Additional information left out of headline. Wisconsin Congressman Derrick Van Orden is a democrat republican and Wisconsin Congressman Mark Pocan is a republican democrat. I would very much like to see these guys debate. It would be a lot of fun.
The exchange of tweets was amusing too.
At 1:35 a.m. Wednesday, Van Orden told Pocan on X “seek mental health counseling” after Pocan criticized the sweeping policy bill the president signed into law. Six hours later, Pocan shot back online, “Only an idiot both votes to cut Medicaid and can’t spell it.”
That reminds me, I need to invest in guillotine futures.
Vibes based voting is stupid
This is a fact, but it’s the reality we’re dealing with. This is the very thing that Colbert was parodying all those years ago on the Colbert Report saying things like; I vote with my gut not my brain, and he doesn’t like facts because they aren’t ‘truthy’ enough, and reality has a liberal bias. This is essentially how these people think.
I have a lot of trouble talking to them too, because if you point out the failings of the republican party you get a “Well, the dems are worse.” reflex. If you point out the pros of the democrats, you get a reflexive “Yeah, but they’re all criminals.” I sincerely believe that there is a conversational path you can walk to open their minds a bit,
I think that the democrats need to be taking notes from the Sanders, AOC, and now Mamdani on how to win over these voters. They talk about policies and goals that support the poor and the working class but the democrats, for the most part, are not going that route. Many seem to think saying that, I’m not the republican is good enough and it clearly isn’t.
Good piece, thanks for posting it. This part really struck home.
One of the mistakes a lot of political people make is that voters have rational and reasoned choices about which party they support; if you vote for a Far Right party you must love Far Right policies.
That’s not true.
Most decisions are vibe-based. We have enough data to show that the lowest of low information voters who are behind Reform have zero idea of the party’s policies. In fact, many of Reform’s aims are in direct opposition to what those voters want.
While they can be considered Far Right on some fronts — massively racist, “hanging’s too good for ‘em” — in other areas they have what would be classed as socialist beliefs. Tax the wealthy till the pips squeak. Invest in public services.
They’re better characterised as Smash the System voters. It’s not working for us how it used to - I’ll vote for anyone who looks like they’re going to upend the status quo.
That bitterness at losing their place in society has made them easy prey to those who promise the clock can be turned back to the days when they were on top. Right now those disillusioned voters feel they’re in an existential fight and they’ll take the support of anyone who says they will break the new way of operating. Trump. Farage. Le Pen and Bardella. Weidel.
I live in rural America. Trump and the right have a lot of vocal support in my area. But when I talk to people, leaving out names of politicians and parties, and just talk to them about specific policies, a huge fraction support policies that, if supported by a republican politician, would get that politician primaried so fast their heads would spin.
This article rings true to me in that all most rural voters know is that the system doesn’t work for them anymore, so they will support anyone who claims to want to break the current system and restore it to what used to work for their grandparents.
It’ll never happen. As soon as Trump’s lawyers explain the discovery process to him again, he’ll stop talking about suing and do something bizarre and frightening to distract the media.
I keep wondering if he is planning on switching parties and running as a moderate republican in '28 and this is just laying the groundwork.
It’s not uncommon for this kind of symptoms to present after a body has been stripped of it’s soul, such as when it has been sold to the devil.
Don’t we all?
I’m a couple days late, but yeah, it was pretty clearly edited based on the metadata.
Working with two independent video forensics experts, WIRED examined the 21-gigabyte files released by the DOJ. Using a metadata tool, reporters analyzed both Exchangeable Image File Format (EXIF) and Extensible Metadata Platform (XMP) data to identify signs of postprocessing.
The “raw” file shows clear signs of having been processed using an Adobe product, most likely Premiere, based on metadata that specifically references file extensions used by the video editing software. According to experts, Adobe software, including Premiere and Photoshop, leaves traces in exported files, often embedding metadata that logs which assets were used and what actions were taken during editing. In this case, the metadata indicates the file was saved at least four times over a 23-minute span on May 23, 2025, by a Windows user account called “MJCOLE~1.” The metadata does not show whether the footage was modified before each time it was saved.
The embedded data suggest the video is not a continuous, unaltered export from a surveillance system, but a composite assembled from at least two separate MP4 files. The metadata includes references to Premiere project files and two specific source clips—2025-05-22 21-12-48.mp4 and 2025-05-22 16-35-21.mp4. These entries appear under a metadata section labeled “Ingredients,” part of Adobe’s internal schema for tracking source material used in edited exports. The metadata does not make clear where in the video the two clips were spliced together.
Further investigation suggests that almost three minutes of the video could be missing though the authors concede that the missing minutes may have been overlap between the two files that were stitched together.
hack cough cough gag wheeze cough… ad infinitum
Please note this is page 56 of the list. You likely won’t finish a single page before you need to go sit out in a garden for a while.
No. They’ll keep them in prison and use them as slave labor to do the exact same agriculture jobs they used to do but without pay.
It’s not that hidden.
Such is why Epstein was smited by the hand of God when he turned his back on God’s light. No treason shall be tolerated in the eyes of the LORD.
And the LORD will also make sure the guards are asleep and the recordings are erased at just the right time so that none may witness the the LORD’S justice and have proof, because one must have faith and proof denies faith.
Judge clarifies: Yes, Trump was found to have raped E. Jean Carroll
“This was a rape claim, this was a rape case all along, and the jury rejected that — made other findings,” his lawyer, Joe Tacopina, said outside the courthouse.
A judge has now clarified that this is basically a legal distinction without a real-world difference. He says that what the jury found Trump did was in fact rape, as commonly understood.
…
“The finding that Ms. Carroll failed to prove that she was ‘raped’ within the meaning of the New York Penal Law does not mean that she failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape,’ ” Kaplan wrote.
He added: “Indeed, as the evidence at trial recounted below makes clear, the jury found that Mr. Trump in fact did exactly that.”
So, yeah, let’s get those lawsuits filed so we can start the discovery process. That should be fun.
Free food for brown children from this administration? I think not.
Not when Congress and SCOTUS are also full of dipshits. It’s like a perfect shit storm that may drown all of us.
But maybe angry enough to not vote at all… so, win? Maybe…?
Nope. There’s no chance of change while such States are so heavily gerrymandered. Plus, the bulk of the voters in these states will vote red 'til they’re dead because voting for a dem would somehow be worse.
It’s terrifying that the human psyche is so fragile and malleable that an LLM can twist a person around to much that they become a danger to themselves and others. And I have to wonder how many of those billionaires talk to their own AI creations and have become just as delusional as the people in this article, but with the money and power to act on those delusions.
This also puts MechaHitler in a new light. How many right wingers on X are being deluded into thinking that they are the chosen one who who can save the world by just killing a few Jews, or dems, or POCs or whatever?