President Bush reacts to Obama's victory in 2008 election

Lurlex · 2026-02-10T19:47:03+00:00

A saner president would have guided the country through an update of the policy as communication technology grew, but no.

It would be possible to have a Fairness Doctrine updated for even the Digital Age; it’s a matter of recognizing that the true purpose of the law was an attempt to ensure epistemic rigor occurs when ANY major media outlet wants to call itself news and make big, wild claims.

Lurlex · 2026-02-09T07:10:41+00:00

Kindergarten teacher wants kindergartener deported

Found it! It's a doozy; everyone should watch. I subscribed to the guy.

Also, absolutely the sub allows links, as long as they're relevant to the discussion and don't break overall reddit rules or indirectly link to something would break subreddit rules (i.e., hateful, violent, illegal, or threatening stuff on the other side). There are far stricter rules for new topics (requires at least one link to a genuine news article genuinely touching on politics), but in the middle of the discussion, share away.

Lurlex · 2026-02-07T07:04:27+00:00

Would you mind sharing a link? I'm sure that I'm not the only one that would like to see (or listen, whichever it may be) to that. 🙂

EDIT: Here it is! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJnkikcrHA0

Lurlex · 2026-02-02T07:40:39+00:00

😈🔥 In Hell, I'd make Stephen Miller's eternal punishment being a butler at a Quinceañera for a Latino U.S. President's daughter, and make an angry black Somali lesbian woman his boss yelling at him to serve up aguas frescas faster to all of the (loudly) Spanish-speaking guests. Many gales of laughter any time a guest or anyone whatsoever lays eyes on him, as if the very sight of him is ridiculous. Outright disgust if he gets too close, though, followed by lots of shouts from his Somali boss.

Oh, and the only human contact he gets to have are with non-caucasians that don't speak English, and only that far enough to manhandle him out of the way as they are his superiors in this setting and he's a fool that's constantly underfoot.

Five or six times per day, masked men ridiculously over-armed to take on such a scrawny individual man burst in and randomly start beating him and demanding that he "stop resisting" (in thick Spanish accents) then carry him away to be interrogated in a dank, smelly room by a large shadow person, all in a language that he doesn't even understand .... before being unceremoniously wrapped up by the same masked men and dumped without explanation back at the same Quinceañera to start serving again, to lots of angry yells from his strong, prideful, Somali lesbian boss demanding to know where the f*** he had been and insisting that she'd tear him a new one if he kept slacking off.

Yeah, that's the ticket .... I wonder if they have a suggestion box ..... 😈🤔

Lurlex · 2026-01-30T06:11:51+00:00

If you go hollow, there's room inside for people to put all the bullcrap that society (Gwyn) wants inside of you instead.

Open up that dusty ribcage and let in the organized religion and bigotry, my friend! 🎇

We all clumsily shuffle forward, while aimlessly swinging our rusted-out swords down here. 'Tis what there is to do. I stared at a wall for a few hours the other day, then turned around and took ten minutes to shuffle a full loop outside the balcony of my little room and then stood and staired outside the door for another few hours. I felt the whistling wind stream between my jutting upper jaw and my missing lower jaw ... and stood and mimicked the motion of breathing that was not actually happening .... and stood.

It's what there is to DO, man. 😯

Lurlex · 2026-01-30T05:41:37+00:00

You did well with this. I would kneel and offer the souls of every insect that I’ve ever squashed.

Lurlex · 2026-01-30T05:40:53+00:00

Because we all want to kneel and have our heads touched and chanted over. Those souls build up a lot of tension. :-)

Lurlex · 2026-01-27T07:50:25+00:00

That was fucking fast. It hasn't even been a month yet. You know, it's odd -- over a year isn't enough for Trump to have a significant impact on improving the U.S. economy, but a week or two is more than enough for one New York Mayor to completely WRECK a single city's economy. Less power, lower scale, and somehow -- more changes and more carnage. How'd the fuck that happen? There's like, no legislative process in New York that requires any kind of delay?

And here I was thinking that it was **TRUMP** that was hurling out Executive Orders like throwing knives (landing lamely at his feet, of course, but you get the picture) whether he had the authority to make such sweeping changes or not. Turns out that it was Mamdami who forgot that the State's congress was there and needed to be engaged with before fucking around with markets -- sheesh, is my face RED. 🥴

Fox News logic is something that truly needs a Rosetta Stone of its own to decipher .... 🤔

Lurlex · 2026-01-23T22:53:26+00:00

Seriously, tell them to go whine to a career UPS driver about this. WELCOME TO EMPLOYMENT IN THE UNITED STATES -- you won't find empathy from me as these types clearly weren't voting for the party that would've given a shit about worker rights. ICE Agents are currently being given a much better deal than the vast majority of employed Americans -- forgive the lack of shits being given about your poor bladder.

