Metaphorical
Metaphorical's JournalCurious to hear from military people here
About what they think of JD Vance's "military experience"?
Republicans Accuse Democrats of Plotting to Nominate Winning Candidate
Borowitz report:
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Calling it “the most crooked conspiracy in American history,” on Sunday Donald J. Trump and other Republicans accused Democrats of plotting to nominate a winning presidential candidate.
“I’ve seen the Democrats do some pretty evil things, but I never thought they’d choose a nominee with a chance of winning,” Trump said. “This should never be allowed to happen in our country.”
“What we are witnessing is no more and no less than a shameless scheme to mount a successful election campaign,” House Speaker Mike Johnson charged. “As God is my witness, this will not stand.”
Senator J.D. Vance attacked the Democrats’ “blatant use of strategy” and warned of more sinister machinations to come.
“In a matter of days, be prepared for them to announce that they’ve chosen a qualified and appealing VP candidate,” Vance said. “We Republicans would never do that.”
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Sometimes the Borowitz Report is more spot on than I suspect even they realize.
Does it matter?
Seriously - let's say for the sake of argument that Joe is showing significant signs of cognitive decline (and after what I have seen of speeches and responses, I think this is VERY unlikely) ... this is the reason that we have a vice president!
I've been all over the map on this, but I'm getting pissed about how this is turning into a referendum on Biden by those who are worried about ... what exactly? Biden raising taxes on those who make more money than anyone on the planet? Biden suddenly reversing himself on Bitcoin? Fear that Biden's going to start wandering around with a sanitary napkin on his ear? Good god!!
I've made my peace with the fact that there is a good probability that sometime between the election and 2028, Biden may very well hand over the reins to Kamala and retire. I voted for her in the primaries in 2020, I think she'd be a great president.
Here's something I dont think these donors are considering - the chances of getting a tax increase of that magnitude, even if we win Congress, is virtually nil. However, people ARE getting angry about the excess power that these people have, and the tide I think is turning on how acceptable it is to continue with the status quo.
I frankly don't care if Biden is behind in the battleground states (and for many, many reasons, I have my doubts about the validity of ANY polls right now). I do care about people who are trying to hold the Democratic party hostage for something that likely won't come to pass anyway, especially with no real alternatives in place.
Entertaining hypotherticals
I want to see Biden elected, and I'm not trying to invite flaming here, however,
Let's say that there is some legitimate concern about Biden's health, something that may be more obvious to those who have been around him than it is to those of us who only see him in videos. Both candidates are old men, people in their late seventies and early eighties. I'm sixty one, and I find I struggle some days. Rather than arguing that these donors are all suddenly turning greedy and out of character, entertain the possibility that they are seeing someone they've known for a while showing a demonstrable decline.
Kamela Harris is meeting with donors and notables this weekend. One of two things will happen - either she will pacify them, Biden is back on the trail Monday, and we push forward to the convention in August.
Or, Harris meets with the donors who have very legitimate concerns about Biden from a health standpoint. Unlike Trump, Biden is honest enough with himself to acknowledge reality, at which point, he comes out Monday morning, announcing that, for health reasons, he is retiring. This makes Kamela Harris President of the United States. She goes into the convention as the legitimate candidate as well, as she was already a part of the ticket. In August, she selects a VP (Gretchen Whitmer would be my guess, but that's just a guess).
Now, I do not know which of these scenarios is more likely to be the case. I do remember when Biden was in Europe, talking with Keir Starmer, that I was surprised at how worn Biden looked, and was concerned.
Now, I can make an argument either way. It would be satisfying to believe that it's the wealthy class putting pressure on Biden given his agenda, and I do think there is some of that, but remember, many of these people have worked with Biden regularly, consider him a friend and a colleague, and it is just out of character for many of them to suddenly change their stripes.
Let's calm down, see what happens over the weekend, and focus on the end goal - defeating Trump, even if it's Kamela Harris that is our standard bearer.
If it helps any
I want to see the press eat crow when Biden accepts the nomination next month.
I'm getting tired of saying this, but "The press lies."
This is the same press that went apesh*t when Kerry was swiftboated, that spewed the narrative about Hillary's mail, that pilloried Howard Dean for his scream, that ridiculed Gore for creating the Internet (and carried the narrative that he had lost in Florida), that relentlessly repeated that Obama's birth certificate was fake.
The press is owned by the billionaire class, and Biden has said he's going to make them pay their fair share of taxes. They tried to ignore Biden, and Biden took them by surprise at the SOTU. They were lying in wait for Biden to stumble once (which he did with the debate) then they turned up the volume to eleven. Now they're threatening not to fund down-ballot races and are doing everything they can to dry up popular support.
This is not accidental, guys. The only good thing I can see out of this is that Trump will have a half-life of about two months if he wins, before he "accidentally" falls out of a window on the thirtieth floor, after he gets elected.
Where were the drones?
This was pulled from the Forbes Security newsletter. I'll try to provide a URL link to it ASAP.
