BootmanLA

As Viking noted, messaging is a privilege. But beyond that: again, the point of this site is not primarily for members to communicate on-on-one with each other. It's to develop a community. Once you prove yourself part of the community, you get the privilege of private communications.

Indeed, but depending on what you mean by "old", it's important to remember that probably the majority of those who were big in the 1980's and 1990's are now dead.

Dude, with all due respect - look at the date on the last post of the actual story, from August of 2011. Chances of another chapter of this story emerging from the author are somewhere around the odds of Donald Trump getting re-elected and then nominating Hillary Clinton to the Supreme Court.

But she wasn't nominated. Bush had the option of submitting her name even knowing she might not get confirmed. That's what Obama did with Garland, even after Yertle the Turtle declared he was going to hold that seat for the next Republican president, whoever that might be (if you think he'd have let Clinton get a justice confirmed on the Court, you're on some sort of substances). Nope. I will freely admit I think a strict conservative approach to the Constitution is wrong (if it were, television, radio, and internet news media would not be covered by the First Amendment, because the First Amendment guarantees freedom "of the press", and in "originalist" thinking - what the conservative wing insists on - a "press" is a physical piece of equipment producing printed material. It's only because we consider the "evolving" meaning of things - something the right wing routinely denounces when it comes to things like sexual orientation being a protected characteristic - that FOXNews enjoys First Amendment rights. Be that as it may, I think a variety of viewpoints on the Court are a good thing, within a reasonable range. I'm no more in favor of a radical leftist approach than I am of the extreme right-wing positions of Clarence Thomas. I'm not the only one - by far - who thinks Thomas is outside the mainstream. The fact that he is frequently - by an order of magnitude more than any other justice he's served with - standing alone in dissent on matters of long-settled jurisprudence tells any disinterested observer that much. He routinely has staked out positions so far to the right that not even Rehnquist, Scalia, or Roberts would go for. Unlike most cheerleaders for one side or the other on here, I actually have to read the opinions issued by the Court - not only majority Opinions, but plurality ones, dissents, partial dissents, and the like, and it's patently clear to anyone who's read Thomas's work that he is outside the mainstream. Or was, until a couple of more recent appointees - the Handmaiden among them - have joined the Court. I assure you that you don't have to explain to me who Preet Bharara is. I agree he would probably make a good choice for an appellate judge at any court, and possibly a SCOTUS justice as well. Odd choice, for a politics forum, but hey, you do you. You may not want to make this political, but every confirmation decision for the US courts is political. Right now, we can HOPE that the replacement for Breyer is more like Breyer than, say, Thomas. If somehow the GOP manages to drag this confirmation out past the midterms (if even one Democrat isn't present to support the nominee, you can bet the GOP will block whoever it is), and the Republicans regain control of the Senate, I have no doubt that McConnell will decide that the Court got along with 8 justices just fine while Scalia was dead, so another two years is no big deal. You're once again parroting right-wing bullshit. Let's get the facts straight. The victim in this VA case was a female student raped by a male student who was her former dating partner. He was not a transgender girl nor was he posing as one, and the school in question had NOT adopted a policy regarding trans persons using restrooms, so that bullshit about liberal policies leading to this is just that - bullshit. The female victim CHOSE the girls' restroom to talk with her former dating partner (I use that term because while they had had consensual sex on more than one previous occasion, I don't know if she considered him a "boyfriend" or what). He assaulted her in the rest room out of opportunity, not because he used a liberal policy to sneak his way in there. Once transferred to another school during the disciplinary process (separate from the criminal process), he sexually assaulted ANOTHER student. The girl's father was arrested at a school board meeting after he got violent and threatened another parent with a fist in her face. I get that he was upset about his daughter's case, but violence towards other parents is not the way to handle it, and he was appropriately arrested for the assault. Garland's memo about parental attacks on school boards, etc. had nothing to do with this case. It had to do with the growing number of right-wing brainwashed people who refuse to wear masks and want to prohibit schools from even allowing masks for the students who feel vulnerable, and who want to prohibit any vaccination requirements, because these dumbfucks have been conditioned by FOXNews and even sleazier right-wing outlets that there's something dangerous about the COVID vaccines, even as over 900,000 people have died from the disease in this country in just two years. THOSE are the parents the AG was warning people to be on the lookout about - the kind that are likely to organize, show up and disrupt meetings, and otherwise terrorize - yes, terrorize is the right word - others into acquiescing to their idiotic view of the world. The VA case, by contrast, was a local incident, not something that would normally rise to the level of notice by the attorney general of the United States. That's like expecting the president to know your fucking birthday and send you a card. Top federal officials have a little bit more on their plates to worry about than a single incident of a domestic violence/rape case in a school.

