Can we just replace Leavitt with a sign that says, "We're not crazy, you're crazy!" That seems to cover it completely. We could hang a nice big crucifix on it and it's pretty much feature-complete.
I agree...but I strongly believed Trump would win in 2024 because I've been actively lowering my expectations for the US voting public since 2016. They always are worse than I expect, and even when I expect them to be worse, they are worse still.
What I've learned is that people are really really not good at a) remembering the experience of suffering accurately (rosy retrospection is a real psychological handicap for our species), b) logically weighing the pros and cons of possible catastrophe, and c) spotting obvious con men and liars.
Hakeem Jefferies: "This disgusting, terrible, vile, atrocious racism has no place in our government so I call on Republicans to do the right thing, and will just be over here while they wait out the controversy."
Chuck Schumer: "Ohhh, this is gre-I mean, terrible. Trump's polls will definitely drop by at least 2% points in the fallout over this, allowing me to write my magnum opus. Watch your mailbox, this is gonna be a two-pager that your intern is going to be very sorry to have to half-read once, Mr. President. But I'll be the bigger man here - Israel needs at least $10 billion more to protect themselves from seasoned 5-year-old Hamas soldiers, and we've shamed ICE enough, so let's not get distracted from passing some mudderfudding BILLS y'all."
John Thune: "I soundly condemn the comments made yesterday, which I won't describe, name or attribute to anyone and that will not alter anything I do whatsoever. Now that this is past as of seven words ago, we need to move on, focus on the President's agenda, and make America great again."
Elon Musk: [resharing the same meme posted by obvious Russian bot] ☝️ 🍉🍉
The USPS, under DeJoy (who has long been trying to undermine the USPS from within), has posted this site, which attempts to debunk (i.e., gaslight) over what the change is. They claim the same process applies and only is being clarified, but that's false since now postmarks will use the process rather than the sending date and that's a major change. This is key:
While we are not changing our postmarking practices, we have made adjustments to our transportation operations that will result in some mailpieces not arriving at our originating processing facilities on the same day that they are mailed. This means that the date on the postmarks applied at our processing facilities will not necessarily match the date on which the customer’s mailpiece was collected by a letter carrier or dropped off at a retail location. [emphasis added]
This is entirely to help support GOP legal challenges that will claim that laws which allow election-day postmarked mail-in ballots to be counted can be struck down, because they will encompass votes that took place after election day, and therefore selectively invalidate mail-in ballots. It's essentially poisoning the reliability of postmarks to allow for ballot suppression.
Here's a PBS story about it as well. It also notes that the staffing crunches at the USPS and closing processing facilities will exacerbate the issue since "processing" times will increase, especially for high-volume days like election day.
Edit: David Steiner, not DeJoy, is the current postmaster general.
My theory is somewhere deep inside himself he knows that once he loses access to his power and position, and the obsequious self-assurance it provides, all that's left will be to confront the abject moral abyss that is his soul. So he's just trying to die ignorant and shameless in office.
These are just depressing numbers considering what is happening daily around here:
But in the new poll, 51 percent said Trump is doing a worse job than President Biden did — a net swing of 18 points. From the pollster’s memo:
49% of voters, a plurality, say Trump’s policies thus far have set America on a worse path. 49% say Trump is doing a better job than Biden (-4).
…
MORE VOTERS ATTRIBUTE ECONOMY TO TRUMP OVER BIDEN
63% of voters say the current state of the economy is mostly due to the Trump administration rather than Biden (+11). 53% say it is worse than it was when Biden was president.
56% of voters say the economy is shrinking, and 66% say inflation is above 3% (-5), including a majority across political parties.
The good news for Trump, although it’s unlikely to ease the pain, is that out of 22 stated policies, 15 of them still enjoy majority support.
It's hard to imagine the full effect of America's modern self-sustaining fascist disinformation ecosystem. It's an alternate reality that follows the same patterns as cult brainwashing, with the same cognitive effects and resistance to deprogramming. North Korea and Russia have a version of this but modern first-world algorithmic feeds and astroturfing / bots multiply the impact and resilience against real information by a thousand times. The people captured by it don't know it's there, even when it wraps them as tightly as a straight jacket.
So: I think the majority of conservatives in the US at least believe ICE is only targeting criminals, and the typically just the worst ones. They don't even see stories like this unless they're strong enough to break that propaganda bubble. And when they do, that fascist media treats it as an honest mistake and that the victims are overreacting.
I mean, you (if you're American) and me. Taxpayers (via the BBB that Trump and his accomplices in congress) have given the DHS/ICE so much money, I doubt Noem would blink at spending tens of millions of our dollars on a PR stunt.
I'm convinced Miller is running the country right now. Nothing else fits the evidence.
Bondi is likely more answerable to Trump since she's leading Trump's personal revenge squad, but articles earlier suggested she does follow strategy set by Miller. For example, I wouldn't be surprised if Miller also directed the decision to pardon all J6-ers since it fits a little too perfectly into his turn-ICE-into-Trump's-militia strategy.
O’Reilly said that he reached out to Moltbook’s creator Matt Schlicht about the vulnerability and told him he could help patch the security. “He’s like, ‘I’m just going to give everything to AI. So send me whatever you have.’” O’Reilly sent Schlicht some instructions for the AI and reached out to the xAI team.
A day passed without another response from the creator of Moltbook and O’Reilly stumbled across a stunning misconfiguration. “It appears to me that you could take over any account, any bot, any agent on the system and take full control of it without any type of previous access,” he said.
...
Schlicht did not respond to 404 Media’s request for comment, but the exposed database has been closed and O’Reilly said that Schlicht has reached out to him for help securing Moltbook.
So yup, this guy cared so little he was going to take the valuable human security insights and guidance, necessary to correct the AI vibe coded slop nightmare and... throw it back into the AI slop machine.
Can we just replace Leavitt with a sign that says, "We're not crazy, you're crazy!" That seems to cover it completely. We could hang a nice big crucifix on it and it's pretty much feature-complete.