Monday, December 30, 2024

I hate Tony Stark

I was never a fan of Iron Man -- not even in the comic books. He was annoying.  Especially in the movies.  CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR goes to how disgusting Iron Man's Tony Stark truly was.


Yes, he packs it in and caves to the government even when Steve (Captain America) is fighting for what's right and what the Avengers should stand for.


But do we get what a true asshole Tony Stark is?


I could do twenty pages just about his attack on the Scarlet Witch.  However, let's instead focus on Sam.  Sam will be the new Captain America whenever that film comes out; however, in this film he was Steve's sidekick the way Rhodey was Tony's sidekick.


Captain America is in a plane and you've got Tony and Rhodey following.  Sam follows to help Captain America elude the two. Tony tells Vision to take Sam out.


Vision sends a flare/bolt after Sam who realizes what's happening and dodges it.  It hits Rhodey who falls to the ground in an Iron Man suit.  Tony's raging and whining and when Sam lands, Tony knocks him to the ground.  Sam almost got Rhodey killed!


Later, because Tony's betrayed the whole team, Sam's in a prison cell when Tony comes to get information about where Steve's headed.  Sam asks about Rhodey and Tony's still blaming him.


That's why Tony Stark was always garbage.  Nothing was ever his fault in his mind.


Rhodey fell because he was hit with the bolt/flare from machine Vision.  If Sam hadn't dodged it, that would have been him on the ground.  No matter who would have ended up on the ground, Tony ordered Vision to send the flare/bolt.


What happened to Rhodey was on Tony's hands, no one else.


He's a prig who never takes accountability.  Easily the most disgusting character in MARVEL.


In terms of the films?  I think Elizabeth Olsen and Scarlet Witch are pathetic.


They need to recast that role going forward because Elizabeth needs to stick to playing snively cry babies.  She has no backbone. 


"Iraq snapshot" (THE COMMON ILLS):

Monday, December 30, 2024.  MAGA rumbles with their billionaire bosses.




Elon Musk on Sunday asked for "more positive" content to be posted to the social media network he owns, resulting in some reminders about his own negative attitude at times.

Musk, the richest man in the world and an appointee of President-elect Donald Trump, took to X to say, "Please post a bit more positive, beautiful or informative content on this platform." 

As the war on the right that he started continues, Elon now tries to offer a new spin to his remarks as he prays to himself that he can fool and control MAGA again:
Elon Musk admitted that the H1-B visas are “broken” and floated a potential fix as he sought to cool a raging civil war within the MAGA base over the immigration program for highly skilled foreign workers.

Just a day after vowing to “go to war on this issue” and telling detractors to “F— yourself,” Musk, the world’s richest man, acknowledged some of the criticisms of the program getting abused and argued that the US should make it more costly to hire foreigners.

“Easily fixed by raising the minimum salary significantly and adding a yearly cost for maintaining the H1B, making it materially more expensive to hire from overseas than domestically,” Musk wrote on X late Saturday in response to a thread claiming H1-B visas were being used to hire low-wage programmers and developers.



If you rested over the weekend and avoided the news, this may be new to you.  Here's some commentary that took place on the topic.









Friday night, Ruth expalined  "The Chump has hit the fan:"


Did you notice?  We are still over 24 days or so before Convicted Felon Donald Chump is sworn in and reoccupies the White House and he is floundering, staggering around like a dying corpse. Chump's betrothed Elon Musk and maid of honor Vivek Ramaswamy have been in the news for their insulting attacks on American workers and insisting that immigrants need to be brought into this country because American workers do not have the skills (Mr. Musk) and they watch the wrong T.V. programs (Miss Ramaswamy).  They are now being savaged by many MAGA voters.  Brad Reed (RAW STORY) reports:


MAGA influencer Laura Loomer appeared on Steve Bannon's "War Room" podcast on Friday to warn President-elect Donald Trump against letting X owner Elon Musk into his administration.