Because this isn't a hookup, one-on-one based site. It's a discussion forum, so discussions should, overwhelmingly, take place on the public boards, not in private messages between users. That's not to denigrate such services, of which many, many exist. That's to say that this isn't designed as one of them. And I'd note that one of the problem such sites face is a massive number of fake profiles and spam messages. On one of the "apps" out there, I can't log on without getting at least 3-4 messages within the first minute, all from bots spamming me to come check out some other site. That's the reality of the internet today, and that's not what the owner of this site wants. By focusing on the public discussions, and limiting the ability of members to communicate privately until they've proven themselves, there's more of a sense of community here (in my opinion) than on any "meet your flavor-of-the-week guy here!" site out there. And for the record, it's not "indefinitely". There's an algorithm that controls what access each member has, based on a number of factors (primarily based on the number of postings you've made, but also factoring in how many reactions you've made once you get that ability, reactions others have given to your posts, and so forth). It's not "indefinitely", but the site owner is deliberately vague about how much participation gets you X level of access, precisely to defeat those bot/spammer types who would use that information to target getting sufficient access as soon as possible.

If I had the time, I'd offer to RawTop to temporarily take on moderator duties to clean up the Health forum (not deleting things, just moving the non-health topics to appropriate places). But I don't, and in any event, I'd probably prune more ruthlessly than most would appreciate.

I respectfully disagree. He gave a statement about himself - having no choice in the matter - and then described a group in which he INCLUDES himself ("we", not "they") as having chosen this route. Those are inherently contradictory viewpoints. It's like saying "I'm a carnivore and can't stop myself from eating red meat" and then saying "We carnivores choose to eat red meat instead of other foods."

I'd note that the person you're saying "Amen" to is no longer a member of this site, despite his raving about "strong bonds" and such. If he feels such strong bonds, why ditch one of the biggest sites specifically for barebacking? My guess - an informed guess based on watching a lot of people come and go here - is that he's gotten his jollies pretending to be a member of some sexually liberated "brotherhood" bound by being poz, and he's moved on to some other masturbatory fantasy. In decades of being around poz people - since the early/mid 1980's - I've found plenty of poz men - LOTS of poz men - who were accepting of their status and felt it was nothing to be ashamed of. I've found some who claimed "poz pride" but when queried on it, expressed that they meant they weren't going to be shamed into hiding it. They were going to be "out and proud", but not in the sense of "See what I accomplished"; more in the sense of, in the words of the song, "I am what I am, and what I am needs no excuses." I've even met quite a few who admit to fantasies involving pozzing, both for chasers and for non-consenting others, but the key word is "fantasies". I've known a small handful who actually were willing to undertake pozzing someone AFTER a serious discussion of the cons and risks involved. I've never known anyone who actually relished the idea of expanding this so-called "brotherhood" on a wide scale in real life. My experiences, of course, are my own, and quite limited, and I'm sure that "I've never known anyone who" is not the same as "There is no one who". Still, I'd say I look with a very skeptical eye at people posting to that effect online. Even here.

This is the one part of your (otherwise spot-on) post that I'm not so sure about. There are populations that might well benefit in that circumstance - for instance, a homeless person who has a pretty fixed abode, who wants to stay healthy but has issues with remembering to take pills, or who doesn't want to carry them on him because of fears of losing them and/or having them stolen. It's been discussed that in such cases, someone with a social services outreach team could make a point of treating those patients in the field, so to speak, either by having a regular day when people can show up, or by visiting certain encampments or whatever on a regular basis. That won't be everyone, of course - it's something that would work best with patients who don't have severe mental illnesses that can make them uncooperative. And of course, when you get to older people (as we're getting to folks with HIV hitting their 70's and 80's), some patients won't remember to take all their medications and don't have anyone checking on them to remind them. Having a social services medical worker come by every couple of months with a shot might be just what some people need. Again, that won't be everyone, of course, but I think there definitely will be cases where inability to adhere to a daily pill regimen will strongly suggest the injectable route.

