Really? Because last I checked Kaepernick still ain’t playing anywhere.
And not thinking an author should have your platform because you don’t think their ideas are worth propagating is an absolutely fantastic reason not to publish them. That’s the literal marketplace of ideas. If it’s a good one, or at least a marketable one, it will have a market.
Ever work with someone that when they called in sick, you just knew they were faking? Maybe you were the lucky one they called, asking you to relay the message and you were treated to something like the following:
Yeah, um, I’m like, real sick. (hack, cough) I think I ate some bad sushi and my allergies are flaring up and to make it worse, I think I caught that bug going around. (More gross nasal sounds here.) I’m hoping I’ll be better by Monday. Tell $boss for me, please, kthxbye.
Well, several Republicans just pulled the equivalent of that and heaped on a hefty helping of hypocrisy.
Last summer, they objected to a change in the House of Representatives that allowed them to designate a proxy to vote on their behalf when there were concerns about traveling and COVID-19.
This week, they used it as an excuse for them to travel to Florida to attend CPAC (the Conservative Political Action Committee) or the right-wing extremist version called AFPAC (America First Political Action Committee).
Guess who also objected to a change in a voting method but had no problem using that change to help himself? Rudy Giuliani. When he voted in the 2020 election, he used an affidavit ballot because his name was not on the voter rolls when he showed up. Without making use of what he considered to be an example of voter fraud, he could not have voted in the election.
Senator Bill Cassidy said that continuing to embrace Trump is going to cost Republican a lot of the upcoming elections. Specifically, he said, “If we idolize one person, we will lose.” Hang on to that for a moment.
Senator Rick Scott, chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, says “the Republican civil war is canceled” and that the GOP is “the voter’s party”, not “Trump’s party”. Donald Trump Jr. disagrees, calling the event “TPAC”, which likely stands for “Trump’s Political Action Committee”.
Before CPAC began, they uninvited a person named Young Pharaoh from being on a guest panel after anti-Semitic and conspiratorial tweets from him were published in an article. And yet who do they still allow to attend who had a much longer history of conspiratorial tweets? Trump.
The artist who made it said he had seen other negative images of Trump and wanted to do better. So he made this. In Rosarito, Mexico. Then he had it shipped to Tampa where it was painted in chrome. Somehow in between there and showing up at CPAC, it became golden.
Now maybe that’s a reference to Trump’s “golden touch” of being a successful businessman (which is steadily being contradicted not only by his past failures like Trump Steaks and Trump University, but by his current businesses that have lost $900 million in recent years), but it didn’t take long for it get compared to the Israelites worshiping the golden calf. The artist contests that and says it’s a statue, not an idol, and he knows what the definition of an idol is.
Regardless, there’s an old definition I heard years ago about what worship is. Anything that you devote a lot of your time and attention to can be categorized as something you worship.
When it comes to Trump’s supporters, many of them have devoted a lot of their time, attention, admiration, respect, money and more to him. They may not say it and they may not like having it said about them, but it could be said that they worship him. For some, they have valued him over their own family members. They’ve cut ties with members of their family because they didn’t support Donald Trump.
Whether you call it a statue or an idol, it is a representation of how much people and specifically the Republicans that attended CPAC worship him. They allowed the statue to remain on the premises while CPAC was under way.
As of Saturday, there were a few Republicans that had expressed an interest in running for president: Ted Cruz, Nikki Haley, Mike Pompeo, Larry Hogan, Josh Hawley and Tom Cotton.
On Sunday, Donald Trump dropped a lot of hints that he’ll run for president in 2024.
As of Sunday night, all of those people now have to make a decision: Do they continue to pursue entering the presidential race in 2024 and risk becoming Trump’s enemy? Or do they go ahead with it, knowing that they’ll be in it so there’s token opposition to Trump’s candidacy?
We all know how little it takes for someone Trump calls “friend” to become his enemy. Being his opponent in the 2024 race will make them his enemy. There’s no middle ground with him. No matter how much they supported him in the past, once he decides if he’ll go through with it, they’re fair game to be taken down.
The best they can hope for is to give it up, or else they enter the race, knowing Trump will be picked and hoping to somehow curry favor so after their already-decided defeat, Trump will still like them enough to choose them as his vice presidential running mate. If you think this is being pessimistic, remember that in the 2016 presidential race, the Democrats undermined Bernie Sanders behind the scenes so that Hillary Clinton would become the front runner for their party. You think Republicans who have supported and rewarded Trump so far wouldn’t do the same?
Given Trump’s past behavior towards women, I think it’s safe to say that Nikki Haley should just pack it in right now. If Trump runs for president again, not only would she become his enemy, there’s no way he’d pick her to be his V.P. running mate.
Politicians just love to gamble with lives, as long as they are not impacted by it. This cartoon illustrate it, and it will be familiar.
