It’s an astonishing story, even for the Trump era. You already have the whole thing of the why he is even using the new plane and cost to the tax payers to retrofit it to bring it up to security standards, money they have lied about repeatedly. You have the prior reporting of going home on the old AF1 because of security concerns about this new one that the Trump admin has been suing the press over (Free Speech for Maga - you get to say the N word on twitter, but the press cannot report unfavourably about the government without being sued by them).
But now we learn even before the plane switch we knew about there was a prior secret one orchestrated with some scooby style trickery, but didnt let anyone know and so allowed a large collection of civilians and press fly home on the plane they were concerned was subject to a legit threat and had insufficient security to protect against.
I scoffed at the news of the EO when I first read it, reading that it was just him saying stupid shit about autism. But this is actually way worse than it was initially reported. It argues that combo shots should be broken up into individual shots (which goes against one of the core arguments made by vaccine “skeptics”), despite there being no evidence for this dosing regimen (a key factor in what gets approved by the FDA and other regulatory bodies) and that those versions of the shots dont even exist. Even if you could ignore all that, spreading out the dosing like this EO is recommending only ever does 1 thing - reduce effective rates of vaccinations because of the impracticality of the new regimen.
This is happening during a record resurgence of measles BTW
We are living in a mass state of delusion with how much pure nonsense is traded on by this political movement. Like literally they will hold up a paper that says one thing and present it as evidence that the complete opposite is true.
But you know he’s not king so I guess I was right that his critics were just being hyperbolic
I hold my hand up in that I was one of those that said, “chilmal”, the sky isn’t falling and he’ll be gone soon enough. My original thinking (shallow as it might have been) was that that are structures in place to limit the damage the buffoon can do. This was sadly wide (very wide) off the mark.
The point I missed was just how corrosive he was going to be (and continues to be) to the basic fabric of everything that has been built by the West in the last 100 years, if not the last 500 years. I know, you did say so, about 10 times a day…
Talking of 10 times a day, Trump probably says or does at least 10 things in a single day that would sink every administration before this one and send a bunch of people to prison to boot.
If buffoonery was all there was then maybe there was a chance for a meh, why does it matter?, Sadly (and maybe obviously for you) his actions have led to the deaths of 1000s likely10s of 1000s of people - this is ongoing (cutting aid, damaging health policies, wars, etc) and will out live him (cutting funding to research, damaging education systems and so on). Ultimately he should be answerable but he wont be - which is the compounding further the damage being done as it says that you can get away with anything.
p.s. He will get away with it as the cost of prosecution will be too high - financially and politically
As has been the case with Trump since the beginning, its not just the enablers who are in a position to do something about it and dont, its the people willfully making the situation worse.
Right now there is an utterly absurd “Fauci knew the vaccine was as dangerous to a pregnancy as anti-abortion medication and he covered that up” thing going on. To push this you either have to have no bullshit radar at all so that you believe something that is so obviously not true (the now common claim that 81% of pregnancies failed after the mother got the shot, despite the best evidence showing no increased risk to pregnancy at all), or you know it isnt true and are getting something out of stoking up fear and distrust in really dangerous ways because of some expectation you will personally benefit from it.
There has been so much written about the various ways “we failed” in our response to Covid, but very little of that has focused on the malicious, active sowing of distrust by fakers and charlatans in ways that went a long way to creating the institutional distrust that was responsible for so much of our collective failure.
The early position on vaccines for pregnant women was “we dont have the data yet for this specific, but Covid itself is very dangerous to a pregnancy and so women should make a decision with their doctor.” The CDC would not recommend pregnant women get vaccinated until August, around the time Fauci is giving this interview.
In the months between the initial vaccine roll out and this formal CDC position on vaccines there was debate internally about how to answer the question on safety. Both rhetorically and with science that they just didnt have when the vaccines were first rolled out. These personal communications show Fauci having chased down some information from experts and relaying to the head of the then head of the CDC a theoretical mechanism for how a vaccine might cause a problem, something that should be factored into how they approach the studies being planned. Note this is not data. It is a purported mechanism they should be on the look out for. Once they got the data and saw the risk was essentially zero Faucci started making public comments like the ones Johnson is sharing and getting worked up about.
