In their zeal for control over online speech, House Democrats are getting closer and closer to the constitutional line, if they have not already crossed it.
Google just pulled down a video this morning of an interview with Trump because it discussed election fraud. How many videos did they pull down over the past 4+ years which spread deliberate lies about the phony Russia collusion hoax again?
Forget the last four years. Now that we know, from all those declassified docuements, that the only "there" there was a suspected Russian spy feeding Hillary false smut about Trump, they're STILL allowing videos promoting the Trump-Russia collusion BS to stand.
And using Russia as cover to censor negative stories. e.g. claiming the Hunter Biden was Russian disinformation (without evidence) even when Biden camp did not deny the story
And where are the Republicans in all of this? Will they do something? No, they're jumping on board, probably wondering why they weren't the first think of such a great way to censor and control. We need a third party candidate. Trump wasn't the answer. He was too brash, too self-interested and too devisive. Bernie sold out immediately. We need an independant candidate that speaks for all Americans not in the elite bubble, with the bite of Trump but the charisma of Obama. The odds of that are almost nil, however. So where to go from here?
There was a time when it was the christian right pushing for censorship of movies, music, etc. which they found it offensive, while the Left (and especially the ACLU) were fighting for freedom of speech.
Both Republican and Democratic establishments have been pro-censorship when it suits them. I've been against censorship of any kind my entire life whether it's de-platforming Parler and other current censorship efforts but I was also an outspoken opponent of the Meese Commission and other far right efforts to restrict Porn and Sexual discussions in general, Tipper Gore and the PMRC (music labeling), and prosecution of Wikileaks.
The current climate is chilling, to say the least. I live in San Francisco and defending Trump's right to continue making his childish Tweets for the past 4 years was an extremely unpopular position. Still, I couldn't believe the number of well-educated people who thought that censoring the President of the United States (or any citizen) was acceptable. It's just very, very sad to me that we've come to this and young people, especially, seem alright with this.
I think anyone who has the "moral superiority", "better than thou" complex is also pro-censorship. Of course there are some super "fake" religious people who are part of this (if there is God, then he surely doesn't want these types of smug people). But the current left is dominated by these smug, condescending and patronizing people. Especially the elites who think they need to solve every single problem for the "unintelligent" poor plebs. Now a days, they are even exploiting identity politics for the same purpose. "If you don't post a black square on your IG, then you are a nazi".
It's amazing how quickly an anti-corporation left winger will pivot to, "they're a private company, they can do what they want."
Political censorship is just the preservation and consolidation of power.
And it works. The Media Research Center found that 4.6% of actual Biden voters they polled said that had they known about the Hunter Biden Laptop story and that there was anything to it, they wouldn't have voted for Biden. If you extrapolate that across the population (and yes, I know you can't necessarily do that, but still), Trump would have won with 289 electoral votes.
Because the story was suppressed on social media, there was no viewer pressure placed on mainstream news stations to report on it honestly, or even at all. They either ignored it altogether, or brought the usual suspects on to yet again invoke the "Russian disinformation campaign" narrative.
I also suspect that if people were generally aware of certain things China was doing from mid-January to the end of February 2020, the Biden family's ties to China and Biden's general position on China, would have lost him more than 4.6% of his votes.
But alas, that story never went viral. It got significant coverage on Fox and other right wing outlets, a few investigative reports in Australian newspapers, and the odd truncated page 8 piece in the US and Canada.
It never went particularly viral on social media, and the mainstream news channels didn't touch it, to my knowledge.
"childish Tweets" seems a little harsh (not to mention judgmental). Yes, Trump may have made some comments many viewed as disparaging, but above all else, his viewpoints and passion for America WERE HONEST. And when any person (much less a political figure) speaks truth to power, there is going to be some kind of blowback. I don't think we need "charisma" as a defining criteria for the next 'electable' Presidential candidate: we had that with Reagan, Bush Sr, Clinton and then Obama.......and the upshot of their administrations is exactly what has gotten us to this Dystopian state of the Nation.
I appreciate his honesty but it was the personal and disparaging attacks that bothered me. Being independent of the "Washington Establishment" and loving the country doesn't mean you have to lob personal attacks constantly. You need to respect people who disagree with you. I understand how badly he was attacked by much of the media and celebrities and that clearly got to him, but his personal and sometimes vindictive comments turned off many independent and moderate voters who otherwise might have really connected with his message and policies.
I want to be proud of my President and having him act like a teenager on social media doesn't give me that feeling. If he had just run his Tweets through one of his kids as a "filter" I think it would have been much, much better for him in the end.
The Vietnam war harkens back to when we actually had a free mainstream press, and consequently that war was ended and no new ones started until the turn of the century.
What about the first Gulf War, and other "minor skirmishes"? If you think that the U.S. government and military weren't "practicing" by carrying out warfare in defenseless countries, more or less secretly, between Vietnam and the turn of the century, you'd of course be quite mistaken. And what about sanctions and embargoes, which are an act of war. The U.S. carries those war crimes out constantly, and did on Iraq after the first Gulf War leading to over a million civilian Iraqi deaths up to the turn of the century.
A government such as the U.S. doesn't have to carry out outright warfare in order to exact what amounts to warfare against other countries, and the U.S. government and military do it all the time. In fact, it is neverending. They're carrying out sanctions against Iran, etc., right now, causing our so-called "enemy", Russia, to bring aid to them. In other words, Russia is rightly counteracting the war crimes of the U.S. government and military; but, to listen to U.S. mainstream media, you'd think Russia was Satan.
The neolibs, including the neocons (they're really one and the same, working in bipartisan tandem), don't care about rights, including and especially freedom of speech. They ARE government, the corporate-fascist, neo-"Nazi", "Fourth Reich" rulers of government, both nationally and globally, and when they believe censorship is "necessary", there will be censorship, particularly to continue to carry out their warfare against human life as a whole (except for their fellow-elitist corporate-fascists), including Americans.
Global domination, including of Americans and the other Western "free peoples", is what it's all about, and "eugenociding" as many people as they can along the way, however they can, through outright warfare and beyond, while obscenely profiting off all of it in the process. Look at the Covid pandemic, they've even obscenely profited off that as well, and purposely causing pandemics to bring about those ends is part of their warfare, too. Everyone except the corporate-fascist rulers and their minions is expendable.
That language is conspiratorial in nature and yet, it isn't altogether unreasonable. Five years ago, I would have said you were full of shit. But now, I have to consider the possibility that we lost this battle a long time ago.
Conspiracies are OF COURSE happening. But one of the biggest conspiracy theories ever, is the official story of what allegedly happened on 9/11 and who carried it out. When the "al CIAduh(!)"-, NSA- run U.S. government doesn't want the truth to get out about who really perpetrated what, and about what really happened, they issue an official story (fairy tale), often as the result of a whitewash commission report, such as the completely-repudiated lone-gunman theory of the JFK assassination, and the also completely-repudiated 19-hijackers-with-box-cutters (who couldn't even fly small planes correctly) supposedly carried out 9/11 theory. If anyone believes any of those commission report findings, they are washed-of(-true-and-truly-independent)-brains fools.
Some truth to this. Certainly popular opinion turned against escalation soon enough for LBJ to decide in 1968 NOT to run for re-election, and Nixon was wise enough to read the public opinion tea leaves and start the drawdown.
Hint: The current "occupier" reversed troop drawdowns, and is purging the military of Republicans. Scared yet? (Sorry to include the third question in the hint for the second.)
There is bipartisan agreement in DC to stay in Afghanistan, even though 59% of Americans oppose it and 73% of veterans support complete withdrawal. Presidents can start wars without congressional permission, but can't end wars
Afghanistan. But, though the second Iraq War was claimed to have been ended, it is really still going on (the U.S. military is still there, and we will probably never give up our billion-dollar permanent bases/staging areas there, including but not limited to the Green Zone---don't believe the government and their propaganda arm, the mainstream media (MSM).
Afghanistan? Is THAT what you call the War against the peanut gallery g_d damned Taliban? We can't defeat the fucking Taliban in 3 times it took us to save the world from REAL Totalitarianism?
I view it as a triangle where the left and right is fighting each other in 2 corners distracted away from the uniparty elites + corporations who are sitting back in the third corner and using the media to broadcast their propaganda to both corners.
A lot of scripts have been flipped in the last few decades. In the 60's, Republicans were the primary stokers of anti-Soviet hysteria, spreading fear of the "red menace" through unhinged right-wing propaganda. Today the fearmongering about Russia comes from the Democrats, albeit for different reasons. Another scenario that's been inverted is the idea that the Democratic Party is the home of the working class. That idea has slowly come unglued over the years and the Republicans now make the claim, rightly or wrongly. One thing's for certain: The Democrats don't even pretend to be the home of the working class any longer. If the Republican Party is that new home, they got it by default.
Don't even have to go back to the 60s. Remember when Obama told Romney in 2012 "The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because, the Cold War’s been over for 20 years.”
That was in 2012. 4 years before the ultimate Russia hysteria was started by Obama....
Yeah, and I sure hope in 20 years people with think back on what Democrats did as, "Russia, Russia, Russia! (we're not Statists) Russia, Russia, Russia!" In other words, I hope the people of then get it.
If the Republicans had won control of Congress and lost the presidential election, we'd have been hearing China, China, China! or Venezuela, Venezuela, Venezuela! for 4 years. LOL
The democrats at one time did represent the working class, and they supported unions, but they have been veering right for decades. Bill Clinton really swung the party to the right. However they cover their tracks with their support for BLM, and gay rights, and abortion, but as a party for the people they've been long gone.
