KaibaCorp
Warlord
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they'll just say that's her slovenian immigrant sensibilities acting up.
Election 2024 Part III: Out with the old!
- Thread starter Birdjaguar
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Thorgalaeg
Deity
Would love to live in a place with such endless desertic lands. Australia, Chile, Argentina, USA, Canada, Namibia... Sahara would also be nice, but it is too hot and full of people wanting to cut throaths.
This of course goes to show what "open up federal land" really means: "Open up national parks and Indian reservations to more exploitation from megacorps who want all the delicious resources there and don't want to have to deal with environmental protections"
SemiLazyGamer
Prince
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- Mar 15, 2021
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The International Longshoremen's Association and the United States Maritime Alliance, Ltd have reached a tentative agreement to boost pay for dockworkers, end the strike immediately, and extended the Master Contract until January 15th, 2025.
Broken_Erika
Play with me.
A Pair of Billionaire Preachers Built the Most Powerful Political Machine in Texas. That’s Just the Start.
Last December, Sid Miller, the Texas commissioner of agriculture, posted a photo of himself brandishing a double-barrel shotgun on X and invited his followers to join him on a “RINO hunt.” Miller had taken to stumping in the March primary election against incumbents he deemed to be Republicans in Name Only. Not long after that, he received a text message from one of his targets, a state representative named Glenn Rogers. “You are a bought and paid for, pathetic narcissist,” it began. “If you had any honor, you would challenge me, or any of my Republican colleagues to a duel.”Rogers, a 68-year-old rancher and grandfather of five, represents a rural district west of Fort Worth. He was proud to serve in a Legislature that, as he told me recently, “couldn’t be more conservative if it tried.” Since entering office in 2021, he co-authored legislation that allowed Texans to carry handguns without a permit, supported the Heartbeat Act that grants citizens the right to sue abortion providers and voted to give the police the power to arrest suspected undocumented migrants in schools and hospitals. In a statehouse packed with debate-me agitators, he was comparatively soft-spoken — a former professor of veterinary medicine with an aversion to grandstanding. He was not in the habit of firing off salvos, as he had to Miller, that ended with “Kiss My Ass!”
But the viciousness of the primary season had been getting to him. Nearly a year before the March elections, ads began to appear in Rogers’ district castigating him not simply as a RINO but as a closet liberal who supported gun control and Shariah law. (Rogers was especially peeved by an ad that photoshopped his signature white cowboy hat onto a headshot of Joe Biden.) Some of the attacks originated from his challenger’s campaign, while others were sponsored by organizations with grassroots-sounding names, like Texans for Fiscal Responsibility, Texas Gun Rights and Texas Family Project. By the time voters headed to the polls, they could have been forgiven for thinking that Rogers had disappointed a suite of conservative groups.
In reality, Rogers had disappointed two men: Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks, billionaires who have made their fortunes in the oil industry. Over the past decade, the pair have built the most powerful political machine in Texas — a network of think tanks, media organizations, political action committees and nonprofits that work in lock step to purge the Legislature of Republicans whose votes they can’t rely on. Cycle after cycle, their relentless maneuvering has pushed the statehouse so far to the right that consultants like to joke that Karl Rove couldn’t win a local race these days. Brandon Darby, the editor of Breitbart Texas, is one of several conservatives who has compared Dunn and Wilks to Russian oligarchs. “They go into other communities and unseat people unwilling to do their bidding,” he says. “You kiss the ring or you’re out.”
Like the Koch brothers, the Mercer family and other conservative billionaires, Dunn and Wilks want to slash regulations and taxes. Their endgame, however, is more radical: not just to limit the government but also to steer it toward Christian rule. “It’s hard to think of other megafunders in the country as big on the theocratic end of the spectrum,” says Peter Montgomery, who oversees the Right Wing Watch project at People for the American Way, a progressive advocacy group.
Texas, which has few limits on campaign spending, is home to a formidable army of donors. Lately Dunn has outspent them all. Since 2000, he and his wife have given more than $29 million to candidates and PACs in Texas. Wilks and his wife, who have donated to many of the same PACs as Dunn, have given $16 million. Last year, Dunn and his associated entities provided two-thirds of the donations to the state Republican Party.
The duo’s ambitions extend beyond Texas. They’ve poured millions into “dark money” groups, which do not have to disclose contributors; conservative-media juggernauts (Wilks provided $4.7 million in seed capital to The Daily Wire, which hosts “The Ben Shapiro Show”); and federal races. Dunn’s $5 million gift to the Make America Great Again super PAC in December made him one of Donald Trump’s top supporters this election season, and he has quietly begun to invest in efforts to influence a possible second Trump administration, including several linked to Project 2025.
Rogers believes he provoked the ire of the Dunn and Wilks machine for two reasons. He refused to support a school voucher bill that would funnel taxpayer dollars to private schools, and he voted to impeach Attorney General Ken Paxton, one of the machine’s most powerful allies. (Paxton, who did not respond to requests for comment, was impeached in part for misusing his office to help a friend under federal investigation.)
Since neither of these issues particularly excited voters, many attacks focused on distorting Rogers’ record on immigration instead. When his wife joined a text group for the spouses of incumbents under siege (they called themselves the Badass Babes), she saw that her husband was not the only opponent of vouchers who had supposedly given Democrats “control of the Texas border.” The mailers sent across the state were identical, with only the names and faces swapped out.
