Gripweed posted:

I got like two pages into it and it was all about how sad Al Franken was. And the whole thing was really long so I called it quits

Chilichimp posted:

I read the article. What's your point?

quote:

the strongest argument that can be made for Franken is he's on the Biden-end of the creep scale, not the Trump-end

Cerebral Bore posted:

Ah yes, the massive voting bloc of people who'll never have to worry about a medical bill or their deductible or insurance premiums ever again but suddenly realize on election day that they had a somewhat different opinion once are sure going to throw out the people who massively improved their lives.

KOTEX GOD OF BLOOD posted:

jane mayer is an excellent writer and researcher and it deserves your time if you want to talk about it!

i guess we should take this to a thread that isn't about the presidential primary, but

isn't the thrust of the article. mayer makes a really convincing case that the primary allegation against him was a hit job, and the rest are, at best, flimsy in their content and suspicious in their context

Heck Yes! Loam! posted:

Imagine defending Al Franken still.

Dude conducted himself extremely poorly, and doesn't deserve a public servant position. Full loving Stop.

KOTEX GOD OF BLOOD posted:

do you have a response to the specific points made in the article? (on second thought I guess this does belong here because a lot of it is about gillibrand)

Heck Yes! Loam! posted:

No, I didn't read it, and I am not going to read it. I just can't waste anymore time on Al loving Franken or people that care about why he's no longer in the senate.

He's gone, he needed to go, and now we can forget about him.

The people getting mad at Gillibrand are worse than the people still defending Franken. None of them are allies.

KOTEX GOD OF BLOOD posted:

thanks for admitting you haven't read it and you aren't going to read it, and that you don't want to waste any more time on al franken! now you can stop posting about al franken, and arguing with people who actually did their loving homework, and this includes about gillibrand, who appears to have used the situation for political gain pretty straightforwardly

KOTEX GOD OF BLOOD posted:

i expected that people in this forum would not actually read about the article but post about it anyway, and that's exactly what i got lol

KOTEX GOD OF BLOOD posted:

jane mayer is an excellent writer and researcher and it deserves your time if you want to talk about it!

i guess we should take this to a thread that isn't about the presidential primary, but

isn't the thrust of the article. mayer makes a really convincing case that the primary allegation against him was a hit job, and the rest are, at best, flimsy in their content and suspicious in their context

Heck Yes! Loam! posted:

Heaven forbid someone does the right thing for political gain.

I went and read the piece and i feel exactly the same way i felt before reading it, but i now have wasted 5-10 minutes.

Heck Yes! Loam! posted:

What exactly are you looking to get out of this discussion, as the article does not exactly present anything new.

theflyingorc posted:

Once it's fully rolled out, it's locked in yeah. The period before it gets locked in would be where you're super vulnerable to backlash. I hope we can pull it off, it's just annoying that voters are as dumb as that poll shows.

KOTEX GOD OF BLOOD posted:

wow, you sure are a fast reader! you managed to read all 12,464 words in between 5 and 10 minutes, for an average speed of 1,246.4 words per minute. an average college student would take 41 and a half minutes to read the article. positively superhuman!!

a small sample:

- some of the most significant specific assertions by tweeden – like that franken had written the piece specifically for her so he could kiss her – are provably, documented false, just straight up lies
- individuals advanced to corroborate hers (and others') claims somehow seem always to be out of reach, whereas numerous individuals can corroborate franken's side of the story
- the carefully crafted rollout was orchestrated by a cohort of top conservative shitbags including roger stone and sean hannity to appear like a reliable story from an unbiased source, in order to provide rhetorical cover for their willingness to handwave roy moore's pedophilia
- at pretty much no stage did anyone attempt to fact check any of the allegations, and the process that would have turned up many of the facts revealed in the article which point to franken being possibly innocent of the claims was cut off by gillibrand, who led the charge to make him immediately resign without any investigation, in an attempt to bolster her own bonafides on the broader issue, including by puffing up a bill to prohibit mandatory arbitration of sexual harrassment claims which franken drafted and gave her

Phone posted:

oh sorry for not adequately providing a 10k word critique of the dogshit apologia being published in the new yorker that i read earlier this morning, i didn't realize that forums user kotex god of blood would be collecting book reports.

Phone posted:

was.

past tense.

let's trace jane mayer's career blowing the lid open on american torture programs (plural), to digging up dirt on the kochs, and then ending up at a new yorker piece about how franken only had 7 accusers (and only 2 of them after he took his seat in the senate, so it's not that bad if you think about it). drat, what happened?

Heck Yes! Loam! posted:

So are you going to write in Al Franken for the primary ballot, or what?

KOTEX GOD OF BLOOD posted:

god forbid you should actually have to sit down and read something in case someone holds you accountable for talking a lot of poo poo about something you deliberately don't know about? no time for "reading" "words", gotta post post post

do you see how boasting about not reading something and then creating a laughably wrong summary of it in the very same post might make you seem less than credible

im just here to debate and discuss, son

Gripweed posted:

There's a loving photograph of Al Franken pretending to grope an unconscious woman, and that's one of the women who accused him of being inappropriate

quote:

The U.S.O. skit didn’t end with the kissing scene. In a coda, Franken appears as a doctor who has just had “a cancellation” in his appointment schedule. Tweeden’s character is informed that “a woman your age should have a complete breast examination every year”; Franken then approaches her with his arms outstretched and his hands aimed at her chest. The script calls for Tweeden’s character to protest, “Al! At ease!” Franken, with a dirty-old-man nod to the audience, replies, “I’m afraid it’s a little too late for that.”

The joke was not memorable, yet when Shajn Cabrera saw the 2006 photograph of Franken on the plane, approaching Tweeden’s chest with his arms outstretched, he immediately recalled the “Dr. Franken” skit. Cabrera had been on the plane when the photograph was taken. At the time, he was a special assistant to the Sergeant Major of the Army, who hosts the U.S.O. tours. “I was the one who put the trip together,” Cabrera said. Looking at the photograph, he thought that “it was a hundred per cent in line with that skit when he does the breast exam.” The image, he said, “was not at all malicious.”

It’s understandable that Tweeden objected to Franken’s having reënacted the gag for a photograph while she was asleep. But when she wrote, “How dare anyone grab my breasts like this and think it’s funny?,” she omitted the fact that she had performed the “breast exam” bit multiple times. Metadata from the camera suggests that, contrary to Tweeden’s statement, the image was taken not on Christmas Eve, 2006, as a final taunt, but on December 21st. Photographs of a stage performance the previous day show Franken advancing toward Tweeden with splayed hands as she fends him off with a script, smiling in a winter coat and a Santa Claus hat.

Consenting to an act onstage is not the same as consenting to an act while sleeping. Rebecca Solnit, the writer known, among other things, for identifying the phenomenon of mansplaining, told me, “One of the key things about consent is it’s not blanket consent. The actor playing Romeo doesn’t get to kiss Juliet offstage because it’s in the script that they did onstage.”

Yet Bonnie Turner, a writer who worked with Franken on “S.N.L.,” said of Tweeden, “It showed bad faith, and was really wrongheaded of her, not to say that the skit was something they’d rehearsed and done over and over, night after night.” Cabrera told me that, when he saw the photograph, he felt sure that Franken had just been “goofing around” at the time.

Gripweed posted:

There's a loving photograph of Al Franken pretending to grope an unconscious woman, and that's one of the women who accused him of being inappropriate

KOTEX GOD OF BLOOD posted:

i think she handles this pretty fairly:

it was indeed crude and unfair to do that while she was sleeping, but conveniently she failed to mention that this was part of a bit they did through multiple performances

Heck Yes! Loam! posted:

Dude just stop. Pretending to grope her was not part of their act. You're just justifying disgusting behavior at this point because he has a D next to his name.

quote:

she omitted the fact that she had performed the “breast exam” bit multiple times...Photographs of a stage performance the previous day show Franken advancing toward Tweeden with splayed hands as she fends him off with a script, smiling in a winter coat and a Santa Claus hat.

papa horny michael posted:

I kissed Juliet on-stage during a performance so there's no reason to think she'll dislike it while asleep backstage.

Heck Yes! Loam! posted:

I think the current summary of thread preferences is as follows:

Bernie > .... > Warren > Giant Meteor > Castro/Booker > Sapient Self Help Book > Third Party > Harris > Trump > Biden

Also Imagine still defending Franken to this day.

theflyingorc posted:

Once it's fully rolled out, it's locked in yeah. The period before it gets locked in would be where you're super vulnerable to backlash. I hope we can pull it off, it's just annoying that voters are as dumb as that poll shows.

KOTEX GOD OF BLOOD posted:

look I'm not here to stan for franken.

quote:

are you going to keep saying that you read the whole thing in quadruple time while getting basic things about it wrong, or are you going to take the L and admit you made poo poo up and got called out on it?

Gripweed posted:

Heck Yes! Loam! posted:

Moving on from sexual assault apologia, We re so so so so hosed if the economy stays strong

https://twitter.com/jwpetersNYT/status/1153416613980454914

KOTEX GOD OF BLOOD posted:

i think she handles this pretty fairly:

it was indeed crude and unfair to do that while she was sleeping, but conveniently she failed to mention that this was part of a bit they did through multiple performances

Heck Yes! Loam! posted:

Hmm yes the picture of her sleeping with his hands over her breasts was from a bit! This is the defense needed to make all this go away and bring my senpai back, and punish that nasty kirsten gillibrand for his murder.

Also

https://twitter.com/pdmcleod/status/1153421587716157441

Lol

daft posted:

Haha what a misfire av buy. Noice

Gripweed posted:

Heck Yes! Loam! posted:

Someone needs to pay attention to their Avatar buys a bit better LOL

Oh Snapple! posted:

Fun part is that unless someone fesses up you'll never really know if it was an actual misfire or someone just trying to make you look bad.

quote:

Moving on from sexual assault apologia, We re so so so so hosed if the economy stays strong

https://twitter.com/jwpetersNYT/status/1153416613980454914

Bad Titty Puker posted:

https://medium.com/@teamwarren/the-coming-economic-crash-and-how-to-stop-it-355703da148b

Gripweed posted:

None doubts that there will be another crash. The problem is what if the crash doesn't happen on a schedule beneficial to Democrats in the 2020 election?If the crash comes 12 months from now, eey great for Democrats. But if it doesn't, if it comes, say 18 months from now, well that's not very helpful, is it?

Which is why we need a candidate who can win even without a well timed economic crisis.

Bad Titty Puker posted:

Oh, I don't know, there might be a few people here and there who aren't openly predicting that a recession will occur in 2020 or 2021.

mandatory lesbian posted:

Imagine being stupid enough to think crime tourism is real