Half-baked Republican Presidential Fruitcakes (and fellow confections)

Hotblack Desiato

Strong risk this clown will be president of the US...

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/dec/22/ron-desantis-appoints-judge-abortion-girl-school-grades

The Black Oil

Land of the Free™.

https://twitter.com/MasonAtoms/status/1614270165562150912

robindch

Land of the Free™.

What's most interesting about this is sheer amount of projection going on - right-wingers whinging about having their views and promoters "cancelled", while available evidence shows clearly that the people doing most of the actual censorship are, well, right-wingers.

Brian?

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120129920#Comment_120129920

absolutely hilarious list. Anne Rice was a devout Catholic when she wrote those books.

smacl

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120130490#Comment_120130490

Was thinking it was all rather random. T'would interesting to know their criteria for rejecting a book (if they even have them)

Brian?

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120130613#Comment_120130613

I’d imagine with the Vampire Chronicles it’s because of the man love. But it seems quite arbitrary for the rest of the list.

smacl

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120130646#Comment_120130646

Guessing William Burroughs doesn't feature heavily either so, though he could be a bit of a quandary being a good white male gun toting right wing rampant homosexual heroin addict. Wonder in the Marquis de Sade or Henry Miller made the cut... If I was Anne Rice or Stephen King I might feel suitably aggrieved😁

Brian?

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120130830#Comment_120130830

Knowing Stephen King he’s delighted

oscarBravo

Knowing Anne Rice she's dead.

Hotblack Desiato

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120130490#Comment_120130490

Many of the fundies in the US hate catholics nearly as much as they hate atheists.

Brian?

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120132839#Comment_120132839

That used to be true, but now you have Amy Comey what’s it and the other lad, Brett Kavanaugh?, on the SCOTUS who are handing them their agenda. Both are Opus Dei style catholic

robindch

#45: "I will implement strong ideological screening of all immigrants - if you don't like our religion [...] then we don't want you in our country and you are not getting in." (cheering sounds)

https://twitter.com/highbrow_nobrow/status/1733515639371801068

Hotblack Desiato

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/apr/19/death-of-republican-party-consequences

The Republican party once stood for limited government, active opposition to Soviet aggression and a balanced budget.

Now it stands only for Trump and his authoritarian neofascism. It demands total loyalty to Trump. It has turned his big lie about the 2020 election being stolen into a litmus test of that loyalty. It has no principled core – no sense of right and wrong.

Gerald Ford, the first president I served, is as far from the current Republican party as was or is any Democratic president.

Sad to say, the Gerald R Ford Presidential Foundation recently declined to present the Gerald R Ford Medal for Distinguished Public Service to former Wyoming representative Liz Cheney out of fear that a future President Trump would retaliate against the organization by taking away its tax-exempt status.

In response, David Hume Kennerly, the Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer, resigned from the foundation’s board. In his resignation letter, he reminded the board that “Gerald Ford became president, in part, because Richard Nixon had ordered the development of an enemies list and demanded his underlings use the IRS against those listed. That’s exactly what the executive committee fears will happen if there’s a second coming of Donald Trump.”

Hotblack Desiato

Got no fewer than four Euro election leaflets through the door today, all loonies, but this guy is the looniest. Someone had already taken the trouble to upload it to the Irish Election Literature site:

Some absolutely amazing guff in there e.g. abortion causes cancer, 'climate hoax', and vaccinating babies causes brain damage (I wonder was he vaccinated as a baby?)

He's been at this for 20 years at least. He's obviously not praying hard enough…

https://irishelectionliterature.com/?s=eamonn+murphy

Hotblack Desiato

Stolen from the National Party thread…

Hotblack Desiato

Meanwhile in what used to be called the world's largest democracy…

https://www.irishtimes.com/world/asia-pacific/2024/05/24/modi-met-with-spirited-social-media-challenge-as-indian-elections-continue/

Dhruv Rathee has emerged as a popular adversarial vlogger, whose recent 30-minute video entitled The Narendra Modi files: A dictator mentality? has attracted more than 24 million viewers on YouTube.

Speaking in Hindi, the Germany-based 29-year-old mechanical engineer has fact-checked Modi and charged the prime minister with perpetuating anti-Muslim communalism. He has also accused Modi of manipulating most of India’s institutions, including the judiciary and investigating agencies, to stifle dissent and opposition to the BJP.

Modi, he said, never mentioned critical issues such as spiralling unemployment, mounting social unrest or soaring income disparities in his election speeches, as he had done little to alleviate them. He also criticised Modi for never holding a press conference in his decade-long tenure or facing an “unscripted interview”.

In March, Sweden’s V-Dem Institute’s Democracy Report 2024 said that after being downgraded as an “electoral autocracy” in 2018, India had declined further on multiple metrics to emerge as “one of the [world’s] worst autocratizers” by the end of 2023.

Its annual report stated that the BJP under Modi had “used laws on sedition, defamation and counter-terrorism to silence critics”.

Meanwhile, Modi has questioned his biological birth and in a recent interview
with News 18 television said he had been sent by god for a particular
task (of ruling India).

“Till my mother was alive, I had the impression that perhaps my birth was a
biological one,” he said. But after her death in December 2022 he said
he realised that his boundless energy could not have emanated from a
biological body, but derived directly from God himself.

robindch

^^^ Modi has failed to win the large majority which he was predicted to win:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0vv93pz14zo

Mr Modi’s BJP-led alliance is leading in more than 290 of 543 seats up for grabs, well short of their target of 400. The Congress and other allied opposition parties have surprised observers, and are now expected to win more than 230. The results give the lie to a slew of exit polls at the weekend that showed the BJP-led NDA alliance on course for a super majority of two-thirds of parliament, which would have allowed it to make changes to the constitution.

Hotblack Desiato

From the Project 2025 thread in CA…

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/2058337289/project-2025-autocratic-christian-nationalist-usa-on-the-way-if-trump-gets-2nd-term

… this really is a must-watch (especially the bit about the Supreme Court). 25 mins but definitely worth it. F-word count is probably into three figures mind 😉

https://twitter.com/TheTNHoller/status/1803138656653476126

robindch

^^^ Project 2025 is near-dictatorship. Full PDF here:

https://static.project2025.org/2025_MandateForLeadership_FULL.pdf

robindch

View of Project-2025 from a guy who's actually read it in depth, rather than just dipped into it, then closed it in disgust:

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-07-10-project-2025-republican-presidencies-tradition/

And the author of the Federal Reserve chapter, like a college student tackling a term paper assignment, summarizes every theory on monetary policy, from the status quo ante, to Milton Friedman’s monetarism, to “commodity-backed money” (the gold standard), all the way to outright Fed abolition, before throwing up his hands at the notion that a future conservative administration could possibly agree upon any satisfactory reform at all.

This misunderstanding is important. The silence, so far, on those parts, indicts us. These are great, big, blinking red “LOOK AT ME” advertisements of vulnerabilities within the conservative coalition. Wedge issues. Opportunities to split Republicans […]

And yes, there is plenty of blunt insanity, too. But, bottom line, this is a complicated document. “Conservatives in Disarray” is precisely the opposite message from that conveyed by all the coverage of Project 2025. But it is an important component of this complexity, and why this text should be picked apart, not panicked over, and studied both for the catastrophes it portends and the potential it provides.

Not helped, of course, by #45 falsely claiming that he didn't know who wrote the document, then - really quite splendidly - claiming that he disagreed with much of it, but still didn't know what was it said to start with.

Hotblack Desiato

Linked to in that article… wow.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon_Jew_count