#in celebration of Trump Conviction Day

[cbk1000]

Chapters: 3/? Fandom: Merlin (TV) Rating: Mature Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings Relationships: Merlin/Arthur Pendragon (Merlin) Characters: Merlin (Merlin), Arthur Pendragon (Merlin), Morgana (Merlin), Gwaine (Merlin), Lancelot (Merlin) Additional Tags: Social Media, Hey guess what the plot of this one is, Yep they're dumb and in love, They're not quite as dumb this time though, because they're together, Don't worry I'll still bring the stupid, If you've read the rest of my work you know you can have confidence in that, Sequel to Fools by Heavenly Compulsion Series: Part 2 of Fools by Heavenly Compulsion Summary:

Sequel to Fools by Heavenly Compulsion. In which Merlin plans a proposal, and there are shenanigans.

[sadbicth]

elon musk did a nazi salute twice at the inauguration, and republicans are defending him.

trump revoked executive order 11246, which prohibited discrimination.

trump put all dei employees on leave to be fired.

trump blamed the dc plane crash on dei.

trump banned all lgbtq+ flags from being hung in government buildings.

trump ordered the pentagon to cancel celebration of mlk jr. day, black history month, women's history month, holocaust remembrance day, asian american pacific islander heritage month, lgbtq+ pride month, juneteenth, women's equality day, national hispanic heritage month, national disability employment awarenessmonth, and national american indian heritage month.

trump proposed removing all palestinians from gaza, turning the area into a vacation resort called “riviera of the middle east”.

trump rolled back biden’s executive order to lower prescription drug costs for people using medicare and medicaid.

trump rescinded the $35 cap on insulin, and prices are expected to rise to $1500 a month.

trump ordered the national institutes of health to cancel their review panels on cancer research.

trump ended the guidelines to prevent ai misuse. the guidelines prevent many things, but notably it prevents production of ai child pornography.

when sean hannity asked trump about the economy, he said “i don’t care”, after campaigning with the economy as his main talking point.

trump has withdrawn the us from the world health organization.

trump is ordering health agencies to stop reporting on bird flu and halt publications of scientific reports.

trump has pardoned over 1500 people who stormed the capitol on january 6th.

trump changed denali back to mount mckinley.

trump signed an executive order to rename the gulf of mexico to gulf of america.

trump shut down cbp one, an app which granted legal entry to 1 million+ immigrants.

trump is allowing ice raids at churches and elementary schools.

trump announced plans to declare a national emergency at the us-mexico border.

trump signed an executive order to expand the use of the death penalty.

trump disbanded the school safety board that works to prevent school shootings. it was comprised of survivors, educators, and gun violence prevention advocates and formed after the school shooting in parkland.

trump withdrew from the paris climate act.

trump revoked all protections for transgender troops in the us military.

trump rescinded executive orders made by biden that benefited and protected women, lgbtq+ people, black americans, hispanic americans, asian americans, native hawaiians, and pacific islanders.

trump is attempting to make it legal to refuse to hire or fire pregnant women.

multiple state legislators are drafting bills to allow the punishment for abortion to be the death penalty.

trump pardoned 23 individuals convicted under the freedom of access to clinic entrances (FACE) act for their anti-abortion activism, including oftentimes violent protests at abortion clinics.

trump signed an executive order allowing deportation of foreign students who they believe express support for hamas or hezbollah.

trump announced that the us government will from here on out only recognize male and female as sexes. intersex is not legally recognized anymore.

the trump administration paused health communications to prevent the fda from announcing food recalls.

andy ogles drafted a constitutional amendment to allow trump to be president for a third term.

the us senate confirmed russell vought, one of the main authors of project 2025, will lead the white house budget office.

andy biggs introduced a bill to abolish osha and completely eliminate federal workplace safety protections.

georgia republican congressman mike collins called for the deportation of new jersey born mariann budde, the bishop who urged trump to “have mercy” on the lgbtq+ community and immigrants during a service at the national cathedral.

six states (arizona, idaho, iowa, kansas, mississippi, and north dakota) are planning on challenging obergefell v. hodges, which would end same-sex marriage nationwide. about a dozen more states have representatives are also considering filing similar resolutions.

amazon revoked protections for lgbtq+ and black employees.

the cdc has removed their hiv prevention page.

the united states state department has officially changed its “travelers with special conditions” page which previously said “lgbtqi+ travelers” to “lgb travelers”, completely getting rid of the tqi+.

every single republican told us we were overreacting. trump swore he had nothing to do with project 2025 yet continues implementing details outlined in it. not a single person has the right to tell us we’re being dramatic anymore.

hope “cheaper eggs and gas” was worth it.

EDIT: i removed the “trump refused to swear on the bible” point because it was being taken as me being an offended christian. i’m not christian, im agnostic. the reason i included it in the first place is because he’s the first president in history to ever refuse to swear on ANYTHING. meanwhile his “conservative christian” followers had no issue with this, and decided to continue to scramble for excuses instead of admitting he may not be as religious as he claims he is. i figured taking that point out entirely is probably better than filling this with an explanation in the middle of the other important issues.

[sir-ballister-boldheart]

Late to this because I was sleeping when it was announced but Happy Trump Conviction Day to all who celebrate :D

[mrs-stans]

Sebastian Stan on His Cristian Mungiu Film, the ‘Brutalist’ Role He Almost Played, Actors on Actors, and Battling for ‘The Apprentice’

The surprise Golden Globe winner tells IndieWire why the industry remains "apprehensive" about his Donald Trump role and about new indie projects with Mungiu and Justin Kurzel.

BY RYAN LATTANZIO

If you don’t watch Marvel movies, then you don’t know Bucky Barnes, which means you only know Sebastian Stan as the also-indie actor behind films like 2024’s “A Different Man” and “The Apprentice.” Both movies have put him in the awards race, and possibly the Oscar running, especially after his grimly funny, pathos-spiked turn as a self-loathing, out-of-options actor with neurofibromatosis in Aaron Schimberg’s “A Different Man” won him a surprise Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Musical or Comedy. That night, he was also nominated for Best Actor in a Drama for “The Apprentice,” where he plays a ’70s New York-era Donald Trump.

Had scheduling gone a different path, he would’ve starred in Brady Corbet’s also-Oscar-contending “The Brutalist,” but Stan had plenty on his plate last year and into this one, setting him up for his biggest awards season run yet. His transformative Trump performance in director Ali Abbasi’s “The Apprentice” has been celebrated since the film‘s 2024 Cannes premiere. Top distributors shunned the film until rookie releaser Briarcliff Entertainment got on board in August 2024, billionaire investor Dan Snyder tried to wrangle creative control and block the release, and, eventually, Stan’s peers declined the chance to speak with the American-Romanian actor in Variety’s popular Actors on Actors series, a major platform for awards contenders. Stan has been candid about not finding a sparring partner for the publication’s viral program. Why not? People don’t want to go near a movie about the incumbent president, including American audiences ($4 million domestic).

Speaking with IndieWire over the phone, Stan said that once he went public with why he wasn’t participating in Actors on Actors, “A lot of friends called me and said, ‘Hey let’s go do this together.’ That was obviously very thoughtful and very kind, but for us, Ali, Jeremy [Strong, who plays lawyer Roy Cohn], that was nothing really new.” (Last November, Variety’s editor-in-chief Ramin Setoodeh told IndieWire, “We invited [Stan] to participate in ‘Actors on Actors,’ the biggest franchise of awards season, but other actors didn’t want to pair with him because they didn’t want to talk about Donald Trump.”)

