The whole point of things like this is to dilute the impact of the words being used. This way, when they get caught doing the exact same thing, it won’t seem “bad” in the eyes of their constituents.
It’s one of the reasons the GOP are pushing so hard to impeach Biden. So when people say that Trump was impeached twice, the MAGA crowd can just say “Yeah, so was Biden. So was Clinton. Presidents get impeached all the time. They never get removed. It’s all for political show anyway, it’s no big deal. The next guy will probably get impeached too.”
It’s why GOP politicians are trying to frame even minor incidents of protest as “insurrections” or “coups”. They know it sounds ridiculous. That’s the whole point. If you water down words like “insurrection”, “coup”, “sedition”, and “treason”, then the MAGA crowd can just say “January 6th wasn’t an insurrection. The country is still here. Quit calling every protest an insurrection. We’re not in the 1780s any more.”
Same thing with the RICO charges. Why do you think Miller and MTG were tweeting “RICO?”. Charge everybody with RICO charges and Trump being charged no longer seems like a big deal.
It’s a long term strategy. Make the idea of being charged with crimes just a normal part of the political process, and make everybody think it’s not that bad. That way, when they’re caught engaging in the corrupt acts they routinely accuse others of engaging in, it’ll be considered “normal” and “no big deal”, and make it almost impossible to remove them.
Just like we did with crony capitalist economy. It’s ok because it’s just the norm for those with capital to fuck over those without. No pitchforks required.
It’s a very insidious way to make the country more like Russia, where there’s so much propaganda there is no objective truth, words have no meaning, and rule of law of even more nebulous.
I offer as proof of your claim how Nunes kept calling things “drug deals” during the first impeachment because there was testimony that John Bolton and his moustache said he wasn’t going to be a part of the “drug deal” being cooked up in Ukraine (referring to the scheme to blackmail Zelenskyy).
Using similar logic we should be able to use for that. It’s a load of bullshit. The government is constantly giving money directly to rich people, but God forbid we do the same thing for regular people.
The difference is that the PPP loans were designed to be partially or fully forgiven. They were given out to stop businesses from going under thanks to COVID lockdowns/border closures/etc. They were never meant to be paid back. They should never have used the term “loan” for them, as clearly doing so made a lot of people think that they were in any way equivalent to a student loan.
Don't get it mistaken, if anyone can find some for Biden we'll be happy to charge them, too... This isn't liberals against conservatives, it's Americans against fascism.
Ford Motor Co.'s second-quarter profit more than tripled to $1.92 billion versus a year ago (source)
Revenue rose 12% to $44.95 billion
Kinda hard to drum up sympathy for the company when it’s raking in almost $2 billion in profit per quarter. Yes, Ford is burning about $1billon per quarter on EVs right now. That’s not something the workers should be financing. That’s money the company is investing to be viable in the future. That sucks for the shareholders; but, they are the ones who will reap any benefits of that investment and they should be the ones eating the cost.
'State' thugs is a strong term. Most police departments, by statements and actions, don't give a shit about what the government wants from them, except when it coincides with their ability to brutalize citizens with impunity.
Is that a textualist or originalist interpretation of the constitution?
In other words…
Are the Supreme Priests going to go by the strict definition of the words or the way they feel the founding fathers intended the words? Ahh who am I kidding?? They are just playing…
“Who’s line is it anyway?: Supreme Edition
The court where everything’s made up and the constitution don’t matter”
Senator Josh Hawley from Missouri has openly acknowledged that the GOP strategy is to make it so miserable for Democrats in red and purple states that they will move to blue states. That would, in turn, cement Republican power in the White House, Senate and thereby the Supreme Court.
I'd say it's a valid strategy, abhorrent though. Because of the rural bias in GOP there will naturally be more counties, states etc that run gop if Dems move to denser blue areas.
More importantly, pushes everything closer to the tipping point where Republicans can pull off Constitutional amendments without meaningful opposition. I see no reason to expect there won't be a significant push towards cementing Christofascism Constitutionally at that point, given the way the party is currently angled.