The onslaught worked. Rogers lost his seat by 27 percentage points, and more than two dozen statehouse candidates backed by the two billionaires prevailed this spring. These challengers received considerable support from Dunn-and-Wilks-backed allies like Miller, the agricultural commissioner, as well as from GOP heavyweights like Gov. Greg Abbott. “You cannot overstate the absolute earthquake that was the March 5 primary,” says Matt Mackowiak, a political consultant and chair of the Travis County GOP.
The morning after his routing at the polls, Rogers published an editorial in The Weatherford Democrat. Commendably short on self-pity, it argued that the real loser in his race was representative democracy. “History will prove,” he wrote, “that our current state government is the most corrupt ever and is ‘bought’ by a few radical dominionist billionaires seeking to destroy public education, privatize our public schools and create a theocracy.”
https://www.propublica.org/article/...ections-voting?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us
JD Vance Claims Trump Won 2020 Election, Won't Say He'll Concede A Loss
Vance has repeatedly accused the media of being "obsessed" about an election Trump regularly brings up.After refusing to answer questions about it on the debate stage Tuesday night, the GOP’s vice presidential nominee, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), falsely claimed Thursday that Donald Trump won the 2020 election, as well as refused to say if he’ll accept a loss. Trump’s running mate, who has propped up the GOP presidential nominee’s election conspiracy theories in the past, continued to do so when Jason Selvig of The Good Liars, a political comedy duo, asked him if he believes Trump’s repeatedly disproven claims that President Joe Biden stole the election from him.
“Did Donald Trump win the 2020 election?” Selvig asked Vance. “Yes,” Vance replied. When Selvig repeated the question, Vance gave an affirmative “yep.”
Selvig then asked Vance whether he’ll concede if Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democrats’ nominee for president, gets more votes than the Trump campaign. Vance refused to answer.
“I really feel bad for you, man,” Vance said to Selvig after he repeated the question.
Vance has been facing pressure to address where he stands on Trump’s election conspiracy theories since his recent debate against Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz. On stage, Walz asked Vance if he still believes Trump was the true victor of the 2020 election, alluding to comments Vance made earlier this year questioning the election’s results and saying Trump should ignore “illegitimate” U.S. Supreme Court rulings on the matter. “Tim, I’m focused on the future,” Vance replied before pivoting to an attack on Harris.
Walz quickly called him out. “That is a damning non-answer,” he said. “I’m pretty shocked by this. [Trump] lost the election. This is not a debate. It’s not anything anywhere other than in Donald Trump’s world.”
There is no Democrat associated media in the US.
Voidwalkin
Emperor
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I actually know someone who did this. Woman moved to Alaska because she was poor. She met her husband there. According to her they had a homestead, in addition to land bought dirt cheap. They just hunted moose, neither worked, beyond selling the antlers to bars.
Unfortunately, he passed of a heart attack. She moved back shortly after; the inconsistencies of sunshine affected her more powerfully without her husband, I guess.
Zardnaar
Deity
USA immigration rates about right.
Australia, Canada, NZ probably need less in short term eg 5 years for housing demand to go down.
Parts of Europe need massive numbers.
Proportionally I'm talking about.
Zardnaar
Deity
Mist of those places are Linda appealing tbh. Except Vegas.
Ajidica
High Quality Person
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![[pissed]](/images/smilies/pissed.gif "Pissed [pissed]")
You only get to pick ONE (1)
No saying lame things to try and pick both
... By all means explain/defend your pick but don't hedge, because that's lameLame things people say for the
1. I WANT
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That is great news!
Three days of Strike and it's over
Not for my Maersk stock though. They dropped 5% today
You billionaires need to start paying your fair shareNot for my Maersk stock though. They dropped 5% today
You do realize I don't live in the US, right?
You only get to pick ONE (1)Teamcandidate!
No saying lame things to try and pick bothteamscandidates so you can claim "See I was right!" or "We won!" or "I'm happy with the result" regardless of who wins... that's lame
Lame things people say for theSuper BowlUS Presidential Election (to try to justify picking bothteamscandidates):
1. I WANTTeamcandidate X to win but I THINKTeamcandidate Y will win = Lame
I don't have a "team", you are a sea and an ocean away.
Stocks go down and then they usually go back up. Or vice versa. Patience.Not for my Maersk stock though. They dropped 5% today
Trump’s ground game relies on untraditional strategies to draw out battleground voters
When absentee ballots first landed on doorsteps in Michigan last month, so did Paul Hudson, a Grand Rapids lawyer and a Republican running to represent the area in Congress. Armed with an app that told him where likely voters lived and which houses might be swayed, he spent that morning walking a densely populated purple community where single-story ranches with Trump flags neighbor homes with “Harris Walz” signs on their lush, well-manicured lawns.It’s a conventional strategy to compete in close races, one battle-tested by campaigns big and small every election. And it’s a playbook that former President Donald Trump’s campaign has tossed aside.
Targeting irregular voters, teaching supporters to surveil polling places and bombarding states with voting-related lawsuits – this is the machine the Trump campaign has built for an election that many expect to hinge on just tens of thousands of ballots cast across seven battleground states. It’s a gamble, Trump’s campaign internally acknowledges, but one that they insist is built on data they have collected over nearly a decade and tested for the past six months.
That, and tens of millions of dollars injected lately by a super PAC aligned with tech billionaire Elon Musk, one of Trump’s most vocal and influential supporters.
More at link
Klaus Hergersheimer
Emperor
Striking a month before an election was a terrible idea. Harold Daggett would've thrown the whole thing to Trump and come out as the most hated man in (probably most of) America.
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