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You can say that again!

Quote:

Originally Posted by _tunic_

This is scary shit. Imagine Biden having a telco with a deepfake Kim Jong-un ....

Dutch MPs in video conference with deep fake imitation of Navalny's Chief of Staff

On the other hand, this means I can finally have a one-on-one with Selma Blair, as long as I'm loaded enough not to remember the person at the other end of the line might actually be a gross dude.

Quote:

Originally Posted by The Soup Nazi

On the other hand, this means I can finally have a one-on-one with Selma Blair, as long as I'm loaded enough not to remember the person at the other end of the line might actually be a gross dude.

the mid-90s internet fears resurface "it's just some old guy trying to pick up women on the other end"

A Daily Beast exclusive for now. The rest of the (decent) media must be fact-checking it as I type...

Bombshell Letter: Gaetz Paid for Sex With Minor, Wingman Says
The Daily Beast has obtained a confession letter that Joel Greenberg wrote after asking Roger Stone to help him obtain a pardon.

One bit that stands out (and there are MANY):

Quote:

Greenberg continued in the handwritten draft that he "confronted" the then-17-year-old and explained to her "how serious of a situation this was, how many people she put in danger."

"She apologized and recognized that by lying about her age, she endangered many people," he continued. "There was no further contact with this individual until after her 18th birthday."

The motherfuckers couldn't get enough of that! Christ on a stick... Hey, where's the Qanut outrage?

Fuck it. What is the point anymore? (To be posted twice!!)

Quote:

Originally Posted by Skuj

Fuck it. What is the point anymore? (To be posted twice!!)

Post, then delete the duplicate. It's what I've been doing these days. More annoying to me is that I don't receive email notifications of new posts on the threads to which I'm subscribed.

From Slate:

Quote:

Liz Cheney Failed the Only Republican Purity Test That Matters
Elise Stefanik’s power grab proves that if you support Trump’s worst behavior, nothing else counts.

It all moved very quickly.

On Tuesday morning, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy signaled in a Fox News interview that he was ready to throw Rep. Liz Cheney—the conservative movement scion and No. 3 House Republican who’s been vocal in her criticism of Donald Trump’s stolen-election narrative and incitement of the Capitol riot—to the wolves. Her persistence in pushing back against the former president’s lies had become a messaging distraction.

McCarthy was doing more than giving his tacit permission for the conference to overthrow Cheney. He was orchestrating her replacement. GOP leaders didn’t want their top woman in leadership replaced with another white guy—yes, this prompted some grumbling among advancement-minded white guys—so McCarthy worked to get ambitious members like the Republican Study Committee chairman, Indiana Rep. Jim Banks, to stand down. McCarthy and his whip, Steve Scalise, worked to consolidate support behind New York Rep. Elise Stefanik, and by Wednesday morning, Stefanik had earned Trump’s “COMPLETE and TOTAL Endorsement for GOP Conference Chair.”

The vote to remove Cheney as conference chair, followed by a vote to elect Stefanik, could come as soon as next week. It is just about a done deal, and Cheney isn’t really attempting to rally support to save herself.

If the House Republican conference were simply concerned about carrying out its consensus message, Stefanik would be an unexpected standard-bearer.

Stefanik, representing a vast district of upstate New York’s North Country, was first elected in 2014 and was at the time—until Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s election two cycles later—the youngest woman elected to Congress in history, at 30. A former George W. Bush administration aide, Stefanik was bred in the GOP establishment, and she developed a relatively moderate voting record in a purplish district. Instead of being a bomb-thrower, she built a serious reputation and accordingly earned positions on the Armed Services and Intelligence committees.

Her district drifted redder under Trump, though, with its Cook Political Report Partisan Voter Index going from R+4 to R+8 between 2017 and 2021. While Stefanik still often broke from the majority of House Republicans on policy issues, she amplified her Trump support elsewhere. She made a national name for herself as one of Trump’s staunchest (and most stunt-driven) defenders during his first impeachment in late 2019, and she supported his last-ditch Texas lawsuit to overturn the 2020 election. She pledged to object to four states’ electors on Jan. 6, but only got the opportunity to object to Pennsylvania’s following the afternoon riot.

