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US Politics: Guns versus Butter


DMC

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14 minutes ago, Trishkin said:

What I love is that Gaetz doesn’t seem to understand that his “extortion” defense actually incriminates him. I mean, say this whole bizarre extortion story is true, that would suggest that somebody’s got some kompromat on him. How can you be extorted if they ain’t got nothing on you?

His lawyers must have been horrified watching that.  Cannot believe that he or anyone on his legal team let that happen.  It's been very entertaining.

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10 minutes ago, larrytheimp said:

His lawyers must have been horrified watching that.  Cannot believe that he or anyone on his legal team let that happen.  It's been very entertaining.

No way anyone on his legal team knew this was happening beforehand. How I imagine it went down:

Tucker: Bro they saying some crazy shit about you. Wanna come on my show and talk about it?

Gaetz: Hell yeah motherfucker!

** 7 minutes later **

Gaetz: There are no pictures of me with child prostitutes.

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I love the Gaetz/ Carlson clips, too. Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy, and for once, his permanently befuddled expression fits.

So do I get this right that he oversees the committee that oversees the investigation into him?

 

https://theintercept.com/2021/03/30/amazon-twitter-ambassadors-jeff-bezos-bernie-sanders/

Amazon ambassadors were trained to defend Jeff Bezos and clap back at Bernie Sanders under a program codenamed “Veritas.”

Amazon’s small Twitter army of “ambassadors” was quietly conceived in 2018 under the codename “Veritas,” which sought to train and dispatch select employees to the social media trenches to defend Amazon and its CEO, Jeff Bezos, according to an internal description of the program obtained exclusively by The Intercept.

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On 4/1/2021 at 8:41 AM, Zorral said:

I've been watching NZ tv after dinner this month, and gotta say, their cities, their infrastructure -- as well as the safety nets -- are so sleek, and modern, so different looking that what we see all over the USA these days.

Compared to the US, perhaps, but there's a lot of room for improvement.

On 4/1/2021 at 8:41 AM, Zorral said:

And people in NZ talk back to cops, push back, all the time, and the cops back down.  Well, that latter -- it is tv.  I admit to knowing nothing about police and policing in New Zealand.

They're definitely not as dangerous as US cops, but unfortunately they do seem to see the US as a role model, and they've been moving in the wrong direction.

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Gaetz showed lawmakers nude photos, sources say

https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/01/politics/matt-gaetz-photos-women/index.html

Quote

 

Rep. Matt Gaetz, the Florida Republican being investigated by the Justice Department over sex trafficking allegations, made a name for himself when he arrived on Capitol Hill as a conservative firebrand on TV and staunch defender of then-President Donald Trump. Behind the scenes, Gaetz gained a reputation in Congress over his relationships with women and bragging about his sexual escapades to his colleagues, multiple sources told CNN.

Gaetz allegedly showed off to other lawmakers photos and videos of nude women he said he had slept with, the sources told CNN, including while on the House floor. The sources, including two people directly shown the material, said Gaetz displayed the images of women on his phone and talked about having sex with them. One of the videos showed a naked woman with a hula hoop, according to one source.
"It was a point of pride," one of the sources said of Gaetz.

 

 

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3 hours ago, felice said:

Compared to the US, perhaps, but there's a lot of room for improvement.

They're definitely not as dangerous as US cops, but unfortunately they do seem to see the US as a role model, and they've been moving in the wrong direction.

I got pulled over in NZ in the middle of nowhere one night while traveling there for a random DUI check. It was a strange experience. Cop just came up to the window and stuck a breathalyzer in my face, checked the reading and left. He barely said a word to me. I guess I appreciate the quick and straight to business nature of the interaction, US cops tend to take their time running checks on you and your car if you get pulled over. This interaction couldn’t have lasted more than 30 seconds.

the only other interactions I have had with police in a foreign country was in Egypt where a policeman tried to get me to pay him for ‘guarding’ me while using an atm. I ran away and didn’t pay him.

anyway to the larger point on infrastructure - yea the US needs an overhaul for sure. And this is why Americans need to get passports and travel. Or, hell, just get some curiosity and google. 

I’ve been to a few countries where an American might kind of expect a certain degree of charming shabbiness only to find their highways and airports better than ours. Much better in some cases. This is an area where the US had a surge of amazing growth in the early-ish years following the development and adoption of the automobile, skyscrapers, and airplanes and then decided ‘we are the best’ and have largely rested on our laurels ever since.

Not that long ago I went on a google image spree of looking at cities across the world and, particularly in China, and was fucking blown away. There are cities I had barely heard of in China that look like the Jetson’s are about to come in for a landing. Meanwhile in cities I’ve lived in like Austin and DC traffic is atrocious and has been and it seems to take 150 years to even think about slapping together a half-assed bandaid that probably involves a toll road. I mean, China’s totalitarian government surely helps them speed things along, but that is not an excuse for a wealthy supposedly first rate country to have not even really attempted to solve a number of basic problems when it comes to infrastructure.

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45 minutes ago, SpaceChampion said:

Yep, he's a real slimeball.

This guy on twitter gets mistaken for him and every time Gaetz is in the news he gets hate thrown at him:

 

The craziest part is that he doesn't even have the same name! I get it for the poor suckers named Ted Cruz, Steve Bannon, and Stephen Miller (there was a twitter thread they all joined in last year, commiserating), but Gertz is not Gaetz.

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Huge protest against white violence upon asian americans marching right here.  There have been so many horrible events of very serious violence in just the last few days --  most of the victims are elderly women, while the attackers are young white guys.  Eff 'em.  Woo, how brave and big and manly, picking on tiny, elderly women.  That who THEY are.

 

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I believe this is the latest, but if I missed it posted before, sorry for the redundancy:

Quote

A Justice Department investigation into Representative Matt Gaetz and an indicted Florida politician is focusing on their involvement with multiple women who were recruited online for sex and received cash payments, according to people close to the investigation and text messages and payment receipts reviewed by The New York Times.

Investigators believe Joel Greenberg, the former tax collector in Seminole County, Fla., who was indicted last year on a federal sex trafficking charge and other crimes, initially met the women through websites that connect people who go on dates in exchange for gifts, fine dining, travel and allowances, according to three people with knowledge of the encounters. Mr. Greenberg introduced the women to Mr. Gaetz, who also had sex with them, the people said.

One of the women who had sex with both men also agreed to have sex with an unidentified associate of theirs in Florida Republican politics, according to a person familiar with the arrangement. Mr. Greenberg had initially contacted her online and introduced her to Mr. Gaetz, the person said.

Mr. Gaetz denied ever paying a woman for sex.

The Justice Department inquiry is also examining whether Mr. Gaetz had sex with a 17-year-old girl and whether she received anything of material value, according to four people familiar with the investigation. The sex trafficking count against Mr. Greenberg involved the same girl, according to two people briefed on the investigation.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/01/us/politics/matt-gaetz-justice-department.html?referringSource=articleShare&fbclid=IwAR33iDV3XmhvZjXVenXX2oZ5M02q7hWaRXIysAuIozA21zkgYcFJbknrJWk

The "also" in the last part is what we've largely been hearing about. Everything that precedes it sounds new and far worse.

Worth noting, I've heard several former prosecutors turned talking heads say that Gaetz should be terrified of Greenberg, because he's already arrested and totally fucked, so he may spill the beans on his former friend to get a better deal.

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Worth noting, I've heard several former prosecutors turned talking heads say that Gaetz should be terrified of Greenberg, because he's already arrested and totally fucked, so he may spill the beans on his former friend to get a better deal.

Seems only fair after he did Tucker dirty like that.

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6 hours ago, Martell Spy said:

Seems only fair after he did Tucker dirty like that.

Tucker spouts off white supremacist rhetoric on a nightly basis - have zero sympathy for him.

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Panic Rooms, Birth Certificates and the Birth of GOP Paranoia
How America’s center-right party started to lose its mind, as told by the man who tried to keep it sane.

By JOHN BOEHNER

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/04/02/john-boehner-book-memoir-excerpt-478506

Quote

 

At some point after the 2008 election, something changed with my friend Roger Ailes. I once met him in New York during the Obama years to plead with him to put a leash on some of the crazies he was putting on the air. It was making my job trying to accomplish anything conservative that much harder. I didn’t expect this meeting to change anything, but I still thought it was bullshit, and I wanted Roger to know it.

When I put it to him like that, he didn’t have much to say. But he did go on and on about the terrorist attack on the U.S. Embassy in Benghazi, which he thought was part of a grand conspiracy that led back to Hillary Clinton. Then he outlined elaborate plots by which George Soros and the Clintons and Obama (and whoever else came to mind) were trying to destroy him.

“They’re monitoring me,” he assured me about the Obama White House. He told me he had a “safe room” built so he couldn’t be spied on. His mansion was being protected by combat-ready security personnel, he said. There was a lot of conspiratorial talk. It was like he’d been reading whacked-out spy novels all weekend.

I thought I could get him to control the crazies, and instead I found myself talking to the president of the club.

And it was clear that he believed all of this crazy stuff. I walked out of that meeting in a daze. I just didn’t believe the entire federal government was so terrified of Roger Ailes that they’d break about a dozen laws to bring him down. I thought I could get him to control the crazies, and instead I found myself talking to the president of the club. One of us was crazy. Maybe it was me.

I have no idea what the relationship between Ailes and Murdoch was like, or if Ailes ever would go off on these paranoid tangents during meetings with his boss. But Murdoch must have thought Ailes was good for business, because he kept him in his job for years.

 

 

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If he actually wrote this book, as opposed to there being a ghost writer, Boehner is a shockingly good writer on a technical level.

However, fuck him for this white-washing bullshit. He may not be as personally crazy as many other Republicans, but he's one of the ones chiefly responsible for letting things get this bad by doing nothing on his watch. If he wants to be on the side of the angels now, he needs to own up to his lack of action.

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2 minutes ago, Fez said:

If he actually wrote this book, as opposed to there being a ghost writer, Boehner is a shockingly good writer on a technical level.

However, fuck him for this white-washing bullshit. He may not be as personally crazy as many other Republicans, but he's one of the ones chiefly responsible for letting things get this bad by doing nothing on his watch. If he wants to be on the side of the angels now, he needs to own up to his lack of action.

Bbbut, he went to talk to Roger Ailes that one time!  How could be possibly have done any more?  :rolleyes:

At best John Boehner was a tool for scumbags like Limbaugh and Ailes and Gingrich and McConnell to use to destroy the country.  And that's a more generous interpretation than he deserves.  Boehner was a leading Republican firebrand before he joined House leadership, and he led the charge against Obama and reason in 2010.  He can take his crocodile tears elsewhere. 

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I mean sure, fuck Boehner. I wouldn’t hang out with the guy. But it *is* a positive thing for the country that any Republican will speak publicly in this way. We are at the point of violent capitol storming and most of them aren’t even saying that it’s bad. The guy doesn’t deserve a medal or a clean slate, but someone with an R next to their name needs to say this stuff and the more awful I think they are the more it might get through to someone who hasn’t had a problem with this shit so far.

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