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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
@Friendperson: No, they just believe that transgender people are just "normal" people confused about their genitals and it's their job to forcefully set them straight and ignore the ones who don't conform to their views.
It's about as hateful as it gets. I don't pretend to know the complexities of transgender people, and don't they know better than me who they are?
Life is unfair...It's comparable to the fallacy of Goal-Oriented Evolution/Evolutionary Levels.
Exactly, or in other words:
Whig History is ahistorical tripe that should never be internalized, it just leads to arrogant "End of History" nonsense.
"Einstein would turn over in his grave. Not only does God play dice, the dice are loaded." -Chairman Sheng-Ji YangUmm....
Edited by megaeliz on Oct 22nd 2018 at 7:08:39 AM
https://whatthefuckjusthappenedtoday.com/2018/10/22/day-641/
Day 641: A great mind.
1/ Saudi Arabia's foreign minister denied that Mohammed bin Salman ordered Jamal Khashoggi's killing, calling it a "rogue operation" by individuals who "made a mistake." Adel al-Jubeir denied that the crown prince had any prior knowledge of the operation and said that the agents involved "weren't people closely tied" to him. (Washington Post)
2/ Surveillance video: A Saudi agent walked out of the Saudi consulate in Istanbul wearing Khashoggi's clothes, a fake beard, and glasses in order to create a misleading trail of evidence. The man in the video, identified as Mustafa al-Madani, was part of the 15-man team that flew to Istanbul to confront Khashoggi. He was seen leaving the consulate through the back door and later at the Blue Mosque. Several members of the team have ties to the crown prince. (CNN / New York Times / Washington Post)
https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/22/middleeast/saudi-operative-jamal-khashoggi-clothes/index.html
3/ Jared Kushner said the White House is still "fact-finding" about the circumstances of Khashoggi's death, declining to say whether he believes Saudi Arabia's explanation that Khashoggi accidentally died during a fistfight inside the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul. "Once we have all the facts, we'll make an assessment." (New York Times / Washington Post)
Steven Mnuchin met with Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman despite announcing that was withdrawing from a conference in Saudi Arabia this week. (Washington Post)
German Chancellor Angela Merkel vowed to halt all German arms exports to Saudi Arabia, calling what happened to Khashoggi a "monstrosity." (Reuters)
4/ The Trump administration plans to redefine the legal definition of gender as strictly biological, unchangeable, and determined by the genitals that a person is born with. The effort by the Department of Health and Human Services would establish a legal definition of sex under Title IX, effectively narrowing the definition of gender and deny federal recognition and civil rights protections to transgender Americans. (New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/21/us/politics/transgender-trump-administration-sex-definition.html
The Education Department is expected to narrow the definition of sexual assault that schools are required to consider, providing more rights to those accused of assault. (Wall Street Journal)
5/ Robert Mueller's team continues to pursue conflicting accounts about Roger Stone's communication with Wiki Leaks. During the presidential campaign, Stone claimed he was in touch with Wiki Leaks founder Julian Assange, predicting that Wiki Leaks would release information related to Hillary Clinton. Stone suggested that his friend Randy Credico "was my principal source regarding the allegedly hacked emails published by Wiki Leaks." Credico has denied the claim, telling Mueller's grand jury that Stone told him during the 2016 campaign that he had a secret back channel to Wiki Leaks. Investigators are also looking into whether Stone shared information that he believed was from Wiki Leaks with members of Trump's presidential campaign. (Washington Post / CNN)
https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/22/politics/roger-stone-wikileaks-contacts-scrutiny/index.html
poll/ 47% of Americans approve of the job Trump is doing – an all-time high. (CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/21/democrats-more-likely-to-vote-in-midterms-than-gop-nbc-wsj-poll.html
poll/ Democrats hold a 9-point lead among likely voters over Republicans in congressional preference. 50% of likely voters prefer Democrat to control Congress after the November elections, versus 41% who want Republicans to stay in charge — up 1 point from Democrats’ lead in the September. (NBC News)
Notables.