Handing out occasional candy to this or that minority group, play divide and conquer in never ending atomization and pitting one against another beats actually improving the lot of vast majority of population hands down. The former only requires moderate investment is various NGOs, and the latter at least some redistribution of wealth. In other words - it is much cheaper to paint BLM in the pavement in front of Whole Foods, than Jeff Bezos to pay $15 per hour to the black / any color "associates" there.
Totally agree. One thing the news never conveys is that our government is corporately owned, and their interests are top priority to those the public elects into office. I don't know why more people have not caught on to that.
Let's have some examples other than a pipeline and federally funded border fence? Republicans are more responsible for NAFTA and other "free trade" agreements that have shipped American jobs overseas. Republicans are also more responsible for the policies our country implements in Central and South America - installing right-wing dictators and getting rid of democratically elected leftist leaders thus causing violence, destabilization and large groups of immigrants to come to the United States. Sure, the Democrats are often willing participants, but that doesn't mean that it's been primarily Republican, pro-corporate, anti-democracy policies that have hurt labor the most in the USA.
First of all, nobody ever called Joe Biden "pro-labor". Secondly in fact it has been Democrats who have introduced and tried to pass legislation that would help laborers.
Every Republican is pro-free-market in labor, which is the ONLY public policy that IS pro-labor. We laborers aren't stupid, and we aren't hive insects to be tossed some nectar by our betters.
"Bill Clinton was certainly a supporter of NAFTA who pushed approval through Congress. But it was negotiated and signed by President George H.W. Bush. (Here’s a photo.) Moreover, more Republicans than Democrats voted for the deal, as the trade pact was vehemently opposed by labor unions. One key ally for Clinton was then-House Minority Whip (and later House speaker) Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), who is said to be on Trump’s list of possible running mates.
NAFTA was a successor to a free-trade pact with Canada. Bush had viewed NAFTA as a political opportunity, an achievement for his reelection campaign. He initialed the deal on Aug. 12, 1992, before the GOP convention, and then formally signed it in December 1992, after he had lost the election to Clinton.
Clinton had supported the pact during the presidential campaign but said he wanted to negotiate side agreements with Mexico concerning enforcement of labor and environmental laws. He didn’t pursue ratification in Congress till after those agreements were reached in August 1993 — but the deals were denounced by labor and environmental groups as too weak.
So Clinton did not negotiate NAFTA, nor did he sign it. But he did put his political prestige on the line to get it approved by Congress — even as two top Democrats, House Majority Leader Richard Gephardt (Mo.) and House Majority Whip David Bonior (Mich.), opposed it. In the House, NAFTA passed 234-200; 132 Republicans and 102 Democrats voted in favor of it. The Senate approved NAFTA 61-38, with the backing of 34 Republicans and 27 Democrats."
Nope. That's just the narrative they have crammed down our throats for the past several decades. While it's true that Clinton sold labor out, it was done at the behest of the Republican Congress. NAFTA was a Bush era policy that Clinton signed after the Republicans (and some Democrats) passed.
Here's another NOPE. You can be pro-labor and still have regulations for pay, safety and other things in place as well as support collective bargaining. You would join a union in a heartbeat if there was one allowed to exist in whatever field you claim to be a laborer.
I love Glocks--the AK-47 of handguns. Simple, rugged and easy to use. You can clean and lube it with guacamole, and the damn thing STILL goes "bang" every time. Not saying how I know that.
You don't have to, but you are free to, and that's a good thing.
As for guns, I don't tell anyone whether I'm owning, let alone packing, and I'll return your rudeness if you ask me, but make no mistake: I don't need no 2nd amendment to have the right to bear arms, ever, or have you ever read the Declaration of Independence (That's independence from State in case you need it spelled out.)
What does that even mean? They always have fought for such. Find me an ACLU take on anything that goes against basic civil rights? Just because they aren't rabid 2nd Amendment barkers (that's the NRA's job apparently) doesn't mean they aren't fighting for civil liberties.
Plenty of recent (last decade) examples. An open mind would find them if it wanted to, so I'm not going to learn to type as fast as you just so I can open YOUR eyes.
Did you forge forget Tipper Gore, the spouse of Al Gore, founded Parents Music Resource Center back in the 1980's. They wanted to have the music business label content and believed government should enforce a rating system for music. I think Frank Zappa spoke in front of Congress against censorship. Both parties love power and want to control.
Yes and you're making the typical mistake that my Trump supporting family and friends make. Tipper was on the side of the religious right. Just like until the 60s the Democrats were mostly segregationist/racist (but still populist and pro-working class if you were white). Who cares what party Tipper Gore's husband was in? They are from Tennessee. C'mon....that's the south. Gore would have governed like a Nixon era Republican, but the partisan activist SCOTUS and the state of Florida stole the election for Bush. And by that point, Tipper had dropped the bullshit about music. I should know. I was a huge Slayer fan during junior high in the early 80s which was when right-leaning but "Democrat" Tipper Gore was doing her thing trying to have certain music censored. And guess what, there DID end up being labels and censorship, but Republicans including Trump (who at the time was a Democrat) were all in favor. https://www.stereogum.com/2092494/the-parental-advisory-sticker-debuted-30-years-ago-today/columns/sounding-board/
So what's your point other than to play a game of "bb...bbbb....but the DEMOCRATS did it too!"?
P.S. as with the media, the government rarely needs to censor content of any kind. Like I said in my other reply, those in the "journalism" and media game know the rules. No overt censorship necessary, except for the fact that there IS government censorship by way of CIA plants at the NYT, WaPo, and probably every major network. But it's the left pointing this out, not the right.
In that case we agree completely. I've been reading and commenting on Greenwald's articles since "Unclaimed Territory" and Salon and I am extremely worried about the massive influence that Silicon Valley (and Wall Street) in concert with the US gov't - which at this time happens to be Democrats, but was Republicans in the runup to the illegal Iraq invasion - have over our ability to communicate freely. It's a huge problem, but it's not one of which fake party happens to be in power or is pushing the next round of censorship. As I'm sure you know, no matter what "news" outlet one works for, one already knows from day one what kind of messaging and information is acceptable and what will cause one's career to stop in its tracks. That holds for Newsmax, Fox, MSNBC, CNN and any other - NYT, WaPo, etc.
And you're dead on right - there is no fundamental difference between the parties when it comes to 99% of life or death matters from abortion to war to sanctions to whatever. They are the Red and Blue factions of The War and Capitalism Party.
But something else happened that decade, largely in reaction to disco decadence and porno chic and the assorted liberation movements that accompanied it all. The Moral Majority, the right-wing merging of evangelical fundamentalism and free-market conservatism, reared its head at the sunset of the ’70s and grew to define the Republican party well into the 21st Century. With their increased power throughout the ’80s came church groups like the record-burning reactionaries the Peters Brothers and cop-mindset organizations like The Back In Control Training Center, which saw both the mainstream popularity of MTV-cosigned superstars and the underground subcultures of ’80s youth as grave threats to the moral fabric of America. Those might’ve been nothing more than a goofy bit of clueless backwards-chair-sitting efforts from conservative crusaders to protect the kids if it weren’t for Tipper Gore.
You deny that it was primarily Christian (right leaning) evangelicals who were leading the charge to censor/label music? As if Tipper Gore means fuq all, for all we know she could have been a Republican/DINO. She certainly seemed to find favor with the evangelical right now didn't she?
And how do they assert themselves? A; they try to please their voters, as it should be. Unless we're talking about the Democrat-lite Party. Then you just fool your voters again.
Well, "Won't be fooled again...." Not after DJT, anyway. The Who missed it by a few decades.
Ehhhhh, I dunno about that. As in "christian right" - I mean, the most famous "book burner" of recent memory was Tipper Gore. Oh, and Bill Clinton had his "Sister Souljah Moment".
Somehow, much like we have carried forward this "Republicans are all about Big Business" - which was probably true in the Eisenhower administration, we also seem to think that all Christians are Right-wing. I would think - even hope - that some Democrats are Christians.
Literally ZERO leftists with any type of platform are claiming divine retribution in Texas. In fact what happened here WAS a failure of GOP/conservative/corporate-primacy politics that have dominated the state for decades. Find me a bona fide leftist saying that this was "divine" intervention or that people deserved to suffer and die or admit you are just making stuff up.
GOP/conservative/corporate-primacy politics would have had several nuclear power stations up and running just in time for the MSM to keep ignoring Texas.
The GOP has controlled Texas state politics for decades now. We have our own independent grid and energy producers. Can we blame GOP politics for having some of the highest (if not THE highest) electricity costs in the continental United States, or are you going to tell us that the largely powerless Democrat minority somehow makes prices higher or that Joe Biden seeded the clouds and created a polar vortex to punish Texas for not joining one of the regional electrical interconnects? LOL
The feds and Democrats (and industry experts) had been warning about it for decades dating back to 1989, but because there is no real regulation in Texas, the emphasis was on producing expensive electricity (some of the most expensive in the country) and minimizing overhead like winterization.
Fact of the matter is that LNG plants made up 80% of the power failures because they were not winterized despite years of warnings from Texas House Democrats, federal regulators and energy industry analysts.
A federal report following a massive power outage in Texas in February 2011 stated that recommendations to winterize the system following a 1989 cold weather event were not mandatory, and implementation lapsed.
Sylvester Turner, a Texas state representative at the time, introduced a bill in 2011 which called for the Public Utility Commission to ensure the Electric Reliability Council of Texas had adequate reserve power to prevent blackout conditions. The bill failed to move forward.
