MAGA-flation. Republican -flation. Trump is a lame duck, but MAGA will survive. Messaging that ties everything that Trump fucksup to him alone gives Republicans in 2 or 4 years room to duck the consequences (I didn’t do it, Trump did it, I don’t agree with everything he did, blah blah blah). We need to make sure to tie everything Trump does to the whole Republican party now, so they all pay the price for letting Trump take over their party and fuck the economy and everything else.

The fight for the midterms starts today. Remember that.

Great, now I’m at the point of the post election grief cycle where I’m getting a bunch of books to try to figure out what happened. I remember this phase from 2016. Thanks for the recommendation for my list!

Interesting issue. Does their belief in their right to power control? There’s that crazy lady in Canada who calls herself the queen of Canada and issues edicts and whatever every now and then (somehow connected to qanon, I don’t remember the details). Could a US official accept a “title” bestowed by her, since she claims nobility and authority?

My recollection on the emoluments issue was SCOTUS punted in the same way they did with respect to Trump’s ability to run for office after the insurrection - Congress must declare the violation, and the remedy is presumably impeachment. So the practical effect is zero, since Congress would never take this up, let alone impeach and remove. I’d love if Dems did though, it would be fun seeing Republicans defend their justice receiving nighthood from some weird ass secret society thing.

Thanks for sharing this. It is a fantastic endorsement. It goes to the heart of everything wrong with the Trump Republican party in a way I haven’t seen the thousands of political commentators be able to do. It’s also just well written, a nice balance of reasoned journalism, humor, and outrage. This is probably the best thing I’ve read this election cycle.

Biden Admin: Israel, you must improve the humanitarian conditions in Gaza in 30 days, or else…

Israel: Designates the main aid organization, a UN organization no less, as a terrorist organization and bans their activities, violating international law in the process.

Biden Admin: …sigh…the US commitment to Israels security is ironclad…

Bezos has tons of federal government contracts. When Trump was president last time he went after Amazon and others he disliked to get their contracts cancelled. Bezos is concerned that if Trump wins, Trump could fuck with his contracts.

That’s the reason. It’s fucked up and more evidence of why news media shouldn’t be owned by fuckhead billionaires. Shameful day in WaPos history. Cowardice. Grovelling to placate Trump for the benefit of the paper 's owner.

Tin foil hat: I am somewhat concerned that our oligarch overlords seem to be hedging in a way that they think Trump might win.

Do pr people not know about the Barbara Streisand effect?! I was going to skip this decoder episode, except the title of the episode was “Intuit asked us to delete part of this episode”. That’s the only reason I listened, and then only just to the portion they wanted deleted. If it wasn’t for the pr genius at Intuit I wouldn’t have cared. Ffs guys.

Just a guess, but it’s probably a combination of two things. First, if we say a self driving car is going to hit an edge case it can’t resolve once in every, say, 100,000 miles, the number of Tesla’s and other self driving cars on the roads now means more miles driven more frequently which means those edge cases are going to occur more frequently. Second, people are becoming over reliant on self driving - they are (incorrectly ) trusting it more and paying less attention, meaning less chance of human intervention when those edge cases occur. So probably the self driving is overall better, but the number of accidents overall is increasing.

When you get past the gross stuff, you can see the Biden admin wants to use this as an opportunity to force Israel to a cease fire. Good luck with that though, Israeli defense minister already declared the war will go on indefinitely. To Israel, there is no day after short of ethnic cleansing. But hope and ignorance spring eternal for Biden:

Hamas is no longer capable of carrying out another October 7.

I will be speaking soon with Prime Minister Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders to congratulate them, to discuss the pathway for bringing the hostages home to their families, and for ending this war once and for all, which has caused so much devastation to innocent people.

There is now the opportunity for a “day after” in Gaza without Hamas in power, and for a political settlement that provides a better future for Israelis and Palestinians alike.  Yahya Sinwar was an insurmountable obstacle to achieving all of those goals. That obstacle no longer exists. But much work remains before us.

It’s even simpler than that. We’re four weeks to the election, everyone in the house of reps is busy campaigning for reelection. Nobody wants to go to DC and work, letting the campaign challengers run around your district unopposed.

And what would be the point if they did come back? Johnson couldn’t get his party to pass a continuing resolution to find the government Republican sweeteners attached (voter id law). How the fuck is he going to get his party on board for “government handouts” without the freedom caucus making some asinine demand that tanks the whole thing. Johnson certainly doesn’t want to remind voters of the shit show of distinction that is the Republican controlled House weeks before an election.

Pull all your vulnerable members off the campaign trail in the final weeks so that you can put on a fuck fuck circus generating daily headlines about how Republicans can’t govern? Fat fucking chance.

And if Biden calls a special session, Republicans are going to say it’s political to make them look bad, cause they can’t govern.

There is a significant difference between proxies and a direct missile attack launched by a nation-state. Just as there is a significant difference between the US arming a genocidal state, and the US actually dropping bombs directly on civilians. Not to say Iran and the US are not blameless for the actions of their proxies, but there are degrees here that are significant. You kneejerk “Iran bad, Israel good” view of the world is devoid of nuance. Maybe you should get yourself a twitch stream.

Israeli military spokesperson Daniel Hagari just held a televised address.

In it, he said the Israeli military is “fully prepared to defend and retaliate” to the Iranian attack, stressing that it would be in a “timely manner”.

