Pete1111
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Posts posted by Pete1111
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On 4/11/2023 at 12:00 AM, stevenkesslar said:
So here's the theory of the case:
In Wisconsin, a big win for liberals and a warning for the GOP
I've read a bunch of stories like this over the past week. But the person I associate the most with this view is Morning Joe. Scarborough argued both before and after the Wisconsin vote that sometimes particular elections really do tell us something about where the country is heading. He pointed to the passage of anti-tax/anti-government Prop 13 in California in 1978 as a first wave of the 1980 Reagan Revolution. Morning Joe's political judgment, especially coming at this with the views of a still conservative Gingrichy Republican, is pretty reliable.
I'd agree with Joe's view that it may be less that liberals and progressives are winning the argument, and more that the MAGA nonsense and election denial essentially makes it no argument at all. At least for people in the middle. Although he also points to specific issues, like abortion, as driving the country toward liberal and progressive positions.
I was really surprised last Tuesday. I was hoping for a close win in Wisconsin, which recent elections would suggest. It was more like a blowout for the liberal candidate. And I thought the White pro-cop candidate would obviously win the Mayor's race in Chicago in this political climate. Oops! All the caveats apply. It was a close race. And it was an internal fight between Democrats, hardly a national referendum. But if there is a strong pro-cop reaction, Chicago did not get the memo.
And that counts, since of the really big cities it is usually Chicago that Foxy conservatives point to as Democrat hell on Earth. You know, the same guys - yup, I mean you Tucker - who love Trump. Except in private. Oops! What the fuck is happening?! Tucker could not really be LOSING the argument, could he?
The easiest argument against my own argument is that Ron Johnson nailed a different Black guy running for Senate to the wall over "defund the police" in Wisconsin last Fall. That said, it didn't work in Georgia or Arizona - both reddish states, still. Nor did it work overall. As that article above points out, the lack of a red wave in 2022 is probably the best data point for the theory that the national wind is at the back of progressives and liberals. Pragmatic conservative Governors like DeWine and DeSantis and Sununu did well. And were mostly rewarded for being pragmatists, I think. But they should have done well in 2022, just list in 1994 and 2010. DeWine barely won the Ohio GOP primary, but like Kasich won in a landslide in the general. People in the middle like pragmatists.
I do buy the argument that the 1970's was a period of ascendant conservative thought. With many rising conservative thought leaders and think tanks, and political stars like Reagan. I can't be objective about it. But Trump is no thought leader. Nor is DeSantis, really. He's your basic White competent conservatism on the inside with a dark MAGA-ish coating on the outside. Which may or may not actually suit current Trumpy appetites in the GOP.
So, again, if liberals are winning, it may in part simply be by default. Long-term surveys say back when Clinton won in 1992, maybe 1 in 4 Americans identified as liberal or progressive. Now it is closer to 1 in 3, on a good day. So the trend among the young for sure is going Democrats' way. But liberals like me are nowhere near a majority.
If we are only 1 in 3 Americans, why are so many things going our way?
The suggestion that the Wisconsin election is a warning to the GOP reminds me the night Obama won the first time, how the mainstream media predicted the times are changing for the GOP, that demographics heavily favor the Dems in years to come. Do we know how wrong that prediction was?
There were many, many Obama counties in the Midwest where now the pendulum has swung so far to the right it seems stuck there. A lot of pundits try to explain what is going on with these voters. Bless them for trying.
What scares me the most (and maybe this is part of our modern voting behavior) is how many Bernicrats thought Trump was clearly a better choice vs. Hillary Clinton and to a lesser degree with Biden vs. Trump. My nephew was attending U of Iowa in Iowa City (which is a very Blue place) when Biden ran. Obviously Biden was unpopular in Iowa. But I was shocked when my nephew parroted how strong the mistrust of centrist Dems, that when Bernie Sanders lost the nomination, his belief how Trump was as good a choice as any of the rest of the Dems. For example he definitely reflected the trend to hate on Buttigieg. Perhaps that is just an anomaly, how Buttigieg is gay, the lefties feel betrayed he is not positioned at the far left end of the teeter totter, just hanging on by his fingertip, where they believe all gays ought to be.