It was the failure to winterize LNG after the 2011 freeze that caused ERCOT's grid to fail. There is a reason that El Paso in the west and Beaumont in the east were not subject to days-long blackouts. Wanna guess what that reason is?
Deism/theism is basically just an attribution of intentionality where it doesn't exist. "Mother Nature is angry and punishing America with hurricanes for electing a climate change denier," to paraphrase Jennifer Lawrence, smells a lot like an attribution of intentionality where it does not exist to me.
I've seen some weird, woo spirituality on the left, as well. Replace "god" with "the universe" and you end up with "The Secret".
Religion in whatever form “ie, god, universe, nationalism, self esteem” is all we have to remain sane. The insanity keeps the insanity at bay. Everyone else has already jumped off a bridge
I don't completely disagree. People need a schema to help them explain and describe existence so they can make predictions that are "good enough" to get by.
I can't tell you how many men have contacted me to tell me they were on the verge of suicide, or 9/10ths of the way to hating women, and that my videos made what they were experiencing make sense.
They felt better, even though their situations were the same as the day before. Someone was still pissing on their leg, but they were no longer buying into the lie that it's just raining. For them just hearing someone say, "yeah, that's not rain, it's actually society pissing on your leg, but there's probably not a lot you can do about it," was enough.
Well, it seems a significant, if not majority, of the human race needs an answer (or at least a guess) to currently objectively unanswerable questions. They should be free and respected to do so, as long as they don't infringe too much on my right to just say, "Gee, I'm not sure I believe that."
I think that is slowly changing in the right direction. In any case, this atheist (of the right, no less!) has found common ground with the religious, both of the right and the left, starting, but not limited to, freedom of religion (spiritual pursuits).
It's funny... I have more in common with believers than not. It's the posturing that drives me nuts. "God bless America." Want to get anywhere in politics? You have to be ready to say that.
No, you are just of the Sadist left, M. Pete Needham. You loved the suffering caused by Katrina, especially enjoying placing blame, erroneously but successfully, on a hapless Republican Rino POTUS. And you love the suffering in Texas today, especially because of religious people suffering.
We are in a 1st Amendment death spiral. Those in power only crave more power.. It is never enough to fairly govern. I am glad that Glenn is at least trying to say "the emperor is wearing no clothes." IMHO we have hit an inflection point that many of our citizens are okay with being told what to think.
I think the inflection point is going the other way. I think the people are becoming REAL woke. No human being is ever really ok with being told what to think.
Fuck social media - a million movements in history succeeded without a single social media post and with hostile press. Facebook can ban every republican and it will only motivate them. People will start printing flyers and gathering in homes.
The free spirit is strong with these two. What I expressed in mild terms, M. Drew Childress expresses with righteous fire, and M. Seth with firm resolve.
Facebook? No such dying chimera ever stood a chance!
The problem with a 3d party, at least historically, is that it splits the vote of whichever side of the political spectrum spawned it, ensuring victory for the other side. I, too, don’t care for Trump’s personal approach — my zeal for him was, in fact, not for him at all but for the principles he stood for — but I think it may take someone with the brass ones he has to stand up to the maelstrom that the left unleashes on anyone they view as a threat. When you play a blood sport, you’d better be made of pretty stout, even belligerent, stuff. See anyone in the current conservative field like that, besides Trump? Me neither.
I'm not so sure he had articulable principles--more like instincts, maybe? And he is damn sure a narcissist. But he unequivocally opposed the Post-Modern Intersectional Victimology Maoists and trolled their enablers on both sides of the aisle mercilessly, and he had some significant policy achievements that I doubt anyone else would have delivered. But mostly, he was an opportunity wasted, not that that was entirely his fault; there is plenty of blame to go around there. That said, I certainly do not regret my vote for him in 2020, and I'd vote for him again if the circumstances were right, but I think his moment as a candidate is passed. The Establishment has closed ranks against him, and to them it's personal now.
But since you pose the question, I personally can't think of anyone on the radar at this moment for whom it would not be a complete waste of time to vote. As Emperors go, Trump was--and hilariously, continues to be--an outstanding middle finger to the denizens of The Ruling Class and their propagandists. And that's not nothing.
While I am not a fan of Trump (for not pardoning Assange and Snowden), I also don't think he's a narcissist. Put aside the persona he's painted as when he's fighting with the politicians and the media, look at what he does when he's not around anyone. Before the 2016 elections, reddit (and people) used to praise Trump for how he treated them in person, even those who were regular people. Look at this post with 23k upvotes and over 10k comments (Post has since been deleted by reddit):
My major criticism of him is his poor hiring choices through out his presidency and then not firing them fast enough. He put too much trust in republicans who kept back stabbing him.
The next "Trump" needs to start by firing everyone he possibly can. Hell Biden is doing it in the military and no one care, that's the most frightening of all
Yep. Check out Calvin Coolidge. Reagan, if only he resisted amnesty. (We do need more immigration, but no cheaters should ever be rewarded. They make good Democrats, though.)
Does anyone doubt Tulsi could be as strong as Thatcher, if she would just leave the dark side instead of trying to save it from itself?
There's plenty of brass balls on the right today, thanks to DJT's lead. Have a little patience, and a little faith. No third party; we own the Republican voter now, and we will own the Republican Party soon. Pay attention, it could take awhile (in political 2-year cycle terms), but when it happens it will be like a bandwagon, with old-style Rinos (once known as Rockefeller Republicans, I could give you a list of names from 1910 on) from Bushes to Romneys to McConnells trying to jump on, but falling by the wayside. The future is Capitalist, not Socialist.
Replaced by Republicans, because they (Whigs) would not sign on to ending the abhorration of human slavery.
The Democats, on the other hand, never gave up their plantations. They have always been FOR human slavery of all kinds, both racial and the WORSE kind, that of the individual to the State.
Or Jim Crow? Or the KKK? Or segregation? Or for voting AGAINST the Civil Rights Act? Or attempting REAL court-packing?
Or the racist, misogynist, eugenicist, ivory-tower-elitist, lying bastard, "progressive," progressive WOAT woodrow wilson.
It's like some kind of statute of limitations has run out, or generational limit on human memory. It's maddening.
The best thing you can say about the Democrat Party over history is they sure are good at fooling the voter, much better than the pikers in the Democrat-lite Party, with their maddening bait and switch tactics over and over and over and.......
Minority 40 wins because the 30 and the 30 erroneously think the other is the bigger enemy than the 40.
Look, a parliamentary fragmentation system DOES work, just not, imo, as well.
Bottom line: VOTERS own political parties, not the other way around. 2016 was all it should have taken to prove this. DJT was a fluke. The dogcatcher would have won, because the VOTER reject the stupid Parties, and their insane control-freak forcing of HEREDITY in choosing POTUS.
We don't need or want no stinking political bloodlines, damn it! Let the voters decide if we will have more State (vote Dem) or less State (vote Rep). ANY 3rd, 4th, etc. Party destroys this essential voter education and realignment every two-four-eight years.
Also, 3rd parties DO have a place to play in re-alignments that occur over years (and multiple elections). Look at 1992. Bush said no new taxes. He lied (and Republican voters wanted more Reagan than he could EVER hope to be). That led to the little Texas dictator throwing the election to the womanizer-in-chief. The rest, as they say,...
i'm not american so i've been wondering how this would work in congres. i can see that you would lose the presidency (a bummer with all that executive action going down), but wouldn't conservatives and libertarians be able to form a coalition even on an issue by issue basis?
While I don't want Trump to run again (not pardoning Assange/Snowden broke the camels back for me), I do think if he does, he will destroy the Republican Party (good thing) if he starts a new party. I would say over 70% of the Republican voter base voted because of Trump, not because of Republican Party. Or he can at least use that as leverage to get the Republican Party to stop being useless cucks and actually start doing something instead of grandstanding.
That's why in the next 2-4 years Trumpites like me will be in charge of the Republican Party, and it's finally going to give Republican voters what they want.
You heard it here. That's my real name. Stand up fearlessly, and let's do this.
Things have to get worse, just to get better? Maybe. So what?
Just like Americans 200 years ago took an unjust, racist, paternal, flawed society and using the "perfection" tools (Declaration and it's Constitution) started the centuries long righteous endeavor to build a shining city of perfection on a hill, and just like Americans kept going, year after year, mistake after mistake, but correction here, injustice ended there, world saved again and again, just like Americans today......the same freedom loving blood runs through OUR veins.
We own our government, and we own whatever political party comes and goes. Stop the groveling AND the bemoaning and take back the Republican Party so Capitalism can continue kicking Socialism's butt. What are we, Capitalism 245, Socialism 0.
Hierarchy is useful and necessary. There are quite a number of basic recurring problems which cannot be solved by anything +other than+ hierarchy, which is why it reappears over and over again: without it, we would all be dead. There are also, however, a great number of serious problems +caused by+ hierarchy. That has been known for millennia and is hardly a secret. So, we will always have to build hierarchies. At the same time-- if we are smart-- we are also preparing to check them and occasionally tear them back down.
Reason I said "especially here in Canada" is because we dont do ANYTHING here without considering what the US is doing 😍. It is not because we want to see people hurt economically etc., its because then OUR system will disintegrate as well. Heaven forbid we grow a pair and "throw the whole lot out" 🙄
An Ontario MPP (Baber) introduced a Private Member's Bill called the "We're all in this together act". It would reduce the salaries of MPPs to what unemployed Canadians receive through CERB ($2000/month) until all the emergency COVID measures other than for hospitals and nursing homes are rescinded.
