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Posted
7 hours ago, NWBuck said:

Given this... Looks like all the colleges and universities can ignore the Dear Colleague letter from February regarding "racial bias and preferences". Who's going to investigate and sanction them since it's a DoE and OCR matter? 

Not holding my breath on the current president Carter (not to be confused with the late, honorable former President Carter).

Posted

I’ve gotten the feeling reading this thread and the leopards thread that veterans believe they are not allowed to be fired, due to their veteran status.  At least some of them.  Preferential treatment from the I hate dei crowd. 

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Posted

For what it's worth, the most inciting violence conversation I've witnessed of late is the consistent and persistent gerrymandering talk in the Leopard's thread; the derail was intense, immutable, and irrelevant. But I usually scroll past most stuff anyway.

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Posted
18 minutes ago, Mrs Whiggins said:

For what it's worth, the most inciting violence conversation I've witnessed of late is the consistent and persistent gerrymandering talk in the Leopard's thread; the derail was intense, immutable, and irrelevant. But I usually scroll past most stuff anyway.

 

disrespect.gif

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Posted
21 minutes ago, Mrs Whiggins said:

For what it's worth, the most inciting violence conversation I've witnessed of late is the consistent and persistent gerrymandering talk in the Leopard's thread; the derail was intense, immutable, and irrelevant. But I usually scroll past most stuff anyway.

seinfeld jackie GIF

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Posted
1 hour ago, immamac said:

This isn't a fucking discussion. It's been a rule forever on the board. 

Then how the hell are we supposed to find lesbian love letters in political prison if we don't amp up the violence rhetoric? We're playing the long game here.
 

 

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Posted (edited)
6 hours ago, South Austin said:

My first car was a beige 1983 Rabbit. My second was a 1991 Jetta. I drove both of them into the ground and had little to no maintenance problems with them. 

I realize VW talk is not going away, but other than the MK IV models, VWs are fine cars, but like all German cars, you have to stay on top of the maintenance schedule.  They have tight tolerances and break if you try to push the annual upkeep.

A  3800 V6 Buick they are not. 

Edited by Bateshorn
Posted
1 minute ago, David Dennison said:

I have no idea why everyone doesn't just buy a Toyota.

Other than the new Land Cruiser, they’re boring looking appliances. Some people appreciate design aesthetics. Some people don’t and that’s okay, too. I’m glad that some people appreciate aesthetics as those folks help pay the bills in my house given my wife’s career.

Posted
11 minutes ago, royiv said:

Other than the new Land Cruiser, they’re boring looking appliances. Some people appreciate design aesthetics. Some people don’t and that’s okay, too. I’m glad that some people appreciate aesthetics as those folks help pay the bills in my house given my wife’s career.

 

11 minutes ago, royiv said:

Other than the new Land Cruiser, they’re boring looking appliances. Some people appreciate design aesthetics. Some people don’t and that’s okay, too. I’m glad that some people appreciate aesthetics as those folks help pay the bills in my house given my wife’s career.

Love my Toyota product 2025 Lexus RS.  We had a 2006 onefor ten years, switched to MBZ for 9, then back.   Looks?  I get plenty of compliments at the PT for old injured folks place.  

Posted
15 minutes ago, David Dennison said:

I have no idea why everyone doesn't just buy a Toyota.

 

1 minute ago, cactusflinthead said:

It's when the design aesthetic supercedes the functionality. See Balenciaga. 

Sure, it's pretty but does it work. 

Did you not read the post I replied to? The question was why doesn’t everyone just buy a Toyota. There are plenty of beautifully designed products out there that are functional and of incredibly high quality. If you would like to have a discussion about high-end design, we can start a discussion about it elsewhere. 

Posted
1 minute ago, Huckleberry said:

I don't understand why anyone would care what someone else likes and purchases but that's 80% of the internet so here we are.

The world would be a boring and soulless place if we all had homogeneous tastes and interests. That said, I definitely judge Tesla drivers.

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Posted
19 minutes ago, royiv said:

Other than the new Land Cruiser, they’re boring looking appliances. Some people appreciate design aesthetics. Some people don’t and that’s okay, too. I’m glad that some people appreciate aesthetics as those folks help pay the bills in my house given my wife’s career.

What's her number?

Posted
1 minute ago, MissingInAction said:

You don't know women at all.

That’s absolutely true. I significantly out-kicked my coverage.

