BootmanLA

I think it's not that Musty Leon is a true believer in Trumpism as much as he's thought access to the levers of power would give him a lot of control over the government. This is a man who doesn't actually like to WORK so much as he likes to be in control and tell others what to do, even when it's clear he is a clueless dumbfuck who fell upward into riches long ago and thinks he's a genius. The problem is that there's only room for one person to actually be in charge in Trumpworld, in large part because the one who is in charge occupies such a large part of it - not just because he's clinically obese, but because his ego can't countenance sharing control of anything with anyone. Notice how Junior is already more than TWO DECADES past the age that Donald was when he took over running his daddy's sleazy but profitable apartments empire, but Junior isn't allowed to run anything more complex than a hypothetical third-tier motel chain for 'patriots' that they shut down before even buying a single piece of land to build any of them. Ivanka went her own way decades ago to sell "girlie stuff" in which Donnie wasn't interested. As for poor Eric and Tiffany, the less said the better. Musk is getting pushback not only from the scions of Wall St. but from everyone else who's got a hand out hoping to get a finger in the pie. The last thing they want is another "boss" to have to convince to give them any; they know the formula for getting it from the octogenarian dotard, and don't want any impediments added to that.

I do. But the thoughts implied in the quote bear addressing. If someone posted from an article that quoted Terra Cotta Hitler, and I wanted to respond to what the ice cold Cheeto was saying, I would quote Mango Mussolini and reply to it. Since my comment wasn't addressed to you - I have no reason to assume you're a bigot in the slightest - I'm pointing out to everyone the fact that Mr. Non-Bigot (who was cited in the piece you posted) is apparently clueless as to what his vote actually means. Not that he's likely to get the message. Until he's deported in some tragic "oh we didn't realize he was legally here, too bad" comedy of errors.

Also: it's not that the three letters were "only a part of the groups moniker" - it was simply BLM. But even so: the statement that "Black Lives Matter" says nothing about white lives. It doesn't say white lives don't matter. It doesn't say black lives are more important that white lives. It's saying they DO matter - implying rather heavily, I would say, that under current treatment, they do not. Insofar as an analogy: the lemon industry might promote its products by saying "Lemons matter." That doesn't say lemons are more important than apples, or grapes, or cherries; it doesn't say that only lemons matter and pomegranates do not. But some pissy fragile snowflake MAGAts decided that's what they WANTED "BLM" to mean so they could strike a "blow for equality" by denouncing the favoritism that didn't actually exist, all to assert the white privilege that actually DOES exist.

Well, with respect, it's a US acronym and its meaning here is really what mattered. If Australians had an "Indigenous Lives Matter" movement, I suspect y'all are all bright enough to realize that doesn't mean that the lives of descendants of white British colonials and the convicts they shipped over there do not matter. If y'all aren't please don't tell me. I want to think Australia is at least a tiny bit smarter than us about something beyond having universal health care.

Because when it first was created, the people who created it thought that's all you needed, the rest being just understood. I'm not saying it was cut off in some editorial committee meeting; I'm saying that's what everyone understood it to mean until some fuckwad assholes decided to weaponize the phrase with the "ALL lives matter" rejoinder. Just like we all understood "woke" meant, broadly speaking, aware of prejudice and systemic injustice, until some more (or the same) fuckwad assholes decided to turn it into an epithet.

Obviously it's really hard to do a scientific study comparing non-bleeding with bleeding and documenting PrEP effectiveness. But the reality is that PrEP, like almost ALL oral medications, is spread through the body via the bloodstream.

FWIW: "I don't do drugs, just poppers" is like saying "I don't eat carbs, only potato chips". Enjoy whatever substances you like, within reason, and by all means draw distinctions in terms of amount of harm, etc. but don't try to convince anyone that a potato chip isn't really a carb, or poppers aren't a drug. They are. Same for people who claim pot can't be a drug because it comes from a plant. Coca leaves and poppies are plant material, too, but that doesn't mean coke and opium aren't drugs.

