US Politics: The Roll Call Heard Across America

[DMC]

2 minutes ago, Fragile Bird said:

Mary Trump secretly recorded 15 hours of conversations with her aunt, Trump’s older sister, Marianne

Wait, so Maryanne was not aware she was being recorded?  I dunno, obviously I have no problem about this politically, but what you just described just seems..unsavory to me.  And yeah, consider how unsavory Trump and the GOP are blah blah blah...but still.

[Fragile Bird]

Trump will say she’s senile at 83. She calls him cruel, and a liar.

Apparently Maryanne at one point asked her brother to ask his lawyer, can’t think of his name, the McCarthy hearings one, to call Ronnie Reagan to suggest he nominate her for the bench. The next day Reagan did do that, and ever since Trump has reminded her that he made her, that she wouldn’t be anywhere without him. Maryanne by all accounts was an excellent lawyer and a very respected judge who other people elevated in rank over the years. That happened because she was good, not because that original favor was requested.

Mary Trump’s lawyers have stated that because of the family’s attacks and lawsuits against her, she started recording conversations to protect herself from further charges that she was lying and making things up.

One of the CNN panelists said she’s listened to 15 minutes of tape and there’s 14 hours and 45 minutes still out there, tape she assumes will be released in bits and pieces over the coming weeks. Presumably other family members were taped as well.

[Fragile Bird]

Trump has tweeted.

”Everyday it’s something else. Who cares”

And a bit more.

[S John]

On 8/22/2020 at 12:07 AM, Simon Steele said:

Lol, that made my night! Thanks for sharing.

I’m glad it did.

The second layer to all of that is that I know that the Steele reference is a reference to Peter Steele and I also love Type O Negative.

So Richard, Peter, or Simon - hit me with a Steele and it’s prob gonna be decent as far as I’m concerned.

[DireWolfSpirit]

3 hours ago, Fragile Bird said:

Trump will say she’s senile at 83. She calls him cruel, and a liar.

Apparently Maryanne at one point asked her brother to ask his lawyer, can’t think of his name, the McCarthy hearings one, to call Ronnie Reagan to suggest he nominate her for the bench. The next day Reagan did do that, and ever since Trump has apparently reminded her that he made her, that she wouldn’t be anywhere without him. Maryanne apparently was an excellent lawyer and a very respected judge who other people elevated her rank over the years. That happened because she was good, not because that original favor was requested.

Mary Trump’s lawyers have stated that because of the family’s attacks and lawsuits against her, she started recording conversations to protect herself from further charges that she was lying and making things up.

One of the CNN panelists said she’s listened to 15 minutes of tape and there’s 14 hours and 45 minutes still out there, tape she assumes will be released in bits and pieces over the coming weeks. Presumably other family members were taped as well.

She's (Judge Trump) tainted in her own right.

She retired to avoid scrutiny over tax and charity fraud if I recall right.

 

[DireWolfSpirit]

5 hours ago, S John said:

Wow, HALF the key speakers are literally Trump’s family.

It was a thin roster that could find praise for the monster.

[Durckad]

6 hours ago, S John said:

Wow, HALF the key speakers are literally Trump’s family.

And the other half have their lips surgically attached to Trump's ass.

Does that make them family too?

[Martell Spy]

15 minutes ago, Durckad said:

And the other half have their lips surgically attached to Trump's ass.

Does that make them family too?

Absolutely. Much like the Gambino family.

[The Anti-Targ]

10 hours ago, Tywin et al. said:

Stop eating babies, Jace!

Ugh! no one eats babies, that is disgusting. It's a refined and purified extract of their vital organs and blood.

[DireWolfSpirit]

1 hour ago, Durckad said:

And the other half have their lips surgically attached to Trump's ass.

Does that make them family too?

In a Centipede tradition kind of way.

[GrimTuesday]

In case anyone is wondering why California is failing to contain the wild fires that are burning basically out of control, turns out it was because Gavin Newsome released a bunch of inmates early because prisons are a major spreading point of covid. Here is a delightful bit from a New York TImes article

Corona Virus Limits California's Efforts to Fight Fires with Prison Labor

Quote

“The inmates should have been put on the fire lines, fighting fires,” said Mike Hampton, a former corrections officer who worked for decades at an inmate fire camp. “How do you justify releasing all these inmates in prime fire season with all these fires going on?”