Posted
3 hours ago, Bateshorn said:

I realize VW talk is not going away, but other than the MK IV models, VWs are fine cars, but like all German cars, you have to stay on top of the maintenance schedule.  They have tight tolerances and break if you try to push the annual upkeep.

I have an old Jetta that I'll drive to work and back until it needs some repair >$1,000 and I "forgot" to change the oil for a good 2 years in there and it handled it like a champ. I might "forget" again so it'll finally die, and I have the incentive to get something newer.

5 minutes ago, DixonHur said:

I guess they laid off all the cyber security people too

Barron is juggling the cyber and college. That's a full workload.

Posted

Fairly long piece, but it includes quotes from business people and Republican politicians who refuse to go on record, which obviously furthers the point.

Also, Republicans are cowards. Yes, I know that's a redundant statement.

 

‘People Are Going Silent’: Fearing Retribution, Trump Critics Muzzle Themselves
People say they are intimidated by online attacks from the president, concerned about harm to their businesses or worried about the safety of their families.

The silence grows louder every day.

Fired federal workers who are worried about losing their homes ask not to be quoted by name. University presidents fearing that millions of dollars in federal funding could disappear are holding their fire. Chief executives alarmed by tariffs that could hurt their businesses are on mute.

Even longtime Republican hawks on Capitol Hill, stunned by President Trump’s revisionist history that Ukraine is to blame for its invasion by Russia, and his Oval Office blowup at President Volodymyr Zelensky, have either muzzled themselves, tiptoed up to criticism without naming Mr. Trump or completely reversed their positions.

More than six weeks into the second Trump administration, there is a chill spreading over political debate in Washington and beyond.

People on both sides of the aisle who would normally be part of the public dialogue about the big issues of the day say they are intimidated by the prospect of online attacks from Mr. Trump and Elon Musk, concerned about harm to their companies and frightened for the safety of their families. Politicians fear banishment by a party remade in Mr. Trump’s image and the prospect of primary opponents financed by Mr. Musk, the president’s all-powerful partner and the world’s richest man.

“When you see important societal actors — be it university presidents, media outlets, C.E.O.s, mayors, governors — changing their behavior in order to avoid the wrath of the government, that’s a sign that we’ve crossed the line into some form of authoritarianism,” said Steven Levitsky, a professor of government at Harvard and the co-author of the influential 2018 book “How Democracies Die.”

cont'd:

Spoiler

Mr. Trump ran in 2024 promising retribution against his enemies and has quickly sent menacing signals from the White House. He revoked the security details of high-profile critics like Gen. Mark A. Milley, a retired Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman who faces death threats from Iran, and said he would pull the security clearances of lawyers at a prominent law firm who are representing Jack Smith, the special counsel who investigated him.

One prominent first-term critic of Mr. Trump said in a recent interview that not only would he not comment on the record, he did not want to be mentioned in this article at all. Every time his name appears in public, he said, the threats against him from the far right increase.

On Capitol Hill, Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina, a Republican, was wavering in his support for Pete Hegseth, Mr. Trump’s nominee for defense secretary, until the president threatened him with a primary and Mr. Tillis did a turnabout. (Mr. Tillis’s office said the senator was simply performing careful vetting.)

Senator Roger Wicker of Mississippi told Mr. Zelensky in a meeting at the Hay-Adams Hotel last week that he was there with other senators “as a show of support.” But after Mr. Trump’s confrontation with Mr. Zelensky later that day, Mr. Wicker took down a social media post showing him shaking hands with the Ukrainian leader.

More than a half-dozen Republican defense hawks in the Senate — not a group usually shy about communicating its views — declined to comment for this article or did not respond to requests for comment about Mr. Trump’s statements on Ukraine or why other Republicans were not speaking out.

Most elected Republicans are fully supportive of Mr. Trump and his agenda, and on issues like immigration some Democrats are moving in his direction, reflecting public opinion. Democrats were divided over the wisdom of the protest by Representative Al Green, Democrat of Texas, during Mr. Trump’s address to Congress on Tuesday night.

But the lack of aggressive pushback from targets of Mr. Trump’s retribution and policy agenda is striking if understandable in other cases.

University presidents are largely silent because they are protecting their institutions, said Ted Mitchell, the president of the American Council on Education. “Don’t wrestle with a pig,” he said. “You’ll just get muddy and annoy the pig.”

