Danny Bateman

I was gonna go with “when you can’t just outright say you’re gonna butcher them like you did Jamal Khashoggi.”

As a matter of fact I think they just charged the guy who leaked the tax returns we DID get to see. I mean leaking personal docs without consent is bad. But for years he’s just lazily stated he’ll release them “AfTEr BeInG AuDiTeD” and the country just kind of shrugged and accepted we’d never see them. It’s wild he’s obviously guilty of tax fraud since every financial transaction he’s ever completed smells to high heaven but it takes New York State to foist any kind of accountability on him for it. And the one effort toward transparency is now being cracked down on.

In addition to actual horserace polls, I've in particular given up on opinion polling like this in our current era. The typical American voter is either too disconnected from day to day politics stuff or just generally too damn stupid to accurately decipher what is really going on.

I mean we should all just be inured to it at this point. The leader of the Republican party, a rich draft dodger who's never paid a bill in his life, stood on a stage and mocked his token opponent's husband for being deployed overseas and threatened to betray our allies to his idol Putin if they didn't - checks notes - pay their bills. His loving crowd cheered and laughed. I'm listening to a Republican Congresswoman on Sirius right now supporting not voting on the foreign aid bill the Senate just passed with $60B for her homeland because it has no border security provisions. After they complained that a foreign aid bill needed border security provisions previously and successfully got them included into a bipartisan bill doing both things. Then personally tanked said bill after their aforementioned leader decided it would be bad for him personally in an election year and the leader of her caucus called it dead on arrival before even seeing it. She was asked why her party tanked the bill that had border security provisions they wanted? She questioned if it was such a strong bill, why didn't it pass the Senate? This is not a serious party and these are not serious people. They've completely lost the ability to care about being hypocrites or the capacity for shame. It's all about power, baby. At this point they thrive on people being too stupid to realize how malignant they are. And if we as a people are too stupid to force them to reckon with their failings, nothing will change. Within the confines of the s#!tty two-party system we have, we'll continue to get the representation we deserve, and it will not be good.

Why?

Yeah I could see that being the case. My thoughts were just my personal hunch. I know a lot of folks need their doom fuel, but honestly I don’t sweat polls at all right now because polls in February are worthless.

I’d place a bet RFK Jr. pulls more anti-Trump Republicans and independents than he does Biden voters. Wasn’t he angling to get on the Libertarian ticket? That strikes me as the exact kind of voter he’d appeal to. Anyone left of center halfway tapped into politics probably abhors him for his anti-vax nonesense and his Russia apologism.

This assumes Republicans care about being hypocrites. They decidedly don’t and haven’t for quite some time.

The Trump plan for immigration. What could ever go wrong here?

He’s gotta be a hard sell on social media with the youngs (esp now that Twitter is Elon’s playground) but that’s pretty funny. I guess the MAGAs are not taking it well.

Yeah with his charisma and broad appeal he was a generational candidate but under Obama the DNC became all about him and screwed the state party infrastructure for downballot Democrats pretty much everywhere. Republicans seized the opportunity and it's why they've got a stranglehold on a lot of state governments. I don't think there's anyone left after Biden. The old guard is pretty much done. And Bernie is too old to represent the leftists in 2028. So the next crop will probably be Newsome, Buttigieg, Pritzker, Whitmer, etc. A lot of governors.

That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying you don't know he has severe cognitive issues bound to rapidly get worse anymore than I know that about Trump. It's why you won't see me propagate that type of narrative about him even though that type of stuff is definitely out there. Being a buffoonish, comically corrupt fascist who cares only about himself offers a target-rich environment. Garland is a timid institutionalist who appointed a Trump appointee to head off Republican complaints about bias. He behaved exactly like you'd expect a young Republican Trump appointee to act and wrote a report with a nice Trumpy narrative for his party to work with. Frankly, if the phrase "I don't recall" in the context of a deposition equates to someone who is not mentally sound, then we need to start building a lot more damn memory care units.

Yep. Typical cognitive changes with aging. I wish we didn't have a system that spat out people this old, but here we are. If we assume both aren't as sharp as they once were, I'll take the non-fascist with good policy that actually benefits me and people I care about 10/10 times.