But back to Wisconsin, if their Supremes can fix their gerrymandering problem, then yes the GOP might be a little worried. Beyond that, I wouldn't bet the farm on voting behavior.
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Amazon Prime recommended it. I avoided paying for it before. I'm not attracted to Eichner's schtick. But now BROS is included with my membership. So I watched this morning.
The reason I tire easily of Eichner is also the main theme of the movie: gay men that are a loud, whiny construct that have no off switch. Big surprise.
Still, that theme would have been more entertaining if Eichner remembered that less is more. We still would have got it.
That said, I loved Luke McFarland, Bowen Yang and Deborah Messing, plus a bunch of other funny supporting characters and clever jokes. Lot of good stuff.
A well made movie that could have been better without Eichner playing himself.
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Pence looks stunning
He would need to keep sweeping up a lot of breadcrumbs to afford that shiny look!
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A lot of tough men have been brought to tears by his arrest, tis true,
that the Dems have pursued their champion over a mere fling with a woman, which Trump is known to deny ever happened.
Such is the Repub's MO, totally forgetting their pursuit of Clinton over the blue dress.
- alvnv and stevenkesslar
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Mary Renault portrayed same-sex affection and love in her books, although there were limits on what publishers allowed.
The Last of the Wine (1956) portrays three instances when Alexias and Lysis made love.
In The King Must Die and Bull From the Sea, the hero Theseus is not portrayed as homosexual yet being with another man was strongly suggested at least twice. It was within is nature in the right situation.
These two books describe certain gay men and women characters as heroic.
Her writing was so beautifully subtle and symbolic that some readers refuse to interpret a young man's attraction to another was more than a strong bond of loyalty.
Renault and her partner lived in South Africa to avoid trouble at home in England. I recall her books were published in the States.
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2 hours ago, Marc in Calif said:
Whether true or not, any accusation might have cost him the election if leaked in the final weeks of the 2016 campaign. It was all about the election.
Remember that this was just after the "Grab 'em by the pussy" recording was leaked. The fundamentalists and ultra-conservatives were starting to get nervous.
Whether or not true, 😉the NYC doorman paid off to kill the story about out-of-wedlock baby should have held out for more.
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On 3/31/2023 at 3:16 PM, stevenkesslar said:
The thing that is most worrisome to me, if I isolate this one moment in time, is that anyone can make a great argument to sweep this under the rug. If all this is about is hush money to a hooker, which is like tip money to a billionaire, it's not worth the drama and division.
What if it's about hush money paid to 3 hookers, or 5 hookers. I wonder if Trump had a nice gaslighting session with Melania, to convince all the women listed in the indictment never saw his little winkie.
If the payments broke multiple laws such as election law, tax fraud, tax evasion, money laundering what have you, that can result in a felony. (Sad trombone)
Martha Stewart and Leona Helmsley did time. Why not Trump?
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51 minutes ago, Suckrates said:
Eric Trump "Geez, at some point, doesnt the guy DESERVE a break? "... NO ! A break ? WHY Eric ? In this country, you break the law, you GO TO JAIL, you entitled WHITE moron !.
Could it be Trump's mother's fault? I wonder if she riled him, that he'll need to try hard, to compensate for that little toadstool winkie of his.
But with MAGA Repubs, it's almost too easy for him.
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Enough of the pvssies and weak little b!tches. Bring back the real GOP men.
Just make sure they haven't fiddled with boys.
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On 2/18/2023 at 5:28 PM, stevenkesslar said:
This is a subset of my point above about the potential risks and rewards of a 2024 Democratic primary.
There's a good argument that Biden inherently pissed on Kamala and promoted Pete in his choices. Yeah, The Veep is more powerful than a Cabinet Secretary. But Biden gave her immigration. Which was almost 100 % sure to be divisive and unpopular. No matter what she tried to do, the likely outcome is gridlock and complaints. Meanwhile, Pete gets to dole out gazillions of dollars and talk about how he worked with Republican Guvs and Mayors to build bridges and roads.
