The goddamn Trump Administration

But

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I don’t know. I just know I got extremely nervous when she started campaigning with Liz Cheney and promised to put a Republican in her Cabinet (probably Cheney).

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Yeah, I think that’s likely true… and I do wonder if that would have just pushed even more people to vote GOP…

Still… I’d very much prefer her in office right now.

Yeah, but how much sway does the VP actually have? I sort of feel like he got majorly side-lined during the campaign…

Yeah, me too… I mean, once… sure, fine. But she did bupkis to reach out to labor and leftists. She ignored the ongoing attacks on trans people and refused to entertain any change on the policy towards Israel-Palestine.

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Oh for sure. I’m just saying, I understand why some people would think she wasn’t going to help them. When people say Democrats are bad on messaging, this is part of it. Part of it is that they sometimes have the wrong message.

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Re, remembering a rosy childhood that was actually insulated;

One of our library regulars was an elderly Japanese Canadian woman who had been interned with her family during WWII, when she was a small child. She remembered it as a fairly idyllic time; playing outside with her sister and other children. As an adult she realised that her parents and the other adults shielded their children; probably went hungry, so the children wouldn’t, for example, but kept that from them. That’s an extreme case, of course, but it shows how kids often don’t understand what’s really going on around them.

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Yeah, I agree. I think the criticism that the Democratic party has a messaging issue is accurate. They also keep going after the mythical “centrist” rather than standing up for their values and rejecting the moral bankruptcy of the Republicans.

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Trump: Drugs are a national emergency, the tiniest amount crossing the borders is justification for the most outrageous foreign policy on any country I see as facilitating them.
Also Trump: People shouldn’t be in jail for facilitating the sales of drugs (and forged documents, and illegal weapons and child abuse material, and…)*.

It’s really time they prosecuted him for his half-dozen murder-for-hire plots… (the drug stuff was less complicated and already put him away for life, so they didn’t bother with that). Granted, he was incompetent and never managed to kill his target (the “assassins” just scammed him), but that hardly seems a defense.

*I do wonder if more drugs came through Silk Road into the US than came from Canada…

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There are two fundamental problems with that.

The first is that it captures the vast majority of Democrats (both voters and politicians) who aren’t doing those things. The majority of congressional, state, and local Democrats aren’t pushing centrist, aren’t throwing trans people under the bus, and absolutely are fighting this regime tooth-and-nail. So when you paint them with the same brush, you’re hindering them while they fight for us. So much for messaging…

The second is that actions speak louder than words. Harris was part of the Biden administration, and deserves full credit for their successes and failures. That includes successes in terms of working with labor, recovering the economy for the middle class, protecting the rights of minorities, etc. It also includes failures, the standout of which is enabling Israel in their genocide of Palestinians. Picking Walz as a running mate mattered. She could have picked a Likud-cheerleader like Shapiro. She could have picked a centrist like Beshear. Instead she consciously chose a progressive.

We need to stop treating Democratic politicians like a uniform block. And one thing I learned from Biden is to let someone’s actions speak rather than their words.

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Only about 43 lbs of fentanyl came from Canada (last year, I believe), and that’s less than my dog weighs, so I think the answer is probably “yes”. Or at least the means to make fentanyl, or other drugs.

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What are they going to do with them? Maybe pile them up in the courtyard and do a little pyro-based ceremony?

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“Almost everything he said…was utterly deluded.”

To be fair that’s pretty much every day.

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I suspect they will be quietly incinerated.

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The 381 books are listed here

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meanwhile, in front of the Murray Nelson government building:

LOTS of support from the passing cars on the US1 overseas highway, where traffic slowed to a crawl.
only four or five middle fingers, a few thumbs down, two Cyberdumpsters (that were roundly booed by the crowd), one coal roller and one dude yelling “doge! doge!” out the window.
way more supportive cheers, honks and waves.

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I was listening to Robert Reich today…

… and he mentioned wealth inequality. He said in the 1940s-50s the rich were taxed at 70%.

Now they are taxed at 40%. They bought :tangerine: :clown_face: and his second term in office. I am sure they are waiting for that ROI in the form of an even lower tax rate.

Fig 3 shows Piketty during a presentation.

Fig 4 shows the same data from the WTID independently plotted.

source:

see also, for more graphs and commentary:

Reagan (1980s) deregulated and started the re-enabling of corporate raiders, expanded tax loopholes for the wealthy (be they corporations or people), and pretty much re-started the war against the poor.

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Well, I guess that’s one way to stop other countries from “ripping us off”.

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FYI, Brad Sullivan was a devout Christian who had to mull over being featured in “Slap Shot”; he was a very lecherous wingman on the team. And Michael Moore may be a lot of things, but he’s correct when he predicts US-Canadian relations.

And I love Gus’s tag line: “Like I care!!” He also played one of the monks in “Sister Act II: Back in the Habit”.

Obv a would-be member of trump’s base here.

Here, I’m pretty sure he’d be a Bernie-Brother…

…but not one who should drive the van.

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