TGIF [DOT 22/11/24]

22/11/24 MegMegMcGee 48

This week has gone by in a fever dream of Nyquil and Sudafed but at least it’s Friday. Tomorrow me and all the varmints are driving to Cleveland for two weeks. I rented a cute little cottage on Lake Erie – should be lovely this time of year as the winds blow off the lake. /s

Only the best people!! So wait now what’s his job going to be?

House committee reportedly told of second sexual encounter between Matt Gaetz and 17-year-old – live
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2024/nov/21/trump-hegseth-gaetz-cabinet-politics-latest-updates

I mean maybe they’ll all just take themselves out of the running, in various ways

RFK Jr. says he drinks raw milk. How safe is unpasteurized milk?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2024/11/21/rfk-jr-raw-milk-difference-taste

Come on man

Linda McMahon, Trump’s Education pick, was sued for allegedly enabling sexual abuse of children
https://www.cnn.com/2024/11/21/business/linda-mcmahon-abuse-wwe-trump-education/index.html

Have a great day!!

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48 Comments

  1. Oh no! Did you see that National Treasure Ellen DeGeneres, who I’m sure was the inspiration for the TV show “Flip This House,” and her lovely wife Portia de Rossi (I don’t know who she is or why she’s famous?) have fled the US in the wake of Trump’s election? With their means they could have gone anywhere but they chose England. No 2-up/2-down in Stoke-on-Trent for this pair; they’re ensconced in the Cotswolds in what I assume is a roomy spread with plenty of grounds to cavort upon.

  2. Oh, and by the way, where are you renting on Lake Erie? Just in general. West of Cleveland? I really enjoyed the times I visited and was given several lakefront driving tours. I was surprised at how Cape Cod-ish those places were, with a little Frank Lloyd Wright Prairie Style thrown in. And, at the time, 10 cents on the dollar compared to what the Hamptons or Fire Island would have cost.

  4. …@bryanlsplinter dropped a link yesterday about the bait & switch gaetz very possibly is partway through executing in a premeditated way…whereby a weasle-worded “resignation” based on a non-binding statement of “not intending” unless/until he decides he does intend after all…to swear himself in to the next session…might mean his being proposed & then deposed from the AG slot would equate to a mere fig-leaf for his ducking the ethics comittee & giving the party an excuse to park it until the clock runs out & he can come back with a fresh slate & no points on his license…& maybe it’s just that combined with my irascible take about the fediverse thing…but I may at some point have tied my mental shoelaces together & tripped & fallen headfirst down a rabbit hole & landed…maybe still headfirst…in something that’s left me spattered with conclusions I can’t seem to shake off to the point of being the one with the hammer seeing nails everyplace?

    …the rawstory gaetz link linked to another thing from back on the 16th

    A giant middle finger from a tiny craven man [RawStory]

    …& like with the one about the conjunction of the platforms…it’s full of stuff I can’t say doesn’t seem to be true right up to the part where it takes its conclusions & fucks off in a direction at odds with what it seems like it just outlined…& I’d rather have its conclusion than the one that seems more inclined to stick to me…so if anyone could tell me where I went wrong & help me untie those mental shoelaces so I can walk it off, I’d be obliged?

    And how many Hannibal Lecters must Trump want to appoint, that he’d try to strongarm the Senate into taking recess just so he can bypass their advice and consent? The Senate’s role on presidential appointments is more than window-dressing. It’s a core Article II Constitutional function, foundational to the separation of powers. Advice and consent from the Senate was designed to keep nutjobs away from the seat of government. Given that the GOP will have a solid 53 member majority of bootlickers in the Senate come January, Trump’s desire to bypass them is even more alarming than whom he’s picked so far.

    …sure…that or he had a few, like fivehead the jailbait lover, mostly intended to be so out of bounds that what’ll get settled for will still be far enough over the line for his purposes…not clear which seems worse…so I’d call it a wash?