Apologies if it offend. It depicts a vulture in the background waiting for a child to die - but there is additional dialogue in the background.
You know, I don’t think I’ve seen a politidoodle as powerful as this in several years.
Maybe not as powerful as Ook’s cartoon…
The last couple of weeks have shown just how out of touch the Oz government is with reality. It started with a rape allegation and has snow-balled from there. Plenty of Oz news sites covering the whole sordid mess.
Parler was shut down because they helped organize the Jan 6 attack, except actual examination of the data shows that a vast majority of it was organized on Twitter and Facebook.
Colin was already benched with injuries when people noticed his protests. When he finally started playing again his performance was less than stellar. A couple years later when he held his personal NFL combine he changed the venue at the last minute and I believe also only allowed his camera people to film, something like 6 teams still showed up to check him out and were possibly impressed by his athleticism but turned off by his behavior.
Members of Congress calling for private companies to drop channels and asking why they haven’t already. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/22/business/media/disinformation-cable-television.html
This after years of CNN and MSNBC commentators promising the next big bombshell on Trump about golden showers, or solid proof that he did X, Y, or Z.
Also see this reaction to a hit piece on Baen Books trying to get them cancelled because of alleged violent speech on their forums, forums which are slightly older than the actual internet. By an author who was declined by that publisher just a couple weeks earlier and which caused WorldCon to disinvite, for the first time ever, a Female Jewish publisher.
Piers Morgan, far from my favorite person, has lost his job because he said that he didn’t believe Markle. A nation that tried for decades to be allowed to criticize royalty is now cancelling careers for criticizing ex-royals.
You are correct. But the independent markets are getting crushed by some of the things I posted above and regulatory capture. I struggle here, because I agree with the concept, but you can’t say you are neutral and then pick and choose what you sell based on the very concepts you said you were neutral.
Amazon will block sales of books that they do not agree with while appearing in front of Congress saying they are neutral.If they want to block sales, that’s their right, but drop the facade of being neutral.
When I look at the top 10 most challenged books of 2019, these don’t strike me as “cancel culture” from the left. I have not and will not claim that it’s all from the right but the idea that it only comes from the left is laughable.
Right wing individuals… Left wing corporations, media, amd government.
None of these are individuals; all are right-wing.
https://www.investingadvicewatchdog.com/Liberal-Companies-Boycott.html
One million moms and 2nd Vote both appear to be normal advocacy groups pushing their own agenda, not government or media organizations. And Kelloggs, a corporation, cancelled Breitbart.
I don’t see a problem with any of those three things. I may not agree with them but those seem like normal things to do and not what I am talking about.
On the right, it’s individuals banding together for a common moral purpose, but on the left it’s all faceless nefarious organizations working in lockstep to keep down the individual? All organizations are composed of people; corporations, non-profits, and media do not lose their right to advocate for (or against) things simply because they are formally organized. That’s really what Citizens United was about, if anyone would actually read it.
Government is different because it’s wielding the power of the state on behalf of all of us; it needs to represent all of us. But government action is not what most people think of when we are discussing “cancel culture”–except at the behalf of individuals and groups, e.g. trying to get books banned for content they don’t like. I am generally against this sort of thing.
Hoo boy. This is starting to make a lot of sense now. I think I’m starting to piece together why Trump refused to give up being president. I’ve still got a lot to go through, but here it is. It wasn’t ego, hubris, entitlement, “I’m always a winner” or anything else like that. It’s because he was financially dependent upon being president and he needed to keep his taxes hidden.
Remember when Trump said “Sure, I’ll release my taxes” and then a month later he said he couldn’t because of an IRS audit? Anyone remember the IRS saying audits don’t prevent tax info from being made public?
I’ll condense this as much as I can but it’s still going to be a lot.
If that had been publicly known back then, would people still have viewed Trump as a winner, or would it have hurt his brand? The latter, and even though he was still on the TV show The Apprentice a decade later, his brand was becoming less prominent. He needed something to make his brand relevant again and to take care of what was coming in the future.
When did Trump announce he was running for President? 2015. What is the maximum length of time a President can serve as per the 22nd Amendment to the U.S. Constitution? Eight years. Remember when Trump said he deserved a third term? That would push his time in office to 12 years, ending in 2029. How many loans did he have coming due between 1995 and 2029? At least 11, for a total of $1.095 billion.
(The above two paragraphs have updated since I first posted this last night after I realized I got the year wrong for his campaign announcement. I don’t have info right now on how many other loans he may have paid off between 1995 and 2015, but that billion+ he owes is correct as of 2019-2020.)