Business leaders rarely criticize presidents of either party, and in any case they like Mr. Trump’s plans for tax cuts and deregulation, if not his tariffs. They also recognize, one of them said, that “periodically culling the work force is actually good for a healthy organization.”

But that business leader thinks that chief executives see the way that Mr. Musk is going about slashing the federal work force as “totally crazy” — but would say so only on the condition of anonymity, fearing retribution.

Pressure on Intellectual Life
Not everyone is staying silent. Consider Michael Roth, the president of Wesleyan University.

“This is the greatest pressure put on intellectual life since the McCarthy era,” Mr. Roth said in an interview. “And I think it’ll be seen in the future, as that time was seen, as a time when people either stood up for their values or ran in fear of the federal government.”

Mr. Roth has called some of the Trump administration’s rhetoric authoritarian and has spoken out in favor of diversity, equity and inclusion programs. In an interview in The Washington Post’s opinion section last month, he criticized Mr. Trump, Vice President JD Vance and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida for using their Ivy League degrees to advance professionally while portraying themselves as populists against “woke” universities.

People sometimes tell him he has courage, Mr. Roth said, but he insisted it wasn’t so. “When people tell me, ‘Oh, you’re brave,’ it frightens the hell out of me,” he said. “I’m a little neurotic Jewish kid from Long Island. I’m afraid of everything.”

Mr. Roth is going public, he said, “because it’s a scandal that the federal government is trying to keep people from speaking their minds.”

Representative Eric Swalwell, a California Democrat and a frequent critic of Mr. Trump, said the real fear among Republicans in the House who might otherwise voice criticism of the administration on some issues was violence against their families.

“I’m friends with a lot of these guys, and I had wrongly assumed that what was holding them back from speaking out against Trump was they were afraid of losing their jobs,” he said in an interview. “But what they’re afraid of is their own personal security. They tell me that their wives tell them, ‘Don’t contribute to us getting harassed at church or at the grocery store or at the club.’”

Mr. Swalwell, who receives plenty of threats himself, said that he spends hundreds of thousands of dollars of his campaign and office funds on security for his own family, and that his daughter recently included a member of his security detail in a drawing of her family for her kindergarten class.

Senator Todd Young of Indiana is one Republican who has experienced browbeating from Mr. Musk for not staying in line. After Mr. Young asked tough questions last month at the confirmation hearing of Tulsi Gabbard, now Mr. Trump’s director of national intelligence, Mr. Musk said on social media that Mr. Young was a “deep state puppet.”

Mr. Musk soon deleted his post and said he had spoken to Mr. Young, whom he was suddenly calling “a great ally in restoring power to the people.” Mr. Young went on to confirm Ms. Gabbard, although in an interview last week he pointedly said he had not discussed her with Mr. Musk.

“I don’t think anyone should be afraid to register their convictions,” he said. “OK?”

Senator Chris Coons, a Delaware Democrat who is friendly with a broad group of Senate Republicans, said in an interview that “those who I have traveled with and worked with and prayed with and been involved with in foreign aid and foreign policy are struck by the swiftness, the forcefulness, the cruelty and the lack of organization of the cuts.”

Why do they not speak out? Mr. Musk, he said, has issued “a credible electoral threat” to finance primary opponents.

And yet, senators only face re-election every six years. “Frankly,” Mr. Coons said, “it is a combination of hoping that things change and somehow this all comes apart and the chain-saw approach to government stops.”

‘Totally Reasonable to Be Worried’
Marc Elias, a prominent Democratic lawyer who oversaw the Biden campaign’s successful efforts to beat back lawsuits filed by allies of Mr. Trump seeking to overturn his 2020 election loss, is sharply critical of Republicans who say they acquiesce to Mr. Trump out of fear.

“I know what it’s like to be targeted by him and the mob he unleashes,” Mr. Elias said in an interview. “It is totally reasonable to be worried. But for a Republican senator to say they are so worried that they’re going to betray their oath of office is such cowardice. Why are you in office?”

Other Republicans see the warnings of authoritarianism as overblown.

“I’m becoming less and less sympathetic,” said former Representative Peter Meijer of Michigan, one of 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Mr. Trump for his role in egging on the Jan. 6, 2021, mob at the Capitol. “The rending of cloth and the gnashing of teeth, good lord.”

After the anti-Israel protests against the war in Gaza on college campuses, Mr. Meijer said, “there’s a lot more that the fringes on either side share with each other.”