    Trump’s asinine choices make clear that we’re in for a bumpy ride for the next two years, but Democrats need to knock it off with the intra-party blame game. In pontificating about what Dems “did wrong,” the line between helpful introspection and destructive navel-gazing is thin already. The most common rejoinder is: ‘If only Biden/Harris/Dems had done X, they’d have won, and it just so happens I’ve been arguing for X for years.’ But there’s a major difference between data-informed reality and narratives that regurgitate preexisting worldviews.

    …this strikes me as a good point that comes with an unfortunate corollary…that might very well be my “X” & just further support the hypothesis…but my “X” is sort of a cheat…since I’m inclined to think that while avoiding the pitfalls of that process there tends to be an accompanying lack of examination about why the clutch of not-individually-outcome-determinitive strands of that weave that are the be-all & end-all of the coverage in the run-up but consigned to “who can really say?” after there are some numbers to crunch…add up to more than the margin by which errors were made…& the biggest one seems to be “more than enough people to have made the difference literally do not have the time, inclination or in a surprising number of cases the ability or access to an understanding of the choice they made”…right up alongside “that nebulous feeling you have about where the edges of the overton window are operates about the same as aristotle’s golden mean & you don’t really know where on that bell curve you are”…but the tails have been wagging the whole dog’s dinner for at least…decades…so…maybe…it would be helpful to shift the baseline back away from “it sounds better when you make it up plus then you don’t have to do any work yourself”?

    Instead of bald recriminations, Democrats should look at the numbers. Harris lost by 3 million votes, out of a national total of 151,318,415 votes. This loss by less than 2 percent of all voters is hardly a mandate. Whatever the spin of the hour is, it should be tempered with awareness of global reality. In defeating Biden’s party, the US did what every other industrialized nation in the world did, with shocking uniformity: We punished the incumbent party, the party who was holding the bag during the worst years of post-COVID economic pain, regardless of who caused it.

    In a remarkably underreported phenomenon, in 2024, whichever ruling party occupied the seat of government was voted out of office, worldwide. This chart from Financial Times plots the increase and decrease in share of votes for incumbent parties dating back to 1910. Over the past century, there’s been a fairly even distribution of incumbent gains and losses, at least through 2020. But in 2024, in elections across the globe, whichever party was in charge– left or right– was shown the same exit door. In 2024, for the first time dating back to 1910, incumbent parties were removed from office with ZERO wins, without regard to partisan ideology.

    …&…I think here is where I jump the tracks?

    So, the real narrative isn’t right vs. left, progressive vs. moderate, Trump vs. Harris. Democrats lost due to post-COVID economic pain outside their control, as it was for every other incumbent party in the world. I realize this is an argument so nice I made it twice, but I offer it again to not only to encourage Democrats to stop the blame game but also to give comfort. As horrific as sending a craven felon to the White House is, US voters fell in line with the same global upset displayed by voters around the world.

    …like…it’s not wrong…& if you look at the chart kamala actually took less of a hit than most

    …suggesting the US is far from being the place where this phenomenon is in fullest effect…but…particularly when that link under the “made it twice” part is literally a column for the chicago tribune arguing that disinformation won the election…with the corollary that the disproportionately wealthy used disproportional wealth to buy the ability to push enough of that mis- & dis- kind of information into the media-verse through which we sift out our impression of the questions being asked & the multiple choice answers open to us so that their preferred outcome fell out of the thing

    We aren’t hateful. We’re just misinformed.

    As I see it, Trump didn’t win this election. Disinformation did, demonstrating that the world’s richest men, by funding disinformation, will stop at nothing to end government regulations and taxes, or to defeat democracy itself.

    We aren’t a hateful nation; we’re a nation that’s been lied to. By Fox, by Russia, by Musk. We have the strongest economy in the world, we recovered post-COVID better than any other advanced economy, unemployment is low, and the Biden stock market hit more records than Trump’s, yet Fox, Musk and Russia convinced half the country that we’re in economic peril. According to AP VoteCast’s sweeping survey and other network exit polls, most voters were focused on a “crumbling” economy, and they broke hard for Trump.
    […]
    The richest men in the world bought the election

    In the final weeks before the election, Musk hosted town halls throughout battleground states and promoted a fraudulent “lottery” that wasn’t really a lottery at all, giving away $1 million a day to promote Trump. Musk, the richest man in the world, says he and his America PAC, funded with $118 million of his own money, will “keep going after this election, and prepare for the midterms and any intermediate elections.” We shall see.