Stan continued, “We had been facing that kind of a thing since Cannes, whether it had even been photo shoots promoting the film, or certain people that were like, ‘We don’t want to go near this.’ Every interview since Cannes, we’ve been asked, ‘How’s the reception been? Why do you think studios are apprenehsive?’ This is sadly the reality. We have a lot of people who love this film or say they do, but when it comes down to jumping in the fire a little bit … hesitancy is understandable, to some extent.”

While understanding the emotional component around not wanting to see a movie about a leader and convicted felon who is on TV every second of the news day, Stan said, “However, around hesitancy, there’s also a slippery slope toward indifference, and that complements fear. That’s the only distinction we have to keep trying to make. You can rightfully own, ‘Hey, this isn’t for me,’ or ‘I don’t want to go there.’ But in terms of ‘I’m too worried, I’m too scared, I don’t want to get in hot water,’ then it’s like, what’s the next thing that becomes OK to not want to deal with it because it’s uncomfortable? We didn’t understand what was so uncomfortable about the movie.”

“The Apprentice” received mixed reviews at Cannes, though I remember in my festival screening being surrounded by European journalists laughing their heads off because they see Trump as a comic figure. Many Americans do not, and with “The Apprentice,” we don’t yet have the benefit of hindsight because we’re still living in the Trump era.

“Usually what happens is you look at movies like ‘Nixon’ or the movie ‘Downfall,’ which is about Hitler, [the movies] happen years later. We’ve had time to process our emotions about it, and we’ve had some distance so we can go back and look at what went wrong or what we [believed] at the time,” Stan said. “You don’t have that luxury [with ‘The Apprentice’]. We don’t have the luxury of not dealing with this person.”

Going back to his moment winning the Globe for “A Different Man,” it’s been a mixed blessing for double nominee Stan.

“There was this unbelievable kind of moment at the Globes that I never really thought was ever going to happen, and you have a brief moment of that, and suddenly, anything can flip,” he said of L.A. going into panic mode right after the Globes amid the ongoing wildfires in Southern California. “In terms of Mother Nature… at the end of the day, it really is just people. We’re all in the same boat there. There’s nothing to differentiate or anything. We are all pretty much in the same boat.”

After he’s finished with awards season duties, Stan expects to head to Europe in March to film the new film from Palme d’Or-winning auteur Cristian Mungiu, which brings the “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days” filmmaker’s usual moral ambiguity into a real-life case of abuse in Romania. He’ll be reuniting with “A Different Man” star Renate Reinsve for the film, which will shoot in Romanian, English, and Norwegian.

“With all of these smaller indies, I always feel even while I’m on the plane going there, I’m always worried, ‘Is the financing going to come through? It’s on its way,” Stan said. “He’s been up there with me for a few years with filmmakers from Romania where I’ve been calling him trying to find a way to work with him, where I can speak Romanian as well. We finally found this story, which is about a Romanian family who’s moved to Norway and then ends up in this very complicated trial. There’s a system [that] investigates cases if there’s ever been physical abuse in the household between the parents or the kids. They go investigating the family for an incident, and it leads to this trial. It happened before the pandemic, and it became national news. There were a lot of religious communities that came to their side, and it’s really interesting and quite complicated.”

Stan has also been instrumental in shepherding the next film from Australian “The Order” director Justin Kurzel, “Burning Rainbow,” about a true Waco-style FBI standoff that brought down a pro-marijuana campground in Michigan a week before 9/11. He’s attached to star in the story of Tom Crosslin and Rolland Rohm, a gay couple defending their land amid police investigations linked to a Rainbow Farm festival-associated killing and their marijuana plants.

“They were raising a child as well,” Stan said. “They were real activists in some ways, and they were very controversial as well because they were running this Rainbow Farm, which was like the start of this Woodstock-style festival that was bringing all these people together, advocating for legalizing marijuana. It was also such a loving place. They were attracting a lot of attention from local authorities, and a lot of controversies were going on down there. It all happened before 9/11, so there are many people who don’t know this story. But I’ve known about it for six years or something. I’ve been tracking it through different evolutions, and it finally landed with Justin. I was tracking him now for two years to basically give me a chance, and finally, I think we’ve got to go and find all the other people.”

As for “The Brutalist,” Stan was announced to star in Brady Corbet’s Golden Globe Best Picture winner in 2019, but scheduling changes on “The Apprentice” interfered. (“The Brutalist” shot in early 2023; “The Apprentice” didn’t film until that fall after a few false starts.) Stan would’ve played Joe Alwyn’s role, Harry Lee Van Buren, the pompous son of Guy Pearce’s moneyed industrialist who exploits Adrien Brody’s Jewish-Hungarian architect.

“I’m glad that the timing [didn’t work out] … The difficulty of that movie is astounding. What they were able to achieve. Some of us would be attached. I was sort of the last one, but then [Corbet] started to go. Because ‘Apprentice’ kept getting pushed, those two started to overlap at one point. I wasn’t available for it, but having seen the movie, Joe is amazing in it, and I would have been too old by that point anyway. I feel like it worked out for the best. It makes total sense with Guy being his father,” Stan said.

As for how Stan’s indie roles fit into the Marvel orbit, especially as he’ll be seen in “Thunderbolts” this spring again as Bucky Barnes, he said, “If I hadn’t had so many opportunities with Marvel with that character alone and creatively what I got to do, I don’t know if I would have been as driven to go in this other direction as well and try to find things that I’m not always at the top of mind for. I believe, like Brady Corbet, films are a directors’ medium. It is about the filmmaker. We have to trust the filmmakers. The best films to me, in my experiences, were with really strong directors with these strong points of view. It’s been amazing to watch Brady. I was attached to that film for a long time, going back to 2019, so I’ve known of that movie and have known Brady since we were kids auditioning. I would see him at casting calls, him and his mom. Even watching him up there on Sunday felt like I’d been weirdly attached to that story as well.”

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Steven Beschloss at America, America:

I know there are many among us who see today as an endpoint. The demise of democracy. The failure of our electorate to commit to self-governance. The willingness to let the richest among us grab power, with the foolish assumption that they would advance the well-being of working people rather than further enrich themselves. Let’s not doubt: The inauguration of Donald Trump is a cruel slap in the face of every lover of democracy, equality, justice and the rule of law. This event offers the terrible odor of billionaires and kleptocrats who see an opportunity to exploit government resources at the expense of taxpaying Americans just trying to get by. The convicted felon mouthing the oath to protect and defend the Constitution? It portends an ugly future, enough to convince some Americans that the democratic project is over, they have lost the battle and there’s nothing they can do now besides turn away. They are wrong. In fact, normalizing the idea that Trump’s return represents the end of democracy is a useful component of his authoritarian playbook. Feelings of resignation and despair are just what the authoritarian ruler wants his opponents to experience. Giving up—or believing that it is beyond our power to sustain America’s democratic values and principles— accelerates his success. This is anticipatory obedience, just as much as billionaires like Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg handing over millions and bowing down to the Malignant One. This is not a time for silence. This is not a time for resignation or despair. This is not a time to be cynical and insist that it’s all over. This is a time to gather your strength and stay engaged. This is a time to seek out guidance, to be nourished by the wisdom of others, to remember that you are not alone, to keep in mind that we are facing challenges that many Americans have faced throughout our history—and that we can get through this together. This is not a time to give up. This would be a disservice to all the good people who came before us and fought for a democratic future defined by justice and equality of opportunity.