The op-ed (NOT a news story, mind you) you linked to was from Marc Thiessen, who is an idiot. He slavishly adores everything that a Republican president does, even when it is directly opposite to what the last Republican president did; he supports everything a Republican president stands for, even if it's exactly 180 degrees from what the last Republican president stood for. The man is an unprincipled hack, so I put no stock whatsoever in his "opinions". That said: I look at Janice Rogers Brown as the female Clarence Thomas: someone far outside the legal mainstream. Her record in California was ghastly; she was rated "not qualified" by the Bar Association at the time of her nomination to the California Supreme Court (she'd never served even as a trial or appellate judge at that point). She wrote, at various times, that minimum wage laws represented a socialist revolution in this country, and that post-Lochner court decisions on economic regulation were inherently wrongly decided - in fact, a position that even the ultra-right judge Robert Bork rejected. When she was first nominated to the DC Circuit (again, leaping ahead of far more qualified judges), she was opposed by bipartisan coalition of senators, and her nomination was returned to the president. She was renominated the next term, where she again faced opposition over her abysmal record; she was only confirmed to the DC Circuit as part of a deal worked out between centrists in the Democratic party and the hard-line Republicans, when the Democrats agreed not to filibuster judicial nominees except in the most extraordinary circumstances. (Note that when the Democrats took control of the Senate, the Republicans pointedly refused to honor that same agreement, beginning to block virtually every judicial nominee. No honor, that's what the Senate GOP has.) With barely ONE month under her belt as a DC Circuit judge, Bush began floating her name to replace Sandra Day O'Connor. In other words, just as Bush the First replaced Thurgood Marshall (the first black Justice) with the ethically and morally challenged stain that is Clarence Thomas, Bush the Second wanted to replace O'Connor, the first female justice, with this inexperienced and radical woman, thinking he could pull the same trick as his daddy - blunting criticism of the candidate from the Democrats because she was a Black woman. It's in THAT context Biden made his remarks, which Thiessen DISHONESTLY characterizes as saying "he would filibuster and kill her nomination." The average person won't go back and look up what Biden said, but I did, and what he said was he would probably endorse a filibuster to prevent Brown from becoming a Supreme Court justice. NOT that he would personally lead the filibuster; not that he definitely would "kill" her nomination; that he would JOIN a filibuster, which might or might not succeed. As I said, Thiessen is a hack. Interestingly, Thiessen also bewails the fact that Brown probably had "majority support" in the Senate - as though majority support should be enough to guarantee confirmation. Of course, he's the same asshole who gleefully endorsed Mitch McConnell's blocking of Merrick Garland's nomination, despite the fact that Garland's prior nomination to the DC Circuit was UNOPPOSED - far more support than Brown EVER had, for ANY nomination. As always, Thiessen the Hack is saying "do what I say, not what I do". You're right that no one remembers Janice Rogers Brown. That's because she was an utterly forgettable failure as a judge.

This makes no sense. How can you say that BB is your "nature and cannot change it" and then in the same paragraph go on to say "We choose to be cumcraving faggots"? If you are choosing it, then it's not something you can't change; and if you can't change it, you aren't choosing it.

To be fair, it should fall on Putin AND on his circle of oligarchs. None of them came by their wealth honestly; they all had help from the government (particularly, Putin) in robbing the nation blind. And in return, they have helped keep him in power by cutting him in on the take, giving him the resources he needs for his propaganda. So while I don't want the punishment to affect ordinary Russians any more than is unavoidable, I'm fine with every one of the rich baddies in Putin's inner circle losing everything and then facing legal consequences.