The fact that California uses an exploitative practice is bad, the fact that their ability to fight wildfires hinges on that practice is a whole other issue. It would be one thing if these inmates were being appropriately compensated for their service, or even just paid minimum wage, but the fact is that they are paid 2-5 bucks a day plus a dollar an hour to put their lives on the line w I'm sure some people comfort themselves with the idea that after they get out of prison these inmates can go out and become firefighters professionally, but aha nope. From this LA times op-ed from last year

Quote

State law directs local emergency services agencies to deny EMT certification to any applicant who has been convicted of two or more felonies, is on parole or probation, or has committed any kind of felony within the past 10 years. So the conviction that got someone into prison and onto a inmate fire crew becomes the disqualification from getting a good, full-time job fighting fires outside of prison.

California has systematically underfunded it fire fighting capabilities because they have been able to fill that gap wit laborers who are one step up from being slaves and now are paying the price. Congratulations Cali, your unethical practices have come back to bite you.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

12 hours ago, DMC said:

Meh, other than all the Trumps that's a pretty standard lineup.  Surprised he's letting Tiffany speak, she seemed to be persona non grata last campaign.  Also, good thing the convention's not gonna be in person.  Kevin McCarthy would probably get booed by Republican delegates.

I'm surprised she agreed to. Her body language always gives off that she hates her family, and they seem to feel the same towards her, from afar at least.

[Fragile Bird]

5 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

I'm surprised she agreed to. Her body language always gives off that she hates her family, and they seem to feel the same towards her, from afar at least.

Trump is bragging the speeches will be live. Maybe she’ll surprise people by talking about what an ass he is?

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

6 hours ago, The Anti-Targ said:

Ugh! no one eats babies, that is disgusting. It's a refined and purified extract of their vital organs and blood.

If you can't bite into them like a giant turkey leg, it isn't the real deal. 

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

9 minutes ago, Fragile Bird said:

Trump is bragging the speeches will be live. Maybe she’ll surprise people by talking about what an ass he is?

No, I doubt it. You were talking above about Mary Trump. Have you read her book? I'm seven or eight chapters in, and what because obvious right away is that family is messed up, and everyone is kind of beaten into submission. 

Also, you don't need a leaked recording to know that Trump had to cheat or bribe his way into Penn. That's one of the best schools in the country, and it's hard to see how someone could get in there and graduate if they don't like to read or write.

[Paladin of Ice]

The California fire system and using inmates as virtual slave labor situation is completely fucked. And the worst is the perverse incentive not to even let them work as fire fighters once they've served their sentence. Why pay a real wage and benefits if you can get them to risk their lives for pennies after they can't find work, slide into recidivism, and get sent back to prison?

A quick reminder of how actually, acutely awful many Republican candidates and Republicans who are about to join Congress are:

Quote

Laura Loomer (R-Wackadoodle) won a Republican congressional primary in Florida Tuesday night, becoming the latest of a score of similarly bizarre figures to be chosen as the GOP standard-bearers in House and Senate races coast to coast.

Loomer has called Muslims “savages,” Islam “a cancer on society,” herself a “proud Islamophobe” and demanded “a non Islamic form of Uber or Lyft because I never want to support another Islamic immigrant driver.” She says she wants more migrants to die.

At her victory celebration Tuesday night, she stood with the founder of the white-nationalist group Proud Boys and too-radioactive-for Breitbart Milo Yiannopoulos. Her hate speech and ties to an anti-Muslim hate group have gotten her banned from Instagram, Medium, PayPal, Venmo, GoFundMe, Lyft, Uber, Facebook (which she sued for $3 billion) and Twitter (she chained herself to its New York headquarters wearing a Holocaust-style yellow Star of David).

She stormed the stage at a Central Park Shakespeare production because the Julius Caesar figure resembled President Trump, and accused the theater troupe of being “ISIS” doing “assassination porn.” She tricked undocumented migrants she found outside a Home Depot into trespassing at Nancy Pelosi’s house in hopes of getting them deported, the Daily Beast’s Will Sommer reported. She trespassed at the California governor’s mansion wearing a sombrero and poncho. She burst onstage at the Women’s March, calling organizers Nazis and demanding: “What about the Jews?”

She showed up at a polling place in a burqa and asked for Huma Abedin’s ballot. She accosted Ilhan Omar at an event, asking, “Ilhan, why did you marry your brother?” She stood outside a Hillary Clinton event with a bullhorn, denouncing the “enabler of a sexual predator,” and she confronted Chelsea Clinton with a request to sign a copy of her book to one of her father’s sexual-assault accusers. Loomer, who attributes 33 “suspicious deaths” to the Clintons, believes they may be trying to kill her with untraceable poison. The former Infowars contributor believes various mass killings have been “false flag” operations.

