[…] But as the dust settles on the 2024 race, the bigger picture now appears quite different. Trump’s 2016 victory no longer looks like a fluke, it now looks like the point at which our politics was infected, before that infection metastasized.
[…] This loss is far beyond any internal petty party debates such as “Harris should’ve picked Josh Shapiro” or “She should’ve done more on Gaza,” or whatever other squabble we may have had. This loss was outside the margin of any Harris campaign decision.
So once again, we grieve for our country, because it is more broken than we ever feared. And then we figure out what to do. […]
For several months I’ve thought about what I would write for you this morning under these circumstances. As I rolled it around in my head, I kept bouncing around between capturing the emotional weight of the moment and looking ahead to what comes next. I’ll try to do both here. In doing so, I followed my usual practice of not drafting Morning Memo in advance so that it would feel fresh and immediate, not contrived or prepackaged.
What doesn’t seem warranted any longer are the warnings, alerts, and cautions about what lies ahead. You’ve heard those from me for more than a year. The whole country heard similar warnings from multiple quarters. It was loud and clear. The campaign was fought directly over the issues of democracy, rule of law, basic decency and respect, and protection for the marginalized. Those principles and values lost and lost badly.
[…] the dark path ahead was chosen clearly and unequivocally: With 51%, Trump is on track to win a majority of the popular vote. Second, Trump will win without undue reliance on the quirks of our 18th century anti-majoritarian constitutional structure.
There is clarity in that result. This is who we are. Not all of us, but a majority of us. It presents a stark picture of America in 2024, without sugarcoating or excuse. It makes it harder to fool yourself about the task at hand, which is an enormous cultural one more than a political one. [True]
Donald Trump’s win isn’t the product of a constitutional quirk. It’s not the result of a poorly conceived or executed campaign by Kamala Harris. It’s not a messaging failure or a tactical error or a strategic blunder. Other broader dynamics at play – like a post-pandemic revulsion toward incumbents or an anti-inflation backlash – are too limited in their scope and specific in their focus to account for the choice that was made: Donald Trump. It would be a category error to ascribe our current predicament to a political failure.
If politics is merely a reflection of culture, then we get to see that reflection clearly and sharply as the sun comes up this morning. If you don’t like what you see, don’t blame the mirror.
Political change is slow; cultural change is glacial (an anachronistic metaphor in an age of rapidly retreating ice). But it’s doable. We’ve seen remarkable cultural changes in our own lifetimes. Cultural change starts small, with the brave, resolute, and individual choices we make in our own lives and communities. It’s reflected in how we live, where we live, and what we live for. These myriad choices we make over the course of conducting our private lives speak more clearly about who we are and what we’re about than the occasional casting of a ballot in an election.
I don’t feel inspired to rally you to action quite yet, and it feels hollow to try. If you need to decompress and recover, I get it. But in our heightened emotional state this morning, some of us are going to be tempted to cast blame all around us for this electoral outcome. It might make us feel good in the moment. But if you’re looking for a political fix to the cultural problem, I’m not sure you’re going to end up fixing much of anything. Politics alone will not save us.
For those of us who believe in the rule of law, a pluralistic society, and standing up to unkind people who engage in hurting others as public blood sport, we’re going to have to take a long view toward promoting those principles in all aspects of our culture so that they are ultimately reflected in our politics in a way they simply are not now. I recognize that many of us have already been doing this slow and steady work, which makes the overnight result even more discouraging. It remains an enormous, decades-long task, but it is something each of us can engage in without uprooting our lives or changing professions or moving abroad.
None of this is to counsel abandoning politics or the public square. We need to create and sustain a cultural imperative to continue to engage in the political realm, too. The many political battles ahead are essential to fight and to fight well. We will need a fresh crop of reserves to begin to spell those who have been fighting these battles for a long time.
In past elections that led to stinging defeats, you could take some solace in knowing that the pendulum of American political life swings back and forth with some regularity. The latest reversal, while seemingly devastating, could be reversed within the span of one election cycle. We sit here this morning with justifiable fear and trepidation that the mechanisms for such reversals of fortune – free and fair elections, majority rule, the rule of law itself – may not be available to us this time.
[…] let me bring this back down to earth a bit.
There is immediate and hard work to do in politics. The marginalized and the disenfranchised are always hurt first and most with the kind of upheaval that we expect to come, but it is worse this time because hurting them has been advertised as the point. People who have been doing their jobs under the rule of law and in support of democratic and civil society institutions – investigators, prosecutors, judges, the press, government workers, librarians, teachers, opposition party leaders – have been promised retribution. Protecting those under threat will be amongst the most noble work of the coming years.
The powers of federal officeholders, we have been told repeatedly and plainly, will be abused to exact revenge against perceived foes, which means anyone who presents a challenge to Trump and MAGA Republicans holding unbridled and absolute power. I take these promises at face value. Countering those efforts, upholding what’s left of the rule of law, fortifying what remains of the democratic system will be similarly noble work.
All of this work will be made infinitely more difficult if Trump is sworn in with Republicans controlling both chambers on Capitol Hill. While he has the Senate, the House may remain too close to call for several more days.
The challenge before us is enormous. It is not a challenge any of us signed up for. It’s been foisted upon us. The past decade has felt like a detour from the lives and aspirations we had hoped to have. I feel a special empathy for those who came of age in the 1960s at the peak of Great Society reforms and have spent their adults lives witnessing their erosion. Those of us with an act or two left, and especially those with their whole lives still to dedicate to making America better than she is presenting right now, owe it to those whose time is ending to summon our essential optimism, roll up our sleeves, and get to down to the hard work that our current predicament demands. That may sound like a rallying cry, but I’m also trying to convince myself.
Jakarta who? Indonesia’s new capital, Nusantara, is packed with tech
If an entire major city was designed from scratch today, what technologies would be built into its fabric? We’re discovering as we watch Indonesia erect a new capital with tech at its heart.
The nation’s future capital, Nusantara, opened its doors last month to up to 300 members of the general public daily for daytime bus tours. Located on more than 250,000 hectares of rainforest land on the east coast of Borneo’s Kalimantan, the city will gradually replace Jakarta as the administrative center over the next two decades.
The problem with Jakarta is that it’s quite literally sinking. In some areas, at a rate of 25 cm per year.
Over-extraction of groundwater and the sheer weight of buildings — a consequence of Jakarta’s role as Indonesia’s commercial and administrative center–are at the root.
Jakarta’s infrastructure is also notoriously inadequate and its traffic is thick and slow.
Nusantara, however, is a rare place in Indonesia where tap water is drinkable, the planned capital aims to be a model of livability and sustainability. The vision is that it will remain walkable with 75 percent of its area dedicated to green spaces.
The government has planned smart energy grids to power the city using predominantly renewable energy. It’s aiming to be carbon neutral by 2045. Over 21,000 solar panels were already installed as of early 2024…
Bits and pieces of news, as summarized by Steve Benen:
* While Donald Trump narrowly won North Carolina, Democrats nevertheless appear to have scored some notable victories in the Tar Heel State, winning the races for governor, lieutenant governor, state attorney general, and state superintendent of public instruction. Democrats have apparently even won enough legislative seats to break the Republicans’ veto-proof majority in the North Carolina General Assembly.
[…] * Voters in Delaware easily elected Democrat Sarah McBride to the state’s U.S. House seat, making her the first openly transgender person ever elected to Congress. [good news]
* On a related note, Delaware voters also easily elected Democrat Lisa Blunt Rochester to the U.S. Senate. With Democrat Angela Alsobrooks also winning her Senate race in Maryland, the chamber will now have two Black women serving simultaneously for the first time in American history. [good news]
* In New Jersey, Democratic Andy Kim will replace outgoing Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez in the U.S. Senate, becoming the Garden State’s first Asian American senator. Kim defeated Republican Curtis Bashaw, 53% to 45%. [good news]
* And I was curious to see whether Democratic Rep. Henry Cuellar would win re-election in Texas, despite being under federal criminal indictment. As it turns out, the incumbent, who’s been charged with bribery and money laundering, prevailed by about five points.
[…] It was never going to be a one and done thing. I wrote a year ago that we’re in a new era in which we have one civic democratic party and one populist autocratic party. To think the civic democratic party is going to win every time is just not a realistic expectation.
[…] When I noted the global wave of anti-incumbent feelings in the post-pandemic era, I did so not to say, “well, this was preordained, it is what it is.” It wasn’t. It’s to understand the field Democrats and Republicans were playing on. But this is a rejection of the last four years. It’s a rejection of Joe Biden’s presidency. That doesn’t mean, by any means, that I think all his policies were wrong or should be abandoned. But that was the public verdict. […]
There is also a lot to absorb here about the defections of the young, racial and ethnic minorities, people’s understanding of themselves as men and women, the fragmentation of our world through social media.
But again, all this picking up the pieces, making sense of a new strategy, considering the next approach first has to grapple with that question of exhaustion. There’s no one election that saves democracy. That whole construct is wrong. It’s the enduring question of what kind of society we want to live in and what we’re going to do about it.
I just read an email from a reader who talked about commiserating with their friend group, many of whom were in the mode of “fuck it, do Project 2025, shoot for the moon, whatever, who cares.” The email got into the draw of nihilism. If you know me, you know I can’t agree with any of that. But we probably shouldn’t judge ourselves too harshly for our immediate reactions. It’s a crushing reverse. We’re entitled to our primal screams and outrage and being done with all of it.
[…] Final point.
What is Trump’s secret power? We now have had three straight presidential elections where he managed to exceed expectations and the polls. He survives things politically no one else could. He’s survived a million things like that. What was the basis of his rise to power? It was as a reality TV star. We need to think a lot more seriously about what that means. You can combine that with the broader cult of celebrity in which he operates and excels. Things don’t stick to him or matter in the same way because a big chunk of the country sees him not as a politician but as a celebrity. We’re in a political culture where reality TV is in some sense reality. We see that in the increasingly fragmented world of social media, the openly performative nature of all of it […]
I don’t have a good answer here, or a suggestion of how to grapple with any of this. It’s certainly not to hire more TikTok consultants. It is more that it is clear to me that there is a whole symbolic and persuasive world of celebrity, reality TV and performative culture that is grabbing hold of our politics and that we need to understand much better. We know this world exists, of course. Most or many of us participate in it. We binge watch absurd but irresistible reality TV shows, we share memes, we know people with PhDs and fancy lawyers who love pro-wresting. But we need to think a bit more seriously about how this world has become the expressive language of politics in early 21st century America.
I’m pretty sure over the coming days and weeks and months Donald Trump and his political party will see this election as an overwhelming mandate to institute the whole MAGA agenda. That will cause a lot of chaos and public immiseration, though unevenly distributed. It will begin to drive its own public backlash. Much of the establishment media and corporate America will try to get along and go along. But some will chronicle and enumerate the toll. And within that maelstrom we will all have to decide, individually and collectively, what we’re going to do about it.
[…] progressive groups have wasted no time in asserting that they will continue their activism and action in response to his policies and rhetoric.
“We’re clear-eyed about the chaos and destruction a second Trump administration will cause to our nation,” the American Civil Liberties Union said in a tweet. “That’s why we’re done with handwringing, admiring the problem, or waiting anxiously to see which unlawful action President-elect Trump will take on Day One. We are ready to take action the minute Trump takes the oath of office.”
During his first term, the ACLU said it filed more than 400 legal actions against the Trump administration, protesting his right-wing actions on immigration in particular.
Gun safety groups also reasserted their stances in the hours following Trump’s victory being called by the networks.
Moms Demand Action wrote on X, “Our army of over 10 million supporters are ready to fight like hell against President Trump and his lawmaker allies if they attempt to undo our progress or push legislation that would make us less safe. With the overwhelming majority of Americans who support strong gun safety laws behind us, we will win.”
Angela Ferrell-Zabala, the group’s executive director, said in a statement they were “crushed” by the election result, but added, “We’re going to continue to organize like our lives depend on it—because they do.”
Everytown for Gun Safety, which was formed following the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, described the election result as “devastating.” But in a post on X, they went on to note, “Make no mistake: Trump’s extremist agenda is a danger for our nation, but it means we’ll double down on our efforts to protect our communities and continue to make progress, just like we did in 2016.”
The environmental activist group Earthjustice also chimed in with reaction.
“We’ve stopped him before, and with your support, we’ll stop him again,” the organization posted on X. “Earthjustice is ready to defend the laws that ensure clean air, fresh water, and communities where every child can grow up free from pollution.”
Anger, anxiety, and shock are rolling across America following the election. But already the progressive movement is making it clear that it won’t stop fighting for the values shared by millions of Americans.
Good news: Democrat Angela Alsobrooks won her Maryland Senate race, defeating two-term GOP Gov. Larry Hogan. She becomes Maryland’s first Black Senator.
Democrat Josh Stein won the North Carolina governor’s race, defeating self-described “Black Nazi” Mark Robinson.
Democrat Eugene Vindman won the VA-07 House race, defeating Derrick Anderson.
[…] let’s take a moment to congratulate the re-election of the first woman to lead Moldova. And just like here, Maia Sandu had to contend with a massive Russian attack on the democratic process:
Sandu won 54.94 percent of the vote compared to 45.06 percent for Alexandr Stoianoglo, who was supported by the pro-Russian Socialists party and whom Sandu fired as prosecutor general last year, according to near-complete results published by the country’s election commission.
“Today, dear Moldovans, you have given a lesson in democracy, worthy of being written in history books…. Freedom, truth, and justice have prevailed,” Sandu declared.
In a statement issued Monday morning by the White House, President Biden said the Moldovan people “went to the polls and voted in favor of President Sandu’s vision for a secure, prosperous, and democratic Moldova.
For months, Russia sought to undermine Moldova’s democratic institutions and election processes. But Russia failed,” Mr. Biden said.
Have Trump And Elon Thanked Putin For The Bomb Threats, Or Are They Totally Rude?
It appears Russia gave the winner at least one big Election Day reacharound.
Before the election it was reported that Donald Trump had stayed in contact with his longtime hero Vladimir Putin since he left office in 2021, as recently as this year, according to author Bob Woodward. (And that he sent Putin COVID care packages, while your American Nana was dying of it!)
It was then reported, in Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal, that Trump’s new benefactor Elon Musk has been having his own secret telephone tonguefucks with Putin for a while now.
One passage from that WSJ story is on our minds this morning, and please, dear leaders, understand that we are just asking questions about it. The article explained that on top of Putin, Musk has also been in contact with one of the Russians in charge of creating Russian disinformation, specifically of the kind intended to screw with the American election:
One of the officials was Sergei Kiriyenko, Putin’s first deputy chief of staff, two of the officials said. What the two talked about isn’t clear.
Last month, the U.S. Justice Department said in an affidavit that Kiriyenko had created some 30 internet domains to spread Russian disinformation, including on Musk’s X, where it was meant to erode support for Ukraine and manipulate American voters ahead of the presidential election.
The extent of Russia’s interference in the 2024 election isn’t yet known, although we know it’s just part of our lives now, especially as the US hands itself over to join the axis of Russia, Hungary, China, North Korea and whatever other dictator Trump is [fond of]. (Oh, is that not what you meant with your vote, Profoundly Stupid American 2024 Electorate?)
One thing’s for sure, though: There were a ton of bullshit bomb threats on polling places in heavily Democratic areas yesterday, and the FBI and other officials, including Republican Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, say they came from Russian actors.
Wonder who in Russia’s disinfo and crime factories gave the orders for those.
None of the threats was deemed to be credible — real bombs would cost money, and Russia is poor as balls. […]
“The FBI is aware of bomb threats to polling locations in several states, many of which appear to originate from Russian email domains,” the agency said in a statement. “None of the threats have been determined to be credible thus far.”
Many polling places had to shut down temporarily and/or evacuate, especially in Georgia in Black neighborhoods in the Atlanta area, but also Biden counties in Michigan and Wisconsin and Pennsylvania and Native American areas in Arizona. […]
[…] Should all precincts with affected polling sites get an extra day to do-over their votes? That’s what Snyder [Historian and author Timothy Snyde] suggested. […]
Of course, if Russia is definitively found to have been behind the threats, then the United States must respond to that before Russia’s golden boy lies his way through another oath of office.
Not sure what that would look like, but we’re sure we could spitball some ideas.
Again, we have no idea how these threats moved the needle, if at all. We have no interest in MyPillow-Guy-ing this election, now or ever.
But if we’re going to pretend to be a functioning non-fascist state for the next 75 days, we should at least pretend to be a functioning non-fascist state for the next 75 days.
Oh look, it’s Rudy again. […] Trump’s personal lawyer owes $145 million plus interest to Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, for ruining their lives with insane conspiracy-theory lies that he repeated over and over. Between that, the alleged sexual harassment, and all that getting indicted and disbarred, he’s been an exceptionally active senior citizen.
Old Roodles has been trying to weasel out of paying what he owes for more than a year, with Rudyshines like filing for bankruptcy, refusing to turn over any documents for the bankruptcy he asked for, then begging to be let out of the bankruptcy, all while spending massive amounts of cash on who-knows-what. […]!
Finally, on October 22, the seeping Scotch-goblin was ordered to turn over just about everything that he owns worth more than a thousand bucks to a receiver: his interest in his Madison Avenue co-op apartment, Lauren Bacall’s Mercedes, cash accounts, sports memorabilia and his collection of watches and tasteful mens’ jewelry.
So what did that asshole do? Well, not that! He refused to answer any calls or emails from their lawyers, or turn over anything. And when Moss and Freeman’s lawyers got access to the apartment, it turned out the old vulture had picked it clean weeks before. And Rudy refused to say what he’d done with all the stuff, other than vaguely gesturing that some of it was in Florida, and some of it in a storage unit at “The America First Warehouse” in Ronkonkoma (not making that up). And no, he won’t give anybody an inventory. He’d also been transferring large sums out of his cash account, which now only has $3,907.99 in it. And apparently he never even started the paperwork to turn over the condo, either.
The whole ignoring-a-court order thing mightily pissed off the judge, who ordered Roodles’ to shuffle his bony ass to US District Court in New York in person at noon on Thursday, as in tomorrow, to explain himself. And no, the judge does not even care that Rudy is supposed to be on the MyPillow guy’s show that day.
And then, then, THEN, THEN!! that fucker had the audacity to roll up on a West Palm Beach, Florida, polling place on Tuesday, being chauffeured around in Lauren Bacall’s very Mercedes and posing for a photo op. […]
I can’t believe America isn’t finished with these people, I just can’t.
[…] Biden and his aides are taking steps already to do what they can to help Ukraine. For one thing, they are working feverishly to ship the Ukrainians the rest of the $6 billion left in weapons and equipment Congress appropriated to assist them as they fend off a brutal Russian invasion.
It’s not clear what Trump will do, if anything, to halt the weapons shipments and contracts with the U.S. defense industry for more air defense systems that will arrive in years to come. But the Pentagon will likely be unable to send everything it has pledged to bring those accounts down to zero by Inauguration Day, given that it takes weeks or months for munitions and other equipment to arrive in Ukraine once the U.S. announces it. And once Trump is in office, he could decide not to send Kyiv those weapons — even if they’ve already been promised. […]
Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin defeated wealthy GOP businessperson Eric Hovde in Wisconsin’s Senate race, The Associated Press projected.
Baldwin, who first won her seat in 2012, narrowly led Hovde throughout the contest in public polling, though the race tightened down the homestretch. […]
Excerpts from a longer New Yorker article by Susan B. Glasser:
Electing Donald J. Trump once could be dismissed as a fluke, an aberration, a terrible mistake—a consequential one, to be sure, yet still fundamentally an error. But America has now twice elected him as its President. It is a disastrous revelation about what the United States really is, as opposed to the country that so many hoped that it could be. His victory was a worst-case scenario—that a convicted felon, a chronic liar who mismanaged a deadly once-in-a-century pandemic, who tried to overturn the last election and unleashed a violent mob on the nation’s Capitol, who calls America “a garbage can for the world,” and who threatens retribution against his political enemies could win—and yet, in the early morning hours of Wednesday, it happened.
[…] For much of the country, Trump’s past offenses were simply disqualifying. […] Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric about invading immigrant hordes, his macho posturing against a female opponent, and his promise to boost an inflation-battered U.S. economy simply resonated more than all the lectures about his many deficiencies as a person and a would-be President.
[…] Four years later, after Joe Biden defeated Trump, Democrats and the dwindling ranks of anti-Trump Republicans made the fatal miscalculation of thinking that it was Trump who had sunk. Too many of them were sure that the hubris and folly of his reluctant exit from the Presidency had destroyed him politically. They saw him as nothing more than a sideshow—a malevolent figure in his Mar-a-Lago exile, but nonetheless a disgraced loser with no prospect of returning to power.
They were wrong. Rule No. 1 in politics is never underestimate your enemy. […] Trump has now achieved an unthinkable resurrection. Even his four criminal indictments have served only to revive and reinvigorate his hold on the Republican Party, which is now centered more than ever on the personality and the grievances of one man. Almost sixty-three million Americans voted for Trump in 2016; more than seventy-four million cast their ballots for him in 2020. In 2024, it’s even possible, as votes are being counted overnight, that Trump might win the popular vote outright for the first time in his three races. […]
Too many voters appeared to have seen Harris as effectively the incumbent President in the race—at a time when large majorities of Americans report dissatisfaction with the direction of the country. This, according to Doug Sosnik, the White House political director for President Bill Clinton, is why ten of the twelve elections leading up to this one have resulted in a change of control in the House, the Senate, and/or the White House.
