What They're Selling

The pretense of expertise will never prevail. But we have to pay attention.

Erika Jordan

" ... dressed like a coupon, but acting like a ransom note."

Changes

I knew a retired Army 4-star. He said most members of the military voted Republican because they gave the DOD big budgets, and hardly used them for anything, while the Democrats kept wanting to cut their budget, and use them for every stupid thing that came along. That started to change with Iraq, and 2 cycles later, he voted for Hillary.

That culture changes slowly, but for several years before he died, he couldn't hear "Trump" or "GOP" without muttering, "Those fuckin' jerks".

The good and honorable ones know that while politics is a factor, their oath is what counts. And they're not stupid - they know when leadership is totally FUBAR, and they know they can vote to change it.

This is NOT the typical fun one, but it needs to be said... military members, and those who claim to "support our troops, need to start taking a close hard look at how they vote.
by u/JMaryland47 in LeopardsAteMyFace

A.I. Nonsense

Have Buck, Will Pass

The buck stops somewhere else: A look at Trump’s tendency to avoid blame when things go awry

WASHINGTON (AP) — It is among the most famous phrases in presidential history: “The buck stops here.” Except with President Donald Trump, it almost never does.

Concerns about a weak economy and still-high inflation? His predecessor, Joe Biden, saddled him with that, he says, even though the Democrat has been out of office for 18-plus months and despite Trump once promising an immediate turnaround.

The problem-plagued revamp of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool? That was marred by vandalism, the Republican president insists, even though the office of a prosecutor he put in the job has said the damage was due to shoddy workmanship.

The increasingly unpopular war in Iran that has kept oil prices high, Trump’s approval rating low and sent shock waves through the global economy? Actually, this was Trump making up for timid earlier presidents who, he argues, squandered nearly 50 years of opportunities to curb Tehran’s nuclear ambitions.

Pithy slogans aside, all modern presidents shift responsibility onto others to some degree, frequently blaming the commander-in-chief who preceded them, Congress — or both. But Trump has taken it to a new level, effectively embracing a de facto political strategy of being in charge of everything but responsible for nothing when things go badly.

“Taking responsibility being a characteristic of presidential leadership — or any kind of leadership — is absolutely true,” said Nicole Anslover, a history professor at Florida Atlantic University and author of “Harry S. Truman: The Coming of the Cold War.”

Trump’s tendency to point fingers at others is increasingly in the spotlight before November’s midterm elections, when Republicans are trying to retain control of Congress. His unwillingness to accept blame sometimes leads him to deny that there are problems at all, and could leave GOP leaders in tight races with little reassurance for voters that their concerns are being addressed.

The White House counters that Trump is working to correct long-festering challenges, not simply throwing up his hands and ignoring them.

The president is “rightfully addressing the failures of his predecessors while taking action to deliver big wins for the American people,” spokesperson Taylor Rogers said, pointing to a series of policies that she said Republicans can run on, including tax cuts, efforts to lower prescription drug prices, cracking down on immigration and the U.S.-Mexico border, increasing domestic energy production and a strong stock market.

Ducking responsibility dates to Trump’s first term

Truman famously kept a “The Buck Stops Here” sign on his desk as president. That came from “pass the buck,” which, according to Truman’s presidential library, dates to frontier times, when poker players would pass a buckhorn handle knife to the person whose turn it was to deal the cards.

“The president, whoever he is, has to decide,” Truman said during his farewell address in 1953. “He can’t pass the buck to anybody. No one else can do the deciding for him. That’s his job.”

The understanding of the phrase has broadened over the years to include taking responsibility for the outcome of tough decisions. Trump used to espouse similar beliefs, saying back in 2013 that in running a business, “Whatever happens, you’re responsible. If it doesn’t happen, you’re responsible.”

Accepting the 2016 presidential nomination, Trump said, “Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it.” But as president, he has often suggested that the solution and blame rest elsewhere.

“The buck stops with everybody,” Trump said in 2019, during a lengthy government shutdown. In 2020, on the same day he declared the coronavirus pandemic a national emergency, he said, “I don’t take responsibility at all” for a lack of COVID-19 testing.