That’s why I’m grateful that this is the day to celebrate the birthday of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., rather than dwell on Trump’s inauguration. These days King is rightly seen as a heroic figure, a widely beloved American who lived a life dedicated to justice, equality and the overcoming of racial discrimination. But the truth is that in his own time he was a deeply controversial figure, a truth-teller who said what needed to be said even when it caused terrible blowback. That included his intensifying criticism of racism, income inequality and the Vietnam War. As I’ve written previously, as late as 1968, the year King was killed, nearly 75 percent of Americans rejected him. Following his assassination in April of that year, nearly a third of Americans felt he “brought it on himself.”

[...] I don’t mean to minimize the scale of danger facing our democracy, rule of law and the Constitution with the return of Trump to our White House. We can expect on this Inauguration Day virtually immediate attacks on immigrants and other vulnerable people, efforts to dismantle government agencies, intensified demands to confirm his reckless appointees, pardons of Jan. 6. insurrectionists and targeting of critics. They will release “shock and awe” executive orders to stoke fear. If we previously could anticipate that major media organizations would do their part to push back, we know now that many of these billionaire-led outlets and tech bro-driven platforms have abandoned their democratic responsibility to serve the public and tell the truth. We have yet to see how the courts will respond once Trump’s Justice Department begins carrying out his demands for retribution with lawsuits, firings and other acts of intimidation to silence opposition. That will put more pressure on independent media and everyday Americans to speak out and oppose the lies and vengeful actions that we see and hear. So rather than look at Jan. 20, 2025 as the end of the era of democracy, I urge you to see it as the beginning a new chapter in our collective effort to defend it. Today is an important day to resist despair and refuse to lose sight of the values and principles that have built our nation. It won’t be easy, but the struggle for a better world never is. As Martin Luther King warned from his Alabama jail cell in 1963, “freedom is never given freely by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.” His words mirrored those of another great American about a century earlier. “Power concedes nothing without a demand,” Frederick Douglass said in 1857. “It never did and it never will.” We cannot be silent. We cannot give up. We must continue to make demands to create the America that we envision for ourselves and coming generations.

Today is also Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. Unlike the man who returned to office today, MLK Jr. was a man of principle.

[misfitwashere]

Here's how Trump's vengeance machine works 

He's the mob boss who keeps his hands clean while others do his dirty work. 

ROBERT REICH

JAN 24

Friends,

Sorry to intrude on you again today, but now that we have come to the end of the first week of Trump II, there’s much to say about the new regime. 

For one thing, Trump’s vengeance machine is even more dangerous than it was before.

The Biden administration had given security protection to Trump’s former secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, his former top aide, Brian Hook, and Trump’s former national security advisor, John Bolton. That was because of credible intelligence showing all three in danger of being killed by agents of Iran. During the first Trump administration, they had authorized the drone strike that killed the powerful Iranian general Oassim Suleimani in early 2020, and Iran is out to get them. 

The outgoing Biden administration privately told the incoming Trump administration that the threat against the three continued. “As recently as the end of last week, two separate government representatives, two separate government agencies called,” Bolton told The New York Times. “They said our current assessment is that the threat level remains the same.”

But on Tuesday, with no explanation, Tump revoked their security protection. They are now at the mercy of Iranian agents in America. 

What had they done to deserve this treatment by Trump? They had committed the sin (in Trump’s mind) of being more loyal to America than to him.

Pompeo had warned Republicans at the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2023 not to look to "celebrity leaders" with "fragile egos. Hook was part of the old Republican foreign-policy establishment (Trump fired Hook on Monday). Bolton had become an outspoken critic Trump. 

If you think Trump’s nominee for FBI director, Kash Patel, will protect them from violence, think again. All three are on Patel’s enemies list, which is basically Trump’s enemies list. (I’ll have more to say about Patel next week when he’s up for senate hearings.)

This is how the Trump vengeance machine works. Trump is the mob boss who keeps his hands clean while others do his dirty work. 

Who else is likely to do Trump’s dirty work? 

Trump has pardoned all the men who attacked the U.S. Capitol on his behalf on January 6, 2021. Trump says they were not violent and did not have weapons — but the world saw their violence; they were also caught on video. Nearly 175 used dangerous or deadly weapons, according to prosecutors. 

They also threw Nazi salutes, posted they intended to start a civil war, vowed “there will be blood,” and called for the lynching of Democratic lawmakers. 

They attacked police with flag poles, bear spray, and a metal whip. They choked officers with their bare hands. They were convicted for, among other things, “hurling officers down a flight of stairs and plotting to kill FBI agents investigating the attacks.” 

A video shows them attacking Officer Michael Fanone, who suffered a heart attack and traumatic brain injury that day. Later he and his family received death threats after he testified in Congress on the incident. They beat Police Officer Daniel Hodges and crushed him in a door, his mouth filled with blood while he cried out for help. 

Now, courtesy of Trump, all these thugs are back on the street. Does anyone really think they will live out the rest of their lives peacefully?

Some of the police officers, including those who testified in January 6 cases, have said they fear for their safety now that the insurrectionists have been released.

“I JUST GOT THE NEWS FROM MY LAWYER… I GOT A PARDON BABY! THANK YOU PRESIDENT TRUMP!!!” Jacob Chansley, dubbed the QAnon shaman as a reflection of his horned-animal headdress and body paint that day, posted on X. “NOW I AM GONNA BY SOME MOTHA FU*KIN GUNS!!! I LOVE THIS COUNTRY!!! GOD BLESS AMERICA!!!!” 

Jackson Reffitt, who reported his father Guy’s participation in the January 6 riot and was a key witness against him, told reporters he fears for his life now that his father is free.

When Stewart Rhodes, leader of the Oath Keepers, was sentenced to 18 years in prison for his role in the riot, the judge said: “You are smart, you are charismatic and compelling and frankly that’s what makes you dangerous. The moment you are released, whenever that may be, you will be ready to take up arms against your government.” And, presumably, arms against Trump’s enemies. 

How many nut-jobs does it take to physically attack someone whom Trump has deemed an enemy? Just ask Paul Pelosi. 

Trump doesn’t deliver violence himself. He just says awful things about a person who has crossed him, like Nancy Pelosi, knowing this will be enough to trigger threats or actual violence by one of his followers. 

Ask the judges and prosecutors who have tried to hold him responsible. 

It doesn’t matter if the awful things Trump says about them are outright lies. In 2018, Trump tweeted a video of Rep. Ilhan Omar that falsely claimed she was dancing on the anniversary of 9/11. She received death threats.

Trump directs his mob with winks and nods. “You had some very fine people on both sides,” he says, reassuring violent bigots where his sympathies lie. 

“Stand back and stand by,” he says, teeing up the thugs, and then: "Big protest in D.C. on January 6th Be there, will be wild!" 

His henchman Elon Musk gives a Nazi salute and then denies that’s what he meant, but the neo-Nazis get the message. 

Trump’s vengeance machine isn’t only about retribution. It’s also intended to intimidate Trump critics — force them to think twice before sounding any alarms, and chill public knowledge or debate about what Trump is doing. 

Be warned. Be safe. And to the extent you can, protect people Trump slams. 

[itsallpoliticsstupid]

The convenient timing of Taylor Swift's endorsement

I'm expecting to be lambasted for this one. But I can take it.

I have a hell of a lot of respect for @mishacollins. Anybody who stands by their convictions even when they are being criticized for them by their fanbase is basically a unicorn in my opinion. He's clearly very passionate about Politics, has his own views and won't bow to others if he's being shouted at, and I really respect him for that.