[…] Trump’s victory, in that sense, was a predictable outcome for a Republican nominee, perhaps even the expected one. And yet what a leap of unthinking partisanship and collective amnesia it has taken for his party to embrace this twice-impeached, four-times-indicted, once-convicted con man from New York. Trump in 2024 was no regular G.O.P. candidate.
[…] Soon after Trump left office, I interviewed a senior national-security official who spent extensive time with him in the Oval Office. The official warned me that a second Trump term would be far more dangerous than his first term, specifically because he had learned how better to get his way—he was, the official said, like the velociraptors in the first “Jurassic Park” movie, who proved capable of learning while hunting their prey. Already, one of Trump’s transition chairs, the billionaire Howard Lutnick, has said publicly that jobs in a new Administration will go only to those who pledge loyalty to Trump himself. Having beaten off impeachment twice, this second-term Trump will have little to fear from Congress reining him in, either, especially now that Republicans have managed to retake control of the Senate. And the Supreme Court, with its far-right majority solidified thanks to three Trump-appointed Justices, has recently granted the Presidency near-total immunity in a case brought by Trump seeking to quash the post-January 6th cases against him.
[…] Trump’s victory will shake alliances and embolden autocrats around the world. What power will nato’s Article 5 guarantee of mutual defense hold with an American President who has publicly said that, as far as he is concerned, Russia can do whatever it wants to nato members who do not, in Trump’s view, pay their fair share?
[…] All of it portends a deeply destabilizing period for the country and the world, which is still highly dependent on American power and leadership. And it is likely to happen with a swiftness that may stun Trump’s opponents.
[…] The question now is a different one: not if we are going back but how far?
[…] Trump will be the first president in American history who will be sworn in after having been impeached. Twice. Trump was impeached for his plot to use the powers of the presidency to pressure Ukraine into smearing President Joe Biden. Later, Trump was impeached for his role in whipping up his supporters to attack the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Trump will also be the first inaugurated U.S. president with two federal indictments under his belt. He has been indicted for attempting to interfere in the electoral process in the 2020 election following his defeat against Biden. Trump was also indicted for improperly taking classified documents and keeping them at his Mar-a-Lago estate, notably in the bathroom next to the toilet.
At a more local level, Trump’s conviction in New York on 34 felony counts will go with him into the Oval Office. Trump made history when he was convicted by a jury of his peers for trying to influence the outcome of the 2016 election via hush payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels.
That presidential first will be paired with Trump’s upcoming sentencing for those convictions—the kind of thing even former President Richard Nixon did not have to contend with.
Trump will also be the first president to be found liable for sexual abuse. In 2023, a New York jury awarded writer E. Jean Carroll $5 million for Trump abusing her in 1996. The jury also found that Trump had defamed Carroll in repeated public statements personally attacking her and her allegations.
There has never been a president sworn in with racketeering charges hanging over their head, but Trump has broken through that barrier. He is currently facing charges in Georgia related to his schemes to subvert the 2020 election in that state. The Georgia prosecutor who brought the case against Trump, Fani Willis, was reelected on Tuesday night.
These blots on Trump’s record were known for months and in spite of them—perhaps even because of them—Republicans chose him as their nominee and never backpedaled even as more details of his actions became public. […]
“We’re clear-eyed about the chaos and destruction a second Trump administration will cause to our nation,” the American Civil Liberties Union said in a tweet. “That’s why we’re done with handwringing, admiring the problem, or waiting anxiously to see which unlawful action President-elect Trump will take on Day One. We are ready to take action the minute Trump takes the oath of office.”
Empty words from an organization that has always defended the ability for fascists and bigots to spread their lies.
Akira MacKenziesays
@ 3
Bullshit! They’ve been chomping at the bit for a racist, Christian national thug who will round up the minorities and libs for extermination since the 70s. They know exactly what they were voting for!
Reginald Selkirksays
@12, 20
Furthermore, the ACLU is counting on the courts to maintain its positions. We have already seen how that works out when the criminal controls the courts.
Jeansays
Anyone relying on institutions and norms to solve any of the chaos that the Trump administration will bring is just fooling themselves and being very naïve. The norms were already dismissed in the first mandate and the institutions that try to block anything will just be dismantled one way or another. It will even be legal thanks to SCOTUS.
The only thing that will stop them is incompetence and lack of imagination. And possibly some internal squabble.
Note the distinction between believing in the teachings of Christ, as opposed to the existence and divinity of Christ.
Now it sounds like Musk’s thinking has evolved: after fully committing himself and tens of millions of his dollars to getting former president Donald Trump reelected, Musk is now pandering to the Christian right.
During a Pennsylvania town hall last week, he claimed that he now believes in the “teachings of Christ,” including the principles “‘love thy neighbor’ and ‘Turn the other cheek,’ which is very important for forgiveness.”
I do not see that in Musk’s actions, past or present.
We could go on and on — but to hear him suggest that he believes in the of Jesus Christ, who deeply opposed wealth inequality and supported the poor and outcasts is almost beyond parody.
you were promised a fascist takeover. You expected government thugs to show up on the street, but your garbage is still being picked up.
[…]
This is the terrible secret behind modern dictatorships: for most people, on most days, they don’t feel like they’re living in one. The freedoms they’ve lost are so distant and abstract that they’ve barely noticed their absence, and that loss didn’t happen all at once […] Turkey didn’t become a de-facto dictatorship overnight, it took two decades of gradual change
[…]
There is, at least, an upside: if change is coming slowly, you have some breathing room. Get up and touch grass for a bit. Take some time to mourn. Rest. Recharge.
Heh, just found a discussion on a hifi forum about if it’s a good idea to buy new gear before Trumps promised tariffs drive the prices up or if it’s better to be careful with your spending right now. The OP admitted that it wasn’t the most pressing problem he could think of, but it was the one on topic for the forum.
The following discussion was pleasantly MAGA free, with several people insisting they did not vote for the disaster to come and others cracking dark jokes about audio quality of gulag speakers blasting propaganda and practically everybody agreeing this was not the worst thing to come by far.
It’s nice for me to experience people not being OK with the repufascists outside of spaces like this.
Bekenstein Boundsays
Lynna@11:
We’re in a political culture where reality TV is in some sense reality.
Oh, dear God no.
…
Why isn’t pinching myself waking me up?
Wait, what? This isn’t a fucking dream? But surely it must be?
…
Ah hell. That’s it. Bring on the meteor. At least then we go out still clinging to a few surviving scraps of sanity. And there’s no risk of reality TV infecting the rest of the galaxy, unless some idiot already broadcast some through a high-output site like Arecibo.
@14:
The extent of Russia’s interference in the 2024 election isn’t yet known, although we know it’s just part of our lives now, especially as the US hands itself over to join the axis of Russia, Hungary, China, North Korea and whatever other dictator Trump is [fond of].
Well, the Zillenials have declared atheism “cringe” because we’re just so mean. I’m sure Elon will be watching astrology TikTok’s and joining a Wiccan coven like all the cool kids do these days.
birger @29, the number of people who thought that November 6 was election day, and who claimed they were going to vote (on Wednesday!), was astounding.
I think we may be underestimating the groundswell of willful ignorance in the USA. Unbelievable.
Throughout the 2024 campaign, Donald Trump realized that the Project 2025 agenda was so radical and unpopular that he treated is as radioactive. “I know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it,” the Republican said over the summer about the blueprint largely written by members of his own team. He added, “I have nothing to do with them.”
As recently as two weeks ago, Trump went so far as to question whether it was even legal for people to air campaign ads pointing out his connections to Project 2025. It came on the heels of an online item in which he said in reference to the right-wing agenda, “I have, and had, nothing to do with it, NEVER READ IT, NEVER SAW IT.”
[…] Project 2025 is already working its way back into the spotlight.
Just hours after Trump was declared the winner, conservative commentator Matt Walsh published an item to social media that read, “Now that the election is over I think we can finally say that yeah actually Project 2025 is the agenda. Lol.”
[…] Steve Bannon — recently released from prison — took time on his post-election show to highlight Walsh’s missive and describe it “fabulous.” [video at the link, check out the religious symbols behind Steve Bannon]
A report in The New Republic added, “Later during the livestream, Bannon could be seen holding a hard copy of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 ‘Mandate For Leadership’ up to the camera in celebration.”
Rolling Stone highlighted a handful of related examples: “Right-wing podcast Benny Johnson also gloated about the project. ‘It is my honor to inform you all that Project 2025 was real the whole time,’ he wrote. In a separate post, Tarrant County GOP Chair Bo French wrote, ‘So can we admit now that we are going to implement Project 2025?’”
[…] we almost certainly haven’t heard the last of Project 2025.
After Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election, “sighs of relief rippled through capitals“ around the world. NBC News Chief Foreign Correspondent Richard Engel reported at the time, many abroad reacted as if “the United States had overthrown a dictator, that democracy has been saved, that America’s reputation had been saved.”
Four years later, it was no secret that many of the United States’ leading allies, most notably in Europe, were desperate to see Donald Trump lose. After his victory, the anguish abroad was nearly as overwhelming as it was in Democratic households from coast to coast.
One of Germany’s leading news magazines ran a cover with a single word headline under a picture of [Trump]. “F—,” it read. (The original actually spelled out the word.)
It’s worth taking a moment to understand why.
The problem isn’t just Trump’s proposed tariffs. Or his buffoonery. Or his erratic tendencies. Or his corruption. Or his willingness to engage in legally dubious abuses. Or the degree to which his reactionary, fascist-like tendencies are offensive to global democracies. Or the awkwardness that will come with Trump coming face to face with international leaders who trashed him after he left the White House, assuming his career couldn’t possibly recover from his first-term failures and alleged crimes.
The more serious problem is that they’re not sure who’s side he’ll be on during a second term.
The Wall Street Journal highlighted the fact that America’s rivals “are coalescing into a new global authoritarian axis.”
Russia has now enlisted North Korea into its nearly three-year war in Ukraine, where it is making slow but steady advances. … China is giving crucial economic and political support to the cooperation among Moscow, Pyongyang and Tehran — while strengthening its own military for a possible war over Taiwan.
At face value, the emergence of this “axis” is unsettling, but more alarming still is the question of whether Trump sees its members as adversaries or like-minded partners.
Ahead of the American elections, for example, Trump described the United States’ international adversaries as “so-called enemies” and countries that “might not be enemies.” Around the same time, Trump publicly trashed our South Korean allies, EU allies, and Ukrainian allies — while pointing to Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and his “strongman” style as some kind of international model worthy of emulation.
A few months earlier, Trump said, “Our allies are the worst.” A month later, he added, “They’re allies, but not when we need them. They’re only allies when they need something.”
Earlier in the year — in the midst of the GOP presidential primaries — Trump also said he was prepared to “encourage” Russia “to do whatever the hell they want” to NATO members that did not spend enough on defense.
And did I mention that Trump has reportedly had several undisclosed chats with Putin since leaving the White House? And that Trump didn’t exactly deny that the conversations took place?
As for why Americans should care, a world in which the United States weakens the NATO alliance and sides authoritarian and dictatorial regimes abroad effectively represents a potential collapse of the post-WWII global order, creating global instability, unpredictability, and security threats. […]
Germany’s government collapsed on Wednesday, as Chancellor Olaf Scholz fired his finance minister and announced a confidence vote that is widely expect to fail and to pave the way to early elections in March. The news from Europe’s largest economy added a huge jolt of uncertainty on a day when much of the world’s attention was focused on the outcome of the U.S. election.
Donald Trump’s projected victory in the presidential race has already prompted one Jan. 6 defendant to ask a federal judge for a delay to his case because Trump has ‘made multiple clemency promises’ to nonviolent offenders. That request was swiftly denied by a federal judge on Wednesday.
Even as stock prices soared on Wednesday, U.S. government debt sold off following Trump’s stunning win over Kamala Harris, pushing the 10-year Treasury yield to its highest level since July. It’s an indication that investors in the world’s biggest bond market fear the incoming administration could trigger inflation and larger federal deficits. Higher yields suggest that bond buyers are demanding greater returns to protect their investments — making it more expensive for the government to finance its debt.
Jack Smith Prepares To End Trump Prosecutions
In the most stinging post-election development, the Justice Department let it be known publicly Wednesday that it plans to wind down the prosecutions of Donald Trump in the Jan. 6 and Mar-a-Lago cases before Inauguration Day. The move is a reflection of a long-standing DOJ position that a sitting president cannot be prosecuted, a position cited favorably by the Supreme Court in its horrendous decision on presidential immunity.
Among the developments:
– “Justice Department officials began signaling that they are eyeing how best to shut down the cases.”–Politico
– “Now that Trump will become president again, DOJ officials see no room to pursue either criminal case against him — and no point in continuing to litigate them in the weeks before he takes office, the people said.”–NBC News
– “The mechanics of how the cases will wind down will become clear in the coming days as court deadlines approach.”–Bloomberg
– While it’s not clear if Smith will issue a final report on his investigations, Attorney General Merrick Garland has said he would make special counsel reports public if they reached his desk.–WaPo
Related: We have just witnessed the greatest failure of federal law enforcement in American history.
In my opinion, that article places too much blame on Biden. I do think that some blame should fall on Biden and on Merrick Garland, but I also see a good case for blaming Republicans for often bailing Trump out, for blaming the conservatives on the Supreme Court, and for blaming Trump himself (and his lawyers.) How about Aileen Cannon? We can place some blame on her.
[…] if the system had worked the way it should have, voters would never have faced such a choice. If Trump had actually faced accountability for his alleged crimes, he may not have even appeared on the ballot.
Vice President Kamala Harris set out to fight to defend our fundamental freedoms and build a country that works for everyone. She stood up for working families, decency, and opportunity. Though this is not the outcome we wanted, our fight for freedom and opportunity endures.
“California will seek to work with the incoming president — but let there be no mistake, we intend to stand with states across our nation to defend our Constitution and uphold the rule of law.
“Federalism is the cornerstone of our democracy. It’s the United STATES of America.”
Le Mond, the largest French newspaper, is bemoaning former President Trump’s victory in the American presidential election this week.
Saying Trump’s election “marks the end of an American era, that of an open superpower committed to the world, eager to set itself up as a democratic model,” the newspaper wrote in an editorial published on Thursday that model “had been challenged over the past two decades. Now, Trump’s return is putting a nail in its coffin.” [Premature nail-in-coffin metaphor in my opinion.]
[…] “There is a real risk that Europe will be divided or even fractured by such a prospect,” the newspaper wrote. “This threat is existential for the European Union, and its leaders need to be aware of it and prepared to confront it, without waiting for Trump to take office – they are long overdue.” [True]
The outlet also took a shot at billionaire Trump booster Elon Musk, who it called “the iconoclastic CEO turned eminence grise.”
“Trump’s voters chose him in full consciousness, as did the business and tech leaders who rallied behind him,” Le Mond concluded. “The rest of the world will suffer.”
Ohio has one of the most outrageously gerrymandered electoral maps in the country, although with so many red states in the competition it can be hard to keep up. What’s really impressive is that the gerrymandered Republican majority in the state Lege managed — twice! — to thwart the will of voters who passed ballot initiatives to demand fair electoral maps.
But pro-democracy activists are a tenacious lot, and this year, they managed to come back with a new plan that would amend the Ohio state constitution and take elected officials and lobbyists entirely out of the process of drawing electoral maps. The plan got enough petition signatures to make the ballot, and it was starting to look like voters would really be able to bring back some democracy and fairness through the measure, named “Issue 1.”
And then of course, Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose (R) and fellow Republicans blowed it up all to fuck by writing an incredibly misleading description of the amendment for the ballot, telling voters that Issue 1 would require partisan gerrymandering, which of course it did not. Ohio’s right-leaning state supreme court then approved the ballot language, despite a state law requiring that ballot measures be described accurately and without bias.
[…] the initiative was overwhelmingly rejected by voters Tuesday, failing by 46 percent to 54 percent — as the Columbus Dispatch notes, by roughly the same margin as the state voted for goddamn Donald Trump.
Just to keep the gaslighting going, the leader of the anti-Measure 1 campaign, former Ohio GOP chair Bob Paduchik, called Tuesday’s vote a victory for “the truth,” which is now defined only by Republicans. “Despite Democrats’ best efforts to deceive Ohioans into changing our constitution and rigging elections in their favor, the truth has carried the day,” he oozed.
Again, he’s talking about an amendment that would have ended Republican gerrymandering and required fair, competitive districts.
[…]
“In analyzing the vote tonight, it is clear that millions of Ohioans who voted ‘yes’ want to end gerrymandering,” said O’Conno [retired state supreme court Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor,]. “And it is also clear that those who voted ‘no’ thought that they were voting to end gerrymandering.”
[Sigh]
[…] Wasn’t that awesome? This time out, all the Republicans had to do to thwart the voters’ intention was to make a real reform bill sound terrible! They didn’t even have to sidestep the earlier laws requiring fair districts.
The ballot language flat out twisted the facts, saying that passing Issue 1 would create a panel “required to gerrymander the boundaries of state legislative and congressional districts,” and that it would “repeal constitutional protections against gerrymandering.” [sheesh]
[…] Bolts recounts the experience of Songgu Kwon, an Ohio voter who fell for the trap:
Kwon voted ‘no’ on the measure—given what he’d just read, he thought, that had to be the way to signal support for independent redistricting. He’d gone in planning to vote ‘yes,’ but he was thrown off by this language he saw; he guessed that he must have been wrong or missed some recent development. “The language seemed really specific that if you vote ‘yes’, you’re for gerrymandering,” he now recalls in frustration.
But when he left the polling station and compared notes with his wife, he quickly figured out that he’d made a mistake: He had just voted to preserve the status quo.
Hell, the day before the election, Fox News Dot Com simply quoted the ballot description of Issue 1 verbatim and asserted that the initiative would institute gerrymandering and repeal “protections” against it.
In addition to enlisting voters to ratfuck the gerrymander reform, Ohio Republicans also won three out of three elections for the state supreme court Tuesday, filling one vacant seat and ousting two Democrats, so future efforts to prevent state elections from being tainted by democracy are likely. Perhaps all Democratic candidates for office in Ohio will be denoted on the ballot by prefacing their names with the words “pedophile supporter and communist.”
After having repeatedly depicted the presidential election as a spiritual clash between good and evil, leading figures in the movement to remake America as an explicitly Christian nation celebrated President-elect Donald Trump’s victory as a fulfillment of God’s divine will.
Lance Wallnau, a celebrity evangelist who has spent decades calling on conservative Christians to occupy positions of power and influence over society, told followers on an election night livestream that Trump’s victory had been prophesied years ago — a key step in God’s plan to usher in a new era of Christian dominion around the world. […]
Well, that was predictable. I’m not even going to bother to post the rest of the “Wallnau and other evangelicals championed him as a flawed leader who had been anointed by God to save America from the demonic influence of Democrats” details.
Akira MacKenziesays
@ 42
TL;DR Newsom: “Fascists are taking over, but we’ll spread our checks and let Trump fuck us lest he withhold disaster aid during wildfire season.”
A scientific report released in October concluded that long-duration spaceflight causes mitochondrial damage producing something similar to accelerated aging. For those of you who fell asleep in science class, mitochondria generate the power for organic cells. If mitochondria stop functioning, we’ll gradually start dying.
The report produced by the Guy Foundation, an independent British research foundation, cited multiple causes behind the cellular damage. First is the increased radiation in space, which was already known to cause an increased risk of astronauts developing cancer later in life. Zero gravity also removed the stimulus needed to maintain healthy mitochondria. While residents on the International Space Station exercise constantly to stave off muscle and bone loss, there’s no workout to help your cells.
Earth’s magnetic field also keeps mitochondria stable. The lack of similar fields in outer space, the Moon and Mars could hamper permanent settlement in the future. It won’t be a permanent barrier, but an obstacle that space agencies will have to tackle as they explore the great unknown.
The report did mention that there isn’t much data on long-term health outcomes because not that many people have spent months in space…
As foolish as this might sound, as recently as last week, there were some far-right voices suggesting that Democratic officials would take steps to block Donald Trump from taking office, even if he won the election fair and square. It dovetailed with related scuttlebutt about enraged liberals and their antifa allies responding to a Trump victory with violence and social unrest. [Projection from rightwing doofuses.]
The GOP nominee made matters worse. After weeks of peddling baseless conspiracy theories about rascally Democrats intending to cheat in the elections, the Republican claimed he knew of actual voter fraud that only existed in his imagination, laying the groundwork for a future challenge.
Midday on Election Day, Trump published an item to his social media platform that read, “A lot of talk about massive CHEATING in Philadelphia. Law Enforcement coming!!!” [Liar.]
As is usually the case, he was peddling baseless nonsense. There was no cheating. Law enforcement was not on the way. Trump’s delusions weren’t real.
They also weren’t necessary. He won. There was no need to pre-emptively delegitimize the presidential race.
The morning after Election Day, Kamala Harris called Trump to concede the race and congratulate him on his victory. Hours later, as NBC News reported, the incumbent Democratic vice president delivered concession remarks at her alma mater, Howard University in Washington.
[S]he stressed that Democrats had to accept the results of the election to preserve democracy. Harris conceded defeat Wednesday. Trump never did when he lost to Joe Biden and Harris in 2020. “Earlier today, I spoke with President-elect Trump and congratulated him on his victory. I also told him that we will help him and his team with their transition and that we will engage in a peaceful transfer of power,” she said, drawing a cheer from the crowd.
“A fundamental principle of American democracy is that when we lose an election, we accept the results,” she added in a gracious speech. “And anyone who seeks the public trust must honor it.”
Around the same, President Joe Biden called Trump, not only to congratulate him, but also to invite him to the White House for a post-election meeting. The retiring Democrat also, of course, assured his predecessor (and successor) that there would a smooth and peaceful transition of power.
