I might get one more compliant from Germany, but still I will Tweet this. pic.twitter.com/uLS9vhTF1l
— Pantomath (@pantomath__) June 7, 2020
On the other hand, our guy Joe:
American history isn’t a fairytale with a guaranteed happy ending. But we have the power to write the future we want for this nation.
Don't let anyone tell you differently.
— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) June 8, 2020
We're facing some of the greatest challenges in our history, and Donald Trump is patting himself on the back. He just has no idea what’s really going on in this country.
It's time for him to step out of his bunker and look around at the consequences of his words and actions.
— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) June 8, 2020
Donald Trump inherited the longest economic expansion in history from the Obama-Biden Administration, but like everything else he’s inherited, he has squandered it. https://t.co/395A6eJAzm
— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) June 9, 2020
.@JoeBiden, asked by @NorahODonnell if he supports defunding the police: "No, I don't support defunding the police. I support conditioning federal aid to police based on whether or not they meet certain basic standards of decency" + can show they can protect the community.
— Ken Thomas (@KThomasDC) June 8, 2020
Mitt Romney marching while saying, “Black Lives Matter.” pic.twitter.com/3URjWlNPzd
— Yamiche Alcindor (@Yamiche) June 7, 2020
Give Mitt Romney this much credit: The man is not known for his exquisite sensitivity to nascent political trends. If he has decided to proclaim that Black Lives Matter, it means that there’s broad support for the concept even in Utah. And, as the Washington Post points out, the Trump campaign is fully aware of how dangerous this is to their chances.
And *that*, if they have any sense whatsoever, should inspire more of his GOP comrades to flee the SS Trumptantic while they can.
(This still made me LOL, though… )
Mitt Romney can prove how woke he really is by beating the shit out of Rand Paul.
— Daily Trix (@DailyTrix) June 8, 2020
I love this. Bringing it all together.#COVID19 #BlackLivesMatter#GeorgeFloydProtests pic.twitter.com/YCWsDHH2yk
— Laurie Garrett (@Laurie_Garrett) June 8, 2020
NotMax
In Mitt’s (Mormon) case, that would be from 1978 on.
//
Chief Oshkosh
“Rebuild. Reform. Right Now.”
At the risk of falling in love with my own words (hijacked from Camden), we need to replace “Defund” with this.
rikyrah
Good Morning, Everyone ???
Baud
So…defunding. #MorningSnark #DontSendLetters
WereBear
Great sign in that last tweet.
Baud
@rikyrah: Good morning.
johnnybuck
if they have any sense whatsoever, should inspire more of his GOP comrades to flee the SS Trumptantic while they can
All they have are racist supporters, they have nowhere else to go.
mrmoshpotato
Don’t hold your breath, Joe.
I’m mrmoshpotato, and I
approve this messagewant to see this happen.Kirk Spencer
Devils lie in the details, joe, but good idea as there do seem to be a few good’uns.
debbie
Trump brings out the best in all of us. //
NotMax
@johnnybuck
And abandon The Plan?
HinTN
Hello darkness, my old friend …
O.M.G.
mrmoshpotato
“8
more yearspercent! 8more yearspercent!”Baud
What a different media we have now than we had in 2016.
Not good enough yet, but some good signs.
Jeffro
Five more months of hapless flailing, GOP. Aren’t y’all glad you canceled those primaries to clear the way for trumpov?
LOLOL
debbie
@mrmoshpotato:
It’s all in the framing! //
NotMax
@Baud
Democrats In Array?
HinTN
Why the hell use that passive construct? Can’t they just say it’s a damn lie?
mrmoshpotato
@HinTN: Have you met our media? :)
JPL
So glad that you included Pantomath’s video. I saw it yesterday and didn’t click on, but decided to today.
@HinTN: lol I laughed out loud.
Baud
@NotMax:
Funny how fascism can help focus the mind.
Kay
The bunker lie but it doesn’t matter- there have been tens of lies since that one, including a huge whopper the AG told on television.
This is what is supposed to happen when you lie all the time- people stop believing you- and I wonder if it’s happening now. Maybe the lies about Biden or the protesters or congressional Democrats and Democratic governors don’t stick because everyone in the Trump Administration has lied and lies so much. Before anyone says it I know the lies stick with Trump’s base, but I’m talking about the other 70% of people.