Not only did his bill fail to pass, another MPP, in retaliation, moved to decrease only Baber's salary in particular to the $2000/month. That passed with unanimous consent. I am not joking.
The motion was later deemed out of order, but the message was clear: We are not all in this together.
As a reluctant fan of Rob Ford, I'm VERY disappointed by his brother Doug.
Yes I know. That other MPP was actually the Government House Leader, Paul Calandra. Bully government since day one--no surprise at that "action". Note that the unanimous vote wasn't allowed to stand by the Speaker of the House.
We have never been in this together. It's just a slogan.
Barber has responded in a very human way. Call your representative and tell them how you feel about the Lockdown and how you are upset with the governments actions (or lack of).
Here is a beautiful quote:
"More importantly, with your help on social media we learned that we can and should STAND UP TO COVID BULLIES. They are hollow, cynical and often mean spirited. We are kind and gentle Canadians, so we will not allow any Covid Bully, to threaten or demean us or anyone else. This is a CULTURAL CHANGE from the last 11 months. We must bring empathy back. I therefore encourage all of you to peacefully and politely, not tolerate any further Covid bullying towards yourself or anyone else."
President Trump was NOT "self-interested". He got the best people to serve in his cabinet (sometimes having to fire his first choice, such as Secretary of State Tillerson) and listened to them. He attended the briefings by the virus task force and got the doctors a far larger audience than they would have gotten without him (as much as 10 million in late March!).
He was VERY friendly with everyone. Remember Salena Zito's articles in The Atlantic during the 2016 election. And his visit to the hospital in Pittsburgh after the attack on the synagogue (where he spent an hour with the Rabbi privately, and then visited each patient and stopped in the hallway to talk with staff members and thank them.
The only exception was the arrogant Democrats who continually attacked him with fake charges and automatic opposition to everything he proposed, and the Democrats in the press who were only interested in talking to their followers and not interested in listening to President Trump.
President Trump was "devisive" only because of the constant attacks on him made people who only followed the Democratic run media oppose him. He left the White House with a 51% approval rating.
I bet you can't name them, or know their record in the last four years, or am I wrong? I'm not saying you are right or wrong, just saying you sound like someone who believes anything Trump is just no good.
Rfhirsch sees the good in Trump, let it be, and I'm sure there is. I know someone who worked for Trump before he was president and for all the talk about his anti-female feelings she would say quite the opposite, that is, he treated the women who worked for him very well.
For all his expensive suits and silk ties, Trump talks more like the tradesmen I know than like an elite. I think that rubs a lot of people the wrong way.
My uncles, my dad and my dad's old apprentices talk like that (when they're not in mixed company), and they're all good people. The contractor I hired to grade my yard and put in fenceposts talks like that. He was great. Did excellent work, and when he miscalculated the estimate for the sod, he ate the cost overage.
I would suggest that his hot mic moment was less indicative of who he actually is around women than the several minutes of interaction with a gorgeous woman that followed.
Billy Bush encouraged her to hug Trump. He gave a perfunctory hug and a peck on the cheek, then reminded everyone he had a wife by dropping her name. Then Bush gives her a much more... enthusiastic hug.
After that, Trump was all business, until Bush again encouraged a flirtation. At that point, Trump was polite, allowed her to take his arm, and played along in a half-ass manner until Bush was out of the picture.
Looked to me like Bush was trying to make something happen, and Trump was just trying to avoid creating a scene or making the woman feel awkward.
I find it very strange how people were so fixated on the "locker room talk" that they were unable to see what followed in a remotely objective light. I make hyperbolic, off-color and ribald jokes all the time (in safe company), and it has no bearing on how I genuinely view and treat other people.
Given all of that, I don't doubt your acquaintance's assertion that Trump treats his female employees very well.
Google just pulled down a video this morning of an interview with Trump because it discussed election fraud. How many videos did they pull down over the past 4+ years which spread deliberate lies about the phony Russia collusion hoax again?
Forget the last four years. Now that we know, from all those declassified docuements, that the only "there" there was a suspected Russian spy feeding Hillary false smut about Trump, they're STILL allowing videos promoting the Trump-Russia collusion BS to stand.
And using Russia as cover to censor negative stories. e.g. claiming the Hunter Biden was Russian disinformation (without evidence) even when Biden camp did not deny the story
https://butseriously.substack.com/p/hunter-did-nothing-wrong-so-stop
Media / tech companies doing politicians' jobs for them in terms of disappearing negative stories is not good
Oh, didn't you get the new news?
It's "Russia, Russia, Russia" forever. Yeah, forever into a Red China sunset.
Apparently former CIA Director Woolsey has teamed up with some Romanian spook to make the case that Khrushchev ordered Oswald to assassinate JFK!
But seriously folks, the JFK kill shot which blew the back of his head out came from in FRONT of the limo, not from “The School Book Depository”.
The questions for me are, why the continued demonization of Russia? Why spread out and out lies about the assassination? And why NOW??
A whole new generation that must be propagandized?
Exactly
And where are the Republicans in all of this? Will they do something? No, they're jumping on board, probably wondering why they weren't the first think of such a great way to censor and control. We need a third party candidate. Trump wasn't the answer. He was too brash, too self-interested and too devisive. Bernie sold out immediately. We need an independant candidate that speaks for all Americans not in the elite bubble, with the bite of Trump but the charisma of Obama. The odds of that are almost nil, however. So where to go from here?
There was a time when it was the christian right pushing for censorship of movies, music, etc. which they found it offensive, while the Left (and especially the ACLU) were fighting for freedom of speech.
Talk about flipping the script.
Both Republican and Democratic establishments have been pro-censorship when it suits them. I've been against censorship of any kind my entire life whether it's de-platforming Parler and other current censorship efforts but I was also an outspoken opponent of the Meese Commission and other far right efforts to restrict Porn and Sexual discussions in general, Tipper Gore and the PMRC (music labeling), and prosecution of Wikileaks.
The current climate is chilling, to say the least. I live in San Francisco and defending Trump's right to continue making his childish Tweets for the past 4 years was an extremely unpopular position. Still, I couldn't believe the number of well-educated people who thought that censoring the President of the United States (or any citizen) was acceptable. It's just very, very sad to me that we've come to this and young people, especially, seem alright with this.
I think anyone who has the "moral superiority", "better than thou" complex is also pro-censorship. Of course there are some super "fake" religious people who are part of this (if there is God, then he surely doesn't want these types of smug people). But the current left is dominated by these smug, condescending and patronizing people. Especially the elites who think they need to solve every single problem for the "unintelligent" poor plebs. Now a days, they are even exploiting identity politics for the same purpose. "If you don't post a black square on your IG, then you are a nazi".
It's amazing how quickly an anti-corporation left winger will pivot to, "they're a private company, they can do what they want."
Political censorship is just the preservation and consolidation of power.
And it works. The Media Research Center found that 4.6% of actual Biden voters they polled said that had they known about the Hunter Biden Laptop story and that there was anything to it, they wouldn't have voted for Biden. If you extrapolate that across the population (and yes, I know you can't necessarily do that, but still), Trump would have won with 289 electoral votes.
Because the story was suppressed on social media, there was no viewer pressure placed on mainstream news stations to report on it honestly, or even at all. They either ignored it altogether, or brought the usual suspects on to yet again invoke the "Russian disinformation campaign" narrative.
I also suspect that if people were generally aware of certain things China was doing from mid-January to the end of February 2020, the Biden family's ties to China and Biden's general position on China, would have lost him more than 4.6% of his votes.
But alas, that story never went viral. It got significant coverage on Fox and other right wing outlets, a few investigative reports in Australian newspapers, and the odd truncated page 8 piece in the US and Canada.
It never went particularly viral on social media, and the mainstream news channels didn't touch it, to my knowledge.
"childish Tweets" seems a little harsh (not to mention judgmental). Yes, Trump may have made some comments many viewed as disparaging, but above all else, his viewpoints and passion for America WERE HONEST. And when any person (much less a political figure) speaks truth to power, there is going to be some kind of blowback. I don't think we need "charisma" as a defining criteria for the next 'electable' Presidential candidate: we had that with Reagan, Bush Sr, Clinton and then Obama.......and the upshot of their administrations is exactly what has gotten us to this Dystopian state of the Nation.
I appreciate his honesty but it was the personal and disparaging attacks that bothered me. Being independent of the "Washington Establishment" and loving the country doesn't mean you have to lob personal attacks constantly. You need to respect people who disagree with you. I understand how badly he was attacked by much of the media and celebrities and that clearly got to him, but his personal and sometimes vindictive comments turned off many independent and moderate voters who otherwise might have really connected with his message and policies.
I want to be proud of my President and having him act like a teenager on social media doesn't give me that feeling. If he had just run his Tweets through one of his kids as a "filter" I think it would have been much, much better for him in the end.
And, ironically considering his, ahem.....caustic nature, he was in this way a breath of fresh air!
Thank you, M.AmyV, seeing the forest despite the burning stumps.
Sorry, that's M. AmyY, I think.
Yes, I've lived long enough to remember the Iraq War and the censorship of anyone against it.
The Vietnam war harkens back to when we actually had a free mainstream press, and consequently that war was ended and no new ones started until the turn of the century.
What about the first Gulf War, and other "minor skirmishes"? If you think that the U.S. government and military weren't "practicing" by carrying out warfare in defenseless countries, more or less secretly, between Vietnam and the turn of the century, you'd of course be quite mistaken. And what about sanctions and embargoes, which are an act of war. The U.S. carries those war crimes out constantly, and did on Iraq after the first Gulf War leading to over a million civilian Iraqi deaths up to the turn of the century.