    His and Fox’s willingness to skirt the law show the fruits of an intimidation campaign by Republican attorneys general and legislators designed to force social media to platform falsehoods and hate speech. These same nefarious forces will oppose any efforts to impose fairness in the media’s coverage of politics, because, for now, they benefit politically from the lies.

    …so…here’s my problem…or the bit of it I’m hoping someone can cure, anyway…none of that is really “news” to me…& it’s not that I’m all the way to thinking there won’t even be mid-terms a couple of years from now…but…in over a century that spread in the FT chart has never been all one side of the line…& the onslaught of bad information we have now compared to the dearth of the good stuff earlier generations had to work with…looks in danger of making a definitive difference while we act like it’s the window dressing & not the main event…in which case he doesn’t need to call off elections…just refine the bullshit matrix to keep that overton window dialed in from a strict electoral perspective that operates with a margin small enough to cover the spread by spraying enough shit in the right direction to have the parts you need to stick

    …so…this doesn’t land for me like the looking up, things-can-only-get-better-once-how-worse-they-are-cuts-through-to-people ending that I’m fairly sure she intends it to be?

    It’s important to get behind that reality and remember that this too shall pass. There’s another election in two years. Every seat in the House and a third of the Senate — mostly Republicans — will be up for reelection. And if Trump keeps up the juvenile shenanigans, voters will punish his party hard, most likely all the way through 2032.

    So as painful as this is, it’s temporary. The only enduring quality about elections is that, as soon as the victor is announced, the next election has already begun.

    …so…if someone could point me at something that indicates we haven’t passed the point at which it’s no longer required to have people fulfill the offices they occupy but merely to “play one on TV”…that’d be great?

    • Assuming we have elections in 2026, the GOP is most likely gonna get their face punched in and I know this because unlike most voters, I can remember both 2006 and 2018 pretty clearly. So on that, fair statement. Does the information environment matter? Of course. But in 2 years it’s gonna be “Did eggs and houses and gas get cheaper?” and if the answer isn’t a boisterous “YES” then there’s no level of information that’s gonna override any of that.

      Indeed, part of why America’s vote skewed less anti-incumbent than the rest of the world’s is that our economy really is doing better post-Covid than almost anywhere else! Consumer sentiment is pretty obviously bogus — see how Republican voters are 15% more optimistic about the economy this month than they were last month, lol — but when Trump tanks shit, shitty Tik Toks aren’t gonna be enough for them to, say, forget they got laid off or that prices haven’t gone down or that they still can’t buy a house.

    • Yeah, I’ve been thinking about some of the points you note:

      1. “What ifs” are stupid. Yeah, I’ve got a lot of anger over what happened and sure, I can list 50 things that *might* have changed the outcome but that’s irrelevant. We’re here, we’ve got to play the hand we were dealt.

      2. Disinformation did indeed win the election. I saw a skeet that said something like “Trump didn’t run against Harris. Trump ran against reality and Trump won.”

      3. I’m no longer *quite* as scared that elections will be canceled. Not that he won’t try but the US is a huge bureaucracy composed of 50 other huge bureaucracies. He doesn’t have time to derail that in two years. And he’s completely lost his “rigged” argument. You can’t keep screeching about rigged elections if you won.

      4. The odds that he’s going to fuck up this economy are HUGE, and voters will punish him for it. P/E ratios in the stock market are high, and that creates the potential for a significant correction/crash. He won’t know how to deal with that and neither will his clown posse. That’s not great, by any stretch, but after both the Great Depression and the Great Recession voters elected Democrats for years.

      As an aside — anybody who has a solid financial take on protecting your 401K and retirement accounts please share. My plan is to ride the irrational exuberance stock market wave until the beginning of January and then shift into fixed-income for the following year or two.

  5. Linda (some educator… where the fuck do Cons get these morons?) McMahon, whose husband took a woman down on her luck and used her as a human fuck toy/toilet and whose organization allowed a pedo ring terrorize young boys for years shouldn’t even be considered for anything… except in this stupid timeline.