Trump claimed that Republicans are planning "very major tax cut" for the middle class before the midterms. Congress, however, is out of session until after November's midterm elections. Last week, the Treasure announced that the government ended the 2018 fiscal year with a $779 billion deficit. (Reuters / Washington Post / Axios)
The Missouri Republican Party sent mailers to 10,000 voters with false information about when absentee ballots are due. The mailers, sent to likely Republican voters, encouraged voters to return their mail-in ballots "today." Mail-in ballots for the state aren't due until Wednesday, Oct. 31. (Kansas City Star)
https://www.kansascity.com/news/politics-government/election/article220334185.html
Trump is preparing to call the midterm elections "illegitimate" if Democrats take control of the House or Senate, according to Carl Bernstein. "Trump is already talking about how to throw legal challenges into the courts, sow confusion, declare a victory actually, and say that the election's been illegitimate." (Washington Examiner)
Trump tweets about non-existent voter fraud, warning people to "cheat at your own peril. Violators will be subject to maximum penalties, both civil and criminal!" (CNN)
https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/22/politics/donald-trump-voter-fraud/index.html
The EPA will withdraw an Obama-era proposal aimed at regulating how waste from uranium milling is disposed in order to reduce the spread of radon. Acting EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler called the now-scrapped proposal "would have imposed significant burdens on uranium miners." (The Hill)
Trump blamed Mexico and Democrats for the so-called caravan of migrants heading to the southern U.S. border, threatening to cut off or reduce aid to Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador as citizens flee gang violence and poverty. Trump also attempted to stoke fear about the caravan, claiming that it now includes "unknown Middle Easterners." (Politico / The Hill / New York Times)
https://www.politico.com/story/2018/10/22/trump-immigration-crisis-921892
Mikhail Gorbachev: The U.S. withdrawing from the nuclear disarmament treaty with Russia is not the work of "a great mind." Trump said the U.S. would withdraw from the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty because Russia has violated the agreement. (New York Times / Reuters / Politico)
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Honestly, I'm not sure we can. But I tend to think that the only people who would take such a claim seriously are the ones that would believe anything that comes out of that thing's mouth just because he said it.
Early voted. Straight D's down the line and a firm No on the question of 'can we please re-institute the soda tax that only we thought was a good idea?'
Edited by Cris_Meyers on Oct 22nd 2018 at 6:19:53 AM
Speaking of Khashoggi, this is worth a read.
Royce's obscure speech was celebrated in an email by Trump ally and fund-raiser Elliott Broidy — at the time, newly minted deputy finance chair of the Republican National Committee. Broidy had just maxed out in campaign contributions to the California Republican and boasted in his (later hacked) emails that not only had he influenced Royce to made a policy flip toward the Saudis and away from its rival neighbor, Qatar, but that he'd "caused" the congressman to mention a virtually unknown Saudi general in his address from the House floor. The world, by and large, did not know anything about that Saudi — Major General Ahmed al-Assiri — in early 2017.
It does now.
Assiri is — one way or the other — up to his eyeballs in the gruesome story that, in October 2018, has become the avatar of a world gone mad — the murder and alleged dismemberment of a U.S.-based Saudi opinion journalist for the Washington Post, Jamal Khashoggi.
This weekend, Assiri — credibly reported to be a leader of a Saudi "tiger team" of torturers and assassins — was ousted from his role as a top intelligence aide to MBS amid reports the Riyadh government is making Assiri into the "rogue killer" scapegoat for what happened inside a Saudi consulate in Istanbul. But almost no one — outside of the cowed posses around MBS and Trump — actually believes Assiri would have acted without orders from the Machiavellian prince.
How a future butcher of Istanbul came to be praised in the U.S. House of Representatives is just one mystery in a tangled web of involving Donald Trump, his closest aide and son-in-law Jared Kushner, Trump's ever-growing and ever-sleazier coterie of hangers-on, hundreds of millions of oil-soaked dollars, an illegal offer of help in Trump's 2016 election, alleged misuse of U.S. intel, and a filthy-rich despotic nation built on a foundation of torture, repression and — we now know — murder.
Given that history, it's been a dull surprise to watch the cringe-worthy amorality of an American president more interested in helping the Saudis get away with a ridiculous cover story than in getting to the bottom of the depravity that occurred in Turkey, or even in voicing the rest of the free world's outrage and anguish. Donald Trump will never get the truth or win justice for Khashoggi — but that doesn't mean that America can't. Put this near the top of your reasons for electing a brand new Congress on Nov. 6: Wiping the splatter of a journalist's blood off America's mortal soul.
