#GOP smokescreen

[jjbster]

[brobotsbro]

Thinking again about GOP (ghost OP). Like omg the potential for character development in not only Smokescreen but also OP himself if Optimus HAD fucking died and Smokescreen got the matrix. Like Smokescreen getting the matrix and becoming a Prime is a whole interesting avenue of it's own but as you know I am fucking obsessed with OP so he's gotta be there.

But like omg. Like idk I just think the idea of Smokescreen being thrust into Primehood unexpectedly and in the middle of the war would really evoke Oh Shit It Me emotions in OP and I just feel there's sooooo much potential in ghost! OP trying to like navigate Smokescreen through the shit ala undead shoulder angel. And I feel that'd really give Smokescreen an intimate look into the man behind the magic tit jewelry so to speak. The Real Optimus, as opposed to Calm and Collected leader.

Especially since, you know, Optimus is also trying to cope on his own with the Whole Being Dead Thing+ not having the matrix doing it's thing in him anymore (vis a vis my other hc about the Matrix being kind of like. A competency amplifier). Also Ratchet being a massive drama king about his death and shit. I feel he'd be like, mixed angst and frustration about that shit.

Plus the comedy potential of Noone Believes Optimus is There As A Ghost. And also my ideal concept in which ghost OP keeps sneaking off during Smokescreens off moments to make Megatron's life hell, bc for maybe dark energon, but mostly bc I say so reasons, Megatron can see him and he's haunting the everloving shit out of him. Pulling out all the horror movie stops. Especially since I like to imagine that ghost OP should look like he did prewar as like a manifestation of self image and soul and shit and anyway that just makes the haunting juicier. Also Smokescreen slowly coming to realize that Megatron and Optimus were A Thing and being HORRIFIED LMAO. Comedy and angst and character arc potential all in one.

God I WISH I could write, but I lack the ability to actually plot out PLOT. my brain decided concepts ONLY. maybe scattered scenes if you're good. Maybe I'll try anyway someday but idk lmao. For now I'll just scream into the wind

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Mark Sumner at Daily Kos:

From the moment Vice President Kamala Harris became the Democratic Party’s nominee for president, Donald Trump has been engaged in an effort to “other” her, or portray her as somehow not a real American. That campaign consists of Trump attacking Harris’ racial identity, demeaning her intelligence, and calling her a “communist.” As The Washington Post reports, Trump has also questioned where Harris “came from,” then tied this question to false claims that her Jamaican father is a “Marxist.”  All of this is a reminder that Trump entered Republican politics by lying about former President Barack Obama’s citizenship. Then he rode into office in 2016 on a wave of racism and xenophobia. Then he spent his time in office telling American congresswomen of color to “go back” to where they came from.  Trump won by ditching the GOP’s usual racist dog whistle for a bullhorn, but Republicans are now dutifully lining up to express their concern about Trump being a “showman.” They've taken to Fox News’ airwaves to plead for Trump to “stick to the issues” and to stop whining about crowd sizes and belittling Harris’ intellect.  But here’s the thing about all of these Republicans: They’re lying. None of them expect—or even want—Trump to do anything but pick up that bullhorn and yell louder.

Republicans know that Trump isn’t capable of holding even the simplest conversation about policy. His recent “economic speech” rapidly disintegrated into shaking boxes of Tic Tacs and hating on windmills. That’s the best he can do, even with days to prepare and a teleprompter on his side. But it’s more than that, because the GOP’s actual positions are horrific. There’s a reason no one wants to be connected to Project 2025 or a Republican Party platform that calls for mass deportation, destroying the Department of Education, and another huge tax break for billionaires. These are not ideas that Republicans want Americans to think about too deeply.  The whole “I wish Trump would talk about the issues” message is a smokescreen.  Trump made his way to the top of the Republican slag pile by being the most vocal advocate of racism, xenophobia, and gender politics. And after eight years of Trumpism, all that’s left of the Republican Party is the policies that are based on these hatreds.

Donald Trump knows nothing other than gratuitous insults against Kamala Harris.

[frostyreturns]

There needs to be more of a culture in Christianity of openly denouncing false prophets by name. Some of these people have millions of followers but all I ever see are polite criticisms of a general type of false prophet without any names.

We need Christian leaders who will go into these liars "ministries" and start flipping tables because they are misleading and destroying the faith of millions. People are so worried about denouncing false prophets just in case they are really from God...but for every Jeremiah there are 20 liars telling you the opposite.

I keep trying to find other people renouncing scumbag liars like Julie Green, who uses surface level conspiracy knowledge to claim God is showing her things happening behind the scenes, when all she's doing is watching alt news. She figured out conspiracists knew something other people in the mainstream don't know or talk about so she reports stuff like what people like me talk about to boomers and pretends God is giving his prophetic insight. Or she'll make prophecies so vague and impossible to be wrong that it makes a horoscope look cutting and specific.

Her other smokescreen is that she's hardcore in the tank for the GOP so most criticisms leveled at her are political and attack her for her right wing views...so then all legitimate criticism gets dismissed by her followers as democrat propaganda.