Democratic congressional leaders also issued statements honoring the voters’ verdict. […]
Ordinarily, none of this would be notable. Over my career in journalism, I’ve covered, in one capacity or another, seven presidential campaigns, and I don’t recall ever being tempted to write a piece noting these customary and routine steps during a presidential transition process.
Indeed, it seems almost silly to applaud Democrats for doing exactly what they were supposed to do, when and how they were supposed to do it, taking the same steps others in their position have taken for generations.
But the context matters.
The 2024 and 2020 presidential elections were nearly mirror images of each other. In both contests, out-of-office challengers won with more than 300 electoral votes. In both contests, the winning candidates won the popular vote. In both contests, the victor nearly swept all of the battleground states. In both contests, the winning candidates saw their party reclaim a Senate majority.
There is, of course, one big difference.
This year, Americans did not see Harris declare victory in the middle of the night based on nothing more than wishful thinking. They didn’t see Democrats claiming, before or after the race, that the political system was “rigged.” They have no plans to utilize “fake electors.” There will be no fundraising gambit in which Democratic donors are asked to contribute to an “Election Defense Fund” that doesn’t exist.
Nancy Pelosi and Hakeem Jeffries will not organize an effort to ask the Supreme Court to reject electoral votes that Democrats don’t like. Biden will not pressure Harris to send the election back to state legislatures. Neither Democrat will summon armed far-left radicals to Washington, fill them with lies, demand that they “fight like hell,” and then deploy them to attack the U.S. Capitol.
[…]. My point is not to peddle some lazy “Democrats are good, Republicans are bad” thesis. Rather, my point is that it’s worth recognizing that when it comes to democracy, the two parties are playing by very different sets of rules.
[…] Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina published a message of sorts to Jack Smith by way of social media the morning after Election Day. It read:
“It is time to look forward to a new chapter in your legal careers as these politically motivated charges against President Trump hit a wall. The Supreme Court substantially rejected what you were trying to do, and after tonight, it’s clear the American people are tired of lawfare. Bring these cases to an end. The American people deserve a refund.”
So, a few things.
First, as the sycophantic senator probably knows, there’s literally zero evidence to suggest that Smith’s cases are “politically motivated.”
Second, if Graham believes the Supreme Court’s ruling — written entirely by Republican-appointed justices — immunizing presidents from accountability is worth celebrating, I’d encourage him to take another look.
But even if we put these relevant details aside, it’s also worth appreciating what a departure this is from a position Graham took in the recent past.
Video of Andrew Weismann discussing the issue tops the article. The video is about six minutes long and is a good overview. Lots of facts, timelines and analysis.
In 2017, for example, as Trump wanted to oust then-special counsel Robert Mueller, it was Graham who told reporters that if the then-president got rid of the then-special counsel, it “could be the beginning of the end of the Trump presidency.”
The South Carolinian added that the system needed “a check and balance here,” and the senator even endorsed legislation that would prevent a president from acting unilaterally to remove a special counsel.
Months later, Graham also said that it would be “corrupt” for Trump to oust a special counsel investigating him, adding that a president stopping an investigation without cause “would be a constitutional crisis.”
To be sure, there’s one relevant detail that’s different — Mueller didn’t indict Trump, and Smith did — but Graham’s evolution on this speaks volumes about his partisan perspective.
Nick Fuentes and some other Trump-adjacent right-wingers have been circulating the phrase “your body my choice” on social media. Some women are reporting upticks in online abuse since the race was called for Trump.
Salon’s Amanda Marcotte put this well when she noted the number of men gleeful about Republicans’ “bringing women to heel.”
The Republican ticket really ran the gamut of these various flavors of misogyny: Vance brought the retrograde gender roles disguised as religious righteousness piece plus the edgelord fondness for particularly incendiary remarks (childless cat ladies and the many other remarks about the “misery” of women without children). Trump embodies the less Christian nationalist and more crude, crass “locker room talk” kind, as he mused over Harris’ “low IQ,” chortled at an audience member at his rally shouting out that she worked on a street corner and embarked on a tangent about how he likes to call Nancy Pelosi a [B-word].
You can argue about the extent to which Harris being a woman hurt her (and may have helped her with college educated women, the sole group that moved farther from Trump this time). But misogyny was a central appeal of the Trump campaign.
Giuliani Tries To Explain Away Why He Hasn’t Surrendered His Assets, Claiming Political Prosecution
Rudy Giuliani tried to explain away why he has not surrendered his assets to former Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and her daughter, Wandrea “Shaye” Moss after he lost the $146 million defamation suit filed against him.
Despite the judge’s ruling, Giuliani explained that he remained unconvinced Freeman and Moss are legally entitled to “a lot” of his assets, including his grandfather’s watch, which he described as a “bit of an heirloom.” [I don’t think that line of argument will play well in front of the judge.]
“Usually you don’t get those, unless you’re involved in a political persecution,” the former New York City mayor said, according to NBC News. “In fact, having me here today is like a political persecution.”
Gov. Newsom Preps California To Fight The New Trump Admin
Less than two days after Trump declared victory in the 2024 presidential election, California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) called in a special session of the state legislature to ask for an increase in state funding for litigation against the incoming Trump administration.
The added funding would help California defend civil rights, climate change, access to abortion, disaster funding and other policies in the state from the right-wing federal agenda the new administration is expected to set.
“The freedoms we hold dear in California are under attack — and we won’t sit idle,” Newsom said in a statement. “California has faced this challenge before, and we know how to respond. We are prepared to fight in the courts, and we will do everything necessary to ensure Californians have the support and resources they need to thrive.”
[…] “Every bit of property that they want is available, if they are entitled to it,” Rudy Giuliani groused. “Now, the law says they’re not entitled to a lot of them. […]”
Uh huh.
Once inside, Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss’s pissed-off lawyer told Judge Lewis Liman they’d just found out Monday that Rudy had opened a new bank account and business entity, Standard USA LLC, over the summe r[…]
And Rudy’s lawyer Ken Caruso tried to go with my client doesn’t know where all the stuff is, what is stuff? The order was ambiguous, and you can’t take my client’s father’s watch, you vindictive monster!
Unsurprisingly Judge Liman was not there for it, and used judge words that mean STFU. Claiming Rudy doesn’t know where his stuff is is “farcical,” the vindictiveness thing is “ridiculous.” Rudy never filed an exemption for the watch, the court takes watches from bodega owners every day, and Rudy can suck it up like every other broke motherfucker the judge sees all the fucking time. His order was ambiguous? Let’s all go through the list together one by one, shall we? (You can read along yourself here starting on page 16.) Are we extra super clear? Make with the condo papers, the signed pictures, the rings, the mirror, the TV, the old guitar cord, the remote control, and your old skateboard, BY MONDAY. And especially the title and keys to that sweet-ass Mercedes. OR YOU WILL GET A MOTION FOR CONTEMPT.
[…] Is Rudy going to make with the keys or keep trying to push his luck with a federal judge? Can he hide his crap long enough for Lord Trump to come save him?
Steve Bannon Gonna Do ‘Rough Roman Justice’ To Everybody […]
As you can imagine, all the worst MAGA creepers are sowing their wild oats right now […]
Blah blah blah, they’re coming for you, etc. Aren’t they happy now that they actually won an election, fair and square (that we know of, some conditions may apply)? No they are still so mad. But happy! […]
None is more McMadHappy than Steve Bannon, who just got out of prison and might have to go back after his New York trial in December, related to that border-wall-building scam.
And in all his McMadHappy rants, Bannon keeps saying he’s going to do “rough Roman justice” to everybody.
He said it on election night. “You deserve rough Roman justice!” But it was a much longer rant than that. Mediaite has the whole transcript:
You stole the 2020 election. You’ve mocked and ridiculed and put people in prison and broken people’s lives because you said this thing was stolen. This entire phony thing is getting swept out. Biden’s getting swept out. Kamala Harris is getting swept out. MSNBC is getting swept out. The Justice Department is getting swept out. The FBI is getting swept out. You people suck, okay?! And now you’re going to pay the price for trying to destroy this country.
And I’m going to tell you, we’re going to get to the bottom of where the 600,000 votes [are]. You manufactured them to steal this election from President Trump in 2020. And think what this country would be if we hadn’t gone through the last four years of your madness, okay? You don’t deserve any respect, you don’t deserve any empathy, and you don’t deserve any pity.
And if anybody gives it to you, it’s Donald J. Trump, because he’s got a big heart and he’s a good man. A good man that you’re still gonna try to put in prison on the 26th of this month. This is how much you people suck. Okay? You’ve destroyed his business thing. And he came back.
He came back in the greatest show of political courage, I think, in world history. Like, [Roman statesman] Cincinnatus coming back from the plough [returning to politics to rescue the Roman Republic]. He’s the American Cincinnatus. And what he has done is a profile in courage. We’ve had his back. But I got to tell you, he may be empathetic. He may have a kind heart. He may be a good man. But we’re not. Okay? And you deserve, as Natalie Winters says, not retribution, justice. But you deserve what we call rough Roman justice, and we’re prepared to give it to you.
[Yikes!]
Yeah, there’s a whole lot there that we’re just not going to respond to except to say that just because we lost doesn’t mean Tim Walz’s belief that Republicans aren’t shedding the “weird” label any time soon is no longer operable. It’s here to stay.
He’s babbling about the 2020 election being stolen (McMadHappy, like we said), and he’s threatening MSNBC, the DOJ, the FBI and more, on charges of “You people suck, okay?!”
And then suddenly he’s talking about Cincinnatus and the plough and “rough Roman justice.” He says it’s what “we” call “rough Roman justice,” but the only Google results we found for that phrase came from the mouth of Steve Bannon.
Is there some kind of MAGA gay porn Discord chat where they write slash fiction about Cincinnatus? Maybe when he says “we,” he’s talking about whatever white gang he perhaps joined in lockup?
Do “we” really use that phrase, or is it more of just a Steve Bannon thing?
Who knows.
Today on his podcast, he was at it again, going on a bizarre, winding rant that namechecked Alex Wagner, MSNBC, Judge Juan Merchan, Special Counsel Jack Smith, Chris Hayes, Rachel Maddow, NBC, the Washington Post, the New York Times. He whined about how they all tried to eliminate Trump, by, like, not allowing him to steal elections and/or trying to hold him accountable for his various crime sprees.
And he ended with:
The central part of our movement is resilience.
You can kick us to the curb. You can stomp us. You can beat us in a battle, but you can’t win the war, and you will not win the war. You people are revolting. Revolting.
What you have done to this country, what you’ve done to the citizens of this country, and yes yes yes, you will pay a price for that. You will pay a price for that. It’s called justice. Rough Roman justice.
Again, is this a porn thing?
[…] We really need to know the rules so everybody can have fun at the MAGA toga party.
Also, was this MAGA toga party organized by the “normal gay guy vote”?
whheydtsays
Re: Lynna, OM @ #55…
Traditionally, there are three types of people who get to use “we” when referring to themselves. Those are royalty, editors and tapeworms. Bannon sure isn’t royalty. He might be considered to be an editor. Has he had a good medical exam to rule out having a tapeworm?
whheydtsays
As regards California… I think one of the first things that the state should do is to arrange with a pharmaceutical company (or start a new one) to manufacture the standard abortion inducing drugs in state. That way, they can be delivered in California where needed without ever entering interstate commerce…or even the USPS.
One of the largest hazards for astronauts traveling to Mars will be overcoming exposure to high energy radiation from the solar wind, solar storms, and galactic cosmic rays that originate outside of our solar system. This radiation is more damaging to humans than medical X-rays used to see broken bones or treat cancer.
The Earth’s magnetosphere traps the high energy radiation particles and shields the Earth from the solar storms and the constantly streaming solar wind that can damage technology as well as people living on Earth…
The original article I linked previously is a bit muddled. The protection provided by the Earth’s magnetic fields is associated with the higher radiation levels in outer space; they are really the same issue. The International Space Station, which orbits at about 400 km altitude, is not high enough to be outside the protective magnetic fields. The only time Earthly astronauts have gone outside the protective magnetic fields is the Apollo missions.
The head of a company specializing in cryptocurrency was kidnapped and held for ransom in downtown Toronto during rush hour Wednesday.
Police were called about a kidnapping in the area of University Avenue and Richmond Street W. just before 6 p.m., says a spokesperson with the Toronto Police Service.
The suspects forced the victim into a vehicle and made a demand for money, the spokesperson said.
The man was later located in Centennial Park in Etobicoke uninjured.
CBC Toronto has learned the victim is Dean Skurka, the president and CEO of Toronto-based financial firm WonderFi. He was released after a ransom of $1 million was paid electronically, a source close to the investigation said…
Hurricane Rafael continues to intensify, now boasting a well-defined eye as it approaches Cuba and the Gulf of Mexico.
Radar data from the Cayman Islands, along with observations from NOAA and Air Force Hurricane Hunter aircraft, confirm that Rafael has developed a double eyewall structure — a feature typical of strengthening hurricanes.
Hurricane Hunters also found that maximum sustained wind speeds have increased to about 115 miles per hour, prompting the National Hurricane Center to upgrade Rafael to a Category 3 storm…
Forecast models are aligned on Rafael’s path over the next two to three days, but uncertainty grows significantly beyond that timeframe…
David Gardner
…
So, you might like to take heart in these five reasons why a second Trump White House might not be so bad, after all.
1. We Survived the First One
Except for the people who didn’t. Like all those who died from COVID. And while I personally did survive, I noticed some things during that time. Such as: Trump hires people who are incompetent, then he throws them under the bus. And every time a Trump acolyte gets fired, they get replaced with someone even worse. This time we are starting at rock bottom, but they will find a way to burrow lower.
2. At Least There Won’t be a Civil War
Only because the people who woud do such a thing are the people who won. I don’t see how that’s a good omen.
3. He May Even Stop a War or Two
While Trump did not start any new wars during his first term, I am not convinced that the policies he implements will lead to long term stability. For example, Ukraine is probably fucked. It’s bad for them. But does that in any way contribute to long term stability in Europe? Ask the same questions about Taiwan and East Asia.
4. He May Go Where No President Has Gone Before (Lately)
He may well relaunch the NASA program sending astronauts to the moon, framing it as a space race against China rather than Russia…
(roll-eyes)
5. It’s the Economy, Stupid
In which they fail to provide any evidence for their belief that the economy will be better under Trump than otherwise. Unless of course, you are a billionaire. I expect them to do especially well. We are going to have to adjust to a new term, trillionaire.
Opinion: Two Reasons Why The Above Is Fucking Moot:
1. Climate change
2. World War III, once Russia realizes it can now attack western Europe with impunity
birgerjohanssonsays
“Scathing Atheist 612 Recrudescent Edition”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=CtPg7put6cQ
I agree with the Diatribe. Hate won the election. Let’s hate everything the Republicans stand for. Keep the anger alive. No more “When they go liw we go high”.
The nearby bright star Vega is surrounded by a surprisingly smooth, 100 billion-mile-wide disk of cosmic dust, confirming that it is not surrounded by any exoplanets, JWST images reveal. And scientists cannot explain its lack of alien worlds.
Anyone who finds a monkey should not interact with it but instead call 911, authorities said.
A police search is underway after 43 monkeys escaped from a research facility in South Carolina on Wednesday night.
Police in Yemassee, Beaufort County, said the Rhesus macaque primates escaped from Alpha Genesis, a business that provides “nonhuman primate products and bio-research services,” according to its website.
The monkeys were a group of “very young females” that have never been used for testing. An Alpha Genesis spokesperson confirmed to police that the animals “are too young to carry disease,” according to police statement.
“Alpha Genesis currently have eyes on the primates and are working to entice them with food,” police said Thursday afternoon.
Traps have also been set up and officers are using thermal imaging cameras in an attempt to recapture the animals, police said.
“Residents are strongly advised to keep doors and windows secured to prevent these animals from entering homes,” Yemassee Sheriff’s Department said in a statement. Anyone who finds a monkey should not interact with it but instead call 911, it said.
The company works with monkeys to carry out clinical trials, including on brain disease disorder treatments, and says it has “one of the largest and most comprehensive nonhuman primate facilities, designed specifically for monkeys, in the United States.”
[…] The company secured a federal contract to run a colony of 3,500 monkeys on Morgan Island off the coast of South Carolina, also known as Monkey Island.
The Post and Courier newspaper in Beaufort County reported that primate escapes have happened several times before in the area, including in May this year, and in 2016 when 19 evaded security at Alpha Genesis before they were recaptured six hours later. […]
[…] This morning after reading the great discussions about the lack of a liberal or Democratic social media/current media landscape, I had a discussion with my 22-year-old son and wanted to add some commentary from a Gen Z (male) voice.
When asked why he (a Democratic Socialist who has reacted very emotionally to the election outcome) thought the younger male vote turned to Trump, he said this:
Anyone online who is interested in any subject that might be even remotely of interest to a young man is going to get fed a stream of content that is heavy bro-culture. Watch a Minecraft YouTube video and pretty quickly there will be a Joe Rogan clip offered up as the next watch. Anything remotely sports related, same thing. Then there will be “libtard roast compilations” that are funny in a middle-school way. Keep watching/clicking and it won’t take long before you are offered up Andrew Tate.
My son’s college roommate was into maps (historical maps), which the algorithm sensed meant male and away he went. He weaned himself off when he got to college and was exposed to other opinions. He said he was just a kid and didn’t really know how a guy was supposed to be or act and these videos (with their machismo and misogyny) made him feel powerful.
My son’s current job is as an after-school tutor at a middle school and he hears the young male students parroting the bro-culture all the time (especially the last two weeks when the election was a hot topic). So it isn’t just this generation of young men who wouldn’t vote for a woman, its probably going to be the next one as well.
I have no idea how this gets “fixed” or even countered. While I knew this was happening (kids getting exposed online to stuff – we had a central computer in the den so my kid’s online activity was done in front of us until high school so we tried…how naive that feels now), I don’t think I realized how our democracy would be affected by letting children on the internet.
What You Should Know About Climate Change Under Trump!
He can’t undo everything!
Here’s a data point to keep in mind as we prepare for another Donald Trump assault on efforts to fight climate change: Across the USA, Election Day 2024 saw millions of Americans voting in record heat. New high temperatures for November were hit in Rochester, New York (81 degrees F); Pittsburgh (also 81 — and the city hasn’t had rain since October 6); Columbus, Ohio (78); and Hartford, Connecticut (78 again, tying a 2022 record). That list, from the indispensable Heatmap News, goes on and on […]
So that’s a thing to remember about the day America sent Donald Trump back to the White House. Trump pledged to give the oil industry everything it wants, and industry lobbyists even helped out by writing up a bunch of executive orders he can use to sweep away many of the climate regulations Joe Biden put in place — just in case Trump forgets his promise while he’s arguing about the size of his Inauguration Day crowd.
There’s no two ways about it: Donald Trump will be returning to office at a crucial moment for America’s — and the world’s — long-delayed commitment to reducing the greenhouse emissions that cause climate change, and he will be able to set back those efforts as long as he’s in office. We’re finally taking our first steps toward a full-scale energy transition, and Trump wants to strangle that progress.
Fortunately, the energy transition is going ahead in spite of Trump. He can slow it — dangerously so, let’s not kid ourselves — but he can only set it back, not eliminate it. I’m going to make use of our new longform orientation to explain why, today and tomorrow.
Worst. Timing. Possible.
The timing really couldn’t be worse, honestly: Joe Biden’s climate policies have been the most significant of any American president, and not only because he has almost no competition. His signature climate bill, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), was praised by the head of the UN’s International Energy Agency as the most important climate agreement since the Paris Agreement — which, of course, Trump wants to pull the USA out of, again.
[…] the IRA and other bills have already racked up significant wins, like an explosion in clean-energy manufacturing thanks to the generous tax incentives for industry, the energy transition is still in its early stages. Both the IRA and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL) are 10-year programs, and many of their provisions are only now starting to have an effect on clean energy and manufacturing.
Just one example: This spring, media and Republican sources (same, almost) mocked the fact that the BIL’s $7.5 billion program to build public EV fast-charging stations didn’t instantly make charging stations sprout up all over the country. A notorious March 2024 Washington Post headline whined that the program “has only produced 7 stations in two years.” Of course, you needed to actually read the article to learn that was actually right on schedule for the 10-year program, and that far more stations would be coming online at an increasing pace. Federal money spent now is expected to result in states actually reaching peak deployment — hundreds of new charging stations annually — between 2026 and 2028. (As of October, 19 stations are up and running, with many more on the way.) And those are only the stations directly funded by the program; hundreds more are also being built by private companies using other incentive programs, and will continue to be.
Trump, of course, lied about the program; at the Republican National Convention in July, he exaggerated the budget and the slow progress, saying “They spent $9 billion on eight chargers, three of which didn’t work,” which is bullshit, and implied that the full program cost over 10 years went into just those stations.
We Aren’t Dead Yet
Now, some maybe-good news: This is where a hell of a lot is riding on control of the House of Representatives, which is still not decided (25 uncalled seats as of this morning). If Democrats hold the House, Trump won’t be able to repeal any of Biden’s climate legislation outright, although Trump can still significantly embugger IRA programs by having regulatory agencies change how they work. The IRA is fairly specific about providing tax credits for consumers who buy EVs, but presumably Trump’s Treasury Department could write such stringent rules to qualify for the credit that they’d be practically useless.
Things obviously get far worse if Republicans take both houses, but even if that happens, the Biden bills may not be entirely doomed. BIL, or at least its transportation spending, is likely to survive, albeit with cuts, which would probably include most of the charging stations. But as the Washington Post notes, Republicans aren’t against climate programs that bring home the bacon to their districts. University of Texas at Austin oil and energy boffin Ben Cahill noted that
[The IRA’s] tax credits for consumers, including those for EVs, rooftop solar panels and heat pumps “will definitely be on the chopping block” but “the investment incentives for wind, solar and battery storage have proven to be quite popular with big business.”
