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Watch this Lincoln Project ad - just beautiful. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GxvvaOpiiHU

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Bulwark writers and pundits maybe making false assumptions about what was omitted from documents vetting J.D.Vance for VP candidacy of Donald Trump.

If Donald Trump and the campaign were fully aware of e.g. the noted "Cat lady" and other derogatory comments about women and denigrating minorities, that were deemed perfecty acceptable even before other aspects of the final vetting process had begun.

The naivete of some Bulwark journalism about the extent of heinousness of Trump - Vance personalities and the Presidential campaign ticket is noticeable in the timidity of some articles in stepping around the severe coarseness of behavior and/or rhetoric from these two men until the Haitian immigrants' pet eating blowup that so incensed much of the previous civilized anti-Trump MAGA approach to this Presidential election, that the lack of harsh criticism was finally off the table.

The News that President Biden has released one plus billion $dollars in aid to Florida, brought the stark reminder from a Bill Maher website release of Donald Trump declaring he would not have provided any financial Aid what-so-ever to California for fighting the horrendous and devastating wild fires in tht state, because he personally hated Gavin Newsom, California's governor.

In consideration of the mass natural disaster of damages and loss of life in Florida, California as well as anywhere else in the USA, it belies credulity that any breathing human being with emotion and conscience would support and vote for the actual monster that is Donald Trump, his exceedingly stupid VP choice or any politician running under that hateful and devisive republican umbrella that is guaranteed to destroy whatever vestiges of sanity. good will, national unity and societal function that remains.

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I have been using the word "Clintonian" for years, specifically by saying "I feel your pain, and not just in the Clintonian sense." To be clear, though, while I have never been a big fan of Bill or Hillary I'd vote for either in a heartbeat if they ran against the evil convicted felon.

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Sep 28·edited Sep 28

Trumpery is in the dictionary. "attractive articles of little value or use." "showy but worthless." "Trumpery" first appeared in English in the mid-15th century with the meanings "deceit or fraud" (a sense that is now [no longer] obsolete) and "worthless nonsense." Less than 100 years later, it was being applied to material objects of little or no value, and useless or worthless speech, whether it's written or spoken.

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Re: Trump/Zelensky. That’s just sad.

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Why are people buying more Trump cookies? Maybe Progressives are into eating healthy.

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Conservative and independent Never-Trumpers are probably also more into eating healthy, but the bigger picture is that MAGA addicts are more likely to buy anything, food or otherwise, they think helps their cult leader. See JVL's article on Trump's latest scam with watches.

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founding

Zelensky is a wizard politician. If anyone can make a case to Trump, he is the man to do it. Of course Trump changes his tune every five minutes, so what he says today may not hold tomorrow.

Trump is a real fool about Ukraine. You cannot appease Putin by giving him some or all of Ukraine. Putin is on a mission. Knowing that Trump wants to pursue an isolationist policy, he will feel free to go after the remainder of the Soviet Bloc. Then he will want more. For those of you who don’t remember Saddam Hussein and Kuwait, I highly recommend the SNL skit with the Church Lady on that topic. Sounds just like Putin. My guess is that it would become impossible to avoid boots on the ground at some point. There are all sorts of possible scenarios involving other actors like China. Trump has no clue and listens to none of the National Security apparatus. Look at all those people who do know who said they were voting for Harris. When it comes to international relations Trump is a neophyte. Even Kim Jong Un put a stop to their talks because Trump wasn’t negotiating-/he only wanted positive things for himself. So much for the love letters.

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Trump no fool. He's tight with the oligarchs, and he's raking in cash for himself, his family, and his cohorts.

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founding

Naturally the childless cat lady goes with the Opus Dei/Project 2025 mission. I am not surprised if they gave it a pass. Perhaps they thought Trump followers and Independents would find it funny? Their treatment of post-menopausal women as useless unless babysitting is actually even worse. There it becomes clear that they don’t plan to let women leave their homes, have independent incomes, pursue careers, no choice about pregnancy, never get divorced even when beaten. It is back to the women’s lot of the 1950s. Strpford Wives stuff. They are idiots. Women will leave the country if they can. And these fools will find that the many, many clever women contribute to the advancement of society, and women workers across the board kneel the economy on track. If MAGA represents the male contribution they are in serious trouble. They don’t believe in science, they don’t believe what the highly educated say. Sounds like reinventing the wheel to me.

Mark is right to warn against a wholesale swallowing of leaked oppo research. It may well be contaminated, but a lot of the hundreds of pages is verifiable.

The bigger issue with Vance is that, I checked with a doctor who knows, that Vance shows serious signs of a personality disorder that would make him unstable at the best of times. He has always wanted to be popular and accepted. His interactions with constituents make clear why even as a well-educated adult he probably didn’t have much success with his contemporaries. We can see that in one photograph of him in a boys’ bathroom with three female classmates. They are goofing around, but he doesn’t look like he is in on the joke. He is trying to compensate—he has done that all through his life, but it will make him volatile. Anyone who can put their wife and children in the path of the wrath of white extremists is really off kilter.

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> Anyone who can put their wife and children in the path of the wrath of white extremists is really off kilter.

The biggest single reason to never support Vance.

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There are people who apparently believe that the only real value a woman's life can have is in the biological perpetuation of the species - i.e., what the females of every animal species do.