This woman predicted that 5 different politicians would die in 2022 and all of them are still alive, she keeps predicting the complete downfall of the deep state she's made prediction after prediction that never come true which is amazing considering how vague most of her predictions are. I don't even believe she's even a Christian nevermind a prophet, she seems to be applying a qanon type of psy op against Christians, although instead of telling them to sit back and do nothing because Trump is going to come in and fix everything they say God is going to swoop in and fix everything...and also Trump will too. Oh yeah she predicted Trump would be president in 2020 and even today her followers are waiting for Biden to be removed and Trump installed.

Then these prophets all copy each others predictions and pretend like they don't listen to each other, so people take hearing it multiple times as confirmation.

The Bible says that anyone who claims to speak for God but does not deserves to die. That's how serious we should be taking these people and there are a lot of them and some of them have massive followings. This would not be the case if more leaders grew a spine and showed some righteous anger and openly denounced these vile false prophets.

Honestly at this point I would advise people to not listen to any preacher who's on tv or the radio I think they're all full of shit. If they weren't liars and they were actually preaching the word of God they wouldn't be allowed to have the platforms they do.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

So much has occurred since Trump’s first impeachment in December 2019 that it is easy to forget the nation’s turmoil at that time. A president had done the unthinkable: he bullied and cajoled an ally to fabricate lies about his political opponent by threatening to withhold military aid Congress had approved. The brutish effort by Trump was equal parts bribery, extortion, and corruption. Nearly every fact needed to prove the crime was recorded on audio. Trump was unfit to continue in office and was a clear and present danger to the Constitution, the rule of law, and our national security.

         But Republicans balked at holding Trump accountable. To conceal the truth and create a smokescreen for acquittal, Senate Republicans irrationally contended that the trial in the Senate was limited to the evidence and witnesses called in the House impeachment proceeding. Republicans did not argue that Trump was innocent of the charges. Instead, they claimed that his conduct did not warrant removal from office and that we should “let the voters decide” if he should be re-elected. Susan Collins argued that Trump “had learned his lesson” and would reform his ways.

         At that fraught, unstable, maddening time in our history, it felt as though the nation was teetering on edge. Into this maelstrom walked Adam Schiff, one of the lead prosecutors in the Senate trial of Trump’s impeachment charges. As lead prosecutor, Adam Schiff spoke for the nation and restored a measure of sanity and reason. He contained the madness of the moment by putting into words the insane and bewildering situation that confronted a troubled country.

         Adam Schiff’s closing argument in the Senate trial will endure as one of the great speeches in our nation’s history. A link to a 3-minute excerpt is here and should be required watching for every American: Schiff: Trump will ‘do it again’ if not removed. Schiff said, in part,

Can we be confident that he will not continue to try to cheat in [this] very election? Can we be confident that Americans and not foreign powers will get to decide, and that the president will shun any further foreign interference in our Democratic affairs. The short, plain, sad, incontestable answer is no, you can’t. You can’t trust this president to do the right thing. Not for one minute, not for one election, not for the sake of our country. You just can’t. He will not change and you know it.

We must say enough — enough! He has betrayed our national security, and he will do so again. He has compromised our elections, and he will do so again. You will not change him. You cannot constrain him. He is who he is. Truth matters little to him. What’s right matters even less, and decency matters not at all.

         Schiff’s words were prophetic. The GOP’s lock-step refusal to convict Trump emboldened him. Eleven months later, Trump began plotting a coup and planning a violent insurrection. If Republicans had heeded Adam Schiff’s eloquent plea, we would have avoided the national tragedy of the January 6th insurrection.

         Because Schiff spoke the truth in such simple, powerful, incontestable terms, Republicans despise him. He is a constant reminder that they had a chance to stop Trump and retreated in fear. Adam Schiff offered to serve as their conscience, the voice of morality and decency in their heads that they ignored to their everlasting shame. And there is more: Schiff is a formidable adversary whose civil demeanor and calm exterior camouflage his tenacity and persistence.

         Because of Schiff’s role in prosecuting Trump and his effectiveness in exposing the depravity of Trump’s enablers, Kevin McCarthy blocked Adam Schiff from the House Select Committee on Intelligence. Schiff’s exclusion from the committee is a blow to our national security.

         The move was vindictive, venal, and petty. McCarthy promised MAGA extremists that he would block Schiff’s membership on the Intelligence Committee to garner support for McCarthy’s ego-driven quest to become Speaker. And it comes at the same time that McCarthy is placing Marjorie Taylor Greene on the committee that oversees Homeland Security. Greene has famously promoted the QAnon conspiracy theory of a Satan-worshipping, pedophile, blood-drinking cabal that runs the world. She also claims that “Jewish space lasers” funded by George Soros were responsible for massive forest fires in California in 2020. McCarthy has also appointed the “human fraud” George Santos to two committees even though Santos has admitted to pervasive lies on his resume and is credibly accused of campaign finance fraud.

         If McCarthy believes he can stop Adam Schiff from speaking the truth, he is sorely mistaken. But McCarthy’s vindictive behavior relating to a committee that has been above partisan politics for decades has rattled the moderates in the GOP caucus. See Newsweek, GOP Rep. Blasts ‘Corrosive’ Kevin McCarthy Kicking Democrats Off Committees. (GOP Rep. Don Bacon from Nebraska has said Kevin McCarthy’s decision to remove Democrats from some House committees was “corrosive.")

