Mega-Thread: Trump Focused Discussion

[zorkuus]

So... reality TV then?

I'm not familiar with reality TV these days. What's the most bottom of the barrel, mouth breather show there is?

[Benggaul]

Numbers are still unreliable and half a dozen states aren't reporting, so I'll just make it a quickie.

Tuesday's report:

11,612 new cases, 207 deaths. No real point in me trying to dissect what that means or the results from the state level since even those run by more honest leaders won't have accurate data for a while thanks to Independence Day, but I would not be surprised if we saw 20k+ again by the end of the week judging from last week's trend. I'll be happy to be proven wrong, however.

Related news:

Delta variant is now dominant Covid strain in U.S.--Pretty sure most of us saw this coming, but it's official now. While all vaccines seem to be relatively effective against this variant, the more people it spreads to the more chances it has to mutate into a variant that is resistant to the vaccines. Get your jabs.

Stay safe, folks.

[PhaelixWW]

I'm not familiar with reality TV these days. What's the most bottom of the barrel, mouth breather show there is?

Um... yes?

(...as in "all of them"...)

[Slirith]

I'm not familiar with reality TV these days. What's the most bottom of the barrel, mouth breather show there is?

Anything on TLC and MTV, take your pick.

[Edge-]

https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/07/polit...ton/index.html

Add Washington DC to the places where Rudy Giuliani is not allowed to practice law.

[postman1782]

Trump sues Facebook and Twitter.



Hmm.

1) First of all, I don't think enforcing a contract is unlawful. Trump might disagree because he refuses to pay people. But if Trump really thought this was illegal, why did he wait until now to move?
2) We can't keep coming up with new ways to say this: Facebook is not run by the government, therefore, their actions are not unConstitutional.
3) Capitalism is about as American as it gets.

Trump is understandably upset. If I robbed someone, I would be upset that I was arrested. But I'd still go to jail. Trump's lawsuit looks like a blatant failure on its face. But whether it is or isn't, there's a follow-up.

Who here has ever received a pop-up or email or whatever that said "We've changed our terms of service"? Because I'm pretty sure I've done that for FB a time or two. Meaning, that FB and Twitter could just move ahead of this. "We've changed our terms of service again," they could say, "to make sure hate speech is scrubbed from our platform. Now we're spelling it out in more detail what happens to you and your account if you try to incite violence again." And they could do it right around Jan 2024 and kick Trump off again.

Trump has spent his whole life thinking he's the biggest bully in the room. Physically he might be right, but he's not stronger than FB or Twitter. He can't throw a lawsuit at them big enough to make them back down -- and he can't win on the merits. All he's doing is risking his return to such platforms by lashing out in a senile tantrum.

I look forward to seeing what few lawyers he has left fail and be fired.

What is really funny about the whole thing? Is because they will get thrown out because they are filed in Florida. The problem is, that in the terms of service, they all state that if you are going to sue them, the lawsuits have to be filed in California. They are all going to be ignored.

[Breccia]

They are all going to be ignored.

Pretty much every legal expert agrees.

TLDR stop here. Trump's press conference on the subject was...Trumpian. He went off-topic, made shit up, and lied. A lot. More than usual, honestly.

Still reading? Neat

"Hey wait, that's CNN. They're known reporters of facts and therefore liberal bias."

Fine, here's MSNBC.

"No, they're also strongly biased towards facts and evidence and therefore liberals. Try again."

NPR has also asked experts.

"Trump has the First Amendment argument exactly wrong," said Paul Barrett, an adjunct law professor and deputy director at New York University's Center for Business and Human Rights. He described the lawsuits as "DOA," or dead on arrival, because the First Amendment applies to government restrictions on speech, not the actions of private companies.

"Yeah well I bet they didn't even ask a single cons--"

Even conservative experts voiced skepticism about Trump's legal case.

"These social media platforms are private property, not the government town square, and are well within their First Amendment rights to refuse to carry speech of third parties. This principle holds even with the former president of the United States and is the constitutional right of every citizen," said Jessica Melugin at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. "This lawsuit is a publicity stunt intended for political gain, not a serious legal argument."

