American Politics

[niallers]

In any other "civilised" country, a candidate like cheetoh mussolini and his couch fucking running mate would be polling around 5% at best or be out of the race more like.

Only in that fucked up country is the orangutan in with a near 50 50 chance of winning.

It's fucking mind boggling.

There's even a maga conspiracy about the Democrats starting and controlling the hurricane last week, to target republican voters!

What the actual fuck

[Anubis]

Former Masa County Clerk getting brutally pummelled by the Judge over her attempts to aid Trump in 2020. 9 year sentence ultimately.

 

 

[Mudface]

33 minutes ago, Anubis said:

Former Masa County Clerk getting brutally pummelled by the Judge over her attempts to aid Trump in 2020. 9 year sentence ultimately.

 

 

 

Nice, wonder if that'll give any of those lined up for this election's deception any pause for thought. Probably not, if they get their leader in, he can pardon them all.

[polymerpunkah]

Yet another example of someone willing to throw their life away for a fat orange pile of shit who wouldn't piss on her if she were on fire.

 

And unlike the Jan 6th morons, caught up in the heat of the moment, she did it intentionally, and still doesn't regret what she's done (including to herself).

 

The Republicans have been busy the past four years putting people like this into similar positions across the USA....

[Bobby Hundreds]

I've read a few times people think Trump is going to file lawsuits in swing states he loses and then appeals in the Supreme court where he owns most of the judges and win that way. Seems hugely fucked up.

[Anubis]

25 minutes ago, Bobby Hundreds said:

I've read a few times people think Trump is going to file lawsuits in swing states he loses and then appeals in the Supreme court where he owns most of the judges and win that way. Seems hugely fucked up.

 

I think he can only go as high as the State Suprem Courts, so that didn’t help him last time.

[Section_31]

[Anubis]

Religious MAGA numpty, and former minor tv role actor, Kevin Sorbo, getting destroyed. Talk about desperate grifting. Tremendous.

 

 

 

[Creator Supreme]

Just seen a story on the BBC webshite, some silly old mare who's just lost her house in the hurricane who is eligible to vote early, and who is she voting for?

 

The fucking cheeto!

[Kepler-186]

Further excellent analysis from Heather Cox Richardson. 
 

November 11, 2024 (Monday)

The day after Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election, Afghanistan’s Taliban offered its congratulations to the American people for “not handing leadership of their great country to a woman.” 

Taliban leaders expressed optimism that Trump’s election would enable a new chapter in the history of U.S-Taliban relations. They noted that it was Trump who suggested a new international order when he inked the February 29, 2020, Doha Agreement between the U.S. and the Taliban. That deal cut out the Afghan government and committed the U.S. to leave Afghanistan by May 2021, closing five military bases and ending economic sanctions on the Taliban. This paved the way for the U.S. evacuation of the country in August 2021 and the return of the Taliban to power. 

The Taliban prohibits girls’ education past the sixth grade and recently banned the sound of women’s voices outside their homes.

In Russia, Russian thinker Alexander Dugin explained the dramatic global impact of Trump’s win. “We have won,” Dugin said. “The world will be never ever like before. Globalists have lost their final combat.” Dugin has made his reputation on his calls for an “anti-American revolution” and a new Russian empire built on “the rejection of [alliances of democratic nations surrounding the Atlantic], strategic control of the United States, and the rejection of the supremacy of economic, liberal market values,” as well as reestablishing traditional family structures with strict gender roles. 

Maxim Trudolyubov of the Wilson Center, a nonpartisan foreign affairs think tank, suggested Friday that Putin’s long-term goal of weakening the U.S. has made him more interested in dividing Americans than in any one candidate. 

Indeed, rather than backing Trump wholeheartedly, Russian president Vladimir Putin has been undercutting him. He did not comment on Trump’s election until Thursday, when he said that the power of liberal democracies over world affairs is “irrevocably disappearing.” Although Ellen Nakashima, John Hudson, and Josh Dawsey of the Washington Post reported that Trump and Putin had spoken on Thursday, Putin denied such a call as “pure fiction.”

Exacerbating America’s internal divisions and demonstrating dominance over both the U.S. and Trump might explain why after Trump became president-elect, laughing Russian media figures showed viewers nude pictures of Trump’s third wife, Melania, taken during her modeling career.

