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Greta is something you couldn't even write as a foil to help display the boorishness and vileness of an entire political movement in a work of fiction. Like the part where people like her and Hogg become targets is... beyond satire.
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Sep 24, 2019 12:49
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OAquinas posted:Trump and the GOP have become such outlandish villains that one-dimensional Capt Planet bad guys would be like "Dude, WTF?"  ... YOU'RE TELLING ME YOU'RE LIKE THIS OVER A HOLD ON [checks notes] A SIXTEEN YEAR OLD GIRL WHO IS, QUOTE, 'ANGRY AT PEOPLE WHO ARE KILLING THE WORLD FOR PROFIT' YOU'RE LIKE A BUNCH OF WET GHOULS. YOU ABSOLUTE TRUMPIAN MEDIOCRITIES
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Sep 24, 2019 13:44
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Arglebargle III posted:WRT climate change, consumer choice action is a bad joke. Sometimes it's a bad joke. Other times, they're bad faith cons that make people associate environmentalism with annoying governmental overreach and become reactively less supportive of environmental protection as a governmental agenda. The straw ban is an example of something so ultimately counterproductive that it wouldn't surprise me if it turned out to have been a planted agenda used to benefit polluters and corporate interests.
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Sep 24, 2019 15:11
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Am I to seriously believe that something mattered
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Sep 24, 2019 15:14
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This is weirdly depressing. He's just grandpa-ing on through a fashscript to a stone faced room.
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Sep 24, 2019 15:43
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Im actually just substantially amazed that trump finally amassed such an egregious threshold of titfaced neon crimedoing that Pelosi was forced to act. This is an amazing threshold to pass, when you think about it. Seven levels of extra comedic incompetence in corruption.
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Sep 24, 2019 22:25
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Something mattered so much that evilweasel returned
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Sep 24, 2019 22:32
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Lordy, there were ... tapes?
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Sep 24, 2019 22:45
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We have an update on the transcript release: apparently the call audio is being audited by the IRS for the indefinite future
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Sep 25, 2019 01:42
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Trump swore an oath, too. It says nothing to us.
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Sep 25, 2019 01:50
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I want to know, in a couple of weeks to a month or so, what this ends up looking like in terms of the odds that the Republicans lose the senate. I am usually inured to hope these days but ... this is exactly the sort of clownshow that risks republicans too much to make circling the wagons save them again.
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Sep 25, 2019 20:01
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Arist posted:Is the loving Press Secretary seriously whining about not having a platform There it is, my first literal laughter for the Mattering
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Sep 25, 2019 20:14
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What's in the whistleblower report that reduced him to this
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Sep 25, 2019 21:44
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RandomBlue posted:He had an affair with Pence's horse. "So is the Horse's name "Mother?""
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Sep 25, 2019 21:51
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Caros posted:I think the president might have severe mental deteriation. A bold claim, where's your medical degree? Also if ... IF you have a medical degree after all, uh we have urgent need of a new adderall prescription for no reason.
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Sep 25, 2019 22:16
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evilweasel posted:the key thing to keep in mind is it's not only about the presidency: it will be difficult to take the senate, but if dems do take the senate much more can get done than if they don't, and if an impeachment trial makes it easier to knock off the fourth or fifth seat needed to take the senate, that's something really important. Yeah, this is what I'm into, personally. All previous prognostication on how strongly the Senate might be in play for the Democrats is now solidly made obsolete by a solid day of President Crimes stepping into the world's largest parking lot of rakes.
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Sep 25, 2019 22:31
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Ho! I am having midnight ramblings and want the smart folk to tell me if I'm saying things that make sense. I think the situation is unfolding in a way which backs up one specific reading: Barr was willing to go to extraordinary and probably illegal lengths to attempt to block this whistleblower report from legally mandatory issue to the House committees – intervening directly and in ways that would create dramatic new degrees of evidence of his wrongdoing and complicity in obstructing justice. He was likely not even sure that it was going to work, but he still evidently felt compelled to try. It suggests that he knew that the report contained information that could sink the presidency. It also suggests it contains evidence of his own criminal involvement, which would come out as part of the whistleblower investigation, and meant that he essentially had nothing to lose. His only remaining option was apparently a hail mary attempt to assert that the whistleblower report fell entirely and solely under DoJ discretion and was at his liberty to release or contain. It was a very risky move, and not exactly one that seemed to have much capacity to survive challenge by the House IC (nor a flurry of continued whistleblower activity to alert everyone as to what happened). The desperation contained within this act is a substantive indicator to what this loving report might really be.
