$500 million in fines thrown out. Did being President help with that?
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You mean from that “judge" in NY?
That’s really interesting. I’d like to see it through today.
Tangentially related to politics, but James Dobson died today. I’m sure he’s in a warmer place looking up at us.
To me “MAGA” represents an ugly turn toward acceptance of the unacceptable rather than a collection of policy goals. Trump once joked that he could shoot someone on 5th Ave and get away with it, or something along those lines, and he wasn’t wrong. Turns out you can grab half the population by the pussy, and if you’ve convinced them they’ll get their slice of the pie they’ll let you. Right wing politicians are terrified of him, and that concerns me. I’d like our leaders, weak and corrupt though they are, to vote their consciences, but Rubio and Vance, for example, are nicely pussy-in-hand now despite their one-time vigorous idealogical differences and complete repudiation of T’s character.
You yourself, @twojarslave, have shifted to accept things you’ve said own the past that you would not, e.g. most recently the Epstein debacle. Because you want Lewiston addressed and his policies, specifically immigration and DEI, speak to that. Do you want to buy Trump a retrofitted Qatar airplane to take home with him? Do you remember when Hillary made off with the White House dishes or some such, and we were all outraged? I remain outraged.
Blame doesn’t matter to me. Blame is what got us here. I’d like something a little finer for our country than blame and hate. I’d like our leader to fan commonality. As you’ve accurately pegged me as not particularly woke, I would like an end to the salad bowl and a return to the melting pot. I believe unity will come from a move backward, toward assimilating our immigrant population, not celebrating them to the point of disaster. But fostering unity is the antithesis of Trump’s agenda.
I absolutely do blame the left. We allowed them to become the thought police. But the right has been right there with them, exploiting the divisions.
I can agree with this as being true for me as well. I do want people who can pass for the other gender to be able to do so without threat of injury, but beyond that I’m not sure what it has to do with me. I will call you by whatever pronoun you convincingly present as. And that’s as far as I’m interested in going. Same thing tattoos I don’t like. Who cares if I like them or not? Just don’t legislate that I have to pretend I do.
Exactly. And you and I and the other people who just want reasonable things (not martial law, not people scooped up by bands of scary masked people in unmarked cars, not trans women with beards reading to school children, not preferential housing for immigrants) are steamrolled. Because you’re right, it’s all or nothing, one side or the other.
I need to come back to this and @Andrewgen_Receptors boomer hate, which go hand-in-hand for me, but I have dinner plans.
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Anything on her about the seasonal hand towels and doilys?
@EmilyQ Thank you for a thoughtful post.
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How about the President heading out on patrol in DC tonight?
Getting detained by Pres Trump would be a cool story.
And a visit from the Commander in Chief would probably be exciting on a boring National Guard duty.
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What policy do you find most concerning? What is the most ugly manifestation in the party and movement to you?
It’s not like that was a public statement and its not like it is inaccurate for a billionaire playboy, nor is that behavior exclusive to men. Rest assured, many women believe they can grab a guy by the dick, and it can also be unwelcome. If you think what Trump said is bad, try declaring yourself a man and using any Maine gym’s locker room, which is your human right in this state. While what Trump said isn’t good, women should be far more concerned that it is my right to decide right now that I’m a woman, change nothing about myself, and go get naked in any public women’s locker room in Maine. If a woman finds herself incarcerated in Maine, she might share her space with a 6’4” violent man, because Maine believes his “right” to be legally treated like a woman supersedes all women’s rights to women’s only spaces.
Maine Democrats are also working towards “decarceration”, aka abolishing the prison system, which should also concern women in particular, because women are generally easiest to victimize.
The case still seems to be moving ahead. I’ve never said I accepted it, but that I’m confident the Trump/Musk rift was Kayfabe designed to stir up media attention, which it definitely has.
He already has met or exceeded my expectations for the executive branch of the Federal government, specifically by stopping the human trafficking, which bears no resemblance to any past concept of immigration.