Yeah, but the strategy’s multi-pronged, so even if you stay and suffer for your suffrage, they can find new reasons to prevent you from voting/discount your ballot. And then you’ve put your life and happiness in jeopardy for nothing. Not a great recruitment pitch for the Stay Put Brigade.
Right? I’m also in Texas because Uncle Sam sent me there. The moment my contract is up, I’m fucking OUT of here.
Wish I hadn’t changed my state of record to be Texas, but that just means I’ll keep voting there until I can bounce. Right now I’m mad favoring Allred to unseat Cruz in 2024.
Me too. I’m a clinical social worker here, and so many of my LGBTQ+ patients have been struggling with suicidal ideation with the politics here, especially with the most recent legislative session. I’m gonna stay here as long as possible and vote in every fucking election possible. Lately I’ve even been voting in the Republican primaries against the extremist candidates. It’s so sad, because it wasn’t this bad here when I was growing up in the 90s. We even had a Dem governor.
How “Christian” of him, eh? It’s disgusting. We are human souls who deserve safety and to not live in fear. I have hope that many Gen Z Texans feel disgusted as well, won’t move, and can turn Texas blue. Once more and more are able to vote, we can transform this state. Maybe that is too idealistic, but it keeps me sane while I am unable to move.
And you don’t even have to be poor. We live in Indiana. Our house is worth far less than any blue state houses. We couldn’t afford to buy a house in a blue state. I hate it here, but I’m here to stay until the housing market collapses.
Or just be willing to hustle? Being young helps too.
I got the job before heading to SF. But another friend of mine in tech sold everything he owned in Ohio, and rented a room in a house for like 800/month and lived with 4 other dudes in a huge house in the inner Richmond. Got by on app hustles until he found a gig coding.
He’s back in Ohio now bc he decided to breed and be closer to family because of it. But he had a solid couple of years more in SF than I did. I kind of regret not just going for it sooner like he did.
This argument needs to die. The EC is never going away, so stop pinning various strategies and hopes on it somehow magically disappearing. If people spent 1/2 as much time on actually voting and campaigning for center and left candidates as they do complaining about the EC, we wouldn’t be in the mess we are in today.
I have worked on campaigns and studied politics for years. With the EC, the current SCOTUS, and the voter suppression and gerrymandering tactics of the last few decades , there is no reasonable long-term path to left, or even center, power. People are allowed to complain. People have been organizing, for years. Nothing has worked, and basic human rights are now being violated in ways and for groups that they hadn’t been before. You’re right that with our current governmental structure, the EC isn’t going anywhere. But democracy’s not about elections alone; it’s about the consent of the governed. A whole lot of us don’t consent, and I don’t think the current institutional infrastructure’s going to survive the blast when that pressure gets too high. And if anything (other than a Constitutional Convention based on the same principles as the EC) happens to the current arrangement, the EC goes too. No one in an underrepresented state would willingly accept those conditions.
HALF the population can’t be bothered to vote in most elections. The country is being dragged to the Right and has been for years now and election after election a massive percent of the population doesn’t seem it is worth going out to the polls. In presidential elections it is higher, but still - there are a LOT and I mean a LOT of elections that could have swung the other way if only a few hundred more people got off their butts and voted. We could have gotten rid of that blowhard Lauren Boebart (however it is spelled) last cycle. She won by only a few hundred votes in an election where less than 60% of the population of that district voted. Apparently Colorado is a mail-in state, so these people didn’t even have to go drive anywhere.
The situation is even worse if you look at demographics. No one had more to lose than the youth of this country and their voting numbers are pitiful. What’s worse is that they have the numbers to change elections. They are a massive group that at this point in time have more people than the dreaded Boomers. Yet their numbers are abysmal.
So when I hear about people complaining about the EC or gerrymandering or a host of other roadblocked set up by the Right for them to get their way on election day, I just think back that these are mostly just excuses. I am not saying that gerrymandering isn’t real - it absolutely is - but even some of the most gerrymandered districts could swing the other way if enough people voted.
