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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
You really think that this behavior would seal Rudy's fate when all the other horrible things he's done haven't?
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"No, probably not, but it is an embarrassment for the administration, for whatever that's worth, considering that Giuliani just came out with that fake email story. Add a pebble to the mountain, I guess.
I've been expecting a bus to head Giuliani's way ever since the impeachment hearings, really. The only reason he survived this long is because he stayed quiet since then.
Which is pretty notable in its own way, now I think of it. Giuliani was Trump's TV lawyer attack dog, but since that impeachment, he seems to have been sidelined to digging up shit in Ukraine.
Edited by Redmess on Oct 21st 2020 at 12:17:49 PM
Hope shines brightest in the darkest timesShortly after he took office, President Trump promoted a seemingly unexpected book.
"A great book for your reading enjoyment," he tweeted in April 2017: " 'REASONS TO VOTE FOR DEMOCRATS' by Michael J. Knowles."
Trump promoting a book about voting for Democrats? Well, you see, the gag was that the book was full of blank pages. Ergo, there are no reasons to vote for Democrats! Pick a copy up at your local Spencer Gifts today.
Even then, though, this was a risky thing to embrace. If you're going to highlight a joke about how blank pages can be used as a visual presentation of rhetorical barrenness, you might want to be cautious about your own use of blank pages to make political points.
Unfortunately for Trump, this is a tactic he likes very much.
The most recent example came this week. With the 2020 presidential election looming, Trump has in recent days made the baffling decision to spend as much energy challenging CBS News's Lesley Stahl as he has his Democratic opponent. Stahl apparently grilled the president in an interview taped Tuesday, reportedly prompting Trump to truncate the discussion earlier than planned. He then jumped on Twitter to disparage Stahl in at times opaque ways.
That effort included this tweet, showing White House press secretary Kayleigh Mc Enany burdening the 78-year-old Stahl with a hefty tome purportedly documenting the Trump administration's many health-care accomplishments.
Those who've been tracking the administration would be justified in wondering what those hundreds of pages document. After all, the administration has been notoriously incapable of presenting a robust health-care plan after spending years trying to undermine the Affordable Care Act. Trump and his team have taken to cobbling together various health-care-related things and presenting them as a comprehensive approach.
What's particularly odd about the book given to Stahl, though, is that the page to which she opened it appears to be blank.
Perhaps it's not. Perhaps there's a title at the top of that page or, perhaps, it's the flyleaf, albeit a few pages in. Perhaps the book has one health-care accomplishment per page. It's hard to say.
Or perhaps the book is another masterpiece by renowned author Michael J. Knowles.
Again, this tactic is a favorite of Trump's. In 2015, he offered one of the few public looks at his taxes, tweeting out a photograph of himself signing his tax return that year - sitting beside a stack of paper that towered over his head.
That appears to have been his 2014 return, a year in which we now know (thanks to the New York Times's reporting) that he paid no federal income tax.
Despite his never making those returns public, Trump was elected president the following year. In early 2017, as he prepared for his inauguration, he held his first news conference in six months to discuss his plans for divesting from his private company. At the event, he stood next to a table piled high with stacks of paper.
"These papers," Trump claimed, "are just some of the many documents that I've signed turning over complete and total control to my sons."
Perhaps! Or perhaps they were blank sheets of paper jammed into manila folders. Trump's team wouldn’t allow the media to look at the documents.
A week later, Trump shared a photo of himself sitting at a desk at Mar-a-Lago - one of the properties ostensibly now under his sons' control - working on his inauguration speech.
This photo, too, prompted some head-scratching. The desk was in a public hallway at the club and was pictured in an Instagram post from several years before apparently serving as a receptionist's station. Perhaps Trump was in fact sitting at a desk in a hallway, using a marker to sketch out his inaugural address on a pristine pad of paper! Or maybe, as was reported at the time, the speech was written by aides.
In December 2017, Trump again used a big stack of paper to make a point. Hoping to illustrate the way in which the federal government had swollen, he compared a stack of paper representing government regulations in 1960 with a much taller stack representing current regulations. Then, mixing his metaphors a bit, he cut the red tape joining the two.
For what it's worth, the "today" stack probably contained far more sheets of paper than were warranted for the analogy to precisely mask the government's growth, but at least this was not an effort to masquerade blank paper as something else.
There's one more example worth mentioning. When Trump contracted the coronavirus last month, he wound up spending a weekend at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. While there, he made an effort to present everything in a business-as-usual manner, including recording several video messages to the public and staging photos in which he went from jacketed in one room to his shirt sleeves in another over a span of about 10 minutes.
Close observers noticed that, in the image above, Trump appears to be writing on an otherwise blank piece of paper. This is a necessary precursor to getting words on a piece of paper, of course, but it was not really clear what we were supposed to be taking away from this. Was he signing a blank piece of paper? Making notes off the top of his head?
It was something of a mystery. But now, happily, we know the answer.
He was writing down some of the many things he's done for Healthcare.
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Yeah, the Washington Examiner is already trying to play it off as people reading too much into it
, citing the White House's claim that it's 512 pages of policy.
Of course, that falls flat on its face when you realize that the fucking Harry Potter series had 4 books that were all greater than 512 pages, yet not one of them approached the size of that behemoth binding that Stahl was given.
"Why would I inflict myself on somebody else?"In some stimulus news, Trump casts doubt on a stimulus deal while Pelosi concedes that it may happen after the election
.
President Trump cast doubt Wednesday on the prospects of a bipartisan, multi-trillion-dollar stimulus deal before Election Day, as Senate Republicans continued to resist a compromise they called too costly and politically fraught.