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Since 2021, the Secret Service has spent at least $400,000 on drones, contract records show. Yet none appear to have detected the emerging Trump assassination attempt.
Aerial images of the site suggest drones would have had an unimpeded view of the building from which the shooter fired at Trump, hitting the former president’s ear, killing an audience member and wounding two others. Even if there had been some cover blocking the line of sight, thermal camera-equipped drones could have monitored the building for threats.
"A drone could have alerted them to a shooter climbing on a roof," David Young, a drone expert and officer at the Graham Police Department in North Carolina told Forbes. “But there is always going to be that need for boots on the ground to be the final puzzle piece to stop that threat."
Luis Figueiredo, an Elizabeth Police Department, New Jersey detective and drone pilot, was surprised that drone surveillance didn’t appear to have been used. "You would think that these protection detail teams would have access to all this equipment," Figueiredo told Forbes.
Yet there’s little evidence there was drone surveillance during the rally. Neither the Secret Service nor local police would say whether or not there were drones in the air at the time of the shooting. Spokesperson Anthony Guglielmi confirmed the agency had a drone program, but told Forbes he didn’t know if they had been used at the rally. He didn’t respond to further questions about its unmanned aerial fleet. The Pennsylvania State Police and the Butler County Sheriff’s Office declined to comment. The FBI, which is investigating the shooting, said it had nothing to add beyond its online statement.
In mid-2022 the Secret Service spent $70,000 on small unmanned aircraft from multi-billion police contractor Axon. And it’s spent over $200,000 on unspecified drones from Atlantic Diving Supply and Paladin Defense Services.
The agency’s drone response capabilities may have been limited by a policy effectively barring the use of cheaper drones made by Chinese manufacturers like DJI, according to Figueiredo, who has worked on DHS task forces. He said such restrictions may have prevented a wider rollout of drones to on-the-ground Secret Service agents on presidential protection teams.
The Secret Service has bought Chinese devices before, spending $12,000 on DJI Mavic 2 Pro and DJI Phantom 4 Pro drones in 2021. But, as Figueiredo pointed out, those devices were purchased before the DHS restrictions were imposed.
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I wondered about this myself as I was thinking about the shooting. There were no drones that I've heard about in the news, despite the fact that such drones are easily the best eyes in the skies that a secret service senior agent would want. They would have easily picked up someone climbing a building and getting in position on the roof. Another point - why are the Republicans not howling for Secret Service blood at this point - their man was shot at, and yet there's curiously very little from the media about the Republicans calling for the resignation of the entire secret service infrastructure. Conjecture - they really would prefer if no one looked too closely at the agents who were deployed for Trump, lest they discover something that doesn't add up.
Can we get some consensus here?
1. Short of one bad debate, when Biden was clearly exhausted and sick with a cold, Biden has been on the campaign trail, indeed, has been a veritable dynamo. Can we PLEASE put to bed the notion that Biden is a) senile, b) decrepit, c) incompetent. He's fucking human. You try maintaining the schedule that he does and not have days where you should be resting but can't. I suspect most people would wilt pretty early on.
2. The corporate media channels are clearly all in for Trump. This shouldn't be even remotely surprising. They are the mouthpieces of the 0.1%, and that sliver of a sliver of the population clearly does not like what Biden is doing to them. BTW, when FDR was in office, the newspapers were just as scathing, just as obsequious, just as self-serving. FDR was re-elected THREE times. That should tell you something right there.
3. Trump is a media creature. He didn't make money by buying and selling real estate, he made money by selling his caricature of a billionaire - Trump university, Trump casinos, Trump steak ... he generally didn't actually own most of these, he simply licensed his name and image. He is the ultimate influencer, and he knows that the only way he stays relevant (and out of prison) is to continue to be the biggest bully on the block.
4. Campaigners vs. Governors - one of the biggest problems in our political system is that the art of campaigning and the art of governing are two very different skill sets. Governing is hard because it requires staying up to date on thousands of different issues daily, making decisions based on too little information, and always angering somebody. Campaigning is grueling, but it is also a sales job - can you convince people to vote for you. Those are two very different, indeed, almost diametrically opposed skill sets. Democrats in general prefer competence (governing) over confidence (selling), while Republicans are the opposite. Biden has learned to be a campaigner, but he's also a highly competent and very experienced governor, and this is the thing that is scaring so many of his enemies.
5. Many people think that the reason that Obama was so vilified was the he was the first "black" president, despite in fact being only half African-American. I think this held true for the low-information voter, but it wasn't the (only) reason that the elite hated him. They hated him because he was effective. He passed landmark legislation, including the Affordable Care Act, despite an outright blitz of a campaign of villification against him.They did it by smearing him in the press, by undermining his proxies in Congress, and by an avalanche of lies. Biden is even more progressive than Obama, and his enemies are terrified about the prospect that he might be able to rein them in. They think they have him in check, but he is very likely to do a checkmate of his own because their board is not as strong as they think it is. A big part of the reason for this is that business people usually tend to believe they are smarter than they actually are.
