#presidential debate 2020

[reactionimagesdaily]

#oh I got this image during the 2020 US presidential debates!! yeah ... #reaction image #reaction meme #daily reaction images #image mood: frick the frack off

[klanced]

mx katie klanced are we voting voltron straight through in the worst fandom poll or genshin. your troops await

i am so sad i missed this poll. i am now going to hold you all hostage and force you to read my outrage. i know this ship sailed literally two weeks ago but LISTEN TO ME!!!!!

anyway i cannot BELIEVE that voltron lost to south park. the category was "most annoying fandom." this is distinctly different than "most annoying show" or "worst show," and it is NOT synonymous with "most unhinged fans." okay? for this poll, what matters is the group character and cultural staying power of the fandom that organized around the show.

an annoying fandom must be:

incredibly vocal and prominent, to the point that even the most reluctant and detached layperson still has some vague idea of the fandom's biggest discourse/fights, usually entirely against their will; and

annoying, in the sense that the fandom's presence (or even a mere reference to their presence) is enough to actively disrupt or impede one's ability to enjoy online internet spaces; and

the fandom is annoying BECAUSE of the source material in question.

point 1 is fairly subjective, as it's all based on one's own experience or perception of a show's cultural diffusion across the broader public consciousness. so i weigh it less heavily when ranking how annoying a show is.

for point 2 i would argue that south park is annoying, and south park fans are annoying, but the south park fandom itself is NOT as annoying (i.e., the fandom is the least annoying aspect of south park). this is because i firmly believe you can differentiate between south park fans versus the south park fandom.

[[actually if i can be frank -- does south park actually have an organized fandom? obviously they have fans, i have seen them in the twitter wilds (usually in the context of out-of-context incredibly well-developed yaoi art/content of? 10 year olds ?????????). but is there actually a cohesive fandom that routinely interacts and develops concepts together? is there a collective identity ??????? my gut reaction is no, but this is very much an online space i don't enter, so what do i know? i also have no idea what that fandom can even talk about, other than the yaoi (although you could easily say this to the voltron fandom as well). whatever, for this argument i will presuppose that there IS a organized south park fandom with a fairly coherent and cohesive identity.]]

anyway, what i wanted to highlight is that there are certainly incredibly annoying individual south park fans who are outrageous, vulgar, and vile. so you would think that, if you put all these annoying individuals into a single collective, that single group would have skyrocketing amounts of annoyingness. but that doesn't seem to happen. i cannot recall any specific complaints about the south park fandom; personal stories involving individual south park fans, sure, but what does the fandom actually do on a broad scale?? if there is any sort of discourse or mobilization, it seems to be fairly contained and localized.

so how can a collective fandom somehow be less annoying than its individual parts? this brings me to point three: an annoying fandom MUST be annoying BECAUSE of its source material. and this does not apply in the south park fandom's case.

to qualify as an annoying fandom, it is not enough to be a group of annoying fans loosely connected by a shared interest; rather, the source material ITSELF must be the inciting incident that galvanizes the group to organize and THEN become annoying.

is the south park fandom annoying? to some extent yes, of course. but i would argue that the south park fandom is annoying, not specifically because of the show in question, but rather because the fandom is comprised of persons who were already predisposed to being annoying, regardless of whether or not they had ever watched south park. this is a subtle but incredibly important distinction.

south park's vulgar and vile humor certainly enables its most annoying fans, but the continued annoying activities of said fans are NOT dependent on the show's existence. a shithead south park fan was always going to be a shithead, now they just have cartman to idolize.

i have spent a lot of time talking about south park. let us now move on to voltron and the voltron fandom.

in contrast to south park, the voltron fandom qualifies as an annoying fandom because its annoying activities were entirely dependent on the existence of voltron the show. would individual voltron fans still have been annoying even if they had never stumbled upon voltron? of course. but the voltron fandom was an organized collective of people that specifically came together to BE ANNOYING ABOUT VOLTRON. and then they made it everyone else's problem.

the voltron fandom was like an ouroboros devouring its own tail; a symbol of infinity, referencing the literally never-ending fighting; and it survived entirely by maiming and cannibalizing itself. the voltron fandom actively ruined every online space it entered. i saw the greatest minds of my generation destroyed by voltron.

honestly, i would argue that the voltron fandom's impact has completely altered the way online fandom functions to this day. the voltron fandom capitalized on the momentum started by the steven universe fandom and other early 2010s online fandoms, and spawned an entire new flavor of fandom discourse that was obsessed with morality and virtue. truthfully, it feels disingenuous to frame what happened as something innocuous as "fandom discourse"; it almost feels like a disservice to the levels of personal faith, passion, and vitriol people poured into voltron. the terms "pro-shipping" and "anti-shipping" have been around for ages, but the voltron fandom turned "pro" and "anti" into genuine identity markers.

this post is already way too insane so i need to quit while i'm ahead. but i would just like to conclude by reiterating that south park has annoying fans but not necessarily an annoying fandom, whereas the voltron fandom was annoying specifically BECAUSE it was the voltron fandom. i think the south park fandom could dissolve tomorrow and assimilate into other similar fandoms without a problem. whereas the voltron fandom was like lightning in a bottle; the activities of the voltron fandom are quintessentially wrapped up in the specific details, characteristics, and attributes of voltron. if voltron's characters or story was even slightly different -- if, say, every character was a college-student for example -- then the nature and activities of the fandom would have been irrevocably different.

and that is why voltron is the more annoying fandom and SHOULD HAVE SWEPT SOUTH PARK IN THE POLL.

