Florida State Seminoles

[hedge]

Obviously the same is not true of the right...

[Jungle Rat]

[eCat]

Driver found innocent of running over protestor, in somewhat liberal Denver

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A Denver jury found a woman accused of hitting a person with her SUV during a 2020 George Floyd protest not guilty of assault.

"Ms. Watson should not have been charged. We appreciate the jury’s verdict of not guilty to the assault charge," driver Jennifer Watson’s attorneys at Brackley Law Office PLLC said in a statement on Facebook after the verdict Friday.

The jury did find her guilty of a misdemeanor reckless driving charge.

Watson’s defense team argued she was fearful during the May 2020 protest in Denver, saying, "she was surrounded by people who began kicking and hitting her car and taunting and yelling at her."

"On the evening of May 28, 2020, my client was just trying to get home, driving a route she took regularly, when she was diverted by protesters at the intersection of East Colfax and Broadway. She was alone in her car with her dog when she was surrounded by people who began kicking and hitting her car and taunting and yelling at her. While stopped, Mr. Max Bailey jumped up onto the hood of her car and her windshield was smashed in two places. She was terrified and fearful for her safety," Watson’s lawyers said last year in a statement.

[eCat]

odd name, interesting info

http://heyjackass.com/

[Jungle Rat]

Good to hear that driver was found innocent. Glad the system worked.

[eCat]

https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/w ... to-you-e5f

a few excerpts from the article

In the successor ideology, there is no escape, no refuge, from the ongoing nightmare of oppression and violence — and you are either fighting this and “on the right side of history,” or you are against it and abetting evil. There is no neutrality. No space for skepticism. No room for debate. No space even for staying silent. (Silence, remember, is violence — perhaps the most profoundly anti-liberal slogan ever invented.)

And that tells you about the will to power behind it. Liberalism leaves you alone. The successor ideology will never let go of you. Liberalism is only concerned with your actions. The successor ideology is concerned with your mind, your psyche, and the deepest recesses of your soul. Liberalism will let you do your job, and let you keep your politics private. S.I. will force you into a struggle session as a condition for employment.

A plank of successor ideology, for example, is that the only and exclusive reason for racial inequality is “white supremacy.” Culture, economics, poverty, criminality, family structure: all are irrelevant, unless seen as mere emanations of white control. Even discussing these complicated factors is racist, according to Ibram X Kendi.

At the moment, I’m recording an audiobook for a new collection of my writing, from 1989 - 2021, “Out On A Limb,” to be published next month. (More to come on that next week.) It covers the Obama years, including my impression in May 2007 that he’d be the next president and why I found him so appealing a figure. It’s been a shocking reminder of how our politics has been transformed since then:

My favorite moment was a very simple one. He referred to the anniversary of the March on Selma, how he went and how he came back and someone (I don’t remember who now) said to him: “That was a great celebration of African-American history.” To which Obama said he replied: “No, no, no, no, no. That was not a great celebration of African-American history. That was a celebration of American history.”

How much further can you get from the ideology of the 1619 Project — that rejects any notion of white contributions to black freedom? In his Jeremiah Wright speech, the best of his career, this is what Obama said of Wright’s CRT-inspired words, damning America:

They expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country — a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America... The profound mistake of Reverend Wright’s sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It’s that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country — a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black; Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old — is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past.

Obama was a straddler, of course, and did not deny that “so many of the disparities that exist in the African-American community today can be directly traced to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.” I don’t deny that either. Who could? But neither did he deny African-American agency or responsibility:

It means taking full responsibility for own lives — by demanding more from our fathers, and spending more time with our children, and reading to them, and teaching them that while they may face challenges and discrimination in their own lives, they must never succumb to despair or cynicism; they must always believe that they can write their own destiny.

To say this today would evoke instant accusations of being a white supremacist and racist. That’s how far the left has moved: Obama as an enabler of white supremacy. You keep asking: what happened to me? I remain an Obamacon, same as I always have been. What, in contrast, has happened to you?

[hedge]

I like Sullivan...