Let's start with an important caveat: U.S. policy toward Saudi Arabia has been amorally bad for decades — long predating Trump and going back the 1970s and an Arab oil embargo that nearly destroyed the U.S. economy. In fact, it's a deal with the devil that goes all the way back to FDR, and it's resulted in absurdities like America's failure to pursue Saudi connections to two of the 9/11 hijackers (15 of the 19 were Saudi natives) and the subsequent decision to invade a completely different country — Iraq — in order to help Saudi's monarchs by closing our military bases there. But something has changed. In the new energy economy, we don't need Saudi oil the way we did in the 20th century. But we have craven, corrupt politicians who will bend over even farther to take some of their last remaining petrodollars.
Let's walk down the sordid trail of money and blood that got us here.
Step 1: The buying of Trump Inc. Over the last generation, Saudi rulers reached the same conclusion about Trump that the Russians apparently reached after The Donald visited Moscow in 1987: That here was a high-profile American who could be bought.
"Saudi Arabia, I get along with all of them," Trump told an Alabama rally in August 2015, as his campaign was just taking off. "They buy apartments from me. They spend $40 million, $50 million." This time, he wasn't lying. The Saudi government bought an entire floor of a Manhattan project called Trump World Tower for $4.5 million in 2001, an arrangement that would have resulted in millions more in fees. That wasn't Trump's first dealing with the House of Saud; in the early 1990s, as the developer teetered on the brink of personal bankruptcy, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal took the yacht that had been dubbed (ironically) The Trump Princess off Trump's cash-starved hands for $20 million.
That the way to Trump's heart runs through his wallet is something that stayed with the Saudis once his presidency dawned. Since late 2016, a flock of Saudi lobbyists (who spent $270,000 for food and lodging at Trump's D.C. hotel), the vast entourage of MBS. (credited for a surge in revenue at his New York hotels this past winter) and other Saudis (whose business offset losses at Trump's Chicago hotel) have aided the Trump Organization in an otherwise difficult time financially. It's important to remember these ties as you think about...
Step 2. The 2016 election and an indecent proposal. On Aug. 3, 2016, Donald Trump Jr. convened a meeting at Trump Tower that also included future anti-immigrant guru Stephen Miller, Blackwater founder and Trump insider Erick Prince, a lobbyist with deep ties to the Saudi rulers and their allies in the United Arab Emirates, or UAE, named George Nader, and an Israeli specialist in psychological warfare named Joel Zamel.
What the Saudis's apparent emissary, Nader, reportedly said that day was stunning. He said the Saudis and UAE wanted Trump to beat Hillary Clinton that November and were willing to put their wealth behind efforts — which, needless to say, would have been illegal — to make that happen. Specifically, they proposed a covert social-media campaign — strikingly similar to one that special counsel Robert Mueller has charged was carried out that fall by Russian spies — to target American voters on Trump's behalf, run by Zamel's Psy-Group.
Trump's then-deputy campaign manager Rick Gates (since convicted and cooperating with Mueller) also reached out to Zamel's now-defunct company about a scheme that would have created 5,000 "bogus personas" — i.e., fake people — that would have persuaded real delegates if somehow the 2016 Republican convention in Cleveland had been deadlocked. Team Trump says it never went through with the supposed Saudi and Zamel schemes. Maybe that's true, but Nader did reportedly later pay Zamel $2 million. No one has been able to explain why. By then, Trump's presidency was at hand, and a bigger — and, if possible, sleazier — inner circle was racing to cash in.
Step 3: The Big Payback. Nader — a convicted pedophile with ties to the Gulf states that stretched back for decades — and his new pal, the once-obscure political fixer and businessman Broidy, strengthened their ties to both Trump and MBS as part of an effort which took them to the brink of a staggering payday of $1 billion.