#at any given moment i have a 300k thesis brewing in the back of my mind about how the american 2016 presidential election #(and general political developments between 2012 - 2020) is irrevocably tied up in how the voltron fandom developed #it's the most batshit insane thing ever. i know. #anyway i'm going to law school in boston this fall!! using my debate skills for. this. #ask #anonymous

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

Donald Trump, in response to a question during a 2020 presidential debate with Joe Biden, insisted that he closed down his bank account in China before his first campaign. But six years’ worth of Trump’s tax records, released Friday, reveal that wasn’t true.

“[I] had an account open, and I closed it,” Trump said with some irritation to moderator Kristen Welker, NBC White House correspondent, in the final debate of the campaign in October 2020. “I closed it before I even ran for President, let alone became President.”

Rep.-elect Daniel Goldman (D-N.Y.), who served as the Democrats’ lead counsel in the first impeachment inquiry into Trump, noted that the former President had bank accounts in China until 2018, from 2015 to 2017, according to his tax records.

“Generally, you only have bank accounts in a foreign country if you are doing transactions in that country’s currency,” Goldman tweeted Friday. “What business was Trump doing in China while he was President?”

Trump, who had accounts in a number of countries and collected income from more than a dozen foreign nations while in office, paid more in taxes in 2020 to the Chinese government than he did in American federal income tax that year, his returns revealed.

Trump also lied a month earlier to then-Fox News commentator Chris Wallace, who pointedly asked him during the first presidential debate in 2020 if he’d paid only $750 in federal income taxes in 2016 and 2017, as The New York Times had reported (which Trump immediately blasted as “fake news”).

Trump angrily responded — twice — that he had paid “millions of dollars.” His returns revealed that indeed he had paid just $750 in federal income taxes in each of those years. Trump and his wife Melania paid no federal income tax in 2020, the last full year he was in office, according to the tax records.

In addition, Trump did not annually donate his $400,000 presidential salary to charity, as he has claimed. He declared no charitable contributions of any kind on his 2020 returns.

Among the early revelations emerging in Trump’s tax records, some of the most troubling involve his financial entanglements abroad while he was President, “highlighting a string of potential conflicts of interest,” Politico noted.

Trump had multiple bank accounts in a number of foreign countries, and collected millions of dollars in income from more than a dozen nations ― including Panama, the Philippines (whose onetime dictator, former President Rodrigo Duterte, he has praised) and the United Arab Emirates during the Trump administration.

While presidents routinely place assets in blind trusts while they’re in office, Trump’s eldest sons continued to openly operate the Trump Organization and forged deals around the world with nations affected by the Trump administration’s policies and expenditures.

Trump’s returns reveal hefty financial losses in the two years before he became President, some of which he carried forward to reduce tax bills.

Trump enjoyed an adjusted gross income of $15.8 million during his first three years in office. He paid $642,000 in federal income tax in 2015, $750 in 2016 and in 2017, just under $1 million in 2018, $133,000 in 2019 and nothing in 2020.

#us politics #news #donald trump #2022 #trump administration #republicans #conservatives #gop #china #trump tax returns #trump taxes #Kristen Welker #2020 presidential election #presidential debate #bradley p. moss #Daniel Goldman #tweet #twitter #Chris Wallace #the new york times #melania trump #trump organization #eric trump #donald trump jr. #pbs newshour #Panama #Philippines #Rodrigo Duterte #United Arab Emirates

[lukeslywalkers]

They need to drop this man’s mugshot so I can abuse it as memes for Pressure Cooker

#flashback to the tag live-blogging the presidential debates because the 2020 ALL STARS season sucked so bad #big brother #bb25

[andhumanslovedstories]

Eight years ago I was so deeply invested in the American presidential election, I listen to multiple weekly podcasts, I was on twitter, I checked the polling updates, read the articles, watched the news, I could tell you the political happenings of every week of 2016, and we were on the road for a large portion of it so we had to work for it. We watched one of the presidential debates in a Las Vegas Panera before heading back to our campsite. I did something similar for the 2020 election because jesus christ what a fucking Historical Year. Now it’s 2024, and gearing up for the grind once more is such a dismal feeling. I don’t want to have to have an opinion on Nicky Haley’s viability as republican candidate. I don’t want to follow another twelve Trump trials. I don’t want to watch everyone even slightly left of center once again devour each other as we polarize about it’s a bigger war crime to vote for Biden or not vote for Biden. Everything is going to get so unpleasant and it’s so important and the stakes are so high and it’s gonna suck the whole time. I’m trying to think of one funny thing that could plausibly happen that would fill me with joy and not terror for the future of America and also the world, and so far I’ve only come up with Jeb Bush giving a presidential campaign another go.

[hellyeahscarleteen]

"Top surgeries are coming out on top when it comes to patient satisfaction. A new study found that when it comes to this particular procedure, people’s long term satisfaction was “overwhelmingly positive compared to other medical and nonmedical decisions.”