Another loan has some financial experts baffled. It’s an “Over $50M” amount that Trump loaned himself from the Chicago Unit Acquisition LLC company he owns. He says he purchased the debt from other companies. For some reason, he’s paying $4.4M a year on interest to his other company when he could just cancel the debt, yet CUA doesn’t make enough money to be worth listing as income, even though the interest paid from Trump to himself does count as income. CUA makes between $1K and $25K according to Trump. Other experts say it could be “debt parking”, which could be tax fraud if the loan doesn’t actually exist, or it’s owed to some other company.
The CUA loan is also labeled as a “springing” loan. Those are loans people and businesses get that are a bad credit risk. They often have harsh repayment terms if certain criteria aren’t met. So Trump loaned himself the money but considers himself a bad credit risk. Uh, yeah. What he says he owes to his own company that doesn’t make any money probably does belong to some other lender.
Ah, but did he actually make that much money? Maybe not. For the portion of the 40 Wall Street property he has, Trump’s tax report says it earned $882K in 2017 and cost $744K for property insurance (year not specified), but loan officials were told it earned $1.67M and the property insurance was $457K. And he doesn’t actually own that part of the property. It’s owned by a German family. Trump has the right to rent part of it to tenants. He paid that family $1.65M for the rights in 2015, yet he told the loan servicer it was only $1.24M. When ProPublica looked at his tax reports and compared them to his loan documents, it averaged to telling tax officials only 81% of what he told lenders he earned.
There’s other examples of discrepancies, such as either at 40 Wall Street or at the Trump International Hotel and Tower where occupancy rates were first listed at 58.9% and jumped to about 95% when he was applying for a loan, but city property tax officials were told a few years earlier it was already at 81%. Then in 2016, both numbers started syncing together.
Well, how about that he’s still fighting to get a tax rebate from the IRS. If he loses, he has to pay $100M to the federal government.
How about that even though COVID-19 affected all kinds of businesses across the nation, when you look at the area some of Trump’s businesses are in and the type of businesses they are, his are not doing as well as the average? That rules out the pandemic as to why they’ve got problems.
How about that he knew if he became president, he could earn a lot of money for his businesses? He was going to shoot for the top and rake in the dough. And he did. He got elected, hung onto his businesses instead of selling them to avoid conflicts of interest, emolument violations, etc., and he watched those businesses benefit from him being president.
But a former president doesn’t rake in as much as a current president does. A former president doesn’t have the protection of being in office to keep his finances hidden. The brand of a former president isn’t as prestigious as a current president’s brand. A former president isn’t at the top any more.
And so you have someone with a lot of motivation to remain as president trying to do exactly that. Someone who had a lot of debts coming due very quickly on businesses that aren’t doing as well as he says they are. Debts he likely planned on never having to pay because he could keep putting them off or refinancing them or getting debt forgiveness because he’s Trump. Someone who saw that if he were a former president, the money coming in would start slowing down, making it harder for him to pay what he can’t get out of.
Which it has. One of his hotels now has so little activity it’s being described as feeling like a ghost town.
He’s turned to political fundraising but he’s got it structured so he doesn’t actually have to spend any of the money on things related to politics. It can go to anything he wants, whether it’s being used to pay off his loans or to go into his own pockets and the pockets of his relatives. Back in December when he raised about $37.4M, roughly 1% went to politics-related efforts.
He continues to push his claims of voter fraud and a stolen election. “Hey, Mr. Trump? Your good friend and supporter Rush Limbaugh died. Would you like to say a few words about him?” “Nah, I’ll just keep repeating my claims over and over again.”
He hints he might run for president again in 2024 but doesn’t actually say he will. That way, he can keep taking in donations from people who think they’re supporting a political candidate. When he walks away and those donors say, “But, but, but… What about the 2024 race?”, he can say, “I didn’t say I was running for president again, did I? You just assumed I was.”
A lot of what Trump earned in the past didn’t come from his hotels, golf courses or things like that. It came from licensing the use of this name. It shouldn’t be a surprise then that he sent a cease and desist letter to the Republican National Committee to keep them from using his name and likeness for their fundraising. They can since he’s a public figure (though also now a private citizen), but he doesn’t want them to because they aren’t paying a licensing fee for it.
In fact, he doubled down at CPAC and in subsequent messages said that the only way America will continue to be great again is by making donations through his website and nowhere else. “Send the money directly to me because no one else knows how to keep this Greatness going.” The RNC seems to have caved in and will have one of their events at Mar-a-Lago.
The Supreme Court has made it possible to get at the tax records Trump’s been fighting to keep hidden. Michael Cohen, former attorney for Trump, former vice president of the Trump Organization and personal counsel to Trump, now convicted felon and disbarred lawyer that the Trump White House dismissed and discredited previously, has met with the Manhattan district attorney seven times and may be meeting with them an eighth time. John W. Dean, President Nixon’s White House counsel and was involved in the Watergate investigation, has said you don’t meet with someone like Cohen that many times if you’re not planning on indicting the people they have knowledge about.
