Political Watch

[pattylt]

My problem with Pelosi isn’t her ability. It’s that she’d be an awesome mentor to someone younger…to teach him/her the tricks and ropes of navigating politics. We need younger people to be able to take those ropes and run with them. If my generation doesn’t get out of the way and let those younger than me gain experience, we might just wind up with a hole that has no one to fill.

Pelosi will likely continue to do a great job but we need to develop younger talent to step in at some point. How many really good Democratic politicians younger than 70 can you name? Maybe 5?

[Minimalist]

Mark Meadows invited to go fuck himself by federal judge.

https://twitter.com/kyledcheney/status/1...20593?s=20


I guess overthrowing the government was NOT part of your official duties, Mark!

[Dānu]

(source)

[Minimalist]

No shit!

[airportkid]

That is a very common misconception until you realize that many US cities are themselves toilets.

[airportkid]

Over the last several years Republicans have increasingly applied "extortion" to achieve political objectives, and I think they've abandoned conventional debate for the soundest of reasons:  the GOP has no credibility.  They're flailing trying to find corruption in Biden's administration while absolutely ignoring rampant corruption all over the GOP, proving that "corruption" itself is not something that matters.  They're awash in lunatic conspiracy beliefs that prove serious politics is not their interest or concern.

The GOP recognizes it can't be taken seriously, and if you can't be taken seriously, all you've got left "extortion".

How does an entire political party regain credibility?  First you have to recognize its necessity, so already it's a lost cause, but even deciding credibility is actually the most powerful political tool, it's impossible to win back without all the non-credible personalities first dying off, and that's a decades long process.

[Minimalist]

At some point they will have to recognize that the "Republican" brand is completely toxic.  It is the home of the Crazies.  Much like the Whigs collapsed and vanished in the 1840's the republican brand needs to vanish.  In the 1850's the Crazies gravitated to the Know Nothing Party - todays Trumptards.

If there are actual conservatives left they need to form a new party and start over as the republicans did in the 1850's.  Slavery was the big issue back then.  Today it seems like Stupidity is the major dividing force.

[Chas]

Sadly, there are tens of millions of U.S. who will never recognize the toxicity of the Republican 'brand', or that the GOP can't be taken seriously.

Do not underestimate the ability of people to close their minds to reason.

[Minimalist]

Those asswipes will cling to the old Magic R brand.  That much is certain.  But if there are others who want a new "conservative" party they are going to have to get off their asses and start working.

Right now, those people still cling to the idea that they can somehow win the R brand back from the crazies and I do think the crazies far outnumber them.

[pattylt]

Those asswipes will cling to the old Magic R brand.  That much is certain.  But if there are others who want a new "conservative" party they are going to have to get off their asses and start working.

Right now, those people still cling to the idea that they can somehow win the R brand back from the crazies and I do think the crazies far outnumber them.

I agree.  I think the party is at a point where there is no hope of rescuing it from the nutcases.  Those nutcases all won with comfortable margins (excepting one that I know of) and fully control the narrative.  The serious, more rational conservatives have no hope of reining in the nuts yet haven’t quite reached the point where they will admit that.

At some point, they will.  The question is, what exactly will they do about it?  Forming a new party is kind of their only hope.  I know the republicans came out from the whigs but I don’t know how they accomplished it or how long it took.

[Minimalist]

The Whig party collapsed after the compromise of 1850.  By 1856 they were officially dead and buried.  The republican party was founded in 1854 mainly from former Whigs who were on the anti-slavery side of the ledger.

John C Fremont was their nominee in 1856 and he lost to James Buchanan by a half million votes.

In 1860 those numbers were virtually reversed when Lincoln defeated 3 other challengers.

[pattylt]

So, 1854 the Republican Party formed and the whigs were no more 2 years later? That’s a pretty quick time span…correct?

I can understand that in 1856 a newly formed party would lose the election. I assume there were still Whig sympathizers and that weakened the Republican votes. That they won the next election is rather amazing but Lincoln was an amazing politician. I need to read up on this…there might be some crucial information that’s applicable going forward. Thanks…

[Minimalist]

Basically.

