Elections; 2024
POSTED BY: THG
UPDATED: Friday, November 21, 2025 00:12
VIEWED: 206031
PAGE 501 of 514
Quote:You are a legless and armless torso, screaming from the hospital bed: "I'm in pain!" Nurse Trump will inject morphine to ease your suffering.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
I'm down with it.
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"My only fear of death is coming back to this bitch reincarnated." ~Tupac Shakur
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Democrats Can’t Hide From the Culture War
This era calls for a new strategy.
By David Faris | Dec 23, 2024
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/12/trump-president-2024-democ
rats-yglesias-fetterman-immigration-trans-rights-culture-war.html
So how to fight fire with fire?
Republicans have an extraordinarily efficient and effective propaganda apparatus, which is able to turn a single, seemingly random incident (or word) into a national news story and outrage generator in a matter of hours. The left has no such operation; the idea of getting down into the muck with Republican culture-war operatives is too distasteful of a prospect to seriously consider. And that needs to change. Winning the culture war doesn’t mean cutting off left-wing nonprofits and academics and letting them twist in the wind. It means going on the attack by identifying and highlighting toxic positions that are de rigueur inside the GOP’s completely batshit advocacy and state legislative universes and tying Republican candidates and officials to them.
This is a target-rich environment. You could choose more or less at random and find either Republican officials or right-wing think tanks and educational institutions advocating ideas so insane that they provoke disbelief rather than outrage. One good example is the GOP’s obeisance to Concealed Carry Reciprocity, or CCR, a proposal that would override state gun laws and impose the permissive regimes of states like Texas—which allow people to carry concealed firearms without a permit—on the rest of the country. This idea is wildly unpopular, with a 2023 Pew survey finding just 24 percent support for it. It’s nutso gun-cult stuff that Democrats could be hammering away at every day, especially since 169 House Republicans have already signed on as sponsors of a CCR bill.
There are organizations, like Media Matters for America, who do great work highlighting the bizarre policies and ideas percolating in the right-wing information universe. But they aren’t as effective without the other pillars of the nuclear culture-war triad the GOP relies on—a heavily subsidized right-wing media industry that includes lavishly funded popular publications and book publishers, a major cable news network that functions as an unapologetic extension of the Republican Party’s political operation and increasingly as a source of personnel for the federal government, and a cadre of Christopher Rufo–like operatives with made-up think tank sinecures whose jobs are essentially to weaponize supposedly loopy ideas and terms that they find on the left.
Left-wing billionaires generally seem to prefer running for president or cutting giant checks to super PACs than getting in the weeds. But they would have much greater impact if they created a parallel set of institutions to compete with the right. Maybe one of them should buy MSNBC (along with a slew of local TV broadcasters) and turn it into the left’s Fox News, and another should bankroll progressive magazines and think tanks and dramatically increase the number of people working for them as well as the reach of their ideas. They could also create watchdog groups whose members join megachurches and attend right-wing institutions like Bob Jones University, where “Young Earth creationism” is the campuswide doctrine for people who will later become board-certified nurses, doctors, and researchers. They could take the American Constitution Society—the underappreciated and underfunded counterpart to the right-wing Federalist Society—and transform it into the vehicle for a forward-looking, progressive constitutional project. The point of all of this drunken spending would be to create a sustainable culture war and political offense that can drive the national conversation and put the far right back on the defensive, where it belongs.
Who would lead that charge? A lot of billionaires that Democrats rely on, like Michael Bloomberg, are cautious institutionalists with Joe Manchin politics who seem uncomfortable fighting fire with fire. But there are a few,
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We already won the culture war.
Sit down and shut up, idiot. We're done listening to anything out of you.
Also, MSNBC is already beyond the Left's Fox News. MSNBC is the Left's NewsMax. CNN is the Left's Fox News.
Have fun with your dumb plans though, moron.
Democrats can't be the counter-culture movement anymore because they are the Establishment. Everybody hates you.
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"My only fear of death is coming back to this bitch reincarnated." ~Tupac Shakur
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Quote:Americans have not lost trust in the media. Republicans have.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Democrats can't be the counter-culture movement anymore because they are the Establishment. Everybody hates you.
