No Dynasty 4 US
Hermann Scherer - Two men bathing. 1925
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so in further russian bullshittery:
russia is in an economic forum called BRICS with south africa and putin was...
Met a guy one day in college who thought I was his friend and asked me to hang out and I didn’t realize I thot he was just being friendly...
From the July 18, 2023 article:
Asked by the town-hall moderator how he’ll ultimately make the decision to run for the presidency, Manchin said the decision would be contingent on whether No Labels could “move the political parties off their respective sides.” He raised the possibility that the parties would moderate their own platforms, in some undefined way, before a potential announcement. ”They’re gonna have to say, ‘OK, we’re gonna look at this again, I don’t think if we stay over here that they’re going to vote for us; maybe we can move.’ Let’s see what happens.”
Manchin also made similar comments earlier in the day, telling an NBC reporter that No Labels was “hoping both sides come to their sensible middle.” Lieberman, in an Atlantic story published Monday, said that “both parties, particularly the Democrats,” were “overreacting” to No Labels’ plans and “would do better to try to build up support for their own ticket and adopt a platform that’s more to the center.”
Manchin and Lieberman are both longtime veterans of the legislative process, and their hedging was reminiscent of the way that members of Congress who claim they’re not going to vote for a specific bill talk before helping pass it….
From the July 19, 2023 essay:
The GOP is committed to nurturing just this type of environment in the rest of the country: downplaying the incidence of sexual assault and minimizing associated punishments; rewarding racial violence and allowing white nationalism to fester; demonizing LGBTQ+ people as dangerous perverts; promoting authoritarian rule.
Through that lens, the recent developments in the military feel like an especially formidable threat. To see this particular institution, which has been obsessively celebrated by the right for generations, taking steps to do better by groups it has traditionally alienated, even for the purpose of strengthening America’s defense, is demoralizing. It also gives greater weight to their public outrage. If the government is doing this stuff in the military, of all places, imagine what it’s doing in the schools!
Click through for a list of 20 possibilities or impossibilities.
From the opinion piece:
Evangelical Christians may be winning the constitutional battle but losing the spiritual war.
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The court has always also asserted that if the government subsidizes one religion it must subsidize all religions. There are now about 32,000 Muslims in private religious schools in the United States. They will no doubt petition to benefit from voucher programs too. There are Orthodox Jewish schools, Buddhist schools and schools dedicated to Transcendental Meditation.
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This will lead to all sorts of activists making religious liberty claims to advance their goals, and they won’t always be conservative. Pro-choice activists are already using religious liberty claims to challenge abortion laws. They argue that since some religions believe life begins later than conception, laws that assume otherwise violate their religious beliefs. A group of nuns sued to block an oil pipeline on the grounds that it violated their religious freedom, citing Pope Francis’ encyclical on the importance of combating climate change.
(via moretimeplease-next)
During the 2016 elections, Russian government agents hacked into the Democratic National Committee and into Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, then dumped the stolen data in an effort to sabotage Donald Trump’s election opponent. The more we learn about the supposed “Hunter Biden laptop,” a scandal meant to roil the campaign of Donald Trump’s election opponent four years later, the more it looks like somebody was following the same hack-and-dump playbook.
Marcy Wheeler has a new post that breaks down some of the many, many known oddities of the supposed “laptop.” When you consider that the whole premise of the story to begin with is that a “Hunter Biden” allegedly wandered into a random Delaware computer repair shop, handed over a damaged laptop, completely forgot about it afterward, and then somehow the computer dude and/or allies decided that Donald Trump ratf–ker Rudy freaking Giuliani was the person he needed to deliver the laptop’s data to, dozens of other oddities piled on top of that begin to turn what started out as farce into a full three-ring circus of weird.
Marcy’s post is, as usual, worth reading in full, but here’s the shortest version of it: Quite a lot of evidence suggests that in 2018 or 2019, Hunter Biden was the target of a successful phish or other hack that gave an outside party access to his iCloud account, his email accounts, and other data.
Of special note is a window of time during which Hunter was receiving addiction treatment (from the disgraced ex-Fox News talking head Dr. Keith Ablow, no less, just to put a nearly cartoonish spin on all this yet again) and appears to have had “limited” online communications. Despite those limited communications, somebody was using this period of time to make a hell of a lot of technical changes to Hunter’s iCloud and email accounts
(via justsayin59)