Amir Khalid
@Baud:
I think Biden is right to steer clear of support for defunding police departments as a nationwide policy. That needs to be decided by local governments based on their own police reform plan. Biden is properly focusing on national standards and criteria for getting federal aid.
JPL
Bunkerboy thinks that scaring the citizens will get him the necessary votes. Lincoln project needs to run the ad of peaceful protesters beings gassed nonstop. That will scare the public.
Baud
@Kay:
Among all the other things going on right now, “normies” pay more attention to things in presidential election years.
Leto
But they like the matching uniforms and marching…
MattF
@mrmoshpotato: She assumed a starting point of zero.
Baud
@MattF:
Momentum!
ETA: The only legitimate question is why other races aren’t also at a 92/8 split.
mrmoshpotato
@Kay: I think of him more as the manbaby who’s a Soviet shitpile mobster conman.
Betty Cracker
@mrmoshpotato: I’m surprised McEnany didn’t just lie about the current polling numbers rather than referring to that embarrassing single-digit performance. The Trump people pull polling numbers out of their asses all day long, so why not just lie about Trump’s level of support among black people too?
Maybe they think there’s an inverse correlation between support among their base of Sean Hannity viewers and black support. That’s probably true, but the tactic for dealing with that dilemma so far has been to tell a separate set of lies to each audience.
mrmoshpotato
Kay
Ha! He actually did what they thought he would do in response to those ads. They must be thrilled.
Mary G
This isn’t a list I’m glad to be on, and I doubt it will help the president’s reelection chances:
(Edited to remove excess hashtags)
Baud
Geminid
Mormons are conservative on many issues, but they may have more of outsider’s view on bigotry and prejudice having experienced it first hand.
WereBear
@Baud:
Because, for Trump, there is NO LINE.
Ken
@Kay: Wait, they’re spending half a million dollars just so Trump sees the ads? And the Lincoln Project planned it? I’m glad they’re sort of on our side.
Baud
@Ken:
I don’t know if the LP planned it. The grifters that run the Trump operation know what it takes to get paid, and that isn’t the same as doing what they need to do to win.
rikyrah
AL,
You missed this
burnspbesq
@Amir Khalid:
Some folks on the left have a tendency to forget that there are Constitutional limits on the powers of the Federal government. They seem to lack the attention span needed for the long, hard struggle to do things state by state.
Baud
@rikyrah:
McCain is so smarmy.
I do dislike the constant need to explain what defunding means.
Oh well.
rikyrah
clay
Hey, a question just occurred to me: Has Bloomberg dumped his pledged millions into the race yet?
germy
Open thread?
Okay, here’s my first-world complaint.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m grateful for the stimulus money, but they sent me a debit card.
Then a few days later, I got a letter (with drumpf’s signature) telling me I got the debit card.
Why couldn’t they send me a check?
I had to call, set up a pin number, and see a whole list of potential fees. “You want to check your balance? There’s a fee. You want to use an ATM? First time, okay, then a fee.” etc. etc.
A fucking VISA debit card.
I mean, what does VISA have to do with this?
Okay, that’s the end of my rant.
debbie
@Kay:
I’ve seen two of those ads on local channels here. They both suck.
NotMax
@Geminid
To channel rikyrah, uh-huh.
Betty Cracker
@Baud: She’s a godawful nepotism poser. Did you see where she got busted for tweeting about the devastation of her ritzy section of Manhattan when she wasn’t even in NYC? Hilarious.
Baud
@germy: Everything is done by cards these days. But usually you should have a period of time in which you can take your money out at an ATM without incurring fees. It’s BS if the Trump people didn’t set it up that way.
Baud
@Betty Cracker: I did. When you go all “Oh the humanity!”, it’s best to actually be at the scene of the disaster. LOL.
Soprano2
@Kay: Have a kind of Trump supporting friend (not a cult member, but likes him) on FB who posted a meme yesterday about wishing that “pants on fire” would be true with politicians. I replied by saying that Donald Trump would have been a pile of ashes four years ago! Of course, they don’t include him in “politicians” when they say that, but it gave me satisfaction nonetheless. Other people see that, too.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@WereBear:
If they let him open his mouth, he’ll be offensive. He can’t help it.
Kay
I know the normies won’t care about this, but I care about it:
Joe Biden knows how our system works and he uses specific language to describe it. The federal government doesn’t decide the vast, vast majority of police funding and that’s not a technical point. It’s how the thing works. If every single politician embedded a lesson like that in every statement the public would understand their own government better.