[eCat]

I read up on him before I posted it. I guess I was vaguely aware of who he was, and I can agree with him on breaking away from the republican party of George Bush.

[hedge]

He was friends with Christopher Hitchens, they appeared together on several CSPAN type programs. I think Hitchens said to him on air one time "stop being such a lesbian" (Sullivan is gay). He didn't seem to mind...

[eCat]

I'm sure I'm not the first to mention this but the most powerful democrat in Washington is Joe Manchin.

His vote has so much power, I read today that Biden wants a 28% corporate tax and Manchin said, nope, I'm only voting for a 25% tax and all the infrastructure has to be paid for without debt.

And what is Biden going to ultimately do? He is going to propose a 25% corporate tax and no added debt for infrastructure which means that Biden is going to have to figure out how to come up with more than $300b in tax revenue to meed his agenda.

There is your electoral college at work. Manchin has to stick to his conservative democrat bona-fides otherwise he is at risk in his home state of West Virginia - so the people of West Virginia has this nation by the balls - probably the most welfare supported, least manufacturing/technological/educated state in the nation (maybe second to Kentucky) and they are demanding fiscal responsibility - while at the same time, I suspect Manchin is going to get any pork barrel project he wants coming in to his home state just to because both the Dems and the Repubs want him happy.

[sardis]

Manchin, all alone, can pretty much put a cap on Democrat ambitions. Question is will the ultra progressives be pragmatic and okay on legislation he does allow or be pissy and vote no because it's not enough?

Sen. Byrd was the best at getting pork to WV in his day....Joe just following in his footsteps.

[sardis]

If there are still people out there worried about Covid now, they are either retarded or in the back pockets of the drug companies.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/07 ... -time.html

[hedge]

Pay wall, thanks...

[Jungle Rat]

Stop being such a lesbian

[hedge]

Ah, the Utopia of free speech websites...

Gettr by the Pu$$y

Jason Miller pitched a free-speech utopia. He got a moderation nightmare.

Ahhh, internet forum moderation policy debates.

Right-wing politicians and pundits will have you believe that their victimization at the hands of overzealous online censors is a challenge both unique and urgent. But for as long as there have been posters posting on the vast information superhighway, the power users among them have discussed the very rules of the road that are perturbing conservatives with passion and verve. These bitter disputes happen no matter the forum. No matter the topic.

A few examples:

How does one ensure that the integrity of the FarmersOnly dating site isn’t harmed by the presence of a garden-variety suburban green thumb?

Could the wheel of ChatRoulette keep spinning if the ball track is consistently landing on a lonely man’s junk?

Were the lovers’ lounges in AOL’s People Connection undermined by 13-year-old boys unconvincingly pretending to be 40-year-old divorcees ISO companionship?

One of my favorite message-board haunts, GWHoops.com, was forced to close up shop when our long-suffering site manager was caught betwixt his laissez faire ethos and a troll with multiple personality disorder whose incessant posting overwhelmed the tens of Colonial faithful who merely wanted to vent about Coach Hobbs’s defensive schemes.

The same problem (to an exponential degree) bedeviled Craigslist, an unmoderated website that in the early aughts grew to become the world’s largest classified ad space and the home to dreamers of all sexualities and genders trying to find that Missed Connection. By 2008, the spammers and scammers and catfishers had begun to swamp the regular old Listers and Craig had to change course to contain them. More than a decade on the site has neither regained its former glory nor resolved the problem.

And thus the question has persisted for sites big and small since the days of the very first usenet groups: How do you balance user experience with the internet’s promise of unhindered expression?

At some point over the past few years this debate, which once had been the sole domain of Prodigy Classic Chat administrators, gripped an entire political party.

The protection of uninhibited speech rights on private internet forums is now one of only three proactive policy priorities of the Republican party. (The other two are limiting the speech rights of woke teachers and addressing imaginary voter fraud.) The GOP’s newfound passion is driven both top-down by the cult leader who is sad he has lost his toys and bottom-up through demands from MAGA voters.

https://thebulwark.com/gettr-by-the-puy/

[Tree]

Speaking of free speech blogs, HCR had a good one today. I don't condone everything she says, but she drops some historical knowledge in this one.

