US Politics, July 2024 - "Will you just drop out, man?"

Thanks, Felicity. My mood is super dark right now and that made me lol.

Dark Brandon vs. Darkness Closing In Brandon

Now with added Immunity™

xxxp yes, K Hive

They polled Michelle

https://www.ipsos.com/sites/default/files/inline-images/graphic%201%20jpeg_5.jpg

Gavin Newsom is slime but he's politically astute, he's gonna stay out of this mess and bide his time

Harris / Obama ftw, she could resign after 6 months and go back to her life. who cares. or VP Barack

RFK Jr. looks like a shrunken apple head

No idea how the people around Biden thought they were going to keep all of this quiet through a campaign season.

One of the depressing things about last week was realizing the aviator shades were a pretty good way of keeping us seeing what we wanted to see. Not that Trump doesn't have a dozen layers of disguise.

xxp Barack is ineligible to be VP, he has to be able to assume the Presidency

Come on, haven't we all wanted to test what the 22nd amendment means by what 'elected' means in "No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice"?

trump will certainly test that if he wins and is still alive in 2028

SCOTUS will find the 22nd amendment unconstitutional on the basis of its conflict with the supreme power of the unitary executive. He needs no election and cannot be term limited. He is and has always been.

"term limits" are for suckers, let's get rid of this whole four year thing and replace it with "until he gets the job done"

I know I was saying that death-of-democracy talk hasn't really fired up many people, but it seems like Project 2025 is getting some traction as a threat. It's handy in having a scary-sounding and easy-to-remember name.

Project 2025 is not a game, it’s white Christian nationalism. It is the Sharia Law of the “Christian” crazy people who aren’t Christian at all but want to control every aspect of your life through their narrow and exclusionary interpretation of Christ’s egalitarian, inclusive,… https://t.co/F1sdIpkovi

— Mark Ruffalo (@MarkRuffalo) July 1, 2024

Rark Muffalo!

Project 2525 is made from people!

Already knew RFK jnr was beyond awful, but didn't know just how awful:

Mary found Robert’s diaries. In the back pages were lists of women with whom Robert had had flings. The book elaborates: “He ranked them from one to ten, as if he were a teenager. Ten, Mary knew, was for full-on intercourse. ‘My lust demons,’ he wrote, were his greatest failing.

“He used the word ‘mugged’ a lot – women who, he wrote, just came up to him on the street and said, How about it? If they had sex, he considered himself mugged, a passive victim of aggressive women.

“There were so many – astronomical numbers, Mary said, and she knew a lot of them: The celebrated actress who came to their house and went on vacations with her family. The older model who was always around. The socialite whose husband was one of Bobby’s good friends. A gorgeous royal. The wife of a very famous man. A lawyer. A doctor. An environmental activist. All these beautiful, accomplished women. How could Mary compete?”

Mary became distraught, weeping and drinking and struggling to get out of bed, the book says. Robert tried to forcibly hospitalise her, telling her that she would be “better off dead”. Callahan interviewed Mary’s therapist, Sheenah Hankin. When Robert asked for Mary to be diagnosed as mentally ill, Hankin refused, telling him: “Your wife isn’t mentally ill. She is angry and depressed, but she is not ill.”

Robert began dating the actor Cheryl Hines, who played Larry David’s wife on Curb Your Enthusiasm. He cut off Mary’s credit card and access to cash. Broke, she had to ask other mothers for an extra $20 so she could buy petrol and groceries.

Finally, she hanged herself at home. The book recounts how Mary had put on her yoga clothes and sandals, and walked out to her barn. “When she was found that afternoon, Mary’s fingers were stuck inside the rope around her neck. She had changed her mind. She had tried to save herself.”

Mary’s siblings insisted that her depression had been a direct result of her husband’s cheating and neglect, his threats to take the children and leave her with nothing, “bringing the full weight of the Kennedy family to bear against her”.

Robert, however, portrayed Mary to the world as a disconsolate alcoholic. In his eulogy, he took no responsibility for the anguish that his adultery had caused her. He said: “I know I did everything I could to help her.”

https://www.theguardian.com/books/article/2024/jul/02/maureen-callahan-kennedy-family-women

xp
i wondered why heritage and conservatives were being so open with their administrative fascism plans, because why not just keep it under wraps and unveil it when it's time to end the republic once and for all? but right now it seems like another cruel game, because it works for them on both sides of reality. on one side, they use it to enflame trump voters that their man has a plan to root out the deep state whatever and replace them with loyal henchmen. then, after the election, they can deny everything, enact the plan differently, pull a few different levers (barf on me for typing that) and hold back on 1 or 2 of the most wretched things, and mock anyone who opposed them for believing in the project 2025 conspiracy theory.(in fall 2029, propublica will publish a brilliant exposé showing how project 2025 was implemented in plain sight in 2025)

also you can see how so much of the world is engulfed in authoritarian states and conspiracy theories - some of them are true, some of them aren't, but almost everything is plausible because the people in charge demonstrably don't care about the wellbeing of normal people

it still pisses me off so much that Trump got a really bad case of Covid and likely would've died a painful death had lifesaving drugs not been invented just in time to save his life

― frogbs, Tuesday, July 2, 2024 6:20 PM (three hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

dirty secret of medicine is that the very best medical therapies we have for anything reduce mortality by at most 20-25%, early covid being no exception

can't we just bioengineer a virus that is only lethal to him

I mean his DNA is probably 75% Big Mac by now

President Biden tomorrow is having lunch with Vice President Harris, and will be meeting in the Roosevelt Room at 6:30pm with Democratic governors.