"Okay but everyone knows NPR is still too heavy with facts to be pro-Trump, and also they're probably still mad Trump tried to take their funding. They're clearly biased towards objective evidence and therefore are liberally biased. Find something further right."

Uh...Reuters?

"This complaint is hard to even make sense of," said Paul Gowder, a professor of law at Northwestern University.

"No, still too factual still too liberal."

This is getting harder and harder. The Washington Examiner?

The suits were filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida. However, Facebook's terms of service require that "any claim, cause of action, or dispute you have against us" be filed exclusively in federal court in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California or a state court located in San Mateo County.

The First Amendment's freedom of speech protections do not apply to private organizations and platforms, such as Facebook or Twitter, meaning that Trump's lawsuit is unlikely to succeed in court.

"No, they are still too factual and still too liberal because they aren't saying Trump will win. Don't you have a source that says Trump will win? I'll believe that one."

Let's see...there's a panelist on FOX News you might like.

So, do I think the lawsuit is going anywhere? I’ve got to be honest, these guys have so much cash to burn, they could tie this thing up for years in litigation. I don’t think you will see the discovery. That’s not the point. The president is trying to do something to correct an injustice for the American people, and this is something we expect our leaders to do, and we’ll see how it shakes out.

You might know Jesse Watters from such things as "George Floyd was a premeditated hit" and "[QAnon] uncovered a lot of great stuff when it comes to Epstein and it comes to the deep state".

"Okay but he still plays it off as not going to win. He says things like Trump is fighting for America and has a lot of cash to burn, two things I choose to believe are true despite all evidence otherwise. But he does not say 'Trump will win this lawsuit', which someone with a B.A. in History is clearly qualified to say. Can't you find someone who will flat-out say Trump will win this lawsuit?"

How about Dershowitz on Breitbart?

"Ah yes, a site like Breitbart is so far removed from facts and logic it will surely fit my needs, and Dershowitz has a strong track record of predicting Trump victories. What did he say?"

Well, apparently, he's kind of part of it.

As you know, I wrote a book about that exact subject, ‘The Case Against the New Censorship: Protecting Free Speech from Big Tech,’ so I’m deeply involved in this issue, and I was also asked to be an expert witness. And I did submit an affidavit for this lawsuit, so I’m not simply an observer. This is a very, very important lawsuit. What’s going on with high tech is unacceptable. It’s inconsistent with the spirit of free speech that underlies our First Amendment.

This is a complicated case because, as the president pointed out, and as Pam Bondi pointed out, and as the others pointed out, these are not just ordinary private companies. They have special exemption under Section 230, and therefore they partake of some kind of government action, and the courts will have to parse this issue. How much of what they do is private? How much of what they do partakes of being public? What we don’t want is the government telling private companies what they can say and what they can do. That would be wrong, but we don’t want these crazy public enormous monopolistic companies to be restricting our free speech.

So...yeah, Dershowitz is of the opinion that, because Section 230 (which Trump is trying to remove in this lawsuit by the way) protects social media companies from, for example, kicking someone who spouts hate speech and encourages violence off their platform because they violated their terms of service from being sued. Such as this lawsuit. Dershowitz is now claiming that because these companies have this protection -- otherwise they'd be forced to carry hate speech and incitement to violence on their platform by the government, which would be a First Amendment violation -- that protection makes them public companies and therefore they have to carry hate speech and incitement to violence because of the First Amendment. He also thinks that will be an argument seriously attempted in court. He does. He wrote a book about it.

"Surely a yuge bigly NYTimes hit!"

Um...it seems to have missed the list.

"Regardless I'm glad to hear that Dershowitz, proud supporter of Trump through thick and much thicker, is behind this lawsuit. Surely he, with his personal interest and heavy Trump bias, flat-out said the lawsuit would succeed."

The current situation is unacceptable, and this lawsuit I think will shake things up considerably, though I can’t predict in the end how it will come out

"OH COME ON!"

I mean, at some point you have to realize that this entire thing is just like Trump's many other lawsuits. Bluster. Not only does he routinely threaten lawsuits that don't happen, but as @cubby has pointed out his batting average in court is in the "moderately underpriced mortgage interest rate" range. Plus let's not rule out that Trump would have to take the stand on this one -- yeah, he said it was a class-action but it wasn't filed as such.