    Really?

    • …well…when you swap a Federal “F” for E-is-for-entertainment…the object of the exercise is literally the application of kayfabe to produce a narrative people will pay for in the knoweldge that the outcome is rigged

      …so…I dunno…but the math checks out?

      • Yep. The whole point of the Gaetz and Hegseth crap was to set the bar so impossibly low that the Senate will happily sign off on literally anyone who doesn’t have a criminal record.

        Also, MAGAs don’t consider looking the other way to be a crime. Exhibit 1: Gym Jordan. They don’t believe they have any responsibility or obligation to other human beings regardless of how helpless those human beings might be.

          • …he doesn’t need a strategy for it to be a winning strategy to rely on him being someone willing to say he’d make gaetz AG for long enough to two-step away from the sort of allegation he’d happily help a fellow mis-represented good ol’ boy (with a little less of the old, thank you very much) slip out of the #metoo noose & back into a seat from which he can kiss rings & scratch backs…just…the right elements of the maelstrom in his orbit

            …real why-not-both.gif energy for me on that one?

          • I do believe it. I’ve said it before: Trump is a moron but he has a significant degree of low cunning. It’s not a huge leap to realize that nominating a lightning rod is likely to smooth subsequent nominations. Plus he’s getting advised by people who are evil but smarter than him. I suspect the degree to which other people are telling his dementia-riddled carcass what to do is a LOT higher than we realize.

            • Some of them are smarter, but he has a way of keeping them in check by obstinately refusing their advice when the mood hits.

              All of the reasonsble political advice at this point four years ago was to put people like Fauci in charge of Covid  He went instead with the “medical” judgment of Hoover Institute economics and law professors that Covid was a hoax. As much as anything, that lost him the election.

              I don’t think we really know what is going on there.

              • Actually he and his people did follow the science, and at the jump it was that Covid was killing minorities and people living in blue cities at a much higher rate. When that turned out to be more a timing issue than a GOP-approved virus, there was kind of no going back.

                This is also the guy who waited for cheers when he talked about Operation Warp Speed until he realized the crowd would only boo so he dropped it.

                • Actually they were saying 500 deaths, tops. There really was no science whatsoever to what they were thinking, it was nothing more than axe grinding against epidemeology.

                  And Trump not only made sure that nobody in the White House was going to cross them, he sent his flunkies like Mick Mulvaney out to crack down on the agencies as well.

                  He changed his tune after the death toll hit five figures, but by that time there was zero science that it would somehow stay confined to places like NYC. That was just nutjob race-based pseudoscience about whites somehow being resiliant. Sweden notoriously followed the advice of the herd immunity idiots, until they realized that in fact Nordic blood was not going to help.

            • Counterpoint: There is NO way Trump realizes that. I think he picks people he likes and/or knows from TV. He’s getting advice from smarter people (literally anyone other than his kids) but we’ve already seen that he doesn’t listen to it! He didn’t want Pam Bondi — loyal but dim and hardly a needle-mover — from the jump. He’s picking his people for the posts he wants them for. Other stuff, yeah, he doesn’t care. But he likes Gaetz and he wanted him and I think playing that his low cunning is some 4D chess is like … we’ve seen this movie. It isn’t. He’s a moron.

              • Better counterpoint: Fox News just started promoting my theory as Trump’s brilliant stratagem. If Fox News is saying it, then it’s a lie, and you’re right and I’m wrong.

              • Look at Hegseth–physically look at the man with your eyeballs, and then think back to what the Mandarin Menace said about wasn’t it Dr Feelgood…. alleged WH Pharmacy Cocaine Stocker i mean *Representative* Ronny Jackson, and few years back–when Trumpty-dumpty said ‘ol Ronny looked “Straight out of Central Casting“.