Hmm…

The Washington Post is reporting, citing three anonymous Pentagon officials, that American troops in the Middle East were not targeted during the Iranian missile attack in Israel.

Iraqi group linked to Iran have previously fired rockets at military bases housing US soldiers in Iraq and Syria.

Another sign that Iran is trying to respond, as a deterrent, rather than with an intent to escalate. At least that’s what it seems like so far.

Iran’s IRGC say attack on Israel response to killing of Nasrallah

Iran’s Fars news agency is reporting that Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said the missile attack under way on Israel is in response to the killing of Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah last week as well as that of the Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh earlier this year.

“In response to the martyrdom of Ismail Haniyeh, Hassan Nasrallah and (IRGC Guards commander) Nilforoshan, we targeted the heart of the occupied territories,” the IRGC said in a statement.

So seems like Iran intends this to be a one and done response for everything Israel has done the last few months.

Depends on Israels response. When Iran did this in April in retaliation for Israel bombing an Iranean embassy, Iran was like “we have retaliated and are good now”, Israel responded but it was limited, and status quo was restored.

If Israel decides to escalate (which is their default play lately), or if Iranean missiles hit forcing them to retaliate, there could be all out war, including involving the US.

If you want a hint of what’s to come:

The far-right Israeli finance minister (Bezalel Smotrich) writes on social media: “Like Gaza, Hezbollah and the state of Lebanon, Iran will regret the moment.”

My guess is that scale and influence have a lot to do with

To break this down a little, first of all “my guess”. You are guessing because the government which is literally enacting a speech restriction hasn’t explained its rational for banning one potential source of disinformation vs actual sources of disinformation. So you are left in the position of guessing. To put a finer point on it, you are in the position of assuming the government is acting with good intentions and doing the labor of searching for a justification that fits with that assumption. Reminds me of the Iraq war when so many conversations I had with people had their default argument be “the government wouldn’t do this if they didn’t have a good reason”. I don’t like to be cynical, and I don’t want to be a “both sides, all politicians are corrupt” kind of guy, but I think it’s pretty clear in this case there is every reason to be cynical. This was just an unfortunate confluence of anti Chinese hate and fear, anti young people hate, and big tech donations that resulted in the government banning a platform used by millions of Americans to disseminate speech. But because Dems helped do it, so many people feel the need to reflexively defend it, even forcing them to “guess” and make up rationales.

As far as influence and reach, obviously that’s not in the bill. Influence is straight out, RT is highly influential in right wing spaces. In terms of numbers of users, that just goes to the profit potential that our good ol American firms are missing out on.

If the US was concerned with propaganda or whatever, they could just regulate the content available on all platforms. They could require all platforms to have transparency around algorithms for recommending content. They could require oversight of how all social media companies operate, much like they do with financial firms or are trying to do with big AI platforms.

But they didn’t. Because they are not attacking a specific problem, they are attacking a specific company.

Also RT has been removed from most broadcasters and App Stores in the US.

Broadcasters voluntarily dropped it after 2016, I think it’s still available on some including dish. As far as app stores, that’s just false, I just checked the Play store and it’s right there ready to download and fill my head with propaganda.

The US owns and regulates the frequencies TV and radio are broadcast on. The Internet is not the same. If the threat of foreign propaganda is the purpose, why can I download the official RT (Russia Today, government run propaganda outlet) app in the Play Store? If the US is worried about a foreign government spreading propaganda, why are they targeting the popular social media app that could theoretically (but no evidence it’s been done yet) be used for propaganda, instead of the actual Russian propaganda app? Hell I can download the south china morning post right from the Play store, straight Chinese propaganda! There are also dozens of Chinese and other foreign adversary run social media platforms, and other apps that could “micro target political messaging campaigns” available. So why did the US Congress single out one single app for punishment?

Money. The problem isn’t propaganda. The problem is money. The problem is tik Tok is or is on the course to be more popular than our American social media platforms. The problem is American firms are being outcompeted in the marketplace, and the government is stepping in to protect the American data mining market. The problem is young people are trading their data for tik toks, instead of giving that data over to be sold to us advertising networks in exchange for YouTube shorts and Instagram stories. If the problem was propaganda, the US would go after propaganda. If the problem is just a Chinese company offers a better product than US companies, then there’s no reason to draft nuanced legislation that goes after all potential foreign influence vectors, you just ban the one app that is hurting the share price of your donors.

That’s generally true, and if I’m going to be stuck with an American government excusing Israels war crimes, it might as well be one that protects abortion, but there is a big stupid “but” to go with that. Trump hates bibi. Not because of any considered foreign policy thing, but because Trump is mad bibi called biden to congratulate him on winning the election. Trump never has forgiven bibi for this, and has been criticizing bibi on the trail because of it. Our politics are fucked, I guess is what I’m trying to say.

It is such a handmaid’s tale view of the world, that all of society should be ordered around producing children. Dogs are bad because they become substitute children and distract us from having human children. IVF is bad because it gives people the option to delay having children. Contraception is bad, because duh no children. Every policy or institution or thing of any kind in society is judged solely on its impact of generating more children as often as possible.

I just can’t get my head around what is motivating this world view. I usually try to make it a point of understanding where the other side is coming from, but Waltz is right, these people are just weird.

That’s an interesting point. I wonder if it works better for Harris, having been in DC so long, does she claim that as her residence?