Compare/contrast with the Trump Administration. Jared held a forum with police where he announced he had solved the problem and Trump said he wouldn’t allow any state/city/government to cut or redirect police budgets/funding. That isn’t our system. They are describing something other than the United States.
rikyrah
NotMax
@Dorothy A. Winsor
Orange man speaks with f*cked tongue.
//
Ladyraxterinok
@Chief Oshkosh:
Remember the 3 Rs? Readin’, Ritin’, and Rithmatic—The 3 basics of any (school/education) system?
rikyrah
???
Dorothy A. Winsor
@germy:
Holy cow. It never occurred to me there’d be fees.
ETA: One of Trump’s cronies must run the debit card program.
rikyrah
Baud
@Kay:
A long time ago, I read something that said that way back in the olden days (i.e., FDR time frame), presidents used to campaign on they types of policies that would ask Congress to enact. Nowadays, of course, every candidate talks about what he or she will do if elected, even if it’s something that only Congress can do.
Baud
@rikyrah: C’mon, now. That’s just too adorable.
Kay
@Soprano2:
Not to burst everyone’s bubble but I think Trump is somewhat right (probably) about polls not counting some of his support. I think his less committed cult members are a little chastened right now but they’ll come roaring back as it gets closer. I’m dreading the absolute panic of Democrats here when that happens :)
I don’t blame them! I too am traumatized! But I think they have to keep it in check because fear is contagious.
Dorothy A. Winsor
I got my first Advanced Reader Copy review yesterday. The publisher sends the ARCs to book reviewers. It made me hyperventilate and emit little squeaky noises.
Baud
@Kay:
Agree. The current polls probably won’t be to the final result.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@rikyrah: “Boot on the throat” is an actual cliché about oppression. The murder of George Flynn flung it in people’s faces for real.
Baud
@rikyrah:
Disappointing comment by Blow. I don’t know where the $400 million figure comes from though.
Kay
@Baud:
Obama made the “states” point CONSTANTLY and I think it helped. He just did it again in his last statement- he told people policing is mostly a state and local issue so they have to vote in those elections too. Repeat, repeat, repeat. People will get it and politicians are in the best position to embed the lesson in every statement.
It also takes fewer bad faith actors who pretend they can redirect police funding in Fort Wayne Indiana from the Oval Office.
WaterGirl
@rikyrah:
And here I thought “Kamala is a cop.” Why would she want to defund the police? :-)
NotMax
@Kay
It ain’t B-J without the appearance of knee-jerk “We’re all doomed!” posts.
Unfortunately.
Betty Cracker
@Kay: Great point. It really is necessary to explode the cult of the presidency too, and Biden’s approach helps while Trumpsters predictably inflate their own power and importance.
We’re undergoing a 4-year lesson in how important it is not to elect a crazy person as POTUS who staffs his administration with family members and sycophants, but it’s still true that most shit gets done by Congress, state and local governments.
evodevo
@germy: It was a handout to the banking industry who manages those cards…ostensibly it was to get the funds to people who had no bank accounts or who had no bank account routing number associated with their IRS tax returns. The fees were a sweetener for the banksters to handle the outlay….that day is long gone when the IRS/Treasury could have handled it by themselves…they’ve been too hollowed out by Repub funding cuts
Soprano2
We got that letter too. I made sure to tell my Trump cultist friend that Trump made the IRS waste millions of dollars sending out a letter telling us we were getting a check. They used to care about stuff like that.
Now I’m going to complain some about the “defund the police” slogan from my perch in mostly white, 65% Trump-supporting country. It’s a bad slogan. It makes the person saying it be put immediately on the defensive in regular (non-activist) media interviews (heard one this morning on NPR that’s probably pretty typical “But you don’t actually want to get rid of the police, right”? “Defund doesn’t actually mean quit paying for them, does it?” “What does it actually mean?”). I totally understand the concept and where they are coming from, but it’s true that if you’re constantly explaining you’re losing. All those white men and women in the suburbs who saw the video of George Floyd’s murder and all the police assaults on peaceful protesters and are appalled and are with you that the police need to change will suddenly not be with you if they think you actually want to get rid of the police. They hear “defund the police” and say “What? I never said I wanted to get rid of them completely! Who’s going to come when my house gets broken into? Who’s going to catch the criminals?” Whether the activists like it or not, white people see the police as people who protect them and who are essential. It’s wonkier, but “Reimagine the police” or “Reinvent the police” is actually more descriptive of what they want to do, and it doesn’t turn off Joe and Jane White Person in the suburbs that you want to have vote for Democrats. Whether the activists like it or not, this is the truth. Look for every Democrat to now have to go through multiple interviews where they have to painstakingly explain that no, they don’t actually want to get rid of the police completely, ad nauseum. As a slogan, it’s a fail. I’m pretty sure I know what Frank Luntz would say about it.