Plus, since many of the IRA’s manufacturing incentives have boosted jobs and growth in red states, members of Congress from those states may decide that fine, OK, we can keep a lot of those benefits in place, especially since they’ll be hearing from the clean energy companies and their super PACs.
That was one of the smart things about the IRA: While it never actually mandated where green tech would be deployed, its benefits were definitely designed to go all over the country and win constituents that way […].
Needless to say, there are a lot of ifs in all of this, and none of it will prevent Trump from setting back climate progress in ways that will be dangerous for keeping the planet habitable. But as I’ll explore further this week, bad as it is, there are still good reasons to temper our dread about how much Trump will be able to fuck up the planet.
Donald Trump was reelected president on Tuesday, four years after fomenting a coup which saw a mob of his supporters storm the U.S. Capitol and then leaving the White House in disgrace. Trump owes his return at least in part to a rankly dishonest right-wing information ecosystem that helped carry him through countless scandals that would have ended the careers of most politicians, driving his comeback to the pinnacle of power.
Conservative audiences are dependent on a right-wing media complex that bombards them with falsehoods and grievances while dissuading them from consulting any alternative sources of information, be they legacy news outlets or government officials or medical experts.
[…] The January 6 insurrection presented Trump’s propagandists with a crossroads. Rupert Murdoch, whose media empire includes right-wing bastions like Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, and New York Post, privately sought for him to become a “non person.” But Tucker Carlson and his allies at Fox and elsewhere instead went to work creating a counternarrative in which Trump was blameless. People who knew better either played along or actively participated in the whitewashing of that day.
Trump’s various indictments for a host of crimes provided additional hinge points. Right-wing media figures who could have used evidence of his abject criminality as a rationale for cutting him loose instead rallied to him and sought to delegitimize those seeking to bring him to justice.
[…] the party’s propaganda wing had united behind him.
Trump […] selected Ohio Sen. JD Vance, a Carlson favorite, as his running mate, and demonstrated the importance of the right-wing echo chamber by giving Carlson himself a prime-time speaking slot at the Republican National Convention.
With the general election set between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, right-wing propagandists went to work […]
They flooded the zone with a bogus narrative of “migrant crime” while ignoring evidence that violent crime was actually plummeting from its Trump-era high.
They instructed their audiences to treat immigrants as a scapegoat, falsely claiming that federal disaster aid desperately needed to respond to hurricanes had been siphoned off to benefit migrants and ginning up grotesque lies about Haitian immigrants eating pets.
They lashed out at the press, urging the Republican base to treat Trump’s poor showing in his debate against Harris as the result of media bias.
When an unprecedented string of former Republican officials and Trump’s own former administration aides came forward with dire warnings of what Trump did in his first term and could do in a second one, they hid the news from their audiences.
[…] beating back burgeoning scandals over his alleged January 6 crimes, communications with Russian President Vladimir Putin, and a political event at Arlington National Cemetery.
[…] without the support of the right-wing propaganda machine, he would not have been in position to sweep his party’s nomination in the first place […]
Now, the same propagandists who helped him back to power are poised to help him carry out his extreme agenda of destruction and retribution.
[…] we have a country that is pickled in right-wing misinformation and rage. And one of the stories that they’ve heard, not for one year but for eight years, is that there is a deep state, a universe of people in government that are out there that have the real power. They’re the ones with the real power. They’re taking power away from you, the individual. And the only person that can give you back that power is Donald Trump. He’s going to — and that’s why they hate him so much, because he’s going to come in and he’s going to get rid of them once and for all. He’s not going to be duped again like last time. And he’s going to give you back your power. […]
I’m not so blinded to think that they all are deeply pro-democracy. Many of them don’t believe in democracy as a principle and they want something more autocratic and authoritarian. But there’s another part, a much larger part, that actually believe that a vote for Donald Trump is a vote for democracy because they have validated and internalized the idea that there’s an anti-democratic secret cabal that is actually preventing their desires and exercise of democratic power from being implemented and put in place, and that only Trump can restore their power.
[…] And the through line, the foundation […], is a large right-wing misinformation engine that has created an environment where, and a lens through which people see the world that is not the way that it is. And so, that’s how you get so many people going out there and saying, “Oh well, he does it because he has to,” or “he’s not really going to do those things,” or “he’s going to do them, but they have it coming to them.” Because they are also in belief that they’re being democratic and defending the system. […]
the goal isn’t to get all those people ultimately in prison or something. It’s to show a force very early on that [the Trump administration] means business, in hopes that most people do the natural thing, the thing that comes instinctually, which is to duck and cover. There’s a reason why, it’s so concerning about anticipatory obedience because it does speed up the process of giving authoritarians more power. And they’re very open about it in Project 2025. That’s the tactic. It’s not just about revenge, although that’s a part of it. It’s also about sending a message that this is the new order and everybody else best get in line. […]
Video and complete transcript are available at the link.
As the dust settles on the 2024 election cycle, and the scope of Republican successes come into view, some observers are drawing a predictable conclusion: If voters backed GOP candidates in such large numbers, it must be because the electorate agrees with the party on the major issues of the day.
Mark Penn, a former adviser to Bill and Hillary Clinton, for example, published a flawed election assessment to social media, which began, “America is a center right country at heart. Only 25 per cent are liberal and the other 75 per cent won’t be ruled by the 25.”
[…] If most voters supported Donald Trump and Republican congressional candidates, the argument goes, then it stands to reason that voters prefer conservative ideas to progressive ideas.
But a closer look at some of the election results suggest the ideological lines aren’t nearly that clean. Trump and his party, for example, championed private school vouchers. But as The New York Times reported, voters in three states — including two red states where Trump won easily — rejected voucher schemes.
In Kentucky, nearly two-thirds of voters defeated a proposal to allow state tax dollars to fund private and charter schools. In Nebraska, 57 percent of voters approved a ballot initiative that repealed a small program intended to give low-income families tax dollars to pay for private-school tuition. In Colorado, votes are still being counted. But it looks likely that voters have narrowly rejected a broadly worded ballot measure that would have established a “right to school choice,” including in private schools and home-school settings.
Note, Nebraska voters backed the GOP ticket by more than 20 points. In Kentucky, the margin was more than 30 points. But those same voters nevertheless took a good look at one of the Republican Party’s top educational priorities and said, “No thanks.”
What’s more, it wasn’t just vouchers. Voters in 10 states considered abortion rights initiatives this year, and they passed in seven — including in some states Trump carried. (In Florida, a majority of voters supported an abortion rights measure, but it wasn’t a large enough majority to pass.)
In ruby-red Missouri, where Republicans such as Trump and Sen. Josh Hawley won easily, voters also easily approved measures to raise the minimum wage and require employers to prove paid sick-leave. Voters in Alaska, which also supported the GOP ticket by a wide margin, did the same thing, increasing the state’s minimum wage to $15 per hour and requiring employers to provide paid sick leave.
A few weeks before Election Day, YouGov conducted an interesting survey in which it asked respondents for their opinions about Trump’s and Kamala Harris’ policy priorities — except the twist was that participants weren’t told which policies were associated with which candidates.
The results were remarkable: Harris’ agenda was far more popular than Trump’s, but many people had no idea that the Democrat’s priorities were, in fact, her priorities.
Asked what they wanted, voters backed Harris’ vision. Asked who they wanted, voters backed the candidate offering the opposite of her vision.
To be sure, there’s room for a broader conversation about why many Americans who support progressive policies end up also supporting candidates who’ll reject those same progressive policies. But on a variety of key fronts, it’s nevertheless true that a true center-right nation, filled with an electorate where conservatism was ascendent, probably wouldn’t have backed quite so many progressive ballot measures.
True.
The article is topped by a video featuring Chris Hayes. His analysis is good, and it restores a broader perspective. That video is about nine minutes long. The “Global Anti-Incumbency Movement” chart is enlightening.
Last week, the church announced that it had developed an anime cartoon, Luce, who will serve as the Vatican’s mascot for this year’s Jubilee festival—a special celebration, held infrequently, that is meant to celebrate spiritual growth and transformation. For reference, Luce looks like this:
(image omitted)…
Yes, young people sure do love anime. But they also love porn. In what appears to have been a compromise between these two youthful preoccupations, web users have wasted no time in converting the holy cartoon into a dirty fantasy that less resembles an innocent religious avatar and more resembles something sprung from the dirtiest depths of the hentai-verse.
404 Media reports that, mere days after her debut to the world, there are now “dozens of AI-generated hardcore pornographic images” of Luce all over the internet. Those images seem to have mostly been generated via sites like Civitai, a site that allows users to generate AI imagery with the click of a button…
Donald Trump’s team appeared to be quietly distancing itself from Robert F Kennedy Jr in the immediate aftermath of the election amid speculation that the former presidential candidate could be handed control of US public health agencies.
Advisers to the president-elect questioned whether Mr Kennedy, a vaccine sceptic who has also been the subject of a series of bizarre stories involving animals, would make it through a security check for a cabinet position.*
It raises questions about what role, if any, Mr Kennedy would be given in the Trump administration, as the Republican’s transition team sets about filling thousands of federal posts for his return to the White House.
Mr Kennedy had previously said that Mr Trump had “promised” him control of the Department of Health and Human Services and public health agencies like the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
However, there is disquiet in the Trump team about media attention on the former independent candidate after he was pressed in a post-election interview with NBC about his vaccine scepticism…
* Ha ha ha. Who appoints the people who hire the people who do security checks? Norms and institutions will not save us.
CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captainsays
Similar to crisis hotlines, ‘warm lines’ offer non-emergency mental health support: to prevent crises. Anonymous, free, run by trained ‘peers’ with personal experience of trauma, recovery, and hope. Providing an empathetic ear, deescalation, coping strategies, resources. Orgs vary, most limit to 20 mins, and rarely 3-way-in crisis orgs much less 911—if ever. Lower stakes = less 1st-timer worry. Most calls are about isolation.
Inclusive Therapists’ crisis resources lists a few warm lines. There are many more regional ones out there: existing in most US states and a number of other countries.
mordredsays
Huh, it seems DNA analysis on some human remains from Pompeii shows that the traditional interpretation of gender and family relationships were often quite wrong:
One particularly famous set of remains revisited by the team is that of an adult with a golden bracelet and a child—the child being on the adult’s lap. Long interpreted as a mother and child, the remains actually belong to an unrelated male and a child. Another duo—long thought to be sisters who died together—included at least one male. Their exact relationship remains unclear, but they weren’t two closely related females…
“Most narratives spun around the victims take into account that they were likely attempting to flee the city, but these stories often link them to their discovery place,” Mittnik said. “For instance, the man found at the Villy of the Mysteries was portrayed as the custodian of the villa who dutifully remained at his post.”
“Our research demonstrates that such interpretations are often unreliable and instead we should consider a wide range of scenarios that could explain the evidence we find,” she added…
The influential historian and philosopher of biology Michael Ruse died on November 1, 2024, at the age of 84, according to the obituary in The Globe and Mail (November 4, 2024). Ruse was one of the founders of the field of philosophy of biology: the first of his more than 70 books was the seminal The Philosophy of Biology (1970) and he founded the field’s first journal, Biology and Philosophy. He was especially interested in evolutionary biology, which he discussed in books such as The Darwinian Revolution (1979, second edition 1999), Darwinism Defended (1982), Taking Darwin Seriously (1986), Monad to Man: The Concept of Progress in Evolutionary Biology (1996), and Darwin and Design (2003), among others.
Owing to his scholarly interest in evolutionary biology, Ruse was recruited by the plaintiffs in McLean v. Arkansas, a legal case challenging the constitutionality of Arkansas’s 1981 equal time for creation science law. His testimony that creation science failed to qualify as scientific was central to the favorable ruling, although it excited considerable controversy among his fellow philosophers. Ruse continued to discuss and criticize creationism, editing a collection of essays related to McLean, But Is It Science? (1988, second edition coedited with Robert T. Pennock 2008) as well as writing The Evolution War (2000), and The Evolution/Creation Struggle (2005). Raised as a Quaker, Ruse was not a believer, but he sought to promote peaceful coexistence of science and religion, articulating his views in books such as Can a Darwinian Be a Christian? (2001) and Science and Spirituality (2010). Despite his differences with his intellectual foes, Ruse was famed for his friendliness and conviviality. Kenneth R. Miller of Brown University, president of NCSE’s board of directors, commented, “I respected him as a philosopher who genuinely understood science and more importantly loved him as a friend.” …
With Donald Trump possibly bringing her father Elon Musk with him in his return to the White House, Musk’s transgender daughter, Vivian Jenna Wilson, has announced plans to leave the United States entirely.
In a message posted Wednesday on Threads, Wilson said Trump’s sweeping victory “confirmed” that she is better off elsewhere more accepting of transgender people…
The idea behind an electoral mandate is pretty straightforward: Presidential candidates present voters with a series of ideas they want to pursue in office, and if they win, they claim that they have the nation’s backing in support of that agenda. To stand in their way, the argument goes, is to reject the will of the American electorate.
With this in mind, Donald Trump said in the runup to Election Day 2024 that he wanted a mandate, and as the results came in, the Republican claimed to have one. NBC News reported early Wednesday morning:
Trump, claiming victory, said America gave him an “unprecedented mandate.” … “America has given us an unprecedented and powerful mandate. We have taken back control of the Senate. Wow, that’s great.”
Let’s note at the outset that Republicans’ interest in presidential candidates and electoral mandates is, at best, selective.
In 2008, Barack Obama won roughly 53% of the popular vote and 365 electoral votes. Were GOP officials on Capitol Hill willing to grudgingly concede that the Democrat had earned a mandate? No, they were not. Four years later, when Obama became only the sixth president in American history to top 51% of the popular vote twice, did Republicans acknowledge the then-president’s mandate? Again, no.
In 2020, when Joe Biden won the popular vote by a fairly wide margin and ended up with the strongest support of any presidential challenger since FDR, did his opponents on the right respectfully recognize his mandate? Take a wild guess.
If you’re thinking that, under GOP rules, only GOP presidents’ mandates matter, you’re not alone.
But let’s put recent history aside and consider the core question of whether Trump has a legitimate claim to a popular mandate — because there’s ample room for skepticism.
First, the president-elect might have a stronger case to make if he’d presented voters with a detailed governing blueprint, but he did not. Trump peddled some vague, bumper-sticker-style talking points, but the post-policy president became a post-policy candidate, indifferent to the substance of governing. It’s difficult, in other words, to credibly claim a mandate for a set of proposals that, for the most part, didn’t exist in a meaningful way. [So true! And, I would add that Trump often says one thing … and then promptly contradicts his earlier statement.]
Second, Trump’s policy priorities, to the extent that they existed, weren’t especially popular. It’s fair to say the GOP candidate prevailed despite his ideas, not because of them.
Third, the idea that Trump’s mandate is “unprecedented” is demonstrably silly. Did he win? Yes. Did he win by historically enormous margins? Not even close. He might eke out a narrow popular-vote win, but plenty of other presidents fared far better. What’s more, he’ll probably finish with 312 electoral votes, which will rank 41st on the presidential history list.
Just so we’re all clear, my point is not to argue that Trump’s win is somehow illegitimate. He won, fair and square, as Democratic leaders have been quick to acknowledge. I believe the electorate made a horrible mistake, but that doesn’t change the legitimacy of the outcome.
But if the president-elect and his allies are going to argue that his win was such a historic landslide that policymakers have no choice but to yield to his will — because he’s the true voice of the nation — that is not an argument worth taking seriously.
The Justice Department on Friday disclosed an Iranian murder-for-hire plot to kill Donald Trump, charging a man who said he had been tasked by a government official before this week’s election with assassinating the Republican president-elect.
Investigators learned of the plot to kill Trump while interviewing Farhad Shakeri, an Afghan national identified by officials as an Iranian government asset who was deported from the U.S. after being imprisoned on robbery charges.
He told investigators that a contact in Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard instructed him this past September to put together a plan within seven days to surveil and ultimately kill Trump, according to a criminal complaint unsealed in federal court in Manhattan. Two other men who the authorities say were recruited to participate in other assassinations, including a prominent Iranian American journalist, were also arrested Friday. Shakeri remains in Iran.
[…] The plot, with the charges unsealed just days after Trump’s defeat of Democrat Kamala Harris, reflects what federal officials have described as ongoing efforts by Iran to target U.S. government officials, including Trump, on U.S. soil. Last summer, the Justice Department charged a Pakistani man with ties to Iran in a murder-for-hire plot.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) laid out a plan to fight the second Trump presidency in a Time essay published Thursday afternoon.
Just like the last go around, Warren says Senate Democrats should do everything they can to fight “radical Trump nominees.”
“We asked tough questions and held the Senate floor for hours to slow down confirmation and expose Republican extremism,” Warren recalls about the first Trump presidency. “These tactics doomed some nominations entirely, laid the groundwork for other cabinet officials to later resign in disgrace, and brought scrutiny that somewhat constrained Trump’s efforts.”
Warren adds that “litigation can slow Trump down, give [Democrats] time to prepare and help the vulnerable, and deliver some victories.”
Warren ends by emphasizing Democrats “must do all [they] can to safeguard our democracy” before Trump takes office in January.
“To resist Trump’s threats to abuse state power against what he calls ‘the enemy within,’ Pentagon leaders should issue a directive now reiterating that the military’s oath is to the Constitution. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer must use every minute of the end-of-year legislative session to confirm federal judges and key regulators—none of whom can be removed by the next President.”
China sets up ‘Birth Encourgagement’ offices”:
.
“China’s Youth Face Hardship! Not Having Children Is Seen as a Crime, Even Punishable By Fines”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=HoSJb-qiAYY
I have not been able to check this on any deeper level, but it seems dumb enough and heavy-handed enough to be a real policy.
Israeli fans were assaulted after a soccer game in Amsterdam by hordes of young people apparently riled up by calls on social media to target Jewish people, Dutch authorities said Friday. Five people were treated at hospitals and dozens were arrested after the attacks, which were condemned as antisemitic by authorities in Amsterdam, Israel and across Europe.
Reports of antisemitic speech, vandalism and violence have been on the rise across Europe since the start of the war in Gaza, and tensions mounted in the Dutch capital ahead of Thursday night’s Europa League match between Ajax and Maccabi Tel Aviv.
Amsterdam authorities banned pro-Palestinian demonstrators from gathering outside the stadium, and video showed a large crowd of Israeli fans chanting anti-Arab slogans on their way to the game. Afterward, youths on scooters and on foot crisscrossed the city in search of Israeli fans, punching and kicking them and then fleeing quickly to evade police, Amsterdam Mayor Femke Halsema said.
On the social media platform Telegram, “there is talk of people going on a Jew hunt,” Halsema said. “That is so shocking and so despicable that I still cannot fathom it.” Dutch Minister of Justice and Security David van Weel vowed to track down and prosecute all of the perpetrators.
Police had to escort some fans back to hotels, according to authorities.
Ofek Ziv, a Maccabi fan from the Israeli city of Petah Tikva, said someone — he didn’t see who — threw a rock at him as he and a friend left the stadium. He was hit in the head, causing light bleeding. He said a group of men began to chase him, before he and his friend got into a taxi, picking up other fans. They took shelter at a hotel.
[…] Another Israeli fan, Alyia Cohen, said that he and his friends were approached by a number of hostile men as they got back to their hotel after the match. […]
Amsterdam police spokeswoman Sara Tillart said it was too early in the investigation to say if anybody other than soccer fans was targeted.
Five people were treated in the hospital and released, while some 20 to 30 people suffered light injuries, police said. At least 62 suspects were arrested, with 10 still in custody, the city’s public prosecutor, René de Beukelaer, told reporters at a news conference Friday.
With condemnation of the violence as antisemitic pouring in from around Europe, the attacks shattered Amsterdam’s long-cherished view of itself as a beacon of tolerance and haven for persecuted religions, including Sephardic Jews from Portugal and Spain who fled to the city centuries ago.
Halsema, Amsterdam’s mayor, described the violence as “an eruption of antisemitism that we had hoped never again to see in Amsterdam.”
In the past, Ajax was known as a soccer club with links to Amsterdam’s Jewish community because visiting fans had to pass the city’s Jewish quarter to get to the club’s former stadium. Ajax fans sometimes wave Star of David flags and chant the Dutch word for Jews.
Israel’s foreign minister, Gideon Saar, flew to Amsterdam on Friday and in a message on X he said that hatred of Jews is “appearing in place after place after place.”
Police said security will be beefed up at Jewish institutions in the city, which has a large Jewish community and was home to Jewish World War II diarist Anne Frank and her family as they hid from Nazi occupiers.
Authorities outlawed demonstrations across the city for the weekend and gave police extra powers to frisk people.
The violence reverberated intensely in Israel and across Europe. Israel’s government initially ordered two planes sent to the Dutch capital to bring fans home. The prime minister’s office later said it would work to help citizens arrange commercial flights.
A statement from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said he “views the horrifying incident with utmost gravity.” He demanded that the Dutch government take “vigorous and swift action” against those involved.
Dutch Prime Minister Dick Schoof condemned the violence and flew home early from a European Union summit in Hungary. […]
Tensions had been brewing in Amsterdam for days ahead of the match. A Palestinian flag was torn down from a building in Amsterdam on Wednesday, Dutch broadcaster NOS reported, and authorities banned a pro-Palestinian demonstration near the stadium.
