#IMP45CH #LOCKHIMUP

[Dakota Tebaldi]

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

JINX!

 

[Ishina]

It's entirely plausible that world famous Austrian actor and director Christoph Waltz is really a Swiss financial investigator called Simon Frick.

 

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

 

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

Tweet for everything. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 

[Free]

I'd be happy if Burkman just stopped writing tweets elsewhere, then pasting them into his Twitter app.

 

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

 

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

About Nazis.

Thread by @JuliusGoat: "This is Nazism. The answer to the ontological question “Is Lou Dobbs vile enough to book a guest too vile even for Lou Dobbs?” To be clear, […]"

 

[Innula Zenovka]

 

[Innula Zenovka]

One of these statements is true.

 

[Free]

I have a solution.

GET RID OF ALL THE LAWS!

 

[Innula Zenovka]

I have a solution.

GET RID OF ALL THE LAWS!

Right now ha, ha, ha, ha, ha
Free is an anti-Christ
Free is an anarchist
Don't know what she wants
But she knows how to get it

 

[Free]

/me brushes dandruff off her shoulder.

 

[Kara Spengler]

He doesn't seem to realise who he's fucking with.

I have to wonder at the strategy. Even if they get rid of Mueller the investigation does not go away.

 

[Free]

I have to wonder at the strategy. Even if they get rid of Mueller the investigation does not go away.

The goal is to get someone more compliant in charge of it. This is what really pissed off Trump about Sessions recusing himself. He didn't care if the investigation happened. He only cared that its independent of his control.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

 

[Innula Zenovka]

The Guardian's Ed Pilkington spent a week attending Trump's rallies:

There is no understanding Donald Trump without understanding his rallies.

They are the crucible of the Trump revolution, the laboratory where he turns his alternative reality into a potion to be sold to his followers. It is at his rallies that his radical reimagining of the US constitution takes shape: not “We the people”, but “We my people”.

As America reels from a gunman killing 11 Jewish worshippers in a Pittsburgh synagogue; pipe bombs being sent to 14 of the US presidents’ leading opponents, and Trump declaring himself a nationalist and sending thousands of troops to the US border to assail unarmed asylum seekers; the most powerful person on earth continues to rely on his rallies as seething cauldrons of passion.

And that’s not all. Trump is using them as a test run for his 2020 bid for re-election.

Which is why I have crisscrossed the country, from Montana and Wisconsin in the north to Texas in the south, Arizona in the west to North Carolina in the east, to observe the president delivering his message to his people.

Five rallies, eight days. At each, we explore a different emotion that Trump evokes to arouse his people’s devotion, in search of the source of his appeal.

Feel the love, feel the hate – my week in the cauldron of Trump's wild rallies

 

[Jolene Benoir]

The Guardian's Ed Pilkington spent a week attending Trump's rallies:

Feel the love, feel the hate – my week in the cauldron of Trump's wild rallies

That was an interesting and scary insight into the rallies. It's about what I expected in terms of their being led by the nose by this con man fascist and their own unwillingness to use even the most simple amount of reason in their "love" of this loathsome creature. They are united in fear, ignorance and hatred. This guy who would shoot his own sister in the face is the level of hatred that we are dealing with here. Hard to top that with facts.

Yep, I'm going to continue to call them nazi rallies. He's using these rallies to tell these people exactly who they should hate.

Tonight in Wisconsin, the crowd are focused on only one thing – hearing their leader. It includes Steve Spaeth (no relation), 40, who runs a home exteriors company in West Bend. I ask him who he regards as his political enemies, and whether “hate” is too strong a word. “Not at all,” he says. “I have a deep and absolute disgust for these human beings.”

Which ones? He rattles off CNN, Soros, Clinton, Waters, Booker, “Pocahontas” AKA Elizabeth Warren, and others. Why do you hate them?“They want to turn America into a socialistic country. It’s disgusting.”

I ask Spaeth how far he is prepared to take his hatred. In reply, he tells a story. The other day he talked to his sister, who is liberal and votes Democratic. He said to her: “If there is a civil war in this country and you were on the wrong side, I would have no problem shooting you in the face.”

You must be joking, I say.

