13
   

Monitoring Biden and other Contemporary Events

 
 
hightor
 
  3  
Reply Fri 8 Nov, 2024 12:59 pm
@Lash,
https://i.imgur.com/leG7bYi.png
Lash
 
  -3  
Reply Fri 8 Nov, 2024 01:43 pm
@hightor,
Staring at teleprompter during what’s supposed to be your own conversation vs having your source material in hand if necessary??

He’s not looking at it.

I am laughing at you!

Let’s wait till Trump does something stupid.

It shouldn’t be long!
glitterbag
 
  2  
Reply Fri 8 Nov, 2024 04:05 pm
@Lash,
After reading your last comment:

As Putin emerges as a leader of a large consortium of nations juxtaposed by the decline of US influence, I was incredibly heartened to hear Putin’s comments yesterday. Notable comments:

He will not stop using the dollar.
He is ready to talk to Trump about the end of hostilities in Ukraine.
He is interested in improved relations with Europe and the US.

He is in a position to do a lot of damage and certainly is motivated to do so.

He appears to be the only adult in the building.

I hope this offer isn’t ignored.

His petroleum products alone would help Europe.


Obviously you are a BIG Putin fan. Please remind me which countries did better while being occupied by the USSR? Can you think of even one? I can't.
glitterbag
 
  3  
Reply Fri 8 Nov, 2024 04:06 pm
@Lash,
Lash wrote:

Anybody who thinks Trump is scripted is an idiot.
He’s a loose cannon who probably doesn’t know half of what he’ll say until it falls out of his mouth.

Kamala, on the other hand, is unable to speak without the words teleprompted in her face.

Why lie so much??? You might find some kind of legitimate criticism in the truth.



You should be pitied.
0 Replies
 
Lash
 
  -2  
Reply Fri 8 Nov, 2024 05:07 pm
@glitterbag,
Please tell me one that’s better while being occupied by the US.

We shouldn’t be in the business of occupying other countries.
georgeob1
 
  1  
Reply Fri 8 Nov, 2024 08:33 pm
One of the most remarkable elements of the recent election and the events that led up to it is the levels of denial and projection that prevail among Democrat Political leaders, sympathetic media figures, and many of their supporters. How often have we heard that Trump is a "threat do our Democracy" and an "authoritarian Tyrant". The rather obvious facts are that it is they and the Biden Administration have been the real threats in both areas, limited only by their incompetence in executing their plans. They have been systematically projecting their own undemocratic and authoritarian motives and actions on their opponents, and now appear to be unable to understand the still unfolding results.

Progressive reformers of every stripe seek to be judged based on the supposed virtues of their good intentions, as opposed to the awful results they usually achieve. In most cases their failures result from the many contradictions in our common human natures and the unforeseen & unwanted side effects of simplistic programs designed to control their behavior. Thus Colleges and Universities respond to government subsidies for tuition by increasing their administrative staffs, adding meaningless courses of study results, in fact yielding significantly higher tuition and less access to now more bureaucratic and less focused educational programs. Not at all hard to understand and foresee: pour more money into a closed economic system and you get higher prices Duh !!

Democrats are also learning that the condescension attendant to the "special benefits" with which they seek to retain the loyalty of the Latinos and Blacks is no longer effective, as both increasingly understand that their needs and aspirations as individuals transcend the group identities with which Democrats kept them on their Plantation for so long. The contempt implicit in Joe Biden's "If you don't vote Democrat, you ain't Black" retort was a telling reminder.

It will take some time to slow the ongoing shifts in the political alignment of large groups of Americans, and the changes evident in this election will likely continue and grow.

Democrats themselves are the real lawless authoritarians who threaten our Democracy. Our immigration laws and those that govern the granting of asylum to endangered people seeking entry into this country require them to appear at one of a designated Border entry stations to make their appeal and await review and judicial approval of the merits of their request. They do not authorize the President or anyone else to provide advance guarantees of asylum to those who swim across the Rio Grande, or are transported here by cartels and they do not authorize the President to expend government funds to charter aircraft to fly them here from points in South America. Only the Congress of the United States is empowered to authorize the expenditure of Federal funds for any purpose, and Biden's actions to do these things and many others including efforts to unilaterally forgive student loans, force limitations on the manufacture of petroleum powered trucks and autos are all clear violations of our Laws, involving powers not granted to our Presidents either in our Constitution or our laws.

