“It’s a little too quiet” - US Politics February 2021

to caek's link: devil's army, sounds lit. where do I enlist?

Ned Raggett and David Grubbs liked
Mike Larsen
@MikeLarsenOH
Charles Manson carved a swastika in his forehead and his lawyers didn't quit.

Replying to
@MikeLarsenOH
Charles Manson never entered the Tate nor LaBianca house yet he went to jail. That’s an argument the prosecutors need to demonstrate in the senate impeachment. Well---

hmm. have all of donald trump's lawyers been accounted for?

Ronald W. Hughes (March 16, 1935 – c. November 1970) was an American attorney who represented Charles Manson. Hughes disappeared while on a camping trip during a ten-day recess from the Tate-LaBianca murder trial in November 1970. His body was found in March 1971, but his cause of death could not be determined. At least one Manson Family member has claimed that Hughes was murdered by the family in an act of retaliation. No one has been charged in connection with his death.

Being "disowned" by one's Dad's cousins seems like it would be a relatively painless experience, tbh. Their ownership stake was a pittance from the beginning.

Kinzinger is the only Congressional Republican who realizes he has bloodthirsty third-rate fascists around him who want him dead.

xpost

in retaliation, i am disowning Kinzinger's cousin

This is from the right of the party

Short thread on Biden's COVID relief plan vs. GOP Senators' plan:

Median income here in western PA is around 60K, meaning half our people make that or less. If you're in/close to that group, there's no question which COVID release proposal is better for you. (1/)

— Conor Lamb (@ConorLambPA) February 1, 2021

when all the GOP vote against COVID relief the Democrats can spend the next two years attacking them for it

wau, so has Biden grown a spine too?

Senate Republicans emerge from a 2 hour meeting with Biden at the White House, describe it as "productive," "cordial" and "excellent" and took zero questions from reporters.

— Alice Miranda Ollstein (@AliceOllstein) February 2, 2021

he drugged them

PSAKI statement following meeting with GOP senators, says BIDEN "will not slow down work on this urgent crisis response, and will not settle for a package that fails to meet the moment." pic.twitter.com/MO4XRaPWbi

— Eli Stokols (@EliStokols) February 2, 2021

god yes. the gerontocracy running the democratic party is dumb and bad and something i love to bitch about, but then they try to primary a pretty moderate but decent guy like Markey with the dampest, palest Kennedy and it's like No Please Not Like That

Which "they" are you talking about here? Pelosi endorsed Kennedy because she has ties to the family but Schumer and the DSCC endorsed Markey.

The entire race was incoherent and only happened because Kennedy thought MA owed him a Senate seat.

otm

Let the games continue

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/01/us/politics/mitch-mcconnell-marjorie-taylor-greene.html

Pelosi endorsed Kennedy because she has ties to the family but Schumer and the DSCC endorsed Markey.

yep fair enough i was letting Pelosi stand in for "Democrats". I thought there were more (and i know there were some more conservative House reps who backed Kennedy), but it looks like most of the senate stayed out of the fray or backed Markey? Except Sinema lol .

AOC is on IG Live right now if you forgot (like me)

Any news?

.@AOC is on IG Live rn walking through the events of Jan. 6 at the Capitol. And she revealed that she is a victim of sexual assault.

— Marlow Stern (@MarlowNYC) February 2, 2021

A coalition of 10 Republican senators took a stimulus counterproposal to the White House on Monday evening, urging President Biden to scale back his ambitions for a sweeping $1.9 trillion pandemic aid package in favor of a plan less than one-third the size that they argued could garner the bipartisan consensus the new president has said he is seeking.

After a two-hour closed-door meeting, Senator Susan Collins of Maine, the leader of the Republican group, said the discussion had been excellent, though “I wouldn’t say that we came together on a package tonight.” She said Mr. Biden and the senators had agreed to continue their talks.

The discussions took place as Democrats prepared to push forward on Mr. Biden’s plan with or without Republican backing, and as the president faced a test of whether he would opt to pursue a scaled-back measure that could fulfill his pledge to foster broad compromise, or use his majority in Congress to reach for a more robust relief effort enacted over stiff Republican opposition.

At the end of a lengthy statement hailing a “substantive and productive” meeting, Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, indicated that the president would not be giving much ground.

Mr. Biden reiterated, she said, “that he will not slow down work on this urgent crisis response, and will not settle for a package that fails to meet the moment.”

jesus at tweet-thread about AOC, particularly the Capitol Officer detail

Quite.

Meantime Ronan Farrow's latest about Bullhorn Lady...I just, some of the details in THIS one.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/a-pennsylvania-mothers-path-to-insurrection-capitol-riot

Just wait until you get to the part about her favorite book -- and the context.

omg u weren't kidding

Powell defended the use of the N-word, saying, “My favorite book is ‘Gone with the Wind,’ and it uses that term freely.”)

Aoc tonight feels like a big deal.

Very much so. What a nightmare.

I would not be surprised if -- if she chose to -- she ended up being a witness next week.

Wtf at that Officer not identifying himself and just repeatedly yelling “where is she”.

wait so they found Bullhorn Lady?

(reading that New Yorker article now, JFC)

xpost - yes and it wasn’t our second worst rep’s mother, not that it matters, still an execrable human being.

Heartbroken over AOC’s IG live thing. I knew it already, on some level, but we really were a razor’s edge away from something far more deadly that day.

she seems to be lobbying for leniency by doing that interview, cos she has to know she's getting caught by now.