That is the perspective of Mark Cuban, the billionaire entrepreneur who supported Kamala Harris for president in 2024 and who spoke recently in Washington at the Principles First summit, an annual anti-Trump gathering. The Republicans, he said, saw “all the identity politics and all the wokeness” on the left “as the real silencing factor.”

Mr. Cuban added that “now that Trump has won, there isn’t value in calling him names. Name-calling is good for running for office, sometimes. Good for trying to get people excited at a rally. But neither fit me.”

Olivia Troye, a first-term Trump White House official who broke with him and spoke at the 2024 Democratic National Convention, said that the “Never Trump” movement had splintered and that it was difficult for her to watch what was happening.

“We’re in a moment when there’s self-preservation, and I don’t blame people for that,” she said. “But we need to remind ourselves that we have the power. The only reason that they have the power and are continuing to do what they do is that people are going silent.”

As Mr. Trump has continued his aggressive effort to reshape the government, there are some signs that more people are speaking out.

In a letter to lawmakers last week, five former defense secretaries who served under Republicans and Democrats — Lloyd J. Austin III, Jim Mattis, Leon E. Panetta, Chuck Hagel and William J. Perry — condemned Mr. Trump’s firing of senior military leaders last month and asked that the House and the Senate hold “immediate hearings to assess the national security implications of Mr. Trump’s dismissals.”

House Republicans are facing voters angry about Mr. Musk’s assault on the federal bureaucracy at town hall gatherings around the country, a hint of a growing backlash.

Jim Farley, the chief executive of Ford, was sharply critical last month of Mr. Trump’s threat to impose tariffs on cars and components from Mexico and Canada, saying they “will blow a hole in the U.S. industry that we have never seen.”

Mr. Trump made good on that threat and imposed 25 percent tariffs this week on all products from Canada and Mexico. But after a conference call on Wednesday with executives from the three largest automakers, including Mr. Farley, Mr. Trump said he would pause tariffs on cars coming into the United States from Canada and Mexico for one month.

Mr. Levitsky, the Harvard professor, said he had some hope. The United States, he said, has a “wealthy and diverse opposition,” and rather than outright authoritarianism, there could be “a slow and gradual slide into a gray area.”

As he put it, “no democracy this old or this rich has ever broken down.”

 

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Posted
Fairly long piece, but it includes quotes from business people and Republican politicians who refuse to go on record, which obviously furthers the point.
Also, Republicans are cowards. Yes, I know that's a redundant statement.
 
‘People Are Going Silent’: Fearing Retribution, Trump Critics Muzzle Themselves
People say they are intimidated by online attacks from the president, concerned about harm to their businesses or worried about the safety of their families.
The silence grows louder every day.
Fired federal workers who are worried about losing their homes ask not to be quoted by name. University presidents fearing that millions of dollars in federal funding could disappear are holding their fire. Chief executives alarmed by tariffs that could hurt their businesses are on mute.
Even longtime Republican hawks on Capitol Hill, stunned by President Trump’s revisionist history that Ukraine is to blame for its invasion by Russia, and his Oval Office blowup at President Volodymyr Zelensky, have either muzzled themselves, tiptoed up to criticism without naming Mr. Trump or completely reversed their positions.
More than six weeks into the second Trump administration, there is a chill spreading over political debate in Washington and beyond.
People on both sides of the aisle who would normally be part of the public dialogue about the big issues of the day say they are intimidated by the prospect of online attacks from Mr. Trump and Elon Musk, concerned about harm to their companies and frightened for the safety of their families. Politicians fear banishment by a party remade in Mr. Trump’s image and the prospect of primary opponents financed by Mr. Musk, the president’s all-powerful partner and the world’s richest man.
“When you see important societal actors — be it university presidents, media outlets, C.E.O.s, mayors, governors — changing their behavior in order to avoid the wrath of the government, that’s a sign that we’ve crossed the line into some form of authoritarianism,” said Steven Levitsky, a professor of government at Harvard and the co-author of the influential 2018 book “How Democracies Die.”
cont'd:
Spoiler