Apologies about your family. Hope they're doing as well as they can. Stuff sucks. You want a fair take? Yeah he's got the same type of memory issues as most people of his age. Same as his opponent. If I wanted to I too could go tit for tat with clips of his opponent misspeaking and forgetting things. Our political system is poised to spit out a couple olds again this cycle as our choices. I think that sucks but it's the system we've got and I don't foresee changes coming because the system is so resistant to change. That said your "diagnosis" is just shooting from the hip unless you're privy to his medical records. Some cognitive decline is normal as we age. Your assumption that it's a "severe brain function issue" that is bound to progress is just 100% your opinion unless you're Dr. Archy, MD, and you're the president's personal physician. I get that it's easy to arrive at that conclusion, especially for Republicans, but it's just not medically sound. And, in spite of my own beliefs here, that Special Counsel opinion was some typical politicized GOP bullcrap. No case to charge him, so might as well get a few punches in that give the party something to run on. But then I wouldn't expect a Trump appointee to call balls and strikes fairly. I would expect them to do something politically beneficial for their party, which is what they did.

OK doctor Archy. When you actually work with people who have dementia every single day, this type of armchair doctoring actually pisses me off. But by all means, nobody seems to let reality ruin a good narrative so please, continue.

A Republican encouraging Russia to attack NATO members? My god man. Reagan would’ve tried to kick Trump’s a$$.

Cousin humpers don’t tend to make for good TV?

Two-tiered justice system, witch hunt, abolish the DOJ, etc.

Well, I’ve now heard Republicans argue both that Trump shouldn’t be convicted during impeachment for high crimes and misdemeanors because that’s what elections are for and that we should now elect Trump again because he hasn’t been convicted of any crimes. Well played, douchebags.

I don’t really care to argue the nitty gritty with you. I get your shtick and I’m not interested. Maybe someoene else is; if you knock yourself out. My actual gripe is that one of the two parties who actually get to run things here has a completely dysfunctional, f#&%ed-up idea of how our political system should work. Rank dishonesty, incompetence, zero accountability and utter subservience to their completely f#&%ed-up standard bearer. All while gaslighting anybody halfway normal into thinking it’s all completely normal, appropriate behavior. It would be great if we could stop pretending it’s normal business as usual and start to acknowledge and address the tremendous damage it’s doing to our political system and our broader society.

This whole thread has just devolved into reverse engineering reasons Republicans are ACTUALLY being the reasonable, responsible ones here. Instead of demanding specific stuff in the bill, getting what they wanted included. And then spiking the bill anyway. So now if we’d all just grow up and accept a MORE conservative bill we could pass it and move on. I’m sorry, no. The Republican Party is a bunch of extremist weirdos on pretty much any given topic. And their elected officials are spineless, craven bootlickers so scared of the leader of their own party they buckle and bow to his every whim without so much as a glancing independent thought. Screw them. They don’t get to take the border hostage.

“If you killed Ted Cruz on the floor of the Senate, and the trial was in the Senate, nobody would convict you." - Lindsey Graham, Republican Senator from South Carolina

For goodness sakes can we stop pretending like we have to treat Tucker Carlson like a legitimate journalist? None of the people TV personalities from Fox News are. They’re professional mouthpieces who get paid gobs and gobs of many to be the faces of the right-wing propaganda machine. The framing for the purpose of the “interview” is idiotic and gives the game away. It’s a scripted stunt. You think a dictator like Putin sits down and gets challenged by real journalists with real questions? Hell, our leaders here in the free world barely do that. No way in hell Putin does. He disappears people who look at him wrong. Tucker is there to serve his purpose and dance his little puppet dance. Pretending otherwise is laughable.

Did COVID hasten your nerdification?

Morons just failed their Mayorkas impeachment vote. Apparently one Democrat they didn’t expect to vote showed up and tipped the scales to no. What an absolute clown show of a party. I can’t believe there are actually people who expect these idiots to be able to trip over their own dicks long enough for to do anything useful for the country.