The Frankish Reich

Mulvaney is said to have had about 1.8 million followers before the Outrage Machine jumped on the Bud Light posting. That's about what Stefon Diggs has. Now, we love Diggs, but I'm quite sure the majority of Americans would say "who?" It then increased by over a million. And is probably higher now. One person loving the controversy? Dylan Mulvaney.

In some kind of social media post that virtually no one saw UNTIL the Outrage Machine got wind of it. Correct. The Right Wing Outrage Machine must be fed. It is constantly looking for some perceived slight or nontraditional thing to jump on. I don't know if it's a good or bad thing that the Left Wing Outrage Machine is giving them a run for their money with the "slaves sometimes learned valuable skills" controversy. Turnabout is fair play?

Pure speculation on my part. But here's what I think happened. Biden was not lying when he suggested he was one of the poorer members of the Senate. After all, he didn't have a lot of inherited family money and he was in the Senate since he was 30 years old. So not much opportunity to accumulate wealth. Just the very good but not enough to get rich on Senate salary. Around the time of Obama-Biden's reelection, he decided that 2012 campaign would be his last. Hillary was, for symbolic and practical reasons, the annointed successor. Hunter had started trading on his family name. Biden - knowing that he wasn't going to be a public figure anymore - let his guard down and decided there was nothing wrong with making a little family fortune of his own to leave to his family. And his personal fortunes certainly do seem to have gotten a lot better since 2009. I don't know what he knew and when he knew it, but he probably did benefit from some Hunter deals, at least indirectly. One key is whether these things happened while he was VP or after. After? Unsavory, but probably not illegal. While VP? A whole different story. That's why I do believe that investigations are warranted here. I'd rather not have it turn into a congressional circus, but that's the world we live in.

Good to see Hunter staying on brand through all this turmoil: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12325023/Hunter-Bidens-lawyer-Kevin-Morris-seen-smoking-BONG-balcony-LA-home-clearly-visible-road-visit-presidents-son.html

There must be some kind of conspiracy against Oppenheimer too!

Yes, you are. Maybe it's best not to start a thread (now onto 4 pages) on someone none of us had ever heard of before the Right Wing Outrage Machine made him/her/them/whatever a cause celebre?

Let's see how it goes when Trump and DeSantis propose Muslim Immigration Ban 3.0, and all those petitions filed by Muslim Americans to bring over their moms and dads are voided.

No doubt some slaves learned skills that they used productively once freed. But it's ridiculously tone deaf. And I can't really think of an important reason to include it. So I must assume that it is included to satisfy the "America must not be presented as bad" guys. Think about similar jaw-droppingly stupid things we could say in a "fair and balanced" look at various atrocities. - The Holocaust was the worst abuse of humanity in the history of the world. Having said that, some Jews who escaped with their lives had developed survival skills that contributed to their success in building the state of Israel. - The Irish Potato Famine was caused or exacerbated by colonial British policies that led to the starvation and exodus of millions. But for those who survived and remained in Ireland, it spurred them to innovate and diversify their economy. It is the logical outgrowth of a political stunt led by DeSantis. One that he doesn't have the guts to defend on the merits now. Oh, he'll take credit for changes to the curriculum. Just not this change, which he won't even bother to defend on the merits. "I didn't write it." Kamala 1, Ron 0. Ouch.

All I know is your campaign is not off to a good start when even Kamala Harris is given the opportunity to own you. She's not a good speaker, but this is right in her wheelhouse and DeSantis was left whimpering about "not his idea to add this"

No doubt about it. That was my dad's story - his time in the Army turned his life around in a very good way. As they say - and I mean it here - thank you for your service.

Over the years many 18 year olds have made decisions like joining the military. Many of them live (or don't live) to regret it.

Irony is dead, Part 987: The Epoch Times is owned and operated by an actual cult.

Remains to be determined. You know, innocent until and all that. What do I think of the cases filed against him? - NY case based on falsifying a business record (the Stormy Daniels payoff): stupid case to bring. Bragg has an arguable legal theory, but it's a stretch. Stupid anyway. - Classified documents case: looks solid to me. Trump's main defense ("I'm the President, I can declassify anything just by thinking about it") refuted by his own recorded words. Some non-LOL defenses here, and a very favorable judge for him, but it looks solid to me. - Jan 6 case that's being worked up now: also seems like a strong theory. Keep in mind that there's Trump the Candidate and Trump the President. He blurred the two more than anyone else in history. He sought to intimidate election officials to find him votes. And we'll see, but it appears that Smith will have a witness or two willing to testify that he knew he lost, showing that his statements were not of the order of "since I know I got more votes than Biden, I need you to keep working to count them accurately," but rather on the order of "go out there as a good Republican and help me perpetrate a fraud."

Definitely not North Korea. Landscape was all wrong. See, with my many areas of expertise I study these things. I must have missed the Gillette issue. Or maybe it's just the Pats connection? I'm ok with boycotting anything Pats related.

Coulda fooled me! Give me a list of what movies and other products you are currently boycotting. That may save me from doing my next Woke is Whatever I Don't Like analysis.

Oh, I most certainly will. By the way, did you notice this in your anti-woke Maverick? And still you stream it with all the groomers.