Ahead of the game, large crowds of supporters of the Israeli team could be seen on video chanting anti-Arab slogans as they headed to the stadium, escorted by police.
“Let the IDF win, and (expletive) the Arabs,” the fans chanted, using the acronym of the Israeli military, as they shook their fists. It also showed police pushing several pro-Palestinian protesters away from a Maccabi fan gathering in a square earlier in the day.
[…] Israel’s national soccer team is scheduled to play France in Paris on Nov. 14 in the Nations League. French Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau said Thursday the match would go ahead as planned. […]
Bomb threats sent to polling places and ballot-counting locations in at least five battleground states across the U.S. Tuesday targeted mostly Democratic counties, an NBC News analysis has found.
The full extent of who received the bomb threats is not clear. […] NBC News compiled a list of 67 locations in 19 counties, based on local news reports and state and local election officials’ statements, all of which appear to have received similar threats. Of the 67 locations, 56 were in 11 counties that voted for Joe Biden in the 2020 election, including the eight most populated. Those high-population Democratic counties include voting locations for Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Detroit, Michigan; Phoenix, Arizona; Atlanta, Georgia; and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Maricopa County, Arizona, which Biden won by a slim margin, has consistently been the subject of election denialism conspiracy theories. The other five — Michigan’s Wayne County, Pennsylvania’s Philadelphia County and Georgia’s DeKalb, Fulton and Gwinnett counties — were some of the largest Democratic strongholds in their respective states.
Bomb threats largely target Biden counties
Many of the threats called in on Election Day were in places President Joe Biden won comfortably in 2020. [Chart at the link]
[…] Some locations that temporarily shut down on Tuesday, like DeKalb and Philadelphia County, extended their voting hours that evening. None of the threats resulted in a voting location closing for the day […]
The FBI said in an emailed statement Tuesday that “many” of the threats “appear to originate from Russian email domains.” Some additional threats appeared to have been sent from a French service, a U.S. official briefed on the matter told NBC News. Anyone with unrestricted internet access can sign up for email services in other countries, making it difficult to deduce who actually sent the threats. […]
From Wonkette: These Little Nazi [B-word, plural] Are Trying To Terrorize Our Daughters And Children.
‘Your body, my choice’ is the newest rallying cry. [Image of red hat bearing that slogan]
Nick Fuentes, an Actual Nazi and erstwhile dining companion of our president-elect […] Donald Trump, posted what may have been his most popular rallying cry yet: “Your Body, My Choice. Forever.” That dude doesn’t even want to fuck women, he says fucking women is gay. He just wants to outlaw us not wanting to fuck him. Or something. I’m not entirely concerned with what he wants. But it’s not just him, actually, though he’s probably making a killing selling his little Nazi hats right now. […]
From Institute for Strategic Dialogue:
On TikTok, female users are reporting that accounts are commenting “your body, my choice” en masse on their posts. One TikTok creator stated: “I had to delete a video because I was being threatened and several men commenting [sic] saying they couldn’t wait until I get raped or ‘your body my choice.’” Another stated: “I woke up this morning to men commenting ‘your body, my choice.’ In a TikTok forum on Reddit, a user posted: “Last night I reported one of the many comments I’ve seen saying ‘Your body, my choice.’ The comment has been left up and the report has been marked as not a violation. How? HOW THE FUCK is that not a violation?”
There’s more, of course, at the link. And Teen Vogue is watching too. Here’s some of what they quote Andrew Tate — with millions of little boy followers thinking he’s the tits — as saying:
“I saw a woman crossing the road today but I just kept my foot down. Right of way? You no longer have rights,” he wrote in one post. “The men are back in charge,” he said in another. And in a repost of a woman saying she’s “asking for a President who isn’t a rapist,” Tate wrote “REQUEST DENIED.”
[Note reference to Andrew Tate in comment 73.]
It’s not just online threats. Anecdotes from social media like this one are terrifying:
I’ve now had two different friends with high school aged daughters who’ve been subjected to shitty teenage boys telling them “your body, my choice.” And to say I’m incandescently angry is an understatement. Guys, you shut that shit down if you hear it. This one is your work.
In the meantime, Black people all over the country are getting personalized texts, with their names on them, telling them to report for their enslavement in camps picking cotton. The texts are going to children as young as middle school — again, with the Black children’s names attached. They know the children’s names.
Incandescent with rage almost covers it … but I am scared. […]
I don’t have great ideas, I’m as lost as all of us right now. […]
I’m pissed off, and I’m scared, and I’m demoralized, and I’m not going to pretend I’m not. The fact that that’s what they want isn’t going to magically make me fightier. If you’ve got a daughter […] tell her to come to you or a grownup at the first sign something’s fucked. If you’ve got children of color, do the same. I have nothing else to offer, except MAKE SOME FUCKING NOISE, TELL YOUR FRIENDS THIS IS HAPPENING, SHOW THE WORLD THESE NASTY NAZI PRICKS. And if your friends or family voted for that, show them too. Show them exactly what they’ve unleashed. […]
There has been no small number of election post-mortems going around in the last two days, most of which I can honestly say I have not felt like reading. Mostly because so many have said, more or less, that if all these people voted for Trump, we must be wrong about them being assholes. Given that he actually got fewer votes than he did last time around, it’s not mathematically clear why that would be.
“It won’t do to dismiss a majority of the country as biased, ignorant or otherwise basely motivated,” said the editorial board of the Washington Post, whose owner barred them from endorsing Harris and eagerly congratulated Trump on his win this week, adding, “Yes, prejudices against foreigners, people of color and other targets of Mr. Trump’s rhetoric surely play a part in his extraordinarily durable appeal, but they can’t explain it all; indeed, the condescension of elites is itself a factor against which his voters were protesting by supporting him.”
So, just to be clear here — the issue is not that Trump and his supporters say horrific things about foreigners, people of color, etc., but that people criticize them for doing so or say that these things are the reason they voted for Trump, or that they were at least not enough of a problem for them to not vote for Trump and that this may be a reflection on their character.” Got it!
The explanation favored by the Post, by centrists, and by Republicans who were never going to vote for anyone but Trump anyway has largely been of the “They need to punch left and bow right if they want to win elections” variety. Surely you will be shocked to hear that this was the take favored by the New York Times’ Bret Stephens.
Here he goes!
Why did Harris lose? There were many tactical missteps: her choice of a progressive running mate who would not help deliver a must-win state like Pennsylvania or Michigan; her inability to separate herself from President Biden; her foolish designation of Trump as a fascist, which, by implication, suggested his supporters were themselves quasi-fascist; her overreliance on celebrity surrogates as she struggled to articulate a compelling rationale for her candidacy[.]
Well, that first part is certainly an interesting take, given that a large part of the reason she lost Michigan was because she refused to say she would stop supplying Israel with bombs with which to kill Palestinians.
The second part is fucking absurd given the completely batshit things that Trump has said about Harris and anyone else who opposes him. He has also called Harris a fascist (as well as a Marxist and a Communist […]), but you don’t see anyone grasping for their smelling salts over that, do you? […]
No, because we’re generally kind of just supposed to expect that Trump and the Right will say terrible things about us and about people we care about, while Trump and the Right demand respect and generosity from us. Indeed, much of Stephens’s op-ed is about the fact that the Left refuses to pretend that Trump is normal and his supporters are kind, wonderful people who just have some “concerns” and are “dismayed” about some things.
But these mistakes of calculation lived within three larger mistakes of worldview. First, the conviction among many liberals that things were pretty much fine, if not downright great, in Biden’s America — and that anyone who didn’t think that way was either a right-wing misinformer or a dupe. Second, the refusal to see how profoundly distasteful so much of modern liberalism has become to so much of America. [See comment 85 for a thorough debunking of that bullshit.] Third, the insistence that the only appropriate form of politics when it comes to Trump is the politics of Resistance — capital R.
Things were pretty much fine! They would have been a lot better if we could have stopped corporations from price gouging, but that would have drawn the usual right-wing hysterics about “price controls.” Every country on earth had economic issues and inflation following the pandemic and interruptions to the supply chain caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The United States has had lower inflation than pretty much every other country on earth. [Graph at the link]
Turkey, which is led by Trump’s good buddy and fellow “strongman” Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, had one of the highest inflation rates in the world, after Lebanon. Russia’s inflation situation was also a lot worse than ours. [Inflation map at the link]
What Stephens and others want to hear is “We feel your pain and you’re right, this whole thing is Joe Biden’s fault” just because it would make them feel good, when it damn well is not. There is almost no question that this would have been worse if Trump was in office.
As far as the “refusal to see how profoundly distasteful so much of modern liberalism has become to so much of America” goes, that’s a them problem. You’ll notice that most people rarely get too specific on points like this because they are at least self-aware enough to know that if they were to say exactly what they were bothered by, they would sound like monsters.
Stephens gave it a go and did not succeed:
The dismissiveness with which liberals treated these concerns was part of something else: dismissiveness toward the moral objections many Americans have to various progressive causes. Concerned about gender transitions for children or about biological males playing on girls’ sports teams? You’re a transphobe. Dismayed by tedious, mandatory and frequently counterproductive D.E.I. seminars that treat white skin as almost inherently problematic? You’re racist. Irritated by new terminology that is supposed to be more inclusive but feels as if it’s borrowing a page from “1984”? That’s doubleplusungood.
Oh, they’re “concerned”? They’re “dismayed”? Is that what we’re playing at? Sorry, no. It’s not like these people are just meekly saying “Oh gosh, I have some questions about whether a girl who was assigned male at birth would have too great of an advantage in sports if playing against girls!” because if that were true, surely they’d stick around to get some answers to their questions. Surely, if it were merely a concern and not merely the “reasonable” face of prejudice, there would be facts that could change their minds, no?
In 2023, there were a grand total of 15 trans teens playing high school sports in the entire United States. Only two of them were transwomen. There are maybe 30 transgender student athletes at colleges, total. We don’t know how many were transwomen, but it’s unlikely the ratio would change all that much. (Our own Crip Dyke has noted that actually, that’s a problem, because it suggests trans girls have been preemptively bullied out of participation.)
On top of that, current research suggests that, following testosterone suppression, “trans women who have undergone testosterone suppression have no clear biological advantages over cis women in elite sport.” [Important to note.]
This is not, by any means, a widespread problem or something that needs to be fixed with legislation. […] The goal with this nonsense is to get people to accept the premise and then use it as a way to justify the further persecution of trans people. [True]
On the second point, there have been diversity programs for decades and no one really gave a flying fuck until Christopher Rufo started ginning up outrage over them once he couldn’t get people hysterical enough about “critical race theory” theory anymore. Notice how you haven’t heard that term much lately? It lost its potency, because it was a nonsensical thing to be mad about in the first place. This will soon be true of DEI programs as soon as they switch to another thing.
There are a lot of things wrong with this argument, but the most glaring one is one that Stephens points out himself — that when Harris did pivot to the right on issues, it didn’t do her any favors because she just didn’t bend the knee hard enough to keep the goal posts from moving.
[H]er failure to forthrightly repudiate some of the more radical positions she took as a candidate in 2019, other than by relying on stock expressions like “My values haven’t changed.”
I am going to venture to guess that what he is talking about here is fracking — both because that’s what similar columns (like the one from the Washington Post’s editorial board) have addressed and because he’s previously complained that she didn’t do enough to push the idea that fracking is good (which it is not).
I just wish she could have made a better case for her current position. Like, if she had noted that by producing more natural gas in the U.S., we’ve become less coal-dependent, which is good for the planet. Or that by producing more oil in the United States, we’re also less dependent on the Middle East. Or that by becoming more energy independent, we can do more to ensure that we are extracting the energy in an environmentally sound way — something we can’t do when the oil is coming from Venezuela or Iraq.
So, just to be clear, it wasn’t enough to just say she’ll let oil companies continue fracking up the environment and our groundwater, she would have also had to lie and say it’s good for the planet, just to make someone like Bret Stephens feel good.
It wasn’t enough that she said she would put Republicans in her Cabinet, either. It wasn’t enough when she got endorsements from Liz and Dick Cheney, the latter of which Republicans used against her.
In fact, you will notice that literally every single time Democrats adopt right-wing positions in hopes of courting their votes, Republicans throw those things right back in their faces. It has never worked out, not once — and, in fact, it has only ever made things worse. If Democrats were to capitulate and say “OK, if it will make you feel better, we’ll bully some transgender kids for you,” they would not get a single thank you note in the mail.
[…] There is nothing wrong with our stances and our policies — policies that people, by and large, actually do support. In fact, a 2021 NBC/PBS/Marist poll actually found that 67 percent of US adults (including 66 percent of Republicans) don’t even want there to be laws banning trans kids from playing sports. Hell, that same poll actually found that Republicans were actually slightly more likely to oppose legislation outlawing gender transition-related medical care for children.
We have our work cut out for us in a lot of ways, but I promise you all, I promise Bret Stephens, that there is no amount of smoke we can blow up Republican asses or “moderate” positions we can take that will sway those voters. Even if that were true, if we have to throw anyone under the bus to get those votes, we don’t deserve to hold any office to begin with.
What we need, frankly, is better PR and better messaging so that the right-wing interpretations of our policies — so frequently laced with bizarre conspiracy theories — are not the ones that prevail.
A question for physicists and generally well-educated nerds.
.
Is there anything even remotely feasible in this article or is it more superconducting BS?
“Designing multicomponent hydrides with potential high Tc superconductivity” by Adam Denchfield, Hyowon Park and Russell J. Hemley, 1 November 2024, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2413096121
birgerjohanssonsays
Clarification. No, I did not mean the BS was superconducting.
The FBI is warning that hackers are obtaining private user information — including emails and phone numbers — from U.S.-based tech companies by compromising government and police email addresses to submit “emergency” data requests. From a report:…
A Russian court has sentenced two Russian soldiers to life in prison for killing a family of nine in occupied Ukraine, in a rare example of the country holding its troops to account for alleged war crimes.
The entire Kapkanets family were killed in their home in the Donetsk region last year by Anton Sopov, 21, and Stanislav Rau, 28, prosecutors said. Among the victims were two children aged five and nine.
The family had been celebrating a birthday at the time, Ukraine’s ombudsman Dmytro Lubinets said a day after the killings.
Some details of the case are unclear, such as whether the soldiers pleaded guilty, as the trial was held behind closed doors due to military secrecy, Russian media reported.
Sopov and Rau were convicted of killing 53-year-old Eduard Kapkanets, his wife Tatiana, their adult sons with their wives, a nine-year-old granddaughter, a four-year-old grandson and a more distant relative of the family.
Ukrainian officials at the time said they believed the family was murdered for refusing to give up their house to the Russian troops.
State news agency Tass reported that the men had been convicted for murder “motivated by political, ideological, racial, national or religious hatred”…
Rafael was moving west across the Gulf of Mexico on Friday morning as the first major hurricane in the Gulf in November for almost 40 years, bringing the threat of life-threatening conditions to the southern United States coastline. Forecasters said the storm could cause dangerous surf and riptides across the whole Gulf region in the coming days, after causing havoc in Cuba where millions are still without power.
Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday congratulated Donald Trump on his election victory in his first public comment on the U.S. vote. … Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Thursday the Kremlin is not ruling out the possibility of contact between Putin and Trump before the inauguration, given that Trump “said he would call Putin before the inauguration.”
President-elect Donald Trump on Thursday named co-campaign chair Susie Wiles as his White House chief of staff, one of the most important nonelected posts in Washington. She will be the first woman in that role.
A federal judge in Texas [a Trump-appointed judge] on Thursday struck down a new Biden administration program that sought to provide a path to U.S. citizenship for hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants married to American citizens.
The ruling, issued by Judge J. Campbell Barker of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, came months after 16 Republican-led states, led by Texas’ attorney general, Ken Paxton, filed a lawsuit claiming that the administration lacked the legal authority to enact the program. In August, Judge Barker temporarily blocked the initiative, just days after it had gone into place.
[…] The Biden administration started the initiative, known as Keeping Families Together, in August, allowing undocumented immigrants who were married to U.S. citizens and had been in the United States for 10 years or more a chance to gain a green card without leaving the country. [sounds reasonable to me]
[…] “It’s extremely disappointing because these are people who have all been here for many years and will move forward in the immigration system,” said Dan Berger, an immigration lawyer who submitted a memo in support of the policy to the Biden administration before it was announced. Now, he said, “their cases will take many years and further clog the system.”
Rebecca Shi, head of the American Business Immigration Coalition, which championed the program, said the lawsuit was a misguided effort.
“At some point, Republican leaders will need to represent all the families in their states instead of opposing every sensible step being taken,” she said in an email. “Polling showed that 41 percent of Trump voters support legal status for undocumented spouses of U.S. citizens.”
A White House spokesman, Angelo Fernández Hernández, said on Friday that the Biden Administration strongly disagreed with the decision, saying it would lead to families “being needlessly torn apart” while spouses went through the process of obtaining permanent resident status. Mr. Fernández said the administration was evaluating whether to appeal.
On Thursday, Fox News host Dana Perino suggested the “death penalty” as a course of action for lawyers who have gone after Donald Trump on legal grounds in the past few years.
The remark occurred during a discussion on the network’s panel show, “The Five.”
[video at the link]
Co-host Greg Gutfeld asked her if the lawyers involved in these cases require therapy following Trump’s successful campaign.
“Yes, they definitely need therapy, and maybe also the death penalty,” Perino responded.
Gutfeld agreed, adding, “Yes, I think the death penalty.”
[…] Going forward, the feedback loop between Trump and Fox News is sure to continue—he feeds them rhetoric and attacks, they amplify those attacks and give him fodder for more fury—and casual talk about death for legal officials doing their jobs will further be normalized.
Mike Davis, an adviser to Donald Trump who is said to be in the running to serve as his U.S. attorney general, has issued a violent threat against New York Attorney General Letitia James.
In an appearance on conservative pundit Benny Johnson’s podcast, Davis said, “Let me just say this to big Tish James: I dare you to try to continue your lawfare against President Trump in his second term.”
He added, “Listen here, sweetheart: We’re not messing around this time, and we will put your fat ass in prison for conspiracy against rights, and I promise you that.”
[…] Davis is the founder of the Article III Project, an advocacy group that wants to make the judiciary more conservative, or rather “a hell of a lot more conservative,” Davis told Politico. He also has a history of incendiary, threatening remarks. Speaking last month about legal proceedings that have occurred involving Trump, Davis said “retribution is a key component of justice.”
Previously, he has backed putting journalists and Trump detractors in a “gulag” and praised putting migrant children in “cages.” Davis has also called for dragging “dead political bodies through the streets,” in a reference to Trump opponents. […]
TikTok, and X are filling with the schadenfreude of a Latino man who voted for Trump, finding out what MAGA really means . . . the “G” slipped revealing the actual letter “W.” (Make America White Again).
From the English translations it seems that Mr. Angel Rodriguez is a Trump voter just like all the white people living in his neighborhood. And he was on good terms with them, their children played together until AFTER Trump won.
Mr. Rodriguez’s children went over to play with the white Trump supporters kids as they had always done and were met by Mr. White MAGA at the door telling them leave, to go back where they came from, and keep to their own kind. He even shot a pew pew in the air for emphasis.
Here’s Mr. Rodriguez’s post on TikTok: [available at the link. He speaks Spanish.]
[…]
Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party refers to a parody of regretful voters who vote for cruel and unjust policies (and politicians) and are then surprised when their own lives become worse as a result.
On October 16th, 2015, Twitter user @cavalorn tweeted, “‘I never thought leopards would eat MY face,’ sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party.” The tweet became a common way to refer to regretful voters over the following five years. — reddit
Dorothy Allison, Working Class Feminist, Author And Absolute Badass, Dies At 75
Excerpt:
[…] Born in South Carolina in 1949, she was a queer feminist, an activist, an author, a class warrior and genuinely kind and incredibly warm person. Her work dealt with themes of class, rape and sexual abuse (she was a survivor herself — like Bone, the protagonist of Bastard, she was sexually abused by her stepfather), sexuality, and infused these serious themes, somehow, with a humor that was so thoughtful it never seemed misplaced. […]
The horror of class stratification, racism, and prejudice is that some people begin to believe that the security of their families and communities depends on the oppression of others, that for some to have good lives there must be others whose lives are truncated and brutal. It is a belief that dominates this culture.
It is what makes the poor whites of the South so determinedly racist and the middle class so contemptuous of the poor. It is a myth that allows some to imagine that they build their lives on the ruin of others, a secret core of shame for the middle class, a goad and a spur to the marginal working class, and cause enough for the homeless and poor to feel no constraints on hatred or violence.
The power of the myth is made even more apparent when we examine how, within the lesbian and feminist communities where we have addressed considerable attention to the politics of marginalization, there is still so much exclusion and fear, so many of us who do not feel safe.
I grew up poor, hated, the victim of physical, emotional, and sexual violence, and I know that suffering does not ennoble. It destroys. To resist destruction, self-hatred, or lifelong hopelessness, we have to throw off the conditioning of being despised, the fear of becoming the they that is talked about so dismissively, to refuse lying myths and easy easy moralities, to see ourselves as human, flawed, and extraordinary. All of us—extraordinary.
Allison was a veteran of the Feminist Sex Wars of the 1980s, having bravely fought on the side of sex-positive feminism and anti-censorship, in opposition to anti-porn crusaders Andrea Dworkin and Catharine Mackinnon. In 1981, she and Jo Arnone founded the Lesbian Sex Mafia, now the oldest running BDSM support and education group for cis and trans women (Yep! There were trans-inclusive feminists in 1981! Allison was one of them!) [video at the link]
[…]
Uh … not good. “Musk joins Trump in call with Zelensky”
[…] Trump and billionaire Elon Musk talked with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as fears grow that the incoming Republican administration will cede territory in Ukraine to Russia.
