With only two months left in the presidential campaign, Trump has evidently decided that he can neither run on his own record nor effectively attack Joe Biden. Instead, he’s running against anarchists who, he insists, secretly rule the Democratic Party and are laying waste to America’s cities.
…apparently that’s what folks should be worried about
…& given the extent to which some people seem determined to fling gasoline at every fire they can start
From business competition in New York to President Barack Obama’s birthplace to mail-in voting, President Trump’s goal has been to undermine the opposition and leave people uncertain about what to believe.
…do you ever wonder if trying so hard to fuck literally everything up is a deliberate attempt to not only poison the presidential chalice but to start enough of those fires that by fanning the flames in every direction he hopes his successor will be too smoked out to prosecute his sorry ass – how else is it possible we haven’t hit bottom yet?
As they have in the past when Russia was accused of misconduct, officials and state media commentators responded to news of a nerve agent attack with an array of improbable explanations.
Allies and Former U.S. Officials Fear Trump Could Seek NATO Exit in a Second Term President Trump is said to have spoken privately for years about withdrawing from the alliance, a move that critics say would be a major victory for Russia.
…the guy who wants to get to keep being president is all in on demonstrating that he only operates in bad faith & prefers an audience who share his complete lack of understanding of how any of this is actually supposed to work
By encouraging North Carolina voters to test the integrity of the elections system by casting both mail and in-person ballots, and repeating some of the same claims in a series of tweets and a speech on Thursday, President Trump seemed to mimic a cynical slogan originating in 20th Century machine politics: Vote early and often.
…let’s face it…in some cases appearances can be deceptive
Reading Mr. Zuckerberg’s election security blog post reminded me of a line from a seminal 2017 article by the journalist Max Read. Three years ago, Mr. Read was struck by a similar pledge from Mr. Zuckerberg to “ensure the integrity” of the German elections. The commitment was admirable, he wrote, but also a tacit admission of Facebook’s immense power. “It’s a declaration that Facebook is assuming a level of power at once of the state and beyond it, as a sovereign, self-regulating, suprastate entity within which states themselves operate.”
Justice Dept. Plans to File Antitrust Charges Against Google in Coming Weeks The attorney general is said to have set a deadline over the objections of career lawyers who say they need more time to build the case.
…& for pretty much anyone who’s been paying more than cursory attention a lot of it just seem like things we already knew
In a conversation with senior staff members about the scheduled visit, Trump said, "Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers." In a separate convo, Trump referred to the more than 1,800 marines who lost their lives at Belleau Wood as "suckers" for getting killed. https://t.co/DJIaH8zLLf
Doesn’t Feel Like a Recession? You Should Be Paying More in Taxes
…remember those stocks that were riding so high?
A day after stocks marched to another record high, Apple tumbled 8 percent, its worst drop since March. Amazon fell almost 5 percent, Microsoft more than 6 percent and Google’s parent, Alphabet, 5 percent.
Ah, and there it is…I was waiting for the section about the President of United States encouraging election fraud in South Carolina. Where folks residing in the 8th worst state in the union (or 42nd best) will believe him and do so. Is it time to bring in external poll watchers and vote counters? Maybe from Iceland? Iceland is a nice, non-aggressive country. Because I surely do not trust any level of government at this point…but wait, isn’t the President trying to diminish trust in the process? Arrrgh, excuse me while my head explodes. Happy weekend to all!
It’s actually North Carolina, but it’s still the second worst Carolina and you know those rubes will do it. The real question at that point is: will any of them get prosecuted for it?
No, they will not. The actual plan here, which has clearly been cooked up by someone smarter than Trump which is literally anyone, was reported in my local paper today. People attempting to vote twice will create chaos at the polls and prevent elections staff from properly tabulating the votes.
The plan is for Trump to garner enough votes to declare victory on election night and then immediately move to eliminate/destroy any subsequently arriving ballots. At least in Florida, in-person votes are given priority during tabulation, with mail votes counted later. You saw this strategy in play during the Rick Scott and Ron DeSantis election fraud process. The “winner” declares victory and demands that all vote counting stop. It’s not absolutely clear that this will benefit Trump, because it will typically cast doubt on MAGA votes, but he’s losing. It’s a Hail Mary. And the more chaos that he can create, the more chances he will have to steal the election in the melee.
I know people are scared of getting sick, but the best plan is still to mask up, take sanitizer, and vote in-person. If you can’t do that you MUST submit your mail-in ballot AS SOON AS POSSIBLE.
…to the extent that there’s a real plan (rather than a mass of strategies some of which are mutually contradictory) it would seem to be about as insidious as possible
…& If you’ll forgive a tinfoil-clad interpretation I might be inclined to embellish it a bit in places?
…we know that in an all too literal sense the data for the vote aggregation from electronic voting machines remains editable from remote mirror locations in (iirc) places that include “swing states”…because the GOP has stonewalled any attempts to rectify that wholly unacceptable situation in the Senate…we know that in proof-of-concept terms it is possible to replicate his electoral college TKO while having no reliable audit trail of hardcopy paper ballots to recount & that the technical explanation of any such fraud is entirely too complex to enter the mind of a determined trump voter…making it an effective fiction if you squint just right & are careful not to have too heavy a thumb on the scales
…we know that Barr’s DoJ is a mockery of the concept it supposedly enshrines & that the USPS has been artificially restricted in its ability to withstand the highly inconvenient onslaught of actual paper ballots that the pandemic has logically called for
…we know that in many places the count cannot lawfully begin early in the way that the submission of votes can…& that he is so keen to get people voting for him to do so in person that he’d rather they broke the law explicitly than have their votes be in the mailed-in column
…& we know that in addition to being fond of making up his own “reality” when the “fake news” & obdurate reality don’t accord with the delusion he needs to peddle to the faithful…very much in a fashion that would indicate no hesitation in falsely claiming victory all the quicker if he knows he’s actually lost
…we know he doesn’t want any thorough briefings (or questions asked) on the subject of foreign interference in the election
…& perhaps most worryingly of all…we know that a man seemingly incapable of foregoing every scrap of projection available has been screeching from the rooftops that the upcoming election will be the most fraudulent in history
…I know how it makes me sound like a crazy person…but honestly if it were in my power I’d have the UN observers in the same way they try in places that are known for rigged elections…& probably shutter facebook from Nov 1st until an accurate & lawful count could be arrived at…or he defaults out of office in January…but then I don’t personally believe facebook has ever had enough redeeming features to justify its existence…much less its effective monopoly on the attention spans of the world’s supply of useful idiots
…I’m all for the suggestion that what it takes is to “vote – in numbers to big to manipulate” but those numbers increasingly look like they need to be bigger (particularly on the night) than they have a history of being in some places whose margins were slim enough to shave the necessary points last time & I can’t honestly say that I’m not having a hard time believing that there’s any way the result isn’t contentious…& likely no chance it won’t be contested even if it’s a landslide in Biden’s favor because perhaps then more than ever he’ll need to rouse his rabble & circle the wagons to better let him pick their pockets while he cowers behind them
…whichever way I try to stack it up it’s looking to be a shitshow…& with the amount of wrong-headed shit that needs righting just to get things back on an even keel that didn’t start out serving some folks all that well Joe’s looking at a short honeymoon, too
Thank you for this. You definitely don’t sound crazy & eloquently stated everything I have been feeling & saying for awhile. Trump lies more than any other president but sometimes he says very true statements in the middle of the larger lies, like “this will be the most fraudulent election in history”. I don’t see any number Biden could win by that would keep it from being a shitshow and am far more convinced the whole election will be rigged to make it look like Trump won by a small margin. I fear only a revolution will get us out of this. I’m still holding out for Trump dropping dead but not hopeful of him not stealing this election.
“Trump lies more than any other president but sometimes he says very true statements in the middle of the larger lies, like “this will be the most fraudulent election in history”.”
THIS!!!
Just like Jr the pther day with the “People in Maga hats *aren’t* being attacked” Freudian slip, Senior accidentally slips up & drops a complete truth into his lies, ALL THE TIME!!!
I dunno, exactly, if it’s a holdover from his education from Roy Cohn, or straight-up Freudian Slips.
But he does it SO OFTEN!!!