For a decade, House GOP leadership politics revolved around whether a candidate was conservative enough to satisfy the right flank of the party. Speaker John Boehner’s perceived interest in cutting deals with Democrats was a constant source of tension that ultimately did him in. Following Boehner’s retirement in 2015, the Freedom Caucus essentially vetoed McCarthy’s ascension to the top post, and the right agreed to Speaker Paul Ryan as a compromise choice. Scalise’s ascension into leadership, too, was the result of a negotiation with conservatives.

The breezy, 24-hour consolidation around Stefanik is about as stark an end to that era as there is. Yes, would-be leaders still have to get signoff from the same right flank. But that signoff doesn’t have anything to do with whether their policy views are adequately conservative.

By any of the measures the Freedom Caucus cared about before 2017, Stefanik’s leadership bid would be a nonstarter. She has a lifetime score of 48 percent with Heritage Action, the conservative pressure group, compared with the average House Republican’s score of 85 percent; Cheney’s score, meanwhile, is 80 percent. Stefanik voted, most notably, against the Trump tax cut package in 2017, and she has called for a repeal of that law’s cap on the state and local tax deduction. That’s something that plenty of Democrats, too, want to repeal, and because such a restoration would primarily benefit the wealthy, Republicans are planning to hit them hard on it. One might think that Stefanik’s entry into leadership, then, would complicate her ability to carry out that particular message.

Along with her generally shaky conservative credentials, Stefanik was not a notable supporter of Trump’s own policy positions. Throughout the Trump administration, she regularly broke from Trump, while Cheney stayed more or less in lockstep with the president. Stefanik voted to block Trump from breaking from the Paris climate accord, to reauthorize the Export-Import Bank (something conservatives used to get extremely mad about, all of a few years ago), to provide disaster aid for Puerto Rico, and to provide additional money for the Postal Service. She voted for the Equality Act (in 2019, at least). Just this year she voted for the Farm Workforce Modernization Act, which would offer a path to legal status for undocumented agricultural workers and has been derided by the usual suspects as “amnesty.”

The vote that really stands out, though, in this vibe-based discussion of how “Trumpy” a member is, was one she took in 2019. When Trump used an emergency declaration to repurpose otherwise-appropriated money to build his border wall, Stefanik was one of 13 House Republicans who voted to repeal the emergency. Cheney was not.

What does this say about the path to leadership now? You don’t have to be consistently conservative on policy, as Stefanik breaks from the conference consensus more often than Cheney does. Nor does it even mean being there on core motivating issues behind “Trumpism” like the wall and reduced immigration. What the path requires, now, is purely loyalty to Trump himself: at a minimum, to keep your mouth shut about Trump’s worst behavior and—even better—to defend it. That’s where the base energy is to make you a star, and that’s how to get Trump’s support. Stefanik may be off-message on a host of issues that used to matter, but she’s on-message on the only thing that still counts: She’s willing to lie for Trump.

Zakaria's latest Washington Post column. The title is kinda obvious, but read on:

Quote:

Republicans care more about tribal loyalty than conservative principles

The Republican Party’s decision (in effect) to excommunicate Rep. Liz Cheney (Wyo.) is a watershed event. It marks the final transformation of the party from an ideologically driven enterprise to one that is tribal, marked less by ideas and more by group loyalty.

Let’s compare the voting records of Cheney to the woman who is set to replace her as chair of the House Republican Conference, Elise Stefanik of New York. The American Conservative Union gives Cheney a lifetime score of 78 (out of 100) for her consistent conservatism. Stefanik gets a lifetime rating of 44, which is one of the lowest scores for a House Republican these days. Cheney reliably voted for President Donald Trump’s policies while Stefanik was one of only 12 House Republicans to vote against the former president’s signature legislation, the 2017 tax cut. But Stefanik has pledged fealty to Trump and his “big lie” about fraud in the 2020 election, while Cheney will not. And Republicans these days care more about tribal loyalty than conservative principles.

