Let's make America Grate Again.

[Chuck Naill]

What Milley is so much more.....

[TSherbs]

"Student loan forgiveness" for people under an an income cap is "unfair."

What a bunch of whiners. Can't you do better than that? The only problem is that the cap should have been lower (even more targeted toward the lower incomes). But that would be even more "unfair," no?

The GOP better get its shit together and stop letting these losers take up the sound bite space. They're gonna blow their momentum (already turning) going into the midterms.

[TSherbs]

Another of America's "greats" showing off her intelligence and sense of history:

Business Insider: Marjorie Taylor Greene compared Joe Biden to Hitler, Israel makes rare criticism.

https://www.businessinsider.com/mtg-...iticism-2022-9

This woman's ego LOVES attention.

[Chip]

How about bailouts for banks? Subsidies for fossil fuel mining and drilling? Tax breaks for the richest and greediest?

I guess it depends on your point of view (or who's jerking your leash.)

[TSherbs]

Making America Great: money-laundering, conspiracy, and fraud. Another of the great con-men: Steve Bannon

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/ste...nt-2022-09-08/

[Chuck Naill]

Making America Great: money-laundering, conspiracy, and fraud. Another of the great con-men: Steve Bannon

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/ste...nt-2022-09-08/

Would you agree that we long to see justice, finally occur?

These folks are proud in their lawlessness.

[Lloyd]

If you ask me, Steve Bannon needs to spend more time laundering his clothes and less time laundering money.

Typos courtesy of Samsung Auto-Incorrect™

[TSherbs]

The prosectutor's office still working on cleaning up the Trump swamp: Trump swump

[dneal]

This seems to fit well here.

There’s a sort of test for commitment to reasoned debate. Does the person make a good faith effort to characterize opposing viewpoints accurately and, in whatever aspects are relevant to the topic at hand, completely? Does the person work cooperatively with their opponent to establish the clearest possible expression of their opponent’s position, and then proceed to argue against that? If not, then they’re not committed to reasoned debate, for no honest person interested in applying reason to find truths would see any point to arguing against a strawman, nor would they stoop to the purely political tactic of appealing to emotion rather than reason.

[Chuck Naill]

Try it sometime, D!

[kazoolaw]

Try it sometime, D!

Kind of a sad post, from the (grade)school of "I know you are but what am I."

[Chuck Naill]

Try it sometime, D!

Kind of a sad post, from the (grade)school of "I know you are but what am I."

It's been a hard week for you, hasn't it?

[kazoolaw]

Try it sometime, D!

Kind of a sad post, from the (grade)school of "I know you are but what am I."

It's been a hard week for you, hasn't it?

Sadder and sadder from the man whose self-awareness is below zero.

[TSherbs]

Ah, the Trump cause keeps getting a "kick in the teeth" (how Trump's lawyer described it). This is the ruling from the judge in the lawsuit against HRC et al tht he dismissed and has just fined the lawyers and charged them for attorney fees for the defendents in this willfully bogus suit:

news article on ruling

Excerpt from the article containing material from the ruling:

“The pleadings in this case contained factual allegations that were either knowingly false or made in reckless disregard for the truth,” Middlebrooks wrote.

“Not just initiated by a shotgun pleading, this was a shotgun lawsuit. Thirty-one individuals and organizations were summoned to court, forced to hire lawyers to defend against frivolous claims,” the judge wrote. “The only common thread against them was Mr. Trump’s animus.”

Middlebrooks added: “Plaintiff deliberately misrepresented public documents by selectively using some portions while omitting other information including findings and conclusions that contradicted his narrative. … It was too frequent to be accidental. Every claim was frivolous, most barred by settled, well-established existing law. These were political grievances masquerading as legal claims.”

“This cannot be attributed to incompetent lawyering,” he wrote. “It was a deliberate use of the judicial system to pursue a political agenda.”

[TSherbs]

If you ask me, Steve Bannon needs to spend more time laundering his clothes and less time laundering money.

Typos courtesy of Samsung Auto-Incorrect™

my lord

funniest thing I have read in a while, Lloyd (not sure how I missed it before)

[TSherbs]

Some insights here, I think:

Trump’s Future Isn’t Up to Fox News
Whatever the conservative grass roots decide, the establishment will be a step or two behind, desperately trying to catch up with the people it claims to lead.

Mark Peterson / Redux

November 11, 2022, 11:37 AM ET

These conservative luminaries are among the many credentialed members of the right who have criticized former President Donald Trump in the aftermath of the Republican Party’s historically underwhelming performance in the midterm elections. They are right to do so: Voters rejected not only many of Trump’s handpicked candidates but also his attacks on democracy and claims about stolen elections. If there was a red wave in the offing, Trump acted as a seawall defending a blue coast.

“These protests aren’t just a dollar short and a few years late. They’re also unlikely to amount to much. The traditional conservative establishment didn’t make Trump, and it can’t break him. If his political career is over, it will be because the voters who brought him to power decide to end it.” Lowry, the editor in chief of National Review, proclaimed in a column for _Politico_.

Murdoch’s media empire has also laid blame at Trump’s feet, most prominently with a New York Post cover on Thursday depicting the former president as “TRUMPTY DUMPTY and adding, “Don (who couldn’t build a wall) had a great fall—can all the GOP’s men put the party back together again?” Party officials across the country are pointing fingers at Trump, including in Michigan, where Democrats won up and down the ballot over Trump-backed candidates.