So much of this pointing to what was said in private messages of people involved in the covid response and using them as a gotchya relies in rejecting how time works. They do the same with the authors of the infamous proximal origins paper, the one that concluded that based on the evidence available by Mar 2020, zoonotic spillover was the overwhelming most likely explanation and that lab origin (as in engineered) was not plausible. Yet skeptics point to internal communications among those authors from the weeks before they’d done the work the subsequent paper would be reporting on showing showing they too had serious concern over a lab origin and took it seriously as a possibility. Using the concept of time, that tells us that at one point they were very open to the possibility of it being lab origin (the most malign form of lab leak origin), but as time progressed and they received and analyzed the data they became increasingly convinced that was not a good explanation and their paper said so. Yet these fucking morons don’t accept that.
You are right, the plane’s crew WH staffers and journos were all allowed to fly on that plane, absolutely appalling behaviour from whoever dreamt that up.If anything had happened it would have, and does raise some serious questions.
When the flight landed the press who were on the plane pushed on some of the unusual safety precautions they were asked to make mid flight, including closing the window blinds. Trump acknowledged there had been a safety concern, but if its safe enough for him then its safe enough for them, knowing he hadnt been on the fucking plane
Wild night in Wisconsin in the Dem Governor’s primary.
The authentically looney DSA candidate with cooky “peak woke” opinions that went beyond “defund the police” into things like “cancel thanksgiving” went into election night WAY ahead in all the polls. She bolstered this position over months of a succession of “WTF is happening” events to other more mainstream, establishment backed candidates
Crowley dropped out early and backed Rodriguez
Rodriguez then dropped out over accusations that her campaign manager had embezzled campaign funds
Remaining “establishment” candidate, Mandela Barnes (the guy whose Senate campaign in the last cycle was bizarrely ignored by the DNC and saw him lose a squeaker of a race against Ron Johnson that he almost certainly would have won with the tiniest bit of support and resources from DC), was again bizarrely ignored with establishment people trying to convince Crowley to get back into the race.
Crowley did reenter the race but only split the vote with Barnes in the polling leaving Hong a clear front runner
Barnes ultimately dropped out a few weeks ago over personal misconduct accusations (maybe the skeleton key to understanding why he historically received so little backing despite being a credible candidate) and rather than helping Crowley in the polls it just solidified Hong’s lead. The perception was the establishment had no idea what they were doing and so no one trusted their judgement on which candidate should be supported so Dem voters were just content to go for anyone else.
The last round of polls had Hong up by as much as 20 points over Crowley. Not a single poll, but a clear consistent pattern of an enormous lead. Yet when the results came in Crowley won. What appears to be the case is this was a huge turn out for primary, and that rather than learning from the misses of 2016 we are just increasingly getting worse at predicting who is going to show up and vote. This is a 20 point polling miss in possibly the most critical 2028 state for the presidency
This week the GOP put out a “Contrast for America” warning of the communist threat the Dems pose should they win elections.
From Fox’s description…
“Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. It must be fought for. It must be protected. It has to be taught, passed along to the next generation. Thirty-five years ago, Republicans and Democrats in Congress, they were fighting communism on a distant shore. Now it’s here,” Johnson says in the video. The website also includes a timeline of failed communist governments throughout the world, followed by dueling lists that show what Republicans are running on versus what Democrats’ far-left insurgency is pushing.
The term “Euro Poor” was trending this summer to explain why Americans were not negatively responding to the price of world cup tickets the way Euros were. Yet,
Twice the rate of users have bought groceries with BNPL than two years ago. 29% of BNPL users say they’ve used the loans for groceries, up from 25% a year ago and 14% two years ago. Nearly half of buy now, pay later users say they’ve paid late on a BNPL loan in the past year. 47% of users say they’ve paid late in the past year, up from 41% in 2025 and 34% in 2024.
McConnell health issues have meant he has not shown up for work at the Senate now for 2 months. He is getting paid on his annual salary of $175k through this absence.
I just saw someone tally up the stats of all of the votes he has taken on expanding medical leave since he joined congress in 85 and it said he has voted against it 23 of 23 times.