Opponents of access to gender-affirming care like to claim that patients will someday regret making irreversible or partially irreversible changes to their bodies, such as gender-affirming mastectomies (often referred to more colloquially as top surgery). Florida Governor and wannabe presidential candidate Ron DeSantis, who has overseen passage of some of the most anti-LGBTQ+ legislation and policies we've seen, once likened trans-affirming care to chemical castration during a debate, while Arkansas Attorney General appeared on Jon Stewart’s show The Problem to deliver the incredibly made-up statistic that 98% of gender dysphoric youth will eventually identify as cisgender.

However, actual medical evidence tells a much different story.

A study published online in the journal JAMA Surgery on August 9 surveyed 139 participants, all of whom had gender-affirming mastectomies at the University of Michigan between January 1, 1990, and February 29, 2020. Researchers found that the median satisfaction rate among respondents was five on a scale of 1 to 5 (the higher the number, the greater the satisfaction, the study explains), and that their medium regret score was 0 on a 100-point scale (again, the lower the number, the lower the regret). In other words, the overwhelming majority of respondents were highly satisfied and regret was vanishingly rare.

Additionally, a quarter of respondents reported having had an additional gender-affirming procedure since their top surgery. As the study’s authors said, “These results suggest sustained intent and consistency in decision-making.”

This is far from the first time that medical evidence has supported the long-term positive effects of gender-affirming surgeries. A 2021 review of multiple studies found that only around 1% of patients who received gender-affirming surgeries regretted their decision. And as the Transgender Legal Defense & Education Fund notes, almost every major medical association has recognized gender-affirming care as a medical necessity."

#trans #top surgery #lgbtq+ #gender affirming care

[lizardsfromspace]

Saw someone actually lay out how messed up the situation is in Wisconsin to relatively little notice on another site & I didn't know that situation was like. That unknown. But

Wisconsin is no longer democratic & is a test case for right-wing rule's endgame

Not democratic in a political party sense. Not democratic in a "it is no longer a democracy in most senses" sense

It went for Biden in 2020 (& blue every recent Presidential election bar 2016) and Democrats won every state office in 2018...

...but it's impossible for them to have a majority in the legislature. Even the 50/50 split implied by election results is impossible

After a Democrat won in 2018 they stripped the Governor of all his power. All he can do is veto bills & call special sessions...

...which end in seconds bc the right just immediately gavels them closed. Sessions on gun violence & abortion ended instantly, with no debate, and thus nothing but far-right laws can even go up for a vote

Not only do they not confirm his appointees but they won a court case saying anyone appointed by a past Governor can stay in after their term if no one new is confirmed

Since the right won't confirm anyone new, people appointed by Scott Walker effectively have their offices permanently, four years later

People going "just vote!" feels so weird bc, yeah, in this case voting is vital, we need a Democratic governor to veto bills, but also you can literally "just vote" & nothing else. Changing the system or even the smallest positive advance is impossible. The best result is upholding the status quo & delaying the right's full takeover of the few offices they don't control by another four years, something you can't count on being able to do bc they've spent the past two years testing the waters of letting the legislature just overrule election results completely

Anyway this is the future, today! and we live in hell

#uspol #long post

[wilwheaton]

In terms of format, this was classic Republican propaganda — literally. As historian Rick Perlstein noted, the town hall setup with a favorable audience was the same one that Richard Nixon’s campaign pioneered under Roger Ailes, who died in 2017. The key for Ailes was to produce a show where Nixon could be a gladiator fighting the moderator for a rapturous audience. When Ailes resigned from Fox News after female employees accused him of sexual harassment, Ailes went on to serve as a debate adviser for Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. And wouldn’t you know it, Fox News gave Trump his own town hall with a rapturous audience in 2020. Last night, CNN too handed Trump a rapturous audience on a platter. The crowd was stocked with Trump supporters: Trump himself was reportedly allowed 15 people of his own (though none asked questions), and reporting indicates that party loyalists were asked to attend as well. It’s unclear what vetting, if any, CNN did.

The CNN Trump town hall was nothing more than GOP propaganda

CNN knew *exactly* what they were doing. Collins knew *exactly* what would happen.

How do I know this? I am not a professional journalist or news person, and even I knew exactly what would happen, all the way down to Trump calling her nasty. If I knew this would happen, there is no way the experienced professionals at CNN didn’t know.

CNN got exactly what it wanted. It would appear, on the surface, that maybe it won’t work out for CNN the way the network thought it would. I hope that’s true. I hope there are meaningful consequences for a so-called news network gleefully and enthusiastically betraying their audience’s trust to run right wing propaganda for ratings.

[saywhat-politics]

A cell phone belonging to a congressman and suspected key figure in Donald Trump's alleged bid to subvert the 2020 presidential election is going to be able to be accessed by Justice Department investigators now that a federal judge granted it.

A longstanding battle being fought by Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA) to shield his cellphone, with nearly 1,700 records in it, from being able to be opened by Justice took a marked turn with Chief U.S. District Judge James Boasberg, The Washington Post reports.

Perry had argued that the phone, which had been seized by the feds back in August 2022, was protected by what the outlet reported as the Constitution's "speech or debate" clause granting Congress members immunity from criminal investigation when carrying out their official duties.

The FBI was in the process of determining what, if any, was Perry’s involvement with Trump’s criminal indictment for allegedly conspiring to thwart the certification of the 2020 election votes and stop then-President Elect Biden from taking office.