                Then take a look at how Gaetz has switched-up his face over the last few years–so that he looks like the unholy amalgamation of a caricature artist’s version of JFK rendered Beavis & Butthead-style–look at his official 2020 pic on Wikipedia–trying incredibly hard to look all sorts of “Young JFK! (TM)” then compare him to the RNC “wtaf?!?!???” that we saw a few months back;

                https://nypost.com/2024/07/18/us-news/matt-gaetz-face-at-the-rnc-sparks-jokes-botox-rumors/

                It looks like Mattthecreeper has been trying to surgery his way into Trump’s gaze & good graces, by *also* turning himself into more of that “Central Casting” type (and can I add that the man’s hair *always* has so much gel/pomade/*whatever* in it, that it just *looks* like he stinks of rancid oil & Axe products!🤢)…

                The transformation over the years has been nearly as impressive as DJTJ & Lurch’s shifts–the capped teeth, the (previously!) subtle shifts in nose, jawline, eyelids, and cheeks–and that fuller “Tousle-able!”(TM) hair, looking *so* very “Kennedy Clan during an afternoon on the water in the Hamptons!”

                Look at how Trump is picking his cast of characters–they are *literally* a cast–chosen for their appearance when *he* sees them on TV–and that’s *all*

              • I agree with your theory, Black Rod!

                I’m 99.999% certain that most of Trumpty-dumpty’s choices are literally just based on how much they “Look like they came out of Central Casting!” And that he doesn’t pay a damn bit of attention to anything other than their ability to look & sound “good” on camera.

  6. À propos of nothing, my heath care practice of the last 4+ years decided to blast me with info geared toward pregnant women and encouraged me to review it so we could discuss at my appt. this morning. I’m a gay man and if I were a woman I’d be well beyond childbearing age, I think. I’m game. I’m fascinated by pregnancy and I love children. There’s a whole section about breastfeeding. As a very young Boomer/very old Gen X-er my mother smoked throughout her pregnancy with me and I was bottle fed from the get-go (breastfeeding was frowned upon at the time) and I grew up to be 6′ 4″ tall, no allergies, no autism, despite the whole panoply of vaccines. I should write to RFK, Jr. about this. He’d be appalled, but I guarantee that his late mother lined him up and vaccinated him up the wazoo.

    • Would you happen to be in this Generation Jones cohort that I happened to find out about a few months ago? (I’m guessing there’re a handful of DS-ites who are.) Probably figures anyway, with the Boomers’ legacy being as toxic as it’s long since been, that the people old enough to be marginally associated with them would be calling for a carve-out. . . .

      • …this seemed like a good faith effort even if I think the literature puts gen X across the 60s/70s so it’s not working with accepted definitions even if maybe it could make an argument for common usage values not doing that either where the academic standard definitions are concerned?

        https://www.reddit.com/r/generationology/comments/1ci8lag/the_generation_for_every_era_kid_since_the_50s_in/

        …somewhere in the replies someone had a go at describing how they aren’t really blocks so much as one tails off into another so as much of your spectrum is a gradient between two as comes in one color…& I’d probably add to that on the grounds that the thing that make you “of” a generation in what you might call a cultural sense are at the very least in dialogue with how they view one another…it means a different thing for a kid born in the 50s to be a lifelong devotee of the beatles than one born to that kid’s kid…for instance…but it wouldn’t make that grandkid being a beatles fanatic inherently disqualifying when it came to them being duly representative of their contempary cohort

        …sometimes I wonder if it would be helpful to be able to see what it looks like in terms of what level of understanding people had of the things that loomed largest at times of life that made them formative…because it sort of seems like that’s what trying to characterize generations is attempting to be an analogue for…but calendar age isn’t really a reliable guide to any of the variables that aren’t when-history-says-X-was-the-big-deal?

        …not that I see any earthly way to be able to do that in any meaningful sense…it’s up there with trying to correct for the seperation between the leading edge of the things humanity has managed to learn so far…& how far along a given person is to grasping enough of the important bits of that to be able to not fall for shit that’s worked on suckers since fire was the thing moving fast & breaking things

        …but…if I didn’t have these mental cul-de-sacs to slow me down I’d probably be running down a street somewhere yelling about something & getting uncharitably compared to that zarathustra fella when he came down from the mountain & spake thus…&…that would suck…because I’m no spider jerusalem…however much I might be willing to pay for a working bowel disruptor?