A government such as the U.S. doesn't have to carry out outright warfare in order to exact what amounts to warfare against other countries, and the U.S. government and military do it all the time. In fact, it is neverending. They're carrying out sanctions against Iran, etc., right now, causing our so-called "enemy", Russia, to bring aid to them. In other words, Russia is rightly counteracting the war crimes of the U.S. government and military; but, to listen to U.S. mainstream media, you'd think Russia was Satan.
The neolibs, including the neocons (they're really one and the same, working in bipartisan tandem), don't care about rights, including and especially freedom of speech. They ARE government, the corporate-fascist, neo-"Nazi", "Fourth Reich" rulers of government, both nationally and globally, and when they believe censorship is "necessary", there will be censorship, particularly to continue to carry out their warfare against human life as a whole (except for their fellow-elitist corporate-fascists), including Americans.
Global domination, including of Americans and the other Western "free peoples", is what it's all about, and "eugenociding" as many people as they can along the way, however they can, through outright warfare and beyond, while obscenely profiting off all of it in the process. Look at the Covid pandemic, they've even obscenely profited off that as well, and purposely causing pandemics to bring about those ends is part of their warfare, too. Everyone except the corporate-fascist rulers and their minions is expendable.
I'd like to dismiss you as a crank. But after seeing certain patterns repeat themselves often enough, I can't.
That is disconcerting on many levels.
Empire gonna empire. Can probably trace this all back a couple hundred years.
I mean, shit, we conquered North America first. Why would we stop there?
That language is conspiratorial in nature and yet, it isn't altogether unreasonable. Five years ago, I would have said you were full of shit. But now, I have to consider the possibility that we lost this battle a long time ago.
Conspiracies are OF COURSE happening. But one of the biggest conspiracy theories ever, is the official story of what allegedly happened on 9/11 and who carried it out. When the "al CIAduh(!)"-, NSA- run U.S. government doesn't want the truth to get out about who really perpetrated what, and about what really happened, they issue an official story (fairy tale), often as the result of a whitewash commission report, such as the completely-repudiated lone-gunman theory of the JFK assassination, and the also completely-repudiated 19-hijackers-with-box-cutters (who couldn't even fly small planes correctly) supposedly carried out 9/11 theory. If anyone believes any of those commission report findings, they are washed-of(-true-and-truly-independent)-brains fools.
(SEE Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth: www.ae911truth.org )
The Gulf of Tonkin incident shows that “free press” was an erroneous assumption.
More a case of the truth being successfully held from the press long enough for the people to be fooled.
There was no "good old days" in terms of a controlled complicit media.
The Tonkin story happened when Operation Mockingbird, as reported on by Bernstein, was in full flower. This is all a matter of history now.
Having said this, there were "real" journalists even then, just as there are now.
Going farther back in time, there was the era of newspaper magnates who had no interest in the truth.
The internet was our last best hope for a free press.
Sadly that did not work out.
Some truth to this. Certainly popular opinion turned against escalation soon enough for LBJ to decide in 1968 NOT to run for re-election, and Nixon was wise enough to read the public opinion tea leaves and start the drawdown.
But military adventurism countinued, both seen and unseen.
By both Parties.
The Iraq War was ended, too. And much more successfully than the Vietnam War.
Question: In the history of the U.S.A., what is the country's longest war/"war"?
Next question: Who was bringing troops home?
Hint: The current "occupier" reversed troop drawdowns, and is purging the military of Republicans. Scared yet? (Sorry to include the third question in the hint for the second.)
Not just the current occupier. Senate voted 81-13 to stop Trump reducing troop numbers in Afghanistan (which he ignored).
https://butseriously.substack.com/p/bipartisan-agreement-isnt-dead-as
There is bipartisan agreement in DC to stay in Afghanistan, even though 59% of Americans oppose it and 73% of veterans support complete withdrawal. Presidents can start wars without congressional permission, but can't end wars
Afghanistan. But, though the second Iraq War was claimed to have been ended, it is really still going on (the U.S. military is still there, and we will probably never give up our billion-dollar permanent bases/staging areas there, including but not limited to the Green Zone---don't believe the government and their propaganda arm, the mainstream media (MSM).
AUMF passed three days after 9/11 has since been used 41 times in 18 countries as authorization to use force
https://butseriously.substack.com/p/bipartisan-agreement-isnt-dead-as
Needs to end
Afghanistan? Is THAT what you call the War against the peanut gallery g_d damned Taliban? We can't defeat the fucking Taliban in 3 times it took us to save the world from REAL Totalitarianism?
I can understand those who believe we are fucked.
More bullshit. Iraq War dissenters were NOT censored, especially compared to today's censorship. (Those of us against the Iraq War WERE right.)
A million Americans were protesting in NYC prior to the Iraq War and millions of others in various countries.
Sorry, your numbers are several zeros off. Would that it were true.
It makes sense. Censorship and control moves through "left and right" not in a linear fashion but in a circular one.
I view it as a triangle where the left and right is fighting each other in 2 corners distracted away from the uniparty elites + corporations who are sitting back in the third corner and using the media to broadcast their propaganda to both corners.
Excellent analogy. May I continue it?:
In the FOURTH corner, Me and my fellow REAL woke. Of course, I have my favored vehicle of change (the right corner).
Well said.
Propagates in a linear fashion like a trigonometric function (sine/cosine wave).
Translating for the mathematically oriented.
*propagates in time...
Up (pos) is politically right, down (neg) is left, fight me!
A lot of scripts have been flipped in the last few decades. In the 60's, Republicans were the primary stokers of anti-Soviet hysteria, spreading fear of the "red menace" through unhinged right-wing propaganda. Today the fearmongering about Russia comes from the Democrats, albeit for different reasons. Another scenario that's been inverted is the idea that the Democratic Party is the home of the working class. That idea has slowly come unglued over the years and the Republicans now make the claim, rightly or wrongly. One thing's for certain: The Democrats don't even pretend to be the home of the working class any longer. If the Republican Party is that new home, they got it by default.
Don't even have to go back to the 60s. Remember when Obama told Romney in 2012 "The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because, the Cold War’s been over for 20 years.”
That was in 2012. 4 years before the ultimate Russia hysteria was started by Obama....
Yeah, and I sure hope in 20 years people with think back on what Democrats did as, "Russia, Russia, Russia! (we're not Statists) Russia, Russia, Russia!" In other words, I hope the people of then get it.
But the truth probably will be that Democrats will still be using it.
If the Republicans had won control of Congress and lost the presidential election, we'd have been hearing China, China, China! or Venezuela, Venezuela, Venezuela! for 4 years. LOL
*people will think
I keep hoping so, but regularly disappointed.
unless successfully indoctrinated.
The democrats at one time did represent the working class, and they supported unions, but they have been veering right for decades. Bill Clinton really swung the party to the right. However they cover their tracks with their support for BLM, and gay rights, and abortion, but as a party for the people they've been long gone.
Handing out occasional candy to this or that minority group, play divide and conquer in never ending atomization and pitting one against another beats actually improving the lot of vast majority of population hands down. The former only requires moderate investment is various NGOs, and the latter at least some redistribution of wealth. In other words - it is much cheaper to paint BLM in the pavement in front of Whole Foods, than Jeff Bezos to pay $15 per hour to the black / any color "associates" there.
Citizens can and would improve their own lot, as our system was designed, if the government would get the f*^k out of our lives.
Totally agree. One thing the news never conveys is that our government is corporately owned, and their interests are top priority to those the public elects into office. I don't know why more people have not caught on to that.
Much true information, but at the state and local levels there are, in fact, pro labor Democrats and virtually zero pro labor Republicans.
Boy, "pro-labor" Democrats sure fire a LOT of laborers!
Let's have some examples other than a pipeline and federally funded border fence? Republicans are more responsible for NAFTA and other "free trade" agreements that have shipped American jobs overseas. Republicans are also more responsible for the policies our country implements in Central and South America - installing right-wing dictators and getting rid of democratically elected leftist leaders thus causing violence, destabilization and large groups of immigrants to come to the United States. Sure, the Democrats are often willing participants, but that doesn't mean that it's been primarily Republican, pro-corporate, anti-democracy policies that have hurt labor the most in the USA.
First of all, nobody ever called Joe Biden "pro-labor". Secondly in fact it has been Democrats who have introduced and tried to pass legislation that would help laborers.
You think laborers the world over want to come here to vote Democrat. I got some bad news for you!
You're probably the most mis-informed person I've ever encountered on the Internet and that's really saying something!
Nope.
Every Republican is pro-free-market in labor, which is the ONLY public policy that IS pro-labor. We laborers aren't stupid, and we aren't hive insects to be tossed some nectar by our betters.
"Bill Clinton was certainly a supporter of NAFTA who pushed approval through Congress. But it was negotiated and signed by President George H.W. Bush. (Here’s a photo.) Moreover, more Republicans than Democrats voted for the deal, as the trade pact was vehemently opposed by labor unions. One key ally for Clinton was then-House Minority Whip (and later House speaker) Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), who is said to be on Trump’s list of possible running mates.
NAFTA was a successor to a free-trade pact with Canada. Bush had viewed NAFTA as a political opportunity, an achievement for his reelection campaign. He initialed the deal on Aug. 12, 1992, before the GOP convention, and then formally signed it in December 1992, after he had lost the election to Clinton.
Clinton had supported the pact during the presidential campaign but said he wanted to negotiate side agreements with Mexico concerning enforcement of labor and environmental laws. He didn’t pursue ratification in Congress till after those agreements were reached in August 1993 — but the deals were denounced by labor and environmental groups as too weak.
