Donald Trump flirted with the idea of being president for three terms – a clear violation of the US constitution – during a bombastic speech for the National Rifle Association in which he vowed to reverse gun safety measures green-lighted during the Biden administration....
His kids lack a great deal of his rizz. DT Jr is too weak, Eric is dumb as dishwater, and Ivanka has the girl cooties that sink every woman Republican candidate for the Presidency.
Not according to the last two election vote-counts. That’s been a problem for the GOP for a while. Anyone they throw up against Trump is too much of a corporate stuffed shirt or hick blowhard to top Trump’s NYC Diva Energy. He’s got a cult of personality in a way guys like DeSantis and Cruz and Romney could only dream of.
He spent less time campaigning for Hillary Clinton than Biden or Sanders and gave up fighting for his judicial nominees back in January. He’s been on permanent vacation ever since.
Sure, it gets his fans out in record numbers, but it also gets people who hate him voting in record numbers, too.
When Bidencrats are concentrated in a few large states and Trumpies are diffused across a larger number of pivotal swing states, the electoral math favors the Republicans. And as Biden’s own approval ratings crumble, people who would normally turn out to hate-vote against Trump are demoralized.
I don’t think we’d have had that 2020 turnout for Joe Biden without Trump.
Trump won more votes in 2020 than he did in 2016. And Biden only clinched the nomination by 40,000 votes across three swing states (all three of which he’s currently trailing Trump in today). He was running a tighter margin than Hillary enjoyed in 2016.
Combine this with Republicans ramping up disenfranchisement efforts, fascist policing of minority communities, a chronically struggling economy, and a President whose declining health inhibits his ability to campaign, and I seriously doubt Biden will see 2020 turnout a second time. Meanwhile, Trump is once again poised to break GOP turnout records.
So, this is definitely good from an infrastructure perspective. But because the infrastructure is all privately owned and operated in pursuit of profit, the cost problem isn’t solved by the new capital.
Much like with all the new natural gas electric plants, these battery centers simply exist to exploit the short periods of time in which Texas electricity prices jump from $25 Mwh to $3000 Mwh. As the cartels sink their claws deeper into the retail market, the possibility of enormous price spikes increase, with base loads falling and surge pricing becoming much more common.
It was in that fuzzy in between time right after Bush nationalized half the financial sector and right before Obama sold it back to the investor class at small profit/large loss (depending on how you weight the massive cut in interest rates as subsidy).
One reason Russia took over Crimea so easily was due to the high Russian-national identifying residents. Same with South Ossetia and Abkhazia. East Ukraine had an enormous Russia-aligned population, which drove the split that provoked the 2014 civil war and ended in the invasion.
And funny you bring up Afghanistan, USSR went down also because of invading it.
The USSR went down to perestroika. Gorbachev’s reform and opening of markets invited record rates of corruption and graft, leading to the oligarchs that installed Yeltsin and Putin a decade later. The Russian military was just about the only institution that survived the hollowing out of the national economy and the dissolution of the old republican system of governance.
Third party candidates don’t typically siphon votes away from the party that religiously tows the line.
Trump doesn’t really tow the line, through. He’s a manifestation of a revolt from inside the GOP’s white nationalist electoral core, against the financial internationalist who have controlled the party since Reagan.
I don’t think it’s clear who RFK is really feeding from. It’s possible his voters simply wouldn’t turn out if he wasn’t on the ballot. But it’s doubtful that he can steal Biden voters by parroting Trump positions.
The dems and the left will debate procedural shit for how to accomplish similar goals. The right is all emotional appeals/reactionaries.
Liberal admins don’t debate procedural shit, they kill legislation hostile to their donors with technicalities. These same technicalities never affect our illegal wars or unconstitutional policing or criminally unconscionable polluting or corrupt corporate bailouts.
The big difference between libs and cons is that cons demand their red meat and are willing to lose an election or two to guarantee it, while liberals are constantly running scared of their replacements in the next election.
The emotion you see isn’t unique to conservatives. It’s simply rewarded rather than shamed.
A federal judge in Fort Worth, Texas, on Friday blocked a new Biden administration rule that would prohibit credit card companies from charging customers late fees higher than $8....
good things the left-wing is trying to pass that the right-wing is stopping
When you can pass bills that can TikTok from the minority by stapling them to foreign military aid, but you can’t expand Medicare or sanction polluters or secure women’s rights to health care or enfranchise DC voters…
This isn’t “the right just sabotaged us!” it’s “the moderates just sided with reactionaries again”.
Caps on credit card fees? Left proposed, right killed.
So much of this boils down to Dems green lighting GOP judicial nominees while Repubs block Dem nominees without consequences.
What is the remedy for this obstruction other than to scream “Vote or things will get worse!” every two years?
The Dens won’t pack the court. They won’t use our majorities when we have them. They won’t stop giving their economic rivals tons of free money. They won’t stop sending cops into university campuses to crack heads.
Throwing up a rule so a Trump judge can skeet shoot it isn’t “doing anything” when you already know the outcome.
Don't like the sound of that (lemmy.world)
Trump floats idea of three-term presidency at NRA convention (www.theguardian.com)
Donald Trump flirted with the idea of being president for three terms – a clear violation of the US constitution – during a bombastic speech for the National Rifle Association in which he vowed to reverse gun safety measures green-lighted during the Biden administration....
Texas power prices briefly soar 1,600% as a spring heat wave is expected to drive record demand for energy (fortune.com)
Stock Buybacks (lemmy.world)
read more here
Ukraine’s Zelenskyy rejects Macron’s Olympic truce proposal (www.politico.eu)
We may clown on him a lot but it's genuinely quite dystopian how much power Elon Musk has. (lemmy.world)
Judge blocks Biden administration rule capping credit card late fees at $8 (www.cnn.com)
A federal judge in Fort Worth, Texas, on Friday blocked a new Biden administration rule that would prohibit credit card companies from charging customers late fees higher than $8....
bUt BoTh SiDeS dA sAmE (lemmy.world)
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. sues Meta, citing chatbot’s reply as evidence of shadowban (arstechnica.com)