Plus, Trump himself has already laid the groundwork for his all-but-certain defeat. He said, even if he was allowed back on FB and Twitter, he might not go anyhow. Which is what a sore loser like Trump would say, when they know they're going to lose and stay kicked off. You can find the entire transcript here. Highlights include:

• Trump asking a doctor to come forward and speak about how Facebook banned her for questioning vaccines, and was then told the doctor's flight was delayed four hours and she wasn't there.
• Trump then said Facebook delayed the doctor's flight.
• Trump said he did the opposite of what Fauci said each time, and he was right each time. I'll let @benggual take that one.
• Trump said that his ban was unConstitutional at least ten times, so there is no chance this was a simple mixup or slip of the tongue. He is pushing that angle hard.
• Trump said he was hiring tobacco lawyers, because when you want to prove you have the moral high ground, oh yeah, you hire tobacco lawyers.
• Trump also said FB and Twitter bully SCOTUS judges, specifically, by getting them to change their ruling by who was going to be President next. Then, he said he'd expand the court to 24 judges.
• Trump once again said New York isn't prosecuting murders, only Republicans. Man, if only I wasn't so against violence, terrorism and murder, I could totally get in on that action. Shame I'm a law-abiding ethical moral human being, and also Trump is lying, of course New York is still prosecuting murders.
• Trump said recent studies are saying hydroxychloroquine works and is three cents per pill. There don't appear to be such "recent studies" that do this. There is one study that lacks a control group and has its own Politifact page, I'll give you a hint, "Mostly False".

Experts told PolitiFact the study is poorly designed and that no conclusion about cause and effect should be drawn from it.

EDIT: I will say one of those experts made one of the best points I've ever seen in 30 years of reading research papers and writing (cough) two. Specifically, that the study tries to point out that some of the subjects who took fewer doses died, when what actually happened was they took fewer doses because they were already dead. And the study tried to make the connection fewer doses -> dead like complete fucking dicks, literally over the dead bodies of the subjects who would complain except they died during the study.

Oh, and CVS and Walgreens are selling it for $1 per pill, not three cents. I'm...hesitant about buying medicne from a place thirty times cheaper than Walgreens.

[beanman12345]

https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/07/polit...ton/index.html

Add Washington DC to the places where Rudy Giuliani is not allowed to practice law.

But him and the rest of the cult can still practice clownery.

[Pendulous]

Numbers are still unreliable and half a dozen states aren't reporting, so I'll just make it a quickie.

Tuesday's report:

11,612 new cases, 207 deaths. No real point in me trying to dissect what that means or the results from the state level since even those run by more honest leaders won't have accurate data for a while thanks to Independence Day, but I would not be surprised if we saw 20k+ again by the end of the week judging from last week's trend. I'll be happy to be proven wrong, however.

Related news:

Delta variant is now dominant Covid strain in U.S.--Pretty sure most of us saw this coming, but it's official now. While all vaccines seem to be relatively effective against this variant, the more people it spreads to the more chances it has to mutate into a variant that is resistant to the vaccines. Get your jabs.

Stay safe, folks.

It's really sad. Only 32% are vaccinated here. And my work is basically begging people to get shots.

[Breccia]

Watch your step in Missouri, Arkansas, regular Kansas, and Connecticut. The Delta variant is spiking there.

It is 96% of new Missouri cases, the highest in the country. I don't have an explanation for Connecticut -- their vaccination rate is fine.

[Poopymonster]

Watch your step in Missouri, Arkansas, regular Kansas, and Connecticut. The Delta variant is spiking there.

It is 96% of new Missouri cases, the highest in the country. I don't have an explanation for Connecticut -- their vaccination rate is fine.

Breaks through wall of proteins screaming "OH YEAH!" Kool-Aid man style?

[Shadowferal]

[Flarelaine]

Tucker crying that he can’t talk to Kremlin agents without being incidentally recorded is pretty hilarious.

Getting recorded is not incidental when talking to Kremlin agents.

[Ripster42]

Pretty much every legal expert agrees.

