trumpty plumpty

[twocoach]

Yesterday, I gave a +1 to Donald for his PR stunt. Musk gets a +1 too. "Illegal" or not.

Musk with his daily million dollar giveaway and Donny making fries and working the drive thru got me thinking. They should tell people it you vote for Donny it's free fries at McDonald's (at their expense) during his term, and once a month Donny or Musk will work at a McDonalds and give away a million dollars to a customer.
Maybe pay to rename all McDonald's to just - Donald's? Or MusKDonald's?

FYI, the McDonald's that Trump "worked" at is being reported as being closed for the appearance. There were no actual customers; it was just a photo op. The good news is that McDonald's does hire felons, it's one of the few places he could get an actual job with his criminal history.

[Sparko]

Gutter having no compass is disappointing. "Either of them". Yeah. A demented pants shitting felon who will destroy the country versus economic security. Such a tough choice. And someone arrest Musk.

[KUTradition]

Yesterday, I gave a +1 to Donald for his PR stunt. Musk gets a +1 too. "Illegal" or not.

Musk with his daily million dollar giveaway and Donny making fries and working the drive thru got me thinking. They should tell people it you vote for Donny it's free fries at McDonald's (at their expense) during his term, and once a month Donny or Musk will work at a McDonalds and give away a million dollars to a customer.
Maybe pay to rename all McDonald's to just - Donald's? Or MusKDonald's?

FYI, the McDonald's that Trump "worked" at is being reported as being closed for the appearance. There were no actual customers; it was just a photo op. The good news is that McDonald's does hire felons, it's one of the few places he could get an actual job with his criminal history.

every “customer” was pre-screened by the campaign

it should be a slap in the face to the real working class

[jfish26]

Did the franchise owner make sure the employees got paid for their lost hours?

[RainbowsandUnicorns]

Gutter having no compass is disappointing. "Either of them". Yeah. A demented pants shitting felon who will destroy the country versus economic security. Such a tough choice. And someone arrest Musk.

I have a compass. It happens to point in multiple directions.
Yes, "either of them". I feel they are both poor candidates. I'm not saying it's a contest. Each one has pros and cons to/for me. The question isn't about me, the question is who the majority of the rest of the country (and/or the "Electoral College") prefers to be their President.
Let me let you in on a little secret. Kamala Harris in NO WAY equates to "economic security".
You and I are in complete agreement about Musk.

[zsn]

The question isn't about me, the question is who the majority of the rest of the country (and/or the "Electoral College") prefers to be their President.

Have you seen Shirley’s signature?

[jfish26]

Gutter having no compass is disappointing. "Either of them". Yeah. A demented pants shitting felon who will destroy the country versus economic security. Such a tough choice. And someone arrest Musk.

I have a compass. It happens to point in multiple directions.
Yes, "either of them". I feel they are both poor candidates. I'm not saying it's a contest. Each one has pros and cons to/for me. The question isn't about me, the question is who the majority of the rest of the country (and/or the "Electoral College") prefers to be their President.
Let me let you in on a little secret. Kamala Harris in NO WAY equates to "economic security".
You and I are in complete agreement about Musk.

Speaking only for myself, it feels like you sometimes put effort into finding fault with the Democratic side.

Is there any assurance of economic security under either? No. Of course not.

But where one side's plan is to deport 4% of the US workforce and replace (in whole or in meaningful part) income taxes with tariffs...the other side's plan would have to be really fucking bad to be worse.

I find no evidence of that in Harris's plans (or Biden's actions).

[Overlander]

Gutter will always present a contrarian front, often with suggestions that just doesn’t see a difference.

Which he is 100% entitled to do so.

[RainbowsandUnicorns]

The question isn't about me, the question is who the majority of the rest of the country (and/or the "Electoral College") prefers to be their President.

Have you seen Shirley’s signature?

Yes. It's outstanding.

[RainbowsandUnicorns]

Gutter having no compass is disappointing. "Either of them". Yeah. A demented pants shitting felon who will destroy the country versus economic security. Such a tough choice. And someone arrest Musk.

I have a compass. It happens to point in multiple directions.
Yes, "either of them". I feel they are both poor candidates. I'm not saying it's a contest. Each one has pros and cons to/for me. The question isn't about me, the question is who the majority of the rest of the country (and/or the "Electoral College") prefers to be their President.
Let me let you in on a little secret. Kamala Harris in NO WAY equates to "economic security".
You and I are in complete agreement about Musk.

Speaking only for myself, it feels like you sometimes put effort into finding fault with the Democratic side.

