[Tsundoku]

Ah fuck, all over bar the shouting now.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis suspends Republican presidential campaign, endorses Donald Trump
Ron DeSantis has suspended his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, saying he would throw his support behind Donald Trump.

https://www.news.com...021ed47f2a1d8f3

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

 Tsundoku, on 21 January 2024 - 08:54 PM, said:

Ah fuck, all over bar the shouting now.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis suspends Republican presidential campaign, endorses Donald Trump
Ron DeSantis has suspended his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, saying he would throw his support behind Donald Trump.

https://www.news.com...021ed47f2a1d8f3

Trump only got 51% of the vote in Iowa, where he's particularly popular (largely because he paid off the farmers---Orban model basically---and because it's one of the whitest states).

The only remaining candidates got less than 1% of the vote---except for Nikki Haley. But the Ramaswamy vote is almost certainly going to Trump, along with a large chunk of the DeSantis (trying to out-Trump the Trump) vote.

Maybe she'll have a chance if she finally gets that KKK endorsement she's clearly been angling for... maybe she'll claim she was adopted?

DeSantis also endorsed Trump. But if he really wanted Trump to win the best way to make sure of that would be to stay in the race---to split the anti-Trump vote with Haley. Unless one of the less than one percenters steps up it's looking like a two-person race now. Unless Haley's really just running for vice president / cabinet appointment / etc.

OTOH:

Quote

College-educated conservatives [...] who have long been more skeptical of Mr. Trump, have quietly powered his remarkable political recovery inside the party — a turnaround over the past year that has notably coincided with a cascade of 91 felony charges in four criminal cases.

[...] it was only a year ago that he trailed Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida in some surveys — a deficit due largely to [Trump's] weakness among college-educated voters.

[...] according to interviews with nearly two dozen college-educated Republican voters [well that's a tiny sample size, even for college educated Republicans, but ok ...]

[...] Many were incredulous over what they described as excessive and unfair legal investigations [...] Others said they [...] viewed Mr. Trump as more likely to win than [...] Haley [...] Several saw Mr. Trump as a more palatable option because they wanted to prioritize domestic problems over foreign relations and were frustrated with high interest rates.

Oh right, the old 'honey badger DGAF so he'll just replace the Fed with anybody who'll cut interest rates to boost the stock market'? Perchance.

Article continues:

Quote

[...] "I like Nikki Haley, and I'd probably vote for her if I thought she could beat him,"

[...] Many[...] viewed support for any candidate other than Mr. Trump as "a wasted vote."

How College-Educated Republicans Learned to Love Trump Again - The New York Times (nytimes.com)

So if it seems like Haley has a chance against Trump now, she might actually have a---very slim---chance... with the college-educated minority.

Oh, and Trump's now going Birther on Haley because she's Indian-American:

Quote

promoting the false claim that she is not eligible to be president because her parents were not U.S. citizens at the time of her birth

Haley dismisses Trump's false suggestion she's not eligible to run for president - ABC News (go.com)

... though Trump has been pressing to make it so that people born in the US to non-citizen parents won't automatically become US citizens. (Maybe he'll try to do that retroactively too....)

And since her first name is Nimarata, he's calling her Nimrada, as in Nimrod (idiot).

While my previous post was largely tongue-in-cheek, explicit would-be theocrats like the current Speaker of the House (third in line for the presidency, remember) probably do think that after Trump establishes authoritarian rule, and then dies, they'll be able to take over. And do even more than they could through Trump's court appointments, once they have control of the executive. But exactly how they plan to seize the executive branch after Trump's death I'm not sure---Stefanik doesn't seem like one of them at all, unless they assassinate her while Mike Johnson or someone similar is Speaker of the House---which seems unlikely. IDK about Trump's other potential VP picks. (OTOH they might genuinely believe that Trump is Go*'s Chosen One---for now at least, and until he drops dead....)