         If speaking unpleasant truths is grounds for exclusion from House committees, then supporting an insurrection surpasses that bar by orders of magnitude. When Democrats next control the House, it should exclude from committees every member who abetted Trump in his attempted coup.

[Robert B. Hubbell Newsletter]

[detective-like-i-give-a-damn]

"the GOP are smokescreening with claims of cognitive decline to take away the DNC's precious time fixing the supreme Court" no, dumbest bitch alive, they're distracting you from the fact that they do not want to fix the supreme court or literally anything else. everyone else has known this since your grandmother was born. TV shows that ended before you were born were pointing this out.

[nebris]

Day IS Night

April 17th, 2010

"The whole Left/Right paradigm is a largely false one, and damned archaic to boot, being based upon the seating arrangements of the French Revolutionary Assemble during its earliest years. In this country the political structure is almost entirely Corporatist. The Dems are Center/Right Corporatists who got into power because the Extreme Right policies of the GOP have brought The Republic to its knees, may have even ruined it. Time will tell. If you had ever deigned to talk to me, you'd know that I did not vote in the last presidential election because I was repelled by the whole Brand Obama insanity. I suspect that Palin was added to McCain's ticket to sink him with an absolute certainty, as only the Far Right actually finds her appealing. The Tea Party is Scared Old White Folks, scared because their time is ending. They know how they treated non-white minorities and are rightly fearful of the same. All their other noise is a smokescreen. If you are honest with yourself... well, you know where I'm going. I'm not a White=Evil type. Those of European descent are simply the ones who've been Top Dog for the last five centuries. Hell, the Modern World is an almost entirely Anglo-European invention. But a lot of that is simply the luck of the draw, not due to any racial superiority. For me, the paradigm is White Male=Oppressive Dominant. Nothing more, nothing less. It's The Penis, not the skin. Chaka Zulu, a 'great black hero,' was also an oppressive bastard, a Fascist and Imperialist. If he had the reach and the tech, he'd have 'put his boot' on a lot more necks. I can name dozens of other non- white male mother fuckers, too. The Tea Party is a political scam. It's members are being hustled by Corporate America. On the other side is Brand Obama. That's a political scam, too. It's my sad duty to inform you that Mass Democracy Has Failed. But there is another path...."

[govic17]

Slavery under the rich? That’s a future that many of the GOP backers want, and its a dire future for ourselves, our children and our grandchildren. It’s sometimes disguised in religion, but that’s just a smokescreen.

The alternative and equally horrible vision is technocracy, making all but a few subservient to computers and their masters.

The two visions share communalities, but ultimately, if either win, only one of them will.

It’s a disaster for the rest of us if either does.

Some people are real. Listen to them.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Private equity health-care monopolies are on a profitable killing spree

It’s not just you. US healthcare, already a bureaucratic nightmare of buck-passing and price-gouging, has gotten far worse. Private equity firms have created regional health-care monopolies that don’t just rip patients off — they’re killing us.

Private equity is a scam. Fund managers raise gigantic sums by claiming to be able to “beat the market.” In reality, they do worse for their investors than a boring old index fund:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/02/25/pluralistic-your-daily-link-dose-25-feb-2020/#extraordinaryclaims

The fund managers don’t have to beat the market in order to make bank. They can take advantage of the “carried interest” loophole, which has nothing to do with interest rates — it’s a tax system that was invented for 16th century sea-captains (no, really):

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/29/writers-must-be-paid/#carried-interest

PE dresses up its playbook in all kinds of bullshit, but it’s a smokescreen. At core, PE funds buy companies, merge them to monopoly, slash wages, fire staff, load up their businesses with debt, and then skedaddle before the businesses collapse. They call this “creating value”:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/24/software-is-cake-too/#looters

This playbook guarantees that everything PE touches will turn to shit. PE is a parasite that preys on weak industries and makes them even more dysfunctional. Think of how PE has cornered regional rental housing markets and then turned every rental in town into a slum:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/08/wall-street-landlords/#the-new-slumlords

Most of us didn’t really think about rail-freight until last winter, when the whole system nearly collapsed. Again, the bloody handprints of PE are all over that crisis:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/04/up-your-nose/#rail-barons

The pandemic put a lot of businesses into a precarious state, and PE swooped in, buying up distressed businesses at scale and putting them into a death-spiral:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/30/medtronic-stole-your-ventilator/#blackstone-kkr

This acquisition was fueled by Trump’s corporate covid bailout and the trillions in public money that the GOP made available to corporate borrowers (remember, PE thrives on debt):

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/17/divi-recaps/#graebers-ghost

Of all the sick industries in America, healthcare is the sickest, and it’s the domain where PE has done the most damage. PE stripped healthcare systems to the bone, removing all excess capacity and exhausting and demoralizing healthcare workers:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/21/profitable-butchers/#looted

They bought up emergency rooms, turned them into scam factories that hit every unfortunate person who stepped foot in them with thousands in “surprise billing” fees. Then they cut doctors’ pay and spent millions on ads to block anti-surprise billing legislation:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/21/all-in-it-together/#doctor-patient-unity

The ER scam was and is wild. Some hospitals lock all their doors except for the ER doors, and then they’d hit you for “emergency care” when you went through the ER on your way to receiving normal, non-emergency procedures:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/14/unhealthy-finances/#steins-law