The left wing leadership of the Democrat Party has used largely incompetent and corrupt puppets such as Joe Biden & Kamila Harris to pose as their leaders, now for a long time. In both cases it appeared to work for a while, but the weakness of both figures finally became evident. Backroom politics bypassed the final stages of the Primary process for the selection of Joe Biden in 2020 and, as we recently saw, as 'ole Joe's weakness and frailties became too publicly evident, the leadership replaced it entirely in the arbitrary appointment of Kamila Harris as their Candidate this year. She too appeared to flourish for a while, but her lack of experience & understanding, and the emptiness of her policy positions and rhetoric finally became evident to large groups of previous Democrat voters, already injured by the many failed policies of the Biden administration. A sudden collapse followed.


hingehead
 
  2  
Reply Sat 9 Nov, 2024 12:16 am
@Lash,
Quote:
Please tell me one that’s better while being occupied by the US.

We shouldn’t be in the business of occupying other countries.


While I agree with your last sentence I can answer your first.

Germany and Japan at the end of WWII with the introduction of the Marshall Plan. Somewhen after that your country lost it's mind on foreign policy.
Builder
 
  -2  
Reply Sat 9 Nov, 2024 12:35 am
@hingehead,
Quote:
Somewhen after that your country lost it's mind on foreign policy.


It was in 1953 that the US first attempted a "regime change" coup in Iran, ousting the democratically elected (and much-loved) leader, Mohammed Mossedegh.

The Shah of Iran wasn't even that keen on being pushed into the driver's seat, but, like most puppets, he wasn't really driving anything. And we all know how that eventually panned out, right?
0 Replies
 
glitterbag
 
  3  
Reply Sat 9 Nov, 2024 01:20 am
@Lash,
So you can't think of even one country that flourished under USSR occupation? How odd, perhaps because there has never been one?
glitterbag
 
  3  
Reply Sat 9 Nov, 2024 01:21 am
@glitterbag,
One correction, you should ask our VietNam war hero George.....he knows everything.
Builder
 
  -2  
Reply Sat 9 Nov, 2024 02:02 am
@glitterbag,
Quote:
How odd, perhaps because there has never been one?


Your own nation is steadily dying under US "occupation".

I guess you won't notice, because it's been so long
since you've seen a nation that is flourishing.
0 Replies
 
hightor
 
  2  
Reply Sat 9 Nov, 2024 03:51 am
Quote:
Social media has been flooded today with stories of Trump voters who are shocked to learn that tariffs will raise consumer prices as reporters are covering that information. Daniel Laguna of LevelUp warned that Trump’s proposed 60% tariff on Chinese imports could raise the costs of gaming consoles by 40%, so that a PS5 Pro gaming system would cost up to $1,000. One of the old justifications for tariffs was that they would bring factories home, but when the $3 billion shoe company Steve Madden announced yesterday it would reduce its imports from China by half to avoid Trump-promised tariffs, it said it will shift production not to the U.S., but to Cambodia, Vietnam, Mexico, and Brazil.

There are also stories that voters who chose Trump to lower household expenses are unhappy to discover that their undocumented relatives are in danger of deportation. When CNN’s Dana Bash asked Indiana Republican senator-elect Jim Banks if undocumented immigrants who had been here for a long time and integrated into the community would be deported, Banks answered that deportation should include “every illegal in this country that we can find.” Yesterday a Trump-appointed federal judge struck down a policy established by the Biden administration that was designed to create an easier path to citizenship for about half a million undocumented immigrants who are married to U.S. citizens.

Meanwhile, Trump’s advisors told Jim VandeHei and MIke Allen of Axios that Trump wasted valuable time at the beginning of his first term and that they will not make that mistake again. They plan to hit the ground running with tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, deregulation, and increased gas and oil production. Trump is looking to fill the top ranks of the government with “billionaires, former CEOs, tech leaders and loyalists.”

After the election, the wealth of Trump-backer Elon Musk jumped about $13 billion, making him worth $300 billion. Musk, who has been in frequent contact with Russian president Vladimir Putin, joined a phone call today between President-elect Trump and Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky.

In Salon today, Amanda Marcotte noted that in states all across the country where voters backed Trump, they also voted for abortion rights, higher minimum wage, paid sick and family leave, and even to ban employers from forcing their employees to sit through right-wing or anti-union meetings. She points out that 12% of voters in Missouri voted both for abortion rights and for Trump.

Marcotte recalled that Catherine Rampell and Youyou Zhou of the Washington Post showed before the election that voters overwhelmingly preferred Harris’s policies to Trump’s if they didn’t know which candidate proposed them. An Ipsos/Reuters poll from October showed that voters who were misinformed about immigration, crime, and the economy tended to vote Republican, while those who knew the facts preferred Democrats. Many Americans turn for information to social media or to friends and family who traffic in conspiracy theories. As Angelo Carusone of Media Matters put it: “We have a country that is pickled in right-wing misinformation and rage.”

