Jump to content

plimon

Legacy Members
  • Posts

    213
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Posts posted by plimon

  1. 9 minutes ago, Biff Tannen said:

    paywall

    Here is the article:

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/01/02/dont-blame-trump-rise-right-wing-conspiracy-theories/?arc404=true

    Quote

    To explain the impeachment inquiry, the GOP has promulgated a flurry of baseless conspiracy theories about the forces arrayed against President Trump. It has been surreal to hear some of the nation’s most influential elected officials spouting ideas basically concocted from thin air. The House Intelligence Committee’s ranking Republican, Devin Nunes (Calif.), denounces “Ukrainian election meddling in 2016 . . . aimed against the Trump campaign.” The Judiciary Committee’s Louie Gohmert (R-Tex.) claims that if Congress could only talk to a certain three Democratic officials, then “every fact of this investigation” would be unearthed. Conservatives online hold that former White House aide Fiona Hill was a mole planted by George Soros.

    Of course, no one purveys these theories with as much verve as Trump. The president has suggested that the nation’s first African American president was born abroad (he wasn’t), that the father of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) had a part in JFK’s assassination (he didn’t), that Ukraine rather than Russia was responsible for election interference (it wasn’t), that the Mueller investigation empaneled by his own administration was a Democratic plot against him, that the Clintons orchestrated the prison killing of accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein (who committed suicide, according to an autopsy) and that the Obama administration spied on his campaign, a claim most recently debunked by the Justice Department’s inspector general.

    It certainly appears, more than ever, that “the truth itself is on trial,” as Peter Baker recently wrote in the New York Times. Some conservatives say Trump, and Trumpism, represent a new frontier of conspiratorial politics — that the theories are unique to Trump’s sensibility and peculiar to his paranoid White House. “Our politics seems more vulnerable to conspiracy theories and outright fabrication,” former president George W. Bush said in a 2017 speech. The “main problem” behind the proliferation of political conspiracy theories “is a president who is also a self-invented fabulist,” argued Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson.

    But in truth, the stew of “alternative facts” has been simmering for more than half a century on the right fringe. The GOP had endless opportunities across the decades to banish these theories — about scheming bureaucrats, Jews, the Federal Reserve, the United Nations — and its leaders often saw them as absurd. But they were also useful, helping to rally support from an aggrieved government-hating base. So the party’s mandarins allowed them to fester and grow until they spread from the toxic fringe to the mainstream, which they have finally overtaken. It’s no wonder someone who embraced those ideas would become successful; Trump validates notions that his voters have long believed, ideas that the party refused to condemn and failed to repudiate.

    Trump, then, isn’t what caused these conspiracy theories. He’s what happens when nobody stands in their way.

    The intellectual life of the American right since Sen. Joe McCarthy’s rise to prominence in 1950 can be seen partially as a series of flirtations with conspiracists and a dedicated reluctance to read fringe crackpots out of its ranks. Yes, William F. Buckley Jr.’s National Review attacked John Birch Society founder Robert Welch, who called Dwight Eisenhower a “dedicated, conscious agent of the communist conspiracy,” in an iconic moment of movement history.

    But conservative leaders more typically embraced the passion and support of the Birchers at the grass roots. At its 1964 national convention, the GOP rejected a plank condemning the society, along with its conspiratorial beliefs. Birchers such as John Rousselot and John Schmitz served in Congress as Republicans in good standing, while conservative oilman and family patriarch Fred Koch was a founding member of the society. Birchers took active part in Republican election campaigns and ran right-wing bookstores packed with conspiratorial treatises such as John Stormer’s “None Dare Call It Treason” (about Soviet “infiltration of American government”) and Fred Schwarz’s “You Can Trust the Communists (to Be Communists).” They served as members of local school boards and state legislatures. Other Republicans rarely spoke up to debunk the Birch view that fluoride in drinking water was part of a communist plot to cause cancer or control Americans’ minds.

    At times, the wild-eyed conspiracism came from the top. Vice President Spiro Agnew delivered speeches identifying a cabal of Washington- and New York-based power brokers who supposedly controlled the news media, whipping up what journalists at the time considered a frenzy of anti-Semitism on the far right. (In 1976, a few years after he’d been indicted on bribery and other charges, Agnew published a novel pushing the anti-Semitic trope that the media’s “Zionist lobby” was controlling America’s foreign policy in the Middle East.)

