Elections; 2024
POSTED BY: THG
UPDATED: Friday, November 21, 2025 00:12
VIEWED: 206031
PAGE 36 of 514
On the South Lawn, Trump now faced reporters and cameras. Over the drone of the helicopter rotors, one reporter asked Trump if he was bothered that “more and more people” were calling him racist.
“I am the least racist person there is anywhere in the world,” Trump replied, hands up, palms facing out for emphasis.
His hands came down. He singled out a vocal critic, the Reverend Al Sharpton. “Now, he’s a racist,” Trump said. “What I’ve done for African Americans, no president, I would say, has done ... And the African American community is so thankful.”
It was an absurd statement. But in a twisted way, Trump was right. As his administrations first term comes to an end, Black Americans—indeed, all Americans— should in one respect be thankful to him. He has held up a mirror to American society, and it has reflected back a grotesque image that many people had until now refused to see: an image not just of the racism still coursing through the country, but also of the reflex to deny that reality. Though it was hardly his intention, no president has caused more Americans to stop denying the existence of racism than Donald Trump.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
WE ARE AT WAR WITH THE NRA and GOP
US Death count in War
Vietnam War 1955-75
58,281
Korean War 1950-53
36,516
Iraq War 2003-11
4,614
Afghanistan War 2001-21
2,402
US gun deaths 2019-21
133,759
51 years of war 101,813 deaths
3 years of US gun deaths 133,759
https://twitter.com/EricG1247/status/1655724832439533568
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Trump was raising doubt that Russia attacked the 2016 election. His interview with John Dickerson was typical of the time.
President Trump: "I'll go along with Russia, could have been China, could've been a lot of different groups."
But it was Russia and the NSA knew it. Reality Winner had seen proof in a top secret report on an in-house newsfeed.
Reality Winner: "I just kept thinking, 'My God, somebody needs to step forward and put this right. Somebody.' "
The secret report said, in 2016, the Russian military "executed cyber espionage" against "122… local government organizations" "targeting officials involved in the management of voter registration systems." It was top secret, in part, because it revealed what the U.S. knew about Russian tactics. Winner told us she was exposing a White House cover-up.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/reality-winner-60-minutes-2022-07-24/
The secret that Trump didn’t want you to know:
https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/3766950/NSA-Report-on-Russia-Sp
earphishing.pdf
Top-Secret NSA Report Details Russian Hacking Effort Days Before 2016 Election
https://web.archive.org/web/20230301062333/https://theintercept.com/20
17/06/05/top-secret-nsa-report-details-russian-hacking-effort-days-before-2016-election/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Note to GOP: More mental health funding won't stop mass shootings
Now that the “thoughts and prayers” mantra has begun to curdle on the lips of even the most stiff-necked opponents of simple, sensible gun safety measures, many have retreated to convenient fallback positions. One of the handiest involves some evocation of “mental health.”
Spend a little money on therapists, in other words, and we’ll avoid the next Uvalde, the next Santa Fe, the next Allen. We’ll likely identify the next mass murderer; we’ll get him help before he heads for the gun store on his 18th birthday, credit card at the ready. Hire more school counselors, and they’ll be able to distinguish between the nascent shooter wearing black and the sullen kid sitting in the back of the class whose other choice of school attire was in the washing machine that day.
Maybe so, although most studies show it’s not that easy.
Predictably, Gov. Greg Abbott is among the more vociferous “mental health” cheerleaders, even as he worked overtime during the just-concluded legislative session to thwart red-flag laws and other common-sense gun-safety measures that have made a difference in other states.
Here’s Abbott, in an interview with Fox News Sunday less than 24 hours after a gunman wielding an assault rifle slaughtered eight people at an Allen outlet mall: “And what Texas is doing in a big-time way, we are working to address that anger and violence by going to its root cause, which is addressing the mental health problems behind it."
“People want a quick solution,” the governor added, “The long-term solution here is to address the mental health issue.”
The short-term, one-word response to such prattle is not printable in a family newspaper. What politicians like Abbott are doing “in a big-time way” is avoiding a life-and-death issue that’s hitting close to home for more and more people.
Of course, we need to spend money on mental health. The governor’s right about that. There’s not a person in this state who wouldn’t benefit from wise counseling and empathic therapy. More than 3 million Texans are living with mental illness, while more than 750,000 have had serious thoughts of suicide, according to data compiled by the National Alliance on Mental Illness Texas, or NAMI.
Lawmakers this session did budget substantial increases in funding for mental health including $2.3 billion for state hospital construction and inpatient care, which we hope will shorten the time people found incompetent to stand trial languish in jails without adequate mental health care. Another initiative, the Texas Child Health Access Through Telemedicine, connects children in school to therapists. It got a boost of nearly $100 million over two years. We applaud these investments.
Unfortunately, even with these big budget numbers, those who need sustained mental health assistance will still struggle to get it in this state. Texas in 2022 ranked near the bottom of the 50 states in access to mental health services, according to Mental Health America, a nonprofit advocacy group. The organization’s annual “State of Mental Health in America” gave Texas an overall ranking of 46 in 2023. We ranked 50th on “access to care,” a category that includes, as the Chronicle reported recently, access to insurance and treatment, among other mental health criteria.
