US Politics, June 2020 — You have to dominate.

i don't think the debates are going to happen in the usual audience format

Would be a sea of red hats, crammed shoulder-to-shoulder (provided its was in a smaller sized venue) if they did.

new debate format: debate participants, moderators, and observers should all lock together in a giant rugby-style scrum, slowly shuffling like a broken amoeba with trump and biden in the very center, trying to raise their heads up every once in a while to get air

lmaoooooooo

BREAKING: Reddit bans "The_Donald" forum in a sweeping overhaul of its hate speech and harassment policieshttps://t.co/UQKAbpbMVZ

— rat king (@MikeIsaac) June 29, 2020

Guaranteeing the potency of their self-image as embattled martrys for years to come. Not that there was a better choice though, I don’t think.

i'm still not sure what happens to trump and his troll army (like The_Donald and 8chan) after the election, assuming he loses. they might go in different directions, or the trolls might follow him.

one school of thought is that that trump will be very happy to lose and go away and concentrate on being a bad businessman instead. if that's the case, i suppose his trolls will go follow some other idiot. but i don't see trump voluntarily walking away from tens of thousands of racists that worship him.

it seems more likely to me that that in his post-presidency period he and his followers will settle nicely into their natural role, which is being on the outside of government, throwing bombs in every direction.

Trump's disapproval rating is at 55.6 among RV/LV polls, according to FiveThirtyEight. It's the highest in 2.5 years https://t.co/85ZK8iNafA

— Nate Cohn (@Nate_Cohn) June 29, 2020

i don't want to fall into the pre-2016 trap of thinking that trump hanging around would be "good" politically for the democrats, but it does seem like if he sticks around and keeps some followers, they are likely to subtract votes from whatever Compassionate Conservative movement emerges from the wreckage. i don't think president nikki haley or whatever will actually be a good person, but they are likely to at least try to make gestures in the direction of not being racist pieces of shit 100% of the time, which would enrage the trolls and elderly white people.

all of that would be a good thing electorally for democrats, but it seems like a bad thing for the country if the only sizable 3rd party-esque movement in years is dedicated to racist trolls

fucking forums only taking action when his numbers tank and the end is in sight. Years of them supporting that bullshit. FB the worst offender, obv

i'm still not sure what happens to trump and his troll army (like The_Donald and 8chan) after the election, assuming he loses. they might go in different directions, or the trolls might follow him.

Paywalled, unfortunately.

Primed by Trump, militias gear up for ‘stolen’ US election

With the president weaponising fears of electoral fraud, armed groups are becoming increasingly paranoidhttps://t.co/6MkrMalOH8

— JJ MacNab (@jjmacnab) June 29, 2020

increasingly paranoid and withdrawn, you say?

No it isn't, no you aren't, yes they do, no they don't, good, and no it isn't https://t.co/NJHrh91mIm

— Paul Blest (@pblest) June 29, 2020

i don't know exactly who is on my top ten shit list, but i know matt gaetz is on it

and he will never contract COVID

The sheer number of users who would simply not be exposed to this stuff if it weren't on facebook (because they don't know how a computer/any other social network) is amazing.

reddit banning the_donald makes no difference to anything but their advertising team. facebook doing something would actually change the world (which is why they won't).

you know what's cooler than changing the world?

making another billion dollars

I learned that after earning my next billion

yeah, it's one of those things you just have to go yourself through to figure out

the irony is that these fuckers, after earning their unnumbered billions, finally retire, only to set up some philanthropic foundation named after themselves, where they can fiddle away their remaining days pretending they are trying to change the world for the better. because what can you do with billions of dollars besides treat the world like your plaything?

I wouldn't know about that. Say, I have mentioned where my workplace is?

https://zuckerbergsanfranciscogeneral.org/

do I still get a taco truck on every corner in Biden's America?

it's impressive that every sentence in that matt gaetz tweet is factually incorrect, but it kind of doesn't matter because the first four words are also wrong. it's not joe biden's america. trump is the president! to the extent you're worried about this stuff, it's on him!

the irony is that these fuckers, after earning their unnumbered billions, finally retire, only to set up some philanthropic foundation named after themselves, where they can fiddle away their remaining days pretending they are trying to change the world for the better. because what can you do with billions of dollars besides treat the world like your plaything?