The damage wasn’t limited to emergency rooms. Whole hospitals — whole hospital systems — were crashed by PE looters, and many of these got emergency government bailouts, because…free market?

https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/01/the-years-of-repair/#mass-murder

PE has bought its way into every corner of the health-care system, and made every bad thing, much, much worse. You know how “bad nursing home” are three of the scariest words in the English language? Try on “bad private equity owned nursing home” for size. The death toll is massive:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/23/acceptable-losses/#disposable-olds

Biden’s SEC chair Gary Gensler has made the most decisive anti-PE moves in decades, requiring disclosures that will help investors (especially union pension funds) pierce the veil of bullshit that brings in the billions that PE fashions into weapons of financial mass destruction:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/10/monopoly-begets-monopoly/#gary-gensler

But the wheels of justice grind slow, and PE has trillions to fuel its race to suck every bit of value out of the health-care system before the party comes to an end.

In “Sick Profit: Investigating Private Equity’s Stealthy Takeover of Health Care Across Cities and Specialties,” Kaiser Health News’s Fred Schulte reveals the plan of attack:

https://khn.org/news/article/private-equity-takeover-health-care-cities-specialties/

In 2021, PE firms bought 1,400 health care companies, spending $206b (the total since 2012 is more than $1t). They’ve cornered regional markets for eye care, dental care, family practices, hospices, and pet care. We’ve had a year to see how that played out, and it’s not pretty.

Since 2014, PE companies have paid out $500m in fines for falsifying health care billings to the US government, but a fine is a price, and the fines have been absorbed into PE’s business plans as part of the cost of operations.

Once a PE firm buys up all the specialists in a region, things get very bad. Take San Antonio, where nearly all the gastroenterology clinics have been bought up by PE firms, and where routine colonoscopies now cost patients thousands more than they paid before:

https://khn.org/news/article/private-equity-gastroenterologist-colonoscopy/

While there are plenty of illegal ways that PE companies extract value from their acquisitions, the legal tactics are pretty ugly all on their own, like cutting staff and replacing them with less skilled, less trained, cheaper workers, putting patients at risk.

This is particularly worrying when you consider how heavily PE companies invest in practices that treat people who are vulnerable and struggle to advocate for themselves, such as behavioral health specialists who treat autism, addiction and mental illness.

Whether or not you can escape PE depends a lot on where you live. PE only owns 12% of the nation’s anesthesiology practices, but those practices are concentrated in five states, where more than two thirds of anesthesiologists are PE owned.

When PE takes over your health care, billings go way up. The average PE-treated patient generates $71 more per claim, and is 9% more likely to experience “lengthy, more costly” care:

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama-health-forum/fullarticle/2795946

Doctors who sell their practices to PE companies are lured in with promises of administrative relief from experts who’ll handle billing, scheduling and compliance. But PE firms exercise fine-grained control over these doctors, violating rules that say medical practices must be run by MDs.

Take National Spine, a PE-backed chain owned by Sentinel Capital Partners that bought up 40+ pain-management clinics across the country. Doctors saw their caseload explode from 16 patients/day to 25. Medicare billings also exploded, with “unnecessary and often worthless” back braces being charged at up to $1,100 each. Patients were given $1,800 “medically unnecessary and often worthless” urine tests. National settled these claims for $3.3m in April 2019, without admitting guilt.

RLH Equity Partners’s pharmacies bilked the military health insurer Tricare out of $68m through a system of kickbacks and telemarketer sales. RLH settled the case for $21m and blamed it on a few corrupt “individuals.”

Most of the time, fraud claims are settled by the companies that the PE funds owe, while the PE funds themselves get off scot-free. That leaves the funds free to re-offend, and to further push the limits on patient endangerment.

One of the grisliest parts of this tale is in the realm of children’s dentistry. PE firms have bought up these practices and turned them into high-volume Medicare-fraud assembly lines that perform rushed, unnecessary major procedures on poor kids and bill the government a fortune for them.

These include baby root canals and crowns, and the PE-backed dental chains set quotas for their staff, requiring them to perform a certain number of major procedures on each patient. One particularly horrifying case recounted by the KHN article is that of two-year old Zion Gastelum, who died following major dental surgery.

Gastelum received six root canals and crowns on his baby teeth at a PE-owned Kool Smiles clinic in Yuma, AZ. The oxygen bottle used during his surgery “was empty or not operating properly” and the staff who oversaw the procedure were undertrained and didn’t notice. He never regained consciousness, and died of brain injuries days later.

Kool Smiles’s owners paid $24m to settle a DoJ overbilling claim less than a month later. The settlement alleged that Kool Smiles performed unnecessary procedures, including baby root canals. Kool Smiles denied that they were responsible for Gastelum’s death.

More than 90% of PE acquisitions fall below the $101m threshold for antitrust review, so they fly under the radar. Once the mergers are complete, they are very hard to unwind. The FTC is working its way through hundreds of comments from doctors or other health care workers asking for tighter scrutiny of health-care mergers.