In The New Republic today, Michael Tomasky reinforced that voters chose Trump in 2024 not because of the economy or inflation, or anything else, but because of how they perceived those issues—which is not the same thing. Right-wing media “fed their audiences a diet of slanted and distorted information that made it possible for Trump to win,” Tomasky wrote. Right-wing media has overtaken legacy media to set the country’s political agenda not only because it’s bigger, but because it speaks with one voice, “and that voice says Democrats and liberals are treasonous elitists who hate you, and Republicans and conservatives love God and country and are your last line of defense against your son coming home from school your daughter.”

Tomasky noted how the work of Matthew Gertz of Media Matters shows that nearly all the crazy memes that became central campaign issues—the pet-eating story, for example, or the idea that the booming economy was terrible—came from right-wing media. In those circles, Vice President Kamala Harris was a stupid, crazed extremist who orchestrated a coup against President Joe Biden and doesn’t care about ordinary Americans, while Trump is under assault and has been for years, and he’s “doing it all for you.”

Investigative reporter Miranda Green outlined how “pink slime” newspapers, which are AI generated from right-wing sites, turned voters to Trump in key swing state counties. Republican strategist Sarah Longwell, who studies focus groups, told NPR, “When I ask voters in focus groups if they think Donald Trump is an authoritarian, the #1 response by far is, ‘What is an authoritarian?’”

In a social media post, Marcotte wrote: “A lot of voters are profoundly ignorant. More so than in the past.” That jumped out to me because there was, indeed, an earlier period in our history when voters were “pickled in right-wing misinformation and rage.”

In the 1850s, white southern leaders made sure that voters did not have access to news that came from outside the American South, and instead steeped them in white supremacist information. They stopped the mail from carrying abolitionist pamphlets, destroyed presses of antislavery newspapers, and drove antislavery southerners out of their region.

Elite enslavers had reason to be concerned about the survival of their system of human enslavement. The land boom of the 1840s, when removal of Indigenous peoples had opened up rich new lands for settlement, had priced many white men out of the market. They had become economically unstable, roving around the country working for wages or stealing to survive. And they deeply resented the fabulously wealthy enslavers who they knew looked down on them.

In 1857, North Carolinian Hinton Rowan Helper wrote a book attacking enslavement. No friend to his Black neighbors, Helper was a virulent white supremacist. But in The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It, he used modern statistics to prove that slavery destroyed economic opportunity for white men, and assailed “the illbreeding and ruffianism of the slaveholding officials.” He noted that voters in the South who did not own slaves outnumbered by far those who did. "Give us fair play, secure to us the right of discussion, the freedom of speech, and we will settle the difficulty at the ballot-box,” he wrote.

In the North the book sold like hotcakes—142,000 copies by fall 1860. But southern leaders banned the book, and burned it, too. They arrested men for selling it and accused northerners of making war on the South. Politicians, newspaper editors, and ministers reinforced white supremacy, warned that the end of slavery would mean race war, and preached that enslavement was God’s law.

When northern voters elected Abraham Lincoln in November 1860 on a platform of containing enslavement in the South, where the sapped soil would soon cut into production, southern leaders decided—usually without the input of voters—to secede from the Union. As leaders promised either that there wouldn’t be a fight, or that if a fight happened it would be quick and painless, poor southern whites rallied to the cause of creating a nation based on white supremacy, reassured by South Carolina senator James Chesnut’s vow that he would personally drink all the blood shed in any threatened civil war.

When Confederate forces fired on Fort Sumter in April 1861, poor white men set out for what they had come to believe was an imperative cause to protect their families and their way of life. By 1862 their enthusiasm had waned, and leaders passed a conscription law. That law permitted wealthy men to hire a substitute and exempted one man to oversee every 20 enslaved men, providing another way for rich men to keep their sons out of danger. Soldiers complained it was a “rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.”

By 1865 the Civil War had killed or wounded 483,026 men out of a southern white population of about five and a half million people. U.S. armies had pushed families off their lands, and wartime inflation drove ordinary people to starvation. By 1865, wives wrote to their soldier husbands to come home or there would be no one left to come home to.

Even those poor white men who survived the war could not rebuild into prosperity. The war took from the South its monopoly of global cotton production, locking poor southerners into profound poverty from which they would not begin to recover until the 1930s, when the New Deal began to pour federal money into the region.

Today, when I received a slew of messages gloating that Trump had won the election and that Republican voters had owned the libs, I could not help but think of that earlier era when ordinary white men sold generations of economic aspirations for white supremacy and bragging rights.

hcr
0 Replies
 
eurocelticyankee
 
  2  
Reply Sat 9 Nov, 2024 04:56 am


Cannot believe you reelected that pile of **** again AND gave the Republicans a bigger majority.
FA's
0 Replies
 
Lash
 
  -2  
Reply Sat 9 Nov, 2024 07:12 am
@hingehead,
I appreciate your sentiment—and of course, I expected Germany and Japan to mentioned as answers.

On the surface of our intervention in those countries, most people would vehemently agree with you.

