All purpose news and politics thread part VI: This Is Not The Time For Posing

[hyped78]

The GOP primary field just got even more crowded, with this guy declaring a run:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_Hurd

Not kidding, but for a second I read "Will Turd"

[Tendrin]

Not kidding, but for a second I read "Will Turd"

I promise his campaign wil lland like one.

[hyped78]

I promise his campaign wil lland like one.

Haha. Is he even "known" at all? I had never heard of this guy

[Dalak]

I know, you're the anecdotes guy, never ceases to amaze me.

I replied to your comment after replying to the comment of another user. I don't think your comment came out of thin air. But if it did, I'll just ignore it then. My original comment is 65246, responding to another user.

There's a word I use for people who ignore inconvenient things to keep pushing their narrative, accuse others of outrageous acts when they disagree, gets caught up in one moral panic after another even after having it pointed out (Kids Forced! . . to do things they came up with), and constantly uses conservative arguments, narratives, catch phrases, biased & wrong definitions, and the same debating tactics despite saying they are liberal: Untrustworthy.

When they are also very combative about it while ignoring evidence that the evidence they are using for their conservative arguments is at-best tainted, that word becomes more valid and could easily be switched out with Troll.


You don't have to reply to this or any posts I make from now on, they won't be responded to anymore.

[kidfresh512]

Samuel Alito and the Donald Trump School of Self-Immolation

Not since 1974 when New Times magazine called Sen. William Scott (R-Va.) Congress’ dumbest member and he called a press conference in response to deny the charge and thereby prove mental deficiencies has a member of the Washington elite so mishandled a critical press salvo as Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. did this week.

Alito, who shares with Donald Trump a toddler’s lack of impulse control, once again demonstrated his inability to plan more than one move ahead at a time after the investigative news outfit ProPublica emailed a list of questions for its story pegged to his flight to a comped 2008 luxury fishing trip in Alaska on a hedge fund billionaire’s private jet.

As if to shout, “I’m not on trial here,” the justice declined to answer ProPublica’s questions, sending that message to the news organization through a court spokesperson. But in a contradictory move, Alito mounted a 1,200-word defense in the form of a Wall Street Journal op-ed to dispute ProPublica’s article — which had not yet been published. Essentially, the justice scooped the news outlet on its own story.

Alito had every right to sting ProPublica before it stung him. But in his case, getting out in front of the story before it published was a little like a judge delivering a verdict after hearing the charges but before the trial had taken place. For one thing, his dense-as-a-legal-brief argument was hard to follow because it lacked the connective tissue to explain what precisely ProPublica’s piece was accusing him of. A billboard mounted on a flatbed truck reading “ProPublica Is Being Mean to Me” and driven in a circle around the Supreme Court Building would have been a more effective public relations ploy. Perhaps the most blockheaded thing about Alito’s preemption was that it gave fresh publicity to the latest installment in a growing series about the justices licking sugar off the tummies of their sugar daddies.

When the ProPublica story, “Justice Samuel Alito Took Luxury Fishing Vacation With GOP Billionaire Who Later Had Cases Before the Court,” landed Tuesday evening after the Alito hors d’oeuvre, the capital’s appetite was hyper-stimulated for the main course. Alito didn’t report the Alaska trip, in apparent violation of the law that requires members of the Supreme Court report most gifts. Also, the billionaire’s hedge fund came before the Supreme Court at least 10 times after the trip, ProPublica reports, and the outlet got several ethics cops to say Alito should have recused himself from these cases but didn’t.

Alito’s ProPublica blow-up is only his latest PR miscue. In April, he gave an interview with his allies at the Wall Street Journal editorial page in which he complained resentfully about the criticism leveled at the court. “We’re being bombarded with this,” Alito said. “Day in and day out,” he added, critics say of the court, “They’re illegitimate. They’re engaging in all sorts of unethical conduct.” Instead of accepting or battling the criticism, Alito chooses to whine. He didn’t exactly convene a press conference to say he’s not the dumbest member of the Supreme Court, but almost. He tells the Journal editorial page that the ethical complaints leveled at the justices, such as Clarence Thomas, “undermines confidence in the government.”