In an interview, Putin’s presidential aide Nikolay Patrushev said today: "To achieve success in the election, Donald Trump relied on certain forces to which he has corresponding obligations. As a responsible person, he will be obliged to fulfill them." Meanwhile, U.S. and Ukrainian officials report that Russia has massed 50,000 soldiers, including North Korean soldiers, to reclaim territory in the Kursk region of Russia taken this year by Ukrainian forces. 

Trump claims to have talked to about seventy world leaders since his reelection but has declined to go through the usual channels of the State Department. This illustrates his determination to reorganize the federal government around himself rather than its normal operations but leaves him—and the United States—vulnerable to misstatements and misunderstandings.

The domestic effects of Trump’s victory also reveal confusion, both within the Republican Party and within national politics. Voters elected Trump and his running mate, Ohio senator J.D. Vance, but it’s hard to miss that billionaire Elon Musk, who backed Trump’s 2024 campaign financially, seems to be “Trump’s shadow vice-president,” as Nick Robins-Early of The Guardian put it. Sources told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins that Musk has been a constant presence at Mar-a-Lago since the election, sitting in on phone calls with foreign leaders and weighing in on staffing decisions. Yesterday at Mar-a-Lago, Musk met with the chief executive officer of the right-wing media channel Newsmax.

Exactly who is in control of the party is unclear, and in the short term that question is playing out over the Senate’s choice of a successor to minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY). In the new Congress, this Republican leader will become Senate majority leader, thereby gaining the power to control the Senate calendar and decide which bills get taken up and which do not. 

Trump controls the majority of Republicans in the House, but he did not control Senate Republicans when McConnell led them. Now he wants to put Florida senator Rick Scott into the leadership role, but Republicans aligned with McConnell and the pre-2016 party want John Thune (R-SD) or John Cornyn (R-TX). There are major struggles taking place over the choice. Today Musk posted on social media his support for Scott. Other MAGA leaders fell in line, with media figure Benny Johnson—recently revealed to be on Russia’s payroll—urging his followers to target senators backing Thune or Cornyn.

Rachael Bade and Eugene Daniels of Politico Playbook suggested that this pressure would backfire, especially since many senators dislike Scott for his unsuccessful leadership of the National Republican Senatorial Committee that works to elect Republicans to the Senate. 

Trump has also tried to sideline senators by demanding they abandon one of their key constitutional roles: that of advice and consent to a president’s appointment of top administration figures. Although Republicans will command a majority in the Senate, Trump is evidently concerned he cannot get some of his appointees through, so has demanded that Republicans agree to let him make recess appointments without going through the usual process of constitutionally mandated advice and consent.

Trump has also demanded that Republicans stop Democrats from making any judicial appointments in the next months, although Republicans continued to approve his nominees after voters elected President Joe Biden in 2020. Indeed, Judge Aileen Cannon, who let Trump off the hook for his retention of classified documents, was approved after Trump had lost the election.

All this jockeying comes amid the fact that while Trump is claiming a mandate from his election, in fact the vote was anything but a landslide. While votes are still being counted, Trump seems to have won by fewer than two percentage points in a cycle where incumbents across the globe lost. This appears to be the smallest popular vote margin for a winning candidate since Richard Nixon won in 1968.

While voters elected Trump, they also backed Democratic policies. In seven states, voters enshrined abortion rights in their constitutions. Two Republican-dominated states raised their minimum wage to $15 an hour; three enshrined mandated paid leave. In exit polls last week, sixty-five percent of voters said they want abortion to remain legal, and fifty-six percent said they want undocumented immigrants to have a chance to apply for legal status.

The gap between what Trump has promised MAGA supporters and what voters want is creating confusion in national politics. How can Trump deliver the national abortion ban MAGAs want when sixty-five percent of voters want abortion rights? How can he deport all undocumented immigrants, including those who have been here for decades and integrated into their communities, while his own voters say they want undocumented immigrants to have a path to citizenship? 

Trump’s people have repeatedly expressed their opinion that Trump was stopped from putting the full MAGA agenda into place because he did not move quickly enough in his first term. They have vowed they will not make that mistake again. But the fast imposition of their extremist policies runs the risk of alienating the more moderate voters who just put them in power.