Mr. Trump blamed Democrats, citing their push to give billions of dollars in aid to state and local governments as a reason an agreement is unlikely before Nov. 3.
"Just don't see any way Nancy Pelosi and Cryin' Chuck Schumer will be willing to do what is right for our great American workers, or our wonderful USA itself, on Stimulus," Mr. Trump posted to Twitter.
The president's tweet came just hours after Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, said that they were continuing to narrow their differences on a plan. Ms. Pelosi had also conceded that a deal might not be possible before the election.
A nearly one-hour conversation between Ms. Pelosi and Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary, brought the pair "closer to being able to put pen to paper to write legislation," a spokesman for Ms. Pelosi said Wednesday afternoon. Separately, Mr. Meadows said that he was "still very hopeful and very optimistic that we're making progress."
But with time waning to cement an agreement, both sides also were wary.
Mr. Meadows, who met with Senate Republicans on Capitol Hill on Wednesday, told reporters that lawmakers in his party had grown suspicious of Ms. Pelosi's tactics and were "starting to get to a point where they believe that she is not negotiating in a fair and equitable manner."
Ms. Pelosi said she remained upbeat about the prospects for a compromise but allowed for the possibility that it would wait until after the election.
"I'm optimistic that there will be a bill," she said in an interview on MSNBC. "It's a question of, is it in time to pay the November rent, which is my goal, or is it going to be shortly thereafter and retroactive."
On the other side of the Capitol, Senate Democrats blocked a move by Republicans to advance a $500 billion plan that would have revived lapsed federal unemployment benefits and a popular federal loan program for small businesses, as well as provide additional money for testing.
Democrats, who have argued the package falls far short of the level of aid needed, unanimously opposed it, and it fell short on a party-line vote of 51-44, failing to clear the 60-vote threshold required to move forward. Mr. Meadows said earlier Wednesday that the toughest obstacles to a bipartisan stimulus deal were a push by Democrats for hundreds of billions of dollars more in federal aid for states and cities and their resistance to a liability shield for businesses. The White House has proposed providing $250 billion to states and municipalities, Mr. Meadows said, while House Democrats have called for double that.
"The biggest issue remains state and local assistance," Mr. Meadows said on the Fox Business Network. "That remains a stumbling block."
Ms. Pelosi and Mr. Mnuchin are expected to speak again on Thursday.
Suffice to say this is unusual considering how poor the Roberts Court has been on electoral rights previously, still, I'm not complaining. It would be very hard to overstate the importance of this ruling.
"Einstein would turn over in his grave. Not only does God play dice, the dice are loaded." -Chairman Sheng-Ji YangFBI announcement is out, apparently Iran was behind the threatening emails, both it and Russia have obtained voter registration information and are using it to interfere.
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ CyranAccording to this
, John Ratcliffe (Director of National Intelligence) said that Iran was spoofing the Proud Boys and sending threatening emails to Democratic voters telling them to vote for Trump. More specifically, he says:
NBC confirms the spoofed emails
:
The emails, which ominously instructed Democratic voters in Florida to switch to the Republican Party, purported to come from the Proud Boys, the right-wing group of Trump supporters that became a flashpoint during the first presidential debate. But the emails were actually "spoofed" and had been designed "to incite social unrest and damage President Trump," said John Ratcliffe, the director of national intelligence. Ratcliffe did not explain how the emails were damaging to Trump, because they were urging Democrats to switch to the Republican Party.
Ratcliffe tried to spin the story about Iran and Russia obtaining voter information so that it reflected positively on Trump. Which is bizarre to me because Russia made it very clear in 2016 that Trump being in office is good for them, and now Iran apparently shares that view.
So, let's hang an anchor from the sun... also my Tumblr![]()
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And right after that, US Supreme Court lets Alabama ban curbside voting in November election, USA Today
A federal appeals court already had refused to lift a requirement that voters using absentee ballots submit affidavits signed by a notary or two adult witnesses. That court also reaffirmed the need for absentee ballots to include copies of photo IDs.
But the appeals court refused to let state officials block counties from employing curbside voting, leading to the latest Supreme Court case.
Edited by nova92 on Oct 21st 2020 at 5:45:51 AM
The government theoretically has no profit motive though, which means they won't be trying to push their opioids on people who don't need them. Remember that these are actually drugs that some people need to relieve their debilitating pain. They just need to be prescribed much more carefully than they have been, to avoid people becoming addicts.
Edited by Clarste on Oct 21st 2020 at 6:12:28 AM
Trump has the weirdest rally ever: He tells his supporters "No one wants (Him)", and then ends the rally short and dances off to the YMCA Song
. My guess is the steroids Trump was taking are finally wearing off. I wouldn't be surprised if we start seeing a Trump that isn't his self absorbed, self obsessed self.
The hardline Revolutionary Guard are exactly that stupid, Trump gives them the perfect excuse to push the nuclear program. That’s before we get into the Russia-Iran relationship and how it could be impacting Iran’s actions.
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ Cyran![]()
It's not stupidity, by pretending to be Proud Boys they hurt Trump's campaign by making people think that his side is intimidating voters. It's a classic false flag, just digitally this time.
Trump has also been extremely aggressive to them, the US destroying itself is not worth it if it brings them down. It's highly unlikely that they're operating under the same strategic calculus as Russia.
Edited by Fourthspartan56 on Oct 21st 2020 at 7:38:16 AM
"Einstein would turn over in his grave. Not only does God play dice, the dice are loaded." -Chairman Sheng-Ji Yang

Smokeycut raises an interesting point though. If its just this scene, then it will be a brief embarrassment (given the speed of the news cycle right now, I give it the debate tomorrow, at best). However, if he has a history of acting inappropriately in private and this causes others to come forward, it could very well escalate.
Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.