    At other times, understanding that they had to court the conspiracy-minded activists of “the base,” the party’s leaders went out of their way to confer legitimacy on extremists. Take the GOP’s relationship with Christian Coalition leader Pat Robertson, who won four states in the 1988 Republican presidential primary contest. In 1991, Robertson published “The New World Order,” holding that scheming government pooh-bahs were working to set up “world government, a world police force, world courts, world banking and currency, and a world elite in charge of it all.” He even suggested that President George H.W. Bush was complicit in establishing this new world order. Still, Republicans wanted votes and donations from Robertson’s acolytes, so Newt Gingrich, Oliver North, William Bennett, Jack Kemp, Jesse Helms and Dinesh D’Souza all happily spoke at his “Road to Victory” conferences. Sen. Bob Dole, a pillar of the Republican establishment and at the time a presidential candidate, told Robertson’s followers in 1995 that “I am proud to stand up here and say that I’ve been awarded a 100 percent voting record in ’93 and 100 percent in 1994 and 100 percent in 1995” from the Christian Coalition.

    During the Clinton years, the crackpot theorizing became harder and harder to distinguish from the Republican Party itself. Conservative billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife sent investigators to Arkansas to dig up dirt on the president’s past, and when they failed, they settled for salacious fabrications that Bill Clinton was part of a drug-smuggling ring. Scaife became what The Washington Post called “a guiding force” behind Gingrich’s Contract With America and a later generation of tea party activists. The Rev. Jerry Falwell, a leader of the religious right (his son is a big Trump supporter), started selling a $43 videotape that, among other charges, said Clinton was responsible for the deaths of “countless people.”

    Of course, Republican leaders didn’t always or uniformly tolerate gonzo conspiracy theories. Presidential nominee John McCain, for instance, contradicted one of his supporters at a 2008 campaign event, telling her that Barack Obama was not, in fact, “an Arab.” Onetime senator and 1996 presidential hopeful Arlen Specter (Pa.) also stuck up for the truth when he assailed two leading GOP conspiracy theorists, Robertson and Pat Buchanan, as leaders of the “intolerant right.”

    Yet over the past seven decades, such voices — pro-fact, pro-science and pro-reason — lost the internal debate over how to treat the tinfoil-hat folks. And such moments of truth-telling by Republicans at all levels have been fleeting and rare.

    While the GOP was actively courting allies who propagated conspiracy theories, the Democratic Party took much the opposite tack — mostly rejecting the outlandish left-wing theories that surfaced from time to time. Although some research has found a recent uptick in Democratic support for conspiracy theories (a jump caused by a lack of political power), elected Democrats have typically fenced their party off from wild-eyed claims promulgated on the left. They never embraced the theory that the 9/11 attacks were an “inside job” carried out by the Bush administration, for example. During the 2004 presidential primary race, even the most lefty antiwar candidates — Dennis Kucinich, Howard Dean, Carol Moseley Braun — largely eschewed conspiracy theories that President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney had gone to war for oil or to enrich their friends in the construction business. The left has its share of anti-vaxxers who believe that vaccines cause autism, yet Democratic officials have battled that lie (which Trump himself has promoted).

    One reason is that Democrats have been reluctant to use anti-government theories to tear down the things they would prefer to burnish, such as government and international institutions that they believe work for social justice and economic progress. Republicans’ conspiracy theories about powerful secret actors are consistent with their small-government views; it is a shorter leap for conservatives to portray Washington as a swamp where individualism, justice and decency go to die.

    Thanks to years of GOP tolerance for surreal thinking on the right, conspiracy theories have moved from the fringe to the center. One poll by Fairleigh Dickinson University found that 63 percent of registered voters subscribe to at least one such theory. Some social science research suggests that people who feel alienated from politics are more prone to thinking conspiratorially. Trump capitalized on that climate of suspicion.

    It’s easy to see the line from older conspiracy theories to the fact-free claims by Trump supporters today. White House adviser Stephen Miller has drawn anti-immigration rhetoric from white-nationalist publications like the 1973 French novel “The Camp of the Saints,” which envisions hordes of immigrants obliterating Western civilization. Breitbart News has featured anti-immigrant, anti-gay and anti-black theories that could have been found in an earlier generation of far-right publications, including American Opinion and American Mercury.

    Perhaps the biggest change of the Trump era is the approach of Republican leaders. In the past, they indulged these theories but never really espoused them. Today, elective officeholders embrace them openly, in the face of explicit counterevidence from the government they purport to run. National security officials have repeatedly stressed in recent weeks that Ukraine did not meddle in the 2016 election and that those who repeat the claim are advancing pro-Russian propaganda. Yet most Republican members of Congress now seem to believe this theory, pointing to a thin report in Politico that documented no top-down, coordinated interference. Trump’s racism (calling Mexican immigrants “rapists”; telling four congresswomen of color who are all U.S. citizens to “go back” to their “crime infested” home countries) and anti-Semitism (he implies Jews are loyal primarily to Israel and motivated mostly by money) align well with old allegations that Jewish bankers and assorted globalists have enriched themselves while inflicting economic havoc on “the people,” as his closing 2016 television ad suggested.

    Polarization has also made mainstream American culture hospitable to ideas once relegated to the margins. Voters have grown more tolerant of political leaders’ failings as long as they adhere to the correct ideological positions, opening a space for someone like Trump to win the presidency and then govern with the support of a minority of the electorate. And grass-roots opinion has shifted in favor of conspiracy theories, a pattern that both follows the cues of political leaders and incentivizes those leaders’ abasements. For instance, Twitter equips Trump to instantaneously air any theory, no matter how nutty, to raucous and affirming plaudits. Fox News also capitalizes on this shift to amplify Trumpian claims (“Russia didn’t hack our democracy,” Fox host Tucker Carlson recently parroted). It’s no wonder that, as Gallup found last February, 30 percent of Republicans see Russia in a favorable light. One recent Post survey of attitudes toward 2016 election conspiracy theories found that 26 percent of Americans believed that CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity firm, invented a story of Russian election meddling in order to hide Ukraine’s efforts to help Hillary Clinton.

    Ultimately, Trump was the logical consequence of a posture followed for decades at the top echelons of the conservative movement: The batty screeds are silly, but since they help us, we won’t work zealously to purge them. Trump’s conspiracy-based capture of the GOP has less to do with him and his perspective than with a party that sought and often won the support of people who believe those notions.

     

    • Like 1
  2. 10 minutes ago, Lobo said:

    "Supremest" is how his dumbass followers would spell their own protest signs, "We are not White Supremests!  We just care about the Rule of Law!"  

    And we all know who "supremest groups" is...Diana Ross & The Supremes.  In fact, it was the supergroup of its day. 

    I gotta get nit-picky on one thing...I'm fucking sick of the 40% of Americans are Trumpers.  Or the 42% "of this country is..."  this or that.  It's not fucking true.  

    254 mm Americans 18 and over.  Now yeah, a lot of them don't vote, some are in prison, some are in comas, some are so old---they don't know what country they live in anymore.  And 129mm Americans voted last time around.  

    That leaves 125mm Americans (95% of whom are eligible to vote and participate in society).  I don't care about getting out the vote, I'm never joining the Democratic Party, etc.  

    Here's my point.  190 mm adult Americans DID NOT FUCKING VOTE FOR TRUMP.  He doesn't have 40-46% of the country.  They're certainly loud as shit and feel like that amount of people, but they are not that many people.  And fewer of his voters have kids to influence than either of the two other two segments I mentioned (Democratic voters & all non-voters).  

    So his 63mm votes (to be generous) of the adult population translates to  just 25%, and 20% of the total overall population.

    I know that the 40-46% is critical for the 2020 Election.  But when we make these sweeping generalizations about how 46% of the country us dumb, 40% of the country falls for anything he says, 42% of Americans are MAGA idiots.  It's fucking bullshit and it feeds this narrative that we're split down the middle and fucked for the future. 