To offset that, I just read a right wing article about how he is the worst Transportation Secretary ever, bar none. Because all he gave us was supply chain problems and train wrecks. While he and his hubby took off paid parent time. Even moderate Republican politicos wonder whether America is ready for a POTUS who kisses a guy on stage. So how Kamala and Pete would play out in a primary is anyone's guess. But the polls right now say she gets maybe 25 to 30 % of the vote. And Pete gets about 10 to 15%. The #2 in most polls is Bernie Sanders, in the high teens. So then you have to factor in that we'll redo the primary fight between progressives and more Establishment liberals/moderates. Who Republicans will say are all socialists.
My best guess is Biden tried to create an orderly transition in his 2020 choices. Kamala got to be Veep. If he dies in office, she will be POTUS. Pete got what was likely to be a highly visible Cabinet job, if Biden got the infrastructure package he wanted. Which he did. So it positioned both of them well. And Harris/Buttigieg would be a ticket that I'd be excited about. But the best laid plans - if that is what they were - can always go awry.
There are aspects of 1980's Reagan/Bush that are very similar. Oldest POTUS ever. Who polls in 1983 say most people don't want to run again. Because he's old, and the economy is rocky. But he runs in 1984, when the economy is better, and wins. Serves out two terms. Even though we know in retrospect he ended up actually having dementia. His # 2 runs to replace him after eight years, and wins. Democrats should be so lucky!
I know I'm being my typical verbose, or detailed, self. But an interesting historical side note. 1984 was the first election Lichtman and his Russian partner in voodoo publicly predicted, way in advance. He said Reagan would win, since almost all his keys worked in Reagan's favor. In the moment, Reagan was not viewed as a particularly strong incumbent. So Lichtman tells an anecdote of how Republican political hack Lee Atwater invited him to the White House to game out what would happen if Reagan DID NOT run in 1984. Lichtman, a lifelong liberal Democrat, says he told Atwater it would hurt Republicans on three of his keys. They'd lose an incumbent. They'd lose what he judged to be a charismatic leader. And they'd gain a primary fight, which could hurt them. Even so, in retrospect, even if they lost those three things Lichtman would probably argue they'd still only have five keys out of 13 against them. As that Broder article I hyperlinked details. And history says you need six against you to lose.
So my point is this. If you make a set of favorable assumptions for Democrats about 2024 - growing economy, a "victory" in Ukraine - Biden could do what Reagan did not. Step aside. And Democrats could win, anyway.
People blaming Buttigieg for supply chain problems don't understand supply chain theory. Yet why would anyone expect the MAGA crowd to get schooled on that or any other subject matter.
Buttigieg is young and smart but the Bernicrats are already coming out of the woodwork again claiming he is a warmongering wolf in sheep's clothing and a failure on East Palestine.
I'm tired of the lib-tards sh!tting on Pete and ready to surrender to the obvious. Biden needs to run again. He'll probably beat Trump.
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Lately Santos is accused of being involved in an ATM skimming operation.
Yet, do all his lies, cheating and stealing compare to Trump and his Org?
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On 2/28/2023 at 10:30 PM, lookin said:
Apparently, Rupert Murdoch was unusually forthcoming in his depositions for the Dominion lawsuit. He admitted he knew that his 'commentators' were peddling false information about the 2020 election. He also said he could have kept Rudy Guiliani and Sydney Powell and their damaging views on Dominion off the network, but that he did not.
It also turns out that Paul Ryan, who sits on Fox's board of directors, implored Murdoch to "move on " and "stop spouting election lies". This adds to Murdoch's problems, as it opens the door to shareholder lawsuits.
Some also wonder if Murdoch's admissions will drive viewers away from the network. Maybe so, but I wonder if their viewers actually look to Fox for factual information or for 'alternative facts' to support incorrect beliefs they already hold.
Somethin' tells me Murdoch's problems are about to get bigger and hopefully make the cost of spreading lies so expensive that few, if any, can afford it.
Does seem like his problems aren't nearly over. Will Murdoch ultimately fire someone?
Bartiromo? Carlson?
For now, the fake news chickens have come home to roost.
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8 hours ago, JKane said:
Matt Baume on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/@MattBaume/videos
All of his videos I've watched have been in-depth and fascinating.
He has a patreon and does a lot of live vlogs. Lives up in Seattle area.
Very funny, clever nice guy.
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A great movie that I love was ignored by Outfest.
I assume their woke police did not want to risk triggering the audience. That was a shame.
The woke changes to West Side Story were too many. I still like the film, but the new version went overboard. Might have been better just to fix the obvious problems.
