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He could've "moved on" before he was 70 before mitläufer like Tuberville, Vance, Paul, Cruz, Lee, Scott and Hawley became the ones with the power on the GOP side of the Senate. Sure, his focus on gaining power and nothing else has led to a lot of short term gains but the lack of vision and message created an incoherent and craven caucus of backstabbers, grand standers and sycophants. His brazen strategy of voting against things just to harm Democrats, even if it harms Americans in return, made him a true piece of shit. Remember, McConnell doesn't hate Donald Trump because Trump is bad for America, he hates Donald Trump because Trump is bad for Republicans.

Pretty fluid poll that moves a lot and takes different things into account depending on the times. 100 years from now being assholes could be the norm and Trump could have the No. 1 spot.

The thing is, considering the current state of the GOP base, she's probably not wrong. It is truly something watching the party that produced Lincoln and T. Roosevelt turn willingly turn itself into the piggy bank for an unimaginative and stupid clown because they're scared that said clown's followers might get mad and cause them to lose a few seats for an election cycle.

They're just holding on to it until the general is under full swing. They aren't going to turn on Trump because he is going to let them do whatever they want to do. The billionaires who follow Accelerationism (i.e. Musk, Thiel, Zuckerberg, Andreessen) want Trump because they see him as a destructive force that will allow them to step in and rebuild America in their own image from his wreckage. These billionaires want to use treat actual human buildings and the world like it's their real-life game of Sim City. Trump's already bought into it with his "Freedom Cities" propositions. It sounds like a conspiracy theory, but remember Musk is pretty much a real life version of a Bond villain.

I try to avoid them, but it's been difficult since the pods I listen to on the way to work and on the way back home have constantly been talking about them. They ought to call MSNBC the Poll Channel now. We all know that even close to the election there's only going to be about six states that matter and within them it's going to come down to a few districts that are always close. Always sucks. I hope after the MAGA thing is over that the next gen lawmakers push reforms like a national popular vote for president (no plurality, of course, if no one gets 50%+1 there should be a runoff between the top two) and term limits for Supreme Court justices. Reforming those two things would hopefully provide for a much more stable and predictable system.

Sounds like it would be a good money laundering scheme honestly. I'd be interested to see how many of these were individual buyers purchasing multiple ugly ass shoes.

Kanye at this point is kind of a dumpster fire people walk by and say "ain't that something?" before moving on. I remember one of those libertarian types in 2020 telling me his candidacy was going to win over black voters and throw the tide of the election. We saw how that went. He's pretty much at this point the crazy uncle that comes down from the attic to rant at breakfast before heading down to the intersection to yell at passing cars till suppertime.

There's a disconnect between people who keep up with everything online and people who don't ... those that don't are the majority. They might hear something about Kanye's issues, but they aren't consuming a stream of it. To most people, he's just kind of a nut whose music they've been buying for years and short of being caught with a live boy or a dead girl they're probably going to keep buying it.

I'm kind of lost on the first paragraph but on the second, I doubt there is going to be a civil war. When the actual Civil War happened, you had the country divided into two drastically different economies, most of the federal agencies the people of states depend on now didn't exist, less mobility between different parts of the country and a lack of a solid uniting American identity at that point. Also, there were less than 15,000 men in the military in 1860, most of those stationed in the western frontier. With such a small military and many defectors, it's not surprising the South thought that they'd be done with things after a battle or two. I don't think they counted on the Union's ability to amass troops like they did nor did they expect Lincoln's administration to be so good at deterring foreign alliances and recognition for the south. We have a totally different situation today. We wouldn't have a civil war, we'd most likely have something akin to the Troubles in Ireland where terrorists attacked soft targets and conducted political assassinations at a local/regional level. Even that's a stretch since 99 percent of them are keyboard blowhards that would chicken out if they realized they could get a scratch ... kind of like Trump, who has a tendency to suck up whenever he realizes he's at a disadvantage. Also, neurodivergent people are susceptible to extremism since like religion, it offers them the chance to have a community by pretty much going along instead of having to navigate social situations which don't come naturally to them. One thing that is severely needed as part of special education programs is some sort of social therapy for neurodivergent kids. I know schools include them in pull-out classes now, but there needs to be a bit more than inclusion. They need to have an idea "why" you do things a certain way and, even if it's just objective, a way to read how other people feel.

First off, this garbage looking, bad tattoo wearing, stupid sounding, piss smelling, sex criminal idolizing dog shit of a person can go fuck himself. Second, this shit has been a talking point of the America Hating/Russian Idolizing right for the last few years under their "they're trying to make the military/public service sector woke!" bullshit. The opposite of what they're arguing has been shown to be true over and over again. You make public service and even national security work more accessible, you're able to widen your pool of candidates. There's people with cerebral palsy and on the spectrum that might have been overlooked for being experts if it weren't for programs to make things more accessible. Sure, they're not going to be on the frontlines disarming bombs by hand or driving convoys, but there's many that have skills that could prevent potential losses from afar as far as troops go. The far right under Trump has pretty much made it OK to hate and attack physical and neurological challenges. You'll notice they'll say dance around the "N" word and other slangs for race and sexuality, but they love using the R word every chance they get. Same vein, they want to say something shitty and they know that certain words are still taboo, so they just take advantage of the one that's still OK to most people even though the intent is pretty much the same as using the others.

Politico has written something about Trump's ability to pay the fines or even obtain a bond from a lender during the appeals process. I think this really explains a lot of shake up of the RNC: He installed his daughter-in-law and a dedicated suck-up. He doesn't care about the RNC's status as a nonprofit and he wants people in charge that don't care either. Like most things he's taken over, he's probably going to suck them dry and abandon them once his needs are served. If they become his personal piggy bank and lose their status, I think that'll pretty much be the end of the Republican Party. No political party can survive without a nonprofit status. So that means they'll dissolve and reform with a new name or they'll just break apart into separate parties like the Whigs and Democratic Republicans did in the 1840s.

I imagine the death parade for Putin will be very theatrical. Going by authoritarian leader deaths (Hoxha, Kim Jong Il, Niyazov) you'll probably see people lined up along the streets to outcry each other. Then there'll be a struggle for power and either Russia collapses further losing its grip on more republicans or becomes more authoritarian. Anyway, the Russians don't memorialize people who stood up to the USSR. They still memorialize Stalin looking back at him as if it were the good old days. I don't think they'll ever memorialize Navalny because Russians.

It's weird, the guy demands loyalty but never shows any in returns. It's not like people don't know this. He throws people under the bus over and over, abandons them over and over or turns on them over and over — that's his entire track record. And people still line up to kiss the ring. I know Republicans believe that it's worth the risk and debasement because they're so terrified of being primaried ... I'm just kind of bemused at the lack of shame.

I didn't watch it. I didn't need to hear Putin's boring History rant to tell me that his motivation is pretty much "We used to own everybody around us 200 years ago. Those were the good old days. I want to bring the good old days back." I'm more bothered by the line of Republicans and fringe media types that fall over themselves trying to tell us "America is the bad guy here." I'm not use to people debasing themselves like this outside the world of fiction.

Maybe he should've taken a trip about an hour and a half out of Moscow. He could've traveled back to 1905. There's a whole genre of travel videos on YouTube chronicling how shitty it is to live in Russia. If you don't die of alcoholism, you're dying of air/ground/water pollution. Kind of a modern Republican party paradise.

Air strikes don't win wars. The U.S. learned that in Iraq and Afghanistan. Just going in guns firing doesn't work either. The use of special forces in targeted strikes at leadership were much more effective. We know Israel already has the intelligence resources and ability to do these targeted assaults, there doesn't seem to be much of a reason not to use them. Hamas needs to be eliminated in order for Gazans to have the extent of outside relations like the West Banks. The current strategy now just seems like they're trying to kill ants with a blowtorch. Netanyahu for some reason has thinks that pissing away the good will of the rest of the world following 10/7 was a winning strategy. I guess he believes he needs to hang on for a few months and Trump will give him a blank check to expel the Gazans into Egypt, a country he probably thinks Trump and Saudi Arabia could bribe into accepting them.

Are polls really anything aside from filler for 24-hour news cycles now? It seems like every election since Nate Silver got a little attention polls are just pushing everything else out of the news. This is after they are shown to pretty inaccurate. Seriously, I've seen the margin of error go from -/+2% to -/+5% in the last couple of years. +/-5% is pretty much the range of every election since the 1980s.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jul/07/iberian-rewilding-project-aims-repopulate-empty-spain?CMP=oth_b-aplnews_d-1 Kind of related to the post about the cultured meat from the other day. That combined with many states losing population and lower birthrates overall makes me hopeful we can see something like this in the next few decades in the U.S.

https://www.politico.com/news/2023/07/05/desantis-trump-florida-2024-gop-primary-loyalty-00104819

Nobody was putting nukes in Ukraine with the intent of aiming them at Russia. Plus, considering Russia's aggression and it's past treatment of Ukraine (the Holodomor jumps to mind) gives it reason to seek both defensive arms and alliances like other former Soviet States like the Baltics and Poland. Anyway, what's your case that "Putin was right"?

From what I heard discussed on the news, it's not a room that public tourist groups would go through. It's a room a lot of people go through though if they've got business with someone in the White House. Even without the random tourists, it's still a lot of people from what they said. Doubt they were there to see Biden, he wasn't even there at the time.

Not the end of the world, but if you're on a road trip, you may want to buy a road map just in case GPS frazzles for a day. https://www.space.com/sun-coronal-mass-ejection-double-punch-july-2023

So, you really got nothing. Anyway, if anything, the Iraq War probably made Americans too restrained when it came to acting abroad. Kind of weird you're pointing at Syria considering that the mission against ISIS and protecting the Kurds was pretty successful until Trump decided to pull out because of his transactional politics that did not take into account the situation they'd be left with, causing one of our most consistent allies in the last 30 years to lose faith in us. You're also distorting facts by claiming the US "led Ukraine into war" overlooking the fact that Russia was the one who invaded without provocation, something they've been doing to Ukraine since 2014. No one is trying to start a war with China. China has been the aggressor in the South China Sea and Taiwan, an island that has been operating on its own for at least three generations and as a democracy since the 80s. Taiwan saw what happened to Hong Kong, they don't want that to happen to them. You're trying to throw up a lot of "what about" strawmen, but you can't seem to get to what you're trying to actually say, which is "Putin was right." I'm pretty sure the reason is that you can't actually support that argument.

They've been lobbying pretty hard, particularly during the Trump years. It's been pretty similar to their battle with plant-based meat alternatives. Here's a couple of links about it: https://thespoon.tech/traditional-meat-producers-lobby-trump-over-cultured-meat/ https://newrepublic.com/article/171709/inside-battle-big-ag-lab-grown-meat

I guess his logic is "they used to be part of the same state that doesn't exist anymore" and "a huge part of the country speaks Russian" I guess the same logic would make an invasion of Canada by the US OK in his book because we both used to belong to England and and a huge swath of it speaks English.