I imagine Elon Musk &co may be thinking along broadly similar lines---with democracy undone (and discredited by a Trump win), they might find a way to install themselves in power---and have the people be grateful. Perhaps Musk's apparent swing to the far right really is a move in a game of higher-dimensional chess---the far right thinks it can use Trump to checkmate democracy, but Musk thinks he can checkmate them in turn out of an unexpected dimension of the future. Personally I do think that, if the right technologists and/or scientists come to power, that would be an optimal outcome. But I highly doubt Musk's right wing nonsense---or the leak of his utterly moronic text messages---is just a ruse; he'd most likely be a terrible autocrat or (legal) oligarch.

OTOOH, while I do think US military action against Canada and Europe is a realistic (but still very far fetched) possibility, a second Trump term would almost certainly have a major negative impact on the world at large through his expected climate change policies:

Quote

Republicans have already written a climate plan for a prospective second Trump term with the innocuous title "Project 2025." This radical plan would block efforts underway to scale up renewable energy and create a clean energy grid. It would defund climate programs at the Environmental Protection Agency and clean energy efforts at the Department of Energy. It would also bar other states from adopting California's clean energy policies and put the fossil fuel industry fox in the environmental henhouse by turning over regulation of polluters to Republican state legislatures.

So, we are truly at a "fragile moment." Global climate action lies on a knife edge, hinging upon American leadership that is threatened by a prospective Trump second term and a radicalized GOP intent on undermining climate progress both here and abroad.

Trump 2.0: The climate cannot survive another Trump term | The Hill

Quote

Trump pulled the U.S. out of the Paris climate agreement, staffed his environmental agencies with fossil fuel lobbyists and claimed — against all scientific evidence — that the Earth's rising temperatures will " start getting cooler."

Expect a second Trump presidency to show less restraint.


Trump's campaign utterances, and the policy proposals being drafted by hundreds of his supporters, point to the likelihood that his return to the White House would bring an all-out war on climate science and policies — eclipsing even his first-term efforts that brought U.S. climate action to a virtual standstill. Those could include steps that aides shrank back from taking last time, such as meddling in the findings of federal climate reports.

"The approach is to go back to all-out fossil fuel production and sit on the EPA,"

Trump supporters expect a 'battle' against climate science in 2nd term - POLITICO

... so unless he's stopped before the end of his term we'll almost certainly need to depend on a technological hail-mary if we want to stop apocalyptic climate change. Though that may well be the case regardless. But again on the bright side it may at least help inspire people who expect to live for a few more decades to support a takeover of the US government by technologists and scientists (... but hopefully not by Elon Musk and his ilk---Zuckerberg has apparently been obsessed with Caesar Augustus for a long time, so maybe he'd make an okay Go*-Emperor of the Metaverse? (kidding!... about that very last part)).

What's behind Mark Zuckerberg's man-crush on Emperor Augustus? | Charlotte Higgins | The Guardian

This post has been edited by Azath Vitr (D'ivers: 21 January 2024 - 09:55 PM

[Abyss]

Haley and Desantis are just jockeying for the vp slot now. She has to fight hard enough to force the issue, he has to suck up harder.

...this is such a wild mess.

[HoosierDaddy]

 Abyss, on 23 January 2024 - 04:46 AM, said:

Haley and Desantis are just jockeying for the vp slot now. She has to fight hard enough to force the issue, he has to suck up harder.

...this is such a wild mess.

I don't think Trump gains anything from a Desantis VP pick. He needs someone who will pull in the suburban moms or minorities to truly get him over the hump.

The fact that this is even being discussed is so pathetic.

Older white guy who isn't maybe the best candidate, but actually didn't do a terrible job vs. an existential threat to the republic?

Hmmmm. I'll go with the existential threat to the republic, I think. He might even also be a an older white guy as well, so there's that!

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

Quote

Biden Can't Actually Win the New Hampshire Primary This Year. But He Can't Afford to Lose It.

[...] Biden got trounced in New Hampshire in 2020 before winning South Carolina, which rescued his presidential hopes from the brink. [...] Then, he had the DNC make South Carolina first.

