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  1. #8266
    Extraordinary Member PaulBullion's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Tendrin View Post
    HEy, WBE. Amanda Chase is at it again:

    https://twitter.com/JessDLT/status/1175109915100270593
    I want a man da chase me, but not like that, not like that!
    "How does the Green Goblin have anything to do with Herpes?" - The Dying Detective

    Hillary was right!

  2. #8267
    Old school comic book fan WestPhillyPunisher's Avatar
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    Sadly, Trump could be right. For all the calls for impeachment by angry Democrats, Nancy Pelosi is said to be slow walking the process for two reasons: 1) she fears backlash in next year's election, 2) she doesn't have the votes in the Republican controlled and complicit Senate. On top of that, with Moscow Mitch and AG Droopy Dog Barr (a.k.a. Roy Cohn 2.0) protecting him like a mother bear with cubs, no wonder Trump feels like no law or even the Constitution can stop him from doing whatever he wants.

    ====================

    U.S. Democracy Is In ‘Intensive Care’ After Ukraine Mess, Says Former Ethics Chief

    “And some of the hospital staff are trying to smother it with a pillow,” warns Walter Schaub. That pretty much sums up what's happening.

    **********

    Ukraine Minister Denies Trump Pressured Zelenskiy During Call: Report

    Ukraine’s foreign minister said Ukraine was an independent state and would not take sides in U.S. politics even if “in theory” the country was in a position to do so. Well now, that's interesting. Is this true, or was said minister covering for Trump?

    **********

    DHS Warns Against Growing Threat Of White Supremacist Extremism Online

    The agency says the internet has become a breeding ground for domestic terrorism, following hate-based mass shootings in the U.S. And Trump isn't helping things by overtly and covertly supporting white supremacists.

    **********

    Trump’s Trade War Hammering Farmers, Factory Workers In Crucial Wisconsin

    The state could be key to his reelection, but the tariff wars are devastating key voting blocs. Will farmers tell Trump to piss off, or will they continue supporting him as they go under?

    **********

    Ben Carson Defends Transphobic Remarks, Accuses Media Of ‘Mischaracterizations’

    He raised concern over “big, hairy men” infiltrating women’s homeless shelters, The Washington Post reported. Dr. Don't Know expresses his ignorance in a grand way. Disgusting.
    Avatar: Here's to the late, great Steve Dillon. Best. Punisher. Artist. EVER!

  3. #8268

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    Quote Originally Posted by Tendrin View Post
    HEy, WBE. Amanda Chase is at it again:

    https://twitter.com/JessDLT/status/1175109915100270593
    Looks like she's gearing up for November's election... or to go postal. Or both.
    X-Books Forum Mutant Tracker/FAQ- Updated every Tuesday.

  4. #8269

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    On this date in 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, as well as 2018, "Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day" published profiles of U.S. Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma, a man who cites the Bible as the evidence he needs to refute climate change (even contradicting Pope Francis' stance on the issue based on his Bible stance, which the Pope is kind of also an expert on), which he does with a passion beyond possibly any other Republican in Congress, most famously in the still frame above from C-SPAN, where he presented a snowball in Washington, D.C. in February as indisputable proof. He also criticized President Obama for attending the Paris climate change accords because climate change science "ignores God's power". He’s also pridefully bragged about his dedication to discrimination over his refusal to have ever employed a single gay staffer in his entire Congressional career, and boasted how there are no gay people amongst any of his 11 children or 47 grandchildren on the floor of the Senate, and in 2016, took to the floor of the Senate to condemn he idea of transgendered citizens being allowed to use the public bathroom of their choice, saying it was a "liberal agenda being crammed down the neck of Oklahoma" . Inhofe once declared 9-11 was “God’s Judgment on the American people for not doing enough to help Israel”. He also expressed his outrage in 2004 when the photos of American soldiers abusing detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison leaked to the public, because he thought everyone was making a fuss over people who deserved what they were getting. Inhofe not only once participated in a Republican filibuster of a bill from New York Senator Kristen Gillibrand that was aimed at preventing military sexual assault, but on the anniversary of that filibuster, he single-handedly moved to block her from bringing the bill to the floor for another vote. He has claimed there are no instances of fracking ever contaminating groundwater, anywhere. Inhofe claimed that “the culture of sanctuary cities” were the real cause of the mass shooting in Las Vegas in 2017, rather than lax gun control laws. Oh, and rounding things out, James Inhofe voted against relief funding for Hurricane Sandy, which is rather hypocritical considering how much he falls all over himself to get disaster relief funding whenever any part of Oklahoma gets hit by a tornado (which is pretty frequent).

    In the current term of Congress, Sen. Inhofe has already voted to confirm every member of Donald Trump's Cabinet of horrors, attempted to repeal the Affordable Care Act and leave 23 million Americans without health insurance, and voted to confirm Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court, as well as Brett Kavanaugh ignoring that Kavanaugh perjured himself multiple times during his confirmation hearings, as well as his first confirmation hearing to become a federal judge, and is a serial sexual predator.

    We’ll add that not long after the death of Sen. John McCain, when the White House bizarrely took its flag down from half-mast ahead of every other institution in Washington, Sen. Inhofe blamed the breach of protocol not on a grudge Donald Trump had with McCain… but on the deceased Arizona Senator. That may have been because the entire time McCain was battling cancer, Inhofe was chomping at the bit to take his place as the head of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Maybe that has something to do with the fact that he also just bought stock in the military contractor Raytheon in the past year, which is a HUGE conflict of interest for someone who, you know, uses his position in the Senate to decide what companies get tax dollars for their military equipment.

    James Inhofe is now 85 years old, next year when he’s up for re-election he will be 86… If there’s any good news we’re hoping to hear outside of a Trump impeachment, it’s Inhofe’s retirement without trying to float around the Senate into his 90s. At the time of this posting, there still hasn’t been an announcement of what his plans are for next year, though.
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  5. #8270
    Invincible Jersey Ninja Tami's Avatar
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  6. #8271
    Old school comic book fan WestPhillyPunisher's Avatar
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  7. #8272
    Ultimate Member Mister Mets's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Tami View Post
    I have a theory, a somewhat crazy (or not) and unsubstantiated theory.

    What if the Whistleblower complaint wasn't about one phone call but two, one (or more) to the Ukraine President, the other to Putin? What if the 'Promise' was made, not to Zelensky, but to Putin? What if the promise made to Putin was that Trump would not give Ukraine the aid package that Congress voted for it to have?
    That would be bad.

    If you could prove it, Trump's probably out of office.

    This does require evidence of what Pence knew and when.

    Quote Originally Posted by SquirrelMan View Post
    With Nazis taking over the US government and Russia trying to toss the western world into chaos, I find it a bit of stretch to say that there are no real acceptable villains left.
    If you insinuate that actual Nazis have taken over the US government within a work of fiction, it could easily piss off everybody. The right and the center might not like the insinuation about people they've voted for, while the left will be very sensitive to whether you're taking everything seriously enough (see the response to Hydra Captain America.)
    Sincerely,
    Thomas Mets

  8. #8273
    Ultimate Member Tendrin's Avatar
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    Who needs to insinuate? We've got Stephen Milller there now.

  9. #8274
    Ultimate Member Mister Mets's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by ChadH View Post
    Because someone has to be the grown-up.
    But we also need to get the immature on-board.

    There is no silence. A policy has been presented with the criteria you are fixated on but you refuse to acknowledge that because then you couldn't assign any blame to the Democrats and would be forced to face the fact that you support a Republican party that no longer exists. Face it. The GOP now supports mass child abuse and it's electorate must approve otherwise they'd be protesting right? Their deafening silence speaks to their true feelings.
    I am unaware of the policy being meant to be the final word on the topic.

    From my understanding, the proposal was a temporary compromise at a time when Republicans had the White House and both houses of Congress, so it's not an indication of what Democrats will do if they win the Senate and the next presidential election (unless you guys think they'll fund the wall if Chuck Schumer is majority leader and Elizabeth Warren is President.)

    It also doesn't address my main concern, an articulation on a limiting principle on legal immigration.

    Looking at the Vox description, the main things the bill did were...
    • Provide a pathway to citizenship for DREAMers
    • Prevent green card holders from sponsoring their adult children to immigrate to the US (although citizens can sponsor their adult children)
    • $25 billion for the wall and technology at the border.
    • Tells ICE not to focus on unauthorized immigrants living in the US without criminal records.