I agree they need (and deserve) a lot of rebuilding assistance. But the oligarchs generally speaking got their money by stealing it from the Russian people, not the Ukranian people; right now, an awful lot of Russians feel for Ukraine and hate this war being levied against them, but if the ill-gotten gains of the oligarchs are showered on Ukraine and not the people from whom they were stolen, there's a serious potential for animosity. Remember that one of the many things that led to WWII was the crushing reparations load placed on the Triple Alliance, particularly Germany, after WWI. A lot of everyday Germans were heavily taxed to pay the reparations demanded by the west, in large measure to compensate France for how much of its farmland and other resources were destroyed. No need to provoke the same response.

I will agree with those who say that it's unlikely (though not impossible) for the masses to overthrow Putin. As long as the military and the oligarchs remain loyal to him, he's likely fairly safe. But. The west is going after the oligarchs, to the extent of not only freezing their assets (when they find them), but seizing them - as in, they're not getting them back. They're increasingly being blocked from leaving Russia (except for China, and godforsaken places like Syria and a few others), and when most of your money is frozen overseas and inflation starts running 20% per month, suddenly Putin doesn't look like such a smart investment for those who robbed their country blind when the USSR came apart at the seams. With even the Swiss going in on the sanctions, there's not going to be any safe place for Russians to spend their money outside Russia, where it's going to be worthless. And there are signs the military is not full-tilt behind Putin, either. They bought into (or pretended to buy into) Putin's plan that they could just steamroll into Ukraine, take over, and be welcomed as heroes of the liberation. The reality is turning out to be... quite different. The officially acknowledged (by Russia) death toll among its troops is already far in excess of what they predicted for the entire operation, which means the real number is undoubtedly substantially more than that. The troops are poorly trained (no reflection on them, it's their trainers who are at fault) and the Ukrainians have captured a goodly number of troops who surrendered rather readily. At some point, some generals are going to talk amongst themselves and question whether this dream of reassembling the Soviet empire is actually feasible. At that point, when enough oligarchs and generals decide that the situation is becoming untenable, Putin had best be very certain his inventory of Novichok is up to date and completely accurate, with none missing.

Every president prior to Lyndon Johnson created an artificially limited selection pool - white men. No women or Blacks (or Hispanics, or anyone else) were considered. Moreover, for more than a century, it was an unwritten rule that there could only be one Catholic justice on the Court at a time, and it was well understood by all presidents and the Senates to whom they submitted nominees for confirmation that second or other Catholics would be rejected. For almost a century and a half, there was effectively a "no Jews" rule, and once that "rule" was broken, the same deal applied as for Catholics: no more than one at a time, with the remainder all Protestant (white men). Anyone who thinks that the pool of black women who could serve on the Supreme Court is too thin for consideration, or who think there's some sort of magic "you must be this qualified to ride this ride" measuring stick, is a fool. George HW Bush didn't select Clarence Thomas because he was "the best candidate" for the job; he picked him because he was the only Black judge with any conservative credentials. Ronald Reagan specifically promised to appoint a woman to the Court, at a time when women lawyers represented 8% of the legal profession and an even smaller percentage of the nation's judges.

I notice it's almost always the guys with 10 or 20 (or fewer) posts on here who show up "en masse" periodically and sing the praises of being poz. Almost like someone is coordinating an effort to promote this. Interesting. In any event, all that "oh i'm liberated I don't have to worry any more" can be had with PrEP. So (to my thinking, at least), opting to contract a fatal-unless-treated-forever disease instead of taking a reasonable precautionary medication is, well, evidence of an undeveloped ability to make sensible decisions. Now, if someone is pursuing getting pozzed because he thinks there is some mystical bond between poz people, because some airhead on here told him there was, well, again, evidence of an undeveloped ability to make sensible decisions. None of those people who share your alleged "bond" are going to pay your health insurance premiums or deductibles, and none of them are going to help nurse you through your first opportunistic infection. But sure, go ahead and bask in that "bond" and "freedom".

I might be giving the dolt too much credit, but I think by "Constitutional Minarchist" he might be making a play on "Constitutional minimalist" - as in he thinks the government can only do the minimal things specifically outlined and we have to ignore all the general, broad provisions of power grants found therein.

