Oh sure - as long as they know they aren't getting shot back at ever, they're all in. I said as much.

Noted Cyber Expert Rudy Giuliani.

Seriously, we somehow have to prevent boomers from using the internet.

Outside of cities, yes. I am from a rural, but union area. It was always a blue district, but has been trending more “conservative”. I use quotes because they pretty much gobble up the Democratic economic message, but balk at gun control and they buy into a lot of the liberal stereotypes that RWNJs have ginned up. They’ll throw the baby out with the bath water over a single issue like guns.

People like to hunt or just go shooting on the weekend. It’s a hobby and interest to many. I’m progressive, but even I cringe listening to some liberal talk radio shows when they know nothing about guns or gun laws. You hear stuff like, “We need to ban all AK-15s and full auto machine guns” and it tells you they know nothing about it. Imagine you’re an outdoorsman and you hear that. You may be opposed to semi-automatic assualt rifles yourself, but hearing that you start to wonder if leaders can draw the line and differentiate between different types of weapons or if they’ll just lump everything together and call it a day.

Gun control is an issue that I don’t give a **** about so I’m not here to debate it.

We had an assault weapons ban that worked pretty well. It's not like this is an unsolvable problem.

Man, Rudy is dumb as hell. Those US attorney jobs are plum appointments used to justify later promotions. They need to raise the bar so hacks like Christie, Giuliani, and Whitacker don't make the cut. Right now republican USAs are the B-team they would be too embarrassed to appoint to judgeships.

https://twitter.com/ScottMStedman/st...21812401762304

Cohen and Flynn are the good guys in this story?

This story sucks. Flynn should've gotten jail time. Weed = prison, trying to kidnap someone and have them shipped to turkey = nothing, that whole epstein ****=nothing. This country justice system and all these lawyers blow.

I don't know that GHWB is better than Trump, let's see obstruction of justice multiple times (check, including pardoning a dude so he didn't go to trial on iran contra). Made up **** to justify going to war in Iraq (oh you thought his kid was the only one who did that?) setup a fake drug thing as justification for boosting the war on drugs. The Willie Horton racist as **** ad.

Like for republican presidents, it looks like Trump right now is better than all of them since Nixon. Sure you might complain of the embarrassment on a daily basis part, but in real overall impact? R's keep acting like Trump is special but that all IS republican.

Holy balls at all these people acting like he was a good person, good people don't say good things about not good people, they don't, they don't call GHWB a patriot when he was only a republican patriot.

Flynn hasn't been sentenced yet, and he cooperated early and the prosecutors held up their end of the deal.

Ultimately, the judge controls sentencing. The guidelines used to be mandatory, but that was ruled unconstitutional. Some judges really don't like high public officials committing crimes. I hope the judge gives him 6 months, which is the maximum that can be expected, or at least three for some "lock him up" yucks. Still, the sentence will be at the judge's discretion and Muller is recommending probation.

Legal system is a total disgrace.

If you are poor and can’t make bail, you sit in jail until your trial, often a year or more, and it makes sense to plead guilty even f you didn’t do it because you’ll serve more time waiting for trial than pleading guilty. Often for total nonsense like drug possession.

Meanwhile Jeffrey Epstein ran a ****ing child sex trafficking and rape factory and does zero real time.

Get ****ed, America.

I have observed before that a plea bargain based 'justice' system is appalling for the poor and vulnerable (and even the ordinary) who are coerced into pleading, while being generally awesome for the rich and powerful.

Although it would be fantastic if it results in trump sitting in jail, that's a stunningly rare sort of event.

Yup he pardoned 6 people for IRan Contra, including that dude who was about to go to trial and likely implicate GHWB for his role in Iran Contra. If you think Trump's future pardons will destroy democracy, democracy was already dead.

chezlaw shut the **** up you don't understand what you're talking about

Just ask him if he enjoyed the football on Sunday.

Not sure who to vote for. I sort of feel like trump is gonna be too busy with this mueller stuff to fire anyone.

I am in no way “moved” by Bob Dole saluting a casket. I mean, maybe a little to get someone other than rich old white guys in charge of stuff. Flame away.

I don't think we should have any "former" presidents in the first place. Eliminate term limits, but if you lose re-election you should get catapulted into the ocean at the conclusion of your replacement's inauguration.

Also their cabinet and staff should be buried alive ldo.

The presidency should follow Danganronpa rules: you only get to leave if you murder someone in your cabinet and get away with it. This is how the SCOTUS works (you didn't think Scalia died of natural causes, did you? That Kennedy guy is crafty).

I did not. But it's just football which is there for an enjoyable type of pain and pleasure.

How anyone on the liberal/left can defend the travesty of the plea bargaining based 'justice' system like they have in the USA beggars belief. It causes real harm and suffering on an epic scale with a huge dollop of racism/etc. Unlike most people. It's indefensible.