    There's a further description of four bills that failed.

    https://www.vox.com/policy-and-polit...ll-vote-failed

    The Coons-McCain bill would have provided a path to citizenship for 1.8 million undocumented immigrants who came to the country as children, and offered no money for Trump’s border wall, though it did include some border security measures.
    The Toomey amendment would have penalized so-called sanctuary cities that refuse to enforce federal immigration policy, by withholding federal funding from those municipalities. Democrats voted against this one.
    There was also a Grassley bill that would have provided a path to citizenship for 1.8 million undocumented immigrants who came to the country as children, offered $25 billion to fund a southern border wall and substantially curtailed family immigration and eliminated the diversity visa lottery program. Democrats largely voted against this one.

    At least until a palatable Republican candidate presents himself. You'll drop Biden in a heartbeat should that occur. If you supported the GOP through the Bush and Obama administrations you've already shown yourself to be of dubious character.
    I am a Republican, so I will support a decent Republican over a decent Democrat. It doesn't appear I'll be lucky enough to have that choice in the upcoming presidential elections.

    I get that you think Trump hasn't really changed any reasonable person's voting habits, that he's not substantively worse than any generic Republican (or that generic Republicans were already so far beyond the pale that they weren't worth voting for to being with), although that would be something that should be articulated more often.

    You say that but frankly, I doubt your integrity. If you can't support a policy co-written by the party you support, why would support a purely Democrat policy?
    I would support a superior clearly articulated alternative, regardless of what party came up with it. But it would have to something I find to be superior.
    Sincerely,
    Thomas Mets

  10. #8275
    Ultimate Member Mister Mets's Avatar
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    Farhad Manjoo considers a President worse than Trump.

    Come, take a stroll with me through my recurrent nightmare: It’s the sweltering summer of 2029, and the man in charge is Tucker Carlson — that is, President Tucker Carlson, the one-time Fox News talker turned righteous, white nationalist economic populist, now in his triumphant second term, after having defeated the incumbent Joseph “Recession Joe” Biden back in 2024.

    Like Trump, President Carlson spends his first term refashioning America along racial lines. But unlike Trump, whose one term is now regarded by much of the right as a best-forgotten political disaster, Carlson advances an ethnonationalist populism that succeeds in a wild, frightening fashion. His secret: competence, a commitment to true political realignment, and a brutal online political machine that represents the full flowering of the tactics and ideology first displayed during 2014’s Gamergate movement.

    Where Trump was a chaotic, undisciplined narcissist, the Carlson who wins in 2024 is a canny political strategist who makes good on Trump’s forgotten promise to embrace anti-corporate economic policies. On paper, parts of Carlson’s agenda seem ripped from the former liberal firebrand Sen. Elizabeth Warren (now in exile in Toronto): His chief enemies are Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft, the megacorporations owned and staffed by wealthy liberals.

    It’s a winning electoral formula: A large minority of Americans are willing to forgive Carlson’s authoritarian, nativist impulses if they see it as part of a war against the out-of-touch, culture-destroying corporations that are automating our jobs; killing every other industry; and exercising complete control over what we watch, read, listen to, buy and believe. And in America, thanks to the Electoral College, winning over a large minority is good enough to regularly win the presidency.

    Obviously I am making all of this up. But my premonition is based on months of research — this is what you might call an educated nightmare. My education: Carlson’s own nightly Fox News show, which I’ve been watching obsessively since January. I began tuning in because Carlson — who, with nearly three million viewers a night, is the second most popular host on cable, after Sean Hannity — has become one of the most fascinatingly terrifying men in conservative media.

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    There are two things that terrify and fascinate me about Carlson. First, unlike most Republican lawmakers today, Carlson is sketching an economic vision of a post-Trump America that departs in key ways from Trumpism, especially in its muscular anti-corporate, populist zeal.

    In January, in a commentary that went viral on the right, Carlson excoriated American political leaders for their commitment to empty capitalism: “For our ruling class, more investment banking is always the answer,” he said. “They teach us it’s more virtuous to devote your life to some soulless corporation than it is to raise your own kids.”

    He regularly criticizes the tech giants, whom he argues are censoring his and his followers’ views. But he also hates corporations more generally for what he calls their attempts to influence culture and politics (including by boycotting his show): His critics, he said in May, “believe democracy is when a tiny group of rich people imposes its values on everyone else by force."

    In June, Carlson praised Elizabeth Warren’s plan for “economic patriotism”: “Many of Warren’s policy prescriptions make obvious sense,” he said, wondering why Republicans, including Trump, didn’t join her vision. “What if the Republican leadership here in Washington had bothered to learn the lessons of the 2016 election?”

    The second thing that scares me about Carlson is his racism, which is both more extreme and more cannily packaged for a digital audience than is Trump’s.