…& it’s not like he has a real justification for not knowing how the thing works, either…he votes by mail…& sounds off about people trying to fraudulently vote & how illegal it is
…not that I don’t think he’s capable of maintaining the necessary cognitive dissonance to wilfully misunderstand things just so but it’s a tawdry kind of sham that just screams I know I can’t win this on the merits
…all in all it has a lot in common with the strategies he’s always employed where court proceedings are involved
I kind of think that Trump believes that his voters that get caught voting twice will just get “honest mistake, no harm” response but Dems will go to jail for 10 years for trying. He may not be wrong the way current things are going with the Justice Dept.
Fun fact about the Facebook ban on political ads: that ban will not include ads that were already scheduled for the week before the election. Because, as with all things, money.
…it is sadly unsurprising that where Facebook is concerned it’s very much more a question of saying they’re doing something rather than actually doing what they’re saying
…none of it’s new, either…& even as window dressing this smacks of too little, too late
I WISH that their motto of “Move Fast and Break Things” was outed a HELL of a lot more than it currently is.🤬🤬🤬
Because that’s EXACTLY what they’re doing to Democracy (around the WORLD, fwiw!), and Zuck asshat extraordinaire that he is doesn’t give a flying fuck, because 1. He’s making Bank, and 2. He’s SO into his own legend/ego, that he thinks that he’s smart enough to keep a handle on things “if they ever REALLY go bad!”
The incompetent ignoramus can’t even begin to comprehend, that his opportunity to intervene with ANY sort of power to stop his terrible machine passed at least half a decade ago.
Because that little shit-for-brains *isn’t* the one running day-to-day operations in his company… he’s the CEO.
And if they can’t get a handle on the racist bullshit *in their OWN internal comms systems* they have ZERO chance of rooting it out, when the whole platform is finally taken over…
Because the racists, bigots, & white-supremacy terrorists *are already INSIDE the house.
🙄🤨☠
…I have literally no love for facebook & even less for the big little zucker himself…his “gee I’m just a guy who wrote a bit of code [mostly to objectify girls who wouldn’t give him the time of day] & got lucky [read too rich to not be doing something entirely fucked up] it’s not like I’m one of those big established companies that actually have to be responsible” routine whenever anyone officially threatens to slap his wrists drives me up the fucking wall
…he’s an odious little bastard & I genuinely believe facebook’s contribution to the world is a malign one on a net basis
That points out the shell game Facebook plays that journalists never, ever pick up on.
#1 Oh, we can’t possibly do any more about fraudulent ads/blatant White supremacists/COVID lies because our systems are just too big and unmanageable.
#2 We are the most cutting edge information tech AI driven company in the universe and we know everything.
It’s long overdue to independently audit Facebook and find out how many users they really have, how many bots they’re hosting, what value they are actually delivering to advertisers, and what they are lying about.
This is one of the reasons why I listen to the Marketplace podcasts. Their Tech reporter, Molly Wood, calls out this double standard shit all the time. She’s also the one who reported the political ad loophole. They don’t miss much.
Can we talk a bit about President Bone Spurs mocking fallen soldiers and how much that reveals about his character as a man and a human, especially given that he’s a fucking draft dodger?
Like, on the one hand, fuck the draft, but on the other hand, SUPER FUCK Donald Trump for mocking people while he hides in his fucking bunker.
If anyone else did that it would end their political career. For him it is just Trump being Trump, barely a blip on the radar. His supporters will claim it is fake news even though you can watch him say that exact same shit about McCain. Every media person should corner every Republican and demand they stand with him or against him and comment on this.
Peter Baker of the NY Times already had his say and decided for inexplicable reasons to focus his story on Trump’s denial. Baker went on to fudge around Trump’s long history of mocking vets like John McCain and the weird incident whefe he refused to visit the Belleau Wood Cemetery, despite well established reporting making it clear Trump was lying.
Peger Baker is the chief White House reporter for the NY Times and he is dumber than a stump and a hack who treats everything coming from the White House as being in good faith and true. It is very likely he wrote this story this way because he was being played by the White House and because the paper was embarrased by being scooped on a story too big for them to pretend never happened.What a stooge.
