The official TLR State of the Union fukkery watch thread (Starts at 9PM ET)

[TripleAgent]

here’s the thing. not every country has the same history nor historical consciousness. america is unique in that, its grotesque record of human rights abuses aside, it has been an experiment in freedom that no other nation in modern times can lay claim to.

and, that experiment took painful steps forward because of the blood black people shed for what little freedom we now enjoy.

because of that, the people have been inculcated on the ideals - however false or empty they may be - of “freedom” and “liberty.”

if you think the public will submit to fascism and go quietly into the night, you couldn’t be more mistaken.

i respect you have children, but you do know that many of the men who fought against nazi germany, vichy france, and other fascist regimes of that period had children, too, right?

"Harm reduction" and all variants of it means "I'm scared to lose my crumbs or to have to suffer for my people, so I'll let the next generation deal with it" like the last couple generations have.

Not the only person using his kids as an excuse around here, but not willing to do whatever it takes no not let them inherit the bullshyt.

 

[Kyle C. Barker]

here’s the thing. not every country has the same history nor historical consciousness. america is unique in that, its grotesque record of human rights abuses aside, it has been an experiment in freedom that no other nation in modern times can lay claim to.

and, that experiment took painful steps forward because of the blood black people shed for what little freedom we now enjoy.

because of that, the people have been inculcated on the ideals - however false or empty they may be - of “freedom” and “liberty.”

if you think the public will submit to fascism and go quietly into the night, you couldn’t be more mistaken.

i respect you have children, but you do know that many of the men who fought against nazi germany, vichy france, and other fascist regimes of that period had children, too, right?

I'm still waiting on specifics negro.

You already wasted our militia budget on GameStop stocks

 

[I Really Mean It]

"Harm reduction" and all variants of it means "I'm scared to lose my crumbs or to have to suffer for my people, so I'll let the next generation deal with it" like the last couple generations have.

Not the only person using his kids as an excuse around here, but not willing to do whatever it takes no not let them inherit the bullshyt.

you see it. been passing the buck for generations, yet haven’t moved a single inch.

 

[the elastic]

 

[Elim Garak]

 

[bnew]

Can somebody who got tik tok let me know what the comments are saying?

you can read comments on there at least on desktop.

 

[bnew]

'Republicans made a mistake': Pollster identifies GOP's biggest blunder on Biden SOTU

Sarah Longwell, a one-time Republican pollster who has kept her distance from the party ever since the emergence of former President Donald Trump, said the GOP made a grievous error by setting expectations so low for President Joe Biden's State of the Union response.Appearing on CNN Friday...

www.rawstory.com

'Republicans made a mistake': Pollster identifies GOP's biggest blunder on Biden SOTU​

Brad Reed

March 8, 2024 8:42AM ET

WASHINGTON, DC - MARCH 07: U.S. President Joe Biden delivers the State of the Union address during a joint meeting of Congress in the House chamber at the U.S. Capitol on March 07, 2024 in Washington, DC. This is Biden’s last State of the Union address before the general election this coming November. Biden was joined by Vice President Kamala Harris and Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA). (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Sarah Longwell, a one-time Republican pollster who has kept her distance from the party ever since the emergence of former President Donald Trump, said the GOP made a grievous error by setting expectations so low for President Joe Biden's State of the Union response.

Appearing on CNN Friday morning, Longwell said that Biden delivered an excellent address by any standard, but she added that its impact was enhanced because Republicans had spent so many months writing off Biden as a doddering invalid on the cusp of death's door.

"Last night, what he said was for the Democratic base," Longwell explained. "But how he said it was for swing voters who needed to see that this guy was all there, that he could do the job. And I told you yesterday when I was on the show, the Republicans have made a mistake because they set the bar at dementia."

Longwell said that the sharpness of Biden's address easily cleared that bar and added that "if that's what dementia looks like then I hope that's how I have dementia when I'm older because he was on his game."

Longwell also said that the Republican reaction to Biden's address showed that he was on top of his game.

"You can tell how well he did by how annoyed Republicans are this morning and last night," she said. "You could just see how upset they were."

Finally, Longwell praised Biden's ability to come across as a happy warrior who was eager to fight with his political rivals without outright hating them.

"He did the thing that I think Joe Biden is particularly good at, where he sparred with Republicans... he somehow managed to have it be incredibly political, he managed to be going right at republicans, but often was also joking with them, smiling at them, egging them on a little bit," she explained.

Watch the video below or at this link.


'Republicans made a mistake': Pollster identifies GOP's biggest blunder on Biden SOTU www.youtube.com

​

 

[bnew]

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/mar/09/journalist-accuses-katie-britt-child-sex-abuse-story\

Journalist says Katie Britt’s story about child sex abuse ‘out-and-out lie’​

Jonathan Katz accuses Britt of being ‘dishonest’ in State of the Union rebuttal with story about Karla Jacinto Romero​

Robert Tait in Washington

Sat 9 Mar 2024 17.33 EST

Doubts have been cast on the accuracy of a story about horrific child sex abuse told by the Republican senator Katie Britt in her widely ridiculed speech delivered in rebuttal to President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address.

