin was in the KGB in East Germany when Chernobyl happened, and he knows full well how pissed off the West was over the would-be cover-up. He maybe in a bubble of sorts, but he has seen what sanctions are doing to his economy, he knows Kursk was invaded, knows Moscow was hit (and has publicly admitted to both). He knows China isn't willing to send him serious military hardware because of the sanctions. And China has already warned not to use nukes. Throwing a nuke into the mix - on a tactical level, if it's on the battlefield, it'll kill just as many Russian soldiers, and probably more given the Ukrainians have access to better equipment (and while he may not give a shit about his soldiers, he doesn't have as many as he needs), and it's liable to cause the Ukrainians to move their troops up close to the Russians, daring him to kill a shitload of his own folks. He obviously can't use it in Kursk. He can't use it in Crimea because it'll kill/poison a fuckload of Russian civilians, and because he claims Crimea = Russia, and nuking Russia is not a good look for him. A battlefield nuke will most likely cause China and India to completely cut ties, and Iran probably won't want to be tied to that albatross, because even a battlefield nuke means the West (and its allies in Asia) are going to come down even harder on anybody still doing business with Russia, to the point of applying the same sanctions to them as are being applied to Russia. China has already been scaling back its financial/trade transactions over fears the US will sanction Chinese banks. China's economy would implode if they got hit with similar sanctions to Russia, and the Chinese government probably can't survive hundreds of millions of Chinese out of work and in the streets (history says governments don't survive that kind of stuff). Even a battlefield nuke is probably going to send some fallout to places that Putin doesn't control, and it's hard to say what would be worse - fallout heading into Russia (which would flip the Russian population out) or out into the Black Sea or Western Europe. Hitting a city full of civilians would be even worse. Everybody even doing a few bucks in trade with Russia will be sanctioned and cut off from the rest of the world (complete with blockades/embargos), and shit will probably happen in the UN which Russia won't like - even with its veto power, it can't stop a large group of nations independently working together against it. The fallout is going to go somewhere. If it drifts over Western Europe, hello Article 5 and at bare minimum NATO taking over the airspace over Ukraine. If that shit drifts over Turkey, you can bet that they'll consider it an attack (as will NATO) and will open up the Straits to any and all Western ships and subs. Most of all, and the TLDR: If he drops a nuke, he becomes a dead man walking, because it would do the opposite of what he wants - rather than making everybody back down, everybody will assume he will do it again, and operation KILL VLADIMIR PUTIN will be in full effect. TLDR #2: If he was going to do it, he would have done it long before things got to this point. If he thought he could get away with it, he would have already done it - maybe Odessa, or maybe around Kharkiv.

I know what I'm doing over the holidays with my dad, and my son.

Yeah, those of us who grew up the 70s and 80s were closer to World War II than kids these days are to the Apollo landings.

He was pushing memes earlier that he would be put in charge of the "Department Of Government Efficiency" Because he loves his fucking acronyms like any kid does.

It does when you're my age

Today's GOP, continuing to reaffirm why so many of us have left over the last 20 years.