The Goat Pen

I would guess that Whole Foods customer base is probably 80% liberal.

The CEO, six weeks from retiring, made statements that basically sets them on fire. I guess going out he doesn't care given if Jeff Bezo's money

The MIF hardly goes to Whole Foods anymore since Amazon took over. She's always been adamantly opposed to paying for Amazon Prime and she chafes at the benefits that AP customers get at Whole Foods. She loves Trump but I'm sure any political implications of shopping at Whole Foods never registered with her. She just knew you could get cooler items at Whole Foods than you can at Food Lion. Plus I'm sure she see's pictures of actresses in Whole Foods in People magazine every other week, so she thinks that makes it cool...

I like Whole Foods, particularly their prepared foods section - bread/food bar, etc, and I like their raw foods - produce and items you buy by the pound

Their packaged brands not so much. Overpriced nonsense for much of it.

but there isn't one convenient enough for me to go there on a regular basis. They aren't going to build a whole foods out here in suburbia.

I like Thom Hartmann but he does get behind some pretty crazy conspiracy theories from time to time. He backed the idea that Sandra Bland was maybe already dead in the picture they took of her in jail.

If Trump took those documents, and I'm sorry, its still a big if

4 years ago we were reading about the Steele Dossier and the FBI using that as justification for a FISA warrant - so there isn't much trust that the FBI is acting as a organization on justice.

but if he did it, then he should get whatever the law requires

however, you have millions, yes , millions of people who absolutely believe that Washington - Dems, GOP, & FBI have been on a witch hunt for him from day 1

and while I suspect the net result is the desire to make sure he has no shot at the presidency again (which again, just feeds into the political witch hunt conspiracy) if he is carted off to prison, there will be backlash. To what degree I can't say.

should he be guilty, the smart move here is him ruined from any further political ambitions.

Of course this is assuming he didn't do something incredibly stupid like hand this info over to a foreign entity.

Just remember that short of a confession on his part, there will be millions of people out there who will believe 100% he is being framed in retaliation for angering the swamp.

I have so little faith in the news media to investigate and report the truth, and so little faith in the DOJ who directs the FBI that its seems perfectly reasonable for them to take down Trump as he at the moment would be the clear choice to head the GOP. Both Biden and McConnell would benefit from this.

As Dave and Sardis have said though, most reasonable Trump voters are done with him, and have been done with him since a few months after the election. They would vote for him as the party choice over a liberal, but they do not want him as the party choice. He still appeals to the confederate flag 4wd crowd but they can't get him elected.

The fucked up thing is the Espionage Act has been used against Assange, Snowden, Ellsberg, Manning. Was also used on Eugene Debs 100 years ago. It's literally a catch-all law used to destroy anyone the government doesn't like.

Kinda like how big tech giants like Facebook and Twitter banned Trump and those same mechanisms will likely come to be used on lefties who criticize their government too hard.

The DNC is not your friend anymore than the GOP is.

Remember, Assange was suddenly a sexual predator, which is more appealing to the public in punishing him rather than publishing embarrassing documents about Hillary Clinton

Snowden made it obvious he had no financial incentive to do what he did, and while he is still in exile in Russia or wherever, his access to the media and his life was so well documented, it would have been difficult to make up shit about him.

My hope is that Snowden is one day pardoned and treated as a national hero.

One thing is for sure. This isn't about nuclear secrets or they wouldn't have waited 2 years. This is a DNC and GOP hit to make sure he can't be POTUS again. Kinda like how the DNC hit Bernie multiple ways, including having pos Liz Warren publicly call him a woman hater or whatever.

Many of the more egregious parts of the Espionage Act were repealed 100 years ago...

"however, you have millions, yes , millions of people who absolutely believe that Washington - Dems, GOP, & FBI have been on a witch hunt for him from day 1"

And if it is proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that he, say, absolutely sold top secret classified info (stuff to do with our nuclear capabilities and strategies, ditto any info we had on the same re: other global nuclear powers, info on spies, both US and foreign, etc, etc), there would still be millions of people who absolutely believe that it was all just people "out to get him." I'm not saying any of that happened (but frankly very few people would be shocked or even surprised if it did - and that alone tells you all you need to know about Trump's character), but it just goes back to Trump's own boast that if he shot somebody in the middle of Fifth Avenue, he wouldn't lose any supporters. That's probably an overstatement, he'd lose some supporters if he was captured on dozens of iPhones and hundreds of eye witnesses literally murdering someone in the middle of Fifth Ave, but even then there would still be people who thought he was the greatest thing ever and would be convinced that he was being unfairly witch hunted. What does that tell you about those people?

the only way it will be proven without a shadow of a doubt is with Trump's confession

because of the Steele dossier, they have reasonable suspicion the FBI would acted on unvetted information, and in order to save face or to drive a political vendetta would manufacturer evidence in order to get an indictment.

there is zero trust in the FBI an DOJ - you don't trust them either, lets flip it around

just imagine if Barr was still in charge and MSNBC was reporting there is strong suspicion in the justice community from mutlipled verified sources that Trump took top secret nuclear documents and Barr is saying its a big nothing burger. The DOJ is a political enforcement arm of the presidency.


Because of that, the shadow of a doubt evidence has to have an incredibly high bar.

"the only way it will be proven without a shadow of a doubt is with Trump's confession"

And yet even then, many people would come up with some justification for why he did it. He was hounded into it by the corrupt dems and "deep state", blah blah blah. They would seriously believe that. That's how members of a cult respond to anything about their leader...

probably but I think those numbers would be small

mainly because DeSantis is waiting in the wings for Trump to get out of the way.

Not everyone who would vote for DeSantis would vote for Trump, but everyone that would vote for Trump would vote for DeSantis

He is the strongest conservative candidate for the presidency

My point is, his followers literally don't care what he does. The rules and laws don't apply to him. What he says, goes. Period. That's a cult...

yea, but you have to distinguish between followers and people that would vote for him over a liberal or a RINO.

Those people have a very healthy dose of suspicion of the government because they see a definite duplicity in how they serve justice in this country. They wanted to see his policies implemented and they saw not just politicians but all branches of the government fight him. Hell, you had a Supreme Court Justice speak out against Trump's policies as a personal political viewpoint.

You don't have to be a Trump flag waving rally attending hard core to question the voting turnout , why the FBI skated on Hillary and then ran with her fake document in an attempt to take down candidate Trump - and then question the validity of any government action against him from then on. It feeds itself at this point.

hedge wrote: ↑Sun Aug 14, 2022 2:50 pm My point is, his followers literally don't care what he does. The rules and laws don't apply to him. What he says, goes. Period. That's a cult...

Are you under the impression that DNC and GOP politicians are any different? Trump is the exact same, he just criticizes the establishment a little too close to home once in a while to win votes, which they can't have. Hell, Biden is building a damn wall in Arizona.

I don't know anybody who supports Andrew Cuomo. He's a sleazeball who deserves what he got. Same with Hunter Biden if it comes to that. Of course I know that plenty of dem politicians are no different from Trump (at least as far as disregard for the law, if not in scale). The difference is I don't lap their nutsacks when they do it and try to blame anyone else but them for their own behavior...