US Politics: We Don’t Need No Stinking Lawyers

[Mindwalker]

What I'm really shocked about are the Dems these days. Who woke them up and told them to fight?!

And did Biden just steal Fetterman's social media team?

[LongRider]

15 minutes ago, Mindwalker said:

What I'm really shocked about are the Dems. Who woke them up and told them to fight?!

And did Biden just steal Fetterman's social media team?

After eight tough years with Obama, the shit about Hunter’s laptop, stealing his daughters diary, dissing his dead son. Lying constantly, disrespectful behavior by Congress members, I hope his new motto is “When they go low, we kick their asses.”  Cuz, I tell ya, that’s what needs to be done. Keep it up Joe, it’s a big fucking deal. 

[Mindwalker]

Lawyer analyzes the bits of the affidavit that are not redacted (ignore hyperbolic thumbnail):

 

[Kalbear]

45 minutes ago, Mindwalker said:

What I'm really shocked about are the Dems these days. Who woke them up and told them to fight?!

And did Biden just steal Fetterman's social media team?

Actually no, they stole the New Jersey Governor's social media team, apparently. She started August 4th, and has brought the classic NJ 'take no shit' attitude to the job.

https://newjerseyglobe.com/fr/megan-coyne-the-voice-of-new-jersey-is-headed-to-the-white-house/

 

STELLAR work so far.

[A Horse Named Stranger]

23 minutes ago, KalVsWade said:

Actually no, they stole the New Jersey Governor's social media team, apparently. She started August 4th, and has brought the classic NJ 'take no shit' attitude to the job.

https://newjerseyglobe.com/fr/megan-coyne-the-voice-of-new-jersey-is-headed-to-the-white-house/

 

STELLAR work so far.

Fetterman would find a way to slip a Dr. Oz joke in there.

[LongRider]

I would watch this.   

 

[Martell Spy]

Biden's student loan relief plan will mainly help working and middle class borrowers, report finds

https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/26/politics/biden-student-loans-middle-class-penn-wharton-budget-model/index.html

Quote

 

(CNN)President Joe Biden's student loan debt relief plan is expected to help mainly working and middle class borrowers, an updated report from an influential research group found. That's a shift from its earlier projection that more higher-income borrowers would benefit from basic loan forgiveness.

About 75% of the benefit will go to households making $88,000 or less per year, according to the Penn Wharton Budget Model analysis released Friday.

 

 

[Zorral]

What semi-fascism is exactly?

https://theracket.news/p/what-semi-fascism-is-exactly?
 

Quote

 

.... This illiteracy [regarding fascism and its history] is a big part of the reason why Americans on the whole were so woefully unprepared to recognize the proto-fascism of Trump’s campaign in 2016, and why we are still struggling to have this conversation today — a year and a half after Trump’s supporters literally stormed the U.S. Capitol and the former president himself tried to overthrow the U.S. government.

If Don Lemon had asked me for a definition, this is what I’d have said:

---

Mostly, I’d have recommended that anyone interested in the question read a couple of books. The first is Robert O. Paxton’s The Anatomy of Fascism. Paxton is a scholar of Vichy France; in the book, first published in 2004, he worked toward a general theory of fascism that went beyond the tired and archaic symbology of the swastika and the fasces. His definitions leave ample room for “semi” or “quasi” formulations of fascism, which pose the very real danger of exploding into the full thing.

He writes:

Fascism in power is a compound, a powerful amalgam of different but marriageable conservative, national socialist, and radical right ingredients, bonded together by common enemies and common passions for a regenerated, energized and purified nation, whatever the cost to free institutions and the rule of law. The precise proportions of this mixture are the result of processes: choices, compromises, alliances, rivalries. Fascism in action looks more like a network of relationships than a fixed essence.

I’ve talked about Paxton in reference to Trump before, and there’s good reason for that. Paxton is far less concerned with what fascists look like or what coherent philosophy they might offer, and more with what he calls “mobilizing passions.”

“At bottom,” he writes, “is a passionate nationalism. Allied to it is a conspiratorial and Manichean view of history as a battle between the good and evil camps, between the pure and the corrupt, in which one’s own community or nation has been the victim. In this Darwinian narrative, the chosen people have been weakened by political parties, social classes, unassimilable minorities, spoiled rentiers, and rationalist thinkers who lack the necessary sense of community.”

I don’t really need to give examples here, do I? That is a good summary of nearly every speech Trump gave as president. So too were many of the other “mobilizing passions” Paxton names: 

• “Dread of the group’s decline under the corrosive effects of individualistic liberalism, class conflict, and alien influences.” (See: “Make America Great Again.”)

• “The need for authority by natural leaders (always male), culminating in a national chief who alone is capable of incarnating the group’s destiny” and “the superiority of the leader’s instincts over abstract and universal reason.” (See: “I alone can fix it.”)

• “The right of the chosen people to dominate others without restraint from any kind of human or divine law.” (See: January 6.)

• And “the belief that one’s group is a victim, a sentiment that justifies any action, without legal or moral limits, against its enemies, both internal and external.”

There is more.

[Zorral]

 

[Mindwalker]

Woman Posed As Heiress To Infiltrate Mar-a-Lago

 

[Fez]

45 minutes ago, Zorral said:

 

One of these isn't like the others though. The school board members were suspended on recommendation from a grand jury, due to ""deceit, malfeasance, misfeasance, neglect of duty and incompetence" in relation to the 2018 Parkland mass shooting. And the suspension was applauded by at least one of the other school board members and by victims advocates.

https://www.nbcmiami.com/news/local/gov-desantis-suspends-4-broward-school-board-members-from-office/2844900/?_osource=db_npd_nbc_wtvj_twt_shr

Quote

 

The school board has nine members, including two, Debra Hixon and Lori Alhadeff, who were elected after Hixon's husband Chris and Alhadeff's daughter Alyssa died in the Stoneman Douglas shooting. They ran on platforms promoting better campus security. Alhadeff, in particular, has frequently been at odds with the targeted members, particularly over Runcie's performance before his resignation.

“Thank you, Gov. Ron DeSantis, for taking the finding from the grand jury report and holding the school board members accountable," Alhadeff said.

Stand With Parkland president Tony Montalto, whose daughter Gina died in the massacre, also applauded the governor's decision.

"We applaud the Governor’s action to follow the recommendation from Florida’s 20th Statewide Grand Jury and remove the Broward School Board members - citing their gross negligence, misfeasance, malfeasance, and sheer incompetence caused the mishandling of many of the aspects that led up to the tragic date that took the lives of so many at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School," Montalto said in a statement.

The grand jury said that Runcie's and the accused board members' “uninformed or even misinformed decisions, incompetent management and lack of meaningful oversight” has led to massive cost overruns and delays in the SMART Program, a multimillion-dollar bond specifically solicited for school safety and renovation initiatives approved by county voters in 2014.

 

Not everything always ties into everything else.

[mormont]

8 hours ago, LongRider said:

I would watch this.   

 

Oh, if you want something to watch, I watched the trailer for the Breitbart-funded movie about Hunter Biden's laptop. Starring Gina Carano and Laurence Fox.

Obviously the makers realised that laptops are not inherently exciting on the screen so there are drugs, guns, strippers and a chainsaw at one point. It looks like an average day in Laurence Fox's life, really.

Also Joe Biden (played by John James, who you could honestly make two Joe Bidens out of and still have leftovers) creeps on Carano's secret service agent character and seduces Beau's wife. Remember what we keep saying about accusations being an admission of guilt? Anyway.

[Maithanet]

Palin needs approximately 70 percent of begich supporters to pick her as thier second choice.  It really depends on how many begich voters left the second choice blank.  If half of them did, then palin is probably toast.  Peltola would only need like 15 percent of the vote to win.  But if only say, 20 percent of voters left it blank, the Palin probably pulls ahead.  Even as nasty as the campaign was and how generally disliked she is, amongst begich voters you gotta think she'll win more than two thirds of those votes.

 

 

[Centrist Simon Steele]

On 8/25/2022 at 7:17 AM, Tywin et al. said:

I disagree. Tuition isn't a bad thing and it helps light a fire under a lot of people's asses. It just can't be what it is today. 

Tuition on public and state schools is a scam. Reagan is the one who fought to institute it because he feared an educated proletariat.

[LongRider]

Quote

Mr. Trump and his defenders have claimed he declassified the material he took to Mar-a-Lago. But documents retrieved from him in January included some marked “HCS,” for Human Intelligence Control System. Such documents have material that could possibly identify C.I.A. informants, meaning a general, sweeping declassification of them would have been, at best, misguided.

 

Gifted NYT article

Everyday this story gets worse.

[DireWolfSpirit]

I believe Trump planned to profit off State secrets. I also think theres a, yet to be discovered, "smoking gun" that will reveal he was negotiating deals to hand over to bidders some of these top secret documents on Defense and CIA operations/operatives.

He is the ultimate sellout, the ultimate traitor and should be punished accordingly.

[A Horse Named Stranger]

My working theory is somewhat different.

Trump is a narcissistic moron, and he kept them, basically because he thought it was cool to have them, and it made him feel important.

[Mindwalker]

I never bought the notion he'd not planned to profit from it, be it by selling and/ or blackmail. This is the eternal conman and grifter we're talking about.

 

Sure, entitlement was involved. And a lot of spite - after all, the American people have rejected him. He knows that, no matter what he says.

[Maithanet]

20 minutes ago, DireWolfSpirit said:

I believe Trump planned to profit off State secrets. I also think theres a, yet to be discovered, "smoking gun" that will reveal he was negotiating deals to hand over to bidders some of these top secret documents on Defense and CIA operations/operatives.

He is the ultimate sellout, the ultimate traitor and should be punished accordingly.

I think this is mostly right, but the tense is wrong.  You say "planned to" and "was negotiating to".  This reeks of unwarranted optimism.  Yes, he probably wanted to sell them to secondary bidders in the future, but the big boys close to Trump, like the Russians and the Saudis undoubtedly wouldn't need a full year to agree on a price and accept delivery.

[Mindwalker]

True. Still wondering what the 2B were for... you know, that the Saudis gave to Jared.