More than one in five adults with mental illness are uninsured in Texas, making it the worst state in the nation for mental health care, according to a new Forbes Advisor study. It’s no coincidence that Texas is one of 10 states that have refused to expand Medicaid through the Affordable Care Act, a simple act that would give nearly 1.5 million Texans access to mental health services, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation report.
“Medicaid is the single-largest funder of mental health services in the country, but Texas loses out by refusing Medicaid to most adults,” writes Anne Dunkelberg, senior fellow with the nonprofit public-interest group Every Texan. “Often mislabeled, Medicaid expansion isn’t
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Guns don't kill people. Democrats kill people.
--------------------------------------------------
Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:You know why a large portion of Americans don't do well in America? They lack seriousness and long-term goals. They spend far too much of their limited energy on trivia. The results along the way for such people aren't particularly good for obvious reasons but nothing is obvious to them because they are living and breathing versions of the cartoon character Homer Simpson. Homer was designed to showcase the behavioral flaws in a majority of Americans but most Americans don't get that because they live with Homer's mental flaws (alcoholism, gluttony, sloth, incompetence at work, etc ) and many other less savory flaws that cannot be included in a show for kids.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Guns don't kill people. Democrats kill people.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Team Trump Scrambles to Unmask the Feds Investigating Him
The former president wants to “immediately” purge the Justice Department’s ranks of the officials and agents who’ve led the criminal probes into his actions
In recent months, the former president has asked close advisers, including at least one of his personal attorneys, if “we know” all the names of senior FBI agents and Justice Department personnel who have worked on the federal probes into him. That’s according to two sources with direct knowledge of the matter and another person briefed on it.
Trump has then privately discussed that should he return to the White House, it is imperative his new Department of Justice “quickly” and “immediately” purge the FBI and DOJ’s ranks of these officials and agents who’ve led the Trump-related criminal investigations, the sources recount. The ex-president has of course dubbed all such probes as illegitimate “witch hunts,” and is now campaigning for the White House on a platform of “retribution” and cleaning house.
Separately, the twice-impeached former president has been saying for many months that on “day one” of his potential second term, he wants FBI director Christopher Wray “out” of the bureau, according to another source familiar with the matter and two people close to Trump. It’s an ironic turn, given that Trump appointed Wray in 2017.
But in the years since, Trump came to deeply distrust Wray. By the end of 2020, Trump was venting to senior administration officials that he would make it a top priority to replace Wray “next year,” blasting the director for not wholesale purging the FBI of non-Trump-loyalists. Trump lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden, and thus didn’t get his chance to fire Wray in 2021.
During some of the conversations this year, including at Trump’s Florida club Mar-a-Lago, some of Trump’s close political allies told him that they are working on figuring out the identities of the FBI and DOJ staff and forming lists, two of the sources relay to Rolling Stone.
However, others have complained that the feds aren’t making it easy for them.
In December 2022, the conservative nonprofit Judicial Watch — run by prominent Trump ally Tom Fitton — filed a Freedom of Information Act request demanding information about “all employees hired by or detailed to the office of Special Counsel Jack Smith.” In April, the Justice Department denied the request on the ground that it was an “unwarranted invasion of personal privacy” and that it would “interfere with enforcement proceedings.”
“One can only conclude, after seeing the uproar over the anti-Trump, partisan Mueller operation, that the Garland Justice Department has something to hide about Jack Smith and his prosecutors again targeting Trump and other Republicans with unprecedented investigations,” Fitton said at the time.
On Friday, Fitton told Rolling Stone that the DOJ is still “stonewalling” him and his group on the identities: “I don’t understand why it is that the names of prosecutors involved in a criminal investigation are secret. The Durham report shows it’s important we know who’s working there. We don’t want Social Security numbers or personal phone numbers, but certainly senior leaders and others who are pursuing this need to be disclosed.
“We were able to get hiring material for the Mueller investigations, interviews applications and stuff like that,” he added.
Fitton said his group is still seeking the information administratively, but that “??this is the type of lawsuit we typically would pursue.”
Other developments have made it harder for MAGA allies to create a comprehensive list of whom to potentially fire. Prior to Smith’s appointment, full names — in official DOJ email addresses — would appear in emails sent by Justice Department lawyers working on the Trump-related probes, to attorneys for subjects and likely targets of the investigations. But in the time since Special Counsel Smith started overseeing the probes last year, such emails began at times only showing initials for multiple DOJ addresse
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:You know why a large portion of Americans don't do well in America? They lack seriousness and long-term goals. They spend far too much of their limited energy on trivia. The results along the way for such people aren't particularly good for obvious reasons but nothing is obvious to them because they are living and breathing versions of the cartoon character Homer Simpson. Homer was designed to showcase the behavioral flaws in a majority of Americans but most Americans don't get that because they live with Homer's mental flaws (alcoholism, gluttony, sloth, incompetence at work, etc ) and many other less savory flaws that cannot be included in a show for kids.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Guns don't kill people. Democrats kill people.
Yeah. Already heard it.
Guns don't kill people. Democrats kill people.
--------------------------------------------------
Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Trumps world is crashing down on him and it brings me great joy.
T 
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
lol
No it isn't.
Brace yourself for Trump's 2nd Presidency if you know what's good for your health, Ted.
I'm afraid you're going to go on a shooting spree when it happens otherwise.
--------------------------------------------------
Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME