Desantis is out

It’s a trump v. Haley race now

https://www.threads.net/@cnn/post/C2YBnJfpXhe/?igshid=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==

1/21/2024 3:55:48 PM

I actually think Haley would make a competent president

But I don’t see the gop nominating an Indian woman to kick trump out

Sad day for America and democracy. Going to be the worst presidential election race in American history

1/21/2024 4:00:42 PM

it’s a sad day because Desantis dropped out?

wat

1/21/2024 4:06:19 PM

Sad because trump is another step closer to presidency despite incrementally more reasons why he shouldn’t be

Also here’s me being epically wrong about desantis and gop a few years ago

https://www.brentroad.com/message_topic.aspx?topic=652386&page=1#16607247

1/21/2024 4:12:39 PM

^^^

I think there is certainly a meaningful amount of racism plaguing the GOP, but I think that’s nearly negligible in terms of reasons Haley isn’t getting traction against Trump.

1/21/2024 11:13:07 PM

^
agreed
Also, tbh, a lot of it is image and she kind of blends in

Quote :

"I actually think Haley would make a competent president"

competent, sure I guess. good, no
biden2024

1/22/2024 3:37:20 AM

Tim Scott posting engagement pics and endorsing Trump, gunning for vp?

1/22/2024 12:08:41 PM

Gunning for that vicious poon

1/22/2024 12:43:03 PM

I can't see Tim Scott as VP tbh

1/22/2024 12:44:32 PM

Nope. He'll pick one of his biggest sycophants and enablers. It'll be a race between Jordan, pedo-Gaetz, MTG, and Stefanik. He won't make the mistake of picking someone with principles again. That burned him on Jan 6th last time.

God help us all.

[Edited on January 22, 2024 at 3:02 PM. Reason : ]

1/22/2024 3:01:20 PM

Time to restore America

1/22/2024 4:06:46 PM

https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/4434317-oklahoma-gop-votes-to-censure-lankford-over-senate-border-talks/

Quote :

"The Oklahoma Republican Party approved a resolution Saturday condemning and censuring Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) for his role as a chief negotiator in the Senate border security talks between Democrats and Republicans. The resolution... said, 'Senator Lankford playing fast and loose with Democrats on our border policy not only disfranchises legal immigrants seeking citizenship but it also puts the safety and security of Americans in great danger.'"

1/29/2024 8:54:53 AM

LOL! House GOP failed to impeach Homeland Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas despite holding their high-profile vote.

PWNT!

2/6/2024 7:04:04 PM

The older i get the more pwnt sounds like a fart

2/7/2024 2:39:46 AM

You mean the more your farts sound like PWNT?

2/7/2024 6:18:28 AM

^^^ Yet somehow these clowns are winning the Congressional generic ballot.

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/generic-ballot/

https://www.realclearpolling.com/polls/state-of-the-union/2024/generic-congressional-vote

[Edited on February 7, 2024 at 8:28 AM. Reason : ]

2/7/2024 8:27:48 AM

Propaganda works. Their voters are self-selecting "news" sources that lie to them. The economy is good. They don't understand what inflation is expect stuff costs more. Taming inflation doesn't mean prices go back to what they were. That's not going to happen.

2/7/2024 10:19:16 AM

Nikki haley lost to "none of these" in Nevada

2/7/2024 11:43:07 AM

^ let's not kid ourselves... if that were an option in November, it might win

2/7/2024 12:52:13 PM

^^^
Correct, it's just that inflation lingers with people still adjusting, and the propaganda. Even "liberal media" coddles the narrative that Biden is just a bad option that we need, which itself feeds this idea, it is irresponsible and done to act mainstream.

2/7/2024 1:20:01 PM

^^^^
expect --> except

Oops!

2/7/2024 1:28:11 PM

Classic TheCoz

2/7/2024 3:20:20 PM

Sounds like another ClassicMixup

2/7/2024 3:38:12 PM

You wouldn't even want prices to go back down. That would be deflation, which is very dangerous.

2/7/2024 6:53:45 PM

Yes, I understand that, but if you asked your average citizen, they will just say stuff like gas and food was cheaper under Trump, and Biden caused inflation and they want prices to go back to where they were. The really dumb part is how Trump was trying to publicly shame Jerome Powell and say he was an idiot for not setting NEGATIVE interest rates. Boy, that sure would have tamed emergent inflation! What a moron. Now he is accusing Powell of political motivations for a pending rate cut that has been long telegraphed. Apparently it's all to help Democrats, and now high interest rates are good! But Trump gets a pass because the public has a very short attention span and memory. The Tweets are all public record.