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This thread discussed further back the no-hijacking rule over at the other site and also discussed the recent thread being locked. I just looked at that thread. The OP wanted to discuss hiring straight escorts. Sadly, members chose to be triggered by it rather than focusing on what the OP wanted to discuss. One can see where that ended up. Generally there are enough scatterbrained members alone as well as those that have zero empathy (let's talk about everything I know and fuck all what you want) that the "no-hijacking" rule was a worthy guideline. I used to try steering back to the OP to help out. I guess I have at least an ounce of empathy.
But I was one of the boycotters last year and like Sukrates did, I ultimately dropped off that Forum. I spend the time that I used to burn over there by listening to political blogs on YouTube such as Bryan Tyler Cohen; Ben Meisales on MidasTouch; and a lesser known but very clever guy from NYC David Feldman. If not for David Feldman I wouldn't know Ann Coulter's term for Nicky Haley, "BabyCakes".
But back to the OP, I agree with NYNakedTop, that forum was fertile ground for members coming from conspiracy sites to spread QAnon (and Kremlin IMO) talking points. What good does it do to engage them? Little or none.
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I was way off on a picture of several parked cars. I judged by the year of the model car. The picture was much later.
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I got blocked from posting in the Politics room on CompanyofMen last Fall. I had pushed back on particular QAnon/Kremlin talking points and got blamed by others for making it too personal.
Fine, I was burning up too much time there anyway. I keep in touch with individual members off site. I hope to see them in PS this April.
I found other sites where I spend more time and enjoy more commeraderie.
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I'm leaving this board. My last reminder about TJ, is his post where allowed to use the N word.
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13 hours ago, Lonnie said:
Wouldn't it be wonderful to have someone to root and maybe work for...right now he's in a lose-lose position with energy prices soaring and green energy still a futuristic dream.
I don't think he's enjoying his job as Transportation Secretary or being in Washington D.C. It must of been humiliating that no one noticed when he stayed home for 2 months paternity leave.
Fox gave him grief about taking leave.
One might wonder whether Pete and family are missing their spacious home in South Bend. Apartment life in DC must be a huge change for his hubby and dogs.
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On 7/8/2022 at 9:56 AM, Lonnie said:
New Lis Smith book interview:
Lis Smith Loves Politics (If Not All Politicians)
Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photos: Getty ImagesThere’s nobody more fun to get spun by than Lis Smith. A hard-rockin’, quick-draw political operative who, in her own telling, loves “some good trench warfare” and “to roll around in the mud,” she became famous for making Mayor Pete semi-plausible as a presidential candidate. She has a sharp answer for everything, and an unnerving nerviness.
And yet … is she really tearing up when I ask her about working for Governor Cuomo during his auto-da-fé last year?
“It’s hard for me to talk about,” she said, clenching her teeth and a bottle of Bud Light last Friday night at Barrow’s Pub, a dive bar near her apartment in the West Village. We were there to discuss Any Given Tuesday: A Political Love Story, her new book out Tuesday, July 19, which ends with her time attempting to advise Cuomo on communications. Not that he was listening. She knew going in that the job was “notoriously an exercise in masochism,” and contends that she got played by Cuomo. “He’s someone I cared for, I loved, I trusted, I viewed as a mentor, a father figure, and it breaks my heart,” she said, lower lip quivering.
After the first blush of accusations against Cuomo, she’d stuck around because he swore he’d merely been “stupid” and that nothing else would emerge. The ground kept shifting as more women came forward. As Smith writes, “America’s governor was quickly turning into America’s asshole.” The eventual attorney general’s report on his sleazy behavior was the coup de Cuomo.
Smith said it pains her to think of “the collateral damage of his actions, all the people who lost their jobs and had their reputation ruined. Frankly, I’m not one of them.” But some of that mud did splash back on her, I pointed out. Texts between Cuomo aides that were published as part of the attorney general’s report showed Smith bragging about how she worked over reporters. (In other words: She got caught doing her job.) Read one entry: “I’m texting w Katy tur. Katy is saying my spin live. Like verbatim on CNN.” Tur, who actually works for MSNBC, was furious about that. “That was taken completely out of context and was completely unfair to her,” Smith protested. “She was talking to Cuomo sources and I was a Cuomo source. She did nothing wrong. She did something people do every day of the week. That is her job. I do feel bad about that.”