Your information is faulty. That is not "for extra protection". That is PART (but only PART) of the routine you can follow as an alternative to daily use. This method is called "on demand" PrEP - the idea is to lessen the number of pills you have to take, IF you are not having sex more than once or twice in a week. When you use the "on demand" method, you take two pills anywhere from 2 to 24 hours before you have sex. Not "right before", because they don't have time to spread through your system before you come in contact with HIV. 2 hours seems to be the minimum time needed for the pills to spread through your body, but the effect begins to diminish pretty significantly after 24 hours, so you can't wait more than that for sex. Once you do have sex - in that 2 to 24 hour window after the first dose - you take a single pill 24 hours after the first dose, and ANOTHER pill 24 hours after that. In total, you take 4 pills over the period in question. By that point, the HIV will have been unable to get a foothold in your system and start replicating, and the virus is short-lived, so you're past the infection point. But note the timing - between the first dose and the last may only be a period of 2 days or slightly longer, during which you're taking four pills, or twice the usual daily dosage. If you have sex twice during a week and you use this method, you're already taking 8 pills, or one more than a "daily" dose would require. Having sex a third time - which is hardly unusual for many of us - means you'd be better off just taking one pill each day. Because while these meds are generally safe, they can have side effects. Some of those side effects may take months or years to present themselves, after a long period of use. So limiting intake to the minimum needed to protect yourself is key. So, to recap: if you have sex on average only once or twice a week, or if you regularly go a week or more without sex, the 2-1-1 dosing of "on demand" PrEP may be a workable, better choice for you. If you have sex at least twice a week and occasionally more often? Stick with daily dosing and just try to make it automatic.

All the people here urging you to keep taking it bare and taking loads (with no mention of PrEP) are giving reprehensible advice. It's fine if you want to BB. It's fine if you want to run the risk of HIV by going without PrEP. But absent a clear understanding with your girlfriend that she's okay with that risk too - one she understands because you've explained to her exactly what you do - it's no longer fine once she's in the picture. I assume - without knowing for certain - that she doesn't know you're bi, she doesn't know you bb, and she doesn't know you're a bottom taking loads. If I'm wrong on all of those, that's one thing. But if I'm right - on any of the three - the honorable choices are to tell her, to dump her, or to quit putting her at risk. The last is an option you almost certainly won't choose, so it's really between the first two.