Most of my gripes with Lewiston are in Augusta, some with the city council and mayor, and nearly exclusively with Maine Democrats. I’ll not mince words, I believe I am living in a corrupt narco state. We literally subsidize the drug cartels with so-called “harm reduction” policies that most of the public is very sick of living with.
I don’t remember that, but I do remember her conducting State Department business on a private server. The classified documents presently being released to the public seem to indicate a soft coup attempt took place. Whether that results in indictments or convictions remains to be seen, but there is actual hard evidence for that, unlike the Russian Collusion hoax that was rammed down the public’s throat after being manufactured out of thin air by bad actors in the intelligence community, seemingly at the behest of Obama himself in his final months in office after Trump secured the 2016 election.
None of his policies are a stark departure from 1990’s Democrat policy, and it would seem to me that the country just unified around it in the most recent election, despite the unprecedented campaign of lies against him that fully revealed how our main steam media aren’t independent government watchdogs at all.
It looks like the young folks are on board, too, which is really important.
That’s precisely why so many people just unified around it, because it was a clear rejection of “woke”, aka Democratic Socialist ideas and policy easily found on the DSA’s website. In academic historical terms, Trump and MAGA are a counter-revolution, moving the policy needle backwards like you just said you wanted, along with prioritizing assimilation of immigrants by promoting English and cutting funding to DEI programs. The office of New Mainers (or something named like that) is on record saying that assimilation is not a priority, in those exact words. They’re crystal clear about it, as is Trump with his competing vision.
I’ve been watching Maine Democrats operate for over a decade, and I don’t see anything different when I observe Democrats at the national level. Maine Republicans aren’t perfect and there’s some crooked people in that bunch too, but they aren’t the ones who staged a Democratic Socialist revolution with the aid of a system of voting that would be the envy of every socialist warlord of the 20th century.
I think we’ve all been the victims of a far-reaching propaganda campaign. With all of its imperfections, MAGA is actually doing something about it, adhering to core American ideas like free speech and other individual rights.
As far as masked men snatching people off of the streets, I don’t see any other way that the deportations can happen. When a single mother barber in Lewiston is the subject of a months-long campaign of political terrorism, including posting her image and contact info on sex worker websites, a dedicated hate webpage plastered all over reddit seen by tens or perhaps hundreds of thousands of people, along with daily harassment of her business, all for sticking up for her severely beaten daughter at public comment in a polite but firm, non-racist way, what do you think the same people are willing to do to ICE agents?
I’ve known an ICE agent for over a decade now. He hunts down international child sex traffickers, participated in the hunt for Robert Card when he had just gunned down dozens of people and was armed with a .308 battle rifle, and raised two wonderful daughters while handling all of that responsibility. Of course I want him wearing a mask when he gets assigned to ERO duties.
I am scratching my head at how loathing a government program that is laughable at best at how it has been managed and boomer hate go hand in hand, but I look forward to hearing it haha 
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Well, as our industrial base was gutted, they were robbed of their pensions, so yeah, boomers = bad.
The ones that didn’t drink themselves to death waiting for the mill to reopen are dicks!
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Since I seem to like an ironic twist more than most, here’s a Boomer explaining Boomer hate.
I think maybe ole Lizard King was more cynical than your average hippy weirdo. He sounds like that yappy little Greta Thünberg.
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I’m probably too blazed and high on burnt gun powder / lead fumes.
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Perfect! 
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One thing boomers did well was teach, at least in the 1980s and 1990s. I barely knew anything about my public school teachers love lives or personal political ideas. The closest I remember was when my high school social studies teacher said that Nixon was really popular and that social security was “The Great American Rip-off”.
I was also lucky enough to have a “lost generation” first grade teacher born around the turn of the century still teaching in the mid 1980s when she was in her mid 80’s. She would hit our hands with a ruler if we got out of line.
Do we really need the media to tell us that these are not to be touched?? Because they are not to be touched! Even the good towels of the corrupt are off limits.