It was a tad more complicated than that.  Millard Fillmore as the serving Whig President agreed to the Compromise of 1850 which, among a few other things, included the Fugitive Slave Act.  No single thing destroyed the Whig party in the north more than that act.  By 1854 they had trouble getting delegates to a convention.  The anti-slavery Whigs fled to the republican party.  The pro-slavery whigs became democrats or Know-Nothings....a/k/a/ the American Party.  In 1856, Fillmore ran for President on the American Party ticket and got about 800,000 votes which was about a million behind the winner, Buchanan.  But you have to remember that in 1856 the electorate was much smaller.  Generally, only free, white males could vote and in some states there were property ownership requirements.  Free blacks, if any, were barred and women were strictly out of luck!

Anyway, it was the fracturing of the parties which helped the republicans grow so quickly and a similar fracture ensured Lincoln's election in 1860.  Remember, the Great Emancipator's party was in favor of stopping the spread of slavery...not abolishing it.  Lincoln himself thought that the slaves should be sent back to Africa!

Times were different.

[Minimalist]

Even Fuckface's favorite judge rules against him.

https://www.reuters.com/legal/judge-issu...023-09-13/

Sept 13 (Reuters) - Former U.S. President Donald Trump and his lawyers may only review classified evidence in a secure place as he prepares for a criminal trial over his handling of secret documents after he left office in 2021, a judge ruled on Wednesday.
Trump, the front-runner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, has been charged along with two aides with illegally storing troves of classified documents at his personal residence and lying to federal investigators who sought to retrieve them.

He had opposed strict security protocols for the classified evidence as inconvenient, saying he and his lawyers should be able to review them in his office at his Mar-a-Lago estate, his personal residence in Palm Beach, Florida.
Wednesday's ruling by U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon in Florida is a win for prosecutors, who said it would be inappropriate for Trump to be able to review classified documents at the very location where he is accused of illegally and haphazardly storing them.

The order requires Trump and his lawyers to review and discuss all classified evidence in what is known as a sensitive compartmented information facility, or SCIF.

He'll be denouncing her as a "never trumper" in short order.  Fuckface is a one-trick pony.

[airportkid]

Fuckface is a one-trick pony.

Hey, a one-trick pony at least has a trick.  Tricks are clever.  The only thing Trump is is a brainless battering ram.  Which, finally, is being splintered by overuse, and hacked to pieces by all the legal snares and bear traps he continuously stumbles into.

[Dānu]

It looks like Brandon's son fucked around and found out.

[Dom]

It looks like Brandon's son fucked around and found out.

Who's Brandon?

[Dānu]

It looks like Brandon's son fucked around and found out.

Who's Brandon?

Joe Biden. (as in, "Let's Go Brandon!")

[Cavebear]

Who's Brandon?

Joe Biden.  (as in, "Let's Go Brandon!")

I don't get that one...

[airportkid]

... I don't get that one ...

It's a species of Mondegreen, described here.

It can be used as a rough measure of IQ, signifying under 3 digits for someone uttering (or more typically screaming) the phrase.

[Cavebear]

... I don't get that one ...

It's a species of Mondegreen, described here.

It can be used as a rough measure of IQ, signifying under 3 digits for someone uttering (or more typically screaming) the phrase.

I'm still not getting it (pause). Oh "under 3 digits IQ". Got it...

[airportkid]

For those of us who have long known "Rudy" for the unrepentant sanctimonious fraud he's been his entire adult life, his current comeuppance is a sweet schadenfreude.

[RobbyPants]

It's a species of Mondegreen, described here.

It can be used as a rough measure of IQ, signifying under 3 digits for someone uttering (or more typically screaming) the phrase.

I'm still not getting it (pause).  Oh "under 3 digits IQ".  Got it...  

A reporter was at a sports event where people were chanting “Fuck Joe Biden.” She reported hearing chants of “let’s go Brandon”, thus starting people on the right saying the latter meaning the former either as a joke or way to avoid swearing.

This, in turn, led to the left making the Dark Brandon meme.

The internet is a wild place, man.

[Cavebear]

I'm still not getting it (pause).  Oh "under 3 digits IQ".  Got it...  

A reporter was at a sports event where people were chanting “Fuck Joe Biden.”  She reported hearing chants of “let’s go Brandon”, thus starting people on the right saying the latter meaning the former either as a joke or way to avoid swearing.