    While Trump is a creature of cable television, Carlson’s segments look like extended YouTube clips, and they’re designed to play to an audience that is extremely online. His critics and white supremacists themselves point out that, more than anyone else on television, Carlson functions as a kind of laundromat for white identity movements: Several times a week, he’ll lift ideas, story lines and troll-based narratives directly from the fetid swamp of online hatred. Then he’ll clean these theories up and wrap them in a bow for his mainstream audience, usually to advance an overarching idea that he mentions constantly: that, thanks to an “invasion” of immigrants, white people in America and Europe face economic and cultural calamity, and that the political, corporate and media establishments are abetting their destruction.

    “No one covers white identity more consistently than Tucker,” said Madeline Peltz, who watches Carlson’s show every night as a researcher for Media Matters for America, a liberal advocacy group that tracks conservative outlets. “I cannot remember a single episode in the last two years that didn’t include these ideas.”

    I’d known all this before I started watching, but actually watching blew my mind: Carlson’s propaganda was so constant, and the sleight of hand with which he inserted barely sanitized racist theories into his broadcast so swift, that I began to see the outlines of my nightmare — that Trump was only a prelude, and that even if he loses next year, someone far more sophisticated than our current president could come along to push digitally mediated politics in an even darker direction.
    Sincerely,
    Thomas Mets

  11. #8276
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    Quote Originally Posted by Mister Mets View Post
    That would be bad.

    If you could prove it, Trump's probably out of office.
    This is good, it shows you are starting to get the reality of Donny's presidency.

  12. #8277
    Invincible Jersey Ninja Tami's Avatar
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    Trump critic and rising GOP star Ben Sasse is now a Trump apologist. How sadly predictable.

    In the end, Ben Sasse got the Trump tweet he gave up so much to get. “Senator Ben Sasse has done a wonderful job representing the people of Nebraska,” President Donald Trump tweeted. “He is great with our Vets, the Military, and your very important Second Amendment. Strong on Crime and the Border, Ben has my Complete and Total Endorsement!”

    And with that, one of the last Trump critics in the Senate GOP was brought to heel. “For Sasse, the past several months have represented something akin to surrender in the war for the soul of modern conservatism,” wrote The Washington Post’s James Hohmann.
    To be fair, Sasse’s surrender was foreshadowed earlier this year by his vote to uphold Trump’s declaration of a “national emergency” to build his wall. The junior senator from Nebraska also won the president’s favor with his radio silence.
    On one level this feels depressingly familiar, as one GOP leader after another has succumbed to Trumpism. The saga of the last three years has been part Yeats (“the best lack all conviction while the worst/ Are full of passionate intensity”) and part “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” And it is easy to see Sasse’s surrender as both inevitable and predictable: this is, after all, Trump’s party, and colleagues who refused to bend the knee have been defeated — like Mark Sanford — or forced into retirement — like Sen. Jeff Flake and Sen. Bob Corker.

    If Sasse had remained anti-Trump, he would have faced a primary challenge and possible defeat; a presidential bid would likely have been a kamikaze mission. So he chose survival; another six years in the Senate that gives him a chance to actually outlast the Trump presidency, whenever it ends.

    But still. Sasse’s surrender is worth analyzing because of what he represented — and what he could have become. Until just a few months ago, Sasse was the Great Never-Trump Hope. Sasse had created a carefully crafted image as a thoughtful, principled constitutional conservative who was willing to defy the worst elements of Trumpism.
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  13. #8278
    Old school comic book fan WestPhillyPunisher's Avatar
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    And, in the end, it was all about survival. Sasse, like all the others, came to realize that going against Trump was a death sentence since he could literally end careers with a tweet, so Sasse decided to kiss ass instead of having his kicked out of politics. Yeah, predictable as the sunrise, but then, I expected no less from Republicans who, as a party, have been brought to heel and emasculated by the Orange Menace.
    Avatar: Here's to the late, great Steve Dillon. Best. Punisher. Artist. EVER!

  14. #8279
    Extraordinary Member PaulBullion's Avatar
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    Clearly, Trump is innocent and handling the pressure with the calmness of an innocent man:

    "How does the Green Goblin have anything to do with Herpes?" - The Dying Detective

    Hillary was right!

  15. #8280
    Mighty Member 4saken1's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Mister Mets View Post
    If you could prove it, Trump's probably out of office.
    .......not that he would lose any of his supporgers.
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