the real target is the companies that feel safe hiring such people
Please, no. We don't want it normalized for employers to scrutinize their employees' politics, regardless of ideology.
Don't they deploy updates like this in a development evironment first to test for exactly this kind of thing? I work in very low-level, mostly unimportant IT and I sweat breaking a single website that gets 100 visitors per month. How does something as big as this not get tested first?
Michelle Obama is particularly popular
Maybe she is, but is she actually popular outside of Democrats who already hero-worship the Obamas? It doesn't seem to me to be a crossover popularity that would bring in another cohort that isn't already on the "likely voter" table.
Trump has successfully convinced people that he wasn't making the decisions and the Deep State is to blame for the screw-up.
It astounds me that this and the stolen election narrative have somehow redounded to Trump's benefit among his supporters. To me, they sound like the plight of someone who is grossly incompetent at understanding and exercising the power he holds as President.
Did the congressional hearings ever explain the "sloped roof" thing?
It was referred to several times. I think once she said something about it like, "I should have been clearer in my statement about that..." without really explaining what that meant. It was a truly abysmal and laughably uninvested performance by her. I couldn't tell if she was a professional time-waster, an incompetent of sociopathic proportions, or a malicious actor. It's bewildering how detached she was from her professional responsibilities.
CBS news on the USSS saying their counter-snipers fired a single shot.
We can see the counter-snipers behind the stage on Trump's left take a few shots, but it's my understanding that it was the counter-snipers to the right of the stage that took the kill shot. I think the team on the left had their view partially obscured by a tree near the edge of the AGR building.
So, without indulging in conspiracies, the three different shot reports are easily accounted for: Crooks, and two counter-snipers.
If the counter-snipers to the left were local police and not SS, that would explain the discrepancy of the "single-shot" description coming from the SS.
Is number 5 surprising? If it’s an ongoing investigation presumably she wouldn’t want to comment one way or the other.
While I don't fault Cheatle for deferring to the FBI on the investigation pertaining to Crooks' motives and movements, for a report on the Service's activities related to July 13, it seems like it would've been trivially easy for her to come prepared with:
- The Action Plan for the July 13 event
- The list of SS and other agency operatives working 7/13 and their assigned duties
- A detailed "what we know now" timeline (with the caveat that their investigation may add or alter it) culled from interviews of of the agents involved.
Seems like a professional org could produce those items within 2-3 days of an incident. It really seemed like she never cared to inquire about anything personally, delegated her oversight, and thought she could just wing it in front of Congress.
Yeah, baring evidence not presented yet, Cheatle just seems at worst incompetent and at best woefully hands-off, rather than malicious.
I'm curious about her career. 20+ years in the Secret Service, with a majority of that on VP detail -- she reportedly escorted Cheney on 9/11 and later worked with the Biden family. A couple of years into Trump's admin, she quits and becomes a security bigwig for Pepsi. Biden pulls her back in about 18 months ago to head the SS.
One can guess that she hit it off with the Bidens during the Obama admin -- and who knows what crazy stuff she witnessed on that family's detail -- as they wanted her back last year. Did she move to Pepsi due to some issue with the Trump admin -- or Pence, if she was on his detail? Or did they have a problem with her if she was showing loyalties to the previous regime?
[EDIT: Answering my own question: "In 2016, she was appointed as the special agent in charge of the James J Rowley Training Center — the 202-acre Secret Service training academy." https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-07-22/secret-service-director-kimberly-cheatle/104113980 Maybe she just didn't like the change from detail agent to a desk job?]
I noticed a few senators asking pointedly about her private communications with Jill Biden, and then saw some suggestions on X today that she may have been "involved" with Dr. Jill, so maybe that's a rumor swirling around DC and just starting to poke its head out for the rest of us.
It is intriguiging that someone who seems to display zero leadership or professional curiosity was gifted with the top job; but sometimes these figurehead roles can be handled with some quality delegation and run on autopilot -- until the shit hits the fan, leaving the detached leader looking like a deer in the headlights because they never really knew what was happening.
I think what you're talking about it more "optics" than "DEI," unless the intent is to remove DEI from the context that actually makes it negative.
A lot of VPs are picked to balance out the weaknesses of the main candidate. Trump picked Pence to give his ticket someone grounded in traditional GOP politics. He picked Vance to give his ticket some youth. Obama picked Biden to balance "inexperienced young black" with "seasoned journeyman white," etc. etc.
DEI is a subset of optics, and more cynical one. Not many people would argue with the generic values of "diversity, equity and inclusion" if defined broadly (well, "equity" is problematic unlike "equality") but the specific policy implications of brand-name DEI as practiced by its proponents is corrosive, and the acronym just becomes a shorthand for criticizing those implications.
The comms failure is, to use a popular parlance, "weird." If the Secret Service is in charge of security for an event, and commonly enlists local LEO as support for their mission, it's baffling to me that it's common practice to silo local LEO's ability to communicate with the SS. If it's not common practice, then it's doubly "weird" that it happened to coincide with here with so many other seemingly obvious breeches in protocol.
In security, in the event of a breach, speed of communication between different layers of the responding force is crucial, and this system seems to have been designed to prevent responder communication from the bottom to the top.
It does call to mind the comical depiction of the FBI in the movie Die Hard, which suggests a derisive elitist attitude from the Feds toward the locals, but it's shocking to see it play out in real life like this.
Biden kicks the bucket sometime around late September and Harris gets a sympathy bump in the polls, and also makes her President thankfully with only a very narrow window in which to screw something up before the election.
I was thinking that they might be holding a 25th amendment claim in their pocket for an October boost if they feel they need it. Get some "first female president" good vibes to propel them over the finish line.
What are they even doing? Where are the ads? Where are the memes?