    He commands 25% of the adult population.  That's it.  That's all who fall for his shit.  That's not that bad.  That's not the civil war both sides keep painting.  It's asinine, but it's easily overcome.  125mm adult Americans didn't fall for his shit then, and we're not falling for it now.  

    Only 25% of the country is all this shit you guys keep throwing around about how fucked we are.  MAGA, Trumpers, Trumpkins, et. al.  It's 25% of the nation.  Now they certainly punch well above their weight politically and in the media.  And aside from maybe 10 million of that 125mm of us in the middle, that big chunk doesn't much matter because it's gonna sit out election season for myriad reasons.  Our all-time high is 139mm, I think the absolute ceiling even now is 150mm.  Again from that 125mm, maybe 10mm get out and vote this time around.  Trump and Biden get their mid-high 40's, and 2% splinter off for third parties.  Same as usual.  

    But my point is as a country, as a body politic, as the human fabric of our nation...we are not 50/50.  We are 25/50/25.  MAGA is not around every corner.  I've got into it on other threads, that they are not going away quietly though in 2021.  But we'll get another thread on that.  46% of my country is not dumb Trumpers who block meaningful progress. They're 25% and if you don't see that massive difference, you're as dumb as they are (hint, it ain't a 21% difference, it's over twice that).  

    tl; dr------I'm all Biden this time around.  46% of the country is not pro-Trump, just 46% of the voters who turned out.  That's a distinction without a difference on Election Day.  But the other 364 days this year.....my country is only 25% pro-Trump.  Damn right that makes a difference.  

     

    The "politically disengaged" tend to be lower-income and less educated. They have the same biases and as the rest of the ones that do vote.

     

    https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/02/19/knight-nonvoter-study-decoding-2020-election-wild-card-115796