Let me as The Woke Police. We have a lot of anti-woke cops around here. Woke or Not Woke? Top Gun II: Maverick featured a white hetero male lead and a white hetero male sidekick. Even though the obviously Iranian "enemy" is not named, the Americans were obviously the good guys (which they wouldn't have been if the "enemy" was the eastern Ukraine, in which case they would have been perpetuating the military industrial endless war deep state, but whatever ...). What if it had: A. Featured Tom Cruise as a straight white male lead with a young straight black male sidekick? [I'm guessing "not woke" since this is apparently kind of o.k.] B. Featured Tom Cruise as a straight white male lead with a young gay black male sidekick? I'm guessing it'd be labeled WOKE! C. Featured Tom Cruise as a straight white male lead with a young lesbian pilot sidekick? Come on, that's too easy. D. Featured Tom Cruise as a straight white male lead with a trans sidekick? You gotta be kidding me. E. Featured Tom Cruise as a straight white male lead in a mission to knock out a uranium enrichment facility in a rogue country controlled by a white nationalist leader? This version would be boycotted. F. Featured Tom Cruise listening to a lecture in front of a map which has Taiwan in the same color as the PRC? Probably o.k. so long as his character hasn't come out as bi.

Thank you. I know understand. It is "woke" if it has a black person or a gay person in a major role of the sort previously played by a white straight person.

I'm saying a movie clearly avoiding naming a geopolitical opponent of the United States - Iran - as "the enemy." Why? Well, I suppose it was to not offend Iranian Americans or even Muslims in general. It made for some stupid scenes. I actually thought I'd missed the line where "Iran" was named when I saw it, so I had to look it up when I got home. That's usually what we call "woke" - the desire not to offend someone, anyone, even if it's in a movie where it only makes sense to name names. So it gets a pass because overall it is viewed as a patriotic American movie. I'm watching another series now called "Hijack" on Apple TV. Pretty good thriller. Straightforward old-fashioned scripting linear scripting. A middle eastern airline (clearly a stand-in for Emirates) is the victim of the hijacking. I'm gonna guess that the original draft had a politically motivated 9/11 type hijacking. But they go out of their way to make the Arab characters generally pro-law enforcement and the bad guys are (you guessed it) a British drug and human trafficking gang. Got that? Human traffickers are now the only acceptable villains. It is hard to make sense of the plot with an ordinary crime syndicate as the villains - what, they're going to go on a suicide hijack mission for a criminal syndicate, not for a political belief?

No. Ideally, we would put both Trump and Biden in the rear view mirror and move on. Hypothetical: let's say Biden runs and loses in the electoral count. There are credible reports of voters in, say, Atlanta who were prevented from voting. O.K. for Biden to declare martial law, bring in federal officers to oversee a re-do in Georgia? O.K. for Biden to say that Kamala should refuse to certify Georgia's electoral slate? What if the pivotal state this time is one with a democratic legislature and governor?

Off the top of my head: - Relying, even in part, on the Steele Dossier was wrong. It was a political document put together at the behest (and apparent expense) of a political campaign, with its true provenance concealed by using a series of other funders (a Seattle law firm tied to the Democratic Party, etc.). That should not have happened. - The Trump campaign did collude with a Russian operative, and if they didn't know she was a Russian operative (the meeting that was mischaracterized as being about "Russian adoptions") they certainly should have known. - Jeff Sessions appointed Mueller to do the investigation. He issued a report, largely clearing Trump of actual collusion, and taking a rather agnostic stand with respect to obstruction. The document speaks for itself. There were convictions, properly obtained, involving important Trump campaign officials and the core basis for the investigation (Manafort). At that point it becomes a question of nomenclature - what is "collusion," since that isn't a legal term. None of that was DOJ's finest day. But again: it can't hold a candle to an attempt to cling to the presidency by cynically urging states to drum up slates of fake electors and urging the VP (with an intimidating mob outside and inside the Capitol) to do something clearly inappropriate and contrary to the rule of law. There you have it. I'm not excusing anyone for anything. I'm just pointing out that in life we need to recognize that not every wrong is of equal magnitude. Oh, well, now we're really grasping at straws. Yes, even worse! Worse too than Aaron Burr shooting Hamilton!!

I know woke when I see it. "The enemy" agrees.

I see you've just chided another poster for lack of reading comprehension. With that in mind, I urge you to re-read the post you responded to here: "Just not of the same order of magnitude [as what Trump did]" Not "acceptable." But does "not of the same order of magnitude" = "acceptable?"

I guess I'm not understanding what counts as "woke." One of the earlier MI movies edited out scenes of urban decay in Shanghai because China didn't like that. Woke? I guess not. Female fighter pilot in Maverick. Woke? I guess not. Black woman with red wig cast as wholly mythical creature in The Little Mermaid. Woke!!

I have lived in a couple small towns. And I don't mean tourist/resort towns or quaint college towns. One near the southwest border, one in the midwest. I knew many good people in both. But I was kind of shocked to find that what I used to think were "urban problems" (like drug addiction) were just as, if not more, prevalent in those towns. EDIT: yeah, its from the NYT, so feel free to brush it aside. But it kind of captures what's going on in many, many small towns across America, and with a great degree of empathy: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/22/opinion/rural-america-economy-revive.html