Aren't these pretty much limited to X? No other platform wants them.
Basically a bunch of people who had reason to dislike him came forward and badmouthed his claims about his military service. I have no idea what the truth is or the specifics of the claims.
Their claim was that he was a rich kid who wanted military "experience" for his future political career and didn't do anything as soldier. IIRC they even suggested his Silver Star was earned via an intentionally-inflicted minor wound that also got his tour cut short.
Any minnesotans got any cool stories about him?
Some of the stuff coming out about him includes:
- Claims that he quit his National Guard post when they were called up to Iraq but has continued to play it up in his bio, including citing a retroactively invalidated rank
- Was once arrested for DUI going nearly 100mph in a 55 zone
- While he allowed Minneapolis to burn in 2020 his wife found romance in the smell of the fiery destruction
- Presided over the redesign of the MN state flag to resemble the Somali flag
- "Tampon Tim"
Can't vouch for the truthiness of any of these. Interesting how #1 & #2 strongly echo attacks on Geroge W Bush in 2000 and 2004.
Name-calling and “vibes” were also the strategy in 2016. Racist/Sexist/Orange/Fascist have literally always been the plan of attack against Trump.
Trump is nothing new in substance, only in style. He's the ugly reflection of politics-as-usual who doesn't feign civility while throwing the same knives.
the "Vance is weird" thing REALLY got under GOP's skin
I've seen this claim a lot on Reddit, along with the celebration of Waltz's dig at the Vance couch rumors. I think it's either a disingenuous interpretation or a case of the Democrats getting high on their own supply. Here's how I interpret the Right's indignance at both of these attacks:
They are both completely manufactured by the powerful coordination of Democrat politicians, the media, and big tech. The individual claims are a trifle, but it's the ease by which both were able to propagate into culturally pervasive conventional wisdom in hours is pretty frightening. They're also completely transparent in their engineering, which goes like this: 1. Make some oddball claim that is either opinion or invented from whole cloth. 2. Follow quickly with a barrage stories about how wounding this claim has been to Republicans. It's dizzying. I would be that most Republicans hadn't even heard of these attacks until after the round of stories came out claiming how devastating these attacks have been.
It's also notable how inauthentic these two claims are in that the attacks therein are virtues within liberalism, where weirdness and sexual noncoformity are supposedly sacred. So it also exposes a deep hipocrisy within Democrats who will apparently say anything to win (I'm not exempting the GOP/Trumpism from this, BTW, just pointing out that the lack of concern for principles is rarely this brazen and happy to be this brazen).
I'm surrounded by Republicans who don't care about these attacks. They're laughable, absurd even. Except for how powerfully they've been executed.
The fear of being too pro Israel isn't so much about votes as a first order effect
It is about votes if you need to win Michigan.
There's now a counter-attack to the couch meme forming on X with a false rumor that Waltz has admitted to drinking horse semen. This kind of low-blow falsehood becoming a tit-for-tat escalation is both not good and easily foreseeable.
What does this mean?
Here she is recalling indulging in the smell of burning tires as an evocation of our times: https://x.com/JessicoBowman/status/1820975378485100928
There's another one of her hoping the riots / looting last as long as they need to. I'll post it when I find it.
Or "a" Somali flag rather than "the" Somali flag: https://www.sportskeeda.com/pop-culture/news-the-united-states-losing-identity-new-minnesota-state-flag-s-resemblance-jubaland-somalia-sparks-controversy-online
Logan's Run
Also: Soylent Green & Midsommar
Lots of movie options that really sell mandatory euthanasia in a positive light!
Saint McConnell saw the necessity of this 30 years ago and went all in on his career to get the courts where they are today.
And who is ironically hated by MAGA as a swamp creature when his ability to navigate the swamp gave them Dobbs. I'm fairly certain that he made a deal with Trump in 2016: We GOP holdouts in the Senate will support you if you let us pick all the judges. It's emblematic of Trump's know-nothing approach to government and the blind cult of personality in his followers that McConnell is so despised by the new right.
I think about that a lot, for what it’s worth. Asking Pence not to certify the election seems like a bright line though.
If not for the 2020 election shenanigans I’d probably agree that he’s just like the prior republican candidates and we’ll see him as tame in ten years compared to the New Threat.
I struggle with this, too. I am anti-Trump for many reasons -- mainly that he's civically corrosive and ignorant of how to operate as president -- and I certainly think that he handled the aftermath of the 2020 election poorly. And I'm glad Pence stood up for order over chaos. However, I don't think that Trump (and the circle of hucksters that he attracts) being typically dumb in his reaction to a very fishy election negates that there was a lot of very fishy stuff going on with that election. IMO everything Trump did made it worse and not better, but the legitimacy of the gripe is still mostly unexamined and very concerning.
The difference is that nothing positive can break for Kamala.
What if Biden is declared unfit in early October and a new wave of enthusiasm for the First Woman President gives her a 5% boost to carry her through the election a week or two after she assumes office?
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As someone who is concerned with the degradation of civics, worrying about optics is super-fucking-important and more people should do it. We teach our kids that having bad feelings is normal, but we need to regulate how and where and when we express these feelings. Jack Black can have wet dreams every night about Trump dying, but as long as he knows that for some reason it's important to not say it out loud is crucial to our ability to function as a society.
That, to jump into another discussion upthread, is the toxicity of Trump: he doesn't care about maintaining civility. It may be refreshing to hear someone say all the dirty things we sometimes think in our worst moments but would never dare say -- but it's important not to take that as a license to just say whatever and not worry about its repercussions. (IMO, Trump and a lot of the media/Democrats who hate him are mirror images of each other on this, he's just a sharper, brighter reflection, so it's not a complaint isolated at him.)
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