The Healthcare Private Equity Association boasts that its members are poised to spend more than $3t to create “the future of healthcare.”

https://hcpea.org/#!event-list

Image: Rae Allen (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/raeallen/6224775722/

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

Videoplasty (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Patient_Care_Cartoon.svg

CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

[Image ID: A hospital Emergency Room parking lot. In the center of the image stands an ogrish, top-hatted, cigar-chomping capitalist caricature. He is standing at a podium, yanking a lever made from a golden dollar-sign. The front of the podium bears a red cross. He holds aloft an elderly man in a hospital bed.]

[whatbigotspost]

I’d give anything for Republicans to just be real that 99% of their positions are driven by thinly veiled white supremacy. The honesty of it would at least be better than how they operate now. But they carefully, strategically maintain that smokescreen of plausible deniability so that “the white moderate” found in places like suburbs can pretend they’re not also white supremacists and vote GOP.

[jerseydeanne]

From the wonderful Larry Schweikart. Enjoy the reading!

Letter From a DemoKKKrat Strategist

Well, actually I’m not a DemoKKKrat strategist. I’m a rabid MAGA supporter. I am offering you this advice because I know you won’t take it. Unlike many others giving you valuable advice, scrotumcrunchers, I do so fully in the spirit of accepting your holy trinity of core beliefs, namely climate whackadoodleism, transoid-homosexual societal dominance, and Jim Crow racism worthy of your Confederate ancestors. I offer these strategies fully understanding that not only won’t you stop, you can’t stop. It’s who you are now. You’ve been absorbed by Sigourney Weaver’s gut-eating alien.

Let’s begin with a sober, realistic view of what’s going to happen in the next two or three years. Republicans, with a strong dose of MAGA blood, will take back the House and the Senate in 2022. Barring some self-immolations by GOP candidates (which you can never disregard, for Republicans are the “stupid party”), there is nothing you can do to stop this right now.

Biteme is dragging you down like Amber Heard in an Aquaman movie. He hit 30% today in the Civiqs poll. Factoring in the margin of error, he is already in Nixon territory and likely will surpass Nixon’s all time low of 26% in the next year. Even were you to pull a Gandalf and magically boot him today, the damage is done for 2022. Face it. You’re gonna get clobbered, and the only question is by how much—-40, 50 or north of 60 seats in the House, two or three or up to five in the Senate? The night is still young for Republicans.

Let’s continue a realistic, sober assessment after that: your agenda, such that it was, is deader than Vision after Thanos ripped his gem out. Deader than Kevin Spacey’s career as a children’s game show host. Deader than Ghislane Maxwell—-who did not kill herself. The GOP could do any number of things in 2023-24, but I’m not advising them. I’m advising you. Realistically, you can do nothing except run to microphones and whine to your snot-groveling iguana-brained Hoax News media. But that won’t affect anything. And, as I have shown in other posts, your once golden path through the courts is closed tighter than Hillary Clinton’s anal cavity.

Then comes 2024: you’re gonna lose, and lose huge to Trump. There won’t be a national China Virus lockdown smokescreen to cover up your phoney mule-in ballots. It’s gonna be a relatively open and fair election that Biteme or whatever retread repticon they sacrifice cannot dodge, avoid, or defeat. Trump will win at historical levels. By then, he may well have a MAGA core of 40% of the Senate and 60% of the House and watch out. 

I’m trying to warn you, because you have two options left. Understand, you are now the Japanese in World War II on an island about to be invaded by overwhelming American force, saturated by non-stop bombing and shelling. There are no reinforcements coming from the ChiComs or Sorosoids or anyone else. You have two choices, just as the Japanese did. 

First, you could choose banzai—-full crazed, frothing, mindless frontal assaults against an enemy with overwhelming firepower. This may look impressive, but it will utterly eviscerate the fast numbers of your numb-bot followers. It’s the quickest way to instill defeatism in whatever rump of a party you have left.

Your second option, and the one I recommend, is withdrawal and digging in for the very, very long haul. Because barring some monumental screwup by Trump or the Republicans, or some totally unforseen calamity . . . . wait, has anyone seen Dr. Fallacy lately? . . .

you should plan on being out of power for at least eight to ten years. Trump will finish a successful second term in 2028, Ron DeSantis will succeed him. 

Could DeSantis be a Herbert Hoover—-a man everyone assumed would be a great success because of his track record? Or a George H. W. Bush? Someone who had his entire path not only smoothed but literally gilded by Ronald Reagan? Both failed miserably. But most likely, you shouldn’t count on this. DeSantis could well be just a younger Trump who will serve two terms of his own.

You DemoKKKrats are just gonna have to ride out a decade of not being in power anywhere except your enclaves, so that is my strategy for you. The Enclave Strategy, just as the Japanese did on the islands. Retreat. Hunker down. Dig in. I figure you will still maintain near-total power of Kollyfornia, Washington, Oregon, Illinois, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Hawaii, Delaware and possibly Colorado—-thought that could change suddenly. You will probably have to give up on New Jersey (hint: see the last governor election), Maryland, New Hampshire, Maine, New Mexico, and even Minnesota. 