Trump reverses course, seeks negative rates from Fed 'boneheads'
September 11, 2019

https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKCN1VW1CI/

Quote :

""The Federal Reserve should get our interest rates down to ZERO, or less, and we should then start to refinance our debt. INTEREST COST COULD BE BROUGHT WAY DOWN, while at the same time substantially lengthening the term," Trump tweeted. "We have the great currency, power, and balance sheet... The USA should always be paying the ... lowest rate. No Inflation!" . . . The Washington Post, citing public filings and financial experts, reported last month that Trump could also personally save millions of dollars a year in interest if the Fed lowers rates, given the outstanding loans on his hotels and resorts."

Fake news!

2/7/2024 7:30:46 PM

This goober scheduled the vote bc the guy was in the hospital and he knew that one vote would kill him. Guy shows up, motion killed
https://twitter.com/DGComedy/status/1755343486113452487

2/7/2024 11:42:55 PM

NC GOP kept doing that a couple years back. There was a Dem getting cancer treatment and they kept trying to vote when she was at the doctor. But now they've Gerrymandered themselves into a super-majority so it doesn't matter.

2/8/2024 5:56:06 PM

Of course some aspects have gotten more extreme, but the general public has always been this way. I just guess the nature of media, the internet, and all that is such that it makes the issue exponentially worse. There's no one set of facts for people to argue upon... even those there still is one reality, and thus the mass cognitive dissonance starts

[Edited on February 8, 2024 at 7:32 PM. Reason : -]

2/8/2024 7:32:03 PM

^^^^ yeah...I mean I would put blame on both of them for inflation, as well as attributing it to some amount being inevitable due to national and global effects from COVID.

[Edited on February 8, 2024 at 7:33 PM. Reason : ^]

2/8/2024 7:32:53 PM

Yes. There is ample blame to go around, but can we be adults and recognize that economies are complex and have many variables and that the President doesn't set inflation any more than he controls stock market returns. The political posturing is just dumb, but the pea-brains they always interview to get the pulse of the man on the street just make me shake my head. Are we not capable of higher-order thought processes?

2/8/2024 8:58:49 PM

Quote :

"but the pea-brains they always interview to get the pulse of the man on the street just make me shake my head."

they probably interview a lot of people and select the ones that are best to go for what they want to show on their channel/show/media

2/8/2024 11:35:23 PM

^ Nah. It's just that very few people are smart, and even fewer are both smart and objective.

2/8/2024 11:42:54 PM

^

I agree with that, I myself said above that:

Quote :

"...the general public has always been this way..."

Even the most fervent blind supporters of the "right" side often share the same traits as those on the exact opposite, life just incidentally brought them one way.

But, these street interviews themselves are definitely cherry picked, perhaps not nefariously, but still, to match a narrative or news story for the night. The extreme example of this, to explain what I mean, are those Jimmy Kimmel street interviews if you've seen them. They ask, like, "where is Germany on a map?" and no one can seem to answer... lmao

2/9/2024 3:37:29 AM

You think most Americans could find Germany on a map?

I don't think you'd have to cherry pick very much. I think that most people wouldn't know.

2/9/2024 9:53:15 PM

We should make finding european countries on a map the prerequisite for being smart

2/9/2024 9:57:14 PM

Lol. This is actually interesting. If I had to guess, it'd be like 2/3 for Germany, cause it's the big one in the middle. France/Spain/Portugal/UK/Russia too. As soon as you go to like Belgium, I can see it falling to like 25-40%.

I wonder if this has actually been studied, probably somewhere

I do wonder if it would be higher for Americans who have voted or do vote though. I think it would

[Edited on February 10, 2024 at 1:45 AM. Reason : -]

2/10/2024 1:44:32 AM

I think you are being very optimistic.

I think maybe because--and I'm making some assumptions here--that you're still in college and your life experiences are, maybe not limited to, but thus far largely dominated by a social circle of reasonably functional and successful people. Yeah, maybe 2/3 of them would find Germany and 1/3 would find Belgium (I'm less confident of the latter).

I don't mean that to come across as "STFU kid, you don't know shit yet." I really don't. Hahaha. I'm just saying that I grew up in a blue collar community, among people who mostly weren't educated much, if any, beyond high school (and in some cases not even that)...although my friends and peers at school mostly were from college-educated suburbia hell.

Still, I was shocked once I got out into the real world, traveled and lived all over the country, and saw exactly how mind-blowingly dumb and ignorant most people are. Dude, I'm not confident that 1/3 of Americans could find, say, Connecticut on the map, let alone Belgium.

1/3 of the country believes that the 2020 election was stolen. Something like 1/2 or 2/3 doesn't have enough cash to cover a $500 emergency expense. 11% have never traveled beyond the state they were born in. 40% have never traveled outside of the US.