But Smith also had a spicy anecdote to drop: “In the last week or two of Cuomo’s governorship, when Cuomo was hemming and hawing and defying all his advisers about whether or not he should resign, Chris Christie confided in one of the advisers that he would personally get in his car and drive to Albany to get Andrew to resign.” (The two ex-govs are as tight as traffic on the GWB.)
Smith, 39, has advised races for governor’s mansions (Terry McAuliffe; Jon Corzine), the Senate (Claire McCaskill), and the White House (Barack Obama; Pete Buttigieg). She grew up in Bronxville, just outside the city, the daughter of two lawyers deeply enmeshed in politics. She was inspired by the The War Room, the documentary about Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign that focuses on his strategists, James Carville and George Stephanopoulos. “That was, for me, why I wanted to get into this,” she said, “but let’s be real, it’s a very male movie.” That didn’t intimidate her much. Smith is comfortable in her own skin, drinking, smoking, swearing, and — when necessary — intimidating, all from behind her Gucci sunglasses, which she often wears inside for the same reason Anna Wintour is said to: so nobody can see what she is looking at.
With Pete Buttigieg in April 2019. Photo: Craig F. Walker/The Boston Globe via Getty ImagesSmith writes that a presidential campaign is “unpredictable. It’s not like tracking a menstrual cycle and knowing the window when you’ll be most fertile or the day you need to carry tampons in your purse.” (I bet Karl Rove has never thought of it quite that way.) Male political operatives, she said, “are deified for being rakish and cursing and drinking and women are expected to be, like, school marms.” Sitting there in her black tee shirt and cutoff jean short-shorts while queuing up Johnny Cash and Guns N’ Roses on the jukebox, Smith looked like the farthest thing from a school marm. She’s fun — something that is in exceedingly short supply in today’s Democratic Party.
She learned the strategic importance of fun from McAuliffe. “Republican leaders said the fact that he was relentless, the fact that he always invited them over for beers, made it easier for them to work with him,” she said. “We sometimes are perceived as the party of school monitors, but we don’t have to be, and there are a lot of people in our party who are not that way. I would say Joe Biden, especially, is not that way.”
Maybe so, but Biden isn’t exactly winning over many Americans these days. And he’s walled off the press. “Biden is not the slickest, sharpest talker on the block, but he never has been,” she says. “That was always his appeal as Obama’s running mate. I worked as the campaign’s director of rapid response in 2012, and there was a yin-yang dynamic. At times, it could be frustrating, because in my job, I’d always have to clean up when he’d say, ‘Good morning, Pennsylvania,’ when he was in Ohio, or talk about Governor Tom Kaine when he meant Tim Kaine, but that’s part of his regular-guy appeal. Most people don’t speak in perfectly formed sentences.” She said Biden should get out there and “talk to people every day, let them know you feel their pain, you’re on top of it, you’re listening to them, and care less about what the D.C. media is saying about your style, and whether you won the day or not.” Perhaps she should go work for the White House. Somniferous Biden could use a doubleshot, and there are job openings, after all.
Her passion for politics is clear, and sometimes, at least according to her book, this can get blurred into her feelings for the politicians too. When John Edwards first lost in 2004, she wrote about how she “sobbed uncontrollably. Edwards was my first political love. When his campaign ended, it hurt as badly as my first breakup.” At Dartmouth, she dated her professor, Jeff Smith, and then moved with him to Missouri when he ran for state senate. “I’d always been a little boy crazy,” Smith writes. After Eliot Spitzer resigned as governor, busted in a prostitution scandal, he ran for city comptroller in a splashy attempted comeback bid in 2013 and hired Smith. She fell hard, writing, “I was a goner the second I agreed to consult for him.”
Their relationship became tabloid dynamite. The New York Post staked out her apartment, her parents’ house, and tracked the couple to Jamaica. It’s clear the scrutiny took its toll. She writes about developing insomnia, paranoia, picking up a Klonopin prescription and losing, for a while, her sense of self-confidence. After years spent shaping press for others, seeing herself slinking across the cover of the tabs was like looking into a funhouse mirror. “Every scandal needs its archetypal characters, and the role I’d been cast in was that of the conniving whore,” she writes. Particularly acute was the agony of explaining it all to her family: “Trust me — no dad or brother ever wants to hear the words, ‘I’m in love with Eliot Spitzer.”