In November, text messages released that revealed Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA) had deeper ties to Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark than many had previously reported and expected.

[thebreakfastgenie]

"This is the new November 5th" "This is just like November 5th" No. There will never be another November 5th.

Do you even remember what late 2020 was like? It was before the COVID vaccine. We were still at the stage of the pandemic where it wasn't really safe for anyone to go anywhere. The Republican Party was acting like it wasn't happening and if it was, it wasn't a big deal. The month before, Amy Coney Barrett got COVID at her super-spreader confirmation party in the Rose Garden after Mitch McConnell reversed everything he said about election year appointments in 2016. Also in October, one of the presidential debates was cancelled because Trump had COVID. He was hospitalized and we all spent a couple of days waiting to see if he was going to die of the virus he told Americans not to worry about. Democrats encouraged their voters to vote by mail in order to be safe during the pandemic, so Republicans sabotaged the postal system in the middle of a pandemic. Mail was taking weeks to arrive. Election Day came and we all held our collective breath and waited for them to count the vote. Election Day went and we still didn't know. I was trying so hard to make myself do literally anything else but all I could do was sit in the couch and refresh electoral maps and stare at Nevada. Sometimes I clicked over to Arizona instead.

And then in the middle of that, destiel. It was such a welcome and desperately needed distraction. It was so completely insane and unexpected. There were perhaps no ships with the same level of history. There will never be anything like it ever again.

#i probably missed at least three things that happened in fall of 2020 #because that's just what literally every day in the trump administration was LIKE

[ivan-fyodorovich-k]

I will be curious to read the vituperative denials of the validity of this article's analysis, which is pasted below the cutoff:

“Are you better off today than you were four years ago?” That question, first posed by Ronald Reagan in a 1980 presidential-campaign debate with Jimmy Carter, has become the quintessential political question about the economy. And most Americans today, it seems, would say their answer is no. In a new survey by Bankrate published on Wednesday, only 21 percent of those surveyed said their financial situation had improved since Joe Biden was elected president in 2020, against 50 percent who said it had gotten worse. That echoed the results of an ABC News/Washington Post poll from September, in which 44 percent of those surveyed said they were worse off financially since Biden’s election. And in a New York Times/Siena College poll released last week, 53 percent of registered voters said that Biden’s policies had hurt them personally.

As has been much commented on (including by me), this gloom is striking when contrasted with the actual performance of the U.S. economy, which grew at an annual rate of 4.9 percent in the most recent quarter, and which has seen unemployment holding below 4 percent for more than 18 months. But the downbeat mood is perhaps even more striking when contrasted with the picture offered by the Federal Reserve’s recently released Survey of Consumer

The survey provides an in-depth analysis of the financial condition of American households, conducted for the Fed by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago. Published every three years, it’s the proverbial gold standard of household research. The latest survey looked at Americans’ net worth as of mid-to-late 2022 and Americans’ income in 2021, comparing them with equivalent data from three years earlier. It found that despite the severe disruption to the economy caused by the pandemic and the recovery from it, Americans across the spectrum saw their incomes and wealth rise over the survey period.

The rise in median household net worth was the most notable improvement: It jumped by 37 percent from 2019 to 2022, rising to $192,000. (All numbers are adjusted for inflation.) Americans in every income bracket saw substantial gains, with the biggest gains registered by people in the middle and upper-middle brackets, which suggests that a slight narrowing of wealth inequality occurred during this time. In particular, Black and Latino households saw their median net worth rise faster than white households did—though the racial wealth gap is so wide that it narrowed only slightly as a result of this change.

A big driver of this increase was the rising value of people’s homes—and a higher percentage of Americans owned homes in 2022 than did in 2019. But households’ financial position improved in other ways too. The amount of money that the median household had in bank accounts and retirement accounts rose substantially. The percentage of Americans owning stocks directly (that is, not in retirement accounts) jumped by more than a third, from about 15 to 21 percent. The percentage of Americans with retirement accounts went from 50.5 to 54.3 percent, a notable improvement. And a fifth of Americans reported owning a business, the highest proportion since the survey began in its current form (in 1989).

Americans also reduced their debt loads during the pandemic. The median credit-card balance dropped by 14 percent, and the share of people with car loans fell. More significantly still, Americans’ median debt-to-asset, debt-to-income, and debt-payment-to-income ratios all fell, meaning that U.S. households had lower debt burdens, on average, in 2022 than they’d had three years earlier.

The gains in real income (in this case, measured from 2018 to 2021) were small—median household income rose 3 percent, with every income bracket seeing gains. But that was better than one might have expected, given that this period included a pandemic-induced recession and only a single year of recovery.

The picture the survey paints, then, is one of American households not only weathering the pandemic in surprisingly good shape, but ultimately also emerging from it in better financial shape than they were going in. And that, in turn, points to the effect of the U.S. policy response to the crisis: Stimulus payments, enhanced unemployment benefits, the child-care tax credit, and the moratorium on student-loan payments boosted household income and balance sheets, helping people pay down debt and increase their savings. In the process, these policies mildly narrowed inequality.

The U.S. government’s aggressive response to the pandemic, including Biden’s stimulus spending, also helped the job market recover all its pandemic-related losses—and add millions of jobs on top. The resulting tight labor market has been a huge boon to lower-wage workers. In fact, because the Fed survey’s income data end in 2021, it understates the income gains for the bottom half of the workforce, and the shrinking income inequality they’ve produced.