This whole we are victims line of reporters reporting about us is just baffling. There are clear and obvious ethical quandaries being reported now and they NEED TO BE REPORTED. These are lifetime appointment judges who are almost impossible to remove other than death in this political climate. We need to know the basic ethical reporting that almost any professional in any other profession has to do.

I don't decide the fate of millions and how they will live. But, I have to pass yearly ethics exams at my job. Just like millions of other people. I can't accept lavish gifts, or go on expensive retreats. And I just work in the Oil and Gas industry. These people literally decide how we live, what rights we have and what can be taken away. Literally life and death decisions come from their benches. Yet its persecution to check whose mega yacht they are on and who is footing the bills for their vacations and gifts? It is ridiculous to even try to defend that. He doesn't even deny it. How in the world can you have someone who has had cases before you almost a dozen times is also funding lavish gifts and trips?

Even the whole recusal thing if it is not backed by any firm rule and just a voluntary thing we should still KNOW as citizens who you are buddy buddy with.

[hyped78]

Neo-Nazi group disrupts drag story hour for children in New Hampshire

State officials say NSC-131, a neo-Nazi group based in New England, had claimed responsibility for the protest. NSC stands for the Nationalist Social Club.

https://news.sky.com/story/neo-nazi-...shire-12907443

And they're not in jail yet because...?!

[hyped78]

Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg say they're ready for a cage fight

https://edition.cnn.com/2023/06/22/t...ght/index.html

[shooshoomanjoe]

Yeah, I'd let a kid at 6 or 7 watch wrestling like I used to, but I'd probably wait until they're about 9 before letting them see MMA then. But that's just me.

Used to love watching wrestling back when Hulk Hogan built his muscles with vitamins and prayers.

[hyped78]

Used to love watching wrestling back when Hulk Hogan built his muscles with vitamins and prayers.

Haha! There's a reason why so many pro wrestlers die young from heart attacks, but when we're kids we don't think about "where did those muscles come from?!"

But I think they've somewhat cleaned up the steroids over the years?

[Mister Mets]

It makes no sense. Would a "woke" person charge $200,000 per passenger to view the Titanic?

The video is dumb, and seems to made for the lowest common denominator, but woke people could be rich history buffs.

[Tendrin]

Even the whole recusal thing if it is not backed by any firm rule and just a voluntary thing we should still KNOW as citizens who you are buddy buddy with.

Leonard Leo and the Federalist Society have deeply corrupted the bench. Josh Marshall talks about this at Talking Points Memo here.

Leonard Leo’s SCOTUS-FedSoc Sponsor Family Program

Alito seems to suggest that he was flying to Alaska and it turned out Singer happened to be flying to Alaska too. And he happened to have a spare seat on his private jet. So what sense would there be in having the seat go to waste? In the spirit of the Alaskan wilderness, taking the seat was sort of a resource-conservation effort in which Alito was lending a hand.

But of course Singer didn’t just happen to going to Alaska. He was going to Alaska specifically to spend quality time with Sam Alito. The whole thing had been arranged by The Federalist Society’s Leonard Leo, who asked Singer if he and Alito could fly up with him on his private jet.

And here’s where the whole picture starts to come into focus — both the Alito story and the Thomas ones. Needless to say, none of these billionaires are just old friends in the sense you or I might recognize. But they didn’t just glom on to their justice on their own. Everyone here is part of Leo’s network. Harlan Crow is a big Republican donor but also a big Federalist Society donor. So is Paul Singer. So is the owner of the fishing lodge. In fact, Leo’s network is so vast and deep-pocketed that eventually he decided he was too big for the Federalist Society and struck out on his own. Indeed last year he secured a record-breaking $1.6 billion donation as a kind of judicial corruption grubstake to fund all his future endeavors.

