I seriously doubt people who say that kind of thing have thought this through for more than about 4 seconds. It’s like having a conversation with a Michael Bay movie.

Yeah that’s a great way to get an immediate injunction from a judge. That’s not how these things work.

That sounds like the easiest but absolutely worst option. I’d prefer that we not directly fund fascism.

I don’t mean to be rude, but you use too many commas for me to figure out what exactly you’re trying to say.

What’s so insidious about this unforced error is now that the NBC execs have inadvertently stepped in dogshit, they’re left with two bad options:

1. Kowtow to fascists by keeping her and letting her gaslight the country on their dime.

2. Give her the boot and prove to fascists that they’re actively being persecuted by “leftwing” media.

There’s no way for them to save face at this point, and they’re complete fucking morons for not seeing this coming from a hundred million miles away.

Because you have eyes.

No.

Not only that, but the clickbait media-sphere has slowly eroded “news” outlets to the point where they no longer cover things like “healthcare”, “taxation”, or “education”. Now they cover polls, donors, polls, primaries, rallies, polls, conventions, polls, elections, exit polls, approval polls, disapproval polls, etc, pretty much non-stop from election to election. The incessant drone of horse race journalism is drowning out any even remotely meaningful coverage of actual things that are happening in people’s lives. Long form and investigative journalism has been displaced by low effort politics-as-sport commentary.

Is there any wonder, then, how one of the major political parties was completely overtaken by a man who’s singularly obsessed with “winning” against “losers”? We’ve been fed a 20-year diet of who-beats-who monotony, and all the actual issues in the country are glossed over as boring and irrelevant. They fed people non-stop infotainment, and then people fell in line behind a vapid, loud-mouthed reality TV billionaire.

The supreme court just ruled that either the 14th amendment somehow doesn’t apply to presidents, trump didn’t engage in insurrection, and/or Trump is just simply above the law.

That’s quite literally not what they argued, even if you try to read it that way. You really should read the opinion before you tell people what it says.

edit: LOL! OP deleted the stupid argument and replaced it with one that sounds less stupid. My quote was lifted verbatim, and the stealth edit speaks volumes.

He’s a fighter. He fights everyone, about everything. I think that’s the crux of it.

Over the 1990s and 2000s these people were completely and utterly forgotten. Textiles, mines, manufacturing plants, they shuttered over and over and over and over again, and their children moved to big cities en masse. Their small cities and rural towns went from being on a growth trajectory (everything was on that trajectory between WWII and NAFTA) to being on a path to contraction and decay. Over that time they got madder, and madder, and madder, and madder, and they watched the Republican party (the one who at least paid lip service to “small government” and “traditional values”) lean harder and harder into corporatism. They were promised good things over and over and over again, and they were constantly pandered to, then lied to, and then ignored. Wash, rinse, repeat.

Well, Trump was the first one who didn’t talk, act, and think like the other guys. He wasn’t a politician, and that’s a great thing because (as they’d all come to agree) politicians are lying scum. So then not only was he willing to fight ferociously for them (and only them), he was willing to spit in the face of the people who lied to them all those years. And those political figures started to look like whiny little children when they stepped up and started saying, “hey, he’s lying to you!” The voters’ response was, “yeah? so the fuck what! you did too!”

He flips the system on its head, and he exposes politicians for what they are, because he’s exactly like them but he doesn’t give a fuck about playing the political game. To them, this is a godsend (literally). It’s the first crack in the political system that gave them any kind of sustained, meaningful authority to push back both politically and culturally, and he delivered a court system that’ll now push the entire country to the right over the next few decades. They simply don’t care about the democratic institutions he’s destroying, because they never helped the rural folk anyway.

Note: I don’t personally agree with much of this nonsense, and I think it’s a lot like shooting yourself in the face to cure a hangnail, but I’m just giving you a sense of how they look at it, and why he’s so weirdly transcendent to them. He’s a rich, connected insider, who decided to burn the system down from the inside.