Musk joined Trump in the conversation with Zelensky on Wednesday, when the Ukrainian president called the president-elect to congratulate him for his election night victory over Vice President Harris.
In the call, Musk said he would continue to support Ukraine with Starlink satellites, according to Axios. […]
Officially, the Trump campaign is not commenting on Musk’s involvement. […]
Zelensky previously described the phone call with Trump as “a productive conversation, a good conversation.” He was among the first world leaders to congratulate Trump after his victory early Wednesday morning.
The Ukrainian leader also said in a Thursday speech that it was vital for allies to stand by Ukraine and to ensure any deal with Russia benefits Kyiv.
On the campaign trail, Trump has repeatedly said he would end the war in Ukraine by the time he takes office on Jan. 20, a plan that observers fear would mean giving up territory in eastern Ukraine seized by Russia since the 2022 invasion.
[…] Musk, who is set to have some informal role in Trump’s administration, has provided Starlink for Ukraine but also has been in regular contact with Putin since 2022, according to The Wall Street Journal. Musk in October 2022 said on his social platform X that he supports a peace plan generally seen as favorable to Russia.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, a close ally of Trump’s, predicted on Friday that the incoming U.S. president would end support for Ukraine.
“The situation on the front is obvious; there’s been a military defeat,” Orban said. “The Americans are going to pull out of this war.”
Kira Rudik, a Ukrainian member of parliament, said in a statement shared by the Atlantic Council think tank that with Trump poised to take office, “Ukraine must prepare a truly pragmatic and efficient victory plan.”
“It is true that many Ukrainians remain concerned over Trump’s earlier statements about ending the war in a single day,” Rudik said, “but we also hope that beyond the campaign trail, there is a clear understanding that wars cannot be stopped overnight without allowing dictators to have their way.”
[…] The stocks of the two biggest private prison operators — CoreCivic (formerly know as Corrections Corp. of America) and Geo Group — have doubled since election day. CoreCivic (CXW) is up 140% since Trump won in November; Geo Group (GEO) has risen 98%.
[…] The reason private prisons are back in vogue is simple: Trump has made sweeping promises to crack down on crime and illegal immigration. Wall Street calculated quickly that Trump’s rhetoric is likely to translate into more people behind bars. And that means more profits for private prisons.
[…] Wall Street expects prisons to get the biggest boost from Trump’s plans to deport illegal immigrants.
The Department of Homeland Security is already trying to hire 10,000 new immigration officers and 5,000 more border control agents. On top of that, DHS intends to ask for more money to fund additional detention facilities.
Both CoreCivic and Geo Group have several thousand beds currently available that could be used for undocumented immigrants, says Michael Kodesch, a stock analyst at Canaccord Genuity. Private prisons currently house roughly 8% of America’s 1.5 million federal and state prison population, according to Kodesch.
Trump’s team embraces private prisons [Because all of the Bad Guys should profit.]T
[…] the Obama Administration slammed them for being more expensive and less safe than government-run facilities.
Private prisons “simply do not provide the same level of correctional services, programs, and resources; they do not save substantially on costs; and as noted in a recent report by the Department’s Office of Inspector General, they do not maintain the same level of safety and security,” former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates wrote at the time. […]
The text below is from a Fortune article posted yesterday.
Trump’s election win sends private prisons stocks soaring as investors anticipate hard crackdown on migration.
[…] Trump’s pledge to crack down hard on mass migration promises to mean big business for private prisons.
Companies like CoreCivic and Geo Group may be known for profiting from the growing population of incarcerated Americans, but they struck gold after expanding into the operation of detention centers for undocumented migrants on behalf of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Now investors are betting heavily their earnings are set to soar, bidding up shares on Wednesday in the aftermath of Trump’s election. Stock in CoreCivic surged 29% while Geo Group saw an even bigger gain, vaulting 42% in a single session.
[…] Trump and his allies have long attacked the Democratic Party for being too soft on crime and too soft on borders […] Elon Musk—himself an immigrant—who made the issue of illegal migration the core argument why he was spending millions in a risky gamble to return Trump to the White House.
[…] During the Trump administration, the federal government expanded its immigration detention system by over 50%, a move that “overwhelmingly benefitted private prison companies”, according to findings from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). The number of migrants detained reached a peak of 55,000 in 2019.
It didn’t end with Biden’s election either. Even though he immediately issued an executive order ending private prison contracts with the federal government when he took office in January 2021, Biden made one exception—migrant detention facilities.
[…] Following Trump’s election on Tuesday, the new president-elect now has to deliver on a promise to launch the “largest deportation in the history of our country.” Vice President-elect JD Vance suggested his boss should start with 1 million undocumented migrants “and then we can go from there”.
There’s just one catch that could potentially throw a wrench in the cogs for CoreCivic and Geo Group. Cities and states need to cooperate with ICE, which is not necessarily a given. Some speculate Trump will use the threat of withholding federal funding as a means to force compliance. […]
birgerjohanssonsays
Paleolithic ocher mine in south africa is 48000 years old – the site was identified by the ‘fingerprint’ of the substance used at paleolithic sites. But the oldest documented use of ocher is by homo erectus, 285 000 years ago.
Lynna, OM, quoting Steve Benen @ # 85: [Trump] won, fair and square…
Surely a line we’ll hear for years from wimp liberals. I wish I could force Benen and his damn ilk to go state by state, starting with Florida and Georgia, and count the total of voters finagled off the rolls by Republican bureaucrats over the last, say, 10 years, and to do some surveys and calculations as to how the elections over that decade might have turned out if those citizens had not had their democratic rights stolen through sleazy manipulations.
Trump may have done something fair/square in his life, but winning this year’s election wasn’t it.
Bekenstein Boundsays
Trump may have done something fair/square in his life
Indeed he did: he lost fair and square in 2020.
As for 2024, I call shenanigans. In the past two (post-Dobbs) years special election after special election has delivered a sharp rebuke to any MAGA candidate running. More recently we heard of massive, unusual early voting turnout that skewed female.
Did all of that just evaporate on the morning of Nov. 5 by magic?
How many votes ended up not being cast because of the Russian bomb threats? Or last minute illegal voter roll purges that were allowed through by Trump-appointed judges? Or assorted threats and intimidation by “election security” brownshirts menacing people near polling stations in heavily D-leaning areas?
KGsays
Pierce R. Butler@114, Bekenstein Bound@115,
No doubt such shenanigans made some difference, but leading Democrats are not contesting the result. If enough Americans (particularly young Americans – I’ve seen a turnout figure of 42%) had turned out to defeat fascism, Trump would have lost. Best to face the facts: a majority of Americans either want fascism, or couldn’t be bothered to vote against it.
lumipunasays
Hello again. I have some comments to post, after having been rudely distracted by a workweek in the midst of watching US election fallout.
lumipunasays
Reginald Selkirk at 49 and 59:
The original article I linked previously is a bit muddled. The protection provided by the Earth’s magnetic fields is associated with the higher radiation levels in outer space; they are really the same issue. The International Space Station, which orbits at about 400 km altitude, is not high enough to be outside the protective magnetic fields. The only time Earthly astronauts have gone outside the protective magnetic fields is the Apollo missions.
If I understand correctly, particle radiation levels are even higher in some regions well within Earth’s magnetic field (the Van Allen belts), because particles from solar wind and cosmic radiation trapped into swirling around the planet. The actual flow of particles toward Earth’s atmosphere is much reduced by magnetic deflection, but the trapped particles accumulate and move around horizontally within the Van Allen belts. The atmosphere stops almost all downward moving particles before they reach Earth’s surface, but the magnetic field is important in reducing the particle flux entering atmosphere, which helps reduce surface radiation levels and the solar wind erosion of Earth’s atmosphere.
The ISS is largely protected, because it orbits within the thin upper reaches of atmosphere, and in lower latitudes where the strong magnetic field generally blocks downward particle flux most efficiently, directing it into polar regions (where the entry of particles into atmosphere creates the auroras). At slightly higher altitudes, radiation levels would increase very rapidly, because the Van Allen belts are concentrated in these very areas, where the magnetic field is strong. There’s still enough radiation at the ISS altitude that it’s potentially harmful to astronauts in the long term.
(please correct me if I’m wrong – I’ve struggled to understand this stuff in simple terms)
A press conference held earlier today was an opportunity for NASA to explain why four Crew-8 astronauts were sent to a hospital after splashing down on Earth on October 25, but the agency and its astronauts quickly shut down any attempt by journalists to glean more information.
NASA’s SpaceX Crew-8 mission returned to Earth after spending eight months on board the International Space Station (ISS). Upon their return home, all four astronauts were hospitalized and one was forced to spend an overnight stay due to an unidentified medical issue…
It took three thieves to pull of this grand caper at Govanni Used Cars on Thursday. One to drive the getaway vehicle into a pole, one to use a sawzall to cut through the gate lock and snag a single catalytic converter and another to fall out of said getaway car. Oh, and he dropped his gun, too. From CBS News: …
(video)
birgerjohanssonsays
At 95, Noam Chomsky has lost the ability to speak or write.
😞
It is not shenanigans exactly, but it is there that the “asymmetrical information ecosystem” affected the election.
Here are some comments from Kate Riga on that subject:
I’ve been thinking for a long time about the asymmetrical information ecosystem, and how Republicans don’t just dominate — Democrats don’t even compete. I’m talking about “cultural” shows from which politics flow downstream — right-wing ideology wrapped in chatter about MMA and the stock market, or hand-making Cheerios and removing seed oils from food.
Democrats are clearly realizing the points/10s of millions of votes they’re leaving on the board; look at Kamala Harris’ forays onto popular podcasts this cycle.
But it’s not enough to make a guest appearance. Democrats need well-produced, well-funded, compelling content that can go punch for punch with the Rogans and the Theo Vons. That’ll require creativity, lots and lots of capital and a search for talent. This is, of course, more difficult because billionaires have a symbiotic relationship with right-wing ideology. It’ll be harder to rustle up wealthy backers for an ideology that explicitly wants them to have less money.
The lefty pods and streams already out there […] won’t cut it, because most of them despise normie Democrats. This was the heart of the great Bernie-Hillary divide, and the “dirtbag left” that adored Sanders and saw Hillary as a figurehead for the institution of the party, which they abhor.
In that way, things are easier for Republicans and the media that supports them. Under Trump, the party has only become more homogenous. Anti-Trump Republicans have either been run out of the party, or self-selected out. Trump doesn’t have to worry about the institutionalists vs. the radicals; there are no institutionalists left.
For Democrats, a serious saturation into this space won’t look like the fawning conspiracy theories and repressive ideology of Ben Shapiro; and it won’t be the irreverent, burn-it-all-down disgust of the far left. They need some other thing, creators that espouse a populist liberal ideology in a non-overtly political way, so as to attract back low propensity voters who would never tap on an explicitly political show.
It’ll require some experimentation and some trial and error to shape this content. Luckily, Democrats have the next two and then four years to figure it out.
“Media analysts say Sinclair, known for anchors reciting script in lockstep, promotes conservative talking points”
Sinclair, one of the largest owners of US television stations, has established itself as an influential player in the conservative movement by using trusted local news channels to spread disinformation and manipulated video of Joe Biden, media analysts say.
The company, which gained notoriety in 2018 for requiring local anchors across the country to read the same segment, has since created a national news show that produces stories distributed to its stations – often at the expense of local news coverage, the experts say.
As local journalism continues to decline, that formula could have an especially big impact on the upcoming presidential election when swing voters may then base their decision on fears over exaggerated problems. [Yes, that’s exactly what happened. The Guardian posted the article in July 2024.]
“When you stress a story the way Sinclair does, say on immigration, and you don’t look at the numbers and you don’t reflect on what has been going on, that is different than a news story. That is a political talking point,” said Anne Nelson, journalist and author of Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right. […]
Sinclair owns or operates 185 TV stations in 86 markets. When the company buys a station, its coverage of national politics increases significantly, as does a shift to the right, according to a 2018 American Political Science Review journal study.
[…] the company distributed stories to its local news websites based on videos manipulated by the Republican National Committee […]
“It’s being distributed through the lens of these trusted local outlets that are branded with ABC, CBS, NBC – media brands that people do not view in the same category as a Fox News – but if you look at a lot of what they are covering, it’s a lot of the issues you might find Trump talk about in a stump speech,” said Judd Legum […]
Sinclair, like Trump, also presents crime as a grave threat, Vogel said, despite violent crime decreasing significantly in recent years.
[…] Sinclair stations also promote misleading concerns about migrants committing crime. […]
Abstractly, I get why somebody might vote for a violent autocratic movement over the price of eggs. Personally, I prefer to live in a society, but I do get it. I would probably check first, to see if said violent autocratic movement actually had a viable plan to bring down the price of eggs, but then, I am a libtard.
Anyway, I’ve been having a grand old time, pinballing between all the same fun, fun emotions you’ve been feeling. The “I guess America is basically evil now” despair, the banging-my-head-on-my-desk-till-it-splinters outrage that lying works so goddamn well, and of course, that burst of “if this is what voters want, they deserve what they get” spite, complete with practicing the smug look I’ll shoot at the bewildered Trump voters as they enter the reeducation camp six months behind me. (Ideally, you want one that’ll still convey the intended level of disdain once your teeth’ve rotted out.) [That last bit is a reference to RFK Jr. removing fluoride from water.]
Most of all, the shaking-my-head-so-hard-my-jowls-ripple-with-measurable-frequency disbelief that anyone anywhere could possibly still believe this visibly decomposing con man is some sort of business genius, who could fix anything, even if he possessed the slightest interest in doing so. Which he doesn’t.
(I don’t actually have jowls, for the record. Though if I keep drinking at the rate I have been this week…)
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me after crashing the economy and causing tens of thousands of senseless Covid deaths, to say nothing of the rapes and felony convictions and staffers calling him a fascistand so on, ad infinitum, well, shame is the least of our worries […]
All in all, a fairly crappy Tuesday, even as Tuesdays go. Always been a lousy TV night, frankly, but I confess I found the season finale of American Democracy particularly dissatisfying. Certainly disappointed the Jack Smith subplot won’t play out. The Russian bomb threats targeting minority precincts were a clever detail, though; my compliments.
And the trailers for next season look awful. So many of my least favorite characters returning in prominent roles. Not excited for this “vengeful narcissist can prosecute anybody he wants” angle, or the economy-wrecking tariffs they’re teasing, and I don’t care for the elevation of this “Elon” fellow, because how many idiot racist billionaires do really you need? Sometimes less is more.
Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck.
Beyond that, most of the political news this week involved sifting through the wreckage for explanations, and it turns out it’s pretty difficult to write jokes about early post-mortem hypothesizing.
“How many points rightward does the electorate have to shift to screw in a dictatorship? THREE TO FIVE, APPARENTLY, BUT WE’RE STILL WAITING FOR MORE DATA…is this thing on?”
See?
Anyway.
[…] Previous blog hiatuses have proven productive, so I’m gonna step away for a bit, to focus my energies on dragging this little bastard [a new comic book] across the finish line, yes, but most of all, to rest up for the fights to come. Feels like the perfect time to unplug, honestly; skip the gloating and the dread, drink some beers, take some walks, drink some more beers, fill any and all available receptacles with fluoridated water before RFK Jr. floods my pipes with whale juice, and then drink any beers that may have evaded my attention, however improbably. […]
Stay safe out there. Take care of yourselves. Above all else, do not, under any circumstances, allow the bastards to grind you down.
The White House announced Saturday that the president and president-elect will meet in Washington next week.
President Joe Biden and President-elect Donald Trump will meet at the White House on Wednesday morning, officials announced on Saturday.
The two will meet in the Oval Office at 11 a.m. that day, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said in a statement. […]
At her concession speech at Howard University in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday, the vice president told supporters, “Earlier today, I spoke with President-elect Trump and congratulated him on his victory. I also told him that we will help him and his team with their transition and that we will engage in a peaceful transfer of power.”
In a phone call with NBC News on Thursday, Trump praised Harris for her commitment to a smooth transition between administrations, saying that in a phone call, Harris “talked about transition, and she said she’d like it to be smooth as can be, which I agree with, of course.”
[…] In a separate speech on Thursday, Biden echoed the same sentiment, telling reporters at the White House, “I will do my duty as president: I will fulfill my oath and I will honor the Constitution. On Jan. 20, we’ll have a peaceful transfer of power here in America.”
In 2020, following Trump’s loss to Biden, the previous Trump administration stonewalled the transition between administrations, spending weeks denying that Trump lost and fighting the Biden team’s efforts to begin transition work.
[…] Trump explicitly did not invite Biden to meet at the White House in 2020 […]
Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-FL) announced […] a convicted felon armed with rifle, a suppressor, and body armor was arrested near his Florida home Monday with a manifesto and apparent plans to harm him. The manifesto allegedly contained “antisemitic rhetoric” as well as a list of targets
A good-governance group is warning of severe consequences if President-elect Donald Trump continues to steer clear of formal transition planning with the Biden administration — inaction that it says is already limiting the federal government’s ability to provide security clearances and briefings to the incoming administration.
Without the planning, says Max Stier, president and CEO of the nonprofit Partnership for Public Service, “it would not be possible” to “be ready to govern on day one.”
Expect to see a lot of this in the near future. A lot of government officials are going to have to deal with this sort of situation. Where the laws, standards and regulations on how things are done are considered a problem by the new government. Some of these rules are new, trying to prevent some of the chaos of the previous Trump administration and some are long standing. The Trump officials are just going to ignore them or order them swept aside. Rules on who can get a security clearance? The Trump officials will issue them to anybody they want, no matter their history. Background checks? Hollowed out to signing a few forms. Ethics rules? The new president is a felon, that sets the bar on ethics.
There are some issues where I expect the law is strong enough to hold up. If only out of self interest Congress and the courts will try to keep Trump from stepping on their territory. The stuff that is just department regulation or tradition is going to get slashed though.
In the face of this some officials will resign, some will glumly put up with it and a few will side with Trump for their own advantage.
[…] Trump is already wanting to giftwrap Crimea for Putin. [X post at the link: “[…] “If Zelensky insists peace requires Crimea, he’s not serious… We have news for President Zelensky: Crimea is gone,” said Bryan Lanza.]
Russian TV, however, is showing nude photos of Melania.
Putin has apparently decided to show Trump who the boss is by humiliating him.
The hosts could barely keep from laughing. [X posts at the link]
[…] Another 1,660 Russians. [List of Russian personnel killed or wounded, plus list of Russian equipment destroyed is available at the link. It is estimated that in the first half of December the number of Russians killed in the war will reach the 3/4 million mark.]
[…]
🇺🇸 The Biden administration has lifted the ban on sending American contractors in Ukraine, allowing them to directly assist in servicing U.S.-provided weaponry, such as F-16s and Patriot systems.
Makes way more sense to service them in Ukraine instead of taking them out of the country to be serviced.
[…]
Panama cancels registration of four tankers from Russia’s shadow fleet
Flag cancellation procedures started after US sanctions targeted the LNG carriers’ Singapore-based operators over connections to Russian gas producer Novatek.
[That’s four tankers out of a much larger shadow fleet estimated to be more than 100 tankers.]
[…]
Ukraine finds US, German, Swiss parts in Russian new stealth drone Okhotnik despite sanctions
A rare Russian drone valued at $15 million met its end in Donetsk Oblast, revealing Moscow’s continued access to restricted Western technology. [image at the link]
Qatar, one of the chief negotiators of a potential cease-fire between Hamas and Israel, said it will suspend its mediation efforts, according to officials.
The move comes amid growing frustration over the lack of progress in the yearlong war in Gaza and fear around widening conflict in the region, The Associated Press reported. Though, the outlet added, it is unclear whether remaining Hamas leadership hosted by Qatar will be required to leave.
If both Israel and Hamas show “serious political willingness” to reach a deal, Qatar could return to the negotiating table, according to an official from Egypt — another mediator alongside the U.S. — per the AP.
Qatar explained to both sides of the aisle that it cannot continue negotiating if both sides refuse to seek a deal “in good faith,” the official said.
“As a consequence, the Hamas political office no longer serves its purpose” in Qatar, another diplomatic source familiar with the matter said, according to the news wire. The outlet added that the Hamas officials said they were aware of the withdrawal of Qatar, but not that they had to leave.
A U.S. official said the Biden administration had been in talks with Qatar about the Hamas office in Doha since the militant group rejected the last proposal for a cease-fire, informing them that the office was no longer useful. The official, AP reported, said the Hamas delegation was informed of the decision 10 days ago.
The news comes just weeks after Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar — the architect of the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel that sparked the war — was killed in a strike on Gaza late last month. It was unclear when, or if, cease-fire negotiations would continue after his death.
Previous talks fell apart as some officials blamed Sinwar’s stonewalling, but Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has also faced criticism for moving the goal posts on keeping his military forces in control of key territory in the Gaza Strip.
Netanyahu has also called for the return of more than 100 hostages still in Gaza before agreeing to a deal. More than 250 people were taken captive by the militant group at the onset of the war.
More than 44,000 Palestinians have been killed in the conflict — many of them women and children — according to local health officials […] that number does not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
Cities under fire alerts include New York City and Boston, where wind gusts up to 35 mph and relative humidity around 25% to 30% is expected.
Wind gusts and [low] humidity are helping to fuel wildfires burning across the Northeast. A whopping 27 million people from New York to Massachusetts are under fire alerts Saturday afternoon.
[…] Vegetation in the area also remains very dry, with this region of the country about 6 to 8 inches behind on rainfall since Sept. 1. A cold front is expected to pass through the region Sunday, bringing up to 1 inch of rain.