Anslover said Truman took full responsibility for dropping atomic bombs on Japan even though he was not informed that the U.S. was developing such weapons until his predecessor, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, died.

John F. Kennedy saw his approval ratings rise after he acknowledged he was to blame for the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba. Ronald Reagan said he was sorry for any involvement he may have had in the Iran-Contra scandal even while saying he wasn’t sure he was to blame. “The buck stops here with me,” he said then.

At his final news conference in early 2009, George W. Bush listed a series of mistakes he had made, including failing to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. His successor, Barack Obama, said, “I screwed up,” after his nominee for health chief, Tom Daschle, withdrew because of unpaid back taxes.

Presidents before Trump “really usually take accountability,” Anslover said.

‘We inherited a total catastrophe,’ Trump says

The president acknowledged in a recent Punchbowl interview that voters are angry, but he said they are not mad at him but at congressional Republicans.

Trump believes his party can hold its congressional majorities after November, but he was clear that if Republicans lose, it won’t be his fault — echoing his comments before the 2018 midterms that he would not accept blame if his party lost control of the House, which it did.

Trump’s approval rating on the economy, once seen as among his strongest issues, has fallen throughout his time in office, from 40% in March 2025 to 32% in July, according to Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research polling. About 6 in 10 U.S. adults say Trump’s economic policies have made economic conditions worse, according to Pew Research Center polling.

“The public certainly expects the president to be concerned about, and focused on, making life more affordable,” Republican pollster Frank Luntz said.

Trump instead points to Biden, under whom inflation hit a four-decade peak of 9.1% in 2022 as the pandemic was still roiling the world economy, before declining to 2.7% by November 2024. Last month, pressured by the Iran war, it was 3.4%.

“When we took office, we inherited a total catastrophe,” Trump said at a recent rally, later adding, “I inherited those high prices, just so you understand.”

Andrew Bates, a Democratic strategist and former Biden White House spokesperson, noted that Trump no longer mentions his campaign promise to “immediately end inflation” on Day One.

“He may not remember having made those promises, but swing voters sure as hell do,” Bates said.

Trump has shown the same pattern with Iran and the Reflecting Pool

The president has characterized the Iran war as “a little excursion” or “detour.” To play down how long it has lasted, he frequently notes that U.S. wars in Vietnam and Afghanistan dragged on for years, though the Iran conflict — which he initially said would be over in four weeks to five weeks — is now in its sixth month with no clear end in sight.

Trump has sought to shift blame to the past on the Reflecting Pool, falsely suggesting that Biden and Obama spent “hundreds of millions of dollars” trying unsuccessfully to fix it.

But Trump’s main defense has been vandalism. And, so far, at least four cases alleging that, including the most prominent case against an Olympic canoeist, have been dropped because of a lack of evidence.

Anslover said that, after 11-plus years in politics, Trump has proved he is not afraid to violate norms of presidential comportment. Lots of his core supporters do not seem bothered.

“For many Americans, it has either been a shift in how they view the presidency, or, like with so many things, they just feel empowered to say, ‘These are my priorities. My priority is not the facts,’” she said.

Reality's A Bitch

Little by little, and one by one,

the Red Hats are realizing

they've been left on the Bait Plane too.

Give Her Hell

202-224-3121

The Right To Resist

The right to resist is a nearly universally acknowledged human right, although its scope and content are controversial. The right to resist, depending on how it is defined, can take the form of civil disobedience or armed resistance against a tyrannical government or foreign occupation; whether it also extends to non-tyrannical governments is disputed. Although the distinguished jurist Hersch Lauterpacht called the right to resist the supreme human right, this right's position in international human rights law is tenuous and rarely discussed. Forty-two countries explicitly recognize a constitutional right to resist, as does the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights.

The Lincoln

I had the extraordinary privilege of making a sales call aboard the USS Lincoln just before her first commissioned shakedown cruise in 1989.

I wasn't allowed to see the whole thing, but what I saw - and who I talked with - impressed the shit outa me. And not because I was some wide-eyed puppy. It was because the people in the US military back then were pretty fuckin' impressive. They all knew the mission, they all knew what they were doing, and they all had an air of quiet confidence, and a real pride of service.

Trump and Hegseth will never be forgiven.

