Trump in charge of voting system changes is sort of like Larry Nassar in charge of sports medicine for teenage girls.
Right - a guy who's known to have visited Epstein's island is denying the conspiracy theories about his oh-so-convenient death.
That has all the credibility of a four-year-old with chocolate on his fingers and crumbs on his face saying "Cookies? What cookies?"
Unfortunately, facts count for nothing now, since Trump is a delusional narcissist whose only reality is inside his own mind, and he's surrounded himself with angrily frightened sycophants who just want to be told that reality is something other than what all the people they hate and fear say it is.
Conservatives live in such a bizarre fantasy world.
You'd think that sooner or later it would filter through to at least some of them that it's meaningful that essentially without exception, if they just let information flow freely, whether on a website or a forum or in public comments or via an AI or whatever - it ends up skewed against conservatism.
But they never seem to get it. Instead, they go to great lengths to carefully censor and silence and astroturf and manipulate to force it over to a pro-conservative position, and they then have to constantly monitor and censor and astroturf to keep it there because if they relax their guard it starts drifting anti-conservative again.
In one sense, yeah - it's easy and obvious - they lie, and often even to themselves.
But that doesn't really explain anything. It goes so far beyond just lying that I really have a hard time making sense of it. Glib answers just don't hack it.
It just doesn't seem possible that they can sincerely believe that opinion consistently turns against them through some sort of near-universal conspiracy and that their constant manipulations and censorship and astroturfing can really be in support of truth. Sure, individuals can be that delusional, but that many of them?
I just can't make sense of it. It's like they believe that gravity is a conspiratorial lie that everyone else pretends to believe in just to stop them from flapping their arms and flying to the moon.
Government of the people, by the idiots, for the psychopaths.
I propose a deliberate and precise tracker of the names and records of all of the people in coming years who are going to needlessly die as a result of being denied healthcare because of the Medicaid cuts, with the express purpose of then entering them into evidence in the manslaughter trials of Trump, Vance, and every Congressperson who voted in favor of this bill.
I'm only half kidding.
I still remember when Facebook first caught on, and I learned that it was a site on which people posted their real names and pictures of themselves and their families and their lives, and all I could think was, "Why in the hell would anyone ever do that?"
I still don't know.
The late 90s or maybe the early 00s Probably pre-Google (so pre-1998) but maybe in their earliest days. Definitely pre YouTube and pre Facebook (so pre-2004). It's been pretty much all downhill since then.
Fucking psychopaths.
I would say that the most telling thing is that there hasn't been a similar shift among Republicsns.
Anyone who can look at what Israel has done and is doing to the Palestinians in Gaza, and increasingly in the West Bank, without being filled with horror, revulsion and pity is a monster.
"Shamed" implies he's capable of feeling shame, which I very much doubt.
And as I point out every time they tout this number, without context, it means nothing.
What was the change in the overall US labor pool for the same month?
This is only actually job "growth" if fewer than 147,000 people were added to the labor pool. If exactly 147,000 people were added to the labor pool, then it's only managing to keep pace, and if more than 147,000 people were added, it's actually a net loss.
80 years of jingoistic propaganda, fear-mongering, religious exceptionalism, war profiteering, institutional racism and lies has created a nation of psychopaths.
The US is now actively and deliberately killing poor people.
Oh look - the latest article in the ongoing series - "Sure we've turned America into a shithole, but why are young people avoiding sex/marriage/parenthood?"
And... the only question is whether Trump is lying, or in the terribly unlikely event that he's telling the truth, Israel is lying.
We can know for certain that at least one of them is.
Not coincidentally pretty much exactly so.
It's a bit dated since it was written in the wake of Kerry's defeat rather than Harris's, but that aside, it's discouragingly (or cynically amusingly) relevant, and could just as easily have been written today.
I've made no secret of the fact that I think that Biden is and always has been (including in 2020) a weak candidate, and that now is not the time to gamble on a weak candidate, especially after the debate just made him appear that much weaker.
But it just struck me that in the unique and bizarre situation in which we find ourselves - running against a brazen criminal with a stated goal of being a dictator fronting for a group of christofascists who already have a playbook for destroying American democracy - Biden has a built-in advantage as the incumbent.
I don't mean the advantage that incumbents are generally presumed to have (he notably does not have that), but a much simpler and more immediate one.
It's disturbingly likely that if/when Trump loses, his christofascist coattail-riders and his legions of angry, hateful and generally heavily-armed chucklefucks are going to literally go to war. They could well end up making Jan. 6 look like the peaceful protest they insist it was, at least in comparison to the violence and bloodshed they'll potentially unleash should their fuhrer lose.
And at that point, it's going to be much better to not have to deal with a transfer of power - to have a president already in place with a full set of aides and well-established communication channels, and to keep that president in office for as long as it takes to withstand the fascists.
As I said, that just struck me, and I haven't fully analyzed it, but I think it has some merit.
And never in my life did I think that things might reach the point, at least in my lifetime, at which I'd be considering the best strategy to combat an impending bloody fascist coup in the US...