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Sep 26, 2019 04:27
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remember, the gears of justice turn very slowly, and one must be patient as they s ... oh, there's a turbo button? lol i never realized, please press that bad boy
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Sep 26, 2019 05:00
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Nunes just said the dumbest thing I think he has ever said to conclude his questioning Basically 'I sure hope we gett to cover these things up next time like they ought to have been'
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Sep 26, 2019 15:07
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It's piggy poop balls. Perennial post .cx slandervatar. Glad to see it go!
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Sep 26, 2019 21:52
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BigBallChunkyTime posted:Hows the_donald been taking it? Irrelevantly but probably with a lot of capital letters and obnoxiously manic cadence
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Sep 26, 2019 23:33
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Fritz Coldcockin posted:Adam Schiff literally did not do any of that. He read from the memo that was provided that says "This is not a transcript" like right at the top. They've cultivated a voterbase that has assiduously not required them to do so for at least a decade. It's made them soft with water-weight, unable even to clasp their stillsuits correctly.
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Sep 27, 2019 13:06
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The situation is already ideal for anyone who looks at this in a electoral outcomes / math nerd sort of way. It's timed well enough to inspire conspiracy theories about intentionally using election-influencing timeframes to drop a scandal in the most damaging window for the presidential election and it's perfectly primed to exacerbate and harden the popular support divide against conservatives, linked inexorably to Trump. I know that the GOP had strategies in place for a certain amount of electoral crisis (mostly fixing elections and loving over minorities but what else is new) but the reason why they aren't able to cohesively make an organized front right now is probably because they are admitting among themselves that they don't know how to handle how bad this is probably going to get and have probably been told that their current degree of antidemocratic election fixing is not sufficient to correct for it. The most important takeaway I have seen so far is this: quote:the republicans wanted to have a situation where the democrats not impeaching or not getting the votes for an impeachment confirmation in the Senate was all that mattered and would be a win for them. they don't have this anymore. they have a situation where it's VERY LIKELY that bringing the impeachment vote to the Senate before the election and forcing the gop to publicly vote in lockstep to save an obviously corrupt president results in them losing the white house and the senate. they are probably in a situation where having to vote on it causes them to lose in a big, generational way.
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Sep 27, 2019 14:07
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USPOL Fall: McCain's brow-furrowing in his grave right now
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Sep 27, 2019 17:34
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Please keep going. Overwhelm the shields.
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Sep 27, 2019 23:25
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Party Plane Jones posted:https://twitter.com/CNN/status/1177754813213356032 they're trying to do a tandem collapse
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Sep 28, 2019 02:24
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Let's release the transcript to get ahead of the report. Oof transcript looks bad. Report comes out. oh the report accurately describes the transcript. Quick, complain that the report is based on secondhand evidence. He NEVER listened to the transcript we already know he accurately described... yes, this will work. Excellent strategy
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Sep 28, 2019 16:35
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Guze posted:Saudi Army has to be the highest percentage of failsons Yeah they try to buy their way to modernized standing army status but
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Sep 29, 2019 04:35
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EwokEntourage posted:Kissinger looks loving terrible. Imagine living like that. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone, except for Kissinger. Kissinger is one of the horcruxes, and this takes a toll on your mortal husk. It's been hard on Cheney, too.
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Sep 29, 2019 15:26
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AhhYes posted:These seem like good numbers this early. It hasn't even been a week since this started to really sink in. Hell, it hasn't even been a week since it really got started to begin with. I imagine the plurality involved will be a majority soon.
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Sep 29, 2019 16:04
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Oh my God, I'm stunned. President Trump lied to Mueller? All my friends are stunned too just out of frame
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Oct 1, 2019 18:29
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Feldegast42 posted:We are all loving dead Like do you think there will be internecine American combat? Civil war situation? I don't think that. I think "climate change related border conflicts"
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Oct 1, 2019 19:46
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Ten is a low sentence because it won't be ten
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Oct 2, 2019 22:05
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:How has no one taken a tire iron to Jacob Wohl’s face yet? We trained him as a joke. He thinks losing is Winning!