I know carrots when I see them,

but what the fuck is that other shit?

Trump's callous response as US sailors throw themselves overboard in Iran war and grim photos of food emerge

Donald Trump brushed aside mounting alarm over conditions aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, even as accounts pile up of desperate sailors trying to go overboard during a record-shattering Iran war deployment.

The Lincoln and its more than 5,000 servicemen have spent more than 250 days at sea since leaving San Diego last November, diverted to support the war with Iran.

Navy families have described collapsing morale and suicidal ideation on the ship, with one sailor's wife telling Navy Times her severely burned-out husband attempted to jump overboard.

On August 3, a sailor assigned to the carrier's air wing went into rough seas wearing a life vest in what the Navy deemed a mental health episode, according to CNN. He was pulled from the water by a search and rescue helicopter within the hour.

Confronted with the fears of military families over conditions on the carrier, the President flatly denied those fears existed: 'Well, no, that ship is moving. No, they're not.'

'That ship is moving right now, or very shortly, and it's being replaced with another very similar ship,' Trump added. The USS George Washington warship is now steaming toward the Middle East to relieve the Lincoln in a swap officials insist was already planned.

Asked whether the deployment had simply gone on too long, the president shot back: 'No. Not nearly long enough.'

Since the start of Trump's war, reports have surfaced of food shortages and rationing aboard the Lincoln, accompanied by grim images of sailors' meals.

Donald Trump brushed aside mounting alarm over conditions aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, even as accounts pile up of desperate sailors trying to go overboard during a record-shattering Iran war deployment

The Lincoln and its more than 5,000 sailors and Marines have spent over 250 days at sea

Asked whether the deployment had simply gone on too long, the President shot back: 'No. Not nearly long enough'

Anxious family members also vented their anger to Navy leaders in San Diego last Thursday, according to Stars and Stripes.

One spouse reportedly said conditions aboard were so bad that her husband texted her saying, 'he hopes he doesn't wake up tomorrow.'

Another woman accused naval officials of breaking the 'trust between us and the leadership' by failing to be more transparent about their loved ones' living conditions.

Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal and other lawmakers are demanding answers from Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth.

Lawmakers want a bipartisan congressional visit to the ship, while Hegseth has waved off the reporting as a complete mischaracterization.

'Listen, we make sure that every ship, every crew, every captain has everything we can provide them at every single moment,' Hegseth told Newsmax on Thursday.

Eighteen US service members have died in Iranian strikes across the region since the war began in February, with hundreds more wounded.

US Central Command has pushed back hard, calling the reports of dire conditions aboard the carrier 'false' and insisting its crews 'remain resilient and resolved.'

Retired Vice Admiral Robert Murrett, now a professor at Syracuse University, told Newsweek that extended Navy deployments can certainly lead to an increase in mental health challenges.

Most carrier deployments run about six months with port calls along the way to refuel and let crews rest on land.

The military should launch an independent review
Amid these alleged conditions, the wife of the sailor who jumped off the aircraft carrier told MSNow that she was kept in the dark about what happened.


She said her husband was in the water for an hour before he was rescued from what she described as a suicide attempt.

'I think that it was handled very poorly because they didn't inform me and they didn't want me to know, and they're just trying to cover this up,' she said.

She shared her last text with her husband on July 21, in which he said life on the ship was getting to him.

'I'm really trying to not feel negative or hopeless but between the wifi and not knowing when I will come home and not knowing what is happening back at home, it's really getting me,' he wrote in the message, noting that he had been due to leave on July 15 but the plan was canceled.

'I don't think I can do another deployment after this and i don't even know if i can finish this deployment,' the sailor added.

Overheard

Hey - I completely understand why so many people are having a hard time deciding who to vote for in the midterms.

I mean, really. On the one hand, you've got Democrats, who've been pretty disappointing for a while now.

And on the other hand, there are child-raping murderers, cheating at every turn, running coin-operated concentration camps, siphoning hundreds of billions of dollars out of the treasury directly into their offshore numbered accounts, while making the whole planet uninhabitable for humans - then blaming you for having a bad attitude, and not being a team player.

I get it - that's a really tough call - a regular Sophie's Choice.