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Posted
1 minute ago, mchookem said:

i honestly chuckled that Vance reading a prepared speech scolding Europe for not placating their own right-wing fanatics more is seen as a paragon of intellect and ability by our own Ignatius J Reilly. whoo-eey 😆

Consider that speech the launch point of his Crusade for Neo-Nazi Dignity. 
 

My valve is acting up. 

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Posted
4 minutes ago, TexArcher said:

Are we sure about this?

I have a good friend from Norway and I dated a woman from Spain.  They both indicated that the general opinion in their home countries is that the United States lost its mind somewhere around the first time we elected Trump.  And I was in London and Paris a couple of years ago, and cabbies were chatting me up with questions that amounted to, "Is the US as batshit crazy now as it seems?"

I found myself at a pool side bar in Playa back in October 2016 with a group of probably mid 40s Germans and another group of late 20s early 30s professional guys from Monterrey (they were there for a bachelor party....they were a lot of fun). Both groups thought we were going batshit crazy back then for even considering Donald Trump and that was a few weeks BEFORE his first election.  

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Posted

ok so I tried to watched a few mins of the Vance speech. Just gaslighting for the first 5 minutes there. Russia isn't the worry and democratic values, uh huh, coughs in January 6th. Just a massive F U to everyone in the room. 

that'll be $9.95 

Hey, its summer down this way. Hope you homies are well. I made it all the way to Saturday and so can you. 

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Posted (edited)
1 hour ago, Satchel said:

Twice, do you think those present came away thinking how smart Vance is? I just hope we don’t “Ted Cruz” him explaining away odious behavior that ostensibly belies his brilliance.

No, that wasn't my point.  But he's smart and well-educated and as a general proposition, pretty articulate.  And I think that's why he gets tied in knots doing Maga shit, because he's an invertebrate.  But theres enough of a notochord in there that he gets twisted up spewing stuff he knows is performative bullshit.

Cruz is much the same way, but a bit more practiced at overcoming his notochord.

Those guys can easily give that speech, as could Kamala Harris.  I don't think Trump could and Joe could come closer than Trump, his agedness and speech impediment notwithstanding.

Edited by TwiceHorn
Posted

If I know one thing, it's that if we ever get out of this hellscape (or, when future historians discuss the demise of America), there will need to be a serious discussion about/reckoning with the huge role that our current media landscape has played in our downfall. Its highly fragmented, heavily curated nature combined with changes in the ways people consume content have created echo chambers like no other. Look at the current home page of Fox News:

image.thumb.png.b3316d27ccc3ef7f719f39bb5a0c3e43.png

Compared to NBC News:

image.thumb.png.2c1de3f1d086adeab9845665cfd71ae7.png

 

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Posted
4 hours ago, 956 Worldwide said:

Hannity is going to get a “joint” interview with Musk and Trump from the White House. Has a sitting POTUS EVER done a “joint” interview with another American? 
 

I am struggling with my historical analogy.  Am I watching Diocletian create the tetrarchy? Am I a Russian titular councillor trying to understand why Rasputin is speaking for the Tsar?

 

Regardless, I think any historian will have to write that in 2025 the U.S. experimented with a dual executive system.

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5146248-trump-elon-musk-hannity-fox-news-doge/amp/

Wait until Trump gets around to doing some fireside sharts.  

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Posted
3 hours ago, Mileslong said:

At what point during this Orange idiots term is he going to put forth the idea of putting him on Mount Rushmore?

He wouldn’t be willing to share the spotlight.  He will have it carved into El Capitan. 

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Posted
2 minutes ago, Pato del Muerto said:

He wouldn’t be willing to share the spotlight.  He will have it carved into El Capitan. 

 

1 minute ago, InkaUtexas said:

Denali. So he can see Russia.

Either way, I'm going full ecowarrior.

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Posted
15 minutes ago, Pato del Muerto said:

He wouldn’t be willing to share the spotlight.  He will have it carved into El Capitan. 

Oh man. That would end me. As in, I would not allow that to occur and I’m pretty sure tens of thousands of others would not either. 

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Posted

Trump's "Shock And Awe" Month

Look through the smoke and chaos and drama. He's blundering and flailing.

https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/trumps-shock-and-awe-month-7a9

Quote

The words “shock and awe” describe the first month of the second Trump administration pretty well, it seems to me. It’s been a blitzkrieg of executive orders, mass firings, violations of laws and norms, wanton cruelty for the sick, destitute, and hungry, and performative administrative chaos as far as the eye can see — all designed to paralyze and stun what’s left of the opposition.

