but, what’s the budget for DoD?
Marcy is unfortunately too often borderline unintelligible in her own blog, but this is an unusually clear piece from her countering the common criticisms of Garland’s perceived delays ininvestigating Jan 6th
lol … I thought it was just me.
It always infuriates me how these retards over there thinks everything revolves around the US. It is not only ignorant, but very insulting. Which president the US has, is 100 percent irrelevant to how Kreml chooses to treat it’s internal enemies, (unless the US some how threatened with something spectacular and totally unrealistic and politically impossible). A US president can change the Russian calculus, possibly the plan, when it comes to intervening in another country if the US threat is credible and painful enough (but that takes a lot, much more than what Biden offered in 2022), but the US has 0.000 % influence in general in Russia.
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Ken Buck, about the closest thing left to a normal Republican in the House, had announced before Christmas he would not be seeking reelection. Today he announced that he cannot deal with it anymore and so wont even be seeing out his full term and instead will be leaving at the end of the next week and now appears to be throwing bombs at his own party on the way out.
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Doesn’t quite belong here but there’s enough of an overlap I think, so:
Not sure whether there are any broader implications here but hopefully something positive can come from this.
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Maybe if it stops some of them from giving their kids guns, it might be a start.
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It’s interesting because Michigan is one of those states that defies the blue/red perspective on guns. It’s margins arent big (except for Whitmer), but has become a fully Democratic run state, but has a strong hunting culture so is very careful to not overstep on gun control.
We are just such a dumb and profoundly racist country
https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/14/politics/adeel-mangi-nomination/index.html
If you point out someone (not even necessarily a Jew) is acting more in the interest of Isreal than the US you are condemned as being anti semitic with no consideration of the merits of the specific argument. Yet you can freely insinuate that an American Citizen is in league with Hamas and as such unfit for the bench simply because he’s Muslim and it be treated as a totally normal thing to think and say.
‘Biden’s announcement was a hastily conceived political move to mollify Democrats upset at the handling of the Israel-Hamas war.’ … ya don’t say.
Officials don’t even have a plan in place to anchor the causeway to the shore: That work can’t be done by U.S. military personnel, as Biden has vowed not to put U.S. boots on the ground in Gaza.
There’s joke, and then there’s this 
How the actual fuck can anyone vote for this piece of shit ?
(Free to read)
https://twitter.com/Acyn/status/1769102618213638350
The exact words…
I’ve seen people, not exactly Trump apologists, try to parse his “bloodbath” comments…“that isnt really what he said”
Why are we still doing this? Whether by malice or by total fuckwittery, the message taken is clear. We are long past the point of excusing a public figure for the impact of his inflammatory language. Either way it is disqualifying. And that’s the ultimate confusion of the Trump era…the excuses for the shit he does is just as disqualifying as the original accusation and yet everyone just moves on.
EDIT: But he also totally said the thing people are pretending he didnt.
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History shows that people using words to describe a situation, and how they intend to address it, end up actually transforming their words into action when they get the opportunity to do so.
Trump should be taken 100% seriously, every word. If most people did that, they’d quickly realize how dangerous he is, and wouldn’t vote for him anymore.
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I’ve recently spent some time with a guy from Ohio who always voted Republican until the last election. He said that he, and his friends and family, who are all like minded, would never vote for Trump. They may, or may not go as far as to vote for Biden, but they’ve heard and seen enough of what Trump is about and it doesn’t align with their values.
Hopefully he will continue to rant and rave and say enough appalling things to keep this constituency away.
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These are people who have always voted Republican though, so to remove them from that column decreases Trumps chances. If he keeps on spouting his bile it should energise middle of the road Democrats too.
There’s a very long way to go though.
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I do think there is something to it that the more extreme he gets the narrower his support should be.
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There is a trope in US politics now that all Trump’s bad shit is already “baked in”. The insinuation being there is no more room for persuasion of Trump voters because they know exactly who is is and what he stands for. I think that is bullshit.
One of the core themes of his time in politics is a complete disconnect between Trump’s actions and the understanding of them from his supporters. Sure, you can find people who support him who acknowledge that Jan6th was part of a coordinated plot to subvert the results of an election, but the majority of those have some significant cognitive dissonance over it, also holding opinions that are contradictory to that (it was a false flag, it was antifa, it was a peaceful rally).
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How many people genuinely understand how badly Trump fucked up the pandemic? How many people just shrug and say “no one got it right so you cant blame trump”, and dont really understand that he did what he did not just as a genuine difference of opinion, but out of a selfish desire to not be viewed as having had a pandemic on his watch and so took every decision he made to just pretend it was not happening? How many people understand what that says about his ability to deal with whatever crisis he may face in a second term?
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How many people genuinely understand how under him how much America is for sale, and even how little he is willing to sell it off for?
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How many people genuinely understand how much of a deviation in civic life the Trump presidency was and how much worse he has signaled it will be in a second term? How many people genuinely understand the implication of the face eating cheatah party meme coming to life for them vs think it’s just a continuation of the us vs them politics they grew up with?
The vast majority of people you will meet who claim to vote for Trump may give some acknowledgement of those issues, but the thing weighing most heavily on their decision of a lot of people to still support Trump will be their lack of understanding of the reality. They will shrug and make some reference to Russiagate, the Biden laptop or the deep state. These are not deep in the weeds Q people, but maybe people who only pay enough attention to be familiar with the headline and main talking points from both sides. I think increasingly that is the real dividing line in US politics, not the left vs right, but the connected vs disconnected. These are the people Hillary was referencing in her basket of deplorables speech…the point being that while some portion of his support is unreachable, a significant portion are still there to be convinced. While I think she got that right what I think she misunderstood was the importance of the messenger. Even had the press covered her message, these people were never going to hear it from her. They would have from a McCain or a Romney though. Even more importantly, the would have coming from that guy they see every month at the classic car coffee event they go to. Or the guy at their expensive country club who occasionally makes up the 4th in their four ball. I think that is why these people are so important far more so than their isolated vote.
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