Which is what the original purpose of this blog was going to be. In essence, I was going to say how it's so important to have celebrities like him talking about their political views to change the narrative in this election, no matter how unpopular they are. And it's frustrating more celebrities can't use their platform like him to do good in this election.

But this morning I read his Facebook post gushing about Taylor Swift's endorsement and my initial thought was 'oh Misha. Why?' And it changed the direction of this blog.

Now whilst I appreciate it is a really important thing that Taylor Swift has thrown her endorsement behind Kamala Harris, can we just talk about the timing of her statement?

Taylor Swift is a woman with unimaginable wealth, and because of this she is able to hire a team of people around her that will be able to keep her appraised of anything in the media that is going to harm her image.

So I find it a little suspect that she claims to have only just found out about the AI images circulating of her endorsing Trump a couple of weeks ago. Yes, she has been on tour, and there have obviously been some horrific incidents associated with her name (the attack in the UK and the foiled terrorist attack), however I can't believe she only just found out.

Even if she mentioned in her statement she didn't want to speak out because of these incidents, that would have felt less disingenuous then saying 'I just found out.'

The second thing, is there has been some negative press surrounding her and the photos with Brittany Mahomes. Personally, I don't care who she's friends with. That's her business. But obviously it isn't a good look being friends with somebody who does seem to be in the Trump camp, especially when you are considered to be a firm friend of the LGBTQIA+ community and ultimately fans see you as a 'feminist icon.'

So to come out with her endorsement just a couple of days after people have been picking up on that, it's just incredibly convenient and feels like a way to get her fans, who were starting to question her back on side.

The third is, she could have endorsed Kamala right at the start. But let's be honest, she wasn't the most popular candidate when she first took over the campaign. It almost feels like she waited to see how popular she would be after the debate before going ahead and posting her endorsement.

One thing I will give her though, as a childfree cat lady, I did find her sign off quite good.

Anyway, those are my thoughts, and vote Kamala Harris in November.

[dalekofchaos]

Chappell Roan is right

Chappel rightfully called out her problems with the Republicans and the democrats and the choices we are given this election and people have a problem with it?

No one here had any issue with Macklemore outright saying he wouldn’t vote for democrats in the fall because of the genocide, and instead praised him for using his platform to speak out, but Chappell Roan says she can’t endorse Kamala but will still vote for her and she gets torn to shreds and “clearly doesn’t understand anything about politics.”

And then the white liberals and privileged gay men came out to smear her name and even began to question and police her queerness. I saw a looooot of progressive white gays side with Zionists in an effort to put a queer woman in her place for the last few days.... Ya'll are worse than the fucking MAGA cultists, at least their evil is obvious, ya'll act like condescending well meaningful bigots but dare to act better.

Notice how when a woman, especially a lesbian with strong convictions or morals stands up for what's right and calls out the hypocrisy of the democratic party, them funding a genocide and not doing enough for Trans people and the LGBTQA+ community in general, they all turn on her for not showing blind allegiance when they have shown nothing but broken promises in return?

Chappell Roan reasonably arguing that she would like better candidates, while clearly stating she thinks Harris is the better candidate. And then read endless comments from Harris supporters saying Roan is an idiot. This is cult behaviour. She's on your side, why demand absolute loyalty?

The people who support Kamala think a winning strategy is to belittle anyone who supports Kamala in the wrong way. Thereby driving away people who would otherwise support her. This, supposedly, is the grown up rational strategy.

And Chappell has a right to be pissed about how the Democratic Party's policies have failed Trans people and the LGBTQ+ community as a whole.

These are the polices that are harming Trans people.

This article alone just shows how the LGBTQA+ community feel unprotected and unheard by the democratic party.

It also doesn't help that in the most recent debate, seeing how trans and queer rights were not even once a topic of discussion. Seeing how trans and queer rights were not even once a topic of discussion. It hurts, and its a terrifying reality we live in.

It’s not just debates. Feel free to check the Democrats 2024 platform’s LGBTQ+ section (pp. 56-57), there’s almost nothing in there for trans people.

So I don’t blame her for not wanting to put her name behind someone who represents a party that just is NOT doing enough.

The way Chappell Roan is just saying we need to hold politician’s accountable to higher standards and demand more from them instead of just accepting their actions, is completely logical and reasonable. The fact that some on the internet has bullied Chappell Roan for dare saying republicans and democrats have both done a terrible job as leaders instead of just blindly praising them is crazy. Like she's saying she's still voting blue, but she's not happy with them which that's valid, that's what normal people should do, question your candidates and request them to be better the same way people are demanding Chappel to be "better." it’s so refreshing to see a celebrity actually talk about and criticize politics instead of just making an instagram post once and pretending everything will be fine once kamala wins. Also a lot of the people who are questioning her queerness on twitter. Gross. idc if you're mad about her recent stances or not, but policing someone's queerness is honestly homophobic and it shows the internet only accepts someone's identity so long as they always agree with them.

Make no mistake about it. Trump, Vance and the Christofaasicts are a clear and present evil.

But how do you decide to fight that evil with Bush and Reagan era republicans to endorse you? Reagan and Bush DESTROYED this country. You think Trump is bad? Everything you think Trump did bad. Everything you know is wrong with this country. It all comes back to Ronald fucking Reagan and there is a goddamned fucking reason why people considered Reagan the Antichrist. On his best days George Bush was a worse president than Donald Trump. The Iraq war was worse than anything Trump did. 2,000,000 civilians killed and 37,000,000 were forced to flee their homes. Nearly everything terrible Trump did in office, Bush laid the groundwork for it. and the fucking democrats rehabilitated him.

How do you look me in the eye and say Kamala getting that vile fucking goblin DIck fucking Cheney's endorsement is a fucking good thing? He should be tried for fucking war crimes, not endorsing Kamala Harris.

Not to mention a black muslim man was wrongfully executed two days ago and no one did a damned fucking thing. Not the so called "pro-life" Republicans and not the democrats. No one in the Biden admin fought for Marcellus Williams

It’s funny watching people go after Roan for having reservations about the Democrats on the same day that a report was released that Blinken knew Israel was starving Palestinians while the Biden administration pretended that it wasn’t happening so they could keep sending weapons.

People would rather smear Chappell Roan than hold politicians accountable. They would rather bury their heads in the sands. Unfriendly fucking reminder, THIS was liberals reaction to the names of Palestinian children being named at the DNC and wouldn't even invite a Palestinian to speak at the DNC.

THIS is the face of the democrat party and liberals. They have shown us time and time again that they are not on our side. They will defend white interests over the collective struggles of Black, Brown, poor and disenfranchised people around the world. This is what Chappell Roan is trying to tell us why she is unhappy with voting for Kamala Harris. Biden, Kamala and their ilk are funding and arming a genocide, not doing enough for LGBTQA+ rights.

They spend millions to billions of dollars on Israel's war crimes, meanwhile people still don’t have healthcare, access to affordable housing, affordable education, no clean energy, reproductive rights and LGBTQ+ rights are trampled on and disability benefits get denied to deserving applicants- and people wonder why I say I hate this fucking country.

I am so fucking tired of human rights being held hostage because YOU empowered the Republicans.

You had ages to Codify RVW and didn't fucking do it. You allowed the Republicans to kill it and you let them see what they can do and because of that we have Project 2025 on the horizon and you have completely and utterly fucked over women and the LGBTQA+ community just so you can hold our fucking rights hostage as leverage for us to vote for you.