“No I am not. I love my sister, we get on great. But she has to know how passionate I am about our president.”

 

[Govi]

Everytime I read accounts of Trump and his rallies, I become frightened for us all. The beautiful civilization we've crafted -- very flawed but nonetheless admirable, too -- is in danger of degenerating lickitysplit into total madness, like a Trump rally, believing (or being forcibly silenced) every stupid lie he offers.

Our years with Trump as president are certainly one of the biggest tests of the American democracy and constitution that we've had, perhaps exceeded only by our Civil War. Can the safeguards incorporated in our Constitution and the American people's adherence to our standards and values withstand an outrageous lawless demagogue? We'll soon see.

.​

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

How on Earth can/do you lay this at Clinton's feet? America has always had people who would prefer fascism, hate other people based upon their race, religion, sex and sexual orientation.

They just didn't have a president directly working on their behalf in the White House.

I knew my thesis would be controversial, so here are now the reasons why I think so.

What we have been witnessing in the last 2-3 decades is an erosion, up to destruction what in many countries before was the center to left consensus about the welfare state. The welfare state was demolished, markets/banks were deregulated, unions busted, worker's rights reduced, taxes for the rich and big companies lowered en masse and so on and on.

All this lead in many countries to a very much shrinking middle class, high increase of poor and a high increase of the wealth of the rich up to the richest. Between those two positions, the poor and the rich, the middle class is being more and more torn apart.

In most countries this development kicked hard in during the 90s, Gerhard Schröder in Germany, Tony Blair in the UK (though Margaret Thatcher started it there), and Bill Clinton in America. Though Clinton did not start it, that was Ronald Reagan, Clinton made some very controversial decisions which still do shape the picture and fate of today's America. Macron in France tries to do the same now, but with limited success, because the France just like to strike if something goes very much wrong so. While Clinton had for sure charisma, was well mannered, soft spoken and intelligent, some of his actions are really worth mentioning.

Under Clinton's presidency falls the reform of a part of the national welfare, which became the TANF program, which is - in short - a failure. But more important, and that's the biggest thing Clinton did, was his deregulation of the financial industry through signing 1999 the Gramm-Leach-Bliley act, which repealed a provision of the Glass-Steagall act from 1932.

Before a bank could be either a commercial bank, so having deposit insurance and bigger federal oversight, or an investment bank, which had less regulation, but did not benefit from federal protection. After changing this, this distinction was gone, and the banks started gambling around, which lead to the financial crisis in 2008. So he contributed his part to that.

He also passed a bill with the so called "Enron loop hole", which deregulated energy trading, and added to their bankruptcy as well.

America was doing well under his presidency, because economy did well at that time. But he did lay the groundwork for several time bombs which would explode sooner or longer after his presidency ended.

You might be surprised, but already in 1998 American philosopher Richard Rorty did predict something like Trump happen sooner or later in his book "Achieving our country"; he said:

Members of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers — themselves desperately afraid of being downsized — are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else.​

At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking for a strongman to vote for — someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots.​

Sounds like America today.

And another prediction as well from Rorty:

One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion. The words ‘nigger’ and ‘kike’ will once again be heard in the workplace. All the sadism which the academic Left has tried to make unacceptable to its students will come flooding back. All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet. ​

And this is for me the real problem: the center to left have no answer to what a renewed consensus for welfare, work rates etc.pp. should look like; instead they are working for diversity and minority stuff, while the workers and poor feel left alone in the rain. Since years, decades. they do feel getting poorer and poorer, are unhappy, unsatisfied, don't have access to basic things while others have.

Trump without doubt is a disaster area. But he's not part of the poltiical establishment, he's more like an accident, that happened. So he's now the shock therapy, the wake up call that probably America needs. Either the political competitors are now finally putting their act together, and find an answer to the real problems of America, or they are going to face distinction.

So this is why for me Trump is not the problem, but an indication of the real problem.

This is the foundation where somebody like Trump can grow on, get elected.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

So, Wohl and Burkman had their news conference with the "big reveal". It went about as well as you might expect; but if you need a hint, Burkman's fly was down, literally, the entire time. Not even kidding.