The journalist and author Jonathan Katz has accused Britt of being “fundamentally dishonest” for invoking the case of a woman who had been sex-trafficked at age 12 and raped multiple times to illustrate the supposed failure of the Biden administration’s border control policies.

Republicans baffled by Katie Britt’s State of the Union response: ‘One of our biggest disasters’


Republicans baffled by Katie Britt’s State of the Union response: ‘One of our biggest disasters’
Read more

The controversy further intensifies the spotlight on Britt – a rising Republican star – after she came under fire from members of her own party for delivering a rejoinder to Biden on Thursday from the setting of a kitchen.

In that speech, Britt described travelling to the Del Rio sector of the US-Mexico border and cited the case of an unidentified woman, whom Britt said confided harrowing experiences. The senator implied these were a direct result of the ongoing crisis at the border, which Republicans have sought to exploit as a campaign issue.

“I spoke to a woman who shared her story with me,” Britt said. “She had been sex-trafficked by the cartels starting at age 12. She told me not just that she was raped every day, but how many times a day she was raped.”

The senator did not say where or when the events occurred, but in outraged tones she implied that they had happened in the US on Biden’s watch: “We wouldn’t be OK with this happening in a third-world country. This is the United States of America. And it’s past time we start acting like it. President Biden’s border crisis is a disgrace. It’s despicable and it’s almost entirely preventable.”

However, in a seven-minute video posted on TikTok, Katz – a former AP reporter who has written on drug wars in Mexico – cited details that appeared to show the story Britt was describing had happened not just outside the US, but many years before Biden became president.

He concluded that Britt had deliberately misrepresented the tale of Karla Jacinto Romero, an activist who has publicly recounted her experiences on numerous occasions at the hands of sex traffickers in her native Mexico.

Now 31, Romero testified to a US Congressional subcommittee in May 2015 describing her experiences at the hands of a trafficker who held her captive between the ages of 12 and 16, before she was eventually rescued. She has also spoken before the Mexican house of representatives and the Vatican.

Britt met Jacinto Romero on a visit to the border with two other Republican senators, Marsha Blackburn and Cindy-Hyde Smith, in January 2023.

The visit was described on Blackburn’s senatorial webpage, which included photos of the three senators sharing a platform with Romero at a news conference.

In his video, Katz dissected what he said was Britt’s attempt to conflate Romero’s story with the US-Mexico border imbroglio, where the build-up of asylum seekers promises to become a central issue in the 2024 presidential election, before lambasting her for “dishonesty”.

Katz said that Britt, by not giving a location or a timeframe for the story, had deliberately tried to create a “beyond misleading” impression that the events had taken place recently and on US soil.

“All I had to do was key in Karla Jacinto Romero’s name … and it took me to [her] testimony to Congress from 2015 about her experiences in Mexico,” he said.

“It took place between 2004 and 2008. I don’t know what they put in the textbooks of Alabama these days, but Joe Biden was not the president of the United States in 2004 or 2008. In 2004 and 2008, the president of the United States was George W Bush, a Republican. [But] none of this really matters because none of these events took place in the United States – or even near the border.”

Katz added: “It seems very clear to me that she is trying to create an association in people’s minds between Joe Biden, the border, Mexicans, you know, Latins – people of Latin descent – and sexual violence. That’s what she’s going for and she is doing it on the basis of something that you can only say is an out-and-out lie.

“It must have been obvious to her, at the very least, that she was not talking to somebody who had recently been 12 years old.”

Katz said he had sought a comment from Britt’s spokesperson but had received no reply. “For now, it just looks as if she got up on national television and lied about something really horrific and important – and for her own personal and her party’s political gain,” he said.

In a statement to media outlets, Britt’s spokesperson Sean Ross sidestepped commenting on whether the senator had been alluding to Romero in Thursday’s speech but insisted her account was “100% correct”.

“The Biden administration’s policies – the policies in this country that the president falsely claims are humane – have empowered the cartels and acted as a magnet to a historic level of migrants making the dangerous journey to our border,” he said. “Along that journey, children, women and men are being subjected to gut-wrenching, heartbreaking horrors in our own backyard.”

Following Britt’s speech, the gun control advocate Shannon Watts noted that the senator had used stories of sexual abuse in an effort to elect Donald Trump, who has been accused of rape in an allegation a judge called “substantially true”, and of assault or misconduct by more than 20 other women. “Senator Katie Britt says sexual assault is the worst thing that can happen to a woman while encouraging Americans to vote for a convicted sexual predator,” Watts said.

