There were six people and a Scotch terrier inhabiting the remote farmhouse Major Major called home, and five of them and the Scotch terrier turned out to be agents for the FBI.

If they take his money and then release a public statement calling him a nazi piece of shit who will never have any influence in their office I’d allow it. Bonus points if they promise Musk they won’t do that before doing it.

Otherwise, yeah. Musk needs to be a Kanye level pariah at least for what he’s done.

Oops all bad apples

Among a lot of other problems, this is a drug addled idiot and known liar saying random bullshit he thinks people will like with no substance behind it

Andrew Yang rn

… so I tells him we got something for that, we got an unelected board of people that make all the decisions that actually matter and they don’t involve the public at all and no elected politicians can do anything about 'em neither.

And the talent agent is just looking all horrified at all this, white as a sheet, and he squeaks out to me, “Dear lord, what do you call this system of government?”

And with a big smile I says “The Aristocrats! Democracy!”

Angelenos opposing the raids took to the streets early on Friday evening, but their protest was quickly met by officers in riot gear. The LAPD declared the protests an unlawful assembly after 7pm.

[Mayor] Bass said she is going to meet with immigrant support groups to discuss plans for responding to situations like the mass ICE raids in the future.

“My message to them is that we are going to fight for all Angelenos regardless of when they got here, whether they have papers or not,” she said. “We are a city of immigrants, and this impacts hundreds of thousands of Angelenos.”

So do the police take orders from the mayor or not? People are trying to “fight for all Angelenos” but LAPD shitheads in riot armor are taking ICE’s side. Either tell your cops to fuck off, admit that you’re just a figurehead with no real power, or quit pretending you actually oppose this.

Regardless of whatever bullshit the officials involve pedal, I’m going to believe this was one of Musk’s toadies trying to sabotage Stephen Miller’s passion project

The thing is, it won’t really because NPR and PBS have plenty of outside funding and will continue to put out great podcasts and videos and other online media that they’re going to keep competing with. Defunding the corporation for public broadcasting is only going to kill tiny stations in rural markets that commercial broadcasters have generally abandoned already anyway because there aren’t enough people there to make for profit media work. The only people this helps are the ones who want to keep rural voters ignorant about what’s going on in the country (which, yeah, benefits these media companies in a lot of ways, but it’s not quite as simple as just killing their competition).

Yeah, I really don’t think it’s anything nefarious from this outlet because they’re actually pretty great with a lot of their headlines, but the general practice throughout journalism and punditry and politics of calling police agencies “law enforcement” and just flatly referring to stuff they do as “law enforcement actions” without interrogating the fact that their “law enforcement actions” are actually breaking the law is a problem

For sure, I tend to be a bit sympathetic to journalists because they have a pretty thankless job and writing quickly about complex events filled with dishonest people pushing bullshit talking points is just always going to be a really hard thing to do really well consistently

But on the other hand what you’re saying is a totally fair criticism, and I’m glad to see it because you’re totally right about the importance of framing and how many bullshit things people in power do gets laundered by being written about in passive voice or as some kind of natural and inevitable outcome instead of as a conscious decision made by real people, and getting push back on it gives journalists at least some basis to change how they do things and say “I’m just responding to what my readers are telling me,” when people accuse them of being biased.

Fair enough, but people are protesting stuff being done by government agents who commonly refer to themselves as “law enforcement officers” and the alphabet soup of all the agencies involved (FBI, ICE, DHS, etc) wouldn’t fit in a headline easily

Trump’s highest approval ratings can be found in his handling of immigration

a) those approval ratings drop quickly when you start asking about anything more specific than “securing the border” like family separations and arresting people at hospitals and court hearings

b) the good approval ratings on the general topic have a lot to do with the fact that the Democratic party doesn’t have a coherent and comprehensive response to Republican lies about immigration because asshole morons like Matthew Yglesias are constantly making the argument that the Dipshit administration doing things like illegally sending an innocent man to a foreign gulag without a trial and then ignoring the court order to return him is actually popular and it would hurt Dems to talk about it (like he did in the speech at a recent DC conference this whole article is about)

Nah, more like a quarter on this issue (arc)

Plus, this is going to be extra unpopular with people in rural areas especially, lots of small towns have no news coverage or any kind of media focusing on them besides public stations, so if they go away nobody’s going to tell you what’s going on at the school board or what the score of the high school football game was or other local stuff like that

Between this and the cuts to Medicaid, people in Trump voting country are getting fucked by this administration, and even they’re starting to realize that, which creates an opportunity for taking these fascist pricks down a notch

“He’s brown, they’re brown, whatever. Say thank you and give me money.” - Trump (if he was honest and more coherent)

Partially because I believe in democracy and the right of voters / non voters to make bad choices,

Partially because I think complaining about non-voters isn’t going to change their behavior at all and might just make them more stubborn,

But mostly because I have spent my entire adult life watching asshole morons get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to advise Democratic candidates to do stupid shit like campaign with Liz Cheney, and then when they lose try to blame everything on trans people for existing or whoever’s the new scapegoat of the day, so I want to see all those fuckers lose their jobs and get shamed out of professional politics almost as badly as I want to see Republicans and their financiers in proson

“You can’t prove that if we delete all of our records!” - Nebraska’s Department of Corrections (basically)

actually fight Hamas instead of the Palestinians as a whole.

You do see how extremely vague this “alternative solution” you’re offering is, right?

I don’t think this is vague at all. Stop doing airstrikes on places that have civilians in them. Send in armed troops instead if shooting one or two Hamas assholes is so important to you, or just drop it and refocus on making your intelligence and security better so October 7 can’t happen again, but either way dropping bombs on places with civilians is never acceptable. “But Hamas [whatever]” does not change that.

e;

I’m extremely sympathetic to the reluctance of going door to door looking for terrorists who are hiding among civilians

Please, at least they have guns and armor and squad mates and medics and it’s infantry v infantry for them, the poor civilian bastards have none of that and are facing a damn air force

“Cool story, still crimes against humanity.” - Nuremberg style tribunal we’ll need to sort all of this out someday

Lol, I voted for Harris