    • Be prepared for enormous amouts of CYA info dumps on pregnancy.

      The legal liabilities for the health industry are on the verge of skyrocketing thanks to the decades of lobbying by the Catholic church and fundamentalists.

      If a doctor in a NYC prescribes a medicine to a gay man but it ends up in the hands of woman in Texas, even if it’s not remotely abortion related, if it has any possible connection to a miscarriage they may well be facing a ruinous lawsuit. The Federalists are focusing on breaking down any and all barriers to thise kinds of suits.

      Info dumps are one way to deal with it, but the logic of the US Catholic bishops will lead to doctors in NYC deciding arbitrarily that someone they don’t know, even you, is too much risk of receiving certain kinds of prescriptions at all. They won’t want to risk your topical antibiotic being traced to a 16 year old relative.

       

    • My mother is a short woman and in the early 80s her doctor told her to not stop smoking when pregnant with me because “you are a small woman and need a low birth weight baby because there won’t be room in there for a normal weight baby.”

  7. …also…while I’m choking on the tit-for-tat of it all…vlad fills dead-men’s-boots-on-the-ground with DPNK troops…the west green-lights hitting those with big “guns” from far away…vlad dry-fires a nuke…& the US agrees anti-personel mines are bad juju…but these ones have a maximum destructive windows of a couple of weeks so what with going on 25% of the territory already having the worse sort here’s a window in which ukraine can fill its boots with a ready supply of those

    …if this is “as smooth as it gets” for this peaceful transition of power…I see myself spending a lot of time being haunted by that open letter of sassoon’s?

    …not to mention the part where if we throw in…say…this part?

    Situation in the State of Palestine: ICC Pre-Trial Chamber I rejects the State of Israel’s challenges to jurisdiction and issues warrants of arrest for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant [ICC] [n.b. they also issued one for the Hamas guy]

    …in a world where the US didn’t like to say the ICC can be ignored & opted out of…maybe the president doesn’t call that sort of thing “outrageous” [BBC]?

    …that all sounds a lot more “mrs judge jenkins” than “maud muller“…even if maud has more about it to bring the seriously-did-more-than-a-few-dozen-people-even-read-the-mueller-report to mind

    …sorry…hard to believe it’s a sunny day where I am…so maybe it’s a good thing looks can be deceiving?

    …then again…while it’s sunny…it absolutely refuses to be warm…which is sort of the opposite of whatever would be taking the edge off

    …& throwing around the term nuclear in enough contextual meanings to rank up there with AI for starting to mean anything but its literal self…is not helping me feel like we value language in even as high a degree as we pay lip service to according speech?

    “They made themselves nuclear,” Howard Lutnick, the co-chair of Trump’s transition and his nominee to serve as Commerce Secretary, told CNBC in September.

    But with the campaign over, Trump’s transition team is turning to Project 2025 to help staff the next administration.

    Already, transition officials are taking suggestions for potential hires from the extensive personnel database created by Project 2025, a person familiar with the situation told NBC News.

    While Project 2025’s massive book of conservative policy recommendations received most of the attention from Democrats, a central part of the effort was putting together a database that officials had framed as a conservative LinkedIn to help staff an incoming Republican administration.

    The person familiar with the transition said officials overseeing plans for some departments and agencies have started to reach out to potential hires whose names and contact information were part of that database.
    […]
    The receptiveness to using the Project 2025 database for potential hires comes as the transition has already shown it is open to tapping contributors to the effort for administration jobs, including Tom Homan as border czar, Brendan Carr as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission and John Ratcliffe as CIA director. Both Homan and Ratcliffe were listed as contributors to Project 2025, while Carr authored a chapter on the FCC.
    […]
    The personnel database was a cornerstone of Project 2025. Under Paul Dans, a former Trump administration official who led Project 2025, the group built a database of more than 10,000 candidates vetted for their MAGA credentials who sought to build out the administration in the event Trump won, as ProPublica reported in August. The idea behind the effort was to ensure that a future Trump administration would have the foot soldiers necessary to rapidly enact his agenda upon taking office.