In an interview with Bannon, Loomer charged that Musk had major conflicts of interest and said that it could turn into a major scandal if Trump keeps him in his inner circle.

"I am simply trying to warn the Trump administration about something that is going to blow up in their face," she said. "And it actually has the risked of getting President Trump impeached in his second term if the Democrats take back the House and are able to spin and create a narrative that... they are enriching themselves in the Trump administration. I'm trying to warn them about a serious issue on the horizon."


Monica Sager (NEWSWEEK) adds:


In a stream of posts on the alt-tech social platform Gettr, former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon warned that billionaire Elon Musk's "true colors" are showing with the ongoing debate about the H-1B visa program.

"True Colors Shining Through," Bannon captioned a post that included an Axios article about how a "MAGA Civil War" has broken out "over race, immigration and billionaires versus the working class."

[. . .]

Bannon has previously called Musk a "stone-cold liar" and said "his paymasters" are from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), referencing the billionaire's extensive business ties to the East Asian nation.

Bannon had also said that Tesla was Musk's only thing "of real value," adding that Musk "uses it for margin loans." Those criticisms came in 2023 before Musk was publicly a leading Trump supporter.


Former U.S. House Representative Joe Walsh has weighed in, "And you are right -- Musk & Ramaswamy are being eaten right now by an intolerant, nationalistic mob that they played a large role in helping to create. They both deserve to be eaten by their mob."  So that is a non-MAGA Republican take. 



Musk exploded and raged on Twitter.  Then someone emerged on Twitter to defend him -- someone most believe was Musk himself trying to pretend to be someone else.   Most who believe that it was really Elon includes Elon's daughter Vivian Wilson.



As for Vivek, Ann noted:

What makes someone trash?  Maybe insulting their own country.  Take this:

Entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, a close Donald Trump ally tasked with helping to dismantle the federal government, is facing scorn from both sides of the aisle for saying America has a culture problem — it focuses on prom queens and sports over math and science — and that's why tech companies hire more people from India and China.


Don't remember hearing that kind of talk from him when he was trying to get the Republican Party's presidential nomination.  He lost.  Now he's going to let the country know what he really thinks of it. 

He's upset, it turns out, because in the 90s America watched Saved By The Bell.  Huh?

No, it doesn't make sense but what also doesn't make sense is that I never watched Saved By The Bell and I'm not the only one who didn't watch.  It was probably a popular show but it did not grip me.  

He's angry because -- look at him -- he can't do a single push up but America, he insists, glorifies cheerleaders and football players.  

Poor little nerd.  Someone gave him an atomic wedgie and it traumatized him for life.

Vivek Ramaswamy's stupidity saves him to a degree.  It's hard to rage against a hate merchant when they're also offering bad pop cultural references that don't mean -- even on the most basic level -- what they claim.  Or does no one get that Ross was the Urkel of FRIENDS and Ross got Rachel and well as good paying jobs?

As the war on the right that Elon started continues, Elon now tries to offer a new spin to his remarks as he prays to himself that he can fool and control MAGA again:

Elon Musk admitted that the H1-B visas are “broken” and floated a potential fix as he sought to cool a raging civil war within the MAGA base over the immigration program for highly skilled foreign workers.

Just a day after vowing to “go to war on this issue” and telling detractors to “F— yourself,” Musk, the world’s richest man, acknowledged some of the criticisms of the program getting abused and argued that the US should make it more costly to hire foreigners.

“Easily fixed by raising the minimum salary significantly and adding a yearly cost for maintaining the H1B, making it materially more expensive to hire from overseas than domestically,” Musk wrote on X late Saturday in response to a thread claiming H1-B visas were being used to hire low-wage programmers and developers.


Elon has created a nightmare for Donald Chump.  It's harming the brand, the message and the cohesion.  It's even left the professional liars at FOX "NEWS" scrambling.Corbin Bolies (THE DAILY BEAST) notes:

The Fox & Friends Weekend hosts tried their best on Sunday to make sense of the MAGA mess over H-1B visas last week, but even they admitted Donald Trump’s flip-flop on the program “left a lot of people confused.”