Republicans have spent the past few decades setting their own hair on fire and then pointing out that it's getting a little warm in here. But those of us who stay away from the conservative gasoline can haven't been affected much. We just smell the burning scalps and wonder why Republicans do this to themselves. (Kevin doesn’t live around Trumptards, for if he did, he’d know they are fucking nut-jobs, which is why they act the way they do and why life in America is a constant struggle for them. Losers who won’t comprehend they are born losers. Angry poor white trash, in other words. Brag again about your house ownership signals that you are not poor, 6ix. You are so pitiful with all the mental health and medical issues plaguing you.)
https://jabberwocking.com/americans-have-not-lost-trust-in-the-media-r
epublicans-have/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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There is so much repellently sleazy behavior documented in the House Ethics Committee report about Matt Gaetz that a reader has to stop every few pages to look away and focus on what still seems astounding: This is the man that Donald Trump wanted to be the attorney general of the United States, the highest-ranking law enforcement official in the land, the leader of the Department of Justice.
In The Matter Of Allegations Relating To Representative Matt Gaetz
Report Of The Committee On Ethics
https://ethics.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/Committee-Report.p
df
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Why is Musk-Trump the "Mump Regime"?
Ask the Mumpers and the Mumpets
By Timothy Snyder | Dec 22, 2024
https://snyder.substack.com/p/why-is-musk-trump-the-mump-regime
For a new world we need new words.
Facing the coming Musk-Trump regime, we will have to be creative. It will not be enough just to rely on the standard terms that come to easily to our lips and pens ("administration," "presidency", and the like). That normalizes the abnormal.
And to repeat unreflectively the words that Musk and Trump and other mumpers use is to take part in the transformation that they bring. Opposition requires clarity and clarity requires concepts. "Mump regime" is one I propose.
As I explained in the last post, "Mump regime," Musk+Trump, keeps the two men who currently matter the most, Elon Musk and Donald Trump, in the proper order.
Musk matters more than Trump. He is the one with the money, the one to whom Trump owes debts. Musk also has a much more lively sense of his own interests and more energy generally. When the two men's ideas clash, as over China in the recent shutdown dispute, Musk gets his way.
"Mump regime" also keeps front and center the basic issue of illness. Democracy is closely connected to health. The historic path to modern political peace and the rule of law led through two stages: vaccines and institutions of public health. Americans have never broken through to a universal health insurance system, and the associated disease, death, fear and poverty is a central problem for our democracy. Now the mumpers and the mumpets are threatening to take away vaccination, which could kill millions of people. One of the diseases it would bring back is, precisely, mumps. Some of the others are far worse.
"Mump regime" is also better, at this point, than "MAGA." That term was always Trump's propaganda, and Trump simply does not matter as he once did. So “MAGA” is not only misleading but obsolete.
MAGA stands for "Make America Great Again." "Make" -- no one is going to make anything. "America" -- the people in charge are largely from elsewhere, and America is no mumper's object of concern. "Great" -- small and fractures is more likely. "Again" -- this level of oligarchy is new, as is the fascist language. We have moved on from a politics of eternity, an obsession with an imaginary past, to a politics of catastrophe.
"Mump regime," on the contrary, helps us to confront a real future. We are heading for a situation in which the fracturing of the government is deliberate and the weakness of the society desired. Some people talk of being the change they want to see in the world; the mumpers are the catastrophe their ideology tells them is inevitable.
And "Mump regime" prepares us mentally for the very real possibility that this form of politics can go on without Trump.
Musk himself is obviously completely unconcerned by the results of elections; it means nothing to him that people voted for Trump. Indeed, the fact that he was able to use a meaninglessly small portion of his wealth to get Trump in office can only breed contempt of both the man and his electorate.
Musk’s current public humiliation of Trump may very well be part of a plan. Make the man look weak; and then make him look crazy; and then invoke Article 25 of the Constitution and put him to bed. I am not saying that I am sure that this will happen: but rather that it is the kind of thing that would be normal in a Mump regime but would be all but unthinkable in a "presidency" or an "administration."