Here’s the thing about your rump enclaves: you really are heavy in the majorities there, so it will be darn near impossible for Republicans to root you out. But ya ain’t goin’ anywhere, and you won’t be able to influence much, despite the economic power of New York, Kollyfornia, and Illinois. My advice is to concentrate on fortifying those enclaves. Because barring a DeSantis meltdown, the final assaults will come in 10 years when even these states were much weakened economically and socially by their perverse policies. By then, those states will be heavily dependent on oil, natural gas, and perhaps even new nuke plants for their energy. Smart education policies by the Trump-DeSantis Era could dramatically slash you cheap pool of university bots who power your “clean industry” of Googleified Gumbo. In a dozen ways, these enclaves will be starved out, frozen out, and ignored out of existence. 

In the meantime, what do you do? Here’s where my advice runs out cuz your politics are so nonsensical that an LSD-laced platypus couldn’t understand them, much less carry them out. But hey, you don’t pay me enough yet to get you past ten years. 

Larry Schweikart

Larry is fantastic! I sucked down every morsel like a fine-aged Filet Mignon with Bernanise sauce! The truth is tasty, and I can't wait to read more.

Thank you so much for sending this in!

Love, JD 😜💋

[justiceamberheard]

I just debunked a Depp stan's argument on here and they turned it around on me to be like "well maybe if you directed this energy towards the supreme court we wouldn't be losing our rights" (first of all, huh? I'm sorry, are you blaming me personally for the actions of five unelected officials who were installed by people I did not vote for??) And then they claimed that the whole trial was actually a GOP smokescreen to distract from this SCOTUS decision so therefore we shouldn't even be talking about it 🙄

The delusion is unreal. These people cannot see how this trial will actually materially affect the lives of real victims. It's all just celebrity gossip to them. It's infuriating

it's easier for them to twist facts rather than accept them. and honestly, idk why it is so hard for them? i liked him too before 2016, i rewatched potc every summer, but when amber shared what he did to her and after reading mountain of documents, i accepted it.

[largeclumpofcells]

Laurence Tribe — Harvard Law School. Lawyer for Al Gore in 2000.

“One of the most curious things about Roe is that, behind its own verbal smokescreen, the substantive judgment on which it rests is nowhere to be found.” “The Supreme Court, 1972 Term—Foreword: Toward a Model of Roles in the Due Process of Life and Law,” 87 Harvard Law Review 1, 7 (1973).

Ruth Bader Ginsburg — Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court

“Roe, I believe, would have been more acceptable as a judicial decision if it had not gone beyond a ruling on the extreme statute before the court. … Heavy-handed judicial intervention was difficult to justify and appears to have provoked, not resolved, conflict.” North Carolina Law Review, 1985

Edward Lazarus — Former clerk to Harry Blackmun

“As a matter of constitutional interpretation and judicial method, Roe borders on the indefensible. I say this as someone utterly committed to the right to choose, as someone who believes such a right has grounding elsewhere in the Constitution instead of where Roe placed it, and as someone who loved Roe’s author like a grandfather.….What, exactly, is the problem with Roe? The problem, I believe, is that it has little connection to the Constitutional right it purportedly interpreted. A constitutional right to privacy broad enough to include abortion has no meaningful foundation in constitutional text, history, or precedent - at least, it does not if those sources are fairly described and reasonably faithfully followed.” “The Lingering Problems with Roe v. Wade, and Why the Recent Senate Hearings on Michael McConnell’s Nomination Only Underlined Them,” FindLaw Legal Commentary, Oct. 3, 2002

“[A]s a matter of constitutional interpretation, even most liberal jurisprudes — if you administer truth serum — will tell you it is basically indefensible.” “Liberals, Don’t Make Her an Icon” Washington Post July 10, 2003.

William Saletan — Slate columnist who left the GOP 2004 because it was too pro-life.

“Blackmun’s [Supreme Court] papers vindicate every indictment of Roe: invention, overreach, arbitrariness, textual indifference.” “Unbecoming Justice Blackmun,” Legal Affairs, May/June 2005.

John Hart Ely — Yale Law School, Harvard Law School, Stanford Law School

Roe “is not constitutional law and gives almost no sense of an obligation to try to be.….What is frightening about Roe is that this super-protected right is not inferable from the language of the Constitution, the framers’ thinking respecting the specific problem in issue, any general value derivable from the provisions they included, or the nation’s governmental structure. Nor is it explainable in terms of the unusual political impotence of the group judicially protected vis-à-vis the interest that legislatively prevailed over it.… At times the inferences the Court has drawn from the values the Constitution marks for special protection have been controversial, even shaky, but never before has its sense of an obligation to draw one been so obviously lacking.” “The Wages of Crying Wolf: A Comment on Roe v. Wade,” 82 Yale Law Journal, 920, 935-937 (1973).

Benjamin Wittes — Washington Post

Roe “is a lousy opinion that disenfranchised millions of conservatives on an issue about which they care deeply.” “Letting Go of Roe,” The Atlantic Monthly, Jan/Feb 2005.

Richard Cohen — Washington Post

“[T]he very basis of the Roe v. Wade decision — the one that grounds abortion rights in the Constitution — strikes many people now as faintly ridiculous. Whatever abortion may be, it cannot simply be a matter of privacy.….As a layman, it’s hard for me to raise profound constitutional objections to the decision. But it is not hard to say it confounds our common-sense understanding of what privacy is. If a Supreme Court ruling is going to affect so many people then it ought to rest on perfectly clear logic and up-to-date science. Roe , with its reliance on trimesters and viability, has a musty feel to it, and its argument about privacy raises more questions than it answers".….Roe “is a Supreme Court decision whose reasoning has not held up. It seems more fiat than argument.….Still, a bad decision is a bad decision. If the best we can say for it is that the end justifies the means, then we have not only lost the argument — but a bit of our soul as well.” “Support Choice, Not Roe” Washington Post, October 19, 2005.

Alan Dershowitz — Harvard Law School

Roe v. Wade and Bush v. Gore “represent opposite sides of the same currency of judicial activism in areas more appropriately left to the political processes…. Judges have no special competence, qualifications, or mandate to decide between equally compelling moral claims (as in the abortion controversy)…. [C]lear governing constitutional principles … are not present in either case.” Supreme Injustice: How the High Court Hijacked Election 2000 (New York: Oxford) 2001, p. 194.

Cass Sunstein — University of Chicago and a Democratic adviser on judicial nominations

“In the Court’s first confrontation with the abortion issue, it laid down a set of rules for legislatures to follow. The Court decided too many issues too quickly. The Court should have allowed the democratic processes of the states to adapt and to generate sensible solutions that might not occur to a set of judges.” “The Supreme Court 1995 Term: FOREWORD: LEAVING THINGS UNDECIDED,” 110 Harvard Law Review 6, 20 (1996).

“What I think is that it just doesn’t have the stable status of Brown or Miranda because it’s been under internal and external assault pretty much from the beginning…. As a constitutional matter, I think Roe was way overreached. I wouldn’t vote to overturn it myself, but that’s because I think it’s good to preserve precedent in general, and the country has sufficiently relied on it that it should not be overruled.” Quoted in: Brian McGuire, “Roe v. Wade an Issue Ahead of Alito Hearing,” New York Sun November 15, 2005

Jeffrey Rosen — Legal Affairs Editor, The New Republic

“In short, 30 years later, it seems increasingly clear that this pro-choice magazine was correct in 1973 when it criticized Roe on constitutional grounds. Its overturning would be the best thing that could happen to the federal judiciary, the pro-choice movement, and the moderate majority of the American people.….Thirty years after Roe, the finest constitutional minds in the country still have not been able to produce a constitutional justification for striking down restrictions on early-term abortions that is substantially more convincing than Justice Harry Blackmun’s famously artless opinion itself. As a result, the pro-choice majority asks nominees to swear allegiance to the decision without being able to identify an intelligible principle to support it.” “Worst Choice” The New Republic February 24, 2003

Michael Kinsley

“Against all odds (and, I’m afraid, against all logic), the basic holding of Roe v. Wade is secure in the Supreme Court.….…a freedom of choice law would guarantee abortion rights the correct way, democratically, rather than by constitutional origami.” “Bad Choice” The New Republic, June 13, 1994.

“Liberal judicial activism peaked with Roe v. Wade, the 1973 abortion decision….Although I am pro-choice, I was taught in law school, and still believe, that Roe v. Wade is a muddle of bad reasoning and an authentic example of judicial overreaching. I also believe it was a political disaster for liberals. Roe is what first politicized religious conservatives while cutting off a political process that was legalizing abortion state by state anyway.” “The Right’s Kind of Activism,” Washington Post, November 14, 2004.

Kermit Roosevelt — University of Pennsylvania Law School

“[I]t is time to admit in public that, as an example of the practice of constitutional opinion writing, Roe is a serious disappointment. You will be hard-pressed to find a constitutional law professor, even among those who support the idea of constitutional protection for the right to choose, who will embrace the opinion itself rather than the result. This is not surprising. As constitutional argument, Roe is barely coherent. The court pulled its fundamental right to choose more or less from the constitutional ether. It supported that right via a lengthy, but purposeless, cross-cultural historical review of abortion restrictions and a tidy but irrelevant refutation of the straw-man argument that a fetus is a constitutional ‘person’ entited to the protection of the 14th Amendment.….By declaring an inviolable fundamental right to abortion, Roe short-circuited the democratic deliberation that is the most reliable method of deciding questions of competing values.” “Shaky Basis for a Constitutional ‘Right’,” Washington Post, January 22, 2003.

Archibald Cox — JFK's Solicitor General, Harvard Law School

“The failure to confront the issue in principled terms leaves the opinion to read like a set of hospital rules and regulations…. Neither historian, nor layman, nor lawyer will be persuaded that all the prescriptions of Justice Blackmun are part of the Constitution” The Role of the Supreme Court in American Government, pp. 113-114 (1976)

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Don’t negotiate with financial terrorists.  ::  April 27, 2023

ROBERT B. HUBBELL

APR 27, 2023

         It takes a lot to displace a story about a defamation/rape trial involving the presumptive GOP nominee, but Kevin McCarthy’s sham budget is beyond the pale. McCarthy browbeat the GOP caucus in the House to pass a bill that has no chance of making it to the floor of the Senate. It is a bad-faith negotiating tactic threatening the global economy because McCarthy is a prisoner/hostage/victim of the MAGA extremists in the House.

Biden responded to the passage of the bill by saying that raising the debt limit was ‘not negotiable’, although he was “happy to meet” with McCarthy separately to discuss efforts to trim federal spending.

         Discussing the details of the bill grants it more dignity than it deserves, but the provisions of the bill highlight the depravity of MAGA extremists. First, it is important to note that despite some specific proposed cutbacks, the bill leaves most of the budget-cutting to the Appropriations Committee—meaning that McCarthy’s bill is a smokescreen designed to conceal the lack of substance. See NYTimes, What’s in the House G.O.P. Debt Limit Bill.  

         Per the Times,

Eventually, Republicans would need to identify spending cuts totaling $3.6 trillion over a decade, by their own calculations, and this bill does not outline them. Instead, House Republican leaders are punting those decisions to the Appropriations Committee.

         To the extent that the bill does identify specific cuts, most of them are targeted at vulnerable Americans who depend on government help for food, housing, and healthcare. The bill also targets Biden’s legislative achievements in the last session of Congress. The bill would:

Impose additional work requirements on recipients of food stamps and Medicaid;

Reverse funding to the IRS to improve customer service and crack down on tax cheats;

Reverse key climate and green energy provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act; and

Expand coal mining and fossil fuel production.

         In exchange for spending cuts to be determined by the Appropriations Committee at a later date, the bill would raise the debt limit for eleven months—ensuring another financial crisis in the spring of 2024.

         Biden is right to refuse to negotiate over the debt limit. Congress has the power of the purse; if the US is to avoid defaulting on existing obligations, it is up to Congress to ensure that the US has sufficient liquidity to pay its bills. If McCarthy can’t manage his caucus to deliver that result, he should resign.

         Watching Congress play “chicken” with a global financial crisis is an anxiety-producing development. But if Biden caves to Republican hostage-taking now, he will guarantee that the US experiences annual debt crises. Better to demonstrate to Republicans that managing the debt limit is not a partisan exercise but a constitutional duty.

[....]

Concluding Thoughts.

         Kevin McCarthy just went through several weeks of humiliating negotiations to produce a bill that is effectively a plea for Joe Biden to negotiate with McCarthy. No one takes the bill seriously, least of all McCarthy, who reportedly told members of his caucus that it didn’t matter what was in the bill because they just ‘needed to pass something.’

         In other words, McCarthy is begging Biden to negotiate. Biden is in a position of strength because he has been unequivocal and unyielding. You can’t negotiate with terrorists. Biden understands that fact.

         Meanwhile, everyone in America will experience the anxiety and worry of an impending debt default as Biden stands firm. But remember, Biden didn’t decide to tie the debt limit to a vague yet complicated package of spending cuts. McCarthy did. So, let’s stand with President Biden as he ensures that America will not experience successive financial crises over the debt limit for the next decade. Keep the longer-term goal in mind as we endure the pain of the debt limit hostage drama.

[Robert B. Hubbell Newsletter]

[tomorrowusa]

We’re continuing to learn more about Donald Trump’s mental instability.

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley was so worried about Trump’s mental state that after the January 6th attack on the US Capitol by pro-Trump terrorists, Gen. Milley took steps to prevent the deranged Trump from starting a nuclear war. Gen. Milley also privately contacted China’s top general to reassure him that the US was not about to go to war.

Woodward/Costa book: Worried Trump could 'go rogue,' Milley took secret action to protect nuclear weapons

"You never know what a president's trigger point is," Milley told his senior staff, according to the book.  

In response, Milley took extraordinary action, and called a secret meeting in his Pentagon office on January 8 to review the process for military action, including launching nuclear weapons. Speaking to senior military officials in charge of the National Military Command Center, the Pentagon's war room, Milley instructed them not to take orders from anyone unless he was involved.

"No matter what you are told, you do the procedure. You do the process. And I'm part of that procedure," Milley told the officers, according to the book. He then went around the room, looked each officer in the eye, and asked them to verbally confirm they understood.  "Got it?" Milley asked, according to the book.  

"Yes, sir."  

[ ... ]

Milley's fear was based on his own observations of Trump's erratic behavior. His concern was magnified by the events of January 6 and the 'extraordinary risk' the situation posed to US national security, the authors write. Milley had already had two back-channel phone calls with China's top general, who was on high alert over the chaos in the US.

No matter how bad you think Trump’s mindset is – he’s actually worse than what you think.

For Trumpsters having hissy fits over the evacuation from Afghanistan in August: Your boy wanted to hurriedly withdraw all US troops 7.5 months before President Biden did.

Milley's fear that Trump could do something unpredictable came from experience. Right after Trump lost the election, Milley discovered the President had signed a military order to withdraw all troops from Afghanistan by January 15, 2021, before he left the White House. 

The snide and baseless GOP accusations about Biden having dementia are just a smokescreen to distract attention from Trump’s own mental and emotional debilitations. Biden has had a stutter all his life but can think and write clearly. Trump’s writing is best exemplified by his adventures with Sharpies on official documents and hurricane maps.

Donald J. Trump is a raving lunatic with woolly caterpillars crawling in his brain. He is unfit for even the most minor elected office in the US. Yet Republicans at every level are kowtowing to him and taking their cues from him. They should not be trusted with power any more than Trump.

If you’d like to read more about the dangerous period between Election Day 2020 and Inauguration Day 2021, check out the book Peril by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa which will be published on September 21st.