[...] the plan wasn't entirely thought through. New Hampshire, rather famously, has a state law [...] requiring that the state hold its primary a week before anyone else. [Iowa doesn't count because it's technically a caucus ...]

Now we have a defiantly unauthorized primary happening in New Hampshire [...] Per DNC rules, presidential candidates are not allowed to campaign, spend money, give speeches, hold rallies, or even put themselves on the ballot in an unauthorized race. [...] The DNC's retaliation: New Hampshire's delegates [votes won't count ...].

[...] Biden allies have swarmed the state[...] Officially, they all just so happen to be there for business related to federal programs and nothing—nothing!—to do with Biden's reelection campaign, which they haven't mentioned, because they're not campaigning.

[...] Meanwhile, another write-in campaign has taken off, threatening a separate headache for Biden and his allies. A "vote cease-fire" campaign is gaining traction in the state

2024 New Hampshire primary: Biden could lose to Dean Phillips—and it'd be his own dang fault. (slate.com)

IDK if I'll vote for Dean Philips after all. Despite Andrew Yang's support. Maybe I'll write in 'cease-fire'? Oh well. Then again I shouldn't dismiss Philips just for letting Musk, Ackman, and Maher interview him, and hopefully I'll find more information about his strategies for Israel and the Middle East (what I've heard so far has not sounded any better than Biden though).

Quote

The Houthis May Have Checkmated Biden [...]

[...] can't be deterred without risky and costly U.S. escalations.

[...]

With its decision to attack, the Biden administration appears to have opened itself up to a geopolitical checkmate by the Houthis. Escalating the strikes against the rebels will likely bring more shipping disruptions — potentially counterproductive to mitigating economic consequences — and risk a full-blown regional war. Negotiating or submitting to the demands of a nonstate militia group from one of the poorest countries in the world would be seen by many as a U.S. surrender and would boost the Houthis' newfound popularity.

[...]

The civil war became a training ground where the Houthis learned to outmaneuver vastly superior U.S.-made weapons — especially air power — in its current operation in the Red Sea. The rebels use inexpensive anti-ship missiles and small boats to attack the shipping vessels, utilizing the advantage of light and mobile forces that drive up costs and weaken the effectiveness of enemies' attacks from the air.

[...] "They have survived a long air campaign by two of the stronger militaries in the region, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, and have adapted how to move and operate their forces accordingly."

[...]

"One of the main things people miss about the Houthis is that their end goal is not just Yemen. This is an expansionist group with regional ambitions," [...] "This conflict is a perfect opportunity for them to say that they are the real vanguard of the Arab nation, while other leaders are complicit in the suffering of the Palestinians."

[...] Rather than weakening the Houthis, the U.S. airstrikes seem to be boosting the Houthis' political standing throughout the Middle East, where analysts say public opinion of the U.S. has reached lows not seen since the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq.

[...] experts say the Biden administration has no good options.

Houthis May Have Checkmated Biden in Red Sea Standoff (theintercept.com)

... and if the Houthi attacks on shipping vessels manage to drive up inflation in the US, they might just get Trump reelected (to accelerate the vicious cycle? or unleash the Israeli state's genocidal tendencies?)....

This post has been edited by Azath Vitr (D'ivers: 23 January 2024 - 01:48 PM

[amphibian]

I would be extremely extremely hesitant to base my presidential primary vote on Andrew Yang and whatever silly stuff he's saying.

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

Quote

Dean Phillips tries to rally voters who backed Bernie Sanders' presidential campaigns

[...] Phillips told reporters [...] he believes the Democratic Party establishment undermined Sanders' 2016 primary [...] and argued they were trying to do the same to him. [...] "I understand how this party operates, and it is nefarious and I think it is dangerous, and I think it is a hypocrisy of democracy."

[...] Phillips has also tried to court Sanders voters by embracing Medicare for All and other progressive policy positions in recent weeks.