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog...family-program

The only answer is to diminish the power of these corrupt pricks by expanding the Court and instituting ethics reforms that make this kind of bribery illegal. And when you consider how the Supreme Court has ruled on bribery issues recentyl, you have to wonder...

[shooshoomanjoe]

Haha! There's a reason why so many pro wrestlers die young from heart attacks, but when we're kids we don't think about "where did those muscles come from?!"

But I think they've somewhat cleaned up the steroids over the years?

They still use steroids. Vince McMahon cleaned it up (or at least his wrestlers didn't look as big) after his trial but it didn't stay clean for long.

[Mister Mets]

The problem is the sports question is a non question, it was never about fairness, you never see anybody who bring up any of the other issues woman athletes face constantly, and the science is out, rules have been in place. It was always a trojan horse to paint trans people in a negative light, IE just like the "groomers" stuff now or the gay = pedophile stuff of the past, and it worked beautifully. The trans minors stuff is the next step, full of nonsense misinformation that can be easily disproven but will just not go away, and that's been used to further take away our civil rights. Were at 558 anti trans bills this year alone, for roughly 0.5% of the population, in many cases laws that effect single digits of people. The thing that frustrates me most right now though it always comes down to right wingers arguing from a place of bigotry and misinformation(as is the usual) and left wingers arguing...rather tepidly, entertaining the misinformation, and the vast majority of those arguing aren't part of the community, aren't doctors, etc. It's incredibly disheartening to constantly have the debate about your existence happen around you, see: what they did to Zooey Zephyr in Montana.

More people are identifying as trans, so it's no longer 0.5% of the population.

According to a Pew poll from early last year, 1.6% of Americans identify as trans or non-binary.

The percentages are higher for younger adults (18-29) with 3% identifying as non-binary, and 2% identifying as trans men and trans women.

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-re...gned-at-birth/

According to the UCLA Williams Institute, the estimate of the number of youth in 2022 who identify as trans has doubled since the last time they did a study.
https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.e...united-states/

It could very well be that the increase of trans identification is mainly due to greater comfort levels coming forward (a comparison is made to increases in percentage of people who are left-handed up until it plateaued once everyone who lefthanded was accepted), but there is an increase and this has policy implications.

[aja_christopher]

The GOP primary field just got even more crowded, with this guy declaring a run:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_Hurd

He's a black moderate Republican who speaks out against Trump and racism within the Republican party.

Absolutely no chance to win -- modern Republicans prefer their candidates extreme and openly bigoted.

The only way Trump might lose the nomination is if he is convicted of crimes and even then Republicans would likely have no problem supporting a racist, homophobic, xenophobic treasonous criminal as their leader because that's where the party stands right now.

The only reason DeSantis even has a chance is because he is trying to be just as bad as Trump -- if not worse.

And because the current leader of the Republican party is looking at decades in prison for said crimes.

[hyped78]

More people are identifying as trans, so it's no longer 0.5% of the population.

According to a Pew poll from early last year, 1.6% of Americans identify as trans or non-binary.

The percentages are higher for younger adults (18-29) with 3% identifying as non-binary, and 2% identifying as trans men and trans women.

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-re...gned-at-birth/

According to the UCLA Williams Institute, the estimate of the number of youth in 2022 who identify as trans has doubled since the last time they did a study.
https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.e...united-states/

It could very well be that the increase of trans identification is mainly due to greater comfort levels coming forward (a comparison is made to increases in percentage of people who are left-handed up until it plateaued once everyone who lefthanded was accepted), but there is an increase and this has policy implications.

According to Gallup, 20.8% of Gen Z Adults (born 1997-2003) in the US identify as LGBTQ+. Trans is 2.1% of those 20.8%.

https://news.gallup.com/poll/389792/...-ticks-up.aspx