What gives you the impression that Bondi is fractionally competent

She actually has experience, if not discernible skill, at heading a government legal agency: she was Florida AG 2011 - 2019. Before that she was a prosecutor with actual litigation experience who appears to have come up the ranks. She was also able to use her position to enrich herself and protect Trump, which may seem easy on the face of it, in Florida especially, but there are still various obstacles like competent judges, opposing attorneys, and state laws to navigate, which she did. She also argued against the appointments of both Habba and Halligan, which suggests she understood what a train wreck that was going to be, but was overruled by Trump.

and what gives you confidence that her replacement will be less competent?

That is a LOW fucking bar, lol. It’s like asking if a cockroach can excel at limbo. So regardless of who is ultimately chosen, “Yes.”

Are you suggesting otherwise? I don’t share your faith that Bondi was too incompetent to be easily bested in incompetence by any replacement chosen. As I said above,

When all a “leader” values is loyalty and everything else is a distant third – like prosecutorial expertise in a HIGHLY technical field such as criminal law – they should expect their opposition to rejoice when they’ve fired someone even fractionally competent, because it’s a complete own-goal that will pay off royally for anyone in opposition to the administration.

I said that because almost all of Trump’s legal picks share a specific characteristic, and it’s not smarts. And there’s another thing to consider: this appointment may be different because he picks men when he “wants something done” and women when he wants a meat shield, but specifically when it comes to picking disposable attorneys, Trump evaluates legal talent with his eyes.

She’s an evil Zio neolib like the rest of the Democratic Party. Crocodile tears

That’s literally MAGA speak with different slurs, lol

Hitler wanted a Triumphbogen, a triumphal arch, twice the size of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris.

Triumphbogen

That’s just inadvertently hilarious. Especially because the entire article is an obvious reference to Trump’s own aspirations to the same gaudy spray-gilded trailer-palace chic.

You think replacing Bondi with Blanche is “progress”?

I do. Todd Blanche is nothing, just a jumped up criminal defense lawyer. You seem to be unaware that people of conscience walking out of Trump’s administration on the justice side has already resulted in major losses for the administration, because he replaces them with talentless hacks whose sole qualification is loyalty to himself.

Two state AGs, Alina Habba and Lindsey Halligan, have been forced out of their illegally held positions as a result.

And at least two revenge prosecution cases near and dear to the orange pustule, those of James Comey and Letitia James, were also thrown out because of the sheer incompetence of the lackeys appointed to the positions vacated by people of conscience. But that hasn’t stopped them from trying, except they’re so incredibly shitty at what they do now they can’t even get grand juries to indict.

I’m not even counting how almost all the career prosecutors walking out of the Minnesota AG office completely crippled the DoJ’s goal of investigating and charging Renee Good’s wife, as well as stopped in its tracks any hope of making that state a showpiece of legal retribution against its many activists and protesters, which is what investigating and (they hoped) charging Good’s wife would have kicked off for them.

All gone, simply because the people with experience and a working conscience left and took their combined experience and institutional knowledge with them.

All of this, including Bondi’s firing, is yet another stake in the heart of this administration’s revenge prosecution program. And wherever it happens, high or low, it’s a BIG step forward in making sure the fascists are crippled from using the courts as tools of control and retribution against the rest of us.

TL;DR: When all a “leader” values is loyalty and everything else is a distant third – like prosecutorial expertise in a HIGHLY technical field such as criminal law – they should expect their opposition to rejoice when they’ve fired someone even fractionally competent, because it’s a complete own-goal that will pay off royally for anyone in opposition to the administration.

Our blessed lord and slaver.

When he at some point dies, i am sure that some people will be waiting for him on the third day to come back

Well, at least the ground will be soft from all the tributes. He’ll have a choice to make: rest in piss or scrabble back up through it, undead motherfucker.

I’m actually hoping for the undead scenario, because of all his kids that will be so enraged about having to wait for the estate cash that they’ll just try to kill him again and again – but before they can, they have to fight off that wife of his wanting to slurp up the undead soul out of his rotting carcass first.

That is absolutely a movie I’d watch. Or, the president can make my dreams come true, lol

So did I: this is supposed to be a representational democracy, with representatives picked locally, with elections held by each state, to represent their individual constituents at every level of government, near or distant.

If the people want a president gone, their representatives are supposed to be doing that for them. That is their specific job. Or to put it another way, if Congress were actually doing what they were elected and constitutionally empowered to do, there would be zero No Kings protests, because they’d have already used their powers to impeach.

The check on the elected representatives is that they are supposed to be disposable when bad, swapped out for better representatives through elections, which is part of why their term length is relatively short.

It used to work.

Truth. Aileen Cannon is so thoroughly corrupt and dedicated to covering up Trump’s crimes that her gag order on Jack Smith meant he could not even describe the contents of his report to Congress under subpoena in a deposition.

Yes. It’s a feature, not a bug, and the propaganda is made to do this by design: if you can keep someone in cognitive dissonance, you can feed them whatever cognitive slop you want, and then they have to find a way to explain it to themselves and keep believing, or face the consequences of realizing the whole thing is a lie, which are usually too high to bear. And it just piles on.