De Blasio, for whom she was a chief spokeswoman when he ran for mayor in 2013, fired her after news of her relationship with Spitzer became public. And she’s not forgiven him. She writes about the rising panic she felt when she first interviewed with de Blasio, realizing that “the likely incoming mayor of New York was childish, intellectually lazy, overconfident in his own abilities, and annoyingly condescending.” She describes him spewing pseudo-intellectualisms while sipping Chianti, his teeth stained purple. “I basically blacked out for the next ten minutes as he talked about everything from Fiorello La Guardia to Buddhism,” she writes, comparing him to the “gross unshowered guy in college who showed up to Philosophy 101 and hogged ten minutes of class time to yell about the necessity of seizing the means of production.” Smith writes how “disingenuous” her firing was, given that a top de Blasio aide — the incoming head of New York City’s Department of Investigation — had been emailing Spitzer repeatedly, begging for his support, writing in one email that “Bill and I were both wondering if you would be open to getting involved.”
“I can see why de Blasio was pissed,” writes Smith. “Both of us had tried to get in bed with Eliot, but only one of us had been successful.”
None of which aligns with how most politicians, or even their operatives, talk these days. But again, she’s no school marm. Post Me Too, workplace entanglements are verboten. But she has only so much patience for that. “My parents met at the workplace, when my dad was in a position of power over my mom,” Smith shrugged. “I dated my college professor. I dated a candidate I consulted for. In my case, I didn’t feel like there were any power dynamics, but I fully understand that other circumstances might be different.”
The Killers’ “Mr. Brightside” began to play in the bar. “I wanted this to be Pete’s campaign anthem,” she said, “but our campaign lawyer said it had Me Too undertones. We went with ‘High Hopes.’”
She thinks Ron DeSantis could be a formidable 2024 contender. “To succeed in the Republican Party,” she said, “it’s not as much about ideological purity. Sometimes it’s more about how much you hate the people the Republican base hates. Christie got it, he hated public employees as much as the Republican base did. Trump hated immigrants as much as or more than the Republican base did. With DeSantis, it’s the experts, and he’s taken on the experts in the education field, the experts in the medical field. He combines it with a real working-class pedigree, and an Ivy League pedigree, and I think he’s figured out the right style, and the right Republican erogenous zones to hit with everything he does.”
The Democratic backbench appears to be nonexistent. “We’ve got to look outside D.C., because voters can smell D.C. on politicians,” said Smith. “I think the future is found a lot of times in states and cities.” She’s been helping out the Michigan Democrat Mallory McMorrow. She also cites as stars the Cincinnati mayor Aftab Pureval, Colin Allred of Texas, and Ritchie Torres in the Bronx.
Does she worry this book she’s written might torch future job prospects? “Sure, there are people who won’t hire me after reading it,” said Smith. “The decision I made was that, I don’t give a fuck. If you think I’m good at what I do, you’ll hire me. If this bothers you, then you weren’t worth my time anyway.”
I haven't read her book but, from your post, might we assume she'd work for Buttigieg if he runs in 2024?
I hope he does.
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On 3/27/2022 at 10:57 PM, Pete1111 said:
YouTube Pride Central channel has several gay films.
I watched Heartstone, from Iceland. Nordic language with English subtitles. Pretty good film. Teens grappling with sexuality and so forth. Quite poignant if you like that sort of film.
Another film on YouTube #PrideCentral is Retake.
Not something I'd watch again, but still was a good watch.
The premise is a little far fetched, yet is an original idea. I gradually came to care about the two leads, especially the younger guy, Devon Graye.
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Might have been better for Trump to walk out on Holder.
- floridarob and lookin
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Minneapolis amends noise ordinance to allow Muslim adhan over public speakers at all hours
in Politics
Posted
America needs to start taxing religion. It's total BS.
But back to the Minneapolis. I escaped that place 20+ years ago and will never return. The people are too quirky for me and that's putting it nicely. They deserve having a Muslim horn blowing in their ears at all hours.
One man's opinion.