You misread what that person said. They're saying the lawsuits are going to be ignored because of where they were filed. That the lawsuits won't even get to the point about arguing how the first amendment works, because they're going to be thrown out on procedural grounds.

- - - Updated - - -

Getting recorded is not incidental when talking to Kremlin agents.

That's what incidental means. They're not targeting him but the RF he's communicating with. As he's not the main target, him being recorded is incidental. Either usage of incidental works here, either as "not the main target" or "liable to happen as a consequence." Maybe you're thinking coincidental. That's the one that means "random chance."

[Breccia]

You misread what that person said. They're saying the lawsuits are going to be ignored because of where they were filed.

Oh, there's a whole laundry list. Some of the legal experts also mentioned the Florida isn't California thing. And a bunch of other stuff.

- - - Updated - - -

The HHS head went on CNN, defending how it was absolutely the government's right to know if you've been vaccinated or not.

Here's how it went:

The federal government has spent trillions of dollars to keep Americans alive during this pandemic. So it is absolutely the government's business [to know who is vaccinated.] It is taxpayers' business if we have to continue to spend money

Now I imagine there's a lot of members of the rabid fanbase, arguing that they're allowed to hide their intentionally vulnerable status. And here's my replies;

1) You do realize that anyone who hides their status, is almost certainly not vaccinated, right? Anyone who's willing to jump through hoops to get vaccinated isn't going to hide that fact.

2) Also, Trump took credit for making the vaccine. Now, he lied, he lies about everything all the time, but he did. But Trump supporters should therefore believe the government was invested in the vaccine. Therefore, the government should know who got the vaccine.

3) But also, if you're against this, you're against voter ID. See, the point of knowing who's vaccinated is to help keep people from being a danger to society. Well, what's a bigger danger to society, to a Trump supporter, than someone voting illegally? Trump spent massive amounts of time, money, and rallies going on and on about the millions of illegals who voted against him. Again, he lied, but look at this from a rabid fanbase's point of view (then throw up). If illegal voting is so dangerous that people need an ID to vote, surely COVID, which can kill you or random people you bump into, is just as ID-worthy. Or, I guess you could claim attacks on democracy are worse than killing random innocent people, which would make sense from a murderous insurrectionist, but a very fine line to draw.

Now I suppose someone might say "I don't think the govt has right to my private medical info" which is fine in general and on paper. But imagine Old Man Johnson down the street renews his driver's license, but leaves out the part where he's blind. "I don't want the government getting that medical info," he says, probably to a mannequin or tree because he's blind. Then his blind ass gets behind the wheel and runs over the first anti-vaxxer anti-maxxer he doesn't see because he's blind¹. Are you angry? Yes. And you should be, unless it's you and the impact kills you. Other than that, now we're on the same page.

The government doesn't need to know if you're taking blood thinners, left-handed, have migraines or are gaining weight. The government has every right to know if just by walking around, you're a risk to yourself and others. If they leak or sell this info, you have my permission and enthusiastic support for suing them. If they're just trying to keep an eye out for tracing purposes, I'd think you'd want the "vaccinated" checkbox to be ticked, so they can stop bothering to watch you. Once you're vaccinated, you're not interesting to HHS anymore, and "Big Brother goes back to spying" on Bubba Jo Bob Bubba leaving a long stay in Hodunk County, Missouri and heading straight to a packed old folks' home filled with taxpayers.

But have I missed anything? Are there other reasons the government shouldn't know if you're vaccinated or not? Please fill me in with any option I've missed, because it's a dense topic and I can't possibly have thought of everything.

---

¹ I nearly lost my father a few Christmasses ago because someone's Alzheimer's went from "bad" to "disabling" between DMV visits. My father was next to his minivan, with the hazard lights on, and was the only car "on the road" (parked). Had the driver been six inches to the left, instead of hitting the minivan, it would have hit my father untying the tree from the roof, and killed him while I was ten yards away. The driver could not speak coherent sentences to the police or medical responders. He should not have been behind the wheel. You're damn right I'm taking this topic seriously.

- - - Updated - - -

Purdue reaches deal in 15-state lawsuit costing them $4.5 billion due to opioid abuse.

"That's great, but why post it here?"