In September, as the Taliban enforced new rules on women in Afghanistan, they also began to target Afghan men. New laws mandated that men stop wearing western jeans, stop cutting their hair and beards in western ways, and stop looking at women other than their wives or female relatives. Religious morality officers are knocking on the doors of those who haven’t recently attended mosque to remind them they can be tried and sentenced for repeated nonattendance, and government employees are afraid they’ll be fired if they don’t grow their beards. According to Rick Noack of the Washington Post, such restrictions surprised men, who were accustomed to enjoying power in their society. Some have been wondering if they should have spoken up to defend the freedoms of their wives and daughters.

One man who had supported the Taliban said he now feels bullied. “We all are practicing Muslims and know what is mandatory or not. But it’s unacceptable to use force on us,” he said. Speaking on the condition of anonymity because he feared drawing the attention of the regime, another man from Kabul said: “If men had raised their voices, we might also be in a different situation now.”

[Anubis]

I wondr if there is enough bi-partisianship among Republicans in the Senate that they could band together with Democrats to stop Trumps' worst excesses.

[Anubis]

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/trump-project-2025-argentina-milei-far-right/

 

 

As the world absorbs the shockwave of Donald Trump’s win in the US presidential election, the playbook for his second term, designed by a handful of right-wing extremists, is already underway in Argentina.

 

Project 2025 is set out in a nearly 900-page ‘Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise’, produced by the Heritage Foundation, a rightwing US think tank, as a ready reckoner for the incoming Trump administration. It details authoritarian tactics that exist in various parts of the world, from attacking public education to dismantling policies to tackle climate change to restricting the rights of women, LGBTIQ+ people, migrants, workers and Black people. But if there is one country already trying some of Project 2025’s most extreme policies to weaken the state and render the enjoyment of rights obsolete, it is Argentina.

 

“If you have any doubts about how Project 2025 would be implemented, you have to look at what has happened in the last year in Argentina”, human rights lawyer Paula Ávila-Guillén, told me in a thought-provoking interview. She is the executive director of the Women's Equality Center (WEC) which works on communication strategies on reproductive health and justice in Latin America.

 

I knew what was happening in my country Argentina. A 30% cut in state spending and an eleven percentage point increase in poverty in less than a year don’t go unnoticed – even if you don't live there. Nor do the struggles that family and friends go through in a society already used to economic crashes. Still, Ávila-Guillén’s provocation prompted me to delve into the way Project 2025 is being carried out back home.

 

Project 2025 has been spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation, but includes an advisory board with more than one hundred other Christian right and far right groups and dozens of former Trump officials.

 

“It is not enough for conservatives to win elections. If we are going to rescue the country from the grip of the radical left, we need both a governing agenda and the right people in place, ready to carry this agenda out on day one of the next conservative administration”, the Heritage Foundation says on its website to introduce Project 2025.

 

In the months leading up to election day, as Project 2025’s authoritarian goals were increasingly documented by the press, hate watch groups and trade unions, Trump tried to distance himself from it.

 

Javier Milei, president of Argentina since December last year and an emerging figurehead of the global far right, has never mentioned Project 2025. But he had been looking to establish ties with the Heritage Foundation since at least 2023, according to documents submitted by a lobbyist to the US Department of Justice.

 

And a copy of the ‘Mandate for Leadership’ was handed to Milei by Heritage’s executive vice-president Derrick Morgan when the two met in Washington in February for the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), according to Argentina’s government website which lists gifts received by the president.

 

A central goal of Project 2025 is to “dismantle the administrative state” allegedly co-opted by the left or wokism. It entails disbanding federal ministries and agencies, cutting public funding for health, education and welfare, and eliminating programmes and resources to combat gender-based violence, discrimination, pollution and climate change.

 

Milei has worked fast in his first ten months in power and has followed this script entirely. The argument for many of his new measures has been the need to lower public spending to balance a lopsided economy, with an annual inflation at 211% and a huge debt owed to the International Monetary Fund. There is nothing wrong with cutting superfluous spending of course, but Milei has gone so much further than anyone might have initially imagined, in what many have dubbed his “chainsaw-style approach” to reducing the size of the state.

“I love being the mole inside the state”, Milei said in an interview in June. “I'm the one destroying the state from within”.

 

Milei has made an unprecedented cut to all public spending at close to 30%. He cut investment in education by 40%, denied increases to pensions, cut access to life-saving drugs for cancer patients, defunded the science and technology system and universities, and laid off almost 27,000 public employees.

 

He closed the public media and froze food distribution to soup kitchens. Now, he’s set to sell-off public companies in the fields of nuclear energy, aviation, fuel, mining, electricity, water, cargo transport, roads and railways.

 

Milei has eliminated nine ministries, including the Ministry of Women, Gender and Diversity and the Ministry of Education – something that the 'Mandate for Leadership' mentions and Trump has also spoken about.

 

Milei has dismantled all gender policies and defunded services including those for survivors of domestic and sexual violence. Last year, more than 170,000 people accessed these services, while official figures show that a femicide is committed every 35 hours in Argentina. It is now unclear whether anyone will continue to keep track of these statistics.

 

He also closed the Institute against Discrimination, Racism and Xenophobia, which he called a “sinister body used for ideological persecution”. Project 2025 authors would no doubt be delighted. Their blueprint for Trump goes to great lengths to explain how every diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policy, programme and fund must be removed.

 

The ‘Mandate for Leadership’ details the need to assemble an army of loyalists from day one to carry out this task of reducing the state. The Heritage Foundation has a database of some 20,000 people in the US who would make up a transitional staff for Trump. But it would require firing tens of thousands of career civil servants to replace them with people loyal to their ideology and ban public employees’ right to unionise.

 

Milei is actively persecuting civil servants who don’t follow his mindset. In a letter to the diplomatic corps, he demanded those who don’t align with his foreign policy ideas to “step aside”, specifically referencing his plan to repudiate the UN's Agenda 2030 which governments have signed to combat poverty, inequality and environmental destruction.

Days later, in a statement, he announced a purge: “The executive branch will launch an audit of the career staff of the foreign ministry with the aim of identifying promoters of anti-freedom ideas”.

 

War on gender

According to Project 2025, the next US president must “remove from every existing rule, regulatory agency, contract, grant, regulation, and federal law the terms sexual orientation and gender identity, diversity, equity, and inclusion, gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender, gender-sensitive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights”.

 

Abortion is mentioned 199 times in the document, including proposing a federal ban, increased criminalisation, more restrictions on providing care for miscarriages and obstetric emergencies, defunding emergency contraception and strict surveillance systems on people who have abortions or suffer miscarriages.

 

Heritage also wants to impose its worldview across borders: restore the so-called ‘Mexico City policy’, which prohibits any US public funding to foreign non-governmental organisations if they include any abortion-related activity – even if they do so with their own funds.

 

The right to abortion, legalised in 2020 in Argentina, is in danger under Milei. His party introduced a bill to repeal abortion which he’s referred to as “aggravated murder”. He’s also defunded the distribution of abortion pills and contraceptives.

 

Milei eliminated a programme to prevent teenage pregnancy and has not set aside any funds in the 2025 budget for comprehensive sex education – which is mandatory by law and considered essential to prevent child abuse. Instead, authorities hired the Chilean Catholic organisation Teen Star, that promotes abstinence, for training teachers in charge of CSE.

 

Milei banned the use of gender inclusive language in public services, and put a Catholic lawyer, Ursula Basset, in the foreign ministry to review all the country's positions on gender and climate change. At the last Organisation of American States General Assembly, Basset stymied the negotiations by demanding the removal of “LGBTI people”, “gender”, “tolerance”, “climate change” and “families” from agreed intergovernmental statements.

 

“Argentina was the only G20 country to oppose the Ministerial Declaration on Gender Equality,” signed last month in Rio, Ávila-Guillén told me. The disagreement stemmed from the fact that “family care” was defined as work and the term “reproductive rights” was mentioned. Argentina ended up in a more extreme position than Saudi Arabia or Russia.

 

Respectability and academic tone is just a veneer for hate in 'Mandate for Leadership'. You only need to skim the document to find polarising language and the construction of an internal enemy. Milei likewise calls his opponents “rats”, “human excrement”, “fucking lefties”, “imbeciles” or “traitors”.

 

“The idea that Milei is the most Argentinian thing that could happen to Argentina is ridiculous; he is part of a much bigger agenda, crafted in the US and which is trying to be implemented in different parts of the world”, Ávila-Guillén says.

 

The lobbyist that connected Milei with the Heritage Foundation last year is Damián Merlo, partner director of Latin America Advisory Group, a company which lobbies in the US on behalf of authoritarian Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele. Merlo is close to digital strategist Fernando Cerimedo, who also works for Milei and has done so for the former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro. Cerimedo is currently under investigation in Brazil for his alleged role in the 2022 failed coup attempt led by Bolsonaro against Brazilian president Inácio Lula da Silva.

 

When Milei took office, he warned the Argentine people that their economic plight might briefly worsen under his harsh measures. This is exactly what millions are now suffering: more poverty and recession.

 

In the last days of the US election campaign, a similar message was spread by billionaire Elon Musk who put more than $100m into Trump's campaign, and who would be, according to Trump, his “secretary of cost-cutting”. Such cuts, Musk warned, might cause “temporary hardship”, but they were necessary in the path to “long-term prosperity”.

 

Prosperity for whom is not clear – but a recipe for hardship, denial of rights and persecution is on display in Argentina, if you can bear to take a look.

 

[Bjornebye]

Try watching Rocky 4 and now and not wanting Drago to get a judges draw (he’d have been 7000 points up and probably in jail in real life I know) 

[Kepler-186]

No surprise really. 
 

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/03/texaco-franco-spanish-civil-war-rieber/

 

 

[polymerpunkah]

The "left-wing" press losing it's collective shit in the US.

 

Though of course another four years of Trump 24/7 will sell a lot of advertising. 

 

No small irony.

[TheHowieLama]

The City of Bonnieville, Kentucky will soon be no more. An audit after Election Day confirmed residents voted to dissolve their local government by only seven votes. 

It's left some residents with many questions on what will happen to City Hall, the roads and streetlights.

The Hart County community is where just over 200 Kentuckians call home. Just off of I-65 you'll see a welcome sign for Bonnieville, which was established in 1958. But by next week all signs, banners with the city's name will be removed. 

 

"We're making history," Bonnieville Mayor Marie Whitlow said. "Sad history but we're making history."

 

 

[TheHowieLama]

Think we can all agree these DOGE boys are among the smartest fellas to ever walk the corridors of power. Some would say genius'. Every avenue of government waste is now a dead end. Only the interests of the American Public will be considered as this federal grift has to end.

 

In other news -

 

RFK wants daughter-in-law to lead CIA and re-open investigation into JFK’s assassination

 

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/axios-rfk-wants-daughter-in-law-to-lead-cia-and-re-open-investigation-into-jfk-s-assassination/vi-AA1vHmSJ#details

[polymerpunkah]

I'm waiting for the moment they realize that most of the politicians in Washington rely on the money the government spends in their constituencies to get and stay elected.

 

For a fellow who's received billions in government subsidies, and billions more in government contracts, you'd think that Musk would already know it.

[Section_31]

Wonder how that empty ballsack Murdoch is reacting to Musk's new place as wormtongue in chief? 

[TheHowieLama]

8 minutes ago, Section_31 said:

Wonder how that empty ballsack Murdoch is reacting to Musk's new place as wormtongue in chief? 

 

Just lost his Succession case didn't he?

[Anubis]

Hey CIA, any time you want to step in here, feel free. Any time at all.

 

Because you’re not normally this reticent.

[polymerpunkah]

Daniel Penny attended the Army/Navy game today with Trump.

 

Word is he's going to be put in charge of cost-cutting at the National Institute of Mental Health.

 

 

[Skidfingers McGonical]

On 12/12/2024 at 13:00, TheHowieLama said:

Think we can all agree these DOGE boys are among the smartest fellas to ever walk the corridors of power. Some would say genius'. Every avenue of government waste is now a dead end. Only the interests of the American Public will be considered as this federal grift has to end.

 

In other news -

 

RFK wants daughter-in-law to lead CIA and re-open investigation into JFK’s assassination

 

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/axios-rfk-wants-daughter-in-law-to-lead-cia-and-re-open-investigation-into-jfk-s-assassination/vi-AA1vHmSJ#details

Well of Biden can pardon his son, why not try and find out who killed your Uncle.

 

Surely Biden has made sure it’s all fair game now.

[TheHowieLama]

Shirley.

[Em City]

Democratic party aides have begun to float ideas for a Kamala Harris political comeback, reportedly eyeing another run at the US’s highest office even as the party continues to grapple with the electoral messages contained in the vice-president’s decisive defeat in November’s White House race against Donald Trump.

 

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/dec/16/kamala-harris-2028-election-president-governor

 

 

The Democrats must have a serious fetish for losing elections. How out of touch do you have to be for this to be your main takeaway from the election?