You might think Republican Party leaders would be calling in the white coats. But there was Roger Stone, the Trump confidant whose prison sentence the president recently commuted, at Loomer’s victory party, calling her the “Joan of Arc of the conservative movement.” Loomer told supporters that Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel congratulated her as a “political rock star.” The state and county GOP embraced her publicly.

Trump himself (his Mar-a-Lago property is in the heavily Democratic district in which Loomer has been nominated) issued a series of congratulatory tweets and retweets about Loomer, saying she has “a great chance against a Pelosi puppet.”

This is the new face of the Republican Party. Next week, Republicans, at a convention featuring the couple who waved guns at racial-justice demonstrators walking past their mansion, will renominate Trump, an avid purveyor of conspiracy theories. And the down-ballot nominees show how pervasive the party’s Trump-induced madness has become.

Nineteen Republican candidates and one independent who have embraced the QAnon conspiracy theory (about a pedophile ring in the U.S. government fighting Trump) have secured spots on the November ballot, according to a tally by Alex Kaplan of the liberal watchdog Media Matters for America. Overall, Kaplan has identified 76 QAnon-affiliated candidates running for Congress this election cycle.

Among them is Marjorie Taylor Greene, who after securing the Republican nomination in Georgia’s conservative 14th District last week is a safe bet for election to Congress. She believes in “an Islamic invasion of our government” and in a “global cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles.” She suggested the 9/11 attacks were fake and said slain Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich was the victim of an Obama administration-ordered MS-13 hit.

Trump calls her a “future Republican Star.”

It would be nice if, instead of fighting each other to the death about how many dollars an hour the minimum wage should be or whether Warren (who has addressed Native crowds and gatherings dozens of times and been embraced by most Native groups since the whole DNA kerfuffle) must self-flagellate for the rest of her life in atonement, my fellow leftists could remember to solve big problems and fight the actual enemy. I swear, some of you would get into a public fist fight with an acquaintance who accidentally stepped on your foot while shrugging about the guy who stabbed you 25 times while mugging you.

[Guest]

11 hours ago, DMC said:

Wait, so Maryanne was not aware she was being recorded?  I dunno, obviously I have no problem about this politically, but what you just described just seems..unsavory to me.  And yeah, consider how unsavory Trump and the GOP are blah blah blah...but still.

As @Fragile Bird points out above, being around a family as toxic as Trump's can make people question their sanity with all the lying and gaslighting that goes on. 

I've been around one similar in type but not in scale (not my own family), and it's bizarre.

[OnionAhaiReborn]

49 minutes ago, Paladin of Ice said:

The California fire system and using inmates as virtual slave labor situation is completely fucked. And the worst is the perverse incentive not to even let them work as fire fighters once they've served their sentence. Why pay a real wage and benefits if you can get them to risk their lives for pennies after they can't find work, slide into recidivism, and get sent back to prison?

A quick reminder of how actually, acutely awful many Republican candidates and Republicans who are about to join Congress are:

It would be nice if, instead of fighting each other to the death about how many dollars an hour the minimum wage should be or whether Warren (who has addressed Native crowds and gatherings dozens of times and been embraced by most Native groups since the whole DNA kerfuffle) must self-flagellate for the rest of her life in atonement, my fellow leftists could remember to solve big problems and fight the actual enemy. I swear, some of you would get into a public fist fight with an acquaintance who accidentally stepped on your foot while shrugging about the guy who stabbed you 25 times while mugging you.

I wonder if deep blue California using virtual slave labor counts as the "actual enemy?"

This is the thing, there are lots of disputes and controversies you can dismiss as trivial (like the minimum wage or Warren's Native American imbroglio), but ultimately I think there is a serious divide where, even though nearly everyone broadly on the left can agree that the Republican Party is horrible, some (center-liberals/moderates) view the Democrats as imperfect but good while others (leftists) view the Democrats as outright bad, though not nearly as horrible as the Republicans. California's exploitation of its prison population is an excellent example of this, as was the police brutality unleashed by Democratic city governments against people out protesting against racist, brutal policing by blue-city police departments, and as is the complicity of much of the Democratic Party in a neoconservative foreign policy, including the Iraq War. 

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

40 minutes ago, OnionAhaiReborn said:

some (center-liberals/moderates) view the Democrats as imperfect but good while others (leftists) view the Democrats as outright bad, 

This is grossly simplistic. 

[maarsen]

I see Biden has borrowed parts of his speech from Jack Layton, our former NDP leader. Of course Jack seemed to have done the same with the words of Wilfred Laurier. When is it plagiarism and when is it referencing some one else?Jack Layton is very well known in Canada and very much a leftist and I don't  think he would have much of a problem with Biden borrowing his phrasing.