Nice history, but you left out the parts where Trump's first campaign manager, who was in hock up past his eyeballs to Russian oligarchs and who had been a key player in the Russian-controlled Ukrainian government that the Ukrainian people themselves threw out of office, was desperate to do something to prevent a polonium creamer being dropped into his coffee. You left out the part where said campaign manager turned over valuable campaign polling data, showing where Clinton support might be peeled away with the right influence campaign, to a Russian intelligence asset. You left out the part where, when Russians representing the government offered intelligence on the Clintons and their campaign, the Trump campaign said "if it's what you say it is I love it, especially in the summer" instead of calling the FBI. You left out the fact that the Mueller report documented that the Russians DID engage in a huge disinformation campaign in favor of Trump, whether or not Trump approved of it or was aware of it in advance. You left out the fact that a Trump confidante and long-time GOP dirty trickster was the conduit between the stolen DNC emails and Wikileaks, with Russia as the conduit. You left out the fact that Trump stood on the world stage in Helsinki and publicly sided with Putin over his own intelligence agencies and their thorough investigative work, which he generally refused to even read or be briefed on. And finally, you left out the part where Trump tried to shake down the president of Ukraine to announce an investigation of Biden - not to actually conduct one, not to actually find anything - just to dirty up Biden for his own electoral prospects, using aid money that Congress had already approved and the Trump administration was refusing to release unless the investigation was announced. (And almost every one of those GOP senators who refused to convict Trump for this extortion is now demanding something be done for Ukraine. Cowardly duplicitous twits, to the core.) Trump didn't give a shit about Europe's dependence on foreign energy. He wanted them to buy ours instead of the Russians', because he was stupid enough to think it was like anything else you can just put in a cargo container and ship across the ocean. That was part and parcel of his idea that America should re-invest in dirty energy (this from the man who thought windmills caused cancer). That last point alone disqualifies him from being considered a serious thinker on energy in any way, shape, or form. We became a net exporter of refined petroleum products in May 2011, and we were close to a net exporter of crude as well before Trump took office. The refined number is far more important, because while you can get crude oil from a lot of places, there are a lot fewer that can refine it; and while it may only take a few months to drill and locate a new source of oil (and some additional time to get it to market), it takes FAR longer to build a refinery complex to process it. So perhaps you should be thanking the president in office in 2011. It's worth remembering that demand might not have fallen so far if Trump's response to COVID hadn't been such an unmitigated disaster. It's worth remembering that unlike western Europe, the reason the US can commit so much money to defense is that we are willing to tolerate people dying from lack of access to health care. We're willing to tolerate old people freezing to death at home in winter or dying of heat stroke in the summer because we don't give a crap about the poor in this country. It's easy to be generous to defense contractors if you ignore your own people's needs, something the rest of the civilized western world does not. That's part of it. Let's remember who set the deadline for withdrawal at this impossible-to-meet-well date. And yes, Russia understands that thanks to decades of GOP wars-without-end (thank you so much, Shrub), especially ones levied without international consensus (thank you again, Shrub), Americans are no longer eager to send our troops into harm's way no matter how important the cause. (And yes, I fault Obama as well for failing to get us out of Iraq and Afghanistan early in his presidency, but to be fair, he did have an economic crisis dumped in his lap on his way into office (thank you AGAIN, Shrub) to deal with. But let's also recognize that Putin didn't need to invade Ukraine while Trump was in power because Trump was (unwittingly, like most things he does) laying the ground work on behalf of Putin. He upended alliances, taught Europe that you couldn't count on America to keep its word, and in general tried to sabotage all the ties that bound the civilized, democratic governments of the world together as a force for the common good. Why WOULD Putin want to invade Ukraine when Trump was doing such a bang-up job of breaking apart the alliance that was most likely to stand in his way? New sanctions are being announced every day. The idea is to ratchet them up, hoping he'll at least call for a cease fire before maximum pressure in terms of sanctions has been applied. (Which is smart: once you've thrown everything you have at him, if he survives, he'll know he's not vulnerable to anything less than a direct military assault. If you can get him to blink for less, you have some reserve left.) True that the Mueller investigation said it could not PROVE a conspiracy with Russia (note it did not say they DISproved such a conspiracy, either). What it DID document, however, was that Russia unquestionably interfered in the election on Trump's behalf - what was unprovable, in large measure because Trump refused to be interviewed by the special counsel, was whether he or his campaign was in on it. As for the Steele Dossier, that's simply a bullshit take on it. For starters, the dossier was contracted and paid for by a research firm (Fusion GPS). Fusion, in turn, had been hired by a contract attorney, one of whose clients was the DNC; the DNC says, and the attorney confirms, that the attorney took this action on his own without the direction of the DNC, although the information gathered was afterward shared with the DNC. It's also important to note that the central finding of the dossier - that Russia had a preference for Trump over Clinton in the election and was taking action to help the former over the latter - was verified by Mueller and that finding is not in dispute among serious-minded people. It's also been proven that its claim that several high-level Trump campaign figures were in close contact and sharing information with Russian intelligence assets was also true. So "completely fabricated" is an outright lie. Some of the more sensational allegations (which were reported as rumors, not as facts) - like the infamous "Pee Tape" allegation - have neither been proven nor disproven - you can't prove something doesn't exist, only that it does (if it does). It is undoubtedly a flawed document that contains raw, unverified information, but it is far from "completely fabricated". Indeed, the parallels are striking. Just as in the late 1930's and early 40's, substantial figures - mostly wealthy white GOP and other right-leaning figures - constantly cautioned about getting involved in the war. It's not our fight, they said. We should stay over here and mind our own business. Who cares if Germany takes over Austria - aren't Austrians really sort of German, anyway? Who cares if they also take over Czechoslovakia - there's some Germans there, too, right? And the rest, they'll adapt. Poland? Europe's going to war over Poland? We need to say far away from that. This Hitler fellow, he can't be THAT bad - how much territory can he actually take, anyway? And then in short order, it was Denmark and Norway and Belgium and the Netherlands and Luxembourg and France and Yugoslavia and Greece, and with Spain in Franco's hands and Italy in Mussolini's, basically all of Europe was under the control of a megalomaniac. And the right-wing was still crowing that we should stay out of war. We were almost prepared to abandon Great Britain, ancestor to the very concept of America, to the Nazis, but Roosevelt was able to persuade Congress otherwise. And then war came to us, anyway. We think that can't happen again, but then we have a 9/11. The lesson we need to learn is to not waste trillions of dollars on wars of choice so that when a war comes that we NEED to be involved in - to preserve the notion of democracy, which is what Putin is trying to extinguish - we are willing to fight back.