Hourly wages for production and nonsupervisory workers (who make up about 80 percent of the American workforce) rose 4.4 percent year-on-year in the third quarter of 2023, for instance, ahead of the pace of inflation. And this was not anomalous: Arindrajit Dube, an economist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, crunched the numbers and found that real wages for that same sector of workers are not just higher than they were in 2019, but are now roughly where they would have been if we’d continued on the upward pre-pandemic trend.

The reason for this is simple: Low unemployment has translated into higher wages. As a recent working paper by Dube, David Autor, and Annie McGrew shows, the tight labor markets of the past few years have given lower-wage workers more bargaining power than in the past, leading to a compression in the wage gap between higher-paid and lower-paid workers. Of course, that gap is still immense, but the three scholars found that the wage gains for lower-paid workers have rolled back about a quarter of the rise in inequality that has occurred since the 1980s.

So what should we take away from the Survey of Consumer Finances data, and from Dube, Autor, and McGrew’s work? Not that everything is fine, but that public policy and macroeconomic management matter a lot. Enhanced unemployment benefits, the child-care tax credit, the stimulus payments—these things materially improved the lives of Americans and helped set the economy up for a strong recovery. If the policy response had been less aggressive, the U.S. economy would be in worse shape now. This is something you can see by looking at Europe, where economies are growing far more slowly and unemployment is higher, while inflation is no lower.

Key to this story is the fact that lower-wage workers in particular would be worse off, because they have been among the chief beneficiaries of the low unemployment created by the robust recovery. It’s a useful reminder that stagnant wages are not an inevitable result of American capitalism: When labor markets are tight, and employers have to compete with one another for employees, workers get paid more.

So, even allowing for the high inflation we saw in 2022, no one could really look at the U.S. economy today and say that the policy choices of the past three years made us poorer. Yet that, of course, is precisely how many Americans feel.

Although that pessimism does not bode well for Biden’s reelection prospects, the real problem with it is even more far-reaching: If voters think that policies that helped them actually hurt them, that makes it much less likely that politicians will embrace similar policies in the future. The U.S. got a lot right in its macroeconomic approach over the past three years. Too bad that voters think it got so much wrong.

#someone somewhere out there will find this infuriating #I'm not an economist and almost every time anyone says anything about economics I think 'sure that makes sense' #so I post in my ignorance #try to resist calling me a retard when you tear this apart #and it's always the worst with things like statistics because someone's gonna be like 'well if you reframe the numbers slightly #you'll find that in fact this article demonstrates that we have less wealth per capita than your average North Korean'

[odinsblog]

I just found out about Jasmine Sherman and they look really cool. Like, the policies that they say they’re going to do? The fact that they have an audiobook option for people to listen to what the policies say on their platform? (If people don’t have JAWS or screen readers on their devices, JAWS for computers.) I really hope they get far enough in the presidential race. Although Cornel West is my next choice should he get far.

Yeah, sorry but Hell NO.

I’m all for audiobooks and JAWS readers, but I’ve never heard of Jasmine Sherman before and as far as I’m concerned, Ms. Sherman is just another throwaway vote. She has the same chance of winning the next election as a randomly picked name from a hat. Same goes for Cornel West and for 🤡 RFK Jr., and same for Marianne Williamson, and in fact, same for anyone who isn’t named (I honestly cannot believe that EYE am saying this, but here we are) Joe Biden.

Look, in 2020 I went through the same journey that I think a lot of voters are going through right now: I swore up and down that I wasn’t going to vote for Biden because he had (and still has, tbqh) a lot of conservative policies that I vehemently disagree with—LOL, don’t even get me started on Title 42, okay? But at the end of the day, I carried my Black ass into that voting booth and I begrudgingly did what I had to do.

All I know is, I do not want Donald fucking Trump in the White House. That’s it. Not “lesser evilism” not “he’s the next LBJ” not anything else, except for I’m voting for the person who has the best chance of beating Trump and keeping his racist ass out of the White House. THAT’S just about my only motivation here. Dassit. Periodt. I can deal with everything else later.

And I can live with myself with that vote.

But yeah, I’m Black and I gotta live not only with myself, but I also gotta live in this world and look other people in the eye. People who don’t even have my extremely limited level of privilege.

I’m not gonna go into detail about how a Trump presidency would make literally everything worse than it already is—and yes, sadly that includes Palestine, Ukraine, transphobia, homophobia, immigration, and whatever else is allegedly important to disproportionately ☭ white, online “leftists” 🙄 who keep telling people not to vote, or keep telling people to vote for candidates who cannot win.

As far as I’m concerned, Trump getting back into the White House is an existential threat to everything I hold dear. So no, anon, I will fucking not be throwing my vote away on some random ass person I’ve never heard of before, who has no mf chance of ever winning.

And yes, I still have problems with Biden. Like, a lot of problems. Like, a LOT, lot. But he’s the best chance we got at stopping Trump, and Trump needs to be stopped. That, plus I desperately want to see Trump pay for everything he’s gotten away with so far. Voting for Biden is the best way for me to give that a chance.