[...] In most New Hampshire polls, Phillips is in the single or low double digits.

Dean Phillips tries to rally Bernie Sanders campaign voters (axios.com)

But if---because Biden is not on the ballot, and plenty of low information voters vote in the primary, and turnout is (as usual in the US) vital---Phillips does well (or even wins) in NH, more people might regard him as a serious candidate---or at least become aware of the fact that he's running.

Quote

Dean Phillips
@deanbphillips

i would consider a pilot ubi program in certain urban and rural communities and measure results before expansion.

[... replies:]

Justin 'The Zig' - ⬆️��
@thezigpc

Considering the evidence we already have, I assume your "pilot program" manta is just to test means of distribution from a federal level rather than to collect more data on the benefits. [...]

Seasonal Stompy Robot
@jwatte

This has been done, many times, and it always works.

However, a "pilot program" is a way to show support for the idea, without having to actually bite the bullet of funding the whole thing[...]

Feminists for Basic Income
@Women4UBI

Pilots have already been done- in the USA and worldwide. The evidence is there. Unconditional, universal Basic Income as a foundational floor to all other social services works.

(1) Dean Phillips on X: "@seth_kafila i would consider a pilot ubi program in certain urban and rural communities and measure results before expansion." / X (twitter.com)

'Always' is rarely forever, but yes. Seasonal Stompy Robot (as the name self-evidently doth imply) is essentially right.

Quote

Sometimes you see a quote attributed to a famous person and think, there's simply no way that's real. Abraham Lincoln talking about the internet [...] Looking at the president's description of his administration's weeklong, almost certainly unconstitutional, and even more certainly ineffectual bombing campaign against the Houthis in Yemen, you're thinking: Surely, there must be some uncharitable editing here, some nip-tuck with ellipses, some faulty attribution, or some contextual bait and switch.

No, he really said that. [Referring to:

"Well, when you say 'working'—are they stopping the Houthis? No. Are they going to continue? Yes." — [...] Biden, in response to the question "Are the airstrikes in Yemen working?"]

[...] There is almost no support globally for Israel's campaign outside of Biden World; even in the United States, poll after poll shows the majority of Americans, and the vast majority of Democrats, want a cease-fire.

[... Biden]'s had no problem circumventing procedural obstruction to continue support for this war. He's gone around Congress to transfer more weapons to Israel, and he simply ignored the chamber in his pursuit of airstrikes on the Houthis [...]

[...] In the week since America's campaign began, Houthi attacks on ships in the region have … increased 200 percent.

[...] Is it working? No. Will it continue? Yes. [...] that second question is also being asked about Biden's presidency. At this rate, the answer might be "no" to that one as well.

Israel-Gaza war: Joe Biden's quote about strikes on Yemen's Houthis was something. (slate.com)

I guess Dean Phillips probably wouldn't be worse than Biden on Israel and the Middle East; so if so that shouldn't factor into my decision. His proposed 'team of rivals' approach would at least get him listening to diverse viewpoints, which will obviously include many progressive voices; and it might be especially helpful if---being optimistic---his presidency (whether in his first or second term) actually extends through a major transition to automated labor and a simultaneous boom in productivity that will make it easier to implement UBI, and finally liberate the people of the United States from de facto forced labor (and set an example---a good one, for once---for the rest of the world again...).

This post has been edited by Azath Vitr (D'ivers: 23 January 2024 - 07:48 PM

[HoosierDaddy]

Dean Phillips isn't going to be the Democratic nominee for President. It simply won't happen. Pretending otherwise is to blissfully stare into sky and think of which form of paradise you'd prefer while the hate express train that Donald Trump is nominally the engineer of mows you down on the train tracks.

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

 HoosierDaddy, on 23 January 2024 - 08:40 PM, said:

Dean Phillips isn't going to be the Democratic nominee for President. It simply won't happen. Pretending otherwise is to blissfully stare into sky and think of which form of paradise you'd prefer while the hate express train that Donald Trump is nominally the engineer of mows you down on the train tracks.

So long as too many people assume that he can't be, he won't be.

Polls have overwhelming demonstrated that a large majority of Democrats want to nominate someone other than Biden in the primary---provided they're significantly younger than him. 'Generic Democrat' is preferred over Biden, and does better against Trump (in the polls at least).

Now they just need to follow the logical implication to its conclusion....

OTOH you may assume that the DNC / will do us another Hillary...

Heroic couplets on the DNC's refusal to count NH primary votes (after of course changing the order of the primaries at Biden's behest, to benefit Biden):

Joseph Biden and the DNC:
Such ardent champions of Democracy...

Such stalwart stewards of its final fall---
Loose wrinkled skin sloughed off in the boiling squalls...

This post has been edited by Azath Vitr (D'ivers: 23 January 2024 - 10:16 PM

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

The Associated Press is already calling it for Biden even though he only has 2.9% of the votes. Phillips has 20.7%; his campaign said that anything over 20% would be considered 'good' given how obscure his campaign has been.

AP is assuming the 'unprocessed write-ins' will go overwhelmingly for Biden. They probably will. But it will be hilarious if, once they actually get around to reading the names on those ballots, the winner ends up being 'Ceasefire'... and Phillips ends up beating Biden.

[amphibian]

The polls cited are garbage because 1) they're interviewing like 70 people who pick up their land lines, 2) nearly every candidate pales next to a generic ideal that nobody pins down into reality, and 3) power isn't the polls and people keep forgetting this.

[Cause]

Generic democrat or generic republicans in these hypothetical poles strikes me as inherently flawed. What does it mean? I’d be shocked if to most people it doesn’t mean biden minus whatever your perceived flaws of him are. It’s amazing these hypothetical nobodies don’t win everything.

[amphibian]

Obama is really popular in polls now - almost a decade after he was evil incarnate to a big chunk of people!

It's almost like the commonly shared or media hyped polls are mostly a waste of time and effort...

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

 amphibian, on 24 January 2024 - 02:13 AM, said:

The polls cited are garbage because 1) they're interviewing like 70 people who pick up their land lines, 2) nearly every candidate pales next to a generic ideal that nobody pins down into reality, and 3) power isn't the polls and people keep forgetting this.

Polls stopped relying exclusively on land lines years ago:

Quote

The AP, and Marist, recognize that a plurality of American adults do not have a landline. Polls that are "conducted by telephone must include people interviewed on their cellphones," according to the Stylebook. "Those that only include landline interviews have no chance of reaching the more than half of American adults who have only a mobile phone."

Random sample telephone dialing (pbs.org)

As for sample size: like many results from probability theory, it's counterintuitive, but what seems like a relatively small random sample can accurately represent a population with a high probability, and uncertainty can be quantified in terms of margin of error, confidence intervals, etc. There is extensive empirical evidence demonstrating that this is true. The problem with modern polling is that whether people respond to polls is correlated with factors that are not statistically independent of their answers---Trump voters are much less likely to respond to polls. (It would not be an issue if, for example, in a Trump vs Biden poll Trump and Biden voters were both equally likely to respond.) So polls have tried to correct for that, and subsequently, on average, have been good at predicting election results. However, if the underlying causal bases of that correlation change, that could cease to be the case.

Quote

If you do it right, probability sampling allows you to make conclusions about a lot of people using a small sample. "If you've ever tasted something you're cooking, you've employed probability sampling," Carvalho said. "You didn't have to eat the whole pot of soup to know what it was, assess what was in it, or decide if 'it needs just a little more of something else.'"

Random sample telephone dialing (pbs.org)

Quote

But [....] "We have slowly but surely abandoned many rules of the road when it comes to accepted principles of polling that attempt to maintain some linkage to probability theory," [...] People see a call that is identified as a "research organization" or a university [...] and they don't take the call. "Only a university person would assume that a caller ID mentioning research or a university would be a universal positive," [...] "For some, it may be a negative and cause them not to pick up the phone. And I've been a university person, so I'm not trying to be hard on universities, but sometimes they don't know what they don't know."

Random sample telephone dialing (pbs.org)

Quote

Let's give a big round of applause to the pollsters. [...] Despite a loud chorus of naysayers claiming that the polls were either underestimating Democratic support or biased yet again against Republicans, the polls were more accurate in 2022 than in any cycle since at least 1998, with almost no bias toward either party.

Of course, some pollsters were more accurate than others. And today, we've updated the FiveThirtyEight pollster ratings to account for each pollster's performance in the 2022 cycle. Our ratings are letter grades that we assign to each pollster based on historical accuracy and transparency. (You can read exactly how we calculate pollster ratings here.) They're one of many tools you should use when deciding how much stock to place in a poll.

The Polls Were Historically Accurate In 2022 | FiveThirtyEight

This post has been edited by Azath Vitr (D'ivers: 24 January 2024 - 01:53 PM

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

Slate's hit piece on Dean Phillips made me lol (are they so desperate for cash they're taking covert commissions from the DNC now?):

Quote

Dean Phillips, the gelato and liquor tycoon running in the Democratic primary

New Hampshire primary: Democrat Dean Phillips lost big to Joe Biden. But he wants to "keep this baby going." (slate.com)

No mention of the coffee shops---too pro-social and politics-adjacent, maybe. Whereas liquor and gelato are evil and should be outlawed! (Make the gelato mafia great again! Actually there is a strong case for banning ice cream and liquor. Which will be stronger if the studies on a liquor replacement with the prosocial benefits but apparently without most of the most negative side effects turn out to be successful in the near future.

But wouldn't it be beautiful if, as global warming births catastrophe after catastrophe, the US is preoccupied with the black market gelato wars between rival roving gangs? If it's mostly killer robots killing each other over ice cream, even better... except for their contribution to global warming of course. (But no: smart monitors will hopefully allow us to regulate our consumption to healthy levels---or, better, attain the ability to get the psychological benefits without the need to consume physical stuff at all.))

It's amusing how they try to make it seem like he just went from swimming in a pool of blood money (liquor! ICE CREAM!) in one of his mansions to running for president.

This post has been edited by Azath Vitr (D'ivers: 25 January 2024 - 03:31 PM

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

Quote

Trump calls on 'all willing states' to blatantly defy [US Supreme Court] border ruling in Texas

[...] Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt ® told Fox News [...] he had "already started putting the numbers together" [...] and previously told Newsmax [...] that he hadn't ruled out the possibility of a "force-on-force" clash between federal troops and state national guardsmen at the border.

[...] "The federal government has broken the compact between the United States and the states," [Texas Governor] Abbott wrote

Trump Calls on 'All Willing States' to Send National Guard Soldiers to Texas (vice.com)

The US president is legally entitled to take control of each state's national guard---the question then is whether anyone would decide to remain loyal to xenophobia / their governor / Trumpism... and there's also the issue of Florida:

Quote

DeSantis Still Dreams of Commanding an Army

[...] The Texas National Guard has fenced off a park in Eagle Pass and installed barriers and concertina wire along a stretch of the Rio Grande River[...]

The U.S. Supreme Court shut down his effort, but in the way of many law-and-order Republicans, Abbott announced his intention to defy the law and "hold the line" against an "invasion." [...]

[DeSantis:] "Anyone that wants to do the U.S. harm will look at that border as the easiest soft underbelly this country has right now," [ would that anyone include Trump & co? ...] DeSantis [...] pledged to stand with Texas [...]

DeSantis said he could have sent the Florida National Guard, but it is under federal control. But in 2022, DeSantis had brought back the Florida State Guard[...] as an entity answerable only to him.

"The president would not be able to federalize the State Guard," he noted.

That meant the feds could not order State Guard members sent to Texas to return to Florida

Stuck in Florida, Ron DeSantis Still Dreams of Commanding an Army (thedailybeast.com)

DeSantis will probably be too chickenshit to send his State Guard, but reinforcements are on the way from all over the USA:

Quote

The MAGA Truckers Are Back—And Heading to the Border

[...] advertised as a "peaceful assembly" of active and former law enforcement, military, ranchers, bikers, business owners, and "Mama Bears."

[...] concern[...] it will attract armed extremists and vigilante groups.

Rhetoric displayed in the video, along with [...] Trump's remarks that immigrants are "poisoning the blood of our country," could spark a volatile situation[...]

"They're basically setting up a confrontation: What we're doing is to confront not just this problem, but individual migrants that might be trying to cross the border. [...]

You're getting people worked up into a frenzy over this, and the notion that it's going to be completely peaceful and there's going to be no criminal activity, nothing bad's going to happen, to me seems really, really misguided."

The "peaceful assembly" label on the flyer[...] is about reducing liability.

The MAGA Truckers are Back—And Heading to the Border (thedailybeast.com)

This post has been edited by Azath Vitr (D'ivers: 27 January 2024 - 01:44 PM

[Lady Bliss]

A lot of angry people on the border with guns. How can that go wrong?

[Macros]

I mean

THEY TOOK IUR JERBS!!!

[Cause]

Has anyone considered paying illegal immigrants peanuts to guard the border against new illegal immigrants?

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

 Macros, on 27 January 2024 - 10:07 PM, said:

I mean

THEY TOOK IUR JERBS!!!

These days it's more like 'they're poisoning the blood of this country, they're demonic vermin invaders'... oh and the trucker convoy is calling itself an 'Army of God'. (But afaik most of them aren't denouncing the immigrants for being Catholic... so there's that.)

Trump on Truth Social today:

Quote

Our border has become a weapon of mass destruction — our destruction, [...]

Just 3 years ago we had the strongest and safest Border in U.S. History. Today we have a catastrophe waiting to happen. It is the WORST BORDER IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD, an open wound in our once great Country. TERRORISTS ARE POURING IN, UNCHECKED, FROM ALL OVER THE WORLD. There is now a 100% chance that there will be MAJOR TERROR ATTACKS IN THE USA. CLOSE THE BORDER!

If Abbott tells the Texas national guard not to obey Biden, will he be arrested for treason? Doubt he'll really do it (Abbott, that is... hopefully Biden won't flinch---and hopefully Abbott hasn't been looking at Trump's boost in popularity post-indictments and hoping he can get the same, then get pardoned by Trump...).

Quote

GOP Governors Invoke the Confederate Theory of Secession to Justify Border Violations

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, joined by 25 other GOP governors, now argues that the Biden administration has violated the federal government's "compact" with the states—an abdication that justifies state usurpation of federal authority at the border. This language embraces the Confederacy's conception of the Constitution as a mere compact that states may exit when they feel it has been broken. [...]

[...] the very first line of a statement Abbott issued [...] that was subsequently backed by the other Republicans[...] "The federal government has broken the compact between the United States and the states." That language is strikingly similar to the very first line of the secession ordinances passed by slave states when they purported to leave the union. [...]

[...] Lincoln was staunchly opposed this so-called compact theory. [...] "The Union of these States is perpetual" under the Constitution. The United States do not form a compact, but are a "country" bound together by "national fabric." This argument provided the entire justification for the war in its early years[...]

[...] the primary legal theory underpinning Republican governors' claims: that the United States constitutes a compact, and Biden's violation of this compact triggers a state's right to supplant federal authority, by force when necessary. [...] The governor vocally despises migrants, almost all of them nonwhite, who are seeking asylum in the United States. At every turn, he depicts them as less than human, violent criminals exploiting the country's generosity to destroy it from within.

Texas border: Greg Abbott joined by GOP governors, invoking confederacy. (slate.com)

This post has been edited by Azath Vitr (D'ivers: 28 January 2024 - 02:08 AM