If you’re overwhelmed by the enormity of the threat the right poses, and you see structural change is impossible, I sympathize. But blaming people who are struggling for not doing something they see as unlikely to produce positive change and that the state is simultaneously actively making it hard for them to do isn’t helpful. I’ve been politically involved since 2000 (academic study, campaign volunteering/work); Barring major disaster, I’m not seeing voter numbers going up from here significantly without legistative changes. You can yell at clouds all you want, but that’s not the point of leverage you’re looking for.
Making everyone a victim who is on some pre-determined path and they have no control over the things that happen to them is exactly the nonsense that I see the youth are falling for. I see posts by Zoomers all the time that essentially boil down to “we’re screwed, so fuck it” or “I give up” or some such. That’s not the America that I grew up in and I refuse to buy into this idea that change is impossible. Americans need “tough love” - coddling them in this idea of “IF ONLY so-and-so was different” then we could fix the environment/housing crisis/healthcare. Be the change you want to be. Expecting that it will simply be handled to you leads to this apathy and tuning-out that far too many Americans already fall into.
I don’t think you understand. No one in my position thinks things will he handed to/handled for us. (Your word choice is unclear.). I think we’re on the Titanic and we’ve struck the iceberg, we just haven’t done the horrible dying in the North Atlantic part. And if I wanted boomers who’ve probably studied our political structure less closely, spent less time doing actual campaign work, and seen less of the way things work than I have, telling me I’m entitled, I’d have asked one of those guys who likes talking about millennials like we’re children whose biggest problem is not laying off the avocado toast. “Kids today are weak, entitled whiners playing the victim card, and I know better because I’m older” may pass for discourse some places, but not here.
Ok. I think people’s actual lives are more important than a 250-year-old document that can’t differentiate between a flint-lock pistol and a machine gun. Don’t you?
Had to scroll too far to find this! I also read that it was totally about strategy in those purple or starting to lean purple states as more young people lean liberal, and the older, evangelical crowd is not being replaced enough with young people to keep a good footing for the Republicans. If the liberal people leave, the states turn solid red, and then they don’t need new people so much to keep power.
Of course no one wants to live in a place that is contrary to their beliefs so you can’t blame anyone for moving somewhere else… but the implications of that are scary for the country as a whole.
The Treaty is often cited in discussions regarding the role of religion in United States government for a clause in Article 11 of the English language American version which states that “the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.”
Signed by founders, we don’t even have to wonder what their thoughts were. Leave your shitty religion out of government.
I have no problem with Christians. I have a problem with whatever GOP-supporting assholes call Christian, because it is nothing like what Jesus would teach/do.
What drives me crazy is the rationalizations around this they make when even without it, its clear most of the founders were rationalists. There is a reason jefferson rewrote the gospels without the supernatural as a morality tale.
If we don’t launch a general strike when the fascist Court guts the already weak NLRB then we’re going to lose everything. We’re already bringing back child labor, we’re already not lettting people retire, we’re already allowing union busting, but with the NLRB gone we’re fucked.
It means they were privileged enough to “escape” as if the spectre of the worlds largest military in the hands of tyrannical fascists won’t affect other places, too.
Further, it’s a real “I got out, you just need to pull yourselves up by your bootstraps” bullshit vibe that judges the weakest for being unable to escape.
The privileged will be happy to escape and leave the rest of us to suffer while preaching about how they saw it all coming and so should have we, as if we didn’t see it coming instead of simply not having the privilege to escape.
In a rare speech during contract talks in the company’s hometown of Dearborn, Michigan, Ford said high labor costs could limit spending to develop new vehicles and invest in factories. “It’s the absolute lifeblood of our company. And if we lose it, we will lose to the competition. America loses. Many jobs will be lost,” said the great grandson of company founder Henry Ford.
Okay, go ahead and spend on R&D and factories, if that is the "absolute lifeblood of [your] company." Good luck producing those new cars in new factories with no workers.
On another note if you are interested in the topic, I can’t recommend Growing Up in Scientology enough on YouTube.
Aaron is an amazing educator, commentator, and satirist on the subject of Scientology. Beyond that he has one of the most genuine, yet charismatic personalities of any person on the platform. I can’t say enough good things about him, his journey, and his work with both exposing as well as freeing people from Scientology’s grip.