    […] In his September interview with CNBC, Lutnick said he “won’t take a list from” Project 2025.

    …tell me this isn’t how this plays as a fucking WWE script for just the trash-talking parts

    “The transition team of Donald Trump has not touched it, has not gone near it,” he said. “And anybody who says it’s got anything to do with us is just not telling the truth on purpose. Because I am clear, clear, clear. Zero.”

    …because I need something to blame for the part where I feel like throwing some chairs at some people…or…is the clothesline still a thing…asking for a friend?

    But a Republican operative who spoke with NBC News shortly after Trump’s electoral victory said “it’s kind of bulls— if they really try to keep all those dudes out.”

    “I think it would be a big mistake,” this person said. “There’s a lot of people with their name in Project 2025. That’s going to be a tough one to really stick by. I think they’ll make an example of a few people. Hopefully some of them will be able to make it through.”

    …to bastardize a quote from a bastard “if [the parts/people you hoped would show up when you voted for me do] I should get all the credit & if [you] lose, I should get none of the blame”

    At a July campaign event in Grand Rapids, Trump said people on “the severe right came up with this Project 2025.”

    “Very, very conservative,” he said. “Sort of the opposite of the radical left. You have the radical left and the radical right. They came up with this. I don’t know what it is. … Then you read some of these things and they are seriously extreme. But I don’t know anything about it. I don’t want to know anything about it.”

    …the mariah carey is apparently now an accredited asset to a campaign toolbox…we used to have “plausible deniablity” but…something inflation something…now the best you can hope for is implausible imitations with no real substance being treated like prime steak by people on a starvation diet?

    A September NBC News poll found that 57% of registered voters viewed Project 2025 negatively while just 4% said they viewed the effort positively.

    …fuck a poll & fuck an exact percentage…that’s a ratio of 1:14.25…& that’s…just fundamentally hard even now for me to wrap my head around…because it’s a plausible sounding split as debateably-representative samples go…noticeably upwards of half of people being able to grasp that they knew enough about what anyone pro-project-2025 wanted to think that letting them have it was a bad idea…&…somewhere down around the size of the uncallable margin in the only parts of the electoral college that count this time…some number a bit smaller than the overall slice of the pie that denied harris the win at the popular vote level…enough sociopaths to embrace lightning bolts & skulls as a logo on their work outfit as something to file under “pros”…& now…at the risk of @farscythe hunting me down & forcibly demonstrating the paucity of my mechanical understanding…I’m stuck with this thing in my head where it seems like all the polls we have all the problems with are in a chamber that’s 1:14.25…& all the swing state winning margins are…let’s see now…if I go by the numbers ABC posted…& my math isn’t too rusty…in the swing states he swept…that <2% loss at the popular vote level for harris seems to fluctuate between…half of that to twice that…give or take…as far as expressing the margin he won by as a percentage of votes cast goes…in michigan, pennsylvania & wisconsin it would appear to be true that had all the votes not cast for either of them gone to her then he wouldn’t have won those…but either way the conversion rate from going on a 15:1 compression against the doom-please lot in the population at large to a…call it between 5:95 and 1:99 inversion at the points where the 1 overpowers the 15 enough to put it into electoral submission

    …that’s…probably not a numbers game real math people would take too seriously…but it has me thinking we all got sold that the engine of US elections has a bunch of in-line states…but we’re taking the compression readings from the wrong chamber in a rotary design courtesy of mc escher?

      • Oh, they will come for the ACA. It remains to be seen if the voters who favor it (one poll shows an over 60% favorability rating) will punish the MAGAs for taking it away. One side effect of Trump’s “mandate” theory is that anything he does will be popular by default because he does it. I’d love to say he’s bound to overstep, but let’s face it, reproductive rights were taken away from half the population and millions of Democrats didn’t bother to vote. So there’s a good chance that if he does abolish it, voters will yawn again.

  11. How did people not expect economic pain post CoVid?

    Maybe not do stupid shit like buying/bidding up homes like crazy? Like they did where I live?

    Or realize that there is no such thing as free money?

    Goes to show no good deed goes unpunished.

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