Thank goodness for the Secret Service and good police work. They should get a lot more funding.

If you're a political progressive, the recent assassination attempts on DJT are thoroughly predictable. It is now an openly accepted fact that the presidential position is above the democracy. DNC: genocidal, ladder-climbing bureaucrat, promoted as candidate with literally zero democratic process; GOP: genocidal oligarch who should already be imprisoned for a failed coup attempt. The curtain is ripped off; the corruption has been revealed. Presidential "elections" will be attended by political violence until - or rather, only if massive reforms are implemented. This is exactly how the powers-that-be want it: the warlord-in-chief position is now completely secured from public opinion without an anti-fascist uprising (and it mostly has been for decades now). The empire will continue.
For most folks, the conniving DNC bureaucrat-puppet looks better than the deranged GOP oligarch-coupster. But her genocidal is bigger than his - there's no "lesser of two evils" here.

Talking about repeated extreme flooding, and its consequences (financial, climate refugees) in the USA:

"But perhaps the most enduring consequence has been the soaring cost of insurance, stoking a crisis with the industry that exploded after the storm. Insurance providers went bankrupt or left the state, and the ones that remained raised their prices — so high in some cases that homeowners simply could not afford coverage, leading to foreclosures.

The population in those areas has declined. New Orleans and the surrounding area had the steepest population drop of any metropolitan area in the country between 2020 and 2023, according to census estimates. Experts attributed the decline to the storm and its financial impacts. "

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/11/weather/francine-hurricane-ida.html

@1, Lol you can’t be serious. The head of the secret service lost her job over the first assassination attempt, and even after that catastrophic failure they somehow allowed an armed lunatic to lurk around the president’s golf course for 12 hours. If it weren’t for the witness photographing his license plate he may have gotten away, and if either of the TWO GUNMEN who have been allowed in Trump's proximity were a better shot he would be dead today. It almost feels like the secret service are trying to let someone kill him.

Clearly the answer is to arm presidential candidates.

Why does no one talk extensively about the fact that the people trying to kill Trump are members of his own cult? And why is Elon Musk allowed to tweet that no one is even trying to kill Harris? She is the sitting Vice President of the United States. Anyone else who did what he did would be visited by the FBI and possibly charged and imprisoned for threatening the life of the second in command of the United States.

Normalizing this violence is bullshit.

Trump has normalized pathological lying to the degree that Ohio has bomb threats and school closures and thwarted attempts at murdering people because a white woman made up a lie about Haitian immigrants eating pets and J.D. Vance and Trump ran with that lie. The fact that that lie was stated, repeatedly, in the debate between the two candidates for the President of the United States is so fucking obscene it is incomprehensible.

Trump never should have been allowed near the White House again after everything that happened while he was squatting in the White House and everything he and his proxy (his nut job friends, colleagues, supporters, and enablers) did to overthrow the election, murder Vice President Pence and Nancy Pelosi, and all of the damage his unfit and corrupt SCOTUS judges have done since he put them on the court.

Democrats in this country failed to even pretended to have tried to ensure he be held accountable and that he is not in prison. Why are there 143 seditionists still active members of congress?

Anyone with any capacity for critical thinking does not believe our two party billionaire bullshit "democracy" is in any way, shape, or form an ACTUAL democracy. There is no lesser of two evils in this country, there is only evil, and all the evil cares about is the money and the power. Everyone in this country is an accomplice in the evil, even if you believe you are not - you enjoy a very specific life here in this country and it is filled to the brim with the blood of those used and then murdered in the name of the United States, worldwide.

Trump only cares about himself and wants to be known for bringing down this country and becoming its first, only, and last dictator. And the fact that he even has a shot at that being possible shows that this country is already a rotting corpse.

Sitting around pretending this is all normal is an inconceivable level of denial and delusion. The people in this country really have no clue what they are in for and when they finally wake up and see it will be too late. And we deserve everything, absolutely everything we get.

2: What do you mean by Kamala's "genocidal"?

4: Nevertheless they[re needed.

6: But both later made contributions to ActBlue. Folks go in and out of "the cult".

Q: Why did the golfer where two pairs of pants?

A: In case he got a hole in one.

“They’re needed”

You said they should be paid more money after repeatedly failing at the one thing they do

@7: the poster meant that Harris is complicit in the Gazan Genocide. that was their 4th post since joining last year.

Xina, it's not a cult - it's a religion.

@2 Put the meth pipe down and return to reality. Kamala Harris is not a bureaucrat. She is a successful politician who has repeatedly won the voters' support at ever more important elected positions. We Democrats voted for her and Biden in the 2020 election, an again in the primary for this election. We did so knowing full well that she could have to take over for Biden at any moment. Democratic confidence in them was so high that there was no real challenge to them in the primary. Biden withdrew because he saw she had a much better chance than he did. The groundswell of support after the convention, and the record numbers of volunteers, show that she has the support of Democrats nationwide.

wanna know what Happens
when we Alllow Enomous Concen-
trations of Wealth into The Wrong Hands?

nyt:

Elon Musk
Writes, Then
Deletes, a Post Musing
About Threats to Biden and Harris

Elon Musk
deleted his post
on X suggesting it
was odd that nobody had
tried to kill President Biden or Kamala Harris.

His remark, just hours after what the authorities said was a second assassination attempt on Donald J. Trump, immediately drew outrage.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/16/us/politics/musk-deleted-tweet-biden-kamala.html

impunity hubris & greed’re
gonna put Humanity into
an (some'd say a well-
deserved) Early
Grave.

edit Out
our reptilican
brainstem or Welcome in
the Reign of the Cockroaches.

Thank you, Nathalie, for sharing Gordon Lightfoot's folk rock classic The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.
I needed some music and enjoyed singing along to the lyrics.

Holy SHIT what a Monday, though!

@13 Greenwood Bob and @14 kristofarian: +2 For the WIN!!!
The current dystopian chain of events is only glaring evidence of how the Tech Age, fueled by insatiable KKKorprate greed, will be the death of us ALL.

10: We're always in need of fixing our bureaucracies to better serve the people as well as those running for pubic office. Is it not progressive to use the tools we have and improve them?

@9- I think it is because it makes the outline of the Depends harder to see.

@2 Harris is on the right side of history regarding a number of important issues even if it often means only paying lip service or taking insufficient/meaningless steps in view of what has to be done. Even paying lip service is good for moving the Overton window in the right direction and she could, may be, be made to do more by a people's movement. Trump is terrible for just about everything (in particular it's straight out game over for climate and public governance) and autocracy offers even fewer opportunities for change. The only plus side I could may be see in Trump is that neocons are lining up behind Harris, which tells us about her foreign policy plans and/or the stupidity of his from the point of view from the empire.

@17, What do you get from typing out this gibberish? Are you training for a beauty pageant or something?

There is nothing “progressive” about rewarding people for failing at their jobs by paying them more. This is not something anyone does. Go back to bed.

@13- thank you. It’s quite sad that you even needed to explain this to anyone but this is the place we’ve gotten to. And Libretto/Xina, there certainly is greater and lesser evil. Let’s say you have two neighbors. One says he’d like to whack you with a stick. The other planes to shoot you in the face. Do you really claim they are equivalent?

Israel Has Killed 8%
of Gaza's Population – the
Equivalent of 26 Million Americans.

Relative to population, that's also more than 7,700 September 11th events. The New York Times and the large media outlets are silent on the true scale of the suffering.

oodles More, most Disturbingly:
https://stevendonziger.substack.com/p/israel-has-killed-8-of-gazas-population

and the Pro-genociders’d
Prefer it if WE were
Silent/Complicit
too.

from Donziger on Justice; a newsletter
about climate, justice, and human rights.

@13 I'm not clear why you so hastily accuse me of methamphetamine abuse. TBH, everything you say about Ms. Harris seems compatible with what I said - can't we both be right? Or maybe it's just that stating the obvious is painful - namely, that the "president" is a warlord-in-chief, far, far beyond the reach of parliamentary reform - and that, accordingly, all of these elections are a sham?
@11 Well - someone has plenty of time on their hands!
@7 If you haven't gotten there yet, I can't help you any further.

@12- it’s completely a cult. If Fat Donald told his people to drink the Cyan-aide, or cut their balls off and eat the pudding, a pretty good fraction would be all in.

11: Thank you. I was afraid it was that.

@21 Why do you assume that I need it explained? I'm familiar with Ms. Harris' career, and I know all about the lesser of two evils arguments. I'm rejecting them. Ms. Harris is assuming a warlord in chief position without democratic consent. If she continues the current historical trend (which is very likely) she will escalate the wars for profit in the developing world. All of the US' GDP is currently being poured into this massive colonialist venture; the socioeconomic conditions which generate the right-wing insurrection continue unabated, along with the insurrection itself. There will be no sustained reforms until the war machine is taken down and the Kamala Harris' of the world find another line of work.
What I think is sad is that many poeple almost certainly already know that, but their worldview is so tiny and selfish that they think Ms. Harris' impressive resume is some kind of paper they can wave around to make the above, inconvenient facts go away. Or maybe - probably - almost certainly - they couldn't care less about US foreign policy as long as they get their fingers in some measley little money pie.

@22: 41K/2,3 million is 1.8%. 4% of 2.3 million is 92,000.

why exaggerate?

@27 It's based on The Lancet estimate of 190,000 victims in Gaza due to Israel's policies

@24 There is a fraction who'll believe everything but many Trump voters know he is a buffoon but they are either a) cynical and self interested or b) they want to blow everything up because they are desperate and nobody is listening. We can do nothing about the first kind but we should be able to acknowledge the second kind and address their needs,

@4 Karl, while I doubt Secret Service is actively trying to off Trump, if the agents assigned to him are quiet-quitting I can certainly understand the impulse. He's continually scapegoated and slandered the security/intel community since his first year in office. And then there was J6, in which he sided (and still sides) with the goons who attacked the Capitol police, injuring dozens of them and causing the deaths of at least a handful. I know how I'd feel in their shoes, regardless of his politics.

@15 You would enjoy KIXI-AM 880. They seem to play that song every half-hour or so.

26 - I too reject the two evils arguments. There is only one evil: Donald J. Trump!

@30
Right.
It’s always the other side that’s bad.
Newsflash: You left wingers are just as brain washed as the right wingers.

If I found no difference between the 2 candidates on a given issue I would simply move onto any number of other issues I care about to determine which candidate is better: health care, reproductive rights, lgbtq rights, gun control, the economy, the courts, and so on. Pretty sure this is how normal people approach voting but it’s always a thrill to see how a galaxy brain operates. I’m learning so much.

@32 For the win!

I'd only add that this is a binary election. Trump will win or Harris will win. Stein, West, and the others won't. By all means, throw your vote away if you want, or consider voting for the lesser evil that might win.

@26- I’m not assuming you need the lesser of 2 evils argument explained. I’m disagreeing with your premise that a lesser of two evils exists. That’s just ridiculous.

And “all of US GDP” going to colonialism? Really? That sounds like something Mudede would claim.

@31, You guys think anyone to the left of Newt Gingrich is a communist so your understanding of politics in general has always been a little bit disengaged from reality, but there is no democratic equivalent to stolen elections or immigrants barbecuing cats. “Both sides are just as bad” is just a coping mechanism for you.

I kinda feel like the Secret Service did their job in this case? They scoured the ground, identified a threat, and eliminated it/him before he could even get a shot off. None of us are immune from danger in any/every environment we expose ourselves to and that's especially true for someone in his unique position. If he wants to mitigate the risks he's exposing himself to he can simply not golf, or better yet not run for President.

@12. Very aptly stated. Like Constantine and Henry VIII before him, Trump has literally reissued his own version of the Bible to relitigate his crimes under divine mandate.

@24, a religion is a cult with political power.

@38- that’s partly right but there’s a difference in how the sheep follow the leader. If the Pope told Catholics to castrate themselves and wait to be taken away by the starships there’d be few takers. In a cult, what the leaders say is more important than any actual belief system. There are certainly some that have attributes of both, like Scientology.

@6

The Cost of Resistance
Chris Hedges

This video is a recording of a talk given by Chris Hedges at the Kairos Club London on September 11, 2024. Drawing on his intimate knowledge of resistance and repression, Hedges detailed the methods we need to adopt to defeat the powerful interests, including the fossil fuel industry and the animal agriculture industry, which have placed their profits above the protection of our species and all life on earth.

Hedges’ talk is preceded by an audio intro from Roger Hallam. Hallam is part of the “Whole Truth Five,” who are five members of Just Stop Oil who were sentenced last month to the longest ever prison sentences for non-violent protest.

Following their conviction, the UN special rapporteur on environmental defenders, Michel Forst said “Today marks a dark day for peaceful environmental protest, the protection of environmental defenders and indeed anyone concerned with the exercise of their fundamental freedoms in the United Kingdom.”

“Courage is contagious. Revolutions begin, as I saw in East Germany, with a few Lutheran clergy holding candles as they marched through the streets of Leipzig in East Germany. It ends with half a million people protesting in East Berlin, the defection of the police and the army to the side of the protesters and the collapse of the Stasi state.

But revolutions only happen when a few dissidents decide they will no longer cooperate.

We may not succeed. So be it. At least those who come after us, and I speak as a father, will say we tried.

The corporate forces that have us in their death grip will destroy our lives. They will destroy the lives of my children. They will destroy the lives of your children.

They will destroy the ecosystem that makes life possible. We owe it to those who come after us not to be complicit in this evil. We owe it to them to refuse to be good Germans."

oodles More for those seeking or
wishing for or Demanding a
Habitable Planet for
themselves & For
their Progeny:
https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox/FMfcgzQXJGmpVwrHZFFTpPgjRscrcHXr

the Real “environmental terrorists’
Are NOT the one’s who’re
out there protesting.

@29 CKathes: That's good to know. Thanks. I do love classic rock and desperately needed a break.

@6 xina and @40 kristofarian: +2 for the WIN!!
Painfully, this is so true. What we're facing is worse than the Holocaust in Nazi Germany. The world has gotten so batshit crazy I feel like I'm on an evilly dystopian planet cooked up by George Lucas. Only there's no Han Solo, Chewbacca, Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, R2D2, and C3PO to save us from Darth Vader, its followers, fixers, and enablers on the Death Star.

thanks, auntie Gee!

well
This is
Disturbing:

nyt:

Wireless Devices
Explode Across Lebanon
After Israel Warns Hezbollah

A Lebanese official
said pagers belonging to
Hezbollah militants had exploded,
causing a large number of injuries.
The Israeli military declined to comment.

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/09/17/world/israel-hamas-war-news

YOUR Tax
Dollars, $TILL
Hard at Work in
bibi's Land Grab cum
Genocide cum Keep-bibi-
the-FUCKOUTTA-Prison gambit.

Where does it End?

@33 Sometimes voting for the candidate we know won't win is a worthwhile and/or necessary statement to make, which isn't equivalent to throwong away one's vote, but a far-right candidate is a unique threat that has to be stopped. I'd even vote for a right winger to prevent a 2nd Trump presidency.

@23 I was assuming it was drugs, because you are divorced from reality. Kamala Harris is the first nominee I've really wanted to vote for since Obama's first term. I'm not the only ohne who believes that, as she has recruited a record number of volunteers in a very short time. She is also the most qualified and well prepared candidate in modern history. She is not the lesser of two evils. She's a really great candidate!

@22 & @42 kristofarian: That is very disturbing news, indeed.

@24 dvs99: Bravo, spot on, and thank you for beating me to it.

@ auntie

at Least Nine Dead one
THOUSAND four HUNDRED
Wounded 300 Seriously when
you Fuck with Israel they don't
'get even" -- they get Ahead. WAY

tf ahead. Escalation
is in the
air.

it
Always Is. &
we're arming
Armageddon