Hosts Rachel Campos-Duffy, Charlie Hurt, and Will Cain reflected on the online meltdown over the visas, which are backed by close Trump allies Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. The issues, they said, were in abuses of the system that prioritized cheaper labor over Musk-type prodigies.

 Even they couldn't make sense of him.  But who could?  The man who brought hate merchants back to Twitter and allowed Tweets endorsing the lynching of Black people and Tweets calling for the murder of gay people and Tweets where Maga's proclaimed that they were going to go into Target and shoot it up, this man or 'man' couldn't then handle when he was on the receiving end of what he'd done to others.  And did you notice?  His pep squad -- Matt Taibi, Glenneth Greenwald and the others -- didn't object.  It was censorship, they insisted, pre-Musk when Twitter banned people for hate speech.  Over the weekend as Musk banned people for being critical, the fake asses said nothing.  Not one word.  


The MAGA meltdown comes at a bad time for Donald Chump.  Tom Boggioni (RAW STORY) observes:  

At a time when Donald Trump's inner circle should be working on getting his Cabinet nominees primed for getting Senate approval, now time is being spent tamping down on a foreign worker controversy that has riled the president-elect's base forcing him to have to weigh in.

At the center of the controversy are comments made by Trump advisors Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk about America needing more H-1B foreign specialty workers which has erupted into a war with Trump's MAGA base that had been promised "America First" policies.

 
He's not even sworn in and already Chump has to address one brewing scandal after the other.  Let's wind down with this from Michael Albert (ZNET):


Donald, the idiot, the madman, the consummate cowardly thug is preparing to unleash shock and awe to paint his agenda onto the American and the world stage such as we have never seen before. Day one, two, three…infinity. He will attempt to unleash the hounds of horror. Why? 

To impose his horrendous agenda—of course. But what’s his rush? To embrace MAGA ever more intimately and to draw those who inhabit its fringes to its center. To instill well beyond MAGA’s fringes futility so debilitating that we either shut up and hunker down to protect ourselves or we kiss up and hope for a few goodies while others suffer. You doubt this prognosis? Okay, suppose we get oil madness, high waters rising, storms beyond measure, deportations beyond counting, gilded billionaire enrichment, intensified austerity, gutted regulations, fascist retooling of government, international mayhem, and vengeful repressive violence not by shock and awe but by slow boiling in a monstrous kettle. How different is that in the end? 

What’s the alternative? Resistance. And what is that? It is saying no by every effective means one can employ. It is no longer laughing and winking. No longer denying what this thug is all about. No longer shrugging it off. It is telling the truth to all in range, so all souls can hear it, openly, loudly, no sugar coating—and trying to act on it. 

When someone with the steering wheel of a gargantuan tank revs the motor and hollers I am going to drive this wonderful magnificent machine upside your head, does it make sense to assume that he doesn’t mean it? That he is just joking? Is it sensible to predict that he won’t be able to aim it? Is it wise to say that someone else, something else, is going to stop him? Or to suppose he is just going to run over a neighbor. For those reasons should we not read the news today and instead return to dressing this morning, and tomorrow morning, and the next and the next, preparing each day for familiar life and familiar life only as if there is no tank? There is no emergency? Does it make sense, even, to list reasons why others won’t resist and then proclaim that because they’re not going to resist you won’t either? Maybe it does make some limited kind of sense, but will it stop the tank?





The following sites updated:




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Friday, December 27, 2024

Trashy Mommy whines that her trashy son remains behind bars

Accountability?  Don't ever expect it from criminals who try to overthrow a government.  ATLANTA BLACK STAR NEWS reports:


The mother of Enrique Tarrio, leader of the Proud Boys and a chief architect of the Jan. 6 insurrection, has gone public with her plea to President-elect Donald Trump to release her son from prison.

“President Trump, I think my son and most of those J6, if not all, deserve to be home with their families,” Zuny Tarrio said in an interview with a WTVJ, an NBC affiliate in South Florida. “We’ve suffered long enough.”


What he should be is publicly executed before a firing squad.  From WIKIPEDIA:

Henry "Enrique" Tarrio[7] (US English: /ˈtɑːrioʊ/ TAR-ee-oh, US Spanish: [taˈri.o]; born 1983 or 1984) is an American convicted seditionist[8] and far-right activist. From 2018 to 2021, he was the chairman of the Proud Boys,[7] a neo-fascist organization that promotes and engages in political violence in the United States.[9] Along with three other Proud Boys leaders, Tarrio was convicted in May 2023 of seditious conspiracy for his role in the 2021 United States Capitol attack. In September 2023, Tarrio was sentenced to 22 years in prison.[6][10]

Tarrio, who is Afro-Cuban, was the Florida state director of the grassroots organization Latinos for Trump.[11][12][13] In 2020, Tarrio was a candidate in the Republican primary election for Florida's 27th congressional district, but withdrew.[3][4][14] According to a former federal prosecutor and the transcripts of a 2014 federal court proceeding, Tarrio had served as an informant to both federal and local law enforcement from 2012 to 2014.[15][16][17]




Read the full entry to see his repeated arrests over the years.  Instead of begging for him to be released, his pathetic mother should be apologizing to the nation for all the crimes he's committed for decades now.  The trash whines that her baby boy wasn't even in DC.  No, he was calling the shots from outside of DC:


Evidence introduced at trial against Tarrio and his co-defendants included videos, thousands of messages on encrypted group chats among Proud Boys leadership, as well as public messages on Parler, from both before and on January 6.[86] Tarrio had convened a "Ministry of Self Defense" (or "MOSD") to coordinate Proud Boys leadership on January 6.[86] The chats showed that Tarrio, stationed in a Baltimore hotel room, encouraged the Proud Boys as they attacked the Capitol.[78][87] Having been barred from D.C. by a judge, Tarrio was not in D.C. during the attack.[68]

On January 6, Tarrio told his followers on social media, "Do what must be done"; later, in an encrypted group chat, he directed other Proud Boys to "Do it again." In another message, Tarrio wrote, "Make no mistake. We did this."[78] Prosecutors also introduced evidence that Tarrio had discussed with associates a plan to have a large crowd in Washington storm government buildings, a scheme that the Proud Boys dubbed "1776 Returns", in which "The Winter Palace" was used as apparent code for the US Capitol.[87]

Tarrio chose not to take the stand to testify in his own defense.[84] A key prosecution witness was former Proud Boy Jeremy Bertino, a former lieutenant of Tarrio who after the January 6 attack pleaded guilty to seditious conspiracy and cooperated with the government. On the stand, Bertino implicated Tarrio and his codefendants in the conspiracy, testifying that their objective was to subvert the election results.[88][89]

In its closing argument, the prosecutors said that the evidence showed that the Proud Boys viewed themselves as "Trump's army"; were "willing to commit violence on his behalf"; and were committed to "all-out war" to keep Trump in power and to stop Biden from taking office.[78] The defendants' lawyers sought to depict the Proud Boys as merely a glorified "drinking club",[84] and Tarrio's lawyers sought to shift responsibility to Trump himself.[78] On May 4, 2023, the jury issued its verdict, finding Tarrio, Nordean, Biggs, and Rehl guilty of seditious conspiracy.[78]


The trashy son may get pardoned by Donald Chump but he's scum and so is she. 


"Iraq snapshot" (THE COMMON ILLS):

Friday, December 26, 2024.  The Water Cooler Set declares the death of non-FOX "NEWS" cable channels while not understanding the changing media landscape, lived reality is about to hit MAGA hard, and much more.



Let's kick things off with Amanda Marcotte (SALON):


In the face of Vice President Kamala Harris losing the presidential election to Donald Trump, the punditry's focus has been almost exclusively on asking how the Democrats couldn't beat a relentless liar with 34 felony convictions and a previous attempted coup under his belt. Everyone has a different theory about Harris' "messaging," with every critic inevitably arguing that if she had just talked more about their pet issue, she would have won.