germy
@evodevo: Had to get their beaks wet.
Mary G
Maybe some of our Atlanta readers can explain this line to vote there. They seem mostly white, but mostly are wearing masks and distancing, so I assume Democrats? Also, why put up with this kind of shit?
ETA: Oops, forgot this:
MattF
Lincoln Project does its thing. Emphasizing Trump’s itty-bitty crowds is a Wilsonian touch.
Betty Cracker
Uh-oh. OANN is now doing the Presidential Daily Briefing rather than Fox & Friends:
Real tweet from the President of the United States this morning.
narya
We here in northern Illinois are already seeing adds for the mango menace. It’s disgusting.
Mary G
Not gonna link or embed it, but Twitler just put out a doozy:
germy
Amir Khalid
@germy:
I hope you took all the money out with your first, free transaction, and then deposited it in your regular account. By the way, in my country, ATM and other card use fees (one ringgit per transaction, or US23¢) are suspended for the duration of the pandemic.
Baud
@Betty Cracker:
I see he’s started foreshadowing his upcoming speech on race that will unite this country.
germy
@Amir Khalid: That’s exactly what we’re doing later today. A complete transfer, and then cut the card into a million pieces.
MattF
@Betty Cracker: He’s going for the ‘untethered to reality’ demographic.
Baud
@Mary G:
Looks like a clusterfuck, even for Georgia.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Soprano2: I agree it’s a bad slogan. As you say, if you’re explaining, you’re losing.
danielx
@Baud:
Especially the ad libbed parts.
different-church-lady
@burnspbesq:
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@NotMax: Was Your Ancestor Written out of History
And
Mary G
@Baud: Wow, people didn’t get requested absentee ballots, so they brought chairs because they knew that they’d be waiting a long time. That’s dedication.
Baud
@Baud: I see I misread your comment, germy. I thought you were saying that there was a fee for first-time use.
Baud
@Mary G:
That’s patriotism.
different-church-lady
@Dorothy A. Winsor: I’d rather defund Visa than the police.
Betty Cracker
@Baud: Do you think that speech will actually be attempted? I’m sure the low-quality hires recognize the need for something like that, but even they must see that it will be really tough for Trump of all people to pull it off.
How will they keep him from ad libbing OANN crackpottery and/or “all lives mattering” the speech? They can’t. It will be a fucking disaster, and they must know that, even as deluded and dumb as they are.
The sad thing is that the bar is so low that all Trump would have to do is admit a few mistakes and credibly imitate empathy for 15 minutes, and MoDo, et al, would hail him as Great Emancipator 2.0. That’s a real danger, IMO. But I’m pretty damned confident that he is incapable of it.
schrodingers_cat
One thing I like about Biden is that he doesn’t fall for the latest trending hashtag! And also good to see that I am in agreement with Biden about “defunding the police”
One reason Putin was so overwhelmingly successful in 2016 is because many privileged Americans (not all are white but many are) have rusty survival instincts (because America has been so overwhelmingly successful post World War II) and fall for magical thinking both on the right and the left.
A luxury many immigrants and minorities do not have. So thank god for the Democratic voters of South Carolina, especially black voters who never left Joe Biden’s side. Thanks to your decisive vote we have a fighting chance to take our democracy back.
Putin must have observed how many Americans brought into the Iraq War build up and decided that the Soviet active measures which had not succeeded for over 50 years would have a greater chance of success now.
SFAW
@Betty Cracker:
“Barr, Jared, Jodl, und Parscale remain in the room. Everyone else get out ….”