No one is suggesting we should be, except the imaginary bogeymen in the fevered brains of the irrational nuts who think we can retreat to within our borders and never deal with the outside world. I wasn't aware you'd been appointed to simultaneously serve in a majority of the seats of the Supreme Court of the United States. You haven't? Oh, well, then, maybe you just aren't the one who gets to decide whether the WPA is constitutional or not. But you should know this: every president has advocated that the WPA is unconstitutional, not because only Congress can declare war, but because as commander in chief, the President can deploy forces even without a formal declaration of war and the reporting requirements of the WPA infringe on the President's powers, not the other way around. While I agree that we need to do far more for our own people than we do, there is literally no provision of the Constitution that prohibits foreign aid. Your fevered imagination as to what the Constitution says is working overtime - I hope you're paying it time-and-a-half.

You said this in response to someone suggesting prayers aren't worth shit. You made a wild, unsubstantiated leap to the notion that he must therefore hate Christians. You're demonstrating a severe inability to make logical connections here.

So you reject the fact-gathering apparatuses of, say, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, and the like in favor of "real facts" from ... checking now... "clayandbuck.com". One of these doofuses is a lawyer who went on a pudding strike (eating only pudding for nearly two months, trying to pressure DirectTV to offer NFL Sunday Ticket in the US Virgin Islands. The other is someone Fox Sports euphemistically called a "radio personality" (because "sports journalist" engendered too many hysterical laughs). But you'll put more faith in what they pull out their asses to tell you over news organizations whose staff collectively have centuries of experience in uncovering the news and reporting it. JFC.

You are mistaking the current president, with whom the world community stands in solidarity, with the previous occupant of the Oval Office, for whom the international community had nothing but contempt (that is, except for the Dictator Caucus). You can support or oppose either party and either president, but you are not going to manufacture "alternative facts" about how the world community viewed the last president vs how they view the current one. Russia was not kept "at bay". Russia chose to bide its time while Hair Furor tried to tear the post-Cold War western alliances apart. He had no reason to move on Ukraine as long as Hair Furor was actively trying to drive a wedge between the US and its European allies. Putin was delighted to sit back and let the Mango Mussolini try to extort Ukraine for security assistance. Putin was delighted when his personal puppet tried to divide NATO over the amount of spending each would make on defense, deliberately mischaracterizing it as "unpaid back dues" to NATO. The previous occupant of the White House stood on an international stage and announced he took Putin's word over the combined work of all his own intelligence agencies, whose work he pointedly refused to even review on a regular basis. Of course Putin's moving now - not because Biden is weak, or perceived as weak, but because Biden is undoing the wreckage the last idiot left in his wake, and he knew his window of opportunity would be closing. Finally: as for keeping our economy pumping: Trump was the first president under whom the number of jobs had a net DECLINE - despite the roaring economy he inherited, which grew no faster under him than it had in the last few years of the Obama administration. His abysmal, incompetent mishandling of Covid not only led to the needless deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans, but caused hundreds of billions (if not trillions) of dollars of damage to the economy. A rabid badger with a broken hind foot could have taken the economy inherited from Obama and managed it as well as Trump did. (The one thing I'll give him credit for: he wanted to provide the $2,000 per person stimulus payments but his own party, stingy rich capitalists to the core, cut it to $600. Biden got the remainder of the money approved, which is part of why the economy began recovering much more quickly under his administration than it was under the last months of Trump.)

That is addressed in dozens of responses to similar questions raised over and over again. The short answer is, that is confidential information; the site owners don't release the formula by which advancing from one level to another is granted, so as to prevent people from gaming the system. The longer answer is, read through this particular part of the forum - you'll see the reasoning explained in greater detail.