I disagree. A sound military thrashing was appropriate. Some give and take with rebuilding assistance attached to certain verifiable political promises—yes.

But we employed deep psychological conditioning to the German people (I don’t know any people who had to go through the same conditioning in Japan; it may have been the same), and as a result, Germany seems to me to be too much another American outpost. Our occupation has morphed into an annex, in my mind. Generations of Germans were brainwashed with guilt and speech laws. I think American has dabbled too much in this and other so-called sovereign nations…

Recently, NATO commanded them to give damaging amounts of money to the Ukraine Project and it’s ruining their economy. Their affordable source of gas was literally blown up intentionally at the command of the US—& Germany was afraid to admit those findings of their investigation.

So, your good point acknowledged, but I disagree.🙂
Lash
 
  0  
Reply Sat 9 Nov, 2024 07:30 am
@georgeob1,
All of this is demonstrably true.

And that may be the only sentence of my response that George has any agreement with.🙂

________________

The thing that concerns me the most about the D party is the extreme damage their propaganda arm (Western media) is doing to the fabric of our society. MSM is ripping Democrat people apart.

MSNBC features purported mental health professionals who advise Democrats to cut themselves off from conservative family members. They’ve already compartmentalized everyone into race, gender, political categories and now, they’re losing family.

Social media is filled with videos of women shaving their heads, scream-crying, saying they should tattoo themselves so they can recognize non-Democrats in public places. This is bizarre, unhealthy behavior. They are doing to themselves what they were told Trump would do to them.

More so, only Democrats have been inculcated with the insane notion that due to political affiliation, they have the right to assault people and destroy or steal their property. The constant drumbeat of dangerous propaganda makes them feel this is ok. I’m seeing A LOT of arrests of old men and women my age, quivering with rage during their crimes, and then surprised when the cops show up at their doors.

The media is guilty.
0 Replies
 
Walter Hinteler
 
  3  
Reply Sat 9 Nov, 2024 07:35 am
@Lash,
Lash wrote:
I disagree. A sound military thrashing was appropriate. Some give and take with rebuilding assistance attached to certain verifiable political promises—yes.

But we employed deep psychological conditioning to the German people (I don’t know any people who had to go through the same conditioning in Japan; it may have been the same), and as a result, Germany seems to me to be too much another American outpost. Our occupation has morphed into an annex, in my mind. Generations of Germans were brainwashed with guilt and speech laws. I think American has dabbled too much in this and other so-called sovereign nations…


You obviously know more about me and my fellow citizens than we and I realise.

The fact is that I was born in the British zone. (The missus too - she even got a British ID card after she was born).

At the turn of the year 2019/2020, all British combat troops left Germany. (There is still a large training area nearby).
The Canadian troops have been withdrawn here since the 1970s, the Belgian troops in the 1980s.

However, I or my family had no contact with them - apart from listening to BFNS and Canadian Forces Radio.

But there was also the Soviet occupation zone, with Soviet troops stationed there until 1991 (Putin was a KGB major in Dresden until 1989)
If you listen to some of the voices of residents of the former GDR, you can certainly recognise ‘American brainwashing’ there, or so you think.

Walter Hinteler
 
  2  
Reply Sat 9 Nov, 2024 07:39 am
@Lash,
Lash wrote:
Generations of Germans were brainwashed with guilt and speech laws.
What do you mean by "guilt"?


Regarding "speech laws":
The Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany:
Quote:
Article 5: Freedom of expression

(1) Every person shall have the right freely to express and disseminate his opinions in speech, writing and pictures, and to inform himself without hindrance from generally accessible sources. Freedom of the press and freedom of reporting by means of broadcasts and films shall be guaranteed. There shall be no censorship.

(2) These rights shall find their limits in the provisions of general laws, in provisions for the protection of young persons, and in the right to personal honour.

(3) Arts and sciences, research and teaching shall be free. The freedom of teaching shall not release any person from allegiance to the constitution.
Lash
 
  -2  
Reply Sat 9 Nov, 2024 07:40 am
@Walter Hinteler,
The fish think they are the experts in what’s in the fishbowl, but it’s never the case.
Lash
 
  -2  
Reply Sat 9 Nov, 2024 07:44 am
@Walter Hinteler,
When we started discussing the Palestinian Holocaust months ago, you were not free to use certain terms in certain combinations. We all understood, on your behalf.

Are you denying that?
0 Replies
 
eurocelticyankee
 
  3  
Reply Sat 9 Nov, 2024 07:45 am
@Lash,
Very Happy
Quote:
The fish think they are the experts in what’s in the fishbowl, but it’s never the case.


That sounds like something the Orangutan would say, only he'd add ''biggest fish bowl in the history of fish bowls with the Arnold Palmer of fish''.

(sigh)
 

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