Here's what's gonna happen. Either we get a straight up Christofascist dystopian nightmare or "nothing will fundamentally change 2.0"

UNFUCKINGFRIENDLY FUCKING REMINDER, WE HAD MULTIPLE UN RESOLUTIONS TO FREE THE HOSTAGES AND END THE GENOCIDE, BUT THE US CONSTANTLY VETOED IT.

So vote whoever you want for, but use critical thinking and for fuck's sake, if Kamala wins, don't act like this is over. Demand better. Hold Kamala and her administration accountable. If Trump wins, don't blame Chappell and don't blame leftists. Blame Kamala and the democrats for refusing to change. For refusing to fight for their voters interests. For refusing to stand AGAINST A FUCKING GENOCIDE!

“fuck Kamala, yet fuck Trump a bit more too. so I’ll vote Kamala if I have to, and nothing else. and will protest her everyday forever afterwards,” is *the* mainstream youth opinion, but white liberals and privileged white gays are too self-obsessed and self-absorbed to get that.

People have more expectations of 20 year old pop stars than of the government and I think that’s a major problem.

Chappell is a beautiful anomaly. Be like Chappell & demand more.

Chappell picks local drag queens as her openers, donates concert proceeds to charities supporting trans poc and palestianians, etc, wanted to read Palestinian poems at the white house when she refused to let them pink-wash her, constantly vocalizes what side of important issues shes on but the second she refuses to blindly endorse a candidate for valid reasons.

Her stance is the most punk rock thing I’ve seen from an artists since Green Day dropped American Idiot and since Sinéad O'Connor took a stand against the Catholic Church and stood up for Palestine. Truly, so eloquently put and she’s a rockstar and I need everyone to understand how much I love her.

It’s so refreshing to see a celebrity actually talk about and criticize politics instead of just making an instagram post once and pretending everything will be fine once Kamala wins.

I can't help but feel if a straight white male cis celebrity had said what Chappell said he'd be treated as some sort of political wizard.

This is from the same Chappell Roan who called out the incredibly parasocial relationships about celebrities is weird and dared to stand up for herself and put up boundaries and since then everyone has just been looking for a reason to be outraged by whatever she says/does

Chappell cares about Palestine. That's a huge thing with her. Right, like, right. And it's a huge thing with a lot of young people. Like, you're not really gonna get an enthusiastic endorsement from somebody who's very, you know. Anti-War in Gaza. You're like, "you should be settling." It's like, not your place to tell her what she does and doesn't value. Chappell's an artist. Chappell's not a politician. Chappell doesn't owe you a fucking thing.

So yeah, Fuck Trump and fuck Kamala and Chappell Roan, keep going because you are a star and an icon because for once we are seeing someone who won't spoon-fed propaganda and stands up for their convictions and morals. We are TIRED of the "lesser evil" So yeah Chappell is right.

[worlds-worst-ships]

Do you ship it?

Based on an idea by @yesneverno

You didn't leave your name which is unusual for regulars to the blog, but I've seen you around a lot lately so I thought I'd post your idea before I go offline all day tomorrow.

As you can see, I struggle to find good things to say about Donny.

[in4newz]

Elon musk did a nazi salute twice at the inauguration, and republicans are defending him

Elon musk did a nazi salute twice at the inauguration, and republicans are defending him.

trump revoked executive order 11246, which prohibited discrimination.

trump put all dei employees on leave to be fired.

trump blamed the dc plane crash on dei.

trump banned all lgbtq+ flags from being hung in government buildings.

trump ordered the pentagon to cancel celebration of mlk jr. day, black history month, women's history month, holocaust remembrance day, asian american pacific islander heritage month, lgbtq+ pride month, juneteenth, women's equality day, national hispanic heritage month, national disability employment awarenessmonth, and national american indian heritage month.

trump rolled back biden’s executive order to lower prescription drug costs for people using medicare and medicaid.

trump rescinded the $35 cap on insulin, and prices are expected to rise to $1500 a month.

trump ordered the national institutes of health to cancel their review panels on cancer research.

trump ended the guidelines to prevent ai misuse. the guidelines prevent many things, but notably it prevents production of ai child pornography.

when sean hannity asked trump about the economy, he said “i don’t care”, after campaigning with the economy as his main talking point.

trump has withdrawn the us from the world health organization.

trump is ordering health agencies to stop reporting on bird flu and halt publications of scientific reports.

trump has pardoned over 1500 people who stormed the capitol on january 6th.

trump changed mount denali back to mount mckinley.

trump signed an executive order to rename the gulf of mexico to gulf of america.

trump shut down cbp one, an app which granted legal entry to 1 million+ immigrants.

trump is allowing ice raids at churches and elementary schools.

trump announced plans to declare a national emergency at the us-mexico border.

trump signed an executive order to expand the use of the death penalty.

trump disbanded the school safety board that works to prevent school shootings. it was comprised of survivors, educators, and gun violence prevention advocates and formed after the school shooting in parkland.

trump withdrew from the paris climate act.

trump revoked all protections for transgender troops in the us military.

trump rescinded executive orders made by biden that benefited and protected women, lgbtq+ people, black americans, hispanic americans, asian americans, native hawaiians, and pacific islanders.

trump is attempting to make it legal to refuse to hire or fire pregnant women.

multiple state legislators are drafting bills to allow the punishment for abortion to be the death penalty.

trump pardoned 23 individuals convicted under the freedom of access to clinic entrances (FACE) act for their anti-abortion activism, including oftentimes violent protests at abortion clinics.

trump signed an executive order allowing deportation of foreign students who they believe express support for hamas or hezbollah.

trump announced that the us government will from here on out only recognize male and female as sexes. intersex is not legally recognized anymore.

trump refused to swear on the bible during his inauguration. (i’ve gotten some comments about this specific point. i didn’t include it because i’m christian, because i’m not. i’m agnostic. i included it because he’s the first president in history to refuse to swear on ANYTHING, bible or not. in the bible it teaches that the only person who cannot touch the bible is the antichrist, yet that on TOP of everything else will never convince his followers that he’s unfit.)

the trump administration paused health communications to prevent the fda from announcing food recalls.

andy ogles drafted a constitutional amendment to allow trump to be president for a third term.

georgia republican congressman mike collins called for the deportation of new jersey born mariann budde, the bishop who urged trump to “have mercy” on the lgbtq+ community and immigrants during a service at the national cathedral.

six states (arizona, idaho, iowa, kansas, mississippi, and north dakota) are planning on challenging obergefell v. hodges, which would end same-sex marriage nationwide. about a dozen more states have representatives are also considering filing similar resolutions.

amazon revoked protections for lgbtq+ and black employees.

the cdc has removed their hiv prevention page.

the united states state department has officially changed its “travelers with special conditions” page which previously said “lgbtqi+ travelers” to “lgb travelers”, completely getting rid of the tqi+.

every single republican told us we were overreacting. trump swore he had nothing to do with project 2025 yet continues implementing details outlined in it. not a single person has the right to tell us we’re being dramatic anymore.

hope “cheaper eggs and gas” was worth it.

Source

[mariacallous]

The name of the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C., is irrevocably linked to political scandal. The hotel hasn’t shied away from capitalizing on it: For about $2,000 a night you can stay in the “Scandal Suite,” where the 1972 break-in at Democratic National Committee's (DNC) headquarters, the crime that led to President Richard Nixon’s resignation, was planned. The room is replete with Nixon memorabilia, a mini-Disneyland devoted to a paranoid, power-hungry president who once declared, “Well, when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.” 

On Jan. 19 the Watergate Hotel will host a celebration of a different president, who also committed crimes and subverted democracy, but instead of resigning, fomented an insurrection, was convicted of felonies, and later won reelection. 

