There is a good collection of hard-hitting political videos at this independent site. They go for the gut, punching hard at how awful Trump’s policies are, and where his decisions are taking us.
Why aren’t the Democrats fighting as fiercely as the people they expect to vote for them? I just can’t picture Pelosi or Schumer campaigning for their party with this same anger; I can’t imagine Biden doing it either.
Chuck Wendig makes his election predictions for next week. Spoiler: he has no idea.
Neither do I, and that’s the terrible thing. I’ve been through awful elections, like when Reagan was anointed as president, and while I was disappointed and unhappy, I knew one thing about election day: the election wouldn’t be a problem. Voting would go smoothly, ballots would be counted, and on election night, you’d get the results and one party would concede and the other party would celebrate. That ended with Bush/Gore. It’s much worse now. We have early voting in some states, and the lines go on for blocks, because the Republicans have been killing polling places; we have swarms of people, like me, voting by mail because we have no confidence in our voting booths any more. That’s tragic for a democracy. You’d think we’d look at absurdly long lines for voting and realize there’s something fucking wrong with the system, and do something about it, but for some reason we’ve turned a blind eye to this failure of simple voting mechanics.
I’ll be braver than Wendig and make some horrible predictions.
I will not be watching the news next week at all. Leave me a comment if civil war breaks out so I know to bunker up and seal up all the windows and doors.
Collin Peterson does not belong in the Democratic party.
It’s an election year, so naturally I’ve been flooded with Republican attack ads against our local representative, Collin Peterson. He sides with Nancy Pelosi 4 out of 5 times! He’s too liberal! It’s the only reason I voted for him this time.
I wish I could retract that vote, and I’ll never make that mistake again. Peterson has come out with a rebuttal ad, in which he touts how truly conservative he is: he voted against the Trump impeachment! The NRA loves him!
Fuck Collin Peterson. I’ve got no shortage of Republicans to vote for, and if I wanted to vote Republican, I wouldn’t have voted for his lying ass.
I knew that Christopher Lee was a tough and scary dude, but Bela Lugosi? That old guy with the accent who was in Plan 9 From Outer Space? I did not expect this, but man, I’ve got to admire him now.
He fought in WWI, he was a Communist leader and union organizer, he was antifa.
By World War II, Hungarian dictator Miklos Horthy allied with Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. In opposition, Lugosi helped form the Hungarian-American Council for Democracy, calling for “Nazism to be wiped out everywhere.”
As a member of American-Hungarian Relief Inc., Lugosi was a keynote speaker at an Aug. 28, 1944, rally in Los Angeles. He demanded Washington rescue Hungarian Jewish refugees, pressure Horthy’s Nazi-puppet regime and easing immigration restrictions.
Dr. Rafael Medoff and J. David Spurlock wrote, “He may have portrayed savage villains on the silver screen, but in real life Béla Lugosi raised his voice in protest against the savage persecution of the Jews in his native Hungary.” (Jewish Ledger, Jan. 3, 2011)
Damn. Respect.
Project Veritas should pay attention. James O’Keefe keeps setting up these pathetic stings that only succeed because his gullible right-wing wants to believe, but Sacha Baron Cohen goes extreme and sets up these unbelievable scenarios that we can’t believe anyone would fall for, and we all say “NO!” when some idiot actually falls for them. The idiot this time is Rudy Giuliani, a big fish in the Trump circle of friends.
So apparently Sacha Baron Cohen is playing his character Borat, which is the first thing that had me shaking my head. Really? Doesn’t everyone recognize him yet? Isn’t the Eastern European yokel schtick all played out? I guess not, since Giuliani got played, falling for Borat pretending to be a Kazhakh diplomat bringing a bribe to the Trump campaign — a bribe which happens to be the opportunity to have sex with his 15 year old daughter. I would have told him to take a hike at the word “bribe”, and would have called the cops when he offered me a child.
In the film, released on Friday, the former New York mayor and current personal attorney to Donald Trump is seen reaching into his trousers and apparently touching his genitals while reclining on a bed in the presence of the actor playing Borat’s daughter, who is posing as a TV journalist.
Following an obsequious interview for a fake conservative news programme, the pair retreat at her suggestion for a drink to the bedroom of a hotel suite, which is rigged with concealed cameras.
After she removes his microphone, Giuliani, 76, can be seen lying back on the bed, fiddling with his untucked shirt and reaching into his trousers. They are then interrupted by Borat who runs in and says: “She’s 15. She’s too old for you.”
Guiliani has excuses — he was just tucking in his shirt! — but seriously, he’s fallen for a Borat skit, willingly went into a young woman’s bedroom, and flopped down on the bed. Give up.
Of course, he’s a Republican, so there will be no consequences. Rudy will still be Trump’s incompetent consigliere, he will still get invited on CNN and Fox to rave, no one will care.
I don’t have a cat girl alter-ego, either, but Contrapoints gets it exactly right: we’re in a fight for our survival, compromise your purity to dive in and put out the trash fire. Hold your nose and vote for Biden, everyone!
Even if the Democrats win the election, don’t expect much of a change.
Joe Biden’s transition team is vetting a handful of Republicans for potential Cabinet positions — despite doubts it will win him new support from the right and the risk it will enrage the left.
Reaching across the aisle to pick senior members of his administration could shore up Biden’s credentials as a unity candidate, a message he’s made a cornerstone of his campaign. Past presidents including George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama have all done the same. But that tradition died with President Donald Trump, and liberal Democrats are already warning that a Republican pick, even a moderate one, could sow distrust within the party before Biden even takes office.
It’s bad enough that we’re settling for a tepid centrist Democrat, but if he caves to that degree, I hope he’s ready to be primaried so hard and to be a one-term president.
It’s clear that massive gatherings of unmasked, heedless people spread the pandemic. The Sturgis motorcycle rally, for instance, seems to have sown surges of infection all across the midwest, in the Dakotas and Minnesota and elsewhere, but that doesn’t seem to stop Republicans from saying stupid stuff.
Here’s a Fargo city commissioner dismissing the importance of masks in slowing the rate of infection.
We’re doomed.
— Molly Jong-Fast🏡 (@MollyJongFast) October 18, 2020
The thing is, no one claims that the virus itself is blocked by a mask — what the mask stops are fluid droplets that are spewed out of our mouths and nose when we talk or sneeze or just plain breathe. There is also empirical evidence that states that mandate the use of masks have lower infection rates than our more laissez-faire neighbors. But that twit, Deputy Mayor Dave Piepkorn, thinks the science supports his claim that masks are useless. Great. Fargo, the city only 2 hours north of me, is going to be doing its part to kill me.
I shouldn’t just pick on North Dakota, though. The idiocy has spilled over into Western Minnesota, where we’re afflicted with all kinds of conservative nonsense. Like, for instance, Bill Ingebrigtsen. He’s not my rep, his district is north of mine, but I have heard him speak at political meetings, and he’s a colossal dumbass. Here he is claiming that racism is not a problem in America, because Obama and pro athletes.
“There is going to be some shootings,” he concluded. “That’s really unfortunate. But to sit here and tell and lie to people and say that that we are in a horrible racist situation in this country. I’d have to ask, how did Obama get to where he is? How did these professional sports ever get to where they are. There’s nobody standing in the way of anything in this country.”
His parting shot was the classic, “Well, racism has never affected me,” which is always so convincing coming out of the mouth of a white Republican representing a district that is 0.29% African American.
In his rebuttal, Ingebrigtsen said that he hasn’t seen any instances of racism, and that state offices already have anti-discrimination departments set up to address such issues.
We really have to get these bozos out of office.