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.c ... ly-11-2021

On Friday, as President Joe Biden signed “An Executive Order Promoting Competition in the American Economy,” he echoed the language of his predecessors. “[C]ompetition keeps the economy moving and keeps it growing,” he said. “Fair competition is why capitalism has been the world’s greatest force for prosperity and growth…. But what we’ve seen over the past few decades is less competition and more concentration that holds our economy back.”

Biden listed how prescription drugs, hearing aids, internet service, and agricultural supplies are all overpriced in the U.S. because of a lack of competition (RFD TV, the nation’s rural channel, has a long-running ad complaining of the cost of hearing aids). He also noted that noncompete clauses make it hard for workers to change jobs, another issue straight out of the late nineteenth century, when southern states tried to keep prices low by prohibiting employers from hiring Black workers away from their current jobs.

“I’m a proud capitalist,” Biden said. “I know America can’t succeed unless American business succeeds…. But let me be very clear: Capitalism without competition isn’t capitalism; it’s exploitation. Without healthy competition, big players can change and charge whatever they want and treat you however they want…. “[W]e know we’ve got a problem—a major problem. But we also have an incredible opportunity. We can bring back more competition to more of the country, helping entrepreneurs and small businesses get in the game, helping workers get a better deal, helping families save money every month. The good news is: We’ve done it before.”

Biden reached into our history to reclaim our long tradition of opposing economic consolidation. Calling out both Roosevelt presidents—Republican Theodore Roosevelt, who oversaw part of the Progressive Era, and Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who oversaw the New Deal—Biden celebrated their attempt to rein in the power of big business, first by focusing on the abuses of those businesses, and then by championing competition.

Civil War era Republicans had organized around the idea that the American economy enjoyed what they called a “harmony of interest.” By that, they meant that everyone had the same economic interests. People at the bottom of the economy, people who drew value out of the products of nature—trees, or fish, or grain—produced value through their hard work. They created more value than they could consume, and this value, in the form of capital, employed people on the next level of the economy: shoemakers, dry goods merchants, cabinetmakers, and so on. They, in turn, produced more than they could consume, and their excess supported a few industrialists and financiers at the top of the pyramid who, in their turn, employed those just starting out. In this vision, the economy was a web in which every person shared a harmony of interest.

But by the 1880s, this idea that all Americans shared the same economic interest had changed into the idea that protecting American businesses would be good for everyone. American businessmen had begun to consolidate their enterprises into trusts, bringing a number of corporations under the same umbrella. The trusts stifled competition and colluded to raise the prices paid by consumers. Their power and funding gave them increasing power over lawmakers. As wealth migrated upward and working Americans felt like they had less and less control over their lives, they began to wonder what had happened to the equality for which they had fought the Civil War.

Labor leaders, newspapers, and Democratic lawmakers began to complain about the power of the wealthy in society and to claim the economic game was rigged, but their general critiques of the economy simply left them open to charges of being “socialists” who wanted to overturn society. Congress in 1890 finally gave in and passed an antitrust act, but it was so toothless that only one senator in the staunchly pro-business Senate voted against it, and no one in the House of Representatives voted no.

Then, around 1900, the so-called muckrakers hit their stride. Muckrakers were journalists who took on the political corruption and the concentration of wealth that plagued their era, but rather than making general moral statements, they did deep research into the workings of specific industries and political machines—Standard Oil, for example, and Minneapolis city government—and revealed the details behind the general outrage.

Their stories built pressure to regulate the robber barons, as they were called by then, but Congress, dominated by business interests, had no interest. Instead, President Theodore Roosevelt and his successor, William Howard Taft, tended to rein in the trusts through the executive branch of the government, especially by legal action undertaken by the Department of Justice.

On Friday, Biden promised to use the power of the executive branch to rein in corporations, much as Theodore Roosevelt did during his terms of office. But there was more to Biden’s statement than that. His emphasis on restoring competition is from the next historical phase of antitrust action.