Another option, however, is to listen to what swing voters who backed Trump said about their decision. That would seem the wisest choice, but to be fair to people who don't want to go there, hearing these people out is a truly miserable experience. What quickly becomes evident about the median voters in an American focus group is how profoundly opposed they are to even the most basic factual information. On the contrary, it's a community with a pathological aversion to reality, where people compulsively react to anything truth-shaped with hostility, running as hard as they can toward disinformation. They are addicted to BS. Of course they voted for Trump, the country's most reliable dealer of their favorite drug. 
This may sound ungenerous to these voters, but only if you've been sparing yourself the torture of engaging their actual opinions. If you hold your nose and dive in, it's startling how much the typical swing voter is allergic to facts. It's not just ignorance, but overt hostility to anything that smacks of veracity. Such as the Trump voter who insisted to the New York Times that Democrats are "lying about pregnancies," by conveying factual information about abortion bans. Or the one who falsely believed "so many people just walk right across the border and get free housing, free food." Or the one who was excited that "Trump brings a Robert Kennedy Jr. or a Tulsi Gabbard and Elon Musk." Or the one who said the  "Democratic Party [is] going after average people who disagreed on Covid, who disagreed on school boards, who disagreed on boys playing in women’s sports," which is just a way to complain about liberals who criticize him on social media for saying things that aren't true. 
Sarah Longwell's "Focus Group" podcast ended the year by interviewing Joe Rogan fans who voted for Trump for the first time this election. It was a smart choice, and not just because Rogan's endorsement likely pushed Trump over the top in a shockingly close election. Rogan's audience perfectly illustrates the way the firehose of disinformation online — his conspiracy theory-hyping podcast has over 16 million followers — has pickled the brains of so many otherwise normal people. Most of the people Longwell interviewed couldn't go two minutes without coughing up a conspiracy theory. Everything is a shadowy plot, from the COVID-19 pandemic to the guy who shot Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania. The straightforward details of the shooting of UnitedHealth CEO Brian Thompson came out after the arrest of Luigi Mangione, and yet these voters refused to believe the banal facts. Some are wallowing in theories that Mangione is a patsy, or that the shooting is a psyop. The truer any information was, the more they rejected it. 


MAGA is stupid.  There's no reason to pretend otherwise.  When we'd get a MAGA uber drive in whatever state we were campaigning in last fall, their ignorance regarding how a tariff works wasn't the only thing that came up.  There was so much more stupidity.  

We noted on recently and a lot of people e-mailed asking what was I talking about.  Roseanne Barr gave a big speech that people on the YOUTUBE left and 'left' mocked -- it did deserve that -- but didn't really seem to understand.

Roseanne, in her speech, was talking about Donald Chump as a savior to children -- I'm blocking the speech -- in my mind -- because it's so painful to watch someone who should know better fall into lies.

And I know Roseanne so I know how she fell in.  Things didn't make sense to her, she smokes way too much pot, her sleep is always erratic meaning she's often up all night reading conspiracies on the internet and taking them as truth and praising God that he's seen fit to enlighten her and now it's her job to enlighten others.

While he was in office from 2017 through 2021, she honest believes -- because of lies on the internet -- that governments -- including the US -- are part of some world sex slavery system for children and that Chump fought that.  He was the savior of children.  

These people have been taken out of the real world and plopped into crazy land.

And if you speak to them -- and we spoke to several nut jobs especially when we were campaigning in South Carolina -- you'll find that they base this on internet liars and on the corporate media system.

Internet liars should be obvious, they're spreading it.

Why did the nut jobs also point to the corporate media.

In their minds, the corporate media proved that this lie was true.  How so?  We would be told that back in 2016 when Hillary Clinton and others were accused of running a children's slave trade out a pizza place in DC, the media was all over that and calling it a lie and blah blah blah. 