Yeah, there's really no way for a non-Black person to say the n-word - unless you're quoting someone else saying it, and only because you can't convey the offensiveness of the original statement without a direct quote - and not be a flaming douche.

Well, now the GOP is in charge, and the Texas government has already offered Trump a huge ranch on the border they just purchased, specifically to use as a concentration camp. Oh, sorry, correction, "deportation center". They called the camps in Europe by all sorts of names, too, as I recall. But let's pretend that all they're going to do is deport people here illegally. Not a single US citizen or other legal resident will "accidentally" get swept up in this mass deportation craze, just like it's crazy that talk that the federal government could lose track of a thousand or so babies separated at the border from their parents and - ooops! - well, they were fostered out somewhere, we don't know where, we certainly didn't keep any actual records of where they went, or insist that the people given custody keep checking in. And anyway, that was then and we promised we'd mostly never do that again. Mostly. Again, let's pretend. We've gotten rid of the illegal immigrants. Housing prices have jumped another 35% almost across the board because there aren't nearly enough workers and the citizen workers are demanding $60 an hour to put roofs on in 105-degree weather. Groceries, especially produce, have shot up by 300% because of lack of harvesters and the fact we can't import affordably any longer because that involves a 25% tariff. Hello, $28 side salad upcharge at Chili's! The cost of car repairs, meanwhile, is 50% higher than it used to be because even for US cars most of the parts are made somewhere else and - oh! tariffs again. Unrest is rising. People are starting to demonstrate (peacefully, for now) but it's very bad optics for Hair Furor's agenda. Where, oh where, could they get these people "out of sight" so things don't look as bad as they seem? And maybe it'll send a message, too, that if you mouth off as a protester too much, no one knows where you are any more. It's not nearly as far fetched as it sounds. Who would have thought we'd still have prisoners sitting in Gitmo, still awaiting trial - supposedly - more than 20 years after they were "picked up" and rendered there? Never assume even a relatively benevolent government can't do ugly things like this. One headed by someone who openly admires Hitler, the NK Kims, Putin, and other authoritarians around the world? Hah.

If you only look at a very few issues, sure. If you look at, say, same-sex marriage specifically and LGBT protections more broadly - including your very right to legally have sex with another man - huge difference. If you look at labor rights vs kowtowing to corporations, huge difference. If you look at women's reproductive autonomy, huge difference. If you look at support for public education as a concept (open to all, financed by all), huge difference. If you look at environmental protection vs. corporate profits at any cost, huge difference. I'm sure there are other areas, but these are some very meaningful areas of policy difference between the two parties and they have absolutely NOT been interchangeable.

It's hard to respond to anyone who thinks the Assad chemical attack was "staged", but yes, some of his actions in the Middle East were insanely erratic (but aren't we told that he and he alone, in his magnificent wisdom, brought peace to the middle east? by establishing diplomatic relations between Israel and a few countries so far from its border that they'd never actually had any physical conflict at all?). But to suggest that's what caused "detente" with North Korea, as opposed to their calculated flattery of him, which naturally caused him to gush and blush like a schoolgirl - think the "love letters" he stole from the National Archives' custody as an example - seems.... what is the phrase I'm looking for here.... woefully naive? I think that's the phrase.

I don't like to put words in anyone else's mouth, so I'm trying very hard not to in this case. But that comes across pretty much as "we have to let Russia do what they want because otherwise things may get worse". That was, I believe, the approach of all the western governments in the 1936-1939 period. Things nonetheless continued to get worse. Markedly so.