This is a big shift. During the 20th century, the party evolved from a country club for wealthy elites (itself a kind of tribe) into a party animated by ideas. The struggle began in the 1950s. As National Review publisher William Rusher once noted, “modern American conservatism largely organized itself during, and in explicit opposition to, the Eisenhower administration.” Barry Goldwater railed against his own party for daring to compromise with liberals. He thundered on the Senate floor in 1960, “We have said for nearly 30 years that the welfare state, centralized government and federal control are wrong, but in spite of that, say a little of it is all right. We are against federal aid to schools, but we have suggested a little of it; we are against federal aid to depressed areas, but we have offered a plan for a little of it; we recognize that to increase the minimum wage would be inflationary and would result in unemployment, but we suggest a little increase.”

Goldwater created the staunchly conservative base that would take over the party, but that free-market ideology was so extreme it proved too toxic to implement. Conservatives were forever promising the repeal of the New Deal, and then the Great Society, but never delivering. This became the Republican dynamic: fire up the base with visions of rollback and then, once in power, quietly accommodate to the reality that most Americans actually wanted the welfare state. It created what my Post colleague E.J. Dionne Jr. calls the politics of “betrayal,” a narrative in which conservative ideas get sold out because of Republican cowardice.

Enter Newt Gingrich, who found a way to keep conservatives charged up by focusing less on ideas and more on attitudes. Gingrich destroyed then-Republican Minority Leader Robert Michel, an old-fashioned politician often called “Mr. Nice Guy.” Gingrich led the attack on George H.W. Bush for striking a deal with Democrats and raising taxes, ensuring that Bush lost his bid for reelection. Gingrich ousted Democratic speaker Jim Wright on flimsy charges, masterfully using innuendo, exaggeration and slander. He tutored a generation of Republicans to remake their rhetoric, coaching them to use words such as “sick,” traitors,” “corrupt” and “selfish” when describing Democrats. The Republican Party became the fight club party.

Over time, Republicans’ dedication to their core ideas began to wear thin. It was difficult to claim fealty to fiscal conservatism when the party had consistently been instrumental in creating massive deficits. Richard M. Nixon and Ronald Reagan in various ways actually expanded the welfare state. The elder Bush was a lifelong moderate, while the younger spoke of a “compassionate conservatism” that would use the federal government to solve social and economic problems. The Iraq War discredited the ideological basis of Republican internationalism.

Trump picked up where Gingrich had left off. He again energized the Republican Party around attitudes, mostly resentments aimed at foreigners — Chinese, Mexicans, Muslims (whom he painted as foreigners) — and liberal elites. Trump was socially conservative and yet economically he violated free-market principles all the time, embracing tariffs, assailing big companies and providing generous subsidies to his favored constituents (such as farmers). But he understood the increasingly ethnic base of the party, and his rhetoric was pitch-perfect in exploiting the insecurities of the White working class.

Cheney says she will fight back to rebuild a Republican Party based on conservative principles. But that battle was lost years ago. The Republican Party today is not a movement dedicated to ideas but a tribe devoted to self-preservation, defined by anger and emotions, and organized around a clannish loyalty to its leader.

From The New York Times:

Quote:

Kushner’s Absurd Peace Plan Has Failed

By Michelle Goldberg
Opinion Columnist

“We are witnessing the last vestiges of what has been known as the Arab-Israeli conflict,” Jared Kushner crowed in The Wall Street Journal two months ago.

He was surveying the results of the Abraham Accords, the ersatz Middle East peace plan he helped negotiate under Donald Trump. At the heart of his supreme self-assurance, and of the accords themselves, was the deadly fiction that the Palestinians were so abject and defeated that Israel could simply ignore their demands.

