June 29, 2023

Trump showed details of the Iran war plan document and it went into Mark Meadows' book

Goddamn, what a traitor-- note the highlighted details

Also, almost certainly that recording of the conversation where Dump is talking about this, has been edited to remove details about the plan

https://twitter.com/RobertMackey/status/1674119728175144960?s=20

June 11, 2023

The documents were Trump's "precious"

The way Dump was so obsessed about where his boxes of documents were-- moving them constantly, hiding them and taking them with him when he traveled, it really brings to mind Gollum and the "precious". Those documents were his "precious"-- and he had to hold on to them no matter what, even if it led to a bitter end!

It's truly bizarre and tragic for him.

June 6, 2023

Gaetz pushes resolution to hold former NYC prosecutor in contempt over Trump charges

Source: The Independent

Rep Matt Gaetz introduced a resolution to hold a former New York City prosecutor in contempt of Congress for refusing to testify about charges against former president Donald Trump. The resolution requests that Mark Pomerantz, who worked in the New York County District Attorney’s office before resigning, be held in contempt of Congress for failing to comply with a congressional subpoena.

(snip)

Mr Bragg’s office later indicted Mr Trump and he was arrested in April. The House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government subpoenaed Mr Pomerantz shortly thereafter. Mr Bragg authorised Congress to question Mr Pomerantz.

Mr Pomerantz later testified before the committee on 12 May but repeatedly invoked his Fifth Amendment rights.

“Through his lack of testimony, Mark Pomerantz has undoubtedly undermined the legitimacy of this witch hunt indictment against President Donald Trump,” Mr Gaetz said in a statement. “Mr Pomerantz pled the Fifth to nearly every question about his time in the Manhattan DA’s office, despite writing a tell-all book about his time there.”

Read more: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/gaetz-nyc-prosecutor-contempt-trump-b2352514.html

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I know it's probably nonsense but does this make any sense?

Is this actually a contemptible charge-- using the 5th too often?

June 5, 2023

Had a weird interaction with a mad "former Democrat" on twitter

She claims that she was a life-long Dem but is furious with Obama and Biden for helping Trump steal the 2016 election from Hillary. She's convinced that Obama/Biden were complicit in helping Trump steal the 2016 election and forced Hillary to conceded. Then they kept her from running in 2020. Also they didn't do anything about the intel that said Russia was helping Trump. she didn't have any clear reason why they would do this except they are weak, or something. She seems to think Obama could have prevented Trump from wining the election or something. She was pretty furious about it still. No arguing with her.

I just never heard of this theory and then someone being so mad about it and was wondering if any of you have encountered people who beoieve this.

May 17, 2023

Astroturf caller on the Stephanie Miller show

Yesterday on the Stephanie Miller show, a guy called in who claimed he was a life-long Union member and Democratic organizer, said he was an old white guy, the type of guy who is the backbone of the Dem party, who went on to say how all his neighbors were turning away from the Democratic party because of social issues. When pressed on which social issues, he said transgenderism and slave reparations for black people. Stephanie got rid of him pretty quickly, assuming, probably correctly, that he was astroturf-- a fake paid caller for the GOP. I mean, there is no serious proposal for slave reparations anywhere. Like the transgender scare, it's clearly a GOP-promoted scare campaign.

Assuming he is fake, and being pushed to call liberal radio programs to spread this message about social issues, what do you think was the point? To scare Dems away from supporting these issues? Just to scare Dems that they are losing voters? Like that is going to chance anyone's mind? And in this vein, why do we regularly see stupid stories about Democrats changing to voting Republican en masse, which I just refuse to believe given the awfulness of the current GOP and all their scandals.

It's also so dumb (which yes of course it is dumb, but that is the conservative way) to blame issues like transgender and LGBTQ on the Dem party, when it's a broader social issue and the only people politicizing this are fucking Republicans. And of course we know it's all just about scaring the conservative base and to distract them from the massive rip-off the GOP conducts on the government on the behalf of corporations and the super-rich.

May 11, 2023

Hillary was right-- they are "deplorable"

That Townhall showed how truly awful his supporters are.

