US Politics, May 2020 — I will never lie to you. You have my word on that.

May they go full Heaven's Gate as soon as humanly possible.

When I was younger, like high school and early college, I was super into learning about conspiracy theories. Not believing them, mind you, just learning about them. Because back then they all seemed so fringe and laughably stupid that is was sorta fascinating to read about them as some sort of societal study or something. But watching brains melt in real time and how the goalposts for the QAn0n believers just keep constantly shifting to new lows, I realize how terrifying they actually are.

It's like this never-ending cycle of:

1) Ridiculous claim easily debunked
2) "Oh that's what they want you to think because..." another easily debunked batshit claim
3) "Well they had to cover up that because..." yet another easily debunked batshit claim
and on and on and on

Like is Hilary in prison? Already executed and replaced with a clone? But that clone was kidnapped by Trump's secret police so a second clone is actually making her public appearances?

Every once in a while in the 80s-90s you might find yourself next to a LaRoucher on an airplane or encounter someone with a card table on a street corner imploring the sheeple to WAKE UP.

The difference is now these things travel around the world in an instant, and are endorsed by a very weird, very dumb person who (through a perfect storm of demographic flukes) has blundered into immense power.

I think it was reading The Illuminatus Trilogy at an impressionable young age, but I used to always approach people like that with a detached bemusement, someone with a funny story. But, somewhere around the jet fuel melts steel it stopped being funny and just keeps getting worse with each passing year.

There's a line in Neil Simon's "Rumors" where one of the characters is trying to explain to a cop why two gunshots were heard and where the party host and his wife are. And he makes up this fantastical bullshit story in a long monologue.

The cop then says "I buy it. I buy it because I like it.", accepting the horseshit story while also indicating he doesn't actually believe it happened.

That's conspiracy theory folk in a nutshell.

JESUS FUCKING CHRIST

https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/499128-biden-tells-charlamagne-tha-god-if-you-dont-support-me-then-you-aint-black

Break or change whatever rules you have to, get us another nominee

mentioned in the Biden thread. Astounding that it was necessary (as it often is itt) that he had to clarify he wasn't talking about Trump, he was talking about his own community

just gonna get a toothy smile and "I'm not Trump" for the next five months

Might as well be if he's gonna say things like that.

At this point I think the DNC is just trolling us to see how low they can go while still getting our vote. Like some twisted experiment in how close to the line of actually losing mass amounts of votes they can get without crossing it.

that was kind of a typical dumb thing for biden to say (and I didn't listen to the interview) but reading the interview this seems like the kind of interview that is frankly...good for Biden. like someone actually asking him directly about shit and letting him answer. Most of his answers here don't seem completely shitty.

xpost

I hate to say this but shit like that is probably a net vote winner. Just like his whole "You don't agree with me? Don't vote for me" thing. It's very easy to sell stuff like that as "Joe's not pandering - he's for what he's for, and if you don't like it you can kick rocks!" to the fabled "low-information voter."

terrific if it didn't somehow also speak to problems with his worldview, but you know, who cares about that

Also that shit doesn’t work for Democrats like it does for Republicans. The rules are different.

Democrats can’t win without turning out constituencies that are maybe not comfortable with an old white man yelling at them.

He’s one missed pull from telling people to pull up their pants.

Pill.

If we know one thing about Joe Biden, it is that he will say or do something jaw-droppingly embarrassing at irregular intervals, but averaging more than once a month. That is Joe. If he becomes president, this pattern will not change.

i mean, look at his record

Oh yay

https://www.wcax.com/content/news/China-focus-on-jobs-fighting-virus-as-layoffs-sweep-globe-570686091.html

Obviously he has no legal authority to do it, but we know what will happen.

1) Trump-friendly Governors, most will do what he says

2) Those who refuse, he'll threaten to withhold Federal funds

3) Lawsuits will probably filed in reaction to this Quid Pro sequel, to block withholding of funds

4) Hundreds of churches if not more reopen.

I fucking hate this man, this country. If only these assholes would just be killing themselves and not other people

One thing I did on this beautiful #EarthDay is read Ed Markey's seminal climate legislation, Waxman-Markey.

(JK it is 185302598475 pages)

But here is a fun fact. One word NOT included in said seminal climate legislation:

Justice.

— Emily Kaufman (@emilybrowne) April 22, 2020

Reincarnate Lee Harvey Oswald

"I tested very positively in a — in another sense. So this morning, yeah — I tested positively toward negative, right? So, no, I tested perfectly this morning. Meaning — meaning I tested negative. But that’s a way of saying it: Positively toward the negative."

https://youtu.be/Vah-601KJzg

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/22/opinion/coronavirus-senate-unemployment.html

Lawmakers need to start thinking beyond the near term. One obvious way to drive economic recovery while looking to the future: a major infrastructure package.

Shoring up roads and bridges, updating lead-riddled water systems, investing in broadband and renewable energy — the United States has a nearly limitless number of projects that need to be addressed. (Parts of Central Michigan are underwater right now, and 10,000 people have been evacuated, following two catastrophic dam failures.) Interest rates are low, and workers are readily available. The government can ease the nation’s pain by spending while the private sector is convalescing.