“One of the reasons the Arab-Israeli conflict persisted for so long was the myth that it could be solved only after Israel and the Palestinians resolved their differences,” wrote Kushner. “That was never true. The Abraham Accords exposed the conflict as nothing more than a real-estate dispute between Israelis and Palestinians that need not hold up Israel’s relations with the broader Arab world.”

To circumvent that dispute, the United States set about bribing other Arab and Muslim countries to normalize relations with Israel. The United Arab Emirates got an enormous arms deal. Morocco got Trump to support its annexation of the Western Sahara. Sudan got taken off America’s list of state sponsors of terrorism.

But the explosion of fighting in Israel and Palestine in recent days makes clear something that never should have been in doubt: justice for the Palestinians is a precondition for peace. And one reason there has been so little justice for the Palestinians is because of the foreign policy of the United States.

“I don’t think that there’s any way that this occupation and creeping annexation process could have gotten where it is today if the United States had said no,” said Jeremy Ben-Ami, the president of the liberal Zionist group J-Street.

One can condemn Hamas and its rockets and still recognize that this current conflagration began with Israeli overreach born of a sense of impunity. A major flash point was the campaign led by Israeli settlers to evict Palestinian families from their homes in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah. There was also an Israeli police raid on the Al Aqsa Mosque on the first night of Ramadan, not to prevent violence, but to cut off its loudspeakers lest prayers drown out a speech by Israel’s president.

Palestinians fear, not without reason, that Israel is trying to push them out of Jerusalem altogether. That, in turn, has let Hamas position itself as Jerusalem’s protector. And Israel seems to consider its right to defend itself from Hamas justification for causing obscene numbers of civilian casualties. So much horror has been born of the delusion, on both the Israeli and American right, that when it comes to the Palestinians, the status quo is sustainable.

To be fair, this is not something that began with Trump: America has been enabling Israel’s occupation and settlement project for decades. Tareq Baconi, a Ramallah-based senior analyst for the International Crisis Group, argued that in some ways the Trump administration was simply more honest than its predecessors about its disregard for the Palestinians. All the same, he said, Trump’s foreign policy allowed “the Israeli right-wing to understand that they can get away with their most extreme policies.”

Before Trump, it was common to say that the occupation would eventually force Israel to choose between being a Jewish state and a democratic one. During the Trump years, Israel’s choice became undeniable.

Israel’s 2018 “nation-state law” enshrined “Jewish settlement as a national value” and undermined the legal equality of Israel’s Arab citizens. As settlements expanded, a two-state solution turned from a distant dream into a fantasy.

The death of a two-state framework, Baconi said, has strengthened a sense of common destiny between Palestinians in the occupied territories and Arab-Israelis, or, as many refer to themselves, Palestinian citizens of Israel. “The more that we see Israel-Palestine as a one-state reality, where Jews have full rights and Palestinians have different tiers of rights,” the more Palestinians will “understand their struggle as a shared struggle,” he said.

A unique and harrowing aspect of the violence now shaking the region has been the intercommunal clashes between Jews and Palestinians within Israel proper. In Lod, at least four synagogues and a religious school were burned. “Jewish mobs were seen roaming the streets of Tiberias and Haifa looking for Arabs to assault,” reported The Times of Israel.

“I’ve lived here for a long time; I’ve never seen it this bad,” Diana Buttu, a former lawyer for the Palestine Liberation Organization, told me by phone from Haifa.

All this mayhem is overdetermined; nearly every iniquity in the region has an impossibly complicated prehistory. But the United States has underwritten both Palestinian subjugation and the growing power of Jewish ethnonationalism. It’s not enough for Joe Biden to be a little bit better than Trump or to try to restart a spectral “peace process.” If Israel can no longer afford to ignore the demands of the Palestinians, neither can we.

Aaaand here we go. So much for the truth champion:

Liz Cheney Sides With Trump, GOP In Stunning Comments On Voter Suppression

Liz Cheney comes out in support of stricter voting laws, sees no link to Trump

Yes, one of those links takes you to the goddamn NY Post. Just goes to show you.