Trump’s been standing at the top of a house of cards he built, boasting for decades how successful he is as he added card after card of debt. But at the bottom of the structure, one of those cards isn’t a card. It’s a manila folder labeled “Donald J. Trump’s tax records”.
He fought for years to keep that folder closed. Now the folder is about to be opened and when it is, someone’s going to pull it out from the bottom of the stack. The house of cards won’t stay standing long afterward. The people that get the most favorable treatment are the ones that get in line early to testify.
How many of the people that have been loyal to Trump will continue to stay loyal once they get a good look at what’s coming for him? How many of them will nope right out of there to save their own skins? How many of them will retreat to a safe distance and watch the downfall of The Donald?
It’s things like the above re His Trumpness and money that make me glad I’m not filthy rich…
To be honest, if the above comes to pass as you suggest, I think he’d just declare bankruptcy and walk away again. He’s good at just walking away from a problem that gets too big (why else did Korea peter out?) because in the Business World that’s what you do. Sack everyone, roll the shutters, leave with the good furniture before the liquidators arrive.
Trump didn’t concede because — at least from our external perspective — he felt cheated by the foot campaign the Democrats had.
DEMS used Postal Vote
It’s super effective!
It was a perfect storm really, everyone at home with the lockdown, the Dems encouraging everyone and their dog (I mean, the fraud was also just as obvious, the number of dead voters was ridiculous; even if it is a small percentage, it shouldn’t be a percentage) to vote for them, while Trump continued to hold rallies that drew large crowds… but had no coördinated foot campaign.
Kinda like how Pizza Express is nice for a quick lunch in a snazzy place, but you order from the takeaway more often because it comes to your house, if you follow my analogy (I’m bad at them 
).
That would be consistent with what he’s done before. I don’t think he would, though.
Michael Cohen said on September 29th that Trump’s biggest fear “is that if his tax return is released, that there’s a whole slew of organizations of accountants and forensic accountants that will rip through it and he will end up with a massive tax bill, fraud penalties, fines, and possibly even tax fraud.”
That’s been repeated a few times since then. What isn’t really said is the follow-up: If he’s convicted of tax fraud, he could very likely spend the rest of his life in prison.
He’s 74 right now. How much more life expectancy does he have? He’s not in great health. He has a bad diet (likely because no one dares tell him no) and the only exercise he gets is golfing. Technically it is exercise but it’s a very minimal amount. Almost all of a round of golf is standing while you watch someone else take their turn, standing while you evaluate how you will take your turn, walking for a bit (or using the golf cart, which he prefers to do). The exercise only gets anywhere close to being vigorous is for about 5 seconds at a time when you’re doing longer drives with the golf club, and then it’s right back to being a passive activity.
Add all that up and not only could Trump spend the rest of his life in prison, his health could deteriorate before he has a chance for parole. I think the stigma of being a convicted felon that dies in prison is something he couldn’t bear. Winners don’t die in prison. Very stable geniuses don’t die in prison. Dying in prison means his face won’t be on Mount Rushmore like he believes he’s entitled to be memorialized.
I suppose I didn’t count on that; my knowledge of how rapid the US Courts are is nil, and I assumed that it would be in a similar state as ours; if you get arrested for non-violent crime right now, your initial court hearing won’t be until 2023. Heck even if you murder a child in front of the police station and video the whole thing, the papers will have gotten bored of you months before your hearing 
Trump being arrested for Tax Fraud would probably be the only way they could take him down, bar him punching Pelosi on television. Rather apt, a mobster taken down by the treasury again.
You’re totally right about his diet though, eat enough Big Macs and they’ll probably get McDonalds to sponsor his casket.
Oh this is rich.
Most people here probably know who Sidney Powell is - the moron who represented Trump for a while and who is now being sued by Dominion Voting Systems for all the lies she spread.
She has just filed a motion for dismissal because no reasonable people would believe her election fraud claims.
A few things to unpack there.
Firstly, she is basically saying that all the people who did believe her are idiots (and there were a heck of a lot of people that did).
When they get to court, Dominion have to prove (among other things) that she knowingly lied about her claims. Her reason for wanting the dismissal is basically that she knowingly lied. Good luck with that one.
I don’t know whether this is true or not, but I read somewhere that she actually took some of her claims to court. I have a suspicion that’s not accurate though as that would likely be grounds for being disbarred. Not that I would have any problems with that happening, but I just have difficulty believing anyone could be that stupid.
Just remember two simple rules.
Bonus rule: After contemplating Rules (1) and (2), start drinking heavily.
And there may be some precedent - remember, Fox “News” got a lawsuit against them dismissed because they argued that no reasonable person would take Tucker Carlson seriously…