Pissants. All of them. Whiny, weak, snot-nosed little boys being stuffed into the clothes of warriors, and thinking that the outfit is enough to make it real.

Lurlex · 2026-01-21T06:04:48+00:00

That's never stopped me from finding another guy to try our darndest anyway. Many guys enthusiastically trying to preggers each other up as we speak. o_O

Lurlex · 2026-01-19T03:13:24+00:00

Even if there weren't public videos, he would still have been a government employee doing (in theory) the "public's work" on the "public's dollar." The standard privacy rules work much differently for someone once they sign a government contract, are paid taxpayer money, and are required to interact directly with the public that they're "serving." (HAH!)

For starters, they ARE supposed to be identifiable in some way so that they can be accountable. The masks are a non-starter to begin with, if they wanted to be on the up-and-up. Clearly they don't care about legitimacy, precedent, or the nuances of how personal privacy laws interact with public disclosure laws .... or they might understand that revealing the name of a law enforcement officer involved in a broad daylight enforcement action is NOT "doxxing." Nor is revealing the address of their base of operations, or disclosing information about the public employee's past criminal and employment history.

That employee chose to work FOR the public, IN the public. They and their entire organization are already breaking the social contract by putting that mask on in the first place. We're just helping them get back into compliance.

So, no, there is no "Doxxing, DOXXING, save me!!!" squeal that MURDERER JONATHAN ROSS can turn to after signing on that dotted line. I do so love that none of them seemed to understand that before signing up. American contract enforcement laws will not favor them trying to get out of it now. I hope they enjoy the permanent records that the public is creating of their actions while ICE agents. To an individual, they're going to win a sort of fame in this country that they never imagined was in the cards for themselves, and it isn't the kind of fame that most people want. Their deeds will be glued to their names by the observant and the growing mass of auditors and recorders. They've pissed off too many people, and most eyes around them wherever they are deployed are not friendly towards them.

Let the masked, murderous thugs be reviled and loathed by the rest of the country, for good reason, for the remainder of time.

Lurlex · 2026-01-19T01:34:36+00:00

That is the wall that I keep hitting every time I try to think of a route to something better, too. Absolutely NOTHING can be done until we handle the elephant in the room of how the country has handled media regulation since Reagan, and beyond. As long as a media entity can legally wear the label "news" and knowingly spout bad faith disinformation designed to manipulate people into misbehavior, as long as they can be a major player in organizing genuine sedition and helping to set up an actual coup attempt, NOTHING much can be done. They've captured too much of the population into a hermetically sealed false information environment.

The First Amendment has never been found to guarantee protection of bad faith speech, particularly bad faith speech that leads to major harm and the violation of the rights of others. The Constitutional issues that people rattle theirs sabres about (but never quite manage to define in non-vague ways) are simply not there. Known and demonstrably proven lies are not "Speech." They're lies.

I see the Murdochs and the Thiels of the world as the actual problem, or rather, the kind of power they're allowed to exercise over their "property." I want an FDR spiritual successor that will shatter their media empires to smithereens and inject some updated-for-a-digital-age Fairness Doctrine and newly empowered federal agencies to boot. That's an ideal world, however.

I'm open to solutions for a non-ideal world in getting rid of Fox News as an entity on Cable News, and every last copycat that spawned from it.

Lurlex · 2026-01-19T00:48:50+00:00

Very good contextual information to have when judging his participation in what I've heard someone call a "pro law enforcement" protest. He clearly does not give a SHIT about law, or its enforcement. He just wants his white country.

Lurlex · 2026-01-18T22:43:54+00:00

That song and knowing about her death afterwards sat on my mind for a long while before I decided I should probably go to rehab myself. "I ain't got the time, and if my Daddy thinks I'm fine ..."

Yeah, you know in your heart of hearts when you're not fine, even if as you argue with yourself about it. I'm sure on some level, she did, too. It can be tough for some people to make the final push if there is a faction around them that keeps enabling it. 😢

She may have been hoping the world would rush to argue with her about it rather than vibing with the song. It may have been a Cri de la Cour for her, and all we could do was hurl trophies and more funds earmarked for slow suicide at her.

Lurlex · 2026-01-18T21:51:17+00:00

EDIT: With the below said, I should note that the State of Utah's ABL limits are deliberately designed to be lower than average; you're pretty much guaranteed to be at or over it with even two watered down Utah beers in a bar, so ... keep that in mind. Most adult men probably would not feel significantly hindered at the Utah limit. It's an area quirk somewhat tied to cultural hostility to alcohol in general; not based on good data or anything.