So yeah, I am deathly afraid of a second Trump term. And a big part of what is driving that fear is the fact that Joe Biden is vulnerable and super beatable. Like, his winning the next election is not a guarantee—did Hillary Clinton’s completely preventable loss teach you nothing at all??

Anyway, I’m not tryna write a book here. I think I’ve made my thoughts clear on Jasmine Sherman and whoever else is the flavor-of-the-day that can’t and won’t beat Trump. Biden is really fucking up and making himself even more beatable by unconditionally supporting Israel, and if he wins he might continue to fuck up, but I promise you that Trump will do unimaginably worse to Palestinians—and that’s not hyperbole.

Lastly, I really debated long and hard about whether or not to make this post rebloggable. PLEASE don’t make me regret that decision, OKAY??

Like, I know that a lot of people who unconditionally LOVE Joe Biden (that’s not me, btw) and the Democratic Party will be tempted to add, “VOTE BLUE NO MATTER WHO!” to this post, but I am begging you to please resist that urge, okay? I don’t know how to precisely put it into words, but unless you’re already convinced and have decided to vote for Biden, there’s just something about adding that braindead slogan that is incredibly off putting. It’s like an annoying ad that you want to skip and ignore on YouTube; it’s vapid; it’s old + tired; it’s lowkey offensive, and it tells people that you haven’t really given a lot of thought to anything and you’re just another insipid Blue MAGA sycophant blindly hopping on the bandwagon. Please find a better more intelligent way to express your support of Biden, okay?

ALSO, if you just search for Jasmine Sherman on Tumblr, you get a lot of anonymous asks like this

And sorry, but having lived through the 2016 and 2020 interface elections, yeah, it just smells fishy af. Chipping away at Biden votes is another way to help get Trump re-elected. And Trump supports Putin and Netanyahu

#anon #ask #answered #politics #election 2024 #jasmine sherman #this is a donald trump hate blog

[mariacallous]

A Trump-appointed prosecutor dropped an unfalsifiable partisan bomb on President Joe Biden Thursday, playing into a years-long right-wing media campaign — and U.S. political journalists decided to treat it as a valid and impartial charge.

Biden, who has a 40-year record of public service in the U.S. Senate, as vice president, and in the Oval Office, is a self-described “gaffe machine” with a well-documented stutter. He is also, at 81, the oldest president in U.S. history.

The right has dedicated substantial time and resources since Biden launched his 2020 presidential campaign to attributing his verbal miscues to his age. Republican political operatives surface out-of-context snippets of Biden’s misstatements and try to blow them up into national stories, and it is rarely-disputed canon in the right-wing media that the president is a mentally failing dementia patient. 

This argument blew up in their faces when Biden performed so well in a debate against then-President Donald Trump that the GOP resorted to accusing him of taking performance-enhancing drugs, and again in 2023, when his canny dealings with then-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy led McCarthy to describe him as “very smart” and Republicans to question how they’d been outmaneuvered by someone purportedly in mental decline. But undeterred by reality, the right has maintained the drumbeat over Biden’s mental status, driving up public concern over the president’s age.

Enter Robert Hur. Attorney General Merrick Garland presumably selected him as a special counsel to investigate Biden’s possible unauthorized removal and retention of classified documents or other records because he thought he could quell potential complaints of political bias by putting in charge a former clerk to right-wing judges whom Trump appointed as a U.S. attorney with every incentive to do maximum political damage to the Democratic president. This is a regular pattern — Republican and Democratic administrations each appoint Republicans to investigate both Republicans and Democrats, though that never seems to halt the complaints from the right about the handling of those cases.

On Thursday, after a year-long investigation, Hur issued a 345-page report in which he concluded that “​​no criminal charges are warranted in this matter” and that “the evidence does not establish Mr. Biden's guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.” But rather than stop there, he also levied an incendiary and gratuitous attack on Biden’s mental status, claiming that, “at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” Hur cited specific mental lapses he’d observed during their five hours of interviews — conducted at a time when Biden was responding to the international crisis caused by the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel — including that his “memory appeared hazy” when discussing the intricacies of 15-year-old White House policy debates.

Hur’s argument that lawyers for the sitting president of the United States would argue in court that he shouldn’t be convicted of a crime because he is a senile old man is facially absurd. Indeed, Biden forcefully pushed back on the critique during a White House appearance Thursday night.

The special counsel’s actions drew sharp criticism from the legal community. Biden’s lawyers blasted claims about Biden’s memory in a draft report, saying, “We do not believe that the report's treatment of President Biden's memory is accurate or appropriate. The report uses highly prejudicial language to describe a commonplace occurrence among witnesses: a lack of recall of years-old events.” On MSNBC, former FBI counsel Andrew Weissmann called the claims “wholly inappropriate,” “gratuitous,” and “exactly what you’re not supposed to do, which is putting your thumb on the scale that could have political repercussions.” Neal Katyal, the former acting U.S. solicitor general, likewise said that based on his tours in the Justice Department, Hur’s statements were “totally gratuitous” and a “too-clever-move-by-half by the special counsel to try and take some swipes at a sitting president.” And Ty Cobb, a former Trump lawyer, said on CNN that he had served on an independent counsel probe that declined to prosecute someone due to “health issues, but we didn’t tell the world that,” suggesting that such statements by Hur were inappropriate.

But by including those inappropriate and gratuitous statements, Hur put an official seal on a partisan attack. 

The right jumped on Hur’s claims, with Republican politicians and right-wing commentators falsely claiming that the special counsel had found that Biden “is not competent to stand trial” and “has dementia.” Some called for the Cabinet to invoke the 25th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and remove him from office.

The mainstream political press, meanwhile, turned Hur’s insinuations about Biden’s mental health — and not his declination to prosecute — into the report’s big takeaway. Here’s a sampling of top headlines from major newspapers, political tipsheets, and digital outlets on Thursday and Friday.

New York Times: “Eight Words and a Verbal Slip Put Biden’s Age Back at the Center of 2024” Axios: “1 big thing: Report questions Biden’s memory” Semafor Flagship: “DoJ report questions Biden’s memory” Washington Post: “Special counsel report paints scathing picture of Biden’s memory” Wall Street Journal: “Biden’s Age Back in Spotlight After Special Counsel Report, Verbal Flubs” CNN: “Biden tries to lay to rest age concerns, but may have exacerbated them” ABC News: “Special counsel blows open debate over Biden age and memory” CBS News: “Biden disputes special counsel findings, insists his memory is fine” Politico: “Age isn’t just a number. It’s a profound and growing problem for Biden.

Stories about Biden’s mental state are clearly catnip for political journalists. They can demonstrate how “fair” they are by providing negative coverage of Biden to balance their treatment of his likely opponent Donald Trump, who is an unhinged authoritarian facing scores of federal and state criminal charges, including for attempting to subvert the 2020 presidential election. And they don’t need to bone up on policy nuances separating the candidates — “is the president addled” is an easy venue for hot takes.

The storyline is particularly toxic because no matter how many times it is repudiated by Biden’s public actions or the statements of people who have spoken to him privately, it cannot be falsified. The White House physician can release health summaries calling him “fit to successfully execute the duties of the Presidency.” Democrats who have recently spoken to the president, like Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY), and reporters who have recently interviewed him, like John Harwood, can attest to his mental acuity at the time of his special counsel interview. But Biden is still Biden, so he’s going to keep making gaffes, as he did Thursday night when he referred to Egyptian president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi as “the president of Mexico,” leading journalists to downplay his newsmaking statements about the Israel-Hamas war and fixate instead on what the statement says about his mental health. 

The choice for reporters is how they respond to such misstatements. On NPR, Mara Liasson said that the White House is pushing back by pointing out that Biden’s foes, like Fox’s Sean Hannity and Trump, have had similar mix-ups.

“But the difference is that one of these missteps, one of these guys who forgets things, Biden, has become a viral meme, and it's become a big problem for him,” she said. “Trump's misstatements, for some reason, have not risen to that level.”

It’s true that Trump’s own verbal missteps have not coalesced into an overarching narrative about his mental fitness for office. But the reason why is obvious: Political journalists decided to treat Biden’s missteps as a big problem, and Trump’s as a small one. They’re setting the agenda, following the lead of the Republican Party, the right-wing media, and now, Hur.

[liskantope]

I think part of the reason I tend to get so argumentative nowadays about "what your side proposes kills people" -type political talking points is that it seems that this is being used more and more frequently as a rhetorical bludgeon, mainly (though not entirely) from the Left. There's a lot of shutting down of arguments based on "but HUMAN LIVES", and it's begun to feel to me like a disturbing trend. For instance, a good bit of the rhetoric in favor of shutting down schools in 2020-2021 seemed to center on "here, look at my computation that the expected value of children's lives lost if we don't shut down schools is greater than zero; anyone who disagrees with us doesn't VALUE HUMAN LIVES", with the effect that a lot of us (including to some extent me) were blinded for a long time to the absolutely devastating effect such extensive school shutdowns (in some geographic areas) had on children and their whole families, an effect that is still scarring them today. I'm not saying anything about whether or how far those school shutdown policies went wrong, just that they had very substantial harmful effects that don't vanish relative to the VALUE OF HUMAN LIVES.

Then there's the now-everyday claim that the anti-trans culture warriors "ARE KILLING US [TRANS PEOPLE]", which is true under a particular interpretation of "killing" and tragically true to an extent pretty well beyond some vanishingly rare extreme cases but is also transparently being used to drown out most other aspects of the debates around trans issues. Much more disturbing still is the accusation I now semi-regularly see casually flung that conservatives "actively want us [trans or LGBT+ people in general] dead" (I think I've occasionally seen left-wing variations on this that aren't even about LGBT+ people). A couple of months ago I called it "stomach-turning" ("it" being both the content of the accusation itself and the fact that so many people in our cultural discourse have seen fit to use it; this of course was semi-willfully misinterpreted by someone as my saying that trans people turn my stomach), and I reiterate now that it's still completely turning my stomach. This example is different from others in some fundamental ways, some of which make me more sympathetic with why people feel driven to use it (and it's not being used to drown out completely unrelated issues, for instance, like the guns thing is), and the general rhetorical weapon of "the other side wants to kill us" deserves its own effortpost which I intend to write later this summer.

So anyway, yeah, I'm also getting a kind of short fuse around insinuations of "what they show kids in school won't kill them, but guns could, so that's the only issue involving schoolchildren that anyone should care about" that I now see daily.