Yeah A A Ron covers Scientology really well, cuts through the nonsence with a great deal of knowledge about the subject and does a lot to help victims of the cult. Well worth a watch.
This is why I don’t watch Tom Cruise, Elisabeth Moss, et al vehicles. You can’t separate the art from the artist when you’re literally financing their criminal organization.
Shelly Miscavige is still held unlawfully by Scientology.
Are you sure about that? I don’t mean that in the sense of doubting that Scientology kidnapped her, but in the sense that I’m unaware of any proof she’s even still alive.
Flo Barnett shot herself three times in the chest and once in the head with a long rifle.
Gary Webb, who exposed the crack cocaine conspiracy within the CIA shot himself twice in the head with a revolver. FWIW, Webb’s death Bay actually have been a suicide. The first shot went through his face.
In November 2016, American conservatives stood on the verge of greatness. The election of Donald Trump to the presidency was a triumph that offered the best chance to reverse the left’s incessant march of progress for its own sake. Many of the best accomplishments, though, happened only in the last year of the Trump administration, after our political appointees had finally figured out the policies and process of different agencies, and after the right personnel were finally in place.
The crazy thing to me is that they said their goal is to stop progress. Sure, they tacked on "for its own sake" to give the base something to latch on to, but if you ask any person impacted by LACK of progress it's for very real sakes and stakes for very real people. Fuck these assholes.
Jesus fuck that Mandate for Leadership is an interesting read. Uncomfortable but it really gives you specific examples of what they plan on doing. 900 pages worth. Wish I had time to read it all as I bet it would help to understand what this fight is all about
I also thought it was hyperbolic until I saw the source. Apnews, along with Reuters, are my gold standards for news. If they are reporting it then I believe it is very real and very serious.
I would love to see Democrats acknowledge this and take some action to fight against this.
Has anyone done so yet or are we peons pretty much on our own as usual?
We need more normal progressives to run for local offices. I would run … but I have the charisma of cow dung and the schmoozing ability of a turnip.
And I would probably want to harm myself dealing with politicians who don’t prioritize solving problems over money, power, and other useless bullshit.
But I see an awful lot of selling out to corporate interests and not much of a call to fight against rising fascism … except as a tool in spam emails and texts to get more donations. I volunteer where I can because I genuinely give a shit. And then I get bombarded with two dozen spam bullshit fundraiser emails a day from this, that, or the other democratic PAC. Certainly doesn’t give me much hope that there’s any authenticity behind any of it.
Meanwhile, we’re an election away from a full takeover that puts the lives of my friends and family and co-workers in jeopardy.
It worries the shit out of us peons but nobody at the top of the Dems is concerned enough, if you ask me.
But I guess that’s how the story played out for Mussolini, Hitler, and other fascists so why not repeat history: the pro corporate, center right portion of the Democratic party (ie the vast majority) sits on their thumbs because what have they got to lose when they have power and money?
The Republicans are going to keep chipping away at democracy like they have since Nixon (50 years ago) until they make the country into their own sick image.
Idk what the fuck needs to happen exactly but fucking somebody do something. Lead the charge. Idk?
They have been moving on this path since Regan, they just have the court and the rigged voting maps now they feel comfortable being open about thier intentions. While people like me was derided as alarmists they were building the engine that got us here
Really they’ve been on this trajectory since Nixon. They were talking about playing the long game to get right-wing media established back then. I imagine they also wanted to take other steps to make sure no other Republican went through the humiliation of having to pay for their crimes. Like rigging the judicial system, and everything else we’ve seen the past 50 years.
reverse the left’s incessant march of progress for its own sake. Many of the best accomplishments, though, happened only in the last year of the Trump administration
This has got to be a troll, George Lucas had better dialogue in the prequels.
The last year of the Trump administration also happened to be where he started a violent insurrection against democracy.
Dude, they fucking are Hydra. Post Red Skull the aim of the organization was “humanity cannot be trusted with its own freedom” if you add “except for me” to the end of that it’s effectively the entire conservative platform
I started, mostly jokingly, predicting a schism/Balkanization in 2011 on acid with some friends. But the whole thing can be traced back as far back as the 30s depending on which thread you decide to follow
apnews.com
Hot