…it certainly underscores how (on top of being just a bone-deep shitty excuse for a human being devoid of anything but self-interest) he has a staggeringly poor grasp of any & every kind of context
…but mainly the thing where a man devoid on anything approaching honor has the unmitigated gall to belittle the sacrifice of those without whom there wouldn’t have been an ascendant US to boom its way through the post war period & make his life of unearned privilege possible…that’s the thing that made me spit feathers & threatened to have me brick my own television?
the other thing, that i DON’T see getting pointed out with that story, is the fact that it’s been said by him *so often* that MULTIPLE SOURCES corroborated the story to FAUX news…
It’s disturbing, to *me,* because Trump is a Narcissist with Antisocial Personality Disorder… and the ONE thing you can count on, with NPD & ASPD, is that those folks will MASK like a motherfucker, in order to be taken as “a real person with HUMAN feelings” in *any* situation where there could be consequences later on (i.e. when they can lose an advantage over anyone else, because their mask slipped…).
THAT many corroborations, saying “Yes, he SAID this!” shows that–just like with his body language & the continuous Freudian Slips, Dolt45 is literally *incapable* of operating on the downlow any more… he LITERALLY CAN NOT mask competently enough to hide his true feelings AT ALL anymore…
Which–along with the *THEN* seemingly incredibly incoherent yammering, train-of-thought track-jumping, and general inability to get out one cohesive statement (in the video where he talks about “i like people who DIDN’T get captured!”), shows exactly how far he’s devolved cognitively–to a truly startling & disturbing level.😕
Ah, and there it is…I was waiting for the section about the President of United States encouraging election fraud in South Carolina. Where folks residing in the 8th worst state in the union (or 42nd best) will believe him and do so. Is it time to bring in external poll watchers and vote counters? Maybe from Iceland? Iceland is a nice, non-aggressive country. Because I surely do not trust any level of government at this point…but wait, isn’t the President trying to diminish trust in the process? Arrrgh, excuse me while my head explodes. Happy weekend to all!
It’s actually North Carolina, but it’s still the second worst Carolina and you know those rubes will do it. The real question at that point is: will any of them get prosecuted for it?
No, they will not. The actual plan here, which has clearly been cooked up by someone smarter than Trump which is literally anyone, was reported in my local paper today. People attempting to vote twice will create chaos at the polls and prevent elections staff from properly tabulating the votes.
The plan is for Trump to garner enough votes to declare victory on election night and then immediately move to eliminate/destroy any subsequently arriving ballots. At least in Florida, in-person votes are given priority during tabulation, with mail votes counted later. You saw this strategy in play during the Rick Scott and Ron DeSantis election fraud process. The “winner” declares victory and demands that all vote counting stop. It’s not absolutely clear that this will benefit Trump, because it will typically cast doubt on MAGA votes, but he’s losing. It’s a Hail Mary. And the more chaos that he can create, the more chances he will have to steal the election in the melee.
I know people are scared of getting sick, but the best plan is still to mask up, take sanitizer, and vote in-person. If you can’t do that you MUST submit your mail-in ballot AS SOON AS POSSIBLE.
…to the extent that there’s a real plan (rather than a mass of strategies some of which are mutually contradictory) it would seem to be about as insidious as possible
…& If you’ll forgive a tinfoil-clad interpretation I might be inclined to embellish it a bit in places?
…we know that in an all too literal sense the data for the vote aggregation from electronic voting machines remains editable from remote mirror locations in (iirc) places that include “swing states”…because the GOP has stonewalled any attempts to rectify that wholly unacceptable situation in the Senate…we know that in proof-of-concept terms it is possible to replicate his electoral college TKO while having no reliable audit trail of hardcopy paper ballots to recount & that the technical explanation of any such fraud is entirely too complex to enter the mind of a determined trump voter…making it an effective fiction if you squint just right & are careful not to have too heavy a thumb on the scales
…we know that Barr’s DoJ is a mockery of the concept it supposedly enshrines & that the USPS has been artificially restricted in its ability to withstand the highly inconvenient onslaught of actual paper ballots that the pandemic has logically called for
…we know that in many places the count cannot lawfully begin early in the way that the submission of votes can…& that he is so keen to get people voting for him to do so in person that he’d rather they broke the law explicitly than have their votes be in the mailed-in column