PST
Who is Romney speaking to? He doesn’t have many black constituents. He must believe that support for Black Lives Matter is good politics among the people he represents. I see it as a sign that this message appeals to moderately conservative, educated white people who usually vote Republican. Biden will never win Utah, but this will be an important piece of the puzzle in places like Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Wisconsin. It means he will have an easier time getting black and progressive turnout without alienating the white swing suburbanites.
Spanky
PSA: For those of you who saw Tom Cotton’s FTFNYT op-ed and thought “Why yes, we DO need to hear some more from some assholes who should have shut the fuck up a long time ago”, the WaPo now has an op-ed up from James Fucking Comey.
Kay
@Betty Cracker:
I’m hoping it will be like that obscene photo op with the orphan. That’s what happens when these freaks try to imitate normal people. You get scenes like that.
Baud
@Betty Cracker: I don’t know. On occasion, Trump has been persuaded to simply read the speech from the teleprompter. I just don’t see how they keep Stephen Miller’s hands off of it.
jonas
…which is precisely why they can’t bail on Trump and still be electable as Republicans. They will go down with the ship.
Anne Laurie
@rikyrah: See next post!
germy
jonas
@Betty Cracker: Here’s what happens every time Trump has to give a speech in which he needs to act empathetic or offer condolences — two things he’s simply viscerally incapable of: He’ll read the damn thing looking like he’s being given a proctological exam and then rush to watch how the speech was covered on cable news. When he sees someone on CNN or something say it sucked, he’ll then start rage tweeting a few minutes later contradicting everything he just said. The headlines write themselves: “In Televised Speech, Trump Says Nation Needs to Heal Racial Wounds; Suggests in subsequent tweet that he may pardon Derek Chauvin”
Barbara
@PST: No doubt Romney has long been fighting a battle even if it’s mostly inside his head to reclaim his father’s Republican party. On the one side there is legacy and principle and hope and on the other there is actual power. So I think of Romney the way I used to think of Maureen Dowd (no longer read her at all), which is to say, as an arbiter of the direction in which conventional wisdom is heading. One thing is sure — Romney will not do anything that would actually decrease his influence or power.
Barbara
@Spanky: I don’t put Comey and Cotton in the same camp. For one thing, Cotton is looking mostly ahead to getting even more power to remake American society into an authoritarian military state. Comey has been in atonement mode for a while now. Yes, the preening and self-regard grates, so I don’t read him, but no, not the same at all.
Immanentize
@Betty Cracker:
In Trump’s fevered mind, that would be showing weakness and therefore, UNACCEPTABLE!
PST
@debbie: Yeah, those Trump ads are utterly forgettable. They are invitations to go to the bathroom or grab a beer.
jonas
Ah, yes, the Great Presidential Moment where he posed with an infant whose parents had been killed in the El Paso massacre by a gunman inspired by Trump’s own anti-immigrant rhetoric, giving a big thumbs-up and wearing that stupid shit-eating photo-op grin of his.
The only way to top this would be to have him pose in the Oval Office kneeling on the neck of a black mannequin labeled “Racism” and giving a thumbs-up.
Citizen Alan
@burnspbesq: This is why I’ve been calling the Rose Twitter crowd “the Teabaggers of the Left” for years. They’re all authoritarian cultists. They just disagree on what they want the dictator to do once he assumes control.
FelonyGovt
@Mary G: Excellent politics, attacking a frail old man and accusing him of faking a fall that left him on the ground bleeding from the head. Way to solidify the senior citizen vote, especially after declaring them expendable to COVID.
jonas
Yes. It’s a CYA move by Parscale to convince Trump he’s still fighting and not just fleecing the campaign. That Lincoln Project ad — which they purposely aired only on the DC Fox affiliate during Tucker Carlson’s program — suggesting Parscale was getting rich while Trump’s poll numbers were tanking was simply *chef’s kiss
PST
@Soprano2: All the reasons that make Defund the Police a bad slogan highlight what a superb slogan Black Lives Matter is. Unambiguous and undeniable. Only the deliberately obtuse can misconstrue it.
PST
@narya:
That’s something else we can blame on Wisconsin and Indiana. Those ads sure can’t be meant for us.
mrmoshpotato
@Baud:
@Mary G: Voter fuckery in Georgia? Why doesn’t that thieving sack of shit just steal the presidential primary too?