The “Coronation Ball,” features a guest list of MAGA celebs and “New Right” luminaries, and comes the day before Donald Trump’s second inauguration, when he’ll retake his position in the White House after a four-year absence, this time with a Supreme Court he helped put in place which, like Nixon, believes crimes aren’t illegal if the president does them. 

The $875-per-ticket black-tie soiree is organized by Jonathan Keeperman, unmasked last year by The Guardian as the pseudonymous far-right Twitter influencer “L0m3z,” who runs the publishing house Passage Press, publishing the works of both historical and contemporary fascists. The company’s biggest author is arguably Curtis Yarvin, a formerly pseudonymous blogger who has advocated for a “national CEO, [or] what’s called a dictator” to be in charge of America. He is scheduled to attend the Coronation Ball, according to a post from Passage Press.

So is Jack Posobiec, author of the book “Unhumans,” which argues the people with left-of-center beliefs are just that; Mike Cernovich, a date rape denier; Christopher Rufo, the man largely responsible for manufacturing moral panics about “critical race theory” and “trans ideology;” and Steve Bannon, the close Trump confidant recently released from prison after refusing to comply with a congressional subpoena from the committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

That the Coronation Ball is happening at the Watergate Hotel just feels a little bit too on the nose, and is perhaps representative of just how far whatever semblance of democracy we had is backsliding. At least Nixon resigned. But now the same hotel where his lackeys covertly orchestrated his crimes is playing host to another president’s lackeys, who don’t need to hide their contempt for democracy, or their views that instead of the inauguration of a democracy, they see this moment as the coronation of a king. 

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Iam not usually one to offer diagnoses of people I’ve never met, but it does seem like the pundit class of the American media is suffering from severe memory loss. Because they’re doing exactly what they did in the 2016 presidential race – providing wildly asymmetrical and inflammatory coverage of the one candidate running against Donald J Trump.

They have become a stampeding herd producing an avalanche of stories suggesting Biden is unfit, will lose and should go away, at a point in the campaign in which replacing him would likely be somewhere between extremely difficult and utterly catastrophic. They do this while ignoring something every scholar and critic of journalism knows well and every journalist should. As Nikole Hannah-Jones put it: “As media we consistently proclaim that we are just reporting the news when in fact we are driving it. What we cover, how we cover it, determines often what Americans think is important and how they perceive these issues yet we keep pretending it’s not so.” They are not reporting that he is a loser; they are making him one.

According to one journalist’s tally, the New York Times has run 192 stories on the subject since the debate, including 50 editorials and 142 news stories. The Washington Post, which has also gone for saturation coverage, published a resignation speech they wrote for him. Not to be outdone, the New Yorker’s editor-in-chief declared that Biden not going away “would be an act not only of self-delusion but of national endangerment” and had a staff writer suggest that Democrats should use the never-before-deployed 25th amendment.

Since this would have to be led by Vice-President Kamala Harris, it would be a sort of insider coup. And so it goes with what appears to be a journalistic competition to outdo each other in the aggressiveness of the attacks and the unreality of the proposals. It’s a dogpile and a panic, and there is no one more unable to understand their own emotional life, biases and motives than people who are utterly convinced of their own ironclad rationality and objectivity, AKA most of these pundits.

Speaking of coups, we’ve had a couple of late, which perhaps merit attention as we consider who is unfit to hold office. This time around, Trump is not just a celebrity with a lot of sexual assault allegations, bankruptcies and loopily malicious statements, as he was in 2016. He’s a convicted criminal who orchestrated a coup attempt to steal an election both through backroom corruption and public lies and through a violent attack on Congress. The extremist US supreme court justices he selected during his last presidential term themselves staged a coup this very Monday, overthrowing the US constitution itself and the principle that no one is above the law to make presidents into kings, just after legalizing bribery of officials, and dismantling the regulatory state by throwing out the Chevron deference.

Trump’s own former staffers are part of the Heritage Foundation’s team planning to implement Project 25 if he wins, which would finish off our system of government with yet another coup. “We are in the process of the second American revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be,” said the foundation’s president the other day. This alarms me. So does the behavior of the US mainstream media, which seems more concerned with sabotaging the only thing standing between us and this third coup.

“Why aren’t we talking about Trump’s fascism?” demands the headline of Jeet Heer’s piece in the Nation, to which the answer might be a piece by the Nation’s own editor-in-chief titled “Biden’s patriotic duty” that proposes his duty is to get lost. Sometimes I wonder if all this coverage is because the media knows how to cover a normal problem like a sub-par candidate; they don’t know how to cover something as abnormal and unprecedented as the end of the republic. So for the most part they don’t.

Biden is old. He was one kind of appalling in the 27 June debate, listless and sometimes stumbling and muddling his words. But Trump was another kind of appalling, in that almost everything he said was an outrageous lie and some of it was a threat. I get that writing about the monstrosity that is Trump faces the problem that it’s not news; he’s been a monster spouting lurid nonsense all his life (but his political crimes are recent, and his free-associating public soliloquies on sharks, batteries, toilets, water flow and Hannibal Lector, among other topics, are genuinely demented). He’s a racist, a fascist and a rapist (according to a civil-court verdict).

We are deciding whether this nation has a future as a more-or-less democratic republic this November, and on that rides the fate of the earth when it comes to acting on climate change. If the US falters at this decisive moment in the climate crisis, it will drag down everyone else’s efforts. Under Trump, it will. But the shocking supreme court decisions this summer and the looming threat of authoritarianism have gotten little ink and air, compared to the hue and cry about Biden’s competence.

Few seem to remember that Biden’s age and his verbal gaffes were an issue in the 2020 campaign. Biden is a lifelong stutterer, and the effort to keep his words on track means that he operates under an extra burden with every unscripted answer he gives, particularly under pressure (though he had a long, easygoing conversation with Howard Stern a couple of months ago, in which he discusses his stuttering at about the 1:13 mark).

Some speech pathologists have suggested he may (not does, just may) have a disorder that sometimes accompanies stuttering, called cluttering, which is not an intellectual deficiency but a sometimes hectic and disorderly translation of thoughts into words. In recent months, actual gerontologists have said in print that Biden appears to have normal signs of aging, not signs of dementia. Nevertheless, the amateur armchair diagnosticians have been out in packs, and their confidence in their ability to diagnose from watching TV is itself an alarming delusion. I am not giving Biden a clean bill of health; I’m saying that I don’t have a basis to render a verdict (and neither do the august editors of large publications).

Few seem to remember that Biden’s age and his verbal gaffes were an issue in the 2020 campaign

Although the Biden administration seems to have run extremely well for three and a half years, with a strong cabinet, few scandals and little turnover, a thriving economy and some major legislative accomplishments, the narrative the punditocracy has created suggest we should ignore this record and decide on the basis of the 90-minute debate and reference to newly surfaced swarms of anonymous sources that Biden is incompetent. Quite a lot of them have been running magical-realism fantasy-football scenarios in which it is fun and easy to swap in your favorite substitute candidate. The reality is that it is hard and quite likely to be a terrible mess. Nevertheless, this pretense is supposed to mean that telling a presidential candidate in mid-campaign to get lost is fine.

The main argument against Biden is not that he can’t govern – that would be hard to make given that he seems to have done so for the past years – but that he can’t win the election. But candidates do not win elections by themselves. Elections are won, to state the obvious, by how the electorate turns out and votes. The electorate votes based on how they understand the situation and evaluate the candidates. That is, of course, in large part shaped by the media, as Hannah-Jones points out, and the media is right now campaigning hard for a Democratic party loss. The other term for that is a Republican victory. Few things have terrified and horrified me the way this does.

Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. She is the author of Orwell’s Roses and co-editor with Thelma Young Lutunatabua of the climate anthology Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility

[sleepynegress]

I'd love to be able to join the fray of those celebrating his 34-count conviction, but... for me, a Black woman, who never had any friends or family who ever thought even for a millisecond that Trump was in any way a man worthy of anything resembling consideration...

And watching white Americans twist themselves every which dishonest way to their souls to justify this man's uplift... and/or darkly acknowledge the discomfort at their family gatherings... I'm just going about my day.

[vague-humanoid]

Inside the Turbulent, Secret World of the AP3 Militia — ProPublica

Last February, some 20 men and their wives gathered for dinner at an upscale restaurant in Spokane, Washington, for their annual Valentine’s Day celebration. The men weren’t just friends; they did community service work together. They had been featured on local television, in khakis and baseball caps, delivering 1,200 pounds of food to an area veterans’ center; they were gearing up for their next food drive, which they called Operation Hunger Smash. A few days after the holiday, the men went camping in the snow-speckled mountains outside Spokane, where they grilled rib-eyes and bacon-wrapped asparagus over a bonfire.

They also engaged in more menacing activities. They assembled regularly — sometimes wearing night-vision goggles in the dark — to practice storming buildings together with semiautomatic rifles. Their drills included using sniper rifles to shoot targets from distances of half a mile. And they belonged to a shadowy organization whose members were debating, with ever more intensity, whether they should engage in mass-scale political violence.

They were among the thousands of members of American Patriots Three Percent, a militia that has long been one of the largest in the United States and has mostly managed to avoid scrutiny. Its ranks included cops and convicted criminals, active-duty U.S. soldiers and small-business owners, truck drivers and health care professionals. Like other militias, AP3 has a vague but militant right-wing ideology, a pronounced sense of grievance and a commitment to armed action. It has already sought to shape American life through vigilante operations: AP3 members have “rounded up” immigrants at the Texas border, assaulted Black Lives Matter protesters and attempted to crack down on people casting absentee ballots.

Now with the presidential election less than 100 days away, AP3 members see the fate of their country turning on a turbulent, charged campaign. They’re certain that Democrats will try to steal — not for the first time, in their view — the White House from Donald Trump. “The next election won’t be decided at a Ballot Box,” an AP3 leader wrote several months ago in a private Telegram chat. “It’ll be decided at the ammo box.” He has said he is ready to force his way into voting centers if need be, or “whatever it takes.”

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Hugh Dougherty at The Daily Beast:

Jeffrey Epstein described himself as Donald Trump’s “closest friend” and claimed intimate knowledge of his proclivity for sex, including cuckolding his best friends, according to recordings obtained exclusively by the Daily Beast. The convicted pedophile even boasted of his closeness to Trump and his now-wife Melania by claiming, “the first time he slept with her was on my plane,” which was dubbed the Lolita Express.

Epstein spoke at length about Trump with the author Michael Wolff in August 2017, two years before being found dead in his jail cell. Wolff was researching his bombshell bestseller Fire and Fury at the time. The recordings cast more light on Trump’s long relationship with Epstein, and will add to debate over the character of the Republican candidate, especially his attitudes and conduct toward women, just days before the election. The tapes tell Epstein’s version of the relationship between two former friends and their very different paths: One toward infamy, prison and suicide; the other toward power, the Oval Office and his own criminal conviction for paying hush money to a porn star. Trump’s camp referred to the tapes’ release as “false smears” and “election interference.” The tapes also offer unusual insight into the friendship of two wealthy, powerful men who frequently went out on the town together, prowling for women in New York and Atlantic City. [...]

Asked by Wolff, “How do you know all this?” Epstein replied, “I was Donald’s closest friend for 10 years.” Wolff shared the tape with the Daily Beast ahead of discussing it on his Fire and Fury podcast on Monday. Last Thursday he caused shockwaves by revealing a few seconds of a separate recording in which Epstein spoke in detail about the inner workings of the Trump administration. Wolff also said Thursday that the pedophile showed off photos of Trump with topless young women sitting in his lap. Wolff, a veteran journalist and author who was also the biographer of Rupert Murdoch, has long attracted praise and bromides. When Fire & Fury was published in January 2018, Trump tried to stop it with a failed cease and desist order, then threatened to sue. No case ever materialized, and it sold 5 million copies worldwide. Wolff, who appears regularly on his Fire and Fury podcast, wrote two more books on Trump after Fire and Fury, and about Epstein in 2021’s Too Famous.

Wolff says he has up to 100 hours of recordings of interviews with Epstein, including from using him as a source for Fire and Fury, and from years of meetings when the disgraced financier appeared to want Wolff to write a biography of him. Wolff said he decided to release parts of the archive after a new accuser, a former Miss Switzerland, alleged last week that Trump had groped her in 1992.

[...] Trump’s long friendship with Epstein, which spanned the late 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s has been well documented. In the 1990s, the two publicly partied at Mar-a-Lago and went to a Victoria’s Secret Angels show together. In 2002, Trump told New York Magazine of Epstein, “I’ve known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy. He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.” Epstein’s infamous leaked addressbooks had Trump’s own phone number as well as Melania’s, while Trump’s name appeared seven times in the passenger logs of Epstein’s planes. (The books and logs also included princes, politicians and potentates such as Bill Clinton, former British prime minister Tony Blair, former Israeli PM Ehud Barak, Prince Andrew and celebrities and billionaires including Mick Jagger and Les Wexner.)

[...] In 2022 Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s former girlfriend who procured him underage girls, would be sentenced to 20 years in federal prison for the sex trafficking of minors. Upon hearing of her arrest in 2020, Trump, then president, said he wished her well. “Her friend or boyfriend was either killed or committed suicide in jail. Yeah, I wish her well… Good luck.” In 2004, Epstein and Trump fell out when they both tried to buy a Palm Beach estate, Maison de L’Amitié, out of bankruptcy. The next year, the FBI began investigating Epstein for child sex trafficking.

In 2019, on the day after Epstein’s arrest, Trump said in the Oval Office, “I was not a fan of his, that I can tell you,” and that they had not been friends for 15 years. He said it “did not much matter” what the fall-out had been over. This September, asked about Epstein by the tech podcaster Lex Fridman, Trump said: “He was a good salesman. He was a hailing, hearty type of guy. He had some nice assets that he’d throw around like islands, but a lot of big people went to that island. But fortunately, I was not one of them.”

[...]

The Epstein tape includes an allegation—which is impossible to verify—that Trump had an affair with a politician while in the White House. Epstein offered no proof or sourcing for the claim. He also alleged that Trump cheated on both his first wife Ivana and second wife Marla Maples with “a Black girl.” At one section, Epstein used a Yiddish racial slur to refer to Black women and alleged Trump boasted to him, “I’m f---ing all these Black women.” The tape mixes sexual allegations with other aspects of Trump’s life. Early in the recording Epstein is heard to say, “You probably know he had a scalp reduction. He’s getting the same male pattern baldness that we all have. He had his scalp reduced. It’s hysterical.” Trump has long refused to release full medical records while his White House medical reports did not disclose any prior surgeries.

“He’s charming. In a devious way, he’s charming. To some extent it’s a typical tragedy where he believes his own bulls---”

— Epstein on Trump

And Epstein offers his eyewitness account of Trump Tower and Trump’s office where, he said, Trump had “fake honors” on the wall. Trump, he claimed, would yell at his personal assistant Rhona Graff, “who’s a loyal, perfect, secretary,” as well as Matthew Calamari Snr., his bodyguard, and Michael Cohen, his attorney who is now an enemy. Epstein compared Trump to “an emotionally challenged 9-year-old,” and said, “He screams and yells at Rhona more than anybody else. His screaming is how he treats people. He has a tantrum, not a temper. If you don’t understand him, it’s frightening. Once you understand him, it’s sort of silly.” Epstein also told Wolff he had positive things to say about Trump. “He’s charming. In a devious way, he’s charming,” he said. “To some extent it’s a typical tragedy where he believes his own bulls---. He has delusions of grandiosity, then he takes it on board.” He added that he had a “self-deprecating nature” and was “not vulgar.” “He’s funny,” Epstein said. “Self-awareness means you’re self-aware. He’s aware of that person, Donald Trump. He talks about The Trump, The Trumpster. ‘Trump’s getting laid.’”

On the tape Epstein, speaking in a New York accent, also mentioned the rich and powerful. (In a deposition released after his death Epstein admitted under oath that he dropped the names of people he had never met.) The names he mentioned on tape include: Former president Bill Clinton; Ivanka Trump and her husband Jared Kushner; then-Defense Secretary James Mattis; and the billionaires Carl Icahn and Tom Barrack, both of whom are friends of Trump. Clinton was a long-standing friend of Epstein but has denied any association after the pedophile’s disgrace in the mid-2000s. Mattis has no known association with him. Ivanka was photographed with him as a child but Kushner has never been known to be linked to him. Barrack appeared in a leaked appointment diary for Epstein from 2016, while Carl Icahn, a corporate raider and long-time Trump friend, was in Epstein’s 1997 address book. Startlingly for a man who became one of the world’s most notorious sex offenders, Epstein on the tapes offers a damning judgment of Trump, telling Wolff, “The moral compass just does not exist.”

The Daily Beast reported that Jeffrey Epstein was Donald Trump's closest friend for about 10 years, according to tapes obtained from the outlet that featured Michael Wolff interviewing the late pedophile.

[tomorrowusa]

House Republicans may be relieved that they finally have a Speaker after 22 days of infighting. But the rest of the country should worry that there's a far right extremist second in line to the presidency. "MAGA Mike" Johnson is even more extreme than Trump on some issues.

Election denier, climate skeptic, anti-abortion: seven beliefs of new US House speaker Mike Johnson

He tried to overturn the 2020 election In the modern Republican party, supporting Donald Trump’s lie about voter fraud in his defeat by Joe Biden is hardly an outlandish position. But Johnson took it further. After the election, he voiced support for Trump’s conspiracy theory that voting machines were rigged. Later, he was one of 147 Republicans to object to results in key states, even after a pro-Trump mob attacked Congress on January 6, a riot now linked to nine deaths and hundreds of convictions. [ ... ] He was a spokesperson for a ‘hate group’ Before entering politics, Johnson worked for the Alliance Defending Freedom – designated a hate group by the Southern Law Poverty Center, which tracks US extremists. According to the SPLC, the ADF has “supported the recriminalisation of sexual acts between consenting LGBTQ+ adults in the US and criminalisation abroad; defended state-sanctioned sterilisation of trans people abroad; contended that LGBTQ+ people are more likely to engage in paedophilia; and claimed that a ‘homosexual agenda’ will destroy Christianity and society”. [ ... ] He opposes LGBTQ+ rights In state politics and at the national level, Johnson has worked to claw back gains made by LGBTQ+ Americans in their fight for equality. In 2016, as he ran for Congress, he told the Louisiana Baptist Message he had “been out on the front lines of the ‘culture war’ defending religious freedom, the sanctity of human life and biblical values, including the defense of traditional marriage, and other ideals like these when they’ve been under assault”. He has since led efforts for a national “don’t say gay” bill, regarding the teaching of LGBTQ+ issues in schools, and is also opposed to gender-affirming care for children. On Wednesday, Rev Jasmine Beach-Ferrara, executive director of the Campaign for Southern Equality, said: “Johnson has made a career out of attacking the LGBTQ+ community at every turn." His positions are out of touch with the clear majority support for LGBTQ+ equality in our country. His new leadership role is just further proof of the dangerous priorities of the GOP and the critical stakes for our democracy – and for LGBTQ+ Americans – in 2024.” [ ... ] He is stringently anti-abortion Johnson has maintained a relatively low profile in Congress but when last year the supreme court removed the right to abortion, Johnson celebrated “a historic and joyful day”. Though Dobbs v Jackson returned abortion rights to the states, Johnson has co-sponsored bills for a nationwide ban. And as he neared his position of power, footage spread of striking remarks in a House hearing. “Roe v Wade did constitutional cover to the elective killing of unborn children in America, period,” Johnson said. [ ... ] He wants to cut social security and Medicare As those comments indicate, Johnson wants to cut programs on which millions rely. Such cuts are widely regarded as a political third-rail – Trump has used the issue to attack Republican presidential rivals, saying only he will defend such benefits – but Johnson is far from alone in wanting to swing the axe. He is an advocate for ‘covenant marriage’ When he married his wife, Kelly, in 1999, the couple agreed to a “covenant” marriage: a conservative Christian idea that makes it harder to divorce. The Johnsons promoted the idea on ABC’s Good Morning America. [ ... ] He is a climate skeptic In 2017, Johnson told voters in his oil-rich home state: “The climate is changing, but the question is, is it being caused by natural cycles over the span of the Earth’s history? Or is it changing because we drive SUVs? I don’t believe in the latter. I don’t think that’s the primary driver.”

You'd really have to try hard to find somebody worse than MAGA Mike. But we're not without the power of the vote; we need to use that power every chance we get.

November 7th is Election Day in many parts of the US. Most notably...

Ohio's statewide ballot measure to restore reproductive freedom by placing a woman's right to choose in the Ohio Constitution. A YES vote on Issue 1 takes abortion out of the hands of the gerrymandered GOP legislature.

Kentucky's Democratic governor is up for re-election.

The Virginia legislature is up for election. If Republicans gain control of both chambers they will try to ban abortion; reproductive tyranny is part of the GOP agenda whenever they hold a trifecta in a state. There's also a special election to fill a vacancy for a US House seat in VA-04.

The state legislature in New Jersey is up for election.

There are judicial elections in Pennsylvania including for the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. There's also a special election to fill a vacancy in the Penn House of Representatives which is currently tied 101 Democrats – 101 Republicans.

All state offices in Mississippi including governor and legislature are up for election. Surprisingly, polls show the GOP incumbent governor ahead by just 1% with 10% undecided.

Like Mississippi, all state offices in Louisiana are up for election.

Rhode Island has a special election to fill a vacancy for a US House seat in RI-01.

^^^ Those are just the highlights. There are elections of some sort in most states on November 7th.

Republicans may grumble at times, but they always turn out for elections. They have a disproportionate amount of power in the US because they vote while many of their liberal neighbors stay home or become too ideologically persnickety.

Allegedly "moderate" GOP House members ultimately fell in line and unanimously backed a far right Speaker.

Elections at all levels count. Speaker "MAGA Mike" Johnson got his start in politics in the Louisiana legislature. He is now the highest ranking GOP elected official in the US.

There's no such thing as an unimportant election. Vote in the November 7th election and actively encourage like-minded friends, family, and neighbors to do so as well.

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