“We lost in ’18. We lost in ’20. We lost in ’21 in Georgia. And now in ’22, we’re going to net-lose governorships, we’re not going to pick up the number of seats in the House that we thought, and we may not win the Senate despite a president who has a 40 percent job approval,” said Chris Christie, the former New Jersey governor who cozied up to Trump but became an apostate (after Trump buried a dagger in his back). “There’s only one person to blame for that, and that’s Donald Trump.”

Trump has responded with a series of typically petulant social-media posts, but even former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who has been careful to remain devoted to Trump publicly, had a snappy reply on Twitter: “Conservatives are elected when we deliver. Not when we just rail on social media. That’s how we can win. We fight for families and a strong America.”

The temptation to make fun of many of these late arrivals is strong, and I will not resist it. Too many Republicans were willing to stand by Trump when he interfered with the Justice Department, supplicated himself to Vladimir Putin, extorted Ukraine, and tried to steal the 2020 election. Many of them didn’t like Trump personally but were willing to hold their noses for the expected political payout. But now that they’ve recognized (as many other people did long ago) that Trump is also an electoral loser, they’ve had enough.

This stand takes courage—the courage to know you’ll be rightfully mocked. But anyone worried about the danger a Trump return would pose should welcome allies, however hypocritical or tardy. The bigger problem is that the backlash to Trump comes too late to make much difference.

One theory about the Republican Party and Trump is that if enough of its movers and shakers had turned on him simultaneously, they could have cast him out. But going back to the 2016 GOP primary, members of the establishment never liked or wanted him. They worried he couldn’t win, and they worried he didn’t agree with their core beliefs on issues such as trade and foreign policy. The problem was that voters did like Trump—although only a plurality in the primary—and didn’t like his rivals. One reason the establishment couldn’t effectively rally around one of his opponents is that Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Scott Walker, and the rest all had weaknesses that a unified media front couldn’t erase.

They tried, though. The high-water mark was the January 2016 “Against Trump” issue of National Review, the flagship movement magazine, which gathered a host of writers from across the right to try to stall the inevitable. It didn’t work. (Some of the contributors remained Never Trumpers, others embraced him, and a third group settled on anti-anti-Trumpism as a compromise.)

The collective-action theory got another test in October 2016, when The Washington Post published a recording of Trump boasting about sexually assaulting women. Many Republicans and conservative pundits abandoned him, but once it became clear that there was no alternative and that GOP voters were still on board, many of them quietly slunk back too.

This pattern has held over and over. After the white-supremacist violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017; after the 2018 Helsinki summit; after the attempted extortion of Ukraine; after Trump lost the 2020 election; and then again after the January 6 insurrection, swaths of conservatives prepared to make a dramatic break and then either changed their mind or held back when they realized that voters were still with Trump. After the election loss, Murdoch’s properties briefly soured on Trump, but when their competitors started to gain market share, Fox and friends had second thoughts.

Perhaps after January 6, a concerted establishment push really could have finished Trump off. The public was appalled; Trump was weak; many Republicans in Congress were ready to act. A unified conservative-media front might have provided Senate Republicans the bulwark they needed to vote to convict Trump in an impeachment trial and prevent him from running again. Instead, the moment passed and many of the players blinked, reopening their eyes to a Trump still in control of the party. The 2022 midterms show how that damaged not only democracy, but also the GOP’s prospects.

Stopping Trump is arguably more difficult now. Unlike in January 2021, he has no formal position from which to be removed, and no mechanism exists to bar him from office. Donors have abandoned him, but he doesn’t need them to win.

None of this means Trump is unstoppable in a Republican primary for president in 2024. (He appears to be preparing to announce his campaign on Tuesday evening at Mar-a-Lago, evidently hoping to quash Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s momentum before it gets out of hand.) But if Trump fizzles out, it will be because Republican voters decide he’s done. Tentative signs exist that some of them are tired of his antics, worry he simply can’t win, or are attracted to the prospect of a younger, fresher face like DeSantis. The grass roots made Trump, and only they can break him. Whatever they decide, the establishment will be a step or two behind, desperately trying to catch up with the people it claims to lead.

[TSherbs]

To that "losing" list one might add 60 lawsuits re the 2020 election....

[Chuck Naill]

Gen Z voters and millions of Americans choose Democracy over Autocracy on Tuesday. Hopefully Trump and DeSantis will destroy each others appeal and a true conservative leader will emerge that understands the will of the people over the will of a party. Someone to unit rather than separate. One that will work with the moderates on both sides. AOC has been as destructive and Trump. David Brook's op-ed this weekend speaks to harm of the far ends of the political spectrum.

I am still hopeful a Cheney, Kitzinger, and or Kasich can regain attention.

[dneal]

NBC:Jan. 6 committee staffers told preliminary plan for final report would focus largely on Trump, not on law enforcement failures, sources say

The House resolution that created the committee said its mission included examining “the preparedness and response” of Capitol Police and other law enforcement agencies.

Staff members of the Jan. 6 committee were informed last week that the committee’s final report would focus largely on former President Donald Trump and much less on findings about failures by the FBI and other law enforcement agencies in the lead up to the attack, three sources familiar with the committee’s work told NBC News.

[Chuck Naill]

Americans have rallied to show that it is indeed a great nation. Sure there can be improvements. However, Trump tried to fix something that wasn't broke and all he did was create white grievances.

If anyone should be grieved, it is Hershal Walker. He made the University of Georgia a football powerhouse and never got a degree. The system used his talents and gave nothing back.