Mr. Trump ran in 2024 promising retribution against his enemies and has quickly sent menacing signals from the White House. He revoked the security details of high-profile critics like Gen. Mark A. Milley, a retired Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman who faces death threats from Iran, and said he would pull the security clearances of lawyers at a prominent law firm who are representing Jack Smith, the special counsel who investigated him.
One prominent first-term critic of Mr. Trump said in a recent interview that not only would he not comment on the record, he did not want to be mentioned in this article at all. Every time his name appears in public, he said, the threats against him from the far right increase.
On Capitol Hill, Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina, a Republican, was wavering in his support for Pete Hegseth, Mr. Trump’s nominee for defense secretary, until the president threatened him with a primary and Mr. Tillis did a turnabout. (Mr. Tillis’s office said the senator was simply performing careful vetting.)
Senator Roger Wicker of Mississippi told Mr. Zelensky in a meeting at the Hay-Adams Hotel last week that he was there with other senators “as a show of support.” But after Mr. Trump’s confrontation with Mr. Zelensky later that day, Mr. Wicker took down a social media post showing him shaking hands with the Ukrainian leader.
More than a half-dozen Republican defense hawks in the Senate — not a group usually shy about communicating its views — declined to comment for this article or did not respond to requests for comment about Mr. Trump’s statements on Ukraine or why other Republicans were not speaking out.
Most elected Republicans are fully supportive of Mr. Trump and his agenda, and on issues like immigration some Democrats are moving in his direction, reflecting public opinion. Democrats were divided over the wisdom of the protest by Representative Al Green, Democrat of Texas, during Mr. Trump’s address to Congress on Tuesday night.
But the lack of aggressive pushback from targets of Mr. Trump’s retribution and policy agenda is striking if understandable in other cases.
University presidents are largely silent because they are protecting their institutions, said Ted Mitchell, the president of the American Council on Education. “Don’t wrestle with a pig,” he said. “You’ll just get muddy and annoy the pig.”
Business leaders rarely criticize presidents of either party, and in any case they like Mr. Trump’s plans for tax cuts and deregulation, if not his tariffs. They also recognize, one of them said, that “periodically culling the work force is actually good for a healthy organization.”
But that business leader thinks that chief executives see the way that Mr. Musk is going about slashing the federal work force as “totally crazy” — but would say so only on the condition of anonymity, fearing retribution.
Pressure on Intellectual Life
Not everyone is staying silent. Consider Michael Roth, the president of Wesleyan University.
“This is the greatest pressure put on intellectual life since the McCarthy era,” Mr. Roth said in an interview. “And I think it’ll be seen in the future, as that time was seen, as a time when people either stood up for their values or ran in fear of the federal government.”
Mr. Roth has called some of the Trump administration’s rhetoric authoritarian and has spoken out in favor of diversity, equity and inclusion programs. In an interview in The Washington Post’s opinion section last month, he criticized Mr. Trump, Vice President JD Vance and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida for using their Ivy League degrees to advance professionally while portraying themselves as populists against “woke” universities.
People sometimes tell him he has courage, Mr. Roth said, but he insisted it wasn’t so. “When people tell me, ‘Oh, you’re brave,’ it frightens the hell out of me,” he said. “I’m a little neurotic Jewish kid from Long Island. I’m afraid of everything.”
Mr. Roth is going public, he said, “because it’s a scandal that the federal government is trying to keep people from speaking their minds.”
Representative Eric Swalwell, a California Democrat and a frequent critic of Mr. Trump, said the real fear among Republicans in the House who might otherwise voice criticism of the administration on some issues was violence against their families.
“I’m friends with a lot of these guys, and I had wrongly assumed that what was holding them back from speaking out against Trump was they were afraid of losing their jobs,” he said in an interview. “But what they’re afraid of is their own personal security. They tell me that their wives tell them, ‘Don’t contribute to us getting harassed at church or at the grocery store or at the club.’”
Mr. Swalwell, who receives plenty of threats himself, said that he spends hundreds of thousands of dollars of his campaign and office funds on security for his own family, and that his daughter recently included a member of his security detail in a drawing of her family for her kindergarten class.