In the 1912 election, political language turned away from the evils of trusts and toward the economic competition so central to American life. Both Republican Theodore Roosevelt and Democrat Woodrow Wilson centered their campaigns around the idea that big business was strangling competition. Wilson called for a “New Freedom” that would get rid of the trusts once and for all and return the nation to a world of small enterprise and opportunity. Roosevelt scoffed at this idea. He talked of the “New Nationalism,” in which a large government would restore competition by regulating big businesses. (He said that if you got rid of trusts and then looked away, they would immediately spring up again.)

While their solutions were different, both Roosevelt and Wilson had reframed the stratified economy not solely as a problem, but also as an opportunity. Trimming the sails of the corporations was not an attack on the liberty of industrialists, but rather a restoration of the competition that had, in the past, enabled the country’s economy to thrive. And, once elected, Wilson managed to get key items of that agenda passed through Congress.

That positive emphasis on competition carried into the administration of the next Roosevelt president, FDR. Biden noted that FDR called for Congress to pass an economic bill of rights, including “the right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies.” And indeed, the idea of restoring a level playing field for all businesses, rather than letting them succeed or fail based on the whims of economic wirepullers, persuaded businessmen who had previously opposed regulation to line up behind the establishment of our Securities and Exchange Act of 1934.

Americans have lost this tradition since 1980, Biden said, when we abandoned the “fundamental American idea that true capitalism depends on fair and open competition.” Reframing business regulation as “laws to promote competition,” he promised 72 specific actions to enforce antitrust laws, stop “abusive actions by monopolies,” and end “bad mergers that lead to mass layoffs, higher prices, fewer options for workers and consumers alike.”

For 40 years, the Republican Party has offered a vision of America as a land of hyperindividualism, in which any government intervention in the economy is seen as an attack on individual liberty because it hampers the accumulation of wealth. Biden’s speech on Friday reclaims a different theme in our history, that of government protecting individualism by keeping the economic playing field level.

[Jungle Rat]

CNN/SI sysop Judy was the original censorship bitch.

[eCat]

this actually would explain alot

https://www.mediaite.com/tv/michael-wol ... kly-drunk/



I think this is a man who can’t stand the fact that he was pushed out, that he’s, you know, a non-player over the hill. He didn’t become president. His career petered out, and because of this, he was willing to do anything, willing to say anything. The secret to getting along with Donald Trump, it’s a very simple secret, merely to say what he wants you to say. If you do that, he embraces you. And Trump would go around saying ‘Rudy is drunk, Rudy falls asleep, Rudy should be put out to pasture.’ But it doesn’t make any difference because if Rudy was the only person — in many cases he was — the only person saying what the president wanted to hear, he’s back in, he’s running the show.

[eCat]

I think you can blame the Republican party for the idea that attacking the economy is an attack on Liberty but you don't have to look very hard to understand the concern.

Whenever the government gets involved in supporting the economic welfare of the country, it turns into a shitshow of excess.

guaranteed student loans have helped push the price of a college education out of reach for most Americans, fannie mae and freddie mac resulted in backed housing loans that created a housing bubble so large that it collapsed our economy, and medicare/medicaid with no big pharma negotiation and patient "rights" has contributed in large part to the medical industry what guaranteed student loans did to the education sector.

The paradox is obvious, people want the government to intervene but at the same time wouldn't trust someone like Trump to manage it, and they hold on to the short sighted belief that their guy is the answer - and in the unlikely event that their guy isn't a complete grifter, his job is temporary and he'll be replaced by more people who will use the bloated program to enrich themselves and their handlers.

At the end of the day the republicans talk a big game but don't deliver, however their promise is sound.

America thrives in a smaller, less intrusive government. However there is a cost that many people can't seem to grasp. Capitalism has winners and losers. The have nots have decided there should be no Jeff Bezos , Zuckerburg or Gates without understanding they limit themselves along the way.

They'll realize this in some small way when they get hit with a wealth tax on the value of their home and 401K, even though they don't have access to that money.

[hedge]

Based on the headline of that Guiliani article, I'm not really in any position to criticize him...