Is there any assurance of economic security under either? No. Of course not.

But where one side's plan is to deport 4% of the US workforce and replace (in whole or in meaningful part) income taxes with tariffs...the other side's plan would have to be really fucking bad to be worse.

I find no evidence of that in Harris's plans (or Biden's actions).

It takes very little effort for me to find fault/s with the Democratic side. Yes, it's even easier for me to find fault/s with the Republican side.
I am 100% against Trump "tariffs" (regardless if congress were to approve them or not) and I am 100% against some of Kamala's economic policies and proposals. Now that being said, I am in favor of some of her's too.
So the bottom line for me is.... The choices come down a giant douche or a turd sandwich. I don't want either. If I feel the need to vote, I will vote for who I feel is less worse - in multiple aspects. At this moment, that would be the turd sandwich.

[Overlander]

Vote for the candidate who isn’t telling you if you elect him you won’t ever have to vote again?

[RainbowsandUnicorns]

Gutter will always present a contrarian front, often with suggestions that just doesn’t see a difference.

Which he is 100% entitled to do so.

Always is a very strong word - as is never.
Yes, 100% guilty as charged in often (too often) presenting a contrarian front.
It's more of a fault than mine than a strength but it comes from MANY years of practice. Both professional (work/employment wise) and non-professional.

Back to Trump....

What is he going to say in Greenville today? I'm putting even money odds that he comments on his "working" at McDonalds and something about the size of a man in a locker room.
Wait, he's already done that the past few days.
Maybe something bad about the white dudes for Harris , or how great is was being with his "black guys" Le'Veon Bell, Antonio Brown, and Mike Wallace?
Stay tuned.....

[RainbowsandUnicorns]

Vote for the candidate who isn’t telling you if you elect him you won’t ever have to vote again?

I know, I know, Kamala sucks less. I get it. I swear.

[jfish26]

October 21, 2024

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.c ... er-21-2024

On Saturday, September 7, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump predicted that his plan to deport 15 to 20 million people currently living in the United States would be “bloody.” He also promised to prosecute his political opponents, including, he wrote, lawyers, political operatives, donors, illegal voters, and election officials. Retired chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley told journalist Bob Woodward that Trump is “a fascist to the core…the most dangerous person to this country.”

On October 14, Trump told Fox News Channel host Maria Bartiromo that he thought enemies within the United States were more dangerous than foreign adversaries and that he thought the military should stop those “radical left lunatics” on Election Day. Since then, he has been talking a lot about “the enemy from within,” specifically naming Representative Adam Schiff and former House speaker Nancy Pelosi, both Democrats from California, as “bad people.” Schiff was the chair of the House Intelligence Committee that broke the 2019 story of Trump’s attempt to extort Volodymyr Zelensky that led to Trump’s first impeachment.

Trump’s references to the “enemy from within” have become so frequent that former White House press secretary turned political analyst Jen Psaki has called them his closing argument for the 2024 election, and she warned that his construction of those who oppose him as “enemies” might sweep in virtually anyone he feels is a threat.

In a searing article today, political scientist Rachel Bitecofer of The Cycle explored exactly what that means in a piece titled “What (Really) Happens If Trump Wins?” Bitecofer outlined Adolf Hitler’s January 30, 1933, oath of office, in which he promised Germans he would uphold the constitution, and the three months he took to dismantle that constitution.

By March, she notes, the concentration camp Dachau was open. Its first prisoners were not Jews, but rather Hitler’s prominent political opponents. By April, Jews had been purged from the civil service, and opposition political parties were illegal. By May, labor unions were banned and students were burning banned books. Within the year, public criticism of Hitler and the Nazis was illegal, and denouncing violators paid well for those who did it.

Bitecofer writes that Trump has promised mass deportations “that he cannot deliver unless he violates both the Constitution and federal law.” To enable that policy, Trump will need to dismantle the merit-based civil service and put into office those loyal to him rather than the Constitution. And then he will purge his political opponents, for once those who would stand against him are purged, Trump can act as he wishes against immigrants, for example, and others.

Ninety years ago, as American reporter Dorothy Thompson ate breakfast at her hotel in Berlin on August 25, 1934, a young man from Hitler’s secret police, the Gestapo, “politely handed me a letter and requested a signed receipt.” She thought nothing of it, she said, “But what a surprise was in store for me!” The letter informed her that, “in light of your numerous anti-German publications,” she was being expelled from Germany.