  3. This being discussed anywhere? 3M charging the government about .63 cents per mask. Trump Admin decides that they will pay some fucking no name bankrupt company about $5.50 per mask, and fucking lulz if they end up being 3M masks. They have probably created some bullshit supply chain where the same mask gets sold 5 times before it ends up on someones face. Would love to see how much these douchebags donate to the GOP over the next year. 
    The Trump administration has awarded bulk contracts to third-party vendors in recent weeks in a scramble to obtain N95 respirator masks, and the government has paid the companies more than $5 per unit, nearly eight times what it would have spent in January and February when U.S. intelligence agencies warned of a looming global pandemic, procurement records show.
    The N95 masks are essential protective gear for health-care workers and others at elevated risk of coronavirus infection, and the government has recommended that people across the country wear masks and other face coverings when outside. Demand for the masks has created a frenzied, freewheeling global market that has pitted U.S. states against the federal government and rich nations against poorer ones.
    Administration officials leaped into the fray late, then embarked on a voracious spending spree. Though U.S. federal agencies made a small number of relatively modest purchases before the second half of March, the government has ordered more than $600 million worth of masks since then.
    Large U.S. companies such as Honeywell and 3M have received the biggest orders, but the Trump administration also has signed high-dollar deals with third-party vendors selling masks for many times the standard price.
    The Federal Emergency Management Agency awarded a $55 million contract for N95s this month to Panthera Worldwide LLC, which is in the business of tactical training. One of its owners said last year that Panthera’s parent company had not had any employees since May 2018, according to sworn testimony.
    It also has no history of manufacturing or procuring medical equipment, according to a review of records produced as a result of legal disputes involving the company and its affiliates.
    Panthera Worldwide’s parent company filed for bankruptcy last fall, and the LLC is no longer recognized in Virginia — where it has its main office — following nonpayment of fees, which according to Virginia code results in “the existence of a limited liability company” being “automatically canceled.”
    James V. Punelli, one of the company’s executives, said he is working his military contacts to obtain the masks.
    “We’ve done DoD medical training over the years and through those contacts with that community were brought sources of supply in order to assist in the COVID-19 response,” Punelli said in a text message to The Washington Post, referring to the Defense Department. “We made the connection with FEMA and offered these supplies to them.”
    Asked about delivery of the masks, Punelli said: “We will provide these masks before May 1 for certain, in full and with a very high-quality product.” He said the company is registered as an LLC in Delaware and allowed its Virginia registration to lapse “because we’re not doing business in Virginia.”
    According to its website, Panthera offers “elite training and mission support” for the U.S. military and other agencies. But in 2018, it entered into a 42-year lease handing over its principal asset — a 750-acre training facility in West Virginia — to a separate company that now operates the site. The facility features a mock village for training exercises in anti-terrorism and tactical operations.
    “They don’t have masks. They’re not in that line of business,” said Robert Starer, a Virginia businessman who leased the training center from Panthera’s owners. “Is it possible that they have a relationship with someone in the world who could provide those masks? Who knows.”
    Starer is now suing the company’s two executives — Punelli and Raymond C. Jones — alleging they overstated the extent of their contracts and customer base, resulting in financial losses for his company. In a complaint filed in Virginia’s Hanover County Circuit Court, Starer alleges that the two men misrepresented “estimated revenue” as “actual cash payments . . . based on existing contracts,” causing him to suffer cash losses in 2018 and 2019. Punelli and Jones have not responded to the lawsuit, according to an attorney who represents Starer.
    Jones did not respond to requests for comment. Punelli said of the lawsuit, “Those frivolous claims are being addressed in due course.”
    The FEMA contract with Panthera, which was awarded without competitive bidding, has a start date of April 1, according to a summary. Lizzie Litzow, a FEMA spokeswoman, said the Panthera contract is for 10 million masks, adding, “Panthera is not a manufacturer, they are a distributor of N95 masks.”
    The price that FEMA is paying Panthera per mask, about $5.50, is significantly higher than what the government pays companies such as 3M, which charges as little as 63 cents per N95 mask, with an average cost of about $1.50 for more advanced models, according to a price index. Prestige Ameritech, the largest domestic mask manufacturer, is charging FEMA about 80 cents per mask for the government’s order of 12 million N95 respirators, part of a $9.5 million contract that started April 7.
    Beyond the premium the federal government is paying to Panthera, the decision to award a contract to an insolvent organization with no apparent expertise in the given field struck experts as unusual.
    “Something is amiss there,” said Chuck Hagel, a former defense secretary and Republican senator from Nebraska. “This is not how the government procures training or any type of supplies. You just wouldn’t do business with somebody like that.”
    In its bankruptcy filing, Panthera Enterprises estimated that it had as many as 99 creditors and said its liabilities could be as high as $50 million. Punelli said Panthera Worldwide “has no significant debt,” but both companies are jointly owned by him and Jones and use the same facilities, according to court records.
    Founded as TenX Group in 2011, the parent company is incorporated in Delaware but has its primary office in Leesburg, Va., according to court records. It has received a handful of federal contracts in recent years, primarily for training exercises such as “high-risk driving,” according to a contract summary from 2018. But Punelli said in sworn testimony in October 2019 that the subsidiary now under contract with FEMA — focused primarily on “activities outside the country” — was bringing in no income. “Not right now,” he told a U.S. attorney who asked whether there were any earnings.
    Litzow, in response to questions about FEMA’s contract with Panthera, said the agency is “bound by law to follow federal acquisition requirements and processes” and did so in this case. “Per these federal acquisition requirements and processes, the Contracting Officer conducted a contractor responsibility determination.”
    The Department of Health and Human Services began gathering information on global supplies of N95s in January and posted a formal notice Feb. 24 to companies that it was preparing to place large orders, according to a department spokeswoman. On March 21, HHS bought 600 million N95s from five companies, with the largest orders going to 3M and Honeywell.
    If the U.S. government had attempted to make large purchases before then, it would have thrown global markets out of whack, according to Stephanie Bialek, a spokeswoman assigned to the agency’s Strategic National Stockpile.
    “It is never the intent of the SNS to disrupt the supply chain when supply is able to meet demand, even if demand is high,” she said. “Making large government purchases at that time likely would have disrupted supplies.”
    Among members of the public, too, demand for masks has climbed, as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has recommended that Americans wear masks and face coverings when in public. On Wednesday, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo (D-N.Y.) said he would issue an executive order requiring them for all New York residents.
    Purchasing records show the Trump administration has placed at least $628 million worth of orders for masks in recent weeks. HHS has placed more than $400 million in mask orders, and the Department of Veterans Affairs has placed orders worth about $82 million.
    One of the biggest buyers is FEMA, which has transformed itself into the supply chain manager for the White House coronavirus task force. The agency proposed a deal in recent weeks to obtain an additional 114 million N95 masks from Nutratrade Australia, whose website says it specializes in bulk shipments of grains, dairy products and other foodstuffs. The FEMA proposal was for $591 million worth of N95 masks, at an average cost of $5.19 per mask, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post.
    The agency said late Wednesday that it does not have a contract with Nutratrade Australia. A representative for Nutratrade reached Wednesday declined to respond to questions about the proposed contract.
    FEMA is importing most of the medical supplies through a process the Trump administration calls “Project Airbridge,” and uses chartered cargo flights to slash delivery times and steer shipments directly to hospitals.