On the American side, Broidy — named to his RNC post after raising money for Trump in 2016 — used his new prominence to shower cash on Republicans in Congress, leverage his access to the White House (even arranging for Nader, despite his child sex-abuse conviction, to get his picture with the president) and sponsor forums that would advance Saudi aims, including weakening American ties to Qatar even though that nation hosts a major U.S. military presence. (Broidy and Nader weren't the only Trump pals looking to cash in; National Enquirer CEO David Pecker, with a deep history of helping the president cover up various sex scandals, published a glossy tribute to MBS and his "Magic Kingdom" and put it on Walmart shelves as he used his White House ties to pursue lucrative deals in Riyadh.)
On the Gulf side, Nader and Broidy were reportedly paid millions by the UAE and were closing in on that billion-dollar payoff from the Saudis; Nader met personally with MBS and was told to run his future business dealings through MBS's right-hand man they called "General Ahmed," meaning Assiri. Assiri, who'd been the Saudis' spokesman for its ongoing campaign of genocide in Yemen, was clearly a rising star and a key person for gaining access to MBS, even as the Washington Post's David Ignatius learned Assiri was now running the "tiger team" to lock up, torture and, occasionally, kill rivals to the prince. Meanwhile, MBS had his own Prince Charming in America …
Step 4: The Jared factor. While Trump's friends cashed in, it was left to the ultimate White House insider, presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner, to serve as America's main point of contact with MBS. It's difficult to look at Kushner's performance over the last two years and not conclude that Team Trump knew it owed more than simply a debt of gratitude to the House of Saud.
Kushner — convinced that Saudi support was critical for his not-even-close-to-realized aspiration of fostering peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians — made sure that Saudi Arabia was his father-in-law's first international trip as president. He grew so close to MBS that they reportedly communicated directly through the secure channel known as Whats App, leaving the rest of the government in the dark over what they discussed.
Last October, Kushner made a surprise, unannounced trip to "the Magic Kingdom" where he spent a couple of days in secret meetings with MBS, reportedly staying up until 4 a.m. What did "the two princes" discuss? According to The Intercept, Kushner — who was devouring the president's super-secret daily security brief despite his then-inability to get a security clearance –discussed and disclosed the names of high-ranking Saudis who'd opposed MBS as he consolidated his power over the oil-rich kingdom. These ties grew as MBS was rounding up his opponents and detaining them — and sometimes torturing them — at a swank hotel in Riyadh. The Intercept also reported that MBS had told his close friend UAE Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed that Kushner was "in his pocket."
So it seems. The Trump administration has so far backed everything MBS and his regime has ever done — with the president and his son-in-law supporting the moves against Qatar that were opposed by the U.S. foreign policy establishment, and aiding the war in Yemen even as it threatens to become the worst humanitarian crisis of the 21st century, and at the same time failing to speak out against the kingdom's increasing human rights abuses.
To the majority of people who haven't been paying attention, the president's behavior in the past week — seemingly determined to help the Saudis develop and promote the implausible lie that Khashoggi died accidentally at the hand of "rogue killers" (including the sacrificial tiger, Assiri) and that MBS had nothing to do with it — seems shocking. In fact, it's just the logical conclusion of a tragic American amorality tale, in which a flood of money can wash away all sins, even murder. If this seems a low point in 242-year history of the United States, that's because it is. But it doesn't have to be the end of the story. For one thing, Congress can, and should, act as soon as tomorrow to cut off all U.S. support — bombs, targeting, refueling … all of it — for the inhumane war in Yemen, and begin pressure for a truce and a diplomatic solution. We can't bring back Khashoggi, but we can save thousands of children in Yemen. We must. It's a moral imperative. And we must consider other sanctions against this murderous monarchy — but that's not all.
Trump and a GOP Congress that's received hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations from the Saudis' American lobbyists will never truly investigate the full story of U.S.-Saudi relations. That's (another) powerful selling point for electing a Democratic-led House — full of new political blood untainted by petrodollars — on Nov. 6. We need Democratic-led committees with subpoena power to answer the following questions:
- How much money does the Trump Organization or any Trump-related business enterprise receive from the Saudi government, its leaders and its lobbyists — much of it in seeming violation of the Emoluments Clause of the U.S. Constitution?
- Did the Saudis and their close ally, UAE, follow through on the scheme to help Trump win the 2016 election by targeting American voters with an illegal campaign of online propaganda?