— Matt Viser (@mviser) July 3, 2024

JUST IN: Governor Gavin Newsom is heading to DC tomorrow to meet with President Biden and other democratic governors.

— Daniela Pardo (@danielapardotv) July 3, 2024

just run six people for President as one hybrid Prez

all hail hydra

agree Mr Shandling

I was out for four or five hours earlier today; felt like 2008 or 2016, wondering what news I'd come back to. Guess nothing much has changed.

I thought that congressman bailing was important because I assume that's something someone--not a Joe Manchin, but a party regular--does with some risk in terms of campaign support from the DNC. I thought he'd only speak up if he'd already sounded out other people beforehand. But I didn't know he's 77; maybe he's not running this year, and that's not a consideration.

I don't know, those kinds of things are always coordinated to some degree. He's obviously not the only one who thinks that, but having a fellow septuagenarian be the first one helps protect against the appearance of some ageist conspiracy against the throne.

The call to DC, hmm. Either the plan is to have them all give him their full public support like in some yakuza movie, or ... anything other than that would be interesting (and possibly not as depressing).

lol "fellow septuagenarian," if only.

fellow old guy, I mean

Newsom walks out of the West Wing missing a pinky

tbh I thought the "Biden should step down" story wouldn't last more than a couple days, it does seem like there are some legs

Feel like this clip of Raskin is revealing. He's obviously in a position to know what's going on. He evades the question about whether he agrees with Doggett — which is to say, he doesn't disagree — and instead talks about "massive unity" after things that are "happening very fast."

That doesn't exactly sound like circling the wagons around Joe.

.@RepRaskin on the Democratic ticket: "I know this is a moving target. It's got to happen quickly. But I can guarantee you—there will be massive unity and focus on that task when we get to the end of this process. And it's happening very quickly." pic.twitter.com/vXqLd4DMNz

— All In with Chris Hayes (@allinwithchris) July 3, 2024

jesus fucking christ. this is the org that gave Trump his Supreme Court picks

Heritage Foundation president celebrates Supreme Court presidential immunity ruling: "We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be" https://t.co/ndMJlNlUKH

— Media Matters (@mmfa) July 3, 2024

wow @ that Raskin quote, that's the exact language you hear from NFL teams who are about to bench their starting quarterback

He truly thinks we’re fucking idiots

https://deadline.com/2024/07/biden-debate-trump-travel-schedule-1236000406/

Isn't that just acknowledging that he's too old? Hope there aren't any global emergencies when he hasn't had a nap.

Can't see Biden surviving this. On top of everything else, there's now four days' (and counting) worth of soundbites of what seems like half the party coming at him, from all directions, that would be hard to explain away down the road; they'd be running non-stop all through October on cable news, in commercials, etc. (I know: Trump says anything that pops into his head without consequence.)

Starting to lean that way as well. At first I thought they'd ride it out, after all everyone thinks he''s in this condition already anyway how much does it really matter if it's eventually become true or not. But momentum is a powerful thing, and if that starts to fall on the side of twist rather than double down and stick, will be difficult to turn around

Having said that, Democrats often exist in a limbo state of indecision, uncertainty, and procrastination, which means there might not be enough momentum in any particular direction, the worst of both worlds

'intelligence sources' and campaign hacks (probably mad about getting blamed) have also started leaking about Biden - the former that he's seemed loopy in intelligence briefings for more than a year, the latter that his debate prep started at lunch and left him time for an afternoon nap

Dropping out is bad ("hey, sorry Americans, he's not competent to run the country and we've been protecting him for a while now hoping you didn't notice - ooopsie!") and staying in is worse once the leaks and intraparty criticism have started, don't know where Democrats could find a silver lining here.

Staying in and doubling down, and dropping out with sudden issue are both exponentially better than the current worst of both worlds strategy which appears to be staying in while talking about how it would be better not to.

Pick a lane! The indecision is far worse than either path

pic.twitter.com/sG8QBHe1d7

— MAGGIE マギー 🕊️ 📿 (@MaggieAustenx) July 2, 2024

I’m all in

The first woke toddler

I have a dweam...

The question is more who doesn't agree with Congressman Doggett. The sooner the better.

NY Times playing a pretty dangerous game here trying to push him out

They played some pretty dangerous games in 2016 too iirc

“Pick a lane! The indecision is far worse than either path”

This is the thing.

The NY Times became Bush II’s free propaganda machine for America’s genocide in Iraq and Afghanistan, so you know they’re always on the right side