Apparently, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is having some trouble giving its money away:

Facebook’s controversies have caused some potential partners to question if they are willing to be associated with CZI. A few scientists who receive funding from CZI have told the philanthropy in recent weeks that they are reexamining if they still want to work with CZI going forward, one source said.

Color of Change, a racial justice group that has been sharply critical of Facebook, turned down a $2 million grant offer last year, according to sources, who said the group effectively saw it as “dirty money” because it came from Facebook. Color of Change declined to comment.

Other groups that have paused at CZI offers include some public school systems, some of which were skittish about using its flagship education initiative: a personalized learning platform called Summit. Some school leaders have told CZI officials they have concerns about the tech because of Facebook’s missteps in handling its users’ data privacy, according to sources.

i don't want to get too tea leafy but CZI is kinds of a menacing combination of letters isnt it

i've posted this before but it's very good https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/plutocrats-at-work-how-big-philanthropy-undermines-democracy

because what can you do with billions of dollars besides treat the world like your plaything?

Why wait to retire?

Feb 17: Bezos pledges https://www.npr.org/2020/02/17/806720144/jeff-bezos-pledges-10-billion-to-fight-climate-change-planets-biggest-threat0 billion to "fight climate change," is criticised in some quarters (a car with me in it) for creating a slush fund and tax write-off with no actual plan, in order to forestall growing internal activism from Amazon employees

June 26: Bezos takes decisive, productive action by renaming the hockey arena near Amazon's office Climate Pledge Arena

oops

that hockey arena is gonna be leed certified zero emissions! we're halfway home!

well, it'll "strive to" be

I like the idea but honestly I prefer Lemon

That Dissent piece is very interesting

The tax dodge of pouring the bulk of your estate into a charitable foundation in order to escape inheritance taxes was conceived and instated during the brief period when the early progressive movement had strong momentum, anti-trust legislation passed, and the progressive income tax was born. The big charitable foundations were a rearguard action designed to keep large fortunes intact and use them to wield political influence under the guise of charity. The important thing was that the money and influence were kept away from public/democratic control and confined to a few board members.

this is good praxis

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/house-democrats-push-through-first-bill-in-a-decade-expanding-affordable-care-act/2020/06/29/350d3046-ba0f-11ea-8cf5-9c1b8d7f84c6_story.html

FAKE NEWS

https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/29/politics/trump-phone-calls-national-security-concerns/index.html

(CNN)In hundreds of highly classified phone calls with foreign heads of state, President Donald Trump was so consistently unprepared for discussion of serious issues, so often outplayed in his conversations with powerful leaders like Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkish President Recep Erdogan, and so abusive to leaders of America's principal allies, that the calls helped convince some senior US officials -- including his former secretaries of state and defense, two national security advisers and his longest-serving chief of staff -- that the President himself posed a danger to the national security of the United States, according to White House and intelligence officials intimately familiar with the contents of the conversations.

now that's a sentence!

as always though, i don't quite understand how his former secretaries of state and defense, two national security advisers and his longest-serving chief of staff all thought he was a danger to national security, but never took any steps to remove him from office

Here's a fun bit from that piece:

In separate interviews, two high-level administration officials familiar with most of the Trump-Putin calls said the President naively elevated Russia -- a second-rate totalitarian state with less than 4% of the world's GDP -- and its authoritarian leader almost to parity with the United States and its President by undermining the tougher, more realistic view of Russia expressed by the US Congress, American intelligence agencies and the long-standing post-war policy consensus of the US and its European allies. "He (Trump) gives away the advantage that was hard won in the Cold War," said one of the officials -- in part by "giving Putin and Russia a legitimacy they never had," the official said. "He's given Russia a lifeline -- because there is no doubt that they're a declining power ... He's playing with something he doesn't understand and he's giving them power that they would use (aggressively)."

"The President's a menace. Something has to be done! By someone else, of course, I don't want 3 am calls from the NRA and the Evangelicals"

According to one high-level source, there are also existing summaries and conversation-readouts of the President's discussions with Erdogan that might reinforce Bolton's allegations against Trump in the so-called "Halkbank case," involving a major Turkish bank with suspected ties to Erdogan and his family. That source said the matter was raised in more than one telephone conversation between Erdogan and Trump.

