- Elon didn't start Tesla
- Tesla was saved by a government bailout loan
- Elon didn't start PayPal
- Elon has a god complex just like other uber-wealthy assholes
Mar 10, 2024
Today I Learned
Trump Lies Update
During his 4 years in office,
very credible sources
have estimated that Trump
mis-led
or
dissembled
or
Straight up fucking lied
over 35,000 times
Tracking President Trump's false and misleading claims
The Fact Checker has evaluated false statements President Trump has made repeatedly and analyzed how often he reiterates them. The claims included here – which we're calling "Bottomless Pinocchios" – are limited to ones that he has repeated 20 times and were rated as Three or Four Pinocchios by the Fact Checker.
THE BASICS:
- The Daddy State lies as a means of demonstrating power.
- The lies have practically nothing to do with the subject of the lies.
- Lying about everything creates chaos, which helps condition us to stop thinking, and look to them for "guidance".
- Once we're totally dependent on them, we'll accept the premise that they can do anything they want.
The goal is to dictate reality to us.
SOTU Update
Katie Britt’s false linkage of a sex-trafficking case to Joe Biden
“We know that President Biden didn’t just create this border crisis. He invited it with 94 executive actions in his first 100 days. When I took office, I took a different approach. I traveled to the Del Rio sector of Texas. That’s where I spoke to a woman who shared her story with me. She had been sex trafficked by the cartels starting at the age of 12. She told me not just that she was raped every day, but how many times a day she was raped. The cartels put her on a mattress in a shoe box of a room, and they sent men through that door over and over again for hours and hours on end. We wouldn’t be okay with this happening in a Third World country. This is the United States of America, and it is past time, in my opinion, that we start acting like it. President Biden’s border policies are a disgrace.”
— Sen. Katie Boyd Britt (R-Ala.), in the Republican response to the State of the Union address, March 7
If you were watching Britt’s speech on Thursday night, you likely would have thought she was talking about a recent victim of sex trafficking who was abused in the United States and suffered because of President Biden’s policies.
If you did, you would have been wrong. Sean Ross, Britt’s communications director, confirmed that she was talking about Karla Jacinto Romero — who has testified before Congress about being forced to work in Mexican brothels from 2004 to 2008. (A viral TikTok by journalist Jonathan Katz first revealed that Britt was speaking about Romero.) In a phone conversation and a statement, Ross disputed that Britt’s language was misleading.
We disagree. Let’s take a look.
The Facts
Britt’s account of Romero’s experience was a centerpiece of her rebuttal to Biden’s address. The way Britt sets up the story, there is no indication that she is talking about a woman who was working in brothels in Mexico during the George W. Bush administration. This is how the passage unfolds.
- She first blames Biden for the surge of migrants at the border.
- Then she says she visited the border shortly after she took office. That would be 2023.
- At length, she details the story of an unnamed victim that she says she met on her trip. The implication is that the woman recently crossed the border — because of “sex trafficking by the cartels.”
- She strongly suggests that her abuse took place in the United States: “We wouldn’t be okay with this happening in a Third World country. This is the United States of America, and it is past time, in my opinion, that we start acting like it.”
- She ends by reinforcing that such alleged trafficking is Biden’s fault: “President Biden’s border policies are a disgrace.”
In a YouTube video, Britt features images of her hugging Romero during her 2023 trip to the border. “If we as leaders of the greatest nation in the world are not fighting to protect the most vulnerable, we are not doing our job,” she said in the video. The implication again is that this happened on Biden’s watch.
When Donald Trump was president, he regularly decried human trafficking that he claimed was happening at the border, including that “thousands of young girls and women” were being smuggled across the border for prostitution. In 2019, we investigated that claim and found no evidence to support it. Most human trafficking prosecutions generally involve legal border crossings, visa fraud and travel into the United States on airplanes. Victim organizations say there are relatively few cases that involve forced kidnapping across the border. This might be one reason Britt regularly cites a case that happened long ago and did not involve crossing the border.
Ross, Britt’s spokesman, said that Romero’s story was indicative of trafficking that is now happening at the border and that should be clear from Britt’s framing in the speech.
He said the reference to a “Third World country” was generic and was not intended to refer to Mexico, which he said is not a Third World country. Third World is a dated Cold War-era term previously used to refer to poor or developing countries. Global South, indicating low income and high poverty, is a more common expression today. Mexico is considered part of the Global South, though it is also a member of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.
In a written statement, Ross said:
“The story Senator Britt told was 100% correct. And there are more innocent victims of that kind of disgusting, brutal trafficking by the cartels than ever before right now. The Biden administration’s policies — the policies in this country that the President falsely claims are humane — have empowered the cartels and acted as a magnet to a historic level of migrants making the dangerous journey to our border. Along that journey, children, women, and men are being subjected to gut-wrenching, heartbreaking horrors in our own backyard. And here at home, the Biden administration’s policies are leading to more and more suffering, including Americans being poisoned by fentanyl and being murdered. These human costs are real, and it’s past time for some on the left to stop pretending otherwise.”