This is part of why the Trump Republicans hate James Talarico so much: he is showing the MAGA crowd you can (and should) be able to keep your Christianity and still ditch Trump, the two are not connected in any actual way except by propaganda. I think urban folks don’t realize just how hard this conflation of MAGA and Christianity has been pumped in rural regions: to leave Trump is to face hellfire. To many of us that sounds ridiculous, and it is, but I’m not joking: they’ve made it so that to be Christian is to be MAGA, and to ditch Trump is to desert Christianity itself.

Strangely enough, the cognitive dissonance is also the weakest point in the whole scheme, and is why the trip out of cognitive manipulation often starts with the tiniest, often unnoticeable piece that doesn’t fit: it sticks in their head and refuses to be argued away, and then something else happens, and something else. Cult deprogramming is all about this, allowing people physical space and time to find their own way out of the mental hole without ever actually forcing them to do so.

It’s why getting rid of the news as infotainment is so critically important if we can ever get out of this mess: that’s the source of the propaganda that keeps it going for the hardcore MAGA believers no matter what their orange god does.

Most of us on this thread don’t, I’d wager to guess.

There is also a non-zero chance that he is just pissed off enough at his wife, who has been cucking him publicly with Lewandowski since the first Trump administration, to have gotten himself “caught” kinda sorta not by accident.

In the pic I saw he’s looking directly at the camera, which would tend to indicate that he knew he was being photographed.

It’s no guarantee he knew where that pic might end up, but on the other hand, in this digital age we ALL know that once a pic is taken, getting it out of every last repository is like trying to pull pee back out of a swimming pool.

Maybe right now he’s happier than he’s been in ages. I hope so, anyway.

TL;DR: I celebrate this guy’s harmless kink, everyone should have one. And honestly, if he employed it to also fuck over his wholly unnatural plastic-filled, two-timing, puppy-killing, immigrant-persecuting, MAGA-loving, murderously fascist virago of a wife that he believed was actually human when he married it, then I celebrate his harmless kink even MORE.

Seems like more people should be upset about this, but I guess we’ve all given up on democracy.

You, maybe. Certainly nowhere near ALL. I was out there on Saturday. It’s FAR from over.

They did intend the people to have both the right and the power to forcibly remove bad presidents: it’s been written into Article I since the beginning.

My personal take is that the framers of the Constitution never expected Congress to legislate themselves out of power, which is why many of the checks on executive power lie in their hands. But that is exactly what they’ve done.

I don’t think these majority Face Eating Party members have actually considered the fact that they’ve fucked themselves as much as they’ve fucked anyone else. But they’ll figure it out too, once they realize a king can appoint his own Congress: he doesn’t actually need them anymore either.

Rules of the comm say you have to use the exact title of the article. I had taken that off and then realized it had to stay if the post was to remain up.

Yeah, I think it’s safe to say that no one wants to watch an orange pustule erupt.

Six hour old account with post history of less than a single day insists year old account with plenty of Iranian content isn’t actually posting from Iran.

Posting the same lie twice doesn’t make it true, it just makes you a repetitive liar. So I’m just gonna block you now and limit my exposure to what I’ve already seen. Got enough misinformation coming at me already without your own ongoing personal amateur hour shit.

I still can’t understand why you need to register to vote? I mean, is that really democracy?

I literally do not understand what this question is trying to say, unless it is coming from a profound misunderstanding of what registering to vote actually means.

In the US, all elections are run by the individual states, across a land mass that is bigger than western Europe, and smaller only than Russia or China, and our voting process goes back to the late 18th century. This process actually worked really well for over two hundred years. It is only with the advent of electronic voting in the 1990s that there has been any real problem with our systems.

But regardless, both back in the 1700s and now, registering to vote in the US is simply a matter of providing your identity and address of residence to your state’s electoral board in accordance with that state’s laws. In return your constitutional right to vote in elections is affirmed by your state, again in accordance with that state’s processes, so that when you show up to vote your vote is properly validated and counted.

So given that understanding, what does registering to vote have to do with any system of government?

What’s not democratic about being affirmed as a lawful voter by the state where you reside, in a country where it is impossible to know all your neighbors by sight and where there even now are vast stretches of rural land that have few to no inhabitants?

It also means that you, as a voter, have zero LOCAL recourse to get yourself added back on to the allowed list, should you ever find you have been kicked off it. And that is by design.

In most (all? I don’t know) states, if there is any problem with your registration or ID at the polling place you are allowed to submit a provisional ballot, which is then counted after the problem is resolved, or discarded if it is not.

But with a federal – physically controlled in Washington, DC – list of allowed voters they can kick whoever they want off the voter rolls, whenever they want, for any reason they want or even no reason at all, and have that be the final word.

EVERYONE is on the disallowed voter list until and unless specifically added, by unnamed operators, in some completely opaque process, answerable to either no one at all, or just to some rubber-stamping kangaroo court in DC.

By contrast, the framers of the Constitution very specifically and deliberately left all election matters to the states, because they never wanted that concentration of power in the federal. Coming out of a very out of touch and physically distant monarchy they wanted people to never be too far from the mechanics of their own elections, so they very carefully wrote it the way they did.

And here we are.

Pretty sure this is gonna be a literal whitelist, as in white voters.

This is very clearly what they wanted all those state voter rolls for.

Pretty much, but as others have pointed out elsewhere, it’s difficult for him to rig the midterms for a number of reasons. It is entirely possible that both the House and the Senate will lose their majorities, even with all these obvious efforts to rig and cheat.

Talk about a whitelist . . .