Although thinking about it…and I imagine all of you will agree…I suspect Trump would not respect the sanctity of the seasonal towel, and would probably touch it with dirty hands BECAUSE he’s been asked not to. And now I wonder if that’s one of the reasons men like him and women are inclined not to. Just stomping through everyone’s freshly mopped kitchen with his muddy boots.
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In local news, DHS confirmed that both drivers who struck and killed pedestrians in Maine in the last week were illegal immigrants from Angola who overstayed tourist visas but were somehow issued licenses and permits by the State of Maine.
Like noncitizen voting, I believe the issuance of licenses like this is far more widespread than Maine Democrats would ever admit.
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So back to this.
Two things for me. One is that I agree that mismanagement is a/the problem (well beyond SS), and probably my greatest gripe with the right. The hypocrisy! My entire adulthood has been spent flip-flopping between the two parties and the single thing they have in common is fiscal irresponsibility, which stems of course from the corruption. At least with the left I can pretend that some of the citizenry benefits from the ~50% of my income taken each year.
But this is not a ponzi scheme if managed correctly. I see that the giant blob of boomers is straining the system currently, but that’s not a before-them problem and should not be an after-them problem. And the boom also paid their 15% throughout their working lives, so there should - again, correctly managed - be a giant blob of money for the subsequent, smaller, generations (although of course I understand that the money is not actually there).
Secondly, and more importantly, to me…how would you have lower-paid workers live in old age? The median savings balance for people age 55-64 is $185K. At the 4% per year my money guy says I can expect to be able to withdraw into perpetuity we have the median retiree living on $7500 per year without SS. And let’s face it, the LNA working in nursing homes and hospitals and the older guys working at Home Depot and so on are not paid enough to be at that median. They are probably not paying into a 401K - with what money? And that’s assuming they aren’t held to just under full time so their company can save on benefits. The average savings for the same age group is $537K, but of course that’s skewed by high wage earners. I read recently that 50% of men and 64% of women at age 60, I think, don’t have $50K saved. ($50,000 x .04 = $2,000/yr).
So we have full time workers charged their 8% and the companies that employ them their 8% for “security” when they’re old, which amounts to something like $20K for workers making $40K a year. How far would you get on $1500/mo?
I have to go again, lol, so I’ll leave this here for now. But my question is: what do we do with the old people, who’ve worked serving us our lunches and who’ve worked at our car washes and grocery stores?
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If you can explain succinctly, how is this? Are you referring to the economics of all three?
In part, yes. The economic policies are quite similar. Both DSA and Nazis are in favor of wage controls, price controls, rent controls, progressive taxation, central economic planning, nationalizing vast swaths of industry, and enforcing ideological compliance in private businesses.
More defining than that is their shared racism in government policy. Racism forms the basis of their in and out-groups and in both cases the government is transformed into a gigantic apparatus for plundering the out-group to benefit the in-group. The groups are just defined differently in both cases, but they both reject the concept of equal protection under the law.
Both favor government censorship, both rely heavily on state propaganda to create narratives in the public mind, and both ideologies seek to ideologically capture public institutions. Instead of Nazi canary breeders and Hitler youth, we have ESG scores, Bud Light marketing campaigns, Social and Emotional Learning in public schools, transgenderism in public schools and youth groups, and diversity quotas in publicly-traded companies.
The biggest difference between Democratic Socialists and National Socialists is the internationalism of Democratic Socialists. The concept of US Citizenship as the basis for rights, including voting rights, is incompatible with both ideologies. Nazis stripped Jewish people of citizenship and never allowed conquered people, not even “Aryans” like Norwegians, to become full citizens of the Reich. Democratic Socialists invert that concept, rejecting US Citizenship altogether and embracing the idea that we’re all “citizens of the world”, a Marxist idea that the Nazis rejected.
Democratic Socialism is the inbred child of already inbred, retarded siblings – National Socialism and Marxist-Leninism. It could possibly prove even more retarded than its deeply handicapped parents, if it is allowed to metastasize. Canada will be worth keeping an eye on as it continues down this path Americans have rejected.
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