This, in turn, led to the left making the Dark Brandon meme.

The internet is a wild place, man.

The degree of emotional anger in the US today is truly frightening. To coin a phrase (joking) "the Center will not hold". We are like a see-saw. Everyone is at one end of the board. Yet, everyone seems to think they are "the center". I suppose that is because almost everyone knows of "weirdos" who are further right and left of themselves. So, by some definition, they can think of themselves a "centrist".

That isn't correct, of course. Just because some people are more extreme in views than one is themself doesn't mean they represent the center. Socialists see Communists on the left and everyone on the right. That doesn't mean they are the political center. That Nazis see the opposite doesn't mean they are the center, either. One can see people on either political side of them and not be "center".

I consider Biden slightly left of center (but not by a whole lot). I say that for several reasons. First, because he is supportive of improving national infrastructure and investment in education and health (both of which benefit the US in the long-term). I think he is "centrist" is avoiding interfering with DOJ investigations. I think he is "centrist" in keeping the Fed and economic/health/tech agencies free of political influence. I think he is "centrist" in supporting democracy and peace-keeping internationally.

Biden is slightly to my right. I favor more aggressive pursuits of social justice, pushback against autocracies, and a reduction of benefits to religious institutions in tax laws. But as far as I can tell, Biden is about as close to "centrist" as we have at the top level. And his age does not concern me much.

[Dānu]

Dr. Karikó, the daughter of a butcher who had come to the United States from Hungary two decades earlier when her research program there ran out of money, was preoccupied by mRNA, which provides instructions to cells to make proteins. Defying the decades-old orthodoxy that mRNA was clinically unusable, she believed that it would spur medical innovations.

At the time, Dr. Weissman was desperate for new approaches to a vaccine against H.I.V., which had long proved impossible to defend against. A physician and virologist who had tried and failed for years to develop a treatment for AIDS, he wondered if he and Dr. Karikó could team up to make an H.I.V. vaccine.

It was a fringe idea that, when they began their research, seemed unlikely to work. The mRNA was delicate, so much so that when it was introduced to cells, the cells instantly destroyed it. Grant reviewers were not impressed. Dr. Weissman’s lab instead relied on seed money that the university gives new faculty members to get started.

“We saw the potential and we weren’t willing to give up,” Dr. Weissman said.

For years, Dr. Weissman and Dr. Karikó were flummoxed. Mice injected with mRNA became lethargic. Countless experiments failed. They wandered down one dead end after another. Their problem was that the immune system interprets mRNA as an invading pathogen and attacks it, sickening the animals while destroying the mRNA.

But eventually, the scientists discovered that cells protect their own mRNA with a specific chemical modification. So they tried making the same change to mRNA synthesized in the lab before injecting it into cells. It worked: The mRNA was taken up by cells without provoking an immune response.

The discovery “fundamentally changed our understanding of how mRNA interacts with our immune system,” the panel that awarded the prize said, adding that the work “contributed to the unprecedented rate of vaccine development during one of the greatest threats to human health in modern times.”

At first, other scientists were largely uninterested in taking up that new approach to vaccination. Their paper, published in 2005, was rejected by the journals Nature and Science, Dr. Weissman said. The study was eventually accepted by a niche publication called Immunity.

But two biotech companies soon took notice: Moderna, in the United States, and BioNTech, in Germany, where Dr. Karikó eventually became a senior vice president. The companies studied the use of mRNA vaccines for flu, cytomegalovirus and other illnesses. None moved out of clinical trials for years.

Then the coronavirus emerged.

Almost instantly, Drs. Karikó and Weissman’s work came together with several strands of disparate research to put vaccine makers ahead of the game in developing shots. That included research done in Canada that allowed fragile mRNA molecules to be safely delivered to human cells, and studies in the United States that pointed the way toward stabilizing the spike protein that coronaviruses used to invade cells.

By late 2020, less than a year into a pandemic that would eventually kill at least seven million people globally, regulators had authorized strikingly effective vaccines made by Moderna and by BioNTech, which partnered with Pfizer to produce its vaccine. Both used the modification Dr. Karikó and Dr. Weissman discovered.

Nobel Prize Awarded to Covid Vaccine Pioneers