While the lawsuits were state-brought, the pressure was mounting with Trump's DoJ help. I posted like 20 times on it. And he did campaign and run on this issue, which may also have helped. It's not ideal, NY in particular isn't thrilled about it, but any accountability is better than none. Trump at least gets an assist for this. Not like it's helping his stats that much.

[Rasulis]

I am trying not to laugh, but this is just too funny.

National Review's Lament: No One Will F*ck Trump Voters

Oh dear. A conservative academic has discovered that nobody wants to bone down with Donald Trump supporters, and for that reason, we probably need a new definition of civil rights that would protect conservatives from discrimination in all areas of American life. In a National Review piece titled "Political Discrimination as Civil-Rights Struggle," Eric Kaufmann frets about the findings of a poll of roughly 1,500 female Ivy League students, showing that, among those who didn't already support Donald Trump, only six percent of them would date a Trump supporter.

Apparently, this has very grave implications!

This reveals the predilection among many young elite Americans for progressive authoritarianism, a belief system that justifies infringing rights to equal treatment or free speech in the name of the emotional "safety" of historically marginalized race, gender, and sexuality groups. In this left-modernist worldview, conservatives' resistance to racial, gender, and sexual progressivism mark them as moral deviants. As Millennials take power, this generational earthquake is set to shake the foundations of the cultural elite to its core, leading to pervasive discrimination against, and censorship of, conservative views.

[Breccia]

No One Will F*ck Trump Voters

Not to worry. They can go home and fuck their feelings.

[PhaelixWW]

The HHS head went on CNN...

Uh... how many people here, primed by the "Trump years", expected the next words in Breccia's post to be: "...and said, 'I don't exist!' "?

[Flarelaine]

That's what incidental means. They're not targeting him but the RF he's communicating with. As he's not the main target, him being recorded is incidental. Either usage of incidental works here, either as "not the main target" or "liable to happen as a consequence." Maybe you're thinking coincidental. That's the one that means "random chance."

That’s literally the definition of the word.

Incidental: liable to happen as a consequence of (an activity)

Boh of you have a point. What I tried to say was getting recorded is pretty much a direct consequence in this event.

[Zan15]

Watch your step in Missouri, Arkansas, regular Kansas, and Connecticut. The Delta variant is spiking there.

It is 96% of new Missouri cases, the highest in the country. I don't have an explanation for Connecticut -- their vaccination rate is fine.

In Connecticut you have three area's


Minority Majority Cities
Rural Hardcore republican/right wing/poor areas
White Majority Cities.

in some of the state’s biggest cities, and some rural areas, vaccination rates lag. In Hartford, for example, 37.5 percent of residents are fully vaccinated. In New Haven, the rate is 47.1 percent.


You can imagine why the Rural area's lag. No different than the midwest "Red" reasons.

Minority area's they have horrific results because they started early with the fear of vaccinations. A lot of it was driven by, believe it or not, religious organizations. Not the big 3 but the smaller local "ministries" and it spread. they also seem to be more susceptible to online fake claims and conspiracies.


https://data.ct.gov/stories/s/CoVP-C...ata/bhcd-4mnv/

Crazy part is they have made these cities "priority" area's and they have proportionally received way more in spending and vaccination sites then "non priority" cities relative to their population size.
They still can't get these people to get the shot.


Priority Zip Codes 51.30% 45.64% 1.2 million people
Other Zip Codes 63.82% 59.19% 2.5 million people



Antidotally the only 3 people at work who are not vaccinated and still wear mask everyday are African American employees. They also have no problem announcing they refuse to get the shot and are proud of it. They have no consistent reason why they won't get it and the reason changes depending on whom they are talking to and which week it is.\
This is all after 2 people at work were severely hospitalized, 3 people had spouses who died of it, many older relatives who died of it and a half of dozen people missing work for weeks because of it in Nov-Feb.

It just baffles my mind because the one i work closely with wanted me to wear a mask so he doesn't catch it from me.... i had covid and had my two shots. He thinks the Vaccine doesn't work. And apparently does not understand the granted protection when you have had covid previously.

He's also afraid of my "shedding". I mean he's not nice making fun of me losing hair...wait that's not shedding is it?