Iowa Republicans love Donald Trump, it seems, slightly more than two seemingly far more plausible candidates combined (Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis). Who can explain to me why this incredibly old guy is more successful with voters than Haley and DeSantis?
In some poll data from Iowa, it looks as though oldsters are the ones who love Trump. Just as here in Florida, it is the young people who love DeSantis the most:
Trump had a few successes before coronapanic overwhelmed his younger self, but what exactly did he accomplish that so many Republicans want him back?
(I haven’t been following the debates, etc., too carefully. Has anything happened that should alter my opinion that, though DeSantis is more aligned with my smaller-government political philosophy Haley is more likely to win a general election? (Americans overall seem to want a planned economy.))
The Colorado Supreme Court, all of whose members “were appointed by Democratic governors”, has voted for protect our democracy by restricting the group of candidates from which Coloradans can choose in the 2024 Presidential elections.
Although I’m sure that this was well-intentioned, could the result be to threaten our democracy instead? I continue to reject the poll numbers that suggest that Donald Trump is a stronger candidate than Nikki Haley (my favorite Republican for the past few years, though that is arguably like being a dwarf among midgets) or Ron DeSantis (a great governor who needs a softer and more optimistic tone if he’s going to go higher, in my opinion). If Trump is banished from politics by an impartial group of 7 Democrat appointees, mightn’t that actually help democracy-ending Republicans by eliminating a candidate who would lose a general election?
What do people read in Denver? I visited the Tattered Cover, an old-school downtown bookstore, to find out. “For the sisters, misters, and binary resisters”:
How’s the “show me the man and I’ll show you the crime” prosecution of Donald Trump going? I’ve been out in the Mountain West and can’t keep up with all of the legal attacks.
[Idi] Amin sent a letter to Richard Nixon during the Watergate crisis: “When the stability of a nation is in danger, the only solution is, unfortunately, to imprison the leaders of the opposition.”
Democrats knew that Donald Trump deserved to be in prison at least as far back as 2016. Has anything new emerged that is convincing to Republicans or is it still a question of a former president’s right to keep his/her/zir/their papers?
Speaking of insurrectionists, here’s a suspicious character who may have participated in the January 6 insurrection… a golden retriever in Kanab, Utah exercising his Second Amendment rights (carrying bullets in his collar):
New York Democrats opened the hunting season on Donald Trump on November 24, 2022 (CNN describes how the law was changed to open a one-year window with no statute of limitations for sexual assault) and E. Jean Carroll has now won $5 million despite no precise memory of when the life-changing attack occurred and no evidence that she and her defendant were ever in a store at the same time (New York Post).
The judge allowed multiple other survivors to testify about what they suffered at the hands of Donald Trump. What stops additional plaintiffs from coming forward, calling the survivors that E. Jean Carroll called at her trial and also E. Jean Carroll herself, and winning $millions? How tough is it to say “I also was at Bergdorf Goodman at some point in the mid-1990s, plus or minus 5 years, and was attacked by Donald Trump”?
To make the testimony more credible to a jury of nine Democrats, a plaintiff could assemble some friends and/or family members to testify that the survivor told them about the rape 30 years ago (plus or minus 5 years).
Related:
“Reid Hoffman apologizes for funding a group that allegedly spread misinformation in Alabama Senate race” (MSNBC): “AET funneled money to a project that used a Facebook page where people pretended to be conservatives. Participants in the project used language to divide actual conservatives, encouraging them to write in a candidate to divert votes from Republican Roy Moore, who had been accused of sexual misconduct by multiple women.”
Brogan v. United States, in which the Supreme Court held that saying “I didn’t do it” is itself a crime, separately punishable (Trump lost $3 million for “defamation” by denying that he raped the plaintiff)
Here’s a Facebook ad that MoveOn paid to show me… “Will you chip in now to help put up billboards outside Mar-a-Lago … “. If I give them enough money, they’ll construct an Interstate highway-style billboard right outside Donald Trump’s bedroom:
The linked-to page asks for monthly donations of $400 or more (“Individual contributions will be allocated as follows: $5,000 per calendar year to a bank account that operates as a Federal PAC, and the remainder to the Non-Contribution Account of the PAC.”) and says, “Chip in monthly to help put up billboards outside Mar-a-Lago and widen the Trump-Fox News rift.”
This sounds like a great way to spend $5,000 per year, but it is a little confusing given that the national historic landmark Mar-a-Lago is in Palm Beach, Florida, which is not famous for having a lot of billboards or other commercial signs. Palm Beach County flatly prohibits billboards and other “off-site signs” in its unincorporated areas, though perhaps a town or city could permit them. (Some pre-1988 billboards were grandfathered in by the county.)
With humans potentially going extinct from climate change or COVID-19 and/or being killed millions at a time via nuclear weapons, what is today’s most important news? “porn star” occurs twice in the follow screen shot and “hush money” once. From the front page text, in other words, we learn that a sex worker allegedly got paid for having sex and then not talking about it.
“If Trump were anyone else, he would have already faced a likely indictment,” said lawyer Bradley Moss, who represents intel agency workers in cases involving classified information.
Far too many documents are classified, and gatekeepers charged with tracking the secret papers are struggling to keep up, experts say.
The U.S. government’s system for labeling and tracking classified documents appears to be broken …
For decades, current and former officials and Congress have warned about the growing problem of labeling too much information secret, or “overclassification.”
Update: this article was highlighted on Twitter by Glenn Greenwald…
How NBC and its "experts" radically and fundamentally changed how they talk about classified document leaks as soon as it went from Trump to Biden:https://t.co/wWgE370khr
Former President Donald Trump hosted White nationalist and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes and rapper Kanye West at his Mar-a-Lago estate this week, demonstrating his continued willingness to associate with figures who have well-publicized antisemitic views as he embarks on another White House run.