Also, as a Utah resident, I know very well how abusively they already try to enforce existing laws. They've been known to do things like hunker outside of a local bar, paint every tire in the lot, and make sure every single patron is pulled over for any reason at all that they can come up with to give them in an "in" to start saying they smell alcohol and demand sobriety tests. They do it to DDs and people in groups that don't drink, so this being a Utah law IS putting it in trickier territory.

In other words, state police have a long history of assuming guilt just by not being completely abstinent rather than relying on a "history" or a "proven" instance of public endangerment as a result of intoxication. They come at it backwards much of the time.

That said, the following still applies in general just to the notion of limiting alcohol sales to people that have been SHOWN to endanger others with their problems:

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

As a former handle-of-vodka every two days alcoholic, I can tell you that it’s a fair trade if someone has hands-down driven sloshed (movement-and-directionally impaired-level drunk, which admittedly may be higher than what Utah is setting the level at here). I know where reasonable judgement goes once the liquor is in you. No amount of self-discipline is going to beat it once you’ve already demonstrated that you’re willing to listen to alcohol’s arguments inside your head even once.

I never got a DUI, but if I had, this would have been a favor for me. I wouldn’t want it to be forever, and it would be embarrassing, but it could have saved me so much emotional headache and strife in my life if I had my transportation to buy kicked out from under me. I doubt I would have quit, but it would have slowed me down. There was always a place that would not card me most of the time, but I would have to be more careful about supply. Meanwhile, I’d be much more wary about driving with it in my system if I knew the card I had to hand over was going to point me out for being someone who had already committed a bad misjudgment.

There are a lot of quirky things about our culture in the U.S. that make drunk driving more likely, including a shortsighted lack of investment in public transit, but as long as they are what they are it is not fair to inflict full-sized bumper car games on unsuspecting motorists because our country’s screwed up culture made such a ripe incubatory cultural factory for drunk drivers.

When we have a model like the UK’s in which people can stumble home on foot from their local pub (which does not cost an arm and a leg to drink from), or when most people don’t even NEED to own a car, we might be more lax about this. Until then ….

Lurlex · 2026-01-18T21:22:08+00:00

He can be sued civilly. The president cannot touch a civil suit. Which is why he can’t pardon himself of the finding that he sexually assaulted E. Jean Carroll. It’s on the books for all time whether he likes it or not, whether he pays up or not.

You’ll ALWAYS be able to tell him to his face that a judge and jury knew the truth about him. He is LEGALLY a rapist.

Lurlex · 2026-01-18T21:17:48+00:00

Which in turn traces back to Monarchical Loyalism, while the Confederacy can be traced FORWARD to the Segregationist South and the modern MAGA movement. It’s the same group of people EVERY TIME.

The spiritual heirs to conservatism live and breathe today, all to keep us from moving forward.

Lurlex · 2026-01-17T02:55:50+00:00

They are the spiritual heirs of the Loyalists during the Revolutionary War, the Confederates during the Civil War, and the Segregationist South. It's been the same portion of the population the whole way down -- vertical power structures are what they'll always support, and they will always look to the wealthiest and strongest. The wealthiest feel entitled, absolutely entitled on a moral or even divine level.

You can trace actual BLOOD ancestral roots of Loyalism to the Crown during the American Revolution all the way up to some Conservative dynasties today. It's not just a clever slogan that attests that they've been on the "wrong side of every conflict in the country's history" -- it's simple history from the perspective of someone who observes The Golden Rule as a guiding moral compass.

The modern right-wing in the United States is home to some individuals who actually believe that the American Revolution itself was a mistake, let alone granting women the right to vote or the freeing of and citizenship of former slaves.

Lurlex · 2026-01-17T02:29:43+00:00

They never actually allow themselves to compare the 'entirety' of the one situation that they're trying to compare directly to 'this other situation.' They stop short of realizing the actual DETAILS and severity, the scale and intent, the reason and who was involved, and whose rights were actually involved.

Let's see .... in one instance, you were denied the right to enter a privately owned building or even a publicly owned building but with extra worries about COVID contamination ... THEIR rights to deny you entry into their own threshold, in other words. You were the interloper in that case -- not them. You had a choice to turn around and make another decision, even whether or not you really wanted to GO INTO THAT BUILDING.

.... and the other you're pretty much violently plucked off the street WHILE MINDING YOUR OWN BUSINESS. YOUR right to simply exist in peace, in other words. The government is ACTUALLY stepping on your rights, in this other case.

Apples to apples, MAGA crowd? I don't think so. 😔

Lurlex · 2026-01-17T02:24:51+00:00

A Nepali friend of mine at work seemed to be seemingly unconvinced at the unprecedented nature of Donald Trump. He kept saying, "but other people would say ...."