- How much of American policy in the Middle East — with millions of lives on the line — was determined not by what was in the best interest of U.S. citizens, not to mention world peace and stability, but by the flood of money swirling around insiders like Nader, Broidy, Pecker, and the Trump family?
- What did Kushner and MBS really talk about in their secret meetings and over Whats App? Did Kushner pass along classified U.S. intelligence that led to the imprisonment, torture or even death of Saudi citizens whose only transgression was political dissent against MBS?
- Finally, given reports of possibly improper intelligence sharing, did Kushner or anyone else in the Trump administration pass along classified information about Khashoggi (whom, it's important to note, ran afoul of the Saudis after he criticized … wait for it … Trump)? And did Team Trump offer advice to MBS on how to cover up Khashoggi's murder? If so, why?
Look, the new Congress is going to have a lot on its plate next January. And anyone who's been a sentient human being the last two years knows that Khashoggi's murder — horrible as it is — is far from the only thing that needs to be investigated. But this is important. The questions raised here — whether money now trumps everything, even murder — cut to the very core of whether the American Experiment can continue. And we won't know the answers until we start asking.
Edited by megaeliz on Oct 22nd 2018 at 7:27:03 AM
The risk isn’t Trump spouting about the elections being illegitimate, the real risk is state level Republican leadership doing it.
Remember how the Republican candidate for governor in Georgia has been purging voters? Well with Trump’s encouragement he might go further and just declare himself the winner regardless of what the actual result is.
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ CyranI don't think this is a risk, to be honest.
The reason that voter suppression is so dangerous is that it hides behind a cloak of legitimacy, "we aren't stopping black people from voting we're just making sure that voters provide the correct records". That's what its power is derived from, to just declare victory has none of the subtly and thus none of the effectiveness.
If Kemp did that then even the most ignorant and apathetic voter could see that his rule is illegitimate, thus benefiting us.
Edited by Fourthspartan56 on Oct 22nd 2018 at 7:32:45 AM
"Einstein would turn over in his grave. Not only does God play dice, the dice are loaded." -Chairman Sheng-Ji YangMaybe, but if the election is close enough that a recount should happen even if he’s narrowly ahead do you think he’d allow a recount?
The Republican Party has in the past awarded itself election victories when they actully lost, it’s not without precedent. (2000 Florida presidential results for anyone unaware).
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ CyranThe Republican Party has in the past awarded itself election victories when they actully lost, it’s not without precedent. (2000 Florida presidential results for anyone unaware).
Hmm, I think this is a much more plausible issue.
Though an important difference is that unlike the Supreme Court Kemp does not have (to the best of my knowledge) the same legitimacy, enough people think the Court is impartial that stealing an election is viable but I don't really see any reason to think that the same could be said for Kemp.
Voter suppression is IMO a much more serious threat. There's a reason that before Trump people generally didn't dispute elections in a fit of spite, it's not something that's particularly intelligent or wise.
"Einstein would turn over in his grave. Not only does God play dice, the dice are loaded." -Chairman Sheng-Ji Yang@Trump Approval Rating 47%: Thankfully that's just one poll. 538 still has him at 43%. Which is higher than it's been in a while, but it's still lower than 47%.
Also, apparently Trump only plans on challenging the results of the election in the event of a Dem victory if the results are close. If it's clear that the Dems totaled the opposition, he won't even bother. Mind you, he's Trump, so he still might. But still.
Edited by kkhohoho on Oct 22nd 2018 at 7:35:27 AM
So about them midterms; it's been a while since I last studied the way elections in the 'states work, so I'll need someone to remind me. I know that in presidential elections, you don't vote directly for the president as such, instead it has to go through the electoral college, which is how Trump got elected even though Clinton had the popular vote; does something similar happen at the state and congress levels? Or do you actually vote for the person directly in those cases?
Because if Clinton still managed to get the popular vote despite all the voter suppression, gerrymandering, foreign meddling and so on, in 2016 (before anyone could do anything more than speculate how bad Trump would be), that says a lot about the chances of a Blue Wave to me.
Those sell-by-dates won't stop me because I can't read!

That doesn’t really fill me with hope for our immediate future considering how long it took Iran to get somewhere that still isn’t even close to the 1970s.
Edited by Bur on Oct 22nd 2018 at 3:53:29 AM