The Pinocchio Test
In a high-profile speech like this, a politician should not mislead voters with emotionally charged language. Romero’s story is tragic and may be evocative of other Mexican girls trapped in the sex trade in that country. But she was not trafficked across the border — and her story has nothing to do with Biden. Britt’s failure to make that clear earns her Four Pinocchios.
Four Pinocchios
Four Pinocchios
Mar 9, 2024
Today's Brando
"... they know what's gonna bring everybody to the wrestling matches ..." Brando has touched on that a few times before, and it's worth repeating:
- Trump is a shiny veneer over nothing
- He's all sizzle and no steak
- Style over substance.
There's a lot more than that in this excellent piece. Brando brings it.
Mar 8, 2024
SOTU
Highlites
Oh my god Katie Britt actually wore the Serena Joy outfit for her State of the Handmaid’s Tale. I’m dying. pic.twitter.com/hGJ8GGUopF
— Chad Chavez (ChadC.bsky.social) (@ChadAChavez) March 8, 2024
Some of the Press Poodles got it about right:
Then there's NYT:
And never mind that the lede paragraph
began with "Biden did great, and then
the GOP sent out this fuckin' loon."
(I may have paraphrased a little)
I encourage everyone to watch this, but you're going to need a stiff drink and a subdued gag reflex.
All it needs is the Sarah McGlachlan music in the background.
Mar 7, 2024
WTF, Mitch?
Mitch McConnell is a lot of bad things - dumb is not one of them.
But he'd have to be pretty dumb to endorse Lord Commander Apricot at a time when Trump can't really do anything to hurt him if he doesn't.
McConnell has announced that he'll be stepping down from his leadership position, and it's more than just a bit likely that he'll be out of politics altogether pretty soon. So - WTF, Mitch?
I think maybe Mitch knows (or is confident) that Trump's going down in flames this year, so he's being cagey and strategic. He'll endorse Trump as a seeming gesture for "party unity", so that when Trump does crash-n-burn, the old guard Republicans can reclaim what's left of the GOP, and resume the plutocracy project in their usual, sneaky, underhanded, fuckery-dependent way.
Or, he's just bailing on another chance to be a leader - same as he's done before - hoping the voters will do his dirty work for him.
Just a wild guess.
Today's Today
On March 7, 1965, an estimated 525 to 600 civil rights marchers headed southeast out of Selma on U.S. Highway 80. The march was led by John Lewis of SNCC and the Reverend Hosea Williams of SCLC, followed by Bob Mants of SNCC and Albert Turner of SCLC. The protest went according to plan until the marchers crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where they encountered a wall of state troopers and county posse waiting for them on the other side.
County sheriff Jim Clark had issued an order for all white men in Dallas County over the age of twenty-one to report to the courthouse that morning to be deputized. Commanding officer John Cloud told the demonstrators to disband at once and go home. Rev. Hosea Williams tried to speak to the officer, but Cloud curtly informed him there was nothing to discuss. Seconds later, the troopers began shoving the demonstrators, knocking many to the ground and beating them with nightsticks. Another detachment of troopers fired tear gas, and mounted troopers charged the crowd on horseback.
Televised images of the brutal attack presented Americans and international audiences with horrifying images of marchers left bloodied and severely injured, and roused support for the Selma Voting Rights Campaign. Amelia Boynton, who had helped organize the march as well as marching in it, was beaten unconscious. A photograph of her lying on the road of the Edmund Pettus Bridge appeared on the front page of newspapers and news magazines around the world. Another marcher, Lynda Blackmon Lowery, age 14, was brutally beaten by a police officer during the march, and needed seven stitches for a cut above her right eye and 28 stitches on the back of her head. John Lewis suffered a skull fracture and bore scars on his head from the incident for the rest of his life. In all, 17 marchers were hospitalized and 50 treated for lesser injuries; the day soon became known as "Bloody Sunday" within the black community.
Mar 6, 2024
Told Ya
Occam's Razor tells us our first consideration should be the obvious:
There's something wrong
with the fucking polling.
Outside of Vermont, which Haley appears to have won, Haley is getting beaten just about everywhere tonight. That’s 100% expected. But we are seeing that polling seemed to dramatically overstate Trump’s margins. So for instance 538 had Trump up 49 points over Haley in Virginia. But it looks like it will be just under 30 points. Needless to say these are still very lopsided defeats. But that’s also a pretty big polling miss.
Some people I’m seeing are ascribing that to a huge amount of strategic voting by independents and Biden-supporting Dems. So it’s interesting but doesn’t mean anything. I’m not sure I totally buy that. I’m not quite sure what it means. But I don’t think I buy that it means nothing. The number of people who are willing to strategic vote is never very high. It’s hard enough to get people to vote at all, let alone vote to make a point for election observers or to own the other parties frontrunners. If that’s what it is I would say that it suggests a truly extreme amount of mobilization on the anti-Trump side.
I suspect a lot of these are either conservative-leaning independents who are voting for Haley but won’t vote for Trump in the general and true independents (move back and forth between parties) and are making a statement. Neither side can win with only its own registered partisans. You need a lot of independents. I’m going to wait until all the numbers are in to decide just what I make of this. But the mix of significant anti-Trump vote and in many cases big polling errors just don’t square with writing it off.
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