Hope and change. That's the message Obama won consecutive terms with. The Republicans have always thrived on fear and insecurity--and hate, which is just ripe fear. To quote Yoda, "Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate." The red scare, the Southern Strategy, urban crime, WMDs, terrorism, immigrants, China--since the 1950s, Republicans have monkey-barred from fear to fear.

It's a natural fit for conservativism. What is conservatism if not the fear of change? And when you're afraid, you want a strongman to lead you, someone who takes pride in our military and law enforcement. Someone who shows no fear, who has swagger. It's also a perfect fit for someone like Trump who would as soon lie as breathe. When you're conjuring terrors, truth is just dead weight.

Kamala didn't run on hope and change. She ran on fear, too. She tried to beat Trump at his own game with none of the advantages of his shameless distain for the truth or a Republican Party and media ecosystem at home with fearmongering. She aped his disdain for immigrants and opposition to China, but of course her main bugaboo was Trump himself. Despite widespread dissatisfaction with our nation's current circumstances, she offered only stasis, while Trump offered revolution.

Non-college graduates know they're getting fucked. Trump says immigrants and China is to blame. Kamala has nothing to say. She could point to the billionaires, the tax dodging corporations, the thriving defense contractors, the predatory medical insurance and pharmaceutical companies, the monopolies bleeding consumers dry in every corner of the economy.

She could paint a vision of affordable healthcare for all, an end to medical bankruptcy, an end to college debt, a thriving green energy blue collar economy, free early childhood education, a guaranteed jobs program, a universal basic income.

She could acknowledge the people who feel left behind and say, "I hear you. This is what I'm going to do for you." Instead, her cries of fear just assured those folks that Trump really was going to fuck shit up fighting for them, that the people who sold them down the river are shaking in their boots. Of course, Trump isn't actually going to make their lives better, but he promised he would, and that's more than Kamala could be bothered to do.

Kamala Harris issued a Whitehouse statement condemning Hamas after the body of an American hostage was found last week:

Hamas is an evil terrorist organization. With these murders, Hamas has even more American blood on its hands. I strongly condemn Hamas’ continued brutality, and so must the entire world.

...

As Vice President, I have no higher priority than the safety of American citizens, wherever they are in the world.

Will this be the trigger for her to use equally strong language to condemn Israel, who has killed 30 times more people in the ongoing genocide than Hamas? Or will she just reiterate as she did in her recent CNN interview that:

I’m unequivocal and — and unwavering in my commitment to Israel’s defense and its ability to defend itself.

...

CNN Reporter: But no change in policy in terms of arms and — and so forth?

No.

Does she care about all Americans, or only those whose deaths justify continuing this genocide?

You should know that it is physically impossible to open the cabin door of an airliner at altitude. Cabin doors are designed so that one must first pull the door in to unlatch it. This requires overcoming a pressure differential of 7 psi or more. Assume a tiny 2' x 5' door. That equates to a surface area of 2' x 5' = 10 sq ft => 10 sq ft x 12" x 12" = 1,440 sq in => 1,440 sq in x 7 psi = 10,080 lbs of force. So the only way the cabin door is coming open is if the cabin is not pressurized, which normally means the plane is climbing to altitude after takeoff or descending for landing. If you are at altitude and the cabin is not pressurized, you will soon pass out unless you are wearing an emergency oxygen mask. The lack of pressure differential means no one would be sucked out of the plane; it would just be extremely windy.

So if someone tries to open the cabin door in the middle of your flight at altitude, just sit back and enjoy the show.

Go ahead and describe what exactly he should have done to make an effective protest. In the meantime, consider that perhaps he simply did not want to be a cog in a genocidal machine as he clearly stated.

Did you read the article? And if so, was it before or after constructing your straw man?

The 35,000 Gazans killed already comprise 1.6% of the population. The 85,000 injured comprises another 4% of the population. Thousands of children have already experienced severe malnutrition that will lead to stunting and lifelong effects. So no, 99% of Gaza will not be able to "move on."

Lol. At least Gaza is a parking lot now!

top: Have rigs

bottom left: opinionated tastes

bottom right: barrels

I can only hope Death hasn't left D.C. yet, but is just sharpening his scythe. In particular, there are a couple presidential candidates who are rotting on the vine.

She didn't even really have a plan to build more houses, just some subsidies that wouldn't put a dent in the problem. She should have proposed something ambitious that people could get excited about. The crazy thing is Biden had some big ambitious policies that he actudlly enacted like the Inflation Reduction Act that dwarf anything Kamala campaigned on. It's the opposite of a winning approach that sells the stars and delivers the moon.

No. It's fairly common for interviewees to ask for a list of questions beforehand, but according to Boston University journalism professor Christopher Daly "it is not good professional practice to give questions in advance to sources such as public officials." And to let the interviewee actually write the questions for you is egregious journalism malpractice, thus the resignation.

Libs couldn't bother to stop a genocide to stop a fascist

Lol. Yeah, leftists have famously supported Genocide Joe unconditionally. /s

When did I heard that before?

Your confused. Self-immolation isn't about self-punishment anymore than any other protest method.

Ethnic nationalism is just racism, whether practiced by white supremacist MAGA Americans or Holocaust survivors. In a liberal democracy, the government serves all people regardless of race. I'm confused by your premise that Holocaust survivors were entitled to their own ethnic state for some reason.

Also, the Zionist movement was not a response to the Holocaust. It was a colonial enterprise that began well before the Holocaust in response to widespread persecution especially in Central Europe. Many Jews opposed the Jewish nationalism undergirding Zionism for the same reasons liberals today reject virtually all nationalist movements. Many emigrated to liberal democracies like the United States where they could live free of ethnic discrimination. Zionists instead chose to respond with their own ethnic persecution.

It is worth recalling in this connection that at the turn of the century, Zionism's similarities to other projects of colonization were not a source of embarrassment or shame for most of the movement's adherents; indeed, they often saw them as a selling point. Zionist leaders studied and sought to learn from the experience of European colonial-settlement enterprises in places like Algeria, Rhodesia, and Kenya, and many imagined their own endeavor as similar in certain ways. Moreover, the Zionist movement readily used such terms as “colony,” “colonial,” and “colonization” to refer to its activities; thus, for example, the original name of its financial arm was the Jewish Colonial Trust. It was only later, after the First World War, that colonialism came to have strongly pejorative connotations for many Europeans. As a consequence the Zionist movement sought to dissociate itself from other European projects of colonization and settlement, began to stress the uniqueness and noncolonial character of its mission and methods, and stopped using such terms, at least in languages other than Hebrew.

Zachary Lockman, Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948 (University of California Press, 1996) 21-57.

In backyard ultras, where competitors keep running until they can no longer maintain a pace of approximately 4 mph, the male record is 50% longer at 450 miles than the female record of 300 miles.

The Obama-appointed US judge Edward Chen found fluoridation could cause developmental damage and lower IQ in children at levels to which the public is generally exposed in drinking water. Though the ruling did not state the level at which fluoridation would damage brains, the levels in US water present an unreasonable risk, the court found.

The EPA now must perform a risk assessment that is among the first steps in setting new limits under the Toxic Substances Control Act.

Armed with a growing body of scientific evidence pointing toward fluoride’s neurotoxicity, public health advocates say the legal win shows they are overcoming “institutional inertia” and the unwillingness of federal public health agencies to admit they may have been wrong.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/oct/04/fluoridation-water-epa-risk-assessement

And Democrats

I look forward to Kamala Harris restating her unconditional commitment to Israel's "right to defend itself."