I'm not sure if you mean offensive in a warfare sense, but since we're talking war, I assume you must. Who has a history of invading, or assisting in the overthrow of legitimate governments of, neighboring countries - NATO members, or Russia? The problem, at its core, is that Putin is at his core an old KGB/USSR stalwart, and he's never gotten over the humiliation of his country's (in essence) empire of satellite states being stripped from its control when the whole thing imploded from mismanagement and corruption. Worse, Russia, this supposedly great historical center of the universe of Eastern Europe and Asia, ended up nearly bankrupt and begging for food from their enemies of the last half century - western democracy. The icing on the cake, the part that makes it so bitter for him to swallow, is that we actually gave them that help. So he's like the disabled person in a wheelchair who got there because his best friends talked him into hotrodding on a dangerous road and caused an accident that left him partly paralyzed, in front of a building with several steps but no ramp. He grudgingly has to ask passersby for aid in getting his chair up the steps, only to be pissed at them for helping instead of being pissed at his friend who pushed him into racing on the dangerous road in the first place.

This isn't necessarily to defend Biden's action or lack thereof. But you can rest assured that no matter how badly he fumbles the ball, Trump will make it worse. Biden doesn't restrict arms sales to Israel? Trump will start cutting the price so they can afford to buy more. Especially with the likes of Miriam Adelson dangling another $50 million or so to his "defense fund" or whatever.

I don't think anyone questions whether all lives matter. But the point of "Black Lives Matter" was the unspoken part left out in simplifying the slogan. "Black Lives Matter Too Just as Much as White Lives" - which is the real message - is unwieldy. Shortening it, though, lets the bigots pretend it's a message about disparaging white people. Because for 400 years, give or take, in this country, black lives did not matter (and still do not matter) as much as white lives, certainly not to the people who have power and wealth. They just don't.

Except that since your post, the (Republican) chairman of the committee has unilaterally closed the investigation, meaning the report will not be completed or released. I say "unilaterally" because no vote was taken, just his own action, but I am confident the Republicans on the committee would have backed him if he'd made that as a public motion.

Put another way: if the report came anywhere within a nuclear missile's range of exonerating Gaetz they would have released it immediately.

For me, those are easy questions to answer, though you won't like them (and yes, they are simply my answers, not "the answers"). 1. None of them, because none of them will do anything good. 2. All of them. How do you balance the work of the person who obliterates public health against the work of the person who crashes the US economy by deporting 10 or 15 million people? The work of the person who sets hundreds of violent 1/6 criminals free to rejoin the anti-government nutcase militias measured against the work of the person who guts public education by converting all federal education money into vouchers? At some point it's like judging a wildfire vs a hurricane: different impacts, all deadly and destructive. 3. I don't give a fucking rat's ass whether they're fashionable or not and anyone who thinks that's important is too stupid to engage with. We did this when the Reich Wing went absolutely nuts the day President Obama wore a tan suit somewhere instead of something dark gray or navy blue. I would have said "least fashionable" would be Melanoma because she's guaranteed to do something fugly as hell like those red nightmare Christmas trees or that "Fuck you" jacket she wore to look at child migrants, but it seems she can't stand her husband enough to spend another four years in the White House so she's going to stay in New York and Mar-a-Stanko. 4. None of them are fuckable in the least. At all. Not even with a dildo with a ten foot pole so I don't have to get within reach of them. Not. A. One.

It may be perfectly true that you are not racist, sexist, misogynistic or homophobic at all. Kudos. But you are clearly not bothered by voting for someone who clearly is racist, sexist, misogynistic, and homophobic. Please tell me what the right adjective is for someone in your circumstance. I don't want to incorrectly label anyone.

