All purpose news and politics thread part VII: News & Politics Total Landscaping

[zinderel]

He will want someone who wont bend this time and follow the law. So even more of an ass kisser than Pence. Since Pence betrayed him and certified the election like he was supposed to. He will want someone that wont hesitate and stand in his way. Help spray tan his ass if he needs too.

If he respected women or people of color at all, I’d suggest Candace Owens as a callous, tone deaf, but calculated choice intended to draw women and black people away from the party that actually supports the rights of women and black people (and allow the far right to claim that it’s DEMOCRATS who hate women and minorities because those evil leftists didn’t support Candace Owens for Vice President)…

[Joy Boy]

If he respected women or people of color at all, I’d suggest Candace Owens as a callous, tone deaf, but calculated choice intended to draw women and black people away from the party that actually supports the rights of women and black people (and allow the far right to claim that it’s DEMOCRATS who hate women and minorities because those evil leftists didn’t support Candace Owens for Vice President)…

Eh, she's just a glorified podcaster at this point after her falling out with Ben Shapiro. I still can't figure out what demographic subscribes to her patreon. Is it your average maga chud who thinks she's one of the good ones, is it black conservatives, or maybe brain rotted neo-con zoomers? Grifters like her make me think the internet was a mistake.

[Tami]

Marco Rubio is an idiot.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

Marco Rubio is an idiot.

Oh, brother! Next thing you know, Fled Cruz will throw his hat in the ring. Cruz dutifully kissed the ring after Trump called his wife ugly and accused his daddy of being involved in JFK's assassination. Trump would just LOVE that cringeworthy level of subservience.

[Catlady in training]

So the stable genius businessman is asking his supporters for money again:

Trump pleads with supporters for cash to help pay soaring legal bills

I liked this part:

The twice-impeached Trump – currently the presumptive Republican presidential nominee – continued: “Democrats think that this will intimidate me. They think that if they take my cash to stifle my campaign, that I’ll GIVE UP!

“But worst of all? They think that YOU will abandon me, and that you will GIVE UP on our country. Here’s one thing they don’t know: WE WILL NEVER SURRENDER!”

Trump did surrender last August, to state authorities in Georgia in a case now concerning 10 election subversion charges. Facing 78 other criminal charges (for election subversion, retention of classified information and hush-money payments), Trump has used his Georgia mugshot in fundraising appeals.

[Dalak]

Agreed. Trump is nothing more than a symptom of the disease that's the lunatics behind Project 2025, and yeah, they're here to stay. Even if they lose come November, they'll just bide their time and wait for 2028, safe and secure in the knowledge that a Qpublican will more than likely win the presidency as no one party has held the White House for three straight terms since the GOP with Reagan and Bush I (1981-1992). Then there's the not so insignificant matter of a dangerously right leaning SCOTUS and the part they're bound to play in reshaping the country's laws to suit the theocrats. The danger of democracy as we know it going down the toilet is as eminent now as it's ever been, and that's no hyperbole.

Exactly. And the current focus on trans people as an acceptable target for hatred, violence, and erasure by ‘conservative christians’ is simply the latest symptom of the rot at the core of America: religious fundamentalism.

As long as we keep pretending that ‘hatred’ and ‘ignorance’ and ‘greed’ are Christian values, the fundamentalists will keep digging in. Look at the state of religious fundamentalism before Nixon. Look at what a religious conservative was. Look at what a political conservative was. Look at how the country and the world viewed the extremist sects of Christianity. Heck, look at how we treated and covered conspiracists like the John Birch Society. Did we have ANYONE who embarrassed (or plotted/supported/ignored an attempted forceful takeover of) the nation the way people like MTG or Josh Hawley or Ted Cruz or Gym Jordan or Boebert or Gohmert or Kennedy or Comer or Johnson or Trump have?

Now, jump to now. Look at what a religious conservative is, now. Look at how we treat Dominionists and prosperity cultists. Look at how influential QANON/Pizzagate/ButHerEmails!!/Benghazi!!/Obama the secret Kenyan Muslim commie/the Biden crime family ‘theories’ are with a very specific audience of ‘patriotic’, ‘Christian’ republicans. Look at the idolaters, worshipping golden idols in return for permission to wallow in their basest instincts. Look at how they claim that their hatred and ignorance are ‘deeply held religious values’. And look at the organizations pushing this narrative: The Heritage Foundation, Alliance Defending Freedom, Family Research Council, Society for American Civic Renewal.