Baud
@mrmoshpotato: Trump stole his primary. The GOP canceled a bunch of them.
jonas
@Citizen Alan: Virtually all revolutions eventually become the very thing they claimed to have fought to overthrow. The inflection point is always when eliminating “counterrevolutionary” thinking starts to replace other goals, such as rule of law, as the main purpose of the movement.
SFAW
@jonas:
Maybe I’m jaded, but to me, 235-240 years is kind of a stretch for “eventually.”
jonas
@Soprano2: Yeah, there’s a lot of smh right now over this. Unfortunately, there *are* a number of BLM and other SJ activists who are running around insisting that, indeed, they really do want to simply zero out police budgets and eliminate law enforcement, period. More pragmatic progressives are waving their hands frantically, going “No, no. We need police, we just need them to do their jobs right” and trying to explain why “defund” doesn’t mean what it says, it actually means “reform,” or something. It’s such a distraction. The media will, of course, do their best to amplify what a few activists on Twitter are saying to the exclusion of the latter because it’s like bringing out the jilted girlfriend from backstage on the Jerry Springer Show. Oooh! Fight! Fight!
Nicole
@Baud:
They did send out some paper checks- my stepmom got a paper check (we got DD, weeks before she did), but then switched to cards, without any sort of notification. Lots of people threw them out because the return address was something not official sounding, and then got charged to get them replaced. The whole things seems fishy. I agree with Dorothy, below, that it sure seems like someone is getting a kickback for this and hope that the Biden Administration looks into it in 2021.
Omnes Omnibus
@PST: Right, the Chicago ad buyers are trying to reach people in Beloit.
SFAW
@jonas:
Yeah, unfortunately the media will likely pull that shit. And the whole disband/defund thing has the potential to become an own-goal.
I heard some Camden (NJ) official — the mayor, maybe? I don’t know — talking about the police reforms instituted there a number of years ago. The figures he cited seemed encouraging, although there were some questions not asked re: the population (i.e., statistical population set) on which those numbers were based.
jonas
@SFAW: 1. I would argue that calling the American Revolution a “revolution” in same breath as the French Revolution or the Russian Revolution is a bit of a stretch. It wasn’t a complete upending of the existing social order. We just declared independence from British rule. 2. The Founders were smart enough to establish a constitutional government (rule of law), rather than just some junta of self-described “patriots” to govern as they saw fit. 3. There were a few moments early in our history where we *did* flirt with what we would now view as completely undemocratic attempts to quell dissent, such as the Alien and Sedition Acts. Thankfully that remains a footnote in the history of the early Republic, rather than a major chapter.
jonas
@SFAW: Camden didn’t get rid of its police force, but it did dissolve it and then rebuild it. Basically they got rid of the city police dept and created a new county-level LEA. Most of the former city cops were re-hired into the new police force, but only after a lengthy screening process and retraining. They also implemented new community policing practices and use-of-force guidelines. The results were impressive. Camden went from being literally one of the most violent cities in the US to more or less on par with other urban areas of its size and demographics within a few years, and police brutality complaints fell dramatically as well. To be sure, it’s a poor, heavily minority area and there are still lots of problems, but policing is no longer its biggest one. I think a lot of people will be looking at Camden and other cities like it in the coming weeks.
Geminid
@NotMax: I too am aware of the racist history of the Mormon Church, and I’m sure the legacy persists. But my comment spoke to how Mormon people may look at things now. Maybe someone who knows Mormons can speak to this. It may be that I’m wrongly attributing traits to Mormons that I saw among Mennonites when I lived in Stuart’s Draft Va. They seem to have stayed clear of the Christo-republicanism that so many Baptist and independent evangelical churches have fallen for. And they, like the Mormons, are heavily into foreign mission work and seem to have a less insular world view than most. The local State Senator, Emmitt Hanger, was one of three Republican senators who helped Gov. Northam push through Medicaid expansion in 2018, and then easily turned back a primary challenge from a pistol packing babtist lady. Hanger is Church of Brethren; they are similar to Mennonites in origin and culture.
Fair Economist
@Soprano2:
A good snappy response is “taxpayer funds shouldn’t be used for cracking the skulls of 75 year old men”. Anytime somebody questions “defund the police”, use it as a chance to point out police abuses, and that our money is being used for it.
Omnes Omnibus
@Geminid: Methodist and Muslim also begin with the same letter. Seriously, I am not sure that Mennonites and Mormons have enough in common to make that kind of comparison.