Hey, I'm just an ordinary schlub of a working mom who eagerly joined a violent mob to storm the US Capitol Building in an attempt to overthrow the government. Who could blame me for that?

That article vividly illustrates just how responsible Facebook is for the rise of the alt-right.

Joan Donovan, a scholar of media manipulation and extremism, who serves as the research director of Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy, told me that Powell’s process of radicalization was increasingly common.

“You don’t have to go to the dark corners of the Web to find this any more,” she said. “Through these influencers, through these political propagandists, it’s all brought in through your news feed, through your home page.”

there’s a Twitter feed that lists the top ten link posts for U.S. Facebook every day (I’m thinking by interactions?) and lemme tell you, it is depressing.

typically stuffed with multiple Dan Bongino and Fox and Ben Shapiro posts. Maybe a Franklin Graham or a Breibart thrown in to mix it up a bit. :-/

Every few months I get unhealthily pissed off that some horny dork wanted to rate hot girls at his college and ended up warping the brains of hundreds of thousands of Americans, nearly destroying our country as a result.

I think my mother helped elucidate that point for me. She's never been all that political, but Trump pushed her over the edge and she started sharing pro-Biden and anti-Trump memes.

She started complaining that one old friend in particular was giving her trouble over these posts, but then began complaining that this same friend was posting outright insane conspiracy nonsense, much like our typical QAnon. This friend was someone who went to the same church as us when I was in high school, and she was a mundane, normal, friendly person who never really talked politics or anything of weight.

as far as we knew, she was still like that a few years ago, but now in just a short period of time, she's basically MTG-lite and harassing my mother on social media with QAnon bullshit.

Man, Kevin Lynn, I've had glancing experiences with his outfit. They operate I think four different anti-immigration advocacy groups, all dressed up like progressive causes (one is actually called Progressives for Immigration Reform). They're pretty creepy. That whole article, basically "yogurt yoga mom turned fascist stormtrooper," feels like just what you'd expect and mind-boggling at the same time.

FB died the moment everybody learned how to share links.

xxpost hell, one of my best friends is in a standing text message chat with his wife, his wife's sisters, and their husbands, and they usually just use it to talk about goings on in their lives, share pictures of their children, discuss the regular drama with their mother, share memes, etc....

and then one day they started sharing nutbar news articles from like Epoch Times and proclaiming SCOTUS was going was going to overturn the election, and my friend told them to take him off the thread if they were going to share shit like that.

of course, one of these couples featured his wife's younger sister and her husband, who used to watch their kids, but had guns in the house that weren't locked up in a safe, and my friend and his wife were furious when they found out. so when given the ultimatum to either get a safe or not watch their kids anymore, the husband told my friend's wife to "mind her fucking business".

it really sucks seeing friends I went to high school with that I have a lot of good memories of turn into fucking lunatics

The people I went to high school with were mostly small town racist assholes anyway, so that’s been no surprise. What’s been more heartbreaking has been watching some of my best friends from college turn from kind, smart and thoughtful people to hate filled garbage monsters.

what really irritates me about these people is they all have the same attitude of "you're all sheep, repeating whatever CNN tells you, while I am a free thinker who seeks out the truth and doesn't succumb to propaganda". first of all, the only time I ever watch CNN is at the gym or at the airport, and I haven't been able to go to either of those places for a year because of you dumb fuckers. secondly, LITERALLY EVERY SINGLE ONE OF YOU pushes the EXACT SAME misinformation at the EXACT SAME time, you have no original thought of your own. zero. fuck you.

Fairly glad to not be burdened with the acquaintance of more than 2 or so friends from high school at this point. We weren’t meant to remember these people!

^^^

Way back when I first joined Facebook I reconnected with a few high school people, but around the time of the Ferguson protests I was reminded of why that was a terrible idea and I’ve been mostly off it since.

Luckily all of my close friends that I kept in contact with turned out pretty alright, even if I have to side-eye a couple of them now and again. but I’m constantly shocked at how many of the vaguely hippie or “alternative” weed-smoking cool dudes and girls aged into full-on maniacs. I mean I shouldn’t be (people from a medium size Mississippi town entering their 40s), but damn.

I’m sure in their heads they “grew up” but it’s like nah fella the things you believe would make children who still think Santa is real roll their eyes.

Would it be likely that that doing your own research thing was a lure to bring people in. Looks like it's like a completing a simple maze gets you a reward Pavlovian thing only the research is heavily guided so it's going to lead you to a close proximity of conclusions.
But you will have this reward that you got there by yourself.
Is that like a classic con game. I leave you to draw your own conclusions but I'll just hide the strings that brought you to them. But there's another element to the end results not only had the con man bilked his mark but awoken something else that lay at least somewhat dormant. & that's now something that other people have to deal with.
But these marks now think they are enlightened by the process they've been through and not hoodwinked. So they're wondering why everybody else is in the dark.

I was thinking the other day on listening to a show talking about cryptids like the Sasquatch that there must be a major Venn overlap between people who believe in their existence and those who follow Qanon. & have the same feeling about outsiders, non believers and other infidels who don't swallow the lore wholesale.

Pretty lucky with my FB friends from high school, because most of us are decent people and in the event that a Trumpy GOP type kicks off, someone will inevitably point out that they remember the person’s various delinquencies as a teen or the way they never applied themselves in school. Another reason is that one of the most popular guys became a reportage photographer in Arizona, documenting chuds along the way, and challenges the large adult sons among us. One guy started trying to bang on about the crimes of Antifa on actual Holocaust Memorial Day and got told off by Jewish classmates.