Did the war begin?

[just-jim]

.
The best part was ‘illegals took 107% of the jobs…’

Doh….donnie dont know math….
.

[dorankj]

You guys are talking about Biden again? You’re right.

[just-jim]

.
Blabbering, blabbering on and on….
.

[PAL]

Droning. Not alot of substance. Be sure and read the fact checkers. He left some details out.
I was falling asleep.

[dorankj]

As only you could, jackass!

[just-jim]

.
You musta been watching a movie like Goonies…..or maybe a documentary on Moonies.

I saw a huckster telling lie after lie…..

(Admit it, though, Ken ….you were playing pocket pool with yourself while fatso rambled around slapping himself on the back the whole time, weren’t you?)
.

[dorankj]

Yes, very positive uplifting and humble!

[PAL]

Listen to Trump's speech tonight.

[mister_coffee]

That "Secretary or Retribution" just keeps turning up...

Also:

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/7 ... -THE-HOUSE

[PAL]

What would you call Jan. 6th?

[dorankj]

Yep! So NOT an insurrection! Your desperation and fearfulness are so obvious and disgusting.

[just-jim]

Lies! We all watched it. Such utter liars.

Just like we all watched Jan 6.
.

[dorankj]

Lies! We all watched it. Such utter liars.

[Rideback]

The guy hit by glass from his teleprompter.

[dorankj]

You mean the guy nearly assassinated? Seems pretty reasonable! You’re really pretty unbelievable.

[Rideback]

Yes, Ken, he called her on Tuesday. What a guy!

[dorankj]

Yes he did! You guys sure do lie at will, like Joe always has. BTW Joe’s call was rejected by the wife of the fire Chief.

[mister_coffee]

Five days later, and Donald Trump still hasn't called the family of the man killed at his rally.

[dorankj]

f*** you Jim! So full of sh**, don’t believe anything he says.

[just-jim]

.
Historian Timothy Snyder’s column today is a must read.

https://snyder.substack.com/p/political-violence
.
A couple portions: (the underline is mine, not Snyders)

“ What to make of the assassination attempt?

I am sharing a few thoughts about where we are, based on assassinations during the interwar period, the 1920s and 1930s. It is distant enough that perhaps we can attend to the examples without too much emotion, and yet close enough to be useful.

We learn that violence that starts on one corner of the far right often ricochets. We find that the important threshold is the enabling of the violence. And we realize is what we do afterwards that counts the most.

None of this makes the outcome of a horrid act completely predictable. But it does help us to see how some things that will predictably be said might be unhelpful and untrue.

Some of Donald Trump’s supporters, including one right-radical senator and one right-radical congressman, were quick to blame the Democrats. (This is also, of course, Moscow’s line).

Their reasoning might seem intuitive, and clearly did seem intuitive to many people. If a radical-right politician such as Donald Trump is the victim of an assassination attempt, should we not presume that the perpetrator is on the radical left?

No, we should not.”
.
….
.
“As far as we can tell right now, the man who tried to assassinate Donald Trump was a registered Republican gun enthusiast. As more details emerge, the image will clarify. Assassins are individuals, and their motivations can sometimes be surprising or turn out to be obscure and debatable.

At this point, it is just worth noting that it would not be surprising if the man who tried to assassinate Trump was, like Trump, a right-wing radical. That would be typical of the United States, where most terrorist acts come from the far right. It would also be historically normal. Trump, like extreme-right-wing politicians in the past, has legitimated violence.

Nothing in recent American political life resembles Trump’s call for “Second-Amendment people” to kill Hillary Clinton, his mockery of Paul Pelosi after an attempted murder, his belittling of Gretchen Whitmer after a kidnapping attempt, the stochastic violence he directs against critics to intimidate them and against his fellow Republicans to keep them in line, the brutal language of his rallies since 2016, his vocal admiration for leaders known to be mass killers, and his violent attempt to overthrow constitutional rule in January 2021.

What matters more than the action, though, is the reaction. We should all condemn political violence. We should all proclaim that this next election will be settled by the number of votes, rather than by threats, coups, beatings, or murders. The media should not spread messages of hatred and baseless conspiratorial thinking.

And we should all be aware of the temptations of martyrdom.

Whatever actually happens in an act of political violence, there will be someone, somewhere, who claims that victimhood means innocence, and that innocence justifies more violence by hands that remain ever blameless. This sort of logic is already all over the internet. That move was made in all the fascist cases. When the German Nazis took over Austria in 1938, they raised a monument to their martyrs. The Romanian fascists killed to avenge theirs.

Trump is of similar mind: he refers to the convicted criminals who stormed the White House as “martyrs” and makes them part of his rallies. He constantly refers to himself as a victim.

One can only hope that he does not escalate such rhetoric, or direct blame where it does not belong. Doing so won’t help him win an election, but it will make further violence more likely.”
.

[mister_coffee]

[Rideback]

Yup, the reporting that he contributed $15 to ActBlue have also been debunked now. A fellow who shares the same name but is 69 and from Pittsburgh and a Democrat is the real donor.

[mister_coffee]

https://www.wnct.com/news/politics/ap-w ... eculating/

“Moments like this are cannon fodder for extremists online, because typically they will react with great confidence to whatever has happened without any real evidence” said Jacob Ware, a research fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “People will fall into spirals and will advance their own ideologies and their own conclusions.”

Westwood said he worries that Saturday’s shooting could spur others to consider violence as a tactic.

“There is a real risk that this spirals,” he said. “Even if someone doesn’t personally support violence, if they think the other side does, and they witness an attempted political assassination, there is a real risk that this could lead to escalation.”

https://medium.com/@dylan_combellick/uk ... 49cd2c0cb7

Russian bots on Twitter and Telegram are already circulating Ukrainian ID photos showing that the shooter was Ukrainian. He wasn’t, and their Photoshop skills have not improved in 30 months of war. Note the obviously different font used on the date and the 000000000 document number.

Also, they got his age very wrong.

Unknown operators have created new Instagram accounts using either stock photos or publicly available photos of the shooter and trying to portray him as a Democrat. He was, according to publicly available records, a Republican. Also, the accounts were created after he died, so…

A Twitter user bearing a physical resemblance to the shooter has decided to post videos of himself posing as the shooter. These videos were created and originally posted after the shooter’s death.

[mister_coffee]

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. This looks like a case of a crazed loon with his father's AR-15 trying to impress Jodie Foster, and the safe bet at the moment is that it exactly what it is.

[Rideback]

Several attendees had gone to security and pointed to the shooter on the rooftop. Security got to him quickly, it's being reported that it was only a minute after Trump got shot, when the SS had him on the ground, that the shooter was taken out. The 152 yards can be measured by Google and that's how law enforcement was able to determine it. The shooter doesn't have a military background so no training there, and Trump himself was moving around when he was shot so a moving target with lots of the bystanders moving as well was not an easy shot.