…& we know that in addition to being fond of making up his own “reality” when the “fake news” & obdurate reality don’t accord with the delusion he needs to peddle to the faithful…very much in a fashion that would indicate no hesitation in falsely claiming victory all the quicker if he knows he’s actually lost
…we know he doesn’t want any thorough briefings (or questions asked) on the subject of foreign interference in the election
…& perhaps most worryingly of all…we know that a man seemingly incapable of foregoing every scrap of projection available has been screeching from the rooftops that the upcoming election will be the most fraudulent in history
…I know how it makes me sound like a crazy person…but honestly if it were in my power I’d have the UN observers in the same way they try in places that are known for rigged elections…& probably shutter facebook from Nov 1st until an accurate & lawful count could be arrived at…or he defaults out of office in January…but then I don’t personally believe facebook has ever had enough redeeming features to justify its existence…much less its effective monopoly on the attention spans of the world’s supply of useful idiots
…I’m all for the suggestion that what it takes is to “vote – in numbers to big to manipulate” but those numbers increasingly look like they need to be bigger (particularly on the night) than they have a history of being in some places whose margins were slim enough to shave the necessary points last time & I can’t honestly say that I’m not having a hard time believing that there’s any way the result isn’t contentious…& likely no chance it won’t be contested even if it’s a landslide in Biden’s favor because perhaps then more than ever he’ll need to rouse his rabble & circle the wagons to better let him pick their pockets while he cowers behind them
…whichever way I try to stack it up it’s looking to be a shitshow…& with the amount of wrong-headed shit that needs righting just to get things back on an even keel that didn’t start out serving some folks all that well Joe’s looking at a short honeymoon, too
Thank you for this. You definitely don’t sound crazy & eloquently stated everything I have been feeling & saying for awhile. Trump lies more than any other president but sometimes he says very true statements in the middle of the larger lies, like “this will be the most fraudulent election in history”. I don’t see any number Biden could win by that would keep it from being a shitshow and am far more convinced the whole election will be rigged to make it look like Trump won by a small margin. I fear only a revolution will get us out of this. I’m still holding out for Trump dropping dead but not hopeful of him not stealing this election.
“Trump lies more than any other president but sometimes he says very true statements in the middle of the larger lies, like “this will be the most fraudulent election in history”.”
THIS!!!
Just like Jr the pther day with the “People in Maga hats *aren’t* being attacked” Freudian slip, Senior accidentally slips up & drops a complete truth into his lies, ALL THE TIME!!!
I dunno, exactly, if it’s a holdover from his education from Roy Cohn, or straight-up Freudian Slips.
But he does it SO OFTEN!!!
…& it’s not like he has a real justification for not knowing how the thing works, either…he votes by mail…& sounds off about people trying to fraudulently vote & how illegal it is
…not that I don’t think he’s capable of maintaining the necessary cognitive dissonance to wilfully misunderstand things just so but it’s a tawdry kind of sham that just screams I know I can’t win this on the merits
…all in all it has a lot in common with the strategies he’s always employed where court proceedings are involved
I kind of think that Trump believes that his voters that get caught voting twice will just get “honest mistake, no harm” response but Dems will go to jail for 10 years for trying. He may not be wrong the way current things are going with the Justice Dept.
This is pretty much what I expect.
I think he said it at the Latrobe, PA rally too. By the way, Mrs. Rogers has a lot to say about trump!
https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-is-in-mr-rogers-neighborhood-and-freds-widow-is-none-too-happy?fbclid=IwAR0Im487JMoH4C4ud22K9jKC8gjxrxBKavSEh3YHWWkA1B37Ei7z-S9ulGM
Fun fact about the Facebook ban on political ads: that ban will not include ads that were already scheduled for the week before the election. Because, as with all things, money.
…it is sadly unsurprising that where Facebook is concerned it’s very much more a question of saying they’re doing something rather than actually doing what they’re saying
…none of it’s new, either…& even as window dressing this smacks of too little, too late
I WISH that their motto of “Move Fast and Break Things” was outed a HELL of a lot more than it currently is.🤬🤬🤬
Because that’s EXACTLY what they’re doing to Democracy (around the WORLD, fwiw!), and Zuck asshat extraordinaire that he is doesn’t give a flying fuck, because 1. He’s making Bank, and 2. He’s SO into his own legend/ego, that he thinks that he’s smart enough to keep a handle on things “if they ever REALLY go bad!”
The incompetent ignoramus can’t even begin to comprehend, that his opportunity to intervene with ANY sort of power to stop his terrible machine passed at least half a decade ago.
