- For a scandal to stick to someone, they have to worry about it.
Be sure to click through to the Twitter links. Chick is fierce.
Maybe this will be the last major development... today? Stormy Daniels Faces $20 Million in Damages in Trump Lawsuit
I think I saw that stormy has a crowd funded legal defense fund. I will likely donate if it becomes clear she needs the money. However, the suit should be thrown out on the grounds that the NDA only paid her $130,000. There's clear law in this area that the punishment sort of has to fit the crime, so the damages could only be like $130,000 + some small punitive amount. This is an attempt to intimidate her that is going to fall flat. He's terrified.
Heartland checking in. The most vocal Trump supporter I know is a flat earther who has a woodie for Pence and doesn't think that Catholicism is a part of Christianity. Also mesas are the remains of giant trees, evolution isn't real, dinosaurs never existed, but the giant trees put out more oxygen and that's why dinosaurs were so big. It's science baby. The second most vocal is very adamant that capitalism hasn't failed as it's never been properly implemented and that we just need more moral capitalists. Also Trump understands what he as a religious underemployed white man wants. The rest are clutching at their guns and/or threw themselves on the sword to avoid voting for Hillary and/or are blatantly racist. None of them care about this. This wouldn't be an issue if They hadn't taken God out of school.
Which proves my point: this is not a principled stand, it's a case of barking along with the loudest dog. Lenin et. al. would use it as an argument against democracy but I would say it's an argument against ignorance. Ignorance is way easier to cure than stupidity.
Willful ignorance is stupidity. ---- edit: On the rare occasions that I've managed to beat down their "FAKE NEWS!" firewall, and actually expose them to, say, Trump's praise of Duterte along with what Duterte has said/done, the response isn't "I didn't know". Rather: "I don't care." The people who were riding the Trump Train simply because the other dogs were barking too jumped off a while ago.
I disagree. I think willful ignorance is a survival mechanism. It's pretty easy to tell the forgotten folk of the flyover states that the coastal elites don't care about them. It happens to be true. It's also easy to point out that there's no future for them the way things are going. That also happens to be true. Argue that things used to be better? Again, facts bear that out. And then when one side argues that the Trans Pacific Partnership is going to somehow make their lives better (when they clearly remember things going utterly to shit after NAFTA), the other side simply has to say "none of the above" and they've got a winning pitch. Let's pretend I'm 55 years old, barely making ends meet, my daughter and her son living in my basement working retail and scraping by, my property values limping up from the catastrophe that was 2008, the plant not closed yet but every year you're never sure, downtown comprised of whatever could survive a Walmart ecosystem. On the one hand I've got "sell your house, move to the city, retrain for a new career, compete against 20-year-olds, start over, maybe you'll survive the future." On the other hand I've got "Make America Great Again." I can tell you which one is easier to swallow. It's the same one that allows me to cling to the notion that somebody, somewhere cares about me. I only have to accept the lie that they know how to fix the world while the other guys are doing it out of malfeasance rather than helplessness. And really - the dissenting opinions moved away long ago and good riddance to 'em. There's trust at the heart of that willful ignorance - "think for me so I don't have to." And the bread and circuses will help for a while, but not forever - watching Dixie Chicks CDs getting run over is fun but it doesn't speed up the line at work. The Carrier plant still closed. And while it might feel good to think that those horrible drug dealers that got Joanie hooked are gonna die like the dogs they are, there's a part of you that knows she switched to black tar heroin because she couldn't afford the Oxy two years after the car crash. That trust isn't inviolate. And it won't last forever. And trust lost is trust betrayed and that never ends well.
I don't think the two are exclusive options. Wanting to believe that someone cares about you and is it taking care of everything in a way that maintains your sense of pride and self worth absolutely is a survival mechanism. Being a drug dealer who believes that Trump cares about you is pretty stupid by this point, though. I don't know. On the one hand, I absolutely see this a class issue at root. On the other hand is salt from daily interactions with vocal Trump supporters. That's where I'm at right now. I should probably nix facebook again.
It's real easy for me to be dispassionate out here on the Left Coast where the baseball-cap wearing potbellied 50-year-old men buying Budweiser are wearing these: I'll say this: I have a lot more faith in my common man in Seattle than I do in LA, and a lot more faith in both than I ever had in New Mexico. Salt builds up and ruins your cropland.
I have no fucking idea. I'm friends with a lot of Republicans since I've been in recovery and outside of the vaguely bohemian vaguely academic group I've always been in. (And because this is Georgia.) I really have no idea how they can hold all these beliefs against all the evidence. I guess the only reliable news sources in the country are Fox and maybe Breitbart and Newsmax. Which makes no sense with a minimum of critical thinking. The right wing vilification of the media that reports what's profitable has led to swaths of people who will only believe what they want to think is true and is blindly faithful to the most obviously corrupt and immoral person to ever be president
If it turns out she was physically threatened, oh damn. That’s deep doodoo for POTUS.
I'm of the opinion that one of the reasons (one of the reasons, not the only one) that the investigation is going so slowly is that there's something undeniably momentous about charging a sitting president with high crimes and misdemeanors. If I were Mueller I'd certainly want my ducks in a row. The laundry list of shit they've been accused of completely swallows physical intimidation of a witness.
Coincidentally, that's one of the things that led to Nixon's downfall. Parallel to Watergate was the prosecution of Daniel Ellsberg for the Pentagon Papers leak. Ellsberg's trial was nullified (I think it was declared a mistrial, but don't quote me on that) after it was revealed that Nixon's goons had threatened to kill him repeatedly. Interestingly, Nixon's "plumbers" were convened to originally attack Ellsberg.