Fair Economist
@jonas:
Yep, it was a rebellion, not a revolution.
Booger
@Geminid: You really need to catch up with the Mormons of 2020. They ain’t no Mennonites.
Bruce K
If you want the view of someone who might be considered an average Mormon-on-the-street, you might check out the webcartoonist Howard Tayler, specifically his Twitter feed @howardtayler. He proclaims himself to be very conservative (but not “politically conservative”), and he appears to be utterly done with the GOP.
(His views on the political situation can often be lost in between commentary on art, slice-of-life musings, and incessant teasing of author Myke Cole, an Iraq veteran/Coast Guard veteran/former NYPD contractor who is also publicly fifty shades of pissed off at the current political situation.)
PST
@Fair Economist:
The revolution came afterwards. The early nineteenth century brought deep, rapid changes in social and political norms.
PJ
@Fair Economist: Or War for Independence, as in that Declaration.
Geminid
@Omnes Omnibus: Both have histories of religious persecution by dominant religions. Both form cohesive bodies within larger gentile communities. Both are heavily into foreign missions that bring them into contact with non-Europeans, and seem to have a less insular world view than other Christian sects.
Soprano2
The worst thing about that interview I heard on NPR this morning is that the woman who was being interviewed, “She the People” president Aimee Allison, said that if Joe Biden didn’t want to say he wanted to “defund the police” that would be a problem for him. She cares more about him reciting her slogan than about getting real change by electing him. I wanted to ask her “So, what’s the alternative? Re-electing Donald Trump? Is that what you’re going to do if Joe Biden won’t recite your slogan?” It’s how the Sanders supporters act, and it drives me crazy. It’s like caring more about the slogan “Medicare for All” than about actually getting more people healthcare.
Geminid
But like I said, I may be incorrectly attributing characteristics to Mormons that I’ve seen in Mennonites. Someone who actually knows Mormons could shed light on them. I was interested, though, in how quickly the organized blow-back against Romney fizzled (when he voted to convict Trump). I think it would have been different in a state like Alabama or Arkansas.
Soprano2
@Fair Economist: Sure, but that doesn’t help with all the white people who don’t even ask because they hear “defund the police” as getting rid of law enforcement completely, so they decide Trump is the safer choice for them. It’s a deeply stupid slogan, especially considering what they actually say they want to accomplish. I guarantee you hysterical posts about Democrats wanting to abolish law enforcement will be showing up on my FB feed, probably today. I think it’s super stupid for us to set up that kind of hurdle. I’m not talking about what Republicans will say, because I know they’ll bash us no matter what we say. I’m talking about ordinary, not that political people who only vote every 4 years. Why should I have to spend a lot of time explaining to them that the slogan doesn’t actually mean what it sounds like it means? It’s an own goal.
Ruckus
@Baud:
It’s not the word defund that’s the problem it’s the vision that the word provokes. Joe changed that around to the police have to earn the right for the money, not just have it shoveled to them. Police have to be accountable, they have to be restrained, otherwise, as it is now, their actions can be disastrous, especially left to their own accord.
It was a great answer to the question. @HoarseWisperer on twitter yesterday ran a thread about how to explain an idea in a way to explain it properly, rather than one word, which would mostly be misunderstood. Defund is that current misunderstood word. Joe just explained it. Not in a catchy phrase but in a realistic way
And the use of, the discussion of that word, defund, how wrong just the one word is, Joe just explained that in the proper way. The “movement” gave him that word to explain. Yes he shouldn’t have had to explain but most of the people trying have been saying the same thing. Joe just did it far better and clearer. And used the word to explain that he’s not against the police, just them being unaccountable and out of control.
Calouste
The shitgibbon only got 45% of the vote in Utah last time around, so if Romney can find the spine to actually endorse Biden, Biden might win Utah. And there are still almost 5 months, so Romney might take a few more steps in that direction if the shitgibbon gives him excuses to do so, which he will.
Ruckus
@germy:
Cashing a check gives them nothing. They can make money on you using your new debt card. Them making money is far better than you getting said money. Don’t you understand? Or is that why you are pissed, you do understand?
Anathema Device
@WereBear: yes, it was.
This reply? not so much
https://twitter.com/laurenbrock100/status/1270159916850982912
Morzer
Please, brutality!
Morzer
https://twitter.com/Politics_Polls/status/1270212807280254977