May 9, 2023

Timothy McVeigh's Dreams Are Coming True

Timothy McVeigh, the right-wing terrorist who killed 168 people in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, cared about one issue above all others: guns. To him, guns were synonymous with freedom, and any government attempt to regulate them meant incipient tyranny.

...

Reading Toobin’s book, it’s startling to realize how much McVeigh’s cause has advanced in the decades since his 2001 execution. McVeigh, who was a member of the K.K.K. and harbored a deep resentment of women, hoped that blowing up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building would inspire an army of followers to make war on the government. This didn’t happen immediately, although, as the historian Kathleen Belew has written, there was a wave of militia and white supremacist violence in the bombing’s aftermath. But today, an often-inchoate movement of people who share many of McVeigh’s views is waging what increasingly looks like a low-level insurgency against the rest of us.

Not all mass shootings are ideologically motivated — far from it. But when there is an ideology involved, it’s usually a far-right one. “All the extremist-related murders in 2022 were committed by right-wing extremists of various kinds,” said a February report from the Anti-Defamation League. Sixty percent of these deaths came from two mass shootings, in Buffalo and Colorado Springs.

....
It’s hard to think of a historical precedent for a society allowing itself to be terrorized in the way we have. The normalization of both right-wing terrorism and periodic mass shootings by deranged loners is possible only because McVeigh’s views have been mainstreamed.

what a chilling reality

May 3, 2023

The reason it is so dangerous to put Trump on CNN or any non-rightwing media is

he puts out so many massive lies and ridiculous things in one minutes and just blabbers on, he is simply IMPOSSIBLE to fact check and yet he undoubtedly will fool a lot of people who don't know he is lying, don't know the details and will fall for his soft aw-shucks style of taking. I cannot take it, it drives me utterly insane to hear his lies and ridiculous statements.

I've seen a fair amount of Trump on Hal Sparks lately and I just can only handle a few minutes of it, even with Hal stopping it regularly and calling him out on his BS. Even Hal can't keep up with all the BS!

On rightwing media, he sounds just like every other dumb and dishonest pundit they put on, so it's nothing new. But no wonder it rots viewers brains.

Anyway, this dude is a danger.

https://twitter.com/HalSparks/status/1653882740012642304

April 12, 2023

Why I Keep My Eyes -- and My Mind -- on the South

Great piece
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/11/opinion/columnists/tennessee-house-nashville-shooting.html

I also keep my eyes on the South because the Republican strategy of disenfranchisement is a state-by-state strategy. It looks like judicial rule where they cannot win. Where they cannot win by judicial rule, they will rule by procedural theft. Where they cannot persuade voters to vote for them, they will persuade the candidate they voted for to become one of them. This Republican strategy of winning by losing can work in any state, but it is most brutally efficient in states where we consider nonwhite voters — especially Black voters — inherently illegitimate.

The South is not exceptionally racist. The South is quintessentially American in its racism. The distinction is clear in how, of the three representatives in question, Tennessee expelled the two Black men but the third, a white woman, held on to her seat. The strategies of disenfranchisement are clearest where the racial animus is strongest.

And so I watch the South to keep my eyes on the central casting of the American democratic imagination and to know where the script our country is writing is going. We are obsessed with the protagonist Trump. If he can overcome his legal troubles. If he can maintain his hold on the G.O.P.

I believe he will. I believe that he can. The only thing that can derail Trump is Trump. The story of avarice consuming a bottomless ego is almost biblical. But it’s not the story that we will look back on as the one that shaped our lives. That story is about historical forces, not character actors.

It discusses the Nashville shooting and the expulsions of the Justins. Also mentions Tricia Cotham switching parties in North Carolina, giving the GOP super majority control of the leg. Just disgraceful.

April 8, 2023

The end goal of the right is fetal personhood and the abolition of legal abortion in the U.S.

"The first footnote in the Kacsmaryk opinion staying the FDA's approval of mifepristone.

If you think the Dobbs "state-by-state" settlement is a lasting one, you're delusional. The endgoal is--and always has been--fetal personhood and the abolition of legal abortion in the U.S."

https://twitter.com/ProfMMurray/status/1644706213475614722?s=20