 

[bnew]

Biden Was So Good, Trump Is Accusing Him of Performance-Enhancing Drugs

We need a president who can get high on life?

nymag.com

THE NATIONAL INTEREST

Biden Was So Good, Trump Is Accusing Him of Performance-Enhancing Drugs

88 COMMENTS​

Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images

THE NATIONAL INTEREST MAR. 8, 2024

Biden Was So Good, Trump Is Accusing Him of Performance-Enhancing Drugs​

We need a president who can get high on life?​

By Jonathan Chait, who’s been a New York political columnist since 2011.

After Republicans spent years depicting him as a near-comatose vegetable who literally does not know where he is, President Biden delivered a forceful State of the Union address. This created a dilemma for Republicans. One option was to attack the speech as partisan and mean. Another, more deranged choice, was to insist that Biden had only pulled it off due to the aid of performance-enhancing drugs.

You can guess which option Trump went with. The former president began posting manically on social media that his adversary, who he has previously labeled “sleepy” and also the mastermind of a plot to control the Ukrainian justice system for the benefit of his son, was on some kind of drug combination.

His minions were quickly taking the insinuation as fact.







It is theoretically possible, I suppose, that an 81-year-old teetotaling Catholic has suddenly embarked upon a drug-fueled lifestyle. But this raises the question of why, exactly, we should care that Biden is using these wonder drugs to elevate his public performance.

After all, in sports, we limit steroid use and other performance-enhancing drugs because those drugs have awful side effects, and give those willing to accept them an unfair advantage. What are the side effects of Biden’s alleged drug use? (Other Trump posts mentioned Biden’s coughing, which, if true, seem like an acceptable trade-off for turning a dementia-riddled zombie into a sprightly leader.)

Or is the idea that Biden is somehow rigging the election by using some kind of drugs that turn him into an energetic public speaker? Is Trump seeding the ground to challenge a potential Biden victory on the grounds that it was drug-enhanced?

 

[bnew]

Joe Biden suddenly leads Donald Trump in multiple polls

The Democrat is outperforming the Republican in a series of polls.

www.newsweek.com

Joe Biden Suddenly Leads Donald Trump in Multiple Polls​

Today at null

01:08
How Donald Trump And Joe Biden Polls Look Eight Months Before Election

By Kate Plummer
FOLLOW​

President Joe Biden is beating his Republican rival, Donald Trump, in multiple polls as the presidential election campaign begins in earnest.

A rematch between Trump, the former president, and Biden has been all but confirmed in the general election after former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley last week dropped out of the GOP primary, leaving Trump without opponents.

Since then, a series of polls have suggested Biden will narrowly beat Trump in the November vote. But with eight months to go, and the polls so tight, this could change and a number of polls have also indicated that Trump will win the election.

Newsweek contacted Biden's campaign and a representative for Trump by email to comment on this story.

Joe Biden speaks at a campaign event at Pullman Yards on March 9, 2024, in Atlanta, Georgia. President Biden and former president Donald Trump are both campaigning in Georgia today ahead of the Primary election... MorePHOTO BY MEGAN VARNER/GETTY IMAGES

One poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation showed Biden leading Trump 47 percent to 44 percent. There were 1,072 registered voters surveyed between February 20 and 28 in this poll.

Another poll of 1,350 registered voters by Emerson College put Biden ahead of the Republican by two percentage points, 51 percent to 49 percent. The survey was carried out between March 5 and 6.

Of the 6,334 registered voters surveyed by Morning Consult between March 1 and 5, 44 percent would vote for Biden and 43 percent for Trump.

And Biden would beat Trump 43 percent to 42 percent, according to TIPP polling.

Writing in his Substack blog Hopium Chronicles, founder of the Democrat supporting New Democrat Network think tank, Simon Rosenberg said he was "optimistic" about the Democrats winning the election.

"A central reason I've been so optimistic about us winning in November is that I always believed that when it became clear to voters that it was Biden vs Trump, and the Biden campaign began in earnest, a big chunk of our wandering coalition would come home," he said. "Biden would then gain 3-4 points and open up a small but meaningful lead in national polling. It's possible that is what we we're seeing now."

However, in other polls, Trump is projected to beat Biden. A March 2 poll of 1,115 likely voters by Redfield & Wilton Strategies gave Trump a four-point lead over Biden, 43 percent to 39 percent.

A March 3 to 5 poll of 1,450 registered voters by YouGov forecasts Trump to garner 44 percent of the vote share to Biden's 42 percent.

Speaking to Newsweek, Heath Brown, an associate professor of public policy at City University of New York, said: "I wouldn't invest too much in any given poll or even a handful of polls. Both campaigns know this race is just about tied right now, will likely remain that way for a while, and are executing their strategies accordingly."

 

[bnew]