She was the first American journalist expelled from Nazi Germany, and that expulsion was no small thing. Thompson had moved to London in 1920 to become a foreign correspondent and began to spend time in Berlin. In 1924 she moved to the city to head the Central European Bureau for the New York Evening Post and the Philadelphia Public Ledger. From there, she reported on the rise of Adolf Hitler. She left her Berlin post in 1928 to marry novelist Sinclair Lewis, and the two settled in Vermont.

When the couple traveled to Sweden in 1930 for Lewis to accept the Nobel Prize in Literature, Thompson visited Germany, where she saw the growing strength of the fascists and the apparent inability of the Nazi’s opponents to come together to stand against them. She continued to visit the country in the following years, reporting on the rise of fascism there, and elsewhere.

In 1931, Thompson interviewed Hitler and declared that, rather than “the future dictator of Germany” she had expected to meet, he was a man of “startling insignificance.” She asked him if he would “abolish the constitution of the German Republic.” He answered: “I will get into power legally” and, once in power, abolish the parliament and the constitution and “found an authority-state, from the lowest cell to the highest instance; everywhere there will be responsibility and authority above, discipline and obedience below.” She did not believe he could succeed: “Imagine a would-be dictator setting out to persuade a sovereign people to vote away their rights,” she wrote in apparent astonishment.

Thompson was back in Berlin in summer 1934 as a representative of the Saturday Evening Post when she received the news that she had 24 hours to leave the country. The other foreign correspondents in Berlin saw her off at the railway station with “great sheaves of American Beauty roses.”

Safely in Paris, Thompson mused that in her first years in Germany she had gotten to know many of the officials of the German republic, and that when she had left to marry Lewis, they offered “many expressions of friendship and gratitude.” But times had changed. “I thought of them sadly as my train pulled out,” she said, “carrying me away from Berlin. Some of those officials still are in the service of the German Government, some of them are émigrés and some of them are dead.”

Thompson came home to a nation where many of the same dark impulses were simmering, her fame after her expulsion from Germany following her. She lectured against fascism across the country in 1935, then began a radio program that reached tens of millions of listeners. Hired in 1936 to write a regular column three days a week for the New York Herald Tribune, she became a leading voice in print, too, warning that what was happening in Germany could also happen in America.

In an echo of Lewis’s bestselling 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here, she wrote in a 1937 column: “No people ever recognize their dictator in advance…. He always represents himself as the instrument for expressing the Incorporated National Will. When Americans think of dictators they always think of some foreign model. If anyone turned up here in a fur hat, boots and a grim look he would be recognized and shunned…. But when our dictator turns up, you can depend on it that he will be one of the boys, and he will stand for everything traditionally American.”

In less than two years, the circulation of her column had grown to reach between seven and eight million people. In 1939 a reporter wrote: “She is read, believed and quoted by millions of women who used to get their political opinions from their husbands, who got them from [political commentator] Walter Lippmann.” The reporter likened Thompson to First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, saying they were the two “most influential women in the U.S.”

When 22,000 American Nazis held a rally at New York City’s Madison Square Garden in honor of President George Washington’s birthday on February 20, 1939, Thompson sat in the front row of the press box, where she laughed loudly during the speeches and yelled “Bunk!” at the stage, illustrating that she would not be muzzled by Nazis. After being escorted out, she returned to her seat, where stormtroopers surrounded her. She later told a reporter: “I was amazed to see a duplicate of what I saw seven years ago in Germany. Tonight I listened to words taken out of the mouth of Adolf Hitler.”

Two years later, In 1941, Thompson returned to the issue she had raised when she mused about those government officials who had gone from thanking her to expelling her. In a piece for Harper’s Magazine titled “Who Goes Nazi?” she wrote: “It is an interesting and somewhat macabre parlor game to play at a large gathering of one’s acquaintances: to speculate who in a showdown would go Nazi,” she wrote. “By now, I think I know. I have gone through the experience many times—in Germany, in Austria, and in France. I have come to know the types: the born Nazis, the Nazis whom democracy itself has created, the certain-to-be fellow-travelers. And I also know those who never, under any conceivable circumstances, would become Nazis.”

Examining a number of types of Americans, she wrote that the line between democracy and fascism was not wealth, or education, or race, or age, or nationality. “Kind, good, happy, gentlemanly, secure people never go Nazi,” she wrote. They were secure enough to be good natured and open to new ideas, and they believed so completely in the promise of American democracy that they would defend it with their lives, even if they seemed too easygoing to join a struggle. “But the frustrated and humiliated intellectual, the rich and scared speculator, the spoiled son, the labor tyrant, the fellow who has achieved success by smelling out the wind of success—they would all go Nazi in a crisis,” she wrote. “Those who haven’t anything in them to tell them what they like and what they don’t—whether it is breeding, or happiness, or wisdom, or a code, however old-fashioned or however modern, go Nazi.”