President Trump has long expressed an openness to infrastructure investment. Some Republican lawmakers are sounding similarly inclined. “I want to do infrastructure,” Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina told CNN this week, noting that he’d told the president this “really is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to give a face-lift to the country.”

what America needs right now more than anything is infrastructure week

not sure what to make of comparing fixing vital infrastructure to cosmetic surgery, feels telling

give our highways some breast implants while you're at it

Give unemployment a little lipo

Unfortunately, the way that metaphor would actually work is trimming the fat from entitlements to give the military a bigger butt

Kayleigh McEnany, who provided this thread title--caught the tail end of the briefing yesterday (I thought they'd stopped doing them altogether). She is totally Sean Spicer Part II. Besides goading the room, she's condescending as fuck.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qnAbeCGNPe4

"Perhaps if I write them out in a slide format--maybe we're visual learners."

you could write it in cuneiform and it wouldn't change the stupidity of what yr saying, Kayleigh

i can't fucking deal with that, had to turn off at 5 minutes, she enrages me

i know why Infrastructure Week is a running joke. it's the trump admin's fallback "this is the serious thing we're working on" item when they need to distract. however, it must be said: it's really, really sad that Infrastructure Week hasn't actually taken place, 3 and a half years into the trump admin. at this point it's worth pushing it to a democratic administration so that the infrastructure can be Green Infrastructure, as much as possible (especially upgrading the grid). but they really could and should have done something years ago. it's sad

if the republicans really cared about governing i think they could have pushed this through during the first couple years of the admin. i think they'd easily be able to pick off enough democratic votes to pass it in a technically "bipartisan" way, too. oh well.

Green New Deal is the Democrats' version of Infrastructure Week, but a little better focused and much more seriously intended.

yep, and it's going to run into a steamroll of opposition, too, sadly. i am gearing up for a couple years of agony (but also progress) for what's likely to happen in 2021-22 under the administration of the most inspirational leader of the 21st century, joe biden. i am guessing that if the green new deal can get some momentum (and it fucking better - it has to) it will be a war on the level of the obamacare wars of 2009-2010. it will be agonizing.

I honestly try to avoid hearing about the progress of The Wall, but I understand it is continuing and costing lots of $$ (corruptly of course). I don't need to say this to you guys, but obviously infrastructure talk was always a lie to win votes and nothing more. Contradicting myself and giving a hateful prick the benefit of the doubt, but I assume Graham called it a "face-lift" to find some new way to appeal to trump's pathetically limited preoccupations

i'm not sure i'm following what you're saying. you mean "infrastructure week" is just code for "build the wall", and people like graham get that but they can't convince trump and other top officials to actually put in the work to pass legislation on it?

when i'm talking about infrastructure, i mean actual infrastructure. i assume graham and trump and his whole universe of fucking pricks are talking about the most possibly racist version of infrastructure that they can possibly imagine, because that's what they do with every policy area. that's their thing. but there's still a very overwhelming case for actual infrastructure that should be obvious to all of congress. the grid needs a massive upgrade everywhere in the country, not just in liberal enclaves

sorry Karl, I wasn't really directly responding to your posts. I was incoherently reacting to two things:
1) This line in the NYT article: "President Trump has long expressed an openness to infrastructure investment," which strikes me as naive. I'd say "infrastructure week" was code for "vote for me" and "I am the building guy who builds things" and not much else. It holds as much value as him screaming about how he brought jobs back to the USA. Building the wall is its own mythology, however...

2) The enraging fact that wall construction is continuing while the republicans tell us there's no money available for economic relief. ftr, I wholeheartedly agree that infrastructure spending is vitally necessary and that should be obvious to everyone. I still think about this chilling Dan Rather investigation I watched like a decade ago about how absolutely fucked all the bridges in america are.

come on, so millions of Americans will either go bankrupt or be relying on food banks to eat, and probably be forced to leave their homes when the moratorium on the evictions/foreclosures ends, and businesses are going under, clearly the best way to combat that is continuing to build a wall that will provide prosperity for all.

1. Build the wall
2. keep out foreigners
3. ???
4. profit!

2) The enraging fact that wall construction is continuing while the republicans tell us there's no money available for economic relief.

14 miles of new bollard fencing (WALL) has been constructed, at a cost of $3.26 billion.

Just a few thousand miles left!

Man even before pandemic I hadn't heard about the immigration "crisis" in quite awhile

Nobody wants to come here now because Covid-19.

With the possible exception of thousands of asylum-seekers from Central America forced back into Mexico to await hearings that the Trump administration is ensuring they will never get. Probably not so many Norwegians, Trump's favorite non-shithole-country immigrants, clamoring to get in right now.

xpost np rob, that makes sense!

XP Well, yeah.

In the early days of the pandemic, Dan Crenshaw and other water carriers/boot lickers were citing the new travel bans (and other immigration hurdles, like THE WALL) as ways to stop/contain the spread, but they've all since moved on to other talking points.

I HOPE ALL AFRICAN AMERICANS WILL READ AND STUDY THIS. 100% CORRECT. SLEEPY JOE WILL NEVER GET YOU THERE. HE NEVER HAS IN THE PAST. I WILL & HAVE!!! https://t.co/j15DLun4KV

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 24, 2020

They're reemerging from the slime pit of 2016: first, Kayleigh McEnany, now Katrina Pierson. Calling Jeffrey Lord.