US Politics, September 2024 -- “I’m Not Going to Apologize For Posting a Joke”

That's how the magic happens.

Loomer and Taylor Greene perhaps

what tailspin? their serene confidence in the Trump's genius and the power of Almighty God would not permit them to question his eventual victory over Satan and his worldly servants

apparently that golf course abuts a warehouse district thats notorious for scam business

Trump owned?

The warehouses I mean. We all know he’s not owned!

theyre not owned by him afaic, heres the video i watched about it, sorry if the guy is annoying its not my fault

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Te4_sWIMy4

And now it's this?

The NY Post article was apparently changed to the following:

"Initial reports suggested two people were firing at each other. However, sources said investigators now believe the Secret Service agent was the only shooter."

Shooting at...who?

A cat, it was lunchtime.

it sounds like it might have actually been another attempt!

they have a backpack and gun. someone fled the scene. cops detained someone at a traffic stop.

AK style gun.

In three minutes it will turn out it was a falling acorn

now they are saying secret service detained them? oh who knows. we shall see. if the deep state wants us to....

as long as it's just lone crazies, I'm fine with an Attempt of the Week. If it's anyone the media can peg as a 'liberal' then it crosses over into territory that can easily be exploited for shifting the election in Trump's direction. ofc, if they succeed, then we're all left with a lump of Vance-shaped putty and a very volatile national mood.

A 40-car Harris-Walz caravan drove past my bookstore a few minutes ago. Encouraging!

-23 wow. he's nearly in JD Vance territory

Favorable Polling:

Harris:
Favorable: 47%
Unfavorable: 44%
Net: +3%

Trump:
Unfavorable: 58%
Favorable: 35%
Net: -23%

Ipsos / Sep 13, 2024 / n=3276 pic.twitter.com/WfO6bG7siG

— Polling USA (@USA_Polling) September 15, 2024

it sounds like it might have actually been another attempt!

― scott seward, Sunday, September 15, 2024 2:30 PM (fifty-nine minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

who cares, game's on

This is a very interesting essay about media bias in a way we don't usually think of it.

I am going to start from my experience of something I might call a black mental hole. Some subjects simply cannot be comprehended by some people. They may be able to read the words and even parrot some ideas, but then the ideas drain out of their heads, beyond the event horizon. It is not a denial of those ideas or argument against them. It comes before those mental processes. The subject simply does not exist in their universe.

This is not confined to women’s issues. It happens with issues of racism and colonialism. Sometimes all three at once.

...

The pattern showed up again recently when the push started to remove President Joe Biden as candidate. There was a black hole in the discussion: the Vice President of the United States, the person who had appeared on primary ballots with Joe Biden, the person designated to take his place if he could not serve as president. In particular, one Kamala Harris, a woman of Black and Indian parentage. She was not part of many of those calculations.

A great many of those advocating Biden’s removal proposed an “open primary” or a convoluted method for finding a replacement candidate: three party elders, two convention votes, and a partridge in a pear tree. The black hole bent all the discussion around it.

Nobody was jumping up and down shouting “Kamala Harris must go!” She just wasn’t there at all. Fortunately, there was pushback, and, over a few days or a week, the event horizon began to dissolve, climaxed by Joe Biden’s definitive resignation and endorsement statements.

Similarly... Harris outlined her plan to defeat Trump in the debate ahead of time, but a great many didn’t notice. I’ll argue it’s because of the woman/ Indian/ Black – induced black hole that swallowed her words before they reached their minds.

We’ll see it again. But my sense, in bringing it up indirectly over the past few weeks, is that these mental black holes are becoming more visible.

that was very hard to read and very confusing.

just that excerpt was. i didn't click the link.

"She was not part of many of those calculations."

if this means she wasn't talked about as a substitute for biden she totally was. all through that agonizing "drop-out-joe" thing. lots of people thought she was the obvious choice.

I think there is something to be said that she is consistently underestimated or dismissed because of her identity.

I often agree with her but that column doesn't make sense

"A great many of those advocating Biden’s removal proposed an “open primary”"

most people didn't want this at all. just some yahoos on twitter who enjoy fantasy football and that one guy who wanted it to be like american idol. they were mostly ignored.

"I think there is something to be said that she is consistently underestimated or dismissed because of her identity."

women often are. and women of color even more so. it also didn't help that she was out of sight for most of biden's presidency! you would have really had to search for her to find her on the news or in newspapers.

I think it was more nobody really knew how this was gonna work, people here figured out pretty quick that the only workable successor was gonna be her

I have to admit that it is extremely funny that someone wrote a column talking about the blind spot vortex people of color often find themselves in and the overarching response here is a bunch of (mostly) white guys going “I don’t see it”

it also didn't help that she was out of sight for most of biden's presidency! you would have really had to search for her to find her on the news or in newspapers.

And part of Rofer's argument is that she was invisible because of who she was (the vice president, also black, also a woman), so there could not possibly have been any news value in reporting on what she was doing — traveling to Central and South American countries to get their leaders to help stem the tide of immigration, which worked (apparently she wrote a long report which no one in the media ever read or told anyone about); going to Ukraine to warn Zelensky that Russia was planning to invade; etc., etc. She's been invisible this entire time because the media is designed to render people like her invisible, so all of a sudden everyone is forced to ask, "Who is this person and how did she get good at this?"