True, but at the same time we have to remind ourselves that blindly following Trump hasn’t really hurt them yet. Not in any real, tangible sense, that is. As far as they can tell, the economy felt pretty good while he was in office, lots of the democratic norms he trashed had no impact on their lives, and most of the negative consequences the left has warned about haven’t yet materialized.

Covid “wasn’t his fault”, and all his crimes mostly amount to more political theater to them. Then when Biden took office two wars started, and illegal immigration skyrocketed. Even if none of that were his fault, he’s easy to blame for it.

Even supporters of the Third Reich followed blindly for a while because it put them on a cultural pedestal and stabilized their economy (kinda). Even when they watched trains carry millions of Jews to their deaths, they still shrugged and kept believing things were at least on the right track. It wasn’t until the fascist noose started closing around the necks of non-traditional enemies of the right, and until the hell of war showed up at their doorsteps, that they were shaken out of their slumber.

Trump simply hasn’t backfired on them yet, and until he does, they’ll continue to push the envelope into oblivion. I’m afraid he’ll have to burn the whole thing to the ground before his supporters will realize what a terrible mistake they made. And by then, it will be too late to recover.

Worth mentioning that in 2008 the total for “uncommitted” in the Democratic primary was 238,168 (39.6%), largely because the DNC stripped Michigan of all their delegates for holding their primary before Super Tuesday, and Obama withdrew his name from the ballot (Clinton didn’t and won). Then in 2012 the total for “uncommitted” was 20,833 (10.7%), in 2016 it was 21,601 (1.79%), in 2020 it was 19,106 (1.2%). Seems like the percentage is heavily dependent on turnout, but totals seem to hover around 20k pretty consistently. That means there’s about a 4x increase in uncommitted sentiment above baseline, which surely will increase the pressure to do something different with respect to Gaza between now and November.

Parties sorted between conservative and liberal, ideologies sorted between urban and rural, and social media sorted all of us into echo chambers. There is no longer any kind of crossover in any part of American society.

Biden locked in Trump’s $2T tax cuts for the rich and corporations, bringing the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%.

Nuance glossed over for the sake of partisan shit-flinging:

He proposed over $3.5 trillion in new taxes, including raising the corporate rate to 28% from 21% and returning the top individual rate to 39.6% from 37% and taxing capital gains at those rates for Americans earning over $1 million. He promised no increases for those earning under $400,000 a year. But opposition from Republicans and Democratic senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, now an Independent, forced Biden to scale back his revenue plans.

Then, Biden claims he wants to bump up the corporate tax rate to 28%, but can’t, for “reasons.”

Yes, reasons. Amazing how Bernie would have had to deal with exactly those same “reasons”, isn’t it?

Biden is full of shit on this issue, open your eyes.

Oh they’re quite open. Trust me on that.

Man, it’s crazy how similar that sounds to exactly what Biden has been saying all along:

And I’ve said many times before: I believe we’re at an inflection point in this country — one of those moments where the decisions we’re about to make can change — literally change the trajectory of our nation for years and possibly decades to come.

Each inflection point in this nation’s history represents a fundamental choice. I believe that America, at this moment, is facing such a choice. And the choice is this: Are we going to continue with an economy where the overwhelming share of the benefits go to big corporations and the very wealthy? Or are we going to take this moment right now to set this country on a new path — one that invests in this nation; creates real, sustained economic growth; and that benefits everyone, including working people and middle-class folks?

That’s something we haven’t realized in this country for decades.

Here’s the simple truth. For a long time, this economy has worked great for those at the very top, while ordinary, hardworking Americans — the people who built this country — have been basically cut out of the deal.

And I’ve said this from the time I announced I was going to run: I believe this is a moment of potentially great change. This is our moment to deal working people back into the economy. This is our moment to prove to the American people that their government works for them, not just for the big corporations and those at the very top.

Yet an off-the-cuff remark about asking wealthy people to accept slightly higher taxes is somehow all his breathless detractors want to pretend has ever existed.