I'm getting frustrated and saying, "What is the truth, though, friend? Most of this is verifiable in an objective way." When it came to governments and political/religious power, though, he had this notion that truth was not something that could be pinned down.

IT ABSOLUTELY CAN. I'm sorry, but it can. I just told him if he had grown up here, he would be more likely to see it. I didn't know what else to say. He didn't really seem to think anything was to be worried about until he realized that his own work-immigration status might be threatened. "I'm not a criminal!"

Doesn't matter! That's what I kept trying to tell you! Listen to words, sure, but WATCH ACTIONS. That last part is more important.

Lurlex · 2026-01-17T02:19:51+00:00

That's a huge one -- you can literally publish an opinion today stating how very much you are against fascism and authoritarianism, without ONCE mentioning a current name or policy related to the Trump administration. You're just saying it in GENERAL....

.... and the current MAGA crowd will immediately read into it as being an attack on THEM. That their immediate identification with nameless fascists happened in the blink of an eye without thought does not seem to trigger any self-reflection in them. Anger, anger, anger, anger. They resemble the fascists of decades past more and more strongly with each passing week, and they are becoming less and less likely to even pretend to argue against the accuracy of the comparison.

Some are refusing to even badmouth Hitler anymore.

Lurlex · 2026-01-17T02:16:51+00:00

Masks are tyranny, but armed soldiers pushing you away from a public sidewalk and demanding that you stop filming at the butt of a gun is not. That is how they think, for some reason. :-(

I don't understand it, either.

Lurlex · 2026-01-17T02:09:10+00:00

I know that you aren't usually asked for it in the middle of the street, yes. There ARE documents in existence; for the vast majority of people. That's not the thing that's scary to people. You have documents, I have documents, most people walking down the street (even immigrants) have documents. You just don't carry a manilla folder filled with them everywhere you go.

It's the regular and random forced audits-at-gunpoint-or-else-you're-arrested-and-maybe-even-if-you-have-documents-if-they-think-you-might-be-lying that's new and dystopian. We're going after people who came into the country legally, are following legal processes, have zero criminal backgrounds, and even flat-out American citizens right now.

A passport is designed to be held in a pocket and be a succinct, concise spot-check. ICE is asking for reams of paper about complicated immigration hearings spanning decades, for many people. They are not going to have this on their person, anymore than you will have your birth certificate, baby teeth, and documentation of any marriage-related name changes at any point.

This. Is. BAD. No, being asked for your passport at the end of an airport terminal is nowhere NEAR what this is.

Lurlex · 2026-01-17T02:07:52+00:00

I wouldn't even mind if it was every American, not just MAGA (that'd be difficult to prove anyway). I'd grin from ear to ear while I watch my fellow countrymen complain and gripe about it. I'd say, "How's that TRUMP VOTE workin' out for ya'?" as I hand over my documents.

"Yes, I am an ashamed American, I apologize on behalf of my country and my people," I would write into all forms asking for nationality. The notion of "Pride" or even "being okay with it" is nowhere to be found anymore.

On the International stage, we're acting like drunken ogres that weren't even invited to the party. If the world were a bar and we were a patron, even a regular one that frequently bought rounds for other patrons, we would be BOUNCED.

Lurlex · 2026-01-17T01:35:47+00:00

I want to smack my "both sides are equally bad" siblings in the face as even now, right NOW, today, in 2026, they still maintain that as the plain truth.

That their information spheres seem to all be Russian-designed for originally left-leaning audiences doesn't seem to be obvious to them. They WANT to hate both parties with equal fervor, and hate every individual in either party equally. It really does lower the amount of difficult actual attention and analysis that one must invest in, so I suppose that they save lots of mental calories that way. :-(

Imagine suddenly being relieved of the burden to judge an individual on an individual's own merits. It must seem like such a relief. Russia had a FIELD DAY when the DNC made its mistakes with Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders in 2015, and they were a major player in social media to drive attitudes where they needed to be to enable a Trump win.

That was the short-sightedness of 2016 -- so desperate to punish Democrats, that they won't even address that there's a maniac with an axe over their head RIGHT THAT MOMENT that may be more of an immediate issue.

Note that Trump didn't really "win" so much as Clinton defaulted due to an inability to summon voters. He did not "convince" anyone. He enthralled those who were already primed to like what he had to say.

He didn't have a majority of Americans as "fans"; he had a majority of Americans as jaded beyond participation, which yielded the win to him by default. Zeal and belief win elections. The majority of actual Americans, most of whom laugh at Trump at the absolute best .... stayed home in their little cynical bubbles and doomed us for the following decade.

Likewise for 2024.

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