So Clinton did not negotiate NAFTA, nor did he sign it. But he did put his political prestige on the line to get it approved by Congress — even as two top Democrats, House Majority Leader Richard Gephardt (Mo.) and House Majority Whip David Bonior (Mich.), opposed it. In the House, NAFTA passed 234-200; 132 Republicans and 102 Democrats voted in favor of it. The Senate approved NAFTA 61-38, with the backing of 34 Republicans and 27 Democrats."
If you were pro-labor, you'd be pro-union.
Nope. That's just the narrative they have crammed down our throats for the past several decades. While it's true that Clinton sold labor out, it was done at the behest of the Republican Congress. NAFTA was a Bush era policy that Clinton signed after the Republicans (and some Democrats) passed.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2016/05/09/history-lesson-more-republicans-than-democrats-supported-nafta/
Here's another NOPE. You can be pro-labor and still have regulations for pay, safety and other things in place as well as support collective bargaining. You would join a union in a heartbeat if there was one allowed to exist in whatever field you claim to be a laborer.
So Clinton didn't even sign NAFTA. But I bet until just now you thought he was solely responsible and that it was a majority Democrat policy goal.
Ah, the good old days, when being a drug crazed hippy actually meant something.
But, as a non-pacifist gun-totin' hippy, I never fit in very well.
Hey! You can still be a pacifist.
You're just the not harmless type.
Only real pacifists are packing.
"Walk softly and carry a big stick."
I just made that up. (In my dreams.)
Hey, happy days are here again, fellow youngster!
Best of all, the weed's so good today, all you have to do to get high is read about it!
That, and we have Glocks now.
I've been doing it wrong and wasting my money then!
You just have to read better articles, I guess. Preferably without paying for them (present company excepted, of course, Glenn).
Here, here! And it's because there's a free market for both, albeit high excise tax and regulation.
I have to try the former. The latter's taken care of.
I love Glocks--the AK-47 of handguns. Simple, rugged and easy to use. You can clean and lube it with guacamole, and the damn thing STILL goes "bang" every time. Not saying how I know that.
You don't have to, but you are free to, and that's a good thing.
As for guns, I don't tell anyone whether I'm owning, let alone packing, and I'll return your rudeness if you ask me, but make no mistake: I don't need no 2nd amendment to have the right to bear arms, ever, or have you ever read the Declaration of Independence (That's independence from State in case you need it spelled out.)
The ACLU is still fighting for civil liberties incl. freedom of speech. https://21stcenturywire.com/2021/01/13/aclu-speaks-up-on-unchecked-power-of-big-tech-after-banning-trump-killing-parler/
But they used to ALWAYS be fighting for such.
What does that even mean? They always have fought for such. Find me an ACLU take on anything that goes against basic civil rights? Just because they aren't rabid 2nd Amendment barkers (that's the NRA's job apparently) doesn't mean they aren't fighting for civil liberties.
Plenty of recent (last decade) examples. An open mind would find them if it wanted to, so I'm not going to learn to type as fast as you just so I can open YOUR eyes.
100%
Did you forge forget Tipper Gore, the spouse of Al Gore, founded Parents Music Resource Center back in the 1980's. They wanted to have the music business label content and believed government should enforce a rating system for music. I think Frank Zappa spoke in front of Congress against censorship. Both parties love power and want to control.
Yes and you're making the typical mistake that my Trump supporting family and friends make. Tipper was on the side of the religious right. Just like until the 60s the Democrats were mostly segregationist/racist (but still populist and pro-working class if you were white). Who cares what party Tipper Gore's husband was in? They are from Tennessee. C'mon....that's the south. Gore would have governed like a Nixon era Republican, but the partisan activist SCOTUS and the state of Florida stole the election for Bush. And by that point, Tipper had dropped the bullshit about music. I should know. I was a huge Slayer fan during junior high in the early 80s which was when right-leaning but "Democrat" Tipper Gore was doing her thing trying to have certain music censored. And guess what, there DID end up being labels and censorship, but Republicans including Trump (who at the time was a Democrat) were all in favor. https://www.stereogum.com/2092494/the-parental-advisory-sticker-debuted-30-years-ago-today/columns/sounding-board/
So what's your point other than to play a game of "bb...bbbb....but the DEMOCRATS did it too!"?
My point is I don't believe government should censor content. And there is not much difference between the parties.
P.S. as with the media, the government rarely needs to censor content of any kind. Like I said in my other reply, those in the "journalism" and media game know the rules. No overt censorship necessary, except for the fact that there IS government censorship by way of CIA plants at the NYT, WaPo, and probably every major network. But it's the left pointing this out, not the right.
https://thegrayzone.com/2019/06/24/new-york-times-media-us-government-approval/
Thanks for the story but I couldn't finish it. I had to get up and vomit.
In that case we agree completely. I've been reading and commenting on Greenwald's articles since "Unclaimed Territory" and Salon and I am extremely worried about the massive influence that Silicon Valley (and Wall Street) in concert with the US gov't - which at this time happens to be Democrats, but was Republicans in the runup to the illegal Iraq invasion - have over our ability to communicate freely. It's a huge problem, but it's not one of which fake party happens to be in power or is pushing the next round of censorship. As I'm sure you know, no matter what "news" outlet one works for, one already knows from day one what kind of messaging and information is acceptable and what will cause one's career to stop in its tracks. That holds for Newsmax, Fox, MSNBC, CNN and any other - NYT, WaPo, etc.
And you're dead on right - there is no fundamental difference between the parties when it comes to 99% of life or death matters from abortion to war to sanctions to whatever. They are the Red and Blue factions of The War and Capitalism Party.
But something else happened that decade, largely in reaction to disco decadence and porno chic and the assorted liberation movements that accompanied it all. The Moral Majority, the right-wing merging of evangelical fundamentalism and free-market conservatism, reared its head at the sunset of the ’70s and grew to define the Republican party well into the 21st Century. With their increased power throughout the ’80s came church groups like the record-burning reactionaries the Peters Brothers and cop-mindset organizations like The Back In Control Training Center, which saw both the mainstream popularity of MTV-cosigned superstars and the underground subcultures of ’80s youth as grave threats to the moral fabric of America. Those might’ve been nothing more than a goofy bit of clueless backwards-chair-sitting efforts from conservative crusaders to protect the kids if it weren’t for Tipper Gore.
Tilting at windmills.
You deny that it was primarily Christian (right leaning) evangelicals who were leading the charge to censor/label music? As if Tipper Gore means fuq all, for all we know she could have been a Republican/DINO. She certainly seemed to find favor with the evangelical right now didn't she?
Jeez, kick a woman when she's down. Are you Algore?
No.
i mean , you are tilting at windmills.
Projection. Look it up, LOL. Hint: psychology
This is even worse. They don’t want their enemies even being able to broadcast at all.
Doesn't it suggest there's always going to be a fight? Whoever gains starts asserting themselves to protect that gain. And vice versa.
And how do they assert themselves? A; they try to please their voters, as it should be. Unless we're talking about the Democrat-lite Party. Then you just fool your voters again.
Well, "Won't be fooled again...." Not after DJT, anyway. The Who missed it by a few decades.
the aclu is mentioned in the article a few times. the democrats are not 'left' imo.
Heart M. Martin, or, if you disagree that Democrats are not 'left,' heart me.
Ehhhhh, I dunno about that. As in "christian right" - I mean, the most famous "book burner" of recent memory was Tipper Gore. Oh, and Bill Clinton had his "Sister Souljah Moment".
Somehow, much like we have carried forward this "Republicans are all about Big Business" - which was probably true in the Eisenhower administration, we also seem to think that all Christians are Right-wing. I would think - even hope - that some Democrats are Christians.
Literally ZERO leftists with any type of platform are claiming divine retribution in Texas. In fact what happened here WAS a failure of GOP/conservative/corporate-primacy politics that have dominated the state for decades. Find me a bona fide leftist saying that this was "divine" intervention or that people deserved to suffer and die or admit you are just making stuff up.
Nope.
GOP/conservative/corporate-primacy politics would have had several nuclear power stations up and running just in time for the MSM to keep ignoring Texas.
The GOP has controlled Texas state politics for decades now. We have our own independent grid and energy producers. Can we blame GOP politics for having some of the highest (if not THE highest) electricity costs in the continental United States, or are you going to tell us that the largely powerless Democrat minority somehow makes prices higher or that Joe Biden seeded the clouds and created a polar vortex to punish Texas for not joining one of the regional electrical interconnects? LOL
I'm sorry you have such a contentious relationship with reality. Every thing you just said is 180 degrees from the truth.
GOP/conservative/corporate-primacy politics are the exact reason that the Texas grid failed during a freeze and 4" of snow.
https://www.wfaa.com/article/news/local/investigates/30-years-of-warnings-to-winterize-texas-power-plants-yet-they-still-froze-will-austin-finally-require-it/287-20540908-dbce-4e17-90a3-19aa4f4f4690
The feds and Democrats (and industry experts) had been warning about it for decades dating back to 1989, but because there is no real regulation in Texas, the emphasis was on producing expensive electricity (some of the most expensive in the country) and minimizing overhead like winterization.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/weather/topstories/ercot-failed-to-weatherize-facilities-against-cold-weather-says-federal-report-from-2011/ar-BB1dKbdI
Nope.
Tell me, are the Keystone pipefitters gonna be rehired by the Feds to build more frozen windmills and dark solar panels in Texas?