West, who has legally changed his name to Ye, posted a video Thursday on Twitter in which he claimed that Trump “is really impressed with Fuentes,” who has repeatedly made antisemitic and racist comments as chronicled by the Anti-Defamation League.
(Why isn’t it forbidden deadnaming to refer to Ye as “Kanye West”?)
I had to visit Wikipedia to figure out who Nick Fuentes was, i.e., a young Mexican-American who has already been unpersoned by nearly all (Jewish-controlled?) media. Readers: Had you heard about Nick Fuentes before this week?
Here are some typical tweets on the subject of Trump’s dinner table:
We are disgusted to learn former President Trump has taken a meeting earlier this week with Nick Fuentes, a known white supremacist and vile Holocaust denier.
Nick Fuentes is a gleeful Holocaust denier and an absolutely vile public figure. That is public information, easily accessible. Perhaps Trump really didn't know who he was. I have a hard time believing that. But he surely knows who Ye is. He invited him. And that's bad enough.
All snark and sarcasm aside, I really, really hope journalists and the Democratic Party treat Trump's meeting with Nick Fuentes as the scandal that it is.
This guy has made openly genocidal, authoritarian statements about the Jews within the past few weeks. it's horrifying.
I’m not sure that I love the evolution of Jewish victimhood over the past 75 years. In 1948, we fought against the regular militaries of Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen. Today our enemy is an individual 24-year-old incel. If we extrapolate out another 10 years, is it reasonable to predict that all Jews worldwide can be taken out by a pet rabbit and we need all of the goyim to rally around us and protect us from that rabbit?
Separately, if indeed it is true that Nick Fuentes is a Holocaust skeptic, why isn’t it reasonable for a 24-year-old to question the Holocaust? Much of what he has been exposed to in U.S. media during his lifetime has proved to be lies. Why is it obvious that on this one subject the New York Times happens to be telling the truth? (Note that the Holocaust was not considered an important subject by the NYT in the 1940s.)
Finally, what is the evidence that Fuentes hates Jews for being Jewish. Maybe he hates the Democrat political program and knows that the majority of secular American Jews have adopted this program as their replacement religion. Is Fuentes on record as saying that he hates Jewish conservatives?
Update: If the pool at Mar-A-Lago were renamed “Wannsee” we could say that a Mexican-American and a Black poet chaired the Second Wannsee Conference.
One powerful obsession has been that a former leader will break out from his island exile and become an absolute ruler once again. I’m talking, of course, about Napoleon on Elba, which was indeed followed by a brief return to power (he was 46 years old at the time).
We face a somewhat analogous situation today. Donald Trump is mostly confined to the island of Palm Beach. It is common for people to express fears regarding the potential for Trump to return to power starting in January 2025 (when Trump will be a little older than 46…).
“Palm Beach” is frequently confused with the city directly across from the ritzy island (where a teardown can cost $110 million). The city has the airport, the office buildings, most of the housing (12X the population), the government offices for “Palm Beach County”, etc. It has the confusing name of “West Palm Beach”.
What about renaming the island that is home to the exiled ruler “Elba” and then we can just use “Palm Beach” to refer to the city and the region?
According to my browser, the word “Trump” occurs 6 times on the front page of today’s New York Times. “Biden” occurs 3 times.
Biden is featured for expanding government (and, therefore, borrowing and the deficit) as well as for being a quarter century older than the mandatory retirement age for an FAA air traffic controller (gone before age 56, even at the sleepiest airports where there might be one operation every 10 minutes).
Some of the headlines mentioning Trump:
Excerpts from the Trump stories:
Liberal excitement is understandable. Mr. Trump faces potential legal jeopardy from the Jan. 6 investigation in Congress and the Mar-a-Lago search. They anticipate fulfilling a dream going back to the earliest days of the Trump administration: to see him frog-marched to jail before the country and the world.
But the nightmare wouldn’t stop there. What if Mr. Trump declares another run for the presidency just as he’s indicted and treats the trial as a circus illustrating the power of the Washington swamp and the need to put Republicans back in charge to drain it?
There is an obvious risk: If Mr. Trump runs again, he might win.
It’s impossible to understand the G.O.P. reaction to the raid, though, without accounting for the context of the Russia investigation of Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign that consumed the first two years of his presidency. … investigations of prominent figures of one party carried out by officials of the other party aren’t going to be met by a relaxed attitude and sympathetic understanding.
The last time there was a significant investigation of a Democratic president, Bill Clinton, Democrats waged all-out war on the prosecutor. The independent counsel, Ken Starr, had a Republican background, but he wasn’t working for a G.O.P. administration. He was appointed by a three-judge panel after Mr. Clinton’s own attorney general, Janet Reno, triggered the investigation.
The Russia investigation was a national fiasco that brought discredit on the F.B.I. and everyone who participated in it. The probe prominently featured a transparently ridiculous dossier generated by the Clinton campaign, eventually spinning into a special-counsel investigation that became, to some significant extent, about itself and whether Mr. Trump was guilty of obstruction. People who should have known better got caught up in the feeding frenzy and speculated that the walls were closing in on Mr. Trump or that he might have been a Russian asset going back decades.
That experience guarantees that no Republican is going to take assurances about the Mar-a-Lago search, or any other Trump investigation, at face value.
Is it fair to say that Trump (our distant neighbor here in Palm Beach County, though there is a world of difference between the Palm Beach and Jupiter lifestyles!) has more mindshare, nearly two years after his last election, than any other former president with the same distance from being in office?