Senator Todd Young of Indiana is one Republican who has experienced browbeating from Mr. Musk for not staying in line. After Mr. Young asked tough questions last month at the confirmation hearing of Tulsi Gabbard, now Mr. Trump’s director of national intelligence, Mr. Musk said on social media that Mr. Young was a “deep state puppet.”
Mr. Musk soon deleted his post and said he had spoken to Mr. Young, whom he was suddenly calling “a great ally in restoring power to the people.” Mr. Young went on to confirm Ms. Gabbard, although in an interview last week he pointedly said he had not discussed her with Mr. Musk.
“I don’t think anyone should be afraid to register their convictions,” he said. “OK?”
Senator Chris Coons, a Delaware Democrat who is friendly with a broad group of Senate Republicans, said in an interview that “those who I have traveled with and worked with and prayed with and been involved with in foreign aid and foreign policy are struck by the swiftness, the forcefulness, the cruelty and the lack of organization of the cuts.”
Why do they not speak out? Mr. Musk, he said, has issued “a credible electoral threat” to finance primary opponents.
And yet, senators only face re-election every six years. “Frankly,” Mr. Coons said, “it is a combination of hoping that things change and somehow this all comes apart and the chain-saw approach to government stops.”
‘Totally Reasonable to Be Worried’
Marc Elias, a prominent Democratic lawyer who oversaw the Biden campaign’s successful efforts to beat back lawsuits filed by allies of Mr. Trump seeking to overturn his 2020 election loss, is sharply critical of Republicans who say they acquiesce to Mr. Trump out of fear.
“I know what it’s like to be targeted by him and the mob he unleashes,” Mr. Elias said in an interview. “It is totally reasonable to be worried. But for a Republican senator to say they are so worried that they’re going to betray their oath of office is such cowardice. Why are you in office?”
Other Republicans see the warnings of authoritarianism as overblown.
“I’m becoming less and less sympathetic,” said former Representative Peter Meijer of Michigan, one of 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Mr. Trump for his role in egging on the Jan. 6, 2021, mob at the Capitol. “The rending of cloth and the gnashing of teeth, good lord.”
After the anti-Israel protests against the war in Gaza on college campuses, Mr. Meijer said, “there’s a lot more that the fringes on either side share with each other.”
That is the perspective of Mark Cuban, the billionaire entrepreneur who supported Kamala Harris for president in 2024 and who spoke recently in Washington at the Principles First summit, an annual anti-Trump gathering. The Republicans, he said, saw “all the identity politics and all the wokeness” on the left “as the real silencing factor.”
Mr. Cuban added that “now that Trump has won, there isn’t value in calling him names. Name-calling is good for running for office, sometimes. Good for trying to get people excited at a rally. But neither fit me.”
Olivia Troye, a first-term Trump White House official who broke with him and spoke at the 2024 Democratic National Convention, said that the “Never Trump” movement had splintered and that it was difficult for her to watch what was happening.
“We’re in a moment when there’s self-preservation, and I don’t blame people for that,” she said. “But we need to remind ourselves that we have the power. The only reason that they have the power and are continuing to do what they do is that people are going silent.”
As Mr. Trump has continued his aggressive effort to reshape the government, there are some signs that more people are speaking out.
In a letter to lawmakers last week, five former defense secretaries who served under Republicans and Democrats — Lloyd J. Austin III, Jim Mattis, Leon E. Panetta, Chuck Hagel and William J. Perry — condemned Mr. Trump’s firing of senior military leaders last month and asked that the House and the Senate hold “immediate hearings to assess the national security implications of Mr. Trump’s dismissals.”
House Republicans are facing voters angry about Mr. Musk’s assault on the federal bureaucracy at town hall gatherings around the country, a hint of a growing backlash.
Jim Farley, the chief executive of Ford, was sharply critical last month of Mr. Trump’s threat to impose tariffs on cars and components from Mexico and Canada, saying they “will blow a hole in the U.S. industry that we have never seen.”
Mr. Trump made good on that threat and imposed 25 percent tariffs this week on all products from Canada and Mexico. But after a conference call on Wednesday with executives from the three largest automakers, including Mr. Farley, Mr. Trump said he would pause tariffs on cars coming into the United States from Canada and Mexico for one month.
Mr. Levitsky, the Harvard professor, said he had some hope. The United States, he said, has a “wealthy and diverse opposition,” and rather than outright authoritarianism, there could be “a slow and gradual slide into a gray area.”
As he put it, “no democracy this old or this rich has ever broken down.”