And front and center: a drug-fueled, sleep-addled billionaire, commandeering the Oval Office, offering half-baked political theories, threatening judges with impeachment, tweeting at the pace of an adderall-addicted gamer, and holding press conferences with a toddler on his shoulders, where he tells the world he cannot be trusted to tell the truth. I guess there are some people who find all this deeply impressive. I’m sorry to say that, despite agreeing with some of Trump’s policy planks, I don’t.

Which brings me back to “shock and awe.” You may recall those words were also once used by a previous administration, huffing its own fumes, bent on breaking norms and boldly declaring a new era. We know now, of course, how the Iraq War ended. And it’s beginning to look as if Trump 2.0 will have something like the same result.

Get the Dish free every Friday

Take DOGE. First off: is this what Trump really ran on? Slashing government spending is a Ryan/Romney type of Republicanism, not Trumpism. Trump, like Karl Rove, has never cared about deficits. “I’m the King of Debt,” he once bragged in a rare lapse into honesty. In his first term, Trump ran up the deficit with glee; and in the first 30 days of this term, his spending per day is $4 billion higher than Biden’s was a year ago. Go read Riedl for how Trump is set to bankrupt the US still further.

Speaking of which: next up are massive tax cuts for the wealthy — paid for by huge cuts to Medicaid and SNAP. Just what Trump’s new multiracial working-class coalition wants! In a Fox News poll, only 1 percent of Americans favored “tax reform” as a Trump priority. I doubt “tax cuts” would get even that.

More to the point, Musk is doing nothing serious to actually cut the deficit. Of course he isn’t: 90 percent of government spending is outside his remit. And where does this guy cut? A program, PEPFAR, that is a rare example of a hugely successful, cost-efficient program; and an entity, the CFPB, which was the only thing that empowered the little guy against big financial corporations after 2008. Populism reborn! Please.

Worse, Musk has cut and fired first, often illegally, and asked questions after — which leaves everything vulnerable to being reversed as soon as the courts weigh in. Has he uncovered rampant fraud, as he and Trump insist? None they’ve shown us. Is the goal to get a case to SCOTUS to affirm the executive’s control of the purse? Maybe. But meantime, many of the EOs are simply and easily being reversed by the courts.

As for that “power of the purse”? Does Vought really think that Kavanaugh or Roberts is about to turn the Congress into the equivalent of Putin’s rubber-stamp Duma? The same Kavanaugh who previously ruled that “even the President does not have unilateral authority to refuse to spend” funds appropriated by Congress? The same Roberts who ruled that “no area seems more clearly the province of Congress than the power of the purse”? Let’s just say that I doubt even this Court will assent to a Claremonster’s view of the American presidency. Which means that all this law-breaking is for naught in the long-term. It’s chaos leading to failure.

Imagine what they might have done. Trump could have announced that Musk and his minions were going in to audit the federal government. Within a few months, they’d bring a report, outlining every insane piece of waste or DEI excess or fraud they could find. Trump would then urge Congress to vote on these reforms. Win, win, win. It’s a great idea to shake up the joint with an outsider! But nah. They are busy ensuring that any cuts they make are brutal, dumb, and destined to expire.

Immigration? As of now, we’ve seen no major change since Biden’s executive order restoring control. The border is extremely quiet. Deportations? The pace of arrests is up but still only around a third of the levels Trump promised. Give him time, of course, but so far: underwhelming. Foreign policy? A man who pledged to keep the US from getting into quagmires abroad now wants the US to take over — checks notes — Gaza, ethnically cleanse its inhabitants, and give it all to Jared and his friends to make money. He also wants to invade and occupy ... Greenland! In talking to Russia, he has begun by blessing Putin’s conquered territories in Eastern Ukraine in advance — for nothing in return. What a negotiator!

And remember the other issue that won him major support: inflation. It ticked up this month, with the average wholesale price of eggs reaching an all-time high of $8 a dozen. It will get worse: Trump is pursuing lower interest rates from the Fed and higher tariffs everywhere: a recipe for super-charging inflation. “The layers of intellectual confusion here are hard to parse,” notes the Wall Street Journal, with uncharacteristic understatement. What happens to Trump’s support when inflation takes off again?

Trump is on firmer ground with his efforts to leverage the federal government’s ubiquitous funding to curtail DEI’s race and sex discrimination. But even here, he is larding up the public record with comments that absolutely reflect his own animus and bigotry — especially against trans people — which will give opponents some chance to fight back in the courts. He didn’t have to do this. There are good, non-transphobic arguments for fairness in sports and ethical medicine for children. But a bigot’s gotta bigot, even if it boomerangs on him, as it should.

Trump is also making exactly the same mistake as Biden did. Biden refused to have any enemies to his left, enabling crazies and extremists and fanatics to run riot in his administration. Trump has a no-enemies-to-the-right approach — which means, for example, he is more than happy to rehire a grown man who just a few months ago tweeted “Normalize Indian hate,” “Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool," and “You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity.” If expressing neo-Nazi views does not disqualify you from the Trump team, nothing does.