I really think you're underestimating how profoundly ignorant the masses are. I did too, until I was maybe late 20s or maybe 30.

2/10/2024 11:05:14 AM

Yeah, we dumb. You will see.

2/10/2024 11:15:24 AM

^^

I get what you mean

This is also where covid kinda worries me. I might be projecting, but how do you even calculate the sheer amount of impact on the future (reading, basic critical thinking skills, etc.), it's so evenly spread in both the skills and among the general population, that it isn't even something you can target I guess, just a "new normal" for a while, so maybe we won't even notice... lol?

2/11/2024 9:02:42 AM

Good to see that the party that tells us to "support the troops" is completely on board with their Presidential frontrunner brazenly attacking a servicemember for being deployed overseas.

2/11/2024 9:49:03 AM

Where's Melania? Trying to unfreeze her face?

2/11/2024 9:54:16 AM

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/joe-biden/special-counsel-charges-fbi-informant-lying-bureau-hunter-joe-biden-rcna139091

whoops

2/15/2024 8:13:28 PM

^We all know it's just Crooked Joe weaponizing the DOJ again to stifle patriotic whistleblowers (liars).

2/15/2024 10:30:38 PM

Quote :

"Alexander Smirnov, 43"

hmm, guy with a Russian name, probably has seen Trump get peed on

2/15/2024 10:55:51 PM

I am just so against releasing russian agent in German custody. If we release him I want all 3 our ppl back

2/15/2024 11:05:38 PM

I’ve ragged on the GOP ITT for over a decade. At some point one assumes they’ve seen it all, but I am literally aghast at where the party finds itself today.

Trump, the party leader now, is increasingly unhinged and is being buried by legit criminal indictments. Yet he has never been in more control and demanded more loyalty from the rank and file. He’s shown he is willing to cut anyone’s political throat if they don’t sufficiently worship him, including moderates that are trying to walk political tightropes. He’s hoovering up all the campaign cash and is either unwilling or unable to share it with allies. There is still a lot of horrible details to drop from the national security related court cases. He continues to elevate garbage YES men to every position of consequence. Even if he died tomorrow it would take a decade to move the party to some semblance of sanity.

The House might be the biggest shit show. You’ve got 215ish Reps but apparently the ~30 dumbest among them are running everything. They’re all short on cash. They can’t pass appropriations bills and are absolutely going to be blamed for the imminent government shutdown. They can’t pass bills related to crisis that they claim are destroying the country. Their impeachment narrative is completely collapsing. More evidence of foreign governments astroturfing their agenda are revealed everyday. Their majority is dwindling due to disgusting criminality. Even as it burns down around them they continue to double down, or announce the their retirements.

The sputtering of the GOP senate, and specifically MCConnell’s loss of control of the chamber, is by far the most disturbing situation. They are unmoored from any policy vision and cowering from the psycho base, waiting for permission from Trump before they take any action.

And there is just no hope for improvement in the near future. The right wing media environment is irredeemable. Any politician that makes a stand is jettisoned and replaced by a MAGA dweeb. We are stuck with this shit show for a while.

And despite all this, they will still cling to many of the levers of power. There is a whole host of states where they will remain firmly in control of everything. The hacks on SCOTUS will continue trying to turn the country into a puritan nightmare. Losses in 2024 aren’t a given, because this is a deeply irrational and stupid country.

I’m trying to use “unamerican” less in my descriptions of politics because of the way it’s been brandished against legitimate political positions, but it’s a pretty apt description of the GOP today. There used to be factions and policies that were interesting and attractive to me, even if I was repulsed by other elements of the party. Now? It’s just sniveling, power hungry con men all the way down.

And there’s almost nothing sane people can do except wait it out and demand better from those parts of our system that still respond to the same portion of the country.

2/22/2024 1:27:18 PM

Cultural degradation

very well put, Terd

I share your sentiments

[Edited on February 22, 2024 at 2:06 PM. Reason : ]

2/22/2024 2:05:12 PM

conservatism was always heading down this path, Trump just happened to be a hell of an accelerant

2/22/2024 2:09:33 PM

newton's third law will take place eventually as it always does, TGL3

FUEL TO THE FIRE

[Edited on February 22, 2024 at 2:13 PM. Reason : !]

2/22/2024 2:13:14 PM

I dont want to get too optimistic (because if it doesn’t end up being true, it’s almost certainly the literal end of US democracy), but the post Roe elections, recent special elections, and their lack of funding give me some hope that the republicans could get trounced badly in November. Of course we would still have the terribly gerrymandered states and the horrible Supreme Court majority, but it would be some nice breathing room. Also that does not imply that getting badly beaten would inspire change the party either, most likely they’d just quadruple down on everything horrible

2/22/2024 2:17:42 PM