Of course, invocations of "my cause is the one whose stakes directly involve life or death so it outranks everything else" isn't exclusive to the Left at all. The Right has been doing it for decades with abortion to shut down both the abortion debate and whatever unrelated debate they didn't want to have ("millions of babies are being MURDERED each year, while liberals obsess over [women's bodies] [or] [just about any totally unrelated issue which appears frivolous next to MURDER]"). I also vaguely remember something that sounded like this in the post-9/11 years ("we're the ones looking out for Americans who might be KILLED in the next terrorist attack, that has to be the only priority right now"). And there was that bizarre "death panels" accusation around 2010-2011 when Obamacare was being debated which I guess might also count.

Only loosely related, but I'm reminded of a moment in the very first vice presidential debate, between Bob Dole and Walter Mondale in 1976, where Dole invoked a computation of the number of deaths in wars the US engaged in under Democratic versus Republican presidents, and apparently he got a lot of blowback from how underhanded this rhetorical move came across.

#political discourse #death #suicide #covid pandemic #school shutdowns #trans issues #gun control #abortion #terrorism #universal health care #american presidential politics

[1americanconservative]

BREAKING REPORT: West Virginia Secretary of State and Governor Hopeful Mac Warner Claims the CIA 'STOLE' the 2020 Election..

During a gubernatorial debate Warner, the Republican Secretary of State of West Virginia asserted that the Central Intelligence Agency [CIA] was involved in rigging the 2020 presidential election against Donald Trump.

Warner, who has 23 years of service in the U.S. Army and is the incumbent Secretary of State in West Virginia, touts himself as a "battle-tested leader" on his electoral campaign site.

He heavily incorporates his military background and administrative roles into his bid for governor.

In a notable departure from his usual statements, Warner directly accused the CIA, claiming, "The election was stolen, and it was stolen by the CIA."

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

“We have to be a nation that trusts women.”

March 15, 2024

ROBERT B. HUBBELL

The most significant political development on Thursday was the appearance by Vice President Kamala Harris at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Minnesota. Her appearance at a women’s healthcare clinic was the first by a U.S. vice president (or president) at a facility that provides abortion services. See CNN, Kamala Harris becomes first VP to visit abortion provider with Planned Parenthood visit.

The visit was part of Kamala Harris’s “Fight for Reproductive Freedoms” tour. She is taking the lead on an issue where she can be (and has been) a more effective and outspoken advocate than President Biden. Her leadership on the issue of reproductive liberty is a good development for Harris, Biden, and the American people.

V.P. Harris said, in part,

I’m here at this health care clinic to uplift the work that is happening in Minnesota as an example of what true leadership looks like. . . . The reason I’m here is because this is a health care crisis. Part of this health care crisis is the clinics like this that have had to shut down and what that has meant to leave no options with any reasonable geographic area for so many women who need this essential care.

Harris framed the issue as one that pitted politicians against women’s control over their bodies:

How dare these elected leaders believe they are in a better position to tell women what they need. To tell women what’s in their best interest. We have to be a nation that trusts women.

Harris’s visit was historic. But it also showcased Kamala Harris’s campaign skills, including her ability to connect with women and young people on the campaign trail. For readers who remember Kamala Harris only from the debate stage in 2020, I urge you to watch a few minutes of her appearance in Minnesota.

No soaring rhetoric. No shouting. No anger. No pep rallies. Instead—like Joe Biden—she is a relatable candidate speaking to the American people about their needs, wants, and fears.

I was impressed and by Kamala Harris’s appearance in Minnasota, and I hope you will be, too.

But there is more. In a similar speech last week in Arizona, Kamala Harris touched on a matter of extreme urgency for all women and men: The plan by religious fundamentalist extremists to make contraception illegal.

In Arizona, Harris said,

And right now, other extremists, as you have heard and know, are in court trying to bring back a law from 1864 that would completely ban abortion in Arizona — 1864.  Understand: 1864, before women had the right to vote, before women could own property, before Arizona was even admitted as a state.

So, the 2024 ballot will not only include access to abortion service, but access to contraception. See The Independent, Republicans are taking aim on contraception — and they’d rather you didn’t know.

In short, Kamala Harris is fast becoming the leading voice for reproductive liberty on the Biden-Harris team.

Readers sometimes send emails suggesting that Joe Biden replace Kamala Harris by appointing her to the Supreme Court or to serve as Attorney General in Biden’s next administration. When I question readers about their desire for a different vice presidential candidate, some say Harris is not “likable.” That (mis-)impression is an unfair hangover from her appearances on a debate stage with sixteen other Democratic candidates in 2020. Watch the video above if you still labor under that misapprehension.

Other readers say (wrongly) that Harris is not “ready” to be president if called upon to replace Biden. As I tell readers who raise that concern, she has more experience than did the following presidents when they began their first term: Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter, John F. Kennedy, Donald Trump, George W. Bush, and Ronald Reagan. She has comparable experience to George H.W. Bush when he was elected president.

Biden and Harris are a formidable team. That fact will become increasingly apparent when Trump picks a V.P. candidate from a rogue’s gallery of sycophants willing to debase themselves by serving as running mate to an insurrectionist, coup-plotting, extortionist, document-stealing sexual abuser.

[Robert B. Hubbell Newsletter]

#women's rights #human rights #totalitarianism #Robert B. Hubbell #Robert B. Hubbell Newletter #Kamala Harris #women #reproductive rights