Then there’s the equivalent of Caligula’s legendary (and probably exaggerated) nomination of his horse for a consulship. That’s RFK Jr, a man who doesn’t believe in vaccines in charge of vaccines; or Tulsi Gabbard, a steward of US intelligence who prefers the KGB to the CIA. Or the insane idea that the president of the United States can just declare that the Gulf of Mexico is now called something else — and then take your press credentials away if you don’t agree.

I guess you could call this frightening. But another word for it is pathetic. Last year, a ton of readers who agreed with me on immigration, DEI, the transing of children, and the need for a more restrained foreign policy asked, in frustration, why I still couldn’t endorse Trump.

I hope that’s clearer now.

 

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Posted
4 hours ago, Mileslong said:

At what point during this Orange idiots term is he going to put forth the idea of putting him on Mount Rushmore?

his statue will replace the lady liberty 

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Posted
43 minutes ago, Chuckie Finster said:


The downfall of this country can essentially be singlehandedly traced back to Rupert Murdoch.

With a MSM media that are cravenly profit driven, is it even realistic to expect anything else?

Posted (edited)
51 minutes ago, Chuckie Finster said:


The downfall of this country can essentially be singlehandedly traced back to Rupert Murdoch.

Rush Limbaugh is rolling over in his grave to not get a courtesy shout out.

Edited by aggie08
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Posted
1 minute ago, Gil Bang said:

that name rings a bell. Is he the self-loathing gay dude?

Gay conservative misogynist racist British Catholic who loved Margaret Thatcher so much he moved to America to live under Ronald Reagan. Got HIV and was an early campaigner for marriage equality, which really got him kicked out of the kool kids konservatives klub, but he kept his name out there by talking about how Black people are just inherently dumber than other people "like guys you just have to read the science of this one nutjob and it's obvious" sort of takes. DADT, DOMA, W, and Iraq broke him from Republicans and he simped huge for Obama for 8 years. Got really hard on the anti-trans train when that started taking off and I'm not surprised to see him "agree with some of Trump's planks."

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Posted
5 hours ago, Anastasis said:

Disagree or agree. We can certainly hash it out on some of the details. But tell me the prior admin and in particular the candidate the Democrats tried to hot swap from VP to POTUS is capable of this presentation. Just give it the whole watch. 

 

 

This has to be trolling. This person impresses you? Are you joking? I’m seriously confused.

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Posted
12 hours ago, 956 Worldwide said:

The lawyers are the first to show the most courage.  Thank you SDNY Assistant Attorney General.

image.thumb.png.124a90218b7141f89c9b03452d434c84.png

I’m going to give New Yorkers “How to Detect Butter Biscuits” lessons.

Posted
53 minutes ago, Bozo_Casanova said:

This has to be trolling. This person impresses you? Are you joking? I’m seriously confused.

In all fairness, I think I was quite clear what the reference standard was in that post. 

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Posted
4 minutes ago, Anastasis said:

In all fairness, I think I was quite clear what the reference standard was in that post. 

So let me see if I understand:

1) you were impressed by the presentation or at least the delivery of the presentation and

2) you don’t think that VP Harris was capable of delivering a similar speech that well

Do I have that right? Please clarify

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Posted (edited)
33 minutes ago, Bozo_Casanova said:

2) you don’t think that VP Harris was capable of delivering a similar speech that well

Close your eyes. Now imagine a 2024 Democratic Party primary. 

Now open your eyes. Trump's America.

Now close your eyes. 

Edited by Anastasis
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Posted
This is what seems inevitable.  While the number of lawyers willing to trash the system for Trump is alarming, I think on the grand scale, more of even the federalist-y lawyers like Danielle Sassoon and that Hagen guy are going to be mainstream in their legal views and only the nutbars will be left to do their bidding.  And the nutbars haven't shown themselves to be very good lawyers so far, even if they once were.
I wonder if Blanche is going to be a fucktoady like Bove.  Although Bondi is a piece of shit, I imagine she's getting a bit nervous about what's being exposed about her DOJ.
And, I think even the insane loyalists he seems to be appointing are going to wind up leaving or getting fired just like the Tillersons, Sessions, and Boltons etc.

Alarming to whom?
Posted
No one in that hall was stunned by Vance’s brilliance or eloquence. They were stupefied at one of the most insane and counter-productive speeches ever delivered by an American elected leader overseas.  Despite what Americans may believe, Europeans are actually rather less alarmist about America and more inclined to think we will ultimately be normal and it is shocking to see a representative of the superpower behave like Viktor Orban because deep down they still think we are a serious country.  
 
The speech wasn’t for them, it was entirely performance art for the base back home.  MSC is always partly a showcase for Americans to do that— but the genius of Trump is his ability to make all the implicit scuzzines of politics extremely explicit. 

It was written by the Kremlin
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Posted
9 hours ago, Chuckie Finster said:


The downfall of this country can essentially be singlehandedly traced back to Rupert Murdoch.

Pretty much that Limbaugh, Fox and all that have been enormously profitable by validating people's ugliest feelings. It's like state media but it doesn't require support of the state because the rubes eat it up. That along with the diminishment of traditional press.

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Posted (edited)
12 hours ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

 

 

 

Literally a death cult. They want people dying. What would the long term advantages be for the mega wealthy if there were a period of famine, disease, and weather death reducing the population, oh, say, by 40%?

Are we about to effortlessly surpass HItler's death toll?

They're clearly wanting mass deaths. I'm surprised the CDC still exists under this regime. Fauci will be hanged in the public square and that organization destroyed due to its wickedness.

Any Dem with a pulpit should be calling this exactly what it is. I'm not talking about the trivialilty of "messaging" about inflation or fucking egg prices. Thank God the mass media are following that with intense up-to-the-minute reports! They know their jobs.

Denying climate change, removing regulation of industry, and lowering our defenses against plague amounts to mass murder. The Gaza plan is genocidal displacement after the Israeli slaughter of the native people. We want to develop the ruins into condos. "Buy early if you want to live on this Indian burial ground!"

We spoke for Nazis in Europe.

They're not weird. They're fucking evil. Speak the word. Stand on your feet. Get voted out of office if that's the cost. Don't go quietly. We've pretty much lost this war. We're going out with nary whimper let alone a bang.

I expect this post to make a huge difference. You're welcome, America.

Edited by RomaVicta
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Posted

That JV Vench speech was full of lots of lies and distortions. It’s no surprise a certain someone is mesmerized by it while making the asinine claim that the Black woman VP wouldn’t have been able to even walk into the room without help. 
 

You’ve been hooked by the right wing propaganda but keep telling yourself you’re too smart to have fallen for it. 

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Posted
11 hours ago, Biff Tannen said:

Oh man. That would end me. As in, I would not allow that to occur and I’m pretty sure tens of thousands of others would not either. 

One would think, my friend, that an attack on the US Capitol or the dismantling of the republic might stir such a response from tens of thousands. 

We're inert.

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Posted
That JV Vench speech was full of lots of lies and distortions. It’s no surprise a certain someone is mesmerized by it while making the asinine claim that the Black woman VP wouldn’t have been able to even walk into the room without help. 
 
You’ve called for the right wing propaganda but keep telling yourself you’re too smart to have fallen for it. 

20 minutes of disingenuous “look, just give fascists a fair shake, and it’s super-cool if foreign actors meddle to the point of tipping the outcome of your elections [it’s just a coincidence that all for those actors happen to favor my party/side…that has NOTHING to do with my suggestion that you allow them to operate unimpeded]”….yeah, that’s IMPRESSIVE. I’m convinced!
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Posted
11 hours ago, Satchel said:

With a MSM media that are cravenly profit driven, is it even realistic to expect anything else?

Don't forget the template factory, journalism schools, where unworldly surbanites learn all the proper formulas for getting quotes instead of hunting up stories. Never dare call something what you see it to be. Listen to the boys down in legal. Two equal sides to everything.

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Posted

“Move fast and break things! Be a disrupter!”

We need to find anyone who ever said that unironically and put them in the new Greenland penal colony. 

https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/14/climate/nuclear-nnsa-firings-trump/index.html

Quote

CNN — 

Trump administration officials fired more than 300 staffers Thursday night at the National Nuclear Security Administration — the agency tasked with managing the nation’s nuclear stockpile — as part of broader Energy Department layoffs, according to four people with knowledge of the matter.

Sources told CNN the officials did not seem to know this agency oversees America’s nuclear weapons.

 

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Posted
8 hours ago, Anastasis said:

Close your eyes. Now imagine a 2024 Democratic Party primary. 

Now open your eyes. Trump's America.

Now close your eyes. 

This doesn’t seem like an answer to the question and you’re no Matt McConaughey

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Posted
4 hours ago, Nivek said:


Alarming to whom?

Those who insist that lawyers have a duty to democracy or at least to something other than naked partisan ambition.

Posted
9 minutes ago, 956 Worldwide said:

“Move fast and break things! Be a disrupter!”

We need to find anyone who ever said that unironically and put them in the new Greenland penal colony. 

https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/14/climate/nuclear-nnsa-firings-trump/index.html

 

"Let me check Surly this morning. See what's going on in the world."

(reads this) 

closing-computer.gif

If we survive as a country it will be an absolute miracle. And I don't mean in four years. I mean like by June.

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