A brush fire in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park burned overnight Friday into Saturday after about 2 acres of dry vegetation ignited during heavy wind gusts, the New York City Fire Department said on X. Firefighters worked overnight to extinguish the fire.
[…] In Passaic County, New Jersey, the 100-acre Cannonball 3 Wildfire continues to burn with 0% containment, according to the New Jersey Forest Fire Service. Fifty-five structures are threatened by the fire, and its cause is under investigation.
[…] Northern New Jersey is under a red flag warning until 6 p.m., meaning the area is experiencing critical fire weather that “can contribute to extreme fire behavior,” according to the National Weather Service.
The active wildfires are increasing concerns around air quality, especially in the New York City area.
On the West Coast, the Mountain Fire continues to burn in Ventura County, California, and has spread across more than 20,600 acres, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire). The fire was 17% contained as of 7:25 a.m. PT and its cause is under investigation.
Sunny and dry conditions are expected in the area Saturday, with wind gusts up to 20 mph. Air quality alerts are in effect throughout Southern California due to wildfire smoke.
lumipunasays
birgerjohansson at 93:
Better a pig than a fascist
I grew up with Porco Rosso, but haven’t watched the film in many years, and generally I’m not much into film analysis. I mainly love Ghibli films for the aesthetics.
Anyway, some time before the US election I saw that famous quote again on social media. It occurred to me that since Porco/Marco makes his living as a bounty hunter, he’s basically a poorly regulated freelance cop. A complicated, flawed character – and still better than a fascist, to make the point. At least, if he’d still be doing essentially the same job while serving formally in Mussolini’s air force. Better a wild pig than a fascist pig. Perhaps not a perfect analogy for Harris vs. Trump, since Harris is very much part of a system, while Trump’s fascism is poorly disciplined and amateurish.
I have to wonder if Marco’s pig transformation is, in part, a deliberate allusion to the English characterization of cops as pigs. And how that relates to whatever connotations “pig” has in Japanese culture.
lumipunasays
Lynna at 103 and 110:
I suppose Trump having chats with world leaders is not considered a violation of the Logan Act now that he’s the incoming president (even if not formally confirmed by Congress yet).
However, I wonder if this license extends to his private supporters and possible future officials, such as Musk, who seems eager to insert himself in Trump’s future foreign policy.
Joshua Johnson will be the face of the resurrected “Onion News Network.” […] ONN effectively ended in 2013 […] under the ownership of private equity […] In January, [Ben Collins, a former disinformation reporter for NBC News] posted on social media that he was trying to recruit people to help him buy the Onion. What started as more or less a joke, though, eventually succeeded
Segments resumed Sep 30. Extra gags lurk in the chyrons. =)
“I think Trump is putting forward a clear and forceful vision of vengeful bloodshed. […] the ad is not entirely partisan. Don Jr. appears in there several times, and there are rumors JD Vance might show up in the next ad. […] But at the end of the day, is this just Trump being Trump, or is he actually planning on literally killing all these people? Maybe. Maybe he isn’t. I don’t know.”
“We’ll just have to wait and see. […] As someone who is featured prominently in the ad, I’ll be keeping a close eye on the story”
* Chyron: Critics argue new ad could alienate swing voters who do not want to die.
* Among the targets were the state of Maryland, a puppy, and Tom Hanks.
@128 JM
AP: Trump’s shunning of transition planning may have severe consequences, governance group says
Trump does not give a fuck about policy nor governance. The reasons he wants to be president are: to feed his narcissistic ego and to stay out of jail.
He farms out everything else.
Judicial appointments? He makes a deal with the Leonard Leo and the Federalist Society. It basically amounts to ‘help me get elected, and you I’ll appoint whatever judges you recommend.
Project 2025 was basically the same deal. The people behind the project would help get Trump elected, and he would give them free rein over policy. He claimed to know nothing about it, and that might possibly be true.
Someone moved the UK’s oldest satellite and there appears to be no record of exactly who, when or why.
Launched in 1969, just a few months after humans first set foot on the Moon, Skynet-1A was put high above Africa’s east coast to relay communications for British forces.
When the spacecraft ceased working a few years later, gravity might have been expected to pull it even further to the east, out over the Indian Ocean.
But today, curiously, Skynet-1A is actually half a planet away, in a position 22,369 miles (36,000km) above the Americas.
Orbital mechanics mean it’s unlikely the half-tonne military spacecraft simply drifted to its current location.
Almost certainly, it was commanded to fire its thrusters in the mid-1970s to take it westwards. The question is who that was and with what authority and purpose? …
The loon is the state bird of Minnesota, a black and white duck like creature with piercing red eyes.
It’s also the mascot of Minnesota United, whose owner Bill McGuire commissioned a giant steel sculpture of a loon, to sit outside the club’s new stadium in St Paul.
…
“You’re going to think this is a bit daft, but the only thing I knew about the loon back then was that it had been sampled on various dance tracks I used to listen to back in the Sub Club in Glasgow in the early 90s,” said Andy.
But after much research into the bird and its relevance to Minnesota, Andy came up with a design and asked Chris and Emily to build it, using the same shipbuilding techniques used on the Kelpies…
Trump does not give a fuck about policy nor governance. The reasons he wants to be president are: to feed his narcissistic ego and to stay out of jail.
He farms out everything else.
That is very true. The point is that there is an existing huge governmental organization that will have to deal with the Trump administration. In some cases Trump and his administration will be able to sweep away standards, more then you would expect are ultimately set by the president or by tradition. In others the will have trouble because they are set by the Constitution or law or the organization is simply too big to redirect with a handful of edicts from the top.
It’s going to get very messy and it isn’t clear how things will turn out.
Lynna at 103 and 110:
I suppose Trump having chats with world leaders is not considered a violation of the Logan Act now that he’s the incoming president (even if not formally confirmed by Congress yet).
However, I wonder if this license extends to his private supporters and possible future officials, such as Musk, who seems eager to insert himself in Trump’s future foreign policy.
I have seen a lot of dispute about this online.
In my opinion (IANAL), Trump is violating the Logan Act because he is conducting “unauthorized negotiations.”
Text from January 30, 1799:
Any citizen of the United States, wherever he may be, who, without authority of the United States, directly or indirectly commences or carries on any correspondence or intercourse with any foreign government or any officer or agent thereof, with intent to influence the measures or conduct of any foreign government or of any officer or agent thereof, in relation to any disputes or controversies with the United States, or to defeat the measures of the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.
Does Trump have “authority”? No, he does not. Not yet. He will have authority after the inauguration, when he is officially sworn in as president.
Trump’s discussions with Putin about Ukraine should qualify as violations of the Logan Act, in my opinion. Ditto for Trump’s discussions with Bibi Netanyahu about the conflict in Gaza.
As for Elon Musk, that guy should no where near even quasi-official discussions of foreign policy, nor the making of USA foreign policy. Not at this time anyway. If he ends up with an official cabinet post, that could change. Meanwhile Musk appears in the “Trump Family Election Photo.” https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-family-election-photo-features-elon-muskbut-not-melania/
[…] Elon Musk appears to have been absorbed into Donald Trump’s family fold. The billionaire was included in an election-night group photo—posted to Musk’s X by Don Jr.’s daughter Kai and captioned “the whole squad”—featuring all the Trumps except Melania. In the pic, Musk is sandwiched between Eric and Lara Trump, holding his son X-AE-A12 and sort of smiling. Unfortunately he has a lot to sort of smile about: For starters, the $119 million he spent on the Trump campaign proved to be a lucrative investment, the win accompanied by a $21 billion stock-fueled surge in Musk’s net worth. Trump has also floated the idea of offering Musk a cabinet position; something fake-sounding and as-yet nonexistent like “secretary of cost-cutting.” And now, it looks like he’s part of the family. […]
Bekenstein Boundsays
Reginald Selkirk@120:
NASA Remains Stubbornly Silent on Why Crew Went to Hospital After Dragon Splashdown
Oh, wonderful. So, on top of bird flu, that nasty orange rash, and the continuing saga of COVID, now we get to deal with the Andromeda Strain, too?!
birgerjohansson@122:
At 95, Noam Chomsky has lost the ability to speak or write.
Why?
Lynna@125:
Always been a lousy TV night, frankly, but I confess I found the season finale of American Democracy particularly dissatisfying.
he had “a massive stroke” in the U.S. last year. “He has difficulty speaking, and the right side of his body is numb,” […] visited daily by a neurologist, speech therapist, and pulmonologist. “His condition has improved significantly,” the paper added. “He left the ICU and is now in a regular room.”
birgerjohanssonsays
‘MAGA Panics McConnell Launches Senate “Coup” Against Trump’
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=ZasRucqgV0
.
Trump cannot get re-elected and some of his plans will be too impopular for his sycophants in the senate.
We have to rely on Mitch Fucking McConnell to stop Project 2025 ???
birgerjohanssonsays
It is now 30 years since TLC’s album “Crazysexycool” (with music like ‘Waterfall’) arrived. They influenced artists all over the world.
birgerjohanssonsays
Margaret Atwood is 85.
As she was born 1939, I realised those who were 15 at the start of WWII and just barely old enough to be soldiers at the end of the war will be 100 years old this year.
This means we will be losing those with living memory of fighting in WWII right about now.
lumipunasays
Lynna at 144 – Thanks for your opinion. Meanwhile,
In the pic, Musk is sandwiched between Eric and Lara Trump, holding his son X-AE-A12 and sort of smiling.
It’s been a few days since the election, and surrealism levels in US news are rapidly rising, evoking memories from the first Trump term. I knew from several years ago (since I’m extremely online) that Musk has a record of giving his children weirdo names that wouldn’t pass child protection scrutiny here in Finland. I had almost forgotten that – Musk regularly tries to provoke the media with something new, and I generally try to avoid paying attention to him (I’ve long had him blocked on Twitter).
This also caught my eye with its delightful absurdity (from Reginald Selkirk quoting The Telegraph at 79):
Mr Kennedy, a vaccine sceptic who has also been the subject of a series of bizarre stories involving animals,
Just the other day, I saw a tweet from a well-reputed US medial doctor named Ashley G. Winter, saying simply “Just because you have great pecs, doesn’t mean you understand public health policy”. I hate that I’m not even American but I still knew instantly who and what argument this was about. Seriously, people have argued that Kennedy is well suited for managing public health because he’s deeply interested in health issues (like many nutcases are) and takes care of his own health (has a steroid body that signals fitness to other misguided idiots).
@147. birgerjohansson : “Trump cannot get re-elected ..”
Under current rules?* Sure.
Will Trump change those rules to serve more terms or rule by proxy?
Franklin D. Roosevelt had 4 terms before the rule was in place.. Trump, well, does he play by the rules and accept limitations and has he talked about abolishing the US Constituition (the document not the old ship) before?
Yeah, I wouldn’t count on it. Even with his age and likely poor health.
.* Which, to be fair, I don’t think are the best given frex a third Obama term could have been comfortably won and a lot better than what we got post 2016 & the whole lame duck effect thing although can see both sides of this. Whole USA political system is rubbish anyhow given who it’s allowed to come into power and keep winning even when they don’t actually get a majority of the people wanting them. Allthat is by the bye tho’ as saying goes.
StevoRsays
^ Not that I’d put it past him to destroy the eponymous old sailing frigate either. After all, what use would Trump see in preserving maritime history and honouring the oldey timey “suckers and losers” who gave their lives to create the nation he parasitises.
Oh, better that her shattered hulk
Should sink beneath the wave;
Her thunders shook the mighty deep,
And there should be her grave;
Sure Trump wouldn’t mind seeing those verses come true.. Besides, did her cannons capture any airports in that war huh? Did they?!!1ty!!?
Albeit I’m sure he’d rather flog it off to some billionaire for cash and favours for his own gain if he could..
StevoRsays
British celebrity chef Jamie Oliver has apologised and withdrawn a children’s book he wrote after it was criticised for causing damaging and disrespectful offence to Indigenous Australians.
Lynna, OM says
For the convenience of readers, here is a link back to the previous set of 500 comments on The Infinite Thread.
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2024/10/04/infinite-thread-xxxiii/comment-page-3/#comment-2241925
Abortion rights measures
Lynna, OM says
I am going to do what I can to help other people in power mitigate the damage Trump will cause.
Cross posted from PZ’s I grieve for my country
Lynna, OM says
A lot of Trump cult followers do not realize that they voted for fascism.
Lynna, OM says
Steve Benen:
Link
Lynna, OM says
Link
Lynna, OM says
Link
Reginald Selkirk says
A new city springs from the rainforest to become Indonesia’s tech hub
birgerjohansson says
Membraneless organelles
“Tiny ‘Organs’ Hiding in Our Cells Could Challenge The Origins of Life : ScienceAlert”
.https://www.sciencealert.com/tiny-organs-hiding-in-our-cells-could-challenge-the-origins-of-life
KG says
Maybe not – but they had no excuse for not knowing: Trump has been making it abundantly clear throughout the campaign.
Lynna, OM says
Bits and pieces of news, as summarized by Steve Benen:
Lynna, OM says
Josh Marshall:
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/thoughts-on-the-day-after
More at the link.
Lynna, OM says
Link
Lynna, OM says
Good news: Democrat Angela Alsobrooks won her Maryland Senate race, defeating two-term GOP Gov. Larry Hogan. She becomes Maryland’s first Black Senator.
Democrat Josh Stein won the North Carolina governor’s race, defeating self-described “Black Nazi” Mark Robinson.
Democrat Eugene Vindman won the VA-07 House race, defeating Derrick Anderson.
Link
Lynna, OM says
https://www.wonkette.com/p/have-trump-and-elon-thanked-putin
Have Trump And Elon Thanked Putin For The Bomb Threats, Or Are They Totally Rude?
It appears Russia gave the winner at least one big Election Day reacharound.
Lynna, OM says
https://www.wonkette.com/p/rudy-giuliani-secreted-his-goodies
Lynna, OM says
Link
Lynna, OM says
Good news:
Link
Lynna, OM says
Excerpts from a longer New Yorker article by Susan B. Glasser:
Link
Lynna, OM says
Link
Akira MacKenzie says
@ 12
Empty words from an organization that has always defended the ability for fascists and bigots to spread their lies.
Akira MacKenzie says
@ 3
Bullshit! They’ve been chomping at the bit for a racist, Christian national thug who will round up the minorities and libs for extermination since the 70s. They know exactly what they were voting for!
Reginald Selkirk says
@12, 20
Furthermore, the ACLU is counting on the courts to maintain its positions. We have already seen how that works out when the criminal controls the courts.
Jean says
Anyone relying on institutions and norms to solve any of the chaos that the Trump administration will bring is just fooling themselves and being very naïve. The norms were already dismissed in the first mandate and the institutions that try to block anything will just be dismantled one way or another. It will even be legal thanks to SCOTUS.
The only thing that will stop them is incompetence and lack of imagination. And possibly some internal squabble.
Reginald Selkirk says
Once an Atheist Hero, Elon Musk Now Says He Believes in the Teachings of Christ
Note the distinction between believing in the teachings of Christ, as opposed to the existence and divinity of Christ.
I do not see that in Musk’s actions, past or present.
CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says
HJ Hornbeck – Resist Gradualism
birgerjohansson says
Ancient unicellular organism indicates embryonic development might have existed prior to animals’ evolution’.https://phys.org/news/2024-11-ancient-unicellular-embryonic-prior-animals.html
mordred says
Heh, just found a discussion on a hifi forum about if it’s a good idea to buy new gear before Trumps promised tariffs drive the prices up or if it’s better to be careful with your spending right now. The OP admitted that it wasn’t the most pressing problem he could think of, but it was the one on topic for the forum.
The following discussion was pleasantly MAGA free, with several people insisting they did not vote for the disaster to come and others cracking dark jokes about audio quality of gulag speakers blasting propaganda and practically everybody agreeing this was not the worst thing to come by far.
It’s nice for me to experience people not being OK with the repufascists outside of spaces like this.
Bekenstein Bound says
Lynna@11:
Oh, dear God no.
…
Why isn’t pinching myself waking me up?
Wait, what? This isn’t a fucking dream? But surely it must be?
…
Ah hell. That’s it. Bring on the meteor. At least then we go out still clinging to a few surviving scraps of sanity. And there’s no risk of reality TV infecting the rest of the galaxy, unless some idiot already broadcast some through a high-output site like Arecibo.
@14:
Israel.
Obviously.
birgerjohansson says
Pod Save Us
“Jimmy Kimmel Reacts to Donald Trump Winning the Presidential Election”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=5JxELubSgJg
birgerjohansson says
Double standard
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/fresh-2
Akira MacKenzie says
@ 24
Well, the Zillenials have declared atheism “cringe” because we’re just so mean. I’m sure Elon will be watching astrology TikTok’s and joining a Wiccan coven like all the cool kids do these days.
Filthy fucking savages.
Lynna, OM says
birger @29, the number of people who thought that November 6 was election day, and who claimed they were going to vote (on Wednesday!), was astounding.
I think we may be underestimating the groundswell of willful ignorance in the USA. Unbelievable.
Lynna, OM says
As Donald Trump prepares to reclaim power, some of his allies are moving the right-wing Project 2025 agenda back into the spotlight.
Lynna, OM says
Link
Lynna, OM says
Washington Post:
Lynna, OM says
Huffington Post:
Lynna, OM says
Politico:
Lynna, OM says
JFC.
Link
Related: We have just witnessed the greatest failure of federal law enforcement in American history.
In my opinion, that article places too much blame on Biden. I do think that some blame should fall on Biden and on Merrick Garland, but I also see a good case for blaming Republicans for often bailing Trump out, for blaming the conservatives on the Supreme Court, and for blaming Trump himself (and his lawyers.) How about Aileen Cannon? We can place some blame on her.
True.
Lynna, OM says
Kamala Harris’ concession speech: YouTube link
birgerjohansson says
Facebook: If the latest US election was held in Europe
https://www.facebook.com/share/14Njfq3YrF/
Lynna, OM says
Cartoon: We interrupt this Tom the Dancing Bug comic for a message from a living nightmare
Lynna, OM says
Gavin Newsom:
Lynna, OM says
Largest French newspaper on Trump win: ‘End of an American world’
Lynna, OM says
Ohio Republicans’ Plan To Ratf*ck Gerrymander Reform Works Perfectly
Turns out all you have to do is lie!
Lynna, OM says
Evangelical leaders celebrate Trump’s victory as a prophecy fulfilled
Some evangelical Christians see Donald Trump’s win as ordained by God, offering “a divine mandate” in his second term.
Well, that was predictable. I’m not even going to bother to post the rest of the “Wallnau and other evangelicals championed him as a flawed leader who had been anointed by God to save America from the demonic influence of Democrats” details.
Akira MacKenzie says
@ 42
TL;DR Newsom: “Fascists are taking over, but we’ll spread our checks and let Trump fuck us lest he withhold disaster aid during wildfire season.”
Reginald Selkirk says
Space Travel Damages Astronauts At The Cellular Level
birgerjohansson says
Stephen Colbert
“You Are Not Alone / The World Reacts To America’s Decision”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=Xbj3xXSPTXY
I am the Swedish Chef, blowing up.
Lynna, OM says
Reginald @47:
I did not know that. interesting.
In other news: In defeat, Democratic leaders show how democracy is supposed to work
Lynna, OM says
Followup to comment 38.
Why Lindsey Graham’s message on special counsel Jack Smith matters
Lynna, OM says
Link
Lynna, OM says
Followup to comment 15.
Link
Lynna, OM says
Followup to comments 42 and 46.
Link
Lynna, OM says
Followup to comments 15 and 52.
https://www.wonkette.com/p/rudy-giuliani-in-court-for-coupe
Lynna, OM says
https://www.wonkette.com/p/steve-bannon-gonna-do-rough-roman
Steve Bannon Gonna Do ‘Rough Roman Justice’ To Everybody […]
whheydt says
Re: Lynna, OM @ #55…
Traditionally, there are three types of people who get to use “we” when referring to themselves. Those are royalty, editors and tapeworms. Bannon sure isn’t royalty. He might be considered to be an editor. Has he had a good medical exam to rule out having a tapeworm?
whheydt says
As regards California… I think one of the first things that the state should do is to arrange with a pharmaceutical company (or start a new one) to manufacture the standard abortion inducing drugs in state. That way, they can be delivered in California where needed without ever entering interstate commerce…or even the USPS.
birgerjohansson says
The TEC Show
“Exit Poll Shows HOW Trump Won 2024 Election”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=mGzbCe5XdjI
Reginald Selkirk says
@49 Lynna, OM
Preparing for future missions to the Moon and Mars
The original article I linked previously is a bit muddled. The protection provided by the Earth’s magnetic fields is associated with the higher radiation levels in outer space; they are really the same issue. The International Space Station, which orbits at about 400 km altitude, is not high enough to be outside the protective magnetic fields. The only time Earthly astronauts have gone outside the protective magnetic fields is the Apollo missions.
Reginald Selkirk says
Toronto crypto company CEO kidnapped, held for $1M ransom before being released
Reginald Selkirk says
Republican David McCormick flips pivotal Pennsylvania Senate seat, ousts Bob Casey
fuck
Reginald Selkirk says
Want To Leave The U.S.? Countries Welcoming Americans With Open Arms
Reginald Selkirk says
@15, 52, 54
Judge scolds Giuliani for not turning over assets to two women, including car he’s driving
‘Scolds’? Fuck that shit. He should be jailed for contempt.