 


Ripped from the pages of “Duh, no shit monthly.”
Posted (edited)
19 hours ago, TwiceHorn said:

I mean what the fuck are Democrats or any other opposition to do when the incumbents win with baldface lies and idiocy.

At some point the Democrats, despite being infested with lawyers at the leadership level,  will realize that politics is strategic marketing, not a contest of evidence-based argumentation, and act accordingly. 
If they don’t it will eventually become a violence contest and the Republic will cease to be one. 

Edited by Bozo_Casanova
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Posted

Senators Call for Investigation of Acting U.S. Attorney in Washington
Democrats wrote to the D.C. bar association that Ed Martin, President Trump’s nominee for one of the most important U.S. attorney’s offices, “abused” his power to threaten opponents.

Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee are asking the District of Columbia’s bar association to investigate Ed Martin, the interim U.S. attorney in the capital, saying that he had “abused” prosecutorial power to threaten his political opponents.

In a letter to the bar association on Thursday, the senators, led by Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the committee’s top Democrat, also accused Mr. Martin of violating professional standards by refusing to recuse himself from a case involving a Capitol rioter he privately represented and dismissing charges against the man.

Mr. Martin, a Missouri Republican who has used social media to threaten critics of President Trump and Elon Musk, has upended one of the most important U.S. attorney’s offices in the country. He has purged nonpolitical career staff involved in the investigations of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack and at times directly interceded in prosecutorial decision-making.

“Mr. Martin has abused his position in several ways,” Mr. Durbin wrote, referring his complaint to the bar association’s office of disciplinary counsel, the body that recommended the disbarment of Rudolph W. Giuliani over false claims he made in lawsuits after the 2020 election.

“Mr. Martin’s conduct not only speaks to his fitness as a lawyer,” added Mr. Durbin, who signed the letter with nine other Democrats, but “his activities are part of a broader course of conduct by President Trump and his allies to undermine the traditional independence of Department of Justice investigations and prosecutions and the rule of law.”

A spokesman for Mr. Martin did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Mr. Trump has nominated Mr. Martin, who also promoted his false claims about the 2020 election, to be the permanent U.S. attorney in Washington. But Mr. Martin’s targeting of opponents, while in sync with the president’s demands for retribution, has alienated some Senate Republicans and could complicate his chances of confirmation. A date for his confirmation hearings has not been set.

Democrats cited several examples of Mr. Martin’s conduct that they said violated professional standards, including his decision to dismiss charges against Joseph Padilla, a former client of Mr. Martin’s who had already been convicted. In the letter, Democrats said Mr. Martin was officially listed as Mr. Padilla’s lawyer at the time he was moving to dismiss the charges against him.

They also referred to a similar instance, in which Mr. Martin recused himself from a case involving a member of the Proud Boys weeks after he had been sworn in as the interim U.S. attorney.

In the letter, the senators claimed that those steps violated bar rules in Washington intended to prevent federal prosecutors from taking action that could benefit or harm clients they once represented.

They also cited Mr. Martin’s bombastic posts on social media. Some were threats against the law firm representing Jack Smith, the former special counsel who investigated Mr. Trump. Others involved Mr. Martin’s creation of Operation Whirlwind, an internal investigation into Democrats who made statements that Mr. Trump’s allies claim were intended to incite violence.

Mr. Martin is “using the threat of prosecution to intimidate government employees and chill the speech of private citizens,” the Democrats wrote.

Mr. Martin quietly pushed in recent days to present evidence against Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, to a federal grand jury over comments he made in 2020 about Supreme Court justices, according to people with knowledge of the situation. Mr. Schumer apologized for the statement, saying it was overheated rhetoric and not a call for violence.

Justice Department officials rebuffed Mr. Martin’s unusual request, and the five-year period during which Mr. Schumer might have been prosecuted lapsed on Tuesday.

Late last month, Mr. Martin demoted several top prosecutors involved in Capitol riot prosecutions to low-level positions handling minor crimes. Earlier this week, more than 50 former prosecutors who worked in the U.S. attorney’s office drafted an open letter calling for the Senate to reject Mr. Martin’s nomination, saying he was “unworthy” of the position.

Mr. Martin threatened the dean of Georgetown University’s law school this week with an investigation if it did not immediately scrap all diversity and inclusion initiatives, according to a person familiar with the matter. The letter was reported earlier by Post Millennial, a conservative website.

Chief among Mr. Martin’s defenders is the president, who had demanded that his appointees in the Justice Department exact vengeance against anyone directly involved in the prosecutions of him or his allies.

“Since Inauguration Day, Ed has been doing a great job as Interim U.S. Attorney, fighting tirelessly to restore Law and Order, and make our Nation’s Capital Safe and Beautiful Again,” Mr. Trump wrote on social media last month in announcing his intention to nominate Mr. Martin for the permanent job. “He will get the job done.”

Posted
2 minutes ago, mchookem said:

where's that meme of maga flipping between tariffs good!/tariffs bad! lol

Two memes and a good post.

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