Perhaps it's because you don't live in the US, and have not (I assume) experienced what those of us who pay attention recognize as ongoing effects of past actions. Chattel slavery existed for 250 years, more or less. Not only was the labor of those individuals stolen, they were deprived of any ability to acquire wealth (minor or not) to pass down to their descendants. They weren't even allowed an education, for the most part, so that their descendants could do better than they (the way most white people could). Their children, their descendants, were literally *property* that could be, and were, bought and sold between and among other slave owners. Emancipation was followed by roughly 100 years of de jure discrimination - not just bad treatment by individuals, but unequal treatment UNDER the law and BY the law. That was in forms as blatant as woefully underfunded black-only school systems and barring them from better, white-only ones (and that's not ancient history; there are still school systems TODAY struggling to integrate the remnants of their separate and decidedly not equal school systems), and as subtle as undisclosed redlining that meant banks would refuse to lend money to people looking to buy houses in black-majority neighborhoods (which kept those houses owned by white absentee landlords). THAT practice went on until the 1980's and is still subtly practiced today. My white great-grandfather was able to send his six daughters (including my grandmother) to higher education, with the result that all six had careers (although one who married quit once she started having children). And he wasn't rich; but he had opportunities open to him (and his daughters did, too) that no black person of his era did, here in Louisiana. Each subsequent generation has benefited from the fact that prior generations were able to give them a boost. That's something my great-grandfather got simply because he was white and the black men who worked under him where they all worked did not, because the system was set up to prevent that. The fact that I own a house today is largely due to my mom's inheritance from HER mother, which allowed her to gift me the down payment, and I'm about to start major renovations on the house that I can afford only because of my share of her inheritance, now that she's gone. These are all things that white privilege provided my family over the last 160 years or so. And even for people who arrived here from Europe in, say, 1910 or 1930, they STILL benefited from a system that privileged whites over blacks for decades after their arrival. About the ONLY people who haven't benefited dramatically from our long history of racism are immigrants who got here, say, after 1970 or so, when we'd finally STARTED (but by no means finished) dismantling the racist systems that benefited people like me. So this idea that we have to trace things to specific individuals' actions and tax THEM with the reparations is bogus. We all benefited from the unjust system. That alone is reason we should all share in the cost of rectifying it.

I didn't say he got his ideas from Russia. Please re-read what I wrote and actually reply to it, instead of twisting my words so that you can attack something I did not say. I said he got PAID by Russia - the government thereof, specifically - to do what he does. Those payments are facts. Not "bogeymen".

According to the Supreme Court, that's not the law, at least in the United States. The law is that obscenity, for one thing, is not protected speech at all, despite the fact that it's unquestionably speech of a sort. Other categories of speech that have no protection, or limited protection, include fraud, child pornography, speech integral to illegal conduct, speech that incites imminent lawless action, speech that violates intellectual property law, true threats, and defamation. All of these can be proscribed by government and punished. Some other forms of speech, including false statements, may receive some but not unlimited protection. The "crowded theater" line is a throwaway piece of dicta that was not, and is not, what the Supreme Court itself said. And the distinction you're trying to draw misses the point entirely. What the Court has held (in its most recent case on the issue) is that speech which is "directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action" and is "likely to incite or produce such action" is not protected. As for using speech to plan murders, etc.: if the speech is integral to the commission of the crime, then it can be punished, even if the person did NOTHING but speak. For instance, a lookout who only telephones someone "the coast is clear" so that they can commit a robbery can be punished for saying that, because it was integral to the commission of the crime.

That's possible. It's also possible that with a different candidate on the ballot, his efforts would be more fruitful. But hey, if you want to relish the notion that the GOP is going to run things for a while and are glad Obama's sidelined, in your view, more power to you.

PEP is generally considered effective ONLY if started within 3 days at the max - and the closer to right after potential exposure, the better. PEP is extended for 28 days because unlike with PrEP (where the sex occurs with a baseline level of antivirals already in your system), PEP is trying to kill off the infection AFTER you've been exposed but hopefully before it takes hold in your system. With PrEP, taking it for 2 days after (in addition to the larger dose earlier on the day of, or as part of a daily ongoing dose) is enough because the virus hit the antivirals in your system immediately. But with PEP, the virus has already had some number of hours or days to start its work, so a much longer treatment to prevent it taking hold is required.

80% is not the turnout number. Granted, I think that it's a sign of how poorly thought out the decisions of that 20% were, but so be it. Harris still got a much larger portion of the black vote than Trump got of the white vote. Her message is clearly more appealing to black voters than Trump's was to white ones, if we look at things strictly through a racial lens - which is, after all, what you're advocating about Obama.