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founding

Yes. That’s why we are born without brains.

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Lordy, I wish character mattered to the voting electorate. Lordy, I wish the voting electorate had more character (integrity, humility, honesty, kindness, empathy)

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RFK JR. & DJT Jr. "blithely and baselessly dismissed fears that success in Ukraine will embolden Putin to push further into Europe. 'Surely,' RFK Jr. and Trump Jr. argued, '[Harris] must know how absurd that is.'”

Are Russia's other neighbors all being "absurd" to worry about the possibility?

Are Kremlin spokesmouths on state TV being "absurd" when they openly fantasize about pushing the Russian empire far to the west? (JuliaDavisNews has offered examples in her translations.)

Maybe it's "absurd" for Putin to say that "Russia's borders end nowhere," but there's nothing absurd about taking such talk as a serious declaration of his aims.

There is something absurd in MAGAs saying we need to let Putin be rewarded for his aggression and stop worrying about the need for deterrence - at the same time as other MAGAs claim that the reason for Russia's invasion of Ukraine is that the Biden administration failed at deterrence.

And it's even more absurd for MAGAs to howl in outage over "the Russia hoax" when they consistently and zealously take the stance most pleasing to the Kremlin.

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If anything, Biden should tell Putin that any use of nukes will be the last decision he ever makes.

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A bakery in Peekskill, N.Y., has been getting threats for selling cookies with the likenesses of Harris and Trump - most of the threats coming from the anti-Trump camp. The bakery has been making such cookies since 1995.

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I was a weird kid and i pondered weird things. One thing i happened to ponder was why the pronoun "I" is capitalized but "you" is not. Surveying the whole of contemporary writing i concluded that things were capitalized to indicate respect or significance. When i investigated writings from around the founding of the nation it seemed people often capitalized to add emphasis. I also noted that ours is the only Romantic language to do this. This struck me as something quintessentially Western... "I" for "Independent".

Since i was also a rebellious kid i thought, well, if the whole of society is gonna capitalize a personal pronoun to signify the supremacy of the individual, then i will refuse to do this so as to signify humility. No irony intended, as i'd also read the words of Jesus and contrasted with modern society, and decided someone needed to advocate for a lost virtue. It might've been annoying and passive aggressive but my heart was in the right place, i think.

In any case it stuck. I was somewhere less than ten years old when i took up this habit and now i'm... somewhere in excess of sixty. I couldn't change now if i wanted to do but i still notice and ponder this sort of stuff.

That's why it stuck out to me that of the adjectives listed in this article, "quixotic" is the only one not capitalized. So here i am again, wondering how these things evolve and end up where they are. Google and ChatGPT tell me it's because in common usage, the term has been decoupled from Don Quixote and used to describe attributes like impractical idealism. But this seems to conflict with Mr. Egger's assertion that the words describe essential qualities of proper noun people.

So i can't shake the sense that in common usage, commoners simply have less respect for a fictional character. Nobody capitalizes "frisbee", "sheetrock", or "superglue" either, because nobody cares about the trademark sensibilities of corporations.

If you have the misfortune to read Trump's writing, he randomly capitalizes words for emphasis. That is to say, significance or import in His mind. "Radical Left". "Second Debate". "Sanctuary City". It's often unintentionally telling, as in "Personal Loyalty". And of course if he really wants to get his point across he capitalizes absolutely everything.

IOW he'd be delighted to see "Trumpian" capitalized no matter how awful the connotations. So this is a long way of asking that should the term enter the popular lexicon, please give it the same respect you give to Johnson & Johnson's "band-aid" trademark.

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Also i suspect Trump cookies are more popular because that's just not a very good caricature of Harris.

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As much as I despise JD Vance, I don’t feel good about journalists publishing info stolen from election campaigns. If it was a whistleblower in the campaign who was sharing news that a candidate had broken the law, maybe. But otherwise you risk being played a fool. It seems like a terrible practice.

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Trump’s small lead in Arizona, if real, is all and only about the border. The state has a democratic governor and soon 2 democratic senators, as Carrie Stupid goes down in flames. It has repeatedly rejected MAGA candidates, like guy who ran against Kelly in 22. It should not go for Trump. It’s all and only about the border.

That being said, can the Harris campaign enlarge on the position the Trump killed the compromise bill (Which is not proving sufficient) by emphasizing that, while immigration reform has been challenging for both parties, they came together on the issue as early as the Bush administration, but then, as now, the GOP’s right wing killed that bipartisan effort? It’s always the hard right zealots, whether Tea Party or Trump, that bury reasonable attempts to remedy this situation.

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"Trumpian" = habitually mendacious, deeply selfish, and defiantly contemptuous of rules and ethics.

The whole Trumpist project has been in large measure an inversion of ethical values and a repackaging of moral bankruptcy as a higher form of patriotic (or Christian) virtue.

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The most notable thing I note is: I am sad and sorry that this (to me) inauspicious flagellation (and all others) did not mention the six state-sanctioned murders that were carried out under the grim auspices of certain state governors who refused in at least two cases to grant either a stay and/or clemency because of substantial evidence pointing to "not guilty" if not outright innocence. I am amazed that not one commentator remarked on this 1600-execution point this nation has reached. What are we about, anyway?

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