Maybe the solar companies WILL hire them. And again, solar actually contributed a net POSITIVE during the freeze last week.
https://www.pv-tech.org/how-texas-solar-helped-meet-winter-storm-challenges-and-could-go-even-further/
Nope.
Windmills that are properly weatherized don't freeze.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/weather/topstories/wind-turbines-can-handle-the-cold-just-fine-just-look-at-iowa/ar-BB1dQegB
Solar panels actually ADDED to the available energy in Texas during the freeze.
https://qz.com/1975311/texas-solar-panels-set-to-take-off-after-grid-collapse/
Fact of the matter is that LNG plants made up 80% of the power failures because they were not winterized despite years of warnings from Texas House Democrats, federal regulators and energy industry analysts.
A federal report following a massive power outage in Texas in February 2011 stated that recommendations to winterize the system following a 1989 cold weather event were not mandatory, and implementation lapsed.
Sylvester Turner, a Texas state representative at the time, introduced a bill in 2011 which called for the Public Utility Commission to ensure the Electric Reliability Council of Texas had adequate reserve power to prevent blackout conditions. The bill failed to move forward.
It was the failure to winterize LNG after the 2011 freeze that caused ERCOT's grid to fail. There is a reason that El Paso in the west and Beaumont in the east were not subject to days-long blackouts. Wanna guess what that reason is?
an eye for an eye, ... otoh, aren't leftist atheists and doesn't that conflict with 'divine' retribution?
Atheists, kind of.
Deism/theism is basically just an attribution of intentionality where it doesn't exist. "Mother Nature is angry and punishing America with hurricanes for electing a climate change denier," to paraphrase Jennifer Lawrence, smells a lot like an attribution of intentionality where it does not exist to me.
I've seen some weird, woo spirituality on the left, as well. Replace "god" with "the universe" and you end up with "The Secret".
Oof. The immensity of the cosmos and the best they got is that swill?
What can I say? It apparently really opens up their chakras.
Religion in whatever form “ie, god, universe, nationalism, self esteem” is all we have to remain sane. The insanity keeps the insanity at bay. Everyone else has already jumped off a bridge
I don't completely disagree. People need a schema to help them explain and describe existence so they can make predictions that are "good enough" to get by.
I can't tell you how many men have contacted me to tell me they were on the verge of suicide, or 9/10ths of the way to hating women, and that my videos made what they were experiencing make sense.
They felt better, even though their situations were the same as the day before. Someone was still pissing on their leg, but they were no longer buying into the lie that it's just raining. For them just hearing someone say, "yeah, that's not rain, it's actually society pissing on your leg, but there's probably not a lot you can do about it," was enough.
Apparently true for some (most?) of us. Not me.
Well, it seems a significant, if not majority, of the human race needs an answer (or at least a guess) to currently objectively unanswerable questions. They should be free and respected to do so, as long as they don't infringe too much on my right to just say, "Gee, I'm not sure I believe that."
This is America. You still have to suck God cock to get anywhere.
I think that is slowly changing in the right direction. In any case, this atheist (of the right, no less!) has found common ground with the religious, both of the right and the left, starting, but not limited to, freedom of religion (spiritual pursuits).
It's funny... I have more in common with believers than not. It's the posturing that drives me nuts. "God bless America." Want to get anywhere in politics? You have to be ready to say that.
It's disgusting.
America will elect a convicted child rapist illegal alien before it elects an atheist to POTUS.
How do we know that many presidents who have been elected weren’t just bullshitting everyone about their actual “faith”? Come on man!!!
I'd vote for a wetback (Cesar Chavez's term) athiest if my judgement was that his apology for illegality was sincere.
(Oh, yes, he WOULD have to be a Capitalist, or at least not an Anti-Capitalist to get my vote in the first place.
wow...I can not unread that.
i see, it's a christian 'left' :-). fake news, fake country, fake people.
Brilliant analogy!
You mistake hoisting Christofacist Texans on their own petard with sincerity. The leftists were mocking the right...holding up a mirror.
No, you are just of the Sadist left, M. Pete Needham. You loved the suffering caused by Katrina, especially enjoying placing blame, erroneously but successfully, on a hapless Republican Rino POTUS. And you love the suffering in Texas today, especially because of religious people suffering.
You sicken me, and I'm an athiest.
You are strident enough to be a New Atheist...like this bigot who let his mask slip... https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/1018933359978909696?s=20
Guilty of "stridency." The rest of your accusation is non sequitor.
We are in a 1st Amendment death spiral. Those in power only crave more power.. It is never enough to fairly govern. I am glad that Glenn is at least trying to say "the emperor is wearing no clothes." IMHO we have hit an inflection point that many of our citizens are okay with being told what to think.
I think the inflection point is going the other way. I think the people are becoming REAL woke. No human being is ever really ok with being told what to think.
Fuck social media - a million movements in history succeeded without a single social media post and with hostile press. Facebook can ban every republican and it will only motivate them. People will start printing flyers and gathering in homes.
Can't stop the signal.
The free spirit is strong with these two. What I expressed in mild terms, M. Drew Childress expresses with righteous fire, and M. Seth with firm resolve.
Facebook? No such dying chimera ever stood a chance!
The problem with a 3d party, at least historically, is that it splits the vote of whichever side of the political spectrum spawned it, ensuring victory for the other side. I, too, don’t care for Trump’s personal approach — my zeal for him was, in fact, not for him at all but for the principles he stood for — but I think it may take someone with the brass ones he has to stand up to the maelstrom that the left unleashes on anyone they view as a threat. When you play a blood sport, you’d better be made of pretty stout, even belligerent, stuff. See anyone in the current conservative field like that, besides Trump? Me neither.
I'm not so sure he had articulable principles--more like instincts, maybe? And he is damn sure a narcissist. But he unequivocally opposed the Post-Modern Intersectional Victimology Maoists and trolled their enablers on both sides of the aisle mercilessly, and he had some significant policy achievements that I doubt anyone else would have delivered. But mostly, he was an opportunity wasted, not that that was entirely his fault; there is plenty of blame to go around there. That said, I certainly do not regret my vote for him in 2020, and I'd vote for him again if the circumstances were right, but I think his moment as a candidate is passed. The Establishment has closed ranks against him, and to them it's personal now.
But since you pose the question, I personally can't think of anyone on the radar at this moment for whom it would not be a complete waste of time to vote. As Emperors go, Trump was--and hilariously, continues to be--an outstanding middle finger to the denizens of The Ruling Class and their propagandists. And that's not nothing.
While I am not a fan of Trump (for not pardoning Assange and Snowden), I also don't think he's a narcissist. Put aside the persona he's painted as when he's fighting with the politicians and the media, look at what he does when he's not around anyone. Before the 2016 elections, reddit (and people) used to praise Trump for how he treated them in person, even those who were regular people. Look at this post with 23k upvotes and over 10k comments (Post has since been deleted by reddit):
http://archive.is/8TvxG
My major criticism of him is his poor hiring choices through out his presidency and then not firing them fast enough. He put too much trust in republicans who kept back stabbing him.
The next "Trump" needs to start by firing everyone he possibly can. Hell Biden is doing it in the military and no one care, that's the most frightening of all
Can it possibly come to pass in this country that no Republicans may serve in the armed forces?
Yes and we will all be speaking Mandarin shortly thereafter.
Agree empty positions better then evil enemies in power
Will the people see it in time?
Oh he is definitely a narcissist, just not a malignant narcissist. Also, best President ever next to Washington.
Yep. Check out Calvin Coolidge. Reagan, if only he resisted amnesty. (We do need more immigration, but no cheaters should ever be rewarded. They make good Democrats, though.)
Except a lot of them vote Republican, like Cesar Chavez would be doing today if he could. (What? Democrats get to vote from the grave.)
Spot on, M. CNNisFakeNews. The truth will out.
Maybe. I never met the man, but I see what I see.
I hope you're wrong about his moment. These are certainly Big Wheels that are turning. I'm just glad my horizon extends beyond time.
We shall see. Four years is a long time, and a lot can happen.
But damn, this discussion is complicated enough without resorting to the metaphysical! ;-)
Well some of us love philosophy (get it?), and some of us are getting a little desparate (too soon for that, imo).
Yeah. I do double positives, too, now and Zen.
Ranked choice voting, which we have in only a few states and which is opposed by both major parties, completely solves you [very valid] suggestion.
Josh Hawley. Noem. Matt Gaetz.
Does anyone doubt Tulsi could be as strong as Thatcher, if she would just leave the dark side instead of trying to save it from itself?
There's plenty of brass balls on the right today, thanks to DJT's lead. Have a little patience, and a little faith. No third party; we own the Republican voter now, and we will own the Republican Party soon. Pay attention, it could take awhile (in political 2-year cycle terms), but when it happens it will be like a bandwagon, with old-style Rinos (once known as Rockefeller Republicans, I could give you a list of names from 1910 on) from Bushes to Romneys to McConnells trying to jump on, but falling by the wayside. The future is Capitalist, not Socialist.
Rick Grennell has balls of steel.
I love Rick Grennell and his balls of steel.
I would he be the next CA Governor.
Where are the Whigs?
Replaced by Republicans, because they (Whigs) would not sign on to ending the abhorration of human slavery.
The Democats, on the other hand, never gave up their plantations. They have always been FOR human slavery of all kinds, both racial and the WORSE kind, that of the individual to the State.
Has the Democratic party ever officially apologized for being so pro-slavery?
Ha!
Or Jim Crow? Or the KKK? Or segregation? Or for voting AGAINST the Civil Rights Act? Or attempting REAL court-packing?
