Having delved a bit on this, this is peak Lumpy. Basically Daniels sued Trump for defamation and lost a particular case where she was on the hook for his lawyers’ fees. Back of the napkin says this fees would be a minimum of $620k. But for a one time only deal, yours if you call in the next 23 minutes, they offered Daniels to settle on $620k and not look deeper, if she settled, with a gag clause. Otherwise, hey!, those fees could double, you know. The thing is the court must agree that the fees are justified. So Stormy says no go on the deal, what’s your total figure? $627,500. So her silence was worth $7,500.
Granted, it isn't Harris' place to stress this bit - as that would come off bigly-wrongly if she were to use the kind of accurate words and accusations that I (or - randomly- say Ian Hislop or Stephen King) would likely use in a Fox interview about the smear (ooops, I meant dear) leader His (Baier's) "honesty" isn't exactly calibrated at "on" most of the time. The simple honest position is that his colleagues are mostly clowns - and that Trump is (briefly) (a) a moron without grasp of most of the standard concepts of democratic politics and (b) a spiteful dangerous moron and (c) a regressive spiteful vengeful moron, who invents criminality that doesn't exist, in order to pin on the lapels of his perceived enemies (critics), and then foists that image out into the idiot part of the public sphere just like a star on the shirt of a jew. and (d) an individual with no respect for the basic functions necessary to run any democratic society As an addendum he would point out that Russia isn't a democratic society, and neither even is Hungary anymore, and that the majority of people in the United States like the manageable working semblance of a democratic structure that they have. The one where the Justice Department isn't what the Orange Baboon says it is, but rather one which goes after people who commit things which we and Alexander Navalny and other extremely awkward people with a tendency to fall out of high windows, call by the name of "crimes"
Don’t know if you saw the Lumpy Town Hall with Harris Faulkner before the Baier-meister took the stage. Theoretically, nominally, supposedly, whatever the audience was made up of primarily/all women. Undecided voters, skeptical female voters, invites on the street to passers-by, real ‘Muricans. Except. Except, the room was filled with Lumpy supporters, various local MAGA/GOP chapters, women festooned with Lumpy paraphernalia and so on. But FoxNews and Harris Faulkner introduced this audience as undecided and skeptical female voters. There was a CNN journo in the audience who has the tale of the tape. Those who asked questions had their Lumpy badges, hats, etc. hidden before going on camera and lots of stuff was edited out. One women declared she had just voted for him today and at another stage, the audience broke into chants of, “Trump! Trump! Trump!” So obviously a 99.99999995% Lumpy MAGA audience. But the broadcast had the editors working overtime, snipping out all the too obviously pro-Lumpy loons for a supposedly neutral audience who just wanted answers. OK, I know my P value cannot exceed 1, but am I surprised that FoxNews did this? P Value 1.9. Now, wait a minute. Imagine the shoe on the other foot. Imagine any of CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, MSNBC had done this for Harris? How many dead Republicans would there be under the lemming pile on the pearl-clutching, fainting couch?
Too bad for him he couldn't pick and edit the Town Hall with Univision where he was faced with undecided Latino voters. Predictably, it did not go well at all.
It's a really scary thought but the executives and anchors at FOX News will probably go a long ways towards deciding if we have a democracy in 2025. During the 2020 election their "News" side actually stayed within touching distance of reality. They were the first to call Arizona for Biden, said that Biden won the election, and even pushed back a little on the craziest theories.The "commentating" side were the ones who platformed the My Pillow Guy and got themselves sued. But even though they were only sorta kind of close to the truth the fact that even FOX News called the election for Biden probably helped keep the true crazies to a lower number. The problem was the News Side actually trying to be real news people lost them ratings to Newsmax and OAN. So what do they do this time around? If they go true crazy and for instant refuse to call the race for Harris even if everyone else has that gives a permission structure for otherwise normal people to go off the deep end. Be interesting and scary to watch.
"I love cows. But if we go with Kamala, you won't have any cows anymore because we're not allowed. I don't want to ruin this kid's day. I love cows, I think they're so cute and so beautiful. But according to Kamala, who's a radical left lunatic, you will not have any cows anymore, so we have to vote her out. If you like cows, you have to vote for me."
Lumpy is doing a town hall here in Lancaster this Sunday. I have a ticket and may actually go just to see how bonkers it is.
If I had the chance, I would. For me, I’d have to satisfy my curiosity about the attendees and of course his Lumpiness himself. I find it difficult to believe that when he goes off on his dementia rants, that the audience doesn’t wonder wtf this is all about? Then again, when you have audience members who purposely wear adult diapers and sanitary napkins on their ears to show their support, I’m guessing all his utterances are treated like holy scripture. (Can’t help thinking of Monty Python’s Life Of Brian , here). But if I’m guessing how they treat his every utterance, I’d like to confirm that for myself. I know a lot of the audience travel many hours to his rallies, following him around a la The Grateful Dead fans, but surely at his last rally, there must have been more than a few, who having traveled many hours, were more than a little pissed off to watch him and Kristi Noem dance on stage to “Cats” for 40 minutes?
Wayne La Pierre. Knee jerk response here would be NRA! Bingo! You get a cookie. Anyway good ol’ Wayne stepped down recently. Ostensibly to spend more time with his family, the reality is that he was caught up in too many bribery and money going missing scandals. Plus, from a PR perspective, he had been the voice of the NRA through too many school shootings and he was less and less effective and believable. Old school, yesterday’s man, time for a change. But the NRA also needed a drastic image remake, needed not only new blood (pun intended), but someone who was not La Pierre, someone reasonably clean, someone to take the organization further in this hyper social media world. Cue Doug Hamlin. New Exec VP and CEO of the NRA. Tara-daa! Interesting, small, insignificant fact about dear ol’ Doug. He has a conviction (along with some of his frat bros) for taking the frat house pet cat, cutting its paws off one by one and then stringing it up still alive, and setting it on fire. The NRA has such nice, upstanding people in the upper echelons of its leadership doesn’t it?
what the hell is your problem? that's just a bit of harmless fun - and has nothing at all to do with the notion that young people who torture animals often grow up to be sadistic psychopaths. and anyway - he didn't shoot the damn thing! btw how come nobody has linked Trump's "no more cows" idea with the Repug congress-thing who said a while back that he needed an assault weapon to protect himself from the cows on his farm? Kamala's looking out for everyone!
Trump doing his best to seal the deal by attracting voters - by rambling for 10 minutes yesterday about the size of Arnold Palmer's dick. of course.
I can save you the trip and tell you how bonkers it will be..... btw how does one get to be an attendee who gets to ask a question? I suppoe they just vet the questions submittted and then go look for the submitters.....
independents/centrists don;t tend to answer polling?? Unless they are delusional (maybe 2% might statistically be - and maybe another less than 10% is buying misinformation - deep state nonsense and the idea that Harris and the democrats - let's take Jamie Raskin as an example, lie more than Trump and republicans - let's take Ted Cruz as an example here ... so could really more than 5%-10% of non-aligned sane people think this???) these people can't be going to vote for Trump. The supposed polling doesn't gel with everything that has occurred vote-wise elsewhere outside of dead red states like Idaho/Wyoming/alabama since the Dobbs decision. Think of what happened in Kansas a couple of months later. It should be farcical to think that Independent/Centrist voters will be voting for Project 2025