In Paris following her expulsion from Berlin, Thompson told a reporter for the Associated Press that the reason she had been attacked was the same reason that Hitler’s power was growing. “Chancellor Hitler is no longer a man, he is a religion,” she said.

Suggesting her expulsion was because of her old article disparaging Hitler, in her own article about her expulsion she noted: “My offense was to think that Hitler is just an ordinary man, after all. That is a crime against the reigning cult in Germany, which says Mr. Hitler is a Messiah sent by God to save the German people…. To question this mystic mission is so heinous that, if you are a German, you can be sent to jail. I, fortunately, am an American, so I merely was sent to Paris. Worse things can happen….”

[Overlander]

“But the frustrated and humiliated intellectual”

Hey, I know that guy!

[twocoach]

Here's that Rachel Bitecofer piece titled “What (Really) Happens If Trump Wins?” that was referenced.

https://thecycle.substack.com/p/what-re ... trump-wins

Scary how much it dovetails into Trump's messages about immigrants and his opposition. If you don't think this is a line that Donald Trump is willing to cross then I ask you, when has Donald Trump ever shown that he even HAS a line he won't cross? This should not be dismissed as TDS. Listen to Trump's own words on the topic. He has said it right out loud for all to see and hear.

[jfish26]

Here's that Rachel Bitecofer piece titled “What (Really) Happens If Trump Wins?” that was referenced.

https://thecycle.substack.com/p/what-re ... trump-wins

Scary how much it dovetails into Trump's messages about immigrants and his opposition. If you don't think this is a line that Donald Trump is willing to cross then I ask you, when has Donald Trump ever shown that he even HAS a line he won't cross? This should not be dismissed as TDS. Listen to Trump's own words on the topic. He has said it right out loud for all to see and hear.

It would be Trump’s mandate to carry out his promises.

What happens if it turns out he’s too lazy or chickenshit or incompetent to do it?

[twocoach]

Here's that Rachel Bitecofer piece titled “What (Really) Happens If Trump Wins?” that was referenced.

https://thecycle.substack.com/p/what-re ... trump-wins

Scary how much it dovetails into Trump's messages about immigrants and his opposition. If you don't think this is a line that Donald Trump is willing to cross then I ask you, when has Donald Trump ever shown that he even HAS a line he won't cross? This should not be dismissed as TDS. Listen to Trump's own words on the topic. He has said it right out loud for all to see and hear.

It would be Trump’s mandate to carry out his promises.

What happens if it turns out he’s too lazy or chickenshit or incompetent to do it?

Frankly, our only hope is that there are a few GOP members of Congress who won't approve the funds necessary to accomplish everything he is trying to do. The cost of his desire to deport tens of millions of people would be staggering, let alone the economic and human toll of seeing the military rolling through neighborhoods scooping up all Hispanics to make them prove they are allowed to be here.

[jfish26]

Here's that Rachel Bitecofer piece titled “What (Really) Happens If Trump Wins?” that was referenced.

https://thecycle.substack.com/p/what-re ... trump-wins

Scary how much it dovetails into Trump's messages about immigrants and his opposition. If you don't think this is a line that Donald Trump is willing to cross then I ask you, when has Donald Trump ever shown that he even HAS a line he won't cross? This should not be dismissed as TDS. Listen to Trump's own words on the topic. He has said it right out loud for all to see and hear.

It would be Trump’s mandate to carry out his promises.

What happens if it turns out he’s too lazy or chickenshit or incompetent to do it?

Frankly, our only hope is that there are a few GOP members of Congress who won't approve the funds necessary to accomplish everything he is trying to do. The cost of his desire to deport tens of millions of people would be staggering, let alone the economic and human toll of seeing the military rolling through neighborhoods scooping up all Hispanics to make them prove they are allowed to be here.

What's he need Congress for?

[twocoach]

It would be Trump’s mandate to carry out his promises.

What happens if it turns out he’s too lazy or chickenshit or incompetent to do it?

Frankly, our only hope is that there are a few GOP members of Congress who won't approve the funds necessary to accomplish everything he is trying to do. The cost of his desire to deport tens of millions of people would be staggering, let alone the economic and human toll of seeing the military rolling through neighborhoods scooping up all Hispanics to make them prove they are allowed to be here.

What's he need Congress for?

Funding.