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Oct 3, 2019 01:47
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Mantis42 posted:George Bush left office with one of the lowest approval ratings in a century, a quagmire in Iraq, a great recession, etc etc and even crazier conservatives emerged from the corpse of his admin and won landslide victories only 2 years later. Because they successfully engaged in the definitively most successful investment in impeding democracy since the Jim Crow era, it should be noted
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Oct 5, 2019 01:38
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coffeetable posted:something else worth mentioning when it comes to old, rural america is how much of a welfare queen it is, and much of the growth in government spending in the past decade is from a growth in retirement benefits. This is actually a huge issue, that I've had too much exposure to. Rural communities are less productive and more reliant on federal and state aid with each passing year – they've all been wholly hollowed out by the pernicious effects of neoliberalism, and now represent an insane drag on federal and state money. They require loads and loads of cash infusion, and they still largely get it – but the ideology of the white rural voter all but ensures that the money we do spend on these communities in abundance is spent in the least effectual ways possible. These communities can have millions upon millions of dollars in benefits just hurled at them and still be absolute humanitarian disasters because it's filtered through white conservative outrage about spending money on anything, which means that the only projects that get through are white conservative grift or the absolute federal minimums needed to do things like keep agricultural roads passable or keep too many old people of dying in outright squalor or neglect in managed care centers. This issue doesn't get a lot of attention and I rarely have any opportunity to bring it up but I believe it is actually one of the worst effects, in sum, of contemporary american conservatism. I just don't talk about it that much because I think that it's more or less a lost cause that won't be solved without a major alteration of the American sociopolitical condition. The GOP destroyed rural america across large swaths of the country, with the strength of the destruction remaining suspiciously proportionate to the strength to which conservatives command the state. As a particular example, you can look at the Colorado / Kansas border. It's a long, straight vertical line the height of Spain, a purely geopolitical conceit that slashes arbitrarily through a long stretch of zillions of acres of ecologically undifferentiated American plains. The difference being that the rural towns on one side are in ok shape and the ones on the other side are falling apart in horrible ways. Colorado's a state that the republicans have essentially permanently lost control of, but Kansas is a place which has been so monopolistically commanded by the GOP that they used it to engage wholesale in their unaltered economic ideology. When you pass into Kansas, it's like night and day, going from a series of rural towns in good or ok shape to a land of complete social and economic collapse. Even Kansas border towns like Kanorado are hollowed out husks full of empty storefronts, as near to being a ghost town as you can get. They're just basically waiting for most of their inhabitants to die off or move out.
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Oct 5, 2019 14:36
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coffeetable posted:On the larger point of from-each-according-to-their ability: it's a good ideal, but several decades of investing a substantial fraction of the national GDP into these places hasn't done much to slow the decline. There are plenty of places that have a need, and as Kavros points out many of them have shown a lot more progress for the investment. The ideal would be to allocate federal funding with a lot of control attached, but as the Obamacare subsidies illustrate the response is simply 'we don't want it!'. Yeah. I would highly recommend not settling on a "gently caress these rural places, why should we care about them" narrative. States which have become pseudo-permanently freed of conservative control through demographic changes and the age cohort instability of the GOP's voterbase have rural communities which are doing OK or even great. Also, throughout the country, rural communities often are representations of hispanic and black enclaves that certainly don't buy into Trumpism, but rather suffer for it due to the dynamics of the state governments that hold their futures hostage.
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Oct 5, 2019 15:01
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happyhippy posted:I have a friend who has to have the last word on anything to 'argue' about. No matter how trivial it is, for example 'Its nice out', he would say 'its going to rain later'. It's all loosely congealed around a pathological need for narcissistic supply, which I think exists in people in varieties that extend well beyond if someone reaches the threshold for clinical narcissism. I think there's a lot of comorbidity with other personality disorders, like borderline or oppositional defiant. Someone like Trump or Giuliani is a toxic stew of those Probably-Clinical-Personality-Disorders which were rigidly ingrained by a torturous upbringing by cruel parents that probably always made them feel insufficient and degraded them constantly and expected unrealistic perfection from an early age, and intensified and made permanent by ridiculous privilege and the lack of accountability to one's actions that it represents. It doesn't even need a label or an official diagnosis (though trump assuredly has one). It's just rich white people born into immense cruelty and the opportunity to abuse power heedlessly, until the heedless abuse of power defines their actions.
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Oct 5, 2019 15:12
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I do in fact gotta give it to him that trump certainly caught all of us by surprise
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Oct 5, 2019 16:12
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SchrodingersCat posted:I will say, when it comes to whistleblowers there is a cascade effect. If there are two right now there may very well be 6 in a month. I am currently involved in a whistleblower case, and the thing that pushed me to file were other whistleblowers coming forward. It gives you courage because there is strength and protection in numbers. If even one whistleblower is a registered Republicans it takes all of the wind out of the bias defense. When there is more than one whistleblower the case becomes about the facts, whereas when you are alone it turns into victim-blaming and personal attacks. It's also a lot harder to "disappear" two people than it is to disappear one. There are currently more than six whistleblower reports that you could say are in process to approach the house intelligence committee -- Andrew Bakaj represents a few more that we already actually know of unrelated to whistleblowers #1 and #2. The things you are talking about are absolutely prescient, and why it's already happening so fast.
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Oct 6, 2019 17:39
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