Bolton wrote in his book that in December 2018, at Erdogan's urging, Trump offered to interfere in an investigation by then-US Attorney for the Southern District of New York Geoffrey Berman into the Turkish bank, which was accused of violating US sanctions on Iran.

xpost to a few days ago, the discussion over whether or not trump is aware of who the US Attorney for SDNY is. he's definitely very aware of whoever the lead federal prosecutor is for the area where he has, was, and is doing corrupt things.

where he was, is, and will be doing corrupt things, i meant. i want to allow him that freedom to keep corrupting

d'oh, and i forgot the last paragraph of it:

"Trump then told Erdogan he would take care of things, explaining that the Southern District prosecutors were not his people, but were Obama people, a problem that would be fixed when they were replaced by his people," Bolton wrote. Berman's office eventually brought an indictment against the bank in October 2019 for fraud, money laundering and other offenses related to participation in a multibillion-dollar scheme to evade the US sanctions on Iran. On June 20, Trump fired Berman -- whose office is also investigating Rudy Giuliani, the President's personal lawyer -- after the prosecutor refused to resign at Attorney General William Barr's direction.

I'm convinced, we should definitely get this guy out of office. To whom do I address my letter?

damn, didn't realize this was a carl bernstein joint. it really is like an extended, article-length bitch slap, it's pretty amazing

i guess if there is any substance to rumors that GOP operatives are talking about dumping trump, they might attempt to use the Trump Transcripts as the triggering event

One person familiar with almost all the conversations with the leaders of Russia, Turkey, Canada, Australia and western Europe described the calls cumulatively as 'abominations' so grievous to US national security interests that if members of Congress heard from witnesses to the actual conversations or read the texts and contemporaneous notes, even many senior Republican members would no longer be able to retain confidence in the President.

...In addition to rough, voice-generated software transcription, almost all of Trump's telephone conversations with Putin, Erdogan and leaders of the western alliance were supplemented and documented by extensive contemporaneous note-taking (and, often, summaries) prepared by Fiona Hill, deputy assistant to the President and senior NSC director for Europe and Russia until her resignation last year. Hill listened to most of the President's calls with Putin, Erdogan and the European leaders, according to her closed-door testimony before the House Intelligence Committee last November.

...Elements of that testimony by Hill, if re-examined by Congressional investigators, might provide a detailed road-map of the President's extensively-documented conversations, the sources said. White House and intelligence officials familiar with the voice-generated transcriptions and underlying documents agreed that their contents could be devastating to the President's standing with members of the Congress of both parties -- and the public -- if revealed in great detail. (There is little doubt that Trump would invoke executive privilege to keep the conversations private. However, some former officials with detailed knowledge of many of the conversations might be willing to testify about them, sources said.)

Trump himself is, curiously, like a walking/talking Kennedy assassination plot: if so many people know all this stuff, have seen this first-hand, including who knows how many people in other countries, allies and enemies alike, then how have all of these people, surely hundreds of them, managed to stay quiet about this for so long? Though the story about the calls, I could have sworn that's old news. Honestly, this stuff is all so insane that they could just rerun the same news stories years later and I would be just as shocked.

he just tweeted this

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Ebs9G-PWAAIYaIJ?format=jpg&name=medium

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/zUoT5AxFpRs/maxresdefault.jpg

(he didn't tweet the second picture)

They stay quiet because they are either pleased as punch this is happening, actively looking for an angle to cash in on it, or both.

Including leaders and their people around the world? Why aren't they leaking? Or are they?

Like, the more that comes out, every single day, the worse he looks, so if someone likes making him look bad, why not make him look worse?

Why would they leak what? The stories like this that have been leaking since he first got ahold of a secure oval office phone line?

i think the underlying motive of the article, the motivation of the "senior officials" who talked to bernstein, is to get democrats to open up an congressional investigation and subpoena the transcripts, which he'd claim executive privilege on, leading to testimony by at least one of them.

why now? after all this? those transcripts have been there since day 1.