    The government pays the cost of the flights, but it hands over approximately half of the supplies to large private medical supply companies, which then distribute them to their clients, according to FEMA.
    Critics of the arrangement say it amounts to a lavish giveaway to the private companies, but administration officials say they are just trying to get badly needed supplies to hospitals as quickly as possible.
    “All the traditional procurement rules are out the window,” said Rick Grimm, executive director of the National Institute of Governmental Purchasing, which trains and advises state and local governments on procurement. Grimm said that when the market is unstable, it can invite price manipulation or the possibility “you may end up with an inferior product you can’t use.”
    Jennifer Ehrlich, a spokeswoman for 3M, said the company has not raised its prices and has taken aggressive legal action against vendors selling its products at a significant markup. The company is planning to increase its output from about 1.1 billion masks per year to 2 billion during the next 12 months, Ehrlich said.
    The company has filed several lawsuits within the past week against companies it says have been engaged in price-gouging and fraudulent sales, including one company that tried to sell 45 million 3M masks to New York City officials at bloated prices and another that tried to sell “tens of millions of likely nonexistent 3M N95 respirators at grossly inflated prices to the federal Division of Strategic National Stockpile, all the while falsely affiliating itself with 3M.”
     
    This would explain why he stalled on using the the War Powers Act...needed time to get some no-bid contracts done.
  4.  

    And at that point, Trump.org would be eligible for bailouts.

    Look for whoever is in charge of this fund to hold back a billion or two, just in case.

     

     

    I would think it would be easier to have some of these companies take the money and put some of it back to a trump PAC. 

  5. So is the plan to rob the Treasury, blow up the bank, and escape out of town before the election? 
     
    Paul Newman and Robert Redford had a lot more panache. These guys are just mobsters. 
    They don't even have to outright take the money. They can just use it to score political and monetary favors after the election. Regardless of the result, it's a win win.
  6. Ok. Simple question:
    Has the president actually enable the war time act thing (sorry don’t know the official name) AND has he actually directed companies to start to make medical supplies.
    He keeps saying he has and he’s asked but he never gave any concrete details. 
    It’s incredibly sad and disturbing that I have to ask bc I can’t get a straight answer... even in 2020 and even with the Google machine.
    My hot take:

    He and his cronies are stalling on this until they can figure out how they can profit out of it.
  7. If I’m going by myself for a regular shopping trip I go to the one in Circle C, it’s only a mile or two further.  But my wife doesn’t like going with me to that one either, because yoga pants.  
    Oh yeah, wife calls it the Gucci HEB. Parking is tight there, so are the yoga pants.
    • Like 1
  8. It depends on the situation too.  I have a shitty neighborhood HEB at Manchaca and Slaughter.  I mean shitty as in a couple days before Christmas, they were out of celery.  For two days.  Before New Years?  Out of blackeyed peas (dried), again for a couple of days.  It doesn't have a butcher and just sucks in general, it's like going to the damned DMV.  So if I'm going to buy stuff for a meal (meat, produce) I generally go to the Randall's that's 5 minutes from my house.  They upgraded their store recently and added a butcher/seafood counter, and while their produce isn't top notch, they generally at least have some.
    I live in Manchaca and that is my least favorite HEB. I take the drive to the HEB+ in Kyle and use curbside. If I just need something quick, then the Buda is my go-to. The South Park store will be opening soon. Curious to check out their bbq...yeah, 4 HEBs within 15 mins from my house.
×
×
  • Create New...