Trump is a fake rich person, and Musk is the richest person on earth (except, possibly, Putin). Trump is crazy like an improv comedian, but Musk is crazy like a guy with satellites. Musk surely understands, even if Trump does not, that the welter of policies we will see in the first six months of the Mump regime will be contradictory and chaotic.
Much mor
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Congress passed a spending bill with one provision stripped out that was extraordinarily important to Musk, an “outbound investment” provision that restricted the ability of Americans to invest in technology factories in China. Musk is building big factories in China and wants to build an AI data center there, even though it could endanger U.S. security. Musk’s complaints about the spending in the bill were cover for his determination to tank the provision that would limit his ability to move technology and business to China. And it worked. The outbound investment provision was stripped out of the bill before it passed.
https://andrewtobias.com/musk-part-ii/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:Americans have not lost trust in the media. Republicans have.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Democrats can't be the counter-culture movement anymore because they are the Establishment. Everybody hates you.
Republicans have spent the past few decades setting their own hair on fire and then pointing out that it's getting a little warm in here. But those of us who stay away from the conservative gasoline can haven't been affected much. We just smell the burning scalps and wonder why Republicans do this to themselves. (Kevin doesn’t live around Trumptards, for if he did, he’d know they are fucking nut-jobs, which is why they act the way they do and why life in America is a constant struggle for them. Losers who won’t comprehend they are born losers. Angry poor white trash, in other words. Brag again about your house ownership signals that you are not poor, 6ix. You are so pitiful with all the mental health and medical issues plaguing you.)
https://jabberwocking.com/americans-have-not-lost-trust-in-the-media-r
epublicans-have/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
You mean that half of Democrats believe the news and are stupid.
Yeah.
Learn how to read a graph, idiot.
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"My only fear of death is coming back to this bitch reincarnated." ~Tupac Shakur
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Republicans don’t know who their daddy is: Musk or Trump?
By Amanda Marcotte | December 24, 2024
https://www.salon.com/2024/12/24/elon-musk-can-easily-use-donald-great
est-advantage-against-him/
The more Donald Trump denies he’s being controlled by billionaire Elon Musk, who purchased the president-elect with over $250 million in campaign spending this year, the less anyone believes him. Last week’s spending battle was complex in the details, but not in the main takeaway: The Tesla CEO is leading the aging and tired Trump by the nose. Trump’s sole ask of congressional Republicans going into budget negotiations was to end the debt ceiling, at least for a couple of years, to spare him the headache of negotiating it while in office. Then Musk started flipping out on Twitter about all manner of line items, seemingly spun up by random social media users named after feline waste products. Both Trump and the GOP meekly followed suit, nearly bringing government to a halt while scrambling to cut a bunch of stuff to appease Musk, who didn’t even understand most of the arguments he was making.
In the end, both Musk and Trump failed to kill the bill. Musk did slightly better, getting some of his specific funding proposals, but he failed at the big-picture goal of decimating the budget. Trump, however, failed miserably, losing most GOP votes for his one goal of shutting down the debt ceiling. Most importantly, the process thoroughly exposed Musk’s hold over Trump. Democrats started the “President Musk” meme, and, predictably, Trump’s narcissism has led to defensiveness. First, Trump’s spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt put out a statement insisting, “President Trump is the leader of the Republican Party. Full stop.”
It wasn’t a full stop, because Trump himself stepped into the fray Sunday at a Turning Points USA event, during an especially sleepy speech. “No, he’s not going to be president, that I can tell you,” Trump told the crowd. “And I’m safe. You know why he can’t be? He wasn’t born in this country.”
The generous interpretation of this comment is that Trump is attacking a strawman, as no one thinks Musk is literally going to be president. They are accusing Musk of being the true power behind the throne. A less generous interpretation is that Trump, age 78, got confused and forgot that he doesn’t have to keep campaigning. Either way, lots of folks on social media recalled the famous line from “Game of Thrones”: “Any man who must say ‘I am the king’ is no true king at all.”
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Was Biden* your Daddy, bitch?
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"My only fear of death is coming back to this bitch reincarnated." ~Tupac Shakur
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