6. Do I believe that the shooting was a false flag event? Yes. Too many pieces do not add up. It plays far too well into the narrative, and the lapses in security seemed almost deliberate. The young man, quite honestly, was likely as much a victim as an assassin, and easily manipulatible. Can I prove it? No, and that's the whole point. The whole bullet vs. glass argument is important because it signals intent - was Crooks trying to kill Trump, or to make him appear the martyred victim? If it was anyone else, this is conspiracy theory talk, but its Trump, who has played the martyred victim card so many times that it's beginning to wear very thin.
7. The point of ALL of this is simple. We are in the midst of a campaign of disinformation, manipulation, lies, and dark money - lots of it. Our opponents are likely not above murder, are certainly not above fomenting violence, and don't give a damn about the constitution. They want to tear down the one thing that can bring them down - the power of the ballot box.
You know what I'm not seeing? MAGA Demonstrations
Thinking back to 2020, by this time in the election, there were regular news segments about pro-Trump demonstrators meeting (usually tightly framed to show how small the group was, as well as positioned in such a way as to NOT show counter-demonstrators that made up a much bigger demonstration). Lately, though, I'm not even seeing that.
I don't think that it's due to a lack of interest on the part of the MSM, but rather to a lack of supporters, and I think this is important.
A lot of the coverage that I have seen exists primarily to show that the Democrats are fractured, disorganized, inept, and even criminal, and is intended to depress voting. However, I think this is backfiring, and I think that if anything, the next couple of weeks will show even more that the would-be emperor has no clothes. First, the incident yesterday raises a very real question for everyone, not just Trumpers: what would happen if the assassination attempt had been against Biden, and he hadn't survived.
This will focus people on the election in a way that nothing else will, and the fact that the shooter was a "typically" incel I think makes the argument that Biden is "at fault" really hard to take for most people who haven't already swallowed the koolaid. For the ones that have, it will make no difference - they will find a way to rationalize this just as they do everything else in their twisted ideology, but it does shine a light on just WHAT those people really look like, what they believe, and how they are inextricably bound to Trump and the Project 2025 ideology.
And then Dark Brandon Walked Into the Room
I think there may be a silver lining in this whole Debate Kurfuffle.
Up until the Debate, I think that most people took Biden for granted (a frequent problem with good Democratic leaders who prefer a calm hand on the tiller rather than big histrionics). He was under fire for what was happening in Israel, Trump was seemingly coming out of his conviction with nary a scratch, and people were getting nervous ... and then the debate happened.
Immediately the pundits were out in force, and people spent long nights thinking the unthinkable - maybe it WAS time for Biden to step down. Despite several very good speeches and more interviews, Biden seemed to be on a long slide to oblivion.
Yet something is happening. Trump essentially did nothing but lie all night during the debate, and a big part of the noise about Biden stepping down seemed to have come primarily from those who were beginning to realize that Trump showed his true colors that night (and it wasn't just orange but turd brown). People began to understand what was going on with Plan 2025, and began asking hard questions. Moreover, people had a chance to reflect and think, despite the cacophony of pundits calling for Biden to step down.
People have begun asking why, and that's the absolute worse thing that can happen when you're trying to run a con.
People have begun paying attention. A ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, a ceasefire brokered by Biden, might very well become a reality soon (people have been doing more than asking WHY there, and Netenyahu is getting nervous).
What's more, Dark Brandon might very well have just replaced Uncle Joe, and I think people are responding.
Here's the thing - President Biden is, in many people's eyes, something of a milquetost. He does his job quietly because it needs to be done, but most people, if asked, would be hard-pressed to tell you what he has done, despite being one of the most productive Liberal presidents in my lifetime.
Dark Brandon, on the other hand, is an underdog, with Trump the bully. Trump has made no secret of his desire to become a dictator, and most Americans, regardless of political affiliation, really don't like dictators. They don't like people who lie and cheat and steal. The don't like people who don't play fair.
People don't want Joe Biden ... they want, they NEED Dark Brandon. They want to get behind someone who will defeat the big bad, against seemingly insurmountable odds, they want Luke Skywalker, not Darth Vader. The biggest mistake that George Lucas ever made was in his decision to try to turn Annakin Skywalker into a misunderstood anti-hero. Nope, he was a villain, and no amount of redemption arc would change that. Trump is a villain, almost the archetypal villain, and like any good villain, he always manages to skate off with no repercussions ... until in the end, he gets his comeuppance at the hand of the hero, not by killing him, but by stripping him of his power to do evil.
Biden needs to step aside. Dark Brandon needs to replace him.
If Biden wins
will the Supreme Court just say "Never mind!"
I wonder if the SC has a fallback position if all of their efforts fail to prevent Biden from being re-elected with both the House and Senate in Democratic hands. Coup attempts usually fail because of overreach, something that the GOP has been guilty of more often than not.
Profile Information
Name: Kurt CagleGender: Male
Hometown: Cascadia
Member since: Sat Dec 3, 2016, 02:02 AM
Number of posts: 1,832