But, we would be told, notice how they don't say a word about the slave trade Trump is fighting!!!!!

That's proof that it's real!!!!

The media doesn't have the time to respond to every nut job on RUMBLE.  But they need to start responding.

It's no fun.  I get that.  In the last four years, I think we've noted four liars on RUMBLE.  They're disgusting people and life is frankly too short for me.  But the media needs to be covering it regularly.  When they do not call it out, it leads already deluded people to become even more irrational and more delusional.  

I spoke about this in a post-election analysis and one person noted that if outlets have time to assign journalists to the Taylor Swift beat and the Beyonce beat, they certainly have time -- and money -- to cover the underbelly of the internet that spreads one lie after another and never gets challenged.

I'm not in the mood to sugar coat.  MAGA lives pathetic lives.  There's the economy, yes.  But it's so much more than that.  They are pathetic.  And they need to whine and scapegoat.  So they target women and people of color who are not their enemies but whom they see as getting ahead while they're sinking.  And the resentment builds and they need some unifying theory to explain why this is going on.  So they latch on to conspiracy theories while looking for a con artist to rescue them.

"He's a convicted felon!" doesn't matter to them when they're embracing the lie that governments -- including our own -- are participants in global sex trafficking of children and only Donald Chump can save us!!!

They delude themselves and if the lies aren't being addressed by the corporate media, they read that as an admission that the lies are true.

We're probably all doomed, to be honest.  Even MSNBC is bringing on crack pots to normalize Chump.  We almost posted an MSNBC segment -- I don't know who the host was, some woman -- due to the title but I paused and thought, stream it first.  I did.  I then deleted it -- I do the evening and overnight posts here at least four hours in advance.  I studied poli sci -- undergraduate and graduate.  I am well aware of the hypothesis that a madman can bring security to a multi-polar system in some ways.  Their Republican guest was trying to make that argument but didn't know that argument.

Chump's lunatic statements about grabbing this country or that?  That's now how even a madman brings security.  Those statements only inflame international relations.  And lead to no options are off the table assertions from other crazy leaders of other countries.

But that's what we got on MSNBC. 



Instead of doing what they should be doing -- exposing lies and taking on crackpot notions -- they are bending to him.

And it's stupid for democracy but it's also stupid for business.

The ratings are in free fall!

This is what those pushing changes at CNN and MNSBC insist.  

Historically, this is the month when ratings go into free fall.  Why?  Few care about politics in the holiday season.  Interest tapers off following a general election.

There is a lesson to learn and that was provided by MORNING JOE which, post-election, began fawning over Chump and saw their ratings drop significantly.  The smartest thing MSNBC could do would be ditch that program. The fawning broke the trust the viewers had for the hosts and then the hosts screaming and yelling at viewers about how people are too stupid to understand what they -- Joe and Mika -- were doing and all that other garbage.  It's really the most harmful program the network has.


Ratings keep being mentioned.  Ratings aren't everything or the only thing.  MORNING JOE is also down on streaming -- which, let's remember, is where everything's headed.  Like it or not, that's where it's headed and it's how news and public affairs programs are increasingly consumed.


Take out THE FIVE and FOX "NEWS" is not doing well in streaming.  MSNBC is doing much better and has many segments that go over 70,000 views -- some well over that. Take out THE FIVE and you're not seeing a lot of hit clips on YOUTUBE for FOX when it comes to streaming in the last 24 hours.  You're dealing with a lot of 14 thousand and 40 thousands.  Their biggest streamer in the last 24 hours is 135K for the story about how Russia might have shot down a plane.  MSNBC has three videos on that topic and the one with the largest streams is at 221K.  CNN covered that as well and their YOUTUBE clip is at 459K.

FOX "NEWS" will from this day forward most likely always have higher viewers because their viewers are older and are youngsters who hit old age early (there's a reason it's called conservativism).  But, so sorry all you idiots who keep insisting that these are the worst times for cable 'news' that's not FOX, that is not accurate.  

The landscape changed some time ago -- long enough for MODERN FAMILY to have done a joke about it and have Hayley explain that her generation gets their news watching a video at the gas pump -- and all the media observers this month and last acting as though FOX "NEWS" is the big success and the business model of the future?  That's just not true.

That should have been in Ava and my piece.  In "Raison d'être (Ava and C.I.)," we noted the liars.  We didn't note the lazy.  Lazy people do no research and run with conventional wisdom and that harms us all.  


And while this nonsense has gone on, no one's really challenged it.  The Water Cooler Set is what Ava and I have long called these lazy idiots.  Many have print experience.  You're seeing the impact the internet is having on broadcast and cable and not one of these conventional wisdom idiots can think back to how the internet changed the figures for newspapers?  How the audience shifted to outlets websites and not printed page.  The consumers want to consume when they want to.  They don't want to be dictated to or tied to a schedule they didn't make.

But instead of talking about how consumers are taking in public affairs programs and news stories, we're getting garbage that among the oldy crowd (elderly and those born old), FOX "NEWS" is a success!!!  When in fact the streaming on YOUTUBE says otherwise.  And you pull segments from THE FIVE out of the mix and FOX "NEWS" is an embarrassment in terms of streams.

By the way, here's the CNN video on Russia that beat MSNBC and FOX "NEWS."


 

Donald Trump has promised to cut energy costs, but an expert said some of his policies might end up hurting his own supporters.

The price of natural gas looks likely to jump despite record-high production, which could undermine the president-elect's campaign pledge, and political analyst Leah Wright Rigueur told CNN that energy costs are largely outside the government's control.

"I think, you know, the secretary of the interior, I think the secretary of energy both understand that or the newly appointed, the nominated secretaries understand that," said Rigueur, an assistant professor of public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. "What is more interesting, I think right now is the fact that under [president Joe] Biden, these kind of energy policies, particularly under the Inflation Reduction Act, have actually been deeply beneficial to red states and blue states, but in particular red states, in some cases rescuing manufacturing, rescuing energy production, rescuing all kinds of industry, and so there is a push amongst Republicans, particularly Republican congressmen, to keep those acts and to keep those things in place."


As much as the press actually doing their job could help educate voters, the reality is that lived experience is about to educate a lot of people over the next four years. 

Jessica Corbett (COMMON DREAMS) notes:

Adding to alarm over U.S. President-elect Donald Trump's immigration plans, his "border czar" toldThe Washington Post in an interview published Thursday that the administration plans to return to detaining migrant families with children.

Tom Homan, who served as acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement during Trump's first term, said that ICE "will look to hold parents with children in 'soft-sided' tent structures similar to those used by U.S. border officials to handle immigration surges," the Post summarized. "The government will not hesitate to deport parents who are in the country illegally, even if they have young U.S.-born children, he added, leaving it to those families to decide whether to exit together or be split up."

Since Trump beat Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris last month, migrant rights advocates have reiterated concerns about the Republican's first-term policies—such as forced separation of families—and his 2024 campaign pledges, from mass deportations to attempting to end birthright citizenship, despite the guarantees of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Homan—who oversaw the so-called "zero tolerance" policy that separated thousands of migrant kids from their parents—said: "Here's the issue... You knew you were in the country illegally and chose to have a child. So you put your family in that position."



And then there's Elon and other idiots.  



 


Their statements are outraging even MAGA.  Educating MAGA now in the way that the media failed to do in the lead up to the election.  Charlie Nash (MEDIAITE) notes:


 Former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy received heavy backlash on Thursday after he suggested that Americans were not being hired because they were mediocre.

After Ramaswamy and billionaire Elon Musk came under fire from prominent Trump supporters on X, formerly Twitter, for supporting H-1B visas over the training and hiring of American workers, Ramaswamy defended his position in a post which accused the United States of suffering from a culture of “mediocrity.”

 
The following sites updated:







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