Harris was mainly in the new the last few years for making statements that sounded simultaneously inane and surreal.

I have to admit that it is extremely funny that someone wrote a column talking about the blind spot vortex people of color often find themselves in and the overarching response here is a bunch of (mostly) white guys going “I don’t see it”

I can't even count the number of times I've seen it happen to you (and I may well have been part of that in the past), so yeah.

I'm contesting Rofer's point that a open convention was the received wisdom. She's right about the media-enforced invisibility.

"I have to admit that it is extremely funny that someone wrote a column talking about the blind spot vortex people of color often find themselves in and the overarching response here is a bunch of (mostly) white guys going “I don’t see it”

i couldn't tell what was going on in that excerpt. it was written really poorly. a black mental hole could have been lots of things.

and this just made it more confusing to me:

"This is not confined to women’s issues. It happens with issues of racism and colonialism."

so i read further. and someone was saying that kamala harris wasn't seen as a replacement for joe biden. which isn't true.

also this is totally vague.

"Similarly... Harris outlined her plan to defeat Trump in the debate ahead of time, but a great many didn’t notice."

i dunno. i just hate bad writing that is confusing as well as bad. but, to be fair, i didn't read the whole thing. just the excerpt. and i didn't read the rest because the excerpt was bad.

A great many of those advocating Biden’s removal proposed an “open primary” or a convoluted method for finding a replacement candidate: three party elders, two convention votes, and a partridge in a pear tree. The black hole bent all the discussion around it.

These statements apply very poorly the discussions here on the ILX US politics threads during the period post-debate-debacle. The "oh how shall we ever pick a replacement" handwringing and suggestions of some kind of speed-dating game with possible successors hand-picked by the party elders were roundly dismissed as pure nonsense. I was among those who pointed out that Harris was standing right there as VP and was the only viable choice, so what was their problem?

If the point of the thinkpiece is that such suggestions never should have arisen among our mostly old white male political class and such obvious idiocy they only made them sound out of touch with reality, then, sure thing. That idea is bread-and-butter around these parts.

Just for the record, this is the current narrative regarding today's guy-who-pointed-a-gun-at-Trump incident:

The unnamed suspect was hiding in shrubbery along the golf course’s fence line running parallel to a main road and armed with an AK-47 style rifle and scope. He was estimated to be between 300 and 500 yards from Trump, who was out on the course playing golf with Secret Service protection. “With a rifle with a scope like that, that’s not a lot of difference,” said Palm Beach County Sheriff Ric Bradshaw.

A Secret Service agent positioned at least one hole ahead of Trump spotted the barrel of the rifle sticking through the fence and fired at least four shots in the gunman’s direction. The gunman fled, leaving behind a backpack containing plates for body armor and a GoPro camera that authorities believed he intended to use during the attempted assassination.

As the gunman ran, an eyewitness saw him get into a car and took a photo of the license plate that was sent to authorities, according to Bradshaw. License plate readers on I-95 detected the vehicle driving northwest into another county where sheriff’s deputies stopped the vehicle and apprehended the suspect. Bradshaw said the suspect did not make statements about the attack on Trump.

xp I think the point is that there were lots of "serious thinkers" who started their analysis from the assumption that no clear favorite existed, when in fact the decision to pass over the sitting vice-president for that role would be an extraordinary occurrence that requires a seriously thoughtful explanation.

otm

clearly the people who wanted someone or something else werent the ones actually making the decision

btw people getting awful close to trump with big guns

wonder if this guy saw what the other guy did and was all i could make that shot

Tied with Gerald Ford now.

mans at home golfing instead of campaigning and people are still trying to shoot him, rude

Probably one of Loomer’s exes.

btw people getting awful close to trump with big guns

The best way for him to avoid this would be for him to leave the US and never come back. Just a suggestion...

interesting point, almost has to be that theres widespread belief amongst the maga set that loomer and trump are having an affair

Eric Blair @protecttruth.bsky.social‬
Ok. I’m starting to wonder if there is something bigger under the surface going on with Laura Loomer.

Republicans did not react this way to Pizzagate, or Chris Rufo, or S Miller. They love racism and conspiracy theories.
So why are craven GOP pols like Tillis reacting like this?

https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:vklsm2d67fx7pirahnp2qd2m/bafkreiasqm5y6pzdk5l4ssjdv275aihm5rmsmgeuzv6ybbfzevrlccdmjm@jpeg

https://bsky.app/profile/protecttruth.bsky.social/post/3l44lk2d5e62d

Twitter rumor is the shooter is a Vivek/haley voter lmao

damn i didnt know it was that serious

She's been invisible this entire time because the media is designed to render people like her invisible

no doubt that is true to some extent, but it is also true that the Biden administration failed to elevate her profile and give her opportunities to succeed (as Ron Klain himself admitted), and Harris herself also deliberately avoided the spotlight for a while after her disastrous interview with Lester Holt in 2021.

Thom Tillis knows he has a clear path to criticize Loomer, who's peripheral and expendable, as long as he doesn't breathe a word directly criticizing Trump. This is a politically expedient way for him to distance himself from the less popular kinds of lunacy Trump has welcomed into the party.