Because that little shit-for-brains *isn’t* the one running day-to-day operations in his company… he’s the CEO.
And if they can’t get a handle on the racist bullshit *in their OWN internal comms systems* they have ZERO chance of rooting it out, when the whole platform is finally taken over…
Because the racists, bigots, & white-supremacy terrorists *are already INSIDE the house.
🙄🤨☠
…I have literally no love for facebook & even less for the big little zucker himself…his “gee I’m just a guy who wrote a bit of code [mostly to objectify girls who wouldn’t give him the time of day] & got lucky [read too rich to not be doing something entirely fucked up] it’s not like I’m one of those big established companies that actually have to be responsible” routine whenever anyone officially threatens to slap his wrists drives me up the fucking wall
…he’s an odious little bastard & I genuinely believe facebook’s contribution to the world is a malign one on a net basis
That points out the shell game Facebook plays that journalists never, ever pick up on.
#1 Oh, we can’t possibly do any more about fraudulent ads/blatant White supremacists/COVID lies because our systems are just too big and unmanageable.
#2 We are the most cutting edge information tech AI driven company in the universe and we know everything.
It’s long overdue to independently audit Facebook and find out how many users they really have, how many bots they’re hosting, what value they are actually delivering to advertisers, and what they are lying about.
This is one of the reasons why I listen to the Marketplace podcasts. Their Tech reporter, Molly Wood, calls out this double standard shit all the time. She’s also the one who reported the political ad loophole. They don’t miss much.
Don’t look at that, look at this, It’s Fur Face Friday!
https://backtalk.kinja.com/fur-face-friday-1844954492
…it’s like a virtual life-preserver in a sea of WTF
Can we talk a bit about President Bone Spurs mocking fallen soldiers and how much that reveals about his character as a man and a human, especially given that he’s a fucking draft dodger?
Like, on the one hand, fuck the draft, but on the other hand, SUPER FUCK Donald Trump for mocking people while he hides in his fucking bunker.
If anyone else did that it would end their political career. For him it is just Trump being Trump, barely a blip on the radar. His supporters will claim it is fake news even though you can watch him say that exact same shit about McCain. Every media person should corner every Republican and demand they stand with him or against him and comment on this.
Peter Baker of the NY Times already had his say and decided for inexplicable reasons to focus his story on Trump’s denial. Baker went on to fudge around Trump’s long history of mocking vets like John McCain and the weird incident whefe he refused to visit the Belleau Wood Cemetery, despite well established reporting making it clear Trump was lying.
Peger Baker is the chief White House reporter for the NY Times and he is dumber than a stump and a hack who treats everything coming from the White House as being in good faith and true. It is very likely he wrote this story this way because he was being played by the White House and because the paper was embarrased by being scooped on a story too big for them to pretend never happened.What a stooge.
…it certainly underscores how (on top of being just a bone-deep shitty excuse for a human being devoid of anything but self-interest) he has a staggeringly poor grasp of any & every kind of context
…but mainly the thing where a man devoid on anything approaching honor has the unmitigated gall to belittle the sacrifice of those without whom there wouldn’t have been an ascendant US to boom its way through the post war period & make his life of unearned privilege possible…that’s the thing that made me spit feathers & threatened to have me brick my own television?
the other thing, that i DON’T see getting pointed out with that story, is the fact that it’s been said by him *so often* that MULTIPLE SOURCES corroborated the story to FAUX news…
It’s disturbing, to *me,* because Trump is a Narcissist with Antisocial Personality Disorder… and the ONE thing you can count on, with NPD & ASPD, is that those folks will MASK like a motherfucker, in order to be taken as “a real person with HUMAN feelings” in *any* situation where there could be consequences later on (i.e. when they can lose an advantage over anyone else, because their mask slipped…).
THAT many corroborations, saying “Yes, he SAID this!” shows that–just like with his body language & the continuous Freudian Slips, Dolt45 is literally *incapable* of operating on the downlow any more… he LITERALLY CAN NOT mask competently enough to hide his true feelings AT ALL anymore…
Which–along with the *THEN* seemingly incredibly incoherent yammering, train-of-thought track-jumping, and general inability to get out one cohesive statement (in the video where he talks about “i like people who DIDN’T get captured!”), shows exactly how far he’s devolved cognitively–to a truly startling & disturbing level.😕