Or the racist, misogynist, eugenicist, ivory-tower-elitist, lying bastard, "progressive," progressive WOAT woodrow wilson.
It's like some kind of statute of limitations has run out, or generational limit on human memory. It's maddening.
The best thing you can say about the Democrat Party over history is they sure are good at fooling the voter, much better than the pikers in the Democrat-lite Party, with their maddening bait and switch tactics over and over and over and.......
John James. Hear him speak. He lost his bid for office, but hear him speak. Frederick Douglass incarnate.
40% Socialist
30% Conservative
30% Libertarian
Socialism (100% State control, 0% individual freedom) WINS AGAIN!!!!!
Gee, tell me again how a RIGHT-leaning country can avoid the road to hell? A third (or fourth, and then a fifth (column?)) party?!?!?!
There are 2 (two) parties, and ONLY 2 (two) parties for a very good reason.
sorry, but these answers are not quite satisfactory. i still don't understand why the us can't have a 3rd or 4th party.
40/30/30.
Minority 40 wins because the 30 and the 30 erroneously think the other is the bigger enemy than the 40.
Look, a parliamentary fragmentation system DOES work, just not, imo, as well.
Bottom line: VOTERS own political parties, not the other way around. 2016 was all it should have taken to prove this. DJT was a fluke. The dogcatcher would have won, because the VOTER reject the stupid Parties, and their insane control-freak forcing of HEREDITY in choosing POTUS.
We don't need or want no stinking political bloodlines, damn it! Let the voters decide if we will have more State (vote Dem) or less State (vote Rep). ANY 3rd, 4th, etc. Party destroys this essential voter education and realignment every two-four-eight years.
Also, 3rd parties DO have a place to play in re-alignments that occur over years (and multiple elections). Look at 1992. Bush said no new taxes. He lied (and Republican voters wanted more Reagan than he could EVER hope to be). That led to the little Texas dictator throwing the election to the womanizer-in-chief. The rest, as they say,...
Thank you, M. AmyY. What you said.
i'm not american so i've been wondering how this would work in congres. i can see that you would lose the presidency (a bummer with all that executive action going down), but wouldn't conservatives and libertarians be able to form a coalition even on an issue by issue basis?
They do all the time. But there are no longer ANY conservatives or libertarians in the Democrat party. They have been purged.
And then I thought of Tulsi, and how much I love her!
Why compromise when you don't have to.
While I don't want Trump to run again (not pardoning Assange/Snowden broke the camels back for me), I do think if he does, he will destroy the Republican Party (good thing) if he starts a new party. I would say over 70% of the Republican voter base voted because of Trump, not because of Republican Party. Or he can at least use that as leverage to get the Republican Party to stop being useless cucks and actually start doing something instead of grandstanding.
That's why in the next 2-4 years Trumpites like me will be in charge of the Republican Party, and it's finally going to give Republican voters what they want.
You heard it here. That's my real name. Stand up fearlessly, and let's do this.
No third Party. Stand up and tell the Republican Party you own it.
40 years in the wilderness? So be it.
Things have to get worse, just to get better? Maybe. So what?
Just like Americans 200 years ago took an unjust, racist, paternal, flawed society and using the "perfection" tools (Declaration and it's Constitution) started the centuries long righteous endeavor to build a shining city of perfection on a hill, and just like Americans kept going, year after year, mistake after mistake, but correction here, injustice ended there, world saved again and again, just like Americans today......the same freedom loving blood runs through OUR veins.
We own our government, and we own whatever political party comes and goes. Stop the groveling AND the bemoaning and take back the Republican Party so Capitalism can continue kicking Socialism's butt. What are we, Capitalism 245, Socialism 0.
The GOP is chock full of statists and greedy parasites.
Yes, as are the Dems
Kinda makes you want to throw out the whole lot, doesn't it?
Definition of a Republican (re: conservative): hates "tyranny", but allows corporations to do whatever they want.
Definition of a Libertarian (re: overgrown children) : a Republican that wants to not serve black people, and smoke weed.
Definition of a Democrat (re: liberal): a Republican that's mostly OK with same-sex marriage and abortion.
You have been indoctrinated well. I hope you can be free one day.
I'm probably going to regret this, but here goes...
How have I been "indoctrinated", and how am I not "free", Jock?
Bullshit Leftist Bullshit.
No no, he's right.
And before you ask, I'm not a leftist.
And all of 'em are down with hierarchy. *smirk*
Hierarchy is useful and necessary. There are quite a number of basic recurring problems which cannot be solved by anything +other than+ hierarchy, which is why it reappears over and over again: without it, we would all be dead. There are also, however, a great number of serious problems +caused by+ hierarchy. That has been known for millennia and is hardly a secret. So, we will always have to build hierarchies. At the same time-- if we are smart-- we are also preparing to check them and occasionally tear them back down.
So are Statists like M. Phil.
Meanwhile the Statist M. Phil has all the solutions.
Yes, ALL of them
Why dont you, the rest of the world (especially here in Canada) is waiting.
Patience, friend! Rome wasn't burned in a day.
Gods speed
Reason I said "especially here in Canada" is because we dont do ANYTHING here without considering what the US is doing 😍. It is not because we want to see people hurt economically etc., its because then OUR system will disintegrate as well. Heaven forbid we grow a pair and "throw the whole lot out" 🙄
HAHAHAHAHA!!!
An Ontario MPP (Baber) introduced a Private Member's Bill called the "We're all in this together act". It would reduce the salaries of MPPs to what unemployed Canadians receive through CERB ($2000/month) until all the emergency COVID measures other than for hospitals and nursing homes are rescinded.
Not only did his bill fail to pass, another MPP, in retaliation, moved to decrease only Baber's salary in particular to the $2000/month. That passed with unanimous consent. I am not joking.
The motion was later deemed out of order, but the message was clear: We are not all in this together.
As a reluctant fan of Rob Ford, I'm VERY disappointed by his brother Doug.
Yes I know. That other MPP was actually the Government House Leader, Paul Calandra. Bully government since day one--no surprise at that "action". Note that the unanimous vote wasn't allowed to stand by the Speaker of the House.
We have never been in this together. It's just a slogan.
Barber has responded in a very human way. Call your representative and tell them how you feel about the Lockdown and how you are upset with the governments actions (or lack of).
Here is a beautiful quote:
"More importantly, with your help on social media we learned that we can and should STAND UP TO COVID BULLIES. They are hollow, cynical and often mean spirited. We are kind and gentle Canadians, so we will not allow any Covid Bully, to threaten or demean us or anyone else. This is a CULTURAL CHANGE from the last 11 months. We must bring empathy back. I therefore encourage all of you to peacefully and politely, not tolerate any further Covid bullying towards yourself or anyone else."
AMEN
President Trump was NOT "self-interested". He got the best people to serve in his cabinet (sometimes having to fire his first choice, such as Secretary of State Tillerson) and listened to them. He attended the briefings by the virus task force and got the doctors a far larger audience than they would have gotten without him (as much as 10 million in late March!).
He was VERY friendly with everyone. Remember Salena Zito's articles in The Atlantic during the 2016 election. And his visit to the hospital in Pittsburgh after the attack on the synagogue (where he spent an hour with the Rabbi privately, and then visited each patient and stopped in the hallway to talk with staff members and thank them.
The only exception was the arrogant Democrats who continually attacked him with fake charges and automatic opposition to everything he proposed, and the Democrats in the press who were only interested in talking to their followers and not interested in listening to President Trump.
President Trump was "devisive" only because of the constant attacks on him made people who only followed the Democratic run media oppose him. He left the White House with a 51% approval rating.
"President Trump was NOT "self-interested". He got the best people to serve in his cabinet"
I can't remember the last time I laughed so hard. Thanks, I needed that.
I bet you can't name them, or know their record in the last four years, or am I wrong? I'm not saying you are right or wrong, just saying you sound like someone who believes anything Trump is just no good.
You mean there's more comedy gold OTHER than Steve Bannon?
Rfhirsch sees the good in Trump, let it be, and I'm sure there is. I know someone who worked for Trump before he was president and for all the talk about his anti-female feelings she would say quite the opposite, that is, he treated the women who worked for him very well.
For all his expensive suits and silk ties, Trump talks more like the tradesmen I know than like an elite. I think that rubs a lot of people the wrong way.
My uncles, my dad and my dad's old apprentices talk like that (when they're not in mixed company), and they're all good people. The contractor I hired to grade my yard and put in fenceposts talks like that. He was great. Did excellent work, and when he miscalculated the estimate for the sod, he ate the cost overage.
I would suggest that his hot mic moment was less indicative of who he actually is around women than the several minutes of interaction with a gorgeous woman that followed.
Billy Bush encouraged her to hug Trump. He gave a perfunctory hug and a peck on the cheek, then reminded everyone he had a wife by dropping her name. Then Bush gives her a much more... enthusiastic hug.
After that, Trump was all business, until Bush again encouraged a flirtation. At that point, Trump was polite, allowed her to take his arm, and played along in a half-ass manner until Bush was out of the picture.
Looked to me like Bush was trying to make something happen, and Trump was just trying to avoid creating a scene or making the woman feel awkward.
I find it very strange how people were so fixated on the "locker room talk" that they were unable to see what followed in a remotely objective light. I make hyperbolic, off-color and ribald jokes all the time (in safe company), and it has no bearing on how I genuinely view and treat other people.
Given all of that, I don't doubt your acquaintance's assertion that Trump treats his female employees very well.
He's the motherfucker off the Apprentice. I watched that show. We voted him into office?
I feel like Doc Brown. "Ronald Reagan? The ACTOR?"