Not even so sure about this. Sure -- lots of them are totally pussies and won't do it. And what I'm about to say is only very subtly different than what you are saying, but I think it's important.

But I'm going to suggest, again, that we are perhaps collectively losing sight of the right's almost explicit, gleeful political project going on here. They are almost completely transparent about this.

They think...:

1. a consortium of their political and tribal enemies -- blacks, Muslims, feminists, the left, liberals, Jews, etc. -- are actively working in concert to disempower them
2. a small subset of elites among their enemies have bought mass-buy-in for leftist political projects via the welfare state ("Democratic plantation! Once the welfare checks stop, be ready! They are recruiting an invading force of Mexicans!")
3. this system will inevitably come crashing due whatever random bull**** economic theories they picked up on YouTube, Reddit, Ron Paul newsletters or way worse
4. related, they in fact want the welfare state to come crashing down and are trying to make that happen
5. Donald Trump and other deplorable politicians and Republicans, now largely converging into one single unit, are their last and best hope to preserve their idealized white supremacist state

Remember the guns, the ammo, the act of very publically and proudly arming themselves and the hysterical fretting they do about their guns is effectively a semi bluff for whether #5 works or not. The guns work in either direction, either to intimidate and harass and shoot their opponents when Trump/Paul Ryan style politics start to really punitively harm the populations they're intended to harm and there's a backlash, or it fails and they're forced to resort to violence to preserve their desired social order.

It's trite, of course, but we should absolutely start seeing this kind of **** as pre-cursor for people ensconced in a fascist political movement, a veritable apocalyptic death cult planning for an end game. Put bluntly, they're not planning to return to a Trump status quo ante and their rhetoric and their actions are pretty transparently headed to a crisis point that they are almost desperate to bring about (e.g., preserve white supremacy and the accompanying backlash they know would come with it, or die trying). Again, this is not a prediction. It may be that the movement atrophies, it's certainly true these sentiments sort of always exist, it may be that things get better, not worse. Maybe we're right on the cusp of an economic boom and everyone will satisfy themselves with a little extra money for a time. Maybe external events like a foreign adversary will emerge and re-direct the blood lust. Maybe the global liberal order can forestall **** with edge tinkering until all these people die off.

Again, these are not predictions but simply that we should start taking these people and their rhetoric ("it's all going to ****, Donald Trump is the last and only hope for white vitality!") and their actions (buying lots of ****ing guns and waving them around at everyone) more seriously, and stop assuming they won't do it, that they're just scared to be fired back on. Maybe it's true now, or they've not so sure the ROI is there, but give it a few years to let the current political crisis play out. But give them credit for putting their plans together. They can't be clearer about the political project to dismantle the welfare state and preserve white supremacy and that together, that will produce a violent backlash and they're arming themselves for it. That's not like healthy behavior and I think we should stop assuming it's all LARPing cosplay and dick anxiety.

The Weekly Standard is broke.

WOMP WOMP

On a quick note, when Wisconsin Republicans passed their lame duck legislation to hamstring Democrat office holders when they come into office the Speaker said this.



Basically saying that the gerrymandered maps are morally correct because they compensate for the populations of Madison (read white liberals) and Milwaukee (read blacks). They even go so far as to say that if you took those cities out then Republicans would have an overwhelming majority. To Republicans, Democrats aren't a legitimate political party in the democratic order because they don't represent fully realized citizens aka white Evangelical people.

The thing is this was openly stated as part of the normal Republican Party's public statements. We focus on guns and what they mean in masculinity or the person's political feelings, but the impetus that pushes the specific response about guns and shooting their enemies because their enemies aren't truly human flows through every aspect of the Republican Party and the Conservative movement. On the Weeds they were talking about how asymmetrical this is politically, how Democrats love power sharing and having moderate opposing governors and hadn't stripped their powers away, while Republican trifectas are gutting positions when Democrats win them.

I'm sure a bunch of Democrats will start up a GoFundMe for it since it was the home of righteous NeverTrumpers.

Sure. Obviously. Put differently yet still, and there's about a thousand different heuristics to measure this, but you can see how plainly the right has morphed into segregation and dehumanization politics by their absolutely stridency on gun control. Reading about gun control say the 1960s and the passage of the Gun Control Act of 1968 is hugely instructive; it passed like 80-20 in the US Senate and the main opponents were sportsmen and hunters, and the NRA declared at the time it was amenable to the bill. Unthinkable now, totally because guns have become a core tenant of right wing philosophy and political agency. We should grapple with why.

That is to say, gun control solutions are appealing to people actively trying to live together peacefully with each other; revering guns as a political principle are for people consciously planning not to.

As best I can tell, liberals and a lot of the left are in just flat out denial about that simple fact, and the implications of this, about what people screaming "guns are fundamental to my freedom" are just so obviously saying.