Every one of them a front for the Christian Nationalist movement that has forgotten how to hide itself beneath the skin of the religion it has parasitized. Every single one of them promotes, supports, or defends hatred and ignorance and violence as ‘christian’ or ‘Republican’ or ‘American’ values. Nothing about this movement is Christian, or conservative, or patriotic, and EVERYTHING that has been terrible in America - income disparity, the destruction of unions, rampant disease, the immigration situation, the spread of hatred and ignorance, the violence against women and minorities, the gun deaths, the ineffective legislatures, the corrupt judges - can be laid at the feet of them and groups like them pushing a Christian Nationalist/White Nationalist narrative for decades and hiding behind ‘Christianity’ and ‘patriotism’ to do so.

So, we need to pay attention to Trump, ABSOLUTELY. But we need to pay attention to the people supporting him and electing him and financing him if we want to stop something WORSE than him - something competent - from rising out of the depths of nationalist depravity in the near future. Trump is imploding before our eyes, and so we can turn some focus onto the people still working with him and what they’re doing when they aren’t pushing a wannabe fascist dictator on us.

Because long after Trump is gone, they will still be there, more desperate than ever. And with a renewed opportunity and four more years to spread lies to - and drain money and humanity from - a captive audience.

It's more important to keep passing around anti-trans psuedo-sicence, distracting from legitimate news involving the rainbow of bigotry on display from GoP officials and conservatives, and announcing worries over the rising fascism embraced by the GoP are exaggerations.

Marco Rubio is an idiot.

Oh, brother! Next thing you know, Fled Cruz will throw his hat in the ring. Cruz dutifully kissed the ring after Trump called his wife ugly and accused his daddy of being involved in JFK's assassination. Trump would just LOVE that cringeworthy level of subservience.

Trump will only have someone who will not take any spotlight away from him, so we'll see how best to fight for such a pathetic position.

So the stable genius businessman is asking his supporters for money again:

Trump pleads with supporters for cash to help pay soaring legal bills

I liked this part:

It's only a question of it the stock deal and his many shilling attempts like the cards & shoes will be able to launder enough foreign money to help him out. He's in no danger of starving, unlike many people mistreated by republican policies.

[CaptainEurope]

Nothing to see here, just Trump supporter and former Newsmax chief White House correspondent Emerald Robinson openly embracing fascism.

[ed2962]

If he respected women or people of color at all, I’d suggest Candace Owens as a callous, tone deaf, but calculated choice intended to draw women and black people away from the party that actually supports the rights of women and black people (and allow the far right to claim that it’s DEMOCRATS who hate women and minorities because those evil leftists didn’t support Candace Owens for Vice President)…

Supposedly that was why Omarosa was part of the Trump cabinet, but I barely her doing anything before they had a falling out.

[ed2962]

Eh, she's just a glorified podcaster at this point after her falling out with Ben Shapiro. I still can't figure out what demographic subscribes to her patreon. Is it your average maga chud who thinks she's one of the good ones, is it black conservatives, or maybe brain rotted neo-con zoomers? Grifters like her make me think the internet was a mistake.

A glorified podcaster at best is all she ever was. But yeah, her audience isn't actual black conservatives...it's folks who don't really think that hard about the issues but like the idea of a black lady saying anti-black, anti-women rhetoric while being well spoken and attractive. I've noticed recently she's been on a PR tour talking to everyone from Bill Mahr to Twitch "Debate Bros" to recently Charlamagne the God. You can tell the people who know the topics or know who she is...Candace isn't comfortable talking to them.

[Panfoot]

Mel Gibson grew up in Australia, but was born in Peekskill, NY. So yeah, he could be Trump's running mate.

Huh, I had no idea!

[zinderel]

A glorified podcaster at best is all she ever was. But yeah, her audience isn't actual black conservatives...it's folks who don't really think that hard about the issues but like the idea of a black lady saying anti-black, anti-women rhetoric while being well spoken and attractive. I've noticed recently she's been on a PR tour talking to everyone from Bill Mahr to Twitch "Debate Bros" to recently Charlamagne the God. You can tell the people who know the topics or know who she is...Candace isn't comfortable talking to them.

That’s why I think she’d be a perfect fit. He’s a demented, vile ooze monster with the mental capacity of a rock. She is a black woman who supports and defends him. That’s as far as he’d need to look for her qualifications, and it would only wind up helping him implode faster. I want to see him pick a running mate so abhorrent that it only helps destroy him faster.

I WANT to watch him burst a blood vessel in his brain and stroke out live on tv in mid-rant. But barring that, watching him make stupid choices that further destroy him politically, financially, socially, medically, legally? That’s a close second.

[Mister Mets]

If he respected women or people of color at all, I’d suggest Candace Owens as a callous, tone deaf, but calculated choice intended to draw women and black people away from the party that actually supports the rights of women and black people (and allow the far right to claim that it’s DEMOCRATS who hate women and minorities because those evil leftists didn’t support Candace Owens for Vice President)…

Well, she'll be 35 next month.

Who would you guys like to see him pick as his VP?

I'll try to take this seriously.

This is an odd question for me because I'm a Republican who wants Trump to lose. I also have to keep in mind the possibility that he wins and won't serve a full term, meaning this person can be elected President (It's also fairly normal for a party to stay in the White House for more than a term: Trump is the second situation in 120 years where a party gets kicked out after one year) and can influence the party in the long-term in a way that a fat 77 year old won't.

Trump goes with serious enough choices that it's probably not going to be someone who sinks the ticket like Kari Lake or Marjorie Taylor Greene.

The least effective of the conventional choices is Kristi Noem. She has an okay resume (Governor, former member of Congress) but there are weird rumors of affairs with Corey Lewandowski, odd endorsements of various products and some other issues that suggest she's not that impressive, so that she would reduce Trump's chances of winning but wouldn't do too much harm if elected.

JD Vance has been mentioned, and I think he would be a weak candidate but I don't think it would be good for the country to double down on a possible path for occasional Republican success as identity politics for white people. He's smart enough that he could damage to the country in a way a grifter wouldn't. The same applies to Tucker Carlson.

Other names seem to fall in two categories, either white women born in the 80s who don't have the resume to run on their own yet (Katie Britt, Elsie Stefanik, Sarah Huckabee Sanders) or 50-something minority male Senators (Marco Rubio, Tim Scott.) In national office, they would mostly be generic Republicans.

I honestly think the likeliest choice is Tulsi Gabbard. It's not that she has a 20 percent chance of being the nominee, but she may have a better chance than any other individual. She seems willing to take the job, and can fit a message that Democrats are just going too far, while simultaneously appealing to Bernie Sanders supporters. She would probably help his general election chances, but I wouldn't see her being a force in the Republican party if the ticket loses. It would make for a very weird primary if Trump is kicked out of office (or a guy in his late 70s who recently lost his sister and his first wife meets the Grim Reaper) and she's running as an incumbent in 2028.

I suppose my top pick would be Noem, because I think it would hurt the chances of winning but if she were to ever become President it wouldn't cause the damage of a Vance, Calrson or Gabbard.

The smartest pick would be Rubio, unless there's evidence that Britt, Stefanik or Huckabee-Sanders is a once in a generation political talent.

[Mister Mets]

And it is working. Here we are discussing the threat that Trans kids pose to the nation, rather than a racist despot who wants to be dictator. Good job.

Who is claiming that trans kids pose a threat to the nation?

People choose what fights to engage in, and what they'll never compromise on.

It's okay to acknowledge you don't want to understand and that you would rather discuss the supposed 'lack of standards of journalism' for random users on DailyKos as a means to deflect than you would the articles linked to in a diary about the bullying Nex endured, or the bomb threats to Oklahoma schools over the rights of people like him, or the targeting of teachers that would support people like him.

I mean, if I were in your shoes, I would certainly not want to talk about those things either and would strive to find a reason not to do so.

It's plainly obvious what's happening here and why.

There doesn't seem to be anything I don't understand about how Dailykos operates. I think it's sketchy to have a system where people post what appears to be evergreen articles, and there's no norm for deleting it if it turns out to be bullshit. If it's a main article, that's different from a generic Facebook post or a comment in a larger discussion that'll be forgotten tomorrow.

Obviously, this isn't a left-wing issue. It's more of a partisan activist issue. It reminds me of the websites posted by the guy who kept claiming that the election was stolen from Trump.

Fake news gets eyeballs because if someone is confident and wrong, they'll be able to say things that others won't.

And the people defending fake news are wasting time and resources that can go towards better arguments.

As should be painfully clear by now to anyone reading along at home, simply explaining things to Mets doesn't get any change in behavior or response from him. He's gotten to the point of claiming clicking the same link again is searching for what's been done since instead of actually searching, while adding so much plausible sounding bovine-excrement (without evidence) to The Week's article to excuse their lies & refusal to update.



I don't think anyone is actually fooled by this, but it's best to point it out in case any aren't sure which is why I continue.

-------

And back to The Week's lies, To review:




You can tell they are lies because nothing of what Mets has brought up was actually mentioned in the article, nor is there any evidence of the reporter diligently tracking down anonymous respondents to check their chromosomes. On top of that, Mets has 'forgotten' that 0.5 of his total is listed as "My Identity Is Not Listed". When we remove them and AMAB individuals from the count we wind up with 3.5 instead of 5. Then we get to the truly transphobic part of these lies: If we assume that exactly half of the respondents are born Male/Female, there is absolutely no point other than causing fear & hate to bring up only those brought up as girls.

It's also been pointed out (with at least one study posted) that the rising Anti-Trans bigotry is particularly focused on trans women and making them out to be predators (BATHROOMS!), which would chill many of those individuals from coming out as trans so evidence has been posted to explain any disparity in numbers. I'm sure I could find other studies mentioning that with a quick google search just like Mets could, but I'm not linking to what's been already posted deliberately to see if he will try to find it or question if it's actually been posted (Like with evidence of Nex's Bullying).

But Daily Kos is trash and we should all acknowledge it. (eyeroll)

Here's another attempt to get the point about The Week through to Mets:

If someone's gender isn't listed, it doesn't match the gender on their birth certificate so they can certainly fall under the transgender umbrella.

Removing trans women (who are by definition AMAB) from a statistic involving trans college students has nothing to do with statistics involving trans people who are also AFAB. I have taken care to make this point multiple times.

There is also no reason to assume half the respondents are born male and half were born female.

College students are not 50/50 male and female. They're more likely to be female.

The general understanding is that up until a decade ago the majority of trans people were AMAB (which I have to note is a weird term because male refers to sex and chromosomes; it seems to imply a connection to people who are intersex when they are a fraction of a fraction of one percent in any poll I've seen.) The numbers have changed recently, something I was agnostic about until your comments made me look deeper and determine that females are now more likely to identify as trans.

A National Library of Medicine study determined that two-thirds of those who identified as nonbinary were assigned female at birth. Incidentally, the percentage was higher for individuals who identified as having a binary gender (IE- male, female, trans male/ trans man/ trans masculine or trans female/ trans woman/ trans feminine.)

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6802728/

I mentioned this more than two years ago.

https://community.cbr.com/showthread...=1#post6032471

It's not controversial. And I don't get why you've been so abusive for years about this.

[SUPERECWFAN1]

Just had a cousin tell me it’s socialism to raise taxes on the wealthy and corporations. Told me they pay enough.

I’m like…man you’re so gonna cry the blues in 30+ years when you need Social Security like myself. And realize it’s f—-ked. All because you idolize rich folks.

[Dalak]

If someone's gender isn't listed, it doesn't match the gender on their birth certificate so they can certainly fall under the transgender umbrella.

Removing trans women (who are by definition AMAB) from a statistic involving trans college students has nothing to do with statistics involving trans people who are also AFAB. I have taken care to make this point multiple times.

There is also no reason to assume half the respondents are born male and half were born female.

The Week article suggests a significant increase in identification as trans or gender nonconforming among females. If females and males were as likely to identify as agender, nonbinary or the designations where it isn't obvious whether a respondent is chromosomally male or female, the figure at the time of the study would be 4.2 percent which is close enough to match the statement of an increase from 1 in 2,000 to 1 in 20.

Well as you posed the half-n-half theory, are forcing people who saw Transgender on a list and selected "Not Listed" under the Transgender umbrella to try and win an argument instead of respecting their choices like The Week should have, and are excusing inflating numbers with invalid results because you feel they are right despite the study they explicitly state saying "1-in-20" not saying that according to posted evidence . . . it's just another Thursday night.

Remember: it's Daily Kos that's Trash. The Week on the other hand: