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kpete

kpete's Journal
kpete's Journal
July 11, 2021

TX AG Brags to CPAC: Trump would not have won TX if he hadn't won 12 voter suppression lawsuits

And there it is. They can't revert to more moderate positions because Trumpism, so they have no choice but to stop Democrats from voting. It's the only way they can win and they're openly admitting it.

To a standing ovation, Texas AG Ken Paxton tells CPAC that Trump would not have won Texas if he hadn’t won 12 voter suppression lawsuits to stop mail-in ballots and drop boxes.


https://twitter.com/bobcesca_go/status/1414272134831017990?s=20
July 11, 2021

Top headlines this morning:

West braces for another record-breaking heat wave, bringing with it fire, death, and ecological collapse

Billionaire launches self into space, beating other billionaire by about a week

https://twitter.com/lydiadepillis/status/1414235838066663424?s=20

mr pete & i drove through the Owen's Valley from Mammoth Lakes yesterday
(this was at 8,300 ft in the Eastern Sierra Mountains!)
it was 87° inside the house when we left at 10:00 a.m.
105° in Bishop
115 ° in Adelanto
107 to 113° until Cajon Pass which was bumper to bumper
87° in San Diego
69° this morning

as we drove, I couldn't help but wonder why the weatherpersons on the radio were not screaming:
THE EARTH IS ON FIRE PEOPLE!

Don't even get me started on forest fire, death & ecological collapse.




July 11, 2021

'I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.'

?w=948

?cache_buster=2b7a2c57ef2b7e697f3dec67d64fae64


UPDATE TO ADD:
I have been told this is NOT a Gandhi quote,
I am bummed
Anyone know the author?
July 11, 2021

At CPAC, a reporter is given a pair of eyeglasses by an old woman who quickly departs...

At CPAC, a reporter is given a pair of eyeglasses by an old woman who quickly departs. Inside, the reporter dons the glasses & discovers that attendees are actually Cenobites, & Trump appears to be an overweight version of Pinhead. The reporter quickly puts the glasses on eBay.

https://twitter.com/laurenweinstein/status/1414023186488823812?s=20

July 11, 2021

Never play the other guy's game --- The other guy's game is designed for the other guy to win.

Intriguing argument from Adam Gopnick, at the New Yorker:

… Donald Trump invented a game: of bullying, lying, sociopathic selfishness, treachery, and outright gangsterism, doing and saying things that no democratic politician had ever done or even thought of doing, and he did it all in broad daylight. (A notorious line attributed to Nixon—“We can do that, but it would be wrong”—was about paying hush money. Even Nixon wouldn’t pardon his henchmen. Trump did.) It was a game designed for Trump alone to win, but all too many got drawn into it. It was a game that some credit to a Russian model of disinformation but actually seems rooted in old-fashioned American Barnumism, weaponized with John Gotti-style ethics. It was designed, in plain English, to throw out so much crap that no one could ever deal with it all. Trying to bat the crap away, you just got more of it all over you, and meanwhile you were implicitly endorsing its relevance.

Biden, by contrast, insisted that the way to win was not to play. In the face of the new politics of spectacle, he kept true to old-school coalition politics. He understood that the Black Church mattered more in Democratic primaries than any amount of Twitter snark, and, by keeping a low profile on social media, showed that social-media politics was a mirage. Throughout the dark, dystopian post-election months of Trump’s tantrum—which led to the insurrection on January 6th—many Democrats deplored Biden’s seeming passivity, his reluctance to call a coup a coup and a would-be dictator a would-be dictator. Instead, he and his team were remarkably (to many, it seemed, exasperatingly) focussed on counting the votes, trusting the process, and staffing the government.

It looked at the time dangerously passive; it turned out to be patiently wise, for Biden and his team, widely attacked as pusillanimous centrists with no particular convictions, are in fact ideologues. Their ideology is largely invisible but no less ideological for refusing to present itself out in the open. It is the belief, animating Biden’s whole career, that there is a surprisingly large area of agreement in American life and that, by appealing to that area of agreement, electoral victory and progress can be found. (As a recent Populace survey stated, Biden and Trump voters hold “collective illusions” about each other, and “what is often mistaken for breadth of political disagreement is actually narrow — if extremely intense — disagreement on a limited number of partisan issues.”) Biden’s ideology is, in fact, the old ideology of pragmatic progressive pluralism—the ideology of F.D.R. and L.B.J. Beneath the strut and show and hysteria of politics, there is often a remarkably resilient consensus in the country. Outside the white Deep South, there was a broad consensus against segregation in 1964; outside the most paranoid registers of Wall Street, there was a similar consensus for social guarantees in 1934. Right now, post-pandemic, polls show a robust consensus for a public option to the Affordable Care Act, modernized infrastructure, even for tax hikes on the very rich and big corporations. The more you devote yourself to theatrical gestures and public spectacle, the less likely you are to succeed at making these improvements—and turning Trumpism around. Successful pluralist politicians reach out to the other side, not in a meek show of bipartisanship, but in order to steal their voters.

… With so many Americans in the grip of a totalized ideology of Trumpism—one that surmounts their obvious self-interest or normal calculations of economic utility—the way to get them out of it is to stop thinking in totalized terms. You get people out of a cult not by offering them a better cult but by helping them see why they don’t need a cult. This is a difficult wisdom—and one that, perhaps not accidentally, was offered often during the campaign by the man who is now Biden’s Transportation Secretary. Pete Buttigieg said at the time that you can’t defeat a cartoon villain by being a cartoon hero. You defeat a cartoon villain by helping people remember that life is not a cartoon. He put it simply to the press: “Trump appeals to people’s smallness, their fears, whatever part of them wants to look backward. We need to be careful that our necessary rebukes of the President don’t corner people into the kind of defensiveness that makes them even more vulnerable to those kinds of appeals. What we really need to do in some ways is talk past Trump and his sins.”



https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/bidens-invisible-ideology?utm_source=nl&utm_brand=tny&utm_mailing=TNY_Daily_071021&utm_campaign=aud-dev&utm_medium=email&bxid=5bd67bd53f92a41245df1ad1&cndid=46207384&hasha=ca4267b462a60f252cf85401b3c734ff&hashb=5332756476ecd7c5f9b2b720ab35d3363bdb0ec7&hashc=4a7a36d6457c7c211bfe331ba51970246bbc906b15de5017113fc13ff1513856&esrc=vendor101&utm_content=B&utm_term=TNY_Daily

July 10, 2021

Go with god (lol)

god hath spoken:

When liberals go door to door vaccinating conservatives, they should also take all their bibles and guns, make a huge bible-gun bonfire and dance around it naked whilst smoking weed. NOTE: The bibles should form the base, for they make good kindling.

https://twitter.com/thegoodgodabove/status/1413628240032411648?s=20
https://twitter.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1413595082238873607?s=20

July 9, 2021

Trump & DeSantis on Collision Course: "There's going to be a blowup-Trump f__king hates DeSantis"

In recent days I spoke with a half dozen GOP insiders about the recent flare-ups between DeSantis’s and Trump’s camps. The sources agreed that DeSantis and Trump are on an inevitable collision course as the 2024 GOP field takes shape. “There’s going to be a blowup,” a prominent Republican said. “Trump fucking hates DeSantis. He just resents his popularity,” a Trump confidant told me. Asked for comment, Trump spokesperson Liz Harrington said: “Governor DeSantis has shown great respect.”

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/07/trump-and-desantis-are-on-a-collision-course
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2021/7/9/2039043/-Vanity-Fair-Trump-f-cking-hates-DeSantis-and-there-s-going-to-be-a-blowup?utm_campaign=trending

July 9, 2021

BRUTAL New Insurrection Video: Mob to Police: "You're going to die tonight"

Another new video court exhibit released in US Capitol Insurrection case.

You can hear someone in mob say to police: "You're going to die tonight"
https://twitter.com/MacFarlaneNews/status/1413561012746428422?s=20

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