Reginald Selkirk says
Major Hurricane: Rafael upgraded to Category 3 with large shift in projected path
Reginald Selkirk says
Opinion: Five Reasons Why Trump’s Win Isn’t the End of the World
Except for the people who didn’t. Like all those who died from COVID. And while I personally did survive, I noticed some things during that time. Such as: Trump hires people who are incompetent, then he throws them under the bus. And every time a Trump acolyte gets fired, they get replaced with someone even worse. This time we are starting at rock bottom, but they will find a way to burrow lower.
Only because the people who woud do such a thing are the people who won. I don’t see how that’s a good omen.
While Trump did not start any new wars during his first term, I am not convinced that the policies he implements will lead to long term stability. For example, Ukraine is probably fucked. It’s bad for them. But does that in any way contribute to long term stability in Europe? Ask the same questions about Taiwan and East Asia.
(roll-eyes)
In which they fail to provide any evidence for their belief that the economy will be better under Trump than otherwise. Unless of course, you are a billionaire. I expect them to do especially well. We are going to have to adjust to a new term, trillionaire.
Reginald Selkirk says
5 Democrats who could run for president in 2028
Too soon.
Bekenstein Bound says
Opinion: Two Reasons Why The Above Is Fucking Moot:
1. Climate change
2. World War III, once Russia realizes it can now attack western Europe with impunity
birgerjohansson says
“Scathing Atheist 612 Recrudescent Edition”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=CtPg7put6cQ
I agree with the Diatribe. Hate won the election. Let’s hate everything the Republicans stand for. Keep the anger alive. No more “When they go liw we go high”.
birgerjohansson says
“Scathing Atheist 612 Diatribe”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=hOy2HHcvy_A
What we are as a country
StevoR says
Source : https://www.livescience.com/space/astronomy/ridiculously-smooth-james-webb-telescope-spies-unusual-pancake-like-disk-around-nearby-star-vega-and-scientists-cant-explain-it
A big and unexpected contrast to Fomalhaut which has the “Sauron’s eye” proplyd & likely exoplanets.
Akira MacKenzie says
@ 69
That speech has to be shared nation-wide.
Lynna, OM says
Police hunt 43 monkeys that escaped from a South Carolina research facility
Anyone who finds a monkey should not interact with it but instead call 911, authorities said.
Lynna, OM says
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/your-reactions-14
Lynna, OM says
https://www.wonkette.com/p/what-you-should-know-about-climate
What You Should Know About Climate Change Under Trump!
He can’t undo everything!
Lynna, OM says
The MAGA propaganda machine helped carry Trump back to the White House — and it’s not done poisoning America
Lynna, OM says
On Deadline: White House, Angelo Carusone explains how “a large right-wing misinformation engine” has distorted people’s perception of reality
Excerpt:
Video and complete transcript are available at the link.
Lynna, OM says
Good news: From education to abortion rights, minimum wage to family leave, progressive policy measures fared quite well in 2024, even amid Republican victories.
True.
The article is topped by a video featuring Chris Hayes. His analysis is good, and it restores a broader perspective. That video is about nine minutes long. The “Global Anti-Incumbency Movement” chart is enlightening.
Reginald Selkirk says
The Vatican Launched an Anime Mascot and Web Users Wasted No Time in Porn-ifying It
Reginald Selkirk says
Trump campaign quietly distances itself from RFK Jr after new vaccine safety comments
* Ha ha ha. Who appoints the people who hire the people who do security checks? Norms and institutions will not save us.
CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says
Similar to crisis hotlines, ‘warm lines’ offer non-emergency mental health support: to prevent crises. Anonymous, free, run by trained ‘peers’ with personal experience of trauma, recovery, and hope. Providing an empathetic ear, deescalation, coping strategies, resources. Orgs vary, most limit to 20 mins, and rarely 3-way-in crisis orgs much less 911—if ever. Lower stakes = less 1st-timer worry. Most calls are about isolation.
2021 National Warmline Survey (characterizing lines in the US)
Inclusive Therapists’ crisis resources lists a few warm lines. There are many more regional ones out there: existing in most US states and a number of other countries.
mordred says
Huh, it seems DNA analysis on some human remains from Pompeii shows that the traditional interpretation of gender and family relationships were often quite wrong:
https://www.cell.com/current-biology/abstract/S0960-9822(24)01361-7
Sorry the only non paywalled thing I found is this German language article:
https://www.spektrum.de/news/pompeji-dna-schreibt-familiengeschichten-der-opfer-neu/2241830
Reginald Selkirk says
@81 mordred
Here’s an article about that at Gizmodo
DNA From Pompeii Victims Reveals Surprising Relationships Amidst the Chaos
Reginald Selkirk says
Philosopher Michael Ruse dies
Reginald Selkirk says
Elon Musk’s Daughter: Trump Win ‘Confirmed’ I’m Leaving USA
Lynna, OM says
The closer one looks to Donald Trump’s claim to “an unprecedented and powerful mandate,” the worse the president-elect’s argument appears.
Lynna, OM says
Justice Department brings criminal charges in Iranian murder-for-hire plan targeting Donald Trump
Lynna, OM says
Link
birgerjohansson says
China sets up ‘Birth Encourgagement’ offices”:
.
“China’s Youth Face Hardship! Not Having Children Is Seen as a Crime, Even Punishable By Fines”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=HoSJb-qiAYY
I have not been able to check this on any deeper level, but it seems dumb enough and heavy-handed enough to be a real policy.
Lynna, OM says
Israeli soccer fans were attacked in Amsterdam. The violence was condemned as antisemitic
Lynna, OM says
Followup to comment 14.
Election Day bomb threats overwhelmingly targeted Democrat-leaning counties
Lynna, OM says
From Wonkette: These Little Nazi [B-word, plural] Are Trying To Terrorize Our Daughters And Children.
‘Your body, my choice’ is the newest rallying cry. [Image of red hat bearing that slogan]
Lynna, OM says
https://www.wonkette.com/p/nyts-bret-stephens-perfectly-explains
birgerjohansson says
Facebook. Porco Rossi, 1992.
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/15CoeivGtc/
Better a pig than a fascist
birgerjohansson says
A Turkish proverb about Trump
.http://youtube.com/post/UgkxzhVrVgYra7SaQMvrEWbahdvigUcX__bd
birgerjohansson says
A question for physicists and generally well-educated nerds.
.
Is there anything even remotely feasible in this article or is it more superconducting BS?
“Designing multicomponent hydrides with potential high Tc superconductivity” by Adam Denchfield, Hyowon Park and Russell J. Hemley, 1 November 2024, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2413096121
birgerjohansson says
Clarification. No, I did not mean the BS was superconducting.
Reginald Selkirk says
FBI Says Hackers Are Sending Fraudulent Police Data Requests To Tech Giants To Steal People’s Private Information
birgerjohansson says
Gisèle Pelicot rape trial |
‘Was I drugged and raped? I’ll never know’: partners of accused share fears at Pelicot trial | The Guardian
.https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/nov/08/women-give-evidence-rape-trial-of-dominique-pelicot-continues
birgerjohansson says
Patience. The Simpsons have not been wrong yet.
.https://www.facebook.com/share/p/14o4dVTGvv/
Reginald Selkirk says
Russia jails soldiers who killed entire family in Ukraine
Reginald Selkirk says
Transparent worm reproduces by injecting sperm into its own head
Lynna, OM says
NBC News:
Lynna, OM says
Associated Press:
Lynna, OM says
NBC News:
Lynna, OM says
New York Times:
Lynna, OM says
Fox News hosts suggest ‘death penalty’ for Trump legal foes
Lynna, OM says
Link
Lynna, OM says
Link
Lynna, OM says
https://www.wonkette.com/p/dorothy-allison-working-class-feminist
Dorothy Allison, Working Class Feminist, Author And Absolute Badass, Dies At 75
Excerpt:
Lynna, OM says
Uh … not good. “Musk joins Trump in call with Zelensky”
Link
Lynna, OM says
These are excerpts from a 2017 article, and yet it still applies today!
Private prison stocks up 100% since Trump’s win
The text below is from a Fortune article posted yesterday.
birgerjohansson says
Paleolithic ocher mine in south africa is 48000 years old – the site was identified by the ‘fingerprint’ of the substance used at paleolithic sites. But the oldest documented use of ocher is by homo erectus, 285 000 years ago.
birgerjohansson says
A tiny smidgeon of good news found at Facebook
“What is happening to Trump’s civil cases he’s on the hook for?”
.https://youtube.com/shorts/xLUV6XjpXsg
Pierce R. Butler says
Lynna, OM, quoting Steve Benen @ # 85: [Trump] won, fair and square…
Surely a line we’ll hear for years from wimp liberals. I wish I could force Benen and his damn ilk to go state by state, starting with Florida and Georgia, and count the total of voters finagled off the rolls by Republican bureaucrats over the last, say, 10 years, and to do some surveys and calculations as to how the elections over that decade might have turned out if those citizens had not had their democratic rights stolen through sleazy manipulations.
Trump may have done something fair/square in his life, but winning this year’s election wasn’t it.
Bekenstein Bound says
Indeed he did: he lost fair and square in 2020.
As for 2024, I call shenanigans. In the past two (post-Dobbs) years special election after special election has delivered a sharp rebuke to any MAGA candidate running. More recently we heard of massive, unusual early voting turnout that skewed female.
Did all of that just evaporate on the morning of Nov. 5 by magic?
How many votes ended up not being cast because of the Russian bomb threats? Or last minute illegal voter roll purges that were allowed through by Trump-appointed judges? Or assorted threats and intimidation by “election security” brownshirts menacing people near polling stations in heavily D-leaning areas?
KG says
Pierce R. Butler@114, Bekenstein Bound@115,
No doubt such shenanigans made some difference, but leading Democrats are not contesting the result. If enough Americans (particularly young Americans – I’ve seen a turnout figure of 42%) had turned out to defeat fascism, Trump would have lost. Best to face the facts: a majority of Americans either want fascism, or couldn’t be bothered to vote against it.
lumipuna says
Hello again. I have some comments to post, after having been rudely distracted by a workweek in the midst of watching US election fallout.
lumipuna says
Reginald Selkirk at 49 and 59:
If I understand correctly, particle radiation levels are even higher in some regions well within Earth’s magnetic field (the Van Allen belts), because particles from solar wind and cosmic radiation trapped into swirling around the planet. The actual flow of particles toward Earth’s atmosphere is much reduced by magnetic deflection, but the trapped particles accumulate and move around horizontally within the Van Allen belts. The atmosphere stops almost all downward moving particles before they reach Earth’s surface, but the magnetic field is important in reducing the particle flux entering atmosphere, which helps reduce surface radiation levels and the solar wind erosion of Earth’s atmosphere.
The ISS is largely protected, because it orbits within the thin upper reaches of atmosphere, and in lower latitudes where the strong magnetic field generally blocks downward particle flux most efficiently, directing it into polar regions (where the entry of particles into atmosphere creates the auroras). At slightly higher altitudes, radiation levels would increase very rapidly, because the Van Allen belts are concentrated in these very areas, where the magnetic field is strong. There’s still enough radiation at the ISS altitude that it’s potentially harmful to astronauts in the long term.
(please correct me if I’m wrong – I’ve struggled to understand this stuff in simple terms)
birgerjohansson says
Sweet schadenfreude.
Farron Cousins:
“Trump Loses BILLIONS As Stock Crashes Following Election?”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=J2hFDFxysZo
Reginald Selkirk says
NASA Remains Stubbornly Silent on Why Crew Went to Hospital After Dragon Splashdown
Reginald Selkirk says
This May Be The Most Hilarious Catalytic Converter Theft Of All Time
birgerjohansson says
At 95, Noam Chomsky has lost the ability to speak or write.
😞
Lynna, OM says
Followup to comments 114, 115 and 116.
It is not shenanigans exactly, but it is there that the “asymmetrical information ecosystem” affected the election.
Here are some comments from Kate Riga on that subject:
Link
See also comments 73 and 91.
I would also advise Democrats to take a closer look at Sinclair, which now reaches 10 million households in the USA, and which is often aired on trusted local news stations.
TV giant known for rightwing disinformation doubles down on its national news agenda. That’s from The Guardian.
“Media analysts say Sinclair, known for anchors reciting script in lockstep, promotes conservative talking points”
Lynna, OM says
Correction to comment 123: “it is there” should be “it is true.”
Lynna, OM says
Link
Lynna, OM says
The White House announced Saturday that the president and president-elect will meet in Washington next week.
Link
CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says
House Democrat targeted in apparent assassination plot
JM says
AP: Trump’s shunning of transition planning may have severe consequences, governance group says
Expect to see a lot of this in the near future. A lot of government officials are going to have to deal with this sort of situation. Where the laws, standards and regulations on how things are done are considered a problem by the new government. Some of these rules are new, trying to prevent some of the chaos of the previous Trump administration and some are long standing. The Trump officials are just going to ignore them or order them swept aside. Rules on who can get a security clearance? The Trump officials will issue them to anybody they want, no matter their history. Background checks? Hollowed out to signing a few forms. Ethics rules? The new president is a felon, that sets the bar on ethics.
There are some issues where I expect the law is strong enough to hold up. If only out of self interest Congress and the courts will try to keep Trump from stepping on their territory. The stuff that is just department regulation or tradition is going to get slashed though.
In the face of this some officials will resign, some will glumly put up with it and a few will side with Trump for their own advantage.
Lynna, OM says
Cartoon: Surprise …
Lynna, OM says
Link
Lynna, OM says
Qatar suspends mediation efforts amid stalled Israel-Hamas cease-fire talks
Lynna, OM says
Wildfires rage across the Northeast as 27 million people remain under fire alerts
Cities under fire alerts include New York City and Boston, where wind gusts up to 35 mph and relative humidity around 25% to 30% is expected.
lumipuna says
birgerjohansson at 93:
I grew up with Porco Rosso, but haven’t watched the film in many years, and generally I’m not much into film analysis. I mainly love Ghibli films for the aesthetics.
Anyway, some time before the US election I saw that famous quote again on social media. It occurred to me that since Porco/Marco makes his living as a bounty hunter, he’s basically a poorly regulated freelance cop. A complicated, flawed character – and still better than a fascist, to make the point. At least, if he’d still be doing essentially the same job while serving formally in Mussolini’s air force. Better a wild pig than a fascist pig. Perhaps not a perfect analogy for Harris vs. Trump, since Harris is very much part of a system, while Trump’s fascism is poorly disciplined and amateurish.
I have to wonder if Marco’s pig transformation is, in part, a deliberate allusion to the English characterization of cops as pigs. And how that relates to whatever connotations “pig” has in Japanese culture.
lumipuna says
Lynna at 103 and 110:
I suppose Trump having chats with world leaders is not considered a violation of the Logan Act now that he’s the incoming president (even if not formally confirmed by Congress yet).
However, I wonder if this license extends to his private supporters and possible future officials, such as Musk, who seems eager to insert himself in Trump’s future foreign policy.
CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says
The Onion is pivoting to video—no joke—with a former MSNBC anchor
Segments resumed Sep 30. Extra gags lurk in the chyrons. =)
Voters warned ballots flushed down toilet will no longer be counted (1:39)
Neo-Nazi pulls off surprise victory in long-held KKK district (2:30)
New Trump ad shows montage of people he’ll kill if elected (2:35)
* Chyron: Critics argue new ad could alienate swing voters who do not want to die.
* Among the targets were the state of Maryland, a puppy, and Tom Hanks.
birgerjohansson says
Frieren: The Anime That Dares To Be Sad
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=xI9DKYVQgXc
Reginald Selkirk says
Trump does not give a fuck about policy nor governance. The reasons he wants to be president are: to feed his narcissistic ego and to stay out of jail.
He farms out everything else.
Judicial appointments? He makes a deal with the Leonard Leo and the Federalist Society. It basically amounts to ‘help me get elected, and you I’ll appoint whatever judges you recommend.
Project 2025 was basically the same deal. The people behind the project would help get Trump elected, and he would give them free rein over policy. He claimed to know nothing about it, and that might possibly be true.
Reginald Selkirk says
Somebody moved UK’s oldest satellite, and no-one knows who or why
Reginald Selkirk says
Kelpies artist brings new sculpture to Minnesota
Reginald Selkirk says
Heavy snow falls on Las Vegas during November snowstorm
JM says
@137 Reginald Selkirk:
That is very true. The point is that there is an existing huge governmental organization that will have to deal with the Trump administration. In some cases Trump and his administration will be able to sweep away standards, more then you would expect are ultimately set by the president or by tradition. In others the will have trouble because they are set by the Constitution or law or the organization is simply too big to redirect with a handful of edicts from the top.
It’s going to get very messy and it isn’t clear how things will turn out.
birgerjohansson says
Youtube: After I heard him say ‘your body, my choice’
http://youtube.com/post/Ugkx12AHw3QHdSlePRI25VsmTVp4sLhDmg4X
Also
http://youtube.com/post/Ugkx-CYI8D4mSBro9QhFNA4zTegHB2NDDvDI
Reginald Selkirk says
Spoiler alert: It’s going to turn out badly. It’s just a question of how badly.
Lynna, OM says
lumipuna @134:
I have seen a lot of dispute about this online.
In my opinion (IANAL), Trump is violating the Logan Act because he is conducting “unauthorized negotiations.”
Text from January 30, 1799:
Does Trump have “authority”? No, he does not. Not yet. He will have authority after the inauguration, when he is officially sworn in as president.
Trump’s discussions with Putin about Ukraine should qualify as violations of the Logan Act, in my opinion. Ditto for Trump’s discussions with Bibi Netanyahu about the conflict in Gaza.
As for Elon Musk, that guy should no where near even quasi-official discussions of foreign policy, nor the making of USA foreign policy. Not at this time anyway. If he ends up with an official cabinet post, that could change. Meanwhile Musk appears in the “Trump Family Election Photo.”
https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-family-election-photo-features-elon-muskbut-not-melania/
Bekenstein Bound says
Reginald Selkirk@120:
Oh, wonderful. So, on top of bird flu, that nasty orange rash, and the continuing saga of COVID, now we get to deal with the Andromeda Strain, too?!
birgerjohansson@122:
Why?
Lynna@125:
ITYM series finale.
CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says
Re: Bekenstein Bound @145:
Noam Chomsky is recovering in Brazil (2024-06-12)
birgerjohansson says
‘MAGA Panics McConnell Launches Senate “Coup” Against Trump’
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=ZasRucqgV0
.
Trump cannot get re-elected and some of his plans will be too impopular for his sycophants in the senate.
We have to rely on Mitch Fucking McConnell to stop Project 2025 ???
birgerjohansson says
It is now 30 years since TLC’s album “Crazysexycool” (with music like ‘Waterfall’) arrived. They influenced artists all over the world.
birgerjohansson says
Margaret Atwood is 85.
As she was born 1939, I realised those who were 15 at the start of WWII and just barely old enough to be soldiers at the end of the war will be 100 years old this year.
This means we will be losing those with living memory of fighting in WWII right about now.
lumipuna says
Lynna at 144 – Thanks for your opinion. Meanwhile,
It’s been a few days since the election, and surrealism levels in US news are rapidly rising, evoking memories from the first Trump term. I knew from several years ago (since I’m extremely online) that Musk has a record of giving his children weirdo names that wouldn’t pass child protection scrutiny here in Finland. I had almost forgotten that – Musk regularly tries to provoke the media with something new, and I generally try to avoid paying attention to him (I’ve long had him blocked on Twitter).
This also caught my eye with its delightful absurdity (from Reginald Selkirk quoting The Telegraph at 79):
Just the other day, I saw a tweet from a well-reputed US medial doctor named Ashley G. Winter, saying simply “Just because you have great pecs, doesn’t mean you understand public health policy”. I hate that I’m not even American but I still knew instantly who and what argument this was about. Seriously, people have argued that Kennedy is well suited for managing public health because he’s deeply interested in health issues (like many nutcases are) and takes care of his own health (has a steroid body that signals fitness to other misguided idiots).
StevoR says
newslaundry
YT channel – Interview with Mehdi Hasan and Sreenivasan Jain on Trump’s threats to the press, why he founded Zeteo news – and an awful lot more 36 minutes and pre-election but some intresting points made & discussed re media, Trump, more.
StevoR says
Seems maybe this would work after all :
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-11-05/world-first-wooden-satellite-developed-in-japan-heads-to-space/104564076
About to find out!
StevoR says
@147. birgerjohansson : “Trump cannot get re-elected ..”
Under current rules?* Sure.
Will Trump change those rules to serve more terms or rule by proxy?
Franklin D. Roosevelt had 4 terms before the rule was in place.. Trump, well, does he play by the rules and accept limitations and has he talked about abolishing the US Constituition (the document not the old ship) before?
Yeah, I wouldn’t count on it. Even with his age and likely poor health.
.* Which, to be fair, I don’t think are the best given frex a third Obama term could have been comfortably won and a lot better than what we got post 2016 & the whole lame duck effect thing although can see both sides of this. Whole USA political system is rubbish anyhow given who it’s allowed to come into power and keep winning even when they don’t actually get a majority of the people wanting them. Allthat is by the bye tho’ as saying goes.
StevoR says
^ Not that I’d put it past him to destroy the eponymous old sailing frigate either. After all, what use would Trump see in preserving maritime history and honouring the oldey timey “suckers and losers” who gave their lives to create the nation he parasitises.
Source : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Ironsides_(poem)
Sure Trump wouldn’t mind seeing those verses come true.. Besides, did her cannons capture any airports in that war huh? Did they?!!1ty!!?
Albeit I’m sure he’d rather flog it off to some billionaire for cash and favours for his own gain if he could..
StevoR says
Source : https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-11-10/jamie-oliver-pulls-kids-book-causing-offence-to-indigenous-aus/104583066
More respect to him from me for doing the right thing once called out.